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Behind the legend of the flocking of all manner of "broken men" to the standard of Romulus lies the probability that the ancient "asylum" behind the Capitol brought a variety of types to the place; and as in Athens so in Rome, such variety of stock might well raise the level of faculty. But it was a faculty for aggression. Given the initial federation of Romans and Sabines, the one general force of comity or cohesion, apart from the more public cults, is the bond of mere collective antagonism to other communities. The total polity is one of war; and never in the history of civilisation has that ground of comity long averted the economic process by which social inequality deepens and widens. It is thus entirely credible that, through this economic process, which we shall trace later, the early Roman polity came to a pass at which its conquest by Etruscan "kings" was welcomed by the plebs, sinking into poverty or held in outlawry under primitive "capitalistic" exploitation. There is no clear historic record of the process; but all the better evidence goes to prove its occurrence.

This makes a temporary palliation, and in time the now privileged plebeians lean to the patrician side and status; while fresh wars with Hernicans, Gauls, Etruscans, and Samnites check class strife, and the patricians recover preponderance, passing a law to check "new men." This is immediately followed by counter measures, limiting interest to ten per cent. and putting a five per cent. tax on manumissions; but the eternal distress of debtors is renewed, and a vain attempt is made to meet it by State loans, and again by reducing interest to five per cent. . Increase of plebeian poverty again causes reactions, and after a mutiny futile laws are passed prohibiting interest altogether ; the dictator Publilius carries popular political laws checking the power of the Senate, and debtors are once more protected . After many wars, checking all domestic progress, popular distress causes a last Secession of the Plebs and new political concessions to them; but still wars multiply, till all Italy is Romanised . The now mixed warlike aristocracy of birth, wealth, and office monopolises power in the Senate; and the residual plebs gradually ceases to be a distinct moral force, its last great struggle being made under the Gracchi, to whom it gives no valid support.

From the Polonian prattle of Cicero to his son we can gather how all schemes of reconstruction were viewed by the ruling class, whether in retrospect or prospect. The slaying of Tiberius Gracchus by Scipio Nasica is a standing theme of praise; the lesson of the course of things social towards a steep sunderance of "haves" and "have-nots" is angrily evaded. Cicero knew as well as any the need for social reconstruction in Rome; and he repeatedly records the sagacity of Lucius Marcus Philippus, who had been tribune and consul in Cicero's boyhood. As consul, Philippus had resisted the attempts of M. Livius Drusus to reform the Senate and provide for the poorer citizens and the Italians; but inasmuch as he had during his tribuneship avowed the fact that there were not left two thousand men in the State who owned property, Cicero denounces the avowal as pernicious. The ideal aristocratic course was to resist all political change and slay those who attempted it--Drusus as the Gracchi before him. It was as a consummation of that policy that there exploded the so-called Marsian or Social War, in which Rome and the Italian States around her grappled and tore for years together like their ancestors of the tribal period; whereafter Marians and Sullans in turn rent Rome, till Sulla's iron dictatorship, restoring class supremacy, marked the beginning of the end of self-governing institutions, and prepared for the day of autocracy, which was not to come without another agony of long-protracted civil war. It is the supreme proof of the deadliness of the path of conquest that for most Romans the end of Roman "freedom" was a relief.

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The process was gradual, and the phenomena are at times apt to delude us. When a political machinery was set up that conduced to systematic and extending warfare in which the commonwealth was often at stake, the community had a new albeit fatal bond of cohesion, and the destructive or repulsive energies for generations found a wide field outside of the State. It is when the aristocratic Republic, succeeding finally in the long struggle with Carthage for the wealth of Sicily and Spain and the control of the Mediterranean, has further overrun Greece and pretty well exhausted the immediate fields of conquest, that the forces of repulsion again begin to work destructively within the body politic itself, and men and classes become the fools of their animosities. The wars of faction, the popular propaganda of the Gracchi, the murderous strifes of Marius and Sulla, the rivalries of Pompey and Crassus, Conservatives and Democrats, Caesar and Pompey, the pandemonium on Caesar's death, all in turn represent the renewed operation within the State of the crude energies of cohesion and strife which had been so long employed in foreign war. And the strife is progressively worse, because the materials are more complex and more corrupt. The aristocracy are more arrogant and hardened, the free farmer class has in large part disappeared, and the populace are more debauched.

The perpetual wars had multiplied slaves; and the slaves added a new and desperate element to the social problem. It was the proof of the fatal lack in Rome of vital ethical feeling--or, let us say, of social science--that this deadly iniquity was never effectually recoiled from, or even impugned as it had been, before Aristotle, among the more highly evolved of the Greeks. As wealth and luxury, pride and power accumulated, the usage of slave labour spread ever further and ate ever deeper into the population, brutalising alike the enslaved and the free.

One partial exception, it is true, must be made. In the early days of the Republic the poor soldier stood to lose his farm by his patriotism. Soon the fighters had to be paid; and from the day of Marius onwards Roman commanders perforce provided for their veterans--so often their accomplices in the violation of their country's laws and liberties. The provision was made on the one hand by donations from the loot, on the other by grants of land taken from others, it might be in Italy itself. Sulla so rewarded his sworders; the triumvirs took the land of eighteen Italian towns to divide among their legionaries. To the end the emperors had constantly to provide for their time-expired men by confiscations. Thus did empire pay for its instrument.

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The animal energies themselves, in time, are affected by domestic conditions; and when Caesar comes on the scene Rome is visibly far on the way to a state of things such as had long before appeared in older civilisations--a state of things commonly but rather loosely called degenerate, in which the animal energies are grown less robust, and the life therefore in some respects more civilised. Such a course had been run in Italy long before the rise of Rome, notably in Etruria, where, after a conquest of aborigines by a small body of invaders, who were in touch with early Greek culture, the civilisation remains at that archaic stage while Greek civilisation continues to progress. There, with a small aristocracy lording it over a people of serfs, progress of all kinds was arrested, and even the religion of the conquerors assimilated to that of the aborigines. In the Rome of Caesar we see, after much fluctuation, with a more complex and less enfeebled structure of population, the beginnings of the same fixation of classes; while, at the same time, there has been such psychological variation as can begin to give new and ostensibly higher channels to the immanent forces of union and strife. This is the social condition that, given the required military evolution, above all lends itself to imperialism or absolute monarchy; which system in turn best maintains itself by a policy of conquest, so employing the animal energies and keeping up the cohesive force of militarist pride throughout all classes. Even now, of course, in a semi-enslaved populace, as in a slave population pure and simple, there were possibilities of insurrection; and it was at length empirically politic for the emperors to give the populace its daily bread and its daily games, as well as to keep it charmed with the spectacle of conquest. The expedient of doles of food did not at once condemn itself by dangerously multiplying mouths, because, although it was only in the upper classes that men commonly refused to marry and have legitimate children, population was now restrained by the preventive checks of vice, city life, and wholesale abortion, which are so much more effective--alike against child and mother--than the random resort to infanticide, though that too had greatly increased.

And now again we see how inevitably the force of attraction correlates with the force of repulsion. The new channels of the spirit of union, being dug not by reason but by ignorance, become new channels for the reverse flow of the spirit of strife; and as sectarian zeal spreads, in the absence of openings, good or bad, for public spirit, there arise new forms of domestic hate and struggle. Crude religious fervours, excluding, or arising in lack of, the play of the saner and higher forms of thought and feeling, beget crude antipathies; and Christianity leads back to bloody strifes and seditions such as had not been seen since the fall of the Republic. There is not intellectuality enough to raise men above this new superinduced barbarism of ignorant instinct; half of the old Christendom, disintegrated like the old politics, is overrun by a more robust barbarism that adopts a simpler creed; and the new barbaric Christendom exhibits in its turn all the modes of operation of the biological forces that had been seen in the old.

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Thus far we have considered Roman evolution in terms of a moral estimate of the reactions of classes. But lest we lose sight of the principle of total causation, it is fitting to restate the process in terms of that conception, thus explaining it non-morally. We may view Rome, to begin with, as a case of the unique aggrandisement of a State in virtue of fit conditions and institutions. Thus the comparatively uncommercial situation of the early Latins, leaving them, beyond cattle-breeding and agriculture, no occupation save war for surplus energy, and no readier way of acquiring wealth; the physical collocation of a group of seven defensive hills, so close that they must be held by a federated group; the ethnic collocation of a set of tribe groups of nearly equal vigour and ardour, strengthening each other's sinews by constant struggling; the creation of the peculiar institution of the annual consulate, securing a perpetuity of motive to conquest and a continuous flow of administrative energy; the peculiar need, imposed by this very habit of all-round warfare, for accommodation between the ruling and ruled classes, and for the safeguarding of the interests of the latter by laws and franchises; the central position of Rome in Italy, enabling her to subdue it piecemeal; and finally the development by all these means of a specialist aristocracy, habitually trained to administration--all these genetic conditions combined to build up the most remarkable military empire the world has ever seen. They obtrude, it is clear, half of the explanation of the fact that the Romans rose to empire where the much more early civilised Greek cities of Italy did not.

Of course, the functions that were originally determined by external conditions came in time to be initial causes--the teeth and claws, so to speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic. The upper-class Romans became, as it were, the experts, the specialists of war and empire and administration. Until they became wholly demoralised by habitual plunder, they showed, despite their intense primeval superstition of citizenship, a degree of sagacity in the conciliation of their defeated rivals which was a main cause of their being able to hold out against Hannibal, and which contrasts markedly with the oppressive and self-defeating policy of imperial Carthage, Athens, and Sparta. Their tradition in part was still that of conquering herdsmen, not wholly turned into mere exploiters of humanity. Pitted against any monarch, they were finally invincible, because a still-growing class supplied their administrators, as the swarming provinces supplied their soldiers, and because for all alike war meant plunder and new lands, as well as glory. Pitted against a republic like Carthage, even when its armies were led by a man of genius, they were still insuppressible, inasmuch as Carthage was a community of traders employing mercenaries, where Rome was a community in arms, producing generals as Carthage produced merchants. Mithridates failed in turn, as Hannibal failed. The genius of one commander, exploiting passive material, could not avail against the accumulated faculty for organisation in the still self-renewing Roman patriciate.

Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of class egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social problem in the older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off domestic strife by colonies, by empire, and by doles, and was already near the economic stage reached only centuries later by the Roman Empire. Save for Rome, her polity might have endured on the imperialist basis for centuries; but, as it was, it was socially exhausted relatively to the task and the danger, depending as it did on hired foreign troops and coerced allies. It is idle to speak, as men still do, of Hannibal's stay in Capua as a fatal mistake. Had Hannibal taken Rome, the ultimate triumph of the Romans would have been just as certain. Their State was bound to outlast the other, so long as it maintained to any extent its old basis of a fecund rural population of free cultivators, supplying a zealous soldiery, headed by a specialised class equally dependent on conquest for all advancement. For the trading Carthaginians, war was, beyond a certain point, a mere act of self-defence; they could not have held and administered Italy had they taken it. The supreme general could last only one lifetime; the nation of warriors still yielded a succession of captains, always learning something more of war, and raising the standard of capacity as the progress of machinery widens the scope of all engineers.

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And yet the deterioration of the Roman State is visibly as sure a sequence as its progress. Nothing that men might then have proposed could save it. In Cicero's day the Senate had become a den of thieves. The spectacle of the wealth of Lucullus, taken in Napoleonic fashion from the opulent East, set governor after governor elsewhere upon a course of ruthless extortion which depraved Rome as infallibly as it devastated the subject States.

It was a riot of robbery in which no public virtue could live. To moralise on the scarcity of Catos is an ill way of spending time if it be not recognised that Catos had latterly become as impossible as eaters of acorns in the upper grades of the ever-plundering State. Cato himself is a product of the last vestiges of the stage before universal conquest; and he begins to show in his own later years all the symptoms of the period of lawless plutocracy. To yearn for a series of such figures is to ask that men shall be capable of holding doggedly by an ethic of honest barbarism while living the lives of pirates and slavers, according no moral sympathy to the larger world of aliens and slaves, yet cherishing a high public spirit for the small world of the patrician State. The man himself was a mere moral anomaly; and in Cato the Younger, dreaming to the last of a loyal republican life, but always ready at his fellow-citizens' behest to go and beat down the rights or liberties of any other State, we have the paternal bias reproduced in an incurable duality. He sought for honour among thieves, himself being one. Concerning the Catonic attitude towards the "degeneration" of Roman patrician life in the age of conquest, it has been truly said that "the policy of shameless selfishness which was pursued by the Roman Senate during this period, and reached its climax in their abominable conduct towards the unhappy, prostrate city of Carthage--the frivolous wars, tending to nothing but aggrandisement and enrichment, waged by Rome continuously after the second Punic War--destroyed the old Roman character far more effectually than Grecian art and philosophy could ever have done. Henceforth there was a fearful increase in internal corruption, immorality, bribery, an insatiable eagerness for riches, disregarding everything else and impudently setting aside laws, orders of the Senate, and legal proceedings, making war unauthorised, celebrating triumphs without permission, plundering the provinces, robbing the allies." And the ideal of conquest inspired it all.

We have only to ask ourselves, What was the administrative class to do? in order to see the fatality of its course. The State must needs go on seeking conquest, by reason alike of the lower-class and the upper-class problem. The administrators must administer, or rust. The moneyed men must have fresh plunder, fresh sources of profit. The proletaries must be either fed or set fighting, else they would clamour and revolt. And as the frontiers of resistance receded, and new war was more and more a matter of far-reaching campaigns, the large administering class at home, men of action devoid of progressive culture, ran to brutal vice and frantic sedition as inevitably as returned sailors to debauch; while the distant leader, passing years of camp life at the head of professional troops, became more and more surely a power extraneous to the Republic. When a State comes to depend for its coherence on a standing army, the head of the army inevitably becomes the head of the State. The Republic passed, as a matter of course, into the Empire, with its army of mercenaries, the senatorial class having outlived the main conditions of its health and energetic stability; the autocracy at once began to delete the remaining brains by banishing or slaying all who openly criticised it; and the Empire, even while maintaining its power by the spell of its great traditional organisation, ran through stage after stage of civic degeneration under good and bad emperors alike, simply because it had and could have no intellectual life commensurate with its physical scope. Its function involved moral atrophy. It needs the strenuous empiricism of a Mommsen to find ground for comfort in the apparition of a Caesar in a State that must needs worsen under Caesars even more profoundly than it did before its malady gave Caesar his opportunity.

Not that the Empire could of itself have died as an organism. There are no such deaths in politics; and the frequent use of the phrase testifies to a hallucination that must greatly hamper political science. The ancient generalisation to the youth, maturity, and decrepitude and death of States is true only in respect of their variations of relative military and economic strength, which follow no general rule.

Had there been no swarming and aggressive barbarians, standing to later Rome as Rome had done to Carthage--collectively exigent of moral equality as Romans had once been, and therefore conjunctly mighty as against the morally etiolated Italians--the Western Roman Empire would have gone on just as the Eastern so long did, just as China has so long done--would have subsisted with little or no progress, most factors of progress being eliminated from its sphere. It ought now to be unnecessary to point out that Christianity was no such factor, but rather the reverse, as the history of Byzantium so thoroughly proves. No Christian writer of antiquity, save perhaps Augustine in a moment of moral aspiration, shows any perception of the political causation of the decay and fall of the Empire. The forces of intellectual progress that did arise and collapse in the decline and the Dark Ages were extra-Christian heretical forces--Sabellian, Arian, Pelagian, anti-ritualistic, anti-monastic, Iconoclastic. These once deleted, Christianity was no more a progressive force among the new peoples than it was among the old; and the later European progress demonstrably came from wholly different causes--new empire, forcing partial peace; Saracen contact, bringing physics, chemistry, and mathematics; new discovery, making new commerce; recovery of pagan lore, making new speculation; printing, making books abundant; gunpowder, making arms a specialty; and the fresh competition and disruption of States, setting up fruitful differences, albeit also preparing new wars. To try to trace these causes in detail would be to attempt a complete sociological sketch of European history, a task far beyond the scope of the present work; though we shall later make certain special surveys that may suffice to illustrate the general law. In the meantime, the foregoing and other bird's-eye views of some ancient developments may illustrate those of modern times.

FOOTNOTES:

GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION

The politico-economic history of Greece has been less cleared up than that of Rome, by reason not only of the greater complexity of the problem, but of the predominance of literary specialism in Greek studies.

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The political history of ancient Greece, similarly summarised, will serve perhaps even better the purpose of illuminating later evolution. That history has served historian after historian as a means of modern polemic. The first considerable English historians of Greece, Gillies and Mitford, pointed to the evil fate of Greek democracy as a conclusive argument against countenancing democracy now; never stopping to ask whether ancient monarchies had fared any better than the democracies. And it is perfectly true that present-day democracies will tend to bad fortune just as did the ancient unless they bottom themselves more firmly and guide themselves by a deeper political science. It will not suffice that we have rejected the foundation of slavery, on which all the Greek polities rested. The strifes between the demos and the aristocracy in the Greek City-States would have arisen just as surely, though more slowly, if the demos, instead of being an upper-grade populace owning slaves, had included the whole mass of the artisan and serving class. Where population increases at anything like the natural animal rate, and infanticide is not overwhelming, poverty must either force emigration or breed strife between the "have-nots" and the "haves," barring such continuous stress of war as suffices at once to thin numbers and yield conquerors the lands of the slain losers. During some centuries the pressure was in part relieved by colonisation, as had already happened among the Phoenicians; the colonies themselves in turn, with their more rapid evolution, developing the inevitable strife of rich and poor more quickly and more violently than the mother cities. Among these, it was when that relief seemed to be exhausted that strife became most dangerous, being obscurely perceived to be a means to advancement and prosperity for individuals, as well as for the State which could extort tribute or plunder from the others. War, however, limits agriculture, so that food supply is kept proportionately small; and with peace the principle of population soon overtakes lost ground; so that, though the Greek States like others tended to gain in solidarity under the stimulus of foreign war, the pressure of poverty was always breeding fresh division.

If we take up Grecian history after the settling down of the prehistoric invasions, which complicated the ordinary process of rupture and fission, that process is seen occurring so frequently, and in so many different States, that there can be no question as to the presence of a general sociological law, not to be counteracted in any community save by a radical change of conditions. Everywhere the phenomena are broadly the same. The upper class attains to providing for its future by holding multitudes of poorer citizens in debt--the ancient adumbration of the modern developments of landlordism, national debts, and large joint-stock enterprises, which yield inheritable incomes. In early times, probably, debt led as often to adult enslavement in Greece as in Rome; but in a world of small and warring City-States, shaken by domestic division, constantly making slaves by capture and purchase, and always exposed to the risk of their insurrection, this was too dangerous a course to be long persisted in, and the creditor was led to press his mortgaged debtor in other ways. The son or the daughter was sold to pay the father's dues, or to serve in perpetual payment of interest; and the cultivator's share was ever at the lowest point. The pressure increases till the mass of debtors are harassed into insurrection, or are used by an adventurer to establish himself as despot. Sometimes, in later days, the documents of debt are publicly destroyed; sometimes the land is divided afresh. Landholders burdened with debt would vote for the former course and resist the latter; and as that was clamoured for at Athens in early times, it may be presumed that in some places it was resorted to. Sometimes even a refunding of interest would be insisted on. Naturally such means of rectification availed only for a moment; the despot stood a fair chance of being assassinated; the triumphant demos would be caballed against; the exiled nobles, with the cold rage of Theognis in their hearts, would return; and the last state of the people would be worse than the first; till again slackened vigilance on one side, and intolerable hardship on the other, renewed the cycle of violent change.

In the course of ages there was perforce some approach to equipoise; but it was presumably at the normal cost of a definite abasement of the populace; and it was by a famous stroke of statecraft that Athens was able so to solve her first great crisis as to make possible some centuries of expanding democratic life. The name of Solon is associated with an early crisis in which debt and destitution among the Athenian demos brought matters to the same point as was marked in Rome by the Secession of the Plebs. The Athenian oligarchy was very much like the Roman; and when the two sides agreed to call in Solon as arbitrator it was with a fairly general expectation that he would take the opportunity to become tyrant. The people knew him to be opposed to plutocratic tyranny; the nobles and traders, anxious for security, thought him sure to be their friend; and both sorts had small objection to such a one as "despot." But Solon, a noble of moderate means, who had gained prestige in the wars of Athens with her neighbour, Megara, and some knowledge of life as a travelling trader, brought to his problem a higher vision than that of a Roman patrician, and doubtless had a less barbarous stock to deal with. Later ages, loosely manipulating tradition, ascribed to him a variety of laws that he cannot have made; but all the records concur in crediting him with a "Seisachtheia," a "shaking-off-of-burdens," and a healing of the worst of the open wounds of the body politic. All existing mortgages were cancelled; all enslavement for debt was abolished; Athenians who had been sold into alien slavery were bought back ; and the coinage was recast--whether or not by way of reducing State payments is not clear.

While the burdened peasants and labourers were thus ostensibly given a new economic outlook on life, they were further humanised by being given a share in the common polity. To the Ecclesia or "Congregation" of the people Solon gave the power of electing the public magistrates; and by way of controlling somewhat the power of the Areopagus or Senate, he established a "pre-considering" Council or "Lower House" of Four Hundred, chosen from all save the poor class, thus giving the State "two anchors." And though the executive was in the hands of the aristocracy, subject only to popular election, the burdens of the community were soundly adjusted by a new or improved classification of citizens according to their incomes , which worked out somewhat as a graduated income-tax, whether by way of a money-rate or in respect of their share in military duties and public "liturgies," which had to be maintained by the richer citizens.

The whole reform was indeed a great achievement; and so far definitive that from that time forward Athens needed no further resort to "Seisachtheia" or to alteration of the money-standard. Solon had in fact eliminated the worst disruptive force at work in the community--the enslavement of the debtor; a reform so radical, when considered as one man's work, that to note its moral limits may seem to imply blindness to its value. Henceforth, on the lines of the democracy which he made possible, Athenians were so far homogeneous that their slaves were aliens. Beyond that point they could not rise; after Solon, as before, they were at daggers drawn with neighbouring Statelets, and to the end it remained tolerable to them to enslave the men of other Greek-speaking communities. Floated over the first reef by Solon, they never found a pilot to clear the second--the principle of group-enmity. Upon that the Hellenic civilisation finally foundered.

Even in respect of what he achieved, Solon received but a chequered recognition in his own time. The peasantry had expected him to divide the land among them; and when they found that the abolition of enslavement for debt did not mean much less stress of life, they were ready to forfeit all the political rights he had given them for some more tangible betterment.

Nonetheless, Solon's recasting of the political structure of the State determined the future evolution. As Athens grew more and more of an industrial and trading city, her people reverted more and more surely to the self-governing ideal; albeit the Solonian constitution preserved the unity of the State, keeping all the people of Attica "Athenians." The rule of Peisistratos was twice upset, and that of his house in all did not last much above fifty years. When the last member was driven out by Kleisthenes , the constitution was re-established in a more democratic form than the Solonian; all freemen of Attica became burghers of Athens; and thousands of unenfranchised citizens and emancipated slaves obtained full rights of citizenship. For better and for worse, republican Athens was made--a new thing in the ancient world, for hitherto "democratical government was a thing unknown in Greece--all Grecian governments were either oligarchical or despotic, the mass of the freemen having not yet tasted of constitutional privilege."

What followed was an evolution of the old conflicting forces on a new constitutional basis, the balance of power and prestige being on the side of the demos and its institutions, no longer on that of a land-owning and dominant aristocracy. But the strife never ceased. Kleisthenes himself found "the Athenian people excluded from everything" once more, and, "being vanquished in the party contest with his rival, took the people into partnership." The economic tendencies of all civic life reproduced the hostility again and again. One of the most remarkable of the laws of Solon was that which disfranchised any citizen who in a "stasis" or seditious feud stood aloof and took no side. He had seen the risks of such apathy in the attempt of Kylon, in his youth, to become despot of Athens; and his fears were realised when Peisistratos seized power. The law may have helped to promote public-spirited action; but in the nature of things it was hardly necessary when once democracy was established. Again and again the demos had to fight for its own hand against the cliques who sought to restore oligarchy; and apathy was not likely to be common. The perpetual generation of fresh poverty through rapid increase of population, and the inevitable resort to innovating fiscal and other measures to relieve it, sufficed to provide grounds of class strife while free Athens endured.

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Nothing can save any democratic polity from the alternatives of insane strife and imperial subjection but a vital prosperous culture, going hand in hand with a sound economy of industry. The Greek democracies in their different way split on the rock that wrecked the Roman Republic: there was no general mental development commensurate with the political problems which arose for solution, and there was no approach to a sound economics. The first proposition will doubtless be denied by those who, nourished on the literature of Greece, have come to see in its relative excellence, the more confidently because of the abiding difficulty of mastering it, the highest reach of the faculties of thought and expression. But this judgment is fundamentally astray, because of the still subsisting separation, in the literary mind, of the idea of literary merit from the idea of scientific sanity. Men themselves too often vowed to the defence and service of a mythology are slow to see that it was not for nothing that the Athenian people bottomed its culture to the last on myth and superstition. Yet a little reflection might make it clear that the community which forced Socrates to drink the hemlock for an alleged and unproved scepticism, and Anaxagoras to fly for a materialistic hypothesis concerning the sun, could have no political enlightenment adequate to the Athenian needs. We see the superstitious Athenian demos playing the part of the ignorant multitude of all ages, eager for a master, incapable of steadfast self-rule, begging that the magnificent Alcibiades, who led the sacred procession to Eleusis in despite of the Spartans near at hand, shall put down his opponents and reign at Athens as king--this after he had been exiled by the same demos on a charge of profane parody of the Eleusinian mysteries, and sacerdotally declared accursed for the offence. A primitive people may stumble along in primitive conditions by dint of elementary political methods; but a civilised people with a complex political problem can solve it only by means of a correspondingly evolved science. And the Athenian people, with their purely literary and aesthetic culture, never as a body reached even a moderate height of ethical and scientific thought, or even any such general aesthetic well-being as we are apt to credit them with. Moderns think of them, as the great song of Euripides has it, "lightly lifting their feet in the lucid air," and are indulgently ready to take by the letter the fine panegyric of the Athenian polity by Pericles, forgetting that statesmen in all ages have glorified their State, always making out the best case, always shunning discouragement for their hearers, and making little account of evil. But Burckhardt, after his long survey, decides with Boeckh that "the Hellenes were more unhappy than most men think;" and the saying holds good of their political and intellectual life above all things.

Our more idealising scholars forget that the philosophy of the philosophers was a specialism, and that the chance of hearing a tragedy of Sophocles or a comedy of Aristophanes was no training in political conduct for a people whose greatest philosopher never learned to see the fatality of slavery. On the economic side, Periclean Athens was nearly as ill founded as aristocratic Rome. Citizens often with neither professions nor studies, with no ballasting occupation for head or hand; average men paid from the unearned tribute of allied States to attend to affairs without any fundamental study of political conditions; citizens whose work was paid for in the same fashion; citizens of merely empirical education, for whom politics was but an endless web of international intrigue, and who had no higher ideal than that of the supremacy of their own State in Hellenedom or their own faction in the State--such men, it is now easy to see, were incapable of saving Athens, much less of unifying Greece. They were politically raised to a situation which only wise and deeply instructed men could fill, and they were neither wise nor deeply instructed, however superior their experience might make them relatively to still worse trained contemporaries, or to populations living under a systematic despotism.

On some of the main problems of life the majority had thought no further than their ancestors of the days of the kings. The spell of religion had kept them ignorant and superstitious. In applied ethics they had as a body made no progress: the extension of sympathy, which is moral advance, had gone no further than the extortion of civic status and power by some new classes, leaving a majority still enslaved. Above all, they could not learn the lesson of collective reciprocity; could not see the expediency of respecting in other communities the liberty they prized as their own chief good. Athens in her turn "became an imperial or despot city, governing an aggregate of dependent subjects all without their own active concurrence, and in many cases doubtless contrary to their own sense of political right.... But the Athenians committed the capital fault of taking the whole alliance into their own hands, and treating the allies purely as subjects, without seeking to attach them by any form of political incorporation or collective meeting and discussion--without taking any pains to maintain community of feeling or idea of a joint interest--without admitting any control, real or even pretended, over themselves as managers. Had they attempted to do this, it might have proved difficult to accomplish--so powerful was the force of geographical dissemination, the tendency to isolated civic life, and the repugnance to any permanent extramural obligations, in every Grecian community. But they do not appear to have ever made the attempt. Finding Athens exalted by circumstances to empire, and the allies degraded into subjects, the Athenian statesmen grasped at the exaltation as a matter of pride as well as profit. Even Pericles, the most prudent and far-sighted of them, betrayed no consciousness that an empire without the cement of some all-pervading interest or attachment, although not practically oppressive, must nevertheless have a natural tendency to become more and more unpopular, and ultimately to crumble in pieces."

In fine, a democracy, the breath of whose nostrils is justice, systematically refused to do as it would be done by; and as was Athens, so were the rest of the Greek States. When the Athenians told the protesting Melians, in effect, that might is right, they did even as Sparta and Thebes had done before them. Hence the instinct of justice was feeble for all purposes, and the domestic strife of factions was nearly as malignant and animalised as in Borgian Italy. Mother cities and their colonies fought more destructively with each other than with aliens; Athens and Syracuse, Corinth and Corcyra, strove more malignantly than did Greek with barbarian. It was their rule after a victory to slay their prisoners. Such men had not learned the secret of stable civic evolution; animal instinct was still enthroned against law and prudence. Unearned income, private and public; blindly tyrannous political aggression; ferocious domestic calumny; civic and racial disruption--these were the due phases and fruits of the handling of a great political problem by men who in the mass had no ideals of increasing knowledge, of growing tolerance, of widening justice, of fraternity. Stoic and Epicurean wisdom and righteousness came too late to save free Hellas: they were the fruits of retrospect in decadence. The very art and literature which glorified Athens were in large part the economic products of impolicy and injustice, being fostered by the ill-gotten wealth accruing to the city from her tributary allies and subject States, somewhat as the art of the great period in Italy was fed by the wealth of the Church and of the merchant princes who grew by the great river of trade. In the one case as in the other, there was no polity, no science, equal to the maintenance of the result when the originating conditions disappeared. Greek art and letters passed away because they were ill rooted. Nobly incorrupt for himself, Pericles thus fatally fostered a civic corruption that no leader's virtues could countervail, and his policy in this regard was probably the great force of frustration to his scheme for a pan-Hellenic congress at Athens, to promote free trade and intercourse.

And it is the prevailing consciencelessness, the universal lust to tyrannise, that really consummates the political dissolution. It was not the battle of Chaeronea that made an end of Greek independence. That disaster would have been retrieved like others if only the Greeks had persistently cared to retrieve it. They fell because they took the bribe of empire. Philip held it out at once by his offer of facile terms to Athens: he was planning in his own way what the pragmatic Isocrates took for the ideal Hellenic course, a Hellenic war of conquest against Persia; and it was that very war, made by Alexander, that transformed the Greeks into a mere diluvium of fortune-hunters, turning away from every ideal of civic stability and dignity to the overrunning of alien populations and the getting of alien gold. Given the process of historic determination, moral bias becomes a fatality; and when it is fixed, "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus." Republican Greece passed away because there were no more republican Greeks, but only a rabble of imperialists. Here again appears the fatality of their past: it was the sombre memory of unappeasable civil strife, of eternal inequality and envy and class attrition, that made the new promise so dazzling; any future seemed fairer than the recent past. But it was through the immediate bait to their cupidity that the Greeks were led out of their old man-making life of turbulent counterpoise, the sphere of free equals, into the new unmanning life of empire, the sphere of slaves. They were easy victims. The men of Aristotle's day had once more before their eyes, in the squalid drama of Philip's house--in the spectacle of alienated wife and son deriding and hating the laurelled conqueror and exulting in his murder--the old lesson of autocracy, its infallible dishonour, its depravation, its dissolution of the inmost ties of cordial life. But any countervailing ideal that still lived among them was overborne by the tide of triumphant conquest; and, with Aristotle and Plato in her hand, Greece turned back to the social ethic of the Heraclidae.

And when once the Circean cup of empire had been drained by the race, there was no more returning to the status of republican manhood. The new self-governing combination of cities which arose in Achaia after the disintegration of Alexander's empire might indeed conceivably have reached a high civilisation in time; but the external conditions, as summed up in the existence of Rome, were now overwhelmingly unfavourable. The opportunity for successful federalism was past. As it was, the Achaian and AEtolian Leagues were but politic unions as much for aggression as for defence, even as the Spartan reformers, Agis and Cleomenes, could never rise above the ideal of Spartan self-assertion and domination. Thus we have on one hand the Spartan kings, concerned for the well-being of the mass of the people as a means to restore Spartan pre-eminence; and on the other hand the Achaian federation of oligarchies, hating the doctrine of sympathy for the demos as much as they hated Sparta--the forces of union and strife always repelling the regimen of peace, to say nothing of fraternity. The spectacle of Cleomenes and Philopoemen at deadly odds is the dramatic summary of the situation; the ablest men of the later Greek age could not transcend their barbarian heredity.

The statement of Freeman that a federal system in Greece was "utterly impossible," is true in the bare philosophic sense that that was impossible which did not happen; but such a proposition would hold equally true of anything else that did not happen at a given time; and it merely creates confusion to affirm it of one item in particular. Pericles schemed something like a federal union; and had his practice been in accord with his ideal, it might conceivably have been at least tried. M. Fustel de Coulanges well points out how the primary religious conception of the ancient City-State expelled and negatived that of a composite State ; that is a process of rational explanation. But unless we conceive the "failures" of the past as lessons to be profited by, there can be neither a social nor a moral science. Freeman, however, actually proceeds to say that Greek federation was utterly undesirable--an extraordinary doctrine in a treatise devoted to studying and advocating federalism. On the principles thus laid down, Dr. Freeman's denunciation of Austria and France in modern times is irrational, since that which has happened in these countries is that which alone was possible; and the problem as to the desirable is hopelessly obscured.

The lesson for modern democracies from the story of the ancient is thus clear enough. To flourish, they must have peace; they must sooner or later practise a scientific and humane restraint of population--the sooner the better, as destruction of surplus population is always going on, even with emigration; they must check inequality, which is the fountain of domestic dispeace; and they must maintain a progressive and scientific culture. And the lesson is one that may now be acted on as it never could have been before. There is no longer a reserve of fecund barbarism ready to overwhelm a civilisation that ceases to be pugnacious; and the civilised States have it in their own power to submit their quarrels to bloodless arbitrament. The inveterate strifes of the Greeks belong to a past stage of civilisation, and were in any case the product of peculiar geographical conditions, Greece being physically divided, externally among islands, and internally into a multitude of glens, which in the days of City-State life and primitive means of communication preserved a state of cantonal separateness and feud, just as did the physical conditions of the Scottish Highlands in the days before effective monarchic rule.

This permanent dissociation of the City-States was only a more intractable form of the primary divisions of the districts. Thus in Attica itself the divisions of party largely followed the localities: "There were as many parties among them as there were different tracts of land in their country"--the mountain-dwellers being democratic, while the plain-dwellers were for an oligarchy, and the coast-dwellers sought a mixed government. See the question further discussed below, ch. iv, ? 2 .

Indeed, the fulness of the autonomous life attained by the separate cities was a psychological hindrance to their political union, given the primary geographical sunderance. Thus we have in the old Amphictyonic councils the evidence of a measure of peaceful political attraction among the tribes before the cities were developed; yet on those ancient beginnings there was no political advance till the rise of formal federalism in the AEtolian and Achaian Leagues after the death of Alexander. And that federalism was not ethically higher than the spirit of the ancient Amphictyonic oath, preserved by AEschines. The balance of the forces of separateness and political wisdom is to be conceived in terms of a given degree of culture relatively to a given set of physical conditions. Happily the deadlock in question no longer subsists for civilised States.

Again, there is now possible a scientific control of population, without infanticide, without vice, without abortion. There has been attained a degree of democratic stability and enlightenment which given peace, permits of a secure gradual extension of the principle of equality by sound machinery. And there is now accumulated a treasury of seminal knowledge which makes possible an endless intellectual progress, the great antiseptic of political decay, provided only that the foregoing conditions are secured. This is, in brief, the programme of progressive democracy.

FOOTNOTES:

THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

? 1

The word "progressive," however, raises one of the most complex issues in sociology. It would be needless to point out, were it not well to anticipate objection, that the foregoing summaries are not offered as a complete theory of progress even as commonly conceived, much less as sufficing to dismiss the dispute as to what progress is, or what basis there is for the modern conceptions bound up with the word. Our generalisations proceed on the assumption--not of course that human affairs must constantly improve in virtue of some cosmic law, but--that by most men of any education a certain advance in range of knowledge, of reflection, of skill, of civic amenity, of general comfort, is held to be attainable and desirable; that such advances have clearly taken place in former periods; and that the due study of these periods and of present conditions may lead to a further and indefinitely prolonged advance. Conceiving progress broadly as occurring by way of rise in the quantity and the quality of pleasurable and intelligent life, we beg the question, for the purposes of this inquiry, as against those who may regard such a tendency with aversion, and those who may deny that such increase ever takes place. Taking as proved the evolution of mankind from lower forms of animal life, we conceive such evolution as immeasurably slow in the period before the attainment of agriculture, which may serve as the stage at which what we term "civilisation" begins. Only with agriculture begins the "civitas," as distinct from the horde or tribe. Thenceforth all advance in arts and ethics, no less than in political co-ordination, counts as "civilisation." The problem is, how to diagnose advance.

Buckle drew his capital distinction, so constantly ignored by his critics, between "European" and "non-European" civilisations. This broadly holds good, but is a historical rather than a sociological proposition. The process of causation is one of life conditions; and the first great steps in the higher Greek civilisation were made in Asia Minor, in contact with Asiatic life, even as the earlier civilisations, such as the "Minoan" of Crete, now being traced through recovered remains, grew up in contact with both Egypt and the East. The distinction here made between "primary" and "secondary" civilisations is of course merely relative, applying as it does only to the historic period. We can but mark off the known civilisations as standing in certain relations one to another. Thus the Roman civilisation was in reality complex before the conquest of Greece, inasmuch as it had undergone Italo-Greek and Etruscan influences representing a then ancient culture. But the Roman militarist system left the Roman civilisation in itself unprogressive, and prevented it from being durably fertilised by the Greek.

Proceeding from general laws to particular cases, we may roughly say that:--

Primary civilisations arise in regions specially favourable to the regular production of abundant food, and lying inland, so as not to offer constant temptation to piratical raids.

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