The Beginnings of New England. Fiske John

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      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 assemblies, 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 assemblies, based on the principle of the three estates, clergy, nobles, 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 assembly 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 assembly 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 assign them all would needlessly encumber our exposition. But there is one that is apparent and extremely instructive. There is sometimes a great advantage in being able to plant political institutions in a virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or perhaps metamorphosed through contact with rival institutions. In America the Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in Britain; and so far as institutions 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 assemblies]

      This illustration 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 Cumberland, 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 worshipped 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 institutions 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 township 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 assembly; all the freemen from all the townships cannot leave their homes and their daily business to attend it. Nor is it merely an assembly of notables, attended by the most important men of the neighbourhood. It is a representative assembly, attended by select men from each township. 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 СКАЧАТЬ