The Beginnings of New England. Fiske John

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ