Book: The Beginnings of New England

J >> John Fiske >> The Beginnings of New England




If we look back for a moment to the primitive stages of society, we may
picture to ourselves the surface of the earth sparsely and scantily
covered with wandering tribes of savages, rude in morals and manners,
narrow and monotonous in experience, sustaining life very much as lower
animals sustain it, by gathering wild fruits or slaying wild game, and
waging chronic warfare alike with powerful beasts and with rival tribes
of men. [Sidenote: Political history is the history of nation-making]

In the widest sense the subject of political history is the description
of the processes by which, under favourable circumstances, innumerable
such primitive tribes have become welded together into mighty nations,
with elevated standards of morals and manners, with wide and varied
experience, sustaining life and ministering to human happiness by
elaborate arts and sciences, and putting a curb upon warfare by limiting
its scope, diminishing its cruelty, and interrupting it by intervals of
peace. The story, as laid before us in the records of three thousand
years, is fascinating and absorbing in its human interest for those who
content themselves with the study of its countless personal incidents,
and neglect its profound philosophical lessons. But for those who study
it in the scientific spirit, the human interest of its details becomes
still more intensely fascinating and absorbing. Battles and coronations,
poems and inventions, migrations and martyrdoms, acquire new meanings
and awaken new emotions as we begin to discern their bearings upon the
solemn work of ages that is slowly winning for humanity a richer and
more perfect life. By such meditation upon men's thoughts and deeds is
the understanding purified, till we become better able to comprehend our
relations to the world and the duty that lies upon each of us to shape
his conduct rightly.

In the welding together of primitive shifting tribes into stable and
powerful nations, we can seem to discern three different methods that
have been followed at different times and places, with widely different
results. In all cases the fusion has been effected by war, but it has
gone on in three broadly contrasted ways. The first of these methods,
which has been followed from time immemorial in the Oriental world, may
be roughly described as _conquest without incorporation._ A tribe grows
to national dimensions by conquering and annexing its neighbours,
without admitting them to a share in its political life. Probably there
is always at first some incorporation, or even perhaps some crude germ
of federative alliance; but this goes very little way,--only far enough
to fuse together a few closely related tribes, agreeing in speech and
habits, into a single great tribe that can overwhelm its neighbours. In
early society this sort of incorporation cannot go far without being
stopped by some impassable barrier of language or religion. After
reaching that point, the conquering tribe simply annexes its neighbours
and makes them its slaves. It becomes a superior caste, ruling over
vanquished peoples, whom it oppresses with frightful cruelty, while
living on the fruits of their toil in what has been aptly termed
Oriental luxury. Such has been the origin of many eastern despotisms, in
the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, and elsewhere. Such a political
structure admits of a very considerable development of material
civilization, in which gorgeous palaces and artistic temples may be
built, and perhaps even literature and scholarship rewarded, with money
wrung from millions of toiling wretches. There is that sort of brutal
strength in it, that it may endure for many long ages, until it comes
into collision with some higher civilization. Then it is likely to end
in sudden collapse, because the fighting quality of the people has
been destroyed. Populations that have lived for centuries in fear of
impalement or crucifixion, and have known no other destination for
the products of their labour than the clutches of the omnipresent
tax-gatherer, are not likely to furnish good soldiers. A handful of
freemen will scatter them like sheep, as the Greeks did twenty-three
centuries ago at Kynaxa, as the English did the other day at Tel
el-Kebir. On the other hand, where the manliness of the vanquished
people is not crushed, the sway of the conquerors who cannot enter into
political union with them is likely to be cast off, as in the case of
the Moors in Spain. There was a civilization in many respects admirable.
It was eminent for industry, science, art, and poetry; its annals are
full of romantic interest; it was in some respects superior to the
Christian system which supplanted it; in many ways it contributed
largely to the progress of the human race; and it was free from some
of the worst vices of Oriental civilizations. Yet because of the
fundamental defect that between the Christian Spaniard and his
Mussulman conqueror there could be no political fusion, this brilliant
civilization was doomed. During eight centuries of more or less
extensive rule in the Spanish peninsula, the Moor was from first to last
an alien, just as after four centuries the Turk is still an alien in
the Balkan peninsula. The natural result was a struggle that lasted
age after age till it ended in the utter extermination of one of the
parties, and left behind it a legacy of hatred and persecution that has
made the history of modern Spain a dismal record of shame and disaster.
[Sidenote: The Oriental method of nation-making]

In this first method of nation-making, then, which we may call the
Oriental method, one now sees but little to commend. It was better than
savagery, and for a long time no more efficient method was possible,
but the leading peoples of the world have long since outgrown it; and
although the resulting form of political government is the oldest we
know and is not yet extinct, it nevertheless has not the elements
of permanence. Sooner or later it will disappear, as savagery is
disappearing, as the rudest types of inchoate human society have
disappeared.

The second method by which nations have been made may be called
the Roman method; and we may briefly describe it as _conquest with
incorporation, but without representation_. The secret of Rome's
wonderful strength lay in the fact that she incorporated the vanquished
peoples into her own body politic. In the early time there was a fusion
of tribes going on in Latium, which, if it had gone no further, would
have been similar to the early fusion of Ionic tribes in Attika or of
Iranian tribes in Media. But whereas everywhere else this political
fusion soon stopped, in the Roman world it went on. One after another
Italian tribes and Italian towns were not merely overcome but admitted
to a share in the political rights and privileges of the victors. By the
time this had gone on until the whole Italian peninsula was consolidated
under the headship of Rome, the result was a power incomparably greater
than any other that the world had yet seen. Never before had so many
people been brought under one government without making slaves of most
of them. Liberty had existed before, whether in barbaric tribes or
in Greek cities. Union had existed before, in Assyrian or Persian
despotisms. Now liberty and union were for the first time joined
together, with consequences enduring and stupendous. The whole
Mediterranean world was brought under one government; ancient barriers
of religion, speech, and custom were overthrown in every direction; and
innumerable barbarian tribes, from the Alps to the wilds of northern
Britain, from the Bay of Biscay to the Carpathian mountains, were more
or less completely transformed into Roman citizens, protected by Roman
law, and sharing in the material and spiritual benefits of Roman
civilization. Gradually the whole vast structure became permeated by
Hellenic and Jewish thought, and thus were laid the lasting foundations
of modern society, of a common Christendom, furnished with a common
stock of ideas concerning man's relation to God and the world, and
acknowledging a common standard of right and wrong. This was a
prodigious work, which raised human life to a much higher plane than
that which it had formerly occupied, and endless gratitude is due to the
thousands of steadfast men who in one way or another devoted their lives
to its accomplishment. [Sidenote: The Roman method of nation-making]

This Roman method of nation-making had nevertheless its fatal
shortcomings, and it was only very slowly, moreover, that it wrought
out its own best results. It was but gradually that the rights and
privileges of Roman citizenship were extended over the whole Roman
world, and in the mean time there were numerous instances where
conquered provinces seemed destined to no better fate than had awaited
the victims of Egyptian or Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty
of Caius Verres could hardly have been outdone by the worst of Persian
satraps; but there was a difference. A moral sense and political sense
had been awakened which could see both the wickedness and the folly of
such conduct. The voice of a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against
the oppressor, who was brought to trial and exiled for deeds which under
the Oriental system, from the days of Artaxerxes to those of the Grand
Turk, would scarcely have called forth a reproving word. It was by slow
degrees that the Roman came to understand the virtues of his own method,
and learned to apply it consistently until the people of all parts of
the empire were, in theory at least, equal before the law. In theory, I
say, for in point of fact there was enough of viciousness in the Roman
system to prevent it from achieving permanent success. Historians have
been fond of showing how the vitality of the whole system was impaired
by wholesale slave-labour, by the false political economy which taxes
all for the benefit of a few, by the debauching view of civil office
which regards it as private perquisite and not as public trust,
and--worst of all, perhaps--by the communistic practice of feeding an
idle proletariat out of the imperial treasury. The names of these deadly
social evils are not unfamiliar to American ears. Even of the last we
have heard ominous whispers in the shape of bills to promote mendicancy
under the specious guise of fostering education or rewarding military
services. And is it not a striking illustration of the slowness with
which mankind learns the plainest rudiments of wisdom and of justice,
that only in the full light of the nineteenth century, and at the cost
of a terrible war, should the most intelligent people on earth have got
rid of a system of labour devised in the crudest ages of antiquity and
fraught with misery to the employed, degradation to the employers, and
loss to everybody? [Sidenote: Its slow development]

These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost
everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact
that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no
adequate means of overcoming them. Unless helped by something supplied
from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these
evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped. What was needed
was the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local
self-government. The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had
been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and
crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been
applied. It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union,
but as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice
Liberty to Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and
enlarging its functions more and more, until by and by the political
life of the several parts had so far died away that, under the pressure
of attack from without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political
system had to be slowly and painfully reconstructed.

Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to
sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount
necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to
the essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making.
It lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew
nothing of representative assemblies. [Sidenote: It knew nothing of
representation]

Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an
aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies were
primary assemblies,--town-meetings. There was no notion of such a thing
as political power delegated by the people to representatives who were
to wield it away from home and out of sight of their constituents. The
Roman's only notion of delegated power was that of authority delegated
by the government to its generals and prefects who discharged at a
distance its military and civil functions. When, therefore, the Roman
popular government, originally adapted to a single city, had come
to extend itself over a large part of the world, it lacked the one
institution by means of which government could be carried on over
so vast an area without degenerating into despotism. [Sidenote: And
therefore ended in despotism]

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. Nobody would have known how to use it. You cannot invent
an institution 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 institution 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 astonishing 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
gratitude 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 noblest 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 classical 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 noble 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 Assisi. 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 institutions, 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 Assyria 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 Washington, 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 crushing 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 assumptions 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.

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