Part 1 (2/2)

Even could the device of representation have occurred to the mind of some statesman trained in Roman methods, it would probably have made no difference. n.o.body would have known how to use it. You cannot invent an inst.i.tution as you would invent a plough. Such a notion as that of representative government must needs start from small beginnings and grow in men's minds until it should become part and parcel of their mental habits. For the want of it the home government at Rome became more and more unmanageable until it fell into the hands of the army, while at the same time the administration of the empire became more and more centralized; the people of its various provinces, even while their social condition was in some respects improved, had less and less voice in the management of their local affairs, and thus the spirit of personal independence was gradually weakened. This centralization was greatly intensified by the perpetual danger of invasion on the northern and eastern frontiers, all the way from the Rhine to the Euphrates.

Do what it would, the government must become more and more a military despotism, must revert toward the Oriental type. The period extending from the third century before Christ to the third century after was a period of extraordinary intellectual expansion and moral awakening; but when we observe the governmental changes introduced under the emperor Diocletian at the very end of this period, we realize how serious had been the political retrogression, how grave the danger that the stream of human life might come to stagnate in Europe, as it had long since stagnated in Asia.

Two mighty agents, cooperating in their opposite ways to prevent any such disaster, were already entering upon the scene. The first was the colonization of the empire by Germanic tribes already far advanced beyond savagery, already somewhat tinctured with Roman civilization, yet at the same time endowed with an intense spirit of personal and local independence. With this wholesome spirit they were about to refresh and revivify the empire, but at the risk of undoing its work of political organization and reducing it to barbarism. The second was the establishment of the Roman church, an inst.i.tution capable of holding European society together in spite of a political disintegration that was widespread and long-continued. While wave after wave of Germanic colonization poured over romanized Europe, breaking down old boundary-lines and working sudden and astonis.h.i.+ng changes on the map, setting up in every quarter baronies, dukedoms, and kingdoms fermenting with vigorous political life; while for twenty generations this salutary but wild and dangerous work was going on, there was never a moment when the imperial sway of Rome was quite set aside and forgotten, there was never a time when union of some sort was not maintained through the dominion which the church had established over the European mind. When we duly consider this great fact in its relations to what went before and what came after, it is hard to find words fit to express the debt of grat.i.tude which modern civilization owes to the Roman Catholic church.

When we think of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once to set apart and stigmatize as the ”Dark Ages”; when we consider how the seeds of what is n.o.blest in modern life were then painfully sown upon the soil which imperial Rome had prepared; when we think of the various work of a Gregory, a Benedict, a Boniface, an Alfred, a Charlemagne; we feel that there is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements of pagan antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with these. Until quite lately, indeed, the student of history has had his attention too narrowly confined to the ages that have been preeminent for literature and art--the so-called cla.s.sical ages--and thus his sense of historical perspective has been impaired. When Mr. Freeman uses Gregory of Tours as a text-book, he shows that he realizes how an epoch may be none the less portentous though it has not had a Tacitus to describe it, and certainly no part of history is more full of human interest than the troubled period in which the powerful streams of Teutonic life pouring into Roman Europe were curbed in their destructiveness and guided to n.o.ble ends by the Catholic church. Out of the interaction between these two mighty agents has come the political system of the modern world. The moment when this interaction might have seemed on the point of reaching a complete and harmonious result was the glorious thirteenth century, the culminating moment of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, as in the times of Caesar or Trajan, there might have seemed to be a union among civilized men, in which the separate life of individuals and localities was not submerged. In that golden age alike of feudal system, of empire, and of church, there were to be seen the greatest monarchs, in fullest sympathy with their peoples, that Christendom has known,--an Edward I., a St.

Louis, a Frederick II. Then when in the pontificates of Innocent III.

and his successors the Roman church reached its apogee, the religious yearnings of men sought expression in the sublimest architecture the world has seen. Then Aquinas summed up in his profound speculations the substance of Catholic theology, and while the morning twilight of modern science might be discerned in the treatises of Roger Bacon, while wandering minstrelsy revealed the treasures of modern speech, soon to be wrought under the hands of Dante and Chaucer into forms of exquisite beauty, the sacred fervour of the apostolic ages found itself renewed in the tender and mystic piety of St. Francis of a.s.sisi. It was a wonderful time, but after all less memorable as the culmination of mediaeval empire and mediaeval church than as the dawning of the new era in which we live to-day, and in which the development of human society proceeds in accordance with more potent methods than those devised by the genius of pagan or Christian Rome. [Sidenote: The German invaders and the Roman church] [Sidenote: The wonderful thirteenth century]

For the origin of these more potent methods we must look back to the early ages of the Teutonic people; for their development and application on a grand scale we must look chiefly to the history of that most Teutonic of peoples in its inst.i.tutions, though perhaps not more than half-Teutonic in blood, the English, with their descendants in the New World. The third method of nation-making may be called the Teutonic or preeminently the English method. It differs from the Oriental and Roman methods which we have been considering in a feature of most profound significance; it contains the principle of representation. For this reason, though like all nation-making it was in its early stages attended with war and conquest, it nevertheless does not necessarily require war and conquest in order to be put into operation. Of the other two methods war was an essential part. In the typical Oriental nation, such as a.s.syria or Persia, we see a conquering tribe holding down a number of vanquished peoples, and treating them like slaves: here the nation is very imperfectly made, and its government is subject to sudden and violent changes. In the Roman empire we see a conquering people hold sway over a number of vanquished peoples, but instead of treating them like slaves, it gradually makes them its equals before the law; here the resulting political body is much more nearly a nation, and its government is much more stable. A Lydian of the fifth century before Christ felt no sense of allegiance to the Persian master who simply robbed and abused him; but the Gaul of the fifth century after Christ was proud of the name of Roman and ready to fight for the empire of which he was a citizen. We have seen, nevertheless, that for want of representation the Roman method failed when applied to an immense territory, and the government tended to become more and more despotic, to revert toward the Oriental type. Now of the English or Teutonic method, I say, war is not an essential part; for where representative government is once established, it is possible for a great nation to be formed by the peaceful coalescence of neighbouring states, or by their union into a federal body. An instance of the former was the coalescence of England and Scotland effected early in the eighteenth century after ages of mutual hostility; for instances of the latter we have Switzerland and the United States. Now federalism, though its rise and establishment may be incidentally accompanied by warfare, is nevertheless in spirit pacific. Conquest in the Oriental sense is quite incompatible with it; conquest in the Roman sense is hardly less so. At the close of our Civil War there were now and then zealous people to be found who thought that the southern states ought to be treated as conquered territory, governed by prefects sent from Was.h.i.+ngton, and held down by military force for a generation or so. Let us hope that there are few to-day who can fail to see that such a course would have been fraught with almost as much danger as the secession movement itself.

At least it would have been a hasty confession, quite uncalled for and quite untrue, that American federalism had thus far proved itself incompetent,--that we had indeed preserved our national unity, but only at the frightful cost of sinking to a lower plane of national life.

[Sidenote: The English method of nation-making] [Sidenote: Pacific tendencies of federalism]

But federalism, with its pacific implications, was not an invention of the Teutonic mind. The idea was familiar to the city communities of ancient Greece, which, along with their intense love of self-government, felt the need of combined action for warding off external attack. In their Achaian and Aitolian leagues the Greeks made brilliant attempts toward founding a nation upon some higher principle than that of mere conquest, and the history of these attempts is exceedingly interesting and instructive. They failed for lack of the principle of representation, which was practically unknown to the world until introduced by the Teutonic colonizers of the Roman empire. Until the idea of power delegated by the people had become familiar to men's minds in its practical bearings, it was impossible to create a great nation without crus.h.i.+ng out the political life in some of its parts. Some centre of power was sure to absorb all the political life, and grow at the expense of the outlying parts, until the result was a centralized despotism. Hence it came to be one of the commonplace a.s.sumptions of political writers that republics must be small, that free government is practicable only in a confined area, and that the only strong and durable government, capable of maintaining order throughout a vast territory, is some form of absolute monarchy. [Sidenote: Fallacy of the notion that republics must be small]

It was quite natural that people should formerly have held this opinion, and it is indeed not yet quite obsolete, but its fallaciousness will become more and more apparent as American history is better understood.

Our experience has now so far widened that we can see that despotism is not the strongest but wellnigh the weakest form of government; that centralized administrations, like that of the Roman empire, have fallen to pieces, not because of too much but because of too little freedom; and that the only perdurable government must be that which succeeds in achieving national unity on a grand scale, without weakening the sense of personal and local independence. For in the body politic this spirit of freedom is as the red corpuscles in the blood; it carries the life with it. It makes the difference between a society of self-respecting men and women and a society of puppets.

Your nation may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence, it is doomed and deserves its doom. As President Cleveland has well said, it is not the business of a government to support its people, but of the people to support their government; and once to lose sight of this vital truth is as dangerous as to trifle with some stealthy narcotic poison. Of the two opposite perils which have perpetually threatened the welfare of political society--anarchy on the one hand, loss of self-government on the other--Jefferson was right in maintaining that the latter is really the more to be dreaded because its beginnings are so terribly insidious. Many will understand what is meant by a threat of secession, where few take heed of the baneful principle involved in a Texas Seed-bill.

That the American people are still fairly alive to the importance of these considerations, is due to the weary ages of struggle in which our forefathers have manfully contended for the right of self-government.

From the days of Arminius and Civilis in the wilds of lower Germany to the days of Franklin and Jefferson in Independence Hall, we have been engaged in this struggle, not without some toughening of our political fibre, not without some refining of our moral sense. Not among our English forefathers only, but among all the peoples of mediaeval and modern Europe has the struggle gone on, with various and instructive results. In all parts of romanized Europe invaded and colonized by Teutonic tribes, self-government attempted to spring up. What may have been the origin of the idea of representation we do not know; like most origins, it seems lost in the prehistoric darkness. Wherever we find Teutonic tribes settling down over a wide area, we find them holding their primary a.s.semblies, usually their annual March-meetings, like those in which Mr. Hosea Biglow and others like him have figured.

Everywhere, too, we find some attempt at representative a.s.semblies, based on the principle of the three estates, clergy, n.o.bles, and commons. But nowhere save in England does the representative principle become firmly established, at first in county-meetings, afterward in a national parliament limiting the powers of the national monarch as the primary tribal a.s.sembly had limited the powers of the tribal chief. It is for this reason that we must call the method of nation-making by means of a representative a.s.sembly the English method. While the idea of representation was perhaps the common property of the Teutonic tribes, it was only in England that it was successfully put into practice and became the dominant political idea. We may therefore agree with Dr.

Stubbs that in its political development England is the most Teutonic of all European countries,--the country which in becoming a great nation has most fully preserved the local independence so characteristic of the ancient Germans. The reasons for this are complicated, and to try to a.s.sign them all would needlessly enc.u.mber our exposition. But there is one that is apparent and extremely instructive. There is sometimes a great advantage in being able to plant political inst.i.tutions in a virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or perhaps metamorphosed through contact with rival inst.i.tutions. In America the Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in Britain; and so far as inst.i.tutions are concerned, our English forefathers settled here as in an empty country. They were not obliged to modify their political ideas so as to bring them into harmony with those of the Indians; the disparity in civilization was so great that the Indians were simply thrust aside, along with the wolves and buffaloes.

[Sidenote: Teutonic March-meetings and representative a.s.semblies]

This ill.u.s.tration will help us to understand the peculiar features of the Teutonic settlement of Britain. Whether the English invaders really slew all the romanized Kelts who dwelt in the island, except those who found refuge in the mountains of c.u.mberland, Wales, and Cornwall, or fled across the channel to Brittany, we need not seek to decide. It is enough to point out one respect in which the Teutonic conquest was immeasurably more complete in Britain than in any other part of the empire. Everywhere else the tribes who settled upon Roman soil--the Goths, Vandals, Suevi, and Burgundians--were christianized, and so to some extent romanized, before they came to take possession. Even the more distant Franks had been converted to Christianity before they had completed their conquest of Gaul. Everywhere except in Britain, therefore, the conquerors had already imbibed Roman ideas, and the authority of Rome was in a certain sense acknowledged. There was no break in the continuity of political events. In Britain, on the other hand, there was a complete break, so that while on the continent the fifth and sixth centuries are seen in the full midday light of history, in Britain they have lapsed into the twilight of half-legendary tradition. The Saxon and English tribes, coming from the remote wilds of northern Germany, whither Roman missionaries had not yet penetrated, still wors.h.i.+pped Thor and Wodan; and their conquest of Britain was effected with such deadly thoroughness that Christianity was destroyed there, or lingered only in sequestered nooks. A land once christianized thus actually fell back into paganism, so that the work of converting it to Christianity had to be done over again. From the landing of heathen Hengest on the isle of Thanet to the landing of Augustine and his monks on the same spot, one hundred and forty-eight years elapsed, during which English inst.i.tutions found time to take deep root in British soil with scarcely more interference, as to essential points, than in American soil twelve centuries afterward. [Sidenote: Peculiarity of the Teutonic conquest of Britain]

The century and a half between 449 and 597 is therefore one of the most important epochs in the history of the people that speak the English language. Before settling in Britain our forefathers had been tribes in the upper stages of barbarism; now they began the process of coalescence into a nation in which the principle of self-government should be retained and developed. The towns.h.i.+p and its town-meeting we find there, as later in New England. The county-meeting we also find, while the county is a little state in itself and not a mere administrative district. And in this county-meeting we may observe a singular feature, something never seen before in the world, something destined to work out vaster political results than Caesar ever dreamed of. This county-meeting is not a primary a.s.sembly; all the freemen from all the towns.h.i.+ps cannot leave their homes and their daily business to attend it. Nor is it merely an a.s.sembly of notables, attended by the most important men of the neighbourhood. It is a representative a.s.sembly, attended by select men from each towns.h.i.+p. We may see in it the germ of the British parliament and of the American congress, as indeed of all modern legislative bodies, for it is a most suggestive commentary upon what we are saying that in all other countries which have legislatures, they have been copied, within quite recent times, from English or American models. We can seldom if ever fix a date for the beginning of anything, and we can by no means fix a date for the beginning of representative a.s.semblies in England. We can only say that where we first find traces of county organization, we find traces of representation. Clearly, if the English conquerors of Britain had left the framework of Roman inst.i.tutions standing there, as it remained standing in Gaul, there would have been great danger of this principle of representation not surviving. It would most likely have been crushed in its callow infancy. The conquerors would insensibly have fallen into the Roman way of doing things, as they did in Gaul. [Sidenote: Survival and development of Teutonic representative a.s.sembly in England]

From the start, then, we find the English nationality growing up under very different conditions from those which obtained in other parts of Europe. So far as inst.i.tutions are concerned, Teutonism was less modified in England than in the German fatherland itself, For the gradual conquest and Christianization of Germany which began with Charles the Great, and went on until in the thirteenth century the frontier had advanced eastward to the Vistula, entailed to a certain extent the romanization of Germany. For a thousand years after Charles the Great, the political head of Germany was also the political head of the Holy Roman Empire, and the civil and criminal code by which the daily life of the modern German citizen is regulated is based upon the jurisprudence of Rome. Nothing, perhaps, could ill.u.s.trate more forcibly than this sheer contrast the peculiarly Teutonic character of English civilization. Between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, when the formation of English nationality was approaching completion, it received a fresh and powerful infusion of Teutonism in the swarms of heathen Northmen or Danes who occupied the eastern coasts, struggled long for the supremacy, and gradually becoming christianized, for a moment succeeded in seizing the crown. Of the invasion of partially romanized Northmen from Normandy which followed soon after, and which has so profoundly affected English society and English speech, we need notice here but two conspicuous features. First, it increased the power of the crown and the clergy, brought all England more than ever under one law, and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It thus made England a formidable military power, while at the same time it brought her into closer relations with continental Europe than she had held since the fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal n.o.bility as the upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English thanehood into the finest middle-cla.s.s of rural gentry and yeomanry that has ever existed in any country; a point of especial interest to Americans, since it was in this stratum of society that the two most powerful streams of English migration to America--the Virginia stream and the New England stream--alike had their source. [Sidenote: Primitive Teutonic inst.i.tutions less modified in England than in Germany]

By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about a result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought about a resistless coalition between the great n.o.bles, the rural gentry and yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result was partly due to peculiar circ.u.mstances which had their origin in the Norman conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits generated by long experience of local representative a.s.semblies,--habits which made it comparatively easy for different cla.s.ses of society to find their voice and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the continent of Europe the encroaching sovereign had to contend with here and there an arrogant va.s.sal, here and there a high-spirited and rebellious town; in England, in this first great crisis of popular government, he found himself confronted by a united people. The fruits of the grand combination were _first_, the wresting of Magna Charta from King John in 1215, and _secondly_, the meeting of the first House of Commons in 1265. Four years of civil war were required to secure these n.o.ble results. The Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an event of the same order of importance as the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century and the American Revolution; and among the founders of that political freedom which is enjoyed to-day by all English-speaking people, the name of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, deserves a place in our grateful remembrance beside the names of Cromwell and Was.h.i.+ngton. Simon's great victory at Lewes in 1264 must rank with Naseby and Yorktown. The work begun by his House of Commons was the same work that has continued to go on without essential interruption down to the days of Cleveland and Gladstone. The fundamental principle of political freedom is ”no taxation without representation”; you must not take a farthing of my money without consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it. Only when this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did government begin to divorce itself from the primitive b.e.s.t.i.a.l barbaric system of tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that in the fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to men. Of all dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be commemorated than 1265; for in that year there was first a.s.serted and applied at Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle of ”no taxation without representation,” that innermost kernel of the English Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly five hundred years afterward. When we think of these dates, by the way, we realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a thousand years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord cannot be done by the listless or the slothful. So much time and so much strife by sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the boon to mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his n.o.ble life on the field of Evesham! Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the day of peril is yet past. From kings, indeed, we have no more to fear; they have come to be as spooks and bogies of the nursery. But the gravest dangers are those which present themselves in new forms, against which people's minds have not yet been fortified with traditional sentiments and phrases. The inherited predatory tendency of men to seize upon the fruits of other people's labour is still very strong, and while we have nothing more to fear from kings, we may yet have trouble enough from commercial monopolies and favoured industries, marching to the polls their hordes of bribed retainers. Well indeed has it been said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. G.o.d never meant that in this fair but treacherous world in which He has placed us we should earn our salvation without steadfast labour. [Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty]

To return to Earl Simon, we see that it was just in that wonderful thirteenth century, when the Roman idea of government might seem to have been attaining its richest and most fruitful development, that the richer and more fruitful English idea first became incarnate in the political const.i.tution of a great and rapidly growing nation. It was not long before the struggle between the Roman Idea and the English Idea, clothed in various forms, became the dominating issue in European history. We have now to observe the rise of modern nationalities, as new centres of political life, out of the various provinces of the Roman world. In the course of this development the Teutonic representative a.s.sembly is at first everywhere discernible, in some form or other, as in the Spanish Cortes or the States-General of France, but on the continent it generally dies out. Only in such nooks as Switzerland and the Netherlands does it survive. In the great nations it succ.u.mbs before the encroachments of the crown. The comparatively novel Teutonic idea of power delegated by the people to their representatives had not become deeply enough rooted in the political soil of the continent; and accordingly we find it more and more disused and at length almost forgotten, while the old and deeply rooted Roman idea of power delegated by the governing body to its lieutenants and prefects usurps its place.

Let us observe some of the most striking features of this growth of modern nationalities. [Sidenote: Conflict between Roman Idea and English Idea begins to become clearly visible in the thirteenth century]

The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in the thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial position of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the Hohenstauffen; it rapidly became more German and less European, until by and by people began to forget what the empire originally meant.

The change which came over the papacy was even more remarkable. The grandchildren of the men who had witnessed the spectacle of a king of France and a king of England humbled at the feet of Innocent III., the children of the men who had found the gigantic powers of a Frederick II.

unequal to the task of curbing the papacy, now beheld the successors of St. Peter carried away to Avignon, there to be kept for seventy years under the supervision of the kings of France. Henceforth the glory of the papacy in its political aspect was to be but the faint shadow of that with which it had shone before. This sudden change in its position showed that the medieval dream of a world-empire was pa.s.sing away, and that new powers were coming uppermost in the shape of modern nationalities with their national sovereigns. So long as these nationalities were in the weakness of their early formation, it was possible for pope and emperor to a.s.sert, and sometimes to come near maintaining, universal supremacy. But the time was now at hand when kings could a.s.sert their independence of the pope, while the emperor was fast sinking to be merely one among kings.

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