| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII | HTML | PDF ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Author: Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind" ***
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
JOAN AND PETER
THE UNDYING FIRE
¶ The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE
And numerous Short Stories now collected in One Volume under the
title of
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
¶ A Series of books on Social, Religious, and Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE
WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
IN THE FOURTH YEAR
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
¶ And two little books about children’s play, called
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
THE OUTLINE OF
HISTORY
Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
BY
H. G. WELLS
WRITTEN WITH THE ADVICE AND EDITORIAL HELP OF
MR. ERNEST BARKER,
SIR H. H. JOHNSTON, SIR E. RAY LANKESTER
AND PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY
AND ILLUSTRATED BY
J. F. HORRABIN
VOLUME I
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY H. G. WELLS.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1920.
NORWOOD PRESS
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
INTRODUCTION
“_A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name,
must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged
with the conviction that all existence is one--a single conception
sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law._”--FRIEDRICH
RATZEL.
This _Outline of History_ is an attempt to tell, truly and clearly, in
one continuous narrative, the whole story of life and mankind so far as
it is known to-day. It is written plainly for the general reader, but
its aim goes beyond its use as merely interesting reading matter. There
is a feeling abroad that the teaching of history considered as a part of
general education is in an unsatisfactory condition, and particularly
that the ordinary treatment of this “subject” by the class and teacher
and examiner is too partial and narrow. But the desire to extend the
general range of historical ideas is confronted by the argument that the
available time for instruction is already consumed by that partial and
narrow treatment, and that therefore, however desirable this extension
of range may be, it is in practice impossible. If an Englishman, for
example, has found the history of England quite enough for his powers of
assimilation, then it seems hopeless to expect his sons and daughters to
master universal history, if that is to consist of the history of
England, plus the history of France, plus the history of Germany, plus
the history of Russia, and so on. To which the only possible answer is
that universal history is at once something more and something less than
the aggregate of the national histories to which we are accustomed, that
it must be approached in a different spirit and dealt with in a
different manner. This book seeks to justify that answer. It has been
written primarily to show that _history as one whole_ is amenable to a
more broad and comprehensive handling than is the history of special
nations and periods, a broader handling that will bring it within the
normal limitations of time and energy set to the reading and education
of an ordinary citizen. This outline deals with ages and races and
nations, where the ordinary history deals with reigns and pedigrees and
campaigns; but it will not be found to be more crowded with names and
dates, nor more difficult to follow and understand. History is no
exception amongst the sciences; as the gaps fill in, the outline
simplifies; as the outlook broadens, the clustering multitude of details
dissolves into general laws. And many topics of quite primary interest
to mankind, the first appearance and the growth of scientific knowledge
for example, and its effects upon human life, the elaboration of the
ideas of money and credit, or the story of the origins and spread and
influence of Christianity, which must be treated fragmentarily or by
elaborate digressions in any partial history, arise and flow completely
and naturally in one general record of the world in which we live.
The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of human history
throughout the world has become very evident during the tragic
happenings of the last few years. Swifter means of communication have
brought all men closer to one another for good or for evil. War becomes
a universal disaster, blind and monstrously destructive; it bombs the
baby in its cradle and sinks the food-ships that cater for the
non-combatant and the neutral. There can be no peace now, we realize,
but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general
prosperity. But _there can be no common peace and prosperity without
common historical ideas_. Without such ideas to hold them together in
harmonious co-operation, with nothing but narrow, selfish, and
conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift
towards conflict and destruction. This truth, which was apparent to that
great philosopher Kant a century or more ago--it is the gist of his
tract upon universal peace--is now plain to the man in the street. Our
internal policies and our economic and social ideas are profoundly
vitiated at present by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin and
historical relationship of social classes. A sense of history as the
common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it
is for peace between the nations.
Such are the views of history that this _Outline_ seeks to realize. It
is an attempt to tell how our present state of affairs, this distressed
and multifarious human life about us, arose in the course of vast ages
and out of the inanimate clash of matter, and to estimate the quality
and amount and range of the hopes with which it now faces its destiny.
It is one experimental contribution to a great and urgently necessary
educational reformation, which must ultimately restore universal
history, revised, corrected, and brought up to date, to its proper place
and use as the backbone of a general education. We say “restore,”
because all the great cultures of the world hitherto, Judaism and
Christianity in the Bible, Islam in the Koran, have used some sort of
cosmogony and world history as a basis. It may indeed be argued that
without such a basis any really binding culture of men is inconceivable.
Without it we are a chaos.
Remarkably few sketches of universal history by one single author have
been written. One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is
Winwood Reade’s _Martyrdom of Man_. This _dates_, as people say,
nowadays, and it has a fine gloom of its own, but it is still an
extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one
consistent process. Mr. F. S. Marvin’s _Living Past_ is also an
admirable summary of human progress. There is a good _General History of
the World_ in one volume by Mr. Oscar Browning. America has recently
produced two well-illustrated and up-to-date class books, Breasted’s
_Ancient Times_ and Robinson’s _Medieval and Modern Times_, which
together give a very good idea of the story of mankind since the
beginning of human societies. There are, moreover, quite a number of
nominally Universal Histories in existence, but they are really not
histories at all, they are encyclopædias of history; they lack the unity
of presentation attainable only when the whole subject has been passed
through one single mind. These universal histories are compilations,
assemblies of separate national or regional histories by different
hands, the parts being necessarily unequal in merit and authority and
disproportionate one to another. Several such universal histories in
thirty or forty volumes or so, adorned with allegorical title pages and
illustrated by folding maps and plans of Noah’s Ark, Solomon’s Temple,
and the Tower of Babel, were produced for the libraries of gentlemen in
the eighteenth century. Helmolt’s _World History_, in eight massive
volumes, is a modern compilation of the same sort, very useful for
reference and richly illustrated, but far better in its parts than as a
whole. Another such collection is the _Historians’ History of the World_
in 25 volumes. _The Encyclopædia Britannica_ contains, of course, a
complete encyclopædia of history within itself, and is the most modern
of all such collections.[1] F. Ratzel’s _History of Mankind_, in spite
of the promise of its title, is mainly a natural history of man, though
it is rich with suggestions upon the nature and development of
civilization. That publication and Miss Ellen Churchill Semple’s
_Influence of Geographical Environment_, based on Ratzel’s work, are
quoted in this _Outline_, and have had considerable influence upon its
plan. F. Ratzel would indeed have been the ideal author for such a book
as our present one. Unfortunately neither he nor any other ideal author
was available.[2]
The writer will offer no apology for making this experiment. His
disqualifications are manifest. But such work needs to be done by as
many people as possible, he was free to make his contribution, and he
was greatly attracted by the task. He has read sedulously and made the
utmost use of all the help he could obtain. There is not a chapter that
has not been examined by some more competent person than himself and
very carefully revised. He has particularly to thank his friends Sir E.
Ray Lankester, Sir H. H. Johnston, Professor Gilbert Murray, and Mr.
Ernest Barker for much counsel and direction and editorial help. Mr.
Philip Guedalla has toiled most efficiently and kindly through all the
proofs. Mr. A. Allison, Professor T. W. Arnold, Mr. Arnold Bennett, the
Rev. A. H. Trevor Benson, Mr. Aodh de Blacam, Mr. Laurence Binyon, the
Rev. G. W. Broomfield, Sir William Bull, Mr. L. Cranmer Byng, Mr. A. J.
D. Campbell, Mr. A. Y. Campbell, Mr. L. Y. Chen, Mr. A. R. Cowan, Mr. O.
G. S. Crawford, Dr. W. S. Culbertson, Mr. R. Langton Cole, Mr. B. G.
Collins, Mr. J. J. L. Duyvendak, Mr. O. W. Ellis, Mr. G. S. Ferrier,
Mr. David Freeman, Mr. S. N. Fu, Mr. G. B. Gloyne, Sir Richard Gregory,
Mr. F. H. Hayward, Mr. Sydney Herbert, Dr. Fr. Krupicka, Mr. H. Lang
Jones, Mr. C. H. B. Laughton, Mr. B. I. Macalpin, Mr. G. H. Mair, Mr. F.
S. Marvin, Mr. J. S. Mayhew, Mr. B. Stafford Morse, Professor J. L.
Myres, the Hon. W. Ormsby-Gore, Sir Sydney Olivier, Mr. R. I. Pocock,
Mr. J. Pringle, Mr. W. H. R. Rivers, Sir Denison Ross, Dr. E. J.
Russell, Dr. Charles Singer, Mr. A. St. George Sanford, Dr. C. O.
Stallybrass, Mr. G. H. Walsh, Mr. G. P. Wells, Miss Rebecca West, and
Mr. George Whale have all to be thanked for help, either by reading
parts of the MS. or by pointing out errors in the published parts,
making suggestions, answering questions, or giving advice. The amount of
friendly and sympathetic assistance the writer has received, often from
very busy people, has been a quite extraordinary experience. He has met
with scarcely a single instance of irritation or impatience on the part
of specialists whose domains he has invaded and traversed in what must
have seemed to many of them an exasperatingly impudent and superficial
way. Numerous other helpful correspondents have pointed out printer’s
errors and minor slips in the serial publication which preceded this
book edition, and they have added many useful items of information, and
to those writers also the warmest thanks are due. But of course none of
these generous helpers are to be held responsible for the judgments,
tone, arrangement, or writing of this _Outline_. In the relative
importance of the parts, in the moral and political implications of the
story, the final decision has necessarily fallen to the writer. The
problem of illustrations was a very difficult one for him, for he had
had no previous experience in the production of an illustrated book. In
Mr. J. F. Horrabin he has had the good fortune to find not only an
illustrator but a collaborator. Mr. Horrabin has spared no pains to make
this work informative and exact. His maps and drawings are a part of the
text, the most vital and decorative part. Some of them, the hypothetical
maps, for example, of the western world at the end of the last glacial
age, during the “pluvial age” and 12,000 years ago, and the migration
map of the Barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire, represent the reading
and inquiry of many laborious days.
The index to this edition is the work of Mr. Strickland Gibson of
Oxford. Several correspondents have asked for a pronouncing index and
accordingly this has been provided.
The writer owes a word of thanks to that living index of printed books,
Mr. J. F. Cox of the London Library. He would also like to acknowledge
here the help he has received from Mrs. Wells. Without her labour in
typing and re-typing the drafts of the various chapters as they have
been revised and amended, in checking references, finding suitable
quotations, hunting up illustrations, and keeping in order the whole
mass of material for this history, and without her constant help and
watchful criticism, its completion would have been impossible.
[Illustration: H. G. Wells]
SCHEME OF CONTENTS
BOOK I
THE MAKING OF OUR WORLD
PAGE
CHAPTER I. THE EARTH IN SPACE AND TIME 3
CHAPTER II. THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS
§ 1. The first living things 7
§ 2. How old is the world? 13
CHAPTER III. NATURAL SELECTION AND THE CHANGES OF SPECIES 16
CHAPTER IV. THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND BY LIFE
§ 1. Life and water 23
§ 2. The earliest animals 25
CHAPTER V. CHANGES IN THE WORLD’S CLIMATE
§ 1. Why life must change continually 29
§ 2. The sun a steadfast star 34
§ 3. Changes from within the earth 35
§ 4. Life may control change 36
CHAPTER VI. THE AGE OF REPTILES
§ 1. The age of lowland life 38
§ 2. Flying dragons 43
§ 3. The first birds 43
§ 4. An age of hardship and death 44
§ 5. The first appearance of fur and feathers 47
CHAPTER VII. THE AGE OF MAMMALS
§ 1. A new age of life 51
§ 2. Tradition comes into the world 52
§ 3. An age of brain growth 56
§ 4. The world grows hard again 57
§ 5. Chronology of the Ice Age 59
BOOK II
THE MAKING OF MEN
CHAPTER VIII. THE ANCESTRY OF MAN
§ 1. Man descended from a walking ape 62
§ 2. First traces of man-like creatures 68
§ 3. The Heidelberg sub-man 69
§ 4. The Piltdown sub-man 70
§ 5. The riddle of the Piltdown remains 72
CHAPTER IX. THE NEANDERTHAL MEN, AN EXTINCT RACE. (THE
EARLY PALÆOLITHIC AGE)
§ 1. The world 50,000 years ago 75
§ 2. The daily life of the first men 79
§ 3. The last Palæolithic men 84
CHAPTER X. THE LATER POSTGLACIAL PALÆOLITHIC MEN, THE FIRST
TRUE MEN. (LATER PALÆOLITHIC AGE)
§ 1. The coming of men like ourselves 86
§ 2. Subdivision of the Later Palæolithic 95
§ 3. The earliest true men were clever savages 98
§ 4. Hunters give place to herdsmen 101
§ 5. No sub-men in America 102
CHAPTER XI. NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE
§ 1. The age of cultivation begins 104
§ 2. Where did the Neolithic culture arise? 108
§ 3. Everyday Neolithic life 109
§ 4. How did sowing begin? 116
§ 5. Primitive trade 118
§ 6. The flooding of the Mediterranean Valley 118
CHAPTER XII. EARLY THOUGHT
§ 1. Primitive philosophy 122
§ 2. The Old Man in religion 125
§ 3. Fear and hope in religion 126
§ 4. Stars and seasons 127
§ 5. Story-telling and myth-making 129
§ 6. Complex origins of religion 130
CHAPTER XIII. THE RACES OF MANKIND
§ 1. Is mankind still differentiating? 136
§ 2. The main races of mankind 140
§ 3. Was there an Alpine race? 142
§ 4. The Heliolithic culture of the Brunet peoples 146
§ 5. How existing races may be related to each other 148
CHAPTER XIV. THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND
§ 1. No one primitive language 150
§ 2. The Aryan languages 151
§ 3. The Semitic languages 153
§ 4. The Hamitic languages 154
§ 5. The Ural-Altaic languages 156
§ 6. The Chinese languages 157
§ 7. Other language groups 157
§ 8. Submerged and lost languages 161
§ 9. How languages may be related 163
BOOK III
THE DAWN OF HISTORY
CHAPTER XV. THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES IN PREHISTORIC TIMES
§ 1. The spreading of the Aryan-speakers 167
§ 2. Primitive Aryan life 169
§ 3. Early Aryan daily life 176
CHAPTER XVI. THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS
§ 1. Early cities and early nomads 183
§ 2A. The riddle of the Sumerians 188
§ 2B. The empire of Sargon the First 191
§ 2C. The empire of Hammurabi 191
§ 2D. The Assyrians and their empire 192
§ 2E. The Chaldean empire 194
§ 3. The early history of Egypt 195
§ 4. The early civilization of India 201
§ 5. The early history of China 201
§ 6. While the civilizations were growing 206
CHAPTER XVII. SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES
§ 1. The earliest ships and sailors 209
§ 2. The Ægean cities before history 213
§ 3. The first voyages of exploration 217
§ 4. Early traders 218
§ 5. Early travellers 220
CHAPTER XVIII. WRITING
§ 1. Picture writing 223
§ 2. Syllable writing 227
§ 3. Alphabet writing 228
§ 4. The place of writing in human life 229
CHAPTER XIX. GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS
§ 1. Nomadic and settled religion 232
§ 2. The priest comes into history 234
§ 3. Priests and the stars 238
§ 4. Priests and the dawn of learning 240
§ 5. King against priests 241
§ 6. How Bel-Marduk struggled against the kings 245
§ 7. The god-kings of Egypt 248
§ 8. Shi Hwang-ti destroys the books 252
CHAPTER XX. SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES, AND FREE INDIVIDUALS
§ 1. The common man in ancient times 254
§ 2. The earliest slaves 256
§ 3. The first “independent” persons 259
§ 4. Social classes three thousand years ago 262
§ 5. Classes hardening into castes 266
§ 6. Caste in India 268
§ 7. The system of the Mandarins 270
§ 8. A summary of five thousand years 272
BOOK IV
JUDEA, GREECE, AND INDIA
CHAPTER XXI. THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS
§ 1. The place of the Israelites in history 277
§ 2. Saul, David, and Solomon 286
§ 3. The Jews a people of mixed origin 292
§ 4. The importance of the Hebrew prophets 294
CHAPTER XXII. THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS
§ 1. The Hellenic peoples 298
§ 2. Distinctive features of the Hellenic civilization 304
§ 3. Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in Greece 307
§ 4. The kingdom of Lydia 315
§ 5. The rise of the Persians in the East 316
§ 6. The story of Crœsus 320
§ 7. Darius invades Russia 326
§ 8. The battle of Marathon 332
§ 9. Thermopylæ and Salamis 334
§ 10. Platæa and Mycale 340
CHAPTER XXIII. GREEK THOUGHT AND LITERATURE
§ 1. The Athens of Pericles 343
§ 2. Socrates 350
§ 3. What was the quality of the common Athenians? 352
§ 4. Greek tragedy and comedy 354
§ 5. Plato and the Academy 355
§ 6. Aristotle and the Lyceum 357
§ 7. Philosophy becomes unworldly 359
§ 8. The quality and limitations of Greek thought 360
CHAPTER XXIV. THE CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
§ 1. Philip of Macedonia 367
§ 2. The murder of King Philip 373
§ 3. Alexander’s first conquests 377
§ 4. The wanderings of Alexander 385
§ 5. Was Alexander indeed great? 389
§ 6. The successors of Alexander 395
§ 7. Pergamum a refuge of culture 396
§ 8. Alexander as a portent of world unity 397
CHAPTER XXV. SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA
§ 1. The science of Alexandria 401
§ 2. Philosophy of Alexandria 410
§ 3. Alexandria as a factory of religions 410
CHAPTER XXVI. THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM
§ 1. The story of Gautama 415
§ 2. Teaching and legend in conflict 421
§ 3. The gospel of Gautama Buddha 422
§ 4. Buddhism and Asoka 426
§ 5. Two great Chinese teachers 433
§ 6. The corruptions of Buddhism 438
§ 7. The present range of Buddhism 440
BOOK V
THE RISE AND COLLAPSE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
CHAPTER XXVII. THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS
§ 1. The beginnings of the Latins 445
§ 2. A new sort of state 454
§ 3. The Carthaginian republic of rich men 466
§ 4. The First Punic War 467
§ 5. Cato the Elder and the spirit of Cato 471
§ 6. The Second Punic War 475
§ 7. The Third Punic War 480
§ 8. How the Punic War undermined Roman liberty 485
§ 9. Comparison of the Roman republic with a modern state 486
CHAPTER XXVIII. FROM TIBERIUS GRACCHUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR
IN ROME
§ 1. The science of thwarting the common man 493
§ 2. Finance in the Roman state 496
§ 3. The last years of republican politics 499
§ 4. The era of the adventurer generals 505
§ 5. Caius Julius Cæsar and his death 509
§ 6. The end of the republic 513
§ 7. Why the Roman republic failed 516
CHAPTER XXIX. THE CÆSARS BETWEEN THE SEA AND THE GREAT
PLAINS OF THE OLD WORLD
§ 1. A short catalogue of emperors 52
§ 2. Roman civilization at its zenith 529
§ 3. Limitations of the Roman mind 539
§ 4. The stir of the great plains 541
§ 5. The Western (true Roman) Empire crumples up 552
§ 6. The Eastern (revived Hellenic) Empire 560
BOOK VI
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM
CHAPTER XXX. THE BEGINNINGS, THE RISE, AND THE DIVISIONS
OF CHRISTIANITY
§ 1. Judea at the Christian era 569
§ 2. The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth 573
§ 3. The universal religions 582
§ 4. The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth 584
§ 5. Doctrines added to the teachings of Jesus 586
§ 6. The struggles and persecutions of Christianity 594
§ 7. Constantine the Great 598
§ 8. The establishment of official Christianity 601
§ 9. The map of Europe, A.D. 500 605
§ 10. The salvation of learning by Christianity 609
CHAPTER XXXI. SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA (CIRCA 50 B.C. TO A.D. 650)
§ 1. Justinian the Great 614
§ 2. The Sassanid Empire in Persia 616
§ 3. The decay of Syria under the Sassanids 619
§ 4. The first message from Islam 623
§ 5. Zoroaster and Mani 624
§ 6. Hunnish peoples in Central Asia and India 627
§ 7. The great age of China 630
§ 8. Intellectual fetters of China 635
§ 9. The travels of Yuan Chwang 642
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Life in the Early Palæozoic 11
Time-chart from Earliest Life to 40,000,000 Years Ago 14
Life in the Later Palæozoic Age 19
Australian Lung Fish 26
Some Reptiles of the Late Palæozoic Age 27
Astronomical Variations Affecting Climate 33
Some Mesozoic Reptiles 40
Later Mesozoic Reptiles 42
Pterodactyls and Archæopteryx 45
Hesperornis 48
Some Oligocene Mammals 53
Miocene Mammals 58
Time-diagram of the Glacial Ages 60
Early Pleistocene Animals, Contemporary with Earliest Man 64
The Sub-Man Pithecanthropus 65
The Riddle of the Piltdown Sub-Man 71
Map of Europe 50,000 Years Ago 77
Neanderthal Man 78
Early Stone Implements 81
Australia and the Western Pacific in the Glacial Age 82
Cro-magnon Man 87
Europe and Western Asia in the Later Palæolithic Age 89
Reindeer Age Articles 90
A Reindeer Age Masterpiece 93
Reindeer Age Engravings and Carvings 94
Diagram of the Estimated Duration of the True Human Periods 97
Neolithic Implements 107
Restoration of a Lake Dwelling 111
Pottery from Lake Dwellings 112
Hut Urns 115
A Menhir of the Neolithic Period 128
Bronze Age Implements 132
Diagram Showing the Duration of the Neolithic Period 133
Heads of Australoid Types 139
Bushwoman 141
Negro Types 142
Mongolian Types 143
Caucasian Types 144
Map of Europe, Asia, Africa 15,000 Years Ago 145
The Swastika 147
Relationship of Human Races (Diagrammatic Summary) 149
Possible Development of Languages 155
Racial Types (after Champollion) 163
Combat between Menelaus and Hector 176
Archaic Horses and Chariots 178
The Cradle of Western Civilization 185
Sumerian Warriors in Phalanx 189
Assyrian Warrior (_temp._ Sargon II) 193
Time-chart 6000 B.C. to A.D. 196
The Cradle of Chinese Civilization (Map) 202
Boats on Nile about 2500 B.C. 211
Egyptian Ship on Red Sea, 1250 B.C. 212
Ægean Civilization (Map) 214
A Votary of the Snake Goddess 215
American Indian Picture-Writing 225
Egyptian Gods--Set, Anubis, Typhon, Bes 236
Egyptian Gods--Thoth-lunus, Hathor, Chnemu 239
An Assyrian King and His Chief Minister 243
Pharaoh Chephren 248
Pharaoh Rameses III as Osiris (Sarcophagus relief) 249
Pharaoh Akhnaton 251
Egyptian Peasants (Pyramid Age) 257
Brawl among Egyptian Boatmen (Pyramid Age) 260
Egyptian Social Types (From Tombs) 261
The Land of the Hebrews 280
Aryan-speaking Peoples 1000-500 B.C. (Map) 301
Hellenic Races 1000-800 B.C. (Map) 302
Greek Sea Fight, 550 B.C. 303
Rowers in an Athenian Warship, 400 B.C. 306
Scythian Types 319
Median and Second Babylonian Empires (in Nebuchadnezzar’s Reign) 321
The Empire of Darius 329
Wars of the Greeks and Persians (Map) 333
Athenian Foot-soldier 334
Persian Body-guard (from Frieze at Susa) 338
The World According to Herodotus 341
Athene of the Parthenon 348
Philip of Macedon 368
Growth of Macedonia under Philip 371
Macedonian Warrior (bas-relief from Pella) 373
Campaigns of Alexander the Great 381
Alexander the Great 389
Break-up of Alexander’s Empire 393
Seleucus I 395
Later State of Alexander’s Empire 398
The World According to Eratosthenes, 200 B.C. 405
The Known World, about 250 B.C. 406
Isis and Horus 413
Serapis 414
The Rise of Buddhism 419
Hariti 428
Chinese Image of Kuan-yin 429
The Spread of Buddhism 432
Indian Gods--Vishnu, Brahma, Siva 437
Indian Gods--Krishna, Kali, Ganesa 439
The Western Mediterranean, 800-600 B.C. 446
Early Latium 447
Burning the Dead: Etruscan Ceremony 449
Statuette of a Gaul 450
Roman Power after the Samnite Wars 451
Samnite Warriors 452
Italy after 275 B.C. 453
Roman Coin Celebrating the Victory over Pyrrhus 455
Mercury 457
Carthaginian Coins 468
Roman _As_ 471
Rome and its Alliances, 150 B.C. 481
Gladiators 489
Roman Power, 50 B.C. 506
Julius Cæsar 512
Roman Empire at Death of Augustus 518
Roman Empire in Time of Trajan 524
Asia and Europe: Life of the Period (Map) 544
Central Asia, 200-100 B.C. 547
Tracks of Migrating and Raiding Peoples, 1-700 A.D. 555
Eastern Roman Empire 561
Constantinople (Maps to show value of its position) 563
Galilee 571
Map of Europe, 500 A.D. 608
The Eastern Empire and the Sassanids 620
Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia 622
Ephthalite Coin 629
Chinese Empire, Tang Dynasty 633
Yuan Chwang’s Route from China to India 643
BOOK I
THE MAKING OF OUR WORLD
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
I
THE EARTH IN SPACE AND TIME
The earth on which we live is a spinning globe. Vast though it seems to
us, it is a mere speck of matter in the greater vastness of space.
Space is, for the most part, emptiness. At great intervals there are in
this emptiness flaring centres of heat and light, the “fixed stars.”
They are all moving about in space, notwithstanding that they are called
fixed stars, but for a long time men did not realize their motion. They
are so vast and at such tremendous distances that their motion is not
perceived. Only in the course of many thousands of years is it
appreciable. These fixed stars are so far off that, for all their
immensity, they seem to be, even when we look at them through the most
powerful telescopes, mere points of light, brighter or less bright. A
few, however, when we turn a telescope upon them, are seen to be whirls
and clouds of shining vapour which we call nebulæ. They are so far off
that a movement of millions of miles would be imperceptible.
One star, however, is so near to us that it is like a great ball of
flame. This one is the sun. The sun is itself in its nature like a fixed
star, but it differs from the other fixed stars in appearance because it
is beyond comparison nearer than they are; and because it is nearer men
have been able to learn something of its nature. Its mean distance from
the earth is ninety-three million miles. It is a mass of flaming matter,
having a diameter of 866,000 miles. Its bulk is a million and a quarter
times the bulk of our earth.
These are difficult figures for the imagination. If a bullet fired from
a Maxim gun at the sun kept its muzzle velocity unimpaired, it would
take seven years to reach the sun. And yet we say the sun is near,
measured by the scale of the stars. If the earth were a small ball, one
inch in diameter, the sun would be a globe of nine feet diameter; it
would fill a small bedroom. It is spinning round on its axis, but since
it is an incandescent fluid, its polar regions do not travel with the
same velocity as its equator, the surface of which rotates in about
twenty-five days. The surface visible to us consists of clouds of
incandescent metallic vapour. At what lies below we can only guess. So
hot is the sun’s atmosphere that iron, nickel, copper, and tin are
present in it in a gaseous state. About it at great distances circle not
only our earth, but certain kindred bodies called the planets. These
shine in the sky because they reflect the light of the sun; they are
near enough for us to note their movements quite easily. Night by night
their positions change with regard to the fixed stars.
It is well to understand how empty space is. If, as we have said, the
sun were a ball nine feet across, our earth would, in proportion, be the
size of a one-inch ball, and at a distance of 323 yards from the sun.
The moon would be a speck the size of a small pea, thirty inches from
the earth. Nearer to the sun than the earth would be two other very
similar specks, the planets Mercury and Venus, at a distance of 125 and
250 yards respectively. Beyond the earth would come the planets Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, at distances of 500, 1806, 3000,
6000, and 9500 yards respectively. There would also be a certain number
of very much smaller specks, flying about amongst these planets, more
particularly a number called the asteroids circling between Mars and
Jupiter, and occasionally a little puff of more or less luminous vapour
and dust would drift into the system from the almost limitless emptiness
beyond. Such a puff is what we call a comet. _All the rest of the space
about us and around us and for unfathomable distances beyond is cold,
lifeless, and void._ The nearest fixed star to us, _on this minute
scale_, be it remembered,--the earth as a one-inch ball, and the moon a
little pea--would be over 40,000 miles away.
The science that tells of these things and how men have come to know
about them is Astronomy, and to books of astronomy the reader must go to
learn more about the sun and stars. The science and description of the
world on which we live are called respectively Geology and Geography.
The diameter of our world is a little under 8000 miles. Its surface is
rough; the more projecting parts of the roughness are mountains, and in
the hollows of its surface there is a film of water, the oceans and
seas. This film of water is about five miles thick at its deepest
part--that is to say, the deepest oceans have a depth of five miles.
This is very little in comparison with the bulk of the world.
About this sphere is a thin covering of air, the atmosphere. As we
ascend in a balloon or go up a mountain from the level of the sea-shore
the air is continually less dense, until at last it becomes so thin that
it cannot support life. At a height of twenty miles there is scarcely
any air at all--not one hundredth part of the density of air at the
surface of the sea. The highest point to which a bird can fly is about
four miles up--the condor, it is said, can struggle up to that; but most
small birds and insects which are carried up by aeroplanes or balloons
drop off insensible at a much lower level, and the greatest height to
which any mountaineer has ever climbed is under five miles. Men have
flown in aeroplanes to a height of over four miles, and balloons with
men in them have reached very nearly seven miles, but at the cost of
considerable physical suffering. Small experimental balloons, containing
not men, but recording instruments, have gone as high as twenty-two
miles.
It is in the upper few hundred feet of the crust of the earth, in the
sea, and in the lower levels of the air below four miles that life is
found. We do not know of any life at all except in these films of air
and water upon our planet. So far as we know, all the rest of space is
as yet without life. Scientific men have discussed the possibility of
life, or of some process of a similar kind, occurring upon such kindred
bodies as the planets Venus and Mars. But they point merely to
questionable possibilities.
Astronomers and geologists and those who study physics have been able to
tell us something of the origin and history of the earth. They consider
that, vast ages ago, the sun was a spinning, flaring mass of matter,
not yet concentrated into a compact centre of heat and light,
considerably larger than it is now, and spinning very much faster, and
that as it whirled, a series of fragments detached themselves from it,
which became the planets. Our earth is one of these planets. The flaring
mass that was the material of the earth broke as it spun into two
masses, a larger, the earth itself, and a smaller, which is now the
dead, still moon. Astronomers give us convincing reasons for supposing
that sun and earth and moon and all that system were then whirling about
at a speed much greater than the speed at which they are moving to-day,
and that at first our earth was a flaming thing upon which no life could
live. The way in which they have reached these conclusions is by a very
beautiful and interesting series of observations and reasoning, too long
and elaborate for us to deal with here. But they oblige us to believe
that the sun, incandescent though it is, is now much cooler than it was,
and that it spins more slowly now than it did, and that it continues to
cool and slow down. And they also show that the rate at which the earth
spins is diminishing and continues to diminish--that is to say, that our
day is growing longer and longer, and that the heat at the centre of the
earth wastes slowly. There was a time when the day was not a half and
not a third of what it is to-day; when a blazing hot sun, much greater
than it is now, must have moved visibly--had there been an eye to mark
it--from its rise to its setting across the skies. There will be a time
when the day will be as long as a year is now, and the cooling sun,
shorn of its beams, will hang motionless in the heavens.
It must have been in days of a much hotter sun, a far swifter day and
night, high tides, great heat, tremendous storms and earthquakes, that
life, of which we are a part, began upon the world. The moon also was
nearer and brighter in those days and had a changing face.[3]
II
THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS
§ 1. _The First Living Things._ § 2. _How Old Is the World?_
§ 1
We do not know how life began upon the earth.[4]
Biologists, that is to say, students of life, have made guesses about
these beginnings, but we will not discuss them here. Let us only note
that they all agree that life began where the tides of those swift days
spread and receded over the steaming beaches of mud and sand.
The atmosphere was much denser then, usually great cloud masses obscured
the sun, frequent storms darkened the heavens. The land of those days,
upheaved by violent volcanic forces, was a barren land, without
vegetation, without soil. The almost incessant rain-storms swept down
upon it, and rivers and torrents carried great loads of sediment out to
sea, to become muds that hardened later into slates and shales, and
sands that became sandstones. The geologists have studied the whole
accumulation of these sediments as it remains to-day, from those of the
earliest ages to the most recent. Of course the oldest deposits are the
most distorted and changed and worn, and in them there is now no certain
trace to be found of life at all. Probably the earliest forms of life
were small and soft, leaving no evidence of their existence behind them.
It was only when some of these living things developed skeletons and
shells of lime and such-like hard material that they left fossil
vestiges after they died, and so put themselves on record for
examination.
The literature of geology is very largely an account of the fossils that
are found in the rocks, and of the order in which layers after layers of
rocks lie one on another. The very oldest rocks must have been formed
before there was any sea at all, when the earth was too hot for a sea to
exist, and when the water that is now sea was an atmosphere of steam
mixed with the air. Its higher levels were dense with clouds, from which
a hot rain fell towards the rocks below, to be converted again into
steam long before it reached their incandescence. Below this steam
atmosphere the molten world-stuff solidified as the first rocks. These
first rocks must have solidified as a cake over glowing liquid material
beneath, much as cooling lava does. They must have appeared first as
crusts and clinkers. They must have been constantly remelted and
recrystallized before any thickness of them became permanently solid.
The name of Fundamental Gneiss is given to a great underlying system of
crystalline rocks which probably formed age by age as this hot youth of
the world drew to its close. The scenery of the world in the days when
the Fundamental Gneiss was formed must have been more like the interior
of a furnace than anything else to be found upon earth at the present
time.
After long ages the steam in the atmosphere began also to condense and
fall right down to earth, pouring at last over these warm primordial
rocks in rivulets of hot water and gathering in depressions as pools and
lakes and the first seas. Into those seas the streams that poured over
the rocks brought with them dust and particles to form a sediment, and
this sediment accumulated in layers, or as geologists call them,
_strata_, and formed the first Sedimentary Rocks. Those earliest
sedimentary rocks sank into depressions and were covered by others; they
were bent, tilted up, and torn by great volcanic disturbances and by
tidal strains that swept through the rocky crust of the earth. We find
these first sedimentary rocks still coming to the surface of the land
here and there, either not covered by later strata or exposed after vast
ages of concealment by the wearing off of the rock that covered them
later--there are great surfaces of them in Canada especially; they are
cleft and bent, partially remelted, recrystallized, hardened and
compressed, but recognizable for what they are. And they contain no
single certain trace of life at all. They are frequently called _Azoic_
(lifeless) Rocks. But since in some of these earliest sedimentary rocks
a substance called graphite (black lead) occurs, and also red and black
oxide of iron, and since it is asserted that these substances need the
activity of living things for their production, which may or may not be
the case, some geologists prefer to call these earliest sedimentary
rocks _Archæozoic_ (primordial life). They suppose that the first life
was soft living matter that had no shells or skeletons or any such
structure that could remain as a recognizable fossil after its death,
and that its chemical influence caused the deposition of graphite and
iron oxide. This is pure guessing, of course, and there is at least an
equal probability that in the time of formation of the Azoic Rocks, life
had not yet begun.
Long ago there were found in certain of these ancient first-formed rocks
in Canada, curious striped masses, and thin layers of white and green
mineral substance which Sir William Dawson considered were fossil
vestiges, the walls or coverings of some very simple sort of living
thing which has now vanished from the earth. He called these markings
_Eozoon Canadense_ (the Canadian dawn-animal). There has been much
discussion and controversy over this Eozoon, but to-day it is agreed
that Eozoon is nothing more than a crystalline marking. Mixed minerals
will often intercrystallize in blobs or branching shapes that are very
suggestive of simple plant or animal forms. Any one who has made a lead
tree in his schooldays, or lit those queer indoor fireworks known as
serpents’ eggs, which unfold like a long snake, or who has seen the
curious markings often found in quartz crystals, or noted the tree-like
pattern on old stone-ware beer mugs, will realize how closely non-living
matter can sometimes mock the shapes of living things.
Overlying or overlapping these Azoic or Archæozoic rocks come others,
manifestly also very ancient and worn, which do contain traces of life.
These first remains are of the simplest description; they are the
vestiges of simple plants, called algæ, or marks like the tracks made by
worms in the sea mud. There are also the skeletons of the microscopic
creatures called Radiolaria. This second series of rocks is called the
Proterozoic (beginning of life) series, and marks a long age in the
world’s history. Lying over and above the Proterozoic rocks is a third
series, which is found to contain a considerable number and variety of
traces of living things. First comes the evidence of a diversity of
shellfish, crabs, and such-like crawling things, worms, seaweeds, and
the like; then of a multitude of fishes and of the beginnings of land
plants and land creatures. These rocks are called the Palæozoic (ancient
life) rocks. They mark a vast era, during which life was slowly
spreading, increasing, and developing in the seas of our world. Through
long ages, through the earliest Palæozoic time, it was no more than a
proliferation of such swimming and creeping things in the water. There
were creatures called trilobites; they were crawling things like big sea
woodlice that were probably related to the American king-crab of to-day.
There were also sea-scorpions, the prefects of that early world. The
individuals of certain species of these were nine feet long. These were
the very highest sorts of life. There were abundant different sorts of
an order of shellfish called brachiopods. There were plant animals,
rooted and joined together like plants, and loose weeds that waved in
the waters.
It was not a display of life to excite our imaginations. There was
nothing that ran or flew or even swam swiftly or skilfully. Except for
the size of some of the creatures, it was not very different from, and
rather less various than, the kind of life a student would gather from
any summer-time ditch nowadays for microscopic examination. Such was the
life of the shallow seas through a hundred million years or more in the
early Palæozoic period. The land during that time was apparently
absolutely barren. We find no trace nor hint of land life. Everything
that lived in those days lived under water for most or all of its life.
[Illustration: Life in the Early Palæozoic
Note its general resemblance, except for size, to the microscopic summer
ditch-water life of to-day.]
Between the formation of these Lower Palæozoic rocks in which the sea
scorpion and trilobite ruled, and our own time, there have intervened
almost immeasurable ages, represented by layers and masses of
sedimentary rocks. There are first the Upper Palæozoic Rocks, and above
these the geologists distinguish two great divisions. Next above the
Palæozoic come the Mesozoic (middle life) rocks, a second vast system of
fossil-bearing rocks, representing perhaps a hundred millions of swift
years, and containing a wonderful array of fossil remains, bones of
giant reptiles and the like, which we will presently describe; and above
these again are the Cainozoic (recent life) rocks, a third great volume
in the history of life, an unfinished volume of which the sand and mud
that was carried out to sea yesterday by the rivers of the world, to
bury the bones and scales and bodies and tracks that will become at last
fossils of the things of to-day, constitute the last written leaf.
(It is, we may note, the practice of many geologists to make a break
between the rest of the Cainozoic system of rocks and those which
contain traces of humanity, which latter are cut off as a separate
system under the name of Quaternary. But that, as we shall see, is
rather like taking the last page of a book, which is really the
conclusion of the last chapter, and making a separate chapter of it and
calling it the last chapter.)
These markings and fossils in the rocks and the rocks themselves are our
first historical documents. The history of life that men have puzzled
out and are still puzzling out from them is called the Record of the
Rocks. By studying this record men are slowly piecing together a story
of life’s beginnings, and of the beginnings of our kind, of which our
ancestors a century or so ago had no suspicion. But when we call these
rocks and the fossils a record and a history, it must not be supposed
that there is any sign of an orderly keeping of a record. It is merely
that whatever happens leaves some trace, if only we are intelligent
enough to detect the meaning of that trace. Nor are the rocks of the
world in orderly layers one above the other, convenient for men to read.
They are not like the books and pages of a library. They are torn,
disrupted, interrupted, flung about, defaced, like a carelessly arranged
office after it has experienced in succession a bombardment, a hostile
military occupation, looting, an earthquake, riots, and a fire. And so
it is that for countless generations this Record of the Rocks lay
unsuspected beneath the feet of men. Fossils were known to the Ionian
Greeks in the sixth century B.C.,[5] they were discussed at Alexandria
by Eratosthenes and others in the third century B.C., a discussion which
is summarized in Strabo’s _Geography_ (?20-10 B.C.). They were known to
the Latin poet Ovid, but he did not understand their nature. He thought
they were the first rude efforts of creative power. They were noted by
Arabic writers in the tenth century. Leonardo da Vinci, who lived so
recently as the opening of the sixteenth century (1452-1519), was one of
the first Europeans to grasp the real significance of fossils,[6] and it
has been only within the last century and a half that man has begun the
serious and sustained deciphering of these long-neglected early pages of
his world’s history.
§ 2
[Illustration: graph of eras]
Speculations about geological time vary enormously.[7] Estimates of the
age of the oldest rocks by geologists and astronomers starting from
different standpoints have varied between 1,600,000,000, and 25,000,000.
The lowest estimate was made by Lord Kelvin in 1867. Professor Huxley
guessed at 400,000,000 years. There is a summary of views and the
grounds upon which the estimates have been made in Osborn’s _Origin and
Evolution of Life_; he inclines to the moderate total of 100,000,000. It
must be clearly understood by the reader how sketchy and provisional all
these time estimates are. They rest nearly always upon theoretical
assumptions of the slenderest kind. That the period of time has been
vast, that it is to be counted by scores and possibly by hundreds of
millions of years, is the utmost that can be said with certainty in the
matter. It is quite open to the reader to divide every number in the
appended time diagram by ten or multiply it by two; no one can gainsay
him. Of the relative amount of time as between one age and another we
have, however, stronger evidence; if the reader cuts down the
800,000,000 we have given here to 400,000,000, then he must reduce the
40,000,000 of the Cainozoic to 20,000,000. And be it noted that whatever
the total sum may be, most geologists are in agreement that _half or
more than half of the whole of geological time had passed before life
had developed to the Later Palæozoic level_. The reader reading quickly
through these opening chapters may be apt to think of them as a mere
swift prelude of preparation to the apparently much longer history that
follows, but in reality that subsequent history is longer only because
it is more detailed and more interesting to us. It looms larger in
perspective. For ages that stagger the imagination this earth spun hot
and lifeless, and again for ages of equal vastness it held no life above
the level of the animalculæ in a drop of ditch-water.
Not only is Space from the point of view of life and humanity empty, but
Time is empty also. Life is like a little glow, scarcely kindled yet, in
these void immensities.
III
NATURAL SELECTION AND THE CHANGES OF SPECIES
Now here it will be well to put plainly certain general facts about this
new thing, _life_, that was creeping in the shallow waters and
intertidal muds of the early Palæozoic period, and which is perhaps
confined to our planet alone in all the immensity of space.
Life differs from all things whatever that are without life in certain
general aspects. There are the most wonderful differences among living
things to-day, but all living things past and present agree in
possessing _a certain power of growth_, all living things _take
nourishment_, all living things _move about_ as they feed and grow,
though the movement may be no more than the spread of roots through the
soil, or of branches in the air. Moreover, living things reproduce; they
give rise to other living things, either by growing and then dividing or
by means of seeds or spores or eggs or other ways of producing young.
_Reproduction_ is a characteristic of life.
No living thing goes on living forever. There seems to be a _limit of
growth_ for every kind of living thing. Among very small and simple
living things, such as that microscopic blob of living matter the
_Amæba_, an individual may grow and then divide completely into two new
individuals, which again may divide in their turn. Many other
microscopic creatures live actively for a time, grow, and then become
quiet and inactive, enclose themselves in an outer covering and break up
wholly into a number of still smaller things, spores, which are released
and scattered and again grow into the likeness of their parent. Among
more complex creatures the reproduction is not usually such simple
division, though division does occur even in the case of many creatures
big enough to be visible to the unassisted eye. But the rule with almost
all larger beings is that the individual grows up to a certain limit of
size. Then, before it becomes unwieldy, its growth declines and stops.
As it reaches its full size it _matures_, it begins to produce young,
which are either born alive or hatched from eggs. But all of its body
does not produce young. Only a special part does that. After the
individual has lived and produced offspring for some time, it ages and
dies. It does so by a sort of necessity. There is a practical limit to
its life as well as to its growth. These things are as true of plants as
they are of animals. And they are not true of things that do not live.
Non-living things, such as crystals, grow, but they have no set limits
of growth or size, they _do not move of their own accord_ and there is
_no stir within them_. Crystals once formed may last unchanged for
millions of years. There is _no reproduction_ for any non-living thing.
This growth and dying and reproduction of living things leads to some
very wonderful consequences. The young which a living thing produces are
either directly, or after some intermediate stages and changes (such as
the changes of a caterpillar and butterfly), like the parent living
thing. But they are never exactly like it or like each other. There is
always a slight difference, which we speak of as _individuality_. A
thousand butterflies this year may produce two or three thousand next
year; these latter will look to us almost exactly like their
predecessors, but each one will have just that slight difference. It is
hard for us to see individuality in butterflies because we do not
observe them very closely, but it is easy for us to see it in men. All
the men and women in the world now are descended from the men and women
of A.D. 1800, but not one of us now is exactly the same as one of that
vanished generation. And what is true of men and butterflies is true of
every sort of living thing, of plants as of animals. Every species
changes all its individualities in each generation. That is as true of
all the minute creatures that swarmed and reproduced and died in the
Archæozoic and Proterozoic seas, as it is of men to-day.
Every species of living things is continually dying and being born
again, as a multitude of fresh individuals.
Consider, then, what must happen to a new-born generation of living
things of any species. Some of the individuals will be stronger or
sturdier or better suited to succeed in life in some way than the rest,
many individuals will be weaker or less suited. In particular single
cases any sort of luck or accident may occur, but _on the whole_ the
better equipped individuals will live and grow up and reproduce
themselves and the weaker will _as a rule_ go under. The latter will be
less able to get food, to fight their enemies and pull through. So that
in each generation there is as it were a picking over of a species, a
picking out of most of the weak or unsuitable and a preference for the
strong and suitable. This process is called _Natural Selection_ or the
_Survival of the Fittest_.[8]
It follows, therefore, from the fact that living things grow and breed
and die, that every species, so long as the conditions under which it
lives remain the same, becomes more and more perfectly fitted to those
conditions in every generation.
But now suppose those conditions change, then the sort of individual
that used to succeed may now fail to succeed and a sort of individual
that could not get on at all under the old conditions may now find its
opportunity. These species will change, therefore, generation by
generation; the old sort of individual that used to prosper and dominate
will fail and die out and the new sort of individual will become the
rule,--until the general character of the species changes.
Suppose, for example, there is some little furry whitey-brown animal
living in a bitterly cold land which is usually under snow. Such
individuals as have the thickest, whitest fur will be least hurt by the
cold, less seen by their enemies, and less conspicuous as they seek
their prey. The fur of this species will thicken and its whiteness
increase with every generation, until there is no advantage in carrying
any more fur.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF LIFE IN THE LATER PALÆOZOIC AGE.
Life is creeping out of the water. An insect like a dragon fly is shown.
There were amphibia like gigantic newts and salamanders, and even
primitive reptiles in these swamps.]
Imagine now a change of climate that brings warmth into the land, sweeps
away the snows, makes white creatures glaringly visible during the
greater part of the year and thick fur an encumbrance. Then every
individual with a touch of brown in its colouring and a thinner fur will
find itself at an advantage, and very white and heavy fur will be a
handicap. There will be a weeding out of the white in favour of the
brown in each generation. If this change of climate come about too
quickly, it may of course exterminate the species altogether; but if it
come about gradually, the species, although it may have a hard time, may
yet be able to change itself and adapt itself generation by generation.
This change and adaptation is called the _Modification of Species_.
Perhaps this change of climate does not occur all over the lands
inhabited by the species; maybe it occurs only on one side of some great
arm of the sea or some great mountain range or such-like divide, and not
on the other. A warm ocean current like the Gulf Stream may be
deflected, and flow so as to warm one side of the barrier, leaving the
other still cold. Then on the cold side this species will still be going
on to its utmost possible furriness and whiteness and on the other side
it will be modifying towards brownness and a thinner coat. At the same
time there will probably be other changes going on; a difference in the
paws perhaps, because one half of the species will be frequently
scratching through snow for its food, while the other will be scampering
over brown earth. Probably also the difference of climate will mean
differences in the sort of food available, and that may produce
differences in the teeth and the digestive organs. And there may be
changes in the sweat and oil glands of the skin due to the changes in
the fur, and these will affect the excretory organs and all the internal
chemistry of the body. And so through all the structure of the creature.
A time will come when the two separated varieties of this formerly
single species will become so unlike each other as to be recognizably
different species. Such a splitting up of a species in the course of
generations into two or more species is called the _Differentiation of
Species_.
And it should be clear to the reader that given these elemental facts of
life, given growth and death and reproduction with individual variation
in a world that changes, life _must_ change in this way, modification
and differentiation _must_ occur, old species _must_ disappear, and new
ones appear. We have chosen for our instance here a familiar sort of
animal, but what is true of furry beasts in snow and ice is true of all
life, and equally true of the soft jellies and simple beginnings that
flowed and crawled for hundreds of millions of years between the tidal
levels and in the shallow, warm waters of the Proterozoic seas.
The early life of the early world, when the blazing sun rose and set in
only a quarter of the time it now takes, when the warm seas poured in
great tides over the sandy and muddy shores of the rocky lands and the
air was full of clouds and steam, must have been modified and varied and
species must have developed at a great pace. Life was probably as swift
and short as the days and years; the generations, which natural
selection picked over, followed one another in rapid succession.
Natural selection is a slower process with man than with any other
creature. It takes twenty years or more before an ordinary human being
in western Europe grows up and reproduces. In the case of most animals
the new generation is on trial in a year or less. With such simple and
lowly beings, however, as first appeared in the primordial seas, growth
and reproduction was probably a matter of a few brief hours or even of a
few brief minutes. Modification and differentiation of species must
accordingly have been extremely rapid, and life had already developed a
very great variety of widely contrasted forms before it began to leave
traces in the rocks. The Record of the Rocks does not begin, therefore,
with any group of closely related forms from which all subsequent and
existing creatures are descended. It begins in the midst of the game,
with nearly every main division of the animal kingdom already
represented.[9] Plants are already plants, and animals animals. The
curtain rises on a drama in the sea that has already begun, and has been
going on for some time. The brachiopods are discovered already in their
shells, accepting and consuming much the same sort of food that oysters
and mussels do now; the great water scorpions crawl among the seaweeds,
the trilobites roll up into balls and unroll and scuttle away. In that
ancient mud and among those early weeds there was probably as rich and
abundant and active a life of infusoria and the like as one finds in a
drop of ditch-water to-day. In the ocean waters, too, down to the utmost
downward limit to which light could filter, then as now, there was an
abundance of minute and translucent, and in many cases phosphorescent,
beings.
But though the ocean and intertidal waters already swarmed with life,
the land above the high-tide line was still, so far as we can guess, a
stony wilderness without a trace of life.
IV
THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND BY LIFE
§ 1. _Life and Water._ § 2. _The Earliest Animals._
§ 1
Wherever the shore line ran there was life, and that life went on in and
by and with water as its home, its medium, and its fundamental
necessity.
The first jelly-like beginnings of life must have perished whenever they
got out of the water, as jelly-fish dry up and perish on our beaches
to-day. Drying up was the fatal thing for life in those days, against
which at first it had no protection. But in a world of rain-pools and
shallow seas and tides, any variation that enabled a living thing to
hold out and keep its moisture during hours of low tide of drought met
with every encouragement in the circumstances of the time. There must
have been a constant risk of stranding. And, on the other hand, life had
to keep rather near the shore and beaches in the shallows because it had
need of air (dissolved of course in the water) and light.
No creature can breathe, no creature can digest its food, without water.
We talk of breathing air, but what all living things really do is to
breathe oxygen dissolved in water. The air we ourselves breathe must
first be dissolved in the moisture in our lungs; and all our food must
be liquefied before it can be assimilated. Water-living creatures which
are always under water, wave the freely exposed gills by which they
breathe in that water, and extract the air dissolved in it. But a
creature that is to be exposed for any time out of the water, must have
its body and its breathing apparatus protected from drying up. Before
the seaweeds could creep up out of the Early Palæozoic seas into the
intertidal line of the beach, they had to develop a tougher outer skin
to hold their moisture. Before the ancestor of the sea scorpion could
survive being left by the tide it had to develop its casing and armour.
The trilobites probably developed their tough covering and rolled up
into balls, far less as a protection against each other and any other
enemies they may have possessed, than as a precaution against drying.
And when presently, as we ascend the Palæozoic rocks, the fish appear,
first of all the backboned or vertebrated animals, it is evident that a
number of them are already adapted by the protection of their gills with
gill covers and by a sort of primitive lung swimming-bladder, to face
the same risk of temporary stranding.
Now the weeds and plants that were adapting themselves to intertidal
conditions were also bringing themselves into a region of brighter
light, and light is very necessary and precious to all plants. Any
development of structure that would stiffen them and hold them up to the
light, so that instead of crumpling and flopping when the waters
receded, they would stand up outspread, was a great advantage. And so we
find them developing fibre and support, and the beginning of _woody
fibre_ in them. The early plants reproduced by soft spores, or
half-animal “gametes,” that were released in water, were distributed by
water and could only germinate under water. The early plants were tied,
and most lowly plants to-day are tied, by the conditions of their life
cycle, to water. But here again there was a great advantage to be got by
the development of some protection of the spores from drought that would
enable reproduction to occur without submergence. So soon as a species
could do that, it could live and reproduce and spread above the
high-water mark, bathed in light and out of reach of the beating and
distress of the waves. The main classificatory divisions of the larger
plants mark stages in the release of plant life from the necessity of
submergence by the development of woody support and of a method of
reproduction that is more and more defiant of drying up. The lower
plants are still the prisoner attendants of water. The lower mosses must
live in damp, and even the development of the spore of the ferns demands
at certain stages extreme wetness. The highest plants have carried
freedom from water so far that they can live and reproduce if only
there is some moisture in the soil below them. They have solved their
problem of living out of water altogether.
The essentials of that problem were worked out through the vast æons of
the Proterozoic Age and the early Palæozoic Age by nature’s method of
experiment and trial. Then slowly, but in great abundance, a variety of
new plants began to swarm away from the sea and over the lower lands,
still keeping to swamp and lagoon and watercourse as they spread.
§ 2
And after the plants came the animal life.
There is no sort of land animal in the world, as there is no sort of
land plant, whose structure is not primarily that of a water-inhabiting
being which has been adapted through the modification and
differentiation of species to life out of the water. This adaptation is
attained in various ways. In the case of the land scorpion the
gill-plates of the primitive sea scorpion are sunken into the body so as
to make the lung-books secure from rapid evaporation. The gills of
crustaceans, such as the crabs which run about in the air, are protected
by the gill-cover extensions of the back shell or carapace. The
ancestors of the insects developed a system of air pouches and air
tubes, the tracheal tubes, which carry the air all over the body before
it is dissolved. In the case of the vertebrated land animals, the gills
of the ancestral fish were first supplemented and then replaced by a
bag-like growth from the throat, the primitive lung swimming-bladder. To
this day there survive certain mudfish which enable us to understand
very clearly the method by which the vertebrated land animals worked
their way out of the water. These creatures (_e.g._ the African lung
fish) are found in tropical regions in which there is a rainy full
season and a dry season, during which the rivers become mere ditches of
baked mud. During the rainy season these fish swim about and breathe by
gills like any other fish. As the waters of the river evaporate, these
fish bury themselves in the mud, their gills go out of action, and the
creature keeps itself alive until the waters return by swallowing air,
which passes into its swimming-bladder. The Australian lung fish, when
it is caught by the drying up of the river in stagnant pools, and the
water has become deaerated and foul, rises to the surface and gulps air.
A newt in a pond does exactly the same thing. These creatures still
remain at the transition stage, the stage at which the ancestors of the
higher vertebrated animals were released from their restriction to an
under-water life.
The amphibia (frogs, newts, tritons, etc.) still show in their life
history all the stages in the process of this liberation. They are still
dependent on water for their reproduction; their eggs must be laid in
sunlit water, and there they must develop. The young tadpole has
branching external gills that wave in the water; then a gill cover grows
back over them and forms a gill chamber. Then, as the creature’s legs
appear and its tail is absorbed, it begins to use its lungs, and its
gills dwindle and vanish. The adult frog can live all the rest of its
days in the air, but it can be drowned if it is kept steadfastly below
water. When we come to the reptile, however, we find an egg which is
protected from evaporation by a tough egg case, and this egg produces
young which breathe by lungs from the very moment of hatching. The
reptile is on all fours with the seeding plant in its freedom from the
necessity to pass any stage of its life cycle in water.
[Illustration: _Australian Lung fish breathing air_]
The later Palæozoic Rocks of the northern hemisphere give us the
materials for a series of pictures of this slow spreading of life over
the land. Geographically, all round the northern half of the world it
was an age of lagoons and shallow seas very favourable to this invasion.
The new plants, now that they had acquired the power to live this new
aerial life, developed with an extraordinary richness and variety.
[Illustration: Some Reptiles of the Late Palæozoic Age]
There were as yet no true flowering plants,[10] no grasses nor trees
that shed their leaves in winter;[11] the first “flora” consisted of
great tree ferns, gigantic equisetums, cycad ferns, and kindred
vegetation. Many of these plants took the form of huge-stemmed trees, of
which great multitudes of trunks survive fossilized to this day. Some of
these trees were over a hundred feet high, of orders and classes now
vanished from the world. They stood with their stems in the water, in
which no doubt there was a thick tangle of soft mosses and green slime
and fungoid growths that left few plain vestiges behind them. The
abundant remains of these first swamp forests constitute the main
coal-measures of the world to-day.
Amidst this luxuriant primitive vegetation crawled and glided and flew
the first insects. They were rigid-winged, four-winged creatures, often
very big, some of them having wings measuring a foot in length. There
were numerous dragon flies--one found in the Belgian coal-measures had a
wing span of twenty-nine inches! There were also a great variety of
flying cockroaches. Scorpions abounded, and a number of early spiders,
which, however, had no spinnerets for web making.[12] Land snails
appeared. So too did the first-known step of our own ancestry upon land,
the amphibia. As we ascend the higher levels of the Later Palæozoic
record, we find the process of air adaptation has gone as far as the
appearance of true reptiles amidst the abundant and various amphibia.
The land life of the Upper Palæozoic Age was the life of a green swamp
forest without flowers or birds or the noises of modern insects. There
were no big land beasts at all; wallowing amphibia and primitive
reptiles were the very highest creatures that life had so far produced.
Whatever land lay away from the water or high above the water was still
altogether barren and lifeless. But steadfastly, generation by
generation, life was creeping away from the shallow sea-water of its
beginning.
V
CHANGES IN THE WORLD’S CLIMATE
§ 1. _Why Life Must Change Continually._ § 2. _The Sun a Steadfast
Star._ § 3. _Changes from Within the Earth._ § 4. _Life May Control
Change._
§ 1
The Record of the Rocks is like a great book that has been carelessly
misused. All its pages are torn, worn, and defaced, and many are
altogether missing. The outline of the story that we sketch here has
been pieced together slowly and painfully in an investigation that is
still incomplete and still in progress. The Carboniferous Rocks, the
“coal-measures,” give us a vision of the first great expansion of life
over the wet lowlands. Then come the torn pages known as the Permian
Rocks (which count as the last of the Palæozoic), that preserve very
little for us of the land vestiges of their age. Only after a long
interval of time does the history spread out generously again.
It must be borne in mind that great changes of climate have always been
in progress, that have sometimes stimulated and sometimes checked life.
Every species of living thing is always adapting itself more and more
closely to its conditions. And conditions are always changing. There is
no finality in adaptation. There is a continuing urgency towards fresh
change.
About these changes of climate some explanations are necessary here.
They are not regular changes; they are slow fluctuations between heat
and cold. The reader must not think that because the sun and earth were
once incandescent, the climatic history of the world is a simple story
of cooling down. The centre of the earth is certainly very hot to this
day, but we feel nothing of that internal heat at the surface; the
internal heat, except for volcanoes and hot springs, has not been
perceptible at the surface since first the rocks grew solid. Even in the
Azoic or Archæozoic Age there are traces in ice-worn rocks and the like
of periods of intense cold. Such cold waves have always been going on
everywhere, alternately with warmer conditions. And there have been
periods of great wetness and periods of great dryness throughout the
earth.
A complete account of the causes of these great climatic fluctuations
has still to be worked out, but we may perhaps point out some of the
chief of them.[13] Prominent among them is the fact that the earth does
not spin in a perfect circle round the sun. Its path or orbit is like a
hoop that is distorted; it is, roughly speaking, elliptical
(ovo-elliptical), and the sun is nearer to one end of the ellipse than
the other. It is at a point which is a focus of the ellipse. And the
shape of this orbit never remains the same. It is slowly distorted by
the attractions of the other planets, for ages it may be nearly
circular, for ages it is more or less elliptical. As the ellipse becomes
most nearly circular, then the focus becomes most nearly the centre.
When the orbit becomes most elliptical, then the position of the sun
becomes most remote from the middle or, to use the astronomer’s phrase,
most eccentric. When the orbit is most nearly circular, then it must be
manifest that all the year round the earth must be getting much the same
amount of heat from the sun; when the orbit is most distorted, then
there will be a season in each year when the earth is nearest the sun
(this phase is called _Perihelion_) and getting a great deal of heat
comparatively, and a season when it will be at its farthest from the sun
(_Aphelion_) and getting very little warmth. A planet at _aphelion_ is
travelling its slowest, and its fastest at _perihelion_; so that the hot
part of its year will last for a much less time than the cold part of
its year. (Sir Robert Ball calculated that the greatest difference
possible between the seasons was thirty-three days.) During ages when
the orbit is most nearly circular there will therefore be least extremes
of climate, and when the orbit is at its greatest eccentricity, there
will be an age of cold with great extremes of seasonal temperature.
These _changes in the orbit of the earth_ are due to the varying pull of
all the planets, and Sir Robert Ball declared himself unable to
calculate any regular cycle of orbital change, but Professor G. H.
Darwin maintained that it is possible to make out a kind of cycle
between greatest and least eccentricity of about 200,000 years.
But this change in the shape of the orbit is only one cause of the
change of the world’s climate. There are many others that have to be
considered with it. As most people know, the change in the seasons is
due to the fact that the equator of the earth is inclined at an angle to
the plane of its orbit. If the earth stood up straight in its orbit, so
that its equator was in the plane of its orbit, there would be no change
in the seasons at all. The sun would always be overhead at the equator,
and the day and night would each be exactly twelve hours long throughout
the year everywhere. It is this inclination which causes the difference
in the seasons and the unequal length of the day in summer and winter.
There is, according to Laplace, a possible variation of nearly three
degrees (from 22° 6’ to 24° 50’) in this inclination of the equator to
the orbit, and when this is at a maximum, the difference between summer
and winter is at its greatest. Great importance has been attached to
this variation in the inclination of the equator to the orbit by Dr.
Croll in his book _Climate and Time_. At present the angle is 23° 27’.
Manifestly when the angle is at its least, the world’s climate, other
things being equal, will be most equable.
And as a third important factor there is what is called the _precession
of the equinoxes_. This is a slow wabble of the pole of the spinning
earth that takes 25,000 odd years. Any one who watches a spinning top as
it “sleeps,” will see its axis making a slow circular movement, exactly
after the fashion of this circling movement of the earth’s axis. The
north pole, therefore, does not always point to the same north point
among the stars; its pointing traces out a circle in the heavens every
25,000 years.
Now, there will be times when the earth is at its extreme of aphelion or
of perihelion, when one hemisphere will be most turned to the sun in
its midsummer position and the other most turned away at its midwinter
position. And as the precession of the equinoxes goes on, a time will
come when the summer-winter position will come not at aphelion and
perihelion, but at the half-way points between them. When the summer of
one hemisphere happens at perihelion and the winter at aphelion, it will
be clear that the summer of the other hemisphere will happen at aphelion
and its winter at perihelion. One hemisphere will have a short hot
summer and a very cold winter, and the other a long cold summer and a
briefer warmish winter. But when the summer-winter positions come at the
half-way point of the orbit, and it is the spring of one hemisphere and
the autumn of the other that is at aphelion or perihelion, there will
not be the same wide difference between the climate of the two
hemispheres.
Here are three wavering systems of change all going on independently of
each other; the precession of the equinoxes, the change in the obliquity
of the equator to the orbit, and the changes in the eccentricity of the
orbit. Each system tends by itself to produce periods of equability and
periods of greater climatic contrast. And all these systems of change
interplay with each other. When it happens that at the same time the
orbit is most nearly circular, the equator is at its least inclination
from the plane of the earth’s orbit, and the spring and autumn are at
perihelion and aphelion, then all these causes will be conspiring to
make climate warm and uniform; there will be least difference of summer
and winter. When, on the other hand, the orbit is in its most eccentric
stage of deformation, when also the equator is most tilted up and when
further the summer and winter are at aphelion and perihelion, then
climates will be at their extremest and winter at its bitterest. There
will be great accumulations of ice and snow in winter; the heat of the
brief hot summer will be partly reflected back into space by the white
snow, and it will be unequal to the task of melting all the winter’s ice
before the earth spins away once more towards its chilly aphelion. The
earth will accumulate cold so long as this conspiracy of extreme
conditions continues.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE ONE SET OF CAUSES, THE ASTRONOMICAL
VARIATIONS, WHICH MAKE THE CLIMATE OF THE WORLD CHANGE SLOWLY BUT
CONTINUOUSLY.
It does not change in regular periods. It fluctuates through vast ages.
As the world’s climate changes, life must change too or perish.]
So our earth’s climate changes and wavers perpetually as these three
systems of influence come together with a common tendency towards
warmth or severity, or as they contradict and cancel each other.
We can trace in the Record of the Rocks an irregular series of changes
due to the interplay of these influences; there have been great ages
when the separate rhythms of these three systems kept them out of
agreement and the atmosphere was temperate, ages of world-wide warmth,
and other ages when they seemed to concentrate bitterly to their utmost
extremity, to freeze out and inflict the utmost stresses and hardship
upon life.
And in accordance we find from the record in the rocks that there have
been long periods of expansion and multiplication when life flowed and
abounded and varied, and harsh ages when there was a great weeding out
and disappearance of species, genera, and classes, and the learning of
stern lessons by all that survived. Such a propitious conjunction it
must have been that gave the age of luxuriant low-grade growth of the
coal-measures; such an adverse series of circumstances that chilled the
closing æons of the Palæozoic time.
It is probable that the warm spells have been long relatively to the
cold ages. Our world to-day seems to be emerging with fluctuations from
a prolonged phase of adversity and extreme conditions. Half a million
years ahead it may be a winterless world with trees and vegetation even
in the polar circles. At present we have no certainty in such a
forecast, but later on, as knowledge increases, it may be possible to
reckon with more precision, so that our race will make its plans
thousands of years ahead to meet the coming changes.
§ 2
Another entirely different cause of changes in the general climate of
the earth may be due to variations in the heat of the sun. We do not yet
understand what causes the heat of the sun or what sustains that undying
fire. It is possible that in the past there have been periods of greater
and lesser intensity. About that we know nothing; human experience has
been too short; and so far we have been able to find no evidence on this
matter in the geological record. On the whole, scientific men are
inclined to believe that the sun has blazed with a general steadfastness
throughout geological time. It may have been cooling slowly, but,
speaking upon the scale of things astronomical, it has certainly not
cooled very much.
§ 3
A third great group of causes influencing climate are to be found in the
forces within the world itself. Throughout the long history of the earth
there has been a continuous wearing down of the hills and mountains by
frost and rain and a carrying out of their material to become
sedimentary rocks under the seas. There has been a continuous process of
wearing down the land and filling up the seas, by which the seas, as
they became shallower, must have spread more and more over the land. The
reverse process, a process of crumpling and upheaval, has also been in
progress, but less regularly. The forces of upheaval have been
spasmodic; the forces of wearing down continuous. For long ages there
has been comparatively little volcanic upheaval, and then have come
periods in which vast mountain chains have been thrust up and the whole
outline of land and sea changed. Such a time was the opening stage of
the Cainozoic period, in which the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Andes
were all thrust up from the sea-level to far beyond their present
elevations, and the main outlines of the existing geography of the world
were drawn.
Now, a time of high mountains and deep seas would mean a larger dry land
surface for the world, and a more restricted sea surface, and a time of
low lands would mean a time of wider and shallower seas. High mountains
precipitate moisture from the atmosphere and hold it out of circulation
as snow and glaciers, while smaller oceans mean a lesser area for
surface evaporation. Other things being equal, lowland stages of the
world’s history would be ages of more general atmospheric moisture than
periods of relatively greater height of the mountains and greater depth
of the seas. But even small increases in the amount of moisture in the
air have a powerful influence upon the transmission of radiant heat
through that air. The sun’s heat will pass much more freely through dry
air than through moist air, and so a greater amount of heat would reach
the land surfaces of the globe under the conditions of extremes of
elevation and depth, than during the periods of relative lowness and
shallowness. Dry phases in the history of the earth mean, therefore, hot
days. But they also mean cold nights, because for the same reason that
the heat comes abundantly to the earth, it will be abundantly radiated
away. Moist phases mean, on the other hand, cooler days and warmer
nights. The same principle applies to the seasons, and so a phase of
great elevations and depressions of the surface would also be another
contributory factor on the side of extreme climatic conditions.
And a stage of greater elevation and depression would intensify its
extreme conditions by the gradual accumulation of ice caps upon the
polar regions and upon the more elevated mountain masses. This
accumulation would be at the expense of the sea, whose surface would
thus be further shrunken in comparison with the land.
Here, then, is another set of varying influences that will play in with
and help or check the influence of the astronomical variations stated in
§ 1 and § 2. There are other more localized forces at work into which we
cannot go in any detail here, but which will be familiar to the student
of the elements of physical geography; the influence of great ocean
currents in carrying warmth from equatorial to more temperate latitudes;
the interference of mountain chains with the moisture borne by prevalent
winds and the like. As in the slow processes of nature these currents
are deflected or the mountain chains worn down or displaced by fresh
upheavals, the climate over great areas will be changed and all the
conditions of life changed with it. Under the incessant slow variations
of these astronomical, telluric, and geographical influences life has no
rest. As its conditions change it must change or perish.
§ 4
And while we are enumerating the forces that change climate and the
conditions of terrestrial life, we may perhaps look ahead a little and
add a fourth set of influences, at first unimportant in the history of
the world so far as the land surface is concerned, but becoming more
important after the age of Reptiles, to which we shall proceed in our
next chapter. These are the effects produced upon climate by life
itself. Particularly great is the influence of vegetation, and
especially that of forests. Every tree is continually transpiring water
vapour into the air; the amount of water evaporated in summer by a lake
surface is far less than the amount evaporated by the same area of beech
forest. As in the later Mesozoic and the Cainozoic Age, great forests
spread over the world, their action in keeping the air moist and
mitigating and stabilizing climate by keeping the summer cool and the
winter mild must have become more and more important. Moreover, forests
accumulate and protect soil and so prepare the possibility of
agricultural life.
Water-weeds again may accumulate to choke and deflect rivers, flood and
convert great areas into marshes, and so lead to the destruction of
forests or the replacement of grass-lands by boggy wildernesses.
Finally, with the appearance of human communities, came what is perhaps
the most powerful of all living influences upon climate. By fire and
plough and axe man alters his world. By destroying forests and by
irrigation man has already affected the climate of great regions of the
world’s surface. The destruction of forests makes the seasons more
extreme; this has happened, for instance, in the northeastern states of
the United States of America. Moreover, the soil is no longer protected
from the scour of rain, and is washed away, leaving only barren rock
beneath. This has happened in Spain and Dalmatia and, some thousands of
years earlier, in South Arabia. By irrigation, on the other hand, man
restores the desert to life and mitigates climate. This process is going
on in Northwest India and Australia. In the future, by making such
operations worldwide and systematic, man may be able to control climate
to an extent at which as yet we can only guess.
VI
THE AGE OF REPTILES
§ 1. _The Age of Lowland Life._ § 2. _Flying Dragons._ § 3. _The
First Birds._ § 4. _An Age of Hardship and Death._ § 5. _The First
Appearance of Fur and Feathers._
§ 1
We know that for hundreds of thousands of years the wetness and warmth,
the shallow lagoon conditions that made possible the vast accumulations
of vegetable matter which, compressed and mummified,[14] are now coal,
prevailed over most of the world. There were some cold intervals, it is
true; but they did not last long enough to destroy the growths. Then
that long age of luxuriant low-grade vegetation drew to its end, and for
a time life on the earth seems to have undergone a period of world-wide
bleakness.
When the story resumes again, we find life entering upon a fresh phase
of richness and expansion. Vegetation has made great advances in the art
of living out of water. While the Palæozoic plants of the coal-measures
probably grew with swamp water flowing over their roots, the Mesozoic
flora from its very outset included palm-like cycads and low-ground
conifers that were distinctly land plants growing on soil above the
water level. The lower levels of the Mesozoic land were no doubt covered
by great fern brakes and shrubby bush and a kind of jungle growth of
trees. But there existed as yet no grass, no small flowering plants, no
turf nor greensward. Probably the Mesozoic was not an age of very
brightly coloured vegetation. It must have had a flora green in the wet
season and brown and purple in the dry. There were no gay flowers, no
bright autumn tints before the fall of the leaf, because there was as
yet no fall of the leaf. And beyond the lower levels the world was still
barren, still unclothed, still exposed without any mitigation to the
wear and tear of the wind and rain.
When one speaks of conifers in the Mesozoic the reader must not think of
the pines and firs that clothe the high mountain slopes of our time. He
must think of low-growing evergreens. The mountains were still as bare
and lifeless as ever. The only colour effects among the mountains were
the colour effects of naked rock, such colours as make the landscape of
Colorado so marvellous to-day.
Amidst this spreading vegetation of the lower plains the reptiles were
increasing mightily in multitude and variety. They were now in many
cases absolutely land animals. There are numerous anatomical points of
distinction between a reptile and an amphibian; they held good between
such reptiles and amphibians as prevailed in the carboniferous time of
the Upper Palæozoic; but the fundamental difference between reptiles and
amphibia which matters in this history is that the amphibian must go
back to the water to lay its eggs, and that in the early stages of its
life it must live in and under water. The reptile, on the other hand,
has cut out all the tadpole stages from its life cycle, or, to be more
exact, its tadpole stages are got through before the young leave the egg
case. The reptile has come out of the water altogether. Some had gone
back to it again, just as the hippopotamus and the otter among mammals
have gone back, but that is a further extension of the story to which we
cannot give much attention in this _Outline_.
[Illustration: Some Mesozoic Reptiles]
In the Palæozoic period, as we have said, life had not spread beyond the
swampy river valleys and the borders of sea lagoons and the like; but in
the Mesozoic, life was growing ever more accustomed to the thinner
medium of the air, was sweeping boldly up over the plains and towards
the hillsides. It is well for the student of human history and the human
future to note that. If a disembodied intelligence with no knowledge of
the future had come to earth and studied life during the early Palæozoic
age, he might very reasonably have concluded that life was absolutely
confined to the water, and that it could never spread over the land. It
found a way. In the Later Palæozoic Period that visitant might have been
equally sure that life could not go beyond the edge of a swamp. The
Mesozoic Period would still have found him setting bounds to life far
more limited than the bounds that are set to-day. And so to-day, though
we mark how life and man are still limited to five miles of air and a
depth of perhaps a mile or so of sea, we must not conclude from that
present limitation that life, through man, may not presently spread out
and up and down to a range of living as yet inconceivable.
[Illustration: Some
Late Mesozoic
Reptiles]
The earliest known reptiles were beasts with great bellies and not very
powerful legs, very like their kindred amphibia, wallowing as the
crocodile wallows to this day; but in the Mesozoic they soon began to
stand up and go stoutly on all fours, and several great sections of them
began to balance themselves on tail and hind legs, rather as the
kangaroos do now, in order to release the fore limbs for grasping food.
The bones of one notable division of reptiles which retained a
quadrupedal habit, a division of which many remains have been found in
South African and Russian Early Mesozoic deposits, display a number of
characters which approach those of the mammalian skeleton, and because
of this resemblance to the mammals (beasts) this division is called the
_Theriomorpha_ (beastlike). Another division was the crocodile branch,
and another developed towards the tortoises and turtles. The
_Plesiosaurs_ and _Ichthyosaurs_ were two groups which have left no
living representatives; they were huge reptiles returning to a
whale-like life in the sea. _Pliosaurus_, one of the largest
plesiosaurs, measured thirty feet from snout to tail tip--of which half
was neck. The _Mosasaurs_ were a third group of great porpoise-like
marine lizards. But the largest and most diversified group of these
Mesozoic reptiles was the group we have spoken of as kangaroo-like, the
_Dinosaurs_, many of which attained enormous proportions. In bigness
these greater _Dinosaurs_ have never been exceeded, although the sea can
still show in the whales creatures as great. Some of these, and the
largest among them, were herbivorous animals; they browsed on the rushy
vegetation and among the ferns and bushes, or they stood up and grasped
trees with their fore legs while they devoured the foliage. Among the
browsers, for example, were the _Diplodocus carnegii_, which measured
eighty=four feet in length, and the _Atlantosaurus_. The
_Gigantosaurus_, disinterred by a German expedition in 1912 from rocks
in East Africa, was still more colossal. It measured well over a hundred
feet! These greater monsters had legs, and they are usually figured as
standing up on them; but it is very doubtful if they could have
supported their weight in this way, out of water. Buoyed up by water or
mud, they may have got along. Another noteworthy type we have figured is
the _Triceratops_. There were also a number of great flesh-eaters who
preyed upon these herbivores. Of these, _Tyrannosaurus_ seems almost the
last word in “frightfulness” among living things. Some species of this
genus measured forty feet from snout to tail. Apparently it carried this
vast body kangaroo fashion on its tail and hind legs. Probably it reared
itself up. Some authorities even suppose that it leapt through the air.
If so, it possessed muscles of a quite miraculous quality. A leaping
elephant would be a far less astounding idea. Much more probably it
waded half submerged in pursuit of the herbivorous river saurians.
§ 2
One special development of the dinosaurian type of reptile was a light,
hopping, climbing group of creatures which developed a bat-like web
between the fifth finger and the side of the body, which was used in
gliding from tree to tree after the fashion of the flying squirrels.
These bat-lizards were the _Pterodactyls_. They are often described as
_flying_ reptiles, and pictures are drawn of Mesozoic scenery in which
they are seen soaring and swooping about. But their breastbone has no
keel such as the breastbone of a bird has for the attachment of muscles
strong enough for long-sustained flying. They must have flitted about
like bats. They must have had a grotesque resemblance to heraldic
dragons, and they played the part of bat-like birds in the Mesozoic
jungles. But bird-like though they were, they were not birds nor the
ancestors of birds. The structure of their wings was altogether
different from that of birds. The structure of their wings was that of a
hand with one long finger and a web; the wing of a bird is like an arm
with feathers projecting from its hind edge. And these Pterodactyls had
no feathers.
§ 3
Far less prevalent at this time were certain other truly birdlike
creatures, of which the earlier sorts also hopped and clambered and the
later sorts skimmed and flew. These were at first--by all the standards
of classification--Reptiles. They developed into true birds as they
developed wings and as their reptilian scales became long and
complicated, fronds rather than scales, and so at last, by much
spreading and splitting, feathers. Feathers are the distinctive covering
of birds, and they give a power of resisting heat and cold far greater
than that of any other integumentary covering except perhaps the
thickest fur. At a very early stage this novel covering of feathers,
this new heatproof contrivance that life had chanced upon, enabled many
species of birds to invade a province for which the pterodactyl was ill
equipped. They took to sea fishing--if indeed they did not begin with
it--and spread to the north and south polewards beyond the temperature
limits set to the true reptiles. The earliest birds seem to have been
carnivorous divers and water birds. To this day some of the most
primitive bird forms are found among the sea birds of the Arctic and
Antarctic seas, and it is among these sea birds that zoologists still
find lingering traces of teeth, which have otherwise vanished completely
from the beak of the bird.
The earliest known bird (the _Archæopteryx_) had no beak; it had a row
of teeth in a jaw like a reptile’s. It had three claws at the forward
corner of its wing. Its tail too was peculiar. All modern birds have
their tail feathers set in a short compact bony rump; the _Archæopteryx_
had a long bony tail with a row of feathers along each side.
§ 4
[Illustration: Archæopteryx
(the earliest known bird)]
This great period of Mesozoic life, this second volume of the book of
life, is indeed an amazing story of reptilian life proliferating and
developing. But the most striking thing of all the story remains to be
told. Right up to the latest Mesozoic Rocks we find all these reptilian
orders we have enumerated still flourishing unchallenged. There is no
hint of an enemy or competitor to them in the relics we find of their
world. Then the record is broken. We do not know how long a time the
break represents; many pages may be missing here, pages that may
represent some great cataclysmal climatic change. When next we find
abundant traces of the land plants and the land animals of the earth,
this great multitude of reptile species had gone. For the most part they
have left no descendants. They have been “wiped out.” The pterodactyls
have gone absolutely; of the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs none is alive;
the mosasaurs have gone; of the lizards a few remain, the monitor of
the Dutch East Indies is the largest; all the multitude and diversity of
the dinosaurs have vanished. Only the crocodiles and the turtles and
tortoises carry on in any quantity into Cainozoic times. The place of
all these types in the picture that the Cainozoic fossils presently
unfold to us is taken by other animals not closely related to the
Mesozoic reptiles and certainly not descended from any of their ruling
types. A new kind of life is in possession of the world.
This apparently abrupt ending up of the reptiles is, beyond all
question, the most striking revolution in the whole history of the earth
before the coming of mankind. It is probably connected with the close of
a vast period of equable warm conditions and the onset of a new austerer
age, in which the winters were bitterer and the summers brief but hot.
The Mesozoic life, animal and vegetable alike, was adapted to warm
conditions and capable of little resistance to cold. The new life, on
the other hand, was before all things capable of resisting great changes
of temperature.
Whatever it was that led to the extinction of the Mesozoic reptiles, it
was probably some very far-reaching change indeed, for the life of the
seas did at the same time undergo a similar catastrophic alteration. The
crescendo and ending of the Reptiles on land was paralleled by the
crescendo and ending of the Ammonites, a division of creatures like
squids with coiled shells which swarmed in those ancient seas. All
through the rocky record of this Mesozoic period there is a vast
multitude and variety of these coiled shells; there are hundreds of
species, and towards the end of the Mesozoic period they increased in
diversity and produced exaggerated types. When the record resumes, these
too have gone. So far as the reptiles are concerned, people may perhaps
be inclined to argue that they were exterminated because the Mammals
that replaced them competed with them, and were more fitted to survive;
but nothing of the sort can be true of the Ammonites, because to this
day their place has not been taken. Simply they are gone. Unknown
conditions made it possible for them to live in the Mesozoic seas, and
then some unknown change made life impossible for them. No genus of
Ammonite survives to-day of all that vast variety, but there still
exists one isolated genus very closely related to the Ammonites, the
Pearly Nautilus. It is found, it is to be noted, in the warm waters of
the Indian and Pacific oceans.[15]
And as for the Mammals competing with and ousting the less fit reptiles,
a struggle of which people talk at times, there is not a scrap of
evidence of any such direct competition. To judge by the Record of the
Rocks as we know it to-day, there is much more reason for believing that
first the reptiles in some inexplicable way perished, and then that
later on, after a very hard time for all life upon the earth, the
mammals, as conditions became more genial again, developed and spread to
fill the vacant world.
§ 5
Were there mammals in the Mesozoic period?
This is a question not yet to be answered precisely. Patiently and
steadily the geologists gather fresh evidence and reason out completer
conclusions. At any time some new deposit may reveal fossils that will
illuminate this question. Certainly either mammals, or the ancestors of
the mammals, must have lived throughout the Mesozoic period. In the very
opening chapter of the Mesozoic volume of the Record there were those
Theriomorphous Reptiles to which we have already alluded, and in the
later Mesozoic a number of small jaw-bones are found, entirely mammalian
in character. But there is not a scrap, not a bone, to suggest that
there lived any Mesozoic Mammal which could look a dinosaur in the face.
The Mesozoic mammals or mammal-like reptiles--for we do not know clearly
which they were--seem to have been all obscure little beasts of the size
of mice and rats, more like a down-trodden order of reptiles than a
distinct class; probably they still laid eggs and were developing only
slowly their distinctive covering of hair. They lived away from big
waters, and perhaps in the desolate uplands, as marmots do now; probably
they lived there beyond the pursuit of the carnivorous dinosaurs. Some
perhaps went on all fours, some chiefly went on their hind legs and
clambered with their fore limbs. They became fossils only so
occasionally that chance has not yet revealed a single complete
skeleton in the whole vast record of the Mesozoic rocks by which to
check these guesses.
[Illustration: _Hesperornis_
(_Reptilian wingless water-bird_)]
These little Theriomorphs, these ancestral mammals, developed hair.
Hairs, like feathers, are long and elaborately specialized scales. Hair
is perhaps the clue to the salvation of the early mammals. Leading lives
upon the margin of existence, away from the marshes and the warmth,
they developed an outer covering only second in its warmth-holding (or
heat-resisting) powers to the down and feathers of the Arctic sea-birds.
And so they held out through the age of hardship between the Mesozoic
and Cainozoic ages, to which most of the true reptiles succumbed.
All the main characteristics of this flora and sea and land fauna that
came to an end with the end of the Mesozoic age were such as were
adapted to an equable climate and to shallow and swampy regions. But in
the case of their Cainozoic successors, both hair and feathers gave _a
power of resistance to variable temperatures_ such as no reptile
possessed, and with it they gave a range far greater than any animal had
hitherto attained.
The range of life of the Lower Palæozoic Period was confined to warm
water.
The range of life of the Upper Palæozoic Period was confined to warm
water or to warm swamps and wet ground.
The range of life of the Mesozoic Period as we know it was confined to
water and fairly low-lying valley regions under equable conditions.
Meanwhile in each of these periods there were types involuntarily
extending the range of life beyond the limits prevailing in that period;
and when ages of extreme conditions prevailed, it was these marginal
types which survived to inherit the depopulated world.
That perhaps is the most general statement we can make about the story
of the geological record; it is a story of widening range. Classes,
genera, and species of animals appear and disappear, but the range
widens. It widens always. Life has never had so great a range as it has
to-day. Life to-day, in the form of man, goes higher in the air than it
has ever done before; man’s geographical range is from pole to pole, he
goes under the water in submarines, he sounds the cold, lifeless
darkness of the deepest seas, he burrows into virgin levels of the
rocks, and in thought and knowledge he pierces to the centre of the
earth and reaches out to the uttermost star. Yet in all the relics of
the Mesozoic time we find no certain memorials of his ancestry. His
ancestors, like the ancestors of all the kindred mammals, must have
been creatures so rare, so obscure, and so remote that they have left
scarcely a trace amidst the abundant vestiges of the monsters that
wallowed rejoicing in the steamy air and lush vegetation of the Mesozoic
lagoons, or crawled or hopped or fluttered over the great river plains
of that time.[16]
VII
THE AGE OF MAMMALS
§ 1. _A New Age of Light._ § 2. _Tradition Comes into the World._ §
3. _An Age of Brain Growth._ § 4. _The World Grows Hard Again._ §
5. _Chronology of the Ice Age._
§ 1
The third great division of the geological record, the Cainozoic, opens
with a world already physically very like the world we live in to-day.
Probably the day was at first still perceptibly shorter, but the scenery
had become very modern in its character. Climate was, of course,
undergoing, age by age, its incessant and irregular variations; lands
that are temperate to-day have passed, since the Cainozoic age began,
through phases of great warmth, intense cold, and extreme dryness; but
the landscape, if it altered, altered to nothing that cannot still be
paralleled to-day in some part of the world or other. In the place of
the cycads, sequoias, and strange conifers of the Mesozoic, the plant
names that now appear in the lists of fossils include birch, beech,
holly, tulip trees, ivy, sweet gum, bread-fruit trees. Flowers had
developed concurrently with bees and butterflies. Palms were now very
important. Such plants had already been in evidence in the later levels
of the (American Cretaceous) Mesozoic, but now they dominated the scene
altogether. Grass was becoming a great fact in the world. Certain
grasses, too, had appeared in the later Mesozoic, but only with the
Cainozoic period came grass plains and turf spreading wide over a world
that was once barren stone.
The period opened with a long phase of considerable warmth; then the
world cooled. And in the opening of this third part of the record, this
Cainozoic period, a gigantic crumpling of the earth’s crust and an
upheaval of mountain ranges was in progress. The Alps, the Andes, the
Himalayas, are all Cainozoic mountain ranges; the background of an early
Cainozoic scene, to be typical, should display an active volcano or so.
It must have been an age of great earthquakes.
Geologists make certain main divisions of the Cainozoic period, and it
will be convenient to name them here and to indicate their climate.
First comes the _Eocene_ (dawn of recent life), an age of exceptional
warmth in the world’s history, subdivided into an older and newer
Eocene; then the _Oligocene_ (but little of recent life), in which the
climate was still equable. The _Miocene_ (with living species still in a
minority) was the great age of mountain building, and the general
temperature was falling. In the _Pliocene_ (more living than extinct
species), climate was very much at its present phase; but with the
_Pleistocene_ (a great majority of living species) there set in a long
period of extreme conditions--it was the Great Ice Age. Glaciers spread
from the poles towards the equator, until England to the Thames was
covered in ice. Thereafter to our own time came a period of partial
recovery.
§ 2
In the forests and following the grass over the Eocene plains there
appeared for the first time a variety and abundance of mammals. Before
we proceed to any description of these mammals, it may be well to note
in general terms what a mammal is.
[Illustration: Some Oligocene Mammals]
From the appearance of the vertebrated animals in the Lower Palæozoic
Age, when the fish first swarmed out into the sea, there has been a
steady progressive development of vertebrated creatures. A fish is a
vertebrated animal that breathes by gills and can live only in water. An
amphibian may be described as a fish that has added to its
gill-breathing the power of breathing air with its swimming-bladder in
adult life, and that has also developed limbs with five toes to them in
place of the fins of a fish. A tadpole is for a time a fish; it becomes
a land creature as it develops. A reptile is a further stage in this
detachment from water; it is an amphibian that is no longer amphibious;
it passes through its tadpole stage--its fish stage, that is--in an
egg. From the beginning it must breathe in air; it can never breathe
under water as a tadpole can do. Now, a modern mammal is really a sort
of reptile that has developed a peculiarly effective protective
covering, hair; and that also retains its eggs in the body until they
hatch so that it brings forth living young (viviparous), and even after
birth it cares for them and feeds them by its mammæ for a longer or
shorter period. Some reptiles, some vipers for example, are viviparous,
but none stand by their young as the real mammals do. Both the birds and
the mammals, which escaped whatever destructive forces made an end to
the Mesozoic reptiles, and which survived to dominate the Cainozoic
world, have these two things in common: first, a far more effective
protection against changes of temperature than any other variation of
the reptile type ever produced; and, secondly, a peculiar care for their
eggs, the bird by incubation and the mammal by retention, and a
disposition to look after the young for a certain period after hatching
or birth. There is by comparison the greatest carelessness about
offspring in the reptile.
Hair was evidently the earliest distinction of the mammals from the rest
of the reptiles. It is doubtful if the particular Theriodont reptiles
who were developing hair in the early Mesozoic were viviparous. Two
mammals survive to this day which not only do not suckle their
young,[17] but which lay eggs, the _Ornithorhynchus_ and the _Echidna_,
and in the Eocene there were a number of allied forms. They are the
survivors of what was probably a much larger number and variety of small
egg-laying hairy creatures, hairy reptiles, hoppers, climbers, and
runners, which included the Mesozoic ancestors of all existing mammals
up to and including man.
Now we may put the essential facts about mammalian reproduction in
another way. _The mammal is a family animal._ And the family habit
involved the possibility of a new sort of continuity of experience in
the world. Compare the completely closed-in life of an individual lizard
with the life of even a quite lowly mammal of almost any kind. The
former has no mental continuity with anything beyond itself; it is a
little self-contained globe of experience that serves its purpose and
ends; but the latter “picks up” from its mother, and “hands on” to its
offspring. All the mammals, except for the two genera we have named, had
already before the lower Eocene age arrived at this stage of pre-adult
dependence and imitation. They were all more or less imitative in youth
and capable of a certain modicum of education; they all, as a part of
their development, received a certain amount of care and example and
even direction from their mother. This is as true of the hyæna and
rhinoceros as it is of the dog or man; the difference of educability is
enormous, but the fact of protection and educability in the young stage
is undeniable. So far as the vertebrated animals go, these new mammals,
with their viviparous, young-protecting disposition, and these new
birds, with their incubating, young-protecting disposition, introduce at
the opening of the Cainozoic period a fresh thing into the expanding
story of life, namely, social association, the addition to hard and
inflexible instinct of _tradition_, and the nervous organization
necessary to receive tradition.
All the innovations that come into the history of life begin very
humbly. The supply of blood-vessels in the swimming-bladder of the
mudfish in the lower Palæozoic torrent-river, that enabled it to pull
through a season of drought, would have seemed at that time to that
bodiless visitant to our planet we have already imagined, a very
unimportant side fact in that ancient world of great sharks and plated
fishes, sea-scorpions, and coral reefs and seaweed; but it opened the
narrow way by which the land vertebrates arose to predominance. The
mudfish would have seemed then a poor refugee from the too crowded and
aggressive life of the sea. But once lungs were launched into the world,
every line of descent that had lungs went on improving them. So, too, in
the upper Palæozoic, the fact that some of the Amphibia were losing
their “amphibiousness” by a retardation of hatching of their eggs, would
have appeared a mere response to the distressful dangers that threatened
the young tadpole. Yet that prepared the conquest of the dry land for
the triumphant multitude of the Mesozoic reptiles. It opened a new
direction towards a free and vigorous land-life along which all the
reptilian animals moved. And this viviparous, young-tending training
that the ancestral mammalia underwent during that age of inferiority and
hardship for them, set going in the world a new continuity of
perception, of which even man to-day only begins to appreciate the
significance.
§ 3
A number of types of mammal already appear in the Eocene. Some are
differentiating in one direction, and some in another, some are
perfecting themselves as herbivorous quadrupeds, some leap and climb
among the trees, some turn back to the water to swim, but all types are
unconsciously exploiting and developing the brain which is the
instrument of this new power of acquisition and educability. In the
Eocene rocks are found small early predecessors of the horse (Eohippus),
tiny camels, pigs, early tapirs, early hedgehogs, monkeys and lemurs,
opossums and carnivores. Now, all these were more or less ancestral to
living forms, and all have brains relatively much smaller than their
living representatives. There is, for instance, an early rhinoceros,
_Titanotherium_, with a brain not one tenth the size of that of the
existing rhinoceros. The latter is by no means a perfect type of the
attentive and submissive student, but even so it is ten times more
observant and teachable than its predecessor. This sort of thing is true
of all the orders and families that survive until to-day. All the
Cainozoic mammals were doing this one thing in common under the urgency
of a common necessity; they were all growing brain. It was a parallel
advance. In the same order or family to-day, the brain is usually from
six to ten times what it was in the Eocene ancestor.
Grass was now spreading over the world, and with this extension arose
some huge graminivorous brutes of which no representative survives
to-day. Such were the Uintatheres and the Titanotheres. And in pursuit
of such beasts came great swarms of primitive dogs, some as big as
bears, and the first cats, one in particular (_Smilodon_), a small
fierce-looking creature with big knife-like canines, the first
sabre-toothed tiger, which was to develop into greater things. American
deposits in the Miocene display a great variety of camels, giraffe
camels with long necks, gazelle camels, llamas, and true camels. North
America, throughout most of the Cainozoic period, appears to have been
in open and easy continuation with Asia, and when at last the glaciers
of the Great Ice Age, and then the Bering Strait, came to separate the
two great continental regions, the last camels were left in the old
world and the llamas in the new.
In the Eocene the first ancestors of the elephants appear in northern
Africa as snouted creatures; the elephant’s trunk dawned on the world in
the Miocene.
One group of creatures is of peculiar interest in a history that is
mainly to be the story of mankind. We find fossils in the Eocene of
monkeys and lemurs, but of one particular creature we have as yet not a
single bone. It was half ape, half monkey; it clambered about the trees
and ran, and probably ran well, on its hind legs upon the ground. It was
small-brained by our present standards, but it had clever hands with
which it handled fruits and beat nuts upon the rocks and perhaps caught
up sticks and stones to smite its fellows. It was our ancestor.
§ 4
Through millions of simian generations the spinning world circled about
the sun; slowly its orbit, which may have been nearly circular during
the equable days of the early Eocene, was drawn by the attraction of the
circling outer planets into a more elliptical form. Its axis of
rotation, which had always heeled over to the plane of its orbit, as the
mast of a yacht under sail heels over to the level of the water, heeled
over by imperceptible degrees a little more and a little more. And each
year its summer point shifted a little further from perihelion round its
path. These were small changes to happen to a one-inch ball, circling at
a distance of 330 yards from a flaming sun nine feet across, in the
course of a few million years. They were changes an immortal astronomer
in Neptune, watching the earth from age to age, would have found almost
imperceptible. But from the point of view of the surviving mammalian
life of the Miocene, they mattered profoundly. Age by age the winters
grew on the whole colder and harder and a few hours longer relatively to
the summers in a thousand years; age by age the summers grew briefer. On
an average the winter snow lay a little later in the spring in each
century, and the glaciers in the northern mountains gained an inch this
year, receded half an inch next, came on again a few inches....
[Illustration: Miocene Mammals]
The Record of the Rocks tells of the increasing chill. The Pliocene was
a temperate time, and many of the warmth-loving plants and animals had
gone. Then, rather less deliberately, some feet or some inches every
year, the ice came on.
An arctic fauna, musk ox, woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, lemming,
ushers in the Pleistocene. Over North America, and Europe and Asia
alike, the ice advanced. For thousands of years it advanced, and then
for thousands of years it receded, to advance again. Europe down to the
Baltic shores, Britain down to the Thames, North America down to New
England, and more centrally as far south as Ohio, lay for ages under the
glaciers. Enormous volumes of water were withdrawn from the ocean and
locked up in those stupendous ice caps so as to cause a world-wide
change in the relative levels of land and sea. Vast areas were exposed
that are now again sea bottom.
The world to-day is still coming slowly out of the last of four great
waves of cold. It is not growing warmer steadily. There have been
fluctuations. Remains of bog oaks, for example, which grew two or three
thousand years ago, are found in Scotland at latitudes in which not even
a stunted oak will grow at the present time. And it is amidst this
crescendo and diminuendo of frost and snow that we first recognize forms
that are like the forms of men. The Age of Mammals culminated in ice and
hardship and man.
§ 5
Guesses about the duration of the great age of cold are still vague, but
in the Time diagram on page 60 we follow H. F. Osborn in accepting as
our guides the estimates of Albrecht Penck[18] and C. A. Reeds.[19]
[Illustration: TIME DIAGRAM OF THE GLACIAL AGES.
The reader should compare this diagram carefully with our first time
diagram, Chapter II, § 2, p. 14. That diagram, if it were on the same
scale as this one, would be between 41 and 410 feet long. The position
of the Eoanthropus is very uncertain: it may be as early as the
Pliocene]
BOOK II
THE MAKING OF MEN
VIII
THE ANCESTRY OF MAN[20]
§ 1. _Man Descended from a Walking Ape._ § 2. _First Traces of
Man-like Creatures._ § 3. _The Heidelberg Sub-man._ § 4. _The
Piltdown Sub-man._ § 5. _The Riddle of the Piltdown Remains._
§ 1
The origin of man is still very obscure. It is commonly asserted that he
is “descended” from some man-like ape such as the chimpanzee, the
orang-utang, or the gorilla, but that of course is as reasonable as
saying that I am “descended” from some Hottentot or Esquimaux as young
or younger than myself. Others, alive to this objection, say that man is
descended from the common ancestor of the chimpanzee, the orang-utang,
and the gorilla. Some “anthropologists” have even indulged in a
speculation whether mankind may not have a double or treble origin; the
negro being descended from a gorilla-like ancestor, the Chinese from a
chimpanzee-like ancestor, and so on. These are very fanciful ideas, to
be mentioned only to be dismissed. It was formerly assumed that the
human ancestor was “probably arboreal,” but the current idea among those
who are qualified to form an opinion seems to be that he was a “ground
ape,” and that the existing apes have developed in the arboreal
direction.
[Illustration: Early Pleistocene Animals]
Of course, if one puts the skeleton of a man and the skeleton of a
gorilla side by side, their general resemblance is so great that it is
easy to jump to the conclusion that the former is derived from such a
type as the latter by a process of brain growth and general refinement.
But if one examines closely into one or two differences, the gap widens.
Particular stress has recently been laid upon the tread of the foot. Man
walks on his toe and his heel; his great toe is his chief lever in
walking, as the reader may see for himself if he examines his own
footprints on the bathroom floor and notes where the pressure falls as
the footprints become fainter. His great toe is the king of his toes.
Among all the apes and monkeys, the only group that have their great
toes developed on anything like the same fashion as man are some of the
lemurs. The baboon walks on a flat foot and all his toes, using his
middle toe as his chief throw off, much as the bear does. And the three
great apes all walk on the outer side of the foot in a very different
manner from the walking of man.
[Illustration: POSSIBLE APPEARANCE OF THE SUB-MAN _PITHECANTHROPUS_.
The face, jaws, and teeth are mere guess work (_see_ text). The creature
may have been much less human looking than this.]
The great apes are forest dwellers; their walking even now is
incidental; they are at their happiest among trees. They have very
distinctive methods of climbing; they swing by the arms much more than
the monkeys do, and do not, like the latter, take off with a spring from
the feet. They have a specially developed climbing style of their own.
But man walks so well and runs so swiftly as to suggest a very long
ancestry upon the ground. Also, he does not climb well now; he climbs
with caution and hesitation. His ancestors may have been running
creatures for long ages. Moreover, it is to be noted that he does not
swim naturally; he has to learn to swim, and that seems to point to a
long-standing separation from rivers and lakes and the sea. Almost
certainly that ancestor was a smaller and slighter creature than its
human descendants. Conceivably the human ancestor at the opening of the
Cainozoic period was a running ape, living chiefly on the ground, hiding
among rocks rather than trees. It could still climb trees well and hold
things between its great toe and its second toe (as the Japanese can to
this day), but it was already coming down to the ground again from a
still remoter, a Mesozoic arboreal ancestry. It is quite understandable
that such a creature would very rarely die in water in such
circumstances as to leave bones to become fossilized.
It must always be borne in mind that among its many other imperfections
the Geological Record necessarily contains abundant traces only of water
or marsh creatures or of creatures easily and frequently drowned. The
same reasons that make any traces of the ancestors of the mammals rare
and relatively unprocurable in the Mesozoic rocks, probably make the
traces of possible human ancestors rare and relatively unprocurable in
the Cainozoic rocks. Such knowledge as we have of the earliest men, for
example, is almost entirely got from a few caves, into which they went
and in which they left their traces. Until the hard Pleistocene times
they lived and died in the open, and their bodies were consumed or
decayed altogether.
But it is well to bear in mind also that the Record of the Rocks has
still to be thoroughly examined. It has been studied only for a few
generations, and by only a few men in each generation. Most men have
been too busy making war, making profits out of their neighbours,
toiling at work that machinery could do for them in a tenth of the time,
or simply playing about, to give any attention to these more interesting
things. There may be, there probably are, thousands of deposits still
untouched containing countless fragments and vestiges of man and his
progenitors. In Asia particularly, in India or the East Indies, there
may be hidden the most illuminating clues. What we know to-day of early
men is the merest scrap of what will presently be known.
The apes and monkeys already appear to have been differentiated at the
beginning of the Cainozoic Age, and there are a number of Oligocene and
Miocene apes whose relations to one another and to the human line have
still to be made out. Among these we may mention _Dryopithecus_ of the
Miocene Age, with a very human-looking jaw. In the Siwalik Hills of
northern India remains of some very interesting apes have been found, of
which _Sivapithecus_ and _Palæopithecus_ were possibly related closely
to the human ancestor. Possibly these animals already used implements.
Charles Darwin represents baboons as opening nuts by breaking them with
stones, using stakes to prize up rocks in the hunt for insects, and
striking blows with sticks and stones.[21] The chimpanzee makes itself a
sort of tree hut by intertwining branches. Stones apparently chipped for
use have been found in strata of Oligocene Age at Boncelles in Belgium.
Possibly the implement-using disposition was already present in the
Mesozoic ancestry from which we are descended.[22]
§ 2
Among the earliest evidences of some creature, either human or at least
more man-like than any living ape upon earth, are a number of flints and
stones very roughly chipped and shaped so as to be held in the hand.
These were probably used as hand-axes. These early implements
(“Eoliths”) are often so crude and simple that there was for a long time
a controversy whether they were to be regarded as natural or artificial
productions.[23] The date of the earliest of them is put by geologists
as Pliocene--that is to say, _before the First Glacial Age_. They occur
also throughout the First Interglacial period. We know of no bones or
other remains in Europe or America of the quasi-human beings of half a
million years ago, who made and used these implements. They used them to
hammer with, perhaps they used them to fight with, and perhaps they used
bits of wood for similar purposes.[24]
But at Trinil, in Java, in strata which are said to correspond either to
the later Pliocene or to the American and European First Ice Age, there
have been found some scattered bones of a creature, such as the makers
of these early implements may have been. The top of a skull, some teeth,
and a thigh-bone have been found. The skull shows a brain-case about
half-way in size between that of the chimpanzee and man, but the
thigh-bone is that of a creature as well adapted to standing and running
as a man, and as free, therefore, to use its hands. The creature was not
a man, nor was it an arboreal ape like the chimpanzee. It was a walking
ape. It has been named by naturalists _Pithecanthropus erectus_ (the
walking ape-man). We cannot say that it is a direct human ancestor, but
we may guess that the creatures who scattered these first stone tools
over the world must have been closely similar and kindred, and that our
ancestor was a beast of like kind. This little trayful of bony fragments
from Trinil is, at present, apart from stone implements, the oldest
relic of early humanity, or of the close blood relations of early
humanity, that is known.
While these early men or “sub-men” were running about Europe four or
five hundred thousand years ago, there were mammoths, rhinoceroses, a
huge hippopotamus, a giant beaver, and a bison and wild cattle in their
world. There were also wild horses, and the sabre-toothed tiger still
abounded. There are no traces of lions or true tigers at that time in
Europe, but there were bears, otters, wolves, and a wild boar. It may be
that the early sub-man sometimes played jackal to the sabre-toothed
tiger, and finished up the bodies on which the latter had gorged
itself.[25]
§ 3
After this first glimpse of something at least sub-human in the record
of geology, there is not another fragment of human or man-like bone yet
known from that record for an interval of hundreds of thousands of
years. It is not until we reach deposits which are stated to be of the
Second Interglacial period, 200,000 years later, 200,000 or 250,000
years ago, that another little scrap of bone comes to hand. Then we find
a jaw-bone.
This jaw-bone was found in a sandpit near Heidelberg, at a depth of
eighty feet from the surface,[26] and it is not the jaw-bone of a man as
we understand man, but it is man-like in every respect, except that it
has absolutely no trace of a chin; it is more massive than a man’s, and
its narrowness behind could not, it is thought, have given the tongue
sufficient play for articulate speech. It is not an ape’s jaw-bone; the
teeth are human. The owner of this jaw-bone has been variously named
_Homo Heidelbergensis_ and _Palæoanthropus Heidelbergensis_, according
to the estimate formed of its humanity or sub-humanity by various
authorities. He lived in a world not remotely unlike the world of the
still earlier sub-man of the first implements; the deposits in which it
is found show that there were elephants, horses, rhinoceroses, bison, a
moose, and so forth with it in the world, but the sabre-toothed tiger
was declining and the lion was spreading over Europe. The implements of
this period (known as the Chellean period) are a very considerable
advance upon those of the Pliocene Age. They are well made but _very
much bigger_ than any truly human implements. The Heidelberg man may
have had a very big body and large forelimbs. He may have been a woolly
strange-looking creature.
§ 4
We must turn over the Record for, it may be, another 100,000 years for
the next remains of anything human or sub-human. Then in a deposit
ascribed to the Third Interglacial period, which may have begun 100,000
years ago and lasted 50,000 years,[27] the smashed pieces of a whole
skull turn up. The deposit is a gravel which may have been derived from
the washing out of still earlier gravel strata and this skull fragment
may be in reality as old as the First Glacial period. The bony remains
discovered at Piltdown in Sussex display a creature still ascending only
very gradually from the sub-human.
The first scraps of this skull were found in an excavation for road
gravel in Sussex. Bit by bit other fragments of this skull were hunted
out from the quarry heaps until most of it could be pieced together. It
is a thick skull, thicker than that of any living race of men, and it
has a brain capacity intermediate between that of Pithecanthropus and
man. This creature has been named _Eoanthropus_, the dawn man. In the
same gravel-pits were found teeth of rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and the
leg-bone of a deer with marks upon it that may be cuts. A curious
bat-shaped instrument of elephant bone has also been found.[28]
There was, moreover, a jaw-bone among these scattered remains, which was
at first assumed naturally enough to belong to _Eoanthropus_, but which
it was afterwards suggested was probably that of a chimpanzee. It is
extraordinarily like that of a chimpanzee, but Dr. Keith, one of the
greatest authorities in these questions, assigns it, after an exhaustive
analysis in his _Antiquity of Man_ (1915), to the skull with which it is
found. It is, as a jaw-bone, far less human in character than the jaw of
the much more ancient _Homo Heidelbergensis_, but the teeth are in some
respects more like those of living men.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE THE RIDDLE OF THE PILTDOWN
SUB-MAN.]
Dr. Keith, swayed by the jaw-bone, does not think that _Eoanthropus_, in
spite of its name, is a creature in the direct ancestry of man. Much
less is it an intermediate form between the Heidelberg man and the
Neanderthal man we shall presently describe. It was only related to the
true ancestor of man as the orang is related to the chimpanzee. It was
one of a number of sub-human running apes of more than ape-like
intelligence, and if it was not on the line royal, it was at any rate a
very close collateral.
After this glimpse of a skull, the Record for very many centuries gives
nothing but flint implements, which improve steadily in quality. A very
characteristic form is shaped like a sole, with one flat side stricken
off at one blow and the other side worked. The archæologists, as the
Record continues, are presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers,
knives, darts, throwing stones, and the like. Progress is now more
rapid; in a few centuries the shape of the hand-axe shows distinct and
recognizable improvements. And then comes quite a number of remains. The
Fourth Glacial Age is rising towards its maximum. Man is taking to
caves and leaving vestiges there; at Krapina in Croatia, at Neanderthal
near Düsseldorf, at Spy, human remains have been found, skulls and bones
of a creature that is certainly a man. Somewhere about 50,000 years ago,
if not earlier, appeared _Homo Neanderthalensis_ (also called _Homo
antiquus_ and _Homo primigenius_), a quite passable human being. His
thumb was not quite equal in flexibility and usefulness to a human
thumb, he stooped forward, and could not hold his head erect, as all
living men do, he was chinless and perhaps incapable of speech, there
were curious differences about the enamel and the roots of his teeth
from those of all living men, he was very thick-set, he was, indeed, not
quite of the human species; but there is no dispute about his
attribution to the genus _Homo_. He was certainly not descended from
Eoanthropus, but his jaw-bone is so like the Heidelberg jaw-bone as to
make it possible that the clumsier and heavier _Homo Heidelbergensis_, a
thousand centuries before him, was of his blood and race.
§ 5
Upon this question of the Piltdown jaw-bone, it may be of interest to
quote here a letter to the writer from Sir Ray Lankester, discussing the
question in a familiar and luminous manner. It will enable the reader to
gauge the extent and quality of the evidence that we possess at present
upon the nature of these early human and sub-human animals. Upon these
fragile Piltdown fragments alone more than a hundred books, pamphlets,
and papers have been written. These scraps of bone are guarded more
carefully from theft and wilful damage than the most precious jewels,
and in the museum cases one sees only carefully executed _fac-similes_.
“As to the Piltdown jaw-bone, the best study of it is that by Smith
Woodward, who first described it and the canine found later. The jaw is
imperfect in front, but has the broad, flat symphysis of the Apes. G. S.
Miller, an American anthropologist, has made a very good comparison of
it with a chimpanzee’s jaw, and concludes that it is a chimpanzee’s.
(His monograph is in the _Am. Jour. of Phys. Anthrop._, vol. i, no. 1.)
The one point in the Piltdown jaw itself against chimpanzee
identification is the smooth, flat, worn surface of the molars. This is
a human character, and is due to lateral movement of the jaw, and hence
rubbing down of the tubercles of the molars. This is not worth much. But
the serious question is, are we to associate this jaw with the cranium
found close by it? If so, it is certainly not chimpanzee nor close to
the Apes, but decidedly hominid. Two other small fragments of crania and
a few more teeth have been found in the gravel two miles from Piltdown,
which agree with the Piltdown cranium in having superciliary ridges
fairly strong for a human skull, but not anything like the great
superciliary ridges of Apes. The fact one has to face is this; here you
have an imperfect cranium, very thick-walled and of small cubical
contents (1100 or so), but much larger in that respect than any ape’s. A
few yards distant from it in the same layer of gravel is found a
jaw-bone having rather large pointed canines, a flat, broad symphysis,
and other points about the inner face of the ramus and ridges which
resemble those of the chimpanzee. Which is the more likely: (_a_) that
these two novel fragments tending apewards from man were parts of the
same individual; or (_b_), that the sweeping of the Wealden valley has
brought there together a half-jaw and a broken cranium _both_ more
ape-like in character than any known human corresponding bits, and yet
derived from two separate anthropoid beasts, one (the jaw) more simian,
and the other (the cranium) much less so? As to the probabilities, we
must remember that this patch of gravel at Piltdown, clearly and
definitely, is a wash-up of remains of various later tertiary and
post-tertiary deposits. It contains fragments of Miocene mastodon and
rhinoceros teeth. These latter differ entirely in mineral character from
the Eoanthropus jaw and the cranium. But (and this needs re-examination
and _chemical_ analysis) the Piltdown jaw and the Piltdown cranium do
not seem to me to be quite alike in their mineral condition. The jaw is
more deeply iron-stained, and I should say (but not confidently), harder
than the cranium. Now, it is easy to attribute too much importance to
that difference, since in a patch of iron-stained gravel, such as that
at Piltdown, the soaking of water and iron salts into bones embedded
may be much greater in one spot than in another only a yard off, or a
few inches deeper!
“So I think we are stumped and baffled! The most prudent way is to keep
the jaw and the cranium apart in all argument about them. On the other
hand, on the principle that hypotheses are not to be multiplied beyond
necessity, there is a case for regarding the two--jaw and cranium--as
having been parts of one beast--or man.”
To which Sir H. H. Johnston adds: “Against the chimpanzee hypothesis it
must be borne in mind that so far no living chimpanzee or fossil
chimpanzee-like remains have been found nearer England than north
equatorial Africa or North-west India, and no remains of great apes at
all nearer than Southern France and the upper Rhine--and those widely
different from the _Eoanthropus_ jaw.”
IX
THE NEANDERTHAL MEN, AN EXTINCT RACE
(The Early Palæolithic Age[29])
§ 1. _The World 50,000 Years Ago._ § 2. _The Daily Life of the
First Men._ § 3. _The Last Palæolithic Men._
§ 1
In the time of the Third Interglacial period the outline of Europe and
western Asia was very different from what it is to-day. Vast areas to
the west and northwest which are now under the Atlantic waters were then
dry land; the Irish Sea and the North Sea were river valleys. Over these
northern areas there spread and receded and spread again a great ice cap
such as covers central Greenland to-day (see Map, on page 77). This vast
ice cap, which covered both polar regions of the earth, withdrew huge
masses of water from the ocean, and the sea-level consequently fell,
exposing great areas of land that are now submerged again. The
Mediterranean area was probably a great valley below the general
sea-level, containing two inland seas cut off from the general ocean.
The climate of this Mediterranean basin was perhaps cold temperate, and
the region of the Sahara to the south was not then a desert of baked
rock and blown sand, but a well-watered and fertile country. Between the
ice sheets to the north and the Alps and Mediterranean valley to the
south stretched a bleak wilderness whose climate changed from harshness
to a mild kindliness and then hardened again for the Fourth Glacial Age.
Across this wilderness, which is now the great plain of Europe, wandered
a various fauna. At first there were hippopotami, rhinoceroses,
mammoths, and elephants. The sabre-toothed tiger was diminishing towards
extinction. Then, as the air chilled, the hippopotamus, and then other
warmth-loving creatures, ceased to come so far north, and the
sabre-toothed tiger disappeared altogether. The woolly mammoth, the
woolly rhinoceros, the musk ox, the bison, the aurochs, and the reindeer
became prevalent, and the temperate vegetation gave place to plants of a
more arctic type. The glaciers spread southward to the maximum of the
Fourth Glacial Age (about 50,000 years ago), and then receded again. In
the earlier phase, the Third Interglacial period, a certain number of
small family groups of men (_Homo Neanderthalensis_) and probably of
sub-men (_Eoanthropus_) wandered over the land, leaving nothing but
their flint implements to witness to their presence. They probably used
a multitude and variety of wooden implements also; they had probably
learnt much about the shapes of objects and the use of different shapes
from wood, knowledge which they afterwards applied to stone; but none of
this wooden material has survived; we can only speculate about its forms
and uses. As the weather hardened to its maximum of severity, the
Neanderthal men, already it would seem acquainted with the use of fire,
began to seek shelter under rock ledges and in caves--and so leave
remains behind them. Hitherto they had been accustomed to squat in the
open about the fire, and near their water supply. But they were
sufficiently intelligent to adapt themselves to the new and harder
conditions. (As for the sub-men, they seem to have succumbed to the
stresses of this Fourth Glacial Age altogether. At any rate, the rudest
type of Palæolithic implements presently disappears.)
[Illustration: THIS MAP REPRESENTS THE PRESENT STATE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF
THE GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE AND WESTERN ASIA AT A PERIOD WHICH WE GUESS TO
BE ABOUT 50,000 YEARS AGO, THE NEANDERTHALER AGE.
Much of this map is of course speculative, but its broad outlines must
be fairly like those of the world in which men first became men.]
Not merely man was taking to the caves. This period also had a cave
lion, a cave bear, and a cave hyæna. These creatures had to be driven
out of the caves and kept out of the caves in which these early men
wanted to squat and hide; and no doubt fire was an effective method of
eviction and protection. Probably early men did not go deeply into the
caves, because they had no means of lighting their recesses. They got in
far enough to be out of the weather, and stored wood and food in odd
corners. Perhaps they barricaded the cave mouths. Their only available
light for going deeply into the caverns would be torches.
[Illustration: Neanderthal Man]
What did these Neanderthal men hunt? Their only possible weapons for
killing such giant creatures as the mammoth or the cave bear, or even
the reindeer, were spears of wood, wooden clubs, and those big pieces of
flint they left behind them, the “Chellean” and “Mousterian”
implements;[30] and probably their usual quarry was smaller game. But
they did certainly eat the flesh of the big beasts when they had a
chance, and perhaps they followed them when sick or when wounded by
combats, or took advantage of them when they were bogged or in trouble
with ice or water. (The Labrador Indians still kill the caribou with
spears at awkward river crossings.) At Dewlish in Dorset, an artificial
trench has been found which is supposed to have been a Palæolithic trap
for elephants.[31] We know that the Neanderthalers partly ate their kill
where it fell; but they brought back the big marrow bones to the cave to
crack and eat at leisure, because few ribs and vertebræ are found in the
caves, but great quantities of cracked and split long bones. They used
skins to wrap about them, and the women probably dressed the skins.
We know also that they were right-handed like modern men, because the
left side of the brain (which serves the right side of the body) is
bigger than the right. But while the back parts of the brain which deal
with sight and touch and the energy of the body are well developed, the
front parts, which are connected with thought and speech, are
comparatively small. It was as big a brain as ours, but different. This
species of _Homo_ had certainly a very different mentality from ours;
its individuals were not merely simpler and lower than we are, they were
on another line. It may be they did not speak at all, or very sparingly.
They had nothing that we should call a language.
§ 2
In Worthington Smith’s _Man the Primeval Savage_ there is a very vividly
written description of early Palæolithic life, from which much of the
following account is borrowed. In the original, Mr. Worthington Smith
assumes a more extensive social life, a larger community, and a more
definite division of labour among its members than is altogether
justifiable in the face of such subsequent writings as J. J. Atkinson’s
memorable essay on Primal Law.[32] For the little tribe Mr. Worthington
Smith described there has been substituted, therefore, a family group
under the leadership of one Old Man, and the suggestions of Mr. Atkinson
as to the behaviour of the Old Man have been worked into the sketch.
Mr. Worthington Smith describes a squatting-place near a stream, because
primitive man, having no pots or other vessels, must needs have kept
close to a water supply, and with some chalk cliffs adjacent from which
flints could be got to work. The air was bleak, and the fire was of
great importance, because fires once out were not easily relit in those
days. When not required to blaze it was probably banked down with ashes.
The most probable way in which fires were started was by hacking a bit
of iron pyrites with a flint amidst dry dead leaves; concretions of iron
pyrites and flints are found together in England where the gault and
chalk approach each other.[33] The little group of people would be
squatting about amidst a litter of fern, moss, and such-like dry
material. Some of the women and children would need to be continually
gathering fuel to keep up the fires. It would be a tradition that had
grown up. The young would imitate their elders in this task. Perhaps
there would be rude wind shelters of boughs on one side of the
encampment.
The Old Man, the father and master of the group, would perhaps be
engaged in hammering flints beside the fire. The children would imitate
him and learn to use the sharpened fragments. Probably some of the women
would hunt good flints; they would fish them out of the chalk with
sticks and bring them to the squatting-place.
There would be skins about. It seems probable that at a very early time
primitive men took to using skins. Probably they were wrapped about the
children, and used to lie upon when the ground was damp and cold. A
woman would perhaps be preparing a skin. The inside of the skin would be
well scraped free of superfluous flesh with trimmed flints, and then
strained and pulled and pegged out flat on the grass, and dried in the
rays of the sun.
[Illustration: EARLY STONE IMPLEMENTS.
The Mousterian Age implements, and all above it, are those of
Neanderthal men or, possibly in the case of the rostro-carinates,
of sub-men. The lower row (Reindeer Age) are the work of true men.
The student should compare this diagram with the time diagram
attached to Chapter VII, § 6, and he should note the relatively
_large size_ of the pre-human implements.
]
Away from the fire other members of the family group prowl in search of
food, but at night they all gather closely round the fire and build it
up, for it is their protection against the wandering bear and such-like
beasts of prey. The Old Man is the only fully adult male in the little
group. There are women, boys and girls, but so soon as the boys are big
enough to rouse the Old Man’s jealousy, he will fall foul of them and
either drive them off or kill them. Some girls may perhaps go off with
these exiles, or two or three of these youths may keep together for a
time, wandering until they come upon some other group, from which they
may try to steal a mate. Then they would probably fall out among
themselves. Some day, when he is forty years old perhaps or even older,
and his teeth are worn down and his energy abating, some younger male
will stand up to the Old Man and kill him and reign in his stead. There
is probably short shrift for the old at the squatting-place. So soon as
they grow weak and bad-tempered, trouble and death come upon them.
What did they eat at the squatting-place?
“Primeval man is commonly described as a hunter of the great hairy
mammoth, of the bear, and the lion, but it is in the highest degree
improbable that the human savage ever hunted animals much larger than
the hare, the rabbit, and the rat. Man was probably the hunted rather
than the hunter.
[Illustration: AUSTRALIA & the Western Pacific in the Glacial Age]
“The primeval savage was both herbivorous and carnivorous. He had for
food hazel-nuts, beech-nuts, sweet chestnuts, earth-nuts, and acorns. He
had crab-apples, wild pears, wild cherries, wild gooseberries, bullaces,
sorbs, sloes, blackberries, yewberries, hips and haws, water-cress,
fungi, the larger and softer leaf-buds, Nostoc (the vegetable substance
called ‘fallen stars’ by country-folk), the fleshy, juicy,
asparagus-like rhizomes or subterranean stems of the _Labiatæ_ and like
plants, as well as other delicacies of the vegetable kingdom. He had
birds’ eggs, young birds, and the honey and honeycomb of wild bees. He
had newts, snails, and frogs--the two latter delicacies are still highly
esteemed in Normandy and Brittany. He had fish, dead and alive, and
fresh-water mussels; he could easily catch fish with his hands and
paddle and dive for and trap them. By the seaside he would have fish,
mollusca, and seaweed. He would have many of the larger birds and
smaller mammals, which he could easily secure by throwing stones and
sticks, or by setting simple snares. He would have the snake, the
slow-worm, and the crayfish. He would have various grubs and insects,
the large larvæ of beetles and various caterpillars. The taste for
caterpillars still survives in China, where they are sold in dried
bundles in the markets. A chief and highly nourishing object of food
would doubtlessly be bones smashed up into a stiff and gritty paste.
“A fact of great importance is this--primeval man would not be
particular about having his flesh food over-fresh. He would constantly
find it in a dead state, and, if semi-putrid, he would relish it none
the less--the taste for high or half-putrid game still survives. If
driven by hunger and hard pressed, he would perhaps sometimes eat his
weaker companions or unhealthy children who happened to be feeble or
unsightly or burthensome. The larger animals in a weak and dying state
would no doubt be much sought for; when these were not forthcoming, dead
and half-rotten examples would be made to suffice. An unpleasant odour
would not be objected to; it is not objected to now in many continental
hotels.
“The savages sat huddled close together round their fire, with fruits,
bones, and half-putrid flesh. We can imagine the old man and his women
twitching the skin of their shoulders, brows, and muzzles as they were
annoyed or bitten by flies or other insects. We can imagine the large
human nostrils, indicative of keen scent, giving rapidly repeated sniffs
at the foul meat before it was consumed; the bad odour of the meat, and
the various other disgusting odours belonging to a haunt of savages,
being not in the least disapproved.
“Man at that time was not a _degraded_ animal, for he had never been
higher; he was therefore an exalted animal, and, low as we esteem him
now, he yet represented the highest stage of development of the animal
kingdom of his time.”
That is at least an acceptable sketch of a Neanderthal squatting-place.
But before extinction overtook them, even the Neanderthalers learnt much
and went far.
Whatever the older Palæolithic men did with their dead, there is reason
to suppose that the later _Homo Neanderthalensis_ buried some
individuals at least with respect and ceremony. One of the best-known
Neanderthal skeletons is that of a youth who apparently had been
deliberately interred. He had been placed in a sleeping posture, head on
the right fore-arm. The head lay on a number of flint fragments
carefully piled together “pillow fashion.” A big hand-axe lay near his
head, and around him were numerous charred and split ox bones, as though
there had been a feast or an offering.
To this appearance of burial during the later Neanderthal age we shall
return when we are considering the ideas that were inside the heads of
primitive men.
This sort of men may have wandered, squatted about their fires, and died
in Europe for a period extending over 100,000 years, if we assume, that
is, that the Heidelberg jaw-bone belongs to a member of the species, a
period so vast that all the subsequent history of our race becomes a
thing of yesterday. Along its own line this species of men was
accumulating a dim tradition, and working out its limited possibilities.
Its thick skull imprisoned its brain, and to the end it was low-browed
and brutish.
§ 3
When the Dutch discovered Tasmania, they found a detached human race not
very greatly advanced beyond this Lower Palæolithic stage. But over most
of the world the Lower Palæolithic culture had developed into a more
complicated and higher life twenty or thirty thousand years ago. The
Tasmanians were not racially Neanderthalers;[34] their brain-cases,
their neck-bones, their jaws and teeth, show that; they had no
Neanderthal affinities; they were of the same species as ourselves.
There can be little doubt that throughout the hundreds of centuries
during which the scattered little groups of Neanderthal men were all
that represented men in Europe, real men, of our own species, in some
other part of the world, were working their way along parallel lines
from much the same stage as the Neanderthalers ended at, and which the
Tasmanians preserved, to a higher level of power and achievement. The
Tasmanians, living under unstimulating conditions, remote from any other
human competition or example, lagged behind the rest of the human
brotherhood.[35]
About 200 centuries ago or earlier, real men of our own species, if not
of our own race, came drifting into the European area.
X
THE LATER POSTGLACIAL PALÆOLITHIC MEN, THE FIRST TRUE MEN
(Later Palæolithic Age)
§ 1. _The Coming of Men Like Ourselves._ § 2. _Subdivision of the
Later Palæolithic._ § 3. _The Earliest True Men Were Splendid
Savages._ § 4. _Hunters Give Place to Herdsmen._ § 5. _No Sub-men
in America._
§ 1
The Neanderthal type of man prevailed in Europe at least for tens of
thousands of years. For ages that make all history seem a thing of
yesterday, these nearly human creatures prevailed. If the Heidelberg jaw
was that of a Neanderthaler, and if there is no error in the estimate of
the age of that jaw, then the Neanderthal Race lasted out for more than
200,000 years! Finally, between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, as the
Fourth Glacial Age softened towards more temperate conditions (see Map
on p. 89), a different human type came upon the scene, and, it would
seem, exterminated _Homo Neanderthalensis_.[36] This new type was
probably developed in South Asia or North Africa, or in lands now
submerged in the Mediterranean basin, and, as more remains are
collected and evidence accumulates, men will learn more of their early
stages. At present we can only guess where and how, through the slow
ages, parallel with the Neanderthal cousin, these first _true men_ arose
out of some more ape-like progenitor. For hundreds of centuries they
were acquiring skill of hand and limb, and power and bulk of brain, in
that still unknown environment. They were already far above the
Neanderthal level of achievement and intelligence, when first they come
into our ken, and they had already split into two or more very
distinctive races.
[Illustration: Cromagnon
Man]
These new-comers did not migrate into Europe in the strict sense of the
word, but rather, as century by century the climate ameliorated, they
followed the food and plants to which they were accustomed, as those
spread into the new realms that opened to them. The ice was receding,
vegetation was increasing, big game of all sorts was becoming more
abundant. Steppe-like conditions, conditions of pasture and shrub, were
bringing with them vast herds of wild horse. Ethnologists (students of
race) class these new human races in one same species as ourselves, and
with all human races subsequent to them, under one common specific name
of _Homo sapiens_. They had quite human brain-cases and hands. Their
teeth and their necks were anatomically as ours are.
Now here again, with every desire to be plain and explicit with the
reader, we have still to trouble him with qualified statements and notes
of interrogation. There is now an enormous literature about these
earliest true men, the men of the Later Palæolithic Age, and it is still
for the general reader a very confusing literature indeed. It is
confusing because it is still confused at the source. We know of two
distinct sorts of skeletal remains in this period, the first of these
known as the Cro-Magnon race, and the second the Grimaldi race; but the
great bulk of the human traces and appliances we find are either without
human bones or with insufficient bones for us to define their associated
physical type. There may have been many more distinct races than these
two. There may have been intermediate types. In the grotto of Cro-Magnon
it was that complete skeletons of one main type of these Newer
Palæolithic men, these true men, were first found, and so it is that
they are spoken of as Cro-Magnards.
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING EUROPE AND WESTERN ASIA ABOUT THE TIME THE
TRUE MEN WERE REPLACING THE NEANDERTHALERS IN WESTERN EUROPE]
[Illustration: Reindeer Age Articles
(_drawn to differing scales_)
_Bone points_
(_Azillian--pierced for thong_)
_Pebble cup mortar_
_Harpoons of reindeer horn_
_Bone needles_
_Arrow straighteners_
(_reindeer horn_)
_Australian natives’ method of using throwing-stick or spear-thrower_
_Throwing-stick_ (_reindeer horn_)]
These Cro-Magnards were a tall people with very broad faces, prominent
noses, and, all things considered, astonishingly big brains. The brain
capacity of the woman in the Cro-Magnon cave exceeded that of the
average male to-day. Her head had been smashed by a heavy blow. There
were also in the same cave with her the complete skeleton of an older
man, nearly six feet high, the fragments of a child’s skeleton, and the
skeletons of two young men. There were also flint implements and
perforated sea-shells, used no doubt as ornaments. Such is one sample of
the earliest true men. But at the Grimaldi cave, near Mentone, were
discovered two skeletons also of the Later Palæolithic period, but of a
widely contrasted type, with negroid characteristics that point rather
to the negroid type. There can be no doubt that we have to deal in this
period with at least two, and probably more, highly divergent races of
true men. They may have overlapped in time, or Cro-Magnards may have
followed the Grimaldi race, and either or both may have been
contemporary with the late Neanderthal men. Various authorities have
very strong opinions upon these points, but they are, at most, opinions.
The whole story is further fogged at present by our inability to
distinguish, in the absence of skeletons, which race has been at work in
any particular case. In what follows the reader will ask of this or
that particular statement, “Yes, but is this the Cro-Magnard or the
Grimaldi man or some other that you are writing about?” To which in most
cases the honest answer is, “As yet we do not know.” Confessedly our
account of the newer Palæolithic is a jumbled account. There are
probably two or three concurrent and only roughly similar histories of
these newer Palæolithic men as yet, inextricably mixed up together. Some
authorities appear to favour the Cro-Magnards unduly and to dismiss the
Grimaldi people with as little as possible of the record.
The appearance of these truly human postglacial Palæolithic peoples was
certainly an enormous leap forward in the history of mankind. Both of
these main races had a human fore-brain, a human hand, an intelligence
very like our own. They dispossessed _Homo Neanderthalensis_ from his
caverns and his stone quarries. And they agreed with modern
ethnologists, it would seem, in regarding him as a different species.
Unlike most savage conquerors, who take the women of the defeated side
for their own and interbreed with them, it would seem that the true men
would have nothing to do with the Neanderthal race, women or men. There
is no trace of any intermixture between the races, in spite of the fact
that the newcomers, being also flint users, were establishing themselves
in the very same spots that their predecessors had occupied. We know
nothing of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this absence of
intermixture seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a
repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead,
his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature. Or he--and
she--may have been too fierce to tame. Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a
survey of the rise of modern man in his _Views and Reviews_: “The dim
racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains,
shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic
tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore....”
These true men of the Palæolithic Age, who replaced the Neanderthalers,
were coming into a milder climate, and although they used the caves and
shelters of their predecessors, they lived largely in the open. They
were hunting peoples, and some or all of them appear to have hunted the
mammoth and the wild horse as well as the reindeer, bison, and aurochs.
They ate much horse. At a great open-air camp at Solutré, where they
seem to have had animal gatherings for many centuries, it is estimated
that there are the bones of 100,000 horses, besides reindeer, mammoth,
and bison bones. They probably followed herds of horses, the little
bearded ponies of that age, as these moved after pasture. They hung
about on the flanks of the herd, and became very wise about its habits
and dispositions. A large part of these men’s lives must have been spent
in watching animals.
Whether they tamed and domesticated the horse is still an open question.
Perhaps they learnt to do so by degrees as the centuries passed. At any
rate, we find late Palæolithic drawings of horses with marks about the
heads that are strongly suggestive of bridles, and there exists a
carving of a horse’s head showing what is perhaps a rope of twisted skin
or tendon. But even if they tamed the horse, it is still more doubtful
whether they rode it or had much use for it when it was tamed. The horse
they knew was a wild pony with a beard under its chin, not up to
carrying a man for any distance. It is improbable that these men had yet
learnt the rather unnatural use of animal’s milk as food. If they tamed
the horse at last, it was the only animal they seem to have tamed. They
had no dogs, and they had little to do with any sort of domesticated
sheep or cattle.
It greatly aids us to realize their common humanity that these earliest
true men could draw. Both races, it would seem, drew astonishingly well.
They were by all standards savages, but they were artistic savages. They
drew better than any of their successors down to the beginnings of
history. They drew and painted on the cliffs and cave walls that they
had wrested from the Neanderthal men. And the surviving drawings come to
the ethnologist, puzzling over bones and scraps, with the effect of a
plain message shining through guesswork and darkness. They drew on bones
and antlers; they carved little figures.
These late Palæolithic people not only drew remarkably well for our
information, and with an increasing skill as the centuries passed, but
they have also left us other information about their lives in their
graves. They buried. They buried their dead, often with ornaments,
weapons, and food; they used a lot of colour in the burial, and
evidently painted the body. From that one may infer that they painted
their bodies during life. Paint was a big fact in their lives. They were
inveterate painters; they used black, brown, red, yellow, and white
pigments, and the pigments they used endure to this day in the caves of
France and Spain. Of all modern races, none have shown so pictorial a
disposition; the nearest approach to it has been among the American
Indians.
[Illustration: A Reindeer Age Masterpiece]
[Illustration:
Reindeer Age (_Aurignacian_)
Engravings & Carvings]
These drawings and paintings of the later Palæolithic people went on
through a long period of time, and present wide fluctuations in artistic
merit. We give here some early sketches, from which we learn of the
interest taken by these early men in the bison, horse, ibex, cave bear,
and reindeer. In its early stages the drawing is often primitive like
the drawing of clever children; quadrupeds are usually drawn with one
hindleg and one foreleg, as children draw them to this day. The legs on
the other side were too much for the artist’s technique. Possibly the
first drawings began as children’s drawings begin, out of idle
scratchings. The savage scratched with a flint on a smooth rock surface,
and was reminded of some line or gesture. But their solid carvings are
at least as old as their first pictures. The earlier drawings betray a
complete incapacity to group animals. As the centuries progressed, more
skilful artists appeared. The representation of beasts became at last
astonishingly vivid and like. But even at the crest of their artistic
time they still drew in profile as children do; perspective and the
fore-shortening needed for back and front views were too much for
them.[37] They rarely drew themselves. The vast majority of their
drawings represent animals. The mammoth and the horse are among the
commonest themes. Some of the people, whether Grimaldi people or
Cro-Magnon people, also made little ivory and soapstone statuettes, and
among these are some very fat female figures. These latter suggest the
physique of Grimaldi rather than of Cro-Magnon artists. They are like
Bushmen women. The human sculpture of the earlier times inclined to
caricature, and generally such human figures as they represent are far
below the animal studies in vigour and veracity.
Later on there was more grace and less coarseness in the human
representations. One little ivory head discovered is that of a girl with
an elaborate coiffure. These people at a later stage also scratched and
engraved designs on ivory and bone. Some of the most interesting groups
of figures are carved very curiously round bone, and especially round
rods of deer bone, so that it is impossible to see the entire design all
together. Figures have also been found modelled in clay, although no
Palæolithic people made any use of pottery.
Many of the paintings are found in the depths of unlit caves. They are
often difficult of access. The artists must have employed lamps to do
their work, and shallow soapstone lamps in which fat could have been
burnt have been found. Whether the seeing of these cavern paintings was
in some way ceremonial or under what circumstances they were seen, we
are now altogether at a loss to imagine.
§ 2
Archæologists distinguish at present three chief stages in the history
of these newer Palæolithic men in Europe, and we must name these stages
here. But it may be as well to note at the same time that it is a
matter of the utmost difficulty to distinguish which of two deposits in
different places is the older or newer. We may very well be dealing with
the work of more or less contemporary and different races when we think
we are dealing with successive ones. We are dealing, the reader must
bear in mind, with little disconnected patches of material, a few score
all together. The earliest stage usually distinguished by the experts is
the _Aurignacian_ (from the grotto of Aurignac); it is characterized by
very well-made flint implements, and by a rapid development of art and
more particularly of statuettes and wall paintings. The most esteemed of
the painted caves is ascribed to the latter part of this the first of
the three subdivisions of the newer Palæolithic. The second subdivision
of this period is called the _Solutrian_ (from Solutré), and is
distinguished particularly by the quality and beauty of its stone
implements; some of its razor-like blades are only equalled and not
surpassed by the very best of the Neolithic work. They are of course
unpolished, but the best specimens are as thin as steel blades and
almost as sharp. Finally, it would seem, came the _Magdalenian_ (from La
Madeleine) stage, in which the horse and reindeer were dwindling in
numbers and the red deer coming into Europe.[38] The stone implements
are smaller, and there is a great quantity of bone harpoons, spearheads,
needles, and the like. The hunters of the third and last stage of the
later Palæolithic Age appear to have supplemented a diminishing food
supply by fishing. The characteristic art of the period consists of deep
reliefs done upon bone and line engraving upon bone. It is to this
period that the designs drawn round bones belong, and it has been
suggested that these designs upon round bones were used to print
coloured designs upon leather. Some of the workmanship on bone was
extraordinarily fine. Parkyn quotes from de Mortillet, about the
Reindeer Age (Magdalenian) bone needles, that they “are much superior to
those of later, even historical, times, down to the Renaissance. The
Romans, for example, never had needles comparable to those of the
Magdalenian epoch.”
[Illustration: TIME DIAGRAM SHOWING THE ESTIMATED DURATION OF THE TRUE
HUMAN PERIODS.
This time diagram again is on a larger scale than its predecessors.
The time diagram on page 60, if it were on this scale, would be
nearly 4 feet long, and the diagram of the whole geological time on
page 14, between 500 and 5000 feet long (or perhaps even as much as
10,000 feet long).
]
It is quite impossible at present to guess at the relative lengths of
these ages. We are not even positive about their relative relationship.
Each lasted perhaps for four or five more thousand years, more than
double the time from the Christian Era to our own day.
At last it would seem that circumstances began to turn altogether
against these hunting Newer Palæolithic people who had flourished for so
long in Europe. They disappeared. New kinds of men appeared in Europe,
replacing them. These latter seem to have brought in bow and arrows;
they had domesticated animals and cultivated the soil. A new way of
living, the Neolithic way of living, spread over the European area; and
the life of the Reindeer Age and of the races of Reindeer Men, the Later
Palæolithic men, after a reign vastly greater than the time between
ourselves and the very earliest beginnings of recorded history, passed
off the European stage.
§ 3
There is a disposition on the part of many writers to exaggerate the
intellectual and physical qualities of these later Palæolithic men and
make a wonder of them.[39] Collectively considered, these people had
remarkable gifts, but a little reflection will show they had almost as
remarkable deficiencies. The tremendous advance they display upon their
Neanderthalian predecessors and their special artistic gift must not
blind us to their very obvious limitations. For all the quantity of
their brains, the quality was narrow and special. They had vivid
perceptions, an acute sense of animal form, they had the real artist’s
impulse to render; so far they were fully grown human beings. But that
disposition to paint and draw is shown to-day by the Bushmen, by
Californian Indians, and by Australian black fellows; it is not a mark
of all-round high intellectual quality. The cumulative effect of their
drawings and paintings is very great, but we must not make the mistake
of crowding all these achievements together in our minds as though they
had suddenly flashed out upon the world in a brief interval of time, or
as though they were all the achievements of one people. These races of
Reindeer Men were in undisturbed possession of western Europe for a
period at least ten times as long as the interval between ourselves and
the beginning of the Christian Era, and through all that immense time
they were free to develop and vary their life to its utmost
possibilities. Their art constitutes their one claim to be accounted
more than common savages.
They were in close contact with animals, but they never seemed to have
got to terms with any animal unless it was the horse. They had no dogs.
They had no properly domesticated animals at all. They watched and drew
and killed and ate. They do not seem to have cooked their food. Perhaps
they scorched and grilled it, but they could not have done much more,
because they had no cooking implements. Although they had clay
available, and although there are several Palæolithic clay figures on
record, they had _no pottery_. Although they had a great variety of
flint and bone implements, they never rose to the possibilities of using
timber for permanent shelters or such-like structures. They never made
hafted axes or the like that would enable them to deal with timber.
There is a suggestion in some of the drawings of a fence of stakes in
which a mammoth seems to be entangled. But here we may be dealing with
superimposed scratchings. They had _no buildings_. It is not even
certain that they had tents or huts. They may have had simple skin
tents. Some of the drawings seem to suggest as much. It is doubtful if
they knew of the bow. They left no good arrowheads behind them. Certain
of their implements are said to be “arrow-straighteners” by
distinguished authorities, but that is about as much evidence as we have
of arrows. They may have used sharpened sticks as arrows. They had _no
cultivation_ of grain or vegetables of any sort. Their women were
probably squaws, smaller than the men; the earlier statuettes represent
them as grossly fat, almost as the Bushmen women are often fat to-day.
(But this may not be true of the Cro-Magnards.)
They clothed themselves, it would seem, in skins, if they clothed
themselves at all. These skins they prepared with skill and elaboration,
and towards the end of the age they used bone needles, no doubt to sew
these pelts. One may guess pretty safely that they painted these skins,
and it has even been supposed, printed off designs upon them from bone
cylinders. But their garments were mere wraps; there are no clasps or
catches to be found. They do not seem to have used grass or such-like
fibre for textiles. Their statuettes are naked. They were, in fact,
except for a fur wrap in cold weather, naked painted savages.
These hunters lived on open steppes for two hundred centuries or so, ten
times the length of the Christian era. They were, perhaps, overtaken by
the growth of the European forests, as the climate became milder and
damper. When the wild horse and the reindeer diminished in Europe, and a
newer type of human culture, with a greater power over food supply, a
greater tenacity of settlement, and probably a larger social
organization, arose, the Reindeer Men had to learn fresh ways of living
or disappear. How far they learnt and mingled their strain with the new
European populations, and how far they went under we cannot yet guess.
Opinions differ widely. Wright lays much stress on the “great hiatus”
between the Palæolithic and Neolithic remains, while Osborn traces the
likeness of the former in several living populations. In the region of
the Doubs and of the Dordogne in France, many individuals are to be met
with to this day with skulls of the “Cro-Magnon” type. Apparently the
Grimaldi type of men has disappeared altogether from Europe. Whether the
Cro-Magnon type of men mingled completely with the Neolithic peoples, or
whether they remained distinct and held their own in favourable
localities to the north and west, following the reindeer over Siberia
and towards America, which at that time was continuous with Siberia, or
whether they disappeared altogether from the world, is a matter that can
be only speculated about at present. There is not enough evidence for a
judgment. Possibly they mingled to a certain extent. There is little to
prevent our believing that they survived without much intermixture for a
long time in north Asia, that “pockets” of them remained here and there
in Europe, that there is a streak of their blood in most European
peoples to-day, and that there is a much stronger streak, if not a
predominant strain, in the Mongolian and American races.[40]
§ 4
It was about 12,000 or fewer years ago that, with the spread of forests
and a great change of the fauna, the long prevalence of the hunting life
in Europe drew to its end. Reindeer vanished. Changing conditions
frequently bring with them new diseases. There may have been prehistoric
pestilences. For many centuries there may have been no men in Britain or
Central Europe (Wright). For a time there were in Southern Europe
drifting communities of some little known people who are called the
Azilians.[41] They may have been transition generations; they may have
been a different race. We do not know. Some authorities incline to the
view that the Azilians were the first wave of a race which, as we shall
see later, has played a great part in populating Europe, the dark-white
or Mediterranean or Iberian race. These Azilian people have left behind
them a multitude of pebbles, roughly daubed with markings of an unknown
purport (see illus., p. 94). The use or significance of these Azilian
pebbles is still a profound mystery. Was this some sort of token
writing? Were they counters in some game? Did the Azilians play with
these pebbles or tell a story with them, as imaginative children will do
with bits of wood and stone nowadays? At present we are unable to cope
with any of these questions.
We will not deal here with the other various peoples who left their
scanty traces in the world during the close of the New Palæolithic
period, the spread of the forests where formerly there had been steppes,
and the wane of the hunters, some 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. We will go
on to describe the new sort of human community that was now spreading
over the northern hemisphere, whose appearance marks what is called the
_Neolithic Age_. The map of the world was assuming something like its
present outlines, the landscape and the flora and fauna were taking on
their existing characteristics. The prevailing animals in the spreading
woods of Europe were the royal stag, the great ox, and the bison; the
mammoth and the musk ox had gone. The great ox, or aurochs, is now
extinct, but it survived in the German forests up to the time of the
Roman Empire. It was never domesticated.[42] It stood eleven feet high
at the shoulder, as high as an elephant. There were still lions in the
Balkan peninsula, and they remained there until about 1000 or 1200 B.C.
The lions of Württemberg and South Germany in those days were twice the
size of the modern lion. South Russia and Central Asia were thickly
wooded then, and there were elephants in Mesopotamia and Syria, and a
fauna in Algeria that was tropical African in character.
Hitherto men in Europe had never gone farther north than the Baltic Sea
or the English midlands, but now Ireland, the Scandinavian peninsula,
and perhaps Great Russia were becoming possible regions for human
occupation. There are no Palæolithic remains in Sweden or Norway, nor in
Ireland or Scotland. Man, when he entered these countries, was
apparently already at the Neolithic stage of social development.
§ 5
Nor is there any convincing evidence of man in America before the end of
the Pleistocene.[43] The same relaxation of the climate that permitted
the retreat of the reindeer hunters into Russia and Siberia, as the
Neolithic tribes advanced, may have allowed them to wander across the
land that is now cut by Bering Strait, and so reach the American
continent. They spread thence southward, age by age. When they reached
South America, they found the giant sloth (the _Megatherium_), the
glyptodon, and many other extinct creatures, still flourishing. The
glyptodon was a monstrous South American armadillo, and a human
skeleton has been found by Roth buried beneath its huge tortoise-like
shell.[44]
All the human remains in America, even the earliest, it is to be noted,
are of an Amer-Indian character. In America there does not seem to have
been any preceding races of sub-men. Man was fully man when he entered
America. The old world was the nursery of the sub-races of mankind.
XI
NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE[45]
§ 1. _The Age of Cultivation Begins._ § 2. _Where Did the Neolithic
Culture Arise?_ § 3. _Everyday Neolithic Life._ § 4. _How Did
Sowing Begin?_ § 5. _Primitive Trade._ § 6. _The Flooding of the
Mediterranean Valley._
§ 1
THE Neolithic phase of human affairs began in Europe about 10,000 or
12,000 years ago. But probably men had reached the Neolithic stage
elsewhere some thousands of years earlier.[46] Neolithic men came slowly
into Europe from the south or south-east as the reindeer and the open
steppes gave way to forest and modern European conditions.
The Neolithic stage in culture is characterized by: (1) the presence of
polished stone implements, and in particular the stone _axe_, which was
perforated so as to be the more effectually fastened to a wooden handle,
and which was probably used rather for working wood than in conflict.
There are also abundant arrow heads. The fact that some implements are
polished does not preclude the presence of great quantities of
implements of unpolished stone. But there are differences in the make
between even the unpolished tools of the Neolithic and of the
Palæolithic Period. (2) The beginning of a sort of agriculture, and the
use of plants and seeds. But at first there are abundant evidences that
hunting was still of great importance in the Neolithic Age. Neolithic
man did not at first sit down to his agriculture. He took snatch crops.
He settled later. (3) Pottery and proper cooking. The horse is no longer
eaten. (4) Domesticated animals. The dog appears very early. The
Neolithic man had domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. He was a
huntsman turned herdsman of the herds he once hunted.[47] (5) Plaiting
and weaving.
These Neolithic people probably “migrated” into Europe, in the same way
that the Reindeer Men had migrated before them; that is to say,
generation by generation and century by century, as the climate changed,
they spread after their accustomed food. They were not “nomads.”
Nomadism, like civilization, had still to be developed. At present we
are quite unable to estimate how far the Neolithic peoples were
new-comers and how far their arts were developed or acquired by the
descendants of some of the hunters and fishers of the Later Palæolithic
Age.
Whatever our conclusions in that matter, this much we may say with
certainty; there is no great break, no further sweeping away of one kind
of man and replacement by another kind between the appearance of the
Neolithic way of living and our own time. There are invasions,
conquests, extensive emigrations and intermixtures, but the races as a
whole carry on and continue to adapt themselves to the areas into which
they began to settle in the opening of the Neolithic Age. The Neolithic
men of Europe were white men ancestral to the modern Europeans. They may
have been of a darker complexion than many of their descendants; of that
we cannot speak with certainty. But there is no real break in culture
from their time onward until we reach the age of coal, steam, and
power-driven machinery that began in the eighteenth century.
After a long time gold, the first known of the metals, appears among the
bone ornaments with jet and amber. Irish Neolithic remains are
particularly rich in gold. Then, perhaps 6000 or 7000 years ago in
Europe, Neolithic people began to use copper in certain centres, making
out of it implements of much the same pattern as their stone ones. They
cast the copper in moulds made to the shape of the stone implements.
Possibly they first found native copper and hammered it into shape.[48]
Later--we will not venture upon figures--men had found out how to get
copper from its ore. Perhaps, as Lord Avebury suggested, they discovered
the secret of smelting by the chance putting of lumps of copper ore
among the ordinary stones with which they built the fire pits they used
for cooking. In China, Hungary, Cornwall, and elsewhere copper ore and
tinstone occur in the same veins; it is a very common association, and
so, rather through dirtiness than skill, the ancient smelters, it may
be, hit upon the harder and better bronze, which is an alloy of copper
and tin.[49] Bronze is not only harder than copper, but the mixture of
tin and copper is more fusible and easier to reduce. The so-called
“pure-copper” implements usually contain a small proportion of tin, and
there are no tin implements known, nor very much evidence to show that
early men knew of tin as a separate metal.[50][51] The plant of a
prehistoric copper smelter has been found in Spain, and the material of
bronze foundries in various localities. The method of smelting revealed
by these finds carries out Lord Avebury’s suggestion. In India, where
zinc and copper ore occur together, brass (which is an alloy of the two
metals) was similarly hit upon.
So slight was the change in fashions and methods produced by the
appearance of bronze, that for a long time such bronze axes and so forth
as were made were cast in moulds to the shape of the stone implements
they were superseding.
[Illustration: Neolithic Implements]
Finally, perhaps as early as 3000 years ago in Europe, and even earlier
in Asia Minor, men began to smelt iron. Once smelting was known to men,
there is no great marvel in the finding of iron. They smelted iron by
blowing up a charcoal fire, and wrought it by heating and hammering.
They produced it at first in comparatively small pieces;[52] its
appearance worked a gradual revolution in weapons and implements; but
it did not suffice to change the general character of men’s
surroundings. Much the same daily life that was being led by the more
settled Neolithic men 10,000 years ago was being led by peasants in
out-of-the-way places all over Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth
century.[53]
People talk of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age in
Europe, but it is misleading to put these ages as if they were of equal
importance in history. Much truer is it to say that there was:
(1) An _Early Palæolithic Age_, of vast duration; (2) a _Later
Palæolithic Age_, that lasted not a tithe of the time; and (3) the Age
of Cultivation, the age of the white men in Europe, which began 10,000
or at most 12,000 years ago, of which the Neolithic Period was the
beginning, and which is still going on.
§ 2
We do not know yet the region in which the ancestors of the white and
whitish Neolithic peoples worked their way up from the Palæolithic stage
of human development. Probably it was somewhere about south-western
Asia, or in some region now submerged beneath the Mediterranean Sea or
the Indian Ocean, that, while the Neanderthal men still lived their hard
lives in the bleak climate of a glaciated Europe, the ancestors of the
white men developed the rude arts of _their_ Later Palæolithic period.
But they do not seem to have developed the artistic skill of their more
northerly kindred, the European Later Palæolithic races. And through the
hundred centuries or so while Reindeer Men were living under
comparatively unprogressive conditions upon the steppes of France,
Germany, and Spain, these more-favoured and progressive people to the
south were mastering agriculture, learning to develop their appliances,
taming the dog, domesticating cattle, and, as the climate to the north
mitigated and the equatorial climate grew more tropical, spreading
northward. All these early chapters of our story have yet to be
disinterred. They will probably be found in Asia Minor, Persia, Arabia,
India, or north Africa, or they lie beneath the Mediterranean waters.
Twelve thousand years ago, or thereabouts--we are still too early for
anything but the roughest chronology--Neolithic peoples were scattered
all over Europe, north Africa, and Asia. They were peoples at about the
level of many of the Polynesian islanders of the last century, and they
were the most advanced peoples in the world.
§ 3
It will be of interest here to give a brief account of the life of the
European Neolithic people before the appearance of metals. We get our
light upon that life from various sources. They scattered their refuse
about, and in some places (_e.g._ on the Danish coast) it accumulated in
great heaps, known as the kitchen middens. They buried some of their
people, but not the common herd, with great care and distinction, and
made huge heaps of earth over their sepulchres; these heaps are the
barrows or dolmens which contribute a feature to the European, Indian,
and American scenery in many districts to this day. In connection with
these mounds, or independently of them, they set up great stones
(megaliths), either singly or in groups, of which Stonehenge in
Wiltshire and Carnac in Brittany are among the best-known examples. In
various places their villages are still traceable.
One fruitful source of knowledge about Neolithic life comes from
Switzerland, and was first revealed by the very dry winter of 1854, when
the water level of one of the lakes, sinking to an unheard-of lowness,
revealed the foundations of prehistoric pile dwellings of the Neolithic
and early Bronze Ages, built out over the water after the fashion of
similar homes that exist to-day in Celebes and elsewhere. Not only were
the timbers of those ancient platforms preserved, but a great multitude
of wooden, bone, stone, and earthenware utensils and ornaments, remains
of food and the like, were found in the peaty accumulations below them.
Even pieces of net and garments have been recovered. Similar lake
dwellings existed in Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere--there are
well-known remains at Glastonbury in Somersetshire; in Ireland lake
dwellings were inhabited from prehistoric times up to the days when
O’Neil of Tyrone was fighting against the English before the plantation
of Scotch colonists to replace the Irish in Ulster in the reign of James
I of England. These lake villages had considerable defensive value, and
there was a sanitary advantage in living over flowing water.
Probably these Neolithic Swiss pile dwellings did not shelter the
largest communities that existed in those days. They were the homes of
small patriarchal groups. Elsewhere upon fertile plains and in more open
country there were probably already much larger assemblies of homes than
in those mountain valleys. There are traces of such a large community of
families in Wiltshire in England, for example; the remains of the stone
circle of Avebury near Silbury mound were once the “finest megalithic
ruin in Europe.”[54] It consisted of two circles of stones surrounded by
a larger circle and a ditch, and covering all together twenty-eight and
a half acres. From it two avenues of stones, each a mile and a half
long, ran west and south on either side of Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill is
the largest prehistoric artificial mound in England. The dimensions of
this centre of a faith and a social life now forgotten altogether by men
indicate the concerted efforts and interests of a very large number of
people, widely scattered though they may have been over the west and
south and centre of England. Possibly they assembled at some particular
season of the year in a primitive sort of fair. The whole community
“lent a hand” in building the mounds and hauling the stones. The Swiss
pile-dwellers, on the contrary, seem to have lived in practically
self-contained villages.
[Illustration: Pottery from Lake Dwellings
J.F.H.
(after a drawing in Déchelette’s “Manuel d’Archéologie”)]
[Illustration: Restoration of a Lake dwelling]
These lake-village people were considerably more advanced in methods and
knowledge, and probably much later in time than the early Neolithic
people who accumulated the shell mounds, known as kitchen middens, on
the Danish and Scotch coasts. These kitchen midden folk may have been as
early as 10,000 B.C. or earlier; the lake dwellings were probably
occupied continuously from 5000 or 4000 B.C. down almost to historic
times. Those early kitchen-midden people were among the most barbaric of
Neolithic peoples, their stone axes were rough, and they had no
domesticated animal except the dog. The lake-dwellers, on the other
hand, had, in addition to the dog, which was of a medium-sized breed,
oxen, goats, and sheep. Later on, as they were approaching the Bronze
Age, they got swine. The remains of cattle and goats prevail in their
débris, and, having regard to the climate and country about them, it
seems probable that these beasts were sheltered in the buildings upon
the piles in winter, and that fodder was stored for them. Probably the
beasts lived in the same houses with the people, as the men and beasts
do now in Swiss chalets. The people in the houses possibly milked the
cows and goats, and milk perhaps played as important a part in their
economy as it does in that of the mountain Swiss of to-day. But of that
we are not sure at present. Milk is not a natural food for adults; it
must have seemed queer stuff to take at first; and it may have been only
after much breeding that a continuous supply of milk was secured from
cows and goats. Some people think that the use of milk, cheese, butter,
and other milk products came later into human life when men became
nomadic. The writer is, however, disposed to give the Neolithic men
credit for having discovered milking. The milk, if they did use it (and,
no doubt, in that case sour curdled milk also, but not well-made cheese
and butter), they must have kept in earthenware pots, for they had
pottery, though it was roughly hand-made pottery and not the shapely
product of the potter’s wheel. They eked out this food supply by
hunting. They killed and ate red deer and roe deer, bison and wild boar.
And they ate the fox, a rather high-flavoured meat, and not what any one
would eat in a world of plenty. Oddly enough, they do not seem to have
eaten the hare, although it was available as food. They are supposed to
have avoided eating it, as some savages are said to avoid eating it to
this day, because they feared that the flesh of so timid a creature
might make them, by a sort of infection, cowardly.[55]
Of their agricultural methods we know very little. No ploughs and no
hoes have been found. They were of wood and have perished. Neolithic men
cultivated and ate wheat, barley, and millet, but they knew nothing of
oats or rye. Their grain they roasted, ground between stones and stored
in pots, to be eaten when needed. And they made exceedingly solid and
heavy bread, because round flat slabs of it have been got out of these
deposits. Apparently they had no yeast. If they had no yeast, then they
had no fermented drink. One sort of barley that they had is the sort
that was cultivated by the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, and
they also had an Egyptian variety of wheat, showing that their ancestors
had brought or derived this cultivation from the south-east. The centre
of diffusion of wheat was somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region.
A wild form is still found in the neighbourhood of Mt. Hermon (see
footnote to Ch. XVI, § 1). When the lake dwellers sowed their little
patches of wheat in Switzerland, they were already following the
immemorial practice of mankind. The seed must have been brought age by
age from that distant centre of diffusion. In the ancestral lands of the
south-east men had already been sowing wheat perhaps for thousands of
years.[56] Those lake dwellers also ate peas, and crab-apples--the only
apples that then existed in the world. Cultivation and selection had not
yet produced the apple of to-day.
They dressed chiefly in skins, but they also made a rough cloth of flax.
Fragments of that flaxen cloth have been discovered. Their nets were
made of flax; they had as yet no knowledge of hemp and hempen rope. With
the coming of bronze, their pins and ornaments increased in number.
There is reason to believe they set great store upon their hair, wearing
it in large shocks with pins of bone and afterwards of metal. To judge
from the absence of realistic carvings or engravings or paintings, they
either did not decorate their garments or decorated them with plaids,
spots, interlacing designs, or similar conventional ornament. Before the
coming of bronze there is no evidence of stools or tables; the Neolithic
people probably squatted on their clay floors. There were no cats in
these lake dwellings; no mice or rats had yet adapted themselves to
human dwellings; the cluck of the hen was not as yet added to the sounds
of human life, nor the domestic egg to its diet.[57]
The chief tool and weapon of Neolithic man was his axe; his next the bow
and arrow. His arrow heads were of flint, beautifully made, and he
lashed them tightly to their shafts. Probably he prepared the ground for
his sowing with a pole, or a pole upon which he had stuck a stag’s horn.
Fish he hooked or harpooned. These implements no doubt stood about in
the interior of the house, from the walls of which hung his
fowling-nets. On the floor, which was of clay or trodden cow-dung (after
the fashion of hut floors in India to-day), stood pots and jars and
woven baskets containing grain, milk, and such-like food. Some of the
pots and pans hung by rope loops to the walls. At one end of the room,
and helping to keep it warm in winter by their animal heat, stabled the
beasts. The children took the cows and goats out to graze, and brought
them in at night before the wolves and bears came prowling.
[Illustration: _Hut urns, the first probably representing a
lake-dwelling.... After Lubbock._]
Since Neolithic man had the bow, he probably also had stringed
instruments, for the rhythmic twanging of a bow-string seems almost
inevitably to lead to that. He also had earthenware drums across which
skins were stretched; perhaps also he made drums by stretching skins
over hollow tree stems.[58] We do not know when man began to sing, but
evidently he was making music, and since he had words, songs were no
doubt being made. To begin with, perhaps, he just let his voice loose as
one may hear Italian peasants now behind their ploughs singing songs
without words. After dark in the winter he sat in his house and talked
and sang and made implements by touch rather than sight. His lighting
must have been poor, and chiefly firelight, but there was probably
always some fire in the village, summer or winter. Fire was too
troublesome to make for men to be willing to let it out readily.
Sometimes a great disaster happened to those pile villages, the fire got
free, and they were burnt out. The Swiss deposits contain clear evidence
of such catastrophes.
All this we gather from the remains of the Swiss pile dwellings, and
such was the character of the human life that spread over Europe, coming
from the south and from the east with the forests as, 10,000 or 12,000
years ago, the reindeer and the Reindeer Men passed away. It is evident
that we have here a way of life already separated by a great gap of
thousands of years of invention from its original Palæolithic stage. The
steps by which it rose from that condition we can only guess at. From
being a hunter hovering upon the outskirts of flocks and herds of wild
cattle and sheep, and from being a co-hunter with the dog, man by
insensible degrees may have developed a sense of proprietorship in the
beasts and struck up a friendship with his canine competitor. He learnt
to turn the cattle when they wandered too far; he brought his better
brain to bear to guide them to fresh pasture. He hemmed the beasts into
valleys and enclosures where he could be sure to find them again. He fed
them when they starved, and so slowly he tamed them. Perhaps his
agriculture began with the storage of fodder. He reaped, no doubt,
before he sowed. The Palæolithic ancestor away in that unknown land of
origin to the south-east first supplemented the precarious meat supply
of the hunter by eating roots and fruits and wild grains. Man storing
graminiferous grasses for his cattle might easily come to beat out the
grain for himself.
§ 4
How did man learn to sow in order that he might reap?
We may hesitate here to guess at the answer to that question. But a very
great deal has been made of the fact that wherever sowing occurs among
primitive people in any part of the world, it is accompanied by a human
sacrifice or by some ceremony which may be interpreted as the mitigation
and vestige of an ancient sacrificial custom. This is the theme of Sir
J. G. Frazer’s _Golden Bough_. From this it has been supposed that the
first sowings were in connection with the burial of a human being,
either through wild grain being put with the dead body as food or
through the scattering of grain over the body. It may be argued that
there is only one reason why man should have disturbed the surface of
the earth before he took to agriculture, and that was to bury his dead;
and in order to bury a dead body and make a mound over it, it was
probably necessary for him to disturb the surface over a considerable
area. Neolithic man’s chief apparatus for mound-making consisted of
picks of deer’s horn and shovels of their shoulder-blades, and with this
he would have found great difficulty in making a deep excavation. Nor
do we find such excavations beside the barrows. Instead of going down
into tough sub-soil, the mound-makers probably scraped up some of the
surface soil and carried it to the mound. All this seems probable, and
it gives just that wide area of bared and turned-over earth upon which
an eared grass, such as barley, millet, or primitive wheat, might have
seeded and grown. Moreover, the mound-makers, being busy with the mound,
would not have time to hunt meat, and if they were accustomed to store
and eat wild grain, they would be likely to scatter grain, and the grain
would be blown by the wind out of their rude vessels over the area they
were disturbing. And if they were bringing up seed in any quantity in
baskets and pots to bury with the corpse, some of it might easily blow
and be scattered over the fresh earth. Returning later to the region of
the mound, they would discover an exceptionally vigorous growth of food
grain, and it would be a natural thing to associate it with the buried
person, and regard it as a consequence of his death and burial. He had
given them back the grain they gave him increased a hundredfold.
At any rate, there is apparently all over the world a traceable
association in ancient ceremonial and in the minds of barbaric people
between the death and burial of a person and the ploughing and sowing of
grain. From this it is assumed that there was once a world-wide
persuasion that it was necessary that some one should be buried before a
crop could be sown, and that out of this persuasion arose a practice and
tradition of human sacrifice at seedtime, which has produced profound
effects in the religious development of the race. There may have been
some idea of refreshing the earth by a blood draught or revivifying it
with the life of the sacrificed person. We state these considerations
here merely as suggestions that have been made of the way in which the
association of seedtime and sacrifice arose. They are, at the best,
speculations; they have a considerable vogue at the present time, and we
have to note them, but we have neither the space nor the time here to
examine them at length. The valuable accumulations of suggestions due to
the industry and ingenuity of Sir J. G. Frazer still await a thorough
critical examination, and to his works the reader must go for the
indefatigable expansion of this idea.
§ 5
All these early beginnings must have taken place far back in time, and
in regions of the world that have still to be effectively explored by
the archæologists. They were probably going on in Asia or Africa, in
what is now the bed of the Mediterranean, or in the region of the Indian
Ocean, while the Reindeer man was developing his art in Europe. The
Neolithic men who drifted over Europe and western Asia 12,000 or 10,000
years ago were long past these beginnings; they were already close, a
few thousand years, to the dawn of written tradition and the remembered
history of mankind. Without any very great shock or break, bronze came
at last into human life, giving a great advantage in warfare to those
tribes who first obtained it. Written history had already begun before
weapons of iron came into Europe to supersede bronze.
Already in those days a sort of primitive trade had sprung up. Bronze
and bronze weapons, and such rare and hard stones as jade, gold because
of its plastic and ornamental possibilities, and skins and flax-net and
cloth, were being swapped and stolen and passed from hand to hand over
great stretches of country. Salt also was probably being traded. On a
meat dietary men can live without salt, but grain-consuming people need
it just as herbivorous animals need it. Hopf says that bitter tribal
wars have been carried on by the desert tribes of the Soudan in recent
years for the possession of the salt deposits between Fezzan and Murzuk.
To begin with, barter, blackmail, tribute, and robbery by violence
passed into each other by insensible degrees. Men got what they wanted
by such means as they could.[59]
§ 6
So far we have been telling of a history without events, a history of
ages and periods and stages in development. But before we conclude this
portion of the human story, we must record what was probably an event of
primary importance and at first perhaps of tragic importance to
developing mankind, and that was the breaking in of the Atlantic waters
to the great Mediterranean valley.
The reader must keep in mind that we are endeavouring to give him plain
statements that he can take hold of comfortably. But both in the matter
of our time charts and the three maps we have given of prehistoric
geography there is necessarily much speculative matter. We have dated
the last Glacial Age and the appearance of the true men as about 40,000
or 35,000 years ago. Please bear that “about” in mind. The truth may be
60,000 or 20,000. But it is no good saying “a very long time” or “ages”
ago, because then the reader will not know whether we mean centuries or
millions of years. And similarly in these maps we give, they represent
not the truth, but something like the truth. The outline of the land was
“some such outline.” There were such seas and such land masses. But both
Mr. Horrabin, who has drawn these maps, and I, who have incited him to
do so, have preferred to err on the timid side.[60] We are not
geologists enough to launch out into original research in these matters,
and so we have stuck to the 40-fathom line and the recent deposits as
our guides for our post-glacial map and for the map of 12,000 to 10,000
B.C. But in one matter we have gone beyond these guides. It is
practically certain that at the end of the last Glacial Age the
Mediterranean was a couple of land-locked sea basins, not connected--or
only connected by a torrential overflow river. The eastern basin was the
fresher; it was fed by the Nile, the “Adriatic” river, the “Red-Sea”
river, and perhaps by a river that poured down amidst the mountains that
are now the Greek Archipelago from the very much bigger Sea of Central
Asia that then existed. Almost certainly human beings, and possibly even
Neolithic men, wandered over that now lost Mediterranean valley.
The reasons for believing this are very good and plain. To this day the
Mediterranean is a sea of evaporation. The rivers that flow into it do
not make up for the evaporation from its surface. There is a constant
current of water pouring into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, and
another current streaming in from the Bosphorus and Black Sea. For the
Black Sea gets more water than it needs from the big rivers that flow
into it; it is an overflowing sea, while the Mediterranean is a thirsty
sea. From which it must be plain that when the Mediterranean was cut off
both from the Atlantic Ocean and the Black Sea it must have been a
shrinking sea with its waters sinking to a much lower level than those
of the ocean outside. This is the case of the Caspian Sea to-day. Still
more so is it the case with the Dead Sea.
But if this reasoning is sound, then where to-day roll the blue waters
of the Mediterranean there must once have been great areas of land, and
land with a very agreeable climate. This was probably the case during
the last Glacial Age, and we do not know how near it was to our time
when the change occurred that brought back the ocean waters into the
Mediterranean basin. Certainly there must have been Grimaldi people, and
perhaps even Azilian and Neolithic people going about in the valleys and
forests of these regions that are now submerged. The Neolithic Dark
Whites, the people of the Mediterranean race, may have gone far towards
the beginnings of settlement and civilization in that great lost
Mediterranean Valley.
Mr. W. B. Wright[61] gives us some very stimulating suggestions here. He
suggests that in the Mediterranean basin there were two lakes, “one a
fresh-water lake, in the eastern depression, which drained into the
other in the western depression. It is interesting to think what must
have happened when the ocean level rose once more as a result of the
dissipation of the ice-sheets, and its waters began to pour over into
the Mediterranean area. The inflow, small at first, must have ultimately
increased to enormous dimensions, as the channel was slowly lowered by
erosion and the ocean level slowly rose. If there were any
unconsolidated materials on the sill of the Strait, the result must have
been a genuine debacle, and if we consider the length of time which even
an enormous torrent would take to fill such a basin as that of the
Mediterranean, we must conclude that this result was likely to have
been attained in any case. Now, this may seem all the wildest
speculation, but it is not entirely so, for if we examine a submarine
contour map of the Straits of Gibraltar, we find there is an enormous
valley running up from the Mediterranean deep, right through the
Straits, and trenching some distance out on to the Atlantic shelf. This
valley or gorge is probably the work of the inflowing waters of the
ocean at the termination of the period of interior drainage.”
This refilling of the Mediterranean, which by the rough chronology we
are employing in this book may have happened somewhen between 30,000 and
10,000 B.C., must have been one of the greatest single events in the
pre-history of our race. If the later date is the truer, then, as the
reader will see plainly enough after reading the next two chapters, the
crude beginnings of civilization, the first lake dwellings and the first
cultivation, were probably round that eastern Levantine Lake into which
there flowed not only the Nile, but the two great rivers that are now
the Adriatic and the Red Sea. Suddenly the ocean waters began to break
through over the westward hills and to pour in upon these primitive
peoples--the lake that had been their home and friend became their
enemy; its waters rose and never abated; their settlements were
submerged; the waters pursued them in their flight. Day by day and year
by year the waters spread up the valleys and drove mankind before them.
Many must have been surrounded and caught by the continually rising salt
flood. It knew no check; it came faster and faster; it rose over the
treetops, over the hills, until it had filled the whole basin of the
present Mediterranean and until it lapped the mountain cliffs of Arabia
and Africa. Far away, long before the dawn of history, this catastrophe
occurred.
XII
EARLY THOUGHT[62]
§ 1. _Primitive Philosophy._ § 2. _The Old Man in Religion._ § 3.
_Fear and Hope in Religion._ § 4. _Stars and Seasons._ § 5.
_Story-telling and Myth-making._ § 6. _Complex Origins of
Religion._
§ 1
Before we go on to tell how 6000 or 7000 years ago men began to gather
into the first towns and to develop something more than the loose-knit
tribes that had hitherto been their highest political association,
something must be said about the things that were going on inside these
brains of which we have traced the growth and development through a
period of 500,000 years from the Pithecanthropus stage.
What was man thinking about himself and about the world in those remote
days?
At first he thought very little about anything but immediate things. At
first he was busy thinking such things as: “Here is a bear; what shall I
do?” Or “There is a squirrel; how can I get it?” Until language had
developed to some extent there could have been little thinking beyond
the range of actual experience, for language is the instrument of
thought as book-keeping is the instrument of business. It records and
fixes and enables thought to get on to more and more complex ideas. It
is the hand of the mind to hold and keep. Primordial man, before he
could talk, probably saw very vividly, mimicked very cleverly, gestured,
laughed, danced, and lived, without much speculation about whence he
came or why he lived. He feared the dark, no doubt, and thunderstorms
and big animals and queer things and whatever he dreamt about, and no
doubt he did things to propitiate what he feared or to change his luck
and please the imaginary powers in rock and beast and river. He made no
clear distinction between animate and inanimate things; if a stick hurt
him, he kicked it; if the river foamed and flooded, he thought it was
hostile. His thought was probably very much at the level of a bright
little contemporary boy of four or five. He had the same subtle
unreasonableness of transition and the same limitations. But since he
had little or no speech he would do little to pass on the fancies that
came to him, and develop any tradition or concerted acts about them.
The drawings even of Late Palæolithic man do not suggest that he paid
any attention to sun or moon or stars or trees. He was preoccupied only
with animals and men. Probably he took day and night, sun and stars,
trees and mountains, as being in the nature of things--as a child takes
its meal times and its nursery staircase for granted. So far as we can
judge, he drew no fantasies, no ghosts or anything of that sort. The
Reindeer Men’s drawings are fearless familiar things, with no hint about
them of any religious or occult feelings. There is scarcely anything
that we can suppose to be a religious or mystical symbol at all in his
productions. No doubt he had a certain amount of what is called
_fetishism_ in his life; he did things we should now think unreasonable
to produce desired ends, for that is all fetishism amounts to; it is
only incorrect science based on guess-work or false analogy, and
entirely different in its nature from religion. No doubt he was excited
by his dreams, and his dreams mixed up at times in his mind with his
waking impressions and puzzled him. Since he buried his dead, and since
even the later Neanderthal men seem to have buried their dead, and
apparently with food and weapons, it has been argued that he had a
belief in a future life. But it is just as reasonable to suppose that
early men buried their dead with food and weapons because they doubted
if they were dead, which is not the same thing as believing them to
have immortal spirits, and that their belief in their continuing
vitality was reinforced by dreams of the departed. They may have
ascribed a sort of were-wolf existence to the dead, and wished to
propitiate them.
The Reindeer man, we feel, was too intelligent and too like ourselves
not to have had some speech, but quite probably it was not very
serviceable for anything beyond direct statement or matter of fact
narrative. He lived in a larger community than the Neanderthaler, but
how large we do not know. Except when game is swarming, hunting
communities must not keep together in large bodies or they will starve.
The Indians who depend upon the caribou in Labrador must be living under
circumstances rather like those of the Reindeer men. They scatter in
small family groups, as the caribou scatter in search of food; but when
the deer collect for the seasonal migration, the Indians also collect.
That is the time for trade and feasts and marriages. The simplest
American Indian is 10,000 years more sophisticated than the Reindeer
man, but probably that sort of gathering and dispersal was also the way
of Reindeer men. At Solutré in France there are traces of a great
camping and feasting-place. There was no doubt an exchange of news
there, but one may doubt if there was anything like an exchange of
ideas. One sees no scope in such a life for theology or philosophy or
superstition or speculation. Fears, yes; but unsystematic fears; fancies
and freaks of the imagination, but personal and transitory freaks and
fancies.
Perhaps there was a certain power of suggestion in these encounters. A
fear really felt needs few words for its transmission; a value set upon
something may be very simply conveyed.
In these questions of primitive thought and religion, we must remember
that the lowly and savage peoples of to-day probably throw very little
light on the mental state of men before the days of fully developed
language. Primordial man could have had little or no tradition before
the development of speech. All savage and primitive peoples of to-day,
on the contrary, are soaked in tradition--the tradition of thousands of
generations. They may have weapons like their remote ancestors and
methods like them, but what were slight and shallow impressions on the
minds of their predecessors are now deep and intricate grooves worn
throughout the intervening centuries generation by generation.
§ 2
Certain very fundamental things there may have been in men’s minds long
before the coming of speech. Chief among these must have been fear of
the Old Man of the tribe. The young of the primitive squatting-place
grew up under that fear. Objects associated with him were probably
forbidden. Every one was forbidden to touch his spear or to sit in his
place, just as to-day little boys must not touch father’s pipe or sit in
his chair. He was probably the master of all the women. The youths of
the little community had to remember that. The idea of _something
forbidden_, the idea of things being, as it is called, _tabu_, not to be
touched, not to be looked at, may thus have got well into the human mind
at a very early stage indeed. J. J. Atkinson, in an ingenious analysis
of these primitive tabus which are found among savage peoples all over
the world, the tabus that separate brother and sister, the tabus that
make a man run and hide from his stepmother, traces them to such a
fundamental cause as this.[63] Only by respecting this primal law could
the young male hope to escape the Old Man’s wrath. And the Old Man must
have been an actor in many a primordial nightmare. A disposition to
propitiate him even after he was dead is quite understandable. One was
not sure that he _was_ dead. He might only be asleep or shamming. Long
after an Old Man was dead, when there was nothing to represent him but a
mound and a megalith, the women would convey to their children how awful
and wonderful he was. And being still a terror to his own little tribe,
it was easy to go on to hoping that he would be a terror to other and
hostile people. In his life he had fought for his tribe, even if he had
bullied it. Why not when he was dead? One sees that the Old Man idea was
an idea very natural to the primitive mind and capable of great
development.[64]
§ 3
Another idea probably arose early out of the mysterious visitation of
infectious diseases, and that was the idea of uncleanness and of being
accurst. From that, too, there may have come an idea of avoiding
particular places and persons, and persons in particular phases of
health. Here was the root of another set of tabus. Then man, from the
very dawn of his mental life, may have had a feeling of the sinister
about places and things. Animals, who dread traps, have that feeling. A
tiger will abandon its usual jungle route at the sight of a few threads
of cotton.[65] Like most young animals, young human beings are easily
made fearful of this or that by their nurses and seniors. Here is
another set of ideas, ideas of repulsion and avoidance, that sprang up
almost inevitably in men.
As soon as speech began to develop, it must have got to work upon such
fundamental feelings and begun to systematize them, and keep them in
mind. By talking together men would reinforce each other’s fears, and
establish a common tradition of tabus of things forbidden and of things
unclean. With the idea of uncleanness would come ideas of cleansing and
of removing a curse. The cleansing would be conducted through the advice
and with the aid of wise old men or wise old women, and in such
cleansing would lie the germ of the earliest priestcraft and witchcraft.
Speech from the first would be a powerful supplement to the merely
imitative education and to the education of cuffs and blows conducted by
a speechless parent. Mothers would tell their young and scold their
young. As speech developed, men would find they had experiences and
persuasions that gave them or seemed to give them power. They would make
secrets of these things. There is a double streak in the human mind, a
streak of cunning secretiveness and a streak perhaps of later origin
that makes us all anxious to tell and astonish and impress each other.
Many people make secrets in order to have secrets to tell. These secrets
of early men they would convey to younger, more impressionable people,
more or less honestly and impressively in some process of initiation.
Moreover, the pedagogic spirit overflows in the human mind; most people
like “telling other people not to.” Extensive arbitrary prohibitions for
the boys, for the girls, for the women, also probably came very early
into human history.
Then the idea of the sinister has for its correlative the idea of the
propitious, and from that to the idea of making things propitious by
ceremonies is an easy step.[66]
§ 4
Out of such ideas and a jumble of kindred ones grew the first
quasi-religious elements in human life. With every development of speech
it became possible to intensify and develop the tradition of tabus and
restraints and ceremonies. There is not a savage or barbaric race to-day
that is not held in a net of such tradition. And with the coming of the
primitive herdsman there would be a considerable broadening out of all
this sort of practice. Things hitherto unheeded would be found of
importance in human affairs. Neolithic man was nomadic in a different
spirit from the mere daylight drift after food of the primordial hunter.
He was a herdsman, upon whose mind a sense of direction and the lie of
the land had been forced. He watched his flock by night as well as by
day. The sun by day and presently the stars by night helped to guide his
migrations; he began to find after many ages that the stars are steadier
guides than the sun. He would begin to note particular stars and star
groups, and to distinguish any individual thing was, for primitive man,
to believe it individualized and personal. He would begin to think of
the chief stars as persons, very shining and dignified and trustworthy
persons looking at him like bright eyes in the night. His primitive
tillage strengthened his sense of the seasons. Particular stars ruled
his heavens when seedtime was due. The beginnings of agriculture were in
the sub-tropical zone, or even nearer the equator, where stars of the
first magnitude shine with a splendour unknown in more temperate
latitudes.
And Neolithic man was counting, and falling under the spell of numbers.
There are savage languages that have no word for any number above five.
Some peoples cannot go above two. But Neolithic man in the lands of his
origin in Asia and Africa even more than in Europe was already counting
his accumulating possessions. He was beginning to use tallies, and
wondering at the triangularity of three and the squareness of four, and
why some quantities like twelve were easy to divide in all sorts of
ways, and others, like thirteen, impossible. Twelve became a noble,
generous, and familiar number to him, and thirteen rather an outcast and
disreputable one.
[Illustration: A CARVED STATUE (“MENHIR”) OF THE NEOLITHIC PERIOD--A
CONTRAST TO THE FREEDOM AND VIGOUR OF PALÆOLITHIC ART.]
Probably man began reckoning time by the clock of the full and new
moons. Moonlight is an important thing to herdsmen who no longer merely
hunt their herds, but watch and guard them. Moonlight, too, was perhaps
his time for love-making, as indeed it may have been for primordial man
and the ground ape ancestor before him. But from the phases of the moon,
as his tillage increased, man’s attitude would go on to the greater
cycle of the seasons. Primordial man probably only drifted before the
winter as the days grew cold. Neolithic man knew surely that the winter
would come, and stored his fodder and presently his grain. He had to
fix a seedtime, a propitious seedtime, or his sowing was a failure. The
earliest recorded reckoning is by moons and by generations of men. The
former seems to be the case in the Book of Genesis, where, if one reads
the great ages of the patriarchs who lived before the flood as lunar
months instead of years, Methusaleh and the others are reduced to a
credible length of life. But with agriculture began the difficult task
of squaring the lunar month with the solar year; a task which has left
its scars on our calendar to-day. Easter shifts uneasily from year to
year, to the great discomfort of holiday-makers; it is now
inconveniently early and now late in the season because of this ancient
reference of time to the moon.
And when men began to move with set intention from place to place with
their animal and other possessions, then they would begin to develop the
idea of other places in which they were not, and to think of what might
be in those other places. And in any valley where they lingered for a
time, they would, remembering how they got there, ask, “How did this or
that other thing get here?” They would begin to wonder what was beyond
the mountains, and where the sun went when it set, and what was above
the clouds.
§ 5
The capacity for telling things increased with their vocabulary. The
simple individual fancies, the unsystematic fetish tricks and
fundamental tabus of Palæolithic man began to be handed on and made into
a more consistent system. Men began to tell stories about themselves,
about the tribe, about its tabus and why they had to be, about the world
and the why for the world. A tribal mind came into existence, a
tradition. Palæolithic man was certainly more of a free individualist,
more of an artist, as well as more of a savage, than Neolithic man.
Neolithic man was coming under prescription; he could be trained from
his youth and told to do things and not to do things; he was not so free
to form independent ideas of his own about things. He had thoughts given
to him; he was under a new power of suggestion. And to have more words
and to attend more to words is not simply to increase mental power;
words themselves are powerful things and dangerous things. Palæolithic
man’s words, perhaps, were chiefly just names. He used them for what
they were. But Neolithic man was thinking about these words, he was
thinking about a number of things with a great deal of verbal confusion,
and getting to some odd conclusions. In speech he had woven a net to
bind his race together, but also it was a net about his feet. Man was
binding himself into new and larger and more efficient combinations
indeed, but at a price. One of the most notable things about the
Neolithic Age is the total absence of that free direct artistic impulse
which was the supreme quality of later Palæolithic man. We find much
industry, much skill, polished implements, pottery with conventional
designs, co-operation upon all sorts of things, but no evidence of
personal creativeness.[67] Self-suppression is beginning for men. Man
has entered upon the long and tortuous and difficult path towards a life
for the common good, with all its sacrifice of personal impulse, which
he is still treading to-day.
Certain things appear in the mythology of mankind again and again.
Neolithic man was enormously impressed by serpents--and he no longer
took the sun for granted. Nearly everywhere that Neolithic culture went,
there went a disposition to associate the sun and the serpent in
decoration and worship. This primitive serpent worship spread ultimately
far beyond the regions where the snake is of serious practical
importance in human life.
§ 6
With the beginnings of agriculture a fresh set of ideas arose in men’s
minds. We have already indicated how easily and naturally men may have
come to associate the idea of sowing with a burial. Sir J. G. Frazer has
pursued the development of this association in the human mind, linking
up with it the conception of special sacrificial persons who are killed
at seedtime, the conception of a specially purified class of people to
kill these sacrifices, the first priests, and the conception of a
_sacrament_, a ceremonial feast in which the tribe eats portions of the
body of the victim in order to share in the sacrificial benefits.
Out of all these factors, out of the Old Man tradition, out of the
desire to escape infection and uncleanness, out of the desire for power
and success through magic, out of the sacrificial tradition of seedtime,
and out of a number of like beliefs and mental experiments and
misconceptions, a complex something was growing up in the lives of men
which was beginning to bind them together mentally and emotionally in a
common life and action. This something we may call _religion_ (Lat.
_religare_, to bind[68]). It was not a simple or logical something, it
was a tangle of ideas about commanding beings and spirits, about gods,
about all sorts of “musts” and “must-nots.” Like all other human
matters, religion has grown. It must be clear from what has gone before
that primitive man--much less his ancestral apes and his ancestral
Mesozoic mammals--could have had no idea of God or Religion; only very
slowly did his brain and his powers of comprehension become capable of
such general conceptions. Religion is something that has grown up with
and through human association, and God has been and is still being
discovered by man.
[Illustration: Bronze Age Implements
(drawn to differing scales)]
This book is not a theological book, and it is not for us to embark upon
theological discussion; but it is a part, a necessary and central part,
of the history of man to describe the dawn and development of his
religious ideas and their influence upon his activities. All these
factors we have noted must have contributed to this development, and
various writers have laid most stress upon one or other of them. Sir J.
G. Frazer we have already noted as the leading student of the derivation
of sacraments from magic sacrifices. Grant Allen, in his _Evolution of
the Idea of God_, laid stress chiefly on the posthumous worship of the
“Old Man.” Sir E. B. Tylor (_Primitive Culture_) gave his attention
mainly to the disposition of primitive man to ascribe a soul to every
object animate and inanimate. Mr. A. E. Crawley, in _The Tree of Life_,
has called attention to other centres of impulse and emotion, and
particularly to sex as a source of deep excitement. The thing we have to
bear in mind is that Neolithic man was still mentally undeveloped, he
could be confused and illogical to a degree quite impossible to an
educated modern person. Conflicting and contradictory ideas could lie in
his mind without challenging one another; now one thing ruled his
thoughts intensely and vividly and now another; his fears, his acts,
were still disconnected as children’s are.
[Illustration: TIME DIAGRAM SHOWING THE GENERAL DURATION OF THE
NEOLITHIC PERIOD IN WHICH EARLY THOUGHT DEVELOPED.]
Confusedly under the stimulus of the need and possibility of
co-operation and a combined life, Neolithic mankind was feeling out for
guidance and knowledge. Men were becoming aware that personally they
needed protection and direction, cleansing from impurity, power beyond
their own strength. Confusedly in response to that demand, bold men,
wise men, shrewd and cunning men were arising to become magicians,
priests, chiefs, and kings. They are not to be thought of as cheats or
usurpers of power, nor the rest of mankind as their dupes. All men are
mixed in their motives; a hundred things move men to seek ascendancy
over other men, but not all such motives are base or bad. The magicians
usually believed more or less in their own magic, the priests in their
ceremonies, the chiefs in their right. The history of mankind henceforth
is a history of more or less blind endeavours to conceive a common
purpose in relation to which all men may live happily, and to create and
develop a common consciousness and a common stock of knowledge which may
serve and illuminate that purpose. In a vast variety of forms this
appearance of kings and priests and magic men was happening all over the
world under Neolithic conditions. Everywhere mankind was seeking where
knowledge and mastery and magic power might reside; everywhere
individual men were willing, honestly or dishonestly, to rule, to
direct, or to be the magic beings who would reconcile the confusions of
the community.
In many ways the simplicity, directness, and detachment of a later
Palæolithic rock-painter appeal more to modern sympathies than does the
state of mind of these Neolithic men, full of the fear of some ancient
Old Man who had developed into a tribal God, obsessed by ideas of
sacrificial propitiation and magic murder. No doubt the reindeer hunter
was a ruthless hunter and a combative and passionate creature, but he
killed for reasons we can still understand; Neolithic man, under the
sway of talk and a confused thought process, killed on theory, he killed
for monstrous and now incredible ideas, he killed those he loved through
fear and under direction. Those Neolithic men not only made human
sacrifices at seedtime; there is every reason to suppose they sacrificed
wives and slaves at the burial of their chieftains; they killed men,
women, and children whenever they were under adversity and thought the
gods were athirst. They practised infanticide.[69] All these things
passed on into the Bronze Age.
Hitherto a social consciousness had been asleep and not even dreaming
in human history. Before it awakened it produced nightmares.
Away beyond the dawn of history, 3000 or 4000 years ago, one thinks of
the Wiltshire uplands in the twilight of a midsummer day’s morning. The
torches pale in the growing light. One has a dim apprehension of a
procession through the avenue of stone, of priests, perhaps
fantastically dressed with skins and horns and horrible painted
masks--not the robed and bearded dignitaries our artists represent the
Druids to have been--of chiefs in skins adorned with necklaces of teeth
and bearing spears and axes, their great heads of hair held up with pins
of bone, of women in skins or flaxen robes, of a great peering crowd of
shock-headed men and naked children. They have assembled from many
distant places; the ground between the avenues and Silbury Hill is
dotted with their encampments. A certain festive cheerfulness prevails.
And amidst the throng march the appointed human victims, submissive,
helpless, staring towards the distant smoking altar at which they are to
die--that the harvests may be good and the tribe increase.... To that
had life progressed 3000 or 4000 years ago from its starting-place in
the slime of the tidal beaches.
XIII
THE RACES OF MANKIND
_§1. Is Mankind Still Differentiating? §2. The Main Races of
Mankind. §3. Was There an Alpine Race? §4. The Brunet Peoples. §5.
How Existing Races may be Related to Each Other._
§ 1
It is necessary now to discuss plainly what is meant by a phrase, used
often very carelessly, “The Races of Mankind.”
It must be evident from what has already been explained in Chapter III
that man, so widely spread and subjected therefore to great differences
of climate, consuming very different food in different regions, attacked
by different enemies, must always have been undergoing considerable
local modification and differentiation. Man, like every other species of
living thing, has constantly been tending to differentiate into several
species; wherever a body of men has been cut off, in islands or oceans
or by deserts or mountains, from the rest of humanity, it must have
begun very soon to develop special characteristics, specially adapted to
the local conditions. But, on the other hand, man is usually a wandering
and enterprising animal, for whom there exist few insurmountable
barriers. Men imitate men, fight and conquer them, interbreed, one
people with another. Concurrently for thousands of years there have been
two sets of forces at work, one tending to separate men into a multitude
of local varieties, and another to remix and blend these varieties
together before a separate species has been established.
These two sets of forces may have fluctuated in this relative effect in
the past. Palæolithic man, for instance, may have been more of a
wanderer, he may have drifted about over a much greater area, than
later Neolithic man; he was less fixed to any sort of home or lair, he
was tied by fewer possessions. Being a hunter, he was obliged to follow
the migrations of his ordinary quarry. A few bad seasons may have
shifted him hundreds of miles. He may therefore have mixed very widely
and developed few varieties over the greater part of the world.
The appearance of agriculture tended to tie those communities of mankind
that took it up to the region in which it was most conveniently carried
on, and so to favour differentiation. Mixing or differentiation is not
dependent upon a higher or lower stage of civilization; many savage
tribes wander now for hundreds of miles; many English villagers in the
eighteenth century, on the other hand, had never been more than eight or
ten miles from their villages, neither they nor their fathers nor
grandfathers before them. Hunting peoples often have enormous range. The
Labrador country, for instance, is inhabited by a few thousand
Indians,[70] who follow the one great herd of caribou as it wanders
yearly north and then south again in pursuit of food. This mere handful
of people covers a territory as large as France. Nomad peoples also
range very widely. Some Kalmuck tribes are said to travel nearly a
thousand miles between summer and winter pasture.
It carries out this suggestion, that Palæolithic man ranged widely and
was distributed, thinly indeed but uniformly, throughout the world, that
the Palæolithic remains we find are everywhere astonishingly uniform. To
quote Sir John Evans,[71] “The implements in distant lands are so
identical in form and character with the British specimens that they
might have been manufactured by the same hands.... On the banks of the
Nile, many hundreds of feet above its present level, implements of the
European types have been discovered; while in Somaliland, in an ancient
river-valley at a great elevation above the sea, Sir H. W. Seton-Karr
has collected a large number of implements formed of flint and
quartzite, which, judging from their form and character, might have been
dug out of the drift-deposits of the Somme and the Seine, the Thames or
the ancient Solent.”
Phases of spreading and intermixture have probably alternated with
phases of settlement and specialization in the history of mankind. But
up to a few hundred years ago it is probable that since the days of the
Palæolithic Age at least mankind has on the whole been differentiating.
The species has differentiated in that period into a very great number
of varieties, many of which have reblended with others, which have
spread and undergone further differentiation or become extinct. Wherever
there has been a strongly marked local difference of conditions and a
check upon intermixture, there one is almost obliged to assume a variety
of mankind must have appeared. Of such local varieties there must have
been a great multitude.
In one remote corner of the world, Tasmania, a little cut-off population
of people remained in the early Palæolithic stage until the discovery of
that island by the Dutch in 1642. They are now, unhappily, extinct. The
last Tasmanian died in 1877. They may have been cut off from the rest of
mankind for 15,000 or 20,000 or 25,000 years.
But among the numerous obstacles and interruptions to intermixture there
have been certain main barriers, such as the Atlantic Ocean, the
highlands, once higher, and the now vanished seas of central Asia and
the like, which have cut off great groups of varieties from other great
groups of varieties over long periods of time. These separated groups of
varieties developed very early certain broad resemblances and
differences. Most of the varieties of men in eastern Asia and America,
but not all, have now this in common, that they have yellowish buff
skins, straight black hair, and often high cheek-bones. Most of the
native peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, but not all, have black or
blackish skins, flat noses, thick lips, and frizzy hair. In north and
western Europe a great number of peoples have fair hair, blue eyes, and
ruddy complexions; and about the Mediterranean there is a prevalence of
white-skinned peoples with dark eyes and black hair. The black hair of
many of these dark whites is straight, but never so strong and waveless
as the hair of the yellow peoples. It is straighter in the east than in
the west. In southern India we find brownish and darker peoples with
straight black hair, and these as we pass eastward give place to more
distinctly yellow peoples. In scattered islands and in Papua and New
Guinea we find another series of black and brownish peoples of a more
lowly type with frizzy hair.
[Illustration: Australoid types]
But it must be borne in mind that these are very loose-fitting
generalizations. Some of the areas and isolated pockets of mankind in
the Asiatic area may have been under conditions more like those in the
European area; some of the African areas are of a more Asiatic and less
distinctively African type. We find a wavy-haired, fairish,
hairy-skinned race, the Ainu, in Japan. They are more like the Europeans
in their facial type than the surrounding yellow Japanese. They may be a
drifted patch of the whites or they may be a quite distinct people. We
find primitive black people in the Andaman Islands far away from
Australia and far away from Africa. There is a streak of very negroid
blood traceable in south Persia and some parts of India. These are the
“Asiatic” negroids. There is little or no proof that all black people,
the Australians, the Asiatic negroids and the negroes, derive from one
origin, but only that they have lived for vast periods under similar
conditions. We must not assume that human beings in the eastern Asiatic
area were all differentiating in one direction and all the human beings
in Africa in another. There were great currents of tendency, it is true,
but there were also backwaters, eddies, admixtures, readmixtures, and
leakages from one main area to the other. A coloured map of the world to
show the races would not present just four great areas of colour; it
would have to be dabbed over with a multitude of tints and intermediate
shades, simple here, mixed and overlapping there.
In the early Neolithic Period in Europe--it may be 10,000 or 12,000
years ago or so--man was differentiating all over the world, and he had
already differentiated into a number of varieties, but he has never
differentiated into different _species_. A “species,” we must remember,
in biological language is distinguished from a “variety” by the fact
that varieties can interbreed, while species either do not do so or
produce offspring which, like mules, are sterile. All mankind can
interbreed freely, can learn to understand the same speech, can adapt
itself to co-operation. And in the present age, man is probably no
longer undergoing differentiation at all. Readmixture is now a far
stronger force than differentiation. Men mingle more and more. Mankind
from the view of a biologist is an animal species in a state of arrested
differentiation and possible readmixture.
§ 2
It is only in the last fifty or sixty years that the varieties of men
came to be regarded in this light, as a tangle of differentiations
recently arrested or still in progress. Before that time students of
mankind, influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the story of Noah
and the Ark and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, were inclined to
classify men into three or four great races, and they were disposed to
regard these races as having always been separate things, descended from
originally separate ancestors. They ignored the great possibilities of
blended races and of special local isolations and variations. The
classification has varied considerably, but there has been rather too
much readiness to assume that mankind _must_ be completely divisible
into three or four main groups. Ethnologists (students of race) have
fallen into grievous disputes about a multitude of minor peoples, as to
whether they were of this or that primary race or “mixed,” or strayed
early forms, or what not. But all races are more or less mixed. There
are, no doubt, four main groups, but each is a miscellany, and there are
little groups that will not go into any of the four main divisions.
[Illustration: Bushwoman]
Subject to these reservations, when it is clearly understood that when
we speak of these main divisions we mean not simple and pure races, but
groups of races, then they have a certain convenience in discussion.
Over the European and Mediterranean area and western Asia there are, and
have been for many thousand years, white peoples, usually called the
CAUCASIANS,[72] subdivided into two or three subdivisions, the northern
blonds, an alleged intermediate race about which many authorities are
doubtful, and the southern dark whites; over eastern Asia and America a
second group of races prevails, the MONGOLIANS, generally with yellow
skins, straight black hair, and sturdy bodies; over Africa the NEGROES,
and in the region of Australia and New Guinea the black, primitive
AUSTRALOIDS. These are convenient terms, provided the student bears in
mind that they are not exactly defined terms. They represent only the
common characteristics of certain main groups of races; they leave out a
number of little peoples who belong properly to none of these
divisions, and they disregard the perpetual mixing where the main groups
overlap.
§ 3
[Illustration: Negro types]
[Illustration: Mongolian Types]
Whether the “Caucasian” race is to be divided into two or three main
subdivisions depends upon the classificatory value to be attached to
certain differences in the skeleton and particularly to the shape of the
skull. The student in his further reading will meet with constant
references to round-skulled (Brachycephalic) and long-skulled peoples
(Dolichocephalic). No skull looked at from above is completely round,
but some skulls (the dolichocephalic) are much more oblong than others;
when the width of a skull is four-fifths or more of its length from back
to front, that skull is called brachycephalic; when the width is less
than four-fifths of the length, the skull is dolichocephalic. While some
ethnologists regard the difference between brachycephaly and
dolichocephaly as a difference of quite primary importance, another
school--which the writer must confess has entirely captured his
convictions--dismisses this as a mere secondary distinction. It seems
probable that the skull shapes of a people may under special
circumstances vary in comparatively few generations.[73]
We do not know what influences alter the shape of the skull, just as we
do not know why people of British descent in the Darling region of
Australia (“Cornstalks”) grow exceptionally tall, or why in New England
their jaw-bones seem to become slighter and their teeth in consequence
rather crowded. Even in Neolithic times dolichocephalic and
brachycephalic skulls are found in the same group of remains and often
buried together, and that is true of most peoples to-day. Some peoples,
such as the mountain people of central Europe, have more brachycephalic
individuals per cent. than others; some, as the Scandinavians, are more
prevalently dolichocephalic. In Neolithic Britain and in Scandinavia
the earliest barrows (= tomb mounds) are long grave-shaped barrows and
the late ones round, and the skulls found in the former are usually
dolichocephalic and in the latter most frequently brachycephalic. This
points perhaps to a succession of races in western Europe in the
Neolithic Period (see Chapter XLV), but it may also point to changes of
diet, habit, or climate.
[Illustration: Caucasian Types]
But it is this study of skull shapes which has led many ethnologists to
divide the Caucasian race, not, as it was divided by Huxley, into two,
the northern _blonds_ and the Mediterranean and North African _dark
whites_ or brunets, but into three. They split his blonds into two
classes. They distinguish a northern European type, blond and
dolichocephalic, the Nordic; a Mediterranean or Iberian race, Huxley’s
dark whites, which is dark-haired and dolichocephalic, and between
these two they descry this third race, their brachycephalic race, the
Alpine race. The opposite school would treat the alleged Alpine race
simply as a number of local brachycephalic varieties of Nordic or
Iberian peoples. The Iberian peoples were the Neolithic people of the
long barrows, and seem at first to have pervaded most of Europe and
western Asia.
[Illustration: Map of EUROPE, Western ASIA & Northern AFRICA in the
Forest (Pluvial) Period (about 15,000 or 12,000 years ago)
Showing probable range of the main races before the dawn of history.
Mountain barriers are indicated thus [symbol] Sea barriers [symbol]]
§ 4
This Mediterranean or Iberian race certainly had a wider range in early
times, and was a less specialized and distinctive race than the Nordic.
It is very hard to define its southward boundaries from the Negro, or to
mark off its early traces in central Asia from those of early Dravidians
or Mongolians. Wilfred Scawen Blunt[74] says that Huxley “had long
suspected a common origin of the Egyptians and the Dravidians of India,
perhaps a long belt of brown-skinned men from India to Spain in very
early days.” Across France and Great Britain these dark-white Iberian or
Mediterranean people were ousted by a round-barrow-making “Alpine” or
Alpine-Nordic race, and the dawn of history in Europe sees them being
pressed westward and southward everywhere by the expansion of the fairer
northern peoples.
It is possible that this “belt” of Huxley’s of dark-white and
brown-skinned men, this race of brunet-brown folk, ultimately spread
even farther than India; that they reached to the shores of the Pacific,
and that they were everywhere the original possessors of the Neolithic
culture and the beginners of what we call civilization. The Nordic and
the Mongolian peoples may have been but north-western and north-eastern
branches from this more fundamental stem. Or the Nordic race may have
been a branch, while the Mongolian, like the Negro, may have been
another equal and distinct stem with which the brunet-browns met and
mingled in South China. Or the Nordic peoples also may have developed
separately from a palæolithic stage.
[Illustration: The Swastika]
At some period in human history (see Elliot Smith’s _Migrations of Early
Culture_) there seems to have been a special type of Neolithic culture
widely distributed in the world which had a group of features so curious
and so unlikely to have been independently developed in different
regions of the earth, as to compel us to believe that it was in effect
one culture. It reached through all the regions inhabited by the brunet
Mediterranean race, and beyond through India, Further India, up the
Pacific coast of China, and it spread at last across the Pacific and to
Mexico and Peru. It was a coastal culture not reaching deeply inland.
(Here again we cover the ground of Huxley’s “belt of brown-skinned men,”
and extend it far to the east across the stepping-stones of Polynesia.
There are, we may note, some very striking resemblances between early
Japanese pottery and so forth and similar Peruvian productions.) This
peculiar development of the Neolithic culture, which, Elliot Smith
called the _heliolithic_[75] culture, included many or all of the
following odd practices: (1) circumcision, (2) the very queer custom of
sending the _father_ to bed when a child is born, known as the
_couvade_, (3) the practice of massage, (4) the making of mummies, (5)
megalithic monuments[76] (_e.g._ Stonehenge), (6) artificial deformation
of the heads of the young by bandages, (7) tattooing, (8) religious
association of the sun and the serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol
known as the swastika (see figure) for good luck. This odd little symbol
spins gaily round the world; it seems incredible that men would have
invented and made a pet of it twice over. Elliot Smith traces these
practices in a sort of constellation all over this great
Mediterranean-Indian Ocean-Pacific area. Where one occurs, most of the
others occur. They link Brittany with Borneo and Peru. But this
constellation of practices does not crop up in the primitive homes of
Nordic or Mongolian peoples, nor does it extend southward much beyond
equatorial Africa. For thousands of years, from 15,000 to 1000 B.C.,
such a heliolithic Neolithic culture and its brownish possessors may
have been oozing round the world through the warmer regions of the
world, drifting by canoes often across wide stretches of sea. And its
region of origin may have been, as Elliot Smith suggests, the
Mediterranean and North-African region. It must have been spreading up
the Pacific Coast and across the island stepping-stones to America, long
after it had passed on into other developments in its areas of origin.
Many of the peoples of the East Indies, Melanesia and Polynesia were
still in this heliolithic stage of development when they were discovered
by European navigators in the eighteenth century. The first
civilizations in Egypt and the Euphrates-Tigris valley probably
developed directly out of this widespread culture.[77] We will discuss
later whether the Chinese civilization had a different origin. The
Semitic nomads of the Arabian desert seem also to have had a heliolithic
stage.
§ 5
It may clear up the necessarily rather confused discussion of this
chapter to give a summary of the views expressed here in a diagram.
This, on page 149, should be compared later with the language diagram on
page 155.
We have put the Australoids as a Negroid branch, but many authorities
would set back the Australoid stem closer to the Tasmanian, and there
may even be sound reasons for transferring both Australoids and
Tasmanians as separate branches to the left of the “Later Palæolithic
Races.” To avoid crowding we have omitted the Hairy Ainu. They may be
the last vestiges of an ancient primitive Pre-Nordic Pre-Mongolian
strain from which the Nordic races are descended.
[Illustration: A Diagrammatic Summary of Current Ideas of the
RELATIONSHIP of HUMAN RACES
(It must be borne in mind that human races interbreed freely.)]
XIV
THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND
§ 1. _No one Primitive Language._ § 2. _The Aryan Languages._ § 3.
_The Semitic Languages._ § 4. _The Hamitic Languages._ § 5. _The
Ural Altaic Languages._ § 6. _The Chinese Languages._ § 7. _Other
Language Groups._ § 8. _Submerged and Lost Languages._ § 9. _How
Languages may be Related._
§ 1
It is improbable that there was ever such a thing as a common human
language. We know nothing of the language of Palæolithic man; we do not
even know whether Palæolithic man talked freely.
We know that Palæolithic man had a keen sense of form and attitude,
because of his drawings; and it has been suggested that he communicated
his ideas very largely by gesture. Probably such words as the earlier
men used were mainly cries of alarm or passion or names for concrete
things, and in many cases they were probably imitative sounds made by or
associated with the things named.[78]
The first languages were probably small collections of such words; they
consisted of interjections and nouns. Probably the nouns were said in
different intonations to convey different meanings. If Palæolithic man
had a word for “horse” or “bear,” he probably showed by tone or gesture
whether he meant “bear is coming,” “bear is going,” “bear is to be
hunted,” “dead bear,” “bear has been here,” “bear did this,” and so on.
Only very slowly did the human mind develop methods of indicating action
and relationship in a formal manner. Modern languages contain many
thousands of words, but the earlier languages could have consisted only
of a few hundred. It is said that even modern European peasants can get
along with something less than a thousand words, and it is quite
conceivable that so late as the Early Neolithic Period that was the
limit of the available vocabulary. Probably men did not indulge in those
days in conversation or description. For narrative purposes they danced
and acted rather than told. They had no method of counting beyond a
method of indicating two by a dual number, and some way of expressing
many. The growth of speech was at first a very slow process indeed, and
grammatical forms and the expression of abstract ideas may have come
very late in human history, perhaps only 400 or 500 generations ago.
§ 2
The students of languages (philologists) tell us that they are unable to
trace with certainty any common features in all the languages of
mankind. They cannot even find any elements common to all the Caucasian
languages. They find over great areas groups of languages which have
similar root words and similar ways of expressing the same idea, but
then they find in other areas languages which appear to be dissimilar
down to their fundamental structure, which express action and relation
by entirely dissimilar devices, and have an altogether different
grammatical scheme.[79] One great group of languages, for example, now
covers nearly all Europe and stretches out to India; it includes
English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Russian, Armenian,
Persian, and various Indian tongues. It is called the Indo-European or
ARYAN family. The same fundamental roots, the same grammatical ideas,
are traceable through all this family. Compare, for example, English
_father, mother_, Gothic _fadar, moutar_, German _vater, mutter_, Latin
_pater, mater_, Greek _pater, meter_, French _père, mère_, Armenian
_hair, mair_, Sanscrit _pitar, matar_, etc., etc. In a similar manner
the Aryan languages ring the changes on a great number of fundamental
words, _f_ in the Germanic languages becoming _p_ in Latin, and so on.
They follow a law of variation called Grimm’s Law. These languages are
not different things, they are variations of one thing. The people who
use these languages think in the same way.
At one time in the remote past, in the Neolithic Age, that is to say
6000[80] years or more ago, there may have been one simple original
speech from which all these Aryan languages have differentiated.
Somewhere between central Europe and western Asia there must have
wandered a number of tribes sufficiently intermingled to develop and use
one tongue. It is convenient here to call them the Aryan peoples. Sir H.
H. Johnston has called them “Aryan Russians.” They belonged mostly to
the Caucasian group of races and to the blond and northern subdivision
of the group, to the Nordic race that is.
Here one must sound a note of warning. There was a time when the
philologists were disposed to confuse languages and races, and to
suppose that people who once all spoke the same tongue must be all of
the same blood. That, however, is not the case, as the reader will
understand if he will think of the negroes of the United States who now
all speak English, or of the Irish, who--except for purposes of
political demonstration--no longer speak the old Erse language but
English, or of the Cornish people, who have lost their ancient Keltic
speech. But what a common language does do, is to show that a common
intercourse has existed, and the possibility of intermixture; and if it
does not point to a common origin, it points at least to a common
future.
But even this original Aryan language, which was a spoken speech perhaps
4000 or 3000 B.C., was by no means a _primordial_ language or the
language of a savage race. Its speakers were in or past the Neolithic
stage of civilization. It had grammatical forms and verbal devices of
some complexity. The vanished methods of expression of the later
Palæolithic peoples, of the Azilians, or of the early Neolithic
kitchen-midden people for instance, were probably much cruder than the
most elementary form of Aryan.
Probably the Aryan group of languages became distinct in a wide region
of which the Danube, Dnieper, Don, and Volga were the main rivers, a
region that extended eastward beyond the Ural mountains north of the
Caspian Sea. The area over which the Aryan speakers roamed probably did
not for a long time reach to the Atlantic or to the south of the Black
Sea beyond Asia Minor. There was no effectual separation of Europe from
Asia then at the Bosphorus.[81] The Danube flowed eastward to a great
sea that extended across the Volga region of south-eastern Russia right
into Turkestan, and included the Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas of
to-day. Perhaps it sent out arms to the Arctic Ocean. It must have been
a pretty effective barrier between the Aryan speakers and the people in
north-eastern Asia. South of this sea stretched a continuous shore from
the Balkans to Afghanistan.[82] North-west of it a region of swamps and
lagoons reached to the Baltic.
§ 3
Next to Aryan, philologists distinguish another group of languages which
seem to have been made quite separately from the Aryan languages, the
Semitic. Hebrew and Arabic are kindred, but they seem to have even a
different set of root words from the Aryan tongues; they express their
ideas of relationship in a different way; the fundamental ideas of their
grammars are generally different. They were in all probability made by
human communities quite out of touch with the Aryans, separately and
independently. Hebrew, Arabic, Abyssinian, ancient Assyrian, ancient
Phœnician, and a number of associated tongues are put together,
therefore, as being derived from a second primary language, which is
called the SEMITIC. In the very beginnings of recorded history we find
Aryan-speaking peoples and Semitic-speaking peoples carrying on the
liveliest intercourse of war and trade round and about the eastern end
of the Mediterranean, but the fundamental differences of the primary
Aryan and primary Semitic languages oblige us to believe that in early
Neolithic times, before the historical period, there must for thousands
of years have been an almost complete separation of the Aryan-speaking
and the Semitic-speaking peoples. The latter seem to have lived either
in south Arabia or in north-east Africa. In the opening centuries of the
Neolithic Age the original Aryan speakers and the original Semitic
speakers were probably living, so to speak, in different worlds, with a
minimum of intercourse. Racially, it would seem, they had a remote
common origin; both Aryan speakers and Semites are classed as
Caucasians; but while the original Aryan speakers seem to have been of
Nordic race, the original Semites were rather of the Mediterranean type.
§ 4
Philologists speak with less unanimity of a third group of languages,
the HAMITIC, which some declare to be distinct from, and others allied
to, the Semitic. The weight of opinion inclines now towards the idea of
some primordial connection of these two groups. The Hamitic group is
certainly a much wider and more various language group than the Semitic
or the Aryan, and the Semitic tongues are more of a family, have more of
a common likeness, than the Aryan. The Semitic languages may have arisen
as some specialized proto-Hamitic group, just as the birds arose from a
special group of reptiles (Chap. IV). It is a tempting speculation, but
one for which there is really no basis of justifying fact, to suppose
that the rude primordial ancestor group of the Aryan tongues branched
off from the proto-Hamitic speech forms at some still earlier date than
the separation and specialization of Semitic. The Hamitic speakers
to-day, like the Semitic speakers, are mainly of the Mediterranean
Caucasian race. Among the Hamitic languages are the ancient Egyptian and
Coptic, the Berber languages (of the mountain people of north Africa,
the Masked Tuaregs, and other such peoples), and what are called the
Ethiopic group of African languages in eastern Africa, including the
speech of the Gallas and the Somalis. The general grouping of these
various tongues suggests that they originated over some great area to
the west, as the primitive Semitic may have arisen to the east of the
Red Sea divide. That divide was probably much more effective in
Pleistocene times; the sea extended across to the west of the Isthmus of
Suez, and a great part of lower Egypt was under water. Long before the
dawn of history, however, Asia and Africa had joined at Suez, and these
two language systems were in contact in that region. And if Asia and
Africa were separated then at Suez, they may, on the other hand, have
been joined by way of Arabia and Abyssinia.
[Illustration: Possible Development of LANGUAGES
disregarding admixtures, e.g. Turkish elements in Russian, Latin in
English, Hamitic in Keltic, & so forth; & omitting various Indian,
Melanesian & other groups.]
These Hamitic languages may have radiated from a centre on the African
coast of the Mediterranean, and they may have extended over the then
existing land connections very widely into western Europe.
All these three great groups of languages, it may be noted, the Aryan,
Semitic, and Hamitic, have one feature in common which they do not share
with any other language, and that is grammatical gender; but whether
that has much weight as evidence of a remote common origin of Aryan,
Semitic, and Hamitic, is a question for the philologist rather than for
the general student. It does not affect the clear evidence of a very
long and very ancient prehistoric separation of the speakers of these
three diverse groups of tongues.
The bulk of the Semitic and Hamitic-speaking peoples are put by
ethnologists with the Aryans among the Caucasian group of races. They
are “white.” The Semitic and Nordic “races” have a much more distinctive
physiognomy; they seem, like their characteristic languages, to be more
marked and specialized than the Hamitic-speaking peoples.
§ 5
Across to the north-east of the Aryan and Semitic areas there must once
have spread a further distinct language system which is now represented
by a group of languages known as the TURANIAN, or URAL-ALTAIC group.
This included the Lappish of Lapland and the Samoyed speech of Siberia,
the Finnish language, Magyar, Turkish or Tartar, Manchu and Mongol; it
has not as a group been so exhaustively studied by European
philologists, and there is insufficient evidence yet whether it does or
does not include the Korean and Japanese languages. (A Japanese writer,
Mr. K. Hirai, has attempted to show that Japanese and Aryan may have had
a common parent tongue.[83])
§ 6
A fifth region of language formation was south-eastern Asia, where there
still prevails a group of languages consisting of monosyllables without
any inflections, in which the tone used in uttering a word determines
its meaning. This may be called the Chinese or MONOSYLLABIC group, and
it includes Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, and Tibetan. The difference
between any of these Chinese tongues and the more western languages is
profound. In the Pekinese form of Chinese there are only about 420
primary monosyllables, and consequently each of these has to do duty for
a great number of things, and the different meanings are indicated
either by the context or by saying the word in a distinctive tone. The
relations of these words to each other are expressed by quite different
methods from the Aryan methods; Chinese grammar is a thing different in
nature from English grammar; it is a separate and different invention.
Many writers declare there is no Chinese grammar at all, and that is
true if we mean by grammar anything in the European sense of inflections
and concords. Consequently any such thing as a literal translation from
Chinese into English is an impossibility. The very method of the thought
is different.[84] Their philosophy remains still largely a sealed book
to the European on this account, and vice versa, because of the
different nature of the expressions.
§ 7
In addition the following other great language families are
distinguished by the philologist. All the American-Indian languages,
which vary widely among themselves, are separable from any Old World
group. Here we may lump them together not so much as a family as a
miscellany.[85] There is one great group of languages in Africa, from a
little way north of the equator to its southern extremity, the BANTU,
and in addition a complex of other languages across the centre of the
continent about which we will not trouble here.[86] There are also two
probably separate groups, the DRAVIDIAN in South India, and the
MALAY-POLYNESIAN stretched over Polynesia, and also now including Indian
tongues.
Now it seems reasonable to conclude from these fundamental differences
that about the time when men were passing from the Palæolithic to
Neolithic conditions, and beginning to form rather larger communities
than the family herd, when they were beginning to tell each other long
stories and argue and exchange ideas, human beings were distributed
about the world in a number of areas which communicated very little with
each other. They were separated by oceans, seas, thick forests, deserts
or mountains from one another. There may have been in that remote time,
it may be 10,000 years ago or more, Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, Turanian,
American, and Chinese-speaking tribes and families, wandering over their
several areas of hunting and pasture, all at very much the same stage of
culture, and each developing its linguistic instrument in its own way.
Probably each of these original tribes was not more numerous altogether
than the Indians in Hudson Bay Territory to-day. Agriculture was barely
beginning, and until agriculture made a denser population possible men
may have been almost as rare as the great apes have always been.
In addition to these early Neolithic tribes, there must have been
various varieties of still more primitive forest folk in Africa and in
India. Central Africa, from the Upper Nile, was then a vast forest,
impenetrable to ordinary human life, a forest of which the Congo forests
of to-day are the last shrunken remains.
Possibly the spread of men of a race higher than primitive Australoids
into the East Indies,[87] and the development of the languages of the
Malay-Polynesian type came later in time than the origination of these
other language groups.
The language divisions of the philologist do tally, it is manifest, in a
broad sort of way with the main race classes of the ethnologist, and
they carry out the same idea of age-long separations between great
divisions of mankind. In the Glacial Age, ice, or at least a climate too
severe for the free spreading of peoples, extended from the north pole
into central Europe and across Russia and Siberia to the great
tablelands of central Asia. After the last Glacial Age, this cold north
mitigated its severities very slowly, and was for long without any other
population than the wandering hunters who spread eastward and across
Bering Strait. North and central Europe and Asia did not become
sufficiently temperate for agriculture until quite recent times, times
that is within the limit of 12,000 or possibly even 10,000 years, and a
dense forest period intervened between the age of the hunter and the
agricultural clearings.
This forest period was also a very wet period. It has been called the
Pluvial or Lacustrine Age, the rain or pond period. It has to be
remembered that the outlines of the land of the world have changed
greatly even in the last hundred centuries. Across European Russia, from
the Baltic to the Caspian Sea, as the ice receded there certainly spread
much water and many impassable swamps; the Caspian Sea and the Sea of
Aral and parts of the Desert of Turkestan, are the vestiges of a great
extent of sea that reached far up to the Volga valley and sent an arm
westward to join the Black Sea. Mountain barriers much higher than they
are now, and the arm of the sea that is now the region of the Indus,
completed the separation of the early Caucasian races from the
Mongolians and the Dravidians, and made the broad racial differentiation
of those groups possible.
Again the blown-sand Desert of Sahara--it is not a dried-up sea, but a
wind desert, and was once fertile and rich in life--becoming more and
more dry and sandy, cut the Caucasians off from the sparse primitive
Negro population in the central forest region of Africa.
The Persian Gulf extended very far to the north of its present head, and
combined with the Syrian desert to cut off the Semitic peoples from the
eastern areas, while on the other hand the south of Arabia, much more
fertile than it is to-day, may have reached across what is now the Gulf
of Aden towards Abyssinia and Somaliland. The Mediterranean and Red Sea
were probably still joined at Suez. The Himalayas and the higher and
vaster massif of central Asia and the northward extension of the Bay of
Bengal up to the present Ganges valley divided off the Dravidians from
the Mongolians, the canoe was the chief link between Dravidian and
Southern Mongol, and the Gobi system of seas and lakes which presently
became the Gobi desert, and the great system of mountain chains which
follow one another across Asia from the center to the north-east, split
the Mongolian races into the Chinese and the Ural-Altaic language
groups.
Bering Strait, when this came into existence, before or after the
Pluvial Period, isolated the Amer-Indians.
These ancient separations must have remained effectual well into
Neolithic times. The barriers between Africa, Asia, and Europe were
lowered or bridged by that time, but mixing had not gone far. The
practical separation of the west from Dravidian India and China
continued indeed down almost into historical times; but the Semite, the
Hamite, and the Aryan were already in close contact and vigorous
reaction again in the very dawn of history.
We are not suggesting here, be it noted, that these ancient separations
were absolute separations, but that they were effectual enough at least
to prevent any great intermixture of blood or any great intermixture of
speech in those days of man’s social beginnings. There was,
nevertheless, some amount of meeting and exchange even then, some drift
of knowledge that spread the crude patterns and use of various
implements, and the seeds of a primitive agriculture about the world.
§ 8
The fundamental tongues of these nine main language groups we have noted
were not by any means all the human speech beginnings of the Neolithic
Age. There may have been other, and possibly many other, ineffective
centres of speech which were afterwards overrun by the speakers of still
surviving tongues, and of elementary languages which faded out. We find
strange little patches of speech still in the world which do not seem to
be connected with any other language about them. Sometimes, however, an
exhaustive inquiry seems to affiliate these disconnected patches, seems
to open out to us tantalizing glimpses of some simpler, wider, and more
fundamental and universal form of human speech. One language group that
has been keenly discussed is the Basque group of dialects. The Basques
live now on the north and south slopes of the Pyrenees; they number
perhaps 600,000 altogether in Europe, and to this day they are a very
sturdy and independent-spirited people. Their language, as it exists
to-day, is a fully developed one. But it is developed upon lines
absolutely different from those of the Aryan languages about it. Basque
newspapers have been published in the Argentine and in the United States
to supply groups of prosperous emigrants. The earliest “French” settlers
in Canada were Basque, and Basque names are frequent among the French
Canadians to this day. Ancient remains point to a much wider
distribution of the Basque speech and people over Spain. For a long time
this Basque language was a profound perplexity to scholars, and its
structural character led to the suggestion that it might be related to
some Amer-Indian tongue. A. H. Keane, in _Man Past and Present_,
assembles reasons for linking it--though remotely--with the Berber
language of North Africa, and through the Berber with the general body
of Hamitic languages, but this relationship is questioned by other
philologists. They find Basque more akin to certain similarly stranded
vestiges of speech found in the Caucasian Mountains, and they are
disposed to regard it as a last surviving member, much changed and
specialized, of a once very widely extended group of pre-Hamitic
languages, otherwise extinct, spoken chiefly by peoples of that brunet
Mediterranean race (round-barrow men) which once occupied most of
western and southern Europe and western Asia, and which may have been
very closely related to the Dravidians of India and the peoples with a
heliolithic culture who spread eastward thence through the East Indies
to Polynesia and beyond.
It is quite possible that over western and southern Europe language
groups extended 10,000 years ago that have completely vanished before
Aryan tongues. Later on we shall note, in passing, the possibility of
three lost language groups represented by (1) Ancient Cretan, Lydian,
and the like (though these may have belonged, says Sir H. H. Johnston,
to the “Basque-Caucasian-Dravidian (!) group”), (2) Sumerian, and (3)
Elamite. The suggestion has been made--it is a mere guess--that ancient
Sumerian may have been a linking language between the early
Basque-Caucasian and early Mongolian groups. If this is true, then we
have in this “Basque-Caucasian-Dravidian-Sumerian-proto-Mongolian” group
a still more ancient and more ancestral system of speech than the
fundamental Hamitic.
The Hottentot language is said to have affinities with the Hamitic
tongues, from which it is separated by the whole breadth of
Bantu-speaking central Africa. A Hottentot-like language with Bushman
affinities is still spoken in equatorial east Africa, and this
strengthens the idea that the whole of east Africa was once
Hamitic-speaking. The Bantu languages and peoples spread, in
comparatively recent times, from some center of origin in west central
Africa and cut off the Hottentots from the other Hamitic peoples. But it
is at least equally probable that the Hottentot is a separate language
group.
Among other remote and isolated little patches of language are the
Papuan speech of New Guinea and the native Australian. The now extinct
Tasmanian language is little known. What we know of it is in support of
what we have guessed about the comparative speechlessness of Palæolithic
man.
We may quote a passage from Hutchinson’s _Living Races of Mankind_ upon
this matter:--
“The language of the natives is irretrievably lost, only imperfect
indication of its structure and a small proportion of its words having
been preserved. In the absence of sibilants and some other features,
their dialects resembled the Australian, but were of ruder, of less
developed structure, and so imperfect that, according to Joseph
Milligan, our best authority on the subject, they observed no settled
order or arrangement of words in the construction of their sentences,
but conveyed in a supplementary fashion by tone, manner, and gesture
those modifications of meaning which we express by mood, tense, number,
etc. Abstract terms were rare; for every variety of gum-tree or
wattle-tree there was a name, but no word for ‘tree’ in general, nor for
qualities such as hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short, round, etc.
Anything hard was ‘like a stone,’ anything round ‘like the moon,’ and so
on, usually suiting the action to the word and confirming by some sign
the meaning to be understood.”
[Illustration: Racial Types ... From Egyptian tomb-paintings. (After
Champollion.)]
§ 9
In reading this chapter it is well to remember how laborious and
difficult are the tasks of comparative philology, and how necessary it
is to understand the qualifications and limitations that are to be put
upon its conclusions. The Aryan group of languages is much better
understood than any other, for the simple reason that it has been more
familiar and accessible to European science. The other groups have been
less thoroughly investigated, because so far they have not been studied
exhaustively by men accustomed to use them, and whose minds are set in
the key of their structure. Even the Semitic languages have been
approached at a disadvantage because few Jews think in Hebrew. But a
time is fast approaching when Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Indian
philologists will come to the rescue in these matters, and good reason
may be found for revising much that has been said above about the native
American, Ural-Altaic, primitive Chinese, and Polynesian groups of
tongues.
BOOK III
THE DAWN OF HISTORY
XV
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES IN PREHISTORIC TIMES
§ 1. _The Spreading of the Aryan-Speakers._ § 2. _Primitive Aryan
Life._ § 3. _Early Aryan Daily Life._
§ 1
We have spoken of the Aryan language as probably arising in the region
of the Danube and South Russia and spreading from that region of origin.
We say “probably,” because it is by no means certainly proved that that
was the centre; there have been vast discussions upon this point and
wide divergences of opinion. We give the prevalent view. As it spread
widely, Aryan began to differentiate into a number of subordinate
languages. To the west and south it encountered the Basque language,
which was then widely spread in Spain, and also possibly various Hamitic
Mediterranean languages.
The Neolithic Mediterranean race, the Iberian race, was distributed over
Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, north Africa, south Italy, and,
in a more civilized state, Greece and Asia Minor. It was probably
closely related to the Egyptian. To judge by its European vestiges it
was a rather small human type, generally with an oval face and a long
head. It buried its chiefs and important people in megalithic
chambers--_i.e._ made of big stones--covered over by great mounds of
earth; and these mounds of earth, being much longer than they are broad,
are spoken of as the long barrows. These people sheltered at times in
caves, and also buried some of their dead therein; and from the traces
of charred, broken, and cut human bones, including the bones of
children, it is inferred that they were cannibals. These short dark
Iberian tribes (and the Basques also if they were a different race) were
thrust back westward, and conquered and enslaved by slowly advancing
waves of a taller and fairer Aryan-speaking people, coming southward and
westward through central Europe, who are spoken of as the Kelts. Only
the Basque resisted the conquering Aryan speech. Gradually these
Keltic-speakers made their way to the Atlantic, and all that now remains
of the Iberians is mixed into the Keltic population. How far the Keltic
invasion affected the Irish population is a matter of debate at the
present time; the Kelts may have been a mere caste of conquerors who
imposed their language on a larger subject population. It is even
doubtful if the north of England is more Aryan than pre-Keltic in blood.
There is a sort of short dark Welshman, and certain types of Irishmen,
who are Iberians by race. The modern Portuguese are also largely of
Iberian blood.
The Kelts spoke a language, Keltic,[88] which was also in its turn to
differentiate into the language of Gaul, Welsh, Breton, Scotch and Irish
Gaelic, and other tongues. They buried the ashes of their chiefs and
important people in round barrows. While these Nordic Kelts were
spreading westward, other Nordic Aryan peoples were pressing down upon
the dark white Mediterranean race in the Italian and Greek peninsulas,
and developing the Latin and Greek groups of tongues. Certain other
Aryan tribes were drifting towards the Baltic and across into
Scandinavia, speaking varieties of the Aryan which became ancient
Norse--the parent of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic--Gothic,
and Low and High German.
While the primitive Aryan speech was thus spreading and breaking up into
daughter languages to the west, it was also spreading and breaking up to
the east. North of the Carpathians and the Black Sea, Aryan-speaking
tribes were increasing and spreading and using a distinctive dialect
called Slavonian, from which came Russian, Serbian, Polish, Bulgarian,
and other tongues; other variations of Aryan distributed over Asia Minor
and Persia were also being individualized as Armenian and Indo-Iranian,
the parent of Sanscrit and Persian. In this book we have used the word
Aryan for all this family of languages, but the term Indo-European is
sometimes used for the entire family, and “Aryan” itself restricted in a
narrower sense to the Indo-Iranian speech.[89] This Indo-Iranian speech
was destined to split later into a number of languages, including
Persian and Sanscrit, the latter being the language of certain tribes of
fair-complexioned Aryan speakers who pushed eastward into India somewhen
between 3000 and 1000 B.C. and conquered dark Dravidian peoples who were
then in possession of that land.
§ 2
What sort of life did these prehistoric Aryans lead, these Nordic Aryans
who were the chief ancestors of most Europeans and most white Americans
and European colonists of to-day, as well as of the Armenians,[90]
Persians, and high-caste Hindus?
In answering that question we are able to resort to a new source of
knowledge in addition to the dug-up remains and vestiges upon which we
have had to rely in the case of Palæolithic man. We have language. By
careful study of the Aryan languages it has been found possible to
deduce a number of conclusions about the life of these Aryan peoples
5000 or 4000 years ago. All these languages have a common resemblance,
as each, as we have already explained, rings the changes upon a number
of common roots. When we find the same root word running through all or
most of these tongues, it seems reasonable to conclude that the thing
that root word signifies must have been known to the common ancestors.
Of course, if they have _exactly the same word_ in their languages, this
may not be the case; it may be the new name of a new thing or of a new
idea that has spread over the world quite recently. “Gas,” for instance
is a word that was made by Van Helmont, a Dutch chemist, about 1625, and
has spread into most civilized tongues, and “tobacco” again is an
American-Indian word which followed the introduction of smoking almost
everywhere. But if the same word turns up in a number of languages, and
_if it follows the characteristic modifications of each language_, we
may feel sure that it has been in that language, and a part of that
language, since the beginning, suffering the same changes with the rest
of it. We know, for example, that the words for waggon and wheel run in
this fashion through the Aryan tongues, and so we are able to conclude
that the primitive Aryans, the more purely Nordic Aryans, had waggons,
though it would seem from the absence of any common roots for spokes,
rim, or axle that their wheels were not wheelwright’s wheels with
spokes, but made of the trunks of trees shaped out with an axe between
the ends.
These primitive waggons were drawn by oxen. The early Aryans did not
ride or drive horses; they had very little to do with horses. The
Reindeer men were a horse-people, but the Neolithic Aryans were a
cow-people. They ate beef, not horse; and after many ages they began
this use of draught cattle. They reckoned wealth by cows. They wandered,
following pasture, and “trekking” their goods, as the South African
Boers do, in ox-waggons, though of course their waggons were much
clumsier than any to be found in the world to-day. They probably ranged
over very wide areas. They were migratory, but not in the strict sense
of the word “nomadic”; they moved in a slower, clumsier fashion than did
the later, more specialized nomadic peoples. They were forest and
parkland people without horses. They were developing a migratory life
out of the more settled “forest clearing” life of the earlier Neolithic
period. Changes of climate which were replacing forest by pasture, and
the accidental burning of forests by fire may have assisted this
development.
When these early “Aryans” came to big rivers or open water, they built
boats, at first hollow tree trunks and then skin-covered frameworks of
lighter wood. Before history began there was already some Aryan
canoe-traffic across the English Channel and in the Baltic, and also
among the Greek islands. But the Aryans, as we shall see later, were
probably not the first peoples to take to the sea.
We have already described the sort of home the primitive Aryan occupied
and his household life, so far as the remains of the Swiss
pile-dwellings enable us to describe these things. Mostly his houses
were of too flimsy a sort, probably of wattle and mud, to have survived,
and possibly he left them and trekked on for very slight reasons. The
Aryan peoples burnt their dead, a custom they still preserve in India,
but their predecessors, the long-barrow people, the Iberians, buried
their dead in a sitting position. In some ancient Aryan burial mounds
(round barrows) the urns containing the ashes of the departed are shaped
like houses, and these represent rounded huts with thatched roofs. See
Fig. p. 57.
The grazing of the primitive Aryan was far more important to him than
his agriculture. At first he cultivated with a rough wooden hoe; then,
after he had found out the use of cattle for draught purposes, he began
real ploughing with oxen, using at first a suitably bent tree bough as
his plough. His first cultivation before that came about must have been
rather in the form of garden patches near the house buildings than of
fields. Most of the land his tribe occupied was common land on which the
cattle grazed together.
He never used stone for building house walls until upon the very verge
of history. He used stone for hearths (_e.g._ at Glastonbury) and
sometimes stone sub-structures. He did, however, make a sort of stone
house in the centre of the great mounds in which he buried his
illustrious dead. He may have learnt this custom from his Iberian
neighbours and predecessors. It was these dark whites of the heliolithic
culture, and not the primitive Aryans, who were responsible for such
primitive temples as Stonehenge or Carnac in Brittany.
His social life was growing. Man was now living in clans and tribal
communities. These clans and communities clashed; they took each other’s
grazing land, they sought to rob each other; there began a new thing in
human life, _war_. For war is not a primeval thing; it has not been in
this world for more than 20,000 years. To this day very primitive
peoples, such as the Australian black-fellows, do not understand war.
The Palæolithic Age was an age of fights and murder, no doubt, but not
of the organized collective fighting of numbers of men.[91] But now men
could talk together and group themselves under leaders, and they found a
need of centres where they could come together with their cattle in time
of raids and danger. They began to make camps with walls of earth and
palisades, many of which are still to be traced in the history-worn
contours of the European scenery. The leaders under whom men fought in
war were often the same men as the sacrificial purifiers who were their
early priests.
The knowledge of bronze spread late in Europe. Neolithic man had been
making his slow advances age by age for 7000 or 8000 years before the
metals came. By that time his social life had developed so that there
were men of various occupations and men and women of different ranks in
the community. There were men who worked wood and leather, potters and
carvers. The women span and wove and embroidered. There were chiefs and
families that were distinguished as leaderly and noble; and man varied
the monotony of his herding and wandering, he consecrated undertakings
and celebrated triumphs, held funeral assemblies, and distinguished the
traditional seasons of the year, by _feasts_. His meats we have already
glanced at; but somewhen between 10,000 B.C. and the broadening
separation of the Aryan peoples towards 2000 or 1000 B.C., mankind
discovered fermentation, and began to brew intoxicating drinks. He made
these of honey, of barley, and, as the Aryan tribes spread southward, of
the grape. And he got merry and drunken. Whether he first used yeast to
make his bread light or to ferment his drink we do not know.
At his feasts there were individuals with a gift for “playing the fool,”
who did so no doubt to win the laughter of their friends,[92] but there
was also another sort of men, of great importance in their time, and
still more important to the historian, certain singers of songs and
stories, the bards or rhapsodists. These _bards_ existed among all the
Aryan-speaking peoples; they were a consequence of and a further factor
in that development of spoken language which was the chief of all the
human advances made in Neolithic times. They chanted or recited stories
of the past, or stories of the living chief and his people; they told
other stories that they invented; they memorized jokes and catches. They
found and seized upon and improved the rhythms, rhymes, alliterations,
and such-like possibilities latent in language; they probably did much
to elaborate and fix grammatical forms. They were the first great
artists of the ear, as the later Aurignacian rock painters were the
first great artists of the eye and hand. No doubt they used much
gesture; probably they learnt appropriate gestures when they learnt
their songs; but the order and sweetness and power of language was their
primary concern.
And they mark a new step forward in the power and range of the human
mind. They sustained and developed in men’s minds a sense of a greater
something than themselves, the tribe, and of a life that extended back
into the past. They not only recalled old hatreds and battles, they
recalled old alliances and a common inheritance. The feats of dead
heroes lived again. A new thought came into men’s minds, the desire to
be remembered. Men began to live in thought before they were born and
after they were dead.
Like most human things, this bardic tradition grew first slowly and then
more rapidly. By the time bronze was coming into Europe there was not an
Aryan people that had not a profession and training of bards. In their
hands language became as beautiful as it is ever likely to be. These
bards were living books, man-histories, guardians and makers of a new
and more powerful tradition in human life. Every Aryan people had its
long poetical records thus handed down, its sagas (Teutonic), its epics
(Greek), its vedas (Old Sanscrit). The earliest Aryan people were
essentially a people of the voice. The recitation seems to have
predominated even in those ceremonial and dramatic dances and that
“dressing-up” which among most human races have also served for the
transmission of tradition.[93]
At that time there was no writing, and when first the art of writing
crept into Europe, as we shall tell later, it must have seemed far too
slow, clumsy, and lifeless a method of record for men to trouble very
much about writing down these glowing and beautiful treasures of the
memory. Writing was at first kept for accounts and matters of fact. The
bards and rhapsodists flourished for long after the introduction of
writing. They survived, indeed, in Europe as the minstrels into the
Middle Ages.
Unhappily their tradition had not the fixity of a written record. They
amended and reconstructed, they had their fashions and their phases of
negligence. Accordingly we have now only the very much altered and
revised vestiges of that spoken literature of prehistoric times. One of
the most interesting and informing of these prehistoric compositions of
the Aryans survives in the Greek _Iliad_. An early form of _Iliad_ was
probably recited by 1000 B.C., but it was not written down until perhaps
700 or 600 B.C. Many men must have had to do with it as authors and
improvers, but later Greek tradition attributed it to a blind bard named
Homer, to whom also is ascribed the _Odyssey_, a composition of a very
different spirit and outlook. To be a bard was naturally a blind man’s
occupation.[94] The Slavs called all bards _sliepac_, which was also
their word for a blind man. The original recited version of the _Iliad_
was older than that of the _Odyssey_. “The _Iliad_ as a complete poem is
older than the _Odyssey_, though the material of the _Odyssey_, being
largely undatable folk-lore, is older than any of the historical
material in the _Iliad_.”[95] Both epics were probably written over and
rewritten by some poet of a later date, in much the same manner that
Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of Queen Victoria, in his _Idylls of
the King_, wrote over the _Morte d’Arthur_ (which was itself a writing
over by Sir Thomas Malory, _circ._ 1450, of pre-existing legends),
making the speeches and sentiments and the characters more in accordance
with those of his own time. But the events of the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_, the way of living they describe, the spirit of the acts
recorded, belong to the closing centuries of the prehistoric age. These
sagas, epics, and vedas do supply, in addition to archæology and
philology, a third source of information about those vanished times.
Here, for example, is the concluding passage of the _Iliad_, describing
very exactly the making of a prehistoric barrow. (We have taken here
Chapman’s rhymed translation, correcting certain words with the help of
the prose version of Lang, Leaf, and Myers.)
“ ... Thus oxen, mules, in waggons straight they put,
Went forth, and an unmeasur’d pile of sylvan matter cut;
Nine days employ’d in carriage, but when the tenth morn shin’d
On wretched mortals, then they brought the bravest of his kind
Forth to be burned. Troy swam in tears. Upon the pile’s most height
They laid the body, and gave fire. All day it burn’d, all night.
But when th’ eleventh morn let on earth her rosy fingers shine,
The people flock’d about the pile, and first with gleaming wine
Quench’d all the flames. His brothers then, and friends, the snowy bones,
Gather’d into an urn of gold, still pouring out their moans.
Then wrapt they in soft purple veils the rich urn, digg’d a pit,
Grav’d it, built up the grave with stones, and quickly piled on it
A barrow....
... The barrow heap’d once, all the town
In Jove-nurs’d Priam’s Court partook a sumptuous fun’ral feast,
And so horse-taming Hector’s rites gave up his soul to rest.”
There remains also an old English saga, _Beowulf_, made long before the
English had crossed from Germany into England, which winds up with a
similar burial. The preparation of a pyre is first described. It is hung
round with shields and coats of mail. The body is brought and the pyre
fired, and then for ten days the warriors built a mighty mound to be
seen afar by the traveller on sea or land. _Beowulf_, which is at least
a thousand years later than the _Iliad_, is also interesting because one
of the main adventures in it is the looting of the treasures of a barrow
already ancient in those days.
§ 3
The Greek epics reveal the early Greeks with no knowledge of iron,
without writing, and before any Greek-founded cities existed in the land
into which they had evidently come quite recently as conquerors. They
were spreading southward from the Aryan region of origin. They seem to
have been a fair people, newcomers in Greece, newcomers to a land that
had been held hitherto by a darker people, people who are now supposed
to have belonged to a dark white “aboriginal” race, a “Mediterranean”
people allied to those Iberians whom the Kelts pressed westward, and to
the Hamitic white people of North Africa.
[Illustration: Combat between Menelaus & Hector (in the Iliad)
From a platter ascribed to the end of the seventh century in the British
Museum. This is probably the earliest known vase bearing a Greek
inscription. Greek writing was just beginning. Note the Swastika.]
Let us, at the risk of a slight repetition, be perfectly clear upon one
point. The _Iliad_ does not give us the primitive neolithic life of that
Aryan region of origin; it gives us that life already well on the move
towards a new state of affairs. The primitive neolithic way of living,
with its tame and domesticated animals, its pottery and cooking, and its
patches of rude cultivation, we have sketched in Chapter XI. We have
already discussed in § 4 of Chapter XIII the probability of a
widespread _heliolithic_ culture, a sort of sub-civilization, very like
the Polynesian and Indonesian life of a hundred years ago, an
elaboration of the earlier Neolithic stage. Between 15,000 and 6000 B.C.
the neolithic way of living had spread with the forests and abundant
vegetation of the Pluvial Period, over the greater part of the old
world, from the Niger to the Hwang-ho and from Ireland to the south of
India. Now, as the climate of great portions of the earth was swinging
towards drier and more open conditions again, the primitive neolithic
life was developing along two divergent directions. One was leading to a
more wandering life, towards at last a constantly migratory life between
summer and winter pasture, which is called NOMADISM; the other, in
certain sunlit river valleys, was towards a water-treasuring life of
irrigation, in which men gathered into the first towns and made the
first CIVILIZATION. The nature and development of civilization we shall
consider more fully in the next chapter, but here we have to note that
the Greeks, as the _Iliad_ presents them, are neither simple neolithic
nomads, innocent of civilization, nor are they civilized men. They are
primitive nomads in an excited state, because they have just come upon
civilization, and regard it as an opportunity for war and loot.[96] So
far they are exceptional and not representative. But our interest in
them in this chapter is not in their distinctively Greek and predatory
aspect, but in what they reveal of the ordinary northward life from
which they are coming.
These early Greeks of the _Iliad_ are sturdy fighters, but without
discipline--their battles are a confusion of single combats. They have
horses, but no cavalry; they use the horse, which is a comparatively
recent addition to Aryan resources, to drag a rude fighting chariot into
battle. The horse is still novel enough to be something of a terror in
itself. For ordinary draught purposes, as in the quotation from the
_Iliad_ we have just made, oxen were employed.
The only priests of these Aryans are the keepers of shrines and sacred
places. There are chiefs, who are heads of families and who also perform
sacrifices, but there does not seem to be much mystery or sacramental
feeling in their religion. When the Greeks go to war, these heads and
elders meet in council and appoint a king, whose powers are very loosely
defined. There are no laws, but only customs; and no exact standards of
conduct.
[Illustration: Horses & chariots--(from an archaic Greek vase)]
The social life of the early Greeks centred about the households of
these leading men. There were no doubt huts for herds and the like, and
outlying farm buildings; but the hall of the chief was a comprehensive
centre, to which everyone went to feast, to hear the bards, to take part
in games and exercises. The primitive craftsmen were gathered there.
About it were cowsheds and stabling and such-like offices. Unimportant
people slept about anywhere as retainers did in the mediæval castles and
as people still do in Indian households. Except for quite personal
possessions, there was still an air of patriarchal communism about the
tribe. The tribe, or the chief as the head of the tribe, owned the
grazing lands; forest and rivers were the wild.
The Aryan civilization seems, and indeed all early communities seem, to
have been without the little separate households that make up the mass
of the population in western Europe or America to-day. The tribe was a
big family; the nation a group of tribal families; a household often
contained hundreds of people. Human society began, just as herds and
droves begin among animals, by the family delaying its breaking up.
Nowadays the lions in East Africa are apparently becoming social animals
in this way, by the young keeping with the mother after they are fully
grown, and hunting in a group. Hitherto the lion has been much more of a
solitary beast. If men and women do not cling to their families nowadays
as much as they did, it is because the state and the community now
supply safety and help and facilities that were once only possible in
the family group.
In the Hindu community of to-day these great households of the earlier
stages of human society are still to be found. Mr. Bhupendranath Basu
has recently described a typical Hindu household.[97] It is an Aryan
household refined and made gentle by thousands of years of civilization,
but its social structure is the same as that of the households of which
the Aryan epics tell.
“The joint family system,” he said, “has descended to us from time
immemorial, the Aryan patriarchal system of old still holding sway in
India. The structure, though ancient, remains full of life. The joint
family is a co-operative corporation, in which men and women have a
well-defined place. At the head of the corporation is the senior member
of the family, generally the eldest male member, but in his absence the
senior female member often assumes control.” (Cp. Penelope in the
_Odyssey_.)
“All able-bodied members must contribute their labour and earnings,
whether of personal skill or agriculture and trade, to the common stock;
weaker members, widows, orphans, and destitute relations, all must be
maintained and supported; sons, nephews, brothers, cousins, all must be
treated equally, for any undue preference is apt to break up the family.
We have no word for cousins--they are either brothers or sisters, and we
do not know what are cousins two degrees removed. The children of a
first cousin are your nephews and nieces, just the same as the children
of your brothers and sisters. A man can no more marry a cousin, however
removed, than he can marry his own sister, except in certain parts of
Madras, where a man may marry his maternal uncle’s daughter. The family
affections, the family ties, are always very strong, and therefore the
maintenance of an equal standard among so many members is not so
difficult as it may appear at first sight. Moreover, life is very
simple. Until recently shoes were not in general use at home, but
sandals without any leather fastenings. I have known of a well-to-do
middle-class family of several brothers and cousins who had two or three
pairs of leather shoes between them, these shoes being only used when
they had occasion to go out, and the same practice is still followed in
the case of the more expensive garments, like shawls, which last for
generations, and with their age are treated with loving care, as having
been used by ancestors of revered memory.
“The joint family remains together sometimes for several generations,
until it becomes too unwieldy, when it breaks up into smaller families,
and you thus see whole villages peopled by members of the same clan. I
have said that the family is a co-operative society, and it may be
likened to a small state, and is kept in its place by strong discipline
based on love and obedience. You see nearly every day the younger
members coming to the head of the family and taking the dust of his feet
as a token of benediction; whenever they go on an enterprise, they take
his leave and carry his blessing.... There are many bonds which bind the
family together--the bonds of sympathy, of common pleasures, of common
sorrows; when a death occurs, all the members go into mourning; when
there is a birth or a wedding, the whole family rejoices. Then above all
is the family deity, some image of Vishnu, the preserver; his place is
in a separate room, generally known as the room of God, or in well-to-do
families in a temple attached to the house, where the family performs
its daily worship. There is a sense of personal attachment between this
image of the deity and the family, for the image generally comes down
from past generations, often miraculously acquired by a pious ancestor
at some remote time.... With the household gods is intimately associated
the family priest.... The Hindu priest is a part of the family life of
his flock, between whom and himself the tie has existed for many
generations. The priest is not generally a man of much learning; he
knows, however, the traditions of his faith.... He is not a very heavy
burden, for he is satisfied with little--a few handfuls of rice, a few
home-grown bananas or vegetables, a little unrefined sugar made in the
village, and sometimes a few pieces of copper are all that is needed....
A picture of our family life would be incomplete without the household
servants. A female servant is known as the ‘jhi,’ or daughter, in
Bengal--she is like the daughter of the house; she calls the master and
the mistress father and mother, and the young men and women of the
family brothers and sisters. She participates in the life of the family;
she goes to the holy places along with her mistress, for she could not
go alone, and generally she spends her life with the family of her
adoption; her children are looked after by the family. The treatment of
men servants is very similar. These servants, men and women, are
generally people of the humbler castes, but a sense of personal
attachment grows up between them and the members of the family, and as
they get on in years they are affectionately called by the younger
members elder brothers, uncles, aunts, etc.... In a well-to-do house
there is always a resident teacher, who instructs the children of the
family as well as other boys of the village; there is no expensive
school building, but room is found in some veranda or shed in the
courtyard for the children and their teacher, and into this school
low-caste boys are freely admitted. These indigenous schools were not of
a very high order, but they supplied an agency of instruction for the
masses which was probably not available in many other countries....
“With Hindu life is bound up its traditional duty of hospitality.
It is the duty of a householder to offer a meal to any stranger who
may come before midday and ask for one; the mistress of the house
does not sit down to her meal until every member is fed, and, as
sometimes her food is all that is left, she does not take her meal
until well after midday lest a hungry stranger should come and
claim one.” ...
We have been tempted to quote Mr. Basu at some length, because here we
do get to something like a living understanding of the type of household
which has prevailed in human communities since Neolithic days, which
still prevails to-day in India, China, and the Far East, but which in
the west is rapidly giving ground before a state and municipal
organization of education and a large-scale industrialism within which
an amount of individual detachment and freedom is possible, such as
these great households never knew....
But let us return now to the history preserved for us in the Aryan
epics.
The Sanscrit epics tell a very similar story to that underlying the
_Iliad_, the story of a fair, beef-eating people--only later did they
become vegetarians--coming down from Persia into the plain of North
India and conquering their way slowly towards the Indus. From the Indus
they spread over India, but as they spread they acquired much from the
dark Dravidians they conquered, and they seem to have lost their bardic
tradition. The vedas, says Mr. Basu, were transmitted chiefly in the
households by the women....
The oral literature of the Keltic peoples who pressed westward has not
been preserved so completely as that of the Greeks or Indians; it was
written down many centuries later, and so, like the barbaric, primitive
English _Beowulf_, has lost any clear evidence of a period of migration
into the lands of an antecedent people. If the pre-Aryans figure in it
at all, it is as the fairy folk of the Irish stories. Ireland, most cut
off of all the Keltic-speaking communities, retained to the latest date
its primitive life; and the _Táin_, the Irish _Iliad_, describes a
cattle-keeping life in which war chariots are still used, and war dogs
also, and the heads of the slain are carried off slung round the horses’
necks. The _Táin_ is the story of a cattle raid. Here too the same
social order appears as in the _Iliad_; the chiefs sit and feast in
great halls, they build halls for themselves, there is singing and
story-telling by the bards and drinking and intoxication.[98] Priests
are not very much in evidence, but there is a sort of medicine man who
deals in spells and prophecy.
XVI
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS
§ 1. _Early Cities and Early Nomads._ § 2A. _The Riddle of the
Sumerians._ § 2B. _The Empire of Sargon the First._ § 2C. _The
Empire of Hammurabi._ § 2D. _The Assyrians and their Empire._ § 2E.
_The Chaldean Empire._ § 3. _The Early History of Egypt._ § 4. _The
Early Civilization of India._ § 5. _The Early History of China._ §
6. _While the Civilizations were Growing._
§ 1
When the Aryan way of speech and life was beginning to spread to the
east and west of the region in which it began, and breaking up as it
spread into a number of languages and nations, considerable communities
of much more civilized men were already in existence in Egypt and in
Mesopotamia, and probably also in China and in (still purely Dravidian)
India. Our story has overshot itself in its account of the Aryans and of
their slow progress from early Neolithic conditions to the heroic
barbarism of the Bronze Age. We must now go back. Such a pre-Keltic
gathering as we sketched at Avebury would have happened about 2000
B.C., and the building of the barrow for Hector as the _Iliad_
describes it, 1300 B.C. or even later. It is perhaps natural for a
European writer writing primarily for English-reading students to
overrun his subject in this way. No great harm is done if the student
does clearly grasp that there has been an overlap.
Here then we take up the main thread of human history again. We must
hark back to 6000 B.C. or even earlier. But although we shall go back
so far, the people we shall describe are people already in some respects
beyond the Neolithic Aryans of three thousand years later, more
particularly in their social organization and their material welfare.
While in Central Europe and Central Asia the primitive Neolithic way of
life was becoming more migratory and developing into nomadism, in the
great river valleys it is becoming more settled and localized. It is
still doubtful whether we are to consider Mesopotamia or Egypt the
earlier scene of the two parallel beginnings of settled communities
living in towns. By 4000 B.C., in both these regions of the earth,
such communities existed, and had been going on for a very considerable
time. The excavations of the American expedition[99] at Nippur have
unearthed evidence of a city community existing there at least as early
as 5000 B.C., and probably as early as 6000 B.C., an earlier date
than anything we know of in Egypt. De Candolle asserts that it is only
in the Euphrates-Tigris district that wheat has ever been found growing
wild.[100] It may be that from Mesopotamia as a centre the cultivation
of wheat spread over the entire eastern hemisphere. Or it may be that
wheat grew wild in some regions now submerged. There may have been a
wild wheat region in what is now the sea bottom of the eastern
Mediterranean. But cultivation is not civilization; the growing of wheat
had spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific with the distribution of the
Neolithic culture by perhaps 10,000 or 9000 B.C., before the
beginnings of civilization. Civilization is something more than the
occasional seasonal growing of wheat. It is the settlement of men upon
an area continuously cultivated and possessed, who live in buildings
continuously inhabited with a common rule and a common city or citadel.
For a long time civilization may quite possibly have developed in
Mesopotamia without any relations with the parallel beginnings in Egypt.
The two settlements may have been quite independent, arising separately
out of the widely diffused Heliolithic Neolithic culture. Or they may
have had a common origin in the region of the Mediterranean, the Red
Sea, and southern Arabia.
[Illustration: Map of The CRADLE of WESTERN CIVILIZATION
6,000 to 4,000 B.C.
J.F.H.]
The first condition necessary to a real settling down of Neolithic men,
as distinguished from a mere temporary settlement among abundant food,
was of course a trustworthy all-the-year-round supply of water, fodder
for the animals, food for themselves, and building material for their
homes. There had to be everything they could need at any season, and no
want that would tempt them to wander further. This was a possible state
of affairs, no doubt, in many European and Asiatic valleys; and in many
such valleys, as in the case of the Swiss lake-dwellings, men settled
from a very early date indeed; but nowhere, of any countries now known
to us, were these favourable conditions found upon such a scale, and
nowhere did they hold good so surely year in and year out as in Egypt
and in the country between the upper waters of the Euphrates and Tigris
and the Persian Gulf.[101] Here was a constant water supply under
enduring sunlight; trustworthy harvests year by year; in Mesopotamia
wheat yielded, says Herodotus, two hundredfold to the sower; Pliny says
that it was cut twice and afterwards yielded good fodder for sheep;
there were abundant palms and many sorts of fruits; and as for building
material, in Egypt there was clay and easily worked stone, and in
Mesopotamia a clay that becomes a brick in the sunshine. In such
countries men would cease to wander and settle down almost unawares;
they would multiply and discover themselves numerous and by their
numbers safe from any casual assailant. They multiplied, producing a
denser human population than the earth had ever known before; their
houses became more substantial, wild beasts were exterminated over great
areas, the security of life increased so that ordinary men went about in
the towns and fields without encumbering themselves with weapons, and,
among themselves at least, they became peaceful peoples. Men took root
as man had never taken root before.
But in the less fertile and more seasonal lands outside these favoured
areas, there developed on the other hand a thinner, more active
population of peoples, the primitive nomadic peoples. In contrast with
the settled folk, the agriculturists, these nomads lived freely and
dangerously. They were in comparison lean and hungry men. Their herding
was still blended with hunting; they fought constantly for their
pastures against hostile families. The discoveries in the elaboration of
implements and the use of metals made by the settled peoples spread to
them and improved their weapons. They followed the settled folk from
Neolithic phase to Bronze phase. It is possible that, in the case of
iron, the first users were nomadic. They became more warlike with better
arms, and more capable of rapid movements with the improvement of their
transport. One must not think of a nomadic stage as a predecessor of a
settled stage in human affairs. To begin with, man was a slow drifter,
following food. Then one sort of men began to settle down, and another
sort became more distinctly nomadic. The settled sort began to rely more
and more upon grain for food; the nomad began to make a greater use of
milk for food. He bred his cows for milk. The two ways of life
specialized in opposite directions. It was inevitable that nomad folk
and the settled folk should clash, that the nomads should seem hard
barbarians to the settled peoples, and the settled peoples soft and
effeminate and very good plunder to the nomad peoples. Along the fringes
of the developing civilizations there must have been a constant raiding
and bickering between hardy nomad tribes and mountain tribes and the
more numerous and less warlike peoples in the towns and villages.
For the most part this was a mere raiding of the borders. The settled
folk had the weight of numbers on their side; the herdsmen might raid
and loot, but they could not stay. That sort of mutual friction might go
on for many generations. But ever and again we find some leader or some
tribe amidst the disorder of free and independent nomads, powerful
enough to force a sort of unity upon its kindred tribes, and then woe
betide the nearest civilization. Down pour the united nomads on the
unwarlike, unarmed plains, and there ensues a war of conquest. Instead
of carrying off the booty, the conquerors settle down on the conquered
land, which becomes all booty for them; the villagers and townsmen are
reduced to servitude and tribute-paying, they become hewers of wood and
drawers of water, and the leaders of the nomads become kings and
princes, masters and aristocrats. They too settle down, they learn many
of the arts and refinements of the conquered, they cease to be lean and
hungry, but for many generations they retain traces of their old nomadic
habits, they hunt and indulge in open-air sports, they drive and race
chariots, they regard work, especially agricultural work, as the lot of
an inferior race and class.
This in a thousand variations has been one of the main stories in
history for the last seventy centuries or more. In the first history
that we can clearly decipher we find already in all the civilized
regions a distinction between a non-working ruler class and the working
mass of the population. And we find too that after some generations, the
aristocrat, having settled down, begins to respect the arts and
refinements and law-abidingness of settlement, and to lose something of
his original hardihood. He intermarries, he patches up a sort of
toleration between conqueror and conquered; he exchanges religious ideas
and learns the lessons upon which soil and climate insist. He becomes a
part of the civilization he has captured. And as he does so, events
gather towards a fresh invasion by the free adventurers of the outer
world.[102]
§ 2A
[Illustration: A very early Sumerian stone carving showing Sumerian
warriors in phalanx]
This alternation of settlement, conquest, refinement, fresh conquest,
refinement, is particularly to be noted in the region of the Euphrates
and Tigris, which lay open in every direction to great areas which are
not arid enough to be complete deserts, but which were not fertile
enough to support civilized populations. Perhaps the earliest people to
form real cities in this part of the world, or indeed in any part of the
world, were a people of mysterious origin called the Sumerians. They
were neither Semites nor Aryans, and whence they came we do not know.
Whether they were dark whites of Iberian or Dravidian affinities is less
certainly to be denied.[103] They used a kind of writing which they
scratched upon clay, and their language has been deciphered.[104] It was
a language more like the unclassified Caucasic language groups than any
others that now exist. These languages may be connected with Basque, and
may represent what was once a widespread group extending from Spain and
western Europe to eastern India, and reaching southwards to Central
Africa. These people shaved their heads and wore simple tunic-like
garments of wool. They settled first on the lower courses of the great
river and not very far from the Persian Gulf, which in those days ran up
for a hundred and thirty miles[105] and more beyond its present head.
They fertilized their fields by letting water run through irrigation
trenches, and they gradually became very skilful hydraulic engineers;
they had cattle, asses, sheep, and goats, but no horses; their
collections of mud huts grew into towns, and their religion raised up
towerlike temple buildings.
Clay, dried in the sun, was a very great fact in the lives of these
people. This lower country of the Euphrates-Tigris valleys had little or
no stone. They built of brick, they made pottery and earthenware images,
and they drew and presently wrote upon thin tile-like cakes of clay.
They do not seem to have had paper or to have used parchment. Their
books and memoranda, even their letters, were potsherds.
At Nippur they built a great tower of brick to their chief god, El-lil
(Enlil), the memory of which is supposed to be preserved in the story of
the Tower of Babel. They seem to have been divided up into city states,
which warred among themselves and maintained for many centuries their
military capacity. Their soldiers carried long spears and shields, and
fought in close formation. Sumerians conquered Sumerians. Sumeria
remained unconquered by any stranger race for a very long period of time
indeed. They developed their civilization, their writing, and their
shipping, through a period that may be twice as long as the whole period
from the Christian era to the present time.
The first of all known empires was that founded by the high priest of
the god of the Sumerian city of Erech. It reached, says an inscription
at Nippur, from the Lower (Persian Gulf) to the Upper (Mediterranean or
Red?) Sea. Among the mud heaps of the Euphrates-Tigris valley the record
of that vast period of history, that first half of the Age of
Cultivation, is buried. There flourished the first temples and the first
priest-rulers that we know of among mankind.
§ 2B
Upon the western edge of this country appeared nomadic tribes of
Semitic-speaking peoples who traded, raided, and fought with the
Sumerians for many generations. Then arose at last a great leader among
these Semites, Sargon (2750 B.C.),[106] who united them, and not only
conquered the Sumerians, but extended his rule from beyond the Persian
Gulf on the east to the Mediterranean on the west. His own people were
called the Akkadians and his empire is called the Sumerian Akkadian
Empire. It endured for over two hundred years.
But though the Semites conquered and gave a king to the Sumerian cities,
it was the Sumerian civilization which prevailed over the simpler
Semitic culture. The newcomers learnt the Sumerian writing (the
“cuneiform” writing) and the Sumerian language; they set up no Semitic
writing of their own. The Sumerian language became for these barbarians
the language of knowledge and power, as Latin was the language of
knowledge and power among the barbaric peoples of the middle ages in
Europe. This Sumerian learning had a very great vitality. It was
destined to survive through a long series of conquests and changes that
now began in the valley of the two rivers.
§ 2C
As the people of the Sumerian Akkadian Empire lost their political and
military vigour, fresh inundations of a warlike people began from the
east, the Elamites,[107] while from the west came the Semitic Amorites,
pinching the Sumerian Akkadian Empire between them. The Amorites settled
in what was at first a small up-river town, named Babylon; and after a
hundred years of warfare became masters of all Mesopotamia under a great
king, Hammurabi (2100 B.C.), who founded the first Babylonian Empire.
Again came peace and security and a decline in aggressive prowess, and
in another hundred years fresh nomads from the east were invading
Babylonia, bringing with them the horse and the war chariot, and setting
up their own king in Babylon....
§2D
Higher up the Tigris, above the clay lands and with easy supplies of
workable stone, a Semitic people, the Assyrians, while the Sumerians
were still unconquered by the Semites, were settling about a number of
cities of which Assur and Nineveh were the chief. Their peculiar
physiognomy, the long nose and thick lips, was very like that of the
commoner type of Polish Jew to-day. They wore great beards and
ringletted long hair, tall caps and long robes. They were constantly
engaged in mutual raiding with the Hittites to the west; they were
conquered by Sargon I and became free again; a certain Tushratta, King
of Mitanni, to the north-west, captured and held their capital, Nineveh,
for a time; they intrigued with Egypt against Babylon and were in the
pay of Egypt; they developed the military art to a very high pitch, and
became mighty raiders and exacters of tribute; and at last, adopting the
horse and the war chariot, they settled accounts for a time with the
Hittites, and then, under Tiglath Pileser I, conquered Babylon for
themselves (about 1100 B.C.[108]). But their hold on the lower, older,
and more civilized land was not secure, and Nineveh, the stone city, as
distinguished from Babylon, the brick city, remained their capital. For
many centuries power swayed between Nineveh and Babylon, and sometimes
it was an Assyrian and sometimes a Babylonian who claimed to be “king of
the world.”
For four centuries Assyria was restrained from expansion towards Egypt
by a fresh northward thrust and settlement of another group of Semitic
peoples, the Arameans, whose chief city was Damascus, and whose
descendants are the Syrians of to-day. (There is, we may note, no
connection whatever between the words Assyrian and Syrian. It is an
accidental similarity.) Across these Syrians the Assyrian kings fought
for power and expansion south-westward. In 745 B.C. arose another
Tiglath Pileser, Tiglath Pileser III, the Tiglath Pileser of the
Bible.[109] He not only directed the transfer of the Israelites to Media
(the “Lost Ten Tribes” whose ultimate fate has exercised so many curious
minds), but he conquered and ruled Babylon, so founding what historians
know as the New Assyrian Empire. His son, Shalmaneser IV,[110] died
during the siege of Samaria, and was succeeded by a usurper, who, no
doubt to flatter Babylonian susceptibilities, took the ancient Akkadian
Sumerian name of Sargon, Sargon II. He seems to have armed the Assyrian
forces for the first time with iron weapons. It was probably Sargon II
who actually carried out the deportation of the Ten Tribes.
Such shiftings about of population became a very distinctive part of the
political methods of the Assyrian new empire. Whole nations who were
difficult to control in their native country would be shifted en _masse_
to unaccustomed regions and amidst strange neighbours, where their only
hope of survival would lie in obedience to the supreme power.
[Illustration: Assyrian warrior
(Bas-relief from the palace of Sargon II)]
Sargon’s son, Sennacherib, led the Assyrian hosts to the borders of
Egypt. There Sennacherib’s army was smitten by a pestilence, a disaster
described in the nineteenth chapter of the Second Book of Kings.
“And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out,
and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five
thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were
all dead corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and
returned, and dwelt at Nineveh.”[111]
Sennacherib’s grandson, Assurbanipal (called by the Greeks
Sardanapalus), did succeed in conquering and for a time holding lower
Egypt.
§2E
The Assyrian Empire lasted only a hundred and fifty years after Sargon
II. Fresh nomadic Semites coming from the south-east, the Chaldeans,
assisted by two Aryan peoples from the north, the Medes and Persians,
combined against it, and took Nineveh in 606 B.C.
The Chaldean Empire, with its capital at Babylon (Second Babylonian
Empire), lasted under Nebuchadnezzar the Great (Nebuchadnezzar II) and
his successors until 539 B.C., when it collapsed before the attack of
Cyrus, the founder of the Persian power....
So the story goes on. In 330 B.C., as we shall tell later in some
detail, a Greek conqueror, Alexander the Great, is looking on the
murdered body of the last of the Persian rulers.
The story of the Tigris and Euphrates civilizations, of which we have
given as yet only the bare outline, is a story of conquest following
after conquest, and each conquest replaces old rulers and ruling classes
by new; races like the Sumerian and the Elamite are swallowed up, their
languages vanish, they interbreed and are lost, the Assyrian melts away
into Chaldean and Syrian, the Hittites become Aryanized and lose
distinction, the Semites who swallowed up the Sumerians give place to
Aryan rulers, Medes and Persians appear in the place of the Elamites,
the Aryan Persian language dominates the empire until the Aryan Greek
ousts it from official life. Meanwhile the plough does its work year by
year, the harvests are gathered, the builders build as they are told,
the tradesmen work and acquire fresh devices; the knowledge of writing
spreads, novel things, the horse and wheeled vehicles and iron, are
introduced and become part of the permanent inheritance of mankind; the
volume of trade upon sea and desert increases, men’s ideas widen, and
knowledge grows. There are set-backs, massacres, pestilence; but the
story is, on the whole, one of enlargement. For four thousand years this
new thing, civilization, which had set its root into the soil of the two
rivers, grew as a tree grows; now losing a limb, now stripped by a
storm, but always growing and resuming its growth. After four thousand
years the warriors and conquerors were still going to and fro over this
growing thing they did not understand, but men had now (330 B.C.) got
iron, horses, writing and computation, money, a greater variety of foods
and textiles, a wider knowledge of their world.
The time that elapsed between the empire of Sargon I and the conquest of
Babylon by Alexander the Great was as long, be it noted, at the least
estimate, as the time from Alexander the Great to the present day. And
before the time of Sargon, men had been settled in the Sumerian land,
living in towns, worshipping in temples, following an orderly Neolithic
agricultural life in an organized community for at least as long again.
“Eridu, Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Larsa, have already an immemorial past when
first they appear in history.”[112]
One of the most difficult things for both the writer and student of
history is to sustain the sense of these time intervals and prevent
these ages becoming shortened by perspective in his imagination. Half
the duration of human civilization and the keys to all its chief
institutions are to be found _before_ Sargon I. Moreover, the reader
cannot too often compare the scale of the dates in these latter fuller
pages of man’s history with the succession of countless generations to
which the time diagrams given on pages 14, 60, and 89 bear witness.
§ 3
The story of the Nile valley from the dawn of its traceable history
until the time of Alexander the Great is not very dissimilar from that
of Babylonia; but while Babylonia lay open on every side to invasion,
Egypt was protected by desert to the west and by desert and sea to the
east, while to the south she had only negro peoples. Consequently her
history is less broken by the invasions of strange races than is the
history of Assyria and Babylon, and until towards the eighth century
B.C., when she fell under an Ethiopian dynasty, whenever a conqueror did
come into her story, he came in from Asia by way of the Isthmus of
Suez.
[Illustration: Iron Weapons]
The Stone Age remains in Egypt are of very uncertain date; there are
Palæolithic and then Neolithic remains. It is not certain whether the
Neolithic pastoral people who left those remains were the direct
ancestors of the later Egyptians. In many respects they differed
entirely from their successors. They buried their dead, but before they
buried them they cut up the bodies and apparently ate portions of the
flesh. They seem to have done this out of a feeling of reverence for the
departed; the dead were “eaten with honour” according to the phrase of
Mr. Flinders Petrie. It may have been that the survivors hoped to retain
thereby some vestige of the strength and virtue that had died. Traces of
similar savage customs have been found in the long barrows that were
scattered over western Europe before the spreading of the Aryan peoples,
and they have pervaded negro Africa, where they are only dying out at
the present time.
[Illustration: Early figure of the Egyptian hippopotamus goddess.]
About 5000 B.C., or earlier, the traces of these primitive peoples
cease, and the true Egyptians appear on the scene. The former people
were hut builders and at a comparatively low stage of Neolithic culture,
the latter were already a civilized Neolithic people; they used brick
and wood buildings instead of their predecessors’ hovels, and they were
working stone. Very soon they passed into the Bronze Age. They possessed
a system of picture writing almost as developed as the contemporary
writing of the Sumerians, but quite different in character. Possibly
there was an irruption from southern Arabia by way of Aden, of a fresh
people, who came into upper Egypt and descended slowly towards the delta
of the Nile. Dr. Wallis Budge writes of them as “conquerors from the
East.” But their gods and their ways, like their picture writing, were
very different indeed from the Sumerian. One of the earliest known
figures of a deity is that of a hippopotamus goddess, and so very
distinctively African.[113]
The clay of the Nile is not so fine and plastic as the Sumerian clay,
and the Egyptians made no use of it for writing. But they early resorted
to strips of the papyrus reed fastened together, from whose name comes
our word “paper.”
The broad outline of the history of Egypt is simpler than the history of
Mesopotamia. It has long been the custom to divide the rulers of Egypt
into a succession of Dynasties, and in speaking of the periods of
Egyptian history it is usual to speak of the first, fourth, fourteenth,
and so on, Dynasty. The Egyptians were ultimately conquered by the
Persians after their establishment in Babylon, and when finally Egypt
fell to Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., it was Dynasty XXXI that came
to an end. In that long history of over 4000 years, a much longer period
than that between the career of Alexander the Great and the present day,
certain broad phases of development may be noted here. There was a phase
known as the “old kingdom,” which culminated in the IVth Dynasty; this
Dynasty marks a period of wealth and splendour, and its monarchs were
obsessed by such a passion for making monuments for themselves as no men
have ever before or since had a chance to display and gratify. It was
Cheops[114] and Chephren and Mycerinus of this IVth Dynasty who raised
the vast piles of the great and the second and the third pyramids at
Gizeh. These unmeaning[115] sepulchral piles, of an almost incredible
vastness,[116] erected in an age when engineering science had scarcely
begun, exhausted the resources of Egypt through three long reigns, and
left her wasted as if by a war.
The story of Egypt from the IVth to the XVth Dynasty is a story of
conflicts between alternative capitals and competing religions, of
separations into several kingdoms and reunions. It is, so to speak, an
internal history. Here we can name only one of that long series of
Pharaohs, Pepi II, who reigned ninety years, the longest reign in
history, and left a great abundance of inscriptions and buildings. At
last there happened to Egypt what happened so frequently to the
civilizations of Mesopotamia. Egypt was conquered by nomadic Semites,
who founded a “shepherd” dynasty, the Hyksos (XVIth), which was finally
expelled by native Egyptians. This invasion probably happened while that
first Babylonian Empire which Hammurabi founded was flourishing, but the
exact correspondences of dates between early Egypt and Babylonia are
still very doubtful. Only after a long period of servitude did a popular
uprising expel these foreigners again.
After the war of liberation (circa 1600 B.C.) there followed a period of
great prosperity in Egypt, _the New Empire_. Egypt became a great and
united military state, and pushed her expeditions at last as far as the
Euphrates, and so the age-long struggle between the Egyptian and
Babylonian-Assyrian power began.
For a time Egypt was the ascendant power. Thothmes III[117] and his son
Amenophis III (XVIIIth Dynasty) ruled from Ethiopia to the Euphrates in
the fifteenth century B.C. For various reasons these names stand out
with unusual distinctness in the Egyptian record. They were great
builders, and left many monuments and inscriptions. Amenophis III
founded Luxor, and added greatly to Karnak. At Tel-el-Amarna a mass of
letters has been found, the royal correspondence with Babylonian and
Hittite and other monarchs, including that Tushratta who took Nineveh,
throwing a flood of light upon the political and social affairs of this
particular age. Of Amenophis IV we shall have more to tell later, but of
one, the most extraordinary and able of Egyptian monarchs, Queen Hatasu,
the aunt and stepmother of Thotmes III, we have no space to tell. She is
represented upon her monuments in masculine garb, and with a long beard
as a symbol of wisdom.
Thereafter there was a brief Syrian conquest of Egypt, a series, of
changing dynasties, among which we may note the XIXth, which included
Rameses II, a great builder of temples, who reigned seventy-seven years
(about 1317 to 1250 B.C.), and who is supposed by some to have been the
Pharaoh of Moses, and the XXIInd, which included Shishak, who plundered
Solomon’s temple (circa 930 B.C.). An Ethiopian conqueror from the Upper
Nile founded the XXVth Dynasty, a foreign dynasty, which went down (670
B.C.) before the new Assyrian Empire created by Tiglath Pileser III,
Sargon II, and Sennacherib, of which we have already made mention.
The days of any Egyptian predominance over foreign nations were drawing
to an end. For a time under Psammetichus I of the XXVIth Dynasty
(664-610 B.C.) native rule was restored, and Necho II recovered for a
time the old Egyptian possessions in Syria up to the Euphrates while the
Medes and Chaldeans were attacking Nineveh. From those gains Necho II
was routed out again after the fall of Nineveh and the Assyrians by
Nebuchadnezzar II, the great Chaldean king, the Nebuchadnezzar of the
Bible. The Jews, who had been the allies of Necho II, were taken into
captivity by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon.
When, in the sixth century B.C., Chaldea fell to the Persians, Egypt
followed suit, a rebellion later made Egypt independent once more for
sixty years, and in 332 B.C. she welcomed Alexander the Great as her
conqueror, to be ruled thereafter by foreigners, first by Greeks, then
by Romans, then in succession by Arabs, Turks, and British, until the
present day.
Such briefly is the history of Egypt from its beginnings; a history
first of isolation and then of increasing entanglement with the affairs
of other nations, as increasing facilities of communication drew the
peoples of the world into closer and closer interaction.
§ 4
The history we need to tell here of India is simpler even than this
brief record of Egypt. Somewhere about the time of Hammurabi or later, a
branch of the Aryan-speaking people who then occupied North Persia and
Afghanistan, pushed down the northwest passes into India. They conquered
their way until they prevailed over all the darker populations of North
India, and spread their rule or influence over the whole peninsula. They
never achieved any unity in India; their history is a history of warring
kings and republics. The Persian empire, in the days of its expansion
after the capture of Babylon, pushed its boundaries beyond the Indus,
and later Alexander the Great marched as far as the border of the desert
that separates the Punjab from the Ganges valley. But with this bare
statement we will for a time leave the history of India.
§ 5
[Illustration: The Cradle of CHINESE CIVILIZATION]
Meanwhile, as this triple system of White Man civilization developed in
India and in the lands about the meeting-places of Asia, Africa, and
Europe, another and quite distinct civilization was developing and
spreading out from the then fertile but now dry and desolate valley of
the Tarim and from the slopes of the Kuen-lun mountains in two
directions, down the course of the Hwang-ho, and into the valley of the
Yang-tse-kiang. We know practically nothing as yet of the archæology of
China, we do not know anything of the Stone Age in that part of the
world, and at present our ideas of this early civilization are derived
from the still very imperfectly explored Chinese literature. It has
evidently been from the first and throughout a Mongolian civilization.
Until after the time of Alexander the Great there are few traces of
any Aryan or Semitic, much less of Hamitic influence. All such
influences were still in another world, separated by mountains, deserts,
and wild nomadic tribes until that time. The Chinese seem to have made
their civilization spontaneously and unassisted. Some recent writers
suppose indeed a connection with ancient Sumeria. Of course both China
and Sumeria arose on the basis of the almost world-wide early Neolithic
culture, but the Tarim valley and the lower Euphrates are separated by
such vast obstacles of mountain and desert as to forbid the idea of any
migration or interchange of peoples who had once settled down.
But though the civilization of China is wholly Mongolian (as we have
defined Mongolian), it does not follow that the northern roots are the
only ones from which it grew. If it grew first in the Tarim valley, then
unlike all other civilizations (including the Mexican and Peruvian) it
did not grow out of the heliolithic culture. We Europeans know very
little as yet of the ethnology and pre-history of southern China. There
the Chinese mingle with such kindred peoples as the Siamese and Burmese,
and seem to bridge over towards the darker Dravidian peoples and towards
the Malays. It is quite clear from the Chinese records that there were
southern as well as northern beginnings of a civilization, and that the
Chinese civilization that comes into history 2000 years B.C. is the
result of a long process of conflicts, minglings, and interchanges
between a southern and a northern culture of which the southern may have
been the earlier. The southern Chinese perhaps played the rôle towards
the northern Chinese that the Hamites or Sumerians played to the Aryan
and Semitic peoples in the west, or that the settled Dravidians played
towards the Aryans in India. They may have been the first agriculturists
and the first temple builders. But so little is known as yet of this
attractive chapter in pre-history, that we cannot dwell upon it further
here.
The chief foreigners mentioned in the early annals of China were a
Ural-Altaic people on the north-east frontier, the Huns, against whom
certain of the earlier emperors made war.
Chinese history is still very imperfectly known to European students,
and our accounts of the early records are particularly unsatisfactory.
About 2700 to 2400 B.C. reigned five emperors, who seem to have been
almost incredibly exemplary beings.
There follows upon these first five emperors a series of dynasties, of
which the accounts become more and more exact and convincing as they
become more recent. China has to tell a long history of border warfare
and of graver struggles between the settled and nomad peoples. To begin
with, China, like Sumer and like Egypt, was a land of city states. The
government was at first a government of numerous kings; they became
loosely feudal under an emperor, as the Egyptians did; and then later,
as with the Egyptians, came a centralizing empire. Shang (1750 to 1125
B.C.) and Chow (1125 to 250 B.C.) are named as being the two great
dynasties of the feudal period. Bronze vessels of these earlier
dynasties, beautiful, splendid, and with a distinctive style of their
own, still exist, and there can be no doubt of the existence of a high
state of culture even before the days of Shang.
It is perhaps a sense of symmetry that made the later historians of
Egypt and China talk of the earlier phases of their national history as
being under dynasties comparable to the dynasties of the later empires,
and of such early “Emperors” as Menes (in Egypt) or the First Five
Emperors (in China). The early dynasties exercised far less centralized
powers than the later ones. Such unity as China possessed under the
Shang dynasty was a religious rather than an effective political union.
The “Son of Heaven” offered sacrifices for all the Chinese. There was a
common script, a common civilization, and a common enemy in the Huns of
the north-western borders.
The last of the Shang Dynasty was a cruel and foolish monarch who burnt
himself alive (1125 B.C.) in his palace after a decisive defeat by Wu
Wang, the founder of the Chow Dynasty. Wu Wang seems to have been helped
by allies from among the south-western tribes as well as by a popular
revolt.
For a time China remained loosely united under the Chow emperors, as
loosely united as was Christendom under the popes in the Middle Ages;
the Chow emperors had become the traditional high priests of the land in
the place of the Shang Dynasty and claimed a sort of overlordship in
Chinese affairs, but gradually the loose ties of usage and sentiment
that held the empire together lost their hold upon men’s minds. Hunnish
peoples to the north and west took on the Chinese civilization without
acquiring a sense of its unity. Feudal princes began to regard
themselves as independent. Mr. Liang-Chi-Chao,[118] one of the Chinese
representatives at the Paris Conference of 1919, states that between the
eighth and fourth centuries B.C. “there were in the Hwang-ho and
Yang-tse valleys no less than five or six thousand small states with
about a dozen powerful states dominating over them.” The land was
subjected to perpetual warfare (“Age of Confusion”). In the sixth
century B.C. the great powers in conflict were Ts’i and Ts’in, which
were northern Hwang-ho states, and Ch’u, which was a vigorous,
aggressive power in the Yang-tse valley. A confederation against Ch’u
laid the foundation for a league that kept the peace for a hundred
years; the league subdued and incorporated Ch’u and made a general
treaty of disarmament. It became the foundation of a new pacific empire.
The knowledge of iron entered China at some unknown date, but iron
weapons began to be commonly used only about 500 B.C., that is to say
two or three hundred years or more after this had become customary in
Assyria, Egypt, and Europe. Iron was probably introduced from the north
into China by the Huns.
The last rulers of the Chow Dynasty were ousted by the kings of Ts’in,
the latter seized upon the sacred sacrificial bronze tripods, and so
were able to take over the imperial duty of offering sacrifices to
Heaven. In this manner was the Ts’in Dynasty established. It ruled with
far more vigour and effect than any previous family. The reign of
Shi-Hwang-ti (meaning “first universal emperor”) of this dynasty is
usually taken to mark the end of feudal and divided China. He seems to
have played the unifying rôle in the east that Alexander the Great might
have played in the west, but he lived longer, and the unity he made (or
restored) was comparatively permanent, while the empire of Alexander the
Great fell to pieces, as we shall tell, at his death. Shi-Hwang-ti,
among other feats in the direction of common effort, organized the
building of the Great Wall of China against the Huns. A civil war
followed close upon his reign, and ended in the establishment of the
Han Dynasty. Under this Han Dynasty the empire grew greatly beyond its
original two river valleys, the Huns were effectively restrained, and
the Chinese penetrated westward until they began to learn at last of
civilized races and civilizations other than their own.
By 100 B.C. the Chinese had heard of India, their power had spread
across Tibet and into Western Turkestan, and they were trading by camel
caravans with Persia and the western world. So much for the present must
suffice for our account of China. We shall return to the distinctive
characters of its civilization later.
§ 6
And in these thousands of years during which man was making his way step
by step from the barbarism of the heliolithic culture to civilization at
these old-world centres, what was happening in the rest of the world? To
the north of these centres, from the Rhine to the Pacific, the Nordic
and Mongolian peoples, as we have told, were also learning the use of
metals; but while the civilizations were settling down these men of the
great plains were becoming migratory and developing from a slow
wandering life towards a complete seasonal nomadism. To the south of the
civilized zone, in central and southern Africa, the negro was making a
slower progress, and that, it would seem, under the stimulus of invasion
by whiter tribes from the Mediterranean regions, bringing with them in
succession cultivation and the use of metals. These white men came to
the black by two routes: across the Sahara to the west as Berbers and
Tuaregs and the like, to mix with the negro and create such quasi-white
races as the Fulas; and also by way of the Nile, where the Baganda (=
Gandafolk) of Uganda, for example, may possibly be of remote white
origin. The African forests were denser then, and spread eastward and
northward from the Upper Nile.
The islands of the East Indies, three thousand years ago, were probably
still only inhabited here and there by stranded patches of Palæolithic
Australoids, who had wandered thither in those immemorial ages when
there was a nearly complete land bridge by way of the East Indies to
Australia. The islands of Oceania were uninhabited. The spreading of the
heliolithic peoples by sea-going canoes into the islands of the Pacific
came much later in the history of man, at earliest a thousand years B.C.
Still later did they reach Madagascar. The beauty of New Zealand also
was as yet wasted upon mankind; its highest living creatures were a
great ostrich-like bird, the moa, now extinct, and the little kiwi which
has feathers like coarse hair and the merest rudiment of wings.
In North America a group of Mongoloid tribes were now cut off altogether
from the old world. They were spreading slowly southward, hunting the
innumerable bison of the plains. They had still to learn for themselves
the secrets of a separate agriculture based on maize, and in South
America to tame the lama to their service and so build up in Mexico and
Peru two civilizations roughly parallel in their nature to that of
Sumer, but different in many respects, and later by six or seven
thousand years....
When men reached the southern extremity of America, the _Megatherium_,
the giant sloth, and the _Glyptodon_, the giant armadillo, were still
living....
There is a considerable imaginative appeal in the obscure story of the
early American civilizations. It was largely a separate
development.[119] Somewhen at last the southward drift of the
Amerindians must have met and mingled with the eastward, canoe-borne
drift of the heliolithic culture. But it was the heliolithic culture
still at a very lowly stage and probably before the use of metals. It
has to be noted as evidence of this canoe-borne origin of American
culture, that elephant-headed figures are found in Central American
drawings. American metallurgy may have arisen independently of the
old-world use of metal, or it may have been brought by these elephant
carvers. These American peoples got to the use of bronze and copper, but
not to the use of iron; they had gold and silver; and their stonework,
their pottery, weaving, and dyeing were carried to a very high level. In
all these things the American product resembles the old-world product
generally, but always it has characteristics that are distinctive. The
American civilizations had picture-writing of a primitive sort, but it
never developed even to the pitch of the earliest Egyptian
hieroglyphics. In Yucatan only was there a kind of script, the Maya
writing, but it was used simply for keeping a calendar. In Peru the
beginnings of writing were superseded by a curious and complicated
method of keeping records by means of knots tied upon strings of various
colours and shapes. It is said that even laws and orders could be
conveyed by this code. These string bundles were called _quipus_, but
though quipus are still to be found in collections, the art of reading
them is altogether lost. The Chinese histories, Mr. L. Y. Chen informs
us, state that a similar method of record by knots was used in China
before the invention of writing there. The Peruvians also got to making
maps and the use of counting-frames. “But with all this there was no
means of handing on knowledge and experience from one generation to
another, nor was anything done to fix and summarize these intellectual
possessions, which are the basis of literature and science.”[120]
When the Spaniards came to America, the Mexicans knew nothing of the
Peruvians nor the Peruvians of the Mexicans. Intercourse there was none.
Whatever links had ever existed were lost and forgotten. The Mexicans
had never heard of the potato, which was a principal article of Peruvian
diet. In 5000 B.C. the Sumerians and Egyptians probably knew as little
of one another. America was 6000 years behind the Old World.
XVII
SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES
§ 1. _The Earliest Ships and Sailors._ § 2. _The Ægean Cities
before History._ § 3. _The First Voyages of Exploration._ § 4.
_Early Traders._ § 5. _Early Travellers._
§ 1
The first boats were made very early indeed in the Neolithic stage of
culture by riverside and lakeside peoples. They were no more than trees
and floating wood, used to assist the imperfect natural swimming powers
of men. Then came the hollowing out of the trees, and then, with the
development of tools and a primitive carpentry, the building of boats.
Men in Egypt and Mesopotamia also developed a primitive type of
basket-work boat, caulked with bitumen. Such was the “ark of bulrushes”
in which Moses was hidden by his mother. A kindred sort of vessel grew
up by the use of skins and hides expanded upon a wicker framework. To
this day cow-hide wicker boats (coracles) are used upon the west coast
of Ireland, where there is plenty of cattle and a poverty of big trees.
They are also still used on the Euphrates, and on the Towy in South
Wales. Inflated skins may have preceded the coracle, and are still used
on the Euphrates and upper Ganges. In the valleys of the great rivers,
boats must early have become an important means of communication; and it
seems natural to suppose that it was from the mouths of the great rivers
that man, already in a reasonably seaworthy vessel, first ventured out
upon what must have seemed to him then the trackless and homeless sea.
No doubt he ventured at first as a fisherman, having learnt the elements
of seacraft in creeks and lagoons. Men may have navigated boats upon
the Levantine lake before the refilling of the Mediterranean by the
Atlantic waters. The canoe was an integral part of the heliolithic
culture, it drifted with that culture upon the warm waters of the earth
from the Mediterranean to (at last) America. There were not only canoes,
but Sumerian boats and ships upon the Euphrates and Tigris, when these
rivers in 7000 B.C. fell by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf. The
Sumerian city of Eridu, which stood at the head of the Persian Gulf
(from which it is now separated by a hundred and thirty miles of
alluvium[121]), had ships upon the sea then. We also find evidence of a
fully developed sea life six thousand years ago at the eastern end of
the Mediterranean, and possibly at that time there were already canoes
on the seas among the islands of the nearer East Indies. There are
pre-dynastic Neolithic Egyptian representations of Nile ships of a fair
size, capable of carrying elephants.[122]
Very soon the seafaring men must have realized the peculiar freedom and
opportunities the ship gave them. They could get away to islands; no
chief nor king could pursue a boat or ship with any certainty; every
captain was a king. The seamen would find it easy to make nests upon
islands and in strong positions on the mainland. There they could
harbour, there they could carry on a certain agriculture and fishery;
but their speciality and their main business was, of course, the
expedition across the sea. That was not usually a trading expedition; it
was much more frequently a piratical raid. From what we know of mankind,
we are bound to conclude that the first sailors plundered when they
could, and traded when they had to.
[Illustration: Boats on the Nile, about 2500 B.C. [From Torr’s “Ancient
Ships”.]]
Because it developed in the comparatively warm and tranquil waters of
the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the
western horn of the Indian Ocean, the shipping of the ancient world
retained throughout certain characteristics that make it differ very
widely from the ocean-going sailing shipping, with its vast spread of
canvas, of the last four hundred years. “The Mediterranean,” says Mr.
Torr,[123] “is a sea where a vessel with sails may lie becalmed for
days together, while a vessel with oars would easily be traversing the
smooth waters, with coasts and islands everywhere at hand to give her
shelter in case of storm. In that sea, therefore, oars became the
characteristic instruments of navigation, and the arrangement of oars
the chief problem in shipbuilding. And so long as the Mediterranean
nations dominated Western Europe, vessels of the southern type were
built upon the northern coasts, though there generally was wind enough
here for sails and too much wave for oars.... The art of rowing can
first be discerned upon the Nile. Boats with oars are represented in the
earliest pictorial monuments of Egypt, dating from about 2500 B.C.; and
although some crews are paddling with their faces towards the bow,
others are rowing with their faces towards the stern. The paddling is
certainly the older practice, for the hieroglyph chen depicts two arms
grasping an oar in the attitude of paddling, and the hieroglyphs were
invented in the earliest ages. And that practice may really have ceased
before 2500 B.C., despite the testimony of monuments of that date; for
in monuments dating from about 1250 B.C. crews are represented
unmistakably rowing with their faces towards the stern and yet grasping
their oars in the attitude of paddling, so that even then Egyptian
artists mechanically followed the turn of the hieroglyph to which their
hands were accustomed. In these reliefs there are twenty rowers on the
boats on the Nile, and thirty on the ships on the Red Sea; but in the
earliest reliefs the number varies considerably, and seems dependent on
the amount of space at the sculptor’s disposal.”
[Illustration: Egyptian ship on the Red Sea, about 1250 B.C. (From
Torr’s “Ancient Ships.”)
Mr. Langton Cole calls attention to the rope truss in this illustration,
stiffening the beam of the ship. No other such use of the truss is known
until the days of modern engineering.]
The Aryan peoples came late to the sea. The earliest ships on the sea
were either Sumerian or Hamitic; the Semitic peoples followed close upon
these pioneers. Along the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the
Phœnicians, a Semitic people, set up a string of independent harbour
towns of which Acre, Tyre, and Sidon were the chief; and later they
pushed their voyages westward and founded Carthage and Utica in North
Africa. Possibly Phœnician keels were already in the Mediterranean by
2000 B.C. Both Tyre and Sidon wee originally on islands, an so easily
defensible against a land raid. But before we go on to the marine
exploits of this great sea-going race, we must note a very remarkable
and curious nest of early sea people whose remains have been discovered
in Crete.[124]
§ 2
These early Cretans were of unknown race, but probably of a race akin to
the Iberians of Spain and Western Europe and the dark whites of Asia
Minor and North Africa, and their language is unknown. This race lived
not only in Crete, but in Cyprus, Greece, Asia Minor, Sicily, and South
Italy. It was a civilized people for long ages before the fair Aryan
Greeks spread southward through Macedonia. At Cnossos, in Crete, there
have been found the most astonishing ruins and remains, and Cnossos,
therefore, is apt to overshadow the rest of these settlements in
people’s imaginations, but it is well to bear in mind that, though
Cnossos was no doubt a chief city of this Ægean civilization, these
“Ægeans” had in the fullness of their time many cities and a wide range.
Possibly, all that we know of them now are but the vestiges of a far
more extensive heliolithic Neolithic civilization which is now submerged
under the waters of the Mediterranean.
At Cnossos there are Neolithic remains as old or older than any of the
pre-dynastic remains of Egypt. The Bronze Age began in Crete as soon as
it did in Egypt, and there have been vases found by Flinders Petrie in
Egypt and referred by him to the Ist Dynasty, which he declared to be
importations from Crete. Stone vessels have been found in Crete of forms
characteristic of the IVth (pyramid-building) Dynasty, and there can be
no doubt that there was a vigorous trade between Crete and Egypt in the
time of the XIIth Dynasty. This continued until about 1000 B.C. It is
clear that this island civilization arising upon the soil of Crete is at
least as old as the Egyptian, and that it was already launched upon the
sea as early as 4000 B.C.
The great days of Crete were not so early as this. It was only about
2500 B.C. that the island appears to have been unified under one ruler.
Then began an age of peace and prosperity unexampled in the history of
the ancient world. Secure from invasion, living in a delightful climate,
trading with every civilized community in the world, the Cretans were
free to develop all the arts and amenities of life. This Cnossos was not
so much a town as the vast palace of the king and his people. It was not
even fortified. The kings, it would seem, were called Minos always, as
the kings of Egypt were all called Pharaoh; the king of Cnossos figures
in the early legends of the Greeks as King Minos, who lived in the
Labyrinth and kept there a horrible monster, half man, half bull, the
Minotaur, to feed which he levied a tribute of youths and maidens from
the Athenians. Those stories are a part of Greek literature, and have
always been known, but it is only in the last few decades that the
excavations at Cnossos have revealed how close these legends were to the
reality. The Cretan labyrinth was a building as stately, complex, and
luxurious as any in the ancient world. Among other details we find
waterpipes, bathrooms, and the like conveniences, such as have hitherto
been regarded as the latest refinements of modern life. The pottery, the
textile manufactures, the sculpture and painting of these people, their
gem and ivory work, their metal and inlaid work, is as admirable as any
that mankind has produced. They were much given to festivals and shows,
and, in particular, they were addicted to bull-fights and gymnastic
entertainments. Their female costume became astonishingly “modern” in
style; their women wore corsets and flounced dresses. They had a system
of writing which has not yet been deciphered.
[Illustration: ÆGEAN CIVILIZATION]
It is the custom nowadays to make a sort of wonder of these achievements
of the Cretans, as though they were a people of incredible artistic
ability living in the dawn of civilization. But their great time was
long past that dawn; as late as 2000 B.C. It took them many centuries to
reach their best in art and skill, and their art and luxury are by no
means so great a wonder if we reflect that for 3000 years they were
immune from invasion, that for a thousand years they were at peace.
Century after century their artizans could perfect their skill, and
their men and women refine upon refinement. Wherever men of almost any
race have been comparatively safe in this fashion for such a length of
time, they have developed much artistic beauty. Given the opportunity,
all races are artistic. Green legend has it that it was in Crete that
Dædalus attempted to make the first flying machine. Dædalus (= cunning
artificer) was a sort of personified summary of mechanical skill. It is
curious to speculate what germ of fact lies behind him and those waxen
wings that, according to the legend, melted and plunged his son Icarus
in the sea.
[Illustration: J.F.H. from photos by British School at Athens
Faience figure from Cnossos ... A votary of the Snake Goddess....]
There came at last a change in the condition of the lives of these
Cretans, for other peoples, the Greeks and the Phœnicians, were also
coming out with powerful fleets upon the seas. We do not know what led
to the disaster nor who inflicted it; but somewhen about 1400 B.C.
Cnossos was sacked and burnt, and though the Cretan life struggled on
there rather lamely for another four centuries, there came at last a
final blow about 1000 B.C. (that is to say, in the days of the Assyrian
ascendancy in the East). The palace at Cnossos was destroyed, and never
rebuilt nor reinhabited. Possibly this was done by the ships of those
newcomers into the Mediterranean, the barbaric Greeks, a group of Aryan
tribes, who may have wiped out Cnossos as they wiped out the city of
Troy. The legend of Theseus tells of such a raid. He entered the
Labyrinth (which may have been the Cnossos Palace) by the aid of
Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, and slew the Minotaur.
The _Iliad_ makes it clear that destruction came upon Troy because the
Trojans stole Greek women. Modern writers, with modern ideas in their
heads, have tried to make out that the Greeks assailed Troy in order to
secure a trade route or some such fine-spun commercial advantage. If so,
the authors of the _Iliad_ hid the motives of their characters very
skilfully. It would be about as reasonable to say that the Homeric
Greeks went to war with the Trojans in order to be well ahead with a
station on the Berlin to Bagdad railway. The Homeric Greeks were a
healthy barbaric Aryan people, with very poor ideas about trade and
“trade routes”; they went to war with the Trojans because they were
thoroughly annoyed about this stealing of women. It is fairly clear from
the Minos legend and from the evidence of the Cnossos remains, that the
Cretans kidnapped or stole youths and maidens to be slaves,
bull-fighters, athletes, and perhaps sacrifices. They traded fairly with
the Egyptians, but it may be they did not realize the gathering strength
of the Greek barbarians; they “traded” violently with them, and so
brought sword and flame upon themselves.[125]
Another great sea people were the Phœnicians. They were great seamen
because they were great traders. Their colony of Carthage (founded
before 800 B.C. by Tyre) became at last greater than any of the older
Phœnician cities, but already before 1500 B.C. both Sidon and Tyre
had settlements upon the African coast. Carthage was comparatively
inaccessible to the Assyrian and Babylonian hosts, and, profiting
greatly by the long siege of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar II, became the
greatest maritime power the world had hitherto seen. She claimed the
Western Mediterranean as her own, and seized every ship she could catch
west of Sardinia. Roman writers accuse her of great cruelties. She
fought the Greeks for Sicily, and later (in the second century B.C.) she
fought the Romans. Alexander the Great formed plans for her conquest;
but he died, as we shall tell later, before he could carry them out.
§ 3
At her zenith Carthage probably had the hitherto unheard-of population
of a million. This population was largely industrial, and her woven
goods were universally famous. As well as a coasting trade, she had a
considerable land trade with Central Africa,[126] and she sold negro
slaves, ivory, metals, precious stones and the like, to all the
Mediterranean people; she worked Spanish copper mines, and her ships
went out into the Atlantic and coasted along Portugal and France
northward as far as the Cassiterides (the Scilly Isles, or Cornwall, in
England) to get tin. About 520 B.C. a certain Hanno made a voyage that
is still one of the most notable in the world. This Hanno, if we may
trust the _Periplus of Hanno_, the Greek translation of his account
which still survives, followed the African coast southward from the
Straits of Gibraltar as far as the confines of Liberia. He had sixty big
ships, and his main task was to found or reinforce certain Carthaginian
stations upon the Morocco coast. Then he pushed southward. He founded a
settlement in the Rio de Oro (on Kerne or Herne Island), and sailed on
past the Senegal river. The voyagers passed on for seven days beyond
the Gambia, and landed at last upon some island. This they left in a
panic, because, although the day was silent with the silence of the
tropical forest, at night they heard the sound of flutes, drums, and
gongs, and the sky was red with the blaze of the bush fires. The coast
country for the rest of the voyage was one blaze of fire, from the
burning of the bush. Streams of fire ran down the hills into the sea,
and at length a blaze arose so loftily that it touched the skies. Three
days further brought them to an island containing a lake (? Sherbro
Island). In this lake was another island (? Macaulay Island), and on
this were wild, hairy men and women, “whom the interpreters called
gorilla.” The Carthaginians, having caught some of the females of these
“gorillas”--they were probably chimpanzees--turned back and eventually
deposited the skins of their captives--who had proved impossibly violent
guests to entertain on board ship--in the Temple of Juno.
A still more wonderful Phœnician sea voyage, long doubted, but now
supported by some archæological evidence, is related by Herodotus, who
declares that the Pharaoh Necho of the XXVIth Dynasty commissioned some
Phœnicians to attempt the circumnavigation of Africa, and that
starting from the Gulf of Suez southward, they did finally come back
through the Mediterranean to the Nile delta. They took nearly three
years to complete their voyage. Each year they landed, and sowed and
harvested a crop of wheat before going on.
§ 4
The great trading cities of the Phœnicians are the most striking of
the early manifestations of the peculiar and characteristic gift of the
Semitic peoples to mankind, trade and exchange.[127] While the Semitic
Phœnician peoples were spreading themselves upon the seas, another
kindred Semitic people, the Arameans, whose occupation of Damascus we
have already noted, were developing the caravan routes of the Arabian
and Persian deserts, and becoming the chief trading people of Western
Asia. The Semitic peoples, earlier civilized than the Aryan, have
always shown, and still show to-day, a far greater sense of quality and
quantity in marketable goods than the latter; it is to their need of
account-keeping that the development of alphabetical writing is to be
ascribed, and it is to them that most of the great advances in
computation are due. Our modern numerals are Arabic; our arithmetic and
algebra are essentially Semitic sciences.
The Semitic peoples, we may point out here, are to this day _counting
peoples_ strong in their sense of equivalents and reparation. The moral
teaching of the Hebrews was saturated by such ideas. “With what measure
ye mete, the same shall be meted unto you.” Other races and peoples have
imagined diverse and fitful and marvellous gods, but it was the trading
Semites who first began to think of God as a Righteous Dealer, whose
promises were kept, who failed not the humblest creditor, and called to
account every spurious act.
The trade that was going on in the ancient world before the sixth or
seventh century B.C. was almost entirely a barter trade. There was
little or no credit or coined money. The ordinary standard of value with
the early Aryans was cattle, as it still is with the Zulus and Kaffirs
to-day. In the _Iliad_, the respective values of two shields are stated
in head of cattle, and the Roman word for moneys, _pecunia_, is derived
from _pecus_, cattle. Cattle as money had this advantage; it did not
need to be carried from one owner to another, and if it needed attention
and food, at any rate it bred. But it was inconvenient for ship or
caravan transit. Many other substances have at various times been found
convenient as a standard; tobacco was once legal tender in the colonial
days in North America, and in West Africa fines are paid and bargains
made in bottles of trade gin. The early Asiatic trade included metals;
and weighed lumps of metal, since they were in general demand and were
convenient for hoarding and storage, costing nothing for fodder and
needing small house-room, soon asserted their superiority over cattle
and sheep. Iron, which seems to have been first reduced from its ores by
the Hittites, was, to begin with, a rare and much-desired
substance.[128] It is stated by Aristotle to have supplied the first
currency. In the collection of letters found at Tel-el-Amarna, addressed
to and from Amenophis III (already mentioned) and his successor
Amenophis IV, one from a Hittite king promises iron as an extremely
valuable gift. Gold, then as now, was the most precious and therefore
most portable, security. In early Egypt silver was almost as rare as
gold until after the XVIIIth Dynasty. Later the general standard of
value in the Eastern world became silver, measured by weight.
To begin with, metals were handed about in ingots and weighed at each
transaction. Then they were stamped to indicate their fineness and
guarantee their purity. The first recorded coins were minted about 600
B.C. in Lydia, a gold-producing country in the west of Asia Minor. The
first-known gold coins were minted in Lydia by Crœsus, whose name has
become a proverb for wealth; he was conquered, as we shall tell later,
by that same Cyrus the Persian who took Babylon in 539 B.C. But very
probably coined money had been used in Babylonia before that time. The
“sealed shekel,” a stamped piece of silver, came very near to being a
coin. The promise to pay so much silver or gold on “leather” (=
parchment) with the seal of some established firm is probably as old or
older than coinage. The Carthaginians used such “leather money.” We know
very little of the way in which small traffic was conducted. Common
people, who in those ancient times were in dependent positions, seem to
have had no money at all; they did their business by barter. Early
Egyptian paintings show this going on.[129]
§ 5
When one realizes the absence of small money or of any conveniently
portable means of exchange in the pre-Alexandrian world, one perceives
how impossible was private travel in those days.[130] The first
“inns”--no doubt a sort of caravanserai--are commonly said to have come
into existence in Lydia in the third or fourth century B.C. That,
however, is too late a date. They are certainly older than that. There
is good evidence of them at least as early as the sixth century.
Æschylus twice mentions inns. His word is “all-receiver,” or
“all-receiving house.”[131] Private travellers must have been fairly
common in the Greek world, including its colonies, by this time. But
such private travel was a comparatively new thing then. The early
historians Hecatæus and Herodotus travelled widely. “I suspect,” says
Professor Gilbert Murray, “that this sort of travel ‘for Historie’ or
‘for discovery’ was rather a Greek invention. Solon is supposed to have
practiced it; and even Lycurgus.”... The earlier travellers were
traders travelling in a caravan or in a shipload, and carrying their
goods and their minas and shekels of metal or gems or bales of fine
stuff with them, or government officials travelling with letters of
introduction and a proper retinue. Possibly there were a few mendicants,
and, in some restricted regions, religious pilgrims.
That earlier world before 600 B.C. was one in which a lonely “stranger”
was a rare and suspected and endangered being. He might suffer horrible
cruelties, for there was little law to protect such as he. Few
individuals strayed therefore. One lived and died attached and tied to
some patriarchal tribe if one was a nomad, or to some great household if
one was civilized, or to one of the big temple establishments which we
will presently discuss. Or one was a herded slave. One knew nothing,
except for a few monstrous legends, of the rest of the world in which
one lived. We know more to-day, indeed, of the world of 600 B.C. than
any single living being knew at that time. We map it out, see it as a
whole in relation to past and future. We begin to learn precisely what
was going on at the same time in Egypt and Spain and Media and India and
China. We can share in imagination, not only the wonder of Hanno’s
sailors, but of the men who lit the warning beacons on the shore. We
know that those “mountains flaming to the sky” were only the customary
burning of the dry grass at that season of the year. Year by year, more
and more rapidly, our common knowledge increases. In the years to come
men will understand still more of those lives in the past until perhaps
they will understand them altogether.
XVIII
WRITING
§ 1. _Picture Writing._ § 2. _Syllable Writing._ § 3. _Alphabet
Writing._ § 4. _The Place of Writing in Human Life._
§ 1
In the five preceding chapters (XIII to XVII) we have sketched in broad
outline the development of the chief human communities from the
primitive beginnings of the heliolithic culture to the great historical
kingdoms and empires in the sixth century B.C. We must now study a
little more closely the general process of social change, the growth of
human ideas, and the elaboration of human relationships that were going
on during these ages between 10,000 B.C. and 500 B.C. What we have done
so far is to draw the map and name the chief kings and empires, to
define the relations in time and space of Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt,
Phœnicia, Cnossos, and the like; we come now to the real business of
history, which is to get down below these outer forms to the thoughts
and lives of individual men.
By far the most important thing that was going on during those fifty or
sixty centuries of social development was the invention of writing and
its gradual progress to importance in human affairs. It was a new
instrument for the human mind, an enormous enlargement of its range of
action, a new means of continuity. We have seen how in later Palæolithic
and early Neolithic times the elaboration of articulate speech gave men
a mental handhold for consecutive thought and a vast enlargement of
their powers of co-operation. For a time this new acquirement seems to
have overshadowed their earlier achievement of drawing, and possibly it
checked the use of gesture. But drawing presently reappeared again, for
record, for signs, for the joy of drawing. Before real writing came
picture-writing, such as is still practised by the Amerindians, the
Bushmen, and savage and barbaric people in all parts of the world. It is
essentially a drawing of things and acts, helped out by heraldic
indications of proper names, and by strokes and dots to represent days
and distances and such-like quantitative ideas.
Quite kindred to such picture-writing is the pictograph that one finds
still in use to-day in international railway time-tables upon the
continent of Europe, where a little black sign of a cup indicates a
stand-up buffet for light refreshments; a crossed knife and fork, a
restaurant; a little steamboat, a transfer to a steamboat; and a
postilion’s horn, a diligence. Similar signs are used in the well-known
Michelin guides for automobilists in Europe, to show a post-office
(envelope) or a telephone (telephone receiver). The quality of hotels is
shown by an inn with one, two, three, or four gables, and so forth.
Similarly, the roads of Europe are marked with wayside signs
representing a gate, to indicate a level crossing ahead, a sinuous bend
for a dangerous curve, and the like. From such pictographic signs to the
first elements of Chinese writing is not a very long stretch.
In Chinese writing there are still traceable a number of pictographs.
Most are now difficult to recognize. A mouth was originally written as a
mouth-shaped hole and is now, for convenience of brushwork, squared; a
child, originally a recognizable little mannikin, is now a hasty wriggle
and a cross; the sun, originally a large circle with a dot in the
centre, has been converted, for the sake of convenience of combination,
into a crossed oblong, which is easier to make with a brush. By
combining these pictographs, a second order of ideas is expressed. For
example, the pictograph for mouth combined with pictograph for vapour
expressed “words.”[132]
[Illustration: _Specimens of American Indian picture-writing_
(_after Schoolcraft ..._)]
No. 1, painted on a rock on the shore of Lake Superior, records an
expedition across the lake, in which five canoes took part. The
upright strokes in each indicate the number of the crew, and the
bird represents a chief, “The Kingfisher.” The three circles (suns)
under the arch (of heaven) indicate that the voyage lasted three
days, and the tortoise, a symbol of land, denotes a safe arrival.
No. 2 is a petition sent to the United States Congress by a group
of Indian tribes, asking for fishing rights in certain small lakes.
The tribes are represented by their totems, martens, bear, manfish,
and catfish, led by the crane. Lines running from the heart and eye
of each animal to the heart and eye of the crane denote that they
are all of one mind; and a line runs from the eye of the crane to
the lakes, shown in the crude little “map” in the lower left-hand
corner.
]
From such combinations one passes to what are called _ideograms_: the
sign for “words” and the sign for “tongue” combine to make “speech”; the
sign for “roof” and the sign for “pig” make “home”--for in the early
domestic economy of China the pig was as important as it used to be in
Ireland. But, as we have already noted earlier, the Chinese language
consists of a comparatively few elementary monosyllabic sounds, which
are all used in a great variety of meanings, and the Chinese soon
discovered that a number of these _pictographs_ and _ideographs_ could
be used also to express other ideas, not so conveniently pictured, but
having the same sound. Characters so used are called _phonograms_. For
example, the sound fang meant not only “boat,” but “a place,”
“spinning,” “fragrant,” “inquire,” and several other meanings according
to the context. But while a boat is easy to draw most of the other
meanings are undrawable. How can one draw “fragrant” or “inquire”? The
Chinese, therefore, took the same sign for all these meanings of _fang_,
but added to each of them another distinctive sign, the determinative,
to show what sort of _fang_ was intended. A “place” was indicated by the
same sign as for “boat” (_fang_) and the determinative sign for “earth”;
“spinning” by the sign for _fang_ and the sign for “silk”; “inquire” by
the sign for _fang_ and the sign for “words,” and so on.
One may perhaps make this development of pictographs, ideographs, and
phonograms a little clearer by taking an analogous case in English.
Suppose we were making up a sort of picture-writing in English, then it
would be very natural to use a square with a slanting line to suggest a
lid, for the word and thing _box_. That would be a pictograph. But now
suppose we had a round sign for money, and suppose we put this sign
inside the box sign, that would do for “cash-box” or “treasury.” That
would be an ideogram. But the word “box” is used for other things than
boxes. There is the box shrub which gives us boxwood. It would be hard
to draw a recognizable box-tree distinct from other trees, but it is
quite easy to put our sign “box,” and add our sign for shrub as a
determinative to determine that it is that sort of box and not a common
box that we want to express. And then there is “box,” the verb, meaning
to fight with fists. Here, again, we need a determinative; we might add
the two crossed swords, a sign which is used very often upon maps to
denote a battle. A box at a theatre needs yet another determinative, and
so we go on, through a long series of phonograms.
Now it is manifest that here in the Chinese writing is a very peculiar
and complex system of sign-writing. A very great number of characters
have to be learnt and the mind habituated to their use. The power it
possesses to carry ideas and discussion is still ungauged by western
standards, but we may doubt whether with this instrument it will ever be
possible to establish such a wide, common mentality as the simpler and
swifter alphabets of the western civilizations permit. In China it
created a special reading-class, the mandarins, who were also the ruling
and official class. Their necessary concentration upon words and
classical forms, rather than upon ideas and realities, seems, in spite
of her comparative peacefulness and the very high individual
intellectual quality of her people, to have greatly hampered the social
and economic development of China. Probably it is the complexity of her
speech and writing, more than any other imaginable cause, that has made
China to-day politically, socially, and individually a vast pool of
backward people rather than the foremost power in the whole world.[133]
§ 2
But while the Chinese mind thus made for itself an instrument which is
probably too elaborate in structure, too laborious in use, and too
inflexible in its form to meet the modern need for simple, swift, exact,
and lucid communications, the growing civilizations of the west were
working out the problem of a written record upon rather different and,
on the whole, more advantageous lines. They did not seek to improve
their script to make it swift and easy, but circumstances conspired to
make it so. The Sumerian picture-writing, which had to be done upon clay
and with little styles, which made curved marks with difficulty and
inaccurately, rapidly degenerated by a conventionalized dabbing down of
wedged-shaped marks (cuneiform = wedge-shaped) into almost
unrecognizable hints of the shapes intended. It helped the Sumerians
greatly to learn to write, that they had to draw so badly. They got very
soon to the Chinese pictographs, ideographs, and phonograms, and beyond
them.
Most people know a sort of puzzle called a rebus. It is a way of
representing words by pictures, not of the things the words represent,
but by the pictures of other things having a similar sound. For example,
two gates and a head is a rebus for Gates-head; a little streamlet
(beck), a crowned monarch, and a ham, Beckingham. The Sumerian language
was a language well adapted to this sort of representation. It was
apparently a language of often quite vast polysyllables, made up of very
distinct inalterable syllables; and many of the syllables taken
separately were the names of concrete things. So that this cuneiform
writing developed very readily into a syllabic way of writing, in which
each sign conveys a syllable just as each act in a charade conveys a
syllable. When presently the Semites conquered Sumeria, they adapted the
syllabic system to their own speech, and so this writing became entirely
a sign-for-a-sound writing. It was so used by the Assyrians and by the
Chaldeans. But it was not a letter-writing, it was a syllable-writing.
This cuneiform script prevailed for long ages over Assyria, Babylonia,
and the Near East generally; there are vestiges of it in some of the
letters of our alphabet to-day.
§ 3
But, meanwhile, in Egypt and upon the Mediterranean coast another system
of writing grew up. Its beginnings are probably to be found in the
priestly picture-writing (hieroglyphics) of the Egyptians, which also in
the usual way became partly a sound-sign system. As we see it on the
Egyptian monuments, the hieroglyphic writing consists of decorative but
stiff and elaborate forms, but for such purpose as letter-writing and
the keeping of recipes and the like, the Egyptian priests used a much
simplified and flowing form of these characters, the _hieratic script_.
Side by side with this hieratic script rose another, probably also
derivative from the hieroglyphs, a script now lost to us, which was
taken over by various non-Egyptian peoples in the Mediterranean, the
Phœnicians, Libyans, Lydians, Cretans, and Celt-Iberians, and used
for business purposes. Possibly a few letters were borrowed from the
later cuneiform. In the hands of these foreigners this writing was, so
to speak, cut off from its roots; it lost all but a few traces of its
early pictorial character. It ceased to be pictographic or ideographic;
it became simply a pure sound-sign system, an _alphabet_.
There were a number of such alphabets in the Mediterranean differing
widely from each other.[134] It may be noted that the Phœnician
alphabet (and perhaps others) omitted vowels. Possibly they pronounced
their consonants very hard and had rather indeterminate vowels, as is
said to be still the case with tribes of South Arabia. Quite probably,
too, the Phœnicians used their alphabet at first not so much for
writing as for single initial letters in their business accounts and
tallies. One of these Mediterranean alphabets reached the Greeks, long
after the time of the Iliad, who presently set to work to make it
express the clear and beautiful sounds of their own highly developed
Aryan speech. It consisted at first of consonants, and the Greeks added
the vowels. They began to write for record, to help and fix their bardic
tradition....
§ 4
So it was by a series of very natural steps that writing grew out of the
life of man. At first and for long ages it was the interest and the
secret of only a few people in a special class, a mere accessory to the
record of pictures. But there were certain very manifest advantages,
quite apart from the increased expressiveness of mood and qualification,
to be gained by making writing a little less plain than straightforward
pictures, and in conventionalizing and codifying it. One of these was
that so messages might be sent understandable by the sender and
receiver, but not plain to the uninitiated. Another was that so one
might put down various matters and help one’s memory and the memory of
one’s friends, without giving away too much to the common herd. Among
some of the earliest Egyptian writings, for example, are medical recipes
and magic formulæ. Accounts, letters, recipes, name lists, itineraries;
these were the earliest of written documents. Then, as the art of
writing and reading spread, came that odd desire, that pathetic desire
so common among human beings, to astonish some strange and remote person
by writing down something striking, some secret one knew, some strange
thought, or even one’s name, so that long after one had gone one’s way,
it might strike upon the sight and mind of another reader. Even in
Sumeria men scratched on walls, and all that remains to us of the
ancient world, its rocks, its buildings, is plastered thickly with the
names and the boasting of those foremost among human advertisers, its
kings. Perhaps half the early inscriptions in that ancient world are of
this nature, if, that is, we group with the name-writing and boasting
the epitaphs, which were probably in many cases prearranged by the
deceased.
For long the desire for crude self-assertion of the name-scrawling sort
and the love of secret understandings kept writing within a narrow
scope; but that other, more truly social desire in men, the desire to
_tell_, was also at work. The profounder possibilities of writing, the
possibilities of a vast extension and definition and settlement of
knowledge and tradition, only grew apparent after long ages. But it will
be interesting at this point and in this connection to recapitulate
certain elemental facts about life, upon which we laid stress in our
earlier chapters, because they illuminate not only the huge value of
writing in the whole field of man’s history, but also the rôle it is
likely to play in his future.
1. Life had at first, it must be remembered, only a discontinuous
repetition of consciousness, as the old died and the young were born.
Such a creature as a reptile has in its brain a capacity for experience,
but when the individual dies, its experience dies with it. Most of its
motives are purely instinctive, and all the mental life that it has is
the result of heredity (birth inheritance).
2. But ordinary mammals have added to pure instinct _tradition_, a
tradition of experience imparted by the imitated example of the mother,
and in the case of such mentally developed animals as dogs, cats, or
apes, by a sort of mute precept also. For example, the mother cat
chastises her young for misbehaviour. So do mother apes and baboons.
3. Primitive man added to his powers of transmitting experience,
representative art and speech. Pictorial and sculptured record and
_verbal tradition_ began.
Verbal tradition was developed to its highest possibility by the bards.
They did much to make language what it is to the world to-day.
4. With the invention of writing, which developed out of pictorial
record, human tradition was able to become fuller and much more exact.
Verbal tradition, which had hitherto changed from age to age, began to
be fixed. Men separated by hundreds of miles could now communicate their
thoughts. An increasing number of human beings began to share a common
written knowledge and a common sense of a past and a future. Human
thinking became a larger operation in which hundreds of minds in
different places and in different ages could react upon one another; it
became a process constantly more continuous and sustained....
5. For hundreds of generations the full power of writing was not
revealed to the world, because for a long time the idea of multiplying
writings by taking prints of a first copy did not become effective. The
only way of multiplying writings was by copying one copy at a time, and
this made books costly and rare. Moreover, the tendency to keep things
secret, to make a cult and mystery of them, and so to gain an advantage
over the generality of men, has always been very strong in men’s minds.
It is only nowadays that the great masses of mankind are learning to
read, and reaching out towards the treasures of knowledge and thought
already stored in books.
Nevertheless, from the first writings onward a new sort of tradition, an
enduring and immortal tradition, began in the minds of men. Life,
through mankind, grew thereafter more and more distinctly conscious of
itself and its world. It is a thin streak of intellectual growth we
trace in history, at first in a world of tumultuous ignorance and
forgetfulness; it is like a mere line of light coming through the chink
of an opening door into a darkened room; but slowly it widens, it grows.
At last came a time in the history of Europe when the door, at the push
of the printer, began to open more rapidly. Knowledge flared up, and as
it flared it ceased to be the privilege of a favoured minority. For us
now that door swings wider, and the light behind grows brighter. Misty
it is still, glowing through clouds of dust and reek.
The door is not half open; the light is but a light new lit. Our world
to-day is only in the beginning of knowledge.
XIX
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS
§ 1. _Nomadic and Settled Religion._ § 2. _The Priest Comes into
History._ § 3. _Priests and the Stars._ § 4. _Priests and the Dawn
of Learning._ § 5. _King against Priest._ § 6. _How Bel-Marduk
Struggled against the Kings._ § 7. _The God-Kings of Egypt._ § 8.
_Shi Hwang-ti Destroys the Books._
§ 1
We have already told what there is to tell of the social life of the
Aryan tribes when they were settling down to the beginnings of civilized
life; we have seen how they were associated in great households, grouped
together under tribal leaders, who made a sort of informal aristocracy
rather like that of the sixth form and prefects in an English boys’
school; we have considered the rôle of the bards in the creation of an
oral tradition, and we have glanced at their not very complex religious
ideas. We may note one or two points of difference from the equivalent
life of the nomadic Semites.
Like the early Aryan life, it was a life in a sort of family-tribe
household. But it had differences due originally perhaps to the warmer,
drier climate. Though both groups of races had cattle and sheep, the
Aryans were rather herdsmen, the Semites, shepherds. The Semites had no
long winter evenings and no bardic singing. They never sat in hall. They
have consequently no epics. They had stories, camp-fire stories, but not
verbally beautified story-recitations. The Semite also was more
polygamous than the Aryan, his women less self-assertive,[135] and the
tendency of his government more patriarchal. The head of the household
or the tribe was less of a leader and more of a master, more like the
Palæolithic Old Man. And the Semitic nomads were closer to the earlier
civilizations, a thing that fitted in with their greater aptitude for
trade and counting. But the religion of the nomadic Semite was as little
organized as the religion of the Aryan. In either case the leading man
performed most of the functions of the priest. The Aryan gods were
little more than a kind of magical super-prince; they were supposed to
sit in hall together, and to talk and make scenes with one another under
Jupiter or Thor. The early Semitic gods, on the other hand, were thought
of as tribal patriarchs. As peoples develop towards nomadism, they seem
to lose even such primitive religion and magic as their Neolithic
ancestors professed. Nomadism cuts men off from fixed temples and
intense local associations; they take a broader and simpler view of the
world. They tend towards religious simplification.
We write here of the nomadic peoples, the Aryan herdsmen and Semitic
shepherds, and we write in the most general terms. They had their
undercurrent of fables and superstitions, their phases of fear and
abjection and sacrificial fury. These people were people like ourselves,
with brains as busy and moody and inconsistent, and with even less
training and discipline. It is absurd to suppose--as so many writers
about early religion do seem to suppose--that their religious notions
can be reduced to the consistent logical development of some one simple
idea. We have already glanced, in Chapter XII, at the elements of
religion that must have arisen necessarily in the minds of those early
peoples. But for most of the twenty-four hours these nomads were busy
upon other things, and there is no sign that their houses, their daily
routines, their ordinary acts, were dominated or their social order
shaped, by any ideas that we should now call religious. As yet life and
its ideas were too elementary for that.
But directly we turn our attention to these new accumulations of human
beings that are beginning in Egypt and Mesopotamia, we find that one of
the most conspicuous objects in every city is a temple or a group of
temples. In some cases there arises beside it in these regions a royal
palace, but as often the temple towers over the palace. This presence of
the temple is equally true of the Phœnician cities and of the Greek
and Roman as they arise. The palace of Cnossos, with its signs of
comfort and pleasure-seeking, and the kindred cities of the Ægean
peoples, include religious shrines, but in Crete there are also temples
standing apart from the palatial city-households. All over the ancient
civilized world we find them; wherever primitive civilization set its
foot in Africa, Europe, or western Asia, a temple arose, and where the
civilization is most ancient, in Egypt and in Sumer, there the temple is
most in evidence. When Hanno reached what he thought was the most
westerly point of Africa, he set up a temple to Hercules. We have, in
fact, come now to a new stage in the history of mankind, the temple
stage.
§ 2
In all these temples there was a shrine; dominating the shrine there was
commonly a great figure, usually of some monstrous half-animal form,
before which stood an altar for sacrifices. This figure was either
regarded as the god or as the image or symbol of the god, for whose
worship the temple existed. And connected with the temple there were a
number, and often a considerable number, of priests or priestesses, and
temple servants, generally wearing a distinctive costume and forming an
important part of the city population. They belonged to no household, as
did the simple priest of the primitive Aryan; they made up a new kind of
household of their own. They were a caste and a class apart, attracting
intelligent recruits from the general population.
The primary duty of this priesthood was concerned with the worship of
and the sacrifices to the god of the temple. And these things were done,
not at any time, but at particular times and seasons. There had come
into the life of man with his herding and agriculture a sense of a
difference between the parts of the year and of a difference between day
and day. Men were beginning to work--and to need days of rest. The
temple, by its festivals, kept count. The temple in the ancient city was
like the clock and calendar upon a writing-desk.
But it was a centre of other functions. It was in the early temples that
the records and tallies of events were kept and that writing began. And
there was knowledge there. The people went to the temple not only _en
masse_ for festivals, but individually for help. The early priests were
also doctors and magicians. In the earliest temples we already find
those little offerings for some private and particular end, which are
still made in the chapels of Catholic churches to-day, _ex votos_,
little models of hearts relieved and limbs restored, acknowledgment of
prayers answered and accepted vows.
It is clear that here we have that comparatively unimportant element in
the life of the early nomad, the medicine-man, the shrine-keeper, and
the memorist, developed, with the development of the community and as a
part of the development of the community from barbarism to civilized
settlement, into something of very much greater importance. And it is
equally evident that those primitive fears of (and hopes of help from)
strange beings, the desire to propitiate unknown forces, the primitive
desire for cleansing and the primitive craving for power and knowledge
have all contributed to crystallize out this new social fact of the
temple.
The temple was accumulated by complex necessities, it grew from many
roots and needs, and the god that dominated the temple was the creation
of many imaginations and made up of all sorts of impulses, ideas, and
half ideas. Here there was a god in which one sort of ideas
predominated, and there another. It is necessary to lay some stress upon
this confusion and variety of origin in gods, because there is a very
abundant literature now in existence upon religious origins, in which a
number of writers insist, some on this leading idea and some on that--we
have noted several in our Chapter XII on “Early Thought”--as though it
were the only idea. Professor Max Müller in his time, for example,
harped perpetually on the idea of sun stories and sun worship. He would
have had us think that early man never had lusts or fears, cravings for
power, nightmares or fantasies, but that he meditated perpetually on the
beneficent source of light and life in the sky. Now dawn and sunset are
very moving facts in the daily life, but they are only two among many.
[Illustration:
Set
Egyptian god of
darkness.
Anubis
darkness god.
Typhon
wife of Anubis, also
known as the Terrible One
The cheerful
Bes
J.F.H.]
Early men, three or four hundred generations ago, had brains very like
our own. The fancies of our childhood and youth are perhaps the best
clue we have to the ground-stuff of early religion, and anyone who can
recall those early mental experiences will understand very easily the
vagueness, the monstrosity, and the incoherent variety of the first
gods. There were sun gods, no doubt, early in the history of temples,
but there were also hippopotamus gods and hawk gods; there were cow
deities, there were monstrous male and female gods, there were gods of
terror and gods of an adorable quaintness, there were gods who were
nothing but lumps of meteoric stone that had fallen amazingly out of the
sky, and gods who were mere natural stones that had chanced to have a
queer and impressive shape. Some gods, like Marduk of Babylon and the
Baal (= the Lord) of the Phœnicians, Canaanites, and the like, were
quite probably at bottom just legendary wonder beings, such as little
boys will invent for themselves to-day. The early Semites, it is said,
as soon as they thought of a god, invented a wife for him; most of the
Egyptian and Babylonian gods were married. But the gods of the nomadic
Semites had not this marrying disposition. Children were less eagerly
sought by the inhabitants of the food-grudging steppes.
Even more natural than to provide a wife for a god is to give him a
house to live in to which offerings can be brought. Of this house the
knowing man, the magician, would naturally become the custodian. A
certain seclusion, a certain aloofness, would add greatly to the
prestige of the god. The steps by which the early temple and the early
priesthood developed so soon as an agricultural population settled and
increased are all quite natural and understandable, up to the stage of
the long temple with the image, shrine and altar at one end and the long
nave in which the worshippers stood. And this temple, because it had
records and secrets, because it was a centre of power, advice, and
instruction, because it sought and attracted imaginative and clever
people for its service, naturally became a kind of brain in the growing
community. The attitude of the common people who tilled the fields and
herded the beasts towards the temple would remain simple and credulous.
There, rarely seen and so imaginatively enhanced, lived the god whose
approval gave prosperity, whose anger meant misfortune; he could be
propitiated by little presents and the help of his servants could be
obtained. He was wonderful, and of such power and knowledge that it did
not do to be disrespectful to him even in one’s thoughts. Within the
priesthood, however, a certain amount of thinking went on at a rather
higher level than that.
§ 3[136]
And now we have to note a very interesting fact about the chief temples
of Egypt and, so far as we know--because the ruins are not so
distinct--of Babylonia, and that is that they were “oriented”--that is
to say, that the same sort of temple was built so that the shrine and
entrance always faced in the same direction.[137] In Babylonian temples
this was most often due east, facing the sunrise on March 21st and
September 21st, the equinoxes; and it is to be noted that it was at the
spring equinox that the Euphrates and Tigris came down in flood. The
Pyramids of Gizeh are also oriented east and west, and the Sphinx faces
due east, but very many of the Egyptian temples to the south of the
delta of the Nile do not point due east, but to the point where the sun
rises at the longest day--and in Egypt the inundation comes close to
that date. Others, however, pointed nearly northward, and others again
pointed to the rising of the star Sirius or to the rising-point of other
conspicuous stars. The fact of orientation links up with the fact that
there early arose a close association between various gods and the sun
and various fixed stars. Whatever the mass of people outside were
thinking, the priests of the temples were beginning to link the
movements of those heavenly bodies with the power in the shrine. They
were thinking about the gods they served and thinking new meanings into
them. They were brooding upon the mystery of the stars. It was very
natural for them to suppose that these shining bodies, so irregularly
distributed and circling so solemnly and silently, must be charged with
portents to mankind.
[Illustration:
Thoth-lunus
god of letters and
all learning
Hathor (Isis)
the Egyptian cow goddess ...
Chnemu
creator-god, married to
Hekt, a frog goddess.
]
Among other things, this orientation of the temples served to fix and
help the great annual festival of the New Year. On one morning in the
year, and one morning alone, in a temple oriented to the rising-place of
the sun at Midsummer Day, the sun’s first rays would smite down through
the gloom of the temple and the long alley of the temple pillars, and
light up the god above the altar and irradiate him with glory. The
narrow, darkened structure of the ancient temples seems to be
deliberately planned for such an effect. No doubt the people were
gathered in the darkness before the dawn; in the darkness there was
chanting and perhaps the offering of sacrifices; the god alone stood
mute and invisible. Prayers and invocations would be made. Then upon the
eyes of the worshippers, sensitized by the darkness, as the sun rose
behind them, the god would suddenly shine.
So, at least, one explanation of orientation is found by such students
of orientation as Sir Norman Lockyer.[138] Not only is orientation
apparent in most of the temples of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and the
east, it is found in the Greek temples; Stonehenge is oriented to the
midsummer sunrise, and so are most of the megalithic circles of Europe;
the Temple of Heaven in Peking is oriented to midwinter. In the days of
the Chinese Empire, up to a few years ago, one of the most important of
all the duties of the Emperor of China was to sacrifice and pray in this
temple upon midwinter’s day for a propitious year.
The Egyptian priests had mapped out the stars into the constellations,
and divided up the zodiac into twelve signs, by 3000 B.C. ...
§ 4
This clear evidence of astronomical inquiry and of a development of
astronomical ideas is the most obvious, but only the most obvious,
evidence of the very considerable intellectual activities that went on
within the temple precincts in ancient times. There is a curious
disposition among many modern writers to deprecate priesthoods and to
speak of priests as though they had always been impostors and
tricksters, preying upon the simplicity of mankind. But, indeed, they
were for long the only writing class, the only reading public, the only
learned and the only thinkers; they were all the professional classes of
the time. You could have no intellectual life at all, you could not get
access to literature or any knowledge except through the priesthood. The
temples were not only observatories and libraries and clinics, they were
museums and treasure-houses. The original _Periplus_ of Hanno hung in
one temple in Carthage, skins of his “gorillas” were hung and treasured
in another. Whatever there was of abiding worth in the life of the
community sheltered there. Herodotus, the early Greek historian (485-425
B.C.), collected most of his material from the priests of the countries
in which he travelled, and it is evident they met him generously and put
their very considerable resources completely at his disposal. Outside
the temples the world was still a world of blankly illiterate and
unspeculative human beings, living from day to day entirely for
themselves. Moreover, there is little evidence that the commonalty felt
cheated by the priests, or had anything but trust and affection for the
early priesthoods. Even the great conquerors of later times were anxious
to keep themselves upon the right side of the priests of the nations and
cities whose obedience they desired, because of the immense popular
influence of these priests.
No doubt there were great differences between temple and temple and cult
and cult in the spirit and quality of the priesthood. Some probably were
cruel, some vicious and greedy, many dull and doctrinaire, stupid with
tradition, but it has to be kept in mind that there were distinct limits
to the degeneracy or inefficiency of a priesthood. It had to keep its
grip upon the general mind. It could not go beyond what people would
stand--either towards the darkness or towards the light. Its authority
rested, in the end, on the persuasion that its activities were
propitious.
§ 5[139]
It is clear that the earliest civilized governments were essentially
priestly governments. It was not kings and captains who first set men
to the plough and a settled life. It was the ideas of the gods and
plenty, working with the acquiescence of common men. The early rulers of
Sumer we know were all priests, kings only because they were chief
priests. And priestly government had its own weaknesses as well as its
peculiar deep-rooted strength. The power of a priesthood is a power over
their own people alone. It is a subjugation through mysterious fears and
hopes. The priesthood can gather its people together for war, but its
traditionalism and all its methods unfit it for military control.
Against the enemy without, a priest-led people is feeble.
Moreover, a priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man
belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense _esprit de
corps_. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a
very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his
own temple. He lives or dies for the honour of his particular god. But
in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is
his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious
cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they
will overcome, but they will never coalesce. Our first perceptions of
events in Sumer, in the dim uncertain light before history began, is of
priests and gods in conflict; until the Sumerians were conquered by the
Semites they were never united; and the same incurable conflict of
priesthoods scars all the temple ruins of Egypt. It was impossible that
it could have been otherwise, having regard to the elements out of which
religion arose.
[Illustration: An Assyrian King & his Chief Minister]
It was out of those two main weaknesses of all priesthoods, namely, the
incapacity for efficient military leadership and their inevitable
jealousy of all other religious cults, that the power of secular
kingship arose. The foreign enemy either prevailed and set up a king
over the people, or the priesthoods who would not give way to each other
set up a common fighting captain, who retained more or less power in
peace time. This secular king developed a group of officials about him
and began, in relation to military organization, to take a share in the
priestly administration of the people’s affairs. So, growing out of
priestcraft and beside the priest, the king, the protagonist of the
priest, appears upon the stage of human history, and a very large
amount of the subsequent experiences of mankind is only to be understood
as an elaboration, complication, and distortion of the struggle,
unconscious or deliberate, between these two systems of human control,
the temple and the palace. And it was in the original centres of
civilization that this antagonism was most completely developed. The
Aryan peoples never passed through a phase of temple rule on their way
to civilization; they came to civilization late; they found that drama
already half-played. They took over the ideas of both temple and
kingship, when those ideas were already elaborately developed, from the
more civilized Hamitic or Semitic people they conquered.
The greater importance of the gods and the priests in the earlier
history of the Mesopotamian civilization is very apparent, but gradually
the palace won its way until it was at last in a position to struggle
definitely for the supreme power. At first, in the story, the palace is
ignorant and friendless in the face of the temple; the priests alone
read, the priests alone know, the people are afraid of him. But in the
dissensions of the various cults comes the opportunity of the palace.
From other cities, from among captives, from defeated or suppressed
religious cults, the palace gets men who also can read and who can do
magic things.[140] The court also becomes a centre of writing and
record; the king thinks for himself and becomes politic. Traders and
foreigners drift to the court, and if the king has not the full records
and the finished scholarship of the priests, he has a wider and fresher
first-hand knowledge of many things. The priest comes into the temple
when he is very young; he passes many years as a neophyte; the path of
learning the clumsy letters of primitive times is slow and toilsome; he
becomes erudite and prejudiced rather than a man of the world. Some of
the more active-minded young priests may even cast envious eyes at the
king’s service. There are many complications and variations in this
ages-long drama of the struggle going on beneath the outward conflicts
of priest and king, between the made man and the born man, between
learning and originality, between established knowledge and settled
usage on the one hand, and creative will and imagination on the other.
It is not always, as we shall find later, the priest who is the
conservative and unimaginative antagonist. Sometimes a king struggles
against narrow and obstructive priesthoods; sometimes priesthoods uphold
the standards of civilization against savage, egotistical, or
reactionary kings.
One or two outstanding facts and incidents of the early stages of this
fundamental struggle in political affairs are all that we can note here
between 4000 B.C. and the days of Alexander.
§ 6
In the early days of Sumeria and Akkadia the city-kings were priests and
medicine-men rather than kings, and it was only when foreign conquerors
sought to establish their hold in relation to existing institutions that
the distinction of priest and king became definite. But the god of the
priests remained as the real overlord of the land and of priest and king
alike. He was the universal landlord; the wealth and authority of his
temples and establishments outshone those of the king. Especially was
this the case within the city walls. Hammurabi, the founder of the first
Babylonian Empire, is one of the earlier monarchs whom we find taking a
firm grip upon the affairs of the community. He does it with the utmost
politeness to the gods. In an inscription recording his irrigation work
in Sumeria and Akkadia, he begins: “When Anu and Bel entrusted me with
the rule of Sumer and Akkad----.” We possess a code of laws made by this
same Hammurabi--it is the earliest known code of law--and at the head of
this code we see the figure of Hammurabi receiving the law from its
nominal promulgator, the god Shamash.
An act of great political importance in the conquest of any city was the
carrying off of its god to become a subordinate in the temple of its
conqueror. This was far more important than the subjugation of king by
king. Merodach, the Babylonian Jupiter, was carried off by the Elamites,
and Babylon did not feel independent until its return. But sometimes a
conqueror was afraid of the god he had conquered. In the collection of
letters addressed to Amenophis III and IV at Tel-Amarna in Egypt, to
which allusion has already been made, is one from a certain king,
Tushratta, King of Mitani, who has conquered Assyria and taken the
statue of the goddess Ishtar. Apparently he has sent this statue into
Egypt, partly to acknowledge the overlordship of Amenophis, but partly
because he fears her anger. (Winckler.) In the Bible is related (Sam. i.
v. 1) how the Ark of the Covenant of the God of the Hebrews was carried
off by the Philistines, as a token of conquest, into the temple of the
fish god, Dagon, at Ashdod, and how Dagon fell down and was broken, and
how the people of Ashdod were smitten with disease. In the latter story
particularly the gods and priests fill the scene; there is no king in
evidence at all.
Right through the history of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires no
monarch seems to have felt his tenure of power secure in Babylon until
he had “taken the hand of Bel”--that is to say, that he had been adopted
by the priesthood of “Bel” as the god’s son and representative. As our
knowledge of Assyrian and Babylonian history grows clearer, it becomes
plainer that the politics of that world, the revolutions, usurpations,
changes of dynasty, intrigues with foreign powers, turned largely upon
issues between the great wealthy priesthoods and the growing but still
inadequate power of the monarchy. The king relied on his army, and this
was usually a mercenary army of foreigners, speedily mutinous if there
was no pay or plunder, and easily bribed. We have already noted the name
of Sennacherib, the son of Sargon II, among the monarchs of the Assyrian
Empire. Sennacherib was involved in a violent quarrel with the
priesthood of Babylon; he never “took the hand of Bel”; and finally
struck at that power by destroying altogether the holy part of the city
of Babylon (691 B.C.) and removing the statue of Bel-Marduk to Assyria.
He was assassinated by one of his sons, and his successor, Esarhaddon
(his son, but not the son who was his assassin), found it expedient to
restore Bel-Marduk and rebuild his temple, and make his peace with the
god.[141]
Assurbanipal (Greek, Sardanapalus), the son of this Esarhaddon, is a
particularly interesting figure from this point of view of the
relationship of priesthood and king. His father’s reconciliation with
the priests of Bel-Marduk went so far that Sardanapalus was given a
Babylonian instead of a military Assyrian education. He became a great
collector of the clay documents of the past, and his library, which has
been unearthed, is now the most precious source of historical material
in the world. But for all his learning he kept his grip on the Assyrian
army; he made a temporary conquest of Egypt, suppressed a rebellion in
Babylon, and carried out a number of successful expeditions. As we have
already told in Chapter XVI, he was almost the last of the Assyrian
monarchs. The Aryan tribes, who knew more of war than of priestcraft,
and particularly the Scythians, the Medes and Persians, had long been
pressing upon Assyria from the north and north-east. The Medes and
Persians formed an alliance with the nomadic Semitic Chaldeans of the
south for the joint undoing of Assyria. Nineveh, the Assyrian capital,
fell to these Aryans in 606 B.C.
Sixty-seven years after the taking of Nineveh by the Aryans, which left
Babylonia to the Semitic Chaldeans, the last monarch of the Chaldean
Empire (the Second Babylonian Empire), Nabonidus, the father of
Belshazzar, was overthrown by Cyrus, the Persian. This Nabonidus, again,
was a highly educated monarch, who brought far too much intelligence and
imagination and not enough of the short range wisdom of this world to
affairs of state. He conducted antiquarian researches, and to his
researches it is that we owe the date of 3750 B.C., assigned to Sargon I
and still accepted by many authorities. He was proud of this
determination, and left inscriptions to record it. It is clear he was a
religious innovator; he built and rearranged temples and attempted to
centralize religion in Babylon by bringing a number of local gods to the
temple of Bel-Marduk. No doubt he realized the weakness and disunion of
his empire due to these conflicting cults, and had some conception of
unification in his mind.
Events were marching too rapidly for any such development. His
innovation had manifestly raised the suspicion and hostility of the
priesthood of Bel. They sided with the Persians. “The soldiers of Cyrus
entered Babylon without fighting.” Nabonidus was taken prisoner, and
Persian sentinels were set at the gates of the temple of Bel, “where the
services continued without intermission.”
Cyrus did, in fact, set up the Persian Empire in Babylon with the
blessing of Bel-Marduk. He gratified the conservative instincts of the
priests by packing off the local gods back to their ancestral temples.
He also restored the Jews to Jerusalem.[142] These were merely matters
of immediate policy to him. But in bringing in the irreligious Aryans,
the ancient priesthood was paying too highly for the continuation of its
temple services. It would have been wiser to have dealt with the
innovations of Nabonidus, that earnest heretic, to have listened to his
ideas, and to have met the needs of a changing world. Cyrus entered
Babylon 539 B.C.; by 521 B.C. Babylon was in insurrection again, and in
520 B.C. another Persian monarch, Darius, was pulling down her walls.
Within two hundred years the life had altogether gone out of those
venerable rituals of Bel-Marduk, and the temple of Bel-Marduk was being
used by builders as a quarry.
[Illustration: CHEPHREN]
§ 7[143]
The story of priest and king in Egypt is similar to, but by no means
parallel with, that of Babylonia. The kings of Sumeria and Assyria were
priests who had become kings; they were secularized priests. The Pharaoh
of Egypt does not appear to have followed precisely that line. Already
in the very oldest records the Pharaoh has a power and importance
exceeding that of any priest. He is, in fact, a god, and more than
either priest or king. We do not know how he got to that position. No
monarch of Sumeria or Babylonia or Assyria could have induced his people
to do for him what the great pyramid-building Pharaohs of the IVth
Dynasty made their people do in those vast erections. The earlier
Pharaohs were not improbably regarded as incarnations of the dominant
god. The falcon god Horus sits behind the head of the great statue of
Chephren. So late a monarch as Rameses III (XIXth Dynasty) is
represented upon his sarcophagus (now at Cambridge) bearing the
distinctive symbols of the three great gods of the Egyptian system.[144]
He carries the two sceptres of Osiris, the god of Day and Resurrection;
upon his head are the horns of the cow goddess Hathor, and also the sun
ball and feathers of Ammon Ra. He is not merely wearing the symbols of
these gods as a devout Babylonian might wear the symbols of Bel-Marduk;
he is these three gods in one.
[Illustration: Ramses III as Osiris--between the goddesses Nephthys and
Isis....
Relief on the cover of the sarcophagus (at Cambridge). After Sharpe.
Inscription (round the edges of cover), as far as decipherable.
“Osiris, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, lord of the two countries
... son of the Sun, beloved of the gods, lord of diadems, Rameses,
prince of Heliopolis, triumphant! Thou art in the condition of a
god, thou shalt arise as Usr, there is no enemy to thee, I give to
thee triumph among them....” BUDGE, _Catalogue, Egyptian
Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge_.
]
The student will find much more in Sir J. G. Frazer’s _Golden Bough_
about the ancient use of human beings as well as statues to represent
gods. Here we have merely to point to an apparent difference of idea
between the Asiatic and African monarchies in this respect.
We find also a number of sculptures and paintings to enforce the idea
that the Pharaohs were the actual sons of gods. The divine fathering and
birth of Amenophis III, for instance (of the XVIIIth Dynasty), is
displayed in extraordinary detail in a series of sculptures at Luxor.
Moreover, it was held that the Pharaohs, being of so divine a strain,
could not marry common clay, and consequently they were accustomed to
marry blood relations within the degrees of consanguinity now
prohibited, even marrying their sisters.
The struggle between palace and temple came into Egyptian history,
therefore, at a different angle from that at which it came into
Babylonia. Nevertheless, it came in. Professor Maspero (in his _New
Light on Ancient Egypt_) gives a very interesting account of the
struggle of Amenophis IV with the priesthoods, and particularly with
priests of the great god, Ammon Ra, Lord of Karnak. The mother of
Amenophis IV was not of the race of Pharaoh; it would seem that his
father, Amenophis III, made a love match with a subject, a beautiful
Syrian named Tii, and Professor Maspero finds in the possible opposition
to and annoyance of this queen by the priests of Ammon Ra the beginnings
of the quarrel. She may, he thinks, have inspired her son with a
fanatical hatred of Ammon Ra. But Amenophis IV may have had a wider
view. Like the Babylonian Nabonidus, who lived a thousand years later,
he may have had in mind the problem of moral unity in his empire. We
have already noted that Amenophis III ruled from Ethiopia to the
Euphrates, and that the store of letters to himself and his son found at
Tel Amarna show a very wide range of interest and influence. At any
rate, Amenophis IV set himself to close all the Egyptian and Syrian
temples, to put an end to all sectarian worship throughout his
dominions, and to establish everywhere the worship of one god, Aton, the
solar disk. He left his capital, Thebes, which was even more the city of
Ammon Ra than later Babylon was the city of Bel-Marduk, and set up his
capital at Tel Amarna; he altered his name from “Amenophis,” which
consecrated him to Ammon (Amen) to “Akhnaton,” the Sun’s Glory; and he
held his own against all the priesthoods of his empire for eighteen
years and died a Pharaoh.
[Illustration: Akhnaton(Amenophis IV)
[based on the cast at Cairo, & the reliefs in the Berlin Museum.]]
Opinions upon Amenophis IV, or Akhnaton, differ very widely. There are
those who regard him as the creature of his mother’s hatred of Ammon and
the uxorious spouse of a beautiful wife. Certainly he loved his wife
very passionately; he showed her great honour--Egypt honoured women, and
was ruled at different times by several queens--and he was sculptured in
one instance with his wife seated upon his knees, and in another in the
act of kissing her in a chariot; but men who live under the sway of
their womenkind do not sustain great empires in the face of the bitter
hostility of the most influential organized bodies in their realm.[145]
Others write of him as a “gloomy fanatic.” Matrimonial bliss is rare in
the cases of gloomy fanatics. It is much more reasonable to regard him
as the Pharaoh who refused to be a god. It is not simply his religious
policy and his frank display of natural affection that seem to mark a
strong and very original personality. His æsthetic ideas were his own.
He refused to have his portrait conventionalized into the customary
smooth beauty of the Pharaoh god, and his face looks out at us across an
interval of thirty-four centuries, a man amidst ranks of divine
insipidities.
A reign of eighteen years was not long enough for the revolution he
contemplated, and his son-in-law who succeeded him went back to Thebes
and made his peace with Ammon Ra.
To the very end of the story the divinity of kings haunted the Egyptian
mind, and infected the thoughts of intellectually healthier races. When
Alexander the Great reached Babylon, the prestige of Bel-Marduk was
already far gone in decay, but in Egypt, Ammon Ra was still god enough
to make a snob of the conquering Grecian. The priests of Ammon Ra, about
the time of the XVIIIth or XIXth Dynasty (_circa_ 1400 B.C.), had set up
in an oasis of the desert a temple and oracle. Here was an image of the
god which could speak, move its head, and accept or reject scrolls of
inquiry. This oracle was still flourishing in 332 B.C. The young master
of the world, it is related, made a special journey to visit it; he came
into the sanctuary, and the image advanced out of the darkness at the
back to meet him. There was an impressive exchange of salutations. Some
such formula as this must have been used (says Professor Maspero):
“Come, son of my loins, who loves me so that I give thee the royalty of
Ra and the royalty of Horus! I give thee valiance, I give thee to hold
all countries and all religions under thy feet; I give thee to strike
all the peoples united together with thy arm!”
So it was that the priests of Egypt conquered their conqueror, and an
Aryan monarch first became a god....[146]
§ 8
The struggle of priest and king in China cannot be discussed here at any
length. It was different again, as in Egypt it was different from
Babylonia, but we find the same effort on the part of the ruler to break
up tradition because it divides up the people. The Chinese Emperor, the
“Son of Heaven,” was himself a high-priest, and his chief duty was
sacrificial; in the more disorderly phases of Chinese history he ceases
to rule and continues only to sacrifice. The literary class was detached
from the priestly class at an early date. It became a bureaucratic body
serving the local kings and rulers. That is a fundamental difference
between the history of China and any Western history. While Alexander
was overrunning Western Asia, China, under the last priest-emperors of
the Chow Dynasty, was sinking into a state of great disorder. Each
province clung to its separate nationality and traditions, and the Huns
spread from province to province. The King of Ts’in (who lived about
eighty years after Alexander the Great), impressed by the mischief
tradition was doing in the land, resolved to destroy the entire Chinese
literature, and his son, Shi Hwang-ti, the “first universal Emperor,”
made a strenuous attempt to seek out and destroy all the existing
classics.[147] They vanished while he ruled, and he ruled without
tradition, and welded China into a unity that endured for some
centuries; but when he had passed, the hidden books crept out again.
China remained united, though not under his descendants, but after a
civil war under a fresh dynasty, the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.). The first
Han monarch did not sustain this campaign of Shi Hwang-ti against the
_literati_, and his successor made his peace with them and restored the
texts of the classics.
XX
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES, AND FREE INDIVIDUALS
§ 1. _The Common Man in Ancient Times._ § 2. _The Earliest Slaves._
§ 3. _The first “Independent” Persons._ § 4. _Social Classes Three
Thousand Years Ago._ § 5. _Classes Hardening into Castes._ § 6.
_Caste in India._ § 7. _The System of the Mandarins._ § 8. _A
Summary of Five Thousand Years._
§ 1
We have been sketching in the last four chapters the growth of civilized
states out of the primitive Neolithic agriculture that began in
Mesopotamia perhaps 15,000, perhaps 20,000, years ago. It was at first
horticulture rather than agriculture; it was done with the hoe before
the plough, and at first it was quite supplementary to the sheep, goat,
and cattle tending that made the “living” of the family tribe. We have
traced the broad outlines of the development in regions of exceptional
fruitfulness of the first settled village communities into more populous
towns and cities, and the growth of the village shrine and the village
medicine-man into the city temple and the city priesthood. We have noted
the beginnings of organized war, first as a bickering between villages,
and then as a more disciplined struggle between the priest-king and god
of one city and those of another. Our story has passed on rapidly from
the first indications of conquest and empire in Sumer, perhaps 6000 or
7000 B.C., to the spectacle of great empires growing up, with roads and
armies, with inscriptions and written documents, with educated
priesthoods and kings and rulers sustained by a tradition already
ancient. We have traced in broad outline the appearance and conflicts
and replacements of these empires of the great rivers. We have directed
attention, in particular, to the evidence of a development of still
wider political ideas as we find it betrayed by the actions and
utterances of such men as Nabonidus and Amenophis IV. It has been an
outline of the accumulations of human experience for ten or fifteen
thousand years, a vast space of time in comparison with all subsequent
history, but a brief period when we measure it against the succession of
endless generations that intervenes between us and the first rude
flint-using human creatures of the Pleistocene dawn. But for these last
four chapters we have been writing almost entirely not about mankind
generally, but only about the men who thought, the men who could draw
and read and write, the men who were altering their world. Beneath their
activities what was the life of the mute multitude?
The life of the common man was, of course, affected and changed by these
things, just as the lives of the domestic animals and the face of the
cultivated country were changed; but for the most part it was a change
suffered and not a change in which the common man upon the land had any
voice or will. Reading and writing were not yet for the likes of him. He
went on cultivating his patch, loving his wife and children, beating his
dog and tending his beasts, grumbling at hard times, fearing the magic
of the priests and the power of the gods, desiring little more except to
be left alone by the powers above him. So he was in 10,000 B.C.; so he
was, unchanged in nature and outlook, in the time of Alexander the
Great; so over the greater part of the world he remains to-day. He got
rather better tools, better seeds, better methods, a slightly sounder
house, he sold his produce in a more organized market as civilization
progressed. A certain freedom and a certain equality passed out of human
life when men ceased to wander. Men paid in liberty for safety, shelter,
and regular meals. By imperceptible degrees the common man found the
patch he cultivated was not his own; it belonged to the god; and he had
to pay a fraction of his produce to the god. Or the god had given it to
the king, who exacted his rent and tax. Or the king had given it to an
official, who was the lord of the common man. And sometimes the god or
the king or the noble had work to be done, and then the common man had
to leave his patch and work for his master.
How far the patch he cultivated was his own was never very clear to him.
In ancient Assyria the land seems to have been held as a sort of
freehold and the occupier paid taxes; in Babylonia the land was the
god’s, and he permitted the cultivator to work thereon. In Egypt the
temples or Pharaoh-the-god or the nobles under Pharaoh were the owners
and rent receivers. But the cultivator was not a slave; he was a
peasant, and only bound to the land in so far that there was nothing
else for him to do but cultivate, and nowhere else for him to go. He
lived in a village or town, and went out to his work. The village, to
begin with, was often merely a big household of related people under a
patriarch headman, the early town a group of householders under its
elders. There was no process of enslavement as civilization grew, but
the headmen and leaderly men grew in power and authority, and the common
men did not keep pace with them, and fell into a tradition of dependence
and subordination.
On the whole, the common men were probably well content to live under
lord or king or god and obey their bidding. It was safer. It was easier.
All animals--and man is no exception--begin life as dependents. Most men
never shake themselves loose from the desire for leading and
protection.[148]
§ 2
[Illustration: Egyptian peasants seized for non-payment of taxes ...
(Pyramid Age)]
The earlier wars did not involve remote or prolonged campaigns, and they
were waged by levies of the common people. But war brought in a new
source of possessions, plunder, and a new social factor, the captive. In
the earlier, simpler days of war, the captive man was kept only to be
tortured or sacrificed to the victorious god; the captive women and
children were assimilated into the tribe. But later many captives were
spared to be slaves because they had exceptional gifts or peculiar arts.
It would be the kings and captains who would take these slaves at first,
and it would speedily become apparent to them that these men were much
more their own than were the peasant cultivators and common men of their
own race.[149] The slave could be commanded to do all sorts of things
for his master that the quasi-free common man would not do so willingly
because of his attachment to his own patch of cultivation. From a very
early period the artificer was often a household slave, and the
manufacture of trade goods, pottery, textiles, metal ware, and so forth,
such as went on vigorously in the household city of the Minos of
Cnossos, was probably a slave industry from the beginning. Sayce, in his
_Babylonians and Assyrians_,[150] quotes Babylonian agreements for the
teaching of trades to slaves, and dealing with the exploitation of slave
products. Slaves produced slave children, enslavement in discharge of
debts added to the slave population; it is probable that as the cities
grew larger, a larger part of the new population consisted of these
slave artificers and slave servants in the large households. They were
by no means abject slaves; in later Babylon their lives and property
were protected by elaborate laws. Nor were they all outlanders. Parents
might sell their children into slavery, and brothers their orphan
sisters. Free men who had no means of livelihood would even sell
themselves into slavery. And slavery was the fate of the insolvent
debtor. Craft apprenticeship, again, was a sort of fixed-term slavery.
Out of the slave population, by a converse process, arose the freed-man
and freed-woman, who worked for wages and had still more definite
individual rights. Since in Babylon slaves could themselves own
property, many slaves saved up and bought themselves. Probably the town
slave was often better off and practically as free as the cultivator of
the soil, and as the rural population increased, its sons and daughters
came to mix with and swell the growing ranks of artificers, some bound,
some free.
As the extent and complexity of government increased, the number of
households multiplied. Under the king’s household grew up the households
of his great ministers and officials, under the temple grew up the
personal households of temple functionaries; it is not difficult to
realize how houses and patches of land would become more and more
distinctly the property of the occupiers, and more and more definitely
alienated from the original owner-god. The earlier empires in Egypt and
China both passed into a feudal stage, in which families, originally
official, became for a time independent noble families. In the later
stages of Babylonian civilization we find an increasing propertied class
of people appearing in the social structure, neither slaves nor peasants
nor priests nor officials, but widows and descendants of such people, or
successful traders and the like, and all _masterless_ folk. Traders came
in from the outside. Babylon was full of Aramean traders, who had great
establishments, with slaves, freed-men, employees of all sorts. (Their
book-keeping was a serious undertaking. It involved storing a great
multitude of earthenware tablets in huge earthenware jars.) Upon this
gathering mixture of more or less free and detached people would live
other people, traders, merchants, small dealers, catering for their
needs. Sayce (_op. cit._) gives the particulars of an agreement for the
setting up and stocking of a tavern and beerhouse, for example. The
passer-by, the man who happened to be about, had come into existence.
But another and far less kindly sort of slavery also arose in the old
civilization, and that was gang slavery. If it did not figure very
largely in the cities, it was very much in evidence elsewhere. The king
was, to begin with, the chief _entrepreneur_. He made the canals and
organized the irrigation (_e.g._ Hammurabi’s enterprises noted in the
previous chapter). He exploited mines. He seems (at Cnossos, _e.g._) to
have organized manufactures for export. The Pharaohs of the 1st Dynasty
were already working the copper and turquoise mines in the peninsula of
Sinai. For many such purposes gangs of captives were cheaper and far
more controllable than levies of the king’s own people. From an early
period, too, captives may have tugged the oars of the galleys, though
Torr (_Ancient Ships_) notes that up to the age of Pericles (450 B.C.)
the free Athenians were not above this task. And the monarch also found
slaves convenient for his military expeditions. They were uprooted men;
they did not fret to go home, because they had no homes to go to. The
Pharaohs hunted slaves in Nubia, in order to have black troops for their
Syrian expeditions. Closely allied to such slave troops were the
mercenary barbaric troops the monarchs caught into their service, not by
positive compulsion, but by the bribes of food and plunder and under the
pressure of need. As the old civilization developed, these mercenary
armies replaced the national levies of the old order more and more, and
servile gang labour became a more and more important and significant
factor in the economic system. From mines and canal and wall building,
the servile gang spread into cultivation. Nobles and temples adopted the
gang slave system for their works. Plantation gangs began to oust the
patch cultivation of the labourer-serf in the case of some staple
products....
§ 3
So, in a few paragraphs, we trace the development of the simple social
structure of the early Sumerian cities to the complex city crowds, the
multitude of individuals varying in race, tradition, education, and
function, varying in wealth, freedom, authority, and usefulness, in the
great cities of the last thousand years B.C. The most notable thing of
all is the gradual increase amidst this heterogeneous multitude of what
we may call _free individuals_, detached persons who are neither
priests, nor kings, nor officials, nor serfs, nor slaves, who are under
no great pressure to work, who have time to read and inquire. They
appear side by side with the development of social security and private
property. Coined money and monetary reckoning developed. The operations
of the Arameans and such-like Semitic trading people led to the
organization of credit and monetary security. In the earlier days almost
the only property, except a few movables, consisted of rights in land
and in houses; later, one could deposit and lend securities, could go
away and return to find one’s property faithfully held and secure.
Towards the middle of the period of the Persian Empire there lived one
free individual, Herodotus, who has a great interest for us because he
was among the first writers of critical and intelligent history, as
distinguished from a mere priestly or court chronicle. It is worth while
to glance here very briefly at the circumstances of his life. Later on
we shall quote from his history.
[Illustration: Brawl among boatmen ... (From tomb of
Ptah-hetep----Pyramid Age)]
We have already noted the conquest of Babylonia by the Aryan Persians
under Cyrus in 539 B.C. We have noted, further, that the Persian Empire
spread into Egypt, where its hold was precarious; and it extended also
over Asia Minor. Herodotus was born about 484 B.C. in a Greek city of
Asia Minor, Halicarnassus, which was under the overlordship of the
Persians, and directly under the rule of a political boss or tyrant.
There is no sign that he was obliged either to work for a living or
spend very much time in the administration of his property. We do not
know the particulars of his affairs, but it is clear that in this minor
Greek city, under foreign rule, he was able to obtain and read and study
manuscripts of nearly everything that had been written in the Greek
language before his time. He travelled, so far as one can gather, with
freedom and comfort about the Greek archipelagoes; he stayed wherever he
wanted to stay, and he seems to have found comfortable accommodation; he
went to Babylon and to Susa, the new capital the Persians had set up in
Babylonia to the east of the Tigris; he toured along the coast of the
Black Sea, and accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge about the
Scythians, the Aryan people who were then distributed over South Russia;
he went to the south of Italy, explored the antiquities of Tyre, coasted
Palestine, landed at Gaza, and made a long stay in Egypt. He went about
Egypt looking at temples and monuments and gathering information. We
know, not only from him, but from other evidence, that in those days the
older temples and the pyramids (which were already nearly three thousand
years old) were visited by strings of tourists, a special sort of
priests acting as guides. The inscriptions the sightseers scribbled upon
the walls remain to this day, and many of them have been deciphered and
published.
[Illustration: STATUETTES FROM MIDDLE-CLASS EGYPTIAN TOMBS SHOWING LOW
CLASS SOCIAL TYPES IN THE ANCIENT COMMUNITIES.]
As his knowledge accumulated, he conceived the idea of writing a great
history of the attempts of Persia to subdue Greece. But in order to
introduce that history he composed an account of the past of Greece,
Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Scythia, and of the geography and
peoples of those countries. He then set himself, it is said, to make his
history known among his friends in Halicarnassus by reciting it to them,
but they failed to appreciate it; and he then betook himself to Athens,
the most flourishing of all Greek cities at that time. There his work
was received with applause. We find him in the centre of a brilliant
circle of intelligent and active-minded people, and the city authorities
voted him a reward of ten talents (a sum of money equivalent to £2,400)
in recognition of his literary achievement....
But we will not complete the biography of this most interesting man, nor
will we enter into any criticism of his garrulous, marvel-telling, and
most entertaining history. It is a book to which all intelligent readers
come sooner or later, abounding as it does in illuminating errors and
Boswellian charm. We give these particulars here simply to show that in
the fifth century B.C. a new factor was becoming evident in human
affairs. Reading and writing had already long escaped from the temple
precincts and the ranks of the court scribes. Record was no longer
confined to court and temple. A new sort of people, these people of
leisure and independent means, were asking questions, exchanging
knowledge and views, and developing ideas. So beneath the march of
armies and the policies of monarchs, and above the common lives of
illiterate and incurious men, we note the beginnings of what is becoming
at last nowadays a dominant power in human affairs, the _free
intelligence of mankind_.
Of that free intelligence we shall have more to say when in a subsequent
chapter we tell of the Greeks.
§ 4
We may summarize the discussion of the last two chapters here by making
a list of the chief elements in this complicated accumulation of human
beings which made up the later Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations of
from two thousand five hundred to three thousand years ago. These
elements grew up and became distinct one from another in the great
river valleys of the world in the course of five or six thousand years.
They developed mental dispositions and traditions and attitudes of
thought one to another. The civilization in which we live to-day is
simply carrying on and still further developing and working out and
rearranging these relationships. This is the world from which we
inherit. It is only by the attentive study of their origins that we can
detach ourselves from the prejudices and immediate ideas of the
particular class to which we may belong, and begin to understand the
social and political questions of our own time.
(1) First, then, came the priesthood, _the temple system_, which
was the nucleus and the guiding intelligence about which the
primitive civilizations grew. It was still in these later days a
great power in the world, the chief repository of knowledge and
tradition, an influence over the lives of every one, and a binding
force to hold the community together. But it was no longer
all-powerful, because its nature made it conservative and
inadaptable. It no longer monopolized knowledge nor initiated fresh
ideas. Learning had already leaked out to other less pledged and
controlled people, who thought for themselves. About the temple
system were grouped its priests and priestesses, its scribes, its
physicians, its magicians, its lay brethren, treasurers, managers,
directors, and the like. It owned great properties and often
hoarded huge treasures.
(2) Over against the priesthood, and originally arising out of it,
was the _court system_, headed by a king or a “king of kings,” who
was in later Assyria and Babylonia a sort of captain and lay
controller of affairs, and in Egypt a god-man, who had released
himself from the control of his priests. About the monarch were
accumulated his scribes, counsellors, record keepers, agents,
captains, and guards. Many of his officials, particularly his
provincial officials, had great subordinate establishments, and
were constantly tending to become independent. The nobility of the
old river valley civilizations arose out of the court system. It
was, therefore, a different thing in its origins from the nobility
of the early Aryans, which was a republican nobility of elders and
leading men.
(3) At the base of the social pyramid was the large and most
necessary class in the community, _the tillers of the soil_. Their
status varied from age to age and in different lands; they were
free peasants paying taxes, or serfs of the god, or serfs or
tenants of king or noble, or of a private owner, paying him a rent;
in most cases tax or rent was paid in produce. In the states of the
river valleys they were high cultivators, cultivating comparatively
small holdings; they lived together for safety in villages, and had
a common interest in maintaining their irrigation channels and a
sense of community in their village life. The cultivation of the
soil is an exacting occupation; the seasons and the harvest sunsets
will not wait for men; children can be utilized at an early age,
and so the cultivator class is generally a poorly educated,
close-toiling class, superstitious by reason of ignorance and the
uncertainty of the seasons, ill-informed and easily put upon. It is
capable at times of great passive resistance, but it has no purpose
in its round but crops and crops, to keep out of debt and hoard
against bad times. So it has remained to our own days over the
greater part of Europe and Asia.
(4) Differing widely in origin and quality from the tillers of the
soil was _the artisan class_. At first, this was probably in part a
town-slave class, in part it consisted of peasants who had
specialized upon a craft. But in developing an art and mystery of
its own, a technique that had to be learnt before it could be
practised, each sort of craft probably developed a certain
independence and a certain sense of community of its own. The
artisans were able to get together and discuss their affairs more
readily than the toilers on the land, and they were able to form
guilds to restrict output, maintain rates of pay, and protect their
common interest.
(5) As the power of the Babylonian rulers spread out beyond the
original areas of good husbandry into grazing regions and less
fertile districts, a class of _herdsmen_ came into existence. In
the case of Babylonia these were nomadic Semites, the Bedouin, like
the Bedouin of to-day. They probably grazed their flocks over great
areas much as the sheep ranchers of California do.[151] They were
paid and esteemed much more highly than the husbandmen.
(6) The first _merchants_ in the world were shipowners, like the
people of Tyre and Cnossos, or nomads who carried and traded goods
as they wandered between one area of primitive civilization and
another. In the Babylonian and Assyrian world the traders were
predominantly the Semitic Arameans, the ancestors of the modern
Syrians. They became a distinct factor in the life of the
community; they formed great households of their own. Usury
developed largely in the last thousand years B.C. Traders needed
accommodation; cultivators wished to anticipate their crops. Sayce
(_op. cit._) gives an account of the Babylonian banking-house of
Egibi, which lasted through several generations and outlived the
Chaldean Empire.
(7) A class of _small retailers_, one must suppose, came into
existence with the complication of society during the later days of
the first empires, but it was not probably of any great importance.
It is difficult to understand how there could be much active
retailing without small change, and there is little evidence of
small change to be found either in Egypt or Mesopotamia.[152]
Shekels and half-shekels of silver, weighing something between a
quarter and half an ounce, are the lightest weights of stamped
metal of which we find mention.
(8) A growing class of _independent property owners_.
(9) As the amenities of life increased, there grew up in the court,
temples, and prosperous private houses a class of _domestic
servants_, slaves or freed slaves, or young peasants taken into the
household.
(10) _Gang workers._--These were prisoners of war or debt slaves,
or impressed or deported men.
(11) _Mercenary soldiers._--These also were often captives or
impressed men. Sometimes they were enlisted from friendly foreign
populations in which the military spirit still prevailed.
(12) _Seamen._
In modern political and economic discussions we are apt to talk rather
glibly of “labour.” Much has been made of the _solidarity of labour_ and
its sense of community. It is well to note that in these first
civilizations, what we speak of as “labour” is represented by five
distinct classes dissimilar in origin, traditions, and outlook--namely,
classes 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, and the oar-tugging part of 12. The “solidarity
of labour” is, we shall find when we come to study the mechanical
revolution of the nineteenth century A.D., a new idea and a new
possibility in human affairs.
§ 5
Let us, before we leave this discussion of the social classes that were
developing in these first civilizations, devote a little attention to
their fixity. How far did they stand aloof from each other, and how far
did they intermingle? So far as the classes we have counted as 9, 10,
11, and 12 go, the servants, the gang labourers and slaves, the gang
soldiers, and, to a lesser extent, the sailors, or at any rate the
galley rowers among the sailors, they were largely recruited classes,
they did not readily and easily form homes, they were not distinctively
breeding classes; they were probably replenished generation after
generation by captives, by the failures of other classes, and especially
from the failures of the class of small retailers, and by persuasion and
impressment from among the cultivators. But so far as the sailors go, we
have to distinguish between the mere rower and the navigating and
shipowning seamen of such ports as Tyre and Sidon. The shipowners pass,
no doubt, by insensible gradations into the mercantile class, but the
navigators must have made a peculiar community in the great seaports,
having homes there and handing on the secrets of seacraft to their sons.
The eighth class we have distinguished was certainly a precarious class,
continually increased by the accession of the heirs and dependents, the
widows and retired members of the wealthy and powerful, and continually
diminished by the deaths or speculative losses of these people and the
dispersal of their properties. The priests and priestesses too, so far
as all this world west of India went, were not a very reproductive
class; many priesthoods were celibate, and that class, too, may also be
counted as a recruited class. Nor are servants, as a rule, reproductive.
They live in the households of other people; they do not have households
and rear large families of their own. This leaves us as the really vital
classes of the ancient civilized community:
(_a_) The royal and aristocratic class, officials, military officers,
and the like;
(_b_) The mercantile class;
(_c_) The town artisans;
(_d_) The cultivators of the soil; and
(_e_) The herdsmen.
Each of these classes reared its own children in its own fashion, and so
naturally kept itself more or less continuously distinct from the
others. General education was not organized in those ancient states,
education was mainly a household matter (as it is still in many parts of
India to-day), and so it was natural and necessary for the sons to
follow in the footsteps of their father and to marry women accustomed to
their own sort of household. Except during times of great political
disturbance therefore, there would be a natural and continuous
separation of classes; which would not, however, prevent exceptional
individuals from intermarrying or passing from one class to another.
Poor aristocrats would marry rich members of the mercantile class;
ambitious herdsmen, artisans, or sailors would become rich merchants. So
far as one can gather, that was the general state of affairs in both
Egypt and Babylonia. The idea was formerly entertained that in Egypt
there was a fixity of classes, but this appears to be a misconception
due to a misreading of Herodotus. The only exclusive class in Egypt
which did not intermarry was, as in England to-day, the semi-divine
royal family.
At various points in the social system there were probably developments
of exclusiveness, an actual barring out of interlopers. Artisans of
particular crafts possessing secrets, for example, have among all races
and in all ages tended to develop guild organizations restricting the
practice of their craft and the marriage of members outside their guild.
Conquering people have also, and especially when there were marked
physical differences of race, been disposed to keep themselves aloof
from the conquered peoples, and have developed an aristocratic
exclusiveness. Such organizations of restriction upon free intercourse
have come and gone in great variety in the history of all long-standing
civilizations. The natural boundaries of function were always there, but
sometimes they have been drawn sharply and laid stress upon, and
sometimes they have been made little of. There has been a general
tendency among the Aryan peoples to distinguish noble (patrician) from
common (plebeian) families; the traces of it are evident throughout the
literature and life of Europe to-day, and it has received a picturesque
enforcement in the “science” of heraldry. This tradition is still active
even in democratic America. Germany, the most methodical of European
countries, had in the Middle Ages a very clear conception of the fixity
of such distinctions. Below the princes (who themselves constituted an
exclusive class which did not marry beneath itself) there were the:
(_a_) Knights, the military and official caste, with heraldic
coats-of-arms;
(_b_ and _c_) The Bürgerstand, the merchants, shipping people, and
artisans; and
(_d_) The Bauernstand, the cultivating serfs or peasants.
Mediæval Germany went as far as any of the Western heirs of the first
great civilizations towards a fixation of classes. The idea is far less
congenial both to the English-speaking people and to the French and
Italians, who, by a sort of instinct, favour a free movement from class
to class. Such exclusive ideas began at first among, and were promoted
chiefly by, the upper classes, but it is a natural response and a
natural Nemesis to such ideas that the mass of the excluded should
presently range themselves in antagonism to their superiors. It was in
Germany, as we shall see in the concluding chapters of this story, that
the conception of a natural and necessary conflict, “the class war,”
between the miscellaneous multitudes of the disinherited (“the
class-conscious proletariat” of the Marxist) and the rulers and
merchants first arose. It was an idea more acceptable to the German mind
than to the British or French.... But before we come to that conflict,
we must traverse a long history of many centuries.
§ 6
If now we turn eastward from this main development of civilization in
the world between Central Asia and the Atlantic, to the social
development of India in the 2000 years next before the Christian era, we
find certain broad and very interesting differences. The first of these
is that we find such a fixity of classes in process of establishment as
no other part of the world can present. This fixity of classes is known
to Europeans as the institution of _caste_;[153] its origins are still
in complete obscurity, but it was certainly well rooted in the Ganges
valley before the days of Alexander the Great. It is a complicated
horizontal division of the social structure into classes or castes, the
members of which may neither eat nor intermarry with persons of a lower
caste under penalty of becoming outcasts, and who may also “lose caste”
for various ceremonial negligences and defilements. By losing caste a
man does not sink to a lower caste; he becomes outcast. The various
subdivisions of caste are very complex; many are practically trade
organizations. Each caste has its local organization which maintains
discipline, distributes various charities, looks after its own poor,
protects the common interests of its members, and examines the
credentials of newcomers from other districts. (There is little to check
the pretensions of a travelling Hindu to be of a higher caste than is
legitimately his.) Originally, the four main castes seem to have been:
The Brahmins--the priests and teachers;
The Kshatriyas--the warriors;
The Vaisyas--herdsmen, merchants, money-lenders, and land-owners;
The Sudras;
And, outside the castes, the Pariahs.
But these primary divisions have long been superseded by the
disappearance of the second and third primary castes, and the
subdivision of the Brahmins and Sudras into a multitude of minor castes,
all exclusive, each holding its members to one definite way of living
and one group of associates.
Next to this extraordinary fission and complication of the social body
we have to note that the Brahmins, the priests and teachers of the
Indian world, unlike so many Western priesthoods, are a reproductive and
exclusive class, taking no recruits from any other social stratum.
Whatever may have been the original incentive to this extensive fixation
of class in India, there can be little doubt of the rôle played by the
Brahmins as the custodians of tradition and the only teachers of the
people in sustaining it. By some it is supposed that the first three of
the four original castes, known also as the “twice born,” were the
descendants of the Vedic Aryan conquerors of India, who established
these hard-and-fast separations to prevent racial mixing with the
conquered Sudras and Pariahs. The Sudras are represented as a previous
wave of northern conquerors, and the Pariahs are the original Dravidian
inhabitants of India. But those speculations are not universally
accepted, and it is, perhaps, rather the case that the uniform
conditions of life in the Ganges valley throughout long centuries served
to stereotype a difference of classes that have never had the same
steadfastness of definition under the more various and variable
conditions of the greater world to the west.
However caste arose, there can be no doubt of its extraordinary hold
upon the Indian mind. In the sixth century B.C. arose Gautama, the great
teacher of Buddhism, proclaiming, “As the four streams that flow into
the Ganges lose their names as soon as they mingle their waters in the
holy river, so all who believe in Buddha cease to be Brahmins,
Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras.” His teaching prevailed in India for
some centuries; it spread over China, Tibet, Japan, Burmah, Ceylon,
Turkestan, Manchuria; it is to-day the religion of one-third of the
human race, but it was finally defeated and driven out of Indian life by
the vitality and persistence of the Brahmins and of their caste
ideas....
§ 7
In China we find a social system travelling along yet another and only a
very roughly parallel line to that followed by the Indian and Western
civilizations. The Chinese civilization even more than the Hindu is
organized for peace, and the warrior plays a small part in its social
scheme. As in the Indian civilization, the leading class is an
intellectual one; less priestly than the Brahmin and more official. But
unlike the Brahmins, the mandarins, who are the literate men of China,
are not a caste; one is not a mandarin by birth, but by education; they
are drawn by education and examination from all classes of the
community, and the son of a mandarin has no prescriptive right to
succeed his father.[154] As a consequence of these differences, while
the Brahmins of India are, as a class, ignorant even of their own sacred
books, mentally slack, and full of a pretentious assurance, the Chinese
mandarin has the energy that comes from hard mental work. But since his
education so far has been almost entirely a scholarly study of the
classical Chinese literature, his influence has been entirely
conservative. Before the days of Alexander the Great, China had already
formed itself and set its feet in the way in which it was still walking
in the year 1900 A.D. Invaders and dynasties had come and gone, but the
routine of life of the yellow civilization remained unchanged.
The traditional Chinese social system recognized four main classes below
the priest-emperor.
(_a_) The literary class, which was equivalent partly to the officials
of the Western world and partly to its teachers and clerics. In the time
of Confucius its education included archery and horsemanship. Rites and
music, history and mathematics completed the “Six Accomplishments.”
(_b_) The cultivators of the land.
(_c_) The artisans.
(_d_) The mercantile class.
But since from the earliest times it has been the Chinese way to divide
the landed possessions of a man among all his sons, there has never been
in Chinese history any class of great land-owners, renting their land to
tenants, such as most other countries have displayed. The Chinese land
has always been cut up into small holdings, which are chiefly freeholds,
and cultivated intensively. There are landlords in China who own one or
a few farms and rent them to tenants, but there are no great, permanent
estates. When a patch of land, by repeated division, is too small to
sustain a man, it is sold to some prospering neighbour, and the former
owner drifts to one of the great towns of China to join the mass of
wage-earning workers there. In China, for many centuries, there have
been these masses of town population with scarcely any property at all,
men neither serfs nor slaves, but held to their daily work by their
utter impecuniousness. From such masses it is that the soldiers needed
by the Chinese government are recruited, and also such gang labour as
has been needed for the making of canals, the building of walls, and the
like has been drawn.[155] The war captive and the slave class play a
smaller part in Chinese history than in any more westerly record of
these ages before the Christian era.
One fact, we may note, is common to all these three stories of
developing social structure, and that is the immense power exercised by
the educated class in the early stages before the crown or the
commonalty began to read and, consequently, to think for itself. In
India, by reason of their exclusiveness, the Brahmins, the educated
class, retain their influence to this day; over the masses of China,
along entirely different lines and because of the complexities of the
written language, the mandarinate has prevailed. The diversity of race
and tradition in the more various and eventful world of the West has
delayed, and perhaps arrested for ever, any parallel organization of the
specially intellectual elements of society into a class ascendancy. In
the Western world, as we have already noted, education early “slopped
over,” and soaked away out of the control of any special class; it
escaped from the limitation of castes and priesthoods and traditions
into the general life of the community. Writing and reading had been
simplified down to a point when it was no longer possible to make a cult
and mystery of them. It may be due to the peculiar elaboration and
difficulty of the Chinese characters, rather than to any racial
difference, that the same thing did not happen to the same extent in
China.
§ 8
In these last six chapters we have traced in outline the whole process
by which, in the course of 5000 or 6000 years--that is to say, in
something between 150 and 200 generations--mankind passed from the stage
of early Neolithic husbandry, in which the primitive skin-clad family
tribe reaped and stored in their rude mud huts the wild-growing fodder
and grain-bearing grasses with sickles of stone, to the days of the
fourth century B.C., when all round the shores of the Mediterranean and
up the Nile, and across Asia to India, and again over the great alluvial
areas of China, spread the fields of human cultivation and busy cities,
great temples, and the coming and going of human commerce. Galleys and
lateen-sailed ships entered and left crowded harbours, and made their
careful way from headland to headland and from headland to island,
keeping always close to the land. Phœnician shipping under Egyptian
owners was making its way into the East Indies and perhaps even further
into the Pacific. Across the deserts of Africa and Arabia and through
Turkestan toiled the caravans with their remote trade; silk was already
coming from China, ivory from Central Africa, and tin from Britain to
the centres of this new life in the world. Men had learnt to weave fine
linen[156] and delicate fabrics of coloured wool; they could bleach and
dye; they had iron as well as copper, bronze, silver, and gold; they had
made the most beautiful pottery and porcelain; there was hardly a
variety of precious stone in the world that they had not found and cut
and polished; they could read and write; divert the course of rivers,
pile pyramids, and make walls a thousand miles long. The fifty or sixty
centuries in which all this had to be achieved may seem a long time in
comparison with the threescore and ten years of a single human life, but
it is utterly inconsiderable in comparison with the stretches of
geological time. Measuring backward from these Alexandrian cities to the
days of the first stone implements, the _rostro-carinate_ implements of
the Pliocene Age, gives us an extent of time fully a hundred times as
long.
We have tried in this account, and with the help of maps and figures and
time charts, to give a just idea of the order and shape of these fifty
or sixty centuries. Our business is with that outline. We have named but
a few names of individuals; though henceforth the personal names must
increase in number. But the content of this outline that we have drawn
here in a few diagrams and charts cannot but touch the imagination. If
only we could look closelier, we should see through all these sixty
centuries a procession of lives more and more akin in their fashion to
our own. We have shown how the naked Palæolithic savage gave place to
the Neolithic cultivator, a type of man still to be found in the
backward places of the world. We have given an illustration of Sumerian
soldiers copied from a carved stone that was set up long before the days
when the Semitic Sargon I conquered the land. Day by day some busy
brownish man carved those figures, and, no doubt, whistled as he carved.
In those days the plain of the Egyptian delta was crowded with gangs of
swarthy workmen unloading the stone that had come down the Nile to add a
fresh course to the current pyramid. One might paint a thousand scenes
from those ages: of some hawker merchant in Egypt spreading his stock of
Babylonish garments before the eyes of some pretty, rich lady; of a
miscellaneous crowd swarming between the pylons to some temple festival
at Thebes; of an excited, dark-eyed audience of Cretans like the
Spaniards of to-day, watching a bull-fight, with the bull-fighters in
trousers and tightly girded, exactly like any contemporary bull-fighter;
of children learning their cuneiform signs--at Nippur the clay exercise
tiles of a school have been found; of a woman with a sick husband at
home slipping into some great temple in Carthage to make a vow for his
recovery. Or perhaps it is a wild Greek, skin-clad and armed with a
bronze axe, standing motionless on some Illyrian mountain crest, struck
with amazement at his first vision of a many-oared Cretan galley
crawling like a great insect across the amethystine mirror of the
Adriatic Sea. He went home to tell his folk a strange story of a
monster, Briareus with his hundred arms. Of millions of such stitches in
each of these 200 generations is the fabric of this history woven. But
unless they mark the presence of a primary seam or join, we cannot pause
now to examine any of these stitches.
BOOK IV
JUDEA, GREECE, AND INDIA
XXI
THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS[157]
§ 1. _The Place of the Israelites in History._ § 2. _Saul, David,
and Solomon._ § 3. _The Jews a People of Mixed Origin._ § 4. _The
Importance of the Hebrew Prophets._
§ 1
We are now in a position to place in their proper relationship to this
general outline of human history the Israelites, and the most remarkable
collection of ancient documents in the world, that collection which is
known to all Christian peoples as the Old Testament. We find in these
documents the most interesting and valuable lights upon the development
of civilization, and the clearest indications of a new spirit that was
coming into human affairs during the struggles of Egypt and Assyria for
predominance in the world of men.
All the books that constitute the Old Testament were certainly in
existence, and in very much their present form, at latest by the year
100 B.C. They were probably already recognized as sacred writings in the
time of Alexander the Great (330 B.C.), and known and read with the
utmost respect a hundred years before his time.[158] At that time some
of them were of comparatively recent composition; others were already of
very considerable antiquity. They were the sacred literature of a
people, the Jews, who, except for a small remnant of common people, had
recently been deported to Babylonia from their own country in 587 B.C.
by Nebuchadnezzar II, the Chaldean. They had returned to their city,
Jerusalem, and had rebuilt their temple there under the auspices of
Cyrus, that Persian conqueror who, we have already noted, in 539 B.C.
overthrew Nabonidus, the last of the Chaldean rulers in Babylon. The
Babylonian Captivity had lasted about fifty years, and many authorities
are of opinion that there was a considerable admixture during that
period both of race and ideas with the Babylonians.
The position of the land of Judea and of Jerusalem, its capital, is a
peculiar one. The country is a band-shaped strip between the
Mediterranean to the west and the desert beyond the Jordan to the east;
through it lies the natural high road between the Hittites, Syria,
Assyria, and Babylonia to the north and Egypt to the south. It was a
country predestined, therefore, to a stormy history. Across it Egypt,
and whatever power was ascendant in the north, fought for empire;
against its people they fought for a trade route. It had itself neither
the area, the agricultural possibilities, nor the mineral wealth to be
important. The story of its people that these scriptures have preserved
runs like a commentary to the greater history of the two systems of
civilization to the north and south and of the sea peoples to the west.
These scriptures consist of a number of different elements. The first
five books, the _Pentateuch_, were early regarded with peculiar respect.
They begin in the form of a universal history with a double account of
the Creation of the world and mankind, of the early life of the race,
and of a great Flood by which, except for certain favoured individuals,
mankind was destroyed. Excavations have revealed Babylonian versions of
both the Creation story and the Flood story of prior date to the
restoration of the Jews, and it is therefore argued by Biblical critics
that these opening chapters were acquired by the Jews during their
captivity. They constitute the first ten chapters of Genesis. There
follows a history of the fathers and founders of the Hebrew nation,
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They are presented as patriarchal Bedouin
chiefs, living the life of nomadic shepherds in the country between
Babylonia and Egypt. The existing Biblical account is said by the
critics to be made up out of several pre-existing versions; but whatever
its origins, the story, as we have it to-day, is full of colour and
vitality. What is called Palestine to-day was at that time the land of
Canaan, inhabited by a Semitic people called the Canaanites, closely
related to the Phœnicians who founded Tyre and Sidon, and to the
Amorites who took Babylon and, under Hammurabi, founded the first
Babylonian Empire. The Canaanites were a settled folk in the days--which
were perhaps contemporary with the days of Hammurabi--when Abraham’s
flocks and herds passed through the land. The God of Abraham, says the
Bible narrative, promised this smiling land of prosperous cities to him
and to his children. To the book of Genesis the reader must go to read
how Abraham, being childless, doubted this promise, and of the births of
Ishmael and Isaac. And in Genesis too, he will find the lives of Isaac
and Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel, and of the twelve sons of
Israel; and how in the days of a great famine they went down into Egypt.
With that, Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch, ends. The next
book, Exodus, is concerned with the story of Moses.
The story of the settlement and slavery of the children of Israel in
Egypt is a difficult one. There is an Egyptian record of a settlement of
certain Semitic peoples in the land of Goshen by the Pharaoh Rameses II,
and it is stated that they were drawn into Egypt by want of food. But of
the life and career of Moses there is no Egyptian record at all; there
is no account of any plagues of Egypt or of any Pharaoh who was drowned
in the Red Sea. There is much about the story of Moses that has a
mythical flavour, and one of the most remarkable incidents in it, his
concealment by his mother in an ark of bulrushes, has also been found in
an ancient Sumerian inscription made at least a thousand years before
his time by that Sargon I who founded the ancient Akkadian Sumerian
Empire. It runs:
“Sargon, the powerful king, the king of Akkadia am I, my mother was
poor, my father I knew not; the brother of my father lived in the
mountains.... My mother, who was poor, secretly gave birth to me; she
placed me in a _basket of reeds_, she shut up the mouth of it with
bitumen, she abandoned me to the river, which did not overwhelm me. The
river bore me away and brought me to Akki the irrigator. Akki the
irrigator received me in the goodness of his heart. Akki the irrigator
reared me to boyhood. Akki the irrigator made me a gardener. My service
as a gardener was pleasing unto Istar and I became king.”
[Illustration: The LAND of the HEBREWS]
This is perplexing. Still more perplexing is the discovery of a clay
tablet written by the Egyptian governors of a city in Canaan to the
Pharaoh Amenophis IV, who came in the XVIIIth Dynasty before Rameses II,
apparently mentioning the Hebrews by name and declaring that they are
overrunning Canaan. Manifestly, if the Hebrews were conquering Canaan in
the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, they could not have been made captive
and oppressed, before they conquered Canaan, by Rameses II of the XIXth
Dynasty. But it is quite understandable that the Exodus story, written
long after the events it narrates, may have concentrated and simplified,
and perhaps personified and symbolized, what was really a long and
complicated history of tribal invasions. One Hebrew tribe may have
drifted down into Egypt and become enslaved, while the others were
already attacking the outlying Canaanite cities. It is even possible
that the land of the captivity was not Egypt (Hebrew, Misraim), but
Misrim in the north of Arabia, on the other side of the Red Sea. These
questions are discussed fully and acutely in the _Encyclopædia Biblica_
(articles _Moses_ and _Exodus_), to which the curious reader must be
referred.[159]
Two other books of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy and Leviticus, are
concerned with the Law and the priestly rules. The book of Numbers takes
up the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert and their invasion of
Canaan.
Whatever the true particulars of the Hebrew invasion of Canaan may be,
there can be no doubt that the country they invaded had changed very
greatly since the days of the legendary promise, made centuries before,
to Abraham. Then it seems to have been largely a Semitic land, with many
prosperous trading cities. But great waves of strange peoples had washed
along this coast. We have already told how the dark Iberian or
Mediterranean peoples of Italy and Greece, the peoples of that Ægean
civilization which culminated at Cnossos, were being assailed by the
southward movement of Aryan-speaking races, such as the Italians and
Greeks, and how Cnossos was sacked about 1400 B.C., and destroyed
altogether about 1000 B.C. It is now evident that the people of these
Ægean seaports were crossing the sea in search of securer land nests.
They invaded the Egyptian delta and the African coast to the west, they
formed alliances with the Hittites and other Aryan or Aryanized races.
This happened after the time of Rameses II, in the time of Rameses III.
Egyptian monuments record great sea fights, and also a march of these
people along the coast of Palestine towards Egypt. Their transport was
in the ox-carts characteristic of the Aryan tribes, and it is clear that
these Cretans were acting in alliance with some early Aryan invaders. No
connected narrative of these conflicts that went on between 1300 B.C.
and 1000 B.C. has yet been made out, but it is evident from the Bible
narrative, that when the Hebrews under Joshua pursued their slow
subjugation of the promised land, they came against a new people, the
Philistines, unknown to Abraham,[160] who were settling along the coast
in a series of cities of which Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon, and Joppa
became the chief, who were really, like the Hebrews, newcomers, and
probably chiefly these Cretans from the sea and from the north. The
invasion, therefore, that began as an attack upon the Canaanites,
speedily became a long and not very successful struggle for the coveted
and promised land with these much more formidable newcomers, the
Philistines.
It cannot be said that the promised land was ever completely in the
grasp of the Hebrews. Following after the Pentateuch in the Bible come
the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth (a digression), Samuel I and II, and
Kings I and II, with Chronicles repeating with variation much of the
matter of Samuel II and Kings; there is a growing flavour of reality in
most of this latter history, and in these books we find the Philistines
steadfastly in possession of the fertile lowlands of the south, and the
Canaanites and Phœnicians holding out against the Israelites in the
north. The first triumphs of Joshua are not repeated. The book of Judges
is a melancholy catalogue of failures. The people lose heart. They
desert the worship of their own god Jehovah,[161] and worship Baal and
Ashtaroth (= Bel and Ishtar). They mixed their race with the
Philistines, with the Hittites, and so forth, and became, as they have
always subsequently been, a racially mixed people. Under a series of
wise men and heroes they wage a generally unsuccessful and never very
united warfare against their enemies. In succession they are conquered
by the Moabites, the Canaanites, the Midianites, and the Philistines.
The story of these conflicts, of Gideon and of Samson and the other
heroes who now and then cast a gleam of hope upon the distresses of
Israel, is told in the book of Judges. In the first book of Samuel is
told the story of their great disaster at Ebenezer in the days when Eli
was judge.
This was a real pitched battle in which the Israelites lost 30,000 (!)
men. They had previously suffered a reverse and lost 4000 men, and then
they brought out their most sacred symbol, the Ark of the Covenant of
God.
“And when the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all
Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the earth rang again. And
when the Philistines heard the noise of the shout, they said, ‘What
meaneth the noise of this great shout in the camp of the Hebrews?’ And
they understood, that the ark of the Lord was come into the camp. And
the Philistines were afraid, for they said, ‘God is come into the camp,’
And they said, ‘Woe unto us! for there hath not been such a thing
heretofore. Woe unto us! who shall deliver us out of the hand of these
mighty Gods? these are the Gods that smote the Egyptians with all the
plagues in the wilderness. Be strong, and quit yourselves like men, O ye
Philistines, that ye be not servants unto the Hebrews, as they have been
to you: quit yourselves like men, and fight.’
“And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and they fled every
man into his tent: and there was a very great slaughter for there fell
of Israel thirty thousand[162] footmen. And the ark of God was taken;
and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain.
“And there ran a man of Benjamin out of the army, and came to Shiloh the
same day with his clothes rent, and with earth upon his head. And when
he came, lo, Eli sat upon a seat by the wayside watching: for his heart
trembled for the ark of God. And when the man came into the city and
told it, all the city cried out. And when Eli heard the noise of the
crying, he said, ‘What meaneth the noise of this tumult?’ And the man
came in hastily, and told Eli. Now Eli was ninety and eight years old;
and his eyes were dim, that he could not see. And the man said unto Eli,
‘I am he that came out of the army, and I fled to-day out of the army.’
And he said, ‘What is there done, my son?’ And the messenger answered
and said, ‘Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there hath been
also a great slaughter among the people, and thy two sons also, Hophni
and Phinehas, are dead, and the ark of God is taken.’ And it came to
pass when he made mention of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off his
seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died:
for he was an old man, and heavy. And he had judged Israel forty years.
“And his daughter in law, Phinehas’ wife, was with child, near to be
delivered: and when she heard the tidings that the ark of God was taken,
and that her father in law and her husband were dead, she bowed herself
and travailed; for her pains came upon her. And about the time of her
death the women that stood by her said unto her, ‘Fear not; for thou
hast born a son! But she answered not, neither did she regard it. And
she named the child I-chabod,[163] saying, ‘The glory is departed from
Israel:’ because the ark of God was taken, and because of her father in
law and her husband.” (1 Sam., chap. iv.)
The successor of Eli and the last of the Judges was Samuel, and at the
end of his rule came an event in the history of Israel which paralleled
and was suggested by the experience of the greater nations around. A
king arose. We are told in vivid language the plain issue between the
more ancient rule of priestcraft and the newer fashion in human affairs.
It is impossible to avoid a second quotation.
“Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to
Samuel unto Ramah, and said unto him: ‘Behold, thou art old, and thy
sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the
nations.’
“But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, ‘Give us a king to
judge us.’ And Samuel prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto
Samuel, ‘Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto
thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I
should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have
done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this
day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they
also unto thee. Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet
protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that
shall reign over them.’
“And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of
him a king. And he said, ‘This will be the manner of the king that shall
reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself,
for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his
chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains
over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his
harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his
chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectioners, and to be
cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your
vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to
his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your
vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will
take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young
men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of
your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that
day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord
will not hear you in that day.’
“Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they
said, ‘Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like
all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us,
and fight our battles.’” (I Sam., chap. viii.)
§ 2
But the nature and position of their land was against the Hebrews, and
their first king Saul was no more successful than their judges. The long
intrigues of the adventurer David against Saul are told in the rest of
the first book of Samuel, and the end of Saul was utter defeat upon
Mount Gilboa. His army was overwhelmed by the Philistine archers.
“And it came to pass on the morrow, when the Philistines came to strip
the slain, that they found Saul and his three sons fallen in Mount
Gilboa. And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent
into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house
of their idols, and among the people. And they put his armour in the
house of Ashtaroth; and they fastened his body to the wall of
Beth-shan.” (I Sam., chap, xxxi.)
David (990 B.C. roughly) was more politic and successful than his
predecessor, and he seems to have placed himself under the protection
of Hiram, King of Tyre. This Phœnician alliance sustained him, and
was the essential element in the greatness of his son Solomon. His
story, with its constant assassinations and executions, reads rather
like the history of some savage chief than of a civilized monarch. It is
told with great vividness in the second book of Samuel.
The first book of Kings begins with the reign of King Solomon (960 B.C.
roughly). The most interesting thing in that story, from the point of
view of the general historian, is the relationship of Solomon to the
national religion and the priesthood, and his dealings with the
tabernacle, the priest Zadok, and the prophet Nathan.
The opening of Solomon’s reign is as bloody as his father’s. The last
recorded speech of David arranges for the murder of Shimei; his last
recorded word is “blood.” “But his hoar head bring thou down to the
grave with blood,” he says, pointing out that though old Shimei is
protected by a vow David had made to the Lord so long as David lives,
there is nothing to bind Solomon in that matter. Solomon proceeds to
murder his brother, who has sought the throne but quailed and made
submission. He then deals freely with his brother’s party. The weak hold
of religion upon the racially and mentally confused Hebrews at that time
is shown by the ease with which he replaces the hostile chief priest by
his own adherent Zadok, and still more strikingly by the murder of Joab
by Benaiah, Solomon’s chief ruffian, in the Tabernacle, while the victim
is claiming sanctuary and holding to the very horns of Jehovah’s altar.
Then Solomon sets to work, in what was for that time a thoroughly modern
spirit, to recast the religion of his people. He continues the alliance
with Hiram, King of Sidon, who uses Solomon’s kingdom as a high road by
which to reach and build shipping upon the Red Sea, and a hitherto
unheard-of wealth accumulates in Jerusalem as a result of this
partnership. Gang labour appears in Israel; Solomon sends relays of men
to cut cedarwood in Lebanon under Hiram, and organizes a service of
porters through the land. (There is much in all this to remind the
reader of the relations of some Central African chief to a European
trading concern.) Solomon then builds a palace for himself, and a temple
not nearly as big for Jehovah. Hitherto, the Ark of the Covenant, the
divine symbol of these ancient Hebrews, had abode in a large tent,
which had been shifted from one high place to another, and sacrifices
had been offered to the God of Israel upon a number of different high
places. Now the ark is brought into the golden splendours of the inner
chamber of a temple of cedar-sheathed stone, and put between two great
winged figures of gilded olivewood, and sacrifices are henceforth to be
made only upon the altar before it.
This centralizing innovation will remind the reader of both Akhnaton and
Nabonidus. Such things as this are done successfully only when the
prestige and tradition and learning of the priestly order has sunken to
a very low level.[164]
“And he appointed, according to the order of David his father, the
courses of the priests to their service, and the Levites to their
charges, to praise and minister before the priests, as the duty of every
day required; the porters also by their courses at every gate; for so
had David the man of God commanded. And they departed not from the
commandment of the king unto the priests and Levites concerning any
matter, or concerning the treasures.”
Neither Solomon’s establishment of the worship of Jehovah in Jerusalem
upon this new footing, nor his vision of and conversation with his God
at the opening of his reign, stood in the way of his developing a sort
of theological flirtatiousness in his declining years. He married
widely, if only for reasons of state and splendour, and he entertained
his numerous wives by sacrificing to their national deities, to the
Sidonian goddess Ashtaroth (Ishtar), to Chemosh (a Moabitish god), to
Moloch, and so forth. The Bible account of Solomon does, in fact, show
us a king and a confused people, both superstitious and mentally
unstable, in no way more religious than any other people of the
surrounding world.
A point of considerable interest in the story of Solomon, because it
marks a phase in Egyptian affairs, is his marriage to a daughter of
Pharaoh: This must have been one of the Pharaohs of the XXIst Dynasty:
In the great days of Amenophis III, as the Tel Amarna letters witness,
Pharaoh could condescend to receive a Babylonian princess into his
harem, but he refused absolutely to grant so divine a creature as an
Egyptian princess in marriage to the Babylonian monarch. It points to
the steady decline of Egyptian prestige that now, three centuries later,
such a petty monarch as Solomon could wed on equal terms with an
Egyptian princess. There was, however, a revival with the next Egyptian
dynasty (XXII); and the Pharaoh Shishak, the founder, taking advantage
of the cleavage between Israel and Judah, which had been developing
through the reigns of both David and Solomon, took Jerusalem and looted
the all-too-brief splendours both of the new temple and of the king’s
house.
Shishak seems also to have subjugated Philistia. From this time onward
it is to be noted that the Philistines fade in importance. They had
already lost their Cretan language and adopted that of the Semites they
had conquered, and although their cities remain more or less
independent, they merge gradually into the general Semitic life of
Palestine.
There is evidence that the original rude but convincing narrative of
Solomon’s rule, of his various murders, of his association with Hiram,
of his palace and temple building, and the extravagances that weakened
and finally tore his kingdom in twain, has been subjected to extensive
interpolations and expansions by a later writer, anxious to exaggerate
his prosperity and glorify his wisdom. It is not the place here to deal
with the criticism of Bible origins, but it is a matter of ordinary
common sense rather than of scholarship to note the manifest reality and
veracity of the main substance of the account of David and Solomon, an
account explaining sometimes and justifying sometimes, but nevertheless
relating facts, even the harshest facts, as only a contemporary or
almost contemporary writer, convinced that they cannot be concealed,
would relate them, and then to remark the sudden lapse into adulation
when the inserted passages occur. It is a striking tribute to the power
of the written assertion over realities in men’s minds that this Bible
narrative has imposed, not only upon the Christian, but upon the Moslim
world, the belief that King Solomon was not only one of the most
magnificent, but one of the wisest of men. Yet the first book of Kings
tells in detail his utmost splendours, and beside the beauty and wonder
of the buildings and organizations of such great monarchs as Thotmes III
or Rameses II or half a dozen other Pharaohs, or of Sargon II or
Sardanapalus or Nebuchadnezzar the Great, they are trivial. His temple,
measured internally, was twenty cubits broad, about 35 feet[165]--that
is, the breadth of a small villa residence--and sixty cubits, say, 100
feet, long. And as for his wisdom and statescraft, one need go no
further than the Bible to see that Solomon was a mere helper in the
wide-reaching schemes of the trader-king Hiram, and his kingdom a pawn
between Phœnicia and Egypt. His importance was due largely to the
temporary enfeeblement of Egypt, which encouraged the ambition of the
Phœnician and made it necessary to propitiate the holder of the key
to an alternate trade route to the East. To his own people Solomon was a
wasteful and oppressive monarch, and already before his death his
kingdom was splitting, visibly to all men.
With the reign of King Solomon the brief glory of the Hebrews ends; the
northern and richer section of his kingdom, long oppressed by taxation
to sustain his splendours, breaks off from Jerusalem to become the
separate kingdom of Israel, and this split ruptures that linking
connection between Sidon and the Red Sea by which Solomon’s gleam of
wealth was possible. There is no more wealth in Hebrew history.
Jerusalem remains the capital of one tribe, the tribe of Judah, the
capital of a land of barren hills, cut off by Philistia from the sea and
surrounded by enemies.
The tales of wars, of religious conflicts, of usurpations,
assassinations, and of fratricidal murders to secure the throne goes on
for three centuries. It is a tale frankly barbaric. Israel wars with
Judah and the neighbouring states; forms alliances first with one and
then with the other. The power of Aramean Syria burns like a baleful
star over the affairs of the Hebrews, and then there rises behind it the
great and growing power of the last Assyrian Empire. For three centuries
the life of the Hebrews was like the life of a man who insists upon
living in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, and is consequently being
run over constantly by omnibuses and motor-lorries.
“Pul” (apparently the same person as Tiglath Pileser III) is, according
to the Bible narrative, the first Assyrian monarch to appear upon the
Hebrew horizon, and Menahem buys him off with a thousand talents of
silver (738 B.C.). But the power of Assyria is heading straight for the
now aged and decadent land of Egypt, and the line of attack lies through
Judea; Tiglath Pileser III returns and Shalmaneser follows in his steps,
the King of Israel intrigues for help with Egypt, that “broken reed,”
and in 721 B.C., as we have already noted, his kingdom is swept off into
captivity and utterly lost to history. The same fate hung over Judah,
but for a little while it was averted. The fate of Sennacherib’s army in
the reign of King Hezekiah (701 B.C.), and how he was murdered by his
sons (II Kings xix. 37), we have already mentioned. The subsequent
subjugation of Egypt by Assyria finds no mention in Holy Writ, but it is
clear that before the reign of Sennacherib, King Hezekiah had carried on
a diplomatic correspondence with Babylon (700 B.C.), which was in revolt
against Sargon II of Assyria. There followed the conquest of Egypt by
Esarhaddon, and then for a time Assyria was occupied with her own
troubles; the Scythians and Medes and Persians were pressing her on the
north, and Babylon was in insurrection. As we have already noted, Egypt,
relieved for a time from Assyrian pressure, entered upon a phase of
revival, first under Psammetichus and then under Necho II.
Again the little country in between made mistakes in its alliances. But
on neither side was there safety. Josiah opposed Necho, and was slain at
the battle of Megiddo (608 B.C.). The king of Judah became an Egyptian
tributary. Then when Necho, after pushing as far as the Euphrates, fell
before Nebuchadnezzar II, Judah fell with him (604 B.C.).
Nebuchadnezzar, after a trial of three puppet kings, carried off the
greater part of the people into captivity in Babylon (586 B.C.), and the
rest, after a rising and a massacre of Babylonian officials, took refuge
from the vengeance of Chaldea in Egypt.
“And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and the
treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king, and
of his princes; all these he brought to Babylon. And they burnt the
house of God and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the
palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof.
And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon;
where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the
kingdom of Persia.” (II Chron. xxxvi. 18, 19, 20.)
So the four centuries of Hebrew kingship comes to an end. From first to
last it was a mere incident in the larger and greater history of Egypt,
Syria, Assyria, and Phœnicia. But out of it there were now to arise
moral and intellectual consequences of primary importance to all
mankind.
§ 3
The Jews who returned, after an interval of more than two generations,
to Jerusalem from Babylonia in the time of Cyrus were a very different
people from the warring Baal worshippers and Jehovah worshippers, the
sacrificers in the high places and sacrificers at Jerusalem of the
kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The plain fact of the Bible narrative is
that the Jews went to Babylon barbarians and came back civilized. They
went a confused and divided multitude, with no national
self-consciousness; they came back with an intense and exclusive
national spirit. They went with no common literature generally known to
them, for it was only about forty years before the captivity that king
Josiah is said to have discovered “a book of the law” in the temple (II
Kings xxii.), and, besides that, there is not a hint in the record of
any reading of books; and they returned with most of their material for
the Old Testament. It is manifest that, relieved of their bickering and
murderous kings, restrained from politics and in the intellectually
stimulating atmosphere of that Babylonian world, the Jewish mind made a
great step forward during the captivity.
It was an age of historical inquiry and learning in Babylonia. The
Babylonian influences that had made Sardanapalus collect a great library
of ancient writings in Nineveh were still at work. We have already told
how Nabonidus was so preoccupied with antiquarian research as to neglect
the defence of his kingdom against Cyrus. Everything, therefore,
contributed to set the exiled Jews inquiring into their own history, and
they found an inspiring leader in the prophet Ezekiel. From such hidden
and forgotten records as they had with them, genealogies, contemporary
histories of David, Solomon, and their other kings, legends and
traditions, they made out and amplified their own story, and told it to
Babylon and themselves. The story of the Creation and the Flood, much of
the story of Moses, much of Samson, were probably incorporated from
Babylonian sources.[166] When the Jews returned to Jerusalem, only the
Pentateuch had been put together into one book, but the grouping of the
rest of the historical books was bound to follow.
The rest of their literature remained for some centuries as separate
books, to which a very variable amount of respect was paid. Some of the
later books are frankly post-captivity compositions. Over all this
literature were thrown certain leading ideas. There was an idea, which
even these books themselves gainsay in detail, that all the people were
pure-blooded children of Abraham; there was next an idea of a promise
made by Jehovah to Abraham that he would exalt the Jewish race above all
other races; and, thirdly, there was the belief first of all that
Jehovah was the greatest and most powerful of tribal gods, and then that
he was a god above all other gods, and at last that he was the only true
god. The Jews became convinced at last, as a people, that they were the
chosen people of the one God of all the earth.
And arising very naturally out of these three ideas, was a fourth, the
idea of a coming leader, a saviour, a Messiah who would realize the
long-postponed promises of Jehovah.
This welding together of the Jews into one tradition-cemented people in
the course of the “seventy years” is the first instance in history of
the new power of the written word in human affairs. It was a mental
consolidation that did much more than unite the people who returned to
Jerusalem. This idea of belonging to a chosen race predestined to
pre-eminence was a very attractive one. It possessed also those Jews who
remained in Babylonia. Its literature reached the Jews now established
in Egypt. It affected the mixed people who had been placed in Samaria,
the old capital of the kings of Israel when the ten tribes were deported
to Media. It inspired a great number of Babylonians and the like to
claim Abraham as their father, and thrust their company upon the
returning Jews. Ammonites and Moabites became adherents. The book of
Nehemiah is full of the distress occasioned by this invasion of the
privileges of the chosen. The Jews were already a people dispersed in
many lands and cities, when their minds and hopes were unified and they
became an exclusive people. But at first their exclusiveness is merely
to preserve soundness of doctrine and worship, warned by such lamentable
lapses as those of King Solomon. To genuine proselytes of whatever race,
Judaism long held out welcoming arms.
To Phœnicians after the falls of Tyre and Carthage, conversion to
Judaism must have been particularly easy and attractive. Their language
was closely akin to Hebrew. It is possible that the great majority of
African and Spanish Jews are really of Phœnician origin. There were
also great Arabian accessions. In South Russia, as we shall note later,
there were even Mongolian Jews.
§ 4
The historical books from Genesis to Nehemiah, upon which the idea of
the promise to the chosen people had been imposed later, were no doubt
the backbone of Jewish mental unity, but they by no means complete the
Hebrew literature from which finally the Bible was made up. Of such
books as Job, said to be an imitation of Greek tragedy, the Song of
Solomon, the Psalms, Proverbs, and others, there is no time to write in
this _Outline_, but it is necessary to deal with the books known as “the
Prophets” with some fullness. For those books are almost the earliest
and certainly the best evidence of the appearance of a new kind of
leading in human affairs.[167]
These prophets are not a new class in the community; they are of the
most various origins--Ezekiel was of the priestly caste and of priestly
sympathies, and Amos was a shepherd; but they have this in common, that
they bring into life a religious force outside the sacrifices and
formalities of priesthood and temple. The earlier prophets seem most
like the earlier priests, they are oracular, they give advice and
foretell events; it is quite possible that at first, in the days when
there were many high places in the land and religious ideas were
comparatively unsettled, there was no great distinction between priest
and prophet. The prophets danced, it would seem, somewhat after the
Dervish fashion, and uttered oracles. Generally they wore a distinctive
mantle of rough goat-skin. They kept up the nomadic tradition as against
the “new ways” of the settlement. But after the building of the temple
and the organization of the priesthood, the prophetic type remains over
and outside the formal religious scheme. They were probably always more
or less of an annoyance to the priests. They became informal advisers
upon public affairs, denouncers of sin and strange practices,
“self-constituted,” as we should say, having no sanction but an inner
light. “Now the word of the Lord came unto”--so and so; that is the
formula.
In the latter and most troubled days of the kingdom of Judah, as Egypt,
North Arabia, Assyria, and then Babylonia closed like a vice upon the
land, these prophets became very significant and powerful. Their appeal
was to anxious and fearful minds, and at first their exhortation was
chiefly towards repentance, the pulling down of this or that high place,
the restoration of worship in Jerusalem, or the like. But through some
of the prophecies there runs already a note like the note of what we
call nowadays a “social reformer.” The rich are “grinding the faces of
the poor”; the luxurious are consuming the children’s bread; influential
and wealthy people make friends with and imitate the splendours and
vices of foreigners, and sacrifice the common people to these new
fashions; and this is hateful to Jehovah, who will certainly punish the
land.
But with the broadening of ideas that came with the Captivity, the
tenour of prophecy broadens and changes. The jealous pettiness that
disfigures the earlier tribal ideas of God give place to a new idea of a
god of universal righteousness. It is clear that the increasing
influence of prophets was not confined to the Jewish people; it was
something that was going on in those days all over the Semitic world.
The breaking down of nations and kingdoms to form the great and changing
empires of that age, the smashing up of cults and priesthoods, the
mutual discrediting of temple by temple in their rivalries and
disputes--all these influences were releasing men’s minds to a freer
and wider religious outlook. The temples had accumulated great stores of
golden vessels and lost their hold upon the imaginations of men. It is
difficult to estimate whether, amidst these constant wars, life had
become more uncertain and unhappy than it had ever been before, but
there can be no doubt that men had become more conscious of its miseries
and insecurities. Except for the weak and the women, there remained
little comfort or assurance in the sacrifices, ritual and formal
devotions of the temples. Such was the world to which the later prophets
of Israel began to talk of the One God, and of a Promise that some day
the world should come to peace and unity and happiness. This great God
that men were now discovering lived in a temple “not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens.” There can be little doubt of a great body of
such thought and utterance in Babylonia, Egypt, and throughout the
Semitic east. The prophetic books of the Bible can be but specimens of
the prophesyings of that time....
We have already drawn attention to the gradual escape of writing and
knowledge from their original limitation to the priesthood and the
temple precincts, from the shell in which they were first developed and
cherished. We have taken Herodotus as an interesting specimen of what we
have called the free intelligence of mankind. Now here we are dealing
with a similar overflow of moral ideas into the general community. The
Hebrew prophets, and the steady expansion of their ideas towards one God
in all the world, is a parallel development of the free conscience of
mankind. From this time onward there runs through human thought, now
weakly and obscurely, now gathering power, the idea of one rule in the
world, and of a promise and possibility of an active and splendid peace
and happiness in human affairs. From being a temple religion of the old
type, the Jewish religion becomes, to a large extent, a prophetic and
creative religion of a new type. Prophet succeeds prophet. Later on, as
we shall tell, there was born a prophet of unprecedented power, Jesus,
whose followers founded the great universal religion of Christianity.
Still later Muhammad, another prophet, appears in Arabia and founds
Islam. In spite of very distinctive features of their own, these two
teachers do in a manner arise out of, and in succession to these Jewish
prophets. It is not the place of the historian to discuss the truth and
falsity of religion, but it is his business to record the appearance of
great constructive ideas. Two thousand four hundred years ago, and six
or seven or eight thousand years after the walls of the first Sumerian
cities arose, the ideas of the moral unity of mankind and of a world
peace had come into the world.[168]
XXII
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS[169]
§ 1. _The Hellenic Peoples._ § 2. _Distinctive Features of Hellenic
Civilization._ § 3. _Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy in Greece._ §
4. _The Kingdom of Lydia._ § 5. _The Rise of the Persians in the East._
§ 6. _The Story of Crœsus._ § 7. _Darius Invades Russia._ § 8. _The
Battle of Marathon._ § 9. _Thermopylæ and Salamis._ § 10. _Platæa and
Mycale._
§ 1
And now our history must go back again to those Aryan-speaking peoples
of whose early beginnings we have given an account in Chapters XIV and
XV. We must, for the sake of precision, repeat here two warnings we have
already given the reader: first, that we use the word Aryan in its
widest sense, to express all the early peoples who spoke languages of
the “Indo-Germanic” or “Indo-European” group; and, secondly, that when
we use the word Aryan we do not imply any racial purity.
The original speakers of the fundamental Aryan language, 2000 or 3000
years B.C., were probably a specialized and distinctive Nordic race of
fair white men, accustomed to forests and cattle, who wandered east of
the Rhine and through the forests of the Danube valley, the Balkan
peninsula, Asia Minor, and eastward to the north and west of the great
Central Asian Sea; but very early they had encountered and mixed
themselves extensively, and as they spread they continued to mix
themselves with other races, with races of uncertain affinities in Asia
Minor and with Iberian and Mediterranean peoples of the dark-haired
white race. For instance, the Aryans, spreading and pressing westward
in successive waves of Keltic-speaking peoples through Gaul and Britain
and Ireland, mixed more and more with Iberian races, and were affected
more and more by that Iberian blood and their speech by the
characteristics of the language their Keltic tongue superseded. Other
waves of Keltic peoples washed with diminishing force into Spain and
Portugal, where to this day the pre-Keltic strain is altogether dominant
although the languages spoken are Aryan. Northward, in Europe, the Aryan
peoples were spreading into hitherto uninhabited country, and so
remaining racially more purely Nordic blonds. They had already reached
Scandinavia many centuries B.C.
From their original range of wandering, other Aryan tribes spread to the
north as well as to the south of the Black Sea, and ultimately, as these
seas shrank and made way for them, to the north and east of the Caspian,
and so began to come into conflict with and mix also with Mongolian
peoples of the Ural-Altaic linguistic group, the horse-keeping people of
the grassy steppes of Central Asia. From these Mongolian races the
Aryans seem to have acquired the use of the horse for riding and
warfare. There were three or four prehistoric varieties or sub-species
of horse in Europe and Asia, but it was the steppe or semi-desert lands
that first gave horses of a build adapted to other than food uses.[170]
All these peoples, it must be understood, shifted their ground rapidly,
a succession of bad seasons might drive them many hundreds of miles, and
it is only in a very rough and provisional manner that their “beats” can
now be indicated. Every summer they went north, every winter they swung
south again. This annual swing covered sometimes hundreds of miles. On
our maps, for the sake of simplicity, we represent the shifting of
nomadic peoples by a straight line; but really they moved in annual
swings, as the broom of a servant who is sweeping out a passage swishes
from side to side as she advances. Spreading round the north of the
Black Sea, and probably to the north of the Caspian, from the range of
the original Teutonic tribes of Central and North-central Europe to the
Iranian peoples who became the Medes and Persians and (Aryan) Hindus,
were the grazing lands of a confusion of tribes, about whom it is truer
to be vague than precise, such as the Cimmerians, the Sarmatians, and
those Scythians who, together with the Medes and Persians, came into
effective contact with the Assyrian Empire by 1000 B.C. or earlier.
East and south of the Black Sea, between the Danube and the Medes and
Persians, and to the north of the Semitic and Mediterranean peoples of
the sea coasts and peninsulas, ranged another series of equally
ill-defined Aryan tribes, moving easily from place to place and
intermixing freely--to the great confusion of historians. They seem, for
instance, to have broken up and assimilated the Hittite civilization,
which was probably pre-Aryan in its origin. They were, perhaps, not so
far advanced along the nomadic line as the Scythians of the great
plains.
The general characteristics of the original Aryan peoples we have
already discussed in Chapter XV. They were a forest people, not a steppe
people, and, consequently, wasteful of wood; they were a cattle people
and not a horse people. The Greeks appear in the dim light before the
dawn of history (say 1500 B.C.), as one of the wandering imperfectly
nomadic Aryan peoples who were gradually extending the range of their
pasturage southward into the Balkan peninsula and coming into conflict
and mixing with that preceding Ægean civilization of which Cnossos was
the crown.
[Illustration: Map showing Distribution of
ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES between about 1,000 & 500 B.C.]
[Illustration: Distribution of the Hellenic Races 1000 to 800 B.C.]
In the Homeric poems these Greek tribes speak one common language, and a
common tradition upheld by the epic poems keeps them together in a loose
unity; they call their various tribes by a common name, _Hellenes_. They
probably came in successive waves. Three main variations of the ancient
Greek speech are distinguished; the Ionic, the Æolic, and the Doric.
There was a great variety of dialects in Greece, almost every city
having its own output of literature.[171] The Doric apparently
constituted the last and most powerful wave of the migration. These
Hellenic tribes conquered and largely destroyed the Ægean civilization
that had preceded their arrival; upon its ashes they built up a
civilization of their own. They took to the sea and crossed by way of
the islands to Asia Minor; and, sailing through the Dardanelles and
Bosphorus, spread their settlements along the south, and presently along
the north borders of the Black Sea. They spread also over the south of
Italy, which was called at last Magna Græcia, and round the northern
coast of the Mediterranean. They founded the town of Marseilles on the
site of an earlier Phœnician colony. They began settlements in Sicily
in rivalry with the Carthaginians as early as 735 B.C.
In the rear of the Greeks proper came the kindred Macedonians and
Thracians; on their left wing, the Phrygians crossed by the Bosphorus
into Asia Minor.
[Illustration: An early Greek sea-fight. From a painted vase, about 550
B.C.]
We find all this distribution of the Greeks effected before the
beginnings of written history. By the seventh century B.C.--that is to
say, by the time of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews--the landmarks
of the ancient world of the pre-Hellenic civilization in Europe have
been obliterated. Tiryns and Cnossos are unimportant sites; Mycenæ and
Troy survive in legend; the great cities of this new Greek world are
Athens, Sparta (the capital of Lacedemon), Corinth, Thebes, Samos,
Miletus. The world our grandfathers called “Ancient Greece” had arisen
on the forgotten ruins of a still more Ancient Greece, in many ways as
civilized and artistic, of which to-day we are only beginning to learn
through the labours of the excavator. But the newer Ancient Greece, of
which we are now telling, still lives vividly in the imaginations and
institutions of men because it spoke a beautiful and most expressive
Aryan tongue akin to our own, and because it had taken over the
Mediterranean alphabet and perfected it by the addition of vowels, so
that reading and writing were now easy arts to learn and practise, and
great numbers of people could master them and make a record for later
ages.[172]
§ 2
Now this Greek civilization that we find growing up in South Italy and
Greece and Asia Minor in the seventh century B.C., is a civilization
differing in many important respects from the two great civilized
systems whose growths we have already traced, that of the Nile and that
of the Two Rivers of Mesopotamia. These civilizations grew through long
ages where they are found; they grew slowly about a temple life out of a
primitive agriculture; priest kings and god kings consolidated such
early city states into empires. But the barbaric Greek herdsmen raiders
came southward into a world whose civilization was already an old story.
Shipping and agriculture, walled cities and writing, were already there.
The Greeks did not grow a civilization of their own; they wrecked one
and put another together upon and out of the ruins.
To this we must ascribe the fact that there is no temple-state stage, no
stage of priest kings, in the Greek record. The Greeks got at once to
the city organization that in the east had grown round the temple. They
took over the association of temple and city; the idea was ready-made
for them. What impressed them most about the city was probably its wall.
It is doubtful if they took to city life and citizenship straight away.
At first they lived in open villages outside the ruins of the cities
they had destroyed, but there stood the model for them, a continual
suggestion. They thought first of a city as a safe place in a time of
strife, and of the temple uncritically as a proper feature of the city.
They came into this inheritance of a previous civilization with the
ideas and traditions of the woodlands still strong in their minds. The
heroic social system of the _Iliad_ took possession of the land, and
adapted itself to the new conditions. As history goes on the Greeks
became more religious and superstitious as the faiths of the conquered
welled up from below.[173]
We have already said that the social structure of the primitive Aryans
was a two-class system of nobles and commoners, the classes not very
sharply marked off from each other, and led in warfare by a king who was
simply the head of one of the noble families, _primus inter pares_, a
leader among his equals. With the conquest of the aboriginal population
and with the building of towns there was added to this simple social
arrangement of two classes a lower stratum of farm-workers and skilled
and unskilled workers, who were for the most part slaves. But all the
Greek communities were not of this “conquest” type. Some were “refugee”
cities representing smashed communities, and in these the aboriginal
substratum would be missing.
In many of the former cases the survivors of the earlier population
formed a subject class, slaves of the state as a whole, as, for
instance, the Helots in Sparta. The nobles and commoners became
landlords and gentlemen farmers; it was they who directed the
shipbuilding and engaged in trade. But some of the poorer free citizens
followed mechanic arts, and, as we have already noted, would even pull
an oar in a galley for pay. Such priests as there were in this Greek
world were either the guardians of shrines and temples or sacrificial
functionaries; Aristotle, in his _Politics_, makes them a mere
subdivision of his official class. The citizen served as warrior in
youth, ruler in his maturity, priest in his old age. The priestly
_class_, in comparison with the equivalent class in Egypt and Babylonia,
was small and insignificant. The gods of the Greeks proper, the gods of
the heroic Greeks, were, as we have already noted, glorified human
beings, and they were treated without very much fear or awe; but beneath
these gods of the conquering freemen lurked other gods of the subjugated
peoples, who found their furtive followers among slaves and women. The
original Aryan gods were not expected to work miracles or control men’s
lives. But Greece, like most of the Eastern world in the thousand years
B.C., was much addicted to consulting _oracles_ or soothsayers. Delphi
was particularly famous for its oracle. “When the Oldest Men in the
tribe could not tell you the right thing to do,” says Gilbert Murray,
“you went to the blessed dead. All oracles were at the tombs of Heroes.
They told you what was ‘Themis,’ what was the right thing to do, or, as
religious people would put it now, what was the Will of the God.”
[Illustration: Rowers in an Athenian warship, about 400 B.C. (Fragment
of relief found on the Acropolis)]
The priests and priestesses of these temples were not united into one
class, nor did they exercise any power as a class. It was the nobles and
free commoners, two classes which, in some cases, merged into one common
body of citizens, who constituted the Greek state. In many cases,
especially in great city states, the population of slaves and
unenfranchised strangers greatly outnumbered the citizens. But for them
the state did not exist; it existed for the select body of citizens
alone. It might or might not tolerate the outsider and the slave, but
they had no legal voice in their treatment--any more than if it had been
a despotism.[174]
This is a social structure differing widely from that of the Eastern
monarchies. The exclusive importance of the Greek citizen reminds one a
little of the exclusive importance of the children of Israel in the
later Jewish state, but there is no equivalent on the Greek side to the
prophets and priests, nor to the idea of an over-ruling Jehovah.
Another contrast between the Greek states and any of the human
communities to which we have hitherto given attention is their
continuous and incurable division. The civilizations of Egypt, Sumeria,
China, and no doubt North India, all began in a number of independent
city states, each one a city with a few miles of dependent agricultural
villages and cultivation around it, but out of this phase they passed by
a process of coalescence into kingdoms and empires. But to the very end
of their independent history the Greeks did not coalesce. Commonly, this
is ascribed to the geographical conditions under which they lived.
Greece is a country cut up into a multitude of valleys by mountain
masses and arms of the sea that render intercommunication difficult; so
difficult that few cities were able to hold many of the others in
subjection for any length of time. Moreover, many Greek cities were on
islands and scattered along remote coasts. To the end the largest city
states of Greece remained smaller than many English counties; and some
had an area of only a few square miles. Athens, the largest of the Greek
cities, at the climax of its power had a population of perhaps a third
of a million. Hardly any other Greek cities ever exceeded 50,000. Of
this, half or more were slaves and strangers, and two-thirds of the free
body women and children.
§ 3
The government of these city states varied very widely in its nature. As
they settled down after their conquests the Greeks retained for a time
the rule of their kings, but these kingdoms drifted back more and more
to the rule of the aristocratic class. In Sparta (Lacedemon) kings were
still distinguished in the sixth century B.C. The Lacedemonians had a
curious system of a double kingship; two kings, drawn from different
royal families, ruled together. But most of the Greek city states had
become aristocratic republics long before the sixth century. There is,
however, a tendency towards slackness and inefficiency in most families
that rule by hereditary right; sooner or later they decline; and as the
Greeks got out upon the seas and set up colonies and commerce extended,
new rich families arose to jostle the old and bring new personalities
into power. These _nouveaux riches_ became members of an expanded ruling
class, a mode of government known as oligarchy--in opposition to
aristocracy--though, strictly, the term oligarchy (= government by the
few) should of course include hereditary aristocracy as a special case.
In many cities persons of exceptional energy, taking advantage of some
social conflict or class grievance, secured a more or less irregular
power in the state. This combination of personality and opportunity has
occurred in the United States of America, for example, where men
exercising various kinds of informal power are called _bosses_. In
Greece they were called _tyrants_. But the tyrant was rather more than a
boss; he was recognized as a monarch, and claimed the authority of a
monarch. The modern boss, on the other hand, shelters behind legal forms
which he has “got hold of” and uses for his own ends. Tyrants were
distinguished from kings, who claimed some sort of right, some family
priority, for example, to rule. They were supported, perhaps, by the
poorer class with a grievance; Peisistratus, for example, who was tyrant
of Athens, with two intervals of exile, between 560 and 527 B.C., was
supported by the poverty-struck Athenian hillmen. Sometimes, as in Greek
Sicily, the tyrant stood for the rich against the poor. When, later on,
the Persians began to subjugate the Greek cities of Asia Minor, they set
up pro-Persian tyrants.
Aristotle, the great philosophical teacher, who was born under the
hereditary Macedonian monarchy, and who was for some years tutor to the
king’s son, distinguishes in his _Politics_ between kings who ruled by
an admitted and inherent right, such as the King of Macedonia, whom he
served, and tyrants who ruled without the consent of the governed. As a
matter of fact, it is hard to conceive of a tyrant ruling without the
consent of many, and the active participation of a substantial number of
his subjects; and the devotion and unselfishness of your “true kings”
has been known to rouse resentment and questioning. Aristotle was also
able to say that while the king ruled for the good of the state, the
tyrant ruled for his own good. Upon this point, as in his ability to
regard slavery as a natural thing and to consider women unfit for
freedom and political rights, Aristotle was in harmony with the trend of
events about him.
A third form of government that prevailed increasingly in Greece in the
sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C., was known as _democracy_. As
the modern world nowadays is constantly talking of democracy, and as the
modern idea of democracy is something widely different from the
democracy of the Greek city states, it will be well to be very explicit
upon the meaning of democracy in Greece. Democracy then was government
by the commonalty, the Demos; it was government by the whole body of the
citizens, by the many as distinguished from the few. But let the modern
reader mark that word “citizen.” The slave was excluded, the freedman
was excluded, the stranger; even the Greek born in the city, whose
father had come eight or ten miles from the city beyond the headland,
was excluded. The earlier democracies (but not all) demanded a property
qualification from the citizen, and property in those days was land;
this was subsequently relaxed, but the modern reader will grasp that
here was something very different from modern democracy. At the end of
the fifth century B.C. this property qualification had been abolished in
Athens, for example; but Pericles, a great Athenian statesman of whom we
shall have more to tell later, had established a law (451 B.C.)
restricting citizenship to those who could establish Athenian descent on
both sides. Thus, in the Greek democracies quite as much as in the
oligarchies, the citizens formed a _close corporation_, ruling
sometimes, as in the case of Athens in its great days, a big population
of serfs, slaves, and “outlanders.” A modern politician used to the
idea, the entirely new and different idea, that democracy in its
perfected form means that every adult man and woman shall have a voice
in the government, would, if suddenly spirited back to the extremist
Greek democracy, regard it as a kind of oligarchy. The only real
difference between a Greek “oligarchy” and a Greek democracy was that in
the former, the poorer and less important citizens had no voice in the
government, and in the latter every citizen had. Aristotle, in his
_Politics_, betrays very clearly the practical outcome of this
difference. Taxation sat lightly on the rich in the oligarchies; the
democracies, on the other hand, taxed the rich, and generally paid the
impecunious citizen a maintenance allowance and special fees. In Athens
fees were paid to citizens even for attending the general assembly. But
the generality of people outside the happy order of citizens worked and
did what they were told, and if one desired the protection of the law,
one sought a citizen to plead for one. For only the citizen had any
standing in the law courts. Greek democracy was, in fact, a sort of
government by a swarm of hereditary barristers. Our modern idea, that
any one in the state is a citizen, would have shocked the privileged
democrats of Athens profoundly.[175]
One obvious result of this monopolization of the state by the class of
citizens was that the patriotism of these privileged people took an
intense and narrow form. They would form alliances, but never coalesce
with other city states. That would have obliterated every advantage by
which they lived. There would have been no more fees, no more
privileges. The narrow geographical limits of these Greek states added
to the intensity of their feeling. A man’s love for his country was
reinforced by his love for his native town, his religion, and his home;
for these were all one. Of course the slaves did not share in these
feelings, and in the oligarchic states very often the excluded class got
over its dislike of foreigners in its greater dislike of the class at
home which oppressed it. But in the main, patriotism in the Greek was a
personal passion of an inspiring and dangerous intensity. Like rejected
love, it was apt to turn into something very like hatred. The Greek
exile resembled the French or Russian _émigré_ in being ready to treat
his beloved country pretty roughly in order to save her from the devils
in human form who had taken possession of her and turned _him_ out.
In the fifth century B.C. Athens formed a system of relationships with a
number of other Greek city states which is often spoken of by historians
as the Athenian Empire. But all the other city states retained their own
governments. One “new fact” added by the Athenian Empire was the
complete and effective suppression of piracy; another was the
institution of a sort of international law. The law, indeed, was
Athenian law; but actions could now be brought and justice administered
between citizens of the different states of the League, which of course
had not been possible before. The Athenian Empire had really developed
out of a league of mutual defence against Persia; its seat had
originally been in the island of Delos, and the allies had contributed
to a common treasure at Delos; the treasure of Delos was carried off to
Athens because it was exposed to a possible Persian raid. Then one city
after another offered a monetary contribution instead of military
service, with the result that in the end Athens was doing almost all the
work and receiving almost all the money. She was supported by one or two
of the larger islands. The “League” in this way became gradually an
“Empire,” but the citizens of the allied states remained, except where
there were special treaties of intermarriage and the like, practically
foreigners to one another. And it was chiefly the poorer citizens of
Athens who sustained this empire by their most vigorous and incessant
personal service. Every citizen was liable to military service at home
or abroad between the ages of eighteen and sixty, sometimes on purely
Athenian affairs and sometimes in defence of the cities of the Empire
whose citizens had bought themselves off. There was probably no single
man over twenty-five in the Athenian Assembly who had not served in
several campaigns in different parts of the Mediterranean or Black Sea,
and who did not expect to serve again. Modern imperialism is denounced
by its opponents as the exploitation of the world by the rich; Athenian
imperialism was the exploitation of the world by the poorer citizens of
Athens.
Another difference from modern conditions, due to the small size of the
Greek city states, was that in a democracy every citizen had the right
to attend and speak and vote in the popular assembly. For most cities
this meant a gathering of only a few hundred people; the greatest had no
more than some thousands of citizens. Nothing of this sort is possible
in a modern “democracy” with, perhaps, several million voters. The
modern “citizen’s” voice in public affairs is limited to the right to
vote for one or other of the party candidates put before him. He, or
she, is then supposed to have “assented” to the resultant government.
Aristotle, who would have enjoyed the electoral methods of our modern
democracies keenly, points out very subtly how the outlying farmer class
of citizens in a democracy can be virtually disenfranchised by calling
the popular assembly too frequently for their regular attendance. In the
later Greek democracies (fifth century) the appointment of public
officials, except in the case of officers requiring very special
knowledge, was by casting lots. This was supposed to protect the general
corporation of privileged citizens from the continued predominance of
rich, influential, and conspicuously able men.
Some democracies (Athens and Miletus, _e.g._) had an institution called
the ostracism,[176] by which in times of crisis and conflict the
decision was made whether some citizen should go into exile for ten
years. This may strike a modern reader as an envious institution, but
that was not its essential quality. It was, says Gilbert Murray, a way
of arriving at a decision in a case when political feeling was so
divided as to threaten a deadlock. There were in the Greek democracies
parties and party leaders, but no regular government in office and no
regular opposition. There was no way, therefore, of carrying out a
policy, although it might be the popular policy, if a strong leader or a
strong group stood out against it. But by the ostracism, the least
popular or the least trusted of the chief leaders in the divided
community was made to retire for a period without loss of honour or
property. Professor Murray suggests that a Greek democracy, if it had
found itself in such a position of deadlock as the British Empire did
upon the question of Home Rule for Ireland in 1914, would have probably
first ostracized Sir Edward Carson, and then proceeded to carry out the
provisions of the Home Rule Bill.
This institution of the ostracism has immortalized one obscure and
rather illiterate member of the democracy of Athens. A certain Aristides
had gained a great reputation in the law court for his righteous
dealing. He fell into a dispute with Themistocles upon a question of
naval policy; Aristides was for the army, Themistocles was a “strong
navy” man, and a deadlock was threatened. There was resort to an
ostracism to decide between them. Plutarch relates that as Aristides
walked through the streets while the voting was in progress, he was
accosted by a strange citizen from the agricultural environs
unaccustomed to the art of writing, and requested to write his own name
on the proffered potsherd.
“But why?” he asked. “Has Aristides ever injured you?”
“No,” said the citizen. “No. Never have I set eyes on him. But, oh! I am
so _bored_ by hearing him called Aristides the Just.”
Whereupon, says Plutarch, without further parley Aristides wrote as the
man desired....
When one understands the true meaning of these Greek constitutions, and
in particular the limitation of all power, whether in the democracies or
the oligarchies, to a locally privileged class, one realizes how
impossible was any effective union of the hundreds of Greek cities
scattered about the Mediterranean region, or even of any effective
co-operation between them for a common end. Each city was in the hands
of a few or a few hundred men, to whom its separateness meant everything
that was worth having in life. Only conquest from the outside could
unite the Greeks, and until Greece was conquered they had no political
unity. When at last they were conquered, they were conquered so
completely that their unity ceased to be of any importance even to
themselves; it was a unity of subjugation.
Yet there was always a certain tradition of unity between all the
Greeks, based on a common language and script, on the common possession
of the heroic epics, and on the continuous intercourse that the maritime
position of the states made possible. And, in addition, there were
certain religious bonds of a unifying kind. Certain shrines, the shrines
of the god Apollo in the island of Delos and at Delphi, for example,
were sustained not by single states, but by leagues of states or
Amphictyonies (= League of neighbours), which in such instances as the
Delphic amphictyony became very wide-reaching unions. The league
protected the shrine and the safety of pilgrims, kept up the roads
leading thereunto, secured peace at the time of special festivals,
upheld certain rules to mitigate the usages of war among its members,
and--the Delian league especially--suppressed piracy. A still more
important link of Hellenic union was the Olympian games that were held
every four years at Olympia. Foot races, boxing, wrestling, javelin
throwing, quoit throwing, jumping, and chariot and horse racing were the
chief sports, and a record of victors and distinguished visitors was
kept. From the year 776 B.C. onward[177] these games were held regularly
for over a thousand years, and they did much to maintain that sense of a
common Greek life (pan-Hellenic) transcending the narrow politics of the
city states.
Such links of sentiment and association were of little avail against the
intense “separatism” of the Greek political institutions. From the
History of Herodotus the student will be able to gather a sense of the
intensity and persistence of the feuds that kept the Greek world in a
state of chronic warfare. In the old days (say, to the sixth century
B.C.) fairly large families prevailed in Greece, and something of the
old Aryan great household system (see Chap. XV), with its strong clan
feeling and its capacity for maintaining an enduring feud, still
remained. The history of Athens circles for many years about the feud of
two great families, the Alcmæonidæ and the Peisistratidæ; the latter
equally an aristocratic family, but founding its power on the support of
the poorer class of the populace and the exploitation of their
grievances. Later on, in the sixth and fifth centuries, a limitation of
births and a shrinkage of families to two or three members--a process
Aristotle notes without perceiving its cause--led to the disappearance
of the old aristocratic clans, and the later wars were due rather to
trade disputes and grievances caused and stirred up by individual
adventurers than to family vendettas.
It is easy to understand, in view of this intense separatism of the
Greeks, how readily the Ionians of Asia and of the islands fell first
under the domination of the kingdom of Lydia, and then under that of the
Persians when Cyrus overthrew Crœsus, the king of Lydia. They
rebelled only to be reconquered. Then came the turn of European Greece.
It is a matter of astonishment, the Greeks themselves were astonished,
to find that Greece itself did not fall under the dominion of the
Persians, these barbaric Aryan masters of the ancient civilizations of
Western Asia. But before we tell of this struggle we must give some
attention to these Asiatics against whom they were pitted; and
particularly to these Medes and Persians who, by 538 B.C., were already
in possession of the ancient civilizations of Assyria, Babylonia, and
about to subjugate Egypt.
§ 4
We have had occasion to mention the kingdom of Lydia, and it may be well
to give a short note here upon the Lydians before proceeding with our
story. The original population of the larger part of Asia Minor may
perhaps have been akin to the original population of Greece and Crete.
If so, it was of “Mediterranean” race. Or it may have been another
branch of those still more generalized and fundamental darkish peoples
from whom arose the Mediterranean race to the west and the Dravidians to
the east. Remains of the same sort of art that distinguishes Cnossos and
Mycenæ are to be found scattered over Asia Minor. But just as the Nordic
Greeks poured southward into Greece to conquer and mix with the
aborigines, so did other and kindred Nordic tribes pour over the
Bosphorus into Asia Minor. Over some areas these Aryan peoples prevailed
altogether, and became the bulk of the inhabitants and retained their
Aryan speech. Such were the Phrygians, a people whose language was
almost as close to that of the Greeks as the Macedonian. But over other
areas the Aryans did not so prevail. In Lydia the original race and
their language held their own. The Lydians were a non-Aryan people
speaking a non-Aryan speech, of which at the present time only a few
words are known. Their capital city was Sardis.
Their religion was also non-Aryan. They worshipped a Great Mother
goddess. The Phrygians also, though retaining their Greek-like language,
became infected with mysterious religion, and much of the mystical
religion and secret ceremonial that pervaded Athens at a later date was
Phrygian (when not Thracian) in origin.
At first the Lydians held the western seacoast of Asia Minor, but they
were driven back from it by the establishment of Ionian Greeks coming by
the sea and founding cities. Later on, however, these Ionian Greek
cities were brought into subjection by the Lydian kings.
The history of this country is not clearly known, and were it known it
would scarcely be of sufficient importance to be related in this
historical outline, but in the eighth century B.C. one monarch, named
Gyges, becomes noteworthy. The country under his rule was subjected to
another Aryan invasion; certain nomadic tribes called the Cimmerians
came pouring across Asia Minor, and they were driven back with
difficulty by Gyges and his son and grandson. Sardis was twice taken and
burnt by these barbarians. And it is on record that Gyges paid tribute
to Sardanapalus, which serves to link him up with our general ideas of
the history of Assyria, Israel, and Egypt. Later, Gyges rebelled against
Assyria, and sent troops to help Psammetichus I to liberate Egypt from
its brief servitude to the Assyrians.
It was Alyattes, the grandson of Gyges, who made Lydia into a
considerable power. He reigned for seven years, and he reduced most of
the Ionian cities of Asia Minor to subjection. The country became the
centre of a great trade between Asia and Europe; it had always been
productive and rich in gold, and now the Lydian monarch was reputed the
richest in Asia. There was a great coming and going between the Black
and Mediterranean Seas, and between the East and West. We have already
noted that Lydia was reputed to be the first country in the world to
produce coined money, and to provide the convenience of inns for
travellers and traders. The Lydian dynasty seems to have been a trading
dynasty of the type of Minos in Crete, with a banking and financial
development.... So much we may note of Lydia by way of preface to the
next section.
§ 5
Now while one series of Aryan-speaking invaders had developed along the
lines we have described in Greece, Magna Græcia, and around the shores
of the Black Sea, another series of Aryan-speaking peoples, whose
originally Nordic blood was perhaps already mixed with a Mongolian
element, were settling and spreading to the north and east of the
Assyrian and Babylonian empires. We have already spoken of the arc-like
dispersion of the Nordic Aryan peoples to the north of the Black and
Caspian Seas; it was probably by this route that the Aryan-speaking
races gradually came down into what is now the Persian country, and
spread, on the one hand, eastward to India (? 2000 to 1000 B.C.), and on
the other, increased and multiplied in the Persian uplands until they
were strong enough to assail first Assyria (650 B.C.) and then Babylon
(538 B.C.).
There is much that is not yet clear about the changes of climate that
have been going on in Europe and Asia during the last 10,000 years. The
ice of the last glacial age receded gradually, and gave way to a long
period of steppe or prairie-like conditions over the great plain of
Europe. About 12,000 or 10,000 years ago, as it is reckoned now, this
state of affairs was giving place to forest conditions. We have already
noted how, as a consequence of these changes, the Solutrian horse
hunters gave place to Magdalenian fishers and forest deer hunters; and
these, again, to the Neolithic herdsmen and agriculturists. For some
thousands of years the European climate seems to have been warmer than
it is to-day. A great sea spread from the coast of the Balkan peninsula
far into Central Asia and extended northward into Central Russia, and
the shrinkage of that sea and the consequent hardening of the climate of
south Russia and Central Asia was going on contemporaneously with the
development of the first civilizations in the river valleys. Many facts
seem to point to a more genial climate in Europe and western Asia, and
still more strongly to a greater luxuriance of plant and vegetable life,
4000 to 3000 years ago, than we find to-day. There were forests then in
south Russia and in the country which is now Western Turkestan, where
now steppes and deserts prevail. On the other hand, between 1500 and
2000 years ago, the Aral-Caspian region was probably drier and those
seas smaller than they are at the present time.
We may note in this connection that Thotmes III (say, the fifteenth
century B.C.), in his expedition beyond the Euphrates, hunted a herd of
120 elephants in that region. Again, an Ægean dagger from Mycenæ, dating
about 2000 B.C., shows a lion-hunt in progress. The hunters carry big
shields and spears, and stand in rows one behind the other. The first
man spears the lion, and when the wounded beast leaps at him, drops flat
under the protection of his big shield, leaving the next man to repeat
his stroke, and so on, until the lion is speared to death. This method
of hunting is practised by the Masai to-day, and could only have been
worked out by a people in a land where lions were abundant. But abundant
lions imply abundant game, and that again means abundant vegetation.
About 2000 B.C. the hardening of the climate in the central parts of the
Old World, to which we have already referred, which put an end to
elephants and lions in Asia Minor and Greece,[178] was turning the faces
of the nomadic Aryan peoples southward towards the fields and forests of
the more settled and civilized nations.
These Aryan peoples come down from the East Caspian regions into history
about the time that Mycenæ and Troy and Cnossos are falling to the
Greeks. It is difficult to disentangle the different tribes and races
that appear under a multitude of names in the records and inscriptions
that record their first appearance, but, fortunately, these distinctions
are not needed in an elementary outline such as this present history. A
people called the Cimmerians appear in the districts of Lake Urumiya and
Van, and shortly after Aryans have spread from Armenia to Elam. In the
ninth century B.C. a people called the Medes, very closely related to
the Persians to the east of them, appear in the Assyrian inscriptions.
Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II, names already familiar in this story,
profess to have made them pay tribute. They are spoken of in the
inscriptions as the “dangerous Medes.” They are as yet a tribal people,
not united under one king.
About the ninth century B.C. Elam and the Elamites, whose capital was
Susa, a people which possessed a tradition and civilization at least as
old as the Sumerian, suddenly vanish from history. We do not know what
happened. They seem to have been overrun and the population absorbed by
the conquerors. Susa is in the hands of the Persians.
[Illustration: Scythians ... as portrayed by a Greek artist....
ONE OF THE FEW EXISTING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ANCIENT SCYTHIANS. FROM A
GREEK ELECTRUM VASE.]
A fourth people, related to these Aryan tribes, who appear at this time
in the narrative of Herodotus, are the “Scythians.” For a while the
monarchs of Assyria play off these various kindred peoples, the
Cimmerians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Scythians, against each
other. Assyrian princesses (a daughter of Esarhaddon, _e.g._) are
married to Scythian chiefs. Nebuchadnezzar the Great, on the other hand,
marries a daughter of Cyaxares, who has become king of all the Medes.
The Aryan Scythians are for the Semitic Assyrians; the Aryan Medes for
the Semitic Babylonians. It was this Cyaxares who took Nineveh, the
Assyrian capital, in 606 B.C., and so released Babylon from the Assyrian
yoke to establish, under Chaldean rule, the Second Babylonian Empire.
The Scythian allies of Assyria drop out of the story after this. They go
on living their own life away to the north without much interference
with the peoples to the south. A glance at the map of this period shows
how, for two-thirds of a century, the Second Babylonian Empire lay like
a lamb within the embrace of the Median lion.
Into the internal struggles of the Medes and Persians, that ended at
last in the accession of Cyrus “the Persian” to the throne of Cyaxares
in 550 B.C., we will not enter. In that year Cyrus was ruling over an
empire that reached from the boundaries of Lydia to Persia and perhaps
to India. Nabonidus, the last of the Babylonian rulers, was, as we have
already told, digging up old records and building temples in Babylonia.
§ 6
But one monarch in the world was alive to the threat of the new power
that lay in the hands of Cyrus. This was Crœsus, the Lydian king. His
son had been killed in a very tragic manner, which Herodotus relates,
but which we will not describe here. Says Herodotus:
“For two years then, Crœsus remained quiet in great mourning, because
he was deprived of his son; but after this period of time, the
overthrowing of the rule of the son of Cyaxares by Cyrus, and the
growing greatness of the Persians, caused Crœsus to cease from his
mourning, and led him to a care of cutting short the power of the
Persians if by any means he might, while yet it was in growth and before
they should have become great.”
He then made trial of the various oracles. His method of trial we will
not relate here, but it led him to the belief that the Delphi Oracle was
alone trustworthy. What follows is rather a lengthy passage, but it is
so characteristic of the garrulousness and wonder-loving mind of the
Father of History, and with such a pleasant touch of spite against the
Lacedemonians, that it is impossible to resist the quotation.
[Illustration: Map showing the relation of the MEDIAN and second
BABYLONIAN (Chaldean) EMPIRES in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar the Great]
“After this, with great sacrifices, he endeavoured to win the favour of
the god at Delphi: for of all the animals that are fit for sacrifice he
offered three thousand of each kind, and he heaped up couches overlaid
with gold and overlaid with silver, and cups of gold, and robes of
purple, and tunics, making of them a great pyre, and this he burnt up,
hoping by these means the more to win over the god to the side of the
Lydians; and he proclaimed to all the Lydians that every one of them
should make sacrifice with that which each man had. And when he had
finished the sacrifice, he melted down a vast quantity of gold, and of
it he wrought half-plinths, making them six palms in length and three in
breadth, and in height one palm; and their number was one hundred and
seventeen. Of these four were of pure gold weighing two talents and a
half each, and the others of gold alloyed with silver weighing two
talents. And he caused to be made also an image of a lion of pure gold
weighing ten talents; which lion, when the temple at Delphi was being
burnt down, fell from off the half-plinths, for upon these it was set,
and is placed now in the treasury of the Corinthians, weighing six
talents and a half, for three talents and a half were melted away from
it. So Crœsus, having finished all these things, sent them to Delphi,
and with them these besides: two mixing-bowls of great size, one of gold
and the other of silver, of which the golden bowl was placed on the
right hand as one enters the temple, and the silver on the left, but the
places of these also were changed after the temple was burnt down....
Moreover, Crœsus sent four silver wine-jars, which stand in the
treasury of the Corinthians, and two vessels for lustral water, one of
gold and the other of silver, of which the gold one is inscribed ‘from
the Lacedemonians,’ who say that it is their offering; therein, however,
they do not speak rightly, for this also is from Crœsus, but one of
the Delphians wrote the inscription upon it, desiring to gratify the
Lacedemonians; and his name I know, but I will not make mention of
it.... And many other votive offerings Crœsus sent with these, not
specially distinguished, among which are certain castings of silver of a
round shape, and also a golden figure of a woman three cubits high,
which the Delphians say is a statue of the baker of Crœsus. Moreover,
Crœsus dedicated the ornaments from his wife’s neck and her
girdles....
“To the Lydians who were to carry these gifts to the temples Crœsus
gave charge that they should ask the Oracles this question also: whether
Crœsus should march against the Persians, and, if so, whether he
should join with himself any army of men as his friends. And when the
Lydians had arrived at the places to which they had been sent and had
dedicated the votive offerings, they inquired of the Oracles, and said:
‘Crœsus, king of the Lydians and of other nations, considering that
these are the only true Oracles among men, presents to you gifts such as
your revelations deserve, and asks you again now whether he shall march
against the Persians, and, if so, whether he shall join with himself any
army of men as allies.’ They inquired thus, and the answers of both the
Oracles agreed in one, declaring to Crœsus that if he should march
against the Persians he should destroy a great empire.... So when the
answers were brought back and Crœsus heard them, he was delighted
with the Oracles, and expecting that he would certainly destroy the
kingdom of Cyrus, he sent again to Pytho, and presented to the men of
Delphi, having ascertained the number of them, two staters of gold for
each man: and in return for this the Delphians gave to Crœsus and to
the Lydians precedence in consulting the Oracle and freedom from all
payments, and the right to front seats at the games, with this privilege
also for all time, that any one of them who wished should be allowed to
become a citizen of Delphi.”
But here we may not run on as Herodotus loved to do. Suffice it to say
that Crœsus made a defensive alliance both with the Lacedemonians and
the Egyptians. We will not quote the story of how a great bronze
mixing-bowl that the Lacedemonians sent to Crœsus went astray, but we
will note a light on the life of the Medes and Persians of that time.
“Thus, then, it happened about the mixing-bowl; but meanwhile Crœsus,
mistaking the meaning of the Oracle, was making a march into Cappadocia,
expecting to overthrow Cyrus and the power of the Persians; and while
Crœsus was preparing to march against the Persians, one of the
Lydians, who even before this time was thought to be a wise man, but in
consequence of this opinion got a very great name for wisdom among the
Lydians, had advised Crœsus as follows: ‘O king, thou art preparing
to march against men who wear breeches of leather, and the rest of their
clothing is of leather also; and they eat food not such as they desire,
but such as they can obtain, dwelling in a land which is rugged; and,
moreover, they make no use of wine but drink water; and no figs have
they for dessert, nor any other good thing. On the one hand, if thou
shalt overcome them, what wilt thou take away from them, seeing they
have nothing? and, on the other hand, if thou shalt be overcome,
consider how many good things thou wilt lose; for once having tasted our
good things, they will cling to them fast, and it will not be possible
to drive them away. I, for my own part, feel gratitude to the gods that
they do not put it into the minds of the Persians to march against the
Lydians.’ Thus he spoke not persuading Crœsus; for it is true indeed
that the Persians before they subdued the Lydians had no luxury nor any
good thing.”
Crœand Cyrus fought an indecisive battle at Pteria, from which
Crœretreated. Cyrus followed him up, and he gave battle outside his
capital town of Sardis. The chief strength of the Lydians lay in their
cavalry; they were excellent, if undisciplined, horsemen, and fought
with long spears.
“Cyrus, when he saw the Lydians being arrayed for battle, fearing their
horsemen, did on the suggestion of Harpagos, a Mede, as follows: All the
camels which were in the train of his army carrying provisions and
baggage he gathered together, and he took off their burdens and set men
upon them provided with the equipment of cavalry; and, having thus
furnished them, forth he appointed them to go in front of the rest of
the army towards the horsemen of Crœsus; and after the camel-troop he
ordered the infantry to follow; and behind the infantry he placed his
whole force of cavalry. Then, when all his men had been placed in their
several positions, he charged them to spare none of the other Lydians,
slaying all who might come in their way, but Crœsus himself they were
not to slay, not even if he should make resistance when he was being
captured. Such was his charge: and he set the camels opposite the
horsemen for this reason--because the horse has a fear of the camel and
cannot endure either to see his form or to scent his smell; for this
reason then the trick had been devised, in order that the cavalry of
Crœsus might be useless, that very force wherewith the Lydian king
was expecting most to shine. And as they were coming together to the
battle, so soon as the horses scented the camels and saw them, they
turned away back, and the hopes of Crœsus were at once brought to
nought. The Lydians, however, for their part did not upon that act as
cowards, but when they perceived what was coming to pass, they leapt
from their horses and fought with the Persians on foot. At length,
however, when many had fallen on either side, the Lydians turned to
flight; and having been driven within the wall of their fortress, they
were besieged by the Persians.”
In fourteen days Sardis was stormed and Crœsus taken prisoner....
“So the Persians having taken him brought him into the presence of
Cyrus; and he piled up a great pyre and caused Crœsus to go up upon
it bound in fetters, and along with him twice seven sons of Lydians,
whether it was that he meant to dedicate this offering as first-fruits
of his victory to some god, or whether he desired to fulfil a vow, or
else had heard that Crœsus was a god-fearing man, and so caused him
to go up on the pyre because he wished to know if any one of the divine
powers would save him, so that he should not be burnt alive. He, they
say, did this; but to Crœsus as he stood upon the pyre there came,
although he was in such evil case, a memory of the saying of Solon, how
he had said with divine inspiration that no one of the living might be
called happy. And when this thought came into his mind, they say that
he sighed deeply and groaned aloud, having been for long silent, and
three times he uttered the name of Solon. Hearing this, Cyrus bade the
interpreters ask Crœsus who was this person on whom he called; and
they came near and asked. And Crœsus for a time, it is said, kept
silence when he was asked this, but afterwards, being pressed, he said:
‘One whom more than much wealth I should have desired to have speech
with all monarchs.’ Then, since his words were of doubtful import, they
asked again of that which he said; and as they were urgent with him and
gave him no peace, he told how once Solon, an Athenian, had come and
having inspected all his wealth had made light of it, with such and such
words; and how all had turned out for him according as Solon had said,
not speaking at all especially with a view to Crœsus himself, but
with a view to the whole human race, and especially those who seem to
themselves to be happy men. And while Crœsus related these things,
already the pyre was lighted and the edges of it round about were
burning. Then they say that Cyrus, hearing from the interpreters what
Crœsus had said, changed his purpose and considered that he himself
also was but a man, and that he was delivering another man, who had been
not inferior to himself in felicity, alive to the fire; and, moreover,
he feared the requital, and reflected that there was nothing of that
which men possessed which was secure; therefore, they say, he ordered
them to extinguish as quickly as possible the fire that was burning, and
to bring down Crœsus and those who were with him from the pyre; and
they, using endeavours, were not able now to get the mastery of the
flames. Then it is related by the Lydians that Crœsus, having learned
how Cyrus had changed his mind, and seeing that every one was trying to
put out the fire, but that they were no longer able to check it, cried
aloud, entreating Apollo that if any gift had ever been given by him
which was acceptable to the god, he would come to his aid and rescue him
from the evil which was now upon him. So he with tears entreated the
god, and suddenly, they say, after clear sky and calm weather clouds
gathered and a storm burst, and it rained with a very violent shower,
and the pyre was extinguished. Then Cyrus, having perceived that
Crœsus was a lover of the gods and a good man, caused him to be
brought down from the pyre and asked him as follows: ‘Crœsus, tell
me who of all men was it who persuaded thee to march upon my land and so
to become an enemy to me instead of a friend?’ And he said: ‘O king, I
did this to thy felicity and to my own misfortune, and the causer of
this was the god of the Hellenes, who incited me to march with my army.
For no one is so senseless as to choose of his own will war rather than
peace, since in peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the
fathers bury their sons. But it was pleasing, I suppose, to the divine
powers that these things should come to pass thus.’”
But Herodotus is too alluring a companion for one who would write an
Outline of History; and the rest of the life of Crœsus, and how he
gave wise counsels to Cyrus, must be read in his ampler page.
When Lydia was subdued, Cyrus turned his attention to Nabonidus in
Babylon. He defeated the Babylonian army, under Belshazzar, outside
Babylon, and then laid siege to the town. He entered the town (538
B.C.), probably as we have already suggested, with the connivance of the
priests of Bel.
§ 7
Cyrus was succeeded by his son Cambyses, who took an army into Egypt
(525 B.C.). There was a battle in the delta, in which Greek mercenaries
fought on both sides. Herodotus declares that he saw the bones of the
slain still lying on the field fifty or sixty years later, and comments
on the comparative thinness of the Persian skulls. After this battle
Cambyses took Memphis and most of Egypt.
In Egypt, we are told, Cambyses went mad. He took great liberties with
the Egyptian temples, and remained at Memphis “opening ancient tombs and
examining the dead bodies.” He had already murdered both Crœsus,
ex-king of Lydia, and his own brother Smerdis before coming to Egypt,
and he died in Syria on the way back to Susa of an accidental wound,
leaving no heirs to succeed him. He was presently succeeded by Darius
the Mede (521 B.C.), the son of Hystaspes, one of the chief councillors
of Cyrus.
The empire of Darius I was larger than any one of the preceding empires
whose growth we have traced. It included all Asia Minor and Syria, that
is to say, the ancient Lydian and Hittite empires, all the old Assyrian
and Babylonian empires, Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian regions, Media,
Persia, and it extended, perhaps, into India to the Indus. The nomadic
Arabians alone of all the peoples of what is nowadays called the Near
East, did not pay tribute to the satraps (provincial governors) of
Darius. The organization of this great empire seems to have been on a
much higher level of efficiency than any of its precursors. Great
arterial roads joined province to province, and there was a system of
royal posts;[179] at stated intervals post horses stood always ready to
carry the government messenger, or the traveller if he had a government
permit, on to the next stage of his journey. Apart from this imperial
right-of-way and the payment of tribute, the local governments possessed
a very considerable amount of local freedom. They were restrained from
internecine conflict, which was all to their own good. And at first the
Greek cities of the mainland of Asia paid the tribute and shared in this
Persian Peace.
Darius was first incited to attack the Greeks in Europe by a homesick
Greek physician at his court, who wanted at any cost to be back in
Greece. Darius had already made plans for an expedition into Europe,
aiming not at Greece, but to the northward of Greece, across the
Bosphorus and Danube. He wanted to strike at South Russia, which he
believed to be the home country of the Scythian nomads who threatened
him on his northern and north-eastern frontiers. But he lent an
attentive ear to the tempter, and sent agents into Greece.[180]
This great expedition of Darius opens out our view in this history. It
lifts a curtain upon the Balkan country behind Greece about which we
have said nothing hitherto; it carries us to and over the Danube. The
nucleus of his army marched from Susa, gathering up contingents as they
made their way to the Bosphorus. Here Greek allies (Ionian Greeks from
Asia) had made a bridge of boats, and the army crossed over while the
Greek allies sailed on in their ships to the Danube, and, two days’ sail
up from its mouth, landed to make another floating bridge. Meanwhile,
Darius and his host advanced along the coast of what is now Bulgaria,
but which was then called Thrace. They crossed the Danube, and prepared
to give battle to the Scythian army and take the cities of the
Scythians.
But the Scythians had no cities, and they evaded a battle, and the war
degenerated into a tedious and hopeless pursuit of more mobile enemies.
Wells were stopped up and pastures destroyed by the nomads. The Scythian
horsemen hung upon the skirts of the great army, which consisted mostly
of foot soldiers, picking off stragglers and preventing foraging; and
they did their best to persuade the Ionian Greeks, who had made and were
guarding the bridge across the Danube, to break up the bridge, and so
ensure the destruction of Darius. So long as Darius continued to
advance, however, the loyalty of his Greek allies remained unshaken.
But privation, fatigue, and sickness hindered and crippled the Persian
army; Darius lost many stragglers and consumed his supplies, and at last
the melancholy conviction dawned upon him that a retreat across the
Danube was necessary to save him from complete exhaustion and defeat.
In order to get a start in his retreat he sacrificed his sick and
wounded. He had these men informed that he was about to attack the
Scythians at nightfall, and under this pretence stole out of the camp
with the pick of his troops and made off southward, leaving the camp
fires burning and the usual noises and movements of the camp behind him.
Next day the men left in the camp realized the trick their monarch had
played upon them, and surrendered themselves to the mercy of the
Scythians; but Darius had got his start, and was able to reach the
bridge of boats before his pursuers came upon him. They were more mobile
than his troops, but they missed their quarry in the darkness. At the
river the retreating Persians “were brought to an extremity of fear,”
for they found the bridge partially broken down and its northern end
destroyed.
[Illustration: The Empire of Darius (tribute-paying countries) at its
greatest extent.]
At this point a voice echoes down the centuries to us. We see a group of
dismayed Persians standing about the Great King upon the bank of the
streaming river; we see the masses of halted troops, hungry and
war-worn; a trail of battered transport stretches away towards the
horizon, upon which at any time the advance guards of the pursuers may
appear. There is not much noise in spite of the multitude, but rather an
inquiring silence. Standing out like a pier from the further side of the
great stream are the remains of the bridge of boats, an enigma.... We
cannot discern whether there are men over there or not. The shipping of
the Ionian Greeks seems still to be drawn up on the further shore, but
it is all very far away.
“Now there was with Darius an Egyptian who had a voice louder than that
of any other man on earth, and this man Darius ordered to take his stand
upon the bank of the Ister (Danube) and to call Histiæus of Miletus.”
This worthy--a day is to come, as we shall presently tell, when his
decapitated head will be sent to Darius at Susa--appears approaching
slowly across the waters in a boat.
There is a parley, and we gather that it is “all right.”
The explanation Histiæus has to make is a complicated one. Some
Scythians have been and have gone again. Scouts, perhaps, these were. It
would seem there had been a discussion between the Scythians and the
Greeks. The Scythians wanted the bridge broken down; they would then,
they said, undertake to finish up the Persian army and make an end to
Darius and his empire, and the Ionian Greeks of Asia could then free
their cities again. Miltiades, the Athenian, was for accepting this
proposal. But Histiæus had been more subtle. He would prefer, he said,
to see the Persians completely destroyed before definitely abandoning
their cause. Would the Scythians go back and destroy the Persians to
make sure of them while the Greeks on their part destroyed the bridge?
Anyhow, whichever side the Greeks took finally, it was clear to him that
it would be wise to destroy the northern end of the bridge, because
otherwise the Scythians might rush it. Indeed, even as they parleyed the
Greeks set to work to demolish the end that linked them to the Scythians
as quickly as possible. In accordance with the suggestions of Histiæus
the Scythians rode off in search of the Persians, and so left the Greeks
safe in either event. If Darius escaped they could be on his side; if he
was destroyed, there was nothing of which the Scythians could complain.
Histiæus did not put it quite in that fashion to Darius. He had at least
kept the shipping and most of the bridge. He represented himself as the
loyal friend of Persia, and Darius was not disposed to be too critical.
The Ionian ships came over. With a sense of immense relief the remnant
of the wasted Persians were presently looking back at the steely flood
of the Danube streaming wide between themselves and their pursuers....
The pleasure and interest had gone out of the European expedition for
Darius. He returned to Susa, leaving an army in Thrace, under a trusted
general Megabazus. This Megabazus set himself to the subjugation of
Thrace, and among other states which submitted reluctantly to Darius was
a kingdom, which thus comes into our history for the first time, the
kingdom of Macedonia, a country inhabited by a people so closely allied
to the Greeks that one of its princes had already been allowed to
compete and take a prize in the Olympian games.
Darius was disposed to reward Histiæus by allowing him to build a city
for himself in Thrace, but Megabazus had a different opinion of the
trustworthiness of Histiæus, and prevailed upon the king to take him to
Susa, and, under the title of councillor, to keep him a prisoner there.
Histiæus was at first flattered by this court position, and then
realized its true meaning. The Persian court bored him, and he grew
homesick for Miletus. He set himself to make mischief, and was able to
stir up a revolt against the Persians among the Ionian Greeks on the
mainland. The twistings and turnings of the story, which included the
burning of Sardis by the Ionians and the defeat of a Greek fleet at the
battle of Ladé (495 B.C.), are too complicated to follow here. It is a
dark and intricate story of treacheries, cruelties, and hate, in which
the death of the wily Histiæus shines almost cheerfully. The Persian
governor of Sardis, through which town he was being taken on his way
back to Susa as a prisoner, having much the same opinion of him as
Megabazus had, and knowing his ability to humbug Darius, killed him
there and then, and sent on the head only to his master.
Cyprus and the Greek islands were dragged into this contest that
Histiæus had stirred up, and at last Athens. Darius realized the error
he had made in turning to the right and not to the left when he had
crossed the Bosphorus, and he now set himself to the conquest of all
Greece. He began with the islands. Tyre and Sidon were subject to
Persia, and ships of the Phœnician and of the Ionian Greeks provided
the Persians with a fleet by means of which one Greek island after
another was subjugated.
§ 8
The first attack upon Greece proper was made in 490 B.C. It was a sea
attack upon Athens, with a force long and carefully prepared for the
task, the fleet being provided with specially built transports for the
conveyance of horses. This expedition made a landing near Marathon in
Attica. The Persians were guided into Marathon by a renegade Greek,
Hippias, the son of Peisistratus, who had been tyrant of Athens. If
Athens fell, then Hippias was to be its tyrant, under the protection of
the Persians. Meanwhile, so urgent was the sense of a crisis in the
affairs of Hellas, that a man, a herald and runner, went from Athens to
Sparta, forgetful of all feuds, to say: “Lacedemonians, the Athenians
make request of you to come to their help, and not to allow a city most
anciently established among the Hellenes to fall into slavery by the
means of Barbarians; for even now Eretria has been enslaved and Hellas
has become the weaker by a city of renown.” This man, Pheidippides, did
the distance from Athens to Sparta, nearly a hundred miles as the crow
flies, and much more if we allow for the contours and the windings of
the way, in something under eight and forty hours.
But before the Spartans could arrive on the scene the battle was joined.
The Athenians charged the enemy. They fought--“in a memorable fashion:
for they were the first of all the Hellenes about whom we know who went
to attack the enemy at a run, and they were the first also who endured
to face the Median garments and the men who wore them, whereas up to
this time the very name of the Medes was to the Hellenes a terror to
hear.”
The Persian wings gave before this impetuous attack, but the centre
held. The Athenians, however, were cool as well as vigorous; they let
the wings run and closed in on the flanks of the centre, whereupon the
main body of the Persians fled to their ships. Seven vessels fell into
the hands of the Athenians; the rest got away, and, after a futile
attempt to sail round to Athens and seize the city before the army
returned thither, the fleet made a retreat to Asia. Let Herodotus close
the story with a paragraph that still further enlightens us upon the
tremendous prestige of the Medes at this time:
[Illustration: The WARS of the GREEKS and PERSIANS]
“Of the Lacedemonians there came to Athens two thousand after the full
moon, making great haste to be in time, so that they arrived in Attica
on the third day after leaving Sparta: and though they had come too late
for the battle, yet they desired to behold the Medes; and accordingly
they went on to Marathon and looked at the bodies of the slain: then
afterwards they departed home, commending the Athenians and the work
which they had done.”
§ 9
So Greece, unified for a while by fear, gained her first victory over
Persia. The news came to Darius simultaneously with the news of a
rebellion in Egypt, and he died while still undecided in which direction
to turn. His son and successor, Xerxes, turned first to Egypt and set up
a Persian satrap there; then for four years he prepared a second attack
upon Greece. Says Herodotus, who was, one must remember, a patriotic
Greek, approaching now to the climax of his History:
“For what nation did Xerxes not lead out of Asia against Hellas? and
what water was not exhausted, being drunk by his host, except only the
great rivers? For some supplied ships, and others were appointed to
serve in the land-army; to some it was appointed to furnish cavalry, and
to others vessels to carry horses, while they served in the expedition
themselves also; others were ordered to furnish ships of war for the
bridges, and others again ships with provisions.”
[Illustration: Monument of Athenian foot soldier, found near Marathon.]
Xerxes passed into Europe, not as Darius did at the half-mile crossing
of the Bosphorus, but at the Hellespont (the Dardanelles). In his
account of the assembling of the great army, and its march from Sardis
to the Hellespont, the poet in Herodotus takes possession of the
historian. The great host passes in splendour by Troy, and Xerxes, who
although a Persian and a Barbarian, seems to have had the advantages of
a classical education, turns aside, says our historian, to visit the
citadel of Priam. The Hellespont was bridged at Abydos, and upon a hill
was set a marble throne from which Xerxes surveyed the whole array of
his forces.
“And seeing all the Hellespont covered over with the ships and all the
shores and the plains of Abydos full of men, then Xerxes pronounced
himself a happy man, and after that he fell to weeping. Artabanus, his
uncle, therefore perceiving him--the same who at first boldly declared
his opinion advising Xerxes not to march against Hellas--this man, I
say, having observed that Xerxes wept, asked as follows: ‘O king, how
far different from one another are the things which thou hast done now
and a short while before now! for having pronounced thyself a happy man,
thou art now shedding tears.’ He said: ‘Yea, for after I had reckoned
up, it came into my mind to feel pity at the thought how brief was the
whole life of man, seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive
when a hundred years have gone by.’”
This may not be exact history, but it is great poetry. It is as splendid
as anything in _The Dynasts_.
The Persian fleet, coasting from headland to headland, accompanied this
land multitude during its march southward; but a violent storm did the
fleet great damage and 400 ships were lost, including much corn
transport. At first the united Hellenes marched out to meet the invaders
at the Vale of Tempe near Mount Olympus, but afterwards retreated
through Thessaly, and chose at last to await the advancing Persians at a
place called Thermopylæ, where at that time--2300 years have altered
these things greatly--there was a great cliff on the landward side and
the sea to the east, with a track scarcely wide enough for a chariot
between. The great advantage to the Greeks of this position at
Thermopylæ was that it prevented the use of either cavalry or chariots,
and narrowed the battle front so as to minimize their numerical
inequality. And there the Persians joined battle with them one summer
day in the year 480 B.C.
For three days the Greeks held this great army, and did them much damage
with small loss to themselves, and then on the third day a detachment
of Persians appeared upon the rear of the Greeks, having learnt of a way
over the mountains from a peasant. There were hasty discussions among
the Greeks; some were for withdrawing, some for holding out. The leader
of the whole force, Leonidas, was for staying; and with him he would
keep, he said, 300 Spartans. The rest of the Greek army could,
meanwhile, make good its retreat to the next defensible pass. The
Thespian contingent of 700, however, refused to fall back. They
preferred to stay and die with the Spartans. Also a contingent of 400
Thebans remained. As Thebes afterwards joined the Persians, there is a
story that these Thebans were detained by force against their will,
which seems on military as well as historical grounds improbable. These
1400 stayed, and were, after a conflict of heroic quality, slain to a
man. Two Spartans happened to be away, sick with ophthalmia. When they
heard the news, one was too ill to move; the other made his helot guide
him to the battle, and there struck blindly until he was killed. The
other, Aristodemus, was taken away with the retreating troops, and
returned to Sparta, where he was not actually punished for his conduct,
but was known as Tresas, “the man who retreated.” It was enough to
distinguish him from all other Spartans, and he got himself killed at
the Battle of Platæa a year later, performing prodigies of reckless
courage.... For a whole day this little band had held the pass, assailed
in front and rear by the whole force of the Persians. They had covered
the retreat of the main Greek army, they had inflicted great losses on
the invaders, and they had raised the prestige of the Greek warrior over
that of the Mede higher even than the victory of Marathon had done.
The Persian cavalry and transport filtered slowly through the narrow
passage of Thermopylæ, and marched on towards Athens, while a series of
naval encounters went on at sea. The Hellenic fleet retreated before the
advance of the Persian shipping, which suffered seriously through its
comparative ignorance of the intricate coasts and of the tricks of the
local weather. Weight of numbers carried the Persian army forward to
Athens; now that Thermopylæ was lost, there was no line of defence
nearer than the Isthmus of Corinth, and this meant the abandonment of
all the intervening territory, including Athens. The population had
either to fly or submit to the Persians. Thebes with all Bœotia
submitted, and was pressed into the Persian army, except one town,
Platæa, whose inhabitants fled to Athens. The turn of Athens came next,
and great efforts were made to persuade her to make terms; but, instead,
the whole population determined to abandon everything and take to the
shipping. The women and non-combatants were carried to Salamis and
various adjacent islands. Only a few people too old to move and a few
dissentients remained in the town, which was occupied by the Persians
and burnt. The sacred objects, statues, etc., which were burnt at this
time, were afterwards buried in the Acropolis by the returning
Athenians, and have been dug up in our own day with the marks of burning
visible upon them. Xerxes sent off a mounted messenger to Susa with the
news, and he invited the sons of Peisistratus, whom he had brought back
with him, to enter upon their inheritance and sacrifice after the
Athenian manner upon the Acropolis.
Meanwhile, the Hellenic confederate fleet had come round to Salamis, and
in the council of war there were bitter differences of opinion. Corinth
and the states behind the Isthmus wanted the fleet to fall back to that
position, abandoning the cities of Megara and Ægina. Themistocles
insisted with all his force on fighting in the narrows of Salamis. The
majority was steadily in favour of retreat, when there suddenly arrived
the news that retreat was cut off. The Persians had sailed round Salamis
and held the sea on the other side. This news was brought by that
Aristides the Just, of whose ostracism we have already told; his sanity
and eloquence did much to help Themistocles to hearten the hesitating
commanders. These two men had formerly been bitter antagonists; but with
a generosity rare in those days, they forgot their differences before
the common danger. At dawn the Greek ships pulled out to battle.
The fleet before them was a fleet more composite and less united than
their own. But it was about three times as great. On one wing were the
Phœnicians, on the other Ionian Greeks from Asia and the Islands.
Some of the latter fought stoutly; others remembered that they too were
Greeks. The Greek ships, on the other hand, were mostly manned by
freemen fighting for their homes. Throughout the early hours the battle
raged confusedly. Then it became evident to Xerxes, watching the
combat, that his fleet was attempting flight. The flight became
disaster.
[Illustration:
Soldiers of the Persian body-guard.
(From frieze in the audience hall of Darius at Susa.)]
Xerxes had taken his seat to watch the battle. He saw his galleys rammed
by the sharp prows of other galleys; his fighting-men shot down; his
ships boarded. Much of the sea-fighting in those days was done by
ramming; the big galleys bore down their opponents by superior weight of
impact, or sheared off their oars and so destroyed their manœuvring
power and left them helpless. Presently, Xerxes saw that some of his
broken ships were surrendering. In the water he could see the heads of
Greeks swimming to land; but “of the Barbarians the greater number
perished in the sea, not knowing how to swim.” The clumsy attempt of the
hard-pressed first line of the Persian fleet to put about led to
indescribable confusion. Some were rammed by the rear ships of their
own side. This ancient shipping was poor, unseaworthy stuff by any
modern standards. The west wind was blowing and many of the broken ships
of Xerxes were now drifting away out of his sight to be wrecked on the
coast beyond. Others were being towed towards Salamis by the Greeks.
Others, less injured and still in fighting trim, were making for the
beaches close beneath him that would bring them under the protection of
his army. Scattered over the further sea, beyond the headlands, remote
and vague, were ships in flight and Greek ships in pursuit. Slowly,
incident by incident, the disaster had unfolded under his eyes. We can
imagine something of the coming and going of messengers, the issuing of
futile orders, the changes of plan, throughout the day. In the morning
Xerxes had come out provided with tables to mark the most successful of
his commanders for reward. In the gold of the sunset he beheld the sea
power of Persia utterly scattered, sunken and destroyed, and the Greek
fleet over against Salamis unbroken and triumphant, ordering its ranks,
as if still incredulous of victory.
The Persian army remained as if in indecision for some days close to the
scene of this sea fight, and then began to retreat to Thessaly, where it
was proposed to winter and resume the campaign. But Xerxes, like Darius
I before him, had conceived a disgust for European campaigns. He was
afraid of the destruction of the bridge of boats. With part of the army
he went on to the Hellespont, leaving the main force in Thessaly under a
general, Mardonius. Of his own retreat the historian relates:
“Whithersoever they came on the march and to whatever nation they seized
the crops of that people and used them for provisions; and if they found
no crops, then they took the grass which was growing up from the earth,
and stripped off the bark from the trees and plucked down the leaves and
devoured them; alike of the cultivated trees and of those growing wild;
and they left nothing behind them: thus they did by reason of famine.
Then plague too seized upon the army and dysentery, which destroyed them
by the way, and some of them also who were sick the king left behind,
laying charge upon the cities where at the time he chanced to be in his
march, to take care of them and support them; of these he left some in
Thessaly, and some at Siris in Paionia, and some in Macedonia.... When,
passing on from Thrace they came to the passage, they crossed over the
Hellespont in haste to Abydos by means of the ships, for they did not
find the floating bridges still stretched across, but broken up by a
storm. While staying there for a time they had distributed to them an
allowance of food more abundant than they had had by the way, and from
satisfying their hunger without restraint and also from the changes of
water there died many of those in the army who had remained safe till
then. The rest arrived with Xerxes at Sardis.”
§ 10
The rest of the Persian army remained in Thessaly under the command of
Mardonius, and for a year he maintained an aggressive campaign against
the Greeks. Finally, he was defeated and killed in a pitched battle at
Platæa (479 B.C.), and on the same day the Persian fleet and a land army
met with joint disaster under the shadow of Mount Mycale on the Asiatic
mainland, between Ephesus and Miletus. The Persian ships, being in fear
of the Greeks, had been drawn up on shore and a wall built about them;
but the Greeks disembarked and stormed this enclosure. They then sailed
to the Hellespont to destroy what was left of the bridge of boats, so
that later the Persian fugitives, retreating from Platæa, had to cross
by shipping at the Bosphorus, and did so with difficulty.
Encouraged by these disasters of the imperial power, the Ionian cities
in Asia began for a second time to revolt against the Persians.
With this the ninth book of the _History_ of Herodotus comes to an end.
He was born about 484 B.C., so that at the time of the battle of Platæa
he was a child of five years old. Much of the substance of his story was
gathered by him from actors in, and eye-witnesses of, the great events
he relates. The war still dragged on for a long time; the Greeks
supported a rebellion against Persian rule in Egypt, and tried
unsuccessfully to take Cyprus; it did not end until about 449 B.C. Then
the Greek coasts of Asia Minor and the Greek cities in the Black Sea
remained generally free, but Cyprus and Egypt continued under Persian
rule. Herodotus, who had been born a Persian subject in the Ionian city
of Halicarnassus, was five and thirty years old by that time, and he
must have taken an early opportunity after this peace of visiting
Babylon and Persia. He probably went to Athens, with his History ready
to recite, about 438 B.C.
The idea of a great union of Greece for aggression against Persia was
not altogether strange to Herodotus. Some of his readers suspect him of
writing to enforce it. It was certainly in the air at that time. He
describes Aristagoras, the son-in-law of Histiæus, as showing the
Spartans “a tablet of bronze on which was engraved a map of the whole
earth with all the seas and rivers.” He makes Aristagoras say: “These
Barbarians are not valiant in fight. You, on the other hand, have now
attained to the utmost skill in war. They fight with bows and arrows and
a short spear: they go into battle wearing trousers and having caps on
their heads. You have perfected your weapons and discipline. They are
easily to be conquered. Not all the other nations of the world have what
they possess: gold, silver, bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and
slaves; _all this you might have for yourselves, if you so desired_.”
[Illustration: The World according to HERODOTUS]
It was a hundred years before these suggestions bore fruit.
Xerxes was murdered in his palace about 465 B.C., and thereafter Persia
made no further attempts at conquest in Europe. We have no such
knowledge of the things that were happening in the empire of the Great
King as we have of the occurrences in the little states of Central
Greece. Greece had suddenly begun to produce literature, and put itself
upon record as no other nation had ever done hitherto. After 479 B.C.
(Platæa) the spirit seems to have gone out of the government of the
Medes and Persians. The empire of the Great King enters upon a period of
decay. An Artaxerxes, a second Xerxes, a second Darius, pass across the
stage; there are rebellions in Egypt and Syria; the Medes rebel; a
second Artaxerxes and a second Cyrus, his brother, fight for the throne.
This history is even as the history of Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt in
the older times. It is autocracy reverting to its normal state of palace
crime, blood-stained magnificence, and moral squalor. But the last-named
struggle produced a Greek masterpiece, for this second Cyrus collected
an army of Greek mercenaries and marched into Babylonia, and was there
killed at the moment of victory over Artaxerxes II. Thereupon, the Ten
Thousand Greeks, left with no one to employ them, made a retreat to the
coast again (401 B.C.), and this retreat was immortalized in a book, one
of the first of personal war books, the _Anabasis_, by their leader
Xenophon.
Murders, revolts, chastisements, disasters, cunning alliances, and base
betrayals, and no Herodotus to record them. Such is the texture of
Persian history. An Artaxerxes III, covered with blood, flourishes dimly
for a time. “Artaxerxes III is said to have been murdered by Bagoas, who
places Arses, the youngest of the king’s sons, on the throne only to
slay him in turn when he seemed to be contemplating independent
action.”[181] So it goes on. Beneath the crimes and disorders of the
palaces, the life of the city and country ran a similar course.
Justice was fitful and law venal. Wars that were unmeaning catastrophes
swept down upon any little gleam of prosperity or decency to which this
or that community clambered. Athens, prospering for a time after the
Persian repulse, was smitten by the plague, in which Pericles, its
greatest ruler, died (428 B.C.). But, as a noteworthy fact amidst these
confusions, the Ten Thousand of Xenophon were scattering now among the
Greek cities, repeating from their own experience the declaration of
Aristagoras that the Persian empire was a rich confusion which it would
be very easy to conquer.
XXIII
GREEK THOUGHT AND LITERATURE[182]
§ 1. _The Athens of Pericles._ § 2. _Socrates._ § 3. _What was the
Quality of the Common Athenians?_ § 4. _Greek Tragedy and Comedy._
§ 5. _Plato and the Academy._ § 6. _Aristotle and the Lyceum._ § 7.
_Philosophy becomes Unworldly._ § 8. _The Quality and Limitations
of Greek Thought._
§ 1
Greek history for the next forty years after Platæa and Mycale is a
story of comparative peace and tranquillity. There were wars, but they
were not intense wars. For a little while in Athens, for a section of
the prosperous, there was leisure and opportunity. And by a combination
of accidents and through the character of a small group of people, this
leisure and opportunity produced the most remarkable and memorable
results. A beautiful literature was produced; the plastic arts
flourished, and the foundations of modern science were laid. Then, after
an interlude of fifty odd years, the long-smouldering hostility between
Athens and Sparta broke out into a fierce and exhausting war, which
sapped at last the vitality of this creative movement.
This war is known in history as the Peloponnesian War; it went on for
nearly thirty years, and wasted all the power of Greece. At first Athens
was in the ascendant, then Sparta. Then arose Thebes, a city not fifty
miles from Athens, to overshadow Sparta. Once more Athens flared into
importance as the head of a confederation. The story must be told at
considerable length or not told at all. It is a story of narrow
rivalries and inexplicable hatreds that would have vanished long ago
out of the memories of men, were it not that it is recorded and
reflected in a great literature.
Through all this time Persia appears and reappears as the ally first of
this league and then of that. About the middle of the fourth century
B.C., Greece becomes aware of a new influence in its affairs, that of
Philip, King of Macedonia. Macedonia does, indeed, arise in the
background of this incurably divided Greece as the Medes and Persians
arose behind the Chaldean Empire. A time comes when the Greek mind turns
round, so to speak, from its disputes, and stares in one united dismay
at the Macedonian.
Planless and murderous squabbles are still planless and murderous
squabbles even though Thucydides tells the story, even though the great
beginnings of a new civilization are wrecked by their disorders; and in
this general outline we can give no space at all to the particulars of
these internecine feuds, to the fights and flights that sent first this
Greek city and then that up to the sky in flames. Upon a one-foot globe
Greece becomes a speck almost too small to recognize; and in a short
history of mankind, all this century and more of dissension between the
days of Salamis and Platæa and the rise of King Philip, shrinks to a
little, almost inaudible clash of disputation, to a mere note upon the
swift passing of opportunity for nations as for men.
But what does not shrink into insignificance, because it has entered
into the intellectual process of all subsequent nations, because it is
inseparably a part of our mental foundation, is the literature that
Athens produced during such patches and gleams of tranquillity and
security as these times afforded her.
Says Professor Gilbert Murray:[183]
“Their outer political history, indeed, like that of all other nations,
is filled with war and diplomacy, with cruelty and deceit. It is the
inner history, the history of thought and feeling and character, that is
so grand. They had some difficulties to contend with which are now
almost out of our path. They had practically no experience, but were
doing everything for the first time; they were utterly weak in material
resources, and their emotions, their ‘_desires and fears and rages_,’
were probably wilder and fiercer than ours. Yet they produced the Athens
of Pericles and of Plato.”
This remarkable outbreak of creative power, which for three and twenty
centuries has been to men of intelligence a guiding and inspiring beacon
out of the past, flared up after the battles of Marathon and Salamis had
made Athens free and fearless, and, without any great excesses of power,
predominant in her world. It was the work of a quite small group of men.
A number of her citizens lived for the better part of a generation under
conditions which, in all ages, have disposed men to produce good and
beautiful work; they were secure, they were free, and they had pride;
and they were without that temptation of apparent and unchallenged power
which disposes all of us to inflict wrongs upon our fellow men. When
political life narrowed down again to the waste and crimes of a
fratricidal war with Sparta, there was so broad and well-fed a flame of
intellectual activity burning that it lasted through all the windy
distresses of this war and beyond the brief lifetime of Alexander the
Great, for a period altogether of more than a hundred years after the
wars began.
Athens, it must be understood, was by far the largest of all the Greek
city democracies. Flushed with victory and the sense of freedom fairly
won, her people did for a time rise towards nobility. Under the guidance
of a great demagogue, Pericles, the chief official of the Athenian
general assembly, and a politician statesman rather of the calibre of
Gladstone or Lincoln in modern history, they were set to the task of
rebuilding their city and expanding their commerce. For a time they were
capable of following a generous leader generously, and Fate gave them a
generous leader. In Pericles there was mingled in the strangest fashion
political ability with a real living passion for deep and high and
beautiful things. He kept in power for over thirty years. He was a man
of extraordinary vigour and liberality of mind. He stamped these
qualities upon his time. As Winckler has remarked, the Athenian
democracy had for a time “the face of Pericles.” He was sustained by
what was probably a very great and noble friendship. There was a woman
of unusual education, Aspasia, from Miletus, whom he could not marry
because of the law that restricted the citizenship of Athens to the
home-born, but who was in effect his wife. She played a large part in
gathering about him men of unusual gifts. All the great writers of the
time knew her, and several have praised her wisdom. Plutarch, it is
true, accuses her of instigating a troublesome and dangerous but finally
successful war against Samos, but, as he himself shows later, this was
necessitated by the naval hostility of the Samians, which threatened the
overseas trade of Athens, upon which all the prosperity of the republic
depended.
Men’s ambitions are apt to reflect the standards of their intimates.
Pericles was content, at any rate, to serve as a leader in Athens rather
than to dominate as a tyrant. Alliances were formed under his guidance,
new colonies and trading stations were established from Italy to the
Black Sea; and the treasures of the league at Delos were brought to
Athens. Convinced of his security from Persia, Pericles spent the war
hoard of the allies upon the beautification of his city. This was an
unrighteous thing to do by our modern standards, but it was not a base
or greedy thing to do. Athens had accomplished the work of the Delian
League, and is not the labourer worthy of his hire? This sequestration
made a time of exceptional opportunity for architects and artists. The
Parthenon of Athens, whose ruins are still a thing of beauty, was but
the crown set upon the clustering glories of the Athens Pericles
rebuilt. Such sculptures as those of Phidias, Myron, and Polyclitus that
still survive, witness to the artistic quality of the time.
The reader must bear in mind that illuminating remark of Winckler’s,
which says that this renascent Athens bore for a time the face of
Pericles. It was the peculiar genius of this man and of his atmosphere
that let loose the genius of men about him, and attracted men of great
intellectual vigour to Athens. Athens wore his face for a time as one
wears a mask, and then became restless and desired to put him aside.
There was very little that was great and generous about the common
Athenian. We have told of the spirit of one sample voter for the
ostracism of Aristides, and Lloyd (in his _Age of Pericles_) declares
that the Athenians would not suffer the name of Miltiades to be
mentioned in connection with the battle of Marathon. The sturdy
self-respect of the common voters revolted presently against the
beautiful buildings rising about them; against the favours shown to such
sculptors as Phidias over popular worthies in the same line of
business; against the donations made to a mere foreigner like Herodotus
of Halicarnassus; against the insulting preference of Pericles for the
company and conversation of a Milesian woman. The public life of
Pericles was conspicuously orderly, and that presently set the man in
the street thinking that his private life must be very corrupt. One
gathers that Pericles was “superior” in his demeanour; he betrayed at
times a contempt for the citizens he served.
“Pericles acquired not only an elevation of sentiment, and a loftiness
and purity of style far removed from the low expression of the vulgar,
but likewise a gravity of countenance which relaxed not into laughter, a
firm and even tone of voice, an easy deportment, and a decency of dress
which no vehemence of speaking ever put into disorder. These things, and
others of a like nature, excited admiration in all that saw him. Such
was his conduct, when a vile and abandoned fellow loaded him a whole day
with reproaches and abuse; he bore it with patience and silence, and
continued in public for the despatch of some urgent affairs. In the
evening he walked softly home, this impudent wretch following, and
insulting him all the way with the most scurrilous language. And as it
was dark when he came to his own door, he ordered one of his servants to
take a torch and light the man home. The poet Ion, however, says he was
proud and supercilious in conversation, and that there was a great deal
of vanity and contempt of others mixed with his dignity of manner.... He
appeared not in the streets except when he went to the forum or the
senate house. He declined the invitations of his friends, and all social
entertainments and recreations; insomuch that in the whole time of his
administration, which was a considerable length, he never went to sup
with any of his friends but once, which was at the marriage of his
nephew Euryptolemus, and he stayed there only until the ceremony of
libation was ended. He considered that the freedom of entertainments
takes away all distinction of office, and that dignity is but little
consistent with familiarity....”[184]
There was as yet no gutter journalism to tell the world of the vileness
of the conspicuous and successful; but the common man, a little out of
conceit with himself, found much consolation in the art of comedy,
which flourished exceedingly. The writers of comedy satisfied that
almost universal craving for the depreciation of those whose apparent
excellence offends our self-love. They threw dirt steadily and
industriously at Pericles and his friends. Pericles was portrayed in a
helmet; a helmet became him, and it is to be feared he knew as much.
This led to much joy and mirth over the pleasant suggestion of a
frightfully distorted head, an onion head. The “goings on” of Aspasia
were of course a fruitful vineyard for the inventions of the street....
[Illustration: Athene of the Parthenon.]
Dreaming souls, weary of the vulgarities of our time, have desired to be
transferred to the sublime Age of Pericles. But, plumped down into that
Athens, they would have found themselves in very much the atmosphere of
the lower sort of contemporary music-hall, very much in the vein of our
popular newspapers; the same hot blast of braying libel, foul
imputation, greedy “patriotism,” and general baseness would have blown
upon them, the “modern note” would have pursued them. As the memories of
Platæa and Salamis faded and the new buildings grew familiar, Pericles
and the pride of Athens became more and more offensive to the homely
humour of the crowd. He was never ostracized--his prestige with the
quieter citizens saved him from that; but he was attacked with
increasing boldness and steadfastness. He lived and died a poor man; he
was perhaps the most honest of demagogues; but this did not save him
from an abortive prosecution for peculation. Defeated in that, his
enemies resorted to a more devious method; they began to lop away his
friends.
Religious intolerance and moral accusations are the natural weapons of
the envious against the leaders of men. His friend Damon was ostracized.
Phidias was attacked for impiety. On the shield of the great statue of
the goddess Athene, Phidias had dared to put, among the combatants in a
fight between Greeks and Amazons, portraits of Pericles and himself.
Phidias died in prison. Anaxagoras, a stranger welcomed to Athens by
Pericles--when there were plenty of honest fellows already there quite
willing to satisfy any reasonable curiosities--was saying the strangest
things about the sun and stars, and hinting not obscurely that there
were no gods, but only one animating spirit (_nous_) in the world.[185]
The comedy writers suddenly found they had deep religious feelings that
could be profoundly and even dangerously shocked, and Anaxagoras fled
the threat of a prosecution. Then came the turn of Aspasia. Athens
seemed bent upon deporting her, and Pericles was torn between the woman
who was the soul of his life and the ungracious city he had saved,
defended, and made more beautiful and unforgettable than any other city
in history. He stood up to defend Aspasia, he was seized by a storm of
very human emotion, and as he spoke he wept--a gleeful thing for the
rabble. His tears saved Aspasia for a time.
The Athenians were content to humiliate Pericles, but he had served them
so long that they were indisposed to do without him. He had been their
leader now for a third of a century.
In 431 B.C. came the war with Sparta. Plutarch accuses Pericles of
bringing it on, because he felt his popularity waned so fast that a war
was needed to make him indispensable.
“And as he himself was become obnoxious to the people upon Phidias’s
account, and was afraid of being called in question for it, he urged on
the war, which as yet was uncertain, and blew up that flame which till
then was stifled and suppressed. By this means he hoped to obviate the
accusations that threatened him, and to mitigate the rage of envy,
because such was his dignity and power, that in all important affairs,
and in every great danger, the republic could place its confidence in
him alone.”
But the war was a slow and dangerous war, and the Athenian people were
impatient. A certain Cleon arose, ambitious to oust Pericles from his
leadership. There was a great clamour for a swift ending of the war.
Cleon set out to be “the man who won the war.” The popular poets got to
work in this fashion:
“Thou king of satyrs ... why boast thy prowess,
Yet shudder at the sound of sharpened swords,
Spite of the flaming Cleon?”
An expedition under the leadership of Pericles was unsuccessful, and
Cleon seized the opportunity for a prosecution. Pericles was suspended
from his command and fined. The story goes that his oldest son--this was
not the son of Aspasia, but of a former wife--turned against him, and
pursued him with vile and incredible accusations. This young man was
carried off by the plague. Then the sister of Pericles died, and then
his last legitimate son. When, after the fashion of the time, he put the
funeral garlands on the boy he wept aloud. Presently he himself took the
contagion and died (428 B.C.).
The salient facts of this brief summary will serve to show how
discordant Pericles was with the normal life of his time and city. This
intellectual and artistic outbreak in Athens was no doubt favoured by
the conditions of the time, but it was also due in part to the
appearance of some very unusual men. It was not a general movement; it
was the movement of a small group of people exceptionally placed and
gifted.
§ 2
Another leading figure in this Athenian movement, a figure still more
out of harmony with the life around him, and quite as much an original
source and stimulant of the enduring greatness of his age, was a man
called Socrates, the son of a stone-mason. He was born about sixteen
years later than Herodotus, and he was beginning to be heard of about
the time when Pericles died. He himself wrote nothing, but it was his
custom to talk in public places. There was in those days a great
searching for wisdom going on; there was a various multitude of teachers
called sophists who reasoned upon truth, beauty, and right living, and
instructed the developing curiosities and imaginations of youth. This
was so because there were no great priestly schools in Greece. And into
these discussions this man came, a clumsy and slovenly figure,
barefooted, gathering about him a band of admirers and disciples.
His method was profoundly sceptical; he believed that the only possible
virtue was true knowledge; he would tolerate no belief, no hope that
could not pass the ultimate acid test. For himself this meant virtue,
but for many of his weaker followers it meant the loss of beliefs and
moral habits that would have restrained their impulses. These weaklings
became self-excusing, self-indulging scoundrels. Among his young
associates were Plato, who afterwards immortalized his method in a
series of philosophical dialogues, and founded the philosophical school
of the Academy, which lasted nine hundred years, Xenophon, of the Ten
Thousand, who described his death, and Isocrates, one of the wisest of
Greek political thinkers; but there were also Critias, who, when Athens
was utterly defeated by Sparta, was leader among the Thirty Tyrants
appointed by the Spartans to keep the crushed city under;[186]
Charmides, who was killed beside Critias when the Thirty were
overthrown; and Alcibiades, a brilliant and complex traitor, who did
much to lead Athens into the disastrous expedition against Syracuse
which destroyed her strength, who betrayed her to the Spartans, and who
was at last assassinated while on his way to the Persian court to
contrive mischief against Greece. These latter pupils were not the only
young men of promise whose vulgar faith and patriotism Socrates
destroyed, to leave nothing in its place. His most inveterate enemy was
a certain Anytus, whose son, a devoted disciple of Socrates, had become
a hopeless drunkard. Through Anytus it was that Socrates was at last
prosecuted for “corrupting” the youth of Athens, and condemned to death
by drinking a poisonous draught made from hemlock (399 B.C.).
His death is described with great beauty in the dialogue of Plato called
by the name of Phædo.
§ 3
The preceding section raised an interesting discussion between Professor
Gilbert Murray and the writer upon the character and quality of the
common Athenian citizen. Professor Murray thought several phrases used
by the writer harsh and unjust. But what he had to say was so
interesting and informing, and the writer was so entirely in agreement
with his spirit, that it seemed better, instead of modifying what had
been written in § 1, to leave that as it stood and to supplement it by
quoting Professor Murray. He objected to the parallelism with a
twentieth-century crowd. “What I want you to do,” he wrote, “is to take
them at the level of the people round them and before them and see how
they differ. For example, the first thing that strikes one is that they
use all their powers for a different purpose than most peoples: for
intellectual and artistic things. No more enormous works here to glorify
divine kings; no private splendour, no luxury, but a wonderful output of
art, poetry, philosophy, and--within limits--science. Compare them with
Rome.
“In the matter of slavery; all nations had slaves; some treated them
very cruelly, some with moderate cruelty. The Greeks alone argued
whether it was right to have them--and ‘cranks’ occasionally proposed
emancipation. You get strong testimony, sometimes indignant testimony,
that the Athenians were too soft altogether in their treatment of
slaves. As soon as you get to Carthaginian or Roman history you get
appalling cruelty (the 6000 crucified by Crassus, the gladiatorial
games, the habitual leg-breaking of slaves, etc.); such things seem
never to have occurred in Greece. As soon as you get to Alexander you
get, of course, the Oriental despotic touch--fantastic vanity and
cruelty; and at length the recurrence of human sacrifice.
“The greatness of Greece comes out only in the art and literature and
thought; not in the political and social history--except in dim flashes.
By all means emphasize clearly to start with that the Greeks of, say,
the ninth century, were practically savages, and those of even the sixth
and in places right on to the fifth and fourth were in many things on
the ‘Lower Cultures’ level. Clothes like Polynesians; tools very poor;
religion ... fragments of the Polynesian all about, when you got outside
the educated Attic world. But the _characteristic_ is that, on this very
low level, you have extraordinary flashes of very high inspiration, as
the poetry and art and philosophy witness. Also, an actual achievement
in social life--what one calls ‘Hellenism,’ _i.e._, republicanism,
simplicity of life, sobriety of thought, almost complete abolition of
torture, mutilation, etc., and an amazing emancipation of the individual
and of the human intellect. It is impossible to speak, really, of the
‘Greek view’ of anything. Because all the different views are put
forward and represented: polytheism, monotheism, atheism; pro-slavery,
anti-slavery; duty to animals, no duty to animals; democracy, monarchy,
aristocracy. The characteristic is that _human thought got free_. (Not
absolutely, of course; only to an amazing extent.) This emancipation was
paid for by all sorts of instability; awful political instability,
because stability in such things is produced exactly by the opposite--by
long firm tradition and cohesiveness.
“It is not fair to say I idealize the Athenian mob; see, for example, my
_Euripides and his Age_. But I don’t think it was like our music-hall
mob. It was much more artistic, much more intellectual and yet more
primitive, more indecent but less lascivious; more capable of atrocious
misconduct; also probably more capable of idealism. But we don’t really
know much about the crowd. It is only a hostile average-sensual-man
background against which the philosophers and poets stand out. There was
no ‘city mob,’ as in Rome. They were nearly all small farmers or
craftsmen. I can’t help thinking that their badness was more like the
faults of a superior South Sea Islander than like the viler side of the
‘crowd’ to-day.”
§ 4
The most characteristic feature of the opening years of this brilliant
century and a half (475 to 325 B.C.) of Greek intellectual life was the
appearance of the great tragedies.
Before the age of Pericles the main literature of the Greek peoples had
been their epic poetry, of which we have already said something in our
account of the earlier nomadic Aryan life. It was made up of songs of
free adventure, aristocratic and valiant in spirit. The main Greek epics
were reduced to writing, and the text of the chief ones put in its
present order in the time of the tyrant Peisistratus (_i.e._,
immediately before the first Persian wars). Chanted originally to the
chiefs and leading men in hall, they were now recited at the public
festivals. In addition, there were also poems of more homely character,
love songs, war lyrics, and the like.
A third stream of poetry also ran into the Greek tradition, perhaps not
of Aryan origin at all, but preserving the religious ideas of the dark
whites whom the Greeks had conquered. There were religious chants and
hymns associated with the secret religious practices of the worship of
Demeter, the earth goddess, and of Orpheus and Dionysus. They are mixed
up with ideas of self-abasement, self-mutilation, and the like, that
were altogether foreign to the healthy directness of the hardy
barbarians from the north. These ideas were creeping out from their
hiding-places, and expressing themselves in Greek in Athens during this
period in the Orphic religious poetry. It seems probable that in the
Athenian population among all the Greek cities the pre-Aryan strain was
unusually strong. This dark strain was subtle, artistic,
creative--Cnossos witnesses to that; but it had no great courage of the
mind; it was afraid of the stars and of life. Whenever that strain is
found in any race, there are to be found also thoughts and legends of
sacrificial murders.
And perhaps also indigenous to the Greek soil, rooted deeply there in
the time of the world-wide ancient heliolithic culture, were religious
dances. Such dances we can trace from the Atlantic to Peru. There is a
drawing in a Spanish cave at Cogul, near the Ebro, which is supposed to
represent a later palæolithic ritual dance. There is little evidence of
the primitive Aryans engaging in religious dances. But running through
the rural life of Greece was the tradition of a dressing-up and a
dancing and chanting associated with the worship of another god, who is
killed and lives again as a part of the ceremonies, the god Dionysus.
After the coming of the Aryans into Greece, the vocal element became
stronger in these proceedings, and thrust into the dance came a
recitation. There was first one reciter, then two, and then three, and
the rest of the company became the chorus to the declamations of these
principal actors. Out of the public performance at festivals and
anniversaries of these choir songs or dithyrambs with one actor grew the
great art of tragedy with three and more. Side by side with tragedy,
comedy developed from another and merrier series of dressings-up and
singing. Here we can but name those who were supreme in these arts who
flourished in the days of Pericles, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides,
the masters of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the writer of comedies. We can
say nothing of the splendour and beauty of the former, nor of the
fantastic invention and wit of the latter. Æschylus won his first prize
for tragedy in the year that Herodotus was born (484 B.C.); Sophocles
came some eighteen years later; Euripides was four years old when
Æschylus was beginning his career. The mockery of Aristophanes broke out
(427 B.C.) only when the days of great tragedy and sculpture and
building were drawing to a close.[187]
§ 5
The influence of Socrates also began to bear fruit after the days of
Pericles and Aspasia. This old questioner, at whose touch faith,
speculation, and illusion shrivelled together, was the centre of a group
of young men who lived through and after the years of the Peloponnesian
War. Of all these young men, one stands out as the greatest of them all,
Plato. He was born 427 B.C., the year of the first performance of the
work of Aristophanes, and he lived for eighty years.
In mental temperament Plato was of an altogether different type from the
older man. He was a most artistic and delicate writer, and Socrates
could write nothing consecutive. He cared for beautiful things and
Socrates despised them. He was supremely concerned with the ordering of
public affairs and the scheming of happier human relationships, while
Socrates, heedless of heat and cold and the opinion of his fellow
creatures, concentrated his mind upon a serene disillusionment. Life,
said Socrates, was deception; only the Soul lived. Plato had a very
great affection for this rugged old teacher, he found his method of the
utmost value in disentangling and cleaning up opinions, and he made him
the central figure of his immortal dialogues; but his own thoughts and
disposition turned him altogether away from the sceptical attitude. In
many of the dialogues the voice is the voice of Socrates, but the
thought is the thought of Plato. Plato was living in a time of doubt and
questioning about all human relationships. In the great days of
Pericles, before 450 B.C., there seems to have been a complete
satisfaction in Athens with social and political institutions. Then
there seemed no reason for questioning. Men felt free; the community
prospered; one suffered chiefly from jealousy. The History of Herodotus
displays little or no dissatisfaction with Athenian political
institutions.
But Plato, who was born about the time Herodotus died, and who grew up
in the atmosphere of a disastrous war and great social distress and
confusion, was from the first face to face with human discord and the
misfit of human institutions. To that challenge his mind responded. One
of his earlier works and his latest are bold and penetrating discussions
of the possible betterment of social relations. Socrates had taught him
to take nothing for granted, not even the common relations of husband
and wife or parent and child. His _Republic_, the first of all Utopian
books, is a young man’s dream of a city in which human life is arranged
according to a novel and a better plan; his last unfinished work, the
_Laws_, is a discussion of the regulation of another such Utopia. There
is much in Plato at which we cannot even glance here, but it is a
landmark in this history, it is a new thing in the development of
mankind, this appearance of the idea of wilfully and completely
recasting human conditions. So far mankind has been living by tradition
under the fear of the gods. Here is a man who says boldly to our race,
and as if it were a quite reasonable and natural thing to say, “Take
hold of your lives. Most of these things that distress you, you can
avoid; most of these things that dominate you, you can overthrow. You
can do as you will with them.”
One other thing besides the conflicts of the time perhaps stimulated the
mind of Plato in this direction. In the days of Pericles Athens had
founded many settlements overseas, and the setting up of these
settlements had familiarized men with the idea that a community need not
grow, it could also be made.
Closely associated with Plato was a younger man, who later also
maintained a school in Athens and lived to an even greater age. This was
Isocrates. He was what we should call a publicist, a writer rather than
an orator, and his peculiar work was to develop the idea of Herodotus,
the idea of a unification of Greece against the Persian Empire, as a
remedy for the baseness and confusion of her politics and the waste and
destruction of her internecine wars. His political horizon was in some
respects broader than Plato’s, and in his later years he looked towards
monarchy, and particularly towards the Macedonian monarchy of Philip, as
a more unifying and broadening method of government than city democracy.
The same drift to monarchist ideas had occurred in the case of that
Xenophon whose _Anabasis_ we have already mentioned. In his old age this
retired mercenary wrote the _Cyropædia_, a “vindication both
theoretically and practically of absolute monarchy as shown in the
organization of the Persian Empire.”[188]
§ 6
Plato taught in the Academy. To him in his old age came a certain
good-looking youngster from Stagira in Macedonia, Aristotle, who was the
son of the Macedonian king’s physician, and a man with a very different
type of mind from that of the great Athenian. He was naturally sceptical
of the imaginative will, and with a great respect for and comprehension
of established fact. Later on, after Plato was dead, he set up a school
at the Lyceum in Athens and taught, criticizing Plato and Socrates with
a certain hardness. When he taught, the shadow of Alexander the Great
lay across the freedom of Greece, and he favoured slavery and
constitutional kings. He had previously been the tutor of Alexander for
several years at the court of Philip of Macedon.[189] Intelligent men
were losing heart in those days, their faith in the power of men to make
their own conditions of life was fading. There were no more Utopias. The
rush of events was manifestly too powerful for such organized effort as
was then practicable between men of fine intelligence. It was possible
to think of recasting human society when human society was a little city
of a few thousand citizens, but what was happening about them was
something cataclysmal; it was the political recasting of the whole known
world, of the affairs of what even then must have amounted to something
between fifty and a hundred million people. It was recasting upon a
scale no human mind was yet equipped to grasp. It drove thought back
upon the idea of a vast and implacable Fate. It made men snatch at
whatever looked stable and unifying. Monarchy, for instance, for all its
manifest vices, was a conceivable government for millions; it had, to a
certain extent, _worked_; it imposed a ruling will where it would seem
that a collective will was impossible. This change of the general
intellectual mood harmonized with Aristotle’s natural respect for
existing fact. If, on the one hand, it made him approve of monarchy and
slavery and the subjection of women as reasonable institutions, on the
other hand it made him eager to understand fact and to get some orderly
knowledge of these realities of nature and human nature that were now so
manifestly triumphant over the creative dreams of the preceding
generation. He is terribly sane and luminous, and terribly wanting in
self-sacrificial enthusiasm. He questions Plato when Plato would exile
poets from his Utopia, for poetry is a power; he directs his energy
along a line diametrically opposed to Socrates’ depreciation of
Anaxagoras. He anticipates Bacon and the modern scientific movement in
his realization of the importance of ordered knowledge. He set himself
to the task of gathering together and setting down knowledge. He was the
first natural historian. Other men before him had speculated about the
nature of things, but he, with every young man he could win over to the
task, set himself to classify and compare things. Plato says in effect:
“Let us take hold of life and remodel it;” this soberer successor: “Let
us first know more of life and meanwhile serve the king.” It was not so
much a contradiction as an immense qualification of the master.
The peculiar relation of Aristotle to Alexander the Great enabled him to
procure means for his work such as were not available again for
scientific inquiry for long ages. He could command hundreds of talents
(a talent = about £240) for his expenses. At one time he had at his
disposal a thousand men scattered throughout Asia and Greece, collecting
matter for his natural history.[190][191] They were, of course, very
untrained observers, collectors of stories rather than observers; but
nothing of the kind had ever been attempted, had even been thought of,
so far as we know, before his time. Political as well as natural science
began. The students of the Lyceum under his direction made an analysis
of 158 political constitutions....
This was the first gleam of organized science in the world. The early
death of Alexander and the breaking up of his empire almost before it
had begun, put an end to endowments on this scale for 2000 years. Only
in Egypt at the Alexandria Museum did any scientific research continue,
and that only for a few generations. Fifty years after Aristotle’s death
the Lyceum had already dwindled to insignificance.
§ 7
The general drift of thought in the concluding years of the fourth
century B.C. was not with Aristotle, nor towards the laborious and
necessary accumulation of ordered knowledge. It is possible that without
his endowments from the king he would have made but a small figure in
intellectual history. Through them he was able to give his splendid
intelligence substance and effect. The ordinary man prefers easy ways so
long as they may be followed, and is almost wilfully heedless whether
they end at last in a cul-de-sac. Finding the stream of events too
powerful to control at once, the generality of philosophical teachers
drifted in those days from the scheming of model cities and the planning
of new ways of living into the elaboration of beautiful and consoling
systems of evasion.
Perhaps that is putting things coarsely and unjustly. But let Professor
Gilbert Murray speak upon this matter.[192]
“The Cynics cared only for virtue and the relation of the soul to God;
the world and its learning and its honours were as dross to them. The
Stoics and Epicureans, so far apart at first sight, were very similar in
their ultimate aim. What they really cared about was ethics--the
practical question how a man should order his life. Both, indeed, gave
themselves to some science--the Epicureans to physics, the Stoics to
logic and rhetoric--but only as a means to an end. The Stoic tried to
win men’s hearts and convictions by sheer subtlety of abstract argument
and dazzling sublimity of thought and expression. The Epicurean was
determined to make Humanity go its way without cringing to capricious
gods and without sacrificing Free-Will. He condensed his gospel into
four maxims: ‘God is not to be feared; Death cannot be felt; the Good
can be won; all that we dread can be borne and conquered.’”
And meanwhile the stream of events flowed on, with a reciprocal
indifference to philosophy.
§ 8
If the Greek classics are to be read with any benefit by modern men,
they must be read as the work of men like ourselves. Regard must be had
to their traditions, their opportunities, and their limitations. There
is a disposition to exaggeration in all human admiration; men will treat
the rough notes of Thucydides or Plato for work they never put in order
as miracles of style, and the errors of their transcribers as hints of
unfathomable mysteries; most of our classical texts are very much
mangled, and all were originally the work of human beings in
difficulties, living in a time of such darkness and narrowness of
outlook as makes our own age by comparison a period of dazzling
illumination. What we shall lose in reverence by this familiar
treatment, we shall gain in sympathy for that group of troubled,
uncertain, and very modern minds. The Athenian writers were, indeed, the
first of modern men. They were discussing questions that we still
discuss; they began to struggle with the great problems that confront us
to-day. Their writings are our dawn.[193]
They began an inquiry, and they arrived at no solutions. We cannot
pretend to-day that we have arrived at solutions to most of the
questions they asked. The mind of the Hebrews, as we have already shown,
awoke suddenly to the endless miseries and disorders of life, saw that
these miseries and disorders were largely due to the lawless acts of
men, and concluded that salvation could come only through subduing
ourselves to the service of the one God who rules heaven and earth. The
Greek, rising to the same perception, was not prepared with the same
idea of a patriarchal deity; he lived in a world in which there was not
God but the gods; if perhaps he felt that the gods themselves were
limited, then he thought of Fate behind them, cold and impersonal. So he
put his problem in the form of an enquiry as to what was right living,
without any definite correlation of the right-living man with the will
of God.... To us, looking at the matter from a standpoint purely
historical, the common problem can now be presented in a form that, for
the purposes of history, covers both the Hebrew and Greek way of putting
it. We have seen our kind rising out of the unconsciousness of animals
to a continuing racial self-consciousness, realizing the unhappiness of
its wild diversity of aims, realizing the inevitable tragedy of
individual self-seeking, and feeling its way blindly towards some
linking and subordinating idea to save it from the pains and accidents
of mere individuality. The gods, the god-king, the idea of the tribe,
the idea of the city; here are ideas that have claimed and held for a
time the devotion of men, ideas in which they have a little lost their
individual selfishness and escaped to the realization of a more enduring
life. Yet, as our wars and disasters prove, none of these greater ideas
have yet been great enough. The gods have failed to protect, the tribe
has proved itself vile and cruel, the city ostracized one’s best and
truest friends, the god-king made a beast of himself....
As we read over the speculative literature of this great period of the
Greeks, we realize three barriers set about the Greek mind, from which
it rarely escaped, but from which we now perhaps are beginning to
escape.
The first of these limitations was the obsession of the Greek mind by
the idea of the city as the ultimate state. In a world in which empire
had followed empire, each greater than its predecessor, in a world
through which men and ideas drove ever more loosely and freely, in a
world visibly unifying even then, the Greeks, because of their peculiar
physical and political circumstances, were still dreaming impossibly of
a compact little city state, impervious to outer influences, valiantly
secure against the whole world. Plato’s estimate of the number of
citizens in a perfect state varied between 1000 (the _Republic_) and
5040 (the _Laws_) citizens.[194] This state was to go to war and hold
its own against other cities of the same size. And this was not a couple
of generations after the hosts of Xerxes had crossed the Hellespont!
Perhaps these Greeks thought the day of world empires had passed for
ever, whereas it was only beginning. At the utmost their minds reached
out to alliances and leagues. There must have been men at the court of
Artaxerxes thinking far away beyond these little ideas of the rocky
creek, the island, and the mountain-encircled valley. But the need for
unification against the greater powers that moved outside the
Greek-speaking world, the Greek mind disregarded wilfully. These
outsiders were barbarians, not to be needlessly thought about; they were
barred out now from Greece for ever. One took Persian money; everybody
took Persian money; what did it matter? Or one enlisted for a time in
their armies (as Xenophon did) and hoped for his luck with a rich
prisoner. Athens took sides in Egyptian affairs, and carried on minor
wars with Persia, but there was no conception of a common policy or a
common future for Greece.... Until at last a voice in Athens began to
shout “Macedonia!” to clamour like a watch-dog, “Macedonia!” This was
the voice of the orator and demagogue Demosthenes, hurling warnings and
threats and denunciations at King Philip of Macedon, who had learnt his
politics not only from Plato and Aristotle, but also from Isocrates and
Xenophon, and from Babylon and Susa, and who was preparing quietly,
ably, and steadfastly to dominate all Greece, and through Greece to
conquer the known world....
There was a second thing that cramped the Greek mind, the institution of
domestic slavery. Slavery was implicit in Greek life; men could conceive
of neither comfort nor dignity without it. But slavery shuts off one’s
sympathy not only from a class of one’s fellow subjects; it puts the
slave-owner into a class and organization against all stranger men. One
is of an elect tribe. Plato, carried by his clear reason and the noble
sanity of his spirit beyond the things of the present, would have
abolished slavery; much popular feeling and the New Comedy were against
it; the Stoics and Epicureans, many of whom were slaves, condemned it as
unnatural, but finding it too strong to upset, decided that it did not
affect the soul and might be ignored. With the wise there was no bound
or free. To the matter-of-fact Aristotle, and probably to most practical
men, its abolition was inconceivable. So they declared that there were
in the world men “naturally slaves.”...
Finally, the thought of the Greeks was hampered by a want of knowledge
that is almost inconceivable to us to-day. They had no knowledge of the
past of mankind at all; at best they had a few shrewd guesses. They had
no knowledge of geography beyond the range of the Mediterranean basin
and the frontiers of Persia. We know far more to-day of what was going
on in Susa, Persepolis, Babylon, and Memphis in the time of Pericles
than he did. Their astronomical ideas were still in the state of
rudimentary speculations. Anaxagoras, greatly daring, thought the sun
and moon were vast globes, so vast that the sun was probably “as big as
all the Peloponnesus.” The forty-seventh proposition of the first book
of Euclid was regarded as one of the supreme triumphs of the human mind.
Their ideas in physics and chemistry were the results of profound
cogitation; it is wonderful that they did guess at atomic structure. One
has to remember their extraordinary poverty in the matter of
experimental apparatus. They had coloured glass for ornament, but no
white glass; no accurate means of measuring the minor intervals of time,
no really efficient numerical notation, no very accurate scales, no
rudiments of telescope or microscope. A modern scientific man dumped
down in the Athens of Pericles would have found the utmost difficulty in
demonstrating the elements of his knowledge, however crudely, to the men
he would have found there. He would have had to rig up the simplest
apparatus under every disadvantage, while Socrates pointed out the
absurdity of seeking Truth with pieces of wood and string and metal such
as small boys use for fishing. And our professor of science would also
have been in constant danger of a prosecution for impiety.
Our world to-day draws upon relatively immense accumulations of
knowledge of fact. In the age of Pericles scarcely the first stone of
our comparatively tremendous cairn of things recorded and proved had
been put in place. When we reflect upon this difference, then it ceases
to be remarkable that the Greeks, with all their aptitude for political
speculation, were blind to the insecurities of their civilization from
without and from within, to the necessity for effective unification, to
the swift rush of events that was to end for long ages these first
brief freedoms of the human mind.
It is not in the results it achieved, but in the attempts it made that
the true value for us of this group of Greek talkers and writers lies.
It is not that they answered questions, but that they dared to ask them.
Never before had man challenged his world and the way of life to which
he found his birth had brought him. Never had he said before that he
could alter his conditions. Tradition and a seeming necessity had held
him to life as he had found it grown up about his tribe since time
immemorial. Hitherto he had taken the world as children still take the
homes and habits in which they have been reared.
So in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. we perceive, most plainly in
Judea and in Athens, but by no means confined to those centres, the
beginnings of a moral and an intellectual process in mankind, an appeal
to righteousness and an appeal to the truth from the passions and
confusions and immediate appearances of existence. It is like the dawn
of the sense of responsibility in a youth, who suddenly discovers that
life is neither easy nor aimless. Mankind is growing up. The rest of
history for three and twenty centuries is threaded with the spreading
out and development and interaction and the clearer and more effective
statement of these main leading ideas. Slowly more and more men
apprehend the reality of human brotherhood, the needlessness of wars and
cruelties and oppression, the possibilities of a common purpose for the
whole of our kind. In every generation thereafter there is the evidence
of men seeking for that better order to which they feel our world must
come. But everywhere and wherever in any man the great constructive
ideas have taken hold, the hot greeds, the jealousies, the suspicions
and impatience that are in the nature of every one of us, war against
the struggle towards greater and broader purposes. The last twenty-three
centuries of history are like the efforts of some impulsive, hasty
immortal to think clearly and live rightly. Blunder follows blunder;
promising beginnings end in grotesque disappointments; streams of living
water are poisoned by the cup that conveys them to the thirsty lips of
mankind. But the hope of men rises again at last after every
disaster....
We pass on now to the story of one futile commencement, one glorious
shattered beginning of human unity. There was in Alexander the Great
knowledge and imagination, power and opportunity, folly, egotism,
detestable vulgarity, and an immense promise broken by the accident of
his early death while men were still dazzled by its immensity.
XXIV
THE CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT[195]
§ 1. _Philip of Macedonia._ § 2. _The Murder of King Philip._ § 3.
_Alexander’s First Conquests._ § 4. _The Wanderings of Alexander._
§ 5. _Was Alexander Indeed Great?_ § 6. _The Successors of
Alexander._ § 7. _Pergamum a Refuge of Culture._ § 8. _Alexander as
a Portent of World Unity._
§ 1
The true hero of the story of Alexander is not so much Alexander as his
father Philip. The author of a piece does not shine in the limelight as
the actor does, and it was Philip who planned much of the greatness that
his son achieved, who laid the foundations and forged the tools, who had
indeed already begun the Persian expedition at the time of his death.
Philip, beyond doubting, was one of the greatest monarchs the world has
ever seen; he was a man of the utmost intelligence and ability, and his
range of ideas was vastly beyond the scope of his time. He made
Aristotle his friend; he must have discussed with him those schemes for
the organization of real knowledge which the philosopher was to realize
later through Alexander’s endowments. Philip, so far as we can judge,
seems to have been Aristotle’s “Prince”; to him Aristotle turned as men
turn only to those whom they admire and trust. To Philip also Isocrates
appealed as the great leader who should unify and ennoble the chaotic
public life of Greece.
In many books it is stated that Philip was a man of incredible cynicism
and of uncontrolled lusts. It is true that at feasts, like all the
Macedonians of his time, he was a hard drinker and some times
drunken--it was probably considered unamiable not to drink excessively
at feasts; but of the other accusations there is no real proof, and for
evidence we have only the railings of such antagonists as Demosthenes,
the Athenian demagogue and orator, a man of reckless rhetoric. The
quotation of a phrase or so will serve to show to what the patriotic
anger of Demosthenes could bring him. In one of the _Philippics_, as his
denunciations of Philip are called, he gives vent in this style:
“Philip--a man who not only is no Greek, and no way akin to the Greeks,
but is not even a barbarian from a respectable country--no, a pestilent
fellow of Macedon, a country from which we never get even a decent
slave.” And so on and so on. We know, as a matter of fact, that the
Macedonians were an Aryan people very closely akin to the Greeks, and
that Philip was probably the best educated man of his time. This was the
spirit in which the adverse accounts of Philip were written.
[Illustration: Philip of Macedon]
When Philip became king of Macedonia in 359 B.C., his country was a
little country without a seaport or industries or any considerable city.
It had a peasant population, Greek almost in language and ready to be
Greek in sympathies, but more purely Nordic in blood than any people to
the south of it. Philip made this little barbaric state into a great
one; he created the most efficient military organization the world had
so far seen, and he had brought most of Greece into one confederacy
under his leadership at the time of his death. And his extraordinary
quality, his power of thinking out beyond the current ideas of his
time, is shown not so much in those matters as in the care with which he
had his son trained to carry on the policy he had created. He is one of
the few monarchs in history who cared for his successor. Alexander was,
as few other monarchs have ever been, a specially educated king; he was
educated for empire. Aristotle was but one of the several able tutors
his father chose for him. Philip confided his policy to him, and
entrusted him with commands and authority by the time he was sixteen. He
commanded the cavalry at Chæronea under his father’s eye. He was nursed
into power--generously and unsuspiciously.
To any one who reads his life with care it is evident that Alexander
started with an equipment of training and ideas of unprecedented value.
As he got beyond the wisdom of his upbringing he began to blunder and
misbehave--sometimes with a dreadful folly. The defects of his character
had triumphed over his upbringing long before he died.
Philip was a king after the old pattern, a leader-king, first among his
peers, of the ancient Nordic Aryan type. The army he found in Macedonia
consisted of a general foot levy and a noble equestrian order called the
“companions.” The people were farmers and hunters and somewhat drunken
in their habits, but ready for discipline and good fighting stuff. And
if the people were homely, the government was intelligent and alert. For
some generations the court language had been Attic (= Athenian) Greek,
and the court had been sufficiently civilized to shelter and entertain
such great figures as Euripides, who died there in 406 B.C., and Zeuxis
the artist. Moreover, Philip, before his accession, had spent some years
as a hostage in Greece. He had had as good an education as Greece could
give at that time. He was, therefore, quite familiar with what we may
call the idea of Isocrates--the idea of a great union of the Greek
states in Europe to dominate the Eastern world; and he knew, too, how
incapable was the Athenian democracy, because of its constitution and
tradition, of taking the opportunity that lay before it. For it was an
opportunity that would have to be shared. To the Athenians or the
Spartans it would mean letting in a “lot of foreigners” to the
advantages of citizenship. It would mean lowering themselves to the
level of equality and fellowship with Macedonians--a people from whom
“we” do not get “even a decent slave.”[196]
There was no way to secure unanimity among the Greeks for the
contemplated enterprise except by some revolutionary political action.
It was no love of peace that kept the Greeks from such an adventure; it
was their political divisions. The resources of the several states were
exhausted in a series of internecine wars--wars arising out of the
merest excuses and fanned by oratorical wind. The ploughing of certain
sacred lands near Delphi by the Phocians was, for example, the pretext
for a sanguinary Sacred War.
[Illustration:The growth of MACEDONIA]
Philip’s first years of kingship were devoted to the discipline of his
army. Hitherto most of the main battle fighting in the world had been
done by footmen in formation. In the very ancient Sumerian battle-pieces
we see spearmen in close order forming the main battle, just as they did
in the Zulu armies of the nineteenth century; the Greek troops of
Philip’s time were still fighting in that same style; the Theban phalanx
was a mass of infantry holding spears, the hinder ranks thrusting their
longer spears between the front-line men. Such a formation went through
anything less disciplined that opposed it. Mounted archers could, of
course, inflict considerable losses on such a mass of men, and
accordingly, as the horse came into warfare, horsemen appeared on either
side as an accessory to this main battle. The reader must remember that
the horse did not come into very effective use in western war until the
rise of the Assyrians, and then at first only as a chariot horse. The
chariots drove full tilt at the infantry mass and tried to break it.
Unless its discipline was very solid they succeeded. The Homeric
fighting is chariot fighting. It is not until the last thousand years
B.C. that we begin to find mounted soldiers, as distinct from
charioteers, playing a part in warfare. At first they appear to have
fought in a scattered fashion, each man doing his personal feats. So the
Lydians fought against Cyrus. It was Philip who seems to have created
charging cavalry. He caused his “companions” to drill for a massed
charge. And also he strengthened his phalanx by giving the rear men
longer spears than had been used hitherto, and so deepening its mass.
The Macedonian phalanx was merely a more solid version of the Theban
phalanx. None of these massed infantry formations was flexible enough to
stand a flank or rear attack. They had very slight manœuvring power.
Both Philip’s and his son’s victories followed, therefore, with
variations, one general scheme of co-operation between these two arms.
The phalanx advanced in the centre and held the enemy’s main body; on
one wing or the other the cavalry charges swept away the enemy cavalry,
and then swooped round upon the flank and rear of the enemy phalanx, the
front of which the Macedonian phalanx was already smiting. The enemy
main battle then broke and was massacred. As Alexander’s military
experience grew, he also added a use of catapults in the field, big
stone-throwing affairs, to break up the enemy infantry. Before his time
catapults had been used in sieges, but never in battles. He invented
“artillery preparation.”
With the weapon of his new army in his hand, Philip first turned his
attention to the north of Macedonia. He carried expeditions into Illyria
and as far as the Danube; he also spread his power along the coast as
far as the Hellespont. He secured possession of a port, Amphipolis, and
certain gold mines adjacent. After several Thracian expeditions he
turned southward in good earnest. He took up the cause of the Delphic
amphictyony against those sacrilegious Phocians, and so appeared as the
champion of Hellenic religion.
There was a strong party of Greeks, it must be understood, a
Pan-Hellenic party, in favour of the Greek headship of Philip. The chief
writer of this Pan-Hellenic movement was Isocrates. Athens, on the other
hand, was the head and front of the opposition to Philip, and Athens was
in open sympathy with Persia, even sending emissaries to the Great King
to warn him of the danger to him of a united Greece. The comings and
goings of twelve years cannot be related here. In 338 B.C. the long
struggle between division and Pan-Hellenism came to a decisive issue,
and at the battle of Chæronea Philip inflicted a crushing defeat upon
Athens and her allies. He gave Athens peace upon astonishingly generous
terms; he displayed himself steadfastly resolved to propitiate and
favour that implacable city; and in 338 B.C. a congress of Greek states
recognized him as captain-general for the war against Persia.
He was now a man of forty-seven. It seemed as though the world lay at
his feet. He had made his little country into the leading state in a
great Græco-Macedonian confederacy. That unification was to be the
prelude to a still greater one, the unification of the Western world
with the Persian empire into one world state of all known peoples. Who
can doubt he had that dream? The writings of Isocrates convince us that
he had it. Who can deny that he might have realized it? He had a
reasonable hope of living for perhaps another quarter century of
activity. In 336 B.C. his advanced guard crossed into Asia....
But he never followed with his main force. He was assassinated.
§ 2
It is necessary now to tell something of the domestic life of King
Philip. The lives of both Philip and his son were pervaded by the
personality of a restless and evil woman, Olympias, the mother of
Alexander.
She was the daughter of the king of Epirus, a country to the west of
Macedonia, and, like Macedonia, a semi-Greek land. She met Philip, or
was thrown in his way, at some religious gathering in Samothrace.
Plutarch declares the marriage was a love-match, and there seems to be
at least this much in the charges against Philip that, like many
energetic and imaginative men, he was prone to impatient love impulses.
He married her when he was already a king, and Alexander was born to him
three years later.
[Illustration: Macedonian warrior.
Bas-relief from Pella.]
It was not long before Olympias and Philip were bitterly estranged. She
was jealous of him, but there was another and graver source of trouble
in her passion for religious mysteries. We have already noted that
beneath the fine and restrained Nordic religion of the Greeks the land
abounded with religious cults of a darker and more ancient kind,
aboriginal cults with secret initiations, orgiastic celebrations, and
often with cruel and obscene rites. These religions of the shadows,
these practices of the women and peasants and slaves, gave Greece her
Orphic, Dionysic, and Demeter cults; they have lurked in the tradition
of Europe down almost to our own times. The witchcraft of the Middle
Ages, with its resort to the blood of babes, scraps of executed
criminals, incantations and magic circles, seems to have been little
else than the lingering vestiges of these solemnities of the dark
whites. In these matters Olympias was an expert and an enthusiast, and
Plutarch mentions that she achieved considerable celebrity by a use of
tame serpents in these pious exercises. The snakes invaded her domestic
apartments, and history is not clear whether Philip found in them matter
for exasperation or religious awe. These occupations of his wife must
have been a serious inconvenience to Philip, for the Macedonian people
were still in that sturdy stage of social development in which neither
enthusiastic religiosity nor uncontrollable wives are admired.
The evidence of a bitter hostility between mother and father peeps out
in many little things in the histories. She was evidently jealous of
Philip’s conquests; she hated his fame. There are many signs that
Olympias did her best to set her son against his father and attach him
wholly to herself. A story survives (in Plutarch’s _Life_) that
“whenever news was brought of Philip’s victories, the capture of a city
or the winning of some great battle, he never seemed greatly rejoiced to
hear it; on the contrary he used to say to his play-fellows: ‘Father
will get everything in advance, boys; he won’t leave any great task for
me to share with you.’” ...
It is not a natural thing for a boy to envy his father in this fashion
without some inspiration. That sentence sounds like an echo.
We have already pointed out how manifest it is that Philip planned the
succession of Alexander, and how eager he was to thrust fame and power
into the boy’s hands. He was thinking of the political structure he was
building--but the mother was thinking of the glory and pride of that
wonderful lady Olympias. She masked her hatred of her husband under the
cloak of a mother’s solicitude for her son’s future. When in 337 B.C.
Philip, after the fashion of kings in those days, married a second wife
who was a native Macedonian, Cleopatra, “of whom he was passionately
enamoured,” Olympias made much trouble.
Plutarch tells of a pitiful scene that occurred at Philip’s marriage to
Cleopatra. There was much drinking of wine at the banquet, and Attalus,
the father of the bride, being “intoxicated with liquor,” betrayed the
general hostility to Olympias and Epirus by saying he hoped there would
be a child by the marriage to give them a truly Macedonian heir.
Whereupon Alexander, taut for such an insult, cried out, “What then am
I?” and hurled his cup at Attalus. Philip, enraged, stood up and, says
Plutarch, drew his sword, only to stumble and fall. Alexander, blind
with rage and jealousy, taunted and insulted his father.
“Macedonians,” he said. “See there the general who would go from Europe
to Asia! Why! he cannot get from one table to another!”
How that scene lives still, the sprawl, the flushed faces, the angry
voice of the boy! Next day Alexander departed with his mother--and
Philip did nothing to restrain them. Olympias went home to Epirus;
Alexander departed to Illyria. Thence Philip persuaded him to return.
Fresh trouble arose. Alexander had a brother of weak intellect, Aridæus,
whom the Persian governor of Caria sought as a son-in-law. “Alexander’s
friends and his mother now infused notions into him again, though
perfectly groundless, that by so noble a match, and the support
consequent upon it, Philip designed the crown for Aridæus. Alexander, in
the uneasiness these suspicions gave him, sent one Thessalus, a player,
into Caria, to desire the grandee to pass by Aridæus, who was of
spurious birth, and deficient in point of understanding, and to take the
lawful heir to the crown into his alliance. Pixodarus was infinitely
more pleased with this proposal. But Philip no sooner had intelligence
of it, than he went to Alexander’s apartment, taking along with him
Philotas, the son of Parmenio, one of his most intimate friends and
companions, and, in his presence, reproached him with his degeneracy and
meanness of spirit, in thinking of being son-in-law to a man of Caria,
one of the slaves of a barbarian king. At the same time he wrote to the
Corinthians, insisting that they should send Thessalus to him in chains.
Harpalus and Niarchus, Phrygius and Ptolemy, some of the other
companions of the prince, he banished. But Alexander afterwards recalled
them, and treated them with great distinction.”
There is something very touching in this story of the father pleading
with the son he manifestly loved, and baffled by the web of mean
suggestion which had been spun about the boy’s imagination.
It was at the marriage of his daughter to her uncle, the king of Epirus
and the brother of Olympias, that Philip was stabbed. He was walking in
a procession into the theatre unarmed, in a white robe, and he was cut
down by one of his bodyguard. The murderer had a horse waiting, and
would have got away, but the foot of his horse caught in a wild vine and
he was thrown from the saddle by the stumble and slain by his
pursuers....
So at the age of twenty Alexander was at the end of his anxiety about
the succession, and established king in Macedonia.
Olympias then reappeared in Macedonia, a woman proudly vindicated. It is
said that she insisted upon paying the same funeral honours to the
memory of the murderer as to Philip, and that she consecrated the fatal
weapon to Apollo, inscribed with the name Myrtalis, by which Philip had
been wont to address her when their loves first began.[197] In Greece
there were great rejoicings over this auspicious event, and Demosthenes,
when he had the news, although it was but seven days after the death of
his own daughter, went into the public assembly at Athens in gay attire
wearing a chaplet.
Whatever Olympias may have done about her husband’s assassin, history
does not doubt about her treatment of her supplanter, Cleopatra. So soon
as Alexander was out of the way--and a revolt of the hillmen in the
north called at once for his attention--Cleopatra’s newly born child was
killed in its mother’s arms, and Cleopatra--no doubt after a little
taunting--was then strangled. These excesses of womanly feeling are said
to have shocked Alexander, but they did not prevent him from leaving his
mother in a position of considerable authority in Macedonia. She wrote
letters to him upon religious and political questions, and he showed a
dutiful disposition in sending her always a large share of the plunder
he made.
§ 3
These stories have to be told because history cannot be understood
without them. Here was the great world of men between India and the
Adriatic ready for union, ready as it had never been before for a
unifying control. Here was the wide order of the Persian empire with its
roads, its posts, its general peace and prosperity, ripe for the
fertilizing influence of the Greek mind. And these stories display the
quality of the human beings to whom those great opportunities came. Here
was this Philip who was a very great and noble man, and yet he was
drunken, he could keep no order in his household. Here was Alexander in
many ways gifted above any man of his time, and he was vain, suspicious,
and passionate, with a mind set awry by his mother.
We are beginning to understand something of what the world might be,
something of what our race might become, were it not for our still raw
humanity. It is barely a matter of seventy generations between ourselves
and Alexander; and between ourselves and the savage hunters our
ancestors, who charred their food in the embers or ate it raw, intervene
some four or five hundred generations. There is not much scope for the
modification of a species in four or five hundred generations. Make men
and women only sufficiently jealous or fearful or drunken or angry, and
the hot red eyes of the cavemen will glare out at us to-day. We have
writing and teaching, science and power; we have tamed the beasts and
schooled the lightning; but we are still only shambling towards the
light. We have tamed and bred the beasts, but we have still to tame and
breed ourselves.
From the very beginning of his reign the deeds of Alexander showed how
well he had assimilated his father’s plans, and how great were his own
abilities. A map of the known world is needed to show the course of his
life. At first, after receiving assurances from Greece that he was to be
captain-general of the Grecian forces, he marched through Thrace to the
Danube; he crossed the river and burnt a village, the second great
monarch to raid the Scythian country beyond the Danube; then recrossed
it and marched westward and so came down by Illyria. By that time the
city of Thebes was in rebellion, and his next blow was at Greece.
Thebes--unsupported of course by Athens--was taken and looted; it was
treated with extravagant violence; all its buildings, except the temple
and the house of the poet Pindar, were razed, and thirty thousand people
sold into slavery. Greece was stunned, and Alexander was free to go on
with the Persian campaign.
This destruction of Thebes betrayed a streak of crazy violence in the
new master of human destinies. It was too heavy a blow to have dealt. It
was a barbaric thing to do. No Greeks would have gone so far with
conquered Greeks. If the spirit of rebellion was killed, so also was the
spirit of help. The Greek states remained inert thereafter, neither
troublesome nor helpful. They would not support Alexander with their
shipping, a thing which was to prove a very grave embarrassment to
him.[198]
There is a story told by Plutarch about this Theban massacre, as if it
redounded to the credit of Alexander, but indeed it shows only how his
saner and his crazy sides were in conflict. It tells of a Macedonian
officer and a Theban lady. This officer was among the looters, and he
entered this woman’s house, inflicted unspeakable insults and injuries
upon her, and at last demanded whether she had gold or silver hidden.
She told him all her treasures had been put into the well, conducted him
thither, and, as he stooped to peer down, pushed him suddenly in and
killed him by throwing great stones upon him. Some allied soldiers came
upon this scene and took her forthwith to Alexander for judgment.
She defied him. Already the extravagant impulse that had ordered the
massacre was upon the wane, and he not only spared her, but had her
family and property and freedom restored to her. This Plutarch makes out
to be a generosity, but the issue is more complicated than that. It was
Alexander who was outraging and plundering and enslaving all Thebes.
That poor crumpled Macedonian brute in the well had been doing only what
he had been told he had full liberty to do. Is a commander first to give
cruel orders, and then to forgive and reward those who slay his
instruments? This gleam of remorse at the instance of one woman who was
not perhaps wanting in tragic dignity and beauty, is a poor set-off to
the murder of a great city.
Mixed with the craziness of Olympias in Alexander was the sanity of
Philip and the teachings of Aristotle. This Theban business certainly
troubled the mind of Alexander. Whenever afterwards he encountered
Thebans, he tried to show them special favour. Thebes, to his credit,
haunted him.
Yet the memory of Thebes did not save three other great cities from
similar brain storms; Tyre he destroyed, and Gaza, and a city in India,
in the storming of which he was knocked down in fair fight and wounded;
and of the latter place not a soul, not a child, was spared. He must
have been badly frightened to have taken so evil a revenge.
At the outset of the war the Persians had this supreme advantage, they
were practically masters of the sea. The ships of the Athenians and
their allies sulked unhelpfully. Alexander, to get at Asia, had to go
round by the Hellespont; and if he pushed far into the Persian empire,
he ran the risk of being cut off completely from his base. His first
task, therefore, was to cripple the enemy at sea, and this he could only
do by marching along the coast of Asia Minor and capturing port after
port until the Persian sea bases were destroyed. If the Persians had
avoided battle and hung upon his lengthening line of communications they
could probably have destroyed him, but this they did not do. A Persian
army not very much greater than his own gave battle on the banks of the
Granicus (334 B.C.) and was destroyed. This left him free to take
Sardis, Ephesus, Miletus, and, after a fierce struggle, Halicarnassus.
Meanwhile the Persian fleet was on his right flank and between him and
Greece, threatening much but accomplishing nothing.
In 333 B.C., pursuing this attack upon the sea bases, he marched along
the coast as far as the head of the gulf now called the Gulf of
Alexandretta. A huge Persian army, under the great king Darius III, was
inland of his line of march, separated from the coast by mountains, and
Alexander went right beyond this enemy force before he or the Persians
realized their proximity. Scouting was evidently very badly done by
Greek and Persian alike. The Persian army was a vast, ill-organized
assembly of soldiers, transport, camp followers, and so forth. Darius,
for instance, was accompanied by his harem, and there was a great
multitude of harem slaves, musicians, dancers, and cooks. Many of the
leading officers had brought their families to witness the hunting down
of the Macedonian invaders. The troops had been levied from every
province in the empire; they had no tradition or principle of combined
action. Seized by the idea of cutting off Alexander from Greece, Darius
moved this multitude over the mountains to the sea; he had the luck to
get through the passes without opposition, and he encamped on the plain
of Issus between the mountains and the shore. And there Alexander, who
had turned back to fight, struck him. The cavalry charge and the phalanx
smashed this great brittle host as a stone smashes a bottle. It was
routed. Darius escaped from his war chariot--that out-of-date
instrument--and fled on horseback, leaving even his harem in the hands
of Alexander.
All the accounts of Alexander after this battle show him at his best. He
was restrained and magnanimous. He treated the Persian princesses with
the utmost civility. And he kept his head; he held steadfastly to his
plan. He let Darius escape, unpursued, into Syria, and he continued his
march upon the naval bases of the Persians--that is to say, upon the
Phœnician ports of Tyre and Sidon.
Sidon surrendered to him; Tyre resisted.
Here, if anywhere, we have the evidence of great military ability on the
part of Alexander. His army was his father’s creation, but Philip had
never shone in the siege of cities. When Alexander was a boy of sixteen,
he had seen his father repulsed by the fortified city of Byzantium upon
the Bosphorus. Now he was face to face with an inviolate city which had
stood siege after siege, which had resisted Nebuchadnezzar the Great for
fourteen years. For the standing of sieges Semitic peoples hold the
palm. Tyre was then an island half a mile from the shore, and her fleet
was unbeaten. On the other hand, Alexander had already learnt much by
the siege of the citadel of Halicarnassus; he had gathered to himself a
corps of engineers from Cyprus and Phœnicia, the Sidonian fleet was
with him, and presently the king of Cyprus came over to him with a
hundred and twenty ships, which gave him the command of the sea.
Moreover, great Carthage, either relying on the strength of the mother
city or being disloyal to her, and being furthermore entangled in a war
in Sicily, sent no help.
[Illustration: The Campaigns & Empire of ALEXANDER the GREAT.]
The first measure of Alexander was to build a pier from the mainland to
the island, a dam which remains to this day; and on this, as it came
close to the walls of Tyre, he set up his towers and battering-rams.
Against the walls he also moored ships in which towers and rams were
erected. The Tyrians used fire-ships against this flotilla, and made
sorties from their two harbours. In a big surprise raid that they made
on the Cyprian ships they were caught and badly mauled; many of their
ships were rammed, and one big galley of five banks of oars and one of
four were captured outright. Finally a breach in the walls was made, and
the Macedonians, clambering up the débris from their ships, stormed the
city.
The siege had lasted seven months. Gaza held out for two. In each case
there was a massacre, the plundering of the city, and the selling of the
survivors into slavery. Then towards the end of 332 B.C. Alexander
entered Egypt, and the command of the sea was assured. Greece, which all
this while had been wavering in its policy, decided now at last that it
was on the side of Alexander, and the council of the Greek states at
Corinth voted its “captain-general” a golden crown of victory. From this
time onward the Greeks were with the Macedonians.
The Egyptians also were with the Macedonians. But they had been for
Alexander from the beginning. They had lived under Persian rule for
nearly two hundred years, and the coming of Alexander meant for them
only a change of masters; on the whole, a change for the better. The
country surrendered without a blow. Alexander treated its religious
feelings with extreme respect. He unwrapped no mummies as Cambyses had
done; he took no liberties with Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis. Here
in great temples, and upon a vast scale, Alexander found the evidences
of a religiosity, mysterious and irrational, to remind him of the
secrets and mysteries that had entertained his mother and impressed his
childhood. During his four months in Egypt he flirted with religious
emotions.
He was still a very young man, we must remember, divided against
himself. The strong sanity he inherited from his father had made him a
great soldier; the teaching of Aristotle had given him something of the
scientific outlook upon the world. He had destroyed Tyre; in Egypt, at
one of the mouths of the Nile, he now founded a new city, Alexandria, to
replace that ancient centre of trade. To the north of Tyre, near Issus,
he founded a second port, Alexandretta. Both of these cities flourish to
this day, and for a time Alexandria was perhaps the greatest city in the
world. The sites, therefore, must have been wisely chosen. But also
Alexander had the unstable emotional imaginativeness of his mother, and
side by side with such creative work he indulged in religious
adventures. The gods of Egypt took possession of his mind. He travelled
four hundred miles to the remote oasis of the oracle of Ammon. He wanted
to settle certain doubts about his true parentage. His mother had
inflamed his mind by hints and vague speeches of some deep mystery about
his parentage. Was so ordinary a human being as Philip of Macedon really
his father?
For nearly four hundred years Egypt had been a country politically
contemptible, overrun now by Ethiopians, now by Assyrians, now by
Babylonians, now by Persians. As the indignities of the present became
more and more disagreeable to contemplate, the past and the other world
became more splendid to Egyptian eyes. It is from the festering
humiliations of peoples that arrogant religious propagandas spring. To
the triumphant the downtrodden can say, “It is naught in the sight of
the true gods.” So the son of Philip of Macedon, the master-general of
Greece, was made to feel a small person amidst the gigantic temples. And
he had an abnormal share of youth’s normal ambition to impress
everybody. How gratifying then for him to discover presently that he was
no mere successful mortal, not one of these modern vulgar Greekish folk,
but ancient and divine, the son of a god, the Pharaoh god, son of Ammon
Ra!
Already in a previous chapter we have given a description of that
encounter in the desert temple.
Not altogether was the young man convinced. He had his moments of
conviction; he had his saner phases when the thing was almost a jest. In
the presence of Macedonians and Greeks he doubted if he was divine. When
it thundered loudly, the ribald Aristarchus could ask him: “Won’t you
do something of the sort, oh Son of Zeus?” But the crazy notion was,
nevertheless, present henceforth in his brain, ready to be inflamed by
wine or flattery.
Next spring (331 B.C.) he returned to Tyre, and marched thence round
towards Assyria, leaving the Syrian desert on his right. Near the ruins
of forgotten Nineveh he found a great Persian army, that had been
gathering since the battle of Issus, awaiting him. It was another huge
medley of contingents, and it relied for its chief force upon that now
antiquated weapon, the war chariot. Of these Darius had a force of two
hundred, and each chariot had scythes attached to its wheels and to the
pole and body of the chariot. There seem to have been four horses to
each chariot, and it will be obvious that if one of those horses was
wounded by javelin or arrow, that chariot was incapacitated. Against
broken footmen or a crowd of individualist fighters such vehicles might
be formidable; but Darius began the battle by flinging these instruments
against the cavalry and light infantry. Few reached their objective, and
those that did were readily disposed of. There was some manœuvring
for position. The well-drilled Macedonians moved obliquely across the
Persian front, keeping good order; the Persians, following this movement
to the flank, opened gaps in their array. Then suddenly the disciplined
Macedonian cavalry charged at one of these torn places and smote the
centre of the Persian host. The infantry followed close upon their
charge. The centre and left of the Persians crumpled up. For a while the
light cavalry on the Persian right gained ground against Alexander’s
left, only to be cut to pieces by the cavalry from Thessaly, which by
this time had become almost as good as its Macedonian model. The Persian
forces ceased to resemble an army. They dissolved into a vast multitude
of fugitives streaming under great dust clouds and without a single
rally across the hot plain towards Arbela. Through the dust and the
flying crowd rode the victors, slaying and slaying until darkness stayed
the slaughter. Darius led the retreat.
Such was the battle of Arbela. It was fought on October the 1st, 331
B.C. We know its date so exactly, because it is recorded that, eleven
days before it began, the soothsayers on both sides had been greatly
exercised by an eclipse of the moon.
Darius fled to the north into the country of the Medes. Alexander
marched on to Babylon. The ancient city of Hammurabi (who had reigned
seventeen hundred years before) and of Nebuchadnezzar the Great and of
Nabonidus, unlike Nineveh, was still a prosperous and important centre.
Like the Egyptians, the Babylonians were not greatly concerned at a
change of rule to Macedonian from Persian. The temple of Bel-Marduk was
in ruins, a quarry for building material, but the tradition of the
Chaldean priests still lingered, and Alexander promised to restore the
building. Thence he marched on to Susa, once the chief city of the
vanished and forgotten Elamites, and now the Persian capital. He went on
to Persepolis, where, as the climax of a drunken carouse, he burnt down
the great palace of the king of kings. This he afterwards declared was
the revenge of Greece for the burning of Athens by Xerxes.
§ 4
And now begins a new phase in the story of Alexander. For the next seven
years he wandered with an army chiefly of Macedonians in the north and
east of what was then the known world. At first it was a pursuit of
Darius. Afterwards it became ----? Was it a systematic survey of a world
he meant to consolidate into one great order, or was it a wild-goose
chase? His own soldiers, his own intimates, thought the latter, and at
last stayed his career beyond the Indus. On the map it looks very like a
wild-goose chase; it seems to aim at nothing in particular and to get
nowhere.
The pursuit of Darius III soon came to a pitiful end. After the battle
of Arbela his own generals seem to have revolted against his weakness
and incompetence; they made him a prisoner, and took him with them in
spite of his desire to throw himself upon the generosity of his
conqueror. Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, they made their leader. There
was at last a hot and exciting chase of the flying caravan which
conveyed the captive king of kings. At dawn, after an all-night pursuit,
it was sighted far ahead. The flight became a headlong bolt. Baggage,
women, everything was abandoned by Bessus and his captains; and one
other impediment also they left behind. By the side of a pool of water
far away from the road a Macedonian trooper presently found a deserted
mule-cart with its mules still in the traces. In this cart lay Darius,
stabbed in a score of places and bleeding to death. He had refused to go
on with Bessus, refused to mount the horse that was brought to him. So
his captains had run him through with their spears and left him.... He
asked his captors for water. What else he may have said we do not know.
The historians have seen fit to fabricate a quite impossible last dying
speech for him. Probably he said very little....
When, a little after sunrise, Alexander came up, Darius was already
dead....
To the historian of the world the wanderings of Alexander have an
interest of their own quite apart from the light they throw upon his
character. Just as the campaign of Darius I lifted the curtain behind
Greece and Macedonia, and showed us something of the silent background
to the north of the audible and recorded history of the early
civilizations, so now Alexander’s campaigns take us into regions about
which there had hitherto been no trustworthy record made.
We discover they were not desert regions, but full of a gathering life
of their own.
He marched to the shores of the Caspian, thence he travelled eastward
across what is now called Western Turkestan. He founded a city that is
now known as Herat; whence he went northward by Cabul and by what is now
Samarkand, right up into the mountains of Central Turkestan. He returned
southward, and came down into India by the Khyber Pass. He fought a
great battle on the Upper Indus against a very tall and chivalrous king,
Porus, in which the Macedonian infantry encountered an array of
elephants and defeated them. Possibly he would have pushed eastward
across the deserts to the Ganges valley, but his troops refused to go
further. Possibly, had they not done so, then or later he would have
gone on until he vanished eastward out of history. But he was forced to
turn about. He built a fleet and descended to the mouth of the Indus.
There he divided his forces. The main army he took along the desolate
coast back to the Persian Gulf, and on the way it suffered dreadfully
and lost many men through thirst. The fleet followed him by sea, and
rejoined him at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. In the course of this
six-year tour he fought battles, received the submission of many strange
peoples, and founded cities. He saw the dead body of Darius in June, 330
B.C.; he returned to Susa in 324 B.C. He found the empire in disorder:
the provincial satraps raising armies of their own, Bactria and Media in
insurrection, and Olympias making government impossible in Macedonia.
Harpalus, the royal treasurer, had bolted with all that was portable of
the royal treasure, and was making his way, bribing as he went, towards
Greece. Some of the Harpalus money is said to have reached Demosthenes.
But before we deal with the closing chapter of the story of Alexander,
let us say a word or so about these northern regions into which he
wandered. It is evident that from the Danube region right across South
Russia, right across the country to the north of the Caspian, right
across the country to the east of the Caspian, as far as the mountain
masses of the Pamir Plateau and eastward into the Tarim basin of Eastern
Turkestan, there spread then a series of similar barbaric tribes and
peoples all at about the same stage of culture, and for the most part
Aryan in their language and possibly Nordic in their race. They had few
cities, mostly they were nomadic; at times they settled temporarily to
cultivate the land. They were certainly already mingling in Central Asia
with Mongolian tribes, but the Mongolian tribes were not then prevalent
there.
An immense process of drying up and elevation has been going on in these
parts of the world during the last ten thousand years. Ten thousand
years ago there was probably a continuous water barrier between the
basin of the Obi and the Aral-Caspian sea. As this had dried up and the
marshy land had become steppe-like country, Nordic nomads from the west
and Mongolian nomads from the east had met and mixed, and the riding
horse had come back into the western world. It is evident this great
stretch of country was becoming a region of accumulation for these
barbaric peoples. They were very loosely attached to the lands they
occupied. They lived in tents and wagons rather than houses. A brief
cycle of plentiful and healthy years, or a cessation of tribal warfare
under some strong ruler, would lead to considerable increases of
population; then two or three hard years would suffice to send the
tribes wandering again in search of food.
From before the dawn of recorded history this region of human
accumulation between the Danube and China had been, as it were,
intermittently _raining_ out tribes southward and westward. It was like
a cloud bank behind the settled landscape that accumulated and then
precipitated invaders. We have noted how the Keltic peoples drizzled
westward, how the Italians, the Greeks, and their Epirote, Macedonian,
and Phrygian kindred came south. We have noted too the Cimmerian drive
from the east, like a sudden driving shower of barbarians across Asia
Minor, the southward coming of the Scythians and Medes and Persians, and
the Aryan descent into India. About a century before Alexander there had
been a fresh Aryan invasion of Italy by a Keltic people, the Gauls, who
had settled in the valley of the Po. Those various races came down out
of their northern obscurity into the light of history; and meanwhile
beyond that light the reservoir accumulated for fresh discharges.
Alexander’s march in Central Asia brings now into our history names that
are fresh to us; the Parthians, a race of mounted bowmen who were
destined to play an important rôle in history a century or so later, and
the Bactrians who lived in the sandy native land of the camel.
Everywhere he seems to have met Aryan-speaking peoples. The Mongolian
barbarians to the north-eastward were still unsuspected, no one imagined
there was yet another great cloud bank of population beyond the
Scythians and their kind, in the north of China, that was presently also
to begin a drift westward and southward, mixing as it came with the
Nordic Scythians and every other people of kindred habits that it
encountered. As yet only China knew of the Huns; there were no Turks in
Western Turkestan or anywhere else then, no Tartars in the world.
This glimpse of the state of affairs in Turkestan in the fourth century
B.C. is one of the most interesting aspects of the wanderings of
Alexander; another is his raid through the Punjab. From the point of
view of the teller of the human story it is provocative that he did not
go on into the Ganges country, and that consequently we have no
independent accounts by Greek writers of the life in ancient Bengal. But
there is a considerable literature in various Indian languages dealing
with Indian history and social life that still needs to be made
accessible to European readers.
§ 5
[Illustration: Alexander the Great
(silver coin of Lysimachus, 321-281 B.C.)]
Alexander had been in undisputed possession of the Persian empire for
six years. He was now thirty-one. In those six years he had created very
little. He had retained most of the organization of the Persian
provinces, appointing fresh satraps or retaining the former ones; the
roads, the ports, the organization of the empire was still as Cyrus, his
greater predecessor, had left them; in Egypt he had merely replaced old
provincial governors by new ones; in India he had defeated Porus, and
then left him in power much as he found him, except that Porus was now
called a satrap by the Greeks. Alexander had, it is true, planned out a
number of towns, and some of them were to grow into great towns;
seventeen Alexandrias he founded altogether;[199] but he had destroyed
Tyre, and with Tyre the security of the sea routes which had hitherto
been the chief westward outlet for Mesopotamia. Historians say that he
Hellenized the east. But Babylonia and Egypt swarmed with Greeks before
his time; he was not the cause, he was a part of the Hellenization. For
a time the whole world, from the Adriatic to the Indus, was under one
ruler; so far he had realized the dreams of Isocrates and Philip his
father. But how far was he making this a permanent and enduring union?
How far as yet was it anything more than a dazzling but transitory
flourish of his own magnificent self?
He was making no great roads, setting up no sure sea communications. It
is idle to accuse him of leaving education alone, because the idea that
empires must be cemented by education was still foreign to human
thought. But he was forming no group of statesmen about him; he was
thinking of no successor; he was creating no tradition--nothing more
than a personal legend. The idea that the world would have to go on
after Alexander, engaged in any other employment than the discussion of
his magnificence, seems to have been outside his mental range. He was
still young, it is true, but well before Philip was one and thirty he
had been thinking of the education of Alexander.
Was Alexander a statesman at all?
Some students of his career assure us that he was; that now at Susa he
planned a mighty world empire, seeing it not simply as a Macedonian
conquest of the world, but as a melting together of racial traditions.
He did one thing, at any rate, that gives colour to this idea; he held a
great marriage feast, in which he and ninety of his generals and friends
were married to Persian brides. He himself married a daughter of Darius,
though already he possessed an Asiatic wife in Roxana, the daughter of
the king of Samarkand. This wholesale wedding was made a very splendid
festival, and at the same time all of his Macedonian soldiers, to the
number of several thousands, who had married Asiatic brides, were given
wedding gifts. This has been called the Marriage of Europe and Asia; the
two continents were to be joined, wrote Plutarch, “in lawful wedlock and
by community of offspring.” And next he began to train recruits from
Persia and the north, Parthians, Bactrians, and the like, in the
distinctive disciplines of the phalanx and the cavalry. Was that also to
assimilate Europe and Asia, or was it to make himself independent of his
Macedonians? They thought the latter, at any rate, and mutinied, and it
was with some difficulty that he brought them to a penitent mood and
induced them to take part in a common feast with the Persians. The
historians have made a long and eloquent speech for him on this
occasion, but the gist of it was that he bade his Macedonians begone,
and gave no sign of how he proposed they should get home out of Persia.
After three days of dismay they submitted to him and begged his
forgiveness.
Here is the matter for a very pretty discussion. Was Alexander really
planning a racial fusion or had he just fallen in love with the pomp and
divinity of an Oriental monarch, and wished to get rid of these
Europeans to whom he was only a king-leader? The writers of his own
time, and those who lived near to his time, lean very much to the latter
alternative. They insist upon his immense vanity. They relate how he
began to wear the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch. “At first only
before the barbarians and privately, but afterwards he came to wear it
in public when he sat for the dispatch of business.” And presently he
demanded Oriental prostrations from his friends.
One thing seems to support the suggestion of great personal vanity in
Alexander. His portrait was painted and sculptured frequently, and
always he is represented as a beautiful youth, with wonderful locks
flowing backward from a broad forehead. Previously most men had worn
beards. But Alexander, enamoured of his own youthful loveliness, would
not part with it; he remained a sham boy at thirty-two; he shaved his
face, and so set a fashion in Greece and Italy that lasted many
centuries.
The stories of violence and vanity in his closing years cluster thick
upon his memory. He listened to tittle-tattle about Philotas, the son of
Parmenio, one of his most trusted and faithful generals. Philotas, it
was said, had boasted to some woman he was making love to that Alexander
was a mere boy; that, but for such men as his father and himself, there
would have been no conquest of Persia, and the like. Such assertions had
a certain element of truth in them. The woman was brought to Alexander,
who listened to her treacheries. Presently Philotas was accused of
conspiracy, and, upon very insufficient evidence, tortured and executed.
Then Alexander thought of Parmenio, whose other two sons had died for
him in battle. He sent swift messengers to assassinate the old man
before he could hear of his son’s death! Now Parmenio had been one of
the most trusted of Philip’s generals; it was Parmenio who had led the
Macedonian armies into Asia before the murder of Philip. There can be
little doubt of the substantial truth of this story, nor about the
execution of Callisthenes, the nephew of Aristotle, who refused
Alexander divine honours, and “went about with as much pride as if he
had demolished a tyranny, while the young men followed him as the only
freeman among thousands.” Mixed with such incidents we have the very
illuminating story of the drunken quarrel in which he killed Clitus. The
monarch and his company had been drinking hard, and the drink had made
the talk loud and free. There was much flattery of the “young god,” much
detraction of Philip, at which Alexander had smiled with
satisfaction.[200] Was he not the son of a god? This drunken
self-complacency was more than the honest Macedonians could stand; it
roused Clitus, his foster-brother, to a frenzy. Clitus reproached
Alexander with his Median costume and praised Philip, there was a loud
quarrel, and, to end it, Clitus was hustled out of the room by his
friends. He was, however, in the obstinate phase of drunkenness, and he
returned by another entrance. He was heard outside quoting Euripides “in
a bold and disrespectful tone”:
“Are these your customs? Is it thus that Greece
Rewards her combatants? Shall one man claim
The trophies won by thousands?”
Whereupon Alexander snatched a spear from one of his guards and ran
Clitus through the body as he lifted the curtain to come in....
One is forced to believe that this was the real atmosphere of the young
conqueror’s life. Then the story of his frantic and cruel display of
grief for Hephæstion can scarcely be all invention. If it is true, or in
any part true, it displays a mind ill-balanced and altogether wrapped up
in personal things, to whom empire was no more than opportunity for
egoistic display, and all the resources of the world stuff for freaks of
that sort of “generosity” which robs a thousand people to extort the
admiration of one astounded recipient.
[Illustration: The BREAK-UP of the EMPIRE of ALEXANDER at the close of
the Fourth Century, B.C.]
Hephæstion, being ill, was put upon a strict diet, but in the absence of
his physician at the theatre he ate a roasted fowl and drank a flagon
of iced wine, in consequence of which he died. Thereupon Alexander
decided upon a display of grief. It was the grief of a lunatic. He had
the physician crucified! He ordered every horse and mule in Persia to be
shorn, and pulled down the battlements of the neighbouring cities. He
prohibited all music in his camp for a long time, and, having taken
certain villages of the Cusæans, he caused all the adults to be
massacred, as a sacrifice to the manes of Hephæstion. Finally he set
aside ten thousand talents (a talent = £240) for a tomb. For those days
this was an enormous sum. None of which things did any real honour to
Hephæstion, but they served to demonstrate to an awe-stricken world what
a tremendous thing the sorrow of Alexander could be.
This last story and many such stories may be lies or distortions or
exaggerations. But they have a vein in common. After a bout of hard
drinking in Babylon a sudden fever came upon Alexander (323 B.C.), and
he sickened and died. He was still only thirty-three years of age.
Forthwith the world empire he had snatched at and held in his hands, as
a child might snatch at and hold a precious vase, fell to the ground and
was shattered to pieces.
Whatever appearance of a world-wide order may have gleamed upon men’s
imaginations vanished at his death. The story becomes the story of a
barbaric autocracy in confusion. Everywhere the provincial rulers set up
for themselves. In the course of a few years the entire family of
Alexander had been destroyed. Roxana, his barbarian wife, was prompt to
murder, as a rival, the daughter of Darius. She herself presently bore
Alexander a posthumous son, who was also called Alexander. He was
murdered, with her, a few years later (311 B.C.). Hercules, the only
other son of Alexander, was murdered also. So too was Aridæus, the
weak-minded half-brother (see § 2). Plutarch gives a last glimpse of
Olympias during a brief interval of power in Macedonia, accusing first
this person and then that of poisoning her wonderful son. Many she
killed in her fury. The bodies of some of his circle who had died after
his death she caused to be dug up, but we do not know if any fresh light
was shed upon his death by these disinterments. Finally Olympias was
killed in Macedonia by the friends of those she had slain.
§ 6
[Illustration: Tetradrachm with head of Seleucus I.]
From this welter of crime there presently emerged three leading figures.
Much of the old Persian empire, as far as the Indus eastward and almost
to Lydia in the west, was held by one general Seleucus, who founded a
dynasty, the Seleucid Dynasty; Macedonia fell to another Macedonian
general, Antigonus; a third Macedonian, Ptolemy, secured Egypt, and
making Alexandria his chief city, established a sufficient naval
ascendancy to keep also Cyprus and most of the coast of Phœnicia and
Asia Minor. The Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires lasted for a considerable
time: the forms of government in Asia Minor and the Balkans were more
unstable. Two maps will help the reader to a sense of the kaleidoscopic
nature of the political boundaries of the third century B.C. Antigonus
was defeated and killed at the battle of Ipsus (301), leaving
Lysimachus, the governor of Thrace, and Cassander, of Macedonia and
Greece, as equally transitory successors. Minor governors carved out
smaller states. Meanwhile the barbarians swung down into the broken-up
and enfeebled world of civilization from the west and from the east.
From the west came the Gauls, a people closely related to the Kelts.
They raided down through Macedonia and Greece to Delphi, and (227 B.C.)
two sections of them crossed the Bosphorus into Asia Minor, being first
employed as mercenaries and then setting up for themselves as
independent plunderers; and after raiding almost to the Taurus, they
settled in the old Phrygian land, holding the people about them to
tribute. (These Gauls of Phrygia became the Galatians of St. Paul’s
Epistle.) Armenia and the southern shores of the Black Sea became a
confusion of changing rulers. Kings with Hellenistic ideas appeared in
Cappadocia, in Pontus (the south shore of the Black Sea), in Bithynia,
and in Pergamum. From the east the Scythians and the Parthians and
Bactrians also drove southward.... For a time there were Greek-ruled
Bactrian states becoming more and more Orientalized; in the second
century B.C. Greek adventurers from Bactria raided down into North India
and founded short-lived kingdoms there, the last eastward fling of the
Greek; then gradually barbarism fell again like a curtain between the
Western civilizations and India.[201]
§ 7
Amidst all these shattered fragments of the burst bubble of Hellenic
empire one small state stands out and demands at least a brief section
to itself, the kingdom of Pergamum. We hear first of this town as an
independent centre during the struggle that ended in the battle of
Ipsus. While the tide of the Gaulish invasion swirled and foamed to and
fro about Asia Minor between the years 277 and 241, Pergamum for a time
paid them tribute, but she retained her general independence, and at
last, under Attalus I, refused her tribute and defeated them in two
decisive battles. For more than a century thereafter (until 133 B.C.)
Pergamum remained free, and was perhaps during that period the most
highly civilized state in the world. On the hill of the Acropolis was
reared a rich group of buildings, palaces, temples, a museum, and a
library, rivals of those of Alexandria of which we shall presently tell,
and almost the first in the world. Under the princes of Pergamum, Greek
art blossomed afresh, and the reliefs of the altar of the temple of Zeus
and the statues of the fighting and dying Gauls which were made there,
are among the great artistic treasures of mankind.
In a little while, as we shall tell later, the influence of a new power
began to be felt in the Eastern Mediterranean, the power of the Roman
republic, friendly to Greece and to Greek civilization; and in this
power the Hellenic communities of Pergamum and Rhodes found a natural
and useful ally and supporter against the Galatians and against the
Orientalized Seleucid empire. We shall relate how at last the Roman
power came into Asia, how it defeated the Seleucid empire at the battle
of Magnesia (190 B.C.), and drove it out of Asia Minor and beyond the
Taurus mountains, and how finally in 133 B.C. Attalus III, the last king
of Pergamum, bowing to his sense of an inevitable destiny, made the
Roman republic the heir to his kingdom, which became then the Roman
province of “Asia.”
§ 8
Nearly all historians are disposed to regard the career of Alexander the
Great as marking an epoch in human affairs. It drew together all the
known world, excepting only the western Mediterranean, into one drama.
But the opinions men have formed of Alexander himself vary enormously.
They fall, most of them, into two main schools. One type of scholar is
fascinated by the youth and splendour of this young man. These
Alexander-worshippers seem disposed to take him at his own valuation, to
condone every crime and folly either as the mere ebullience of a rich
nature or as the bitter necessity to some gigantic scheme, and to regard
his life as framed upon a design, a scheme of statesmanship, such as all
the wider knowledge and wider ideas of these later times barely suffice
to bring into the scope of our understanding. On the other hand, there
are those who see him only as a wrecker of the slowly maturing
possibilities of a free and tranquil Hellenized world.
[Illustration: A further Stage in the BREAK-UP of ALEXANDER’S EMPIRE in
the first half of the Third Century, B.C.]
Before we ascribe to Alexander or to his father Philip schemes of world
policy such as a twentieth-century historian-philosopher might approve,
we shall do well to consider very carefully the utmost range of
knowledge and thought that was possible in those days. The world of
Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle had practically no historical
perspective at all; there had not been such a thing as history in the
world, history, that is, as distinguished from mere priestly chronicles,
until the last couple of centuries. Even highly educated men had the
most circumscribed ideas of geography and foreign countries. For most
men the world was still flat and limitless. The only systematic
political philosophy was based on the experiences of minute city states,
and took no thought of empires. Nobody knew anything of the origins of
civilization. No one had speculated upon economics.[202]
[Illustration: A further Stage in the BREAK-UP of ALEXANDER’S EMPIRE
in the first half of the third century B.C.]
No one had worked out the reaction of one social class upon another. We
are too apt to consider the career of Alexander as the crown of some
process that had long been afoot; as the climax of a crescendo. In a
sense, no doubt, it was that; but much more true is it that it was not
so much an end as a beginning; it was the first revelation to the human
imagination of the oneness of human affairs. The utmost reach of the
thought of Greece before his time was of a Persian empire Hellenized, a
predominance in the world of Macedonians and Greeks. But before
Alexander was dead, and much more after he was dead and there had been
time to think him over, the conception of a world law and organization
was a practicable and assimilable idea for the minds of men.
For some generations Alexander the Great was for mankind the symbol and
embodiment of world order and world dominion. He became a fabulous
being. His head, adorned with the divine symbols of the demi-god
Hercules or the god Ammon Ra, appears on the coins of such among his
successors as could claim to be his heirs. Then the idea of world
dominion was taken up by another great people, a people who for some
centuries exhibited considerable political genius, the Romans; and the
figure of another conspicuous adventurer, Cæsar, eclipsed for the
western half of the old world the figure of Alexander.
So by the beginning of the third century B.C. we find already arisen in
the Western civilization of the old world three of the great structural
ideas that rule the mind of contemporary mankind. We have already traced
the escape of writing and knowledge from the secrets and mysteries and
initiations of the old-world priesthoods, and the development of the
idea of a universal knowledge, of a universally understandable and
communicable history and philosophy. We have taken the figures of
Herodotus and Aristotle as typical exponents of this first great idea,
the idea of _science_--using the word science in its widest and
properest sense, to include history and signify a clear vision of man
in relation to the things about him. We have traced also the
generalization of religion among the Babylonians, Jews, and other
Semitic peoples, from the dark worship in temples and consecrated places
of some local or tribal god to the open service of _one universal God of
Righteousness_, whose temple is the whole world. And now we have traced
also the first germination of the idea of a _world polity_. The rest of
the history of mankind is very largely the history of those three ideas
of science, of a universal righteousness, and of a human commonweal,
spreading out from the minds of the rare and exceptional persons and
peoples in which they first originated, into the general consciousness
of the race, and giving first a new colour, then a new spirit, and then
a new direction to human affairs.
XXV
SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA[203]
§ 1. _The Science of Alexandria._ § 2. _Philosophy of Alexandria._
§ 3. _Alexandria as a Factory of Religions._
§ 1
One of the most prosperous fragments of the brief world empire of
Alexander the Great was Egypt, which fell to the share of the Ptolemy
whose name we have already noted as one of the associates of Alexander
whom King Philip had banished. The country was at a secure distance from
plundering Gaul or Parthian, and the destruction of Tyre and the
Phœnician navy and the creation of Alexandria gave Egypt a temporary
naval ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Alexandria grew to
proportions that rivalled Carthage; eastward she had an overseas trade
through the Red Sea with Arabia and India; and westward her traffic
competed with the Carthaginian. In the Macedonian and Greek governors of
the Ptolemies, the Egyptians found a government more sympathetic and
tolerable than any they had ever known since they ceased to be a
self-governing empire. Indeed it is rather that Egypt conquered and
annexed the Ptolemies politically, than that the Macedonians ruled
Egypt.
There was a return to Egyptian political ideas, rather than any attempt
to Hellenize the government of the country. Ptolemy became Pharaoh, the
god king, and his administration continued the ancient tradition of
Pepi, Thotmes, Rameses, and Necho. Alexandria, however, for her town
affairs, and subject to the divine overlordship of Pharaoh, had a
constitution of the Greek city type. And the language of the court and
administration was Attic Greek. Greek became so much the general
language of educated people in Egypt that the Jewish community there
found it necessary to translate their Bible into the Greek language;
many men of their own people being no longer able to understand Hebrew,
Attic Greek for some centuries before and after Christ was the language
of all educated men from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf.
Of all Alexander’s group of young men, Ptolemy seems to have done most
to carry out those ideas of a systematic organization of knowledge with
which Aristotle had no doubt familiarized the court of Philip of
Macedon. Ptolemy was a man of very extraordinary intellectual gifts, at
once creative and modest, with a certain understandable cynicism towards
the strain of Olympias in the mind of Alexander. His contemporary
history of Alexander’s campaigns has perished; but it was a source to
which all the surviving accounts are deeply indebted.
The Museum he set up in Alexandria was in effect the first university in
the world. As its name implies, it was dedicated to the service of the
Muses, which was also the case with the Peripatetic school at Athens. It
was, however, a religious body only in form, in order to meet the legal
difficulties of endowment in a world that had never foreseen such a
thing as a secular intellectual process. It was essentially a college of
learned men engaged chiefly in research and record, but also to a
certain extent in teaching. At the outset, and for two or three
generations, the Museum at Alexandria presented such a scientific
constellation as even Athens at its best could not rival. Particularly
sound and good was the mathematical and geographical work. The names of
Euclid, familiar to every schoolboy, Eratosthenes, who measured the size
of the earth and came within fifty miles of the true diameter,
Apollonius, who wrote on conic sections, stand out. Hipparchus made the
first attempt to catalogue and map the stars with a view to checking any
changes that might be occurring in the heavens. Hero devised the first
steam engine. Archimedes came to Alexandria to study, and remained a
frequent correspondent of the Museum. The medical school of Alexandria
was equally famous. For the first time in the world’s history a standard
of professional knowledge was set up. Herophilus, the greatest of the
Alexandrian anatomists, is said to have conducted vivisections upon
condemned criminals.[204] Other teachers, in opposition to Herophilus,
condemned the study of anatomy and developed the science of drugs. But
this scientific blaze at Alexandria did not endure altogether for more
than a century. The organization of the Museum was not planned to ensure
its mental continuity. It was a “royal” college; its professors and
fellows (as we may call them) were appointed and paid by Pharaoh. “The
republican character of the private corporations called the schools or
academies at Athens was far more stable and independent.”[205] Royal
patronage was all very well so long as Pharaoh was Ptolemy I, or Ptolemy
II, but the strain degenerated, and the long tradition of Egyptian
priestcraft presently swallowed up the Ptolemies--and destroyed the
Aristotelian mentality of the Museum altogether. The Museum had not
existed for a hundred years before its scientific energy was extinct.
Side by side with the Museum, Ptolemy I created a more enduring monument
to himself in the great library. This was a combination of state library
and state publishing upon a scale hitherto unheard of. It was to be
altogether encyclopædic. If any stranger brought an unknown book to
Egypt, he had to have it copied for the collection, and a considerable
staff of copyists was engaged continually in making duplicates of all
the more popular and necessary works. The library, like a university
press, had an outward trade. It was a book-selling affair. Under
Callimachus, the head of the library during the tune of Ptolemy II and
III, the arrangement and cataloguing of the accumulations was
systematically undertaken. In those days, it must be remembered, books
were not in pages, but rolled like the music-rolls of the modern
piano-player, and in order to refer to any particular passage, a reader
had to roll back or roll forward very tediously, a process which wore
out books and readers together. One thinks at once of a simple and
obvious little machine by which such a roll could have been quickly
wound to and fro for reference, but nothing of the sort seems to have
been used. Every time a roll was read it was handled by two perspiring
hands. It was to minimize the waste of time and trouble that Callimachus
broke up long works, such as the History of Herodotus, into “books” or
volumes, as we should call them, each upon a separate roll. The library
of Alexandria drew a far vaster crowd of students than the teachers of
the Museum. The lodging and catering for these visitors from all parts
of the world became a considerable business interest for the Alexandrian
population.
[Illustration: Map of the WORLD according to ERATOSTHENES (200 B. C.)]
[Illustration: The Known World about 250 B.C.]
It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the intellectual life
improves. Contrast the ordinary library facilities of a middle-class
English home, such as the present writer is now working in, with the
inconveniences and deficiencies of the equipment of an Alexandrian
writer, and one realizes the enormous waste of time, physical
exertion, and attention that went on through all the centuries during
which that library flourished. Before the present writer lie half a
dozen books, and there are good indices to three of them. He can pick up
any one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a
quotation, and go on writing. Contrast with that the tedious unfolding
of a rolled manuscript. Close at hand are two encyclopædias, a
dictionary, an atlas of the world, a biographical dictionary, and other
books of reference. They have no marginal indices, it is true; but that
perhaps is asking for too much at present. There were no such resources
in the world in 300 B.C. Alexandria had still to produce the first
grammar and the first dictionary. This present book is being written in
manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and typewritten very
accurately. It can then, with the utmost convenience, be read over,
corrected amply, rearranged freely, retyped, and recorrected. The
Alexandrian author had to dictate or recopy every word he wrote. Before
he could turn back to what he had written previously, he had to dry his
last words by waving them in the air or pouring sand over them; he had
not even blotting-paper. Whatever an author wrote had to be recopied
again and again before it could reach any considerable circle of
readers, and every copyist introduced some new error.[206] Whenever a
need for maps or diagrams arose, there were fresh difficulties. Such a
science as anatomy, for example, depending as it does upon accurate
drawing, must have been enormously hampered by the natural limitations
of the copyist. The transmission of geographical fact again must have
been almost incredibly tedious. No doubt a day will come when a private
library and writing-desk of the year A.D. 1919 will seem quaintly clumsy
and difficult; but, measured by the standards of Alexandria, they are
astonishingly quick, efficient, and economical of nervous and mental
energy.
No attempt seems to have been made at Alexandria to print anything at
all. That strikes one at first as a very remarkable fact. The world was
crying out for books, and not simply for books. There was an urgent
public need for notices, proclamations, and the like. Yet there is
nothing in the history of the Western civilizations that one can call
printing until the fifteenth century A.D. It is not as though printing
was a recondite art or dependent upon any precedent and preliminary
discoveries. Printing is the most obvious of dodges. In principle it has
always been known. As we have already stated, there is ground for
supposing that the Palæolithic men of the Magdalenian period may have
printed designs on their leather garments. The “seals” of ancient
Sumeria again were printing devices. Coins are print. Illiterate persons
in all ages have used wooden or metal stamps for their signatures;
William I, the Norman Conqueror of England, for example, used such a
stamp with ink to sign documents. In China the classics were being
printed by the second century A.D. Yet either because of a complex of
small difficulties about ink or papyrus or the form of books, or because
of some protective resistance on the part of the owners of the slave
copyists, or because the script was too swift and easy to set men
thinking how to write it still more easily, as the Chinese character or
the Gothic letters did, or because of a gap in the social system between
men of thought and knowledge and men of technical skill, printing was
not used--not even used for the exact reproduction of illustrations.
The chief reason for this failure to develop printing systematically
lies, no doubt, in the fact that there was no abundant supply of
printable material of a uniform texture and convenient form. The supply
of papyrus was strictly limited, strip had to be fastened to strip, and
there was no standard size of sheet. Paper had yet to come from China to
release the mind of Europe. Had there been presses, they would have had
to stand idle while the papyrus rolls were slowly made. But this
explanation does not account for the failure to use block printing in
the case of illustrations and diagrams.
These limitations enable us to understand why it was that Alexandria
could at once achieve the most extraordinary intellectual triumphs--for
such a feat as that of Eratosthenes, for instance, having regard to his
poverty of apparatus, is sufficient to put him on a level with Newton or
Pasteur--and yet have little or no effect upon the course of politics
or the lives and thoughts of people round about her. Her Museum and
library were a centre of light, but it was light in a dark lantern
hidden from the general world. There were no means of carrying its
results even to sympathetic men abroad except by tedious letter-writing.
There was no possibility of communicating what was known there to the
general body of men. Students had to come at great cost to themselves to
this crowded centre because there was no other way of gathering even
scraps of knowledge. At Athens and Alexandria there were bookstalls
where manuscript note-books of variable quality could be bought at
reasonable prices, but any extension of education to larger classes and
other centres would have produced at once a restrictive shortage of
papyrus. Education did not reach into the masses at all; to become more
than superficially educated one had to abandon the ordinary life of the
times and come for long years to live a hovering existence in the
neighbourhood of ill-equipped and overworked sages. Learning was not
indeed so complete a withdrawal from ordinary life as initiation into a
priesthood, but it was still something in that nature.
And very speedily that feeling of freedom, that openness and directness
of statement which is the vital air of the true intellectual life, faded
out of Alexandria. From the first the patronage even of Ptolemy I set a
limit to political discussion. Presently the dissensions of the schools
let in the superstitions and prejudices of the city mob to scholastic
affairs.
Wisdom passed away from Alexandria and left pedantry behind. For the use
of books was substituted the worship of books. Very speedily the learned
became a specialized queer class with unpleasant characteristics of its
own. The Museum had not existed for half a dozen generations before
Alexandria was familiar with a new type of human being; shy, eccentric,
unpractical, incapable of essentials, strangely fierce upon trivialities
of literary detail, as bitterly jealous of the colleague within as of
the unlearned without, the bent Scholarly Man. He was as intolerant as a
priest, though he had no altar; as obscurantist as a magician, though he
had no cave. For him no method of copying was sufficiently tedious and
no rare book sufficiently inaccessible. He was a sort of by-product of
the intellectual process of mankind. For many precious generations the
new-lit fires of the human intelligence were to be seriously banked down
by this by-product.
Right thinking is necessarily an open process, and the only science and
history of full value to men consist of what is generally and clearly
known; this is surely a platitude, but we have still to discover how to
preserve our centres of philosophy and research from the caking and
darkening accumulations of narrow and dingy-spirited specialists. We
have still to ensure that a man of learning shall be none the less a man
of affairs, and that all that can be thought and known is kept plainly,
honestly, and easily available to the ordinary men and women who are the
substance of mankind.
§ 2
At first the mental activities of Alexandria centred upon the Museum,
and were mainly scientific. Philosophy, which in a more vigorous age had
been a doctrine of power over self and the material world, without
abandoning these pretensions, became in reality a doctrine of secret
consolation. The stimulant changed into an opiate. The philosopher let
the world, as the vulgar say, rip, the world of which he was a part, and
consoled himself by saying in very beautiful and elaborate forms that
the world was illusion and that there was in him something
quintessential and sublime, outside and above the world. Athens,[207]
politically insignificant, but still a great and crowded mart throughout
the fourth century, decaying almost imperceptibly so far as outer
seeming went, and treated with a strange respect that was half contempt
by all the warring powers and adventurers of the world, was the fitting
centre of such philosophical teaching. It was quite a couple of
centuries before the schools of Alexandria became as important in
philosophical discussion.
But of Philo the Jew in the first century A.D., and of Plotinus in the
third, interesting as the thought and influence of these men were, the
scale of this outline will not permit us to treat.
§ 3
If Alexandria was late to develop a distinctive philosophy, she was
early prominent as a great factory and exchange of religious ideas.
The Museum and Library represented only one of the three sides of the
triple city of Alexandria. They represented the Aristotelian, the
Hellenic, and Macedonian element. But Ptolemy I had brought together two
other factors to this strange centre. First there was a great number of
Jews, brought partly from Palestine, but largely also from those
settlements in Egypt which had never returned to Jerusalem; these latter
were the Jews of the Diaspora or Dispersion, a race of Jews who, as we
have already noted in Chapter XXI, had not shared the Babylonian
Captivity, but who were nevertheless in possession of the Bible and in
close correspondence with their co-religionists throughout the world.
These Jews populated so great a quarter of Alexandria that the town
became the largest Jewish city in the world, with far more Jews in it
than there were in Jerusalem. We have already noted that they had found
it necessary to translate their scriptures into Greek. And, finally,
there was a great population of native Egyptians, also for the most part
speaking Greek, but with the superstitious temperament of the dark
whites and with the vast tradition of forty centuries of temple religion
and temple sacrifices at the back of their minds. In Alexandria three
types of mind and spirit met, the three main types of the white race,
the clear-headed criticism of the Aryan Greek, the moral fervour and
monotheism of the Semitic Jew, and the deep Mediterranean tradition of
mysteries and sacrifices that we have already seen at work in the secret
cults and occult practices of Greece, ideas which in Hamitic Egypt ruled
proudly in great temples in the open light of day.
These three were the permanent elements of the Alexandrian blend. But in
the seaport and markets mingled men of every known race, comparing their
religious ideas and customs. It is even related that in the third
century B.C. Buddhist missionaries came from the court of King Asoka in
India. Aristotle remarks in his _Politics_ that the religious beliefs of
men are apt to borrow their form from political institutions, “men
assimilate the lives no less than the bodily forms of the gods to their
own,” and this age of Greek-speaking great empires under autocratic
monarchs was bearing hardly upon those merely local celebrities, the old
tribal and city deities. Men were requiring deities with an outlook at
least as wide as the empires, and except where the interests of
powerful priesthoods stood in the way, a curious process of assimilation
of gods was going on. Men found that though there were many gods, they
were all very much alike. Where there had been many gods, men came to
think there must be really only one god under a diversity of names. He
had been everywhere--under an alias. The Roman Jupiter, the Greek Zeus,
the Egyptian Ammon, the putative father of Alexander and the old
antagonist of Amenophis IV., the Babylonian Bel-Marduk, were all
sufficiently similar to be identified.
“Father of all in every age, in every clime adored
By saint, by savage and by sage, Jehovah, Jove or Lord.”
Where there were distinct differences, the difficulty was met by saying
that these were different _aspects_ of the same god. Bel-Marduk,
however, was now a very decadent god indeed, who hardly survived as a
pseudonym; Assur, Dagon, and the like, poor old gods of fallen nations,
had long since passed out of memory, and did not come into the
amalgamation. Osiris, a god popular with the Egyptian commonalty, was
already identified with Apis, the sacred bull in the temple of Memphis,
and somewhat confused with Ammon. Under the name of Serapis he became
the great god of Hellenic Alexandria.[208] He was Jupiter-Serapis. The
Egyptian cow goddess, Hathor or Isis, was also represented now in human
guise as the wife of Osiris, to whom she bore the infant Horus, who grew
up to be Osiris again. These bald statements sound strange, no doubt, to
a modern mind, but these identifications and mixing up of one god with
another are very illustrative of the struggle the quickening human
intelligence was making to cling still to religion and its emotional
bonds and fellowship, while making its gods more reasonable and
universal.
This fusing of one god with another is called _theocrasia_, and nowhere
was it more vigorously going on than in Alexandria. Only two peoples
resisted it in this period: the Jews, who already had their faith in the
One God of Heaven and Earth, Jehovah, and the Persians, who had a
monotheistic sun worship.
It was Ptolemy I who set up not only the Museum in Alexandria, but the
Serapeum, devoted to the worship of a trinity of gods which represented
the result of a process of theocrasia applied more particularly to the
gods of Greece and Egypt.
[Illustration: Isis and Horus]
This trinity consisted of the god Serapis (= Osiris + Apis), the goddess
Isis (= Hathor, the cow-moon goddess), and the child-god Horus. In one
way or another almost every other god was identified with one or other
of these three aspects of the one God, even the sun god Mithras of the
Persians. And they were each other; they were three, but they were also
one. They were worshipped with great fervour, and the jangling of a
peculiar instrument, the _sistrum_, a frame set with bells and used
rather after the fashion of the tambourine in the proceedings of the
modern Salvation Army, was a distinctive accessory to the ceremonies.
And now for the first time we find the idea of immortality becoming the
central idea of a religion that extended beyond Egypt. Neither the early
Aryans nor the early Semites seem to have troubled very much about
immortality, it has affected the Mongolian mind very little, but the
continuation of the individual life after death had been from the
earliest times an intense pre-occupation of the Egyptians. It played now
a large part in the worship of Serapis. In the devotional literature of
his cult he is spoken of as “the saviour and leader of souls, leading
souls to the light and receiving them again.” It is stated that “he
raises the dead, he shows forth the longed-for light of the sun to those
who see, whose holy tombs contain multitudes of sacred books”; and
again, “we never can escape him, he will save us, after death we shall
still be the care of his providence.”[209]
The ceremonial burning of candles and the offering of ex-votos, that is
to say of small models of parts of the human body in need of succour,
was a part of the worship of the Serapeum. Isis attracted many devotees,
who vowed their lives to her. Her images stood in the temple, crowned as
the Queen of Heaven and bearing the infant Horus in her arms. The
candles flared and guttered before her, and the wax ex-votos hung about
the shrine. The novice was put through a long and careful preparation,
he took vows of celibacy, and when he was initiated his head was shaved
and he was clad in a linen garment....
[Illustration: Serapis]
In this worship of Serapis, which spread very widely throughout the
civilized world in the third and second centuries B.C., we see the most
remarkable anticipations of usages and forms of expression that were
destined to dominate the European world throughout the Christian era.
The essential idea, the living spirit, of Christianity was, as we shall
presently show, a new thing in the history of the mind and will of man;
but the garments of ritual and symbol and formula that Christianity has
worn, and still in many countries wears to this day, were certainly
woven in the cult and temples of Jupiter, Serapis, and Isis that spread
now from Alexandria throughout the civilized world in the age of
theocrasia in the second and first centuries before Christ.[210]
XXVI
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM[211]
§ 1. _The Story of Gautama._ § 2. _Teaching and Legend in
Conflict._ § 3. _The Gospel of Gautama Buddha._ § 4. _Buddhism and
Asoka._[212] § 5. _Two Great Chinese Teachers._ § 6. _The
Corruptions of Buddhism._ § 7. _The Present Range of Buddhism._
§ 1
It is interesting to turn from the mental and moral activities of Athens
and Alexandria, and the growth of human ideas in the Mediterranean
world, to the almost entirely separate intellectual life of India. Here
was a civilization which from the first seems to have grown up upon its
own roots and with a character of its own. It was cut off from the
civilizations to the west and to the east by vast mountain barriers and
desert regions. The Aryan tribes who had come down into the peninsula
soon lost touch with their kindred to the west and north, and developed
upon lines of their own. This was more particularly the case with those
who had passed on into the Ganges country and beyond. They found a
civilization already scattered over India, the Dravidian civilization.
This had arisen independently, just as the Sumerian, Cretan, and
Egyptian civilizations seem to have arisen, out of that widespread
development of the Neolithic culture, the heliolithic culture, whose
characteristics we have already described. They revived and changed this
Dravidian civilization much as the Greeks did the Ægean or the Semites
the Sumerian.
These Indian Aryans were living under different conditions from those
that prevailed to the north-west. They were living in a warmer climate,
in which a diet of beef and fermented liquor was destructive; they were
forced, therefore, to a generally vegetarian dietary, and the prolific
soil, almost unasked, gave them all the food they needed. There was no
further reason for them to wander; the crops and seasons were
trustworthy. They wanted little clothing or housing. They wanted so
little that trade was undeveloped. There was still land for every one
who desired to cultivate a patch--and a little patch sufficed. Their
political life was simple and comparatively secure; no great conquering
powers had arisen as yet in India, and her natural barriers sufficed to
stop the early imperialisms to the west of her and to the east.
Thousands of comparatively pacific little village republics and
chieftainships were spread over the land. There was no sea life, there
were no pirate raiders, no strange traders. One might write a history of
India coming down to four hundred years ago and hardly mention the sea.
The history of India for many centuries had been happier, less fierce,
and more dreamlike than any other history. The noblemen, the rajahs,
hunted; life was largely made up of love stories. Here and there a
maharajah arose amidst the rajahs and built a city, caught and tamed
many elephants, slew many tigers, and left a tradition of his splendour
and his wonderful processions.
It was somewhen between 500 and 600 B.C., when Crœsus was flourishing
in Lydia and Cyrus was preparing to snatch Babylon from Nabonidus, that
the founder of Buddhism was born in India. He was born in a small
republican tribal community in the north of Bengal under the Himalayas,
in what is now overgrown jungle country on the borders of Nepal. The
little state was ruled by a family, the Sakya clan, of which this man,
Siddhattha Gautama, was a member. Siddhattha was his personal name, like
Caius or John; Gautama, or Gôtama, his family name, like Cæsar or Smith;
Sakya his clan name, like Julius. The institution of caste was not yet
fully established in India, and the Brahmins, though they were
privileged and influential, had not yet struggled to the head of the
system; but there were already strongly marked class distinctions and a
practically impermeable partition between the noble Aryans and the
darker common people. Gautama belonged to the former race. His
teaching, we may note, was called the Aryan Path, the Aryan Truth.
It is only within the last half-century that the increasing study of the
Pali language, in which most of the original sources were written, has
given the world a real knowledge of the life and actual thought of
Gautama. Previously his story was overlaid by monstrous accumulations of
legend, and his teaching violently misconceived. But now we have a very
human and understandable account of him.
He was a good-looking, capable young man of fortune, and until he was
twenty-nine he lived the ordinary aristocratic life of his time. It was
not a very satisfying life intellectually. There was no literature
except the oral tradition of the Vedas, and that was chiefly monopolized
by the Brahmins; there was even less knowledge. The world was bound by
the snowy Himalayas to the north and spread indefinitely to the south.
The city of Benares, which had a king, was about a hundred miles away.
The chief amusements were hunting and love-making. All the good that
life seemed to offer, Gautama enjoyed. He was married at nineteen to a
beautiful cousin. For some years they remained childless. He hunted and
played and went about in his sunny world of gardens and groves and
irrigated rice-fields. And it was amidst this life that a great
discontent fell upon him. It was the unhappiness of a fine brain that
seeks employment. He lived amidst plenty and beauty, he passed from
gratification to gratification, and his soul was not satisfied. It was
as if he heard the destinies of the race calling to him. He felt that
the existence he was leading was not the reality of life, but a
holiday--a holiday that had gone on too long.
While he was in this mood he saw four things that served to point his
thoughts. He was driving on some excursion of pleasure, when he came
upon a man dreadfully broken down by age. The poor bent, enfeebled
creature struck his imagination. “Such is the way of life,” said Channa,
his charioteer, and “to that we must all come.” While this was yet in
his mind he chanced upon a man suffering horribly from some loathsome
disease. “Such is the way of life,” said Channa. The third vision was of
an unburied body, swollen, eyeless, mauled by passing birds and beasts
and altogether terrible. “That is the way of life,” said Channa.
The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the
unsatisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the mind of Gautama.
And then he and Channa saw one of those wandering ascetics who already
existed in great numbers in India. These men lived under severe rules,
spending much time in meditation and in religious discussion. For many
men before Gautama in that land of uneventful sunshine had found life
distressing and mysterious. These ascetics were all supposed to be
seeking some deeper reality in life, and a passionate desire to do
likewise took possession of Gautama.
He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when the news was
brought to him that his wife had been delivered of his first-born son.
“This is another tie to break,” said Gautama.
He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fellow clansmen.
There was a great feast and a Nautch dance to celebrate the birth of
this new tie, and in the night Gautama awoke in a great agony of spirit,
“like a man who is told that his house is on fire.” In the ante-room the
dancing girls were lying in strips of darkness and moonlight. He called
Channa, and told him to prepare his horse. Then he went softly to the
threshold of his wife’s chamber, and saw her by the light of a little
oil lamp, sleeping sweetly, surrounded by flowers, with his infant son
in her arm. He felt a great craving to take up the child in one first
and last embrace before he departed, but the fear of waking his wife
prevented him, and at last he turned away and went out into the bright
Indian moonshine to Channa waiting with the horses, and mounted and
stole away.
As he rode through the night with Channa, it seemed to him that Mara,
the Tempter of Mankind, filled the sky and disputed with him. “Return,”
said Mara, “and be a king, and I will make you the greatest of kings. Go
on, and you will fail. Never will I cease to dog your footsteps. Lust or
malice or anger will betray you at last in some unwary moment; sooner or
later you will be mine.”
[Illustration: Map to illustrate the RISE of BUDDHISM
[Patna-Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital.]]
Very far they rode that night, and in the morning he stopped outside the
lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy river. There he cut
off his flowing locks with his sword, removed all his ornaments, and
sent them and his horse and sword back to his house by Channa. Then
going on he presently met a ragged man and exchanged clothes with him,
and so having divested himself of all worldly entanglements, he was free
to pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way southward to a resort
of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur running into Bengal northward
from the Vindhya Mountains, close to the town of Rajgir. There a number
of wise men lived in a warren of caves, going into the town for their
simple supplies and imparting their knowledge by word of mouth to such
as cared to come to them.
This instruction must have been very much in the style of the Socratic
discussions that were going on in Athens a couple of centuries later.
Gautama became versed in all the metaphysics of his age. But his acute
intelligence was dissatisfied with the solutions offered him.
The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that power and
knowledge may be obtained by extreme asceticism, by fasting,
sleeplessness, and self-torment, and these ideas Gautama now put to the
test. He betook himself with five disciple companions to the jungle in a
gorge in the Vindhya Mountains, and there he gave himself up to fasting
and terrible penances. His fame spread, “like the sound of a great bell
hung in the canopy of the skies.”[213] But it brought him no sense of
truth achieved. One day he was walking up and down, trying to think in
spite of his enfeebled state. Suddenly he staggered and fell
unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness of these semi-magic
ways of attempting wisdom was plain to him.
He amazed and horrified his five companions by demanding ordinary food
and refusing to continue his self-mortifications. He had realized that
whatever truth a man may reach is reached best by a nourished brain in a
healthy body. Such a conception was absolutely foreign to the ideas of
the land and age. His disciples deserted him, and went off in a
melancholy state to Benares. The boom of the great bell ceased. Gautama
the wonderful had fallen.
For a time Gautama wandered alone, the loneliest figure in history,
battling for light.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its
advances, it secures its positions step by step, with but little
realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of
abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory. So it would seem it
happened to Gautama. He had seated himself under a great tree by the
side of a river to eat, when this sense of clear vision came to him. It
seemed to him that he saw life plain. He is said to have sat all day and
all night in profound thought, and then he rose up to impart his vision
to the world.
§ 2
Such is the plain story of Gautama as we gather it from a comparison of
early writings. But common men must have their cheap marvels and
wonders.
It is nothing to them that this little planet should at last produce
upon its surface a man thinking of the past and the future and the
essential nature of existence. And so we must have this sort of thing by
some worthy Pali scribe, making the most of it:
“When the conflict began between the Saviour of the World and the Prince
of Evil a thousand appalling meteors fell.... Rivers flowed back towards
their sources; peaks and lofty mountains where countless trees had grown
for ages rolled crumbling to the earth.... the sun enveloped itself in
awful darkness, and a host of headless spirits filled the air.”[214]
Of which phenomena history has preserved no authentication. Instead we
have only the figure of a lonely man walking towards Benares.
Extraordinary attention has been given to the tree under which Gautama
had this sense of mental clarity. It was a tree of the fig genus, and
from the first it was treated with peculiar veneration. It was called
the Bo Tree. It has long since perished, but close at hand lives another
great tree which may be its descendant, and in Ceylon there grows to
this day a tree, the oldest historical tree in the world, which we know
certainly to have been planted as a cutting from the Bo Tree in the year
245 B.C. From that time to this it has been carefully tended and
watered; its great branches are supported by pillars, and the earth has
been terraced up about it so that it has been able to put out fresh
roots continually. It helps us to realize the shortness of all human
history to see so many generations spanned by the endurance of one
single tree. Gautama’s disciples unhappily have cared more for the
preservation of his tree than of his thought, which from the first they
misconceived and distorted.
At Benares Gautama sought out his five pupils, who were still leading
the ascetic life. There is an account of their hesitation to receive him
when they saw him approaching. He was a backslider. But there was some
power of personality in him that prevailed over their coldness, and he
made them listen to his new convictions. For five days the discussion
was carried on. When he had at last convinced them that he was now
enlightened, they hailed him as the Buddha. There was already in those
days a belief in India that at long intervals Wisdom returned to the
earth and was revealed to mankind through a chosen person known as the
Buddha. According to Indian belief there have been many such Buddhas;
Gautama Buddha is only the latest one of a series. But it is doubtful if
he himself accepted that title or recognized that theory. In his
discourses he never called himself the Buddha.
He and his recovered disciples then formed a sort of Academy in the Deer
Park at Benares. They made themselves huts, and accumulated other
followers to the number of threescore or more. In the rainy season they
remained in discourse at this settlement, and during the dry weather
they dispersed about the country, each giving his version of the new
teachings. All their teaching was done, it would seem, by word of mouth.
There was probably no writing yet in India at all. We must remember that
in the time of Buddha it is doubtful if even the Iliad had been
committed to writing. Probably the Mediterranean alphabet, which is the
basis of most Indian scripts, had not yet reached India. The master,
therefore, worked out and composed pithy and brief verses, aphorisms,
and lists of “points,” and these were expanded in the discourse of his
disciples. It greatly helped them to have these points and aphorisms
numbered. The modern mind is apt to be impatient of the tendency of
Indian thought to a numerical statement of things, the Eightfold Path,
the Four Truths, and so on, but this enumeration was a mnemonic
necessity in an undocumented world.
§ 3
The fundamental teaching of Gautama, as it is now being made plain to us
by the study of original sources, is clear and simple and in the
closest harmony with modern ideas. It is beyond all dispute the
achievement of one of the most penetrating intelligences the world has
ever known.
We have what are almost certainly the authentic heads of his discourse
to the five disciples which embodies his essential doctrine. All the
miseries and discontents of life he traces to insatiable selfishness.
Suffering, he teaches, is due to the craving individuality, to the
torment of greedy desire. Until a man has overcome every sort of
personal craving his life is trouble and his end sorrow. There are three
principal forms the craving of life takes, and all are evil. The first
is the desire to gratify the senses, sensuousness. The second is the
desire for personal immortality. The third is the desire for prosperity,
worldliness. All these must be overcome--that is to say, a man must no
longer be living for himself--before life can become serene. But when
they are indeed overcome and no longer rule a man’s life, when the first
personal pronoun has vanished from his private thoughts, then he has
reached the higher wisdom, Nirvana, serenity of soul. For Nirvana does
not mean, as many people wrongly believe, extinction, but the extinction
of the futile personal aims that necessarily make life base or pitiful
or dreadful.
Now here, surely, we have the completest analysis of the problem of the
soul’s peace. Every religion that is worth the name, every philosophy,
warns us to lose ourselves in something greater than ourselves.
“Whosoever would save his life, shall lose it;” there is exactly the
same lesson.
The teaching of history, as we are unfolding it in this book, is
strictly in accordance with this teaching of Buddha. There is, as we are
seeing, no social order, no security, no peace or happiness, no
righteous leadership or kingship, unless men lose themselves in
something greater than themselves. The study of biological progress
again reveals exactly the same process--the merger of the narrow globe
of the individual experience in a wider being (compare what has been
said in Chaps. XII and XVIII). To forget oneself in greater interests is
to escape from a prison.
The self-abnegation must be complete. From the point of view of Gautama,
that dread of death, that greed for an endless continuation of his mean
little individual life which drove the Egyptian and those who learnt
from him with propitiations and charms into the temples, was as mortal
and ugly and evil a thing as lust or avarice or hate. The religion of
Gautama is flatly opposite to the “immortality” religions. And his
teaching is set like flint against asceticism, as a mere attempt to win
personal power by personal pains.
But when we come to the rule of life, the Aryan Path, by which we are to
escape from the threefold base cravings that dishonour human life, then
the teaching is not so clear. It is not so clear for one very manifest
reason, Gautama had no knowledge nor vision of history; he had no clear
sense of the vast and many-sided adventure of life opening out in space
and time. His mind was confined within the ideas of his age and people,
and their minds were shaped into notions of perpetual recurrence, of
world following world and of Buddha following Buddha, a stagnant
circling of the universe. The idea of mankind as a great Brotherhood
pursuing an endless destiny under the God of Righteousness, the idea
that was already dawning upon the Semitic consciousness in Babylon at
this time, did not exist in his world. Yet his account of the Eightfold
Path is, nevertheless, within these limitations, profoundly wise.
Let us briefly recapitulate the eight elements of the Aryan Path. First,
Right Views; Gautama placed the stern examination of views and ideas,
the insistence upon _truth_ as the first research of his followers.
There was to be no clinging to tawdry superstitions. He condemned, for
instance, the prevalent belief in the transmigration of souls. In a
well-known early Buddhist dialogue there is a destructive analysis of
the idea of an enduring individual soul. Next to Right Views came Right
Aspirations; because nature abhors a vacuum, and since base cravings are
to be expelled, other desires must be encouraged--love for the service
of others, desire to do and secure justice and the like. Primitive and
uncorrupted Buddhism aimed not at the destruction of desire, but at the
change of desire. Devotion to science and art, or to the betterment of
things manifestly falls into harmony with the Buddhistic Right
Aspirations, provided such aims are free from jealousy or the craving
for fame. Right Speech, Right Conduct, and Right Livelihood, need no
expansion here. Sixthly in this list came Right Effort, for Gautama had
no toleration for good intentions and slovenly application; the disciple
had to keep a keenly critical eye upon his activities. The seventh
element of the path, Right Mindfulness, is the constant guard against a
lapse into personal feeling or glory for whatever is done or not done.
And, finally, comes Right Rapture, which seems to be aimed against the
pointless ecstasies of the devout, such witless gloryings, for instance,
as those that went to the jingle of the Alexandrian sistrum.
We will not discuss here the Buddhistic doctrine of _Karma_, because it
belongs to a world of thought that is passing away. The good or evil of
every life was supposed to determine the happiness or misery of some
subsequent life, that was in some inexplicable way identified with its
predecessor. Nowadays we realize that a life goes on in its consequences
for ever, but we find no necessity to suppose that any particular life
resumes again. The Indian mind was full of the idea of cyclic
recurrence; everything was supposed to come round again. This is a very
natural supposition for men to make; so things seem to be until we
analyze them. Modern science has made clear to us that there is no such
exact recurrence as we are apt to suppose; every day is by an
infinitesimal quantity a little longer than the day before; no
generation repeats the previous generation precisely; history never
repeats itself; change, we realize now, is inexhaustible; all things are
eternally new. But these differences between our general ideas and those
Buddha must have possessed need not in any way prevent us from
appreciating the unprecedented wisdom, the goodness, and the greatness
of this plan of an emancipated life as Gautama laid it down somewhen in
the sixth century before Christ.
And if he failed in theory to gather together all the wills of the
converted into the one multifarious activity of our race battling
against death and deadness in time and space, he did in practice direct
his own life and that of all his immediate disciples into one
progressive adventure, which was to preach and spread the doctrine and
methods of Nirvana or soul-serenity throughout our fevered world. For
them at least his teaching was complete and full. But all men cannot
preach or teach; doctrine is but one of many of the functions of life
that are fundamentally righteous. To the modern mind it seems at least
equally acceptable that a man may, though perhaps against greater
difficulties, cultivate the soil, rule a city, make roads, build houses,
construct engines, or seek and spread knowledge, in perfect
self-forgetfulness and serenity. As much was inherent in Gautama’s
teaching, but the stress was certainly laid upon the teaching itself,
and upon withdrawal from rather than upon the ennoblement of the
ordinary affairs of men.
In certain other respects this primitive Buddhism differed from any of
the religions we have hitherto considered. It was primarily a religion
of conduct, not a religion of observances and sacrifices. It had no
temples, and since it had no sacrifices it had no sacred order of
priests. Nor had it any theology. It neither asserted nor denied the
reality of the innumerable and often grotesque gods who were worshipped
in India at that time. It passed them by.
§ 4
From the very first this new teaching was misconceived. One corruption
was perhaps inherent in its teaching. Because the world of men had as
yet no sense of the continuous progressive effort of life, it was very
easy to slip from the idea of renouncing self to the idea of renouncing
active life. As Gautama’s own experiences had shown, it is easier to
flee from this world than from self. His early disciples were strenuous
thinkers and teachers, but the lapse into mere monastic seclusion was a
very easy one, particularly easy in the climate of India, where an
extreme simplicity of living is convenient and attractive, and exertion
more laborious than anywhere else in the world.
And it was early the fate of Gautama, as it has been the fate of most
religious founders since his days, to be made into a wonder by his less
intelligent disciples in their efforts to impress the outer world. We
have already noted how one devout follower could not but believe that
the moment of the master’s mental irradiation must necessarily have been
marked by an epileptic fit of the elements. This is one small sample of
the vast accumulation of vulgar marvels that presently sprang up about
the memory of Gautama.
There can be no doubt that for the great multitude of human beings then
as now the mere idea of an emancipation from self is a very difficult
one to grasp. It is probable that even among the teachers Buddha was
sending out from Benares there were many who did not grasp it and still
less were able to convey it to their hearers. Their teaching quite
naturally took on the aspect of salvation not from oneself--that idea
was beyond them--but from misfortunes and sufferings here and hereafter.
In the existing superstitions of the people, and especially in the idea
of the transmigration of the soul after death, though this idea was
contrary to the Master’s own teaching, they found stuff of fear they
could work upon. They urged virtue upon the people lest they should live
again in degraded or miserable forms, or fall into some one of the
innumerable hells of torment with which the Brahminical teachers had
already familiarized their minds. They represented Buddha as the saviour
from almost unlimited torment.
There seems to be no limit to the lies that honest but stupid disciples
will tell for the glory of their master and for what they regard as the
success of their propaganda. Men who would scorn to tell a lie in
everyday life will become unscrupulous cheats and liars when they have
given themselves up to propagandist work; it is one of the perplexing
absurdities of our human nature. Such honest souls, for most of them
were indubitably honest, were presently telling their hearers of the
miracles that attended the Buddha’s birth--they no longer called him
Gautama, because that was too familiar a name--of his youthful feats of
strength, of the marvels of his everyday life, winding up with a sort of
illumination of his body at the moment of death. Of course it was
impossible to believe that Buddha was the son of a mortal father. He was
miraculously conceived through his mother dreaming of a beautiful white
elephant! Previously he had himself been a marvellous elephant with six
tusks; he had generously given them all to a needy hunter--and even
helped him to saw them off. And so on.
Moreover, a theology grew up about Buddha. He was discovered to be a
god. He was one of a series of divine beings, the Buddhas. There was an
undying “Spirit of all the Buddhas”; there was a great series of Buddhas
past and Buddhas (or Buddisatvas) yet to come. But we cannot go further
into these complications of Asiatic theology. “Under the overpowering
influence of these sickly imaginations the moral teachings of Gautama
have been almost hid from view. The theories grew and flourished; each
new step, each new hypothesis, demanded another; until the whole sky was
filled with forgeries of the brain, and the nobler and simpler lessons
of the founder of the religion were smothered beneath the glittering
mass of metaphysical subtleties.”[215]
[Illustration: Hariti (painting from Chinese Turkestan, 6th Cent'y.
A.D.)
[after Foucher]]
In the third century B.C. Buddhism was gaining wealth and power, and the
little groups of simple huts in which the teachers of the Order gathered
in the rainy season were giving place to substantial monastic buildings.
To this period belong the beginnings of Buddhistic art. Now if we
remember how recent was the adventure of Alexander, that all the Punjab
was still under Seleucid rule, that all India abounded with Greek
adventurers, and that there was still quite open communication by sea
and land with Alexandria, it is no great wonder to find that this early
Buddhist art was strongly Greek in character, and that the new
Alexandrian cult of Serapis and Isis was extraordinarily influential in
its development.
The kingdom of Gandhara on the northwest frontier near Peshawar, which
flourished in the third century B.C., was a typical meeting-place of
the Hellenic and Indian worlds. Here are to be found the earliest
Buddhist sculptures, and interwoven with them are figures which are
recognizably the figures of Serapis and Isis and Horus already worked
into the legendary net that gathered about Buddha. No doubt the Greek
artists who came to Gandhara were loath to relinquish a familiar theme.
But Isis, we are told, is no longer Isis but Hariti, a pestilence
goddess whom Buddha converted and made benevolent. Foucher traces Isis
from this centre into China, but here other influences were also at work
and the story becomes too complex for us to disentangle in this
_Outline_.[216] China had a Taoist deity, the Holy Mother, the Queen of
Heaven, who took on the name (originally a male name) of Kuan-yin and
who came to resemble the Isis figure very closely. The Isis figures, we
feel, must have influenced the treatment of Kuan-yin. Like Isis she was
also Queen of the Seas, Stella Maris. In Japan she was called Kwannon.
There seems to have been a constant exchange of the outer forms of
religion between east and west. We read in Hue’s Travels how perplexing
he and his fellow missionary found this possession of a common tradition
of worship. “The cross,” he says, “the mitre, the dalmatica, the cope,
which the Grand Lamas wear on their journeys, or when they are
performing some ceremony out of the temple; the service with double
choirs, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer, suspended from five
chains, which you can open or close at pleasure; the benedictions given
by the Lamas by extending the right hand over the heads of the faithful;
the chaplet, ecclesiastical celibacy, spiritual retirement, the worship
of the saints, the fasts, the processions, the litanies, the holy water,
all these are analogies between the Buddhists and ourselves.”[217]
[Illustration: CHINESE IMAGE OF KUAN-YIN.]
The cult and doctrine of Gautama, gathering corruptions and variations
from Brahminism and Hellenism alike, was spread throughout India by an
increasing multitude of teachers in the fourth and third centuries B.C.
For some generations at least it retained much of the moral beauty and
something of the simplicity of the opening phase. Many people who have
no intellectual grasp upon the meaning of self-abnegation and
disinterestedness have nevertheless the ability to appreciate a
splendour in the reality of these qualities. Early Buddhism was
certainly producing noble lives, and it is not only through reason that
the latent response to nobility is aroused in our minds. It spread
rather in spite of than because of the concessions that it made to
vulgar imaginations. It spread because many of the early Buddhists were
sweet and gentle, helpful and noble and admirable people, who compelled
belief in their sustaining faith.
Quite early in its career Buddhism came into conflict with the growing
pretensions of the Brahmins. As we have already noted, this priestly
caste was still only struggling to dominate Indian life in the days of
Gautama. They had already great advantages. They had the monopoly of
tradition and religious sacrifices. But their power was being challenged
by the development of kingship, for the men who became clanleaders and
kings were usually not of the Brahminical caste.
Kingship received an impetus from the Persian and Greek invasions of the
Punjab. We have already noted the name of King Porus whom, in spite of
his elephants, Alexander defeated and turned into a satrap. There came
also to the Greek camp upon the Indus a certain low-caste[218]
adventurer named Chandragupta Maurya, whom the Greeks called
Sandracottus, with a scheme for conquering the Ganges country. The
scheme was not welcome to the Macedonians, who were in revolt against
marching any further into India, and he had to fly the camp. He wandered
among the tribes upon the north-west frontier, secured their support,
and after Alexander had departed, overran the Punjab, ousting the
Macedonian representatives. He then conquered the Ganges country (321
B.C.), waged a successful war (303 B.C.) against Seleucus (Seleucus I)
when the latter attempted to recover the Punjab, and consolidated a
great empire reaching across all the plain of northern India from the
western to the eastern sea. And this King Chandragupta came into much
the same conflict with the growing power of the Brahmins, into the
conflict between crown and priesthood, that we have already noted as
happening in Babylonia and Egypt and China. He saw in the spreading
doctrine of Buddhism an ally against the growth of priestcraft and
caste. He supported and endowed the Buddhistic Order, and encouraged its
teachings.
He was succeeded by his son, who conquered Madras and was in turn
succeeded by Asoka (264 to 227 B.C.), one of the great monarchs of
history, whose dominions extended from Afghanistan to Madras. He is the
only military monarch on record who abandoned warfare after victory. He
had invaded Kalinga (255 B.C.), a country along the east coast of
Madras, perhaps with some intention of completing the conquest of the
tip of the Indian peninsula. The expedition was successful, but he was
disgusted by what he saw of the cruelties and horrors of war. He
declared, in certain inscriptions that still exist, that he would no
longer seek conquest by war, but by religion, and the rest of his life
was devoted to the spreading of Buddhism throughout the world.
He seems to have ruled his vast empire in peace and with great ability.
He was no mere religious fanatic. But in the year of his one and only
war he joined the Buddhist community as a layman, and some years later
he became a full member of the Order, and devoted himself to the
attainment of Nirvana by the Eightfold Path. How entirely compatible
that way of living then was with the most useful and beneficent
activities his life shows. Right Aspiration, Right Effort, and Right
Livelihood distinguished his career. He organized a great digging of
wells in India, and the planting of trees for shade. He appointed
officers for the supervision of charitable works. He founded hospitals
and public gardens. He had gardens made for the growing of medicinal
herbs. Had he had an Aristotle to inspire him, he would no doubt have
endowed scientific research upon a great scale. He created a ministry
for the care of the aborigines and subject races. He made provision for
the education of women. He made, he was the first monarch to make, an
attempt to educate his people into a common view of the ends and way of
life. He made vast benefactions to the Buddhist teaching orders, and
tried to stimulate them to a better study of their own literature. All
over the land he set up long inscriptions rehearsing the teaching of
Gautama, and it is the simple and human teaching and not the
preposterous accretions. Thirty-five of his inscriptions survive to this
day. Moreover, he sent missionaries to spread the noble and reasonable
teaching of his master throughout the world, to Kashmir, to Ceylon, to
the Seleucids, and the Ptolemies. It was one of these missions which
carried that cutting of the Bo Tree, of which we have already told, to
Ceylon.
[Illustration: Map to illustrate the spread of--Buddhism]
For eight and twenty years Asoka worked sanely for the real needs of
men. Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the
columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses and serenities
and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Asoka shines, and shines
almost alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan his name is still
honoured. China, Tibet, and even India, though it has left his doctrine,
preserve the tradition of his greatness. More living men cherish his
memory to-day than have ever heard the names of Constantine or
Charlemagne.
§ 5
It is thought that the vast benefactions of Asoka finally corrupted
Buddhism by attracting to its Order great numbers of mercenary and
insincere adherents, but there can be no doubt that its rapid extension
throughout Asia was very largely due to his stimulus.
It made its way into Central Asia through Afghanistan and Turkestan, and
so reached China. Buddhist teaching had spread widely in China before
200 B.C.[219] Buddhism found there a popular and prevalent religion,
Taoism, a development of very ancient and primitive magic and occult
practices. It was reorganized as a distinctive cult by Chang Daoling in
the days of the Han dynasty. Tao means the Way, which corresponds
closely with the idea of the Aryan Path. The two religions spread side
by side and underwent similar changes, so that nowadays their outward
practice is very similar. Buddhism also encountered Confucianism, which
was even less theological and even more a code of personal conduct. And
finally it encountered the teachings of Lao Tse, “anarchist,
evolutionist, pacifist, and moral philosopher,”[220] which were not so
much a religion as a philosophical rule of life. The teachings of this
Lao Tse were later to become incorporated with the Taoist religion by
Chen Tuan, the founder of modern Taoism.
Confucius, the founder of Confucianism, like Lao Tse, the great southern
teacher (whom he met and admired), and Gautama, lived also in the sixth
century B.C. His life has some interesting parallelisms with that of
some of the more political of the Greek philosophers of the fifth and
fourth. The sixth century B.C. falls into the period assigned by Chinese
historians to the Chow Dynasty, but in those days the rule of that
dynasty had become little more than nominal; the emperor conducted the
traditional sacrifices of the Son of Heaven, and received a certain
formal respect. Even his nominal empire was not a sixth part of the
China of to-day. In Chapter XVI we have already glanced at the state of
affairs in China at this time; practically China was a multitude of
warring states open to the northern barbarians. Confucius was a subject
in one of those states, Lu; he was of aristocratic birth, but poor; and,
after occupying various official positions, he set up a sort of Academy
in Lu for the discovery and imparting of Wisdom. And we also find
Confucius travelling from state to state in China, seeking a prince who
would make him his counsellor and become the centre of a reformed world.
Plato, two centuries later, in exactly the same spirit, went as advisor
to the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, and we have already noted the
attitudes of Aristotle and Isocrates towards Philip of Macedonia.
The teaching of Confucius centred upon the idea of a noble life which he
embodied in a standard or ideal, the Aristocratic Man. This phrase is
often translated into English as the Superior Person, but as “superior”
and “person,” like “respectable” and “genteel,” have long become
semi-humorous terms of abuse, this rendering is not fair to
Confucianism. He did present to his time the ideal of a devoted public
man. The public side was very important to him. He was far more of a
constructive political thinker than Gautama or Lao Tse. His mind was
full of the condition of China, and he sought to call the Aristocratic
Man into existence very largely in order to produce the noble state. One
of his sayings may be quoted here: “It is impossible to withdraw from
the world, and associate with birds and beasts that have no affinity
with us. With whom should I associate but with suffering men? The
disorder that prevails is what requires my efforts. If right principles
ruled through the kingdom, there would be no necessity for me to change
its state.”
The political basis of his teaching seems to be characteristic of
Chinese moral ideas; there is a much directer reference to the State
than is the case with most Indian and European moral and religious
doctrine. For a time he was appointed magistrate in Chung-tu, a city of
the dukedom of Lu, and here he sought to regulate life to an
extraordinary extent, to subdue every relationship and action indeed to
the rule of an elaborate etiquette. “Ceremonial in every detail, such as
we are wont to see only in the courts of rulers and the households of
high dignitaries, became obligatory on the people at large and all
matters of daily life were subject to rigid rule. Even the food which
the different classes of people might eat was regulated; males and
females were kept apart in the streets; even the thickness of coffins
and the shape and situation of graves were made the subject of
regulations.”[221]
This is all, as people say, very Chinese. No other people have ever
approached moral order and social stability through the channel of
manners. Yet in China, at any rate, the methods of Confucius have had an
enormous effect, and no nation in the world to-day has such a universal
tradition of decorum and self-restraint.
Later on the influence of Confucius over his duke was undermined, and he
withdrew again into private life. His last days were saddened by the
deaths of some of his most promising disciples. “No intelligent ruler,”
he said, “arises to take me as his master, and my time has come to die.”
...
But he died to live. Says Hirth, “There can be no doubt that Confucius
has had a greater influence on the development of the Chinese national
character than many emperors taken together. He is, therefore, one of
the essential figures to be considered in connection with any history of
China. That he could influence his nation to such a degree was, it
appears to me, due more to the peculiarity of the nation than to that of
his own personality. Had he lived in any other part of the world, his
name would perhaps be forgotten. As we have seen, he had formed his
character and his personal views on man’s life from a careful study of
documents closely connected with the moral philosophy cultivated by
former generations. What he preached to his contemporaries was,
therefore, not all new to them; but, having himself, in the study of old
records, heard the dim voice of the sages of the past, he became, as it
were, the megaphone phonograph through which were expressed to the
nation those views which he had derived from the early development of
the nation itself.... The great influence of Confucius’s personality on
national life in China was due not only to his writings and his
teachings as recorded by others, but also to his doings. His personal
character, as described by his disciples and in the accounts of later
writers, some of which may be entirely legendary, has become the pattern
for millions of those who are bent on imitating the outward manners of a
great man.... Whatever he did in public was regulated to the minutest
detail by ceremony. This was no invention of his own, since ceremonial
life had been cultivated many centuries before Confucius; but his
authority and example did much to perpetuate what he considered
desirable social practices.”
The Chinese speak of Buddhism and the doctrines of Lao Tse and Confucius
as the Three Teachings. Together they constitute the basis and point of
departure of all later Chinese thought. Their thorough study is a
necessary preliminary to the establishment of any real intellectual and
moral community between the great people of the East and the Western
world.[222]
There are certain things to be remarked in common of all these three
teachers, of whom Gautama was indisputably the greatest and profoundest,
whose doctrines to this day dominate the thought of the great majority
of human beings; there are certain features in which their teaching
contrasts with the thoughts and feelings that were soon to take
possession of the western world. Primarily they are personal and
tolerant doctrines; they are doctrines of a Way, of a Path, of a
Nobility, and not doctrines of a church or a general rule. And they
offer nothing either for or against the existence and worship of the
current gods. The Athenian philosophers, it is to be noted, had just the
same theological detachment; Socrates was quite willing to bow politely
or sacrifice formally to almost any divinity,--reserving his private
thoughts. This attitude is flatly antagonistic to the state of mind that
was growing up in the Jewish communities of Judea, Egypt, and Babylonia,
in which the thought of the one God was first and foremost. Neither
Gautama nor Lao Tse nor Confucius had any inkling of this idea of a
_jealous_ God, a God who would have “none other gods,” a God of terrible
Truth, who would not tolerate any lurking belief in magic, witchcraft,
or old customs, or any sacrificing to the god-king or any trifling with
the stern unity of things.
[Illustration: Vishnu Brahma Siva]
§ 6
The intolerance of the Jewish mind did keep its essential faith clear
and clean. The theological disregard of the great Eastern teachers,
neither assenting nor denying, did on the other hand permit elaborations
of explanation and accumulations of ritual from the very beginning.
Except for Gautama’s insistence upon Right Views, which was easily
disregarded, there was no _self-cleansing_ element in either Buddhism,
Taoism, or Confucianism. There was no effective prohibition of
superstitious practices, spirit raising, incantations, prostrations, and
supplementary worships. At an early stage a process of encrustation
began, and continued. The new faiths caught almost every disease of the
corrupt religions they sought to replace; they took over the idols and
the temples, the altars and the censers.
Tibet to-day is a Buddhistic country, yet Gautama, could he return to
earth, might go from end to end of Tibet seeking his own teaching in
vain. He would find that most ancient type of human ruler, a god-king,
enthroned, the Dalai Lama, the “living Buddha.” At Lhassa he would find
a huge temple filled with priests, abbots, and lamas--he whose only
buildings were huts and who made no priests--and above a high altar he
would behold a huge golden idol, which he would learn was called
“Gautama Buddha”! He would hear services intoned before this divinity,
and certain precepts, which would be dimly familiar to him, murmured as
responses. Bells, incense, prostrations, would play their part in these
amazing proceedings. At one point in the service a bell would be rung
and a mirror lifted up, while the whole congregation, in an access of
reverence, bowed lower....
About this Buddhist countryside he would discover a number of curious
little mechanisms, little wind-wheels and water-wheels spinning, on
which brief prayers were inscribed. Every time these things spin, he
would learn, it counts as a prayer. “To whom?” he would ask. Moreover,
there would be a number of flagstaffs in the land carrying beautiful
silk flags, silk flags which bore the perplexing inscription, “_Om Mani
padme hum_,” “the jewel is in the lotus.” Whenever the flag flaps, he
would learn, it was a prayer also, very beneficial to the gentleman who
paid for the flag and to the land generally. Gangs of workmen,
employed by pious persons, would be going about the country cutting this
precious formula on cliff and stone. And this, he would realize at last,
was what the world had made of his religion! Beneath this gaudy glitter
was buried the Aryan Way to serenity of soul.[223]
[Illustration: Krishna
Kali, as an impersonation of Vengeance
Ganesa]
We have already noted the want of any progressive idea in primitive
Buddhism. In that again it contrasted with Judaism. The idea of a
Promise gave to Judaism a quality no previous or contemporary religion
displayed; it made Judaism historical and dramatic. It justified its
fierce intolerance because it pointed to an aim. In spite of the truth
and profundity of the psychological side of Gautama’s teaching, Buddhism
stagnated and corrupted for the lack of that directive idea. Judaism, it
must be confessed, in its earlier phases, entered but little into the
souls of men; it let them remain lustful, avaricious, worldly, or
superstitious; but because of its persuasion of a promise and of a
divine leadership to serve divine ends, it remained in comparison with
Buddhism bright and expectant, like a cared-for sword.
§ 7
For some time Buddhism flourished in India. But Brahminism, with its
many gods and its endless variety of cults, always flourished by its
side, and the organization of the Brahmins grew more powerful, until at
last they were able to turn upon this caste-denying cult and oust it
from India altogether. The story of that struggle is not to be told
here; there were persecutions and reactions, but by the eleventh
century, except for Orissa, Buddhist teaching was extinct in India. Much
of its gentleness and charity had, however, become incorporated with
Brahminism.
Over great areas of the world, as our map has shown, it still survives;
and it is quite possible that in contact with western science, and
inspired by the spirit of history, the original teaching of Gautama,
revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of
human destiny.
But with the loss of India the Aryan Way ceased to rule the lives of any
Aryan peoples. It is curious to note that while the one great Aryan
religion is now almost exclusively confined to Mongolian peoples, the
Aryans themselves are under the sway of two religions, Christianity and
Islam, which are, as we shall see, essentially Semitic. And both
Buddhism and Christianity wear garments of ritual and formula that seem
to be derived through Hellenistic channels from that land of temples and
priestcraft, Egypt, and from the mentality of the brown Hamitic
peoples.
BOOK V
THE RISE AND COLLAPSE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
XXVII
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS[224]
§ 1. _The Beginnings of the Latins._ § 2. _A New Sort of State._ §
3. _The Carthaginian Republic of Rich Men._ § 4. _The First Punic
War._ § 5. _Cato the Elder and the Spirit of Cato._ § 6. _The
Second Punic War._ § 7. _The Third Punic War._ § 8. _How the Punic
War Undermined Roman Liberty._ § 9. _Comparison of the Roman
Republic with a Modern State._
§ 1
It is now necessary to take up the history of the two great republics of
the Western Mediterranean, Rome and Carthage, and to tell how Rome
succeeded in maintaining for some centuries an empire even greater than
that achieved by the conquests of Alexander. But this new empire was, as
we shall try to make clear, a political structure differing very
profoundly in its nature from any of the great Oriental empires that had
preceded it. Great changes in the texture of human society and in the
conditions of social interrelations had been going on for some
centuries. The flexibility and transferability of money was becoming a
power and, like all powers in inexpert hands, a danger in human affairs.
It was altering the relations of rich men to the state and to their
poorer fellow citizens. This new empire, the Roman empire, unlike all
the preceding empires, was not the creation of a great conqueror. No
Sargon, no Thothmes, no Nebuchadnezzar, no Cyrus nor Alexander nor
Chandragupta, was its fountain head. It was made by a republic. It grew
by a kind of necessity through new concentrating and unifying forces
that were steadily gathering power in human affairs.
But first it is necessary to give some idea of the state of affairs in
Italy in the centuries immediately preceding the appearance of Rome in
the world’s story.
[Illustration: The WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN, 800-600 B.C.]
[Illustration: EARLY LATIUM]
Before 1200 B.C., that is to say before the rise of the Assyrian empire,
the siege of Troy, and the final destruction of Cnossos, but after the
time of Amenophis IV, Italy, like Spain, was probably still inhabited
mainly by dark white people of the more fundamental Iberian or
Mediterranean race.[225] This aboriginal population was probably a thin
and backward one. But already in Italy, as in Greece, the Aryans were
coming southward. By 1000 B.C. immigrants from the north had settled
over most of the north and centre of Italy, and, as in Greece, they had
inter-married with their darker predecessors and established a group of
Aryan languages, the Italian group, more akin to the Keltic
(Gaelic)[226] than to any other, of which the most interesting from the
historical point of view was that spoken by the Latin tribes in the
plains south and east of the river Tiber. Meanwhile the Greeks had been
settling down in Greece, and now they were taking to the sea and
crossing over to South Italy and Sicily and establishing themselves
there. Subsequently they established colonies along the French Riviera
and founded Marseilles upon the site of an older Phoenician colony.
Another interesting people also had come into Italy by sea. These were a
brownish sturdy people, to judge from the pictures they have left of
themselves; very probably they were a tribe of those Ægean “dark whites”
who were being driven out of Greece and Asia Minor and the islands in
between by the Greeks. We have already told the tale of Cnossos (Chapter
XVII) and of the settlement of the kindred Philistines in Palestine
(Chapter XXI, § 1). These Etruscans, as they were called in Italy, were
known even in ancient times to be of Asiatic origin, and it is tempting,
but probably unjustifiable, to connect this tradition with the Æneid,
the sham epic of the Latin poet Virgil, in which the Latin civilization
is ascribed to Trojan immigrants from Asia Minor. (But the Trojans
themselves were probably an Aryan people allied to the Phrygians.) These
Etruscan people conquered most of Italy north of the Tiber from the
Aryan tribes who were scattered over that country. Probably the
Etruscans ruled over a subjugated Italian population, so reversing the
state of affairs in Greece, in which the Aryans were uppermost.
Our map, which may be taken to represent roughly the state of affairs
about 750 B.C., also shows the establishments of the Phœnician
traders, of which Carthage was the chief, along the shores of Africa and
Spain.
Of all the peoples actually in Italy, the Etruscans were by far the most
civilized. They built sturdy fortresses of the Mycænean type of
architecture; they had a metal industry; they used imported Greek
pottery of a very fine type. The Latin tribes on the other side of the
Tiber were by comparison barbaric.
The Latins were still a rude farming people. The centre of their worship
was a temple to the tribal god Jupiter, upon the Alban Mount. There they
gathered for their chief festivals very much after the fashion of the
early tribal gathering we have already imagined at Avebury (Chapter
XII). This gathering-place was not a town. It was a high place of
assembly. There was no population permanently there. There were,
however, twelve townships in the Latin league. At one point upon the
Tiber there was a ford, and here there was a trade between Latins and
Etruscans. At this ford Rome had its beginnings. Traders assembled
there, and refugees from the twelve towns found an asylum and occupation
at this trading centre. Upon the seven hills near the ford a number of
settlements sprang up, which finally amalgamated into one city.
Most people have heard the story of the two brothers Romulus and Remus,
who founded Rome, and the legend of how they were exposed as infants and
sheltered and suckled by a wolf. Little value is now attached to this
tale by modern historians. The peninsula of Italy was not then the
smiling land of vineyards and olive orchards it has since become. It was
still a rough country of marsh and forest, in which the farmers grazed
their cattle and made their clearings. Rome, on the boundary between
Latin and Etruscan, was not in a very strong position for defence. At
first there were perhaps Latin kings in Rome, then it would seem the
city fell into the hands of Etruscan rulers whose tyrannous conduct led
at last to their expulsion, and Rome became a Latin-speaking republic.
The Etruscan kings were expelled from Rome in the sixth century B.C.,
while the successors of Nebuchadnezzar were ruling by the sufferance of
the Medes in Babylon, while Confucius was seeking a king to reform the
disorders of China, and while Gautama was teaching the Aryan Way to his
disciples at Benares.
[Illustration: Etruscan painting of a Ceremonial Burning of the Dead]
Of the struggle between the Romans and the Etruscans we cannot tell in
any detail here. The Etruscans were the better armed, the more
civilized, and the more numerous, and it would probably have gone hard
with the Romans if they had had to fight them alone. But two disasters
happened to the Etruscans which so weakened them that the Romans were
able at last to master them altogether. The first of these was a war
with the Greeks of Syracuse in Sicily which destroyed the Etruscan fleet
(474 B.C.), and the second was a great raid of the Gauls from the north
into Italy. These latter people swarmed into North Italy and occupied
the valley of the Po towards the end of the fifth century B.C., as a
couple of centuries later their kindred were to swarm down into Greece
and Asia Minor and settle in Galatia. The Etruscans were thus caught
between hammer and anvil, and after a long and intermittent war the
Romans were able to capture Veii, an Etruscan fortress, a few miles from
Rome, which had hitherto been a great threat and annoyance to them.
It is to this period of struggle against the Etruscan monarchs, the
Tarquins, that Macaulay’s _Lays of Ancient Rome_, familiar to every
schoolboy, refer.
[Illustration: Greek statuette of a Gaul.
(From Myrina)]
But the invasion of the Gauls was one of those convulsions of the
nations that leave nothing as it has been before. They carried their
raiding right down the Italian peninsula, devastating all Etruria. They
took and sacked Rome (390 B.C.). According to Roman legends--on which
doubt is thrown--the citadel on the Capitol held out, and this also the
Gauls would have taken by surprise at night, if certain geese had not
been awakened by their stealthy movements and set up such a cackling as
to arouse the garrison. After that the Gauls, who were ill-equipped for
siege operations, and perhaps suffering from disease in their camp, were
bought off, and departed to the northward again, and, though they made
subsequent raids, they never again reached Rome.
The leader of the Gauls who sacked Rome was named Brennus. It is related
of him that as the gold of the ransom was being weighed, there was some
dispute about the justice of the counterpoise, whereupon he flung his
sword into the scale, saying, “_Væ victis!_” (“Woe to the
vanquished!”)--a phrase that has haunted the discussions of all
subsequent ransoms and indemnities down to the present time.
For half a century after this experience Rome was engaged in a series of
wars to establish herself at the head of the Latin tribes. For the
burning of the chief city seems to have stimulated rather than crippled
her energies. However much she had suffered, most of her neighbours
seem to have suffered more. By 290 B.C. Rome was the mistress city of
all Central Italy from the Arno to south of Naples. She had conquered
the Etruscans altogether, and her boundaries marched with those of the
Gauls to the north and with the regions of Italy under Greek dominion
(Magna Græcia) to the south. Along the Gaulish boundary she had planted
garrisons and colonial cities, and no doubt it was because of that line
of defence that the raiding enterprises of the Gauls were deflected
eastward into the Balkans.
[Illustration: The ROMAN POWER after the SAMNITE WARS]
After what we have already told of the history of Greece and the
constitutions of her cities, it will not surprise the reader to learn
that the Greeks of Sicily and Italy were divided up into a number of
separate city governments, of which Syracuse and Tarentum (the modern
Taranto) were the chief, and that they had no common rule of direction
or policy. But now, alarmed at the spread of the Roman power, they
looked across the Adriatic for help, and found it in the ambitions of
Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus. Between the Romans and Pyrrhus these Greeks
of Magna Græcia were very much in the same position that Greece proper
had been in, between the Macedonians and the Persians half a century
before.
[Illustration: Samnite warriors.... (from painted vases)]
[Illustration: Map of ITALY after 275 B.C.]
The reader will remember that Epirus, the part of Greece that is closest
to the heel of Italy, was the native land of Olympias, the mother of
Alexander. In the kaleidoscopic changes of the map that followed the
death of Alexander, Epirus was sometimes swamped by Macedonia, sometimes
independent. This Pyrrhus was a kinsman of Alexander the Great, and a
monarch of ability and enterprise, and he seems to have planned a career
of conquest in Italy and Sicily. He commanded an admirable army,
against which the comparatively inexpert Roman levies could at first do
little. His army included all the established military devices of the
time, an infantry phalanx, Thessalian cavalry and twenty fighting
elephants from the east. He routed the Romans at Heraclea (280 B.C.),
and, pressing after them, defeated them again at Ausculum (279 B.C.) in
their own territory. Then, instead of pursuing the Romans further, he
made a truce with them, turned his attention to the subjugation of
Sicily, and so brought the sea power of Carthage into alliance against
him. For Carthage could not afford to have a strong power established so
close to her as Sicily. Rome in those days seemed to the Carthaginians a
far less serious threat than the possibility of another Alexander the
Great ruling Sicily. A Carthaginian fleet appeared off the mouth of the
Tiber, therefore, to encourage or induce the Romans to renew the
struggle, and Rome and Carthage were definitely allied against the
invader.
This interposition of Carthage was fatal to Pyrrhus. Without any
decisive battle his power wilted, and, after a disastrous repulse in an
attack upon the Roman camp of Beneventum, he had to retire to Epirus
(275 B.C.).
It is recorded that when Pyrrhus left Sicily, he said he left it to be
the battleground of Rome and Carthage. He was killed three years later
in a battle in the streets of Argos. The war against Pyrrhus was won by
the Carthaginian fleet, and Rome reaped a full half of the harvest of
victory. Sicily fell completely to Carthage, and Rome came down to the
toe and heel of Italy, and looked across the Straits of Messina at her
new rival. In eleven years’ time (264 B.C.) the prophecy of Pyrrhus was
fulfilled, and the first war with Carthage, the first of the three
Punic[227] Wars, had begun.
§ 2[228]
But we write “Rome” and the “Romans,” and we have still to explain what
manner of people these were who were playing a rôle of conquest that had
hitherto been played only by able and aggressive monarchs.
Their state was, in the fifth century B.C., a republic of the Aryan type
very similar to a Greek aristocratic republic. The earliest accounts of
the social life of Rome give us a picture of a very primitive Aryan
community. “In the second half of the fifth century before Christ, Rome
was still an aristocratic community of free peasants, occupying an area
of nearly 400 square miles, with a population certainly not exceeding
150,000, almost entirely dispersed over the country-side and divided
into seventeen districts or rural tribes. Most of the families had a
small holding and a cottage of their own, where father and sons lived
and worked together, growing corn for the most part, with here and there
a strip of vine or olive. Their few head of cattle were kept at pasture
on the neighbouring common land; their clothes and simple implements of
husbandry they made for themselves at home. Only at rare intervals and
on special occasions would they make their way into the fortified town,
which was the centre at once of their religion and their government.
Here were the temples of the gods, the houses of the wealthy, and the
shops of the artizans and traders, where corn, oil, or wine could be
bartered in small quantities for salt or rough tools and weapons of
iron.”[229]
[Illustration: ROMAN COIN STRUCK TO COMMEMORATE THE VICTORY OVER PYRRHUS
AND HIS ELEPHANTS.]
This community followed the usual tradition of a division into
aristocratic and common citizens, who were called in Rome patricians and
plebeians. These were the citizens; the slave or out-lander had no more
part in the state than he had in Greece. But the constitution differed
from any Greek constitution in the fact that a great part of the ruling
power was gathered into the hands of a body called the Senate, which was
neither purely a body of hereditary members nor directly an elected and
representative one. It was a nominated one, and in the earlier period it
was nominated solely from among the patricians. It existed before the
expulsion of the kings, and in the time of the kings it was the king who
nominated the senators. But after the expulsion of the kings (510 B.C.),
the supreme government was vested in the hands of two elected rulers,
the _consuls_; and it was the consuls who took over the business of
appointing senators. In the early days of the Republic only patricians
were eligible as consuls or senators, and the share of the plebeians in
the government consisted merely in a right to vote for the _consuls_ and
other public officials. Even for that purpose their votes did not have
the same value as those of their patrician fellow citizens. But their
votes had at any rate sufficient weight to induce many of the patrician
candidates to profess a more or less sincere concern for plebeian
grievances. In the early phases of the Roman state, moreover, the
plebeians were not only excluded from public office, but from
intermarriage with the patrician class. The administration was evidently
primarily a patrician affair.
The early phase of Roman affairs was therefore an aristocracy of a very
pronounced type, and the internal history of Rome for the two centuries
and a half between the expulsion of the last Etruscan king, Tarquin the
Proud, and the beginning of the first Punic War (264 B.C.), was very
largely a struggle for mastery between those two orders, the patricians
and the plebeians. It was, in fact, closely parallel with the struggle
of aristocracy and democracy in the city states of Greece, and, as in
the case of Greece, there were whole classes in the community, slaves,
freed slaves, unpropertied free men, outlanders, and the like, who were
entirely outside and beneath the struggle. We have already noted the
essential difference of Greek democracy and what is called democracy in
the world to-day. Another misused word is the Roman term _proletariat_,
which in modern jargon means all the unpropertied people in a modern
state. In Rome the _proletarii_ were a voting division of fully
qualified citizens whose property was less than 10,000 copper asses (=
£275). They were an enrolled class; their value to the state consisted
in their raising families of citizens (proles = offspring), and from
their ranks were drawn the colonists who went to form new Latin cities
or to garrison important points. But the proletarii were quite distinct
in origin from slaves or freedmen or the miscellaneous driftage of a
town slum, and it is a great pity that modern political discussion
should be confused by an inaccurate use of a term which has no exact
modern equivalent and which expresses nothing real in modern social
classification.
The mass of the details of this struggle between patricians and
plebeians we can afford to ignore in this outline. It was a struggle
which showed the Romans to be a people of a curiously shrewd character,
never forcing things to a destructive crisis, but being within the
limits of their discretion grasping hard dealers. The patricians made a
mean use of their political advantages to grow rich through the national
conquests at the expense not only of the defeated enemy, but of the
poorer plebeian, whose farm had been neglected and who had fallen into
debt during his military service. The plebeians were ousted from any
share in the conquered lands, which the patricians divided up among
themselves. The introduction of money[230] probably increased the
facilities of the usurer and the difficulties of the borrowing debtor.
Three sorts of pressure won the plebeians a greater share in the
government of the country and the good things that were coming to Rome
as she grew powerful. The first of these (1) was the general strike of
plebeians; the plebeians seem to have invented the strike, which now
makes its first appearance in history. Twice they actually marched right
out of Rome, threatening to make a new city higher up the Tiber, and
twice this threat proved conclusive. The second method of pressure (2)
was the threat of a tyranny. Just as in Attica (the little state of
which Athens was the capital), Peisistratus raised himself to power on
the support of the poorer districts, so there was to be found in most
periods of plebeian discontent some ambitious man ready to figure as a
leader and wrest power from the senate. For a long time the Roman
patricians were clever enough to beat every such potential tyrant by
giving in to a certain extent to the plebeians. And finally (3) there
were patricians big-minded and far-seeing enough to insist upon the need
of reconciliation with the plebeians.
[Illustration: Mercury
The plebeian god of commerce.
J.F.M.
[From a Roman bronze.]]
Thus in 509 B.C., Valerius Poplicola (3), the consul, enacted that
whenever the life or rights of any citizen were at stake, there should
be an appeal from the magistrates to the general assembly. This Lex
Valeria was “the Habeas Corpus of Rome,” and it freed the Roman
plebeians from the worst dangers of class vindictiveness in the law
courts.
In 494 B.C. occurred the first strike (1). “After the Latin war the
pressure of debt had become excessive, and the plebeians saw with
indignation their friends, who had often served the state bravely in the
legions, thrown into chains and reduced to slavery at the demand of
patrician creditors. War was raging against the Volscians; but the
legionaries, on their victorious return, refused any longer to obey the
consuls, and marched, though without any disorder, to the Sacred Mount
beyond the Anio (up the Tiber). There they prepared to found a new city,
since the rights of citizens were denied to them in the old one. The
patricians were compelled to give way, and the plebeians, returning to
Rome from the “First Secession,” received the privilege of having
officers of their own, tribunes and ædiles.”[231]
In 486 B.C. arose Spurius Cassius (2), a consul who carried an Agrarian
Law securing public land for the plebeians. But the next year he was
accused of aiming at royal power, and condemned to death. His law never
came into operation.
There followed a long struggle on the part of the plebeians to have the
laws of Rome written down, so that they would no longer have to trust to
patrician memories. In 451-450 B.C. the law of the Twelve Tables was
published, the basis of all Roman law.
But in order that the Twelve Tables should be formulated, a committee of
ten (the _decemvirate_) was appointed in the place of the ordinary
magistrates. A second decemvirate, appointed in succession to the first,
attempted a sort of aristocratic counter-revolution under Appius
Claudius. The plebeians withdrew again a second time to the Sacred
Mount, and Appius Claudius committed suicide in prison.
In 440 came a famine, and a second attempt to found a popular tyranny
upon the popular wrongs, by Spurius Mælius, a wealthy plebeian, which
ended in his assassination.
After the sack of Rome by the Gauls (390 B.C.), Marcus Manlius, who had
been in command of the Capitol when the geese had saved it, came forward
as a popular leader. The plebeians were suffering severely from the
after-war usury and profiteering of the patricians, and were incurring
heavy debts in rebuilding and restocking their farms. Manlius spent his
fortune in releasing debtors. He was accused by the patricians of
tyrannous intentions, condemned, and suffered the fate of condemned
traitors in Rome, being flung from the Tarpeian Rock, the precipitous
edge of that same Capitoline Hill he had defended.
In 376 B.C., Licinius, who was one of the ten tribunes for the people,
began a long struggle with the patricians by making certain proposals
called the Licinian Rogations, that there should be a limit to the
amount of public land taken by any single citizen, so leaving some for
everybody, that outstanding debts should be forgiven without interest
upon the repayment of the principal, and that henceforth one at least of
the two consuls should be a plebeian. This precipitated a ten-year
struggle. The plebeian power to stop business by the veto of their
representatives, the tribunes, was fully exercised. In cases of national
extremity it was the custom to set all other magistrates aside and
appoint one leader, the Dictator. Rome had done such a thing during
times of military necessity before, but now the patricians set up a
Dictator in a time of profound peace, with the idea of crushing Licinius
altogether. They appointed Camillus, who had besieged and taken Veii
from the Etruscans. But Camillus was a wiser man than his supporters; he
brought about a compromise between the two orders in which most of the
demands of the plebeians were conceded (366 B.C.), dedicated a temple to
Concord, and resigned his power.
Thereafter the struggle between the orders abated. It abated because,
among other influences, the social differences between patricians and
plebeians were diminishing. Trade was coming to Rome with increasing
political power, and many plebeians were growing rich and many
patricians becoming relatively poor. Inter-marriage had been rendered
possible by a change in the law, and social intermixture was going on.
While the rich plebeians were becoming, if not aristocratic, at least
oligarchic in habits and sympathy, new classes were springing up in Rome
with fresh interests and no political standing. Particularly abundant
were the freedmen, slaves set free, for the most part artisans, but some
of them traders, who were growing wealthy. And the Senate, no longer a
purely patrician body--since various official positions were now open to
plebeians, and such plebeian officials became senators--was becoming now
an assembly of all the wealthy, able, energetic, and influential men in
the state. The Roman power was expanding, and as it expanded these old
class oppositions of the early Latin community were becoming unmeaning.
They were being replaced by new associations and new antagonisms. Rich
men of all origins were being drawn together into a common interest
against the communistic ideas of the poor.
In 390 B.C. Rome was a miserable little city on the borders of Etruria,
being sacked by the Gauls; in 275 B.C. she was ruling and unifying all
Italy, from the Arno to the Straits of Messina. The compromise of
Camillus (367 B.C.) had put an end to internal dissensions, and left her
energies free for expansion. And the same queer combination of sagacity
and aggressive selfishness that had distinguished the war of her orders
at home and enabled her population to worry out a balance of power
without any catastrophe, marks her policy abroad. She understood the
value of allies; she could assimilate; abroad as at home she could in
those days at least “give and take” with a certain fairness and sanity.
There lay the peculiar power of Rome. By that it was she succeeded where
Athens, for example, had conspicuously failed.
The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of
“patriotism” which is the ruin of all nations. “Athens for the
Athenians” was the guiding principle of her rule, and “tax the
foreigner” her substitute for political wisdom.[232] Even Pericles used
the funds of the allies to beautify the capital city. So Athens was
disliked and envied by her own empire; her disasters were not felt and
shared as disasters by her subject-cities. The shrewder, nobler Roman
senators of the great years of Rome, before the first Punic War
overstrained her moral strength and began her degeneration, were not
only willing in the last resort to share their privileges with the mass
of their own people, but eager to incorporate their sturdiest
antagonists upon terms of equality with themselves. They extended their
citizenship cautiously but steadily. Some cities became Roman, with even
a voting share in the government. Others had self-government and the
right to trade or marry in Rome, without full Roman citizenship.
Garrisons of full citizens were set up at strategic points, and colonies
with variable privileges established amidst the purely conquered
peoples. The need to keep communications open in this great and growing
mass of citizenship was evident from the first. Printing and paper were
not yet available for intercourse, but a system of high roads followed
the Latin speech and the Roman rule. The first of these, the Appian Way,
ran from Rome ultimately into the heel of Italy. It was begun by the
censor Appius Claudius (who must not be confused with the decemvir
Appius Claudius of a century earlier) in 312 B.C.
According to a census made in 265 B.C., there were already in the Roman
dominions, that is to say in Italy south of the Arno, 300,000 citizens.
They all had a common interest in the welfare of the state; they were
all touched a little with the diffused kingship of the republic. This
was, we have to note, an absolutely new thing in the history of mankind.
All considerable states and kingdoms and empires hitherto had been
communities by mere obedience to some head, some monarch, upon whose
moods and character the public welfare was helplessly dependent. No
republic had hitherto succeeded in being anything more than a city
state. The so-called Athenian “empire” was simply a city state directing
its allies and its subjugated cities. In a few decades the Roman
republic was destined to extend its citizenship into the valley of the
Po, to assimilate the kindred Gauls, replacing their language by Latin,
and to set up a Latin city, Aquileia, at the very head of the Adriatic
Sea. In 89 B.C. all free inhabitants of Italy became Roman citizens; in
212 A.D. the citizenship was extended to all free men in the
empire.[233]
This extraordinary political growth was manifestly the precursor of all
modern states of the western type. It is as interesting to the political
student, therefore, as a carboniferous amphibian or an _archæopteryx_ to
the student of zoological development. It is the primitive type of the
now dominant order. Its experiences throw light upon all subsequent
political history.
One natural result of this growth of a democracy of hundreds of
thousands of citizens scattered over the greater part of Italy was the
growth in power of the Senate. There had been in the development of the
Roman constitution a variety of forms of the popular assembly, the
plebeian assembly, the assembly by tribes, the assembly by centuries,
and the like, into which variety we cannot enter here with any fullness;
but the idea was established that with the popular assembly lay the
power of initiating laws. It is to be noted that there was a sort of
parallel government in this system. The assembly by tribes or by
centuries was an assembly of the _whole citizen body_, patrician and
plebeian together; the assembly of the plebeians was of course an
assembly only of the plebeian class. Each assembly had its own
officials; the former, the consuls, etc.; the latter, the tribunes.
While Rome was a little state, twenty miles square, it was possible to
assemble something like a representative gathering of the people, but it
will be manifest that with the means of communication existing in Italy
at that time, it was now impossible for the great bulk of the citizens
even to keep themselves informed of what was going on at Rome, much less
to take any effective part in political life there. Aristotle in his
_Politics_ had already pointed out the virtual disenfranchisement of
voters who lived out of the city and were preoccupied with agricultural
pursuits, and this sort of disenfranchisement by mechanical difficulties
applied to the vast majority of Roman citizens. With the growth of Rome
an unanticipated weakness crept into political life through these
causes, and the popular assembly became more and more a gathering of
political hacks and the city riffraff, and less and less a
representation of the ordinary worthy citizens. The popular assembly
came nearest to power and dignity in the fourth century B.C. From that
period it steadily declined in influence, and the new Senate, which was
no longer a patrician body, with a homogeneous and on the whole a noble
tradition, but a body of rich men, ex-magistrates, powerful officials,
bold adventurers, and the like, pervaded by a strong disposition to
return to the idea of hereditary qualification, became for three
centuries the ruling power in the Roman world.
There are two devices since known to the world which might have enabled
the popular government of Rome to go on developing beyond its climax in
the days of Appius Claudius the Censor, at the close of the fourth
century B.C., but neither of them occurred to the Roman mind. The first
of these devices was a proper use of print. In our account of early
Alexandria we have already remarked upon the strange fact that printed
books did not come into the world in the fourth or third century B.C.
This account of Roman affairs forces us to repeat that remark. To the
modern mind it is clear that a widespread popular government demands, as
a necessary condition for health, a steady supply of correct information
upon public affairs to all the citizens and a maintenance of interest.
The popular governments in the modern states that have sprung up on
either side of the Atlantic during the last two centuries have been
possible only through the more or less honest and thorough ventilation
of public affairs through the press. But in Italy the only way in which
the government at Rome could communicate with any body of its citizens
elsewhere was by the antiquated device of sending a herald, and with the
individual citizen it could hold no communication by any means at all.
The second device, for which the English are chiefly responsible in the
history of mankind, which the Romans never used, was the almost equally
obvious one of representative government. For the old Popular Assembly
(in its threefold form) it would have been possible to have substituted
a gathering of delegates. Later on in history, the English did, as the
state grew, realize this necessity. Certain men, the Knights of the
Shire, were called up to Westminster to speak and vote for local
feeling, and were more or less formally elected for that end. The Roman
situation seems to a modern mind to have called aloud for such a
modification. It was never made.[234]
The method of assembling the _comitia tributa_[235] (one of the three
main forms of the Popular Assembly) was by the proclamation of a herald,
who was necessarily inaudible to most of Italy, seventeen days before
the date of the gathering. The augurs, the priests of divination whom
Rome had inherited from the Etruscans, examined the entrails of
sacrificial beasts on the night before the actual assembly, and if they
thought fit to say that these gory portents were unfavourable, the
_comitia tributa_ dispersed. But if the augurs reported that the livers
were propitious, there was a great blowing of horns from the Capitol and
from the walls of the city, and the assembly went on. It was held in the
open air, either in the little Forum beneath the Capitol or in a still
smaller recess opening out of the Forum, or in the military exercising
ground, the Campus Martius, now the most crowded part of modern Rome,
but then an open space. Business began at dawn with prayer. There were
no seats, and this probably helped to reconcile the citizen to the rule
that everything ended at sunset.
After the opening prayer came a discussion of the measures to be
considered by the assembly, and the proposals before the meeting were
read out. Is it not astonishing that there were no printed copies
distributed? If any copies were handed about, they must have been in
manuscript, and each copy must have been liable to errors and deliberate
falsification. No questions seem to have been allowed, but private
individuals might address the gathering with the permission of the
presiding magistrate.
The multitude then proceeded to go into enclosures like cattle-pens
according to their tribes, and each tribe voted upon the measure under
consideration. The decision was then taken not by the majority of the
citizens, but by the majority of tribes, and it was announced by the
heralds.
The Popular Assembly by centuries, _comitia centuriata_, was very
similar in its character, except that instead of thirty-five tribes
there were, in the third century B.C., 373 centuries, and there was a
sacrifice as well as prayer to begin with. The centuries, originally
military (like the “hundreds” of primitive English local government),
had long since lost any connection with the number one hundred. Some
contained only a few people; some very many. There were eighteen
centuries of knights (equites), who were originally men in a position to
maintain a horse and serve in the cavalry, though later the Roman
knighthood, like knighthood in England, became a vulgar distinction of
no military, mental, or moral significance. (These equites became a very
important class as Rome traded and grew rich; for a time they were the
real moving class in the community. There was as little chivalry left
among them at last as there is in the “honours list” knights of England
of to-day. The senators from about 200 B.C. were excluded from trade.
The equites became, therefore, the great business men, _negotiatores_,
and as _publicani_ they farmed the taxes.) There were, in addition,
eighty (!) centuries of wealthy men (worth over 100,000 asses),
twenty-two of men worth over 75,000 asses, and so on. There were two
centuries each of mechanics and musicians, and the _proletarii_ made up
one century. The decision in the _comitia centuriata_ was by the
majority of centuries.
Is it any wonder that with the growth of the Roman state and the
complication of its business, power shifted back from such a Popular
Assembly to the Senate, which was a comparatively compact body varying
between three hundred as a minimum, and, at the utmost, nine hundred
members (to which it was raised by Cæsar), men who had to do with
affairs and big business, who knew each other more or less, and had a
tradition of government and policy? The power of nominating and calling
up the senators vested in the Republic first with the consuls, and when,
some time after, “censors” were created, and many of the powers of the
consuls had been transferred to them, they were also given this power.
Appius Claudius, one of the first of the censors to exercise it,
enrolled freedmen in the tribes and called sons of freedmen to the
Senate. But this was a shocking arrangement to the conservative
instincts of the time; the consuls would not recognize his Senate, and
the next censors (304 B.C.) set aside his invitations. His attempt,
however, serves to show how far the Senate had progressed from its
original condition as a purely patrician body. Like the contemporary
British House of Lords, it had become a gathering of big business men,
energetic politicians, successful adventurers, great landowners, and the
like; its patrician dignity was a picturesque sham; but, unlike the
British House of Lords, it was unchecked legally by anything but the
inefficient Popular Assembly we have already described, and by the
tribunes elected by the plebeian assembly. Its legal control over the
consuls and proconsuls was not great; it had little executive power; but
in its prestige and experience lay its strength and influence. The
interests of its members were naturally antagonistic to the interests of
the general body of citizens, but for some generations that great mass
of ordinary men was impotent to express its dissent from the proceedings
of this oligarchy. Direct popular government of a state larger than a
city state had already failed therefore in Italy, because as yet there
was no public education, no press, and no representative system; it had
failed through these mere mechanical difficulties, before the first
Punic War. But its appearance is of enormous interest, as the first
appearance of a set of problems with which the whole political
intelligence of the world wrestles at the present time.
The Senate met usually in a Senate House in the Forum, but on special
occasions it would be called to meet in this or that temple; and when it
had to deal with foreign ambassadors or its own generals (who were not
allowed to enter the city while in command of the troops), it assembled
in the Campus Martius outside the walls.
§ 3
It has been necessary to deal rather fully with the political structure
of the Roman republic because of its immense importance to this day.
The constitution of Carthage[236] need not detain us long.
Italy under Rome was a republican country; Carthage was that much older
thing, a republican city. She had an “empire,” as Athens had an
“empire,” of tributary states which did not love her, and she had a
great and naturally disloyal industrial slave population.
In the city there were two elected “kings,” as Aristotle calls them, the
_suffetes_, who were really equivalent to the Roman censors; their
Semitic name was the same as that used for the Jewish _judges_. There
was an impotent public assembly and a senate of leading personages; but
two committees of this senate, nominally elected, but elected by easily
controlled methods, the Hundred and Four and the Thirty, really
constituted a close oligarchy of the richest and most influential men.
They told as little as they could to their allies and fellow citizens,
and consulted them as little as possible. They pursued schemes in which
the welfare of Carthage was no doubt subordinated to the advantage of
their own group. They were hostile to new men or novel measures, and
confident that a sea ascendancy that had lasted two centuries must be in
the very nature of things.
§ 4
It would be interesting, and not altogether idle, to speculate what
might have happened to mankind if Rome and Carthage could have settled
their differences and made a permanent alliance in the Western world. If
Alexander the Great had lived, he might have come westward and driven
these two powers into such a fusion of interests. But that would not
have suited the private schemes and splendours of the Carthaginian
oligarchy, and the new Senate of greater Rome was now growing fond of
the taste of plunder and casting covetous eyes across the Straits of
Messina upon the Carthaginian possessions in Sicily. They were covetous,
but they were afraid of the Carthaginian sea-power. Roman popular
“patriotism,” however, was also jealous and fearful of these
Carthaginians, and less inclined to count the cost of a conflict. The
alliance Pyrrhus had forced upon Rome and Carthage held good for eleven
years, but Rome was ripe for what is called in modern political jargon
an “offensive defensive” war. The occasion arose in 264 B.C.
At that time Sicily was not completely in Carthaginian hands. The
eastward end was still under the power of the Greek king of Syracuse,
Hiero, a successor of that Dionysius to whom Plato had gone as resident
court philosopher. A band of mercenaries who had been in the service of
Syracuse seized upon Messina (289 B.C.), and raided the trade of
Syracuse so that at last Hiero was forced to take measures to suppress
them (270 B.C.). Thereupon Carthage, which was also vitally concerned in
the suppression of piracy, came to his aid, and put in a Carthaginian
garrison at Messina. This was an altogether justifiable proceeding. Now
that Tyre had been destroyed, the only capable guardian of sea law in
the Mediterranean was Carthage, and the suppression of piracy was her
task by habit and tradition.
[Illustration: Carthaginian coins.]
The pirates of Messina appealed to Rome, and the accumulating jealousy
and fear of Carthage decided the Roman people to help them. An
expedition was dispatched to Messina under the consul Appius Claudius
(the third Appius Claudius we have had to mention in this history).
So began the first of the most wasteful and disastrous series of wars
that has ever darkened the history of mankind. But this is how one
historian, soaked with the fantastic political ideas of our times, is
pleased to write of this evil expedition. “The Romans knew they were
entering on war with Carthage; but the political instincts of the people
were right, for a Carthaginian garrison on the Sicilian Straits would
have been a dangerous menace to the peace of Italy.” So they protected
the peace of Italy from this “menace” by a war that lasted nearly a
quarter of a century. They wrecked their own slowly acquired political
_moral_ in the process.
The Romans captured Messina, and Hiero deserted from the Carthaginians
to the Romans. Then for some time the struggle centred upon the town
Agrigentum. This the Romans besieged, and a period of trench warfare
ensued. Both sides suffered greatly from plague and irregular supplies;
the Romans lost 30,000 men; but in the end (261 B.C.) the Carthaginians
evacuated the place and retired to their fortified towns on the western
coast of the island of which Lilybæum was the chief. These they could
supply easily from the African mainland, and, as long as their sea
ascendancy held, they could exhaust any Roman effort against them.
And now a new and very extraordinary phase of the war began. The Romans
came out upon the sea, and to the astonishment of the Carthaginians and
themselves defeated the Carthaginian fleet. Since the days of Salamis
there had been a considerable development of naval architecture. Then
the ruling type of battleship was a trireme, a galley with three banks
(rows) of oars; now the leading Carthaginian battleship was a
quinquereme, a much bigger galley with five banks of oars, which could
ram or shear the oars of any feebler vessel. The Romans had come into
the war with no such shipping. Now they set to work to build
quinqueremes, being helped, it is said, in their designing by one of
these Carthaginian vessels coming ashore. In two months they built a
hundred quinqueremes and thirty triremes. But they had no skilled
navigators, no experienced oarsmen, and these deficiencies they remedied
partly with the assistance of their Greek allies and partly by the
invention of new tactics. Instead of relying upon ramming or breaking
the oars of the adversary, which demanded more seamanship than they
possessed, they decided to board the enemy, and they constructed a sort
of long drawbridge on their ships, held up to a mast by a pulley and
with grappling-hooks and spikes at the end. They also loaded their
galleys with soldiers. Then as the Carthaginian rammed or swept
alongside, this _corvus_, as it was called, could be let down and the
boarders could swarm aboard him.
Simple as this device was, it proved a complete success. It changed the
course of the war and the fate of the world. The small amount of
invention needed to counteract the _corvus_ was not apparently within
the compass of the Carthaginian rulers. At the battle of Mylæ (260 B.C.)
the Romans gained their first naval victory and captured or destroyed
fifty vessels. At the great battle of Ecnomus (256 B.C.), “probably the
greatest naval engagement of antiquity,”[237] in which seven or eight
hundred big ships were engaged, the Carthaginians showed that they had
learnt nothing from their former disaster. According to rule they
out-manœuvred and defeated the Romans, but the _corvus_ again
defeated them. The Romans sank thirty vessels and captured sixty-four.
Thereafter the war continued with violent fluctuations of fortune, but
with a continuous demonstration of the greater energy, solidarity, and
initiative of the Romans. After Ecnomus the Romans invaded Africa by
sea, and sent an insufficiently supported army, which after many
successes and the capture of Tunis (within ten miles of Carthage) was
completely defeated. They lost their sea ascendancy through a storm, and
regained it by building a second fleet of two hundred and twenty ships
within three months. They captured Palermo, and defeated a great
Carthaginian army there (251 B.C.), capturing one hundred and four
elephants, and making such a triumphal procession into Rome as that city
had never seen before. They made an unsuccessful siege of Lilybæum, the
chief surviving Carthaginian stronghold in Sicily. They lost their
second fleet in a great naval battle at Drepanum (249 B.C.), losing one
hundred and eighty out of two hundred and ten vessels; and a third fleet
of one hundred and twenty battleships and eight hundred transports was
lost in the same year partly in battle and partly in a storm.
For seven years a sort of war went on between the nearly exhausted
combatants, a war of raids and feeble sieges, during which the
Carthaginians had the best of it at sea. Then by a last supreme effort
Rome launched a fourth fleet of two hundred keels, and defeated the
last strength of the Carthaginians at the battle of the Ægatian Isles
(241 B.C.), after which Carthage (240 B.C.) sued for peace.
By the terms of this peace, all Sicily, except for the dominions of
Hiero of Syracuse, became an “estate” of the Roman people. There was no
such process of assimilation as had been practised in Italy; Sicily
became a conquered province, paying tribute and yielding profit like the
provinces of the older empires. And, in addition, Carthage paid a war
indemnity of 3200 talents (£788,000).
§ 5
[Illustration: Roman As (bronze, 4th Cent. B.C. Half size.)]
For twenty-two years there was peace between Rome and Carthage. It was
peace without prosperity. Both combatants were suffering from the want
and disorganization that follow naturally and necessarily upon all great
wars. The territories of Carthage seethed with violent disorder; the
returning soldiers could not get their pay, and mutinied and looted; the
land went uncultivated. We read of horrible cruelties in the suppression
of these troubles by Hamilcar, the Carthaginian general; of men being
crucified by the thousand. Sardinia and Corsica revolted. The “peace of
Italy” was scarcely happier. The Gauls rose and marched south; they were
defeated, and 40,000 of them killed at Telamon. It is manifest that
Italy was incomplete until it reached the Alps. Roman colonies were
planted in the valley of the Po, and the great northward artery, the Via
Flaminia, was begun. But it shows the moral and intellectual degradation
of this post-war period that when the Gauls were threatening Rome, human
sacrifices were proposed and carried out. The old Carthaginian sea law
was broken up--it may have been selfish and monopolistic, but it was at
least orderly--the Adriatic swarmed with Illyrian pirates, and as the
result of a quarrel arising out of this state of affairs, Illyria, after
two wars, had to be annexed as a second “province.” By sending
expeditions to annex Sardinia and Corsica, which were Carthaginian
provinces in revolt, the Romans prepared the way for the Second Punic
War.
The First Punic War had tested and demonstrated the relative strength of
Rome and Carthage. With a little more wisdom on either side, with a
little more magnanimity on the part of Rome, there need never have been
a renewal of the struggle. But Rome was an ungracious conqueror. She
seized Corsica and Sardinia on no just grounds, she increased the
indemnity by 1200 talents, she set a limit, the Ebro, to Carthaginian
developments in Spain. There was a strong party in Carthage, led by
Hanno, for the propitiation of Rome; but it was natural that many
Carthaginians should come to regard their national adversary with a
despairing hatred.
So began that age-long hostility between the lands north and south of
the Mediterranean which lasts down to our own day, the conflict of the
Semiticized Berber and the Aryanized south European, in spite of the
fact that these two divisions of Mediterranean man have so much
physically in common. Henceforth they took different sides in religion,
in language, in costume, and culture.
Hatred is one of the passions that can master a life, and there is a
type of temperament very prone to it, ready to see life in terms of
vindictive melodrama, ready to find stimulus and satisfaction in
frightful demonstrations of “justice” and revenge. The fears and
jealousies of the squatting-place and the cave still bear their dark
blossoms in our lives; we are not four hundred generations yet from the
old Stone Age. Great wars, as all Europe knows, give this “hating”
temperament the utmost scope, and the greed and pride and cruelty that
the First Punic War had released were now producing a rich crop of
anti-foreign monomania. The outstanding figure upon the side of Carthage
was a great general and administrator, Hamilcar Barca, who now set
himself to circumvent and shatter Rome. He was the father-in-law of
Hasdrubal and the father of a boy Hannibal, destined to be the most
dreaded enemy that ever scared the Roman Senate. The most obvious
course before Carthage was the reconstruction of its fleet and naval
administration, and the recovery of sea power, but this, it would seem,
Hamilcar could not effect. As an alternative he resolved to organize
Spain as the base of a land attack upon Italy. He went to Spain as
governor in 236 B.C., and Hannibal related afterwards that his father
then--he was a boy of eleven--made him vow deathless hostility to the
Roman power.
This quasi-insane concentration of the gifts and lives of the Barca
family upon revenge is but one instance of the narrowing and
embitterment of life that the stresses and universal sense of insecurity
of this great struggle produced in the minds of men. A quarter of a
century of war had left the whole western world miserable and harsh.
While the eleven-year-old Hannibal was taking his vow of undying hatred,
there was running about a farmhouse of Tusculum a small but probably
very disagreeable child of two named Marcus Porcius Cato. This boy lived
to be eighty-five years old, and his ruling passion seems to have been
hatred for any human happiness but his own. He was a good soldier, and
had a successful political career. He held a command in Spain, and
distinguished himself by his cruelties. He posed as a champion of
religion and public morality, and under this convenient cloak carried on
a lifelong war against everything that was young, gracious, or pleasant.
Whoever roused his jealousy incurred his moral disapproval. He was
energetic in the support and administration of all laws against dress,
against the personal adornment of women, against entertainments and free
discussion. He was so fortunate as to be made censor, which gave him
great power over the private lives of public people. He was thus able to
ruin public opponents through private scandals. He expelled Manlius from
the Senate for giving his wife a kiss in the daytime in the sight of
their daughter. He persecuted Greek literature, about which, until late
in life, he was totally ignorant. Then he read and admired Demosthenes.
He wrote in Latin upon agriculture and the ancient and lost virtues of
Rome. From these writings much light is thrown upon his qualities. One
of his maxims was that when a slave was not sleeping he should be
working. Another was that old oxen and slaves should be sold off. He
left the war horse that had carried him through his Spanish campaigns
behind him when he returned to Italy in order to save freight. He hated
other people’s gardens, and cut off the supply of water for garden use
in Rome. After entertaining company, when dinner was over he would go
out to correct any negligence in the service with a leather thong. He
admired his own virtues very greatly, and insisted upon them in his
writings. There was a battle at Thermopylæ against Antiochus the Great,
of which he wrote, “those who saw him charging the enemy, routing and
pursuing them, declared that Cato owed less to the people of Rome, than
the people of Rome owed to Cato.”[238] In his old age Cato became
lascivious and misconducted himself with a woman slave. Finally, when
his son protested against this disorder of their joint household, he
married a young wife, the daughter of his secretary, who was not in a
position to refuse his offer. (What became of the woman slave is not
told. Probably he sold her.) This compendium of all the old Roman
virtues died at an advanced age, respected and feared. Almost his last
public act was to urge on the Third Punic War and the final destruction
of Carthage. He had gone to Carthage as a commissioner to settle certain
differences between Carthage and Numidia, and he had been shocked and
horrified to find some evidences of prosperity and even of happiness in
that country.
From the time of that visit onward Cato concluded every speech he made
in the Senate by croaking out “_Delenda est Carthago_” (“Carthage must
be destroyed”).
Such was the type of man that rose to prominence in Rome during the
Punic struggle, such was the protagonist of Hannibal and the
Carthaginian _revanche_, and by him and by Hannibal we may judge the
tone and quality of the age.
The two great western powers, and Rome perhaps more than Carthage, were
strained mentally and morally by the stresses of the First War. The evil
side of life was uppermost. The history of the Second and Third Punic
Wars (219 to 201 and 149 to 146 B.C.), it is plain, is not the history
of perfectly sane peoples. It is nonsense for historians to write of the
“political instincts” of the Romans or Carthaginians. Quite other
instincts were loose. The red eyes of the ancestral ape had come back
into the world. It was a time when reasonable men were howled down or
murdered; the true spirit of the age is shown in the eager examination
for signs and portents of the still quivering livers of those human
victims who were sacrificed in Rome during the panic before the battle
of Telamon. The western world was indeed black with homicidal monomania.
Two great peoples, both very necessary to the world’s development, fell
foul of one another, and at last Rome succeeded in murdering Carthage.
§ 6
We can only tell very briefly here of the particulars of the Second and
Third Punic Wars. We have told how Hamilcar began to organize Spain, and
how the Romans forbade him to cross the Ebro. He died in 228 B.C., and
was followed by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who was assassinated in 221
B.C., and succeeded by Hannibal, who was now twenty-six. The actual war
was precipitated by the Romans making a breach of their own regulations,
and interfering with affairs south of the Ebro. Whereupon Hannibal
marched straight through the south of Gaul, and crossed the Alps (218
B.C.) into Italy.
The history of the next fifteen years is the story of the most brilliant
and futile raid in history. For fifteen years Hannibal held out in
Italy, victorious and unconquered. The Roman generals were no match for
the Carthaginian, and whenever they met him they were beaten. But one
Roman general, P. Cornelius Scipio, had the strategic sense to take a
course that robbed all Hannibal’s victories of fruit. At the outbreak of
the war he had been sent by sea to Marseilles to intercept Hannibal; he
arrived three days late, and, instead of pursuing him, he sent on his
army into Spain to cut up Hannibal’s supplies and reinforcements.
Throughout all the subsequent war there remained this Roman army of
Spain between Hannibal and his base. He was left “in the air,” incapable
of conducting sieges or establishing conquests.
Whenever he met the Romans in open fight he beat them. He gained two
great victories in North Italy, and won over the Gauls to his side. He
pressed south into Etruria, and ambushed, surrounded, and completely
destroyed a Roman army at Lake Trasimene. In 216 B.C. he was assailed by
a vastly superior Roman force under Varro at Cannæ, and destroyed it
utterly. Fifty thousand men are said to have been killed and ten
thousand prisoners taken. He was, however, unable to push on and capture
Rome because he had no siege equipment.
But Cannæ produced other fruits. A large part of Southern Italy came
over to Hannibal, including Capua, the city next in size to Rome, and
the Macedonians allied themselves with him. Moreover, Hiero of Syracuse,
the faithful ally of Rome, was now dead, and his successor Hieronymus
turned over to the Carthaginians. The Romans carried on the war,
however, with great toughness and resolution; they refused to treat with
Hannibal after Cannæ, they pressed a slow but finally successful
blockade and a siege of Capua, and a Roman army set itself to reduce
Syracuse. The siege of Syracuse is chiefly memorable for the brilliant
inventions of the philosopher Archimedes, which long held the Romans at
bay. We have already named this Archimedes as one of the pupils and
correspondents of the school of the Alexandrian Museum. He was killed in
the final storm of the town. Tarentum (209 B.C.), Hannibal’s chief port
and means of supply from Carthage, at last followed Syracuse (212 B.C.)
and Capua (211 B.C.), and his communications became irregular.
Spain also was wrested bit by bit from the Carthaginian grip. When at
last reinforcements for Hannibal under his brother Hasdrubal (not to be
confused with his brother-in-law of the same name who was assassinated)
struggled through into Italy, they were destroyed at the battle of the
Metaurus (207 B.C.), and the first news that came to Hannibal of the
disaster was the hacked-off head of his brother thrown into his camp.
Thereafter Hannibal was blockaded into Calabria, the heel of Italy. He
had no forces for further operations of any magnitude, and he returned
at last to Carthage in time to command the Carthaginians in the last
battle of the war.
This last battle, the battle of Zama (202 B.C.), was fought close to
Carthage.
It was the first defeat Hannibal experienced, and so it is well to give
a little attention to the personality of his conqueror, Scipio Africanus
the Elder, who stands out in history as a very fine gentleman indeed, a
great soldier and a generous man. We have already mentioned a certain P.
Cornelius Scipio who struck at Hannibal’s base in Spain; this was his
son; until after Zama this son bore the same name of P. Cornelius
Scipio, and then the surname of Africanus was given him. (The younger
Scipio Africanus, Scipio Africanus Minor, who was later to end the Third
Punic War, was the adopted son of this first Scipio Africanus the
Elder.) Scipio Africanus was everything that aroused the distrust,
hatred, and opposition of old-fashioned Romans of the school of Cato. He
was young, he was happy and able, he spent money freely, he was well
versed in Greek literature, and inclined rather to Phrygian novelties in
religion than to the sterner divinities of Rome. And he did not believe
in the extreme discretion that then ruled Roman strategy.
After the early defeats of the Second Punic War, Roman military
operations were dominated by the personality of a general, Fabius, who
raised the necessity of avoiding battle with Hannibal into a kind of
sacred principle. For ten years “Fabian tactics” prevailed in Italy. The
Romans blockaded, cut up convoys, attacked stragglers, and ran away
whenever Hannibal appeared. No doubt it was wise for a time after their
first defeats to do this sort of thing, but the business of the stronger
power, and Rome was the stronger power throughout the Second Punic War,
is not to tolerate an interminable war, but to repair losses, discover
able generals, train better armies, and destroy the enemy power.
Decision is one of the duties of strength.
To such men as young Scipio, the sly, ineffective artfulness of
Fabianism, which was causing both Italy and Carthage to bleed slowly to
death, was detestable. He clamoured for an attack upon Carthage itself.
“But Fabius, on this occasion, filled the city with alarms, as if the
commonwealth was going to be brought into the most extreme danger by a
rash and indiscreet young man; in short, he scrupled not to do or say
anything he thought likely to dissuade his countrymen from embracing the
proposal. With the Senate he carried his point. But the people believed
that his opposition to Scipio proceeded either from envy of his success,
or from a secret fear that if this young hero should perform some signal
exploit, put an end to the war, or even remove it out of Italy, his own
slow proceedings through the course of so many years might be imputed to
indolence or timidity.... He applied to Crassus, the colleague of
Scipio, and endeavoured to persuade him not to yield that province to
Scipio, but, if he thought it proper to conduct the war in that manner,
to go himself against Carthage. Nay, he even hindered the raising of
money for that expedition, so that Scipio was obliged to find the
supplies as he could.... He endeavoured to prevent the young men who
offered to go as volunteers from giving in their names, and loudly
declared, both in the Senate and Forum, ‘That Scipio did not only
himself avoid Hannibal, but intended to carry away with him the
remaining strength of Italy, persuading the young men to abandon their
parents, their wives, and native city, while an unsubdued and potent
enemy was still at their doors.’ With these assertions he so terrified
the people, that they allowed Scipio to take with him only the legions
that were in Sicily, and three hundred of those men who had served him
with so much fidelity in Spain.... After Scipio was gone over into
Africa, an account was soon brought to Rome of his glorious and
wonderful achievements. This account was followed by rich spoils, which
confirmed it. A Numidian king was taken prisoner; two camps were burned
and destroyed; and in them a vast number of men, arms, and horses; and
the Carthaginians sent orders to Hannibal to quit his fruitless hopes in
Italy, and return home to defend his own country. Whilst every tongue
was applauding these exploits of Scipio, Fabius proposed that his
successor should be appointed, without any shadow of reason for it,
except what this well-known maxim implies: viz., ‘That it is dangerous
to trust affairs of such importance to the fortune of one man, because
it is not likely that he will be always successful.’ ... Nay, even when
Hannibal embarked his army and quitted Italy, Fabius ceased not to
disturb the general joy and to damp the spirits of Rome, for he took the
liberty to affirm, ‘That the commonwealth was now come to her last and
worst trial; that she had the most reason to dread the efforts of
Hannibal when he should arrive in Africa, and attack her sons under the
walls of Carthage; that Scipio would have to do with an army yet warm
with the blood of so many Roman generals, dictators, and consuls.’ The
city was alarmed with these declamations, and though the war was removed
into Africa, the danger seemed to approach nearer Rome than ever.”
Before the battle of Zama there were a brief truce and negotiations,
which broke down through the fault of the Carthaginians. As with the
battle of Arbela, so the exact day of the battle of Zama can be fixed by
an eclipse, which in this case occurred during the fighting. The Romans
had been joined by the Numidians, the hinterland people of Carthage,
under their king Massinissa, and this gave them--for the first time in
any battle against Hannibal--a great superiority of cavalry. Hannibal’s
cavalry wings were driven off, while at the same time the sounder
discipline of Scipio’s infantry enabled them to open lanes for the
charge of the Carthaginian war elephants without being thrown into
confusion. Hannibal attempted to extend his infantry line to envelop the
Roman infantry mass, but while at Cannæ all the advantage of training
and therefore of manœuvring power had been on his side, and he had
been able to surround and massacre a crowd of infantry, he now found
against him an infantry line better than his own. His own line broke as
it extended, the Roman legion charged home, and the day was lost. The
Roman cavalry came back from the pursuit of Hannibal’s horse to turn
what was already a defeat into a disastrous rout.
Carthage submitted without any further struggle. The terms were severe,
but they left it possible for her to hope for an honourable future. She
had to abandon Spain to Rome, to give up all her war fleet except ten
vessels, to pay 10,000 talents (£2,400,000), and, what was the most
difficult condition of all, to agree not to wage war without the
permission of Rome. Finally a condition was added that Hannibal, as the
great enemy of Rome, should be surrendered. But he saved his countrymen
from this humiliation by flying to Asia.
These were exorbitant conditions, with which Rome should have been
content. But there are nations so cowardly that they dare not merely
conquer their enemies; they must _mak siccar_ and destroy them. The
generation of Romans that saw greatness and virtue in a man like Cato
the Censor, necessarily made their country a mean ally and a cowardly
victor.
§ 7
The history of Rome for the fifty-six years that elapsed between the
battle of Zama and the last act of the tragedy, the Third Punic War,
tells of a hard ungracious expansion of power abroad and of a slow
destruction, by the usury and greed of the rich, of the free
agricultural population at home.
The spirit of the nation had become harsh and base; there was no further
extension of citizenship, no more generous attempts at the assimilation
of congenial foreign populations. Spain was administered badly, and
settled slowly and with great difficulty. Complicated interventions led
to the reduction of Illyria and Macedonia to the position of
tribute-paying provinces; Rome, it was evident, was going to “tax the
foreigner” now and release her home population from taxation. After 168
B.C. the old land tax was no longer levied in Italy, and the only
revenue derived from Italy was from the state domains and through a tax
on imports from overseas. The revenues from the province of “Asia”
defrayed the expenses of the Roman state.[239] At home men of the Cato
type were acquiring farms by loans and foreclosure, often the farms of
men impoverished by war service; they were driving the free citizens off
their land, and running their farms with the pitilessly driven slave
labour that was made cheap and abundant. Such men regarded alien
populations abroad merely as unimported slaves. Sicily was handed over
to the greedy enterprise of tax-farmers. Corn could be grown there by
rich men using slaves, and imported very profitably into Rome, and so
the home land could be turned over to cattle and sheep feeding.
Consequently a drift of the uprooted Italian population to the towns,
and particularly to Rome, began.
Of the first conflicts of the spreading power of Rome with the
Seleucids, and how she formed an alliance with Egypt, we can tell little
here, nor of the tortuous fluctuations of the Greek cities under the
shadow of her advance until they fell into actual subjugation. A map
must suffice to show the extension of her empire at this time.
[Illustration: The EXTENT of the ROMAN POWER & its ALLIANCES about 150
B.C.]
The general grim baseness of the age was not without its protesting
voices. We have already told how the wasting disease of the Second Punic
War, a disease of the state which was producing avaricious rich men
exactly as diseases of the body will sometimes produce great pustules,
was ended by the vigour of Scipio Africanus. When it had seemed doubtful
whether the Senate would let him go as the Roman general, he had
threatened an appeal to the people. Thereafter he was a marked man for
the senatorial gang, who were steadily changing Italy from a land of
free cultivators to a land of slave-worked cattle ranches; they
attempted to ruin him before ever he reached Africa; they gave him
forces insufficient, as they hoped, for victory; and after the war they
barred him strictly from office. Interest and his natural malice alike
prompted Cato to attack him.
Scipio Africanus the Elder seems to have been of a generous and
impatient temperament, and indisposed to exploit the popular discontent
with current tendencies and his own very great popularity to his own
advantage. He went as subordinate to his brother Lucius Scipio, when the
latter commanded the first Roman army to pass into Asia. At Magnesia in
Lydia a great composite army under Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch,
suffered the fate (190 B.C.) of the very similar Persian armies of a
hundred and forty years before. This victory drew down upon Lucius
Scipio the hostility of the Senate, and he was accused of
misappropriating moneys received from Antiochus. This filled Africanus
with honest rage. As Lucius stood up in the Senate with his accounts in
his hands ready for the badgering of his accusers, Africanus snatched
the documents from him, tore them up, and flung the fragments down. His
brother, he said, had paid into the treasury 200,000 sestertia (=
£2,000,000). Was he now to be pestered and tripped up upon this or that
item? When, later on, Lucius was prosecuted and condemned, Africanus
rescued him by force. Being impeached, he reminded the people that the
day was the anniversary of the battle of Zama, and defied the
authorities amidst the plaudits of the crowd.
The Roman people seem to have liked and supported Scipio Africanus, and,
after an interval of two thousand years, men must like him still. He was
able to throw torn paper in the face of the Senate, and when Lucius was
attacked again, one of the tribunes of the people interposed his veto
and quashed the proceedings. But Scipio Africanus lacked that harder
alloy which makes men great democratic leaders. He was no Cæsar. He had
none of the qualities that subdue a man to the base necessities of
political life. After these events he retired in disgust from Rome to
his estates, and there he died in the year 183 B.C.
In the same year died Hannibal. He poisoned himself in despair. The
steadfast fear of the Roman Senate had hunted him from court to court.
In spite of the indignant protests of Scipio, Rome in the peace
negotiations had demanded his surrender from Carthage, and she continued
to make this demand of every power that sheltered him. When peace was
made with Antiochus III, this was one of the conditions. He was run to
earth at last in Bithynia; the king of Bithynia detained him in order to
send him to Rome, but he had long carried the poison he needed in a
ring, and by this he died.
It adds to the honour of the name of Scipio that it was another Scipio,
Scipio Nasica, who parodied Cato’s Delenda est Carthago by ending all
his speeches in the Senate with “Carthage must stand.” He had the wisdom
to see that the existence and stimulus of Carthage contributed to the
general prosperity of Rome.[240]
Yet it was the second Scipio Africanus, the adopted grandson of Scipio
Africanus the Elder, who took and destroyed Carthage.[241] The sole
offence of the Carthaginians, which brought about the third and last
Punic War, was that they continued to trade and prosper. Their trade was
not a trade that competed with that of Rome; when Carthage was
destroyed, much of her trade died with her, and North Africa entered
upon a phase of economic retrogression; but her prosperity aroused that
passion of envy which was evidently more powerful even than avarice in
the “old Roman” type. The rich Equestrian order resented any wealth in
the world but its own. Rome provoked the war by encouraging the
Numidians to encroach upon Carthage until the Carthaginians were goaded
to fight in despair. Rome then pounced upon Carthage, and declared she
had broken the treaty! She had made war without permission.
The Carthaginians sent the hostages Rome demanded, they surrendered
their arms, they prepared to surrender territory. But submission only
increased the arrogance of Rome and the pitiless greed of the rich
Equestrian order which swayed her counsels. She now demanded that
Carthage should be abandoned, and the population remove to a spot at
least ten miles from the sea. This demand they made to a population that
subsisted almost entirely by overseas trade!
This preposterous order roused the Carthaginians to despair. They
recalled their exiles and prepared for resistance. The military
efficiency of the Romans had been steadily declining through a
half-century of narrow-minded and base-spirited government, and the
first attacks upon the town in 149 B.C. almost ended in disaster. Young
Scipio, during these operations, distinguished himself in a minor
capacity. The next year was also a year of failure for the incompetents
of the Senate. That august body then passed from a bullying mood to one
of extreme panic. The Roman populace was even more seriously scared.
Young Scipio, chiefly on account of his name, although he was under the
proper age, and in other respects not qualified for the office, was made
consul, and bundled off to Africa to save his precious country.
There followed the most obstinate and dreadful of sieges. Scipio built a
mole across the harbour, and cut off all supplies by land or sea. The
Carthaginians suffered horribly from famine; but they held out until the
town was stormed. The street fighting lasted for six days, and when at
last the citadel capitulated, there were fifty thousand Carthaginians
left alive out of an estimated population of half a million. These
survivors went into slavery, the whole city was burnt, the ruins were
ploughed to express final destruction, and a curse was invoked with
great solemnities upon anyone who might attempt to rebuild it.
In the same year (146 B.C.) the Roman Senate and Equestrians also
_murdered_ another great city that seemed to limit their trade
monopolies, Corinth. They had a justification, for Corinth had been in
arms against them, but it was an inadequate justification.
§ 8
We must note here, in a brief section, a change in the military system
of Rome, after the Second Punic War, that was of enormous importance in
her later development. Up to that period the Roman armies had been
levies of free citizens. Fighting power and voting power were closely
connected; the public assembly by centuries followed the paraphernalia
of a military mobilization, and marched, headed by the Equestrian
centuries, to the Campus Martius. The system was very like that of the
Boers before the last war in South Africa. The ordinary Roman citizen,
like the ordinary Boer, was a farmer; at the summons of his country he
went “on commando.” The Boers were, indeed, in many respects, the last
survivors of Aryanism. They fought extraordinarily well, but at the back
of their minds was an anxious desire to go back to their farms. For
prolonged operations, such as the siege of Veii, the Romans reinforced
and relieved their troops in relays; the Boers did much the same at the
siege of Ladysmith.
The necessity for subjugating Spain after the Second Punic War involved
a need for armies of a different type. Spain was too far off for
periodic reliefs, and the war demanded a more thorough training than was
possible with these on and off soldiers. Accordingly men were enlisted
for longer terms and _paid_. So the paid soldier first appeared in Roman
affairs. And to pay was added booty. Cato distributed silver treasure
among his command in Spain; and it is also on record that he attacked
Scipio Africanus for distributing booty among his troops in Sicily. The
introduction of military pay led on to a professional army, and this, a
century later, to the disarmament of the ordinary Roman citizen, who was
now drifting in an impoverished state into Rome and the larger towns.
The great wars had been won, the foundations of the empire had been well
and truly laid by the embattled farmers of Rome before 200 B.C. In the
process the embattled farmers of Rome had already largely disappeared.
The change that began after the Second Punic War was completed towards
the close of the century in the reorganization of the army by Marius, as
we will tell in its place. After his time we shall begin to write of
“the army,” and then of “the legions,” and we shall find we are dealing
with a new kind of army altogether, no longer held together in the
solidarity of a common citizenship. As that tie fails, the legions
discover another in _esprit de corps_, in their common difference from
and their common interest against the general community. They begin to
develop a warmer interest in their personal leaders, who secure them pay
and plunder. Before the Punic Wars it was the tendency of ambitious men
in Rome to court the plebeians; after that time they began to court the
legions.
§ 9
The history of the Roman Republic thus far, is in many respects much
more modern in flavour, especially to the American or Western European
reader, than anything that has preceded it. For the first time we have
something like a self-governing “nation,” something larger than a mere
city state, seeking to control its own destinies. For the first time we
have a wide countryside under one conception of law. We get in the
Senate and the popular assembly a conflict of groups and personalities,
an argumentative process of control, far more stable and enduring than
any autocracy can be, and far more flexible and adaptable than any
priesthood. For the first time also we encounter social conflicts
comparable to our own. Money has superseded barter, and financial
capital has become fluid and free; not perhaps so fluid and free as it
is to-day, but much more so than it had ever been before. The Punic Wars
were wars of peoples, such as were no other wars we have yet recorded.
Indubitably the broad lines of our present world, the main ideas, the
chief oppositions, were appearing in those days.
But, as we have already pointed out, certain of the elementary
facilities and some of the current political ideas of our time were
still wanting in the Rome of the Punic Wars. There were no
newspapers,[242] and there was practically no use of elected
representatives in the popular assemblies. And another deficiency, very
understandable to us nowadays, but quite beyond the scope of anyone
then, was the absence of any general elementary political education at
all. The plebeians of Rome had shown some glimmering of the idea that
without knowledge votes cannot make men free, when they had insisted
upon the publication of the law of the Twelve Tables; but they had never
been able, it was beyond the possibilities of the time, to imagine any
further extension of knowledge to the bulk of the people. It is only
nowadays that men are beginning to understand fully the political
significance of the maxim that “knowledge is power.” Two British Trade
Unions, for example, have recently set up a Labour College to meet the
special needs of able working-men in history, political and social
science, and the like. But education in republican Rome was the freak of
the individual parent, and the privilege of wealth and leisure. It was
mainly in the hands of Greeks, who were in many cases slaves. There was
a thin small stream of very fine learning and very fine thinking up to
the first century of the monarchy, let Lucretius and Cicero witness, but
it did not spread into the mass of the people. The ordinary Roman was
not only blankly ignorant of the history of mankind, but also of the
conditions of foreign peoples; he had no knowledge of economic laws nor
of social possibilities. Even his own interests he did not clearly
understand.
Of course, in the little city states of Greece and in that early Roman
state of four hundred square miles, men acquired by talk and observation
a sufficient knowledge for the ordinary duties of citizenship, but by
the beginning of the Punic Wars the business was already too big and
complicated for illiterate men. Yet nobody seems to have observed the
gap that was opening between the citizen and his state, and so there is
no record at all of any attempt to enlarge the citizen by instruction to
meet his enlarged duties. From the second century B.C. and onward
everyone is remarking upon the ignorance of the common citizen and his
lack of political wisdom, everything is suffering from the lack of
political solidarity due to this ignorance, but no one goes on to what
we should now consider the inevitable corollary, no one proposes to
destroy the ignorance complained of. There existed no means whatever for
the instruction of the masses of the people in a common political and
social ideal. It was only with the development of the great propagandist
religions in the Roman world, of which Christianity was the chief and
the survivor, that the possibility of such a systematic instruction of
great masses of people became apparent in the world. That very great
political genius, the Emperor Constantine the Great, six centuries
later, was the first to apprehend and to attempt to use this possibility
for the preservation and the mental and moral knitting-together of the
world community over which he ruled.
[Illustration: Gladiators (from a wall-painting at Pompeii)]
But it is not only in these deficiencies of news and of education and of
the expedient of representative government that this political system of
Rome differed from our own. True, it was far more like a modern
civilized state than any other state we have considered hitherto, but in
some matters it was strangely primordial and “sub-civilized.” Every now
and then the reader of Roman history, reading it in terms of debates
and measures, policies and campaigns, capital and labour, comes upon
something that gives him much the same shock he would feel if he went
down to an unknown caller in his house and extended his hand to meet the
misshapen hairy paw of _Homo Neanderthalensis_ and looked up to see a
chinless, bestial face. We have noted the occurrence of human sacrifice
in the third century B.C., and much that we learn of the religion of
republican Rome carries us far back beyond the days of decent gods, to
the age of shamanism and magic. We talk of a legislative gathering, and
the mind flies to Westminster; but how should we feel if we went to see
the beginning of a session of the House of Lords, and discovered the
Lord Chancellor, with bloody fingers, portentously fiddling about among
the entrails of a newly killed sheep? The mind would recoil from
Westminster to the customs of Benin. And the slavery of Rome was a
savage slavery, altogether viler than the slavery of Babylon. We have
had a glimpse of the virtuous Cato among his slaves in the second
century B.C. Moreover, in the third century B.C., when King Asoka was
ruling India in light and gentleness, the Romans were reviving an
Etruscan sport, the setting on of slaves to fight for their lives. One
is reminded of West Africa again in the origin of this amusement; it
grew out of the prehistoric custom of a massacre of captives at the
burial of a chief. There was a religious touch about this sport, the
slaves with hooks, who dragged the dead bodies out of the arena, wore
masks to represent the infernal ferry-man-god, Charon. In 264 B.C., the
very year in which Asoka began to reign and the First Punic War began,
the first recorded gladiatorial combat took place in the forum at Rome,
to celebrate the funeral of a member of the old Roman family of Brutus.
This was a modest display of three couples, but soon gladiators were
fighting by the hundred. The taste for these combats grew rapidly, and
the wars supplied an abundance of captives. The old Roman moralists, who
were so severe upon kissing and women’s ornaments and Greek philosophy,
had nothing but good to say for this new development. So long as pain
was inflicted, Roman morality, it would seem, was satisfied.
If republican Rome was the first of modern self-governing national
communities, she was certainly the “Neanderthal” form of them.
In the course of the next two or three centuries the gladiatorial shows
of Rome grew to immense proportions. To begin with, while wars were
frequent, the gladiators were prisoners of war. They came with their
characteristic national weapons, tattooed Britons, Moors, Scythians,
negroes, and the like, and there was perhaps some military value in
these exhibitions. Then criminals of the lower classes[243] condemned to
death were also used. The ancient world did not understand that a
criminal condemned to death still has rights, and at any rate the use of
a criminal as a gladiator was not so bad as his use as “material” for
the vivisectors of the Museum at Alexandria. But as the profits of this
sort of show business grew and the demand for victims increased,
ordinary slaves were sold to the trainers of gladiators, and any slave
who had aroused his owner’s spite might find himself in an establishment
for letting out gladiators. And dissipated young men who had squandered
their property, and lads of spirit, would go voluntarily into the trade
for a stated time, trusting to their prowess to survive. As the business
developed, a new use was found for gladiators as armed retainers; rich
men would buy a band, and employ it as a bodyguard or hire it out for
profit at the shows. The festivities of a show began with a ceremonial
procession (_pompa_) and a sham fight (_prælusio_). The real fighting
was heralded by trumpets. Gladiators who objected to fight for any
reason were driven on by whips and hot irons. A wounded man would
sometimes call for pity by holding up his forefinger. The spectators
would then either wave their handkerchiefs in token of mercy, or condemn
him to death by holding out their clenched fists with the thumbs
down.[244] The slain and nearly dead were dragged out to a particular
place, the _spoliarium_, where they were stripped of their arms and
possessions, and those who had not already expired were killed.
This organization of murder as a sport and show serves to measure the
great gap in moral standards between the Roman community and our own. No
doubt cruelties and outrages upon human dignity as monstrous as this
still go on in the world, but they do not go on in the name of the law
and without a single dissentient voice. For it is true that until the
time of Seneca (first century A.D.) there is no record of any plain
protest against this business. The conscience of mankind was weaker and
less intelligent then than now. Presently a new power was to come into
the human conscience through the spread of Christianity. The spirit of
Jesus in Christianity became the great antagonist in the later Roman
state of these cruel shows and of slavery, and, as Christianity spread,
these two evil things dwindled and disappeared.[245]
XXVIII
FROM TIBERIUS GRACCHUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR IN ROME
§ 1. _The Science of Thwarting the Common Man._ § 2. _Finance in
the Roman State._ § 3. _The Last Years of Republican Politics._ §
4. _The Era of the Adventurer Generals._ § 5. _The End of the
Republic._ § 6. _The Coming of the Princeps._ § 7. _Why the Roman
Republic Failed._
§ 1
We have already twice likened the self-governing community of Rome to a
“Neanderthal” variety of the modern “democratic” civilized state, and we
shall recur again to this comparison. In form the two things, the first
great primitive essay and its later relations, are extraordinarily
similar; in spirit they differ very profoundly. Roman political and
social life, and particularly Roman political and social life in the
century between the fall of Carthage and the rise of Cæsar and Cæsarism,
has a very marked general resemblance to the political and social life
in such countries as the United States of America or the British Empire
to-day. The resemblance is intensified by the common use, with a certain
inaccuracy in every case, of such terms as “senate,” “democracy,”
“proletariat,” and the like. But everything in the Roman state was
earlier, cruder, and clumsier; the injustices were more glaring, the
conflicts harsher. There was comparatively little knowledge and few
general ideas. Aristotle’s scientific works were only beginning to be
read in Rome in the first century B.C.; Ferrero,[246] it is true, makes
Cæsar familiar with the Politics of Aristotle, and ascribes to him the
dream of making a “Periclean Rome,” but in doing so, Ferrero seems to
be indulging in one of those lapses into picturesque romancing which are
at once the joy and the snare of all historical writers.
Attention has already been drawn to the profound difference between
Roman and modern conditions due to the absence of a press, of any
popular education or of the representative idea in the popular assembly.
Our world to-day is still far from solving the problem of representation
and from producing a public assembly which will really summarize,
crystallize, and express the thought and will of the community; our
elections are still largely an ingenious mockery of the common voter who
finds himself helpless in the face of party organizations which reduce
his free choice of a representative to the less unpalatable of two
political hacks, but, even so, his vote, in comparison with the vote of
an ordinary honest Roman citizen, is an effective instrument. Too many
of our histories dealing with this period of Roman history write of “the
popular party,” and of the votes of the people and so forth, as though
such things were as much working realities as they are to-day. But the
senators and politicians of Rome saw to it that such things never did
exist as clean and wholesome realities. These modern phrases are very
misleading unless they are carefully qualified.
We have already described the gatherings of the popular comitia; but
that clumsy assembly in sheep pens does not convey the full extent to
which the gerrymandering of popular representation could be carried in
Rome. Whenever there was a new enfranchisement of citizens in Italy,
there would be the most elaborate trickery and counter-trickery to enrol
the new voters into as few or as many of the thirty old “tribes” as
possible, or to put them into as few as possible new tribes. Since the
vote was taken by tribes, it is obvious that however great the number of
new additions made, if they were all got together into one tribe, their
opinion would only count for one tribal vote, and similarly if they were
crowded into just a few tribes, old or new. On the other hand, if they
were put into too many tribes, their effect in any particular tribe
might be inconsiderable. Here was the sort of work to fascinate every
smart knave in politics. The _comitia tributa_, could be _worked_ at
times so as to vote right counter to the general feeling of the people.
And as we have already noted, the great mass of voters in Italy were
also disenfranchised by distance. About the middle period of the
Carthaginian wars there were upwards of 300,000 Roman citizens; about
100 B.C. there were more than 900,000, but in effect the voting of the
popular assembly was confined to a few score thousand resident in and
near Rome, and mostly men of a base type. And the Roman voters were
“organized” to an extent that makes the Tammany machine of New York seem
artless and honest. They belonged to clubs, _collegia sodalicia_, having
usually some elegant religious pretensions; and the rising politician
working his way to office went first to the usurers and then with the
borrowed money to these clubs. If the outside voters were moved enough
by any question to swarm into the city, it was always possible to put
off the voting by declaring the omens unfavourable. If they came in
unarmed, they could be intimidated; if they brought in arms, then the
cry was raised that there was a plot to overthrow the republic, and a
massacre would be organized.
There can be no doubt that all Italy, all the empire, was festering with
discomfort, anxiety, and discontent in the century after the destruction
of Carthage; a few men were growing very rich, and the majority of
people found themselves entangled in an inexplicable net of uncertain
prices, jumpy markets, and debts; but yet there was no way at all of
stating and clearing up the general dissatisfaction. There is no record
of a single attempt to make the popular assembly a straightforward and
workable public organ. Beneath the superficial appearances of public
affairs struggled a mute giant of public opinion and public will, who
sometimes made some great political effort, a rush to vote or such like,
and sometimes broke into actual violence. So long as there was no actual
violence, the Senate and the financiers kept on in their own disastrous
way. Only when they were badly frightened would governing cliques or
parties desist from some nefarious policy and heed the common good. The
real method of popular expression in Italy in those days was not the
_comitia tributa_, but the strike and insurrection, the righteous and
necessary methods of all cheated or suppressed peoples. We have seen in
our own days in Great Britain a decline in the prestige of
parliamentary government and a drift towards unconstitutional methods on
the part of the masses through exactly the same cause, through the
incurable disposition of politicians to gerrymander the electoral
machine until the community is driven to explosion.
For insurrectionary purposes a discontented population needs a leader,
and the political history of the concluding century of Roman
republicanism is a history of insurrectionary leaders and
counter-revolutionary leaders. Most of the former are manifestly
unscrupulous adventurers who try to utilize the public necessity and
unhappiness for their own advancement. Many of the historians of this
period betray a disposition to take sides, and are either aristocratic
in tone or fiercely democratic; but, indeed, neither side in these
complex and intricate disputes has a record of high aims or clean hands.
The Senate and the rich equestrians were vulgar and greedy spirits,
hostile and contemptuous towards the poor mob; and the populace was
ignorant, unstable, and at least equally greedy. The Scipios in all this
record shine, by comparison, a group of gentlemen. To the motives of one
or the other figures of the time, to Tiberius Gracchus, for example, we
may perhaps extend the benefit of the doubt. But for the rest, they do
but demonstrate how clever and cunning men may be, how subtle in
contention, how brilliant in pretence, and how utterly wanting in wisdom
or grace of spirit. “A shambling, hairy, brutish, but probably very
cunning creature with a big brain behind;” so someone, I think it was
Sir Harry Johnston, has described _Homo Neanderthalensis_.
To this day we must still use similar terms to describe the soul of the
politician. The statesman has still to oust the politician from his
lairs and weapon heaps. History has still to become a record of human
dignity.
§ 2
Another respect in which the Roman system was a crude anticipation of
our own, and different from any preceding political system we have
considered, was that it was a cash and credit-using system. Money had
been in the world as yet for only a few centuries. But its use had been
growing; it was providing a fluid medium for trade and enterprise, and
changing economic conditions profoundly. In republican Rome, the
financier and the “money” interest began to play a part recognizably
similar to their rôles to-day.
We have already noted--in our account of Herodotus--that a first effect
of money was to give freedom of movement and leisure to a number of
people who could not otherwise have enjoyed these privileges. And that
is the peculiar value of money to mankind. Instead of a worker or helper
being paid in kind and in such a way that he is tied as much in his
enjoyment as in his labour, money leaves him free to do as he pleases
amidst a wide choice of purchasable aids, eases, and indulgences. He may
eat his money or drink it or give it to a temple or spend it in learning
something or save it against some foreseen occasion. That is the good of
money, the freedom of its universal convertibility. But the freedom
money gives the poor man is nothing to the freedom money has given the
rich man. With money rich men ceased to be tied to lands, houses,
stores, flocks, and herds. They could change the nature and locality of
their possessions with an unheard-of freedom. In the third and second
century B.C., this release, this untethering of wealth, began to tell
upon the general economic life of the Roman and Hellenized world. People
began to buy land and the like not for use, but to sell again at a
profit; people borrowed to buy, speculation developed. No doubt there
were bankers in the Babylon of 1000 B.C., but they lent in a far more
limited and solid way, bars of metal and stocks of goods. That earlier
world was a world of barter and payment in kind, and it went slowly--and
much more staidly and stably--for that reason. In that state the vast
realm of China has remained almost down to the present time.
The big cities before Rome were trading and manufacturing cities. Such
were Corinth and Carthage and Syracuse. But Rome never produced a very
considerable industrial population, and her warehouses never rivalled
those of Alexandria. The little port of Ostia was always big enough for
her needs. Rome was a political and financial capital, and in the latter
respect, at least, she was a new sort of city. She imported profits and
tribute, and very little went out from her in return. The wharves of
Ostia were chiefly busy unloading corn from Sicily and Africa and loot
from all the world.
After the fall of Carthage the Roman imagination went wild with the
hitherto unknown possibilities of finance. Money, like most other
inventions, had “happened” to mankind, and men had still to
develop--to-day they have still to perfect--the science and morality of
money. One sees the thing “catching on” in the recorded life and the
writings of Cato the Censor. In his early days he was bitterly virtuous
against usury; in his later he was devising ingenious schemes for safe
usury.
In this curiously interesting century of Roman history we find man after
man asking, “What has happened to Rome?” Various answers are made--a
decline in religion, a decline from the virtues of the Roman
forefathers, Greek “intellectual poison,” and the like. We who can look
at the problem with a large perspective, can see that what had happened
to Rome was “money”--the new freedoms and chances and opportunities that
money opened out. Money floated the Romans off the firm ground, everyone
was getting hold of money, the majority by the simple expedient of
running into debt; the eastward expansion of the empire was very largely
a hunt for treasure in strong rooms and temples to keep pace with the
hunger of the new need. The Equestrian order, in particular, became the
money power. Everyone was developing property. Farmers were giving up
corn and cattle, borrowing money, buying slaves, and starting the more
intensive cultivation of oil and wine. Money was young in human
experience and wild, nobody had it under control. It fluctuated greatly.
It was now abundant and now scarce. Men made sly and crude schemes to
corner it, to hoard it, to send up prices by releasing hoarded metals. A
small body of very shrewd men was growing immensely rich. Many
patricians were growing poor and irritated and unscrupulous. Among the
middle sort of peoples there was much hope, much adventure, and much
more disappointment. The growing mass of the expropriated was permeated
by that vague, baffled, and hopeless sense of being inexplicably bested,
which is the preparatory condition for all great revolutionary
movements.
§ 3
The first conspicuous leader to appeal to the gathering revolutionary
feeling in Italy was Tiberius Gracchus. He looks more like an honest man
than any other figure in this period of history, unless it be Scipio
Africanus the Elder. At first Tiberius Gracchus was a moderate reformer
of a rather reactionary type. He wished to restore the yeoman class to
property, very largely because he believed that class to be the backbone
of the army, and his military experience in Spain before and after the
destruction of Carthage had impressed upon him the declining efficiency
of the legions. He was what we should call nowadays a “Back-to-the-land”
man. He did not understand, and few people understand to-day, how much
easier it is to shift population from the land into the towns, than to
return it to the laborious and simple routines of agricultural life. He
wanted to revive the Licinian laws, which had been established when
Camillus built his temple of Concord nearly two centuries and a half
before (see Chap. xxvii, § 2), so far as they broke up great estates and
restrained slave labour.
These Licinian laws had repeatedly been revived and repeatedly lapsed to
a dead letter again. It was only when the big proprietors in the Senate
opposed this proposal that Tiberius Gracchus turned to the people and
began a furious agitation for popular government. He created a
commission to inquire into the title of all landowners. In the midst of
his activities occurred one of the most extraordinary incidents in
history. Attalus, the king of the rich country of Pergamum in Asia
Minor, died (133 B.C.), and left his kingdom to the Roman people.
It is difficult for us to understand the motives of this bequest.
Pergamum was a country allied to Rome, and so moderately secure from
aggression; and the natural consequence of such a will was to provoke a
violent scramble among the senatorial gangs and a dispute between them
and the people for the spoils of the new acquisition. Practically
Attalus handed over his country to be looted. The act is so amazing that
one is driven towards the hypothesis of forgery.[247] There were of
course many Italian business people established in the country and a
strong party of native rich men in close relations with Rome. To them,
no doubt, a coalescence with the Roman system would have been
acceptable. Josephus bears witness to such a desire for annexation among
the rich men of Syria, a desire running counter to the wishes of both
king and people. This Pergamum bequest, astonishing in itself, had the
still more astonishing result of producing imitations in other quarters.
In 96 B.C. Ptolemy Apion bequeathed Cyrenaica, in North Africa, to the
Roman people; in 81 B.C. Alexander II, King of Egypt, followed suit with
Egypt, a legacy too big for the courage if not for the appetite of the
Senators, and they declined it; in 74 B.C. Nicomedes, King of Bithynia,
demised Bithynia. Of these latter testamentary freaks we will say no
more here. But it will be manifest how great an opportunity was given
Tiberius Gracchus, by the bequest of Attalus, of accusing the rich of
greed and of proposing to decree the treasures of Attalus to the
commonalty. He proposed to use this new wealth to provide seed, stock,
and agricultural implements for the resettlement of the land.
His movement was speedily entangled in the complexities of the Roman
electoral system--without a simple and straightforward electoral method,
all popular movements in all ages necessarily become entangled and
maddened in constitutional intricacies, and almost as necessarily lead
to bloodshed. It was needed, if his work was to go on, that Tiberius
Gracchus should continue to be tribune, and it was illegal for him to be
tribune twice in succession. He overstepped the bounds of legality, and
stood for the tribuneship a second time; the peasants who came in from
the countryside to vote for him came in armed; the cry that he was
aiming at a tyranny, the cry that had long ago destroyed Mælius and
Manlius, was raised in the Senate, the friends of “law and order” went
to the Capitol in state, accompanied by a rabble of dependents armed
with staves and bludgeons; there was a conflict, or rather a massacre of
the revolutionaries, in which nearly three hundred people were killed,
and Tiberius Gracchus was beaten to death with the fragments of a broken
bench by two Senators.
Thereupon the Senators attempted a sort of counter-revolution, and
proscribed many of the followers of Tiberius Gracchus; but the state of
public opinion was so sullen and threatening that this movement was
dropped and Scipio Nasica, who was implicated in the death of Tiberius,
though he occupied the position of pontifex maximus and should have
remained in Rome for the public sacrifices which were the duties of that
official, went abroad to avoid trouble.
The uneasiness of Italy next roused Scipio Africanus the Younger to
propose the enfranchisement of all Italy. But he died suddenly before he
could carry the proposal into effect.
Then followed the ambiguous career of Caius Gracchus, the brother of
Tiberius, who followed some tortuous “policy” that still exercises the
mind of historians. He increased the burthens of taxation laid upon the
provinces, it is supposed with the idea of setting the modern financiers
(the Equites) against the senatorial landowners. He gave the former the
newly bequeathed taxes of Asia to farm, and, what is worse, he gave them
control of the special courts set up to prevent extortion. He started
enormous public works and particularly the construction of new roads,
and he is accused of making a political use of the contracts. He revived
the proposal to enfranchise Italy. He increased the distribution of
subsidized cheap corn to the Roman citizens.... Here we cannot attempt
to disentangle his schemes, much less to judge him. But that his policy
was offensive to the groups that controlled the Senate there can be no
doubt whatever. He was massacred by the champions of “law and order,”
with about three thousand of his followers, in the streets of Rome in
121 B.C. His decapitated head was carried to the Senate on the point of
a pike.
(A reward of its weight in gold, says Plutarch, had been offered for
this trophy; and its captor, acting in the true spirit of a champion of
“big business,” filled the braincase with lead on its way to the
scales.)
In spite of these prompt firm measures the Senate was not to enjoy the
benefits of peace and the advantages of a control of the imperial
resources for long. Within ten years the people were in revolt again.
In 118 B.C. the throne of Numidia, the semi-barbaric kingdom that had
arisen in North Africa upon the ruins of the civilized Carthaginian
power, was seized by a certain able Jugurtha, who had served with the
Roman armies in Spain, and had a knowledge of the Roman character. He
provoked the military intervention of Rome. But the Romans found that
their military power, under a Senate of financiers and landlords, was
very different from what it had been even in the days of the younger
Scipio Africanus. “Jugurtha bought over the Commissioners sent out to
watch him, the Senators charged with their prosecution, and the generals
in command against him.”[248] There is a mistaken Roman proverb:
“_pecunia non olet_” (money does not stink), for the money of Jugurtha
stank even in Rome. There was an angry agitation; and a capable soldier
of lowly origin, Marius, was carried to the consulship (107 B.C.) on the
wave of popular indignation. Marius made no attempt on the model of the
Gracchi to restore the backbone of the army by rehabilitating the yeoman
class. He was a professional soldier with a high standard of efficiency
and a disposition to take short cuts. He simply raised troops from among
the poor, whether countrymen or townsmen, paid them well, disciplined
them thoroughly, and (106 B.C.) ended the seven years’ war with Jugurtha
by bringing that chieftain in chains to Rome. It did not occur to
anybody that incidentally Marius had also created a professional army
with no interest to hold it together but its pay. He then held on to the
consulship more or less illegally for several years, and in 102 and 101
B.C. repelled a threatening move of the Germans (who thus appear in our
history for the first time), who were raiding through Gaul towards
Italy. He gained two victories; one on Italian soil. He was hailed as
the saviour of his country, a second Camillus (100 B.C.).
The social tensions of the time mocked that comparison with Camillus.
The Senate benefited by the greater energy in foreign affairs and the
increased military efficiency that Marius had introduced, but the
sullen, shapeless discontent of the mass of the people was still seeking
some effective outlet. The rich grew richer and the poor poorer. It was
impossible to stifle the consequences of that process for ever by
political trickery. The Italian people were still unenfranchised. Two
extreme democratic leaders, Saturninus and Glaucia, were assassinated,
but that familiar senatorial remedy failed to assuage the populace on
this occasion. In 92 B.C. an aristocratic official, Rutilius Rufus, who
had tried to restrain the exactions of the financiers in Asia Minor, was
condemned on a charge of corruption so manifestly trumped up that it
deceived no one; and in 91 B.C., Livius Drusus, a newly elected tribune
of the people, who was making capital out of the trial of Rutilius
Rufus, was assassinated. He had proposed a general enfranchisement of
the Italians, and he had foreshadowed not only another land law, but a
general abolition of debts. Yet for all this vigour on the part of the
senatorial usurers, landgrabbers, and forestallers, the hungry and the
anxious were still insurgent. The murder of Drusus was the last drop in
the popular cup; Italy blazed into a desperate insurrection.
There followed two years of bitter civil war, the Social War. It was a
war between the idea of a united Italy and the idea of the rule of the
Roman Senate. It was not a “social” war in the modern sense, but a war
between Rome and her Italian allies (allies = Socii). “Roman generals,
trained in the traditions of colonial warfare, marched ruthlessly up and
down Italy, burning farms, sacking towns, and carrying off men, women,
and children, to sell them in the open market or work them in gangs upon
their estates.”[249] Marius and an aristocratic general, Sulla, who had
been with him in Africa and who was his bitter rival, both commanded on
the side of Rome. But though the insurgents experienced defeats and
looting, neither of these generals brought the war to an end. It was
ended in a manner (89 B.C.) by the practical surrender of the Roman
Senate to the idea of reform. The spirit was taken out of the
insurrection by the concession of their demands “in principle”; and then
as soon as the rebels had dispersed, the usual cheating of the new
voters, by such methods as we have explained in § 1 of this chapter, was
resumed.
By the next year (88 B.C.) the old round had begun again. It was mixed
up with the personal intrigues of Marius and Sulla against each other;
but the struggle had taken on another complexion through the army
reforms of Marius, which had created a new type of legionary, a landless
professional soldier with no interest in life but pay and plunder, and
with no feeling of loyalty except to a successful general. A popular
tribune, Sulpicius, was bringing forward some new laws affecting debt,
and the consuls were dodging the storm by declaring a suspension of
public business. Then came the usual resort to violence, and the
followers of Sulpicius drove the consuls from the forum. But here it is
that the new forces which the new army had made possible came into play.
King Mithridates of Pontius, the Hellenized king of the southern shores
of the Black Sea east of Bithynia, was pressing Rome into war. One of
the proposed laws of Sulpicius was that Marius should command the armies
sent against this Mithridates. Whereupon Sulla marched the army he had
commanded throughout the Social War to Rome, Marius and Sulpicius fled,
and a new age, an age of military pronunciamentos, began.
Of how Sulla had himself made commander against Mithridates and
departed, and of how legions friendly to Marius then seized power, how
Marius returned to Italy and enjoyed a thorough massacre of his
political opponents and died, sated, of fever, we cannot tell in any
detail. But one measure during the Marian reign of terror did much to
relieve the social tension, and that was the abolition of three-quarters
of all outstanding debts. Nor can we tell here how Sulla made a
discreditable peace with Mithridates (who had massacred a hundred
thousand Italians in Asia Minor) in order to bring his legions back to
Rome, defeat the Marians at the battle of the Colline Gate of Rome, and
reverse the arrangements of Marius. Sulla restored law and order by the
proscription and execution of over five thousand people. He desolated
large parts of Italy, restored the Senate to power, repealed many of the
recent laws, though he was unable to restore the cancelled burden of
debt, and then, feeling bored by politics and having amassed great
riches, he retired with an air of dignity into private life, gave
himself up to abominable vices, and so presently died, eaten up with
some disgusting disease produced by debauchery.[250]
§ 4
Political life in Italy was not so much tranquillized as stunned by the
massacres and confiscations of Marius and Sulla. The scale upon which
this history is planned will not permit us to tell here of the great
adventurers who, relying more and more on the support of the legions,
presently began to scheme and intrigue again for dictatorial power in
Rome. In 73 B.C. all Italy was terrified by a rising of the slaves, and
particularly of the gladiators, led by a gladiator from Thessaly,
Spartacus. He and seventy others had fled out from a gladiatorial “farm”
at Capua. Similar risings had already occurred in Sicily. The forces
under Spartacus necessarily became a miscellaneous band drawn from east
and west, without any common idea except the idea of dispersing and
getting home; nevertheless, he held out in southern Italy for two years,
using the then apparently extinct crater of Vesuvius for a time as a
natural fortress. The Italians, for all their love of gladiatorial
display, failed to appreciate this conversion of the whole country into
an arena, this bringing of the gladiatorial sword to the door, and when
at last Spartacus was overthrown, their terror changed to frantic
cruelty, six thousand of his captured followers were crucified--long
miles of nailed and drooping victims--along the Appian Way.
Here we cannot deal at any length with Lucullus, who invaded Pontus and
fought Mithridates, and brought the cultivated cherry-tree to Europe;
nor can we tell how ingeniously Pompey the Great stole the triumph and
most of the prestige Lucullus had won in Armenia beyond Pontus.
Lucullus, like Sulla, retired into an opulent private life, but with
more elegance and with a more gracious end. We cannot relate in any
detail how Julius Cæsar accumulated reputation in the west, by
conquering Gaul, defeating the German tribes upon the Rhine, and
pushing a punitive raid across the Straits of Dover into Britain. More
and more important grow the legions; less and less significant are the
Senate and the assemblies of Rome. But there is a certain grim humour
about the story of Crassus that we cannot altogether neglect.
[Illustration: The ROMAN POWER about 50 B.C.]
This Crassus was a great money-lender and forestaller. He was a typical
man of the new Equestrian type, the social equivalent of a modern
munition profiteer. He first grew rich by buying up the property of
those proscribed by Sulla. His earliest exploits in the field were
against Spartacus, whom finally he crushed by great payments and
exertions after a prolonged and expensive campaign. He then, as the
outcome of complicated bargains, secured the command in the east and
prepared to emulate the glories of Lucullus, who had pushed east from
Pergamum and Bithynia into Pontus, and of Pompey, who had completed the
looting of Armenia.
His experiences serve to demonstrate the gross ignorance with which the
Romans were conducting their affairs at that time. He crossed the
Euphrates, expecting to find in Persia another Hellenized kingdom like
Pontus. But, as we have already intimated, the great reservoirs of
nomadic peoples that stretched round from the Danube across Russia into
Central Asia, had been raining back into the lands between the Caspian
Sea and the Indus that Alexander had conquered for Hellenism. Crassus
found himself against the “Scythian” again; against mobile tribes of
horsemen led by a monarch in Median costume.[251] The particular variety
of “Scythian” he encountered was called the Parthian. It is possible
that in the Parthians a Mongolian (Turanian) element was now mingled
with the Aryan strain; but the campaign of Crassus beyond the Euphrates
is curiously like the campaign of Darius beyond the Danube; there is the
same heavy thrusting of an infantry force against elusive light
horsemen. But Crassus was less quick than Darius to realize the need of
withdrawal, and the Parthians were better bowmen than the Scythians
Darius met. They seemed to have had some sort of noisy projectile of
unusual strength and force, something different from an ordinary
arrow.[252] The campaign culminated in that two days’ massacre of the
hot, thirsty, hungry, and weary Roman legions, which is known as the
battle of Carrhæ (53 B.C.). They toiled through the sand, charging an
enemy who always evaded their charge and rode round them and shot them
to pieces. Twenty thousand of them were killed, and ten thousand marched
on eastward as prisoners into slavery in Iran.
What became of Crassus is not clearly known. There is a story, probably
invented for our moral benefit and suggested by his usuries, that he
fell alive into the hands of the Parthians and was killed by having
molten gold poured down his throat.
But this disaster has a very great significance indeed to our general
history of mankind. It serves to remind us that from the Rhine to the
Euphrates, all along to the north of the Alps and Danube and Black Sea,
stretched one continuous cloud of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, whom
the statescraft of imperial Rome was never able to pacify and civilize,
nor her military science subdue. We have already called attention to a
map showing how the Second Babylonian Empire, the Chaldean Empire, lay
like a lamb in the embrace of the Median power. In exactly the same way
the Roman Empire lay like a lamb in the embrace of this great crescent
of outer barbarians. Not only was Rome never able to thrust back or
assimilate that superincumbent crescent, but she was never able to
organize the Mediterranean Sea into a secure and orderly system of
communication between one part of her empire and another. Quite unknown
as yet to Rome, the Mongolian tribes from northeastern Asia, the Huns
and their kin, walled back and driven out from China by the Tsi and Han
dynasties, were drifting and pressing westward, mixing with the
Parthians, the Scythians, the Teutons and the like, or driving them
before them.
Never at any time did the Romans succeed in pushing their empire beyond
Mesopotamia, and upon Mesopotamia their hold was never very secure.
Before the close of the republic that power of assimilation which had
been the secret of their success was giving way to “patriotic”
exclusiveness and “patriotic” greed. Rome plundered and destroyed Asia
Minor and Babylonia, which were the necessary basis for an eastward
extension to India, just as she had destroyed and looted Carthage and so
had no foothold for extension into Africa, and just as she had destroyed
Corinth and so cut herself off from an easy way into the heart of
Greece. Western European writers, impressed by the fact that later on
Rome Romanized and civilized Gaul and South Britain and restored the
scene of her earlier devastations in Spain to prosperity, are apt to
ignore that over far greater areas to the south and east her influence
was to weaken and so restore to barbarism the far wider conquests of
Hellenic civilization.
§ 5
But among the politicians of Italy in the first century B.C. there were
no maps of Germany and Russia, Africa and central Asia, and no
sufficient intelligence to study them had they existed. Rome never
developed the fine curiosities that sent Hanno and the sailors of
Pharaoh Necho down the coasts of Africa. When, in the first century
B.C., the emissaries of the Han dynasty reached the eastern shores of
the Caspian Sea, they found only stories of a civilization that had
receded. The memory of Alexander still lived in these lands, but of Rome
men only knew that Pompey had come to the western shores of the Caspian
and gone away again, and that Crassus had been destroyed. Rome was
preoccupied at home. What mental energy remained over in the Roman
citizen from the attempt to grow personally rich and keep personally
safe was intent upon the stratagems and strokes and counter-strokes of
the various adventurers who were now manifestly grappling for the
supreme power.
It is the custom of historians to treat these struggles with extreme
respect. In particular the figure of Julius Cæsar is set up as if it
were a star of supreme brightness and importance in the history of
mankind.[253] Yet a dispassionate consideration of the known facts fails
altogether to justify this demi-god theory of Cæsar. Not even that
precipitate wrecker of splendid possibilities, Alexander the Great, has
been so magnified and dressed up for the admiration of careless and
uncritical readers. There is a type of scholar who, to be plain, sits
and _invents_ marvellous world policies for the more conspicuous figures
in history with the merest scraps of justification or with no
justification at all. We are told that Alexander planned the conquest of
Carthage and Rome and the complete subjugation of India, and that only
his death shattered these schemes. What we know for certain is that he
conquered the Persian Empire, and never went far beyond its boundaries;
and that when he was supposed to be making these vast and noble plans,
he was in fact indulging in such monstrous antics as his mourning for
his favourite Hephæstion, and as his main occupation he was drinking
himself to death. So too Julius Cæsar is credited with the intention of
doing just that one not impossible thing which would have secured the
Roman Empire from its ultimate collapse--namely, the systematic conquest
and civilization of Europe as far as the Baltic and the Dnieper. He was
to have marched upon Germany, says Plutarch, through Parthia and
Scythia, round the north of the Caspian and Black Seas. Yet the fact we
have to reconcile with this wise and magnificent project is that at the
crest of his power, Cæsar, already a bald, middle-aged man, past the
graces and hot impulses of youthful love, spent the better part of a
year in Egypt, feasting and entertaining himself in amorous pleasantries
with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. And afterwards he brought her with
him to Rome, where her influence over him was bitterly resented. Such
complications with a woman mark the elderly sensualist or
sentimentalist--he was fifty-four at the commencement of the
_affaire_--rather than the master-ruler of men.
On the side of the superman idea of Cæsar, we have to count a bust in
the Naples Museum. It represents a fine and intellectual face, very
noble in its expression, and we can couple with that the story that his
head, even at birth, was unusually large and finely formed. But there is
really no satisfying evidence that this well-known bust does represent
Cæsar, and it is hard to reconcile its austere serenity with the
reputation for violent impulse and disorderliness that clung to him.
Other busts of a quite different man are also, with more probability,
ascribed to him.
There can be little doubt that he was a dissolute and extravagant young
man--the scandals cluster thick about his sojourn in Bithynia, whither
he fled from Sulla; he was the associate of the reprobate Clodius and
the conspirator Catiline, and there is nothing in his political career
to suggest any aim higher or remoter than his own advancement to power,
and all the personal glory and indulgence that power makes possible. We
will not attempt to tell here of the turns and devices of his career.
Although he was of an old patrician family, he came into politics as the
brilliant darling of the people. He spent great sums and incurred heavy
debts to provide public festivals on the most lavish scale. He opposed
the tradition of Sulla, and cherished the memory of Marius, who was his
uncle by marriage. For a time he worked in conjunction with Crassus and
Pompey, but after the death of Crassus he and Pompey came into conflict.
By 49 B.C. he and Pompey, with their legions, he from the west and
Pompey from the east, were fighting openly for predominance in the Roman
state. He had broken the law by bringing his legions across the Rubicon,
which was the boundary between his command and Italy proper. At the
battle of Pharsalos in Thessaly (48 B.C.) Pompey was routed, and,
fleeing to Egypt, was murdered, leaving Cæsar more master of the Roman
world than ever Sulla had been.
He was then created dictator for ten years in 46 B.C., and early in 45
B.C. he was made dictator for life. This was monarchy; if not hereditary
monarchy, it was at least electoral life monarchy. It was unlimited
opportunity to do his best for the world. And by the spirit and quality
of his use of this dictatorial power during these four years we are
bound to judge him. A certain reorganization of local administration he
effected, and he seems to have taken up what was a fairly obvious
necessity of the times, a project for the restoration of the two
murdered seaports of Corinth and Carthage, whose destruction had
wrecked the sea-life of the Mediterranean. But much more evident was the
influence of Cleopatra and Egypt upon his mind. Like Alexander before
him, his head seems to have been turned by the king-god tradition,
assisted no doubt in his case by the adulation of that charming
hereditary goddess, Cleopatra. We find evidence of exactly that same
conflict upon the score of divine pretensions, between him and his
personal friends, that we have already recorded in the case of
Alexander. So far as the Hellenized east was concerned, the paying of
divine honours to rulers was a familiar idea; but it was still repulsive
to the lingering Aryanism of Rome.
[Illustration: JVLIVS CÆSAR
(from the Naples bust)]
Antony, who had been his second in command at Pharsalos, was one of the
chief of his flatterers. Plutarch describes a scene at the public games
in which Antony tried to force a crown upon Cæsar, which Cæsar, after a
little coyness and in face of the manifested displeasure of the crowd,
refused. But he had adopted the ivory sceptre and throne, which were the
traditional insignia of the ancient kings of Rome. His image was carried
amidst that of the gods in the opening _pompa_ of the arena, and his
statue was set up in a temple with an inscription, “To the Unconquerable
God!” Priests even were appointed for his godhead. These things are not
the symptoms of great-mindedness, but of a common man’s megalomania.
Cæsar’s record of vulgar scheming for the tawdriest mockeries of
personal worship is a silly and shameful record; it is incompatible
with the idea that he was a wise and wonderful superman setting the
world to rights.
Finally (44 B.C.) he was assassinated by a group of his own friends and
supporters, to whom these divine aspirations had become intolerable. He
was beset in the Senate, and stabbed in three and twenty places, dying
at the foot of the statue of his fallen rival Pompey the Great. The
scene marks the complete demoralization of the old Roman governing body.
Brutus, the ringleader of the murderers, would have addressed the
senators, but, confronted by this crisis, they were scuttling off in
every direction. For the best part of a day Rome did not know what to
make of this event; the murderers marched about with their bloody
weapons through an undecided city, with no one gainsaying them and only
a few joining them; then public opinion turned against them, some of
their houses were attacked, and they had to hide and fly for their
lives.
§ 6
But the trend of things was overwhelmingly towards monarchy. For
thirteen years more the struggle of personalities went on. One single
man is to be noted as inspired by broad ideas and an ambition not
entirely egoistic, Cicero. He was a man of modest origin, whose
eloquence and literary power had won him a prominent place in the
Senate. He was a little tainted by the abusive tradition of Demosthenes,
nevertheless he stands out, a noble and pathetically ineffective figure,
pleading with the now utterly degenerate, base, and cowardly Senate for
the high ideals of the Republic. He was a writer of great care and
distinction, and the orations and private letters he has left us make
him one of the most real and living figures of this period to the modern
reader.[254] He was proscribed and killed in 43 B.C., the year after the
murder of Julius Cæsar, and his head and hands were nailed up in the
Roman forum. Octavian, who became at last the monarch of Rome, seems to
have made an effort to save Cicero; that murder was certainly not his
crime.
Here we cannot trace out the tangle of alliances and betrayals that
ended in the ascendancy of this Octavian, the adopted heir of Julius
Cæsar. The fate of the chief figures is interwoven with that of
Cleopatra.
After the death of Cæsar, she set herself to capture the emotions and
vanity of Antony, a much younger man than Cæsar, with whom she was
probably already acquainted. For a time Octavian and Antony and a third
figure, Lepidus, divided the Roman world just as Cæsar and Pompey had
divided it before their final conflict. Octavian took the hardier west,
and consolidated his power; Antony had the more gorgeous east--and
Cleopatra. To Lepidus fell that picked bone, Carthaginian Africa. He
seems to have been a good man of good traditions, set upon the
restoration of Carthage rather than upon wealth or personal vanities.
The mind of Antony succumbed to those same ancient ideas of divine
kingship that had already proved too much for the mental equilibrium of
Julius Cæsar. In the company of Cleopatra he gave himself up to love,
amusements, and a dream of sensuous glory, until Octavian felt that the
time was ripe to end these two Egyptian divinities.
In 32 B.C. Octavian induced the Senate to depose Antony from the command
of the east, and proceeded to attack him. A great naval battle at Actium
(31 B.C.) was decided by the unexpected desertion of Cleopatra with
sixty ships in the midst of the fight. It is quite impossible for us to
decide now whether this was due to premeditated treachery or to the
sudden whim of a charming woman. The departure of these ships threw the
fleet of Antony into hopeless confusion, which was increased by the
headlong flight of this model lover in pursuit. He went off in a swift
galley after her without informing his commanders. He left his followers
to fight and die as they thought fit, and for a time they were
incredulous that he had gone. The subsequent encounter of the two lovers
and their reconciliation is a matter for ironical speculation on the
part of Plutarch.
Octavian’s net closed slowly round his rival. It is not improbable that
there was some sort of understanding between Octavian and Cleopatra, as
perhaps in the time of Julius Cæsar there may have been between the
queen and Antony. Antony gave way to much mournful posturing, varied by
love scenes, during this last stage of his little drama. For a time he
posed as an imitator of the cynic Timon, as one who had lost all faith
in mankind, though one may think that his deserted sailors at Actium had
better reason for such an attitude. Finally he found himself and
Cleopatra besieged by Octavian in Alexandria. There were some sallies
and minor successes, and Antony was loud with challenges to Octavian to
decide the matter by personal combat. Being led to believe that
Cleopatra had committed suicide, this star of romance stabbed himself,
but so ineffectually as to die lingeringly, and he was carried off to
expire in her presence (30 B.C.).
Plutarch’s account of Antony, which was derived very largely from
witnesses who had seen and known him, describes him as of heroic mould.
He is compared to the demi-god Hercules, from whom indeed he claimed
descent, and also to the Indian Bacchus. There is a disgusting but
illuminating description of a scene in the Senate when he attempted to
speak while drunk, and was overtaken by one of the least dignified
concomitants of intoxication.
For a little while Cleopatra still clung to life, and perhaps to the
hope that she might reduce Octavian to the same divine rôle that had
already been played by Julius Cæsar and Antony. She had an interview
with Octavian, in which she presented herself as beauty in distress and
very lightly clad. But when it became manifest that Octavian lacked the
godlike spark, and that his care for her comfort and welfare was
dictated chiefly by his desire to exhibit her in a triumphal procession
through the streets of Rome, she also committed suicide. An asp was
smuggled to her past the Roman sentries, concealed in a basket of figs,
and by its fangs she died.
Octavian seems to have been almost entirely free from the divine
aspirations of Julius Cæsar and Antony. He was neither God nor romantic
hero; he was a man. He was a man of far greater breadth and capacity
than any other player in this last act of the Republican drama in Rome.
All things considered, he was perhaps the best thing that could have
happened to Rome at that time. He “voluntarily resigned the
extraordinary powers which he had held since 43, and, to quote his own
words, ‘handed over the republic to the control of the Senate and the
people of Rome.’ The old constitutional machinery was once more set in
motion; the Senate, assembly, and magistrates resumed their functions,
and Octavian himself was hailed as the ‘restorer of the commonwealth and
the champion of freedom.’ It was not so easy to determine what relation
he himself, the actual master of the Roman world, should occupy towards
this revived republic. His abdication, in any real sense of the word,
would have simply thrown everything back into confusion. The interests
of peace and order required that he should retain at least the
substantial part of his authority; and this object was in fact
accomplished, and the rule of the emperors founded, in a manner which
has no parallel in history. Any revival of the kingly title was out of
the question, and Octavian himself expressly refused the dictatorship.
Nor was any new office created or any new official title invented for
his benefit. But by Senate and people he was invested according to the
old constitutional forms with certain powers, as many citizens had been
before him, and so took his place by the side of the lawfully appointed
magistrates of the republic; only, to mark his pre-eminent dignity, as
the first of them all, the Senate decreed that he should take as an
additional cognomen that of ‘Augustus,’ while in common parlance he was
henceforth styled Princeps, a simple title of courtesy, familiar to
republican usage and conveying no other idea than that of a recognized
primacy and precedence over his fellow-citizens. The ideal sketched by
Cicero in his _De Republica_, of a constitutional president of a free
republic, was apparently realized; but it was only in appearance. For in
fact the special prerogatives conferred upon Octavian gave him back in
substance the autocratic authority he had resigned, and as between the
restored republic and its new _princeps_ the balance of power was
overwhelmingly on the side of the latter.”[255]
§ 7
In this manner it was that Roman republicanism ended in a _princeps_ or
ruling prince, and the first great experiment in a self-governing
community on a scale larger than that of tribe or city, collapsed and
failed.
The essence of its failure was that it could not sustain unity. In its
early stages its citizens, both patrician and plebeian, had a certain
tradition of justice and good faith, and of the loyalty of all citizens
to the law, and of the goodness of the law for all citizens; it clung to
this idea of the importance of the law and of law-abidingness nearly
into the first century B.C. But the unforeseen invention and development
of money, the temptations and disruptions of imperial expansion, the
entanglement of electoral methods, weakened and swamped this tradition
by presenting old issues in new disguises under which the judgment did
not recognize them, and by enabling men to be loyal to the professions
of citizenship and disloyal to its spirit. The bond of the Roman people
had always been a moral rather than a religious bond; their religion was
sacrificial and superstitious; it embodied no such great ideas of a
divine leader and of a sacred mission as Judaism was developing. As the
idea of citizenship failed and faded before the new occasions, there
remained no inner, that is to say no real, unity in the system at all.
Every man tended more and more to do what was right in his own eyes.
Under such conditions there was no choice between chaos and a return to
monarchy, to the acceptance of some chosen individual as the one
unifying will in the state. Of course in that return there is always
hidden the expectation that the monarch will become as it were magic,
will cease to be merely a petty human being, and will think and feel as
something greater and more noble, as indeed a state personage; and of
course monarchy invariably fails to satisfy that expectation. We shall
glance at the extent of this failure in the brief review we shall
presently make of the emperors of Rome. We shall find at last one of the
more constructive of these emperors, Constantine the Great, conscious of
his own inadequacy as a unifying power, turning to the faith, the
organization, and teaching network of one of the new religious movements
in the empire, to supply just that permeating and correlating factor in
men’s minds that was so manifestly wanting.
[Illustration: The ROMAN EMPIRE at the death of AUGUSTUS. A.D. 14]
With Cæsar, the civilization of Europe and Western Asia went back to
monarchy, and, through monarchy, assisted presently by organized
Christianity, it sought to achieve peace, righteousness, happiness, and
world order for close upon eighteen centuries. Then almost suddenly it
began reverting to republicanism, first in one country and then in
another, and, assisted by the new powers of printing and the press and
of organized general education, and by the universalist religious ideas
in which the world had been soaked for generations, it has now resumed
again the effort to create a republican world-state and a world-wide
scheme of economic righteousness which the Romans had made so
prematurely and in which they had so utterly and disastrously failed.
Certain conditions, we are now beginning to perceive, are absolutely
necessary to such a creation; conditions which it is inconceivable that
any pre-Christian Roman could have regarded as possible. We may still
think the attainment of these conditions a vastly laborious and
difficult and uncertain undertaking, but we understand that the attempt
must be made because no other prospect before us gives even a promise of
happiness or self-respect or preservation of our kind. The first of
these conditions is that there should be a common political idea in the
minds of all men, an idea of the state thought of as the personal
possession of each individual and as the backbone fact of his scheme of
duties. In the early days of Rome, when it was a little visible state,
twenty miles square, such notions could be and were developed in
children in their homes, and by what they saw and heard of the political
lives of their fathers; but in a larger country such as Rome had already
become before the war with Pyrrhus, there was a need of an organized
teaching of the history, of the main laws, and of the general intentions
of the state towards everyone if this moral unity was to be maintained.
But the need was never realized, and no attempt at any such teaching was
ever made. At the time it could not have been made. It is inconceivable
that it could have been made. The knowledge was not there, and there
existed no class from which the needed teachers could be drawn and no
conception of an organization for any such systematic moral and
intellectual training as the teaching organization of Christianity, with
its creeds and catechisms and sermons and confirmations, presently
supplied.
Moreover, we know nowadays that even a universal education of this sort
supplies only the basis for a healthy republican state. Next to
education there must come abundant, prompt, and truthful information of
what is going on in the state, and frank and free discussion of the
issues of the time. Even nowadays these functions are performed only
very imperfectly and badly by the press we have and by our publicists
and politicians; but badly though it is done, the thing is done, and the
fact that it is done at all argues that it may ultimately be done well.
In the Roman state it was not even attempted. The Roman citizen got his
political facts from rumour and the occasional orator. He stood wedged
in the forum, imperfectly hearing a distant speaker. He probably
misconceived every issue upon which he voted.
And of the monstrous ineffectiveness of the Roman voting system we have
already written.
Unable to surmount or remove these obstacles to a sane and effective
popular government, the political instincts of the Roman mind turned
towards monarchy. But it was not monarchy of the later European type,
not hereditary monarchy, which was now installed in Rome. The _princeps_
was really like an American war-time president elected not for four
years, but for life, able to appoint senators instead of being
restrained by an elected senate, and with a rabble popular meeting in
the place of the house of representatives. He was also _pontifex
maximus_, chief of the sacrificial priests, a function unknown at
Washington; and in practice it became usual for him to designate and
train his successor and to select for that honour a son or an adopted
son or a near relation whom he could trust. The power of the _princeps_
was in itself enormous to entrust to the hands of a single man without
any adequate checks, but it was further enhanced by the tradition of
monarch-worship which had now spread out from Egypt over the entire
Hellenized east, and which was coming to Rome in the head of every
Oriental slave and immigrant. By natural and imperceptible degrees the
idea of the god emperor came to dominate the whole Romanized world.
Only one thing presently remained to remind the god emperor that he was
mortal, and that was the army. The god emperor was never safe upon the
Olympus of the Palatine Hill at Rome. He was only secure while he was
the beloved captain of his legions. And as a consequence only the
hardworking emperors who kept their legions active and in close touch
with themselves had long reigns. The sword overhung the emperor and
spurred him to incessant activity. If he left things to his generals,
one of those generals presently replaced him. This spur was perhaps the
redeeming feature of the Roman Imperial system. In the greater,
compacter, and securer empire of China there was not the same need of
legions, and so there was not the same swift end for lazy or dissipated
or juvenile monarchs that overtook such types in Rome.
XXIX
THE CÆSARS BETWEEN THE SEA AND THE GREAT PLAINS OF THE OLD WORLD[256]
§ 1. _A Short Catalogue of Emperors._ § 2. _Roman Civilization at
its Zenith._ § 3. _Limitations of the Roman Mind._ § 4. _The Stir
of the Great Plains._ § 5. _The Western (true Roman) Empire
crumples up._ § 6. _The Eastern (revived Hellenic) Empire._
§ 1
Western writers are apt, through their patriotic predispositions, to
overestimate the organization, civilizing work, and security of the
absolute monarchy that established itself in Rome after the accession of
Augustus Cæsar. From it we derive the political traditions of Britain,
France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, and these countries loom big in the
perspectives of European writers. By the scale of a world history the
Roman Empire ceases to seem so overwhelmingly important. It lasted about
four centuries in all before it was completely shattered. The Byzantine
Empire was no genuine continuation of it; it was a resumption of the
Hellenic Empire of Alexander; it spoke Greek; its monarch had a Roman
title no doubt, but so for that matter had the late Tsar of Bulgaria.
During its four centuries of life the empire of Rome had phases of
division and complete chaos; its prosperous years, if they are gathered
together and added up, do not amount in all to a couple of centuries.
Compared with the quiet steady expansion, the security, and the
civilizing task of the contemporary Chinese Empire, or with Egypt
between 4000 and 1000 B.C., orwith Sumeria before the Semitic conquest,
this amounts to a mere incident in history. The Persian Empire of
Cyrus, again, which reached from the Hellespont to the Indus, had as
high a standard of civilization; and its homelands remained unconquered
and fairly prosperous for over two hundred years. Its predecessor, the
Median Empire, had endured for half a century. After a brief submergence
by Alexander the Great, it rose again as the Seleucid Empire, which
endured for some centuries. The Seleucid dominion shrank at last to the
west of the Euphrates, and became a part of the Roman Empire; but
Persia, revived by the Parthians as a new Persian Empire, first under
the Arsacids and then under the Sassanids, outlived the empire of Rome.
The Sassanids repeatedly carried war into the Byzantine Empire, and held
the line of the Euphrates steadfastly. In 616 A.D. under Chosroes II,
they were holding Damascus, Jerusalem, and Egypt, and threatening the
Hellespont. But there has been no tradition to keep alive the glories of
the Sassanids. The reputation of Rome has flourished through the
prosperity of her heirs. The tradition of Rome is greater than its
reality.
History distinguishes two chief groups of Roman emperors who were great
administrators. The first of these groups began with:--
Augustus Cæsar (27 B.C. to 14 A.D.), the Octavian of the previous
section, who worked hard at the reorganization of the provincial
governments and at financial reform. He established a certain tradition
of lawfulness and honesty in the bureaucracy, and he restrained the more
monstrous corruptions and tyrannies by giving the provincial citizen the
right to appeal to Cæsar. But he fixed the European boundaries of the
empire along the Rhine and Danube, so leaving Germany, which is the
necessary backbone of a safe and prosperous Europe, to barbarism; and he
made a similar limitation in the east at the Euphrates, leaving Armenia
independent, to be a constant bone of contention with the Arsacids and
Sassanids. It is doubtful whether he considered that he was fixing the
final boundaries of the empire along these lines, or whether he thought
it desirable to consolidate for some years before any further attempts
at expansion.
[Illustration: The EMPIRE in the time of TRAJAN]
Tiberius (14 to 37 A.D.) is also described as a capable ruler, but he
became intensely unpopular in Rome, and it would seem that he was
addicted to gross and abominable vices. But his indulgence in these and
his personal tyrannies and cruelties did not interfere with the general
prosperity of the empire. It is difficult to judge him; nearly all our
sources of information are manifestly hostile to him.
Caligula (37 to 41 A.D.) was insane, but the empire carried on during
four years of eccentricity at its head. Finally he was murdered in his
palace by his servants, and there seems to have been an attempt to
restore the senatorial government, an attempt which was promptly
suppressed by the household legions.
Claudius (41 to 54 A.D.), the uncle of Caligula, upon whom the choice of
the soldiers fell, was personally uncouth, but he seems to have been a
hardworking and fairly capable administrator. He advanced the westward
boundary of the empire by annexing the southern half of Britain. He was
poisoned by Agrippina, the mother of his adopted son, Nero, and a woman
of great charm and force of character.
Nero (54 to 68 A.D.), like Tiberius, is credited with monstrous vices
and cruelties, but the empire had acquired sufficient momentum to carry
on through his fourteen years of power. He certainly murdered his
devoted but troublesome mother and his wife, the latter as a mark of
devotion to a lady, Poppæa, who then married him; but the domestic
infelicities of the Cæsars are no part of our present story. The reader
greedy for criminal particulars must go to the classical source,
Suetonius. These various Cæsars and their successors and their womenkind
were probably no worse essentially than most weak and passionate human
beings, but they had no real religion, being themselves gods; they had
no wide knowledge on which to build high ambitions, their women were
fierce and often illiterate, and they were under no restraints of law or
custom. They were surrounded by creatures ready to stimulate their
slightest wishes and to translate their vaguest impulses into action.
What are mere passing black thoughts and angry impulses with most of us
became therefore deeds with them. Before a man condemns Nero as a
different species of being from himself, he should examine his own
secret thoughts very carefully. Nero became intensely unpopular in Rome,
and it is interesting to note that he became unpopular not because he
murdered and poisoned his intimate relations, but because there was an
insurrection in Britain under a certain Queen Boadicea, and the Roman
forces suffered a great disaster (61 A.D.), and because there was a
destructive earthquake in Southern Italy. The Roman population, true to
its Etruscan streak, never religious and always superstitious, did not
mind a wicked Cæsar, but it did object strongly to an unpropitious one.
The Spanish legions rose in insurrection under an elderly general of
seventy-three, Galba, whom they acclaimed emperor. He advanced upon Rome
carried in a litter. Nero, hopeless of support, committed suicide (68
A.D.).
Galba, however, was only one of a group of would-be emperors. The
generals in command of the Rhine legions, the Palatine troops, and the
eastern armies, each attempted to seize power. Rome saw four emperors in
a year, Galba, Otho, Vitellus, and Vespasian; the fourth, Vespasian
(69-79 A.D.), from the eastern command, had the firmest grip, and held
and kept the prize. But with Nero the line of Cæsars born or adopted
ended. Cæsar ceased to be the family name of the Roman emperors, and
became a title, Divus Cæsar, the Cæsar god. The monarchy took a step
forward towards orientalism by an increased insistence upon the worship
of the ruler.
Vespasian (69 to 79 A.D.) and his sons Titus (79 A.D.) and Domitian (81
A.D.) constitute, as it were, a second dynasty, the Flavian; then after
the assassination of Domitian came a group of emperors related to one
another not by blood, but by adoption, the adoptive emperors. Nerva (96
A.D.) was the first of this line, and Trajan (98 A.D.) the second. They
were followed by the indefatigable Hadrian (117 A.D.), Antoninus Pius
(138 A.D.), and Marcus Aurelius (161 to 180 A.D.). Under both the
Flavians and the Antonines the boundaries of the empire crept forward
again. North Britain was annexed in 84 A.D., the angle of the Rhine and
Danube was filled in, and what is now Transylvania was made into a new
province, Dacia. Trajan also invaded Parthia and annexed Armenia,
Assyria, and Mesopotamia. Under his rule the empire reached its maximum
extent. Hadrian, his successor, was of a cautious and retractile
disposition. He abandoned these new eastern conquests of Trajan’s, and
he also abandoned North Britain. He adopted the Chinese idea of the
limiting wall against barbarism, an excellent idea so long as the
pressure of population on the imperial side of the wall is greater than
the pressure from without, but worthless otherwise. He built Hadrian’s
wall across Britain, and a palisade between the Rhine and the Danube.
The full tide of Roman expansion was past, and in the reign of his
successor the North European frontier was already actively on the
defensive against the aggression of Teutonic and Slavic tribes.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus is one of those figures in history about which
men differ widely and intensely. To some critics he seems to have been a
priggish person; he dabbled in religions, and took a pleasure in
conducting priestly ceremonies in priestly garments--a disposition
offensive to common men--and they resent his alleged failure to restrain
the wickedness of his wife Faustina. The stories of his domestic
infelicity, however, rest on no very good foundations, though certainly
his son Commodus was a startling person for a good home to produce. On
the other hand, he was unquestionably a devoted and industrious emperor,
holding social order together through a series of disastrous years of
vile weather, great floods, failing harvests and famine, barbaric raids
and revolts, and at last a terrible universal pestilence. Says F. W.
Farrar, quoted in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, “He regarded himself as
being, in fact, the servant of all. The registry of the citizens, the
suppression of litigation, the elevation of public morals, the care of
minors, the retrenchment of public expenses, the limitation of
gladiatorial games and shows, the care of roads, the restoration of
senatorial privileges, the appointment of none but worthy magistrates,
even the regulation of street traffic, these and numberless other duties
so completely absorbed his attention that, in spite of indifferent
health, they often kept him at severe labour from early morning till
long after midnight. His position, indeed, often necessitated his
presence at games and shows; but on these occasions he occupied himself
either in reading, or being read to, or in writing notes. He was one of
those who held that nothing should be done hastily, and that few crimes
were worse than waste of time.”
But it is not by these industries that he is now remembered. He was one
of the greatest exponents of the Stoical philosophy, and in his
_Meditations_, jotted down in camp and court, he has put so much of a
human soul on record as to raise up for himself in each generation a
fresh series of friends and admirers.
With the death of Marcus Aurelius this phase of unity and comparatively
good government came to an end, and his son Commodus inaugurated an age
of disorder. Practically the empire had been at peace within itself for
two hundred years. Now for a hundred years the student of Roman history
must master the various criminology of a number of inadequate emperors,
while the frontier crumbled and receded under barbarian pressure. One or
two names only seem to be the names of able men: such were Septimius
Severus, Aurelian, and Probus. Septimius Severus was a Carthaginian, and
his sister was never able to master Latin. She conducted her Roman
household in the Punic language, which must have made Cato the elder
turn in his grave. The rest of the emperors of this period were chiefly
adventurers too unimportant to the general scheme of things for us to
note. At times there were separate emperors ruling in different parts of
the distracted empire. From our present point of view the Emperor
Decius, who was defeated and killed during a great raid of the Goths
into Thrace in 251 A.D., and the Emperor Valerian, who, together with
the great city of Antioch, was captured by the Sassanid Shah of Persia
in 260 A.D., are worthy of notice because they mark the insecurity of
the whole Roman system, and the character of the outer pressure upon it.
So too is Claudius, “the Conqueror of the Goths,” because he gained a
great victory over these people at Nish in Serbia (270 A.D.), and
because he died, like Pericles, of the plague.
Through all these centuries intermittent pestilences were playing a part
in weakening races and altering social conditions, a part that has still
to be properly worked out by historians. There was, for instance, a
great plague throughout the empire between the years 164 and 180 A.D. in
the reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. It probably did much to
disorganize social life and prepare the way for the troubles that
followed the accession of Commodus. This same pestilence devastated
China, as we shall note in § 4 of this chapter. Considerable
fluctuations of climate had also been going on in the first and second
centuries, producing stresses and shiftings of population, whose force
historians have still to appraise. But before we go on to tell of the
irruptions of the barbarians and the attempts of such later emperors as
Diocletian (284 A.D.) and Constantine the Great (312 A.D.) to hold
together the heaving and splitting vessel of the state we must describe
something of the conditions of human life in the Roman Empire during its
two centuries of prosperity.
§ 2
The impatient reader of history may be disposed to count the two
centuries of order between 27 B.C. and 180 A.D. as among the wasted
opportunities of mankind. It was an age of spending rather than of
creation, an age of architecture and trade in which the rich grew richer
and the poor poorer and the soul and spirit of man decayed. Looked at
superficially, as a man might have looked at it from an aeroplane a
couple of thousand feet in the air, there was a considerable flourish of
prosperity. Everywhere, from York to Cyrene and from Lisbon to Antioch,
he would have noted large and well-built cities, with temples, theatres,
amphitheatres, markets, and the like; thousands of such cities, supplied
by great aqueducts and served by splendid high roads, whose stately
remains astonish us to this day. He would have noted an abundant
cultivation, and have soared too high to discover that this cultivation
was the grudging work of slaves. Upon the Mediterranean and the Red Sea
a considerable traffic would be visible; and the sight of two ships
alongside each other would not at that altitude reveal the fact that one
was a pirate and plundering the other.
And even if the observer came down to a closer scrutiny, there would
still be much accumulated improvement to note. There had been a
softening of manners and a general refinement since the days of Julius
Cæsar. With this there had been a real increase of humane feeling.
During the period of the Antonines, laws for the protection of slaves
from extreme cruelty came into existence, and it was no longer
permissible to sell them to the gladiatorial schools. Not only were the
cities outwardly more splendidly built, but within the homes of the
wealthy there had been great advances in the art of decoration. The
gross feasting, animal indulgence, and vulgar display of the earlier
days of Roman prosperity were now tempered by a certain refinement.
Dress had become richer, finer, and more beautiful. There was a great
trade in silk with remote China, for the mulberry tree and the silkworm
had not yet begun to move west. By the time silk had ended its long and
varied journey to Rome it was worth its weight in gold. Yet it was used
abundantly, and there was a steady flow of the precious metals eastward
in exchange. There had been very considerable advances in gastronomy and
the arts of entertainment. Petronius describes a feast given by a
wealthy man under the early Cæsars, a remarkable succession of courses,
some delicious, some amazing, exceeding anything that even the
splendours and imagination of modern New York could produce; and the
festival was varied by music and by displays of tight-rope dancing,
juggling, Homeric recitations, and the like. There was a considerable
amount of what we may describe as “rich men’s culture” throughout the
empire. Books were far more plentiful than they had been before the time
of the Cæsars. Men prided themselves upon their libraries, even when the
cares and responsibilities of property made them too busy to give their
literary treasures much more than a passing examination. The knowledge
of Greek spread eastward and of Latin westward, and if the prominent men
of this or that British or Gallic city lacked any profound Greek culture
themselves, they could always turn to some slave or other, whose
learning had been guaranteed of the highest quality by the slave-dealer,
to supply the deficiency.
The generation of Cato had despised Greeks and the Greek language, but
now all that was changed. The prestige of Greek learning of an approved
and settled type was as high in the Rome of Antoninus Pius as it was in
the Oxford and Cambridge of Victorian England. The Greek scholar
received the same mixture of unintelligent deference and practical
contempt. There was a very considerable amount of Greek scholarship, and
of written criticism and commentary. Indeed there was so great an
admiration for Greek letters as almost completely to destroy the Greek
spirit; and the recorded observations of Aristotle were valued so highly
as to preclude any attempt to imitate his organization of further
inquiry. It is noteworthy that while Aristotle in the original Greek
fell like seed upon stony soil in the Roman world, he was, in Syrian and
Arabic translations, immensely stimulating to the Arabic civilization
of a thousand years later. Nor were the æsthetic claims of Latin
neglected in this heyday of Greek erudition. As Greece had her epics and
so forth, the Romans felt that they too must have their epics. The age
of Augustus was an age of imitative literature. Virgil in the Æneid set
himself modestly but resolutely, and with an elegant sort of
successfulness, to parallel Homer, just as Lord Tennyson, the poet
laureate of Queen Victoria, using the mediæval literature about King
Arthur as his material, did a similar service for Great Britain in his
_Idylls of the King_.
All this wide-spread culture of the wealthy householder is to the credit
of the early Roman Empire, and Gibbon makes the most of it in the sunny
review of the age of the Antonines with which he opens his _Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire_. His design for that great work demanded a
prelude of splendour and tranquillity. But he was far too shrewd and
subtle not to qualify his apparent approval of the conditions he
describes. “Under the Roman Empire,” he writes, “the labour of an
industrious and ingenious people was variously but incessantly employed
in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table, their houses,
and their furniture, the favourites of fortune united every refinement
of convenience, of elegance, and of splendour, whatever could soothe
their pride, or gratify their sensuality. Such refinements, under the
odious name of luxury, have been severely arraigned by the moralists of
every age; and it might perhaps be more conducive to the virtue, as well
as happiness, of mankind, if all possessed the necessaries, and none the
superfluities of life. But in the present imperfect condition of
society, luxury, though it may proceed from vice or folly, seems to be
the only means that can correct the unequal distribution of property.
The diligent mechanic and the skilful artist, who have obtained no share
in the division of the earth, receive a voluntary tax from the
possessors of land; and the latter are prompted, by a sense of interest,
to improve those estates, with whose produce they may purchase
additional pleasure. This operation, the particular effects of which are
felt in every society, acted with much more diffuse energy in the Roman
world. The provinces would soon have been exhausted of their wealth, if
the manufactures and commerce of luxury had not insensibly restored to
the industrious subjects the sums which were exacted from them by the
arms and authority of Rome.” And so on, with a sting of satire in every
fold of the florid description.
If we look a little more widely than a hovering aeroplane can do at the
movement of races upon the earth, or a little more closely than an
inspection of streets, amphitheatres, and banquets goes, into the souls
and thoughts of men, we shall find that this impressive display of
material prosperity is merely the shining garment of a polity blind to
things without and things within, and blind to the future. If, for
instance, we compare the two centuries of Roman ascendancy and
opportunity, the first and second centuries A.D., with the two centuries
of Greek and Hellenic life beginning about 466 B.C. with the supremacy
of Pericles in Athens, we are amazed by--we cannot call it an
inferiority, it is a complete absence of science. The incuriousness of
the Roman rich and the Roman rulers was more massive and monumental even
than their architecture.
In one field of knowledge particularly we might have expected the Romans
to have been alert and enterprising, and that was geography. Their
political interests demanded a steadfast inquiry into the state of
affairs beyond their frontiers, and yet that inquiry was never made.
There is practically no literature of Roman travel beyond the imperial
limits, no such keen and curious accounts as Herodotus gives of the
Scythians, the Africans, and the like. There is nothing in Latin to
compare with the early descriptions of India and Siberia that are to be
found in Chinese. The Roman legions went at one time into Scotland, yet
there remains no really intelligent account of Picts or Scots, much less
any glance at the seas beyond. Such explorations as those of Hanno or
Pharaoh Necho seem to have been altogether beyond the scope of the Roman
imagination. It is probable that after the destruction of Carthage the
amount of shipping that went out into the Atlantic through the Straits
of Gibraltar fell to inconsiderable proportions. Still more impossible
in this world of vulgar wealth, enslaved intelligence, and bureaucratic
rule was any further development of the astronomy and physiography of
Alexandria. The Romans do not seem even to have inquired what manner of
men wove the silk and prepared the spices or collected the amber and the
pearls that came into their markets. Yet the channels of inquiry were
open and easy; pathways led in every direction to the most convenient
“jumping-off places” for explorers it is possible to imagine.
“The most remote countries of the ancient world were ransacked to supply
the pomp and delicacy of Rome. The forests of Scythia afforded some
valuable furs. Amber was brought overland from the shores of the Baltic
to the Danube, and the barbarians were astonished at the price which
they received in exchange for so useless a commodity. There was a
considerable demand for Babylonian carpets and other manufactures of the
East; but the most important branch of foreign trade was carried on with
Arabia and India. Every year, about the time of the summer solstice, a
fleet of a hundred and twenty vessels sailed from Myos-hormos, a port of
Egypt on the Red Sea. By the periodical assistance of the monsoons, they
traversed the ocean in about forty days. The coast of Malabar, or the
island of Ceylon, was the usual term of their navigation, and it was in
those markets that the merchants from the more remote countries of Asia
expected their arrival. The return of the fleet to Egypt was fixed to
the months of December or January, and as soon as their rich cargo had
been transported, on the backs of camels, from the Red Sea to the Nile,
and had descended that river as far as Alexandria, it was poured,
without delay, into the capital of the empire.”[257]
Yet Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch its
gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn anything of
India, China, Persia or Scythia, Buddha or Zoroaster, or about the Huns,
the Negroes, the people of Scandinavia, or the secrets of the western
sea.
When we realize the uninspiring quality of the social atmosphere which
made this indifference possible, we are able to account for the failure
of Rome during its age of opportunity to develop any physical or
chemical science, and as a consequence to gain any increased control
over matter. Most of the physicians in Rome were Greeks and many of them
slaves--for the Roman wealthy did not even understand that a bought mind
is a spoilt mind. Yet this was not due to any want of natural genius
among the Roman people; it was due entirely to their social and economic
conditions. From the Middle Ages to the present day Italy has produced
a great number of brilliant scientific men. And one of the most shrewd
and inspired of scientific writers was an Italian, Lucretius, who lived
between the time of Marius and Julius Cæsar (about 100 B.C. to about 55
B.C.). This amazing man was of the quality of Leonardo da Vinci (also an
Italian) or Newton. He wrote a long Latin poem about the processes of
Nature, _De Rerum Natura_, in which he guessed with astonishing insight
about the constitution of matter and about the early history of mankind.
Osborn in his _Old Stone Age_ quotes with admiration long passages from
Lucretius about primitive man, so good and true are they to-day. But
this was an individual display, a seed that bore no fruit. Roman science
was stillborn, into a suffocating atmosphere of vile wealth and military
oppression. The true figure to represent the classical Roman attitude to
science is not Lucretius, but that Roman soldier who hacked Archimedes
to death at the storming of Syracuse.
And if physical and biological science wilted and died on the stony soil
of Roman prosperity, political and social science never had a chance to
germinate. Political discussion would have been treason to the emperor,
social or economic inquiry would have threatened the rich. So Rome,
until disaster fell upon her, never examined into her own social health,
never questioned the ultimate value of her hard officialism.
Consequently, there was no one who realized the gravity of her failure
to develop any intellectual imagination to hold her empire together, any
general education in common ideas that would make men fight and work for
the empire as men will fight and work for a dear possession. But the
rulers of the Roman Empire did not want their citizens to fight for
anything in any spirit at all. The rich had eaten the heart out of their
general population, and they were content with the meal they had made.
The legions were filled with Germans, Britons, Numidians, and the like;
and until the very end the wealthy Romans thought they could go on
buying barbarians to defend them against the enemy without and the rebel
poor within. How little was done in education by the Romans is shown by
an account of what was done. Says Mr. H. Stuart Jones,[258] “Julius
Cæsar bestowed Roman citizenship on ‘teachers of the liberal arts’;
Vespasian endowed professorships of Greek and Latin oratory at Rome; and
later emperors, especially Antoninus Pius, extended the same benefits to
the provinces. Local enterprise and munificence were also devoted to the
cause of education; we learn from the correspondence of the younger
Pliny that public schools were founded in the towns of Northern Italy.
But though there was a wide diffusion of knowledge under the empire,
there was no true intellectual progress. Augustus, it is true, gathered
about him;the most brilliant writers of his time, and the début of the
new monarchy coincided with the Golden Age of Roman literature; but this
was of brief duration, and the beginnings of the Christian era saw the
triumph of classicism and the first steps in the decline which awaits
all literary movements which look to the past rather than the future.”
There is a diagnosis of the intellectual decadence of the age in a
treatise upon the sublime by a Greek writer who wrote somewhen in the
second, third, or fourth century A.D., and who may possibly have been
Longinus Philologus,[259] which states very distinctly one manifest
factor in the mental sickness of the Roman world. He is cited by Gibbon:
“The sublime Longinus, who, in somewhat a later period and in the court
of a Syrian queen, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and
laments the degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their
sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed their talents. ‘In
the same manner,’ says he, ‘as some children always remain pigmies,
whose infant limbs have been too closely confined, thus our tender
minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are
unable to expand themselves or to attain that well-proportioned
greatness which we admire in the ancients; who, living under a popular
government, wrote with all the same freedom as they acted.’”
But this critic grasped only one aspect of the restraints upon mental
activity. The leading-strings that kept the Roman mind in a permanent
state of infantilism constituted a double servitude; they were economic
as well as political. The account Gibbon gives of the life and
activities of a certain Herodes Atticus, who lived in the time of
Hadrian, shows just how little was the share of the ordinary citizen in
the outward magnificence of the time. This Atticus had an immense
fortune, and he amused himself by huge architectural benefactions to
various cities. Athens was given a racecourse and a theatre of cedar,
curiously carved, was set up there to the memory of his wife; a theatre
was built at Corinth, a racecourse was given to Delphi, baths to
Thermopylæ, an aqueduct to Canusium, and so on and so on. One is struck
by the spectacle of a world of slaves and common people who were not
consulted and over whose heads, without any participation on their part,
this rich man indulged in his displays of “taste.”[260] Numerous
inscriptions in Greece and Asia still preserve the name of Herodes
Atticus, “patron and benefactor,” who ranged about the empire as though
it was his private garden, commemorating himself by these
embellishments. He did not confine himself to splendid buildings. He was
also a philosopher, though none of his wisdom has survived. He had a
large villa near Athens, and there philosophers were welcome guests so
long as they convinced their patron of the soundness of their
pretensions, received his discourses with respect, and did not offend
him by insolent controversy.
The world, it is evident, was not progressing during these two centuries
of Roman prosperity. But was it happy in its stagnation? There are signs
of a very unmistakable sort that the great mass of human beings in the
empire, a mass numbering something between a hundred and a hundred and
fifty millions, was not happy, was probably very acutely miserable,
beneath its outward magnificence. True there were no great wars and
conquests within the empire, little of famine or fire or sword to
afflict mankind; but, on the other hand, there was a terrible restraint
by government, and still more by the property of the rich, upon the free
activities of nearly everyone. Life for the great majority who were
neither rich nor official, nor the womankind and the parasites of the
rich and official, must have been laborious, tedious, and lacking in
interest and freedom to a degree that a modern mind can scarcely
imagine.
Three things in particular may be cited to sustain the opinion that
this period was a period of widespread unhappiness. The first of these
is the extraordinary apathy of the population to political events. They
saw one upstart pretender to empire succeed another with complete
indifference. Such things did not seem to matter to them; hope had gone.
When presently the barbarians poured into the empire, there was nothing
but the legions to face them. There was no popular uprising against them
at all. Everywhere the barbarians must have been outnumbered if only the
people had resisted. But the people did not resist. It is manifest that
to the bulk of its inhabitants the Roman Empire did not seem to be a
thing worth fighting for. To the slaves and common people the barbarian
probably seemed to promise more freedom and less indignity than the
pompous rule of the imperial official and grinding employment by the
rich. The looting and burning of palaces and an occasional massacre did
not shock the folk of the Roman underworld as it shocked the wealthy and
cultured people to whom we owe such accounts as we have of the breaking
down of the imperial system. Great numbers of slaves and common people
probably joined the barbarians, who knew little of racial or patriotic
prejudices, and were openhanded to any promising recruit. No doubt in
many cases the population found that the barbarian was a worse
infliction even than the tax-gatherer and the slave-driver. But that
discovery came too late for resistance or the restoration of the old
order.
And as a second symptom that points to the same conclusion that life was
hardly worth living for the poor and the slaves and the majority of
people during the age of the Antonines, we must reckon the steady
depopulation of the empire. People refused to have children. They did
so, we suggest, because their homes were not safe from oppression,
because in the case of slaves there was no security that the husband and
wife would not be separated, because there was no pride nor reasonable
hope in children any more. In modern states the great breeding-ground
has always been the agricultural countryside where there is a more or
less secure peasantry; but under the Roman Empire the peasant and the
small cultivator was either a worried debtor, or he was held in a
network of restraints that made him a spiritless serf, or he had been
ousted altogether by the gang production of slaves.
A third indication that this outwardly flourishing period was one of
deep unhappiness and mental distress for vast multitudes, is to be found
in the spread of new religious movements throughout the population. We
have seen how in the case of the little country of Judea a whole nation
may be infected by the persuasion that life is unsatisfactory and
_wrong_, and that something is needed to set it right. The mind of the
Jews, as we know, had crystallized about the idea of the Promise of the
One True God and the coming of a Saviour or Messiah. Rather different
ideas from these were spreading through the Roman Empire. They were but
varying answers to one universal question: “What must we do for
salvation?” A frequent and natural consequence of disgust with life as
it is, is to throw the imagination forward to an after-life, which is to
redeem all the miseries and injustices of this one. The belief in such
compensation is a great opiate for present miseries. Egyptian religion
had long been saturated with anticipations of immortality, and we have
seen how central was that idea to the cult of Serapis and Isis at
Alexandria. The ancient mysteries of Demeter and Orpheus, the mysteries
of the Mediterranean race, revived and made a sort of _theocrasia_ with
these new cults.
A second great religious movement was Mithraism, a development of
Zoroastrianism, a religion of very ancient Aryan origin, traceable back
to the Indo-Iranian people before they split into Persians and Hindus.
We cannot here examine its mysteries in any detail.[261] Mithras was a
god of light, a Sun of Righteousness, and in the shrines of the cult he
was always represented as slaying a sacred bull whose blood was the seed
of life. Suffice it that, complicated with many added ingredients, this
worship of Mithras came into the Roman Empire about the time of Pompey
the Great, and began to spread very widely under the Cæsars and
Antonines. Like the Isis religion, it promised immortality. Its
followers were mainly slaves, soldiers, and distressed people. In its
methods of worship, in the burning of candles before the altar and so
forth, it had a certain superficial resemblance to the later
developments of the ritual of the third great religious movement in the
Roman world, Christianity.
Christianity also was a doctrine of immortality and salvation, and it
too spread at first chiefly among the lowly and unhappy. Christianity
has been denounced by modern writers as a “slave religion.” It was. It
took the slaves and the downtrodden, and it gave them hope and restored
their self-respect, so that they stood up for righteousness like men and
faced persecution and torment. But of the origins and quality of
Christianity we will tell more fully in a later chapter.
§ 3
We have already shown reason for our statement that the Roman imperial
system was a very unsound political growth indeed. It is absurd to write
of its statecraft; it had none. At its best it had a bureaucratic
administration which kept the peace of the world for a time and failed
altogether to secure it.
Let us note here the main factors in its failure.
The clue to all its failure lies in the absence of any free mental
activity and any organization for the increase, development, and
application of knowledge. It respected wealth and it despised science.
It gave government to the rich, and imagined that wise men could be
bought and bargained for in the slave markets when they were needed. It
was, therefore, a colossally ignorant and unimaginative empire. It
foresaw nothing.
It had no strategic foresight, because it was blankly ignorant of
geography and ethnology. It knew nothing of the conditions of Russia,
Central Asia, and the East. It was content to keep the Rhine and Danube
as its boundaries, and to make no effort to Romanize Germany. But we
need only look at the map of Europe and Asia showing the Roman Empire to
see that a willing and incorporated Germany was absolutely essential to
the life and security of Western Europe. Excluded, Germany became a
wedge that needed only the impact of the Hunnish hammer to split up the
whole system.
Moreover, this neglect to push the boundaries northward to the Baltic
left that sea and the North Sea as a region of experiment and training
and instruction in seamanship for the Northmen of Scandinavia, Denmark,
and the Frisian coast. But Rome went on its way quite stupidly,
oblivious to the growth of a newer and more powerful piracy in the
north.
The same unimaginative quality made the Romans leave the seaways of the
Mediterranean undeveloped. When presently the barbarians pressed down to
the warm water, we read of no swift transport of armies from Spain or
Africa or Asia to the rescue of Italy and the Adriatic coasts. Instead,
we see the Vandals becoming masters of the western Mediterranean without
so much as a naval battle.
The Romans had been held at the Euphrates by an array of mounted
archers. It was clear that as the legion was organized it was useless in
wide open country, and it should have been equally clear that sooner or
later the mounted nomads of east Germany, south Russia, or Parthia were
bound to try conclusions with the empire. But the Romans, two hundred
years after Cæsar’s time, were still marching about, the same drilled
and clanking cohorts they had always been, easily ridden round and shot
to pieces. The empire had learnt nothing even from Carrhæ.
The incapacity of the Roman imperialism for novelty in methods of
transport again is amazing. It was patent that their power and unity
depended upon the swift movement of troops and supplies from one part of
the empire to another. The republic made magnificent roads; the empire
never improved upon them. Four hundred years before the Antonines, Hero
of Alexandria had made the first steam-engine. Beautiful records of such
beginnings of science were among the neglected treasures of the rich
men’s libraries throughout the imperial domains. They were seed lying on
stony ground. The armies and couriers of Marcus Aurelius drudged along
the roads exactly as the armies of Scipio Africanus had done three
centuries before them.
The Roman writers were always lamenting the effeminacy of the age. It
was their favourite cant. They recognized that the free men of the
forest and steppes and desert were harder and more desperate fighters
than their citizens, but the natural corollary of developing the
industrial power of their accumulations of population to make a
countervailing equipment never entered their heads. Instead they took
the barbarians into their legions, taught them the arts of war, marched
them about the empire, and returned them, with their lesson well learnt,
to their own people.
In view of these obvious negligences, it is no wonder that the Romans
disregarded that more subtle thing, the soul of the empire altogether,
and made no effort to teach or train or win its common people into any
conscious participation with its life. Such teaching or training would
indeed have run counter to all the ideas of the rich men and the
imperial officials. They had made a tool of religion; science,
literature, and education they had entrusted to the care of slaves, who
were bred and trained and sold like dogs or horses; ignorant, pompous,
and base, the Roman adventurers of finance and property who created the
empire lorded it with a sense of the utmost security while their
destruction gathered without the empire and within.
By the second and third centuries A.D. the overtaxed and overstrained
imperial machine was already staggering towards its downfall.
§ 4[262]
And now it is necessary, if we are to understand clearly the true
situation of the Roman Empire, to turn our eyes to the world beyond its
northern and eastern borders, the world of the plains, that stretches,
with scarcely a break, from Holland across Germany and Russia to the
mountains of Central Asia and Mongolia, and to give a little attention
to the parallel empire in China that was now consolidating and
developing a far tougher and more enduring moral and intellectual unity
than the Romans ever achieved.
“It is the practice,” says Mr. E. H. Parker, “even amongst our most
highly educated men in Europe, to deliver sonorous sentences about being
‘masters of the world,’ ‘bringing all nations of the earth under her
sway,’ and so on, when in reality only some corner of the Mediterranean
is involved, or some ephemeral sally into Persia and Gaul. Cyrus and
Alexander, Darius and Xerxes, Cæsar and Pompey, all made very
interesting excursions, but they were certainly not on a larger scale or
charged with greater human interest than the campaigns which were going
on at the other end of Asia. Western civilization possessed much in art
and science for which China never cared, but, on the other hand, the
Chinese developed a historical and critical literature, a courtesy of
demeanour, a luxury of clothing, and an administrative system of which
Europe might have been proud. In one word, the history of the Far East
is quite as interesting as that of the Far West. It only requires to be
able to read it. When we brush away contemptuously from our notice the
tremendous events which took place on the plains of Tartary, we must not
blame the Chinese too much for declining to interest themselves in the
doings of what to them appear insignificant states dotted round the
Mediterranean and Caspian, which, at this time, was practically all the
world of which we knew in Europe.”[263]
We have already mentioned (in chap. xvi. and elsewhere) the name of
Shi-Hwang-ti, who consolidated an empire much smaller, indeed, than the
present limits of China, but still very great and populous, spreading
from the valleys of the Hwang-ho and the Yang Tse. He became king of
Ch’in in 246 B.C. and emperor in 220 B.C., and he reigned until 210
B.C., and during this third of a century he effected much the same work
of consolidation that Augustus Cæsar carried out in Rome two centuries
later. At his death there was dynastic trouble for four years, and then
(206 B.C.) a fresh dynasty, the Han, established itself and ruled for
two hundred and twenty-nine years. The opening quarter century of the
Christian era was troubled by a usurper; then what is called the Later
Han Dynasty recovered power and ruled for another century and a half,
until China, in the time of the Antonines, was so devastated by an
eleven-year pestilence as to fall into disorder. This same pestilence,
we may note, also helped to produce a century of confusion in the
Western world (see § 1). But altogether, until this happened, for more
than four hundred years Central China was generally at peace, and on
the whole well governed, a cycle of strength and prosperity unparalleled
by anything in the experience of the Western world.
Only the first of the Han monarchs continued the policy of Shi-Hwang-ti
against the _literati_. His successor restored the classics, for the old
separatist tradition was broken, and in the uniformity of learning
throughout the empire lay, he saw, the cement of Chinese unity. While
the Roman world was still blind to the need of any universal mental
organization, the Han emperors were setting up a uniform system of
education and of literary degrees throughout China that has maintained
the intellectual solidarity of that great and always expanding country
into modern times. The bureaucrats of Rome were of the most
miscellaneous origins and traditions; the bureaucrats of China were, and
are still, made in the same mould, all members of one tradition. Since
the Han days China has experienced great vicissitudes of political
fortune, but they have never changed her fundamental character; she has
been divided, but she has always recovered her unity; she has been
conquered, and she has always absorbed and assimilated her conquerors.
But from our present point of view, the most important consequences of
this consolidation of China under Shi-Hwang-ti and the Hans was in its
reaction upon the unsettled tribes of the northern and western border of
China. Throughout the disordered centuries before the time of
Shi-Hwang-ti, the Hiung-nu or Huns had occupied Mongolia and large
portions of northern China, and had raided freely into China and
interfered freely in Chinese politics. The new power and organization of
the Chinese civilization began to change this state of affairs for good
and all.
[Illustration: Map of ASIA (with EUROPE) to illustrate the general
conditions of life during the Historical Period.]
We have already, in our first account of Chinese beginnings, noted the
existence of these Huns. It is necessary now to explain briefly who and
what they were. Even in using this word Hun as a general equivalent for
the Hiung-nu, we step on to controversial ground. In our accounts of the
development of the Western world we have had occasion to name the
Scythians, and to explain the difficulty of distinguishing clearly
between Cimmerians, Sarmatians, Medes, Persians, Parthians, Goths, and
other more or less nomadic, more or less Aryan peoples who drifted to
and fro in a great arc between the Danube and Central Asia. While
sections of the Aryans were moving south and acquiring and developing
civilization, these other Aryan peoples were developing mobility and
nomadism; they were learning the life of the tent, the wagon, and the
herd. They were learning also to use milk as a food basis, and were
probably becoming less agricultural, less disposed to take even snatch
crops, than they had been. Their development was being aided by a slow
change in climate that was replacing the swamps and forests and
parklands of South Russia and Central Asia by steppes, by wide grazing
lands that is, which favoured a healthy, unsettled life, and
necessitated an annual movement between summer and winter pasture. These
peoples had only the lowest political forms; they split up, they mingled
together; the various races had identical social habits; and so it is
that the difficulty, the impossibility of sharp distinctions between
them arises. Now the case of the Mongolian races to the north and
north-west of the Chinese civilization is very parallel. There can be
little doubt that the Hiung-nu, the Huns, and the later people called
the Mongols, were all very much the same people, and that the Turks and
Tartars presently branched off from this same drifting Mongolian
population. Kalmucks and Buriats are later developments of the same
strain. Here we shall favour the use of the word “Hun” as a sort of
general term for these tribes, just as we have been free and wide in our
use of “Scythian” in the West.
The consolidation of China was a very serious matter for these Hunnish
peoples. Hitherto their overflow of population had gone adventuring
southward into the disorders of divided China as water goes into a
sponge. Now they found a wall built against them, a firm government, and
disciplined armies cutting them off from the grass plains. And though
the wall held them back, it did not hold back the Chinese. They were
increasing and multiplying through these centuries of peace, and as they
increased and multiplied, they spread steadily with house and plough
wherever the soil permitted. They spread westward into Tibet and
northward and north-westwardly, perhaps to the edge of the Gobi desert.
They spread into the homes and pasturing and hunting-grounds of the
Hunnish nomads, exactly as the white people of the United States spread
westward into the hunting-grounds of the Red Indians. And in spite of
raid and massacre they were just as invincible because they had the
pressure of numbers and a strong avenging government behind them. Even
without the latter support the cultivating civilization of China has
enormous powers of permeation and extension. It has spread slowly and
continuously for three thousand years. It is spreading in Manchuria and
Siberia to-day. It roots deeply where it spreads.
Partly the Huns were civilized and assimilated by the Chinese. The more
northerly Huns were checked and their super-abundant energies were
turned westward. The southern Huns were merged into the imperial
population.
If the reader will examine the map of Central Asia, he will see that
very great mountain barriers separate the Southern, Western, and Eastern
peoples of Asia. (But he should be wary of forming his ideas from a map
upon Mercator’s projection, which enormously exaggerates the areas and
distances of Northern Asia and Siberia.) He will find that from the
central mountain masses three great mountain systems radiate eastward;
the Himalayas going south-eastward, south of Tibet, the Kuen Lun
eastward, north of Tibet, and the Thien Shan north-eastward to join the
Altai mountains. Further to the north is the great plain, still steadily
thawing and drying. Between the Thien Shan and the Kuen Lun is an area,
the Tarim Basin (= roughly Eastern Turkestan), of rivers that never
reach the sea, but end in swamps and intermittent lakes. This basin was
much more fertile in the past than it is now. The mountain barrier to
the west of this Tarim Basin is high, but not forbidding; there are many
practicable routes downward into Western Turkestan, and it is possible
to travel either along the northern foothills of the Kuen Lun or by the
Tarim valley westward from China to Kashgar (where the roads converge),
and so over the mountains to Kokand, Samarkand, and Bokhara. Here then
is the natural meeting-place in history of Aryan and Mongolian. Here or
round by the sea.
[Illustration: Map of CENTRAL ASIA in the 2nd & 1st Centuries
B.C.]
We have already noted how Alexander the Great came to one side of the
barrier in 329 B.C. High among the mountains of Turkestan a lake
preserves his name. Indeed, so living is the tradition of his great
raid, that almost any stone ruin in Central Asia is still ascribed to
“Iskander.” After this brief glimpse, the light of history upon this
region fades again, and when it becomes bright once more it is on the
eastern and not upon the western side. Far away to the east Shi-Hwang-ti
had routed the Huns and walled them out of China proper. A portion of
these people remained in the north of China, a remnant which was
destined to amalgamate with Chinese life under the Hans, but a
considerable section had turned westward and (second and first centuries
B.C.) driven before them a kindred people called the Yueh-Chi, driving
them from the eastern to the western extremity of the Kuen Lun, and at
last right over the barrier into the once Aryan region of Western
Turkestan.[264] These Yueh-Chi conquered the slightly Hellenized kingdom
of Bactria, and mixed with Aryan people there. Later on these Yueh-Chi
became, or were merged with Aryan elements into, a people called the
Indo-Scythians, who went on down the Khyber Pass and conquered northern
portions of India as far as Benares (100-150 A.D.), wiping out the last
vestiges of Hellenic rule in India. This big splash over of the
Mongolian races westward was probably not the first of such splashes,
but it is the first recorded splash. In the rear of the Yueh-Chi were
the Huns, and in the rear of the Huns and turning them now northward was
the vigorous Han Dynasty of China. In the reign of the greatest of the
Han monarchs, Wu-Ti (140-86 B.C.), the Huns had been driven northward
out of the whole of Eastern Turkestan or subjugated, the Tarim Basin
swarmed with Chinese settlers, and caravans were going over westward
with silk and lacquer and jade to trade for the gold and silver of
Armenia and Rome.
The splash over of the Yueh-Chi is recorded, but it is fairly evident
that much westward movement of sections of the Hunnish peoples is not
recorded. From 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. the Chinese Empire maintained a
hard, resolute, advancing front towards nomadism, and the surplus of
the nomads drifted steadily west. There was no such settling down behind
a final frontier on the part of the Chinese as we see in the case of the
Romans at the Rhine and Danube. The drift of the nomads before this
Chinese thrust, century by century, turned southward at first towards
Bactria. The Parthians of the first century B.C. probably mingled
Scythian and Mongolian elements. The “singing arrows” that destroyed the
army of Crassus came, it would seem, originally from the Altai and the
Tian Shan. After the first century B.C. the line of greater attraction
and least resistance lay for a time towards the north of the Caspian. In
a century or so all the country known as Western Turkestan was
“Mongolized,” and so it remains to this day. A second great thrust by
China began about 75 A.D., and accelerated the westward drift of the
nomads. In 102, Pan Chau, a great Chinese general, was sending explorers
from his advanced camp upon the Caspian (or, as some authorities say,
the Persian Gulf) to learn particulars of the Roman power. But their
reports decided him not to proceed.
By the first century A.D. nomadic Mongolian peoples are in evidence upon
the eastern boundaries of Europe, already greatly mixed with Aryan
nomads and with uprooted Aryan elements from the Caspian-Pamir region.
There are Hunnish peoples established between the Caspian Sea and the
Urals. West of them were the Alans, probably also a Mongolian people
with Aryan elements; they had fought against Pompey the Great when he
was in Armenia in 65 B.C. These are as yet the furthest westward peoples
of the new Mongolian advance, and they made no further westward push
until the fourth century A.D. To the north-west the Finns, a Mongolian
people, had long been established as far west as the Baltic.
West of the Huns, beyond the Don, there were Aryan tribes, the Goths.
These Goths had spread south-eastward from their region of origin in
Scandinavia. They were a Teutonic people, and we have already marked
them crossing the Baltic in the map on page 301. They continued to move
south-eastward across Russia, using the rivers and never forgetting
their Baltic watercraft. No doubt they assimilated much Scythian
population as they spread down to the Black Sea. In the first century
A.D. they were in two main divisions, the Ostrogoths, the East Goths,
who were between the Don and the Dnieper, and the Visigoths, or West
Goths, west of the Dnieper. During the first century there was an air of
quiescence over the great plains, but population was accumulating and
the tribes were fermenting. The second and third centuries seem to have
been a phase of comparatively moist seasons and abundant grass.
Presently in the fourth and fifth centuries the weather grew drier and
the grass became scanty, and the nomads stirred afresh.
But it is interesting to note that in the opening century of the
Christian era, the Chinese Empire was strong enough to expel and push
off from itself the surplus of this Mongolian nomadism to the north of
it which presently conquered North India and gathered force and mingled
with Aryan nomadism, and fell at last like an avalanche upon the
weak-backed Roman Empire.
Before we go on to tell of the blows that now began to fall upon the
Roman Empire and of the efforts of one or two great men to arrest the
collapse, we may say a few words about the habits and quality of these
westward-drifting barbaric Mongolian peoples who were now spreading from
the limits of China towards the Black and Baltic Seas. It is still the
European custom to follow the lead of the Roman writers and write of
these Huns and their associates as of something incredibly destructive
and cruel. But such accounts as we have from the Romans were written in
periods of panic, and the Roman could lie about his enemies with a
freedom and vigour that must arouse the envy even of the modern
propagandist. He could talk of “Punic faith” as a byword for perfidy
while committing the most abominable treacheries against Carthage, and
his railing accusations of systematic cruelty against this people or
that were usually the prelude and excuse for some frightful massacre or
enslavement or robbery on his own part. He had quite a modern passion
for self-justification. We must remember that these accounts of the
savagery and frightfulness of the Huns came from a people whose chief
amusement was gladiatorial shows, and whose chief method of dealing with
insurrection and sedition was nailing the offender to a cross to die.
From first to last the Roman Empire must have killed hundreds of
thousands of men in that way. A large portion of the population of this
empire that could complain of the barbarism of its assailants consisted
of slaves subject practically to almost any lust or caprice at the hands
of their owners. It is well to bear these facts in mind before we mourn
the swamping of the Roman Empire by the barbarians as though it was an
extinction of all that is fine in life by all that is black and ugly.
The facts seem to be that the Hunnish peoples were the eastern
equivalent of the primitive Aryans of whom we have given an account in
Chapter XV, and that, in spite of their profound racial and linguistic
differences, they mixed with the nomadic and semi-nomadic residuum of
the Aryan races north of the Danube and Persia very easily and
successfully. Instead of killing, they enlisted and intermarried with
the peoples they invaded. They had that necessary gift for all peoples
destined to political predominance, tolerant assimilation. They came
rather later in time, and their nomadic life was more highly developed
than that of the primitive Aryans. The primitive Aryans were a forest
and ox-wagon people who took to the horse later. The Hunnish peoples had
grown up with the horse. Somewhen about 1200 or 1000 years B.C. they
began to ride the horse. The bit, the saddle, the stirrup, these are not
primitive things, but they are necessary if man and horse are to keep
going for long stretches. It is well to bear in mind how modern a thing
is riding. Altogether man has not been in the saddle for much more than
three thousand years.[265] We have already noted the gradual appearance
of the war-chariot, the mounted man, and finally of disciplined cavalry
in this history. It was from the Mongolian regions of Asia that these
things came. To this day men in Central Asia go rather in the saddle
than on their proper feet. Says Ratzel,[266] “Strong, longnecked horses
are found in enormous numbers on the steppes. For Mongols and Turcomans
riding is not a luxury; even the Mongol shepherds tend their flocks on
horseback. Children are taught to ride in early youth; and the boy of
three years old often takes his first riding-lesson on a safe child’s
saddle and makes quick progress.”
It is impossible to suppose that the Huns and the Alans could have
differed very widely in character from the present nomads of the steppe
regions, and nearly all observers are agreed in describing these latter
as open and pleasant people. They are thoroughly honest and
free-spirited. “The character of the herdsmen of Central Asia,” says
Ratzel,[267] “when unadulterated, is ponderous eloquence, frankness,
rough good-nature, pride, but also indolence, irritability, and a
tendency to vindictiveness. Their faces show a considerable share of
frankness combined with amusing naïveté.... Their courage is rather a
sudden blaze of pugnacity than cold boldness. Religious fanaticism they
have none. Hospitality is universal.” This is not an entirely
disagreeable picture. Their personal bearing, he says further, is
quieter and more dignified than that of the townsmen of Turkestan and
Persia. Add to this that the nomadic life prevents any great class
inequalities or any extensive development of slavery.
Of course these peoples out of Asia were totally illiterate and
artistically undeveloped. But we must not suppose, on that account, that
they were primitive barbarians, and that their state of life was at the
level from which the agricultural civilization had long ago arisen. It
was not. They too had developed, but they had developed along a
different line, a line with less intellectual complication, more
personal dignity perhaps, and certainly with a more intimate contact
with wind and sky.
§ 5
The first serious irruptions of the German tribes into the Roman Empire
began in the third century with the decay of the central power.[268] We
will not entangle the reader here with the vexed and intricate question
of the names, identity, and inter-relationships of the various Germanic
tribes. Historians find great difficulties in keeping them distinct, and
these difficulties are enhanced by the fact that they themselves took
little care to keep themselves distinct. We find in 236 A.D. a people
called the Franks breaking bounds upon the Lower Rhine, and another,
the Alamanni, pouring into Alsace. A much more serious push southward
was that of the Goths. We have already noted the presence of these
people in South Russia, and their division by the Dnieper into Western
and Eastern Goths. They had become a maritime people again upon the
Black Sea--probably their traditional migration from Sweden was along
the waterways, for it is still possible to row a boat, with only a few
quite practicable portages, from the Baltic right across Russia to
either the Black or Caspian Sea--and they had wrested the command of the
eastern seas from the control of Rome. They were presently raiding the
shores of Greece. They also crossed the Danube in a great land raid in
247, and defeated and killed the Emperor Decius in what is now Serbia.
The province of Dacia vanished from Roman history. In 270 they were
defeated at Nish in Serbia by Claudius, and in 276 they were raiding
Pontus. It is characteristic of the invertebrate nature of the empire
that the legions of Gaul found that the most effective method of dealing
with the Franks and the Alamanni at this time was by setting up a
separate emperor in Gaul and doing the job by themselves.
Then for a while the barbarians were held, and the Emperor Probus in 276
forced the Franks and the Alamanni back over the Rhine. But it is
significant of the general atmosphere of insecurity created by these
raids that Aurelian (270-275) fortified Rome, which had been an open and
secure city for all the earlier years of the empire.
In 321 A.D. the Goths were again over the Danube, plundering what is now
Serbia and Bulgaria. They were driven back by Constantine the Great, of
whom we shall have more to tell in the next chapter. About the end of
his reign (337 A.D.) the Vandals, a people closely kindred to the Goths,
being pressed by them, obtained permission to cross the Danube into
Pannonia, which is now that part of Hungary west of the river.
But by the middle of the fourth century the Hunnish people to the east
were becoming aggressive again. They had long subjugated the Alani, and
now they made the Ostrogoths, the east Goths, tributary. The Visigoths
(or West Goths) followed the example of the Vandals, and made
arrangements to cross the Danube into Roman territory. There was some
dispute upon the terms of this settlement, and the Visigoths, growing
fierce, assumed the offensive, and at Adrianople defeated the Emperor
Valens, who was killed in this battle. They were then allowed to settle
in what is now Bulgaria, and their army became nominally a Roman army,
though they retained their own chiefs, the foremost of whom was Alaric.
It exhibits the complete “barbarization” of the Roman empire that had
already occurred, that the chief opponent of Alaric the Goth, Stilicho,
was a Pannonian Vandal. The legions in Gaul were under the command of a
Frank, and the Emperor Theodosius I (emp. 379-395) was a Spaniard
chiefly supported by Gothic auxiliaries.
The empire was now splitting finally into an eastern (Greek-speaking)
and a western (Latin-speaking) half. Theodosius the Great was succeeded
by his sons Arcadius at Constantinople and Honorius at Ravenna. Alaric
made a puppet of the eastern monarch and Stilicho of the western. Huns
now first appear within the empire as auxiliary troops enlisted under
Stilicho. In this struggle of East and West, the frontier--if we can
still speak of a frontier between the unauthorized barbarian without and
the barbarian in possession within--gave way. Fresh Vandals, more Goths,
Alans, Suevi, marched freely westward, living upon the country. Amidst
this confusion occurred a crowning event. Alaric and Goth marched down
Italy, and after a short siege captured Rome (410).
By 425 or so, the Vandals (whom originally we noted in East Germany) and
a portion of the Alani (whom we first mentioned in South-east Russia)
had traversed Gaul and the Pyrenees, and had amalgamated and settled in
the south of Spain. There were Huns in possession of Pannonia and Goths
in Dalmatia. Into Bohemia and Moravia came and settled a Slavic people,
the Czechs (451). In Portugal and north of the Vandals in Spain were
Visigoths and Suevi. Gaul was divided among Visigoths, Franks, and
Burgundians. Britain was being invaded by Low German tribes, the Jutes,
Angles, and Saxons, before whom the Keltic British of the south-west
were flying across the sea to what is now Brittany in France. The usual
date given for this invasion is 449, but it was probably earlier.[269]
And as the result of intrigues between two imperial politicians, the
Vandals of the south of Spain, under their king Genseric, embarked _en
masse_ for North Africa (429), became masters of Carthage (439), secured
the mastery of the sea, raided, captured, and pillaged Rome (455),
crossed into Sicily, and set up a kingdom in West Sicily, which endured
there for a hundred years (up to 534). At the time of its greatest
extent (477) this Vandal kingdom included also Corsica, Sardinia, and
the Balearic Isles, as well as much of North Africa.
[Illustration: The TRACKS of various MIGRATING & RAIDING PEOPLES between
1 A.D. and 700 A.D.]
About this Vandal kingdom facts and figures are given that show very
clearly the true nature of these barbarian irruptions. They were not
really the conquest and replacement of one people or race by another;
what happened was something very different, it was a social revolution
started and masked by a superficial foreign conquest. The whole Vandal
nation, men, women, and children, that came from Spain to Africa, for
example, did not number more than eighty thousand souls. We know this
because we have particulars of the transport problem. In their struggle
for North Africa, Dr. Schurtz tells us,[270] “there is no trace of any
serious resistance offered by the inhabitants; Boniface (the Roman
governor of North Africa) had defended Hippo with Gothic mercenaries,
while the native population lent no appreciable assistance, and the
nomad tribes of the country either adopted a dubious attitude or availed
themselves of the difficulties of the Roman governor to make attacks and
engage in predatory expeditions. This demoralization resulted from
social conditions, which had perhaps developed more unfavourably in
Africa than in other parts of the Roman Empire. The free peasants had
long ago become the serfs of the great landed proprietors, and were
little superior in position to the masses of slaves who were everywhere
to be found. And the great landowners had become in their turn easy
victims of the policy of extortion followed by unscrupulous governors to
an increasingly unprecedented extent in proportion as the dignity of the
imperial power sank lower. No man who had anything to lose would now
take a place in the senate of the large towns, which had once been the
goal of the ambitious, for the senators were required to make up all
deficiencies in the revenue, and such deficiencies were now frequent
and considerable.... Bloody insurrections repeatedly broke out, always
traceable ultimately to the pressure of taxation....”
Manifestly the Vandals came in as a positive relief to such a
system.[271] They exterminated the great landowners, wiped out all debts
to Roman money-lenders, and abolished the last vestiges of military
service. The cultivators found themselves better off; the minor
officials kept their places; it was not so much a conquest as a
liberation from an intolerable deadlock.
It was while the Vandals were still in Africa that a great leader,
Attila, arose among the Huns. The seat of his government was in the
plains east of the Danube. For a time he swayed a considerable empire of
Hunnish and Germanic tribes, and his rule stretched from the Rhine into
Central Asia. He negotiated on equal terms with the Chinese emperor. He
bullied Ravenna and Constantinople for ten years. Honoria, the
grand-daughter of Theodosius II, Emperor of the Eastern empire, one of
those passionate young ladies who cause so much trouble in the world,
having been put under restraint because of a love affair with a court
chamberlain, sent her ring to Attila and called upon him to be her
husband and deliverer. He was also urged to attack the Eastern empire by
Genseric the Vandal, who was faced by an alliance of the Western and
Eastern emperors. He raided southward to the very walls of
Constantinople, completely destroying, says Gibbon, seventy cities in
his progress, and forcing upon the emperor an onerous peace, which
apparently did not involve the liberation of Honoria to her hero.
At this distance of time we are unable to guess at the motives for this
omission. Attila continued to speak of her as his affianced bride, and
to use the relationship as a pretext for aggressions. In the subsequent
negotiations a certain Priscus accompanied an embassy to the camp of the
Hunnish monarch, and the fragments that still survive of the narrative
he wrote give us a glimpse of the camp and way of living of the great
conqueror.
The embassy was itself a curiously constituted body. Its head was
Maximin, an honest diplomatist who went in good faith, Quite unknown to
him and, at the time, to Priscus, Vigilius, the interpreter of the
expedition, had also a secret mission from the court of Theodosius which
was to secure by bribery the assassination of Attila. The little
expedition went by way of Nish; it crossed the Danube in canoes, dug out
of a single tree, and it was fed by contributions from the villages on
the route. Differences in dietary soon attracted the attention of the
envoys. Priscus mentions mead in the place of wine, millet for corn, and
a drink either distilled[272] or brewed from barley. The journey through
Hungary will remind the reader in many of its incidents of the journeys
of travellers in Central Africa during the Victorian period. The
travellers were politely offered temporary wives.
Attila’s capital was rather a vast camp and village than a town. There
was only one building of stone, a bath constructed on the Roman model.
The mass of the people were in huts and tents; Attila and his leading
men lived in timber palaces in great stockaded enclosures with their
numerous wives and ministers about them. There was a vast display of
loot, but Attila himself affected a nomadic simplicity; he was served in
wooden cups and platters, and never touched bread. He worked hard, kept
open court before the gate of his palace, and was commonly in the
saddle. The primitive custom of both Aryans and Mongols of holding great
feasts in halls still held good, and there was much hard drinking.
Priscus describes how bards chanted before Attila. They “recited the
verses which they had composed, to celebrate his valour and his
victories. A profound silence prevailed in the hall, and the attention
of the guests was captivated by the vocal harmony, which revived and
perpetuated the memory of their own exploits; a martial ardour flashed
from the eyes of the warriors, who were impatient for battle; and the
tears of the old men expressed their generous despair, that they could
no longer partake the danger and glory of the field. This entertainment,
which might be considered as a school of military virtue, was succeeded
by a farce that debased the dignity of human nature. A Moorish and
Scythian buffoon successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators
by their deformed figures, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd
speeches, and the strange, unintelligible confusion of the Latin, the
Gothic, and the Hunnish languages, and the hall resounded with loud and
licentious peals of laughter. In the midst of this intemperate riot,
Attila alone, without change of countenance, maintained his steadfast
and inflexible gravity.”[273]
Although Attila was aware, through the confession of the proposed
assassin, of the secret work of Vigilius, he allowed this embassy to
return in safety, with presents of numerous horses and the like, to
Constantinople. Then he despatched an ambassador to Theodosius II to
give that monarch, as people say, a piece of his mind. “Theodosius,”
said the envoy, “is the son of an illustrious and respectable parent;
Attila, likewise, is descended from a noble race; and _he_ has
supported, by his actions, the dignity which he inherited from his
father Munzuk. But Theodosius has forfeited his parental honours, and,
by consenting to pay tribute, has degraded himself to the condition of a
slave. It is therefore just that he should reverence the man whom
fortune and merit have placed above him; instead of attempting, like a
wicked slave, clandestinely to conspire against his master.”
This straightforward bullying was met by abject submission. The emperor
sued for pardon, and paid a great ransom.
In 451 Attila declared war on the western empire. He invaded Gaul. So
far as the imperial forces were concerned, he had things all his own
way, and he sacked most of the towns of France as far south as Orleans.
Then the Franks and Visigoths and the imperial forces united against
him, and a great and obstinate battle at Troyes (451), in which over
150,000 men were killed on both sides, ended in his repulse and saved
Europe from a Mongolian overlord. This disaster by no means exhausted
Attila’s resources. He turned his attention southward, and overran North
Italy. He burnt Aquileia and Padua, and looted Milan, but he made peace
at the entreaty of Pope Leo I. He died in 453....
Hereafter the Huns, so far as that name goes in Europe, the Huns of
Attila, disappeared out of history. They dissolved into the surrounding
populations. They were probably already much mixed, and rather Aryan
than Mongolian. They did not become, as one might suppose, the
inhabitants of Hungary, though they have probably left many descendants
there. About a hundred years after came another Hunnish or mixed people,
the Avars, out of the east into Hungary, but these were driven out
eastward again by Charlemagne in 791-5. The Magyars, the modern
Hungarians, came westward later. They were a Turko-Finnish people. The
Magyar is a language belonging to the Finno-Ugrian division of the
Ural-Altaic tongues. The Magyars were on the Volga about 550. They
settled in Hungary about 900.... But we are getting too far on in our
story, and we must return to Rome.
In 493 Theodoric, a Goth, became King of Rome, but already for seventeen
years there had been no Roman emperor. So it was in utter social decay
and collapse that the great slave-holding “world-ascendancy” of the
God-Cæsars and the rich men of Rome came to an end.
§ 6
But though throughout the whole of Western Europe and North Africa the
Roman imperial system had collapsed, though credit had vanished, luxury
production had ceased, and money was hidden, though creditors were going
unpaid and slaves masterless, the tradition of the Cæsars was still
being carried on in Constantinople. We have already had occasion to
mention as two outstanding figures among the late Cæsars, Diocletian
(284) and Constantine the Great (312), and it was to the latter of these
that the world owes the setting up of a fresh imperial centre at
Constantinople. Very early during the imperial period the unsuitability
of the position of Rome as a world capital, due to the Roman failure to
use the sea, was felt. The destruction of Carthage and Corinth had
killed the shipping of the main Mediterranean sea-routes. For a people
who did not use the sea properly, having the administrative centre at
Rome meant that every legion, every draft of officials, every order, had
to travel northward for half the length of Italy before it could turn
east or west. Consequently nearly all the more capable emperors set up
their headquarters at some subordinate centre in a more convenient
position. Sirmium (on the River Save), Milan, Lyons, and Nicomedia (in
Bithynia) were among such supplementary capitals. For a time under
Diocletian, Durazzo was the imperial capital. Ravenna, near the head of
the Adriatic, was the capital of the last Roman emperors in the time of
Alaric and Stilicho.
[Illustration: The EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE circa 500 A.D.]
It was Constantine the Great who determined upon the permanent transfer
of the centre of imperial power to the Bosphorus. We have already noted
the existence of the city of Byzantium, which Constantine chose to
develop into his new capital. It played a part in the story of the
intricate Histiæus (chap. xxii, § 4); it repulsed Philip of Macedon
(chap. xxiv, § 3). If the reader will examine its position, he will see
that in the hands of a line of capable emperors, and as the centre of a
people with some solidarity and spirit and seacraft (neither of which
things were vouchsafed to it), it was extraordinarily well placed. Its
galleys could have penetrated up the rivers to the heart of Russia and
outflanked every barbarian advance. It commanded practicable trade
routes to the east, and it was within a reasonable striking distance of
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and all the more prosperous and civilized
regions of the world at that period. And even under the rule of a
series of inept monarchs and under demoralized social conditions, the
remains of the Roman Empire centring at Constantinople held out for
nearly a thousand years.
It was the manifest intention of Constantine the Great that
Constantinople should be the centre of an undivided empire. But having
regard to the methods of travel and transport available at the time, the
geographical conditions of Europe and Western Asia do not point to any
one necessary centre of government. If Rome faced westward instead of
eastward, and so failed to reach out beyond the Euphrates,
Constantinople on the other hand was hopelessly remote from Gaul. The
enfeebled Mediterranean civilization, after a certain struggle for
Italy, did in fact let go of the west altogether and concentrated upon
what were practically the central vestiges, the stump, of the empire of
Alexander. The Greek language resumed its sway, which had never been
very seriously undermined by the official use of Latin. This “Eastern”
or Byzantine empire is generally spoken of as if it were a continuation
of the Roman tradition. It is really far more like a resumption of
Alexander’s.
[Illustration: Map to illustrate the geographical advantages of
CONSTANTINOPLE]
The Latin language had not the intellectual vigour behind it, it had not
the literature and the science, to make it a necessity to intelligent
men and so to maintain an ascendancy over the Greek. For no language,
whatever officialdom may do, can impose itself in competition with
another that can offer the advantages of a great literature or
encyclopædic information. Aggressive languages must bring gifts, and the
gifts of Greek were incomparably greater than the gifts of Latin. The
Eastern empire was from the beginnings of its separation Greek-speaking,
and a continuation, though a degenerate continuation, of the Hellenic
tradition. Its intellectual centre was no longer in Greece, but
Alexandria. Its mentality was no longer the mentality of free-minded
plain-speaking citizens, of the Stagirite Aristotle and the Greek Plato;
its mentality was the mentality of the pedants and of men politically
impotent; its philosophy was a pompous evasion of real things, and its
scientific impulse was dead. Nevertheless, it was Hellenic. The Roman
had come, and he had gone again. Indeed he had gone very extensively
from the west also. By the sixth century A.D. the populations of Europe
and North Africa had been stirred up like sediment. When presently in
the seventh and eighth centuries the sediment begins to settle down
again and populations begin to take on a definite localized character,
the Roman is only to be found by name in the region about Rome. Over
large parts of his Western empire we find changed and changing
modifications of his Latin speech; in Gaul, where the Frank is learning
a Gallic form of Latin and evolving French in the process; in Italy,
where, under the influence of Teutonic invaders, the Lombards and Goths,
Latin is being modified into various Italian dialects; in Spain and
Portugal, where it is becoming Spanish and Portuguese. The fundamental
Latinity of the languages in these regions serves to remind us of the
numerical unimportance of the various Frankish, Vandal, Avar, Gothic,
and the like German-speaking invaders, and serves to justify our
statement that what happened to the Western empire was not so much
conquest and the replacement of one population by another as a political
and social revolution. The district of Valais in South Switzerland also
retained a fundamentally Latin speech and so did the Canton Grisons;
and, what is more curious and interesting, is that in Dacia and Mœsia
Inferior, large parts of which to the north of the Danube became the
modern Roumania (= Romania), although these regions were added late to
the empire and lost soon, the Latin speech also remained.
In Britain Latin was practically wiped out by the conquering
Anglo-Saxons, from among whose various dialects the root stock of
English presently grew.
But while the smashing of the Roman social and political structure was
thus complete, while in the east it was thrown off by the older and
stronger Hellenic tradition, and while in the west it was broken up into
fragments that began to take on a new and separate life of their own,
there was one thing that did not perish, but grew, and that was the
tradition of the world empire of Rome and of the supremacy of the
Cæsars. When the reality was destroyed, the legend had freedom to
expand. Removed from the possibility of verification, the idea of a
serene and splendid Roman world-supremacy grew up in the imagination of
mankind, and still holds it to this day.
Ever since the time of Alexander, human thought has been haunted by the
possible political unity of the race. All the sturdy chiefs and leaders
and kings of the barbarians, who raided through the prostrate but vast
disorder of the decayed empire, were capable of conceiving of some
mighty king of kings greater than themselves and giving a real law for
all men, and they were ready to believe that elsewhere in space and time
and capable of returning presently to resume his supremacy, Cæsar had
been such a king of kings. Far above their own titles, therefore, they
esteemed and envied the title of Cæsar. The international history of
Europe from this time henceforth is largely the story of kings and
adventurers setting up to be Cæsar and Imperator (Emperor). We shall
tell of some of them in their places. So universal did this “Cæsaring”
become, that the Great War of 1914-18 mowed down no fewer than four
Cæsars, the German Kaiser (= Cæsar), the Austrian Kaiser, the Tsar (=
Cæsar) of Russia, and that fantastic figure, the Tsar of Bulgaria. The
French “Imperator” (Napoleon III) had already fallen in 1871. There is
now (1920) no one left in the world to carry on the Imperial title or
the tradition of Divus Cæsar except the Turkish Sultan and the British
monarch. The former commemorates his lordship over Constantinople as
Kaisar-i-Roum[274]; the latter is called the Cæsar of India (a country
no real Cæsar ever looked upon), Kaisar-i-Hind.
BOOK VI
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM
XXX
THE BEGINNINGS, THE RISE, AND THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTIANITY
§ 1. _Judea at the Christian Era._ § 2. _The Teachings of Jesus of
Nazareth._ § 3. _The New Universal Religions._ § 4. _The
Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth._ § 5. _Doctrines added to the
Teachings of Jesus._ § 6. _The Struggles and Persecutions of
Christianity._ § 7. _Constantine the Great._ § 8. _The
Establishment of Official Christianity._ § 9. _The Map of Europe,
A.D. 500._ § 10. _The Salvation of Learning by Christianity._
§ 1
Before we can understand the qualities of Christianity, which must now
play a large part in our history, and which opened men’s eyes to fresh
aspects of the possibility of a unified world, we must go back some
centuries and tell of the condition of affairs in Palestine and Syria,
in which countries Christianity arose. We have already told in Chapter
XXI the main facts about the origin of the Jewish nation and tradition,
about the Diaspora, about the fundamentally scattered nature of Jewry
even from the beginning, and the gradual development of the idea of one
just God ruling the earth and bound by a special promise to preserve and
bring to honour the Jewish people. The Jewish idea was and is a curious
combination of theological breadth and an intense racial patriotism. The
Jews looked for a special saviour, a Messiah, who was to redeem mankind
by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and
Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the benevolent but
firm Jewish heel. As the political power of the Semitic peoples
declined, as Carthage followed Tyre into the darkness and Spain became
a Roman province, this dream grew and spread. There can be little doubt
that the scattered Phœnicians in Spain and Africa and throughout the
Mediterranean, speaking as they did a language closely akin to Hebrew
and being deprived of their authentic political rights, became
proselytes to Judaism. For phases of vigorous proselytism alternated
with phases of exclusive jealousy in Jewish history. On one occasion the
Idumeans, being conquered, were all forcibly made Jews.[275] There were
Arab tribes who were Jews in the time of Muhammad, and a Turkish people
who were mainly Jews in South Russia in the ninth century. Judaism is
indeed the reconstructed political ideal of many shattered
peoples--mainly Semitic. It is to the Phœnician contingent and to
Aramean accessions in Babylon that the financial and commercial
tradition of the Jews is to be ascribed. But as a result of these
coalescences and assimilations, almost everywhere in the towns
throughout the Roman Empire, and far beyond it in the east, Jewish
communities traded and flourished, and were kept in touch through the
Bible and through a religious and educational organization. The main
part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea.
Manifestly this intercommunicating series of Judaized communities had
very great financial and political facilities. They could assemble
resources, they could stir up, they could allay. They were neither so
abundant nor so civilized as the still more widely diffused Greeks, but
they had a tradition of greater solidarity. Greek was hostile to Greek;
Jew stood by Jew. Wherever a Jew went, he found men of like mind and
like tradition with himself. He could get shelter, food, loans, and
legal help. And by reason of this solidarity rulers had everywhere to
take account of this people as a help, as a source of loans, or as a
source of trouble. So it is that the Jews have persisted as a people
while Hellenism has become a universal light for mankind.
We cannot tell here in any detail the history of that smaller part of
Jewry that lived in Judea. These Jews had returned to their old position
of danger; again they were seeking peace in, so to speak, the middle of
a highway. In the old time they had been between Syria and Assyria to
the north and Egypt to the south; now they had the Seleucids to the
north and the Ptolemys to the south, and when the Seleucids went, then
down came the Roman power upon them. The independence of Judea was
always a qualified and precarious thing. The reader must go to the
_Antiquities_ and the _Wars of the Jews_ of Flavius Josephus, a copious,
tedious, and maddeningly patriotic writer, to learn of the succession of
their rulers, of their high-priest monarchs, and of the Maccabæans, the
Herods, and the like. These rulers were for the most part of the
ordinary eastern type, cunning, treacherous, and blood-stained. Thrice
Jerusalem was taken and twice the temple was destroyed. It was the
support of the far more powerful Diaspora that prevented the little
country from being wiped out altogether, until 70 A.D., when Titus, the
adopted son and successor of the Emperor Vespasian, after a siege that
ranks in bitterness and horror with that of Tyre and Carthage, took
Jerusalem and destroyed city and temple altogether. He did this in an
attempt to destroy Jewry, but indeed he made Jewry stronger by
destroying its one sensitive and vulnerable point.
[Illustration: GALILEE and surrounding provinces.]
Throughout a history of five centuries of war and civil commotion
between the return from captivity and the destruction of Jerusalem,
certain constant features of the Jew persisted. He remained obstinately
monotheistic; he would have none other gods but the one true God. In
Rome, as in Jerusalem, he stood out manfully against the worship of any
god-Cæsar. And to the best of his ability he held to his covenants with
his God. No graven images could enter Jerusalem; even the Roman
standards with their eagles had to stay outside.
Two divergent lines of thought are traceable in Jewish affairs during
these five hundred years. On the right, so to speak, are the high and
narrow Jews, the Pharisees, very orthodox, very punctilious upon even
the minutest details of the law, intensely patriotic and exclusive.
Jerusalem on one occasion fell to the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV
because the Jews would not defend it on the Sabbath day, when it is
forbidden to work; and it was because the Jews made no effort to destroy
his siege train on the Sabbath that Pompey the Great was able to take
Jerusalem. But against these narrow Jews were pitted the broad Jews, the
Jews of the left, who were Hellenizers, among whom are to be ranked the
Sadducees, who did not believe in immortality. These latter Jews, the
broad Jews, were all more or less disposed to mingle with and assimilate
themselves to the Greeks and Hellenized peoples about them. They were
ready to accept proselytes, and so to share God and his promise with all
mankind. But what they gained in generosity they lost in rectitude. They
were the worldlings of Judea. We have already noted how the Hellenized
Jews of Egypt lost their Hebrew, and had to have their Bible translated
into Greek.
In the reign of Tiberius Cæsar a great teacher arose out of Judea who
was to liberate the intense realization of the righteousness and
unchallengeable oneness of God, and of man’s moral obligation to God,
which was the strength of orthodox Judaism, from that greedy and
exclusive narrowness with which it was so extraordinarily intermingled
in the Jewish mind. This was Jesus of Nazareth, the seed rather than the
founder of Christianity.
§ 2
The audience to which this book will first be presented will be largely
an audience of Christians, with perhaps a sprinkling of Jewish readers,
and the former at least will regard Jesus of Nazareth as being much more
than a human teacher, and his appearance in the world not as a natural
event in history, but as something of a supernatural sort interrupting
and changing that steady development of life towards a common
consciousness and a common will, which we have hitherto been tracing in
this book. But these persuasions, dominant as they are in Europe and
America, are nevertheless not the persuasions of all men or of the great
majority of mankind, and we are writing this outline of the story of
life with as complete an avoidance of controversial matter as may be. We
are trying to write as if this book was to be read as much by Hindus or
Moslems or Buddhists as by Americans and Western Europeans. We shall
therefore hold closely to the apparent facts, and avoid, without any
disputation or denial, the theological interpretations that have been
imposed upon them. We shall tell what men have believed about Jesus of
Nazareth, but him we shall treat as being what he appeared to be, a man,
just as a painter must needs paint him as a man. The documents that
testify to his acts and teachings we shall treat as ordinary human
documents. If the light of divinity shine through our recital, we will
neither help nor hinder it. This is what we have already done in the
case of Buddha, and what we shall do later with Muhammad. About Jesus we
have to write not theology but history, and our concern is not with the
spiritual and theological significance of his life, but with its effects
upon the political and everyday life of men.
Almost our only sources of information about the personality of Jesus
are derived from the four gospels, all of which were certainly in
existence a few decades after his death, and from allusions to his life
in the letters (epistles) of the early Christian propagandists. The
first three gospels, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, many
suppose to be derived from some earlier documents; the gospel of St.
John has more idiosyncrasy and is coloured by theology of a strongly
Hellenic type. Critics are disposed to regard the gospel of St. Mark as
being the most trustworthy account of the personality and actual words
of Jesus.[276] But all four agree in giving us a picture of a very
definite personality; they carry the same conviction of reality that the
early accounts of Buddha do. In spite of miraculous and incredible
additions, one is obliged to say, “Here was a man. This part of the tale
could not have been invented.”
But just as the personality of Gautama Buddha has been distorted and
obscured by the stiff squatting figure, the gilded idol of later
Buddhism, so one feels that the lean and strenuous personality of Jesus
is much wronged by the unreality and conventionality that a mistaken
reverence has imposed upon his figure in modern Christian art. Jesus was
a penniless teacher, who wandered about the dusty sun-lit country of
Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented
clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something
motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This
alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot
distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise
additions of the unintelligently devout.
And it may be that the early parts of the gospels are accretions of the
same nature. The miraculous circumstances of the birth of Jesus, the
great star that brought wise men from the east to worship at his manger
cradle, the massacre of the male infant children in the region of
Bethlehem by Herod as a consequence of these portents, and the flight
into Egypt, are all supposed to be such accretionary matter by many
authorities. At the best they are events unnecessary to the teaching,
and they rob it of much of the strength and power it possesses when we
strip it of such accompaniment. So, too, do the discrepant genealogies
given by Matthew and Luke, in which there is an endeavour to trace the
direct descent of Joseph, his father, from King David, as though it was
any honour to Jesus or to anyone to have such a man as an ancestor. The
insertion of these genealogies is the more peculiar and unreasonable,
because, according to the legend, Jesus was not the son of Joseph at
all, but miraculously conceived.
We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult accessories,
with the figure of a being, very human, very earnest and passionate,
capable of swift anger, and teaching a new and simple and profound
doctrine--namely, the universal loving Fatherhood of God and the coming
of the Kingdom of Heaven. He was clearly a person--to use a common
phrase--of intense personal magnetism. He attracted followers and filled
them with love and courage. Weak and ailing people were heartened and
healed by his presence. Yet he was probably of a delicate physique,
because of the swiftness with which he died under the pains of
crucifixion. There is a tradition that he fainted when, according to the
custom, he was made to bear his cross to the place of execution. When he
first appeared as a teacher he was a man of about thirty. He went about
the country for three years spreading his doctrine, and then he came to
Jerusalem and was accused of trying to set up a strange kingdom in
Judea; he was tried upon this charge, and crucified together with two
thieves. Long before they were dead, his sufferings were over.
Now it is a matter of fact that in the gospels all that body of
theological assertion which constitutes Christianity finds little
support. There is, as the reader may see for himself, no clear and
emphatic assertion in these books of the doctrines which Christian
teachers of all denominations find generally necessary to salvation. It
is difficult to get any words that actually came from Jesus in which he
claimed to be the Jewish Messiah (rendered in Greek by “the Christ”) or
to be a part of the godhead, or in which he explained the doctrine of
the Atonement or urged any sacrifices or sacraments (that is to say,
priestly offices) upon his followers. We shall see presently how later
on all Christendom was torn by disputes about the Trinity. There is no
evidence that the apostles of Jesus ever heard of the Trinity--at any
rate from him. The observance of the Jewish Sabbath, again, transferred
to the Mithraic Sun-day, is an important feature of many Christian
cults; but Jesus deliberately broke the Sabbath, and said that it was
made for man and not man for the Sabbath. Nor did he say a word about
the worship of his mother Mary, in the guise of Isis, the Queen of
Heaven. All that is most characteristically Christian in worship and
usage, he ignored. Sceptical writers have had the temerity to deny that
Jesus can be called a Christian at all. For light upon these
extraordinary gaps in his teaching, each reader must go to his own
religious guides. Here we are bound to mention these gaps on account of
the difficulties and controversies that arose out of them, and we are
equally bound not to enlarge upon them.
As remarkable is the enormous prominence given by Jesus to the teaching
of what he called the Kingdom of Heaven, and its comparative
insignificance in the procedure and teaching of most of the Christian
churches.
This doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of
Jesus, and which plays so small a part in the Christian creeds, is
certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and
changed human thought. It is small wonder if the world of that time
failed to grasp its full significance, and recoiled in dismay from even
a half apprehension of its tremendous challenges to the established
habits and institutions of mankind. It is small wonder if the hesitating
convert and disciple presently went back to the old familiar ideas of
temple and altar, of fierce deity and propitiatory observance, of
consecrated priest and magic blessing, and--these things being attended
to--reverted then to the dear old habitual life of hates and profits and
competition and pride. For the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, as
Jesus seems to have preached it, was no less than a bold and
uncompromising demand for a complete change and cleansing of the life of
our struggling race, an utter cleansing, without and within. To the
gospels the reader must go for all that is preserved of this tremendous
teaching; here we are only concerned with the jar of its impact upon
established ideas.
The Jews were persuaded that God, the one God of the whole world, was a
righteous god, but they also thought of him as a trading god who had
made a bargain with their Father Abraham about them, a very good bargain
indeed for them, to bring them at last to predominance in the earth.
With dismay and anger they heard Jesus sweeping away their dear
securities. God, he taught, was no bargainer; there were no chosen
people and no favourites in the Kingdom of Heaven. God was the loving
father of all life, as incapable of showing favour as the universal sun.
And all men were brothers--sinners alike and beloved sons alike of this
divine father. In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus cast scorn
upon that natural tendency we all obey, to glorify our own people and to
minimize the righteousness of other creeds and other races. In the
parable of the labourers he thrust aside the obstinate claim of the Jews
to have a sort of first mortgage upon God. All whom God takes into the
kingdom, he taught, God serves alike; there is no distinction in his
treatment, because there is no measure to his bounty. From all,
moreover, as the parable of the buried talent witnesses, and as the
incident of the widow’s mite enforces, he demands the utmost. There are
no privileges, no rebates, and no excuses in the Kingdom of Heaven.
But it was not only the intense tribal patriotism of the Jews that Jesus
outraged. They were a people of intense family loyalty, and he would
have swept away all the narrow and restrictive family affections in the
great flood of the love of God. The whole Kingdom of Heaven was to be
the family of his followers. We are told that, “While he yet talked to
the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring
to speak with him. Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy
brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and
said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?
And he stretched forth his hand towards his disciples, and said, Behold
my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father
which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and
mother.”[277]
And not only did Jesus strike at patriotism and the bonds of family
loyalty in the name of God’s universal fatherhood and the brotherhood of
all mankind, but it is clear that his teaching condemned all the
gradations of the economic system, all private wealth, and personal
advantages. All men belonged to the kingdom; all their possessions
belonged to the kingdom; the righteous life for all men, the only
righteous life, was the service of God’s will with all that we had, with
all that we were. Again and again he denounced private riches and the
reservation of any private life.
“And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and
kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may
inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good?
there is none good but one, that is, God. Thou knowest the commandments,
Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false
witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and mother. And he answered and
said unto him, Master, all these things have I observed from my youth.
Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou
lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor,
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and
follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he
had great possessions.
“And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly
shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the
disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answered again, and
saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches
to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
God.”[278]
Moreover, in his tremendous prophecy of this kingdom which was to make
all men one together in God, Jesus had small patience for the bargaining
righteousness of formal religion. Another large part of his recorded
utterances is aimed against the meticulous observance of the rules of
the pious career. “Then came together unto him the Pharisees, and
certain of the scribes, which came from Jerusalem. And when they saw
some of his disciples eat bread with defiled, that is to say, with
unwashen, hands, they found fault. For the Pharisees, and all the Jews,
except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the
elders. And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat
not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold,
as the washing of cups, and pots, brazen vessels, and of tables. Then
the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples
according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen
hands? He answered and said unto them, Well hath Isaiah prophesied of
you hypocrites, as it is written,
“This people honoureth me with their lips,
“But their heart is far from me.
“Howbeit in vain do they worship me,
“Teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
“For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men,
as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such things ye do. And
he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye
may keep your own tradition.”[279]
So, too, we may note a score of places in which he flouted that darling
virtue of the formalist, the observance of the Sabbath.
It was not merely a moral and a social revolution that Jesus proclaimed;
it is clear from a score of indications that his teaching had a
political bent of the plainest sort. It is true that he said his kingdom
was not of this world, that it was in the hearts of men and not upon a
throne; but it is equally clear that wherever and in what measure his
kingdom was set up in the hearts of men, the outer world would be in
that measure revolutionized and made new.
Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers may have missed
in his utterances, it is plain that they did not miss his resolve to
revolutionize the world. Some of the questions that were brought to
Jesus and the answers he gave enable us to guess at the drift of much of
his unrecorded teaching. The directness of his political attack is
manifest by such an incident as that of the coin--
“And they send unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians,
to catch him in his words. And when they were come, they say unto him,
Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou
regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth:
Is it lawful to give tribute to Cæsar, or not? Shall we give, or shall
we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt
ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it. And they brought it. And he
saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said
unto him, Cæsar’s. And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Cæsar
the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are
God’s”[280]--which in view of all else that he had taught, left very
little of a man or his possessions for Cæsar.
The whole tenor of the opposition to him and the circumstances of his
trial and execution show clearly that to his contemporaries he seemed to
propose plainly, and did propose plainly to change and fuse and enlarge
all human life. But even his disciples did not grasp the profound and
comprehensive significance of that proposal. They were ridden by the old
Jewish dream of a king, a Messiah to overthrow the Hellenized Herods and
the Roman overlord, and restore the fabled glories of David. They
disregarded the substance of his teaching, plain and direct though it
was; evidently they thought it was merely his mysterious and singular
way of setting about the adventure that would at last put him on the
throne of Jerusalem. They thought he was just another king among the
endless succession of kings, but of a quasi-magic kind, and making
quasi-magic professions of an impossible virtue.
“And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come unto him, saying Master,
we would that thou shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall desire. And
he said unto them, What would ye that I should do for you? They said
unto him, Grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy right hand, and the
other on thy left hand, in thy glory. But Jesus said unto them, Ye know
not what ye ask: can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be
baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? And they said unto
him, We can. And Jesus said unto them, Ye shall indeed drink of the cup
that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye
be baptized: but to sit on my right hand and on my left hand is not mine
to give; but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared. And when
the ten heard it, they began to be much displeased with James and John.
But Jesus called them to him, and saith unto them, Ye know that they
which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over
them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But so shall it
not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your
minister: and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of
all. For even the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”[281]
This was cold comfort for those who looked for a due reward for their
services and hardships in his train. They could not believe this hard
doctrine of a kingdom of service which was its own exceeding great
reward. Even after his death upon the cross, they could still, after
their first dismay, revert to the belief that he was nevertheless in the
vein of the ancient world of pomps and privileges, that presently by
some amazing miracle he would become undead again and return, and set up
his throne with much splendour and graciousness in Jerusalem. They
thought his life was a stratagem and his death a trick.
He was too great for his disciples. And in view of what he plainly said,
is it any wonder that all who were rich and prosperous felt a horror of
strange things, a swimming of their world at his teaching? Perhaps the
priests and the rulers and the rich men understood him better than his
followers. He was dragging out all the little private reservations they
had made from social service into the light of a universal religious
life. He was like some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out of
the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the white blaze of
this kingdom of his there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride
and precedence; no motive indeed and no reward but love. Is it any
wonder that men were dazzled and blinded and cried out against him? Even
his disciples cried out when he would not spare them the light. Is it
any wonder that the priests realized that between this man and
themselves there was no choice but that he or priestcraft should perish?
Is it any wonder that the Roman soldiers, confronted and amazed by
something soaring over their comprehension and threatening all their
disciplines, should take refuge in wild laughter, and crown him with
thorns and robe him in purple and make a mock Cæsar of him? For to take
him seriously was to enter upon a strange and alarming life, to abandon
habits, to control instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible
happiness....
Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much for our
small hearts?[282]
§ 3
Yet be it noted that while there was much in the real teachings of Jesus
that a rich man or a priest or a trader or an imperial official or any
ordinary respectable citizen could not accept without the most
revolutionary changes in his way of living, yet there was nothing that a
follower of the actual teaching of Gautama Sakya might not receive very
readily, nothing to prevent a primitive Buddhist from being also a
Nazarene, and nothing to prevent a personal disciple of Jesus from
accepting all the recorded teachings of Buddha.
Again consider the tone of this extract from the writings of a Chinaman,
Mo Ti, who lived somewhere in the fourth century B.C., when the
doctrines of Confucius and Lao Tse prevailed in China, before the advent
of Buddhism to that country, and note how “Nazarene” it is.
“The mutual attacks of state on state; the mutual usurpations of family
on family; the mutual robberies of man on man; the want of kindness on
the part of the sovereign and of loyalty on the part of the minister;
the want of tenderness and filial duty between father and son--these,
and such as these, are the things injurious to the empire. All this has
arisen from want of mutual love. If but that one virtue could be made
universal, the princes loving one another would have no battle-fields;
the chiefs of families would attempt no usurpations; men would commit no
robberies; rulers and ministers would be gracious and loyal; fathers and
sons would be kind and filial; brothers would be harmonious and easily
reconciled. Men in general loving one another, the strong would not make
prey of the weak; the many would not plunder the few, the rich would not
insult the poor, the noble would not be insolent to the mean; and the
deceitful would not impose upon the simple.”[283]
This is extraordinarily like the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth cast into
political terms. The thoughts of Mo Ti came close to the Kingdom of
Heaven.
This essential identity is the most important historical aspect of these
great world religions. They were in their beginnings quite unlike the
priest, altar and temple cults, those cults for the worship of definite
finite gods that played so great and so essential a part in the earlier
stages of man’s development between 15000 B.C. and 600 B.C. These new
world religions, from 600 B.C. onward, were essentially religions of the
heart and of the universal sky. They swept away all those various and
limited gods that had served the turn of human needs since the first
communities were welded together by fear and hope. And presently when we
come to Islam we shall find that for a third time the same fundamental
new doctrine of the need of a universal devotion of all men to one Will
reappears. Islam indeed is marred, as Judaism is marred, by a streak of
primitive exclusiveness; its founder was manifestly of a commoner clay
than either Jesus or Gautama, and he had to tack on to his assertion of
the supremacy of God an assertion that Muhammad was in especial his
prophet, a queer little lapse into proprietorship, a touchingly baseless
claim for the copyright of an idea which, as a matter of fact, he had
picked up from the Jews and Christians about him. Yet, warned by the
experiences of Christianity, Muhammad was very emphatic in insisting
that he himself was merely a man. And the broad idea of human
brotherhood under God that he preached, and the spirit in which his
followers have carried it among black and fallen races, puts his
essential teaching little lower than that of its two greater but far
more abundantly corrupted and misrepresented rivals.
We speak of these great religions of mankind which arose between the
Persian conquest of Babylon and the break-up of the Roman empire as
rivals; but it is their defects, their accumulations and excrescences,
their differences of language and phrase, that cause the rivalry; and it
is not to one overcoming the other or to any new variant replacing them
that we must look, but to the white truth in each being burnt free from
its dross, and becoming manifestly the same truth--namely, that the
hearts of men, and therewith all the lives and institutions of men, must
be subdued to one common Will, ruling them all.[284]
And though much has been written foolishly about the antagonism of
science and religion, there is indeed no such antagonism. What all these
world religions declare by inspiration and insight, history as it grows
clearer and science as its range extends display, as a reasonable and
demonstrable fact, that men form one universal brotherhood, that they
spring from one common origin, that their individual lives, their
nations and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last
in one common human destiny upon this little planet amidst the stars.
And the psychologist can now stand beside the preacher and assure us
that there is no reasoned peace of heart, no balance and no safety in
the soul, until a man in losing his life has found it, and has schooled
and disciplined his interests and will beyond greeds, rivalries, fears,
instincts, and narrow affections. The history of our race and personal
religious experience run so closely parallel as to seem to a modern
observer almost the same thing; both tell of a being at first scattered
and blind and utterly confused, feeling its way slowly to the serenity
and salvation of an ordered and coherent purpose. That, in the simplest,
is the outline of history; whether one have a religious purpose or
disavow a religious purpose altogether, the lines of the outline remain
the same.
§ 4
In the year 30 A.D.,[285] while Tiberius, the second emperor, was
Emperor of Rome and Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea, a little
while before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus of Nazareth came into
Jerusalem. Probably he came then for the first time. Hitherto he had
been preaching chiefly in Galilee, and for the most part round and about
the town of Capernaum. In Capernaum he had preached in the synagogue.
His entry into Jerusalem was a pacific triumph. He had gathered a great
following in Galilee--he had sometimes to preach from a boat upon the
Lake of Galilee, because of the pressure of the crowd upon the
shore--and his fame had spread before him to the capital. Great crowds
came out to greet him. It is clear they did not understand the drift of
his teaching, and that they shared the general persuasion that by some
magic of righteousness he was going to overthrow the established order.
He rode into the city upon the foal of an ass that had been borrowed by
his disciples. The crowd accompanied him with cries of triumph and
shouts of “Hosanna,” a word of rejoicing.
He went to the temple. Its outer courts were cumbered with the tables of
money-changers and with the stalls of those who sold doves to be
liberated by pious visitors to the temple. These traders upon religion
he and his followers cast out, overturning the tables. It was almost his
only act of positive rule.
Then for a week he taught in Jerusalem, surrounded by a crowd of
followers who made his arrest by the authorities difficult. Then
officialdom gathered itself together against this astonishing intruder.
One of his disciples, Judas, dismayed and disappointed at the apparent
ineffectiveness of this capture of Jerusalem, went to the Jewish priests
to give them his advice and help in the arrest of Jesus. For this
service he was rewarded with thirty pieces of silver. The high priest
and the Jews generally had many reasons for dismay at this gentle
insurrection that was filling the streets with excited crowds; for
example, the Romans might misunderstand it or use it as an occasion to
do some mischief to the whole Jewish people. Accordingly the high priest
Caiaphas, in his anxiety to show his loyalty to the Roman overlord, was
the leader in the proceedings against this unarmed Messiah, and the
priests and the orthodox mob of Jerusalem the chief accusers of Jesus.
How he was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, how he was tried and
sentenced by Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, how he was scourged
and mocked by the Roman soldiers and crucified upon the hill called
Golgotha, is told with unsurpassable simplicity and dignity in the
gospels.
The revolution collapsed utterly. The disciples of Jesus with one accord
deserted him, and Peter, being taxed as one of them, said, “I know not
the man.” This was not the end they had anticipated in their great
coming to Jerusalem. His last hours of aching pain and thirst upon the
cross were watched only by a few women and near friends. Towards the end
of the long day of suffering this abandoned leader roused himself to one
supreme effort, cried out with a loud voice, “My God! my God! why hast
thou forsaken me?” and, leaving these words to echo down the ages, a
perpetual riddle to the faithful, died.
It was inevitable that simple believers should have tried to enhance the
stark terrors of this tragedy by foolish stories of physical
disturbances similar to those which had been invented to emphasize the
conversion of Gautama. We are told that a great darkness fell upon the
earth, and that the veil of the temple was rent in twain; but if indeed
these things occurred, they produced not the slightest effect upon the
minds of people in Jerusalem at that time. It is difficult to believe
nowadays that the order of nature indulged in any such meaningless
comments. Far more tremendous is it to suppose a world apparently
indifferent to those three crosses in the red evening twilight, and to
the little group of perplexed and desolated watchers. The darkness
closed upon the hill; the distant city set about its preparations for
the Passover; scarcely anyone but that knot of mourners on the way to
their homes troubled whether Jesus of Nazareth was still dying or
already dead....
The souls of the disciples were plunged for a time into utter darkness.
Then presently came a whisper among them and stories, rather discrepant
stories, that the body of Jesus was not in the tomb in which it had been
placed, and that first one and then another had seen him alive. Soon
they were consoling themselves with the conviction that he had risen
from the dead, that he had shown himself to many, and had ascended
visibly into heaven. Witnesses were found to declare that they had
positively seen him go up, visibly in his body. He had gone through the
blue--to God. Soon they had convinced themselves that he would presently
come again, in power and glory, to judge all mankind. In a little while,
they said, he would come back to them; and in these bright revivals of
their old-time dream of an assertive and temporal splendour they forgot
the greater measure, the giant measure, he had given them of the Kingdom
of God.
§ 5[286]
The story of the early beginnings of Christianity is the story of the
struggle between the real teachings and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth and
the limitations, amplifications, and misunderstandings of the very
inferior men who had loved and followed him from Galilee, and who were
now the bearers and custodians of his message to mankind. The gospels
and the Acts of the Apostles present a patched and uneven record, but
there can be little question that on the whole it is a quite honest
record of those early days.
The early Nazarenes, as the followers of Jesus were called, present from
the first a spectacle of a great confusion between these two strands,
his teaching on the one hand, and the glosses and interpretations of the
disciples on the other. They continued for a time his disciplines of the
complete subjugation of self; they had their goods in common, they had
no bond but love. Nevertheless, they built their faith upon the stories
that were told of his resurrection and magical ascension, and the
promised return. Few of them understood that the renunciation of self is
its own reward, that it is itself the Kingdom of Heaven; they regarded
it as a sacrifice that entitled them to the compensation of power and
dominion when presently the second coming occurred. They had now all
identified Jesus with the promised Christ, the Messiah so long expected
by the Jewish people. They found out prophecies of the crucifixion in
the prophets--the Gospel of Matthew is particularly insistent upon these
prophecies. Revived by these hopes, enforced by the sweet and pure lives
of many of the believers, the Nazarene doctrine began to spread very
rapidly in Judea and Syria.
And presently there arose a second great teacher, whom many modern
authorities regard as the real founder of Christianity, Saul of Tarsus,
or Paul. Saul apparently was his Jewish and Paul his Roman name; he was
a Roman citizen, and a man of much wider education and a much narrower
intellectuality than Jesus seems to have been. By birth he was probably
a Jew, though some Jewish writers deny this; he had certainly studied
under Jewish teachers. But he was well versed in the Hellenic theologies
of Alexandria, and his language was Greek. Some classical scholars
profess to find his Greek unsatisfactory; he did not use the Greek of
Athens, but the Greek of Alexandria; but he used it with power and
freedom.[287] He was a religious theorist and teacher long before he
heard of Jesus of Nazareth, and he appears in the New Testament
narrative at first as the bitter critic and antagonist of the Nazarenes.
The present writer has been unable to find any discussion of the
religious ideas of Paul before he became a follower of Jesus. There must
have been a basis, if only a basis of departure, for his new views, and
their phraseology certainly supplied the colour of his new doctrines. We
are almost equally in the dark as to the teachings of Gamaliel, who is
named as the Jewish teacher at whose feet he sat. Nor do we know what
Gentile teachings had reached him. It is highly probable that he had
been influenced by Mithraism. He uses phrases curiously like Mithraistic
phrases. What will be clear to anyone who reads his various Epistles,
side by side with the Gospels, is that his mind was saturated by an idea
which does not appear at all prominently in the reported sayings and
teaching of Jesus, the idea of a sacrificial person, who is offered up
to God as an atonement for sin. What Jesus preached was a new birth of
the human soul; what Paul preached was the ancient religion of priest
and altar and propitiatory bloodshed. Jesus was to him the Easter lamb,
that traditional human victim without spot or blemish who haunts all the
religions of the dark white peoples. Paul came to the Nazarenes with
overwhelming force because he came to them with this completely
satisfactory explanation of the disaster of the crucifixion. It was a
brilliant elucidation of what had been utterly perplexing.
Paul had never seen Jesus. His knowledge of Jesus and his teaching must
have been derived from the hearsay of the original disciples. It is
clear that he apprehended much of the spirit of Jesus and his doctrine
of a new birth, but he built this into a theological system, a very
subtle and ingenious system, whose appeal to this day is chiefly
intellectual. And it is clear that the faith of the Nazarenes, which he
found as a doctrine of motive and a way of living, he made into a
doctrine of _belief_. He found the Nazarenes with a spirit and hope, and
he left them Christians with the beginning of a creed.
But we must refer the reader to the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline
Epistles for an account of Paul’s mission and teaching. He was a man of
enormous energy, and he taught at Jerusalem, Antioch, Athens, Corinth,
Ephesus, and Rome.
Possibly he went into Spain. The manner of his death is not certainly
known, but it is said that he was killed in Rome during the reign of
Nero. A great fire had burnt a large part of Rome, and the new sect was
accused of causing this. The rapid spread of Christian teaching
certainly owes more to Paul than to any other single man. Within two
decades of the crucifixion this new religion was already attracting the
attention of the Roman rulers in several provinces. If it had acquired a
theology in the hands of Saint Paul, it still retained much of the
revolutionary and elementary quality of the teachings of Jesus. It had
become somewhat more tolerant of private property; it would accept
wealthy adherents without insisting upon the communization of their
riches, and Saint Paul has condoned the institution of slavery (“Slaves,
be obedient to your masters”),[288] but it still set its face like flint
against certain fundamental institutions of the Roman world. It would
not tolerate the godhead of Cæsar; not even by a mute gesture at the
altar would the Christians consent to worship the Emperor, though their
lives were at stake in the matter. It denounced the gladiatorial shows.
Unarmed, but possessing enormous powers of passive resistance,
Christianity thus appeared at the outset plainly as rebellion, striking
at the political if not at the economic essentials of the imperial
system. The first evidences of Christianity in non-Christian literature
we find when perplexed Roman officials began to write to one another and
exchange views upon the strange problem presented by this infectious
rebellion of otherwise harmless people.
Much of the history of the Christians in the first two centuries of the
Christian era is very obscure. They spread far and wide throughout the
world, but we know very little of their ideas or their ceremonies and
methods during that time. As yet they had no settled creeds, and there
can be little doubt that there were wide local variations in their
beliefs and disciplines during this formless period. But whatever their
local differences, everywhere they seem to have carried much of the
spirit of Jesus; and though everywhere they aroused bitter enmity and
active counter-propaganda, the very charges made against them witness to
the general goodness of their lives.
During this indefinite time a considerable amount of a sort of
theocrasia seems to have gone on between the Christian cult and the
almost equally popular and widely diffused Mithraic cult, and the cult
of Serapis[289]-Isis-Horus. From the former it would seem the Christians
adopted Sun-day as their chief day of worship instead of the Jewish
Sabbath, the abundant use of candles in religious ceremonies, the legend
of the adoration by the shepherds, and probably also those ideas and
phrases, so distinctive of certain sects to this day, about being
“washed in the blood” of Christ, and of Christ being a blood sacrifice.
For we have to remember that a death by crucifixion is hardly a more
bloody death than hanging; to speak of Jesus shedding his blood for
mankind is really a most inaccurate expression. But Mithraism centred
upon some now forgotten mysteries about Mithras sacrificing a sacred and
benevolent bull; all the Mithraic shrines seem to have contained a
figure of Mithras killing this bull, which bleeds copiously, and from
this blood a new life sprang. The Mithraist votary actually bathed in
the blood of the sacrificial bull, and was “born again” thereby. At his
initiation he went beneath a scaffolding on which the bull was killed,
and the blood ran down on him.[290]
The contributions of the Alexandrine cult to Christian thought and
practices were even more considerable. In the personality of Horus, who
was at once the son of Serapis and identical with Serapis, it was
natural for the Christians to find an illuminating analogue in their
struggles with the Pauline mysteries. From that to the identification of
Mary with Isis, and her elevation to a rank quasi-divine--in spite of
the saying of Jesus about his mother and his brothers that we have
already quoted--was also a very natural step. Natural, too, was it for
Christianity to adopt, almost insensibly, the practical methods of the
popular religions of the time. Its priests took on the head-shaving and
the characteristic garments of the Egyptian priests, because that sort
of thing seemed to be the right way of distinguishing a priest. One
accretion followed another. Almost insensibly the originally
revolutionary teaching was buried under these customary acquisitions. We
have already tried to imagine Gautama Buddha returning to Tibet, and his
amazement at the worship of his own image in Lhassa. We will but suggest
the parallel amazement of some earnest Nazarene who had known and
followed his dusty and travel-worn Master through the dry sunlight of
Galilee, restored suddenly to this world and visiting, let us say, a
mass in St. Peter’s at Rome, at learning that the consecrated wafer upon
the altar was none other than his crucified teacher.[291]
Religion in a world community is not many things but one thing, and it
was inevitable that all the living religious faiths in the world at the
time, and all the philosophy and religious thought that came into
contact with Christianity, should come to an account with Christianity
and exchange phrases and ideas. The hopes of the early Nazarenes had
identified Jesus with the Christ; the brilliant mind of Paul had
surrounded his career with mystical significance. Jesus had called men
and women to a giant undertaking, to the renunciation of self, to the
new birth into the kingdom of love. The line of least resistance for the
flagging convert was to intellectualize himself away from this plain
doctrine, this stark proposition, into complicated theories and
ceremonies--that would leave his essential self alone. How much easier
is it to sprinkle oneself with blood than to purge oneself from malice
and competition; to eat bread and drink wine and pretend one had
absorbed divinity, to give candles rather than the heart, to shave the
head and retain the scheming privacy of the brain inside it! The world
was full of such evasive philosophy and theological stuff in the opening
centuries of the Christian era. It is not for us here to enlarge upon
the distinctive features of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Philonism, and the
like teachings which abounded in the Alexandrian world. But it was all
one world with that in which the early Christians were living. The
writings of such men as Origen, Plotinus, and Augustine witness to the
inevitable give and take of the time.
Jesus called himself the Son of God and also the Son of Man; but he laid
little stress on who he was or what he was, and much upon the teachings
of the Kingdom. In declaring that he was more than a man and divine,
Paul and his other followers, whether they were right or wrong, opened
up a vast field of argument. Was Jesus God? Or had God created him? Was
he identical with God or separate from God? It is not the function of
the historian to answer such questions, but he is bound to note them,
and to note how unavoidable they were, because of the immense influence
they have had upon the whole subsequent life of western mankind. By the
fourth century of the Christian Era we find all the Christian
communities so agitated and exasperated by tortuous and elusive
arguments about the nature of God as to be largely negligent of the
simpler teachings of charity, service, and brotherhood that Jesus had
inculcated.
The chief views that the historian notices are those of the Arians, the
Sabellians, and the Trinitarians. The Arians followed Arius, who taught
that Christ was less than God; the Sabellians taught that he was a mode
or aspect of God; God was Creator, Saviour, and Comforter just as one
man may be father, trustee, and guest; the Trinitarians, of whom
Athanasius was the great leader, taught that the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Ghost were three distinct Persons, but one God. The reader is
referred to the Athanasian Creed[292] for the exact expression of the
latter mystery, and for the alarming consequences to him of any failure
to grasp and believe it. To Gibbon he must go for a derisive statement
of these controversies. The present writer can deal with them neither
with awe nor derision; they seem to him, he must confess, a disastrous
ebullition of the human mind entirely inconsistent with the plain
account of Jesus preserved for us in the gospels. Orthodoxy became a
test not only for Christian office, but for Christian trade and help. A
small point of doctrine might mean affluence or beggary to a man. It is
difficult to read the surviving literature of the time without a strong
sense of the dogmatism, the spites, rivalries, and pedantries of the men
who tore Christianity to pieces for the sake of these theological
refinements. Most of the Trinitarian disputants--for it is chiefly
Trinitarian documents that survive--accuse their antagonists, probably
with truth, of mean and secondary motives, but they do so in a manner
that betrays their own base spirit very clearly. Arius, for example, is
accused of heretical opposition because he was not appointed Bishop of
Alexandria. Riots and excommunications and banishments punctuated these
controversies, and finally came official persecutions. These fine
differences about the constitution of the Deity interwove with politics
and international disputes. Men who quarrelled over business affairs,
wives who wished to annoy their husbands, developed antagonistic views
upon this exalted theme. Most of the barbarian invaders of the empire
were Arians; probably because their simple minds found the Trinitarian
position incomprehensible.
It is easy for the sceptic to mock at these disputes. But even if we
think that these attempts to say exactly how God was related to himself
were presumptuous and intellectually monstrous, nevertheless we are
bound to recognize that beneath these preposterous refinements of
impossible dogmas there lay often a real passion for truth--even if it
was truth ill conceived. Both sides produced genuine martyrs. And the
zeal of these controversies, though it is a base and often malicious
zeal, did at any rate make the Christian sects very energetically
propagandist and educational. Moreover, because the history of the
Christian body in the fourth and fifth centuries is largely a record of
these unhappy disputes, that must not blind us to the fact that the
spirit of Jesus did live and ennoble many lives among the Christians.
The text of the gospels, though it was probably tampered with during
this period, was not destroyed, and Jesus of Nazareth, in his own
manifest inimitable greatness, still taught through that text. Nor did
these unhappy quarrels prevent Christianity from maintaining a united
front against gladiatorial shows and against slavery, and against the
degrading worship of idols and of the god-Cæsar.
§ 6
So far as it challenged the divinity of Cæsar and the characteristic
institutions of the empire, Christianity is to be regarded as a
rebellious and disintegrating movement, and so it was regarded by most
of the emperors before Constantine the Great. It encountered
considerable hostility, and at last systematic attempts to suppress it.
Decius was the first emperor to organize an official persecution, and
the great era of the martyrs was in the time of Diocletian (303 and
following years). The persecution of Diocletian was indeed the crowning
struggle of the old idea of the god-emperor against the already great
and powerful organization that denied his divinity. Diocletian had
reorganized the monarchy upon lines of extreme absolutism; he had
abolished the last vestiges of republican institutions; he was the first
emperor to surround himself completely with the awe-inspiring etiquette
of an eastern monarch. He was forced by the logic of his assumptions to
attempt the complete eradication of a system that flatly denied them.
The test in the persecution was that the Christian was required to offer
sacrifice to the emperor.
“Though Diocletian, still averse to the effusion of blood, had moderated
the fury of Galerius, who proposed that everyone refusing to offer
sacrifice should immediately be burnt alive, the penalties inflicted on
the obstinacy of the Christians might be deemed sufficiently rigorous
and effectual. It was enacted that their churches, in all the provinces
of the empire, should be demolished to their foundations; and the
punishment of death was denounced against all who should presume to hold
any secret assemblies for the purpose of religious worship. The
philosophers, who now assumed the unworthy office of directing the blind
zeal of persecution, had diligently studied the nature and genius of the
Christian religion; and as they were not ignorant that the speculative
doctrines of the faith were supposed to be contained in the writings of
the prophets, of the evangelists, and of the apostles, they most
probably suggested the order, that the bishops and presbyters should
deliver all their sacred books into the hands of the magistrates, who
were commanded, under the severest penalties, to burn them in a public
and solemn manner. By the same edict, the property of the church was at
once confiscated; and the several parts of which it might consist were
either sold to the highest bidder, united to the imperial domain,
bestowed on the cities or corporations, or granted to the solicitations
of rapacious courtiers. After taking such effectual measures to abolish
the worship, and to dissolve the government of the Christians, it was
thought necessary to subject to the most intolerable hardships the
condition of those perverse individuals who should still reject the
religion of nature, of Rome, and of their ancestors. Persons of a
liberal birth were declared incapable of holding any honours or
employments; slaves were for ever deprived of the hopes of freedom; and
the whole body of the Christians were put out of the protection of the
law. The judges were authorized to hear and to determine every action
that was brought against a Christian; but the Christians were not
permitted to complain of any injury which they themselves had suffered;
and those unfortunate sectaries were exposed to the severity, while they
were excluded from the benefits, of public justice.... This edict was
scarcely exhibited to the public view, in the most conspicuous place in
Nicomedia, before it was torn down by the hands of a Christian, who
expressed at the same time, by the bitterest of invectives, his contempt
as well as abhorrence for such impious and tyrannical governors. His
offence, according to the mildest laws, amounted to treason, and
deserved death, and if it be true that he was a person of rank and
education, those circumstances could serve only to aggravate his guilt.
He was burnt, or rather roasted, by a slow fire; and his executioners,
zealous to revenge the personal insult which had been offered to the
emperors, exhausted every refinement of cruelty without being able to
subdue his patience, or to alter the steady and insulting smile which in
his dying agonies he still preserved in his countenance.”[293]
So with the death of this unnamed martyr the great persecution opened.
But, as Gibbon points out, our information as to its severity is of very
doubtful value. He estimates the total of victims as about two thousand,
and contrasts this with the known multitudes of Christians martyred by
their fellow Christians during the period of the Reformation. Gibbon was
strongly prejudiced against Christianity, and here he seems disposed to
minimize the fortitude and sufferings of the Christians. In many
provinces, no doubt, there must have been a great reluctance to enforce
the edict. But there was a systematic hunt for the copies of Holy Writ,
and in many places a systematic destruction of Christian churches. There
were tortures and executions, as well as a great crowding of the gaols
with Christian presbyters and bishops. We have to remember that the
Christian community was now a very considerable element of the
population, and that an influential proportion of the officials charged
with the execution of the edict were themselves of the proscribed faith.
Galerius, who was in control of the eastern provinces, was among the
most vigorous of the persecutors, but in the end, on his deathbed (371),
he realized the futility of his attacks upon this huge community, and
granted toleration in an edict, the gist of which Gibbon translates as
follows:--
“Among the important cares which have occupied our mind for the utility
and preservation of the empire, it was our intention to correct and
re-establish all things according to the ancient laws and public
discipline of the Romans. We were particularly desirous of reclaiming
into the way of reason and nature the deluded Christians who had
renounced the religion and ceremonies instituted by their fathers; and
presumptuously despising the practice of antiquity, had invented
extravagant laws and opinions according to the dictates of their fancy,
and had collected a various society from the different provinces of our
empire. The edicts which we have published to enforce the worship of the
gods having exposed many of the Christians to danger and distress, many
having suffered death, and many more who still persist in their impious
folly, being left destitute of any public exercise of religion, we are
disposed to extend to those unhappy men the effects of our wonted
clemency. We permit them, therefore, freely to profess their private
opinions and to assemble in their conventicles without fear or
molestation, provided always that they preserve a due respect to the
established laws and government. By another rescript we shall signify
our intentions to the judges and magistrates; and we hope that our
indulgence will engage the Christians to offer up their prayers to the
deity whom they adore, for our safety and prosperity, for their own, and
for that of the republic.”
In a few years Constantine the Great was reigning, first as associated
emperor (312) and then as the sole ruler (324), and the severer trials
of Christianity were over. If Christianity was a rebellious and
destructive force towards a pagan Rome, it was a unifying and organizing
force within its own communion. This fact the genius of Constantine
grasped. The spirit of Jesus, for all the doctrinal dissensions that
prevailed, made a great freemasonry throughout and even beyond the
limits of the empire. The faith was spreading among the barbarians
beyond the border; it had extended into Persia and Central Asia. It
provided the only hope of moral solidarity he could discern in the great
welter of narrow views and self-seeking over which he had to rule. It,
and it alone, had the facilities for organizing _will_, for the need of
which the empire was falling to pieces like a piece of rotten cloth. In
312 Constantine had to fight for Rome and his position against
Maxentius. He put the Christian monogram upon the shields and banners of
his troops, and claimed that the God of the Christians had fought for
him in his complete victory at the battle of the Milvian Bridge just
outside Rome. By this act he renounced all those pretensions to divinity
that the vanity of Alexander the Great had first brought into the
western world, and with the applause and enthusiastic support of the
Christians he established himself as a monarch more absolute even than
Diocletian.
In a few years’ time Christianity had become the official religion of
the empire, and in A.D. 337 Constantine upon his deathbed was baptized
as a Christian.[294]
§ 7
The figure of Constantine the Great is at least as cardinal in history
as that of Alexander the Great or Augustus Cæsar. We know very little of
his personality or of his private life; no Plutarch, no Suetonius, has
preserved any intimate and living details about him. Abuse we have of
him from his enemies, and much obviously fulsome panegyric to set
against it; but none of these writers give us a living character of him;
he is a party symbol for them, a partisan flag. It is stated by the
hostile Zosimus that, like Sargon I, he was of illegitimate birth; his
father was a distinguished general and his mother, Helena, an
innkeeper’s daughter of Nish in Serbia. Gibbon,[295] however, is of
opinion that there was a valid marriage. In any case it was a lowly
marriage, and the personal genius of Constantine prevailed against
serious disadvantages. He was comparatively illiterate, he knew little
or no Greek. It appears to be true that he banished his eldest son
Crispus, and caused him to be executed at the instigation of the young
man’s stepmother, Fausta; and it is also recorded that he was afterwards
convinced of the innocence of Crispus, and caused Fausta to be
executed--according to one account by being boiled to death in her bath,
and according to another by being exposed naked to wild beasts on a
desolate mountain--while there is also very satisfactory documentary
evidence that she survived him. If she was executed, the fact remains
that her three sons, together with two nephews, became the appointed
heirs of Constantine. Clearly there is nothing solid to be got from this
libellous tangle, and such soufflé as is possible with these scanty
materials is to be found admirably done by Gibbon (chap. xviii.).
Gibbon, because of his anti-Christian animus, is hostile to Constantine;
but he admits that he was temperate and chaste. He accuses him of
prodigality because of his great public buildings, and of being vain and
dissolute (!) because in his old age he wore a wig--Gibbon wore his own
hair tied with a becoming black bow--and a diadem and magnificent robes.
But all the later emperors after Diocletian wore diadems and magnificent
robes.
But if the personality of Constantine the Great remains phantom-like, if
the particulars of his domestic life reveal nothing but a vague tragedy,
we can still guess at much that was in his mind. It must, in the closing
years of his life, have been a very lonely mind. He was more of an
autocrat than any previous emperor had been--that is to say, he had less
counsel and help. No class of public-spirited and trustworthy men
remained; no senate nor council shared and developed his schemes. How
much he apprehended the geographical weakness of the empire, how far he
saw the complete disaster that was now so near, we can only guess. He
made his real capital at Nicomedia in Bithynia; Constantinople across
the Bosphorus was still being built when he died. Like Diocletian, he
seems to have realized the broken-backed outline of his dominions, and
to have concentrated his attention on foreign affairs and more
particularly on the affairs of Hungary, South Russia, and the Black Sea.
He reorganized all the official machinery of the empire; he gave it a
new constitution and sought to establish a dynasty. He was a restless
remaker of things; the social confusion he tried to fix by assisting in
the development of a caste system. This was following up the work of his
great predecessor Diocletian. He tried to make a caste of the peasants
and small cultivators, and to restrict them from moving from their
holdings. In fact he sought to make them serfs. The supply of slave
labour had fallen off because the empire was no longer an invading but
an invaded power; he turned to serfdom as the remedy. His creative
efforts necessitated unprecedentedly heavy taxation. All these things
point to a lonely and forcible mind. It is in his manifest understanding
of the need of some unifying moral force if the empire was to hold
together that his claim to originality lies.
It was only after he had turned to Christianity that he seems to have
realized the fierce dissensions of the theologians. He made a great
effort to reconcile these differences in order to have one uniform and
harmonious teaching in the community, and at his initiative a general
council of the Church was held at Nicæa, a town near Nicomedia and over
against Constantinople, in 325. Eusebius gives a curious account of this
strange gathering, over which the Emperor, although he was not yet a
baptized Christian, presided. It was not his first council of the
Church, for he had already (in 313) presided over a council at Arles. He
sat in the midst of the council of Nicæa upon a golden throne, and as he
had little Greek, we must suppose he was reduced to watching the
countenances and gestures of the debaters, and listening to their
intonations. The council was a stormy one. When old Arius rose to speak,
one Nicholas of Myra struck him in the face, and afterwards many ran
out, thrusting their fingers into their ears in affected horror at the
old man’s heresies. One is tempted to imagine the great emperor, deeply
anxious for the soul of his empire, firmly resolved to end these
divisions, bending towards his interpreters to ask them the meaning of
the uproar.
The views that prevailed at Nicæa are embodied in the Nicene Creed, a
strictly Trinitarian statement, and the Emperor sustained the
Trinitarian position. But afterwards, when Athanasius bore too hardly
upon the Arians, he had him banished from Alexandria; and when the
church at Alexandria would have excommunicated Arius, he obliged it to
readmit him to communion.
§ 8
This date, 325 A.D., is a very convenient date in our history. It is the
date of the first complete general (“œcumenical”) council of the
entire Christian world. (That at Arles we have mentioned had been a
gathering of only the western half.) It marks the definite entry upon
the stage of human affairs of the Christian church and of Christianity
as it is generally understood in the world to-day. It marks the exact
definition of Christian teaching by the Nicene Creed.
It is necessary that we should recall the reader’s attention to the
profound differences between this fully developed Christianity of Nicæa
and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. All Christians hold that the
latter is completely contained in the former, but that is a question
outside our province. What is clearly apparent is that the teaching of
Jesus of Nazareth was a _prophetic teaching_ of the new type that began
with the Hebrew prophets. It was not priestly, it had no consecrated
temple and no altar. It had no rites and ceremonies. Its sacrifice was
“a broken and a contrite heart.” Its only organization was an
organization of preachers, and its chief function was the sermon. But
the fully fledged Christianity of the fourth century, though it
preserved as its nucleus the teachings of Jesus in the gospels, was
mainly a _priestly religion_ of a type already familiar to the world for
thousands of years. The centre of its elaborate ritual was an altar, and
the essential act of worship the sacrifice, by a consecrated priest, of
the mass. And it had a rapidly developing organization of deacons,
priests, and bishops.
But if Christianity had taken on an extraordinary outward resemblance
to the cults of Serapis, Ammon, or Bel-Marduk, we must remember that
even its priestcraft had certain novel features. Nowhere did it possess
any quasi-divine image of God. There was no head temple containing the
god, because God was everywhere. There was no holy of holies. Its
widespread altars were all addressed to the unseen universal Trinity.
Even in its most archaic aspects there was in Christianity something
new.
A very important thing for us to note is the rôle played by the Emperor
in the fixation of Christianity. Not only was the council of Nicæa
assembled by Constantine the Great, but all the great councils, the two
at Constantinople (381 and 553), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451),
were called together by the imperial power. And it is very manifest that
in much of the history of Christianity at this time the spirit of
Constantine the Great is as evident or more evident than the spirit of
Jesus. He was, we have said, a pure autocrat. The last vestiges of Roman
republicanism had vanished in the days of Aurelian and Diocletian. To
the best of his lights he was trying to remake the crazy empire while
there was yet time, and he worked without any councillors, any public
opinion, or any sense of the need of such aids and checks. The idea of
stamping out all controversy and division, stamping out all thought, by
imposing one dogmatic creed upon all believers, is an altogether
autocratic idea, it is the idea of the single-handed man who feels that
to work at all he must be free from opposition and criticism. The
history of the Church under his influence becomes now therefore a
history of the violent struggles that were bound to follow upon his
sudden and rough summons to unanimity. From him the Church acquired the
disposition to be authoritative and unquestioned, to develop a
centralized organization and run parallel to the empire.
A second great autocrat who presently contributed to the stamping upon
Catholic Christianity of a distinctly authoritative character was
Theodosius I, Theodosius the Great (379-395). He forbade the unorthodox
to hold meetings, handed over all churches to the Trinitarians, and
overthrew the heathen temples, throughout the empire, and in 390 he
caused the great statue of Serapis at Alexandria to be destroyed. There
was to be no rivalry, no qualification to the rigid unity of the
Church.
Here we cannot tell of the vast internal troubles of the Church,[296]
its indigestions of heresy; of Arians and Paulicians, of Gnostics and
Manicheans. Had it been less authoritative and more tolerant of
intellectual variety, it might perhaps have been a still more powerful
body than it became. But in spite of all these disorders, it did for
some time maintain a conception of human unity more intimate and far
wider than was ever achieved before. By the fifth century Christendom
was already becoming greater, sturdier, and more enduring than any
empire had ever been because it was something not merely imposed upon
them, but interwoven with the texture of their minds. It reached out far
beyond the utmost limits of the empire, into Armenia, Persia, Abyssinia,
Ireland, Germany, India, and Turkestan. “Though made up of widely
scattered congregations, it was thought of as one body of Christ, one
people of God. This ideal unity found expression in many ways.
Inter-communication between the various Christian communities was very
active. Christians upon a journey were always sure of a warm welcome and
hospitable entertainment from their fellow-disciples. Messengers and
letters were sent freely from one church to another. Missionaries and
evangelists went continually from place to place. Documents of various
kinds, including gospels and apostolic epistles, circulated widely. Thus
in various ways the feeling of unity found expression, and the
development of widely separated parts of Christendom conformed more or
less closely to a common type.”[297]
Christendom retained at least the formal tradition of this general unity
of spirit until 1054, when the Latin-speaking Western church and the
main and original Greek-speaking church, the “Orthodox” church, severed
themselves from one another, ostensibly upon the question of adding two
words to the creed. The older creed had declared that the “Holy Ghost
proceeded from the Father.” The Latins wanted to add, and did add
“_Filioque_” (=and from the son), and placed the Greeks out of their
communion because they would not follow this lead. But already as early
as the fifth century the Christians in Eastern Syria, Persia, Central
Asia--there were churches at Merv, Herat, and Samarkand--and India had
detached themselves on a similar score. These extremely interesting
Asiatic Christians are known in history as the Nestorian Church, and
their influence extended into China. The Egyptian and Abyssinian
churches also detached themselves very early upon similarly inexplicable
points. Long before this formal separation of the Latin and
Greek-speaking halves of the main church, however, there was a practical
separation following upon the breaking up of the empire. Their
conditions diverged from the first. While the Greek-speaking Eastern
Empire held together and the emperor at Constantinople remained dominant
in the Church, the Latin half of the empire, as we have already told,
collapsed, and left the Church free of any such imperial control.
Moreover, while ecclesiastical authority in the empire of Constantinople
was divided between the high-bishops, or patriarchs, of Constantinople,
Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, authority in the West was
concentrated in the patriarch, or Pope, of Rome. The Bishop of Rome had
always been recognized as first among the patriarchs, and all these
things conspired to justify exceptional pretensions upon his part to a
quasi-imperial authority. With the final fall of the Western Empire, he
took over the ancient title of _pontifex maximus_ which the emperors had
held, and so became the supreme sacrificial priest of the Roman
tradition. Over the Christians of the West his supremacy was fully
recognized, but from the beginning it had to be urged with discretion
within the dominions of the Eastern emperor and the jurisdictions of the
other four patriarchs.
Ideas of worldly rule by the Church were already prevalent in the fourth
century. Saint Augustine, a citizen of Hippo in North Africa, who wrote
between 354 and 430, gave expression to the developing political ideas
of the Church in his book _The City of God. The City of God_ represents
the possibility of making the world into a theological and organized
Kingdom of Heaven. The city, as Augustine puts it, is “a spiritual
society of the predestined faithful,”[298] but the step from that to a
political application was not a very wide one. The Church was to be the
ruler of the world over all nations, the divinely led ruling power over
a great league of terrestrial states. In later years these ideas
developed into a definite political theory and policy. As the barbarian
races settled and became Christian, the Pope began to claim an
overlordship of their kings. In a few centuries the Pope had become in
theory, and to a certain extent in practice, the high priest, censor,
judge, and divine monarch of Christendom; his influence extended in the
west far beyond the utmost range of the old empire, to Ireland, Norway,
and Sweden, and over all Germany. For more than a thousand years this
idea of the unity of Christendom, of Christendom as a sort of vast
Amphictyony, whose members even in war time were restrained from many
extremities by the idea of a common brotherhood and a common loyalty to
the Church, dominated Europe. The history of Europe from the fifth
century onward to the fifteenth is very largely the history of the
failure of this great idea of a divine world government to realize
itself in practice.
§ 9
We have already given an account in the previous chapter of the chief
irruptions of the barbarian races. We may now, with the help of a map,
make a brief review of the political divisions of Europe at the close of
the fifth century. No vestige of the Western Empire, the original Roman
Empire, remained as such. Over many parts of Europe a sort of legendary
overlordship of the Hellenic Eastern Empire held its place in men’s
minds. The emperor at Constantinople was, in theory at least, still
emperor. In Britain, the quite barbaric Teutonic Angles, Saxons, and
Jutes had conquered the eastern half of England; in the west of the
island the Britons still held out, but were gradually being forced back
into Wales and Cornwall. The Anglo-Saxons seem to have been among the
most ruthless and effective of barbarian conquerors, for wherever they
prevailed, their language completely replaced the Keltic or Latin
speech--it is not certain which[299]--used by the British. These
Anglo-Saxons were as yet not Christianized. Most of Gaul, Holland, and
the Rhineland was under the fairly vigorous, Christianized, and much
more civilized kingdom of the Franks. But the Rhone Valley was under
the separate kingdom of the Burgundians. Spain and some of the south of
France were under the rule of the Visigoths, but the Suevi were in
possession of the north-west corner of the peninsula. Of the Vandal
kingdom in Africa we have already written; and Italy, still in its
population and habits Roman, came under the rule of the Ostrogoths.
There was no emperor in Rome, but Theodoric I ruled there as the first
of a line of Gothic kings, and his rule extended across the Alps into
Pannonia and down the Adriatic to Dalmatia and Serbia. To the east of
the Gothic kingdom the emperors of Constantinople ruled definitely. The
Bulgars were still at this time a Mongolian tribe of horse-riding nomads
in the region of the Volga; the Aryan Serbs had recently come southward
to the shores of the Black Sea into the original home of the Visigoths;
the Turko-Finnish Magyars were not yet in Europe. The Lombards were as
yet north of the Danube.
The sixth century was marked by a phase of vigour on the part of the
Eastern Empire under the Emperor Justinian (527-565). The Vandal kingdom
was recovered in 534; the Goths were expelled from Italy in 553. So soon
as Justinian was dead (565), the Lombards descended into Italy and
settled in Lombardy, but they left Ravenna, Rome, Southern Italy, and
North Africa under the rule of the Eastern Empire.
Such was the political condition of the world in which the idea of
Christendom developed. The daily life of that time was going on at a
very low level indeed physically, intellectually, and morally. It is
frequently said that Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries relapsed
into barbarism, but that does not express the reality of the case very
well. Barbarism is a social order of an elementary type, orderly within
its limits; the state of Europe beneath its political fragmentation was
a social disorder. Its morale was not that of a kraal, but that of a
slum. In a savage kraal a savage knows that he belongs to a community,
and lives and acts accordingly; in a slum, the individual neither knows
of nor acts in relation to any greater being.
Only very slowly and weakly did Christianity restore that lost sense of
community and teach men to rally about the idea of Christendom. The
social and economic structure of the Roman Empire was in ruins. That
civilization had been a civilization of wealth and political power
sustained by the limitation and slavery of the great mass of mankind. It
had presented a spectacle of outward splendour and luxurious refinement,
but beneath that brave outward show were cruelty, stupidity, and
stagnation. It had to break down, it had to be removed before anything
better could replace it.
We have already called attention to its intellectual deadness. For three
centuries it had produced neither science nor literature.[300] It is
only where men are to be found neither too rich and powerful to be
tempted into extravagant indulgences nor too poor and limited to care
for anything beyond the daily need that those disinterested curiosities
and serene impulses can have play that give sane philosophy and science
and great art to the world, and the plutocracy of Rome had made such a
class impossible. When men and women are unlimited and unrestrained, the
evidence of history shows clearly that they are all liable to become
monsters of self-indulgence; when, on the other hand, they are driven
and unhappy, then their impulse is towards immoderate tragical resorts,
towards wild revolts or towards the austerities and intensities of
religion.
[Illustration: Map of EUROPE about 500 A.D.]
It is not perhaps true to say that the world became miserable in these
“dark ages” to which we have now come; much nearer the truth is it to
say that the violent and vulgar fraud of Roman imperialism, that world
of politicians, adventurers, landowners, and financiers, collapsed into
a sea of misery that was already there. Our histories of these times are
very imperfect: there were few places where men could write, and little
encouragement to write at all; no one was sure even of the safety of his
manuscript or the possibility of its being read. But we know enough to
tell that this age was an age not merely of war and robbery, but of
famine and pestilence. No effective sanitary organization had yet come
into the world, and the migrations of the time must have destroyed
whatever hygienic balance had been established. Attila’s ravages in
North Italy were checked by an outbreak of fever in 452. There was a
great epidemic of bubonic plague towards the end of the reign of
Justinian (565) which did much to weaken the defence of Italy against
the Lombards. In 543 ten thousand people had died in one day in
Constantinople. (Gibbon says “each day.”) Plague was raging in Rome in
590. The seventh century was also a plague-stricken century. The
Englishman Bede, one of the few writers of the time, records pestilences
in England in 664, 672, 678, and 683, no fewer than four in twenty
years! Gibbon couples the Justinian epidemic with the great comet of
531, and with the very frequent and serious earthquakes of that reign.
“Many cities of the east were left vacant, and in several districts of
Italy the harvest and the vintage withered on the ground.” He alleges
“a visible decrease of the human species which has never been made good
in some of the fairest countries of the globe.” To many in those dark
days it seemed that all learning and all that made life seemly and
desirable was perishing.[301]
How far the common lot was unhappier under these conditions of squalor
and insecurity than it had been under the grinding order of the imperial
system it is impossible to say. There was possibly much local variation,
the rule of violent bullies here and a good-tempered freedom there,
famine this year and plenty the next. If robbers abounded, tax-gatherers
and creditors had disappeared. Such kings as those of the Frankish and
Gothic kingdoms were really phantom rulers to most of their so-called
subjects; the life of each district went on at a low level, with little
trade or travel. Greater or lesser areas of country-side would be
dominated by some able person, claiming with more or less justice the
title of lord or count or duke from the tradition of the later empire or
from the king. Such local nobles would assemble bands of retainers and
build themselves strongholds. Often they adapted pre-existing buildings.
The Colosseum at Rome, for example, the arena of many great gladiatorial
shows, was converted into a fortress, and so was the amphitheatre at
Arles. So also was the great tomb of Hadrian at Rome. In the decaying
and now insanitary towns and cities shrunken bodies of artisans would
hold together and serve the needs of the cultivating villages about them
by their industry, placing themselves under the protection of some
adjacent noble.
§ 10
A very important share in the social recrystallization that went on in
the sixth and seventh centuries after the breakdown and fusion of the
fourth and fifth was taken by the Christian monastic orders that were
now arising in the Western world.
Monasteries had existed in the world before Christianity. During the
period of social unhappiness among the Jews before the time of Jesus of
Nazareth, there was a sect of Essenes who lived apart in communities
vowed to austere lives of solitude, purity, and self-denial. Buddhism,
too, had developed its communities of men who withdrew from the general
effort and commerce of the world to lead lives of austerity and
contemplation. Indeed, the story of Buddha, as we have told it, shows
that such ideas must have prevailed in India long before his time, and
that at last he repudiated them. Quite early in the history of
Christianity there arose a similar movement away from the competition
and heat and stress of the daily life of men. In Egypt, particularly,
great numbers of men and women went out into the desert and there lived
solitary lives of prayer and contemplation, living in absolute poverty
in caves or under rocks, and subsisting on the chance alms of those whom
their holiness impressed. Such lives would signify little to the
historian, they are indeed of their very nature lives withdrawn from
history, were it not for the turn this monastic tendency presently took
among the more energetic and practical Europeans.
One of the central figures in the story of the development of
monasticism in Europe is Saint Benedict, who lived between 480 and 544.
He was born at Spoleto in Italy, and he was a young man of good family
and ability. The shadow of the times fell upon him, and, like Buddha, he
took to the religious life and at first set no limit to his austerities.
Fifty miles from Rome is Subiaco, and there at the end of a gorge of the
Anio, beneath a jungle growth of weeds and bushes, rose a deserted
palace built by the Emperor Nero, overlooking an artificial lake that
had been made in those days of departed prosperity by damming back the
waters of the river. Here, with a hair shirt as his chief possession,
Benedict took up his quarters in a cave in the high southward-looking
cliff that overhangs the stream, in so inaccessible a position that his
food had to be lowered to him on a cord by a faithful admirer.[302]
Three years he lived here, and his fame spread as Buddha’s did nearly a
thousand years before under similar circumstances.
As in the case of Buddha, the story of Benedict has been overlaid by
foolish and credulous disciples with a mass of silly stories of
miracles and manifestations. But presently we find him, no longer
engaged in self-torment, but controlling a group of twelve monasteries,
and the resort of a great number of people. Youths are brought to him to
be educated, and the whole character of his life has changed.
From Subiaco he removed further southward to Monte Cassino, half-way
between Rome and Naples, a lonely and beautiful mountain, in the midst
of a great circle of majestic heights. Here, it is interesting to note
that in the sixth century A.D. he found a temple of Apollo and a sacred
grove and the country-side still worshipping at this shrine. His first
labours had to be missionary labours, and it was with difficulty that he
persuaded the simple pagans to demolish their temple and cut down their
grove. The establishment upon Monte Cassino became a famous and powerful
centre within the lifetime of its founder. Mixed up with the imbecile
inventions of marvel-loving monks about demons exorcised, disciples
walking on the water, and dead children restored to life, we can still
detect something of the real spirit of Benedict. Particularly
significant are the stories that represent him as discouraging extreme
mortification. He sent a damping message to a solitary who had invented
a new degree in saintliness by chaining himself to a rock in a narrow
cave. “Break thy chain,” said Benedict, “for the true servant of God is
chained not to rocks by iron, but to righteousness by Christ.”
And next to the discouragement of solitary self-torture it is Benedict’s
distinction that he insisted upon hard work. Through the legends shines
the clear indication of the trouble made by his patrician students and
disciples who found themselves obliged to toil instead of leading lives
of leisurely austerity under the ministrations of the lower class
brethren. A third remarkable thing about Benedict was his political
influence. He set himself to reconcile Goths and Italians, and it is
clear that Totila, his Gothic king, came to him for counsel and was
greatly influenced by him. When Totila retook Naples from the Greeks,
the Goths protected the women from insult and treated even the captured
soldiers with humanity. When Belisarius, Justinian’s general, had taken
the same place ten years previously, he had celebrated his triumph by a
general massacre.
Now the monastic organization of Benedict was a very great beginning in
the western world.[303] One of his prominent followers was Pope Gregory
the Great (540-604), the first monk to become Pope (590); he was one of
the most capable and energetic of the popes, sending successful missions
to the unconverted, and particularly to the Anglo-Saxons. He ruled in
Rome like an independent king, organizing armies, making treaties. It is
clear that Augustine’s _City of God_ was a very real thing to him. To
his influence is due the imposition of the Benedictine rule upon nearly
the whole of Latin monasticism.
Closely associated with these two names in the development of a
civilizing monasticism out of the merely egotistic mortifications of the
early recluses is that of Cassiodorus (490-585). He was evidently much
senior to Pope Gregory, and younger by ten years than Benedict, and,
like these two, he belonged to a patrician family, a Syrian family
settled in Italy. He had a considerable official career under the Gothic
kings; and when, between 545 and 553, the overthrow of those kings and
the great pestilence paved the way for the new barbaric rule of the
Lombards, he took refuge in a monastic career. He founded a monastery
upon his private estates, and set the monks he gathered to work in quite
the Benedictine fashion, though whether his monks actually followed the
Benedictine rule that was being formulated about the same time from
Monte Cassino we do not know. But there can be no question of his
influence upon the development of this great working, teaching, and
studying order. It is evident that he was profoundly impressed by the
universal decay of education and the possible loss of all learning and
of the ancient literature by the world; and from the first he directed
his brethren to the task of preserving and restoring these things. He
collected ancient MSS. and caused them to be copied. He made sundials,
water clocks, and similar apparatus, a little last gleam of experimental
science in the gathering ignorance. He wrote a history of the Gothic
kings, and, what is more significant of his sense of the needs of the
time, he produced a series of school books on the liberal arts and a
grammar. Probably his influence was even greater than that of Saint
Benedict in making monasticism into a powerful instrument for the
restoration of social order in the Western world.
The spread of monasteries of the Benedictine order or type in the
seventh and eighth centuries was very considerable. Everywhere we find
them as centres of light, restoring, maintaining, and raising the
standard of cultivation, preserving some sort of elementary education,
spreading useful arts, multiplying and storing books, and keeping before
the eyes of the world the spectacle and example of a social backbone.
For eight centuries thenceforth the European monastic system remained a
system of patches and fibres of enlightenment in what might otherwise
have been a wholly chaotic world. Closely associated with the
Benedictine monasteries were the schools that grew presently into the
medieval universities. The schools of the Roman world had been
altogether swept away in the general social breakdown. There was a time
when very few priests in Britain or Gaul could read the gospel or their
service books. Only gradually was teaching restored to the world. But
when it was restored, it came back not as the duty work of a learned
slave, but as the religious service of a special class of devoted men.
In the east also there was a breach of educational continuity, but there
the cause was not so much social disorder as religious intolerance, and
the break was by no means so complete. Justinian closed and dispersed
the schools of Athens (529), whose origins we have described in chap.
xxiii, §§ 1 and 2; but he did this very largely in order to destroy a
rival to the new school he was setting up in Constantinople, which was
more directly under imperial control. Since the new Latin learning of
the developing western universities had no text-books and literature of
its own, it had, in spite of its strong theological bias to the
contrary, to depend very largely upon the Latin classics and the Latin
translations of the Greek literature. It was obliged to preserve far
more of that splendid literature than it had a mind to do.
XXXI
SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA (CIRCA 50 B.C. TO A.D. 650)
§ 1. _Justinian the Great._ § 2. _The Sassanid Empire in Persia._ §
3. _The Decay of Syria under the Sassanids._ § 4. _The First
Message from Islam._ § 5. _Zoroaster and Mani._ § 6. _Hunnish
Peoples in Central Asia and India._ § 7. _The Great Age of China._
§ 8. _Intellectual Fetters of China._ § 9. _The Travels of Yuan
Chwang._
§ 1
In the preceding two chapters we have concentrated our attention chiefly
on the collapse in the comparatively short space of four centuries of
the political and social order of the western part of the great Roman
Empire of Cæsar and Trajan. We have dwelt upon the completeness of that
collapse. To any intelligent and public-spirited mind living in the time
and under the circumstances of St. Benedict or Cassiodorus, it must have
seemed, indeed, as if the light of civilization was waning and near
extinction. But with the longer views a study of universal history gives
us, we can view those centuries of shadow as a phase, and probably a
necessary phase, in the onward march of social and political ideas and
understandings. And if, during that time, a dark sense of calamity
rested upon Western Europe, we must remember that over large portions of
the world there was no retrogression.
With their Western prepossessions European writers are much too prone to
underrate the tenacity of the Eastern empire that centred upon
Constantinople. This empire embodied a tradition much more ancient than
that of Rome. If the reader will look at the map we have given of its
extent in the sixth century, and if he will reflect that its official
language had then become Greek, he will realize that what we are dealing
with here is only nominally a branch of the Roman Empire; it is really
the Hellenic Empire of which Herodotus dreamt and which Alexander the
Great founded. True it called itself Roman and its people “Romans,” and
to this day modern Greek is called “Romaic.” True also that Constantine
the Great knew no Greek and that Justinian’s accent was bad. These
superficialities of name and form cannot alter the fact that the empire
was in reality Hellenic, with a past of six centuries at the time of
Constantine the Great, and that while the real Roman Empire crumpled up
completely in four centuries, this Hellenic “Roman Empire” held out for
more than eleven, from 312, the beginning of the reign of Constantine
the Great, to 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks.
And while we have had to tell of something like a complete social
collapse in the west, there were no such equivalent breakdowns in the
east. Towns and cities flourished, the countryside was well cultivated,
trade went on. For many centuries Constantinople was the greatest and
richest city in the world. We will not trouble ourselves here with the
names and follies, the crimes and intrigues, of its tale of emperors. As
with most monarchs of great states, they did not guide their empire;
they were carried by it. We have already dealt at some length with
Constantine the Great (312-337), we have mentioned Theodosius the Great
(379-395), who for a little while reunited the empire, and Justinian I
(527-565).[304] Presently we shall tell something of Heraclius
(610-641). Justinian, like Constantine, may have had Slav blood in his
veins. He was a man of great ambition and great organizing power, and he
had the good fortune to be married to a woman of equal or greater
ability, the Empress Theodora, who had in her youth been an actress of
doubtful reputation. But his ambitious attempts to restore the ancient
greatness of the empire probably overtaxed its resources. As we have
told, he reconquered the African province from the Vandals and most of
Italy from the Goths. He also recovered the South of Spain. He built the
great and beautiful church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople, founded a
university, and codified the law.[305] But against this we must set his
closing of the schools of Athens. Meanwhile a great plague swept the
world, and at his death this renewed and expanded empire of his crumpled
up again like a blown-out bladder. The greater part of his Italian
conquests was lost to the Lombards. Italy was indeed at that time almost
a desert; the Lombard historians assert they came into an empty country.
The Avars and Slavs struck down from the Danube country towards the
Adriatic, Slav populations establishing themselves in what is now
Serbia, Croatia, and Dalmatia, to become the Yugo-Slavs of to-day.
Moreover, a great and exhausting struggle began with the Sassanid Empire
in Persia.
But before we say anything of this struggle, in which the Persians
thrice came near to taking Constantinople, and which was decided by a
great Persian defeat at Nineveh (627), it is necessary to sketch very
briefly the history of Persia from the Parthian days.
§ 2
We have already drawn a comparison between the brief four centuries of
Roman imperialism and the obstinate vitality of the imperialism of the
Euphrates-Tigris country. We have glanced very transitorily at the
Hellenized Bactrian and Seleucid monarchies that flourished in the
eastern half of Alexander’s area of conquest for three centuries, and
told how the Parthians came down into Mesopotamia in the last century
B.C. We have described the battle of Carrhæ and the end of Crassus.
Thereafter for two centuries and a half the Parthian dynasty of the
Arsacids ruled in the east and the Roman in the west, with Armenia and
Syria between them, and the boundaries shifted east and west as either
side grew stronger. We have marked the utmost eastward extension of the
Roman Empire under Trajan (see map to chap. xxix., § 3), and we have
noted that about the same time the Indo-Scythians (chap. xxix., § 4),
poured down into India.
In 227 occurred a revolution, and the Arsacid dynasty gave way to a more
vigorous line, the Sassanid, a national Persian line under Ardashir I.
In one respect the empire of Ardashir I presented a curious parallelism
with that of Constantine the Great a hundred years later. Ardashir
attempted to consolidate it by insisting upon religious unity, and
adopted as the state religion the old Persian faith of Zoroaster, of
which we shall have more to say later.
This new Sassanid Empire immediately became aggressive, and under Sapor
I, the son and successor of Ardashir, took Antioch. We have already
noted how the Emperor Valerian was defeated (260) and taken prisoner.
But as Sapor was retiring from a victorious march into Asia Minor, he
was fallen upon and defeated by Odenathus, the Arab king of a great
desert-trading centre, Palmyra.
For a brief time under Odenathus, and then under his widow Zenobia,
Palmyra was a considerable state, wedged between the two empires. Then
it fell to the Emperor Aurelian, who carried off Zenobia in chains to
grace his triumph at Rome (272).
We will not attempt to trace the fluctuating fortunes of the Sassanids
during the next three centuries. Throughout that time war between Persia
and the empire of Constantinople wasted Asia Minor like a fever.
Christianity spread widely and was persecuted, for after the
Christianization of Rome the Persian monarch remained the only
god-monarch on earth, and he saw in Christianity merely the propaganda
of his Byzantine rival. Constantinople became the protector of the
Christians and Persia of the Zoroastrians; in a treaty of 422, the one
empire agreed to tolerate Zoroastrianism and the other Christianity. In
483, the Christians of the east split off from the Orthodox church and
became the Nestorian church; which, as we have already noted, spread its
missionaries far and wide throughout Central and Eastern Asia. This
separation from Europe, since it freed the Christian bishops of the
east from the rule of the Byzantine patriarchs, and so lifted from the
Nestorian church the suspicion of political disloyalty, led to a
complete toleration of Christianity in Persia. With Chosroes I (531-579)
came a last period of Sassanid vigour. He was the contemporary and
parallel of Justinian. He reformed taxation, restored the orthodox
Zoroastrianism, extended his power into Southern Arabia (Yemen), which
he rescued from the rule of Abyssinian Christians, pushed his northern
frontier into Western Turkestan, and carried on a series of wars with
Justinian. His reputation as an enlightened ruler stood so high, that
when Justinian closed the schools of Athens, the last Greek philosophers
betook themselves to his court. They sought in him the philosopher
king--that mirage which, as we have noted, Confucius and Plato had
sought in their day. The philosophers found the atmosphere of orthodox
Zoroastrianism even less to their taste than orthodox Christianity, and
in 549 Chosroes had the kindness to insert a clause in an armistice with
Justinian, permitting their return to Greece, and ensuring that they
should not be molested for their pagan philosophy or their transitory
pro-Persian behaviour.
It is in connection with Chosroes that we hear now of a new Hunnish
people in Central Asia, the Turks, who are, we learn, first in alliance
with him and then with Constantinople.
Chosroes II (590-628), the grandson of Chosroes I, experienced
extraordinary fluctuations of fortune. At the outset of his career he
achieved astonishing successes against the empire of Constantinople.
Three times (in 608, 615, and 627) his armies reached Chalcedon, which
is over against Constantinople; he took Antioch, Damascus, and Jerusalem
(614), and from Jerusalem he carried off a cross, said to be the true
cross on which Jesus was crucified, to his capital Ctesiphon. (But some
of this or some other true cross had already got to Rome. It had been
brought from Jerusalem, it was said, by the “Empress Helena,” the
idealized and canonized mother of Constantine, a story for which Gibbon
displayed small respect.[306]) In 619, Chosroes II conquered that facile
country, Egypt. This career of conquest was at last arrested by the
Emperor Heraclius (610), who set about restoring the ruined military
power of Constantinople. For some time Heraclius avoided a great battle
while he gathered his forces. He took the field in good earnest in 623.
The Persians experienced a series of defeats culminating in the battle
of Nineveh (627); but neither side had the strength for the complete
defeat of the other. At the end of the struggle there was still an
undefeated Persian army upon the Bosphorus, although there were
victorious Byzantine forces in Mesopotamia. In 628 Chosroes II was
deposed and murdered by his son. An indecisive peace was concluded
between the two exhausted empires a year or so later, restoring their
old boundaries; and the true cross was sent back to Heraclius, who
replaced it in Jerusalem with much pomp and ceremony.
§ 3
So we give briefly the leading events in the history of the Persian as
of the Byzantine Empire. What is more interesting for us and less easy
to give are the changes that went on in the lives of the general
population of those great empires during that time. The present writer
can find little of a definite character about the great pestilences that
we know swept the world in the second and sixth centuries of this era.
Certainly they depleted population, and probably they disorganized
social order in these regions just as much as we know they did in the
Roman and Chinese empires.
The late Sir Mark Sykes, whose untimely death in Paris during the
influenza epidemic of 1919 was an irreparable loss to Great Britain,
wrote in _The Caliph’s Last Heritage_ a vivid review of the general life
of Nearer Asia during the period we are considering. In the opening
centuries of the present era, he says: “the direction of military
administration and imperial finance became entirely divorced in men’s
minds from practical government; and notwithstanding the vilest tyranny
of sots, drunkards, tyrants, lunatics, savages, and abandoned women, who
from time to time held the reins of government, Mesopotamia, Babylonia,
and Syria contained enormous populations, huge canals and dykes were
kept in repair, and commerce and architecture flourished, in spite of a
perpetual procession of hostile armies and a continual changing of the
nationality of the governor. Each peasant’s interest was centred in his
ruling town; each citizen’s interest was in the progress and prosperity
of his city; and the advent of an enemy’s army may have sometimes been
looked on even with satisfaction, if his victory was assured and the
payment of his contracts a matter of certainty.
[Illustration: _The_ EASTERN EMPIRE _and the_ SASSANIDS]
“A raid from the north,[307] on the other hand, must have been a matter
for dread. Then the villagers had need to take refuge behind the walls
of the cities, from whence they could descry the smoke which told of the
wreck and damage caused by the nomads. So long, however, as the canals
were not destroyed (and, indeed, they were built with such solidity and
caution that their safety was assured), no irreparable damage could be
effected....
“In Armenia and Pontus the condition of life was quite otherwise. These
were mountain districts, containing fierce tribes headed by powerful
native nobility under recognized ruling kings, while in the valleys and
plains the peaceful cultivator provided the necessary economic
resources.... Cilicia and Cappadocia were now thoroughly subject to
Greek influence, and contained numerous wealthy and highly civilized
towns, besides possessing a considerable merchant marine. Passing from
Cilicia to the Hellespont, the whole Mediterranean coast was crowded
with wealthy cities and Greek colonies, entirely cosmopolitan in thought
and speech, with those municipal and local ambitions which seem natural
to the Grecian character. The Grecian Zone extended from Caria to the
Bosphorus, and followed the coast as far as Sinope on the Black Sea,
where it gradually faded away.
“Syria was broken up into a curious quiltlike pattern of principalities
and municipal kingdoms; beginning with the almost barbarous states of
Commagene and Edessa (Urfa) in the north. South of these stood Bambyce,
with its huge temples and priestly governors. Towards the coast a dense
population in villages and towns clustered around the independent cities
of Antioch, Apamea, and Emesa (Homs); while out in the wilderness the
great Semitic merchant city of Palmyra was gaining wealth and greatness
as the neutral trading-ground between Parthia and Rome. Between the
Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon we find, at the height of its glory, Heliopolis
(Baalbek), the battered fragments of which even now command our
admiration.... Bending in towards Galilee we find the wondrous cities of
Gerasa and Philadelphia (Amman) connected by solid roads of masonry and
furnished with gigantic aqueducts.... Syria is still so rich in ruins
and remains of the period that it is not difficult to picture to oneself
the nature of its civilization. The arts of Greece, imported long
before, had been developed into magnificence that bordered on vulgarity.
The richness of ornamentation, the lavish expense, the flaunting wealth,
all tell that the tastes of the voluptuous and artistic Semites were
then as now. I have stood in the colonnades of Palmyra and I have dined
in the Hotel Cecil, and, save that the latter is built of iron, daubed
with sham wood, sham stucco, sham gold, sham velvet, and sham stone, the
effect is identical. In Syria there were slaves in sufficient quantity
to make real buildings, but the artistic spirit is as debased as
anything made by machinery. Over against the cities the village folk
must have dwelt pretty much as they do now, in houses of mud and dry
stone wall; while out in the distant pastures the Bedouin tended their
flocks in freedom under the rule of the Nabatean kings of their own
race, or performed the office of guardians and agents of the great
trading caravans.
[Illustration: _Cities of_ ASIA MINOR, SYRIA _&_ MESOPOTAMIA _during the
first centuries of the Christian Era...._]
“Beyond the herdsmen lay the parching deserts, which acted as the
impenetrable barrier and defence of the Parthian Empire behind the
Euphrates, where stood the great cities of Ctesiphon, Seleucia, Hatra,
Nisibin, Harran, and hundreds more whose very names are forgotten. These
great townships subsisted on the enormous cereal wealth of Mesopotamia,
watered as it then was by canals, whose makers’ names were even then
already lost in the mists of antiquity. Babylon and Nineveh had passed
away; the successors of Persia and Macedon had given place to Parthia;
but the people and the cultivation were the same as when Cyrus the
Conqueror had first subdued the land. The language of many of the towns
was Greek, and the cultured citizens of Seleucia might criticize the
philosophies and tragedies of Athens; but the millions of the
agricultural population knew possibly no more of these things than does
many an Essex peasant of to-day know of what passes in the metropolis.”
Compare with this the state of affairs at the end of the seventh
century.
“Syria was now an impoverished and stricken land, and her great cities,
though still populated, must have been encumbered with ruins which the
public funds were not sufficient to remove. Damascus and Jerusalem
themselves had not recovered from the effects of long and terrible
sieges; Amman and Gerash had declined into wretched villages under the
sway and lordship of the Bedouin. The Hauran, perhaps, still showed
signs of the prosperity for which it had been noted in the days of
Trajan; but the wretched buildings and rude inscriptions of this date
all point to a sad and depressing decline. Out in the desert, Palmyra
stood empty and desolate save for a garrison in the castle. On the
coasts and in the Lebanon a shadow of the former business and wealth was
still to be seen; but in the north, ruin, desolation, and abandonment
must have been the common state of the country, which had been raided
with unfailing regularity for one hundred years and had been held by an
enemy for fifteen. Agriculture must have declined, and the population
notably decreased through the plagues and distresses from which it had
suffered.
“Cappadocia had insensibly sunk into barbarism; and the great basilicas
and cities, which the rude countrymen could neither repair nor restore,
had been levelled with the ground. The Anatolian peninsula had been
ploughed and harrowed by the Persian armies; the great cities had been
plundered and sacked.”
§ 4
It was while Heraclius was engaged in restoring order in this already
desolated Syria after the death of Chosroes II and before the final
peace with Persia, that a strange message was brought to him. The bearer
had ridden over to the imperial outpost at Bostra in the wilderness
south of Damascus. The letter was in Arabic, the obscure Semitic
language of the nomadic peoples of the southern desert; and probably
only an interpretation reached him--presumably with deprecatory notes by
the interpreter.
It was an odd, florid challenge from someone who called himself
“Muhammad the Prophet of God.” This Muhammad, it appeared, called upon
Heraclius to acknowledge the one true God and to serve him. Nothing else
was definite in the document.
There is no record of the reception of this missive, and presumably it
went unanswered. The emperor probably shrugged his shoulders, and was
faintly amused at the incident.
But at Ctesiphon they knew more about this Muhammad. He was said to be a
tiresome false prophet, who had incited Yemen, the rich province of
Southern Arabia, to rebel against the King of Kings. Kavadh was much
occupied with affairs. He had deposed and murdered his father Chosroes
II, and he was attempting to reorganize the Persian military forces. To
him also came a message identical with that sent to Heraclius. The thing
angered him. He tore up the letter, flung the fragments at the envoy,
and bade him begone.
When this was told to the sender far away in the squalid little town of
Medina, he was very angry. “Even so, O Lord!” he cried; “rend Thou his
kingdom from him.” (A.D. 628.)
§ 5
But before we go on to tell of the rise of Islam in the world, it will
be well to complete our survey of the condition of Asia in the dawn of
the seventh century. And a word or so is due to religious developments
in the Persian community during the Sassanid period.
From the days of Cyrus onward Zoroastrianism had prevailed over the
ancient gods of Nineveh and Babylon. Zoroaster (the Greek spelling of
the Iranian, “Zarathustra”), like Buddha, was an Aryan. We know nothing
of the age in which he lived; some authorities make him as early as 1000
B.C., others make him contemporary with Buddha or Confucius; and as
little do we know of his place of birth or his exact nationality. His
teachings are preserved to us in the Zend Avesta, but here, since they
no longer play any great part in the world’s affairs, we cannot deal
with them in any detail. The opposition of a good god, Ormuzd, the god
of light, truth, frankness, and the sun, and a bad god, Ahriman, god of
secrecy, cunning, diplomacy, darkness, and night, formed a very central
part of his religion. As we find it in history, it is already surrounded
by a ceremonial and sacerdotal system; it has no images, but it has
priests, temples, and altars, on which burn a sacred fire and at which
sacrificial ceremonies are performed. Among other distinctive features
is its prohibition of either the burning or the burial of the dead. The
Parsees of India, the last surviving Zoroastrians, still lay their dead
out within certain open towers, the Towers of Silence, to which the
vultures come.
Under the Sassanid kings from Ardashir onward (227), this religion was
the official religion; its head was the second person in the state next
to the king, and the king in quite the ancient fashion was supposed to
be divine or semi-divine and upon terms of peculiar intimacy with
Ormuzd.
But the religious fermentation of the world did not leave the supremacy
of Zoroastrianism undisputed in the Persian Empire. Not only was there a
great eastward diffusion of Christianity, to which we have already given
notice, but new sects arose in Persia, incorporating the novel ideas of
the time. One early variant or branch of Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, we
have already named.[308] It had spread into Europe by the first century
B.C., after the eastern campaigns of Pompey the Great. It became
enormously popular with the soldiers and common people, and, until the
time of Constantine the Great, continued to be a serious rival to
Christianity. Indeed, one of his successors, the Emperor Julian
(361-363), known in Christian history as “Julian the Apostate,” made a
belated attempt to substitute it for the accepted faith.[309] Mithras
was a god of light, “proceeding” from Ormuzd and miraculously born, in
much the same way that the third person in the Christian Trinity
proceeds from the first. Of this branch of the Zoroastrian stem we need
say no more. In the third century A.D., however, another religion,
Manichæism, arose, which deserves some notice now.
Mani, the founder of Manichæism, was born the son of a good family of
Ecbatana, the old Median capital (A.D. 216). He was educated at
Ctesiphon. His father was some sort of religious sectary, and he was
brought up in an atmosphere of religious discussion. There came to him
that persuasion that he at last had the complete light, which is the
moving power of all religious initiators. He was impelled to proclaim
his doctrine. In A.D. 242, at the accession of Sapor I, the second
Sassanid monarch, he began his teaching.
It is characteristic of the way in which men’s minds were moving in
those days that his teaching included a sort of theocrasia. He was not,
he declared, proclaiming anything new. The great religious founders
before him had all been right: Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus
Christ--all had been true prophets, but to him it was appointed to
clarify and crown their imperfect and confused teaching. This he did in
Zoroastrian language. He explains the perplexities and contradictions of
life as a conflict of light and darkness, Ormuzd was God and Ahriman
Satan. But how man was created, how he fell from light into darkness,
how he is being disentangled and redeemed from the darkness, and of the
part played by Jesus in this strange mixture of religions we cannot
explain here even if we would. Our interest with the system is
historical and not theological.
But of the utmost historical interest is the fact that Mani not only
went about Iran preaching these new and to him these finally satisfying
ideas of his, but into Turkestan, into India, and over the passes into
China. This freedom of travel is to be noted. It is interesting also
because it brings before us the fact that Turkestan was no longer a
country of dangerous nomads, but a country in which cities were
flourishing and men had the education and leisure for theological
argument. The ideas of Mani spread eastward and westward with great
rapidity, and they were a most fruitful rootstock of heresies throughout
the entire Christian world for nearly a thousand years.
Somewhen about A.D. 270 Mani came back to Ctesiphon and made many
converts. This brought him into conflict with the official religion and
the priesthood. In 277 the reigning monarch had him crucified and his
body, for some unknown reason, flayed, and there began a fierce
persecution of his adherents. Nevertheless, Manichæism held its own in
Persia with Nestorian Christianity and orthodox Zoroastrianism
(Mazdaism) for some centuries.
§ 6
It becomes fairly evident that in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. not
merely Persia, but the regions that are now Turkestan and Afghanistan
were far more advanced in civilization than were the French and English
of that time. The obscurity of the history of these regions has been
lifted in the last two decades, and a very considerable literature
written in languages of the Turkish group has been discovered. These
extant manuscripts date from the seventh century onward. The alphabet is
an adaptation of the Syrian, introduced by Manichæan missionaries, and
many of the MSS. discovered--parchments have been found in windows in
the place of glass--are as beautifully written as any Benedictine
production. Mixed up with a very extensive Manichæan literature are
translations of the Christian scriptures and Buddhistic writings. Much
of this early Turkish material still awaits examination.
Everything points to the conclusion that those centuries, which were
centuries of disaster and retrogression in Europe, were comparatively an
age of progress in Middle Asia eastward into China.
A steady westward drift to the north of the Caspian of Hunnish peoples,
who were now called Tartars and Turks, was still going on in the sixth
century, but it must be thought of as an overflow rather than as a
migration of whole peoples. The world from the Danube to the Chinese
frontiers was still largely a nomadic world, with towns and cities
growing up upon the chief trade routes. We need not tell in any detail
here of the constant clash of the Turkish peoples of Western Turkestan
with the Persians to the south of them, the age-long bickering of
Turanian and Iranian. We hear nothing of any great northward marches of
the Persians, but there were great and memorable raids to the south both
by the Turanians to the east and the Alans to the west of the Caspian
before the big series of movements of the third and fourth century
westward that carried the Alans and Huns into the heart of Europe. There
was a nomadic drift to the east of Persia and southward through
Afghanistan towards India, as well as this drift to the north-west.
These streams of nomads flowed by Persia on either side. We have already
mentioned the Yueh-Chi (chap. xxix., § 4), who finally descended into
India as the Indo-Scythians in the second century. A backward, still
nomadic section of these Yueh-Chi remained in Central Asia, and became
numerous upon the steppes of Turkestan, as the Ephthalites or White
Huns. After being a nuisance and a danger to the Persians for three
centuries, they finally began raiding into India in the footsteps of
their kinsmen about the year 470, about a quarter of a century after the
death of Attila. They did not migrate into India; they went to and fro,
looting in India and returning with their loot to their own country,
just as later the Huns established themselves in the great plain of the
Danube and raided all Europe.
The history of India during these seven centuries we are now reviewing
is punctuated by these two invasions of the Yueh-Chi, the Indo-Scythians
who, as we have said, wiped out the last traces of Hellenic rule, and
the Ephthalites. Before the former of these, the Indo-Scythians, a wave
of uprooted populations, the Sakas, had been pushed; so that altogether
India experienced three waves of barbaric invasion, about A.D. 100,
about A.D. 120, and about A.D. 470. But only the second of these
invasions was a permanent conquest and settlement. The Indo-Scythians
made their headquarters on the Northwest Frontier and set up a dynasty,
the Kushan dynasty, which ruled most of North India as far east as
Benares.
The chief among these Kushan monarchs was Kanishka (date unknown), who
added to North India Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan. Like Asoka, he was a
great and vigorous promoter of Buddhism, and these conquests, this great
empire of the Northwest Frontier, must have brought India into close and
frequent relations with China and Tibet.
We will not trouble to record here the divisions and coalescences of
power in India, nor the dynasties that followed the Kushans, because
these things signify very little to us from our present point of view.
Sometimes all India was a patchwork quilt of states; sometimes such
empires as that of the Guptas prevailed over great areas. These things
made little difference in the ideas, the religion, and the ordinary way
of life of the Indian peoples. Brahminism held its own against Buddhism,
and the two religions prospered side by side. The mass of the population
was living then very much as it lives to-day; dressing, cultivating, and
building its houses in much the same fashion.
[Illustration: An Ephthalite Coin....]
The irruption of the Ephthalites is memorable not so much because of its
permanent effects as because of the atrocities perpetrated by the
invaders. These Ephthalites very closely resembled the Huns of Attila in
their barbarism; they merely raided, they produced no such dynasty as
the Kushan monarchy; and their chiefs retained their headquarters in
Western Turkestan. Mihiragula, their most capable leader, has been
called the Attila of India. One of his favourite amusements, we are
told, was the expensive one of rolling elephants down precipitous places
in order to watch their sufferings. His abominations roused his Indian
tributary princes to revolt, and he was overthrown (528). But the final
ending of the Ephthalite raids into India was effected not by Indians,
but by the destruction of the central establishment of the Ephthalites
on the Oxus (565) by the growing power of the Turks, working in alliance
with the Persians. After this break-up, the Ephthalites dissolved very
rapidly and completely into the surrounding populations, much as the
European Huns did after the death of Attila a hundred years earlier.
Nomads without central grazing lands must disperse; nothing else is
possible. Some of the chief Rajput clans of to-day in Rajputana in North
India are descended, it is said, from these White Huns.[310]
§ 7[311]
These seven centuries which saw the beginning and the end of the
emperors in Rome and the complete breakdown and recasting of the social,
economic, political, and religious life of Western Europe, saw also very
profound changes in the Chinese world. It is too commonly assumed by
both Chinese, Japanese, and European historians, that the Han dynasty,
under which we find China at the beginning of this period, and the Tang
dynasty, with which it closed, were analogous ascendancies controlling a
practically similar empire, and that the four centuries of division that
elapsed between the end of the Han dynasty (220) and the beginning of
the Tang period (619) were centuries of disturbance rather than
essential change. The divisions of China are supposed to be merely
political and territorial; and, deceived by the fact that at the close
as at the commencement of these four centuries, China occupied much the
same wide extent of Asia, and was still recognizably China, still with a
common culture, a common script, and a common body of ideas, they ignore
the very fundamental breaking down and reconstruction that went on, and
the many parallelisms to the European experience that China displayed.
It is true that the social collapse was never so complete in the Chinese
as in the European world. There remained throughout the whole period
considerable areas in which the elaboration of the arts of life could go
on. There was no such complete deterioration in cleanliness, decoration,
artistic and literary production as we have to record in the West, and
no such abandonment of any search for grace and pleasure. We note, for
instance, that “tea” appeared in the world, and its use spread
throughout China. China began to drink tea in the sixth century A.D.
And there were Chinese poets to write delightfully about the effects of
the first cup and the second cup and the third cup, and so on. China
continued to produce beautiful paintings long after the fall of the Han
rule. In the second, third, and fourth centuries some of the most lovely
landscapes were painted that have ever been done by men. A considerable
production of beautiful vases and carvings also continued. Fine building
and decoration went on. Printing from wood blocks began about the same
time as tea-drinking, and with the seventh century came a remarkable
revival of poetry.
Certain differences between the great empires of the East and West were
all in favour of the stability of the former. China had no general
coinage. The cash and credit system of the Western world, at once
efficient and dangerous, had not strained her economic life. Not that
the monetary idea was unknown. For small transactions the various
provinces were using perforated zinc and brass “cash,” but for larger
there was nothing but stamped ingots of silver. This great empire was
still carrying on most of its business on a basis of barter like that
which prevailed in Babylon in the days of the Aramean merchants. And so
it continued to do to the dawn of the twentieth century.
We have seen how under the Roman republic economic and social order was
destroyed by the too great fluidity of property that money brought
about. Money became abstract, and lost touch with the real values it was
supposed to represent. Individuals and communities got preposterously
into debt, and the world was saddled by a class of rich men who were
creditors, men who did not handle and administer any real wealth, but
who had the power to call up money. No such development of “finance”
occurred in China. Wealth in China remained real and visible. And China
had no need for any Licinian law, nor for a Tiberius Gracchus. The idea
of property in China did not extend far beyond tangible things. There
was no “labour” slavery, no gang servitude.[312] The occupier and user
of the land was in most instances practically the owner of it, subject
to a land tax. There was a certain amount of small scale landlordism,
but no great estates. Landless men worked for wages paid mostly in
kind--as they were in ancient Babylon.
These things made for stability and the geographical form of China for
unity; nevertheless, the vigour of the Han dynasty declined, and when at
last at the close of the second century A.D. the world catastrophe of
the great pestilence struck the system, the same pestilence that
inaugurated a century of confusion in the Roman empire, the dynasty fell
like a rotten tree before a gale. And the same tendency to break up into
a number of warring states, and the same eruption of barbaric rulers,
was displayed in East and West alike. In China, as in the Western
empire, faith had decayed. Mr. Fu ascribes much of the political
nervelessness of China in this period to Epicureanism, arising, he
thinks, out of the sceptical individualism of Lao Tse. This phase of
division is known as the “Three Kingdom Period.” The fourth century saw
a dynasty of more or less civilized Huns established as rulers in the
province of Shen-si. This Hunnish kingdom included not merely the north
of China, but great areas of Siberia; its dynasty absorbed the Chinese
civilization, and its influence carried Chinese trade and knowledge to
the Arctic circle. Mr. Fu compares this Siberian monarchy to the empire
of Charlemagne in Europe; it was the barbarian becoming “Chinized” as
Charlemagne was a barbarian becoming Romanized. Out of a fusion of these
Siberian with native north Chinese elements arose the Suy dynasty, which
conquered the south. This Suy dynasty marks the beginning of a
renascence of China. Under a Suy monarch the Lu-chu isles were annexed
to China, and there was a phase of great literary activity. The number
of volumes at this time in the imperial library was increased, we are
told, to 54,000. The dawn of the seventh century saw the beginning of
the great Tang dynasty, which was to endure for three centuries.
The renascence of China that began with Suy and culminated in Tang was,
Mr. Fu insists, a real new birth. “The spirit,” he writes, “was a new
one; it marked the Tang civilization with entirely distinctive features.
Four main factors had been brought together and fused: (1) Chinese
liberal culture; (2) Chinese classicism; (3) Indian Buddhism; and (4)
Northern bravery. A new China had come into being. The provincial
system, the central administration and the military organization of the
Tang dynasty, were quite different from those of their predecessors. The
arts had been much influenced and revivified by Indian and Central
Asiatic influences. The literature was no mere continuation of the old;
it was a new production. The religious and philosophical schools of
Buddhism were fresh features. It was a period of substantial change.
[Illustration: The CHINESE EMPIRE under the TANG Dynasty (greatest
extent) [Superimposed--The Roman Empire at its greatest extent, under
Trajan.]]
“It may be interesting to compare this making of China with the fate of
the Roman Empire in her later days. As the Roman world was divided into
the eastern and western halves, so was the Chinese world into the
southern and the northern. The barbarians in the case of Rome and in the
case of China made similar invasions. They established dominions of a
similar sort. Charlemagne’s empire corresponded to that of the Siberian
dynasty (Later Wei), the temporary recovery of the Western empire by
Justinian corresponded to the temporary recovery of the north by Liu Yu.
The Byzantine line corresponded to the southern dynasties. But from this
point the two worlds diverged. China recovered her unity; Europe has
still to do so.”
The dominions of the emperor Tai-tsung (627), the second Tang monarch,
extended southward into Annam and westward to the Caspian Sea. His
southern frontier in that direction marched with that of Persia. His
northern ran along the Altai from the Kirghis steppe, north of the
desert of Gobi. But it did not include Korea, which was conquered and
made tributary by his son. This Tang dynasty civilized and incorporated
into the Chinese race the whole of the southward population, and just as
the Chinese of the north call themselves the “men of Han,” so the
Chinese of the south call themselves the “men of Tang.” The law was
codified, the literary examination system was revised, and a complete
and accurate edition of all the Chinese classics was produced. To the
court of Tai-tsung came an embassy from Byzantium, and, what is more
significant, from Persia came a company of Nestorian missionaries (631).
These latter Tai-tsung received with great respect; he heard them state
the chief articles of their creed, and ordered the Christian scriptures
to be translated into Chinese for his further examination. In 638 he
announced that he found the new religion entirely satisfactory, and that
it might be preached within the empire. He also allowed the building of
a church and the foundation of a monastery.
A still more remarkable embassy also came to the court of Tai-tsung in
the year 628, three years earlier than the Nestorians. This was a party
of Arabs, who came by sea to Canton in a trading vessel from Yanbu, the
port of Medina in Arabia. (Incidentally it is interesting to know that
there were such vessels engaged in an east and west trade at this time.)
These Arabs had been sent by that Muhammad we have already mentioned,
who styled himself “The Prophet of God,” and the message they brought to
Tai-tsung was probably identical with the summons which was sent in the
same year to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius and to Kavadh in Ctesiphon.
But the Chinese monarch neither neglected the message as Heraclius did,
nor insulted the envoys after the fashion of the parricide Kavadh. He
received them well, expressed great interest in their theological views,
and assisted them, it is said, to build a mosque for the Arab traders in
Canton--a mosque which survives to this day. It is one of the oldest
mosques in the world.
§ 8
The urbanity, the culture, and the power of China under the early Tang
rulers are in so vivid a contrast with the decay, disorder, and
divisions of the Western world, as at once to raise some of the most
interesting questions in the history of civilization. Why did not China
keep this great lead she had won by her rapid return to unity and order?
Why does she not to this day dominate the world culturally and
politically?
For a long time she certainly did keep ahead. It is only a thousand
years later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the
discovery of America, the spread of printed books and education in the
West, and the dawn of modern scientific discovery, that we can say with
confidence that the Western world began to pull ahead of China. Under
the Tang rule, her greatest period, and then again under the artistic
but rather decadent Sung dynasty (960-1279), and again during the period
of the cultured Mings (1358-1644), China presented a spectacle of
prosperity, happiness, and artistic activity far in front of any
contemporary state. And seeing that she achieved so much, why did she
not achieve more? Chinese shipping was upon the seas, and there was a
considerable overseas trade during that time.[313] Why did the Chinese
never discover America or Australia? There was much isolated
observation, ingenuity, and invention. The Chinese knew of gunpowder in
the sixth century,[314] they used coal and gas heating centuries before
these things were used in Europe; their bridge-building, their hydraulic
engineering was admirable; the knowledge of materials shown in their
enamel and lacquer ware is very great. Why did they never organize the
system of record and co-operation in inquiry that has given the world
modern science? And why, in spite of their general training in good
manners and self-restraint, did intellectual education never soak down
into the general mass of the population? Why are the masses of China
to-day, and why have they always been, in spite of an exceptionally high
level of natural intelligence, illiterate?
It is customary to meet such questions with rather platitudinous
answers. We are told that the Chinaman is the most conservative of human
beings, that, in contrast with the European races, his mind is twisted
round towards the past, that he is the willing slave of etiquette and
precedent to a degree inconceivable to Western minds. He is represented
as having a mentality so distinct that one might almost expect to find a
difference in brain structure to explain it. The appeals of Confucius to
the wisdom of the ancients are always quoted to clinch this suggestion.
If, however, we examine this generalization more closely, it dissolves
into thin air. The superior intellectual initiative, the liberal
enterprise, the experimental disposition that is supposed to
characterize the Western mind, is manifest in the history of that mind
only during certain phases and under exceptional circumstances. For the
rest, the Western world displays itself as traditional and conservative
as China. And, on the other hand, the Chinese mind has, under conditions
of stimulus, shown itself quite as inventive and versatile as the
European, and the very kindred Japanese mind even more so. For, take the
case of the Greeks, the whole swing of their mental vigour falls into
the period between the sixth century B.C. and the decay of the
Alexandrian Museum under the later Ptolemies in the second century B.C.
There were Greeks before that time and Greeks since, but a history of a
thousand years of the Byzantine empire showed the Hellenic world at
least as intellectually stagnant as China. Then we have already drawn
attention to the comparative sterility of the Italian mind during the
Roman period and its abundant fertility since the Renaissance of
learning. The English mind again had a phase of brightness in the
seventh and eighth centuries, and it did not shine again until the
fifteenth. Again, the mind of the Arabs, as we shall presently tell,
blazed out like a star for half a dozen generations after the appearance
of Islam, having never achieved anything of importance before or since.
On the other hand, there was always a great deal of scattered
inventiveness in China, and the progress of Chinese art witnesses to new
movements and vigorous innovations. We exaggerate the reverence of the
Chinese for their fathers; parricide was a far commoner crime among the
Chinese emperors than it was even among the rulers of Persia. Moreover,
there have been several liberalizing movements in China, several
recorded struggles against the “ancient ways.”
It has already been suggested that phases of real intellectual progress
in any community seem to be connected with the existence of a detached
class of men, sufficiently free not to be obliged to toil or worry
exhaustively about mundane needs, and not rich and powerful enough to be
tempted into extravagances of lust, display, or cruelty. They must have
a sense of security, but not a conceit of superiority. This class, we
have further insinuated, must be able to talk freely and communicate
easily. It must not be watched for heresy or persecuted for any ideas it
may express. Such a happy state of affairs certainly prevailed in Greece
during its best days. A class of intelligent, free gentlefolk is indeed
evident in history whenever there is a record of bold philosophy or
effective scientific advances.
In the days of Tang and Sung and Ming there must have been an abundance
of pleasantly circumstanced people in China of just the class that
supplied most of the young men of the Academy at Athens, or the bright
intelligences of Renaissance Italy, or the members of the London Royal
Society, that mother society of modern science; and yet China did not
produce in these periods of opportunity any such large beginnings of
recorded and analyzed fact.
If we reject the idea that there is some profound racial difference
between China and the West which makes the Chinese by nature
conservative and the West by nature progressive, then we are forced to
look for the operating cause of this difference in progressiveness in
some other direction. Many people are disposed to find that operating
cause which has, in spite of her original advantages, retarded China so
greatly during the last four or five centuries, in the imprisonment of
the Chinese mind in a script and in an idiom of thought so elaborate and
so difficult that the mental energy of the country has been largely
consumed in acquiring it. This view deserves examination.
We have already given an account in chap. xviii. of the peculiarities of
Chinese writing and of the Chinese language. The Japanese writing is
derived from the Chinese, and consists of a more rapidly written system
of forms. A great number of these forms are ideograms taken over from
the Chinese and used exactly as the Chinese ideograms are used, but also
a number of signs are used to express syllables; there is a Japanese
syllabary after the fashion of the Sumerian syllabary we have described
in chap. xviii. The Japanese writing remains a clumsy system, as clumsy
as cuneiform, though not so clumsy as Chinese; and there has been a
movement in Japan to adopt a Western alphabet. Korea long ago went a
step farther and developed a true alphabet from the same Chinese
origins. With these exceptions all the great writing systems now in use
in the world are based on the Mediterranean alphabets, and are beyond
comparison more easily learnt and mastered than the Chinese. This means
that while other peoples learn merely a comparatively simple and
straightforward method of setting down the language with which they are
familiar, the Chinaman has to master a great multitude of complex word
signs and word groups. He must not simply learn the signs, but the
established grouping of those signs to represent various meanings. He
must familiarize himself, therefore, with a number of exemplary
classical works. Consequently in China, while you will find great
numbers of people who know the significance of certain frequent and
familiar characters, you discover only a few whose knowledge is
sufficiently extensive to grasp the meaning of a newspaper paragraph,
and still fewer who can read any subtlety of intention or fine shades of
meaning. In a lesser degree this is true also of Japan. No doubt
European readers, especially of such word-rich languages as English or
Russian, vary greatly among themselves in regard to the extent of books
they can understand and how far they understand them; their power varies
according to their vocabularies; but the corresponding levels of
understanding among the Chinese represent a far greater expenditure of
time and labour upon their attainment. A mandarin’s education in China
is, mainly, learning to read.
And it may be that the consequent preoccupation of the educated class
during its most susceptible years upon the Chinese classics gave it a
bias in favour of this traditional learning upon which it had spent so
much time and energy. Few men who have toiled to build up any system of
knowledge in their minds will willingly scrap it in favour of something
strange and new; this disposition is as characteristic of the West as of
the East; it is shown as markedly by the scholars of the British and
American universities as by any Chinese mandarins, and the British at
the present time, in spite of the great and manifest advantages in
popular education and national propaganda the change would give them,
refuse to make any move from their present barbaric orthography towards
a phonetic alphabet and spelling. The peculiarities of the Chinese
script, and the educational system arising out of that script, must have
acted age after age as an invincible filter that favoured the plastic
and scholarly mind as against the restive and originating type, and kept
the latter out of positions of influence and authority. There is much
that is plausible in this explanation.
There have been several attempts to simplify the Chinese writing and to
adopt an alphabetical system. In the early days of Buddhism in China,
when there was a considerable amount of translation from Sanskrit,
Indian influences came near to achieving this end; two Chinese alphabets
were indeed invented, and each had some little use. But what hindered
the general adoption of these, and what stands in the way of any
phonetic system of Chinese writing to-day, is this, that while the
literary script and phraseology is the same from one end of China to the
other, the spoken language of the common people, both in pronunciation
and in its familiar idioms, varies so widely that men from one province
may be incomprehensible to men from another. There is, however, a
“standard Chinese,” a rather bookish spoken idiom, which is generally
understood by educated people; and it is upon the possibility of
applying an alphabetical system of writing to this standard Chinese that
the hopes of modern educational reformers in China are based at the
present time. For fresh attempts are now being made to release the
Chinese mind from this ancient entanglement.
A Chinese alphabet has been formed; it is taught in the common schools,
and newspapers and pamphlets are issued in it. And the rigid examination
system that killed all intellectual initiatives has been destroyed.
The very success and early prosperity and general contentment of China
in the past must have worked to justify in that land all the natural
self-complacency and conservatism of mankind. No animal will change when
its conditions are “good enough” for present survival. And in this
matter man is still an animal. Until the nineteenth century, for more
than two thousand years, there was little in the history of China that
could cause any serious doubts in the mind of a Chinaman of the general
superiority of his own civilization to that of the rest of the world,
and there was no reason apparent therefore for any alteration. China
produced a profusion of beautiful art, some delightful poetry,
astonishing cookery, and thousands of millions of glowingly pleasant
lives generation after generation. Her ships followed her marvellous
inland waterways, and put to sea but rarely, and then only to India or
Borneo as their utmost adventure. (Until the sixteenth century we must
remember European seamen never sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean. The
Norse discovery of America, the Phœnician circumnavigation of Africa,
were exceptional feats.) And these things were attained without any such
general boredom, servitude, indignity, and misery as underlay the rule
of the rich in the Roman Empire. There was much poverty, much
discontent, but it was not massed poverty, it was not a necessary
popular discontent. For a thousand years the Chinese system, though it
creaked and swayed at times, seemed proof against decay. Dynastic
changes there were, rebellions, phases of disorder, famines,
pestilences; two great invasions that set foreign dynasties upon the
throne of the Son of Heaven, but no such shock as to revolutionize the
order of the daily round. The emperors and dynasties might come and go;
the mandarins, the examinations, the classics, and the traditions and
habitual life remained. China’s civilization had already reached its
culmination in the seventh century A.D., its crowning period was the
Tang period; and though it continued to spread slowly and steadily into
Annam, into Cambodia, into Siam, into Tibet, into Nepal, Korea,
Mongolia, and Manchuria, there is henceforth little more than such
geographical progress to record of it in this history for a thousand
years.[315]
§ 9[316]
In the year 629, the year after the arrival of Muhammad’s envoys at
Canton and thirty odd years after the landing of Pope Gregory’s
missionaries in England, a certain learned and devout Buddhist named
Yuan Chwang started out from Singan, Tai-tsung’s capital, upon a great
journey to India. He was away sixteen years, he returned in 645, and he
wrote an account of his travels which is treasured as a Chinese classic.
One or two points about his experiences are to be noted here because
they contribute to our general review of the state of the world in the
seventh century A.D.
Yuan Chwang was as eager for marvels and as credulous as Herodotus, and
without the latter writer’s fine sense of history; he could never pass a
monument or ruin without learning some fabulous story about it; Chinese
ideas of the dignity of literature perhaps prevented him from telling us
much detail of how he travelled, who were his attendants, how he was
lodged, or what he ate and how he paid his expenses--details precious
to the historian; nevertheless, he gives us a series of illuminating
flashes upon China, Central Asia, and India in the period now under
consideration.
[Illustration: YUAN CHWANG’S route from China to India, 629-645 A.D.]
His journey was an enormous one. He went and came back by way of the
Pamirs. He went by the northern route, crossing the desert of Gobi,
passing along the southern slopes of the Thien Shan, skirting the great
deep blue lake of Issik Kul, and so to Tashkend and Samarkand, and then
more or less in the footsteps of Alexander the Great southward to the
Khyber Pass and Peshawur. He returned by the southern route, crossing
the Pamirs from Afghanistan to Kashgar, and so along the line of retreat
the Yueh Chi had followed in the reverse direction seven centuries
before, and by Yarkand, along the slopes of the Kuen Lun to rejoin his
former route near the desert end of the Great Wall. Each route involved
some hard mountaineering. His journeyings in India are untraceable; he
was there fourteen years, and he went all over the peninsula from Nepal
to Ceylon.
At that time there was an imperial edict forbidding foreign travel, so
that Yuan Chwang started from Singan like an escaping criminal. There
was a pursuit to prevent him carrying out his project. How he bought a
lean red-coloured horse that knew the desert paths from a strange
grey-beard, how he dodged a frontier guard-house with the help of a
“foreign person” who made him a bridge of brushwood lower down the
river, how he crossed the desert guided by the bones of men and cattle,
how he saw a mirage, and how twice he narrowly escaped being shot by
arrows when he was getting water near the watch-towers on the desert
track, the reader will find in the _Life_. He lost his way in the desert
of Gobi, and for four nights and five days he had no water; when he was
in the mountains among the glaciers, twelve of his party were frozen to
death. All this is in the _Life_; he tells little of it in his own
account of his travels.
He shows us the Turks, this new development of the Hun tradition, in
possession not only of what is now Turkestan, but all along the northern
route. He mentions many cities and considerable cultivation. He is
entertained by various rulers, allies of or more or less nominally
tributaries to China, and among others by the Khan of the Turks, a
magnificent person in green satin, with his long hair tied with silk.
“The gold embroidery of this grand tent shone with a dazzling splendour;
the ministers of the presence in attendance sat on mats in long rows on
either side all dressed in magnificent brocade robes, while the rest of
the retinue on duty stood behind. You saw that although it was a case of
a frontier ruler, yet there was an air of distinction and elegance. The
Khan came out from his tent about thirty paces to meet Yuan Chwang, who,
after a courteous greeting, entered the tent.... After a short interval
envoys from China and Kao-chang were admitted and presented their
despatches and credentials, which the Khan perused. He was much elated,
and caused the envoys to be seated; then he ordered wine and music for
himself and them and grape-syrup for the pilgrim. Hereupon all pledged
each other, and the filling and draining of the winecups made a din and
bustle, while the mingled music of various instruments rose loud:
although the airs were the popular strains of foreigners, yet they
pleased the senses and exhilarated the mental faculties. After a little,
piles of roasted beef and mutton were served for the others, and lawful
food, such as cakes, milk, candy, honey, and grapes, for the pilgrim.
After the entertainment, grape-syrup was again served, and the Khan
invited Yuan Chwang to improve the occasion, whereupon the pilgrim
expounded the doctrines of the ‘ten virtues,’ compassion for animal
life, and the paramitas and emancipation. The Khan, raising his hands,
bowed, and gladly believed and accepted the teaching.”
Yuan Chwang’s account of Samarkand[317] is of a large and prosperous
city, “a great commercial entrepôt, the country about it very fertile,
abounding in trees and flowers and yielding many fine horses. Its
inhabitants were skilful craftsmen, smart and energetic.” At that time
we must remember there was hardly such a thing as a town in Anglo-Saxon
England.
As his narrative approached his experiences in India, however, the pious
and learned pilgrim in Yuan Chwang got the better of the traveller, and
the book becomes congested with monstrous stories of incredible
miracles.[318] Nevertheless, we get an impression of houses, clothing,
and the like, closely resembling those of the India of to-day. Then, as
now, the kaleidoscopic variety of an Indian crowd contrasted with the
blue uniformity of the multitude in China. In the time of Buddha it is
doubtful if there were reading and writing in India; now reading and
writing were quite common accomplishments. Yuan Chwang gives an
interesting account of a great Buddhist university at Nalanda, where
ruins have quite recently been discovered and excavated. Nalanda and
Taxilla seem to have been considerable educational centres as early as
the opening of the schools of Athens. The caste system Yuan Chwang found
fully established in spite of Buddha, and the Brahmins were now
altogether in the ascendant. He names the four main castes we have
mentioned in chap. xx., § 4 (_q.v._), but his account of their functions
is rather different. The Sudras, he says, were the tillers of the soil.
Indian writers say that their function was to wait upon the three “twice
born” castes above them.
But, as we have already intimated, Yuan Chwang’s account of Indian
realities is swamped by his accumulation of legends and pious
inventions. For these he had come, and in these he rejoiced. The rest,
as we shall see, was a task that had been set him. The faith of Buddha
which in the days of Asoka, and even so late as Kanishka, was still pure
enough to be a noble inspiration, we now discover absolutely lost in a
wilderness of preposterous rubbish, a philosophy of endless Buddhas,
tales of manifestations and marvels like a Christmas pantomime,
immaculate conceptions by six-tusked elephants, charitable princes
giving themselves up to be eaten by starving tigresses, temples built
over a sacred nail-paring, and the like. We cannot give such stories
here; if the reader likes that sort of thing, he must go to the
publications of the Royal Asiatic Society or the India Society, where he
will find a delirium of such imaginations. And in competition with this
Buddhism, intellectually undermined as it now was and smothered in
gilded decoration, Brahminism was everywhere gaining ground again, as
Yuan Chwang notes with regret.
Side by side with these evidences of a vast intellectual decay in India
we may note the repeated appearance in Yuan Chwang’s narrative of ruined
and deserted cities. Much of the country was still suffering from the
ravages of the Ephthalites and the consequent disorders. Again and again
we find such passages as this: “he went north-east through a great
forest, the road being a narrow, dangerous path, with wild buffalo and
wild elephants, and robbers and hunters always in wait to kill
travellers, and emerging from the forest he reached the country of
Kou-shih-na-ka-lo (Kúsinagara). The city walls were in ruins, and the
towns and villages were deserted. The brick foundations of the ‘old
city’ (that is, the city which had been the capital) were above ten _li_
in circuit; there were very few inhabitants, the interior of the city
being a wild waste.” This ruin was, however, by no means universal;
there is at least as much mention of crowded cities and villages and
busy cultivations.
The _Life_ tells of many hardships upon the return journey: he fell
among robbers; the great elephant that was carrying the bulk of his
possessions was drowned; he had much difficulty in getting fresh
transport. Here we cannot deal with these adventures.
The return of Yuan Chwang to Singan, the Chinese capital, was, we
gather, a triumph. Advance couriers must have told of his coming. There
was a public holiday; the streets were decorated by gay banners and made
glad with music. He was escorted into the city with great pomp and
ceremony. Twenty horses were needed to carry the spoils of his travels;
he had brought with him hundreds of Buddhist books written in Sanskrit,
and made of trimmed leaves of palm and birch bark strung together in
layers; he had many images great and small of Buddha, in gold, silver,
crystal, and sandalwood; he had holy pictures, and no fewer than one
hundred and fifty well authenticated true relics of Buddha. Yuan Chwang
was presented to the emperor, who treated him as a personal friend, took
him into the palace, and questioned him day by day about the wonders of
these strange lands in which he had stayed so long. But while the
emperor asked about India, the pilgrim was disposed only to talk about
Buddhism.
Buddhist writers thought very highly of Tai-tsung because of his
reception of Yuan Chwang (645). But so did the Moslem historians,
because of that mosque at Canton, and so did the Christian writers,
because of the Nestorian envoys (631).
The subsequent history of Yuan Chwang contains two incidents that throw
light upon the mental workings of this great monarch, Tai-tsung, who was
probably quite as much a Moslem as he was a Christian or a Buddhist. The
trouble about all religious specialists is that they know too much about
their own religion and how it differs from others; the advantage, or
disadvantage, of such creative statesmen as Tai-tsung and Constantine
the Great is that they know comparatively little of such matters.
Evidently the fundamental good of all these religions seemed to
Tai-tsung to be much the same fundamental good. So it was natural to him
to propose that Yuan Chwang should now give up the religious life and
come into his foreign office, a proposal that Yuan Chwang would not
entertain for a moment. The emperor then insisted at least upon a
written account of the travels, and so got this classic we treasure. And
finally Tai-tsung proposed to this highly saturated Buddhist that he
should now use his knowledge of Sanskrit in translating the works of the
great Chinese teacher, Lao Tse, so as to make them available for Indian
readers. It seemed, no doubt, to the emperor a fair return and a useful
service to the fundamental good that lies beneath all religions. On the
whole, he thought Lao Tse might very well rank with or even a little
above Buddha, and therefore that if his work was put before the
Brahmins, they would receive it gladly. In much the same spirit
Constantine the Great had done his utmost to make Arius and Athanasius
settle down amicably together. But naturally enough this suggestion was
repulsed by Yuan Chwang. He retired to a monastery and spent the rest of
his years translating as much as he could of the Buddhist literature he
had brought with him into elegant Chinese writing.
* * * * *
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
¶ Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
JOAN AND PETER
THE UNDYING FIRE
¶ The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE
And numerous Short Stories now collected in One Volume under the title
of THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
¶ A Series of books on Social, Religious, and Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
IN THE FOURTH YEAR
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
¶ And two little books about children’s play, called
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
* * * * *
THE OUTLINE OF
HISTORY
Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
BY
H. G. WELLS
WRITTEN WITH THE ADVICE AND EDITORIAL HELP OF
MR. ERNEST BARKER,
SIR H. H. JOHNSTON, SIR E. RAY LANKESTER
AND PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY
AND ILLUSTRATED BY
J. F. HORRABIN
VOLUME II
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY H. G. WELLS.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1920.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
SCHEME OF CONTENTS
BOOK VI (CONTINUED)
PAGE
CHAPTER XXXII. MUHAMMAD AND ARAB ISLAM
§ 1. Arabia before Muhammad 1
§ 2. Life of Muhammad to the Hegira 4
§ 3. Muhammad becomes a fighting prophet 8
§ 4. The teachings of Islam 14
§ 5. The caliphs Abu Bekr and Omar 16
§ 6. The great days of the Omayyads 22
§ 7. The decay of Islam under the Abbasids 31
§ 8. The intellectual life of Arab Islam 34
CHAPTER XXXIII. CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES
§ 1. The Western world at its lowest ebb 40
§ 2. The feudal system 42
§ 3. The Frankish kingdom of the Merovingians 46
§ 4. The Christianization of the western barbarians 48
§ 5. Charlemagne becomes emperor of the West 54
§ 6. The personality of Charlemagne 59
§ 7. The French and the Germans become distinct 61
§ 8. The Normans, the Saracens, the Hungarians, and the Seljuk Turks 64
§ 9. How Constantinople appealed to Rome 72
§ 10. The Crusades 76
§ 11. The Crusades a test of Christianity 84
§ 12. The Emperor Frederick II 86
§ 13. Defects and limitations of the papacy 90
§ 14. A list of leading Popes 96
BOOK VII
THE GREAT MONGOL EMPIRES OF THE LAND WAYS
AND THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE SEA WAYS
CHAPTER XXXIV. THE GREAT EMPIRE OF JENGIS KHAN AND HIS
SUCCESSORS
§ 1. Asia at the end of the twelfth century 105
§ 2. The rise and victories of the Mongols 108
§ 3. The travels of Marco Polo 114
§ 4. The Ottoman Turks, the Turkish Caliph, and Constantinople 120
§ 5. Why the Mongols were not Christianized 126
§ 5A. Kublai Khan founds the Yuan Dynasty 127
§ 5B. The Mongols revert to tribalism 128
§ 5C. The Kipchak empire and the Tsar of Muscovy 128
§ 5D. Timurlane 130
§ 5E. The Mongol empire of India 133
§ 5F. The Mongols and the Gipsies 137
CHAPTER XXXV. THE RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
§ 1. Christianity and popular education 139
§ 2. Europe begins to think for itself 148
§ 3. The Great Plague and the dawn of communism 153
§ 4. How paper liberated the human mind 158
§ 5. Protestantism of the princes and Protestantism of the peoples 160
§ 6. The reawakening of science 167
§ 7. The new growth of European towns 177
§ 8. America comes into history 184
§ 9. What Machiavelli thought of the world 194
§ 10. The republic of Switzerland 198
§ 11A. The life of the Emperor Charles V 199
§ 11B. Protestants if the prince wills it 210
§ 11C. The intellectual under-tow 210
BOOK VIII
THE AGE OF THE GREAT POWERS
CHAPTER XXXVI. PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS
§ 1. Princes and foreign policy 213
§ 2. The English republic 218
§ 3. The Dutch republic 228
§ 4. The break-up and disorder of Germany 232
§ 5. The splendours of Grand Monarchy in Europe 236
§ 6. The growth of the idea of Great Powers 243
§ 7. The crowned republic of Poland and its fate 248
§ 8. The first scramble for empire overseas 251
§ 9. Britain dominates India 254
§ 10. Russia’s ride to the Pacific 259
§ 11. What Gibbon thought of the world in 1780 262
§ 12. The social truce draws to an end 269
CHAPTER XXXVII. THE NEW DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICS OF AMERICA
AND FRANCE
§ 1. Inconveniences of the Great Power system 278
§ 2. The thirteen colonies before their revolt 280
§ 3. Civil war is forced upon the colonies 286
§ 4. The War of Independence 291
§ 5. The constitution of the United States 294
§ 6. Primitive features of the United States constitution 301
§ 7. Revolutionary ideas in France 307
§ 8. The Revolution of the year 1789 311
§ 9. The French “crowned republic” of ’89-’91 313
§ 10. The Revolution of the Jacobins 321
§ 11. The Jacobin republic, 1792-4 331
§ 12. The Directory 337
§ 13. The pause in reconstruction and the dawn of modern Socialism 339
CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
§ 1. The Buonaparte family in Corsica 348
§ 2. Bonaparte as a republican general 349
§ 3. Napoleon First Consul, 1799-1804 354
§ 4. Napoleon I Emperor, 1804-1814 360
§ 5. The Hundred Days 368
§ 6. The cult of the Napoleonic 373
§ 7. The map of Europe in 1815 377
CHAPTER XXXIX. THE REALITIES AND IMAGINATION OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY. THE INCREASE OF KNOWLEDGE AND CLEAR
THINKING. THE NATIONALIST PHASE
§ 1. The mechanical revolution 384
§ 2. Relation of the mechanical to the industrial revolution 393
§ 3. The fermentation of ideas, 1848 399
§ 4. The development of the idea of Socialism 401
§ 5. Shortcomings of Socialism as a scheme of human society 411
§ 6. How Darwinism affected religious and political ideas 416
§ 7. Mr. Gladstone and the idea of Nationalism 426
§ 8. Europe between 1848 and 1878 436
§ 9. The (second) scramble for overseas empires 449
§ 10. The Indian precedent in Asia 461
§ 11. The history of Japan 464
§ 12. Close of the period of overseas expansion 469
§ 13. The British Empire in 1914 470
CHAPTER XL. THE INTERNATIONAL CATASTROPHE OF 1914 AND THE
CLOSE OF THE GREAT POWER PERIOD
§ 1. The armed peace before the Great War 475
§ 2. Imperial Germany 477
§ 3. The spirit of Imperialism in Britain and Ireland 486
§ 4. Imperialism in France, Italy, and the Balkans 499
§ 5. Russia still a Grand Monarchy in 1914 502
§ 6. The United States and the Imperial idea 503
§ 7. The immediate causes of the Great War 508
§ 8. A summary of the Great War up to 1917 513
§ 9. The Great War from the Russian collapse to the armistice 524
§ 10. The political, economic, and social disorganization caused by
the Great War 532
§ 11. President Wilson and the problems of Versailles 543
§ 12. Summary of the first Covenant of the League of Nations 558
§ 13. A general outline of the treaties of 1919 and 1920 562
§ 14. A forecast of the “next war” 567
§ 15. The state of men’s minds in 1920 572
BOOK IX
THE NEXT STAGE IN HISTORY
CHAPTER XLI. MAN’S COMING OF AGE. THE PROBABLE STRUGGLE
FOR THE UNIFICATION OF THE WORLD INTO ONE COMMUNITY
OF KNOWLEDGE AND WILL
§ 1. The possible unification of men’s wills in political matters 579
§ 2. How a Federal World Government may come about 583
§ 3. Some fundamental characteristics of a modern world state 586
§ 4. What this world might be like, were men united in a common
peace and justice 588
§ 5. The stages beyond? 594
FIVE TIME CHARTS OF THE WORLD’S AFFAIRS FROM B.C. 1000 TO A.D. 1920 599
A CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FROM 800 B.C. TO A.D. 1920 605
INDEX 625
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Arabia and Adjacent Countries 2
The Beginnings of Moslem Power 19
The Growth of Moslem Power in 25 Years 23
The Moslem Empire 25
Europe, 500 A.D. 44
Frankish Dominions in the Time of Charles Martel 45
England, 640 A.D. 49
England, 878 A.D. 52
Europe at the Death of Charlemagne 55
France at the Close of the 10th Century 65
Empire of Otto the Great 68
The Coming of the Seljuks (Map) 70
The First Crusade (Map) 77
Europe and Asia, 1200 107
Empire of Jengis Khan, 1227 111
Travels of Marco Polo 115
Ottoman Empire before 1453 123
Ottoman Empire, 1566 125
Empire of Timurlane 131
Europe at the Fall of Constantinople 141
“We have the payne....” John Bull’s Speech 155
Ignatius of Loyola 164
European Trade Routes in the 14th Century 183
The Chief Voyages of Exploration up to 1522 191
Mexico and Peru 192
Switzerland 198
Europe in the Time of Charles V 201
Martin Luther 203
Francis I 204
Henry VIII 206
Charles V 207
Central Europe, 1648 233
Louis XIV 237
The Partitions of Poland 250
Britain, France, and Spain in America, 1750 255
Chief Foreign Settlements in India, 17th Century 256
India in 1750 260
American Colonies, 1760 283
Boston in 1775 292
The United States in 1790 295
The United States Showing Dates of the Chief Territorial Extensions 299
Benjamin Franklin 303
George Washington 304
The Flight to Varennes (Map) 322
North Eastern Frontier of France, 1792 330
Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign 352
Napoleon as Emperor 360
Tsar Alexander I 362
Napoleon’s Empire, 1810 365
The Trail of Napoleon 369
Europe after the Congress of Vienna 379
The Natural Political Map of Europe 383
Mr. Gladstone 427
Tribal Gods of the 19th Century 434
Map of Europe, 1848-1871 439
Italy, 1861 441
Bismarck 443
The Balkans, 1878 448
Comparative Maps of Asia under Different Projections 450
The British Empire in 1815 452
Africa in the Middle of 19th Century 458
Africa, 1914 459
Japan and the East Coast of Asia 468
Overseas Empires of European Powers, 1914 474
Emperor William II 482
Ireland . 491
The Balkan States, 1913 501
The Original German Plan, 1914 514
The Western Front, 1915-18 517
Time Chart of the Great War, 1914-18 528-29
President Wilson 551
M. Clemenceau 552
Mr. Lloyd George 553
Germany after the Peace Treaty, 1919 561
The Turkish Treaty, 1920 563
The Break-up of Austria-Hungary 565
Time-chart 1000 B.C.-300 B.C. 599
Time-chart 400 B.C.-A.D. 300 600
Time-chart A.D. 200-A.D. 900 601
Time-chart A.D. 800-A.D. 1500 602
Time-chart A.D. 1220-A.D. 1920 603
BOOK VI (_Continued_)
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM (_Continued_)
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
XXXII
MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM[319]
§ 1. _Arabia before Muhammad._ § 2. _Life of Muhammad to the
Hegira._ § 3. _Muhammad becomes a Fighting Prophet._ § 4. _The
Teachings of Islam._ § 5. _The Caliphs Abu Bekr and Omar._ § 6.
_The Great Days of the Omayyads._ § 7. _The Decay of Islam under
the Abbasids._ § 8. _The Intellectual Life of Arab Islam._
§ 1
We have already described how in A.D. 628 the courts of Heraclius, of
Kavadh, and of Tai-tsung were visited by Arab envoys sent from a certain
Muhammad, “The Prophet of God,” at the small trading town of Medina in
Arabia. We must tell now who this prophet was who had arisen among the
nomads and traders of the Arabian desert.
From time immemorial Arabia, except for the fertile strip of the Yemen
to the south, had been a land of nomads, the headquarters and land of
origin of the Semitic peoples. From Arabia at various times waves of
these nomads had drifted north, east, and west into the early
civilizations of Egypt, the Mediterranean coast, and Mesopotamia. We
have noted in this history how the Sumerians were swamped and overcome
by such Semitic waves, how the Semitic Phœnicians and Canaanites
established themselves along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean,
how the Babylonians and Assyrians were settled Semitic peoples, how the
Hyksos conquered Egypt, how the Arameans established themselves in Syria
with Damascus as their capital, and how the Hebrews partially conquered
their “Promised Land.” At some unknown date the Chaldeans drifted in
from Eastern Arabia and settled in the old southern Sumerian lands.
With each invasion first this and then that section of the Semitic
peoples comes into history. But each of such swarmings still leaves a
tribal nucleus behind to supply fresh invasions in the future.
[Illustration: Map of ARABIA and adjacent countries]
The history of the more highly organized empires of the horse and iron
period, the empires of roads and writing, shows Arabia thrust like a
wedge between Egypt, Palestine, and the Euphrates-Tigris country, and
still a reservoir of nomadic tribes who raid and trade and exact tribute
for the immunity and protection of caravans. There are temporary and
flimsy subjugations. Egypt, Persia, Macedonia, Rome, Syria,
Constantinople, and again Persia claim some unreal suzerainty in turn
over Arabia, profess some unsubstantial protection. Under Trajan there
was a Roman province of “Arabia,” which included the then fertile region
of the Hauran and extended as far as Petra. Now and then some Arab chief
and his trading city rises to temporary splendour. Such was that
Odenathus of Palmyra, whose brief career we have noted in chap. xxxi, §
2, and another such transitory desert city whose ruins still astonish
the traveller was Baalbek.
After the destruction of Palmyra, the desert Arabs began to be spoken of
in the Roman and Persian records as Saracens.
In the time of Chosroes II., Persia claimed a certain ascendancy over
Arabia, and maintained officials and tax collectors in the Yemen. Before
that time the Yemen had been under the rule of the Abyssinian Christians
for some years, and before that for seven centuries it had had native
princes professing, be it noted, the Jewish faith.
Until the opening of the seventh century A.D. there were no signs of any
unwonted or dangerous energy in the Arabian deserts. The life of the
country was going on as it had gone on for long generations. Wherever
there were fertile patches, wherever, that is, there was a spring or a
well, a scanty agricultural population subsisted, living in walled towns
because of the Bedouin who wandered with their sheep, cattle, and horses
over the desert. Upon the main caravan routes the chief towns rose to a
certain second-rate prosperity, and foremost among them were Medina and
Mecca.[320] In the beginning of the seventh century Medina was a town of
about 15,000 inhabitants all told; Mecca may have had twenty or
twenty-five thousand. Medina was a comparatively well-watered town, and
possessed abundant date groves; its inhabitants were Yemenites, from the
fertile land to the south. Mecca was a town of a different character,
built about a spring of water with a bitter taste, and inhabited by
recently settled Bedouin.
Mecca was not merely nor primarily a trading centre; it was a place of
pilgrimage. Among the Arab tribes there had long existed a sort of
Amphictyony (see chap. xxii, § 1) centring upon Mecca and certain other
sanctuaries; there were months of truce to war and blood feuds, and
customs of protection and hospitality for the pilgrim. In addition there
had grown up an Olympic element in these gatherings; the Arabs were
discovering possibilities of beauty in their language, and there were
recitations of war poetry and love songs. The sheiks of the tribes,
under a “king of the poets,” sat in judgment and awarded prizes; the
prize songs were sung through all Arabia.
The Kaaba, the sanctuary at Mecca, was of very ancient date. It was a
small square temple of black stones, which had for its corner-stone a
meteorite. This meteorite was regarded as a god, and all the little
tribal gods of Arabia were under his protection. The permanent
inhabitants of Mecca were a tribe of Bedouin who had seized this temple
and constituted themselves its guardians. To them there came in the
months of truce a great incourse of people, who marched about the Kaaba
ceremonially, bowed themselves, and kissed the stone, and also engaged
in trade and poetical recitations. The Meccans profited much from these
visitors.
All of this is very reminiscent of the religious and political state of
affairs in Greece fourteen centuries earlier. But the paganism of these
more primitive Arabs was already being assailed from several directions.
There had been a great proselytizing of Arabs during the period of the
Maccabeans and Herods in Judea; and, as we have already noted, the Yemen
had been in succession under the rule of Jews (Arab proselytes to
Judaism, _i.e._), Christians, and Zoroastrians. It is evident that there
must have been plenty of religious discussion during the pilgrimage
fairs at Mecca and the like centres. Naturally enough Mecca was a
stronghold of the old pagan cult which gave it its importance and
prosperity; Medina, on the other hand, had Jewish proclivities, and
there were Jewish settlements near by. It was inevitable that Mecca and
Medina should be in a state of rivalry and bickering feud.
§ 2
It was in Mecca about the year A.D. 570 that Muhammad, the founder of
Islam, was born. He was born in considerable poverty, and even by the
standards of the desert he was uneducated; it is doubtful if he ever
learnt to write. He was for some years a shepherd’s boy; then he became
the servant of a certain Kadija, the widow of a rich merchant. Probably
he had to look after her camels or help in her trading operations; and
he is said to have travelled with caravans to the Yemen and to Syria. He
does not seem to have been a very useful trader, but he had the good
fortune to find favour in the lady’s eyes, and she married him, to the
great annoyance of her family. He was then only twenty-five years old.
It is uncertain if his wife was much older, though tradition declares
she was forty. After the marriage he probably made no more long
journeys. There were several children, one of whom was named Abd
Manif--that is to say, the servant of the Meccan god Manif, which
demonstrates that at that time Muhammad had made no religious
discoveries.
Until he was forty he did indeed live a particularly undistinguished
life in Mecca, as the husband of a prosperous wife. There may be some
ground for the supposition that he became partner in a business in
agricultural produce. To anyone visiting Mecca about A.D. 600 he would
probably have seemed something of a loafer, a rather shy, good-looking
individual, sitting about and listening to talk, a poor poet, and an
altogether second-rate man.
About his internal life we can only speculate. Imaginative writers have
supposed that he had great spiritual struggles, that he went out into
the desert in agonies of doubt and divine desire. “In the silence of the
desert night, in the bright heat of noontide desert day, he, as do all
men, had known and felt himself alone yet not in solitude, for the
desert is of God, and in the desert no man may deny Him.”[321] Maybe
that was so, but there is no evidence of any such desert trips. Yet he
was certainly thinking deeply of the things about him. Possibly he had
seen Christian churches in Syria; almost certainly he knew much of the
Jews and their religion, and he heard their scorn for this black stone
of the Kaaba that ruled over the three hundred odd tribal gods of
Arabia. He saw the pilgrimage crowds, and noted the threads of
insincerity and superstition in the paganism of the town. It oppressed
his mind. The Jews had perhaps converted him to a belief in the One True
God, without his knowing what had happened to him.
At last he could keep these feelings to himself no longer. When he was
forty he began to talk about the reality of God, at first apparently
only to his wife and a few intimates. He produced certain verses, which
he declared had been revealed to him by an angel. They involved an
assertion of the unity of God and some acceptable generalizations about
righteousness. He also insisted upon a future life, the fear of hell for
the negligent and evil, and the reservation of paradise for the
believer in the One God. Except for his claim to be a new prophet, there
does not seem to have been anything very new about these doctrines at
the time, but this was seditious teaching for Mecca, which partly
subsisted upon its polytheistic cult, and which was therefore holding on
to idols when all the rest of the world was giving them up. Like Mani,
Muhammad claimed that the prophets before him, and especially Jesus and
Abraham, had been divine teachers, but that he crowned and completed
their teaching. Buddhism, however, he did not name, probably because he
had never heard of Buddha. Desert Arabia was in a theological backwater.
For some years the new religion was the secret of a small group of
simple people, Kadija, the prophet’s wife, Ali, an adopted son, Zeid, a
slave, and Abu Bekr, a friend and admirer. For some years it was an
obscure sect in a few households of Mecca, a mere scowl and muttering at
idolatry, so obscure and unimportant that the leading men of the town
did not trouble about it in the least. Then it gathered strength.
Muhammad began to preach more openly, to teach the doctrine of a future
life, and to threaten idolaters and unbelievers with hell fire. He seems
to have preached with considerable effect. It appeared to many that he
was aiming at a sort of dictatorship in Mecca, and drawing many
susceptible and discontented people to his side; and an attempt was made
to discourage and suppress the new movement.
Mecca was a place of pilgrimage and a sanctuary; no blood could be shed
within its walls; nevertheless, things were made extremely disagreeable
for the followers of the new teacher. Boycott and confiscation were used
against them. Some were driven to take refuge in Christian Abyssinia.
But the Prophet himself went unscathed because he was well connected,
and his opponents did not want to begin a blood feud. We cannot follow
the fluctuations of the struggle here, but it is necessary to note one
perplexing incident in the new prophet’s career, which, says Sir Mark
Sykes, “proves him to have been an Arab of the Arabs.” After all his
insistence upon the oneness of God, he wavered. He came into the
courtyard of the Kaaba, and declared that the gods and goddesses of
Mecca might, after all, be real, might be a species of saints with a
power of intercession.
His recantation was received with enthusiasm, but he had no sooner made
it than he repented, and his repentance shows that he had indeed the
fear of God in him. His lapse from honesty proves him honest. He did all
he could to repair the evil he had done. He said that the devil had
possessed his tongue, and denounced idolatry again with renewed vigour.
The struggle against the antiquated deities, after a brief interval of
peace, was renewed again more grimly, and with no further hope of
reconciliation.
For a time the old interests had the upper hand. At the end of ten years
of prophesying, Muhammad found himself a man of fifty, and altogether
unsuccessful in Mecca. Kadija, his first wife, was dead, and several of
his chief supporters had also recently died. He sought a refuge at the
neighbouring town of Tayf, but Tayf drove him out with stones and abuse.
Then, when the world looked darkest to him, opportunity opened before
him. He found he had been weighed and approved in an unexpected quarter.
The city of Medina was much torn by internal dissension, and many of its
people, during the time of pilgrimage to Mecca, had been attracted by
Muhammad’s teaching. Probably the numerous Jews in Medina had shaken the
ancient idolatry of the people. An invitation was sent to him to come
and rule in the name of his God in Medina.
He did not go at once. He parleyed for two years, sending a disciple to
preach in Medina and destroy the idols there. Then he began sending such
followers as he had in Mecca to Medina to await his coming there; he did
not want to trust himself to unknown adherents in a strange city. This
exodus of the faithful continued, until at last only he and Abu Bekr
remained.
In spite of the character of Mecca as a sanctuary, he was very nearly
murdered there. The elders of the town evidently knew of what was going
on in Medina, and they realized the danger to them if this seditious
prophet presently found himself master of a town on their main caravan
route to Syria. Custom must bow to imperative necessity, they thought;
and they decided that, blood feud or no blood feud, Muhammad must die.
They arranged that he should be murdered in his bed; and in order to
share the guilt of this breach of sanctuary they appointed a committee
to do this, representing every family in the city except Muhammad’s
own. But Muhammad had already prepared his flight; and when in the
night they rushed into his room, they found Ali, his adopted son,
sleeping, or feigning sleep, on his bed.
The flight (the Hegira[322]) was an adventurous one, the pursuit being
pressed hard. Expert desert trackers sought for the spoor to the north
of the town, but Muhammad and Abu Bekr had gone south to certain caves
where camels and provisions were hidden, and thence he made a great
detour to Medina. There he and his faithful companion arrived, and were
received with great enthusiasm on September 20, 622. It was the end of
his probation and the beginning of his power.[323]
§ 3
Until the Hegira, until he was fifty-one, the character of the founder
of Islam is a matter of speculation and dispute. Thereafter he is in the
light. We discover a man of great imaginative power but tortuous in the
Arab fashion, and with most of the virtues and defects of the Bedouin.
The opening of his reign was “very Bedouin.” The rule of the One God of
all the earth, as it was interpreted by Muhammad, began with a series of
raids--which for more than a year were invariably unsuccessful--upon the
caravans of Mecca. Then came a grave scandal, the breaking of the
ancient customary truce of the Arab Amphictyony in the sacred month of
Rahab. A party of Moslems, in this season of profound peace,
treacherously attacked a small caravan and killed a man. It was their
only success, and they did it by the order of the Prophet.
Presently came a battle. A force of seven hundred men had come out from
Mecca to convoy home another caravan, and they encountered a large
raiding party of three hundred. There was a fight, the battle of Badr,
and the Meccans got the worst of it. They lost about fifty or sixty
killed and as many wounded. Muhammad returned in triumph to Medina, and
was inspired by Allah and this success to order the assassination of a
number of his opponents among the Jews in the town who had treated his
prophetic claims with a disagreeable levity.
But Mecca resolved to avenge Badr, and at the battle of Uhud, near
Medina, inflicted an indecisive defeat upon the Prophet’s followers.
Muhammad was knocked down and nearly killed, and there was much running
away among his followers. The Meccans, however, did not push their
advantage and enter Medina.
For some time all the energies of the Prophet were concentrated upon
rallying his followers, who were evidently much dispirited. The Koran
records the chastened feelings of those days. “The _suras_ of the
Koran,” says Sir Mark Sykes, “which are attributed to this period, excel
nearly all the others in their majesty and sublime confidence.” Here,
for the judgment of the reader, is an example of these majestic
utterances, from the recent orthodox translation by the Maulvi Muhammad
Ali.[324]
“Oh, you who believe! If you obey those who disbelieve, they will turn
you back upon your heels, so you will turn back losers.
“Nay! Allah is your Patron, and He is the best of the helpers.
“We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, because
they set up with Allah that for which He has sent down no authority, and
their abode is the fire; and evil is the abode of the unjust.
“And certainly Allah made good to you His promise, when you slew them by
His permission, until when you became weak-hearted and disputed about
the affair and disobeyed after He had shown you that which you loved; of
you were some who desired this world, and of you were some who desired
the hereafter; then He turned you away from them that He might try you;
and He has certainly pardoned you, and Allah is Gracious to the
believers.
“When you ran off precipitately, and did not wait for anyone, and the
Apostle was calling you from your rear, so He gave you another sorrow
instead of your sorrow, so that you might not grieve at what had escaped
you, nor at what befell you; and Allah is aware of what you do.
“Then after sorrow he sent down security upon you, a calm coming upon a
party of you, and there was another party whom their own souls had
rendered anxious; they entertained about Allah thoughts of ignorance
quite unjustly, saying: We have no hand in this affair. Say, surely the
affair is wholly in the hands of Allah. They conceal within their souls
what they would not reveal to you. They say: Had we any hand in the
affair, we would not have been slain here. Say: had you remained in your
houses, those for whom slaughter was ordained would certainly have gone
forth to the places where they would be slain, and that Allah might test
what was in your breasts and that He might purge what was in your
hearts; and Allah knows what is in the breasts.
“As for those of you who turned back on the day when the two armies met,
only the devil sought to cause them to make a slip on account of some
deeds they had done, and certainly Allah has pardoned them; surely Allah
is Forgiving, Forbearing.”
* * * * *
Inconclusive hostilities continued for some years, and at last Mecca
made a crowning effort to stamp out for good and all the growing power
of Medina. A mixed force of no fewer than 10,000 men was scraped
together, an enormous force for the time and country. It was, of course,
an entirely undisciplined force of footmen, horsemen, and camel riders,
and it was prepared for nothing but the usual desert scrimmage. Bows,
spears, and swords were its only weapons. When at last it arrived amid a
vast cloud of dust in sight of the hovels and houses of Medina, instead
of a smaller force of the same kind drawn up for battle as it had
expected, it found a new and entirely disconcerting phenomenon, a trench
and a wall. Assisted by a Persian convert, Muhammad had entrenched
himself in Medina!
This trench struck the Bedouin miscellany as one of the most
unsportsmanlike things that had ever been known in the history of the
world. They rode about the place. They shouted their opinion of the
whole business to the besieged. They discharged a few arrows, and at
last encamped to argue about this amazing outrage. They could arrive at
no decision. Muhammad would not come out; the rains began to fall, the
tents of the allies got wet, and the cooking difficult, views became
divergent and tempers gave way, and at last this great host dwindled
again into its constituent parts without ever having given battle (627).
The bands dispersed north, east, and south, became clouds of dust, and
ceased to matter. Near Medina was a castle of Jews, against whom
Muhammad was already incensed because of their disrespect for his
theology. They had shown a disposition to side with the probable victor
in this last struggle, and Muhammad now fell upon them, slew all the
men, nine hundred of them, and enslaved the women and children. Possibly
many of their late allies were among the bidders for these slaves. Never
again after this quaint failure did Mecca make an effective rally
against Muhammad, and one by one its leading men came over to his side.
We need not follow the windings of the truce and the treaty that finally
extended the rule of the Prophet to Mecca. The gist of the agreement was
that the faithful should turn towards Mecca when they prayed instead of
turning towards Jerusalem, as they had hitherto done, and that Mecca
should be the pilgrimage centre of the new faith. So long as the
pilgrimage continued, the men of Mecca, it would seem, did not care very
much whether the crowd assembled in the name of one god or many.
Muhammad was getting more and more hopeless of any extensive conversion
of the Jews and Christians, and he was ceasing to press his idea that
all these faiths really worshipped the same One God. Allah was becoming
more and more his own special God, tethered now by this treaty to the
meteoric stone of the Kaaba, and less and less the father of all
mankind. Already the Prophet had betrayed a disposition to make a deal
with Mecca, and at last it was effected. The lordship of Mecca was well
worth the concession. Of comings and goings and a final conflict we need
not tell. In 629 Muhammad came to the town as its master. The image of
Manif, the god after whom he had once named his son, was smashed under
his feet as he entered the Kaaba.
Thereafter his power extended, there were battles, treacheries,
massacres; but on the whole he prevailed, until he was master of all
Arabia; and when he was master of all Arabia in 632, at the age of
sixty-two, he died.
Throughout the concluding eleven years of his life after the Hegira,
there is little to distinguish the general conduct of Muhammad from that
of any other welder of peoples into a monarchy. The chief difference is
his use of a religion of his own creation as his cement. He was
diplomatic, treacherous, ruthless, or compromising as the occasion
required and as any other Arab king might have been in his place; and
there was singularly little spirituality in his kingship. Nor was his
domestic life during his time of power and freedom one of exceptional
edification. Until the death of Kadija, when he was fifty, he seems to
have been the honest husband of one wife; but then, as many men do in
their declining years, he developed a disagreeably strong interest in
women.
He married two wives after the death of Kadija, one being the young
Ayesha, who became and remained his favourite and most influential
partner; and subsequently a number of other women, wives and concubines,
were added to his establishment. This led to much trouble and confusion,
and in spite of many special and very helpful revelations on the part of
Allah, these complications still require much explanation and argument
from the faithful. There was, for example, a scandal about Ayesha; she
was left behind on one occasion when the howdah and the camel went on,
while she was looking for her necklace among the bushes; and so Allah
had to intervene with some heat and denounce her slanderers. Allah also
had to speak very plainly about the general craving among this household
of women for “this world’s life and its ornature” and for “finery.” Then
there was much discussion because the Prophet first married his young
cousin Zainib to his adopted son Zaid, and afterwards, “when Zaid had
accomplished his want of her,” the Prophet took her and married
her--but, as the inspired book makes clear, only in order to show the
difference between an adopted and a real son. “We gave her to you as a
wife, so that there should be no difficulty for the believers in respect
of the wives of their adopted sons, when they have accomplished their
want of them, and Allah’s command shall be performed.” Yet surely a
simple statement in the Koran should have sufficed without this
excessively practical demonstration. There was, moreover, a mutiny in
the harem on account of the undue favours shown by the Prophet to an
Egyptian concubine who had borne him a boy, a boy for whom he had a
great affection, since none of Kadija’s sons had survived. These
domestic troubles mingle inextricably with our impression of the
Prophet’s personality. One of his wives was a Jewess, Safiyya, whom he
had married on the evening of the battle in which her husband had been
captured and executed. He viewed the captured women at the end of the
day, and she found favour in his eyes and was taken to his tent.
These are salient facts in these last eleven years of Muhammad’s career.
Because he too founded a great religion, there are those who write of
this evidently lustful and rather shifty leader as though he were a man
to put beside Jesus of Nazareth or Gautama or Mani. But it is surely
manifest that he was a being of a commoner clay; he was vain,
egotistical, tyrannous, and a self-deceiver; and it would throw all our
history out of proportion if, out of an insincere deference to the
possible Moslem reader, we were to present him in any other light.
Yet, unless we balance it, this insistence upon his vanity, egotism,
self-deception, and hot desire does not complete the justice of the
case. We must not swing across from the repudiation of the extravagant
pretensions of the faithful to an equally extravagant condemnation. Can
a man who has no good qualities hold a friend? Because those who knew
Muhammad best believed in him most. Kadija for all her days believed in
him--but she may have been a fond woman. Abu Bekr is a better witness,
and he never wavered in his devotion. Abu Bekr believed in the Prophet,
and it is very hard for anyone who reads the history of these times not
to believe in Abu Bekr. Ali again risked his life for the Prophet in his
darkest days. Muhammad was no impostor, at any rate, though at times his
vanity made him behave as though Allah was at his beck and call, and as
if his thoughts were necessarily God’s thoughts. And if his bloodstained
passion with Safiyya amazes and disgusts our modern minds, his love for
little Ibrahim, the son of Mary the Egyptian, and his passionate grief
when the child died, reinstate him in the fellowship of all those who
have known love and loss.
He smoothed the earth over the little grave with his own hands. “This
eases the afflicted heart,” he said. “Though it neither profits nor
injures the dead, yet it is a comfort to the living.”
§ 4
But the personal quality of Muhammad is one thing and the quality of
Islam, the religion he founded, is quite another. Muhammad was not
pitted against Jesus or Mani, and his relative stature is only a very
secondary question for us; it is Islam which was pitted against the
corrupted Christianity of the seventh century and against the decaying
tradition of the Zoroastrian Magi with which the historian has the
greater concern. And whether it was through its Prophet, or whether it
was in spite of its Prophet, and through certain accidents in its origin
and certain qualities of the desert from which it sprang, there can be
no denying that Islam possesses many fine and noble attributes. It is
not always through sublime persons that great things come into human
life. It is the folly of the simple disciple which demands miraculous
frippery on the majesty of truth and immaculate conceptions for
righteousness.
A year before his death, at the end of the tenth year of the Hegira,
Muhammad made his last pilgrimage from Medina to Mecca. He made then a
great sermon to his people of which the tradition is as follows. There
are, of course, disputes as to the authenticity of the words, but there
can be no dispute that the world of Islam, a world still of three
hundred million people, receives them to this day as its rule of life,
and to a great extent observes it. The reader will note that the first
paragraph sweeps away all plunder and blood feuds among the followers of
Islam. The last makes the believing Negro the equal of the Caliph. They
may not be sublime words, as certain utterances of Jesus of Nazareth are
sublime; but they established in the world a great tradition of
dignified fair dealing, they breathe a spirit of generosity, and they
are human and workable. They created a society more free from widespread
cruelty and social oppression than any society had ever been in the
world before.
“Ye people: Hearken to my words; for I know not whether, after this
year, I shall ever be amongst you here again. Your lives and property
are sacred and inviolable amongst one another until the end of time.
“The Lord hath ordained to every man the share of his inheritance; a
testament is not lawful to the prejudice of heirs.
“The child belongeth to the parent; and the violator of wedlock shall be
stoned.
“Whoever claimeth falsely another for his father, or another for his
master, the curse of God and the angels and of all mankind shall rest
upon him.
“Ye people! Ye have rights demandable of your wives, and they have
rights demandable of you. Upon them it is incumbent not to violate their
conjugal faith nor commit any act of open impropriety; which things if
they do, ye have authority to shut them up in separate apartments and to
beat them with stripes, yet not severely. But if they refrain therefrom,
clothe them and feed them suitably. And treat your women well, for they
are with you as captives and prisoners; they have not power over
anything as regards themselves. And ye have verily taken them on the
security of God, and have made their persons lawful unto you by the
words of God.
“And your slaves, see that ye feed them with such food as ye eat
yourselves, and clothe them with the stuff ye wear. And if they commit a
fault which ye are not inclined to forgive, then sell them, for they are
the servants of the Lord, and are not to be tormented.
“Ye people! hearken to my speech and comprehend the same. Know that
every Moslem is the brother of every other Moslem. All of you are on the
same equality.”
This insistence upon kindliness and consideration in the daily life is
one of the main virtues of Islam, but it is not the only one. Equally
important is the uncompromising monotheism, void of any Jewish
exclusiveness, which is sustained by the Koran. Islam from the outset
was fairly proof against the theological elaborations that have
perplexed and divided Christianity and smothered the spirit of Jesus.
And its third source of strength has been in the meticulous prescription
of methods of prayer and worship, and its clear statement of the limited
and conventional significance of the importance ascribed to Mecca. All
sacrifice was barred to the faithful; no loophole was left for the
sacrificial priest of the old dispensation to come back into the new
faith. It was not simply a new faith, a purely prophetic religion, as
the religion of Jesus was in the time of Jesus, or the religion of
Gautama in the lifetime of Gautama, but it was so stated as to remain
so. Islam to this day has learned doctors, teachers, and preachers; but
it has no priests.
It was full of the spirit of kindliness, generosity, and brotherhood; it
was a simple and understandable religion; it was instinct with the
chivalrous sentiment of the desert; and it made its appeal straight to
the commonest instincts in the composition of ordinary men. Against it
were pitted Judaism, which had made a racial hoard of God; Christianity
talking and preaching endlessly now of trinities, doctrines, and
heresies no ordinary man could make head or tail of; and Mazdaism, the
cult of the Zoroastrian Magi, who had inspired the crucifixion of Mani.
The bulk of the people to whom the challenge of Islam came did not
trouble very much whether Muhammad was lustful or not, or whether he had
done some shifty and questionable things; what appealed to them was that
this God, Allah, he preached, was by the test of the conscience in their
hearts a God of righteousness, and that the honest acceptance of his
doctrine and method opened the door wide in a world of uncertainty,
treachery, and intolerable divisions to a great and increasing
brotherhood of trustworthy men on earth, and to a paradise not of
perpetual exercises in praise and worship, in which saints, priests, and
anointed kings were still to have the upper places, but of equal
fellowship and simple and understandable delights such as their souls
craved for. Without any ambiguous symbolism, without any darkening of
altars or chanting of priests, Muhammad had brought home those
attractive doctrines to the hearts of mankind.
§ 5
The true embodiment of the spirit of Islam was not Muhammad, but his
close friend and supporter Abu Bekr. There can be little doubt that if
Muhammad was the mind and imagination of primitive Islam, Abu Bekr was
its conscience and its will. Throughout their life together it was
Muhammad who said the thing, but it was Abu Bekr who believed the
thing. When Muhammad wavered, Abu Bekr sustained him. Abu Bekr was a man
without doubts, his beliefs cut down to acts cleanly as a sharp knife
cuts. We may feel sure that Abu Bekr would never have temporized about
the minor gods of Mecca, or needed inspirations from Allah to explain
his private life. When in the eleventh year of the Hegira (632) the
Prophet sickened of a fever and died, it was Abu Bekr who succeeded him
as Caliph and leader of the people (Kalifa = Successor), and it was the
unflinching confidence of Abu Bekr in the righteousness of Allah which
prevented a split between Medina and Mecca, which stamped down a
widespread insurrection of the Bedouin against taxation for the common
cause, and carried out a great plundering raid into Syria that the dead
Prophet had projected. And then Abu Bekr, with that faith which moves
mountains, set himself simply and sanely to organize the subjugation of
the whole world to Allah--with little armies of 3000 or 4000
Arabs--according to those letters the Prophet had written from Medina in
628 to all the monarchs of the world.
And the attempt came near to succeeding. Had there been in Islam a score
of men, younger men to carry on his work, of Abu Bekr’s quality, it
would certainly have succeeded. It came near to succeeding because
Arabia was now a centre of faith and will, and because nowhere else in
the world until China was reached, unless it was upon the steppes of
Russia or Turkestan, was there another community of free-spirited men
with any power of belief in their rulers and leaders. The head of the
Byzantine Empire, Heraclius, the conqueror of Chosroes II, was past his
prime and suffering from dropsy, and his empire was exhausted by the
long Persian War. Nor had he at any time displayed such exceptional
ability as the new occasion demanded. The motley of people under his
rule knew little of him and cared less. Persia was at the lowest depths
of monarchist degradation, the parricide Kavadh II had died after a
reign of a few months, and a series of dynastic intrigues and romantic
murders enlivened the palace but weakened the country. The war between
Persia and the Byzantine Empire was only formally concluded about the
time of the beginning of Abu Bekr’s rule. Both sides had made great use
of Arab auxiliaries; over Syria a number of towns and settlements of
Christianized Arabs were scattered who professed a baseless loyalty to
Constantinople; the Persian marches between Mesopotamia and the desert
were under the control of an Arab tributary prince, whose capital was at
Hira. Arab influence was strong in such cities as Damascus, where
Christian Arab gentlemen would read and recite the latest poetry from
the desert competitors. There was thus a great amount of easily
assimilable material ready at hand for Islam.
And the military campaigns that now began were among the most brilliant
in the world’s history. Arabia had suddenly become a garden of fine men.
The name of Khalid stands out as the brightest star in a constellation
of able and devoted Moslem generals. Whenever he commanded he was
victorious, and when the jealousy of the second Caliph, Omar, degraded
him unjustly and inexcusably,[325] he made no ado, but served Allah
cheerfully and well as a subordinate to those over whom he had ruled. We
cannot trace the story of this warfare here; the Arab armies struck
simultaneously at Byzantine Syria and the Persian frontier city of Hira,
and everywhere they offered a choice of three alternatives: either pay
tribute, or confess the true God and join us, or die. They encountered
armies, large and disciplined but spiritless armies, and defeated them.
And nowhere was there such a thing as a popular resistance. The people
of the populous irrigation lands of Mesopotamia cared not a jot whether
they paid taxes to Byzantium or Persepolis or to Medina; and of the two,
Arabs or Persian court, the Arabs, the Arabs of the great years, were
manifestly the cleaner people, more just and more merciful. The
Christian Arabs joined the invaders very readily and so did many Jews.
Just as in the west, so now in the east, an invasion became a social
revolution. But here it was also a religious revolution with a new and
distinctive mental vitality.
[Illustration: The BEGINNINGS of the MOSLEM POWER]
It was Khalid who fought the decisive battle (634) with the army of
Heraclius upon the banks of the Yarmuk, a tributary of the Jordan. The
legions, as ever, were without proper cavalry; for seven centuries the
ghost of old Crassus had haunted the east in vain; the imperial armies
relied upon Christian Arab auxiliaries, and these deserted to the
Moslems as the armies joined issue. A great parade of priests, sacred
banners, pictures, and holy relics was made by the Byzantine host, and
it was further sustained by the chanting of monks. But there was no
magic in the relics and little conviction about the chanting. On the
Arab side the Emirs and sheiks harangued the troops, and after the
ancient Arab fashion the shrill voices of women in the rear encouraged
their men. The Moslem ranks were full of believers before whom shone
victory or paradise. The battle was never in doubt after the defection
of the irregular cavalry. An attempt to retreat dissolved into a rout
and became a massacre. The Byzantine army had fought with its back to
the river, which was presently choked with its dead.
Thereafter Heraclius slowly relinquished all Syria, which he had so
lately won back from the Persians, to his new antagonists. Damascus soon
fell, and a year later the Moslems entered Antioch. For a time they had
to abandon it again to a last effort from Constantinople, but they
re-entered it for good under Khalid.
Meanwhile on the eastern front, after a swift initial success which gave
them Hira, the Persian resistance stiffened. The dynastic struggle had
ended at last in the coming of a king of kings, and a general of ability
had been found in Rustam. He gave battle at Kadessia (637). His army was
just such another composite host as Darius had led into Thrace or
Alexander defeated at Issus; it was a medley of levies. He had
thirty-three war elephants, and he sat on a golden throne upon a raised
platform behind the Persian ranks, surveying the battle, which throne
will remind the reader of Herodotus, the Hellespont, and Salamis more
than a thousand years before. The battle lasted three days; each day the
Arabs attacked and the Persian host held its ground until nightfall
called a truce. On the third day the Arabs received reinforcements, and
towards the evening the Persians attempted to bring the struggle to an
end by a charge of elephants. At first the huge beasts carried all
before them; then one was wounded painfully and became uncontrollable,
rushing up and down between the armies. Its panic affected the others,
and for a time both armies remained dumbfounded in the red light of
sunset, watching the frantic efforts of these grey, squealing monsters
to escape from the tormenting masses of armed men that hemmed them in.
It was by the merest chance that at last they broke through the Persian
and not through the Arab array, and that it was the Arabs who were able
to charge home upon the resulting confusion. The twilight darkened to
night, but this time the armies did not separate. All through the night
the Arabs smote in the name of Allah, and pressed upon the shattered and
retreating Persians. Dawn broke upon the vestiges of Rustam’s army in
flight far beyond the litter of the battlefield. Its path was marked by
scattered weapons and war material, abandoned transport, and the dead
and dying. The platform and the golden throne were broken down, and
Rustam lay dead among a heap of dead men....
Already in 634 Abu Bekr had died and given place to Omar, the Prophet’s
brother-in-law, as Caliph; and it was under Omar (634-643) that the main
conquests of the Moslems occurred. The Byzantine Empire was pushed out
of Syria altogether. But at the Taurus Mountains the Moslem thrust was
held. Armenia was overrun, all Mesopotamia was conquered and Persia
beyond the rivers. Egypt passed almost passively from Greek to Arab; in
a few years the Semitic race, in the name of God and His Prophet, had
recovered nearly all the dominions it had lost to the Aryan Persians a
thousand years before. Jerusalem fell early, making a treaty without
standing siege, and so the True Cross which had been carried off by the
Persians a dozen years before, and elaborately restored by Heraclius,
passed once more out of the rule of Christians. But it was still in
Christian hands; the Christians were to be tolerated, paying only a poll
tax; and all the churches and all the relics were left in their
possession.
Jerusalem made a peculiar condition for its surrender. The city would
give itself only to the Caliph Omar in person. Hitherto he had been in
Medina organizing armies and controlling the general campaign. He came
to Jerusalem (638), and the manner of his coming shows how swiftly the
vigour and simplicity of the first Moslem onset was being sapped by
success. He came the six-hundred-mile journey with only one attendant;
he was mounted on a camel, and a bag of barley, another of dates, a
waterskin, and a wooden platter were his provision for the journey. He
was met outside the city by his chief captains, robed splendidly in
silks and with richly caparisoned horses. At this amazing sight the old
man was overcome with rage. He slipped down from his saddle, scrabbled
up dirt and stones with his hands, and pelted these fine gentlemen,
shouting abuse. What was this insult? What did this finery mean? Where
were his warriors? Where were the desert men? He would not let these
popinjays escort him. He went on with his attendant, and the smart Emirs
rode afar off--well out of range of his stones. He met the Patriarch of
Jerusalem, who had apparently taken over the city from its Byzantine
rulers, alone. With the Patriarch he got on very well. They went round
the Holy Places together, and Omar, now a little appeased, made sly
jokes at the expense of his too magnificent followers.
Equally indicative of the tendencies of the time is Omar’s letter
ordering one of his governors who had built himself a palace at Kufa, to
demolish it again.
“They tell me,” he wrote, “you would imitate the palace of
Chosroes,[326] and that you would even use the gates that once were his.
Will you also have guards and porters at those gates, as Chosroes had?
Will you keep the faithful afar off and deny audience to the poor? Would
you depart from the custom of our Prophet, and be as magnificent as
those Persian emperors, and descend to hell even as they have
done?”[327]
§ 6
Abu Bekr and Omar I are the two master figures in the history of Islam.
It is not within our scope here to describe the wars by which in a
hundred and twenty-five years Islam spread itself from the Indus to the
Atlantic and Spain, and from Kashgar on the borders of China to Upper
Egypt. Two maps must suffice to show the limits to which the vigorous
impulse of the new faith carried the Arab idea and the Arabic
scriptures, before worldliness, the old trading and plundering spirit,
and the glamour of the silk robe had completely recovered their
paralyzing sway over the Arab intelligence and will. The reader will
note how the great tide swept over the footsteps of Yuan Chwang, and how
easily in Africa the easy conquests of the Vandals were repeated in the
reverse direction. And if the reader entertains any delusions about a
fine civilization, either Persian, Roman, Hellenic, or Egyptian, being
submerged by this flood, the sooner he dismisses such ideas the better.
Islam prevailed because it was the best social and political order the
times could offer. It prevailed because everywhere it found politically
apathetic peoples, robbed, oppressed, bullied, uneducated, and
unorganized, and it found selfish and unsound governments out of touch
with any people at all. It was the broadest, freshest, and cleanest
political idea that had yet come into actual activity in the world, and
it offered better terms than any other to the mass of mankind. The
capitalistic and slave-holding system of the Roman Empire and the
literature and culture and social tradition of Europe had altogether
decayed and broken down before Islam arose; it was only when mankind
lost faith in the sincerity of its representatives that Islam too began
to decay.
[Illustration: The GROWTH of the MOSLEM POWER in 25 years]
The larger part of its energy spent itself in conquering and
assimilating Persia and Turkestan; its most vigorous thrusts were
northwardly from Persia and westwardly through Egypt. Had it
concentrated its first vigour upon the Byzantine Empire, there can be
little doubt that by the eighth century it would have taken
Constantinople and come through into Europe as easily as it reached the
Pamirs. The Caliph Moawiya, it is true, besieged the capital for seven
years (672 to 678), and Suleiman in 717 and 718; but the pressure was
not sustained, and for three or four centuries longer the Byzantine
Empire remained the crazy bulwark of Europe. In the newly Christianized
or still pagan Avars, Bulgars, Serbs, Slavs, and Saxons, Islam would
certainly have found as ready converts as it did in the Turks of Central
Asia. And though, instead of insisting upon Constantinople, it first
came round into Europe by the circuitous route of Africa and Spain, it
was only in France, at the end of a vast line of communications from
Arabia, that it encountered a power sufficiently vigorous to arrest its
advance.
From the outset the Bedouin aristocrats of Mecca dominated the new
empire. Abu Bekr, the first Caliph, was in an informal shouting way
elected at Medina, and so were Omar I and Othman, the third Caliph, but
all three were Meccans of good family. They were not men of Medina. And
though Abu Bekr and Omar were men of stark simplicity and righteousness
Othman was of a baser quality, a man quite in the vein of those silk
robes, to whom conquest was not conquest for Allah but for Arabia, and
especially for Mecca in Arabia, and more particularly for himself and
for the Meccans and for his family, the Omayyads. He was a worthy man,
who stood out for his country and his town and his “people.” He was no
early convert as his two predecessors had been; he had joined the
Prophet for reasons of policy in fair give and take. With his accession
the Caliph ceases to be a strange man of fire and wonder, and becomes an
Oriental monarch like many Oriental monarchs before and since, a fairly
good monarch by Eastern standards as yet, but nothing more.
[Illustration: The MOSLEM EMPIRE, 750 A.D.]
The rule and death of Othman brought out the consequences of Muhammad’s
weaknesses as clearly as the lives of Abu Bekr and Omar had witnessed to
the divine fire in his teaching. Muhammad had been politic at times when
Abu Bekr would have been firm, and the new element of aristocratic
greediness that came in with Othman was one fruit of those politic
moments. And the legacy of that carelessly compiled harem of the
Prophet, the family complications and jealousies which had lurked in the
background of Moslem affairs during the rule of the first two Caliphs,
was now coming out into the light of day. Ali, who was the nephew, the
adopted son, and the son-in-law of the Prophet--he was the husband of
the Prophet’s daughter Fatima--he had considered himself the rightful
Caliph. His claims formed an undertow to the resentment of Medina and of
the rival families of Mecca against the advancement of the Omayyads. But
Ayesha, the favourite wife of the Prophet, had always been jealous of
Fatima and hostile to Ali. She supported Othman.... The splendid opening
of the story of Islam collapses suddenly into this squalid dispute and
bickering of heirs and widows.
In 656 Othman, an old man of eighty, was stoned in the streets of Medina
by a mob, chased to his house, and murdered; and Ali became at last
Caliph, only to be murdered in his turn (661). In one of the battles in
this civil war, Ayesha, now a gallant, mischievous old lady,
distinguished herself by leading a charge, mounted on a camel. She was
taken prisoner and treated well.
While the armies of Islam were advancing triumphantly to the conquest of
the world, this sickness of civil war smote at its head. What was the
rule of Allah in the world to Ayesha when she could score off the
detested Fatima, and what heed were the Omayyads and the partisans of
Ali likely to take of the unity of mankind when they had a good hot feud
of this sort to entertain them, with the caliphate as a prize? The
world of Islam was rent in twain by the spites, greeds, and partisan
silliness of a handful of men and women in Medina. That quarrel still
lives. To this day one main division of the Moslems, the Shiites,
maintain the hereditary right of Ali to be Caliph _as an article of
faith_! They prevail in Persia and India. But an equally important
section, the Sunnites, with whom it is difficult for a disinterested
observer not to agree, deny this peculiar addendum to Muhammad’s simple
creed. So far as we can gather at this length of time, Ali was an
entirely commonplace individual.
To watch this schism creeping across the brave beginnings of Islam is
like watching a case of softening of the brain. To the copious
literature of the subject we must refer the reader who wishes to learn
how Hasan, the son of Ali, was poisoned by his wife, and how Husein, his
brother, was killed. We do but name them here because they still afford
a large section of mankind scope for sentimental partisanship and mutual
annoyance. They are the two chief Shiite martyrs. Amidst the coming and
going of their conflicts the old Kaaba at Mecca was burnt down, and
naturally there began endless disputation whether it should be rebuilt
in exactly its ancient form or on a much larger scale.
In this and the preceding sections we have seen once more the inevitable
struggle of this newest and latest unifying impulse in the world’s
affairs against the everyday worldliness of mankind, and we have seen
also how from the first the complicated household of Muhammad was like
an evil legacy to the new faith. But as this history now degenerates
into the normal crimes and intrigues of an Oriental dynasty, the student
of history will realize a third fundamental weakness in the world
reforms of Muhammad. He was an illiterate Arab, ignorant of history,
totally ignorant of all the political experiences of Rome and Greece,
and almost as ignorant of the real history of Judea; and he left his
followers with no scheme for a stable government embodying and
concentrating the general will of the faithful, and no effective form to
express the very real spirit of democracy (using the word in its modern
sense) that pervades the essential teaching of Islam. His own rule was
unlimited autocracy, and autocratic Islam has remained. Politically
Islam was not an advance, but a retrogression from the traditional
freedoms and customary laws of the desert. The breach of the pilgrims’
trace that led to the battle of Badr is the blackest mark against early
Islam. Nominally Allah is its chief ruler--but practically its master
has always been whatever man was vigorous and unscrupulous enough to
snatch and hold the Caliphate--and, subject to revolts and
assassinations, its final law has been that man’s will.
For a time, after the death of Ali, the Omayyad family was in the
ascendant, and for nearly a century they gave rulers to Islam.
The Arab historians are so occupied with the dynastic squabbles and
crimes of the time, that it is difficult to trace the external history
of the period. We find Moslem shipping upon the seas defeating the
Byzantine fleet in a great sea fight off the coast of Lycia (A.D. 655),
but how the Moslems acquired this victorious fleet thus early we do not
clearly know. It was probably chiefly Egyptian. For some years Islam
certainly controlled the eastern Mediterranean, and in 662 and again in
672, during the reign of Muawiya (662-680), the first great Omayyad
Caliph, made two sea attacks upon Constantinople. They had to be sea
attacks because Islam, so long as it was under Arab rule, never
surmounted the barrier of the Taurus Mountains. During the same period
the Moslems were also pressing their conquests further and further into
Central Asia. While Islam was already decaying at its centre, it was yet
making great hosts of new adherents and awakening a new spirit among the
hitherto divided and aimless Turkish peoples. Medina was no longer a
possible centre for its vast enterprises in Asia, Africa, and the
Mediterranean, and so Damascus became the usual capital of the Omayyad
Caliphs.
Chief among these, as for a time the clouds of dynastic intrigue clear,
are Abdal Malik (685-705) and Walid I (705-715), under whom the Omayyad
line rose to the climax of its successes. The western boundary was
carried to the Pyrenees, while to the east the domains of the Caliph
marched with China. The son of Walid, Suleiman (715), carried out a
second series of Moslem attacks upon Constantinople which his father had
planned and proposed. As with the Caliph Muawiya half a century before,
the approach was by sea--for Asia Minor, as we have just noted, was
still unconquered--and the shipping was drawn chiefly from Egypt. The
emperor, a usurper, Leo the Isaurian, displayed extraordinary skill and
obstinacy in the defence; he burnt most of the Moslem shipping in a
brilliant sortie, cut up the troops they had landed upon the Asiatic
side of the Bosphorus, and after a campaign in Europe of two years
(717-718), a winter of unexampled severity completed their defeat.
From this point onward the glory of the Omayyad line decays. The first
tremendous impulse of Islam was now spent. There was no further
expansion and a manifest decline in religious zeal. Islam had made
millions of converts, and had digested those millions very imperfectly.
Cities, nations, whole sects and races, Arab pagans, Jews, Christians,
Manichæans, Zoroastrians, Turanian pagans, had been swallowed up into
this new vast empire of Muhammad’s successors. It has hitherto been the
common characteristic of all the great unifying religious initiators of
the world, the common oversight, that they have accepted the moral and
theological ideals to which the first appeal was made, as though they
were universal ideals. Muhammad’s appeal, for example, was to the
traditional chivalry and underlying monotheistic feelings of the
intelligent Arabs of his time. These things were latent in the mind and
conscience of Mecca and Medina; he did but call them forth. Then, as the
new teaching spread and stereotyped itself, it had to work on a
continually more uncongenial basis, it had to grow in soil that
distorted and perverted it. Its sole textbook was the Koran. To minds
untuned to the melodies of Arabic, this book seemed to be, as it seems
to many European minds to-day, a mixture of fine-spirited rhetoric
with--to put it plainly--formless and unintelligent gabble. Countless
converts missed the real thing in it altogether. To that we must ascribe
the readiness of the Persian and Indian sections of the faith to join
the Shiite schism upon a quarrel that they could at least understand and
feel. And to the same attempt to square the new stuff with old
prepossessions was due such extravagant theology as presently disputed
whether the Koran was and always had been co-existent with God.[328] We
should be stupefied by the preposterousness of this idea if we did not
recognize in it at once the well-meaning attempt of some learned
Christian convert to Islamize his belief that “In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[329]
None of the great unifying religious initiators of the world hitherto
seems to have been accompanied by any understanding of the vast
educational task, the vast work of lucid and varied exposition and
intellectual organization involved in its propositions. They all present
the same history of a rapid spreading, like a little water poured over a
great area, and then of superficiality and corruption.
In a little while we hear stories of an Omayyad Caliph, Walid II
(743-744), who mocked at the Koran, ate pork, drank wine, and did not
pray. Those stories may have been true or they may have been circulated
for political reasons. There began a puritan reaction in Mecca and
Medina against the levity and luxury of Damascus. Another great Arab
family, the Abbas family, the Abbasids, a thoroughly wicked line, had
long been scheming for power, and was making capital out of the general
discontent. The feud of the Omayyads and the Abbasids was older than
Islam; it had been going on before Muhammad was born. These Abbasids
took up the tradition of the Shiite “martyrs,” Ali and his sons Hasan
and Husein, and identified themselves with it. The banner of the
Omayyads was white; the Abbasid adopted a black banner, black in
mourning for Hasan and Husein, black because black is more impressive
than any colour; moreover, the Abbasids declared that all the Caliphs
after Ali were usurpers. In 749 they accomplished a carefully prepared
revolution, and the last of the Omayyad Caliphs was hunted down and
slain in Egypt. Abul Abbas was the first of the Abbasid Caliphs, and he
began his reign by collecting into one prison every living male of the
Omayyad line upon whom he could lay hands and causing them all to be
massacred. Their bodies were heaped together, a leathern carpet was
spread over them, and on this gruesome table Abul Abbas and his
councillors feasted.[330] Moreover, the tombs of the Omayyad Caliphs
were rifled, and their bones burnt and scattered to the four winds of
heaven. So the grievances of Ali were avenged at last, and the Omayyad
line passed out of history.
There was, it is interesting to note, a rising on behalf of the Omayyads
in Khorasan which was assisted by the Chinese emperor.
§ 7
But the descendants of Ali were not destined to share in this triumph
for long. The Abbasids were adventurers and rulers of an older school
than Islam. Now that the tradition of Ali had served its purpose, the
next proceeding of the new Caliph was to hunt down and slaughter the
surviving members of his family, the descendants of Ali and Fatima.
Clearly the old traditions of Sassanid Persia and of Persia before the
Greeks were returning to the world. With the accession of the Abbasids
the control of the sea departed from the Caliph, and with it went Spain
and North Africa, in which, under an Omayyad survivor in the former
case, independent Moslem states now arose. The centre of gravity of
Islam shifted across the desert from Damascus to Mesopotamia. Mansur,
the successor of Abul Abbas, built himself a new capital at Bagdad near
the ruins of Ctesiphon, the former Sassanid capital. Turks and Persians
as well as Arabs became Emirs, and the army was reorganized upon
Sassanid lines. Medina and Mecca were now only of importance as
pilgrimage centres, to which the faithful turned to pray. But because it
was a fine language, and because it was the language of the Koran,
Arabic continued to spread until presently it had replaced Greek and
become the language of educated men throughout the whole Moslem world.
Of the Abbasid monarchs after Abul Abbas we need tell little here. A
bickering war went on year by year in Asia Minor in which neither
Byzantium nor Bagdad made any permanent gains, though once or twice the
Moslems raided as far as the Bosphorus. A false prophet, Mokanna, who
said he was God, had a brief but troublesome career. There were plots,
there were insurrections; they lie flat and colourless now in the
histories like dead flowers in an old book. One other Abbasid Caliph
only need be named, and that quite as much for his legendary as for his
real importance, Haroun-al-Raschid[331] (786-809). He was not only the
Caliph of an outwardly prosperous empire in the world of reality, but he
was also the Caliph of an undying empire in the deathless world of
fiction, he was the Haroun-al-Raschid of the _Arabian Nights_.
Sir Mark Sykes[332] gives an account of the reality of his empire from
which we will quote certain passages. He says: “The Imperial Court was
polished, luxurious, and unlimitedly wealthy; the capital, Bagdad, a
gigantic mercantile city surrounding a huge administrative fortress,
wherein every department of state had a properly regulated and
well-ordered public office; where schools and colleges abounded; whither
philosophers, students, doctors, poets, and theologians flocked from all
parts of the civilized globe.... The provincial capitals were
embellished with vast public buildings, and linked together by an
effective and rapid service of posts and caravans; the frontiers were
secure and well garrisoned, the army loyal, efficient, and brave; the
governors and ministers honest and forbearing. The empire stretched with
equal strength and unimpaired control from the Cilician gates to Aden,
and from Egypt to Central Asia. Christians, Pagans, Jews, as well as
Moslems, were employed in the government service. Usurpers, rebellious
generals, and false prophets seemed to have vanished from the Moslem
dominions. Traffic and wealth had taken the place of revolution and
famine.... Pestilence and disease were met by Imperial hospitals and
government physicians.... In government business the rough-and-ready
methods of Arabian administration had given place to a complicated
system of Divans, initiated partly from the Roman, but chiefly taken
from the Persian system of government. Posts, Finance, Privy Seal, Crown
Lands, Justice, and Military affairs were each administered by separate
bureaux in the hands of ministers and officials; an army of clerks,
scribes, writers, and accountants swarmed into these offices and
gradually swept the whole power of the government into their own hands
by separating the Commander of the Faithful from any direct intercourse
with his subjects. The Imperial Palace and the entourage were equally
based on Roman and Persian precedents. Eunuchs, closely veiled ‘harems’
of women, guards, spies, go-betweens, jesters, poets, and dwarfs
clustered around the person of the Commander of the Faithful, each, in
his degree, endeavouring to gain the royal favour and indirectly
distracting the royal mind from affairs of business and state. Meanwhile
the mercantile trade of the East poured gold into Bagdad, and
supplemented the other enormous stream of money derived from the
contributions of plunder and loot despatched to the capital by the
commanders of the victorious raiding forces which harried Asia Minor,
India, and Turkestan. The seemingly unending supply of Turkish slaves
and Byzantine specie added to the richness of the revenues of Irak, and,
combined with the vast commercial traffic of which Bagdad was the
centre, produced a large and powerful moneyed class, composed of the
sons of generals, officials, landed proprietors, royal favourites,
merchants, and the like, who encouraged the arts, literature,
philosophy, and poetry as the mood took them, building palaces for
themselves, vying with each other in the luxury of their entertainments,
suborning poets to sound their praises, dabbling in philosophy,
supporting various schools of thought, endowing charities, and, in fact,
behaving as the wealthy have always behaved in all ages.
“I have said that the Abbasid Empire in the days of Haroun-al-Raschid
was weak and feeble to a degree, and perhaps the reader will consider
this a foolish proposition when he takes into consideration that I have
described the Empire as orderly, the administration definite and
settled, the army efficient, and wealth abundant. The reason I make the
suggestion is that the Abbasid Empire had lost touch with everything
original and vital in Islam, and was constructed entirely by the reunion
of the fragments of the empires Islam had destroyed. There was nothing
in the empire which appealed to the higher instincts of the leaders of
the people; the holy war had degenerated into a systematic acquisition
of plunder. The Caliph had become a luxurious Emperor or King of Kings;
the administration had changed from a patriarchal system to a
bureaucracy. The wealthier classes were rapidly losing all faith in the
religion of the state; speculative philosophy and high living were
taking the place of Koranic orthodoxy and Arabian simplicity. The
solitary bond which could have held the empire together, the sternness
and plainness of the Moslem faith, was completely neglected by both the
Caliph and his advisers.... Haroun-al-Raschid himself was a wine-bibber,
and his palace was decorated with graven images of birds and beasts and
men....
“For a moment we stand amazed at the greatness of the Abbasid dominion;
then suddenly we realize that it is but as a fair husk enclosing the
dust and ashes of dead civilizations.”
Haroun-al-Raschid died in 809. At his death his great empire fell
immediately into civil war and confusion, and the next great event of
unusual importance in this region of the world comes two hundred years
later when the Turks, under the chiefs of the great family of the
Seljuks, poured southward out of Turkestan, and not only conquered the
empire of Bagdad, but Asia Minor also. Coming from the northeast as they
did, they were able to outflank the great barrier of the Taurus
Mountains, which had hitherto held back the Moslems. They were still
much the same people as those of whom Yuan Chwang gave us a glimpse four
hundred years earlier, but now they were Moslems, and Moslems of the
primitive type, men whom Abu Bekr would have welcomed to Islam. They
caused a great revival of vigour in Islam, and they turned the minds of
the Moslem world once more in the direction of a religious war against
Christendom. For there had been a sort of truce between these two great
religions after the cessation of the Moslem advance and the decline of
the Omayyads. Such warfare as had gone on between Christianity and Islam
had been rather border-bickering than sustained war. It became only a
bitter fanatical struggle again in the eleventh century.
§ 8
But before we go on to tell of the Turks and the Crusaders, the great
wars that began between Christendom and Islam, and which have left a
quite insane intolerance between these great systems right down to the
present time, it is necessary to give a little more attention to the
intellectual life of the Arabic-speaking world which was now spreading
more and more widely over the regions which Hellenism had once
dominated. For some generations before Muhammad, the Arab mind had been,
as it were, smouldering, it had been producing poetry and much religious
discussion; under the stimulus of the national and racial successes it
presently blazed out with a brilliance second only to that of the Greeks
during their best period. From a new angle and with a fresh vigour it
took up that systematic development of positive knowledge which the
Greeks had begun and relinquished. It revived the human pursuit of
science. If the Greek was the father, then the Arab was the
foster-father of the scientific method of dealing with reality, that is
to say, by absolute frankness, the utmost simplicity of statement and
explanation, exact record, and exhaustive criticism. Through the Arabs
it was and not by the Latin route that the modern world received that
gift of light and power.
Their conquests brought the Arabs into contact with the Greek literary
tradition, not at first directly, but through the Syrian translations of
the Greek writers. The Nestorian Christians, the Christians to the east
of orthodoxy, seem to have been much more intelligent and active-minded
than the court theologians of Byzantium, and at a much higher level of
general education than the Latin-speaking Christians of the west. They
had been tolerated during the latter days of the Sassanids, and they
were tolerated by Islam until the ascendancy of the Turks in the
eleventh century. They had preserved much of the Hellenic medical
science, and had even added to it. In the Omayyad times most of the
physicians in the Caliph’s dominions were Nestorians, and no doubt many
learned Nestorians professed Islam without any serious compunction or
any great change in their work and thoughts. They had preserved much of
Aristotle both in Greek and in Syrian translations. They had a
considerable mathematical literature. Their equipment makes the
contemporary resources of Saint Benedict or Cassiodorus seem very
pitiful. To these Nestorian teachers came the fresh Arab mind out of the
desert, keen and curious, and learnt much and improved upon its
teaching.
But the Nestorians were not the only teachers available for the Arabs.
Throughout all the rich cities of the east the kindred Jews were
scattered with their own distinctive literature and tradition, and the
Arab and the Jewish mind reacted upon one another to a common benefit.
The Arab was informed and the Jew sharpened to a keener edge. The Jews
have never been pedants in the matter of their language; we have already
noted that a thousand years before Islam they spoke Greek in Hellenized
Alexandria, and now all over this new Moslem world they were speaking
and writing Arabic. Some of the greatest of Jewish literature was
written in Arabic, the religious writings of Maimonides, for example.
Indeed, it is difficult to say in the case of this Arabic culture where
the Jew ends and the Arab begins, so important and essential were its
Jewish factors.
Moreover, there was a third source of inspiration, more particularly in
mathematical science, to which at present it is difficult to do
justice--India. There can be little doubt that the Arab mind during its
best period was in effective contact with Sanskrit literature and with
Indian ideas, and that it derived much from this source.
The distinctive activities of the Arab mind were already manifest under
the Omayyads, though it was during the Abbasid time that it made its
best display. History is the beginning and core of all sound philosophy
and all great literature, and the first Arab writers of distinction were
historians, biographers, and quasi-historical poets. Romantic fiction
and the short story followed as a reading public developed, willing to
be amused. And as reading ceased to be a special accomplishment, and
became necessary to every man of affairs and to every youth of breeding,
came the systematic growth of an educational system and an educational
literature. By the ninth and tenth centuries there are not only
grammars, but great lexicons, and a mass of philological learning in
Islam.
And a century or so in advance of the west, there grew up in the Moslem
world at a number of centres, at Basra, at Kufa, at Bagdad and Cairo,
and at Cordoba, out of what were at first religious schools dependent
upon mosques, a series of great universities. The light of these
universities shone far beyond the Moslem world, and drew students to
them from east and west. At Cordoba in particular there were great
numbers of Christian students, and the influence of Arab philosophy
coming by way of Spain upon the universities of Paris, Oxford, and North
Italy and upon Western European thought generally, was very considerable
indeed. The name of Averroes (Ibn-rushd) of Cordoba (1126-1198), stands
out as that of the culminating influence of Arab philosophy upon
European thought. He developed the teachings of Aristotle upon lines
that made a sharp division between religious and scientific truth, and
so prepared the way for the liberation of scientific research from the
theological dogmatism that restrained it both under Christianity and
under Islam. Another great name is that of Avicenna (Ibnsinā), the
Prince of Physicians (980-1037), who was born at the other end of the
Arabic world at Bokhara, and who travelled in Khorasan.... The
book-copying industry flourished at Alexandria, Damascus, Cairo, and
Bagdad, and about the year 970 there were twenty-seven free schools open
in Cordoba for the education of the poor.
“In mathematics,” say Thatcher and Schwill,[333] “the Arabs built on the
foundations of the Greek mathematicians. The origin of the so-called
Arabic numerals is obscure. Under Theodoric the Great, Boethius made use
of certain signs which were in part very like the nine digits which we
now use. One of the pupils of Gerbert also used signs which were still
more like ours, but the zero was unknown till the twelfth century, when
it was invented by an Arab mathematician named Muhammad-Ibn-Musa, who
also was the first to use the decimal notation, and who gave the digits
the value of position. In geometry the Arabs did not add much to Euclid,
but algebra is practically their creation; also they developed spherical
trigonometry, inventing the sine, tangent, and cotangent. In physics
they invented the pendulum, and produced work on optics. They made
progress in the science of astronomy. They built several observatories,
and constructed many astronomical instruments which are still in use.
They calculated the angle of the ecliptic and the precession of the
equinoxes. Their knowledge of astronomy was undoubtedly considerable.
“In medicine they made great advances over the work of the Greeks. They
studied physiology and hygiene, and their _materia medica_ was
practically the same as ours to-day. Many of their methods of treatment
are still in use among us. Their surgeons understood the use of
anæsthetics, and performed some of the most difficult operations known.
At the time when in Europe the practice of medicine was forbidden by the
Church, which expected cures to be effected by religious rites performed
by the clergy, the Arabs had a real science of medicine. In chemistry
they made a good beginning. They discovered many new substances, such as
alcohol,[334] potash, nitrate of silver, corrosive sublimate, and nitric
and sulphuric acid.... In manufactures they outdid the world in variety
and beauty of design and perfection of workmanship. They worked in all
the metals--gold, silver, copper, bronze, iron, and steel. In textile
fabrics they have never been surpassed. They made glass and pottery of
the finest quality. They knew the secrets of dyeing, and they
manufactured paper. They had many processes of dressing leather; and
their work was famous throughout Europe. They made tinctures, essences,
and syrups. They made sugar from the cane, and grew many fine kinds of
wine. They practised farming in a scientific way, and had good systems
of irrigation. They knew the value of fertilizers, and adapted their
crops to the quality of the ground. They excelled in horticulture,
knowing how to graft and how to produce new varieties of fruit and
flowers. They introduced into the west many trees and plants from the
east, and wrote scientific treatises on farming.”
One item in this account must be underlined here because of its
importance in the intellectual life of mankind, the manufacture of
paper. This the Arabs seem to have learnt from the Chinese by way of
Central Asia. The Europeans acquired it from the Arabs. Until that time
books had to be written upon parchment or papyrus, and after the Arab
conquest of Egypt Europe was cut off from the papyrus supply. Until
paper became abundant, the art of printing was of little use, and
newspapers and popular education by means of books was impossible. This
was probably a much more important factor in the relative backwardness
of Europe during the dark ages than historians seem disposed to
admit....
And all this mental life went on in the Moslem world in spite of a very
considerable amount of political disorder. From first to last the Arabs
never grappled with the problem, the still unsolved problem, of the
stable progressive state; everywhere their form of government was
absolutist and subject to the convulsions, changes, intrigues, and
murders that have always characterized the extremer forms of monarchy.
But for some centuries, beneath the crimes and rivalries of courts and
camps, the spirit of Islam did preserve a certain general decency and
restraint in life; the Byzantine Empire was impotent to shatter this
civilization, and the Turkish danger in the north-east gathered strength
only very slowly. Until the Turk fell upon it, the intellectual life of
Islam continued. Perhaps it secretly flattered itself that it would
always be able to go on in spite of the thread of violence and unreason
in its political direction. Hitherto in all countries that has been the
characteristic attitude of science and literature. The intellectual man
has been loath to come to grips with the forcible man. He has generally
been something of a courtier and time server. Possibly he has never yet
been quite sure of himself. Hitherto men of reason and knowledge have
never had the assurance and courage of the religious fanatic. But there
can be little doubt that they have accumulated settled convictions and
gathered confidence during the last few centuries; they have slowly
found a means to power through the development of popular education and
popular literature, and to-day they are far more disposed to say things
plainly and to claim a dominating voice in the organization of human
affairs than they have ever been before in the world’s history.
XXXIII
CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES
§ 1. _The Western World at its Lowest Ebb._ § 2. _The Feudal
System._ § 3. _The Frankish Kingdom of the Merovingians._ § 4. _The
Christianization of the Western Barbarians._ § 5. _Charlemagne
becomes Emperor of the West._ § 6. _The Personality of
Charlemagne._ § 7. _The French and the Germans become Distinct._ §
8. _The Normans, the Saracens, the Hungarians, and the Seljuk
Turks._ § 9. _How Constantinople Appealed to Rome._ § 10. _The
Crusades._ § 11. _The Crusades a Test of Christianity._ § 12. _The
Emperor Frederick II._ § 13. _Defects and Limitations of the
Papacy._ § 14. _A List of Leading Popes._
§ 1
Let us turn again now from this intellectual renascence in the cradle of
the ancient civilizations to the affairs of the Western world. We have
described the complete economic, social, and political break up of the
Roman imperial system in the west, the confusion and darkness that
followed in the sixth and seventh centuries, and the struggles of such
men as Cassiodorus to keep alight the flame of human learning amidst
these windy confusions. For a time it would be idle to write of states
and rulers. Smaller or greater adventurers seized a castle or a
countryside and ruled an uncertain area. The British Islands, for
instance, were split up amidst a multitude of rulers; numerous Keltic
chiefs in Ireland and Scotland and Wales and Cornwall fought and
prevailed over and succumbed to each other; the English invaders were
also divided into a number of fluctuating “kingdoms,” Kent, Wessex,
Essex, Sussex, Mercia, Northumbria, and East Anglia, which were
constantly at war with one another. So it was over most of the Western
world. Here a bishop would be the monarch, as Gregory the Great was in
Rome; here a town or a group of towns would be under the rule of the
duke or prince of this or that. Amidst the vast ruins of the city of
Rome half-independent families of quasi-noble adventurers and their
retainers maintained themselves. The Pope kept a sort of general
predominance there, but he was sometimes more than balanced by a “Duke
of Rome.” The great arena of the Colosseum had been made into a
privately-owned castle, and so too had the vast circular tomb of the
Emperor Hadrian; and the adventurers who had possession of these
strongholds and their partisans waylaid each other and fought and
bickered in the ruinous streets of the once imperial city. The tomb of
Hadrian was known after the days of Gregory the Great as the Castle of
St. Angelo, the Castle of the Holy Angel, because when he was crossing
the bridge over the Tiber on his way to St. Peter’s to pray against the
great pestilence which was devastating the city, he had had a vision of
a great angel standing over the dark mass of the mausoleum and sheathing
a sword, and he had known then that his prayers would be answered. This
Castle of St. Angelo played a very important part in Roman affairs
during this age of disorder.
Spain was in much the same state of political fragmentation as Italy or
France or Britain; and in Spain the old feud of Carthaginian and Roman
was still continued in the bitter hostility of their descendants and
heirs, the Jew and the Christian. So that when the power of the Caliph
had swept along the North African coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, it
found in the Spanish Jews ready helpers in its invasion of Europe. A
Moslem army of Arabs and of Berbers, the nomadic Hamitic people of the
African desert and mountain hinterland who had been converted to Islam,
crossed and defeated the West Goths in a great battle in 711. In a few
years the whole country was in their possession.
In 720 Islam had reached the Pyrenees, and had pushed round their
eastern end into France; and for a time it seemed that the faith was
likely to subjugate Gaul as easily as it had subjugated the Spanish
peninsula. But presently it struck against something hard, a new kingdom
of the Franks, which had been consolidating itself for some two
centuries in the Rhineland and North France.
Of this Frankish kingdom, the precursor of France and Germany, which
formed the western bulwark of Europe against the faith of Muhammad, as
the Byzantine Empire behind the Taurus Mountains formed the eastern, we
shall now have much to tell; but first we must give some account of the
new system of social groupings out of which it arose.
§ 2
It is necessary that the reader should have a definite idea of the
social condition of western Europe in the eighth century. It was not a
barbarism. Eastern Europe was still barbaric and savage; things had
progressed but little beyond the state of affairs described by Gibbon in
his account of the mission of Priscus to Attila (see vol. i, p. 557).
But western Europe was a shattered civilization, without law, without
administration, with roads destroyed and education disorganized, but
still with great numbers of people with civilized ideas and habits and
traditions. It was a time of confusion, of brigandage, of crimes
unpunished and universal insecurity. It is very interesting to trace how
out of the universal mêlée, the beginnings of a new order appeared. In a
modern breakdown there would probably be the formation of local
vigilance societies, which would combine and restore a police
administration and a roughly democratic rule. But in the broken-down
western empire of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, men’s ideas
turned rather to leaders than to committees, and the centres about which
affairs crystallized were here barbaric chiefs, here a vigorous bishop
or some surviving claimant to a Roman official position, here a
long-recognized landowner or man of ancient family, and here again some
vigorous usurper of power. No solitary man was safe. So men were forced
to link themselves with others, preferably people stronger than
themselves. The lonely man chose the most powerful and active person in
his district and became _his_ man. The freeman or the weak lordling of a
petty territory linked himself to some more powerful lord. The
protection of that lord (or the danger of his hostility) became more
considerable with every such accession. So very rapidly there went on a
process of political crystallization in the confused and lawless sea
into which the Western Empire had liquefied. These natural associations
and alliances of protector and subordinates grew very rapidly into a
system, _the feudal system_, traces of which are still to be found in
the social structure of every European community west of Russia.
This process speedily took on technical forms and laws of its own. In
such a country as Gaul it was already well in progress in the days of
insecurity _before_ the barbarian tribes broke into the empire as
conquerors. The Franks when they came into Gaul brought with them an
institution, which we have already noted in the case of the Macedonians,
and which was probably of very wide distribution among the Nordic
people, the gathering about the chief or war king of a body of young men
of good family, the companions or _comitatus_, his counts or captains.
It was natural in the case of invading peoples that the relations of a
weak lord to a strong lord should take on the relations of a count to
his king, and that a conquering chief should divide seized and
confiscated estates among his companions. From the side of the decaying
empire there came to feudalism the idea of the grouping for mutual
protection of men and estates; from the Teutonic side came the notions
of knightly association, devotion, and personal service. The former was
the economic side of the institution, the latter the chivalrous.
The analogy of the aggregation of feudal groupings with crystallization
is a very close one. As the historian watches the whirling and eddying
confusion of the fourth and fifth century in Western Europe, he begins
to perceive the appearance of these pyramidal growths of heads and
subordinates and sub-subordinates, which jostle against one another,
branch, dissolve again, or coalesce. “We use the term ‘feudal system’
for convenience’ sake, but with a degree of impropriety if it conveys
the meaning ‘systematic.’ Feudalism in its most flourishing age was
anything but systematic. It was confusion roughly organized. Great
diversity prevailed everywhere, and we should not be surprised to find
some different fact or custom in every lordship. Anglo-Norman feudalism
attained in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a logical completeness
and a uniformity of practice which, in the feudal age proper, can hardly
be found elsewhere through so large a territory....
[Illustration: Map of EUROPE about 500 A.D.]
“The foundation of the feudal relationship proper was the _fief_, which
was usually land, but might be any desirable thing, as an office, a
revenue in money or kind, the right to collect a toll, or operate a
mill. In return for the fief, the man became the _vassal_ of his lord;
he knelt before him, and, with his hands between his lord’s hands,
promised him fealty and service.... The faithful performance of all the
duties he had assumed in homage constituted the vassal’s right and title
to his fief. So long as they were fulfilled, he, and his heir after him,
held the fief as his property, practically and in relation to all
under-tenants as if he were the owner. In the ceremony of homage and
investiture, which is the creative contract of feudalism, the
obligations assumed by the two parties were, as a rule, not specified in
exact terms. They were determined by local custom.... In many points of
detail the vassal’s services differed widely in different parts of the
feudal world. We may say, however, that they fall into two classes,
general and specific. The general included all that might come under the
idea of loyalty, seeking the lord’s interests, keeping his secrets,
betraying the plans of his enemies, protecting his family, etc. The
specific services are capable of more definite statement, and they
usually received exact definition in custom and sometimes in written
documents. The most characteristic of these was the military service,
which included appearance in the field on summons with a certain force,
often armed in a specified way, and remaining a specified length of
time. It often included also the duty of guarding the lord’s castle, and
of holding one’s own castle subject to the plans of the lord for the
defence of his fief....
[Illustration: Area more or less under FRANKISH dominion in the time of
CHARLES MARTEL]
“Theoretically regarded, feudalism covered Europe with a network of
these fiefs, rising in graded ranks one above the other from the
smallest, the knight’s fee, at the bottom, to the king at the top, who
was the supreme landowner, or who held the kingdom from God....”[335]
But this was the theory that was superimposed upon the established
facts. The reality of feudalism was its voluntary co-operation.
“The feudal state was one in which, it has been said, private law had
usurped the place of public law.” But rather is it truer that public law
had failed and vanished and private law had come in to fill the vacuum.
Public duty had become private obligation.
§ 3
We have already mentioned various kingdoms of the barbarian tribes who
set up a more or less flimsy dominion over this or that area amidst the
débris of the empire, the kingdoms of the Suevi and West Goths in Spain,
the East-Gothic kingdom in Italy, and the Italian Lombard kingdom which
succeeded the Goths after Justinian had expelled the latter and after
the great pestilence had devastated Italy. The Frankish kingdom was
another such barbarian power which arose first in what is now Belgium,
and which spread southward to the Loire, but it developed far more
strength and solidarity than any of the others. It was the first real
state to emerge from the universal wreckage. It became at last a wide
and vigorous political reality, and from it are derived two great powers
of modern Europe, France and the German Empire. Its founder was Clovis
(481-511), who began as a small king in Belgium and ended with his
southern frontiers nearly at the Pyrenees. He divided his kingdom among
his four sons, but the Franks retained a tradition of unity in spite of
this division, and for a time fraternal wars for a single control united
rather than divided them. A more serious split arose, however, through
the Latinization of the Western Franks, who occupied Romanized Gaul and
who learnt to speak the corrupt Latin of the subject population, while
the Franks of the Rhineland retained their Low German speech. At a low
level of civilization, differences in language cause very powerful
political strains. For a hundred and fifty years the Frankish world was
split in two, Neustria, the nucleus of France, speaking a Latinish
speech, which became at last the French language we know, and
Austrasia, the Rhineland, which remained German.[336]
We will not tell here of the decay of the dynasty, the Merovingian
dynasty, founded by Clovis; nor how in Austrasia a certain court
official, the Mayor of the Palace, gradually became the king _de facto_
and used the real king as a puppet. The position of Mayor of the Palace
also became hereditary in the seventh century, and in 687 a certain
Pepin of Heristhal, the Austrasian Mayor of the Palace, had conquered
Neustria and reunited all the Franks. He was followed in 714 by his son,
Charles Martel, who also bore no higher title than mayor of the palace.
(His poor little Merovingian kings do not matter in the slightest degree
to us here.) It was this Charles Martel who stopped the Moslems. They
had pushed as far as Tours when he met them, and in a great battle
between that place and Poitiers (732) utterly defeated them and broke
their spirit. Thereafter the Pyrenees remained their utmost boundary;
they came no further into Western Europe.
Charles Martel divided his power between two sons, but one resigned and
went into a monastery, leaving his brother Pepin sole ruler. This Pepin
it was who finally extinguished the descendants of Clovis. He sent to
the Pope to ask who was the true king of the Franks, the man who held
the power or the man who wore the crown; and the Pope, who was in need
of a supporter, decided in favour of the Mayor of the Palace. So Pepin
was chosen king at a gathering of the Frankish nobles in the Merovingian
capital Soissons, and anointed and crowned. That was in 751. The
Franco-Germany he united was consolidated by his son Charlemagne. It
held together until the death of his grandson Louis (840), and then
France and Germany broke away again--to the great injury of mankind. It
was not a difference of race or temperament, it was a difference of
language and tradition that split these Frankish peoples asunder.
That old separation of Neustria and Austrasia still works out in bitter
consequences. In 1916 the ancient conflict of Neustria and Austrasia had
broken out into war once more. In the August of that year the present
writer visited Soissons, and crossed the temporary wooden bridge that
had been built by the English after the Battle of the Aisne from the
main part of the town to the suburb of Saint Médard. Canvas screens
protected passengers upon the bridge from the observation of the German
sharpshooters who were sniping from their trenches down the curve of the
river. He went with his guides across a field and along by the wall of
an orchard in which a German shell exploded as he passed. So he reached
the battered buildings that stand upon the site of the ancient abbey of
Saint Médard, in which the last Merovingian was deposed and Pepin the
Short was crowned in his stead. Beneath these ancient buildings there
were great crypts, very useful as dug-outs--for the German advanced
lines were not more than a couple of hundred yards away. The sturdy
French soldier lads were cooking and resting in these shelters, and
lying down to sleep among the stone coffins that had held the bones of
their Merovingian kings.
§ 4
The populations over which Charles Martel and King Pepin ruled were at
very different levels of civilization in different districts. To the
west and south the bulk of the people consisted of Latinized and
Christian Kelts; in the central regions these rulers had to deal with
such more or less Christianized Germans as the Franks and Burgundians
and Alemanni; to the northeast were still pagan Frisians and Saxons; to
the east were the Bavarians, recently Christianized through the
activities of St. Boniface; and to the east of them again pagan Slavs
and Avars. The “Paganism” of the Germans and Slavs was very similar to
the primitive religion of the Greeks; it was a manly religion in which
temple, priest, and sacrifices played a small part, and its gods were
like men, a kind of “school prefects” of more powerful beings who
interfered impulsively and irregularly in human affairs. The Germans
had a Jupiter in Odin, a Mars in Thor, a Venus in Freya, and so on.
Throughout the seventh and eighth centuries a steady process of
conversion to Christianity went on amidst these German and Slavonic
tribes.
[Illustration: ENGLAND in 640 A.D.]
It will be interesting to English-speaking readers to note that the most
zealous and successful missionaries among the Saxons and Frisians came
from England. Christianity was twice planted in the British Isles. It
was already there while Britain was a part of the Roman Empire; a
martyr, St. Alban, gave his name to the town of St. Albans, and nearly
every visitor to Canterbury has also visited little Old St. Martin’s
church, which was used during the Roman times. From Britain, as we have
already said, Christianity spread beyond the imperial boundaries into
Ireland--the chief missionary was St. Patrick--and there was a vigorous
monastic movement with which are connected the names of St. Columba and
the religious settlements of Iona. Then in the fifth and sixth centuries
came the fierce and pagan English, and they cut off the early Church of
Ireland from the main body of Christianity. In the seventh century
Christian missionaries were converting the English, both in the north
from Ireland and in the south from Rome. The Rome mission was sent by
Pope Gregory the Great just at the close of the sixth century. The story
goes that he saw English boys for sale in the Roman slave market, though
it is a little difficult to understand how they got there. They were
very fair and good-looking. In answer to his inquiries, he was told that
they were Angles. “Not Angles, but Angels,” said he, “had they but the
gospel.”
The mission worked through the seventh century. Before that century was
over, most of the English were Christians; though Mercia, the central
English kingdom, held out stoutly against the priests and for the
ancient faith and ways. And there was a swift progress in learning upon
the part of these new converts. The monasteries of the kingdom of
Northumbria in the north of England became a centre of light and
learning. Theodore of Tarsus was one of the earliest archbishops of
Canterbury (669-690). “While Greek was utterly unknown in the west of
Europe, it was mastered by some of the pupils of Theodore. The
monasteries contained many monks who were excellent scholars. Most
famous of all was Bede, known as the Venerable Bede (673-735), a monk of
Jarrow (on Tyne). He had for his pupils the six hundred monks of that
monastery, besides the many strangers who came to hear him. He gradually
mastered all the learning of his day, and left at his death forty-five
volumes of his writings, the most important of which are ‘The
Ecclesiastical History of the English’ and his translation of the Gospel
of John into English. His writings were widely known and used
throughout Europe. He reckoned all dates from the birth of Christ, and
through his works the use of Christian chronology became common in
Europe. Owing to the large number of monasteries and monks in
Northumbria, that part of England was for a time far in advance of the
south in civilization.”[337]
In the seventh and eighth centuries we find the English missionaries
active upon the eastern frontiers of the Frankish kingdom. Chief among
these was St. Boniface (680-755), who was born at Crediton, in
Devonshire, who converted the Frisians, Thuringians, and Hessians, and
who was martyred in Holland.
Both in England and on the Continent the ascendant rulers seized upon
Christianity as a unifying force to cement their conquests. Christianity
became a banner for aggressive chiefs--as it did in Uganda in Africa in
the bloody days before that country was annexed to the British Empire.
After Pepin, who died in 768, came two sons, Charles and another, who
divided his kingdom; but the brother of Charles died in 771, and Charles
then became sole king (771-814) of the growing realm of the Franks. This
Charles is known in history as Charles the Great, or Charlemagne. As in
the case of Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, posterity has
enormously exaggerated his memory. He made his wars of aggression
definitely religious wars. All the world of north-western Europe, which
is now Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, and Norway and Sweden,
was in the ninth century an arena of bitter conflict between the old
faith and the new. Whole nations were converted to Christianity by the
sword just as Islam in Arabia, Central Asia, and Africa had converted
whole nations a century or so before.
With fire and sword Charlemagne preached the Gospel of the Cross to the
Saxons, Bohemians, and as far as the Danube into what is now Hungary; he
carried the same teaching down the Adriatic Coast through what is now
Dalmatia, and drove the Moslems back from the Pyrenees as far as
Barcelona.
Moreover, he it was who sheltered Egbert, an exile from Wessex in
England, and assisted him presently to establish himself as King in
Wessex (802). Egbert subdued the Britons in Cornwall, as Charlemagne
conquered the Britons of Brittany, and, by a series of wars, which he
continued after the death of his Frankish patron, made himself at last
the first King of all England (828).
[Illustration: ENGLAND at the Treaty of Wedmore 878]
But the attacks of Charlemagne upon the last strongholds of paganism
provoked a vigorous reaction on the part of the unconverted. The
Christianized English had retained very little of the seamanship that
had brought them from the mainland, and the Franks had not yet become
seamen. As the Christian propaganda of Charlemagne swept towards the
shores of the North and Baltic seas, the pagans were driven to the sea.
They retaliated for the Christian persecutions with plundering raids and
expeditions against the northern coasts of France and against Christian
England. These pagan Saxons and English of the mainland and their
kindred from Denmark and Norway are the Danes and Northmen of our
national histories. They were also called Vikings,[338] which means
“inlet-men,” because they came from the deep inlets of the Scandinavian
coast. They came in long black galleys, making little use of sails. Most
of our information about these wars and invasions of the pagan Vikings
is derived from Christian sources, and so we have abundant information
of the massacres and atrocities of their raids and very little about the
cruelties inflicted upon their pagan brethren, the Saxons, at the hands
of Charlemagne. Their animus against the cross and against monks and
nuns was extreme. They delighted in the burning of monasteries and
nunneries and the slaughter of their inmates.
Throughout the period between the fifth and the ninth centuries these
Vikings or Northmen were learning seamanship, becoming bolder, and
ranging further. They braved the northern seas until the icy shores of
Greenland were a familiar haunt, and by the ninth century they had
settlements (of which Europe in general knew nothing) in America. In the
tenth and eleventh centuries many of their sagas began to be written
down in Iceland. They saw the world in terms of valiant adventure. They
assailed the walrus, the bear, and the whale. In their imaginations a
great and rich city to the south, a sort of confusion of Rome and
Byzantium, loomed large. They called it “Miklagård” (Michael’s court) or
Micklegarth. The magnetism of Micklegarth was to draw the descendants of
these Northmen down into the Mediterranean by two routes, by the west
and also across Russia from the Baltic, as we shall tell later. By the
Russian route went also the kindred Swedes.
So long as Charlemagne and Egbert lived, the Vikings were no more than
raiders; but as the ninth century wore on, these raids developed into
organized invasions. In several districts of England the hold of
Christianity was by no means firm as yet. In Mercia in particular the
pagan Northmen found sympathy and help. By 886 the Danes had conquered a
fair part of England and the English king, Alfred the Great, had
recognized their rule over their conquests, the Dane-law, in the pact he
made with Guthrum their leader. A little later, in 912, another
expedition under Rolf the Ganger established itself upon the coast of
France in the region that was known henceforth as Normandy (=
Northman-dy). But of how there was presently a fresh conquest of England
by the Danes and how finally the Duke of Normandy became King of
England, we cannot tell at any length. There were very small racial and
social differences between Angle, Saxon, Jute, Dane, or Norman; and
though these changes loom large in the imaginations of the English, they
are seen to be very slight rufflings indeed of the stream of history
when we measure them by the standards of a greater world. The issue
between Christianity and paganism vanished presently from the struggle.
By the Treaty of Wedmore the Danes agreed to be baptized if they were
assured of their conquests; and the descendants of Rolf in Normandy were
not merely Christianized, but they learnt to speak French from the more
civilized people about them, forgetting their own Norse tongue. Of much
greater significance in the history of mankind are the relations of
Charlemagne with his neighbours to the south and east, and to the
imperial tradition.
§ 5
[Illustration: EUROPE at the death of CHARLEMAGNE--814.]
Through Charlemagne the tradition of the Roman Cæsar was revived in
Europe.[339] The Roman Empire was dead and decaying; the Byzantine
Empire was far gone in decay; but the education and mentality of Europe
had sunken to a level at which new creative political ideas were
probably impossible. In all Europe there survived not a tithe of the
speculative vigour that we find in the Athenian literature of the fifth
century B.C. There was no power to postulate a new occasion or to
conceive and organize a novel political method. Official Christianity
had long overlaid and accustomed itself to ignore those strange
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth from which it had arisen. The Roman
Church, clinging tenaciously to its possession of the title of _pontifex
maximus_, had long since abandoned its appointed task of achieving the
Kingdom of Heaven. It was preoccupied with the revival of Roman
ascendancy on earth, which it conceived of as its inheritance. It had
become a political body, using the faith and needs of simple men to
forward its schemes. Europe drifted towards a dreary imitation and
revival of the misconceived failures of the past. For eleven centuries
from Charlemagne onwards, “Emperors” and “Cæsars” of this line and that
come and go in the history of Europe like fancies in a disordered mind.
We shall have to tell of a great process of mental growth in Europe, of
enlarged horizons and accumulating power, but it was a process that went
on independently of, and in spite of, the political forms of the time,
until at last it shattered those forms altogether. Europe during those
eleven centuries of the imitation Cæsars which began with Charlemagne,
and which closed only in the monstrous bloodshed of 1914-1918, has been
like a busy factory owned by a somnambulist, who is sometimes quite
unimportant and sometimes disastrously in the way. Or rather than a
somnambulist, let us say by a corpse that magically simulates a kind of
life. The Roman Empire staggers, sprawls, is thrust off the stage, and
reappears, and--if we may carry the image one step further--it is the
Church of Rome which plays the part of the magician and keeps this
corpse alive.
And throughout the whole period there is always a struggle going on for
the control of the corpse between the spiritual and various temporal
powers. We have already noted the spirit of St. Augustine’s _City of
God_. It was a book which we know Charlemagne read, or had read to
him--for his literary accomplishments are rather questionable. He
conceived of this Christian Empire as being ruled and maintained in its
orthodoxy by some such great Cæsar as himself. He was to rule even the
Pope. But at Rome the view taken of the revived empire differed a little
from that. There the view taken was that the Christian Cæsar must be
anointed and guided by the Pope--who would even have the power to
excommunicate and depose him. Even in the time of Charlemagne this
divergence of view was apparent. In the following centuries it became
acute.
The idea of the empire dawned only very gradually upon the mind of
Charlemagne. At first he was simply the ruler of his father’s kingdom of
the Franks, and his powers were fully occupied in struggles with the
Saxons and Bavarians, and with the Slavs to the east of them, with the
Moslem in Spain, and with various insurrections in his own dominions.
And as the result of a quarrel with the King of Lombardy, his
father-in-law, he conquered Lombardy and North Italy. We have noted the
establishment of the Lombards in North Italy about 570 after the great
pestilence, and after the overthrow of the East Gothic kings by
Justinian. These Lombards had always been a danger and a fear to the
Popes, and there had been an alliance between Pope and Frankish King
against them in the time of Pepin. Now Charlemagne completely subjugated
Lombardy (774), sent his father-in-law to a monastery, and carried his
conquests beyond the present north-eastern boundaries of Italy into
Dalmatia in 776. In 781 he caused one of his sons, Pepin, who did not
outlive him, to be crowned King of Italy in Rome.
There was a new Pope, Leo III, in 795, who seems from the first to have
resolved to make Charlemagne emperor. Hitherto the court at Byzantium
had possessed a certain indefinite authority over the Pope. Strong
emperors like Justinian had bullied the Popes and obliged them to come
to Constantinople; weak emperors had annoyed them ineffectively. The
idea of a breach, both secular and religious, with Constantinople had
long been entertained at the Lateran,[340] and in the Frankish power
there seemed to be just the support that was necessary if Constantinople
was to be defied. So at his accession Leo III sent the keys of the tomb
of St. Peter and a banner to Charlemagne as the symbols of his
sovereignty in Rome as King of Italy. Very soon the Pope had to appeal
to the protection he had chosen. He was unpopular in Rome; he was
attacked and ill-treated in the streets during a procession, and obliged
to fly to Germany (799). Eginhard says his eyes were gouged out and his
tongue cut off; he seems, however, to have had both eyes and tongue
again a year later. Charlemagne brought him back and reinstated him
(800).
Then occurred a very important scene. On Christmas Day, in the year 800,
as Charles was rising from prayer in the Church of St. Peter, the Pope,
who had everything in readiness, clapped a crown upon his head and
hailed him Cæsar and Augustus. There was great popular applause. But
Eginhard, the friend and biographer of Charlemagne, says that the new
emperor was by no means pleased by this coup of Pope Leo’s. If he had
known this was to happen, he said, “he would not have entered the
church, great festival though it was.” No doubt he had been thinking and
talking of making himself emperor, but he had evidently not intended
that the Pope should make him emperor. He had had some idea of marrying
the Empress Irene, who at that time reigned in Constantinople, and so
becoming monarch of both Eastern and Western Empires. He was now obliged
to accept the title in the manner that Leo III had adopted as a gift
from the Pope, and in a way that estranged Constantinople and secured
the separation of Rome from the Byzantine Church.
At first Byzantium was unwilling to recognize the imperial title of
Charlemagne. But in 810 a great disaster fell upon the Byzantine Empire.
The pagan Bulgarians, under their Prince Krum (802-814), defeated and
destroyed the armies of the Emperor Nicephorus, whose skull became a
drinking-cup for Krum. The greater part of the Balkan peninsula was
conquered by these people. (The Bulgarian and the English nations thus
became established as political unities almost simultaneously.) After
this misfortune Byzantium was in no position to dispute this revival of
the empire in the West, and in 812 Charlemagne was formally recognized
by Byzantine envoys as Emperor and Augustus.
So the Empire of Rome, which had died at the hands of Odoacer in 476,
rose again in 800 as the “Holy Roman Empire.” While its physical
strength lay north of the Alps, the centre of its idea was Rome. It was
therefore from the beginning a divided thing of uncertain power, a claim
and an argument rather than a necessary reality. The German sword was
always clattering over the Alps into Italy, and missions and legates
toiling over in the reverse direction. But the Germans could never hold
Italy permanently, because they could not stand the malaria that the
ruined, neglected, undrained country fostered. And in Rome, as well as
in several other of the cities of Italy, there smouldered a more ancient
tradition, the tradition of the aristocratic republic, hostile to both
Emperor and Pope.
§ 6
In spite of the fact that we have a life of him written by his
contemporary, Eginhard,[341] the character and personality of
Charlemagne are difficult to visualize. Eginhard lacks vividness; he
tells many particulars, but not the particulars that make a man live
again in the record. Charlemagne, he says, was a tall man, with a rather
feeble voice; and he had bright eyes and a long nose. “The top of his
head was round,” whatever that may mean, and his hair was “white.” He
had a thick, rather short neck, and “his belly too prominent.” He wore a
tunic with a silver border, and gartered hose. He had a blue cloak, and
was always girt with his sword, hilt and belt being of gold and silver.
He was evidently a man of great activity, one imagines him moving
quickly, and his numerous love affairs did not interfere at all with his
incessant military and political labours. He had numerous wives and
mistresses. He took much exercise, was fond of pomp and religious
ceremonies, and gave generously. He was a man of very miscellaneous
activity and great intellectual enterprise, and with a self-confidence
that is rather suggestive of William II, the ex-German Emperor, the
last, perhaps for ever, of this series of imitation Cæsars in Europe
which Charlemagne began.
The mental life that Eginhard records of him is interesting, because it
not only gives glimpses of a curious character, but serves as a sample
of the intellectuality of the time. He could read probably; at meals he
“listened to music or reading,” but we are told that he had not acquired
the art of writing; “he used to keep his writing-book and tablets under
his pillow, that when he had leisure he might practise his hand in
forming letters, but he made little progress in an art begun too late in
life.” He had, however, a real respect for learning and a real desire
for knowledge, and he did his utmost to attract men of learning to his
court. Among others who came was Alcuin, a learned Englishman. All
those learned men were, of course, clergymen, there being no other
learned men, and naturally they gave a strongly clerical tinge to the
information they imparted to their master. At his court, which was
usually at Aix-la-Chapelle or Mayence, he maintained in the winter
months a curious institution called his “school,” in which he and his
erudite associates affected to lay aside all thoughts of worldly
position, assumed names taken from the classical writers or from Holy
Writ, and discoursed upon theology and literature. Charlemagne himself
was “David.” He developed a considerable knowledge of theology, and it
is to him that we must ascribe the addition of the words _filioque_ to
the Nicene Creed (see chap, xxx, § 8), an addition that finally split
the Latin and Greek Churches asunder. But it is more than doubtful if he
had any such separation in mind. He wanted to add a word or so to the
creed, just as the Emperor William II wanted to write operas and paint
pictures,[342] and he took up what was originally a Spanish innovation.
Of his organization of his empire there is little to be said here. He
was far too restless and busy to consider the quality of his successor
or the condition of political stability, and the most noteworthy thing
in this relationship is that he particularly schooled his son and
successor, Louis the Pious (814-840), to take the crown from the altar
and _crown himself_. But Louis the Pious was too pious to adhere to
those instructions when the Pope made an objection.
The legislation of Charlemagne was greatly coloured by Bible reading; he
knew his Bible well, as the times went; and it is characteristic of him
that after he had been crowned emperor he required every male subject
above the age of twelve to renew his oath of allegiance, and to
undertake to be not simply a good subject, but a good Christian. To
refuse baptism or to retract after baptism was a crime punishable by
death. He did much to encourage architecture, and imported many Italian
architects, chiefly from Ravenna, to whom we owe that pleasant Byzantine
style that still at Worms and Cologne and elsewhere delights the
tourist in the Rhineland.[343] He founded a number of cathedrals and
monastic schools, did much to encourage the study of classical Latin,
and was a distinguished amateur of church music. The possibility of his
talking Latin and understanding Greek is open to discussion; probably he
talked French-Latin. Frankish, however, was his habitual tongue. He made
a collection of old German songs and tales, but these were destroyed by
his successor Louis the Pious on account of their paganism.
He corresponded with Haroun-al-Raschid, the Abbasid Caliph at Bagdad,
who was not perhaps the less friendly to him on account of his vigorous
handling of the Omayyad Arabs in Spain. Gibbon supposes that this
“public correspondence was founded on vanity,” and that “their remote
situation left no room for a competition of interest.” But with the
Byzantine Empire between them in the East, and the independent caliphate
of Spain in the West, and a common danger in the Turks of the great
plains, they had three very excellent reasons for cordiality.
Haroun-al-Raschid, says Gibbon, sent Charlemagne by his ambassadors a
splendid tent, a water clock, an elephant, and the keys of the Holy
Sepulchre. The last item suggests that Charlemagne was to some extent
regarded by the Saracen monarch as the protector of the Christians and
Christian properties in his dominions. Some historians declare
explicitly that there was a treaty to that effect.[344]
§ 7
The Empire of Charlemagne did not outlive his son and successor, Louis
the Pious. It fell apart into its main constituents. The Latinized
Keltic and Frankish population of Gaul begins now to be recognizable as
France, though this France was broken up into a number of dukedoms and
principalities, often with no more than a nominal unity; the
German-speaking peoples between the Rhine and the Slavs to the east
similarly begin to develop an even more fragmentary intimation of
Germany. When at length a real emperor reappears in Western Europe
(962), he is not a Frank, but a Saxon; the conquered in Germany have
become the masters.
It is impossible here to trace the events of the ninth and tenth
centuries in any detail, the alliances, the treacheries, the claims and
acquisitions. Everywhere there was lawlessness, war, and a struggle for
power. In 987 the nominal kingdom of France passed from the hands of the
Carlovingians, the last descendants of Charlemagne, into the hands of
Hugh Capet, who founded a new dynasty. Most of his alleged subordinates
were in fact independent, and willing to make war on the king at the
slightest provocation. The dominions of the Duke of Normandy, for
example, were more extensive and more powerful than the patrimony of
Hugh Capet. Almost the only unity of this France over which the king
exercised a nominal authority lay in the common resolution of its great
provinces to resist incorporation in any empire dominated either by a
German ruler or by the Pope. Apart from the simple organization dictated
by that common will, France was a mosaic of practically independent
nobles. It was an era of castle-building and fortification, and what was
called “private war” throughout all Europe.
The state of Rome in the tenth century is almost indescribable. The
decay of the Empire of Charlemagne left the Pope without a protector,
threatened by Byzantium and the Saracens (who had taken Sicily), and
face to face with the unruly nobles of Rome. Among the most powerful of
these were two women, Theodora and Marozia, mother and daughter,[345]
who in succession held the Castle of St. Angelo (§ 1), which
Theophylact, the patrician husband of Theodora, had seized with most of
the temporal power of the Pope; these two women were as bold,
unscrupulous, and dissolute as any male prince of the time could have
been, and they are abused by historians as though they were ten times
worse. Marozia seized and imprisoned Pope John X (928), who speedily
died under her care. She subsequently made her illegitimate son pope,
under the title of John XI. After him her grandson, John XII, filled the
chair of St. Peter. Gibbon’s account of the manners and morals of John
XII takes refuge at last beneath a veil of Latin footnotes. This Pope,
John XII, was finally degraded by the new German Emperor Otto, who came
over the Alps and down into Italy to be crowned in 962.[346]
This new line of Saxon emperors, which thus comes into prominence,
sprang from a certain Henry the Fowler, who was elected King of Germany
by an assembly of German nobles, princes, and prelates in 919. In 936 he
was succeeded as King by his son, Otto I, surnamed the Great, who was
also elected to be his successor at Aix-la-Chapelle, and who finally
descended upon Rome at the invitation of John XII, to be crowned emperor
in 962. His subsequent degradation of John was forced upon him by that
Pope’s treachery. With his assumption of the imperial dignity, Otto I
did not so much overcome Rome as restore the ancient tussle of Pope and
Emperor for ascendancy to something like decency and dignity again. Otto
I was followed by Otto II (973-983), and he again by a third Otto
(983-1002).[347]
The struggle between the Emperor and the Pope for ascendancy over the
Holy Roman Empire plays a large part in the history of the early Middle
Ages, and we shall have presently to sketch its chief phases. Though the
Church never sank quite to the level of John XII again, nevertheless the
story fluctuates through phases of great violence, confusion, and
intrigue. Yet the outer history of Christendom is not the whole history
of Christendom. That the Lateran was as cunning, foolish, and criminal
as most other contemporary courts has to be recorded; but, if we are to
keep due proportions in this history, it must not be unduly emphasized.
We must remember that through all those ages, leaving profound
consequences, but leaving no conspicuous records upon the historian’s
page, countless men and women were touched by that Spirit of Jesus which
still lived and lives still at the core of Christianity, that they led
lives that were on the whole gracious and helpful, and that they did
unselfish and devoted deeds. Through those ages such lives cleared the
air and made a better world possible. Just as in the Moslem world the
Spirit of Islam generation by generation produced its crop of courage,
integrity, and kindliness.
§ 8
While the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdoms of France and England were
thus appearing amidst the extreme political fragmentation of the
civilization of Western Europe, both that civilization and the Byzantine
Empire were being subjected to a threefold attack: from the Saracen
powers, from the Northmen, and, more slowly developed and most
formidable of all, from a new westward thrust of the Turkish peoples
through South Russia, and also by way of Armenia and the Empire of
Bagdad from Central Asia.
After the overthrow of the Omayyads by the Abbasid dynasty, the strength
of the Saracenic impulse against Europe diminished. Islam was no longer
united. Spain was under a separate Omayyad Caliph, North Africa, though
nominally subject to the Abbasids, was really independent, and presently
(969) Egypt became a separate power with a Shiite Caliph of its own, a
pretender claiming descent from Ali and Fatima (the Fatimite Caliphate).
These Egyptian Fatimites, the green flag Moslems, were fanatics in
comparison with the Abbasids, and did much to embitter the genial
relations of Islam and Christianity. They took Jerusalem, and interfered
with the Christian access to the Holy Sepulchre. On the other side of
the shrunken Abbasid domain there was also a Shiite kingdom in Persia.
The chief Saracen conquest in the ninth century was Sicily; but this was
not overrun in the grand old style in a year or so, but subjugated
tediously through a long century, and with many set-backs. The Spanish
Saracens disputed in Sicily with the Saracens from Africa. In Spain the
Saracens were giving ground before a renascent Christian effort.
Nevertheless, the Byzantine Empire and Western Christendom were still
so weak upon the Mediterranean Sea that the Saracen raiders and pirates
from North Africa were able to raid almost unchallenged in South Italy
and the Greek Islands.
[Illustration: FRANCE at the close of the 10th Century]
But now a new force was appearing in the Mediterranean. We have already
remarked that the Roman Empire never extended itself to the shores of
the Baltic Sea, nor had ever the vigour to push itself into Denmark. The
Nordic Aryan peoples of these neglected regions learnt much from the
empire that was unable to subdue them; as we have already noted in § 4,
they developed the art of shipbuilding and became bold seamen; they
spread across the North Sea to the west, and across the Baltic and up
the Russian rivers into the very heart of what is now Russia. One of
their earliest settlements in Russia was Novgorod the Great. There is
the same trouble and confusion for the student of history with these
northern tribes as there is with the Scythians of classical times, and
with the Hunnish Turkish peoples of Eastern and Central Asia. They
appear under a great variety of names, they change and intermingle. In
the case of Britain, for example, the Angles, the Saxons, and Jutes
conquered most of what is now England in the fifth and sixth centuries;
the Danes, a second wave of practically the same people, followed in the
eighth and ninth; and in 1013 a Danish King, Canute, reigned in England,
and not only over England, but over Denmark and Norway. For a time,
under Canute and his sons, it seemed possible that a great confederation
of the Northmen might have established itself. Then in 1066 a third wave
of the same people flowed over England from the “Norman” state in
France, where the Northmen had been settled since the days of Rolf the
Ganger (912), and where they had learnt to speak French. William, Duke
of Normandy, became the William the Conqueror (1066) of English history.
Practically, from the standpoint of universal history, all these peoples
were the same people, waves of one Nordic stock. These waves were not
only flowing westward, but eastward. Already we have noted (chap, xxix,
§ 4), a very interesting earlier movement of the same peoples under the
name of Goths from the Baltic to the Black Sea. We have traced the
splitting of these Goths into the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, and the
adventurous wanderings that ended at last in the Ostrogoth kingdom in
Italy and the Visigoth states in Spain. In the ninth century a second
movement of the Northmen across Russia was going on at the same time
that their establishments in England and their dukedom of Normandy were
coming into existence. The populations of South Scotland, England, East
Ireland, Flanders, Normandy, and the Russias have more elements in
common than we are accustomed to recognize. All are fundamentally Gothic
and Nordic peoples. These “Russian” Norsemen travelled in the
summer-time, using the river routes that abounded in Russia; they
carried their ships by portages from the northward-running rivers to
those flowing southward. They appeared as pirates, raiders, and traders
both upon the Caspian and the Black Sea. The Arabic chroniclers note
their apparition upon the Caspian, and give them the name of Russians.
They raided Persia, and threatened Constantinople with a great fleet of
small craft (in 865, 904, 941, and 1043).[348] One of these Northmen,
Rurik (_circa_ 850), established himself as the ruler of Novgorod and
Kief, and laid the foundations of modern Russia. The fighting qualities
of the Russian Vikings were speedily appreciated at Constantinople; the
Greeks called them Varangians, and an Imperial Varangian bodyguard was
formed. After the conquest of England by the Normans (1066), a number of
Danes and English were driven into exile and joined these Russian
Varangians, apparently finding few obstacles to intercourse in their
speech and habits.
Meanwhile the Normans from Normandy were also finding their way into the
Mediterranean from the West. They came first as mercenaries, and later
as independent invaders; and they came mainly, not, it is to be noted,
by sea, but in scattered bands by land. They came through the Rhineland
and Italy partly in the search for warlike employment and loot, partly
as pilgrims. For the ninth and tenth centuries saw a great development
of pilgrimage. These Normans, as they grew powerful, discovered
themselves such rapacious and vigorous robbers that they forced the
Eastern Emperor and the Pope into a feeble and ineffective alliance
against them (1053). They defeated and captured and were pardoned by the
Pope; they established themselves in Calabria and South Italy, conquered
Sicily from the Saracens (1060-1090), and under Robert Guiscard, who had
entered Italy as a pilgrim adventurer and began his career as a brigand
in Calabria, threatened the Byzantine Empire itself (1081). His army,
which contained a contingent of Sicilian Moslems, crossed from Brindisi
to Epirus in the reverse direction to that in which Pyrrhus had crossed
to attack the Roman Republic, thirteen centuries before (275 B.C.). He
laid siege to the Byzantine stronghold of Durazzo.
[Illustration:
The EMPIRE of
OTTO
the GREAT
]
Robert captured Durazzo (1082), but the pressure of affairs in Italy
recalled him, and ultimately put an end to this first Norman attack upon
the Empire of Byzantium leaving the way open for the rule of a
comparatively vigorous Comnenian dynasty (1081-1204). In Italy, amidst
conflicts too complex for us to tell here, it fell to Robert Guiscard to
besiege and sack Rome (1084); and Gibbon notes with quiet satisfaction
the presence of a large contingent of Sicilian Moslems amongst the
looters. There were in the twelfth century three other Norman attacks
upon the Eastern power, one by the son of Robert Guiscard, and the two
others directly from Sicily by sea....
But neither the Saracens nor the Normans pounded quite so heavily
against the old empire at Byzantium or against the Holy Roman Empire,
the vamped-up Roman Empire of the West, as did the double thrust from
the Turanian centres in Central Asia, of which we must now tell. We have
already noted (chap. xxix, § 5) the westward movement of the Avars, and
the Turkish Magyars who followed in their track. From the days of Pepin
I onward, the Frankish power and its successors in Germany were in
conflict with these Eastern raiders along all the Eastern borderlands.
Charlemagne held and punished them, and established some sort of
overlordship as far east as the Carpathians; but amidst the enfeeblement
that followed his death, these peoples, more or less blended now in the
accounts under the name of Hungarians, led by the Magyars,
re-established their complete freedom again, and raided yearly, often as
far as the Rhine. They destroyed, Gibbon notes, the monastery of St.
Gall in Switzerland, and the town of Bremen. Their great raiding period
was between 900 and 950. Their biggest effort, through Germany right
into France, thence over the Alps and home again by North Italy, was in
938-9.
Thrust southward by these disturbances, and by others to be presently
noted, the Bulgarians, as we have told in § 5, established themselves
under Krum, between the Danube and Constantinople. Originally a Turkish
people, the Bulgarians, since their first appearance in the east of
Russia, had become by repeated admixture almost entirely Slavonic in
race and language. For some time after their establishment in Bulgaria
they remained pagan. Their king, Boris (852-884), entertained Moslem
envoys, and seems to have contemplated an adhesion to Islam, but finally
he married a Byzantine princess, and handed himself and his people over
to the Christian faith.
[Illustration: The COMING of the SELJUKS.]
The Hungarians were drubbed into a certain respect for civilization by
Henry the Fowler, the elected King of Germany, and Otto the First, the
first Saxon emperor, in the tenth century. But they did not decide to
adopt Christianity until about A.D. 1000. Though they were
Christianized, they retained their own Turko-Finnic language (Magyar),
and they retain it to this day.
Bulgarians and Hungarians do not, however, exhaust the catalogue of the
peoples whose westward movements embodied the Turkish thrust across
South Russia. Behind the Hungarians and Bulgarians thrust the Khazars, a
Turkish people, with whom were mingled a very considerable proportion of
Jews who had been expelled from Constantinople, and who had mixed with
them and made many proselytes. To these Jewish Khazars are to be
ascribed the great settlements of Jews in Poland and Russia.[349] Behind
the Khazars again, and overrunning them, were the Petschenegs (or
Patzinaks), a savage Turkish people who are first heard of in the ninth
century, and who were destined to dissolve and vanish as the kindred
Huns did five centuries before. And while the trend of all these peoples
was westward, we have, when we are thinking of the present population of
these South Russian regions, to remember also the coming and going of
the Northmen between the Baltic and the Black Sea, who interwove with
the Turkish migrants like warp and woof, and bear in mind also that
there was a considerable Slavonic population, the heirs and descendants
of Scythians, Sarmatians, and the like, already established in these
restless, lawless, but fertile areas. All these races mixed with and
reacted upon one another. The universal prevalence of Slavonic
languages, except in Hungary, shows that the population remained
predominantly Slav. And in what is now Roumania, for all the passage of
peoples, and in spite of conquest after conquest, the tradition and
inheritance of the Roman provinces of Dacia and Mœsia Inferior still
kept a Latin speech and memory alive.
But this direct thrust of the Turkish peoples against Christendom to the
north of the Black Sea was, in the end, not nearly so important as their
indirect thrust south of it through the empire of the Caliph. We cannot
deal here with the tribes and dissensions of the Turkish peoples of
Turkestan, nor with the particular causes that brought to the fore the
tribes under the rule of the Seljuk clan. In the eleventh century these
Seljuk Turks broke with irresistible force not in one army, but in a
group of armies, and under two brothers, into the decaying fragments of
the Moslem Empire. For Islam had long ceased to be one empire. The
orthodox Sunnite Abbasid rule had shrunken to what was once Babylonia;
and even in Bagdad the Caliph was the mere creature of his Turkish
palace guards. A sort of mayor of the palace, a Turk, was the real
ruler. East of the Caliph, in Persia, and west of him in Palestine,
Syria, and Egypt, were Shiite heretics. The Seljuk Turks were orthodox
Sunnites; they now swept down upon and conquered the Shiite rulers and
upstarts, and established themselves as the protectors of the Bagdad
Caliph, taking over the temporal powers of the mayor of the palace. Very
early they conquered Armenia from the Greeks, and then, breaking the
bounds that had restrained the power of Islam for four centuries, they
swept on to the conquest of Asia Minor, almost to the gates of
Constantinople. The mountain barrier of Cilicia that had held the Moslem
so long had been turned by the conquest of Armenia from the northeast.
Under Alp Arslan, who had united all the Seljuk power in his own hands,
the Turks utterly smashed the Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert,
or Melasgird (1071). The effect of this battle upon people’s
imaginations was very great. Islam, which had appeared far gone in
decay, which had been divided religiously and politically, was suddenly
discovered to have risen again, and it was the secure old Byzantine
Empire that seemed on the brink of dissolution. The loss of Asia Minor
was very swift. The Seljuks established themselves at Iconium (Konia),
in what is now Anatolia. In a little while they were in possession of
the fortress of Nicæa over against the capital.
§ 9
We have already told of the attack of the Normans upon the Byzantine
Empire from the west, and of the battle of Durazzo (1081); and we have
noted that Constantinople had still vivid memories of the Russian sea
raids (1043). Bulgaria, it is true, had been tamed, but there was heavy
and uncertain warfare going on with the Petschenegs. North and west, the
emperor’s hands were full. This swift advance of the Turks into country
that had been so long securely Byzantine must have seemed like the
approach of final disaster. The Eastern Emperor, Michael VII, under the
pressure of these convergent dangers, took a step that probably seemed
both to himself and to Rome of the utmost political significance. He
appealed to the Pope, Gregory VII, for assistance. His appeal was
repeated still more urgently by his successor, Alexius Comnenus, to Pope
Urban II.
To the counsellors of Rome this must have presented itself as a supreme
opportunity for the assertion of the headship of the Pope over the
entire Christian world.
In this history we have traced the growth of this idea of a religious
government of Christendom--and through Christendom of mankind--and we
have shown how naturally and how necessarily, because of the tradition
of world empire, it found a centre at Rome. The Pope of Rome was the
only Western patriarch; he was the religious head of a vast region in
which the ruling tongue was Latin; the other patriarchs of the Orthodox
Church spoke Greek, and so were inaudible throughout his domains; and
the two words _Filioque_, which had been added to the Latin creed (see
chap. xxx, § 8, and chap. xxxiii, § 6), had split off the Byzantine
Christians by one of those impalpable and elusive doctrinal points upon
which there is no reconciliation. (The final rupture was in 1054.) The
life of the Lateran changed in its quality with every occupant of the
chair of St. Peter: sometimes papal Rome was a den of corruption and
uncleanness, as it had been in the days of John XII; sometimes it was
pervaded by the influence of widely thinking and nobly thinking men. But
behind the Pope was the assembly of the cardinals, priests, and a great
number of highly educated officials, who never, even in the darkest and
wildest days, lost sight altogether of the very grand idea of a divine
world dominion, of a peace of Christ throughout the earth that St.
Augustine had expressed. Through all the Middle Ages that idea was the
guiding influence in Rome. For a time, perhaps, mean minds would prevail
there, and in the affairs of the world Rome would play the part of a
greedy, treacherous, and insanely cunning old woman; followed a phase of
masculine and quite worldly astuteness perhaps, or a phase of
exaltation. Came an interlude of fanaticism or pedantry, when all the
pressure was upon exact doctrine. Or there was a moral collapse, and the
Lateran became the throne of some sensuous or æsthetic autocrat, ready
to sell every hope or honour the Church could give for money to spend
upon pleasure or display. Yet, on the whole, the papal ship kept its
course, and came presently into the wind again.
In this period to which we have now come, the period of the eleventh
century, we discover a Rome dominated by the personality of an
exceptionally great statesman, Hildebrand, who occupied various official
positions under a succession of Popes, and finally became Pope himself
under the name of Gregory VII (1073-1085). We find that under his
influence, vice, sloth, and corruption have been swept out of the
Church, that the method of electing the Popes has been reformed, and
that a great struggle has been waged with the Emperor upon the
manifestly vital question of “investitures,” the question whether Pope
or temporal monarch should have the decisive voice in the appointment of
the bishops in their domains. Hitherto the Roman clergy had been able to
marry; but now, to detach them effectually from the world and to make
them more completely the instruments of the church, celibacy was imposed
upon all priests....[350]
Gregory VII had been prevented by his struggle over the investitures
from any effectual answer to the first appeal from Byzantium; but he had
left a worthy successor in Urban II (1087-1099); and when the letter of
Alexius came to hand, Urban seized at once upon the opportunity it
afforded for drawing together all the thoughts and forces of Western
Europe into one passion and purpose. Thereby he might hope to end the
private warfare that prevailed, and find a proper outlet for the immense
energy of the Normans. He saw, too, an opportunity of thrusting the
Byzantine power and Church aside, and extending the influence of the
Latin Church over Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The envoys of Alexius
were heard at a church council, hastily summoned at Piacenza (=
Placentia), and next year (1095), at Clermont, Urban held a second great
council, in which all the slowly gathered strength of the Church was
organized for a universal war propaganda against the Moslems. Private
war, all war among Christians, was to cease until the infidel had been
swept back and the site of the Holy Sepulchre was again in Christian
hands.
The fervour of the response enables us to understand the great work of
creative organization that had been done in Western Europe in the
previous five centuries. In the beginning of the seventh century we saw
Western Europe as a chaos of social and political fragments, with no
common idea nor hope, a system shattered almost to a dust of
self-seeking individuals. Now in the dawn of the eleventh century there
is everywhere a common belief, a linking idea, to which men may devote
themselves, and by which they can co-operate together in a universal
enterprise. We realize that, in spite of much weakness and intellectual
and moral unsoundness, to this extent the Christian Church has _worked_.
We are able to measure the evil phases of tenth-century Rome, the
scandals, the filthiness, the murders and violence, at their proper
value by the scale of this fact. No doubt also all over Christendom
there had been many lazy, evil, and foolish priests; but it is manifest
that this task of teaching and co-ordination that had been accomplished
could have been accomplished only through a great multitude of
right-living priests and monks and nuns. A new and greater amphictyony,
the amphictyony of Christendom, had come into the world, and it had been
built by thousands of anonymous, faithful lives.
And this response to the appeal of Urban the Second was not confined
only to what we should call educated people. It was not simply knights
and princes who were willing to go upon this crusade. Side by side with
the figure of Urban we must put the figure of Peter the Hermit, a type
novel to Europe, albeit a little reminiscent of the Hebrew prophets.
This man appeared preaching the crusade to the common people. He told a
story--whether truthful or untruthful hardly matters in this
connection--of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, of the wanton destruction at
the Holy Sepulchre by the Seljuk Turks, who took it in 1073, and of the
exactions, brutalities, and deliberate cruelties practised upon the
Christian pilgrims to the Holy Places. Barefooted, clad in a coarse
garment, riding on an ass, and bearing a huge cross, this man travelled
about France and Germany, and everywhere harangued vast crowds in church
or street or market-place.
Here for the first time we discover Europe with an idea and a soul! Here
is a universal response of indignation of the story of a remote wrong, a
swift understanding of a common cause for rich and poor alike. You
cannot imagine this thing happening in the Empire of Augustus Cæsar, or
indeed in any previous state in the world’s history. Something of the
kind might perhaps have been possible in the far smaller world of
Hellas, or in Arabia before Islam. But this movement affected nations,
kingdoms, tongues, and peoples. It is clear that we are dealing with
something new that has come into the world, a new clear connection of
the common interest with the consciousness of the common man.
§ 10
From the very first this flaming enthusiasm was mixed with baser
elements. There was the cold and calculated scheme of the free and
ambitious Latin Church to subdue and replace the emperor-ruled Byzantine
Church; there was the freebooting instinct of the Normans, who were
tearing Italy to pieces, which turned readily enough to a new and richer
world of plunder; and there was something in the multitude who now
turned their faces east, something deeper than love in the human
composition, namely, fear-born hate, that the impassioned appeals of the
propagandists and the exaggeration of the horrors and cruelties of the
infidel had fanned into flame. And there were still other forces; the
intolerant Seljuks and the intolerant Fatimites lay now an impassable
barrier across the eastward trade of Genoa and Venice that had hitherto
flowed through Bagdad and Aleppo, or through Egypt. They must force open
these closed channels, unless Constantinople and the Black Sea route
were to monopolize Eastern trade altogether. Moreover, in 1094 and 1095
there had been a pestilence and famine from the Scheldt to Bohemia, and
there was great social disorganization. “No wonder,” says Mr. Ernest
Barker, “that a stream of emigration set towards the East, such as would
in modern times flow towards a newly discovered goldfield--a stream
carrying in its turbid waters much refuse, tramps and bankrupts,
camp-followers and hucksters, fugitive monks and escaped villeins, and
marked by the same motley grouping, the same fever of life, the same
alternations of affluence and beggary, which mark the rush for a
goldfield to-day.”
But these were secondary contributory causes. The fact of predominant
interest to the historian of mankind is this _will to crusade_ suddenly
revealed as a new mass possibility in human affairs.
[Illustration: Map to illustrate the FIRST CRUSADE]
The story of the crusades abounds in such romantic and picturesque
detail that the writer of an Outline of History must ride his pen upon
the curb through this alluring field. The first forces to move eastward
were great crowds of undisciplined people rather than armies, and they
sought to make their way by the valley of the Danube, and thence
southward to Constantinople.
This was the “people’s crusade.” Never before in the whole history of
the world had there been such a spectacle as these masses of practically
leaderless people moved by an idea. It was a very crude idea. When they
got among foreigners, they do not seem to have realized that they were
not already among the infidel. Two great mobs, the advance guard of the
expedition, committed such excesses in Hungary, where the language must
have been incomprehensible to them, as to provoke the Hungarians to
destroy them. They were massacred. A third host began with a great
pogrom of the Jews in the Rhineland--for the Christian blood was up--and
this multitude was also dispersed in Hungary. Two other hosts under
Peter got through and reached Constantinople, to the astonishment and
dismay of the Emperor Alexius. They looted and committed outrages as
they came, and at last he shipped them across the Bosphorus, to be
massacred rather than defeated by the Seljuks (1096).
This first unhappy appearance of the “people” as people in modern
European history was followed in 1097 by the organized forces of the
First Crusade. They came by diverse routes from France, Normandy,
Flanders, England, Southern Italy, and Sicily, and the will and power of
them were the Normans. They crossed the Bosphorus and captured Nicæa,
which Alexius snatched away from them before they could loot it. They
then went on by much the same route as Alexander the Great, through the
Cilician Gates, leaving the Turks in Konia unconquered, past the
battle-fields of the Issus, and so to Antioch, which they took after
nearly a year’s siege. Then they defeated a great relieving army from
Mosul. A large part of the Crusaders remained in Antioch, a smaller
force under Godfrey of Bouillon (in Belgium) went on to Jerusalem.
“After a little more than a month’s siege, the city was finally captured
(July 15). The slaughter was terrible; the blood of the conquered ran
down the streets, until men splashed in blood as they rode. At
nightfall, ‘sobbing for excess of joy,’ the crusaders came to the
Sepulchre from their treading of the wine-press, and put their
blood-stained hands together in prayer. So, on that day of July, the
First Crusade came to an end.”[351]
The authority of the Patriarch of Jerusalem was at once seized upon by
the Latin clergy with the expedition, and the Orthodox Christians found
themselves in rather a worse case under Latin rule than under the Turk.
There were already Latin principalities established at Antioch and
Edessa, and there began a struggle for ascendancy between these various
courts and kings, and an unsuccessful attempt to make Jerusalem a
property of the Pope. These are complications beyond our present scope.
Let us quote, however, a characteristic passage from Gibbon:--
“In a style less grave than that of history, I should perhaps compare
the Emperor Alexius to the jackal, who is said to follow the steps and
to devour the leavings of the lion. Whatever had been his fears and
toils in the passage of the First Crusade, they were amply recompensed
by the subsequent benefits which he derived from the exploits of the
Franks. His dexterity and vigilance secured their first conquest of
Nicæa, and from this threatening station the Turks were compelled to
evacuate the neighbourhood of Constantinople. While the Crusaders, with
blind valour, advanced into the midland countries of Asia, the crafty
Greek improved the favourable occasion when the emirs of the sea coast
were recalled to the standard of the Sultan. The Turks were driven from
the isles of Rhodes and Chios; the cities of Ephesus and Smyrna, of
Sardes, Philadelphia, and Laodicea were restored to the empire, which
Alexius enlarged from the Hellespont to the banks of the Mæander and the
rocky shores of Pamphylia. The churches resumed their splendour; the
towns were rebuilt and fortified; and the desert country was peopled
with colonies of Christians, who were gently removed from the more
distant and dangerous frontier. In these paternal cares we may forgive
Alexius, if we forget the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre; but, by the
Latins, he was stigmatized with the foul reproach of treason and
desertion. They had sworn fidelity and obedience to his throne; but _he_
had promised to assist their enterprise in person, or at least, with his
troops and treasures; his base retreat dissolved their obligations; and
the sword, which had been the instrument of their victory, was the
pledge and title of their just independence. It does not appear that the
emperor attempted to revive his obsolete claims over the kingdom of
Jerusalem, but the borders of Cilicia and Syria were more recent in his
possession and more accessible to his arms. The great army of the
Crusaders was annihilated or dispersed; the principality of Antioch was
left without a head, by the surprise and captivity of Bohemond; his
ransom had oppressed him with a heavy debt; and his Norman followers
were insufficient to repel the hostilities of the Greeks and Turks. In
this distress, Bohemond embraced a magnanimous resolution, of leaving
the defence of Antioch to his kinsman, the faithful Tancred; of arming
the West against the Byzantine Empire, and of executing the design which
he inherited from the lessons and example of his father Guiscard. His
embarkation was clandestine; and if we may credit a tale of the Princess
Anna, he passed the hostile sea closely secreted in a coffin. (Anna
Comnena adds, that to complete the imitation, he was shut up with a dead
cock; and condescends to wonder how the barbarian could endure the
confinement and putrefaction. This absurd tale is unknown to the
Latins.) But his reception in France was dignified by the public
applause and his marriage with the king’s daughter; his return was
glorious, since the bravest spirits of the age enlisted under his
veteran command; and he repassed the Adriatic at the head of five
thousand horse and forty thousand foot, assembled from the most remote
climates of Europe. The strength of Durazzo and prudence of Alexius, the
progress of famine and approach of winter, eluded his ambitious hopes;
and the venal confederates were seduced from his standard. A treaty of
peace suspended the fears of the Greeks.”
We have dealt thus lengthily with the First Crusade, because it displays
completely the quality of all these expeditions. The reality of the
struggle between the Latin and the Byzantine system became more and more
nakedly apparent. In 1101 came reinforcements, in which the fleet of the
mercantile republics of Venice and Genoa played a prominent part, and
the power of the kingdom of Jerusalem was extended. The year 1147 saw a
Second Crusade, in which both the Emperor Conrad III and King Louis of
France participated. It was a much more stately and far less successful
and enthusiastic expedition than its predecessor. It had been provoked
by the fall of Edessa to the Moslems in 1144. One large division of
Germans, instead of going to the Holy Land, attacked and subjugated the
still pagan Wends east of the Elbe. This, the Pope agreed, counted as
crusading, and so did the capture of Lisbon, and the foundation of the
Christian kingdom of Portugal by the Flemish and English contingents.
In 1169 a Kurdish adventurer, named Saladin, became ruler of Egypt, in
which country the Shiite heresy had now fallen before a Sunnite revival.
This Saladin reunited the efforts of Egypt and Bagdad, and preached a
Jehad, a Holy War, a counter-crusade, of all the Moslems against the
Christians. This Jehad excited almost as much feeling in Islam as the
First Crusade had done in Christendom. It was now a case of crusader
against crusader; and in 1187 Jerusalem was retaken. This provoked the
Third Crusade (1189). This also was a grand affair, planned jointly by
the Emperor Frederick I (known better as Frederick Barbarossa), the King
of France, and the King of England (who at that time owned many of the
fairest French provinces). The papacy played a secondary part in this
expedition; it was in one of its phases of enfeeblement; and the crusade
was the most courtly, chivalrous, and romantic of all. Religious
bitterness was mitigated by the idea of knightly gallantry, which
obsessed both Saladin and Richard I (1189-1199) of England
(Cœur-de-Lion), and the lover of romance may very well turn to the
romances about this period for its flavour. The crusade saved the
principality of Antioch for a time, but failed to retake Jerusalem. The
Christians, however, remained in possession of the seacoast of
Palestine.
By the time of the Third Crusade, the magic and wonder had gone out of
these movements altogether. The common people had found them out. Men
went, but only kings and nobles straggled back; and that often only
after heavy taxation for a ransom. The idea of the crusades was
cheapened by their too frequent and trivial use. Whenever the Pope
quarrelled with anyone now, he called for a crusade, until the word
ceased to mean anything but an attempt to give flavour to an unpalatable
civil war. There was a crusade against the heretics in the south of
France, one against John (King of England), one against the Emperor
Frederick II. The Popes did not understand the necessity of dignity to
the papacy. They had achieved a moral ascendancy in Christendom.
Forthwith they began to fritter it away. They not only cheapened the
idea of the crusades, but they made their tremendous power of
excommunication, of putting people outside all the sacraments, hopes,
and comforts of religion, ridiculous by using it in mere disputes of
policy. Frederick II was not only crusaded against, but
excommunicated--without visible injury. He was excommunicated again in
1239, and a third time in 1245.[352]
The bulk of the Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land at all. It
started from Venice (1202), captured Zara, encamped at Constantinople
(1203), and finally, in 1204, stormed the city. It was frankly a
combined attack on the Byzantine Empire. Venice took much of the coasts
and islands of the empire, and a Latin, Baldwin of Flanders, was set up
as emperor in Constantinople. The Latin and Greek Churches were declared
to be reunited, and Latin emperors ruled as conquerors in
Constantinople from 1204 to 1261.
In 1212 occurred a dreadful thing, a children’s crusade. An excitement
that could no longer affect sane adults was spread among the children in
the south of France and in the Rhone Valley. A crowd of many thousands
of French boys marched to Marseilles; they were then lured on board ship
by slave traders, who sold them into slavery in Egypt. The Rhineland
children tramped into Italy, many perishing by the way, and there
dispersed. Pope Innocent III made great capital out of this strange
business. “The very children put us to shame,” he said; and sought to
whip up enthusiasm for a Fifth Crusade. This crusade aimed at the
conquest of Egypt, because Jerusalem was now held by the Egyptian
Sultan; its remnants returned in 1221, after an inglorious evacuation of
its one capture, Damietta, with the Jerusalem vestiges of the True Cross
as a sort of consolation concession on the part of the victor. We have
already noted the earlier adventures of this venerable relic before the
days of Muhammad in chap. xxxi, § 2, when it was carried off by Chosroes
II to Ctesiphon, and recovered by the Emperor Heraclius. Fragments of
the True Cross, however, had always been in Rome at the church of S.
Croce-in-Gerusalemme, since the days of the Empress Helena (the mother
of Constantine the Great) to whom, says the legend, its hiding-place had
been revealed in a vision during her pilgrimage to the Holy Land.[353]
The Sixth Crusade (1229) was a crusade bordering upon absurdity. The
Emperor Frederick II had promised to go upon a crusade, and evaded his
vow. He had made a false start and returned. He was probably bored by
the mere idea of a crusade. But the vow had been part of the bargain by
which he secured the support of Pope Innocent III in his election as
emperor. He busied himself in reorganizing the government of his
Sicilian kingdom, though he had given the Pope to understand that he
would relinquish these possessions if he became emperor; and the Pope
was anxious to stop this process of consolidation by sending him to the
Holy Land. The Pope did not want Frederick II, or any German emperor at
all in Italy, because he himself wished to rule Italy. As Frederick II
remained evasive, Gregory IX excommunicated him, proclaimed a crusade
against him, and invaded his dominions in Italy (1228). Whereupon the
Emperor sailed with an army to the Holy Land. There he had a meeting
with the Sultan of Egypt (the Emperor spoke six languages freely,
including Arabic); and it would seem these two gentlemen, both of
sceptical opinions, exchanged views of a congenial sort, discussed the
Pope in a worldly spirit, debated the Mongolian rush westward, which
threatened them both alike, and agreed finally to a commercial
convention, and the surrender of a part of the kingdom of Jerusalem to
Frederick. This indeed was a new sort of crusade, a crusade by private
treaty. As this astonishing crusader had been excommunicated, he had to
indulge in a purely secular coronation in Jerusalem, taking the crown
from the altar with his own hand, in a church from which all the clergy
had gone. Probably there was no one to show him the Holy Places; indeed
these were presently all put under an interdict by the Patriarch of
Jerusalem and locked up; manifestly the affair differed altogether in
spirit from the red onslaught of the First Crusade. It had not even the
kindly sociability of the Caliph Omar’s visit six hundred years before.
Frederick II rode out of Jerusalem almost alone, returned from this
unromantic success to Italy, put his affairs there in order very
rapidly, chased the papal armies out of his possessions, and obliged the
Pope to give him absolution from his excommunication (1230). This Sixth
Crusade was indeed not only the _reductio ad absurdum_ of crusades, but
of papal excommunications. Of this Frederick II we shall tell more in a
later section, because he was very typical of certain new forces that
were coming into European affairs.
The Christians lost Jerusalem again in 1244; it was taken from them very
easily by the Sultan of Egypt when they attempted an intrigue against
him. This provoked the Seventh Crusade, the Crusade of St. Louis, King
of France (Louis IX), who was taken prisoner in Egypt and ransomed in
1250. Not until 1918, when it fell to a mixed force of French, British,
and Indian troops, did Jerusalem slip once more from the Moslem
grasp....
One more crusade remains to be noted, an expedition to Tunis by this
same Louis IX, who died of fever there.
§11
The essential interest of the crusades for the historian of mankind lies
in the wave of emotion, of unifying feeling, that animated the first.
Thereafter these expeditions became more and more an established
process, and less and less vital events. The First Crusade was an
occurrence like the discovery of America; the later ones were more and
more like a trip across the Atlantic. In the eleventh century, the idea
of the crusade must have been like a strange and wonderful light in the
sky; in the thirteenth one can imagine honest burghers saying in tones
of protest, “What! _another_ crusade!” The experience of St. Louis in
Egypt is not like a fresh experience for mankind; it is much more like a
round of golf over some well-known links, a round that was dogged by
misfortune. It is an insignificant series of events. The interest of
life had shifted to other directions.
The beginning of the crusades displays all Europe saturated by a naïve
Christianity, and ready to follow the leading of the Pope trustfully and
simply. The scandals of the Lateran during its evil days, with which we
are all so familiar now, were practically unknown outside Rome. And
Gregory VII and Urban II had redeemed all that. But intellectually and
morally their successors at the Lateran and the Vatican[354] were not
equal to their opportunities. The strength of the papacy lay in the
faith men had in it, and it used that faith so carelessly as to enfeeble
it. Rome has always had too much of the shrewdness of the priest and too
little of the power of the prophet. So that while the eleventh century
was a century of ignorant and confiding men, the thirteenth was an age
of knowing and disillusioned men. It was a far more civilized and
profoundly sceptical world.
The bishops, priests, and the monastic institutions of Latin Christendom
before the days of Gregory VII had been perhaps rather loosely linked
together and very variable in quality; but it is clear that they were,
as a rule, intensely intimate with the people among whom they found
themselves, and with much of the spirit of Jesus still alive in them;
they were trusted, and they had enormous power _within the conscience of
their followers_. The church, in comparison with its later state, was
more in the hands of local laymen and the local ruler; it lacked its
later universality. The energetic bracing up of the church organization
by Gregory VII, which was designed to increase the central power of
Rome, broke many subtle filaments between priest and monastery on the
one hand, and the country-side about them on the other. Men of faith and
wisdom believe in growth and their fellow men; but priests, even such
priests as Gregory VII, believe in the false “efficiency” of an imposed
discipline. The squabble over investitures made every prince in
Christendom suspicious of the bishops as agents of a foreign power; this
suspicion filtered down to the parishes. The political enterprises of
the papacy necessitated an increasing demand for money. Already in the
thirteenth century it was being said everywhere that the priests were
not good men, that they were always hunting for money.
In the days of ignorance there had been an extraordinary willingness to
believe the Catholic priesthood good and wise. Relatively it was better
and wiser in those days. Great powers beyond her spiritual functions had
been entrusted to the church, and very extraordinary freedoms. Of this
confidence the fullest advantage had been taken. In the Middle Ages the
church had become a state within the state. It had its own law courts.
Cases involving not merely priests, but monks, students, crusaders,
widows, orphans, and the helpless, were reserved for the clerical
courts; and whenever the rites or rules of the church were involved,
there the church claimed jurisdiction over such matters as wills,
marriages, oaths, and of course over heresy, sorcery, and blasphemy.
There were numerous clerical prisons in which offenders might pine all
their lives. The Pope was the supreme law-giver of Christendom, and his
court at Rome the final and decisive court of appeal. And the church
levied taxes; it had not only vast properties and a great income from
fees, but it imposed a tax of a tenth, the tithe, upon its subjects. It
did not call for this as a pious benefaction; it demanded it as a right.
The clergy, on the other hand, were now claiming exemption from lay
taxation.
This attempt to trade upon their peculiar prestige and evade their share
in fiscal burdens was certainly one very considerable factor in the
growing dissatisfaction with the clergy. Apart from any question of
justice, it was impolitic. It made taxes seem ten times more burthensome
to those who had to pay. It made everyone feel the immunities of the
church. And a still more extravagant and unwise claim made by the church
was the claim to the power of _dispensation_. The Pope might in many
instances set aside the laws of the church in individual cases; he might
allow cousins to marry, permit a man to have two wives, or release
anyone from a vow. But to do such things is to admit that the laws
affected are not based upon necessity and an inherent righteousness;
that they are in fact restrictive and vexatious. The law-giver, of all
beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as
though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of
mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we
own.
§ 12
The Emperor Frederick II is a very convenient example of the sort of
doubter and rebel the thirteenth century could produce. It may be
interesting to tell a little of this intelligent and cynical man. He was
the son of the German Emperor, Henry VI, and grandson of Frederick
Barbarossa, and his mother was the daughter of Roger I, the Norman King
of Sicily. He inherited this kingdom in 1198, when he was four years
old; his mother was his guardian for six months, and when she died, Pope
Innocent III (1198 to 1216) became regent and guardian. He seems to have
had an exceptionally good and remarkably mixed education, and his
accomplishments earned him the flattering title of _Stupor mundi_, the
amazement of the world. The result of getting an Arabic view of
Christianity, and a Christian view of Islam, was to make him believe
that all religions were impostures, a view held perhaps by many a
stifled observer in the Age of Faith. But he talked about his views; his
blasphemies and heresies are on record. Growing up under the arrogant
rule of Innocent III, who never seems to have realized that his ward had
come of age, he developed a slightly humorous evasiveness. It was the
papal policy to prevent any fresh coalescence of the power of Germany
and Italy, and it was equally Frederick’s determination to get whatever
he could. When presently opportunity offered him the imperial crown of
Germany, he secured the Pope’s support by agreeing, if he were elected,
to relinquish his possessions in Sicily and South Italy, and to put down
heresy in Germany. For Innocent III was one of the great persecuting
Popes, an able, grasping, and aggressive man. (For a Pope, he was
exceptionally young. He became Pope at thirty-seven.) It was Innocent
who had preached a cruel crusade against the heretics in the south of
France, a crusade that presently became a looting expedition beyond his
control. So soon as Frederick was elected emperor (1211),[355] Innocent
pressed for the performance of the vows and promises he had wrung from
his dutiful ward. The clergy were to be freed from lay jurisdiction and
from taxation, and exemplary cruelties were to be practised upon the
heretics. None of which things Frederick did. As we have already told,
he would not even relinquish Sicily. He liked Sicily as a place of
residence better than he liked Germany.
Innocent III died baffled in 1216, and his successor, Honorius III,
effected nothing. Honorius was succeeded by Gregory IX (1227), who
evidently came to the papal throne with a nervous resolution to master
this perplexing young man. He excommunicated him at once for failing to
start upon his crusade, which was now twelve years overdue; and he
denounced his vices, heresies, and general offences in a public letter
(1227). To this Frederick replied in a far abler document addressed to
all the princes of Europe, a document of extreme importance in history,
because it is the first clear statement of the issue between the
pretensions of the Pope to be absolute ruler of all Christendom, and the
claims of the secular rulers.[356] This conflict had always been
smouldering; it had broken out here in one form, and there in another;
but now Frederick put it in clear general terms upon which men could
combine together.
Having delivered this blow, he departed upon the pacific crusade of
which we have already told. In 1239, Gregory IX was excommunicating him
for a second time, and renewing that warfare of public abuse in which
the papacy had already suffered severely. The controversy was revived
after Gregory IX was dead, when Innocent IV was Pope; and again a
devastating letter, which men were bound to remember, was written by
Frederick against the church. He denounced the pride and irreligion of
the clergy, and ascribed all the corruptions of the time to their pride
and wealth. He proposed to his fellow princes a general confiscation of
church property--for the good of the church. It was a suggestion that
never afterwards left the imagination of the European princes.
We will not go on to tell of his last years or of the disaster at Parma,
due to his carelessness, which cast a shadow of failure over his end.
The particular events of his life are far less significant than its
general atmosphere. It is possible to piece together something of his
court life in Sicily. He is described towards the end of his life as
“red, bald, and short-sighted”; but his features were good and pleasing.
He was luxurious in his way of living, and fond of beautiful things. He
is described as licentious. But it is clear that his mind was not
satisfied by religious scepticism, and that he was a man of very
effectual curiosity and inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Moslem as well
as Christian philosophers at his court, and he did much to irrigate the
Italian mind with Saracenic influences. Through him Arabic numerals and
algebra were introduced to Christian students, and among other
philosophers at his court was Michael Scott, who translated portions of
Aristotle and the commentaries thereon of the great Arab philosopher
Averroes (of Cordoba). In 1224 Frederick founded the University of
Naples, and he enlarged and enriched the great medical school at Salerno
University, the most ancient of universities. He also founded a
zoological garden. He left a book on hawking, which shows him to have
been an acute observer of the habits of birds, and he was one of the
first Italians to write Italian verse. Italian poetry was indeed born at
his court. He has been called by an able writer, “the first of the
moderns,” and the phrase expresses aptly the unprejudiced detachment of
his intellectual side. His was an all-round originality. During a gold
shortage he introduced and made a success of a coinage of stamped
leather, bearing his promise to pay in gold, a sort of leather bank-note
issue.[357]
In spite of the torrent of abuse and calumny in which Frederick was
drenched, he left a profound impression upon the popular imagination. He
is still remembered in South Italy almost as vividly as is Napoleon I by
the peasants of France; he is the “Gran Federigo.” And German scholars
declare[358] that, in spite of Frederick’s manifest dislike for Germany,
it is he, and not Frederick I, Frederick Barbarossa, to whom that German
legend originally attached--that legend which represents a great monarch
slumbering in a deep cavern, his beard grown round a stone table,
against a day of awakening when the world will be restored by him from
an extremity of disorder to peace. Afterwards, it seems, the story was
transferred to the Crusader Barbarossa, the grandfather of Frederick II.
A difficult child was Frederick II for Mother Church, and he was only
the precursor of many such difficult children. The princes and educated
gentlemen throughout Europe read his letters and discussed them. The
more enterprising university students found, marked, and digested the
Arabic Aristotle he had made accessible to them in Latin. Salerno cast a
baleful light upon Rome. All sorts of men must have been impressed by
the futility of the excommunications and interdicts that were levelled
at Frederick.
§ 13[359]
We have said that Innocent III never seemed to realize that his ward,
Frederick II, was growing up. It is equally true that the papacy never
seemed to realize that Europe was growing up. It is impossible for an
intelligent modern student of history not to sympathize with the
underlying idea of the papal court, with the idea of one universal rule
of righteousness keeping the peace of the earth, and not to recognize
the many elements of nobility that entered into the Lateran policy.
Sooner or later mankind must come to one universal peace, unless our
race is to be destroyed by the increasing power of its own destructive
inventions; and that universal peace must needs take the form of a
government, that is to say a law-sustaining organization, in the best
sense of the word religious; a government ruling men through the
educated co-ordination of their minds in a common conception of human
history and human destiny.
The papacy we must now recognize as the first clearly conscious attempt
to provide such a government in the world. We cannot too earnestly
examine its deficiencies and inadequacies, for every lesson we can draw
from them is necessarily of the greatest value to us in forming our
ideas of our own international relationships. We have tried to suggest
the main factors in the breakdown of the Roman Republic, and it now
behoves us to attempt a diagnosis of the failure of the Roman Church to
secure and organize the good will of mankind.
The first thing that will strike the student is the intermittence of the
efforts of the church to establish the world City of God. The policy of
the church was not whole-heartedly and continuously set upon that end.
It was only now and then that some fine personality or some group of
fine personalities dominated it in that direction. The kingdom of God
that Jesus of Nazareth had preached was overlaid, as we have explained,
almost from the beginning by the doctrines and ceremonial traditions of
an earlier age, and of an intellectually inferior type. Christianity
almost from its commencement ceased to be purely prophetic and
creative. It entangled itself with archaic traditions of human
sacrifice, with Mithraic blood-cleansing, with priestcraft as ancient as
human society, and with elaborate doctrines about the structure of the
divinity. The gory forefinger of the Etruscan pontifex maximus
emphasized the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth; the mental complexity of
the Alexandrian Greek entangled them. In the inevitable jangle of these
incompatibles the church had become dogmatic. In despair of other
solutions to its intellectual discords it had resorted to arbitrary
authority. Its priests and bishops were more and more men moulded to
creeds and dogmas and set procedures; by the time they became cardinals
or popes they were usually oldish men, habituated to a politic struggle
for immediate ends and no longer capable of world-wide views. They no
longer wanted to see the Kingdom of God established in the hearts of
men--they had forgotten about that; they wanted to see the power of the
church, which was their own power, dominating men. They were prepared to
bargain even with the hates and fears and lusts in men’s hearts to
ensure that power. And it was just because many of them probably doubted
secretly of the entire soundness of their vast and elaborate doctrinal
fabric, that they would brook no discussion of it. They were intolerant
of questions or dissent, not because they were sure of their faith, but
because they were not. They wanted conformity for reasons of policy. By
the thirteenth century the church was evidently already morbidly anxious
about the gnawing doubts that might presently lay the whole structure of
its pretensions in ruins. It had no serenity of soul. It was hunting
everywhere for heretics as timid old ladies are said to look under beds
and in cupboards for burglars before retiring for the night.
We have already mentioned (chap, xxxi, § 5) the Persian Mani who was
crucified and flayed in the year 277. His way of representing the
struggle between good and evil was as a struggle between a power of
light which was, as it were, in rebellion against a power of darkness
inherent in the universe. All these profound mysteries are necessarily
represented by symbols and poetic expressions, and the ideas of Mani
still find a response in many intellectual temperaments to-day. One may
hear Manichæan doctrines from many Christian pulpits. But the orthodox
Catholic symbol was a different one. These Manichæan ideas had spread
very widely in Europe, and particularly in Bulgaria and the south of
France. In the south of France the people who held them were called the
Cathars or Albigenses. Their ideas jarred so little with the essentials
of Christianity that they believed themselves to be devout Christians.
As a body they lived lives of conspicuous virtue and purity in a
violent, undisciplined, and vicious age. But they questioned the
doctrinal soundness of Rome and the orthodox interpretation of the
Bible. They thought Jesus was a rebel against the cruelty of the God of
the Old Testament, and not his harmonious son. Closely associated with
the Albigenses were the Waldenses, the followers of a man called Waldo,
who seems to have been quite soundly Catholic in his theology, but
equally offensive to the church because he denounced the riches and
luxury of the clergy. This was enough for the Lateran, and so we have
the spectacle of Innocent III preaching a crusade against these
unfortunate sectaries, and permitting the enlistment of every wandering
scoundrel at loose ends to carry fire and sword and rape and every
conceivable outrage among the most peaceful subjects of the King of
France. The accounts of the cruelties and abominations of this crusade
are far more terrible to read than any account of Christian martyrdoms
by the pagans, and they have the added horror of being indisputably
true.
This black and pitiless intolerance was an evil spirit to be mixed into
the project of a rule of God on earth. This was a spirit entirely
counter to that of Jesus of Nazareth. We do not hear of his smacking the
faces or wringing the wrists of recalcitrant or unresponsive disciples.
But the Popes during their centuries of power were always raging against
the slightest reflection upon the intellectual sufficiency of the
church.
And the intolerance of the church was not confined to religious matters.
The shrewd, pompous, irascible, and rather malignant old men who
manifestly constituted a dominant majority in the councils of the
church, resented any knowledge but their own knowledge, and distrusted
any thought at all that they did not correct and control. They set
themselves to restrain science, of which they were evidently jealous.
Any mental activity but their own struck them as being insolent. Later
on they were to have a great struggle upon the question of the earth’s
position in space, and whether it moved round the sun or not. This was
really not the business of the church at all. She might very well have
left to reason the things that are reason’s, but she seems to have been
impelled by an inner necessity to estrange the intellectual conscience
in men.
Had this intolerance sprung from a real intensity of conviction it would
have been bad enough, but it was accompanied by a scarcely disguised
contempt for the intelligence and mental dignity of the common man that
makes it far less acceptable to our modern judgments, and which no doubt
made it far less acceptable to the free spirits of the time. We have
told quite dispassionately the policy of the Roman church towards her
troubled sister in the East. Many of the tools and expedients she used
were abominable. In her treatment of her own people a streak of real
cynicism is visible. She destroyed her prestige by disregarding her own
teaching of righteousness. Of dispensations we have already spoken (§
11). Her crowning folly in the sixteenth century was the sale of
_indulgences_, whereby the sufferings of the soul in purgatory could be
commuted for a money payment. But the spirit that led at last to this
shameless and, as it proved, disastrous proceeding, was already very
evident in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Long before the seed of criticism that Frederick II had sown had
germinated in men’s minds and produced its inevitable crop of rebellion,
there was apparent a strong feeling in Christendom that all was not well
with the spiritual atmosphere. There began movements, movements that
nowadays we should call “revivalist,” within the church, that implied
rather than uttered a criticism of the sufficiency of her existing
methods and organization. Men sought fresh forms of righteous living
outside the monasteries and priesthood. One notable figure is that of
St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226). We cannot tell here in any detail of
how this pleasant young gentleman gave up all the amenities and ease of
his life and went forth to seek God; the opening of the story is not
unlike the early experiences of Gautama Buddha. He had a sudden
conversion in the midst of a life of pleasure, and, taking a vow of
extreme poverty, he gave himself up to an imitation of the life of
Christ, and to the service of the sick and wretched, and more
particularly to the service of the lepers, who then abounded in Italy.
He was joined by great multitudes of disciples, and so the first Friars
of the Franciscan Order came into existence. An order of women devotees
was set up beside the original confraternity, and in addition great
numbers of men and women were brought into less formal association. He
preached, unmolested by the Moslems, be it noted, in Egypt and
Palestine, though the Fifth Crusade was then in progress. His relations
with the church are still a matter for discussion.[360] His work had
been sanctioned by Pope Innocent III, but while he was in the East there
was a reconstitution of his order, intensifying its discipline and
substituting authority for responsive impulse, and as a consequence of
these changes he resigned its headship. To the end he clung passionately
to the ideal of poverty, but he was hardly dead before the order was
holding property through trustees and building a great church and
monastery to his memory at Assisi. The disciplines of the order that
were applied after his death to his immediate associates are scarcely to
be distinguished from a persecution; several of the more conspicuous
zealots for simplicity were scourged, others were imprisoned, one was
killed while attempting to escape, and Brother Bernard, the “first
disciple,” passed a year in the woods and hills, hunted like a wild
beast.
This struggle within the Franciscan Order is a very interesting one,
because it foreshadows the great troubles that were coming to
Christendom. All through the thirteenth century a section of the
Franciscans were straining at the rule of the church, and in 1318 four
of them were burnt alive at Marseilles as incorrigible heretics. There
seems to have been little difference between the teaching and spirit of
St. Francis and that of Waldo in the twelfth century, the founder of the
murdered sect of Waldenses. Both were passionately enthusiastic for the
spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. But while Waldo rebelled against the
church, St. Francis did his best to be a good child of the church, and
his comment on the spirit of official Christianity was only implicit.
But both were instances of an outbreak of conscience against authority
and the ordinary procedure of the church. And it is plain that in the
second instance, as in the first, the church scented rebellion.
A very different character to St. Francis was the Spaniard St. Dominic
(1170-1221), who was, of all things, orthodox. He had a passion for the
argumentative conversion of heretics, and he was commissioned by Pope
Innocent III to go and preach to the Albigenses. His work went on side
by side with the fighting and massacres of the crusade; whom Dominic
could not convert, Innocent’s crusader slew; yet his very activities and
the recognition and encouragement of his order by the Pope witness to
the rising tide of discussion, and to the persuasion even of the papacy
that force was no remedy. In several respects the development of the
Black Friars or Dominicans--the Franciscans were the Grey Friars--shows
the Roman church at the parting of the ways, committing itself more and
more deeply to organized dogma, and so to a hopeless conflict with the
quickening intelligence and courage of mankind. She whose one duty was
to lead, chose to compel. The last discourse of St. Dominic to the
heretics he had sought to convert is preserved to us. It is a signpost
in history. It betrays the fatal exasperation of a man who has lost his
faith in the power of truth because _his_ truth has not prevailed. “For
many years,” he said, “I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness,
preaching, praying, and weeping. But according to the proverb of my
country, ‘where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.’ We
shall rouse against you princes and prelates, who, alas! will arm
nations and kingdoms against this land ... and thus blows will avail
where blessings and gentleness have been powerless.”[361]
The thirteenth century saw the development of a new institution in the
church, the papal Inquisition. Before this time it had been customary
for the Pope to make occasional inquests or inquiries into heresy in
this region or that, but now Innocent III saw in the new order of the
Dominicans a powerful instrument of suppression. The Inquisition was
organized as a standing inquiry under their direction, and with fire and
torment the church set itself, through this instrument, to assail and
weaken the human conscience in which its sole hope of world dominion
resided. Before the thirteenth century the penalty of death had been
inflicted but rarely upon heretics and unbelievers. Now in a hundred
market-places in Europe the dignitaries of the church watched the
blackened bodies of its antagonists, for the most part poor and
insignificant people, burn and sink pitifully, and their own great
mission to mankind burn and sink with them into dust and ashes.
The beginnings of the Franciscans and the Dominicans were but two among
many of the new forces that were arising in Christendom, either to help
or shatter the church, as its own wisdom might decide. Those two orders
the church did assimilate and use, though with a little violence in the
case of the former. But other forces were more frankly disobedient and
critical. A century and a half later came Wycliffe (1320-1384). He was a
learned doctor at Oxford; for a time he was Master of Balliol; and he
held various livings in the church. Quite late in his life he began a
series of outspoken criticisms of the corruption of the clergy and the
unwisdom of the church. He organized a number of poor priests, the
Wycliffites, to spread his ideas throughout England; and in order that
people should judge between the church and himself, he translated the
Bible into English. He was a more learned and far abler man than either
St. Francis or St. Dominic. He had supporters in high places and a great
following among the people; and though Rome raged against him, and
ordered his imprisonment, he died a free man, still administering the
Sacraments as parish priest of Lutterworth. But the black and ancient
spirit that was leading the Catholic church to its destruction would not
let his bones rest in his grave. By a decree of the Council of Constance
in 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burnt, an order which
was carried out at the command of Pope Martin V by Bishop Fleming in
1428. This desecration was not the act of some isolated fanatic; it was
the official act of the church.
§ 14
The history of the papacy is confusing to the general reader because of
the multitude and abundance of the Popes. They mostly began to reign as
old men, and their reigns were short, averaging less than two years
each. But certain of the Popes stand out and supply convenient handles
for the student to grasp. Such were Gregory I (590-604) the Great, the
first monkish Pope, the friend of Benedict, the sender of the English
mission. Other noteworthy Popes are Leo III (795-816), who crowned
Charlemagne, the scandalous Popes John XI (931-936) and John XII
(955-963), which latter was deposed by the Emperor Otto I, and the great
Hildebrand, who ended his days as Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), and who
did so much by establishing the celibacy of the clergy, and insisting
upon the supremacy of the church over kings and princes, to centralize
the power of the church in Rome. The next Pope but one after Gregory VII
was Urban II (1087-1099), the Pope of the First Crusade. The period from
the time of Gregory VII onward for a century and a half, was the great
period of ambition and effort for the church. There was a real sustained
attempt to unite all Christendom under a purified and reorganized
church.
The setting up of Latin kingdoms in Syria and the Holy Land, in
religious communion with Rome, after the First Crusade, marked the
opening stage of a conquest of Eastern Christianity by Rome that reached
its climax during the Latin rule in Constantinople (1204-1261).
In 1176, at Venice, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (Frederick I) knelt
to the Pope Alexander III, recognized his spiritual supremacy, and swore
fealty to him. But after the death of Alexander III, in 1181, the
peculiar weakness of the papacy, its liability to fall to old and
enfeebled men, became manifest. Five Popes tottered to the Lateran to
die within the space of ten years. Only with Innocent III (1198-1216)
did another vigorous Pope take up the great policy of the City of God.
Under Innocent III, the guardian of that Emperor Frederick II, whose
career we have already studied in §§ 10 and 12, and the five Popes who
followed him, the Pope of Rome came nearer to being the monarch of a
united Christendom than he had ever been before, and was ever to be
again. The empire was weakened by internal dissensions, Constantinople
was in Latin hands, from Bulgaria to Ireland and from Norway to Sicily
and Jerusalem the Pope was supreme. Yet this supremacy was more apparent
than real. For, as we have seen, while in the time of Urban the power
of faith was strong in all Christian Europe, in the time of Innocent III
the papacy had lost its hold upon the hearts of princes, and the faith
and conscience of the common people was turning against a merely
political and aggressive church.
The church in the thirteenth century was extending its legal power in
the world, and losing its grip upon men’s consciences. It was becoming
less persuasive and more violent. No intelligent man can tell of this
process or read of this process of failure without very mingled
feelings. The church had sheltered and formed a new Europe throughout
the long ages of European darkness and chaos; it had been the matrix in
which the new civilization had been cast. But this new-formed
civilization was impelled to grow by its own inherent vitality, and the
church lacked sufficient power of growth and accommodation. The time was
fast approaching when this matrix was to be broken.
The first striking intimation of the decay of the living and sustaining
forces of the papacy appeared when presently the Popes came into
conflict with the growing power of the French king. During the lifetime
of the Emperor Frederick II, Germany fell into disunion, and the French
king began to play the rôle of guard, supporter, and rival to the Pope
that had hitherto fallen to the Hohenstaufen emperors. A series of Popes
pursued the policy of supporting the French monarchs. French princes
were established in the kingdom of Sicily and Naples, with the support
and approval of Rome, and the French kings saw before them the
possibility of restoring and ruling the Empire of Charlemagne. When,
however, the German interregnum after the death of Frederick II, the
last of the Hohenstaufens, came to an end and Rudolf of Habsburg was
elected first Habsburg Emperor (1273), the policy of the Lateran began
to fluctuate between France and Germany, veering about with the
sympathies of each successive Pope. In the East in 1261 the Greeks
recaptured Constantinople from the Latin emperors, and the founder of
the new Greek dynasty, Michael Palæologus, Michael VIII, after some
unreal tentatives of reconciliation with the Pope, broke away from the
Roman communion altogether, and with that, and the fall of the Latin
kingdoms in Asia, the eastward ascendancy of the Popes came to an end.
In 1294 Boniface VIII became Pope. He was an Italian, hostile to the
French, and full of a sense of the great traditions and mission of Rome.
For a time he carried things with a high hand. In 1300 he held a
jubilee, and a vast multitude of pilgrims assembled in Rome. “So great
was the influx of money into the papal treasury, that two assistants
were kept busy with rakes collecting the offerings that were deposited
at the tomb of St. Peter.”[362] But this festival was a delusive
triumph. It is easier to raise a host of excursionists than a band of
crusaders. Boniface came into conflict with the French king in 1302, and
in 1303, as he was about to pronounce sentence of excommunication
against that monarch, he was surprised and arrested in his own ancestral
palace, at Anagni, by Guillaume de Nogaret. This agent from the French
king forced an entrance into the palace, made his way into the bedroom
of the frightened Pope--he was lying in bed with a cross in his
hands--and heaped threats and insults upon him. The Pope was liberated a
day or so later by the townspeople, and returned to Rome; but there he
was seized upon and again made prisoner by the Orsini family, and in a
few weeks’ time the shocked and disillusioned old man died a prisoner in
their hands.
The people of Anagni did resent the first outrage, and rose against
Nogaret to liberate Boniface, but then Anagni was the Pope’s native
town. The important point to note is that the French king, in this rough
treatment of the head of Christendom, was acting with the full approval
of his people; he had summoned a council of the Three Estates of France
(lords, church, and commons) and gained their consent before proceeding
to extremities. Neither in Italy, Germany, nor England was there the
slightest general manifestation of disapproval at this free handling of
the sovereign pontiff. The idea of Christendom had decayed until its
power over the minds of men had gone.
Throughout the fourteenth century the papacy did nothing to recover its
moral sway. The next Pope elected, Clement V, was a Frenchman, the
choice of King Philip of France. He never came to Rome. He set up his
court in the town of Avignon, which then belonged not to France, but to
the Papal See, though embedded in French territory, and there his
successors remained until 1377, when Pope Gregory XI returned to the
Vatican palace in Rome. But Gregory XI did not take the sympathies of
the whole church with him. Many of the cardinals were of French origin,
and their habits and associations were rooted deep at Avignon. When in
1378 Gregory XI died, and an Italian, Urban VI, was elected, these
dissentient cardinals declared the election invalid, and elected another
Pope, the anti-Pope, Clement VII. This split is called the Great Schism.
The Popes remained in Rome, and all the anti-French powers, the Emperor,
the King of England, Hungary, Poland, and the North of Europe were loyal
to them. The anti-Popes, on the other hand, continued in Avignon, and
were supported by the King of France, his ally the King of Scotland,
Spain, Portugal, and various German princes. Each Pope excommunicated
and cursed the adherents of his rival, so that by one standard or
another all Christendom was damned during this time (1378-1417). The
lamentable effect of this split upon the solidarity of Christendom it is
impossible to exaggerate. Is it any marvel that such men as Wycliffe
began to teach men to think on their own account when the fountain of
truth thus squirted against itself? In 1417 the Great Schism was healed
at the Council of Constance, the same council that dug up and burnt
Wycliffe’s bones, and which, as we shall tell later, caused the burning
of John Huss; at this council, Pope and anti-Pope resigned or were swept
aside, and Martin V became the sole Pope of a formally reunited but
spiritually very badly strained Christendom.
How later on the Council of Basle (1437) led to a fresh schism, and to
further anti-Popes, we cannot relate here.
Such, briefly, is the story of the great centuries of papal ascendancy
and papal decline. It is the story of the failure to achieve the very
noble and splendid idea of a unified and religious world. We have
pointed out in the previous section how greatly the inheritance of a
complex dogmatic theology encumbered the church in this its ambitious
adventure. It had too much theology, and not enough religion. But it may
not be idle to point out here how much the individual insufficiency of
the Popes also contributed to the collapse of its scheme and dignity.
There was no such level of education in the world as to provide a
succession of cardinals and popes with the breadth of knowledge and
outlook needed for the task they had undertaken; they were not
sufficiently educated for their task, and only a few, by sheer force of
genius, transcended that defect. And, as we have already pointed out,
they were, when at last they got to power, too old to use it. Before
they could grasp the situation they had to control, most of them were
dead. It would be interesting to speculate how far it would have tilted
the balance in favour of the church if the cardinals had retired at
fifty, and if no one could have been elected Pope after fifty-five. This
would have lengthened the average reign of each Pope, and enormously
increased the continuity of the policy of the church. And it is perhaps
possible that a more perfect system of selecting the cardinals, who were
the electors and counsellors of the Pope, might have been devised. The
rules and ways by which men reach power are of very great importance in
human affairs. The psychology of the ruler is a science that has still
to be properly studied. We have seen the Roman Republic wrecked, and
here we see the church failing in its world mission very largely through
ineffective electoral methods.
BOOK VII
THE MONGOL EMPIRES OF THE LAND WAYS AND THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE SEA
WAYS
XXXIV
THE GREAT EMPIRE OF JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS
(THE AGE OF THE LAND WAYS)
§ 1. _Asia at the end of the Twelfth Century._ § 2. _The Rise and
Victories of the Mongols._ § 3. _The Travels of Marco Polo._ § 4.
_The Ottoman Turks and Constantinople._ § 5. _Why the Mongols were
not Christianized._ § 5A. _Kublai Khan founds the Yuan Dynasty._ §
5B. _The Mongols Revert to Tribalism._ § 5C. _The Kipchak Empire
and the Tsar of Muscovy._ § 5D. _Timurlane._ § 5E. _The Mongol
Empire of India._ § 5F. _The Mongols and the Gipsies._
§ 1
We have to tell now of the last and greatest of all the raids of
nomadism upon the civilizations of the East and West. We have traced in
this history the development side by side of these two ways of living,
and we have pointed out that as the civilizations grew more extensive
and better organized, the arms, the mobility, and the intelligence of
the nomads also improved. The nomad was not simply an uncivilized man,
he was a man specialized and specializing along his own line. From the
very beginning of history the nomad and the settled people have been in
reaction. We have told of the Semitic and Elamite raids upon Sumeria; we
have seen the Western empire smashed by the nomads of the great plains
and Persia conquered and Byzantium shaken by the nomads of Arabia.
Whenever civilization seems to be choking amidst its weeds of wealth and
debt and servitude, when its faiths seem rotting into cynicism and its
powers of further growth are hopelessly entangled in effete formulæ, the
nomad drives in like a plough to break up the festering stagnation and
release the world to new beginnings. The Mongol aggression, which began
with the thirteenth century, was the greatest, and so far it has been
the last, of all these destructive reploughings of human association.
From entire obscurity the Mongols came very suddenly into history
towards the close of the twelfth century. They appeared in the country
to the north of China, in the land of origin of the Huns and Turks, and
they were manifestly of the same strain as these peoples. They were
gathered together under a chief, with whose name we will not tax the
memory of the reader; under his son Jengis Khan their power grew with
extraordinary swiftness.
The reader will already have an idea of the gradual breaking up of the
original unity of Islam. In the beginning of the thirteenth century
there were a number of separate and discordant Moslem states in Western
Asia. There was Egypt (with Palestine and much of Syria) under the
successors of Saladin, there was the Seljuk power in Asia Minor, there
was still an Abbasid caliphate in Bagdad, and to the east of this again
there had grown up a very considerable empire, the Kharismian empire,
that of the Turkish princes from Khiva who had conquered a number of
fragmentary Seljuk principalities and reigned from the Ganges Valley to
the Tigris. They had but an insecure hold on the Persian and Indian
populations.
[Illustration: Map of EUROPE and ASIA about 1200 A.D.]
The state of the Chinese civilization was equally inviting to an
enterprising invader. One last glimpse of China in this history was in
the seventh century during the opening years of the Tang dynasty, when
that shrewd and able emperor Tai-tsung was weighing the respective
merits of Nestorian Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and the teachings of
Lao Tse, and on the whole inclining to the opinion that Lao Tse was as
good a teacher as any. We have described his reception of the traveller
Yuan Chwang. Tai-tsung tolerated all religions, but several of his
successors conducted a pitiless persecution of the Buddhist faith; it
flourished in spite of these persecutions, and its monasteries played a
somewhat analogous part in at first sustaining learning and afterwards
retarding it, that the Christian monastic organization did in the West.
By the tenth century the great Tang dynasty was in an extreme state of
decay; the usual degenerative process through a series of voluptuaries
and incapables had gone on, and China broke up again politically into a
variable number of contending states, “The age of the Ten States,” an
age of confusion that lasted through the first half of the tenth
century. Then arose a dynasty, the Northern Sung (960-1127), which
established a sort of unity, but which was in constant struggle with a
number of Hunnish peoples from the north who were pressing down the
eastern coast. For a time one of these peoples, the Khitan, prevailed.
In the twelfth century these people had been subjugated and had given
place to another Hunnish empire, the empire of the Kin, with its capital
at Pekin and its southern boundary south of Hwangho. The Sung empire
shrank before this Kin empire. In 1138 the capital was shifted from
Nankin, which was now too close to the northern frontier, to the city of
Han Chau on the coast. From 1127 onward to 1295, the Sung dynasty is
known as the Southern Sung. To the northwest of its territories there
was now the Tartar empire of the Hsia; to the north, the Kin empire,
both states in which the Chinese population was under rulers in whom
nomadic traditions were still strong. So that here on the east also the
main masses of Asiatic mankind were under uncongenial rulers and ready
to accept, if not to welcome, the arrival of a conqueror.
Northern India we have already noted was also a conquered country at the
opening of the thirteenth century. It was at first a part of the Khivan
empire, but in 1206 an adventurous ruler, Kutub, who had been a slave
and who had risen as a slave to be governor of the Indian province, set
up a separate Moslem state of Hindustan in Delhi. Brahminism had long
since ousted Buddhism from India, but the converts to Islam were still
but a small ruling minority in the land.
Such was the political state of Asia when Jengis Khan began to
consolidate his power among the nomads in the country between Lakes
Balkash and Baikal in the beginning of the thirteenth century.
§ 2
The career of conquest of Jengis Khan and his immediate successors
astounded the world, and probably astounded no one more than these
Mongol Khans themselves.
The Mongols were in the twelfth century a tribe subject to those Kin who
had conquered Northeast China. They were a horde of nomadic horsemen
living in tents, and subsisting mainly upon mare’s milk products and
meat. Their occupations were pasturage and hunting, varied by war. They
drifted northward as the snows melted for summer pasture, and southward
to winter pasture after the custom of the steppes. Their military
education began with a successful insurrection against the Kin. The
empire of Kin had the resources of half China behind it, and in the
struggle the Mongols learnt very much of the military science of the
Chinese. By the end of the twelfth century they were already a fighting
tribe of exceptional quality.
The opening years of the career of Jengis were spent in developing his
military machine, in assimilating the Mongols and the associated tribes
about them into one organized army. His first considerable extension of
power was westward, when the Tartar Kirghis and the Uigurs (who were the
Tartar people of the Tarim basin) were not so much conquered as induced
to join his organization. He then attacked the Kin empire and took Pekin
(1214). The Khitan people, who had been so recently subdued by the Kin,
threw in their fortunes with his, and were of very great help to him.
The settled Chinese population went on sowing and reaping and trading
during this change of masters without lending its weight to either side.
We have already mentioned the very recent Kharismian empire of
Turkestan, Persia, and North India. This empire extended eastward to
Kashgar, and it must have seemed one of the most progressive and hopeful
empires of the time. Jengis Khan, while still engaged in this war with
the Kin empire, sent envoys to Kharismia. They were put to death, an
almost incredible stupidity. The Kharismian government, to use the
political jargon of to-day, had decided not to “recognize” Jengis Khan,
and took this spirited course with him. Thereupon (1218) the great host
of horsemen that Jengis Khan had consolidated and disciplined swept over
the Pamirs and down into Turkestan. It was well armed, and probably it
had some guns and gunpowder for siege work--for the Chinese were
certainly using gunpowder at this time, and the Mongols learnt its use
from them. Kashgar, Khokand, Bokhara fell and then Samarkand, the
capital of the Kharismian empire. Thereafter nothing held the Mongols in
the Kharismian territories. They swept westward to the Caspian, and
southward as far as Lahore. To the north of the Caspian a Mongol army
encountered a Russian force from Kieff. There was a series of battles,
in which the Russian armies were finally defeated and the Grand Duke of
Kieff taken prisoner. So it was the Mongols appeared on the northern
shores of the Black Sea. A panic swept Constantinople, which set itself
to reconstruct its fortifications. Meanwhile other armies were engaged
in the conquest of the empire of the Hsia in China. This was annexed,
and only the southern part of the Kin empire remained unsubdued. In 1227
Jengis Khan died in the midst of a career of triumph. His empire reached
already from the Pacific to the Dnieper. And it was an empire still
vigorously expanding.
Like all the empires founded by nomads, it was, to begin with, purely a
military and administrative empire, a framework rather than a rule. It
centred on the personality of the monarch, and its relations with the
mass of the populations over which it ruled was simply one of taxation
for the maintenance of the horde. But Jengis Khan had called to his aid
a very able and experienced administrator of the Kin empire, who was
learned in all the traditions and science of the Chinese. This
statesman, Yeliu Chutsai, was able to carry on the affairs of the
Mongols long after the death of Jengis Khan, and there can be little
doubt that he is one of the great political heroes of history. He
tempered the barbaric ferocity of his masters, and saved innumerable
cities and works of art from destruction. He collected archives and
inscriptions, and when he was accused of corruption, his sole wealth was
found to consist of documents and a few musical instruments. To him
perhaps quite as much as to Jengis is the efficiency of the Mongol
military machine to be ascribed. Under Jengis, we may note further, we
find the completest religious toleration established across the entire
breadth of Asia.
[Illustration: The EMPIRE of JENGIS KHAN at his death (1227)]
At the death of Jengis the capital of the new empire was still in the
great barbaric town of Karakorum in Mongolia. There an assembly of
Mongol leaders elected Ogdai Khan, the son of Jengis, as his successor.
The war against the vestiges of the Kin empire was prosecuted until
Kin was altogether subdued (1234). The Chinese empire to the south under
the Sung dynasty helped the Mongols in this task, so destroying their
own bulwark against the universal conquerors. The Mongol hosts then
swept right across Asia to Russia (1235), an amazing march. Kieff was
destroyed in 1240, and nearly all Russia became tributary to the
Mongols. Poland was ravaged, and a mixed army of Poles and Germans was
annihilated at the battle of Liegnitz in Lower Silesia in 1241. The
Emperor Frederick II does not seem to have made any great efforts to
stay the advancing tide.
“It is only recently,” says Bury, in his notes to Gibbon’s _Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire_, “that European history has begun to
understand that the successes of the Mongol army which overran Poland
and occupied Hungary in the spring of A.D. 1241 were won by consummate
strategy and were not due to a mere overwhelming superiority of numbers.
But this fact has not yet become a matter of common knowledge; the
vulgar opinion which represents the Tartars as a wild horde carrying all
before them solely by their multitude, and galloping through Eastern
Europe without a strategic plan, rushing at all obstacles and overcoming
them by mere weight, still prevails....
“It was wonderful how punctually and effectually the arrangements of the
commander were carried out in operations extending from the Lower
Vistula to Transylvania. Such a campaign was quite beyond the power of
any European army of the time, and it was beyond the vision of any
European commander. There was no general in Europe, from Frederick II
downward, who was not a tyro in strategy compared to Subutai. It should
also be noticed that the Mongols embarked upon the enterprise with full
knowledge of the political situation of Hungary and the condition of
Poland--they had taken care to inform themselves by a well-organized
system of spies; on the other hand, the Hungarians and Christian powers,
like childish barbarians, knew hardly anything about their enemies.”
But though the Mongols were victorious at Liegnitz, they did not
continue their drive westward. They were getting into woodlands and
hilly country, which did not suit their tactics; and so they turned
southward and prepared to settle in Hungary, massacring or assimilating
the kindred Magyar, even as these had previously massacred and
assimilated the mixed Scythians and Avars and Huns before them. From the
Hungarian plain they would probably have made raids west and south as
the Hungarians had done in the ninth century, the Avars in the seventh
and eighth, and the Huns in the fifth. But in Asia the Mongols were
fighting a stiff war of conquest against the Sung, and they were also
raiding Persia and Asia Minor; Ogdai died suddenly, and in 1242 there
was trouble about the succession, and recalled by this, the undefeated
hosts of Mongols began to pour back across Hungary and Rumania towards
the east.
To the great relief of Europe the dynastic troubles at Karakorum lasted
for some years, and this vast new empire showed signs of splitting up.
Mangu Khan became the Great Khan in 1251, and he nominated his brother
Kublai Khan as Governor-General of China. Slowly but surely the entire
Sung empire was subjugated, and as it was subjugated the eastern Mongols
became more and more Chinese in their culture and methods. Tibet was
invaded and devastated by Mangu, and Persia and Syria invaded in good
earnest. Another brother of Mangu, Hulagu, was in command of this latter
war. He turned his arms against the caliphate and captured Bagdad, in
which city he perpetrated a massacre of the entire population. Bagdad
was still the religious capital of Islam, and the Mongols had become
bitterly hostile to the Moslems. This hostility exacerbated the natural
discord of nomad and townsman. In 1259 Mangu died, and in 1260--for it
took the best part of a year for the Mongol leaders to gather from the
extremities of this vast empire, from Hungary and Syria and Scind and
China--Kublai was elected Great Khan. He was already deeply interested
in Chinese affairs; he made his capital Pekin instead of Karakorum, and
Persia, Syria, and Asia Minor became virtually independent under his
brother Hulagu, while the hordes of Mongols in Russia and Asia next to
Russia, and various smaller Mongol groups in Turkestan became also
practically separate. Kublai died in 1294, and with his death even the
titular supremacy of the Great Khan disappeared.
At the death of Kublai there was a main Mongol empire, with Pekin as its
capital, including all China and Mongolia; there was a second great
Mongol empire, that of Kipchak in Russia; there was a third in Persia,
that founded by Hulagu, the Ilkhan empire, to which the Seljuk Turks in
Asia Minor were tributary; there was a Siberian state between Kipchak
and Mongolia; and another separate state “Great Turkey” in Turkestan. It
is particularly remarkable that India beyond the Punjab was never
invaded by the Mongols during this period, and that an army under the
Sultan of Egypt completely defeated Ketboga, Hulagu’s general, in
Palestine (1260), and stopped them from entering Africa. By 1260 the
impulse of Mongol conquest had already passed its zenith. Thereafter the
Mongol story is one of division and decay.
The Mongol dynasty that Kublai Khan had founded in China, the Yuan
dynasty, lasted from 1280 until 1368. Later on a recrudescence of
Mongolian energy in Western Asia was destined to create a still more
enduring monarchy in India.
§ 3
Now this story of Mongolian conquests is surely the most remarkable in
all history. The conquests of Alexander the Great cannot compare with
them in extent. And their effect in diffusing and broadening men’s
ideas, though such things are more difficult to estimate, is at least
comparable to the spread of the Hellenic civilization which is
associated with Alexander’s adventure. For a time all Asia and Western
Europe enjoyed an open intercourse; all the roads were temporarily open,
and representatives of every nation appeared at the court of Karakorum.
The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the religious feud of
Christianity and Islam were lowered. Great hopes were entertained by the
papacy for the conversion of the Mongols to Christianity. Their only
religion so far had been Shamanism, a primitive paganism. Envoys of the
Pope, Buddhist priests from India, Parisian and Italian and Chinese
artificers, Byzantine and Armenian merchants, mingled with Arab
officials and Persian and Indian astronomers and mathematicians at the
Mongol court. We hear too much in history of the campaigns and massacres
of the Mongols, and not enough of their indubitable curiosity and zest
for learning. Not perhaps as an originative people, but as transmitters
of knowledge and method their influence upon the world’s history has
been enormous. And everything one can learn of the vague and romantic
personalities of Jengis or Kublai tends to confirm the impression that
these men were built upon a larger scale, and were at least as
understanding and creative monarchs as either that flamboyant but
egotistical figure Alexander the Great, or that raiser of political
ghosts, that energetic but illiterate theologian, Charlemagne.
[Illustration: MONGOL States about 1280 A.D. & MARCO POLO’S travels.]
The missionary enterprises of the papacy in Mongolia ended in failure.
Christianity was losing its persuasive power. The Mongols had no
prejudice against Christianity; they evidently preferred it at first to
Islam; but the missions that came to them were manifestly using the
power in the great teachings of Jesus to advance the vast claims of the
Pope to world dominion. Christianity so vitiated was not good enough for
the Mongol mind. To make the empire of the Mongols part of the kingdom
of God might have appealed to them; but not to make it a fief of a group
of French and Italian priests, whose claims were as gigantic as their
powers and outlook were feeble, who were now the creatures of the
Emperor of Germany, now the nominees of the King of France, and now the
victims of their own petty spites and vanities. In 1269 Kublai Khan sent
a mission to the Pope with the evident intention of finding some common
mode of action with Western Christendom. He asked that a hundred men of
learning and ability should be sent to his court to establish an
understanding. His mission found the Western world popeless, and engaged
in one of those disputes about the succession that are so frequent in
the history of the papacy. For two years there was no pope at all. When
at last a pope was appointed, he despatched two Dominican friars to
convert the greatest power in Asia to his rule! Those worthy men were
appalled by the length and hardship of the journey before them, and
found an early excuse for abandoning the expedition.
But this abortive mission was only one of a number of attempts to
communicate, and always they were feeble and feeble-spirited attempts,
with nothing of the conquering fire of the earlier Christian missions.
Innocent IV had already sent some Dominicans to Karakorum, and Saint
Louis of France had also despatched missionaries and relics by way of
Persia; Mangu Khan had numerous Nestorian Christians at his court, and
subsequent papal envoys actually reached Pekin. We hear of the
appointment of various legates and bishops to the East, but many of
these seem to have lost themselves and perhaps their lives before they
reached China. There was a papal legate in Pekin in 1346, but he seems
to have been a mere papal diplomatist. With the downfall of the
Mongolian (Yuan) dynasty (1368), the dwindling opportunity of the
Christian missions passed altogether. The house of Yuan was followed by
that of Ming, a strongly nationalist Chinese dynasty, at first very
hostile to all foreigners. There may have been a massacre of the
Christian missions. Until the later days of the Mings (1644) little more
is heard of Christianity, whether Nestorian or Catholic, in China. Then
a fresh and rather more successful attempt to propagate Catholic
Christianity in China was made by the Jesuits, but this second
missionary wave reached China by the sea.
In the year 1298 a naval battle occurred between the Genoese and the
Venetians, in which the latter were defeated. Among the 7000 prisoners
taken by the Genoese was a Venetian gentleman named Marco Polo, who had
been a great traveller, and who was very generally believed by his
neighbours to be given to exaggeration. He had taken part in that first
mission to Kublai Khan, and had gone on when the two Dominicans turned
back. While this Marco Polo was a prisoner in Genoa, he beguiled his
tedium by talking of his travels to a certain writer named Rusticiano,
who wrote them down. We will not enter here into the vexed question of
the exact authenticity of Rusticiano’s story--we do not certainly know
in what language it was written--but there can be no doubt of the
general truth of this remarkable narrative, which became enormously
popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with all men of active
intelligence. _The Travels of Marco Polo_ is one of the great books of
history. It opens this world of the thirteenth century, this century
which saw the reign of Frederick II and the beginnings of the
Inquisition, to our imaginations as no mere historian’s chronicle can
do. It led directly to the discovery of America.
It begins by telling of the journey of Marco’s father, Nicolo Polo, and
uncle, Maffeo Polo, to China. These two were Venetian merchants of
standing, living in Constantinople, and somewhen about 1260 they went to
the Crimea and thence to Kazan; from that place they journeyed to
Bokhara, and at Bokhara they fell in with a party of envoys from Kublai
Khan in China to his brother Hulagu in Persia. These envoys pressed them
to come on to the Great Khan, who at that time had never seen men of the
“Latin” peoples. They went on; and it is clear they made a very
favourable impression upon Kublai, and interested him greatly in the
civilization of Christendom. They were made the bearers of that request
for a hundred teachers and learned men, “intelligent men acquainted with
the Seven Arts, able to enter into controversy and able clearly to prove
to idolaters and other kinds of folk that the Law of Christ was best,”
to which we have just alluded. But when they returned Christendom was in
a phase of confusion, and it was only after a delay of two years that
they got their authorization to start for China again in the company of
those two faint-hearted Dominicans. They took with them young Marco, and
it is due to his presence and the boredom of his subsequent captivity at
Genoa that this most interesting experience has been preserved to us.
The three Polos started by way of Palestine and not by the Crimea, as in
the previous expedition. They had with them a gold tablet and other
indications from the Great Khan that must have greatly facilitated their
journey. The Great Khan had asked for some oil from the lamp that burns
in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem; and so thither they first went, and
then by way of Cilicia into Armenia. They went thus far north because
the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Ilkhan domains at this time. Thence
they came by way of Mesopotamia to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, as if they
contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz they met merchants from India. For
some reason they did not take ship, but instead turned northward through
the Persian deserts, and so by way of Balkh over the Pamir to Kashgar,
and by way of Kotan and the Lob Nor (so following in the footsteps of
Yuan Chwang) into the Hwangho Valley and on to Pekin. Pekin Polo calls
“Cambulac”; Northern China, “Cathay” (= Khitan); and Southern China of
the former Sung dynasty, “Manzi.” At Pekin was the Great Khan, and they
were hospitably entertained. Marco particularly pleased Kublai; he was
young and clever, and it is clear he had mastered the Tartar language
very thoroughly. He was given an official position and sent on several
missions, chiefly in South-west China. The tale he had to tell of vast
stretches of smiling and prosperous country, “all the way excellent
hostelries for travellers,” and “fine vineyards, fields, and gardens,”
of “many abbeys” of Buddhist monks, of manufactures of “cloth of silk
and gold and many fine taffetas,” a “constant succession of cities and
boroughs,” and so on, first roused the incredulity and then fired the
imagination of all Europe. He told of Burmah, and of its great armies
with hundreds of elephants, and how these animals were defeated by the
Mongol bowmen, and also of the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of
Japan, and greatly exaggerated the amount of gold in that country. And,
still more wonderful, he told of Christians and Christian rulers in
China, and of a certain “Prester John,” John the Priest, who was the
“king” of a Christian people. Those people he had not seen. Apparently
they were a tribe of Nestorian Tartars in Mongolia. An understandable
excitement probably made Rusticiano over-emphasize what must have seemed
to him the greatest marvel of the whole story, and Prester John became
one of the most stimulating legends of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. It encouraged European enterprise enormously to think that
far away in China was a community of their co-religionists, presumably
ready to welcome and assist them. For three years Marco ruled the city
of Yang-chow as governor, and he probably impressed the Chinese
inhabitants as being very little more of a foreigner than any Tartar
would have been. He may also have been sent on a mission to India.
Chinese records mention a certain Polo attached to the imperial council
in 1277, a very valuable confirmation of the general truth of the Polo
story.
The Polos had taken about three and a half years to get to China. They
stayed there upwards of sixteen. Then they began to feel homesick. They
were the protégés of Kublai, and possibly they felt that his favours
roused a certain envy that might have disagreeable results after his
death. They sought his permission to return. For a time he refused it,
and then an opportunity occurred. Argon, the Ilkhan monarch of Persia,
the grandson of Hulagu, Kublai’s brother, had lost his Mongol wife, and
on her deathbed had promised not to wed any other woman but a Mongol of
her own tribe. He sent ambassadors to Pekin, and a suitable princess was
selected, a girl of seventeen. To spare her the fatigues of the caravan
route, it was decided to send her by sea with a suitable escort. The
“Barons” in charge of her asked for the company of the Polos because
these latter were experienced travellers and sage men, and the Polos
snatched at this opportunity of getting homeward. The expedition sailed
from some port on the east of South China; they stayed long in Sumatra
and South India, and they reached Persia after a voyage of two years.
They delivered the young lady safely to Argon’s successor--for Argon was
dead--and she married Argon’s son. The Polos then went by Tabriz to
Trebizond, sailed to Constantinople, and got back to Venice about 1295.
It is related that the returned travellers, dressed in Tartar garb, were
refused admission to their own house. It was some time before they could
establish their identity. Many people who admitted that, were still
inclined to look askance at them as shabby wanderers; and, in order to
dispel such doubts, they gave a great feast, and when it was at its
height they had their old padded suits brought to them, dismissed the
servants, and then ripped open these garments, whereupon an incredible
display of “rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, emeralds, and diamonds”
poured out before the dazzled company. Even after this, Marco’s accounts
of the size and population of China were received with much furtive
mockery. The wits nicknamed him _Il Milione_, because he was always
talking of millions of people and millions of ducats.
Such was the story that raised eyebrows first in Venice and then
throughout the Western world. The European literature, and especially
the European romance of the fifteenth century, echoes with the names in
Marco Polo’s story, with Cathay and Cambulac and the like.
§ 4
These travels of Marco Polo were only the beginning of a very
considerable intercourse. That intercourse was to bring many
revolutionary ideas and many revolutionary things to Europe, including
a greatly extended use of paper and printing from blocks, the almost
equally revolutionary use of gunpowder in warfare, and the mariner’s
compass which was to release the European shipping from navigation by
coasting. The popular imagination has always been disposed to ascribe
every such striking result to Marco Polo. He has become the type and
symbol for all such interchanges. As a matter of fact, there is no
evidence that he had any share in these three importations. There were
many mute Marco Polos who never met their Rusticianos, and history has
not preserved their names. Before we go on, however, to describe the
great widening of the mental horizons of Europe that was now beginning,
and to which this book of travels was to contribute very materially, it
will be convenient first to note a curious side consequence of the great
Mongol conquests, the appearance of the Ottoman Turks upon the
Dardanelles, and next to state in general terms the breaking up and
development of the several parts of the empire of Jengis Khan.
The Ottoman Turks were a little band of fugitives who fled southwesterly
before the first invasion of Western Turkestan by Jengis. They made
their long way from Central Asia, over deserts and mountains and through
alien populations, seeking some new lands in which they might settle. “A
small band of alien herdsmen,” says Sir Mark Sykes, “wandering unchecked
through crusades and counter-crusades, principalities, empires, and
states. Where they camped, how they moved and preserved their flocks and
herds, where they found pasture, how they made their peace with the
various chiefs through whose territories they passed, are questions
which one may well ask in wonder.”
They found a resting-place at last and kindred and congenial neighbours
on the tablelands of Asia Minor among the Seljuk Turks. Most of this
country, the modern Anatolia, was now largely Turkish in speech and
Moslem in religion, except that there was a considerable proportion of
Greeks, Jews, and Armenians in the town populations. No doubt the
various strains of Hittite, Phrygian, Trojan, Lydian, Ionian Greek,
Cimmerian, Galatian, and Italian (from the Pergamus times) still flowed
in the blood of the people, but they had long since forgotten these
ancestral elements. They were indeed much the same blend of ancient
Mediterranean dark-whites, Nordic Aryans, Semites and Mongolians as were
the inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, but they believed themselves to
be a pure Turanian race, and altogether superior to the Christians on
the other side of the Bosphorus.
Gradually the Ottoman Turks became important, and at last dominant among
the small principalities into which the Seljuk empire, the empire of
“Roum,” had fallen. Their relations with the dwindling empire of
Constantinople remained for some centuries tolerantly hostile. They made
no attack upon the Bosphorus, but they got a footing in Europe at the
Dardanelles, and, using this route, the route of Xerxes and not the
route of Darius, they pushed their way steadily into Macedonia, Epirus,
Illyria, Yugo-Slavia, and Bulgaria. In the Serbs (Yugo-Slavs) and
Bulgarians the Turks found people very like themselves in culture and,
though neither side recognized it, probably very similar in racial
admixture, with a little less of the dark Mediterranean and Mongolian
strains than the Turks and a trifle more of the Nordic element. But
these Balkan peoples were Christians, and bitterly divided among
themselves. The Turks on the other hand spoke one language; they had a
greater sense of unity, they had the Moslem habits of temperance and
frugality, and they were on the whole better soldiers. They converted
what they could of the conquered people to Islam; the Christians they
disarmed, and conferred upon them the monopoly of tax-paying. Gradually
the Ottoman princes consolidated an empire that reached from the Taurus
mountains in the east to Hungary and Roumania in the west. Adrianople
became their chief city. They surrounded the shrunken empire of
Constantinople on every side.
The Ottomans organized a standing military force, the Janissaries,
rather on the lines of the Mamelukes who dominated Egypt. “These troops
were formed of levies of Christian youths to the extent of one thousand
per annum, who were affiliated to the Bektashi order of dervishes, and
though at first not obliged to embrace Islam, were one and all strongly
imbued with the mystic and fraternal ideas of the confraternity to which
they were attached. Highly paid, well disciplined, a close and jealous
secret society, the Janissaries provided the newly formed Ottoman state
with a patriotic force of trained infantry soldiers, which, in an age
of light cavalry and hired companies of mercenaries, was an invaluable
asset....[363]
[Illustration: The OTTOMAN EMPIRE before 1453.]
“The relations between the Ottoman Sultans and the Emperors has been
singular in the annals of Moslem and Christian states. The Turks had
been involved in the family and dynastic quarrels of the Imperial City,
were bound by ties of blood to the ruling families, frequently supplied
troops for the defence of Constantinople, and on occasion hired parts of
its garrison to assist them in their various campaigns; the sons of the
Emperors and Byzantine statesmen even accompanied the Turkish forces in
the field, yet the Ottomans never ceased to annex Imperial territories
and cities both in Asia and Thrace. This curious intercourse between the
House of Osman and the Imperial government had a profound effect on both
institutions; the Greeks grew more and more debased and demoralized by
the shifts and tricks that their military weakness obliged them to adopt
towards their neighbours, the Turks were corrupted by the alien
atmosphere of intrigue and treachery which crept into their domestic
life. Fratricide and parricide, the two crimes which most frequently
stained the annals of the Imperial Palace, eventually formed a part of
the policy of the Ottoman dynasty. One of the sons of Murad I embarked
on an intrigue with Andronicus, the son of the Greek Emperor, to murder
their respective fathers....
“The Byzantine found it more easy to negotiate with the Ottoman Pasha
than with the Pope. For years the Turks and Byzantines had intermarried,
and hunted in couples in strange by-paths of diplomacy. The Ottoman had
played the Bulgar and the Serb of Europe against the Emperor, just as
the Emperor had played the Asiatic Amir against the Sultan; the Greek
and Turkish Royal Princes had mutually agreed to hold each other’s
rivals as prisoners and hostages; in fact, Turk and Byzantine policy had
so intertwined that it is difficult to say whether the Turks regarded
the Greeks as their allies, enemies, or subjects, or whether the Greeks
looked upon the Turks as their tyrants, destroyers, or
protectors....”[364]
It was in 1453, under the Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad II, that
Constantinople at last fell to the Moslems. He attacked it from the
European side, and with a great power of artillery. The Greek Emperor
was killed, and there was much looting and massacre. The great church of
Saint Sophia which Justinian the Great had built (532) was plundered of
its treasures and turned at once into a mosque. This event sent a wave
of excitement throughout Europe, and an attempt was made to organize a
crusade, but the days of the crusades were past.
[Illustration: The OTTOMAN EMPIRE at the death of Suleiman the
Magnificent 1566 A.D.]
Says Sir Mark Sykes: “To the Turks the capture of Constantinople was a
crowning mercy and yet a fatal blow. Constantinople had been the tutor
and polisher of the Turks. So long as the Ottomans could draw science,
learning, philosophy, art, and tolerance from a living fountain of
civilization in the heart of their dominions, so long had the Ottomans
not only brute force, but intellectual power. So long as the Ottoman
Empire had in Constantinople a free port, a market, a centre of world
finance, a pool of gold, an exchange, so long did the Ottomans never
lack for money and financial support. Muhammad was a great statesman,
the moment he entered Constantinople he endeavoured to stay the damage
his ambition had done; he supported the patriarch, he conciliated the
Greeks, he did all he could to continue Constantinople the city of the
Emperors ... but the fatal step had been taken; Constantinople as the
city of the Sultans was Constantinople no more; the markets died away,
the culture and civilization fled, the complex finance faded from sight;
and the Turks had lost their governors and their support. On the other
hand, the corruptions of Byzantium remained, the bureaucracy, the
eunuchs, the palace guards, the spies, the bribers, go-betweens--all
these the Ottomans took over, and all these survived in luxuriant life.
The Turks, in taking Stambul, let slip a treasure and gained a
pestilence....”
Muhammad’s ambition was not sated by the capture of Constantinople. He
set his eyes also upon Rome. He captured and looted the Italian town of
Otranto, and it is probable that a very vigorous and perhaps successful
attempt to conquer Italy--for the peninsula was divided against
itself--was averted only by his death (1481). His sons engaged in
fratricidal strife. Under Bayezid II (1481-1512), his successor, war was
carried into Poland, and most of Greece was conquered. Selim
(1512-1520), the son of Bayezid, extended the Ottoman power over Armenia
and conquered Egypt. In Egypt, the last Abbasid Caliph was living under
the protection of the Mameluke Sultan--for the Fatimite caliphate was a
thing of the past. Selim bought the title of Caliph from this last
degenerate Abbasid, and acquired the sacred banner and other relics of
the Prophet. So the Ottoman Sultan became also Caliph of all Islam.
Selim was followed by Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566), who
conquered Bagdad in the east and the greater part of Hungary in the
west, and very nearly captured Vienna. His fleets also took Algiers, and
inflicted a number of reverses upon the Venetians. In most of his
warfare with the empire he was in alliance with the French. Under him
the Ottoman power reached its zenith.
§ 5
Let us now very briefly run over the subsequent development of the main
masses of the empire of the Great Khan. In no case did Christianity
succeed in capturing the imagination of these Mongol states.
Christianity was in a phase of moral and intellectual insolvency,
without any collective faith, energy, or honour; we have told of the
wretched brace of timid Dominicans which was the Pope’s reply to the
appeal of Kublai Khan, and we have noted the general failure of the
overland mission of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That
apostolic passion that could win whole nations to the Kingdom of Heaven
was dead in the church.
In 1305, as we have told, the Pope became the kept pontiff of the French
king. All the craft and policy of the Popes of the thirteenth century to
oust the Emperor from Italy had only served to let in the French to
replace him. From 1305 to 1377 the Popes remained at Avignon; and such
slight missionary effort as they made was merely a part of the strategy
of Western European politics.[365] In 1377 the Pope Gregory XI did
indeed re-enter Rome and die there, but the French cardinals split off
from the others at the election of his successor, and two Popes were
elected, one at Avignon and one at Rome. This split, the Great Schism,
lasted from 1378 to 1418. Each Pope cursed the other, and put all his
supporters under an interdict. Such was the state of Christianity, and
such were now the custodians of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. All
Asia was white unto harvest, but there was no effort to reap it.
When at last the church was reunited and missionary energy returned with
the foundation of the order of the Jesuits, the days of opportunity were
over. The possibility of a world-wide moral unification of East and West
through Christianity had passed away. The Mongols in China and Central
Asia turned to Buddhism; in South Russia, Western Turkestan, and the
Ilkhan Empire they embraced Islam.
§ 5A
In China the Mongols were already saturated with Chinese civilization by
the time of Kublai. After 1280 the Chinese annals treat Kublai as a
Chinese monarch, the founder of the Yuan dynasty (1280-1368). This
Mongol dynasty was finally over-thrown by a Chinese nationalist
movement which set up the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), a cultivated and
artistic line of emperors, ruling until a northern people, the Manchus,
who were the same as the Kin whom Jengis had overthrown, conquered China
and established a dynasty which gave way only to a native republican
form of government in 1912.
It was the Manchus who obliged the Chinese to wear pig-tails as a mark
of submission. The pigtailed Chinaman is quite a recent, and now a
vanished figure in history.
§ 5B
In the Pamirs, in much of Eastern and Western Turkestan, and to the
north, the Mongols dropped back towards the tribal conditions from which
they had been lifted by Jengis. It is possible to trace the dwindling
succession of many of the small Kans who became independent during this
period, almost down to the present time. The Kalmuks in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries founded a considerable empire, but dynastic
troubles broke it up before it had extended its power beyond Central
Asia. The Chinese recovered Eastern Turkestan from them about 1757.
Tibet was more and more closely linked with China, and became the great
home of Buddhism and Buddhist monasticism.
Over most of the area of Western Central Asia and Persia and
Mesopotamia, the ancient distinction of nomad and settled population
remains to this day. The townsmen despise and cheat the nomads, the
nomads ill-treat and despise the townsfolk.
§ 5C
The Mongols of the great realm of Kipchak remained nomadic, and grazed
their stock across the wide plains of South Russia and Western Asia
adjacent to Russia. They became not very devout Moslems, retaining many
traces of their earlier barbaric Shamanism. Their chief Khan was the
Khan of the Golden Horde. To the west, over large tracts of open
country, and more particularly in what is now known as Ukrainia, the old
Scythian population, Slavs with a Mongol admixture, reverted to a
similar nomadic life. These Christian nomads, the Cossacks, formed a
sort of frontier screen against the Tartars, and their free and
adventurous life was so attractive to the peasants of Poland and
Lithuania that severe laws had to be passed to prevent a vast migration
from the ploughlands to the steppes. The serf-owning landlords of Poland
regarded the Cossacks with considerable hostility on this account, and
war was as frequent between the Polish chivalry and the Cossacks as it
was between the latter and the Tartars.[366]
In the empire of Kipchak, as in Turkestan almost up to the present time,
while the nomads roamed over wide areas, a number of towns and
cultivated regions sustained a settled population which usually paid
tribute to the nomad Khan. In such towns as Kieff, Moscow, and the like,
the pre-Mongol, Christian town life went on under Russian dukes or
Tartar governors, who collected the tribute for the Khan of the Golden
Horde. The Grand Duke of Moscow gained the confidence of the Khan, and
gradually, under his authority, obtained an ascendancy over many of his
fellow tributaries. In the fifteenth century, under its grand duke, Ivan
III, Ivan the Great (1462-1505), Moscow threw off its Mongol allegiance
and refused to pay tribute any longer (1480). The successors of
Constantine no longer reigned in Constantinople, and Ivan took
possession of the Byzantine double-headed eagle for his arms. He claimed
to be the heir to Byzantium because of his marriage (1472) with Zoe
Palæologus of the imperial line. This ambitious grand dukedom of Moscow
assailed and subjugated the ancient Northman trading republic of
Novgorod to the north, and so the foundations of the modern Russian
Empire were laid and a link with the mercantile life of the Baltic
established. Ivan III did not, however, carry his claim to be the heir
of the Christian rulers of Constantinople to the extent of assuming the
imperial title. This step was taken by his grandson, Ivan IV (Ivan the
Terrible, because of his insane cruelties; 1533-1584). Although the
ruler of Moscow thus came to be called Tsar (Cæsar), his tradition was
in many respects Tartar rather than European; he was autocratic after
the unlimited Asiatic pattern, and the form of Christianity he affected
was the Eastern, court-ruled, “orthodox” form, which had reached Russia
long before the Mongol conquest, by means of Bulgarian missionaries from
Constantinople.
To the west of the domains of Kipchak, outside the range of Mongol rule,
a second centre of Slav consolidation had been set up during the tenth
and eleventh centuries in Poland. The Mongol wave had washed over
Poland, but had never subjugated it. Poland was not “orthodox,” but
Roman Catholic in religion; it used the Latin alphabet instead of the
strange Russian letters, and its monarch never assumed an absolute
independence of the Emperor. Poland was in fact in its origins an
outlying part of Christendom and of the Holy Empire; Russia never was
anything of the sort.
§ 5D
The nature and development of the empire of the Ilkhans in Persia,
Mesopotamia, and Syria is perhaps the most interesting of all the
stories of these Mongol powers, because in this region nomadism really
did attempt, and really did to a very considerable degree succeed in its
attempt to stamp a settled civilized system out of existence. When
Jengis Khan first invaded China, we are told that there was a serious
discussion among the Mongol chiefs whether all the towns and settled
populations should not be destroyed. To these simple practitioners of
the open-air life the settled populations seemed corrupt, crowded,
vicious, effeminate, dangerous, and incomprehensible; a detestable human
efflorescence upon what would otherwise have been good pasture. They had
no use whatever for the towns. The early Franks and the Anglo-Saxon
conquerors of South Britain had much the same feeling towards townsmen.
But it was only under Hulagu in Mesopotamia that these ideas seem to
have been embodied in a deliberate policy. The Mongols here did not only
burn and massacre; they destroyed the irrigation system that had endured
for at least eight thousand years, and with that the mother civilization
of all the Western world came to an end. Since the days of the
priest-kings of Sumeria there had been a continuous cultivation in these
fertile regions, an accumulation of tradition, a great population, a
succession of busy cities, Eridu, Nippur, Babylon, Nineveh, Ctesiphon,
Bagdad. Now the fertility ceased. Mesopotamia became a land of ruins
and desolation, through which great waters ran to waste, or overflowed
their banks to make malarious swamps. Later on Mosul and Bagdad revived
feebly as second-rate towns....
[Illustration: The EMPIRE of TIMURLANE]
But for the defeat and death of Hulagu’s general Kitboga in Palestine
(1260), the same fate might have overtaken Egypt. But Egypt was now a
Turkish sultanate; it was dominated by a body of soldiers, the
Mamelukes, whose ranks, like those of their imitators, the Janissaries
of the Ottoman Empire, were recruited and kept vigorous by the purchase
and training of boy slaves. A capable Sultan such men would obey; a weak
or evil one they would replace. Under this ascendancy Egypt remained an
independent power until 1517, when it fell to the Ottoman Turks.
The first destructive vigour of Hulagu’s Mongols soon subsided, but in
the fifteenth century a last tornado of nomadism arose in Western
Turkestan under the leadership of a certain Timur the Lame, or
Timurlane. He was descended in the female line from Jengis Khan. He
established himself in Samarkand, and spread his authority over Kipchak
(Turkestan to South Russia), Siberia, and southward as far as the Indus.
He assumed the title of Great Khan in 1369. He was a nomad of the savage
school, and he created an empire of desolation from North India to
Syria. Pyramids of skulls were his particular architectural fancy; after
the storming of Ispahan he made one of 70,000. His ambition was to
restore the empire of Jengis Khan as he conceived it, a project in which
he completely failed. He spread destruction far and wide; the Ottoman
Turks--it was before the taking of Constantinople and their days of
greatness--and Egypt paid him tribute; the Punjab he devastated; and
Delhi surrendered to him. After Delhi had surrendered, however, he made
a frightful massacre of its inhabitants. At the time of his death (1405)
very little remained to witness to his power but a name of horror,
ruins, and desolated countries, and a shrunken and impoverished domain
in Persia.
The dynasty founded by Timur in Persia was extinguished by another
Turkoman horde fifty years later.
§ 5E[367]
In 1505 a small Turkoman chieftain, Baber, a descendant of Timur and
therefore of Jengis, was forced after some years of warfare and some
temporary successes--for a time he held Samarkand--to fly with a few
followers over the Hindu Kush to Afghanistan. There his band increased,
and he made himself master of Cabul. He assembled an army, accumulated
guns, and then laid claim to the Punjab, because Timur had conquered it
a hundred and seven years before. He pushed his successes beyond the
Punjab. India was in a state of division, and quite ready to welcome any
capable invader who promised peace and order. After various fluctuations
of fortune Baber met the Sultan of Delhi at Panipat (1525), ten miles
north of that town, and though he had but 25,000 men, provided, however,
with guns, against a thousand elephants and four times as many men--the
numbers, by the by, are his own estimate--he gained a complete victory.
He ceased to call himself King of Cabul, and assumed the title of
Emperor of Hindustan. “This,” he wrote, “is quite a different world from
our countries.” It was finer, more fertile, altogether richer. He
conquered as far as Bengal, but his untimely death in 1530 checked the
tide of Mongol conquest for a quarter of a century, and it was only
after the accession of his grandson Akbar that it flowed again. Akbar
subjugated all India as far as Berar, and his great-grandson Aurungzeb
(1658-1707) was practically master of the entire peninsula. This great
dynasty of Baber (1526-1530), Humayun (1530-1556), Akbar (1556-1605),
Jehangir (1605-1628), Shah Jehan (1628-1658), and Aurungzeb (1658-1707),
in which son succeeded father for six generations, this “Mogul (=
Mongol) dynasty,”[368] marks the most splendid age that had hitherto
dawned upon India. Akbar next perhaps to Asoka, was one of the greatest
of Indian monarchs, and one of the few royal figures that approach the
stature of great men.
To Akbar it is necessary to give the same distinctive attention that we
have shown to Charlemagne or Constantine the Great. He is one of the
hinges of history. Much of his work of consolidation and organization in
India survives to this day. It was taken over and continued by the
British when they became the successors of the Mogul emperors. The
British monarch, indeed, now uses as his Indian title the title of the
Mogul emperors, _Kaisar-i-Hind_. All the other great administrations of
the descendants of Jengis Khan, in Russia, throughout Western and
Central Asia and in China, have long since dissolved away and given
place to other forms of government. Their governments were indeed little
more than taxing governments; a system of revenue-collecting to feed the
central establishment of the ruler, like the Golden Horde in South
Russia or the imperial city at Karakorum or Pekin. The life and ideas of
the people they left alone, careless how they lived--so long as they
paid. So it was that after centuries of subjugation, a Christian Moscow
and Kieff, a Shiite Persia, and a thoroughly Chinese China rose again
from their Mongol submergence. But Akbar made a new India. He gave the
princes and ruling classes of India some inklings at least of a common
interest. If India is now anything more than a sort of rag-bag of
incoherent states and races, a prey to every casual raider from the
north, it is very largely due to him.
His distinctive quality was his openness of mind. He set himself to make
every sort of able man in India, whatever his race or religion,
available for the public work of Indian life. His instinct was the true
statesman’s instinct for synthesis. His empire was to be neither a
Moslem nor a Mongol one, nor was it to be Rajput or Aryan, or Dravidian,
or Hindu, or high or low caste; it was to be _Indian_. “During the years
of his training he enjoyed many opportunities of noting the good
qualities, the fidelity, the devotion, often the nobility of soul, of
those Hindu princes, whom, because they were followers of Brahma, his
Moslem courtiers devoted mentally to eternal torments. He noted that
these men, and men who thought like them, constituted the vast majority
of his subjects. He noted, further, of many of them, and those the most
trustworthy, that though they had apparently much to gain from a worldly
point of view by embracing the religion of the court, they held fast to
their own. His reflective mind, therefore, was unwilling from the outset
to accept the theory that because he, the conqueror, the ruler,
happened to be born a Muhammadan, therefore Muhammadanism was true for
all mankind. Gradually his thoughts found words in the utterance: ‘Why
should I claim to guide men before I myself am guided?’ and, as he
listened to other doctrines and other creeds, his honest doubts became
confirmed, and, noting daily the bitter narrowness of sectarianism, no
matter of what form of religion, he became more and more wedded to the
principle of toleration for all.”
“The son of a fugitive emperor,” says Dr. Emil Schmit, “born in the
desert, brought up in nominal confinement, he had known the bitter side
of life from his youth up. Fortune had given him a powerful frame, which
he trained to support the extremities of exertion. Physical exercise was
with him a passion; he was devoted to the chase and especially to the
fierce excitement of catching the wild horse or elephant or slaying the
dangerous tiger. On one occasion, when it was necessary to dissuade the
Raja of Jodhpore to abandon his intention of forcing the widow of his
deceased son to mount the funeral pyre, Akbar rode two hundred and
twenty miles in two days. In battle he displayed the utmost bravery. He
led his troops in person during the dangerous part of a campaign,
leaving to his generals the lighter task of finishing the war. In every
victory he displayed humanity to the conquered, and decisively opposed
any exhibition of cruelty. Free from all these prejudices which separate
society and create dissension, tolerant to men of other beliefs,
impartial to men of other races, whether Hindu or Dravidian, he was a
man obviously marked out to weld the conflicting elements of his kingdom
into a strong and prosperous whole.
“In all seriousness he devoted himself to the work of peace. Moderate in
all pleasures, needing but little sleep and accustomed to divide his
tune with the utmost accuracy, he found leisure to devote himself to
science and art after the completion of his State duties. The famous
personages and scholars who adorned the capital he had built for himself
at Fatehpur-Sikri were at the same time his friends; every Thursday
evening a circle of these was collected for intellectual conversation
and philosophical discussion. His closest friends were two highly
talented brothers, Faizi and Abul Fazl, the sons of a learned
free-thinker. The elder of these was a famous scholar in Hindu
literature; with his help, and under his direction, Akbar had the most
important of the Sanskrit works translated into Persian. Fazl, on the
other hand, who was an especially close friend of Akbar, was a general,
a statesman, and an organizer, and to his activity Akbar’s kingdom
chiefly owed the solidarity of its internal organization.”[369]
(Such was the quality of the circle that used to meet in the palaces of
Fatehpur-Sikri, buildings which still stand in the Indian sunlight--but
empty now and desolate. Fatehpur-Sikri, like the city of Ambar, is now a
dead city. A few years ago the child of a British official was killed by
a panther in one of its silent streets.)
All this that we have quoted reveals a pre-eminent monarch. But Akbar,
like all men, great or petty, lived within the limitations of his period
and its circles of ideas. And a Turkoman, ruling in India, was
necessarily ignorant of much that Europe had been painfully learning for
a thousand years. He knew nothing of the growth of a popular
consciousness in Europe, and little or nothing of the wide educational
possibilities that the church had been working out in the West. His
upbringing in Islam and his native genius made it plain to him that a
great nation in India could only be cemented by common ideas upon a
religious basis, but the knowledge of how such a solidarity could be
created and sustained by universal schools, cheap books, and a
university system at once organized and free to think, to which the
modern state is still feeling its way, was as impossible to him as a
knowledge of steamboats or aeroplanes. The form of Islam he knew best
was the narrow and fiercely intolerant form of the Turkish Sunnites. The
Moslems were only a minority of the population. The problem he faced was
indeed very parallel to the problem of Constantine the Great. But it had
peculiar difficulties of its own. He never got beyond an attempt to
adapt Islam to a wider appeal by substituting for “There is one God, and
Muhammad is his prophet,” the declaration, “There is one God, and the
Emperor is his vice-regent.” This he thought might form a common
platform for every variety of faith in India, that kaleidoscope of
religions. With this faith he associated a simple ritual borrowed from
the Persian Zoroastrians (the Parsees) who still survived, and survive
to-day, in India. This new state religion, however, died with him,
because it had no roots in the minds of the people about him.
The essential factor in the organization of a living state, the world is
coming to realize, is the organization of an education. This Akbar never
understood. And he had no class of men available who would suggest such
an idea to him or help him to carry it out. The Moslem teachers in India
were not so much teachers as conservators of an intense bigotry; they
did not want a common mind in India, but only a common intolerance in
Islam. The Brahmins, who had the monopoly of teaching among the Hindus,
had all the conceit and slackness of hereditary privilege. Yet though
Akbar made no general educational scheme for India, he set up a number
of Moslem and Hindu schools. He knew less and he did more for India in
these matters than the British who succeeded him. Some of the British
viceroys have aped his magnificence, his costly tents and awnings, his
palatial buildings and his elephants of state, but none have gone far
enough beyond the political outlook of this mediæval Turkoman to attempt
that popular education which is an absolute necessity to India before
she can play her fitting part in the commonweal of mankind.[370]
§ 5F
A curious side result of these later Mongol perturbations, those of the
fourteenth century of which Timurlane was the head and centre, was the
appearance of drifting batches of a strange refugee Eastern people in
Europe, the Gipsies. They appeared somewhen about the end of the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in Greece, where they were
believed to be Egyptians (hence Gipsy), a very general persuasion which
they themselves accepted and disseminated. Their leaders, however,
styled themselves “Counts of Asia Minor.” They had probably been
drifting about Western Asia for some centuries before the massacres of
Timurlane drove them over the Hellespont. They may have been dislodged
from their original homeland--as the Ottoman Turks were--by the great
cataclysm of Jengis or even earlier. They had drifted about as the
Ottoman Turks had drifted about, but with less good fortune. They spread
slowly westward across Europe, strange fragments of nomadism in a world
of plough and city, driven off their ancient habitat of the Bactrian
steppes to harbour upon European commons and by hedgerows and in wild
woodlands and neglected patches. The Germans called them “Hungarians”
and “Tartars,” the French, “Bohemians.” They do not seem to have kept
the true tradition of their origin, but they have a distinctive language
which indicates their lost history; it contains many North Indian words,
and is probably in its origin North India. There are also considerable
Armenian and Persian elements in their speech. They are found in all
European countries to-day; they are tinkers, pedlars, horse-dealers,
showmen, fortune-tellers, and beggars. To many imaginative minds their
wayside encampments, with their smoking fires, their rounded tents,
their hobbled horses, and their brawl of sunburnt children, have a very
strong appeal. Civilization is so new a thing in history, and has been
for most of the time so very local a thing, that it has still to conquer
and assimilate most of our instincts to its needs. In most of us, irked
by its conventions and complexities, there stirs the nomad strain. We
are but half-hearted home-keepers. The blood in our veins was brewed on
the steppes as well as on the ploughlands.
XXXV
THE RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION[371]
(LAND WAYS GIVE PLACE TO SEA WAYS)
§ 1. _Christianity and Popular Education._ § 2. _Europe begins to
Think for Itself._ § 3. _The Great Plague and the Dawn of
Communism._ § 4. _How Paper Liberated the Human Mind._ § 5.
_Protestantism of the Princes and Protestantism of the Peoples._ §
6. _The Reawakening of Science._ § 7. _The New Growth of European
Towns._ § 8. _America Comes into History._ § 9. _What Machiavelli
Thought of the World._ § 10. _The Republic of Switzerland._ § 11A.
_The Life of the Emperor Charles V._ § 11B. _Protestants if the
Prince Wills it._ § 11C. _The Intellectual Under-tow._
§ 1
Judged by the map, the three centuries from the beginning of the
thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century were an age of recession
for Christendom. These centuries were the Age of the Mongolian peoples.
Nomadism from Central Asia dominated the known world. At the crest of
this period there were rulers of Mongol or the kindred Turkish race and
nomadic tradition in China, India, Persia, Egypt, North Africa, the
Balkan Peninsula, Hungary, and Russia. The Ottoman Turk had even taken
to the sea, and fought the Venetian upon his own Mediterranean waters.
In 1529 the Turks besieged Vienna, and were defeated rather by the
weather than by the defenders. The Habsburg empire of Charles V paid the
Sultan tribute. It was not until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, the
battle in which Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, lost his left arm,
that Christendom, to use his words, “broke the pride of the Osmans and
undeceived the world which had regarded the Turkish fleet as
invincible.” The sole region of Christian advance was Spain. A man of
foresight surveying the world in the early sixteenth century might well
have concluded that it was only a matter of a few generations before the
whole world became Mongolian--and probably Moslem. Just as to-day most
people seem to take it for granted that European rule and a sort of
liberal Christianity are destined to spread over the whole world. Few
people seem to realize how recent a thing is this European ascendancy.
It was only as the fifteenth century drew to its close that any
indications of the real vitality of Western Europe became clearly
apparent.
Our history is now approaching our own times, and our study becomes more
and more a study of the existing state of affairs. The European or
Europeanized system in which the reader is living is the same system
that we see developing in the crumpled-up, Mongol-threatened Europe of
the early fifteenth century. Its problems then were the embryonic form
of the problems of to-day. It is impossible to discuss that time without
discussing our own time. We become political in spite of ourselves.
“Politics without history has no root,” said Sir J. R. Seeley; “history
without politics has no fruit.”
Let us try, with as much detachment as we can achieve, to discover what
the forces were that were dividing and holding back the energies of
Europe during this tremendous outbreak of the Mongol peoples, and how we
are to explain the accumulation of mental and physical energy that
undoubtedly went on during this phase of apparent retrocession, and
which broke out so impressively at its close.
[Illustration: EUROPE at the time of the FALL of CONSTANTINOPLE]
Now, just as in the Mesozoic Age, while the great reptiles lorded it
over the earth, there were developing in odd out-of-the-way corners
those hairy mammals and feathered birds who were finally to supersede
that tremendous fauna altogether by another far more versatile and
capable, so in the limited territories of Western Europe of the Middle
Ages, while the Mongolian monarchies dominated the world from the Danube
to the Pacific and from the Arctic seas to Madras and Morocco and the
Nile, the fundamental lines of a new and harder and more efficient type
of human community were being laid down. This type of community, which
is still only in the phase of formation, which is still growing and
experimental, we may perhaps speak of as the “modern state.” This is, we
must recognize, a vague expression, but we shall endeavour to get
meaning into it as we proceed. We have noted the appearance of its main
root ideas in the Greek republics and especially in Athens, in the great
Roman republic, in Judaism, in Islam, and in the story of Western
Catholicism. Essentially this modern state, as we see it growing under
our eyes to-day, is a tentative combination of two apparently
contradictory ideas, the idea of a _community of faith and obedience_,
such as the earliest civilizations undoubtedly were, and the idea of a
_community of will_, such as were the primitive political groupings of
the Nordic and Hunnish peoples. For thousands of years the settled
civilized peoples, who were originally in most cases dark-white
Caucasians, or Dravidian or Southern Mongolian peoples, seem to have
developed their ideas and habits along the line of worship and personal
subjection, and the nomadic peoples theirs along the line of personal
self-reliance and self-assertion. Naturally enough under the
circumstances the nomadic peoples were always supplying the
civilizations with fresh rulers and new aristocracies. That is the
rhythm of all early history. It was only after thousands of years of
cyclic changes between refreshment by nomadic conquest, civilization,
decadence, and fresh conquest that the present process of a mutual
blending of “civilized” and “free” tendencies into a new type of
community, that now demands our attention and which is the substance of
contemporary history, began.
We have traced in this history the slow development of larger and larger
“civilized” human communities from the days of such a Palæolithic family
tribe as that described in Chapter IX. We have seen how the advantages
and necessities of cultivation, the fear of tribal gods, the ideas of
the priest-king and the god-king, played their part in consolidating
continually larger and more powerful societies in regions of maximum
fertility. We have watched the interplay of priest, who was usually
native, and monarch, who was usually a conqueror, in these early
civilizations, the development of a written tradition and its escape
from priestly control, and the appearance of novel forces, at first
apparently incidental and secondary, which we have called the free
intelligence and the free conscience of mankind. We have seen the rulers
of the primitive civilizations of the river valleys widening their area
and extending their sway, and simultaneously over the less fertile areas
of the earth we have seen mere tribal savagery develop into a more and
more united and politically competent nomadism. Steadily and divergently
mankind pursued one or other of these two lines. For long ages all the
civilizations grew and developed along monarchist lines, upon lines of
absolute monarchy, and in every monarchy and dynasty we have watched, as
if it were a necessary process, efficiency and energy give way to pomp,
indolence, and decay, and finally succumb to some fresher lineage from
the desert or the steppe. The story of the early cultivating
civilizations and their temples and courts and cities bulks large in
human history, but it is well to remember that the scene of that story
was never more than a very small part of the land surface of the globe.
Over the greater part of the earth until quite recently, until the last
two thousand years, the hardier, less numerous tribal peoples of forest
and parkland and the nomadic peoples of the seasonal grasslands
maintained and developed their own ways of life.
The primitive civilizations were, we may say, “communities of
obedience”; obedience to god-kings or kings under gods was their cement;
the nomadic tendency on the other hand has always been towards a
different type of association which we shall here call a “community of
will.” In a wandering, fighting community the individual must be at once
self-reliant and disciplined. The chiefs of such communities must be
chiefs who are followed, not masters who compel. This community of will
is traceable throughout the entire history of mankind; everywhere we
find the original disposition of all the nomads alike, Nordic, Semitic,
or Mongolian, was individually more _willing_ and more _erect_ than
that of the settled folk. The Nordic peoples came into Italy and Greece
under leader kings; they did not bring any systematic temple cults with
them, they found such things in the conquered lands and adapted as they
adopted them. The Greeks and Latins lapsed very easily again into
republics, and so did the Aryans in India. There was a tradition of
election also in the early Frankish and German kingdoms.[372] The early
Caliphs were elected, the Judges of Israel and the “kings” of Carthage
and Tyre were elected, and so was the Great Khan of the Mongols until
Kublai became a Chinese monarch.... Equally constant in the settled
lands do we find the opposite idea, the idea of a non-elective divinity
in kings and of their natural and inherent right to rule.... As our
history has developed we have noted the appearance of new and
complicating elements in the story of human societies; we have seen that
nomad turned go-between, the trader, appear, and we have noted the
growing importance of shipping in the world. It seems as inevitable that
voyaging should make men free in their minds as that settlement within a
narrow horizon should make men timid and servile.... But in spite of all
such complications, the broad antagonism between the method of obedience
and the method of will runs through history down into our own times. To
this day their reconciliation is incomplete.
Civilization even in its most servile forms has always offered much that
is enormously attractive, convenient, and congenial to mankind; but
something restless and untamed in our race has striven continually to
convert civilization from its original reliance upon unparticipating
obedience into a community of participating wills. And to the lurking
nomadism in our blood, and particularly in the blood of monarchs and
aristocracies, we must ascribe also that incessant urgency towards a
wider range that forces every state to extend its boundaries if it can,
and to spread its interests to the ends of the earth. The power of
nomadic restlessness that tends to bring all the earth under one rule,
seems to be identical with the spirit that makes most of us chafe under
direction and restraint, and seek to participate in whatever government
we tolerate. And this natural, this temperamental struggle of mankind to
reconcile civilization with freedom has been kept alive age after age by
the military and political impotence of every “community of obedience”
that has ever existed. Obedience, once men are broken to it, can be
easily captured and transferred; witness the passive rôle of Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and India, the original and typical lands of submission,
the “cradles of civilization,” as they have passed from one lordship to
another. A servile civilization is a standing invitation to predatory
free men. But on the other hand a “community of will” necessitates a
fusion of intractable materials; it is a far harder community to bring
about, and still more difficult to maintain. The story of Alexander the
Great displays the community of will of the Macedonian captains
gradually dissolving before his demand that they should worship him. The
incident of the murder of Clitus is quite typical of the struggle
between the free and the servile tradition that went on whenever a new
conqueror from the open lands and the open air found himself installed
in the palace of an ancient monarchy.
In the case of the Roman Republic, history tells of the first big
community of will in the world’s history, the first free community much
larger than a city, and how it weakened with growth and spent itself
upon success until at last it gave way to a monarchy of the ancient
type, and decayed swiftly into one of the feeblest communities of
servitude that ever collapsed before a handful of invaders. We have
given some attention in this book to the factors in that decay, because
they are of primary importance in human history. One of the most evident
was the want of any wide organization of education to base the ordinary
citizens’ minds upon the idea of service and obligation to the republic,
to keep them _willing_, that is; another was the absence of any medium
of general information to keep their activities in harmony, to enable
them to _will_ as one body. The community of will is limited in size by
the limitations set upon the possibilities of a community of knowledge.
The concentration of property in a few hands and the replacement of free
workers by slaves were rendered possible by the decay of public spirit
and the confusion of the public intelligence that resulted from these
limitations. There was, moreover, no efficient religious idea behind the
Roman state; the dark Etruscan liver-peering cult of Rome was as little
adapted to the political needs of a great community as the very similar
Shamanism of the Mongols. It is in the fact that both Christianity and
Islam, in their distinctive ways, did at least promise to supply, for
the first time in human experience, this patent gap in the Roman
republican system as well as in the nomadic system, to give a common
moral education for a mass of people, and to supply them with a common
history of the past and a common idea of a human purpose and destiny,
that their enormous historical importance lies. Aristotle, as we have
noted, had set a limit to the ideal community of a few thousand
citizens, because he could not conceive how a larger multitude could be
held together by a common idea. He had had no experience of any sort of
education beyond the tutorial methods of his time. Greek education was
almost purely _viva-voce_ education; it could reach therefore only to a
limited aristocracy. Both the Christian church and Islam demonstrated
the unsoundness of Aristotle’s limitation. We may think they did their
task of education in their vast fields of opportunity crudely or badly,
but the point of interest to us is that they did it at all. Both
sustained almost world-wide propagandas of idea and inspiration. Both
relied successfully upon the power of the written word to link great
multitudes of diverse men together in common enterprises. By the
eleventh century, as we have seen, the idea of Christendom had been
imposed upon all the vast warring miscellany of the smashed and
pulverized Western empire, and upon Europe far beyond its limits, as a
uniting and inspiring idea. It had made a shallow but effective
community of will over an unprecedented area and out of an unprecedented
multitude of human beings. Only one other thing at all like this had
ever happened to any great section of mankind before, and that was the
idea of a community of good behaviour that the _literati_ had spread
throughout China.[373]
The Catholic Church provided what the Roman Republic had lacked, a
system of popular teaching, a number of universities and methods of
intellectual inter-communication. By this achievement it opened the way
to the new possibilities of human government that now become apparent in
this _Outline_, possibilities that are still being apprehended and
worked out in the world in which we are living. Hitherto the government
of states had been either authoritative, under some uncriticized and
unchallenged combination of priest and monarch, or it had been a
democracy, uneducated and uninformed, degenerating with any considerable
increase of size, as Rome and Athens did, into a mere rule by mob and
politician. But by the thirteenth century the first intimations had
already dawned of an ideal of government which is still making its way
to realization, the modern ideal, the ideal of a world-wide _educational
government_, in which the ordinary man is neither the slave of an
absolute monarch nor of a demagogue-ruled state, but an informed,
inspired, and consulted part of his community. It is upon the word
educational that stress must be laid, and upon the idea that information
must precede consultation. It is in the practical realization of this
idea[374] that education is a collective function and not a private
affair that one essential distinction of the “modern state” from any of
its precursors lies. The modern citizen, men are coming to realize, must
be informed first and then consulted. Before he can vote he must hear
the evidence; before he can decide he must know. It is not by setting up
polling booths, but by setting up schools and making literature and
knowledge and news universally accessible that the way is opened from
servitude and confusion to that willingly co-operative state which is
the modern ideal. Votes in themselves are worthless things. Men had
votes in Italy in the time of the Gracchi. Their votes did not help
them. Until a man has education, a vote is a useless and dangerous thing
for him to possess. The ideal community towards which we move is not a
community of will simply; it is _a community of knowledge and will_,
replacing _a community of faith and obedience_. Education is the adapter
which will make the nomadic spirit of freedom and self-reliance
compatible with the co-operations and wealth and security of
civilization.
§ 2
But though it is certain that the Catholic Church, through its
propagandas, its popular appeals, its schools and universities, opened
up the prospect of the modern educational state in Europe, it is equally
certain that the Catholic Church never intended to do anything of the
sort. It did not send out knowledge with its blessing; it let it loose
inadvertently. It was not the Roman Republic whose heir the Church
esteemed itself, but the Roman Emperor. Its conception of education was
not release, not an invitation to participate, but the subjugation of
minds. Two of the greatest educators of the Middle Ages were indeed not
churchmen at all, but monarchs and statesmen, Charlemagne and Alfred the
Great of England, who made use of the church organization. But it was
the church that had provided the organization. Church and monarchs in
their mutual grapple for power were both calling to their aid the
thoughts of the common man. In response to these conflicting appeals
appeared the common man, the unofficial outside independent man,
thinking for himself.
Already in the thirteenth century we have seen Pope Gregory IX and the
Emperor Frederick II engaging in a violent public controversy. Already
then there was a sense that a new arbitrator greater than pope or
monarchy had come into the world, that there were readers and a public
opinion. The exodus of the Popes to Avignon, and the divisions and
disorders of the Papacy during the fourteenth century, stimulated this
free judgment upon authority throughout Europe enormously.
At first the current criticism upon the church concerned only moral and
material things. The wealth and luxury of the higher clergy and the
heavy papal taxation were the chief grounds of complaint. And the
earlier attempts to restore Christian simplicity, the foundation of the
Franciscans for example, were not movements of separation, but movements
of revival. Only later did a deeper and more distinctive criticism
develop which attacked the central fact of the church’s teaching and the
justification of priestly importance, namely, the sacrifice of the mass.
We have sketched in broad outlines the early beginnings of Christianity,
and we have shown how rapidly that difficult and austere conception of
the Kingdom of God, which was the central idea of the teachings of Jesus
of Nazareth, was overlaid by a revival of the ancient sacrificial idea,
a doctrine more difficult indeed to grasp, but easier to reconcile with
the habits and dispositions and acquiescences of everyday life in the
Near East. We have noted how a sort of theocrasia went on between
Christianity and Judaism and the cult of the Serapeum and Mithraism and
other competing cults, by which the Mithraist Sun-day, the Jewish idea
of blood as a religious essential, the Alexandrian importance of the
Mother of God, the shaven and fasting priest, self-tormenting
asceticism, and many other matters of belief and ritual and practice,
became grafted upon the developing religion. These adaptations, no
doubt, made the new teaching much more understandable and acceptable in
Egypt and Syria and the like. There were things in the way of thought of
the dark-white Mediterranean race; they were congenial to that type. But
as we have shown in our story of Muhammad, these acquisitions did not
make Christianity more acceptable to the Arab nomads; to them these
features made it disgusting. And so, too, the robed and shaven monk and
nun and priest seem to have roused something like an instinctive
hostility in the Nordic barbarians of the North and West. We have noted
the peculiar bias of the early Anglo-Saxons and Northmen against the
monks and nuns. They seem to have felt that the lives and habits of
these devotees were queer and unnatural.
The clash between what we may call the “dark-white” factors and the
newer elements in Christianity was no doubt intensified by Pope Gregory
VII’s imposition of celibacy upon the Catholic priests in the eleventh
century. The East had known religious celibates for thousands of years;
in the West they were regarded with the profoundest scepticism and
suspicion.[375]
And now in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as the lay mind of
the Nordic peoples began to acquire learning, to read and write and
express itself, and as it came into touch with the stimulating
activities of the Arab mind, we find a much more formidable criticism of
Catholicism beginning, an intellectual attack upon the priest as priest,
and upon the ceremony of the mass as the central fact of the religious
life, coupled with a demand for a return to the personal teachings of
Jesus as recorded in the Gospels.
We have already mentioned the career of the Englishman Wycliffe (_c._
1320-1384), and how he translated the Bible into English in order to set
up a counter authority to that of the Pope. He denounced the doctrines
of the church about the mass as disastrous error, and particularly the
teaching that the consecrated bread eaten in that ceremony becomes in
some magical way the actual body of Christ. We will not pursue the
question of transubstantiation, as this process of the mystical change
of the elements in the sacrament is called, into its intricacies. These
are matters for the theological specialist. But it will be obvious that
any doctrine, such as the Catholic doctrine, which makes the
consecration of the elements in the sacrament a miraculous process
performed by the priest, and only to be performed by the priest, and
which makes the sacrament the central necessity of the religious system,
enhances the importance of the priestly order enormously. On the other
hand, the view, which was the typical “Protestant” view, that this
sacrament is a mere eating of bread and drinking of wine as a personal
remembrance of Jesus of Nazareth, does away at last with any particular
need for a consecrated priest at all. Wycliffe himself did not go to
this extremity; he was a priest, and he remained a priest to the end of
his life, but his doctrine raised a question that carried men far beyond
his positions. From the point of view of the historian the struggle
against Rome that Wycliffe opened became very speedily a struggle of
what one may call rational or layman’s religion making its appeal to the
free intelligence and the free conscience in mankind, against
authoritative, traditional, ceremonial, and priestly religion. The
ultimate tendency of this complicated struggle was to strip Christianity
as bare as Islam of every vestige of ancient priestcraft, to revert to
the Bible documents as authority, and to recover, if possible, the
primordial teachings of Jesus. Most of its issues are still undecided
among Christians to this day.[376]
Wycliffe’s writings had nowhere more influence than in Bohemia. About
1396 a learned Czech, John Huss, delivered a series of lectures in the
university of Prague based upon the doctrines of the great Oxford
teacher. Huss became rector of the university, and his teachings roused
the church to excommunicate him (1412). This was at the time of the
Great Schism, just before the Council of Constance (1414-1418) gathered
to discuss the scandalous disorder of the church. We have already told
(chap. xxxiii, § 13) how the schism was ended by the election of Martin
V. The council aspired to reunite Christendom completely. But the
methods by which it sought this reunion jar with our modern consciences.
Wycliffe’s bones were condemned to be burnt. Huss was decoyed to
Constance under promise of a safe conduct, and he was then put upon his
trial for heresy. He was ordered to recant certain of his opinions. He
replied that he could not recant until he was convinced of his error. He
was told that it was his duty to recant if his superiors required it of
him, whether he was convinced or not. He refused to accept this view. In
spite of the Emperor’s safe conduct, he was burnt alive (1415), a martyr
not for any specific doctrine, but for the free intelligence and free
conscience of mankind.
It would be impossible to put the issue between priest and anti-priest
more clearly than it was put at this trial of John Huss, or to
demonstrate more completely the evil spirit in priestcraft. A colleague
of Huss, Jerome of Prague, was burnt in the following year.
These outrages were followed by an insurrection of the Hussites in
Bohemia (1419), the first of a series of religious wars that marked the
breaking-up of Christendom. In 1420, the Pope, Martin V, issued a bull
proclaiming a crusade “for the destruction of the Wycliffites, Hussites,
and all other heretics in Bohemia,” and attracted by this invitation the
unemployed soldiers of fortune, and all the drifting blackguardism of
Europe converged upon that valiant country. They found in Bohemia, under
its great leader Ziska, more hardship and less loot than crusaders were
disposed to face. The Hussites were conducting their affairs upon
extreme democratic lines, and the whole country was aflame with
enthusiasm. The crusaders beleaguered Prague, but failed to take it, and
they experienced a series of reverses that ended in their retreat from
Bohemia. A second crusade (1421) was no more successful. Two other
crusades failed. Then unhappily the Hussites fell into internal
dissensions. Encouraged by this, a fifth crusade (1431) crossed the
frontier under Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg.
The army of these crusaders, according to the lowest estimates,
consisted of 90,000 infantry and 40,000 horsemen. Attacking Bohemia from
the west, they first laid siege to the town of Tachov, but failing to
capture the strongly fortified city, they stormed the little town of
Most, and here, as well as in the surrounding country, committed the
most horrible atrocities on a population a large part of which was
entirely innocent of any form of theology whatever. The crusaders,
advancing by slow marches, penetrated further into Bohemia, till they
reached the neighbourhood of the town of Domazlice (Tauss). “It was at
three o’clock on August 14th, 1431, that the crusaders, who were
encamped in the plain between Domazlice and Horsuv Tyn, received the
news that the Hussites, under the leadership of Prokop the Great, were
approaching. Though the Bohemians were still four miles off, the rattle
of their war-wagons and the song, ‘All ye warriors of God,’ which their
whole host was chanting, could already be heard.” The enthusiasm of the
crusaders evaporated with astounding rapidity. Lützow[377] describes how
the papal representative and the Duke of Saxony ascended a convenient
hill to inspect the battlefield. It was, they discovered, not going to
be a battlefield. The German camp was in utter confusion. Horsemen were
streaming off in every direction, and the clatter of empty wagons being
driven off almost drowned the sound of that terrible singing. The
crusaders were abandoning even their loot. Came a message from the
Margrave of Brandenburg advising flight; there was no holding any of
their troops. They were dangerous now only to their own side, and the
papal representative spent an unpleasant night hiding from them in the
forest.... So ended the Bohemian crusade.
In 1434 civil war again broke out among the Hussites, in which the
extreme and most valiant section was defeated, and in 1436 an agreement
was patched up between the Council of Basle and the moderate Hussites,
in which the Bohemian church was allowed to retain certain distinctions
from the general Catholic practice, which held good until the German
Reformation in the sixteenth century.
§ 3
The split among the Hussites was largely due to the drift of the
extremer section towards a primitive communism, which alarmed the
wealthier and more influential Czech noblemen. Similar tendencies had
already appeared among the English Wycliffites. They seem to follow
naturally enough upon the doctrines of equal human brotherhood that
emerge whenever there is an attempt to reach back to the fundamentals of
Christianity.
The development of such ideas had been greatly stimulated by a
stupendous misfortune that had swept the world and laid bare the
foundations of society, a pestilence of unheard-of virulence. It was
called the Black Death, and it came nearer to the extirpation of mankind
than any other evil has ever done. It was far more deadly than the
plague of Pericles, or the plague of Marcus Aurelius, or the plague
waves of the time of Justinian and Gregory the Great that paved the way
for the Lombards in Italy. It arose in South Russia or Central Asia, and
came by way of the Crimea and a Genoese ship to Genoa and Western
Europe. It passed by Armenia to Asia Minor, Egypt, and North Africa. It
reached England in 1348. Two thirds of the students at Oxford died, we
are told; it is estimated that between a quarter and a half of the whole
population of England perished at this time. Throughout all Europe there
was as great a mortality. Hecker estimates the total as twenty-five
million dead. It spread eastward to China, where, the Chinese records
say, thirteen million people perished. In China the social
disorganization led to a neglect of the river embankments, and as a
consequence great floods devastated the crowded agricultural lands.[378]
Never was there so clear a warning to mankind to seek knowledge and
cease from bickering, to unite against the dark powers of nature. All
the massacres of Hulagu and Timurlane were as nothing to this. “Its
ravages,” says J. R. Green, “were fiercest in the greater towns, where
filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and
fever. In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Manny
purchased for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards
marked by the Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said
to have been interred. Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in
Bristol the living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black
Death fell on the villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More than
one half of the priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the
diocese of Norwich two thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents.
The whole organization of labour was thrown out of gear. The scarcity of
hands made it difficult for the minor tenants to perform the services
due for their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent
by the landowners induced the farmers to refrain from the abandonment of
their farms. For a time cultivation became impossible. ‘The sheep and
cattle strayed through the fields and corn,’ says a contemporary, ‘and
there were none left who could drive them.’”
[Illustration: “We have the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynd in the
feldes”....John Ball’s speech]
It was from these distresses that the peasant wars of the fourteenth
century sprang. There was a great shortage of labour and a great
shortage of goods, and the rich abbots and monastic cultivators who
owned so much of the land, and the nobles and rich merchants, were too
ignorant of economic laws to understand that they must not press upon
the toilers in this time of general distress. They saw their property
deteriorating, their lands going out of cultivation, and they made
violent statutes to compel men to work without any rise in wages, and to
prevent their straying in search of better employment. Naturally enough
this provoked “a new revolt against the whole system of social
inequality which had till then passed unquestioned as the divine order
of the world. The cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the
words of ‘a mad priest of Kent,’ as the courtly Froissart calls him, who
for twenty years (1360-1381) found audience for his sermons, in defiance
of interdict and imprisonment, in the stout yeomen who gathered in the
Kentish churchyards. ‘Mad,’ as the landowners called him, it was in the
preaching of John Ball that England first listened to a declaration of
natural equality and the rights of man. ‘Good people,’ cried the
preacher, ‘things will never go well in England so long as goods be not
in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right
are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? On what grounds have
they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the
same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that
they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by
our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet and
warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags.
They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we oat-cake and straw, and
water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and
labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of
our toil that these men hold their state.’ A spirit fatal to the whole
system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rhyme which condensed
the levelling doctrine of John Ball: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who
was then the gentleman?’”[379]
Wat Tyler, the leader of the English insurgents, was assassinated by the
Mayor of London in the presence of the young King Richard II (1381), and
his movement collapsed. The communist side of the Hussite movement was a
part of the same system of disturbance. A little earlier than the
English outbreak had occurred the French “Jacquerie” (1358), in which
the French peasants had risen, burnt châteaux, and devastated the
country-side. A century later the same urgency was to sweep Germany into
a series of bloody Peasant Wars. These began late in the fifteenth
century. Economic and religious disturbance mingled in the case of
Germany even more plainly than in England. One conspicuous phase of
these German troubles was the Anabaptist outbreak. The sect of the
Anabaptists appeared in Wittenberg in 1521 under three “prophets,” and
broke out into insurrection in 1525. Between 1532 and 1535 the
insurgents held the town of Münster in Westphalia, and did their utmost
to realize their ideas of a religious communism. They were besieged by
the Bishop of Münster, and under the distresses of the siege a sort of
insanity ran rife in the town; cannibalism is said to have occurred, and
a certain John of Leyden seized power, proclaimed himself the successor
of King David, and followed that monarch’s evil example by practising
polygamy. After the surrender of the city the victorious bishop had the
Anabaptist leaders tortured very horribly and executed in the
marketplace, their mutilated bodies being hung in cages from a church
tower to witness to all the world that decency and order were now
restored in Münster....
These upheavals of the common labouring men of the Western European
countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were more serious
and sustained than anything that had ever happened in history before.
The nearest previous approach to them were certain communistic
Muhammadan movements in Persia. There was a peasant revolt in Normandy
about A.D. 1000, and there were revolts of peasants (Bagaudæ) in the
later Roman Empire, but these were not nearly so formidable. They show a
new spirit growing in human affairs, a spirit altogether different from
the unquestioning apathy of the serfs and peasants in the original
regions of civilization or from the anarchist hopelessness of the serf
and slave labour of the Roman capitalists. All these early insurrections
of the workers that we have mentioned were suppressed with much cruelty,
but the movement itself was never completely stamped out. From that time
to this there has been a spirit of revolt in the lower levels of the
pyramid of civilization. There have been phases of insurrection, phases
of repression, phases of compromise and comparative pacification; but
from that time until this, the struggle has never wholly ceased. We
shall see it flaring out during the French Revolution at the end of the
eighteenth century, insurgent again in the middle and at the opening of
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and achieving vast
proportions in the world of to-day. The socialist movement of the
nineteenth century was only one version of that continuing revolt.
In many countries, in France and Germany and Russia, for example, this
labour movement has assumed at times an attitude hostile to
Christianity, but there can be little doubt that this steady and, on the
whole, growing pressure of the common man in the West against a life of
toil and subservience is closely associated with Christian teaching. The
church and the Christian missionary may not have intended to spread
equalitarian doctrines, but behind the church was the unquenchable
personality of Jesus of Nazareth, and even in spite of himself the
Christian preacher brought the seeds of freedom and responsibility with
him, and sooner or later they shot up where he had been.
This steady and growing upheaval of “Labour,” its development of a
consciousness of itself as a class and of a definite claim upon the
world at large, quite as much as the presence of schools and
universities, quite as much as abundant printed books and a developing
and expanding process of scientific research, mark off our present type
of civilization, the “modern civilization,” from any pre-existing state
of human society, and mark it, for all its incidental successes, as a
thing unfinished and transitory. It is an embryo or it is something
doomed to die. It may be able to solve this complex problem of
co-ordinated toil and happiness, and so adjust itself to the needs of
the human soul, or it may fail and end in a catastrophe as the Roman
system did. It may be the opening phase of some more balanced and
satisfying order of society, or it may be a system destined to
disruption and replacement by some differently conceived method of human
association. Like its predecessor, our present civilization may be no
more than one of those crops farmers sow to improve their land by the
fixation of nitrogen from the air; it may have grown only that,
accumulating certain traditions, it may be ploughed into the soil again
for better things to follow. Such questions as these are the practical
realities of history, and in all that follows we shall find them
becoming clearer and more important, until in our last chapter we shall
end, as all our days and years end, with a recapitulation of our hopes
and fears--and a note of interrogation.
§ 4
The development of free discussion in Europe during this age of
fermentation was enormously stimulated by the appearance of printed
books. It was the introduction of paper from the East that made
practicable the long latent method of printing. It is still difficult to
assign the honour of priority in the use of the simple expedient of
printing for multiplying books. It is a trivial question that has been
preposterously debated.[380] Apparently the glory, such as it is,
belongs to Holland. In Haarlem, one Coster was printing from movable
type somewhen before 1446. Gutenberg was printing at Mainz about the
same time. There were printers in Italy by 1465, and Caxton set up his
press in Westminster in 1477. But long before this time there had been a
partial use of printing. Manuscripts as early as the twelfth century
display initial letters that may have been printed from wooden stamps.
Far more important is the question of the manufacture of paper. It is
scarcely too much to say that paper made the revival of Europe possible.
Paper originated in China, where its use probably goes back to the
second century B.C. In 751 the Chinese made an attack upon the Arab
Moslems in Samarkand; they were repulsed, and among the prisoners taken
from them were some skilled paper-makers, from whom the art was learnt.
Arabic paper manuscripts from the ninth century onward still exist. The
manufacture entered Christendom either through Greece or by the capture
of Moorish paper-mills during the Christian reconquest of Spain. But
under the Christian Spanish the product deteriorated sadly. Good paper
was not made in Christian Europe until near the end of the thirteenth
century, and then it was Italy which led the world. Only by the
fourteenth century did the manufacture reach Germany, and not until the
end of that century was it abundant and cheap enough for the printing of
books to be a practicable business proposition. Thereupon printing
followed naturally and necessarily, and the intellectual life of the
world entered upon a new and far more vigorous phase. It ceased to be a
little trickle from mind to mind; it became a broad flood, in which
thousands and presently scores and hundreds of thousands of minds
participated.
One immediate result of this achievement of printing was the appearance
of an abundance of Bibles in the world. Another was a cheapening of
school-books. The knowledge of reading spread swiftly. There was not
only a great increase of books in the world, but the books that were now
made were plainer to read and so easier to understand. Instead of
toiling at a crabbed text and then thinking over its significance,
readers now could think unimpeded as they read. With this increase in
the facility of reading, the reading public grew. The book ceased to be
a highly decorated toy or a scholar’s mystery. People began to write
books to be read as well as looked at by ordinary people. With the
fourteenth century the real history of the European literatures begins.
We find a rapid development of standard Italian, standard English,
standard French, standard Spanish, and standard German.[381] These
languages became literary languages; they were tried over, polished by
use, and made exact and vigorous. They became at last as capable of the
burden of philosophical discussion as Greek or Latin.
§ 5
Here we devote a section to certain elementary statements about the
movement in men’s religious ideas during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. They are a necessary introduction to the political history of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that follows in Chapter XXXVI.
We have to distinguish clearly between two entirely different systems of
opposition to the Catholic church. They intermingled very confusingly.
The church was losing its hold upon the consciences of princes and rich
and able people; it was also losing the faith and confidence of common
people. The effect of its decline of spiritual power upon the former
class was to make them resent its interference, its moral restrictions,
its claims to overlordship, its claim to tax, and to dissolve
allegiances. They ceased to respect its power and its property. This
insubordination of princes and rulers was going on throughout the Middle
Ages, but it was only when in the sixteenth century the church began to
side openly with its old antagonist the Emperor, when it offered him its
support and accepted his help in its campaign against heresy, that
princes began to think seriously of breaking away from the Roman
communion and setting up fragments of a church. And they would never
have done so if they had not perceived that the hold of the church upon
the masses of mankind had relaxed.
The revolt of the princes was essentially an irreligious revolt against
the world-rule of the church. The Emperor Frederick II, with his
epistles to his fellow princes, was its forerunner. The revolt of the
people against the church, on the other hand, was as essentially
religious. They objected not to the church’s power, but to its
weaknesses. They wanted a deeply righteous and fearless church to help
them and organize them against the wickedness of powerful men. Their
movements against the church, within it and without, were movements not
for release from a religious control, but for a fuller and more abundant
religious control. They did not want less religious control, but
more--but they wanted to be assured that it was religious. They objected
to the Pope not because he was the religious head of the world, but
because he was not; because he was a wealthy earthly prince when he
ought to have been their spiritual leader.
The contest in Europe from the fourteenth century onward therefore was a
three-cornered contest. The princes wanted to use the popular forces
against the Pope, but not to let those forces grow too powerful for
their own power and glory. For a long time the church went from prince
to prince for an ally without realizing that the lost ally it needed to
recover was popular veneration.
Because of this triple aspect of the mental and moral conflicts that
were going on in the fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
the series of ensuing changes, those changes that are known collectively
in history as the Reformation, took on a threefold aspect. There was the
Reformation according to the princes, who wanted to stop the flow of
money to Rome and to seize the moral authority, the educational power,
and the material possessions of the church within their dominions. There
was the Reformation according to the people, who sought to make
Christianity a power against unrighteousness, and particularly against
the unrighteousness of the rich and powerful. And finally there was the
Reformation within the church, of which St. Francis of Assisi was the
precursor, which sought to restore the goodness of the church and,
through its goodness, to restore its power.
The Reformation according to the princes took the form of a replacement
of the Pope by the prince as the head of the religion and the controller
of the consciences of his people. The princes had no idea and no
intention of letting free the judgments of their subjects more
particularly with the object-lessons of the Hussites and the Anabaptists
before their eyes; they sought to establish national churches dependent
upon the throne. As England, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, North
Germany, and Bohemia broke away from the Roman communion, the princes
and other ministers showed the utmost solicitude to keep the movement
well under control. Just as much reformation as would sever the link
with Rome they permitted; anything beyond that, any dangerous break
towards the primitive teachings of Jesus or the crude direct
interpretation of the Bible, they resisted. The Established Church of
England is one of the most typical and successful of the resulting
compromises. It is still sacramental and sacerdotal; but its
organization centres in the Court and the Lord Chancellor, and though
subversive views may, and do, break out in the lower and less prosperous
ranks of its priesthood, it is impossible for them to struggle up to any
position of influence and authority.
The Reformation according to the common man was very different in spirit
from the Princely Reformation. We have already told something of the
popular attempts at Reformation in Bohemia and Germany. The wide
spiritual upheavals of the time were at once more honest, more confused,
more enduring, and less immediately successful than the reforms of the
princes. Very few religious-spirited men had the daring to break away or
the effrontery to confess that they had broken away from all
authoritative teaching, and that they were now relying entirely upon
their own minds and consciences. That required a very high intellectual
courage. The general drift of the common man in this period in Europe
was to set up his new acquisition, the Bible, as a counter authority to
the church. This was particularly the case with the great leader of
German Protestantism, Martin Luther (1483-1546). All over Germany, and
indeed all over Western Europe, there were now men spelling over the
black-letter pages of the newly translated and printed Bible, over the
Book of Leviticus and the Song of Solomon and the Revelation of St. John
the Divine--strange and perplexing books--quite as much as over the
simple and inspiring record of Jesus in the Gospels. Naturally they
produced strange views and grotesque interpretations. It is surprising
that they were not stranger and grotesquer. But the human reason is an
obstinate thing, and will criticize and select in spite of its own
resolutions. The bulk of these new Bible students took what their
consciences approved from the Bible and ignored its riddles and
contradictions. All over Europe, wherever the new Protestant churches of
the princes were set up, a living and very active residuum of
Protestants remained who declined to have their religion made over for
them in this fashion. These were the Nonconformists, a medley of sects,
having nothing in common but their resistance to authoritative religion,
whether of the Pope or the State.[382] Most but not all of these
Nonconformists held to the Bible as a divinely inspired and
authoritative guide. This was a strategic rather than an abiding
position, and the modern drift of Nonconformity has been onward away
from this original Bibliolatry towards a mitigated and sentimentalized
recognition of the bare teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Beyond the range
of Nonconformity, beyond the range of professed Christianity at all,
there is also now a great and growing mass of equalitarian belief and
altruistic impulse in the modern civilizations, which certainly owes, as
we have already asserted, its spirit to Christianity, which began to
appear in Europe as the church lost its grip upon the general
mind.[383]
Let us say a word now of the third phase of the Reformation process, the
Reformation within the church. This was already beginning in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries with the appearance of the Black and Grey
Friars (chap. xxxiii, § 13). In the sixteenth century, and when it was
most needed, came a fresh impetus of the same kind. This was the
foundation of the Society of the Jesuits by Inigo Lopez de Recalde,
better known to the world to-day as Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
[Illustration: Loyola.]
Ignatius began his career as a very tough and gallant young Spaniard. He
was clever and dexterous and inspired by a passion for pluck, hardihood,
and rather showy glory. His love affairs were free and picturesque. In
1521 the French took the town of Pampeluna in Spain from the Emperor
Charles V, and Ignatius was one of the defenders. His legs were smashed
by a cannon-ball, and he was taken prisoner. One leg was badly set and
had to be broken again, and these painful and complex operations nearly
cost him his life. He received the last sacraments. In the night,
thereafter, he began to mend, and presently he was convalescent and
facing the prospect of a life in which he would perhaps always be a
cripple. His thoughts turned to the adventure of religion. Sometimes he
would think of a certain great lady, and how, in spite of his broken
state, he might yet win her admiration by some amazing deed; and
sometimes he would think of being in some especial and personal way the
Knight of Christ. In the midst of these confusions, one night as he lay
awake, he tells us, a new great lady claimed his attention; he had a
vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary carrying the Infant Christ in her
arms. “Immediately a loathing seized him for the former deeds of his
life.” He resolved to give up all further thoughts of earthly women, and
to lead a life of absolute chastity and devotion to the Mother of God.
He projected great pilgrimages and a monastic life.
His final method of taking his vows marks him the countryman of Don
Quixote. He had regained his strength, and he was riding out into the
world rather aimlessly, a penniless soldier of fortune with little but
his arms and the mule on which he rode, when he fell into company with a
Moor. They went on together and talked, and presently disputed about
religion. The Moor was the better educated man; he had the best of the
argument, he said offensive things about the Virgin Mary that were
difficult to answer, and he parted triumphantly from Ignatius. The young
Knight of our Lady was boiling with shame and indignation. He hesitated
whether he should go after the Moor and kill him or pursue the
pilgrimage he had in mind. At a fork in the road he left things to his
mule, which spared the Moor. He came to the Benedictine Abbey of Manresa
near Montserrat, and here he imitated that peerless hero of the mediæval
romance, Amadis de Gaul, and kept an all-night vigil before the Altar of
the Blessed Virgin. He presented his mule to the abbey, he gave his
worldly clothes to a beggar, he laid his sword and dagger upon the
altar, and clothed himself in a rough sackcloth garment and hempen
shoes. He then took himself to a neighbouring hospice and gave himself
up to scourgings and austerities. For a whole week he fasted absolutely.
Thence he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
For some years he wandered, consumed with the idea of founding a new
order of religious knighthood, but not knowing clearly how to set about
this enterprise. He became more and more aware of his own illiteracy,
and the Inquisition, which was beginning to take an interest in his
proceedings, forbade him to attempt to teach others until he had spent
at least four years in study. So much cruelty and intolerance is laid at
the door of the Inquisition that it is pleasant to record that in its
handling of this heady, imaginative young enthusiast it showed itself
both sympathetic and sane. It recognized his vigour and possible uses;
it saw the dangers of his ignorance. He studied at Salamanca and Paris,
among other places. He was ordained a priest in 1538, and a year later
his long-dreamt-of order was founded under the military title of the
“Company of Jesus.” Like the Salvation Army of modern England, it made
the most direct attempt to bring the generous tradition of military
organization and discipline to the service of religion.
This Ignatius of Loyola who founded the Order of Jesuits was a man of
forty-seven; he was a very different man, much wiser and steadier, than
the rather absurd young man who had aped Amadis de Gaul and kept vigil
in the abbey of Manresa; and the missionary and educational organization
he now created and placed at the disposal of the Pope was one of the
most powerful instruments the church had ever handled. These men gave
themselves freely and wholly to be used by the church. It was the Order
of the Jesuits which carried Christianity to China again after the
downfall of the Ming Dynasty, and Jesuits were the chief Christian
missionaries in India and North America. To their civilizing work among
the Indians in South America we shall presently allude. But their main
achievement lay in raising the standard of Catholic education. Their
schools became and remained for a long time the best schools in
Christendom. Says Lord Verulam (= Sir Francis Bacon): “As for the
pedagogic part ... consult the schools of the Jesuits, for nothing
better has been put in practice.” They raised the level of intelligence,
they quickened the conscience of all Catholic Europe, they stimulated
Protestant Europe to competitive educational efforts.... Some day it may
be we shall see a new order of Jesuits, vowed not to the service of the
Pope, but to the service of mankind.
And concurrently with this great wave of educational effort, the tone
and quality of the church was also greatly improved by the
clarification of doctrine and the reforms in organization and discipline
that were made by the Council of Trent. This council met intermittently
either at Trent or Bologna between the years 1545 and 1563, and its work
was at least as important as the energy of the Jesuits in arresting the
crimes and blunders that were causing state after state to fall away
from the Roman communion. The change wrought by the Reformation within
the Church of Rome was as great as the change wrought in the Protestant
churches that detached themselves from the mother body. There are
henceforth no more open scandals or schisms to record. But if anything,
there has been an intensification of doctrinal narrowness, and such
phases of imaginative vigour as are represented by Gregory the Great, or
by the group of Popes associated with Gregory VII and Urban II, or by
the group that began with Innocent III, no longer enliven the sober and
pedestrian narrative. The world war of 1914-1918 was a unique
opportunity for the Papacy; the occasion was manifest for some clear
strong voice proclaiming the universal obligation to righteousness, the
brotherhood of men, the claims of human welfare over patriotic passion.
No such moral lead was given. The Papacy seemed to be balancing its
traditional reliance upon the faithful Habsburgs against its quarrel
with republican France.
§ 6
The reader must not suppose that the destructive criticism of the
Catholic Church and of Catholic Christianity, and the printing and study
of the Bible, were the only or even the most important of the
intellectual activities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That
was merely the popular and most conspicuous aspect of the intellectual
revival of the time. Behind this conspicuous and popular awakening to
thought and discussion, other less immediately striking but ultimately
more important mental developments were in progress. Of the trend of
these developments we must now give some brief indications. They had
begun long before books were printed, but it was printing that released
them from obscurity.
We have already told something of the first appearance of the free
intelligence, the spirit of inquiry and plain statement, in human
affairs. One name is central in the record of that first attempt at
systematic knowledge, the name of Aristotle. We have noted also the
brief phase of scientific work at Alexandria. From that time onward the
complicated economic and political and religious conflicts of Europe and
Western Asia impeded further intellectual progress. These regions, as we
have seen, fell for long ages under the sway of the Oriental type of
monarchy and of Oriental religious traditions. Rome tried and abandoned
a slave-system of industry. The first great capitalistic system
developed and fell into chaos through its own inherent rottenness.
Europe relapsed into universal insecurity. The Semite rose against the
Aryan, and replaced Hellenic civilization throughout Western Asia and
Egypt by an Arabic culture. All Western Asia and half of Europe fell
under Mongolian rule. It is only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
that we find the Nordic intelligence struggling through again to
expression.
We then find in the growing universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna
an increasing amount of philosophical discussion going on. In form it is
chiefly a discussion of logical questions. As the basis of this
discussion we find part of the teachings of Aristotle, not the whole
mass of writings he left behind him, but his logic only. Later on his
work became better known through the Latin translations of the Arabic
edition annotated by Averroes.[384]
Except for these translations of
Aristotle, very little of the Greek philosophical literature was read in
Western Europe until the fifteenth century. The creative Plato--as
distinguished from the scientific Aristotle--was almost unknown. Some
neo-Platonic writers were known, but neo-Platonism had much the same
relation to Plato that Christian Science has to Christ.
It has been the practice of recent writers to decry the philosophical
discussion of the mediæval “schoolmen” as tedious and futile. It was
nothing of the sort. It had to assume a severely technical form because
the dignitaries of the church, ignorant and intolerant, were on the
watch for heresy. It lacked the sweet clearness, therefore, of fearless
thought. It often hinted what it dared not say. But it dealt with
fundamentally important things, it was a long and necessary struggle to
clear up and correct certain inherent defects of the human mind, and
many people to-day blunder dangerously through their neglect of the
issues the schoolmen discussed.
There is a natural tendency in the human mind to exaggerate the
differences and resemblances upon which classification is based, to
suppose that things called by different names are altogether different,
and that things called by the same name are practically identical. This
tendency to exaggerate classification produces a thousand evils and
injustices. In the sphere of race or nationality, for example, a
“European” will often treat an “Asiatic” almost as if he were a
different animal, while he will be disposed to regard another “European”
as necessarily as virtuous and charming as himself. He will, as a matter
of course, take sides with Europeans against Asiatics. But, as the
reader of this history must realize, there is no such difference as the
opposition of these names implies. It is a phantom difference created by
two names....
The main mediæval controversy was between the “Realists” and the
“Nominalists,” and it is necessary to warn the reader that the word
“Realist” in mediæval discussion has a meaning almost diametrically
opposed to “Realist” as it is used in the jargon of modern criticism.
The modern “Realist” is one who insists on materialist details; the
mediæval “Realist” was far nearer what nowadays we should call an
Idealist, and his contempt for incidental detail was profound. The
Realists outdid the vulgar tendency to exaggerate the significance of
class. They held that there was something in a name, in a common noun
that is, that was essentially real. For example, they held there was a
typical “European,” an ideal European, who was far more real than any
individual European. Every European was, as it were, a failure, a
departure, a flawed specimen of this profounder reality. On the other
hand the Nominalist held that the only realities in the case were the
individual Europeans, that the name “European” was merely a name and
nothing more than a name applied to all these instances.
Nothing is quite so difficult as the compression of philosophical
controversies, which are by their nature voluminous and various and
tinted by the mental colours of a variety of minds. With the difference
of Realist and Nominalist stated baldly, as we have stated it here, the
modern reader unaccustomed to philosophical discussion may be disposed
to leap at once to the side of the Nominalist. But the matter is not so
simple that it can be covered by one instance, and here we have
purposely chosen an extreme instance. Names and classifications differ
in their value and reality. While it is absurd to suppose that there can
be much depth of class difference between men called Thomas and men
called William, or that there is an ideal and quintessential Thomas or
William, yet on the other hand there may be much profounder differences
between a white man and a Hottentot, and still more between _Homo
sapiens_ and _Homo neanderthalensis_. While again the distinction
between the class of pets and the class of useful animals is dependent
upon very slight differences of habit and application, the difference of
a cat and dog is so profound that the microscope can trace it in a drop
of blood or a single hair. When this aspect of the question is
considered, it becomes understandable how Nominalism had ultimately to
abandon the idea that names were as insignificant as labels, and how,
out of a revised and amended Nominalism, there grew up that systematic
attempt to find the _true_--the most significant and
fruitful--classification of things and substances which is called
Scientific Research.
And it will be almost as evident that while the tendency of Realism,
which is the natural tendency of every untutored mind, was towards
dogma, harsh divisions, harsh judgments, and uncompromising attitudes,
the tendency of earlier and later Nominalism was towards qualified
statements, towards an examination of individual instances, and towards
inquiry and experiment and scepticism. And it may not surprise the
reader to learn that the philosophy of the Catholic Church was
essentially a Realist philosophy.[385]
So while in the market-place and the ways of the common life men were
questioning the morals and righteousness of the clergy, the good faith
and propriety of their celibacy, and the justice of papal taxation;
while in theological circles their minds were set upon the question of
transubstantiation, the question of the divinity or not of the bread and
wine in the mass, in studies and lecture-rooms a wider-reaching
criticism of the methods of thought upon which the very fundamentals of
Catholic teaching rested was in progress. We cannot attempt here to
gauge the significance in this process of such names as Peter Abelard
(1079-1142), Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), and Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274). These men sought to reconstruct Catholicism on a sounder
system of reasoning. Chief among their critics and successors were Duns
Scotus (?-1308), an Oxford Franciscan and, to judge by his sedulous
thought and deliberate subtleties, a Scotchman, and Occam, an Englishman
(?-1347). Both these latter, like Averroes (see chap. xxxii, § 8), made
a definite distinction between theological and philosophical truth; they
placed theology on a pinnacle, but they placed it where it could no
longer obstruct research. Duns Scotus declared that it was impossible to
prove by reasoning the existence of God or of the Trinity or the
credibility of the Act of Creation; Occam was still more insistent upon
this separation--which manifestly released scientific inquiry from
dogmatic control. A later generation, benefiting by the freedoms towards
which these pioneers worked, and knowing not the sources of its freedom,
had the ingratitude to use the name of Scotus as a term for stupidity,
and so we have our English word “Dunce.” Says Professor Pringle
Pattison,[386] “Occam, who is still a Scholastic, gives us the
Scholastic justification of the spirit which had already taken hold upon
Roger Bacon, and which was to enter upon its rights in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.”
Standing apart by himself because of his distinctive genius is this
Roger Bacon (about 1210 to about 1293), who was also English. He was a
Franciscan of Oxford, and a very typical Englishman indeed, irritable,
hasty, honest, and shrewd. He was two centuries ahead of his world. Says
H. O. Taylor of him:[387]
“The career of Bacon was an intellectual tragedy, conforming to the old
principles of tragic art: that the hero’s character shall be large and
noble, but not flawless, inasmuch as the fatal consummation must issue
from character, and not happen through chance. He died an old man, as in
his youth, so in his age, a devotee of tangible knowledge. His pursuit
of a knowledge which was not altogether learning had been obstructed by
the Order of which he was an unhappy and rebellious member; quite as
fatally his achievement was deformed from within by the principles which
he accepted from his time. But he was responsible for his acceptance of
current opinions; and as his views roused the distrust of his brother
Friars, his intractable temper drew their hostility (of which we know
very little) on his head. Persuasiveness and tact were needed by one who
would impress such novel views as his upon his fellows or, in the
thirteenth century, escape persecution for their divulgence. Bacon
attacked dead and living worthies, tactlessly, fatuously, and unfairly.
Of his life scarcely anything is known, save from his allusions to
himself and others; and these are insufficient for the construction of
even a slight consecutive narrative. Born; studied at Oxford; went to
Paris, studied, experimented; is at Oxford again, and a Franciscan;
studies, teaches, becomes suspect to his Order, is sent back to Paris,
kept under surveillance, receives a letter from the Pope, writes,
writes, writes--his three best-known works; is again in trouble,
confined for many years, released, and dead, so very dead, body and
frame alike, until partly unearthed after five centuries.”
The bulk of these “three best-known works” is a hotly phrased and
sometimes quite abusive, but entirely just attack on the ignorance of
the times, combined with a wealth of suggestions for the increase of
knowledge. In his passionate insistence upon the need of experiment and
of collecting knowledge, the spirit of Aristotle lives again in him.
“Experiment, experiment,” that is the burthen of Roger Bacon. Yet of
Aristotle himself Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of him because
men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and pored over bad
Latin translations of the master. “If I had my way,” he wrote, in his
intemperate fashion, “I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the
study of them can only lead to a loss of time, produce error, and
increase ignorance,” a sentiment that Aristotle would probably have
echoed could he have returned to a world in which his works were not so
much read as worshipped--and that, as Roger Bacon showed, in the most
abominable translations.
Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of seeming to
square it all with orthodoxy for fear of the prison and worse, Roger
Bacon shouted to mankind, “Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities;
_look at the world_!” Four chief sources of ignorance he denounced:
respect for authority, custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the
vain proud unteachableness of our dispositions. Overcome but these, and
a world of power would open to men:--
“Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great
ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with
greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made
so that without a draught animal they may be moved cum _impetu
inæstimabili_, as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which
antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may
sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may
beat the air in the manner of a flying bird.”
Occam, Roger Bacon, these are the early precursors of a great movement
in Europe away from “Realism” towards reality. For a time the older
influences fought against the naturalism of the new Nominalists. In 1339
Occam’s books were put under a ban and Nominalism solemnly condemned. As
late as 1473 an attempt was made to bind teachers of Paris by an oath to
teach Realism.[388] It was only in the sixteenth century with the
printing of books and the increase of intelligence that the movement
from absolutism towards experiment became massive, and that one
investigator began to co-operate with another.
Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries experimenting with
material things was on the increase, items of knowledge were being won
by men, but there was no inter-related advance. The work was done in a
detached, furtive, and inglorious manner. A tradition of isolated
investigation came into Europe from the Arabs and a considerable amount
of private and secretive research was carried on by the alchemists, for
whom modern writers are a little too apt with their contempt. These
alchemists were in close touch with the glass and metal workers and with
the herbalists and medicine-makers of the times; they pried into many
secrets of nature, but they were obsessed by “practical” ideas; they
sought not knowledge, but power; they wanted to find out how to
manufacture gold from cheaper materials, how to make men immortal by the
elixir of life, and such-like vulgar dreams. Incidentally in their
researches they learnt much about poisons, dyes, metallurgy, and the
like; they discovered various refractory substances, and worked their
way towards clear glass and so to lenses and optical instruments; but as
scientific men tell us continually, and as “practical” men still refuse
to learn, it is only when knowledge is sought for her own sake that she
gives rich and unexpected gifts in any abundance to her servants. The
world of to-day is still much more disposed to spend money on technical
research than on pure science. Half the men in our scientific
laboratories still dream of patents and secret processes. We live to-day
largely in the age of alchemists, for all our sneers at their memory.
The “business man” of to-day still thinks of research as a sort of
alchemy.
Closely associated with the alchemists were the astrologers, who were
also a “practical” race. They studied the stars--to tell fortunes. They
lacked that broader faith and understanding which induces men simply to
study the stars.
Not until the fifteenth century did the ideas which Roger Bacon first
expressed begin to produce their first-fruits in new knowledge and a
widening outlook. Then suddenly, as the sixteenth century dawned, and as
the world recovered from the storm of social trouble that had followed
the pestilences of the fourteenth century, Western Europe broke out into
a galaxy of names that outshine the utmost scientific reputations of the
best age of Greece. Nearly every nation contributed, the reader will
note, for science knows no nationality.
One of the earliest and most splendid in this constellation is the
Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a man with an almost
miraculous vision for reality. He was a naturalist, an anatomist, an
engineer, as well as a very great artist. He was the first modern to
realize the true nature of fossils,[389] he made note-books of
observations that still amaze us, he was convinced of the practicability
of mechanical flight. Another great name is that of Copernicus, a Pole
(1473-1543), who made the first clear analysis of the movements of the
heavenly bodies and showed that the earth moves round the sun. Tycho
Brahe (1546-1601), a Dane working at the university of Prague, rejected
this latter belief, but his observations of celestial movements were of
the utmost value to his successors, and especially to the German,
Kepler (1571-1630). Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the founder of the
science of dynamics. Before his time it was believed that a weight a
hundred times greater than another would fall a hundred times as fast.
Galileo denied this. Instead of arguing about it like a scholar and a
gentleman, he put it to the coarse test of experiment by dropping two
unequal weights from an upper gallery of the leaning tower of Pisa--to
the horror of all erudite men. He made what was almost the first
telescope, and he developed the astronomical views of Copernicus; but
the church, still struggling gallantly against the light, decided that
to believe that the earth was smaller and inferior to the sun made man
and Christianity of no account, and diminished the importance of the
Pope; so Galileo, under threats of dire punishment, when he was an old
man of sixty-nine, was made to recant this view and put the earth back
in its place as the immovable centre of the universe. He knelt before
ten cardinals in scarlet, an assembly august enough to overawe truth
itself, while he amended the creation he had disarranged. The story has
it that as he rose from his knees, after repeating his recantation, he
muttered, “_Eppur si muove_”--“it moves nevertheless.”
Newton (1642-1727) was born in the year of Galileo’s death. By his
discovery of the law of gravitation he completed the clear vision of the
starry universe that we have to-day. But Newton carries us into the
eighteenth century. He carries us too far for the present chapter. Among
the earlier names, that of Dr. Gilbert (1540-1603), of Colchester, is
pre-eminent. Roger Bacon had preached experiment, Gilbert was one of the
first to practise it. There can be little doubt that his work, which was
chiefly upon magnetism, helped to form the ideas of Francis Bacon, Lord
Verulam (1561-1626), Lord Chancellor to James I of England. This Francis
Bacon has been called the “Father of Experimental Philosophy,” but of
his share in the development of scientific work far too much has been
made.[390] He was, says Sir R. A. Gregory, “not the founder but the
apostle” of the scientific method. His greatest service to science was a
fantastic book, _The New Atlantis_. “In his _New Atlantis_, Francis
Bacon planned in somewhat fanciful language a palace of invention, a
great temple of science, where the pursuit of knowledge in all its
branches was to be organized on principles of the highest efficiency.”
From this Utopian dream arose the Royal Society of London, which
received a Royal Charter from Charles II of England in 1662. The
essential use and virtue of this society was and is _publication_. Its
formation marks a definite step from isolated inquiry towards
co-operative work, from the secret and solitary investigations of the
alchemist to the frank report and open discussion which is the life of
the modern scientific process. For the true scientific method is this:
to trust no statements without verification, to test all things as
rigorously as possible, to keep no secrets, to attempt no monopolies, to
give out one’s best modestly and plainly, serving no other end but
knowledge.
The long-slumbering science of anatomy was revived by Harvey
(1578-1657), who demonstrated the circulation of the blood.... Presently
the Dutchman, Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) brought the first crude microscope
to bear upon the hidden minutiæ of life.
These are but some of the brightest stars amidst that increasing
multitude of men who have from the fifteenth century to our own time,
with more and more collective energy and vigour, lit up our vision of
the universe, and increased our power over the conditions of our lives.
§ 7
We have dealt thus fully with the beginnings of science in the Middle
Ages because of its ultimate importance in human affairs. In the long
run, Roger Bacon is of more significance to mankind than any monarch of
his time. But the contemporary world, for the most part, knew nothing of
this smouldering activity in studies and lecture-rooms and alchemist’s
laboratories that was presently to alter all the conditions of life. The
church did indeed take notice of what was afoot, but only because of the
disregard of her conclusive decisions. She had decided that the earth
was the very centre of God’s creation, and that the Pope was the
divinely appointed ruler of the earth. Men’s ideas on these essential
points, she insisted, must not be disturbed by any contrary teaching. So
soon, however, as she had compelled Galileo to say that the world did
not move she was satisfied; she does not seem to have realized how
ominous it was for her that, after all, the earth did move.
Very great social as well as intellectual developments were in progress
in Western Europe throughout this period of the later Middle Ages. But
the human mind apprehends events far more vividly than changes; and men
for the most part, then as now, kept on in their own traditions in spite
of the shifting scene about them.
In an outline such as this it is impossible to crowd in the clustering
events of history that do not clearly show the main process of human
development, however bright and picturesque they may be. We have to
record the steady growth of towns and cities, the reviving power of
trade and money, the gradual re-establishment of law and custom, the
extension of security, the supersession of private warfare that went on
in Western Europe in the period between the First Crusade and the
sixteenth century. Of much that looms large in our national histories we
cannot tell anything. We have no space for the story of the repeated
attempts of the English kings to conquer Scotland and set themselves up
as kings of France, nor of how the Norman English established themselves
insecurely in Ireland (twelfth century), and how Wales was linked to the
English crown (1282). All through the Middle Ages the struggle of
England with Scotland and France was in progress; there were times when
it seemed that Scotland was finally subjugated and when the English king
held far more land in France than its titular sovereign. In the English
histories this struggle with France is too often represented as a
single-handed and almost successful attempt to conquer France. In
reality it was a joint enterprise undertaken in concert with the
powerful French vassal state of Burgundy to conquer and divide the
patrimony of Hugh Capet.[391] Of the English rout by the Scotch at
Bannockburn (1314), and of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, the
Scottish national heroes, of the battles of Crecy (1346) and Poitiers
(1356) and Agincourt (1415) in France, which shine like stars in the
English imagination, little battles in which sturdy bowmen through some
sunny hours made a great havoc among French knights in armour, of the
Black Prince and Henry V of England, and of how a peasant girl, Joan of
Arc, the Maid of Orleans, drove the English out of her country again
(1429-1430), this history relates nothing. For every country has such
cherished national events. They are the ornamental tapestry of history,
and no part of the building. Rajputana or Poland, Russia, Spain, Persia,
and China can all match or outdo the utmost romance of western Europe,
with equally adventurous knights and equally valiant princesses and
equally stout fights against the odds. Nor can we tell how Louis XI of
France (1461-1483), the son of Joan of Arc’s Charles VII, brought
Burgundy to heel and laid the foundations of a centralized French
monarchy. It signifies more that in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, gunpowder, that Mongol gift, came to Europe so that the kings
(Louis XI included) and the law, relying upon the support of the growing
towns, were able to batter down the castles of the half-independent
robber knights and barons of the earlier Middle Ages and consolidate a
more centralized power. The fighting nobles and knights of the barbaric
period disappear slowly from history during these centuries; the
Crusades consumed them, such dynastic wars as the English Wars of the
Roses killed them off, the arrows from the English long-bow pierced them
and stuck out a yard behind, infantry so armed swept them from the
stricken field; they became reconciled to trade and changed their
nature. They disappeared in everything but a titular sense from the west
and south of Europe before they disappeared from Germany. The knight in
Germany remained a professional fighting man into the sixteenth century.
Between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries in western Europe, and
particularly in France and England, there sprang up like flowers a
multitude of very distinctive and beautiful buildings, cathedrals,
abbeys, and the like, the Gothic architecture. This lovely efflorescence
marks the appearance of a body of craftsmen closely linked in its
beginnings to the church. In Italy and Spain too the world was
beginning to build freely and beautifully again. At first it was the
wealth of the church that provided most of these buildings; then kings
and merchants also began to build.
From the twelfth century onward, with the increase of trade, there was a
great revival of town life throughout Europe. Prominent among these
towns were Venice, with its dependents Ragusa and Corfu, Genoa, Verona,
Bologna, Pisa, Florence, Naples, Milan, Marseilles, Lisbon, Barcelona,
Narbonne, Tours, Orleans, Bordeaux, Paris, Ghent, Bruges, Boulogne,
London, Oxford, Cambridge, Southampton, Dover, Antwerp, Hamburg, Bremen,
Cologne, Mayence, Nuremberg, Munich, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Breslau,
Stettin, Dantzig, Königsberg, Riga, Pskof, Novgorod, Wisby, and Bergen.
“A West German town, between 1400 and 1500,[392] embodied all the
achievements of progress at that time, although from a modern standpoint
much seems wanting.... The streets were mostly narrow and irregularly
built, the houses chiefly of wood, while almost every burgher kept his
cattle in the house, and the herd of swine which was driven every
morning by the town herdsman to the pasture-ground formed an inevitable
part of city life.[393] In Frankfort-on-Main it was unlawful after 1481
to keep swine in the Altstadt, but in the Neustadt and in Sachsenhausen
this custom remained as a matter of course. It was only in 1645, after a
corresponding attempt in 1556 had failed, that the swine-pens in the
inner town were pulled down at Leipzig. The rich burghers, who
occasionally took part in the great trading companies, were
conspicuously wealthy landowners and had extensive courtyards with large
barns inside the town walls. The most opulent of them owned those
splendid patrician houses which we still admire even to-day. But even in
the older towns most houses of the fifteenth century have disappeared;
only here and there a building with open timber-work and over-hanging
storeys, as in Bacharach or Miltenburg, reminds us of the style of
architecture then customary in the houses of burghers. The great bulk
of the inferior population, who lived on mendicancy, or got a livelihood
by the exercise of the inferior industries, inhabited squalid hovels
outside the town; the town wall was often the only support for these
wretched buildings. The internal fittings of the houses, even amongst
the wealthy population, were very defective according to modern ideas;
the Gothic style was as little suitable for the petty details of objects
of luxury as it was splendidly adapted for the building of churches and
town halls. The influence of the Renaissance added much to the comfort
of the house.
“The fourteenth and fifteenth century saw the building of numerous
Gothic town churches and town halls throughout Europe which still in
many cases serve their original purpose. The power and prosperity of the
towns find their best expression in these and in the fortifications with
their strong towers and gateways. Every picture of a town of the
sixteenth or later centuries shows conspicuously these latter erections
for the protection and honour of the town. The town did many things
which in our time are done by the State. Social problems were taken up
by town administration or the corresponding municipal organization. The
regulation of trade was the concern of the guilds in agreement with the
council, the care of the poor belonged to the church, while the council
looked after the protection of the town walls and the very necessary
fire brigades. The council, mindful of its social duties, superintended
the filling of the municipal granaries, in order to have supplies in
years of scarcity. Such store-houses were erected in almost every town
during the fifteenth century. Tariffs of prices for the sale of all
wares, high enough to enable every artisan to make a good livelihood,
and to give the purchaser a guarantee for the quality of the wares, were
maintained. The town was also the chief capitalist; as a seller of
annuities on lives and inheritances it was a banker and enjoyed
unlimited credit. In return it obtained means for the construction of
fortifications or for such occasions as the acquisition of sovereign
rights from the hand of an impecunious prince.”
For the most part these European towns were independent or
quasi-independent aristocratic republics. Most admitted a vague
overlordship on the part of the church, or of the emperor or of a king.
Others were parts of kingdoms, or even the capitals of dukes or kings.
In such cases their internal freedom was maintained by a royal or
imperial charter. In England the Royal City of Westminster on the Thames
stood cheek by jowl with the walled city of London, into which the King
came only with ceremony and permission. The entirely free Venetian
republic ruled an empire of dependent islands and trading ports, rather
after the fashion of the Athenian republic. Genoa also stood alone. The
Germanic towns of the Baltic and North Sea from Riga to Middelburg in
Holland, Dortmund, and Cologne were loosely allied in a confederation,
the confederation of the Hansa towns, under the leadership of Hamburg,
Bremen, and Lubeck, a confederation which was still more loosely
attached to the empire. This confederation, which included over seventy
towns in all, and which had dépôts in Novgorod, Bergen, London, and
Bruges, did much to keep the northern seas clean of piracy, that curse
of the Mediterranean and of the Eastern seas. The Eastern Empire
throughout its last phase, from the Ottoman conquest of its European
hinterland in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century until its fall
in 1453, was practically only the trading town of Constantinople, a town
state like Genoa or Venice, except that it was encumbered by a corrupt
imperial court.
[Illustration: Principal EUROPEAN TRADE ROUTES of the 14th Cent'y]
The fullest and most splendid developments of this city life of the
later Middle Ages occurred in Italy. After the end of the Hohenstaufen
line in the thirteenth century, the hold of the Holy Roman Empire upon
North and Central Italy weakened, although, as we shall tell, German
Emperors were still crowned as kings and emperors in Italy up to the
time of Charles V (_circ._ 1530). There arose a number of
quasi-independent city states to the north of Rome, the papal capital.
South Italy and Sicily, however, remained under foreign dominion. Genoa
and her rival, Venice, were the great trading seaports of this time;
their noble palaces, their lordly paintings, still win our admiration.
Milan, at the foot of the St. Gothard pass, revived to wealth and power.
Inland was Florence, a trading and financial centre which, under the
almost monarchical rule of the Medici family in the fifteenth century,
enjoyed a second “Periclean age.” But already before the time of these
cultivated Medici “bosses,” Florence had produced much beautiful art.
Giotto’s tower (Giotto, born 1266, died 1337) and the glorious Duomo (by
Brunellesco, born 1377, died 1446) already existed. Towards the end of
the fourteenth century Florence became the centre of the rediscovery,
restoration, and imitation of antique art (the “Renaissance” in its
narrower sense). Artistic productions, unlike philosophical thought and
scientific discovery, are the ornaments and expression rather than the
creative substance of history, and here we cannot attempt to trace the
development of the art of Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Donatello (died
1466), Leonardo da Vinci (died 1519), Michelangelo (1475-1564), and
Raphael (died 1520). Of the scientific speculation of Leonardo we have
already had occasion to speak.
§ 8
In 1453, as we have related, Constantinople fell. Throughout the next
century the Turkish pressure upon Europe was heavy and continuous. The
boundary line between Mongol and Aryan, which had lain somewhere east of
the Pamirs in the days of Pericles, had receded now to Hungary.
Constantinople had long been a mere island of Christians in a Turk-ruled
Balkan Peninsula. Its fall did much to interrupt the trade with the
East.
Of the two rival cities of the Mediterranean, Venice was generally on
much better terms with the Turks than Genoa. Every intelligent Genoese
sailor fretted at the trading monopoly of Venice, and tried to invent
some way of getting through it or round it. And there were now new
peoples taking to the sea trade, and disposed to look for new ways to
the old markets because the ancient routes were closed to them. The
Portuguese, for example, were developing an Atlantic coasting trade. The
Atlantic was waking up again after a vast period of neglect that dated
from the Roman murder of Carthage. It is rather a delicate matter to
decide whether the western European was pushing out into the Atlantic or
whether he was being pushed out into it by the Turk, who lorded it in
the Mediterranean until the Battle of Lepanto (1571). The Venetian and
Genoese ships were creeping round to Antwerp, and the Hansa town seamen
were coming south and extending their range. And there were
considerable developments of seamanship and shipbuilding in progress.
The Mediterranean, as we have noted (chapter xvii) is a sea for galleys
and coasting. But upon the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea winds are
more prevalent, seas run higher, the shore is often a danger rather than
a refuge. The high seas called for the sailing ship, and in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it appears, keeping its course by the
compass and the stars.
By the thirteenth century the Hansa merchants were already sailing
regularly from Bergen across the grey cold seas to the Northmen in
Iceland. In Iceland men knew of Greenland, and adventurous voyagers had
long ago found a further land beyond, Vinland, where the climate was
pleasant and where men could settle if they chose to cut themselves off
from the rest of human kind. This Vinland was either Nova Scotia or,
what is more probable, New England.
All over Europe in the fifteenth century merchants and sailors were
speculating about new ways to the East. The Portuguese, unaware that
Pharaoh Necho had solved the problem ages ago, were asking whether it
was not possible to go round to India by the coast of Africa. Their
ships followed in the course that Hanno took to Cape Verde (1445). They
put out to sea to the west and found the Canary Isles, Madeira, and the
Azores.[394] That was a fairly long stride across the Atlantic. In 1486
a Portuguese, Diaz, reported that he had rounded the south of Africa....
A certain Genoese, Christopher Columbus, began to think more and more of
what is to us a very obvious and natural enterprise, but which strained
the imagination of the fifteenth century to the utmost, a voyage due
west across the Atlantic. At that time nobody knew of the existence of
America as a separate continent. Columbus knew that the world was a
sphere, but he under-estimated its size; the travels of Marco Polo had
given him an exaggerated idea of the extent of Asia, and he supposed
therefore that Japan, with its reputation for a great wealth of gold,
lay across the Atlantic in about the position of Mexico. He had made
various voyages in the Atlantic; he had been to Iceland and perhaps
heard of Vinland, which must have greatly encouraged these ideas of his,
and this project of sailing into the sunset became the ruling purpose of
his life. He was a penniless man, some accounts say he was a bankrupt,
and his only way of securing a ship was to get someone to entrust him
with a command. He went first to King John II of Portugal, who listened
to him, made difficulties, and then arranged for an expedition to start
without his knowledge, a purely Portuguese expedition. This highly
diplomatic attempt to steal a march on an original man failed, as it
deserved to fail; the crew became mutinous, the captain lost heart and
returned (1483). Columbus then went to the Court of Spain.
At first he could get no ship and no powers. Spain was assailing
Granada, the last foothold of the Moslems in western Europe. Most of
Spain had been recovered by the Christians between the eleventh and the
thirteenth century; then had come a pause; and now all Spain, united by
the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, was setting
itself to the completion of the Christian conquest. Despairing of
Spanish help, Columbus sent his brother Bartholomew to Henry VII of
England, but the adventure did not attract that canny monarch. Finally
in 1492 Granada fell, and then, helped by some merchants of the town of
Palos, Columbus got his ships, three ships, of which only one, the
_Santa Maria_, of 100 tons burthen, was decked. The two other were open
boats of half that tonnage.
The little expedition--it numbered altogether eighty-eight men!--went
south to the Canaries, and then stood out across the unknown seas, in
beautiful weather and with a helpful wind.
The story of that momentous voyage of two months and nine days must be
read in detail to be appreciated. The crew was full of doubts and fears;
they might, they feared, sail on for ever. They were comforted by seeing
some birds, and later on by finding a pole worked with tools, and a
branch with strange berries. At ten o’clock, on the night of October
11th, 1492, Columbus saw a light ahead; the next morning land was
sighted, and, while the day was still young, Columbus landed on the
shores of the new world, richly apparelled and bearing the royal banner
of Spain....
Early in 1493 Columbus returned to Europe. He brought gold, cotton,
strange beasts and birds, and two wild-eyed painted Indians to be
baptized. He had not found Japan, it was thought, but India. The islands
he had found were called, therefore the West Indies. The same year he
sailed again with a great expedition of seventeen ships and fifteen
thousand men, with the express permission of the Pope to take possession
of these new lands for the Spanish crown....
We cannot tell of his experiences as Governor of this Spanish colony,
nor how he was superseded and put in chains. In a little while a swarm
of Spanish adventurers were exploring the new lands. But it is
interesting to note that Columbus died ignorant of the fact that he had
discovered a new continent. He believed to the day of his death that he
had sailed round the world to Asia.
The news of his discoveries caused a great excitement throughout western
Europe. It spurred the Portuguese to fresh attempts to reach India by
the South African route. In 1497, Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon to
Zanzibar, and thence, with an Arab pilot, he struck across the Indian
Ocean to Calicut in India. In 1515 there were Portuguese ships in Java
and the Moluccas. In 1519 a Portuguese sailor, Magellan, in the
employment of the Spanish King, coasted to the south of South America,
passed through the dark and forbidding “Strait of Magellan,” and so came
into the Pacific Ocean, which had already been sighted by Spanish
explorers who had crossed the Isthmus of Panama.
Magellan’s expedition continued across the Pacific Ocean westward. This
was a far more heroic voyage than that of Columbus; for _eight and
ninety days_ Magellan sailed unflinchingly over that vast, empty ocean,
sighting nothing but two little desert islands. The crews were rotten
with scurvy; there was little water and that bad, and putrid biscuit to
eat. Rats were hunted eagerly; cowhide was gnawed and sawdust devoured
to stay the pangs of hunger. In this state the expedition reached the
Ladrones. They discovered the Philippines, and here Magellan was killed
in a fight with the natives. Several other captains were murdered. Five
ships had started with Magellan in August, 1519, and two hundred and
eighty men; in July, 1522, the _Vittoria_, with a remnant of one and
thirty men aboard, returned up the Atlantic to her anchorage near the
Mole of Seville, in the river Guadalquivir--the first ship that ever
circumnavigated this planet.[395]
The English and French and Dutch and the sailors of the Hansa towns came
rather later into this new adventure of exploration. They had not the
same keen interest in the eastern trade. And when they did come in,
their first efforts were directed to sailing round the north of America
as Magellan had sailed round the south, and to sailing round the north
of Asia as Vasco da Gama had sailed round the south of Africa. Both
these enterprises were doomed to failure by the nature of things. Both
in America and the East, Spain and Portugal had half a century’s start
of England and France and Holland. And Germany never started. The King
of Spain was Emperor of Germany in those crucial years, and the Pope had
given the monopoly of America to Spain, and not simply to Spain, but to
the kingdom of Castile. This must have restrained both Germany and
Holland at first from American adventures. The Hansa towns were
quasi-independent; they had no monarch behind them to support them, and
no unity among themselves for so big an enterprise as oceanic
exploration. It was the misfortune of Germany, and perhaps of the world,
that, as we will presently tell, a storm of warfare exhausted her when
all the Western powers were going to this newly opened school of trade
and administration upon the high seas.
Slowly throughout the sixteenth century the immense good fortune of
Castile unfolded itself before the dazzled eyes of Europe. She had found
a new world, abounding in gold and silver and wonderful possibilities of
settlement. It was all hers, because the Pope had said so. The Court of
Rome, in an access of magnificence, had divided this new world of
strange lands, which was now opening out to the European imagination,
between the Spanish, who were to have everything west of a line 370
leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, and the Portuguese, to whom
everything east of this line was given.
At first the only people encountered by the Spaniards in America were
savages of a Mongoloid type. Many of these savages were cannibals. It is
a misfortune for science that the first Europeans to reach America were
these rather incurious Spaniards, without any scientific passion,
thirsty for gold, and full of the blind bigotry of a recent religious
war. They made few intelligent observations of the native methods and
ideas of these primordial people. They slaughtered them, they robbed
them, they enslaved them, and baptized them; but they made small note of
the customs and motives that changed and vanished under their assault.
They were as destructive and reckless as the British in Tasmania, who
shot the last Palæolithic men at sight, and put out poisoned meat for
them to find.
Great areas of the American interior were prairie land, whose nomadic
tribes subsisted upon vast herds of the now practically extinct bison.
In their manner of life, in their painted garments and their free use of
paint, in their general physical characters, these prairie Indians
showed remarkable resemblances to the Later Palæolithic men of the
Solutrian age in Europe. But they had no horses. They seem to have made
no very great advance from that primordial state, which was probably the
state in which their ancestors had reached America. They had, however, a
knowledge of metals, and most notably a free use of native copper, but
no knowledge of iron. As the Spaniards penetrated into the continent,
they found and they attacked, plundered, and destroyed two separate
civilized systems that had developed in America, perhaps quite
independently of the civilized systems of the old world. One of them was
the Aztec civilization of Mexico; the other, that of Peru. They had
arisen out of the heliolithic sub-civilization that had drifted across
the Pacific from its region of origin round and about the Mediterranean.
We have already noted one or two points of interest in these unique
developments. Along their own lines these civilized peoples had reached
to a state of affairs roughly parallel with the culture of pre-dynastic
Egypt or the early Sumerian cities. Before the Aztecs and the Peruvians
there had been still earlier civilized beginnings which had either been
destroyed by their successors, or which had failed and relapsed of their
own accord.
The Aztecs seem to have been a conquering, less civilized people,
dominating a more civilized community, as the Aryans dominated Greece
and North India. Their religion was a primitive, complex, and cruel
system, in which human sacrifices and ceremonial cannibalism played a
large part. Their minds were haunted by the idea of sin and the need for
bloody propitiations.[396]
The Aztec civilization was destroyed by an expedition under Cortez. He
had eleven ships, four hundred Europeans, two hundred Indians, sixteen
horses, and fourteen guns. But in Yucatan he picked up a stray Spaniard
who had been a captive with the Indians for some years, and who had more
or less learnt various Indian languages, and knew that the Aztec rule
was deeply resented by many of its subjects. It was in alliance with
these that Cortez advanced over the mountains into the valley of Mexico,
(1519)[397]. How he entered Mexico, how its monarch, Montezuma, was
killed by his own people for favouring the Spaniards, how Cortez was
besieged in Mexico, and escaped with the loss of his guns and horses,
and how after a terrible retreat to the coast he was able to return and
subjugate the whole land, is a romantic and picturesque story which we
cannot even attempt to tell here. The population of Mexico to this day
is largely of native blood, but Spanish has replaced the native
languages, and such culture as exists is Catholic and Spanish.
[Illustration: Map of the World to show the CHIEF VOYAGES of EXPLORATION
(to 1522)]
[Illustration: MEXICO and PERU]
The still more curious Peruvian state fell a victim to another
adventurer, Pizarro. He sailed from the Isthmus of Panama in 1530, with
an expedition of a hundred and sixty-eight Spaniards. Like Cortez in
Mexico, he availed himself of the native dissensions to secure
possession of the doomed state. Like Cortez, too, who had made a captive
and tool of Montezuma, he seized the Inca of Peru by treachery, and
attempted to rule in his name. Here again we cannot do justice to the
tangle of subsequent events, the ill-planned insurrections of the
natives, the arrival of Spanish reinforcements from Mexico, and the
reduction of the state to a Spanish province. Nor can we tell much more
of the swift spread of Spanish adventurers over the rest of America,
outside the Portuguese reservation of Brazil. To begin with, each story
is nearly always a story of adventurers and of cruelty and loot. The
Spaniards ill-treated the natives, they quarrelled among themselves, the
law and order of Spain were months and years away from them; it was only
very slowly that the phase of violence and conquest passed into a phase
of government and settlement. But long before there was much order in
America, a steady stream of gold and silver began to flow across the
Atlantic to the Spanish government and people.
After the first violent treasure hunt came plantation and the working of
mines. With that arose the earliest labour difficulty in the new world.
At first the Indians were enslaved with much brutality and injustice;
but to the honour of the Spaniards this did not go uncriticized. The
natives found champions, and very valiant champions, in the Dominican
Order and in a secular priest Las Casas, who was for a time a planter
and slave-owner in Cuba until his conscience smote him. An importation
of negro slaves from West Africa also began quite early in the sixteenth
century. After some retrogression, Mexico, Brazil, and Spanish South
America began to develop into great slave-holding, wealth-producing
lands....
We cannot tell here, as we would like to do, of the fine civilizing work
done in South America, and more especially among the natives, by the
Franciscans, and presently by the Jesuits, who came into America in the
latter half of the sixteenth century (after 1549)....[398]
So it was that Spain rose to a temporary power and prominence in the
world’s affairs. It was a very sudden and very memorable rise. From the
eleventh century this infertile and corrugated peninsula had been
divided against itself, its Christian population had sustained a
perpetual conflict with the Moors; then by what seems like an accident
it achieved unity just in time to reap the first harvest of benefit from
the discovery of America. Before that time Spain had always been a poor
country; it is a poor country to-day, almost its only wealth lies in its
mines. For a century, however, through its monopoly of the gold and
silver of America, it dominated the world. The east and centre of Europe
were still overshadowed by the Turk and Mongol; the discovery of America
was itself a consequence of the Turkish conquests; very largely through
the Mongolian inventions of compass and paper, and under the stimulus of
travel in Asia and of the growing knowledge of eastern Asiatic wealth
and civilization, came this astonishing blazing up of the mental,
physical, and social energies of the “Atlantic fringe.” For close in the
wake of Portugal and Spain came France and England, and presently
Holland, each in its turn taking up the rôle of expansion and empire
overseas. The centre of interest for European history which once lay in
the Levant shifts now from the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea to the
Atlantic. For some centuries the Turkish Empire and Central Asia and
China are relatively neglected by the limelight of the European
historian. Nevertheless, these central regions of the world remain
central, and their welfare and participation is necessary to the
permanent peace of mankind.
§ 9
And now let us consider the political consequences of this vast release
and expansion of European ideas in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries with the new development of science, the exploration of the
world, the great dissemination of knowledge through paper and printing,
and the spread of a new craving for freedom and equality. How was it
affecting the mentality of the courts and kings that directed the formal
affairs of mankind? We have already shown how the hold of the Catholic
church upon the consciences of men was weakening at this time. Only the
Spaniards, fresh from a long and finally successful religious war
against Islam, had any great enthusiasm left for the church. The Turkish
conquests and the expansion of the known world robbed the Roman Empire
of its former prestige of universality. The old mental and moral
framework of Europe was breaking up. What was happening to the dukes,
princes, and kings of the old dispensation during this age of change?
In England, as we shall tell later, very subtle and interesting
tendencies were leading towards a new method in government, the method
of parliament, that was to spread later on over nearly all the world.
But of these tendencies the world at large was as yet practically
unconscious in the sixteenth century.
Few monarchs have left us intimate diaries; to be a monarch and to be
frank are incompatible feats; monarchy is itself necessarily a pose. The
historian is obliged to speculate about the contents of the head that
wears a crown as best he can. No doubt regal psychology has varied with
the ages. We have, however, the writings of a very able man of this
period who set himself to study and expound the arts of kingcraft as
they were understood in the later fifteenth century. This was the
celebrated Florentine, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). He was of good
birth and reasonable fortune, and he had entered the public employment
of the republic by the time he was twenty-five. For eighteen years he
was in the Florentine diplomatic service; he was engaged upon a number
of embassies, and in 1500 he was sent to France to deal with the French
king. From 1502 to 1512 he was the right-hand man of the gonfalonier
(the life president) of Florence, Soderini. Machiavelli reorganized the
Florentine army, wrote speeches for the gonfalonier, was indeed the
ruling intelligence in Florentine affairs. When Soderini, who had leant
upon the French, was overthrown by the Medici family whom the Spanish
supported, Machiavelli, though he tried to transfer his services to the
victors, was tortured on the rack and expelled. He took up his quarters
in a villa near San Casciano, twelve miles or so from Florence, and
there entertained himself partly by collecting and writing salacious
stories to a friend in Rome, and partly by writing books about Italian
politics in which he could no longer play a part. Just as we owe Marco
Polo’s book of travels to his imprisonment, so we owe Machiavelli’s
_Prince_, his _Florentine History_, and _The Art of War_ to his downfall
and the boredom of San Casciano.
The enduring value of these books lies in the clear idea they give us of
the quality and limitations of the ruling minds of this age. Their
atmosphere was his atmosphere. If he brought an exceptionally keen
intelligence to their business, that merely throws it into a brighter
light.
His susceptible mind had been greatly impressed by the cunning, cruelty,
audacity, and ambition of Cæsar Borgia, the Duke of Valentino, in whose
camp he had spent some months as an envoy. In his _Prince_ he idealized
this dazzling person. Cæsar Borgia (1476-1507), the reader must
understand, was the son of Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia
(1492-1503). The reader will perhaps be startled at the idea of a Pope
having a son, but this, we must remember, was a pre-reformation Pope.
The Papacy at this time was in a mood of moral relaxation, and though
Alexander was, as a priest, pledged to live unmarried, this did not
hinder him from living openly with a sort of unmarried wife, and
devoting the resources of Christendom to the advancement of his family.
Cæsar was a youth of spirit even for the times in which he lived; he had
early caused his elder brother to be murdered, and also the husband of
his sister, Lucrezia. He had indeed betrayed and murdered a number of
people. With his father’s assistance he had become duke of a wide area
of Central Italy when Machiavelli visited him. He had shown little or no
military ability, but considerable dexterity and administrative power.
His magnificence was of the most temporary sort. When presently his
father died, it collapsed like a pricked bladder. Its unsoundness was
not evident to Machiavelli.[399] Our chief interest in Cæsar Borgia is
that he realized Machiavelli’s highest ideals of a superb and successful
prince.
Much has been written to show that Machiavelli had wide and noble
intentions behind his political writings, but all such attempts to
ennoble him will leave the sceptical reader who insists on reading the
lines instead of reading imaginary things between the lines of
Machiavelli’s work, cold towards him. This man manifestly had no belief
in any righteousness at all, no belief in a God ruling over the world or
in a God in men’s hearts, no understanding of the power of conscience in
men. Not for him were Utopian visions of world-wide human order, or
attempts to realize the _City of God_. Such things he did not want. It
seemed to him that to get power, to gratify one’s desires and
sensibilities and hates, to swagger triumphantly in the world, must be
the crown of human desire. Only a prince could fully realize such a
life. Some streak of timidity or his sense of the poorness of his
personal claims had evidently made him abandon such dreams for himself;
but at least he might hope to serve a prince, to live close to the
glory, to share the plunder and the lust and the gratified malice. He
might even make himself indispensable! He set himself, therefore, to
become an “expert” in prince-craft. He assisted Soderini to fail. When
he was racked and rejected by the Medicis, and had no further hopes of
being even a successful court parasite, he wrote these handbooks of
cunning to show what a clever servant some prince had lost. His ruling
thought, his great contribution to political literature, was that the
moral obligations upon ordinary men cannot bind princes.[400]
There is a disposition to ascribe the virtue of patriotism to
Machiavelli because he suggested that Italy, which was weak and
divided--she had been invaded by the Turks and saved from conquest only
by the death of the Sultan Muhammad, and she was being fought over by
the French and Spanish as though she was something inanimate--might be
united and strong; but he saw in that possibility only a great
opportunity for a prince. And he advocated a national army only because
he saw the Italian method of carrying on war by hiring bands of foreign
mercenaries was a hopeless one. At any time such troops might go over to
a better paymaster or decide to plunder the state they protected. He had
been deeply impressed by the victories of the Swiss over the Milanese,
but he never fathomed the secret of the free spirit that made those
victories possible. The Florentine militia he created was a complete
failure. He was a man born blind to the qualities that make peoples free
and nations great.
Yet this morally blind man was living in a little world of morally blind
men. It is clear that his style of thought was the style of thought of
the court of his time. Behind the princes of the new states that had
grown up out of the wreckage of the empire and the failure of the
Church, there were everywhere chancellors and secretaries and trusted
ministers of the Machiavellian type. Cromwell, for instance, the
minister of Henry VIII of England after his breach with Rome, regarded
Machiavelli’s _Prince_ as the quintessence of political wisdom. When
the princes were themselves sufficiently clever they too were
Machiavellian. They were scheming to outdo one another, to rob weaker
contemporaries, to destroy rivals, so that they might for a brief
interval swagger. They had little or no vision of any scheme of human
destinies greater than this game they played against one another.
[Illustration: SWITZERLAND, _showing principal Passes and Routes_]
§ 10
It is interesting to note that this Swiss infantry which had so
impressed Machiavelli was no part of the princely system of Europe. At
the very centre of the European system there had arisen a little
confederation of free states, the Swiss Confederation, which after some
centuries of nominal adhesion to the Holy Roman Empire became frankly
republican in 1499. As early as the thirteenth century, the peasant
farmers of three valleys round about the Lake of Lucerne took it into
their heads that they would dispense with an overlord and manage their
own affairs in their own fashion. Their chief trouble came from the
claims of a noble family of the Aar Valley, the Habsburg family. In 1245
the men of Schwyz burnt the castle of New Habsburg which had been set up
near Lucerne to overawe them; its ruins are still to be seen there.
This Habsburg family was a growing and acquisitive one; it had lands and
possessions throughout Germany; and in 1273, after the extinction of the
Hohenstaufen house, Rudolf of Habsburg was elected Emperor of Germany, a
distinction that became at last practically hereditary in his family.
None the less, the men of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden did not mean to
be ruled by any Habsburg; they formed an Everlasting League in 1291, and
they held their own among the mountains from that time onward to this
day, first as free members of the empire and then as an absolutely
independent confederation. Of the heroic legend of William Tell we have
no space to tell here, nor have we room in which to trace the gradual
extension of the confederation to its present boundaries. Romansh,
Italian, and French-speaking valleys were presently added to this
valiant little republican group. The red cross flag of Geneva has become
the symbol of international humanity in the midst of warfare. The bright
and thriving cities of Switzerland have been a refuge for free men from
a score of tyrannies.
§ 11A
Most of the figures that stand out in history, do so through some
exceptional personal quality, good or bad, that makes them more
significant than their fellows. But there was born at Ghent in Belgium
in 1500 a man of commonplace abilities and melancholy temperament, the
son of a mentally defective mother who had been married for reasons of
state, who was, through no fault of his own, to become the focus of the
accumulating stresses of Europe. The historian must give him a quite
unmerited and accidental prominence side by side with such marked
individualities as Alexander and Charlemagne and Frederick II. This was
the Emperor Charles V. For a time he had an air of being the greatest
monarch in Europe since Charlemagne. Both he and his illusory greatness
were the results of the matrimonial statecraft of his grandfather, the
Emperor Maximilian I (born 1459, died 1519).
Some families have fought, others have intrigued their way to world
power; the Habsburgs married their way. Maximilian began his career with
the inheritance of the Habsburgs, Austria, Styria, part of Alsace and
other districts; he married--the lady’s name scarcely matters to us--the
Netherlands and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy slipped from him after his
first wife’s death, but the Netherlands he held. Then he tried
unsuccessfully to marry Brittany. He became Emperor in succession to his
father, Frederick III, in 1493, and married the duchy of Milan. Finally
he married his son to the weak-minded daughter of Ferdinand and
Isabella, the Ferdinand and Isabella of Columbus, who not only reigned
over a freshly united Spain, and over Sardinia and the kingdom of the
Two Sicilies, but by virtue of the papal gifts to Castile, over all
America west of Brazil. So it was that Charles, his grandson, inherited
most of the American continent and between a third and a half of what
the Turks had left of Europe. The father of Charles died in 1506, and
Maximilian did his best to secure his grandson’s election to the
imperial throne.
Charles succeeded to the Netherlands in 1506; he became practically king
of the Spanish dominions, his mother being imbecile, when his
grandfather Ferdinand died in 1516; and his grandfather Maximilian dying
in 1519, he was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still comparatively
tender age of twenty.
[Illustration: EUROPE in the time of CHARLES V.]
His election as Emperor was opposed by the young and brilliant French
King, Francis I, who had succeeded to the French throne in 1515 at the
age of twenty-one. The candidature of Francis was supported by Leo X
(1513), who also requires from us the epithet brilliant. It was indeed
an age of brilliant monarchs. It was the age of Baber in India
(1526-1530) and Suleiman in Turkey (1520). Both Leo and Francis dreaded
the concentration of so much power in the hands of one man as the
election of Charles threatened. The only other monarch who seemed to
matter in Europe was Henry VIII, who had become King of England in 1509
at the age of eighteen. He also offered himself as a candidate for the
empire, and the imaginative English reader may amuse himself by
working out the possible consequences of such an election. There was
much scope for diplomacy in this triangle of kings. Charles on his way
from Spain to Germany visited England and secured the support of Henry
against Francis by bribing his minister, Cardinal Wolsey. Henry also
made a great parade of friendship with Francis, there was feasting,
tournaments, and suchlike antiquated gallantries in France, in a courtly
picnic known to historians as the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520).
Knighthood was becoming a picturesque affectation in the sixteenth
century. The Emperor Maximilian I is still called “the last of the
knights”; by German historians.
The election of Charles was secured, it is to be noted, by a vast amount
of bribery. He had as his chief supporters and creditors the great
German business house of the Fuggers. That large treatment of money and
credit which we call finance, which had gone out of European political
life with the collapse of the Roman Empire, was now coming back to
power. This appearance of the Fuggers, whose houses and palaces outshone
those of the emperors, marks the upward movement of forces that had
begun two or three centuries earlier in Cahors in France and in Florence
and other Italian towns. Money, public debts, and social unrest and
discontent, re-enter upon the miniature stage of this _Outline_. Charles
V was not so much a Habsburg as a Fugger emperor.
For a time this fair, not very intelligent-looking young man with the
thick upper lip and long, clumsy chin--features which still afflict his
descendants--was largely a puppet in the hands of his ministers. Able
servants after the order of Machiavelli guided him at first in the arts
of kingship. Then in a slow but effectual way he began to assert
himself. He was confronted at the very outset of his reign in Germany
with the perplexing dissensions of Christendom. The revolt against the
papal rule which had been going on since the days of Huss and Wycliffe
had been recently exasperated by a new and unusually cynical selling of
indulgences to raise money for the completion of St. Peter’s at Rome. A
monk named Luther, who had been consecrated as a priest, who had taken
to reading the Bible, and who, while visiting Rome on the business of
his order, had been much shocked by the levity and worldly splendour of
the Papacy, had come forward against these papal expedients at
Wittenberg (1517), offering disputation and propounding certain theses.
An important controversy ensued. At first Luther carried on this
controversy in Latin, but presently took to German, and speedily had the
people in a ferment. Charles found this dispute raging when he came from
Spain to Germany. He summoned an assembly or “diet” of the empire at
Worms on the Rhine. To this, Luther, who had been asked to recant his
views by Pope Leo X, and who had refused to do so, was summoned. He
came, and, entirely in the spirit of Huss, refused to recant unless he
was convinced of his error by logical argument or the authority of
Scripture. But his protectors among the princes were too powerful for
him to suffer the fate of John Huss.
[Illustration: Luther
(after Cranach)]
Here was a perplexing situation for the young Emperor. There is reason
to suppose that he was inclined at first to support Luther against the
Pope. Leo X had opposed the election of Charles, and was friendly with
his rival, Francis I. But Charles V was not a good Machiavellian, and he
had acquired in Spain a considerable religious sincerity. He decided
against Luther. Many of the German princes, and especially the Elector
of Saxony, sided with the reformer. Luther went into hiding under the
protection of the Saxon Elector, and Charles found himself in the
presence of the opening rift that was to split Christendom into two
contending camps.
Close upon these disturbances, and probably connected with them, came a
widespread peasants’ revolt throughout Germany. This outbreak frightened
Luther very effectually. He was shocked by its excesses, and from that
time forth the Reformation he advocated ceased to be a Reformation
according to the people and became a Reformation according to the
princes. He lost his confidence in that free judgment for which he had
stood up so manfully.
[Illustration: Francis I]
Meanwhile Charles realized that his great empire was in very serious
danger both from the west and from the east. On the west of him was his
spirited rival, Francis I; to the east was the Turk in Hungary, in
alliance with Francis and clamouring for certain arrears of tribute from
the Austrian dominions. Charles had the money and army of Spain at his
disposal, but it was extremely difficult to get any effective support in
money from Germany. His grandfather had developed a German infantry on
the Swiss model, very much upon the lines expounded in Machiavelli’s
_Art of War_, but these troops had to be paid and his imperial subsidies
had to be supplemented by unsecured borrowings, which were finally to
bring his supporters, the Fuggers, to ruin.
On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was successful
against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was north Italy;
the generalship was dull on both sides; their advances and retreats
depended chiefly on the arrival of reinforcements. The German army
invaded France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back into Italy, lost
Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long and unsuccessful
siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German forces, defeated, wounded,
and taken prisoner. He sent back a message to his queen that all was
“lost but honour,” made a humiliating peace, and broke it as soon as he
was liberated so that even the salvage of honour was but temporary.
Henry VIII and the Pope, in obedience to the rules of Machiavellian
strategy, now went over to the side of France in order to prevent
Charles becoming too powerful. The German troops in Milan, under the
Constable of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather than followed their
commander into a raid upon Rome. They stormed the city and pillaged it
(1527). The Pope took refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo while the
looting and slaughter went on. He bought off the German troops at last
by the payment of four hundred thousand ducats. Ten years of such stupid
and confused fighting impoverished all Europe and left the Emperor in
possession of Milan. In 1530 he was crowned by the Pope--he was the last
German Emperor to be crowned by the Pope--at Bologna. One thinks of the
rather dull-looking blonde face, with its long lip and chin, bearing the
solemn expression of one who endures a doubtful though probably
honourable ceremony.
Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hungary. They had
defeated and killed the King of Hungary in 1526, they held Buda-Pesth,
and in 1529, as we have already noted, Suleiman the Magnificent very
nearly took Vienna. The Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances,
and did his utmost to drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest
difficulty in getting the German princes to unite, even with this
formidable enemy upon their very borders. Francis I remained implacable
for a time, and there was a new French war; but in 1538 Charles won his
rival over to a more friendly attitude by ravaging the south of France.
Francis and Charles then formed an alliance against the Turk, but the
Protestant princes, the German princes who were resolved to break away
from Rome, had formed a league, the Schmalkaldic League (named after the
little town of Schmalkalden in Hesse, at which its constitution was
arranged), against the Emperor, and in the place of a great campaign to
recover Hungary for Christendom Charles had to turn his mind to the
gathering internal struggle in Germany. Of that struggle he saw only the
opening war. It was a struggle, a sanguinary irrational bickering of
princes for ascendancy, now flaming into war and destruction, now
sinking back to intrigues and diplomacies; it was a snake’s sack of
Machiavellian policies, that was to go on writhing incurably right into
the nineteenth century, and to waste and desolate Central Europe again
and again.
The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces at work in these
gathering troubles. He was for his time and station an exceptionally
worthy man, and he seems to have taken the religious dissensions that
were tearing Europe into warring fragments as genuine theological
differences. He gathered diets and councils in futile attempts at
reconciliation. Formulæ and confessions were tried over. The student of
German history must struggle with the details of the Religious Peace of
Nuremberg, the settlement at the diet of Ratisbon, the Interim of
Augsburg, and the like. Here we do but mention them as details in the
worried life of this culminating emperor. As a matter of fact, hardly
one of the multifarious princes and rulers in Europe seems to have been
acting in good faith. The widespread religious trouble of the world, the
desire of the common people for truth and social righteousness, the
spreading knowledge of the time, all those things were merely counters
in the imaginations of princely diplomacy. Henry VIII of England, who
had begun his career with a book written against heresy, and who had
been rewarded by the Pope with the title of “Defender of the Faith,”
being anxious to divorce his first wife in favour of an animated young
lady named Anne Boleyn,[401] and wishing also to turn against the
Emperor in favour of Francis I and to loot the vast wealth of the church
in England, joined the company of Protestant princes in 1530. Sweden,
Denmark, and Norway had already gone over to the Protestant side.
[Illustration: Henry VIII.]
The German religious war began in 1546, a few months after the death of
Martin Luther. We need not trouble about the incidents of the campaign.
The Protestant Saxon army was badly beaten at Lochau. By something very
like a breach of faith Philip of Hesse, the Emperor’s chief remaining
antagonist, was caught and imprisoned, and the Turks were bought off by
the payment of an annual tribute. In 1547, to the great relief of the
Emperor, Francis I died. So by 1547 Charles got to a kind of
settlement, and made his last efforts to effect peace where there was
no peace. In 1552 all Germany was at war again, only a precipitate
flight from Innsbruck saved Charles from capture, and in 1552, with the
treaty of Passau, came another unstable equilibrium. Charles was now
utterly weary of the cares and splendours of empire; he had never had a
very sound constitution, he was naturally indolent, and he was suffering
greatly from gout. He abdicated. He made over all his sovereign rights
in Germany to his brother Ferdinand, and Spain and the Netherlands he
resigned to his son Philip. He then retired to a monastery at Yuste,
among the oak and chestnut forests in the hills to the north of the
Tagus valley, and there he died in 1558.
[Illustration: Charles V.]
Much has been written in a sentimental vein of this retirement, this
renunciation of the world by this tired majestic Titan, world-weary,
seeking in an austere solitude his peace with God. But his retreat was
neither solitary nor austere; he had with him nearly a hundred and fifty
attendants; his establishment had all the indulgences without the
fatigues of a court, and Philip II was a dutiful son to whom his
father’s advice was a command. As for his austerities, let Prescott
witness: “In the almost daily correspondence between Quixada, or
Gaztelu, and the Secretary of State at Valladolid, there is scarcely a
letter that does not turn more or less on the Emperor’s eating or his
illness. The one seems naturally to follow, like a running commentary,
on the other. It is rare that such topics have formed the burden of
communications with the department of state. It must have been no easy
matter for the secretary to preserve his gravity in the perusal of
despatches in which politics and gastronomy were so strangely mixed
together. The courier from Valladolid to Lisbon was ordered to make a
detour, so as to take Jarandilla in his route, and bring supplies for
the royal table. On Thursdays he was to bring fish to serve for the
_jour maigre_ that was to follow. The trout in the neighbourhood
Charles thought too small; so others, of a larger size, were to be sent
from Valladolid. Fish of every kind was to his taste, as, indeed, was
anything that in its nature or habits at all approached to fish. Eels,
frogs, oysters, occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare.
Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great favour with him; and he
regretted that he had not brought a better supply of these from the Low
Countries. On an eel-pasty he particularly doted.”...[402]
In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III granting him a
dispensation from fasting, and allowing him to break his fast early in
the morning even when he was to take the sacrament.
“That Charles was not altogether unmindful of his wearing apparel in
Yuste, may be inferred from the fact that his wardrobe contained no less
than sixteen robes of silk and velvet, lined with ermine, or eider down,
or the soft hair of the Barbary goat. As to the furniture and upholstery
of his apartments, how little reliance is to be placed on the reports so
carelessly circulated about these may be gathered from a single glance
at the inventory of his effects, prepared by Quixada and Gaztelu soon
after their master’s death. Among the items we find carpets from Turkey
and Alcarez, canopies of velvet and other stuffs, hangings of fine black
cloth, which since his mother’s death he had always chosen for his own
bedroom; while the remaining apartments were provided with no less than
twenty-five suits of tapestry, from the looms of Flanders, richly
embroidered with figures of animals and with landscapes.... Among the
different pieces of plate we find some of pure gold, and others
especially noted for their curious workmanship; and as this was an age
in which the art of working the precious metals was carried to the
highest perfection, we cannot doubt that some of the finest specimens
had come into the Emperor’s possession. The whole amount of plate was
estimated at between twelve and thirteen thousand ounces in weight.”...[403]
Charles had never acquired the habit of reading, but he would be read
aloud to at meals after the fashion of Charlemagne, and would make what
one narrator describes as a “sweet and heavenly commentary.” He also
amused himself with technical toys, by listening to music or sermons,
and by attending to the imperial business that still came drifting in to
him. The death of the Empress, to whom he was greatly attached, had
turned his mind towards religion, which in his case took a punctilious
and ceremonial form; every Friday in Lent he scourged himself with the
rest of the monks with such good will as to draw blood. These exercises
and the gout released a bigotry in Charles that had been hitherto
restrained by considerations of policy. The appearance of Protestant
teaching close at hand in Valladolid roused him to fury. “Tell the grand
inquisitor and his council from me to be at their posts, and to lay the
axe at the root of the evil before it spreads further.”... He expressed
a doubt whether it would not be well, in so black an affair, to dispense
with the ordinary course of justice, and to show no mercy; “lest the
criminal, if pardoned, should have the opportunity of repeating his
crime.” He recommended, as an example, his own mode of proceeding in the
Netherlands, “where all who remained obstinate in their errors were
burned alive, and those who were admitted to penitence were beheaded.”
Among the chief pleasures of the Catholic monarch between meals during
this time of retirement were funeral services. He not only attended
every actual funeral that was celebrated at Yuste, but he had services
conducted for the absent dead, he held a funeral service in memory of
his wife on the anniversary of her death, and finally he celebrated his
own obsequies. “The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of
hundreds of wax-lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness.
The brethren in their conventual dress, and all the Emperor’s household
clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge catafalque, shrouded also
in black, which had been raised in the centre of the chapel. The service
for the burial of the dead was then performed; and, amidst the dismal
wail of the monks, the prayers ascended for the departed spirit, that it
might be received into the mansions of the blessed. The sorrowful
attendants were melted to tears, as the image of their master’s death
was presented to their minds--or they were touched, it may be, with
compassion by this pitiable display of weakness. Charles, muffled in a
dark mantle, and bearing a lighted candle in his hand, mingled with his
household, the spectator of his own obsequies; and the doleful ceremony
was concluded by his placing the taper in the hands of the priest, in
sign of his surrendering up his soul to the Almighty.”
Other accounts make Charles wear a shroud and lie in the coffin,
remaining there alone until the last mourner had left the chapel.
Within two months of this masquerade he was dead. And the greatness of
the Holy Roman Empire died with him. The Holy Roman Empire struggled on
indeed to the days of Napoleon, but as an invalid and dying thing.
§ 11B
Ferdinand, the brother of Charles V, took over his abandoned work and
met the German princes at the diet of Augsburg in 1555. Again there was
an attempt to establish a religious peace. Nothing could better show the
quality of that attempted settlement and the blindness of the princes
and statesmen concerned in it, to the deeper and broader processes of
the time, than the form that settlement took. The recognition of
religious freedom was to apply to the states and not to individual
citizens; _cujus regio ejus religio_, “_the confession of the subject
was to be dependent on that of the territorial lord_.”
§ 11C
We have given as much attention as we have done to the writings of
Machiavelli and to the personality of Charles V because they throw a
flood of light upon the antagonisms of the next period in our history.
This present chapter has told the story of a vast expansion of human
horizons and of a great increase and distribution of knowledge; we have
seen the conscience of common men awakening and intimations of a new and
profounder social justice spreading throughout the general body of the
Western civilization. But this process of light and thought was leaving
courts and the political life of the world untouched. There is little in
Machiavelli that might not have been written by some clever secretary
in the court of Chosroes I or Shi-Hwang-ti--or even of Sargon I or Pepi.
While the world in everything else was moving forward, in political
ideas, in ideas about the relationship of state to state and of
sovereign to citizen, it was standing still. Nay, it was falling back.
For the great idea of the Catholic Church as the world city of God had
been destroyed in men’s minds by the church itself, and the dream of a
world imperialism had, in the person of Charles V, been carried in
effigy through Europe to limbo. Politically the world seemed falling
back towards personal monarchy of the Assyrian or Macedonian pattern.
It is not that the newly awakened intellectual energies of western
European men were too absorbed in theological restatement, in scientific
investigations, in exploration and mercantile development, to give a
thought to the claims and responsibilities of rulers. Not only were
common men drawing ideas of a theocratic or republican or communistic
character from the now accessible Bible, but the renewed study of the
Greek classics was bringing the creative and fertilizing spirit of Plato
to bear upon the Western mind. In England Sir Thomas More produced a
quaint imitation of Plato’s _Republic_ in his _Utopia_, setting out a
sort of autocratic communism. In Naples, a century later, a certain
friar Campanella was equally bold in his _City of the Sun_. But such
discussions were having no immediate effect upon political arrangements.
Compared with the massiveness of the task, these books do indeed seem
poetical and scholarly and flimsy. (Yet later on the _Utopia_ was to
bear fruit in the English Poor Laws.) The intellectual and moral
development of the Western mind and this drift towards Machiavellian
monarchy in Europe were for a time going on concurrently in the same
world, but they were going on almost independently. The statesmen still
schemed and manœuvred as if nothing grew but the power of wary and
fortunate kings. It was only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
that these two streams of tendency, the stream of general ideas and the
drift of traditional and egoistic monarchical diplomacy, interfered and
came into conflict.
BOOK VIII
THE AGE OF THE GREAT POWERS
XXXVI
PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS
§ 1. _Princes and Foreign Policy._ § 2. _The English Republic._ §
3. _The Dutch Republic._ § 4. _The Break-up and Disorder of
Germany._ § 5. _The Splendours of Grand Monarchy in Europe._ § 6.
_The Growth of the Idea of Great Powers._ § 7. _The Crowned
Republic of Poland and Its Fate._ § 8. _The First Scramble for
Empire Overseas._ § 9. _Britain Dominates India._ § 10. _Russia’s
Ride to the Pacific._ §11. _What Gibbon Thought of the World in
1780._ § 12. _The Social Truce Draws to an End._
§ 1
In the preceding chapter we have traced the beginnings of a new
civilization, the civilization of the “modern” type which becomes at the
present time world-wide. It is still a vast unformed thing, still only
in the opening phases of growth and development to-day. We have seen the
mediæval ideas of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Roman Church, as
forms of universal law and order, fade in its dawn. They fade out, as if
it were necessary in order that these ideas of one law and one order for
all men should be redrawn on world-wide lines. And while in nearly every
other field of human interest there was advance, the effacement of these
general political ideas of the Church and Empire led back for a time in
things political towards merely personal monarchy and monarchist
nationalism of the Macedonian type. There came an interregnum, as it
were, in the consolidation of human affairs, a phase of the type the
Chinese annalists would call an “Age of Confusion.” This interregnum has
lasted as long as that between the fall of the Western Empire and the
crowning of Charlemagne in Rome. We are living in it to-day. It may be
drawing to its close; we cannot tell yet. The old leading ideas had
broken down, a medley of new and untried projects and suggestions
perplexed men’s minds and actions, and meanwhile the world at large had
to fall back for leadership upon the ancient tradition of an individual
prince. There was no new way clearly apparent for men to follow, and the
prince was there.
All over the world the close of the sixteenth century saw monarchy
prevailing and tending towards absolutism. Germany and Italy were
patchworks of autocratic princely dominions, Spain was practically
autocratic, the throne had never been so powerful in England, and as the
seventeenth century drew on, the French monarchy gradually became the
greatest and most consolidated power in Europe. The phases and
fluctuations of its ascent we cannot record here.
At every court there were groups of ministers and secretaries who played
a Machiavellian game against their foreign rivals. Foreign policy is the
natural employment of courts and monarchies. Foreign offices are, so to
speak, the leading characters in all the histories of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. They kept Europe in a fever of wars. And wars
were becoming expensive. Armies were no longer untrained levies, no
longer assemblies of feudal knights who brought their own horses and
weapons and retainers with them; they needed more and more artillery;
they consisted of paid troops who insisted on their pay; they were
professional and slow and elaborate, conducting long sieges,
necessitating elaborate fortifications. War expenditure increased
everywhere and called for more and more taxation. And here it was that
these monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came into
conflict with new and shapeless forces of freedom in the community. In
practice the princes found they were not masters of their subjects’
lives or property. They found an inconvenient resistance to the taxation
that was necessary if their diplomatic aggressions and alliances were to
continue. Finance became an unpleasant spectre in every council chamber.
In theory the monarch owned his country. James I of England (1603)
declared that “As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can
do; so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what
a king can do, or say that a king cannot do this or that.” In practice,
however, he found, and his son Charles I (1625) was to find still more
effectually, that there were in his dominions a great number of
landlords and merchants, substantial and intelligent persons, who set a
very definite limit to the calls and occasions of the monarch and his
ministers. They were prepared to tolerate his rule if they themselves
might also be monarchs of their lands and businesses and trades and what
not. But not otherwise.
Everywhere in Europe there was a parallel development. Beneath the kings
and princes there were these lesser monarchs, the private owners,
noblemen, wealthy citizens, and the like, who were now offering the
sovereign prince much the same resistance that the kings and princes of
Germany had offered the Emperor. They wanted to limit taxation so far as
it pressed upon themselves, and to be free in their own houses and
estates. And the spread of books and reading and inter-communication was
enabling these smaller monarchs, these monarchs of ownership, to develop
such a community of ideas and such a solidarity of resistance as had
been possible at no previous stage in the world’s history. Everywhere
they were disposed to resist the prince, but it was not everywhere that
they found the same faculties for an organized resistance. The economic
circumstances and the political traditions of the Netherlands and
England made those countries the first to bring this antagonism of
monarchy and private ownership to an issue.[404]
At first this seventeenth-century “public,” this public of property
owners, cared very little for foreign policy. They did not perceive at
first how it affected them. They did not want to be bothered with it;
it was, they conceded, the affairs of kings and princes.[405] They made
no attempts therefore to control foreign entanglements. But it was with
the direct consequences of these entanglements that they quarrelled;
they objected to heavy taxation, to interference with trade, to
arbitrary imprisonment, and to the control of consciences by the
monarch. It was upon these questions that they joined issue with the
Crown.
§ 2
The open struggle of the private property owner against the aggressions
of the “Prince” begins in England far back in the twelfth century.[406]
The phase in this struggle that we have to study now is the phase that
opened with the attempts of Henry VII and VIII and their successors,
Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, to make the government of England a
“personal monarchy” of the continental type. It became more acute when,
by dynastic accidents, James, King of Scotland, became James I, King of
both Scotland and England (1603), and began to talk in the manner we
have already quoted of his “divine right” to do as he pleased. But never
had the path of English monarchy been a smooth one. In all the
monarchies of the Northmen and Germanic invaders of the empire there had
been a tradition of a popular assembly of influential and representative
men to preserve their general liberties, and in none was it more living
than in England. France had her tradition of the assembly of the Three
Estates, Spain her Cortes, but the English assembly was peculiar in two
respects: that it had behind it a documentary declaration of certain
elementary and universal rights, and that it contained elected “Knights
of the Shire,” as well as elected burghers from the towns. The French
and Spanish assemblies had the latter, but not the former element.
These two features gave the English Parliament a peculiar strength in
its struggle with the Throne. The document in question was _Magna
Carta_, the Great Charter, a declaration which was forced from King John
(1199-1216), the brother and successor of Richard Cœur de Lion
(1189-99) after a revolt of the Barons in 1215. It rehearsed a number of
fundamental rights that made England a legal and not a regal state. It
rejected the power of the king to control the personal property and
liberty of every sort of citizen--save with the consent of that man’s
equals.
The presence of the elected shire representatives in the English
Parliament, the second peculiarity of the British situation, came about
from very simple and apparently innocuous beginnings. From the shires,
or county divisions, knights seem to have been summoned to the national
council to testify to the taxable capacity of their districts. They were
sent up by the minor gentry, freeholders and village elders of their
districts as early as 1254, two knights from each shire. This idea
inspired Simon de Montfort,[407] who was in rebellion against Henry III,
the successor of John, to summon to the national council two knights
from each shire and two citizens from each city or borough. Edward I,
the successor to Henry III, continued this practice because it seemed a
convenient way of getting into financial touch with the growing towns.
At first there was considerable reluctance on the parts of the knights
and townsmen to attend Parliament, but gradually the power they
possessed of linking the redress of grievances with the granting of
subsidies was realized. Quite early, if not from the first, these
representatives of the general property owners in town and country, the
Commons, sat and debated apart from the great Lords and Bishops. So
there grew up in England a representative assembly, the Commons, beside
an episcopal and patrician one, the Lords. There was no profound and
fundamental difference between the personnel of the two assemblies; many
of the knights of the shire were substantial men who might be as wealthy
and influential as peers and also the sons and brothers of peers, but on
the whole the Commons was the more plebeian assembly. From the first
these two assemblies, and especially the Commons, displayed a
disposition to claim the entire power of taxation in the land. Gradually
they extended their purview of grievances to a criticism of all the
affairs of the realm. We will not follow the fluctuations of the power
and prestige of the English Parliament through the time of the Tudor
monarchs (_i.e._, Henry VII and VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth),
but it will be manifest from what has been said that when at last James
Stuart made his open claim to autocracy, the English merchants, peers,
and private gentlemen found themselves with a tried and honoured
traditional means of resisting him such as no other people in Europe
possessed.
Another peculiarity of the English political conflict was its
comparative detachment from the great struggle between Catholic and
Protestant that was now being waged all over Europe. There were, it is
true, very distinct religious issues mixed up in the English struggle,
but upon its main lines it was a political struggle of King against the
Parliament embodying the class of private-property-owning citizens. Both
Crown and people were formally reformed and Protestant. It is true that
many people on the latter side were Protestants of a Bible-respecting,
non-sacerdotal type, representing the reformation according to the
peoples, and that the king was the nominal head of a special sacerdotal
and sacramental church, the established Church of England, representing
the reformation according to the princes, but this antagonism never
completely obscured the essentials of the conflict.
The struggle of King and Parliament had already reached an acute phase
before the death of James I (1625), but only in the reign of his son
Charles I did it culminate in civil war. Charles did exactly what one
might have expected a king to do in such a position, in view of the lack
of Parliamentary control over foreign policy; he embroiled the country
in a conflict with both Spain and France, and then came to the country
for supplies in the hope that patriotic feeling would override the
normal dislike to giving him money. When Parliament refused supplies, he
demanded loans from various subjects, and attempted similar illegal
exactions. This produced from Parliament in 1628 a very memorable
document, the _Petition of Right_, citing the Great Charter and
rehearsing the legal limitations upon the power of the English king,
denying his right to levy charges upon, or to imprison, or punish
anyone, or to quarter soldiers on the people, without due process of
law. The Petition of Right stated the case of the English Parliament.
The disposition to “state a case” has always been a very marked English
characteristic. When President Wilson, during the Great War of 1914-18,
prefaced each step in his policy by a “Note,” he was walking in the most
respectable traditions of the English. Charles dealt with this
Parliament with a high hand, he dismissed it in 1629, and for eleven
years he summoned no Parliament. He levied money illegally, but not
enough for his purpose; and realizing that the church could be used as
an instrument of obedience, he made Laud, an aggressive high churchman,
very much of a priest and a very strong believer in “divine right,”
Archbishop of Canterbury, and so head of the Church of England.
In 1638 Charles tried to extend the half-Protestant, half-Catholic
characteristics of the Church of England to his other kingdom of
Scotland, where the secession from catholicism had been more complete,
and where a non-sacerdotal, non-sacramental form of Christianity,
Presbyterianism, had been established as the national church. The Scotch
revolted, and the English levies Charles raised to fight them mutinied.
Insolvency, at all tunes the natural result of a “spirited” foreign
policy, was close at hand. Charles, without money or trustworthy troops,
had to summon a Parliament at last in 1640. This Parliament, the Short
Parliament, he dismissed in the same year; he tried a Council of Peers
at York (1640), and then, in the November of that year, summoned his
last Parliament.
This body, the Long Parliament, assembled in the mood for conflict. It
seized Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and charged him with treason.
It published a “Grand Remonstrance,” which was a long and full statement
of its case against Charles. It provided by a bill for a meeting of
Parliament at least once in three years, whether the King summoned it or
no. It prosecuted the King’s chief ministers who had helped him to reign
for so long without Parliament, and in particular the Earl of Strafford.
To save Strafford the King plotted for a sudden seizure of London by the
army. This was discovered, and the Bill for Strafford’s condemnation was
hurried on in the midst of a vast popular excitement. Charles I, who
was probably one of the meanest and most treacherous occupants the
English throne has ever known, was frightened by the London crowds.
Before Strafford could die by due legal process, it was necessary for
the King to give his assent. Charles gave it--and Strafford was
beheaded. Meanwhile the King was plotting and looking for help in
strange quarters--from the Catholic Irish, from treasonable Scotchmen.
Finally he resorted to a forcible-feeble display of violence. He went
down to the Houses of Parliament to arrest five of his most active
opponents. He entered the House of Commons and took the Speaker’s chair.
He was prepared with some bold speech about treason, but when he saw the
places of his five antagonists vacant, he was baffled, confused, and
spoke in broken sentences. He learnt that they had departed from his
royal city of Westminster and taken refuge in the city of London (see
chap. xxv, § 7). London defied him. A week later the Five Members were
escorted back in triumph to the Parliament House in Westminster by the
Trained Bands of London, and the King, to avoid the noise and hostility
of the occasion, left Whitehall for Windsor.
Both parties then prepared openly for war.
The King was the traditional head of the army, and the habit of
obedience in soldiers is to the King. The Parliament had the greater
resources. The King set up his standard at Nottingham on the eve of a
dark and stormy August day in 1642. There followed a long and obstinate
civil war, the King holding Oxford, the Parliament, London. Success
swayed from side to side but the King could never close on London nor
Parliament take Oxford. Each antagonist was weakened by moderate
adherents who “did not want to go too far.” There emerged among the
Parliamentary commanders a certain Oliver Cromwell, who had raised a
small troop of horse and who rose to the position of general. Lord
Warwick, his contemporary, describes him as a plain man, in a cloth suit
“made by an ill country tailor.” He was no mere fighting soldier, but a
military organizer; he realized the inferior quality of many of the
Parliamentary forces, and set himself to remedy it. The Cavaliers of the
King had the picturesque tradition of chivalry and loyalty on their
side; Parliament was something new and difficult--without any
comparable traditions. “Your troops are most of them old decayed serving
men and tapsters,” said Cromwell. “Do you think that the spirits of such
base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have
honour and courage and resolution in them?” But there is something
better and stronger than picturesque chivalry in the world, religious
enthusiasm. He set himself to get together a “godly” regiment. They were
to be earnest, sober-living men. Above all, they were to be men of
strong convictions. He disregarded all social traditions, and drew his
officers from every class. “I had rather have a plain, russet-coated
captain _that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows_, than
what you call a gentleman and is nothing else.” England discovered a new
force, the Ironsides, in its midst, in which footmen, draymen, and
ships’ captains held high command, side by side with men of family. They
became the type on which the Parliament sought to reconstruct its entire
army. The Ironsides were the backbone of this “New Model.” From Marston
Moor to Naseby these men swept the Cavaliers before them. The King was
at last a captive in the hands of Parliament.
There were still attempts at settlement that would have left the King a
sort of king, but Charles was a man doomed to tragic issues, incessantly
scheming, “so false a man that he is not to be trusted.” The English
were drifting towards a situation new in the world’s history, in which a
monarch should be formally tried for treason to his people and
condemned.
Most revolutions are precipitated, as this English one was, by the
excesses of the ruler, and by attempts at strength and firmness beyond
the compass of the law; and most revolutions swing by a kind of
necessity towards an extremer conclusion than is warranted by the
original quarrel. The English revolution was no exception. The English
are by nature a compromising and even a vacillating people, and probably
the great majority of them still wanted the King to be King and the
people to be free, and all the lions and lambs to lie down together in
peace and liberty. But the army of the New Model could not go back.
There would have been scant mercy for these draymen and footmen who had
ridden down the King’s gentlemen if the King came back. When Parliament
began to treat again with this regal trickster, the New Model
intervened; Colonel Pride turned out eighty members from the House of
Commons who favoured the King, and the illegal residue, the Rump
Parliament, then put the King on trial.
But indeed the King was already doomed. The House of Lords rejected the
ordinance for the trial, and the Rump then proclaimed “that the People
are under God, the original of all just power,” and that “the Commons of
England ... have the supreme power in this nation,” and--assuming that
it was itself the Commons--proceeded with the trial. The King was
condemned as a “tyrant, traitor, murderer, and enemy of his country.” He
was taken one January morning in 1649 to a scaffold erected outside the
windows of his own banqueting-room at Whitehall. There he was beheaded.
He died with piety and a certain noble self-pity--eight years after the
execution of Strafford, and after six and a half years of a destructive
civil war which had been caused almost entirely by his own lawlessness.
This was indeed a great and terrifying thing that Parliament had done.
The like of it had never been heard of in the world before. Kings had
killed each other times enough; parricide, fratricide, assassination,
those are the privileged expedients of princes; but that a section of
the people should rise up, try its king solemnly and deliberately for
disloyalty, mischief, and treachery, and condemn and kill him, sent
horror through every court in Europe. The Rump Parliament had gone
beyond the ideas and conscience of its time. It was as if a committee of
jungle deer had taken and killed a tiger--a crime against nature. The
Tsar of Russia chased the English envoy from his court. France and
Holland committed acts of open hostility. England, confused and
conscience-stricken at her own sacrilege, stood isolated before the
world.
But for a time the personal quality of Oliver Cromwell and the
discipline and strength of the army he had created maintained England in
the republican course she had taken. The Irish Catholics had made a
massacre of the Protestant English in Ireland, and now Cromwell
suppressed the Irish insurrection with great vigour. Except for certain
friars at the storm of Drogheda, none but men with arms in their hands
were killed by his troops; but the atrocities of the massacre were fresh
in his mind, no quarter was given in battle, and so his memory still
rankles in the minds of the Irish, who have a long memory for their own
wrongs. After Ireland came Scotland, where Cromwell shattered a Royalist
army at the Battle of Dunbar (1650). Then he turned his attention to
Holland, which country had rashly seized upon the divisions among the
English as an excuse for the injury of a trade rival. The Dutch were
then the rulers of the sea, and the English fleet fought against odds;
but after a series of obstinate sea fights the Dutch were driven from
the British seas and the English took their place as the ascendant naval
power. Dutch and French ships must dip their flags to them. An English
fleet went into the Mediterranean--the first English naval force to
enter those waters; it put right various grievances of the English
shippers with Tuscany and Malta, and bombarded the pirate nest of
Algiers and destroyed the pirate fleet--which in the lax days of Charles
had been wont to come right up to the coast of Cornwall and Devon to
intercept ships and carry off slaves to Africa. The strong arm of
England also intervened to protect the Protestants in the south of
France, who were being hunted to death by the Duke of Savoy. France,
Sweden, Denmark, all found it wiser to overcome their first distaste for
regicide and allied themselves with England. Came a war with Spain, and
the great English Admiral Blake destroyed the Spanish Plate Fleet at
Teneriffe in an action of almost incredible daring. He engaged land
batteries. He was the first man “that brought ships to contemn castles
on the shore.” (He died in 1657, and was buried in Westminster Abbey,
but after the restoration of the monarchy his bones were dug out by the
order of Charles II, and removed to St. Margaret’s, Westminster.) Such
was the figure that England cut in the eyes of the world during her
brief republican days.
On September 3rd, 1658, Cromwell died in the midst of a great storm that
did not fail to impress the superstitious. Once his strong hand lay
still, England fell away from this premature attempt to realize a
righteous commonweal of free men. In 1660 Charles II, the son of Charles
the “Martyr,” was welcomed back to England with all those
manifestations of personal loyalty dear to the English heart, and the
country relaxed from its military and naval efficiency as a sleeper
might wake and stretch and yawn after too intense a dream. The Puritans
were done with. “Merrie England” was herself again, and in 1667 the
Dutch, once more masters of the sea, sailed up the Thames to Gravesend
and burnt an English fleet in the Medway. “On the night when our ships
were burnt by the Dutch,” says Pepys, in his diary, “the King did sup
with my Lady Castelmaine, and there they were all mad, hunting a poor
moth.” Charles, from the date of his return, 1660, took control of the
foreign affairs of the state, and in 1670 concluded a secret treaty with
Louis XIV of France by which he undertook to subordinate entirely
English foreign policy to that of France for an annual pension of
£100,000. Dunkirk, which Cromwell had taken, had already been sold back
to France. The King was a great sportsman; he had the true English love
for watching horse races, and the racing centre at Newmarket is perhaps
his most characteristic monument.
While Charles lived, his easy humour enabled him to retain the British
crown, but he did so by wariness and compromise, and when in 1685 he was
succeeded by his brother James II, who was a devout Catholic, and too
dull to recognize the hidden limitation of the monarchy in Britain, the
old issue between Parliament and Crown became acute. James set himself
to force his country into a religious reunion with Rome. In 1688 he was
in flight to France. But this time the great lords and merchants and
gentlemen were too circumspect to let this revolt against the King fling
them into the hands of a second Pride or a second Cromwell. They had
already called in another king, William, Prince of Orange, to replace
James. The change was made rapidly. There was no civil war--except in
Ireland--and no release of the deeper revolutionary forces of the
country.
Of William’s claim to the throne, or rather of his wife Mary’s claim, we
cannot tell here, its interest is purely technical, nor how William III
and Mary ruled, nor how, after the widower William had reigned alone for
a time, the throne passed on to Mary’s sister Anne (1702-14). Anne seems
to have thought favourably of a restoration of the Stuart line, but the
Lords and the Commons, who now dominated English affairs, preferred a
less competent king. Some sort of claim could be made out for the
Elector of Hanover, who became King of England as George I (1714-27). He
was entirely German, he could speak no English, and he brought a swarm
of German women and German attendants to the English court; a dullness,
a tarnish, came over the intellectual life of the land with his coming,
the poetry, painting, architecture, and imaginative literature of later
eighteenth-century England is immeasurably below that of the seventeenth
century,[408] but this isolation of the court from English life was his
conclusive recommendation to the great landowners and the commercial
interests who chiefly brought him over. England entered upon a phase
which Lord Beaconsfield has called the “Venetian oligarchy” stage; the
supreme power resided in Parliament, dominated now by the Lords, for the
art of bribery and a study of the methods of working elections carried
to a high pitch by Sir Robert Walpole had robbed the House of Commons of
its original freedom and vigour. By ingenious devices the parliamentary
vote was restricted to a shrinking number of electors, old towns with
little or no population would return one or two members (old Sarum had
one non-resident voter, no population, and two members), while newer
populous centres had no representation at all. And by insisting upon a
high property qualification for members, the chance of the Commons
speaking in common accents of vulgar needs was still more restricted.
George I was followed by the very similar George II (1727-60), and it
was only at his death that England had again a king who had been born in
England, and one who could speak English fairly well, his grandson
George III. On this monarch’s attempt to recover some of the larger
powers of monarchy we shall have something to say in a later section.
Such briefly is the story of the struggle in England during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between the three main factors in
the problem of the “modern state”; between the crown, the private
property owners, and that vague power, still blind and ignorant, the
power of the quite common people. This latter factor appears as yet only
at moments when the country is most deeply stirred; then it sinks back
into the depths. But the end of the story, thus far, is a very complete
triumph of the British private property owner over the dreams and
schemes of Machiavellian absolutism. With the Hanoverian Dynasty England
became--as the _Times_ recently styled her--a “crowned republic.” She
had worked out a new method of government, Parliamentary government,
recalling in many ways the Senate and Popular Assembly of Rome, but more
steadfast and efficient because of its use, however restricted, of the
representative method. Her assembly at Westminster was to become the
“Mother of Parliaments” throughout the world. Towards the crown the
English Parliament has held and still holds much the relation of the
mayor of the palace to the Merovingian kings. The king is conceived of
as ceremonial and irresponsible, a living symbol of the royal and
imperial system. But much power remains latent in the tradition and
prestige of the crown, and the succession of the four Hanoverian
Georges, William IV (1830), Victoria (1837), Edward VII (1901), and the
present king, George V (1910), is of a quite different strain from the
feeble and short-lived Merovingian monarchs. In the affairs of the
church, the military and naval organizations, and the foreign office,
these sovereigns have all in various degrees exercised an influence
which is none the less important because it is indefinable.
§ 3
The breaking away of the Netherlands from absolutist monarchy was on the
face of it much more of a religious and national affair and much less
economic and social than the English parliamentary revolution. In the
twelfth century all the lower Rhine country was divided up among a
number of small rulers, and the population was a Low German one on a
Keltic basis, mixed with subsequent Danish ingredients very similar to
the English admixture. The southeastern fringe of it spoke French
dialects; the bulk, Frisian, Dutch, and other Low German languages. The
Netherlands figured largely in the crusades. Godfrey of Bouillon, who
took Jerusalem (First Crusade), was a Belgian; and the founder of the
so-called Latin Dynasty of emperors in Constantinople (Fourth Crusade)
was Baldwin of Flanders. (They were called Latin emperors because they
were on the side of the Latin church.) In the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries considerable towns grew up in the Netherlands: Ghent, Bruges,
Ypres, Utrecht, Leyden, Haarlem, and so forth; and these towns developed
quasi-independent municipal governments and a class of educated
townsmen. We will not trouble the reader with the dynastic accidents
that linked the affairs of the Netherlands with Burgundy (Eastern
France), and which finally made their overlordship the inheritance of
the Emperor Charles V.
It was under Charles that the Protestant doctrines that now prevailed in
Germany spread into the Netherlands. Charles persecuted with some
vigour, but in 1556, as we have told, he handed over the task to his son
Philip (Philip II). Philip’s spirited foreign policy--he was carrying on
a war with France--presently became a second source of trouble between
himself and the Netherlandish noblemen and townsmen, because he had to
come to them for supplies. The great nobles, led by William the Silent,
Prince of Orange, and the Counts of Egmont and Horn, made themselves the
heads of a popular resistance, in which it is now impossible to
disentangle the objection to taxation from the objection to religious
persecution. The great nobles were not at first Protestants. They became
Protestants as the struggle grew in bitterness. The people were often
bitterly Protestant.
Philip was resolved to rule both the property and consciences of his
Netherlander. He sent picked Spanish troops into the country, and he
made governor-general a nobleman named Alva, one of those ruthless
“strong” men who wreck governments and monarchies. For a time he ruled
the land with a hand of iron, but the hand of iron begets a soul of iron
in the body it grips, and in 1567--about eighty years, that is, before
the English civil war--the Netherlands were in open revolt. Alva
murdered, sacked, and massacred--in vain. Counts Egmont and Horn were
executed. William the Silent became the great leader of the Dutch, a
king _de facto_. For a long time, and with many complications, the
struggle for liberty continued, and through it all it is noteworthy that
the rebels continued to cling to the plea that Philip II was their
king--if only he would be a reasonable and limited king. But the idea of
limited monarchy was distasteful to the crowned heads of Europe at that
time, and at last Philip drove the United Provinces, for which we now
use the name of Holland, to the republican form of government. Holland,
be it noted--not all the Netherlands; the southern Netherlands, Belgium
as we now call that country, remained at the end of the struggle a
Spanish possession and Catholic.
The siege of Alkmaar (1573), as Motley[409] describes it, may be taken
as a sample of that long and hideous conflict between the little Dutch
people and the still vast resources of Catholic Imperialism.
“‘If I take Alkmaar,’ Alva wrote to Philip, ‘I am resolved not to leave
a single creature alive; the knife shall be put to every throat.’ ...
“And now, with the dismantled and desolate Haarlem before their eyes, a
prophetic phantom, perhaps, of their own imminent fate, did the handful
of people shut up within Alkmaar prepare for the worst. Their main hope
lay in the friendly sea. The vast sluices called the Zyp, through which
the inundation of the whole northern province could be very soon
effected, were but a few miles distant. By opening these gates, and by
piercing a few dykes, the ocean might be made to fight for them. To
obtain this result, however, the consent of the inhabitants was
requisite, as the destruction of all the standing crops would be
inevitable. The city was so closely invested, that it was a matter of
life and death to venture forth, and it was difficult, therefore, to
find an envoy for this hazardous mission. At last, a carpenter in the
city, Peter Van der Mey by name, undertook the adventure....
“Affairs soon approached a crisis within the beleaguered city. Daily
skirmishes, without decisive results, had taken place outside the walls.
At last, on the 18th of September, after a steady cannonade of nearly
twelve hours, Don Frederick, at three in the afternoon, ordered an
assault. Notwithstanding his seven months’ experience at Haarlem, he
still believed it certain that he should carry Alkmaar by storm. The
attack took place at once upon the Frisian gate and upon the red tower
on the opposite side. Two choice regiments, recently arrived from
Lombardy, led the onset, rending the air with their shouts and confident
of an easy victory. They were sustained by what seemed an overwhelming
force of disciplined troops. Yet never, even in the recent history of
Haarlem, had an attack been received by more dauntless breasts. Every
living man was on the walls. The storming parties were assailed with
cannon, with musketry, with pistols. Boiling water, pitch and oil,
molten lead, and unslaked lime were poured upon them every moment.
Hundreds of tarred and burning hoops were skilfully quoited around the
necks of the soldiers, who struggled in vain to extricate themselves
from these fiery ruffs, while as fast as any of the invaders planted
foot upon the breach, they were confronted face to face with sword and
dagger by the burghers, who hurled them headlong into the moat below.
“Thrice was the attack renewed with ever-increasing rage--thrice
repulsed with unflinching fortitude. The storm continued four hours
long. During all that period not one of the defenders left his post,
till he dropped from it dead or wounded.... The trumpet of recall was
sounded, and the Spaniards, utterly discomfited, retired from the walls,
leaving at least one thousand dead in the trenches, while only thirteen
burghers and twenty-four of the garrison lost their lives.... Ensign
Solis, who had mounted the breach for an instant, and miraculously
escaped with life, after having been hurled from the battlements,
reported that he had seen ‘neither helmet nor harness’ as he looked down
into the city: only some plain-looking people, generally dressed like
fishermen. Yet these plain-looking fishermen had defeated the veterans
of Alva....
“Meantime, as Governor Sonoy had opened many of the dykes, the land in
the neighbourhood of the camp was becoming plashy, although as yet the
threatened inundation had not taken place. The soldiers were already
very uncomfortable and very refractory. The carpenter-envoy had not been
idle....”
He returned with despatches for the city. By accident or contrivance he
lost these despatches as he made his way into the town, so that they
fell into Alva’s hands. They contained a definite promise from the Duke
of Orange to flood the country so as to drown the whole Spanish army.
Incidentally this would also have drowned most of the Dutch harvest and
cattle. But Alva, when he had read these documents, did not wait for the
opening of any more sluices. Presently the stout men of Alkmaar,
cheering and jeering, watched the Spaniards breaking camp....
The form assumed by the government of Holland was a patrician republic
under the headship of the house of Orange. The States-General was far
less representative of the whole body of citizens than was the English
Parliament even in its “Venetian” days. Though the worst of the struggle
was over after Alkmaar, Holland was not effectively independent until
1609, and its independence was only fully and completely recognized by
the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. We have given this account of the
origin of free Holland _after_ our account of the English revolution
because it was less representative of the essential triangle of forces
in the developing modern state, and because it was complicated by the
merely patriotic element of insurrection against the Spanish foreigner.
But though we have told of it later, the reader must remember it came to
its climax in the time of Queen Elizabeth of England, half a century
earlier than the English civil war. As Motley says, the Dutch, the
English, and the American revolution, of which latter we have presently
to tell, “form but a single chapter in the great volume of human fate.”
§ 4
Upon no part of Europe did the collapse of the idea of a unified
Christendom bring more disastrous consequences than to Germany.
Naturally one would have supposed that the Emperor, being by origin a
German, both in the case of the earlier lines and in the case of the
Habsburgs, would have developed into the national monarch of a united
German-speaking state. It was the accidental misfortune of Germany that
her Emperors never remained German. Frederick II, the last Hohenstaufen,
was, as we have seen, a half-Orientalized Sicilian; the Habsburgs, by
marriage and inclination, became in the person of Charles V, first
Burgundian and then Spanish in spirit. After the death of Charles V, his
brother Ferdinand took Austria and the empire, and his son Philip II
took Spain, the Netherlands, and South Italy; but the Austrian line,
obstinately Catholic, holding its patrimony mostly on the eastern
frontiers, deeply entangled therefore with Hungarian affairs and paying
tribute, as Ferdinand and his two successors did, to the Turk, retained
no grip upon the north Germans with their disposition towards
Protestantism, their Baltic and westward affinities, and their ignorance
of or indifference to the Turkish danger.
[Illustration: Central EUROPE after the Peace of Westphalia, 1648.]
The sovereign princes, dukes, electors, prince bishops, and the like,
whose domains cut up the map of the Germany of the Middle Ages into a
crazy patchwork, were really not the equivalents of the kings of England
and France. They were rather on the level of the great land-owning dukes
and peers of France and England. Until 1701 none of them had the title
of “King.” Many of their dominions were less both in size and value than
the larger estates of the British nobility. The German Diet was like the
States-General or like a parliament without the presence of elected
representatives. So that the great civil war in Germany that presently
broke out, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), was in its essential nature
much more closely akin to the civil war in England (1643-49) and to the
war of the Fronde (1648-53), the league of feudal nobles against the
Crown in France, than appears upon the surface. In all these cases the
Crown was either Catholic or disposed to become Catholic, and the
recalcitrant nobles found their individualistic disposition tending to a
Protestant formula. But while in England and Holland the Protestant
nobles and rich merchants ultimately triumphed and in France the success
of the Crown was even more complete, in Germany neither was the Emperor
strong enough, nor had the Protestant princes a sufficient unity and
organization among themselves to secure a conclusive triumph. It ended
there in a torn-up Germany. Moreover, the German issue was complicated
by the fact that various non-German peoples, the Protestant Bohemians
and the Protestant Swedes (who had a new Protestant monarchy which had
arisen under Gustava Vasa as a direct result of the Reformation) were
entangled in the struggle. Finally, the French monarchy, triumphant now
over its own nobles, although it was Catholic, came in on the Protestant
side with the evident intention of taking the place of the Habsburgs as
the imperial line.
The prolongation of the war, and the fact that it was not fought along a
determined frontier, but all over an empire of patches, Protestant here,
Catholic there, made it one of the most cruel and destructive that
Europe had known since the days of the barbarian raids. Its peculiar
mischief lay not in the fighting, but in the concomitants of the
fighting. It came at a time when military tactics had developed to a
point that rendered ordinary levies useless against trained professional
infantry. Volley firing with muskets at a range of a few score yards had
abolished the individualistic knight in armour, but the charge of
disciplined masses of cavalry could still disperse any infantry that had
not been drilled into a mechanical rigidity. The infantry with their
muzzle-loading muskets could not keep up a steady enough fire to wither
determined cavalry before it charged home. They had, therefore, to meet
the shock standing or kneeling behind a bristling wall of pikes or
bayonets. For this they needed great discipline and experience. Iron
cannon were still of small size and not very abundant, and they did not
play a decisive part as yet in warfare. They could “plough lanes” in
infantry, but they could not easily smash and scatter it if it was
sturdy and well drilled. War under these conditions was entirely in the
hands of seasoned professional soldiers, and the question of their pay
was as important a one to the generals of that time as the question of
food or munitions. As the long struggle dragged on from phase to phase,
and the financial distress of the land increased, the commanders of both
sides were forced to fall back upon the looting of towns and villages,
both for supply and to make up the arrears of their soldiers’ pay. The
soldiers became, therefore, more and more mere brigands living on the
country, and the Thirty Years’ War set up a tradition of looting as a
legitimate operation in warfare and of outrage as a soldiers’ privilege
that has tainted the good name of Germany right down to the Great War of
1914. The earlier chapters of Defoe’s _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, with its
vivid description of the massacre and burning of Magdeburg, will give
the reader a far better idea of the warfare of this time than any formal
history. So harried was the land that the farmers ceased from
cultivation, what snatch crops could be harvested were hidden away, and
great crowds of starving women and children became camp followers of the
armies, and supplied a thievish tail to the rougher plundering. At the
close of the struggle all Germany was ruined and desolate. Central
Europe did not fully recover from these robberies and devastations for a
century.
Here we can but name Tilly and Wallenstein, the great plunder captains
on the Habsburg side, and Gustavus Adolphus, the King of Sweden, the
Lion of the North, the champion of the Protestants, whose dream was to
make the Baltic Sea a “Swedish Lake.” Gustavus Adolphus was killed in
his decisive victory over Wallenstein at Lützen (1632), and Wallenstein
was murdered in 1634. In 1648 the princes and diplomatists gathered
amidst the havoc they had made to patch up the affairs of Central Europe
at the Peace of Westphalia. By that peace the power of the Emperor was
reduced to a shadow, and the acquisition of Alsace brought France up to
the Rhine. And one German prince, the Hohenzollern Elector of
Brandenburg, acquired so much territory as to become the greatest German
power next to the Emperor, a power that presently (1701) became the
kingdom of Prussia. The Treaty also recognized two long accomplished
facts, the separation from the empire and the complete independence of
both Holland and Switzerland.
§ 5
We have opened this chapter with the stories of two countries. Britain
and the Netherlands, in which the resistance of the private citizen to
this new type of monarchy, the Machiavellian monarchy, that was arising
out of the moral collapse of Christendom, succeeded. But in France,
Russia, in many states of Germany and of Italy--Saxony and Tuscany _e.
g._--personal monarchy was not so restrained and overthrown; it
established itself indeed as the ruling European system during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
(In Poland conditions were peculiar, and they will be dealt with in a
later section.)
In France there had been no Magna Carta, and there was no tradition of
parliamentary rule. There was the same opposition of interests between
the crown on the one hand and the landlords and merchants on the other,
but the latter had no recognized and traditional gathering-place, and no
dignified method of unity. They formed oppositions to the crown, they
made leagues of resistance--such was the “Fronde,” which was struggling
against the young King Louis XIV and his great minister Mazarin, while
Charles I was fighting for his life in England--but ultimately (1652),
after a civil war, they were conclusively defeated; and while in England
after the establishment of the Hanoverians the House of Lords and their
subservient Commons ruled the country, in France, after 1652, the court
entirely dominated the aristocracy. Cardinal Mazarin was himself
building upon a foundation that Cardinal Richelieu, the contemporary of
King James I of England, had prepared for him. After the time of Mazarin
we hear of no great French nobles unless they are at court as court
servants and officials. They have been tamed--but at a price, the price
of throwing the burthen of taxation upon the voiceless mass of the
common people. From many taxes both the clergy and the
nobility--everyone indeed who bore a title--were exempt. In the end this
injustice became intolerable, but for a while the French monarchy
flourished like the Psalmist’s green bay tree. By the opening of the
eighteenth century English writers are already calling attention to the
misery of the French lower classes and the comparative prosperity, _at
that time_, of the English poor.
[Illustration: Louis XIV.]
On such terms of unrighteousness what we may call “Grand Monarchy”
established itself in France. Louis XIV, styled the Grand Monarque,
reigned for the unparalleled length of seventy-two years (1643-1715),
and set a pattern for all the kings of Europe. At first he was guided by
his Machiavellian minister, Cardinal Mazarin; after the death of the
Cardinal he himself in his own proper person became the ideal “Prince.”
He was, within his limitations, an exceptionally capable king; his
ambition was stronger than his baser passions, and he guided his
country towards bankruptcy through the complication of a spirited
foreign policy, with an elaborate dignity that still extorts our
admiration. His immediate desire was to consolidate and extend France to
the Rhine and Pyrenees, and to absorb the Spanish Netherlands; his
remoter view saw the French kings as the possible successors of
Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman Empire. He made bribery a state
method almost more important than warfare. Charles II of England was in
his pay, and so were most of the Polish nobility, presently to be
described. His money, or rather the money of the tax-paying classes in
France, went everywhere. But his prevailing occupation was splendour.
His great palace at Versailles, with its salons, its corridors, its
mirrors, its terraces and fountains and parks and prospects, was the
envy and admiration of the world. He provoked a universal imitation.
Every king and princelet in Europe was building his own Versailles as
much beyond his means as his subjects and credits would permit.
Everywhere the nobility rebuilt or extended their chateaux to the new
pattern. A great industry of beautiful and elaborate fabrics and
furnishings developed. The luxurious arts flourished everywhere;
sculpture in alabaster, faience, gilt wood-work, metal work, stamped
leather, much music, magnificent painting, beautiful printing and
bindings, fine cookery, fine vintages. Amidst the mirrors and fine
furniture went a strange race of “gentlemen” in vast powdered wigs,
silks and laces, poised upon high red heels, supported by amazing canes;
and still more wonderful “ladies,” under towers of powdered hair and
wearing vast expansions of silk and satin sustained on wire. Through it
all postured the great Louis, the sun of his world, unaware of the
meagre and sulky and bitter faces that watched him from those lower
darknesses to which his sunshine did not penetrate.
We cannot give here at any length the story of the wars and doings of
this monarch. In many ways Voltaire’s _Siècle de Louis XIV_ is still the
best and most wholesome account. He created a French navy fit to face
the English and Dutch; a very considerable achievement. But because his
intelligence did not rise above the lure of that Fata Morgana, that
crack in the political wits of Europe, the dream of a world-wide Holy
Roman Empire, he drifted in his later years to the propitiation of the
Papacy, which had hitherto been hostile to him. He set himself against
those spirits of independence and disunion, the Protestant princes, and
he made war against Protestantism in France. Great numbers of his most
sober and valuable subjects were driven abroad by his religious
persecutions, taking arts and industries with them. The English silk
manufacture, for instance, was founded by French Protestants. Under his
rule were carried out the “dragonnades,” a peculiarly malignant and
effectual form of persecution. Rough soldiers were quartered in the
houses of the Protestants, and were free to disorder the life of their
hosts and insult their womankind as they thought fit. Men yielded to
that sort of pressure who would not have yielded to rack and fire. The
education of the next generation of Protestants was broken up, and the
parents had to give Catholic instruction or none. They gave it, no
doubt, with a sneer and an intonation that destroyed all faith in it.
While more tolerant countries became mainly sincerely Catholic or
sincerely Protestant, the persecuting countries, like France and Spain
and Italy, so destroyed honest Protestant teaching that these peoples
became mainly Catholic believers or Catholic atheists, ready to break
out into blank atheism whenever the opportunity offered. The next reign,
that of Louis XV, was the age of that supreme mocker, Voltaire
(1694-1778), an age in which everybody in French society conformed to
the Roman church and hardly anyone believed in it.
It was part--and an excellent part--of the pose of Grand Monarchy to
patronize literature and the sciences. Louis XIV set up an academy of
sciences in rivalry with the English Royal Society of Charles II and the
similar association at Florence. He decorated his court with poets,
playwrights, philosophers, and scientific men. If the scientific process
got little inspiration from this patronage, it did at any rate acquire
resources for experiment and publication, and a certain prestige in the
eyes of the vulgar.
Louis XV was the great-grandson of Louis XIV, and an incompetent
imitator of his predecessor’s magnificence. He posed as a king, but his
ruling passion was that common obsession of our kind, the pursuit of
women, tempered by a superstitious fear of hell. How such women as the
Duchess of Châteauroux, Madame de Pompadour, and Madame du Barry
dominated the pleasures of the king, and how wars and alliances were
made, provinces devastated, thousands of people killed, because of the
vanities and spites of these creatures, and how all the public life of
France and Europe was tainted with intrigue and prostitution and
imposture because of them, the reader must learn from the memoirs of the
time. The spirited foreign policy went on steadily under Louis XV
towards its final smash. In 1774 this Louis, Louis the Well-Beloved, as
his flatterers called him, died of smallpox, and was succeeded by his
grandson, Louis XVI (1774-93), a dull, well-meaning man, an excellent
shot, and an amateur locksmith of some ingenuity. Of how he came to
follow Charles I to the scaffold we shall tell in a later section. Our
present concern is with Grand Monarchy in the days of its glory.
[Illustration: EUROPE in 1714]
Among the chief practitioners of Grand Monarchy outside France we may
note first the Prussian kings, Frederick William I (1713-40), and his
son and successor, Frederick II, Frederick the Great (1740-86). The
story of the slow rise of the Hohenzollern family, which ruled the
kingdom of Prussia, from inconspicuous beginnings is too tedious and
unimportant for us to follow here. It is a story of luck and violence,
of bold claims and sudden betrayals. It is told with great appreciation
in Carlyle’s _Frederick the Great_. By the eighteenth century the
Prussian kingdom was important enough to threaten the empire; it had a
strong, well-drilled army, and its king was an attentive and worthy
student of Machiavelli. Frederick the Great perfected his Versailles at
Potsdam. There the park of Sans Souci, with its fountains, avenues,
statuary, aped its model; there also was the New Palace, a vast brick
building erected at enormous expense, the Orangery in the Italian style,
with a collection of pictures, a Marble Palace, and so on. Frederick
carried culture to the pitch of authorship, and corresponded with and
entertained Voltaire, to their mutual exasperation. The Austrian
dominions were kept too busy between the hammer of the French and the
anvil of the Turks to develop the real Grand Monarch style until the
reign of Maria-Theresa (who, being a woman, did not bear the title of
Empress) (1740-80). Joseph II, who was Emperor from 1765-92, succeeded
to her palaces in 1780. With Peter the Great (1682-1725) the empire of
Muscovy broke away from her Tartar traditions and entered the sphere of
French attraction. Peter shaved the Oriental beards of his nobles and
introduced Western costume. These were but the outward and visible
symbols of his westering tendencies. To release himself from the Asiatic
feeling and traditions of Moscow, which, like Pekin, has a sacred inner
city, the Kremlin, he built himself a new capital, Petrograd, upon the
swamp of the Neva. And of course he built his Versailles, the Peterhof,
about eighteen miles from this new Paris, employing a French architect
and having a terrace, fountains, cascades, picture gallery, park, and
all the recognized features. His more distinguished successors were
Elizabeth (1741-62) and Catherine the Great, a German princess, who,
after obtaining the crown in sound Oriental fashion through the murder
of her husband, the legitimate Tsar, reverted to advanced Western ideals
and ruled with great vigour from 1762 to 1796. She set up an academy,
and corresponded with Voltaire. And she lived to witness the end of the
system of Grand Monarchy in Europe and the execution of Louis XVI.
We cannot even catalogue here the minor Grand Monarchs of the time in
Florence (Tuscany) and Savoy and Saxony and Denmark and Sweden.
Versailles, under a score of names, is starred in every volume of
Bædeker, and the tourist gapes in their palaces. Nor can we deal with
the war of the Spanish Succession. Spain, overstrained by the imperial
enterprises of Charles V and Philip II, and enfeebled by a bigoted
persecution of Protestants, Moslems, and Jews, was throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sinking down from her temporary
importance in European affairs to the level of a secondary power again.
These European monarchs ruled their kingdoms as their noblemen ruled
their estates: they plotted against one another, they were politic and
far-seeing in an unreal fashion, they made wars, they spent the
substance of Europe upon absurd “policies” of aggression and resistance.
At last there burst upon them a great storm out of the depths. That
storm, the First French Revolution, the indignation of the common man in
Europe, took their system unawares. It was but the opening outbreak of a
great cycle of political and social storms that still continue, that
will perhaps continue until every vestige of nationalist monarchy has
been swept out of the world and the skies clear again for the great
peace of the federation of mankind.
§ 6
We have seen how the idea of a world-rule and a community of mankind
first came into human affairs, and we have traced how the failure of the
Christian churches to sustain and establish those conceptions of its
founder, led to a moral collapse in political affairs and a reversion to
egotism and want of faith. We have seen how Machiavellian monarchy set
itself up against the spirit of brotherhood in Christendom, and how
Machiavellian monarchy developed throughout a large part of Europe into
the Grand Monarchies and Parliamentary Monarchies of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. But the mind and imagination of man is incessantly
active, and beneath the sway of the grand monarchs, a complex of notions
and traditions was being woven as a net is woven, to catch and entangle
men’s minds, the conception of international politics not as a matter of
dealings between princes, but as a matter of dealings between a kind of
immortal Beings, the Powers. The Princes came and went; a Louis XIV
would be followed by a petticoat-hunting Louis XV, and he again by that
dull-witted amateur locksmith, Louis XVI. Peter the Great gave place to
a succession of empresses; the chief continuity of the Habsburgs after
Charles V, either in Austria or Spain, was a continuity of thick lips,
clumsy chins, and superstition; the amiable scoundrelism of a Charles II
would make a mock of his own pretensions. But what remained much more
steadfast were the secretariats of the foreign ministeries and the ideas
of people who wrote of state concerns. The ministers maintained a
continuity of policy during the “off days” of their monarchs, and
between one monarch and another.
So we find that the prince gradually became less important in men’s
minds than the “Power” of which he was the head. We begin to read less
and less of the schemes and ambitions of King This or That, and more of
the “Designs of France” or the “Ambitions of Prussia.” In an age when
religious faith was declining, we find men displaying a new and vivid
belief in the reality of these personifications. These vast vague
phantoms, the “Powers,” crept insensibly into European political
thought, until in the later eighteenth and in the nineteenth centuries
they dominated it entirely. To this day they dominate it. European life
remained nominally Christian, but to worship one God in spirit and in
truth is to belong to one community with all one’s fellow worshippers.
In practical reality Europe does not do this, she has given herself up
altogether to the worship of this strange state mythology. To these
sovereign deities, to the unity of “Italy,” to the hegemony of
“Prussia,” to the glory of “France,” and the destinies of “Russia,” she
has sacrificed many generations of possible unity, peace, and prosperity
and the lives of millions of men.
To regard a tribe or a state as a sort of personality is a very old
disposition of the human mind. The Bible abounds in such
personifications. Judah, Edom, Moab, Assyria figure in the Hebrew
Scriptures as if they were individuals; it is sometimes impossible to
say whether the Hebrew writer is dealing with a person or with a nation.
It is manifestly a primitive and natural tendency. But in the case of
modern Europe it is a retrocession. Europe, under the idea of
Christendom, had gone far towards unification. And while such tribal
persons as “Israel” or “Tyre” did represent a certain community of
blood, a certain uniformity of type, and a homogeneity of interest, the
European powers which arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
were entirely fictitious unities. Russia was in truth an assembly of the
most incongruous elements, Cossacks, Tartars, Ukrainians, Muscovites,
and, after the time of Peter, Esthonians and Lithuanians; the France of
Louis XV comprehended German Alsace and freshly assimilated regions of
Burgundy; it was a prison of suppressed Huguenots and a sweating-house
for peasants. In “Britain,” England carried on her back the Hanoverian
dominions in Germany, Scotland, the profoundly alien Welsh and the
hostile and Catholic Irish. Such powers as Sweden, Prussia, and still
more so Poland and Austria, if we watch them in a series of historical
maps, contract, expand, thrust out extensions, and wander over the map
of Europe like amœbæ under the microscope....
If we consider the psychology of international relationship as we see it
manifested in the world about us, and as it is shown by the development
of the “Power” idea in modern Europe, we shall realize certain
historically very important facts about the nature of man. Aristotle
said that man is a political animal, but in our modern sense of the word
politics, which now covers world-politics, he is nothing of the sort. He
has still the instincts of the family tribe, and beyond that he has a
disposition to attach himself and his family to something larger, to a
tribe, a city, a nation, or a state. But that disposition, left to
itself, is a vague and very uncritical disposition. If anything, he is
inclined to fear and dislike criticism of this something larger that
encloses his life and to which he has given himself, and to avoid such
criticism. Perhaps he has a subconscious fear of the isolation that may
ensue if the system is broken or discredited. He takes the _milieu_ in
which he finds himself for granted; he accepts his city or his
government, just as he accepts the nose or the digestion which fortune
has bestowed upon him. But men’s loyalties, the sides they take in
political things, are not innate, they are educational results. For most
men their education in these matters is the silent, continuous education
of things about them. Men find themselves a part of Merry England or
Holy Russia; they grow up into these devotions; they accept them as a
part of their nature.
It is only slowly that the world is beginning to realize how profoundly
the tacit education of circumstances can be supplemented, modified, or
corrected by positive teaching, by literature, discussion, and properly
criticized experience. The real life of the ordinary man is his everyday
life, his little circle of affections, fears, hungers, lusts, and
imaginative impulses. It is only when his attention is directed to
political affairs as something vitally affecting this personal circle,
that he brings his reluctant mind to bear upon them. It is scarcely too
much to say that the ordinary man thinks as little about political
matters as he can, and stops thinking about them as soon as possible. It
is still only very curious and exceptional minds, or minds that have by
example or good education acquired the scientific habit of wanting to
know why, or minds shocked and distressed by some public catastrophe
and roused to wide apprehensions of danger, that will not accept
governments and institutions, however preposterous, that do not directly
annoy them, as satisfactory. The ordinary human being, until he is so
aroused, will acquiesce in any collective activities that are going on
in this world in which he finds himself, and any phrasing or
symbolization that meets his vague need for something greater to which
his personal affairs, his individual circle, can be anchored.
If we keep these manifest limitations of our nature in mind, it no
longer becomes a mystery how, as the idea of Christianity as a world
brotherhood of men sank into discredit because of its fatal entanglement
with priestcraft and the Papacy on the one hand and with the authority
of princes on the other, and the age of faith passed into our present
age of doubt and disbelief, men shifted the reference of their lives
from the kingdom of God and the brotherhood of mankind to these
apparently more living realities, France and England, Holy Russia,
Spain, Prussia, which were at least embodied in active courts, which
maintained laws, exerted power through armies and navies, waved flags
with a compelling solemnity, and were self-assertive and insatiably
greedy in an entirely human and understandable fashion. Certainly such
men as Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin thought of themselves as
serving greater ends than their own or their monarch’s; they served the
quasi-divine France of their imaginations. And as certainly these habits
of mind percolated down from them to their subordinates and to the
general body of the population. In the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries the general population of Europe was religious and only
vaguely patriotic; by the nineteenth it had become wholly patriotic. In
a crowded English or French or German railway carriage of the later
nineteenth century it would have aroused far less hostility to have
jeered at God than to have jeered at one of those strange beings,
England or France or Germany. To these things men’s minds clung, and
they clung to them because in all the world there appeared nothing else
so satisfying to cling to. They were the real and living gods of Europe.
(Yet in the background of the consciousness of the world, waiting as the
silence and moonlight wait above the flares and shouts, the
hurdy-gurdys and quarrels of a village fair, is the knowledge that all
mankind is one brotherhood, that God is the universal and impartial
Father of mankind, and that only in that universal service can mankind
find peace, or peace be found for the troubles of the individual
soul....)
This idealization of governments and foreign offices, this mythology of
“Powers” and their loves and hates and conflicts, has so obsessed the
imaginations of Europe and Western Asia as to provide it with its “forms
of thought.” Nearly all the histories, nearly all the political
literature of the last two centuries in Europe, have been written in its
phraseology. Yet a time is coming when a clearer-sighted generation will
read with perplexity how in the community of western Europe, consisting
everywhere of very slight variations of a common racial mixture of
Nordic and Iberian peoples and immigrant Semitic and Mongolian elements,
speaking nearly everywhere modifications of the same Aryan speech,
having a common past in the Roman Empire, common religious forms, common
social usages, and a common art and science, and intermarrying so freely
that no one could tell with certainty the “nationality” of any of his
great-grand-children, men could be moved to the wildest excitement upon
the question of the ascendancy of “France,” the rise and unification of
“Germany,” the rival claims of “Russia” and “Greece” to possess
Constantinople. These conflicts will seem then as reasonless and insane
as those dead, now incomprehensible feuds of the “greens” and “blues”
that once filled the streets of Byzantium with shouting and bloodshed.
Tremendously as these phantoms, the Powers, rule our minds and lives
to-day, they are, as this history shows clearly, things only of the last
few centuries, a mere hour, an incidental phase, in the vast deliberate
history of our kind. They mark a phase of relapse, a backwater, as the
rise of Machiavellian monarchy marks a backwater; they are part of the
same eddy of faltering faith, in a process altogether greater and
altogether different in its general tendency, the process of the moral
and intellectual reunion of mankind. For a time men have relapsed upon
these national or imperial gods of theirs; it is but for a time. The
idea of the world state, the universal kingdom of righteousness of
which every living soul shall be a citizen, was already in the world two
thousand years ago never more to leave it. Men know that it is present
even when they refuse to recognize it. In the writings and talk of men
about international affairs to-day, in the current discussions of
historians and political journalists, there is an effect of drunken men
growing sober, and terribly afraid of growing sober. They still talk
loudly of their “love” for France, of their “hatred” of Germany, of the
“traditional ascendancy of Britain at sea,” and so on and so on, like
those who sing of their cups in spite of the steadfast onset of sobriety
and a headache. These are dead gods they serve. By sea or land men want
no Powers ascendant, but only law and service. That silent unavoidable
challenge is in all our minds like dawn breaking slowly, shining between
the shutters of a disordered room.
§ 7
The seventeenth century in Europe was the century of Louis XIV; he and
French ascendancy and Versailles are the central motif of the story. The
eighteenth century was equally the century of the “rise of Prussia as a
great power,” and the chief figure in the story is Frederick II,
Frederick the Great. Interwoven with his history is the story of Poland.
The condition of affairs in Poland was peculiar. Unlike its three
neighbours, Prussia, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of the
Habsburgs, Poland had not developed a Grand Monarchy. Its system of
government may be best described as republican with a king, an elected
life-president. Each king was separately elected. It was in fact rather
more republican than Britain, but its republicanism was more
aristocratic in form. Poland had little trade and few manufactures; she
was agricultural and still with great areas of grazing, forest, and
waste; she was a poor country, and her landowners were poor aristocrats.
The mass of her population was a downtrodden and savagely ignorant
peasantry, and she also harboured great masses of very poor Jews. She
had remained Catholic. She was, so to speak, a poor Catholic inland
Britain, entirely surrounded by enemies instead of by the sea. She had
no definite boundaries at all, neither sea nor mountain. And it added to
her misfortunes that some of her elected kings had been brilliant and
aggressive rulers. Eastward her power extended weakly into regions
inhabited almost entirely by Russians; westward she overlapped a German
subject population.
Because she had no great trade, she had no great towns to compare with
those of western Europe, and no vigorous universities to hold her mind
together. Her noble class lived on their estates, without much
intellectual intercourse. They were patriotic, they had an aristocratic
sense of freedom--which was entirely compatible with the systematic
impoverishment of their serfs--but their patriotism and freedom were
incapable of effective co-operation. While warfare was a matter of
levies of men and horses, Poland was a comparatively strong power; but
it was quite unable to keep pace with the development of military art
that was making standing forces of professional soldiers the necessary
weapon in warfare. Yet divided and disabled as she was, she could yet
count some notable victories to her credit. The last Turkish attack upon
Vienna (1683) was defeated by the Polish cavalry under King John
Sobiesky, King John III. (This same Sobiesky, before he was elected
king, had been in the pay of Louis XIV, and had also fought for the
Swedes against his native country.) Needless to say, this weak
aristocratic republic, with its recurrent royal elections, invited
aggression from all three of its neighbours. “Foreign money,” and every
sort of exterior interference, came into the country at each election.
And like the Greeks of old, every disgruntled Polish patriot flew off to
some foreign enemy to wreak his indignation upon his ungrateful country.
Even when the King of Poland was elected, he had very little power
because of the mutual jealousy of the nobles. Like the English peers,
they preferred a foreigner, and for much the same reason, because he had
no roots of power in the land; but, unlike the British, their own
government had not the solidarity which the periodic assembling of
Parliament in London, the “coming up to town,” gave the British peers.
In London there was “Society,” a continuous intermingling of influential
persons and ideas. Poland had no London and no “Society.” So practically
Poland had no central government at all. The King of Poland could not
make war nor peace, levy a tax nor alter the law, without the consent of
the Diet, and _any single member of the Diet had the power of putting a
veto upon any proposal before it_. He had merely to rise and say, “I
disapprove,” and the matter dropped. He could even carry his free veto,
his _liberum veto_, further. He could object to the assembly of the
Diet, and the Diet was thereby dissolved. Poland was not simply a
crowned aristocratic republic like the British, it was a paralyzed
crowned aristocratic republic.
[Illustration: The PARTITIONS of POLAND]
To Frederick the Great the existence of Poland was particularly
provocative because of the way in which an arm of Poland reached out to
the Baltic at Dantzig and separated his ancestral dominions in East
Prussia from his territories within the empire. It was he who incited
Catherine the Second of Russia and Maria Theresa of Austria, whose
respect he had earned by depriving her of Silesia, to a joint attack
upon Poland.
Let four maps of Poland tell the tale.
After this first outrage of 1772 Poland underwent a great change of
heart. Poland was indeed born as a nation on the eve of her dissolution.
There was a hasty but very considerable development of education,
literature, and art; historians and poets sprang up, and the impossible
constitution that had made Poland impotent was swept aside. The free
veto was abolished, the crown was made hereditary to save Poland from
the foreign intrigues that attended every election, and a Parliament in
imitation of the British was set up. There were, however, lovers of the
old order in Poland who resented these necessary changes, and these
obstructives were naturally supported by Prussia and Russia, who wanted
no Polish revival. Came the second partition, and, after a fierce
patriotic struggle that began in the region annexed by Prussia and found
a leader and national hero in Kosciusko, the final obliteration of
Poland from the map. So for a time ended this Parliamentary threat to
Grand Monarchy in Eastern Europe. But the patriotism and republican
passion of the Poles grew stronger and clearer with suppression. For a
hundred and twenty years Poland grew in spirit, and struggled like a
submerged creature beneath the political and military net that held her
down. She rose again in 1918, at the end of the Great War.
§ 8
We have given some account of the ascendancy of France in Europe, the
swift decay of the sappy growth of Spanish power and its separation from
Austria, and the rise of Prussia. So far as Portugal, Spain, France,
Britain, and Holland were concerned, their competition for ascendancy in
Europe was extended and complicated by a struggle for dominion overseas.
The discovery of the huge continent of America, thinly inhabited,
undeveloped, and admirably adapted for European settlement and
exploitation, the simultaneous discovery of great areas of unworked
country south of the torrid equatorial regions of Africa that had
hitherto limited European knowledge, and the gradual realization of vast
island regions in the Eastern seas, as yet untouched by Western
civilization, was a presentation of opportunity to mankind unprecedented
in all history. It was as if the peoples of Europe had come into some
splendid legacy. Their world had suddenly quadrupled. There was more
than enough for all; they had only to take these lands and continue to
do well by them, and their crowded poverty would vanish like a dream.
And they received this glorious legacy like ill-bred heirs; it meant no
more to them than a fresh occasion for atrocious disputes. But what
community of human beings has ever yet preferred creation to conspiracy?
What nation in all our story has ever worked with another when, at any
cost to itself, it could contrive to do that other an injury? The Powers
of Europe began by a frantic “claiming” of the new realms. They went on
to exhausting conflicts. Spain, who claimed first and most, and who was
for a time “mistress” of two-thirds of America, made no better use of
her possession than to bleed herself nearly to death therein.
We have told how the Papacy in its last assertion of world dominion,
instead of maintaining the common duty of all Christendom to make a
great common civilization in the new lands, divided the American
continent between Spain and Portugal. This naturally roused the
hostility of the excluded nations. The seamen of England showed no
respect for either claim, and set themselves particularly against the
Spanish; the Swedes turned their Protestantism to a similar account. The
Hollanders, so soon as they had shaken off their Spanish masters, also
set their sails westward to flout the Pope and share in the good things
of the new world. His Most Catholic Majesty of France hesitated as
little as any Protestant. All these powers were soon busy pegging out
claims in North America and the West Indies.
Neither the Danish kingdom (which at that time included Norway and
Iceland) nor the Swedes secured very much in the scramble. The Danes
annexed some of the West Indian islands. Sweden got nothing. Both
Denmark and Sweden at this time were deep in the affairs of Germany. We
have already named Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant “Lion of the
North,” and mentioned his campaigns in Germany, Poland, and Russia.
These Eastern European regions are great absorbents of energy, and the
strength that might have given Sweden a large share in the new world
reaped a barren harvest of glory in Europe. Such small settlements as
the Swedes made in America presently fell to the Dutch.
The Hollanders too, with the French monarchy under Cardinal Richelieu
and under Louis XIV eating its way across the Spanish Netherlands
towards their frontier, had not the undistracted resources that Britain,
behind her “silver streak” of sea, could put into overseas adventures.
Moreover, the absolutist efforts of James I and Charles I, and the
restoration of Charles II, had the effect of driving out from England a
great number of sturdy-minded, republican-spirited Protestants, men of
substance and character, who set up in America, and particularly in New
England, out of reach, as they supposed, of the king and his taxes. The
_Mayflower_ was only one of the pioneer vessels of a stream of
emigrants. It was the luck of Britain that they remained, though
dissentient in spirit, under the British flag. The Dutch never sent out
settlers of the same quantity and quality, first because their Spanish
rulers would not let them, and then because they had got possession of
their own country. And though there was a great emigration of Protestant
Huguenots from the dragonnades and persecution of Louis XIV, they had
Holland and England close at hand as refuges, and their industry, skill,
and sobriety went mainly to strengthen those countries, and particularly
England. A few of them founded settlements in Carolina, but these did
not remain French; they fell first to the Spanish and finally to the
English.
The Dutch settlements, with the Swedish, also succumbed to Britain;
Nieuw Amsterdam became British in 1674, and its name was changed to New
York, as the reader may learn very cheerfully in Washington Irving’s
_Knickerbocker’s History of New York_. The state of affairs in North
America in 1750 is indicated very clearly by a map we have adapted from
one in Robinson’s _Medieval and Modern Times_. The British power was
established along the east coast from Savannah to the St. Lawrence
River, and Newfoundland and considerable northern areas, the Hudson Bay
Company territories, had been acquired by treaty from the French. The
British occupied Barbados (almost our oldest possession) in 1605, and
acquired Jamaica, the Bahamas, and British Honduras from the Spaniards.
But France was pursuing a very dangerous and alarming game, a game even
more dangerous and alarming on the map than in reality. She had made
real settlements in Quebec and Montreal to the north and at New Orleans
in the south, and her explorers and agents had pushed south and north,
making treaties with the American Indians of the great plains and
setting up claims--without setting up towns--right across the continent
behind the British. But the realities of the case are not adequately
represented in this way. The British colonies were being very solidly
settled by a good class of people; they already numbered a population of
over a million; the French at that time hardly counted a tenth of that.
They had a number of brilliant travellers and missionaries at work, but
no substance of population behind them.
Many old maps of America in this period are still to be found, maps
designed to scare and “rouse” the British to a sense of the “designs of
France” in America. War broke out in 1754, and in 1759 the British and
Colonial forces under General Wolfe took Quebec and completed the
conquest of Canada in the next year. In 1763 Canada was finally ceded to
Britain. (But the western part of the rather indefinite region of
Louisiana in the south, named after Louis XIV, remained outside the
British sphere. It was taken over by Spain; and in 1800 it was recovered
by France. Finally, in 1803, it was bought from France by the United
States government.) In this Canadian war the American colonists gained a
considerable experience of the military art, and a knowledge of British
military organization that was to be of great use to them a little
later.
§ 9
[Illustration: Britain, France & Spain in America, 175O.]
[Illustration: The chief Foreign Settlements in INDIA at the end of the
17th Century]
It was not only in America that the French and British powers clashed.
The condition of India at this time was one very interesting and
attractive to European adventurers. The great Mongol Empire of Baber,
Akbar, and Aurangzeb was now far gone in decay. What had happened to
India was very parallel to what had happened to Germany. The Great Mogul
at Delhi in India, like the Holy Roman Emperor in Germany, was still
legally overlord, but after the death of Aurangzeb he exerted only a
nominal authority except in the immediate neighbourhood of his capital.
In the southwest a Hindu people, the Mahrattas, had risen against Islam,
restored Brahminism as the ruling religion, and for a time extended
their power over the whole southern triangle of India. In Rajputana also
the rule of Islam was replaced by Brahminism, and at Bhurtpur and Jaipur
there ruled powerful Rajput princes. In Oudh there was a Shiite kingdom,
with its capital at Lucknow, and Bengal was also a separate (Moslem)
kingdom. Away in the Punjab to the north had arisen a very interesting
religious body, the Sikhs, proclaiming the universal rule of one God and
assailing both the Hindu Vedas and the Moslem Koran. Originally a
pacific sect, the Sikhs presently followed the example of Islam, and
sought--at first very disastrously to themselves--to establish the
kingdom of God by the sword. And into this confused and disordered India
there presently (1738) came an invader from the north, Nadir Shah
(1736-47), the Turcoman ruler of Persia, who swept down through the
Khyber pass, broke every army that stood in his way, and captured and
sacked Delhi, carrying off an enormous booty. He left the north of India
so utterly broken, that in the next twenty years there were no less than
six other successful plundering raids into North India from Afghanistan,
which had become an independent state at the death of Nadir Shah. For a
time Mahrattas fought with Afghans for the rule of North India; then the
Mahratta power broke up into a series of principalities, Indore,
Gwalior, Baroda, and others....
This was the India into which the French and English were thrusting
during the eighteenth century. A succession of other European powers had
been struggling for a commercial and political footing in India and the
east ever since Vasco da Gama had made his memorable voyage round the
Cape to Calicut. The sea trade of India had previously been in the hands
of the Red Sea Arabs, and the Portuguese won it from them in a series of
sea fights. The Portuguese ships were the bigger, and carried a heavier
armament. For a time the Portuguese held the Indian trade as their own,
and Lisbon outshone Venice as a mart for oriental spices; the
seventeenth century, however, saw the Dutch grasping at this monopoly.
At the crest of their power the Dutch had settlements at the Cape of
Good Hope, they held Mauritius, they had two establishments in Persia,
twelve in India, six in Ceylon, and all over the East Indies they had
dotted their fortified stations. But their selfish resolution to exclude
traders of any other European nationality forced the Swedes, Danes,
French, and English into hostile competition. The first effectual blows
at their overseas monopoly were struck in European waters by the
victories of Blake, the English republican admiral; and by the opening
of the eighteenth century both the English and French were in vigorous
competition with the Dutch for trade and privileges throughout India. At
Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta the English established their headquarters;
Pondicherry and Chandernagore were the chief French settlements.
At first all these European powers came merely as traders, and the only
establishments they attempted were warehouses; but the unsettled state
of the country, and the unscrupulous methods of their rivals, made it
natural for them to fortify and arm their settlements, and this armament
made them attractive allies of the various warring princes who now
divided India. And it was entirely in the spirit of the new European
nationalist politics that when the French took one side, the British
should take another. The great leader upon the English side was Robert
Clive, who was born in 1725, and went to India in 1743. His chief
antagonist was Dupleix. The story of this struggle throughout the first
half of the eighteenth century is too long and intricate to be told
here. By 1761 the British found themselves completely dominant in the
Indian peninsula. At Plassey (1757) and at Buxar (1764) their armies
gained striking and conclusive victories over the army of Bengal and the
army of Oudh. The great Mogul, nominally their overlord, became in
effect their puppet. They levied taxes over great areas; they exacted
indemnities for real or fancied opposition.
These successes were not gained directly by the forces of the King of
England; they were gained by the East India Trading Company, which had
been originally, at the time of its incorporation under Queen Elizabeth,
no more than a company of sea adventurers. Step by step they had been
forced to raise troops and arm their ships. And now this trading
company, with its tradition of gain, found itself dealing not merely in
spices and dyes and tea and jewels, but in the revenues and territories
of princes and the destinies of India. It had come to buy and sell, and
it found itself achieving a tremendous piracy. There was no one to
challenge its proceedings. Is it any wonder that its captains and
commanders and officials, nay, even its clerks and common soldiers, came
back to England loaded with spoils? Men under such circumstances, with a
great and wealthy land at their mercy, could not determine what they
might or might not do. It was a strange land to them, with a strange
sunlight; its brown people were a different race, outside their range of
sympathy; its temples and buildings seemed to sustain fantastic
standards of behaviour. Englishmen at home were perplexed when presently
these generals and officials came back to make dark accusations against
each other of extortions and cruelties. Upon Clive Parliament passed a
vote of censure. He committed suicide in 1774. In 1788 Warren Hastings,
a second great Indian administrator, was impeached and acquitted (1792).
It was a strange and unprecedented situation in the world’s history. The
English Parliament found itself ruling over a London trading company,
which in its turn was dominating an empire far greater and more populous
than all the domains of the British crown. To the bulk of the English
people India was a remote, fantastic, almost inaccessible land, to which
adventurous poor young men went out, to return after many years very
rich and very choleric old gentlemen. It was difficult for the English
to conceive what the life of these countless brown millions in the
eastern sunshine could be. Their imaginations declined the task. India
remained romantically unreal. It was impossible for the English,
therefore, to exert any effective supervision and control over the
company’s proceedings.
§ 10
[Illustration: INDIA in 1750]
And while the great peninsula of the south of Asia was thus falling
under the dominion of the English sea traders, an equally remarkable
reaction of Europe upon Asia was going on in the north. We have told in
chap. xxxiv, § 5C, how the Christian states of Russia recovered their
independence from the Golden Horde, and how the Tsar of Moscow became
master of the republic of Novgorod; and in § 5 of this chapter we have
told of Peter the Great joining the circle of Grand Monarchs and, as it
were, dragging Russia into Europe. The rise of this great central power
of the old world, which is neither altogether of the East nor altogether
of the West, is one of the utmost importance to our human destiny. We
have also told in the same chapter of the appearance of a Christian
steppe people, the Cossacks, who formed a barrier between the feudal
agriculture of Poland and Hungary to the west and the Tartar to the
east. The Cossacks were the wild east of Europe, and in many ways not
unlike the wild west of the United States in the middle nineteenth
century. All who had made Russia too hot to hold them, criminals as well
as the persecuted innocent, rebellious serfs, religious sectaries,
thieves, vagabonds, murderers, sought asylum in the southern steppes,
and there made a fresh start and fought for life and freedom against
Pole, Russian, and Tartar alike. Doubtless fugitives from the Tartars to
the east also contributed to the Cossack mixture. Chief among these new
nomad tribes were the Ukraine Cossacks on the Dnieper and the Don
Cossacks on the Don. Slowly these border folk were incorporated in the
Russian imperial service, much as the Highland clans of Scotland were
converted into regiments by the British government. New lands were
offered them in Asia. They became a weapon against the dwindling power
of the Mongolian nomads, first in Turkestan and then across Siberia as
far as the Amur.
The decay of Mongol energy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
is very difficult to explain. Within two or three centuries from the
days of Jengis and Timurlane, Central Asia had relapsed from a period of
world ascendancy to extreme political impotence. Changes of climate,
unrecorded pestilences, infections of a malarial type, may have played
their part in this recession--which may be only a temporary recession
measured by the scale of universal history--of the Central Asian
peoples. Some authorities think that the spread of Buddhist teaching
from China also had a pacifying influence upon them. At any rate, by the
sixteenth century the Mongol Tartar and Turkish peoples were no longer
pressing outward, but were being invaded, subjugated, and pushed back
both by Christian Russia in the west and by China in the east.
All through the seventeenth century the Cossacks were spreading eastward
from European Russia, and settling wherever they found agricultural
conditions. Cordons of forts and stations formed a moving frontier to
these settlements to the south, where the Turkomans were still strong
and active; to the north-east, however, Russia had no frontier until she
reached right to the Pacific....
At the same time China was in a phase of expansion. In 1644 the Ming
Dynasty, in a state of artistic decay and greatly weakened by a Japanese
invasion, fell to Manchu conquerors, a people apparently identical with
the former Kin Dynasty, which had ruled at Pekin over North China until
the days of Jengis. It was the Manchus who imposed the pigtail as a mark
of political loyalty upon the Chinese population. They brought a new
energy into Chinese affairs, and their northern interests led to a
considerable northward expansion of the Chinese civilization and
influence into Manchuria and Mongolia. So it was that by the middle of
the eighteenth century the Russians and Chinese were in contact in
Mongolia. At this period China ruled eastern Turkestan, Tibet, Nepal,
Burmah, and Annam....
We have mentioned a Japanese invasion of China (or rather of Korea).
Except for this aggression upon China, Japan plays no part in our
history before the nineteenth century. Like China under the Mings, Japan
had set her face resolutely against the interference of foreigners in
her affairs. She was a country leading her own civilized life, magically
sealed against intruders. We have told little of her hitherto because
there was little to tell. Her picturesque and romantic history stands
apart from the general drama of human affairs. Her population was
chiefly a Mongolian population, with some very interesting white people
of a Nordic type, the Hairy Ainu, in the northern islands. Her
civilization seems to have been derived almost entirely from Korea and
China; her art is a special development of Chinese art, her writing an
adaptation of the Chinese script.
§ 11
In these preceding ten sections we have been dealing with an age of
division, of separated nationalities. We have already described this
period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an interregnum in
the progress of mankind towards a worldwide unity. Throughout this
period there was no ruling unifying idea in men’s minds. The impulse of
the empire had failed until the Emperor was no more than one of a number
of competing princes, and the dream of Christendom also was a fading
dream. The developing “powers” jostled one another throughout the world;
but for a time it seemed that they might jostle one another indefinitely
without any great catastrophe to mankind. The great geographical
discoveries of the sixteenth century had so enlarged human resources
that, for all their divisions, for all the waste of their wars and
policies, the people of Europe enjoyed a considerable and increasing
prosperity. Central Europe recovered steadily from the devastation of
the Thirty Years War.
Looking back upon this period, which came to its climax in the
eighteenth century, looking back, as we can begin to do nowadays, and
seeing its events in relation to the centuries that came before it and
to the great movements of the present time, we are able to realize how
transitory and provisional were its political forms and how unstable its
securities. Provisional it was as no other age has been provisional, an
age of assimilation and recuperation, a political pause, a gathering up
of the ideas of men and the resources of science for a wider human
effort. But the contemporary mind did not see it in that light. The
failure of the great creative ideas as they had been formulated in the
Middle Ages, had left human thought for a time destitute of the guidance
of creative ideas; even educated and imaginative men saw the world
undramatically; no longer as an interplay of effort and destiny, but as
the scene in which a trite happiness was sought and the milder virtues
were rewarded. It was not simply the contented and conservative-minded
who, in a world of rapid changes, were under the sway of this assurance
of an achieved fixity of human conditions. Even highly critical and
insurgent intelligences, in default of any sustaining movements in the
soul of the community, betrayed the same disposition. Political life,
they felt, had ceased to be the urgent and tragic thing it had once
been; it had become a polite comedy. The eighteenth was a century of
comedy--which at the end grew grim. It is inconceivable that that world
of the middle eighteenth century could have produced a Jesus of
Nazareth, a Gautama, a Francis of Assisi, an Ignatius of Loyola. If one
may imagine an eighteenth-century John Huss, it is impossible to imagine
anyone with sufficient passion to burn him. Until the stirrings of
conscience in Britain that developed into the Methodist revival began,
we can detect scarcely a suspicion that there still remained great tasks
in hand for our race to do, that enormous disturbances were close at
hand, or that the path of man through space and time was dark with
countless dangers, and must to the end remain a high and terrible
enterprise.
We have quoted again and again in this history from Gibbon’s _Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire_. Now we shall quote from it for the last
time and bid it farewell, for we have come to the age in which it was
written. Gibbon was born in 1737,[410]
and the last volume of his
history was published in 1787, but the passage we shall quote was
probably written in the year 1780. Gibbon was a young man of delicate
health and fairly good fortune; he had a partial and interrupted
education at Oxford, and then he completed his studies in Geneva; on the
whole his outlook was French and cosmopolitan rather than British, and
he was much under the intellectual influence of that great Frenchman who
is best known under the name of Voltaire (François Marie Arouet de
Voltaire, 1694-1778). Voltaire was an author of enormous industry;
seventy volumes of him adorn the present writer’s shelves, and another
edition of Voltaire’s works runs to ninety-four; he dealt largely with
history and public affairs, and he corresponded with Catherine the Great
of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Louis XV, and most of the
prominent people of the time. Both Voltaire and Gibbon had the sense of
history strong in them; both have set out very plainly and fully their
visions of human life; and it is clear that to both of them the system
in which they lived, the system of monarchy, of leisurely and privileged
gentlefolks, of rather despised industrial and trading people and of
down-trodden and negligible labourers and poor and common people, seemed
the most stably established way of living that the world has ever seen.
They postured a little as republicans, and sneered at the divine
pretensions of monarchy; but the republicanism that appealed to Voltaire
was the crowned republicanism of the Britain of those days, in which the
king was simply the official head, the first and greatest of the
gentlemen.
The ideal they sustained was the ideal of a polite and polished world in
which men--men of quality that is, for no others counted--would be
ashamed to be cruel or gross or enthusiastic, in which the appointments
of life would be spacious and elegant, and the fear of ridicule the
potent auxiliary of the law in maintaining the decorum and harmonies of
life. Voltaire had in him the possibility of a passionate hatred of
injustice, and his interventions on behalf of persecuted or ill-used men
are the high lights of his long and complicated life-story. And this
being the mental disposition of Gibbon and Voltaire, and of the age in
which they lived, it is natural that they should find the existence of
religion in the world, and in particular the existence of Christianity,
a perplexing and rather unaccountable phenomenon. The whole of that
side of life seemed to them a kind of craziness in the human make-up.
Gibbon’s great history is essentially an attack upon Christianity as the
operating cause of the decline and fall. He idealized the crude and
gross plutocracy of Rome into a world of fine gentlemen upon the
eighteenth-century model, and told how it fell before the Barbarian from
without because of the decay through Christianity within. In our history
here we have tried to set that story in a better light. To Voltaire
official Christianity was “_l’infâme_”; something that limited people’s
lives, interfered with their thoughts, persecuted harmless dissentients.
And indeed in that period of the interregnum there was very little life
or light in either the orthodox Christianity of Rome or in the orthodox
tame churches of Russia and of the Protestant princes. In an interregnum
incommoded with an abundance of sleek parsons and sly priests it was
hard to realize what fires had once blazed in the heart of Christianity,
and what fires of political and religious passion might still blaze in
the hearts of men.
At the end of his third volume Gibbon completed his account of the
breaking up of the Western Empire. He then raised the question whether
civilization might ever undergo again a similar collapse. This led him
to review the existing state of affairs (1780) and to compare it with
the state of affairs during the decline of imperial Rome. It will be
very convenient to our general design to quote some passages from that
comparison here, for nothing could better illustrate the state of mind
of the liberal thinkers of Europe at the crest of the political
interregnum of the age of the Great Powers, before the first intimations
of those profound political and social forces of disintegration that
have produced at length the dramatic interrogations of our own times.
“This awful revolution,” wrote Gibbon of the Western collapse, “may be
usefully applied to the useful instruction of the present age. It is the
duty of a patriot to prefer and promote the exclusive interest and glory
of his native country; but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his
views, and to consider Europe as one great republic, whose various
inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and
cultivation. The balance of power will continue to fluctuate, and the
prosperity of our own or the neighbouring kingdoms may be alternately
exalted or depressed; but these partial events cannot essentially injure
our general state of happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and
manners, which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind,
the Europeans and their colonies. The savage nations of the globe are
the common enemies of civilized society; and we may enquire with anxious
curiosity whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those
calamities which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.
Perhaps the same reflections will illustrate the fall of that mighty
empire and explain the probable causes of our actual security.
“The Romans were ignorant of the extent of their danger, and the number
of their enemies. Beyond the Rhine and Danube, the northern countries of
Europe and Asia were filled with innumerable tribes of hunters and
shepherds, poor, voracious, and turbulent; bold in arms, and impatient
to ravish the fruits of industry. The Barbarian world was agitated by
the rapid impulse of war; and the peace of Gaul or Italy was shaken by
the distant revolutions of China. The Huns, who fled before a victorious
enemy, directed their march towards the west; and the torrent was
swelled by the gradual accession of captives and allies. The flying
tribes who yielded to the Huns assumed in their turn the spirit of
conquest; the endless column of barbarians pressed on the Roman Empire
with accumulated weight and, if the foremost were destroyed, the vacant
space was instantly replenished by new assailants. Such formidable
emigrations can no longer issue from the North; and the long repose,
which has been imputed to the decrease of population, is the happy
consequence of the progress of arts and agriculture. Instead of some
rude villages, thinly scattered among its woods and morasses, Germany
now produces a list of two thousand three hundred walled towns; the
Christian kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Poland have been successively
established; and the Hanse merchants, with the Teutonic knights, have
extended their colonies along the coast of the Baltic, as far as the
Gulf of Finland. From the Gulf of Finland to the Eastern Ocean, Russia
now assumes the form of a powerful and civilized empire. The plough,
the loom, and the forge are introduced on the banks of the Volga, the
Oby, and the Lena; and the fiercest of the Tartar hordes have been
taught to tremble and obey....
“The Empire of Rome was firmly established by the singular and perfect
coalition of its members.... But this union was purchased by the loss of
national freedom and military spirit; and the servile provinces,
destitute of life and motion, expected their safety from the mercenary
troops and governors, who were directed by the orders of a distant
court. The happiness of a hundred millions depended on the personal
merit of one or two men, perhaps children, whose minds were corrupted by
education, luxury, and despotic power. Europe is now divided into twelve
powerful, though unequal kingdoms, three respectable commonwealths, and
a variety of smaller, though independent, states; the chances of royal
and ministerial talents are multiplied, at least with the number of its
rulers; and a Julian[411] or Semiramis[412] may reign in the north,
while Arcadius and Honorius[413] again slumber on the thrones of the
House of Bourbon. The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual
influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and
stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at
least, of moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced
into the most defective constitutions by the general manners of the
times. In peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated
by the emulation of so many active rivals: in war, the European forces
are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests. If a savage
conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly
vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany,
the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who,
perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the
victorious Barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the
Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their
pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and
flourish in the American world which is already filled with her colonies
and institutions.
“Cold, poverty, and a life of danger and fatigue fortify the strength
and courage of Barbarians. In every age they have oppressed the polite
and peaceful nations of China, India, and Persia, who neglected, and
still neglect, to counterbalance these natural powers by the resources
of military art. The warlike states of antiquity, Greece, Macedonia, and
Rome, educated a race of soldiers; exercised their bodies, disciplined
their courage, multiplied their forces by regular evolutions, and
converted the iron which they possessed into strong and serviceable
weapons. But this superiority insensibly declined with their laws and
manners; and the feeble policy of Constantine and his successors armed
and instructed, for the ruin of the empire, the rude valour of the
Barbarian mercenaries. The military art has been changed by the
invention of gunpowder; which enables man to command the two most
powerful agents of nature, air and fire. Mathematics, chemistry,
mechanics, architecture, have been applied to the service of war; and
the adverse parties oppose to each other the most elaborate modes of
attack and of defence. Historians may indignantly observe that the
preparations of a siege would found and maintain a flourishing colony;
yet we cannot be displeased that the subversion of a city should be a
work of cost and difficulty, or that an industrious people should be
protected by those arts, which survive and supply the decay of military
virtue. Cannon and fortifications now form an impregnable barrier
against the Tartar horse;[414] and Europe is secure from any future
irruption of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease
to be barbarous....
“Should these speculations be found doubtful or fallacious, there still
remains a more humble source of comfort and hope. The discoveries of
ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic history, or tradition,
of the most enlightened nations, represent the _human savage_, naked
both in mind and body, and destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and
almost of language. From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive
and universal state of man, he has gradually arisen to command the
animals, to fertilize the earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure
the heavens. His progress in the improvement and exercise of his mental
and corporeal faculties has been irregular and various, infinitely slow
in the beginning, and increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity;
ages of laborious ascent have been followed by a moment of rapid
downfall; and the several climates of the globe have felt the
vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of four thousand
years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions; we
cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their
advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that no
people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their
original barbarism.
“Since the first discovery of the arts, war, commerce, and religious
zeal have diffused, among the savages of the Old and New World, those
inestimable gifts, they have been successively propagated; they can
never be lost. We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion
that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real
wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the
human race.”
§ 12[415]
One of the most interesting aspects of this story of Europe in the
seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century during the phase of the Grand
and Parliamentary Monarchies, is the comparative quiescence of the
peasants and workers. The insurrectionary fires of the fourteenth and
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seem to have died down. The acute
economic clashes of the earlier period had been mitigated by rough
adjustments. The discovery of America had revolutionized and changed the
scale of business and industry, had brought a vast volume of precious
metal for money into Europe, had increased and varied employment. For a
time life and work ceased to be intolerable to the masses of the poor.
This did not, of course, prevent much individual misery and discontent;
the poor we have always had with us, but this misery and discontent was
divided and scattered. It became inaudible.
In the earlier period the common people had had an idea to crystallize
upon, the idea of Christian communism. They had found an educated
leadership in the dissentient priests and doctors of the Wycliffe type.
As the movement for a revival in Christianity spent its force, as
Lutheranism fell back for leadership from Jesus upon the Protestant
Princes, this contact and reaction of the fresher minds of the educated
class upon the illiterate mass was interrupted. However numerous a
downtrodden class may be, and however extreme its miseries, it will
never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity
by the development of some common general idea. Educated men and men of
ideas are more necessary to a popular political movement than to any
other political process. A monarchy learns by ruling, and an oligarchy
of any type has the education of affairs; but the common man, the
peasant or toiler, has no experience in large matters, and can exist
politically only through the services, devotion, and guidance of
educated men. The Reformation, the Reformation that succeeded, the
Reformation that is of the Princes, by breaking up educational
facilities, largely destroyed the poor scholar and priest class whose
persuasion of the crowd had rendered the Reformation possible.
The Princes of the Protestant countries when they seized upon the
national churches early apprehended the necessity of gripping the
universities also. Their idea of education was the idea of capturing
young clever people for the service of their betters. Beyond that they
were disposed to regard education as a mischievous thing. The only way
to an education, therefore, for a poor man was through patronage. Of
course there was a parade of encouragement towards learning in all the
Grand Monarchies, a setting up of Academies and Royal Societies, but
these benefited only a small class of subservient scholars. The church
also had learnt to distrust the educated poor man. In the great
aristocratic “crowned republic” of Britain there was the same shrinkage
of educational opportunity. “Both the ancient universities,” says
Hammond, in his account of the eighteenth century, “were the
universities of the rich. There is a passage in Macaulay describing the
state and pomp of Oxford at the end of the seventeenth century, ‘when
her Chancellor, the Venerable Duke of Ormonde, sat in his embroidered
mantle on his throne under the painted ceiling of the Sheldonian
theatre, surrounded by hundreds of graduates robed according to their
rank, while the noblest youths of England were solemnly presented to him
as candidates for academical honours.’ The university was a power, not
in the sense in which that could be said of a university like the old
university of Paris, whose learning could make Popes tremble, but in the
sense that the university was part of the recognized machinery of
aristocracy. What was true of the universities was true of the public
schools. Education in England was the nursery not of a society, but of
an order; not of a state, but of a race of owner-rulers.” The missionary
spirit had departed from education throughout Europe. To that quite as
much as to the amelioration of things by a diffused prosperity, this
phase of quiescence among the lower classes is to be ascribed. They had
lost brains and speech, and they were fed. The community was like a
pithed animal in the hands of the governing class.[416]
Moreover, there had been considerable changes in the proportions of
class to class. One of the most difficult things for the historian to
trace is the relative amount of the total property of the community held
at any time by any particular class in that community. These things
fluctuate very rapidly. The peasant wars of Europe indicate a phase of
comparatively concentrated property when large masses of people could
feel themselves expropriated and at a common disadvantage, and so take
mass action. This was the time of the rise and prosperity of the Fuggers
and their like, a time of international finance. Then with the vast
importation of silver and gold and commodities into Europe from America,
there seems to have been a restoration of a more diffused state of
wealth. The poor were just as miserable as ever, but there were perhaps
not so many poor relatively, and they were broken up into a variety of
types without any ideas in common. In Great Britain the agricultural
life which had been dislocated by the confiscations of the Reformation
had settled down again into a system of tenant fanning under great
landowners. Side by side with the large estates there was still,
however, much common land for pasturing the beasts of the poorer
villagers, and much land cultivated in strips upon communal lines. The
middling sort of man, and even the poorer sort of man upon the land,
were leading an endurable existence in 1700. The standard of life, the
idea, that is, of what is an endurable existence, was, however, rising
during the opening phase of Grand Monarchy; after a time the process of
the upward concentration of wealth seems to have been resumed, the
larger landowners began to acquire and crowd out the poorer free
cultivators, and the proportion of poor people and of people who felt
they were leading impoverished lives increased again. The bigger men
were unchallenged rulers of Great Britain, and they set themselves to
enact laws, the Enclosure Acts, that practically confiscated the
unenclosed and common lands, mainly for the benefit of the larger
landowners. The smaller men sank to the level of wage workers upon the
land over which they had once possessed rights of cultivation and
pasture.
The peasant in France and upon the Continent generally was not so
expropriated; his enemy was not the landlord, but the tax-gatherer; he
was squeezed on his land instead of being squeezed off it.
As the eighteenth century progressed, it is apparent in the literature
of the time that what to do with “the poor” was again exercising men’s
thoughts. We find such active-minded English writers as Defoe
(1659-1731) and Fielding (1707-54) deeply exercised by this problem. But
as yet there is no such revival of the communistic and equalitarian
ideas of primitive Christianity as distinguished the time of Wycliffe
and John Huss. Protestantism in breaking up the universal church had for
a time broken up the idea of a universal human solidarity. Even if the
universal church of the Middle Ages had failed altogether to realize
that idea, it had at any rate been the symbol of that idea.
Defoe and Fielding were men of a livelier practical imagination than
Gibbon, and they realized something of the economic processes that were
afoot in their time. So did Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74); his _Deserted
Village_ (1770) is a pamphlet on enclosures disguised as a poem.[417]
But Gibbon’s circumstances had never brought economic facts very vividly
before his eyes; he saw the world as a struggle between barbarism and
civilization, but he perceived nothing of that other struggle over which
he floated, the mute, unconscious struggle of the commonalty against
able, powerful, rich, and selfish men. He did not perceive the
accumulation of stresses that were presently to strain and break up all
the balance of his “twelve powerful, though unequal, kingdoms,” his
“three respectable commonwealths,” and their rag, tag, and bobtail of
independent minor princes, reigning dukes, and so forth. Even the civil
war that had begun in the British colonies in America did not rouse him
to the nearness of what we now call “Democracy.”
From what we have been saying hitherto, the reader may suppose that the
squeezing of the small farmer and the peasant off the land by the great
landowners, the mere grabbing of commons and the concentration of
property in the hands of a powerful privileged and greedy class, was all
that was happening to the English land in the eighteenth century. So we
do but state the worse side of the change. Concurrently with this change
of ownership there was going on a great improvement in agriculture.
There can be little doubt that the methods of cultivation pursued by the
peasants, squatters, and small farmers were antiquated, wasteful, and
comparatively unproductive, and that the larger private holdings and
estates created by the Enclosure Acts were much more productive (one
authority says twenty times more productive) than the old ways. The
change was perhaps a necessary one and the evil of it was not that it
was brought about, but that it was brought about so as to increase both
wealth and the numbers of the poor. Its benefits were intercepted by the
bigger private owners. The community was injured to the great profit of
this class.
And here we come upon one of the chief problems of our lives at the
present time, the problem of the deflection of the profits of progress.
For two hundred years there has been, mainly under the influence of the
spirit of science and enquiry, a steady improvement in the methods of
production of almost everything that humanity requires. If our sense of
community and our social science were equal to the tasks required of
them, there can be little question that this great increment in
production would have benefited the whole community, would have given
everyone an amount of education, leisure and freedom such as mankind had
never dreamt of before. But though the common standard of living has
risen, the rise has been on a scale disproportionately small. The rich
have developed a freedom and luxury unknown in the world hitherto, and
there has been an increase in the proportion of rich people and
stagnantly prosperous and unproductive people in the community; but that
also fails to account for the full benefit. There has been much sheer
waste. Vast accumulations of material and energy have gone into warlike
preparations and warfare. Much has been devoted to the futile efforts of
unsuccessful business competition. Huge possibilities have remained
undeveloped because of the opposition of owners, forestallers, and
speculators to their economical exploitation. The good things that
science and organization have been bringing within the reach of mankind
have not been taken methodically and used to their utmost, but they have
been scrambled for, snatched at, seized upon by gambling adventurers and
employed upon selfish and vain ends. The eighteenth century in Europe,
and more particularly in Great Britain and Poland, was the age of
private ownership. “Private enterprise,” which meant in practice that
everyone was entitled to get everything he could out of the business of
the community, reigned supreme. No sense of obligation to the state in
business matters is to be found in the ordinary novels, plays, and such
like representative literature of the time. Everyone is out “to make his
fortune,” there is no recognition that it is wrong to be an unproductive
parasite on the community, and still less that a financier or merchant
or manufacturer can ever be overpaid for his services to mankind. This
was the moral atmosphere of the time, and those lords and gentlemen who
grabbed the people’s commons, assumed possession of the mines under
their lands, and crushed down the yeoman farmers and peasants to the
status of pauper labourers, had no idea that they were living anything
but highly meritorious lives.
Concurrently with this change in Great Britain from traditional patch
agriculture and common pasture to large and more scientific agriculture,
very great changes were going on in the manufacture of commodities. In
these changes Great Britain was, in the eighteenth century, leading the
world. Hitherto, throughout the whole course of history from the
beginnings of civilization, manufactures, building, and industries
generally had been in the hands of craftsmen and small masters who
worked in their own houses. They had been organized in guilds, and were
mostly their own employers. They formed an essential and permanent
middle class. There were capitalists among them, who let out looms and
the like, supplied material, and took the finished product, but they
were not big capitalists. There had been no rich manufacturers. The rich
men of the world before this time had been great landowners or
money-lenders and money manipulators or merchants. But in the eighteenth
century, workers in certain industries began to be collected together
into factories in order to produce things in larger quantities through a
systematic division of labour, and the employer, as distinguished from
the master worker, began to be a person of importance. Moreover,
mechanical invention was producing machines that simplified the manual
work of production, and were capable of being driven by water power and
presently by steam. In 1765 Watt’s steam engine was constructed, a very
important date in the history of industrialism.
The cotton industry was one of the first to pass into factory production
(originally with water-driven machinery). The woollen industry followed.
At the same time iron smelting, which had been restrained hitherto to
small methods by the use of charcoal, resorted to coke made from coal,
and the coal and iron industries also began to expand. The iron industry
shifted from the wooded country of Sussex and Surrey to the coal
districts. By 1800 this change-over of industry from a small scale
business with small employers to a large scale production under big
employers was well in progress. Everywhere there sprang up factories
using first water then steam power. It was a change of fundamental
importance in human economy. From the dawn of history the manufacturer
and craftsman had been, as we have said, a sort of middle-class
townsman. The machine and the employer now superseded his skill, and he
either became an employer of his fellows, and grew towards wealth and
equality with the other rich classes, or he remained a worker and sank
very rapidly to the level of a mere labourer. This great change in human
affairs is known as the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in Great
Britain, it spread during the nineteenth century throughout the world.
As the Industrial Revolution went on, a great gulf opened between
employer and employed. In the past every manufacturing worker had the
hope of becoming an independent master. Even the slave craftsmen of
Babylon and Rome were protected by laws that enabled them to save and
buy their freedom and to set up for themselves. But now a factory and
its engines and machines became a vast and costly thing, measured by the
scale of the worker’s pocket. Wealthy men had to come together to create
an enterprise; credit and plant, that is to say, “Capital,” were
required. “Setting up for oneself” ceased to be a normal hope for an
artisan. The worker was henceforth a worker from the cradle to the
grave. Besides the landlords and merchants and the money-dealers who
financed trading companies and lent their money to the merchants and the
state, there arose now this new wealth of industrial capital--a new sort
of power in the state.
Of the working out of these beginnings we shall tell later. The
immediate effect of the industrial revolution upon the countries to
which it came was to cause a vast, distressful shifting and stirring of
the mute, uneducated, leaderless, and now more and more propertyless
common population. The small cultivators and peasants, ruined and
dislodged by the Enclosure Acts, drifted towards the new manufacturing
regions, and there they joined the families of the impoverished and
degraded craftsmen in the factories. Great towns of squalid houses came
into existence. Nobody seems to have noted clearly what was going on at
the time. It is the keynote of “private enterprise” to mind one’s own
business, secure the utmost profit, and disregard any other
consequences. Ugly great factories grew up, built as cheaply as
possible, to hold as many machines and workers as possible. Around them
gathered the streets of workers’ homes, built at the cheapest rate,
without space, without privacy, barely decent, and let at the utmost
rent that could be exacted. These new industrial centres were at first
without schools, without churches.... The English gentleman of the
closing decades of the eighteenth century read Gibbon’s third volume and
congratulated himself that there was henceforth no serious fear of the
Barbarians, with this new barbarism growing up, with this metamorphosis
of his countrymen into something dark and desperate, in full progress,
within an easy walk perhaps of his door.
XXXVII
THE NEW DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE
§ 1. _Inconveniences of the Great Power System._ § 2. _The Thirteen
Colonies before Their Revolt._ § 3. _Civil War is Forced upon the
Colonies._ § 4. _The War of Independence._ § 5. _The Constitution
of the United States._ § 6. _Primitive Features of the United
States Constitution._ § 7. _Revolutionary Ideas in France._ § 8.
_The Revolution of the Year 1789._ § 9. _The French “Crowned
Republic” of ‘89-91._ § 10. _The Revolutions of the Jacobins._ §
11. _The Jacobin Republic, 1792-94._ § 12. _The Directory._ § 13.
_The Pause in Reconstruction and the Dawn of Modern Socialism._
§ 1[418]
When Gibbon, nearly a century and a half ago, was congratulating the
world of refined and educated people that the age of great political and
social catastrophes was past, he was neglecting many signs which we--in
the wisdom of accomplished facts--could have told him portended far
heavier jolts and dislocations than any he foresaw. We have told how the
struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century princes for
ascendancies and advantages developed into a more cunning and
complicated struggle of foreign offices, masquerading as idealized
“Great Powers,” as the eighteenth century wore on. The intricate and
pretentious art of diplomacy developed. The “Prince” ceased to be a
single and secretive Machiavellian schemer, and became merely the
crowned symbol of a Machiavellian scheme. Prussia, Russia, and Austria
fell upon and divided Poland. France was baffled in profound schemes
against Spain. Britain circumvented the “designs of France” in America
and acquired Canada, and got the better of France in India. And then a
remarkable thing occurred, a thing very shocking to European diplomacy.
The British colonies in America flatly refused to have further part or
lot in this game of “Great Powers.” They objected that they had no voice
and no great interest in these European schemes and conflicts, and they
refused to bear any portion of the burthen of taxation these foreign
policies entailed.
Of course this decision did not flash out complete and finished from the
American mind at the beginning of these troubles. In America in the
eighteenth century, just as in England in the seventeenth, there was an
entire willingness, indeed a desire on the part of ordinary men, to
leave foreign affairs in the hands of the king and his ministers. But
there was an equally strong desire on the part of ordinary men to be
neither taxed nor interfered with in their ordinary pursuits. These are
incompatible wishes. Common men cannot shirk world politics and at the
same time enjoy private freedom; but it has taken them countless
generations to learn this. The first impulse in the American revolt
against the government in Great Britain was therefore simply a
resentment against the taxation and interference that followed
necessarily from “foreign policy” without any clear recognition of what
was involved in that objection. It was only when the revolt was
consummated that the people of the American colonies recognized at all
clearly that they had repudiated the Great Power view of life. The
sentence in which that repudiation was expressed was Washington’s
injunction to “avoid entangling alliances.” From his time until the year
1917 the united colonies of Great Britain in North America, liberated
and independent as the United States of America, stood apart altogether
from the blood-stained intrigues and conflicts of the European foreign
offices. Soon after (1810-1823) they were able to extend their principle
of detachment to the rest of the continent, and to make all the New
World “out of bounds” for the scheming expansionists of the old. When at
length, in 1917, they were obliged to re-enter the arena of world
politics, it was to bring the new spirit and new aims their aloofness
had enabled them to develop into the tangle of international
relationships. They were not, however, the first to stand aloof. Since
the treaty of Westphalia (1648), the confederated states of Switzerland,
in their mountain fastnesses, had sustained their right to exclusion
from the schemes of kings and empires.
But since the North American peoples are now to play an increasingly
important part in our history, it will be well to devote a little more
attention than we have hitherto given to their development. We have
already glanced at this story in § 8 of the preceding chapter. We will
now tell a little more fully--though still in the barest outline--what
these colonies were, whose recalcitrance was so disconcerting to the
king and ministers of Great Britain in their diplomatic game against the
rest of mankind.[419]
§ 2
The extent of the British colonies in America in the early half of the
eighteenth century is shown in the accompanying map.[420] The darker
shading represents the districts settled in 1700, the lighter the growth
of the settlements up to 1760. It will be seen that the colonies were a
mere fringe of population along the coast, spreading gradually inland
and finding in the Alleghany and Blue Mountains a very serious barrier.
Among the oldest of these settlements was the colony of Virginia, the
name of which commemorates Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen of England.
The first expedition to found a colony in Virginia was made by Sir
Walter Raleigh in 1584, but there was no permanent settlement at that
time; and the real beginnings of Virginia date from the foundation of
the Virginia Company in 1606 in the reign of James I (1603-25). The
story of John Smith and the early founders of Virginia, and of how the
Indian “princess” Pocahontas married one of his gentlemen, is an
English classic.[421] In growing tobacco the Virginians found the
beginning of prosperity. At the same time that the Virginian Company was
founded, the Plymouth Company obtained a charter for the settlement of
the country to the north of Long Island Sound, to which the English laid
claim. But it was only in 1620 that the northern region began to be
settled, and that under fresh charters. The settlers of the northern
region (New England), which became Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode
Island, and Massachusetts, were men of a different stamp to the Virginia
people. They were Protestants discontented with the Anglican Church
compromise, and republican-spirited men hopeless of resistance to the
Grand Monarchy of James I and Charles I. Their pioneer ship was the
_Mayflower_, which founded New Plymouth in 1620. The dominant northern
colony was Massachusetts. Differences in religious method and in ideas
of toleration led to the separation of the three other Puritan colonies
from Massachusetts. It illustrates the scale upon which things were done
in those days that the whole state of New Hampshire was claimed as
belonging to a certain Captain John Mason, and that he offered to sell
it to the king (King Charles II in 1671) in exchange for the right to
import 300 tons of French wine free of duty--an offer which was refused.
The present state of Maine was bought by Massachusetts from its alleged
owner for twelve hundred and fifty pounds.
In the Civil War that ended with the decapitation of Charles I the
sympathies of New England were for the Parliament, and Virginia was
Cavalier; but two hundred and fifty miles separated these settlements,
and there were no serious hostilities. With the return of the monarchy
in 1660, there was a vigorous development of British colonization in
America. Charles II and his associates were greedy for gain, and the
British crown had no wish to make any further experiments in illegal
taxation at home. But the undefined relations of the colonies to the
crown and the British government seemed to afford promise of financial
adventure across the Atlantic. There was a rapid development of
plantations and proprietary colonies. Lord Baltimore had already in 1632
set up a colony that was to be a home of religious freedom for
Catholics under the attractive name of Maryland, to the north and east
of Virginia; and now the Quaker Penn (who was nevertheless a very good
friend of Charles II) established himself to the north at Philadelphia
and founded the colony of Pennsylvania. Its main boundary with Maryland
and Virginia was delimited by two men, Mason and Dixon, whose “Mason and
Dixon line” was destined to become a very important line indeed in the
later affairs of the United States. Carolina, which was originally an
unsuccessful French Protestant establishment, and which owed its name
not to Charles (Carolus) II of England, but to Charles IX of France, had
fallen into English hands and was settled at several points.[422]
Between Maryland and New England stretched a number of small Dutch and
Swedish settlements, of which the chief town was New Amsterdam. These
settlements were captured from the Dutch by the British in 1664, lost
again in 1673, and restored by treaty when Holland and England made
peace in 1674. Thereby the whole coast from Maine to Carolina became in
some form or other a British possession. To the south the Spanish were
established; their headquarters were at Fort St. Augustine in Florida,
and in 1732 the town of Savannah[423] was settled by a philanthropist
Oglethorpe from England, who had taken pity on the miserable people
imprisoned for debt in England, and rescued a number of them from prison
to become the founders of a new colony, Georgia, which was to be a
bulwark against the Spanish. So by the middle of the eighteenth century
we have these settlements along the American coastline: the New England
group of Puritans and free Protestants, Maine (belonging to
Massachusetts), New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and
Massachusetts; the captured Dutch group, which was now divided up into
New York (New Amsterdam rechristened), New Jersey, and Delaware (Swedish
before it was Dutch, and in its earliest British phase attached to
Pennsylvania); then came catholic Maryland; Cavalier Virginia; Carolina
(which was presently divided into North and South), and Oglethorpe’s
Georgia. Later on a number of Tyrolese Protestants took refuge in
Georgia, and there was a considerable immigration of a good class of
German cultivators into Pennsylvania.
[Illustration: The AMERICAN Colonies, showing territories settled up to
1760]
Such were the miscellaneous origins of the citizens of the Thirteen
Colonies.[424] The possibility of their ever becoming closely united
would have struck an impartial observer in 1760 as being very slight.
Superadded to the initial differences of origin, fresh differences were
created by climate. North of the Mason and Dixon line farming was
practised mainly upon British or Central European lines by free white
cultivators. The settled country of New England took on a likeness to
the English countryside; considerable areas of Pennsylvania developed
fields and farmhouses like those of South Germany. The distinctive
conditions in the north had, socially, important effects. Masters and
men had to labour together as backwoodsmen, and were equalized in the
process. They did not start equally; many “servants” are mentioned in
the roster of the _Mayflower_. But they rapidly became equal under
colonial conditions; there was, for instance, a vast tract of land to be
had for the taking, and the “servant” went off and took land like his
master. The English class system disappeared. Under colonial conditions
there arose equality “in the faculties both of body and mind,” and an
individual independence of judgment impatient of interference from
England. But south of the Mason and Dixon line tobacco growing began,
and the warmer climate encouraged the establishment of plantations with
gang labour. Red Indian captives were employed; Cromwell sent Irish
prisoners of war to Virginia, which did much to reconcile the Royalist
planters to republicanism; convicts were sent out, and there was a
considerable trade in kidnapped children, who were “spirited away” to
America to become apprentices or bond slaves. But the most convenient
form of gang labour proved to be that of negro slaves. The first negro
slaves were brought to Jamestown in Virginia by a Dutch ship as early as
1620. By 1700 negro slaves were scattered all over the states, but
Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas were their chief regions of
employment, and while the communities to the north were communities of
not very rich and not very poor farming men, the south developed a type
of large proprietor and a white community of overseers and professional
men subsisting on slave labour. Slave labour was a necessity to the
social and economic system that had grown up in the south; in the north
the presence of slaves was unnecessary and in some respects
inconvenient. Conscientious scruples about slavery were more free,
therefore, to develop and flourish in the northern atmosphere. To this
question of the revival of slavery in the world we must return when we
come to consider the perplexities of American Democracy. Here we note it
simply as an added factor in the heterogeneous mixture of the British
Colonies.[425]
But if the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies were miscellaneous in
their origins and various in their habits and sympathies, they had three
very strong antagonisms in common. They had a common interest against
the Red Indians. For a time they shared a common dread of French
conquest and dominion. And thirdly, they were all in conflict with the
claims of the British crown and the commercial selfishness of the narrow
oligarchy who dominated the British Parliament and British affairs.
So far as the first danger went, the Indians were a constant evil, but
never more than a threat of disaster. They remained divided against
themselves. Yet they had shown possibilities of combination upon a
larger scale. The Five Nations of the Iroquois (see map, p. 283) was a
very important league of tribes. But it never succeeded in playing off
the French against the English to secure itself, and no Red Indian
Jengis Khan ever arose among these nomads of the new world. The French
aggression was a more serious threat. The French never made settlements
in America on a scale to compete with the English, but their government
set about the encirclement of the colonies and their subjugation in a
terrifyingly systematic manner. The English in America were colonists;
the French were explorers, adventurers, agents, missionaries, merchants,
and soldiers. Only in Canada did they strike root. French statesmen sat
over maps and dreamt dreams, and their dreams are to be seen in our map
in the chain of forts creeping southward from the Great Lakes and
northward up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The struggle of France and
Britain was a worldwide struggle. It was decided in India, in Germany,
and on the high seas. In the Peace of Paris (1763) the French gave
England Canada, and relinquished Louisiana to the inert hands of
declining Spain. It was the complete abandonment of America by France.
The lifting of the French danger left the colonists unencumbered to face
their third common antagonist--the crown and government of their mother
land.
§ 3
We have noted in the previous chapter how the governing class of Great
Britain steadily acquired the land and destroyed the liberty of the
common people throughout the eighteenth century, and how greedily and
blindly the new industrial revolution was brought about. We have noted
also how the British Parliament, through the decay of the representative
methods of the House of Commons, had become both in its upper and lower
houses merely the instrument of government through the big landowners.
Both these big property-holders and the crown were deeply interested in
America; the former as private adventurers, the latter partly as
representing the speculative exploitations of the Stuart kings, and
partly as representing the state in search of funds for the expenses of
foreign policy, and neither lords nor crown were disposed to regard the
traders, planters, and common people of the colonies with any more
consideration than they did the yeomen and small cultivators at home. At
bottom the interests of the common man in Great Britain, Ireland, and
America were the same. Each was being squeezed by the same system. But
while in Britain oppressor and oppressed were closely tangled up in one
intimate social system, in America the crown and the exploiter were far
away, and men could get together and develop a sense of community
against their common enemy.
Moreover, the American colonist had the important advantage of
possessing a separate and legal organ of resistance to the British
government in the assembly or legislature of his colony that was
necessary for the management of local affairs. The common man in
Britain, cheated out of his proper representation in the Commons, had no
organ, no centre of expression and action for his discontents.
It will be evident to the reader, bearing in mind the variety of the
colonies, that here was the possibility of an endless series of
disputes, aggressions, and counter-aggressions. The story of the
development of irritations between the colonies and Britain is a story
far too intricate, subtle, and lengthy for the scheme of this _Outline_.
Suffice it that the grievances fell under three main heads: attempts to
secure for British adventurers or the British government the profits of
the exploitation of new lands; systematic restrictions upon trade
designed to keep the foreign trade of the colonies entirely in British
hands, so that the colonial exports all went through Britain and only
British-made goods were used in America;[426] and finally attempts at
taxation through the British Parliament as the supreme taxing authority
of the empire. Under the pressure of this triple system of annoyances,
the American colonists were forced to do a very considerable amount of
hard political thinking. Such men as Patrick Henry and James Otis began
to discuss the fundamental ideas of government and political association
very much as they had been discussed in England in the great days of
Cromwell’s Commonweal. They began to deny both the divine origin of
kingship and the supremacy of the British Parliament, and (James Otis,
1762[427]) to say such things as:--
“God made all men naturally equal.
“Ideas of earthly superiority are educational, not innate.
“Kings were made for the good of the people, and not the people for
them.
“No government has a right to make slaves of its subjects.
“Though most governments are _de facto_ arbitrary, and consequently the
curse and scandal of human nature, yet none are _de jure_ arbitrary.”
Some of which propositions reach far.
This ferment in the political ideas of the Americans was started by
English leaven. One very influential English writer was John Locke
(1632-1704), whose _Two Treatises on Civil Government_ may be taken, as
much as any one single book can be taken in such cases, as the point of
departure for modern democratic ideas. He was the son of a Cromwellian
soldier, he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, during the republican
ascendancy, he spent some years in Holland in exile, and his writings
form a bridge between the bold political thinking of those earlier
republican days and the revolutionary movement both in America and
France.
But men do not begin to act upon theories. It is always some real
danger, some practical necessity, that produces action; and it is only
after action has destroyed old relationships and produced a new and
perplexing state of affairs that theory comes to its own. Then it is
that theory is put to the test. The discord in interests and ideas
between the colonists was brought to a fighting issue by the obstinate
resolve of the British Parliament after the peace of 1763 to impose
taxation upon the American colonies. Britain was at peace and flushed
with successes; it seemed an admirable opportunity for settling accounts
with these recalcitrant settlers. But the great British property-owners
found a power beside their own, of much the same mind with them, but a
little divergent in its ends--the reviving crown. King George III, who
had begun his reign in 1760, was resolved to be much more of a king than
his two German predecessors. He could speak English; he claimed to
“glory in the name of Briton”--and indeed it is not a bad name for a man
without a perceptible drop of English, Welsh, or Scotch blood in his
veins. In the American colonies and the overseas possessions generally,
with their indefinite charters or no charters at all, it seemed to him
that the crown might claim authority and obtain resources and powers
absolutely denied to it by the strong and jealous aristocracy in
Britain. This inclined many of the Whig noblemen to a sympathy with the
colonists that they might not otherwise have shown. They had no
objection to the exploitation of the colonies in the interests of
British “private enterprise,” but they had very strong objections to the
strengthening of the crown by that exploitation so as to make it
presently independent of themselves.[428]
The war that broke out was therefore in reality not a war between
Britain and the colonists, it was a war between the British government
and the colonists, with a body of Whig noblemen and a considerable
amount of public feeling in England on the side of the latter. An early
move after 1763 was an attempt to raise revenue for Britain in the
colonies by requiring that newspapers and documents of various sorts
should be stamped. This was stiffly resisted, the British crown was
intimidated, and the Stamp Acts were repealed (1766). Their repeal was
greeted by riotous rejoicings in London, more hearty even than those in
the colonies.
But the Stamp Act affair was only one eddy in a turbulent stream flowing
towards civil war. Upon a score of pretexts, and up and down the coast,
the representatives of the British government were busy asserting their
authority and making British government intolerable. The quartering of
soldiers upon the colonists was a great nuisance. Rhode Island was
particularly active in defying the trade restrictions; the Rhode
Islanders were “free traders,”--that is to say, smugglers; a government
schooner, the _Gaspee_, ran aground off Providence; she was surprised,
boarded, and captured by armed men in boats, and burnt. In 1773, with a
total disregard of the existing colonial tea trade, special advantages
for the importation of tea into America[429] were given by the British
Parliament to the East India Company. It was resolved by the colonists
to refuse and boycott this tea. When the tea importers at Boston showed
themselves resolute to land their cargoes, a band of men disguised as
Indians, in the presence of a great crowd of people, boarded the three
tea ships and threw the tea overboard (December 16th, 1773).
All 1774 was occupied in the gathering up of resources on either side
for the coming conflict. It was decided by the British Parliament in the
spring of 1774 to punish Boston by closing her port. Her trade was to be
destroyed unless she accepted that tea. It was a quite typical instance
of that silly “firmness” which shatters empires. In order to enforce
this measure, British troops were concentrated at Boston under General
Gage. The colonists took counter-measures. The first colonial Congress
met at Philadelphia in September, at which twelve colonies were
represented: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island,
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and
North and South Carolina. Georgia was not present. True to the best
English traditions, the Congress documented its attitude by a
“Declaration of Rights.” Practically this Congress was an
insurrectionary government, but no blow was struck until the spring of
1775. Then came the first shedding of blood.
Two of the American leaders, Hancock and Samuel Adams, had been marked
down by the British Government for arrest and trial for treason; they
were known to be at Lexington, about eleven miles from Boston; and in
the night of April 18th, 1775, Gage set his forces in motion for their
arrest.
That night was a momentous one in history. The movement of Gage’s troops
had been observed, signal lanterns were shown from a church tower in
Boston, and two men, Dawes and Paul Revere, stole away in boats across
the Back Bay to take horse and warn the countryside. The British were
also ferried over the water, and as they marched through the night
towards Lexington, the firing of signal cannon and the ringing of church
bells went before them. As they entered Lexington at dawn, they saw a
little company of men drawn up in military fashion. It seems that the
British fired first. There was a single shot and then a volley, and the
little handful decamped, apparently without any answering shots, leaving
eight dead and nine wounded upon the village green.
The British then marched on to Concord, ten miles further, occupied the
village, and stationed a party on the bridge at that place. The
expedition had failed in its purpose of arresting Hancock and Adams, and
the British commander seems to have been at a loss what to do next.
Meanwhile the colonial levies were coming up from all directions, and
presently the picket upon the bridge found itself subjected to an
increasing fire from a gathering number of assailants firing from behind
trees and fences. A retreat to Boston was decided upon. It was a
disastrous retreat. The country had risen behind the British; all the
morning the colonials had been gathering. Both sides of the road were
now swarming with sharpshooters firing from behind rock and fence and
building; the soldiers were in conspicuous scarlet uniforms, with yellow
facings and white gaiters and cravats; this must have stood out very
vividly against the cold sharp colours of the late New England spring;
the day was bright, hot, and dusty, and they were already exhausted by a
night march. Every few yards a man fell, wounded or killed. The rest
tramped on, or halted to fire an ineffectual volley. No counter-attack
was possible. Their assailants lurked everywhere. At Lexington there
were British reinforcements and two guns, and after a brief rest the
retreat was resumed in better order. But the sharpshooting and pursuit
was pressed to the river, and after the British had crossed back into
Boston, the colonial levies took up their quarters in Cambridge and
prepared to blockade the city.
§ 4
So the war began. It was not a war that promised a conclusive end. The
colonists had no one vulnerable capital; they were dispersed over a
great country, with a limitless wilderness behind it, and so they had
great powers of resistance. They had learnt their tactics largely from
the Indians; they could fight well in open order, and harry and destroy
troops in movement. But they had no disciplined army that could meet the
British in a pitched battle, and little military equipment; and their
levies grew impatient at a long campaign, and tended to go home to their
farms. The British, on the other hand, had a well-drilled army, and
their command of the sea gave them the power of shifting their attack up
and down the long Atlantic seaboard. They were at peace with all the
world. But the king was stupid and greedy to interfere in the conduct of
affairs; the generals he favoured were stupid “strong men” or flighty
men of birth and fashion; and the heart of England was not in the
business. He trusted rather to being able to blockade, raid, and annoy
the colonists into submission than to a conclusive conquest and
occupation of the land. But the methods employed, and particularly the
use of hired German troops, who still retained the cruel traditions of
the Thirty Years’ War, and of Indian auxiliaries, who raped and scalped
the outlying settlers, did not so much weary the Americans of the war as
of the British. The Congress, meeting for the second time in 1775,
endorsed the actions of the New England colonists, and appointed George
Washington the American commander-in-chief. In 1777, General Burgoyne,
in an attempt to get down to New York from Canada, was defeated at
Freeman’s Farm on the Upper Hudson, and surrounded and obliged to
capitulate at Saratoga with his whole army. This disaster encouraged the
French and Spanish to come into the struggle on the side of the
colonists. The French sent an army to the States under General
Lafayette, and their fleet did much to minimize the advantage of the
British at sea. General Cornwallis was caught in the Yorktown peninsula
in Virginia in 1781, and capitulated with his army. The British
Government, now heavily engaged with France and Spain in Europe, was at
the end of its resources.
[Illustration: Sketch map to show BOSTON & neighbourhood 1775]
At the outset of the war the colonists in general seem to have been as
little disposed to repudiate monarchy and claim complete independence as
were the Hollanders in the opening phase of Philip II’s persecutions and
follies. The separatists were called radicals; they were mostly
extremely democratic, as we should say in England to-day, and their
advanced views frightened many of the steadier and wealthier colonists,
for whom class privileges and distinctions had considerable charm. But
early in 1776 an able and persuasive Englishman, Tom Paine, published a
pamphlet at Philadelphia with the title of _Common Sense_, which had an
enormous effect on public opinion. Its style was rhetorical by modern
standards. “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of Nature cries,
‘’Tis time to part,’” and so forth. But its effects were very great. It
converted thousands to the necessity of separation. The turn-over of
opinion, once it had begun, was rapid.
Only in the summer of 1776 did Congress take the irrevocable step of
declaring for separation. “The Declaration of Independence,” another of
those exemplary documents which it has been the peculiar service of the
English to produce for mankind, was drawn up by Thomas Jefferson; and
after various amendments and modifications it was made the fundamental
document of the United States of America. There were two noteworthy
amendments to Jefferson’s draft. He had denounced the slave trade
fiercely, and blamed the home government for interfering with colonial
attempts to end it. This was thrown out, and so too was a sentence about
the British: “we must endeavour to forget our former love for them ...
we might have been a free and a great people together.”
(But for the British crown and great proprietors and the mutual
ignorance of the common men in the two countries.)[430]
Towards the end of 1782, the preliminary articles of the treaty in which
Britain recognized the complete independence of the United States were
signed at Paris. The end of the war was proclaimed on April 19th, 1783,
exactly eight years after Paul Revere’s ride, and the retreat of Gage’s
men from Concord to Boston. The Treaty of Peace was finally signed at
Paris in September.
§ 5
From the point of view of human history, the way in which the Thirteen
States became independent is of far less importance than the fact that
they did become independent. And with the establishment of their
independence came a new sort of community into the world. It was like
something coming out of an egg. It was a western European civilization
that had broken free from the last traces of Empire and Christendom; it
had not a vestige of monarchy left and no state religion. It had no
dukes, princes, counts, nor any sort of title-bearers claiming to
ascendancy or respect as a right. Even its unity was as yet a mere unity
for defence and freedom. It was in these respects such a clean start in
political organization as the world had not seen before. The absence of
any binding religious tie is especially noteworthy. It had a number of
forms of Christianity, its spirit was indubitably Christian; but as a
state document of 1796 explicitly declared, “The government of the
United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian
religion.”[431] The new community had in fact gone right down to the
bare and stripped fundamentals of human association, and it was building
up a new sort of society and a new sort of state upon those foundations.
Here were about four million people scattered over vast areas with very
slow and difficult means of inter-communication, poor as yet, but with
the potentiality of limitless wealth, setting out to do in reality on a
huge scale such a feat of construction as the Athenian philosophers
twenty-two centuries before had done in imagination and theory.
This situation marks a definite stage in the release of man from
precedent and usage, and a definite step forward towards the conscious
and deliberate reconstruction of his circumstances to suit his needs and
aims. It was a new method becoming practical in human affairs. The
modern states of Europe have been evolved institution by institution
slowly and planlessly out of preceding things. The United States were
planned and made.
[Illustration: The UNITED STATES, showing the extent of settlement in
1790.]
In one respect, however, the creative freedom of the new nation was very
seriously restricted. This new sort of community and state was not built
upon a cleared site. It was not even so frankly an artificiality as some
of the later Athenian colonies, which went out from the mother city to
plan and build brand new city states with brand new constitutions. The
thirteen colonies by the end of the war had all of them constitutions
either like that of Connecticut and Rhode Island dating from their
original charters (1662) or, as in the case of the rest of the states,
where a British governor had played a large part in the administration,
re-made during the conflict. But we may well consider these
reconstructions as contributory essays and experiments in the general
constructive effort.
Upon the effort certain ideas stood out very prominently. One is the
idea of political and social equality. This idea, which we saw coming
into the world as an extreme and almost incredible idea in the age
between Buddha and Jesus of Nazareth, is now asserted in the later
eighteenth century as a practical standard of human relationship. Says
the fundamental statement of Virginia: “All men are by nature equally
free and independent,” and it proceeds to rehearse their “rights,” and
to assert that all magistrates and governors are but “trustees and
servants”; of the commonweal. All men are equally entitled to the free
exercise of religion. The king by right, the aristocrat, the “natural
slave,” the god king, and the god have all vanished from this political
scheme--so far as these declarations go. Most of the states produced
similar preludes to government. The Declaration of Independence said
that “all men are born equal.” It is everywhere asserted in
eighteenth-century terms that the new community is to be--to use the
phraseology we have introduced in an earlier chapter--a community of
will and not a community of obedience. But the thinkers of that time had
a rather clumsier way of putting the thing, they imagined a sort of
individual choice of and assent to citizenship that never in fact
occurred--the so-called Social Contract. The Massachusetts preamble, for
instance, asserts that the state is a voluntary association, “by which
the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the
whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common
good.”
Now it will be evident that most of these fundamental statements are
very questionable statements. Men are not born equal, they are not born
free; they are born a most various multitude enmeshed in an ancient and
complex social net. Nor is any man invited to sign the social contract
or, failing that, to depart into solitude. These statements, literally
interpreted, are so manifestly false that it is impossible to believe
that the men who made them intended them to be literally interpreted.
They made them in order to express certain elusive but profoundly
important ideas--ideas that after another century and a half of thinking
the world is in a better position to express. Civilization, as this
outline has shown, arose as a community of obedience, and was
essentially a community of obedience. But generation after generation
the spirit was abused by priests and rulers. There was a continual
influx of masterful will from the forests, parklands, and steppes. The
human spirit had at last rebelled altogether against the blind
obediences of the common life; it was seeking--and at first it was
seeking very clumsily--to achieve a new and better sort of civilization
that should also be a community of will. To that end it was necessary
that every man should be treated as the sovereign of himself; his
standing was to be one of fellowship and not of servility. His real use,
his real importance depended upon his individual quality.
The method by which these creators of political America sought to secure
this community of will was an extremely simple and crude one. They gave
what was for the time, and in view of American conditions, a very wide
franchise. Conditions varied in the different states; the widest
franchise was in Pennsylvania, where every adult male taxpayer voted,
but, compared with Britain, all the United States were well within sight
of manhood suffrage by the end of the eighteenth century. These makers
of America also made efforts, considerable for their times, but puny by
more modern standards, to secure a widely diffused common education. The
information of the citizens as to what was going on at home and abroad,
they left, apparently without any qualms of misgiving, to public
meetings and the privately owned printing press.
The story of the various state constitutions, and of the constitution of
the United States as a whole, is a very intricate one, and we can only
deal with it here in the broadest way. The most noteworthy point in a
modern view is the disregard of women as citizens. The American
community was a simple, largely agricultural community, and most women
were married; it seemed natural that they should be represented by
their men folk. But New Jersey admitted a few women to vote on a
property qualification. Another point of great interest is the almost
universal decision to have two governing assemblies, confirming or
checking each other, on the model of the Lords and Commons of Britain.
Only Pennsylvania had a single representative chamber, and that was felt
to be a very dangerous and ultra-democratic state of affairs. Apart from
the argument that legislation should be slow as well as sure, it is
difficult to establish any necessity for this “bi-cameral” arrangement.
It seems to have been a fashion with constitution planners in the
eighteenth century rather than a reasonable imperative. The British
division was an old one; the Lords, the original parliament, was an
assembly of “notables,” the leading men of the kingdom; the House of
Commons came in as a new factor, as the elected spokesmen of the
burghers and the small landed men. It was a little too hastily assumed
in the eighteenth century that the commonalty would be given to wild
impulses and would need checking; opinion was for democracy, but for
democracy with powerful brakes always on, whether it was going up hill
or down. About all the upper houses there was therefore a flavour of
selectness; they were elected on a more limited franchise. This idea of
making an upper chamber which shall be a stronghold for the substantial
man does not appeal to modern thinkers so strongly as it did to the men
of the eighteenth century, but the bi-cameral idea in another form still
has its advocates. They suggest that a community may with advantage
consider its affairs from two points of view--through the eyes of a body
elected to represent trades, industries, professions, public services,
and the like, a body representing _function_, and through the eyes of a
second body elected by localities to represent _communities_. For the
members of the former a man would vote by his calling, for the latter by
his district of residence. They point out that the British House of
Lords is in effect a body representing function, in which the land, the
law, and the church are no doubt disproportionately represented, but in
which industrialism, finance, the great public services, art, science,
and medicine, also find places; and that the British House of Commons is
purely geographical in its reference. It has even been suggested in
Britain that there should be “labour peers,” selected from among the
leaders of the great industrial trade unions. But these are speculations
beyond our present scope.
[Illustration: The UNITED STATES of AMERICA]
The Central Government of the United States was at first a very feeble
body, a congress of representatives of the thirteen governments, held
together by certain Articles of Confederation. This Congress was little
more than a conference of sovereign representatives; it had no control,
for instance, over the foreign trade of each state, it could not coin
money nor levy taxes by its own authority. When John Adams, the first
minister from the United States to England, went to discuss a commercial
treaty with the British foreign secretary, he was met by a request for
thirteen representatives, one from each of the states concerned. He had
to confess his inadequacy to make binding arrangements. The British
presently began dealing with each state separately over the head of
Congress, and they retained possession of a number of posts in the
American territory about the great lakes because of the inability of
Congress to hold these regions effectually. In another urgent matter
Congress proved equally feeble. To the west of the thirteen states
stretched limitless lands into which settlers were now pushing in
ever-increasing numbers. Each of the states had indefinable claims to
expansion westward. It was evident to every clear-sighted man that the
jostling of these claims must lead in the long run to war, unless the
Central Government could take on their apportionment. The feebleness of
the Central Government, its lack of concentration, became so much of an
inconvenience and so manifest a danger that there was some secret
discussion of a monarchy, and Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, the
president of Congress, caused Prince Henry of Prussia, the brother of
Frederick the Great, to be approached on the subject. Finally a
constitutional convention was called in 1787 at Philadelphia, and there
it was that the present constitution of the United States was in its
broad lines hammered out. A great change of spirit had gone on during
the intervening years, a widespread realization of the need of unity.
When the Articles of Confederation were drawn up, men had thought of the
people of Virginia, the people of Massachusetts, the people of Rhode
Island, and the like; but now there appears a new conception, “the
people of the United States.” The new government, with the executive
President, the senators, congressmen, and the Supreme Court, that was
now created, was declared to be the government of “the people of the
United States”; it was a synthesis and not a mere assembly. It said “we
the people,” and not “we the states,” as Lee of Virginia bitterly
complained. It was to be a “federal” and not a confederate government.
State by state the new constitution was ratified, and in the spring of
1788 the first congress upon the new lines assembled at New York, under
the presidency of George Washington, who had been the national
commander-in-chief throughout the War of Independence. The constitution
then underwent considerable revision, and Washington upon the Potomac
was selected as the Federal capital.
§ 6
In an earlier chapter we have described the Roman republic, and its
mixture of modern features with dark superstition and primordial
savagery, as the Neanderthal anticipation of the modern democratic
state. A time may come when people will regard the contrivances and
machinery of the American constitution as the political equivalents of
the implements and contrivances of Neolithic man. They have served their
purpose well, and under their protection the people of the States have
grown into one of the greatest, most powerful, and most civilized
communities that the world has yet seen; but there is no reason in that
for regarding the American constitution as a thing more final and
inalterable than the pattern of street railway that overshadows many New
York thoroughfares, or the excellent and homely type of house
architecture that still prevails in Philadelphia. These things also have
served a purpose well, they have their faults, and they can be improved.
Our political contrivances, just as much as our domestic and mechanical
contrivances, need to undergo constant revision as knowledge and
understanding grow.
Since the American constitution was planned, our conception of history
and our knowledge of collective psychology has undergone very
considerable development. We are beginning to see many things in the
problem of government to which the men of the eighteenth century were
blind; and, courageous as their constructive disposition was in relation
to whatever political creation had gone before, it fell far short of the
boldness which we in these days realize to be needful if this great
human problem of establishing a civilized community of will in the earth
is to be solved. They took many things for granted that now we know need
to be made the subject of the most exacting scientific study and the
most careful adjustment. They thought it was only necessary to set up
schools and colleges, with a grant of land for maintenance, and that
they might then be left to themselves. But education is not a weed that
will grow lustily in any soil, it is a necessary and delicate crop that
may easily wilt and degenerate. We learn nowadays that the
under-development of universities and educational machinery is like some
under-development of the brain and nerves, which hampers the whole
growth of the social body. By European standards, by the standard of any
state that has existed hitherto, the level of the common education of
America is high; but by the standard of what it might be, America is an
uneducated country. And those fathers of America thought also that they
had but to leave the press free, and everyone would live in the light.
They did not realize that a free press could develop a sort of
constitutional venality due to its relations with advertisers, and that
large newspaper proprietors could become buccaneers of opinion and
insensate wreckers of good beginnings. And, finally, the makers of
America had no knowledge of the complexities of vote manipulation. The
whole science of elections was beyond their ken, they knew nothing of
the need of the transferable vote to prevent the “working” of elections
by specialized organizations, and the crude and rigid methods they
adopted left their political system the certain prey of the great party
machines that have robbed American democracy of half its freedom and
most of its political soul. Politics became a trade, and a very base
trade; decent and able men, after the first great period, drifted out of
politics and attended to “business,” and what I have called elsewhere
the “sense of the state”[432] declined. Private enterprise ruled in many
matters of common concern, because political corruption made collective
enterprise impossible.
Yet the defects of the great political system created by the Americans
of the revolutionary period did not appear at once. For several
generations the history of the United States was one of rapid expansion
and of an amount of freedom, homely happiness, and energetic work
unparalleled in the world’s history. And the record of America for the
whole last century and a half, in spite of many reversions towards
inequality, in spite of much rawness and much blundering, is
nevertheless as bright and honourable a story as that of any other
contemporary people.
[Illustration: Benjamin Franklin]
In this brief account of the creation of the United States of America we
have been able to do little more than mention the names of some of the
group of great men who made this new departure in human history. We have
named casually or we have not even named such men as Tom Paine, Benjamin
Franklin, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, the Adams brothers, Madison,
Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. It is hard to measure the men
of one period of history with those in another. Some writers, even
American writers, impressed by the artificial splendours of the European
courts and by the tawdry and destructive exploits of a Frederick the
Great or a Great Catherine, display a snobbish shame of something
homespun about these makers of America. They feel that Benjamin Franklin
at the court of Louis XVI, with his long hair, his plain clothes, and
his pawky manner, was sadly lacking in aristocratic distinction. But
stripped to their personalities, Louis XVI was hardly gifted enough or
noble-minded enough to be Franklin’s valet. If human greatness is a
matter of scale and glitter, then no doubt Alexander the Great is at the
apex of human greatness. But is greatness that? Is not a great man
rather one who, in a great position or amidst great opportunities--and
great gifts are no more than great opportunities--serves God and his
fellows with a humble heart? And quite a number of these Americans of
the revolutionary time do seem to have displayed much disinterestedness
and devotion. They were limited men, fallible men; Washington was, for
example, a conspicuously indolent man; but on the whole they seem to
have cared more for the commonweal they were creating than for any
personal end or personal vanity.
[Illustration: Washington]
They were all limited men. They were limited in knowledge and outlook;
they were limited by the limitations of the time. And there was no
perfect man among them. They were, like all of us, men of mixed motives;
good impulses arose in their minds, great ideas swept through them, and
also they could be jealous, lazy, obstinate, greedy, vicious. If one
were to write a true, full, and particular history of the making of the
United States, it would have to be written with charity and high spirits
as a splendid comedy. And in no other regard do we find the rich
tortuous humanity of the American story so finely displayed as in regard
to slavery. Slavery, having regard to the general question of labour, is
the test of this new soul in the world’s history, the American soul.
Slavery began very early in the European history of America, and no
European people who went to America can be held altogether innocent in
the matter. At a time when the German is still the moral whipping-boy of
Europe, it is well to note that the German record is in this respect the
best of all. Almost the first outspoken utterances against negro slavery
came from German settlers in Pennsylvania. But the German settler was
working with free labour upon a temperate countryside, well north of the
plantation zone; he was not under serious temptation in this matter.
American slavery began with the enslavement of Indians for gang work in
mines and upon plantations, and it is curious to note that it was a very
good and humane man indeed, Las Casas, who urged that negroes should be
brought to America to relieve his tormented Indian protégés. The need
for labour upon the plantations of the West Indies and the south was
imperative. When the supply of Indian captives proved inadequate, the
planters turned not only to the negro, but to the jails and poor-houses
of Europe for a supply of toilers. The reader of Defoe’s _Moll Flanders_
will learn how the business of Virginian white slavery looked to an
intelligent Englishman in the early eighteenth century. But the negro
came very early. The year (1620) that saw the Pilgrim Fathers landing at
Plymouth in New England saw a Dutch sloop disembarking the first cargo
of negroes at Jamestown in Virginia. Negro slavery was as old as New
England; it had been an American institution for over a century and a
half before the War of Independence. It was to struggle on for the
better part of a century more.
But the conscience of thoughtful men in the colonies was never quite
easy upon this score, and it was one of the accusations of Thomas
Jefferson against the crown and lords of Great Britain that every
attempt to ameliorate or restrain the slave trade on the part of the
colonists had been checked by the great proprietary interests in the
mother country.[433] With the moral and intellectual ferment of the
revolution, the question of negro slavery came right into the foreground
of the public conscience. The contrast and the challenge glared upon the
mind. “All men are by nature free and equal,” said the Virginia Bill of
Rights, and outside in the sunshine, under the whip of the overseer,
toiled the negro slave.
It witnesses to the great change in human ideas since the Roman Imperial
system dissolved under the barbarian inrush, that there could be this
heart-searching. Conditions of industry, production, and land tenure had
long prevented any recrudescence of gang slavery; but now the cycle had
come round again, and there were enormous immediate advantages to be
reaped by the owning and ruling classes in the revival of that ancient
institution in mines, upon plantations, and upon great public works. It
was revived--but against great opposition. From the beginning of the
revival there were protests, and they grew. The revival was counter to
the new conscience of mankind. In some respects the new gang slavery was
worse than anything in the ancient world. Peculiarly horrible was the
provocation by the trade of slave wars and man hunts in Western Africa,
and the cruelties of the long transatlantic voyage. The poor creatures
were packed on the ships often with insufficient provision of food and
water, without proper sanitation, without medicines. Many who could
tolerate slavery upon the plantations found the slave trade too much for
their moral digestions. Three European nations were chiefly concerned in
this dark business, Britain, Spain, and Portugal, because they were the
chief owners of the new lands in America. The comparative innocence of
the other European powers is to be ascribed largely to their lesser
temptations. They were similar communities; in parallel circumstances
they would have behaved similarly.
Throughout the middle part of the eighteenth century there was an active
agitation against negro slavery in Great Britain as well as in the
States. It was estimated that in 1770 there were fifteen thousand slaves
in Britain, mostly brought over by their owners from the West Indies and
Virginia. In 1771 the issue came to a conclusive test in Britain before
Lord Mansfield. A negro named James Somersett had been brought to
England from Virginia by his owner. He ran away, was captured, and
violently taken on a ship to be returned to Virginia. From the ship he
was extracted by a writ of _habeas corpus_. Lord Mansfield declared that
slavery was a condition unknown to English law, an “odious” condition,
and Somersett walked out of the court a free man.
The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 had declared that “all men are
born free and equal.” A certain negro, Quaco, put this to the test in
1783, and in that year the soil of Massachusetts became like the soil of
Britain, intolerant of slavery; to tread upon it was to become free. At
that time no other state in the Union followed this example. At the
census of 1790, Massachusetts, alone of all the states, returned “no
slaves.”
The state of opinion in Virginia is remarkable, because it brings to
light the peculiar difficulties of the southern states. The great
Virginian statesmen, such as Washington and Jefferson, condemned the
institution, yet because there was no other form of domestic service,
Washington owned slaves. There was in Virginia a strong party in favour
of emancipating slaves. But they demanded that the emancipated slaves
should leave the state within a year or be outlawed! They were naturally
alarmed at the possibility that a free barbaric black community, many of
its members African-born and reeking with traditions of cannibalism and
secret and dreadful religious rites, should arise beside them upon
Virginian soil. When we consider that point of view, we can understand
why it was that a large number of Virginians should be disposed to
retain the mass of blacks in the country under control as slaves, while
at the same time they were bitterly opposed to the slave trade and the
importation of any fresh blood from Africa. The free blacks, one sees,
might easily become a nuisance; indeed the free state of Massachusetts
presently closed its borders to their entry.... The question of slavery,
which in the ancient world was usually no more than a question of status
between individuals racially akin, merged in America with the different
and profounder question of relationship between two races at opposite
extremes of the human species and of the most contrasted types of
tradition and culture. If the black man had been white, there can be
little doubt that negro slavery, like white servitude, would have
vanished from the United States within a generation of the Declaration
of Independence as a natural consequence of the statements in that
declaration.
§ 7[434]
We have told of the War of Independence in America as the first great
break away from the system of European monarchies and foreign offices,
as the repudiation by a new community of Machiavellian statescraft as
the directive form of human affairs. Within a decade there came a second
and much more portentous revolt against this strange game of Great
Powers, this tangled interaction of courts and policies which obsessed
Europe. But this time it was no breaking away at the outskirts. In
France, the nest and home of Grand Monarchy, the heart and centre of
Europe, came this second upheaval. And, unlike the American colonists,
who simply repudiated a king, the French, following in the footsteps of
the English revolution, beheaded one.
Like the British revolution and like the revolution in the United
States, the French revolution can be traced back to the ambitious
absurdities of the French monarchy. The schemes of aggrandizement, the
aims and designs of the Grand Monarch, necessitated an expenditure upon
war equipment throughout Europe out of all proportion to the taxable
capacity of the age. And even the splendours of monarchy were enormously
costly, measured by the productivity of the time. In France, just as in
Britain and in America, the first resistance was made not to the monarch
as such and to his foreign policy as such, nor with any clear
recognition of these things as the roots of the trouble, but merely to
the inconveniences and charges upon the individual life caused by them.
The practical taxable capacity of France must have been relatively much
less than that of England because of the various exemptions of the
nobility and clergy. The burthen resting directly upon the common people
was heavier. That made the upper classes the confederates of the court
instead of the antagonists of the court as they were in England, and so
prolonged the period of waste further; but when at last the
bursting-point did come, the explosion was more violent and shattering.
During the years of the American War of Independence there were few
signs of any impending explosion in France.[435] There was much misery
among the lower classes, much criticism and satire, much outspoken
liberal thinking, but there was little to indicate that the thing as a
whole, with all its customs, usages, and familiar discords, might not go
on for an indefinite time. It was consuming beyond its powers of
production, but as yet only the inarticulate classes were feeling the
pinch. Gibbon, the historian, knew France well; Paris was as familiar to
him as London; but there is no suspicion to be detected in the passage
we have quoted that days of political and social dissolution were at
hand. No doubt the world abounded in absurdities and injustices, yet
nevertheless, from the point of view of a scholar and a gentleman, it
was fairly comfortable, and it seemed fairly secure.
There was much liberal thought, speech, and sentiment in France at this
time. Parallel with and a little later than John Locke in England,
Montesquieu (1689-1755) in France, in the earlier half of the eighteenth
century, had subjected social, political, and religious institutions to
the same searching and fundamental analysis, especially in his _Esprit
des Lois_. He had stripped the magical prestige from the absolutist
monarchy in France. He shares with Locke the credit for clearing away
many of the false ideas that had hitherto prevented deliberate and
conscious attempts to reconstruct human society. It was not his fault if
at first some extremely unsound and impermanent shanties were run up on
the vacant site. The generation that followed him in the middle and
later decades of the eighteenth century was boldly speculative upon the
moral and intellectual clearings he had made. A group of brilliant
writers, the “Encyclopædists,” mostly rebel spirits from the excellent
schools of the Jesuits, set themselves under the leadership of Diderot
to scheme out, in a group of works, a new world (1766). The glory of the
Encyclopædists, says Mallet, lay “in their hatred of things unjust, in
their denunciation of the trade in slaves, of the inequalities of
taxation, of the corruption of justice, of the wastefulness of wars, in
their dreams of social progress, in their sympathy with the rising
empire of industry which was beginning to transform the world.” Their
chief error seems to have been an indiscriminate hostility to religion.
They believed that man was naturally just and politically competent,
whereas his impulse to social service and self-forgetfulness is usually
developed only through an education essentially religious, and sustained
only in an atmosphere of honest co-operation. Unco-ordinated human
initiatives lead to nothing but social chaos.
Side by side with the Encyclopædists were the Economists or Physiocrats,
who were making bold and crude inquiries into the production and
distribution of food and goods. Morally, the author of the _Code de la
Nature_, denounced the institution of private property and proposed a
communistic organization of society. He was the precursor of that large
and various school of collectivist thinkers in the nineteenth century
who are lumped together as Socialists.
Both the Encyclopædists and the various Economists and Physiocrats
demanded a considerable amount of hard thinking in their disciples. An
easier and more popular leader to follow was that eloquent
sentimentalist, Rousseau (1712-78). He preached the alluring doctrine
that the primitive state of man was one of virtue and happiness, from
which he had declined through the rather inexplicable activities of
priests, kings, lawyers, and the like. (We have tried to convey to our
readers in chap, ix, § 2, primitive man’s state of virtue and happiness,
as the vivid vision of Mr. Worthington Smith has realized it; and we
have done our best to show both the necessity of priests and kings to
early civilization, and the possible inconveniences of their later rô1es
in human affairs.) Rousseau’s work was essentially demoralizing. It
struck not only at the existing social fabric, but at any social
organization. When he wrote of the _Social Contract_, he did so rather
to excuse breaches of the covenant than to emphasize its necessity. Man
is so far from perfect, that a writer who could show that the almost
universal disposition, against which we all have to fortify ourselves,
to repudiate debts, misbehave sexually, and evade the toil and expenses
of education for ourselves and others, is not after all a delinquency,
but a fine display of Natural Virtue, was bound to have a large
following in every class that could read him. Rousseau’s tremendous
vogue did much to swamp the harder, clearer thinkers of this time, and
to prepare a sentimental, declamatory, and insincere popular psychology
for the great trials that were now coming upon France.[436]
We have already remarked that hitherto no human community has begun to
act upon theory. There must first be some breakdown and necessity for
direction that lets theory into her own. Up to 1788 the republican and
anarchist talk and writing of French thinkers must have seemed as
ineffective and politically unimportant as the æsthetic socialism of
William Morris at the end of the nineteenth century. There was the
social and political system going on with an effect of an invincible
persistence, the king hunting and mending his clocks, the court and the
world of fashion pursuing their pleasures, the financiers conceiving
continually more enterprising extensions of credit, business blundering
clumsily along its ancient routes, much incommoded by taxes and imposts,
the peasants worrying, toiling, and suffering, full of a hopeless hatred
of the nobleman’s château. Men talked--and felt they were merely
talking. Anything might be said, because nothing would ever happen.
§ 8
The first jar to this sense of the secure continuity of life in France
came in 1787. Louis XVI (1774-92) was a dull, ill-educated monarch, and
he had the misfortune to be married to a silly and extravagant woman,
Marie Antoinette, the sister of the Austrian emperor. The question of
her virtue is one of profound interest to a certain type of historical
writer, but we need not discuss it here. She lived, as Paul Wiriath[437]
puts it, “side by side, but not at the side” of her husband. She was
rather heavy-featured, but not so plain as to prevent her posing as a
beautiful, romantic, and haughty queen. When the exchequer was exhausted
by the war in America (an enterprise to weaken England of the highest
Machiavellian quality), when the whole country was uneasy with
discontents, she set her influence to thwart the attempts at economy of
the king’s ministers, to encourage every sort of aristocratic
extravagance, and to restore the church and the nobility to the position
they had held in the great days of Louis XIV. Non-aristocratic officers
were to be weeded from the army; the power of the church over private
life was to be extended. She found in an upper-class official, Calonne,
her ideal minister of finance. From 1783-87 this wonderful man produced
money as if by magic--and as if by magic it disappeared again. Then in
1787 he collapsed. He had piled loan on loan, and now he declared that
the monarchy, the Grand Monarchy that had ruled France since the days of
Louis XIV, was bankrupt. No more money could be raised. There must be a
gathering of the Notables of the kingdom to consider the situation.
To the gathering of notables, a summoned assembly of leading men,
Calonne propounded a scheme for a subsidy to be levied upon all landed
property. This roused the aristocrats to a pitch of great indignation.
They demanded the summoning of a body roughly equivalent to the British
parliament, the States General, which had not met since 1610. Regardless
of the organ of opinion they were creating for the discontents below
them, excited only by the proposal that they should bear part of the
weight of the financial burthens of the country, the French notables
insisted. And in May, 1789, the States General met.
It was an assembly of the representatives of three orders, the nobles,
the clergy, and the Third Estate, the commons. For the Third Estate the
franchise was very wide, nearly every tax-payer of twenty-five having a
vote. (The parish priests voted as clergy, the small noblesse as
nobles.) The States General was a body without any tradition of
procedure. Enquiries were sent to the antiquarians of the Academy of
Inscriptions in that matter. Its opening deliberations turned on the
question whether it was to meet as one body or as three, each estate
having an equal vote. Since the Clergy numbered 308, the Nobles 285, and
the Deputies 621, the former arrangement would put the Commons in an
absolute majority, the latter gave them one vote in three. Nor had the
States General any meeting-place. Should it meet in Paris or in some
provincial city? Versailles was chosen, “because of the hunting.”
It is clear that the king and queen meant to treat this fuss about the
national finance as a terrible bore, and to allow it to interfere with
their social routine as little as possible. We find the meetings going
on in salons that were not wanted, in orangeries and tennis-courts, and
so forth.
The question whether the voting was to be by the estates or by head was
clearly a vital one. It was wrangled over for six weeks. The Third
Estate, taking a leaf from the book of the English House of Commons,
then declared that it alone represented the nation, and that no taxation
must be levied henceforth without its consent. Whereupon the king closed
the hall in which it was sitting, and intimated that the deputies had
better go home. Instead, the deputies met in a convenient tennis-court,
and there took oath, the Oath of the Tennis Court, not to separate until
they had established a constitution in France.
The king took a high line, and attempted to disperse the Third Estate by
force. The soldiers refused to act. On that the king gave in with a
dangerous suddenness, and accepted the principle that the Three Estates
should all deliberate and vote together as one National Assembly.
Meanwhile, apparently at the queen’s instigation, foreign regiments in
the French service, who could be trusted to act against the people, were
brought up from the provinces under the Marshal de Broglie, and the king
prepared to go back upon his concessions. Whereupon Paris and France
revolted. Broglie hesitated to fire on the crowds. A provisional city
government was set up in Paris and in most of the other large cities,
and a new armed force, the National Guard, a force designed primarily
and plainly to resist the forces of the crown, was brought into
existence by these municipal bodies.
The revolt of July, 1789 was really the effective French revolution. The
grim-looking prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of Paris,
and the insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. Everywhere
châteaux belonging to the nobility were burnt by the peasants, their
title-deeds carefully destroyed, and the nobles murdered or driven away.
In a month the ancient and decayed system of the aristocratic order had
collapsed. Many of the leading princes and courtiers of the queen’s
party fled abroad. The National Assembly found itself called upon to
create a new political and social system for a new age.[438]
§ 9
The French National Assembly was far less fortunate in the circumstances
of its task than the American Congress. The latter had half a continent
to itself, with no possible antagonist but the British Government. Its
religious and educational organizations were various, collectively not
very powerful, and on the whole friendly. King George was far away in
England, and sinking slowly towards an imbecile condition. Nevertheless,
it took the United States several years to hammer out a working
constitution. The French, on the other hand, were surrounded by
aggressive neighbors with Machiavellian ideas, they were encumbered by a
king and court resolved to make mischief, and the church was one single
great organization inextricably bound up with the ancient order. The
queen was in close correspondence with the Count of Artois, the Duke of
Bourbon, and the other exiled princes who were trying to induce Austria
and Prussia to attack the new French nation. Moreover, France was
already a bankrupt country, while the United States had limitless
undeveloped resources; and the revolution, by altering the conditions of
land tenure and marketing, had produced an economic disorganization that
has no parallel in the case of America.
These were the unavoidable difficulties of the situation. But in
addition the Assembly made difficulties for itself. There was no orderly
procedure. The English House of Commons had had more than five centuries
of experience in its work, and Mirabeau, one of the great leaders of the
early Revolution, tried in vain to have the English rules adopted. But
the feeling of the times was all in favour of outcries, dramatic
interruptions, and such-like manifestations of Natural Virtue. And the
disorder did not come merely from the assembly. There was a great
gallery, much too great a gallery, for strangers; but who would restrain
the free citizens from having a voice in the national control? This
gallery swarmed with people eager for a “scene,” ready to applaud or
shout down the speakers below. The abler speakers were obliged to play
to the gallery, and take a sentimental and sensational line. It was easy
at a crisis to bring in a mob to kill debate.
So encumbered, the Assembly set about its constructive task. On the
Fourth of August it achieved a great dramatic success. Led by several of
the nobles, it made a clean sweep, in a series of resolutions, of
serfdom, privileges, tax exemptions, tithes, feudal courts. Titles
followed. Long before France was a republic it was an offence for a
nobleman to sign his name with his title. For six weeks the Assembly
devoted itself, with endless opportunities for rhetoric, to the
formulation of a Declaration of the Rights of Man--on the lines of the
Bills of Rights that were the English preliminaries to organized change.
Meanwhile the court plotted for reaction, and the people felt that the
court was plotting. The story is complicated here by the scoundrelly
schemes of the king’s cousin, Philip of Orleans, who hoped to use the
discords of the time to replace Louis on the French throne. His gardens
at the Palais Royal were thrown open to the public, and became a great
centre of advanced discussion. His agents did much to intensify the
popular suspicion of the king. And things were exacerbated by a shortage
of provisions--for which the king’s government was held guilty.
Presently the loyal Flanders regiment appeared at Versailles. The royal
family was scheming to get farther away from Paris--in order to undo all
that had been done, to restore tyranny and extravagance. Such
constitutional monarchists as General Lafayette were seriously alarmed.
And just at this time occurred an outbreak of popular indignation at the
scarcity of food, that passed by an easy transition into indignation
against the threat of royalist reaction. It was believed that there was
an abundance of provisions at Versailles; that food was being kept there
away from the people. The public mind had been much disturbed by
reports, possibly by exaggerated reports, of a recent banquet at
Versailles, hostile to the nation. Here are some extracts from Carlyle
descriptive of that unfortunate feast.
“The Hall of the Opera is granted; the Salon d’Hercule shall be
drawing-room. Not only the Officers of Flandre, but of the Swiss, of the
Hundred Swiss; nay of the Versailles National Guard, such of them as
have any loyalty, shall feast; it will be a Repast like few.
“And now suppose this Repast, the solid part of it, transacted; and the
first bottle over. Suppose the customary loyal toasts drunk; the King’s
health, the Queen’s with deafening vivats; that of the nation ‘omitted,’
or even ‘rejected.’ Suppose champagne flowing; with pot-valorous speech,
with instrumental music; empty featherheads growing ever the noisier, in
their own emptiness, in each other’s noise. Her Majesty, who looks
unusually sad to-night (His Majesty sitting dulled with the day’s
hunting), is told that the sight of it would cheer her. Behold! She
enters there, issuing from her State-rooms, like the Moon from clouds,
this fairest unhappy Queen of Hearts; royal Husband by her side, young
Dauphin in her arms! She descends from the Boxes, amid splendour and
acclaim; walks queen-like round the Tables; gracefully nodding; her
looks full of sorrow, yet of gratitude and daring, with the hope of
France on her mother-bosom! And now, the band striking up, _O Richard, O
mon Roi, l’univers t’abandonne_ (Oh Richard, O my king, the world is all
forsaking thee), could man do other than rise to height of pity, of
loyal valour? Could feather-headed young ensigns do other than, by white
Bourbon Cockades, handed them from fair fingers; by waving of swords,
drawn to pledge the Queen’s health; by trampling of National Cockades;
by scaling the Boxes, whence intrusive murmurs may come; by
vociferation, sound, fury and distraction, within doors and
without--testify what tempest-tost state of vacuity they are in?...
“A natural Repast; in ordinary times, a harmless one: now fatal.... Poor
ill-advised Marie Antoinette; with a woman’s vehemence, not with a
sovereign’s foresight! It was so natural, yet so unwise. Next day, in
public speech of ceremony, her Majesty declares herself ‘delighted with
Thursday.’”
And here to set against this is Carlyle’s picture of the mood of the
people.
“In squalid garret, on Monday morning Maternity awakes, to hear children
weeping for bread. Maternity must forth to the streets, to the
herb-makers and bakers’-queues; meets there with hunger-stricken
Maternity, sympathetic, exasperative. O we unhappy women! But, instead
of bakers’-queues, why not to Aristocrats’ palaces, the root of the
matter? _Allons!_ Let us assemble. To the Hôtel-de-Ville; to
Versailles....”
There was much shouting and coming and going in Paris before this latter
idea realized itself. One Maillard appeared with organizing power, and
assumed a certain leadership. There can be little doubt that the
revolutionary leaders, and particularly General Lafayette, used and
organized this outbreak to secure the king, before he could slip
away--as Charles I did to Oxford--to begin a civil war. As the afternoon
wore on, the procession started on its eleven mile tramp....
Again we quote Carlyle:
“Maillard has halted his draggled Menads on the last hill-top; and now
Versailles, and the Château of Versailles, and far and wide the
inheritance of Royalty opens to the wondering eye. From far on the
right, over Marly and Saint-Germain-en-Laye; round towards Rambouillet,
on the left, beautiful all; softly embosomed; as if in sadness, in the
dim moist weather! And near before us is Versailles, New and Old; with
that broad frondent _Avenue de Versailles_ between--stately frondent,
broad, three hundred feet as men reckon, with its four rows of elms; and
then the Château de Versailles, ending in royal parks and pleasances,
gleaming lakelets, arbours, labyrinths, the _Ménagerie_, and Great and
Little Trianon. High-towered dwellings, leafy pleasant places; where the
gods of this lower world abide: whence, nevertheless, black care cannot
be excluded; whither Menadic hunger is even now advancing, armed with
pike-thyrsi!”
Rain fell as the evening closed.
“Behold the Esplanade, over all its spacious expanse, is covered with
groups of squalid dripping women; of lank-haired male rascality, armed
with axes, rusty pikes, old muskets, iron-shod clubs (_batons ferrés_,
which end in knives or swordblades, a kind of extempore billhook);
looking nothing but hungry revolt. The rain pours; Gardes-du-Corps go
caracoling through the groups ‘amid hisses’; irritating and agitating
what is but dispersed here to reunite there....
“Innumerable squalid women beleaguer the President and Deputation;
insist on going with him: has not his Majesty himself, looking from the
window, sent out to ask, What we wanted? ‘Bread, and speech with the
King,’ that was the answer. Twelve women are clamorously added to the
deputation; and march with it, across the Esplanade; through dissipated
groups, caracoling bodyguards and the pouring rain.”
“Bread and not too much talking!” Natural demands.
“One learns also that the royal Carriages are getting yoked, as if for
Metz. Carriages, royal or not, have verily showed themselves at the
back gates. They even produced, or quoted, a written order from our
Versailles Municipality--which is a monarchic not a democratic one.
However, Versailles patrols drove them in again; as the vigilant
Lecointre had strictly charged them to do....
“So sink the shadows of night, blustering, rainy; and all paths grow
dark. Strangest night ever seen in these regions; perhaps since the
Bartholomew Night, when Versailles, as Bassompierre writes of it, was a
_chetif château_.
“O for the lyre of some Orpheus, to constrain, with touch of melodious
strings, these mad masses into Order! For here all seems fallen asunder,
in wide-yawning dislocation. The highest, as in down-rushing of a world,
is come in contact with the lowest: the rascality of France beleaguering
the royalty of France; ‘iron-shod batons’ lifted round the diadem, not
to guard it! With denunciations of bloodthirsty anti-national
bodyguards, are heard dark growlings against a queenly name.
“The Court sits tremulous, powerless: varies with the varying temper of
the Esplanade, with the varying colour of the rumours from Paris.
Thick-coming rumours; now of peace, now of war. Necker and all the
Ministers consult; with a blank issue. The Œil-de-Bœuf is one
tempest of whispers: We will fly to Metz; we will not fly. The royal
carriages again attempt egress--though for trial merely; they are again
driven in by Lecointres patrols.”
But we must send the reader to Carlyle to learn of the coming of the
National Guard in the night under General Lafayette himself, the
bargaining between the Assembly and the King, the outbreak of fighting
in the morning between the bodyguard and the hungry besiegers, and how
the latter stormed into the palace and came near to a massacre of the
royal family. Lafayette and his troops turned out in time to prevent
that, and timely cart-loads of loaves arrived from Paris for the crowd.
At last it was decided that the king should come to Paris.
“Processional marches not a few our world has seen; Roman triumphs and
ovations, Cabiric cymbal-beatings, Royal progresses, Irish funerals; but
this of the French Monarchy marching to its bed remained to be seen.
Miles long, and of breadth losing itself in vagueness, for all the
neighbouring country crowds to see. Slow: stagnating along, like
shoreless Lake, yet with a noise like Niagara, like Babel and Bedlam. A
splashing and a tramping; a hurrahing, uproaring, musket-volleying; the
truest segment of Chaos seen in these latter Ages! Till slowly it
disembogue itself in the thickening dusk, into expectant Paris, through
a double row of faces all the way from Passy to the Hôtel-de-Ville.
“Consider this: Vanguard of National troops; with trains of artillery;
of pikemen and pikewomen, mounted on cannons, on carts, hackney-coaches,
or on foot.... Loaves stuck on the points of bayonets, green boughs
stuck in gun-barrels. Next, as main-march, ‘fifty cart-loads of corn,’
which have been lent, for peace, from the stores of Versailles. Behind
which follow stragglers of the Garde-du-Corps; all humiliated, in
Grenadier bonnets. Close on these comes the royal carriage; come royal
carriages; for there are a hundred national deputies too, among whom
sits Mirabeau--his remarks not given. Then finally, pell-mell, as
rear-guard, Flandre, Swiss, Hundred Swiss, other bodyguards, brigands,
whosoever cannot get before. Between and among all which masses flows
without limit Saint-Antoine and the Menadic cohort. Menadic especially
about the royal carriage.... Covered with tricolor; singing ‘allusive
songs’; pointing with one hand to the royal carriage, which the
allusions hit, and pointing to the provision-wagons with the other hand,
and these words: ‘Courage, Friends! We shall not want bread now; we are
bringing you the Baker, the Bakeress, and Baker’s boy.’ ...
“The wet day draggles the tricolor, but the joy is unextinguishable. Is
not all well now? ‘_Ah Madame, notre bonne Reine_,’ said some of these
Strong-women some days hence, ‘Ah, Madame, our good Queen, don’t be a
traitor any more and we will all love you!’ ...”
This was October the sixth, 1789. For nearly two years the royal family
dwelt unmolested in the Tuileries. Had the court kept common faith with
the people, the king might have died there, a king.
From 1789 to 1791 the early Revolution held its own; France was a
limited monarchy, the king kept a diminished state in the Tuileries, and
the National Assembly ruled a country at peace. The reader who will
glance back to the maps of Poland we have given in the previous chapter
will realize what occupied Russia, Prussia, and Austria at this time.
While France experimented with a crowned republic in the west, the last
division of the crowned republic of the east was in progress. France
could wait.
When we consider its inexperience, the conditions under which it worked,
and the complexities of its problems, one must concede that the Assembly
did a very remarkable amount of constructive work. Much of that work was
sound and still endures, much was experimental and has been undone. Some
was disastrous. There was a clearing up of the penal code; torture,
arbitrary imprisonment, and persecutions for heresy were abolished; and
the ancient provinces of France, Normandy, Burgundy, and the like gave
place to eighty departments. Promotion to the highest ranks in the army
was laid open to men of every class. An excellent and simple system of
law courts was set up, but its value was much vitiated by having the
judges appointed by popular election for short periods of time. This
made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the judges, like the
members of the Assembly, were forced to play to the gallery. And the
whole vast property of the church was seized and administered by the
state; religious establishments not engaged in education or works of
charity were broken up, and the salaries of the clergy made a charge
upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad thing for the lower clergy
in France, who were often scandalously underpaid in comparison with the
richer dignitaries. But in addition the choice of priests and bishops
was made elective, which struck at the very root idea of the Roman
church, which centred everything upon the Pope, and in which all
authority is from above downward. Practically the National Assembly
wanted at one blow to make the church in France Protestant, in
organization if not in doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and
conflicts between the state priests of the republic and the recalcitrant
(non-juring) priests who were loyal to Rome....
One curious thing the National Assembly did which greatly weakened its
grip on affairs. It decreed that no member of the Assembly should be an
executive minister. This was in imitation of the American constitution,
where also ministers are separated from the legislature. The British
method has been to have all ministers in the legislative body, ready to
answer questions and account for their interpretation of the laws and
their conduct of the nation’s business. If the legislature represents
the sovereign people, then it is surely necessary for the ministers to
be in the closest touch with their sovereign. This severance of the
legislature and executive in France caused misunderstandings and
mistrust; the legislature lacked control and the executive lacked moral
force. This led to such an ineffectiveness in the central government
that in many districts at this time, communes and towns were to be found
that were practically self-governing communities; they accepted or
rejected the commands of Paris as they thought fit, declined the payment
of taxes, and divided up the church lands according to their local
appetites.
§ 10
It is quite possible that with the loyal support of the crown and a
reasonable patriotism on the part of the nobility, the National
Assembly, in spite of its noisy galleries, its Rousseauism, and its
inexperience, might have blundered through to a stable form of
parliamentary government for France. In Mirabeau it had a statesman with
clear ideas of the needs of the time; he knew the strength and the
defects of the British system, and apparently he had set himself to
establish in France a parallel political organization upon a wider, more
honest franchise. He had, it is true, indulged in a sort of Ruritanian
flirtation with the queen, seen her secretly, pronounced her very
solemnly the “only _man_” about the king, and made rather a fool of
himself in that matter, but his schemes were drawn upon a much larger
scale than the scale of the back stairs of the Tuileries. By his death
in 1791 France certainly lost one of her most constructive statesmen,
and the National Assembly its last chance of any co-operation with the
king. When there is a court there is usually a conspiracy, and royalist
schemes and royalist mischief-making were the last straw in the balance
against the National Assembly. The royalists did not care for Mirabeau,
they did not care for France; they wanted to be back in their lost
paradise of privilege, haughtiness, and limitless expenditure, and it
seemed to them that if only they could make the government of the
National Assembly impossible, then by a sort of miracle the dry bones of
the ancient régime would live again. They had no sense of the other
possibility, the gulf of the republican extremists, that yawned at their
feet.
[Illustration: Map to illustrate the FLIGHT to VARENNES]
One June night in 1791, between eleven o’clock and midnight, the king
and queen and their two children slipped out of the Tuileries disguised,
threaded their palpitating way through Paris, circled round from the
north of the city to the east, and got at last into a
travelling-carriage that was waiting upon the road to Chalons. They were
flying to the army of the east.[439] The army of the east was “loyal,”
that is to say, its general and officers at least were prepared to
betray France to the king and court. Here was adventure at last after
the queen’s heart, and one can understand the pleasurable excitement of
the little party as the miles lengthened between themselves and Paris.
Away over the hills were reverence, deep bows, and the kissing of hands.
Then back to Versailles. A little shooting of the mob in
Paris--artillery, if need be. A few executions--but not of the sort of
people who matter. A White Terror for a few months. Then all would be
well again. Perhaps Calonne might return too, with fresh financial
expedients. He was busy just then gathering support among the German
princes. There were a lot of chateaux to rebuild, but the people who
burnt them down could hardly complain if the task of rebuilding them
pressed rather heavily upon their grimy necks....
All such bright anticipations were cruelly dashed that night at
Varennes. The king had been recognized at Sainte Menehould by the
landlord of the post house, and as the night fell, the eastward roads
clattered with galloping messengers rousing the country, and trying to
intercept the fugitives. There were fresh horses waiting in the upper
village of Varennes--the young officer in charge had given the king up
for the night and gone to bed--while for half an hour in the lower
village the poor king, disguised as a valet, disputed with his
postillions, who had expected reliefs in the lower village and refused
to go further. Finally they consented to go on. They consented too late.
The little party found the postmaster from Sainte Menehould, who had
ridden past while the postillions wrangled, and a number of worthy
republicans of Varennes whom he had gathered together, awaiting them at
the bridge between the two parts of the town. The bridge was barricaded.
Muskets were thrust into the carriage: “Your passports?”
The king surrendered without a struggle. The little party was taken into
the house of some village functionary. “Well,” said the king, “here you
have me!” Also he remarked that he was hungry. At dinner he commended
the wine, “quite excellent wine.” What the queen said is not recorded.
There were royalist troops at hand, but they attempted no rescue. The
tocsin began to ring, and the village “illuminated itself,” to guard
against surprise....
A very crestfallen coachload of royalty returned to Paris and was
received by vast crowds--_in silence_. The word had gone forth that
whoever insulted the king should be thrashed, and whoever applauded him
should be killed....
It was only after this foolish exploit that the idea of a republic took
hold of the French mind. Before this flight to Varennes there was no
doubt much abstract republican sentiment, but there was scarcely any
expressed disposition to abolish monarchy in France. Even in July, a
month after the flight, a great meeting in the Champ de Mars, supporting
a petition for the dethronement of the king, was dispersed by the
authorities, and many people were killed. But such displays of firmness
could not prevent the lesson of that flight soaking into men’s minds.
Just as in England in the days of Charles I, so now in France men
realized that the king could not be trusted--he was dangerous. The
Jacobins, the extreme republican party, grew rapidly in strength. Their
leaders, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, who had hitherto been a group of
impossibles on the extreme left, began to dominate the National
Assembly.
These Jacobins were the equivalents of the American radicals, men with
untrammelled advanced ideas. Their strength lay in the fact that they
were unencumbered and downright. They were poor men with nothing to
lose. The party of moderation, of compromise with the relics of the old
order, was led by such men of established position as General Lafayette,
the general who had commanded the French troops in America, and
Mirabeau, an aristocrat who was ready to model himself on the rich and
influential aristocrats of England. But Robespierre was a needy but
clever young lawyer from Arras, whose most precious possession was his
faith in Rousseau; Danton was a scarcely more wealthy barrister in
Paris, one of those big roaring gesticulating Frenchmen who are in
normal times the heroic loud-talkers of provincial cafés; Marat was an
older man, a Swiss of very great scientific distinction, but equally
unembarrassed by possessions. On Marat’s scientific standing it is
necessary to lay stress because there is a sort of fashion among English
writers to misrepresent the leaders of great revolutionary movements as
ignorant men. This gives a false view of the mental processes of
revolution; and it is the task of the historian to correct it. Marat, we
find, was conversant with English, Spanish, German, and Italian; he had
spent several years in England, he was made an honorary M.D. of St.
Andrew’s, and had published some valuable contributions to medical
science in English. Both Benjamin Franklin and Goethe were greatly
interested in his work in physics. This is the man who is called by
Carlyle “rabid dog,” “atrocious,” “squalid,” and “Dog-leech”--this last
by way of tribute to his science.
The revolution called Marat to politics, and his earliest contributions
to the great discussion were fine and sane. There was a prevalent
delusion in France that England was a land of liberty. His _Tableau des
vices de la constitution d’Angleterre_ showed the realities of the
English position. His last years were maddened by an almost intolerable
skin disease which he caught while hiding in the sewers of Paris to
escape the consequences of his denunciation of the king as a traitor
after the flight to Varennes. Only by sitting in a hot bath could he
collect his mind to write. He had been treated hardly and suffered, and
he became hard; nevertheless he stands out in history as a man of rare,
unblemished honesty. His poverty seems particularly to have provoked the
scorn of Carlyle.
“What a road he has travelled; and sits now, about half-past seven of
the clock, stewing in slipper-bath; sore afflicted; ill of Revolution
Fever.... Excessively sick and worn, poor man: with precisely
elevenpence half penny of ready-money, in paper; with slipper-bath;
strong three-footed stool for writing on, the while: and a squalid
Washerwoman for his sole household ... that is his civic establishment
in Medical-School Street; thither and not elsewhere has his road led
him.... Hark, a rap again! A musical woman’s voice, refusing to be
rejected: it is the Citoyenne who would do France a service. Marat,
recognizing from within, cries, Admit her. Charlotte Corday is
admitted.”
The young heroine--for republican leaders are fair game, and their
assassins are necessarily heroines and their voices “musical”--offered
to give him some necessary information about the counter-revolution at
Caen, and as he was occupied in making a note of her facts, she stabbed
him with a large sheath knife (1792)....
Such was the quality of most of the leaders of the Jacobin party. They
were men of no property--untethered men. They were more dissociated and
more elemental, therefore, than any other party; and they were ready to
push the ideas of freedom and equality to a logical extremity. Their
standards of patriotic virtue were high and harsh. There was something
inhuman even in their humanitarian zeal. They saw without humour the
disposition of the moderates to ease things down, to keep the common
folk just a little needy and respectful, and royalty (and men of
substance) just a little respected. They were blinded by the formulæ of
Rousseauism to the historical truth that man is by nature oppressor and
oppressed, and that it is only slowly by law, education, and the spirit
of love in the world that men can be made happy and free.
And while in America the formulæ of eighteenth-century democracy were on
the whole stimulating and helpful because it was already a land of
open-air practical equality so far as white men were concerned, in
France these formulæ made a very heady and dangerous mixture for the
town populations, because considerable parts of the towns of France were
slums full of dispossessed, demoralized, degraded, and bitter-spirited
people. The Parisian crowd was in a particularly desperate and dangerous
state, because the industries of Paris had been largely luxury
industries, and much of her employment parasitic on the weaknesses and
vices of fashionable life. Now the fashionable world had gone over the
frontier, travellers were restricted, business disordered, and the city
full of unemployed and angry people.
But the royalists, instead of realizing the significance of these
Jacobins with their dangerous integrity and their dangerous grip upon
the imagination of the mob, had the conceit to think they could make
tools of them. The time for the replacement of the National Assembly
under the new-made constitution by the “Legislative Assembly” was
drawing near; and when the Jacobins, with the idea of breaking up the
moderates, proposed to make the members of the National Assembly
ineligible for the Legislative Assembly, the royalists supported them
with great glee, and carried the proposal. They perceived that the
Legislative Assembly, so clipped of all experience, must certainly be a
politically incompetent body. They would “extract good from the excess
of evil,”[440] and presently France would fall back helpless into the
hands of her legitimate masters. So they thought. And the royalists did
more than this. They backed the election of a Jacobin as Mayor of Paris.
It was about as clever as if a man brought home a hungry tiger to
convince his wife of her need of him. There stood another body ready at
hand with which these royalists did not reckon, far better equipped than
the court to step in and take the place of an ineffective Legislative
Assembly, and that was the strongly Jacobin Commune of Paris installed
at the Hôtel de Ville.
So far France had been at peace. None of her neighbours had attacked
her, because she appeared to be weakening herself by her internal
dissensions. It was Poland that suffered by the distraction of France.
But there seemed no reason why they should not insult and threaten her,
and prepare the way for a later partition at their convenience. At
Pillnitz, in 1791, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria met,
and issued a declaration[441] that the restoration of order and monarchy
in France was a matter of interest to all sovereigns. And an army of
emigrés, French nobles and gentlemen, an army largely of officers, was
allowed to accumulate close to the frontier.
It was France that declared war against Austria. The motives of those
who supported this step were conflicting. Many republicans wanted it
because they wished to see the kindred people of Belgium liberated from
the Austrian yoke. Many royalists wanted it because they saw in war a
possibility of restoring the prestige of the crown. Marat opposed it
bitterly in his paper _L’Ami du Peuple_, because he did not want to see
republican enthusiasm turned into war fever. His instinct warned him of
Napoleon. On April 20th, 1792, the king came down to the Assembly and
proposed war amidst great applause.
The war began disastrously. Three French armies entered Belgium, two
were badly beaten, and the third, under Lafayette, retreated. Then
Prussia declared war in support of Austria, and the allied forces, under
the Duke of Brunswick, prepared to invade France. The duke issued one of
the most foolish proclamations in history; he was, he said, invading
France to restore the royal authority. Any further indignity shown the
king he threatened to visit upon the Assembly and Paris with “military
execution.” This was surely enough to make the most royalist Frenchman a
republican--at least for the duration of the war.
The new phase of revolution, the Jacobin revolution, was the direct
outcome of this proclamation. It made the Legislative Assembly, in which
orderly republicans (Girondins) and royalists prevailed, it made the
government which had put down that republican meeting in the Champ de
Mars and hunted Marat into the sewers, impossible. The insurgents
gathered at the Hôtel de Ville, and on the tenth of August the Commune
launched an attack on the palace of the Tuileries.
The king behaved with a clumsy stupidity, and with that disregard for
others which is the prerogative of kings. He had with him a Swiss guard
of nearly a thousand men as well as National Guards of uncertain
loyalty. He held out vaguely until firing began, and then he went off to
the adjacent Assembly to place himself and his family under its
protection, leaving his Swiss fighting. No doubt he hoped to antagonize
Assembly and Commune, but the Assembly had none of the fighting spirit
of the Hôtel de Ville. The royal refugees were placed in a box reserved
for journalists (out of which a small room opened), and there they
remained for sixteen hours while the Assembly debated their fate.
Outside there were the sounds of a considerable battle; every now and
then a window would break. The unfortunate Swiss were fighting with
their backs to the wall because there was now nothing else for them to
do....
The Assembly had no stomach to back the government’s action of July in
the Champ de Mars. The fierce vigour of the Commune dominated it. The
king found no comfort whatever in the Assembly. It scolded him and
discussed his “suspension.” The Swiss fought until they received a
message from the king to desist, and then--the crowd being savagely
angry at the needless bloodshed and out of control--they were for the
most part massacred.
The long and tedious attempt to “Merovingianize” Louis, to make an
honest crowned republican out of a dull and inadaptable absolute
monarch, was now drawing to its tragic close. The Commune of Paris was
practically in control of France. The Legislative Assembly--which had
apparently undergone a change of heart--decreed that the king was
suspended from his office, confined him in the Temple, replaced him by
an executive commission, and summoned a National Convention to frame a
new constitution.
The tension of patriotic and republican France was now becoming
intolerable. Such armies as she had were rolling back helplessly toward
Paris. Longwy had fallen, the great fortress of Verdun followed, and
nothing seemed likely to stop the march of the allies upon the capital.
The sense of royalist treachery rose to panic cruelty. At any rate the
royalists had to be silenced and stilled and scared out of sight. The
Commune set itself to hunt out every royalist that could be found, until
the prisons of Paris were full. Danton incited the crowd against the
prisoners, Marat saw the danger of a massacre. Before it was too late
Marat tried to secure the establishment of emergency tribunals to filter
the innocent from the guilty in this miscellaneous collection of
schemers, suspects, and harmless gentlefolk. He was disregarded, and
early in September the inevitable massacre occurred.
Suddenly, first at one prison and then at others, bands of insurgents
took possession. A sort of rough court was constituted, and outside
gathered a wild mob armed with sabres, pikes, and axes. One by one the
prisoners, men and women alike, were led out from their cells,
questioned briefly, pardoned with the cry of “Vive la Nation,” or thrust
out to the mob at the gates. There the crowd jostled and fought to get a
slash or thrust at a victim. The condemned were stabbed, hacked, and
beaten to death, their heads hewn off, stuck on pikes, and carried about
the town, their torn bodies thrust aside. Among others, the Princesse de
Lamballe, whom the king and queen had left behind in the Tuileries,
perished. Her head was carried on a pike to the Temple for the queen to
see.
In the queen’s cell were two National Guards. One would have had her
look out and see this grisly sight. The other, in pity, would not let
her do so.
[Illustration: North Eastern Frontier of FRANCE showing the military
position September 1792]
Even as this red tragedy was going on in Paris, the French general
Dumouriez, who had rushed an army from Flanders into the forests of the
Argonne, was holding up the advance of the allies beyond Verdun. On
September 20th occurred a battle, mainly an artillery encounter, at
Valmy. A not very resolute Prussian advance was checked,[442] the French
infantry stood firm, their artillery was better than the allied
artillery. For ten days after this repulse the Duke of Brunswick
hesitated, and then he began to fall back towards the Rhine. This battle
at Valmy--it was little more than a cannonade--was one of the decisive
battles in the world’s history. The Revolution was saved. The National
Convention met on September 21st, 1792, and immediately proclaimed a
republic. The trial and execution of the king followed with a sort of
logical necessity upon these things. He died rather as a symbol than as
a man. There was nothing else to be done with him; poor man, he cumbered
the earth. France could not let him go to hearten the emigrants, could
not keep him harmless at home; his existence threatened her. Marat had
urged this trial relentlessly, yet with that acid clearness of his he
would not have the king charged with any offence committed before he
signed the constitution, because before then he was a real monarch,
super-legal, and so incapable of being illegal. Nor would Marat permit
attacks upon the king’s counsel.... Throughout Marat played a bitter and
yet often a just part; he was a great man, a fine intelligence, in a
skin of fire; wrung with that organic hate in the blood that is not a
product of the mind but of the body.
Louis was beheaded in January, 1793. He was guillotined--for since the
previous August the guillotine had been in use as the official
instrument in French executions.
Danton, in his leonine rôle, was very fine upon this occasion. “The
kings of Europe would challenge us,” he roared. “We throw them the head
of a king!”
§ 11
And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French people.
There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and the Republic.
There was to be an end to compromise at home and abroad; at home
royalists and every form of disloyalty were to be stamped out; abroad
France was to be the protector and helper of all revolutionaries. All
Europe, all the world, was to become republican. The youth of France
poured into the Republican armies; a new and wonderful song spread
through the land, a song that still warms the blood like wine, the
Marseillaise. Before that chant and the leaping columns of French
bayonets and their enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies
rolled back; before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far
beyond the utmost achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on
foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they had
raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland. Then the
French Government did an unwise thing. It had been exasperated by the
expulsion of its representative from England upon the execution of
Louis, and it declared war against England. It was an unwise thing to
do, because the revolution which had given France a new enthusiastic
infantry and a brilliant artillery, released from its aristocratic
officers and many cramping traditions,[443] had destroyed the discipline
of its navy, and the English were supreme upon the sea. And this
provocation united all England against France, whereas there had been at
first a very considerable liberal movement in Great Britain in sympathy
with the revolution. It robbed France of her one prospective ally.[444]
Of the fight that France made in the next few years against a European
coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove the Austrians for ever
out of Belgium, and made Holland a republic. The Dutch fleet, frozen in
the Texel, surrendered to a handful of cavalry without firing its guns.
For some time the French thrust towards Italy was hung up, and it was
only in 1796 that a new general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the ragged and
hungry republican armies in triumph across Piedmont to Mantua and
Verona. An _Outline of History_ cannot map out campaigns; but of the new
quality that had come into war, it is bound to take note. The old
professional armies had fought for the fighting, as slack as workers
paid by the hour; these wonderful new armies fought hungry and thirsty,
for victory. Their enemies called them the “New French.” Says C. F.
Atkinson,[445] “What astonished the Allies most of all was the number
and the velocity of the Republicans. These improvised armies had in fact
nothing to delay them. Tents were unprocurable for want of money,
untransportable for want of the enormous number of wagons that would
have been required, and also unnecessary, for the discomfort that would
have caused wholesale desertion in professional armies was cheerfully
borne by the men of 1793-4. Supplies for armies of then unheard-of size
could not be carried in convoys, and the French soon became familiar
with ‘living on the country.’ Thus 1793 saw the birth of the modern
system of war--rapidity of movement, full development of national
strength, bivouacs, requisitions and force as against cautious
manœuvring, small professional armies, tents and full rations, and
chicane. The first represented the decision-compelling spirit, the
second the spirit of risking little to gain a little....”
And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the
Marseillaise and fighting for _la France_, manifestly never quite clear
in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the countries
into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending
itself in a far less glorious fashion. Marat, the one man of commanding
intelligence among the Jacobins, was now frantic with an incurable
disease, and presently he was murdered; Danton was a series of patriotic
thunderstorms; the steadfast fanaticism of Robespierre dominated the
situation. This man is difficult to judge; he was a man of poor
physique, naturally timid, and a prig. But he had that most necessary
gift for power, faith. He believed not in a god familiar to men, but in
a certain Supreme Being, and that Rousseau was his prophet. He set
himself to save the Republic as he conceived it, and he imagined it
could be saved by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to
save the republic. The living spirit of the republic, it seemed, had
sprung from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king.
There were insurrections: one in the west, in the district of La Vendée,
where the people rose against the conscription and against the
dispossession of the orthodox clergy, and were led by noblemen and
priests; one in the south, where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the
royalists of Toulon had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To
which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing
royalists.
Nothing could have better pleased the fierce heart of the Paris slums.
The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering
began.[446] The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood.
The queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre’s antagonists were
guillotined, atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were
guillotined, Danton was guillotined because he thought there was too
much guillotine; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine
chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre
lived, it seemed, on blood, and needed more and more, as an opium-taker
needs more and more opium.
Danton was still Danton, leonine and exemplary upon the guillotine.
“Danton,” he said, “no weakness!”
And the grotesque thing about the story is that Robespierre was
indubitably honest. He was far more honest than any of the group of men
who succeeded him. He was inspired by a consuming passion for a new
order of human life. So far as he could contrive it, the Committee of
Public Safety, the emergency government of twelve which had now thrust
aside the Convention, _constructed_. The scale on which it sought to
construct was stupendous. All the intricate problems with which we still
struggle to-day were met by swift and shallow solutions. Attempts were
made to equalize property. “Opulence,” said St. Just, “is infamous.” The
property of the rich was taxed or confiscated in order that it should be
divided among the poor. Every man was to have a secure house, a living,
a wife and children. The labourer was worthy of his hire, but not
entitled to an advantage. There was an attempt to abolish _profit_
altogether, the rude incentive of most human commerce since the
beginning of society. Profit is the economic riddle that still puzzles
us to-day. There were harsh laws against “profiteering” in France in
1793--England in 1919 found it necessary to make quite similar laws. And
the Jacobin government not only replanned--in eloquent outline--the
economic, but also the social system. Divorce was made as easy as
marriage; the distinction of legitimate and illegitimate children was
abolished.... A new calendar was devised, with new names for the months,
a week of ten days, and the like--that has long since been swept away;
but also the clumsy coinage and the tangled weights and measures of old
France gave place to the simple and lucid decimal system that still
endures.... There was a proposal from one extremist group to abolish God
among other institutions altogether, and to substitute the worship of
Reason. There was, indeed, a Feast of Reason in the cathedral of
Notre-Dame, with a pretty actress as the goddess of Reason. But against
this Robespierre set his face; he was no atheist. “Atheism,” he said,
“is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being who watches over oppressed
innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the idea of the
people.”
So he guillotined Hébert, who had celebrated the Feast of Reason, and
all his party.
A certain mental disorder became perceptible in Robespierre as the
summer of 1794 drew on. He was deeply concerned with his religion. (The
arrests and executions of suspects were going on now as briskly as ever.
Through the streets of Paris every day rumbled the Terror with its carts
full of condemned people.) He induced the Convention to decree that
France believed in a Supreme Being, and in that comforting doctrine, the
immortality of the soul. In June he celebrated a great festival, the
festival of his Supreme Being. There was a procession to the Champ de
Mars, which he headed, brilliantly arrayed, bearing a great bunch of
flowers and wheat ears. Figures of inflammatory material, representing
Atheism and Vice, were solemnly burnt; then, by an ingenious mechanism,
and with some slight creakings, an incombustible statue of Wisdom rose
in their place. There were discourses--Robespierre delivered the chief
one--but apparently no worship....
Thereafter Robespierre displayed a disposition to brood aloof from
affairs. For a month he kept away from the Convention.
One day in July he reappeared and delivered a strange speech that
clearly foreshadowed fresh prosecutions. “Gazing on the multitude of
vices which the torrent of Revolution has rolled down,” he cried, in his
last great speech in the Convention, “I have sometimes trembled lest I
should be soiled by the impure neighbourhood of wicked men.... I know
that it is easy for the leagued tyrants of the world to overwhelm a
single individual; but I know also what is the duty of a man who can die
in the defence of humanity.”...
And so on to vague utterances that seemed to threaten everyone.
The Convention heard this speech in silence; then when a proposal was
made to print and circulate it, broke into a resentful uproar and
refused permission. Robespierre went off in bitter resentment to the
club of his supporters, and _reread his speech to them_!
That night was full of talk and meetings and preparations for the
morrow, and the next morning the Convention turned upon Robespierre. One
Tallien threatened him with a dagger. When he tried to speak, he was
shouted down, and the President jingled the bell at him. “President of
Assassins,” cried Robespierre, “I demand speech!” It was refused him.
His voice deserted him; he coughed and spluttered. “The blood of Danton
chokes him,” cried someone.
He was accused and arrested there and then with his chief supporters.
Whereupon the Hôtel de Ville, still stoutly Jacobin, rose against the
Convention, and Robespierre and his companions were snatched out of the
hands of their captors. There was a night of gathering, marching,
counter-marching; and at last, about three in the morning, the forces of
the Convention faced the forces of the Commune outside the Hôtel de
Ville. Henriot, the Jacobin commander, after a busy day was drunk
upstairs; a parley ensued, and then, after some indecision, the soldiers
of the Commune went over to the Government. There was a shouting of
patriotic sentiments, and someone looked out from the Hôtel de Ville.
Robespierre and his last companions found themselves betrayed and
trapped.
Two or three of these men threw themselves out of a window, and injured
themselves frightfully on the railings below without killing themselves.
Others attempted suicide. Robespierre, it seems, was shot in the lower
jaw by a gendarme. He was found, his eyes staring from a pale face whose
lower part was blood.
Followed seventeen hours of agony before his end. He spoke never a word
during that time; his jaw being bound up roughly in dirty linen. He and
his companions, and the broken, dying bodies of those who had jumped
from the windows, twenty-two men altogether, were taken to the
guillotine instead of the condemned appointed for that day. Mostly, his
eyes were closed, but, says Carlyle, he opened them to see the great
knife rising above him, and struggled. Also it would seem he screamed
when the executioner removed his bandages. Then the knife came down,
swift and merciful.
The Terror was at an end. From first to last there had been condemned
and executed about four thousand people.
§ 12
It witnesses to the immense vitality and the profound rightness of the
flood of new ideals and intentions that the French Revolution had
released into the world of practical endeavour, that it could still flow
in a creative torrent after it had been caricatured and mocked in the
grotesque personality and career of Robespierre. He had shown its
deepest thoughts, he had displayed anticipations of its methods and
conclusions, through the green and distorting lenses of his preposterous
vanity and egotism, he had smeared and blackened all its hope and
promise with blood and horror, and the power of these ideas was not
destroyed. They stood the extreme tests of ridiculous and horrible
presentation. After his downfall, the Republic still ruled unassailable.
Leaderless, for his successors were a group of crafty or commonplace
men, the European republic struggled on, and presently fell and rose
again, and fell and rose and still struggles, entangled but invincible.
And it is well to remind the reader here of the real dimensions of this
phase of the Terror, which strikes so vividly upon the imagination and
which has therefore been enormously exaggerated relatively to the rest
of the revolution. From 1789 to late in 1791 the French Revolution was
an orderly process, and from the summer of 1794 the Republic was an
orderly and victorious state. The Terror was not the work of the whole
country, but of the town mob which owed its existence and its savagery
to the misrule and social injustice of the ancient régime; and the
explosion of the Terror could have happened only through the persistent
treacherous disloyalty of the royalists which, while it raised the
extremists to frenzy, disinclined the mass of moderate republicans from
any intervention. The best men were busy fighting the Austrians and
royalists on the frontier. Altogether, we must remember, the total of
the killed in the Terror amounted to a few thousands, and among those
thousands there were certainly a great number of active antagonists whom
the Republic, by all the standards of that time, was entitled to kill.
It included such traitors and mischief-makers as Philip, Duke of
Orleans, of the Palais Royal, who had voted for the death of Louis XVI.
More lives were wasted by the British generals alone on the opening day
of what is known as the Somme offensive of July, 1916, than in the whole
French revolution from start to finish. We hear so much about the
martyrs of the French Terror because they were notable, well-connected
people, and because there has been a sort of propaganda of their
sufferings. But let us balance against them in our minds what was going
on in the prisons of the world generally at that time. In Britain and
America, while the Terror ruled in France, far more people were
slaughtered for offences--very often quite trivial offences--against
property than were condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal for treason
against the State. Of course, they were very common people indeed, but
in their rough way they suffered. A girl was hung in Massachusetts in
1789 for forcibly taking the hat, shoes, and buckles of another girl she
had met in the street.[447] Again, Howard the philanthropist (about
1773) found a number of perfectly innocent people detained in the
English prisons who had been tried and acquitted, but were unable to pay
the gaoler’s fees. And these prisons were filthy places under no
effective control. Torture was still in use in the Hanoverian dominions
of his Britannic majesty King George III. It had been in use in France
up to the time of the National Assembly. These things mark the level of
the age. It is not on record that anyone was deliberately tortured by
the French revolutionaries during the Terror. Those few hundreds of
French gentlefolk fell into a pit that most of them had been well
content should exist for others. It was tragic, but not, by the scale of
universal history, a great tragedy. The common man in France was more
free, better off, and happier during the “Terror” than he had been in
1787.
The story of the Republic after the summer of 1794 becomes a tangled
story of political groups aiming at everything from a radical republic
to a royalist reaction, but pervaded by a general desire for some
definite working arrangement even at the price of considerable
concessions. There was a series of insurrections of the Jacobins and of
the royalists, there seems to have been what we should call nowadays a
hooligan class in Paris which was quite ready to turn out to fight and
loot on either side; nevertheless the Convention produced a government,
the Directory of five members, which held France together for five
years. The last, most threatening revolt of all, in October, 1795, was
suppressed with great skill and decision by a rising young general,
Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Directory was victorious abroad, but uncreative at home; its members
were far too anxious to stick to the sweets and glories of office to
prepare a constitution that would supersede them, and far too dishonest
to handle the task of financial and economic reconstruction demanded by
the condition of France. We need only note two of their names, Carnot,
who was an honest republican, and Barras, who was conspicuously a rogue.
Their reign of five years formed a curious interlude in this history of
great changes. They took things as they found them. The propagandist
zeal of the revolution carried the French armies into Holland, Belgium,
Switzerland, south Germany, and north Italy. Everywhere kings were
expelled and republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated
the Directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures of the
liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment of the French
Government. Their wars became less and less the holy war of freedom, and
more and more like the aggressive wars of the ancient régime. The last
feature of Grand Monarchy that France was disposed to discard was her
tradition of foreign policy, grasping, aggressive, restless,
French-centred. One discovers it still as vigorous under the Directorate
as if there had been no revolution.
§ 13
The ebb of this tide of Revolution in the world, this tide which had
created the great Republic of America and threatened to submerge all
European monarchies, was now at hand. It is as if something had thrust
up from beneath the surface of human affairs, made a gigantic effort,
and spent itself. It swept many obsolescent and evil things away, but
many evil and unjust things remained. It solved many problems, and it
left the desire for fellowship and order face to face with much vaster
problems that it seemed only to have revealed. Privilege of certain
types had gone, many tyrannies, much religious persecution. When these
things of the ancient régime had vanished, it seemed as if they had
never mattered. What did matter was that for all their votes and
enfranchisement, and in spite of all their passion and effort, common
men were still not free and not enjoying an equal happiness; that the
immense promise and air of a new world with which the Revolution had
come, remained unfulfilled.
Yet, after all, this wave of revolution had realized nearly everything
that had been clearly thought out before it came. It was not failing now
for want of impetus, but for want of finished ideas. Many things that
had oppressed mankind were swept away for ever. Now that they were swept
away it became apparent how unprepared men were for the creative
opportunities this clearance gave them. And periods of revolution are
periods of action; in them men reap the harvests of ideas that have
grown during phases of interlude, and they leave the fields cleared for
a new season of growth, but they cannot suddenly produce ripened new
ideas to meet an unanticipated riddle.
The sweeping away of king and lord, of priest and inquisitor, of
landlord and tax-gatherer and task-master, left the mass of men face to
face for the first time with certain very fundamental aspects of the
social structure, relationships they had taken for granted, and had
never realized the need of thinking hard and continuously about before.
Institutions that had seemed to be in the nature of things, and matters
that had seemed to happen by the same sort of necessity that brought
round the dawn and springtime, were discovered to be artificial,
controllable, were they not so perplexingly intricate, and--now that the
old routines were abolished and done away with--in urgent need of
control. The New Order found itself confronted with three riddles which
it was quite unprepared to solve: Property, Currency, and International
Relationship.
Let us take these three problems in order, and ask what they are and how
they arose in human affairs. Every human life is deeply entangled in
them, and concerned in their solution. The rest of this history becomes
more and more clearly the development of the effort to solve these
problems; that is to say, so to interpret property, so to establish
currency, and so to control international reactions as to render
possible a world-wide, progressive and happy community of will. They are
the three riddles of the sphinx of fate, to which the human commonweal
must find an answer or perish.
The idea of property arises out of the combative instincts of the
species. Long before men were men, the ancestral ape was a proprietor.
Primitive property is what a beast will fight for. The dog and his bone,
the tigress and her lair, the roaring stag and his herd, these are
proprietorship blazing. No more nonsensical expression is conceivable in
sociology than the term “primitive communism.” The Old Man of the family
tribe of early palæolithic times insisted upon his proprietorship in his
wives and daughters, in his tools, in his visible universe. If any other
man wandered into his visible universe he fought him, and if he could he
slew him. The tribe grew in the course of ages, as Atkinson showed
convincingly in his _Primal Law_, by the gradual toleration by the Old
Man of the existence of the younger men, and of their proprietorship in
the wives they captured from outside the tribe, and in the tools and
ornaments they made and the game they slew. Human society grew by a
compromise between this one’s property and that. It was largely a
compromise and an alliance forced upon men by the necessity of driving
some other tribe out of its visible universe. If the hills and forests
and streams were not _your_ land or _my_ land, it was because they had
to be our land. Each of us would have preferred to have it _my_ land,
but that would not work. In that case the other fellows would have
destroyed us. Society, therefore, is from its beginnings the mitigation
of ownership. Ownership in the beast and in the primitive savage was far
more intense a thing than it is in the civilized world to-day. It is
rooted more strongly in our instincts than in our reason.
In the natural savage and in the untutored man to-day--for it is well to
keep in mind that no man to-day is more than four hundred generations
from the primordial savage--there is no limitation to the sphere of
ownership. Whatever you can fight for, you can own; women-folk, spared
captive, captured beast, forest glade, stone pit, or what not. As the
community grew and a sort of law came to restrain internecine fighting,
men developed rough and ready methods of settling proprietorship. Men
could own what they were the first to make or capture or claim. It
seemed natural that a debtor who could not pay up should become the
property of his creditor. Equally natural was it that, after claiming a
patch of land (“Bags I,” as the schoolboy says), a man should exact
payments and tribute from anyone else who wanted to use it. It was only
slowly, as the possibilities of organized life dawned on men, that this
unlimited property in anything whatever began to be recognized as a
nuisance. Men found themselves born into a universe all owned and
claimed, nay! they found themselves born, owned, and claimed. The secial
struggles of the earlier civilization are difficult to trace now, but
the history we have told of the Roman republic shows a community waking
up to the idea that they may become a public inconvenience and should
then be repudiated, and that the unlimited ownership of land is also an
inconvenience. We find that later Babylonia severely limited the rights
of property in slaves. Finally, we find in the teaching of that great
revolutionist, Jesus of Nazareth, such an attack upon property as had
never been before. Easier it was, he said, for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle than for the owner of great possessions to enter the
kingdom of heaven. A steady, continuous criticism of the permissible
scope of property seems to have been going on in the world for the last
twenty-five or thirty centuries. Nineteen hundred years after Jesus of
Nazareth we find all the world that has come under the Christian
teaching persuaded that there could be no property in persons. There has
been a turn over in the common conscience in that matter. And also the
idea that “a man may do what he likes with his own” was clearly very
much shaken in relation to other sorts of property. But this world of
the closing eighteenth century was still only in the interrogative stage
in this matter. It had got nothing clear enough, much less settled
enough, to act upon. One of its primary impulses was to protect property
against the greed and waste of kings and the exploitation of noble
adventurers. It was to protect private property that the Revolution
began. But its equalitarian formulæ carried it into a criticism of the
very property it had risen to protect. How can men be free and equal
when numbers of them have no ground to stand upon and nothing to eat,
and the owners will neither feed nor lodge them unless they toil?
Excessively--the poor complained.
To which riddle the Jacobin reply was to set about “dividing up.” They
wanted to intensify and universalize property. Aiming at the same end
by another route, there were already in the eighteenth century certain
primitive socialists--or, to be more exact, communists--who wanted to
“abolish” private property altogether. The state (a democratic state was
of course understood) was to own all property. It was only as the
nineteenth century developed that men began to realize that property was
not one simple thing, but a great complex of ownerships of different
values and consequences, that many things (such as human beings, the
implements of an artist, clothing, toothbrushes) are very profoundly and
incurably personal property, and that there is a very great range of
things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens,
pleasure-boats, for example, which need each to be considered very
particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it may come
under private ownership, and how far it falls into the public domain and
may be administered and let out by the state in the collective interest.
On the practical side these questions pass into politics, and the
problem of making and sustaining efficient state administration. They
open up issues in social psychology, and interact with the enquiries of
educational science. We have to-day the advantage of a hundred and
thirty years of discussion over the first revolutionary generation, but
even now this criticism of property is still a vast and passionate
ferment rather than a science. Under the circumstances it was impossible
that eighteenth-century France should present any other spectacle than
that of vague and confused popular movements seeking to dispossess
owners, and classes of small and large owners holding on grimly,
demanding, before everything else, law, order, and security, and seeking
to increase their individual share of anything whatever that could be
legally possessed.
Closely connected with the vagueness of men’s ideas about property was
the vagueness of their ideas about currency. Both the American and the
French republics fell into serious trouble upon this score. Here, again,
we deal with something that is not simple, a tangle of usages,
conventions, laws, and prevalent mental habits, out of which arise
problems which admit of no solution in simple terms, and which yet are
of vital importance to the everyday life of the community. The validity
of the acknowledgement a man is given for a day’s work is manifestly of
quite primary importance to the working of the social machine. The
growth of confidence in the precious metals and of coins, until the
assurance became practically universal that good money could be trusted
to have its purchasing power anywhere, must have been a gradual one in
human history. And being fairly established, this assurance was
subjected to very considerable strains and perplexities by the action of
governments in debasing currency and in substituting paper promises to
pay for the actual metallic coins. Every age produced a number of clever
people intelligent enough to realize the opportunities for smart
operations afforded by the complex of faiths and fictions upon which the
money system rested, and sufficiently unsound morally to give their best
energies to growing rich and so getting people to work for them, through
tricks and tampering with gold, coinage, and credit. So soon as serious
political and social dislocation occurred, the money mechanism began to
work stiffly and inaccurately. The United States and the French Republic
both started their careers in a phase of financial difficulty.
Everywhere governments had been borrowing and issuing paper promises to
pay interest, more interest than they could conveniently raise. Both
revolutions led to much desperate public spending and borrowing, and at
the same time to an interruption of cultivation and production that
further diminished real taxable wealth. Both governments, being unable
to pay their way in gold, resorted to the issue of paper money,
promising to pay upon the security of undeveloped land (in America) or
recently confiscated church lands (France). In both cases the amount of
issue went far beyond the confidence of men in the new security. Gold
was called in, hidden by the cunning ones, or went abroad to pay for
imports; and people found themselves with various sorts of bills and
notes in the place of coins, all of uncertain and diminishing value.
However complicated the origins of currency, its practical effect and
the end it has to serve in the community may be stated roughly in simple
terms. The money a man receives for his work (mental or bodily) or for
relinquishing his property in some consumable good, must ultimately be
able to purchase for him for his use a fairly equivalent amount of
consumable goods. (“Consumable goods” is a phrase we would have
understood in the widest sense to represent even such things as a
journey, a lecture or theatrical entertainment, housing, medical advice,
and so forth.) When everyone in a community is assured of this, and
assured that the money will not deteriorate in purchasing power, then
currency--and the distribution of goods by trade--is in a healthy and
satisfactory state. Then men will work cheerfully, and only then. The
imperative need for that steadfastness and security of currency is the
fixed datum from which the scientific study and control of currency must
begin. But under the most stable conditions there will always be
fluctuations in currency value. The sum total of saleable consumable
goods in the world and in various countries varies from year to year and
from season to season; autumn is probably a time of plenty in comparison
with spring; with an increase the purchasing power of currency will
increase, unless there is also an increase in the amount of currency. On
the other hand, if there is a diminution in the production of consumable
goods or a great and unprofitable destruction of consumable goods, such
as occurs in a war, the share of the total of consumable goods
represented by a sum of money will diminish and prices and wages will
rise. In modern war the explosion of a single big shell, even if it hits
nothing, destroys labour and material roughly equivalent to a
comfortable cottage or a year’s holiday for a man. If the shell hits
anything, then that further destruction has to be added to the
diminution of consumable goods. Every shell that burst in the recent war
diminished by a little fraction the purchasing value of every coin in
the whole world. If there is also an increase of currency during a
period when consumable goods are being used up and not fully
replaced--and the necessities of revolutionary and war-making
governments almost always require this--then the enhancement of prices
and the fall in the value of the currency paid in wages is still
greater. Usually also governments under these stresses borrow money,
that is to say, they issue interest-bearing paper, secured on the
willingness and ability of the general community to endure taxation.
Such operations would be difficult enough if they were carried out
frankly by perfectly honest men, in the full light of publicity and
scientific knowledge. But hitherto this has never been the case; at
every point the clever egotist, the bad rich man, is trying to deflect
things a little to his own advantage. Everywhere too one finds the
stupid egotist ready to take fright and break into panic. Consequently
we presently discover the state encumbered by an excess of currency,
which is in effect a non-interest-paying debt, and also with a great
burthen of interest upon loans. Both credit and currency begin to
fluctuate wildly with the evaporation of public confidence. They are, we
say, demoralized.
The ultimate consequence of an entirely demoralized currency would be to
end all work and all trade that could not be carried on by payment in
kind and barter. Men would refuse to work except for food, clothing,
housing, and payment in kind. The immediate consequence of a partially
demoralized currency is to drive up prices and make trading feverishly
adventurous and workers suspicious and irritable. A sharp man wants
under such conditions to hold money for as brief a period as possible;
he demands the utmost for his reality, and buys a reality again as soon
as possible in order to get this perishable stuff, the currency paper,
off his hands. All who have fixed incomes and saved accumulations suffer
by the rise in prices, and the wage-earners find, with a gathering fury,
that the real value of their wages is continually less. Here is a state
of affairs where the duty of every clever person is evidently to help
adjust and reassure. But all the traditions of private enterprise, all
the ideas of the later eighteenth century, went to justify the action of
acute-minded and dexterous people who set themselves to accumulate
claims, titles, and tangible property in the storms and dislocations of
this currency breakdown. The number of understanding people in the world
who were setting themselves sincerely and simply to restore honest and
workable currency and credit conditions were few and ineffectual. Most
of the financial and speculative people of the time were playing the
part of Cornish wreckers--not apparently with any conscious dishonesty,
but with the completest self-approval and the applause of their fellow
men. The aim of every clever person was to accumulate as much as he
could of really negotiable wealth, and then, and only then, to bring
about some sort of stabilizing political process that would leave him in
advantageous possession of his accumulation. Here were the factors of a
bad economic atmosphere, suspicious, feverish, greedy, and
speculative....
In the third direction in which the Revolution had been unprepared with
clear ideas, the problem of international relationships, developments
were to occur that interacted disastrously with this state of financial
and economic adventure, this scramble and confusion, this pre-occupation
of men’s minds with the perplexing slipperiness of their private
property and their monetary position at home. The Republic at its birth
found itself at war. For a time that war was waged by the new levies
with a patriotism and a zeal unparalleled in the world’s history. But
that could not go on. The Directory found itself at the head of a
conquering country, intolerably needy and embarrassed at home, and in
occupation of rich foreign lands, full of seizable wealth and material
and financial opportunity. We have all double natures, and the French in
particular seem to be developed logically and symmetrically on both
sides. Into these conquered regions France came as a liberator, the
teacher of Republicanism to mankind. Holland and Belgium became the
Batavian Republic, Genoa and its Riviera the Ligurian Republic, north
Italy the Cisalpine Republic, Switzerland was rechristened the Helvetian
Republic, Mülhausen, Rome, and Naples were designated republics. Grouped
about France, these republics were to be a constellation of freedom
leading the world. That was the ideal side. At the same time the French
government, and French private individuals in concert with the
government, proceeded to a complete and exhaustive exploitation of the
resources of these liberated lands.
So within ten years of the meeting of the States General, New France
begins to take on a singular likeness to the old. It is more flushed,
more vigorous; it wears a cap of liberty instead of a crown; it has a
new army--but a damaged fleet; it has new rich people instead of the old
rich people, a new peasantry working even harder than the old and
yielding more taxes, a new foreign policy curiously like the old foreign
policy disrobed, and--there is no Millennium.
XXXVIII
THE CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE[448]
§ 1. _The Bonaparte Family in Corsica._ § 2. _Bonaparte as a
Republican General._ § 3. _Napoleon First Consul, 1799-1804._ § 4.
_Napoleon I, Emperor, 1804-14._ § 5. _The Hundred Days._ § 6. _The
Cult of the Napoleonic._ § 7. _The Map of Europe in 1815._
§ 1
And now we come to one of the most illuminating figures in modern
history, the figure of an adventurer and a wrecker, whose story seems to
display with an extraordinary vividness the universal subtle conflict of
egotism, vanity, and personality with the weaker, wider claims of the
common good. Against this background of confusion and stress and hope,
this strained and heaving France and Europe, this stormy and tremendous
dawn, appears this dark little archaic personage, hard, compact,
capable, unscrupulous, imitative, and neatly vulgar. He was born (1769)
in the still half-barbaric island of Corsica, the son of a rather
prosaic father, a lawyer who had been first a patriotic Corsican against
the French monarchy which was trying to subjugate Corsica, and who had
then gone over to the side of the invader. His mother was of sturdier
stuff, passionately patriotic and a strong and managing woman. (She
birched her sons; on one occasion she birched Napoleon when he was
sixteen.) There were numerous brothers and sisters, and the family
pursued the French authorities with importunities for rewards and jobs.
Except for Napoleon it seems to have been a thoroughly commonplace,
“hungry” family. He was clever, bad-tempered, and overbearing. From his
mother he had acquired a romantic Corsican patriotism.
Through the patronage of the French governor of Corsica he got an
education first at the military school of Brienne and then at the
military school of Paris, from which he passed into the artillery in
1785. He was an industrious student both of mathematics and history, his
memory was prodigiously good, and he made copious note-books which still
exist. These note-books show no very exceptional intelligence, and they
contain short pieces of original composition--upon suicide and similar
adolescent topics. He fell early under the spell of Rousseau; he
developed sensibility and a scorn for the corruptions of civilization.
In 1786 he wrote a pamphlet against a Swiss pastor who had attacked
Rousseau. It was a very ordinary adolescent production, rhetorical and
imitative. He dreamt of an independent Corsica, freed from the French.
With the revolution, he became an ardent republican and a supporter of
the new French régime in Corsica. For some years, until the fall of
Robespierre, he remained a Jacobin.
§ 2
He soon gained the reputation of a useful and capable officer, and it
was through Robespierre’s younger brother that he got his first chance
of distinction at Toulon. Toulon had been handed over to the British and
Spanish by the Royalists, and an allied fleet occupied its harbour.
Bonaparte was given the command of the artillery, and under his
direction the French forced the allies to abandon the port and town.
He was next appointed commander of the artillery in Italy, but he had
not taken up his duties when the death of Robespierre seemed likely to
involve his own; he was put under arrest as a Jacobin, and for a time he
was in danger of the guillotine. That danger passed. He was employed as
artillery commander in an abortive raid upon Corsica, and then went to
Paris (1795) rather down at heel. Madame Junot in her Memoirs describes
his lean face and slovenly appearance at this time, “his ill-combed,
ill-powdered hair hanging down over his grey overcoat,” his gloveless
hands and badly blacked boots. It was a time of exhaustion and reaction
after the severities of the Jacobite republic. “In Paris,” says Holland
Rose, “the star of Liberty was paling before Mercury, Mars, and
Venus”--finance, uniforms, and social charm. The best of the common men
were in the armies, away beyond the frontiers. We have already noted the
last rising of the royalists in this year (1795). Napoleon had the luck
to be in Paris, and found his second opportunity in this affair. He
saved the Republic--of the Directory.
His abilities greatly impressed Carnot, the most upright of the
Directors. Moreover, he married a charming young widow, Madame Josephine
de Beauharnais, who had great influence with Barras. Both these things
probably helped him to secure the command in Italy.
We have no space here for the story of his brilliant campaigns in Italy
(1796-7), but of the spirit in which that invasion of Italy was
conducted we must say a word or two, because it illustrates so vividly
the double soul of France and of Napoleon, and how revolutionary
idealism was paling before practical urgencies. He proclaimed to the
Italians that the French were coming to break their chains--_and they
were_! He wrote to the Directory: “We will levy 20,000,000 francs in
exactions in this country; it is one of the richest in the world.” To
his soldiers he said, “You are famished and nearly naked.... I lead you
into the most fertile plain in the world. There you will find great
towns, rich provinces, honour, glory, riches....”
We are all such mixed stuff as this; in all of us the intimations of a
new world and a finer duty struggle to veil and control the ancient
greeds and lusts of our inherited past; but these passages, written by a
young man of twenty-seven, seem to show the gilt of honourable idealism
rubbed off at an unusually early age. These are the bribes of an
adventurer who has brought whatever impulse of devotion to a great cause
once stirred within him, well under the control of his self love.
His successes in Italy were brilliant and complete; they enormously
stimulated his self-confidence and his contempt for the energy and
ability of his fellow creatures. He had wanted to go into Italy because
there lay the most attractive task--he had risked his position in the
army by refusing to take up the irksome duties of a command against the
rebels in La Vendée--and there are clear signs of a vast expansion of
his vanity with his victories. He had been a great reader of Plutarch’s
Lives and of Roman history, and his extremely active but totally
uncreative imagination was now busy with dreams of a revival of the
eastern conquests of the Roman Empire. He got the republic of Venice out
of his way by cutting it up between the French and Austria, securing the
Ionian Islands and the Venetian fleet for France. This peace, the peace
of Campo Formio, was for both sides a thoroughly scoundrelly and
ultimately a disastrous bargain. The new republic of France assisted in
the murder of an ancient republic--Napoleon carried his point against a
considerable outcry in France--and Austria got Venetia, in which land in
1918 she was destined to bleed to death. There were also secret clauses
by which both France and Austria were later to acquire south German
territory. And it was not only the Roman push eastward that was now
exciting Napoleon’s brain. This was the land of Cæsar--and Cæsar was a
bad example for the successful general of a not very stable republic.
Cæsar had come back to Rome from Gaul a hero and conqueror. His new
imitator would come back from Egypt and India--Egypt and India were to
be his Gaul. There was really none of the genius about which historians
write so glibly in this decision. It was a tawdry and ill-conceived
imitation. The elements of failure stared him in the face. The way to
Egypt and India was by sea, and the British, in spite of two recent
naval mutinies, whose importance Napoleon exaggerated, were stronger
than the French at sea. Moreover, Egypt was a part of the Turkish
empire, by no means a contemptible power in those days. Nevertheless he
persuaded the Directory, which was dazzled by his Italian exploits, to
let him go. An Armada started from Toulon in May, 1798, captured Malta,
and had the good luck to evade the British fleet and arrive at
Alexandria. He landed his troops hurriedly, and the battle of the
Pyramids made him master of Egypt.
[Illustration: Map to illustrate Napoleon’s EGYPTIAN CAMPAIGN]
The main British fleet at that time was in the Atlantic outside Cadiz,
but the admiral had detached a force of his best ships, under
Vice-Admiral Nelson--a man certainly as great a genius in naval affairs
as was Napoleon in things military--to chase and engage the French
flotilla.[449] For a time Nelson sought the French fleet in vain;
finally, on the evening of the first of August, he found it at anchor in
Aboukir Bay. He had caught it unawares; many of the men were ashore and
a council was being held in the flagship. He had no charts, and it was a
hazardous thing to sail into the shallow water in a bad light. The
French admiral concluded, therefore, that he would not attack before
morning, and so made no haste in recalling his men aboard until it was
too late to do so. Nelson struck at once--against the advice of some of
his captains. One ship only went aground. She marked the shoal for the
rest of the fleet. He sailed to the attack in a double line about
sundown, putting the French between two fires. Night fell as the battle
was joined; the fight thundered and crashed in the darkness, until it
was lit presently by the flames of burning French ships, and then by the
flare of the French flag-ship, the Orient, blowing up.... Before
midnight the battle of the Nile was over, and Napoleon’s fleet was
destroyed. Napoleon was cut off from France.
Says Holland Rose, quoting Thiers, this Egyptian expedition was “the
rashest attempt history records.” Napoleon was left in Egypt with the
Turks gathering against him and his army infected with the plague.
Nevertheless, with a stupid sort of persistence, he went on for a time
with this Eastern scheme. He gained a victory at Jaffa, and, being short
of provisions, _massacred all his prisoners_. Then he tried to take
Acre, where his own siege artillery, just captured at sea by the
English, was used against him. Returning baffled to Egypt, he gained a
brilliant victory over a Turkish force at Aboukir, and then, deserting
the army of Egypt--it held on until 1801, when it capitulated to a
British force--made his escape back to France (1799), narrowly missing
capture by a British cruiser off Sicily.
Here was muddle and failure enough to discredit any general--had it been
known. But the very British cruisers which came so near to catching him,
helped him by preventing any real understanding of the Egyptian
situation from reaching the French people. He could make a great
flourish over the battle of Aboukir and conceal the shame and loss of
Acre. Things were not going well with France just then. There had been
military failures at several points; much of Italy had been lost,
Bonaparte’s Italy, and this turned men’s minds to him as the natural
saviour of that situation; moreover, there had been much peculation, and
some of it was coming to light; France was in one of her phases of
financial scandal, and Napoleon had not filched; the public was in that
state of moral fatigue when a strong and honest man is called for, a
wonderful, impossible healing man who will do everything for everybody.
People, poor lazy souls, persuaded themselves that this specious young
man with the hard face, so providentially back from Egypt, was the
strong and honest man required--another Washington.
With Julius Cæsar rather than Washington at the back of his mind,
Napoleon responded to the demand of his time. A conspiracy was carefully
engineered to replace the Directory by three “Consuls”--everybody seems
to have been reading far too much Roman history just then--of whom
Napoleon was to be the chief. The working of that conspiracy is too
intricate a story for our space; it involved a Cromwell-like dispersal
of the Lower House (the Council of Five Hundred), and in this affair
Napoleon lost his nerve. The deputies shouted at him and hustled him,
and he seems to have been very much frightened. He nearly fainted,
stuttered, and could say nothing, but the situation was saved by his
brother Lucien, who brought in the soldiers and dispersed the council.
This little hitch did not affect the final success of the scheme. The
three Consuls were installed at the Luxembourg palace, with two
commissioners, to reconstruct the constitution.
With all his confidence restored and sure of the support of the people,
who supposed him to be honest, patriotic, republican, and able to bring
about a good peace, Napoleon took a high hand with his colleagues and
the commissioners. A constitution was produced in which the chief
executive officer was to be called the First Consul, with enormous
powers. He was to be Napoleon; this was part of the constitution. He was
to be re-elected or replaced at the end of ten years. He was to be
assisted by a Council of State, appointed by himself, which was to
initiate legislation and send its proposals to two bodies, the
Legislative Body (which could vote, but not discuss) and the Tribunate
(which could discuss, but not vote), which were _selected_ by an
appointed Senate from a special class, the “notabilities of France,” who
were elected by the “notabilities of the departments,” who were elected
by the “notabilities of the commune,” who were elected by the common
voters. The suffrage for the election of the notabilities of the commune
was universal. This was the sole vestige of democracy in the astounding
pyramid. This constitution was chiefly the joint production of a worthy
philosopher Sieyès, who was one of the three consuls, and Bonaparte. But
so weary was France with her troubles and efforts, and so confident were
men in the virtue and ability of this adventurer from Corsica, that
when, at the birth of the nineteenth century, this constitution was
submitted to the country, it was carried by 3,011,007 votes to 1,562.
France put herself absolutely in Bonaparte’s hands, and prepared to be
peaceful, happy, and glorious.
§ 3
Now surely here was opportunity such as never came to man before. Here
was a position in which a man might well bow himself in fear of himself,
and search his heart and serve God and man to the utmost. The old order
of things was dead or dying; strange new forces drove through the world
seeking form and direction; the promise of a world republic and an
enduring world peace whispered in a multitude of startled minds. Had
this man any profundity of vision, any power of creative imagination,
had he been accessible to any disinterested ambition, he might have done
work for mankind that would have made him the very sun of history. All
Europe and America, stirred by the first promise of a new age, was
waiting for him. Not France alone. France was in his hand, his
instrument, to do with as he pleased, willing for peace, but tempered
for war like an exquisite sword. There lacked nothing to this great
occasion but a noble imagination. And failing that, Napoleon could do no
more than strut upon the crest of this great mountain of opportunity
like a cockerel on a dunghill. The figure he makes in history is one of
almost incredible self-conceit, of vanity, greed, and cunning, of
callous contempt and disregard of all who trusted him, and of a
grandiose aping of Cæsar, Alexander, and Charlemagne which would be
purely comic if it were not caked over with human blood. Until, as
Victor Hugo said in his tremendous way, “God was bored by him,” and he
was kicked aside into a corner to end his days, explaining and
explaining how very clever his worst blunders had been, prowling about
his dismal hot island shooting birds and squabbling meanly with an
underbred gaoler who failed to show him proper “respect.”
His career as First Consul was perhaps the least dishonourable phase in
his career. He took the crumbling military affairs of the Directory in
hand, and after a complicated campaign in North Italy brought matters to
a head in the victory of Marengo, near Alessandria (1800). It was a
victory that at some moments came very near disaster. In the December of
the same year General Moreau, in the midst of snow, mud, and altogether
abominable weather, inflicted an overwhelming defeat upon the Austrian
army at Hohenlinden. If Napoleon had gained this battle, it would have
counted among his most characteristic and brilliant exploits. These
things made the hoped-for peace possible. In 1801 the preliminaries of
peace with England and Austria were signed. Peace with England, the
Treaty of Amiens, was concluded in 1802, and Napoleon was free to give
himself to the creative statecraft of which France, and Europe through
France, stood in need. The war had given the country extended
boundaries, the treaty with England restored the colonial empire of
France and left her in a position of security beyond the utmost dreams
of Louis XIV. It was open to Napoleon to work out and consolidate the
new order of things, to make a modern state that should become a beacon
and inspiration to Europe and all the world.
He attempted nothing of the sort. He did not realize that there were
such things as modern states in the scheme of possibility. His little
imitative imagination was full of a deep cunning dream of being Cæsar
over again--as if this universe would ever tolerate anything of that
sort over again! He was scheming to make himself a real emperor, with a
crown upon his head and all his rivals and school-fellows and friends at
his feet. This could give him no fresh power that he did not already
exercise, but it would be more splendid--it would astonish his mother.
What response was there in a head of that sort for the splendid creative
challenge of the time? But first France must be prosperous. France
hungry would certainly not endure an emperor. He set himself to carry
out an old scheme of roads that Louis XV had approved; he developed
canals in imitation of the English canals; he reorganized the police and
made the country safe; and, preparing the scene for his personal drama,
he set himself to make Paris look like Rome, with classical arches, with
classical columns. Admirable schemes for banking development were
available, and he made use of them. In all these things he moved with
the times, they would have happened--with less autocracy, with less
centralization, if he had never been born. And he set himself to weaken
the republicans whose fundamental convictions he was planning to
outrage. He recalled the émigrés, provided they gave satisfactory
assurances to respect the new régime. Many were very willing to come
back on such terms, and let Bourbons be bygones. And he worked out a
great reconciliation, a Concordat, with Rome. Rome was to support him,
and he was to restore the authority of Rome in the parishes. France
would never be obedient and manageable, he thought; she would never
stand a new monarchy, without religion. “How can you have order in a
state,” he said, “without religion? Society cannot exist without
inequality of fortunes, which cannot endure apart from religion. When
one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot
resign himself to this difference, unless there is an authority which
declares--‘God wills it thus: there must be poor and rich in the world:
but hereafter and during all eternity the division of things will take
place differently.’” Religion--especially of the later Roman brand--was,
in fact, excellent stuff for keeping the common people quiet. In his
early honest Jacobin days he had denounced it for that very reason.
Another great achievement which marks his imaginative scope and his
estimate of human nature was the institution of the Legion of Honour, a
scheme for decorating Frenchmen with bits of ribbon which was admirably
calculated to divert ambitious men from subversive proceedings.
(Washington, when he became President of the United States, abolished
the only order that has ever adorned any citizen of the American
republic, the Order of Cincinnatus, because he had no use for the snob
in his fellow man.)
And also Napoleon interested himself in Christian propaganda. Here is
the Napoleonic view of the political uses of Christ, a view that has
tainted all French missions from that time forth. “It is my wish to
re-establish the institution for foreign missions; for the religious
missionaries may be very useful to me in Asia, Africa, and America, as I
shall make them reconnoitre all the lands they visit. The sanctity of
their dress will not only protect them, but serve to conceal their
political and commercial investigations. The head of the missionary
establishment shall reside no longer at Rome, but in Paris.”
These are the ideas of a roguish merchant rather than a statesman. His
treatment of education shows the same narrow vision, the same blindness
to the realities of the dawn about him. Elementary education he
neglected almost completely; he left it to the conscience of the local
authorities, and he provided that the teachers should be paid out of the
fees of the scholars; it is clear he did not want the common people to
be educated; he had no glimmering of any understanding why they should
be; but he interested himself in the provision of technical and higher
schools because his state needed the services of clever, self-seeking,
well-informed men. This was an astounding retrogression from the great
scheme, drafted by Condorcet, for the Republic in 1792, for a complete
system of free education for the entire nation. Slowly but steadfastly
the project of Condorcet comes true; the great nations of the world are
being compelled to bring it nearer and nearer to realization, and the
cheap devices of Napoleon pass out of our interest. As for the education
of the mothers and wives of our race, this was the quality of Napoleon’s
wisdom: “I do not think that we need trouble ourselves with any plan of
instruction for young females, they cannot be better brought up than by
their mothers. Public education is not suitable for them, because they
are never called upon to act in public. Manners are all in all to them,
and marriage is all they look to.”
The First Consul was no kinder to women in the Code Napoleon. A wife,
for example, had no control over her own property; she was in her
husband’s hands. This code was the work very largely of the Council of
State. Napoleon seems rather to have hindered than helped its
deliberations. He would invade the session without notice, and favour
its members with lengthy and egotistical monologues, frequently quite
irrelevant to the matter in hand. The Council listened with profound
respect; it was all the Council could do. He would keep his councillors
up to unearthly hours, and betray a simple pride in his superior
wakefulness. He recalled these discussions with peculiar satisfaction in
his later years, and remarked on one occasion that his glory consisted
not in having won forty battles, but in having created the Code
Napoleon.... So far as it substituted plain statements for inaccessible
legal mysteries his Code was a good thing; it gathered together, revised
and made clear a vast disorderly accumulation of laws, old and new. Like
all his constructive work, it made for immediate efficiency, it defined
things and relations so that men could get to work upon them without
further discussion. It was of less immediate practical importance that
it frequently defined them wrongly. There was no intellectual power, as
distinguished from intellectual energy, behind this codification. It
took everything that existed for granted. (“Sa Majesté ne croit que ce
qui est.”[450]) The fundamental ideas of the civilized community and of
the terms of human co-operation were in a process of reconstruction all
about Napoleon--and he never perceived it. He accepted a phase of
change, and tried to fix it for ever. To this day France is cramped by
this early nineteenth-century strait-waistcoat into which he clapped
her. He fixed the status of women, the status of labourers, the status
of the peasant; they all struggle to this day in the net of his hard
definitions.
So briskly and forcibly Napoleon set his mind, hard, clear, narrow, and
base, to brace up France. That bracing up was only a part of the large
egotistical schemes that dominated him. His imagination was set upon a
new Cæsarism. In 1802 he got himself made First Consul for life with the
power of appointing a successor, and his clear intention of annexing
Holland and Italy, in spite of his treaty obligations to keep them
separate, made the Peace of Amiens totter crazily from the very
beginning. Since his schemes were bound to provoke a war with England,
he should, at any cost, have kept quiet until he had brought his navy to
a superiority over the British navy. He had the control of great
resources for ship-building, the British government was a weak one, and
three or four years would have sufficed to shift that balance. But in
spite of his rough experiences in Egypt, he had never mastered the
importance of sea power, and he had not the mental steadfastness for a
waiting game and long preparation. In 1803 his occupation of Switzerland
precipitated a crisis,[451] and war broke out again with England. The
weak Addington in England gave place to the greater Pitt. The rest of
Napoleon’s story turns upon that war.
During the period of the Consulate, the First Consul was very active in
advancing the fortunes of his brothers and sisters. This was quite
human, very clannish and Corsican, and it helps us to understand just
how he valued his position and the opportunities before him. Few of us
can live without an audience, and the first audience of our childhood is
our family; most of us to the end of our days are swayed by the desire
to impress our parents and brothers and sisters. Few “letters home” of
successful men or women display the graces of modesty and
self-forgetfulness. Only souls uplifted, as the soul of Jesus of
Nazareth was uplifted, can say of all the world, “Behold my mother and
my brethren!” A large factor in the making of Napoleon was the desire to
amaze, astonish, and subdue the minds of the Bonaparte family, and their
neighbours. He promoted his brothers ridiculously--for they were the
most ordinary of men. The hungry Bonapartes were in luck. Surely all
Corsica was open-mouthed! But one person who knew him well was neither
amazed nor subdued. This was his mother. He sent her money to spend and
astonish the neighbours; he exhorted her to make a display, to live as
became the mother of so marvellous, so world-shaking, a son. But the
good lady, who had birched the Man of Destiny at the age of sixteen for
grimacing at his grandmother, was neither dazzled nor deceived by him at
the age of thirty-two. All France might worship him, but she had no
illusions. She put by the money he sent her; she continued her customary
economies. “When it is all over,” she said, “you will be glad of my
savings.”
[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor]
§ 4
We will not detail the steps by which Napoleon became Emperor. His
coronation was the most extraordinary revival of stale history that it
is possible to imagine. Cæsar was no longer the model; Napoleon was
playing now at being Charlemagne. He was crowned emperor, not indeed at
Rome, but in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris; the Pope (Pius VII)
had been brought from Rome to perform the ceremony; and at the climax
Napoleon I seized the crown, waved the Pope aside, and crowned himself.
The attentive reader of this _Outline_ will know that a thousand years
before this would have had considerable significance; in 1804 it was
just a ridiculous scene. In 1806 Napoleon revived another venerable
antiquity, and, following still the footsteps of Charlemagne, crowned
himself with the iron crown of Lombardy in the cathedral of Milan. All
this mummery was to have a wonderful effect upon the imagination of
western Germany, which was to remember that it too had been a part of
the empire of Charlemagne.
The four daughter republics of France were now to become kingdoms; in
1806 he set up brother Louis in Holland and brother Joseph in Naples.
But the story of the subordinate kingdoms he created in Europe, helpful
though this free handling of frontiers was towards the subsequent
unification of Italy and Germany, is too complex and evanescent for this
_Outline_.
The pact between the new Charlemagne and the new Leo did not hold good
for very long. In 1807 he began to bully the Pope, and in 1811 he made
him a close prisoner at Fontainebleau. There does not seem to have been
much reason in these proceedings. They estranged all Catholic opinion,
as his coronation had estranged all liberal opinion. He ceased to stand
either for the old or the new. The new he had betrayed; the old he had
failed to win. He stood at last for nothing but himself.
There seems to have been as little reason in the foreign policy that now
plunged Europe into a fresh cycle of wars. Having quarreled with Great
Britain too soon, he (1804) assembled a vast army at Boulogne for the
conquest of England, regardless of the naval situation. He even struck a
medal and erected a column at Boulogne to commemorate the triumph of
this projected invasion. In some “Napoleonic” fashion the British fleet
was to be decoyed away, this army of Boulogne was to be smuggled across
the Channel on a flotilla of rafts and boats, and London was to be
captured before the fleet returned. At the same time his aggressions in
south Germany forced Austria and Russia steadily into a coalition with
Britain against him. In 1805 two fatal blows were struck at any hope he
may have entertained of ultimate victory, by the British Admirals Calder
and Nelson. In July the former inflicted a serious reverse upon the
French fleet in the Bay of Biscay; in October the latter destroyed the
joint fleets of France and Spain at the battle of Trafalgar. Nelson
died splendidly upon the _Victory_, victorious. Thereafter Napoleon was
left with Britain in pitiless opposition, unattainable and
unconquerable, able to strike here or there against him along all the
coasts of Europe.
But for a while the mortal wound of Trafalgar was hidden from the French
mind altogether. They heard merely that “storms have caused us to lose
some ships of the line after an imprudent fight.” After Calder’s victory
he had snatched his army from Boulogne, rushed it across half Europe,
and defeated the Austrian and Russian armies at Ulm and Austerlitz.
Under these inauspicious circumstances Prussia came into the war against
him, and was utterly defeated and broken at the battle of Jena (1806).
Although Austria and Prussia were broken, Russia was still a fighting
power, and the next year was devoted to this unnecessary antagonist of
the French, against whom an abler and saner ruler would never have
fought at all. We cannot trace in any detail the difficulties of the
Polish campaign against Russia; Napoleon was roughly handled at
Pultusk--which he announced in Paris as a brilliant victory--and again
at Eylau. Then the Russians were defeated at Friedland (1807). As yet he
had never touched Russian soil, the Russians were still as unbeaten as
the British; but now came an extraordinary piece of good fortune for
Napoleon. By a mixture of boasting, subtlety, and flattery he won over
the young and ambitious Tsar, Alexander I--he was just thirty years
old--to an alliance. The two emperors met on a raft in the middle of the
Niemen at Tilsit, and there came to an understanding.
[Illustration: Tsar Alexander I.]
This meeting was an occasion for sublime foolishness on the part of both
the principal actors. Alexander had imbibed much liberalism during his
education at the court of Catherine II, and was all for freedom,
education, and the new order of the world--subject to his own
pre-eminence. “He would gladly have everyone free,” said one of his
early associates, “provided that everyone was prepared to do freely
exactly what he wished.” And he declared that he would have abolished
serfdom if it had cost him his head--if only civilization had been more
advanced. He made war against France, he said, because Napoleon was a
tyrant, to free the French people. After Friedland he saw Napoleon in a
different light. These two men met eleven days after that rout;
Alexander no doubt in the state of explanatory exaltation natural to his
type during a mood of change.
To Napoleon the meeting must have been extremely gratifying. This was
his first meeting with an emperor upon terms of equality. Like all men
of limited vision, this man was a snob to the bone, his continual
solicitude for his titles shows as much, and here was a real emperor, a
born emperor, taking his three-year-old dignities as equivalent to the
authentic imperialism of Moscow. Two imaginations soared together upon
the raft at Tilsit. “What is Europe?” said Alexander. “_We_ are Europe.”
They discussed the affairs of Prussia and Austria in that spirit, they
divided Turkey in anticipation, they arranged for the conquest of India,
and indeed of most of Asia, and that Russia should take Finland from the
Swedes; and they disregarded the disagreeable fact that the greater part
of the world’s surface is sea, and that on the seas the British fleets
sailed now unchallenged. Close at hand was Poland, ready to rise up and
become the passionate ally of France had Napoleon but willed it so. But
he was blind to Poland. It was a day of visions without vision. Napoleon
even then, it seems, concealed the daring thought that he might one day
marry a Russian princess, a real princess. But that, he was to learn in
1810, was going a little too far.
After Tilsit there was a perceptible deterioration in Napoleon’s
quality; he became rasher, less patient of obstacles, more and more the
fated master of the world, more and more intolerable to everyone he
encountered.
In 1808 he committed a very serious blunder. Spain was his abject ally,
completely under his control, but he saw fit to depose its Bourbon king
in order to promote his brother Joseph from the crown of the two
Sicilies. Portugal he had already conquered, and the two kingdoms of
Spain and Portugal were to be united. Thereupon the Spanish arose in a
state of patriotic fury, surrounded a French army at Baylen, and
compelled it to surrender. It was an astonishing break in the French
career of victory.
The British were not slow to seize the foothold this insurrection gave
them. A British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley (afterwards the Duke of
Wellington) landed in Portugal, defeated the French at Vimiero, and
compelled them to retire into Spain. The news of these reverses caused a
very great excitement in Germany and Austria, and the Tsar assumed a
more arrogant attitude towards his ally.
There was another meeting of these two potentates at Erfurt, in which
the Tsar was manifestly less amenable to the dazzling tactics of
Napoleon than he had been. Followed four years of unstable “ascendancy”
for France, while the outlines on the map of Europe waved about like
garments on a clothesline on a windy day. Napoleon’s personal empire
grew by frank annexations to include Holland, much of western Germany,
much of Italy, and much of the eastern Adriatic coast. But one by one
the French colonies were falling to the British, and the British armies
in the Spanish peninsula, with the Spanish auxiliaries, slowly pressed
the French northward. All Europe was getting very weary of Napoleon and
very indignant with him; his antagonists now were no longer merely
monarchs and ministers, but whole peoples also. The Prussians, after the
disaster of Jena in 1807, had set to work to put their house in order.
Under the leadership of Freiherr von Stein they had swept aside their
feudalism, abolished privilege and serfdom, organized popular education
and popular patriotism, accomplished, in fact, without any internal
struggle nearly everything that France had achieved in 1789. By 1810 a
new Prussia existed, the nucleus of a new Germany. And now Alexander,
inspired it would seem by dreams of world ascendancy even crazier than
his rival’s, was posing again as the friend of liberty. In 1810 fresh
friction was created by Alexander’s objection to Napoleon’s matrimonial
ambitions. For he was now divorcing his old helper Josephine, because
she was childless, in order to secure the “continuity” of his
“dynasty.” Napoleon, thwarted of a Russian princess, snubbed indeed by
Alexander, turned to Austria, and married the arch-duchess Marie Louise.
The Austrian statesmen read him aright. They were very ready to throw
him their princess. By that marriage Napoleon was captured for the
dynastic system; he might have been the maker of a new world, he
preferred to be the son-in-law of the old.
[Illustration: The EMPIRE of NAPOLEON about 1810]
In the next two years this adventurer’s affairs crumbled apace. Nobody
believed in his pretensions any more. He was no longer the leader and
complement of the revolution; no longer the embodied spirit of a world
reborn; he was just a new and nastier sort of autocrat. He had estranged
all free-spirited men, and he had antagonized the church. Kings and
Jacobins were at one, when it came to the question of his overthrow.
Only base and self-seeking people supported him, because he seemed to
have the secret of success. Britain was now his inveterate enemy, Spain
was blazing with a spirit that surely a Corsican should have understood;
it needed only a breach with Alexander I to set this empire of bluff and
stage scenery swaying towards its downfall. The quarrel came.
Alexander’s feelings for Napoleon had always been of a very mixed sort;
he envied Napoleon as a rival, and despised him as an underbred upstart.
Moreover, there was a kind of vague and sentimental greatness about
Alexander; he was given to mystical religiosity, he had the conception
of a mission for Russia and himself to bring peace to Europe and the
world--by destroying Napoleon. In that respect he had an imaginative
greatness Napoleon lacked. But bringing peace to Europe seemed to him
quite compatible with the annexation of Finland, of most of Poland, and
of great portions of the Turkish empire. This man’s mind moved in a
luminous fog. And particularly he wanted to resume trading with Britain,
against which Napoleon had set his face. For all the trade of Germany
had been dislocated and the mercantile classes embittered by the
Napoleonic “Continental System,” which was to ruin Britain by excluding
British goods from every country in Europe. Russia had suffered more
even than Germany.
The breach came in 1811, when Alexander withdrew from the “Continental
System.” In 1812 a great mass of armies, amounting altogether to 600,000
men, began to move towards Russia under the supreme command of the new
emperor. About half this force was French; the rest was drawn from the
French allies and subject peoples. It was a conglomerate army like the
army of Darius or the army of Kavadh. The Spanish war was still going
on; Napoleon made no attempt to end it. Altogether, it drained away a
quarter of a million men from France. He fought his way across Poland
and Russia to Moscow before the winter--for the most part the Russian
armies declined battle--and even before the winter closed in upon him
his position became manifestly dangerous. He took Moscow, expecting that
this would oblige Alexander to make peace. Alexander would not make
peace, and Napoleon found himself in much the same position as Darius
had been in 2,300 years before in South Russia. The Russians, still
unconquered in a decisive battle, raided his communications, wasted his
army--disease helped them; even before Napoleon reached Moscow 150,000
men had been lost. But he lacked the wisdom of Darius, and would not
retreat. The winter remained mild for an unusually long time--he could
have escaped; but instead he remained in Moscow, making impossible
plans, at a loss. He had been marvellously lucky in all his previous
flounderings; he had escaped undeservedly from Egypt, he had been saved
from destruction in Britain by the British naval victories; but now he
was in the net again, and this time he was not to escape. Perhaps he
would have wintered in Moscow, but the Russians smoked him out; they set
fire to and burnt most of the city.[452]
It was late in October, too late altogether, before he decided to
return. He made an ineffectual attempt to break through to a fresh line
of retreat to the southwest, and then turned the faces of the survivors
of his Grand Army towards the country they had devastated in their
advance. Immense distances separated them from any friendly territory.
The winter was in no hurry. For a week the Grand Army struggled through
mud; then came sharp frosts, and then the first flakes of snow, and then
snow and snow....
Slowly discipline dissolved. The hungry army spread itself out in search
of supplies until it broke up into mere bands of marauders. The
peasants, if only in self-defence, rose against them, waylaid them, and
murdered them; a cloud of light cavalry--Scythians still--hunted them
down. That retreat is one of the great tragedies of history.
At last Napoleon and his staff and a handful of guards and attendants
reappeared in Germany, bringing no army with him, followed only by
straggling and demoralized bands. The Grand Army, retreating under
Murat, reached Königsberg in a disciplined state, but only about a
thousand strong out of six hundred thousand. From Königsberg Murat fell
back to Posen. The Prussian contingent had surrendered to the Russians;
the Austrians had gone homeward to the south. Everywhere scattered
fugitives, ragged, lean, and frost-bitten, spread the news of the
disaster.
Napoleon’s magic was nearly exhausted. He did not dare to stay with his
troops in Germany; he fled post haste to Paris. He began to order new
levies and gather fresh armies amidst the wreckage of his world empire.
Austria turned against him (1813); all Europe was eager to rise against
this defaulting trustee of freedom, this mere usurper. He had betrayed
the new order; the old order he had saved and revived now destroyed him.
Prussia rose, and the German “War of Liberation” began. Sweden joined
his enemies. Later Holland revolted. Murat had rallied about 14,000
Frenchmen round his disciplined nucleus in Posen, and this force
retreated through Germany, as a man might retreat who had ventured into
a cageful of drugged lions and found that the effects of the drug were
evaporating. Napoleon, with fresh forces, took up the chief command in
the spring, won a great battle at Dresden, and then for a time he seems
to have gone to pieces intellectually and morally. He became insanely
irritable, with moods of inaction. He did little or nothing to follow up
the Battle of Dresden. In September the “Battle of the Nations” was
fought round and about Leipzig, after which the Saxons, who had hitherto
followed his star, went over to the allies. The end of the year saw the
French beaten back into France.
1814 was the closing campaign. France was invaded from the east and the
south; Swedes, Germans, Austrians, Russians, crossed the Rhine; British
and Spanish came through the Pyrenees. Once more Napoleon fought
brilliantly, but now he fought ineffectually. The eastern armies did not
so much defeat him as push past him, and Paris capitulated in March. A
little later at Fontainebleau the emperor abdicated.
In Provence, on his way out of the country, his life was endangered by a
royalist mob.
§ 5
[Illustration: The TRAIL of NAPOLEON]
This was the natural and proper end of Napoleon’s career. So this raid
of an intolerable egotist across the disordered beginnings of a new time
should have closed. At last he was suppressed. And had there been any
real wisdom in the conduct of human affairs, we should now have to tell
of the concentration of human science and will upon the task his
treachery and vanity had interrupted, the task of building up a world
system of justice and free effort in the place of the bankrupt ancient
order. But we have to tell of nothing of the sort. Science and wisdom
were conspicuously absent from the great council of the allies. Came the
vague humanitarianism and dreamy vanity of the Tsar Alexander, came the
shaken Habsburgs of Austria, the resentful Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the
aristocratic traditions of Britain, still badly frightened by the
revolution and its conscience all awry with stolen commons and sweated
factory children. No peoples came to the Congress, but only monarchs and
foreign ministers; and though you bray a foreign office in the bloodiest
of war mortars, yet will its diplomatic habits not depart from it. The
Congress had hardly assembled before the diplomatists set to work making
secret bargains and treaties behind each other’s backs. Nothing could
exceed the pompous triviality of the Congress which gathered at Vienna
after a magnificent ceremonial visit of the allied sovereigns to London.
The social side of the congress was very strong, pretty ladies abounded,
there was a galaxy of stars and uniforms, endless dinners and balls, a
mighty flow of bright anecdotes and sparkling wit. Whether the two
million dead men upon the battle-fields laughed at the jokes, admired
the assemblies, and marvelled at the diplomatists is beyond our
knowledge. It is to be hoped their poor wraiths got something out of the
display. The brightest spirit of the gathering was a certain Talleyrand,
one of Napoleon’s princes, a very brilliant man indeed, who had been a
pre-revolutionary cleric, who had proposed the revolutionary
confiscation of the church estates, and who was now for bringing back
the Bourbons.
The allies, after the fashion of Peace Congresses, frittered away
precious time in more and more rapacious disputes; the Bourbons returned
to France. Back came all the remainder of the émigrés with them, eager
for restitution and revenge. One great egotism had been swept
aside--only to reveal a crowd of meaner egotists. The new king was the
brother of Louis XVI; he had taken the title of Louis XVIII very eagerly
so soon as he learnt that his little nephew (Louis XVII) was dead in the
Temple. He was gouty and clumsy, not perhaps ill-disposed, but the
symbol of the ancient system; all that was new in France felt the heavy
threat of reaction that came with him. This was no liberation, only a
new tyranny, a heavy and inglorious tyranny instead of an active and
splendid one. Was there no hope for France but this? The Bourbons showed
particular malice against the veterans of the Grand Army, and France was
now full of returned prisoners of war, who found themselves under a
cloud. Napoleon had been packed off to a little consolation empire of
his own, upon the island of Elba. He was still to be called Emperor and
keep a certain state. The chivalry or whim of Alexander had insisted
upon this treatment of his fallen rival. The Habsburgs, who had toadied
to his success, had taken away his Habsburg empress--she went willingly
enough--to Vienna, and he never saw her again.
After eleven months at Elba Napoleon judged that France had had enough
of the Bourbons; he contrived to evade the British ships that watched
his island, and reappeared at Cannes in France for his last gamble
against fate. His progress to Paris was a triumphal procession; he
walked on white Bourbon cockades. For a hundred days, “the Hundred
Days,” he was master of France again.
His return created a perplexing position for any honest Frenchman. On
the one hand there was this adventurer who had betrayed the republic; on
the other the dull weight of old kingship restored. The allies would not
hear of any further experiments in republicanism; it was the Bourbons or
Napoleon. Is it any wonder that on the whole France was with Napoleon?
And he came back professing to be a changed man; there was to be no more
despotism; he would respect the constitution régime....
He gathered an army, he made some attempts at peace with the allies;
when he found these efforts ineffectual, he struck swiftly at the
British, Dutch, and Prussians in Belgium, hoping to defeat them before
the Austrians and Russians could come up. He did very nearly manage
this. He beat the Prussians at Ligny, but not sufficiently; and then he
was hopelessly defeated by the tenacity of the British under Wellington
at Waterloo (1815), the Prussians, under Blücher, coming in on his right
flank as the day wore on. Waterloo ended in a rout; it left Napoleon
without support and without hope. France fell away from him again.
Everyone who had joined him was eager now to attack him, and so efface
that error. A provisional government in Paris ordered him to leave the
country; was for giving him twenty-four hours to do it in.
He tried to get to America, but Rochefort, which he reached, was watched
by British cruisers. France, now disillusioned and uncomfortably
royalist again, was hot in pursuit of him. He went aboard a British
frigate, the _Bellerophon_, asking to be received as a refugee, but
being treated as a prisoner. He was taken to Plymouth, and from Plymouth
straight to the lonely tropical island of St. Helena.
There he remained until his death from cancer in 1821, devoting himself
chiefly to the preparation of his memoirs, which were designed to
exhibit the chief events of his life in a misleading and attractive
light and to minimize his worst blunders. One or two of the men with him
recorded his conversations and set down their impressions of him.
These works had a great vogue in France and Europe. The Holy Alliance of
the monarchs of Russia, Austria, and Prussia (to which other monarchs
were invited to adhere) laboured under the delusion that in defeating
Napoleon they had defeated the Revolution, turned back the clock of
fate, and restored Grand Monarchy--on a sanctified basis for evermore.
The cardinal document of the scheme of the Holy Alliance is said to have
been drawn up under the inspiration of the Baroness von Krüdener, who
seems to have been a sort of spiritual director to the Russian emperor.
It opened, “In the name of the Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity,” and
it bound the participating monarchs “regarding themselves towards their
subjects and armies as fathers of families,” and “considering each other
as fellow-countrymen,” to sustain each other, protect true religion, and
urge their subjects to strengthen and exercise themselves in Christian
duties. Christ, it was declared, was the real king of all Christian
peoples, a very Merovingian king, one may remark, with these reigning
sovereigns as his mayors of the palace. The British king had no power to
sign this document, the Pope and the sultan were not asked; the rest of
the European monarchs, including the king of France, adhered. But the
king of Poland did not sign because there was no king in Poland;
Alexander, in a mood of pious abstraction, was sitting on the greater
part of Poland. The Holy Alliance never became an actual legal alliance
of states; it gave place to a real league of nations, the Concert of
Europe, which France joined in 1818, and from which Britain withdrew in
1822.
There followed a period of peace and dull oppression in Europe over
which Alexander brooded in attitudes of orthodoxy, piety, and
unquenchable self-satisfaction. Many people in those hopeless days were
disposed to regard even Napoleon with charity, and to accept his claim
that in some inexplicable way he had, in asserting himself, been
asserting the revolution and France. A cult of him as of something
mystically heroic grew up after his death.[453]
§ 6
In the long perspectives of history the cult of Napoleon, and his
peculiar effect upon certain types of mind, is of far more interest and
far more importance than his actual adventures. The world has largely
recovered from the mischief he did; perhaps that amount of mischief had
to be done by some agency; perhaps his career, or some such career, was
a necessary consequence of the world’s mental unpreparedness for the
crisis of the revolution. But that his peculiar personality should
dominate the imaginations of great numbers of people, throws a light
upon factors of enduring significance in our human problem.
It would be difficult to find a human being less likely to arouse
affection. One reads in vain through the monstrous accumulations of
Napoleonic literature for a single record of self-forgetfulness.
Laughter is one great difference between man and the lower animals, one
method of our brotherhood, and there is no evidence that Napoleon ever
laughed. Nor can we imagine another of the most beautiful of human
expressions upon the face of this saturnine egotist, that expression of
disinterested interest that one sees in the face of an artist or artisan
“lost,” as we say, in his work. Out of his portraits he looks at us with
a thin scorn upon his lips, the scorn of the criminal who believes that
he can certainly cheat such fools as we are, and withal with a certain
uneasiness in his eyes. That uneasiness haunts all his portraits. Are
we really convinced he is quite right? Are his laurels straight? He had
a vast contempt for man in general and men in particular, a contempt
that took him at last to St. Helena, that same contempt that fills our
jails with forgers, poisoners, and the like victims of self-conceit.
There is no proof that this unbrotherly, unhumorous egotist was ever
sincerely loved by any human being. The Empress Josephine was unfaithful
to him as he to her. His young Austrian wife would not accompany him to
Elba. A certain Polish countess followed him thither, but not, it would
seem, for love, but on account of the son she had borne him. She wanted
settlements. She stayed only two days with him. He had never even a dog
to love him. He estranged most of his colleagues and fellow generals. He
had no familiar friend. No one who knew him felt safe with him. In his
intimacy, his unflinching self-concentration must have been a terrible
bore. His personal habits were unpleasant; the moodiness of bad health
came to him early. True it is that his soldiers, who, save for a few
rare melodramatic encounters, saw nothing of him, idolized their “Little
Corporal.” But it was not him they idolized, but a carefully fostered
legend of an incredibly clever, recklessly brave little man, a little
pet of a man, who was devoted to France and them.
Why, then, is there an enormous cult of Napoleon, an endless writing of
books about him, an insatiable collecting of relics and documents, a
kind of worship of his memory? Marat was a far more noble, persistent,
subtle, and pathetic figure; Talleyrand a greater statesman and a much
more amusing personality; Moreau and Hoche abler leaders of armies; his
rival, the Tsar Alexander, as egotistical, more successful, more
emotional, and with a finer imagination. Are men dazzled simply by the
scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?
No doubt scale has something to do with the matter; he was a “record,”
the record plunger; but there is something more in it than that. There
is an appeal in Napoleon to something deeper and more fundamental in
human nature than mere astonishment at bigness. His very deficiencies
bring out starkly certain qualities that lurk suppressed and hidden in
us all. He was unhampered. He had never a gleam of religion or affection
or the sense of duty. He was, as few men are or dare to be, a
scoundrel, bright and complete. Most of us are constrained more or less
and now and then to serve God or our fellow men, to do things
disinterestedly, to behave decently when no one is watching us. He was
not so constrained. Most men do a little regret and resent their good
deeds, and find a secret satisfaction in their unpunished bad ones. The
early palæolithic strain is still strong in us; we are being made over,
slowly and reluctantly, into social and fraternal creatures. Few of us
thoroughly enjoy being good citizens. Our moral conflicts, therefore,
are intricate and comic; the constant effort to explain to ourselves and
others that there is a fine moral purpose in this shirking of our duty
or in that self-seeking act. We are all regretfully of the race of Tsar
Alexander, who destroyed the freedom of Poland, annexed Finland, and
secured his imperial predominance piously, “in the name of the most Holy
and Indivisible Trinity”--when it would have been far more agreeable to
have done it in the name of the most Holy and Magnificent Alexander.
There was none of this robing of greed and crime about Napoleon. His
self-conceit and his instinctive and fundamental atheism made him at
least magnificently direct. What we all want to do secretly, more or
less, he did in the daylight.
Directness was his distinctive and immortalizing quality. He had no
brains to waste in secondary considerations. He flung his armies across
Europe straight at their mark, there never were such marches before; he
fought to win; when he struck he struck with all his might. And what he
wanted, he wanted simply and completely, and got--if he could.
There lies his fascination. Since his time his name has been one of the
utmost reassurance to great multitudes of doubting men; to the business
man hesitating over a more than shady transaction, to the clerk
fingering a carelessly written cheque that could so easily be altered,
to the trustee in want of ready money, to the manufacturer meditating
the pros and cons of an adulteration, to thousands of such people the
word “Napoleonic” has come with an effect of decisive relief. We live in
a world full of would-be Napoleons of finance, of the press, of the
turf; half the cells in our jails and many in our mad-houses are St.
Helenas. He was the very embodiment of that sound, clear, self-centred
common sense, without sentiment or scruples or reflection, that
struggles with our feebler better nature, that may ultimately destroy
mankind. In all history there is no figure so completely antithetical to
the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, whose pitiless and difficult doctrine
of self-abandonment and self-forgetfulness we can neither disregard nor
yet bring ourselves to obey. That summons to a new way of life haunts
our world to-day, haunts wealth and comfort and every sort of success.
It is a trouble to us all. Our uneasiness grows. Napoleon was free from
it. The cultivation of the Napoleonic legend seems to offer a kind of
refuge. From salvation.
In that antithesis lies the essential historical importance of Napoleon.
His career marks the beginning of a new phase in the elations of strong
and able and energetic and advantageously placed men to the main mass of
mankind. They are robbed of Self-deception; they must either serve or
openly defy the idea of service. They must be humble or Napoleonic;
there is no more service with privilege and pride. Napoleon adorned
himself with ancient titles and antiquated robes, but the more he
brought himself into contact with tradition, the more manifestly he
displayed himself as something new. In the Tsar Alexander I, who was
never direct, this direct new imperialism met the old. Hitherto the
kings and potentates of the world had taken themselves in good faith,
had had the support of religion in their consciences, had believed they
were serving God in their kingship, and that they were necessary to
mankind and beneficial to mankind. In many cases they were no doubt
swayed by very mixed motives, his majesty had “weaknesses,” his majesty
almost always had a sensitive personal vanity. Sometimes, indeed, a born
rascal like Charles II of England would have the grace or the
gracelessness to laugh at himself, but the generality of kings and
tyrants had the profoundest faith in themselves, and were sustained by
the sincere faith of their loyal supporters. The emperor Charles V and
his son Philip II, Charles I of England, Louis XIV, and the Tsar
Alexander were all inspired by a complete assurance of their own
righteousness, were convinced that opposition to them was sheer
wickedness, wickedness to be overcome in any way and punished with the
utmost severity. But Napoleon knew himself for what he was, an
individual man getting the better of his fellow men. He had small doubt
in his struggle with the republicans, where the moral superiority lay.
With Napoleon, we note the beginning of a clearer-headed age. The
self-deceptions of wealth, power, and prominence wear thin. His new
imperialism reflected upon the old.
For a time the Concert of Europe struggled valiantly to carry on upon
the old lines, but the French Revolution had shrivelled the heart of
monarchy. In 1830, and again in 1848, the evaporation of the simple old
royalist faith became very evident. Alexander I and his narrow-minded
successor, Nicholas I, could still sustain the delusion of divine right
in Russia--that did not perish until 1917--the idea hung on in Prussia
in spite of much muttered criticism,[454] but for the rest of Europe the
days of the unchallenged claim of kingship had gone. “What good are
you?” said the world to monarchs; “and what do you do for us?”
So challenged, many of the monarchs became apologetic and fussily
useful. One or two, as we shall have to tell, became “Napoleonic.” But
so far no European monarch has betrayed any disposition to waive the
remnant of his ancient trappings, to cease his passive and traditional
opposition to political readjustment, and to move of his own accord
towards that more broadly conceived government of human affairs as one
world-wide community of will, which the future welfare of mankind
demands.
§ 7[455]
For nearly forty years the idea of the Holy Alliance, the Concert of
Europe which arose out of it, and the series of congresses and
conferences that succeeded the concert, kept an insecure peace in
war-exhausted Europe. Two main things prevented that period from being a
complete social and international peace, and prepared the way for the
cycle of wars between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency
of the royal courts concerned, towards the restoration of unfair
privilege and interference with freedom of thought and writing and
teaching. The second was the impossible system of boundaries drawn by
the diplomatists of Vienna.
The obstinate disposition of monarchy to march back towards past
conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain. Here even
the Inquisition was restored. Across the Atlantic the Spanish colonies
had followed the example of the United States and revolted against the
European Great Power system, when Napoleon set up his brother Joseph
upon the Spanish throne in 1810. The Washington of South America was
General Bolivar. Spain was unable to suppress this revolt, it dragged on
much as the United States War of Independence had dragged on, and at
last the suggestion was made by Austria in accordance with the spirit of
the Holy Alliance, that the European monarchs should assist Spain in
this struggle. This was opposed by Britain in Europe, but it was the
prompt action of President Monroe of the United States in 1823 which
conclusively warned off this projected monarchist restoration. He
announced that the United States would regard any extension of the
European system in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile act. Thus arose
the Monroe Doctrine, which has kept the Great Power System out of
America for nearly a hundred years, and permitted the new states of
Spanish America to work out their destinies along their own lines. But
if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies, it could at least, under the
protection of the Concert of Europe, do what it chose in Europe. A
popular insurrection in Spain was crushed by a French army in 1823, with
a mandate from a European congress, and simultaneously Austria
suppressed a revolution in Naples. The moving spirit in this conspiracy
of governments against peoples was the Austrian statesman, Metternich.
In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by that Count d’Artois whom
we have seen hovering as an émigré on the French frontiers in 1789; he
took the title of Charles X. Charles set himself to destroy the liberty
of the press and universities, and to restore absolute government; the
sum of a billion francs was voted to compensate the nobles for the
château burnings and sequestrations of 1789. In 1830 Paris rose against
this embodiment of the ancient régime, and replaced him by the son of
that sinister Philip, Duke of Orleans, whose execution was one of the
brightest achievements of the Terror. The other continental monarchies,
in face of the open approval of the revolution by Great Britain and a
strong liberal ferment in Germany and Austria, did not interfere in this
affair. After all, France was still a monarchy. This young man, Louis
Philippe (1830-48), remained the constitutional king of France for
eighteen years. He went down in 1848, a very eventful year for Europe,
of which we shall tell in the next chapter.
[Illustration: EUROPE after the Congress of Vienna]
Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the Congress of Vienna,
which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings to which, sooner or
later, all monarchist courts seem by their very nature to gravitate. The
stresses that arose from the unscientific map-making of the diplomatists
gathered force more deliberately, but they were even more dangerous to
the peace of mankind. It is extraordinarily inconvenient to administer
together the affairs of peoples speaking different languages and so
reading different literatures and having different general ideas,
especially if those differences are exacerbated by religious disputes.
Only some strong mutual interest, such as the common defensive needs of
the Swiss mountaineers, can justify a close linking of peoples of
dissimilar languages and faiths; and even in Switzerland there is the
utmost local autonomy. Ultimately, when the Great Power tradition is
certainly dead and buried, those Swiss populations may gravitate towards
their natural affinities in Germany, France, and Italy. When, as in
Macedonia, populations are mixed in a patchwork of villages and
districts, the cantonal system is imperatively needed. But if the reader
will look at the map of Europe as the Congress of Vienna drew it, he
will see that this gathering seems almost as if it had planned the
maximum of local exasperation. It destroyed the Dutch Republic, quite
needlessly, it lumped together the Protestant Dutch with the
French-speaking Catholics of the old Spanish (Austrian) Netherlands, and
set up a kingdom of the Netherlands. It handed over not merely the old
republic of Venice, but all of North Italy as far as Milan to the
German-speaking Austrians. French-speaking Savoy it combined with pieces
of Italy to restore the kingdom of Sardinia.[456] Austria and Hungary,
already a sufficiently explosive mixture of discordant nationalities,
Germans, Hungarians, Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, Roumanians, and now
Italians, was made still more impossible by confirming Austria’s Polish
acquisitions of 1772 and 1795. The Polish people, being catholic and
republican-spirited, were chiefly given over to the less civilized rule
of the Greek-orthodox Tsar, but important districts went to Protestant
Russia. The Tsar was also confirmed in his acquisition of the entirely
alien Finns. The very dissimilar Norwegian and Swedish peoples were
bound together under one king. Germany, the reader will see, was left
in a particularly dangerous state of muddle. Prussia and Austria were
both partly in and partly out of a German confederation, which included
a multitude of minor states. The King of Denmark came into the German
confederation by virtue of certain German-speaking possessions in
Holstein. Luxembourg was included in the German Confederation, though
its ruler was also King of the Netherlands, and though many of its
peoples talked French. Here was a crazy tangle, an outrage on the common
sense of mankind, a preposterous disregard of the fact that the people
who talk German and base their ideas on German literature, the people
who talk Italian and base their ideas on Italian literature, and the
people who talk Polish and base their ideas on Polish literature, will
all be far better off and most helpful and least obnoxious to the rest
of mankind if they conduct their own affairs in their own idiom within
the ring-fence of their own speech. Is it any wonder that one of the
most popular songs in Germany during this period declared that wherever
the German tongue was spoken, there was the German Fatherland?
Even to-day men are still reluctant to recognize that areas of
government are not matters for the bargaining and interplay of tsars and
kings and foreign offices. There is _a natural and necessary political
map of the world_ which transcends these things. There is _a best way
possible_ of dividing any part of the world into administrative areas,
and a best possible kind of government for every area, having regard to
the speech and race of its inhabitants, and it is the common concern of
all men of intelligence to secure those divisions and establish those
forms of government quite irrespective of diplomacies and flags,
“claims” and melodramatic “loyalties” and the existing political map of
the world. The natural political map of the world insists upon itself.
It heaves and frets beneath the artificial political map like some
misfitted giant. In 1830 French-speaking Belgium, stirred up by the
current revolution in France, revolted against its Dutch association in
the kingdom of the Netherlands. The Powers, terrified at the possibility
of a republic and of annexation to France, hurried in to pacify this
situation, and gave the Belgians a monarch from that rich
breeding-ground of monarchs, Germany, Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg Gotha.
There were also ineffectual revolts in Italy and Germany in 1830, and a
much more serious one in Russian Poland. A republican government held
out in Warsaw for a year against Nicholas I (who succeeded Alexander in
1825), and was then stamped out of existence with great violence and
cruelty. The Polish language was banned, and the Greek Orthodox church
was substituted for the Roman Catholic as the State religion....
An outbreak of the natural political map of the world, which occurred in
1821, ultimately secured the support of England, France, and Russia.
This was the insurrection of the Greeks against the Turks. For six years
they fought a desperate war, while the governments of Europe looked on.
Liberal opinion protested against this inactivity; volunteers from every
European country joined the insurgents, and at last Britain, France, and
Russia took joint action. The Turkish fleet was destroyed by the French
and English at the Battle of Navarino (1827), and the Tsar invaded
Turkey. By the treaty of Adrianople (1829) Greece was declared free, but
she was not permitted to resume her ancient republican traditions. There
is a sort of historical indecency in a Greek monarchy. But a Greek
republic would have been dangerous to all monarchy in a Europe that
fretted under the ideas of the Holy Alliance. One monarch makes many. A
German king was found for Greece, one Prince Otto of Bavaria, slightly
demented, but quite royal--he gave way to delusions about his divine
right, and was ejected in 1862--and Christian governors were set up in
the Danubian provinces (which are now Roumania) and Serbia (a part of
the Jugo-Slav region). This was a partial concession to the natural
political map, but much blood had still to run before the Turk was
altogether expelled from these lands. A little later the natural
political map was to assert itself in Italy and Germany.
[Illustration: The NATURAL POLITICAL MAP of EUROPE]
XXXIX
THE REALITIES AND IMAGINATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[457]
§ 1. _The Mechanical Revolution._ § 2. _Relation of the Mechanical
to the Industrial Revolution._ § 3. _The Fermentation of Ideas,
1848._ § 4. _The Development of the Idea of Socialism._ § 5.
_Shortcomings of Socialism as a Scheme of Human Society._ § 6. _How
Darwinism Affected Religious and Political Ideas._ § 7. _Mr.
Gladstone and the Idea of Nationalism._ § 8. _Europe between 1848
and 1878._ § 9. _The (Second) Scramble for Overseas Empires._ § 10.
_The Indian Precedent in Asia._ § 11. _The History of Japan._ § 12.
_Close of the Period of Overseas Expansion._ § 13. _The British
Empire in 1914._
§ 1
The career and personality of Napoleon I bulks disproportionately in the
nineteenth century histories. He was of little significance to the broad
onward movement of human affairs; he was an interruption, a reminder of
latent evils, a thing like the bacterium of some pestilence. Even
regarded as a pestilence, he was not of supreme rank; he killed far
fewer people than the influenza epidemic of 1918, and produced less
political and social disruption than the plague of Justinian. Some such
interlude had to happen, and some such patched-up settlement of Europe
as the Concert of Europe, because there was no worked-out system of
ideas upon which a new world could be constructed. And even the Concert
of Europe had in it an element of progress. It did at least set aside
the individualism of Machiavellian monarchy and declare that there was a
human or at any rate a European commonweal. If it divided the world
among the kings, it made respectful gestures towards human unity and the
service of God and man.
The permanently effective task before mankind which had to be done
before any new and enduring social and political edifice was possible,
the task upon which the human intelligence is, with many interruptions
and amidst much anger and turmoil, still engaged, was, and is, the task
of working out and applying a Science of Property as a basis for freedom
and social justice, a Science of Currency to ensure and preserve an
efficient economic medium, a Science of Government and Collective
Operations whereby in every community men may learn to pursue their
common interests in harmony, a Science of World Politics, through which
the stark waste and cruelty of warfare between races, peoples, and
nations may be brought to an end and the common interests of mankind
brought under a common control, and, above all, a world-wide System of
Education to sustain the will and interest of men in their common human
adventure. The real makers of history in the nineteenth century, the
people whose consequences will be determining human life a century
ahead, were those who advanced and contributed to this fivefold
constructive effort. Compared to them, the foreign ministers and
“statesmen” and politicians of this period were no more than a number of
troublesome and occasionally incendiary schoolboys--and a few metal
thieves--playing about and doing transitory mischief amidst the
accumulating materials upon the site of a great building whose nature
they did not understand.
And while throughout the nineteenth century the mind of Western
civilization, which the Renascence had released, gathered itself to the
task of creative social and political reconstruction that still lies
before it, there swept across the world a wave of universal change in
human power and the material conditions of life that the first
scientific efforts of that liberated mind had made possible. The
prophecies of Roger Bacon began to live in reality. The accumulating
knowledge and confidence of the little succession of men who had been
carrying on the development of science, now began to bear fruit that
common men could understand. The most obvious firstfruit was the
steam-engine. The first steam-engines in the eighteenth century were
pumping engines used to keep water out of the newly opened coal mines.
These coal mines were being worked to supply coke for iron smelting, for
which wood-charcoal had previously been employed. It was James Watt, a
mathematical instrument maker of Glasgow, who improved this
steam-pumping engine and made it available for the driving of machinery.
The first engine so employed was installed in a cotton mill in
Nottingham in 1785. In 1804 Trevithick adapted the Watt engine to
transport, and made the first locomotive. In 1830 the first railway,
between Liverpool and Manchester, was opened, and Stephenson’s “Rocket,”
with a thirteen-ton train, got up to a speed of forty-four miles per
hour. From 1830 onward railways multiplied. By the middle of the century
a network of railways had spread all over Europe.
Here was a sudden change in what had long been a fixed condition of
human life, the maximum rate of land transport. After the Russian
disaster, Napoleon travelled from near Vilna to Paris in 312 hours. This
was a journey of about 1,400 miles. He was travelling with every
conceivable advantage, and he averaged under five miles an hour. An
ordinary traveller could not have done this distance in twice the time.
These were about the same maximum rates of travel as held good between
Rome and Gaul in the first century A.D., or between Sardis and Susa in
the fourth century B.C. Then suddenly came a tremendous change. The
railways reduced this journey for any ordinary traveller to less than
forty-eight hours. That is to say, they reduced the chief European
distances to about a tenth of what they had been. They made it possible
to carry out administrative work in areas ten times as great as any that
had hitherto been workable under one administration. The full
significance of that possibility in Europe still remains to be realized.
Europe is still netted in boundaries drawn in the horse and road era. In
America the effects were immediate. To the United States of America,
sprawling westward, it meant the possibility of a continuous access to
Washington, however far the frontier travelled across the continent. It
meant unity, sustained on a scale that would otherwise have been
impossible.
The steamboat was, if anything, a little ahead of the steam-engine in
its earlier phases. There was a steamboat, the _Charlotte Dundas_, on
the Firth of Clyde Canal in 1802, and in 1807 an American named Fulton
had a paying steamer, _The Clermont_, with British-built engines, upon
the Hudson River above New York. The first steamship to put to sea was
also an American, the _Phœnix_, which went from New York (Hoboken) to
Philadelphia. So, too, was the first ship using steam (she also had
sails) to cross the Atlantic, the _Savannah_ (1819). All these were
paddle-wheel boats, and paddle-wheel boats are not adapted to work in
heavy seas. The paddles smash too easily, and the boat is then disabled.
The screw steamship followed rather slowly. Many difficulties had to be
surmounted before the screw was a practicable thing. Not until the
middle of the century did the tonnage of steamships upon the sea begin
to overhaul that of sailing-ships. After that the evolution in sea
transport was rapid. For the first time men began to cross the seas and
oceans with some certainty as to the date of their arrival. The
transatlantic crossing, which had been an uncertain adventure of several
weeks--which might stretch to months--was accelerated, until in 1910 it
was brought down, in the case of the fastest boats, to under five days,
with a practically notifiable hour of arrival. All over the oceans there
was the same reduction in the time and the same increase in the
certainty of human communications.
Concurrently with the development of steam transport upon land and sea a
new and striking addition to the facilities of human intercourse arose
out of the investigations of Volta, Galvani, and Faraday into various
electrical phenomena. The electric telegraph came into existence in
1835. The first underseas cable was laid in 1851 between France and
England. In a few years the telegraph system had spread over the
civilized world, and news which had hitherto travelled slowly from point
to point became practically simultaneous throughout the earth.
These things, the steam railway and the electric telegraph, were to the
popular imagination of the middle nineteenth century the most striking
and revolutionary of inventions, but they were only the most
conspicuous and clumsy firstfruits of a far more extensive process.
Technical knowledge and skill were developing with an extraordinary
rapidity, and to an extraordinary extent measured by the progress of any
previous age. Far less conspicuous at first in everyday life, but
finally far more important, was the extension of man’s power over
various structural materials. Before the middle of the eighteenth
century iron was reduced from its ores by means of wood-charcoal, was
handled in small pieces, and hammered and wrought into shape. It was
material for a craftsman. Quality and treatment were enormously
dependent upon the experience and sagacity of the individual iron
worker. The largest masses of iron that could be dealt with under those
conditions amounted at most (in the sixteenth century) to two or three
tons. (There was a very definite upward limit, therefore, to the size of
cannon.) The blast furnace arose in the eighteenth century, and
developed with the use of coke. Not before the eighteenth century do we
find rolled sheet iron (1728) and rolled rods and bars (1783). Nasmyth’s
steam hammer came as late as 1838. The ancient world, because of its
metallurgical inferiority, could not use steam. The steam engine, even
the primitive pumping engine, could not develop before sheet iron was
available. The early engines seem to the modern eye very pitiful and
clumsy bits of ironmongery, but they were the utmost that the
metallurgical science of the time could do. As late as 1856 came the
Bessemer process, and presently (1864) the open-hearth process, in which
steel and every sort of iron could be melted, purified, and cast in a
manner and upon a scale hitherto unheard of. To-day in the electric
furnace one may see tons of incandescent steel swirling about like
boiling milk in a saucepan. Nothing in the previous practical advances
of mankind is comparable in its consequences to the complete mastery
over enormous masses of steel and iron and over their texture and
quality which man has now achieved. The railways and early engines of
all sorts were the mere first triumphs of the new metallurgical methods.
Presently came ships of iron and steel, vast bridges, and a new way of
building with steel upon a gigantic scale. Men realized too late that
they had planned their railways with far too timid a gauge, that they
could have organized their travelling with far more steadiness and
comfort upon a much bigger scale.
Before the nineteenth century there were no ships in the world much over
2,000 tons burthen; now there is nothing wonderful about a 50,000-ton
liner. There are people who sneer at this kind of progress as being a
progress in “mere size,” but that sort of sneering merely marks the
intellectual limitations of those who indulge in it. The great ship or
the steel-frame building is not, as they imagine, a magnified version of
the small ship or building of the past; it is a thing different in kind,
more lightly and strongly built, of finer and stronger materials;
instead of being a thing of precedent and rule-of-thumb, it is a thing
of subtle and intricate calculation. In the old house or ship, matter
was dominant--the material and its needs had to be slavishly obeyed; in
the new, matter has been captured, changed, coerced. Think of the coal
and iron and sand dragged out of the banks and pits, wrenched, wrought,
molten and cast, to be flung at last, a slender, glittering pinnacle of
steel and glass, six hundred feet above the crowded city!
We have given these particulars of the advance in man’s knowledge of the
metallurgy of steel and its results by way of illustration. A parallel
story could be told of the metallurgy of copper and tin, and of a
multitude of metals, nickel and aluminium to name but two, unknown
before the nineteenth century dawned. It is in this great and growing
mastery over substances, over different sorts of glass, over rocks and
plasters and the like, over colours and textures, that the main triumphs
of the mechanical revolution have thus far been achieved. Yet we are
still in the stage of the firstfruits in the matter. We have the power,
but we have still to learn how to use our power. Many of the first
employments of these gifts of science have been vulgar, tawdry, stupid,
or horrible. The artist and the adaptor have still hardly begun to work
with the endless variety of substances now at their disposal.
Concurrently with this extension of mechanical possibilities the new
science of electricity grew up. It was only in the eighties of the
nineteenth century that this body of inquiry began to yield results to
impress the vulgar mind. Then suddenly came electric light and electric
traction; and the transmutation of forces, the possibility of sending
_power_, that could be changed into mechanical motion or light or heat
as one chose, along a copper wire, as water is sent along a pipe, began
to come through to the ideas of ordinary people....
The British and the French were at first the leading peoples in this
great proliferation of knowledge; but presently the German, who had
learnt humility under Napoleon, showed such zeal and pertinacity in
scientific inquiry as to overhaul these leaders. British science was
largely the creation of Englishmen and Scotchmen[458] working outside
the ordinary centres of erudition.[459] We have told how in England the
universities after the reformation ceased to have a wide popular appeal,
how they became the educational preserve of the nobility and gentry, and
the strongholds of the established church. A pompous and unintelligent
classical pretentiousness dominated them, and they dominated the schools
of the middle and upper classes. The only knowledge recognized was an
uncritical textual knowledge of a selection of Latin and Greek classics,
and the test of a good style was its abundance of quotations, allusions,
and stereotyped expressions. The early development of British science
went on, therefore, in spite of the formal educational organization, and
in the teeth of the bitter hostility of the teaching and clerical
professions. French education, too, was dominated by the classical
tradition of the Jesuits, and consequently it was not difficult for the
Germans to organize a body of investigators, small indeed in relation to
the possibilities of the case, but large in proportion to the little
band of British and French inventors and experimentalists. And though
this work of research and experiment was making Britain and France the
most rich and powerful countries in the world, it was not making
scientific and inventive men rich and powerful. There is a necessary
unworldliness about a sincere scientific man; he is too preoccupied with
his research to plan and scheme how to make money out of it. The
economic exploitation of his discoveries falls very easily and
naturally, therefore, into the hands of a more acquisitive type; and so
we find that the crops of rich men which every fresh phase of scientific
and technical progress has produced in Great Britain, though they have
not displayed quite the same passionate desire to insult and kill the
goose that laid the national golden eggs as the scholastic and clerical
professions, have been quite content to let that profitable creature
starve. Inventors and discoverers came by nature, they thought, for
cleverer people to profit by.
In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German “learned” did
not display the same vehement hatred of the new learning. They permitted
its development. The German business man and manufacturer again had not
quite the same contempt for the man of science as had his British
competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be a cultivated
crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did concede, therefore, a certain
amount of opportunity to the scientific mind; their public expenditure
on scientific work was relatively greater, and this expenditure was
abundantly rewarded. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the
German scientific worker had made German a necessary language for every
science student who wished to keep abreast with the latest work in his
department, and in certain branches, and particularly in chemistry,
Germany acquired a very great superiority over her western neighbours.
The scientific effort of the sixties and seventies in Germany began to
tell after the eighties, and the Germans gained steadily upon Britain
and France in technical and industrial prosperity.
In an _Outline of History_ such as this it is impossible to trace the
network of complex mental processes that led to the incessant extension
of knowledge and power that is now going on; all we can do here is to
call the reader’s attention to the most salient turning-points that
finally led the toboggan of human affairs into its present swift ice-run
of progress. We have told of the first release of human curiosity and of
the beginnings of systematic inquiry and experiment. We have told, too,
how, when the plutocratic Roman system and its resultant imperialism had
come and gone again, this process of inquiry was renewed. We have told
of the escape of investigation from ideas of secrecy and personal
advantage to the idea of publication and a brotherhood of knowledge,
and we have noted the foundation of the British Royal Society, the
Florentine Society, and their like as a consequence of this socializing
of thought. These things were the roots of the mechanical revolution,
and so long as the root of pure scientific inquiry lives, that
revolution will progress. The mechanical revolution itself began, we may
say, with the exhaustion of the wood supply for the ironworks of
England. This led to the use of coal, the coal mine led to the simple
pumping engine, the development of the pumping engine by Watt into a
machine-driving engine led on to the locomotive and the steamship. This
was the first phase of a great expansion in the use of steam. A second
phase in the mechanical revolution began with the application of
electrical science to practical problems and the development of electric
lighting, power-transmission, and traction.
A third phase is to be distinguished when in the eighties a new type of
engine came into use, an engine in which the expansive force of an
explosive mixture replaced the expansive force of steam. The light,
highly efficient engines that were thus made possible were applied to
the automobile, and developed at last to reach such a pitch of lightness
and efficiency as to render flight--long known to be possible--a
practical achievement. A successful flying-machine--but not a machine
large enough to take up a human body--was made by Professor Langley of
the Smithsonian Institution of Washington as early as 1897. By 1909 the
aeroplane was available for human locomotion. There had seemed to be a
pause in the increase of human speed with the perfection of railways and
automobile road traction, but with the flying-machine came fresh
reductions in the effective distance between one point of the earth’s
surface and another. In the eighteenth century the distance from London
to Edinburgh was an eight days’ journey; in 1918 the British Civil Air
Transport Commission reported that the journey from London to Melbourne,
half-way round the earth, would probably, in a few years’ time, be
accomplished in that same period of eight days.
Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reductions in the
time distances of one place from another. They are merely one aspect of
a much profounder and more momentous enlargement of human possibility.
The science of agriculture and agricultural chemistry, for instance,
made quite parallel advances during the nineteenth century. Men learnt
so to fertilize the soil as to produce quadruple and quintuple the crops
got from the same area in the seventeenth century. There was a still
more extraordinary advance in medical science; the average duration of
life rose, the daily efficiency increased, the waste of life through
ill-health diminished.
Now here altogether we have such a change in human life as to constitute
a fresh phase of history. In a little more than a century this
mechanical revolution has been brought about. In that time man made a
stride in the material conditions of his life vaster than he had done
during the whole long interval between the palæolithic stage and the age
of cultivation, or between the days of Pepi in Egypt and those of George
III. A new gigantic material framework for human affairs has come unto
existence. Clearly it demands great readjustments of our social,
economical, and political methods. But these readjustments have
necessarily waited upon the development of the mechanical revolution,
and they are still only in their opening stage to-day.
§ 2
There is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what we have
here called the _mechanical revolution_, which was an entirely new thing
in human experience arising out of the development of organized science,
a new step like the invention of agriculture or the discovery of metals,
with something else, quite different in its origins, something for which
there was already an historical precedent, the social and financial
development which is called the _industrial revolution_. The two
processes were going on together, they were constantly reacting upon
each other, but they were in root and essence different. There would
have been an industrial revolution of sorts if there had been no coal,
no steam, no machinery; but in that case it would probably have followed
far more closely upon the lines of the social and financial developments
of the later years of the Roman republic. It would have repeated the
story of dispossessed free cultivators, gang labour, great estates,
great financial fortunes, and a socially destructive financial process.
Even the factory method came before power and machinery. Factories were
the product not of machinery, but of the “division of labour.” Drilled
and sweated workers were making such things as millinery, cardboard
boxes, and furniture, and colouring maps and book illustrations, and so
forth, before even water-wheels had been used for industrial processes.
There were factories in Rome in the days of Augustus. New books, for
instance, were dictated to rows of copyists in the factories of the
booksellers. The attentive student of Defoe and of the political
pamphlets of Fielding will realize that the idea of herding poor people
into establishments to work collectively for their living was already
current in Britain before the close of the seventeenth century. There
are intimations of it even as early as More’s _Utopia_ (1516). It was a
social and not a mechanical development.
Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and economic
history of western Europe was in fact retreading the path along which
the Roman State had gone in the three last centuries B.C. America was in
many ways a new Spain, and India and China a new Egypt. But the
political disunions of Europe, the political convulsions against
monarchy, the recalcitrance of the common folk and perhaps also the
greater accessibility of the western European intelligence to mechanical
ideas and inventions, turned the process into quite novel directions.
Ideas of human solidarity, thanks to Christianity, were far more widely
diffused in this newer European world, political power was not so
concentrated, and the man of energy anxious to get rich turned his mind,
therefore, very willingly from the ideas of the slave and of gang labour
to the idea of mechanical power and the machine.
The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical invention and
discovery, was a new thing in human experience, and it went on
regardless of the social, political, economic, and industrial
consequences it might produce. The industrial revolution, on the other
hand, like most other human affairs, was and is more and more profoundly
changed and deflected by the constant variation in human conditions
caused by the mechanical revolution. And the essential difference
between the amassing of riches, the extinction of small farmers and
small business men, and the phase of big finance in the latter centuries
of the Roman republic on the one hand, and the very similar
concentration of capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on
the other, lies in the profound difference in the character of labour
that the mechanical revolution was bringing about. The power of the old
world was human power; everything depended ultimately upon the driving
power of human muscle, the muscle of ignorant and subjugated men. A
little animal muscle, supplied by draft oxen, horse traction, and the
like, contributed. Where a weight had to be lifted, men lifted it; where
a rock had to be quarried, men chipped it out; where a field had to be
ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it; the Roman equivalent of the
steamship was the galley with its banks of sweating rowers. A vast
proportion of mankind in the early civilizations was employed in purely
mechanical drudgery. At its onset, power-driven machinery did not seem
to promise any release from such unintelligent toil. Great gangs of men
were employed in excavating canals, in making railway cuttings and
embankments, and the like. The number of miners increased enormously.
But the extension of facilities and the output of commodities increased
much more. And as the nineteenth century went on, the plain logic of the
new situation asserted itself more clearly. Human beings were no longer
wanted as a source of mere indiscriminated power. What could be done
mechanically by a human being could be done faster and better by a
machine. The human being was needed now only where choice and
intelligence had to be exercised. Human beings were wanted only as human
beings. The _drudge_, on whom all the previous civilizations had rested,
the creature of mere obedience, the man whose brains were superfluous,
had become unnecessary to the welfare of mankind.
This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture and mining as
it was of the newest metallurgical processes. For ploughing, sowing, and
harvesting, swift machines came forward to do the work of scores of
men.[460] The Roman civilization was built upon cheap and degraded human
beings; modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap mechanical
power. For a hundred years power has been getting cheaper and labour
dearer. If for a generation or so machinery has had to wait its turn in
the mine, it is simply because for a time men were cheaper than
machinery.[461]
Now here was a change-over of quite primary importance in human affairs.
The chief solicitude of the rich and of the ruler in the old
civilization had been to keep up a supply of drudges. As the nineteenth
century went on, it became more and more plain to the intelligent
directive people that the common man had now to be something better than
a drudge. He had to be educated--if only to secure “industrial
efficiency.” He had to understand what he was about. From the days of
the first Christian propaganda, popular education had been smouldering
in Europe, just as it has smouldered in Asia wherever Islam has set its
foot, because of the necessity of making the believer understand a
little of the belief by which he is saved, and of enabling him to read a
little in the sacred books by which his belief is conveyed. Christian
controversies, with their competition for adherents, ploughed the ground
for the harvest of popular education. In England, for instance, by the
thirties and forties of the nineteenth century, the disputes of the
sects and the necessity of catching adherents young had produced an
abundance of night schools, Sunday schools, and a series of competing
educational organizations for children, the dissenting British schools,
the church National Schools, and even Roman Catholic elementary schools.
The earlier, less enlightened manufacturers, unable to take a broad view
of their own interests, hated and opposed these schools. But here again
needy Germany led her richer neighbours. The religious teacher found the
profit-seeker at his side, unexpectedly eager to get the commonalty, if
not educated, at least “trained.” The student of the English magazines
of the middle and later Victorian period may trace the steadily
spreading recognition of the new necessity for popular education. The
upper and middle classes of England, themselves by no means well
educated, for a generation or so regarded popular education with a sort
of tittering hostility. In the middle Victorian period it was thought to
be extraordinarily funny that a shop assistant should lean across the
counter and ask two lady customers not to speak French, as he
“understood the langwidge.” This was a “joke” in that monumental record
of British humour, _Punch_. It was almost as amusing to the Victorian
English as the story of Balaam’s ass. The German competitor later on
robbed that joke of its fun. Before the death of Queen Victoria, English
shop assistants were being badgered to attend evening classes to learn
French.
The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of rapid advance
in popular education throughout all the Westernized world. There was no
parallel advance in the education of the upper classes, some advance no
doubt, but nothing to correspond, and so the great gulf that had divided
that world hitherto into the readers and the non-reading mass became
little more than a slightly perceptible difference in educational level.
At the back of this process was the mechanical revolution, apparently
regardless of social conditions, but really insisting inexorably upon
the complete abolition of a totally illiterate class throughout the
world.
The economic revolution of the Roman republic had never been clearly
apprehended by the common people of Rome. The ordinary Roman citizen
never saw the changes through which he lived, clearly and
comprehensively as we see them. But the industrial revolution, as it
went on towards the end of the nineteenth century, was more and more
distinctly _seen_ as one whole process by the common people it was
affecting, because presently they could read and discuss and
communicate, and because they went about and saw things as no commonalty
had ever done before.
In this Outline of History we have been careful to indicate the gradual
appearance of the ordinary people as a class with a will and ideas in
common. It is the writer’s belief that massive movements of the
“ordinary people” over considerable areas only became possible as a
result of the propagandist religions, Christianity and Islam, and their
insistence upon individual self-respect. We have cited the enthusiasm of
the commonalty for the First Crusade as marking a new phase in social
history. But before the nineteenth century even these massive movements
were comparatively restricted. The equalitarian insurrections of the
peasantry, from the Wycliffe period onward, were confined to the peasant
communities of definite localities, they spread only slowly into
districts affected by similar forces. The town artisan rioted indeed,
but only locally. The château-burning of the French revolution was not
the act of a peasantry who had overthrown a government, it was the act
of a peasantry released by the overthrow of a government. The Commune of
Paris was the first effective appearance of the town artisan as a
political power, and the Parisian crowd of the First Revolution was a
very mixed, primitive-thinking, and savage crowd compared with any
Western European crowd after 1830.
But the mechanical revolution was not only pressing education upon the
whole population, it was leading to a big-capitalism and to a
large-scale reorganization of industry that was to produce a new and
distinctive system of ideas in the common people in the place of the
mere uncomfortable recalcitrance and elemental rebellions of an
illiterate commonalty. We have already noted how the industrial
revolution had split the manufacturing class, which had hitherto been a
middling and various sort of class, into two sections, the employers,
who became rich enough to mingle with the financial, merchandizing, and
landowning classes, and the employees, who drifted to a status closer
and closer to that of mere gang and agricultural labour. As the
manufacturing employee sank, the agricultural labourer, by the
introduction of agricultural machinery and the increase in his
individual productivity, rose. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
Karl Marx (1818-83), a German Jew of great scholarly attainments, who
did much of his work in the British Museum library in London, was
pointing out that the organization of the working classes by the
steadily concentrating group of capitalist owners, was developing a new
social classification to replace the more complex class systems of the
past (see chapter xx, §§ 4, 5, and 6). Property, so far as it was power,
was being gathered together into relatively few hands, the hands of the
big rich men, the capitalist class; while there was a great mingling of
workers with little or no property, whom he called the “expropriated,”
or “proletariat”--a misuse of this word (see chap. xxvii, § 2)--who were
bound to develop a common “class consciousness” of the conflict of their
interests with those of the rich men. Differences of education and
tradition between the various older social elements which were in
process of being fused up into the new class of the expropriated, seemed
for a time to contradict this sweeping generalization; the traditions of
the professions, the small employers, the farmer peasant and the like
were all different from one another and from the various craftsman
traditions of the workers; but with the spread of education and the
cheapening of literature, this “Marxian” generalization becomes now more
and more acceptable. These classes, who were linked at first by nothing
but a common impoverishment, were and are being reduced or raised to the
same standard of life, forced to read the same books and share the same
inconveniences. A sense of solidarity between all sorts of poor and
propertyless men, as against the profit-amassing and
wealth-concentrating class, is growing more and more evident in our
world. Old differences fade away, the difference between craftsman and
open-air worker, between black coat and overall, between poor clergyman
and elementary school-master, between policeman and bus-driver. They
must all buy the same cheap furnishings and live in similar cheap
houses; their sons and daughters will all mingle and marry; success at
the upper levels becomes more and more hopeless for the rank and file.
Marx, who did not so much advocate the class-war, the war of the
expropriated mass against the appropriating few, as foretell it, is
being more and more justified by events.[462]
§ 3
To trace any broad outlines in the fermentation of ideas that went on
during the mechanical and industrial revolution of the nineteenth
century is a very difficult task. But we must attempt it if we are to
link what has gone before in this history with the condition of our
world to-day.
It will be convenient to distinguish two main periods in the hundred
years between 1814 and 1914. First came the period 1814-48, in which
there was a very considerable amount of liberal thinking and writing _in
limited circles_, but during which there were no great changes or
development of thought in the general mass of the people. Throughout
this period the world’s affairs were living, so to speak, on their old
intellectual capital, they were going on in accordance with the leading
ideas of the Revolution and the counter-revolution. The dominant liberal
ideas were freedom and a certain vague equalitarianism; the conservative
ideas were monarchy, organized religion, social privilege, and
obedience.
Until 1848 the spirit of the Holy Alliance, the spirit of Metternich,
struggled to prevent a revival of the European revolution that Napoleon
had betrayed and set back. In America, both North and South, on the
other hand, the revolution had triumphed and nineteenth-century
liberalism ruled unchallenged. Britain was an uneasy country, never
quite loyally reactionary nor quite loyally progressive, neither truly
monarchist nor truly republican, the land of Cromwell and also of the
Merry Monarch, Charles; anti-Austrian, anti-Bourbon, anti-papal, yet
weakly repressive. We have told of the first series of liberal storms in
Europe in and about the year 1830; in Britain in 1832 a Reform Bill,
greatly extending the franchise and restoring something of its
representative character to the House of Commons, relieved the
situation. Round and about 1848 came a second and much more serious
system of outbreaks, that overthrew the Orleans monarchy and established
a second Republic in France (1848-52), raised North Italy and Hungary
against Austria, and the Poles in Posen against the Germans, and sent
the Pope in flight from the republicans of Rome. A very interesting
Pan-Slavic conference held at Prague foreshadowed many of the
territorial readjustments of 1919. It dispersed after an insurrection at
Prague had been suppressed by Austrian troops.
Ultimately all these insurrections failed; the current system staggered,
but kept its feet. There were no doubt serious social discontents
beneath these revolts, but as yet, except in the case of Paris, these
had no very clear form; and this 1848 storm, so far as the rest of
Europe was concerned, may be best described, in a phrase, as a revolt
of the natural political map against the artificial arrangements of the
Vienna diplomatists, and the system of suppressions those arrangements
entailed.
The history of Europe, then, from 1815 to 1848 was, generally speaking,
a sequel to the history of Europe from 1789 to 1814. There were no
really new _motifs_ in the composition. The main trouble was still the
struggle, though often a blind and misdirected struggle, of the
interests of ordinary men against the Great Powers system which cramped
and oppressed the life of mankind.
But after 1848, from 1848 to 1914, though the readjustment of the map
still went on towards a free and unified Italy and a unified Germany,
there began a fresh phase in the process of mental and political
adaptation to the new knowledge and the new material powers of mankind.
Came a great irruption of new social, religious, and political ideas
into the general European mind. In the next three sections we will
consider the origin and quality of these irruptions. They laid the
foundations upon which we base our political thought to-day, but for a
long time they had no very great effect on contemporary politics.
Contemporary politics continued to run on in the old lines, but with a
steadily diminishing support in the intellectual convictions and
consciences of men. We have already described the way in which a strong
intellectual process undermined the system of Grand Monarchy in France
before 1789. A similar undermining process was going on throughout
Europe during the Great Power period of 1848-1914. Profound doubts of
the system of government and of the liberties of many forms of property
in the economic system spread throughout the social body. Then came the
greatest and most disorganizing war in history, so that it is still
impossible to estimate the power and range of the accumulated new ideas
of those sixty-six years. We have been through a greater catastrophe
even than the Napoleonic catastrophe, and we are in a slack-water
period, corresponding to the period 1815-30. Our 1830 and our 1848 are
still to come and show us where we stand.
§ 4
We have traced throughout this history the gradual restriction of the
idea of property from the first unlimited claim of the strong man to
possess everything and the gradual realization of brotherhood as
something transcending personal self-seeking (see especially chap.
xxxvii, § 13). Men were first subjugated into more than tribal societies
by the fear of monarch and deity. It is only within the last three or at
most four thousand years that we have any clear evidence that voluntary
self-abandonment to some greater end, without fee or reward, was an
acceptable idea to men, or that anyone had propounded it. Then we find
spreading over the surface of human affairs, as patches of sunshine
spread and pass over the hillsides upon a windy day in spring, the idea
that there is a happiness in self-devotion greater than any personal
gratification or triumph, and a life of mankind different and greater
and more important than the sum of all the individual lives within it.
We have seen that idea become vivid as a beacon, vivid as sunshine
caught and reflected dazzlingly by some window in the landscape, in the
teaching of Buddha, Lao Tse, and, most clearly of all, of Jesus of
Nazareth. Through all its variations and corruptions Christianity has
never completely lost the suggestion of a devotion to God’s commonweal
that makes the personal pomps of monarchs and rulers seem like the
insolence of an over-dressed servant and the splendours and
gratifications of wealth like the waste of robbers. No man living in a
community which such a religion as Christianity or Islam has touched can
be altogether a slave; there is an ineradicable quality in these
religions that compels men to judge their masters and to realize their
own responsibility for the world.
As men have felt their way towards this new state of mind from the
fierce self-centred greed and instinctive combativeness of the early
Palæolithic family group, they have sought to express the drift of their
thoughts and necessities very variously. They have found themselves in
disagreement and conflict with old-established ideas, and there has been
a natural tendency to contradict these ideas flatly, to fly over to the
absolute contrary. Faced by a world in which rule and classes and order
seem to do little but give opportunity for personal selfishness and
unrighteous oppression, the first impatient movement was to declare for
a universal equality and a practical anarchy. Faced by a world in which
property seemed little more than a protection for selfishness and a
method of enslavement, it was as natural to repudiate all property. Our
history shows an increasing impulse to revolt against rulers and against
ownership. We have traced it in the middle ages burning the rich man’s
châteaux and experimenting in theocracy and communism. In the French
revolutions this double revolt is clear and plain. In France we find
side by side, inspired by the same spirit and as natural parts of the
same revolutionary movement, men who, with their eyes on the ruler’s
taxes, declared that property should be inviolable, and others who, with
their eyes on the employer’s hard bargains, declared that property
should be abolished. But what they are really revolting against in each
case is that the ruler and the employer, instead of becoming servants of
the community, still remain, like most of mankind, self-seeking,
oppressive individuals.
Throughout the ages we find this belief growing in men’s minds that
there can be such a rearrangement of laws and powers as to give rule and
order while still restraining the egotism of any ruler and of any ruling
class that may be necessary, and such a definition of property as will
give freedom without oppressive power. We begin to realize nowadays that
these ends are only to be attained by a complex constructive effort;
they arise through the conflict of new human needs against ignorance and
old human nature; but throughout the nineteenth century there was a
persistent disposition to solve the problem by some simple formula. (And
be happy ever afterwards, regardless of the fact that all human life,
all life, is throughout the ages nothing but the continuing solution of
a continuous synthetic problem.)
The earlier half of the nineteenth century saw a number of experiments
in the formation of trial human societies of a new kind. One of these,
the Oneida Community (1845-79), under the leadership of a man of very
considerable genius and learning, John Humphry Noyes, did for a number
of decades succeed in realizing many of the most striking proposals of
Plato’s _Republic_; it became wealthy and respected; but it broke up in
1879 largely because of the disposition of the younger generation to
leave its peculiar limitations in order to play a part in the larger
community of the world outside. A powerful business corporation still
preserves its industrial tradition.[463] But the Oneida experiment was
too bold and strange a departure to influence the general development of
modern civilization. Far more important historically were the
experiments and ideas of Robert Owen (1771-1858), a Manchester
cotton-spinner. He is very generally regarded as the founder of modern
Socialism; it was in connection with his work that the word “socialism”
first arose (about 1835).
He seems to have been a thoroughly competent business man; he made a
number of innovations in the cotton-spinning industry, and acquired a
fair fortune at an early age. He was distressed by the waste of human
possibilities among his workers, and he set himself to improve their
condition and the relations of employer and employed. This he sought to
do first at his Manchester factory and afterwards at New Lanark, where
he found himself in practical control of works employing about two
thousand people. Between 1800 and 1828 he achieved very considerable
things: he reduced the hours of labour, made his factory sanitary and
agreeable, abolished the employment of very young children, improved the
training of his workers, provided unemployment pay during a period of
trade depression, established a system of schools, and made New Lanark a
model of a better industrialism, while at the same time sustaining its
commercial prosperity. He wrote vigorously to defend the mass of mankind
against the charges of intemperance and improvidence which were held to
justify the economic iniquities of the time.[464] He held that men and
women are largely the product of their educational environment, a thesis
that needs no advocacy to-day. And he set himself to a propaganda of the
views that New Lanark had justified. He attacked the selfish indolence
of his fellow manufacturers, and in 1819, largely under his urgency, the
first Factory Act was passed, the first attempt to restrain employers
from taking the most stupid and intolerable advantages of their workers’
poverty. Some of the restrictions of that Act amaze us to-day. It seems
incredible now that it should ever have been necessary to protect little
children of _nine_ (!) from work in factories, or to limit the nominal
working day of such employees to _twelve hours_!
People are perhaps too apt to write of the industrial revolution as
though it led to the enslavement and overworking of poor children who
had hitherto been happy and free. But this misinterprets history. From
the very beginnings of civilization the little children of the poor had
always been obliged to do whatever work they could do. But the factory
system gathered up all this infantile toil and made it systematic,
conspicuous, and scandalous. The factory system challenged the
quickening human conscience on that issue. The British Factory Act of
1819, weak and feeble though it seems to us, was the Magna Carta of
childhood; thereafter the protection of the children of the poor, first
from toil and then from bodily starvation and ignorance, began.
We cannot tell here in any detail the full story of Owen’s life and
thought.[465] His work at New Lanark had been, he felt, only a trial
upon a small working model. What could be done for one industrial
community could be done, he held, for every industrial community in the
country; he advocated a resettlement of the industrial population in
townships on the New Lanark plan. For a time he seemed to have captured
the imagination of the world. The _Times_ and _Morning Post_ supported
his proposals; among the visitors to New Lanark was the Grand Duke
Nicholas who succeeded Alexander I as Tsar; a fast friend was the Duke
of Kent, son of George III and father of Queen Victoria. But all the
haters of change and all--and there are always many such--who were
jealous of the poor, and all the employers who were likely to be
troubled by his projects, were waiting for an excuse to counter-attack
him, and they found it in the expression of his religious opinions,
which were hostile to official Christianity, and through those he was
successfully discredited. But he continued to develop his projects and
experiments, of which the chief was a community at New Harmony in
Indiana (U. S. A.), in which he sank most of his capital. His partners
bought him out of the New Lanark business in 1828.
Owen’s experiments and suggestions ranged very widely, and do not fall
under any single formula. There was nothing doctrinaire about him. His
New Lanark experiment was the first of a number of “benevolent
businesses” in the world; Lord Leverhulme’s Port Sunlight, the Cadburys’
Bournville, and the Ford businesses in America are contemporary
instances; it was not really a socialist experiment at all; it was a
“paternal” experiment. But his proposals for state settlements were what
we should call state socialism to-day. His American experiment and his
later writings point to a completer form of socialism, a much wider
departure from the existing state of affairs. It is clear that the
riddle of currency exercised Owen. He understood that we can no more
hope for real economic justice while we pay for work with money of
fluctuating value than we could hope for a punctual world if there was a
continual inconstant variability in the length of an hour. One of his
experiments was an attempt at a circulation of labour notes representing
one hour, five hours, or twenty hours of work. The co-operative
societies of to-day, societies of poor men which combine for the
collective buying and distribution of commodities or for collective
manufacture or dairying or other forms of agriculture, arose directly
out of his initiatives, though the pioneer co-operative societies of his
own time ended in failure. Their successors have spread throughout the
whole world, and number to-day some thirty or forty million of
adherents.
A point to note about this early socialism of Owen’s is that it was not
at first at all “democratic.” Its initiative was benevolent, its early
form patriarchal; it was something up to which the workers were to be
educated by liberally disposed employers and leaders. The first
socialism was not a worker’s movement; it was a master’s movement.
Concurrently with this work of Owen’s, another and quite independent
series of developments was going on in America and Britain which was
destined to come at last into reaction with his socialistic ideas. The
English law had long prohibited combinations in restraint of trade,
combinations to raise prices or wages by concerted action. There had
been no great hardship in these prohibitions before the agrarian and
industrial changes of the eighteenth century let loose a great swarm of
workers living from hand to mouth and competing for insufficient
employment. Under these new conditions, the workers in many industries
found themselves intolerably squeezed. They were played off one against
another; day by day and hour by hour none knew what concession his
fellow might not have made, and what further reduction of pay or
increase of toil might not ensue. It became vitally necessary for the
workers to make agreements--illegal though they were--against such
underselling. At first these agreements had to be made and sustained by
secret societies. Or clubs, established ostensibly for quite other
purposes, social clubs, funeral societies, and the like, served to mask
the wage-protecting combination. The fact that these associations were
illegal disposed them to violence; they were savage against “blacklegs”
and “rats” who would not join them, and still more savage with traitors.
In 1824 the House of Commons recognized the desirability of relieving
tension in these matters by conceding the right of workmen to form
combinations for “collective bargaining” with the masters. This enabled
Trade Unions to develop with a large measure of freedom. At first very
clumsy and primitive organizations and with very restricted freedoms,
the Trade Unions have risen gradually to be a real Fourth Estate in the
country, a great system of bodies representing the mass of industrial
workers.
Arising at first in Britain and America, they have, with various
national modifications, and under varying legal conditions, spread to
France, Germany, and all the westernized communities.
Organized originally to sustain wages and restrict intolerable hours,
the Trade Union movement was at first something altogether distinct from
socialism. The Trade Unionist tried to make the best for himself of the
existing capitalism and the existing conditions of employment; the
socialist proposed to change the system. It was the imagination and
generalizing power of Karl Marx which brought these two movements into
relationship. He was a man with the sense of history very strong in him;
he was the first to perceive that the old social classes that had
endured since the beginning of civilization were in process of
dissolution and regrouping. His racial Jewish commercialism made the
antagonism of property and labour very plain to him. And his upbringing
in Germany--where, as we have pointed out, the tendency of class to
harden into caste was more evident than in any other European
country--made him conceive of labour as presently becoming “class
conscious” and collectively antagonistic to the property-concentrating
classes. In the Trade Union movement which was spreading over the world,
he believed he saw this development of class-conscious labour.
What, he asked, would be the outcome of the “class war” of the
capitalist and proletariat? The capitalist adventurers, he alleged,
because of their inherent greed and combativeness, would gather power
over capital into fewer and fewer hands,[466] until at last they would
concentrate all the means of production, transit, and the like into a
form seizable by the workers, whose class consciousness and solidarity
would be developed _pari passu_ by the process of organizing and
concentrating industry. They would seize this capital and work it for
themselves. This would be the social revolution. Then individual
property and freedom would be restored, based upon the common ownership
of the earth and the management by the community as a whole of the great
productive services which the private capitalist had organized and
concentrated. This would be the end of the “capitalist” system, but not
the end of the system of capitalism. State capitalism would replace
private owner capitalism.
This marks a great stride away from the socialism of Owen. Owen (like
Plato) looked to the common sense of men of any or every class to
reorganize the casual and faulty political, economic, and social
structure. Marx found something more in the nature of a driving force in
his class hostility based on expropriation and injustice. And he was not
simply a prophetic theorist; he was also a propagandist of the revolt of
labour, the revolt of the so-called “proletariat.” Labour, he perceived,
had a common interest against the capitalist everywhere, though under
the test of the Great Power wars of the time, and particularly of the
liberation of Italy, he showed that he failed to grasp the fact that
labour everywhere has a common interest in the peace of the world. But
with the social revolution in view he did succeed in inspiring the
formation of an international league of workers, the First
International.
The subsequent history of socialism is chequered between the British
tradition of Owen and the German class feeling of Marx. What is called
Fabian Socialism, the exposition of socialism by the London Fabian
Society, makes its appeal to reasonable men of all classes. What are
called “Revisionists” in German Socialism incline in the same direction.
But on the whole, it is Marx who has carried the day against Owen, and
the general disposition of socialists throughout the world is to look to
the organization of labour and labour only to supply the fighting forces
that will disentangle the political and economic organization of human
affairs from the hands of the more or less irresponsible private owners
and adventurers who now control it.
These are the broad features of the project which is called Socialism.
We will discuss its incompletenesses and inadequacies in our next
section. It was perhaps inevitable that socialism should be greatly
distraught and subdivided by doubts and disputes and sects and schools;
they are growth symptoms like the spots on a youth’s face. Here we can
but glance at the difference between state socialism, which would run
the economic business of the country through its political government,
and the newer schools of syndicalism and guild socialism which would
entrust a large measure in the government of each industry to the
workers of every grade--including the directors and managers--engaged in
that industry. This “guild socialism” is really a new sort of capitalism
with a committee of workers and officials in each industry taking the
place of the free private capitalists of that industry. The _personnel_
becomes the collective capitalist. Nor can we discuss the undemocratic
idea of the Russian leader Lenin, that a population cannot judge of
socialism before it has experienced it, and that a group of socialists
are therefore justified in seizing and socializing, if they can, the
life of a country without at first setting up any democratic form of
general government at all, for which sort of seizure he uses the Marxian
phrase, a very incompetent phrase, the “dictatorship of the
proletariat.” All Russia now is a huge experiment in that dictatorship
(August, 1920).[467] The “proletariat” is supposed to be dictating
through committees of workmen and soldiers, the Soviets, but at present
we have no means of ascertaining how far Russian affairs are under the
direction of a genuine mass intelligence and will, and how far the
activities of the Soviets are restrained and directed by the group of
vigorous personalities which leads the revolution. Nor do we know if the
methods of election used for the Soviets are any improvement upon the
unsatisfactory methods in use in the Atlantic democracies. Non-workers
have no representation in this new Russian state.
§ 5
We are all socialists nowadays, said Sir William Harcourt years ago, and
that is loosely true to-day. There can be few people who fail to realize
the provisional nature and the dangerous instability of our present
political and economic system, and still fewer who believe with the
doctrinaire individualists that profit-hunting “go as you please” will
guide mankind to any haven of prosperity and happiness. Great
rearrangements are necessary, and a systematic legal subordination of
personal self-seeking to the public good. So far most reasonable men are
socialists. But these are only preliminary propositions. How far has
socialism and modern thought generally gone towards working out the
conception of this new political and social order, of which our world
admittedly stands in need? We are obliged to answer that there is no
clear conception of the new state towards which we vaguely struggle,
that our science of human relationships is still so crude and
speculative as to leave us without definite guidance upon a score of
primarily important issues. In 1920 we are no more in a position to set
up a scientifically conceived political system in the world than were
men to set up an electric power station in 1820. They could not have
done that then to save their lives.
The Marxist system points us to an accumulation of revolutionary forces
in the modern world. These forces will continually tend towards
revolution. But Marx assumed too hastily that a revolutionary impulse
would necessarily produce an ordered state of a new and better kind. A
revolution may stop half way in mere destruction. No socialist sect has
yet defined its projected government clearly; the Bolsheviks in their
Russian experiment seem to have been guided by a phrase, the
dictatorship of the proletariat, and in practice, we are told, Trotsky
and Lenin have proved as autocratic as the less intelligent but equally
well-meaning Tsar, Alexander I. We have been at some pains to show from
our brief study of the French revolution that a revolution can establish
nothing permanent that has not already been thought out beforehand and
apprehended by the general mind. The French republic, confronted with
unexpected difficulties in economics, currency, and international
relationships, collapsed to the egotisms of the newly rich people of the
Directory, and finally to the egotism of Napoleon. Law and a plan,
steadily upheld, are more necessary in revolutionary times than in
ordinary hum-drum times, because in revolutionary times society
degenerates much more readily into a mere scramble under the ascendancy
of the forcible and cunning.
If in general terms we take stock of the political and social science of
our age, we shall measure something of the preliminary intellectual task
still to be done by mankind before we can hope to see any permanent
constructive achievements emerging from the mere traditionalism and
adventuring that rule our collective affairs to-day. This Socialism,
which professes to be a complete theory of a new social order, we
discover, when we look into it, to be no more than a partial
theory--very illuminating, so far as it goes--about property. We have
already discussed the relationship of social development to the
restriction of the idea of property (chap. xxxvii, § 13). There are
various schools of thought which would restrict property more or less
completely. Communism is the proposal to abolish property altogether,
or, in other words, to hold all things in common. Modern Socialism, on
the other hand--or, to give it a more precise name, “Collectivism”--does
clearly distinguish between personal property and collective property.
The gist of the socialist proposal is that land and all the natural
means of production, transit, and distribution should be collectively
owned. Within these limits there is to be much free private ownership
and unrestricted personal freedom. Given efficient administration, it
may be doubted whether many people nowadays would dispute that proposal.
But socialism has never gone on to a thorough examination of that
proviso for efficient administration.
Again, what community is it that is to own the collective property; is
it to be the sovereign or the township or the county or the nation or
mankind? Socialism makes no clear answer. Socialists are very free with
the word “nationalize,” but we have been subjecting the ideas of
“nations” and “nationalism” to some destructive criticism in this
_Outline_. If socialists object to a single individual claiming a mine
or a great stretch of agricultural land as his own individual property,
with a right to refuse or barter its use and profit to others, why
should they permit a single nation to monopolize the mines or trade
routes or natural wealth of the territories in which it lives, against
the rest of mankind? There seems to be great confusion in socialist
theory in this matter. And unless human life is to become a mass meeting
of the race in permanent session, how is the community to appoint its
officers to carry on its collective concerns? After all, the private
owner of land or of a business or the like is a sort of public official
in so far as his ownership is sanctioned and protected by the community.
Instead of being paid a salary or fees, he is allowed to make a profit.
The only valid reason for dismissing him from his ownership is that the
new control to be substituted will be more efficient and profitable and
satisfactory to the community. And, being dismissed, he has at least the
same claim to consideration from the community that he himself has shown
in the past to the worker thrown out of employment by a mechanical
invention.
This question of administration, the sound and adequate bar to much
immediate socialization, brings us to the still largely unsolved problem
of human association; how are we to secure the best direction of human
affairs and the maximum of willing co-operation with that direction?
This is ultimately a complex problem in psychology, but it is absurd to
pretend that it is an insoluble one. There must be a definite best,
which is the right thing, in these matters. But if it is not insoluble,
it is equally unreasonable to pretend that it has been solved. The
problem in its completeness involves the working out of the best methods
in the following departments, and their complete correlation:--
(i) _Education._--The preparation of the individual for an understanding
and willing co-operation in the world’s affairs.
(ii) _Information._--The continual truthful presentation of public
affairs to the individual for his judgment and approval. Closely
connected with this need for current information is the codification of
the law, the problem of keeping the law plain, clear, and accessible to
all.
(iii) _Representation._--The selection of representatives and agents to
act in the collective interest in harmony with the general will based on
this education and plain information.
(iv) _The Executive._--The appointment of executive agents and the
maintenance of means for keeping them responsible to the community,
without at the same time hampering intelligent initiatives.
(v) _Thought and Research._--The systematic criticism of affairs and
laws to provide data for popular judgments, and through those judgments
to ensure the secular improvement of the human organization.
These are the five heads under which the broad problem of human society
presents itself to us. In the world around us we see makeshift devices
at work in all those branches, ill co-ordinated one with another and
unsatisfactory in themselves. We see an educational system meanly
financed and equipped, badly organized and crippled by the interventions
and hostilities of religious bodies; we see popular information supplied
chiefly by a venal press dependent upon advertisements and subsidies; we
see farcical methods of election returning politicians to power as
unrepresentative as any hereditary ruler or casual conqueror; everywhere
the executive is more or less influenced or controlled by groups of rich
adventurers, and the pursuit of political and social science and of
public criticism is still the work of devoted and eccentric individuals
rather than a recognized and honoured function in the state. There is a
gigantic task before right-thinking men in the cleansing and sweetening
of the politician’s stable; and until it is done, any complete
realization of socialism is impossible. While private adventurers
control the political life of the State it is ridiculous to think of the
state taking over collective economic interests from private
adventurers.
Not only has the socialist movement failed thus far to produce a
scientifically reasoned scheme for the correlation of education, law,
and the exercise of public power, but even in the economic field, as we
have already pointed out, creative forces wait for the conception of a
right organization of credit and a right method of payment and
interchange. It is a truism that the willingness of the worker depends,
among other things, upon his complete confidence in the purchasing
power of the currency in which he is paid. As this confidence goes, work
ceases, except in so far as it can be rewarded by payment in goods. But
there is no sufficient science of currency and business psychology to
restrain governments from the most disturbing interferences with the
public credit and with the circulation. And such interferences lead
straight to the cessation of work, that is, of the production of
necessary things. Upon such vital practical questions it is scarcely too
much to say that the mass of those socialists who would recast the world
have no definite ideas at all. Yet in a socialist world quite as much as
in any other sort of world, people must be paid money for their work
rather than be paid in kind if any such thing as personal freedom is to
continue. Here too there must be an ascertainable right thing to do.
Until that is determined, history in these matters will continue to be
not so much a record of experiments as of flounderings.[468]
And in another direction the social and political thinking of the
nineteenth century was, in the face of the vastness of the mechanical
revolution, timid, limited, and insufficient, and that was in regard to
international relations. The reader of socialistic literature will find
the socialists constantly writing and talking of the “State,” and never
betraying any realization that the “State” might be all sorts of
organizations in all sorts of areas, from the republic of San Marino to
the British Empire. It is true that Karl Marx had a conception of a
solidarity of interests between the workers in all the industrialized
countries, but there is little or no suggestion in Marxist socialism of
the logical corollary of this, the establishment of a democratic world
federal government (with national or provincial “state” governments) as
a natural consequence of his projected social revolution. At most there
is a vague aspiration. But if there is any logic about the Marxist, it
should be his declared political end for which he should work without
ceasing. Put to the test of the war of 1914, the socialists of almost
all the European countries showed that their class-conscious
internationalism was veneered very thinly indeed over their patriotic
feelings, and had to no degree replaced them. Everywhere during the
German war socialists denounced that war as made by capitalist
governments, but it produces little or no permanent effect to denounce a
government or a world system unless you have a working idea of a better
government and a better system to replace it.
We state these things here because they are facts, and a living and
necessary part of a contemporary survey of human history. It is not our
task either to advocate or controvert socialism. But it is in our
picture to note that political and social life are, and must remain,
chaotic and disastrous without the development of some such constructive
scheme as socialism _sketches_, and to point out clearly how far away
the world is at present from any such scheme. An enormous amount of
intellectual toil and discussion and education and many years--whether
decades or centuries, no man can tell--must intervene before a new
order, planned as ships and railways are planned, runs, as the cables
and the postal deliveries run, over the whole surface of our earth. And
until such a new order draws mankind together with its net, human life,
as we shall presently show by the story of the European wars since 1854,
must become more and more casual, dangerous, miserable, anxious, and
disastrous because of the continually more powerful and destructive war
methods the continuing mechanical revolution produces.
§ 6[469]
While the mechanical revolution which the growth of physical science had
brought about was destroying the ancient social classification of the
civilized state which had been evolved through thousands of years, and
producing new possibilities and new ideals of a righteous human
community and a righteous world order, a change at least as great and
novel was going on in the field of religious thought. That same growth
of scientific knowledge from which sprang the mechanical revolution was
the moving cause of these religious disturbances.
In the opening chapters of this _Outline_ we have given the main story
of the Record of the Rocks; we have shown life for the little beginning
of consciousness that it is in the still waiting vastness of the void of
space and time. But before the end of the eighteenth century, this
enormous prospect of the past which fills a modern mind with humility
and illimitable hope, was hidden from the general consciousness of our
race. It was veiled by the curtain of a Sumerian legend. The heavens
were no more than a stage background to a little drama of kings. Men had
been too occupied with their own private passions and personal affairs
to heed the intimations of their own great destiny that lay about them
everywhere.
They learnt their true position in space long before they placed
themselves in time. We have already named the earlier astronomers, and
told how Galileo was made to recant his assertion that the earth moved
round the sun. He was made to do so by the church, and the church was
stirred to make him do so because any doubt that the world was the
centre of the universe seemed to strike fatally at the authority of
Christianity.
Now, upon that matter the teller of modern history is obliged to be at
once cautious and bold. He has to pick his way between cowardly evasion
on the one hand, and partisanship on the other. As far as possible he
must confine himself to facts and restrain his opinions. Yet it is well
to remember that no opinions can be altogether restrained. The writer
has his own very strong and definite persuasions, and the reader must
bear that in mind. It is a fact in history that the teaching of Jesus of
Nazareth had in it something profoundly new and creative; he preached a
new Kingdom of Heaven in the hearts and in the world of men. There was
nothing in his teaching, so far as we can judge it at this distance of
time, to clash or interfere with any discovery or expansion of the
history of the world and mankind. But it is equally a fact in history
that St. Paul and his successors added to or completed or imposed upon
or substituted another doctrine for--as you may prefer to think--the
plain and profoundly revolutionary teachings of Jesus by expounding a
subtle and complex theory of salvation, a salvation which could be
attained very largely by belief and formalities, without any serious
disturbance of the believer’s ordinary habits and occupations, and that
this Pauline teaching did involve very definite beliefs about the
history of the world and man. It is not the business of the historian to
controvert or explain these matters; the question of their ultimate
significance depends upon the theologian; the historian’s concern is
merely with the fact that official Christianity throughout the world
adopted St. Paul’s view so plainly expressed in his epistles and so
untraceable in the gospels, that the meaning of religion lay not in the
future, but in the past, and that Jesus was not so much a teacher of
wonderful new things, as a predestinate divine blood sacrifice of deep
mystery and sacredness made in atonement of a particular historical act
of disobedience to the Creator committed by our first parents, Adam and
Eve, in response to the temptation of a serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Upon the belief in that Fall as a fact, and not upon the personality of
Jesus of Nazareth, upon the theories of Paul, and not upon the
injunctions of Jesus, doctrinal Christianity built itself.
We have already noted that this story of the special creation of the
world and of Adam and Eve and the serpent was also an ancient Babylonian
story, and probably a still more ancient Sumerian story, and that the
Jewish sacred books were the medium by which this very ancient and
primitive “heliolithic” serpent legend entered Christianity. Wherever
official Christianity has gone, it has taken this story with it. It has
tied itself up to that story. Until a century and less ago the whole
Christianized world felt bound to believe and did believe, that the
universe had been specially created in the course of six days by the
word of God a few thousand years before--according to Bishop Ussher,
4004 B.C. (The _Universal History_, in forty-two volumes, published in
1779 by a group of London booksellers, discusses whether the precise
date of the first day of Creation was March 21st or September 21st, 4004
B.C., and inclines to the view that the latter was the more probable
season.)
Upon this historical assumption rested the religious fabric of the
Western and Westernized civilization, and yet the whole world was
littered, the hills, mountains, deltas, and seas were bursting with
evidence of its utter absurdity. The religious life of the leading
nations, still a very intense and sincere religious life, was going on
in a house of history built upon sand.
There is frequent recognition in classical literature of a sounder
cosmogony. Aristotle was aware of the broad principles of modern
geology, they shine through the speculations of Lucretius, and we have
noted also Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452-1519) lucid interpretation of
fossils. A Frenchman, Descartes (1596-1650), speculated boldly upon the
incandescent beginnings of our globe, and an Italian, Steno (1631-87),
began the collection of fossils and the description of strata. But it
was only as the eighteenth century drew to its close that the systematic
study of geology assumed such proportions as to affect the general
authority of the Bible version of that ancient Sumerian narrative.
Contemporaneously with the _Universal History_ quoted above, a great
French naturalist, Buffon, was writing upon the Epochs of Nature (1778),
and boldly extending the age of the world to 70,000 or 75,000 years. He
divided his story into six epochs to square with the six days of the
Creation story. These days, it was argued, were figurative days; they
were really ages. There was a general disposition to do this on the part
of the new science of geology. By that accommodating device, geology
contrived to make a peace with orthodox religious teaching that lasted
until the middle of the nineteenth century.
We cannot trace here the contributions of such men as Hutton and
Playfair and Sir Charles Lyell, and the Frenchmen Lamarck and Cuvier, in
unfolding and developing the record of the rocks. It was only slowly
that the general intelligence of the Western world was awakened to two
disconcerting facts: firstly, that the succession of life in the
geological record did not correspond to the acts of the six days of
creation; and, secondly, that the record, in harmony with a mass of
biological facts, pointed away from the Bible assertion of a separate
creation of each species straight towards a genetic relation between
all forms of life, _in which even man was included_! The importance of
this last issue to the existing doctrinal system was manifest. If all
the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then
there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had
been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the
story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement, upon which the
current teaching based Christian emotion and morality, collapsed like a
house of cards.
It was with something like horror, therefore, that great numbers of
honest and religious-spirited men followed the work of the great English
naturalist, Charles Darwin (1809-82); in 1859 he published his _Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection_, a powerful and permanently
valuable exposition of that conception of the change and development of
species which we have sketched briefly in Chapter III; and in 1871 he
completed the outline of his work with the _Descent of Man_, which
brought man definitely into the same scheme of development with the rest
of life.
Many men and women are still living who can remember the dismay and
distress among ordinary intelligent people in the Western communities as
the invincible case of the biologists and geologists against the
orthodox Christian cosmogony unfolded itself. The minds of many quite
honest men resisted the new knowledge instinctively and irrationally.
Their whole moral edifice was built upon false history; they were too
old and set to rebuild it; they felt the practical truth of their moral
convictions, and this new truth seemed to them to be incompatible with
that. They believed that to assent to it would be to prepare a moral
collapse for the world. And so they produced a moral collapse by not
assenting to it. The universities in England particularly, being
primarily clerical in their constitution, resisted the new learning very
bitterly. During the seventies and eighties a stormy controversy raged
throughout the civilized world. The quality of the discussions and the
fatal ignorance of the church may be gauged by a description in
Hackett’s _Commonplace Book_ of a meeting of the British Association in
1860, at which Bishop Wilberforce assailed Huxley, the great champion of
the Darwinian views, in this fashion.
Facing “Huxley with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, _was it
through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed his descent from
a monkey_? Huxley turned to his neighbour, and said, ‘The Lord hath
delivered him into my hands.’ Then he stood before us and spoke these
tremendous words, ‘He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor;
but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts
to obscure the truth.’” (Another version has it: “I have certainly said
that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his
grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel ashamed in
recalling, it would rather be a man of restless and versatile intellect
who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real
acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric and distract
the attention of his audience from the real point at issue by eloquent
digressions and skilled appeals to prejudice.”) These words were
certainly spoken with passion. The scene was one of great excitement. A
lady fainted, says Hackett.... Such was the temper of this controversy.
The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity unawares, suddenly.
Formal Christianity was confronted with a clearly demonstrable error in
her theological statements. The Christian theologians were neither wise
enough nor mentally nimble enough to accept the new truth, modify their
formulæ, and insist upon the living and undiminished vitality of the
religious reality those formulæ had hitherto sufficed to express. For
the discovery of man’s descent from sub-human forms does not even
remotely touch the teaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet priests and
bishops raged at Darwin; foolish attempts were made to suppress
Darwinian literature and to insult and discredit the exponents of the
new views. There was much wild talk of the “antagonism” of religion and
science. Now in all ages there have been sceptics in Christendom. The
Emperor Frederick II was certainly a sceptic; in the eighteenth century
Gibbon and Voltaire were openly anti-Christian, and their writings
influenced a number of scattered readers. But these were exceptional
people.... Now the whole of Christendom became as a whole sceptical.
This new controversy touched everybody who read a book or heard
intelligent conversation. A new generation of young people grew up, and
they found the defenders of Christianity in an evil temper, fighting
their cause without dignity or fairness. It was the orthodox theology
that the new scientific advances had compromised, but the angry
theologians declared that it was religion.
In the end men may discover that religion shines all the brighter for
the loss of its doctrinal wrappings, but to the young it seemed as if
indeed there had been a conflict of science and religion, and that in
that conflict science had won.
The immediate effect of this great dispute upon the ideas and methods of
people in the prosperous and influential classes throughout the
westernized world was very detrimental indeed. The new biological
science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old
moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued. The general level of
social life in those classes was far higher in the early twentieth than
in the early seventeenth century, but in one respect, in respect to
disinterestedness and conscientiousness in these classes, it is probable
that the tone of the earlier age was better than the latter. In the
owning and active classes of the seventeenth century, in spite of a few
definite “infidels,” there was probably a much higher percentage of men
and women who prayed sincerely, who searched their souls to find if they
had done evil, and who were prepared to suffer and make great sacrifices
for what they conceived to be right, than in the opening years of the
twentieth century. There was a real loss of faith after 1859. The true
gold of religion was in many cases thrown away with the worn-out purse
that had contained it for so long, and it was not recovered. Towards the
close of the nineteenth century a crude misunderstanding of Darwinism
had become the fundamental mindstuff of great masses of the “educated”
everywhere. The seventeenth-century kings and owners and rulers and
leaders had had the idea at the back of their minds that they prevailed
by the will of God; they really feared Him, they got priests to put
things right for them with Him; when they were wicked, they tried not to
think of Him. But the old faith of the kings, owners, and rulers of the
opening twentieth century had faded under the actinic light of
scientific criticism. Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth
century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for
Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak
and confiding. And they believed further that they had to be strong,
energetic, ruthless, “practical,” egotistical, because God was dead, and
had always, it seemed, been dead--which was going altogether further
than the new knowledge justified.
They soon got beyond the first crude popular misconception of Darwinism,
the idea that every man is for himself alone. But they stuck at the next
level. Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting
dog. He is much more than a dog--but this they did not see. And just as
in a pack it is necessary to bully and subdue the younger and weaker for
the general good, so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the
human pack should bully and subdue. Hence a new scorn for the ideas of
democracy that had ruled the earlier nineteenth century, and a revived
admiration for the overbearing and the cruel. It was quite
characteristic of the times that Mr. Kipling should lead the children of
the middle and upper-class British public back to the Jungle, to learn
“the law,” and that in his book _Stalky and Co._ he should give an
appreciative description of the torture of two boys by three others, who
have by a subterfuge tied up their victims helplessly before revealing
their hostile intentions.
It is worth while to give a little attention to this incident in _Stalky
and Co._, because it lights up the political psychology of the British
Empire at the close of the nineteenth century very vividly. The history
of the last half century is not to be understood without an
understanding of the mental twist which this story exemplifies. The two
boys who are tortured are “bullies,” that is the excuse of their
tormentors, and these latter have further been incited to the orgy by a
clergyman. Nothing can restrain the gusto with which they (and Mr.
Kipling) set about the job. Before resorting to torture, the teaching
seems to be, see that you pump up a little justifiable moral
indignation, and all will be well. If you have the authorities on your
side, then you cannot be to blame. Such, apparently, is the simple
doctrine of this typical imperialist. But every bully has to the best of
his ability followed that doctrine since the human animal developed
sufficient intelligence to be consciously cruel.
Another point in the story is very significant indeed. The head master
and his clerical assistant are both represented as being privy to the
affair. They want this bullying to occur. Instead of exercising their
own authority, they use these boys, who are Mr. Kipling’s heroes, to
punish the two victims. Head master and clergyman turn a deaf ear to the
complaints of an indignant mother. All this Mr. Kipling represents as a
most desirable state of affairs. In this we have the key to the ugliest,
most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern imperialism; the
idea of a _tacit conspiracy between the law and illegal violence_. Just
as the Tsardom wrecked itself at last by a furtive encouragement of the
ruffians of the Black Hundreds, who massacred Jews and other people
supposed to be inimical to the Tsar, so the good name of the British
Imperial Government has been tainted--and is still tainted--by an
illegal raid made by Doctor Jameson into the Transvaal before the Boer
War, and by the adventures, which we shall presently describe, of Sir
Edward Carson and Mr. F. E. Smith (now Lord Birkenhead) in Ireland. By
such treasons against their subjects, empires destroy themselves. The
true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies and emotions, but
in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and
legal. So soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to
be anything more than “the gang in possession,” and its days are
numbered.
It was just this dignity of government which the crude Darwinism and the
Kiplingism of the later Victorian years were destroying. Competition and
survival were accepted as the basal facts of life. “War is the natural
state of nations,” said a popular London men’s weekly[470] the other
day, with an air of repeating something universally known. “Peace is
only the interval of rest and preparation between wars.” In accordance
with such ideas the growing boy was exhorted to be “loyal” to his school
and contemptuous of other schools, “loyal” to his class against other
classes, “loyal” to his nation and contemptuous and fierce towards other
nations, “loyal” to the English-speaking peoples and contemptuous and
hostile to the German or French-speaking. His instinct for brotherhood
was narrowed and debased. The universal brotherhood of mankind was
laughed to scorn. All life was bickering, he was taught; and yet the
whole course of history has shown that the bickering nations perish, and
that the alliances and coalescences of peoples and nations ensure the
life they comprehend.
So the Darwinian crisis continued that destruction of Christian prestige
which the narrowness of priestcraft and the consequent division of
Christendom among the monarchist and national Protestant churches of the
Reformation had begun, and at a time when man’s need for pacifying and
unifying ideas was greater than it had ever been. Just when men of
different races and languages and political ideas were being brought by
the mechanical revolution to a closeness of contact and a power of
mutual injury undreamt of before, the authority of the doctrines by
which men had hitherto transcended tribal and local limitations was
undermined. Just when different classes were being aroused to a fierce
realization of mutual economic antagonism, the fundamental teaching of
brotherhood was discredited and a pseudo-scientific sanction given to
self-seeking and oppression.[471] From this stage onward the historian
can tell no longer of ordinary clerical Christianity as a power in men’s
affairs. In politics and social questions the appeal to its standards
ceased. Yet never was there so imperative a demand in the world of men
for a common basis upon which they could work together, a common
conception of aim in which they could lose themselves. We shall find
great masses of people inspired to passionate devotion, by ideas of
nationalism, of imperialism, of class-conscious socialism. But official
and orthodox Christianity no longer inspired. Men would no longer live
by it or die for it.
This paradoxical final decline of a universal faith in the Westernized
world, just when men were being drawn together by the mechanical
revolution into one inseparable political and economic system, may have
been due entirely to the coincidence of that revolution with destructive
scientific discovery, or it may also have been accelerated by the
irritations produced by the sudden close clashing with unfamiliar
peoples and races. It may have been a merely temporary decline due to
the need for a sloughing-off of the out-worn theology and antique
sacerdotalism which confined its appeal to the western world,
preparatory to a reconstruction of religious statement upon simpler
world-wide lines. It may have been merely a cleansing of the teachings
of Jesus of Nazareth from theological and ceremonial accretions. Upon
such “may have beens” we can speculate here, but we cannot decide.
History can deal with the small beginnings in the past of the great
things of the present, but in the present only with what is plain and
obvious. We cannot tell what seeds of the future may not be germinating
already amidst our present confusions.
§ 7
The vast changes we have been recording in the range of human power and
intercourse constitute the fundamental realities of nineteenth-century
history. But the atlas and political history of a time do not show what
is being made, but what has been made, and what is still going on. The
formal history of the latter half of the nineteenth century is not so
much concerned with these permanent changes in human affairs, as with
the schemes of Foreign Offices and the continuing exploits of the Great
Powers. The men who were discovering, inventing, developing inventions
and working out ideas were far too busy and far too few for effective
interference in public affairs. The diplomatists, politicians, and
statesmen, on the other hand, were far too occupied with their
established interplay of nations and parties to heed what the
contemporary mind was doing. The Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-81), a
leading British statesman, remarked (of the Darwinian controversy) that
it seemed to be a dispute whether men were descended from apes or
angels, and that for his part, he was “on the side of the angels”--a
sprightly saying which added greatly to his reputation. His rival,
Gladstone (1809-98), was of a more serious quality, and in the habit of
plunging during his vacations heavily and conspicuously into
intellectual affairs; among other such exploits he joined in public
controversy with Huxley upon Huxley’s own subject. He revealed ideas
derived from Buffon (died 1788) uncontaminated by any later influence.
The whole field of modern discovery, says Lecky in his _Democracy and
Liberty_ was outside his range.
When this Mr. Gladstone was taken by Sir John Lubbock to see Charles
Darwin,[472] he talked all the time of Bulgarian politics, and was
evidently quite unaware of the real importance of the man he was
visiting. Darwin, Lord Morley records, expressed himself as deeply
sensible of the honour done him by the visit of “such a great man,” but
he offered no comments on the Bulgarian discourse. Faraday, the English
electrician, whose work lives wherever a dynamo spins, who is in the
aeroplane, the deep-sea cable, the lights that light the ways of the
world, and wherever electricity serves our kind, was also visited by
Gladstone when the latter was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The man of
science tried in vain to explain some simple piece of apparatus to this
fine flower of the parliamentary world. “But,” said Mr. Gladstone,
“after all, what _good_ is it?” “Why, sir,” said Faraday, doing his best
to bring things home to him, “presently you will be able to tax
it.”[473]
[Illustration: Mr. Gladstone]
Mr. Gladstone was one of the most central and representative politician
statesmen of the later nineteenth century, and it will be worth while to
devote a paragraph or so to his ideas and intellectual limitations. They
will help us to understand better the astonishing irrelevance of the
political life of this period to the realities that rose about it. He
was a person of exceptional intellectual vigour; he had flashes of real
insight; but his circumstances and temperament conspired against his
ever attaining any real vision of the world in which he lived.
He was the son of Sir John Gladstone, a West Indian slave-holder, the
mortality among whose slaves was a matter of debate in the House of
Commons; he was educated at Eton College, and at Christ Church, Oxford,
and his mind never recovered from the process. We have already told how
after the Reformation the English universities ceased to be the organs
of the general intellectual life, and shrank to be merely the
educational preserves of the aristocracy and the church. Jews, Roman
Catholics, dissenters, sceptics, and all forms of intellectual activity
were carefully barred out from those almost extinguished lamps of
learning. Their mathematical work was poor, a series of exercises in the
mere patience-games and formulæ-writing of lower mathematics; science
they despised and excluded, and their staple training was the study,
without any archæology or historical perspective, of the more rhetorical
and “poetic” of the Latin and Greek classics.[474] Such a training
prepared men not so much to tackle and solve the problems of life, as to
plaster them over with more or less apt quotations. It turned the mind
away from living contemporary things; it showed the world reflected in a
distorting mirror of bad historical analogies; all the fated
convergences of history were refracted into false parallels. The British
Parliament was thought of as a Senate, statesmen postured as patricians
and equestrians; the new industrial population, now learning to read and
think for itself, was transfigured into the likeness of the illiterate
savage and privileged citizen mob of later republican Rome.[475] It was
natural, therefore, that at the Oxford Union Society young Gladstone
should distinguish himself by an eloquent speech against the threatened
reform of the worst electoral abuses (see chap. xxxiv, § 2), should
contest the immediate emancipation of the parental slaves--slavery, he
said, was “sanctioned by Holy Scripture”--and should oppose on religious
grounds the removal of the disabilities of the Jews. He was returned to
Parliament as Tory member for Newark in 1832, promising to resist “that
growing desire for change” which threatened to produce, “along with
partial good, a melancholy preponderance of mischief.” In his first
Parliament he distinguished himself by his opposition to the admission
of religious dissenters to the universities.
Here we have a mind manifestly of a tradition and make-up akin to that
of the framers of the Holy Alliance, a mind set steadfastly against all
the vast creative tendencies of the nineteenth-century world, as though
they were no more than a mere mischievous restlessness of slaves and
lower-class persons that would presently be allayed. But because of the
streak of insight in his composition, Gladstone did not remain set in a
course of pure conservatism, he presently began to realize the strength
of the stream upon which things were being carried forward; his
intelligence, in spite of its perversion, set itself to grasp the real
forms of the torrent of change about him. He was a man of great
ambitions and immense energy; his animosity against his brilliant and
flippant Jewish rival Disraeli (afterwards Lord Beaconsfield), who was
becoming a leader amid the shifting of groups and parties, swung this
man who had been the “rising hope of the stern unbending Tories” more
and more into a liberal attitude. He began to express belief in the
people, to support extensions of the franchise, to cultivate the esteem
of the dissenters, and, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to shift the
burthen of taxation from the food and comforts of the new classes of
needy voters, that the franchise extensions were bringing into the
political world. It is clear that for some years he was profoundly
perplexed by the deep forces that evidently lay beneath the stir and
thrust of international politics; then he became a great exponent of a
half-true theory, the theory of Nationalism, that has played and still
plays an intensely mischievous part in the world.
We have already pointed out that there must be a natural political map
of the world which gives the best possible geographical divisions for
human administrations. Any other political division of the world than
this natural political map will necessarily be a misfit, and must
produce stresses of hostility and insurrection tending to shift
boundaries in the direction indicated by the natural political map.
These would seem to be self-evident propositions were it not that the
diplomatists at Vienna evidently neither believed nor understood
anything of the sort, and thought themselves as free to carve up the
world as one is free to carve up such a boneless structure as a cheese.
Nor were these propositions evident to Mr. Gladstone. Most of the
upheavals and conflicts that began in Europe as the world recovered from
the exhaustion of the Napoleonic wars were quite obviously attempts of
the ordinary common men to get rid of governments that were such misfits
as to be in many cases intolerable. Generally the existing governments
were misfits throughout Europe because they were not socially
representative, and so they were hampering production and wasting human
possibilities; but when there were added to these universal annoyances
differences of religion and racial culture between rulers and ruled (as
in most of Ireland), differences in race and language (as in Austrian
North Italy and throughout most of the Austrian Empire), or differences
in all these respects (as in Poland and the Turkish Empire in Europe),
the exasperation drove towards bloodshed. Europe was a system of
governing machines abominably adjusted. But Mr. Gladstone was no patient
mechanic set upon easing and righting the clumsy injuries of those
stupid adjustments. He was a white-faced, black-haired man of incredible
energy, with eyes like an eagle’s, wrath almost divine, and the “finest
baritone voice in Europe.” He apprehended these things romantically,
therefore, in a manner suitable for passionate treatment in large halls.
He was blind to the pitiful and wonderful reality of mankind, to these
millions and millions of ill-informed, ill-equipped, inexpressive, and
divided human beings, mostly very willing, could they but do it, to live
righteously and well. He fixed his eagle eye on a fantastic vision of
“nations rightly struggling to be free.”[476]
What is a nation? What is nationality? He never paused to ask. No one
under the spell of that fine baritone paused to ask. But historians must
stand to the questions a politician can evade. If our story of the world
has demonstrated anything, it has demonstrated the mingling of races and
peoples, the instability of human divisions, the swirling variety of
human groups and human ideas of association. A nation, it has been said,
is an accumulation of human beings who think they are one people; but we
are told that Ireland is a nation, and Protestant Ulster certainly does
not share that idea; and Italy did not think it was one people until
long after its unity was accomplished. When the writer was in Italy in
1916, people were saying: “This war will make us one nation.” Again, are
the English a nation or have they merged into a “British nationality”?
Scotchmen do not seem to believe very much in this British nationality.
It cannot be a community of race or language that constitutes a nation,
because the Gaels and the Lowlanders make up the Scotch “nation”; it
cannot be a common religion, for England has scores; nor a common
literature, or why is Britain separated from the United States, and the
Argentine Republic from Spain? We may suggest that a nation is in effect
any assembly, mixture, or confusion of people which is either afflicted
by or wishes to be afflicted by a foreign office of its own, in order
that it should behave collectively as if it alone constituted humanity.
We have already in Chapter xxxvi, § 6, traced the development of the
Machiavellian monarchies into the rule of their foreign offices, playing
the part of “Powers.” The “nationality” which Mr. Gladstone made his
guiding political principle, is really no more than the romantic and
emotional exaggeration of the stresses produced by the discord of the
natural political map with unsuitable political arrangements. These
stresses could be used for the benefit of this power or the detriment of
that.
[Illustration: Tribal Gods--national symbols for which men would die--of
the 19th Century
John Bull Britannia Germania France Cathleen ni Houlihan]
Throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly throughout its
latter half, there has been a great working up of this nationalism in
the world. All men are by nature partisans and patriots, but the natural
tribalism of men in the nineteenth century was unnaturally exaggerated,
it was fretted and over-stimulated and inflamed and forced into the
nationalist mould. Nationalism was taught in schools, emphasized by
newspapers, preached and mocked and sung into men. Men were brought to
feel that they were as improper without a nationality as without their
clothes in a crowded assembly. Oriental peoples who had never heard of
nationality before, took to it as they took to the cigarettes and bowler
hats of the west. India, a galaxy of contrasted races, religions, and
cultures, Dravidian, Mongolian, and Aryan, became a “nation.” There were
perplexing cases, of course, as when a young Whitechapel Jew had to
decide whether he belonged to the British or the Jewish nation.[477]
Caricature and political cartoons played a large part in this elevation
of the cult of these newer and bigger tribal gods--for such indeed the
modern “nations” are--to their ascendancy over the imagination of the
nineteenth century. If one turns over the pages of _Punch_, that queer
contemporary record of the British soul, which has lasted now since
1841, one finds the figures of Britannia, Hibernia, France, and Germania
embracing, disputing, reproving, rejoicing, grieving. It greatly helped
the diplomatists to carry on their game of Great Powers to convey
politics in this form to the doubting general intelligence. To the
common man, resentful that his son should be sent abroad to be shot, it
was made clear that instead of this being merely the result of the
obstinacy and greed of two foreign offices, it was really a necessary
part of a righteous inevitable gigantic struggle between two of these
dim vast divinities. France had been wronged by Germania, or Italia was
showing a proper spirit to Austria. The boy’s death ceased to appear an
outrage on common sense; it assumed a sort of mythological dignity. And
insurrection could clothe itself in the same romantic habiliments as
diplomacy. Ireland became a Cinderella goddess, Cathleen ni Houlihan,
full of heart-rending and unforgivable wrongs, and young India
transcended its realities in the worship of Bande Mataram.
The essential idea of nineteenth-century nationalism was the “legitimate
claim” of every nation to complete sovereignty, the claim of every
nation to manage all its affairs within its own territory, regardless of
any other nation. The flaw in this idea is that the affairs and
interests of every modern community extend to the uttermost parts of the
earth. The assassination of Sarajevo in 1914, for example, which caused
the great war, produced the utmost distress among the Indian tribes of
Labrador because that war interrupted the marketing of the furs upon
which they relied for such necessities as ammunition, without which they
could not get sufficient food. A world of independent sovereign nations
means, therefore, a world of perpetual injuries, a world of states
constantly preparing for or waging war. But concurrently and
discordantly with the preaching of this nationalism of which Gladstone
was the outstanding exponent,[478] there was, among the stronger
nationalities, a vigorous propagation of another set of ideas, the
ideas of imperialism, in which a powerful and advanced nation was
conceded the right to dominate a group of other less advanced nations or
less politically developed nations or peoples whose nationality was
still undeveloped, who were expected by the dominating nation to be
grateful for its protection and dominance. This use of the word empire
was evidently a different one from its former universal significance.
The new empires did not even pretend to be a continuation of the world
empire of Rome. The leading spirit in British imperialism was Lord
Beaconsfield, Gladstone’s antagonist. These two ideas of nationality
and, as the crown of national success, “empire,” ruled European
political thought, ruled indeed the political thought of the world,
throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, and ruled it to
the practical exclusion of any wider conception of a common human
welfare. They were plausible and dangerously unsound working ideas. They
represented nothing fundamental and inalterable in human nature, and
they failed to meet the new needs of world controls and world security
that the mechanical revolution was every day making more imperative.
They were accepted because people in general had neither the sweeping
views that a scientific study of history can give, nor had they any
longer the comprehensive charity of a world religion. Their danger to
all the routines of ordinary life was not realized until it was too
late.
§ 8
After the middle of the nineteenth century, this world of new powers and
old ideas, this fermenting new wine in the old bottles of diplomacy,
broke out through the flimsy restraints of the Treaty of Vienna into a
series of wars. By an ironical accident the new system of disturbances
was preceded by a peace festival in London, the Great Exhibition of
1851.
The moving spirit in this exhibition was Prince Albert of
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the nephew of Leopold I, the German king who had
been placed upon the Belgian throne in 1831, and who was also the
maternal uncle of the young Queen Victoria of England. She had become
queen in 1837 at the age of eighteen. The two young cousins--they were
of the same age--had married in 1840 under their uncle’s auspices, and
Prince Albert was known to the British as the “Prince Consort.” He was a
young man of sound intelligence and exceptional education, and he seems
to have been greatly shocked by the mental stagnation into which England
had sunken. Oxford and Cambridge, those once starry centres, were still
recovering but slowly from the intellectual ebb of the later eighteenth
century. At neither university did the annual matriculations number more
than four hundred. The examinations were for the most part mere _viva
voce_ ceremonies. Except for two colleges in London (the University of
London) and one in Durham, this was all the education on a university
footing that England had to offer. It was very largely the initiative of
this scandalized young German who had married the British queen which
produced the university commission of 1850, and it was with a view to
waking up England further that he promoted the first International
Exhibition which was to afford some opportunity for a comparison of the
artistic and industrial products of the various European nations.
The project was bitterly opposed. In the House of Commons it was
prophesied that England would be overrun by foreign rogues and
revolutionaries who would corrupt the morals of the people and destroy
all faith and loyalty in the country.
The exhibition was held in Hyde Park in a great building of glass and
iron--which afterwards was re-erected as the Crystal Palace. Financially
it was a great success. It made many English people realize for the
first time that theirs was not the only industrial country in the world,
and that commercial prosperity was not a divinely appointed British
monopoly. There was the clearest evidence of a Europe recovering
steadily from the devastation of the Napoleonic wars, and rapidly
overtaking the British lead in trade and manufacture. It was followed
directly by the organization of a Science and Art Department (1853), to
recover, if possible, the educational leeway that Britain had lost.
The exhibition released a considerable amount of international talk and
sentiment. It had already found expression in the work of such young
poets as Tennyson, who had glanced down the vista of the future.
“Till the war-drums throb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.”
There was much shallow optimism on the part of comfortable people just
then. Peace seemed to be more secure than it had been for a long time.
The social gales of 1848 had blown, and, it seemed, blown themselves
out. Nowhere had the revolution succeeded. In France it had been
betrayed a second time by a Bonaparte, a nephew of the first Napoleon,
but a much more supple and intelligent man.[479] He had posed as a
revolutionary while availing himself of the glamour of his name; he had
twice attempted raids on France during the Orleans monarchy. He had
written a manual of artillery to link himself to his uncle’s prestige,
and he had also published an account of what he alleged to be Napoleonic
views, _Des Idées Napoléoniennes_, in which he jumbled up socialism,
socialistic reform, and pacificism with the Napoleonic legend. The
republic of 1848 was soon in difficulties with crude labour experiments,
and in October he was able to re-enter the country and stand for
election as President. He took an oath as President to be faithful to
the democratic republic, and to regard as enemies all who attempted to
change the form of government. In two years’ time (December, 1852) he
was Emperor of the French.
At first he was regarded with considerable suspicion by Queen Victoria,
or rather by Baron Stockmar, the friend and servant of King Leopold of
Belgium, and the keeper of the international conscience of the British
queen and her consort. All this group of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha people had a
reasonable and generous enthusiasm for the unity and well-being of
Germany--upon liberal lines--and they were disposed to be alarmed at
this Bonapartist revival. Lord Palmerston, the British foreign minister,
was, on the other hand, friendly with the usurper from the outset; he
offended the queen by sending amiable despatches to the French President
without submitting them for her examination and so giving her
sufficient time to consult Stockmar upon them, and he was obliged to
resign. But subsequently the British Court veered round to a more
cordial attitude to the new adventurer. The opening years of his reign
promised a liberal monarchy rather than a Napoleonic career; a
government of “cheap bread, great public works, and holidays,”[480] and
he expressed himself warmly in favour of the idea of nationalism, which
was naturally a very acceptable idea to any liberal German intelligence.
There had been a brief all-German parliament at Frankfort in 1848, which
was overthrown in 1849 by the Prussian monarchy.
[Illustration: Map of EUROPE, 1848-1871]
(This conflict between Palmerston and the Crown is interesting because
it shows the way in which the aristocratic ruling class of the crowned
republic of the Britain of the early Georges was now, with an uneasy
democracy below it, an educated royal consort above, and an education
which had not kept pace with the times, losing power to the renascent
energy of the Crown. A Stockmar would have been impossible in the reigns
of George I or George II, or in a nineteenth-century Great Britain with
a reasonably well-educated peerage.)
Before 1848 all the great European courts of the Vienna settlement had
been kept in a kind of alliance by the fear of a second and more
universal democratic revolution. After the revolutionary failures of
1848 this fear was lifted, and they were free to resume the scheming and
counter-scheming of the days before 1789--with the vastly more powerful
armies and fleets the first Napoleonic phase had given them. The game of
Great Powers was resumed with zest, after an interval of sixty years,
and it continued until it produced the catastrophe of 1914.
The Tsar of Russia, Nicholas I, was the first to move towards war. He
resumed the traditional thrust of Peter the Great towards
Constantinople. Nicholas invented the phrase of the “sick man of Europe”
for the Sultan, and, finding an excuse in the misgovernment of the
Christian population of the Turkish empire, he occupied the Danubian
principalities in 1853. European diplomatists found themselves with a
question of quite the eighteenth-century pattern. The designs of Russia
were understood to clash with the designs of France in Syria, and to
threaten the Mediterranean route to India of Great Britain, and the
outcome was an alliance of France and England to bolster up Turkey and a
war, the Crimean War, which ended in the repulse of Russia. One might
have thought that the restraint of Russia was rather the business of
Austria and Germany, but the passion of the foreign offices of France
and England for burning their fingers in Russian affairs has always been
very difficult to control.
The next phase of interest in this revival of the Great Power drama was
the exploitation by the Emperor Napoleon III and the king of the small
kingdom of Sardinia in North Italy, of the inconveniences and miseries
of the divided state of Italy, and particularly of the Austrian rule in
the north. The King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel, made an old-time
bargain for Napoleon’s help in return for the provinces of Nice and
Savoy. The war between France and Sardinia on the one hand, and Austria
on the other, broke out in 1859, and was over in a few weeks. The
Austrians were badly beaten at Magenta and Solferino. Then, being
threatened by Prussia on the Rhine, Napoleon made peace, leaving
Sardinia the richer for Lombardy.
[Illustration: The KINGDOM of ITALY, 1861.]
The next move in the game of Victor Emmanuel, and of his chief minister
Cavour, was an insurrectionary movement in Sicily led by the great
Italian patriot Garibaldi. Sicily and Naples were liberated, and all
Italy, except only Rome (which remained loyal to the Pope) and Venetia,
which was held by the Austrians, fell to the king of Sardinia. A general
Italian parliament met at Turin in 1861, and Victor Emmanuel became the
first king of Italy.
But now the interest in this game of European diplomacy shifted to
Germany. Already the common sense of the natural political map had
asserted itself. In 1848 all Germany, including, of course, German
Austria, was for a time united under the Frankfort parliament. But that
sort of union was particularly offensive to all the German courts and
foreign offices; they did not want a Germany united by the will of its
people, they wanted Germany united by regal and diplomatic action--as
Italy was being united. In 1848 the German parliament had insisted that
the largely German provinces of Schleswig-Holstein, which had been in
the German Bund, must belong to Germany. It had ordered the Prussian
army to occupy them, and the king of Prussia had refused to take his
orders from the German parliament, and so had precipitated the downfall
of that body. Now the King of Denmark, Christian IX, for no conceivable
motive except the natural folly of kings, embarked upon a campaign of
annoyance against the Germans in these two duchies. Prussian affairs
were then very much in the hands of a minister of the
seventeenth-century type, Von Bismarck (count in 1865, prince in 1871),
and he saw brilliant opportunities in this trouble. He became the
champion of the German nationality in these duchies--it must be
remembered that the King of Prussia had refused to undertake this rôle
for democratic Germany in 1848--and he persuaded Austria to side with
Prussia in a military intervention. Denmark had no chance against these
Great Powers; she was easily beaten and obliged to relinquish the
duchies. Then Bismarck picked a quarrel with Austria for the possession
of these two small states. So he brought about a needless and
fratricidal war of Germans for the greater glory of Prussia and the
ascendancy of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany. German writers of a
romantic turn of mind represent Bismarck as a great statesman planning
the unity of Germany; but indeed he was doing nothing of the kind. The
unity of Germany was a reality in 1848. It was and is in the nature of
things. The Prussian monarchy was simply delaying the inevitable in
order to seem to achieve it in Prussian fashion. That is why, when at
last Germany was unified, instead of bearing the likeness of a modern
civilized people, it presented itself to the world with the face of this
archaic Bismarck, with a fierce moustache, huge jack boots, a spiked
helmet, and a sword.
In this war between Prussia and Austria, Prussia had for an ally Italy;
most of the smaller German states, who dreaded the schemes of Prussia,
fought on the side of Austria. The reader will naturally want to know
why Napoleon III did not grasp this admirable occasion for statecraft
and come into the war to his own advantage. All the rules of the Great
Power game required that he should. But Napoleon, unhappily for himself,
had got his fingers in a trap on the other side of the Atlantic, and was
in no position to intervene.
[Illustration: Bismarck]
In order to understand the entanglement of this shifty gentleman, it is
necessary to explain that the discord in interests between the northern
and southern states of the American union, due to the economic
differences based on slavery, had at last led to open civil war. The
federal system established in 1789 had to fight the secessionist efforts
of the confederated slave-holding states. We have traced the causes of
that great struggle in Chapter XXXVII, §6; its course we cannot relate
here, nor tell how President Lincoln (born 1809, died 1865, president
from 1861) rose to greatness, how the republic was cleansed from the
stain of slavery, and how the federal government of the union was
preserved.
For four long years (1861-65) this war swung to and fro, through the
rich woods and over the hills of Virginia between Washington and
Richmond, until at last the secessionist left was thrust back and
broken, and Sherman, the unionist general, swept across Georgia to the
sea in the rear of the main confederate (secessionist) armies. All the
elements of reaction in Europe rejoiced during the four years of
republican dissension; the British aristocracy openly sided with the
confederate states, and the British Government permitted several
privateers, and particularly the _Alabama_, to be launched in England
to attack the federal shipping. Napoleon III was even more rash in his
assumption that after all the new world had fallen before the old. The
sure shield of the Monroe Doctrine, it seemed to him, was thrust aside
for good, the Great Powers might meddle again in America, and the
blessings of an adventurous monarchy be restored there. A pretext for
interference was found in certain liberties taken with the property of
foreigners by the Mexican president. A joint expedition of French,
British, and Spanish occupied Vera Cruz, but Napoleon’s projects were
too bold for his allies, and they withdrew when it became clear that he
contemplated nothing less than the establishment of a Mexican empire.
This he did, after much stiff fighting, making the Archduke Maximilian
of Austria, Emperor of Mexico in 1864. The French forces, however,
remained in effectual possession of the country, and a crowd of French
speculators poured into Mexico to exploit its mines and resources.
But in April, 1865, the civil war in the United States was brought to an
end by the surrender of the great southern commander, General Lee, at
Appomattox Court House, and the little group of eager Europeans in
possession of Mexico found themselves faced by the victorious federal
government, in a thoroughly grim mood, with a large, dangerous-looking
army in hand. The French imperialists were bluntly given the alternative
of war with the United States or clearing out of America. In effect this
was an instruction to go. This was the entanglement which prevented
Napoleon III from interference between Prussia and Austria in 1866, and
this was the reason why Bismarck precipitated his struggle with Austria.
While Prussia was fighting Austria, Napoleon III was trying to escape
with dignity from the briars of Mexico. He invented a shabby quarrel
upon financial grounds with Maximilian and withdrew the French troops.
Then, by all the rules of kingship, Maximilian should have abdicated.
But instead he made a fight for his empire; he was defeated by his
recalcitrant subjects, caught, and shot as a public nuisance in 1867. So
the peace of President Monroe was restored to the new world. There
remained only one monarchy in America, the empire of Brazil, where a
branch of the Portuguese royal family continued to reign until 1889. In
that year the emperor was quietly packed off to Paris, and Brazil came
into line with the rest of the continent.
But while Napoleon was busy with his American adventure, Prussia and
Italy were snatching victory over the Austrians (1866). Italy was badly
beaten at Custozza and in the naval battle of Lissa, but the Austrian
army was so crushed by the Prussian at the battle of Sadow, that Austria
made an abject surrender. Italy gained the province of Venetia, so
making one more step towards unity--only Rome and Trieste and a few
small towns on the north and north-western frontiers remained--and
Prussia became the head of a North German Confederation, from which
Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse, and Austria were excluded.
Four years later came the next step towards the natural political map of
Europe, when Napoleon III plunged into war against Prussia. A kind of
self-destroying foolishness urged him to do this. He came near to this
war in 1867 so soon as he was free from Mexico, by demanding Luxembourg
for France; he embarked upon it in 1870, when a cousin of the king of
Prussia became a candidate for the vacant throne of Spain. Napoleon had
some theory in his mind that Austria, Bavaria, Württemberg, and the
other states outside the North German Confederation would side with him
against Prussia.[481] He probably thought this would happen because he
wanted it to happen. But since 1848 the Germans, so far as foreign
meddling was concerned, had been in spirit a united people; Bismarck was
merely imposing the Hohenzollern monarchy, with pomp, ceremony, and
bloodshed, upon accomplished facts. All Germany sided with Prussia.
Early in August, 1870, the united German forces invaded France. After
the battles of Wörth and Gravelotte, one French army under Bazaine was
forced into Metz and surrounded there, and, on September 1st, a second,
with which was Napoleon, was defeated and obliged to capitulate at
Sedan. Paris found herself bare to the invader. For a second time the
promises of Napoleonism had failed France disastrously. On September
4th, France declared herself a republic again, and thus regenerated,
prepared to fight for existence against triumphant Prussianism. For
though it was a united Germany that had overcome French imperialism, it
had Prussia in the saddle. The army in Metz capitulated in October;
Paris, after a siege and bombardment, surrendered in January, 1871.
With pomp and ceremony, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, amidst a
great array of military uniforms, the King of Prussia was declared
German Emperor, and Bismarck and the sword of the Hohenzollerns claimed
the credit for that German unity which a common language and literature
had long since assured.
The peace of Frankfort was a Hohenzollern peace. Bismarck had availed
himself of the national feeling of Germany to secure the aid of the
South German states, but he had no grasp of the essential forces that
had given victory to him and to his royal master. The power that had
driven Prussia to victory was the power of the natural political map of
Europe insisting upon the unity of the German-speaking peoples. In the
east, Germany was already sinning against that natural map by her
administration of Posen and other Polish districts. Now greedy for
territory, and particularly for iron mines, she annexed a considerable
area of French-speaking Lorraine, including Metz, and Alsace, which, in
spite of its German speech, was largely French in sympathy. Inevitably
there was a clash between German rulers and French subjects in these
annexed provinces; inevitably the wrongs and bitterness of the
subjugated France of Lorraine echoed in Paris and kept alive the
passionate resentment of the French....
The natural map had already secured political recognition in the
Austrian Empire after Sadowa (1866). Hungary, which had been
subordinated to Austria, was erected into a kingdom on an equal footing
with Austria, and the Empire of Austria had become the dual “monarchy”
of Austria-Hungary. But in the southeast of this empire, and over the
Turkish empire, the boundaries and subjugations of the conquest period
still remained.
A fresh upthrust of the natural map began in 1875, when the Christian
races in the Balkans, and particularly the Bulgarians, became restless
and insurgent. The Turks adopted violent repressive measures, and
embarked upon massacres of Bulgarians on an enormous scale. Thereupon
Russia intervened (1877), and after a year of costly warfare obliged the
Turks to sign the treaty of San Stefano, which was, on the whole, a
sensible treaty, breaking up the artificial Turkish Empire, and to a
large extent establishing the natural map. But it had become the
tradition of British policy to thwart “the designs of Russia”--heaven
knows why!--whenever Russia appeared to have a design, and the British
foreign office, under the premiership of Lord Beaconsfield, intervened
with a threat of war if a considerable restoration of the Turks’
facilities for exaction, persecution, and massacre was not made. For a
time war seemed very probable. The British music-halls, those lamps to
British foreign policy, were lit with patriotic fire, and the London
errand-boy on his rounds was inspired to chant, with the simple dignity
of a great people conscious of its high destinies, a song declaring
that:
“We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo,[482] if we do,
We got the ships, we got the men, we got the munn-aye too”....
and so on to a climax:
“The Russ’ns shall not ’ave Con-stan-te-no - - - ple.”
In consequence of this British opposition, a conference was assembled in
1878 at Berlin to revise the treaty of San Stefano, chiefly in the
interests of the Turkish and Austrian monarchies, the British acquired
the island of Cyprus, to which they had no sort of right whatever, and
which has never been of the slightest use to them, and Lord Beaconsfield
returned triumphantly from the Berlin Conference, to the extreme
exasperation of Mr. Gladstone, with what the British were given to
understand at the time was “Peace with Honour.”
This treaty of Berlin was the second main factor, the peace of Frankfort
being the first, in bringing about the great war of 1914-18.
These thirty years after 1848 are years of very great interest to the
student of international political methods. Released from their terror
of a world-wide insurrection of the common people, the governments of
Europe were doing their best to resume the game of Great Powers that had
been so rudely interrupted by the American and French revolutions. But
it looked much more like the old game than it was in reality. The
mechanical revolution was making war a far more complete disturbance of
the general life than it had ever been before, and the proceedings of
the diplomatists were ruled, in spite of their efforts to disregard the
fact, by imperatives that Charles V and Louis XIV had never known.
Irritation with misgovernment was capable of far better organization and
far more effective expression than it had ever been before. Statesmen
dressed this up as the work of the spirit of Nationalism, but there were
times and occasions when that costume wore very thin. The grand monarchs
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had seemed to be free to do
this or that, to make war or to keep the peace, to conquer this province
or cede that as they willed; but such a ruler as Napoleon III went from
one proceeding to another with something of the effect of a man who
feels his way among things unseen.
[Illustration: Map of the BALKANS to illustrate the TREATY of BERLIN
1878]
None of these European governments in the nineteenth century was in fact
a free agent. We look to-day at the maps of Europe since 1814, we
compare them with the natural map, and we see that the game the Great
Powers played was indeed a game of foregone conclusions. Whatever
arrangements they made that were in accordance with the natural
political map of the world, and the trend towards educational democracy,
held, and whatever arrangements they made contrary to these things,
collapsed. We are forced, therefore, to the conclusion, that all the
diplomatic fussing, posturing, and scheming, all the intrigue and
bloodshed of these years, all the monstrous turmoil and waste of kings
and armies, all the wonderful attitudes, deeds, and schemes of the
Cavours, Bismarcks, Disraelis, Bonapartes, and the like “great men,”
might very well have been avoided altogether had Europe but had the
sense to instruct a small body of ordinarily honest ethnologists,
geographers, and sociologists to draw out its proper boundaries and
prescribe suitable forms of government in a reasonable manner. The
romantic phase in history had come to an end. A new age was beginning
with new and greater imperatives, and these nineteenth-century statesmen
were but pretending to control events.
§ 9
We have suggested that in the political history of Europe between 1848
and 1878, the mechanical revolution was not yet producing any very
revolutionary changes. The post-revolutionary Great Powers were still
going on within boundaries of practically the same size and with much
the same formalities as they had done in pre-revolutionary times. But
where the increased speed and certainty of transport and telegraphic
communications were already producing very considerable changes of
condition and method, was in the overseas enterprises of Britain and the
other European powers, and in the reaction of Asia and Africa to Europe.
[Illustration: Comparative Maps of ASIA (a) as part of hemisphere (b) on
Mercator’s projection to show relative sizes of Asiatic Russia and India
in the two cases.]
The end of the eighteenth century was a period of disrupting empires and
disillusioned expansionists. The long and tedious journey between
Britain and Spain and their colonies in America prevented any really
free coming and going between the home land and the daughter lands, and
so the colonies separated into new and distinct communities, with
distinctive ideas and interests and even modes of speech. As they grew
they strained more and more at the feeble and uncertain link of shipping
that joined them. Weak trading-posts in the wilderness, like those of
France in Canada, or trading establishments in great alien communities,
like those of Britain in India, might well cling for bare existence to
the nation which gave them support and a reason for their existence.
That much and no more seemed to many thinkers in the early part of the
nineteenth century to be the limit set to overseas rule. In 1820 the
sketchy great European “empires” outside of Europe that had figured so
bravely in the maps of the middle eighteenth century, had shrunken to
very small dimensions. Only the Russian sprawled as large as ever across
Asia. It sprawled much larger in the imaginations of many Europeans than
in reality, because of their habit of studying the geography of the
world upon Mercator’s projection, which enormously exaggerated the size
of Siberia.
The British Empire in 1815 consisted of the thinly populated coastal
river and lake regions of Canada, and a great hinterland of wilderness
in which the only settlements as yet were the fur-trading stations of
the Hudson Bay Company, about a third of the Indian peninsula, under the
rule of the East India Company, the coast districts of the Cape of Good
Hope inhabited by blacks and rebellious-spirited Dutch settlers; a few
trading stations on the coast of West Africa, the rock of Gibraltar, the
island of Malta, Jamaica, a few minor slave-labour possessions in the
West Indies, British Guiana in South America, and, on the other side of
the world, two dumps for convicts at Botany Bay in Australia and in
Tasmania. Spain retained Cuba and a few settlements in the Philippine
Islands. Portugal had in Africa some vestiges of her ancient claims.
Holland had various islands and possessions in the East Indies and Dutch
Guiana, and Denmark an island or so in the West Indies. France had one
or two West Indian Islands and French Guiana. This seemed to be as much
as the European powers needed, or were likely to acquire of the rest of
the world. Only the East Indian Company showed any spirit of expansion.
[Illustration: The BRITISH EMPIRE in 1815
[Mercator’s Projection]]
In India, as we have already told, a peculiar empire was being built up,
not by the British peoples, nor by the British Government, but by this
company of private adventurers with their monopoly and royal charter.
The company had been forced to become a military and political power
during the years of Indian division and insecurity that followed the
break-up of India after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. It had learnt to
trade in states and peoples during the eighteenth century. Clive
founded, Warren Hastings organized, this strange new sort of empire;
French rivalry was defeated, as we have already told; and by 1798, Lord
Mornington, afterwards the Marquis Wellesley, the elder brother of that
General Wellesley who became the Duke of Wellington, became
Governor-General of India, and set the policy of the company definitely
upon the line of replacing the fading empire of the Grand Mogul by its
own rule. Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt was a direct attack upon the
empire of this British company. While Europe was busy with the
Napoleonic wars, the East India Company, under a succession of
governors-general, was playing much the same rôle in India that had been
played before by Turkoman and such-like invaders from the north. And
after the peace of Vienna it went on, levying its revenues, making wars,
sending ambassadors to Asiatic powers, a quasi-independent state, a
state, however, with a marked disposition to send wealth westward.
In Chapter XXXVI, § 9, we have sketched the break-up of the empire of
the Great Mogul and the appearance of the Mahratta states, the Rajput
principalities, the Moslem kingdoms of Oudh and Bengal, and the Sikhs.
We cannot tell here in any detail how the British company made its way
to supremacy sometimes as the ally of this power, sometimes as that, and
finally as the conqueror of all. Its power spread to Assam, Sind, Oudh.
The map of India began to take on the outlines familiar to the English
schoolboy of to-day, a patchwork of native states embraced and held
together by the great provinces under direct British rule....
Now as this strange unprecedented empire of the company grew in the
period between 1800 and 1858, the mechanical revolution was quietly
abolishing the great distance that had once separated India and Britain.
In the old days the rule of the company had interfered little in the
domestic life of the Indian states; it had given India foreign
overlords, but India was used to foreign overlords, and had hitherto
assimilated them; these Englishmen came into the country young, lived
there most of their lives, and became a part of its system. But now the
mechanical revolution began to alter this state of affairs. It became
easier for the British officials to go home and to have holidays in
Europe, easier for them to bring out wives and families; they ceased to
be Indianized; they remained more conspicuously foreign and western--and
there were more of them. And they began to interfere more vigorously
with Indian customs. Magical and terrible things like the telegraph and
the railway arrived. Christian missions became offensively busy. If they
did not make very many converts, at least they made sceptics among the
adherents of the older faiths. The young men in the towns began to be
“Europeanized” to the great dismay of their elders.
India had endured many changes of rulers before, but never the sort of
changes in her ways that these things portended. The Moslem teachers and
the Brahmins were alike alarmed, and the British were blamed for the
progress of mankind. Conflicts of economic interests grew more acute
with the increasing nearness of Europe; Indian industries, and
particularly the ancient cotton industry, suffered from legislation that
favoured the British manufacturer.[483] A piece of incredible folly on
the part of the company precipitated an outbreak. To the Brahmin a cow
is sacred; to the Moslem the pig is unclean. A new rifle, needing
greased cartridges--which the men had to bite--was served out to the
company’s Indian soldiers; the troops discovered that their cartridges
were greased with the fat of cows and swine. This discovery precipitated
a revolt of the company’s Indian army, the Indian mutiny (1857). First
the troops mutinied at Meerut. Then Delhi rose to restore the empire of
the Great Mogul....
The British public suddenly discovered India. They became aware of that
little garrison of British people, far away in that strange land of
fiery dust and weary sunshine, fighting for life against dark multitudes
of assailants. How they got there and what right they had there, the
British public did not ask. The love of one’s kin in danger overrides
such questions. 1857 was a year of passionate anxiety in Great Britain.
With mere handfuls of troops the British leaders, and notably Lawrence
and Nicholson, did amazing things. They did not sit down to be besieged
while the mutineers organized and gathered prestige; that would have
lost them India for ever. They attacked often against overwhelming odds.
“Clubs, not spades, are trumps,” said Lawrence. The Sikhs, the Gurkhas,
the Punjab troops stuck to the British. The south remained tranquil. Of
the massacres of Cawnpore and Lucknow in Oudh, and how a greatly
outnumbered force of British troops besieged and stormed Delhi, other
histories must tell. By April, 1859, the last embers of the blaze had
been stamped out, and the British were masters of India again. In no
sense had the mutiny been a popular insurrection; it was a mutiny merely
of the Bengal Army, due largely to the unimaginative rule of the company
officials. Its story abounds in instances of Indian help and kindness to
British fugitives. But it was a warning.
The direct result of the mutiny was the annexation of the Indian Empire
to the British Crown. By the act entitled _An Act for the Better
Government of India_, the Governor-General became a Viceroy representing
the Sovereign, and the place of the company was taken by a Secretary of
State for India responsible to the British Parliament. In 1877, Lord
Beaconsfield, to complete this work, caused Queen Victoria to be
proclaimed Empress of India.
Upon these extraordinary lines India and Britain are linked at the
present time. India is still the empire of the Great Mogul, but the
Great Mogul has been replaced by the “crowned republic” of Great
Britain. India is an autocracy without an autocrat. Its rule combines
the disadvantage of absolute monarchy with the impersonality and
irresponsibility of democratic officialdom. The Indian with a complaint
to make has no visible monarch to go to; his Emperor is a golden symbol;
he must circulate pamphlets in England or inspire a question in the
British House of Commons. The more occupied Parliament is with British
affairs, the less attention India will receive, and the more she will be
at the mercy of her small group of higher officials.
This is manifestly impossible as a permanent state of affairs. Indian
life, whatever its restraints, is moving forward with the rest of the
world; India has an increasing service of newspapers, an increasing
number of educated people affected by Western ideas, and an increasing
sense of a common grievance against her government. There had been
little or no corresponding advance in the education and quality of the
British official in India during the century. His tradition is a high
one; he is often a man of exceptional quality, but the system is
unimaginative and inflexible. Moreover, the military power that stands
behind these officials has developed neither in character nor
intelligence during the last century. No other class has been so
stagnant intellectually as the British military caste. Confronted with a
more educated India, the British military man, uneasily aware of his
educational defects and constantly apprehensive of ridicule, has in the
last few years displayed a disposition towards spasmodic violence that
has had some very lamentable results. For a time the great war
altogether diverted what small amount of British public attention was
previously given to India, and drew away the more intelligent military
men from her service. During those years, and the feverish years of
unsettlement that followed, things occurred in India, the massacre of an
unarmed political gathering at Amritzar in which nearly two thousand
people were killed or wounded, floggings and humiliating outrages, a
sort of official’s Terror, that produced a profound moral shock when at
last the Hunter Commission of 1919 brought them before the home public.
In liberal-minded Englishmen, who have been wont to regard their empire
as an incipient league of free peoples, this revelation, of the barbaric
quality in its administrators produced a very understandable dismay....
But the time has not yet come for writing the chapter of history that
India is opening for herself.... We cannot discuss here in detail the
still unsettled problems of the new India that struggles into being.
Already in the Government of India Act of 1919 we may have the opening
of a new and happier era that may culminate in a free and willing group
of Indian peoples taking an equal place among the confederated states of
the world....
The growth of the British Empire in directions other than that of India
was by no means so rapid during the earlier half of the nineteenth
century. A considerable school of political thinkers in Britain was
disposed to regard overseas possessions as a source of weakness to the
kingdom. The Australian settlements developed slowly until in 1842 the
discovery of valuable copper mines, and in 1851 of gold, gave them a new
importance. Improvements in transport were also making Australian wool
an increasingly marketable commodity in Europe. Canada too was not
remarkably progressive until 1849; it was troubled by dissensions
between its French and British inhabitants, there were several serious
revolts, and it was only in 1867 that a new constitution creating a
Federal Dominion of Canada relieved its internal strains. It was the
railway that altered the Canadian outlook. It enabled Canada, just as it
enabled the United States, to expand westward, to market its corn and
other produce in Europe, and in spite of its swift and extensive growth,
to remain in language and sympathy and interests one community. The
railway, the steamship, and the telegraphic cable were indeed changing
all the conditions of colonial development.
Before 1840, English settlements had already begun in New Zealand, and a
new Zealand Land Company had been formed to exploit the possibilities of
the island. In 1840 New Zealand also was added to the colonial
possessions of the British Crown.
Canada, as we have noted, was the first of the British possessions to
respond richly to the new economic possibilities the new methods of
transport were opening. Presently the republics of South America, and
particularly the Argentine Republic, began to feel, in their cattle
trade and coffee growing, the increased nearness of the European market.
Hitherto the chief commodities that had attracted the European powers
into unsettled and barbaric regions had been gold or other metals,
spices, ivory, or slaves. But in the latter quarter of the nineteenth
century the increase of the European populations was obliging their
governments to look abroad for staple foods; and the growth of
scientific industrialism was creating a demand for new raw materials,
fats and greases of every kind, rubber, and other hitherto disregarded
substances. It was plain that Great Britain and Holland and Portugal
were reaping a great and growing commercial advantage from their very
considerable control of tropical and semi-tropical products. After 1871
Germany and presently France and later Italy began to look for unannexed
raw-material areas, or for Oriental countries capable of profitable
modernization.
[Illustration: AFRICA about the middle of the 19th Century]
[Illustration: AFRICA 1914]
So began a fresh scramble all over the world, except in the American
region where the Monroe Doctrine now barred such adventures, for
politically unprotected lands. Close to Europe was the continent of
Africa, full of vaguely known possibilities. In 1850 it was a continent
of black mystery; only Egypt and the coast were known. A map must show
the greatness of the European ignorance at that time. It would need a
book as long as this Outline to do justice to the amazing story of the
explorers and adventurers who first pierced this cloud of darkness, and
to the political agents, administrators, traders, settlers, and
scientific men who followed in their track. Wonderful races of men like
the pigmies, strange beasts like the okapi, marvellous fruits and
flowers and insects, terrible diseases, astounding scenery of forest
and mountain, enormous inland seas, and gigantic rivers and cascades
were revealed; a whole new world. Even remains (at Zimbabwe) of some
unrecorded and vanished civilization, the southward enterprise of an
early people, were discovered. Into this new world came the Europeans,
and found the rifle already there in the hands of the Arab
slave-traders, and negro life in disorder. By 1900, as our second map
must show, all Africa was mapped, explored, estimated, and divided
between the European powers, divided with much snarling and disputation
into portions that left each power uneasy or discontented. Little heed
was given to the welfare of the natives in this scramble. The Arab
slaver was indeed curbed rather than expelled, but the greed for
rubber, which was a wild product collected under compulsion by the
natives in the Belgian Congo, a greed exacerbated by the pitiless
avarice of the King of the Belgians, and the clash of inexperienced
European administrators with the native population in many other
annexations, led to horrible atrocities. No European power has perfectly
clean hands in this matter.
We cannot tell here in any detail how Great Britain got possession of
Egypt in 1883, and remained there in spite of the fact that Egypt was
technically a part of the Turkish Empire, nor how nearly this scramble
led to war between France and Great Britain in 1898, when a certain
Colonel Marchand, crossing Central Africa from the west coast, tried at
Fashoda to seize the Upper Nile. In Uganda the French Catholic and the
British Anglican missionaries disseminated a form of Christianity so
heavily charged with the spirit of Napoleon, and so finely insistent
upon the nuances of doctrine, that a few years after its first glimpse
of European civilization, Mengo, the capital of Uganda, was littered
with dead “Protestants” and “Catholics” extremely difficult to
distinguish from the entirely unspiritual warriors of the old régime.
Nor can we tell how the British Government first let the Boers, or Dutch
settlers, of the Orange River district and the Transvaal set up
independent republics in the inland parts of South Africa, and then
repented and annexed the Transvaal Republic in 1877; nor how the
Transvaal Boers fought for freedom and won it after the Battle of Majuba
Hill (1881). Majuba Hill was made to rankle in the memory of the English
people by a persistent press campaign. A war with both republics broke
out in 1899, a three years’ war enormously costly to the British people,
which ended at last in the surrender of the two republics.
Their period of subjugation was a brief one. In 1907, after the downfall
of the imperialist government which had conquered them, the Liberals
took the South African problem in hand, and these former republics
became free and fairly willing associates with Cape Colony and Natal in
a confederation of all the states of South Africa as one self-governing
republic under the British Crown.
In a quarter of a century the partition of Africa was completed. There
remained unannexed three comparatively small countries: Liberia, a
settlement of liberated negro slaves on the west coast; Morocco, under a
Moslem Sultan;[484] and Abyssinia, a barbaric country, with an ancient
and peculiar form of Christianity, which had successfully maintained its
independence against Italy at the Battle of Adowa in 1896.
§ 10
It is difficult to believe that any large number of people really
accepted this headlong painting of the map of Africa in European colours
as a permanent new settlement of the world’s affairs, but it is the duty
of the historian to record that it was so accepted. There was but a
shallow historical background to the European mind in the nineteenth
century, hardly any sense of what constitutes an enduring political
system, and no habit of penetrating criticism. The quite temporary
advantages that the onset of the mechanical revolution in the west had
given the European great powers over the rest of the old world were
regarded by people, blankly ignorant of the great Mongol conquests of
the thirteenth and following centuries, as evidences of a permanent and
assured leadership. They had no sense of the transferability of science
and its fruits. They did not realize that Chinamen and Indians could
carry on the work of research as ably as Frenchmen or Englishmen. They
believed that there was some innate intellectual drive in the west, and
some innate indolence and conservatism in the east, that assured the
Europeans a world predominance for ever.
The consequence of this infatuation was that the various European
foreign offices set themselves not merely to scramble with the British
for the savage and undeveloped regions of the world’s surface, but also
to carve up the populous and civilized countries of Asia as though these
peoples also were no more than raw material for European exploitation.
The inwardly precarious but outwardly splendid imperialism of the
British ruling class in India, and the extensive and profitable
possessions of the Dutch in the East Indies, filled the ruling and
mercantile classes of the rival great powers with dreams of similar
glories in Persia, in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, and in Further
India, China, and Japan. In the closing years of the nineteenth century
it was assumed, as the reader may verify by an examination of the
current literature of the period, to be a natural and inevitable thing
that all the world should fall under European dominion. With a
hypocritical pretence of reluctant benevolent effort the European mind
prepared itself to take up what Mr. Rudyard Kipling called “the White
Man’s Burthen”--that is to say, the loot and lordship of the earth. The
Powers set themselves to this enterprise in a mood of jostling rivalry,
with half-educated or illiterate populations at home, with a mere
handful of men, a few thousand at most, engaged in scientific research,
with their internal political systems in a state of tension or
convulsive change, with a creaking economic system of the most
provisional sort, and with their religions far gone in decay. They
really believed that the vast populations of eastern Asia could be
permanently subordinated to such a Europe.
Even to-day there are many people who fail to grasp the essential facts
of this situation. They do not realize that in Asia the average brain is
not one whit inferior in quality to the average European brain; that
history shows Asiatics to be as bold, as vigorous, as generous, as
self-sacrificing, and as capable of strong collective action as
Europeans, and that there are and must continue to be a great many more
Asiatics than Europeans in the world. It has always been difficult to
restrain the leakage of knowledge from one population to another, and
now it becomes impossible. Under modern conditions world-wide economic
and educational equalization is in the long run inevitable. An
intellectual and moral rally of the Asiatics is going on at the present
time. The slight leeway of a century or so, a few decades may recover.
At the present time, for example, for one Englishman who knows Chinese
thoroughly, or has any intimate knowledge of Chinese life and thought,
there are hundreds of Chinamen conversant with everything the English
know. The balance of knowledge in favour of India may be even greater.
To Britain, India sends students; to India, Britain sends officials.
There is no organization whatever for the sending of European students,
as students, to examine and inquire into Indian history, archæology, and
current affairs.
Since the year 1898, the year of the seizure of Kiau-Chau by Germany and
of Wei-hai-wei by Britain, and the year after the Russian taking of Port
Arthur, events in China have moved more rapidly than in any other
country except Japan. A great hatred of Europeans swept like a flame
over China, and a political society for the expulsion of Europeans, the
Boxers, grew up and broke out into violence in 1900. This was an
outbreak of rage and mischief on quite old-fashioned lines. In 1900 the
Boxers murdered 250 Europeans and, it is said, nearly 30,000 Christians.
China, not for the first time in history, was under the sway of a
dowager empress, who, like the Empress Theodora of Constantinople, had
once, it is said, been a woman of no repute. She was an ignorant woman,
but of great force of character and in close sympathy with the Boxers.
She supported them, and protected those who perpetrated outrages on the
Europeans. All that again is what might have happened in 500 B.C. or
thereabouts against the Huns.
Things came to a crisis in 1900. The Boxers became more and more
threatening to the Europeans in China. Attempts were made to send up
additional European guards to the Peking legations, but this only
precipitated matters. The German ambassador was shot down in the streets
of Peking by a soldier of the imperial guard. The rest of the foreign
ambassadors gathered together and made a fortification of the more
favourably situated embassies and stood a siege of two months. A
combined allied force of 20,000 under a German general then marched up
to Peking and relieved the legations, and the old Empress fled
northwestward. Some of the European troops committed grave atrocities
upon the Chinese civil population.[485] That brings one up to about the
level of 1850, let us say.
There followed the practical annexation of Manchuria by Russia, a
squabble among the powers, and in 1904 a British invasion of Tibet,
hitherto a forbidden country. But what did not appear on the surface of
these events, and what made all these events fundamentally different,
was that China now contained a considerable number of able people who
had a European education and European knowledge. The Boxer Insurrection
subsided, and then the influence of this new factor began to appear in
talk of a constitution (1906), in the suppression of opium-smoking, and
in educational reforms. A constitution of the Japanese type came into
existence in 1909, making China a limited monarchy. But China is not to
be moulded to the Japanese pattern, and the revolutionary stir
continued. Japan, in her own reorganization, and in accordance with her
temperament, had turned her eyes to the monarchist west, but China was
looking across the Pacific. In 1911 the essential Chinese revolution
began. In 1912 the emperor abdicated, and the greatest community in the
world became a republic. The overthrow of the emperor was also the
overthrow of the Manchus, and the Mongolian pigtail, which had been
compulsory for the Chinese since 1644, vanished again from the land.
At the present time it is probable that there is more good brain matter
and more devoted men working out the modernization and the
reorganization of the Chinese civilization than we should find directed
to the welfare of any single European people. China will presently have
a modernized practicable script, a press, new and vigorous modern
universities, a reorganized industrial system, and a growing body of
scientific and economic inquiry. The natural industry and ingenuity of
her vast population will be released to co-operate upon terms of
equality with the Western world. She may have great internal
difficulties ahead of her yet; of that no man can judge. Nevertheless,
the time may not be very distant when the Federated States of China may
be at one with the United States of America and a pacified and
reconciled Europe in upholding the organized peace of the world.
§ 11
The pioneer country, however, in the recovery of the Asiatic peoples was
not China, but Japan. We have outrun our story in telling of China.
Hitherto Japan has played but a small part in this history; her secluded
civilization has not contributed very largely to the general shaping of
human destinies; she has received much, but she has given little. The
original inhabitants of the Japanese Islands were probably a northern
people with remote Nordic affinities, the Hairy Ainu. But the Japanese
proper are of the Mongolian race. Physically they resemble the
Amerindians, and there are many curious resemblances between the
prehistoric pottery and so forth of Japan and similar Peruvian products.
It is not impossible that they are a back-flow from the trans-Pacific
drift of the early heliolithic culture, but they may also have absorbed
from the south a Malay and even a Negrito element.
Whatever the origin of the Japanese, there can be no doubt that their
civilization, their writing, and their literary and artistic traditions
are derived from the Chinese. They were emerging from barbarism in the
second and third century of the Christian Era, and one of their earliest
acts as a people outside their own country was an invasion of Korea
under a queen Jingo, who seems to have played a large part in
establishing their civilization. Their history is an interesting and
romantic one; they developed a feudal system and a tradition of
chivalry; their attacks upon Korea and China are an Eastern equivalent
of the English wars in France. Japan was first brought into contact with
Europe in the sixteenth century; in 1542 some Portuguese reached it in a
Chinese junk, and in 1549 a Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, began his
teaching there. The Jesuit accounts describe a country greatly
devastated by perpetual feudal war. For a time Japan welcomed European
intercourse, and the Christian missionaries made a great number of
converts. A certain William Adams, of Gillingham, in Kent, became the
most trusted European adviser of the Japanese, and showed them how to
build big ships. There were voyages in Japanese-built ships to India and
Peru. Then arose complicated quarrels between the Spanish Dominicans,
the Portuguese Jesuits, and the English and Dutch Protestants, each
warning the Japanese against the evil political designs of the others.
The Jesuits, in a phase of ascendancy, persecuted and insulted the
Buddhists with great acrimony. These troubles interwove with the feudal
conflicts of the time. In the end the Japanese came to the conclusion
that the Europeans and their Christianity were an intolerable nuisance,
and that Catholic Christianity in particular was a mere cloak for the
political dreams of the Pope and the Spanish monarchy--already in
possession of the Philippine Islands; there was a great and conclusive
persecution of the Christians, and in 1638 Japan was absolutely closed
to Europeans,[486] and remained closed for over 200 years. During those
two centuries the Japanese remained as completely cut off from the rest
of the world as though they lived upon another planet. It was forbidden
to build any ship larger than a mere coasting boat. No Japanese could go
abroad, and no European enter the country.
For two centuries Japan remained outside the main current of history.
She lived on in a state of picturesque feudalism enlivened by blood
feuds, in which about five per cent. of the population, the samurai, or
fighting men, and the nobles and their families, tyrannized without
restraint over the rest of the population. All common men knelt when a
noble passed; to betray the slightest disrespect was to risk being
slashed to death by his _samurai_. The elect classes lived lives of
romantic adventure without one redeeming gleam of novelty; they loved,
murdered, and pursued fine points of honour--which probably bored the
intelligent ones extremely. We can imagine the wretchedness of a curious
mind, tormented by the craving for travel and knowledge, cooped up in
these islands of empty romance.
Meanwhile the great world outside went on to wider visions and new
powers. Strange shipping became more frequent, passing the Japanese
headlands; sometimes ships were wrecked and sailors brought ashore.
Through the Dutch settlement at Deshima, their one link with the outer
universe, came warnings that Japan was not keeping pace with the power
of the Western world. In 1837 a ship sailed into Yedo Bay flying a
strange flag of stripes and stars, and carrying some Japanese sailors
she had picked up far adrift in the Pacific. She was driven off by a
cannon shot. This flag presently reappeared on other ships. One in 1849
came to demand the liberation of eighteen shipwrecked American sailors.
Then in 1853 came four American warships under Commodore Perry, and
refused to be driven away. He lay at anchor in forbidden waters, and
sent messages to the two rulers who at that time shared the control of
Japan. In 1854 he returned with ten ships, amazing ships propelled by
steam, and equipped with big guns, and he made proposals for trade and
intercourse that the Japanese had no power to resist. He landed with a
guard of 500 men to sign the treaty. Incredulous crowds watched this
visitation from the outer world, marching through the streets.
Russia, Holland, and Britain followed in the wake of America. Foreigners
entered the country, and conflicts between them and Japanese gentlemen
of spirit ensued. A British subject was killed in a street brawl, and a
Japanese town was bombarded by the British (1863). A great nobleman
whose estates commanded the Straits of Shimonoseki saw fit to fire on
foreign vessels, and a second bombardment by a fleet of British, French,
Dutch, and American warships destroyed his batteries and scattered his
swordsmen. Finally an allied squadron (1865), at anchor off Kioto,
imposed a ratification of the treaties which opened Japan to the world.
The humiliation of the Japanese by these events was intense, and it
would seem that the salvation of peoples lies largely in such
humiliations. With astonishing energy and intelligence they set
themselves to bring their culture and organization up to the level of
the European powers. Never in all the history of mankind did a nation
make such a stride as Japan then did. In 1866 she was a mediæval people,
a fantastic caricature of the extremist romantic feudalism; in 1899 hers
was a completely Westernized people, on a level with the most advanced
European powers, and well in advance of Russia. She completely dispelled
the persuasion that Asia was in some irrevocable way hopelessly behind
Europe. She made all European progress seem sluggish and tentative by
comparison.
We cannot tell here in any detail of Japan’s war with China in 1894-95.
It demonstrated the extent of her Westernization. She had an efficient
Westernized army and a small but sound fleet. But the significance of
her renascence, though it was appreciated by Britain and the United
States, who were already treating her as if she were a European state,
was not understood by the other great powers engaged in the pursuit of
new Indias in Asia. Russia was pushing down through Manchuria to Korea,
France was already established far to the south in Tonkin and Annam,
Germany was prowling hungrily on the look-out for some settlement. The
three powers combined to prevent Japan reaping any fruits from the
Chinese war, and particularly from establishing herself on the mainland
at the points commanding the Japan sea. She was exhausted by her war
with China, and they threatened her with war.
[Illustration: JAPAN & the Eastern Coast of Asia]
In 1898 Germany descended upon China, and, making the murder of two
missionaries her excuse, annexed a portion of the province of
Shang-tung. Thereupon Russia seized the Liao-tung peninsula, and
extorted the consent of China to an extension of her trans-Siberian
railway to Port Arthur; and in 1900 she occupied Manchuria. Britain was
unable to resist the imitative impulse, and seized the port of
Wei-hai-wei (1898). How alarming these movements must have been to every
intelligent Japanese a glance at the map will show. They led to a war
with Russia which marks an epoch in the history of Asia, the close of
the period of European arrogance. The Russian people were, of course,
innocent and ignorant of this trouble that was being made for them
half-way round the world, and the wiser Russian statesmen were against
these foolish thrusts; but a gang of financial adventurers surrounded
the Tsar, including the Grand Dukes, his cousins. They had gambled
deeply in the prospective looting of Manchuria and China, and they would
suffer no withdrawal. So there began a transportation of great armies of
Japanese soldiers across the sea to Port Arthur and Korea, and the
sending of endless train-loads of Russian peasants along the Siberian
railway to die in those distant battlefields.
The Russians, badly led and dishonestly provided, were beaten on sea and
land alike. The Russian Baltic Fleet sailed round Africa to be utterly
destroyed in the Straits of Tshu-shima. A revolutionary movement among
the common people of Russia, infuriated by this remote and reasonless
slaughter, obliged the Tsar to end the war (1905); he returned the
southern half of Saghalien, which had been seized by Russia in 1875,
evacuated Manchuria, resigned Korea to Japan. The White Man was
beginning to drop his “Burthen” in eastern Asia. For some years,
however, Germany remained in uneasy possession of Kiau-Chau.
§ 12
We have already noted how the enterprise of Italy in Abyssinia had been
checked at the terrible battle of Adowa (1896), in which over 3000
Italians were killed and more than 4000 taken prisoner. The phase of
imperial expansion at the expense of organized non-European states was
manifestly drawing to a close. It had entangled the quite sufficiently
difficult political and social problems of Great Britain, France, Spain,
Italy, Germany, and Russia with the affairs of considerable alien,
unassimilable, and resentful populations; Great Britain had Egypt (not
formally annexed as yet), India, Burmah, and a variety of such minor
problems as Malta and Shanghai; France had cumbered herself with Tonkin
and Annam in addition to Algiers and Tunis; Spain was newly entangled in
Morocco; Italy had found trouble for herself in Tripoli; and German
overseas imperialism, though its “place in the sun” seemed a poor one,
derived what satisfaction it could from the thought of a prospective war
with Japan over Kiau-Chau. All these “subject” lands had populations at
a level of intelligence and education very little lower than those of
the possessing country; the development of a native press, of a
collective self-consciousness, and of demands for self-government was in
each case inevitable, and the statesmen of Europe had been far too busy
achieving these empires to have any clear ideas of what they would do
with them when they got them.
The Western democracies, as they woke up to freedom, discovered
themselves “imperial,” and were considerably embarrassed by the
discovery. The East came to the Western capitals with perplexing
demands. In London the common Englishman, much preoccupied by strikes,
by economic riddles, by questions of nationalization, municipalization,
and the like, found that his path was crossed and his public meetings
attended by a large and increasing number of swarthy gentlemen in
turbans, fezzes, and other strange headgear, all saying in effect: “You
have got us. The people who represent your government have destroyed our
own government, and prevent us from making a new one. What are you going
to do with us?”
(A question whose answer still lies beyond the frontiers of history.)
§ 13
We may note here briefly the very various nature of the constituents of
the British Empire in 1914. It was and is a quite unique political
combination; nothing of the sort has ever existed before.
First and central to the whole system was the “crowned republic” of the
United British Kingdoms, including (against the will of a considerable
part of the Irish people) Ireland. The majority of the British
Parliament, made up of the three united parliaments of England,
Scotland, and Ireland, determines the headship, the quality, and policy
of the ministry, and determines it largely on considerations arising out
of British domestic politics. It is this ministry which is the effective
supreme government, with powers of peace and war, over all the rest of
the empire;
Next in order of political importance to the British States were the
“crowned republics” of Australia, Canada, Newfoundland (the oldest
British possession, 1583), New Zealand, and South Africa, all
practically independent and self-governing states in alliance with Great
Britain, but each with a representative of the Crown appointed by the
Government in office;
Next the Indian Empire, an extension of the empire of the Great Mogul,
with its dependent and “protected” states reaching now from Baluchistan
to Burmah, and including Aden, in all of which empire the British Crown
and the Indian Office (under Parliamentary control) played the rôle of
the original Turkoman dynasty;
Then the ambiguous possession of Egypt, still nominally a part of the
Turkish Empire and still retaining its own monarch, the Khedive, but
under almost despotic British official rule;
Then the still more ambiguous “Anglo-Egyptian” Sudan province, occupied
and administered jointly by the British and by the (British controlled)
Egyptian Government;
Then a number of partially self-governing communities, some British in
origin and some not, with elected legislatures and an appointed
executive, such as Malta,[487] Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Bermuda;
Then the Crown colonies, in which the rule of the British Home
Government (through the Colonial Office), verged on autocracy, as in
Ceylon, Trinidad, and Fiji (where there was an appointed council), and
Gibraltar and St. Helena (where there was a governor);
Then great areas of (chiefly) tropical lands, raw-product areas, with
politically weak and under-civilized native communities, which were
nominally protectorates, and administered either by a High Commissioner
set over native chiefs (as in Basutoland) or over a chartered company
(as in Rhodesia). In some cases the Foreign Office, in some cases the
Colonial Office, and in some cases the India Office had been concerned
in acquiring the possessions that fell into this last and least definite
class of all, but for the most part the Colonial Office was now
responsible for them.
It will be manifest, therefore, that no single office and no single
brain had ever comprehended the British Empire as a whole. It was a
mixture of growths and accumulations entirely different from anything
that has ever been called an empire before. It guaranteed a wide peace
and security; that is why it was endured and sustained by many men of
the “subject” races--in spite of official tyrannies and insufficiencies,
and of much negligence on the part of the “home” public. Like the
“Athenian empire,” it was an overseas empire; its ways were sea ways,
and its common link was the British Navy. Like all empires, its cohesion
was dependent physically upon a method of communication; the development
of seamanship, ship-building, and steamships between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries had made it a possible and convenient Pax--the “Pax
Britannica,” and fresh developments of air or swift land transport might
at any time make it inconvenient.
Air transport may indeed be already opening the way to a still more
extensive and universal “Pax,” in which the British system may of its
own accord merge. It is impossible to say whether this unprecedented
imperialism will obstruct or help forward that final unification of the
world’s affairs towards which all history is pointing. A system so
various in its structure has many contradictory aspects, some very
attractive, and some very repellent to a liberal intelligence. The
conversion of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from mere
administered dependencies into quasi-independent allies, has been a very
fine feat of statescraft. But in these cases the British Government had
to deal with largely kindred and sympathetic populations, very ready to
renew the methods of the old country upon a distant soil. In the case of
mainly alien peoples the record is not so good, and, for reasons we
have already partly analyzed (§ 6), it has been worse during the last
few decades than it was before. There has been a deterioration in the
quality of British imperialism in relation to “subject peoples.” Whether
that is a temporary deterioration or whether it is a fated drift towards
disruption is a question of the profoundest moment to an English writer,
but it is one that it is impossible to discuss properly within the
limits of this Outline. But even at its worst it is open to question
whether the British rule in India does not compare favourably with any
other domination of one entirely remote and alien civilization by
another. What is wrong is not so much that Britain rules India and
Egypt, but that any civilized country should be ruled by the legislature
of another, and that there should be no impartial court of appeal in the
world yet to readjust this arrangement.[488]
[Illustration: OVERSEAS EMPIRES of EUROPEAN POWERS, January 1914.]
XL
THE INTERNATIONAL CATASTROPHE OF 1914[489]
§ 1. _The Armed Peace before the Great War._ § 2. _Imperial
Germany._ § 3. _The Spirit of Imperialism in Britain and Ireland._
§ 4. _Imperialism in France, Italy, and the Balkans._ § 5. _Russia
a Grand Monarchy._ § 6. _The United States and the Imperial Idea._
§ 7. _The Immediate Causes of the Great War._ § 8. _A Summary of
the Great War up to 1917._ § 9. _The Great War from the Russian
Collapse to the Armistice._ § 10. _The Political, Economical, and
Social Disorganization Caused by the War._ § 11. _President Wilson
and the Problems of Versailles._ § 12. _Summary of the First
Covenant of the League of Nations._ § 13. _A General Outline of the
Treaties of 1919 and 1920._ § 14. _A Forecast of the “Next War.”_ §
15. _The State of Men’s Minds in 1920._
§ 1
For thirty-six years after the Treaty of San Stefano and the Berlin
Conference, Europe maintained an uneasy peace within its borders; there
was no war between any of the leading states during this period. They
jostled, browbeat, and threatened one another, but they did not come to
actual hostilities. There was a general realization after 1871 that
modern war was a much more serious thing than the professional warfare
of the eighteenth century, an effort of peoples as a whole that might
strain the social fabric very severely, an adventure not to be rashly
embarked upon. The mechanical revolution was giving constantly more
powerful (and expensive) weapons by land and sea, and more rapid methods
of transport; and making it more and more impossible to carry on warfare
without a complete dislocation of the economic life of the community.
Even the foreign offices felt the fear of war.
But though war was dreaded as it had never been dreaded in the world
before, nothing was done in the way of setting up a federal control to
prevent human affairs drifting towards war. In 1898, it is true, the
young Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) issued a rescript inviting the other
Great Powers to a conference of states “seeking to make the great idea
of universal peace triumph over the elements of trouble and discord.”
His rescript recalls the declaration of his predecessor, Alexander I,
which gave its tone to the Holy Alliance, and it is vitiated by the same
assumption that peace can be established between sovereign governments
rather than by a broad appeal to the needs and rights of the one people
of mankind. The lesson of the United States of America, which showed
that there could be neither unity of action nor peace until the thought
of the “people of Virginia” and the “people of Massachusetts” had been
swept aside by the thought of the “people of the United States,” went
entirely disregarded in the European attempts at pacification. Two
conferences were held at The Hague in Holland, one in 1899 and another
in 1907, and at the second nearly all the sovereign states of the world
were represented. They were represented diplomatically, there was no
direction of the general intelligence of the world to their
deliberations, the ordinary common man did not even know that these
conferences were sitting, and for the most part the assembled
representatives haggled cunningly upon points of international law
affecting war, leaving aside the abolition of war as a chimæra. These
Hague Conferences did nothing to dispel the idea that international life
is necessarily competitive. They accepted that idea. They did nothing to
develop the consciousness of a world commonweal overriding sovereigns
and foreign offices. The international lawyers and statesmen who
attended these gatherings were as little disposed to hasten on a world
commonweal on such a basis as were the Prussian statesmen of 1848 to
welcome an all-German parliament overriding the rights and “policy” of
the King of Prussia.
In America a series of three Pan-American conferences in 1889, 1901, and
1906 went some way towards the development of a scheme of international
arbitration for the whole American continent.
The character and good faith of Nicholas II, who initiated these Hague
gatherings, we will not discuss at any length here. He may have thought
that time was on the side of Russia. But of the general unwillingness of
the Great Powers to face the prospect of a merger of sovereign powers,
without which permanent peace projects are absurd, there can be no sort
of doubt whatever. It was no cessation of international competition with
its acute phase of war that they desired, but rather a cheapening of
war, which was becoming too costly. Each wanted to economize the wastage
of minor disputes and conflicts, and to establish international laws
that would embarrass its more formidable opponents in wartime without
incommoding itself. These were the practical ends they sought at the
Hague Conference. It was a gathering they attended to please Nicholas
II, just as the monarchs of Europe had subscribed to the evangelical
propositions of the Holy Alliance to please Alexander I; and as they had
attended it, they tried to make what they conceived to be some use of
it.
§ 2
The peace of Frankfort had left Germany Prussianized and united, the
most formidable of all the Great Powers of Europe. France was humiliated
and crippled. Her lapse into republicanism seemed likely to leave her
without friends in any European court. Italy was as yet a mere
stripling. Austria sank now rapidly to the position of a confederate in
German policy. Russia was vast, but undeveloped; and the British Empire
was mighty only on the sea. Beyond Europe the one power to be reckoned
with by Germany was the United States of America, growing now into a
great industrial nation, but with no army nor navy worth considering by
European standards.
The new Germany which was embodied in the empire that had been created
at Versailles was a complex and astonishing mixture of the fresh
intellectual and material forces of the world, with the narrowest
political traditions of the European system. She was vigorously
educational; she was by far the most educational state in the world; she
made the educational pace for all her neighbours and rivals. In this
time of reckoning for Germany, it may help the British reader to a
balanced attitude to recall the educational stimulation for which his
country has to thank first the German Prince Consort and then German
competition. That mean jealousy of the educated common man on the part
of the British church and ruling class, which no patriotic pride or
generous impulse had ever sufficed to overcome, went down before a
growing fear of German efficiency. And Germany took up the organization
of scientific research and of the application of scientific method to
industrial and social development with such a faith and energy as no
other community had ever shown before. Throughout all this period of the
armed peace she was reaping and sowing afresh and reaping again the
harvests, the unfailing harvests, of freely disseminated knowledge. She
grew swiftly to become a great manufacturing and trading power; her
steel output outran the British; in a hundred new fields of production
and commerce, where intelligence and system was of more account than
mere trader’s cunning, in the manufacture of optical glass, of dyes, and
of a multitude of chemical products and in endless novel processes, she
led the world.
To the British manufacturer who was accustomed to see inventions come
into his works, he knew not whence nor why, begging to be adopted, this
new German method of keeping and paying scientific men seemed abominably
unfair. It was compelling fortune, he felt. It was packing the cards. It
was encouraging a nasty class of intellectuals to interfere in the
affairs of sound business men. Science went abroad from its first home
like an unloved child. The splendid chemical industry of Germany was
built on the work of the Englishman Perkins, who could find no
“practical” English business man to back him. And Germany also led the
way in many forms of social legislation. Germany realized that labour is
a national asset, that it deteriorates through unemployment, and that,
for the common good, it has to be taken care of outside the works. The
British employer was still under the delusion that labour had no
business to exist outside the works, and that the worse such exterior
existence was, the better somehow for him. Moreover, because of his
general illiteracy, he was an intense individualist: his was the
insensate rivalry of the vulgar mind; he hated his fellow manufacturers
about as much as he hated his labour and his customers. German
producers, on the other hand, were persuaded of the great advantages of
combination and civility; their enterprises tended to flow together and
assume more and more the character of national undertakings.
This educating, scientific, and organizing Germany was the natural
development of the liberal Germany of 1848; it had its roots far back in
the recuperative effort after the shame of the Napoleonic conquest. All
that was good, all that was great in this modern Germany, she owed
indeed to her schoolmasters. But this scientific organizing spirit was
only one of the two factors that made up the new German Empire. The
other factor was the Hohenzollern monarchy which had survived Jena,
which had tricked and bested the revolution of 1848, and which, under
the guidance of Bismarck, had now clambered to the legal headship of all
Germany outside Austria. Except the Tsardom, no other European state had
so preserved the tradition of the Grand Monarchy of the eighteenth
century as the Prussian. Through the tradition of Frederick the Great,
Machiavelli now reigned in Germany. In the head of this fine new modern
state, therefore, there sat no fine modern brain to guide it to a world
predominance in world service, but an old spider lusting for power.
Prussianized Germany was at once the newest and the most antiquated
thing in Western Europe. She was the best and the wickedest state of her
time.
The psychology of nations is still but a rudimentary science.
Psychologists have scarcely begun to study the citizen side of the
individual man. But it is of the utmost importance to our subject that
the student of universal history should give some thought to the mental
growth of the generations of Germans educated since the victories of
1871. They were naturally inflated by their sweeping unqualified
successes in war, and by their rapid progress from comparative poverty
to wealth. It would have been more than human in them if they had not
given way to some excesses of patriotic vanity. But this reaction was
deliberately seized upon and fostered and developed by a systematic
exploitation and control of school and college, literature and press, in
the interests of the Hohenzollern dynasty. A teacher, a professor, who
did not teach and preach, in and out of season, the racial, moral,
intellectual, and physical superiority of the Germans to all other
peoples, their extraordinary devotion to war and their dynasty, and
their inevitable destiny under that dynasty to lead the world, was a
marked man, doomed to failure and obscurity.[490] German historical
teaching became an immense systematic falsification of the human past,
with a view to the Hohenzollern future. All other nations were
represented as incompetent and decadent; the Prussians were the leaders
and regenerators of mankind. The young German read this in his
school-books, heard it in church, found it in his literature, had it
poured into him with passionate conviction by his professor. It was
poured into him by all his professors; Hueffer (_op. cit._) says that
lectures in biology or mathematics would break off from their proper
subject to indulge in long passages of royalist patriotic rant. Only
minds of extraordinary toughness and originality could resist such a
torrent of suggestion. Insensibly there was built up in the German mind
a conception of Germany and its emperor as of something splendid and
predominant as nothing else had ever been before, a godlike nation in
“shining armour” brandishing the “good German sword” in a world of
inferior--and very badly disposed--peoples. We have told our story of
Europe; the reader may judge whether the glitter of the German sword is
exceptionally blinding. Germania was deliberately intoxicated, she was
systematically kept drunk, with this sort of patriotic rhetoric. It is
the greatest of the Hohenzollern crimes that the Crown constantly and
persistently tampered with education, and particularly with historical
teaching. No other modern state has so sinned against education. The
oligarchy of the crowned republic of Great Britain may have crippled and
starved education, but the Hohenzollern monarchy corrupted and
prostituted it.
It cannot be too clearly stated, it is the most important fact in the
history of the last half century, that the German people was
methodically indoctrinated with the idea of a German world-predominance
based on might, and with the theory that war was a necessary thing in
life. The key to German historical teaching is to be found in Count
Moltke’s dictum: “Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a
beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by
God.” (Gladstone, we have noted, in his Tory days showed the same pious
acquiescence in the family slave-holding.) “Without war the world would
stagnate and lose itself in materialism.” And the anti-Christian German
philosopher, Nietzsche, found himself quite at one with the pious
field-marshal. “It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment,” he observes,
“to expect much (even anything at all) from mankind if it forgets how to
make war. As yet no means are known which call so much into action as a
great war that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality
born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness,
that fervour born of effort in the annihilation of the enemy, that proud
indifference to loss, to one’s own existence, to that of one’s fellows,
that earthquake-like soul-shaking which a people needs when it is losing
its vitality.”[491]
This sort of teaching, which pervaded the German Empire from end to end,
was bound to be noted abroad, bound to alarm every other power and
people in the world, bound to provoke an anti-German confederation; and
it was accompanied by a parade of military, and presently of naval
preparation, that threatened France, Russia, and Britain alike. It
affected the thoughts, the manners, and morals of the entire German
people--for they are a plastic people, and not refractory under
instruction like the Irish and English. After 1871, the German abroad
thrust out his chest and raised his voice. He threw a sort of trampling
quality even into the operations of commerce. His machinery came on the
markets of the world, his shipping took the seas with a splash of
patriotic challenge. His very merits he used as a means of offence. (And
probably most other peoples, if they had had the same experiences and
undergone the same training, would have behaved in a similar manner.)
[Illustration: The Emperor William II.]
By one of those accidents in history that personify and precipitate
catastrophes, the ruler of Germany, the emperor William II, embodied the
new education of his people and the Hohenzollern tradition in the
completest form. He came to the throne in 1888 at the age of
twenty-nine; his father, Frederick III, had succeeded his grandfather,
William I, in the March, to die in the June of that year. William II was
the grandson of Queen Victoria on his mother’s side, but his temperament
showed no traces of the liberal German tradition that distinguished the
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family. His head was full of the frothy stuff of the
new imperialism. He signalized his accession by an address to his army
and navy; his address to his people followed three days later. A high
note of contempt for democracy was sounded: “The soldier and the army,
not parliamentary majorities, have welded together the German Empire. My
trust is placed in the army.” So the patient work of the German
schoolmasters was disowned, and the Hohenzollern declared himself
triumphant.
The next exploit of the young monarch was to quarrel with the old
Chancellor, Bismarck, who had made the new German Empire, and to dismiss
him (1890). There were no profound differences of opinion between them,
but, as Bismarck said, the Emperor intended to be his own chancellor.
These were the opening acts of an active and aggressive career. This
William II meant to make a noise in the world, a louder noise than any
other monarch had ever made. The whole of Europe was soon familiar with
the figure of the new monarch, invariably in military uniform of the
most glittering sort, staring valiantly, fiercely moustached, and with a
withered left arm ingeniously minimized. He affected silver shining
breastplates and long white cloaks. A great restlessness was manifest.
It was clear he conceived himself destined for great things, but for a
time it was not manifest what particular great things these were. There
was no oracle at Delphi now to tell him that he was destined to destroy
a great empire.
The note of theatricality about him and the dismissal of Bismarck
alarmed many of his subjects, but they were presently reassured by the
idea that he was using his influence in the cause of peace and to
consolidate Germany. He travelled much, to London, Vienna, Rome--where
he had private conversations with the Pope--to Athens, where his sister
married the king in 1889, and to Constantinople. He was the first
Christian sovereign to be a Sultan’s guest. He also went to Palestine. A
special gate was knocked through the ancient wall of Jerusalem so that
he could ride into that place; it was beneath his dignity to walk in. He
induced the Sultan to commence the reorganization of the Turkish Army
upon German lines and under German officers. In 1895 he announced that
Germany was a “world power,” and that “the future of Germany lay upon
the water”--regardless of the fact that the British considered that they
were there already--and he began to interest himself more and more in
the building up of a great navy. He also took German art and literature
under his care; he used his influence to retain the distinctive and
blinding German blackletter against the Roman type used by the rest of
western Europe, and he supported the Pan-German movement, which claimed
the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Flemish Belgians and the German Swiss
as members of a great German brotherhood--as in fact good assimilable
stuff for a hungry young empire which meant to grow. All other monarchs
in Europe paled before him.
He used the general hostility against Britain aroused throughout Europe
by the war against the Boer Republics to press forward his schemes for
a great navy, and this, together with the rapid and challenging
extension of the German colonial empire in Africa and the Pacific Ocean,
alarmed and irritated the British extremely. British liberal opinion in
particular found itself under the exasperating necessity of supporting
an ever-increasing British Navy. “I will not rest,” he said, “until I
have brought my navy to the same height at which my army stands.” The
most peace-loving of the islanders could not ignore that threat.
In 1890 he had acquired the small island of Heligoland from Britain.
This he made into a great naval fortress.
As his navy grew, his enterprise increased. He proclaimed the Germans
“the salt of the earth.” They must not “weary in the work of
civilization; Germany, like the spirit of Imperial Rome, must expand and
impose itself.” This he said on Polish soil, in support of the steady
efforts the Germans were making to suppress the Polish language and
culture, and to Germanize their share of Poland. God he described as his
“Divine Ally.” In the old absolutisms the monarch was either God himself
or the adopted agent of God; the Kaiser took God for his trusty
henchman. “Our old God,” he said affectionately. When the Germans seized
Kiau-Chau, he spoke of the German “mailed fist.” When he backed Austria
against Russia, he talked of Germany in her “shining armour.”
The disasters of Russia in Manchuria in 1905 released the spirit of
German imperialism to bolder aggressions. The fear of a joint attack
from France and Russia seemed lifting. The emperor made a kind of regal
progress through the Holy Land, landed at Tangier to assure the Sultan
of Morocco of his support against the French, and inflicted upon France
the crowning indignity of compelling her by a threat of war to dismiss
Delcassé, her foreign minister. He drew tighter the links between
Austria and Germany, and in 1908, Austria, with his support, defied the
rest of Europe by annexing from the Turk the Yugo-Slav provinces of
Bosnia and Herzegovina. So by his naval challenge to Britain and these
aggressions upon France and the Slavs he forced Britain, France, and
Russia into a defensive understanding against him. The Bosnian
annexation had the further effect of estranging Italy, which had
hitherto been his ally.
Such was the personality that the evil fate of Germany set over her to
stimulate, organize, and render intolerable to the rest of the world the
natural pride and self-assertion of a great people who had at last,
after long centuries of division and weakness, escaped from a jungle of
princes to unity and the world’s respect. It was natural that the
commercial and industrial leaders of this new Germany who were now
getting rich, the financiers intent upon overseas exploits, the
officials and the vulgar, should find this leader very much to their
taste. Many Germans who thought him rash or tawdry in their secret
hearts, supported him publicly because he had so taking an air of
success. _Hoch der Kaiser!_
Yet Germany did not yield itself without a struggle to the
strong-flowing tide of imperialism. Important elements in German life
struggled against this swaggering new autocracy. The old German nations,
and particularly the Bavarians, refused to be swallowed up in
Prussianism. And with the spread of education and the rapid
industrialization of Germany, organized labour developed its ideas and a
steady antagonism to the military and patriotic clattering of its ruler.
A new political party was growing up in the state, the Social Democrats,
professing the doctrines of Marx. In the teeth of the utmost opposition
from the official and clerical organizations, and of violently
repressive laws against its propaganda and against combinations, this
party grew. The Kaiser denounced it again and again; its leaders were
sent to prison or driven abroad. Still it grew. When he came to the
throne it polled not half a million votes; in 1907 it polled over three
million. He attempted to concede many things, old age and sickness
insurance, for example, as a condescending gift, things which it claimed
for the workers as their right. His conversion to socialism was noted,
but it gained no converts to imperialism. His naval ambitions were ably
and bitterly denounced; the colonial adventures of the new German
capitalists were incessantly attacked by this party of the common sense
of the common man. But to the army, the Social Democrats accorded a
moderate support, because, much as they detested their home-grown
autocrat, they hated and dreaded the barbaric and retrogressive
autocracy of Russia on their eastern frontier more.
The danger plainly before Germany was that this swaggering imperialism
would compel Britain, Russia, and France into a combined attack upon
her, an offensive-defensive. The Kaiser wavered between a stiff attitude
towards Britain and clumsy attempts to propitiate her, while his fleet
grew and while he prepared for a preliminary struggle with Russia and
France. When in 1913 the British government proposed a cessation on
either hand of naval construction for a year, it was refused. The Kaiser
was afflicted with a son and heir more Hohenzollern, more imperialistic,
more Pan-Germanic than his father. He had been nurtured upon imperialist
propaganda. His toys had been soldiers and guns. He snatched at a
premature popularity by outdoing his father’s patriotic and aggressive
attitudes. His father, it was felt, was growing middle-aged and
over-careful. The Crown Prince renewed him. Germany had never been so
strong, never so ready for a new great adventure and another harvest of
victories. The Russians, he was instructed, were decayed, the French
degenerate, the British on the verge of civil war. This young Crown
Prince was but a sample of the abounding upper-class youth of Germany in
the spring of 1914. They had all drunken from the same cup. Their
professors and teachers, their speakers and leaders, their mothers and
sweethearts, had been preparing them for the great occasion that was now
very nearly at hand. They were full of the tremulous sense of imminent
conflict, of a trumpet call to stupendous achievements, of victory over
mankind abroad, triumph over the recalcitrant workers at home. The
country was taut and excited like an athletic competitor at the end of
his training.
§ 3
Throughout the period of the armed peace Germany was making the pace and
setting the tone for the rest of Europe. The influence of her new
doctrines of aggressive imperialism was particularly strong upon the
British mind, which was ill-equipped to resist a strong intellectual
thrust from abroad. The educational impulse the Prince Consort had given
had died away after his death; the universities of Oxford and Cambridge
were hindered in their task of effective revision of upper-class
education by the fears and prejudices the so-called “conflict of science
and religion” had roused in the clergy who dominated them through
Convocation; popular education was crippled by religious squabbling, by
the extreme parsimony of the public authorities, by the desire of
employers for child labour, and by individualistic objection to
“educating other people’s children.” The old tradition of the English,
the tradition of plain statement, legality, fair play, and a certain
measure of republican freedom had faded considerably during the stresses
of the Napoleonic Wars; romanticism, of which Sir Walter Scott, the
great novelist, was the chief promoter, had infected the national
imagination with a craving for the florid and picturesque. “Mr. Briggs,”
the comic Englishman of _Punch_ in the fifties and sixties, getting
himself into highland costume and stalking deer, was fairly
representative of the spirit of the new movement. It presently dawned
upon Mr. Briggs as a richly coloured and creditable fact he had hitherto
not observed, that the sun never set on his dominions. The country which
had once put Clive and Warren Hastings on trial for their unrighteous
treatment of Indians, was now persuaded to regard them as entirely
chivalrous and devoted figures. They were “empire builders.” Under the
spell of Disraeli’s Oriental imagination, which had made Queen Victoria
an “empress,” the Englishman turned readily enough towards the vague
exaltations of modern imperialism.
The perverted ethnology and distorted history which was persuading the
mixed Slavic, Keltic, and Teutonic Germans that they were a wonderful
race apart, was imitated by English writers who began to exalt a new
ethnological invention, the “Anglo-Saxon.” This remarkable compound was
presented as the culmination of humanity, the crown and reward of the
accumulated effort of Greek and Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Jew, Mongol,
and such-like lowly precursors of its white splendour. The senseless
legend of German superiority did much to exacerbate the irritations of
the Poles in Posen and the French in Lorraine. The even more ridiculous
legend of the superior Anglo-Saxon did not merely increase the
irritations of English rule in Ireland, but it lowered the tone of
British dealings with “subject” peoples throughout the entire world. For
the cessation of respect and the cultivation of “superior” ideas are the
cessation of civility and justice. In the early days of British rule in
India, British officials went out modestly as to a wonderful country to
learn and live; now they went out absurdly, as samples of a wonderful
people, as lights to a great darkness, to profit and prevail.
The imitation of German patriotic misconceptions did not end with this
“Anglo-Saxon” fabrication. The clever young men at the British
universities in the eighties and nineties, bored by the flatness and
insincerities of domestic politics, were moved to imitation and rivalry
by this new teaching of an arrogant, subtle, and forceful nationalist
imperialism, this combination of Machiavelli and Attila, which was being
imposed upon the thought and activities of young Germany. Britain, too,
they thought, must have her shining armour and wave her good sword. The
new British imperialism found its poet in Mr. Kipling and its practical
support in a number of financial and business interests whose way to
monopolies and exploitations was lighted by its glow. These
Prussianizing Englishmen carried their imitation of Germany to the most
extraordinary lengths. Central Europe is one continuous economic system,
best worked as one; and the new Germany had achieved a great customs
union, a Zollverein of all its constituents. It became naturally one
compact system, like a clenched fist. The British Empire sprawled like
an open hand throughout the world, its members different in nature,
need, and relationship, with no common interest except the common
guarantee of safety. But the new Imperialists were blind to that
difference. If new Germany had a Zollverein, then the British Empire
must be in the fashion; and the natural development of its various
elements must be hampered everywhere by “imperial preferences” and the
like....
Yet the imperialist movement in Great Britain never had the authority
nor the unanimity it had in Germany. It was not a natural product of any
of the three united but diverse British peoples. It was not congenial to
them. Queen Victoria and her successors, Edward VII and George V, were
indisposed, either by temperament or tradition, to wear “shining
armour,” shake “mailed fists,” and flourish “good swords” in the
Hohenzollern fashion. They had the wisdom to refrain from any overt
meddling with public ideas. And this “British” imperialist movement had
from the first aroused the hostility of the large number of English,
Welsh, Irish, and Scotch writers who refused to recognize this new
“British” nationality or to accept the theory that they were these
“Anglo-Saxon” supermen. And many great interests in Britain, and notably
the shipping interest, had been built up upon free trade, and regarded
the fiscal proposals of the new imperialists, and the new financial and
mercantile adventurers with whom they were associated, with a
justifiable suspicion. On the other hand, these ideas ran like wildfire
through the military class, through Indian officialdom and the like.
Hitherto there had always been something apologetic about the army man
in England. He was not native to that soil. Here was a movement that
promised to make him as splendidly important as his Prussian brother in
arms. And the imperialist idea also found support in the cheap popular
press that was now coming into existence to cater for the new stratum of
readers created by elementary education. This press wanted plain,
bright, simple ideas adapted to the needs of readers who had scarcely
begun to think.
In spite of such support, and its strong appeal to national vanity,
British imperialism never saturated the mass of the British peoples. The
English are not a mentally docile people, and the noisy and rather
forced enthusiasm for imperialism and higher tariffs of the old Tory
Party, the army class, the country clergy, the music-halls, the
assimilated aliens, the vulgar rich, and the new large employers,
inclined the commoner sort, and particularly organized labour, to a
suspicious attitude. If the continually irritated sore of the Majuba
defeat permitted the country to be rushed into the needless, toilsome,
and costly conquest of the Boer republics in South Africa, the strain of
that adventure produced a sufficient reaction towards decency and
justice to reinstate the Liberal Party in power, and to undo the worst
of that mischief by the creation of a South African confederation.
Considerable advances continued to be made in popular education, and in
the recovery of public interests and the general wealth from the
possession of the few. And in these years of the armed peace, the three
British peoples came very near to a settlement, on fairly just and
reasonable lines, of their long-standing misunderstanding with Ireland.
The great war, unluckily for them, overtook them in the very crisis of
this effort.
Like Japan, Ireland has figured but little in this _Outline of
History_, and for the same reason, because she is an extreme island
country, receiving much, but hitherto giving but little back into the
general drama. Her population is a very mixed one, its basis, and
probably its main substance, being of the dark “Mediterranean” strain,
pre-Nordic and pre-Aryan, like the Basques and the people of Portugal
and south Italy. These people reached the island in Neolithic times; no
Palæolithic remains have been found in Ireland. Over this original basis
there flowed, about the sixth century B.C.--we do not know to what
degree of submergence--a wave of Keltic peoples, in at least sufficient
strength to establish a Keltic language, the Irish Gaelic. There were
comings and goings, invasions and counter-invasions of this and that
Keltic or Kelticized people between Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and
England. The island was Christianized in the fifth century. Later on the
east coast was raided and settled by Northmen, but we do not know to
what extent they altered the racial quality. The Norman-English came in
1169, in the time of Henry II and onward. The Teutonic strain may be as
strong or stronger than the Keltic in modern Ireland. Hitherto Ireland
had been a tribal and barbaric country, with a few centres of security
wherein the artistic tendencies of the more ancient race found scope in
metal-work and the illumination of holy books. Now, in the twelfth
century, there was an imperfect conquest by the English Crown, and
scattered settlements by Normans and English in various parts of the
country. From the outset profound temperamental differences between the
Irish and English were manifest, differences exacerbated by a difference
of language, and these became much more evident after the Protestant
Reformation. The English were naturally a non-sacerdotal people; they
had the Northman’s dislike for and disbelief in priests; the share of
Englishmen in the European Reformation was a leading one. The Irish
found the priest congenial, and resisted the Reformation obstinately and
bitterly.
The English rule in Ireland had been from the first an intermittent
civil war due to the clash of languages and the different laws of land
tenure and inheritance of the two peoples. It was further embittered at
the Reformation by this religious incompatibility. The rebellions,
massacres, and subjugations of the unhappy island during the reigns of
Elizabeth and James I we cannot tell of here; but under James came a
new discord with the confiscation of large areas of Ulster and their
settlement with Presbyterian Scotch colonists. They formed a Protestant
community in necessary permanent conflict with the Catholic remainder of
Ireland.
[Illustration: IRELAND]
In the political conflicts during the reign of Charles I and the
Commonweal, and of James II and William and Mary, the two sides in
English affairs found sympathizers and allies in the Irish parties.
There is a saying in Ireland that England’s misfortune is Ireland’s
opportunity, and the English civil trouble that led to the execution of
Strafford enabled the Irish Catholics to perpetrate a ferocious massacre
of the English in Ireland (1641)--a very cruel and barbaric massacre in
which neither women nor little children were spared. Later on Cromwell
was to avenge that massacre by giving no quarter to any men actually
found under arms, a severity remembered by the Irish Catholics with
extravagant bitterness. Between 1689 and 1691 Ireland was again torn by
civil war. James II sought the support of the Irish Catholics against
William III, and his adherents were badly beaten at the battles of the
Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691).
There was a settlement, the Treaty of Limerick, a disputed settlement in
which the English Government promised much in the way of tolerance for
Catholics and the like, and failed to keep its promises. Limerick is
still a cardinal memory in the long story of Irish embitterment.
Comparatively few English people have even heard of this Treaty of
Limerick; in Ireland it rankles to this day.
The eighteenth century was a century of accumulating grievance. English
commercial jealousy put heavy restraints upon Irish trade, and the
development of a wool industry was destroyed in the south and west. The
Ulster Protestants were treated little better than the Catholics in
these matters, and they were the chief of the rebels. There was more
agrarian revolt in the north than in the south; the Steel Boys, and
later the Peep-o’-Day Boys, were Ulster terrorists. There was a
parliament in Ireland, but it was a Protestant parliament, even more
limited and corrupt than the contemporary British Parliament; there was
a considerable civilization in and about Dublin, and much literary and
scientific activity, conducted in English and centring upon the
Protestant university of Trinity College. This was the Ireland of Swift,
Goldsmith, Burke, Berkeley, and Boyle. It was essentially a part of the
English culture. The Catholic religion and the Irish language were
outcast and persecuted things in the darkness.
It was from this Ireland of the darkness that the recalcitrant Ireland
of the twentieth century arose. The Irish Parliament, its fine
literature, its science, all its culture, gravitated naturally enough to
London, because they were inseparably a part of that world. The more
prosperous landlords went to England to live, and had their children
educated there. The increasing facilities of communication enhanced this
tendency and depleted Dublin. The Act of Union (January 1st, 1801) was
the natural coalescence of two entirely kindred systems, of the
Anglo-Irish Parliament with the British Parliament, both oligarchic,
both politically corrupt in the same fashion. There was a vigorous
opposition on the part, not so much of the outer Irish as of Protestants
settled in Ireland, and a futile insurrection under Robert Emmet in
1803. Dublin, which had been a fine Anglo-Irish city in the middle
eighteenth century, was gradually deserted by its intellectual and
political life, and invaded by the outer Irish of Ireland. Its
fashionable life became more and more official, centring upon the Lord
Lieutenant in Dublin Castle; its chief social occasion is now a horse
show. But while the Ireland of Swift and Goldsmith was part and lot with
the England of Pope, Dr. Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, while there
has never been and is not now any real definable difference except one
of geography between the “governing class” in Ireland and in Britain,
the Irish underworld and the English underworld were essentially
dissimilar. The upward struggle of the English “democracy” to education,
to political recognition, had no Irish counterpart. Britain was
producing a great industrial population, Protestant or sceptical; she
had agricultural labourers indeed, but no peasants. Ireland had become a
land of peasants, blankly ignorant and helplessly priest-ridden. Their
cultivation degenerated more and more into a growing of potatoes and a
feeding of pigs. The people married and bred; except for the consumption
of whisky when it could be got, and a little fighting, family life was
their only amusement. This was the direct result of orthodox Catholic
teaching; the priests were all-powerful with the people and they taught
them nothing; not even washing or drainage; they forbade them to seek
any Protestant learning, they allowed their agricultural science to sink
to mere potato-growing, and they preyed upon their poverty. Here are the
appalling consequences. The population of Ireland
in 1785 was 2,845,932,
in 1803 was 5,536,594,
in 1845 was 8,295,061,
at which date the weary potato gave way under its ever-growing burthen
and there was a frightful famine. Many died, many emigrated, especially
to the United States; an outflow of emigration began that made Ireland
for a time a land of old people and empty nests.
Now because of the Union of the Parliaments, the enfranchisement of the
English and Irish populations went on simultaneously. Catholic
enfranchisement in England meant Catholic enfranchisement in Ireland.
The British got votes because they wanted them; the Irish commonalty got
votes because the English did. Ireland was over-represented in the Union
Parliament, because originally Irish seats had been easier for the
governing class to manipulate than English; and so it came about that
this Irish and Catholic Ireland, which had never before had any
political instrument at all, and which had never sought a political
instrument, found itself with the power to thrust a solid body of
members into the legislature of Great Britain. After the general
election of 1874, the newly enfranchised “democracy” of Britain found
itself confronted by a strange and perplexing Irish “democracy,”
different in its religion, its traditions, and its needs, telling a tale
of wrongs, of which the common English had never heard, clamouring
passionately for separation which they could not understand and which
impressed them chiefly as being needlessly unfriendly. The national
egotism of the Irish is intense; their circumstances have made it
intense; they were incapable of considering the state of affairs in
England; the new Irish party came into the British Parliament to
obstruct and disorder English business until Ireland became free, and to
make themselves a nuisance to the English. This spirit was only too
welcome to the oligarchy which still ruled the British Empire; they
allied themselves with the “loyal” Protestants in the north of
Ireland--loyal that is to the Imperial Government because of their dread
of a Catholic predominance in Ireland--and they watched and assisted the
gradual exasperation of the British common people by this indiscriminate
hostility of the common people of Ireland.
The story of the relation of Ireland to Britain for the last
half-century is one that reflects the utmost discredit upon the
governing class of the British Empire, but it is not one of which the
English commons need be ashamed. Again and again they have given
evidences of goodwill. British legislation in relation to Ireland for
nearly half a century shows a series of clumsy attempts on the part of
liberal England, made in the face of a strenuous opposition from the
Conservative Party and the Ulster Irish, to satisfy Irish complaints and
get to a footing of fellowship. In 1886 Gladstone, in pursuit of his
idea of nationality, brought political disaster upon himself by
introducing the first Irish Home Rule Bill, a genuine attempt to give
over Irish affairs _for the first time in history_ to the Irish people.
In many respects it was a faulty and dangerous proposal, and it provided
no satisfactory assurance to the Protestant Irish, and especially the
Ulster Protestants, of protection against possible injuries from the
priest-ridden illiterates of the south. This may have been a fancied
danger, but these fears should have been respected. The bill broke the
Liberal Party asunder; and a coalition government, the Unionist
Government, replaced that of Mr. Gladstone.
This digression into the history of Ireland now comes up to the time of
infectious imperialism in Europe. The Unionist Government which ousted
Mr. Gladstone had a predominantly Tory element, and was in spirit
“imperialist” as no previous British Government had been. The British
political history of the subsequent years is largely a history of the
conflict of the new imperialism, through which an arrogant “British”
nationalism sought to override the rest of the empire against the
temperamental liberalism and reasonableness of the English, which tended
to develop the empire into a confederation of free and willing allies.
Naturally the “British” imperialists wanted a subjugated Irish;
naturally the English Liberals wanted a free, participating Irish. In
1892 Gladstone struggled back to power with a small Home Rule majority;
and in 1893 his second Home Rule Bill passed the Commons, and was
rejected by the Lords. It was not, however, until 1895 that an
imperialist government took office. The party which sustained it was
called not Imperialist, but “Unionist”--an odd name when we consider how
steadily and strenuously it has worked to destroy any possibility of an
Empire commonweal. These Imperialists remained in power for ten years.
We have already noted their conquest of South Africa. They were defeated
in 1905 in an attempt to establish a tariff wall on the Teutonic model.
The ensuing Liberal Government then turned the conquered South African
Dutch into contented fellow-subjects by creating the self-governing
Dominion of South Africa. After which it embarked upon a long-impending
struggle with the persistently imperialist House of Lords.
This was a very fundamental struggle in British affairs. On the one hand
were the Liberal majority of the people of Great Britain honestly and
wisely anxious to put this Irish affair upon a new and more hopeful
footing, and, if possible, to change the vindictive animosity of the
Irish into friendship; on the other were all the factors of this new
British Imperialism resolved at any cost and in spite of every electoral
verdict, legally, if possible, but if not, illegally, to maintain their
ascendancy over the affairs of the English, Scotch, and Irish and all
the rest of the empire alike. It was, under new names, the age-long
internal struggle of the English community; that same conflict of a free
and liberal-spirited commonalty against powerful “big men” and big
adventures and authoritative persons which we have already dealt with in
our account of the liberation of America. Ireland was merely a
battleground as America had been. In India, in Ireland, in England, the
governing class and their associated adventurers were all of one mind;
but the Irish people, thanks to their religious difference, had little
sense of solidarity with the English. Yet such Irish statesmen as
Redmond, the leader of the Irish party in the House of Commons,
transcended this national narrowness for a time, and gave a generous
response to English good intentions. Slowly yet steadily the barrier of
the House of Lords was broken down, and a third Irish Home Rule Bill was
brought in by Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister, in 1912. Throughout 1913
and the early part of 1914 this bill was fought and re-fought through
Parliament. At first it gave Home Rule to all Ireland; but an Amending
Act, excluding Ulster on certain conditions, was promised. This struggle
lasted right up to the outbreak of the Great War. The royal assent was
given to this bill after the actual outbreak of war, and also to a bill
suspending the coming into force of Irish Home Rule until after the end
of the war. These bills were put upon the Statute Book.
But from the introduction of the third Home Rule Bill onward the
opposition to it had assumed a violent and extravagant form. Sir Edward
Carson, a Dublin lawyer who had become a member of the English Bar, and
who had held a legal position in the ministry of Mr. Gladstone (before
the Home Rule split) and in the subsequent imperialist government, was
the organizer and leader of this resistance to a reconciliation of the
two peoples. In spite of his Dublin origin, he set up to be a leader of
the Ulster Protestants; and he brought to the conflict that contempt for
law which is all too common a characteristic of the successful
barrister, and those gifts of persistent, unqualified, and
uncompromising hostility which distinguish a certain type of Irishman.
He was the most “un-English” of men, dark, romantic, and violent; and
from the opening of the struggle he talked with gusto of armed
resistance to this freer reunion of the English and Irish which the
third Home Rule Bill contemplated. The excitement intensified throughout
1913. A body of volunteers was organized in Ulster, arms were smuggled
into the country, and Sir Edward Carson and a rising lawyer named F. E.
Smith, trapped up in semi-military style, toured Ulster, inspecting
these volunteers and inflaming local passion. The arms of these
prospective rebels were obtained from Germany, and various utterances of
Sir Edward Carson’s associates hinted at support from “a great
Protestant monarch.” The first bloodshed occurred at Londonderry in
August, 1913. Contrasted with Ulster, the rest of Ireland was at that
time a land of order and decency, relying upon its great leader Redmond
and the good faith of the three British peoples.
Now these threats of civil war from Ireland were not in themselves
anything very exceptional in the record of that unhappy island; what
makes them exceptional and significant in the world’s history is the
vehement support they found among the English military and governing
classes, and the immunity from punishment and restraint of Sir Edward
Carson and his friends. The virus of reaction which came from the
success and splendour of German imperialism had spread widely, as we
have explained, throughout the prevalent and prosperous classes in Great
Britain. A generation had grown up forgetful of the mighty traditions of
their forefathers, and ready to exchange the greatness of English
freedom for the tawdriest of imperialisms. A fund of a million pounds
was raised, chiefly in England, to support the Ulster Rebellion, an
Ulster Provisional Government was formed, prominent English people
mingled in the fray and careered about Ulster in automobiles, assisting
in the gun-running, and there is evidence that a number of British
officers and generals were prepared for a pronunciamento upon South
American lines rather than obedience to the law. The natural result of
all this upper-class disorderliness was to alarm the main part of
Ireland, never a ready friend to England. That Ireland also began in its
turn to organize “National Volunteers” and to smuggle arms. The military
authorities showed themselves much keener in the suppression of the
Nationalist than of the Ulster gun importation, and in July, 1914, an
attempt to run guns at Howth, near Dublin, led to fighting and bloodshed
in the Dublin streets. The British Isles were on the verge of civil war.
Such in outline is the story of the imperialist revolutionary movement
in Great Britain up to the eve of the great war. For revolutionary this
movement of Sir Edward Carson and his associates was. It was plainly an
attempt to set aside parliamentary government and the slow-grown,
imperfect liberties of the British peoples, and, with the assistance of
the army, to substitute a more Prussianized type of rule, using the
Irish conflict as the point of departure. It was the reactionary effort
of a few score thousand people to arrest the world movement towards
democratic law and social justice, strictly parallel to and closely
sympathetic with the new imperialism of the German junkers and rich men.
But in one very important respect British and German imperialism
differed. In Germany it centred upon the crown; its noisiest, most
conspicuous advocate was the heir-apparent. In Great Britain the king
stood aloof. By no single public act did King George V betray the
slightest approval of the new movement, and the behaviour of the Prince
of Wales, his son and heir, has been equally correct.
In August, 1914, the storm of the great war burst upon the world. In
September, Sir Edward Carson was denouncing the placing of the Home Rule
Bill upon the Statute Book. On the same day, Mr. John Redmond was
calling upon the Irish people to take their equal part in the burthen
and effort of the war. For a time Ireland played her part in the war
side by side with England faithfully and well, until in 1915 the Liberal
Government was replaced by a coalition, in which this Sir Edward Carson,
with the bloodshed at Londonderry and Howth upon his head, figured as
Attorney-General (with a salary of £7000 and fees), to be replaced
presently by his associate in the Ulster sedition, Sir F. E. Smith.
Grosser insult was never offered to a friendly people. The work of
reconciliation, begun by Gladstone in 1886, and brought so near to
completion in 1914, was completely and finally wrecked.[492]
In the spring of 1916 Dublin revolted unsuccessfully against this new
government. The ringleaders of this insurrection, many of them mere
boys, were shot with a deliberate and clumsy sternness that, in view of
the treatment of the Ulster rebel leaders, impressed all Ireland as
atrociously unjust. A traitor, Sir Roger Casement, who had been knighted
for previous services to the empire, was tried and executed, no doubt
deservedly, but his prosecutor was Sir F. E. Smith of the Ulster
insurrection, a shocking conjunction. The Dublin revolt had had little
support in Ireland generally, but thereafter the movement for an
independent republic grew rapidly to great proportions. Against this
strong emotional drive there struggled the more moderate ideas of such
Irish statesmen as Sir Horace Plunkett, who wished to see Ireland become
a Dominion, a “crowned republic” that is, within the empire, on an equal
footing with Canada and Australia.[493]
When in December, 1919, Mr. Lloyd George introduced his Home Rule Bill
into the Imperial Parliament there were no Irish members, except Sir
Edward Carson and his followers, to receive it. The rest of Ireland was
away. It refused to begin again that old dreary round of hope and
disappointment. Let the British and their pet Ulstermen do as they
would, said the Irish....
§ 4
Our studies of modern imperialism in Germany and Britain bring out
certain forces common to the two countries, and we shall find these same
forces at work in variable degrees and with various modifications in the
case of the other great modern communities at which we shall now glance.
This modern imperialism is not a synthetic uniting movement like the
older imperialism; it is essentially a _megalomaniac nationalism_, a
nationalism made aggressive by prosperity; and always it finds its
strongest support in the military and official castes, and in the
enterprising and acquisitive strata of society, in new money, that is,
and big business; its chief critics in the educated poor, and its chief
opponents in the peasantry and the labour masses. It accepts monarchy
where it finds it, but it is not necessarily a monarchist movement. It
does, however, need a foreign office of the traditional type for its
full development. Its origin, which we have traced very carefully in
this book of our history, makes this clear. Modern imperialism is the
natural development of the Great Power system which arose, with the
foreign office method of policy, out of the Machiavellian monarchies
after the break-up of Christendom. It will only come to an end when the
intercourse of nations and peoples through embassies and foreign offices
is replaced by an assembly of elected representatives in direct touch
with their peoples.
[Illustration: The BALKAN STATES after the Wars of 1912-13]
French imperialism during the period of the Armed Peace in Europe was
naturally of a less confident type than the German. It called itself
“nationalism” rather than imperialism, and it set itself, by appeals to
patriotic pride, to thwart the efforts of those socialists and
rationalists who sought to get into touch with liberal elements in
German life. It brooded upon the _Revanche_, the return match with
Prussia. But in spite of that pre-occupation, it set itself to the
adventure of annexation and exploitation in the Far East and in Africa,
narrowly escaping a war with Britain upon the Fashoda clash (1898), and
it never relinquished a dream of acquisitions in Syria.[494] Italy too
caught the imperialist fever; the blood letting of Adowa cooled her for
a time, and then she resumed in 1911 with a war upon Turkey and the
annexation of Tripoli.[495]
The Italian imperialists exhorted their countrymen to forget Mazzini and
remember Julius Cæsar; for were they not the heirs of the Roman Empire?
Imperialism touched the Balkans; little countries not a hundred years
from slavery began to betray exalted intentions; King Ferdinand of
Bulgaria assumed the title of Tsar, the latest of the pseudo-Cæsars, and
in the shop-windows of Athens the curious student could study maps
showing the dream of a vast Greek empire in Europe and Asia.
In 1913 the three states of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece fell upon
Turkey, already weakened by her war with Italy, and swept her out of all
her European possessions except the country between Adrianople and
Constantinople; later in that year they quarrelled among themselves over
the division of the spoils. Roumania joined in the game and helped to
crush Bulgaria. Turkey recovered Adrianople. The greater imperialisms of
Austria, Russia, and Italy watched that conflict and one another....
§ 5
While all the world to the west of her was changing rapidly, Russia
throughout the nineteenth century changed very slowly indeed. At the end
of the nineteenth century, as at its beginning, she was still a Grand
Monarchy, of the later seventeenth-century type standing on a basis of
barbarism, she was still at a stage where court intrigues and imperial
favourites could control her international relations. She had driven a
great railway across Siberia to find the disasters of the Japanese war
at the end of it; she was using modern methods and modern weapons so far
as her undeveloped industrialism and her small supply of sufficiently
educated people permitted; such writers as Dostoievski had devised a
sort of mystical imperialism based on the idea of Holy Russia and her
mission, colored by racial illusions and anti-Semitic passion; but, as
events were to show, this had not sunken very deeply into the
imagination of the Russian masses. A vague, very simple Christianity
pervaded the illiterate peasant life, mixed with much superstition. It
was like the pre-Reformation peasant life of France or Germany. The
Russian moujik was supposed to worship and revere his Tsar and to love
to serve a gentleman; in 1913 reactionary English writers were still
praising his simple and unquestioning loyalty. But, as in the case of
the western European peasant of the days of peasant revolts, this
reverence for the monarchy was mixed up with the idea that the monarch
and the nobleman had to be good and beneficial, and this simple loyalty
could, under sufficient provocation, be turned into the same pitiless
intolerance of social injustice that burnt the châteaux in the Jacquerie
(see chapter xxxv, § 3) and set up the theocracy in Münster (chapter
xxxv, § 3). Once the commons were moved to anger, there were no links of
understanding in a generally diffused education in Russia to mitigate
the fury of the outbreak. The upper classes were as much beyond the
sympathy of the lower as a different species of animal. These Russian
masses were three centuries away from such nationalist imperialism as
Germany displayed.
And in another respect Russia differed from modern Western Europe and
paralleled its mediæval phase, and that was in the fact that her
universities were the resort of many very poor students quite out of
touch and out of sympathy with the bureaucratic autocracy. Before 1917
the significance of the proximity of these two factors of revolution,
the fuel of discontent and the match of free ideas, was not recognized
in European thought, and few people realized that in Russia more than in
any other country lay the possibilities of a fundamental
revolution.[496]
§ 6
When we turn from these European Great Powers, with their inheritance of
foreign offices and national policies, to the United States of America,
which broke away completely from the Great Power System in 1776, we find
a most interesting contrast in the operation of the forces which
produced the expansive imperialism of Europe. For America as for Europe
the mechanical revolution had brought all the world within the range of
a few days’ journey. The United States, like the Great Powers, had
worldwide financial and mercantile interests; a great industrialism had
grown up and was in need of overseas markets; the same crises of belief
that had shaken the moral solidarity of Europe had occurred in the
American world. Her people were as patriotic and spirited as any. Why
then did not the United States develop armaments and an aggressive
policy? Why was not the stars and stripes waving over Mexico, and why
was there not a new Indian system growing up in China under that flag?
It was the American who had opened up Japan. After doing so, he had let
that power Europeanize itself and become formidable without a protest.
That alone was enough to make Machiavelli, the father of modern foreign
policy, turn in his grave. If a Europeanized Great Power had been in the
place of the United States, Great Britain would have had to fortify the
Canadian frontier from end to end--it is now absolutely unarmed--and to
maintain a great arsenal in the St. Lawrence. All the divided states of
Central and South America would long since have been subjugated and
placed under the disciplinary control of United States officials of the
“governing class.” There would have been a perpetual campaign to
Americanize Australia and New Zealand, and yet another claimant for a
share in tropical Africa.
And by an odd accident America had produced in President Roosevelt
(President 1901-1908) a man of an energy as restless as the German
Kaiser’s, as eager for large achievements, as florid and eloquent, an
adventurous man with a turn for world politics and an instinct for
armaments, the very man, we might imagine, to have involved his country
in the scramble for overseas possession.
There does not appear to be any other explanation of this general
restraint and abstinence on the part of the United States except in
their fundamentally different institutions and traditions. In the first
place the United States Government has no foreign office and no
diplomatic corps of the European type, no body of “experts” to maintain
the tradition of an aggressive policy. The president has great powers,
but they are subject to the control of the senate, which again is
responsible to the state legislatures and the people. The foreign
relations of the country are thus under open and public control. Secret
treaties are impossible under such a system, and foreign powers complain
of the difficulty and uncertainty of “understandings” with the United
States, a very excellent state of affairs. The United States are
constitutionally incapacitated, therefore, from the kind of foreign
policy that has kept Europe for so long constantly on the verge of war.
And, secondly, there has hitherto existed in the States no organization
for and no tradition of what one may call non-assimilable possessions.
Where there is no crown there cannot be crown colonies. In spreading
across the American continent, the United States had developed a quite
distinctive method of dealing with new territories, admirably adapted
for unsettled lands, but very inconvenient if applied too freely to
areas already containing an alien population. This method was based on
the idea that there cannot be in the United States system a permanently
subject people. The first stage of the ordinary process of assimilation
had been the creation of a “territory” under the federal government,
having a considerable measure of self-government, sending a delegate
(who could not vote) to congress, and destined, in the natural course of
things, as the country became settled and population increased, to
flower at last into full statehood. This had been the process of
development of all the latter states of the Union; the latest
territories to become states being Arizona and New Mexico in 1910. The
frozen wilderness of Alaska, bought from Russia, remained politically
undeveloped simply because it had an insufficient population for state
organization. As the annexations of Germany and Great Britain in the
Pacific threatened to deprive the United States navy of coaling stations
in that ocean, a part of the Samoan Islands (1889) and the Sandwich
Islands (Hawaii) were annexed (1898). Here for the first time the United
States had real subject populations to deal with. But in the absence of
any class comparable to the Anglo-Indian officials who sway British
opinion, the American procedure followed the territorial method. Every
effort was made to bring the educational standards of Hawaii up to the
American level, and a domestic legislature on the territorial pattern
was organized so that these dusky islanders seem destined ultimately to
obtain full United States citizenship. (The small Samoan Islands are
taken care of by a United States naval administrator.)
In 1895 occurred a quarrel between the United States and Britain upon
the subject of Venezuela, and the Monroe Doctrine was upheld stoutly by
President Cleveland. Then Mr. Olney made this remarkable declaration:
“To-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent,
and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its
interposition.” This, together with the various Pan-American congresses
that have been held, points to a real open “foreign policy” of alliance
and mutual help throughout America. Treaties of arbitration hold good
over all that continent, and the future seems to point to a gradual
development of inter-state organization, a Pax Americana, of the
English-speaking and Spanish-speaking peoples, the former in the rôle of
elder brother. Here is something we cannot even call an empire,
something going far beyond the great alliance of the British Empire in
the open equality of its constituent parts.
Consistently with this idea of a common American welfare, the United
States in 1898 intervened in the affairs of Cuba, which had been in a
state of chronic insurrection against Spain for many years. A brief war
ended in the acquisition of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippine
Islands. Cuba is now an independent self-governing republic. Porto Rico
and the Philippines have, however, a special sort of government, with a
popularly elected lower house and an upper body containing members
appointed by the United States senate. It is improbable that either
Porto Rico or the Philippines will become states in the Union. They are
much more likely to become free states in some comprehensive alliance
with both English-speaking and Latin America.
Both Cuba and Porto Rico welcomed the American intervention in their
affairs, but in the Philippine Islands there was a demand for complete
and immediate freedom after the Spanish war, and a considerable
resistance to the American military administration. There it was the
United States came nearest to imperialism of the Great Power type, and
that her record is most questionable. There was much sympathy with the
insurgents in the states. Here is the point of view of ex-President
Roosevelt as he wrote it in his _Autobiography_ (1913):--
“As regards the Philippines, my belief was that we should train them for
self-government as rapidly as possible, and then leave them free to
decide their own fate. I did not believe in setting the time-limit
within which we would give them independence, because I did not believe
it wise to try to forecast how soon they would be fit for
self-government; and once having made the promise, I would have felt
that it was imperative to keep it. Within a few months of my assuming
office we had stamped out the last armed resistance in the Philippines
that was not of merely sporadic character; and as soon as peace was
secured, we turned our energies to developing the islands in the
interests of the natives. We established schools everywhere; we built
roads; we administered an even-handed justice; we did everything
possible to encourage agriculture and industry; and in constantly
increasing measure we employed natives to do their own governing, and
finally provided a legislative chamber.... We are governing, and have
been governing, the islands in the interests of the Filipinos
themselves. If after due time the Filipinos themselves decide that they
do not wish to be thus governed, then I trust that we will leave; but
when we do leave, it must be distinctly understood that we retain no
protectorate--and above all that we take part in no joint
protectorate--over the islands, and give them no guarantee, of
neutrality or otherwise; that in short, we are absolutely quit of
responsibility for them, of every kind and description.”[497]
This is an entirely different outlook from that of a British or French
foreign office or colonial office official. But it is not very widely
different from the spirit that created the Dominions of Canada, South
Africa, and Australia, and brought forward the three Home Rule Bills for
Ireland. It is in the older and more characteristic English tradition
from which the Declaration of Independence derives. It sets aside,
without discussion, the detestable idea of “subject peoples.”
Here we will not enter into political complications attendant upon the
making of the Panama Canal, for they introduce no fresh light upon this
interesting question of the American method in world politics. The
history of Panama is American history purely. But manifestly just as the
political structure of the Union was a new thing in the world, so too
were its relations with the world beyond its borders.[498]
§ 7
We have been at some pains to examine the state of mind of Europe and of
America in regard to international relations in the years that led up to
the world tragedy of 1914 because, as more and more people are coming to
recognize, that great war or some such war was a necessary consequence
of the mentality of the period. All the things that men and nations do
are the outcome of instinctive motives reacting upon the ideas which
talk and books and newspapers and schoolmasters and so forth have put
into people’s heads. Physical necessities, pestilences, changes of
climate, and the like outer things may deflect and distort the growth of
human history, but its living root is thought.
All human history is fundamentally a history of ideas. Between the man
of to-day and the Cro-Magnard the physical and mental differences are
very slight; their essential difference lies in the extent and content
of the mental background which we have acquired in the five or six
hundred generations that intervene.
We are too close to the events of the Great War to pretend that this
_Outline_ can record the verdict of history thereupon, but we may hazard
the guess that when the passions of the conflict have faded, it will be
Germany that will be most blamed for bringing it about, and she will be
blamed not because she was morally and intellectually very different
from her neighbours, but because she had the common disease of
imperialism in its most complete and energetic form. No self-respecting
historian, however superficial and popular his aims may be, can
countenance the legend, produced by the stresses of the war, that the
German is a sort of human being more cruel and abominable than any other
variety of men. All the great states of Europe before 1914 were in a
condition of aggressive nationalism and drifting towards war; the
government of Germany did but lead the general movement. She fell into
the pit first, and she floundered deepest. She became the dreadful
example at which all her fellow sinners could cry out.
For long, Germany and Austria had been plotting an extension of German
influence eastward through Asia Minor to the East. The German idea was
crystallized in the phrase “Berlin to Bagdad.” Antagonized to the German
dreams were those of Russia, which was scheming for an extension of the
Slav ascendancy to Constantinople and through Serbia to the Adriatic.
These lines of ambition lay across one another and were mutually
incompatible. The feverish state of affairs in the Balkans was largely
the outcome of the intrigues and propagandas sustained by the German and
Slav schemes. Turkey turned for support to Germany, Serbia to Russia.
Roumania and Italy, both Latin in tradition, both nominally allies of
Germany, pursued remoter and deeper schemes in common. Ferdinand, the
Tsar of Bulgaria, was following still darker ends; and the squalid
mysteries of the Greek court, whose king was the German Kaiser’s
brother-in-law, are beyond our present powers of inquiry.
But the tangle did not end with Germany on the one hand and Russia on
the other. The greed of Germany in 1871 had made France her inveterate
enemy. The French people, aware of their inability to recover their lost
provinces by their own strength, had conceived exaggerated ideas of the
power and helpfulness of Russia. The French people had subscribed
enormously to Russian loans. France was the ally of Russia. If the
German powers made war upon Russia, France would certainly attack them.
Now the short eastern French frontier was very strongly defended. There
was little prospect of Germany repeating the successes of 1870-71
against that barrier. But the Belgian frontier of France was longer and
less strongly defended. An attack in overwhelming force on France
through Belgium might repeat 1870 on a larger scale. The French left
might be swung back south-eastwardly on Verdun, as a pivot, and crowded
back upon its right, as one shuts an open razor. This scheme the German
strategists had worked out with great care and elaboration. Its
execution involved an outrage upon the law of nations, because Prussia
had undertaken to guarantee the neutrality of Belgium and had no quarrel
with her, and it involved the risk of bringing in Great Britain (which
power was also pledged to protect Belgium) against Germany. Yet the
Germans believed that their fleet had grown strong enough to make Great
Britain hesitate to interfere, and with a view to possibilities they had
constructed a great system of strategic railways to the Belgian
frontier, and made every preparation for the execution of this scheme.
So they might hope to strike down France at one blow, and deal at their
leisure with Russia.
In 1914 all things seemed moving together in favour of the two Central
Powers. Russia, it is true, had been recovering since 1906, but only
very slowly; France was distracted by financial scandals. The astounding
murder of M. Calmette, the editor of the _Figaro_, by the wife of M.
Caillaux, the minister of finance, brought these to a climax in March;
Britain, all Germany was assured, was on the verge of a civil war in
Ireland. Repeated efforts were made both by foreign and English people
to get some definite statement of what Britain would do if Germany and
Austria assailed France and Russia; but the British Foreign Secretary
maintained a front of heavy ambiguity up to the very day of the British
entry into the war.[499] As a consequence, there was a feeling on the
continent that Britain would either not fight or delay fighting, and
this may have encouraged Germany to go on threatening France. Events
were precipitated on June 28th by the assassination of the Archduke
Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian Empire, when on a state
visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Here was a timely excuse to
set the armies marching. “It is now or never,” said the German
Emperor.[500] Serbia was accused of instigating the murderers, and
notwithstanding the fact that Austrian commissioners reported that there
was no evidence to implicate the Serbian government, the
Austro-Hungarian government contrived to press this grievance towards
war. On July 23rd Austria discharged an ultimatum at Serbia, and, in
spite of a practical submission on the part of Serbia, and of the
efforts of Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, to call a
conference of the powers, declared war against Serbia on July 28th.
Russia mobilized her army on July 30th, and on August 1st Germany
declared war upon her. German troops crossed into French territory next
day, and, simultaneously with the delivery of an ultimatum to the
unfortunate Belgians, the big flanking movement through Luxembourg and
Belgium began. Westward rode the scouts and advanced guards. Westward
rushed a multitude of automobiles packed with soldiers. Enormous columns
of grey-clad infantry followed; round-eyed, fair young Germans they were
for the most part--law-abiding, educated youngsters who had never yet
seen a shot fired in anger. “This was war,” they were told. They had to
be bold and ruthless. Some of them did their best to carry out these
militarist instructions at the expense of the ill-fated Belgians.
A disproportionate fuss has been made over the detailed atrocities in
Belgium, disproportionate, that is, in relation to the fundamental
atrocity of August, 1914, which was the invasion of Belgium. Given that,
the casual shootings and lootings, the wanton destruction of property,
the plundering of inns and of food and drink shops by hungry and weary
men, and the consequent rapes and incendiarism, follow naturally enough.
Only very simple people believe that an army in the field can maintain
as high a level of honesty, decency, and justice as a settled community
at home. And the tradition of the Thirty Years War still influenced the
Prussian army. It has been customary in the countries allied against
Germany to treat all this vileness and bloodshed of the Belgian months
as though nothing of the sort had ever happened before, and as if it
were due to some distinctively evil strain in the German character. They
were nicknamed “Huns.” But nothing could be less like the systematic
destructions of the nomads (who once proposed to exterminate the entire
Chinese population in order to restore China to pasture) than the German
crimes in Belgium. Much of that crime was the drunken brutality of men
who for the first time in their lives were free to use lethal weapons,
much of it was the hysterical violence of men shocked at their own
proceedings and in deadly fear of the revenge of the people whose
country they had outraged, and much of it was done under duress because
of the theory that men should be terrible in warfare and that
populations are best subdued by fear. The German common people were
bundled from an orderly obedience into this war in such a manner that
atrocities were bound to ensue. They certainly did horrible and
disgusting things. But any people who had been worked up for war and led
into war as the Germans were, would have behaved in a similar manner.
On the night of August 2nd, while most of Europe, still under the
tranquil inertias of half a century of peace, still in the habitual
enjoyment of such a widely diffused plenty and cheapness and freedom as
no man living will ever see again, was thinking about its summer
holidays, the little Belgian village of Visé was ablaze, and stupefied
rustics were being led out and shot because it was alleged someone had
fired on the invaders. The officers who ordered these acts, the men who
obeyed, must surely have felt scared at the strangeness of the things
they did. Most of them had never yet seen a violent death. And they had
set light not to a village, but a world. It was the beginning of the end
of an age of comfort, confidence, and gentle and seemly behaviour in
Europe.
So soon as it was clear that Belgium was to be invaded, Great Britain
ceased to hesitate, and (at eleven at night on August 4th) declared war
upon Germany. The following day a German mine-laying vessel was caught
off the Thames mouth by the cruiser _Amphion_ and sunk,--the first time
that the British and Germans had ever met in conflict under their own
national flags upon land or water....
All Europe still remembers the strange atmosphere of those eventful
sunny August days, the end of the Armed Peace. For nearly half a century
the Western world had been tranquil and had seemed safe. Only a few
middle-aged and ageing people in France had had any practical experience
of warfare. The newspapers spoke of a world catastrophe, but that
conveyed very little meaning to those for whom the world had always
seemed secure, who were indeed almost incapable of thinking of it as
otherwise than secure. In Britain particularly for some weeks the
peace-time routine continued in a slightly dazed fashion. It was like a
man still walking about the world unaware that he has contracted a fatal
disease which will alter every routine and habit in his life. People
went on with their summer holidays; shops reassured their customers with
the announcement, “business as usual.” There was much talk and
excitement when the newspapers came, but it was the talk and excitement
of spectators who have no vivid sense of participation in the
catastrophe that was presently to involve them all.
§ 8[501]
[Illustration: Map to illustrate the Original GERMAN Plan, 1914]
We will now review very briefly the main phases of the world struggle
which had thus commenced. Planned by Germany, it began with a swift
attack designed to “knock out” France while Russia was still getting her
forces together in the East. For a time all went well. Military science
is never up to date under modern conditions, because military men are as
a class unimaginative, there are always at any date undeveloped
inventions capable of disturbing current tactical and strategic practice
which the military intelligence has declined. The German plan had been
made for some years; it was a stale plan; it could probably have been
foiled at the outset by a proper use of entrenchments and barbed wire
and machine guns, but the French were by no means as advanced in their
military science as the Germans, and they trusted to methods of open
warfare that were at least fourteen years behind the times. They had a
proper equipment neither of barbed wire nor machine guns, and there was
a ridiculous tradition that the Frenchman did not fight well behind
earthworks. The Belgian frontier was defended by the fortress of Liège,
ten or twelve years out of date, with forts whose armament had been
furnished and fitted in many cases by German contractors; and the
French north-eastern frontier was very badly equipped. Naturally the
German armament firm of Krupp had provided nutcrackers for these nuts in
the form of exceptionally heavy guns firing high explosive shells. These
defences proved therefore to be mere traps for their garrisons. The
French attacked and failed in the southern Ardennes. The German hosts
swung round the French left with an effect of being irresistible; Liège
fell on August 9th, Brussels was reached on August 20th, and the small
British army of about 70,000, which had arrived in Belgium, was struck
at Mons (August 22nd) in overwhelming force, and driven backward in
spite of the very deadly rifle tactics it had learnt during the South
African War. (The German troops could not believe that the British were
using rifles and not machine guns against them.) The little British
force was pushed aside westward, and the German right swept down so as
to leave Paris to the west and crumple the entire French army back upon
itself.
So confident was the German higher command at this stage of having won
the war, that by the end of August German troops were already being
withdrawn for the Eastern front, where the Russians were playing havoc
in East and West Prussia. And then came the French counter-attack,
strategically a very swift and brilliant counter-attack. The French
struck back on their centre, they produced an unexpected army on their
left, and the small British army, shaken but reinforced, was still fit
to play a worthy part in the counter-stroke. The German right overran
itself, lost its cohesion, and was driven back from the Marne to the
Aisne (Battle of the Marne, September 6th to 10th). It would have been
driven back farther had it not had the art of entrenchment in reserve.
Upon the Aisne it stood and dug itself in. The heavy guns, the high
explosive shell, the tanks, needed by the allies to smash up these
entrenchments, did not yet exist.
The Battle of the Marne shattered the original German plan. For a time
France was saved. But the German was not defeated; he had still a great
offensive superiority in men and equipment. His fear of the Russian in
the east had been relieved by a tremendous victory at Tannenberg. His
next phase was a headlong, less elaborately planned campaign to outflank
the left of the allied armies and to seize the Channel ports and cut off
supplies coming from Britain to France. Both armies extended to the west
in a sort of race to the coast. Then the Germans, with a great
superiority of guns and equipment, struck at the British round and about
Ypres. They came very near to a break through, but the British held
them.
The war on the Western front settled down to trench warfare. Neither
side had the science and equipment needed to solve the problem of
breaking through modern entrenchments and entanglements, and both sides
were now compelled to resort to scientific men, inventors, and such-like
unmilitary persons for counsel and help in their difficulty. At that
time the essential problem of trench warfare had already been solved;
there existed in England, for instance, the model of a tank, which would
have given the allies a swift and easy victory before 1916; but the
professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative
mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his
gifts in such a calling; nearly all supremely great soldiers have been
either inexperienced fresh-minded young men like Alexander, Napoleon,
and Hoche, politicians turned soldiers like Julius Cæsar, nomads like
the Hun and Mongol captains, or amateurs like Cromwell and Washington;
whereas this war after fifty years of militarism was a hopelessly
professional war; from first to last it was impossible to get it out of
the hands of the regular generals, and neither the German nor allied
headquarters was disposed to regard an invention with toleration that
would destroy their traditional methods.[502] The tank was not only
disagreeably strange to these military gentlemen, but it gave an
unprofessional protection to the common soldiers within it. The Germans,
however, did make some innovations. In February (28th) they produced a
rather futile novelty, the flame projector, the user of which was in
constant danger of being burnt alive, and in April, in the midst of a
second grave offensive upon the British (second Battle of Ypres, April
17th to May 17th), they employed a cloud of poison gas. This horrible
device was used against Algerian and Canadian troops; it shook them by
the physical torture it inflicted, and by the anguish of those who died,
but it failed to break through them. For some weeks chemists were of
more importance than soldiers on the allied front, and within six weeks
the defensive troops were already in possession of protective methods
and devices.
[Illustration: The WESTERN FRONT 1915-18]
For a year and a half, until July, 1916, the Western front remained in a
state of indecisive tension. There were heavy attacks on either side
that ended in bloody repulses. The French made costly but glorious
thrusts at Arras and in Champagne in 1915, the British at Loos. From
Switzerland to the North Sea there ran two continuous lines of
entrenchment, sometimes at a distance of a mile or more, sometimes at a
distance of a few feet (at Arras, _e.g._), and in and behind these lines
of trenches millions of men toiled, raided their enemies, and prepared
for sanguinary and foredoomed offensives. In any preceding age these
stagnant masses of men would have engendered a pestilence inevitably,
but here again modern science had altered the conditions of warfare.
Certain novel diseases appeared, trench feet for instance, caused by
prolonged standing in cold water, new forms of dysentery, and the like,
but none developed to an extent to disable either combatant force.
Behind this front the whole life of the belligerent nations was being
turned more and more to the task of maintaining supplies of food,
munitions, and, above all, men to supply the places of those who day by
day were killed or mangled.[503] The Germans had had the luck to possess
a considerable number of big siege guns intended for the frontier
fortresses; these were now available for trench smashing with high
explosive, a use no one had foreseen for them. The Allies throughout the
first years were markedly inferior in their supply of big guns and
ammunition, and their losses were steadily greater than the German. Mr.
Asquith, the British Prime Minister, though a very fine practitioner in
all the arts of Parliament, was wanting in creative ability; and it is
probably due to the push and hustle of Mr. Lloyd George (who presently
ousted him in December, 1916) and the clamour of the British press that
this inferiority of supplies was eventually rectified.[504]
There was a tremendous German onslaught upon the French throughout the
first half of 1916 round and about Verdun. The Germans suffered enormous
losses and were held, after pushing in the French lines for some miles.
The French losses were as great or greater. “_Ils ne passeront pas_,”
said and sang the French infantry--and kept their word.
The Eastern German front was more extended and less systematically
entrenched than the Western. For a time the Russian armies continued to
press westward in spite of the Tannenberg disaster. They conquered
nearly the whole of Galicia from the Austrians, took Lemberg on
September 2nd, 1914, and the great fortress of Przemysl on March 22nd,
1915. But after the Germans had failed to break the Western front of the
Allies, and after an ineffective allied offensive made without proper
material,[505] they turned to Russia, and a series of heavy blows, with
a novel use of massed artillery, were struck first in the south and then
at the north of the Russian front. On June 22nd, Przemysl was retaken,
and the whole Russian line was driven back until Vilna (September 2nd)
was in German hands.
In May, 1915 (23rd), Italy joined the allies, and declared war upon
Austria. (Not until a year later did she declare war on Germany.) She
pushed over her eastern boundary towards Goritzia (which fell in the
summer of 1916), but her intervention was of little use at that time to
either Russia or the two Western powers. She merely established another
line of trench warfare among the high mountains of her picturesque
north-eastern frontier.
While the main fronts of the chief combatants were in this state of
exhaustive deadlock, both sides were attempting to strike round behind
the front of their adversaries. The Germans made a series of Zeppelin,
and later of aeroplane, raids upon Paris and the east of England.
Ostensibly these aimed at depôts, munition works, and the like targets
of military importance, but practically they bombed promiscuously at
inhabited places. At first these raiders dropped not very effective
bombs, but later the size and quality of these missiles increased,
considerable numbers of people were killed and injured, and very much
damage was done. The English people were roused to a pitch of extreme
indignation by these outrages.[506] Although the Germans had possessed
Zeppelins for some years, no one in authority in Great Britain had
thought out the proper methods of dealing with them, and it was not
until late in 1916 that an adequate supply of anti-aircraft guns was
brought into play and that these raiders were systematically attacked by
aeroplanes. Then came a series of Zeppelin disasters, and after the
spring of 1917 they ceased to be used for any purpose but sea scouting,
and their place as raiders was taken by large aeroplanes (the Gothas).
The visits of these latter machines to London and the east of England
became systematic after the summer of 1917. All through the winter of
1917-18, London on every moonlight night became familiar with the
banging of warning maroons, the shrill whistles of the police alarm, the
hasty clearance of the streets, the distant rumbling of scores and
hundreds of anti-aircraft guns growing steadily to a wild uproar of
thuds and crashes, the swish of flying shrapnel, and at last, if any of
the raiders got through the barrage, with the dull heavy bang of the
bursting bombs. Then presently, amidst the diminuendo of the gun fire,
would come the inimitable rushing sound of the fire brigade engines and
the hurry of the ambulances.... War was brought home to every Londoner
by these experiences.
While the Germans were thus assailing the nerve of their enemy home
population through the air, they were also attacking the overseas trade
of the British by every means in their power. At the outset of the war
they had various trade destroyers scattered over the world, and a
squadron of powerful modern cruisers in the Pacific, namely, the
_Scharnhorst_, the _Gneisenau_, the _Leipzig_, the _Nürnberg_, and the
_Dresden_. Some of the detached cruisers, and particularly the _Emden_,
did a considerable amount of commerce destroying before they were hunted
down, and the main squadron caught an inferior British force off the
coast of Chile and sank the _Good Hope_ and the _Monmouth_ on November
1st, 1914. A month later these German ships were themselves pounced upon
by a British force, and all (except the _Dresden_) sunk by Admiral
Sturdee in the Battle of the Falkland Isles. After this conflict the
allies remained in undisputed possession of the surface of the sea, a
supremacy which the great naval Battle of Jutland (May 1st, 1916) did
nothing to shake. The Germans concentrated their attention more and more
upon submarine warfare. From the beginning of the war they had had
considerable submarine successes. On one day, September 22nd, 1914, they
sank three powerful cruisers, the _Aboukir_, the _Hogue_, and the
_Cressy_, with 1473 men. They continued to levy a toll upon British
shipping throughout the war; at first they hailed and examined passenger
and mercantile shipping, but this practice they discontinued for fear of
traps, and in the spring of 1915 they began to sink ships without
notice. In May, 1915, they sank the great passenger liner, the
_Lusitania_, without any warning, drowning a number of American
citizens. This embittered American feeling against them, but the
possibility of injuring and perhaps reducing Britain by a submarine
blockade was so great, that they persisted in a more and more
intensified submarine campaign, regardless of the danger of dragging the
United States into the circle of their enemies.
Meanwhile, Turkish forces, very ill equipped, were making threatening
gestures at Egypt across the desert of Sinai.
And while the Germans were thus striking at Britain, their least
accessible and most formidable antagonist, through the air and under the
sea, the French and British were also embarking upon a disastrous flank
attack in the east upon the Central Powers through Turkey. The Gallipoli
campaign was finely imagined, but disgracefully executed. Had it
succeeded, the Allies would have captured Constantinople in 1915. But
the Turks were given two months’ notice of the project by a premature
bombardment of the Dardanelles in February, the scheme was also probably
betrayed through the Greek Court, and when at last British and French
forces were landed upon the Gallipoli peninsula in April, they found the
Turks well entrenched and better equipped for trench warfare[507] than
themselves. The Allies trusted for heavy artillery to the great guns of
the ships, which were comparatively useless for battering down
entrenchments, and among every other sort of thing that they had failed
to foresee, they had not foreseen hostile submarines. Several great
battleships were lost; they went down in the same clear waters over
which the ships of Xerxes had once sailed to their fate at Salamis. The
story of the Gallipoli campaign from the side of the Allies is at once
heroic and pitiful, a story of courage and incompetence, and of life,
material, and prestige wasted, culminating in a withdrawal in January,
1916.[508]
This failure was due in part to the refusal of the Greeks to co-operate
in the adventure. For a year and a half the Greek king, the
brother-in-law of the Kaiser, being protected by friends in high
quarters on the Allied side, tricked and misled the Allies, and wasted
the lives of great numbers of common British and French soldiers. In
June, 1917, he was forced to abdicate, but instead of permitting the
Greeks, under their proper leader Venizelos, to follow their natural and
traditional republican disposition, his son, Alexander, the Kaiser’s
nephew, was made king in his place--_by the Allies!_ This Greek chapter
in the story of the great war still awaits the investigations of the
historian. It is at present a quite inexplicable story, and we give
these preposterous facts with no attempt to rationalize them.
Linked up closely with this Greek vacillation was the entry of Bulgaria
into the war (October 12th, 1915). The king of Bulgaria had hesitated
for more than a year to make any decision between the two sides. Now the
manifest failure of the British at Gallipoli, coupled with a strong
Austro-German attack in Serbia, swung him over to the Central Powers.
While the Serbs were hotly engaged with the Austro-German invaders upon
the Danube he attacked Serbia in the rear, and in a few weeks the
country had been completely overrun. The Serbian army made a terrible
retreat through the mountains of Albania to the coast, where its remains
were rescued by an Allied fleet.
An Allied force landed at Salonika in Greece, and pushed inland towards
Monastir, but was unable to render any effectual assistance to the
Serbians. It was the Salonika plan which sealed the fate of the
Gallipoli expedition.
To the east, in Mesopotamia, the British, using Indian troops chiefly,
made a still remoter flank attack upon the Central Powers. An army, very
ill provided for the campaign, was landed at Basra in the November of
1914, and pushed up towards Bagdad in the following year. It gained a
victory at Ctesiphon, the ancient Arsacid and Sassanid capital within
twenty-five miles of Bagdad, but the Turks were heavily reinforced,
there was a retreat to Kut, and there the British army, under General
Townshend, was surrounded and starved into surrender on April 29th,
1916.
All these campaigns in the air, under the seas, in Russia, Turkey, and
Asia, were subsidiary to the main front, the front of decision, between
Switzerland and the sea; and there the main millions lay entrenched,
slowly learning the necessary methods of modern scientific warfare.
There was a rapid progress in the use of the aeroplane. At the outset of
the war this had been used chiefly for scouting, and by the Germans for
the dropping of marks for the artillery. Such a thing as aerial fighting
was unheard of. In 1916 the aeroplanes carried machine guns and fought
in the air; their bombing work was increasingly important, they had
developed a wonderful art of aerial photography, and all the aerial side
of artillery work, both with aeroplanes and observation balloons, had
been enormously developed. But the military mind was still resisting the
use of the tank, the obvious weapon for decision in trench warfare.
Many intelligent people outside military circles understood this quite
clearly. The use of the tank against trenches was an altogether obvious
expedient. Leonardo da Vinci invented an early tank, but what military
“expert” has ever had the wits to study Leonardo? Soon after the South
African War, in 1903, there were stories in magazines describing
imaginary battles in which tanks figured, and a complete working model
of a tank was shown to the British military authorities--who of course
rejected it--in 1912. Tanks had been invented and re-invented before the
war began. But had the matter rested entirely in the hands of the
military, there would never have been any use of tanks. It was Mr.
Winston Churchill, at that time at the British Admiralty, who insisted
upon the manufacture of the first tanks, and it was in the teeth of the
grimmest opposition that they were sent to France.[509] To the British
navy, and not to the army, military science owes the use of these
devices. The German military authorities were equally set against them.
In July, 1916, Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, began a
great offensive which failed to break through the German line. In some
places he advanced a few miles; in others he was completely repulsed.
There was a huge slaughter of the new British armies. And he did not use
tanks.
In September, when the season was growing too late for a sustained
offensive, tanks first appeared in warfare. A few were put into action
by the British in a not very intelligent fashion. Their effect upon the
German was profound, they produced something like a panic, and there can
be little doubt that had they been used in July in sufficient numbers
and handled by a general of imagination and energy, they would have
ended the war there and then. At that time the Allies were in greater
strength than the Germans upon the Western front. Russia, though fast
approaching exhaustion, was still fighting, Italy was pressing the
Austrians hard, and Roumania was just entering the war on the side of
the allies. But the waste of men in this disastrous July offensive,
coupled with the obstinate neglect of the possibilities of the tanks by
the military authorities, brought the Allied cause to the very brink of
disaster.
Directly the British failure of July had reassured the Germans, they
turned on the Roumanians, and the winter of 1916 saw the same fate
overtake Roumania that had fallen upon Serbia in 1915. The year that had
begun with the retreat from Gallipoli and the surrender of Kut, ended
with the crushing of Roumania and with volleys fired at a landing party
of French and British marines by a royalist crowd in the port of Athens.
It looked as though King Constantine of Greece, that protégé of the
Allied foreign offices, meant to lead his people in the footsteps of
King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. But the coast line of Greece is one much
exposed to naval action. Greece was blockaded, and a French force from
Salonika joined hands with an Italian force from Valona to cut the king
of Greece off from his Central European friends.
On the whole, things looked much less dangerous for the Hohenzollern
imperialism at the end of 1916 than they had done after the failure of
the first great rush at the Marne. The Allies had wasted two years of
opportunity. Belgium, Serbia, and Roumania, and large areas of France
and Russia, were occupied by Austro-German troops. Counterstroke after
counterstroke had failed, and Russia was now tottering towards a
collapse. Had Germany been ruled with any wisdom, she might have made a
reasonable peace at this time. But the touch of success had intoxicated
her imperialists. They wanted not safety, but triumph, not world
welfare, but world empire. “World power or downfall” was their formula;
it gave their antagonists no alternative but a fight to a conclusive
end.
§ 9
Early in 1917 Russia collapsed.
By this time the enormous strain of the war was telling hardly upon all
the European populations. There had been a great disorganization of
transport everywhere, a discontinuance of the normal repairs and
replacements of shipping, railways, and the like, a using-up of material
of all sorts, a dwindling of food production, a withdrawal of greater
and greater masses of men from industry, a cessation of educational
work, and a steady diminution of the ordinary securities and honesties
of life. Nowhere was the available directive ability capable of keeping
a grip upon affairs in the face of the rupture of habitual bonds and the
replacement of the subtle disciplines of peace by the clumsy brutalities
of military “order.” More and more of the European population was being
transferred from surroundings and conditions to which it was accustomed,
to novel circumstances which distressed, stimulated, and demoralized it.
But Russia suffered first and most from this universal pulling up of
civilization from its roots. The Russian autocracy was dishonest and
incompetent. The Tsar, like several of his ancestors, had now given way
to a crazy pietism, and the court was dominated by a religious impostor,
Rasputin, whose cult was one of unspeakable foulness, a reeking scandal
in the face of the world. Beneath the rule of this dirty mysticism,
indolence and scoundrelism mismanaged the war. The Russian common
soldiers were sent into battle without guns to support them, without
even rifle ammunition; they were wasted by their officers and generals
in a delirium of militarist enthusiasm. For a time they seemed to be
suffering mutely as the beasts suffer; but there is a limit to the
endurance even of the most ignorant. A profound disgust for the Tsardom
was creeping through these armies of betrayed and wasted men. From the
close of 1915 onwards Russia was a source of deepening anxiety to her
Western allies. Throughout 1916 she remained largely on the defensive,
and there were rumours of a separate peace with Germany. She gave little
help to Roumania.
On December 29th, 1916, the monk Rasputin was murdered at a dinner-party
in Petrograd, and a belated attempt was made to put the Tsardom in
order. By March things were moving rapidly; food riots in Petrograd
developed into a revolutionary insurrection; there was an attempted
suppression of the Duma, the representative body, attempted arrests of
liberal leaders, the formation of a provisional government under Prince
Lvoff, and an abdication (March 15th) by the Tsar. For a time it seemed
that a moderate and controlled revolution might be possible--perhaps
under a new Tsar. Then it became evident that the destruction of
confidence in Russia had gone too far for any such adjustments. The
Russian people were sick to death of the old order of things in Europe,
of Tsars and of wars and great powers; it wanted relief, and that
speedily, from unendurable miseries. The Allies had no understanding of
Russian realities; their diplomatists were ignorant of Russian; genteel
persons, with their attention directed to the Russian Court rather than
Russia, they blundered steadily with the new situation. There was little
goodwill among the diplomatists for republicanism, and a manifest
disposition to embarrass the new government as much as possible. At the
head of the Russian republican government was an eloquent and
picturesque leader, Kerensky, who found himself assailed by the deep
forces of a profounder revolutionary movement, the “social revolution,”
at home and cold-shouldered by the Allied governments abroad. His allies
would neither let him give the Russian people land nor peace beyond
their frontiers. The French and the British press pestered their
exhausted ally for a fresh offensive, but when presently the Germans
made a strong attack by sea and land upon Riga, the British Admiralty
quailed before the prospect of a Baltic expedition in relief. The new
Russian republic had to fight unsupported. In spite of their great naval
predominance and the bitter protests of the great English admiral, Lord
Fisher (1841-1920), it is to be noted that the Allies, except for some
submarine attacks, left the Germans the complete mastery of the Baltic
throughout the war.
The Russian masses were resolute to end the war. There had come into
existence in Petrograd a body representing the workers and common
soldiers, the Soviet, and this body clamoured for an international
conference of socialists at Stockholm. Food riots were occurring in
Berlin at this time, war weariness in Austria and Germany was profound,
and there can be little doubt, in the light of subsequent events, that
such a conference would have precipitated a reasonable peace on
democratic lines in 1917 and a German revolution. Kerensky implored his
Western allies to allow this conference to take place, but, fearful of a
worldwide outbreak of socialism and republicanism, they refused, in
spite of the favourable response of a small majority of the British
Labour Party. Without either moral or physical help from the Allies, the
“moderate” Russian republic still fought on and made a last desperate
offensive effort in July. It failed after some preliminary successes and
another great slaughtering of Russians.
The limit of Russian endurance was reached. Mutinies broke out in the
Russian armies, and particularly upon the northern front, and upon
November 7th, 1917, Kerensky’s government was overthrown and power was
seized by the Soviet Government, dominated by the Bolshevik socialists
under Lenin, and pledged to make peace regardless of the Western powers.
Russia passed definitely “out of the war.”
In the spring of 1917 there had been a costly and ineffective French
attack upon the Champagne front which had failed to break through and
sustained enormous losses. Here, then, by the end of 1917, was a phase
of events altogether favourable to Germany, had her government been
fighting for security and well-being rather than for pride and victory.
But to the very end, to the pitch of final exhaustion, the people of the
Central Powers were held to the effort to realize an impossible world
imperialism.
To that end it was necessary that Britain should be not merely resisted,
but subjugated, and in order to do that Germany had already dragged
America into the circle of her enemies. Throughout 1916 the submarine
campaign had been growing in intensity, but hitherto it had respected
neutral shipping. In January, 1917, a complete “blockade” of Great
Britain and France was proclaimed, and all neutral powers were warned to
withdraw their shipping from the British seas. An indiscriminate sinking
of the world’s shipping began which compelled the United States to enter
the war in April (6th), 1917. Throughout 1917, while Russia was breaking
up and becoming impotent, the American people were changing swiftly and
steadily into a great military nation. And the unrestricted submarine
campaign, for which the German imperialists had accepted the risk of
this fresh antagonist, was far less successful than had been hoped. The
British navy proved itself much more inventive and resourceful than the
British army; there was a rapid development of anti-submarine devices
under water, upon the surface, and in the air; and after a month or so
of serious destruction, the tale of submarine sinkings declined. The
British found it necessary to put themselves upon food rations; but the
regulations were well framed and ably administered, the public showed an
excellent spirit and intelligence, and the danger of famine and social
disorder was kept at arm’s length.
[Illustration: Time Chart of the Great War, 1914-18 (Western Front)]
[Illustration: Time Chart of the Great War, 1914-18 (Eastern Front)]
Yet the German imperial government persisted in its course. If the
submarine was not doing all that had been expected, and if the armies
of America gathered like a thunder-cloud, yet Russia was definitely
down; and in October the same sort of Autumn offensive that had
overthrown Serbia in 1915 and Roumania in 1916 was now turned with
crushing effect against Italy. The Italian front collapsed after the
Battle of Caporetto, and the Austro-German armies poured down into
Venetia and came almost within gunfire of Venice. Germany felt
justified, therefore, in taking a high line with the Russian peace
proposals, and the peace of Brest Litovsk (March 2nd, 1918) gave the
Western allies some intimation of what a German victory would mean to
them. It was a crushing and exorbitant peace, dictated with the utmost
arrogance of confident victors.
All through the winter German troops had been shifting from the Eastern
to the Western front, and now, in the spring of 1918, the jaded
enthusiasm of hungry, weary, and bleeding Germany was lashed up for the
one supreme effort that was really and truly to end the war. For some
months American troops had been in France, but the bulk of the American
army was still across the Atlantic. It was high time for the final
conclusive blow upon the Western front, if such a blow was ever to be
delivered. The first attack was upon the British in the Somme region.
The not very brilliant cavalry generals who were still in command of a
front upon which cavalry was a useless encumbrance, were caught napping;
and on March 21st, in “Gough’s Disaster,” a British army was driven back
in such disorder as no British army had ever known before. Thousands of
guns were lost, and scores of thousands of prisoners. Many of these
losses were due to the utter incompetence of the higher command. No less
than a hundred tanks were abandoned _because they ran out of petrol_!
The British were driven back almost to Amiens.[510] Throughout April and
May the Germans rained offensives on the Allied front. They came near to
a break through in the north, and they made a great drive back to the
Marne, which they reached again on May 30th, 1918.
This was the climax of the German effort. Behind it was nothing but an
exhausted homeland. Fresh troops were hurrying from Britain across the
Channel, and America was now pouring men into France by the hundred
thousand. In June the weary Austrians made a last effort in Italy, and
collapsed before an Italian counter-attack. Early in June the French
began to develop a counter-attack in the Marne angle. By July the tide
was turning and the Germans were reeling back. The Battle of Château
Thierry (July 18th) proved the quality of the new American armies. In
August the British opened a great and successful thrust into Belgium,
and the bulge of the German lines towards Amiens wilted and collapsed.
Germany had finished. The fighting spirit passed out of her army, and
October was a story of defeat and retreat along the entire Western
front. Early in November British troops were in Valenciennes and
Americans in Sedan. In Italy also the Austrian armies were in a state of
disorderly retreat. But everywhere now the Hohenzollern and Habsburg
forces were collapsing. The smash at the end was amazingly swift.
Frenchmen and Englishmen could not believe their newspapers as day after
day they announced the capture of more hundreds of guns and more
thousands of prisoners.
In September a great allied offensive against Bulgaria had produced a
revolution in that country and peace proposals. Turkey had followed with
a capitulation at the end of October, and Austro-Hungary on November
4th. There was an attempt to bring out the German Fleet for a last
fight, but the sailors mutinied (November 7th).
The Kaiser and the Crown Prince bolted hastily, and without a scrap of
dignity, into Holland. It was like welshers bolting from a racecourse to
escape a ducking. On November 11th an armistice was signed, and the war
was at an end....
For four years and a quarter the war had lasted, and gradually it had
drawn nearly everyone, in the Western world at least, into its vortex.
Upwards of ten millions of people had been actually killed through the
fighting, another twenty or twenty-five million had died through the
hardships and disorders entailed. Scores of millions were suffering and
enfeebled by under-nourishment and misery. A vast proportion of the
living were now engaged in war work, in drilling and armament, in making
munitions, in hospitals, in working as substitutes for men who had gone
into the armies and the like. Business men had been adapting themselves
to the more hectic methods necessary for profit in a world in a state of
crisis. The war had become, indeed, an atmosphere, a habit of life, a
new social order. Then suddenly it ended.
In London the armistice was proclaimed about midday on November 11th. It
produced a strange cessation of every ordinary routine. Clerks poured
out of their offices and would not return, assistants deserted their
shops, omnibus drivers and the drivers of military lorries set out upon
journeys of their own devising with picked-up loads of astounded and
cheering passengers going nowhere in particular and careless whither
they went. Vast vacant crowds presently choked the streets, and every
house and shop that possessed such adornments hung out flags. When night
came, many of the main streets, which had been kept in darkness for many
months because of the air raids, were brightly lit. It was very strange
to see thronging multitudes assembled in an artificial light again.
Everyone felt aimless, with a kind of strained and aching relief. It was
over at last. There would be no more killing in France, no more air
raids--and things would get better. People wanted to laugh, and
weep--and could do neither. Youths of spirit and young soldiers on leave
formed thin noisy processions that shoved their way through the general
drift, and did their best to make a jollification. A captured German gun
was hauled from the Mall, where a vast array of such trophies had been
set out, into Trafalgar Square, and its carriage burnt. Squibs and
crackers were thrown about. But there was little concerted rejoicing.
Nearly everyone had lost too much and suffered too much to rejoice with
any fervour.[511]
§ 10
The world in the year after the great war was like a man who has had
some vital surgical operation very roughly performed, and who is not yet
sure whether he can now go on living or whether he has not been so
profoundly shocked and injured that he will presently fall down and die.
It was a world dazed and stunned. German militarist imperialism had been
defeated, but at an overwhelming cost. It had come very near to victory.
Everything went on, now that the strain of the conflict had ceased,
rather laxly, rather weakly, and with a gusty and uncertain temper.
There was a universal hunger for peace, a universal desire for the lost
safety and liberty and prosperity of pre-war times, without any power of
will to achieve and secure these things.
Just as with the Roman Republic under the long strain of the Punic War,
so now there had been a great release of violence and cruelty, and a
profound deterioration in financial and economic morality. Generous
spirits had sacrificed themselves freely to the urgent demands of the
war, but the sly and base of the worlds of business and money had
watched the convulsive opportunities of the time and secured a firm grip
upon the resources and political power of their countries. Everywhere
men who would have been regarded as shady adventurers before 1914 had
acquired power and influence while better men toiled unprofitably. Such
men as Lord Rhondda, the British food controller, killed themselves with
hard work, while the war profiteer waxed rich and secured his grip upon
press and party organization.
In the course of the war there had been extraordinary experiments in
collective management in nearly all the belligerent countries. It was
realized that the common expedients of peacetime commerce, the higgling
of the market, the holding out for a favourable bargain, were
incompatible with the swift needs of warfare. Transport, fuel, food
supply, and the distribution of the raw materials not only of clothing,
housing, and the like, but of everything needed for war munitions, had
been brought under public control. No longer had farmers been allowed to
under-farm; cattle had been put upon deer-parks and grass-lands ploughed
up, with or without the owner’s approval. Luxury building and
speculative company promotion had been restrained. In effect, a sort of
emergency socialist state had been established throughout belligerent
Europe. It was rough-and-ready and wasteful, but it was more effective
than the tangled incessant profit-seeking, the cornering and
forestalling and incoherent productiveness of “private enterprise.”
In the earlier years of the war there was a very widespread feeling of
brotherhood and the common interest in all the belligerent states. The
common men were everywhere sacrificing life and health for what they
believed to be the common good of the state. In return, it was promised,
there would be less social injustice after the war, a more universal
devotion to the common welfare. In Great Britain, for instance, Mr.
Lloyd George was particularly insistent upon his intention to make the
after-war Britain “a land fit for heroes.” He foreshadowed the
continuation of this new war communism into the peace period in
discourses of great fire and beauty. In Great Britain there was created
a Ministry of Reconstruction, which was understood to be planning a new
and more generous social order, better labour conditions, better
housing, extended education, a complete and scientific revision of the
economic system. Similar hopes of a better world sustained the common
soldiers of France and Germany and Italy. It was premature
disillusionment that caused the Russian collapse. So that two mutually
dangerous streams of anticipation were running through the minds of men
in Western Europe towards the end of the war. The rich and adventurous
men, and particularly the new war profiteers, were making their plans to
prevent such developments as that air transport should become a state
property, and to snatch back manufactures, shipping, land transport, the
public services generally, and the trade in staples from the hands of
the commonweal into the grip of private profit; they were securing
possession of newspapers and busying themselves with party caucuses and
the like to that end; while the masses of common men were looking
forward naïvely to a new state of society planned almost entirely in
their interest and according to generous general ideas. The history of
1919 is largely the clash of these two streams of anticipation. There
was a hasty selling off, by the “business” government in control, of
every remunerative public enterprise to private speculators.... By the
middle of 1919 the labour masses throughout the world were manifestly
disappointed and in a thoroughly bad temper. The British “Ministry of
Reconstruction” and its foreign equivalents were exposed as a soothing
sham. The common man felt he had been cheated. There was to be no
reconstruction, but only a restoration of the old order--in the harsher
form necessitated by the poverty of the new time.
For four years the drama of the war had obscured the social question
which had been developing in the Western civilizations throughout the
nineteenth century. Now that the war was over, this question reappeared
gaunt and bare, as it had never been seen before.
And the irritations and hardships and the general insecurity of the new
time were exacerbated by a profound disturbance of currency and credit.
Money, a complicated growth of conventions rather than a system of
values, had been deprived within the belligerent countries of the
support of a gold standard. Gold had been retained only for
international trade, and every government had produced excessive
quantities of paper money for domestic use. With the breaking down of
the war-time barriers the international exchange became a wildly
fluctuating confusion, a source of distress to everyone except a few
gamblers and wily speculators. Prices rose and rose--with an infuriating
effect upon the wage-earner. On the one hand was the employer resisting
his demands for more pay; on the other hand, food, house-room, and
clothing were being steadily cornered against him. And, which was the
essential danger of the situation, _he had lost any confidence he had
ever possessed that any patience or industrial willingness he displayed
would really alleviate the shortages and inconveniences by which he
suffered_.
In the speeches of politicians towards the close of 1919 and the spring
of 1920, there was manifest an increasing recognition of the fact that
what is called the capitalist system--the private ownership system that
is, in which private profit is the working incentive--was on its trial.
It had to produce general prosperity, they admitted, or it had to be
revised. It is interesting to note such a speech as that of Mr. Lloyd
George, the British premier, delivered on Saturday, December 6th, 1919.
Mr. Lloyd George had had the education and training of a Welsh
solicitor; he entered politics early, and in the course of a brilliant
parliamentary career he had had few later opportunities for reading and
thought. But being a man of great natural shrewdness, he was expressing
here very accurately the ideas of the more intelligent of the business
men and wealthy men and ordinary citizens who supported him.
“There is a new challenge to civilization,” he said. “What is it? It is
fundamental. It affects the whole fabric of society as we know it; its
commerce, its trade, its industry, its finance, its social order--all
are involved in it. There are those who maintain that the prosperity and
strength of the country have been built up by the stimulating and
invigorating appeal to individual impulse, to individual action. That is
one view. The State must educate; the State must assist where necessary;
the State must control where necessary; the State must shield the weak
against the arrogance of the strong; but the life springs from
individual impulse and energy. (Cheers.) That is one view. What is the
other? That private enterprise is a failure, tried, and found wanting--a
complete failure, a cruel failure. It must be rooted out, and the
community must take charge as a community, to produce, to distribute, as
well as to control.
“Those are great challenges for us to decide. _We_ say that the ills of
private enterprise can be averted. _They_ say, ‘No, they cannot. No
ameliorative, no palliative, no restrictive, no remedial measure will
avail. These evils are inherent in the system. They are the fruit of the
tree, and you must cut it down.’ That is the challenge we hear ringing
through the civilized world to-day, from ocean to ocean, through valley
and plain. You hear it in the whining and maniacal shrieking of the
Bolshevists. You hear it in the loud, clear, but more restrained tones
of Congresses and Conferences. The Bolshevists would blow up the fabric
with high explosive, with horror. Others would pull down with the
crowbars and with cranks--especially cranks. (Laughter.)
“Unemployment, with its injustice for the man who seeks and thirsts for
employment, who begs for labour and cannot get it, and who is punished
for failure he is not responsible for by the starvation of his
children--that torture is _something that private enterprise ought to
remedy for its own sake_. (Cheers.) Sweating, slums, the sense of
semi-slavery in labour, must go. We must cultivate a sense of manhood by
treating men as men. If I--and I say this deliberately--if I had to
choose between this fabric I believe in, and allowing millions of men
and women and children to rot in its cellars, I would not hesitate one
hour. That is not the choice. Thank God it is not the choice. Private
enterprise can produce more, so that all men get a fair share of
it....”[512]
Here, put into quasi-eloquent phrasing, and with a jest adapted to the
mental habits of the audience, we have the common-sense view of the
ordinary prosperous man not only of Great Britain, but of America or
France or Italy or Germany. In quality and tone it is a fair sample of
British political thought in 1919. The prevailing economic system has
made us what we are, is the underlying idea; and we do not want any
process of social destruction to precede a renascence of society, we do
not want to experiment with the fundamentals of our social order. Let us
accept that. Adaptation, Mr. Lloyd George admitted, there had to be. Now
this occasion of his speaking was a year and a month after the
Armistice, and for all that period private enterprise had been failing
to do all that Mr. Lloyd George was so cheerfully promising it would do.
The community was in urgent need of houses. Throughout the war there had
been a cessation not only of building, but of repairs. The shortage of
houses in the last months of 1919 amounted to scores of thousands in
Britain alone.[513] Multitudes of people were living in a state of
exasperating congestion, and the most shameless profiteering in
apartments and houses was going on. It was a difficult, but not an
impossible situation. Given the same enthusiasm and energy and
self-sacrifice that had tided over the monstrous crisis of 1916, the far
easier task of providing a million houses could have been performed in a
year or so. But there had been corners in building materials, transport
was in a disordered state, and it did not _pay_ private enterprise to
build houses at any rents within the means of the people who needed
them. Private enterprise, therefore, so far from bothering about the
public need of housing, did nothing but corner and speculate in rents
and sub-letting. It now demanded grants in aid from the State--in order
to build at a profit. And there was a great crowding and dislocation of
goods at the dépôts because there was insufficient road transport. There
was an urgent want of cheap automobiles to move about goods and workers.
But private enterprise in the automobile industry found it far more
profitable to produce splendid and costly cars for those whom the war
had made rich. The munition factories built with public money could have
been converted very readily into factories for the mass production of
cheap automobiles, but private enterprise had insisted upon these
factories being sold by the State, and would neither meet the public
need itself nor let the State do so. So, too, with the world, in the
direst discomfort for need of shipping, private enterprise insisted upon
the shutting down of the newly constructed State shipyards. Currency was
dislocated everywhere, but private enterprise was busy buying and
selling francs or marks and intensifying the trouble. While Mr. George
was making the very characteristic speech we have quoted, the discontent
of the common man was gathering everywhere, and little or nothing was
being done to satisfy his needs. It was becoming very evident that
unless there was to be some profound change in the spirit of business,
under an unrestrained private enterprise system there was little or no
hope, in Europe at any rate, of decent housing, clothing, or education
for the workers for two or three generations.
These are facts that the historian of mankind is obliged to note with as
little comment as possible. Private enterprise in Europe in 1919
displayed neither will nor capacity for meeting the crying needs of the
time. So soon as it was released from control, it ran naturally into
speculation, cornering, and luxury production. It followed the line of
maximum profit. It displayed no sense of its own dangers; and it
resisted any attempt to restrain and moderate its profits and make
itself serviceable, even in its own interest. And this went on in the
face of the most striking manifestations of the extreme recalcitrance on
the part of the European masses to the prolonged continuance of the
privations and inconveniences they suffered. In 1913 these masses were
living as they had lived since birth; they were habituated to the life
they led. The masses of 1919, on the other hand, had been uprooted
everywhere, to go into the armies, to go into munition factories, and so
on. They had lost their habits of acquiescence, and they were hardier
and more capable of desperate action. Great multitudes of men had gone
through such brutalizing training as, for instance, bayonet drill; they
had learnt to be ferocious, and to think less either of killing or being
killed. Social unrest had become, therefore, much more dangerous.
Everything seemed to point to a refusal to tolerate the current state of
affairs for many years. Unless the educated and prosperous and
comfortable people of Europe could speedily get their private enterprise
under sufficient restraint to make it work well and rapidly for the
common good, unless they could develop the idea of business as primarily
a form of public service and not primarily a method of profit-making,
unless they could in their own interest achieve a security of peace that
would admit of a cessation not only of war preparation, but of
international commercial warfare, strike and insurrection promised to
follow strike and insurrection up to a complete social and political
collapse. It was not that the masses had or imagined that they had the
plan of a new social, political, and economic system. They had not, and
they did not believe they had. The defects we have pointed out in the
socialist scheme (chapter xxxix, § 5) were no secret from them. It was a
much more dangerous state of affairs than that. It was that they were
becoming so disgusted with the current system, with its silly luxury,
its universal waste, and its general misery, that they did not care what
happened afterwards so long as they could destroy it. It was a return to
a state of mind comparable to that which had rendered possible the
debacle of the Roman Empire.
Already in 1919 the world had seen one great community go that way, the
Russian people. The Russians overturned the old order and submitted to
the autocratic rule of a small group of doctrinaire Bolshevik
socialists, because these men seemed to have something new to try. They
wrecked the old system, and at any cost they would not have it back. The
information available from Russia at the time of writing this summary is
still too conflicting and too obviously tainted by propagandist aims for
us to form any judgment upon the proceedings and methods of the Soviet
Government, but it is very plain that from November, 1917, Russia has
not only endured that government and its mainly socialistic methods, but
has fought for it successfully against anything that seemed to threaten
a return to the old régime.
We have already (§ 5) pointed out the very broad differences between the
Russian and the Western communities, and the strong reasons there are
for doubting that they will move upon parallel lines and act in similar
ways. The Russian masses were cut off by want of education and sympathy
from the small civilized community of prosperous and educated people
which lived upon them. These latter were a little separate nation. The
masses below have thrown that separate nation off and destroyed it and
begun again, so to speak, upon a new sort of society which, whether it
succeed or collapse, cannot fail to be of intense interest to all
mankind. But there is much more unity of thought and feeling between
class and class in the West than in Russia, and particularly in the
Atlantic communities. Even if they wrangle, classes can talk together
and understand each other. There is no unbroken stratum of illiterates.
The groups of rich and speculative men, the “bad men” in business and
affairs, whose freedoms are making the very name of “private enterprise”
stink in the nostrils of the ordinary man, are only the more active
section of very much larger classes, guilty perhaps of indolence and
self-indulgence, but capable of being roused to a sense not merely of
the wickedness but of the danger of systematic self-seeking in a
strained, impoverished, and sorely tried world. Many of these more
reasonable and moral people have shown themselves clearly aware of the
nature of the present situation, and some of them have made speeches and
delivered sermons and written books--often addressed to the working
classes--expressing very generous and unselfish views. Speeches and
sermons and books will in themselves do little to allay the gathering
wrath of classes ill housed, ill fed, and unhealthy, and angry because
they believe things are so through the reckless greed of others; but
such utterances are valuable as admissions, and if these good
intentions, encouraged perhaps and aided by a certain pressure from
below, presently develop into a resolute combining and direction of the
energies of private enterprise--for a time at least--towards socially
necessary work and a restriction of speculation and luxury, and if there
begin a rapid provision, even at some cost to the hoards and
satisfactions of the successful classes, of the decent homes and
gardens, of the pleasant public surroundings, the health services and
the education and leisure needed to tranquillize the fiercer
discontents, it is still possible that readjustment rather than
revolution will be the method of the Atlantic communities. But that
readjustment cannot be indefinitely delayed; it must come soon.
In one way or another it seems inevitable now that the new standard of
well-being which the mechanical revolution of the last century has
rendered possible, should become the general standard of life.
Revolution is conditional upon public discomfort. Social peace is
impossible without a rapid amelioration of the needless discomforts of
the present time. A rapid resort to willing service and social
reconstruction on the part of those who own and rule, or else a
worldwide social revolution leading towards an equalization of
conditions and an attempt to secure comfort on new and untried lines,
seem now to be the only alternatives before mankind. The choice which
route shall be taken lies, we believe, in western Europe, and still more
so in America, with the educated, possessing, and influential classes.
The former route demands much sacrifice, for prosperous people in
particular, a voluntary assumption of public duties and a voluntary
acceptance of class discipline and self-denial; the latter may take an
indefinite time to traverse, it will certainly be a very destructive and
bloody process, and whether it will lead to a new and better state of
affairs at last is questionable. A social revolution, if ultimately the
western European States blunder into it, may prove to be a process
extending over centuries; it may involve a social breakdown as complete
as that of the Roman Empire, and it may necessitate as slow a
recuperation.
Let us add to what has been written above a short passage from an abler
and far more authoritative pen.[514] It approaches this question of
economic disorganization from a different angle, but the drift of its
implications is the same. It says as plainly to the private capitalist
system: “Mend, show more understanding, and a better and a stronger will
for the common welfare, or go.”
“In the latter stages of the war all the belligerent governments
practised, from necessity or incompetence, what a Bolshevist might have
done from design.[515] Even now, when the war is over, most of them
continue out of weakness the same malpractices. But further, the
Governments of Europe, being many of them at this moment reckless in
their methods as well as weak, seek to direct on to a class known as
‘profiteers’ the popular indignation against the more obvious
consequences of their vicious methods. These profiteers are, broadly
speaking, the entrepreneur class of capitalists, that is to say, the
active and constructive element in the whole capitalist society, who in
a period of rapidly rising prices cannot but get rich quick whether they
wish it or desire it or not.[516] If prices are continually rising,
every trader who has purchased for stock or owns property and plant
inevitably makes profits. By directing hatred against this class,
therefore, the European Governments are carrying a step further the
fatal process which the subtle mind of Lenin had consciously conceived.
The profiteers are a consequence and not a cause of rising prices. By
combining a popular hatred of the class of _entrepreneurs_ with the blow
already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary
disturbance of contract and of the established equilibrium of wealth
which is the inevitable result of inflation, these governments are fast
rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of
the nineteenth century. But they have no plan for replacing it.
“We are thus faced in Europe with the spectacle of an extraordinary
weakness, on the part of the great capitalist class, which has emerged
from the industrial triumphs of the nineteenth century and seemed a very
few years ago our all-powerful master. The terror and personal timidity
of the individuals of this class is now so great, their confidence in
their place in society and in their necessity to the social organism so
diminished, that they are the easy victims of intimidation. This was not
so in England twenty-five years ago, any more than it is now in the
United States. Then the capitalists believed in themselves, in their
value to society, in the propriety of their continued existence in the
full enjoyment of their riches and the unlimited exercise of their
power. Now they tremble before every insult. Call them pro-Germans,
international financiers, or profiteers, and they will give you any
ransom you choose to ask not to speak of them so harshly. They allow
themselves to be ruined and altogether undone by their own instruments,
governments of their own making, and a press of which they are the
proprietors. Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society
ever perished save by its own hand.”
§ 11[517]
We have dealt with the social and economic disorder of the European
communities, and the rapid return of the “class-war” to the foreground
of attention, before giving any account of the work of world settlement
that centred on the Peace Conference at Paris, because the worried and
preoccupied state of everyone concerned with private problems of income,
prices, employment, and the like goes far to explain the jaded
atmosphere in which that Conference addressed itself to the vast task
before it.
The story of the Conference turns very largely upon the adventure of one
particular man, one of those men whom accident or personal quality picks
out as a type to lighten the task of the historian. We have in the
course of this history found it very helpful at times to focus our
attention upon some individual, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Yuan
Chwang, the Emperor Frederick II and Charles V and Napoleon I for
example, and to let him by reflection illuminate the period in which he
lived. The conclusion of the Great War can be seen most easily as the
rise of the American President, President Wilson, to predominant
importance in the world’s hopes and attention, and his failure to
justify that predominance.
President Wilson (born 1856) had previously been a prominent student and
teacher of history, constitutional law, and the political sciences
generally. He had held various professorial chairs, and had been
President of Princeton University (New Jersey). There is a long list of
books to his credit, and they show a mind rather exclusively directed to
American history and American politics. There is no evidence that he had
at any time in his life made a general study of the world problem
outside the very peculiar and exceptional American case. He was mentally
the new thing in history, negligent of and rather ignorant of the older
things out of which his new world had arisen. He retired from academic
life, and was elected Democratic Governor of New Jersey in 1910. In 1913
he became the Democratic presidential candidate, and as a consequence of
a violent quarrel between ex-President Roosevelt and President Taft,
which split the dominant Republican party, he became President of the
United States.
The events of August 1914 seem to have taken President Wilson, like the
rest of his fellow-countrymen, by surprise. We find him cabling an offer
of his services as a mediator on August 3rd. Then, for a time, he and
America watched the conflict. At first neither the American people nor
their President seem to have had a very clear or profound understanding
of that long-gathered catastrophe. Their tradition for a century had
been to disregard the problems of the Old World, and it was not to be
lightly changed. The imperialistic arrogance of the German Court and the
stupid inclination of the German military authorities towards
melodramatic “frightfulness,” their invasion of Belgium, their cruelties
there, their use of poison gas, and the nuisance of their submarine
campaign created a deepening hostility to Germany in the States as the
war proceeded; but the tradition of political abstinence and the
deep-rooted persuasion that America possessed a political morality
altogether superior to European conflicts restrained the President from
active intervention. He adopted a lofty tone. He professed to be unable
to judge the causes and justice of the Great War. It was largely his
high pacific attitude that secured his re-election as President for a
second term. But the world is not to be mended by merely regarding
evil-doers with an expression of rather undiscriminating disapproval. By
the end of 1916 the Germans had been encouraged to believe that under no
circumstances whatever would the United States fight, and in 1917 they
began their unrestricted submarine warfare and the sinking of American
ships without notice. President Wilson and the American people were
dragged into the war by this supreme folly. And also they were dragged
into a reluctant attempt to define their relations to Old-World politics
in some other terms than those of mere aloofness. Their thoughts and
temper changed very rapidly. They came into the war side by side with
the Allies, but not in any pact with the Allies. They came into the
war, in the name of their own modern civilization, to punish and end an
intolerable political and military situation.
Slow and belated judgments are sometimes the best judgments. In a series
of “notes,” too long and various for detailed treatment in this
_Outline_, thinking aloud, as it were, in the hearing of all mankind,
President Wilson sought to state the essential differences of the
American State from the Great Powers of the Old World. We have been at
some pains in this history to make plain the development of these
differences. He unfolded a conception of international relationships
that came like a gospel, like the hope of a better world, to the whole
eastern hemisphere. Secret agreements were to cease, “nations” were to
determine their own destinies, militarist aggression was to cease, the
sea-ways were to be free to all mankind. These commonplaces of American
thought, these secret desires of every sane man, came like a great light
upon the darkness of anger and conflict in Europe. At last, men felt,
the ranks of diplomacy were broken, the veils of Great Power “policy”
were rent in twain. Here with authority, with the strength of a powerful
new nation behind it, was the desire of the common man throughout the
world, plainly said.
Manifestly there was needed some over-riding instrument of government to
establish world law and maintain these broad and liberal generalizations
upon human intercourse. A number of schemes had floated in men’s minds
for the attainment of that end. In particular there was a movement for
some sort of world league, a “League of Nations.” The American President
adopted this phrase and sought to realize it. An essential condition of
the peace he sought through the overthrow of German imperialism was, he
declared, to be this federal organ. This League of Nations was to be the
final court of appeal in international affairs. It was to be the
substantial realization of the peace. Here again he awakened a
tremendous echo.
President Wilson was the spokesman of a new age. Throughout the war, and
for some little time after it had ended, he held, so far as the Old
World was concerned, that exalted position. But in America, where they
knew him better, there were doubts. And writing as we do now with the
wisdom of subsequent events, we can understand these doubts. America,
throughout a century and more of detachment and security, had developed
new ideals and formulæ of political thought, without realizing with any
intensity that, under conditions of stress and danger, these ideals and
formulæ might have to be passionately sustained. To her community many
things were platitudes that had to the Old World communities, entangled
still in ancient political complications, the quality of a saving
gospel. President Wilson was responding to the thought and conditions of
his own people and his own country, based on a liberal tradition that
had first found its full expression in English speech; but to Europe and
Asia he seemed to be thinking and saying, for the first time in history,
things hitherto undeveloped and altogether secret. And that
misconception he may have shared.
We are dealing here with an able and successful professor of political
science, who did not fully realize what he owed to his contemporaries
and the literary and political atmosphere he had breathed throughout his
life; and who passed very rapidly, after his re-election as President,
from the mental attitudes of a political leader to those of a Messiah.
His “notes” are a series of explorations of the elements of the world
situation. When at last, in his address to Congress of January 8th,
1918, he produced his Fourteen Points as a definite statement of the
American peace intentions, they were, as a statement, far better in
their spirit than in their arrangement and matter.
Yet, since the Fourteen Points certainly mark a new epoch in human
affairs, and since it was in the belief that they would determine and
limit the pains and penalties of the peace treaty that Germany
capitulated,[518] it may be well to summarize them here, with a word or
so of explanation.
(I) The First Point was the most vital of all. It summarizes and
dismisses the essential evils of the Great Power system. It demands:
“Open covenants of peace openly arrived at, after which there shall be
no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall
proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
(II) “Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas outside territorial
waters alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in
whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of
international covenants.”
(III) “The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the
establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations
consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.”
(IV) “Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will
be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.”
There are four points of universal importance, admirably stated. But II
is insufficient. Why should the sea-ways alone be free? What of the
air-ways above three thousand feet? What of the great international land
routes? Why, if Switzerland is at war with Germany and Italy, should
those powers be able to stop air and land transit and the passage of
peaceful people between France and Constantinople?
After IV, the Fourteen Points embark upon the consideration of
particular cases, for which one general statement should have sufficed.
(V) provides for “A free, open-minded and absolutely impartial
adjustment of all colonial claims based upon a strict observance of the
principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the
interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the
equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.”...
This is hopelessly vague. What, for instance, is this about claims and
title? There is no definition, no standard here.
The drop towards particular current issues continues in the next eight
points, which betray clearly how limited and accidental was the
President’s vision of European affairs.
(VI) is a vague demand for the evacuation of Russian territory (then
occupied by Germany), and the “assistance” (undefined) of the Russian
people.
(VII) Evacuation and restoration of Belgium.
(VIII) Evacuation and restoration of all French territory, and the
“righting” of the wrong done to France by Prussia in the matter of
Alsace-Lorraine.
(IX) The readjustment of the Italian frontier “on the lines of
nationality.”
(X) “Autonomy” of the Austrian “subject nations.”
(XI) The Balkans to be evacuated, Serbia to be granted an outlet to the
sea, and the independence of the Balkan States to be guaranteed.
(XII) Turkish subject nations to be assured of “undoubted security of
life and unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” The
Dardanelles to be internationalized, and Ottoman sovereignty to be
recognized only in Turkish districts.
(XIII) Poland to be independent.
Finally the Fourteenth Point arises again to the Great Charter level out
of this peddling with special cases.
(XIV) “A general association of nations must be formed under specific
covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political
and territorial independence for great and small States alike.”
So far the Fourteen Points. But some of the utterances of President
Wilson after this epoch-making address went much further and much higher
than this first statement. On September 27th, 1918, at New York, he said
some very important things:
“As I see it, the constitution of that League of Nations and the clear
definition of its objects must be a part, in a sense the most essential
part, of the peace settlement itself. It cannot be formed now. If formed
now, it would be merely a new alliance confined to the nations
associated against a common enemy....
“But these general terms do not disclose the whole matter. Some details
are needed to make them sound less like a thesis and more like a
practical programme. These, then, are some of the particulars, and I
state them with the greater confidence because I can state them
authoritatively as representing this Government’s interpretation of its
own duty with regard to peace.
“First, the impartial justice meted out must involve no discrimination
between those to whom we wish to be just and those to whom we do not
wish to be just. It must be a justice that has no favourites and knows
no standards but the equal rights of the several peoples concerned.
“Second, no special or separate interest of any single nation or any
group of nations can be made the basis of any part of the settlement
which is not consistent with the common interest of all.
“Third, there can be no leagues or alliances or special covenants and
understandings within the general and common family of the League of
Nations.
“Fourth, and more specifically, there can be no special selfish economic
combinations within the League, and no employment of any form of
economic boycott or exclusion, except as the power of economic penalty,
by exclusion from the markets of the world, may be vested in the League
of Nations itself as a means of discipline and control.
“Fifth, all international agreements and treaties of every kind must be
made known in their entirety to the rest of the world....
“In the same sentence in which I say that the United States will enter
into no special arrangements or understandings with particular nations,
let me say also that the United States is prepared to assume its full
share of responsibility for the maintenance of the common covenants and
understandings upon which peace must henceforth rest.
“We still read Washington’s immortal warning against entangling
alliances with full comprehension and an answering purpose. But only
special and limited alliances entangle; and we recognize and accept the
duty of a new day in which we are permitted to hope for a general
alliance, which will avoid entanglements and clear the air of the world
for common understandings and the maintenance of common rights.”
These Fourteen Points and their significant later addenda had an immense
reception throughout the world. Here at last seemed a peace for
reasonable men everywhere, as good and acceptable to honest and decent
Germans and Russians, as to honest and decent Frenchmen and Englishmen
and Belgians; and for some months the whole world was lit by faith in
Wilson. Could they have been made the basis of a world settlement in
1919, they would forthwith have opened a new and more hopeful era in
human affairs.
But, as we must tell, they did not do that. There was about President
Wilson a certain narrowness of mind, a certain suspicion of egotism;
there was in the generation of people in the United States to whom this
great occasion came, a generation born in security, reared in plenty
and, so far as history goes, in ignorance, a generation remote from the
tragic issues that had made Europe grave, a certain superficiality and
lightness of mind. It was not that the American people were superficial
by nature and necessity, but that they had never been deeply stirred by
the idea of a human community larger than their own. It was an
intellectual but not a moral conviction, with them. One had on the one
hand these new people of the new world, with their new ideas, their
finer and better ideas, of peace and world righteousness, and on the
other the old, bitter, deeply entangled peoples of the Great Power
system and the former were crude and rather childish in their immense
inexperience, and the latter were seasoned and bitter and intricate. The
theme of this clash of the raw idealist youthfulness of a new age with
the experienced ripeness of the old, was treated years ago by that great
novelist, Henry James, in a very typical story called _Daisy Miller_. It
is the pathetic story of a frank, trustful, high-minded, but rather
simple-minded American girl, with a real disposition towards
righteousness and a great desire for a “good time” and how she came to
Europe and was swiftly entangled and put in the wrong, and at last
driven to welcome death by the complex tortuousness and obstinate
limitations of the older world. There have been a thousand variants of
that theme in real life, a thousand such trans-Atlantic tragedies, and
the story of President Wilson is one of them. But it is not to be
supposed, because the new thing succumbs to the old infections, that is
the final condemnation of the new thing.
Probably no fallible human being manifestly trying to do his best amidst
overwhelming circumstances has been subjected to such minute, searching,
and pitiless criticism as President Wilson. He is blamed, and it would
seem that he is rightly blamed, for conducting the war and the ensuing
peace negotiations on strictly party lines. He remained the President
representing the American Democratic Party, when circumstances conspired
to make him the representative of the general interests of mankind. He
made no attempt to forget party issues for a time, and to incorporate
with himself such great American leaders as ex-President Roosevelt,
ex-President Taft, and the like. He did not draw fully upon the moral
and intellectual resources of the States; he made the whole issue too
personal, and he surrounded himself with merely personal adherents. And
a still graver error was his decision to come to the Peace Conference
himself. Nearly every experienced critic seems to be of opinion that he
should have remained in America, in the rôle of America, speaking
occasionally as if a nation spoke. Throughout the concluding years of
the war he had achieved an unexampled position in the world.
[Illustration: President Wilson]
Says Doctor Dillon:[519] “Europe, when the President touched its shores,
was as clay ready for the creative potter. Never before were the nations
so eager to follow a Moses who would take them to the long-promised land
where wars are prohibited and blockades unknown. And to their thinking
he was that great leader. In France men bowed down before him with awe
and affection. Labour leaders in Paris told me that they shed tears of
joy in his presence, and that their comrades would go through fire and
water to help him to realize his noble schemes. To the working classes
in Italy his name was a heavenly clarion at the sound of which the earth
would be renewed. The Germans regarded him and his humane doctrine as
their sheet-anchor of safety. The fearless Herr Muehlon said: ‘If
President Wilson were to address the Germans, and pronounce a severe
sentence upon them, they would accept it with resignation and without a
murmur and set to work at once.’ In German-Austria his fame was that of
a saviour, and the mere mention of his name brought balm to the
suffering and surcease of sorrow to the afflicted....”
Such was the overpowering expectation of the audience to which
President Wilson prepared to show himself. He reached France on board
the _George Washington_ in December, 1918.
He brought his wife with him. That seemed no doubt a perfectly natural
and proper thing to an American mind. Quite a number of the American
representatives brought their wives. Unhappily a social quality, nay,
almost a tourist quality, was introduced into the world settlement by
these ladies. Transport facilities were limited, and most of them
arrived in Europe with a radiant air of privilege. They came as if they
came to a treat. They were, it was intimated, seeing Europe under
exceptionally interesting circumstances. They would visit Chester, or
Warwick, or Windsor _en route_--for they might not have a chance of
seeing these celebrated places again. Important interviews would be
broken off to get in a visit to some “old historical mansion.” This may
seem a trivial matter to note in a History of Mankind, but it was such
small human things as this that threw a miasma of futility over the
Peace Conference of 1919. In a little while one discovered that Wilson,
the Hope of Mankind, had vanished, and that all the illustrated fashion
papers contained pictures of a delighted tourist and his wife, grouped
smilingly with crowned heads and such-like enviable company.... It is so
easy to be wise after the event, and to perceive that he should not have
come over.
[Illustration: M. Clemenceau]
The men he had chiefly to deal with, for example M. Clemenceau (France),
Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour (Britain), Baron Sonnino and Signor
Orlando (Italy), were men of widely dissimilar historical traditions.
But in one respect they resembled him and appealed to his sympathies.
They, too, were party politicians, who had led their country through the
war. Like himself they had failed to grasp the necessity of entrusting
the work of settlement to more specially qualified men. “They were the
merest novices in international affairs. Geography, ethnology,
psychology, and political history were sealed books to them. Like the
Rector of Louvain University, who told Oliver Goldsmith that, as he had
become the head of that institution without knowing Greek, he failed to
see why it should be taught there, the chiefs of State, having obtained
the highest position in their respective countries without more than an
inkling of international affairs, were unable to realize the importance
of mastering them or the impossibility of repairing the omission as they
went along....”[520]
“What they lacked, however, might in some perceptible degree have been
supplied by enlisting as their helpers men more happily endowed than
themselves. But they deliberately chose mediocrities. It is a mark of
genial spirits that they are well served, but the plenipotentiaries of
the Conference were not characterized by it. Away in the background some
of them had familiars or casual prompters to whose counsels they were
wont to listen, but many of the adjoints who moved in the limelight of
the world-stage were gritless and pithless.
[Illustration: Mr. Lloyd George]
“As the heads of the principal Governments implicitly claimed to be the
authorized spokesmen of the human race, and endowed with unlimited
powers, it is worth noting that this claim was boldly challenged by the
people’s organs in the Press. Nearly all the journals read by the masses
objected from the first to the dictatorship of the group of Premiers,
Mr. Wilson being excepted....”[521]
The restriction upon our space in this _Outline_ will not allow us to
tell here how the Peace Conference shrank from a Council of Ten to a
Council of Four (Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando), and how
it became a conference less and less like a frank and open discussion of
the future of mankind, and more and more like some old-fashioned
diplomatic conspiracy. Great and wonderful had been the hopes that had
gathered to Paris. “The Paris of the Conference,” says Dr. Dillon,
“ceased to be the capital of France. It became a vast cosmopolitan
caravanserai teeming with unwonted aspects of life and turmoil, filled
with curious samples of the races, tribes, and tongues of four
continents who came to watch and wait for the mysterious to-morrow.
“An Arabian Nights’ touch was imparted to the dissolving panorama by
strange visitants from Tartary and Kurdistan, Corea and Aderbeijan,
Armenia, Persia, and the Hedjaz--men with patriarchal beards and
scimitar-shaped noses, and others from desert and oasis, from Samarkand
and Bokhara. Turbans and fezzes, sugar-loaf hats and head-gear
resembling episcopal mitres, old military uniforms devised for the
embryonic armies of new states on the eve of perpetual peace,
snowy-white burnouses, flowing mantles, and graceful garments like the
Roman toga, contributed to create an atmosphere of dreamy unreality in
the city where the grimmest of realities were being faced and coped
with.
“Then came the men of wealth, of intellect, of industrial enterprise,
and the seed-bearers of the ethical new ordering, members of economic
committees from the United States, Britain, Italy, Poland, Russia,
India, and Japan, representatives of naphtha industries and far-off coal
mines, pilgrims, fanatics and charlatans from all climes, priests of all
religions, preachers of every doctrine, who mingled with princes,
field-marshals, statesmen, anarchists, builders-up and pullers-down. All
of them burned with desire to be near to the crucible in which the
political and social systems of the world were to be melted and recast.
Every day, in my walks in my apartment, or at restaurants, I met
emissaries from lands and peoples whose very names had seldom been heard
of before in the West. A delegation from the Pont-Euxine Greeks called
on me, and discoursed of their ancient cities of Trebizond, Samsoun,
Tripoli, Kerassund, in which I resided many years ago, and informed me
that they, too, desired to become welded into an independent Greek
Republic, and had come to have their claims allowed. The Albanians were
represented by my old friend Turkhan Pasha, on the one hand, and by my
friend Essad Pasha on the other--the former desirous of Italy’s
protection, the latter demanding complete independence. Chinamen,
Japanese, Coreans, Hindus, Kirghizes, Lesghiens, Circassians,
Mingrelians, Buryats, Malays, and Negroes and Negroids from Africa and
America were among the tribes and tongues foregathered in Paris to watch
the rebuilding of the political world system and to see where they ‘came
in.’ ...”
To this thronging, amazing Paris, agape for a new world, came President
Wilson, and found its gathering forces dominated by a personality
narrower, in every way more limited and beyond comparison more forcible
than himself: the French Premier, M. Clemenceau. At the instance of
President Wilson, M. Clemenceau was elected President of the Conference.
“It was,” said President Wilson, “a special tribute to the sufferings
and sacrifices of France.” And that, unhappily, sounded the keynote of
the Conference, whose sole business should have been with the future of
mankind.
Georges Benjamin Clemenceau[522] was an old journalist politician, a
great denouncer of abuses, a great upsetter of governments, a doctor who
had, while a municipal councillor, kept a free clinic, and a fierce,
experienced duellist. None of his duels ended fatally, but he faced them
with great intrepidity. He had passed from the medical school to
republican journalism in the days of the Empire. In those days he was an
extremist of the left. He was for a time a teacher in America, and he
married and divorced an American wife. He was thirty in the eventful
year 1871. He returned to France after Sedan, and flung himself into the
stormy politics of the defeated nation with great fire and vigour.
Thereafter France was his world, the France of vigorous journalism,
high-spirited personal quarrels, challenges, confrontations, scenes,
dramatic effects, and witticisms at any cost. He was what people call
“fierce stuff,” he was nicknamed the “Tiger,” and he seems to have been
rather proud of his nickname. Professional patriot rather than statesman
and thinker, this was the man whom the war had flung up to misrepresent
the fine mind and the generous spirit of France.[523] His limitations
had a profound effect upon the conference, which was further coloured
by the dramatic resort for the purpose of signature to the very Hall of
Mirrors at Versailles in which Germany had triumphed and proclaimed her
unity. There the Germans were to sign. To M. Clemenceau and to France,
in that atmosphere, the war ceased to seem a world war; it was merely
the sequel of the previous conflict of the Terrible Year, the downfall
and punishment of offending Germany. “The world had to be made safe for
democracy,” said President Wilson. That from M. Clemenceau’s expressed
point of view was “talking like Jesus Christ.” The world had to be made
safe for Paris. “Talking like Jesus Christ” seemed a very ridiculous
thing to many of those brilliant rather than sound diplomatists and
politicians who made the year 1919 supreme in the history of human
insufficiency.
(Another flash of the “Tiger’s” wit, it may be noted, was that President
Wilson with his fourteen points was “worse” than God Almighty. “Le bon
Dieu” only had ten....)
M. Clemenceau sat with Signor Orlando in the more central chairs of a
semicircle of four in front of the fire, says Keynes. He wore a black
frock-coat and grey suede gloves, which he never removed during these
sessions. He was, it is to be noted, the only one of these four
reconstructors of the world who could understand and speak both French
and English.
The aims of M. Clemenceau were simple and in a manner attainable. He
wanted all the settlement of 1871 undone. He wanted Germany punished as
though she was a uniquely sinful nation and France a sinless martyr
land. He wanted Germany so crippled and devastated as never more to be
able to stand up to France. He wanted to hurt and humiliate Germany more
than France had been hurt and humiliated in 1871. He did not care if in
breaking Germany Europe was broken; his mind did not go far enough
beyond the Rhine to understand that possibility. He accepted President
Wilson’s League of Nations as an excellent proposal if it would
guarantee the security of France whatever she did, but he preferred a
binding alliance of the United States and England to maintain, uphold,
and glorify France under practically any circumstances. He wanted wider
opportunities for the exploitation of Syria, north Africa, and so forth
by Parisian financial groups. He wanted indemnities to recuperate
France, loans, gifts, and tributes to France, glory and homage to
France. France had suffered, and France had to be rewarded. Belgium,
Russia, Serbia, Poland, Armenia, Britain, Germany, and Austria had all
suffered too, all mankind had suffered, but what would you? that was not
his affair. These were the supers of a drama in which France was for him
the star.... In much the same spirit Signor Orlando seems to have sought
the welfare of Italy.
Mr. Lloyd George brought to the Council of Four the subtlety of a
Welshman, the intricacy of a European, and an urgent necessity for
respecting the nationalist egotism of the British imperialists and
capitalists who had returned him to power. Into the secrecy of that
council went President Wilson (leaving Point I at the door) with the
very noblest aims for his newly discovered American world policy, his
rather hastily compiled Fourteen (now reduced to Thirteen) Points, and a
project rather than a scheme for a League of Nations.
The Second Point was presently observed to be missing. It may have
fallen into the Atlantic on the way over. It may have been thrown into
the sea as an offering to the British Admiralty.
“There can seldom have been a statesman of the first rank more
incompetent than the President in the agilities of the Council
Chamber.”[524] From the whispering darknesses and fireside disputes of
that council, and after various comings and goings we cannot here
describe, he emerged at last with his Fourteen Points pitifully torn and
dishevelled, but with a little puling infant of a League of Nations,
which might die or which might live and grow--no one could tell. This
history cannot tell. We are at the end of our term. But that much, at
least, he had saved....
Let us now consider briefly this Covenant of the League of Nations, and
recapitulate the terms of the quasi-settlement of the world’s affairs of
1919-20; and let us indicate here and there where the latter departs
from the promised standard of the Fourteen Points, and where it is most
dangerous to the future peace and most manifestly contrary to the
welfare of mankind. Because just as the history of Europe in the
nineteenth century was largely the undoing of the Treaty of Vienna, and
as the Great War was the necessary outcome of the Treaty of Frankfort
and the Treaty of Berlin, so the general history of the twentieth
century henceforth will be largely the amendment or reversal of the more
ungenerous and unscientific arrangements of the Treaty of 1919, and a
struggle to establish those necessary impartial world controls of which
the League of Nations is the first insufficient and unsatisfactory
sketch.
§ 12
This homunculus in a bottle which it was hoped might become at last Man
ruling the Earth, this League of Nations as it was embodied in the
Covenant of April 28th, 1919, was not a league of peoples at all; it was
a league of “states, dominions, or colonies.” It was stipulated that
these should be “fully self-governing,” but there was no definition
whatever of this phrase. There was no bar to a limited franchise and no
provision for any direct control by the people of any state. India
figured--presumably as a “fully self-governing state!” An autocracy
would no doubt have been admissible as a “fully self-governing”
democracy with a franchise limited to one person. The League of the
Covenant of 1919 was, in fact, a league of “representatives” of foreign
offices, and it did not even abolish the nonsense of embassies at every
capital. The British Empire appeared once as a whole, and then India (!)
and the four dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New
Zealand appeared as separate sovereign states. The Indian representative
was, of course, sure to be merely a British nominee; the other four
would be colonial politicians. But if the British Empire was to be thus
dissected, a representative of Great Britain should have been
substituted for the Imperial representative, and Ireland and Egypt
should also have been given representation. Moreover, either New York
State or Virginia was historically and legally almost as much a
sovereign state as New Zealand or Canada. The inclusion of India raised
logical claims for French Africa and French Asia. One French
representative did propose a separate vote for the little principality
of Monaco.
There was to be an assembly of the League in which every member state
was to be represented and to have an equal voice, but the working
directorate of the league was to vest in a Council, which was to
consist of the representatives of the United States, Britain, France,
Italy, and Japan, with four other members elected by the Assembly. The
Council was to meet once a year; the gatherings of the Assembly were to
be at “stated intervals,” not stated.
Except in certain specified instances the league of this Covenant could
make only unanimous decisions. One dissentient on the council could bar
any proposal--on the lines of the old Polish _liberum veto_ (chapter
xxxvi, § 7). This was a quite disastrous provision. To many minds it
made the Covenant League rather less desirable than no league at all. It
was a complete recognition of the unalienable sovereignty of states, and
a repudiation of the idea of an over-riding commonweal of mankind. This
provision practically barred the way to all amendments to the league
constitution in future except by the clumsy expedient of a simultaneous
withdrawal of the majority of member states desiring a change, to form
the league again on new lines. The covenant made inevitable such a final
winding-up of the league it created, and that was perhaps the best thing
about it.
The following powers, it was proposed, should be excluded from the
original league: Germany, Austria, Russia, and whatever remains there
were of the Turkish Empire. But any of these might subsequently be
included with the assent of two thirds of the Assembly. The original
membership of the league as specified in the projected Covenant was: the
United States of America, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, the British Empire
(Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India), China, Cuba,
Ecuador, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, the Hedjas, Honduras, Italy,
Japan, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, the
Serb-Croat-Slovene State, Siam, Czecho-Slovakia, and Uruguay. To which
were to be added by invitation the following powers which had been
neutral in the war: the Argentine Republic, Chile, Colombia, Denmark,
Holland, Norway, Paraguay, Persia, Salvador, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,
and Venezuela.
Such being the constitution of the league, it is scarcely to be wondered
at that its powers were special and limited. It was given a seat at
Geneva and a secretariat. It had no powers even to inspect the military
preparations of its constituent states, or to instruct a military and
naval staff to plan out the armed co-operation needed to keep the peace
of the world. The French representative in the League of Nations
Commission, M. Leon Bourgeois, insisted lucidly and repeatedly on the
logical necessity of such powers. As a speaker he was rather copious and
lacking in “spice” of the Clemenceau quality. The final scene in the
plenary session of April 28th, before the adoption of the Covenant, is
described compactly by Mr. Wilson Harris, the crowded Banqueting Hall at
the Quai d’Orsay, with its “E” of tables for the delegates, with
secretaries and officials lining the walls and a solid mass of
journalists at the lower end of the room. “At the head of the room the
‘Big Three’ _diverted themselves in undertones_ at the expense of the
worthy M. Bourgeois, now launched, with the help of what must have been
an entirely superfluous sheaf of notes, on the fifth rendering of his
speech in support of his famous amendments.”
They were so often “diverting themselves in undertones,” those three men
whom God had mocked with the most tremendous opportunity in history.
Keynes (_op. cit._) gives other instances of the levities, vulgarities,
disregards, inattentions, and inadequacies of these meetings.
This poor Covenant arrived at in this fashion returned with President
Wilson to America, and there it was subjected to an amount of
opposition, criticism, and revision which showed, among other things,
how relatively unimpaired was the mental energy of the United States. It
was manifest that the people of America had no mind to a compact that
was virtually little more than a league of allied imperialisms for
mutual insurance. The Senate refused to ratify the covenant, and the
first meeting of the League Council was held therefore without American
representatives. The close of 1919 and the opening months of 1920 saw a
very curious change come over American feeling after the pro-French and
pro-British enthusiasms of the war period. The peace negotiations
reminded the Americans, in a confused and very irritating way, of their
profound differences in international outlook from any European power
that the war had for a time helped them to forget. They felt they had
been “rushed” into many things without due consideration. They
experienced a violent revulsion towards that policy of isolation that
had broken down in 1917. The close of 1919 saw a phase, a very
understandable phase, of passionate and even violent “Americanism,” in
which European imperialism and European socialism were equally anathema.
There may have been a sordid element in the American disposition to
“cut” the moral responsibilities the United States had incurred in the
affairs of the Old World, and to realize the enormous financial and
political advantages the war had given the new world; but the broad
instinct of the American people seems to have been sound in its distrust
of the proposed settlement.
[Illustration: GERMANY after the PEACE TREATY of 1919]
§ 13
The main terms of the Treaties of 1919-20 with which the Conference of
Paris concluded its labours can be stated much more vividly by a few
maps than by a written abstract. We need scarcely point out how much
those treaties left unsettled, but we may perhaps enumerate some of the
more salient breaches of the Twelve that survived out of the Fourteen
Points at the opening of the Conference.
One initial cause of nearly all those breaches lay, we believe, in the
complete unpreparedness and unwillingness of that pre-existing league of
nations, subjected states and exploited areas, the British Empire, to
submit to any dissection and adaptation of its system or to any control
of its naval and aerial armament. A kindred contributory cause was the
equal unpreparedness of the American mind for any interference with the
ascendancy of the United States in the New World (compare Secretary
Olney’s declaration in this chapter, § 6). Neither of those Great
Powers, who were necessarily dominant and leading Powers at Paris, had
properly thought out the implications of a League of Nations in relation
to these older arrangements, and so their support of that project had to
most European observers a curiously hypocritical air; it was as if they
wished to retain and ensure their own vast predominance and security
while at the same time restraining any other power from such expansions,
annexations, and alliances as might create a rival and competitive
imperialism. Their failure to set an example of international confidence
destroyed all possibility of international confidence in the other
nations represented at Paris.
[Illustration: Map to illustrate the TURKISH TREATY, 1920]
Even more unfortunate was the refusal of the Americans to assent to the
Japanese demand for a recognition of racial equality.
Moreover, the foreign offices of the British, the French, and the
Italians were haunted by traditional schemes of aggression entirely
incompatible with the new ideas. A League of Nations that is to be of
any appreciable value to mankind must supersede imperialisms; it is
either a super-imperialism, a liberal world-empire of united states,
participant or in tutelage, or it is nothing; but few of the people at
the Paris Conference had the mental vigour even to assert this obvious
consequence of the League proposal. They wanted to be at the same time
bound and free, to ensure peace for ever, but to keep their weapons in
their hands. Accordingly the old annexation projects of the Great Power
period were hastily and thinly camouflaged as proposed acts of this poor
little birth of April 28th. The newly born and barely animate League was
represented to be distributing, with all the reckless munificence of a
captive pope, “mandates” to the old imperialisms that, had it been the
young Hercules we desired, it would certainly have strangled in its
cradle. Britain was to have extensive “mandates” in Mesopotamia and East
Africa; France was to have the same in Syria; Italy was to have all her
holdings to the west and southeast of Egypt consolidated as mandatory
territory. Clearly, if the weak thing that was being nursed by its
Secretary in its cradle at Geneva into some semblance of life, did
presently succumb to the infantile weakness of all institutions born
without passion, all these “mandates” would become frank annexations.
Moreover, all the powers fought tooth and nail at the Conference for
“strategic” frontiers--the ugliest symptom of all. Why should a state
want a strategic frontier unless it contemplates war? If on that plea
Italy insisted upon a subject population of Germans in the southern
Tyrol and a subject population of Yugo-Slavs in Dalmatia, and if little
Greece began landing troops in Asia Minor, neither France nor Britain
was in a position to rebuke these outbreaks of pre-millennial method.
[Illustration: The BREAK-UP of AUSTRIA-HUNGARY]
We will not enter here into any detailed account of how President Wilson
gave way to the Japanese and consented to their replacing the Germans at
Kiau Chau, which is Chinese property, how the almost purely German city
of Dantzig was practically, if not legally, annexed to Poland, and how
the powers disputed over the claims of the Italian imperialists, a claim
strengthened by these instances, to seize the Yugo-Slav part of Fiume
and deprive the Yugo-Slavs of a good Adriatic outlet. Nor will we do
more than note the complex arrangements and justifications that put the
French in possession of the Saar valley, which is German territory, or
the entirely iniquitous breach of the right of “self-determination”
which practically forbade German Austria to unite--as it is natural and
proper that she should unite--with the rest of Germany. These burning
questions of 1919-20, which occupied the newspapers and the minds of
statesmen and politicians, and filled all our waste paper baskets with
propaganda literature, may seem presently very incidental things in the
larger movement of these times. All these disputes, like the suspicions
and tetchy injustices of a weary and irritated man, may lose their
importance as the tone of the world improves, and the still inadequately
apprehended lessons of the Great War and the Petty Peace that followed
it begin to be digested by the general intelligence of mankind.
It is worth while for the reader to compare the treaty maps we give with
what we have called the natural political map of Europe. The new
arrangements do approach this latter more closely than any previous
system of boundaries. It may be a necessary preliminary to any
satisfactory league of peoples, that each people should first be in
something like complete possession of its own household.
It is absurd to despair of mankind because of these treaties, or to
regard them as anything more than feeble first sketches of a world
settlement. To do so would be to suppose that there is nothing in
France--that land of fine imaginations--better than M. Clemenceau,
nothing in America stronger and wiser than President Wilson, and nothing
in Britain to steady the Keltic traits of Mr. Lloyd George. The
attention we have given to these three personalities in this _Outline_
is intended less to enhance their importance than to emphasize their
unimportance, and to make it clear to the reader how provisional and
incidental all that they did must be in the world’s affairs. On no
statesmen, on no particular men or groups of men, on no state or
organization indeed, and on no Covenant or Treaty, does the future of
our race now depend. The year 1919 was not a year of creation and
decision, it was just the first cheerless dawn of a long day of
creative effort. The conferences of the Ten, of the Four, of the Big
Three, had no trace of creative power; there was no light in the men of
Versailles; the dawn was manifest rather as a grey light of critical
disapproval that broke through the shutters and staled the guttering
candles of the old diplomacy as the conference yawned and drawled to its
end. Creation was not there. But a great process of thought spreads
throughout the world; many thousands of men and women, in every country,
for the most part undistinguished and unknown people, are awakening to
their responsibility, are studying, thinking, writing, and teaching,
getting together, correcting false impressions, challenging foolish
ideas, trying to find out and tell the truth; and upon them it is that
we must rest our hope, such hope as we can entertain, of a saner plan to
take the place of this first flimsy League and this patched and
discomforting garment of treaties that has been flung for a while over
the naked distresses of our world.
§ 14
The failure to produce a more satisfactory world settlement in 1919-20
was, we have suggested, a symptom of an almost universal intellectual
and moral lassitude, resulting from the overstrain of the Great War. A
lack of fresh initiative is characteristic of a fatigue phase; everyone,
from sheer inability to change, drifts on for a time along the lines of
mental habit and precedent.
Nothing could be more illustrative of this fatigue inertia than the
expressed ideas of military men at this time. It will round off this
chapter in an entirely significant way, and complete our picture of the
immense world interrogation on which our history must end, if we give
here the briefest summary of a lecture that was delivered to a gathering
of field-marshals, generals, major-generals, and the like by
Major-General Sir Louis Jackson, at the Royal United Service Institution
in London one day in December, 1919. Lord Peel, the British
Under-Secretary for War, presided, and the reader must picture to
himself the not too large and quite dignified room of assembly in that
building, and all these fine, grave, soldierly figures quietly intent
upon the lecturer’s words. He is describing, with a certain subdued
enthusiasm, the probable technical developments of military method in
the “next war.”
Outside, through the evening twilight of Whitehall, flows the London
traffic, not quite so abundant as in 1914, but still fairly abundant;
the omnibuses all overcrowded because there are now not nearly enough of
them, and the clothing of people generally shabbier. Some little way
down Whitehall is a temporary erection, the Cenotaph, with its base
smothered with a vast, pathetic heap of decaying wreaths, bunches of
flowers, and the like, a cenotaph to commemorate the eight hundred
thousand young men of the Empire who have been killed in the recent
struggle. A few people are putting fresh flowers and wreaths there. One
or two are crying.
The prospect stretches out beyond this gathering into the grey vastness
of London, where people are now crowded as they have never been crowded
before, whose food is dear and employment more uncertain than it has
ever been. But let not the spectacle be one of unrelieved gloom; Regent
Street, Oxford Street, and Bond Street are bright with shoppers and
congested with new automobiles, because we must remember that everybody
does not lose by a war. Beyond London the country sinks into night, and
across the narrow sea are North France and Belgium devastated, Germany
with scores of thousands of her infants dwindling and dying for want of
milk, all Austria starving. Half the population of Vienna, it is
believed, unless American relief comes quickly, is doomed to die of
hardship before the spring. Beyond that bleak twilight stretches the
darkness of Russia. There, at least, no rich people are buying anything,
and no military men are reading essays on the next war. But in icy
Petrograd is little food, little wood, and no coal. All the towns of
Russia southward as far as the snow reaches are in a similar plight, and
in the Ukraine and to the south a ragged and dingy war drags to its end.
Europe is bankrupt, and people’s pockets rustle with paper money whose
purchasing power dwindles as they walk about with it.
But now we will return to Sir Louis in the well-lit room at the United
Service Institution.
He was of opinion--we follow the report in next morning’s
_Times_[525]--that we were merely on the eve of the most extensive
modifications of the art of war known to history. It behoved us,
therefore--us being, of course, the British and not the whole of
mankind--to get on with our armaments and to keep ahead; a fine opening
generalization. “It was necessary to develop new arms.... The nation
which best did so would have a great advantage in the next war. There
were people who were crying aloud for a reduction of armaments----”
(But there the Director of Trench Warfare and Supplies was wrong. They
were just crying at the cenotaph, poor, soft, and stupid souls, because
a son or a brother or a father was dead.)
Sir Louis believed that one of the greatest developments in the art of
warfare would be brought about in mechanical transport. The tank he
treated with ingratitude. These military gentlemen are ungrateful to an
invention which shoved and butted them into victory almost in spite of
themselves. The tank, said Sir Louis, was “a freak.... The outstanding
feature” of the tank, he said, was that it made mechanical transport
independent of the roads. Hitherto armies on the march had only been
able to spoil the roads; now their transport on caterpillar wheels would
advance in open order on a broad front carrying guns, munitions,
supplies, bridging equipment, rafts, and men--and incidentally ploughing
up and destroying hedges, ditches, fields, and cultivation generally.
Armies would wallow across the country, leaving nothing behind but dust
and mud.
So our imaginations are led up to the actual hostilities.
Sir Louis was in favour of gas. For punitive expeditions particularly,
gas was to be recommended. And here he startled and disconcerted his
hearers by a gleam of something approaching sentimentality. “It might be
possible,” he said, “to come to some agreement that no gas should be
used which caused unnecessary suffering.” But there his heart spoke
rather than his head; it should have been clear to him that if law can
so far override warfare as to prohibit any sort of evil device whatever,
it can override warfare to the extent of prohibiting it altogether. And
where would Sir Louis Jackson and his audience be then? War is war; its
only law is the law that the maximum destruction of the forces of the
enemy is necessary. To that law in warfare all considerations of
humanity and justice are subordinate.
From gas Sir Louis passed to the air. Here he predicted “most important
advances.... We need not trouble ourselves yet with flying destroyers or
flying concrete forts, but in twenty years’ time the Air Force Estimates
might be the most important part of our preparations for war.” He
discussed the conversion of commercial flying machines to bombing and
reconnaissance uses, and the need for special types of fighting machine
in considerable numbers and always ready. He gave reasons for supposing
that the bombers in the next war would not have the same targets near
the front of the armies, and would secure better results by going
further afield and bombing the centres “where stores are being
manufactured and troops trained.” As everyone who stayed in London or
the east of England in 1917-18 knows, this means the promiscuous bombing
of any and every centre of population. But, of course, the bombing of
those ‘prentice days would be child’s play to the bombing of the “next
war.” There would be countless more aeroplanes, bigger and much nastier
bombs....
Sir Louis, proceeding with his sketch, mentioned the “destruction of the
greater part of London” as a possible incident in the coming struggle.
And so on to the culminating moral, that the highest pay, the utmost
importance, the freest expenditure, must be allowed to military
gentlemen. “The expense entailed is in the nature of an absolutely
necessary insurance.” With which his particular audience warmly agreed.
And a certain Major-General Stone, a little forgetful of the source of
his phrases,[526] said he hoped that this lecture “may be the beginning
not of trusting in the League of Nations, but in _our own_ right hand
and _our_ stretched-out arm!”
But we will not go on with the details of this dream. For indeed no
Utopia was ever so impossible as this forecast of a world in which
scarcely anything but very carefully sandbagged and camouflaged G. H. Q.
would be reasonably safe, in which countless bombers would bomb the
belligerent lands incessantly and great armies with lines of caterpillar
transport roll to and fro, churning the fields of the earth into
blood-streaked mud. There is not energy enough and no will whatever left
in the world for such things. Generals who cannot foresee tanks cannot
be expected to foresee or understand world bankruptcy; still less are
they likely to understand the limits imposed upon military operations by
the fluctuating temper of the common man. Apparently these military
authorities of the United Service Institution did not even know that
warfare aims at the production of states of mind in the enemy, and is
sustained by states of mind. The chief neglected factor in the
calculations of Sir Louis is the fact that no people whatever will stand
such warfare as he contemplates, not even the people on the winning
side. For as northern France, south-eastern Britain, and north Italy now
understand, the victor in the “next war” may be bombed and starved
almost as badly as the loser. A phase is possible in which a
war-tormented population may cease to discriminate between military
gentlemen on this side or that, and may be moved to destroy them as the
common enemies of the race. The Great War of 1914-18 was the culmination
of the military energy of the western populations, and they fought and
fought well because they believed they were fighting “the war to end
war.” They were. German imperialism, with its organized grip upon
education and its close alliance with an aggressive commercialism, was
beaten and finished. The militarism and imperialism of Britain and
France and Italy are by comparison feeble, disorganized, and
disorganizing survivals. They are things “left over” by the great war.
They have no persuasive power. They go on--for sheer want of wits to
leave off. No European Government will ever get the same proportion of
its people into the ranks and into its munition works again as the
governments of 1914-18 did. Our world is very weak and feeble still
(1920), but its war fever is over. Its temperature is, if anything,
sub-normal. It is doubtful if it will take the fever again for a long
time. The alterations in the conditions of warfare are already much
profounder than such authorities as Sir Louis Jackson suspect.[527]
§ 15
This _Outline_ of our history would not be complete without at least a
few words by way of a stock-taking of the state of mind in which we
leave mankind to-day. For the history of our race for the last few
thousand years is no more than a history of the development and
succession of states of mind and of acts arising out of them. Human
history is in essence a history of ideas, and these tremendous
experiences of the war constitute a crowning epoch. In the past six
years there must have been a destruction of fixed ideas, prejudices, and
mental limitations unparalleled in all history. Never before can there
have been so great and so universal an awakening from assumed and
accepted things. Never before have men stood so barely face to face with
the community of their interests and their common destiny. We do not
begin to realize yet how much of the pre-war world is done with for good
and all, and how much that is new is beginning. Few of us have attempted
to measure yet the change in our own minds.
And on the whole and in spite of much eddying and backwash of motives
and thought, there does seem to have been a step forward towards the
consciousness of a collective need and of the possibility of a
collective effort embracing all mankind. Death, waste, hunger, and
disease are very rife to-day; the world is full of physical evils, but
there is this mental awakening to set against them.
In all material things the year 1913 seems now, to a European at least,
a year of amazing and unattainable plenty. But it was a year of great
social discontent and of waste, of vice and an extravagant search for
personal indulgence on the part of the free and wealthy classes. The
Great War was visibly approaching; yet there was neither will nor
understanding to prevent the catastrophe; smart and fashionable life
capered to nigger dance tunes, and that hectic generation was disposed
to welcome even a universal war as a fresh and crowning excitement. War
did not seem real to the moods of that time; nothing seemed real to the
moods of that time. It was a world of lost or faded beliefs. It did not
believe even in the florid nationalisms and imperialisms which waved
their flags and filled half the world with the stir and glitter of great
armies. But it set itself in the form of these things because they
trampled and glittered very entertainingly and because they promised
sensational adventures. The catastrophe of the war was not an
unnecessary disaster; it was a necessary fulfilment of such an age of
drift. Only through a catastrophe, it may be, could a new phase of human
thought and will have become possible.
This graver world of 1920 does seem to be awakening to the truth that
there are realities worth seeking and evils not to be tolerated. The
mental and moral backgrounds of hundreds of millions of minds have been
altered and are being altered by the stern lessons of this age.
Brotherhood through sorrow, sorrow for common sufferings and for
irreparable mutual injuries, is spreading and increasing throughout the
world. There are no doubt great countervailing evils, a wild scramble
for the diminishing surplus of wealth, a propaganda, but a failing
propaganda, of division and hatred. The dominating fact, nevertheless,
is a new sanity....
What a wonderful and moving spectacle is this of our kind to-day! Would
that we could compress into one head and for the use of one right hand
the power of ten thousand novelists and playwrights and biographers and
the quintessence of a thousand histories, to render the endless variety,
the incessant multitudinous adventure, and at the same time the
increasing unity of this display. Everywhere, with a mysterious
individual difference, we see youth growing to adolescence and the
interplay of love, desire, curiosities, passionate impulses, rivalries.
As the earth spins from darkness into the light, the millions wake again
to a new day in their life of toil, anxiety, little satisfactions,
little chagrins, rivalries, spites, generosities. From tropic to the
bleakest north, the cocks crow before the advancing margin of dawn. The
early toiler hurries to his work, the fox and the thief slink home, the
tramp stretches his stiff limbs under the haystack, and springs up alert
before the farmer’s man discovers him, the ploughman is already in the
field with his horses, the fires are lit in the cottage and the kettle
sings. The hours warm as the day advances; the crowded trains converge
upon the city centres, the traffic thickens in the streets, the
breakfast-table of the prosperous home is spread, the professor begins
his lecture, the shop assistants greet their first customers....
Outwardly it is very like the world before the war. And yet it is
profoundly different. The sense of inevitable routines that held all the
world in thrall six years ago has gone. And the habitual assurance of
security has gone too. The world has been roused--for a time at
least--to great dangers and great desires. These minds, this innumerable
multitude of minds, are open to fresh ideas of association and duty and
relationship as they were never open before. The old confused and
divided world is condemned; it is going on provisionally under a
sentence of great and as yet incalculable change.
Every one of these hundred of millions of human beings is in some form
seeking happiness, is driven by complex and conflicting motives, is
guided by habits, is swayed by base cravings, by endless suggestions, by
passions and affections, by vague exalted ideas. Every one of them is
capable of cruelties and fine emotions, of despairs and devotions and
self-forgetful effort. All of them forget; all of them become slack with
fatigue and fearful or mean or incapable under a sufficient strain. The
follies of vanity entrap them all into absurdities. Not one is
altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent;
and not one is altogether vile. Every one of them can be unhappy, every
one can feel disappointment and remorse. Not a single one but has at
some time wept. And in every one of them is a streak of divinity. Each
one for all the obsessions of self is yet dimly aware of something in
common, of something that could make a unity out of our infinite
diversity. And they are everyone more aware of this than in 1913.
Through all the world grows the realization that there can be no
securely happy individual life without a righteous general life. Through
all the world spreads the suspicion that this scheme of things might be
remade, and remade better, and that our present evils need not be. Our
lives, we see with a growing certitude, are fretted and shadowed and
spoilt because there is as yet no worldwide law, no certain justice. Yet
there is nothing absolutely unattainable in world law and world justice.
More men are capable of realizing this than was ever possible at any
previous time. And to be aware of a need is to be half-way towards its
satisfaction. We call this stir towards a new order, this refusal to
drift on in the old directions, unrest, but rather is it hope which
disturbs the world.
What real driving force is there in all this aspiration towards a new
and wider order? What directive forces are these stirring millions
likely to encounter? What accidents and subtle suggestions may not
waylay them and cheat them? An age is closing and an age begins. This
chapter of history which tells of the Great Powers into which
Christendom broke up and of the unbridled national and individual
self-seeking which ensued, has culminated in a world catastrophe and is
at its end. What will be the next stage in history?
BOOK IX
THE NEXT STAGE IN HISTORY
XLI
THE POSSIBLE UNIFICATION OF THE WORLD INTO ONE COMMUNITY OF KNOWLEDGE
AND WILL
§1. _The Possible Unification of Men’s Wills in Political Matters._
§2. _How a Federal World Government may come about._ §3. _Some
Fundamental Characteristics of a Modern World State._ §4. _What
this World might be were it under one Law and Justice._ §5. _The
Stages Beyond._
§ 1
We have brought this _Outline of History_ up to our own times, but we
have brought it to no conclusion. It breaks off at a dramatic phase of
expectation. The story of life which began inestimable millions of years
ago, the adventure of mankind which was already afoot half a million
years ago, rises to a crisis in the immense interrogation of to-day. The
drama becomes ourselves. It is you, it is I, it is all that is happening
to us and all that we are doing which will supply the next chapter of
this continually expanding adventure.
Our history has traced a steady growth of the social and political units
into which men have combined. In the brief period of ten thousand years
these units have grown from the small family tribe of the early
neolithic culture to the vast united realms--vast yet still too small
and partial--of the present time. And this change in size of the
state--a change manifestly incomplete--has been accompanied by profound
changes in its nature. Compulsion and servitude have given way to ideas
of associated freedom, and the sovereignty that was once concentrated in
an autocratic king and god has been widely diffused throughout the
community. Until the Roman republic extended itself to all Italy, there
had been no free community larger than a city state; all great
communities were communities of obedience under a monarch. The great
united republic of the United States would have been impossible before
the printing press and the railway. The telegraph and telephone, the
aeroplane, the continual progress of land and sea transit, are now
insisting upon a still larger political organization.
If our _Outline_ has been faithfully drawn, and if these brief
conclusions are sound, it follows that we are engaged upon an immense
task of adjustment to these great lines upon which our affairs are
moving. Our wars, our social conflict, our enormous economic stresses,
are all aspects of that adjustment. The loyalties and allegiances to-day
are at best provisional loyalties and allegiances. Our true State, this
state that is already beginning, this state to which every man owes his
utmost political effort, must be now this nascent Federal World State to
which human necessities point. Our true God now is the God of all men.
Nationalism as a God must follow the tribal gods to limbo. Our true
nationality is mankind.
How far will modern men lay hold upon and identify themselves with this
necessity and set themselves to revise their ideas, remake their
institutions, and educate the coming generations to this final extension
of citizenship? How far will they remain dark, obdurate, habitual, and
traditional, resisting the convergent forces that offer them either
unity or misery? Sooner or later that unity must come or else plainly
men must perish by their own inventions. We, because we believe in the
power of reason and in the increasing good-will in men, find ourselves
compelled to reject the latter possibility. But the way to the former
may be very long and tedious, very tragic and wearisome, a martyrdom of
many generations, or it may be travelled over almost swiftly in the
course of a generation or so. That depends upon forces whose nature we
understand to some extent now, but not their power. There has to be a
great process of education, by precept and by information and by
experience, but there are as yet no quantitative measures of education
to tell us _how much_ has to be learnt or _how soon_ that learning can
be done. Our estimates vary with our moods; the time may be much longer
than our hopes and much shorter than our fears.
The terrible experiences of the Great War have made very many men who
once took political things lightly take them now very gravely. To a
certain small number of men and women the attainment of a world peace
has become the supreme work in life, has become a religious
self-devotion. To a much greater number it has become at least a ruling
motive. Many such people now are seeking ways of working for this great
end, or they are already working for this great end, by pen and
persuasion, in schools and colleges and books, and in the highways and
byways of public life. Perhaps now most human beings in the world are
well-disposed towards such efforts, but rather confusedly disposed; they
are without any clear sense of what must be done and what ought to be
prevented, that human solidarity may be advanced. The world-wide
outbreak of faith and hope in President Wilson, before he began to wilt
and fail us, was a very significant thing indeed for the future of
mankind. Set against these motives of unity indeed are other motives
entirely antagonistic, the fear and hatred of strange things and
peoples, love of and trust in the old traditional thing, patriotisms,
race prejudices, suspicions, distrusts--and the elements of spite,
scoundrelism, and utter selfishness that are so strong still in every
human soul.
The overriding powers that hitherto in the individual soul and in the
community have struggled and prevailed against the ferocious, base, and
individual impulses that divide us from one another, have been the
powers of religion and education. Religion and education, those closely
interwoven influences, have made possible the greater human societies
whose growth we have traced in this _Outline_; they have been the chief
synthetic forces throughout this great story of enlarging human
coöperations that we have traced from its beginnings. We have found in
the intellectual and theological conflicts of the nineteenth century the
explanation of that curious exceptional disentanglement of religious
teaching from formal education which is a distinctive feature of our
age, and we have traced the consequences of this phase of religious
disputation and confusion in the reversion of international politics
towards a brutal nationalism and in the backward drift of industrial
and business life towards harsh, selfish, and uncreative profit-seeking.
There has been a slipping off of ancient restraints; a real
_de-civilization_ of men’s minds. We would lay stress here on the
suggestion that this divorce of religious teaching from organized
education is necessarily a temporary one, a transitory dislocation, and
that presently education must become again in intention and spirit
religious, and that the impulse to devotion, to universal service and to
a complete escape from self, which has been the common underlying force
in all the great religions of the last five and twenty centuries, an
impulse which ebbed so perceptibly during the prosperity, laxity,
disillusionment, and scepticism of the past seventy or eighty years,
will reappear again, stripped and plain, as the recognized fundamental
structural impulse in human society.
Education is the preparation of the individual for the community, and
his religious training is the core of that preparation. With the great
intellectual restatements and expansions of the nineteenth century, and
educational break-up, a confusion and loss of aim in education was
inevitable. We can no longer prepare the individual for a community when
our ideas of a community are shattered and undergoing reconstruction.
The old loyalties, the old too limited and narrow political and social
assumptions, the old too elaborate religious formulæ, have lost their
power of conviction, and the greater ideas of a world state and of an
economic commonweal have been winning their way only very slowly to
recognition. So far they have swayed only a minority of exceptional
people. But out of the trouble and tragedy of this present time there
may emerge a moral and intellectual revival, a religious revival, of a
simplicity and scope to draw together men of alien races and now
discrete traditions into one common and sustained way of living for the
world’s service. We cannot foretell the scope and power of such a
revival; we cannot even produce evidence of its onset. The beginnings of
such things are never conspicuous. Great movements of the racial soul
come at first “like a thief in the night,” and then suddenly are
discovered to be powerful and world-wide. Religious emotion--stripped of
corruptions and freed from its last priestly entanglements--may
presently blow through life again like a great wind, bursting the doors
and flinging open the shutters of the individual life, and making many
things possible and easy that in these present days of exhaustion seem
almost too difficult to desire.[528]
§ 2
If we suppose a sufficient righteousness and intelligence in men to
produce presently, from the tremendous lessons of history, an effective
will for a world peace--that is to say, an effective will _for a world
law under a world government_--for in no other fashion is a secure world
peace conceivable--in what manner may we expect things to move towards
this end? That movement will certainly not go on equally in every
country, nor is it likely to take at first one uniform mode of
expression. Here it will find a congenial and stimulating atmosphere,
here it will find itself antagonistic to deep tradition or racial
idiosyncrasy or well-organized base oppositions. In some cases those to
whom the call of the new order has come will be living in a state almost
ready to serve the ends of the greater political synthesis, in others
they will have to fight like conspirators against the rule of evil laws.
There is little in the political constitution of such countries as the
United States or Switzerland that would impede their coalescence upon
terms of frank give and take with other equally civilized
confederations; political systems involving dependent areas and “subject
peoples” such as the Turkish Empire was before the Great War, seem to
require something in the nature of a breaking up before they can be
adapted to a federal world system. Any state obsessed by traditions of
an aggressive foreign policy will be difficult to assimilate into a
world combination. But though here the government may be helpful, and
here dark and hostile, the essential task of men of goodwill in all
states and countries remains the same; it is an educational task, and
its very essence is to bring to the minds of all men everywhere, as a
necessary basis for world coöperation, _a new telling and
interpretation, a common interpretation, of history_.
Does this League of Nations which has been created by the covenant of
1919 contain within it the germ of any permanent federation of human
effort? Will it grow into something for which, as Stallybrass says, men
will be ready to “work whole-heartedly and, if necessary, _fight_”--as
hitherto they have been willing to fight for their country and their own
people? There are few intimations of any such enthusiasm for the League
at the present time. The League does not even seem to know how to talk
to common men. It has gone into official buildings, and comparatively
few people in the world understand or care what it is doing there. It
may be that the League is no more than a first project of union,
exemplary only in its insufficiencies and dangers, destined to be
superseded by something closer and completer as were the United States
Articles of Confederation by the Federal Constitution (see chapter
xxxvii, § 5). The League is at present a mere partial league of
governments and states. It emphasizes nationality; it defers to
sovereignty. What the world needs is no such league of nations as this
nor even a mere league of peoples, but _a world league of men_. The
world perishes unless sovereignty is merged and nationality
subordinated. And for that the minds of men must first be prepared by
experience and knowledge and thought. The supreme task before men at the
present time is political education.
It may be that several partial leagues may precede any world league. The
common misfortunes and urgent common needs of Europe and Asia may be
more efficacious in bringing the European and Asiatic states to reason
and a sort of unity, than the mere intellectual and sentimental ties of
the United States and Great Britain and France. A United States of the
Old World is a possibility to set against the possibility of an Atlantic
union. Moreover, there is much to be said for an American experiment, a
Pan-American league, in which the New World European colonies would play
an in-and-out part as Luxembourg did for a time in the German
confederation.
We will not attempt to weigh here what share may be taken in the
recasting and consolidation of human affairs by the teachings and
propaganda of labour internationalism, by the studies and needs of
international finance, or by such boundary-destroying powers as science
and art and historical teaching. All these things may exert a combined
pressure, in which it may never be possible to apportion the exact
shares. Opposition may dissolve, antagonistic cults flatten out to a
common culture, almost imperceptibly. The bold idealism of to-day may
seem mere common sense to-morrow. And the problem of a forecast is
complicated by the possibilities of interludes and backwaters. History
has never gone simply forward. More particularly are the years after a
great war apt to be years of apparent retrocession; men are too weary to
see what has been done, what has been cleared away, and what has been
made possible.
Among the things that seem to move commandingly towards an adequate
world control at the present time are these:--
(1) The increasing destructiveness and intolerableness of war waged with
the new powers of science.
(2) The inevitable fusion of the world’s economic affairs into one
system, leading necessarily, it would seem, to some common control of
currency, and demanding safe and uninterrupted communications, and a
free movement of goods and people by sea and land throughout the whole
world. The satisfaction of these needs will require a world control of
very considerable authority and powers of enforcement.
(3) The need, because of the increasing mobility of peoples, of
effectual controls of health everywhere.
(4) The urgent need of some equalization of labour conditions, and of
the minimum standard of life throughout the world. This seems to carry
with it, as a necessary corollary, the establishment of some minimum
standard of education for everyone.
(5) The impossibility of developing the enormous benefits of flying
without a world control of the air-ways.
The necessity and logic of such diverse considerations as these push the
mind irresistibly, in spite of the clashes of race and tradition and the
huge difficulties created by differences in language, towards the belief
that a conscious struggle to establish or prevent a political world
community will be the next stage in human history. The things that
require that world community are permanent _needs_, one or other of
these needs appeals to nearly everyone, and against their continuing
persistence are only mortal difficulties, great no doubt, but mortal;
prejudices, passions, animosities, delusions about race and country,
egotisms, and such-like fluctuating and evanescent things, set up in
men’s minds by education and suggestion; none of them things that make
now for the welfare and survival of the individuals who are under their
sway nor of the states and towns and associations in which they prevail.
§ 3
Our _Outline of History_ has been ill written if it has failed to convey
our conviction of the character of the state towards which the world is
moving. Let us summarize here, very briefly, the main lines to which the
developments of history seem to point as the necessary lines of that
world organization. The attainment of this world state may be impeded
and may be opposed to-day by many apparently vast forces; but it has,
urging it on, a much more powerful force, that of the free and growing
common intelligence of mankind. To-day there is in the world a small but
increasing number of men, historians, archæologists, ethnologists,
economists, sociologists, psychologists, educationists, and the like,
who are doing for human institutions that same task of creative analysis
which the scientific men of the seventeenth and eighteenth century did
for the materials and mechanism of human life; and just as these latter,
almost unaware of what they were doing, made telegraphy, swift transit
on sea and land, flying and a thousand hitherto impossible things
possible, so the former may be doing more than the world suspects, or
than they themselves suspect, to clear up and make plain the thing to do
and the way to do it, in the greater and more urgent human affairs.
Let us ape Roger Bacon in his prophetic mood, and set down what we
believe will be the broad fundamentals of the coming world state.
(i) It will be based upon a common world religion, very much simplified
and universalized and better understood. This will not be Christianity
nor Islam nor Buddhism nor any such specialized form of religion, but
religion itself pure and undefiled; the Eightfold Way, the Kingdom of
Heaven, brotherhood, creative service, and self-forgetfulness.
Throughout the world men’s thoughts and motives will be turned by
education, example, and the circle of ideas about them, from the
obsession of self to the cheerful service of human knowledge, human
power, and human unity.
(ii) And this world state will be sustained by a universal education,
organized upon a scale and of a penetration and quality beyond all
present experience. The whole race, and not simply classes and peoples,
will be _educated_. Most parents will have a technical knowledge of
teaching. Quite apart from the duties of parentage, perhaps ten per
cent. or more of the adult population will, at some time or other in
their lives, be workers in the world’s educational organization. And
education, as the new age will conceive it, will go on throughout life;
it will not cease at any particular age. Men and women will simply
become self-educators and individual students and student teachers as
they grow older.
(iii) There will be no armies, no navies, and no classes of unemployed
people, wealthy or poor.
(iv) The world-state’s organization of scientific research and record
compared with that of to-day will be like an ocean liner beside the
dug-out canoe of some early heliolithic wanderer.
(v) There will be a vast free literature of criticism and discussion.
(vi) The world’s political organization will be democratic, that is to
say, the government and direction of affairs will be in immediate touch
with and responsive to the general thought of the educated whole
population.
(vii) Its economic organization will be an exploitation of all natural
wealth and every fresh possibility science reveals, by the agents and
servants of the common government for the common good. Private
enterprise will be the servant--a useful, valued, and well-rewarded
servant--and no longer the robber master of the commonweal.
(viii) And this implies two achievements that seem very difficult to us
to-day. They are matters of mechanism, but they are as essential to the
world’s well-being as it is to a soldier’s, no matter how brave he may
be, that his machine gun should not jam, and to an aeronaut’s that his
steering-gear should not fail him in mid-air. Political well-being
demands that electoral methods shall be used, and economic well-being
requires that a currency shall be used, safeguarded or proof against the
contrivances and manipulations of clever, dishonest men.
§ 4
There can be little question that the attainment of a federation of all
humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to
insure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of
the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase
of human energy as to open a new phase in human history. The enormous
waste caused by military preparation and the mutual annoyance of
competing great powers, and the still more enormous waste due to the
under-productiveness of great masses of people, either because they are
too wealthy for stimulus or too poor for efficiency, would cease. There
would be a vast increase in the supply of human necessities, a rise in
the standard of life and in what is considered a necessity, a
development of transport and every kind of convenience; and a multitude
of people would be transferred from low-grade production to such higher
work as art of all kinds, teaching, scientific research, and the like.
All over the world there would be a setting free of human capacity, such
as has occurred hitherto only in small places and through precious
limited phases of prosperity and security. Unless we are to suppose that
spontaneous outbreaks of super-men have occurred in the past, it is
reasonable to conclude that the Athens of Pericles, the Florence of the
Medici, Elizabethan England, the great deeds of Asoka, the Tang and Ming
periods in art, are but samples of what a whole world of sustained
security would yield continuously and cumulatively. Without supposing
any change in human quality, but merely its release from the present
system of inordinate waste, history justifies this expectation.
We have seen how, since the liberation of human thought in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, a comparatively few curious and intelligent
men, chiefly in western Europe, have produced a vision of the world and
a body of science that is now, on the material side, revolutionizing
life. Mostly these men have worked against great discouragement, with
insufficient funds and small help or support from the mass of mankind.
It is impossible to believe that these men were the maximum intellectual
harvest of their generation. England alone in the last three centuries
must have produced scores of Newtons who never learnt to read, hundreds
of Daltons, Darwins, Bacons, and Huxleys, who died stunted in hovels, or
never got a chance of proving their quality. All the world over, there
must have been myriads of potential first-class investigators, splendid
artists, creative minds, who never caught a gleam of inspiration or
opportunity, for every one of that kind who has left his mark upon the
world. In the trenches of the Western front alone during the late war
thousands of potential great men died unfulfilled. But a world with
something like a secure international peace and something like social
justice, will fish for capacity with the fine net of universal
education, and may expect a yield beyond comparison greater than any
yield of able and brilliant men that the world has known hitherto.
It is such considerations as this indeed which justify the concentration
of effort in the near future upon the making of a new world state of
righteousness out of our present confusions. War is a horrible thing,
and constantly more horrible and dreadful, so that unless it is ended it
will certainly end human society; social injustice, and the sight of the
limited and cramped human beings it produces, torment the soul; but the
strongest incentive to constructive political and social work for an
imaginative spirit lies not so much in the mere hope of escaping evils
as in the opportunity for great adventures that their suppression will
open to our race. We want to get rid of the militarist not simply
because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable
thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way to
achievement. We want to abolish many extravagances of private ownership
just as we should want to abolish some idiot guardian who refused us
admission to a studio in which there were fine things to do.
There are people who seem to imagine that a world order and one
universal law of justice would end human adventure. It would but begin
it. But instead of the adventure of the past, the “romance” of the
cinematograph world, the perpetual reiterated harping upon the trite
reactions of sex and combat and the hunt for gold, it would be an
unending exploration upon the edge of experience. Hitherto man has been
living in a slum, amidst quarrels, revenges, vanities, shames and
taints, hot desires, and urgent appetites. He has scarcely tasted sweet
air yet and the great freedoms of the world that science has enlarged
for him.
To picture to ourselves something of the wider life that world unity
would open to men is a very attractive speculation. Life will certainly
go with a stronger pulse, it will breathe a deeper breath, because it
will have dispelled and conquered a hundred infections of body and mind
that now reduce it to invalidism and squalor. We have already laid
stress on the vast elimination of drudgery from human life through the
creation of a new race of slaves, the machines. This--and the
disappearance of war and the smoothing out of endless restraints and
contentions by juster social and economic arrangements--will lift the
burthen of toilsome work and routine work, that has been the price of
human security since the dawn of the first civilizations, from the
shoulders of our children. Which does not mean that they will cease to
work, but that they will cease to do irksome work under pressure, and
will work freely, planning, making, creating, according to their gifts
and instincts. They will fight nature no longer as dull conscripts of
the pick and plough, but for a splendid conquest. Only the
spiritlessness of our present depression blinds us to the clear
intimations of our reason that in the course of a few generations every
little country town could become an Athens, every human being could be
gentle in breeding and healthy in body and mind, the whole solid earth
man’s mine and its uttermost regions his playground.
In this _Outline_ we have sought to show two great systems of
development interacting in the story of human society. We have seen,
growing out of that later special neolithic culture, the heliolithic
culture, and arising out of this in the warmer alluvial parts of the
world, the great primordial civilizations, fecund systems of subjugation
and obedience, vast multiplications of industrious and subservient men.
We have shown the necessary relationship of these early civilizations to
the early temples and to king-gods and god-kings. At the same time we
have traced the development from a simpler neolithic level of the
wanderer peoples, who became the nomadic peoples, in those great groups
the Aryans and the Hun-Mongol peoples of the north-west and the
north-east and (from a heliolithic phase) the Semites of the Arabian
deserts. Our history has told of a repeated overrunning and refreshment
of the originally brunet civilizations by these hardier, bolder,
free-spirited peoples of the steppes and desert. We have pointed out
how these constantly recurring nomadic injections have steadily altered
the primordial civilizations both in blood and in spirit; and how the
world religions of to-day, and what we now call democracy, the boldness
of modern scientific inquiry and a universal restlessness, are due to
this “nomadization” of civilization. The old civilizations created
tradition, and lived by tradition. To-day the power of tradition is
destroyed.[529] The body of our state is civilization still, but its
spirit is the spirit of the nomadic world. It is the spirit of the great
plains and the high seas.
So that it is difficult to resist the persuasion that so soon as one law
runs in the earth and the fierceness of frontiers ceases to distress us,
that urgency in our nature that stirs us in spring and autumn to be up
and travelling, will have its way with us. We shall obey the call of the
summer pastures and the winter pastures in our blood, the call of the
mountains, the desert, and the sea. For some of us also, who may be of a
different lineage, there is the call of the forest, and there are those
who would hunt in the summer and return to the fields for the harvest
and the plough. But this does not mean that men will have become
homeless and all adrift. The normal nomadic life is not a homeless one,
but a movement between homes. The Kalmucks to-day, like the swallows, go
yearly a thousand miles from one home to another. The beautiful and
convenient cities of the coming age, we conclude, will have their
seasons when they will be full of life and seasons when they will seem
asleep. Life will ebb and flow to and from every region seasonally as
the interest of that region rises or declines.
There will be little drudgery in this better-ordered world. Natural
power harnessed in machines will be the general drudge. What drudgery is
inevitable will be done as a service and duty for a few years or months
out of each life; it will not consume nor degrade the whole life of
anyone. And not only drudges, but many other sorts of men and ways of
living which loom large in the current social scheme will necessarily
have dwindled in importance or passed away altogether. There will be few
professional fighting men or none at all, no custom-house officers; the
increased multitude of teachers will have abolished large police forces
and large jail staffs, mad-houses will be rare or non-existent; a
worldwide sanitation will have diminished the proportion of hospitals,
nurses, sick-room attendants, and the like; a world-wide economic
justice, the floating population of cheats, sharpers, gamblers,
forestallers, parasites, and speculators generally. But there will be no
diminution of adventure or romance in this world of the days to come.
Sea fisheries and the incessant insurrection of the sea, for example,
will call for their own stalwart types of men; the high air will clamour
for manhood, the deep and dangerous secret places of nature. Men will
turn again with renewed interest to the animal world. In these
disordered days a stupid, uncontrollable massacre of animal species goes
on--from certain angles of vision it is a thing almost more tragic than
human miseries; in the nineteenth century dozens of animal species, and
some of them very interesting species, were exterminated; but one of the
first fruits of an effective world state would be the better protection
of what are now wild beasts. It is a strange thing in human history to
note how little has been done since the Bronze Age in taming, using,
befriending, and appreciating the animal life about us. But that mere
witless killing which is called sport to-day, would inevitably give
place in a better educated world community to a modification of the
primitive instincts that find expression in this way, changing them into
an interest not in the deaths, but in the lives of beasts, and leading
to fresh and perhaps very strange and beautiful attempts to befriend
these pathetic, kindred lower creatures we no longer fear as enemies,
hate as rivals, or need as slaves. And a world state and universal
justice does not mean the imprisonment of our race in any bleak
institutional orderliness. There will still be mountains and the sea,
there will be jungles and great forests, cared for indeed and treasured
and protected; the great plains will still spread before us and the wild
winds blow. But men will not hate so much, fear so much, nor cheat so
desperately--and they will keep their minds and bodies cleaner.
There are unhopeful prophets who see in the gathering together of men
into one community the possibility of violent race conflicts, conflicts
for “ascendancy,” but that is to suppose that civilization is incapable
of adjustments by which men of different qualities and temperaments and
appearances will live side by side, following different rôles and
contributing diverse gifts. The weaving of mankind into one community
does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the
reverse; the welcome and the adequate utilization of distinctive quality
in an atmosphere of understanding. It is the almost universal bad
manners of the present age which make race intolerable to race. The
community to which we may be moving will be more mixed--which does not
necessarily mean more interbred--more various and more interesting than
any existing community. Communities all to one pattern, like boxes of
toy soldiers, are things of the past rather than the future.
But one of the hardest, most impossible tasks a writer can set himself,
is to picture the life of people better educated, happier in their
circumstances, more free and more healthy than he is himself. We know
enough to-day to know that there is infinite room for betterment in
every human concern. Nothing is needed but collective effort. Our
poverty, our restraints, our infections and indigestions, our quarrels
and misunderstandings, are all things controllable and removable by
concerted human action, but we know as little how life would feel
without them as some poor dirty, ill-treated, fierce-souled creature
born and bred amidst the cruel and dingy surroundings of a European back
street can know what it is to bathe every day, always to be clad
beautifully, to climb mountains for pleasure, to fly, to meet none but
agreeable, well-mannered people, to conduct researches or make
delightful things. Yet a time when all such good things will be for all
men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that
brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it.
One cannot foretell the surprises or disappointments the future has in
store. Before this chapter of the World State can begin fairly in our
histories, other chapters as yet unsuspected may still need to be
written, as long and as full of conflict as our account of the growth
and rivalries of the Great Powers. There may be tragic economic
struggles, grim grapplings of race with race and class with class. We do
not know; we cannot tell. These are unnecessary disasters, but they may
be unavoidable disasters. Human history becomes more and more a race
between education and catastrophe. Against the unifying effort of
Christendom and against the unifying influence of the mechanical
revolution, catastrophe won. New falsities may arise and hold men in
some unrighteous and fated scheme of order for a time, before they
collapse amidst the misery and slaughter of generations. Yet, clumsily
or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress. In this
_Outline_, in our account of Palæolithic men, we have borrowed a
description from Mr. Worthington Smith of the very highest life in the
world some fifty thousand years ago. It was a bestial life. We have
sketched too the gathering for a human sacrifice, some fifteen thousand
years ago. That scene again is almost incredibly cruel to a modern
civilized reader. Yet it is not more than five hundred years since the
great empire of the Aztecs still believed that it could live only by the
shedding of blood. Every year in Mexico hundreds of human victims died
in this fashion: the body was bent like a bow over the curved stone of
sacrifice, the breast was slashed open with a knife of obsidian, and the
priest tore out the beating heart of the still living victim. The day
may be close at hand when we shall no longer tear out the hearts of men,
even for the sake of our national gods. Let the reader but refer to the
earlier time charts we have given in this history, and he will see the
true measure and transitoriness of all the conflicts, deprivations, and
miseries of this present period of painful and yet hopeful change.
§ 5
History is and must always be no more than an account of beginnings. We
can venture to prophesy that the next chapters to be written will tell,
though perhaps with long interludes of set-back and disaster, of the
final achievement of world-wide political and social unity. But when
that is attained, it will mean no resting stage, nor even a breathing
stage, before the development of a new struggle and of new and vaster
efforts. Men will unify only to intensify the search for knowledge and
power, and live as ever for new occasions. Animal and vegetable life,
the obscure processes of psychology, the intimate structure of matter
and the interior of our earth, will yield their secrets and endow their
conqueror. Life begins perpetually. Gathered together at last under the
leadership of man, the student-teacher of the universe, unified,
disciplined, armed with the secret powers of the atom and with knowledge
as yet beyond dreaming, Life, for ever dying to be born afresh, for ever
young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a
footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.
TIME CHARTS
AND
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
[Illustration: TIME CHART]
[Illustration: TIME CHART]
[Illustration: TIME CHART]
[Illustration: TIME CHART]
[Illustration: TIME CHART]
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
To conclude this _Outline_, we give here a Table of Leading Events from
the year 800 B.C. to 1920 A.D. With it we give five time diagrams
covering the period from 1000 B.C. onward, which present the trend of
events in a graphic form.
It is well that the reader should keep in mind an idea of the true
proportions of historical to geological time. The scale of these five
diagrams is such that by it the time diagram on page 196, vol. i, would
be about 8½ times as long, that is to say about 4 feet; that on page
97, showing the length of time since the first true men, about 55 feet
long; that on page 60, showing the interval since the Eoliths, 555 feet;
and that on page 14, representing the whole of geological time, would be
somewhere between 12 and, at the longest and most probable estimate, 260
miles! Let the reader therefore take one of these chronological tables
we give, and imagine it extended upon a long strip of paper to a
distance of 55 feet. He would have to get up and walk about that
distance to note the date of the painting of the Altamira caves, and he
would have to go ten times that distance by the side of the same narrow
strip to reach the earlier Neanderthalers. A mile or so from home, but
probably much further away, the strip might be recording the last of the
dinosaurs. And this on a scale which represents the time from Columbus
to ourselves by three inches of space!
Chronology only begins to be precise enough to specify the exact year of
any event after the establishment of the eras of the First Olympiad and
the building of Rome.
About the year 1000 B.C. the Aryan peoples were establishing themselves
in the peninsulas of Spain, Italy, and the Balkans, and they were
established in North India, Cnossos was already destroyed and the
spacious times of Egypt, of Thothmes III, Amenophis III, and Rameses II
were three or four centuries away. Weak monarchs of the XXIst Dynasty
were ruling in the Nile Valley. Israel was united under her early
kings; Saul or David or possibly even Solomon may have been reigning.
Sargon I (2750 B.C.) of the Akkadian Sumerian Empire was a remote memory
in Babylonian history, more remote than is Constantine the Great from
the world of the present day. Hammurabi had been dead a thousand years.
The Assyrians were already dominating the less military Babylonians. In
1100 B.C. Tiglath Pileser I had taken Babylon. But there was no
permanent conquest; Assyria and Babylonia were still separate empires.
In China the new Chow Dynasty was flourishing. Stonehenge in England was
already a thousand years old.
The next two centuries saw a renascence of Egypt under the XXIInd
Dynasty, the splitting up of the brief little Hebrew kingdom of Solomon,
the spreading of the Greeks in the Balkans, South Italy, and Asia Minor,
and the days of Etruscan predominance in Central Italy. We may begin our
list of ascertainable dates with--
B.C.
800. The building of Carthage.
790. The Ethiopian conquest of Egypt (founding the XXVth
Dynasty).
776. First Olympiad.
753. Rome built.
745. Tiglath Pileser III conquered Babylonia and founded the
New Assyrian Empire.
738. Menahem, king of Israel, bought off Tiglath Pileser III.
735. Greeks settling in Sicily.
722. Sargon II armed the Assyrians with iron weapons.
721. He deported the Israelites.
704. Sennacherib.
701. His army destroyed by pestilence on its way to Egypt.
680. Esarhaddon took Thebes in Egypt (overthrowing the Ethiopian
XXVth Dynasty).
667. Sardanapalus.
664. Psammetichus I restored the freedom of Egypt and founded
the XXVIth Dynasty (to 610). He was assisted against
Assyria by Lydian troops sent by Gyges.
608. Necho of Egypt defeated Josiah, king of Judah, at the Battle
of Megiddo.
606. Capture of Nineveh by the Chaldeans and Medes. Foundation
of the Chaldean Empire.
604. Necho pushed to the Euphrates and was overthrown by
Nebuchadnezzar II. Josiah fell with him.
586. Nebuchadnezzar carried off the Jews to Babylon. Many
fled to Egypt and settled there.
550. Cyrus the Persian succeeded Cyaxares the Mede.
Cyrus conquered Crœsus.
Buddha lived about this time. So also did Confucius and
Lao Tse.
539. Cyrus took Babylon and founded the Persian Empire.
527. Peisistratus died.
525. Cambyses conquered Egypt.
521. Darius I, the son of Hystaspes, ruled from the Hellespont to
the Indus.
His expedition to Scythia.
490. Battle of Marathon.
484. Herodotus born. Æschylus won his first prize for tragedy.
480. Battles of Thermopylæ and Salamis.
479. The Battles of Platæa and Mycale completed the repulse of
Persia.
474. Etruscan fleet destroyed by the Sicilian Greeks.
470. Voyage of Hanno.
466. Pericles.
465. Xerxes murdered.
438. Herodotus recited his History in Athens.
431. Peloponnesian War began (to 404).
428. Pericles died. Herodotus died.
427. Aristophanes began his career. Plato born. He lived to 347.
401. Retreat of the Ten Thousand.
390. Brennus sacked Rome.
366. Camillus built the Temple of Concord.
359. Philip became king of Macedonia.
338. Battle of Chæronea.
336. Macedonian troops crossed into Asia. Philip murdered.
334. Battle of the Granicus.
333. Battle of Issus.
332. Alexander in Egypt.
331. Battle of Arbela.
330. Darius III killed.
323. Death of Alexander the Great.
321. Rise of Chandragupta in the Punjab. The Romans completely
beaten by the Samnites at the battle of the
Caudine Forks.
303. Chandragupta repulsed Seleucus.
285. Ptolemy Soter died.
281. Pyrrhus invaded Italy.
280. Battle of Heraclea.
279. Battle of Ausculum.
278. Gauls’ raid into Asia Minor and settlement in Galatia.
275. Pyrrhus left Italy.
264. First Punic War. (Asoka began to reign in Behar--to
227.) First gladiatorial games in Rome.
260. Battle of Mylæ.
256. Battle of Ecnomus.
246. Shi-Hwang-ti became king of Ch’in.
242. Battle of Ægatian Isles.
241. End of First Punic War.
225. Battle of Telamon. Roman armies in Illyria.
220. Shi-Hwang-ti became emperor of China.
219. Second Punic War.
216. Battle of Cannæ.
214. Great Wall of China begun.
210. Death of Shi-Hwang-ti.
202. Battle of Zama.
201. End of Second Punic War.
200-197. Rome at war with Macedonia.
192. War with the Seleucids.
190. Battle of Magnesia.
149. Third Punic War. (The Yueh-Chi came into Western
Turkestan.)
146. Carthage destroyed. Corinth destroyed.
133. Attalus bequeathed Pergamum to Rome. Tiberius Gracchus
killed.
121. Caius Gracchus killed.
118. War with Jugurtha.
106. War with Jugurtha ended.
102. Marius drove back Germans.
100. Triumph of Marius. (Wu-ti conquering the Tarim Valley.)
91. Social war.
89. All Italians became Roman citizens.
86. Death of Marius.
78. Death of Sulla.
73. The revolt of the slaves under Spartacus.
71. Defeat and end of Spartacus.
66. Pompey led Roman troops to the Caspian and Euphrates.
He encountered the Alani.
64. Mithridates of Pontus died.
53. Crassus killed at Carrhæ. Mongolian elements with Parthians.
48. Julius Cæsar defeated Pompey at Pharsalos.
44. Julius Cæsar assassinated.
31. Battle of Actium.
27. Augustus Cæsar princeps (until 14 A.D.).
4. True date of birth of Jesus of Nazareth.
A.D. Christian Era began.
6. Province of Mœsia established.
9. Province of Pannonia established. Imperial boundary
carried to the Danube.
14. Augustus died. Tiberius emperor.
30. Jesus of Nazareth crucified.
37. Caligula succeeded Tiberius.
41. Claudius (the first emperor of the legions) made emperor by
pretorian guard after murder of Caligula.
54. Nero succeeded Claudius.
61. Boadicea massacred Roman garrison in Britain.
68. Suicide of Nero. (Galba, Otho, Vitellus, emperors in succession.)
69. Vespasian began the so-called Flavian dynasty.
79. Titus succeeded Vespasian.
81. Domitian.
84. North Britain annexed.
96. Nerva began the so-called dynasty of the Antonines.
98. Trajan succeeded Nerva.
102. Pan Chau on the Caspian Sea. (Indo-Scythians invading
North India.)
117. Hadrian succeeded Trajan. Roman Empire at its greatest
extent.
138. Antoninus Pius succeeded Hadrian.
(The Indo-Scythians at this time were destroying the
last traces of Hellenic rule in India.)
150. [About this time Kanishka reigned in India, Kashgar, Yarkand,
and Kotan.]
161. Marcus Aurelius succeeded Antoninus Pius.
164. Great plague began, and lasted to the death of M. Aurelius
(180). This also devastated all Asia.
180. Death of Marcus Aurelius.
(Nearly a century of war and disorder began in the Roman
Empire.)
220. End of the Han dynasty. Beginning of four hundred years
of division in China.
227. Ardashir I (first Sassanid shah) put an end to Arsacid line
in Persia.
242. Mani began his teaching.
247. Goths crossed Danube in a great raid.
251. Great victory of Goths. Emperor Decius killed.
260. Sapor I, the second Sassanid shah, took Antioch, captured
the Emperor Valerian, and was cut up on his return from
Asia Minor by Odenathus of Palmyra.
269. The Emperor Claudius defeated the Goths at Nish.
270. Aurelian became emperor.
272. Zenobia carried captive to Rome. End of the brief glories
of Palmyra.
275. Probus succeeded Aurelian.
276. Goths in Pontus. The Emperor Probus forced back Franks
and Alemanni.
277. Mani crucified in Persia.
284. Diocletian became emperor.
303. Diocletian persecuted the Christians.
311. Galerius abandoned the persecution of the Christians.
312. Constantine the Great became emperor.
313. Constantine presided over a Christian Council at Arles.
321. Fresh Gothic raids driven back.
323. Constantine presided over the Council of Nicæa.
337. Vandals driven by Goths obtained leave to settle in
Pannonia. Constantine baptized on his death-bed.
354. St. Augustine born.
361-3. Julian the Apostate attempted to substitute Mithraism
for Christianity.
379. Theodosius the Great (a Spaniard) emperor.
390. The statue of Serapis at Alexandria broken up.
392. Theodosius the Great, emperor of east and west.
395. Theodosius the Great died. Honorius and Arcadius redivided
the empire with Stilicho and Alaric as their masters
and protectors.
410. The Visigoths under Alaric captured Rome.
425. Vandals settling in south of Spain. Huns in Pannonia,
Goths in Dalmatia. Visigoths and Suevi in Portugal and
North Spain. English invading Britain.
429. Vandals under Genseric invaded Africa.
439. Vandals took Carthage.
448. Priscus visited Attila.
451. Attila raided Gaul and was defeated by Franks, Alemanni,
and Romans at Troyes.
453. Death of Attila.
455. Vandals sacked Rome.
470. Ephthalites’ raid into India.
476. Odoacer, king of a medley of Teutonic tribes, informed Constantinople
that there was no emperor in the West. End
of the Western Empire.
480. St. Benedict born.
481. Clovis in France. The Merovingians.
483. Nestorian church broke away from the Orthodox Christian
church.
493. Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, conquered Italy and became King
of Italy, but was nominally subject to Constantinople.
(Gothic kings in Italy. Goths settled on special confiscated
lands as a garrison.)
527. Justinian emperor.
528. Mihiragula, the (Ephthalite) Attila of India, overthrown.
529. Justinian closed the schools at Athens, which had flourished
nearly a thousand years. Belisarius (Justinian’s general)
took Naples.
531. Chosroes I began to reign.
543. Great plague in Constantinople.
544. St. Benedict died.
553. Goths expelled from Italy by Justinian. Cassiodorus
founded his monastery.
565. Justinian died. The Lombards conquered most of North
Italy (leaving Ravenna and Rome Byzantine). The
Turks broke up the Ephthalites in Western Turkestan.
570. Muhammad born.
579. Chosroes I died.
(The Lombards dominant in Italy.)
590. Plague raged in Rome. (Gregory the Great--Gregory I--and
the vision of St. Angelo.) Chosroes II began to
reign.
610. Heraclius began to reign.
619. Chosroes II held Egypt, Jerusalem, Damascus, and had
armies on Hellespont. Tang dynasty began in China.
622. The Hegira.
623. Battle of Badr.
627. Great Persian defeat at Nineveh by Heraclius. The Meccan
Allies besieged Medina. Tai-tsung became Emperor of
China.
628. Kavadh II murdered and succeeded his father, Chosroes II.
Muhammad wrote letters to all the rulers of the earth.
629. Yuan Chwang started for India. Muhammad entered
Mecca.
631. Tai-tsung received Nestorian missionaries.
632. Muhammad died. Abu Bekr Caliph.
634. Battle of the Yarmuk. Moslems took Syria. Omar second
Caliph.
637. Battle of Kadessia.
638. Jerusalem surrendered to Omar.
642. Heraclius died.
643. Othman third Caliph.
645. Yuan Chwang returned to Singan.
655. Defeat of the Byzantine fleet by the Moslems.
656. Othman murdered at Medina.
661. Ali murdered.
662. Moawija Caliph. (First of the Omayyad caliphs.)
668. The Caliph Moawija attacked Constantinople by sea--Theodore
of Tarsus became Archbishop of Canterbury.
675. Last of the sea attacks by Moawija on Constantinople.
687. Pepin of Heristhal, mayor of the palace, reunited Austrasia
and Neustria.
711. Moslem army invaded Spain from Africa.
714. Charles Martel mayor of the palace.
715. The domains of the Caliph Walid I extended from the
Pyrenees to China.
717-18. Suleiman, son and successor of Walid, failed to take
Constantinople. The Omayyad line passed its climax.
732. Charles Martel defeated the Moslems near Poitiers.
735. Death of the Venerable Bede.
743. Walid II Caliph,--the unbelieving Caliph.
749. Overthrow of the Omayyads. Abdul Abbas, the first Abbasid
Caliph. Spain remained Omayyad. Beginning
of the break-up of the Arab Empire.
751. Pepin crowned King of the French.
755. Martyrdom of St. Boniface.
768. Pepin died.
771. Charlemagne sole king.
774. Charlemagne conquered Lombardy.
776. Charlemagne in Dalmatia.
786. Haroun al Raschid Abbasid Caliph in Bagdad (to 809).
795. Leo III became Pope (to 816).
800. Leo crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West.
802. Egbert, formerly an English refugee at the court of Charlemagne,
established himself as King of Wessex.
810. Krum of Bulgaria defeated and killed the Emperor Nicephorus.
814. Charlemagne died, Louis the Pious succeeds him.
828. Egbert became first King of England.
843. Louis the Pious died, and the Carlovingian Empire went to
pieces. Until 962 there was no regular succession of Holy
Roman Emperors, though the title appeared intermittently.
850. About this time Rurik (a Northman) became ruler of Novgorod
and Kieff.
852. Boris first Christian King of Bulgaria (to 884).
865. The fleet of the Russians (Northmen) threatened Constantinople.
886. The Treaty of Alfred of England and Guthrum the Dane,
establishing the Danes in the Danelaw.
904. Russian (Northmen) fleet off Constantinople.
912. Rolf the Ganger established himself in Normandy.
919. Henry the Fowler elected King of Germany.
928. Marozia imprisoned Pope John X.
931. John XI Pope (to 936).
936. Otto I became King of Germany in succession to his father,
Henry the Fowler.
941. Russian fleet again threatened Constantinople.
955. John XII Pope.
960. Northern Sung Dynasty began in China.
962. Otto I, King of Germany, crowned Emperor (first Saxon
Emperor) by John XII.
963. Otto deposed John XII.
969. Separate Fatimite Caliphate set up in Egypt.
973. Otto II.
983. Otto III.
987. Hugh Capet became King of France. End of the Carlovingian
line of French kings.
1013. Canute became King of England, Denmark, and Norway.
1037. Avicenna of Bokhara, the Prince of Physicians, died.
1043. Russian fleet threatened Constantinople.
1066. Conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy.
1071. Revival of Islam under the Seljuk Turks. Battle of
Melasgird.
1073. Hildebrand became Pope (Gregory VII) to 1085.
1082. Robert Guiscard captured Durazzo.
1084. Robert Guiscard sacked Rome.
1087-99. Urban II Pope.
1094. Pestilence.
1095. Urban II at Clermont summoned the First Crusade.
1096. Massacre of the People’s Crusade.
1099. Godfrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem. Paschal II
Pope (to 1118).
1138. Kin Empire flourished. The Sung capital shifted from
Nanking to Hang Chau.
1147. The Second Crusade. Foundation of the Christian Kingdom
of Portugal.
1169. Saladin Sultan of Egypt.
1176. Frederick Barbarossa acknowledged supremacy of the
Pope (Alexander III) at Venice.
1187. Saladin captured Jerusalem.
1189. The Third Crusade.
1198. Averroes of Cordoba, the Arab philosopher, died. Innocent
III Pope (to 1216). Frederick II (aged four), King
of Sicily, became his ward.
1202. The Fourth Crusade attacked the Eastern Empire.
1204. Capture of Constantinople by the Latins.
1206. Kutub founded Moslem state at Delhi.
1212. The Children’s Crusade.
1214. Jengis Khan took Peking.
1215. Magna Carta signed.
1216. Honorius III Pope.
1218. Jengis Khan invaded Kharismia.
1221. Failure and return of the Fifth Crusade. St. Dominic died.
(The Dominicans.)
1226. St. Francis of Assisi died. (The Franciscans.)
1227. Jengis Khan died, Khan from the Caspian to the Pacific,
and was succeeded by Ogdai Khan.
1227. Gregory IX Pope.
1228. Frederick II embarked upon the Sixth Crusade, and acquired
Jerusalem.
1234. Mongols completed conquest of the Kin Empire with the
help of the Sung Empire.
1239. Frederick II excommunicated for the second time.
1240. Mongols destroyed Kieff. Russia tributary to the Mongols.
1241. Mongol victory at Liegnitz in Silesia.
1244. The Egyptian Sultan recaptured Jerusalem. This led to
the Seventh Crusade.
1245. Frederick II re-excommunicated. The men of Schwyz
burnt the castle of New Habsburg.
1250. St. Louis of France ransomed. Frederick II, the last
Hohenstaufen Emperor, died. German interregnum until
1273.
1251. Mangu Khan became Great Khan. Kublai Khan governor
of China.
1258. Hulagu Khan took and destroyed Bagdad.
1260. Kublai Khan became Great Khan. Ketboga defeated in
Palestine.
1261. The Greeks recaptured Constantinople from the Latins.
1269. Kublai Khan sent a message of inquiry to the Pope by the
older Polos.
1271. Marco Polo started upon his travels.
1273. Rudolf of Habsburg elected Emperor. The Swiss formed
their Everlasting League.
1280. Kublai Khan founded the Yuan Dynasty in China.
1292. Death of Kublai Khan.
1293. Roger Bacon, the prophet of experimental science, died.
1294. Boniface VIII Pope (to 1303).
1295. Marco Polo returned to Venice.
1303. Death of Pope Boniface VIII after the outrage of Anagni
by Guillaume de Nogaret.
1305. Clement V Pope. The papal court set up at Avignon.
1308. Duns Scotus died.
1318. Four Franciscans burnt for heresy at Marseilles.
1347. Occam died.
1348. The Great Plague, the Black Death.
1358. The Jacquerie in France.
1360. In China the Mongol (Yuan) Dynasty fell, and was succeeded
by the Ming Dynasty (to 1644).
1367. Timurlane assumed the title of Great Khan.
1377. Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome.
1378. The Great Schism. Urban VI in Rome, Clement VII at
Avignon.
1381. Peasant revolt in England. Wat Tyler murdered in the
presence of King Richard II.
1384. Wycliffe died.
1398. Huss preached Wycliffism at Prague.
1405. Death of Timurlane.
1414-18. The Council of Constance. Huss burnt (1415).
1417. The Great Schism ended, Martin V Pope.
1420. The Hussites revolted. Martin V preached a crusade
against them.
1431. The Catholic Crusaders dissolved before the Hussites at
Domazlice. The Council of Basle met.
1436. The Hussites came to terms with the church.
1439. Council of Basle created a fresh schism in the church.
1445. Discovery of Cape Verde by the Portuguese.
1446. First printed books (Coster in Haarlem).
1449. End of the Council of Basle.
1453. Ottoman Turks under Muhammad II took Constantinople.
1480. Ivan III, Grand-duke of Moscow, threw off the Mongol
allegiance.
1481. Death of the Sultan Muhammad II while preparing for the
conquest of Italy. Bayazid II Turkish Sultan (to 1512).
1486. Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
1492. Columbus crossed the Atlantic to America. Rodrigo Borgia,
Alexander VI, Pope (to 1503).
1493. Maximilian I became Emperor.
1498. Vasco da Gama sailed round the Cape to India.
1499. Switzerland became an independent republic.
1500. Charles V born.
1509. Henry VIII King of England.
1512. Selim Sultan (to 1520). He bought the title of Caliph.
Fall of Soderini (and Machiavelli) in Florence.
1513. Leo X Pope.
1515. Francis I King of France.
1517. Selim annexed Egypt. Luther propounded his theses at
Wittenberg.
1519. Leonardo da Vinci died. Magellan’s expedition started to
sail round the world. Cortez entered Mexico city.
1520. Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan (to 1566), who ruled from
Bagdad to Hungary. Charles V Emperor.
1521. Luther at the Diet of Worms. Loyola wounded at Pampeluna.
1525. Baber won the battle of Panipat, captured Delhi, and
founded the Mogul Empire.
1527. The German troops in Italy, under the Constable of Bourbon,
took and pillaged Rome.
1529. Suleiman besieged Vienna.
1530. Pizarro invaded Peru. Charles V crowned by the Pope.
Henry VIII began his quarrel with the Papacy.
1532. The Anabaptists seized Münster.
1535. Fall of the Anabaptist rule in Münster.
1539. The Company of Jesus founded.
1543. Copernicus died.
1545. The Council of Trent (to 1563) assembled to put the
church in order.
1546. Martin Luther died.
1547. Ivan IV (the Terrible) took the title of Tsar of Russia.
Francis I died.
1549. First Jesuit missions arrived in South America.
1552. Treaty of Passau. Temporary pacification of Germany.
1556. Charles V abdicated. Akbar Great Mogul (to 1605).
Ignatius of Loyola died.
1558. Death of Charles V.
1563. End of the Council of Trent and the reform of the Catholic
Church.
1564. Galileo born.
1566. Suleiman the Magnificent died.
1567. Revolt of the Netherlands.
1568. Execution of Counts Egmont and Horn.
1571. Kepler born.
1573. Siege of Alkmaar.
1578. Harvey born.
1583. Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to Virginia.
1601. Tycho Brahe died.
1603. James I King of England and Scotland. Dr. Gilbert died.
1605. Jehangir Great Mogul.
1606. Virginia Company founded.
1609. Holland independent.
1618. Thirty Years War began.
1620. Mayflower expedition founded New Plymouth. First negro
slaves landed at Jamestown (Va.).
1625. Charles I of England.
1626. Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) died.
1628. Shah Jehan Great Mogul. The English Petition of Right.
1629. Charles I of England began his eleven years of rule without
a parliament.
1630. Kepler died.
1632. Leeuwenhoek born. Gustavus Adolphus killed at the
Battle of Lützen.
1634. Wallenstein murdered.
1638. Japan closed to Europeans (until 1865).
1640. Charles I of England summoned the Long Parliament.
1641. Massacre of the English in Ireland.
1642. Galileo died. Newton born.
1643. Louis XIV began his reign of seventy-two years.
1644. The Manchus ended the Ming dynasty.
1645. Swine pens in the inner town of Leipzig pulled down.
1648. Treaty of Westphalia. Thereby Holland and Switzerland
were recognized as free republics and Prussia became
important. The treaty gave a complete victory neither to
the Imperial Crown nor to the Princes.
War of the Fronde; it ended in the complete victory
of the French crown.
1649. Execution of Charles I of England.
1658. Aurungzeb Great Mogul. Cromwell died.
1660. Charles II of England.
1674. Nieuw Amsterdam finally became British by treaty and
was renamed New York.
1683. The last Turkish attack on Vienna defeated by John III
of Poland.
1688. The British Revolution. Flight of James II. William
and Mary began to reign.
1689. Peter the Great of Russia (to 1725).
1690. Battle of the Boyne in Ireland.
1694. Voltaire born.
1701. Frederick I first King of Prussia.
1704. John Locke, the father of modern democratic theory, died.
1707. Death of Aurungzeb. The empire of the Great Mogul
disintegrated.
1713. Frederick the Great of Prussia born.
1714. George I of Britain.
1715. Louis XV of France.
1727. Newton died. George II of Britain.
1732. Oglethorpe founded Georgia.
1736. Nadir Shah raided India. (The beginning of twenty years
of raiding and disorder in India.)
1740. Maria-Theresa began to reign. (Being a woman, she
could not be empress. Her husband, Francis I, was emperor
until his death in 1765, when her son, Joseph II,
succeeded him.)
1740. Accession of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia.
1741. The Empress Elizabeth of Russia began to reign.
1755-63. Britain and France struggled for America and India.
France in alliance with Austria and Russia against Prussia
and Britain (1756-63); the Seven Years’ War.
1757. Battle of Plassey.
1759. The British general Wolfe took Quebec.
1760. George III of Britain.
1762. The Empress Elizabeth of Russia died. Murder of the
Tsar Paul, and accession of Catherine the Great of Russia
(to 1796).
1763. Peace of Paris; Canada ceded to Britain. British dominant
in India.
1764. Battle of Buxar.
1769. Napoleon Bonaparte born.
1774. Louis XVI began his reign. Suicide of Clive. The
American revolutionary drama began.
1775. Battle of Lexington.
1776. Declaration of Independence by the United States of
America.
1778. J. J. Rousseau, the creator of modern democratic sentiment,
died.
1780. End of the reign of Maria-Theresa. The Emperor Joseph
(1765 to 1790) succeeded her in the hereditary Habsburg
dominions.
1783. Treaty of Peace between Britain and the new United States
of America. Quaco set free in Massachusetts.
1787. The Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia set up the
Federal Government of the United States. France discovered
to be bankrupt. The Assembly of the Notables.
1788. First Federal Congress of the United States at New York.
1789. The French States-General assembled. Storming of the
Bastille.
1791. The Jacobin Revolution. Flight to Varennes.
1792. France declared war on Austria; Prussia declared war on
France. Battle of Valmy. France became a republic.
1793. Louis XVI beheaded.
1794. Execution of Robespierre and end of the Jacobin republic.
Rule of the Convention.
1795. The Directory. Bonaparte suppressed a revolt and went
to Italy as commander-in-chief.
1797. By the Peace of Campo Formio Bonaparte destroyed the
Republic of Venice.
1798. Bonaparte went to Egypt. Battle of the Nile.
1799. Bonaparte returned. He became First Consul with enormous
powers.
1800. Legislative union of Ireland and England enacted January
1st, 1801.
1800. Napoleon’s campaign against Austria. Battles of Marengo
(in Italy) and Hohenlinden (Moreau’s victory).
1801. Preliminaries of peace between France, England, and Austria
signed.
1803. Bonaparte occupied Switzerland, and so precipitated war.
1804. Bonaparte became Emperor. Francis II took the title of
Emperor of Austria in 1805, and in 1806 he dropped the
title of Holy Roman Emperor. So the “Holy Roman
Empire” came to an end.
1805. Battle of Trafalgar. Battles of Ulm and Austerlitz.
1806. Prussia overthrown at Jena.
1807. Battles of Eylau and Friedland and Treaty of Tilsit.
1808. Napoleon made his brother Joseph King of Spain.
1810. Spanish America became republican.
1811. Alexander withdrew from the “Continental System.”
1812. Moscow.
1814. Abdication of Napoleon. Louis XVIII.
1815. The Waterloo campaign. The Treaty of Vienna.
1819. The First Factory Act passed through the efforts of Robert
Owen.
1821. The Greek revolt.
1824. Charles X of France.
1825. Nicholas I of Russia.
1827. Battle of Navarino.
1829. Greece independent.
1830. A year of disturbance. Louis Philippe ousted Charles X.
Belgium broke away from Holland. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
became king of this new country, Belgium.
Russian Poland revolted ineffectually. First
railway (Liverpool to Manchester).
1832. The First Reform Bill in Britain restored the democratic
character of the British Parliament.
1835. The word socialism first used.
1837. Queen Victoria.
1840. Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
1848. Another year of disturbance. Republics in France and
Rome. The Pan-slavic conference at Prague. All Germany
united in a parliament at Frankfort. German unity
destroyed by the King of Prussia.
1851. The Great Exhibition of London.
1852. Napoleon III Emperor of the French.
1854. Perry (second expedition) landed in Japan. Nicholas I
occupied the Danubian provinces of Turkey.
1854-56. Crimean War.
1856. Alexander II of Russia.
1857. The Indian Mutiny.
1858. Robert Owen died.
1859. Franco-Austrian war. Battles of Magenta and Solferino.
1861. Victor Emmanuel First King of Italy. Abraham Lincoln
became President U.S.A. The American Civil War began.
1863. British bombarded a Japanese town.
1864. Maximilian became Emperor of Mexico.
1865. Surrender of Appomattox Court House. Japan opened to
the world.
1866. Prussia and Italy attacked Austria (and the south German
states in alliance with her). Battle of Sadowa.
1867. The Emperor Maximilian shot.
1870. Napoleon III declared war against Prussia.
1871. Paris surrendered (January). The King of Prussia became
William I, “German Emperor.” The Hohenzollern Peace
of Frankfort.
1875. The “Bulgarian atrocities.”
1877. Russo-Turkish War. Treaty of San Stefano. Queen Victoria
became Empress of India.
1878. The Treaty of Berlin. The Armed Peace of forty-six years
began in western Europe.
1881. The Battle of Majuba Hill. The Transvaal free.
1883. Britain occupied Egypt.
1886. Gladstone’s first Irish Home Rule Bill.
1888. Frederick II (March), William II (June), German
Emperors.
1890. Bismarck dismissed. Heligoland ceded to Germany by
Lord Salisbury.
1894-95. Japanese war with China.
1895. “Unionist” (Imperialist) government in Britain.
1896. Battle of Adowa.
1898. The Fashoda quarrel between France and Britain. Germany
acquired Kiau-Chau.
1899. The war in South Africa began (Boer war).
1900. The Boxer risings in China. Siege of the Legations at Peking.
1904. The British invaded Tibet.
1904-5. Russo-Japanese war.
1906. The “Unionist” (Imperialist) party in Great Britain defeated
by the Liberals upon the question of tariffs.
1907. The Confederation of South Africa established.
1908. Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina.
1909. M. Bleriot flew in an aeroplane from France to England.
1911. Italy made war on Turkey and seized Tripoli.
1912. China became a republic.
1913. The Balkan league made war on Turkey. Bloodshed at
Londonderry in Ireland caused by “Unionist” gun
running.
1914. The Great War in Europe began (for which see special time
chart on pp. 528-29).
1917. The two Russian revolutions. Establishment of the Bolshevik
régime in Russia.
1919-20. The Clemenceau Peace of Versailles.
1920. First meeting of the League of Nations, from which Germany,
Austria, Russia, and Turkey were excluded, and
at which the United States was not represented.
And here our _Outline_ breaks off.
INDEX
KEY TO PRONUNCIATION
VOWELS
ä as in far (fär), father (fä’ thũr), mikado (mi kä’ dō).
ă “ “ fat (făt), ample (ămpl), abstinence (ăb’ stin ens).
ā “ “ fate (fāt), wait (wāt), deign (dān), jade (jād).
aw “ “ fall (fawl), appal (a pawl’), broad (brawd).
â “ “ fair (fâr), bear (bâr), where (hwâr).
e “ “ bell (bel), bury (ber’ i).
ē “ “ beef (bēf), thief (thēf), idea (ī dē’ ă), beer (bēr),
casino (kă sē’ nō).
i “ “ bit (bit), lily (lil’ ī), nymph (nimf), build (bild).
ī “ “ bite (bīt), analyze (ăn’ ă līz), light (līt).
o “ “ not (not), watch (woch), cough (kof), sorry (sor’ i).
ō “ “ no (nō), blow (blō), brooch (brōch).
ô “ “ north (nôrth), absorb (ăb sôrb’).
oo “ “ food (food), do (doo), prove (proov), blue (bloo), strew (stroo).
u “ “ bull (bul), good (gud), would (wud).
ŭ “ “ sun (sŭn), love (lŭv), enough (ē nŭf’).
ū “ “ muse (mūs), stew (stū), cure (kūr).
ũ “ “ her (hũr), search (sũrch), word (wũrd), bird (bũrd).
ou “ “ bout (bout), bough (bou), crowd (kroud).
oi “ “ join (join), joy (joi), buoy (boi).
A short mark placed over italic a, e, o, or u (_ă_, _ĕ_,
_ŏ_, _ŭ_), signifies that the vowel has an obscure,
indeterminate, or slurred sound, as in:--
advice (_ă_d vīs, current (kŭr’ _ĕ_nt), notion (nō’ sh_ŭ_n),
breakable (brā’ k_ă_ bl), sailor (sā’ l_ŏ_r), pleasure (plezh’ _ŭ_r).
CONSONANTS
“s” is used only for the sibilant “s” (as in “toast,” tōst,
“place,” plās); the sonant “s” (as in “toes,” “plays”) is
printed “z” (tōz, plāz).
“c” (except in the combinations “ch” and “_ch_”), “q” and “x” are
not used.
b, d, f, h (but see the combinations below), k, l, m, n (see _n_
below), p, r, t, v, z, and w and y when used as consonants have
their usual values.
ch as in church (chũrch), batch (băch), capriccio (kä prē’ chō).
_ch_ “ “ loch (lo_ch_), coronach (kor’ o nä_ch_), clachan (klă_ch_’ än).
g “ “ get (get), finger (fing’ gũr).
j “ “ join (join), judge (jŭj), germ (jũrm), ginger (jin’ jĕr).
gh (in List of Proper Names only) as in Ludwig (lut’ vigh).
hl ( “ “ “ “ ) “ “ Llandeilo (hlăn dī’ lō).
hw as in white (hwīt), nowhere (nō’ hwâr).
_n_ “ “ cabochon (kä bō sho_n_’), congé (ko_n_’ shā).
sh “ “ shawl (shawl), mention (men’ shŭn).
zh “ “ measure (mezh’ _ŭ_r), vision (vizh’ _ŏ_n).
th “ “ thin (thin), breath (breth).
_th_ “ “ thine (_th_īn), breathe (brē_th_).
The accent (’) _follows_ the syllable to be stressed.
Aar (ār) VALLEY, ii, 199
Aaronson, Aaron, i, 184
Abbasids (_ă_ băs’ īdz), ii, 30-36, 61, 64, 70, 106, 126, 613
Abbott, E., i, 6
Abbott, W. J. Lewis, i, 68
Abd Manif (äbd män ēf’), ii, 5
Abdal Malik (äbd äl mä’ lik), ii, 28
Abelard, P., ii, 171
Aboukir (ä boo kēr’), ii, 352, 353
_Aboukir_, cruiser, ii, 520
Abraham the Patriarch, i, 196, 278, 282, 293-94, 576, ii, 6
Absolution, ii, 216
Abu Bekr (ä’ boo bek’ _ĕ_r), ii, 6, 7, 8, 13-22, 34, 612
Abul Abbas, ii, 30, 31, 613
Abul Fazl (ā’ bool fā’ zl), ii, 135
Abydos (_ă_ bī’ dos), i, 335, 340
Abyssinia, i, 156, 160, 359, ii, 461
Abyssinian Christians, i, 603, 618, ii, 3, 8;
language, i, 154
Académie des Sciences, ii, 239
Academy, Greek, i, 351, 354-57
Academy of Inscriptions, ii, 312
Achilles (ä kil’ ēz), i, 177
Acre, i, 212, ii, 353
Acropolis (ă krop’ ŏ lis), i, 306, 337
Act of Union, ii, 492
Actium (ăk’ ti _ŭ_m), battle of, i, 514, ii, 609
Acts of the Apostles, i, 587, 589
Adam and Eve, ii, 418
Adams, Prof. G. B., ii, 46
Adams, John, ii, 300, 303
Adams, Samuel, ii, 290, 303
Adams, W. P., ii, 532
Adams, William, ii, 465
Addington, ii, 359
Aden, i, 160, 197, ii, 32, 471
Adowa (ă’ dō wă), battle of, ii, 461, 469, 500, 624
Adrianople, i, 554, ii, 122, 502;
Treaty of, ii, 382
Adriatic, i, 274, 389, 452, 461, 471, 540, 561, 606, 616, ii, 54, 80, 364, 509
Adriatic river, i, 119, 120
Ægatian Isles, i, 471, ii, 608
Ægean (ē jē’ _ă_n), cities, i, 234;
civilization, i, 213-16, 281, 300;
Dark Whites, i, 447;
hunters, i, 317
Ægina (ē jī’ n_ă_), i, 337
Æneid (ē’ nē id), the, i, 448
Æolic dialect, i, 300
Aeroplanes, i, 5, ii, 392, 519, 523
Æschylus (ēs’ ki l_ŭ_s), i, 221, 355, ii, 607
Afghanistan, i, 153, 201, 396, 431, 433, 627-28, 643, ii, 133, 257
Africa, i, 57, 74, 109, 120, 145, 154-56, 162, 281, 489, 509,
ii, 114, 139, 153;
peoples of, i, 86, 109, 138, 141, 149, 158-60, 195-201, 206, 234;
languages of, i, 161-62;
early trade with, i, 217, 273;
Moslems in, i, 217, 565, ii, 22, 24, 30, 31, 41, 51, 64, 65, 613;
voyages and travels in, i, 218, 509, ii, 185-88, 252;
Phœnicians in, i, 448, 482-84, 513, 570, 640;
Roman, i, 470, 478-79, 498, 540, 560, 606;
Vandals in, i, 556, 606, 615, ii, 611;
slavery in, ii, 193, 225, 306;
modern exploitation of, ii, 451, 458-60, 484
Africa, Central, i, 158, 558;
East, i, 42, 178;
South (_see_ South Africa);
West, i, 219, ii, 193
African lung fish, i, 25
Aga Khan (ä’ gä kän’), ii, 473
Agincourt, ii, 179
Agriculture, early, i, 104, 108, 113-14, 116, 133, 137, 158,
171, 190, 254, 317;
slaves in, i, 259;
Arab knowledge of, ii, 38;
in Great Britain, ii, 272, 273
Agriculturists, i, 264, 267, 271
Agrigentum (ăg ri gen’ t_ŭ_m), i, 469
Agrippina (ăg ri pī’ n_ă_), i, 525
Ahriman (ă’ ri män), i, 625, 626
Ainu (ī’ noo), i, 139, 148, ii, 262, 464
Air, the, i, 5, 23, 36
Air Force, ii, 570
Aisne (ān), ii, 515;
battle of the, ii, 48
Aix-la-Chapelle, ii, 60, 63
Akbar (äk’ bũr), ii, 133-37, 256, 618
Akhnaton (äk nä’ ton). (_See_ Amenophis IV)
Akkadia (and Akkadians), i, 191, 245
Akkadian-Sumerian Empire, i, 196, 279, ii, 606
Akki, i, 279
_Alabama_, the, ii, 443-44
Alamanni, i, 553, ii, 48, 610
Alans, i, 549-54, 627-28, ii, 609
Alaric (ăl’ _ă_ rik), i, 554, 561, ii, 611
Alaska, ii, 505
Alban, St., ii, 50
Alban Mount, i, 448
Albania, ii, 522
Albert, Prince Consort, ii, 436, 486, 622
Albertus Magnus, ii, 171
Albigenses (ăl bi jen’ sēz), ii, 92, 95, 219
Alcarez (ăl cär’ ez), ii, 208
Alchemists, ii, 174
Alcibiades (ăl si bī’ _ă_ dēz), i, 351
Alcmæonidæ (ălk mē on’ i dē), i, 314
Alcohol, discovery of, ii, 38
Alcuin (ăl’ kwin), ii, 59
Alemanni. (_See_ Alamanni)
Aleppo, ii, 76
Alexander the Great, i, 133, 195, 198, 200, 205, 217,
252, 253, 277, 345, 352, 357-59, 366-99, 412, 428,
430, 445, 452, 467, 484, 507, 510,
512, 522, 542, 546, 562, 597, 615-16, 643,
ii, 20, 51, 78, 114, 145, 199, 303, 608;
empire of (maps), i, 393, 398;
mother of, i, 452
Alexander, son of Alexander the Great, i, 394
Alexander II, king of Egypt, i, 500
Alexander I, tsar of Russia, ii, 362-66, 370-76, 382, 405, 411, 476-77, 622
Alexander II, tsar of Russia, ii, 623
Alexander III (pope), ii, 97, 615
Alexander VI (pope), ii, 195, 617
Alexandretta, i, 379, 383
Alexandria, i, 13, 383, 389, 395-96, 428, 463
497, 515, 532, 538, 562, 587, 601, 602, 604, ii, 36, 91, 168, 351, 611;
museum at, i, 359, 402-13, 476, 490, 636;
culture and religion of, i, 401-14,
590-91, 602, ii, 37;
library at, i, 405, 411;
Serapeum, i, 413, 414
Alexandrian cities, i, 273
Alexius Comnenus (ă lek’ si ŭs kom nē’n_ŭ_s), ii, 72-80
Alfred, king, ii, 54, 148, 614
Algæ, i, 10
Algebra (ăl’ je br_ă_), i, 219, ii, 37, 88
Algeria, i, 102, 217, 565, ii, 501
Algiers, ii, 126, 225, 470
Ali (ā’ lē), nephew of Muhammad, ii, 6-8, 13, 26-31, 64, 613
Alkmaar (älk mär’), siege of, ii, 230-32
Allah, ii, 9-20, 24, 26
Alleghany mountains, ii, 280
Allen, Grant, i, 131
Allen, W. A. C., i, 294
Alp Arslan (älp ärs län’), ii. 72
Alphabets, i, 228, 304, 422, 627, 638-40
Alpine race, i, 146
Alps, the, i, 35, 52, 75, 471, 475, 508, 606, ii, 58, 63, 69, 194
Alsace, i, 553, ii, 200, 236, 244, 446
Alstadt, ii, 180
Altai (äl’ tī), the, i, 546, 633
Altamira (al tă mër’ ă), cave of, i, 93, ii, 605
Aluminium, ii, 389
Alva, General, ii, 229-32
Alyattes (ă li ăt’ ēz), i, 316
Amadis (ăm’ _ă_ dis) de Gaul, ii, 165, 166
Ambar, ii, 136
Amber, i, 105, 532
Amenophis (ăm _ĕ_ nō’ fis) III, i, 200, 220, 245, 250, 288
Amenophis IV, i, 196, 220, 245, 250, 251, 255, 281, 288, 412, 446, ii, 605
America, i, 56, 59, 100, 219, ii, 254, 400;
prehistoric, i, 100, 102-03, 107, 148, 207, 208;
races of, i, 100, 102-03, 138, 141, 158;
languages of, i, 150, 158, 164;
discovery of, i, 635, 640, ii, 53, 84, 117,
185 _sqq._, 193, 251-52, 269, 617;
European settlements in, ii, 252-55, 271,
273, 278-94, 304, 619.
(_See also_ United States)
America, Central, drawings, i, 207
America, South, i, 207, ii, 166, 187,
192-93, 200, 378, 457, 622
American Indians, i, 113, 124, 137, 143,
157-60, 207, 225, ii, 166, 187, 189, 254, 292, 304-05, 464
American king-crab, i, 10;
picture writing, i, 207
Amiens, ii, 530;
Peace of, ii, 355, 359
Amir, ii, 124
Amman (Philadelphia), i, 621-22
Ammianus, i, 607
Ammon, i, 249-52, 383, 399, 412, 602
Ammonites, i, 46
Ammonites, a people, i, 294
Amœba (_ă_ mē’ bȧ), i, 16
Amorites, i, 191, 279
Amos the prophet, i, 294
Amphibia, i, 26, 28, 38, 52, 55
Amphictyonies (ăm fik’ ti _ŏ_n iz), i, 313, ii, 3, 8
_Amphion_, cruiser, ii, 512
Amphipolis (ăm fip’ _ŏ_ lis), i, 371, 372
Amritzar (ăm rit’ s_ă_r), ii, 456
Amur (ă moor´), ii, 261
Anabaptists, ii, 156, 157, 162, 618
Anabasis (_ă_ năb´ _ă_ sis), the, i, 342
Anagni (ä nän´ yē), ii, 99, 616
Anatolia, ii, 72, 121
Anatolian peninsula, i, 623
Anatomy, i, 402-04, ii, 177
Anaxagoras (ăn _ă_k săg´ _ŏ_ răs), i, 349, 358, 364
Andaman (ăn´ d_ă_ măn) Islands, i, 139
Andes, i, 35, 52
Andronicus (ăn dr_ŏ_ nī´ k_ŭ_s), ii, 124
Angelo, St., ii, 612
Angles, i, 554, 605, ii, 50, 54, 66
Anglia, East, ii, 40
Anglicanism, ii, 163
Anglo-Norman feudalism, ii, 43
“Anglo-Saxon,” ii, 487-88
Anglo-Saxons, i, 564, 605, 612, ii, 47, 130, 149
Animals, i, 10, 16-23, 25-27,
52-57, 64, 66, 67, 102, 105,
112, 116, 128, 254. (_See also_ Mammals)
Anio, the, i, 458, 610
Anna Comnena (kom nē´ n_ă_), ii, 79
Annam, i, 634, 640, ii, 262, 467, 470
Anne, queen, ii, 226
Anselm, St., ii, 171
Antarctic birds, i, 44
Antigonus (ăn tig´ ō n_ŭ_s), i, 395
Antimony, i, 106
Antioch, i, 529, 589, 598, 604, 617-21, ii, 19, 78-81, 610
Antiochus (ăn tī´ ȯ k_ŭ_s) III, i, 474, 482, 483
Antiochus IV, i, 572
Antonines, i, 526-31, 537-40, ii, 610
Antoninus (ăn tō nī´ n_ŭ_s), Marcus Aurelius, i, 526-28, 540, ii, 153, 610
Antoninus Pius, i, 526, 530, ii, 610
Antony, i, 512, 514, 515
Antwerp, ii, 180, 184
Anu, i, 245
Anubis (_ă_ nū´ bis), Egyptian god, i, 236
Anytus(ăn´ i t_ŭ_s), i, 352
Apamea (ăp _ă_ mē´ _ă_), i, 621
Apes, i, 65-67, 230;
anthropoid, i, 57, 63, 65-66, 73
Aphelion, i, 30-34
Apion, i, 500
Apis (ā´ pis), i, 382, 412, 413, 590
Apollinaris Sidonius, i, 607
Apollo, i, 313, 325, 376, 611
Apollonius (ă p_ŏ_ lō´ ni _ŭ_s), i, 402
Appian Way, i, 461, 505
Apples, i, 113
Appomattox Court House, ii, 444, 623
Apuleius (ăp ū lē´ _ŭ_s), i, 607
Aquileia (ă kwē lā´ y_ă_), i, 461, 559
Aquinas (_ă_ kwī´ n_ă_s), ii, 168, 171
Arabia, i, 37, 109, 121, 154, 156, 160, 184, 196,
197, 218, 229, 273, 281, 295,
401, 533, 618, 624, 634, ii, 1-6, 11, 17, 18, 24,
51, 75, 105. (_See also_ Arabs)
Arabian Nights, the, ii, 32
Arabic language and literature, i, 148, 153,
530-31, 623, ii, 3-4, 22, 29, 31, 34-35, 159
Arabs, i, 188, 217, 327, 565, 570, 634, ii,
1-8, 15-21, 28, 32, 39, 41, 61, 67, 114, 149, 159, 257, 613;
culture of, i, 636, ii, 34-39, 88, 149, 168, 174-75
Aral sea, i, 153, 159, 387
Aral-Caspian region, i, 317
Arameans, i, 192, 218, 258, 259, 265, 570, 631, ii, 1
Arbela (är bē´ l_ă_), battle of, i, 384, 479, ii, 608
Arcadius, i, 554, ii, 611
Archæopteryx (är kē op´ t_ĕ_r iks), i, 45
Archæozoic (är kē ō zō´ ik) period, i, 9. (_See also_ Azoic)
Archer, William, ii, 473
Archers, i, 370
Archimedes (är ki mē´ dēz), i, 402, 476, 534
Architecture, ii, 60, 179
Arctic birds, i, 44;
Circle, i, 632;
Ocean, i, 153;
seas, ii, 142
Ardashir (ar dă shēr´) I, i, 617, 625, ii, 610
Ardennes, ii, 514
Argentine republic, i, 161, ii, 457
Argon, ii, 119
Argonne, ii, 329
Argos, i, 453, 454
Ariadne (ăr i ăd´ ni), i, 216
Arians (är´ i _ă_nz), i, 592, 601
Aridæus (ăr i dē´ _ŭ_s), i, 375, 394
Aristagoras (ăr is tăg´ _ŏ_ răs), i, 341, 342
Aristarchus, i, 384
Aristides (ăr is tī´ dēz), i, 312, 313, 337, 346
Aristocracy, i, 188, 265, 308
Aristodemus (ăr is t_ŏ_ dē´ m_ŭ_s), i, 336
Aristophanes (ăr is tof´ _ă_ nēz), i, 221, 355, ii, 607
Aristotle, i, 220, 305, 314, 357-59, 379, 383, 392,
397, 402, 411, 434, 493, 530, 562,
ii, 35, 37, 88, 146, 168-69, 173, 245, 419, 432;
_Politics_ of, i, 308, 309, 462, 467, ii, 169
Arithmetic, i, 219
Arius (ȧ rī´ ŭs), i, 592, 600, 648
Arizona, ii, 505
Ark of bulrushes, i, 209
Ark of the Covenant, i, 245, 284-88
Arles (arl), i, 600, 601, 609, ii, 611
Armadillo, giant, i, 102, 207
Armenia (and the Armenians), i, 169, 318, 395,
505, 523, 526, 548, 549, 603, 616, 620,
ii, 21, 64, 72, 114, 118, 121, 125, 153
Armenian language, i, 151, 169, ii, 138
Arno, i, 451, 460, 461
Arras, ii, 324, 517
Arrow, i, 508, 549
Arrow heads, i, 104, 107, 114, 130
Arrow straighteners, i, 90, 99
Arsacids (ăr săs’ idz), i, 523, 616, ii, 610
Arses, i, 342
Art, Buddhist, i, 428;
Cretan, i, 215;
Neolithic, i, 130;
Palæolithic, i, 92-99, 123
Artabanus (ăr tă bā’ nŭs), i, 335
Artaxerxes II, i, 342, 363
Artaxerxes III, i, 342
Arthur, king, i, 531
Artillery, i, 372, ii, 124
Artisans, i, 264-269
Artois (ă twă’), Count of. (_See_ Charles X)
Aryan, definition of, i, 298;
languages and literature, i, 133, 151-55, 161-64, 167-69,
173, 298, 387, 446, ii, 247;
peoples and civilisations, i, 152, 160, 167 _sqq._,
189, 194, 201, 232-33, 243-44, 247, 281-82, 298-300, 305,
315-18, 387, 415-16,
446-48, 545, 549-51, 558, ii, 144, 168, 184, 190, 490, 605
Aryan Way, the, i, 417, 424, 433, 440, 449
As, Roman coin, i, 471
Ascalon, i, 282
Asceticism, i, 418, 420
Ashdod, i, 245, 282
Ashley, Sir W., ii, 287
Ashtaroth (ăsh’ tă roth), i, 282, 286, 288
Asia, general and early period, i, 56, 59, 75, 77,
86, 100, 102, 108, 109, 118, 153, 157-160, 195, 273,
299, 317, 318, 536, 542-49, 551, 557, 624, 627, ii,
69, 98, 105-08, 114, 153, 168, 185, 247, 449, 464, 610;
Greeks in, i, 327, 375, 390, 396;
Romans in, i, 397, 482, 501, 533, 539;
tribes and people of, i, 508, 545-52, ii, 113, 127, 134, 137, 259, 266;
Christianity in, i, 517, 597, 604, 617, ii, 79, 114, 116, 117;
Turks in, i, 618-23, ii, 24, 28, 51, 64, 66, 121, 123;
voyages and travels in, i, 627-29, 642-43, ii, 187, 193, 194, 462
Asia, Central, i, 102, 138, 159, 160, 298, 541, 547, ii, 32, 139, 194, 261;
tribes, people, and civilization of, i, 184, 387, 507, 604, ii, 127
Asia, Eastern, i, 140-41
Asia, South-eastern, languages of, i, 157
Asia, Western, i, 89, 145, ii, 106, 168;
tribes, people, and civilization of, i, 141, 145, 218, 234, ii, 168
Asia Minor, i, 107, 109, 153, 196, 220, 265, 298, 318,
327, 395, 503-06, 509, 617, 622, ii, 28, 114, 137, 153;
tribes and people of, i, 189, 213, 298, 315-17, 388, 447-48;
Greeks in, i, 300, 302, 304, 308, 315-16, 340, ii, 606;
Gauls in, i, 395, 449, ii, 608;
Turks in, ii, 31, 33, 72, 106, 114, 121
Asiatics, intellectual status of, ii, 462
Asoka (ă shō’ ka), King, i, 196, 411, 431, 432, 489,
628, 646, ii, 133, 608
Aspasia (ăs pā’ shi ȧ), i, 345-6, 349-50, 355
Asquith, Rt. Hon. H. H., ii, 432, 496, 518
Ass, wild, i, 217
Assam, ii, 453
Assisi (ă sē’ zi), ii, 93
Assur, i, 192, 412
Assurbanipal. (_See_ Sardanapalus)
Assyria (and Assyrians), i, 192-94, 199, 205, 216, 225, 240,
243-47, 256, 262, 277, 290-95, 300, 315-17, 319, 327, 342,
383, 384, 446, 526, 570, ii, 1, 244, 606
Assyrian language and writing, i, 153, 228
Asteroids, i, 4
Astrologers, ii, 175
Astronomy, i, 5, 240, 364, ii, 37, 114, 175-76
Athanasius, i, 592, 601, 648
Atheism, ii, 333
Athene (ă thē’ nē), i, 348
Athens, i, 262, 302-13, 330-52,
372, 378, 385, 457, 461, 467, 536, 589, 623, ii, 483, 502, 524;
social and political, i, 220, 309-12, 348, 352-57, 368, 460, ii, 147;
literature and learning, i, 343-66, 404, 405, 409, 613,
618, 637, 645, ii, 54, 612
Atkinson, C. F., ii, 332
Atkinson, J. J., i, 79, 125, 257, ii, 341
Atlantic Ocean, i, 75-76, 119, 120, 138, 153, 532, 640, ii, 22, 84, 193, 267;
navigation of, i, 217, ii, 185-88, 192, 387, 617
Atlantosaurus (ăt lăn to saw’ rŭs), i, 42
Atmosphere, i, 4, 5, 34
Aton (ä’ ton), Egyptian god, i, 250
Atonement, i, 575, 588
Attalus (ăt’ _ă_ l_ŭ_s), i, 375
Attalus I, i, 396
Attalus III, i, 397, 483, 499, ii, 609
Attica (ăt’ i k_ă_), i, 332-33, 457
Attila (ăt’ i l_ă_), i, 174, 557-59, 608, 628-29, ii, 42, 611
Aughrim, battle of, ii, 492
Augsburg, ii, 206, 210
Augurs, Roman, i, 464
Augustine, St., Bishop of Hippo, i, 592, 598, 604, 607, 612, ii, 56, 73, 611
Augustus Cæsar, Roman Emperor, i, 513-18, 522, 523, 535, 542, 598, ii, 75, 609
Aurangzeb. (_See_ Aurungzeb)
Aurelian, emperor, i, 528, 535, 553, 602, 617, ii, 610
Aurignac, i, 96
Aurignacian (aw rig nā’ sh_ŭ_n) age, i, 96, 97, 173
Aurochs (aw’ roks), i, 76, 92, 101
Aurungzeb (aw rŭng zāb’), ii, 133, 256, 453, 620
Ausculum, battle of, i, 453, ii, 608
Ausonius (aw sō’ ni ŭs), i, 607
Austerlitz, ii, 362, 622
Austin, Mary, i, 264
Australia, i, 37, 82, 206, 635, ii, 451, 456, 471, 472;
aborigines of, i, 98, 139-40, 172
Australian language, i, 162;
lung-fish, i, 25;
throwing-stick, i, 90
Australoids, i, 139, 141, 148, 159, 206
Austrasia, ii, 45, 47, 48, 613
Austria, ii, 200, 204, 233, 240-44, 251, 278, 314, 320, 327,
378-80, 400, 446-47;
wars with France, ii, 327, 332, 351, 355, 361, 368, 441, 621;
war with Prussia, ii, 442-45, 623;
in Great War, ii, 510, 531, 566, 624
Autocracy, i, 342, ii, 220
Automobiles, ii, 392
Avars, i, 560, 564, 616, 620, ii, 24, 48, 69, 113
Avebury, i, 110, 183, 196, 448
Avebury, Lord, i, 80, 106-07, 110, 115, 118, 134, ii, 426
Averroes (ă ver’ ō ēz), ii, 37, 88, 168, 171, 615
Avicenna (ăv i sen’ ă), ii, 37, 168, 614
Avignon (ă vē nyo_n_’), ii, 84, 99, 127, 148, 617
Axes, ancient, i, 104-07, 112-14, 132
Axis of earth, i, 57
Ayesha (I’ _ĕ_ shă), ii, 12, 26
Azilian age, i, 90, 94, 97, 101, 120, 133, 152
Azoic (ă zo’ ik) period, i, 9, 14, 17, 30
Azores, ii, 185
Aztecs, ii, 189-90
B
Baal, i, 237, 283, 292
Baalbek (bäl bek’), i, 621, ii, 3
Babel, Tower of, i, 190
Baber, ii, 133, 200, 256, 618
Baboons, i, 65, 67, 230
Babylon (and Babylonia), i, 192-201, 218-23, 228, 245-60,
263-67, 277-79, 290-95,
315, 317, 319-20, 326, 342, 364, 383, 385, 389, 394, 411-12, 416, 424,
436, 449, 483, 497, 508, 509, 533, 570, 583, 619-23, 631, 632,
ii, 1, 71, 130, 276, 342, 606, 607;
religion of, i, 238-42, 245-48, 278, 296, 400, 431
Bacchus, i, 515
Bacharach, ii, 180
Back Bay, ii, 290
Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam, i, 358, ii, 166, 176, 619
Bacon, Roger, ii, 168, 172-77, 385, 616
Bactria (and Bactrians), i, 385, 387-90, 396, 549, 616, ii, 138
Baden, ii, 445
Badr (bäd’ _ĕ_r), battle of, ii, 8, 28, 612
Baedeker, ii, 242
Baganda, i, 206
Bagaudæ, ii, 157
Bagdad, ii, 31-38, 61, 64, 70, 71, 76, 80, 106, 113, 126, 130, 522, 613, 618
Bagoas (bă gō’ ăs), i, 342
Bahamas, ii, 254, 255, 471
Baikal (bī käl’), ii, 108
Baldwin of Flanders, ii, 81, 168, 229
Balearic Isles, i, 556
Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J., ii, 552
Balkan peninsula, i, 102, 153, 196, 298, 300, 317, 395, 451,
ii, 58, 122, 139, 184, 446, 501, 509, 606, 624
Balkash, lake, ii, 108
Balkh, ii, 118
Ball, Dyer, i, 642
Ball, John, ii, 155, 156
Ball, Sir Robert, i, 30
Balliol College, ii, 96
Balloons, i, 5
Baltic Sea, i, 59, 102, 153, 159, 171, 510, 533, 539,
549-53, 641, ii, 53, 65, 71, 129, 182, 233, 235-36, 251, 266, 526
Baltimore, Lord, ii, 281
Baluchistan. (_See_ Beluchistan)
Bambyce (băm bī´ sē), i, 621
Bannockburn, ii, 175
Bantu, i, 158, 162, 189
Barbados, ii, 254
Barbarians, ii, 267-69
Barbarossa, Frederick. (_See_ Frederick I, emperor)
Barber, M. H., ii, 503
Barbusse, ii, 513
Barca family, i, 472, 473
Barcelona, ii, 51, 180
Bards, i, 172, 230
Baring, Maurice, ii, 503
Barley, i, 113, 172, 558
Baroda (bă rō´ d_ă_), ii, 257
Barons, Revolt of the, ii, 219
Barras (bä rä´), ii, 339, 350
Barrows, i, 109, 117, 144, 168, 171, 175, 176, 183, 196, 197
Barry, Comtesse du. (_See_ Du Barry)
Basle, Council of, ii, 100, 153, 617
Basque language, i, 161, 162, 167, 189;
race, i, 161, 162, 168, ii, 490
Basra, ii, 36, 522
Bassett, ii, 282
Bassompierre, ii, 318
Bastille, ii, 313, 621
Basu, Bhupendranath, i, 179, 181, 182
Basutoland, ii, 472
Batavian Republic, ii, 347
Bateman, T., i, 134
Bats, i, 43
Bauer, i, 359
Bauernstand, i, 268
Bavaria (and Bavarians), ii, 48, 57, 178, 445, 485
Bayezid (bï _ĕ_ zēd´) II, Sultan, ii, 126, 617
Baylen, ii, 364
Bazaine, General, ii, 445
Beaconsfield, Earl of, ii, 227, 426, 430, 436, 447, 455, 487
Beal, i, 642 \
Bears, i, 69, 76, 78, 93, 94
Beauharnais, Josephine de, ii, 350, 364, 374
Beauty, artistic, i, 215
Beaver, European, i, 69
Beazley, Raymond, ii, 67, 129, 185
Bede, the Venerable, i, 608, ii, 50, 613
Bedouins, i, 264, 278, 622, ii, 3, 8, 10, 17, 24
Beech, fossil, i, 51
Beer, G. L., ii, 287
Bees, i, 51
Behar, ii, 608
Behring Straits, i, 57, 102, 159, 160
Bektashi, order of dervishes, ii, 122
Bel, i, 245, 246, 283, 326
Belgium, ii, 46, 78, 199, 230, 327, 331, 332, 339, 347, 371, 381, 509-14, 622
Belisarius, i, 611, ii, 612
Bellarmine (bel´ ăr mēn), card., ii, 164
_Bellerophon_ (b_ĕ_ ler´ _ŏ_ fon), frigate, ii, 372
Bel-Marduk (bel mär´ dook), i, 245-52, 385, 412, 602
Belshazzar, i, 247, 326
Beluchistan (bel oo chi stän´), ii, 471;
languages of, i, 189
Benaiah, i, 287
Benares (be nä´ rēz), i, 417-22, 427, 449, 548, 628
Benedict, St., i, 610-14, ii, 35, 97, 611, 612
Benedictines, i, 612-13, ii, 149, 165
Beneventum, i, 454
Bengal, i, 181, 388, 416, 419, ii, 133, 257, 258
Bengal, Bay of, i, 160
Benin, i, 489
Benjamin, tribe of, i, 284
Benson, Hugh, i, 591
Beowulf (bā´ ō wulf), i, 176, 182, 198
Berar, ii, 133
Berber language, i, 154, 161, 168
Berbers, i, 206, 472, 565, ii, 41
Bergen, ii, 180, 182, 185
Berkeley, George, ii, 492
Berlière, i, 612
Berlin, Treaty of, ii, 447, 475, 558, 623
Bermuda, ii, 471
Bernard, brother, ii, 94
Bes, Egyptian god, i, 236
Bessemer process, ii, 388
Bessus, satrap, i, 385-86
Bethlehem, i, 574
Beth-shan, i, 286
Bhurtpur (bhũrt poor´), ii, 256
Bible, the, i, 193, 281, 282, 290, 402, 411, 570, 572,
ii, 60, 92, 96, 150, 151,
159, 162, 167, 211, 244
Bigg, C., i, 625
Birch tree, i, 51
Birds, i, 5, 43, 44, 45, 54
Birkenhead, Lord. (_See_ Smith, Sir F. E.)
Birkett, ii, 129
Birth-rate in ancient Athens, i, 314
Biscay, Bay of, ii, 361
Bismarck, Prince, ii, 442-46, 482, 483, 623
Bison (bī´ s_ŏ_n), i, 69, 70, 76, 92, 93, 101, 207
Bithynia, i, 395, 483, 500-06, 511, 560, 600
Black Death, ii, 153-54, 617
Black Friars, ii, 95
Black Hundred, ii, 424
Black lead, i, 9
Black Prince, ii, 179
Black Sea, i, 120, 153, 159, 196, 260, 299, 300, 316,
340, 346, 395, 508, 510, 549-53, 600, 606, 621, ii, 66, 71, 76, 110
Blake, Admiral, ii, 225, 257
Bleriot, M., ii, 624
Blind bards, i, 174
Blood sacrifice, i, 588, 590, ii, 149
Blue Mountains, ii, 280
Blücher, Marshal, ii, 371
Blues, faction of the, ii, 247
Blumenbach, i, 141
Blunt, W. S., i, 146, ii, 500
Bo Tree, i, 421, 432
Boadicea (bō ă di sē´ ă), i, 526, ii, 609
Boars, i, 69
Boats, i, 209-12.
(_See also_ Ships)
Body, painting of, i, 93, 99, 100
Bœtia (bē ō´ shi ă), i, 337
Boer Republics, ii, 460, 483, 489
Boer War, i, 485, ii, 424, 460, 623
Boethius (bō ē´ thi ŭs), ii. 37
Bohemia (and Bohemians), i, 554, ii, 51, 76, 152, 153, 162, 234
Bohemond, ii, 79
Bokhara (bō khä´ rä), i, 546, ii, 37, 110, 118
Boleyn, Anne, ii, 206
Bolivar (bol´ i vär), General, ii, 378
Bologna (bō lōn´ yă), ii, 167, 168, 180, 205
Bolshevists, ii, 411, 527, 536, 539, 624
Bombay, ii, 258
Bonaparte, Joseph, ii, 361, 364, 378, 622
Bonaparte, Louis, ii, 361
Bonaparte, Lucien, ii, 354
Bonaparte, Napoleon.
(_See_ Napoleon I)
Boncelles (bo_n_ sel´), i, 67
Bone carvings, i, 95-99;
implements, i, 90, 96-99, 114
Boniface, St., ii, 48, 51, 613
Boniface VIII, Pope, ii, 99, 616
Boniface, Roman Governor, i, 556
Book-keeping, Aramean, i, 258
Books, i, 253, 405-09, ii, 159.
(_See also_ Printing)
Bordeaux, ii, 180
Borgia, Alexander.
(_See_ Alexander VI, Pope)
Borgia, Cæsar and Lucrezia, ii, 195-96
Boris, king of Bulgaria, ii, 70, 614
Borneo, i, 147, 148, 640
Bosnia, ii, 484, 624
Bosphorus, i, 120, 153, 302, 303,
315, 327, 329, 334, 340, 380,
395, 561, 600, 619, 621, ii, 29, 31, 78, 122
Bosses, American, i, 308
Boston, Mass., ii, 289-94
Bostra, i, 623
Botany Bay, ii, 451
Botticelli (bot i chel’ i), ii, 184
Boulogne, ii, 180, 362
Bourbon, Constable of, ii, 204, 618
Bourbon, Duke of, ii, 314
Bourbons, ii, 327, 356, 370, 371
Bourgeois (boor zhwä’), Léon, ii, 560
Bournville, ii, 406
Bow and arrow, i, 98, 114, 507-08
Bowmen, Mongol, ii, 119
Boxer rising, ii, 463, 624
Boyle, Robert, ii, 390, 492
Boyne, battle of the, ii, 492, 620
Brachiopods (brăk’ i ō podz), i, 10, 21
Brachycephalic (brăk i s_ĕ_ făl’ ik) skull, i, 142, 143
Brahe (brä’ h_ĕ_), Tycho, ii, 175, 619
Brahma, i, 437, ii, 134
Brahminism (and Brahmins),
i, 269-72, 416-17, 427, 430, 440, 629, 645-48, ii, 108, 137, 256, 454
Brailsford, ii, 543
Brain, i, 56, 79, 87
Brandenburg, elector of, ii, 236
Brass, i, 106
Brazil, ii, 192, 193, 200, 444
Bread in Neolithic Age, i, 113
Bread-fruit tree, i, 51
Breasted, J. H., i, 248, 256, 294
Breathing, i, 23-28
Bréhier, L., ii, 61
Bremen, ii, 69, 180, 182
Brennus, i, 450, ii, 607
Breslau, ii, 180
Brest-Litovsk (brest lē tovsk’), ii, 530
Breton language, i, 168
Briareus (brī’ ă roos), i, 274
Brienne, ii, 349
Brindisi (brēn’ dē zē), ii, 67
Bristol, ii, 154
Britain, i, 59, 113, 145, 196, 273, 489, 534, 613, ii, 41, 51, 66;
invasions of, ii, 554, 605, ii, 130, 610, 611;
Roman, i, 219, 507, 509, 522, 525, 526, 564, i, 40, 50, 610;
Keltic, i, 299, 554.
(_See also_ England _and_ Great Britain)
British Army, officers of, ii, 516
British Association, ii, 420
British Channel, i, 170
British Civil Air Transport Commission, ii, 392
British Empire
(1815), ii, 451;
(1914), ii, 470-72
British Empire, political life of, i, 493
British Museum, i, 630, ii, 398
“British” nationality, ii, 488-89
“British schools,” ii, 396
Britons, ancient.
(_See_ Britain)
Brittany, i, 147, 171, 554, ii, 52, 200
Broglie, Marshal de, ii, 313
Brontosaurus (bron tö saw’ rŭs), i, 40
Bronze, i, 106, 118, 172, 173, 207;
Chinese vessels of, i, 204;
ornaments, i, 114;
weapons, i, 106
Bronze Age, i, 97, 108, 132, 133, 196, 197, 213
Brown, Campbell, ii, 38
Browne, Jukes, i, 50, 119
Bruce, Robert the, ii, 179
Bruges (broozh), ii, 180, 182, 229
Brunellesco (broo ne les’ kō), ii, 183
Brunswick, Duke of, ii, 327, 330
Brussels, ii, 331, 514
Brutus, i, 490, 513
Bryce, ii, 54
Bubonic plague, i, 608
Buch, C. D., i, 300
Bucknall, i, 50
Buda-Pesth (boo’ dă pest), ii, 205
Buddha (bood’ă), i, 196, 270, 420, 422, 433, 438, 449, 533,
573-74, 582, 586, 591, 610, 624,
626, 645, 646-47, ii, 13, 93, 263, 296, 607;
life of, i, 416 _sqq._;
teaching of, i, 422 _sqq._, 436, ii, 16, 402
Buddhism, i, 270, 411, 416 _sqq._, 582, 610, 626, 629,
632, 639, 645, 646, ii, 6,
106, 108, 114, 119, 127, 261.
(_See also_ Buddha)
Buddhist art, i, 428
Budge, Wallis, i, 197, 198, 249
Buffon, Comte de, ii, 419, 426
Building, i, 197
Bulgaria (and Bulgarians), i, 328, 522, 553, 606, ii, 24,
58, 69-72, 92, 97, 122-24, 130, 446, 501, 502, 522, 531, 614
Bulgarian atrocities, ii, 623
Bulgarian language, i, 168
Bull fights, Cretan, i, 274
Bunbury, i, 217
Bürgerstand, i, 268
Burgoyne, General, ii, 292
Burgundy (and Burgundians), i, 554, 606, ii, 48, 178, 200, 229, 244, 320
Burial, early, i, 84. 93, 109, 117, 123, 130, 167, 171, 175, 197, 545
Burke, Edmund, ii, 289, 492
Burmah (and Burmese), i, 114, 203, ii, 119, 262, 471
Burmese language, i, 157
Burnet, i, 349
Burning the dead, i, 171
Burrell, Prof., i, 6
Burton, Richard, i, 189
Bury, J. B., i, 305, 327, 454, 464, ii, 112
Bushman language, i, 162
Bushmen, i, 68, 95, 98, 141, 224
Butler, M. E., i, 85
Butler, Samuel, i, 150
Butter in Neolithic Age, i, 112
Butterflies, i, 17, 51
Buxar, ii, 258, 621
Byng, L. C., i, 541
Byzantine architecture, ii, 60
Byzantine church.
(_See_ Greek Church)
Byzantine Empire, i, 522, 562, 606, 617, 636, ii, 17-21,
24, 28, 39, 42, 53, 58,
60, 64-69, 72, 76, 79, 80, 81, 182, 613, 614
Byzantium (bi zăn’ tyŭm), i, 380,
634, ii, 18, 31, 35, 57, 62, 74, 105, 126, 129,
247. (_See also_ Constantinople)
Cabul (kä’ bul), i, 386, ii, 133
Cadbury, Messrs., ii, 406
Cadiz (kā’ diz), ii, 352
Caen (kā_n_), ii, 325
Cæsar, title, etc., i, 526, 564, 581, 589, 594, ii, 56, 59
Cæsar, Julius, i, 113, 133, 196, 399,
465, 487, 493, 505, 510-17, 529, 534, 542,
ii, 51, 351, 353, 609
Cæsars, the, i, 526, 538, 560
Cahors, ii, 202
Caiaphas (kī’ _ă_ făs), i, 585
Caillaux, M., ii, 510
Cainozoic (kī n_ŏ_ zō’ ik) period, i, 12, 13, 14, 35, 37, 46, 49-56, 66
Cairo, ii, 36, 37
Calabria, i, 476, ii, 67, 68
Calcutta, ii, 258;
University Commission, ii, 137
Calder, Admiral, ii, 362
Calendar, the, i, 129
Calicut, ii, 187, 257
California, i, 264
Californian Indians, i, 98
Caligula (kă lig’ ū lă), i, 525, ii, 609
Caliphs, ii, 17, 18, 24-34, 41, 61, 64, 71, 126, 144, 612, 613, 618
Callicratidas (kă li krā’ ti dăs), i, 378
Callimachus (kă lim´ ă kŭs), i, 405
Callisthenes (kă lis´ th_ĕ_ nēz), i, 392
Calmette, ii, 510
Calonne, ii, 312, 323
Calvinism, ii, 164
Cambodia, i, 640
Cambridge, ii, 180;
University of, i, 530, ii, 437, 486
Cambridge, Mass., ii, 291
“Cambulac,” ii, 118
Cambyses (kăm bī´ sēz), i, 326, 382, ii, 607
Camels, i, 56, 217, 323
Camillus (că mil´ ŭs), i, 459, 483, 499, 502, ii, 607
Campanella, ii, 211
Campo Formio, peace of, ii, 351, 621
Camptosaurus (kămp tō saw´ rus) i, 40
Canaan (and the Canaanites), i, 278-83, ii, 1
Canada, i, 9, 161, ii, 254, 279, 285, 292, 451, 457, 471, 472, 621
Canadian dawn animal, i, 9
Canary Isles, ii, 185
Candahar, i, 389
Candles, ceremonial, i, 413, 414
Candolle (kä_n_ dōl´), de, i, 184
Cannæ (kăn´ ē), battle of, i, 476, 479, ii, 608
Cannes, ii, 371
Cannibalism, i, 167, ii, 156, 189, 190
Canning, George, ii, 436
Cannon, ii, 235, 268
Canoes, i, 210
Canterbury, ii, 50;
archbishops of, ii, 50, 613
Canton, i, 634, 642, 647
Canusium (că nūz´ i ŭm), i, 536
Canute, ii, 66, 614
Cape Colony, ii, 460
Capernaum, i, 584
Capet (kă pā´), Hugh, ii, 62, 178, 614
Capitalism, ii, 168, 276, 398-99, 407-08, 535
Caporetto, battle of, ii, 529
Cappadocia, i, 323, 395, 620, 623
Capua (kăp´ ū ă), i, 476, 505
Carboniferous rocks, i, 29
Cardinals, ii, 100, 127
Caria (kā´ ri ă), i, 375, 621
Caribou (kăr i boo´), i, 78, 124, 137
Carlovingians, ii, 62, 614
Carlyle, Thomas, ii, 240, 307, 313 _sqq._, 336
Carnac, i, 109, 171
Carnivores, early type of, i, 56
Carnivorous animals, i, 43
Carnot (kär nō´), L. N. M., ii, 339, 350
Carolana, ii, 282
Carolina, ii, 253, 282, 283, 284, 290
Carpathians, ii, 69
Carrhæ, i, 508, 540, 616, ii, 609
Carson, Sir Edward, i, 312, ii, 424, 497, 498, 499
Carthage (and the Carthaginians), i, 196, 212, 216-18, 241,
274, 294, 303, 352, 382, 401, 445, 448, 453, 497,
509-14, 532, 550, 556, 560, 569, 571, ii, 41, 89, 144c, 184, 606, 608;
war with Rome, i, 453, 467-85
Carvings, Palæolithic.
(_See_ Art)
Casement, Sir Roger, ii, 499
Cash, Chinese, i, 631
Caspian Sea, i, 120, 153, 159, 196, 299, 317, 318,
327, 387, 507, 509, 542, 549,
553, 627, 634, ii, 67, 110, 154, 609, 610, 615
Caspian-Pamir region, i, 549
Cassander, i, 395
Cassiodorus (kăs i ō dōr´ ŭs), i, 612, 614, ii, 36, 40, 612
Cassiterides (kăs i ter´ i dēz), i, 217
Cassius, Spurius, i, 458
Caste, i, 268-71, 416, 431
Castelmaine, Lady, ii, 226
Castile, ii, 188, 200
Cat, i, 56, 230
Catalonians, ii, 185
Catapult, i, 372
Caterpillars, i, 83
Cathars, ii, 92
“Cathay,” ii, 118
Catherine the Great, ii, 242, 264, 267, 303, 620
Catherine II, ii, 251, 363
Catholicism, ii, 142, 147-50, 160 _sqq._,
164, 171, 194, 211, 234, 239, 248,
281, 490-94
Catiline, i, 511
Cato, Marcus Porcius, i, 473, 477, 479, 486, 489, 498, 528
Cattle, i, 69, 105, 219.
(_See also_ Animals)
Caucasian languages, i, 151, 189
Caucasians, i, 141-42, 151-159, ii, 142
Caucasus (kaw´ kă sŭs), i, 106, 141, 161, 327, 620
Caudine Forks, ii, 608
Cavaliers, ii, 222-23
Cavalry, i, 370
Cave drawings, i, 93, 94;
dwellings, i, 167;
men, i, 66, 72, 76, 78, 88
Cavour, ii, 441
Cawnpore, ii, 455
Caxton, William, ii, 159
Celebes (sel’ e bēz), pile dwellings, i, 109
Celibacy, i, 414, ii, 74, 149
Celsus, i, 403
Celt-Iberian script, i, 228
Celtic. (_See_ Keltic)
Celts, bronze, i, 132
Cenotaph (Whitehall), ii, 568
Cephalus (sef’ ă lŭs), i, 306
Ceremonies, early use of, i, 127
Cervantes (sũr văn’ tēz), ii, 140
Ceylon, i, 421, 432, 533, 643, ii, 257, 471
Chadwick, i, 177
Chæronea (kēr ō nē’ ă), battle of, i, 369, 372, ii, 607
Chalcedon (kăl sē’ d_ŏ_n), i, 602, 618
Chaldea (and the Chaldeans), i, 194, 200, 247, 265, 291,
319, 344, 385, 508, ii, 1, 607
Chaldean writing, i, 228
Chalons, ii, 322
Champagne, depart., ii, 330, 517, 527
Chancellor, Lord, of England, ii, 162
Chandernagore, ii, 258
Chandragupta (chăn dră goop’ t_ă_), i, 430, 445, ii, 608
Chang Daoling, i, 433
Chang-tu, i, 434
Channa, the charioteer, i, 417
Channing, ii, 278, 280, 294, 338
Chapman, G., i, 175
Charcoal, ii, 275
Chariots, i, 177, 192, 370, 384
Charlemagne, emperor, i, 433, 560, 632, 633,
ii, 47-48, 51-54, 56-62, 69, 97, 98,
116, 133, 148, 199, 208, 215, 238, 360, 361, 614
Charles V, emperor, ii, 140, 164, 182, 199 _sqq._,
229, 232, 242, 376, 618
Charles I, king of England, ii, 217-25, 236, 240,
253, 281-82, 317, 376
Charles II, king of England, ii, 177, 225, 238,
243, 253, 281-82, 376
Charles VII, king of France, ii, 179
Charles IX, king of France, ii, 282
Charles X, king of France, ii, 314, 378, 622
Charles III, king of Spain, ii, 267
_Charlotte Dundas_, steamboat, ii, 387
Charmides (kär’ mi dēz), i, 351
Charon, i, 489
Charter House, London, ii, 154
Château Thierry, ii, 531
Châteauroux, Duchess of, ii, 240
Chatham, Earl of.
(_See_ Pitt, William)
Chaucer, ii, 160
Cheese, i, 112
Chellean age, i, 60, 70, 78-81, 87
Chelles, i, 78
Chemistry, ii, 38
Chemosh (kē’ mosh), i, 288
Chen, L. Y., i, 208, 211, 253, 641
Chen Tuan, i, 433
Cheops (kē’ ops), i, 198
Chephren (kef’ ren), i, 198, 248-49
Cherry-tree, i, 505
Chieftains, i, 134, 178
Child labour, ii, 404-05
Chimpanzee, i, 63, 67-74, 218
Chin, absence of, i, 72
China, i, 83, 106, 114, 160, 432, 532, 626, 627,
ii, 17, 117, 134, 179, 194, 261-62;
history (_early history and Great age of_), i,
196, 201-06, 252-53, 271-72, 388, 449, 508, 528,
541-43, 545-50, 617, 630-36, ii, 606, 610, 612;
(_10th to 18th century_), ii, 106, 108-14, 127-28,
130, 134, 154, 261-62, 266,
616, 617;
(_20th century_), ii, 461-69, 624;
Christianity in, i, 604, ii, 116-17, 119, 166;
civilization and culture, i, 147, 148, 183, 196,
201-03, 208, 271-72, 307, 408,
541, 543, 626-27, 630-31, 633 _sqq._, ii, 38, 106, 147, 159;
other religions of, i, 252, 428-29, 433, 437, ii, 261;
social, i, 181, 269-70, 271-72, 497, 630, ii, 464.
(_See also_ Chow, Han, Kin, Ming, Shang, Sung, Suy,
Tang, Tsing, Wei, and Yuan dynasties)
China, Great Wall of, i, 205, 272, 526, 643, ii, 608
Chinese, the, i, 63, 157;
classics, i, 225, 639;
coinage, i, 631;
emperor, i, 240, 252, 557;
language, i, 157, 158, 162, 224-26, 638;
script, i, 224-27, 272, 638-40, ii, 262
Chios (kī’ os), ii, 79
Chnemu, Egyptian god, i, 239
Chosroes (koz’ rō ēz) I, i, 618, ii, 22, 211, 612
Chosroes II, i, 523, 618-19, 624, ii, 3, 17, 82, 612
Chow dynasty, i, 196, 204, 205, 253, 433, ii, 606
Christ. (_See_ Jesus of Nazareth)
Christ Church, Oxford, ii, 427
Christian IX, ii, 442
Christian era, ii, 609
Christian science, ii, 169
Christianity, i, 296, 519, 569, 617, ii, 129, 161, 244, 264-65, 421, 422;
history (_early_), i, 491, 586 _sqq._, 601-05, ii, 51, 53-54, 611;
(_middle ages_), ii, 50 _sqq._, 63, 71-75, 84-86, 95-96, 151-53;
and Buddhism, i, 429, 441;
and Islam, ii, 14-16, 20-21, 28-34, 41 _sqq._, 63-64, 80 _sqq._, 114-15, 149;
and Judaism, ii, 149;
and learning, i, 609 _sqq._;
missions and propaganda, i, 488, 617, 625, 634, ii, 3-6, 48-54,
70, 114-22, 126-27, 134, 146-47, 357, 394-96, 465;
official, i, 601 _sqq._, ii, 54, 265, 418, 425;
ritual of, i, 413-14, 441, 538-39, 591-92, ii, 90-91, 148-152;
sects, i, 592, ii, 35, 106, 116-17;
spirit of, i, 414, 538-39, 576-77, ii, 157-58, 402.
(_See also_ Jesus of Nazareth)
Chronicles, book of the, i, 282
Chronology, ii, 51
Ch’u, state of, i, 205
Chu Hsi, i, 641
Church, the, i, 600-05, ii, 38, 85-88, 91, 92, 97-101,
150, 164, 176, 177-78, 272, 617
Church, Sir A. H., i, 7
Churches, orientation of, i, 238
Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston, ii, 523
Cicero, M. Tullius, i, 131, 487, 491, 513, 516
Cilicia, i, 487, 620, ii, 72, 79, 118
Cilician Gates, ii, 32, 78
Cimmerians, i, 300, 316, 318, 388, 543, ii, 121
Cincinnatus, Order of, ii, 357
Circumcision, i, 147
Cistercian order, ii, 150
Citizenship, i, 309, 311-12
City States, Chinese, i, 204;
Greek, i, 305-14, 362, 363, 370, 454;
Sumerian, i, 191
Civilization, i, 635 _sqq._, ii, 138, 144, 157-58, 216;
Aegean, i, 213-16;
Hellenic, i, 302 _sqq._;
prehistoric, i, 145, 169 _sqq._, 175-78;
primitive, i, 182-208, ii, 143.
(_See also_ Culture)
Clans, i, 171
Class consciousness, ii, 399, 407-08;
distinction, i, 188, 267-68;
war, i, 168
Classes, social, i, 263-72
Classics, study of the, ii, 390, 428
Classification, ii, 169
Claudian, the historian, i, 607
Claudius, emperor (A.D. 41-54), i, 525, 528, ii, 609
Claudius, emperor (A.D. 268-270), i, 553, ii, 610
Claudius, Appius, decemvir, i, 458
Claudius, Appius, the Censor, i, 461-466
Claudius, Consul, i, 468
Clay documents, i, 190, 197-98, 246;
modelling, Palæolithic, i, 95, 99
Clemenceau, G. B., ii, 552-56, 566, 624
Clement V (pope), ii, 99, 616
Clement VII (anti-pope), ii, 100, 617
Cleon, i, 350
Cleopatra, i, 510-15
Cleopatra (wife of Philip II), i, 374, 376
Clergy, taxation of, ii, 86
Clermont, ii, 74, 615
_Clermont_, steamer, ii, 387
Cleveland, President, ii, 505
Climate, change of, i, 18, 20, 30-37, 46,
51, 52, 57, 100, 108, 170, 177, 317, 545, 550;
effect of, i, 35-36, 232, 317
Clitus (klī’ tŭs), i, 392, ii, 145
Clive, Robert, Lord, ii, 258, 453, 487, 621
Clodius, i, 511
Clothing, i, 99, 109, 114
Clovis, ii, 46, 47, 611
Cluniac order, ii, 150
Clyde, Firth of, ii, 387
Cnossos (nos’ os), i, 196, 213-16, 223, 234, 257,
264, 281, 300, 303, 315, 318, 354, 446, 447, ii, 605
Coal, i, 28, 29, 34, 38, 635, ii, 275, 386, 392
Cockroaches, i, 28
Code Napoléon, ii, 358
Cogul, i, 354
Coinage, earliest, i, 220;
Athenian, i, 220;
Bactrian, i, 396;
Carthaginian, i, 468;
Ephthalite, i, 629;
Lydian, i, 316;
pre-Roman British, i, 396;
Roman, i, 455, 471
Coinage of stamped leather, ii, 89
Coke, ii, 275
Cole, Langton, i, 212
Collectivism, ii, 412
Cologne, ii, 60, 180, 182
Colonies, British, ii, 279-83, 471;
scramble for, ii, 449-61
Colorado, i, 39
Colosseum, i, 609, ii, 41
Columba, St., ii, 50
Columbus, Bartholomew, ii, 186
Columbus, Christopher, ii, 185 _sqq._, 200, 605, 617
Comedy, Greek, i, 363
Comet, i, 4, 608
Commagene (kom _ă_ jē’ nē), i, 621
Commodus (kom’ _ŏ_ dŭs), i, 527-29
Commons, House of, ii, 219-28, 236, 286, 298, 313, 400
Commune, French Revolution, ii, 328, 336
Communism, ii, 153-58, 270 _sqq._, 341, 410, 412
Communities, i, 171, ii, 142-48
Community of obedience, ii, 296;
of will, ii, 296
Comnena, Anna.
(_See_ Anna)
Comnenus, Alexius.
(_See_ Alexius)
“Companions,” equestrian order, i, 369, 371
Compass, i, 635, ii, 193
Concert of Europe, ii, 373, 377, 384
Concord, Mass., ii, 290, 294
Concord, Temple of, i, 499, ii, 607
Condor, the, i, 5
Condorcet (ko_n_ dôr sā’), ii, 358
Confucianism, i, 433-40, 642
Confucius, i, 196, 270, 433-40, 449, 582, 618, 624, 636, ii, 607
Congo, i, 159, ii, 460
Congregationalism, ii, 163
Congress, American, ii, 300
Congress, 1st Colonial, ii, 290
Conifers, i, 38
Connecticut, ii, 281, 282, 290, 296
Conrad II, ii, 63
Conrad III, ii, 63, 80
Constance, ii, 151
Constance, Council of, ii, 96, 100, 151, 617
Constantine I the Great, i, 433, 488, 517,
529, 553, 560, 594, 597, 602, 615, 617, 618, 625, 647, 648,
ii, 82, 133, 136, 268, 611, 612
Constantine, King of Greece, ii, 524
Constantinople, i, 554, 557, 559-65, 600-08, 614-19,
ii, 2, 18-20, 24, 28, 57, 67, 70-72, 76-82, 97, 110,
118-24, 141, 168, 182, 247, 440, 483,
502, 509, 611, 612, 613, 614, 615, 616, 617.
(_See also_ Byzantium)
Consuls, Roman, i, 455
Convicts sent to New England, ii, 284
Cooking, i, 105, 106, 113
Co-operative Societies, ii, 406
Copernicus (kō per’ ni kŭs), ii, 175, 618
Copper, i, 4, 105, 207, 217, ii, 189, 389
Copper axes, i, 132
Coptic language, i, 154
Coracles, i, 209
Corday, Charlotte, ii, 325
Cordoba (kôr’ dō bă), ii, 36, 37
Corfinium, i, 464
Corfu (kôr foo’), ii, 180
Corinth (and Corinthians), i, 303,
321, 336, 375, 382, 485, 491, 497, 509, 511, 536, 560, 589, ii, 608
Corinth, isthmus of, i, 336
Cornish people, i, 152
“Cornstalks,” i, 143
Cornwall, i, 106, 217, 605, ii, 40, 51, 225
Cornwallis, General, ii, 292
Corrosive sublimate, ii, 38
Corsets, i, 214
Corsica, i, 471, 556, ii, 348-49
Cortez, ii, 189-90, 618
Corvus, the, i, 470
Cossacks, ii, 129, 244, 259-61
Coster, printer, ii, 159, 617
Cotton industry, ii, 275
Cotylosaur (kot’ i lō sawr), i, 27
Councils, Church, ii, 74, 95, 100, 151, 153, 167, 611, 617
Counting, i, 151
“Counts of Asia Minor,” ii, 137
Court system, i, 263
Couvade (ku väd’), i, 147
Cow, sacred to Brahmins, ii, 454
Cow deities, i, 237
Cox, Hippesley, i, 110
Crab-apples, i, 113
Crabs, i, 10
Crabtree, Rev. W., i, 189
Cranach, ii, 203
Cranium, of apes, i, 72;
Piltdown.
(_See_ Piltdown)
Crassus, i, 352, 478, 507-11, 549, 616, ii, 19, 609
Crawley, A. E., i, 131
Creation, story of, i, 278, 293, ii, 418-20
Crécy, ii, 179
Crediton, ii, 51
Creeds, Christian, i, 592, 609, ii, 73, 611
Cremation, i, 171
_Cressy_, cruiser, ii, 520
Cretan Labyrinth, i, 214-16;
language, i, 162, 289;
script, i, 228
Crete (and Cretans), i, 104, 189, 196, 212-16, 234, 274, 282, 315, 316
Crimea, ii, 118, 153
Crimean War, ii, 440, 623
Criminals, Roman, i, 490-91;
used for vivisection, i, 403, 404
Crispus, son of Constantine, i, 599
Critias, i, 331
Croatia, i, 616
Crocodiles, i, 41, 46
Crœsus (krē’ sŭs), i, 220, 314, 320-26, 416, ii, 607
Croll, i, 30
Cro-Magnon race, i, 87, 88-95, 99-100
Cromwell, Oliver, ii, 222-25, 284, 287, 491
Cromwell, Thomas, ii, 197
Cross, in Buddhist ritual, i, 429;
true, i, 618, ii, 21, 82
Crown, the power of the, ii, 228
Crucifixion, i, 550, 590
Crusades, ii, 34, 75 _sqq._, 80-84, 94, 97,
124, 152, 179, 229, 397, 615, 616, 617
Crustaceans, i, 25
Crystal Palace, ii, 437
Crystals, i, 9, 17
Ctesiphon (tes’ i fon), i, 618, 622, 624, 626, 634, ii, 22, 31, 82, 129, 522
Cuba, ii, 193, 451, 506
Cubit, length of, i, 290
Culture, Aryan, i, 171-82;
Heliolithic, i, 147-49, 162, 171, 177, 184,
188, 196, 201, 207-13, 223, 415;
Neolithic, i, 104-5, 107-8, 110 _sqq._, 128,
146, 149, 152, 172-73, 184-88, 197, 203, 205-8, 415;
prehistoric and primitive, i, 76 _sqq._, 122 _sqq._
(_See also_ Civilization)
Cumont, i, 412, 590
Cuneiform (kū’ nē i fôrm), i, 191, 227, 274
Cup, pebble, i, 90
Currency, ii, 342-47, 385, 406, 413, 535
Cusæans, i, 394
Custozza, ii, 445
Cuvier (ku vyā), ii, 419
Cyaxares (si ăk’ să rēz), i, 319, ii, 607
Cycads (sī’ kădz), i, 38, 51
Cynics, i, 360
Cyprus, i, 106, 213, 331, 340, 380, 395, ii, 447
Cyrenaica (sir ē nā’ i kă), i, 500
Cyrene (sī rē’ nē), i, 529
Cyrus, the Great, i, 194, 196, 220, 248,
260, 278, 292, 314, 320-26, 370, 389,
416, 445, 523, 542, 622, 624, ii, 607
Cyrus, the Younger, i, 342
Czecho-Slovaks, ii, 380
Czechs (cheks), i, 554, ii, 153
Dacia, i, 526, 553, 564, ii, 71
Dædalus (dē’ d_ă_ lŭs), i, 215
Dagon, i, 245, 412
Dalai Lama (dä lī’ lă’ mä), i, 438
Dalmatia, i, 37, 554, 606, 616, ii, 51, 57, 564, 611, 613
Damascus, i, 102, 218, 273, 523, 618, 623, ii, 1, 18, 20, 28, 31, 37, 154, 612
Damask, i, 273
Damietta, ii, 82
Damon, friend of Pericles, i, 349
Dancing, i, 174, 354
Danelaw, ii, 54, 614
Danes, ii, 53, 54, 66, 228, 614
Daniel, book of, i, 277
Danish language, i, 168
Dante, ii, 160
Danton, ii, 324, 329-36
Dantzig, ii, 180, 251, 564
Danube, i, 153, 298, 300, 327-31, 372, 377, 387, 507, 508, 523, 526,
533, 539, 545, 549, 551, 553, 557, 558, 564,
606, 616, 627, ii, 51, 69, 76, 142, 266, 522, 610
Danubian provinces, ii, 382, 440
Dardanelles, i, 302, ii, 121, 521
Darius (dă rī’ ŭs) I, i, 248, 326-32, 334, 339, 386, ii, 607
Darius II, i, 342
Darius III, i, 379-80, 384-87, 390, 394, 507,
542, ii, 20, 122, 366-67, 608
Dark ages, the, i, 607
Darling region, i, 143
Dartmouth, Lord, ii, 305
Darwin, Charles, i, 67, ii, 420, 427
Darwin, Prof. G. H., i, 31
Darwinism, ii, 420-27
David, King, i, 286-89, 293, 569, 574, 580, ii, 156, 606
Davids, Rhys, i, 415, 420, 421, 428, 430
Davidson, J. L. Strachan, i, 513
Davis, i, 603
Davis, J. W., ii, 507-08
Davis, Stearns, ii, 475
Dawes, ii, 290
Dawson, Sir William, i, 9
Day, length of, i, 6, 51
Dead, eating the, i, 197
Dead Sea, i, 120
Debtor, slavery as fate of, i, 257
Déchelette, i, 111
Decimal notation, ii, 37
Decius, Emperor, i, 528, 553, 594, ii, 610
Declaration of Independence, ii, 293, 296
_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ (Gibbon), ii, 263-69
Deer, i, 70
Defoe, Daniel, ii, 235, 272, 305, 394
Deformities, i, 147
Delaware, ii, 283, 290
Delcassé, ii, 484
Delhi, ii, 108, 132, 256, 257, 454, 455, 615
Delian League, i, 314, 346
Delos, Island of, i, 311, 313
Delphi, i, 313, 320-22, 370, 395, 536
Delphi, oracle of, i, 305, 321-23
Delphic amphictyony, i, 372
Demeter (de më’ t_ĕ_r), i, 354, 374, 538
Democracy, i, 309-13, 456, ii, 163, 164, 273, 298, 326
Demos, i, 309
Demosthenes (d_ĕ_ mos’ th_ĕ_ nēz), i, 358, 363, 368, 376, 387, 473, 513
Deniker, i, 102, 103
Denmark, i, 109, 110, 539, ii, 51, 65, 66, 162, 206, 225,
242, 252-53, 257, 266, 381, 442, 451, 614
Deportation, i, 193
Dervishes, ii, 122
Descartes (dā kart’), ii, 419
Deshima, ii, 465, 466
Deuteronomy, book of, i, 281
Devon, ii, 225
Dewlish, i, 78
Dialects, i, 300
Diaspora (dī ăs’ p_ŏ_ r_ă_), i, 411, 569-71
Diaz (dē’ äs), ii, 185, 617
Dicasts, i, 310
Dickens, Charles, ii, 180
Dickinson, Lowes, ii, 543
Dicrorerus (dī kr_ŏ_ rē’ rŭs), i, 58
Dictator, Roman, i, 459
Diderot (dēd rō’), ii, 308
Diet (assembly), ii, 234, 250
Dillon, Dr., ii, 543, 551, 553
Dinosaurs (dī’ n_ŏ_ sawrz), i, 41, 46
Dinothere (dī’ n_ŏ_ thēr), i, 58
Diocletian, i, 529, 561, 594, 599-600, ii, 611
Dionysus, god, i, 354, 373
Dionysius of Syracuse, i, 434, 468
Diplodocus (dip lod’ _ŏ_ kŭs), i, 40
Disease, infectious, i, 126
Dispensations, papal, ii, 86, 93
Disraeli, Benjamin.
(_See_ Beaconsfield, Earl of)
Divans, ii, 32
Divination, i, 464
Divine right, ii, 164, 377
Divus Cæsar, i, 526
Dixon line, ii, 282, 284
Dnieper (nē’ p_ĕ_r), i, 153, 510, 553, ii, 110, 260
Doctors, i, 235
Dog, the, i, 56, 105, 108, 112, 116, 230
Dolichocephalic (dol i kō s_ĕ_ făl’ ik) skull, i, 142-46
Dolmens, i, 109
Domazlice, ii, 152, 617
Dominic, St., ii, 95-96, 615
Dominican Order, ii, 95-96, 116, 127, 193, 465, 615
Domitian, i, 526, ii, 610
Don, river, i, 153, 549, ii, 261
Don Cossacks, ii, 260
Donatello, ii, 183
Dordogne (dör dō’ ny_ĕ_), i, 100
Doric dialect, i, 300
Dorset, i, 78
Dortmund, ii, 182
Dostoievski (dos to ef’ ski), ii, 502
Doubs, i, 100
Douglas, Sir R. K., i, 253
Dover, ii, 180
Dover, Straits of, i, 507
Dragon flies, i, 28
Dragonnades, ii, 239, 253
Dravidian civilization, i, 196, 203, 415, ii, 142;
language, i, 158, 189
Dravidians, i, 146, 159, 160, 169, 182, 270, 315, ii, 134
Drepanum (drep’ _ă_ nŭm), i, 470
_Dresden_, cruiser, ii, 520
Dresden, battle of, ii, 368
Driver, S. R., i, 288
Drogheda, ii, 224
Druids, i, 135
Drums, Neolithic, i, 115
Drusus, Livius, i, 503
Dryopithecus (drī _ŏ_ pi thē’ kŭs), i, 66
Dubarry, Comtesse, ii, 240
Dublin, ii, 492, 493, 498, 499
Duma, the, ii, 525
Dumouriez (du moo ryā’), General, ii, 329
Dunbar, battle of, ii, 225
Dunce, derivation of, ii, 172
Dunkirk, ii, 226
Duns Scotus, ii, 171, 616
Dunstan, ii, 150
Dupleix (du plā’), ii, 258
Durazzo (du rad’ zō), i, 561, ii, 67, 72, 80, 616
Durham, ii, 396;
University of, ii, 437
Durham, Lord, ii, 293
Düsseldorf, i, 72
Dutch language, ii, 47, 228;
people, ii, 47;
Republic, ii, 228-33, 380;
settlements and seamanship, i, 84, ii, 188, 253, 282-83, 461, 465-66.
(_See also_ Holland)
Duyvendak, Mr., i, 630, 641
Dwellings, Neolithic, i, 114
Dyeing, ii, 38
Dynamics, ii, 176
_Dynasts, The_, i, 335, ii, 348
Earth, the, i, 3-8, 13-15, 29-34, 56-59
East, orientation to, i, 238
East India Company, ii, 258, 289, 451, 453
Easter, feast of, i, 129
Easter lamb, i, 588
Eastern (Greek) Empire.
(_See_ Byzantine Empire)
Eastlake, ii, 404
Ebenezer, i, 283
Ebro, river, i, 354, 472, 475
Ecbatana (ek băt’ _ă_ n_ă_), i, 626
Ecclesiastes, book of, i, 277
Echidna (e kid’ n_ă_), i, 54
Economists, French, ii, 309
Economus (ē kon’ ō mŭs), battle of, i, 470, ii, 608
Eden, garden of, i, 293, ii, 418
Eder, ii, 513
Edessa, i, 621, ii, 78, 80
Edgar, ii, 150
Edom, ii, 244
Education, i, 267, 270, 272, 408-9, 612-13,
ii, 137, 146, 147, 166, 270 _sqq._, 302,
357, 385, 390-92, 396-97, 413, 428-31
Edward I, ii, 219
Edward VI, ii, 218, 220
Edward VII, ii, 228, 488
Edward, Prince of Wales, son of George V, ii, 498
Egbert, ii, 51, 53, 614
Egerton, H. E., ii, 377
Eggs, i, 39, 53, 54, 114
Egibi (ē gē’ bē), i, 265
Eginhard, ii, 59
Egmont, Count of, ii, 229
Egypt, i, 106, 154, 156, 395, 522, 561,
570, 572, 574, 618, ii, 1, 30, 83, 84, 94, 139, 153, 612;
history (_early_), i, 133, 148, 183-86,
195-98, 200-01, 204, 209-13, 220, 228,
229, 233-34, 246, 248, 256, 261, 265, 267,
274, 277-82, 289, 290-95, 307, 315-16, 323,
326-27, 334, 340, 342, 359, 522, ii, 1, 189, 605, 606;
(_and Greece_), i, 382, 389, 401-02, ii, 607;
(_and Rome_), i, 480, 500, 510-12, 533;
(_and Islam_), ii, 21-24, 29-32, 37, 64, 71,
82-84, 106, 114, 118, 122, 126, 132, 614, 618;
(_modern period_), ii, 351, 353, 359, 453, 460, 471, 500, 621, 623;
Christianity in, i, 604, 610, ii, 74, 149;
Jews in, i, 402, 436, 572, ii, 607;
Kingship in, i, 248-52, 263, 520;
religious systems, i, 197-98, 236-42, 248-52,
296, 382-83, 404, 410-14, 431, 538, 590-91
Egyptian language, i, 154
Egyptian script, i, 208, 228
Egyptian shipping, i, 273
“Egyptians” (Gipsies), ii, 137
Elam (ē’ lăm), i, 189, 318
Elamite language, i, 162
Elamites, i, 189, 194, 245, 385, ii, 105
Elba, ii, 371, 374
Elbe, ii, 80
Elections, i, 494, ii, 302
Electricity, ii, 388, 389-90
Electrum, i, 220
Elephants, i, 57, 70, 76, 78, 102, 207, 210, 317, 386, 453, 455, 470-79, ii, 20
Eli, judge, i, 283-85
Elixir of life, ii, 174
Elizabeth, Queen of England, ii, 218, 220, 232, 258, 280
Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, ii, 242, 620
El-lil, i, 190
_Emden_, cruiser, ii, 520
Emesa (em´ ē s_ă_), i, 621
Emigration, ii, 76
Emirs, ii, 31
Emmet, Robert, ii, 493
Emperor, title of, i, 565
Emperors of Germany, ii, 199
Employers and employed, ii, 276, 397-98
Enclosure Acts, ii, 272-76
“Encyclopædists,” the, ii, 309
England, i, 605, ii, 64, 66, 178, 200, 433, 470-71;
history (_early_), i, 52, 101, 645, ii, 40, 50-54, 66, 614;
(_under the Normans_), ii, 67, 615;
(_in the 13th and 14th centuries_), ii, 176-77;
(_Civil war_), ii, 218, 221-25, 281;
(_war with Holland_), ii, 225-26, 282;
(_war with Spain_), ii, 220, 225;
(_reign of Charles II_), ii, 225-26;
(_in 18th century_), ii, 226-28;
(_and America_), ii, 253-54;
(_union with Ireland_), ii, 621;
_political and constitutional_, i, 463,
465, ii, 194, 216-17, 219-21, 226-28, 236;
religion, i, 642, ii, 49-54, 99, 150,
162, 206, 220, 221, 225, 252, 253, 282;
social, ii, 154-56, 244, 271-73, 324, 334, 617.
(_See also_ Britain, Great Britain, _and_ the Great War)
English, the, ii, 50, 58, 66-67, 611
English language, i, 151, 564, 638, ii, 50, 160
English seamen, ii, 188
Entelodont (en tel´ ō dont), i, 53
Eoanthropus (ē ō ăn thrō´ pŭs), i, 60, 70-74.
(_See also_ Man)
Eocene (ē´ ō sēn) period, i, 52-59
Eohippus, i, 56
Eolithic age, i, 75
Eoliths, i, 68, 102, ii, 605
Eozoon (ē ō zō´ _ŏ_n) Canadense, i, 9
Ephesus (ef´ ē sŭs), i, 340, 379, 589, ii, 79
Ephesus, Council of, i, 602
Ephthalite (ef´ th_ă_ līt) coins, i, 329
Ephthalites, i, 628-30, 646, ii, 611, 612
Epics, i, 173, 175, 232
Epictetus (ep ik tē´ tŭs), i, 492
Epicureans (ep i kū rē´ _ă_nz), i, 360, 363, 632
Epirus (ē pī´ rŭs), i, 375, 376, 452, 454, ii, 67, 122
Equality, ii, 16, 296
Equator, i, 31-33
Equinoxes, i, 31
Equisetums (ek wi sē´ tŭmz), i, 27
Erasistratus (er ă sis´ tră tŭs), i, 404
Eratosthenes (er ă tos´ th_ĕ_ nēz), i, 13, 402, 405, 408
Erech, i, 190
Eretria, i, 332
Erfurt, ii, 364
Eridu (ā´ ri doo), i, 133, 190, 195, 196, 210, ii, 130
Ervine, St. John, ii, 499
Esarhaddon (ē săr hăd´ _ŏ_n), i, 246, 291, 319, ii, 606
Essad Pasha, ii, 554
Essenes (e sēnz´), i, 610
Essex, i, 623, ii, 40
Esthonians, ii, 244
Ethiopia (and Ethiopians), i, 200, 250, 383, ii, 606
Ethiopian dynasty, i, 195, ii, 606
Ethiopic language, i, 154
Ethnologists, i, 141
Etiquette in China, i, 434
Eton College, ii, 427
Etruria, i, 450, 460, 475
Etruscans, i, 447-50, 459, 464, ii, 91, 146, 606, 607
Eucharist, the, i, 591
Euclid, i, 364, 402, ii, 37
Euphrates, i, 148, 184-90, 194, 199, 203,
209, 238, 250, 291, 317, 507, 508, 523,
540, 562, 616, 622, ii, 2, 607
Euripides (ū rip´ i dēz), i, 351, 355, 369, 392
Europe, i, 151, 159-62;
Christianity in, i, 517, 603-05, 609, ii,
51, 84-86, 90, 96, 99-101, 114, 148,
159-63, 166-67, 206, 234, 244, 246, 270;
common cause in, ii, 74-77;
Concert of, ii, 373, 377, 378, 384, 385;
feudalism in, ii, 42 _sqq._;
history (general), i, 334, 544, 605-06, 625,
ii, 42-43, 54-57, 107, 140, 181, 200, 202, 206,
216, 232-36, 240-53, 262-63, 269-72, 360 _sqq._, 367, 370, 377-82, 431;
Huns in, i, 559, 628;
Imperialism in, ii, 469-70, 475 _sqq._;
industrial revolution in, ii,276;
intellectual development in, ii, 37-39, 88-89, 147, 167-69, 174-76;
languages of, i, 161;
literature of, ii, 160;
“Marriage with Asia,” i, 390;
mechanical revolution in, ii, 393 _sqq._;
monarchy in, ii, 211, 230, 236-43, 253;
Mongolians in, i, 549, ii, 112, 168;
Moslems in, ii, 24, 28-32, 41, 47, 65, 121, 184, 186;
natural political map of, ii, 383, 446, 449, 566;
peoples and races of, i, 104, 138-39, 141, 145,
298-99, 546-48, ii, 137, 266;
Powers of, ii, 242-43, 278-79, 474;
prehistoric, i, 59, 69, 75-77, 87-89, 95-105,
108, 118, 132-33, 140, 145, 149,
172-76, 183-84, 196, 206, 234, 240, 317, ii, 189;
social development in, ii, 140, 157, 176
_sqq._, 200, 215-16, 217, 246, 269-77, 400-401.
(_See also_ Great War)
Europeans descended from Neolithic man, i, 105
Euryptolemus (ū rip tol’ _ĕ_ mŭs), i, 347
Eusebius (ū sē’ bi ŭs), i, 600
Evans, i, 21
Evans, Sir Arthur, i, 104, 150, 212, 228
Evans, Sir John, i, 137
Everlasting League, ii, 199, 616
Evolution of the Earth, i, 5-6
Examinations, i, 270, 640
Excommunication, ii, 81
Executive, the, ii, 414
Exodus, book of, i, 279, 281
Experience, i, 230
Exploration, i, 217-18
“Expropriated,” the, ii, 398
ex votos, i, 235, 414
Eylau (I’ lou), battle of, ii, 362, 622
Ezekiel, i, 292, 294
Fabian Society, ii, 409
Fabius, i, 477-78
Factories, growth of, ii, 275-77
Factory Act, ii, 404, 405, 622
Factory system, ii, 394, 405
Fairies, i, 182
Faith, decline of a universal, ii, 425
Faizi (fä’ i zi), ii, 135
Falkland Isles, battle of, ii, 520
Families, noble and plebeian, i, 267-68
Family groups, i, 79, 110, 178-82
Faraday, M., ii, 387, 427
Farming, Arab knowledge of, ii, 38
Farrand, i, 158
Farrar, F. W., i, 527
Fashoda (fä shō’ dă), ii, 460, 500, 624
Fatepur-sikri (fŭt ē poor’ sik’ ri), ii, 135, 136
Fatima (făt’ i mă), ii, 26, 31, 64
Fatimite caliphate, ii, 64, 76, 126, 614
Fauna, early, i, 101
Fausta, i, 599
Faustina (faws tī’ nă), i, 527
Fayle, C. E., ii, 543
Fear, i, 125
Feasts, Aryan, i, 172-73
Feathers, i, 43-44, 48-49
Ferdinand I, emperor, ii, 207, 210, 233
Ferdinand, king of Bulgaria, ii, 501, 509, 524
Ferdinand, king of Spain, ii, 186, 200
Ferguson, i, 252, 410
Fermentation, i, 172
Ferns, i, 24, 27
Ferrero (fer rā’ rō), i, 455, 493, 502
Fetishism, i, 123, 129
Feudal system, the, i, 43 _sqq._
Fezzan, i, 118
Fiefs, ii, 43
Field of the Cloth of Gold, i, 202
Fielding, H., ii, 272, 394
Fiji, ii, 471
Filmer, ii, 164
Finance, i, 496-98, ii, 202, 216
Finland (and the Finns), i, 549, 606, ii, 366, 375, 380
Finland, Gulf of, ii, 266
Finnish language, i, 156
Finno-Ugrian language, i, 560
Fire, early use of, i, 78-80
Fire-arms, i, 565
Fish, i, 10, 24, 25, 52
Fisher, Lord, ii, 526
Fisher, Osmond, i, 78
Fishing, i, 96-97, 114
Fiske, ii, 282
Fiume (fū’ mā), ii, 566
Five Classics, the, i, 227
Flame projectors, ii, 516
Flanders, ii, 66, 78, 208, 329
Flavian dynasty, i, 526, ii, 609
Flax, i, 114
Fleming, Bishop, ii, 96
Flemings, the, ii, 47, 81, 178
Flemish language, ii, 47
Flint implements, i, 60, 68-69, 71, 78-82, 88, 91, 94, 99, 107, 114, 137
Flood, story of the, i, 278, 293
Florence, ii, 180, 182-83, 195-97, 202, 239, 242, 618
Florentine Society, ii, 392
Florida, ii, 282
Flowers, Cainozoic, i, 51
Flying machines, i, 215, ii, 173, 174, 175, 392
Fontainebleau (fo_n_ tān blō’), ii, 361, 368
Food, i, 16, 20, 78-84, 113, 116, 186-87
Fools, i, 172
Foot of apes, men, and monkeys, i, 63-66
Forbes, ii, 129
Ford businesses, ii, 406
Forests, i, 37, 100-04
Fort St. Augustine, ii, 282
Fossils, i, 8-13, 26, 46-51, 57, 66, ii, 175, 419
Foucher, i, 429
“Fourteen Points,” the, ii, 546-48, 556
Fowl, domesticated, i, 113, 114
Fowler, W. Warde, i, 148, 510
Fox, the, as food, i, 113
France, i, 74, 108;
history (_to Revolutionary period_), i, 88, 93, 146,
217, 522, 554, 606, 627, ii, 24, 41, 46-48, 51, 53,
62, 69, 75, 78-82, 87, 92, 98, 99, 127, 156-57, 166,
178, 179, 180, 193-205, 215-29, 234-39, 243-51, 267,
272, 279, 620, 621;
(_Revolutionary period_), ii, 157, 164, 242-47, 621;
(_Napoleonic period_), ii, 248-74, 621;
(_to Great War_), ii, 370-73, 382, 400, 438-46, 484,
486, 509, 622, 623;
(_Great War_), ii, 48, 513 _sqq._;
Imperialism, ii, 470, 500;
overseas dominions, ii, 251-54, 279-86, 292, 363, 364,
451, 467.
(_See also_ Franks, Gaul)
Francis, St., of Assisi, ii, 94-96, 161, 263, 615
Francis I, emperor, ii, 620
Francis II, emperor, ii, 622
Francis I, king of France, ii, 200-06, 618
Francis Ferdinand, archduke, ii, 510
Franciscan Order, ii, 94-96, 148, 171, 173, 193, 615, 616
Frankfort, ii, 180, 439, 623;
Peace of, ii, 446-47, 477, 623
Franklin, Benj., ii, 303, 324
Franks, the, i, 552, 559, 564, 606,
609, ii, 41, 42, 46-52, 57-62, 69, 78, 130, 144, 610
Frazer, Sir J. G., i, 116, 117, 125, 130-131, 249
Frederick I (Barbarossa), emperor,
ii, 80, 86, 87, 89, 97, 615
Frederick II, emperor, ii, 80, 82,
86 _sqq._, 112, 117, 148, 160-61, 199, 232, 421, 615, 616
Frederick III, emperor, ii, 200
Frederick I, king of Prussia, ii, 240, 620
Frederick II (the Great), king of Prussia, ii, 240, 248,
264, 267, 300, 303, 620
Frederick III, king of Prussia, ii, 482
Frederick, don, ii, 230
Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg, ii, 152
Free discussion, ii, 158;
trade in Athens, i, 460
Free intelligence, i, 262
Freedom, i, 259-60, ii, 279
Freeman’s Farm, ii, 292
French language, i, 151, 564, ii, 47, 54, 66, 160, 199, 228
Freud, Sigismund, i, 127
Freya (frī’ ă), ii, 49
Friars, the, ii, 164, 172.
(_See also_ Franciscan Order)
Friedland (frēd’ lănt), battle of, ii, 362, 622
Frisian coast, i, 539; language, ii, 228
Frisians, the, ii, 49-51
Frog, the, i, 26
Froissart (frwä sär’), ii, 155
Fronde, the, ii, 234-36
Fu, S. N., i, 630-32, 641-42
Fuggers, the, ii, 202, 204, 271
Fulas, i, 206
Fuller, Colonel, ii, 571
Fulton, R., ii, 387
Furnace, blast, ii, 388; electric, ii, 389
Future life, belief in, i, 123, 538
Gaelic, i, 168, ii, 490
Gage, General, ii, 290, 294
Galatia, i, 449, ii, 608
Galatians, i, 395, 397, ii, 121
Galba, i, 526, ii, 609
Galerius, i, 594, 596, ii, 611
Galicia, ii, 518
Galilee, i, 571, 584, 587, 591, 621
Galileo (găl i lē’ ō), Galilei, ii, 176, 417, 618, 619
Gallas, language of the, i, 154
Galleys, i, 259
Galvani, ii, 387
Gama, Vasco da (văs kō’ dä gä’ mä), ii, 187-88, 257, 617
Gamaliel, i, 588
Gambia, i, 218
Games, i, 314
Gametes (găm ēts’), i, 24
Gandhara (gän d hä’ rä), i, 428
Ganesa (gă nā’ shă), i, 439
Gang labour, i, 265, 287
Ganges, i, 160, 201, 269, 270, 386, 388, 415, 430, ii, 106
Gardner, Alice, i, 625
Garibaldi, ii, 441
Gas, i, 170, 635
Gas in warfare, ii, 516, 569
_Gaspee_, vessel, ii, 289
Gath, i, 282
Gaul (and the Gauls), i, 196,
299, 388, 395, 450-51, 458-60, 471, 475, 500,
502-07, 509, 542, 553, 559, 564, 605, 613, ii, 41, 46, 61, 266, 608, 611
Gaulish language, i, 168
Gautama (gou´ tă mă).
(_See_ Buddha)
Gaza, i, 261, 282, 379, 382
Gazelle, i, 56
Gaztelu, ii, 207, 208
Genesis, book of, i, 129, 277-82
Geneva, ii, 163, 199, 264, 559
Genoa (jen’ ō ă) and the Genoese, ii, 76, 80, 117, 153, 180, 182, 185, 347
Genseric (jen’ s_ĕ_r ik), i, 556, 557, ii, 611
Gentiles, the, i, 580
Geography, i, 5
Geology, i, 5, 8, ii, 419
Geomancers (jē ō măn’ s_ĕ_rs), i, 635
Geometry, ii, 37
George I, ii, 227, 620
George II, ii, 227, 620
George III, ii, 227, 288, 293, 314, 338, 620
George IV, ii, 228
George V, ii, 144, 228, 488, 498
George, Lloyd, ii, 499, 518, 534-38, 552-53, 557, 566
Georgia, ii, 282, 290, 443, 620
Gerasa (jer’ ă să), i, 621
Gerash, i, 623
Gerbert (gār’ ber), ii, 37
German language, i, 151, 168, ii, 47, 160, 228;
songs and tales, ii, 61
Germany, i, 101, 108, 318;
history (_to Saxon kings_), i, 502, 507, 509, 510, 522, 534, 539, 540,
552, 557, 603, ii, 46-47, 51, 57, 61-62, 144, 150, 609;
(_Saxon kings to Napoleonic period_), ii, 61, 69, 75, 80,
86, 87, 98-100, 112,
116, 138, 156, 157-62, 179, 180, 182, 188, 199-210,
216, 228, 232-36, 244-48, 253, 256, 266-67, 283, 285, 292, 304,
339, 361-66, 614, 616, 618;
(_War of Liberation to the Great War_), ii, 367-68,
381-82, 390-91, 396-401, 438-46, 467, 469-70, 476 _sqq._, 623;
(_Great War_), ii, 499 _sqq._;
class distinction in, i, 268;
Imperialism of, ii, 470, 479-86, 508
Gesture language, i, 163
Gethsemane, i, 585
Ghent, ii, 180, 199, 229
Gibbon, Edward, i, 531-35, 557, 558, 592, 595, 599, 608, 618,
ii, 30, 42, 60, 62,
67, 69, 78, 82, 112, 227, 263-73, 277, 278, 308, 421
Gibbons (animal), i, 67
Gibbs, Philip, ii, 513, 516, 518, 530, 572
Gibraltar, i, 67, 120, 217, 532, ii, 41, 451, 471
Gideon, i, 283
Gigantosaurus (jī găn tō saw’ rŭs), i, 42
Gilbert, Dr., ii, 176, 619
Gilboa, Mount, i, 285
Gills, i, 23, 25, 52
Gin, i, 219
Giotto (jot’ ō), ii, 183
Gipsies, ii, 137, 138
Gipsy language, ii, 138
Giraffe, i, 56
Girondins, ii, 328
Gizeh (gē’ z_ĕ_), i, 198, 238
Glacial Age.
(_See_ Ice Age)
Gladiators, i, 489-91, 505, 529, 533, 589, 594, 609, ii, 608, 609
Gladstone, Sir John, ii, 427
Gladstone, W. E., i, 345, ii, 426-33, 447, 481, 495, 499, 623
Glasfurd, A. I. R., i, 114, 126
Glass, ii, 38
Glastonbury, i, 110, 171
Glaucia, i, 503
Glyptodon (glip’ tō don), i, 102, 207
_Gneisenau_ (gnī’ z_ĕ_ nou), cruiser, ii, 520
Gneiss (nīs), fundamental, i, 8
Gnosticism (nos’ ti sizm), i, 592, 603
Goats in lake dwellings, i, 112
Gobi Desert, i, 160, 545, 634, 643, 644
God, i, 583, 592, 602, ii, 29, 171, 174;
idea of one true, i, 295-96, 400, 424, 436,
538, 569, 572, 576, ii, 5-7, 11, 18, 136;
of Judaism, i, 219, 282 _sqq._, 361, 412, ii, 16;
Kingdom of, ii, 90, 97, 116, 149, 246
Godfrey of Bouillon, ii, 78, 228, 615
Gods, i, 234-39, 240, 245-46, 411-12, 483;
Aryan, i, 233-34, 305;
Egyptian, i, 236-39, 248-52;
Greek, i, 305, 361-62, 483;
Japanese, i, 429;
Semitic, i, 233;
tribal, i, 134, 295
Goethe, ii, 324
Gold, i, 105, 118, 220, ii, 89, 344
Golden Horde, the, ii, 134, 259
Goldsmith, Oliver, i, 376, ii, 273, 492, 493, 553
Golgotha, i, 585
Gooch, G. P., ii, 475
Good Hope, Cape of, ii, 257, 451, 617
_Good Hope_, cruiser, ii, 520
Goods, consumable, ii, 344
Goose, i, 113
Gorham, Nathaniel, ii, 300
Gorilla, i, 63, 67, 218
“Gorillas,” i, 218
Goritzia (gō rē t’ sē _ă_), ii, 519
Goshen, land of, i, 279
Gospels, the, i, 573, 576, 585-88, 593, 601, ii, 150, 418
Gotha (gō’ t_ă_) aeroplane, ii, 519
Gothic architecture, ii, 179;
language,
i, 168
Goths, i, 528, 543, 549, 553, 556,
560-64, 606, 609, 611, 612, 615,
ii, 41, 46, 57, 66, 610, 611, 612
Gough, General, ii, 530
Gould, Baring, i, 610
Gourgaud (goor gō’), ii, 358
Government, i, 232-33, 241-42, 462-64, ii, 147, 385
Gowland, Dr., i, 106
Gracchi, the, i, 502, ii, 147
Gracchus, Caius, i, 502, ii, 609
Gracchus, Tiberius, i, 483, 496-501, ii, 609
Graham, Cunninghame, ii, 193
Grain, as food, i, 113-17, 184
Granada, ii, 186
Grand Remonstrance, ii, 221
Granicus (gră nī’ kŭs), battle of the, i, 379, ii, 608
Grape, i, 172
Graphite, i, 9
Grasses, i, 51, 56
Gravelotte (gräv lot’), ii, 445
Gravesend, ii, 226
Gravitation, law of, ii, 176
Gray, G. B., i, 281
Gray, Thomas, ii, 227
Great Britain, history (_general_), ii, 244, 470;
(_and India_), ii, 134-37, 254-59;
(_and America_), ii, 253-54, 273, 279-82, 285-94, 621;
(_and French Revolution_), ii, 327, 331-32;
(_in Napoleonic period_), ii, 351-54, 359, 361, 366, 372, 621;
(_war with Turkey_), ii, 382;
(_Crimean war_), ii, 440;
(_suspicion of Russia_), ii, 447;
(_in alliance against Germany_), ii, 484-86;
(_the Great War_), ii, 510 _sqq._;
(_effect of Great War on_), ii, 533-34 _sqq._;
constitutional, political, and social,
i, 495, ii, 271-73, 298, 306-07, 321,
338, 388-89, 400, 486-87, 622;
expansion and Imperialism, ii, 246-47, 451-60, 463, 469, 470-72, 486-99, 624.
(_See also_ Britain _and_ England)
Great Exhibition, the, ii, 436, 623
Great Mogul, ii, 256, 258
Great ox. (_See_ Aurochs)
Great Schism. (_See_ Papal Schism)
Great War, the, ii, 48, 166, 221, 235, 251, 510 _sqq._, 624
Greatness, ii, 303
Greece (and the Greeks), i, 86, 108, 114, 281, 313-18, 446-47,
ii, 144, 160, 190;
history (_to war with Persia_), i, 13, 176-78, 213-16, 234,
281, 300 _sqq._, ii, 606;
(_war with Persia_), i, 314-15, 327-42, ii, 607;
(_to 15th century_), i, 343-45, 357, 362-64, 367-72, 377-78,
395, 449, 554, 611, 621, ii, 79, 98, 121-26, 616;
(_modern_), ii, 382, 502, 521-22, 524, 622;
civilization, i, 304-14, 352-53, 363-64, 455, 491-92, 623;
constitutional, i, 305-15, 360-64, 369, 378, 455, 488;
religion, i, 240, 304-06, 354-55, 374, 412, 483, ii, 48;
thought and learning, i, 359-65, 399-404, 408-09, 488, 618, 636, ii, 35, 168
Greek, alphabet, i, 228-29;
archipelago, i, 119, 260;
Church, i, 603, 617, ii, 58, 60, 73, 74, 78, 81, 98, 380, 611;
islands, i, 171, ii, 65;
language and literature, i, 151, 168, 173-76, 194, 300, 348,
354-56, 359-62, 402, 411, 530, 535, 562, 588, 614-15, 621,
ii, 31, 35, 36, 50, 61, 73, 159, 211;
warfare, i, 370
Greek (Eastern) Empire, _see_ Eastern (Greek) Empire
Green, J. R., ii, 154
Green flag, ii, 64
Greenland, i, 75, ii, 53, 185
“Greens,” faction of the, ii, 247
Gregorovius, ii, 63
Gregory, Sir R. A., ii, 176, 384, 427
Gregory I, the Great, i, 612, 642, ii, 41, 50, 72, 97, 153, 167, 612
Gregory VII, ii, 72, 73, 74, 84, 149, 167, 615
Gregory IX, ii, 83, 87, 148, 616
Gregory XI, ii, 100, 127, 617
Grenfell, i, 137
Grey, Sir Edward, ii, 511
Grey Friars.
(_See_ Franciscan Order)
Grimaldi race, i, 88, 90-95, 120
Grimm’s Law, i, 152
Grisons, i, 564
Grote, i, 351
Growth, i, 16
Guadalquivir (gaw dăl kwiv’ _ĕ_r), ii, 188
Guianas, the, ii, 451
Guilds, i, 267
Guillemard, ii, 188
Guillotine, ii, 333
Guiscard (gēs kăr’), Robert, ii, 67, 69, 79, 615
Gulf Stream, i, 20
Gum-tree, i, 51
Gunpowder, i, 635, ii, 109, 121, 179, 268
Guptas (goop’ t_ă_z), i, 629
Gurkhas, ii, 455
Gustavus Adolphus, ii, 235, 236, 253
Gutenberg, ii, 159
Guthrum, ii, 54, 614
Gwalior, ii, 257
Gyges (gī’ jēz), i, 316, ii, 606
Haarlem (här’ lem), ii, 159, 229, 231,
617
Habsburgs, ii, 63, 98, 140, 167, 199-202, 232, 235, 243, 248, 370, 371
Hackett, ii, 420-21
Hadrian, i, 526, 536, ii, 610
Hadrian, tomb of, i, 609, ii, 41
Hadrian’s wall, i, 526-27
Hague Conferences, ii, 476-77
Haig, Sir Douglas, ii, 523
Hair, i, 49-54
Halicarnassus (hăl i kăr näs’ ŭs), i, 260, 262, 340, 379, 380
Hall, i, 218
Hall, H. R., i, 184
Ham, son of Noah, i, 140
Hamburg, ii, 180, 182
Hamilcar, i, 471, 475
Hamilton, Alexander, ii, 303
Hamilton, Sir Ian, ii, 521
Hamilton, Sir William, ii, 390
Hamites, i, 158, 176, 189, 203, 244, ii, 41
Hamitic languages, i, 154, 155, 161, 162, 167;
ships, i, 212
Hammond, ii, 269, 270
Hammurabi (hăm moo rä’ bē), i, 191, 196, 199, 201, 245, 258, 279, 385, ii, 606
Han, men of, i, 634
Han dynasty, i, 205, 253, 270, 433, 508, 509, 542, 543, 548, 630, 631, ii, 610
Hancock, ii, 290
Hang Chau (hăng’ chou), ii, 108, 615
Hannibal, i, 473-79, 483
Hanno, i, 196, 217-18, 221, 234, 241, 472, 509, 532, ii, 185, 607
Hanover, ii, 338
Hanover, elector of.
(_See_ George I.)
Hanoverian dominions, ii, 244
Hanoverian dynasty, ii, 228, 236
Hansa towns, ii, 182-88
Hanse merchants, ii, 266
Harcourt, Sir William, ii, 411
Hardy, Thomas, i, 335, ii, 349
Hare, the, i, 113
Hariti, i, 428
Harnack, ii, 174
Haroun-al-Raschid (hä roon ăl ră shēd´), ii, 32, 33, 61, 613
Harpagos (här´ pă gŏs), i, 323
Harpalus (här´ pă lŭs), i, 375, 387
Harpoons, i, 90, 96
Harran, i, 622
Harris, H. Wilson, ii, 543, 560
Harrison, Benjamin, i, 68
Harvey, John, ii, 177, 619
Hasan, son of Ali, ii, 27, 30
Hasdrubal, i, 472-76
Hastings, Warren, ii, 259, 453, 487
Hatasu (hä´ tă soo), Queen of Egypt, i, 200
Hathor, i, 239, 249, 412, 413
Hatra, i, 622
Hatred, i, 472
Hauran, i, 623, ii, 2
Haverfield, F. J., i, 461, 605
Hawk gods, i, 237
Head, deformation of, i, 147
Headlam, J. W., ii, 377
Hearths, i, 171
Heaven, Kingdom of, i, 575-79, 582, 587, ii, 417.
(_See also_ God)
Hébert, ii, 335
Hebrew language, i, 153, 155, 164, 570, 572;
literature, i, 293-94; prophets, i, 601;
thought, i, 361;
moral teaching, i, 219.
(_See also_ Jewish)
Hebrews, i, 245, 279-283, ii, 1.
(_See also_ Jews)
Hecataeus (hek _ă_ tē´ ŭs), i, 221
Hecker, ii, 154
Hector, i, 175, 183
Hedgehogs, i, 56
Hegira (hej´ i ră), ii, 8, 12, 14, 17, 612
Heidelberg man, i, 60, 64, 69, 70-71, 84
Hekt, i, 239
Helen of Troy, i, 216
Helena, Empress, i, 618, ii, 82
Helena, mother of Constantine, i, 599
Heligoland, ii, 484, 623
Heliolithic (hē li ō lith´ ik) culture, i, 147-49, 162, 171,
177, 184, 188, 196,
201, 207-13, 223, 415, ii, 189, 465
Heliolithic peoples, i, 206
Heliopolis (hē li op’ ō lis), (Baalbek), i 621, ii, 3
Hellé, André, ii, 513
Hellenes, i, 300
Hellenic civilization, i, 302 _sqq._, ii, 22, 168;
tradition, i, 562
Hellenism, i, 353, 430, 570
Hellespont, i, 334-35, 339, 340, 362, 372, 379, 523,
621, ii, 20, 79, 137, 607, 612
Helmolt, H. F., i, 192, 541, 556, 635, ii, 18, 22, 136, 180
Helmont, van, i, 170
Helots, i, 305
Hen.
(_See_ Fowl, domesticated)
Henriot, ii, 336
Henry II, German Emperor, ii, 63
Henry V, German Emperor, ii, 63
Henry VI, German Emperor, ii, 86
Henry II, King of England, ii, 490
Henry III, King of England, ii, 219
Henry V, King of England, ii, 178
Henry VII, King of England, ii, 186,
218, 220
Henry VIII, King of England, ii, 163, 197, 200, 204, 206, 218, 220, 618
Henry of Prussia, Prince, ii, 300
Henry the Fowler, ii, 63, 70, 614
Henry, Patrick, ii, 287, 303
Hephaestion (hē fes’ ti_ŏ_n), i, 392, 394, 510
Hephaestus, i, 173
Heraclea (her ă klē’ _ă_), i, 453, ii, 608
Heraclius (her ă klī’ ŭs), i, 615, 618, 623, 634, ii, 17-20, 82, 612, 613
Heraldry, i, 268
Herat, i, 386, 604
Herbivorous animals, i, 41, 43
Hercules, demi-god, i, 399, 515
Hercules, son of Alexander, i, 394
Hercules, temple of, i, 234
Herdsmen, i, 264, 267
Hereditary rule, ii, 144
Heredity, i, 230
Heretic, ii, 95
Heristhal, ii, 47
Hermon, Mount, i, 113, 184
Herne Island, i, 217
Hero, i, 402, 540
Herodes Atticus (her ō’ dēz ăt’ i kŭs), i, 535, 536
Herodians, i, 579
Herodotus (hē rod’ ō tŭs), i, 186, 218, 221, 241, 260-62,
267, 296, 314, 319-26,
332, 340, 342, 347, 350, 355, 356, 370, 399, 405, 497, 532, 615, 642,
ii, 20, 607
Herods, the, i, 571, 574, 580, ii, 4
Heroic Age, i, 177
Herophilus (hē rof’ i lŭs), i, 403, 404
Herzegovina (hert s_ĕ_ gov’ _ĕ_ nă), ii, 484, 624
Hesperornis (hes p_ĕ_r ôr’ nis), i, 48
Hesse (hes’ _ĕ_) and Hessians, ii, 51, 205, 445
Hezekiah, King, i, 291
Hieratic script, i, 228
Hiero (hī’ _ĕ_r ō), i, 468, 469, 476
Hieroglyphics, i, 208, 211, 227, 228
Hieronymus (hī er on’ i mŭs) of Syracuse, i, 476
Hildebrand.
(See Gregory VII)
Himalayas, i, 35, 52, 160, 546
Hindu deities, i, 437, 439;
priests, i, 180;
schools, ii, 137
Hindu Kush, ii, 133
Hindus, i, 169, 179-81, 269-70, 299, 538, ii, 134, 137, 256
Hindustan, ii, 108, 133
Hipparchus, i, 402
Hippias, i, 332
Hippo, i, 556, 604
Hippopotamus, i, 38, 69, 70, 76
Hippopotamus deities, i, 197, 236
Hira, ii, 18, 20
Hirai, K., i, 157
Hiram, King of Sidon, i, 287-90
Hirth, i, 435, 541, 582, 635
Histiæus, i, 330-31, 341, 561
Hittites, i, 192, 196, 200, 219, 278, 282, 283, 300, 327, ii, 121
Hi-ung-nu.
(_See_ Huns)
Hobson, J. A., ii, 543
Hoche, General, ii, 374
Hogarth, D. G., i, 367, 392
Hogarth, William, ii, 227
_Hogue_, cruiser, ii, 520
Hohenlinden, battle of, ii, 355, 622
Hohenstaufens (hō en stou’ fenz), ii, 63, 98, 182, 199, 232, 616
Hohenzollerns, ii, 236, 240, 370, 442, 445, 479, 480
Holkham Hall, i, 13
Holland, i, 541, 605, ii, 47, 51, 159, 163, 182, 188,
193, 224, 229-30, 233, 236, 251, 257, 258, 282,
331, 339, 347, 359, 361, 368, 380, 381, 451, 457, 622
Holland, Rev. W. E. S., ii, 473
Holly, i, 51
Holmes, i, 615
Holmes, A., i, 13
Holmes, Rice, i, 104
Holstein, ii, 381
Holy Alliance, ii, 372, 377, 382, 400, 430, 476, 477
Holy Land.
(_See_ Crusades and Palestine)
Holy Roman Empire, ii, 58, 63, 69, 130, 182, 198,
202 _sqq._, 210, 215, 238, 256, 614, 622
Homage, ii, 44
Home Rule Bill, i, 312
Homer, i, 114, 174-82, 196, 216, 219, 229, 300, 304, 508, 531
Homo antiquus.
_See_ Neanderthal man;
Heidelbergensis, _see_ Heidelberg man;
Neanderthalensis, _see_ Neanderthal man;
primigenius, _see_ Neanderthal man;
sapiens, _see_ Man, true
Homs, i, 621
Honduras (hon dūr´ ăs), British, ii, 254
Honey, i, 172
Honoria, i, 557
Honorius, i, 554, ii, 611
Honorius III, pope, ii, 87, 615
Hope in religion, i, 125
Hopf, Ludwig, i, 80, 118, 130
Hophni, i, 284
Horace, i, 407
Horn, Count of, ii, 229
Horn implements, i, 90, 107, 116
Horrabin, F., i, 119
Horses, i, 58, 64, 69, 70, 92-100, 105, 170, 177, 192, 299, 551
Horsuv Tyn, ii, 152
Horticulture, i, 254
Horus, i, 249, 252, 412-14, 429, 590, 591
Hose, i, 148
Hotel Cecil, i, 621
Hottentot language, i, 162
Households, growth of, i, 258
Houses, stone, i, 171
Howard, the philanthropist, ii, 338
Howe, F. C., ii, 543
Howorth, H. H., i, 541
Howth, ii, 498
Hrdlicka, Dr., i, 102
Hsia, Empire of, ii, 110
Hubbard, i, 536, 642
Huc, i, 429, 440
Hudson Bay Company, ii, 254, 451
Hudson Bay Territory, i, 158
Hudson River, ii, 292, 387
Hueffer, F. M., ii, 480
Hugo, Victor, ii, 355
Huguenots, ii, 244, 253, 282
Hulagu, ii, 114, 118, 120, 130, 154, 616
Human association, ii, 413
Human sacrifice, i, 116-17, 130-31, 134, ii, 91, 190
Humayun (hoo mä´ yoon), ii, 133
Hungary (and the Hungarians), i, 106, 553, 558, 560,
600, ii, 51, 69, 70, 77, 100, 113, 122, 126, 139,
184, 204, 205, 233, 260, 380, 400, 446, 618.
(_See also_ Austria)
Huns, i, 196, 203-05, 253, 272, 388, 508, 533,
539, 541, 543-52, 554, 557, 559, 618, 627-32,
644, ii, 66, 71, 106, 108, 113, 142, 266, 611
Hunter Commission, ii, 456
Hunting, i, 91, 92, 96-104, 112, 124, 317, 318
Husein, son of Ali, ii, 27, 30
Huss, John, ii, 100, 151, 202, 263, 272, 615
Hussites, ii, 152-56, 617
Hut urns, i, 115
Hutchinson, i, 162
Hutchinson, H. N., i, 50
Hutton, ii, 419
Huxley, Prof., i, 13, 146, ii, 420-21, 426
Hwang-ho (hwăng’ hō), river, i, 205, 542, 641, ii, 108, 118
Hyæna cave, i, 76
Hyænodon (hī ē’ nō don), i, 53
Hyde Park, ii, 437
Hyksos, i, 196, 199, ii, 1
Hyracodon (hī răk’ ō don), i, 53
Hystaspes (his tăs’ pēz), i, 326, ii, 607
Iberian language, i, 167
Iberians, i, 101, 146, 167, 171, 176, 196, 213, 281, 298, 446, ii, 247.
(_See also_ Mediterranean race)
Ibex, i, 93
Ibn Batuta (ibn bä too’ tä), ii, 154
Ibn-rushd.
(_See_ Averroes)
Ibrahim, son of Muhammad, ii, 13
Icarus (ik’ ă rŭs), i, 215
Ice, effect of, i, 59
Ice Age, i, 52, 57-60, 68-72, 77, 82, 87, 119, 120, 159, 317
Iceland, ii, 53, 185, 252
Icelandic language, i, 168
I-chabod, i, 285
Ichthyosaurs (ik’ thi ō sawrz), i, 41, 45
Iconium, ii, 72
Ideograms, i, 224-26
Ideographs, i, 226
Idumeans, i, 570
Ignatius, St., of Loyola, ii, 164-66, 263, 618
Iliad, the.
(_See_ Homer)
Ilkhan, Empire of, ii, 114, 118, 127, 130
Illyria, i, 372, 375, 377, 472, 480, ii, 122, 608
Immortality, idea of, i, 124, 413, 423-24, 538-39
Imperator, title of, i, 565
Imperial preference, ii, 488
Imperialism, i, 311, ii, 424, 436, 461, 475 _sqq._, 498-502
Implements, bone, i, 99;
bronze, i, 132;
Chellean, i, 70;
copper, i, 105;
earliest use of, i, 67-68;
flint, i, 71, 76-81, 88, 91, 96, 99, 107, 114;
horn, i, 90, 107, 116;
iron, i, 107;
Neolithic, i, 104-05, 114, 132;
Palæolithic, i, 76, 104, 137;
Pliocene, i, 68-69;
stone, i, 57, 67, 69, 75, 80, 88, 96, 104, 106, 273;
use of by animals, i, 67;
wooden, i, 76
Inca of Peru, ii, 190
Independency, ii, 163
India, i, 37, 74, 106, 109, 114, 160, 181-82, 206, 327, 396,
432, 489, 509, 532,
548, 626, ii, 27, 33, 109, 133, 139, 144, 268, 351;
history (_Alexander in_), i, 379, 386, 388, 428, 510;
(_Indo-Scythians in_), i, 548, 617, 628, ii, 610;
(_Ephthalites in_), i, 629, ii, 611;
(_Mongols in_), i, 550, 557, ii, 114, 133-37;
(_17th and 18th centuries_), ii, 254, 256-58, 262;
(_British in_), ii, 133-37, 254-59, 279, 285, 451-56, 471, 487, 620, 621;
civilization, social development, and culture,
i, 147, 171, 179, 183, 196, 201,
268-70, 272, 307, 415-16, 430, ii, 136, 145, 455;
European settlements in, ii, 254-59, 279, 285, 620;
languages of, i, 158, 169, 189, ii, 139-40;
peoples and races, i, 138-39, 145, 158-60,
196, 201, 203, 317, 386, 629, ii, 106, 190;
religions of, i, 270, 416 _sqq._, 440, 604,
610, 625, ii, 108, 114, 136, 166;
trade of, i, 401, 533, 640, ii, 257;
travels and voyages to, i, 533, 642, 645,
ii, 119, 185-87, 465, 612, 617
Indian corn, i, 113
Indian ocean, i, 47, 108, 118, 210, ii, 187
Indian sign-language, i, 150
Indians, American.
(_See_ American Indians)
Indies, East, i, 46, 148, 159, 162, 206, 210, 273, ii, 257, 451, 461
Indies, West, ii, 187, 252, 305, 306, 451
Individual, the free, i, 259
Individuality, in reproduction, i, 17
Indo-European languages.
(_See_ Aryan languages)
Indo-Iranian language, i, 169;
people, i, 538
Indonesian life, i, 177
Indore, ii, 257
Indo-Scythians, i, 548, 617, 628, ii, 610
Indulgences, ii, 93, 202
Indus, i, 159, 182, 201, 327, 385-89, 395, 430, 507, 523, ii, 22, 132, 607
Industrial Revolution, ii, 276, 393-98, 405
Industrialism, ii, 273-75
Infanticide, i, 134
Influenza, ii, 384
Information, ii, 413
Infusoria, i, 21
Inge, Dean, i, 583, 587, ii, 416
Innes, A. D., ii, 218
Innocent III, pope, ii, 82, 86-98, 167, 615
Innocent IV, ii, 81, 88, 116
Inns, early, i, 220
Innsbruck, ii, 207
Inquisition, the, ii, 95, 117, 166, 209, 378
Insects, i, 5, 28
Instruments, Neolithic musical, i, 115
Interglacial period, i, 60, 68-70, 75-76
“International,” the, ii, 409
International relationship, ii, 347
Internationalism, ii, 432
Intoxicants, i, 172, 182
Investitures, ii, 44, 74, 85
Ion, poet, i, 347
Iona, ii, 50
Ionian Islands, ii, 351
Ionians, i, 314-16, 327-32, 337-40, ii, 121
Ionic dialect, i, 300
Ipsus (ip’ sŭs), battle of, i, 395
Irak, ii, 33
Iran (ē rän’), i, 508, 626
Iranians, i, 299, 627
Ireland, i, 86, 102, 105, 110, 182, 209, 299, 312, 603,
ii, 40, 50, 66, 97, 178,
224-26, 424, 432, 471, 488-99, 621, 623, 624
Irene (ī rē’ nē), Empress, ii, 58
Irish, Catholics, ii, 222, 224, 244;
language, i, 152, 168;
prisoners, ii, 284;
race, i, 167
Irish sea, i, 75
Iron, i, 4, 79, 133;
as currency, i, 219-20;
use of, i, 107, 187, 196, 205, 207, ii, 275, 387-89, 606
Iron Age, i, 97, 108, 133
Ironsides, ii, 223
Iroquois (ir ō kwoi’) tribes, ii, 285
Irrigation, i, 37, 190
Irving, Washington, ii, 253
Isaac, patriarch, i, 278-79
Isabella of Castile, ii, 186, 200
Isaiah, i, 578
Ishmael, i, 279
Ishtar, i, 232, 245, 279, 283
Isis, i, 239, 249, 412-14, 428-29, 538, 575, 590-91
Iskender, i, 389
Islam, i, 296, 441, 583, 624, 636, ii, 4 _sqq._, 113, 142, 194;
and Christianity, ii, 34, 35, 64, 114, 149;
propaganda of, ii, 15-16, 28, 51, 108, 116, 127, 142, 256, 396, 397;
teaching of, ii, 14 _sqq._, 64, 136, 146, 402.
(_See also_ Moslems, _and_ Muhammadanism)
Isocrates (ī sok’ ră tēz), i, 351, 357, 363, 367, 373, 390, 397
Ispahan (is pă hän’), ii, 132
Israel, Kingdom of (and Israelites), i, 193, 277 _sqq._,
316, ii, 144, 244, 606.
(_See also_ Jews)
Issik Kul (is’ ik kool), i, 643
Issus, battle of, i, 380-84, ii, 20, 78, 608
Italian language, i, 151, 446, ii, 160, 199
Italy (and Italians), i, 106, 196, 213, 281,
388, 446-47, 526, 611, ii, 121, 144, 608;
history (_Greeks in_), i, 302, 304, 346, 447, 451-52, ii, 606-08;
(_Gauls in_), i, 388, 449, 471;
(_Roman_), i, 453, 460, 494, 499-505, ii, 147;
(_invasion by Hannibal_), i, 475-77;
(_Goths in_), i, 553, 606, ii, 46, 65, 612;
(_Huns in_), i, 559, 608;
(_Lombards in_), i, 606, 616, ii, 57, 153, 612;
(_Charlemagne in_), ii, 57-58;
(_Germans in_), ii, 58, 618;
(_Normans in_), ii, 67, 69, 76;
(_Saracens in_), ii, 67;
(_Magyars in_), ii, 69;
(_13th-18th cent._), ii, 83, 87-89, 97-98, 126, 127,
182-84, 195-97, 204, 216, 233, 236, 621-22;
(_Napoleonic period_), ii, 332, 339, 347, 350-55, 359, 364, 622;
(_to unification of_), ii, 380-82, 400, 432;
(_Kingdom of_), ii, 440-45, 461, 469-70, 500-01, 519, 622, 624;
imperialism of, ii, 470, 500.
(_See also_ Rome _and_ Great War)
Ivan III, ii, 129, 617; IV (_the Terrible_), ii, 129, 618
Ivory, trade in, i, 273
Ivy, fossil, i, 51
Jackson, Sir Louis, ii, 567 _sqq._
Jackson, T. G., ii, 61
Jacob, patriarch, i, 278 _sq._
Jacobins, French, ii, 324, 333 _sqq._, 342, 349, 621
Jacquerie, ii, 156, 502, 621
Jade, i, 118
Jaffa, ii, 353
Jaipur (jī poor’), ii, 256
Jamaica, ii, 254, 451, 471
James I, i, 110, ii, 216 _sqq._, 237, 253, 280
James II, ii, 226, 491
James, St., i, 580
James, Henry, ii, 550
Jameson, Dr., ii, 424
Jamestown, ii, 284, 305
Janissaries, ii, 122, 132
Japan, i, 139, 429, 432, 642, ii, 119, 185, 187, 261-62, 463-70, 623, 624
Japanese, i, 66, 147, 636, ii, 464;
language and writing, i, 156, 638
Japhet, i, 140
Jarandilla, ii, 207
Jarrow, ii, 50
Java, i, 68, ii, 187
Jaw, chimpanzee, i, 72;
human, _ib._; Piltdown (_see_ Piltdown)
Jefferson, Tho., ii, 293, 303 _sqq._
Jehad (jē häd’), “holy war,” ii, 80
Jehan (jē hăn’), Shah, ii, 133
Jehangir, ii, 133
Jehovah, i, 282, 287, 293, 307, 412
Jena (yā’ nă), battle of, ii, 362, 364, 476, 622
Jengis Khan (jen’ gis kän), ii, 106, 108, 109 _sq._,
116 _sq._, 121, 128 _sqq._,
261, 615
Jenné, i, 565
Jerboas, ii, 154
Jerome of Prague, ii, 151
Jerusalem, i, 247, 278, 288-93, 411, 523, 571-72,
575, 578, 580-81, 584-86, 589,
604, 618-19, 623, ii, 11, 21, 22, 64, 75, 78-84, 97, 229, 483, 612, 615
Jesuits, ii, 117, 127, 164 _sq._, 193, 309, 390, 465, 618 _sq._
Jesus, spirit and teaching of, i, 296, 492, 572 _sqq._,
601, 617, 626, ii, 6, 13 _sqq._, 54, 64, 85,
90 _sqq._, 116, 127, 149 _sq._, 158, 163, 263, 296,
342, 360, 376, 402, 417, 426, 609 _sq._
Jet, i, 105
Jevons, F. B., i, 118
Jewellery, iron, i, 107
Jewish religion and sacred books, i, 278, 294-96, 400,
411, 440, 538, 571-72, 576, ii, 36, 417
Jews, i, 200, 247, 278, 292-97, 303, 402, 411, 569-72,
609-10, ii, 3-9, 18, 29, 32, 36, 41, 71,
77, 88, 121, 147, 242, 248, 424, 607.
(_See also_ Judaism)
“Jingo,” ii, 447
Jingo, queen, ii, 465
Joab, i, 287
Joan of Arc, ii, 179
Job, Book of, i, 114, 294
Jodhpore (jōd poor’), Raja of, ii, 135
John, king of England, ii, 81, 219
John II, king of Portugal, ii, 186
John III, king of Poland.
(_See_ Sobiesky, John)
John X, pope, ii, 62, 614
John XI, pope, ii, 62, 614
John XII, pope, ii, 62 _sq._, 73, 97, 614
John of Leyden, ii, 156
John, Prester, ii, 119
John, St., ii, 580, 598;
Gospel of, i, 573, ii, 30, 50
Johnson, i, 238
Johnson, Samuel, ii, 493
Johnston, R. M., ii, 348
Jones, F. Wood, i, 63
Jones, H. Stuart, i, 454, 516, 522, 534, 609
Joppa, i, 282
Jordan, river, i, 278, ii, 19
Joseph, St., i, 574
Joseph II, emperor, ii, 240, 620 _sq._
Josephine, empress.
(_See_ Beauharnais)
Josephus, i, 500, 571 _sq._
Joshua, i, 282
Josiah, king of Judah, i, 292, ii, 607 _sq._
Judah, kingdom of, i, 289 _sqq._, ii, 244
Judaism, i, 440, 570, 583, ii, 16, 142, 149.
(_See also_ Jews)
Judas, i, 585
Judea, i, 196, 278, 365, 436, 538, 569 _sqq._, 584 _sqq._, ii, 4, 27
Judges, Book of, i, 282 _sq._
Judges of Israel, i, 467, ii, 144
Jugo-Slavs (ū’ gō slävz).
(_See_ Yugo-Slavs)
Jugurtha (joo gũr’ th_ă_), i, 502 _sq._, ii, 609
Julian the Apostate, i, 625, ii, 611
Julius III, ii, 208
Jung, i, 361
Jungle fowl, i, 114
Juno, i, 218, 483
Junot, Mme., ii, 349
Jupiter, i, 233, 412 _sq._, 448, ii, 49
Jupiter, planet, i, 4
Jupiter Ammon, i, 252
Jupiter Serapis, i, 412
Justinian, i, 606, 608, 611, 613, 633, ii, 46, 57 _sq._, 124, 153, 384, 612
Jutes, i, 554, 605, ii, 54, 66
Jutland, battle of, ii, 520
Kaaba (kä’ ă bă), ii, 5 _sqq._, 11, 27
Kadessia, battle of, ii, 20, 613
Kadija (kă dē’ j_ă_), ii, 6 _sqq._
Kaffirs, i, 219
Kaisar-i-Hind, i, 565, ii, 134
Kaisar-i-Roum, i, 565
Kaiser, Austrian, i, 565;
German, i, 565
Kali (kă’ lē), i, 439
Kalifa.
(_See_ Caliph)
Kalinga, i, 431
Kalmucks (käl’ mŭks), i, 137, 143, 545, ii, 128
Kanishka (kă nish’ k_ă_), i, 628, 646, ii, 610
Kao-chang, i, 644
Karakorum (kä rä kōr’ ăm), ii, 110 _sqq._, 134
Karma (kär’ mă), doctrine of, i, 425
Karnak, i, 200
Kashgar (kăsh gär’), i, 546, 628, 643, ii, 22, 109, 118, 610
Kashmir, Buddhists in, i, 432
Kautsky, ii, 510
Kavadh, i, 624, 634, ii, 1, 366, 612
Kazan (kă zän’), ii, 118
Keane, A. H., i, 118, 161
Keith, Dr. A., i, 63, 71 _sq._
Keltic languages, i, 168, 182, 299, 446, 605
Keltic race, i, 110, 168, 176, 182, 196, 299,
388, 395, 554, ii, 40, 48, 228, 490
Kelvin, Lord, i, 13
Kent, Duke of, ii, 405
Kent, Kingdom of, ii, 40
Kepler, ii, 176, 619
Kerensky, ii, 526-27
Kerne Island, i, 217
Ketboga, ii, 114, 132, 616
Keynes, J. M., ii, 541, 557, 560
Khalid (kä lēd’), ii, 18 _sq._
Khans, i, 644, ii, 108 _sqq._, 126 _sqq._, 144, 615 _sq._
Kharismia, ii, 106, 109, 615
Khazars (kä zärz’), ii, 70, 71
Khedive, the, of Egypt, ii, 471
Khitan people, ii, 109, 118
Khiva (kē’ vă), ii, 106, 108
Khokand (kō kănd’), i, 546, ii, 110
Khorasan (kō ră sän’), ii, 31, 37
Khotan (kō tän’), i, 628, ii, 118, 610
Khyber Pass, i, 386, 548, 643, ii, 257
Kiau-Chau (kyou’ chou’), ii, 469 _sq._, 564, 624
Kidnapped children sent to New England, ii, 284
Kieff, ii, 67, 110 _sq._, 129, 134, 614;
Grand Duke of, ii, 110
Kin Empire, ii, 108-09 _sq._, 128, 261, 615
Kings, book of, i, 193, 282, 287, 289, 291
Kings (and kingship), i, 134, 178, 218, 240 _sqq._,
248 _sqq._, 263, 285 _sqq._,
305 _sq._, 430, ii, 142, 194, 233-34, 286, 375 _sq._;
divine right of, ii, 216, 221
Kioto (kyō´ tō), ii, 467
Kipchak, Empire, ii, 114, 128 _sq._
Kipling, Rudyard, ii, 423, 462, 488
Kirghis (kir gēz´), ii, 109;
steppe, i, 634
Kitchen-middens, i, 109, 110, 152
Kiwi, i, 207
Knighthood, i, 465, ii, 202
Knights, i, 268, ii, 179;
of the Shire, i, 463, ii, 218
Knipe, H. R., i, 50
Knives, flint, i, 96
Knots, records by means of, i, 208
Knowledge, diffusion of, i, 296, 397 _sqq._, 487, ii, 168-69
Konia, ii, 72, 78
Königsberg, ii, 180, 367
Koran, ii, 9 _sq._, 15, 29 _sq._, 257
Korea, i, 633, 638 _sq._, ii, 261, 465 _sqq._
Korean alphabet, i, 638;
language, i, 156
Kosciusko (kos i ŭs´ kō), ii, 251
Krapina, i, 72
Kremlin, the, ii, 242
Krishna (krish´ nă), i, 439
Kropotkin, ii, 425
Krüdener, Baroness von, ii, 372
Krum, Prince of Bulgaria, ii, 58, 69, 614
Krupp, firm of, ii, 514
Kshatriyas (kshä trē´ yăz), i, 269, 270
Kuan-yin, i, 429
Kublai Khan (koo´ blī kän), ii, 108 _sqq._, 126 _sq._, 144, 616 _sq._
Kuen-lun (kwen loon´) mountains, i, 201, 546, 548, 643
Kufa, ii, 36
Kushan (koo shän´) dynasty, i, 628
Kusinagara, i, 646
Kut, ii, 522
Kutub, ii, 108, 615
Labour, i, 255, 265, 271, ii, 154-56, 157-58, 193, 404 _sqq._, 478
Labour Colleges, i, 487
Labourers, Statute of, ii, 156
Labrador, i, 78, 124, 137, ii, 435
Labyrinth, Cretan, i, 214, 216
Lacedemon (läs _ĕ_ dē´ m_ŏ_n), i, 303
Lacedemonians, i, 307, 322, 332
Ladé, i, 331
Ladrones (lä drōnz´), ii, 187
Ladysmith, i, 485
Lafayette (lä fā yet´), General, ii, 292, 316, 318, 324, 327
Lagash(lā´ găsh), i, 195
Lahore, ii, 110
Lake dwellings, i, 109-112, 133.
(_See also_ Pile dwellings)
La Madeleine, i, 96
Lamas, Grand, i, 429
Lamballe, princesse de, ii, 329
Lamps, Palæolithic, i, 95
Lance head, bronze, i, 132
Land, tenure of, i, 256, 271
Lanfranc, Archbishop, ii, 150
Lang, Andrew, i, 79
Langley, Prof., ii, 392
Languages of mankind, i, 126, 133, 150-64, 167-74, 189, 227, 298, 446
Lankester, Sir Ray, i, 50, 63, 68, 72-74
Laodicea (lā ō di sē´ ă), ii, 79
Lao Tse (lä´ ot z_ĕ_), i, 433, 436, 582, 632, 641, 647, ii, 106, 402, 607
Laplace, i, 31
Lapland, i, 156
Larsa, i, 195
Las Casas (läs kä´ säs), ii, 193, 305
Lateran, the, ii, 57, 63, 73, 84, 90, 92, 97
Latin, emperors, ii, 97, 229;
language and literature, i, 168, 169, 189, 461,
530, 534-5, 564, 605, 613, ii,
60, 71, 73, 130, 160
Latins, the, i, 445-454, ii, 616
Latium, i, 447
Laud, Archbishop, ii, 221
Laughter, ii, 373
Law, i, 309, 616, ii, 46
Lawrence, Colonel, i, 188
Lawrence, General, ii, 455
Leaf, Walter, i, 216
League of Nations, ii, 545, 548-49, 557-564, 624
Learning, i, 240-41, 609, ii, 114
Leather, Arabian, ii, 38;
money, i, 220, ii, 89;
as clothing, i, 408
Lebanon, i, 287, 621, 623
Lecky, i, 426
Lecointre (l_ĕ_ kwäntr´), ii, 318
Lee, General, ii, 301, 444
Leeuwenhoek (lā´ vĕn huk), ii, 177
Legge, i, 401, 413, 538, 595
Legion of Honour, ii, 357
Legrain, L., i, 241
Leicestershire, ii, 156
Leiden, ii, 229
Leipzig (līp´ sik), ii, 180;
battle of, ii, 368
_Leipzig_, cruiser, ii, 520
Lemberg, ii, 518
Lemming, i, 58
Le Moustier, i, 78
Lemurs, i, 56-57, 65
Lena, river, ii, 267
Lenin (len’ in), ii, 409-11, 527
Leo I, i, 559; III, ii, 57, 58, 60, 97, 613;
X, ii, 200-203, 618
Leo the Isaurian, ii, 29
Leonidas (lē on’ i dăs), i, 336
Leopold I, of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, ii, 381, 436, 622
Leopold, king of Belgium, ii, 438
Lepanto, battle of, ii, 140, 184
Lepers, ii, 94
Lepidus (lep’ i dŭs), i, 514
Levant, the, i, 598, ii, 194
Levantine lake, i, 210
Leverhulme, Lord, ii, 406
Levites, i, 288
Leviticus, Book of, i, 281
Lex Valeria, i, 457
Lexington, ii, 290-91, 621
Lhassa, i, 438, 591
Liang-chi-chao, i, 205
Liao-tung (lē ou’ toong’), ii, 469
Liberal Party, ii, 489
Liberia, i, 217, ii, 461
Libraries, i, 246, 292, 405-09
Libyan script, i, 228
Licinian Rogations and Laws, i, 459, 499, 631
Licinius, i, 459
Liége (1ē āzh’), ii, 513, 514
Liegnitz (lēg’ nits), battle of, ii, 112, 616
Life, i, 6, 16; early forms of, i, 7-15, 19-22, 38 _sqq._;
intellectual development of human, i, 229-31
Light, essential to plants, i, 24
Ligny (1ē nyē’), ii, 371
Ligurian republic, ii, 347
Lilybæum, i, 469, 470
Limerick, Treaty of, ii, 492
Lincoln, Abraham, i, 345, ii, 443, 623
Lion, the, i, 69, 70, 76, 102, 178, 317
Lippi, Filippo, ii, 183
Lisbon, i, 529, ii, 80, 180, 187, 207, 257
Lissa, battle of, ii, 445
Literature, prehistoric, i, 173
Lithuania, ii, 129, 244
Liu Yu, i, 633
Liverpool, ii, 386, 622
Lizards, i, 46
Llama, i, 56, 207
Lloyd, i, 346, 446
Lloyd, L., i, 174
Lob Nor, ii, 118
Lochau (lō chou’), ii, 206
Locke, John, ii, 288, 309, 620
Lockyer, Sir Norman, i, 240
Logic, study of, ii, 168
Loire (lwär), the, ii, 46
Lombardy (and Lombards), i, 143, 564, 606, 608,
612, 616, ii, 46, 57, 153, 361, 441, 612
London, ii, 154, 156, 180, 182, 221, 222, 249,
259, 289, 361, 370, 398, 437, 470, 483,
492, 520, 532, 623
London, Royal Society.
(_See_ Royal Society of London)
London, University of, ii, 437
Londonderry, ii, 497-98, 624
Longinus (lon jī’ nŭs), i, 535
Long Island Sound, ii, 281
Longwy (lo_n_ vē’), ii, 329
Loos, ii, 517
Lopez de Recalde, Inigo.
(_See_ Ignatius, St., of Loyola)
Lords, House of, i, 466, 489, ii, 219, 224-26, 236, 298
Loreburn, Lord, ii, 510
Lorraine, ii, 446, 487
Lost Ten Tribes, i, 193
Louis the Pious, ii, 47, 60-61, 614
Louis VII, ii, 80; IX, ii, 84, 116, 616;
XI, ii, 179; XIV, ii, 226, 236, 237-39, 249, 253, 311, 331, 356, 376;
XV, ii, 239-40, 243-44, 264, 332, 356, 620;
XVI, ii, 240, 243, 267, 308, 311 _sqq._, 337, 370, 621; XVII, ii, 370;
XVIII, ii, 370, 378, 622
Louis Philippe, ii, 379, 622
Louisiana, ii, 254, 286
Lourdes, i, 591
Louvain University, ii, 553
Low, Sidney, ii, 473
Loyalty, modern conceptions of, ii, 424
Loyola (lō-yō’ l_ă_, loi ō’ l_ă_), St.
(_See_ Ignatius, St., of Loyola)
Lu, i, 434
Lubbock, Sir John.
(_See_ Avebury, Lord)
Lubeck, ii, 182
Lucerne, Lake of, ii, 198
Lu-chu Islands, i, 631
Lucknow, ii, 257, 455
Lucretius (lū krē’ shi ŭs), i, 488, 534, ii, 419
Lucullus (lū kŭl’ ŭs), i, 505
Luke, St., i, 573
Lull, Prof., i, 6, 7
Lunar month, i, 129
Lung-fish, i, 25
Lungs, i, 25, 55
“Lur,” bronze, i, 132
_Lusitania_, liner, ii, 520
Luther, Martin, ii, 160, 162-63, 171, 202-03, 206, 618
Lutterworth, ii, 96
Lützen (lut’ s_ĕ_n), ii, 236
Lutsow, Count, ii, 152
Luxembourg, ii, 381, 445, 511
Luxembourg Palace, ii, 354
Luxor, i, 200, 250
Lvoff, Prince, ii, 525
Lyceum, Athens, i, 357, 359
Lycia, sea-battle of, ii, 28
Lycurgus (lī kũr’ gŭs), i, 221
Lydia (and Lydians), i, 220, 314-16, 320 _sqq._, 326-7, 370, 395,
416, 482, ii, 121, 606
Lydian language, i, 162;
script, i, 228
Lyell, Sir C., i, 50, ii, 419
Lynd, ii, 499
Lyons, i, 560, ii, 333
Lysias (lis’ i ăs), orator, i, 306
Lysimachus (lī sim’ _ă_ kŭs), i, 395
Macallister, Stewart, i, 168
Macaulay, Lord, i, 450, ii, 270, 273, 428
Macaulay Island, i, 218
Maccabeans, i, 571, ii, 4
McCurdy, ii, 513
MacDougall, i, 148
Macedon, i, 622
Macedonia (and the Macedonians), i, 213, 303, 308, 331, 340, 363,
367 _sqq._, 386-95, 401-2, 430, 452, 476, 480,
ii, 2, 43, 122, 145, 268, 380, 607
Machiavelli (mä kē ā vel’ ē), N., ii, 195-98, 202, 210, 240, 479, 618
Machinery, ii, 275, 395
Mac Neilh, i, 168
Madagascar, i, 207
Madeira, ii, 185
Madelin, ii, 307
_Madhurattha Vilasini_ (măd’ hoorāt’ t’h_ă_ vi lä’ si nē), i, 421
Madison, ii, 303
Madras, i, 179, 431, ii, 142, 258
Mæander (mē ăn’ dĕr), ii, 79
Mælius, Spurius, i, 458, 500
Magdalenian Age, i, 96, 97;
clothing, i, 408;
hunters, i, 317
Magdeburg, ii, 180, 235
Magellan, Ferdinand, ii, 187-88, 618
Magenta, ii, 441, 623
Magic and magicians, i, 134, 235
Magna Carta, ii, 219, 615
Magna Græcia, i, 302, 316, 451, 452
Magna Mater, i, 483
Magnesia, i, 397, 482, ii, 608
Magnetism, ii, 176
Magyar language, i, 156, 560, ii, 70
Magyars (môd´ yôrz, mă jărz´), i, 560, 606, ii, 69, 113
Mahaffy, i, 357, 389, 401, 404
Mahan, ii, 352
Mahrattas, ii, 257
Maillard, ii, 316-17
Maimonides (mī mon´ i dēz), ii, 36
Maine, ii, 281, 282
Mainz (mīnts), ii, 60, 159, 180, 331
Maize, i, 113, 207
Majuba, ii, 460, 489, 623
Malabar, i, 533
Malay-Polynesian languages, i, 158
Malays, i, 203, ii, 465
Malleson, ii, 133
Mallet, ii, 309
Malory, Sir Thomas, i, 175
Malta, ii, 225, 351, 359, 451, 470
Mamelukes, ii, 122, 126, 132
Mammals, i, 46-50, 58-59, 64 _sqq._
(_See also_ Animals)
Mammoth, i, 58, 64, 69, 76, 78, 92, 95, 99, 101
Man, i, 5, 17, 21, 37, 41, 63-67, 101, 105-109, 110, 134-35;
ancestry of, i, 49, 56-59, 63-69, ii, 420;
brotherhood of, i, 584;
early, i, 57, 85-88, 91, 100-09, 115, 122-35, 145, 149, 273, 407, ii, 341;
Eoanthropus, i, 60, 70-74;
Heidelberg, i, 60, 69, 71, 84;
life of common, i, 255;
as mechanical power, ii, 394;
Neanderthal, i, 60, 72, 90, 91-95, 97, 108, 122-25;
primeval, i, 76-84;
and the State, ii, 244-45
Manchester, ii, 386, 404, 622
Manchu (măn choo´) language, i, 156
Manchuria, i, 546, 641, ii, 261, 463-69, 484
Manchus, ii, 128, 261, 464
Mandarins, i, 270, 272
Mangu Khan, ii, 113, 116, 616
Mani (mä´ nē), i, 626-27, ii, 6, 13, 14, 91-92, 611
Manichæans (măn i kē´ _ă_nz), i, 603, 626, ii, 29, 91-92
Manichæism, i, 626
Manif (mä nēf), ii, 5, 11
Mankind, i, 136-149, 295-7, 365;
brotherhood of, ii, 246
Manlius, Marcus, i, 458, 473, 500
Manny, Sir Walter, ii, 154
Manresa (män rā’ s_ă_), Abbey of, ii, 165
Mansfield, Lord, ii, 306
Mansur, ii, 31
Mantinea (măn ti nē’ _ă_), i, 378
Mantua (măn’ tyū _ă_), ii, 332
Manuscripts, i, 407, 627, ii, 159
“Manzi,” ii, 118
Manzikert (măn’ zi kũrt), ii, 72
Mara, Indian god, i, 418
Marat (mä rä’), ii, 324-33, 374
Marathon, i, 332-7, 345, 346, ii, 607
Marchand, Colonel, ii, 460
Marcus Aurelius.
(_See_ Antoninus)
Mardonius (mär dō ni ŭs), i, 339, 340
Marduk (mär dook), a god, i, 237
Marengo, ii, 355, 622
Margoliouth, D. S., ii, 1
Maria Theresa, ii, 240, 251, 620, 621
Marie Antoinette, ii, 311
Marie Louise, Archduchess, ii, 365, 374
Mariner’s compass, i, 635, ii, 121
Maritime power, i, 215-16
Marius (mär’ i ŭs), i, 486, 502-05, ii, 511, 609
Mark, St., i, 573, 578, 579, 580
Marly, ii, 317
Marmots, i, 47
Marne, ii, 515, 530
Marozia, ii, 62, 614
Marriage and intermarriage, i, 179, 237, 250, 267
Mars, god, ii, 49
Mars, planet, i, 4, 5
Marseillaise, the, ii, 331
Marseilles (mär sālz’), i, 203, 447, 475, ii, 82, 94, 180, 204, 333, 616
Marston Moor, ii, 223
Martel, Charles, ii, 45, 47-48, 614
Martin V, Pope, ii, 96, 100, 152, 617
Marvin, F. S., i, 401, ii, 90, 384
Marx, Karl, ii, 398, 399, 408, 409, 411, 415-16, 485
Marxists, i, 268
Mary, the Egyptian, ii, 13
Mary, the Virgin, i, 575, 591
Mary I, Queen of England, ii, 218, 220
Mary II, Queen of England, ii, 226
Maryland, ii, 282, 283, 284, 290
Mas d’Azil, i, 101
Masai hunters, i, 318
Masked Tuaregs, i, 154
Mason, Capt. John, ii, 282
Mason, Otis T., i, 63, 104
Mason and Dixon line, ii, 282, 284
Maspero, i, 250, 252
Mass, the, ii, 149
Massachusetts, ii, 281, 282, 290, 296, 300, 306, 338, 621
Massage, i, 147
Massinissa, King, i, 479
Mastodon (măs’ tō don), i, 58, 73
Mathematics, ii, 35-36, 37, 114
Matheson, i, 445
Matthew, St., i, 573, 577, 587
Maulvi Muhammad Ali, ii, 9
Mauritius, ii, 257
Maxentius, i, 597
Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, ii, 444, 623
Maximilian I, ii, 200, 617
Maximin, i, 557
Maya (mä’ yä) writing, i, 208
Mayence.
(See Mainz)
_Mayflower_, the, ii, 253, 281, 284
Mayor, i, 491
Mayor of the Palace, ii, 47
Mazarin, Cardinal, ii, 236, 237, 246
Mazdaism, i, 627, ii, 16
Mead, i, 558
Mecca, ii, 3-17, 24-30
Meccan allies, ii, 612
Mechanical Revolution, the, ii, 386-96, 415, 425, 437,
449, 453, 461, 476, 541
Medes, i, 194, 200, 248, 291, 299, 315, 318-23, 332,
335, 342, 344, 387, 449, 543, ii, 607
Media (mē’ di ă), i, 193, 293, 319, 327, 387, 508, 523
Medici (med’ i chē) family, ii, 182, 195, 196
Medicine, i, 402 _sqq._, ii, 35, 37
Medina (me dē’ n_ă_), i, 624, 634, ii, 1, 3, 7-11, 14,
17, 18, 21, 24, 26, 27, 612
Mediterranean, i, 153, 160, 184, 190, 210, 212, 216, 218,
278, 304, 396, 445-6, 468, 508, 529, 540, 542, 560,
570, 621, 641, ii, 28, 53, 65, 139-40, 182, 184, 189, 194, 225
Mediterranean, alphabets, i, 228, 304, 638;
civilization, i, 84, 149, 196, 228, 273, 562, ii, 1;
early navigation of, i, 210, 211, 216, 512;
race and peoples, i, 101, 108, 138, 141-45, 154, 160-62,
168, 176, 206, 281, 298, 300, 313, 445,
471-72, 538, ii, 122, 149, 490;
valley, i, 75, 108, 118, 119, 120, 184, 196
Medway, ii, 226
Meerut, ii, 454
Megabazus (meg _ă_ bā’ zŭs), i, 331
Megalithic monuments, i, 109, 110, 125, 147, 240
Megara (meg’ _ă_ r_ă_), i, 337
Megatherium, i, 102, 207
Megiddo, i, 291, ii, 607
Meillet, A., i, 300
Melanesia, i, 148, 149
Melasgird, ii, 72, 615
Memphis, i, 326, 364, 382, 412
Menahem (men’ _ă_ hem), i, 291, ii, 606
Mendicants, i, 221
Menelaus (men _ĕ_ lā’ ŭs), i, 176
Menes (mē’ nēz), i, 196, 204
Mengo, ii, 460
Menhir, i, 128
Mercator’s projection, i, 546, ii, 451
Mercenary armies, ii, 197
Merchants, i, 264-67, 271
Mercia, ii, 40, 50, 54
Mercury, god, i, 457
Mercury, planet, i, 4
Merodach (mer’ ō dăk), i, 245
Merovingians, ii, 46-47, 228
Merv, i, 604
Merycodus (mer i kō’ dŭs), i, 58
Mesopotamia, i, 102, 133, 183-86, 191, 196-99, 209,
233, 244, 252, 265, 304, 389,
509, 526, 561, 565, 616, 619, 622, ii, 1, 18, 21,
31, 118, 128, 130, 145, 522
Mesozoic (mes ō zö’ ik) period, i, 12, 14, 37-55, 66, 67, ii, 140
Messiah, i, 293, 538, 569, 575, 580-86
Messina (me sē’ n_ă_), Straits of, i, 454, 460, 468, 469
Metallurgy, ii, 388
Metals, i, 105, 106, 205, 207, 219, ii, 174
Metaurus, i, 476
Methodist revival, ii, 263
Methuselah, i, 129
Metternich, ii, 378, 400
Metz, ii, 317, 318, 445, 446
Mexico (and the Mexicans), i, 147, 203, 207, 208,
ii, 186, 189, 190, 193, 444, 445, 618
Mey, Peter van der, ii, 230
Michael VII, emperor, ii, 72
Michael VIII.
(_See_ Palæologus, Michael)
Michelangelo, ii, 183
Michelin guides, i, 224
Micklegarth, ii, 53
Microscope, ii, 177
Middelburg, ii, 182
Midianites, i, 283
Midsummer day, i, 240
Midwinter day, i, 240
Migrations, i, 105, 548-52
Mihiragula (mi her ă goo’ lă), i, 629, ii, 612
Miklagord, ii, 53
Milan, i, 559, 560, ii, 180, 182, 197, 200, 204, 205, 361, 380
Miletus (mī lē’ tŭs), i, 303, 312, 330, 340, 379
Military organization, i, 190;
service, i, 311;
tactics, ii, 234
Milk, i, 92, 112, 187, 545
Miller, G. S., i, 72
Millet, i, 558
Milligan, Joseph, i, 163
Miltenburg, ii, 180
Miltiades (mil tī’ _ă_ dēz), i, 330, 346
Milvian Bridge, i, 597
Minerals, i, 9
Ming dynasty, i, 227, 635, 637, 641-42, ii, 117, 128, 166, 261, 617
Minos (mī’ nos), i, 196, 214, 216, 257, 316
Minotaur (min’ ō tawr), i, 214, 216
Minstrels, i, 174
Miocene (mī’ ō sēn) period, i, 52, 58-59, 66, 73
Mirabeau (mē rä bō), ii, 314, 319-24
Misraim and Misrim, i, 281
Missionaries (and missions), i, 432, ii, 48, 50, 116, 166, 460, 618
Mississippi, ii, 285
Mitanni, i, 192
Mithraic inscriptions, i, 492
Mithraic Sun-day, i, 575
Mithraism, i, 538, 588, 590, 625, ii, 91, 149, 611
Mithras, i, 413, 538, 590, 625
Mithridates (mith ri dā’ tēz), i, 504, 505, ii, 609
Mo Ti, i, 582
Moa, i, 207
Moab (and Moabites), i, 283, 294, ii, 244
Moawija.
(_See_ Muawija)
Modestov, i, 446
Moerbeke (moor’ bā k_ĕ_), William of, ii, 168
Mœsia, i, 564, ii, 71, 609
Mogul, Great, ii, 471, 620
Mogul dynasty, ii, 133, 618
Mohammed.
(_See_ Muhammad)
Mokanna, ii, 31
Moloch, i, 288
Moltke, Count, ii, 481
Moluccas, ii, 187
Mommsen, i, 454, 464, 480, 483, 500
Monarchy, i, 263, 357, ii, 143, 211, 215, 216-17,
230, 236, 248, 251, 307, 339, 372
Monasteries (and monasticism), i, 609 _sqq._, ii, 50, 106, 150
Monastir (mō nas tēr’), ii, 522
Money, i, 219, 220, 265, 445, 457, 496, 629-30, ii, 344-45.
(_See also_ Currency)
Mongolia, i, 541, 543, 640, ii, 110-20, 261-62
Mongolian languages, i, 156, 162;
races and peoples, i, 100, 141-49, 158, 160, 174,
205, 299, 316, 387, 388, 507,
508, 543-51, 606, ii, 121-22, 139, 142, 247, 261, 262, 464
Mongoloid tribes, i, 207, ii, 189
Mongols, i, 541, 545, 551, 558, ii, 83, 106 _sqq._,
114, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130,
140, 142, 143, 168, 184, 193, 261, 268, 616, 617
Monitors, i, 46
Monkeys, i, 56, 57, 65, 67
Monks.
(_See_ Monasteries)
_Monmouth_, cruiser, ii, 520
Monosyllabic language, i, 157
Monotheism, ii, 15
Monroe, President, ii, 378, 444
Monroe Doctrine, ii, 444, 458, 505
Mons, ii, 514
Monte Cassino, i, 611, 612
Montefiore, C. G., i, 586
Montelius, i, 104
Montesquieu, ii, 309
Montezuma (mon tē zoo’ m_ă_, ii, 190
Montfort, Simon de, ii, 219
Montreal, ii, 254
Montserrat, ii, 165
Moon, i, 6, 128, 129
Moorish buffoon, i, 558
Moorish paper, ii, 159
Moors, i, 490, 565, ii, 193
Moose, i, 70
Moral ideas, i, 296
Moravia, i, 554
More, Sir Thomas, ii, 211, 394
Moreau, General, ii, 355, 374, 622
Morelly, ii, 309
Morgan, W., i, 587
Morley, Lord, ii, 427
_Morning Post_, ii, 405
Mornington, Lord, ii, 453
Morocco, i, 217, 565, ii, 142, 461, 470, 484, 500
Morris, William, ii, 311
Mortar, pebble, i, 90
Morte d’Arthur, i, 175
Mortillet, de, i, 96
Mosasaurs (mō’ s_ă_ sawrz), i, 41, 45
Moscow, ii, 129, 134, 242, 366, 622
Moscow, Grand Duke of, ii, 129, 617
Moscow, Tsar of, ii, 259
Moses, i, 196, 200, 209, 244, 279, 293, 626
Moslem schools, ii, 137;
universities, ii, 36;
year, ii, 8
Moslems, the, ii, 19-29, 34, 64, 70, 74, 80-84, 94,
108, 113, 128, 136, 140, 159,
453, 613, 615;
in Europe, ii, 28-32, 41, 47, 51, 57, 67, 88, 186, 242, 613, 615.
(_See also_ Crusades _and_ Islam)
Mosses, i, 24, 27
Mosso, i, 210
Most, ii, 152
Mosul, ii, 78, 132
Motley, ii, 230, 232
Mounds, i, 109, 117, 125
Mountains (and mountaineering), i, 5, 35, 36, 52
Mousterian Age (and implements), i, 60, 78, 81, 87, 97
Muawija (moo ă wē’ yă), ii, 24-28, 613
Mudfish, i, 26, 55
Muehlon, Herr, ii, 551
Muhammad (mu hăm’ ăd), prophet, i, 296, 573, 583, 624,
634, 642, ii, 1, 126, 136,
149;
life of, ii, 4 _sqq._, 26-27;
teaching of, ii, 13-16, 29
Muhammad II, sultan, ii, 124, 197, 617
Muhammad-Ibn-Musa, ii, 37
Muhammadan communistic movement, ii, 157
Muhammadanism, ii, 29, 42, 135.
(_See also_ Islam _and_ Muhammad)
Mulberry tree, i, 530
Mules, i, 140
Mülhausen (mul’ hou zen), ii, 347
Müller, Max, i, 235
Mummies, i, 147
Mummius, i, 483
Munich (mū’ nik), ii, 180
Münster (mun’ ster), ii, 156, 157, 503, 618
Münster, Bishop of, ii, 156
Munzuk, i, 559
Murad I, ii, 124
Murat (mu rä’), ii, 367
Murray, John, ii, 263
Murzuk, i, 118
Muscovites, ii, 244
Muscovy, empire of, ii, 242
Musical instruments, i, 115
Musk ox, i, 58, 64, 76, 101
Muskets, ii, 234
Mycale (mik’ _ă_ lē), i, 340, 343, ii, 607
Mycenæ (mī sē’ nē), i, 106, 303, 315, 317
Mycenean (mī sē nē’ _ā_n) architecture, i, 448
Mycerinus (mis ũ rī’ nŭs), i, 198
Mylæ, i, 470, ii, 608
Myos-hormos, i, 533
Myres, J. L., i, 228
Myriapods (mir’ i _ă_ podz), i, 28
Myrina (mi rī’ nă), i, 450
Myron, i, 346
Myrtalis (mũr’ tă lis), i, 376
Mysteries, religious, i, 373
Myth-making, i, 129
Mythology, i, 130, 361
Nabatean Kings, i, 622
Nabonidus (năb ō nī’ dŭs), i, 247-50, 255, 278, 288,
292, 320, 326, 385, 416, 483
Nadir Shah (nä´ dēr shä’), ii, 257, 620
Nagasaki (nä gă sä’ kē), ii, 465
Nalanda, i, 645
Nanking, i, 642, ii, 108, 615
Naples, i, 451, 510, 611, ii, 88, 98, 180, 211, 347, 378, 441, 612
Napoleon I, ii, 89, 210, 327, 332, 339, 348-82, 384, 386, 453, 621, 622;
III, i, 565, ii, 436, 438-45, 448, 623
Narbonne, ii, 180
Naseby, ii, 223
Nasmyth, ii, 388
Natal, ii, 460
Nathan, i, 287
“National Schools,” ii, 396
Nationalism, ii, 431-36, 439, 448, 498-500
Nationalization, ii, 412
Natural History Museum, i, 50
Natural rights, ii, 156; selection, i, 18
Nautilus, Pearly, i, 47
Naval tactics, Roman, i, 469-71
Navarino (năv ă rē’ nō), battle of, ii, 382, 622
Navigation, early, i, 170, 209-18
Nazarenes, i, 587-91
Neanderthal (nā ăn’ der täl) man, i, 60, 71-87, 91, 92,
97, 108, 123, 124, 489, 496
Nebuchadnezzar (neb ū kăd nez’ _ă_r) (the Great) II, i,
194, 200, 217, 277, 290,
291, 319, 380, 385, ii, 607
Nebulæ, i, 3
Necho (nē’ kō), Pharaoh, i, 200, 218, 291, 401, 509, 532, ii, 185, 607
Necker, ii, 318
Needles, bone, i, 90, 96-97
Negritos, ii, 465
Negroes, i, 63, 68, 141, 146, 197, 206, 533, ii, 193, 284-85, 305, 306
Negroid race, i, 88, 139-40, 145, 148, 160, 189, 195
Nehemiah, i, 294
Nelson, Horatio, ii, 352, 361-62
Neohipparion, i, 58
Neolithic Age, i, 75, 97-110, 112-16, 152-54, 158-62, 169 _sqq._, 196-97;
agriculture, i, 113-17, 130, 189, 254, 317;
civilization and culture, i, 104-16, 124-25, 129-34, 145-49, 151-53, 171-76,
181-88, 195, 197, 201-03, 206-08, 209-13;
man, 100-06, 126-30, 131-35, 140, 145, 158-60, 167-72, 223, 273-74, ii, 301
Neo-platonism, i, 592, ii, 169
Nepal (nē pawl’), i, 416, 640, 643, ii, 262
Nephthys (nef’ this), i, 249
Neptune, planet, i, 4
Nero, i, 525-26, 589, 610, ii, 609
Nerva, i, 526, ii, 610
Nestorian Christians, i, 604, 617, 627, 634, 647, ii, 35, 106, 117-19, 611, 612
Netherlands, the, ii, 200, 207, 217, 228-33, 238, 253, 380, 381.
(_See also_ Dutch Republic _and_ Holland)
Nets, flax, i, 114
Neustadt (noi’ stăt), ii, 180
Neustria, ii, 46, 47, 48, 613
Neva, river, ii, 242
New Amsterdam, ii, 253, 282-83
Newark, ii, 430
New England, i, 59, 143, ii, 185, 253, 281-84
Newfoundland, ii, 254, 471
New Guinea, i, 139, 141, 162
New Habsburg, ii, 199, 616
New Hampshire, ii, 281, 290
New Harmony (U. S. A.), ii, 405
New Jersey, ii, 283, 290, 298, 543-44
New Lanark, ii, 404-06
Newmarket, ii, 226
New Mexico, ii, 505
New Orleans, ii, 254
New Plymouth, ii, 281
Newton, Sir Isaac, i, 408, 534, ii, 176, 620
Newts, i, 26
New Year, festival of, i, 240
New York, i, 495, ii, 180, 253, 283, 290, 292, 301, 387, 621
New Zealand, i, 207, ii, 457, 471-72
Niarchus, i, 375
Nibelungenlied (nē’ b_ĕ_ lung en lēt), i, 177
Nicæa (nī sē’ _ă_), i, 600-01, ii, 72, 78, 79, 611
Nice, Province of, ii, 440
Nicene (nī’ sēn) Creed, i, 601, ii, 60, 611
Nicephorus (nī sef’ ō rŭs), ii, 58, 614
Nicholas I, tsar, ii, 377, 382, 405, 440, 622;
II, ii, 476, 477
Nicholas of Myra, i, 600
Nicholson, Gen. John, ii, 455
Nickel, i, 4, ii, 389
Nicomedes (nik ō mē’ dēz), King of Bithynia, i, 500
Nicomedia, i, 560, 595, 600
Niemen (nē’ men), ii, 362
Nietzsche (nē’ ch_ĕ_), ii, 481
Nieuw Amsterdam.
(_See_ New Amsterdam)
Niger, river, i, 565
Nile, the, i, 119, 121, 137, 158, 200, 206, 210, 211, 274,
304, 359, 533, ii, 142, 460;
battle of, ii, 352, 621;
delta, i, 197, 218, 238;
valley, 195, 273, ii, 605, 612
Nineveh (nin’ _ĕ_ v_ĕ_), i, 192-96, 200, 246, 292, 319, 384,
616, 619, 622, 624, ii, 130, 607
Nippur (nip poor’), i, 133, 184-85, 190, 196, 274, ii, 130
Nirvana (nir vä’ nä), i, 423, 425, 431
Nish, i, 528, 553, 558, 599, ii, 610
Nisibin, i, 622
Nitrate of silver, ii, 38
Nitric acid, ii, 38
Noah, i, 140
Nobility, i, 258, 263
Nogaret, Guillaume de, ii, 99, 616
Nomadism (and Nomads), i, 105, 112, 137, 148, 177, 186-88,
206, 232-33, 387-88, 507-08, 545-52, 555, 627-28, 641,
ii, 1, 105, 108-10, 128-30, 137-39, 143-45, 189
Nominalism, ii, 169 _sqq._
Nonconformity, ii, 168
Nordic race, i, 146-154, 206, 298, 315, 368, 373, 387,
548, ii, 43, 66, 122, 144,
149, 168, 247, 262, 490
Normandy (and the Normans), ii, 54, 66-67, 69, 72, 74,
76, 78, 150, 157, 178, 185, 320, 615;
dukedom of, ii, 62, 66
Norse language, i, 168, ii, 54
North, Lord, ii, 293
Northmen, i, 539, ii, 53-54, 64, 66, 71, 149, 490
North Pole, i, 31
North Sea, the, i, 75, 539, ii, 66, 182, 185
Northumberland, ii, 396
Northumbria, kingdom of, ii, 40, 50
Norway, i, 102, 605, ii, 51, 66, 97, 162, 206, 252, 380, 614
Norwegian language, i, 168
Norwich, ii, 154
Norwood, i, 355
Nottingham, ii, 222, 386
Nova Scotia, ii, 185
Novgorod (nov gō rod’), ii, 66, 129, 180, 182, 259, 614
Noyes, J. H., ii, 403
Nubia, i, 259
Nubian wild ass, i, 217
Numbers, Book of, i, 281
Numbers, use of, i, 128
Numerals, Arabic, i, 219, ii, 37, 88
Numidia (and Numidians), i, 474, 479, 484, 502, 534
Nuns, ii, 149
Nuremberg, ii, 180;
Peace of, ii, 206
_Nürnberg_ (nurn’ ber_ch_), cruiser, ii, 520
Oak, i, 59
Oars, i, 211
Obedience and will, ii, 140-43
Obi (ō’ bē), river, i, 387, ii, 267
Occam, ii, 171, 172, 174, 617
Ocean, i, 5, 36
Oceania, i, 206
Octavian.
(_See_ Augustus)
Odenathus (od ē nā’ thŭs), i, 617, ii, 3, 610
Odin, ii, 49
Odoacer (ō dō ā’ s_ĕ_r), ii, 58, 611
Odysseus, i, 508
Odyssey.
(_See_ Homer)
Œcumenical councils, i, 601
Offerings, i, 234
Ogdal Khan, ii, 110, 113, 615
Oglethorpe, ii, 282, 620
Ohio (ō hī’ ō), i, 59, ii, 285
Okakura, i, 641
“Old Man” in religion, i, 125, 131-35, ii, 341
Oligarchies, i, 307-10
Oligocene (ol’ i gō sēn) period, i, 52, 53, 66, 67
Olney, Mr., ii, 505, 562
Olympiad, first, i, 314, ii, 606
Olympian games, i, 314
Olympias, i, 373, _sqq._, 387, 394, 402, 452
Olympus, mount, i, 335
Omani (ō mä’ ni) Arabs, i, 565
Omar I, caliph, ii, 18-26, 83, 613
Omayyads (ō mī’ yădz), ii, 24-36, 61, 64, 613
Oneida community, ii, 403-04, 415
O’Neil of Tyrone, i, 110
Opossum, i, 56
Oracles, i, 252, 305, 321-23
Orange, house of, ii, 232
Orange, Duke of, ii, 232
Orange River, ii, 460
Orang-outang, i, 63, 67
Orbit of earth, i, 30-33, 57
_Orient_, ship, ii, 352
Orientation of temples, i, 238, 240
Origen (or’ i j_ĕ_n), i, 592
Orissa, i, 440
Orlando, Signor, ii, 552, 556
Orleans, i, 559, ii, 180, 400
Ormonde, Duke of, ii, 271
Ormuz, ii, 118
Ormuzd (ôr’ mŭzd), i, 625, 626
Ornaments, i, 114
Ornithorhynchus (ôr nith ō ring’ kŭs), i, 54
Orpheus (ôr’ fūs), i, 354, 538
Orphic cult, i, 354, 373
Orsini (ôr sē’ nē) family, ii, 99
Orthodox Church.
(_See_ Greek Church)
Osborn, Prof. H. F., i, 7, 13, 50, 59, 63, 86, 96, 100, 534
Osiris (ō sīr’ is), i, 249, 412, 413, 590
Osman, House of, ii, 123
Ostia, i, 497
Ostracism, i, 312
Ostrogoths, i, 550, 553, 606, ii, 66, 612
Othman, ii, 24, 26, 613
Otho, Emperor, i, 526, ii, 609
Otis, James, ii, 287
Otranto, ii, 126
Otters, i, 38, 69
Otto I, ii, 63, 68, 70, 97, 614
Otto II, ii, 63, 614
Otto III, ii, 63, 614
Otto of Bavaria, ii, 382
Ottoman Empire, ii, 121-25, 131, 132, 136, 139, 184, 617.
(_See also_ Turkey _and_ Turks)
Oudh (oud), ii, 256, 258, 453
Oundle School, ii, 429
Ovid, i, 13
Owen, Robert, ii, 404-09, 623
Ownership, ii, 341
Ox, great, i, 101
Ox-carts, i, 282
Oxen, i, 112, 170, 178, 217
Oxford, i, 530, ii, 37, 96, 153,
168, 171, 172, 180, 222, 264, 271, 288, 317, 427-30, 437, 486
Oxide of iron, i, 9
Oxus, i, 629
Oxydactylus (ok si dăk’ ti lŭs), i, 58
Oxygen (ok’ si j_ĕ_n), i, 23
Pacific Ocean, i, 47, 82, 148, 206,
273, ii, 110, 142, 187, 189, 261, 484
Paddling in navigation, i, 211
Padua, i, 559
Paine, Tom, ii, 293, 303
Painted pebbles, i, 94, 101
Painting, Palæolithic, i, 93, 94, 95
Paionia, i, 339
Palæoanthropus Heidelbergensis (păl ē ō ăn thrō’ pŭs hī’
del bũrg en’ sis), i, 57, 69-73, 84
Palæolithic age, i, 25-27, 34, 56-60, 75-85, 91, 96-100, 108, 158, 171, 197;
art, i, 92-100, 123, 129;
implements, i, 76, 80, 104, 105, 107, 137;
man, i, 82-85, 96-97, 102-06, 115-17, 128-30, 134-35,
137-38, 145, 148-52, 162,
169, 206, 223, 233, 273, 354, 408, ii, 142, 189, 341
Palæologus (păl ē ol’ ō gŭs), Michael (Michael VIII), ii, 98;
Zoe, ii, 129
Palæopithecus (păl ē ō pi thē’ kŭs), i, 67
Palæozoic (păl ē ō zō’ ik) period, i, 9-15, 25, 27, 28,
29, 39, 49, 55
Palais Royal, ii, 315
Palawan (p_ă_ lä’ w_ă_n), ii, 507
Palermo (p_ă_ ler’ mō), i, 470
Palestine, i, 184, 261, 278, 280, 289, 447, 569,
ii, 2, 71, 74, 80, 94, 106, 114, 118, 132, 483, 616
Pali (pä’ lē) language, i, 417
Palmerston, Lord, ii, 438
Palms, Cainozoic, i, 51
Palmyra (pă mī’ ră), i, 617, 621 _sqq._, ii, 3, 610
Palos (pä’ lōs), ii, 186
Pamir (pā mēr’) Plateau, i, 387
Pamirs, i, 643, ii, 24, 109, 118, 128, 184
Pampeluna (păm pĕ loo’ n_ă_), ii, 164, 618
Pamphylia (păm fil’ i _ă_), ii, 79
Panama Canal, ii, 507
Panama, Isthmus of, ii, 187, 190
Pan-American Conferences, ii, 447, 505
Pan Chau, i, 549, ii, 610
Pan-German movement, ii, 483
Panipat (pä’ nē pŭt), ii, 133, 618
Pannonia (pă nō’ ni _ă_), i, 553-54, 606, ii, 609
Panther in Europe, i, 318
Papacy (incl. popes), policy of, ii, 90;
outline of, ii, 96;
and the Great War, ii, 167;
and world dominion, ii, 252;
miscellaneous, i, 603-05, 612, ii, 41, 47, 56 _sqq._, 67,
72, 80 _sqq._, 92, 95, 99, 114 _sq._,
124 _sqq._, 147 _sq._, 161, 166-67, 188, 203, 246, 400, 618.
(_See also_ Rome, Church of)
Papal Schism, ii, 99-100, 127, 151, 617
Paper, introduction and use of, i, 198, 408, ii, 38, 121,
158 _sq._, 194
Papua (pä’ pu _ă_), type of mankind in, i, 139
Papuan speech, i, 162
Papyrus (pă pī’ rŭs), i, 198, 408, ii, 38
Parchment, ii, 38
Parchment promissory notes, ii, 89
Pariahs, i, 269
Paris, Peace of, ii, 286, 621; during the Revolution, ii, 313 _sqq._;
Napoleon in, ii, 348, 360, 368, 371;
capitulation of, ii, 368;
rising against Charles X, ii, 378-79;
revolution of 1848, ii, 400-01;
siege of, ii, 446;
Zeppelin raids on, ii, 519;
Peace Conference at, ii, 543-58, 560-66;
miscellaneous, ii, 180, 294, 356, 398, 621
Paris, University of, ii, 37, 166 _sq._, 173, 271
Parisian artificers, ii, 114
Parker, E. H., i, 541, 542
Parkyn, i, 63, 96
Parliament, government by, ii, 194;
English, ii, 219-28, 248, 259, 287 _sq._, 492 _sq._, 622;
Polish, ii, 251
Parliamentary Monarchy in Europe, ii, 243
Parma, ii, 88
Parmenio (pär mē’ ni ō), i, 375, 391
Parricide, i, 637
Parsees, i, 625, ii, 137
Parthenon (pär’ th_ĕ_ non), i, 346
Parthia (and Parthians), i, 388 _sq._, 396, 506
_sqq._, 523, 526, 540, 543 _sq._,
616, 621 _sq._, ii, 609
Paschal II, ii, 615
Passau (päs’ ou), Treaty of, ii, 207, 618
Passover, Feast of the, i, 586 _sq._
Passy (pă sē’), ii, 319
Pasteur (păs tũr’), i, 408
Pastor, L. v., ii, 127
Patriarchal groups, i, 110
Patricians, Roman, i, 454-63
Patrick, St., ii, 50
Patriotism, i, 310, 460, ii, 246
Patroclus (pă trō’ klŭs), i, 177
Pattison, Prof. Pringle, ii, 172
Patzinaks, ii, 71
Paul, St., i, 395, 462, 491, 583, 586 _sqq._, ii, 418
Paul, Tsar of Russia, ii, 620
Paulicians, i, 603
Pauline epistles, i, 588 _sq._
Pauline mysteries, i, 591
Pavia (pă vē’ _ă_), ii, 204
Payne, E. S., i, 158
Peace, universal, i, 296-97, ii, 90
Peace Conference.
(_See_ Paris)
Peas, as food, i, 113
Peasant revolts, ii, 154 _sq._, 203, 271, 397-98, 617
Peasants, i, 151, 257
Pecunia, i, 219
Pecus, i, 219
Pedantry, advent of, i, 409
Peel, Lord, ii, 567
Peel, Sir Robert, ii, 428
Peep-o’-Day Boys, ii, 492
Peers, Council of, ii, 221
Peet, i, 446
Pegu (pē goo’), ii, 119
Peisistratidæ (pī sis trä’ ti dē), i, 314
Peisistratus (pī sis’ tr_ă_ tŭs), i, 308, 332, 337, 354, 457, ii, 607
Peisker, T., i, 105
Pekinese language, i, 157
Peking, i, 240, 642, ii, 108, 109, 117 _sq._, 134, 242, 261, 463, 615
Pelham, i, 454
Pella (pel’ _ă_), i, 373
Peloponnesian War, i, 306, 343, ii, 607
Pelycosaurs (pel’ i kō sawr_z_), i, 27
Penck, Albrecht, i, 59, 70
Pendulum, invention of, ii, 37
Penelope, i, 179
Penn, William, ii, 282
Pennsylvania, ii, 282, 283, 290, 297 _sq._, 304
Pennsylvania, University of, i, 184
Pentateuch, i, 278 _sqq._, 293
Pepi, i, 199, 401, ii, 211
Pepin (pep’ in), I, ii, 47, 48, 51, 69, 613;
son of Charlemagne, ii, 57;
of Heristhal, ii, 47, 613
Pepys, Samuel, ii, 226
Perdiccas (pũr dik’ ăs), i, 370
Pergamum (pũr’ g_ă_ mŭm), i, 395-96,
499 _sq._, 507, ii, 609
Pericles (per’ i klēz), i, 309, 342 _sqq._,
364, 460, 528 _sq._, ii, 153, 182, 184, 607;
Age of, i, 355 _sq._, 364
Perihelion, i, 30 _sqq._, 57
Peripatetic school, i, 402
Periplus of Hanno, i, 217, 241
Perkins, ii, 478
Permian rocks, i, 29
Perry, Commodore, ii, 466, 623
Perry, Mr., i, 172
Persepolis (pũr sep’ ō lis), i, 364, 385, ii, 18
Persia (and the Persians), i, 109, 139, 169, 182,
218, 247, 248, 291-92, 299, 317, 372, 377, 389,
394-95, 452, 507, 510, 533, 538, 542, 543, 551,
622, 623, 627-28, 634-37, ii, 2, 3, 17-21, 67, 71,
105, 109, 113-19, 128, 139, 157, 179, 257, 268, 610;
history (_rise of_) i, 194, 198-200, 206, 247, 260, 308, 311-15, 318-23;
(_Empire_) i, 523, ii, 607, (_war with Greece_) i,
327 _sqq._, (_war with Alexander_) i, 379-80, 383-89,
ii, 608, (_Sassanid Empire_) i, 528, 616-18, 625, ii,
31, 610, (_Islam and Persia_) ii,
20-31, 64, (_Mongol Empire_) ii, 113, 130-34;
religion of, i, 412-13, 597, 604, 617-18, 624-27, 634, ii, 136
Persian Gulf, i, 160, 186, 190, 210, 387, ii, 118
Persian language, i, 151, 169, 189, 194, ii, 136, 138
Peru, i, 147, 203, 207-08, ii, 189-90, 192, 465, 618
Peshawar (p_ĕ_ shawr’), i, 428, 643
Pessinus (pes’ i nŭs), i, 483
Pestilence, i, 101, 528, 542, 607, 612,
616, 619, 632, ii, 41, 46, 57, 76, 153-54, 384, 617 _sqq._
Peter, St., i, 114, 585, ii, 57, 99;
the Great, ii, 243 _sq._, 259, 440, 620;
the Hermit, ii, 75 _sq._
Peterhof, ii, 242
Petition of Right, ii, 220
Petra (pē’ tr_ă_), ii, 2
Petrie, Flinders, i, 143, 197, 213, 552
Petrograd, i, 630, ii, 242, 525 _sq._, 568
Petronius (p_ĕ_ trō’ ni ŭs), i, 530
Petschenegs, ii, 71 _sq._
Phalanx, i, 370 _sq._, 453
Phanerogams, i, 26
Pharaohs, the, i, 199, 214, 248 _sq._, 256 _sqq._,
279, 388, 401 _sq._, 509, 532
Pharisees, i, 572, 578-79
Pharsalos (fär sā’ lŏs), battle of, i, 511, 512, ii, 609
Pheidippides (fī dip’ i dēz), i, 332
Phidias (fid’ i ăs), i, 346 _sq._
Philadelphia (ancient), i, 621, ii, 79;
U.S.A., ii, 282, 290 _sq._, 300, 387, 621
Philip, of Hesse, ii, 206
Philip of Macedon, i, 343, 358, 367 _sqq._,
390 _sq._, 397, 401-02, 434, 561, ii,
607
Philip, King of France, ii, 99
Philip II, King of Spain, ii, 207, 229 _sq._, 233, 242, 292, 376
Philip, Duke of Orleans, ii, 315, 337, 379
Philippine Islands, ii, 187, 451, 465, 506
Philistia (and Philistines), i, 196, 245, 282 _sqq._, 447
Phillimore, Sir Walter, ii, 543
Phillips, W. A., ii, 373, 377
Philo (fī’ lō), the Jew, i, 410
Philonism, i, 592
Philosophers, at court of Frederick II, ii, 88
Philosophy, primitive, i, 122-23;
Greek, i, 357-60, 410;
medicinal, ii, 168 _sqq._;
experimental, ii, 176
Philotas (fi lō’ tăs), i, 375, 391
Phinehas, i, 284
Phocians (fō’ shi _ă_nz), i, 372
Phocis (fō’ sis), i, 378
Phœnicia (fē nish’ _ă_), and Phœnicians,
i, 212 _sqq._, 223, 234, 273, 279 _sq._,
287, 290 _sqq._, 331, 337, 380, 395, 401, 570, 640, ii, 1;
language and script, i, 153, 228;
colonies, i, 303, 447
Phœnix, i, 177
_Phœnix_, steamship, ii, 387
Phonetic spelling, i, 639
Phonograms, i, 225 _sq._
Phrygia (frij’ i _ă_), and Phrygians, i, 303, 315, 388, 395, 448, ii, 121
Phrygian mysteries, i, 477
Phrygius, i, 375
Physics, ii, 37
Physiocrats, ii, 309
Piacenza (pyä chen’ ts_ă_), ii, 74
Pictographs, i, 224 _sqq._
Picts, i, 532
Picture writing, i, 197, 207, 224-28
Piedmont, ii, 332
Pig, i, 56, 224;
unclean to Moslems, ii, 454
Pigtails, Chinese, ii, 128, 261, 464
Pilate, Pontius, i, 585
Pile dwellings, i, 106, 171, 186.
(_See also_ Lake dwellings)
Pilgrim Fathers, ii, 305
Pilgrims, i, 221, ii, 67, 75
Pillnitz, ii, 327
Piltdown skull, i, 60, 70 _sqq._
Pindar (pin’ d_ă_r), i, 378
Pins, bone, i, 114
Piracy, ii, 182
Pirsson, L. V., i, 50
Pisa, ii, 176, 180
Pithecanthropus (pith e kăn thrō’ pŭs) erectus, i, 60, 65 _sqq._
Pitt, William, 1st Earl of Chatham, ii, 289, 332, 359
Pius VII, ii, 360
Pixodarus (pik sō där’ ŭs), i, 375
Pizarro (pi zär’ ō), ii, 190, 618
Placentia (plă sen’ shi _ă_).
(_See_ Piacenza)
Plague.
(_See_ Pestilence)
Plaiting, Neolithic, i, 105
Planets, i, 3 _sq._, 30
Plants, i, 10 _sqq._
Plassey, battle of, ii, 258, 620
Plataea (plă tē’ _ă_), battle of, i, 336, 340 _sqq._,
348, ii, 607
Plato, i, 306, 344, 351, 355 _sqq._, 397, 399, 434,
468, 562, 618, ii, 169, 211,
403, 408, 607
Playfair, ii, 419
Plebeians, Roman, i, 455 _sqq._, 486, 487
Pleistocene (plīs’ tō sēn) Age, i, 52, 59, 60, 64 _sq._, 102, 156, 255
Plesiosaurs (plē’ zi ō sawrz), i, 40, 45, 50
Pliny, the elder, i, 186;
the younger, i, 535, ii, 38
Pliocene (plī’ ō sēn) Age, i, 52, 58, 60, 68 _sq._, 273
Plotinus (plō tī’ nūs), i, 410, 592
Plunkett, Sir Horace, ii, 499
Plutarch, i, 313, 346 _sq._, 373, 374, 378, 390,
394, 474, 501, 505, 512 _sqq._,
598, ii, 351
Pluvial Age, i, 159 _sq._, 177
Plymouth, ii, 372; (New England), ii, 305
Plymouth Company, ii, 281
Po, valley of the, i, 388, 449, 461, 471
Pocahontas (pō kă hon’ t_ă_s), ii, 280
Pocock, R. I., i, 28, 67, 95
Pocock, Roger, i, 299, 551
Podmore, F., ii, 405
Poitiers, ii, 47, 179, 613
Poland, ii, 71, 100, 112, 126, 129, 130, 179,
236, 244, 248-51, 260, 266, 274, 278, 320,
327, 363-66, 372, 375, 380-382, b400, 566, 620, 622
Polish language, i, 168
Political ideas, common, i, 519
Politics (and Politicians), i, 496, ii, 140, 245
Polo, Maffeo, ii, 117
Polo, Marco, i, 541, ii, 117, 120-21, 185, 195, 616
Polo, Nicolo, ii, 117
Polyclitus (pol i klī’ tŭs), i, 346
Polygamy, i, 232
Polynesia, i, 147, 162;
languages of, i, 158, 164;
peoples of, i, 109, 148, 159, 177, 353
Pompadour, Madame de, ii, 240
Pompeii (pom pā’ yē), i, 489
Pompey, i, 505, 509-14, 538-42, 549, 572, 625, ii, 609
Pondicherry, ii, 258
Pontifex maximus, ii, 56
Pontus, i, 395, 504 _sq._, 553, 620, ii, 609 _sq._
Poole, Ernest, ii, 503
Poor, the, ii, 269 _sq._
Poor Laws, ii, 211
Pope, Alex., ii, 493
Popes.
(_See_ Papacy)
Poplicola (pop lik’ ō l_ă_), Valerius, i, 457
Poppaea (po pē’ _ă_), i, 525
Popular education, Christianity and, ii, 139 _sqq._
Port Arthur, ii, 462, 469
Port Sunlight, ii, 406
Porto Rico, ii, 506
Portugal (and Portuguese), i, 168, 217, 299,
554, 564, 565, ii, 80, 100, 364, 490, 611, 617;
overseas trade and expansion of, ii, 184-88,
192-93, 251, 252, 257, 306, 451, 457, 465
Porus (pō’ rŭs), king, i, 386 _sq._, 430
Posen, ii, 367, 400, 446, 487
Post horses in ancient Persia, i, 327
Potash, ii, 38
Potato, i, 208
Potomac, river, ii, 301
Potsdam, ii, 240
Pottery, i, 105, 112 _sq._, 130 _sq._, 147, 448, ii, 38
Poultry.
(_See_ Fowl)
Powers, Great, ii, 216 _sqq._, 246-47, 252, 278-79, 380, 440, 447, 500
Prague, ii, 151, 152, 175, 400 _sq._, 617, 623;
University of, ii, 151
Prayer-flags, Buddhist, i, 438
Prayer-wheels, i, 438
Precession of the equinoxes, i, 31
_Prehistoric Peeps_, i, 50
Presbyterianism, ii, 163, 221
Prescott, ii, 207 _sq._
Press, free, ii, 302; in politics, i, 463
Prester, John, ii, 119
Priam (prī’ ăm), i, 335
Pride, Colonel, ii, 224 _sq._
Priestcraft (incl. Priesthood and Priests),
i, 127, 130, 134, 178, 182, 190, 204,
232-53, 263, 266, 285, 305, 430, ii, 16,
85, 149-51, 246, 425
Primal law, i, 79
Prince, character of a, ii, 195 _sqq._
Princes, an exclusive class, i, 267
Princeton, Univ. of, ii, 543
Printing, i, 231, 407-08, 463, ii, 121,
158 _sq._, 167, 174, 617;
Chinese, i, 631
Priscus (pris’ kŭs), i, 557 _sq._, ii, 42, 611
Prisoners as slaves, ii, 305
Prisons, English, ii, 338
Private enterprise, ii, 273 _sq._, 535 _sqq._;
ownership, ii, 274;
property, ii, 228
Probus (prō’ bŭs), emperor, i, 528, 553, ii, 610
Production, distribution and profits of, ii, 274;
of machinery, ii, 275-76
Profit, ii, 334
Profiteers, ii, 541
Prokop the Great, ii, 152
Proletariat, i, 268, 456, ii, 398, 408 _sqq._
Promissory notes, early, i, 220
Property, i, 259, 265, ii, 146, 217, 308, 338 _sqq._, 385, 398 _sq._, 411
Prophets, Jewish, i, 294 _sq._
Propitiation, i, 127, 134
Proterozoic (prot er ō zō’ ik) period, i, 10, 14, 17, 25 _sq._
Protestantism, ii, 150, 160-67, 206, 209, 218-25, 229,
233, 239, 242, 252-53, 265, 269-71, 281-83, 465, 490-95
Provence, ii, 368
Proverbs, book of, i, 294
Providence, Rhode I., ii, 289
Prussia, ii, 236, 240, 243-53, 278, 314,
320, 327, 362, 364-67, 371, 381, 441-46,
478-80, 619 _sqq._
Przemysl (pshem’ isl), ii, 518-19
Psalms, i, 277, 294
Psammetichus (sä met’ i kŭs), i, 200, 291, 316, ii, 606
Pskof, ii, 180
Ptah-hetep (ptä’ het ep), tomb of, i, 260
Pteria (tē’ ri _ă_), i, 323
Pterodactyls (ter ō dăk’ tilz), i, 40 _sqq._
Ptolemies, i, 395, 401, 432, 571, 636
Ptolemy (tol’ _ĕ_ mi), I, i, 375, 401-02, 404, 409-13, ii, 608;
Ptolemy II, i, 404;
Ptolemy III, i, 404
Public opinion, growth of, ii, 148
Public schools.
(_See_ Schools, public)
“Pul,” Assyrian monarch, i, 290
Pultusk, ii, 362
Punch, ii, 397, 435, 487
Punic (pū’ nik), language, i, 528;
wars, i, 196, 454 _sq._, 460, 466 _sqq._, ii, 608
Punjab, i, 201, 388, 428 _sq._, ii, 114, 132 _sq._, 257, 608
Puritan Revolution, ii, 217
Puritans, ii, 226, 282
Pyramids, i, 133, 198 _sq._, 238, 261, 274;
battle of the, ii, 351
Pyrenees, i, 160, 554, ii, 28, 41, 46 _sq._, 51, 238, 368, 613
Pyrrhus (pir’ ŭs), i, 452 _sqq._, 467, ii, 67, 608
Pytho (pī’ thō), i, 322
Quaco, ii, 467, 621
Quadrupedal reptiles, i, 41
Quartz, i, 9
Quartzite implements, i, 137
Quaternary rocks, i, 12
Quebec, ii, 254, 620
Quinquereme (kwin’ kw_ĕ_ rēm), i, 469
Quipus, i, 208
Quixada (kë hä’ dä), ii, 207, 208
Ra, i, 250
Races of mankind, i, 87 _sqq._, 89, 95, 100-101, 120, 136-49
Radiolaria, i, 10
Ragusa (rä goo’ z_ă_), ii, 180
Rahab, month of, ii, 8
Rai, Lajpat, ii, 454, 473
Railways, ii, 386, 622
Rajgir, i, 420
Rajput (räj poot’) clans, i, 629
Rajput princes, ii, 256
Rajputana, i, 629, ii, 179, 256
Raleigh, Sir Walter, ii, 280
Ramah, i, 285
Rambouillet (ro_n_ boo yä’), ii, 317
Rameses (răm’ ē sēz) II, i, 196, 200, 279, 281-82, 289, 401, ii, 605
Rameses III, i, 249, 282
Raphael, ii, 183
Rasputin (răs poot’ in), ii, 525
Ratisbon, Diet of, ii, 206
Ratzel, i, 153, 208, 541, 551
Ravenna, i, 554, 557, 561, 606, ii, 60, 612
Realism (and Realists), ii, 169 _sqq._
Rebus, i, 227
Reconstruction, Ministry of, ii, 534
Red Cross, ii, 199
Red deer, i, 96
Red Indians, i, 546, ii, 285
Red Sea, i, 156, 160, 184, 210, 211, 279, 281, 287, 290, 401, 529, 533
“Red Sea” river, i, 119, 121
Redmond, John, ii, 496, 498
Reed, E. T., i, 50
Reed pipes, i, 115
Reeds, C. A., i, 59
Reform Bill, ii, 400, 622
Reformation, the, i, 596, ii, 161-64, 167, 204, 270, 272
Regicide, ii, 225
Reinach, Salomon, i, 6, 401
Reindeer, i, 64, 76, 78, 90, 93, 101, 115
Reindeer Age, i, 81, 90, 93-98
Reindeer men, i, 105, 108, 115, 118, 123, 124, 133, 170
Religion, i, 124, 127, 131-33, 178, 232, 235-37,
411-14, 582 _sqq._, ii, 163, 165, 309, 422;
“Old Man” in, i, 125, 131, 134
Religious dances, i, 355
Religious wars, ii, 206-07
Remus (rē’ mŭs) and Romulus (rom’ ū lŭs), i, 448
Renaissance, ii, 139, 184
Renan, ii, 169
Renascence, ii, 139
Rent, i, 255-56, 264
Reparation, i, 219
Representation, political, i, 494-95, ii, 298, 414
Reproduction, i, 16-18; of amphibia, i, 26;
of mammals, i, 54
Reptiles, i, 26, 28, 38 _sqq._
Republicanism, i, 519, ii, 248, 264, 347
Republics, i, 307-08, ii, 142
Retailers, i, 265
Revelation, Book of, i, 598
Revere, Paul, ii, 290, 294
“Revisionists,” ii, 409
Revolution, ii, 403, 411
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, ii, 227, 493
Rhine, i, 74, 206, 298, 507, 508, 523, 526, 539,
549, 552, 553, 557, ii, 61, 69,
203, 236, 238, 266, 330, 368, 441
Rhineland, i, 605, ii, 41, 47, 61, 67, 77, 82, 228
Rhinoceros, i, 56, 58, 64, 69, 70, 76
Rhode Island, ii, 281, 282, 289, 290, 296, 300
Rhodes, i, 396, ii, 79
Rhodesia, i, 174, ii, 472
Rhondda, Lord, ii, 533
Rhone Valley, i, 606, ii, 82
Rhys, Sir John, i, 168
Rice, i, 646
Richard I, Cœur de Lion, ii, 81, 219
Richard II, ii, 156, 617
Richelieu, Cardinal, ii, 237, 246, 253
Richmond, ii, 443
Ridgeway, W., i, 106, 298
Riga, ii, 180, 182, 526
Righteousness, i, 400
Rio de Oro (rē’ ō dā ō’ rō), i, 217
Ripley, i, 143
Ritual, ii, 149.
(_See also_ Christianity)
Rivers, i, 37
Rivers, W. H. R. i, 148
Riviera (rē vē ār’ă), French, i, 447;
Italian, ii, 347
Rivoira, ii, 61
Robert of Sicily.
(_See_ Guiscard, Robert)
Robertson, ii, 208
Robespierre (rō bes pyâr’), ii, 324, 333-336, 349, 621
Robinson, J. H., ii, 99, 253
Roch, ii, 518
Rochefort, ii, 372
“Rocket,” the, ii, 386
Rocks, i, 8-13, 27-30
Rocquain, ii, 308
Roger I, King of Sicily, ii, 86
Rolf the Ganger, ii, 54, 66, 614
Roman coins, i, 455
Roman Empire, i, 517 _sqq._;
social and political state of, i, 529, 534-42, 550;
fall of, i, 550 _sqq._;
separation into Eastern and Western Empires, i, 554 _sqq._;
later Roman Empire (Western), i, 597, 605, 614,
619, 632, 633, ii, 42, 54, 56,
58, 64, 157, 265, 268, 611.
(_See also_ Eastern (Greek) Empire)
Roman law, i, 458, 615-16;
roads, i, 461, 540
Roman Republic (19th century), ii, 347, 622-23
Romansch language, ii, 47, 199
Rome, i, 407, 504, 510, 519, 548, 564-65, 572,
589, 606-11, 615-18, 621, 633, ii,
2, 50, 126, 182, 195, 202, 276, 441, 445, 483;
early history of, i, 445-51, 458, ii, 607-08; war with Carthage, i, 454;
social and political state of, i, 352, 454-66,
473, 480-503, 505, 515-16, 630-31, ii, 145, 343, 394, 607 _sqq._;
assemblies of, i, 462-66, 486, 488-89, 494, 507;
patricians and plebeians, i, 454-62, 486-88;
Senate, i, 455, 459, 463-66, 482, 483-87, 493-505, 511-16, 525;
Consuls of i, 455, 466;
colonies of, i, 458, 461, 471-72;
Punic wars, i, 196, 454 _sq._, 460, 466 _sqq._, ii, 608;
assimilation of, i, 483, 509;
military system of, i, 485, 502, 505, 520;
bequests to, i, 500, ii, 609;
Social war, i, 503, ii, 609;
monarchy in, and the fall of the Republic, i, 509-21;
Roman Empire (_see above_);
plague in, i, 608, ii, 41, 612;
true cross at, i, 618, ii, 82;
“duke of,” ii, 41;
Pepin crowned at, ii, 57;
in 10th century, ii, 62;
sacked by Guiscard, ii, 69, 615;
Germans raid, ii, 204, 618;
Charlemagne crowned at, ii, 215
Rome, Church of (inc. general Christian associations), i, 589 _sqq._,
603-05, 612, ii, 41, 50, 53-58, 73, 74, 85, 90-101,
127, 130, 197, 202, 215, 226, 356.
(_See also_ Catholicism _and_ Papacy)
Romulus and Remus, i, 448
Roosevelt, President, ii, 504, 506, 544, 551
Rose, Holland, ii, 348, 353, 358
Roses, Wars of the, ii, 179
Ross, i, 541, ii, 30
Rostro-carinate implements, i, 60, 81, 273
Roth, H. L., i, 85, 103
“Roum,” Empire of, ii, 122
Roumania (and the Roumanians), i, 564, ii, 71, 113, 122, 380, 382, 502, 524
Rousseau (roo sō’), J. J., ii, 163, 310, 324, 333, 349, 621
Rowing, i, 211, 469
Roxana, i, 390, 394
Royal Asiatic Society, i, 646
Royal families, marriage of, i, 267
Royal Society of London, i, 637, ii, 177, 239, 392
Rubicon (roo’ bi k_ŏ_n), the, i, 511
Rudolf I, German Emperor, ii, 63, 98, 199, 616
Rulers, deification of, i, 484
Ruling families, i, 307-08
Rumansch language.
(_See_ Romansch language)
Rump Parliament, ii, 224
Rurik, ii, 67, 614
Russia, i, 102, 151, 159, 196, 294, 317, 327, 387, 507,
539, 541, 545, 549, 553, 561, 570, 600, ii, 17, 53,
64, 66-67, 70, 110-14, 127, 128, 129, 130, 134, 139,
157, 179, 236, 244-53, 259-61, 266, 267, 278, 320, 361,
366, 380, 410, 411, 440, 447, 463-69, 484, 485, 502, 509,
510, 524-27, 620-24.
(_See also_ Great War)
Russian language, i, 151, 168, 638
Russo-Japanese war, i, 642
Rustam, ii, 20, 21
Rusticiano, ii, 117-21
Ruth, Book of, i, 282
Rutilius, P. Rufus, i, 503
Saar (sär) Valley, ii, 566
Sabatier, P., ii, 94
Sabbath, Jewish, i, 572, 575, 579, 590
Sabellians, i, 592
Sachsenhausen (sach’ sen hou zen), ii, 180
Sacraments, i, 130-31
Sacrifice, i, 116, 134, 178, 204-05, 234, ii, 190, 418;
human, i, 117, 130, 134, 352-54, 489
Sadducees, i, 572
Sadowa (sä’ dō vä), battle of, ii, 445-46, 623
Safiyya (sä fyē’ jă), ii, 13
Sagas, i, 173, ii, 53
Saghalien (sä gä lēn’), ii, 469
Sahara, i, 75, 160, 206, 217, 228, ii, 501
Sails, use of, i, 210-11
St. Andrew’s, ii, 324
St. Angelo, castle of, ii, 41, 62, 84, 205
St. Gall, monastery of, ii, 69
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, ii, 317
St. Gothard Pass, ii, 182
St. Helena, ii, 372, 374, 471
St. Just, ii, 334
St. Lawrence river, ii, 254
St. Médard, ii, 48
St. Peter’s, Rome, i, 238, 591, ii, 202
St. Petersburg. (_See_ Petrograd)
St. Sophia, Church of, i, 615, ii, 124
Sainte Menehould, ii, 323
Sakas (sä’ käs), i, 628
Sakya (sä’ kyä) clan, i, 416
Saladin (săl’ _ă_ din), ii, 80, 106, 615
Salamis (săl’ _ă_ mis), i, 337-39, 344, 348, 469, ii, 20, 607
Salerno, ii, 89
Salian dynasty, ii, 63
Salisbury, Lord, ii, 623
Salmon of Reindeer Age, i, 94
Salonika, ii, 522, 524
Salt, i, 118
Salvation, Christian theory of, ii, 418
Salvation Army, i, 413, ii, 166
Samaria, i, 193, 293
Samarkand, i, 386, 390, 546, 604, 643, 645, ii, 110, 132, 133, 159
Samnites, i, 452, ii, 608
Samoan Islands, ii, 505
Samos, i, 303, 346
Samothrace (săm’ ō thrās), i, 373
Samoyed (săm’ ō yed) language, i, 156
Samson, i, 283, 293
Samuel, Book of, i, 282-86
Samurai (săm’ u rī), i, 642, ii, 466
San Casciano, ii, 195
Sanderson, F. W., ii, 271
Sandracottus.
(_See_ Chandragupta)
Sandstone, i, 7
Sandwich Islands, ii, 505
Sandys, ii, 169
Sanskrit, i, 169, 182, 639, 647, ii, 36, 136
Sans Souci (san soo sē’), park of, ii, 240
San Stefano, treaty of, ii, 447, 475, 623
_Santa Maria_, ship, ii, 186
Sapor I, i, 617, 626, ii, 610
Saracens, i, 565, ii, 3, 64-69
Sarajevo (să rī’ vō), ii, 435, 510
Saratoga, ii, 292
Sardanapalus (sär d_ă_ n_ă_ pā’ lŭs), i, 194, 246, 290, 292, 316, ii, 606
Sardes, ii, 79
Sardinia, i, 217, 471, 556, ii, 200, 380, 440
Sardis, i, 316, 324, 331, 334, 340, 379
Sargon, I, i, 133, 191-95, 196, 247, 274, 279, 599, ii, 211, 606;
II, i, 193, 196, 200, 246, 290, 318, ii, 606
Sarmatians, i, 300, 543, ii, 71
Sarum, Old, ii, 227
Sassanids (săs’ ă nidz), i, 523, 625, ii, 31, 35, 610.
(_See also_ Persia)
Saturn, planet, i, 4
Saturninus (săt ũr nī’ nŭs), i, 503
Saul, king of Israel, i, 286, ii, 606
Saul of Tarsus.
(_See_ Paul, St.)
Savannah, ii, 254, 282
_Savannah_, steamship, ii, 387
Save, river, i, 560
Savoy, ii, 225, 242, 331, 380, 440
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family, ii, 482
Saxony (and the Saxons), i, 554, 605,
ii, 24, 48, 49, 51-54, 62, 66, 144, 236, 242, 368
Saxony, Duke of, ii, 152;
Elector of, ii, 203
Sayce, Prof., i, 186, 190, 210, 257, 265
Scandinavia, i, 102, 143, 299, 533, 539, 549
_Scharnhorst_, cruiser, ii, 520
Scheldt, the, ii, 76, 331
Schism, the Great, ii, 100, 127, 151, 617
Schleswig-Holstein, ii, 442
Schmalkalden, ii, 205
Schmalkaldic league, ii, 205
Schmidt, Dr., ii, 136
Schmit, E., ii, 135
Scholars, i, 409
Scholasticism, ii, 167 _sqq._
Schools, monastic, i, 613, ii, 60;
public, ii, 269 _sq._, 428-30
Schrader, O., i, 118, 169
Schuchert, C., i, 50
Schurtz, Dr., i, 556, ii, 18, 22
Schwill, ii, 37, 51, 377
Schwyz (shvēts), ii, 199, 616
Science, i, 397 _sqq._, ii, 35, 174 _sqq._;
exploitation of, ii, 388-91, 410;
and religion, i, 584, ii, 174, 177, 421-22
Science and Art Department, ii, 437
Scientific research, ii, 171
Scilly Isles, i, 217
Scind (sind), ii, 113
Scipio, Lucius, i, 482
Scipio, P Cornelius, i, 475
Scipio (sip’ i ō) Africanus, the Elder, i, 477-79, 483, 486, 499, 540
Scipio Africanus Minor, i, 477, 483, 501
Scipio Nasica (nă sī’ kă), i, 483, 501
Scorpion, i, 25, 28
Scorpion, sea.
(_See_ Sea-scorpion)
Scotch colonists, i, 110
Scotland, i, 59, 102, 109, 110, 532,
ii, 40, 66, 100, 162, 163, 178, 221, 225, 244, 261, 433, 471
Scott, E. F., i, 581
Scott, Michael, ii, 88
Scott, Sir Walter, ii, 487
Scriptures, Arabic, ii, 22; Christian, i, 627, 634
Scythia (sith’ i _ă_) and the Scythians,
i, 247, 261, 291, 300-01, 319, 327-30,
377, 388, 396, 490, 507, 510, 532-33,
543-45, 558, ii, 66, 71, 113, 128, 367, 607
Sea, depth of, i, 5
Sea fights, ancient, i, 337-40
Sea power, ancient, i, 379-80, ii, 28
Sea trade, ii, 182
Seamanship, early, i, 209-11, 216-17, 218, 266, 272-73, ii, 185 _sqq._
Seas, primordial, i, 8, 10, 16, 21-24, 46
Sea-scorpion, i, 10, 21, 24
Seasons, the, i, 30-33, 127, 128-29
Seaweed, i, 23
Sebastiani Report, ii, 359
Secunderabad (sē kŭn d_ĕ_r _ă_ băd’), i, 389
Sedan, ii, 445, 531
Seek, i, 598
Seeley, Sir J. R., ii, 140
Seignobos (sen yō bō’), ii, 384
Seine, the, i, 137
Seleucia, i, 622
Seleucid (s_ĕ_ lū’ sid) dynasty, i, 395-97,
428, 432, 480, 523, 571-72, 616, ii, 608
Seleucus (s_ĕ_ lū’ kŭs) I, i, 395, 430
Selfishness, i, 423
Selim (sā lēm’), sultan, ii, 126, 618
Seljuks (sel jooks’), ii, 33, 71-72, 106, 114, 121, 615.
(_See also_ Turks)
Semites (and Semitic peoples), i, 148, 153-60, 188
_sqq._, 212, 218-19, 228, 232-233, 237, 242,
264-65, 300, ii, 1, 2, 21, 105, 122, 143, 168, 249
Semitic languages, i, 153-55, 164
Seneca (sen’ ē k_ă_), i, 491
Senegal river, i, 217
Sennacherib (sē năk’ er ib), i, 193-94, 200, 246, 291, ii, 606
Sepulchre, Holy, ii, 61, 64, 74, 78, 118
Sequoias (sē kwoi’ _ă_z), i, 51
Serapeum (ser _ă_ pē’ ŭm), i, 413, 414, ii, 149
Serapis (sē rā’ pis), i, 412-14, 428, 538, 590-91, 602, ii, 611
Serbia (and the Serbs), i, 528, 553, 606,
616, ii, 24, 122, 224, 382, 502, 508-11, 524
Serbian language, i, 168
Serfdom, i, 600
Sergius III, Pope, ii, 63
Serpent in religion, i, 130, 147, ii, 418
Servants, domestic, i, 265
Set, Egyptian god, i, 236
Seton-Karr, Sir H. W., i, 137
Seven Years War, ii, 332, 620
Severus (sē vēr’ ŭs), Septimus, i, 528
Seville, ii, 188
Sex, i, 131
Seyffert, i, 464, 490, 491
Shakespeare, W., i, 173
Shale, i, 7
Shalmaneser (shăl mă nē’ zũr), i, 193, 291
Shamanism, ii, 114, 128, 146
Shamash, i, 245
Shang dynasty, i, 196, 204
Shanghai (shăng hī’), ii, 470
Shang-tung, ii, 469
Sharifian emperors, i, 565
Sharpe, S., i, 249
Shaving the face, i, 391
Sheep in lake dwellings, i, 112
Shekel, i, 220, 265
Sheldonian Theatre, ii, 271
Shell Age, supposed, i, 68
Shellfish, i, 9, 10
Shells as implements, i, 68;
as ornaments, i, 88
Shem, i, 140
Shen-si, i, 632
Sherbro Island, i, 218
Sherman, General, ii, 443
Shi-Hwang-ti, emperor, i, 196, 205, 253, 542-43, 548, 642, ii, 211, 608
Shiites (shē’ īts), ii, 27, 30, 64, 70, 72, 80, 134, 256
Shiloh, i, 284
Shimei, i, 287
Shimonoseki (shē’ m_ŏ_ nō sāk’ _ĕ_), Straits of, ii, 467
Shipbuilding, ii, 66, 388-89
Ships, earliest, i, 209-11
Shishak (shī’ shăk), i, 200, 388
Shrines, i, 234, 313
Siam (and Siamese), i, 203, 640
Siamese language, i, 157
Siberia, i, 100-02, 156-59, 532, 546, 632, ii, 114, 132, 261
Siberian railway, ii, 469, 502
Sicilies, Two, ii, 200, 364
Sicily, i, 213, 217, 303, 308, 382, 447, 449,
451-54, 471, 480, 486, 498, 505, 566,
ii, 62, 64, 69, 78, 83, 86-88, 97, 182,
353, 380, 441, 615
Sickles, earthenware, i, 189
Siddhattha Gautama (sid hät’ t’h_ă_ gou’ t_ă_ m_ă_).
(_See_ Buddha)
Sidon, i, 196, 212, 216, 266, 279, 290, 331, 380
Sieyès (syā yes’), ii, 354
Sign-language, i, 150
Sikhs (sēks), ii, 257, 453
Silbury, i, 110, 135
Silesia, ii, 112, 251
Silk, i, 273, 530, ii, 238
Silver as standard of value, i, 220
Sin, idea of, ii, 190
Sinai, i, 259
Sind, ii, 453
Singan, i, 642, 644, 647, ii, 613
Singer, Dr., i, 403
Singing, i, 115
Sinope (sī nō’ pē), i, 621
Siris, i, 339
Sirius (sir’ i ŭs), a star, i, 238
Sirmium, i, 560
Sistrum, i, 413, 425
Siva, i, 437
Sivapithecus (si v_ă_ pi thē kŭs), i, 67
Siwalik Hills, i, 67
Skins, use of, as clothing, i, 80, 99, 114;
inflated, as boats, i, 209
Skrine, i, 541, ii, 30
Skull, shapes of, i, 100, 142-46
Slate, i, 7
Slavery (and slaves), i, 255-59, 305-09, 352, 363, 455,
489-92, 529, 589, 594, 631, ii, 15, 33, 130,
146, 193, 225, 276, 284-85, 293, 304-05 _sqq._;
American, ii, 342, 619
Slavic tribes, i, 527
Slavonian dialect, i, 168
Slavonic languages, ii, 69
Slavs, i, 616, ii, 24, 49, 57, 61, 69, 128
Sloth, i, 102, 207
Smelting, i, 106, 107
Smerdis, i, 326
Smilodon (smī’ lō don), i, 56
Smith, A. L., ii, 88
Smith, Elliot, i, 69, 84, 146, 147, 189, 207
Smith, Rt. Hon. F. E., ii, 424, 497-99
Smith, John, ii, 280
Smith, Worthington, i, 63, 79, ii, 310
Smithsonian Institution, ii, 392
Smyrna, ii, 79
Snails, i, 28
Sobiesky (sō byes’ ki), John (John III), ii, 249, 620
Social Contract, ii, 296, 310
Social Democrats, ii, 485
Social War, the, i, 503, ii, 609
Socialism, ii, 157, 310, 339-46, 403 _sqq._, 622
Society, beginning of human, i, 178
Socrates (sok’ r_ă_ tēz), i, 114, 350, 355-56, 364, 420, 436
Soddy, Prof., ii, 410
Soderini, ii, 195-96, 618
Soil, protection of, i, 37
Soissons, ii, 47, 48
Solar year, i, 129
Solent, the, i, 137
Solferino (sol fe rē’ nō), battle of, ii, 441, 623
Solis, ensign, ii, 231
Sollas, Prof., i, 63, 69, 84, 100
Solomon, King, i, 200, 287-94, 569, ii, 606
Solon, i, 221, 324-25
Solutré, i, 92, 96, 124
Solutrian Age, i, 96, 97, 317, ii, 189
Somaliland, i, 137, 160, 217
Somalis, language of, i, 154
Somersett, J., ii, 306
Somme, the, i, 137; battle of, ii, 338, 530
Sonnino, Baron, ii, 552
Sonoy, Governor, ii, 231
Soothsayers, i, 305
Sophists, Greek, i, 350
Sophocles (sof’ ō klēz), i, 351, 355
Soudan, tribes of, i, 118
Soul, the, i, 131
South Africa, i, 485, ii, 460, 471, 472, 489,
495, 623-24
South Kensington, Natural History Museum, i, 50
South Sea Islanders, i, 68, 353
Southampton, ii, 180
Soviets (sov’ yets), ii, 410, 526, 539
Sowing, and burial, i, 130;
and human sacrifice, i, 117, 134
Space, i, 3, 4, 15
Spain, i, 37, 93, 106, 108, 146, 161, 196,
213, 217, 299, 446-48, 589, 615, ii, 41, 100, 140, 159, 179, 246;
history (_Carthaginians in_), i, 472-79;
(_Romans in_), i, 480, 485-86, 499-502, 509, 522, 540, 569;
(_Vandals in_), i, 554, 556, ii, 611;
(_under the Goths_), i, 606, ii, 46, 66, 613;
(_Moors in_), i, 565, ii, 24-25, 31, 36-37, 57, 61, 64, 194, 242, 613;
(_15th-16th cent._), ii, 186, 188, 193-95, 197, 200-04;
(_17th-18th cent._), ii, 216, 218, 220, 225,
229, 233, 239, 242-43, 251-52, 279, 292;
(_19th cent._), ii, 362, 378, 445, 506;
overseas dominions, i, 208, ii, 187-94;
colonial expansion, ii, 251-54, 282, 286, 292, 306, 378, 451, 470
Spanish language, i, 151, 564, ii, 160, 190
Sparta, i, 303-07, 332-36, 343, 349-50, 369, 378, 460
Spartacus (spar’ t_ă_ kŭs), i, 505, ii, 609
Spearheads, bone, i, 96
Species, i, 17-22, 25, 29, 138-40
Speech, development of, i, 72, 79, 124-27, 129, 130, 150, 151, 162-63, 223-26
Spelling, need for reform of, i, 282-83
Spence, L., ii, 190
Sphinx, the, i, 238
Spices, Oriental, ii, 257
Spiders, early, i, 28
Spinden, i, 207
Spinnerets of spiders, i, 28
Spoleto (spō lā’ tō), i, 610
Spores, i, 24
Spurrell, H. G. F., i, 63, 98
Spy, i, 72
Stag, i, 94, 101
Stagira (st_ă_ jīr’ _ă_), i, 357
_Stalky and Co._, ii, 423
Stallybrass, Dr. C. O., ii, 154, 543
Stambul (stăm bool’), ii, 126
Stamp Acts, ii, 289
Stamps used for signatures, i, 408
Stars, i, 4; and early man, i, 127, 238, 240
State, the, i, 488 _sqq._, 519, ii, 142, 163, 197, 244, 415
States-General, the, ii, 234, 312, 621
Steam, use of, ii, 386, 392
Steamboat, introduction of the, ii, 387
Steam-engine, invention of, i, 540, ii, 275, 386
Steam-hammer, ii, 388
Steam-power, ii, 275
Steel, i, 273, ii, 388
“Steel Boys,” the, ii, 492
Stegosaurus (steg ō saw’ rŭs), i, 40
Stein, Freiherr von, ii, 364
Steno, ii, 419
Stephenson, G., ii, 386
Stern, Q. B., ii, 433
Stettin, ii, 180
Stilicho (stil’ i kō), i, 554, 561, ii, 611
Stockholm, ii, 526
Stockmar, Baron, ii, 438-39
Stoicism, i, 360, 363, 588
Stone, early use of, i, 171
Stone, Major-Gen., ii, 570
Stone Age, i, 60, 68, 75, 81, 96, 97, 104-13, b197, 213, 274
Stonehenge, i, 109-10, 147, 171, 196, 240, ii, 606
Stopes, Dr. Marie, i, 38
Story-telling, primitive, i, 129
Strabo (strā’ bō), i, 13
Strafford, Earl of, ii, 221-22, 491
Strata, geological, i, 7 _sqq._
Strikes in ancient Rome, i, 457-58, 496
Stuart dynasty, ii, 163, 225-26
Stubbs, Bishop, ii, 54
Sturdee, Admiral, ii, 520
Styria, ii, 200
Subiaco (soo bē ä’ kō), i, 611
Submarine warfare, ii, 520, 527
Subutai, ii, 112
Sudan, the, ii, 471
Sudras, i, 269, 270, 645
Suetonius (swē tō’ ni ŭs), i, 525, 598
Suevi (swē’ vī), i, 554, 606, ii, 46, 611
Suez, i, 156, 160, 195, 218
Suffering, cause of, i, 423
Suffrage, manhood, ii, 297
Sugar, ii, 38
Suleiman (soo lā măn’) the Magnificent, ii, 24, 28, 126, 200, 205, 613
Sulla, i, 503-04, 511, ii, 609
Sulphuric acid, ii, 38
Sulpicius (sŭl pish’ i ŭs), i, 504
Sultan, Turkish, i, 565
Sumatra, i, 635, ii, 120
Sumer (incl. Sumeria and Sumerians), i, 133, 188-96,
203, 208, 210, 212, 218,
227-28, 232, 234, 242-48, 254, 259, 274, 297, 307,
319, 370, 522, ii, 1, 105, 130, 189
Sumerian language and writing, i, 133, 162, 189, 198, 227, 229, 279, 408, 638
Sun, the, i, 3-4, 30, 34;
worship, i, 130, 147, 235-38, 412-13
Sunday, i, 575, 590, ii, 149;
schools, ii, 396
Sung dynasty, i, 634-35, 641, ii, 108, 112-13, 118, 614
Sunnites, ii, 27, 71, 80, 136
“Sunstone,” i, 147
Superior, Lake, i, 225
Surrey, ii, 275
Susa, i, 104, 189, 260, 318, 326-31, 337-38, 364, 385-87, 390
Sussex, i, 70, ii, 40, 275
Suy dynasty, i, 632
Swabians, ii, 47, 63
Swansea, Lord, i, 106
Swastika (swăs’ ti k_ă_, i, 147, 176
Sweden (and the Swedes), i, 102, 553, 605,
ii, 51, 53, 162, 206, 225, 234,
242, 244, 249, 257, 266, 283, 368, 380
Swedish language, i, 168
Swift, Dean, ii, 492, 493
Swift, Fletcher H., i, 297
Swimming-bladder, i, 25, 52, 55
Swine, keeping of, i, 112, ii, 180
Switzerland (including the Swiss), i, 106-09,
113, 115, 171, 186, 564, ii, 69, 198 _sq._,
204, 236, 280, 319, 328, 339, 347, 359, 380, 616, 617
Swords, bronze, i, 132
Sykes, Ella and Percy, i, 548
Sykes, Sir Mark, i, 619, ii, 5, 9, 29-30, 121-23
Syndicalism, ii, 409
Synœcism of gods, i, 483-84
Syracuse, i, 351, 449, 452, 468, 476, 497, 534
Syria (and Syrians), i, 102, 160, 192, 194, 200,
250, 265, 278, 290, 292, 326, 342, 380, 500,
569-70, 587, 598, 604, 617, 619-21,
ii, 1-2, 4, 7, 17-21, 71, 74, 79, 97, 106,
113, 130-32, 149, 359, 440, 500
Syrian language, i, 530, 627, ii, 35
Tabriz, ii, 120
Tabu, i, 113, 125-29
Tachov (tăk’ hov), ii, 152
Tacitus (tăs’ i tŭs), i, 491, ii, 144
Tadpoles, i, 26, 52
Taft, President, ii, 544, 551
Tagus valley, ii, 207
_Tain_, an Irish epic, i, 182
Tai-tsung, i, 634, 642, 647, ii, 106, 612
Talleyrand, ii, 370, 374
Tallien, ii, 336
Tallies, i, 128
Tammany, i, 495
Tancred, ii, 79
Tang dynasty, i, 630-33, 641, ii, 106, 612
Tangier, ii, 484
Tanks, ii, 515-16, 523, 530, 569, 571
Tannenberg, ii, 515, 518
Taoism (tou’ izm), i, 433, 438, 641
Tapir, i, 56
Tarentum, i, 452, 476
Tarim (tä rēm’) valley, i, 201-02, 387, 546, ii, 109, 609
Tarpeian Rock, i, 459
Tarquins, the, i, 450, 456
Tartar language, i, 156, ii, 119
Tartars (and Tartary), i, 388, 542,
545, 627, ii, 109, 112, 119, 129, 244, 260, 267
Tashkend, i, 643
Tasmania (and Tasmanians), i, 82, 84, 85, 138, 148, ii, 189, 451;
language, i, 162
Tattooing, i, 147
Taurus mountains, i, 395-97, ii, 21, 28, 34, 42, 122
Taxation, i, 255, 264, 310, ii, 217-18
Taxilla, i, 645
Tayf (tī’ if), ii, 7
Taylor, H. O., ii, 172
Tea, i, 630, ii, 289
Teeth, i, 44, 69-73, 86, 87
Telamon (tel’ _ă_ mon), battle of, i, 471, 475, ii, 608
Telegraph, electric, ii, 387
Tel-el-Amarna (tel el ä mär’ nă), i, 200, 220, 245, 250, 288
Telescope, invention of the, ii, 176
Tell, William, ii, 199
Tempe (tem’ pē), vale of, i, 335
Temples, i, 190, 234-41, 250, 304
Ten Thousand, Retreat of the, ii, 607
Ten Tribes, the, i, 193
Teneriffe, ii, 225
Tennyson, Lord, i, 175, 531, ii, 438
Tertullian (tũr tŭl’ y_ă_n), i, 403
Testament, Old, i, 114, 277, 292, 294;
New, i, 114
Tetrabelodon (tet r_ă_ bel’ ō don), i, 58
Teutonic Knights, ii, 266
Teutonic tribes, i, 299, 509, 527, 552, ii, 611
Texel, ii, 332
Textile fabrics, Arab, ii, 38
Thames, the, i, 59, 137, ii, 182, 226, 512
Thatcher, ii, 37, 51, 377
Thebes (thēbz) and Thebans, i, 252, 274, 303, 336, 343, 370-71, ii, 606
Themistocles (thē mis’ tō klēz), i, 313, 337
Theocrasia, i, 412, 414, 538, 590, 626, ii, 149
Theodora, Empress, i, 615
Theodora, sister of Marozia, ii, 62
Theodore of Tarsus, ii, 50, 613
Theodoric (thē od’ ō rik) the Goth, i, 560, 606, ii, 37, 612
Theodosius (thē ō dō’ shi ŭs), the Great, i, 554, 602, 615, ii, 611
Theodosius II, i, 557-59
Theophrastus (thē ō frăs’ tŭs), i, 13
Theophylact, ii, 62
Theriodont (thē’ ri ō dont) reptiles, i, 54
Theriomorpha, i, 41, 47, 48
Thermopylæ (thũr mop’ i lē), i, 335, 336, 474, 536, ii, 607
Theseus (thē’ sūs), i, 216
Thespians, i, 336
Thessalus (thes’ ă lŭs), i, 375
Thessaly (and Thessalians), i, 335-40, 384, 453, 511
Thibet, i, 432, 628
Thien Shan, i, 546, 643
Thiers (tyâr), ii, 353
Thirty Tyrants, i, 351
Thirty Years’ War, ii, 235, 262, 292, 511
Thomas, Albert, ii, 439
Thompson, R. Campbell, i, 189
Thor, i, 233, ii, 49
Thoth-lunus (thoth’ lū’ nŭs), Egyptian
god, i, 239
Thothmes (thoth’ mēz), i, 199, 289, 317, 401, 445, ii, 605
Thought and research, i, 122-35, 352-53, 360-62, ii, 414
Thrace (thrās) and Thracians, i, 303, 328-31, 340, 372, 377, 395, ii, 20, 123
Three Teachings, the, i, 436
Throwing sticks, i, 90
Thucydides (thū sid’ i dēz), i, 344, 360, 399, 460
Thuringians, ii, 51
Tian Shan, i, 549
Tiber, river, i, 447, 448, 454, 458, ii, 41
Tiberius Cæsar, i, 523, 572, 584, ii, 609
Tibet, i, 206, 438, 545-47, 591, 640, ii, 113, 128, 262, 463, 624
Tibetan language, i, 157
Tides, i, 8
Tiger, sabre-toothed, i, 56, 64, 69, 70, 76
Tiglath Pileser (tig’ lăth pi lē’ z_ĕ_r), I, i, 192, 196;
III, i, 193, 200, 246, 290, 318, ii, 606
Tigris, i, 186, 192, 210, 238, 260, 616, ii, 2, 106
Tii, Queen, i, 250
Tille, Dr., ii, 180
Tilly, ii, 235
Tilsit, Treaty of, ii, 363, 622
Timbuktu, i, 565
Time, i, 13-15, 128-29, ii, 605
_Times_, the, ii, 405
Timon (tī’ mon), i, 515
Timurlane, ii, 132-33, 137, 154, 261, 617
Tin, i, 4, 106, 217, 273, ii, 389
Tinstone, i, 106
Tiryns (tī’ rinz), i, 303
Titanothere (tī’ tăn ō thēr), i, 53, 56
Titus, i, 526, 571, ii, 610
Tobacco, i, 170, 219, ii, 281, 284
Toe, great, i, 66
Tolstoy, ii, 367
Tonkin, ii, 467, 470
Torr, Cecil, i, 210, 259
Tortoises, i, 40, 46
Torture, use of, ii, 338
Tory Party, ii, 489
Totila (tot’ i lă), i, 611
Toulon, ii, 333, 349, 351
Tours, ii, 47, 180
Towers of Silence, i, 625
Town life, European, ii, 180 _sqq._
_Town Topics_, ii, 424
Townshend, General, ii, 522
Township, primitive, i, 256
Tracheal tubes, i, 25
Trachodon (trăk’ ō don), i, 42
Trade, early, i, 118, 208-22, 257, 264-65;
routes, ii, 76, 183; sea, ii, 184-85
Trade Unions, i, 487, 536, ii, 407
Tradition, i, 55, 124-29, 230
Trafalgar, battle of, ii, 362, 622
Trajan (trā’ jăn), i, 524, 526, 614, 623, ii, 2, 610
Transmigration of souls, i, 424, 427
Transport, ii, 386, 569
Transubstantiation, ii, 150-51, 171
Transvaal, ii, 424, 460, 623.
(_See also_ South Africa)
Transylvania, i, 526, ii, 112
Trasimene, Lake, i, 475
Travels, early, i, 221, ii, 386
Trebizond, ii, 120
Trees, i, 27, 37
Trench warfare, ii, 515
Trent, Council of, ii, 167, 618
Tresas, i, 336
Trevithick, ii, 386
Trianon, the, ii, 317
Tribal system, i, 177, ii, 128
Trilobites, i, 10, 21-24
Triceratops (trī ser’ ă tops), i, 42
Trieste, ii, 445
Trigonometry, ii, 37
Trinidad, ii, 471
Trinil, i, 68-69
Trinitarians, i, 592-93, 601-02
Trinity, doctrine of the, i, 575, 592, 602, 625-26, ii, 171
Trinity College, Dublin, ii, 492
Tripoli, i, 228, ii, 470, 500, 624;
Treaty of, ii, 294
Trireme, i, 469
Trojans, i, 216, 448, ii, 121
Tröltsch, i, 604
Trotsky, ii, 411
Troy, i, 216, 303, 318, 335, 446
Troyes (trwä), battle of, i, 559, ii, 611
Trumpet, bronze, i, 132
Tsar, title of, i, 565, ii, 129
Tshushima (tsoo shē’ mă), Straits of, ii, 469
Ts’i (dynasty and state), i, 205, 508
Ts’in (dynasty and state), i, 205, 253
Tuaregs, i, 154, 206
Tudor, ii, 287
Tuileries, ii, 319, 322, 328, 329
Tulip tree, i, 51
Tunis, i, 470, ii, 84, 470, 500
Turanian language. (_See_ Ural-Altaic languages)
Turanians, i, 158, 620, 627, ii, 29, 69, 122
Turkestan, i, 153, 159, 206, 273, 317,
386, 387, 388, 428, 433, 546, 548,
549, 603, 618, 620, 627-29, 644,
ii, 17, 24, 33, 71, 109, 113, 121,
127-28, 132, 261, 262, 608, 612
Turkey, ii, 208, 366, 382, 440, 446, 483, 484, 500, 502, 521-22, 531, 623, 624.
(_See also_ Turks)
Turkey, Great, ii, 114
Turkhan Pasha, ii, 554
Turkish fleet, ii, 140;
language and literature, i, 156, 627, ii, 122;
peoples, i, 541, 570, 627, ii, 28, 64, 66-72, 139-40, 261 (_see also_ Turks);
princes, ii, 106, 124
Turko-Finnic language, ii, 70
Turko-Finnish peoples, i, 560, 606
Turkomans, i, 551, ii, 132-33, 261, 471
Turks, i, 388, 545, 618, 627, 629, 644, ii, 24, 34-35, 61, 106, 121-22, 617;
and the Crusades, ii, 78 _sqq._;
Ottoman, i, 615, ii, 121 _sqq._,
138-40, 182-84, 193-94, 197, 200, 204-06, 233,
240, 249, 353, 447, 617, 620;
Seljuk, ii, 34, 39, 70, 114, 121, 615
Turtles, i, 40, 46
Tuscany, ii, 225, 236, 242
Tusculum, i, 473
Tushratta, King, i, 192, 200, 245
Twelve Tables, the, i, 458, 487
Tyler, Wat, ii, 156, 617
Tylor, E. B., i, 131
Tyndale, Bible of, i, 282
Typhon (tī’ fon), Egyptian god, i, 236
Tyrannosaurus (tī răn ō saw’ rŭs), i, 42
Tyrants, i, 308
Tyre, i, 196, 212, 216, 261, 264, 266,
279, 294, 331, 379, 380, 382-84, 401, 468,
569, 571, ii, 144, 244
Tyrol, ii, 283, 564
Uganda, i, 206, ii, 51, 460
Uhud, battle of, ii, 9
Uigurs (wē’ goorz), ii, 109
Uintathere (ū in’ tă thēr), i, 53, 56
Ukraine Cossacks, ii, 260
Ukrainia (and Ukrainians), ii, 128-29, 244
Ulm, ii, 362, 622
Ulster, i, 110, ii, 432, 489-98
Uncleanness, i, 126, 131
“Unionist” party, ii, 495
United Provinces.
(_See_ Holland)
United Service Institution, ii, 567, 571
United States, i, 37, 546, ii, 294, 297 _sqq._;
constitution, i, 225, 520, ii, 293 _sq._, 314, 378, 621;
political and social conditions, i, 268, 308,
493, ii, 292-96, 326, 338, 344, 386-87, 395, 551;
slavery in, ii, 193, 293;
Declaration of Independence, ii, 293, 621;
treaty with Britain, ii, 293-94, 621;
Civil War, ii, 443, 623;
unity of, ii, 476;
modern foreign policy of, ii, 503-07;
in Great War, ii, 527, 583, 560-62.
(_See also_ America)
_Universal History_, the, ii, 418, 419
Universal law, ii, 215
Universals, ii, 174
Universe, ii, 418
Universities, i, 613, ii, 37, 88, 168, 270, 390, 427
University Commission, ii, 437
Unterwalden (oon’ ter val den), ii, 199
Ur, i, 195
Ural mountains, i, 153, 549
Ural-Altaic languages, i, 155, 156, 160, 164, 174, 299, 560;
people, i, 203
Uranus (ūr’ ă nŭs), i, 4
Urban II (pope), ii, 72, 74, 84, 97, 167, 615
Urban VI (pope), ii, 100, 617
Urfa, i, 621
Uri, ii, 199
Urns, i, 115
Uruk, i, 195
Urumiya (ū rū mē’ yă), lake, i, 318
Ussher, Bishop, ii, 418
Usury, i, 265
Utica (ū’ ti k_ă_), i, 212
Utopias, i, 358, ii, 211
Utrecht, ii, 229
Vaisyas (vīs’ yăz), i, 269, 270
Valais, i, 564
Valenciennes, ii, 531
Valens, Emperor, i, 554
Valerian, Emperor, i, 528, 617, ii, 610
Valladolid, ii, 207-09
Valmy, battle of, ii, 330, 621
Valona, ii, 524
Value, i, 219, 220
Van, i, 318
Vandals, i, 540, 553, 556, 564, 606, 615, ii, 22, 611
Varangians (vă răn’ ji ănz), ii, 67
Varennes (vă ren’), ii, 323-25, 621
Varro, i, 476
Vasa (vä’ să), Gustava, ii, 234
Vases, i, 213
Vassalage, ii, 44
Vatican, ii, 57, 84, 100
Vaughan, ii, 310
Vedas (vā’ dăz), i, 173, 182, 417, ii, 257
Vegetarians, i, 182, 416
Vegetation, i, 37, 38
Veii (vē’ yī), i, 450, 459, 483, 485
Vendée, ii, 333, 351
Venetia, ii, 441, 445, 529
Venezuela, ii, 505
Venice (and the Venetians), ii, 76, 80, 81, 97,
117, 120, 126, 139, 180, 182, 184,
257, 351, 380, 529, 616, 621
Venizelos (ven i zē’ los), ii, 522
Venus, goddess, ii, 49
Venus, planet, i, 4, 5
Vera Cruz, ii, 444
Verbal tradition, i, 230
Verde, Cape, ii, 617
Verde, Cape, Islands, ii, 188
Verdun, ii, 329, 330, 509
Verona, ii, 180, 332
Versailles, ii, 238, 242, 248, 312-22, 446, 477, 556;
Peace of, ii, 560 _sqq._, 624
Verulam, Lord.
(_See_ Bacon, Sir Francis)
Vespasian (ves pā’ zhi ăn), i, 526, 535, 571, ii, 609
Vessels of stone, i, 213
Vesuvius, i, 505
Via Flaminia, i, 471
Victims, human, i, 588
Victor Emmanuel, ii, 441, 623
Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, i, 175, 531,
ii, 228, 437, 438, 455, 482, 487, 622, 623
_Victory_, flagship, ii, 362
Vienna, ii, 126, 140, 205, 249, 371, 483, 568, 618, 620;
Congress of, ii, 370, 378, 379, 431, 436, 440, 453, 557, 622
Vigilius, i, 558, 559
Vikings (vik’ ingz), ii, 53, 67
Village, the, i, 109, 256
Vilna, ii, 386, 519
Vimiero (vē mā’ ē roo), ii, 364
Vinci (vin’ chē), Leonardo da, i, 13, 534, ii, 175, 183, 419, 523, 618
Vindhya (vind’ yă) mountains, i, 420
Vinland, ii, 185
Virgil, i, 407, 448, 531
Virginia, ii, 280, 283, 290, 292, 296, 300, 305, 306, 443
Virtue, i, 351
Visé, ii, 512
Vishnu, i, 180, 437
Visigoths, i, 550, 553, 559, 606, ii, 66, 611
Vistula, ii, 112
Vitellus, i, 526, ii, 609
_Vittoria_, ship, ii, 188
Viviparous animals, i, 54-55
Vivisection, i, 403, 404, 490
Vocabulary of man, i, 151
Volga, i, 153, 159, 432, 560, 606, ii, 267
Volscians, i, 458
Volta, ii, 387
Voltaire, F. M. A. de, ii, 238, 240, 264, 421, 620
Votes, ii, 147
Vowels, i, 304
Voyages, i, 217-18, ii, 191
Vulgate, the, i, 307
Wages, i, 258, ii, 156
Wagons, i, 170
Waldenses, ii, 92, 94
Waldo, ii, 92, 94
Wales, i, 209, 605, ii, 40, 178
Waley, Arthur, i, 157
Walid (wa lēd’) I, ii, 28, 613
Walid II, ii, 28, 613
Wallace, William, ii, 178
Wallenstein, ii, 235
Walpole, Sir Robert, ii, 227
Wang Yang Ming, i, 642
War, Great.
(_See_ Great War)
War and warfare, i, 171, 254, 256, 306,
370-72, ii, 234, 424, 475-76, 481, 513 _sqq._, 567-70
War of American Independence, ii, 291 _sqq._
Warsaw, ii, 382
Warwick, Lord, ii, 222
Washington, i, 520, ii, 279, 301, 357, 392, 443
Washington, George, ii, 292, 301, 303, 307, 353
Water, i, 23, ii, 275
Waterloo, ii, 371, 624
Watt, James, ii, 275, 386, 392
Watters, i, 541, 642, 645
Wealden Valley, i, 73
Weale, Putnam, ii, 461
Weapons, i, 78, 108, 114, 196, 205
Weaving, i, 105
Wedmore, Treaty of, ii, 52, 54
Wei dynasty, later, i, 633
Wei-hai-wei (wā hī wā’), ii, 462, 469
Wellesley, Marquis.
(_See_ Mornington, Lord)
Wellesley, Sir Arthur.
(_See_ Wellington, Duke of)
Wellington, Duke of, ii, 364, 371
Wells, J., i, 458, 467, 470
Welsh, the, ii, 244
Welsh language, i, 168
Wends, the, ii, 80
Were-wolf, i, 124
Wessex, ii, 40, 51, 614
Western civilization, i, 636
Westminster, i, 463, 489, ii, 159, 182, 222, 225, 228
Westphalia, Peace of, ii, 232, 236, 280
Weyl, ii, 543
Whales, i, 41
Wheat, i, 113, 184, 186
Wheeler, B. I., i, 359, 362, 367
Whigs, ii, 288-89, 332
Whistles, i, 115
White Man’s Burthen, ii, 462
Whitehall, ii, 222, 224, 568
Wilberforce, Bishop, ii, 420
Wilhelm I, German Emperor, ii, 482
Wilhelm II, German Emperor, ii, 59, 60, 482-86, 623
Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Germany, ii, 486
Will and obedience, ii, 142-48
William I, etc., Emperors of Germany.
(_See_ Wilhelm)
William the Conqueror, i, 408, ii, 54, 66, 150, 615
William III, Prince of Orange, ii, 226, 491-92, 620
William IV, King of England, ii, 228
William the Silent, ii, 229
Williams, Harold, ii, 71
Williams, S. Wells, i, 541
Wilson, W., President of U. S. A., ii, 221, 284, 543-46, 550-57, 564-67
Wiltshire, i, 110, 135
Winckler, H., i, 192, 195, 246, 342
Windsor, ii, 222
Wine, ii, 281
Wiriath, ii, 311, 326
Wisby, ii, 180
Witchcraft, i, 126, 374
Withington, E. T., i, 403
Wittenberg, ii, 156, 203, 618
Woden, ii, 144
Wolfe, General, ii, 254, 620
Wolsey, Cardinal, ii, 202
Wolves, i, 69, 448
Women, i, 95, 99, 181, 232, 251, 309, ii, 13, 297
Wood, i, 76
Wood Age, i, 68
Wood blocks, for printing, ii, 159
Woodruff, Prof. L. L., i, 7
Woodward, G. M., i, 50
Woodward, Smith, i, 72
Woolf, L. S., ii, 377, 543
Woollen industry, ii, 275
Workmen, ii, 404-407
World (geographical), i, 341, 405, 406, ii, 187, 188, 191, 605;
(political), i, 397, 399, 400, ii, 278, 381, 385, 431, 449
World, Old, nursery of mankind, i, 103
World dominion (and unity), i, 374, 397,
399, ii, 72, 90, 211, 243, 246, 252,
261-262
Worms, town, ii, 60
Worms, Diet of, ii, 203, 618
Worship, i, 130
Wörth (vũrt), ii, 445
Wright, W. B., i, 30, 63, 78, 96, 100, 101, 120
Writing, i, 174, 176, 189, 197, 198, 207-208,
214, 223-31, 296, 421, 639, ii, 59
Written word, i, 293
Wu Ti, i, 548, ii, 609
Wu Wang, i, 204
Württemberg, i, 102, ii, 445
Wycliffe, John, and his followers, ii, 96,
100, 150-53, 160, 171, 174, 202, 270, 272, 617
Xavier (zā’ vi ũr), Francis, ii, 465
Xenophanes (ze nof’ _ă_ nēz), i, 13
Xenophon, i, 342, 351, 357, 363, 399
Xerxes (zũrk’ sēz), i, 334-42, 362, 385, 542, ii, 122, 607
Yanbu, i, 634
Yang-chow, ii, 119
Yang-tse valley, i, 205, 542
Yang-tse-kiang (yäng tsē kyäng’), i, 201, 641
Yarkand, i, 628, 643, ii, 610
Yarmuk, ii, 18, 613
Year, Moslem, ii, 8; solar, i, 129
Yeast, i, 172
Yedo bay, ii, 466
Yeliu Chutsai, ii, 110
Yemen, i, 618, 624, ii, 3-4
York, i, 529, ii, 221
Yorkshire, ii, 154
Yorktown, ii, 292
Ypres (ē’ pr), ii, 229, 515, 516
Yuan Chwang, i, 541, 642 _sqq._, ii, 22, 34, 106, 118, 612-13
Yuan dynasty, ii, 114, 117, 127, 617
Yucatan, i, 308, ii, 190
Yueh-Chi, i, 548, 628, 643, ii, 618
Yugo-Slavia (and Yugo-Slavs), i, 616, ii, 122, 380 _sq._, 484, 564, 566
Yule, i, 541
Yuste (yoos’ tā), ii, 207-09
Zadok, i, 287
Zaid (zā’ id), ii, 12
Zainib, ii, 12
Zama (zā’ m_ă_), i, 476-80, 482, ii, 608
Zanzibar, ii, 187
Zara, ii, 81
Zarathustra (zā ră thoos’ tr_ă_).
(_See_ Zoroaster)
Zebedee, i, 580
Zeid (zīd), a slave, ii, 6
Zend Avesta, i, 624
Zenobia, i, 535, 617, ii, 610
Zeppelin raids, ii, 519
Zeus (zūs), i, 396, 412
Zeuxis (zūk’ sis), i, 369
Zimbabwe (zēm băb’ wā), ii, 459
Zimmern, i, 305, 310, 343
Zinc, i, 106
Ziska, ii, 152
Zodiac, i, 240
Zollverein (tsol’ fer īn), ii, 488
Zoroaster (zō rō ăs’ tũr) and Zoroastrianism,
i, 533, 538, 617, 618, 624, 625,
626, 627, ii, 4, 14, 16, 29, 137
Zoroastrian language, i, 626
Zosimus (zōs’ i mŭs), i, 599
Zulus, i, 219, 370
Zyp, the, ii, 230
Printed in the United States of America.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See upon this an excellent pamphlet by F. J. Gould, _History, the
Supreme in the Instruction of the Young_ (Watts & Co.).
[2] A compact and inspiring book to be noted here is Fairgrieve’s
_Geography and World Power_. Another very suggestive book is Andrew Reid
Cowan’s _Master Clues in World History_.
[3] For a convenient recent discussion of the origin of the earth and
its early history before the seas were precipitated and sedimentation
began, the student should consult Professor Burrell’s contribution to
the Yale lectures, _The Evolution of the Earth and Its Inhabitants_
(1918), edited by President Lull.
[4] Here in this history of life we are doing our best to give only
known and established facts in the broadest way, and to reduce to a
minimum the speculative element that must necessarily enter into our
account. The reader who is curious upon this question of life’s
beginning will find a very good summary of current suggestions done by
Professor L. L. Woodruff in President Lull’s excellent compilation _The
Evolution of the Earth_ (Yale University Press). Professor H. F.
Osborn’s _Origin and Evolution of Life_ is also a very vigorous and
suggestive book upon this subject, but it demands a fair knowledge of
physics and chemistry. Two very stimulating essays _for the student_ are
A. H. Church’s _Botanical Memoirs_. No 183, Ox. Univ. Press.
[5] Theophrastus, quoting Xenophanes.
[6] There is a discussion of fossils in the Holkham Hall Leonardo MS.
[7] An admirable recent book, short and written in a style intelligible
to the general reader, is Arthur Holmes, _The Age of the Earth_. He
gives a good summary of this most interesting discussion, and sustains
the maximum estimate of 1600 million years.
[8] It might be called with more exactness the _Survival of the Fitter_.
[9] See Evans, The Sudden Appearance of the Cambrian Fauna. (_Proc. of
XIe Congrès Geolog. Inst., 1910_) for a discussion of this.
[10] Phanerogams.
[11] Deciduous trees.
[12] This, says Mr. R. I. Pocock, has to be qualified. There were
Carboniferous spiders with spinnerets, though they may have used the
silk only for egg cases. And he thinks that the Carboniferous myriapods
point to _ground_ beneath the trees.
[13] See Sir R. Ball’s _Causes of the Great Ice Age_, and Dr. Croll’s
_Climate and Time_. These are sound books to read still, but the reader
will find many of their conclusions modified in Wright’s _The Quaternary
Ice Age_, which is a quarter of a century more recent.
[14] Dr. Marie Stopes, _Monograph on the Constitution of Coal_.
[15] See article “Cephalopoda” in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ for its
anatomy.
[16] And here the genius of a great humorous artist (E. T. Reed) obliges
us to add a footnote to clear away a common misconception. He was the
creator of a series of fantastic pictures, _Prehistoric Peeps_, which
have had a deserved and immense vogue, and it was his whim to represent
primitive men as engaged in an unending wild struggle with great
Plesiosaurs and the like. His fantasy has become a common belief. As we
shall see, millions of years elapsed between the vanishing of the last
great Mesozoic reptile and the first appearance of man upon this earth.
Early man had as contemporaries some monstrous animals, as we shall
note, but not these extreme monsters.
In these opening six chapters we have been much indebted, in addition to
the books already named in the text or in footnotes, to Ray Lankester’s
_Extinct Animals_, Osborne’s _Age of Mammals_, Jukes Browne’s, Lyell’s
and Pirsson and Schuchert’s textbooks of geology, and the collections
and catalogues of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. H. R.
Knipe’s _From Nebula to Man_ and his _Evolution in the Past_ have also
been very useful and suggestive. These two books are full of admirable
illustrations of extinct monsters by Miss G. M. Woodward and Mr.
Bucknall. There are good figures also in _Extinct Monsters_ and
_Creatures of Other Days_ by H. N. Hutchinson.
[17] They secrete a nutritive fluid on which the young feeds from glands
scattered over the skin. But the glands are not gathered together into
mammæ with nipples for suckling. The stuff oozes out, the mother lies on
her back, and the young browse upon her moist skin.
[18] _Die Alpen in Eiszeitalters_, vol. iii.
[19] “Graphic Projection of the Pleistocene,” “Climatic Oscillations,”
in _Bulletin of Geological Soc. Am._, vol. xxvi.
[20] In this and the next chapters the writer has used Osborn’s _Men of
the Stone Age_, Sollas’ _Ancient Hunters_, Dr. Keith’s _Antiquity of
Man_, W. B. Wright’s _The Quaternary Ice Age_, Worthington Smith’s _Man,
the Primeval Savage_, F. Wood Jones’ _Arboreal Man_, H. G. F. Spurrell’s
_Modern Man and his Forerunners_, O. T. Mason’s _Origins of Invention_,
Parkyn’s _History of Prehistoric Art_, Salomon Reinach’s _Repertoire de
l’Art Quaternaire_, and various of the papers in Ray Lankester’s
_Science from an Easy Chair_.
[21] Darwin’s _Descent of Man_.
[22] In _Conquest_ for February, 1920, Mr. R. I. Pocock published a very
useful criticism of this section as it stood in the first version of the
_Outline_. It has been carefully modified in accordance with his views.
In addition, we take the liberty of quoting the following:
“It was formerly held, I believe, that, so far as habits are concerned,
the transitional steps in man’s descent were to be traced from an active
arboreal monkey to the equally active arboreal gibbon, and thence to the
less active, but still mainly arboreal, orang-utang; from the latter to
the half arboreal, half terrestrial chimpanzee, thence, through the
mainly terrestrial gorilla, to wholly terrestrial man. In other words,
the stages of man’s evolution were a series of structural modifications
resulting from the gradual dropping of the ancestral habit of living in
trees in favour of life on the ground. But such a conception leaves
unexplained the great differences between monkeys and gibbons in
arboreal and terrestrial activity. Were it correct, we should expect the
gibbons to show a transition between monkeys and other apes in their
method of moving through trees and on the ground. They show no such
transition. It is necessary, therefore, to formulate another theory.
“Since all the active climbing monkeys have well-developed tails, and
since the tail tends to shorten or disappear in species of less active
habits which live, like the monkey of Gibraltar, on rocky hillsides, the
absence of the tail in apes suggests very forcibly that their ancestor
had to a great extent given up living in trees. Moreover, the short
broad foot of the apes, their ability to stand and walk erect, their
peculiar way of climbing, all point to the conclusion that they are
descended, not from a truly arboreal ape, but from an ape which had
already taken to terrestrial life, with partly bipedal, partly
quadrupedal progression; an ape which, while still retaining the power
to ascend trees for purposes of feeding and escaping from carnivorous
foes, was, at best, probably a slow, inactive climber, certainly not an
arboreal leaper like a monkey. A large ape of that mode of life, with
hands and feet not very different from those of a chimpanzee or gorilla,
but with stronger legs and shorter arms, is my conception of the
ancestor of existing apes and of man. And the progenitor of that
hypothetical ancestor was probably a big ground monkey.”
[23] Among the earlier pioneers of the latter view was Mr. Harrison, a
grocer of Ightham in Kent, one of those modest and devoted observers to
whom British geology owes so much. At first his “Eoliths” were flouted
and derided by archæologists, but to-day he has the scientific world
with him in the recognition of the quasi-human origin of many of his
specimens. With him we must honour Mr. W. J. Lewis Abbott, a jeweller of
St. Leonards, whose intimate knowledge of stone structure has been of
the utmost value in these discussions. See “Occ. Papers,” No. 4, of the
Royal Anthropl. Inst., for a description by Sir E. R. Lankester of one
of the better formed of these early implements.
[24] Some writers suppose that a Wood and Shell age preceded the
earliest Stone Age. South Sea Islanders, Negroes, and Bushmen still make
use of wood and the sharp-edged shells of land and water molluscs as
implements.
[25] For some interesting suggestions on the origin of flint implements
see Elliot Smith’s presidential address to the Anthropl. Sect. of the
Brit. Assn., 1912.
[26] Sollas’ _Ancient Hunters_, p. 40.
[27] We follow Penck.
[28] For sixpence and postage the reader can get from the British
Museum, South Kensington, a very fully illustrated pamphlet _A Guide to
the Fossil Remains of Man_, showing the Piltdown material in great
detail.
[29] Three phases of human history before the knowledge and use of
metals are often distinguished. First there is the so-called Eolithic
Age (dawn of stone implements), then the Palæolithic Age (old stone
implements), and finally an age in which the implements are skilfully
made and frequently well finished and polished (Neolithic Age). The
Palæolithic period is further divided into an earlier (sub-human) and a
later (fully human) period. We shall comment on these divisions later.
[30] From Chelles and Le Moustier in France.
[31] Osmond Fisher, quoted in Wright’s _Quaternary Ice Age_.
[32] _Social Origins_, by Andrew Lang, and _Primal Law_, by J. J.
Atkinson. (Longmans, 1903.)
[33] This first origin of fire was suggested by Sir John Lubbock
(_Prehistoric Times_), and Ludwig Hopf, in _The Human Species_, says
that “Flints and pieces of pyrites are found in close proximity in
palæolithic settlements near the remains of mammoths.”
[34] But compare Sollas’ _Ancient Hunters_. Elliot Smith (_Primitive
Man_, Proceedings Brit. Acad., vol. vii) says they approach the
Neanderthal type.
[35] What is known of the Tasmanian Old Stone men is to be found in Roth
and Butler’s _Aborigines of Tasmania_. See also footnote on the
Tasmanian language to Chapter XIII.
[36] The opinion that the Neanderthal race (_Homo Neanderthalensis_) is
an extinct species which did not interbreed with the true men (_Homo
sapiens_) is held by Professor Osborn, and it is the view to which the
writer inclines and to which he has pointed in the treatment of this
section; but it is only fair to the reader to note that many writers do
not share this view. They write and speak of living “Neanderthalers” in
contemporary populations. One observer has written in the past of such
types in the west of Ireland; another has observed them in Greece. These
so-called “living Neanderthalers” have neither the peculiarities of
neck, thumb, nor teeth that distinguish the Neanderthal race of pro-men.
The cheek teeth of true men, for instance, have what we call fangs, long
fangs; the Neanderthaler’s cheek tooth is a _more complicated and
specialized_ cheek tooth, a long tooth with short fangs, and his canine
teeth were _less_ marked, _less_ like dog-teeth, than ours. Nothing
could show more clearly that he was on a different line of development.
We must remember that so far only western Europe has been properly
explored for Palæolithic remains, and that practically all we know of
the Neanderthal species comes from that area (see Map, p. 89). No doubt
the ancestor of _Homo sapiens_ (which species includes the Tasmanians)
was a very similar and parallel creature to _Homo Neanderthalensis_. And
we are not so far from that ancestor as to have eliminated not indeed
“Neanderthal,” but “Neanderthaloid” types. The existence of such types
no more proves that the Neanderthal species, the makers of the Chellean
and Mousterian implements, interbred with _Homo sapiens_ in the European
area than do monkey-faced people testify to an interbreeding with
monkeys; or people with faces like horses, that there is an equine
strain in our population.
[37] R. I. Pocock.
[38] See Osborn in his _Men of the Old Stone Age_. But see Wright’s
_Quaternary Ice Age_ for a different view of the Magdalenian Age.
[39] See, for example, H. G. F. Spurrell, _Modern Man and His
Forerunners_, end of Chapter III.
[40] Upon this question W. J. Sollas’ _Ancient Hunters_ is very full and
suggestive.
[41] From the cave of Mas d’Azil.
[42] But our domestic cattle are derived from some form of
aurochs--probably from some lesser Central Asiatic variety.--H. H. J.
[43] “The various finds of human remains in North America for which the
geological antiquity has been claimed have been thus briefly passed
under review. In every instance where enough of the bones is preserved
for comparison, the evidence bears witness against the geological
antiquity of the remains and for their close affinity to or identity
with the modern Indians.” (Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of American
Ethnology, Bulletin 33. Dr. Hrdlicka.)
But J. Deniker quotes evidence to show that eoliths and early palæoliths
have been found in America. See his compact but full summary of the
evidence and views for and against in his _Races of Man_, pp. 510, 511.
[44] “Questioned by some authorities,” says J. Deniker in _The Races of
Man_.
[45] A good account of Palæolithic and Neolithic man is to be found in
Rice Holmes’ _Ancient Britain_, 1907. Otis T. Mason’s _Origins of
Invention_ also illuminates this period.
[46] The deposits at Susa show neolithic remains perhaps more than
20,000 years old. See Montelius _Congrès Internat. d’Anthrop. Prehist._,
1906, p. 32. Sir Arthur Evans says the neolithic age began in Crete more
than 14,000 years ago.--G. Wh.
[47] See Peisker, _Cambridge Medieval History_, Vol. I, for some
interesting views upon domestication.--E. B.
[48] Native copper is still found to-day in Italy, Hungary, Cornwall,
and many other places.
[49] This view of the origin of bronze is that of Dr. Gowland, _The
Metals Antiquity_ (Huxley Lecture, 1912). But Lord Avebury quotes the
verbal opinion of the late Lord Swansea against this view, and sets it
aside without further argument.
[50] Ridgeway (_Early Age of Greece_) says a lump of tin has been found
in the Swiss pile-dwelling deposits.
[51] Tin was known as a foreign import in Egypt under the XVIIIth
Dynasty; there is (rare) Mycenæan tin, and there are (probably later,
but not clearly dated) tin objects in the Caucasus. But it is very
difficult to distinguish tin from antimony. There is a good deal of
Cyprus bronze which contains antimony; a good deal which seems to be tin
is antimony--the ancients trying to get tin, but actually getting
antimony and thinking it was tin.--J. L. M.
[52] In connection with iron, note the distinction of ornamental and
useful iron. Ornamental iron, a rarity, perhaps meteoric, as jewellery
or magical stuff, occurs in east Europe sporadically in the time of the
XVIIIth Dynasty. This must be distinguished from the copious useful iron
which appears in Greece much later from the North.--J. L. M.
[53] People were probably healthier and longer lived in the Bronze than
in the Neolithic age. The disparity of stature between male and female
was much less.--G. Wh.
[54] Lord Avebury. For a good account of Avebury, Stonehenge, and the
traces of a well-developed social system in England before the coming of
the Keltic peoples, see Hippesley Cox, _The Green Roads of England_.
[55] Caesar _de Bello Gallico_ says the Britons tabooed hare, fowl and
goose.--G. Wh.
[56] All Old World peoples who had entered upon the Neolithic stage grew
and ate wheat, but the American Indians must have developed agriculture
independently in America after their separation from the Old World
populations. They never had wheat. Their cultivation was maize, Indian
corn, a new-world grain.
[57] Poultry and hens’ eggs were late additions to the human cuisine, in
spite of the large part they now play in our dietary. The hen is not
mentioned in the Old Testament (but note the allusion to an egg, Job vi,
6) nor by Homer. Up to about 1300 B.C. the only fowls in the world were
jungle denizens in India and Burmah. The crowing of jungle cocks is
noted by Glasfurd in his admirable accounts of tiger shooting as the
invariable preliminary of dawn in the Indian jungle. Probably poultry
were first domesticated in Burmah. They got to China, according to the
records, only about 1100 B.C. They reached Greece via Persia before the
time of Socrates. In the New Testament the crowing of the cock
reproaches Peter for his desertion of the Master.
[58] Later Palæolithic bone whistles are known. One may guess that reed
pipes were an early invention.
[59] In addition to authorities already cited, we have used for this and
the following chapters Lord Avebury’s _Prehistoric Times_, Schrader and
Jevons’ _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_, and A. H.
Keane’s _Man Past and Present_.
[60] Among other books we have used Jukes Browne’s _Building of the
British Isles_.
[61] _The Quaternary Ice Age._
[62] Our treatment of this chapter is written for the general reader and
is broad and general. But the student who wishes to go more thoroughly
into the development of the civilized mentality out of the elements of
the primitive human mind should read and study very carefully that very
illuminating book, Jung’s _Psychology of the Unconscious_ (English
translation by Beatrice M. Hinckle), and especially the opening two
chapters. That book is a most important contribution to the mental
history of mankind.
[63] J. J. Atkinson’s _Primal Law_.
[64] See Sir J. G. Frazer, _Belief in Immortality_.
[65] Glasfurd’s _Rifle and Romance in the Indian Jungle_, 1915.
[66] For some interesting suggestions here see Sigismund Freud, _Totem
and Taboo, Resemblances between the Psychic Life of Savages and
Neurotics_.
[67] Ludwig Hopf, in _The Human Species_, calls the later Palæolithic
art “masculine” and the Neolithic “feminine.” The pottery was made by
women, he says, and that accounts for it. But the arrowheads were made
by men, and there was nothing to prevent Neolithic men from taking
scraps of bone or slabs of rock and carving them--had they dared. We
suggest they did not dare to do so.
[68] But Cicero says relegere, “_to read over_,” and the “binding” by
those who accept _religare_ is often written of as being merely the
binding of a vow.
[69] Bateman, _Ten Years’ Digging in Celtic and Saxon Gravehills_,
quoted by Lord Avebury in _Prehistoric Times_, p. 176.
[70] Cabot in _Labrador_, by Grenfell and others. Macmillan, New York.
[71] Quoted in _Ency. Brit._, vol. ix, p. 850.
[72] This is not a good name, and may perhaps drop out of use later.
Blumenbach chose a particular skull as the “type” of this race and it
happened to be a skull from the Caucasus.--G. S.
[73] The skull shape of the Lombards, says Flinders Petrie, changed from
dolichocephalic to brachycephalic in a few hundred years. See his Huxley
Lecture for 1906, _Migrations_, published by the _Anthropological
Institute_. Ripley is the great authority on the other side.
[74] _My Diaries_, under date of July 25, 1894.
[75] “Sunstone” culture because of the sun worship and the megaliths.
This is not a very happily chosen term. It suggests a division
equivalent to palæolithic (old stone) and neolithic (new stone), whereas
it is a development of the Neolithic culture.
[76] Megalithic monuments have been made quite recently by primitive
Indian peoples.
[77] For some interesting suggestions in this matter, see W. H. R.
Rivers, “_Sun Cult and Megaliths in Oceana_” (_American Anthropologist_
(N.S.), vol. xvii). Hose and MacDougall, _The Pagan Tribes of Borneo_,
contains some very interesting parallelisms between the culture of
modern Borneo and the prehistoric culture of southern Europe. See also
Dr. W. Warde Fowler’s “Ancient Italy and Modern Borneo” in the _Journal
of Roman Studies_ (1916).
[78] Sir Arthur Evans suggests that in America sign-language arose
before speech, because the sign-language is common to all Indians in
North America, whereas the languages are different. See his
_Anthropology and the Classics_.--G. M.
Samuel Butler (_Note Books_) suggests that language was “originally
confined to a few scholars.”--G. Wh.
[79] See article “Grammar” in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[80] Sir H. H. Johnston gives this estimate in his _Comparative Study of
the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages_.
[81] Greek--ox-ford.
[82] Ratsel (quoted in the _Ency. Brit._, art. “Caspian”).
[83] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Japan.”
[84] The four characters indicating “Affairs, query, imperative, old,”
placed in that order, for example, represent “Why walk in the ancient
ways?” The Chinaman gives the bare cores of his meaning; the Englishman
gets to it by a bold metaphor. He may be talking of conservatism in
cooking or in bookbinding, but he will say: “Why walk in the ancient
ways?” Mr. Arthur Waley, in the interesting essay on Chinese thought and
poetry which precedes his book, _170 Chinese Poems_ (Constable, 1918),
makes it clear how in these fields Chinese thought is kept practical and
restricted by the limitations upon metaphor the linguistic structure of
Chinese imposes. See also Hirst, _Ancient History of China_, ch. vii.
[85] See Farrand, _The American Nation_, and E. S. Payne, _History of
the New World called America_, and note footnote to § 1 of this chapter.
[86] These are discussed compactly, but with very special knowledge, by
Sir Harry Johnston in his little book on _The Opening up of Africa_, in
the Home University Library. The student who finds this subject of
philological history interesting, should read the introduction to the
same writer’s _Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages_.
[87] The Polynesians appear to be a later eastward extension of the dark
whites or brown peoples. See again § 4 of chap. xiii.
[88] “The Keltic group of languages, of which it has been said that they
combined an Aryan vocabulary with a Berber (or Iberian) grammar.” Sir
Harry Johnston. See also Sir John Rhys, The Welsh People, Mac Neilh’s
_Phases in Irish History_, and various articles by Prof. Stewart
Macalister in the _Irish Monthly_ (1917-1919).
[89] See Schrader (translated by Jevons), _Prehistoric Antiquities of
the Aryan Peoples_, p. 404. But though the word Aryan was undoubtedly in
its original application the name only of the Indo-Iranian people, it
has been used in modern discussion for more than half a century in the
wider sense. A word was badly wanted for that purpose, and “Aryan” was
taken; failing “Aryan” we should be obliged to fall back on
“Indo-Germanic” or “Indo-European,” terms equally open to objection and
ugly and clumsy to employ.
[90] But these may have been an originally Semitic people who learnt an
Aryan speech.
[91] On this point see Perry, _An Ethnological Study of Warfare_, vol.
lxi., Mem. Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc., and also published separately
1917.--G. Wh.
[92] Fools, I think, were not wits, but deformed idiots, whom the
company teased and laughed at. Certainly so in Roman and mediæval times.
They do not occur in the Hellenic Age, except at courts in Asia Minor;
but they must have been present in pre-Hellenic kingdoms; cf. end of
_Iliad I._, where the gods laugh consumedly not at Hephaestus’ wit, but
at his lameness. The idealized Fool of Shakespeare is, like the
idealized Hermit of the romances, the invention of later days.--G. M
[93] The Aryans developed their languages and their ballads and epics
between 10,000 B.C. and the historical period. Very much later in time,
probably within the last 3,000 years, the nomadic Mongolian peoples of
Asia began to develop their Ural-Altaic speech, under similar
conditions, by similar poetic uses. Later we shall note the presence of
bards at the court of Attila the Hun.
[94] It is suggested in the text that blind men became bards: Myres says
that bards were (artificially) blinded to stop them from going
elsewhere--the tribe wanted to keep them. The poetic touch is that “the
Muses” blind the poet. Not a bit of it. (Homer, being a blind bard,
describes things by sound--the twanging arrow, the far-thundering sea,
the noise of the chariot going through the gate. He is audile, not
visual.)--E. B.
But in this matter note the adjectives in the passage quoted here from
the _Iliad_; they are all visual.--G. H. M.
Mr. L. Lloyd, of the experimental station at Cheshunt, tells me he has
seen in Rhodesia the musician and singer of a troupe of native dancers
who had been blinded by his chief to prevent him leaving the
village.--H. G. W.
[95] G.M.
[96] The _Iliad_ describes what Chadwick calls a Heroic Age: _i.e._ a
time when the barbarians or nomads are breaking up an old civilization.
Men are led by chiefs who live by plunder and conquest and make
themselves kingdoms. The tribe is broken up; instead comes the comitatus
of casual men who attach themselves to a particular chief, as Phœnix or
Patroclus to Achilles. Religion is broken up, being by origin local.
Hence there is almost no religion in the _Iliad_ or the
_Nibelungenlied_. Almost no magic. No family life. Tremendous booty, and
_la carrière ouverte aux talents_ with a vengeance.--G. M.
[97] _Some Aspects of Hindu Life in India._ Paper read to the Royal
Society of Arts, Nov. 28, 1918.
[98] No Greek heroes, in Homer or the heroic tradition, ever get drunk.
In the comic tradition they do, and of course centaurs and barbarians
do.--G. M.
[99] Babylonian expedition of the University of Pennsylvania.
[100] H. R. Hall, _Ancient History of the Near East_, says it has been
found in Palestine.--S. H.
The late Mr. Aaron Aaronson found a real wild wheat upon the slopes of
Mt. Hermon. See Bulletin 274, Plant Indus. Bureau, U. S. Dept. of
Agriculture; and Stapf in Suppl. to the _Jour. of the Board of Agri.,
Lond._, vol. xvii, No. 3.--E. J. R.
[101] We shall use “Mesopotamia” here loosely for the Euphrates-Tigris
country generally. Strictly, of course, as its name indicates,
Mesopotamia (mid rivers) means only the country _between_ those two
great rivers. That country in the fork was probably very marshy and
unhealthy in early times (Sayce), until it was drained by man, and the
early cities grew up west of the Euphrates and east of the Tigris.
Probably these rivers then flowed separately into the Persian Gulf.
[102] My friend Colonel Lawrence tells me that the movement among the
Arabs is somewhat as follows: (1) the sessile village cultivators are
pushed out by over-population into the desert--very reluctantly; (2)
they wander in the desert for a thousand years or so--as a stick pushed
into the water gets carried about for a long way; (3) they are pushed
again out of the desert, back again into sessile life by
starvation--very reluctantly (they have learned to love the desert); and
when they come back into sessile life they are on the other side--_i.e._
having started in west Arabia, they land in Mesopotamia. Thus they
wander a thousand years or so, and end up thousands of miles from where
they started.--E. B.
[103] Sir H. H. Johnston is inclined to believe that a common late
Neolithic and early bronze culture spread widely in this primitive
world. He links the Dravidian languages of India--some of which group
are to be found in Beluchistan and the eastern fringe of Persia--with
certain languages in the Caucasian Mountains, and these again with
Basque. He would bring the Sumerians, the early Cretans, and the early
peoples of Asia Minor into this early “brown” or dark white culture
before the Aryans, Semites, or Hamites developed their language cultures
and thrust across this band of primordial civilization. He connects
these “class and prefix” languages with the creation of the African
Bantu, but that is a speculation beyond the scope of this present work.
A series of articles on this subject by the Rev. W. Crabtree will be
found in the _Journal of the African Society_. The connection of
Sumerian and Bantu was first suggested by Sir Richard Burton in 1885.
These views are in complete accordance with Elliot Smith’s suggestion of
a widespread heliolithic culture already dealt with in chap. xiii, § 4,
p. 146
[104] Excavations conducted at Eridu by Capt. R. Campbell Thompson
during the recent war have revealed an early Neolithic agricultural
stage, before the invention of writing or the use of bronze, beneath the
earliest Sumerian foundations. The crops were cut by sickles of
earthenware. Capt. Thompson thinks that these pre-Sumerian people were
not of Sumerian race, but proto-Elamites. Entirely similar Neolithic
remains have been found at Susa, once the chief city of Elam.
[105] Sayce, in _Babylonian and Assyrian Life_, estimates that in 6500
B.C. Eridu was on the seacoast.
[106] Authorities vary upon this date. Some put back Sargon I to 3750
B.C. This latter was his traditional date based on Babylonian records.
[107] Of unknown language and race, “neither Sumerians nor Semites,”
says Sayce. Their central city was Susa. Their archæology is still
largely an unworked mine. They are believed by some, says Sir H. H.
Johnston, to have been negroid in type. There is a strong negroid strain
in the modern people of Elam.
[108] For most of these dates here Winckler in _Helmolt’s World History_
has been followed.
[109] II. Kings xv. 29, and xvi. 7 _et seq._
[110] II. Kings xvii. 3.
[111] To be murdered by his sons.
[112] Winckler (Craig), _History of Babylonia and Assyria_.
[113] “The original home or centre of development of this ‘Dynastic’
Egyptian type seems to have been in southern or south-western Arabia.
This region of south-western and southern Arabia, ten to fifteen
thousand years ago, was probably an even better favoured province than
it is at the present day, when it still bears the Roman designation of
Arabia Felix--so much of the rest of this gaunt, lava-covered,
sand-strewn peninsula being decidedly ‘infelix.’ It has high
mountains--a certain degree of rainfall on them, and was anciently
clothed in rich forests before the camels, goats, and sheep of Neolithic
and Bronze Age man nibbled away much of this verdure. Above all there
grew trees oozing with delicious-scented resins or gums. These, when
civilization dawned on the world, became very precious and an offering
of sweet savour to the civilized man’s gods, because so grateful to his
own nostrils.” _Africa_, by Sir H. H. Johnston.
[114] 3733 B.C., Wallis Budge.
[115] But compare the citation of _Beowulf_ in Chap. XV, § 2.--R. L. C.
[116] The great pyramid is 450 feet high and its side 700 feet long. It
is calculated (says Wallis Budge) to weigh 4,883,000 tons. All this
stone was lugged into place chiefly by human muscle.
[117] There are variants to these names, and to most Egyptian names, for
few self-respecting Egyptologists will tolerate the spelling of their
colleagues. One may find, for instance, Thethmosis, Thoutmosis,
Tahutmes, Thutmose, or Thethmosis; Amunothph, Amenhotep or Amenothes. A
pleasing variation is to break up the name, as, for instance, Amen
Hetep. This particular little constellation of variants is given here
not only because it is amusing, but because it is desirable that the
reader should know such variations exist. For most names the rule of
this book has been to follow whatever usage has established itself in
English literature, regardless of the possible contemporary
pronunciation. Amenophis, for example, has been so written in English
books for two centuries. It came into the language by indirect routes,
but it is now as fairly established as is Damascus as the English name
of a Syrian town. Nevertheless, there are limits to this classicism. The
writer, after some vacillation, has abandoned Oliver Goldsmith and Dr.
Johnson in the case of “Peisistratus” and “Keltic,” which were formerly
spelt “Pisistratus” and “Celtic.”
[118] _China and the League of Nations_, a pamphlet by Mr.
Liang-Chi-Chao. (_Pekin Leader_ Office.)
[119] Here we touch on highly controversial matters. The reader
interested in the question of the separate origin of the American
civilization should consult _Nature_, Jan. 27, 1916, Spinden and Elliot
Smith in discussion.
[120] F. Ratzel, _History of Mankind_.
[121] Sayce.
[122] Mosso, _The Dawn of Mediterranean Civilization_.--R. L. G.
[123] Cecil Torr, _Ancient Ships_.
[124] See Evans’ _Prehistoric Tombs of Cnossos_.
[125] This is, I think, too dogmatic about Helen. True, raids on women
were a real cause of war, but they were also a very favourite _ficelle_
of fiction. A war with Troy might easily arise by the carrying off of a
woman. But why was Troy destroyed six several times? It looks to me as
if there was some strong motive for building just there, and an equally
strong motive for great confederacies destroying the city when
built.--G. M.
Walter Leaf in his _Homer and History_ is in agreement with G. M. on
this point.--G. Wh.
[126] There were no domesticated camels in Africa until after the
Persian conquest of Egypt. This must have greatly restricted the desert
routes. (See Bunbury, _History of Ancient Geography_, note to Chap.
VIII.) But the Sahara desert of 3000 or 2000 years ago was less parched
and sterile than it is to-day. From rock engravings we may deduce the
theory that the desert was crossed from oasis to oasis by riding oxen
and by ox-carts: perhaps, also, on horses and asses. The camel as a
beast of transport was seemingly not introduced into North Africa till
the Arab invasions of the seventh century A.D. The fossil remains of
camels are found in Algeria, and wild camels may have lingered in the
wastes of the Sahara and Somaliland till the domesticated camel was
introduced. The Nubian wild ass also seems to have extended its range to
the Sahara.--H. H. J.
[127] There was Sumerian trade organized round the temples before the
Semites got into Babylonia. See Hall and King, _Archæological
Discoveries in Western Asia_.--E. B.
[128] Iron bars of fixed weight were used for coin in Britain. Cæsar,
_De Bello Gallico_.--G. Wh.
[129] The earliest coinage of the west coast of Asia Minor was in
electrum, a mixture of gold and silver, and there is an interesting
controversy as to whether the first issues were stamped by cities,
temples, or private bankers.--P. G.
[130] Small change was in existence before the time of Alexander. The
Athenians had a range of exceedingly small silver coins running almost
down to the size of a pinhead, which were generally carried in the
mouth; a character in Aristophanes was suddenly assaulted, and swallowed
his change in consequence.--P. G.
[131] There is an inn-keeper in Aristophanes, but it may be inferred
from the circumstance that she is represented as letting lodgings in
hell that the early inn left much to be desired.--P. G.
[132] See the _Encyclopædia Brit._, Article _China_, p. 218.
[133] The writer’s friend, Mr. L. Y. Chen, thinks that this is only
partially true. He thinks that the emperors insisted upon a minute and
rigorous study of the set classics in order to check intellectual
innovation. This was especially the case with the Ming emperors, the
first of whom, when reorganizing the examination system on a narrower
basis, said definitely, “This will bring all the intellectuals of the
world into my trap.” The Five Classics and the Four Books have
imprisoned the mind of China.
[134] The Libyan alphabet survived in North Africa until a century ago,
and was still used then for correspondence. It was supposed to be
extinct, but in 1897 Sir Arthur Evans and Mr. J. L. Myres saw what
looked like ancient Cretan lettering on some dyed skins from the Sahara
in the bazaar at Tripoli. It was the ancient alphabet still in use for
commercial signs.--E. B.
[135] The Sumerians allowed much more freedom and authority to women
than the Semites. They had priestess-queens, and one of their great
divinities was a goddess, Ishtar.
[136] See Johnson’s _Byeways of British Archæology_.
[137] Many Christian churches, almost all, indeed, built between the
fifth century and the Renaissance, are oriented to the east. St. Peter’s
at Rome is oriented east and west.
[138] In his _Dawn of Astronomy_.
[139] Legrain’s _Le Temps des Rois d’Ur_ (Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des
Hautes Etudes) was useful here.
[140] Cp. Moses and the Egyptian Magicians.
[141] According to Winckler, Sargon II, unlike his son, was pro-priest,
and his usurpation of the throne was the result of an intrigue of the
Babylonian priests against the feudal Assyrian military system of
Tiglath Pileser III.
[142] See the last two verses of the Second Book of Chronicles, and
Ezra, ch. i.
[143] A book of the utmost interest and value here is Breasted’s
_Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_.
[144] See S. Sharpe’s _Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity_.
[145] Akhnaton lost some or all his father’s Syrian conquests.--G. W. B.
[146] Many authorities regard Alexander as a man with the ideas of a
pushful nineteenth-century (A.D.) monarch, and consider this visit to
Jupiter Ammon as a master-stroke of policy. He was, we are asked to
believe, deliberately and cynically acquiring divinity as a “unifying
idea.” The writer is totally unable to accept anything of the sort. For
a discussion of the question, see Ferguson’s _Greek Imperialism_.
[147] “His reforming zeal made him unpopular with the upper classes.
Schoolmen and pedants held up to the admiration of the people the heroes
of the feudal times and the advantages of the system they administered.
Seeing in this propaganda danger to the state, Shi Hwang-ti determined
to break once and for all with the past. To this end he ordered the
destruction of all books having reference to the past history of the
empire, and many scholars were put to death for failing in obedience to
it.”--The late Sir R. K. Douglas in the _Encyclopædia Brit._, article
_China_.
Mr. L. Y. Chen does not agree with Sir R. K. Douglas here. He thinks
that the motives of Shi Hwang-ti were obscurantist. His object was the
intellectual slavery of the people. He collected a library for his own
use.
[148] There were literary expressions of social discontent in Egypt
before 2000 B.C. See “Social Forces and Religion” in Breasted’s
_Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_ for some of the earliest
complaints of the common man under the ancient civilizations.
[149] The student should compare with this J. J. Atkinson’s account (in
his _Primal Law_) of the significance of marriage by capture and his
theory of the origin of marriage.
[150] See also his shorter _Social Life of the Babylonians and
Assyrians_.
[151] See Mary Austin, _The Flock_.
[152] J. L. M. says this is the view of a Londoner. In a village or
small town where everyone knows everyone, long credits are possible with
barter. In Asia Minor there is much reckoning with quite imaginary money
of account.
[153] From _casta_, a word of Portuguese origin; the Indian word is
_varna_, colour.
[154] In the time of Confucius classes were much more fixed than later.
Under the Han Dynasty the competitive examination system was not yet
established. Scholars were recommended for appointments by local
dignitaries, etc.--L. Y. C.
[155] The Grand Canal of China, the longer portion of which was made in
the sixth century A.D., has a total length of nearly 900 miles. It was
begun in the fifth century B.C. “Between Su-chow and Chin-kiang the
canal is often 100 feet wide and its sides are, in many places, faced
with stone. It is spanned by fine stone bridges, and near its banks are
many memorial arches and lofty pagodas.” The Great Wall of China, which
was begun in the third century B.C., was built originally to defend
China against the Huns. It is about 1500 miles long; its average height
is between 20 and 30 feet, and every 200 yards there are towers 40 feet
high.
[156] Damascus was already making Damask, and “Damascening” steel.
[157] _The Encyclopædia Biblica_ has been of great use here.
[158] This is probably much too early an estimate. The Book of Daniel
was not written until 167-5 B.C. Ecclesiastes and several Psalms are
later than Alexander.--G. W. B.
[159] See also G. B. Gray, _A Critical Introduction to the Old
Testament_.
[160] This may seem to contradict Genesis xx. 15, and xxi. and xxvi.
various verses, but compare with this the _Encyclopædia Biblica_ article
_Philistines_.
[161] So this name should be spelt in English. It is now the fashion
among the learned and among the sceptical to spell it Yahwe or Jahveh or
Jahve, or in some such fashion. There is a justification for this in the
fact that at first only the consonants were written in Hebrew, and then,
for reasons into which we will not enter here, the wrong vowels were
inserted in this name. But ever since the days of Tyndale’s Bible,
Jehovah has been established in English literature as the name of the
God of Israel, and it is not to be lightly altered. There is at present
a deplorable tendency to strange spelling among historians. Attention
has already been called to the confusion that is being accumulated in
people’s minds by the variable spelling of Egyptologists, but the
tendency is now almost universal among historical writers. In an
otherwise admirable little book, _The Opening-up of Africa_, by Sir H.
H. Johnston, for example, one finds him spelling Saul as Sha’ul and
Solomon as Shelomoh; Jerusalem becomes Yerusalim and the Hebrews, Habiru
or Ibrim. Historians do not realize how the mind of the general reader
is distressed and discouraged by these constantly fluctuating attempts
to achieve phonetic exactitude. This treatment of old forms has much the
same effect as the dazzle-painting of ships that went on during the
submarine warfare. It is dazzle-spelling. The ordinary educated man is
so confused that he fails altogether to recognize even his oldest
friends under their modern disguises. He loses his way in the story
hopelessly. The old events occur to novel names in unfamiliar places. He
conceives a disgust for history in which no record seems to tally with
any other record. Still more maddening and confusing is the variable
spelling of Chinese names. A large part of the popular indifference to
Chinese history may be due to the impossibility of holding on to the
thread of a story in which one narrator talks of T’sin and another of
Sin, and both forms mix themselves with Chin and T’chin. A boldly
Europeanized name, such as Confucius, is far more readily grasped.
Modern writers in their zeal for phonetics seem to have lost their sense
of proportion. It is of far more importance not merely to civilization,
but to the welfare, respect, and endowment of historians, that the
general community should form clear and sound ideas of historical
processes, than that it should pronounce the name Jehovah exactly as
this or that learned gentleman believes it was pronounced by the Hebrews
of the days of Ezra. A day may come in the future for one final,
conclusive reform in the spelling of historical names. Meanwhile, it
will probably save school teachers of history from endless confusion and
muddle if they adhere firmly to the time-established spelling. Yet we
have attempted no pedantic classicalism. The reader will find
Peisistratus for Goldsmith’s Pisistratus, the Arabic spelling of
Muhammad, Kelt for Celt, and Habsburg taking the place of the older
Hapsburg.
[162] Figures certainly exaggerated.--G. M.
[163] That is, where is the glory?
[164] But upon the question whether its “Centralization” was the work of
Solomon or a much later idea, cp. S. R. Driver, _Deuteronomy_ (Int.
Crit. Commentary).--G. W. B.
[165] Estimates of the cubit vary. The greatest is 44 inches. This would
extend the width to seventy-odd feet.
[166] But one version of the Creation story and the Eden story, though
originally from Babylon, seem to have been known to the Hebrews before
the Exile.--G. W. B.
[167] For early Egyptian anticipations of the idea of a Messiah and of
the prophetic style, see Breasted’s _Development of Religion and Thought
in Ancient Egypt_. A very good book on the Hebrew prophets is W. A. C.
Allen’s _Old Testament Prophets_.
[168] Fletcher H. Swift’s _Education in Ancient Israel from Earliest
Times to A.D. 70_ is an interesting account of the way in which the
Jewish religion, because it was a literature-sustained religion, led to
the first efforts to provide elementary education for all the children
in the community.
[169] Ridgeway’s _Early History of Greece_ has been used here, and
Gilbert Murray’s _Rise of the Greek Epic_.
[170] Roger Pocock’s _Horses_ is a good and readable book on these
questions.
[171] This is a little misleading. I may quote from C. D. Buch,
_Introduction to the Study of Greek Dialects_ (_a_) “The great majority
of the dialects play no rôle whatever in literature” (p. 14); (_b_) “In
the course of literary development the dialects” (in a mixed and
artificial form, _e.g._ the “epic” dialect) “came to be characteristic
of certain classes of literature; and their rôle once established, the
choice usually depended upon this factor, rather than upon the native
dialect of the author.” (p. 12.) Speaking generally, each class of
literature preserved the dialect of the region where it was first
cultivated.
The following work is a most illuminating one on this subject: A.
Meillet, _Aperçu d’une Histoire de la Langue Grecque_ (Paris, 1913).--H.
L. J.
[172] Vowels were less necessary for the expression of a Semitic
language. In the early Semitic alphabets only A, I, and U were provided
with symbols, but for such a language as Greek, in which many of the
inflectional endings are vowels, a variety of vowel signs was
indispensable.
[173] See Zimmern’s _Greek Commonwealth_, Bury’s _History of Greece_,
and Barker’s _Greek Political Theory_.
[174] “For them the state did not exist.” This needs qualification.
Cephalus, at whose house the conversation of Plato’s _Republic_ is
placed, was a resident alien. He was a wealthy man in the best society,
and taken as a type of the “happy man.” His son, Lysias, was a leading
orator. Even in the matter of the slaves: the Old Oligarch, in the
“Constitution of Athens,” complains that the Athenian slaves had no
distinctive dress or manners, and so a gentleman could not even push one
of them! In the _Republic_ itself there is a description of the
Democratic State, in which the slaves push you off the pavement.
Moreover, even during the Peloponnesian War, there was no persecution of
aliens and no expulsion of aliens from Athens. They were evidently a
loyal and contented class. True, in time of food shortage, the claims of
everybody to true citizenship were scrutinized more and more closely;
but that was unavoidable.--G. M.
[175] I do not agree with “hereditary barristers” or “fee-hunting.” The
Athenian dicasts were not barristers, but judges: they sat in panels
(sometimes a panel of some hundreds) and judged. They had to be paid for
attendance as judges (don’t we pay jurymen?) because it took them away
from their work as potters, dyers, and stone-masons. Pay was a genuine
and good democratic institution; it was just what made possible the
ordinary citizen’s co-operation in the life of the state, and stopped
its business from being the perquisite of the rich. I feel strongly that
the text is unjust to Athens.--E. B.
See Zimmern’s _Greek Commonwealth_, and Barker’s _Greek Political
Theory_, pp. 29-30.
[176] From ostrakon, a tile; the voter wrote the name on a tile or
shell.
[177] 776 B.C. is the year of the First Olympiad, a valuable
starting-point in Greek chronology.
[178] It is, at least, doubtful whether any change of climate expelled
either lion or elephant from southeast Europe and Asia Minor; the cause
of their gradual disappearance was--I think--nothing but Man,
increasingly well armed for the chase. Lions lingered in the Balkan
peninsula till about the fourth century B.C., if not later. Elephants
had perhaps disappeared from western Asia by the eighth century B.C. The
lion (much bigger than the existing form) stayed on in southern Germany
till the Neolithic period. The panther inhabited Greece, southern Italy,
and southern Spain likewise till the beginning of the historical period
(say 1000 B.C.).--H. H. J.
[179] But a thousand years earlier the Hittites seem to have had paved
high roads running across their country.
[180] But cp. Bury’s _History of Greece_, ch. vi., § 5.
[181] Winckler, in Helmolt’s _Universal History_.
[182] See in relation to this chapter, Zimmern’s _Greek Commonwealth_. A
very handy book for the student in this section is Abbott’s _Skeleton
Outline of Greek History_.
[183] _Ancient Greek Literature_, by Gilbert Murray (Heinemann, 1911).
[184] _Plutarch._
[185] For an account of his views, see Burnet’s _Early Greek
Philosophy_. Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_ is also a good book for this
section.
[186] “But it was not only against the lives, properties, and liberties
of Athenian citizens that the Thirty made war. They were not less
solicitous to extinguish the intellectual force and education of the
city, a project so perfectly in harmony both with the sentiment and
practice of Sparta, that they counted on the support of their foreign
allies. Among the ordinances which they promulgated was one, expressly
forbidding any one ‘to teach the art of words.’ The edict of the Thirty
was, in fact, a general suppression of the higher class of teachers or
professors, above the rank of the elementary (teacher of letters or)
grammatist. If such an edict could have been maintained in force for a
generation, combined with the other mandates of the Thirty--the city out
of which Sophocles and Euripides had just died, and in which Plato and
Isocrates were in vigorous age, would have been degraded to the
intellectual level of the meanest community in Greece. It was not
uncommon for a Grecian despot to suppress all those assemblies wherein
youths came together for the purpose of common training, either
intellectual or gymnastic, as well as the public banquets and clubs or
associations, as being dangerous to his authority, tending to elevation
of courage, and to a consciousness of political rights among the
citizens.”--Grote’s _History of Greece_.
[187] A very good and useful account of this great literature for the
reader who is not a classical student is Norwood’s _Greek Tragedy_.
[188] Mahaffy.
[189] There is not a single sentence in praise of Alexander, no
dedication, no compliments, in all Aristotle. On the other hand, he
never mentions Demosthenes nor quotes him in the Rhetoric.--G. M.
[190] Wheeler.
[191] Bauer, in _Vom Griechentum zum Christentum_, says that Alexander
sent a mission of exploration to Abyssinia to enable Aristotle to settle
the question of the cause of the Nile inundations (melting of mountain
snows), and that he also had tropical flora and other material collected
for him--E. B.
[192] _Ancient Greek Literature._
[193] Jung in his _Psychology of the Unconscious_ is very good in his
chapter I on the differences between ancient (pre-Athenian) thought and
modern thought. The former he calls Undirected Thinking, the latter
Directed Thinking. The former was a thinking in images, akin to
dreaming; the latter a thinking in words. Science is an organization of
directed thinking. The Antique spirit (before the Greek thinkers,
_i.e._) created not science but mythology. The ancient human world was a
world of subjective fantasies like the world of children and uneducated
young people to-day, and like the world of savages and dreams. Infantile
thought and dreams are a re-echo of the prehistoric and savage. Myths
are the mass dreams of peoples, and dreams the myths of individuals. The
work of hard and disciplined thinking by means of carefully analyzed
words and statements which was begun by the Greek thinkers and resumed
by the scholastic philosophers of whom we shall tell in the middle ages,
was a necessary preliminary to the development of modern science.
[194] “For the proper administration of justice and for the distribution
of authority it is necessary that the citizens be acquainted with each
other’s characters, so that, where this cannot be, much mischief ensues,
both in the use of authority and in the administration of justice; for
it is not just to decide arbitrarily, as must be the case with excessive
population.” Aristotle’s _Politics_, quoted by Wheeler, who adds,
“Aristotle comes to the conclusion that the natural ‘limit to the size
of the state must be found in the capability of being easily taken in at
a glance.’” But Murray notes that the word Eusunopton means also
“capable of being comprehended as a unity”--a very different and wider
idea.
[195] Benjamin Ide Wheeler’s _Alexander the Great_ and G. D. Hogarth’s
_Philip and Alexander_ have been very useful here.
[196] To the common Athenians, that is. But to many thoughtful Greeks
the rôle of Macedonia in their future was a matter of earnest
speculation. Herodotus (viii. 137) tells a long story of a prophecy by
which the inheritance of Perdiccas, the ancestor of the Macedonian
kings, was to embrace at last the whole round world. This was written a
hundred years before Philip and Alexander.
[197] Goldsmith’s _History of Greece_. The picturesque disposition of
the novelist rather than the austere method of the historian, is
apparent here.
[198] But Phocis was treated in the same way by Philip and his friends
in 346, and Mantinea by Sparta in 385. It was a regular Greek punishment
of a city to break it up into villages; and as for selling into slavery,
Callicratidas the Spartan, in the Peloponnesian War, was held to be very
noble when he said he would not sell Greeks into slavery. Anyhow, the
destruction of Thebes was due to the _Greek_ enemies of Thebes, who
pressed it on Alexander.--E. B.
[199] Mahaffy. Their names have undergone various changes--_e.g._
Candahar (Iskender) and Secunderabad.
[200] D. G. Hogarth.
[201] The stages by which Bactria degenerated into Afghanistan may be
studied neatly in the progressive deterioration of its coinage from a
decent standard of Hellenic accomplishment into the vague flourishes of
Orientalism; it began by displaying a Heracles of pure Greek blood and a
pair of horsemen who would hardly have seemed out of place on the frieze
of the Parthenon, and it fell steadily to a level of incompetence only
equalled by the crude imitations of Roman currency that were being made
in pre-Roman Britain about the same time.--P. G.
[202] Before that time. But such speculation was going on then. There is
some interesting economic theory in Plato’s _Republic_, and Aristotle
was writing the _œconomica_. Xenophon wrote on Athenian revenues and
other economic matters. Thucycides wrote an excellent passage on the
Greek past, and Aristotle dealt with barbaric customs.--E. B.
[203] _Vide_ Mahaffy’s _Greek Life and Thought and his Progress of
Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire_, Marvin’s _Living Past_, Legge’s
_Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity_, and Reinach’s _Orpheus_.
[204] The question whether the vivisection of human beings, or, indeed,
whether any vivisection at all occurred at Alexandria, is one of
considerable importance because of the light it throws upon the moral
and intellectual quality of the time. One of the editors of this book
was inclined to throw doubt upon it, as a thing antipathetic to the
Greek spirit. The writer has taken some pains to find out the facts of
the case, and he has been so fortunate as to have the help of Dr.
Singer, one of the greatest living authorities upon the history of
medicine. There are statements made by Tertullian (_De Anima_, chap.
xxv.), but he was a biased and untrustworthy witness. The conclusive
passage is taken from Celsus, who wrote during the reign of Tiberius,
three centuries after the great days of Alexandria. “If you are to have
one witness,” writes Dr. Singer, “you could hardly have a better. In my
own mind I am satisfied with the evidence of Celsus, and I have asked
Dr. E. T. Wittrington, our best authority on Greek medicine, and he also
is satisfied.”
The following is a translation of the passage in Celsus, _De Re Medica_.
One school says that “it is necessary to dissect the bodies of the dead,
and to examine their viscera and intestines. Herophilus and Erasistratus
adopted by far the best method, for they obtained criminals from prison
by royal permission, and dissected them alive, and they examined, while
they still breathed, the parts which Nature had concealed, noting their
position, warmth (or possibly ‘colour’--_colorem_ instead of _calorem_),
shape, size, relation, hardness, softness, smoothness, and feel; also
the projections and depressions of each and how they fit into one
another. For if there happen any inward pain, he who has not learned
where the viscera and intestines are placed, cannot know where the pain
is; nor can the diseased part be cured by one who does not know what
part it is. Again, if the viscera of any one are exposed by a wound, he
who is ignorant of the natural colour of that part in the healthy state
cannot know whether it be sound or corrupted, and therefore cannot cure
the corrupted part. Moreover remedies can be applied more appropriately
externally when the position, shape, and size of the internal parts is
known, and the same argument holds for all the other matters that we
have mentioned. Nor is it a cruel act, as many would have it, to seek
remedies for innocent mankind throughout the ages by torture of a few
criminals.”
Against this view, says Celsus, the other school argues that “to cut
open the abdomen and thorax of living men, and thus to turn that art
which concerns itself with the health of mankind not only into an
instrument of death (_pestem_--lit. ‘a plague’), but (death) in its most
horrible form, and this although some of the things that we seek thus
barbarously can by no means be known, while others may be learned
without cruelty. For the colour, smoothness, softness, hardness, and all
their like are not the same when the body is cut open as when it is
whole; and, moreover, even in bodies that have not been thus ravaged,
these properties are often changed by fear, grief, want of food, or of
digestion, fatigue and a thousand other lesser causes. It is thus more
likely that the inner organs, which are more tender, and to which the
light is a new experience, are changed by serious wounds and by
mangling.
“Further, nothing can be more foolish than to think that any things are
the same in a live man as in a moribund one, or, rather, in one
practically dead. It is indeed true that the abdomen, with which our
argument is less concerned, can be opened while a man yet lives, but as
soon as the knife reaches the thorax (præcordium), and outs the
transverse septum, which is a membrane dividing the superior parts from
the inferior and called diaphragma by the Greeks, the man at once gives
up the ghost, and thus it is the breast and its viscera of a dead and
not a living man which the murderous physician examines. He has thus but
performed a cruel murder, and has not learned what the viscera of a
living man are like.”
Celsus’ own judgment is given a little later: “To dissect a living body
is both cruel and unnecessary; to dissect dead bodies is necessary.”
It is to be noted, says Professor Murray, that Herophilus and
Erasistratus were not living in a Greek city state, but under an
_oriental despot_.
[205] Mahaffy.
[206] It has been suggested that new books were perhaps dictated to a
roomful of copyists, and so issued in a first edition of some hundreds
at least. In Rome, Horace and Virgil seem to have been issued in quite
considerable editions.
[207] See Ferguson’s _Hellenistic Athens_.
[208] Serapis sounds like a compound of Apis and Osiris, but there is
reason for supposing that the name is really of Chaldean origin. See
Cumont, _Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism_.
[209] Legge, _Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity_.
[210] See for much light on the syncretic religions before Christianity
Franz Cumont, _Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism_. This is a very
able and thoroughly interesting book.
[211] Rhys Davids’ _Buddhism_ and other writings by him have been our
chief guide here.
[212] Pronounced Ashoka.
[213] The _Burmese Chronicle_, quoted by Rhys Davids.
[214] The _Madhurattha Vilasini_, quoted by Rhys Davids.
[215] Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_.
[216] See R.F. Johnston, _Buddhist China_.--L.C.B.
[217] Hue’s _Travels in Tartary, Tibet, and China_.
[218] Rhys Davids. He was the son of a king by a low-caste mother.
[219] See Giles, _Confucianism and its Rivals_.
[220] S. N. Fu.
[221] Hirth’s _The Ancient History of China_.
[222] The reader will find a footnote to Chap. XXXI, § 8, signed L. C.
B., which gives the main differences between the teachings of Confucius
and Lao Tse.
[223] See Hue’s _Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China_.
[224] A very convenient handbook for this and the next two chapters is
Matheson’s _Skeleton Outline of Roman History_.
[225] For Italian pre-history see Modestov’s _Introduction à l’histoire
Romaine_, and Peet’s _Stone and Bronze Age in Italy and Sicily_.
[226] See Lloyd’s _Making of the Roman People_.
[227] Latin _Pœni_ = Carthaginians. _Punicus (adj.)_ = Carthaginian,
_i.e._ Phœnician.
[228] See Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_; Mommsen, _History of
Rome_; and the histories of the Roman Empire by Bury, H. Stuart Jones,
and W. E. Heitland.
[229] Ferrero, _The Greatness and Decline of Rome_.
[230] J. Wells, _Short History of Rome to the Death of Augustus_.
[231] J. Wells.
[232] But note that Athens had (1) no taxes on foreigners, and inflicted
no disabilities on them except absence of citizenship. No “expulsions of
aliens” such as were regular at Sparta, and common in most places. This
is a frequent Athenian boast. Cp. Thucydides, ii. 39, “Our city is
thrown open to the world. We never expel a foreigner or prevent him from
seeing and learning anything of which the secret, if revealed, might be
useful to an enemy.” (2) Practically Free Trade; only a general 5 per
cent. import duty. (3) Great interest in foreign places, constitutions,
customs, etc. Athens was very oppressive--by modern standards--to its
subject-allies; chiefly because there was no representation, and because
she was so much at war. But even here, after her defeat in 404, they
voluntarily gathered to her again. The second Athenian Empire was not in
any way forced upon them.--G. M.
[233] Haverfield says--and I think he is right--that Rome had a great
advantage in her imperial development--viz., that she was a city and not
a nation. A nation implies some unity of race, and race prejudice. A
city is based on the mere fact of citizenship. We should have said to
St. Paul: “Citizen or no citizen, you are only a Levantine Jew.” But a
Roman, apparently, did not think of saying so. Hence the great freedom
with which emperors and senators are taken from other races.--G. M.
[234] The point raised here that Rome never developed representation is
a very interesting one. There was a golden chance in the Social War (90
B.C.). The allies of Rome (socii) revolted, and set up a counter Rome in
Corfinium. Now, to our minds, the obvious thing for them to do was (1)
to make Corfinium just a capital; (2) to set up a parliament there,
consisting of representatives drawn from the allies, who lived, of
course, all over Italy. Not a bit of it. They made Corfinium a city
state (not a capital), and feigned themselves all to be citizens of it,
meeting in a primary assembly there. They also set up, it is true, a
senate of 500; but this was just a copy of the Roman senate, and not a
representative body (see Mommsen, vol. iii. pp. 237-8, Eng. trans.).
Under the Roman Empire there were germs of representation in provincial
assemblies: see Bury, _Student’s Roman Empire_, on the _concilium
Lugdunense_ in Gaul and τἁ κοιγἁ in Asia Minor.--E. B.
[235] Seyffert’s _Dictionary of Classical Antiquities_. (Nettleship
Sandys.)
[236] Aristotle, _Politics_, Bk. ii. ch. xi.; and J. Wells, _Rome to the
Death of Augustus_.
[237] J. Wells, _op. cit._
[238] Plutarch, _Life of Cato_.
[239] Mommsen says the other provinces cost as much as they paid.
[240] But it was this Scipio Nasica who was responsible for the killing
of Tiberius Gracchus. On the whole, he seems to have been a statesman of
very distinguished abilities. He was the means of bringing the Asiatic
Great Mother Goddess to Rome. “People at Rome generally were beginning
to see that they would have to take over Asia. Had they any right?
Nasica was sent on a mission to invite the Magna Mater at Pessinus to
come to Rome. Her image nodded ‘yes.’ She was brought and installed in
Rome. Now this is a policy of peaceful assimilation. Just as in Babylon
you get gods of other cities brought to Babylon, just as Nabonidus (see
Chap. xix. § 6) was trying to get an amicable pantheon as a way of
peaceful assimilation, and failing to do so because he did not bring the
priesthoods as well as the gods, so Rome was at this time thinking on
the same lines. Camillus had shown the way when he suggested the
invitation of Juno of Veii to Rome. Now Nasica, it may be suggested,
wanted to treat Carthage in the same fashion. He opposed the destruction
of Carthage in 146 (Mommsen, iii. p. 23, p. 39). If he had had his way,
one may guess, he would have invited the Carthaginian gods to Rome, and
the corollary would have been the enfranchisement of the Carthaginian
population--the treatment of the Carthaginians as equals, whose gods had
been received in Rome, and stood in Rome. Mummius did the same in
carrying off the statues of Greek gods to Rome, only, being stupid, he
did not understand why (146 B.C.).”
Nasica’s visit to Pessinus was as important as the testament of Attalus.
His policy is not the policy of Rome the conqueror, but Rome the
assimilator. He is trying to get a nexus by a common pantheon. If this
had been done, the Republic might have survived. As it was, the
deification of the ruler had to provide the nexus, as in Alexander’s
empire. The “Synœcism of gods” or the “deification of rulers,” those are
the only ways of amalgamating peoples. It is a pity Alexander and Rome
did not attempt the former.--J. L. M. and E. B.
[241] The intervening Scipio was a man of learning and high character
who died young.--G. M.
[242] Julius Cæsar (60 B.C.) caused the proceedings of the Senate to be
published by having them written up upon bulletin boards, _in albo_
(upon the white). It had been the custom to publish the annual edict of
the prætor in this fashion. There were professional letter-writers who
sent news by special courier to rich country correspondents, and these
would copy down the stuff upon the Album (white board). Cicero, while he
was governor in Cilicia, got the current news from such a professional
correspondent. He complains in one letter that it was not what he
wanted; the expert was too full of the chariot races and other sporting
intelligence, and failed to give any view of the political situation.
Obviously this news-letter system was available only for public men in
prosperous circumstances.
[243] Seyffert, _op. cit._
[244] Authorities differ here. Mayor says thumbs up (to the breast)
meant death and thumbs down meant “Lower that sword.” The popular
persuasion is that thumbs down meant death. Seyffert’s _Dict. Class.
Antiq._ gives this view. See the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article
“Gladiators.”
[245] “A little more needs to be said on this matter. The Greeks cited
gladiatorial shows as a reason for regarding the Romans as _Barbaroi_,
and there were riots when some Roman proconsul tried to introduce them
in Corinth. Among Romans, the better people evidently disliked them, but
a sort of shyness prevented them from frankly denouncing them as cruel.
For instance, Cicero, when he had to attend the Circus, took his tablets
and his secretary with him, and didn’t look. He expresses particular
disgust at the killing of an elephant; and somebody in Tacitus (Drusus,
Ann. 1. 76) was unpopular because he was too fond of gladiatorial
bloodshed--“_quamquam vili sanguine nimis gaudens_” (“rejoicing too much
in blood, worthless blood though it was”). The games were unhesitatingly
condemned by Greek philosophy, and at different times two Cynics and one
Christian gave their lives in the arena, protesting against them, before
they were abolished.
“I do not think Christianity had any such relation to slavery as is here
stated. St. Paul’s action in sending back a slave to his master, and his
injunction, ‘Slaves, obey your masters,’ were regularly quoted on the
pro-slavery side, down to the nineteenth century; on the other hand,
both the popular philosophies and the Mystery religions were against
slavery in their whole tendency, and Christianity of course in time
became the chief representative of these movements. Probably the best
test is the number of slaves who occupied posts of honour in the
religious and philosophic systems, like Epictetus, for instance, or the
many slaves who hold offices in the Mithraic Inscriptions. I do not
happen to know if any slaves were made Christian bishops, but by analogy
I should think it likely that some were. In all the Mystery religions,
as soon as you entered the community, and had communion with God,
earthly distinctions shrivelled away.”--G. M.
The Spirit of Jesus is something different from formal Christianity,
which I regard as the vehicle, the largely unsympathetic vehicle, by
which that spirit was carried about the world.--H. G. W.
[246] _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, bk. i. ch. xi.
[247] There is no evidence of forgery and no contemporary suggestion of
the sort. The bequest of Attalus, even if it was a forgery (Mommsen
accepts it, iii. p. 55), is of importance, as showing that a great many
people did think that Rome was the best administrator. Otherwise, the
story (if it is only a story) could not have caught on. _A priori_ there
seems good reason for the testament. The Attalid dynasty was “petering
out”; there were troublesome Gauls about (Mommsen, iii. p. 53).--J. L.
M. and E. B.
[248] Ferrero.
[249] Ferrero.
[250] Plutarch. To which, however, G. M. adds the following note. “It is
generally believed that Sulla died through bursting a blood-vessel in a
fit of temper. The story of abominable vices seems to be only the
regular slander of the Roman mob against anyone who did not live in
public.”
[251] Plutarch.
[252] The bow was probably the composite bow, so called because it is
made of several plates (five or so) of horn, like the springs of a
carriage: it discharges a high-speed arrow with a twang. This was the
bow the Mongols used. This short composite bow (it was not a long bow)
was quite old in human experience. It was the bow of Odysseus; the
Assyrians had it in a modified form. It went out in Greece, but it
survived as the Mongol bow. It was quite short, very stiff to pull, with
a flat trajectory, a remarkable range, and a great noise (cp. Homer’s
reference to the twang of the bow). It went out in the Mediterranean
because the climate was not good for it, and because there were
insufficient animals to supply the horn.--J. L. M.
[253] For a good compact account of Cæsar, much more appreciative of him
than our text, see Warde Fowler’s _Julius Cæsar_.
[254] See Strachan Davidson’s _Cicero_, or, better, his own letters to
Atticus.
[255] H. S. Jones, in _The Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Rome.” His
contribution is admirably verified and exact, and we are greatly
indebted to it.
[256] The best book in a compact compass for expanding this chapter is
H. Stuart Jones’s _The Roman Empire_.
[257] Gibbon.
[258] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Rome.”
[259] See _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Longinus.” The Syrian
queen referred to by Gibbon is Zenobia. Longinus was put to death by
Aurelian. See ch. xxxii., § 2.
[260] The natural result of a plutocratic rule above was a vigorous
trade-unionism intent only on short hours and high wages below, and as
indifferent as the rich to the common weal. See Hubbard’s _Fate of
Empires_, a very stimulating book, differing widely in its spirit and
conclusions from those of the writer.
[261] See Legge, _Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity_.
[262] No really good, full, and popular descriptive history, with maps
and illustrations, of early and medieval China, nor of the Mongol (Hun)
and Turkish peoples, seems to exist in the English language. The writer
has consulted Skrine and Ross’s _Heart of Asia_, Hirth’s _Ancient
History of China_, S. Wells Williams’ _History of China_, _A Thousand
Years of the Tartars_, by E. H. Parker, H. H. Howorth’s History of the
Mongols, and has found much useful material scattered through Ratzel and
Helmolt. He has later on made a useful section from Watters’ translation
and commentary upon the _Travels of Yuan Chwang_, supplemented by the
_Life of Yuan Chwang_, edited by L. Cranmer Byng. Yule’s edition of
Marco Polo has also been a very inspiring source of material.
[263] E. H. Parker, _A Thousand Years of the Tartars_.
[264] Even in eastern Turkestan there are still strong evidences of
Nordic blood in the physiognomy of the people. See Ella and Percy Sykes,
_Through Deserts and Oases of Central Asia_.
[265] See Roger Pocock, _Horses_, a very interesting and picturesque
little book.
[266] _The History of Mankind_, book v., C.
[267] _The History of Mankind_, book v., C.
[268] See _Migrations_, by Flinders Petrie, the 1906 Huxley Lecture of
the Royal Anthrop. Institute.
[269] E. B.
[270] In Helmolt’s _History of the World_.
[271] E. B. disagrees with this view. He regards it as the pro-Teutonic
view of the German historians.
[272] Gibbon.
[273] Gibbon.
[274] The spread and the vitality of the place-name “Rome” were even
greater than the vogue of the title “Cæsar.” All the countries which had
formed part of the Eastern and Western divisions of the Roman Empire
(excepting the ephemeral extension of Roman rule over Mesopotamia) were
known to the Saracens, the Arabs, the Berbers as “Rum,” and their
peoples as “Rumis,” “Rumas.” And this name was applied without, in all
cases, carrying with it the signification of “Christian” or
“Christendom.” Thus the Spanish Moors were, and their descendants are,
styled by the Moroccan Moors and the Algerians and Tunisians: “Rumas.”
When expelled from Spain most of them took service under the Sharifian
Emperors of Morocco, and brought with them a European knowledge of
fire-arms. Thus you are told in Algeria that “Romans” (_i.e._ Spanish
Moors) conquered the Upper Niger basin for Morocco in the seventeenth
century; their descendants remain there till to-day between Jenné and
Timbuktu, still known to the French as “Roumas.” Some Spanish Moors even
penetrated to the coast of eastern equatorial Africa and carried the
name of “Rome” into the fierce expulsion of the Portuguese from those
parts which was begun by the Omani Arabs.--H. H. J.
[275] Josephus.
[276] See _Encyclopædia Biblica_; article “Jesus.”
[277] Matt. xii. 46-50.
[278] Mark x. 17-25.
[279] Mark. vii. 1-9.
[280] Mark xii. 13-17.
[281] Mark x. 35-45.
[282] For the connexion of Jesus with the Messiah idea, see E. F.
Scott’s _Kingdom of the Messiah_.
[283] Hirth, _The Ancient History of China_. Chap. viii.
[284] “St. Paul understood what most Christians never realize, namely,
that the Gospel of Christ is not a religion, but religion itself in its
most universal and deepest significance.”--Dean Inge in _Outspoken
Essays_.
[285] Authorities vary considerably upon this date, and upon most of the
dates of the life of Jesus. See _Encyclopædia Biblica_, art.
“Chronology.”
[286] See _Judaism and St. Paul_, by C. G. Montefiore, for some
interesting speculations on the religion of Paul before his conversion.
See also the very interesting paper on St. Paul in Dean Inge’s
_Outspoken Essays_ already quoted in a footnote. An excellent book
widely divergent from the opinions expressed in the text is W. Morgan’s
_Religion and Theology of St. Paul_.
[287] Paul’s Greek is very good. He is affected by the philosophical
jargon of the Hellenistic schools and by that of Stoicism. But his
mastery of sublime language is amazing.--G. M.
[288] The spirit of Jesus, the animating spirit of Christianity, which
breathes through the gospels, was flatly opposed both to private
property and slavery, but the attitude of the Christians was never so
definite. Generally they ameliorated rather than abolished.--H. G. W.
Patristic theory justified slavery as a result of the Fall. See Carlyle,
_Medieval Political Theory in the West_.--E. B.
[289] Serapis was a synthesis of Osiris and Apis.
[290] See Legge, _Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity_, chap. xii.
See also Cumont’s _Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism_ for a very
clear account of the gradual development of Roman Paganism into a
religion very similar to Christianity _pari passu_ with the development
of Christianity.
[291] Cp. Father Hugh Benson’s account of the procession of the Host in
his book _Lourdes_.
[292] In any prayer book of the Episcopalian Church. The Athanasian
Creed embodies the view of Athanasius, but probably was not composed by
him.
[293] Gibbon, _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, chap. xvi.
[294] Here, from another point of view, are some remarks upon the
acceptance of Christianity by the empire. Let us remember that the
Church, an object so familiar to us, was to the decent Roman a very
strange thing. It was a vast society for mutual help, quite outside the
state and the recognized corporations; it was secret (hence the frequent
inquisitions and the praise given by Church historians to those who
“confessed Christ”); it drew its main strength from a class “not well
thought of by the police, the proletariat of the big manufacturing towns
of Syria and the Levant, like Antioch.” Alternately proscribed and
connived at, much subjected to pogroms, it gradually increased in
strength. Diocletian summoned his two associated Cæsars to a conference
on the subject, and they decided to crush the society by a drastic
persecution. They persecuted and failed, and Diocletian resigned.
Constantine the Great, the next claimant to the empire, made terms with
the society and succeeded. He established it as official, and overcame
its hatred of Rome by showering wealth and power on it. Eventually, when
in fear of death, he got baptized. All modern analogies are fallacious,
but if you imagine a blend of pacifist international socialists with
some mystical Indian sect, drawing its supporters mainly from an
oppressed and ill-liked foreign proletariat, such as the “hunkey”
population of some big American towns, full of the noblest moral
professions but at the same time alien, or even hostile, to the whole
established order of society, I think you will get the sort of
impression that the Christian society made on a Roman. The conception of
the blameless and saintly Early Christian is, I think, hugely romance.
Of course, like most religious reformers, they were in the main seekers
after righteousness and above the average of their contemporaries. Also
the Christian writers are apt to have more life and vision than their
conventional or reactionary Pagan contemporaries. But consider the
appalling accusations made by all the Christian sects against each
other, and the furious denunciation of the turbulent Christian monastics
by Augustine. Also consider what a spirit lies behind the Book of
Revelation! Read especially Chapters 17-19, a series of elaborate and
horrific curses upon Rome (including repeated threats of its destruction
by fire, which the Christians were believed to have attempted), or the
end of Chapter 14 where the ministers of the Son of Man tread the
winepress of the world till the blood comes “even to the bridles of the
horses.” If we found such a book now circulating in India, with England
taking the place of Rome, I fear there would be some shooting and
hanging. The fact that the Christians actually prayed for the
destruction of the whole world by fire seemed to the average
non-Christian evidence of almost maniacal wickedness.
I do not of course write to blame the Revelationist; such visions of
hatred are the natural outcome of persecution and great suffering. I am
merely trying to make intelligible the dislike and even dread of the
Christians which seems to have been commonly felt. (See also Seek,
_Untergang der Antiken Welt_, vol. 3, esp. the notes.)--G.M.
[295] q.v., _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, chap. xiv.
[296] On the rise of dogma or tradition in the Church, especially at
Rome, see Davis, _Mediæval Europe_ (Home University Library).--E. B.
[297] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, art. “Church History,” p. 336.
[298] E. B. (quoted from Tröltsch).
[299] See Haverfield. _The Romanization of Roman Britain_.--E. B.
[300] No literature! I demur entirely. Apuleius, Ammianus, St.
Augustine, the Vulgate, Claudian, Sidonius Apollinaris, Ausonius--I
mention but a few names--are not these literature?--E. B.
I forgot the _Golden Ass_ and St. Augustine as coming into the Imperial
period, but do these two names save the situation? E. B. ekes out with
one second-rate historian, a translation, three court poets. Yet we are
dealing here with the literature of a “world” empire.--H. G. W.
[301] A very interesting and suggestive book bearing on this question of
disease in relation to political history is _Malaria: a Neglected Factor
in the History of Greece and Rome_, by W. H. S. Jones.
[302] Baring Gould’s _Lives of the Saints_.
[303] On Benedictinism, see Dom. Berlière’s _L’Ordre Monastique_.--E. B.
[304] See Holmes’ _Justinian and Theodora_.--E. B.
[305] Great importance is attached to this task by historians, including
one of the editors of this history. We are told that the essential
contribution of Rome to the inheritance of mankind is the idea of
society founded on law, and that this exploit of Justinian was the crown
of the gift. The writer is ill-equipped to estimate the peculiar value
of Roman legalism to mankind. Existing law seems to him to be based upon
a confused foundation of conventions, arbitrary assumptions, and working
fictions about human relationship, and to be a very impracticable and
antiquated system indeed; he is persuaded that a time will come when the
whole theory and practice of law will be recast in the light of a
well-developed science of social psychology in accordance with a
scientific conception of human society as one developing organization
and in definite relationship to a system of moral and intellectual
education. He contemplates the law and lawyers of to-day with a
temperamental lack of appreciation. This may have made him negligent of
Justinian and unjust to Rome as a whole.
[306] _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, chap. xxiii.
[307] Turanians from Turkestan or Avars from the Caucasus.
[308] There is a good account of Mithraism in C. Bigg’s _The Church’s
Task in the Roman Empire_.--E. B.
[309] Julian was not so much a Mithraist as a syncretist. See Alice
Gardner, _Julian the Apostate_.--E. B.
[310] The Ephthalites on the Oxus produced a coinage in silver and
copper consisting of three denominations: heavy silver, light silver,
and copper. Thirteen specimens are known to survive, the light silver
denomination being represented by two specimens in the British Museum
and one at Petrograd, until I was fortunate enough to add two to their
number by a _trouvaille_ in Oxford Street.--P. G.
Our illustration shows one of these two coins. It may have been struck
in India in some state under Ephthalite dominion. Its interest for us
lies in the figure it gives of a Hun horseman. He seems to wear a
feather head-dress, reminding one of a Red Indian or a Moscow hotel
porter, and his leg gear suggests an American cow-boy. Note his great
quiver of arrows.--H. G. W.
[311] I am greatly indebted to Mr. S. N. Fu and to Mr. Duyvendak for
much information and criticism upon the matter of this and the next
section. They have both been rewritten since the appearance of the
_Outline_ in parts.
[312] There were girl slaves who did domestic work and women who were
bought and sold.--J.J.L.D.
[313] It is doubtful if the Chinese knew of the mariner’s compass.
Hirth, _Ancient History of China_, p. 126 sqq. comes to the conclusion,
after a careful examination of all data, that, although it is probable
something like the compass was known in high antiquity, the knowledge of
it was lost for a long time afterwards, until, in the Middle Ages, it
reappears as an instrument in the hands of geomancers (people who
selected favourable sites for graves, etc). The earliest unmistakable
mention of its use as a guide to mariners occurs in a work of the 12th
century and refers to its use on foreign ships trading between China and
Sumatra. Hirth is rather inclined to assume that Arab travellers may
have seen it in the hands of Chinese geomancers and applied its use to
navigation, so that it was afterwards brought back by them to China as
the “mariner’s compass.”--J. J. L. D.
[314] Helmolt.
[315] The reason for the stationariness of China goes, we think, deeper
than a script. China has formed a social-economic system which (1)
cannot be transplanted, and (2) cannot be changed without tremendous
effort. She lives by agriculture--rice-growing. (There is some tea among
the foot hills, but it has to grow _with_ rice to support the
population.) Towns exist--on the edge of the rice-fields, for their
needs. The town is dependent on the country, not, as elsewhere, country
on town. There are small properties; all the hands are wanted, and can
be absorbed, in old ancestral agricultural jobs. A state of small
peasants, tilling, tilling, tilling, has no source of initiative towards
change. If coal is to be mined in the future, and China industrialized,
then a society that has not fundamentally changed for thousands of years
may be changed. China is like an Egypt or Sumeria, so big that the
nomads--those terrible agents of change--beat on its mass in vain. What
the nomads have not done, modern industrialism may do.--J. L. M. and E.
B.
Both Mr. Chen and Mr. Fu lay considerable stress upon the institution of
the patriarchal Chinese family clan, which retains its sons at home,
marrying them at an early age before they achieve economic independence,
as a retarding influence upon Chinese progress. Mr. Chen and Mr.
Duyvendak are also inclined to lay stress upon the paralyzing effect of
the classical examinations upon the Chinese mind. These examinations
have subdued or rejected all innovating intelligences. Mr. Duyvendak
also points out that J. L. M. and E. B. have overlooked the fact that
rice is grown only in South China.
L. C. B. disagrees with J. L. M. and E. B. in his analysis of the
Chinese problem. His sympathies are with the south; with the philosophy
of Lao Tse. He writes as follows:--
“In order to answer the question--why China achieved so much under the
T’ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties, and thereafter failed to achieve more,
it is necessary to consider what were the principal factors of culture
and progress under these dynasties, and how they came to be
extinguished.
“From the earliest times there have always been two widely differing
types of Chinese mind--the Northern or Confucian, and the Southern or
Taoist. As Mr. Okakura has pointed out, the Yangtse-Kiang and the
Hwang-Ho rivers are respectively, from the point of view of thought and
culture, the Mediterranean and the Baltic of China. Taoism was the
idealism of the south, Confucianism the practice of the north. Both
stood for adjustment; but the adjustment of Confucius was the adjustment
of the individual in his social and ceremonial relations to others,
while that of Lao Tse was the adjustment of the individual soul in its
relation to the Infinite. The history of China is bound up with the
struggle of those two forces, culminating in the practically complete
defeat of Taoism after centuries of ebb and flow. Chu Hsi, A.D.
1130-1200, was the later St. Paul of modern Confucianism. During the
T’ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties China was temporarily united, and free
play was allowed to the thought of both schools. Each played its part
and each reacted upon the other, to the great benefit of the Empire. Yet
both systems carried within them the seeds of decay. Taoism, divorced
from the affairs of everyday life and the education of the people, lost
itself in art, literature, and mythology. Confucianism added layer after
layer of hard shell about the inert organism of social life. The end was
finally reached in 1421 under the Mings with the transference of the
capital from Nanking to Peking, and the dominance of the Confucian party
who had brought it about. Only in the later Ming period does the great
solitary figure of Wang Yang Ming arise. His central doctrine that
thought and learning are of small value unless translated into action
had little immediate effect in China, but it fell upon Japanese soil,
quickened the drooping Samurai spirit, and reached maturity with the
Russo-Japanese war and the advance of modern Japan.
“The imprisonment of the Chinese mind in the ancient script is merely
one aspect of Confucianism in its bondage to the past. The statement of
J. L. M. and E. B. that China is a nation of peasants is
incomprehensible to me. There has always been a great urban
industrialism and a great commerce. ‘The Chinese,’ as Dyer Ball says,
‘are pre-eminently a trading race.... Nor has the trade of China been
simply a modern affair. From remote antiquity the Chinese have been true
to their commercial instincts, and have not only been the civilizers of
Eastern Asia, supplying them with their letters and literature’ [and
artistic products], ‘but they have also provided for their more material
wants, and received in exchange the commodities which they required from
the neighbouring nations.’ Trade with India was developed to a great
extent in the ninth century A.D.”
This interesting question is also discussed very ably and interestingly
in Hubbard’s _The Fate of Empires_.
In discussing §§ 7 and 8, Mr. S. N. Fu has pointed out that little or
nothing is said in this Outline of the period of confusion before
Shi-Hwang-ti. It was an age of political division indeed, but of very
great intellectual initiatives. Unhappily there exists as yet little or
no material in Europe available for the purposes of this history, upon
this equivalent to the Athenian period of mental vigour in Europe.
[316] See Watters’ _Travels of Yuan Chwang_ and Beal’s _Life of Hiuen
Tsiang_ (= Yuan Chwang).
[317] There is some little doubt about this identification. See Watters.
[318] The _British Encyclopædia_ article (Hsuan Tsang) is full and good
on his Indian travels.
[319] See Margoliouth’s _Mahommedanism_ and his _Life of Mahomet_.--E.
B.
[320] Should be spelt Mădina and Măkka.--H. H. J.
[321] Mark Sykes.
[322] Should be spelt and pronounced Hijra.--H. H. J.
[323] From the year of this flight (= Hegira) from Mecca through the
desert to Medina, the Moslem world dates its era. The Moslem year is a
year of twelve lunar months (354 days), and is therefore shorter than
the year of Western chronology by eleven days. A.H. (the Moslem
reckoning) gains a year on A.D. once in every 33 years (about). A.D.
1920 is A.H. 1338 until September 15, when A.H. 1339 begins. A.D. 20,526
and A.H. 20,526 will be partly coincident.
[324] Published by the _Islamic Review_.
[325] But Schurtz, in Helmolt’s _History of the World_, says that the
private life of the gallant Khalid was a scandal to the faithful. He
committed adultery, a serious offence in a world of polygamy.
[326] At Ctesiphon.
[327] Paraphrased from Schurtz in Helmolt’s _History of the World_.
[328] Mark Sykes.
[329] St. John’s Gospel, chap. i. 1.
[330] Thus Sykes. But Skrine and Ross say only that seventy members of
the Omayyad family were invited to a feast under promise of amnesty, and
then massacred by the attendants. Gibbon gives eighty victims, and tells
his story thus: “Four score of the Omayyads, who had yielded to the
faith or clemency of their foes, were invited to a banquet at Damascus.
The laws of hospitality were violated by a promiscuous massacre; the
board was spread over their fallen bodies; and the festivity of their
guests were enlivened by the music of their dying groans.” History is
not yet an exact science.
[331] Harun-ar-Rashid = Aaron the Just.--H. H. J.
[332] _The Caliph’s Last Heritage._
[333] _A General History of Europe._
[334] Alcohol as “spirits of wine” was known to Pliny (100 A.D.) The
studentof the history of science should consult Campbell Brown’s
_History of Chemistry_ and check these statements in the text.
[335] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Feudalism,” by Professor G. B.
Adams.
[336] The Franks differed from the Swabians and South Germans, and came
much nearer the Anglo-Saxons in that they spoke a “Low German” and not a
“High German” dialect. Their language resembled plattdeutsch and
Anglo-Saxon, and was the direct parent of Dutch and Flemish. In fact,
the Franks where they were not Latinized became Flemings and “Dutchmen”
of South Holland (North Holland is still Friesisch--_i.e._ Anglo-Saxon).
The “French” which the Latinized Franks and Burgundians spoke in the
seventh to the tenth centuries was remarkably like the Rumansch language
of Switzerland, judging from the vestiges that remain in old
documents.--H. H. J.
[337] _A General History of Europe_, Thatcher and Schwill.
[338] N. B.--Vik-ings, not Vi-kings. Vik = a fiord or inlet.
[339] _Vide_ Stubbs’ _History of Germany in the Middle Ages_, and
Bryce’s _Holy Roman Empire_.
[340] The Lateran was the earlier palace of the Popes in Rome. Later
they occupied the Vatican.
[341] Eginhard’s _Life of Karl the Great_. (Glaister.)
[342] The addition was discreetly opposed by Leo III. “In the
correspondence between them the Pope assumes the liberality of a
statesman and the prince descends to the prejudice and passions of a
priest.”--Gibbon, chap. lx.
[343] The Byzantine style in Gaul is, I fancy, much earlier than
Charlemagne, and goes back to the 4th century or earlier. See Rivoira’s
_History of Lombard Architecture_, or T. G. Jackson’s _History of Gothic
Architecture_.--E. B.
[344] See L. Brechier, _L’Eglise et l’Orient au Moyen Age_.
[345] Gibbon mentions a second Theodora, the sister of Marozia.
[346] This period is a tangled one. The authority is Gregorovius,
_History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages_ (an excellent general
book from A.D. 400 to 1527), vol. iii of the Eng. trans., p. 249 seq.
John X owed the tiara to his mistress, the elder Theodora, but he was
“the foremost statesman of his age” (Gregorovius, p. 259). He fell in
928 owing to Marozia. John XI became Pope in 931 (after two Popes had
intervened in the period 928-931); he was Marozia’s son, possibly by
Pope Sergius III. John XII did not come at once after John XI, who died
in 936; there were several Popes in between; and he became Pope in
955.--E. B.
[347] There were three dynasties of emperors in the early Middle Ages:
Saxon: Otto I (962) to Henry II, ending 1024.
Salian: Conrad II to Henry V, ending about 1125.
Hohenstaufen: Conrad III to Frederic II, ending in 1250.
The Hohenstaufens were Swabian in origin. Then came the Habsburgs with
Rudolph I in 1273, who lasted until 1918.
[348] These dates are from Gibbon. Beazley gives 865, 904-7, 935, 944,
971-2. (_History of Russia_, Clarendon Press.)
[349] “A Turkish people whose leaders had adopted Judaism,” says Harold
Williams.
[350] For the development of the papacy, see H. W. C. Davis, _Mediæval
Europe_.
[351] E. Barker, art. “Crusades,” _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[352] Technically only twice, the excommunication of 1245 was a renewal
by Innocent IV of that of 1239.--E. B.
[353] “The custody of the _True Cross_, which on Easter Sunday was
solemnly exposed to the people, was entrusted to the Bishop of
Jerusalem; and he alone might gratify the curious devotion of the
pilgrims, by the gift of small pieces, which they encased in gold or
gems, and carried away in triumph to their respective countries. But, as
this gainful branch of commerce must soon have been annihilated, it was
found convenient to suppose that the marvellous wood possessed a secret
power of vegetation, and that its substance, though continually
diminished, still remained entire and unimpaired.”--Gibbon.
[354] The Popes inhabited the palace of the Lateran until 1305, when a
French Pope set up the papal court at Avignon. When the Pope returned to
Rome in 1377 the Lateran was almost in ruins, and the palace of the
Vatican became the seat of the papal court. It was, among other
advantages, much nearer to the papal stronghold, the Castle of San
Angelo.
[355] He was crowned emperor in 1220 by Honorius III, the successor of
Innocent.
[356] Some authorities deny his authorship of this letter. See A. L.
Smith’s _Church and State in the Middle Ages_.
[357] Perhaps parchment, rather than leather. Such promises on parchment
were also used by the Carthaginians. Was Frederick’s money an
inheritance from an old tradition living on in Sicily since Carthaginian
times?--E. B.
[358] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, art. “Frederick II.”
[359] In relation to this section, see the chapter on the “Unity of the
Middle Ages” in F. S. Marvin’s _Unity of Western Civilization_.
[360] See Paul Sabatier’s _Vie de S. Francois d’Assise_ (English trans.
by Houghton).
[361] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, art. “Dominic.”
[362] J. H. Robinson.
[363] Sir Mark Sykes, _The Caliphs’ Last Heritage_.
[364] Sir Mark Sykes, _The Caliphs’ Last Heritage_.
[365] But see Pastor, _History of the Popes_, Vol. I.
[366] See Beazley, Forbes and Birkett’s _Russia_ for a fuller account of
the Cossacks and also see later chap. xxxvi, § 10.
[367] See Malleson’s _Akbar_, in the _Rulers of India_ series.
[368] “Mogul” is our crude rendering of the Arabic spelling Mughal,
which itself was a corruption of Mongol, the Arabic alphabet having no
symbol for _ng_.--H. H. J.
[369] Dr. Schmit in Helmolt’s _History of the World_.
[370] I do not think this is fair. See _Edinburgh Review_ for January,
1920, article on Calcutta University Commission.--E. B.
But popular education!--H. G. W.
[371] Renascence here means rebirth, and it is applied to the recovery
of the entire Western world. It is not to be confused with “the
Renaissance,” an educational, literary, and artistic revival that went
on in Italy and the Western world affected by Italy during the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Renaissance was only a part of
the Renascence of Europe. The Renaissance was a revival due to the
exhumation of classical art and learning; it was but one factor in the
very much larger and more complicated resurrection of European capacity
and vigour, with which we are dealing in this chapter.
[372] The early Frankish and other German kings were not elective. They
were hereditary; but as there was no primogeniture, there was either
partition among the sons, or a struggle to decide which son or relative
should succeed. In such a struggle the nobles might take part, and this
might mean some form of election. But heredity is the thing: _reges ex
nobilitate sumunt_, says Tacitus: the king must have the nobility of
being Woden-born, or he cannot be king. The genealogies of our early
Saxon kings all go back to Woden, and George V is Woden-born.--E. B.
[373] But the Jews were already holding their community together by
systematic education at least as early as the beginning of the Christian
era.
[374] The Greeks had this idea.--E. B.
[375] I do not think this is just. The Anglo-Saxons were not
anti-monastic. They were converted by Benedictine monks in 600; just
after 700 they sent out monks to convert Germany; about 960, under
Dunstan and Edgar, they experienced a monastic revival. The Normans
after 1066 introduced the Cluniac and Cistercian orders, and spread
monasticism, while the earlier Northmen, after 900, were quite
favourable to the Church in England.
Note that Gregory’s imposition of celibacy on the clergy was accepted,
and willingly accepted, by the contemporary lay world. William the
Conqueror, through Archbishop Lanfranc, enforced celibacy in
England.--E. B.
[376] Wycliffe believed in a real presence--but he held that it was
spiritual and not substantial. The host was two things--bread, and at
the same time a spiritual Christ. This is not the “memorial” view.--E.
B.
[377] Lützow’s _Bohemia_.
[378] Dr. C. O. Stallybrass says that this plague reached China thirty
or forty years after its first appearance in Europe. Ibn Batuta, the
Arab traveller, who was in China from 1342 to 1346, first met with it on
his return to Damascus. The Black Death is the human form of a disease
endemic among the jerboas and other small rodents in the districts round
the head of the Caspian Sea.
[379] The seeds of conflict which grew up into the Peasants’ Revolt of
1381 were sown upon ground which is strangely familiar to any writer in
1920. A European catastrophe had reduced production and consequently
increased the earnings of workers and traders. Rural wages had risen by
48 per cent in England, when an unwise executive endeavored to enforce
in the Ordinance and Statute of Labourers (1350-51) a return to the
pre-plague wages and prices of 1346, and aimed a blow in the Statute of
1378 against labour combinations. The villeins were driven to
desperation by the loss of their recent increase of comfort, and the
outbreak came, as Froissart saw it from the angle of the Court, “all
through the too great comfort of the commonalty.” Other ingredients
which entered into the outbreak were the resentment felt by the new
working class at the restrictions imposed on its right to combine, the
objection of the lower clergy to papal taxes, and a frank dislike of
foreigners and landlords. There was no touch of Wycliffe’s influence in
the rising. It was at its feeblest in Leicestershire, and it murdered
one of the only other Liberal churchmen in England.--P. G.
[380] See article “Typography” in the _Encyclo. Brit._
[381] Standard Italian dates from Dante (1300); standard English from
Chaucer and Wycliffe (1380); standard German from Luther (1520).--E. B.
[382] But Nonconformity was stamped out in Germany. See § 11 B of this
chapter.
[383] “If I were writing a history of democracy,” comments E. B., “I
should deal first with democracy in religion, which is Calvinism,
founded by a great Frenchman at Geneva, and then with democracy in
politics, which is the French Revolution, inaugurated by another great
Frenchman at Geneva, Rousseau. (The parallel of these two is
striking--both typical exponents of the French genius, in its ardent
logic and its apostolic fervour which gives in a burning lava to the
world the findings of its logic.) It is noticeable in England how
democracy in religion (Presbyterianism, which is simply Calvinism, plus
Independency or Congregationalism) leads straight under the Stuarts to
the English democratic ideas of the seventeenth century. I do not think
the democratic element in Protestantism is sufficiently appreciated in
the text. Even Luther, in the early days of 1520, could write _The
Freedom of a Christian Man_ and champion the priesthood of each believer
and his direct access to his Maker. Luther, it is true, changed by 1525,
and became a monarchist, the apostle of a state religion, under a godly
prince who was _summus episcopus_. Anglicanism was from the first a
monarchist religion, under a Henry VIII who was _supremum caput_. But if
Lutheranism became, and Anglicanism was from the first, a religion of
the State, Calvinism was always the religion of resistance to the
State--in Holland and in Scotland most especially. The Reformation thus
produced two opposite effects in politics; so far as it was Lutheran and
Anglican it was monarchist; so far as it was Calvinistic, it was
democratic. It is at first sight curious, but it is really quite
natural, that the Catholics of the counter-reformation should also have
been democratic. The Catholics could not admit the control of the
monarch in the sphere of religion any more than the Calvinist; and here,
as in other things (_e.g_. in the claim to possession of infallible
truth), the Catholic priest and the Calvinistic presbyter were agreed.
Filmer, an exponent of Anglican monarchism, expresses this well when he
says, in speaking of the doctrine of a social contract, that ‘Cardinal
Bellarmine and Calvin both look asquint this way.’ For the doctrine of a
social contract was the democratic doctrine put forward by Catholics and
Calvinists in opposition to the Lutheran and Anglican doctrine of divine
right.”
[384] Aristotle’s _Organon_, or logic, had always been in part known to
the West and was known as a whole after about 1130. In the thirteenth
century the rest of his writings became known, in two ways. One way was
that of direct translation from the Greek into Latin: it was in this way
that St. Thomas Aquinas knew the _Ethics_ and the _Politics_ (the latter
translated about 1260 by William of Moerbeke, Archbishop of Corinth in
the Latin Empire of Constantinople started under Baldwin of Flanders in
1204, and a Fleming himself). The other way was that of indirect
translation, that is to say, of translations of Arabic paraphrases of,
or commentaries on, the works of Aristotle, such as had been made by
Averroes and by Avicenna before him. It was Aristotle’s _Physics_ and (I
think) _Metaphysics_ that first became known in this way. In this latter
way the West received a version of Aristotle which, like Bottom the
Weaver, was strangely “translated.” Sometimes translations were made
direct from Arabic into Latin; sometimes they were made first into
Hebrew, and then new translations were made from Hebrew into Latin. As
the Arabic version of Aristotle was not always itself direct, but
sometimes made from Syriac versions of the Greek, confusion became
confounded. The Latin translations of the Arabic Aristotle sometimes
contained not translation, but _transliteration_ of Arabic words or
sentences; and Roger Bacon very naturally objected to their
unintelligibility. What is more, Aristotle’s views, as well as his
words, were transmogrified in the process. But the important thing is
that for Aristotle’s _Organon_, _Ethics_, and _Politics_ there were
direct translations from the Greek. (See Sandys’ _History of Classical
Scholarship_ and Renan’s _Averroes et l’Averroisme_.)--E. B.
[385] I do not agree with this paragraph. In the first sentence things
are alleged about Realism which are not justified. It was the philosophy
of the priests and most humane thinkers of the Middle Ages, of St.
Anselm and of John Wycliffe. Nor is it true that Realism was the
philosophy of the church. It was, in the early Middle Ages; but after
Occam (1330) Nominalism triumphed, and was the philosophy of the church
till the Reformation. Luther denounced Nominalism.--E. B.
[386] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Scholasticism.”
[387] _The Medieval Mind_, by Henry Osborn Taylor.
[388] This gives a wrong impression about Nominalism, that it was banned
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The contrary is the case. The
attempt of 1339 came to nothing; that of 1473 was belated and
unsuccessful. Except Wycliffe, there is no considerable thinker of these
centuries, so far as I know, who is not Nominalist. The triumph of
Nominalism was no unmixed benefit. Its insistence on study of the
individual was indeed favourable to natural science; and Harnack says
that it led to good work in psychology. But its nescience about
Universals led to obscurantism in theology. Wycliffe as a Realist could
hold that God acted _secundum rationes exemplares_, by certain and known
universal rules; the Nominalists reduced God to inscrutable omnipotence.
They went on to add that He could therefore only be known at all by the
miraculous intervention of the mass through the priesthood. Their
scepticism about Universals thus overleapt itself, and fell on the other
side, into obscurantist ecclesiasticism.--E. B.
[389] _Cp._ chap. ii, § 1, towards the end.
[390] See Gregory’s _Discovery_, chap. vi.
[391] Not from 1340-1360, under Edward III, but later under Henry V,
1413-1422.--E. B.
Edward had Flemish and Bavarian allies.--H. G. W.
[392] From Dr. Tille in Helmolt’s _History of the World_.
[393] Charles Dickens in his _American Notes_ mentions swine in
Broadway, New York, in the middle nineteenth century.
[394] In these maritime adventures in the eastern Atlantic and the west
African coast the Portuguese were preceded in the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries by Normans, Catalonians, and
Genoese. See Raymond Beazley, _History of Exploration in the Middle
Ages_.--H. H. J.
[395] See Guillemard’s _Ferdinand Magellan_.
[396] For an interesting account of these American civilizations, see L.
Spence, _The Civilization of Ancient Mexico and Myths of Mexico and
Peru_.
[397] See Prescott’s _History of the Conquest of Mexico_ and his
_History of the Conquest of Peru_.
[398] See Cunninghame Graham’s _A Vanished Arcadia_.
[399] Machiavelli examines the causes of Cæsar’s collapse, but he holds
that it was due to _fortuna_, against which Cæsar’s _virtú_ could not
prevail.--E. B.
[400] E. B. writes as follows: “I think better of Machiavelli than you
do, and especially on two points. (1) He raises a real issue--whether,
when a crisis besets the State, the ruler is not bound to abandon the
rules of private morality, if by doing so he can preserve the State. If
he abandons those rules, he does _wrong_--and Machiavelli admits
that--but, at the same time, as the agent and organ of the State, he
does _right_ by preserving it, so far, at any rate, as it is right that
it should be preserved. This is a real issue, which one cannot simply
dismiss. _E.g._, all war is wrong, by the rules of private morality,
because it is killing; but it may have a qualified and conditioned
rightness if it is necessary to preserve the State, and if the State, as
a scheme of good life, ought to be preserved. (2) Machiavelli did
believe in the people. He only exalts the _new_ prince, who arises to
restore order and security in a troubled State. In normal times he
believes that the people is a good judge of men: that ‘better than many
fortresses is not to be hated by the people’; that the trite proverb,
‘He who founds himself on the people founds himself on mud,’ is untrue,
except as applied to demagogues.”
[401] But he had a better reason for doing this in the fact that there
was no heir to the throne. The Wars of the Roses, a bitter dynastic war,
were still very vivid in the minds of English people.--F. H. H.
[402] Prescott’s Appendix to Robertson’s _History of Charles V._
[403] Prescott.
[404] It was private _conscience_, rather than private property, that
quarrelled with and limited princes. The Puritan Revolution in England
(1640-1660) was a puritan revolution--it sprang from the religious
motive first and foremost. The economic motive was secondary. The
“economic interpretation of history” is always tempting, but men’s souls
have always mattered more than their pockets. Englishmen fought Charles
I for the sake of free consciences rather than for the sake of free
pockets. This is a large issue, on which much could be written; but I
feel sure that religion came first in our Civil War.--E. B.
I do not agree. Loath as I am to differ from E. B., I can find no
evidence of any religious issue as important as the issue of taxation
either in the English Civil War or the American War of Independence.--H.
G. W.
I did not mention the Americans. I will surrender them to H. G. W.--E.
B.
[405] Englishmen did try to control the foreign policy of James I,
because it involved questions of religion, and because their primary
concern was religious. They wanted foreign policy to be directed to the
militant defence of Protestantism. James I, a good internationalist (in
his way), and at any rate a lover of peace, wanted to secure European
peace by diplomacy--and failed to do so. His parliaments, and all
seventeenth-century parliaments, were vitally interested in foreign
policy.--E. B.
[406] A very good general history of Great Britain, too little known as
yet, is A. D. Innes’ _History of the British Nation_ (1912).
[407] This is not the same Simon de Montfort as the leader of the
crusades against the Albigenses, but his son.
[408] But Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hogarth, Gray, Gibbon, for instance!--G.
M. And the golden age of the great cabinet-makers!--P. G.
Exactly! Culture taking refuge in the portraits, libraries, and
households of a few rich people. No national culture in the court, nor
among the commonalty; a steady decay.--H. G. W.
[409] _Rise of the Dutch Republic._
[410] See his fragment of autobiography (_The Autobiography of Edward
Gibbon_, edited by John Murray).
[411] Frederick the Great of Prussia.
[412] Catherine the Great of Russia.
[413] Louis XVI of France and Charles III of Spain.
[414] Gibbon forgets here that cannon and the fundamentals of modern
military method came to Europe with the Mongols.
[415] See for the expansion of the topics of this section, Hammond’s
_Town Labourer_, _Village Labourer_, and _Skilled Labourer_. These three
books are too little known to the general reader. They are not
dry-as-dust compilations of statistics, but full of interesting matter
and delightfully well written.
[416] “Our present public school system is candidly based on training a
dominant master class. But the uprising of the workers and modern
conditions are rapidly making the _dominant method_ unworkable.... The
change in the aim of schools will transform all the organizations and
methods of schools, and my belief is that this change will make the new
era.”--F. W. Sanderson, Head Master of Oundle, in an address at Leeds,
February 16, 1920.
[417] The student who looks up the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article
“Goldsmith,” instead of going to the poem itself, will find some hostile
comments thereon which are themselves now literature and history; they
were written by Lord Macaulay (1800-59).
[418] Channing’s excellent new _History of the United States_ to vol.
iv. has been our handbook here.
[419] You are, I think, unjust to Great Britain and her “great power
game.” She was not playing that game--or, so far as she was, she was
acting against “France” to liberate the colonies from the French menace
in the hinterland which alarmed them. Once liberated, they broke loose,
somewhat selfishly, refusing to pay the piper, though they had enjoyed,
and done much to call, the tune. Great Britain was indeed to blame, not
on the “great power” ground, but on the “sovereignty” ground, which made
her stickle for the “sovereignty” of the British parliament over
colonial legislature. It wasn’t diplomatists, it was lawyers in both
countries, who precipitated the struggle of 1776.--E. B.
But see §§ 2 and 3.--H. G. W.
[420] See Channing’s _History of the United States_, vol. ii.
[421] _John Smith’s Travels._
[422] There is some doubt about the name of Carolina. Channing, in his
short history, says it was named in honour of Charles II. Bassett says
it was named originally Carolana, in honour of Charles I, in 1629, and
kept the name, under the new form of Carolina in honour of Charles II.
Fiske, _Old Virginia and Her Neighbors_, vol. i. p. 265, speaks of
Carolina, in 1629, as named “either in honour of Charles I or because
the name had been given by Huguenots in 1562 in honour of Charles IX of
France.” Another authority speaks of the name as used before, and now no
doubt retained in honour of the English king; but, according to him, the
name had not been used for the country (called, by the French, Florida),
but for a fort in it, the arx Carolana. He adds that in 1629 the name
Carolana is used, but Carolina appears afterwards, and becomes normal
after 1662.--E. B.
[423] From the Spanish word Sabaña = “meadow.”--H. H. J.
[424] See for the fundamental differences of north and south, W. Wilson,
_The State_, the historical sections at the beginning of the chapter on
the United States Government.--E. B.
[425] An admirable account of negro slavery is to be found in Sir H. H.
Johnston’s _The Negro in the New World_.
[426] I disbelieve in this “commercial selfishness” emphasized in the
text. Modern American historians, such as Beer, themselves rebut the
charge. On the whole, English commercial policy was fair. (1) If the
colonists could only export certain “enumerated” commodities to England,
the English market was the best, and they were given privileges there;
while non-enumerated commodities could be exported anywhere, and even
“enumerated” articles were in practice smuggled everywhere. (2) If the
colonists had to import from England, it was their best market, and they
got “drawbacks” on dutiable goods imported into England from the
Continent when they took them out of England; while again in practice
they freely smuggled goods from any country to America. (3) The English
navigation laws, in the long run, encouraged American shipbuilding; and
if some colonial manufactures were stopped in order that they might not
compete with English manufactures, the amount of such restriction was
slight. On all this, see Sir William Ashley, _Surveys Historic and
Economic_, pp. 300 _seqq._--E. B.
[427] See Tudor’s _Life of James Otis_.
[428] I disagree entirely with this. George, with the bulk of Parliament
behind him, was out to insist on the sovereignty of the British
Parliament (not of himself) over the colonists. Nor was it the Whig
noblemen who opposed him, but Burke (conservatively inclined, and
therefore up in arms for the traditional rights of the colonial
legislatures) and Chatham (liberally inclined, and therefore up in arms
for the principle of “no representation, no taxation”).--E. B.
[429] This again in my view is wrong. The system proposed, I read in an
American writer, meant cheaper tea in the colonies. The objection taken
by the colonists was legal.--E. B.
[430] I think this gives an erroneous impression that there was no real
chance of reconciliation in 1776. There was. And indeed the whole
separation was far from inevitable. If the British had (1) recognized
the autonomy in each colony of its legislature, and (2) granted to the
colonies cabinet government in place of government by governors sent
from England, there would have been no schism. By 1839, the time of Lord
Durham’s report, the British had learned to make the recognition and the
grant; and with greater wisdom they could have made both in 1776. A
great statesman in 1776 could have stopped the separation, and made
history different. I am inclined to say that nothing is inevitable in
history--except that when you don’t have good men, you don’t get good
results. And that was the position under George III and Lord North.--E.
B.
[431] The Tripoli Treaty, see Channing, vol. iii. chap. xviii.
[432] Wells, _The Future in America_.
[433] In 1776 Lord Dartmouth wrote that the colonists could not be
allowed “to check or discourage a traffic so beneficent to the nation.”
[434] A very readable and remarkably well-illustrated book for the
general reader upon the French Revolution is Wheeler’s _French
Revolution_. Carlyle’s _French Revolution_ has some splendid passages,
but it is often unjust and evil-spirited. Madelin’s _French Revolution_
is a good recent book.
[435] But see Rocquain’s _L’Esprit révolutionnaire avant la Révolution_.
He traces the growth of a revolutionary spirit in the 18th century, and
points to many predictions of a debacle in 18th-century French
literature.--E. B.
[436] I disagree utterly and entirely with this view of Rousseau, which
is quite unfair to the man who wrote _Du Contrat Social_. (1) He did
_not_ believe in the “state of nature”; he believed in the State, which
had lifted man from being a brute that followed its nose into a
reasoning being and a man. (2) He did not write to excuse breakers of
the covenant. On the contrary, he wrote to preach the sovereignty of the
general will, and he believed in the entire control of the individual by
that will. Rousseau has been much misrepresented, and the text follows
the misrepresentations. See Vaughan, _The Political Writings of
Rousseau_, introduction to _Du Contrat Social_.--E. B.
[437] Article “France,” _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[438] There is a very picturesque account of the storming of the
Bastille in Carlyle’s _French Revolution_, book v, chap. vi.
[439] Carlyle is at his best on this flight, _French Revolution_, book
iv, chaps. iv and v.
[440] Wiriath.
[441] The Declaration of Pillnitz was a diplomatic _démarche_ that
failed. Great Britain had definitely refused to intervene in favour of
the French monarchy, and Austrian statesmanship proposed to save the
collective face of European monarchy by a sounding announcement of
sympathy with the French Bourbons, followed by a proviso that unanimity
should be secured before intervention was attempted. French opinion (and
most historians) concentrated on the announcement and overlooked the
proviso.--P.G.
[442] The sour grapes of Champagne spread dysentery in the Prussian
army.--P.G.
[443] The intelligence of the French army of the Revolution was largely
due to a period of intelligent military thinking and writing which set
in among French soldiers after the defeats of the army of Louis XV in
the Seven Years War. Napoleon himself was full of traces of this
inspiration.--P. G.
[444] I cannot agree that England was ever, at any moment, “a
prospective ally” of France. There was a deep divergence of interests;
and it is impossible to think of Pitt and the Whig nobles being in any
way the allies of the France of 1793.--E. B.
[445] In his article, “French Revolutionary Wars,” in the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_.
[446] In the thirteen months before June, 1794, there were 1220
executions; in the following seven weeks there were 1376.--P. G.
[447] Channing, vol. iii. chap. xviii.
[448] Two very useful books have been Holland Rose’s _Personality of
Napoleon_ and his _Life of Napoleon I_. A compact and convenient
biography, with good battle maps, is R. M. Johnston’s _Napoleon_. Thomas
Hardy’s great epic-drama, _The Dynasts_, is a magnificent picture of
Napoleon’s career, historically very exact. It is one of the great stars
of English literature, too little known as yet to the general public.
[449] See Mahan’s _Life of Nelson_.
[450] Gourgaud quoted by Holland Rose.
[451] The resumption of war was more directly due to the publication in
France of the Sebastiani Report, a full account by the staff officer of
the ports and strong places of Egypt and Syria. The alarm occasioned by
this document hardened the determination of the British government to
retain a garrison at Malta in spite of the obligation to evacuate it
imposed by the Peace of Amiens.--P. G.
[452] All this is admirably told in Tolstoy’s wonderful _War and Peace_.
[453] The best textbook to follow in expanding this chapter is W. A.
Phillips’ _Confederation of Europe_.
[454] See J. W. Headlam’s _Life of Bismarck_.
[455] W. A. Phillips’ _Confederation of Europe_ is the leading textbook
here. H. E. Egerton’s _British Foreign Policy in the Nineteenth Century_
and L. S. Woolf’s _International Government_ are very illuminating. See
also Thatcher and Schwill’s convenient _General History of Europe_ and
Philip Guedalla’s _Partition of Europe; 1715-1815_.
[456] The Dukes of Savoy (ancestors of the present Italian kings) had
been astride the Alps, ruling in France and Italy, for centuries; and
their strategic position had long given them a European importance. The
Dukes of Savoy had been kings since 1713, first as Kings of Sicily,
1713-20, and then (when Sicily was exchanged for Sardinia in 1720) as
Kings of Sardinia.--E. B.
[457] An excellent book on the substance of this chapter is F. S.
Marvin’s _Century of Hope_. Another is R. A. Gregory’s _Discovery_. See
also Seignobos’ _Political History of Contemporary Europe_.
[458] But note Boyle and Sir Wm. Hamilton as conspicuous scientific men
who were Irishmen.
[459] It is worth noting that nearly all the great inventors in England
during the eighteenth century were working men, that inventions
proceeded from the workshop, and not from the laboratory. It is also
worth noting that only two of these inventors accumulated fortunes and
founded families.--E. B.
[460] Here America led the old world.
[461] In Northumberland and Durham in the early days of coal mining they
were so cheaply esteemed that it was unusual to hold inquests on the
bodies of men killed in mine disasters.
[462] It is sometimes argued against Marx that the proportion of people
who have savings invested has increased in many modern communities.
These savings are technically “capital” and their owners “capitalists”
to that extent, and this is supposed to contradict the statement of Marx
that property concentrates into few and fewer hands. Marx used many of
his terms carelessly and chose them ill, and his ideas were better than
his words. When he wrote property he meant “property so far as it is
power.” The small investor has remarkably little power over his invested
capital.
[463] See J. H. Noyes, _History of American Socialisms_, and Eastlake,
_The Oneida Community_.
[464] See his _A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principles of the
Formation of the Human Character_.
[465] See F. Podmore, _Life of Robert Owen_, or his own _Life of Robert
Owen, Written by Himself_.
[466] Increases or diminutions of the passive shareholding class would
not affect this concentration very materially. A shareholder has very
little power over his property.
[467] I find in a book of essays and addresses by Professor Soddy an
interesting and compact statement of certain resemblances in spirit
between scientific research and modern socialism. I venture to quote a
passage here because of its great significance at the present time.
“The immense acquisition,” he says, “to the wealth and resources of
mankind which has been the result of the past century of science, should
have been the golden opportunity of statesmen and humanitarians and the
raw material out of which the sum total of human happiness could have
been augmented. Instead, it has but revealed a growing incapacity and
failure on the part of the altruist to appreciate the nature and power
of the new weapon that science has placed in his hands, and an
ever-increasing rapacity and far-sightedness on the part of the egotist
to secure it for his own ends.
“For many a decade now, owing primarily and indisputably to the
intellectual achievements of a comparative handful of men of communistic
and cloisteral habit of thought, a steady shower of material benefits
has been raining down upon humanity, and for these benefits men have
fought in the traditional manner of the struggle when the fickle
sunlight was the sole hazardous income of the world. The strong have fed
and grown fat upon a larger and ever larger share of the manna. Initial
slight differences of strength and sagacity have become so emphasized by
the virile stream that the more successful are becoming monstrously so,
and the unsuccessful less and less able to secure a full meal than
before the shower began.
“Already it savours of indelicacy and tactlessness to recall that the
exploiters of all this wealth are not its creators; that the spirit of
acquisitiveness which has ensured success to them, rather than to their
immediate neighbours, is the antithesis of the spirit by which the
wealth was won.
“Amid all the sneers at the impracticability and visionary character of
communist schemes, let it not be forgotten that science is a communism,
neither theoretical nor on paper, but actual and in practice. The
results of those who labour in the fields of knowledge for its own sake
are published freely and pooled in the general stock for the benefit of
all. Common ownership of all its acquisitions is the breath of its life.
Secrecy or individualism of any kind would destroy its fertility.”
So far Professor Soddy, but let the writer add that there is this point
about the scientific world not to be overlooked. Every worker in the
latter is a specially educated man, and he is free to leave the
communism of science if he thinks fit. This is very different from a
communism imposed upon an unprepared mass of people containing large
recalcitrant minorities or majorities. A communism sustained by a
community of will based on education--an extension, that is, of the
communism of scientific research to human affairs generally--is the
ideal underlying the political ideas of most intelligent modern men.
[468] We may note a very interesting experiment in wages payment here
that has been made by the American Oneida silver company. A committee on
which the workers are strongly represented makes a summary week by week
of the current prices of staple commodities and common necessities. Week
by week it is noted that prices are so much per cent, above the normal
figure of January, 1914 (or some such date), which is taken as the
standard. On pay-day every worker receives his wages _plus_ a percentage
representing the higher prices, so that though the actual sums paid vary
week by week, the purchasing power of the wages paid remains practically
constant. Here, perhaps, we have a germ of a system that may grow to
considerable importance. The burthen of rising prices is shifted to the
employer, who can take them into account in fixing his prices.
[469] For a closely parallel view of religion to that given here, see
that admirable book, _Outspoken Essays_, by Dean Inge, Essays VIII and
IX on _St. Paul_ and on _Institutionalism and Mysticism_.
[470] _Town Topics_, November 26th, 1919.
[471] Kropotkin’s _Mutual Aid_ is worth noting here as one of the
earliest correctives to these popular misconceptions of Darwinism.--G.
M.
[472] Morley’s _Life of Gladstone_.
[473] R. A. Gregory’s _Discovery_.
[474] The great Oxford school of _Literæ Humaniores_, which means a
serious study of Ancient Philosophy and Ancient History, was already
thirty years old in Gladstone’s time, and was a really serious training
in solid philosophy and solid history. It was all the more serious, as
every candidate for Honours had to take _two_ schools and to offer
Mathematics as well as _Literæ Humaniores_. Both Peel (about 1810) and
Gladstone (about 1830) took these two schools, and both gained Firsts in
both. (This, by the way, is the only true and genuine “double first.”)
Men with such a training were genuinely and nobly trained for
statesmanship.--E. B.
With no knowledge of ethnology, no vision of history as a whole,
misconceiving the record of geology, ignorant of the elementary ideas of
biological science, of modern political, social, and economic science
and modern thought and literature!--H. G. W.
[475] The old classical training had great faults, but not quite those
which are here imputed to it. It was the education of an aristocratic
leisured class who had not to earn their living. Hence it was (1)
entirely idealist and non-utilitarian. It aimed not at fitting people
for a paid profession, but at culture and inner development. (2) It
depended enormously on _leisure_. The work done in compulsory work-hours
was small in range, but severe, almost entirely classics and
mathematics. These were intended as a training of the mind and a test of
ability, but were not the real field of ambition. That lay in the large
amount of time allotted to _free study_. Peel, Gladstone, Macaulay,
Hallam, etc., show what was expected of the best men. Literature, modern
history, French and Italian, theology and philosophy, and even a good
deal of generalised science, were things you read in your free time.
Think what Macaulay’s “schoolboy” was supposed to know, and reflect that
practically none of it was taught in school hours! Some of the best
papers on English literature that I ever read were done by a certain
sixth form which had, I was told, no time at all given to the subject in
the time-table. As the Head Master told me, “A good man was rather
laughed at if he did not know Shakespeare and Milton.”
This conception of a small hard nucleus of compulsory work, combined
with a wide margin of leisure, was very good for the best men, who used
their free time in the right way, but left the weak men thoroughly
uneducated. The reaction against it came with long hours, wide
curriculum, and compulsory games, leaving no leisure either for study or
for mischief.
The modern idea that school should teach _all_ that a boy ought to know,
is educationally disastrous; but it is the natural result of boys coming
from uneducated homes. The home, not the school, is the real key to the
wider and higher side of education. But this raises large questions.--G.
M.
G. M., I submit, has not grasped the modern idea in education. The
modern idea of a public school as exemplified in such a case as Oundle
does not fill up the time of the boy with prescribed work and games; it
leaves large spaces for self-development; but also it provides museums,
a good collection of pictures, libraries, and an abundance of good music
in addition to the mere “playing fields” of the old type of public
school. And it inquires into the use a boy is making of his free
energies. The phase of “cram” is over, but the new schools do provide
good pasture, show the way thither, and “vet” a boy who displays no
appetite. G. M. ignores entirely the clear statement in the text that
Gladstone was a grossly _ignorant_ man, and the instances given of the
feebleness and worthlessness of the “generalized science” these boys of
the old persuasion picked up. So far from the old classical training
being the education of an aristocratic class, it was, as G. M. admits
within a line or so, the education of a few individuals, the rest of the
class remaining barbarians. It may have aimed at culture and inner
development, but it missed its aim. Consequently, the bright lads of the
Gladstone-Macaulay-Peel type who did not pick up a few enlightened ideas
by accident or at home, were quite unable to carry their own class with
them; it remained politically boorish. They had to appeal for
understanding to classes whose education had been free from “classical”
pretentiousness....
These notes submitted to E. B. at this stage provoked him to a warm
protest. His sympathies were “heart and soul with G. M.,” and Mr.
Gladstone, he declared with emphasis, was not an ignorant man. A little
more must be said on this question. If the reader realize, what we have
been trying to make clear in this history, that human progress is
largely mental progress, a clearing and an enlargement of ideas, then he
will understand why it is that the compiler of this _Outline_ has given
so much space here to these controversial notes upon the education of
Mr. Gladstone. For the education of Mr. Gladstone was typical of that
ruling-class education which has dominated British and European affairs,
so far as they have been dominated by ideas, up to the present time. It
is most significant of the differences and difficulties of our age that
the statement, which seemed to the writer a simple statement of an
obvious fact, that Mr. Gladstone was a profoundly ignorant man, should
have so scandalized two of the editors of this work. No doubt Mr.
Gladstone knew much and knew many things, and it is just because he did
so and was in many respects the fine flower of the education of his
period, that his ignorance is so interesting to us. Many Chinese
mandarins knew much and many things--beautifully. And were ignorant men.
Mr. Gladstone’s was not the ignorance of deficiency, but the ignorance
of excess, a copious ignorance; it was not a failure to know this or
that particular fact, an ignorance excusable enough, but a profound and
sought-after and established ignorance of reality, so that he did not
grasp the bearing of definite facts presented to him or of far-reaching
ideas put before him, upon the great issues with which he was concerned.
He lived, as it were, in a luminous and blinding cloud. That cloud,
which I call his ignorance, my two editors call his wonderful and
abounding culture. It was a culture that wrapped about and adorned the
great goddess Reality. But indeed he is not to be adorned but stripped.
She ceases to be herself or to bless her votary unless she is faced
stark and faced fearlessly.--H. G. W.
[476] The impression made on me, an old Gladstonian, by Gladstone’s
politics, was mainly twofold. (1) A strong assertion that politics were
(as Aristotle said) a development of ethics, and concerned with
discovering and doing what is Right, not what is convenient or
profitable to any particular class or nation. (2) A strong subconscious
suggestion that the highest education and culture and knowledge were
useful for politics, which was in fact a very high practical art,
demanding the highest qualities. Hence largely the horror we had of
Dizzy. (3) A general sanguine conviction that Honesty was the best
policy; that what was right would also prove to be ultimately the most
profitable, so that there was no real conflict.
I do not say that Mr. G. acted consistently up to these principles, or
that they could be acted up to; but they formed the milk of the word for
most of us.--G. M.
I cannot agree that Gladstone was a prophet of nationalism. He was a
prophet of Liberalism, and, as such, a hater of oppression. He protested
against Bourbon oppression in Naples or Turkish oppression in Bulgaria
or Armenia; but to protest against oppression is not to champion
nationalism. Gladstone championed not nationalism, but internationalism;
he emphasized the idea that “public right” should control the relations
of states. The fine words which Mr. Asquith used to state the British
cause in August, 1914, were (unless I am mistaken) an echo of
Gladstone’s own words. A noble objection to oppression; a noble
championing of the rule of public right--these were the staples of
Gladstone’s prophecy. The pity was that, when it came to the actual
handling of foreign affairs (_e.g._ in Egypt about 1884), Gladstone
could not translate his ideals into practice.--E. B.
[477] G. B. Stern’s _Children of No Man’s Land_ is a novel of this topic
of British nationality in relation to German Jews written with great
insight.
[478] The doctrine of nationalities was in reality a legacy of French
revolutionary theory. From the men of the First Republic, who found it a
useful excuse for a forward foreign policy in the best Richelieu
tradition, it passed into the possession of Napoleon, who gave more
attention to it at St. Helena than he had ever done at the Tuileries.
Thence it came naturally into the political inheritance of Napoleon III,
who sacrificed France to his belief in it. Gladstone only got it by a
side wind, the theory having drifted into the British tradition by
reason of the accident of Canning’s anti-interventionist foreign policy
during the Spanish-American War of Independence.--P. G.
[479] This is a paradox to which I cannot subscribe. Please put me down
as convinced of the opposite.--E. B.
[480] Albert Thomas in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[481] There were also hopes of an Italian alliance for France, and
these, combined with the anti-Prussian direction of Austrian policy, and
the Franco-Russian _rapprochement_ which had followed the Crimean War,
almost justified Napoleon in believing that he would not be left
entirely alone.--P. G.
[482] Hence “Jingo” for any rabid patriot.
[483] See _England’s Debt to India_ by Lajpat Rai for a good statement
of India’s economic grievance.
[484] Now a French Protectorate.--P. G.
[485] See Putnam Weale’s _Indiscreet Letters from Pekin_, a partly
fictitious book, but true and vivid in its effects.
[486] With the exception of one wretched Dutch factory on the minute
island of Deshima in the harbour of Nagasaki. The Dutch were exposed to
almost unendurable indignities. They had no intercourse with any
Japanese except the special officials appointed to deal with them.
[487] A new and much more liberal Maltese constitution was promulgated
in June, 1920, practically putting Malta on the footing of a
self-governing colony.
[488] All intelligent Englishmen or Englishwomen with a vote owe it to
the Empire and themselves to read at least one book dealing with India
or Egypt from the native point of view. For India, Lajpat Rai’s
Political Future of India is to be recommended. A compact book running
counter to the views in this text, and giving the Church missionary
point of view, is the Rev. W. E. S. Holland’s Goal of India. William
Archer’s _India and the Future_ is an interesting display of the
temperamental clash of a Nordic writer with things Dravidian. It
sustains the argument that even the most high-minded Nordic type cannot
be trusted to govern other races sympathetically. (See also in that
matter Archer’s _In Afro-America_.) The Aga Khan’s _India in Transition_
gives very admirably the views of a liberal Indian gentleman. Sidney
Low’s _A Vision of India_ is still not yet superseded as a picture of
India in 1905-6, when the present stir was only brewing.
[489] A very good book for the expansion of this chapter is Stearns
Davis’ (with Anderson and Tyler) _Armed Peace_, a history of Europe from
1870 to 1914. Even more illuminating is G. P. Gooch’s _History of Our
Time (1885-1911)_. This is quite a tiny book, but very clear and
thorough. It was revised in its present form in February, 1914, so that
its title is misleading; it comes up to 1914. It contains an excellent
student’s bibliography.
[490] See F. M. Hueffer’s able but badly named book, _When Blood is
their Argument_. It gives an admirable account of just how the pressure
was applied to the teaching organization.
[491] These quotations are from Sir Thomas Barclay’s article “Peace” in
_The Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[492] St. John Ervine’s novel, _Changing Winds_, gives a good account of
the mentality of this time.
[493] See the various publications of the Irish Dominion League, St.
Stephen’s Green, Dublin. A good recent account of Irish ideas is to be
found in Lynd’s _Ireland a Nation_ (1919).
[494] Wilfred Scawen Blunt regards the English remaining in Egypt, when
they had pledged themselves to go, as the greatest cause of the troubles
that culminated in 1914. To pacify the French over Egypt, England
connived at the French occupation of Morocco, which Germany had looked
upon as her share of North Africa. Hence Germany’s bristling attitude to
France, and the _revival_ in France of the _revanche_ idea, which had
died down. See Blunt’s _My Diaries_, vol. i, September 30th, 1891.--A.
C. W.
[495] It should not be forgotten that Italian action against Turkey was
precipitated by the granting of a charter by the Sultan to an
Austro-German company or syndicate for the “taking over” of the
Tripolitaine: a process which could only have ended by the hoisting of
the Imperial German flag on the southern shores of the Mediterranean,
opposite Italy. Also, that through Morocco the Germans were attempting
to undermine the French position in Algeria and Tunis by supplying the
Moroccans with arms and money, and inducing them to attack French rule
separately in Western Algeria, and even by way of Saharan oases in
Southern Tunis. The writer of this note has actually witnessed this
process going on between 1898 and 1911. He asserts that, whether from
right or wrong motives, Germany forced France to tackle the thorny
problem of Morocco. Either she had to do so or prepare for the
evacuation of Algeria. France may have made a few mistakes, but she has
conferred enormous benefits on North Africa. Under her control the
indigenous population has increased remarkably.--H. H. J.
[496] The general reader who wants some picture in his mind of the
recent state of Russia should read Ernest Poole’s _The Village_.
Pre-revolutionary Russia is admirably sketched in Maurice Baring’s
_Mainsprings of Russia_, _The Russian People_, and _A Year in Russia_. A
small, very illuminating book on the Russian revolution is M. H.
Barber’s _A British Nurse in Bolshevik Russia_.
[497] One very good reason for the provisional retention of the
Philippines under American control is the certainty that the “Moros,”
the Muhammadan peoples of Palawan, and the southern islands of the main
groups would proceed to conquer the “Christian” Filipinos, and that
after a welter of civil war and destruction, Japan or some other outside
power would be appealed to to intervene.--H. H. J.
[498] An unfriendly critic might denounce the treaty-making power of the
United States, and the machinery by which it operates, as complicated
and cumbersome, ill adapted to the complex demands of international
intercourse, slow in action and uncertain in outcome. The requirement of
a two-thirds rather than a majority vote in the Senate he might
criticize not unjustly as a dubious excess of caution.... Believe me,
the American people are like for many years to accomplish through this
means their compacts with mankind. The checks and balances by which it
is surrounded, the free and full debate which it allows, are in their
eyes virtues rather than defects. They rejoice in the fact that all
engagements which affect their destinies must be spread upon the public
records, and that there is not, and there never can be, a secret treaty
binding them either in law or in morals. Looking back upon a diplomatic
history which is not without its chapters of success, they feel that on
the whole the scheme the fathers builded has served the children well.
With a conservatism in matters of government as great perhaps as that of
any people in the world, they will suffer much inconvenience and run the
risk of occasional misunderstanding before they make a change.--J. W.
Davis (U. S. A. Ambassador to Britain), _The Treaty Making Power of the
United States_. (Oxf. Univ. Brit. Am. Club. Paper No. 1.)
[499] I think his policy was quite clear. He said to Germany, “If you
bring on war, you must expect England to support France and Russia.” To
France and Russia he said: “If you are unreasonable, do not expect
England to support you.” He thus brought pressure to bear on both
sides.--G. M.
An illuminating book on the causes of the war is Lord Loreburn’s _How
the War Came_.--H. H. J.
[500] Kautsky’s report on the origin of the war.
[501] For the common soldier’s view of the war there is no better book
than _Le Feu_ by Barbusse. An illustrated book of great quaintness,
beauty, and veracity is André Hellé’s _Le Livre des Heures_. No other
book recalls so completely the _feel_ and effect of the phases of the
war. An admirably written and very wise book is Philip Gibbs’ _Realities
of War_. Some light upon the peculiar difference of the fighting of the
Great War from any previous warfare will be found in McCurdy’s _War
Neuroses_ and Eder’s book on the same subject.
[502] “What mainly was wrong with our generalship was the system which
put the High Command into the hands of a group of men belonging to the
old school of war, unable by reason of their age and traditions to get
away from rigid methods, and to become elastic in face of new
conditions. Our Staff College had been hopelessly inefficient in its
system of training, if I am justified in forming such an opinion from
specimens produced by it, who had the brains of canaries and the manners
of Potsdam. There was also a close corporation among the officers of the
Regular Army, so that they took the lion’s share of Staff appointments,
thus keeping out brilliant young men of the New Armies, whose brain
power, to say the least of it, was on a higher level than that of the
Sandhurst standard.” Philip Gibbs, _Realities of War_.
[503] “The smart society of G.H.Q. was best seen at the Officers’ Club
at dinnertime. It was as much like musical comedy as any stage setting
of war at the Gaiety. The band played rag-time and light music while the
warriors fed, and all these generals and staff officers, with their
decorations and Army bands, and polished buttons and crossed swords,
were waited upon by little W.A.A.C.s., with the G.H.Q. colours tied up
in bows on their hair, and khaki stockings under their short skirts, and
fancy aprons. Such a chatter! Such bursts of light-hearted laughter!
Such whisperings of secrets, of intrigues, and scandals in high places!
Such callous-hearted courage when British soldiers were being blown to
bits, gassed, blinded, maimed, and shell-shocked in places that were
far, so very far, from G.H.Q.”--Phillip Gibbs, _The Realities of War_.
[504] But see Roch, _Mr. Lloyd George and the War_, and Arthur’s _Life
of Lord Kitchener_.
[505] “The want of an unlimited quantity of high explosives was a fatal
bar to our success.”--_The Times_, May 14th, 1915.
[506] But compare the British bombardment of Japanese towns noted in
Chap. xxxix, § 11. And aeroplane bombs and machine-gun fire have since
been used by the British military authorities against Indian village
crowds _suspected_ of sedition.
[507] _E.g._ in hand grenades.
[508] For the flighty incapacity of the British military authorities in
this adventure, see Sir Ian Hamilton’s _Gallipoli Diary_. It is only
fair to the British commander to add that the incapacity was that of the
home authorities to understand his demands for men and material.--P. G.
[509] See Stern, _Tanks 1914-1918_. See also Fuller, _Tanks in the Great
War_.
[510] “I found a general opinion among officers and men under the
command of the Fifth Army that they had been victims of atrocious staff
work, tragic in its consequence. From what I saw of some of the Fifth
Army staff officers, I was of the same opinion. Some of these young
gentlemen, and some of the elderly officers, were arrogant and
supercilious, without revealing any sign of intelligence. If they had
wisdom, it was deeply camouflaged by an air of inefficiency. If they had
knowledge, they hid it as a secret of their own. General Gough in
Flanders, though personally responsible for many tragic happenings, was
badly served by some of his subordinates, and battalion officers and
divisional staffs raged against the whole of the Fifth Army
organization, or lack of organization, with an extreme passion of
speech.”--Philip Gibbs, _Realities of War_.
[511] A very good account of the state of mind of Paris during and after
the war is in W. P. Adams’ _Paris Sees it Through_.
[512] _The Times_, December 8th, 1919.
[513] Authorities vary between 250,000 and a million houses.
[514] J. M. Keynes, _op. cit._
[515] They debauched the currency, _i.e._ and wasted money recklessly.
[516] Mr. Keynes ignores the fortunes made by deliberately cornering and
withholding commodities in a time of shortage.
[517] Among the books consulted here, for this and the two following
sections, were Dr. Dillon’s _Peace Conference_; H. Wilson Harris’s _The
Peace in the Making_ and _President Wilson, his Problems and his
Policy_; J. M. Keynes’s _Economic Consequences of the Peace_; Weyl’s
_The End of the War_; Stallybrass’s _Society of States_; Brailsford’s _A
League of Nations_; F. C. Howe’s _Why War?_ L. S. Woolf’s _International
Government_; J. A. Hobson’s _Towards International Government_; Lowes
Dickinson’s _The Choice before Us_; Sir Walter Phillimore’s _Three
Centuries of Treaties_, and C. E. Fayle’s _Great Settlement_.
[518] “The Allied Governments,” the effective passage ran, “have given
careful consideration to the correspondence which has passed between the
President of the United States and the German Government. Subject to the
qualifications which follow, they declare their readiness to make peace
with the Government of Germany on the terms of peace laid down in the
President’s Address to Congress of January 8th, 1918, and the principles
of settlement enunciated in his subsequent Addresses.”
(Note transmitted to the German Government by the Allies through the
Swiss Minister on November 5th, 1918.)
[519] In his book, _The Peace Conference_.
[520] Dillon.
[521] Dillon. And see his _The Peace Conference_, Chapter III, for
instances of the amazing ignorance of various delegates.
[522] See _Clemenceau_, by C. Ducray.
[523] He wrote several novels. They are not very good novels; they
incline to sentimental melodrama. _Le Plus Fort_ is now available to
English readers in a translation under the title of “The Stronger.” It
is tawdry and dull. A cinematograph version has been shown.
[524] Keynes.
[525] Checked by subsequent comparison with the published article in the
_Jour. of the Roy. United Service Institution_, vol. lxv., No. 457,
February, 1920.
[526] Cp. Psalm cxxxvi.
[527] Here is another glimpse of the agreeable dreams that fill the
contemporary military mind. It is from Fuller’s recently published
_Tanks in the Great War_. Colonel Fuller does not share that hostility
to tanks characteristic of the older type of soldier. In the next war,
he tells us: “Fast-moving tanks, equipped with tons of liquid gas ...
will cross the frontier and obliterate every living thing in the fields
and farms, the villages, and cities of the enemy’s country. Whilst life
is being swept away around the frontier, fleets of aeroplanes will
attack the enemy’s great industrial and governing centres. All these
attacks will be made, at first, not against the enemy’s army ... but
against the civil population, in order to compel it to accept the will
of the attacker.”
For a good, well-balanced account of what modern war really means, see
Philip Gibbs, _Realities of War_, already cited in two footnotes to § 8.
[528] A suggestive book here containing a good account of the drift of
modern religious thought is G. W. Cooke’s _Social Evolution of
Religion_.
[529] Compare Basil Thompson, _The Fijians, a Study of the Decay of
Custom_; Introduction and opening chapters. This is a fine study of an
ancient “heliolithic” culture breaking up under modernization.
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Volume I.
parellel=> parellel {pg 618}
Justianian=> Justinian {pg 618}
Kaniska=> Kanishka {pg 646}
Volume II.
agressive=> aggressive {pg 503}
completer=> complete {pg 527}
Arisona=> Arizona {index}
Vimeiro=> Vimiero {index}
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.