(Qatnell Intneraitg BIthtata 
 
 Stifatu, New ^ark 
 
Cornell University Library 
 D 7.F85L4 
 
 Lectures to American audences / 
 
 3 1924 028 068 967 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028068967 
 
LECTURES 
 
 AMERICAN AUDIENCES. 
 
 ^•r'"""^ 
 
 EDWARD A.JFREEMAN, D. C.L., LL.D., 
 
 Honorary Fellow op Trinity College, Oxford. 
 
 I. THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE 
 
 "^ HOMES. 
 
 II. THE PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF GENERAL 
 
 EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 PORTER & COATES. 
 
Copyright, 
 
 By PORTER & COATES, 
 
 1882. 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 These two series of Lectures were read in several 
 American cities in the course of the autumn and winter 
 of 1881-1882. The first course was read before the 
 Lowell Institute at Boston and the Peabody Institute 
 at Baltimore, and, in a condensed shape, at New York. 
 The second course was read at Ithaca, New Haven, and 
 Philadelphia, and some parts of the last lecture were 
 read at several other places. Each course was meant to 
 have a distinct character of its own. The first was meant 
 to be of a more popular kind; the second, intended 
 originally for the members of Cornell University, was 
 meant to have more of an academic character. But I 
 was both surprised and pleased to find it appreciated 
 as it was by large and more general audiences, both at 
 Ithaca and elsewhere. 
 
 Each course has a distinct subject of its own, and 
 forms a whole by itself But as the two subjects to a 
 certain extent overlap, some matters will be found dealt 
 with in both. Still, as they come in naturally in both 
 
iv PREFACE. 
 
 courses, and as they are looked at from different points 
 and dealt with on different scales, I saw no reason to cut 
 out any part of either course because some of the same 
 general thoughts and statements were to be found in the 
 other also. 
 
 In reading the lectures in different places, some mat- 
 ter of a specially local character was necessarily left 
 out and put in at each. Things for instance which had 
 a special fitness at Boston had no special fitness at Bal- 
 timore. In revising the lectures for the press, I have 
 for the most part kept such local references as belonged 
 specially to New England. In the first series there are 
 naturally a good many of these, and that from two 
 causes. The lectures were written first of all for de- 
 livery at Boston ; and it will be further easy to see that, 
 for the particular purpose which I had in hand, the name, 
 the institutions, and the history of New England supplied 
 me with much that specially suited my object. 
 
 In some parts of the second course, especially in the 
 last lecture, I have got upon questions of modern poli- 
 tics, though not on the immediate politics either of the 
 United States or of Great Britain. The last lecture, it 
 will be seen, is of unusual length. The whole of it was 
 not delivered in any one place; but parts of it were 
 read and spoken in different places. It was first written 
 in November 1881, when the resistance of the South- 
 Dalmatian highlands to Austrian oppression had not very 
 
PREFACE. V 
 
 long begun. This struggle, it must be remembered, 
 began before the revolt in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 
 which arose out of it, and which drew to itself much 
 more general attention. Of the later stages of the strug- 
 gle it is very hard to say anything. For the Austrian 
 government, by arresting and expelling Mr. Evans and 
 forbidding Mr. Stillman to enter the country, has thor- 
 oughly succeeded in its attempt to hinder all truthful 
 reports from reaching any Western land. But there is, 
 I believe, no doubt that the Austrian troops have occu- 
 pied Crivoscia, but that, in so doing, they have simply 
 occupied a desert. The whole population, men, women, 
 and children, rather than submit to foreign tyranny, have 
 left their homes, and here taken shelter with their free 
 fellow-countrymen in Montenegro. Francis Joseph now 
 reigns in Crivoscia as Xerxes once reigned in Athens. 
 May the possession of the one despot be as short-lived 
 as that of the other. 
 
 The United States, as far as my experience goes, con- 
 tain no native partisan of either Turk or Austrian. That 
 such is the case forms one of the many ties which bind 
 me to a land to my sojourn in which I shall always look 
 back as one of the brightest times of my life. I cannot 
 let this little book go forth from an American press 
 without expressing my deep-felt thanks for the kindness 
 which I received wherever I went, from New York to 
 St. Louis. But where every memory is pleasant, I can- 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 not help picking out a few memories which are the 
 pleasantest of all. While giving my best thanks to my 
 American friends everywhere, I cannot help adding a 
 small special tribute to my friends at Ithaca and at New 
 Haven. 
 
 SOMERLEAZE, WeLLS, SOMERSET, 
 
 July nth, 1882. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE 
 HOMES. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PACK 
 
 Old, Middle, and New England , 7 
 
 LECTURE IL 
 The English Name ." 38 
 
 LECTURE in. 
 The First Voyage and the Second 68 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 The Oldest England and the Second 99 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 The English in their Second Home 135 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 The Second Voyage and the Third Home 169 
 
 vii 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 II. THE PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF GENE- 
 RAL EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Causes and their Effects 205 
 
 LECTURE n. 
 The Democratic City 238 
 
 LECTURE in. 
 The Aristocratic City 277 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 The Ruling City and its Empire 311 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 The Elder and the Newer England 358 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 Rome Transplanted 400 
 
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 
 
 ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 
 
 IN 
 
 ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 mii, MiatiK mti i^eto 3Bttslant(. 
 
 The subject which I have chosen for the course of lec- 
 tures which I am now called upon to give before you is 
 not a new theme in my hands. It may almost seem rash 
 on my part to choose for my first audience beyond the 
 Ocean a subject on which my pen and my voice have so 
 often been busy in my own hemisphere. Can I find any- 
 thing new to say about the English people, their origin, 
 their later history, unless I seek to say something new by 
 unsaying and refuting all that I have ever said before ? 
 Now I am certainly not going to seek for newness by 
 that course. I do not suppose that I shall, in the course 
 of these six lectures, say many things before you here 
 in Boston which I have not said, and often said, either be- 
 fore some gathering in my own island or in some of the 
 many writings with which I have cumbered the earth. But 
 change of place will, I trust, bring somewhat of newness 
 with it. The same subject, dealt with on a new side of 
 
 7 
 
8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 Ocean, will be in some sort a new subject. The things 
 and persons spoken of may be the same, but they will 
 put on new relations and proportions. We may speak 
 of no fresh things/of no fresh persons — ^we may bring in 
 no names that we have not often heard before ; but we 
 may have to speak of some of them in such a way that 
 the last may become first and the first last. The side of 
 things which is most prominent when they are looked at 
 from European soil may not always be the most promi- 
 nent when they are looked at from American soil. When 
 two great societies of men have for many ages a common 
 history, and when at a certain point the common history 
 parts into two distinct histories, both should alike look 
 back to the common possession, both should alike cleave 
 to the common possession, both should feel that it is a 
 common possession and not the exclusive right of either. 
 Yet the later separation, the new thoughts, the new feel- 
 ings, which cannot fail to follow on that separation, 
 are sure to cause the older and common possession 
 to be looked on with somewhat different eyes by those 
 who, from the point of parting have walked in one direc- 
 tion, and by those who have walked in another. 
 
 I stand before you this day cis a member of one great 
 community, addressing members of another great com- 
 munity, both of which communities have an equal right 
 in such a common possession as I speak of And that 
 common possession is no mean one. It is no other than 
 the history, the tongue, the laws, the freedom, of the 
 English folk, from the first moment when history or 
 legend gives us any glimpses of the English folk in any 
 of the homes which they have made their own. In these 
 later times those homes have become many ; but in the 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 9 
 
 long course of the history with which we have to deal 
 there are some, there are three, which stand forth con- 
 spicuous above all others. The title which I have chosen 
 for our subject of these evenings is " The English People 
 in its Three Homes." I trust that there is no one here 
 who will not take my words as they are meant to be 
 taken — I trust that there is no one who will not welcome 
 me as I ask to be welcomed — when I say that of these 
 three homes I am now standing in the latest and the 
 vastest. I have more than once said, sportively yet in 
 all seriousness, that what I have to speak of is Old, 
 Middle, and New England. That, here in Boston, I am 
 standing on the soil of New England I need not go about 
 to prove. But I would ask, even in Boston, to be allowed 
 to use that familiar name in a somewhat wider sense than 
 that which it technically bears. I think that the New Eng- 
 land of the seventeenth century, the New England of the 
 eighteenth, can afford to allow me, for the nonce at least, 
 to extend its name to all the independent English-speak- 
 ing lands on its own side of Ocean. The New England 
 of which I have to speak — of which I have to speak in 
 its relations to two older Englands — can acknowledge no 
 bounds narrower than those of the United States of 
 America. 
 
 Now New England, by its very name, implies an older 
 England. And the older England which that name im- 
 plies is the England which is my own home and birth- 
 place. And it is of the ties which bind this newer 
 England to that older one, that older England to this 
 newer one, that I have now mainly to speak before you. 
 I have to speak of all things, past and present, which 
 can set forth those two great communities, older and 
 younger, as alike members of one yet greater whole. 
 
lO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 I have to set forth whatever can serve to draw together 
 the two communities and those who form them — what- 
 ever can serve to draw the greater child to its elder 
 parent, the elder parent to its greater child. I have to 
 enlarge on all that can draw together those whom geo- 
 graphical position, whom historical destiny, has parted 
 asunder into two distinct political societies, but who 
 ought still to deem themselves one, as brethren in a high- 
 er brotherhood, born of one ancient stock, speaking one 
 ancient tongue, sharers under different forms in one an- 
 cient freedom — a freedom that was struggled for and won 
 by the common forefathers of both. All this is part of 
 my subject, its highest and worthiest part. But it is not 
 the whole of my subject ; it is not, in historical order, its 
 earliest part. If I ask you in this newer England to look 
 back to the older, I have to ask that older England in its 
 turn to look back in the like sort. If I call on you here 
 in this newer England to look to the rock from whence 
 you were hewn and to the hole of the pit whence you 
 were digged, I have to preach the same lesson to the men 
 of my own older England also. If I ask you to look to 
 the land which is truly your motherland, I must ask both 
 you and the men of the motherland herself to look to 
 the land which is truly the motherland of the mother. 
 Mark that, while I have spoken of your land as the 
 New England, I have not ventured to speak of my 
 own land as the Old. I have spoken of an older and 
 a newer England, but I have not ventured to speak of 
 that older England as Old England. For the true his- 
 tory of our race, the true history of our own branch 
 of that race, will never be fully taken in unless we ever 
 bear in mind that, beyond that England which with most 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. II 
 
 of US passes for Old England, there is an older England 
 still. 
 
 You will bear with me while I speak of your newer 
 England as the child and colony of my older England, 
 if I speak of my own older England as itself the child 
 and colony of that oldest England- of all. That oldest 
 England sent forth her sons to the shores of the isle of 
 Britain, as in after-times the isle of Britain sent forth her 
 sons to the vaster mainland of America. In the general 
 history of our race, as part of the general history of the 
 world, while I call on you — not only here in Massachu- 
 setts and her immediate neighbours, but through the 
 whole length and breadth of your vast Union — to look 
 on yourselves as men of a New England, I cannot claim 
 the name of Old England for the land which I ask you 
 to look on eis a motherland and to look on her sons as 
 brethren. The island from which I come, the island from 
 which your fathers came, is, in the general history of our 
 folk, not Old England, but only Middle England. For 
 Old England in the strictest sense, for the oldest Eng- 
 land of all, for the first land in which we know that men 
 bore the English name and spoke the English tongue, 
 you must, when you have crossed the Ocean to come to 
 us, again cross that narrower arm of Ocean which parts 
 the great Teutonic island from the older Teutonic main- 
 land. In the true historic map of the English folk, be- 
 tween the Old England on the mainland of Europe and 
 the New England on the mainland of America, lies that 
 England which is the child of the one, the parent of the 
 other, the Middle England in the isle of Britain. You 
 are well pleased, and rightly pleased, to tell the tale how 
 your fathers came from the isle of Britain to plant the 
 
12 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 first germs of the mighty fabric of this New England 
 on American soil. And so we of the Middle England 
 must not forget, and along with us you of the New 
 England must not forget either, how our forefathers, 
 your remoter forefathers, came in the like sort from the 
 continent of Europe, from the oldest England of all, to 
 plant the germs of the Middle England, and thereby of 
 the New England also, upon the conquered shores of 
 Britain. We must go back together to those early days 
 of our race when 
 
 " From the east hither 
 Angles and Saxons 
 Up became. 
 Over broad sea 
 Britain they sought." 
 
 And we must remember that in crossing the sea, in 
 seeking Britain, if they founded the great settlement of 
 the English folk in our European island, they founded 
 also, as a germ that was to bear fruit after many 
 ages, this vaster settlement of the English folk on your 
 American mainland. In founding the kingdom of Eng- 
 land and all that that name implies, they founded, not in 
 a figure, but as a remote father may be said to found his 
 remote children, the confederation of the United States 
 of America and all that that name implies. 
 
 I can well believe that I have just now said some things 
 which may to some sound startling; I have indeed purpose- 
 ly thrown some things into a somewhat startling shape. I 
 may have said some things already — I shall certainly 
 say some things as I go on — which to some minds may 
 sound doubtful, and which may seem capable of being 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 1 3 
 
 met by argument. Be it so ; any old arguments I think 
 I can answer ; to any new arguments I shall be ready to 
 listen. But let us not have them yet. I shall come to 
 the stage of disputation later. I ask leave, first of all, to 
 tell my tale — if it be so, to set forth my paradox — in my 
 own way, and to keep clear of disputings, and even of 
 arguments, on this our first night of meeting. I trust 
 that I have already made plain what I mean by my par- 
 able of Old, Middle, and New England ; I trust that I 
 have pointed out beyond chance of mistake where the 
 three homes of the English people are to be looked for. 
 We have found one England on the mainland of Europe, 
 another in the isle of Britain, a third on the mainland 
 of America. Let me now go on for the rest of this first 
 lecture to work out this general sketch in somewhat 
 more of detail. And I will ask leave to do this some- 
 what positively, somewhat dogmatically. I will ask leave 
 to state my own view with some confidence, taking for 
 the present very little heed to the views of others. 
 Let me say my own say to-night on this my first ap- 
 pearing before a gathering here on the soil of the 
 third England. In other lectures I may come to such 
 difficulties, such objections, as I have as yet heard 
 of If any fresh difficulties or objections should be 
 brought to my knowledge before I next meet you 
 here, it may be hard to grapple with them at such 
 short notice, but I will at least do my best. 
 
 Let us then, before we go into any details, dis- 
 puted or undisputed, take a wide and general view of 
 the history of the English people. I say the Eng- 
 lish people, because so to speak best sets forth what 
 
14 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 I have in my own mind. I cannot, with any accuracy, 
 speak of the English race; that would be claiming 
 for ourselves too great a place among the nations 
 of the earth. The English people, in its three 
 homes, is, after all, but one member of a greater fam- 
 ily ; we are not a race, but only part of a race. Wider 
 than the bond which binds together all the speakers of 
 the English tongue, narrower than the bond which binds 
 together all the nations of Aryan Christendom, comes 
 the bond which binds, or should bind, together all the 
 many branches of the Teutonic race. Of that race we 
 are one great division, or rather, in truth, we are a 
 division of a division. On the other hand, I could not, 
 for my present purpose, speak, with any accuracy, of 
 the English nation. For the word nation has in practice 
 taken to itself a meaning which is not implied in the 
 word itself, a meaning partly local, partly political. It 
 commonly means that those to whom it is applied live 
 under one common government; indeed it almost 
 seems to imply that they occupy a continuous terri- 
 tory, or, at all events, a territory whose parts do not lie 
 far asunder. I think we never apply the word nation to 
 people who are under different governments, unless we 
 mean to imply, or at least to suggest, that they ought to 
 be under one government. If I speak, as I often have 
 spoken, of the Greek, the Servian, or the Bulgarian 
 nation as divided among several governments, I have 
 always meant to imply that that division is a wrongful 
 thing, and that the whole of each of those nations ought 
 to be united under one common national government. 
 Now assuredly there is nothing further from the 
 thoughts of any sane man on either side of Ocean 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 1 5 
 
 than to wish to see all the speakers of the English 
 tongue united under one common government. Some 
 perhaps might even wish, without losing the character 
 of sane persons, to see the number of independent 
 English-speaking governments in the world greater 
 than it now is. And the geographical position of the 
 countless speakers of the English tongue is such that 
 each creation of a fresh English-speaking government 
 would be the creation of a fresh English-speaking na- 
 tion. As there is now one independent English-speak- 
 ing nation in Britain, another independent English- 
 speaking nation in America, I know not why there 
 should not be a third such in Australia, perhaps even 
 a fourth in Africa. I must therefore speak of you, 
 citizens of the United States, as members of an Eng- 
 lish nation, as members of one English nation, while 
 I am a member of another. I cannot use the word 
 nation so as to take us both in. It implies a political 
 and a local connexion which cannot exist between two 
 independent political societies with the Ocean rolling 
 between them. But, if we do not belong to the same 
 nation, I do hold that we belong to the same people, or 
 rather, to use a word of our own tongue, to the same 
 folk. By that I mean that we come of the same stock, 
 that we speak the same tongue, that we have a long 
 common history and a crowd of common memories. I 
 mean, in short, that we are one folk in all things except 
 that local and political separation which the hand of 
 nature and the facts of history have wrought. And 
 these ties of blood and speech and memory surely rise 
 above the lesser facts of local and political separation to 
 make us feel ourselves in the highest sense one people. 
 
1 6 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 We dwell in different quarters of the globe, but we are 
 surely more to one another than dwellers in the same 
 quarter of the globe who do not come of the com- 
 mon stock, who do not speak the common tongue. 
 Let me say that the words "foreign" and "foreigner" 
 are words which should never be spoken between 
 men of the English folk in Britain and men of 
 the English folk in America. It grates a little on my 
 ear when I see in some of your newspapers news from 
 the British England set down among " news from foreign 
 lands." Yet this may perhaps be borne ; the mere land 
 may in a sense be called "foreign." It grated much 
 more on my ear when, in an American edition of a lit- 
 tle book, not of my own writing, but one in which I 
 have a kind of fatherly interest, I saw its author spoken 
 of as "a foreign writer." This, I must say, was too 
 much. It grated even more on my ears when I heard 
 myself, in a speech otherwise highly honourable to me, 
 spoken of as one of a " foreign nationality." But I was 
 relieved and comforted by the hearty zeal with which 
 the rest of the company accepted my strong disclaimers 
 of anything foreign about me, and welcomed me as 
 one of their own kin. " Foreign," " foreigner," " foreign 
 nationality ;" away with such forms of words ! You are 
 not foreigners ; we do not look on you as foreigners, 
 when you come to visit the older England in Britain. 
 And I am not a foreigner, I will not deem myself a fo- 
 reigner, I will not bear that you should look on me as a 
 foreigner, when I come to visit this newer England in 
 America. Here on your soil I am not indeed in mine 
 own home, but I am none the less among mine own 
 folk. I am among men of mine own blood and mine 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 1 7 
 
 own tongue, sharers in all that a man of either England 
 deems it his pride and happiness to share in. How can 
 we be strangers and foreigners to one another, how can 
 we be other than kinsfolk and brethren of the same 
 hearth, when we think that your forefathers and mine 
 may have sailed together from the oldest England of 
 all in the keels of Hengest or of Cerdic — that they may 
 have lurked together with Alfred in the marshes of 
 Athelney — ^that they may have stood side by side in the 
 thick shield-wall on the hill of Senlac — that they may 
 have marched together as brethren to live and die for 
 English freedom alike on the field of overthrow at 
 Evesham and on the field of victory at Naseby ? 
 
 I surely need not remind you that the whole heritage 
 of the past, the history, the memories, the illustrious 
 names, which belong to the earlier days of the English 
 folk in Britain, are yours as well as ours. They are 
 in the stricter sense your own. The men who piled 
 up the mighty fabric of English law and English free- 
 dom were your fathers, your brethren, no less than ours. 
 In the long line of hero-kings who built up the king- 
 dom of England you have as full a share as we have ; 
 in building up the kingdom of England they were build- 
 ing up the commonwealth of America. If yours is the 
 king who lurked in Athelney, yours too is the king who 
 won the fight of Brunanburh. Yours are the king who 
 waged the year of battles with the Dane and the king 
 who waged the day of battle with the Norman. And if 
 the kings are yours as well as ours, so are the men who 
 curbed the power of kings. Yours are the men who wrung 
 the Great Charter from the kingly rebel ; yours are 
 
1 8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 the men who dictated the Provisions of Oxford and the 
 men who gathered round the victor of Poitiers on the 
 nobler field of the Good Parliament. Your share is 
 alike with ours in every blow struck on behalf of free- 
 dom, from the day of Lewes to the day of Marston. 
 And if we boast that we won to ourselves the men of 
 other lands, if we changed the Dane and the Norman 
 into Englishmen as true as if their forefathers had first 
 seen the shores of Britain from the keels of Hengest, 
 the work was yours as well as ours. The strangers 
 whom we made specially our own, they whose names we 
 rank' alongside of the noblest of our native worthies, 
 the men who came from the beech-clad isles of Den- 
 mark, from the deep Alpine valley of Aosta, from the 
 Strong Mount that guarded the land of France against 
 the Norman, to become Englishmen on English soil, 
 Cnut the King, Anselm the Bishop, Simon the Earl, — 
 they are yours by the same law of adoption that makes 
 them ours. And when the course of our history parts 
 asunder, when the English people become two nations 
 instead of one, if the history which you have wrought 
 in America is no longer ours, if the history which we 
 have wrought in Britain is no longer yours, in the same 
 sense as is the common history which we wrought to- 
 gether in earlier times, still, we have a common interest, 
 a common fellow-feeling, the feeling which follows the 
 deeds of friends and kinsfolk with a different eye from 
 that with which it follows the deeds of strangers, in all 
 that men of English blood have done on American soil 
 since the older and the newer England parted asunder. 
 And you too, I trust, have not ceased to look with the 
 like feeling on all that men of English blood have done 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 1 9 
 
 on British soil since the day when the newer England 
 bade farewell to its political connexion with the elder, 
 but did not, I trust, bid farewell to the far higher tie 
 of a common blood, a common speech, the long glories 
 of a common history. 
 
 Let me now go back to the earliest of those deeds in which 
 I have just said that your forefathers and mine may well 
 have shared together. I said that they may have sailed 
 together from the oldest England of all in the keels of 
 Hengest or of Cerdic. What then is the difference be- 
 tween us on the eastern side of Ocean and you on this 
 western side ? It is simply this : that you have taken 
 two great voyages, while we have taken only one. And 
 the first of those voyages we assuredly took together. 
 The men of New England and the men of Middle Eng- 
 land assuredly started together from the shores of Old 
 England. Not that we all started in one company. 
 Both those great voyages were made up of many smaller 
 voyages. The Englishmen who settled in Virginia and 
 the Englishmen who settled in Georgia sailed with a 
 considerable interval of time between their sailings. But 
 both sailed on the same errand ; both set forth from the 
 same island to seek for new homes on the same conti- 
 nent. So it was in that more ancient voyage which led 
 the forefathers of both to the island from which they 
 sailed. It took a good many voyages from the oldest 
 England on the European mainland before the second 
 England in the isle of Britain became an English land. 
 But what I say is that, in those earliest voyages of all 
 we who went no further than the second England, and 
 you who ages afterward pressed on to make a third 
 
20 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 England, had an equal share. So comparatively short 
 a time has passed since the second of those great voy- 
 ages that there must be many a man here who knows 
 perfectly well who his forefathers were who first came 
 to this third England, and from what part of the second 
 England they came. So long a time has passed since 
 the first of those great voyages that a man must be wise 
 indeed — wise, I should think, beyond anything that is 
 written — if he can profess to know from what part of 
 the oldest England his forefathers came, and whether 
 they made their voyage with Hengest or with Cerdic or 
 with any older or later captains. My position is only that, 
 though we can none of us tell exactly whence our fore- 
 fathers came or under whose leadership, we can at least 
 say with a very large amount of likelihood that they 
 came from some part or another of a certain region 
 of the European continent, and under the leadership of 
 some one or other of those chiefs whose coming changed 
 Britain into England. 
 
 It is true that, for reasons of which I shall speak another 
 time, it might be rash for each particular man to say this of 
 his own particular forefathers. But the English people, as 
 a whole, may say it with the most perfect confidence of 
 the forefathers of the English people as a whole. My 
 position is that those among the English people who 
 shared in the second voyage, and those who did not 
 share in it, all shared alike in the first voyage. The 
 forefathers of those who abode in the second England 
 and the forefathers of those who went on to make the 
 third England alike set forth in the beginning from the 
 first England of all. In some or other of the keels 
 which crossed the narrower Ocean from the first Eng- 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 21 
 
 land to the second sailed the forefathers of Washington 
 and the forefathers of Chatham. Whether they sailed 
 in the same keel or not the most prying genealogist can- 
 not tell us. It is enough that they both sailed in some 
 keel or other. What then is the history of the three 
 homes of the English people ? What is the history of 
 Old, Middle, and New England ? It may be summed 
 up in a few words. We all set forth from a continent and 
 sailed to make a new home in an island, leaving, be it 
 ever remembered, a good many of our kinsfolk in the 
 old home on the continent. We all stayed together in 
 the island till we had pretty well forgotten from what 
 parts of the continent we severally came. After a time, 
 while some of us stayed in our second home, some of 
 us sailed forth yet again from the island to make a third 
 home in another continent. Or shall I put it more 
 briefly? We all took one voyage from the mainland 
 of Europe to the isle of Britain. Some of us abode in 
 that isle, while others took a second voyage from the 
 isle of Britain to the mainland of America. Or shall I 
 put it more briefly still ? We all sailed together a little 
 way westward. Then some of us thought we had had 
 enough of sailing, while others sailed on a long way 
 farther westward still. 
 
 Now about the second voyage no one doubts for a 
 moment. Every man in Britain and in America keeps 
 it in his memory. It is about the first voyage that some 
 of us are less clear. Indeed, in one sense all of us must 
 be less clear about it. None of us can have that minute 
 knowledge of the first voyage which some of us have of 
 the second. But I mean that some of us are less clear 
 about it in another sense — that some of us hardly take it 
 
22 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 in as a fact, and certainly do not carry it about in their 
 memories as they do the fact of the second voyage. It 
 is neither wonderful nor blameable if it be so ; it is but 
 few of us who are likely to dwell with the same kind of 
 memory, I might say with the same kind of affection, on 
 a distant fact, to be made out mainly by curious research, 
 and on a comparatively recent fact whose results thrust 
 themselves on our notice at every moment. My own 
 thoughts, my own studies, have made the earlier fact 
 seem as natural, as familiar, to me as the later fact. But 
 I cannot expect this to be so with every one, or indeed- 
 with many people. Still, the fact is none the less a fact ; 
 and we ought to keep that fact as clearly and as con- 
 stantly in our memories as its nature will allow us. 
 I wish just now specially to bring out the fact, to 
 bring it out in the broadest and simplest way, that 
 there was such a first voyage, that there is such 
 an older home of our people, that there is a land 
 which once stood to the British home of our peo- 
 ple in the same relStion in which the British home 
 of our people stands to this American home. Mark, I 
 say, " which once stood ; " I cannot venture to say " which 
 still stands." There are a crowd of points of unlikeness 
 between the two cases, the natural, result of historical., 
 causes — points of unlikeness some of which will doubt- 
 less at once occur to you, and of some of which I shall 
 myself speak hereafter. But I have now to speak of the 
 points of likeness, not of the points of unlikeness. I 
 have not now to dwell on the vast differences of detail 
 between the first and the second migration, between the 
 ancient settlement of the English in Britain and the later 
 settlement in America. I have now simply to insist on 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 23 
 
 the fact that there was such an earlier settlement — that 
 we had an earlier home, and moved from that earlier 
 home, and to assert that the general history of the whole 
 English people is not rightly understood unless those 
 facts are constantly and carefully borne in mind. 
 
 As then your history, the history of that part of 
 the English people which settled on American soil, 
 does not begin on American soil, as you have an 
 equal right with us in the history of our common fore- 
 fathers on British soil, so that common history in which 
 we have a common right did not begin on British soil. 
 As the fathers and founders of this English nation in 
 America brought with them their tongue, their laws, their 
 national being, from an older home, so our common 
 fathers and founders, the fathers and founders of the 
 English nation in Britain, brought with them their 
 tongue, their laws, their national being, from an earlier 
 home still. If you are a colony — the word, if rightly 
 understood, is not a disparaging one — we are a colony 
 also. If the English settlements in America were, in 
 times which seem almost recent, colonies of the older 
 England in Britain, so those settlements in Britain which 
 made that older England were themselves colonies of 
 the still older England on the continent of Europe. 
 
 I have used the word colony, and I have said that I 
 do not use it in any disparaging sense. You will feel 
 that I do not do so when I apply it equally to my own 
 England and to yours. I use the word, because I have 
 no better word to use, and because the word, if rightly 
 defined, perfectly suits my purpose. I have simply to 
 guard against what I hold to be an abuse of it. The 
 
24 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 word colony to most minds perhaps suggests, if not 
 bondage, yet imperfect freedom. It suggests the notion 
 of a body of settlers from some country who still re- 
 main in a state of greater or less dependence on the 
 mother-country ; it suggests communities which are not 
 free and independent states in the highest sense. Now 
 this is an use of the word which may do very well in the 
 colonial office of any country which has dependent 
 colonies : it will not do for the purposes of the histo- 
 rian. For we have no other word than colotiy to express 
 settlements the very essence of which was that they 
 were independent of the mother-country from the be- 
 ginning. We speak of colonies in the days of ancient 
 Greece. Syracuse was a colony of Corinth ; Tarentum 
 was a colony of Sparta; Miletos was a colony of 
 Athens. That does not mean that those cities were 
 from the beginning dependencies of Corinth, Sparta, 
 and Athens ; the very name implies that they were 
 independent from the beginning. As a mere matter of 
 etymology, the word colony represents, or rather is, 
 the Latin colonia ; but in neither of its uses does it 
 represent its meaning. A Roman colony was not a 
 colony either in the sense in which Syracuse was a 
 colony of Corinth, or in the sense in which the Eng- 
 lish settlements in Australia are colonies of Great Brit- 
 ain. A Roman colony was not, like the Greek or 
 the English colony, a settlement in a land either unin- 
 habited or inhabited by men of some wholly alien and 
 commonly inferior race. A Roman colony was in its 
 beginning a Roman garrison planted in some other 
 Italian town to keep that town in obedience to Rome. 
 The colonists were not settlers in a new land who had 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 2$ 
 
 to create everything for themselves : they took pos- 
 session of houses and lands already built and tilled — 
 the houses and lands in many cases of men of their 
 own blood and speech. Such a colony has nothing in 
 common with the colonies of modern Europe. Colony 
 in the modern sense and colonia in the Roman sense 
 mean two different things. But colony in the modern 
 sense represents, or ought to represent, the Greek 
 d::ocxta. That word, expressing the settlement of men 
 who go from one home to another, is the word which 
 describes the relation between Syracuse and Corinth, be- 
 tween Miletos and Athens. It is, I venture to think, the 
 word which expresses the relation between this newer 
 England and the older one. Once on a time thirteen fa- 
 mous colonies of the older England voted that they were 
 and ought to be free and independent States. By that vote 
 they ceased, in the sense of a colonial office, to be English 
 colonies any longer. In the sense of history they became 
 English colonies more truly than before. As long as they 
 were dependent, they hardly deserved the name ; it was 
 only when they won independence that they became, in 
 the full sense, Sjioaoi, dwellers in another home. In 
 the language of history, by winning independence they 
 ceased to he. provinces ; they did not cease to be colonies. 
 It was independence only which made them colonies of 
 England in the highest sense — which made them in the 
 truest sense a new England, the peer of the elder Eng- 
 land. As the Greek colonies in Southern Italy came to 
 bear the name of the Great Greece, so it may be that 
 this newer England on the American continent is fated 
 to be the Great England, in distinction from what is cer- 
 tainly physically the smaller England in its European 
 
26 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 island. But whether less or equal or greater, the thir- 
 teen colonies, and the later States which have sprung up 
 around them, did not, in becoming free and independ- 
 ent States, cease to be, in the true sense, colonies of 
 the older England. And in that sense the settlements 
 which made up that older England were themselves col- 
 onies of an older England still. As Massachusetts and 
 Virginia were colonies of the second England in the 
 European island, so Wessex and Northumberland were 
 colonies of the first England on the European main- 
 land. 
 
 Now, when I speak of the first England on the Euro- 
 pean mainland, I must ask, for the purposes at least of 
 this first lecture, to be allowed the same kind of geo- 
 graphical licence which I took in speaking of the third 
 England on the American mainland. As there is a cer- 
 tain part of the American continent to which the name 
 of New England belongs in the strictest and most fami- 
 liar usage, so there is a certain part of the European con- 
 tinent to which the name of Old England belongs, 
 perhaps somewhat less strictly, certainly somewhat less 
 familiarly. I mean the land of Angeln on the borders of 
 Germany and Denmark. Angeln and England are truly 
 the same name; or, more truly still, there is just that 
 difference between the two names which marks England 
 as a colony of Angeln. Englaland, England, is strictly 
 the land of the Engle, Angli, Etiglish; the name of the 
 people is on the face of it older than the name of the 
 land ; the land simply takes its name from the people. 
 It is therefore not wonderful that we do not find the 
 name England in use till some centuries after the settle- 
 ment of the English had given a part of Britain the right 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 2/ 
 
 to bear it. But Angeln is one of those cases in which 
 the name of the land and the name of the people are in 
 the strictest sense one and the same. It is so with not a 
 few names in old Greek and in modern German. Preus- 
 sen, Sachsen, Hessen, are at once the names of the people 
 and the names of the land. We may be sure that in all 
 these cases the name of the people is really the older, 
 and that the land did take its name from them ; but the 
 fact is not so openly proclaimed as it is in the case of 
 names like England, Scotland, Finland. So in names 
 within the isle of Britain, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, are strict- 
 ly the names of the people — Wesi-seaxe, SuS-seaxe, East- 
 seaxe. We use exactly the same form when we speak 
 of Wales as a land ; for Wales is simply the name which 
 we have chosen to give to the British people, the Wealas 
 or strangers. Now all these names passed, so to speak, 
 of themselves from the people to the land ; there is no dis- 
 tinction whatever between the name of the people and 
 the name of the land. But there is a kind of conscious- 
 ness about such a name as England when given by a peo- 
 ple to their own land. It was gradually found that the Teu- 
 tonic settlements in Britain needed a common name, and 
 the common name that they took was the name of the 
 greatest tribe among them. It is quite fitting that such 
 a primitive form as Angeln should be the name of the 
 old motherland, the land of those who stayed behind — 
 though it is said that in Angeln, strictly so called, nobody 
 did stay behind — and that such a form as England, a later 
 form — I might almost say a colonial form — should be the 
 name of the land of those who left the old home to plant 
 colonies in the isle of Britain. And mark that much the 
 same thing has happened with the northern part of the 
 
28 THE ENGLISH PEOrLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 island as with the southern. That northern part we call 
 Scotland, but the older home of the Scots was in Erin or 
 Ireland. From that older home they planted a colony 
 in the isle of Britain. Now we never call the old home 
 of the Scots by the name of Scotland: we give that name 
 only to the land occupied by the Scottish colony in Brit- 
 ain, exactly as we give the name of England to the land 
 occupied by the English colony. There is then a real 
 and fitting distinction between Angeln, the older name 
 of the motherland, and England, the much later name 
 of the colony. But, as names of two successive homes 
 of the English people, each implying in different ways 
 that the land so called is the land of the English, we 
 may count Angeln and England as the same name, as 
 opposed to the names of any other people and their 
 land, as opposed to any other names of our own people 
 and our own land. And when I wish to group our three 
 homes and their names in an emphatic way, it certainly 
 answers my purpose better to speak of Angeln as Old Eng- 
 land than to speak of England as New Angeln. Our name 
 is the same in either land ; how we came by the name I will 
 not too curiously inquire. Those who said that we were 
 called Angles because we lived in an angle or corner of 
 the land, and those who said that we were so called from 
 our angelic faces, both simply showed that they had 
 learned more Latin than was good for them. Whether 
 any of us, in either of our homes, will be better pleased 
 to think that we may be called from an angle or a hook, I 
 will not take upon myself to determine. It is enough 
 for my purpose that we are the Engle, Angli, English, 
 and that Angeln and England are alike names of lands 
 in which the folk of the Engle have dwelled. And I do 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 29 
 
 not think that I take an unwarrantable liberty in calling 
 both lands by the more familiar form of the common 
 name, and in speaking of the land of Angeln as Old 
 England. 
 
 But I have said that I mean to take a real geogra- 
 phical liberty in the old world, as I have already done in 
 the new. As I have, for the purpose of these lectures, 
 ventured to give a wider sense than is usual to the name 
 of New England, so I must venture to give a like wide 
 sense to the name of Old England. As I cannot at all 
 afford to shut up the name of New England within the 
 narrow bounds of the lands which are specially known 
 as the New England States, so I cannot at all afford to 
 shut up the name of Old England within the much nar- 
 rower bounds of the proper Angeln in a corner of the 
 duchy of Sleswick. As I must ask leave to carry, for 
 my special purposes, the name of New England beyond 
 the Alleghanies, beyond the Mississ'ippi, beyond the 
 Rocky Mountains, and to give it no boundary short 
 of the Eastern Ocean, so I must ask leave to carry the 
 name of Old England beyond the Eider, beyond the 
 Elbe, beyond the Weser, to the shores of the lake 
 which burst its bounds and became the Zuyder Zee. 
 Nay, I shall not quarrel with any one who will allow 
 me to carry the name further still beyond the mouths 
 of the Scheld, perhaps even to the mouth of the Somme. 
 I do not mean that there ever was a time when the name 
 of England, or even the name of Angeln, was ever ap- 
 plied to these lands, any more than I mean that the 
 name of New England is commonly applied to the whole 
 extent of your North American Union. I only mean 
 that, as it is historically accurate to give the name of 
 
30 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 New England the wider sense, so it needs but a very 
 slight historical licence to do the like by the name of 
 Old England. The wider and unfamiliar sense serves 
 best to suit my immediate purpose; it more forcibly 
 sets forth the historic truth which it is my present ob- 
 ject to set forth. That object is to point out that what 
 the isle of Britain was to the continent of North Amer- 
 ica, a certain part of the continent of Europe was, ages 
 before, to the isle of Britain. That part of the continent 
 of Europe it is perhaps easier to point out than to define. 
 Among the Teutonic settlers in Britain some tribes 
 stand out conspicuously; Angles, Saxons, and Jutes 
 stand out conspicuously above all. The Jutes led the 
 way ; from the Angles the land and the united nation 
 took their name ; the Saxons gave us the name by which 
 our Celtic neighbours have ever known us. But there is 
 no reason to confine the area from which our forefathers 
 came to the space which we should mark on the map 
 as the land of the continental Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. 
 So great a migration is always likely to be swollen by 
 some who are quite alien to the leading tribe; it is 
 always certain to be swollen by many who are of stocks 
 akin to the leading tribe, but who do not actually belong 
 to it. As we in Britain are those who stayed behind at the 
 time of the second great migration of our people, so I ven- 
 ture to look on all our Low-Dutch kinsfolk on the con- 
 tinent of Europe as those who stayed behind at the time 
 of the first great migration of our people. Our special 
 hearth and. cradle is doubtless to be found in the imme- 
 diate marchland of Germany and Denmark, but the great 
 common home of our people is to be looked on as 
 stretching along the whole of that long coast where 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 3 1 
 
 various dialects of the Low-Dutch tongue are spoken. 
 If Angles and Saxons came, we know that Frisians came 
 also, and with Frisians as an element among us, it is 
 hardly too bold to claim the whole Netherlands as in 
 the widest sense Old England, as the land of one 
 part of the kinsfolk who stayed behind. Through that 
 whole region, from the special Anglian corner far into 
 what is now northern France, the true tongue of the 
 people, sometimes overshadowed by other tongues, is 
 some dialect or other of that branch of the great Teu- 
 tonic family which is essentially the same as our own 
 speech. From Flanders to Sleswick the natural tongue 
 is one which differs from English only as the historical 
 events of fourteen hundred years of separation have in- 
 evitably made the two tongues — two dialects, I should 
 rather say, of the same tongue — to differ. From these 
 lands we came as a people. That was our first histor^ 
 ical migration. Our remote forefathers must have made 
 endless earlier migrations as parts of the great Aryan 
 body, as parts of the smaller Teutonic body. But our 
 voyage from the Low-Dutch mainland to the isle of 
 Britain was our first migration as a people. It was our 
 first migration after we had worked out for ourselves a 
 separate being and a separate tongue. It was the first 
 migration of men, some of whom already actually bore 
 the English name, while others bore the names of those 
 kindred tribes which joined with the proper Engle to 
 make up the English nation. The forefathers of Angles, 
 Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, must once have dwelled in 
 Eastern Europe, even in central Asia. But Angles, 
 Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, as nations or tribes distin- 
 guished by those names from other Aryan, from other 
 
32 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 Teutonic, nations or tribes, cannot be traced further 
 away from Britain than the old Angeln, the old Saxony, 
 and the other neighbouring and kindred lands. From 
 those lands their first voyage led them into the isle of 
 Britain, some to make that isle their home for ever, 
 some to make it a halting-place of ages before they 
 started on a second and longer voyage. 
 
 The history of our people then begins in the Low- 
 Dutch lands of the European mainland. It there parts 
 off into the history of those who went forth to win for 
 themselves new homes in Britain, and the history of those 
 who abode in the old continental home. The history of 
 those who went forth to win for themselves new homes 
 in Britain again, after many ages, parts off into the history 
 of those who went forth to win for themselves new homes 
 in North America, and the history of those who abode in 
 the old island home. Such is our history in few words. 
 The tie which thus binds together the Middle England 
 and the New, the England in Britain and the England in 
 America, is, I trust, not hard to understand, not hard to 
 feel. It is, from obvious reasons, not so easy to under- 
 stand or to feel the tie which should bind both Middle 
 England and New to the oldest England of all. It is a 
 tie which it needs some searching to find out, one which 
 does not, like the other, force itself upon the mind by the 
 most obvious witness of language, of history, of all that 
 makes divided brethren to be brethren still. But the tie 
 is still real ; it is still living. Let us look back to the 
 earliest times when we have any sure knowledge of our 
 own people. Let us look to the first century of our aera, 
 to the early days of Imperial Rome. Let us seek for a 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 33 
 
 national hero in those days. It will be easy to find him; 
 but we may be tempted to look for him in the wrong 
 place. We may be tempted to see him in the hero of 
 another race who fought for a land which was in after- 
 times to become England, rather than in the hero of our 
 own race who fought for a land which, in a wide sense, 
 was England then. We may be tempted to see him in 
 Celtic Caractacus rather than in Teutonic Arminius. 
 Yet Arminius was a man of our own blood; Carac- 
 tacus was a man of another blood. The deeds of Carac- 
 tacus had no visible effect on our English history ; the 
 day when Arminius smote down Varus was one of the 
 greatest days in the history of our race. Had the 
 Roman overcome northern Germany as he overcame 
 southern Britain, the English people could never have 
 been what it was in later history, or, more truly, the 
 English people could never have been at all. I have 
 little doubt that, if the distinction is to be drawn at 
 all, Arminius and his fellows would be found to belong 
 to the Low-Dutch rather than to the High-Dutch divi- 
 sion of the Teutonic race. But it may be safer to look 
 on that distinction as one of later date, and to say that, 
 up to the fifth century, the Teuton whose descendants 
 were to abide in Germany and the Teuton whose descend- 
 ants were to make the voyage to Britain had one com- 
 mon history, exactly as, up to the seventeenth century, 
 the Englishman whose descendants were to abide in 
 Britain and the Englishman whose descendants were to 
 make the voyage to America had one common history. 
 In any case, if the Roman power had in the second 
 century incorporated Germany as it incorporated Gaul 
 and Spain, no English people, no Teutonic people of 
 
34 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 any kind, could have grown up as they did grow up. 
 The men by Elbe and Weser, instead of being ready 
 to bring Teutonic speech, Teutonic law, Teutonic free- 
 dom, into the isle of Britain, would have been mere 
 Roman provincials, among whom freedom would have 
 been a name, and who could have known no speech or 
 law but the speech and law of their conquerors. In this 
 sense Arminius saved the national life, the national free- 
 dom, of the English people, before it had become the 
 English people, no less truly than those who saved the 
 national life and freedom of the fully-grown English 
 people of later times. In this sense the old Cheruscan 
 hero, the liberator of Germany, may claim a place in 
 the annals of our race alongside of Alfred and Dunstan, 
 alongside of Stephen Langton and Simon of Montfort, 
 alongside of Pym and Hampden, alongside of Halifax 
 and Somers, alongside of Washington and Hamilton. 
 In this sense we of the English folk on either side of 
 Ocean may praise famous men and our fathers that 
 begat us, even while we speak of the men of days when 
 the special English nation had as yet no being, but when 
 there was already work to do for the greater race of 
 which the English nation is but a part. 
 
 And as with fathers, so with brethren. Of all parts of 
 the European mainland, we should surely look with the 
 keenest interest on the lands which are still inhabited by 
 those men of our own race who stayed behind. To this 
 day in a large part of that long line of coast from whence 
 our fathers came, dwell men who come of our own stock, 
 and who speak tongues near akin to our own — who more 
 strictly speak our own tongue in another shape. And 
 the history of those lands is no mean history. The his- 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 35 
 
 tory of the Hanseatic League, the history of the United 
 Provinces, is one of which we may well be proud to 
 think that it has been wrought by men of our own kin. 
 Nowhere on the mainland of Europe, save in the eternal 
 democracy of the Swiss mountains, did the old freedom 
 linger on to a later day than it lingered in the Frisian 
 sea-lands. Nowhere did men wage a better fight for 
 ancient rights than the men of Ditmarsch waged against 
 the counts of Holstein and kings of Denmark. An his- 
 torian of your own has told the tale of the men who, 
 driven to strive alike against nature and against man, 
 knew how to win the free soil of Holland and Zealand, 
 first from the sea and then from the Spaniard. But it 
 adds a deeper charm to that tale if we bear in mind that 
 it is part of the history of our own people — if we think 
 that the men who wrought that work among the dykes 
 and channels of the old Frisian shore were not only fel- 
 low-workers in the same cause, but were in truth kins- 
 folk of the same household, as the men who wrought 
 the same work in the British island and on the American 
 mainland. You, men of the second colony, will, I trust, 
 allow that you did not take away all the goodness of the 
 old stock from what to you is the elder home. Some- 
 thing was, 1 trust, left behind in the isle of Britain to do 
 deeds in yet later times not wholly unworthy of the long 
 earlier history which we have in common. And so we, 
 men of the first colony, and you, men of the second 
 colony, also, may well bear in mind that something was 
 left in the oldest home of all to do deeds not unworthy 
 of the common stock of all. 
 
 And, speaking on this side of Ocean, I cannot forget 
 that, in one part of your land at least, there are men in 
 
36 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 whose history the first and the second voyage are the 
 same — men whose fathers came straight fi-om the oldest 
 England to the newest, without ever passing through the 
 middle home of our folk. I cannot forget that along- 
 side of New England specially so called lies the land 
 which once was New Netherlands. I cannot forget that 
 there are still in your land not a few whose names and 
 pedigrees proclaim them to belong to that branch of the 
 common stock by which New Netherlands were settled. 
 For, from my point of view, the men of New Netherlands 
 are as much a branch of the common stock as the men 
 who settled in Maine or in Georgia or the men who 
 stayed behind in Britain. You, men of Boston, proclaim 
 by the name of your city that your motherland was the 
 British Holland, that Holland of which the elder Boston 
 is the head. Those who came to New Amsterdam from 
 the other Holland on the European mainland did but 
 make the same journey more speedily, in a single pull 
 instead of two. There are vessels which start from the 
 havens of the elder Saxony, which halt in Britain on the 
 West-Saxon shore, and which then make their way, it 
 may be to New England strictly so called, it may be to 
 what was New Netherlands. The every-day course of a 
 North-German steamer is in truth a type of the history 
 of our race. It starts from the oldest home of our blood 
 and speech to make its way to the newest. But it begins 
 by making its way, in the very wake of Cerdic and Cyn- 
 ric, to the home which lies between the two, the Middle 
 England on the British soil. 
 
 The tie which binds the New England to the Middle 
 is indeed, from many causes, far closer than that which 
 binds the Middle England to the Old. But this last tie, 
 
OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 37 
 
 far less close as it is, is equally real. We shall not 
 rightly understand the history of our people if we forget 
 either. I have said that, when the keels of Hengest drew 
 near to the Kentish shore, they bore with them the germs 
 of the American commonwealth as well as the germs of 
 the English kingdom. I will go further back. When 
 Augustus vainly called on Varus to give him back the 
 legions which had fallen beneath the Cheruscan sword, he 
 was mourning for an event but for which we could never 
 have stood here as we now stand. But for that me- 
 morable day in the childhood of our people, neither the 
 League of the Hansa nor the Union of Utrecht, neither the 
 Great Charter of England nor the Federal Constitution 
 of America, could ever have had a place on the page of 
 history. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 I ASKED in my first lecture that I might, for that 
 once, be allowed to say my say after my own fash- 
 ion, and that I might keep objections and answers to 
 objections for another time. I said that, though I did 
 not believe that I should say anything new, I should 
 most likely say some things that might be startling, 
 some things that might easily seem open to objection. 
 Now I am so old a stager in controversy, I am so used 
 to assaults of all kinds, reasonable and unreasonable, 
 that I think I pretty well know the kind of objections 
 which are likely to be brought. I may even go a 
 step further. I have already ventured to say that I 
 believe I know the answers to those objections. I 
 am not at all clear that I could not write a fairly plau- 
 sible answer to myself; only 'I am much surer that I 
 could write a rejoinder to that answer which should 
 be something more than plausible. So, as I asked 
 to be allowed to enjoy a dogmatic evening the other 
 night, I shall venture to treat you to a controversial 
 evening now. But, in disputing, I wish as far as possible 
 to dispute about things and not about names. I say as 
 far as possible, because one cannot help to some extent 
 disputing about names. We must do so for this reason, 
 that in very truth names are things. In itself it is a 
 
 3S 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 39 
 
 matter of indifference by what mere sound anything is 
 called. It is merely through the course which the his- 
 tory of language happens to have taken that a certain 
 meaning has come to be attached to one sound and 
 another meaning to another. But when the meaning is 
 once attached to the sound, the name becomes something 
 more than a sound ; it becomes a thing, a fact. So long 
 as an accurate impression of facts is conveyed, it does 
 not matter in the least by what words — that is, by what 
 sounds — that impression is conveyed. That is, it does 
 not matter as far as the facts are concerned ; it may 
 matter on some other ground, as a matter of metrical 
 harmony or of literary style. On some of these latter 
 grounds I may have a pet word, and another man may 
 have another pet word ; but if his word and mine con- 
 vey the same idea with equal clearness, one word is as 
 good as the other for the purpose of conveying knowledge. 
 The question between them is strictly a question of words ; 
 it is a purely literary question, not a question of history or 
 science. But when meanings have got so closely attached 
 to words that one word gives a correct impression of 
 facts while another word gives an incorrect impression, 
 then the question between the two words is no longer a 
 mere question of words ; it becomes a question of facts. 
 Let me take an example which will at once plunge us into 
 the midst of the controversies which I have promised 
 you for this evening's entertainment. Suppose I say 
 that "the English people" or "the English folk began," 
 while another man says that " the Anglo-Saxon race 
 commenced." Wherever my words differ from his, I 
 like each of my words better than, his, and I can tell 
 you why I like each of them better. But my reason for 
 
40 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 liking them better would not be the same in all three cases. 
 I like " begin " better than " commence " on a purely 
 literary ground. For the purpose of conveying the 
 meaning one word is as good as the other. But I like 
 the sound and the associations of the word " begin " 
 better than the sound and the associations of the word 
 " commence." When a Teutonic and a Romance word each 
 expresses the same idea equally well — how much more 
 then when the Teutonic word expresses the idea much 
 better — I like to use the Teutonic word better than the 
 Romance word. But the question between " begin " and 
 "commence" is purely a question of words; it has 
 nothing to do with facts. But when I speak of " the 
 English people" or "the English folk," and the other 
 man speaks of "the Anglo-Saxon race," I hold that it 
 is no longer a mere question of words, but that it has 
 become a question of facts. The thoughts of the man 
 who uses the other formula may be every whit as accu- 
 rate as my thoughts ; but I maintain that he does not 
 choose the words that are most likely to convey his 
 thoughts accurately to others. I maintain that, though 
 he may thoroughly know the facts himself, he is likely 
 to give to others a wrong impression of the facts. In 
 this sense I hold that the question between "English 
 people" and "Anglo-Saxon race" is not, like the 
 question between "begin" and "commence," a mere 
 question of words; I hold that it touches, not words 
 only, but facts also. 
 
 We have now fairly reached the domain of controversy ; 
 but before I say anything at all controversial, or even apo- 
 logetic, about my subject, may I say a word or two about 
 myself? A great many strange things have been said of 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 4 1 
 
 me in Middle England ; for aught I know some strange 
 things may have been said of me in New England also. 
 I know that strange things have been said of me, pos- 
 sibly in Old England in the wide sense in which I have 
 defined Old England, certainly within those once Slavonic 
 and now Teutonic lands which lie beyond Old England. 
 I once saw a book of mine reviewed in the High-Dutch 
 tongue, in which review I was throughout spoken of as 
 though I belonged to New England and not to Middle. 
 I was American, and I showed it in every page — " er 
 bleibt immer Amerikaner." Better to carry out this 
 theory, the Cambridge in England at which I have had 
 the honor to show myself once or twice was taken to be 
 your neighbouring Cambridge on the other side of your 
 river. Well, here I had nothing to complain of, except 
 the complaint that one brings against every statement 
 of the thing which is not. If might just as well have 
 been as the Berlin critic fancied ; only it was not so. It 
 is much harder when I am told that I am " the great 
 enemy of the name Anglo-Saxon," or of the name " Char- 
 lemagne," or of any other name. It is hardest of all 
 when I am told that all that I have ever done has been 
 to " alter the spelling of the names of the Anglo-Saxon 
 kings." Now as for spelling, I have always preached 
 the extremest doctrine of liberty of spelling. At the 
 utmost, I have only asked to be allowed to indulge my 
 own fancies and to allow other people to indulge theirs. 
 I did not at all know that I had altered the spelling 
 of the names of the Anglo-Saxon kings. I thought 
 that I had spelled them as my predecessors and 
 teachers, Kemble and Lappenberg, spelled them before 
 me. At all events, I was vain enough to think that 
 
42 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 if I had done that, it was not all that I had done ; I 
 really believed that I had done one or two things be- 
 sides. Anyhow, when I learn that I have changed or 
 invented or done something strangely and dangerously 
 novel in this very small matter of spelling — and in one 
 or two other matters — I can only guess that my critics 
 have not read the writings of the scholars who went 
 before me; I am quite certain that they have not read 
 mine. In short, with all the advances which our age 
 has made in natural science, mental science, social sci- 
 ence, and all the other sciences, it still remains what, if 
 I were to use a hard word, I might call a mythopceic 
 age. Certainly it grows quite as thick a crop of legends 
 as ever grew in the days of Homer or in the days of 
 Beowulf. Of such legends I have had the honor to be 
 myself the subject of several ; and, as I dabble a little 
 in comparative mythology, I believe that I can take a 
 calm, and even a scientific, view of a legend about 
 myself as well as of a legend about anybody else. In 
 such legends I can often see, as in other legends, the 
 small kernel of truth round which the mythical details 
 have gathered ; sometimes I cannot see even that. But 
 there is one common saying about me which I sincerely 
 hope is in no sense legendary, but rather that it is true 
 to the letter. It has often been said in Middle England 
 — it may, for aught I know, be said in New England — 
 that I am a pedant. Well, in the sense in which that 
 word is used, I will not speak so highly of myself as to 
 say that I am a pedant ; but I will say that I do my best 
 to be one. What I understand by a pedant in such cases 
 is a man who first tries to think accurately — that is, to 
 make his thoughts conformable to facts — and who then 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 43 
 
 tries to speak accurately — that is, to make his words 
 conformable to his thoughts. Now this twofold pro- 
 cess takes some trouble; therefore the man who feels 
 that he has not taken this trouble, and who is in his 
 heart ashamed of himself for not having taken it, re- 
 lieves himself outwardly by calling the man who has 
 taken it a pedant. I warn you then that, at all events 
 in this present lecture, when I shall have, more than in 
 the others, to say something about words and names, 
 when I shall perhaps have to draw some distinctions 
 which, to those who are not pedants and do not try to 
 be pedants, may seem to be distinctions without differ- 
 ences, I shall treat every word, name, and thing as pe- 
 dantically as I know how. I shall at least strive in all 
 things to come as near to the honourable character of a 
 pedant as the measure of my natural gifts will enable 
 me to come. 
 
 To speak then with as near an approach to pedantry 
 as I can reach to, it is certainly true that I have, in my 
 former lecture and in many other places, used the word 
 " English " where many people would have used the word 
 " Anglo-Saxon." I can even believe that some people 
 may have been surprised, that some may even have been 
 puzzled — I will not believe that any one can have been 
 offended — at my using the one word rather than the 
 other. I have known people surprised and puzzled at it 
 in Middle England ; and here in New England I think I 
 can see rather obvious reasons why it may grate on a 
 natural vein of feeling for which there is no room in 
 Middle England. Now I use the one word rather 
 than the other, for the very simple but undoubtedly 
 
44 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 pedantic reason that it better expresses the facts of the 
 case than the other, that it is less likely to lead to con- 
 fusion and misapprehension than the other. But in no 
 case can I allow that its use is any peculiarity of mine, 
 any invention of mine, any novelty of my own personal 
 devising. In using the name English as the name of our 
 people in all its homes, from our first appearance as a 
 people to this day on which we are now met, I have 
 simply followed those who have gone before me, those 
 from whom I learned most in earlier days. I have fol- 
 lowed the teaching, though not the practice, of Sir Fran- 
 cis Palgrave ; I have followed the practice of my still 
 more immediate master, Dr. Guest. If any one has been 
 guilty of innovation, that deadliest of crimes in a world 
 which is always changing, in this simple matter of no- 
 menclature, it is they who are the offenders, and not I. It 
 seemed to me that they had good reasons for the rule 
 which the one laid down and which the other followed ; 
 therefore I followed it too ; but on the score of inven- 
 tion, innovation, and so forth, I certainly deserve neither 
 praise nor blame; the praise or blame must all go to 
 my teachers. 
 
 I am half ashamed to be talking and disputing so 
 much about a name ; but, after all, the question is not 
 merely a question of names ; and I fancy moreover that 
 the question naturally comes in a rather different light 
 on the two sides of Ocean. It may therefore not be 
 wholly useless to speak a little more fully on this very 
 pedantic question of nomenclature. 
 
 First then, I altogether disclaim the character which 
 has been laid upon me of " the great enemy of the name 
 Anglo-Saxon." Unhappily, there are so many things in 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 45 
 
 the world of which one cannot help being the enemy 
 that I can hardly fancy myself finding time to become 
 the enemy of a name, except so far as it may, instead 
 of representing a fact, represent the opposite to a fact. 
 Least of all should I pick out for my enmity a name 
 which not uncommonly forms part of the royal style of 
 Glorious .iEthelstan and his successors. Kind people 
 have before now got together for my benefit a large 
 number of instances to prove the use of the word 
 " Anglo-Saxon '' in the tenth and eleventh centuries. 
 But they might have spared their trouble ; I have al- 
 ready got together the same instances and more also in 
 the Appendix to the first volume of my History of 
 the Norman Conquest. Nobody who knew anything 
 of ancient documents ever doubted that the name 
 "Anglo-Saxon" was in established, but by no means 
 common, use in the tenth and eleventh centuries. My 
 contention is simply this; because a certain name 
 was used in one sense — a perfectly clear and very 
 narrow sense — in the tenth century, it does not follow 
 that it is well to use it in the nineteenth century in two 
 senses, both of which seem to me to be misleading, and 
 which certainly are quite different both from one another 
 and from the ancient sense. I do not think that such 
 an use of language can be the use most likely to lead to 
 clearness and accuracy of thought. Let me run shortly 
 through the plain facts of the case, though I have, in 
 different shapes and at different lengths, gone through 
 them a thousand and one times already. 
 
 Among the Teutonic tribes which settled in Britain, 
 two, the Angles and the Saxons, stood out foremost. These 
 two between them occupied by far the greater part of 
 
46 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 the land that was occupied at all. Each of these two 
 gave its name to the united nation, but each gave it on 
 different lips. The Saxons were the earlier invaders ; 
 they had more to do with the Celtic remnant which 
 abode in the land. On the lips then of the Celtic inhab- 
 itants of Britain, the whole of the Teutonic inhabitants 
 of Britain were known from the beginning, and are known 
 still, as Saxons. But, as the various Teutonic settlements 
 drew together, as they began to have common national 
 feelings and to feel the need of a common national name, 
 the name which they chose was not the same as that 
 by which their Celtic neighbours called them. They did 
 not call themselves Saxons and their land Saxony ; they 
 called themselves English and their land England. I 
 used the word Saxony in all seriousness ; it is a real 
 name for the Teutonic'part of Britain, and it is an older 
 name than the name England. But it is a name used 
 only from the outside by Celtic neighbours and enemies ; 
 it was not used from the inside by the Teutonic people 
 themselves. In their mouths, as soon as they took to 
 themselves a common name, that name was English; as 
 soon as they gave their land a common name, that name 
 was England. And that usage has gone on to this day, 
 without break or change, without variableness or shadow 
 of turning. At no time, in the. ninth century or the 
 nineteenth, would a Teutonic inhabitant of Britain, if 
 asked his nationality, as opposed either to the inhabit- 
 ants of some other land or to the Celtic inhabitants of 
 his own land, have called himself by any name but 
 Angle, English. The English name is general, it is 
 national ; the Saxon name is only local. The English 
 name is constantly used so as to take in the Saxon ; the 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 47 
 
 Saxon name is never used, on Teutonic mouths speaking 
 the Teutonic tongue, so as to take in the Angle. And 
 this is the more remarkable, because the age when 
 English was fully established as the name of the people, 
 and England as the name of the land, was an age of 
 Saxon supremacy, an age when a Saxon state held 
 the headship of England and of Britain, when Saxon 
 kings grew step by step to be Kings of the English and 
 lords of the whole British island. 
 
 In common use then, the men of the tenth and elev- 
 enth centuries knew themselves by no name but Eng- 
 lish. When, in the latter half of the eleventh, they had 
 more need of a national name than ever, when they 
 needed a name to distinguish themselves from foreign 
 conquerors in their own land, that name was English, 
 and none other. In romances and romantic histories 
 you find a strong opposition drawn between " Normans " 
 and " Saxons." The Norman is supposed ever to have 
 on his mouth the name " Saxon " as a name of contempt; 
 he gibes at the " Saxon churl ;" perhaps he even goes 
 out to hunt the " Saxon swine." I . have lived a good 
 deal in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and I think 
 that I know how men spoke then. I know no reason 
 to think that a Norman settled in England ever spoke 
 of his English neighbours as swine ; I have no reason to 
 think that he ever spoke of them as churls, unless when 
 they really were of the degree of a churl, and not of any 
 higher or lower degree. And I am quite certain that if 
 he spoke of them as either churls or swine, he spoke of. 
 them not as Saxon churls or swine, but as English. Dur- 
 ing the time when any distinction of the kind needed to be 
 drawn in common usage — and a wonderfully short time 
 
48 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 that was — the distinction was always between Normans 
 and English. During the much longer time during which 
 the distinction, practically forgotten, went on as a sur- 
 vival in legal formulse, the legal phrase always distin- 
 guished French and English. Why French ? some may 
 ask ; for assuredly each particular Norman was hardly 
 more likely to call himself a Frenchman than an Eng- 
 lishman was. But French was the only general name 
 which could take in all William^s French-speaking fol- 
 lowers, not a few of whom were far from being native 
 Normans. The opposition then, as long as any was 
 made, was made between " Norman and English," be- 
 tween " French and English ;" never between " Normans 
 and Saxons." The distinction died out as the Norman 
 born on English ground learned to feel as an English- 
 man, to call himself an Englishman. Of this I am cer- 
 tain: no native of England speaking his own tongue 
 ever spoke of himself as a Saxon, unless, as belonging 
 to the strictly Saxon part of England, he wished to 
 distinguish himself from an Angle or a Jute. 
 
 Still less did any man ever call himself an Anglo- 
 Saxon. I feel sure that no man, in the times of which 
 I am speaking, ever did call himself so ; but, if he did, 
 I am sure he must have meant to say that one of his 
 parents was an Angle and the other a Saxon. By An- 
 glo-Saxon many people mean Englishmen living before 
 the year 1066, as distinguished from Englishmen living 
 after that year. I need hardly stop to prove that no man, 
 either before or after the year 1066, could ever have 
 called himself an Anglo-Saxon in this sense. Neither 
 did any man of those days call himself an Anglo- 
 Saxon, meaning thereby a Saxon in England as dis- 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 49 
 
 tinguished from a Saxon in Germany or elsewhere. 
 This is another modern use of the word, quite different 
 from that in which its use ends at the year 1 066. The one 
 use is chronological; the other is geographical. And 
 I have often wondered how it is that " Anglo-Saxons " 
 and " Anglo-Normans " seem to mean Saxons and Nor- 
 mans settled in England, while " Anglo-Indians " and 
 "Anglo-Americans" seem to mean English settled 
 in India or America. The truth is, that no one man 
 ever called himself an Anglo-Saxon at all in any sense. 
 But it is undoubtedly true that, in a certain sense and 
 under certain circumstances, men did speak of the nation 
 as Anglo-Saxons. But it is only in one very distinct 
 sense and under somewhat restricted circumstances. The 
 common every-day name was English; Anglo-Saxon 
 was a grander and more formal name, used only now 
 and then. Let me tell you how it is used. First, in 
 England itself it is invariably used in the plural ; one 
 Anglo-Saxon, all by himself, seems to have been a thing 
 unheard of. Secondly, it is very seldom used, except in 
 the royal style. We hear not uncommonly of a King of 
 the Anglo-Saxons ; but, as we never hear of one Anglo- 
 Saxon all by himself, so we very seldom hear of the 
 whole company of Anglo-Saxons except in reference to 
 their king. Thirdly, while the phrase is not uncommon 
 in Latin, it is excessively rare in English, and the two or 
 three times when it is found in English it is in the royal 
 style. Fourthly, even as a Latin style of the king 
 it is all but wholly confined to formal documents, and 
 even in those it is rare compared with the simpler name 
 " English." In ordinary writing it is excessively rare, 
 even in Latin, and it is absolutely unknown in English. 
 
50 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 I mean that the king, in a solemn Latin document, not 
 uncommonly called himself King of the Anglo-Saxons — 
 that for him to call himself so in a solemn Enghsh doc- 
 ument was not absolutely unknown — but that an historian, 
 telling his story himself, very seldom used the word, 
 even if he were speaking of the king in Latin, and that 
 in ordinary English narrative it was never used at all. 
 With the smallest possible chance of exceptions, we may 
 say that on English mouths the name Anglo-Saxon is 
 confined to the royal style and the Latin language, and 
 is comparatively rare even there. 
 
 Now, in what sense is the word used on those rare 
 occasions when it is used ? Not surely to mean Saxons 
 in England as distinguished from Saxons in Germany; 
 still less, by any prophetic insight, to mean Englishmen 
 before 1066. If ^thelstan called himself King of the An- 
 glo-Saxons, he did not mean to say, Remember that I, 
 King .(Ethelstan, lived before the Norman Conquest. The 
 phrase is simply a contraction. Rex Anglorum, King of 
 the Angles or English, was after all an inadequate de- 
 scription of a prince a large part of whose subjects 
 were Saxons and not Angles, whose immediate king- 
 dom was Saxon, and who came of a Saxon stock. His 
 truer and more formal title was Rex Anglorum et Sax- 
 onum, King of the Angles and Saxons. And, by a 
 not very wonderful abridgement, that title sometimes 
 became Rex Anglo-Saxojtum, King of the Anglo-Sax- 
 ons. That is simply all; the word is a contracted 
 form, which, in England at least, was never in ordinary 
 use, but which was not uncommonly used in the more 
 stately language of the royal style. And it was meant 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. SI 
 
 to describe the nation formed by the union of Angles 
 and Saxons under one sovereign. 
 
 On the other hand, the name is used somewhat more 
 freely by foreign writers, and they do sometimes use it 
 as meaning Saxons in England as opposed to Saxons in 
 Germany. This use is not wonderful. To a writer in 
 England that distinction was of no importance, or at 
 least he expressed it in another way. The West-, East-, 
 and South-Ssixons in Britain were fully distinguished by 
 their local names from the Old-Saxons who abode in Ger- 
 many. To a writer in Gaul or Germany, as part of Brit- 
 ain began to be known, first as Saxony, then as England, 
 it would seem natural enough to distinguish its people 
 from the older Saxons in Germany as Saxons in England. 
 I have no doubt that in these continental writers the 
 name Anglo-Saxon is sometimes used in that sense ; and I 
 have once, only once, found in a foreign writer a case 
 where the name is used in the singular. But the name 
 went out of use ; by the twelfth century, at the latest, 
 Anglia, Angli, Anglici, Angligence were the only names 
 by which the Teutonic part of Britain and its people were 
 known both at home and abroad. And from that day to 
 this, English, and English only, has been the natural name, 
 the name which comes first to every man's mind and 
 tongue, as the name of the inhabitants of Teutonic Britain 
 and of the lands which have been colonized from Teu- 
 tonic Britain. When any other name is used, it is used 
 consciously, of set purpose, with a view to draw some 
 distinction or to meet some objection. English is 
 equally the name by which we are known to men 
 of other nations, always excepting the Celtic inhab- 
 itants of the British islands; to them, at least when 
 
52 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 they speak their own tongues, the Englishman is still 
 the Saxon. 
 
 I said that, when any other name than English is used, 
 it is used consciously with some definite purpose. And 
 I think I can see the purposes with which the word 
 " Anglo-Saxon " — a word never in common use in any 
 age, which was used in a special and narrow sense in 
 the tenth and eleventh centuries, and which was quite 
 forgotten in the twelfth — has been artificially called up 
 for use in the nineteenth. It is called up for two wholly 
 different purposes, to be used in two quite different 
 senses — senses which have nothing to do either with one 
 another or with the narrow ancient sense. One sense is 
 that in which Englishmen who lived before the year 
 1066 are distinguished from Englishmen who lived after 
 the year 1066 by being called, sometimes " Saxons," 
 sometimes "Anglo-Saxons." The object here, I sup- 
 pose, is to mark off Englishmen who lived before that 
 year as being somehow a different set of people from 
 Englishmen who lived after it. But the main object of 
 my teaching on this subject is to insist on the fact that 
 Englishmen before 1066 and Englishmen after 1066 are 
 not two different sets of men, but the same set of men. 
 Because therefore I wish before all things to set forth 
 English history as one unbroken story — because I wish 
 to set forth the Englishmen of a thousand years back 
 as the forefathers of Englishmen now, and Englishmen 
 now as the children of Englishmen a thousand years 
 back — because I wish to bring these simple but mis- 
 understood facts home to eveiy English mind on either 
 side of Ocean, — I like to use the name which clearly 
 expresses the truths on which I wish to insist, rather 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 53 
 
 than the name which practically denies or confuses 
 those truths. Following then my great teachers, I 
 must have one and the same name, not two different 
 names, to mean Englishmen who lived before the com- 
 ing of William the Norman and EngHshmen who lived 
 after his coming. And to that end I prefer to use the 
 name by which Englishmen have uninterruptedly called 
 themselves on both sides of that event, and not by 
 some other name by which they never called them- 
 selves. Holding that the personal identiy, so to speak, 
 of the English people has remained untouched ever 
 since they made the first of their two great voyages 
 fourteen hundred years back, I must call them through- 
 out those fourteen hundred years by some one name, 
 and to that end I must choose the name by which they 
 have called themselves from the earliest time when they 
 found it needful to have a common name. The sub- 
 ject of Edward the Confessor called himself an Eng- 
 lishman, as the subject of Queen Victoria calls himself 
 an Englishman now. Why am I to call the subject of 
 Edward the Confessor a Saxon or an Anglo-Saxon, 
 unless I am to call the subject of Queen Victoria a 
 Saxon or an Anglo-Saxon also? 
 
 But haply some one will tell me that I shall do well 
 to call the subject of Queen Victoria an Anglo-Saxon, 
 above all when I speak of the subjects of Queen Victoria 
 in that special hght in which I wish the subjects of Queen 
 Victoria to be looked on here. I shall be asked whether 
 "Anglo-Saxon" is not the right name to set forth the 
 brotherhood of the speakers of the English tongue all 
 over the world. I answer that for that purpose too I 
 rather choose the name English. And I do this on 
 
54 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 more grounds than one. First of all, it is the name 
 which has always been used. No one ever talked of 
 "the Anglo-Saxon race" and the like till quite lately; 
 no one does it quite naturally; it implies a conscious 
 object, a special desire to express something, to avoid 
 something. It is at best an ornament of style ; it is not 
 the first word which would come into a man's head as the 
 obvious name for all men of English blood and English 
 speech. Again, it is an ambiguous word ; it is a word 
 used in two senses. Sometimes, as we have seen, it 
 means Englishmen before 1066 as distinguished from 
 Englishmen after 1066. Sometimes it means men of 
 English speech all over the world now in 188 1. I do 
 not see why we should use the same word to express 
 these two very different ideas, or why we should express 
 either of them by a word which hardly exists except 
 in the royal style of the tenth century. Surely the 
 simplest, plainest, most natural, most obvious name, 
 the name which springs most naturally to our tongues, 
 the name which calls up the oldest, the noblest, the most 
 thrilling, associations, is the best of all. We wish to set 
 forth that we in our island, you on your continent, we 
 in Middle England, you in New, are brethren in one 
 common heritage, sharers in the common English blood, 
 the common English speech, the common English tra- 
 ditions, the common English glories. We wish to set 
 forth that all that is ours is yours also, that you have an 
 equal share with us in every memory, in every posses- 
 sion, of which we are proud, for which we are thankful. 
 How then can we refuse to you, how can you refuse to 
 accept from us, the common name which for a thousand 
 years has expressed the common brotherhood ? I will 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 55 
 
 not cast about for some curious, artificial, technical, term 
 dug out of some Corner by antiquarian research, and 
 choose that as the sign of our ancient and unbroken 
 brotherhood. I will rather choose the name which 
 comes straightest from the heart, which springs most 
 readily to the lips. Men of New England, I claim you 
 as Englishmen. Sprung as you are of English blood, 
 speakers as you are of the English tongue, sharers as 
 you are in the great inheritance of English law, neither 
 my feelings nor my reason will allow me to call you by 
 any other name. What we are, you are ; for thirteen 
 hundred years our forefathers and yours lived together, 
 worked together, suffered together, conquered together. 
 And all that they did they did under one name, the 
 name which alone can mark that we are alike children 
 of one common stock, whose sons, in whatever quarter 
 of the globe they light their fires, have all kindled them 
 from one common hearth. Speakers of the tongue of 
 Caedmon and of Milton, inheritors of the freedom for 
 which Godwine strove in one age and Hampden n 
 another, I claim you as brethren, I call you by the one 
 name which can express that brotherhood : if you cast 
 aside that old familiar name, there is none other that I 
 can offer. 
 
 But it may be asked, How can two wholly distinct 
 political societies, on opposite sides of the Ocean, be 
 united under one common name? Some one here on 
 American soil may say to me. No ; you are English in 
 England, we are Americans in America. I answer back 
 again. No ; we are alike English, in whatever quarter of 
 the globe we dwell ; we are English in Britain, you are 
 
56 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 English in America. As we did not forfeit the name by 
 staying behind, neither did you forfeit it by going forth. 
 Nor did you forfeit it, you rather showed more fully your 
 title to it, when you did as Englishmen have done in 
 every age, and drew the sword against unrighteous 
 rulers. Washington did not cease to be an Englishman 
 because he withstood George the Third, any more than 
 Hampden ceased to be an Englishman because he with- 
 stood Charles the First. I have his own witness. I 
 doubt greatly whether Washington .or any other of the 
 leaders of your War of Independence ever used the word 
 " English" as the distinctive name of those against whom 
 they acted. So far as I have seen, the name that was 
 then used in that sense was " British." And that was 
 the word which exactly expressed the truth. The strife 
 was not a foreign war between the English and some 
 other people ; it was, like civil wars of earlier times, a 
 strife between two branches of the English people. It 
 was a strife, if you will, between British English and 
 American English ; British therefore, and not English, 
 was the name by which the champions of freedom spoke 
 of their enemies. But more than this, as far as I have 
 seen, " British," not " English," was the word always 
 used on your side of the Ocean, as the name of the 
 enemy, not only in the War of Independence, but in the 
 far more unhappy war of 1 812. It is for you to tell 
 me, rather than for me to tell you, when and why the 
 more modern usage began. Anyhow, for the Kingdom 
 of Great Britain and Ireland, as a power — a power not 
 wholly English, but made of English, British, and Irish 
 elements — the proper political and geographical adjec- 
 tive is that which Washington used, the adjective Brit- 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 57 
 
 ish. But for the English folk, wherever they dwell, what- 
 ever be their form of government, whether they form one 
 political society or two or many, the true national adjec- 
 tive is English. We may be parted by outward and 
 accidental differences, but the inward essence is the same. 
 Some of us are British subjects, some of us are American 
 citizens, but both alike are something which takes in 
 both; both are alike English brethren. 
 
 And where, I would ask, is the great difficulty, the 
 great wonder, in applying a common name to members 
 of two distinct political communities ? There is no lack 
 of precedents for such an use of names. I will not refer to 
 the cases of Germany and Italy, both till our own day 
 divided — Germany to some extent divided still — among 
 a number of separate states. . For in those lands it has 
 been the great work of our own day to bring the divided 
 brethren together — to work a nearly perfect union of 
 Italy, to work a nearer approach to a perfect union of 
 Germany than has been known for many ages. But the 
 union of Germany and of Italy was desirable and possible 
 because geographical conditions allowed it, while any 
 real political union between the United States of America 
 and the kingdom of Great Britain is a thing which geo- 
 graphical conditions forbid. Still the German and Italian 
 examples prove thus much, that men may belong to dif- 
 ferent political societies, and yet may bear a common 
 national name, and may feel for many purposes as mem- 
 bers of one nation. But the real parallel is to be sought 
 for in much earlier times. It is to be sought for among 
 ±he people who of old time played in a narrower sphere 
 the same part which we have played in a wider one. I 
 must come back to a matter on which I said something 
 
5 8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 in my first lecture. I then spoke of the true meaning 
 of the word colony ; I maintained that, when the Thirteen 
 States declared themselves to be free and independent, 
 they did not thereby cease to be English colonies, but 
 became English colonies in a truer sense. I illustrated 
 that seeming paradox by the colonies of ancient Greece. 
 Let me now carry out that illustration a little further. 
 
 What the Greek of old was to the shores and islands 
 and peninsulas of the Mediterranean, the Englishman of 
 the last three centuries has been to the shores and islands 
 and peninsulas of the Ocean and to boundless continents 
 beyond them. Each crossed the sea in ships to win for 
 himself a new land, and, wherever he won for himself a 
 new land, he made that land a new Greece or a new Eng- 
 land. In the language of ancient days, Greece, Hellas, 
 was not a single land with a boundary to be diplomat- 
 ically fixed. Wherever Greeks dwelled, they remained 
 Greeks — Greeks by name, Greeks by feeling ; wherever 
 they dwelled, they took Greece and the name of Greece 
 with them. Wherever Hellenes dwelled, there was Hellas. 
 Outlying spots in Africa, in Gaul, in Spain, on the fur- 
 thest shores of the Euxine, high up among the isles of 
 Dalmatia, were as truly parts of Greece, their people 
 were as truly Greeks, as Athens, Sparta, and Argos, 
 and the Greeks of those older cities. Men went forth 
 to some distant land, and there they enlarged Hellas by 
 a new city, a new member, a new independent member, 
 of the common Hellenic body. The younger cities were 
 as truly distinct and free political communities as the 
 older ones ; the colony, independent from its birth, owed 
 to its metropolis love and reverence, but it owed nothing 
 more. From her child Syracuse the mother Corinth 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 59 
 
 asked only love and reverence, and love and reverence 
 she received in full measure. From her other child 
 Korkyra she asked for something more than love and 
 reverence, and bitter hatred and bloody wars were the 
 fruits. So might it have been with us, if we had had the 
 wisdom of the men of those old cities — if we had not so 
 long carried about with us that strange superstition 
 which teaches that Englishmen who settle in distant 
 lands, instead of forming free English communities from 
 the beginning, must needs everywhere remain subjects 
 of the sovereign of that part of the English people which 
 has gone as far as the isle of Britain and no further. 
 Thirteen — at least twelve — renowned homes of English- 
 men along this eastern shore of your great continent 
 might have been free and independent States, united by a 
 federal bond, in the seventeenth century instead of in the 
 eighteenth. You might have been from the beginning 
 to your Corinth as another Syracuse ; you would not have 
 been driven to be, for two unhappy moments — I trust 
 never again to be since those two unhappy moments — 
 as another Korkyra. Those moments I will pass by. I 
 will deem of myself standing here as a man of Corinth 
 speaking to men of Syracuse. I will deem of myself as 
 speaking to men of the same stock, of the same speech, 
 in a wide sense of the same nation — men sharing in the 
 same history, the same memories, parted indeed into 
 separate political bodies by the physical cause that we 
 are parted by the great and wide Ocean, but none the 
 less united by every tie that can make us in the highest 
 sense one and the same people. So, in the teeth of dis- 
 tance, of jealousies, of often cruel wars, each branch of 
 the scattered folk of Hellas felt toward every other 
 
6o THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 branch. So should every branch of the scattered folk of 
 England feel toward every other branch. They, scat- 
 tered and divided as they were, were still bound together 
 by the common name of Hellenes. So should we, scat- 
 tered indeed more widely than they were — for our world 
 is a greater world than theirs was — ^but far less divided 
 than they were in speech and history and feeling, be 
 bound together by the common name of Englishmen. 
 
 When then the Thirteen States declared themselves 
 free and independent, they in truth became for the first 
 time colonies of the elder England in the worthiest 
 sense. By that act they rose to the level of the ancient 
 settlements of Greece in other lands ; they rose to the 
 level of Syracuse and Massalia — colonies, new settle- 
 ments, children of full age enjoying the freedom of full 
 age, peers of the mother-state, owing to the mother- 
 state, not the forced obedience of a subject, but only the 
 willing and kindly respect of a full-grown son to his 
 father. By that act the people of those true English 
 colonies, those free and independent States, did not 
 cease to be Englishmen, but became Englishmen in a 
 truer and a higher sense. By independence, and by in- 
 dependence only, you. Englishmen in America, rose to 
 the level of your fellow-Englishmen in Britain. And, if 
 the same promotion should ever come to other settle- 
 ments of Englishmen in distant lands, one of the many 
 gains of such an event will be that it will enable the 
 English of Britain and the English of America more 
 fully to feel their common brotherhood. As long as 
 there are only two independent English nations in the 
 world, there is an unavoidable tendency to dwell on 
 points of difference, perhaps even to call up points of 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 6 1 
 
 jealousy. When there are three, four, five, independent 
 English nations, we may fairly hope that such tenden- 
 cies will die out, that they will be merged in the tend- 
 ency to acknowledge the brotherhood which will bind 
 together those three, four, or five nations, in distinction 
 from all others. 
 
 But as long as things remain as they are, if I speak of 
 you as Americans, I mean the phrase to be elliptical ; 
 I mean " American English " as distinguished from " Brit- 
 ish English." And now let me again for a moment 
 speak of myself, and tell you a story about myself 
 I was once taken to task by a publication on this side 
 of the Ocean — not indeed in my own person, for the 
 offence was done in an anonymous writing — for say- 
 ing sportively that, in the mouth of a man of New 
 England, the proper name for a man of Middle England 
 was a " Britisher." I was thought by that saying to 
 mean something offensive to the men of New England. 
 No innocent man was ever more cruelly misconstrued. 
 Instead of anything offensive, I meant all that was 
 kindly, respectful, brotherly. I meant that you did 
 right to call us by some name which, if it did not assert, 
 at least did not deny, the common English brotherhood. 
 Now, if you call yourselves " Americans," and call us 
 " English " in opposition to "Americans," you do in effect 
 disclaim the English name. You reproach us as it were 
 with being the only English, while we wish to receive 
 you as no less English than ourselves. But if yOu call 
 us " Britishers," you allow, at least you do not shut out, 
 all that I ask for. Perhaps the name " Britisher" does not 
 sound very elegant, perhaps it does not exactly belong 
 to the high-polite style ; but never mind that, if it is at 
 
62 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 least patient of the better sense which I wish to put 
 upon it. If you call yourselves Americans and us 
 " Britishers," I understand by " Britishers " Englishmen 
 born and dwelling in Britain, as distinguished from 
 Englishmen born and dwelling in America. I know 
 a novel written long ago in Middle England, where an 
 American merchant-captain is made to set down in his 
 log, "Met a Britisher; treated politely." The time, it 
 should be noticed, was in the great war between Great 
 Britain and France, when neutral vessels were not al- 
 ways treated politely. Now you know better than I 
 do whether such a captain was likely, then or now, 
 really to set down in his log, " Met a Britisher ; treated 
 politely." All that I say is, that, if he did so, I for one 
 do not object to the name, but accept it as the name 
 best describing the facts of the case. I will accept it till 
 somebody better solves what is the real difficulty of the 
 case. We need a substantive to match the adjective 
 British. If " Britisher '' is rejected as vulgar, " Briton " 
 must be rejected as something worse, as distinctly inac- 
 curate. In my own island I should greatly object to be 
 called a Britisher, or even a Briton; in Britain either 
 name would be a mark of race between two races of 
 men dwelling in the same island. But here in America 
 we wish to distinguish, not between two races of men 
 in the same land, but between men of the same race in 
 two distant lands. The American, in short, is the 
 American Englishman, the Britisher is the British Eng- 
 lishman. I was called a Britisher the other day, and I 
 did not feel angry. If the American editor who spoke 
 of the little book which I mentioned as " foreign " will 
 strike out that ugly word "foreign," and put instead 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 63 
 
 " British," or even " Britisher," I will embrace him as 
 an English brother. 
 
 One word more of graver import. An event has 
 lately happened — it has happened since I began to put 
 pen to paper for the writing of the present lecture — 
 which, sad in every other aspect, has been joyful in 
 this, that it has brought the two great divisions of the 
 English folk nearer together in heart and feeling. We 
 have been made as one man by a common sorrow. It 
 is not very long since the hearts of all the world were 
 stirred by the tale of a great and illustrious monarch 
 struck down by the murderer's hand in the streets of 
 his own capital. That was the recompense for a life 
 given for the good of his people ; that was the reward 
 of the prince who had raised millions of his own sub- 
 jects for the first time to the full rank of human beings 
 — the prince who, while he set free the bondsman in his 
 own realm, forgot not to set free the bondsmen of his 
 own race beyond the bounds of his own realm. We 
 mourned for Alexander the Liberator, liberator of 
 Russia, liberator of Bulgaria, as it was fit to mourn for a 
 noble man doomed to an unworthy fate. Since that day 
 we have had to mourn again, to mourn for a man no 
 less noble, cut down no less unworthily, cut down when 
 he had just stretched forth his hand for a mighty 
 and a noble work. And this time our mourning has 
 been deeper. It has been deeper, because this time 
 we have been mourning for one of our own selves ; we 
 have been mourning for a brother ; we have been shar- 
 ing in the mourning of brethren. We mourned for the 
 man of our own blood as we could not mourn for the 
 
64 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 stranger. We could not mourn for an Emperor of all 
 the Russias as we could mourn for the chosen leader 
 of a mighty commonwealth of our own people. We 
 could not mourn even for Alexander the Liberator as 
 we could mourn for James Abram Garfield. All the 
 signs of grief and kindred feeling, the people of one 
 political body watching day by day for the least news 
 of the welfare of the chief of another political body, 
 watching as though they had been watching by the bed 
 of a father or a brother — the breathless eagerness to 
 hear of every turn for the better or for the worse — ^the 
 prayers sent up from the temples of various forms of 
 the common faith for a Christian brother and a Chris- 
 tian ruler — the marks of sorrow when all was over, the 
 sermons, the speeches, the muffled bells, the flags half- 
 mast high, the telegraph-wires flashing messages of sym- 
 pathy, the court of Britain in the unwonted garb of 
 sorrow, — what does all this prove? It proves indeed 
 honour and sympathy for a noble man cruelly and foully 
 wronged. But that we felt for the murdered Emperor 
 no less than for the murdered President. This time it 
 proves something more ; it proves that a President of 
 the United States can be something to us Englishmen 
 of Britain which an Emperor of all the Russias cannot 
 be. We felt for one of ourselves ; I cannot say for a 
 countryman — that geography forbids — but for a man 
 of our own blood and our own speech. We could 
 write over the grave of Garfield as we could not write 
 over the grave of Alexander, " The man is near of kin 
 to us." We felt, we mourned, for one who in himself 
 deserved our sympathy and our sorrow ; but that sym- 
 pathy and sorrow were all the keener because he who 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 6$ 
 
 called them forth was a brother called to be the head 
 of a commonwealth of brethren. We felt for the man 
 in himself, but we felt yet more for the people who had 
 freely placed their destinies in his hands. Surely never 
 have Englishmen on either side of Ocean been more 
 closely drawn together than they have now been drawn 
 together in watching and in mourning beside the bed, 
 over the grave, of the chief, the chosen chief, the worthy 
 chief, of one of the two great divisions of the English 
 people. 
 
 I have gone thus far, not at all forgetting that all I have 
 been saying goes on certain assumptions. In arguing 
 that you, English-speaking dwellers in this western con- 
 tinent, are, not less than we, English-speaking dwellers 
 in what to you is an eastern island, are parts of one 
 common English people, brethren of one common 
 English family, I have throughout assumed that there 
 is such a thing as a common English people, such a 
 thing as a common English family. Now I am so 
 used to controversies of all kinds that I shall not be 
 greatly surprised if some one on either side of the 
 Ocean should deny my assumption, and maintain that 
 there is no English people at all. Some of us, I have 
 often found occasion to. notice, have a wonderful fancy 
 for arguing that we are not ourselves, but somebody 
 else. I know not a few who, so far from believing in 
 an older English people on the European mainland — 
 so far from believing in a younger English people on 
 the American mainland — will hardly allow that there is 
 an English people in the isle of Britain itself At least 
 they will not allow that the English people has had an 
 
66 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 unbroken being in the isle of Britain from its first 
 coming into it till now. This is a peculiarly English 
 fancy ; I know of no other people who have the same 
 singular taste for turning their backs upon themselves. 
 Other nations have rather a fancy for claiming more than 
 their due ; the English alone — I suspect I may extend 
 the remark to some on both sides of the Ocean — have 
 this self-effacing zeal to claim less than rightly belongs 
 to them. If I may have to persuade some here that 
 their history did not begin in the seventeenth century, 
 so I have to persuade some at home that their history did 
 not begin in the thirteenth century or in the eleventh. 
 The better to do this, I must ask both them and you to 
 come back with me to the real beginning, the common 
 beginning, of both of us in the fifth century. I am pre- 
 pared to be told both that you here are not strictly an 
 English people, and that we in Britain are not strictly an 
 English people. I am prepared to be told that, alike in 
 America and in Britain, the Teutonic blood of the fifth 
 century has been so mixed with other elements, that the 
 nature and proportion of the mixture has been so differ- 
 ent in the two cases, that, instead of one fairly homoge- 
 neous race, we have become in truth two distinct mixed 
 races. I shall be prepared to admit all the facts, 'so far 
 as they are facts, on which this doctrine is grounded ; 
 but I shall be also prepared to deal with those facts in 
 quite another way. In one sense we are a mixed race, 
 because, in one sense, every nation on the face of the 
 earth is, and must be, a mixed race. And it is no less 
 certain that this mixture has not taken exactly the same 
 course in Britain and in America. But I am also pre- 
 pared to maintain that we are not mixed in such a way 
 
THE ENGLISH NAME. 6/ 
 
 or to such a degree as to deny our national identity — that 
 we are not so mixed, either in Britain or in America, as 
 to make us some other people or some two other peoples, 
 and not the one people that we were from the beginning. 
 And I shall be prepared to argue another point. I shall 
 not be surprised if some, either here or there, find a 
 difficulty in admitting the analogy which I have assumed 
 between what I call the first voyage and the second, 
 between the process which colonized Britain in the fifth 
 century and the process which colonized America in the 
 seventeenth. Now I see the differences, many and great, 
 as clearly as any man ; I only maintain that the like- 
 nesses are yet more and greater. This evening I have 
 had largely to speak of a name, but it has been of a 
 name which is in truth no small fact. At our next meet- 
 ing we will go on to look a little more narrowly into the 
 facts which that name sets forth, the facts which show 
 that I who speak and you who listen to me, I of the 
 European island, you of the American mainland, are in 
 truth brethren of one house, sharers in one heritage, the 
 heritage of those bold colonists fourteen hundred years 
 ago whose calling it was to change so large a part of 
 Celtic Britain into Teutonic England. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 Let me begin the present stage of our argument by 
 stating as strongly as may be the manifest points of dif- 
 ference between the colonization of Britain in the fifth 
 and sixth centuries from the European mainland, and 
 the colonization of America in the seventeenth century 
 from the isle of Britain. Those differences, as I have 
 already said, are neither few nor slight. The connexion 
 between the English people in Britain and the English 
 people in America is plain on the face of it. Everybody 
 admits it ; it needs no proof That the North American 
 States were settled by English-speaking colonists from 
 Britain, that those States proclaim to this day the mem- 
 ory of the fact by keeping on the unbroken use of the 
 English language, are points which I need not stop to 
 make ■ good by witnesses. I who speak and you who 
 hear are ourselves the best witnesses to the fact. We 
 exchange our thoughts without an interpreter ; we each 
 speak to the other in our own tongue in which we were 
 born. I need hardly take much time to answer some ar- 
 guments — I am tempted to call them cavils — which I have 
 known brought to prove that Britain and America have 
 ceased to speak a common language. Some small differ- 
 ences in accent, some small differences in vocabulary, 
 are eagerly pressed into the service of this fallacy. I 
 
 68 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 69 
 
 have been gravely told that "English" and "American" 
 are two different languages because one speaks of a 
 " shop " and the other of a " store," because one speaks 
 of a " railway-carriage " and the other of a " railroad-car." 
 Now people who talk in this way cannot know the real 
 nature of differences of language, or even of differences 
 of dialect. Differences of this kind are not differences 
 of language; they are not even differences of dialect. 
 They are merely differences of local custom, often to be 
 easily accounted for by differences of local circumstances. 
 I have not the slightest doubt that a " store " in a newly- 
 founded New England town differed a good deal from a 
 " shop " in an old-standing town in the older England. 
 It was likely to have, far more than the other had, the 
 nature of a store in the strict sense ; it was doubtless 
 called a " store " because that was the name which best 
 expressed what it was. I could myself greatly enlarge 
 the list by words which I have myself heard since I 
 came into America, but I have heard no difference of 
 language, no difference of dialect. I can mark differ- 
 ences of dialect between different parts of the United 
 States, as I can mark differences of dialect between dif- 
 ferent parts of England; but a general American dia- 
 lect of English, as distinguished from a general British 
 dialect of English, I have not marked. I have indeed 
 marked a good many differences of local usage, not a 
 few of which are good seventeenth-century words and 
 uses of words which lived on here after they were 
 dropped in Britain. I have hearci one word only that 
 did not at once convey its meaning. The word " rare," 
 applied to meat not cooked enough, did sound really 
 Strange to me; but an eminent citizen of yours pres- 
 
70 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 t 
 ently showed me that it had for it the authority of 
 
 Dryden. And a neighbour of my own at home pres- 
 ently wrote to rebuke me for not knowing a word which 
 was in daily use in the county of Somerset. But the 
 attempt to prove difference of language from simple dif- 
 ference of local use proves too much. That kind of 
 argument might be just as easily turned to show that 
 there are half a dozen or more languages spoken in the 
 elder England itself A hackney-carriage is, or lately 
 was, best known in London as a cab, in Birmingham as 
 a car, in Manchester as a coach, and in most other places 
 as a. fly. I do not doubt that there is a real reason for 
 every one of these small differences of usage; at any 
 rate, there is something that savours of poetry or meta- 
 phor in the fly, and something that savours of slang in 
 the cab. Or again, I remember a foolish man in 
 England publishing his travels in America, and set- 
 ting down as " Americanisms " the use of such words 
 as "fall" and "bottom." I wonder whether he thought 
 that " fall " and " bottom " were " American " words 
 invented since the Declaration of Independence, which 
 have taken the place of " English " words — perhaps Latin 
 " autumn " and " valley " — which were in use before that 
 event. Now I might very well question the fact whether 
 " fall " and " bottom " are in any way distinctive of Amer- 
 ica. "Bottom," in much the same sense as " dale" or 
 " combe," lives both in local nomenclature and in our 
 common translation of the Bible ; and if " fall," as a sea- 
 son of the year, has 'gone out of use in Britain, it has 
 gone out very lately. At least, I perfectly well remem- 
 ber the phrase of "spring and fall" in my childhood. 
 But I grant that, if there be this difference in the use of 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 7 1 
 
 words like " fall " and " bottom," it does come a degree 
 nearer to the real difference of language or dialect than 
 differences in the use of words like " store " and " car." 
 "Fall" and "bottom" are words which belong to the 
 very essence of the language. We must, from the very 
 beginning of things, have some names for the seasons 
 of the year and for the marked features of nature. If 
 it could be shown that we do habitually call the mass of 
 objects of this kind by different names, it would go some 
 way toward proving a difference of language, or at least 
 of vocabulary. But even then it would not go very far, 
 unless the names used on each side were names which 
 were altogether unintelligible on the other side. If sun, 
 moon, and stars, earth, air, fire, and water, father and 
 mother, son and daughter, brother and sister, ever come 
 to be habitually called on one side of the Ocean by 
 names which are not understood on the other side, 
 then I shall allow that there is an English and an 
 American language distinct from one another, but not 
 till then. 
 
 A statesman in England, lately deceased, once spoke 
 of the United States as a country which had borrowed 
 its language and several other things from another 
 country. What did he think that you, men of New 
 England, were ? It is hardly possible that he looked 
 on the people of the United States as Red Indians who 
 had learned English. Yet his words, taken literally, 
 could hardly bear any other meaning. Truly there is 
 no borrowing in the case: you did not borrow from 
 us any more than we borrowed from you. Each divi- 
 sion of the English folk, each on its own side of the 
 Ocean, kept the possession which was common to both 
 
72 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 of equal right, and, as not the least precious part of 
 that common possession, each kept the old Teutonic 
 mother-tongue. Men who speak different languages 
 need an interpreter; men who speak different dialects 
 of the same language often understand one another 
 with difficulty, but there is commonly some interme- 
 diate form of the common tongue which they both 
 understand with ease. But we, Englishmen of the two 
 sides of the Ocean, are not driven to any shifts like 
 these in holding converse with one another. We speak 
 the same tongue, with the same grammatical forms, 
 the same essential vocabulary. We have a common 
 possession in the older literature of the common tongue, 
 older than the days of separation. And we have a com- 
 mon possession too in the literature which since the 
 separation has grown up on the two sides of the Ocean. 
 English books are read in America, American books 
 are read in England, not as books belonging to a for- 
 eign literature, but as parts of a literature which is 
 equally at home in both lands. Between good writ- 
 ing and speaking in England and good writing and 
 speaking in America, there is, I maintain, no differ- 
 ence whatever ■ in point of language, strictly so called. 
 That there should be a certain local flavour about each, 
 a certain style and taste and manner, which may show 
 to which side of the Ocean the writer or speaker be- 
 longs, is in no way wonderful, in no way matter of 
 blame on either side. But differences of this kind are 
 not real differences of language. Nor is it at all won- 
 derful if bad writers in England and bad writers in 
 America should sometimes be bad with different and 
 characteristic kinds of badness. That proves nothing 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 73 
 
 for the present argument ; it proves no more than the 
 doctrine which was old in the days of Aristotle, that 
 there is only one way of being right, but that there are 
 many ways of being wrong. The truth that there is 
 not even a dialectic difference between the tongue of 
 Middle England and the tongue of New England may 
 better come home to you if you compare the case of 
 British and American English with a case of real dia- 
 lectic difference. Take the case of the Northern and 
 Southern types of English within Britain itself In the 
 last century — it may even have been so within the pres- 
 ent century — a literary Scotsman habitually used two 
 dialects of the same tongue. He spoke his own nat- 
 ural tongue, the Northern form of English, a much 
 truer and purer form of English than the Southern 
 English which we speak. But he wrote, or tried to 
 write, Southern English, according to the received 
 models of Southern English. And this he did con- 
 sciously, giving his mind of set purpose to eschew the 
 peculiarities of his own natural dialect, and to employ 
 in their stead the peculiarities of the dialect which 
 formed his literary ideal. I will not insult you by sup- 
 posing that a good American writer has any need to do 
 anything of this kind. He has no need to imitate the 
 English of Britain ; he has simply to write in its purity 
 the common language of Britain and America. . To that 
 end he will eschew all forms of speech which depart 
 from that purity, whether they are of British or of Amer- 
 ican origin. But he has no need to eschew any forms 
 simply as being American, or to adopt any forms simply 
 as being British. He has simply to write the common 
 speech, adopting whatever is good, eschewing whatever 
 
74 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 is bad, from whichever side of Ocean the good and the 
 bad may come. 
 
 Now, after comparing New England and Middle 
 England in this matter, let us go back and compare 
 Middle England and Old England. We shall now find 
 another state of things. Allow me again to take in 
 under the name of Old England, not merely the older 
 Angeln or the older Saxony, but the whole Nether- 
 Dutch-speaking coast of the European continent. Any- 
 where in that region, if I choose to say that the tongue 
 is the same as the tongue of Middle and New England, 
 I shall be saying what is perfectly true in a certain 
 sense. But it will not be true in the same sense as that 
 in which I say that the tongue of Middle and of New 
 England is the same. The truth of this last proposition 
 is not a matter of any special learning ; it is not a kind 
 of inner doctrine taken in by those only who are masters 
 of some special learning: it is a matter of every-day 
 experience about which every man's common sense 
 can judge. But if I say that the tongue of Angeln, or 
 of the Old Saxony, or of Friesland, Holland, and Flan- 
 ders, is the same as the English tongue common to 
 Britain and America, I am saying what is perfectly true 
 as a matter of learned inquiry, but what is not true as 
 a matter of every-day experience. The common tongue 
 of Britain and America is not 'practically intelligible 
 in those Nether-Dutch lands, and the speech of those 
 Nether-Dutch lands is not practically intelligible in 
 Britain and America. I say not practically intelligible ; 
 I do not say that they are utterly unintelligible to one 
 another, like two tongues which have no kindred 
 between them at all, or no nearer kindred than is 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 75 
 
 implied in common Aryan origin. The philologer re- 
 cognizes the near kindred at a glance, and there are a 
 crowd of stories which show that the likeness between 
 the tongues strikes even those who are not philologers. 
 One constantly hears stories how an Englishman in 
 Flanders or Holland, or even in Denmark, contrived, 
 while speaking his own tongue, to make himself under- 
 stood by the men of the land. But tales like these are 
 always told as something' remarkable, something which 
 we are expected to be rather surprised at hearing. The 
 truth is that the Nether-Dutch of the European mainland 
 and the Nether-Dutch — that is, the English — of Britain 
 and America have long ceased to be mutually intelligi- 
 ble, but that they can again become mutually intelligible 
 under certain circumstances. I can believe that it may 
 happen through happy accident. I can believe the story 
 of the Englishman in Holland — how he wanted warm 
 water — how he found that, when he asked over and 
 over again for eau chaude, nothing came of it — how 
 he at last cried out " warm water " in a kind of despair, 
 and then the thing that he wanted was at once brought 
 to him. I know by experience that, in the city of Ham- 
 burg, where, though the polite and literary speech is 
 High-Dutch, the natural speech of the people is 
 Nether-Dutch, if you speak English slowly and care- 
 fully, choosing your words well and uttering them 
 distinctly, you will be understood by a common man 
 in the streets of the Hanseatic city. But you will not — 
 at least I did not — understand what our Nether-Dutch 
 kinsman says back again, because he will not pick his 
 words carefully or utter them slowly. Practically there- 
 fore the two languages are no longer one. Practically 
 
"jd THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 they have become two languages. They have passed 
 the stage of dialectic difference. They are for practical 
 purposes mutually unintelligible, and there is no third 
 or intermediate form of speech which is intelligible to 
 both. The tongues have no common literature. He 
 who speaks one of them by nature, and wishes to read 
 books in the other, must learn that other tongue as a 
 foreign language. The unity of speech between Middle 
 England and New is an unity of every-day usage which 
 every man can feel and understand. The unity of speech 
 between Old England and Middle is merely an unity of 
 philological curiosity which it needs special teaching to 
 feel and understand. 
 
 I might carry on this same kind of contrast through 
 many points of detail, the result of all of which would 
 be to show in the same way that there has been for ages 
 a division between the English in Britain and their near- 
 est kinsfolk on the European continent of quite another 
 kind from the division which parts the English in Amer- 
 ica from the English in Britain. This wide difference is 
 owing to the widely different circumstances under which 
 the earlier and the later colony was founded. First of 
 all, the settlement of the English in Britain took place 
 fourteen hundred years ago ; the settlement of the Eng- 
 lish in America took place less than three hundred years 
 ago. It is only natural, from a mere reckoning of years, 
 that the earlier colony should have parted off much 
 more widely from the metropolis than the later colony 
 has done. But the mere reckoning of years is not all ; it 
 might so happen that three hundred years should work 
 a greater amount of change than fourteen hundred. The 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. TJ 
 
 real cause is to be found, not so much in the mere dif- 
 ference in the number of years as in the fact that the 
 later settlement was the work of a nation which had 
 long been fully formed, while the earlier settlement was 
 the work of a people whose national being was not yet 
 fully formed, or, rather, whose national being derived 
 its fully developed shape from the fact of the settlement 
 itself At the time of the English settlement in Britain, 
 the consciousness of distinct national life could hardly 
 have begun among the Nether-Dutch people ; their lan- 
 guage, their institutions, were still only forming, not yet 
 formed ; their literature, if it had begun, was still only a 
 literature of traditional poems, and it was presently to 
 receive a deadly blow through the teaching of Christian- 
 ity. A part of this young and unformed people parted 
 off from the general mass to occupy seats in a new land. 
 The colonists who were thus parted from their mother- 
 land did not forget whence they had come ; but, in the 
 nature of things, they could not keep up the same con- 
 nexion with that motherland which the colonists of the 
 seventeenth centuiy, no less naturally, did keep up with 
 theirs. And to the simple minds of the fifth and sixth 
 centuries the thought never suggested itself that Angles 
 and Saxons who left the mainland to settle in Britain 
 owed any political allegiance to the old Angeln or the 
 old Saxony on the mainland. 
 
 But nothing tended so greatly to part off the earlier 
 settlers from their motherland as the nature of the land 
 in which they made their settlement. Their colonies 
 were planted in Britain ; that is, in an island, in a great 
 island, an island which was traditionally looked on as 
 another world. There is no fact in the whole history of 
 
78 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 our people more important than the fact that our first 
 great settlement was made in an island. No migration 
 to any other part of the continent could have had the 
 same consequences as our migration from the continent 
 to the isle of Britain. At an early stage of our national 
 life, we planted ourselves in a new world, carrying with 
 us our infant tongue, our infant institutions, all the ele- 
 ments out of which national life grows. In that new 
 world they grew up to their first perfection. The Eng- 
 lish of Britain first became a nation within the four seas 
 of Britain. Our insular position determined our history 
 and determined our national character. All the cir- 
 cumstances of their later history tended to separate 
 the insular and the continental branches of the Ne- 
 ther-Dutch stock. The insular Teutons, settling in an 
 island from which Roman rule had passed away, and 
 who had to make and to defend their settlement by long 
 wars against a stubborn and restless enemy, lived quite 
 another historic life from any of their fellows. Their po- 
 sition was equally unlike that of the Teutons who abode 
 on Teutonic soil and that of the Teutons who made far 
 easier settlements in the provinces of the Roman Empire. 
 In their island world the English lived on, severed from 
 their continental kinsfolk and placed out of reach of the 
 chief influences which affected them. They grew up 
 apart, remaining in many things more strictly Teutonic 
 than their continental kinsfolk, needing a twofold con- 
 quest, spiritual and temporal, to bring them in any mea- 
 sure within the verge of the Latin world of Europe. 
 And, when the Romance influence came upon England, 
 it came in a shape in which it never affected any other 
 of the kindred lands. For it came in the form of a con- 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 79 
 
 quest, but a conquest of so peculiar a character that in 
 the end it rather strengthened the national life than 
 weakened it. The English of Britain, in short, were 
 parted at so early a stage from the English of the con- 
 tinent that their history took a wholly distinct course. 
 They grew up as a wholly distinct people, keeping up 
 a constant intercourse with some of the kindred nations, 
 but only the intercourse of strangers and foreigners, of 
 men of another nation and another speech. 
 
 In opposition to all this, the second migration of the 
 English folk, the migration which made a large part of the 
 North American continent an English land, was made 
 when the English nation was in every sense fully 
 formed, when its language, its literature, its institutions, 
 had put on their distinct and characteristic shapes. 
 There was no need for a new nation to be formed out of 
 as yet unformed elements ; there was no need for new 
 institutions to be developed out of unformed germs ; 
 there was at most an existing nation to undei^o a geo 
 graphical and political cleaving asunder, but with no 
 further change than was involved in that geographical 
 and political cleaving asunder. The English .settlers in 
 America did not, according to the strange delusion of the 
 statesman whom I quoted some time back, borrow the 
 laws, language, and institutions of some other country ; 
 they took with them, ready made, from their old to their 
 new country, their own laws, language, and institutions, 
 which were equally their own in the old country and in 
 the new. Some things doubtless needed to be changed 
 by reason of the mere change from an island in the old 
 world to a continent in the new; some things again 
 needed to be modified when the colonies of England be- 
 
8o THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 came more truly colonies of England by independence. 
 But all such changes were in truth reforms of an old fab- 
 ric, not the creation of a new fabric. The work was already 
 done ; the fabric was already reared ; the English nation 
 had been formed and had waxed to its full growth on 
 British soil ; there was no need, no possibility, that an- 
 other nation in the same sense, or in any sense but the 
 strictly political sense, should grow up on American 
 soil. The old tongue, the old memories, the old life, 
 lived on in both the divided branches of the English 
 nation. There could not be, the facts of history would 
 not allow that there should be, the same amount of 
 change, the same amount of separation, between the 
 second England and the third as the facts of earlier 
 history had wrought between the first England and 
 the second. 
 
 And yet there are not lacking some points of direct 
 likeness between the older and the later settlements. 
 I have spoken of the insular position of the English in 
 Britain as having had no small effect on their history 
 and national character. Shall you be surprised if I say 
 that a position not wholly unlike in some respects has 
 had no small effect on the history and national charac- 
 ter of the English in America ? Looking on the map, 
 on the vast extent of the North American continent, 
 and considering further how few, compared with some 
 other parts both of the old and the new world, are the 
 islands of any size which lie along your coasts, I can 
 hardly call the United States an insular power. But I 
 shall hardly be wrong in calling them an isolated power. 
 You live in a world of your own, as the English did 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 8 1 
 
 when they first left the continent for the great island. 
 You are as distinctly the first power in your own world 
 as the elder English were the first power in their own 
 world. And if we overleap mere political boundaries, — 
 if we take in all the English-speaking inhabitants of 
 North America, both in the lands which have become 
 truly a new England and in the lands which still lag be- 
 hind that standard — North America is so pre-eminently 
 an English land that its other inhabitants, whether rem- 
 nants of earlier races or settlers from other parts of the 
 old world, seem something exceptional beside its Eng- 
 lish-speaking people. So it was in the isle of Britain 
 itself. The kingdom of England — after the union of 
 many small kingdoms and principalities had formed the 
 kingdom of England — was not the only English power 
 in the isle of Britain. The kingdom of Scotland, often 
 politically the enemy of England, was still practically 
 an English kingdom ; among the three elements in the 
 population of Scotland, it was its English element, the 
 men of Teutonic Lothian, that made Scotland all that it 
 historically became. In measuring Teutonic settlement 
 and Teutonic influence in Britain, we must take into our 
 reckoning, not only the kingdom of England politically 
 so called, but also the dominant English element in Scot- 
 land. And, taking in the two, the Teuton becomes dis- 
 tinctly dominant throughout the island ; the Celt is 
 something exceptional. Thus, alike in the European 
 island and in the American continent, the English 
 settlers were predominant in a world of their own. In 
 both they were dominant ; in both they were isolated. 
 Neither had, like the nations of continental Europe, 
 powers of equal rank, but foreign in every sense of the 
 
82 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 word, close on their borders. Neither has ever known 
 the experience of lands Hke France, Germany, and Italy, 
 which have had to live with other great nations, alien 
 and rival nations, marching on them through a long 
 frontier. The English people, both in Britain and in 
 America, would most likely have been in some things 
 a different kind of people if they had gone through 
 that experience. And if our Nether-Dutch kinsfolk 
 on the European mainland have not gone through 
 altogether the same experience as France, Germany, or 
 Italy, it has been from a cause exactly opposite to those 
 which affected us in Britain and in America. Their 
 fate was ruled, not by isolation, but by lack of isolation. 
 They have had too many neighbours, and neighbours 
 often too strong for them. In the long line of their 
 coast, some of them passed under the rule of France 
 and some under the rule of Denmark. The greater 
 part has been merged in the closely-allied, but still 
 quite distinct, speech and nationality of the High- 
 German. On the whole continent of Europe there is 
 left only one independent land wholly and avowedly 
 of the Nether-Dutch speech and kin. That land is 
 one with which Englishmen both in Europe and 
 in America have had much to do both in war and in 
 peace. We sent them Wilfrith to preach to them the 
 faith and Sidney to die for their freedom. And they 
 sent us William of Orange, if not to die, yet to live for 
 ours. And, on this side of the Ocean, as I have already 
 pointed out, they were the original settlers of the great- 
 est city and of one of the greatest States of your Union. 
 The truest representative of the oldest England on the 
 European continent is the modern kingdom of the Neth- 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 83 
 
 erlands, once famous by the more glorious name of the 
 Seven United Provinces. 
 
 I have sometimes been asked, in a kind of mockery, 
 whether I should wish the history of England or the 
 language of England to have been the same as the 
 history and the language of the Netherlands. The ques- 
 tion is commonly put with reference to the effects of 
 the Romance element in England — above all, to the 
 effects of the Norman Conquest. If there had been no 
 Norman Conquest, or if Romance influences had not 
 made their way into England in some other shape, Eng- 
 land, we are told — and therefore, remember, America too 
 — would have been no more in the world than the Neth- 
 erlands have been. Our tongue would have been no 
 more harmonious, our literature would have been no 
 greater, than the one independent Nether-Dutch lan- 
 guage and literature now to be found on the mainland 
 of Europe. Now this kind of comparison savours a little 
 of that kind of condescending benevolence toward the 
 rest of the world of which I remember a good instance 
 in a child's story. A child points out to his mother that 
 a man who is passing by is a Frenchman. The mother 
 answers, " Yes, poor man ; but he can't help it." I do not 
 suppose that any of us here, from whichever side of the 
 Ocean, would wish to change either with the Frenchman 
 or with the Hollander. But I do not know that that 
 proves of itself any inherent superiority on our part over 
 the Frenchman or the Hollander. It is quite possible that 
 he would be just as unwilling to change with any of us, 
 and we should not like the inference that might thence 
 be drawn the other way. I certainly think — and you. 
 
84 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 countrymen of Motley, may be inclined to think with 
 me — that the history of the Netherlands is not quite so 
 contemptible as the question which I have quoted seems 
 to imply. Still I freely allow that I should not wish to 
 exchange the history of England for the history of the 
 Netherlands. But I should be neither offended nor as- 
 tonished if the Hollander proved just as little willing to 
 exchange his national history for mine. About the lan- 
 guage I cannot speak so freely. I know next to nothing 
 of the language, and nothing at all of the literature. 
 My very small dabblings in continental Nether-Dutch 
 have been made in other dialects of the common tongue. 
 But I believe the popular notion is that the Nether-Dutch 
 of Holland and the other six provinces is a grotesque 
 kind of language, something like English, something 
 like German, but not exactly like either, and that it is 
 to be looked on as something queer and outlandish, 
 because it is not exactly like either. Now I cannot 
 admit that every Teutonic language is necessarily bound 
 to conform to one or other of two types, English and 
 High-German. The tongue of Holland may surely have 
 struck out a line of its own, and it may be just as good 
 in its own line as the tongues of the two greater coun- 
 tries on each side of it. As for the literature, it is not 
 in the nature of things that the literature of the Seven 
 Provinces should hold the same place in the world's 
 esteem as the literature of England or France, of Ger- 
 many or Italy. He who speaks in the tongue of Hol- 
 land does not speak to the same vast audience of men 
 of his own tongue as he does who speaks the tongue of 
 England ; still less does he speak to the same audience 
 of men of tongues not his own as he does who speaks 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 85 
 
 the tongue of France. He thereby loses one great 
 incitement to excellence ; he knows that it is only with- 
 in a very narrow range that he can be listened to. But 
 why may not a poet, an orator, or an historian, in the 
 Nether-Dutch tongue of Holland, in himself and for 
 his own people, be as good a poet, orator, or historian, 
 as if he wrote in English or French or High-German ? 
 I will not here enter on the question of the good or bad 
 effect of the Romance infusion, into our language. But 
 the analogy of other tongues seems to show that a 
 state on the scale of England would in any case, with 
 or without any alien infusion, have developed for itself 
 a literature on a different scale, so to 'speak, from the 
 literature of the Seven Provinces. And this at least I 
 know, that there is nothing grotesque or contemptible, 
 nothing unworthy of being the vehicle of the very 
 greatest literature, in the tongue of England before the 
 Romance infusion made its way into it. Have we not 
 our Homer after Homer in the heroic lay of Beowulf? 
 Have we not our Milton before Milton in the sacred 
 song of Caedmon ? 
 
 But all this is not the real answer to such questions 
 as whether England, left to her own Teutonic being, 
 without any Romance elements brought in by conquer- 
 ors or others, would not have been as Holland now is. 
 Now if it is ruled to be so specially sad a fate to be as 
 Holland, I admit, as fully as my questioner can wish to 
 imply, that the greatest case of Romance influence in 
 England, the Norman Conquest of England, effectually 
 saved us from being as Holland. I fully admit, in the 
 words of Gibbon, that England was a gainer by the 
 Norman Conquest. But I must be allowed to put my 
 
86 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 own meaning on Gibbon's words. What that meaning 
 is I hope to show hereafter. I will here only state my 
 paradox. I believe that we have been, in the long run, 
 more Teutonic, more truly English, than if Romance- 
 speaking invaders had left us to ourselves. I believe 
 that it is largely owing to the Norman Conquest that 
 we, on both sides of Ocean, may fairly boast ourselves 
 as a greater and truer representative of the old Nether- 
 Dutch stock than any nation now left on the European 
 mainland. That doctrine, that paradox, I have main- 
 tained in five large volumes ; I have also maintained it 
 in one very small volume indeed. 
 
 But the question, captious as it is, at least assumes my 
 main point. It assumes that the English people is a Teu- 
 tonic people, a Nether-Dutch people, a kindred people 
 with the men of Holland and with all other men of the 
 Nether-Dutch stock on the European mainland. It is 
 strange that one should have to argue such a point as 
 this, that one should have to go about to prove that we 
 are ourselves and not somebody else. But there are so 
 many odd confusions about in the world that it may be 
 needful, for the ten thousandth time, to say something 
 about this matter also. I may not unlikely be told — it 
 will be very far from the first time, if I am — that we 
 are not ourselves, that we are hardly so much as some- 
 body else, that we are, in truth, nobody in particular ; 
 in other words, that we are a mixed race. Now in 
 a certain sense this is true; all races are mixed; no 
 nation in the world ever was, or ever will be, or ever 
 can be, of absolutely pure descent ; there is none which 
 does not number some members, many members, who 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 8/ 
 
 do not come of the original stock by blood, but who 
 belong to it only by the law of adoption. If we wish 
 to establish the purity of descent of any people by that 
 kind of physical proof which would satisfy the physi- 
 ologist, or that kind of legal proof which would satisfy 
 the genealogist, we shall not find it in the case of the 
 English people ; but then we shall not find it in the case 
 of any other people. If this kind of proof is needed, 
 we may give up talking about races and nations alto- 
 gether; we may give up all national feelings, all national 
 pride, all national traditions. But, if we admit the law 
 of adoption, all becomes clear. Here is a certain col- 
 lection of men called a nation, presumably — for we can 
 get no further — of kindred blood in the first instance. 
 The nation is marked off by the common marks of a 
 nation, above all by the possession of a common lan- 
 guage. In process of time this society admits, one by 
 one, or at all events in numbers which bear no proportion 
 to its own, certain adoptive members. They come in, 
 possibly by adoption in the strictest sense, perhaps by 
 conquest, perhaps by migration. And the conquest may 
 be either conquest wrought or conquest undergone ; 
 migration too, like conquest, may happen either way — 
 that is, the nation may adopt some members from the 
 people in whose land it settles, and it may adopt other 
 members from among those who at a later stage settle in 
 its land. Such adoptive members are adopted in the sense 
 of the old Roman law of adoption, when a Roman citi- 
 zen chose to himself a son out of another Roman gens. 
 They become for all practical purposes part of the nation ; 
 they accept its language, its feelings, its traditions ; in a 
 generation or two they are lost in its general mass ; they 
 
88 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 become uiyiistinguishable in any way from the hered- 
 itary members of the body into which they are adopted. 
 If such adoption as this is held to destroy the purity of 
 a nation, then it is no use talking about nations at all. 
 Every nation has gone through the processes of which we 
 have just spoken in a greater or less degree. And the 
 greater part the nation has played in the general affairs 
 of the world, the more largely its history has affected the 
 history of any other nations, the more largely will it be 
 found to have gone through them. Absolute purity of 
 blood, I repeat, will be found nowhere ; but the nearest 
 approaches to it must be looked for among those nations 
 which have played the least figure in history, those which 
 have moved least, those which have had least effect on the 
 history of other nations. The Basques must be a nearly 
 unmixed people; so must those Albanians who have 
 not migrated into Greece ; so, I should think, must have 
 been the old Prussians, till the Teutonic Knights ate 
 them up. Among nations of higher historic fame, the 
 Norwegians must have received a smaller infusion of 
 foreign blood than most other European nations, simply 
 because, for a good many centuries past, they have played 
 only a secondary part in Europe. And, judged by this 
 standard, the English must certainly rank among the more 
 mixed nations ; we cannot claim the approximate purity 
 of Basques and Albanians. All the various forms of 
 adoption have been largely practised and largely under- 
 gone by the English people — some in their third home, 
 some in their second, some, I do not doubt, in their 
 first home also. In this sense we must plead guilty to 
 being a mixed race ; we must admit the crime, if crime 
 it be, of having on both sides of the Ocean turned many 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 89 
 
 men into Englishmen who were not Enghshmen by nat- 
 ural descent. 
 
 But we may now fairly ask whether we are more 
 mixed than those other nations of Europe who have 
 played an equal part in general history. Let us 
 compare ourselves with two of the foremost. We 
 cannot take a place alongside of the Basques and 
 the Albanians; let us see how we stand alongside of 
 the Germans and the French. I assert fearlessly that 
 we are not more mixed than the Germans, and that 
 we are a great deal less mixed than the French. If 
 this last fact is held to prove that the French are a 
 greater people than either Germans or English, then the 
 Frenchman in my child's story is avenged : the Germans 
 and the English, poor fellows, cannot help it. We are 
 told that the English are not a pure Teutonic people, 
 because, in the course of the conquest of Britain, they 
 must have assimilated many men of British, some per- 
 haps of Roman, blood. But look at the map of Ger- 
 many. Look at it in the fourth century, when the Ger- 
 man lands west of the Rhine and south of the Danube are 
 still thick with Roman cities. Did no Roman blood, no 
 Celtic blood, no blood of the earlier inhabitants, who- 
 ever they may have been, find its way into the veins of 
 the Teutonic conquerors who won or won back those 
 lands for Germany ? Look again to the east in the days 
 of Charles the Great and later still. See all the lands 
 east of the Elbe, and some to the west of it, occupied 
 by the Slavonic nations. To this day there are large 
 districts within the German Empire whose speech is 
 still Slavonic, and German-speaking lands are still 
 ruled by dukes who can trace up an undoubted pedi- 
 
90 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 gree to old Slavonic kings. And the Prussians too, 
 whose name so large a part of Germany has consented 
 to take, surely some of them must have been Teuton- 
 ized ; they cannot every one have been devoured. No 
 one, I think, can doubt that the amount of Slavonic 
 blood among the modern Germans must be far greater 
 than the amount of Celtic blood among the modern 
 English in Britain and America. Yet, in the teeth of all 
 this, the Germans are Germans ; they are, for all essential 
 and practical purposes, a Teutonic people. Celts, Slaves, 
 Prussians, have become Germans ; the Germans have 
 not become Celts or Slaves, or, in anything but name, 
 Prussians. And within the Teutonic pale, crowds of 
 men of our own immediate branch of the great stock, 
 men of the Nether-Dutch stock — Englishmen, that is, 
 who stayed behind — have, for all practical purposes, 
 passed over from the Nether-Dutch stock to the High. 
 But as the modern Germans, notwithstanding admix- 
 ture from outside, are still a Teutonic people, so, not- 
 withstanding admixture from inside, they are still a 
 High-German people. And, if we have thus to speak 
 of Germany, what shall we say of France ? Surely that 
 very eminent German writer who called the French a mixed 
 folk — a Mischvolk — in a very special sense said no more 
 than the truth. Here is a people of whom we see at the 
 first glance that their name comes from one source and 
 their tongue from another, while their blood must come 
 mainly from a third source or from many other sources. 
 The people of Gaul have learned the tongue of one set 
 of conquerors ; they have taken the name of another. 
 Save in a few corners, the whole land has adopted the 
 tongue of the Roman, and the land and its folk alike 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 9 1 
 
 have taken the name of the Teutonic Frank. But the 
 great mass of the French people must spring, neither 
 from Franks nor from Romans, but from those who 
 were in the land before Franks or Romans came into 
 it. And who were they ? Celts, we may be sure, in the 
 greater part of the land, but by no means in all. South 
 of the Loire, still more south of the Garonne, we are in 
 lands which have absolutely nothing in common with 
 the northern parts of Gaul, except the facts that they 
 were united under Roman rule and that they have been 
 united again in later times. In northern Gaul the peo- 
 ple must be mainly Celts, with a considerable infusion 
 of Frankish blood; in southern Gaul they must be 
 largely Iberians, Ligurians, other nations who are neither 
 Celtic, Roman, nor Teutonic, with a much slighter infu- 
 sion of Gothic and Burgundian fclood. Add again Teu- 
 tonic infusions of other kinds — add the Germans who in 
 Caesar's day were already on the left bank of the Rhine, 
 the Nether-Dutch settlements which once pressed far to 
 the south of all that for some ages has been called Flan- 
 ders, the Saxon settlements in various parts of north- 
 ern Gaul, and the greater Scandinavian settlement which 
 grew into the duchy of Normandy, — all this gives us a 
 picture of a mixture of blood which I must think far 
 surpasses anything to be found in either England or 
 Germany. I believe that the French are, even as a mat- 
 ter of blood, far more mixed, far more truly to be called 
 a Mischvolk, than either the Germans or the English. 
 I am certain that the name is more truly to be applied 
 to them in another sense which concerns me more. 
 
 Let us start again from our doctrine that, while some 
 nations come nearfer to purity of blood than others, 
 
92 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 none is of absolutely pure blood, that all have, in a 
 greater or less degree, been recruited by adoption. 
 Now on adoption follows assimilation. The adopted 
 members of the family conform to the standard of the 
 hereditary members. I am far from saying that the 
 presence of the adopted members exercises no influence 
 on the body into which they are adopted ; but the body 
 into which they are adopted exercises an incalculably 
 greater influence on them. They are incorporated, man 
 by man, company by company, into a greater pre- 
 existing body, by which they are absorbed. But that 
 pre-existing body may have been formed in different 
 ways. In our days and for some centuries back, no 
 nation in Europe has had a more distinct national being 
 and national character than the French. And it has had 
 also a most remarka!Ble power of attraction; lands 
 inhabited by men of other races and other tongues have 
 been largely contented to merge themselves in France. 
 This tendency has doubtless helped to make the French 
 yet more of a Mischvolk than before ; but the body into 
 which Provence and Franche Comte and Elsass and 
 Savoy have in different ages been incorporated, was a 
 Mischvolk already. When strictly French history begins 
 in the tenth century, we already see a nation whose 
 national being is made up of three elements. As a 
 matter of descent, it must have been more Celtic than 
 anything else. As a matter of language, it was Roman. 
 French is essentially a Latin tongue ; it contains a Teu- 
 tonic infusion far greater than might be thought at first 
 sight, but it contains no Celtic infusion worth speaking 
 of, nor does the Teutonic infusion interfere with the 
 essentially Latin character of the language. As a mat- 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 93 
 
 ter of national name, as a matter of political history, 
 this same body is Teutonic. France is historically one 
 of the powers which arose out of the break-up of the 
 great Teutonic dominion of the Franks. It is one -of 
 those two parts of that dominion in which the Prankish 
 name lived on. The later annexations of France were 
 thus incorporated into a body which had been formed 
 out of mingled elements, a body which may be called by 
 different names according to the point of view from 
 which it is looked at — a body which the ethnologer 
 proper would most likely call mainly Celtic, which the 
 philologer proper must call Latin, which the strictly 
 political historian can call nothing but Teutonic. The 
 people of the lands which were annexed by France in 
 later times did not become either Celts or Romans or 
 Teutons ; they were merged in that compound essence 
 which had been formed by the mixture of Celtic, Roman, 
 and Teutonic elements ; they became Frenchmen. 
 
 The point on which I have been insisting in this last 
 stage of my argument is that, in the case of the French 
 people, the adopting and assimilating body itself is a 
 compound body formed out of several elements. We 
 cannot say that the assimilating body was itself formed 
 by assimilation ; it was formed by another process. The 
 Romans did no doubt largely assimilate the Celts and 
 and other original inhabitants of Gaul ; but we cannot 
 say that these artificial Romans either assimilated their 
 Teutonic conquerors or were assimilated by them. We 
 cannot say either that they absorbed the Franks or that 
 they were absorbed by them. In short, the three elements 
 in Gaul, the three elements which go to make up the 
 modern French nationality, have been fused together 
 7 
 
94 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 without assimilation. The result is a fourth thing, differ- 
 ent from any of the three. We cannot even say that any 
 one of the three elements is dominant. Not one has 
 given its own prevailing character to the whole. Any 
 one of the three may be said to be dominant, according 
 to the point of view from which the whole is looked at. 
 Now I maintain that this process by which the French 
 people was formed, as it has nothing answering to it in 
 the case of the German people, has nothing answering 
 to it in the case of the English. With regard to the 
 German people, it is hardly needful to carry on the argu- 
 ment any further. With them we may take the position 
 for granted ; the tendency of error is rather to look on the 
 German nation as being less mixed than it is. Having 
 brought in other nations by way only of illustration, let 
 us go on with ourselves. I maintain that we are not a 
 Mischvolk like the French. I hold that, though we have 
 largely practised the law of adoption, though we have, 
 on both sides of the Ocean, adopted many who were not 
 our own by birth, though we may have been to some ex- 
 tent modified by those whom we adopted, yet the adopt- 
 ing and assimilating body has been itself a distinct unity, 
 not a compound body like that union of Celtic, Roman, 
 and Teutonic elements which formed the French people. 
 I maintain that, though we have received several infu- 
 sions from outside, yet there are no co-ordinate elements 
 in the kernel of our nationality, in the body which adopts 
 and assimilates that which is infused. We are not a 
 purely Teutonic people, because no people is purely 
 anything. But our kernel is purely Teutonic ;' whatever 
 we have received from outside has been assimilated and 
 absorbed into a Teutonic body. The Celt of Gaul has 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 95 
 
 never changed his home, but on his own soil he has 
 adopted the speech of the Roman and the name of the 
 Frank. We have all of us changed our home once; 
 some of us have changed it twice. But in none of our 
 three homes have we ever cast aside our national lan- 
 guage; in none of them, I hope I may say, have we 
 ever cast aside our national name. 
 
 On the early history of our language I mean to speak 
 more fully at another stage. At present I will only ask 
 you to bear in mind the distinction between change of 
 language and change within a language. All languages 
 change ; they change in two ways : they change by the 
 changes within the language itself, such as the wearing 
 out of inflexions, the cutting down of words to a shorter 
 form. They change also by taking in words from other 
 languages. No language is wholly free from changes of 
 both these kinds, though some languages have been much 
 more largely affected by them than others. In most 
 cases, by dint of the two, languages change so much 
 that, after a reasonable time, say a thousand years or so, 
 the elder form becomes unintelligible, and has to be 
 learned like another language. For practical purposes 
 it has become another language ; but in the eyes of the 
 philologer and the historian it is still the same. No- 
 thing has happened to change what we may call its per- 
 sonal identity ; it has changed, but only as a man changes 
 in passing from infancy to old age ; it remains the same 
 language in the same sense that the new-born babe and 
 the hoary grey-beard are the same man. In this sense 
 we have never changed our language ; in this sense the 
 tongue of Hengest and Cerdic and the tongue of Glad- 
 
96 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 stone and Garfield is the same tongue. The change has 
 been great; but it has been wholly a change within 
 the language itself; we have never cast aside one lan- 
 guage and taken to another. We have never done as 
 the Celts and Iberians of Gaul did when they cast aside 
 their native Celtic and Iberian tongues, and took to the 
 Latin tongue instead. We have never done, as a large 
 part of the inhabitants of the British islands have done, 
 when they cast aside their Welsh and Irish speech and 
 took to English instead. Bear this in mind : however 
 much the English tongue has changed, however great an 
 infusion of foreign words it may have received, yet at no 
 period of our history did it supplant any other tongue ; 
 at no period of our history was it ever supplanted by 
 any other tongue. And if you bear this in mind, I think 
 you will see that it was something more than a question 
 of words when I insisted on the necessity of calling that 
 tongue by one and the same name from its earliest stages 
 to its latest. If we call it by one name up to a certain 
 year, and by some other name after that year, we disguise 
 the fact that the historical identity of the language has 
 never been broken. And compound languages do not 
 exist at all. Even a compound nation like the French 
 does not speak a compound language. The Latin speech 
 of Gaul took in a large Teutonic infusion ; but it remains 
 a Latin speech. The English speech of Britain took in 
 a yet larger Romance infusion; but it remains a Teu- 
 tonic speech. 
 
 The first migration then of the English people, the 
 migration which led us from the continent of Europe to 
 the isle of Britain, differed in many of its circumstances 
 
THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 97 
 
 from the second migration of the Enghsh people, that 
 led some of us from the isle of Britain to the continent 
 of America. Those differences chiefly arise from the 
 fact that the first migration was made in the infancy of 
 our nation, or rather that it was the migration itself 
 which formed the nation; while the second migration 
 was made after the nation had reached the fulness of its 
 growth. The English nation put on its distinctive cha- 
 racter among nations in the space of time, no short 
 space, a thousand years and more, which passed between 
 the two migrations. Far more change therefore natu- 
 rally followed the first migration than has followed the 
 second. But notwithstanding all this, the first and the 
 second migration are both alike simply stages in the his- 
 tory of the same people. At each stage our forefathers, or 
 some of them, sought for themselves new homes beyond 
 the sea. And each change of home had its effect on 
 those who made the change. But neither the migra- 
 tions themselves, nor yet anything that we did or suf- 
 fered in the long ages between the migrations, did any- 
 thing to break the continuity of our national being, to 
 disturb the personal identity of our national tongue. 
 Between the first and the second England the severance 
 has been greater; the men of the Teutonic mainland 
 and the men of the Teutonic island have become in 
 many things strangers. And yet they are not wholly 
 strangers. Whether in reading the records of past 
 times or in personally visiting the lands of our earliest 
 dwelling, the memories of ancient brotherhood are 
 constantly pressing themselves on the mind. Along 
 the whole of that long coast, from the Channel to the 
 Baltic, Flemish, Frisian, Saxon, Anglian, we feel, in a 
 
98 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 way that we do not feel in the lands of the Romance, 
 or even of the High-German, speech, that we are still 
 among brethren. And we may be forgiven if, among 
 those memories, we are sometimes tempted to exalt 
 ourselves, and to think that the highest mission of the 
 oldest England was to act as the starting-point for the 
 migration which made the second. Whether the high- 
 est mission of the second England has been to act as 
 the starting-point for the migration which made the 
 third, I will not seek to inquire ; I trust you will not 
 lay it upon me to inquire. I trust that the second and 
 the third England may live long enough side by side 
 in true brotherhood to make it needless to stir up such 
 invidious questions on either side. Let us not commit 
 the unwisdom rebuked ages ago by the highest voice, of 
 disputing among ourselves which should be the grea;t- 
 est. Let us rather hope that both may long remain 
 great, and that each may ever rejoice in the greatness 
 of the other. Between them at least there need be no 
 severance, such as the events of history have wrought 
 between both of them and the England of a yet earlier 
 day. Though the Ocean rolls between them, as the sea 
 rolled between Corinth and Syracuse, between Phokaia 
 and Massalia, yet, as Corinth and Syracuse, Phokaia and 
 Massalia, were all alike members of the one Hellenic 
 body, so the scattered members of the English folk, 
 parted in place, parted in polity, but not parted in heart 
 or speech, should, in all times and in all places, remem- 
 ber that the English folk is one. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 2Ei)e ©Itrest CBnglantr antr tije ^cconlr. 
 
 I ONCE heard of an audience who, in listening to a 
 speaker, waited for the end of his exordium, but the end 
 of his exordium did not come. In other words, he broke 
 off in the middle of his speech, and never came to the 
 end of it. Perhaps the statement so put merely illus- 
 trates the danger of using hard words without fully 
 grasping their meaning. I can fancy that he who 
 thus described the disappointed hearers might, if another 
 word had come into his head, have thought it sounded 
 equally well to say that they waited for the end of his 
 peroration. But I am beginning to fear that the de- 
 scription may be literally true of the present course of 
 lectures. I am beginning to fear that, through three 
 evenings' work, you have been waiting for the end of 
 my exordium, and I am not myself quite clear that the 
 end of my exordium is yet come. So far from having 
 come to the beginning of the end, I am not clear that I 
 have come to the end of the beginning. I have spent 
 half my course on general statements and answers to 
 possible objections. And I am not at all clear that I 
 have got to the end of the objections even now. I 
 will not insult the great continent to which I have lately 
 made my way ^y assuming it as possible that it harbours 
 any of the sect of the Anglo- Israelites, the sect which holds 
 
 9» 
 
lOO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 that we are all of the stock of the Jews. But I should 
 not say Jews either. The full developement of the doc- 
 trine traces up the English to the tribe of Ephraim and 
 the Irish to the tribe of Dan. Now one of the prophets 
 bids us answer a fool according to his folly ; and I have 
 always thought that to this argument it was answer 
 enough to say that, according to another prophet, 
 Ephraim feedeth on wind, and that John Bull has always 
 been thought to need somewhat stronger meat. No, I 
 will not believe that the Anglo-Israelites are other than 
 a purely insular curiosity. If I am shown one on 
 American soil, I shall ask to see his brother who believes 
 that the earth is flat, and that the sun is only three miles 
 from it. But I am followed about by visions of some 
 enemy who may arise to say that none of us on 
 either side of the Ocean are English after all, but that 
 we are all of us Welsh. There is an ingenious gentle- 
 man at Liverpool of that way of thinking, and he has 
 proved his point by finding very hard Welsh derivations 
 for the easiest English words. Those who understand 
 the Celtic tongues better than I, perhaps better than the 
 Liverpool gentleman, tell me that some of his ancient 
 Welsh turns out to be modern Irish ; but I suppose that 
 does not greatly matter when a man has got tight hold 
 of a theory. Now as this theory is, at all events, one 
 degree less absurd than that of the Anglo-Israelites, and 
 as the communication between Liverpool and the United 
 States is very direct — only just stopping at Queenstown 
 to take in an Irish derivation or two — it did strike me 
 as possible that this form of error may have managed 
 to straggle across the Ocean, while I cannot bring my- 
 self to believe that there is a single Anglo-Israelite in 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. lOI 
 
 the New World. But I will not formally argue against 
 the votary of the Briton, any more than against the 
 votary of the Hebrew. I will state my own case, and 
 the grounds on which it rests, if indeed I shall not show 
 some disrespect to my hearers by even stating the 
 grounds of a case which is so perfectly plain. 
 
 We have now got halfway through our journey; 
 and it is time that we should try and call up some 
 more definite notion of the first great journey of 
 the English folk across the sea. I lay a special stress 
 on this last word. If the second journey was made 
 by sea, that was in no sort wonderful. That the colo- 
 nies of England from the seventeenth century onwards 
 were made by sea is involved in the insular position 
 of England. But the special insular position of Eng- 
 land is only a stronger case of the general position of the 
 colonizing powers of Europe. Portugal, the leader in the 
 work, Spain, France, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, have 
 all colonized by sea. They could not colonize in any 
 other way. There is only one European power which 
 can colonize in any other way. The peculiar geograph- 
 ical position of Russia has enabled that power, first to 
 annex a vast Asiatic dominion marching immediately 
 on its European territory, and then to make its way 
 into America, not by crossing the Atlantic toward the 
 west, but by crossing a strait of the Pacific toward the 
 east. That Russian territory in America has now been 
 added to the possessions of the English-speaking folk ; 
 but the English-speaking folk could never have reached 
 it in the first instance in that peculiar way in which it was 
 perfectly natural for Russia to reach it. But it would seem 
 that the other way of coming has answered better for 
 
102 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 the planting of new nations of European descent on the 
 soil of the New World. No new Russian nation has, so 
 to speak, crept into America by the way of Behring's 
 Strait. But a new English nation, a new Portuguese 
 nation, and more than one new Spanish nation, still 
 stand on American ground. A new French nation has 
 arisen, to yield its place to the colonists of England, 
 dependent and independent. And all these outlying 
 European nations have been formed within the two 
 great peninsulas of the New World by the process of 
 boldly crossing the Atlantic westward. 
 
 Now why do I call your attention to anything so ob- 
 vious as this ? I do it for this reason. The migration 
 from the first England to the second, and the migration 
 from the second England to the third, were alike made 
 by sea. But the mode of migration which was natural, 
 and even necessary, in the seventeenth century was alto- 
 gether exceptional in the fifth. In the whole course of 
 the Wandering of the Nations, the only great Teutonic 
 settlement made by sea within the Roman Empire, or 
 within kinds which had lately been part of the Roman 
 Empire, was the settlement of the Angles and Saxons in 
 Britain. They settled by sea : Goths, Vandals, Franks, 
 Burgundians, settled by land. I shall hardly have it 
 thrown in my teeth that the Vandals passed into 
 Africa by sea; their passage was not a long one, and 
 they had already passed into Spaih by land. The 
 cause of the difference is obvious : Gaul, Spain, Italy, 
 could be reached by land ; the isle of Britain could 
 not. But the results of the difference are great indeed. 
 They amount simply to this, that there is to this day 
 an English tongue in the world, and an English folk to 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. IO3 
 
 speak it Where is the Goth in Gaul, in Spain, and Italy ? 
 There is not so much as a name on the map to give an 
 answer even to our eyes. Where is the Burgundian ? 
 Where is the Frank? The names of both abide; the 
 name of one of them is still the name of a mighty nation. 
 But ask them to give an account of themselves in our 
 ears, and they can give it only in a tongue which is still 
 essentially the tongue of Rome. But, alike in' Middle 
 England and in New, the English name abides, and the 
 English tongue abides with it. The Goth and the Frank, 
 the people of Ataulf and the people of Hlodwig, have 
 been lost for ages among the greater mass of those whom 
 they subdued, but did not drive out. But the Angle and 
 the Saxon, merged together under the common English 
 name, but never merged in the mass of those whom they 
 subdued, still abide within the bounds within which they 
 did something more than subdue. Where they settled, 
 they drove out ; where they never thoroughly settled, the 
 older inhabitants of the land abide beside them. In the 
 isle of Britain, if the Englishman is there, the Briton is 
 there too, still speaking his ancient tongue withrn no in- 
 considerable part of his ancient land. From Gaul the 
 tongue of Vercingetorix and the tongue of Hlodwig 
 have both passed away. Or, at the very most, a tongue 
 which may have been that of Vercingetorix has been 
 kept alive in a corner by settlements from Britain. The 
 tongue of Csesar is still the speech of the land. It has 
 indeed gone through great changes, but it has never 
 been cast aside or exchanged for another tongue. But 
 the isle of Britain knows not the tongue of Caesar in 
 either its older or its newer shape. The speech of the 
 land is the tongue of Hengest and Cerdic. It has indeed 
 
104 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 gone through great changes, but it has never been cast 
 aside or exchanged for another tongue. And by its 
 side the tongue of Arthur and Cadwalader abides, the 
 speech of no small remnant of that elder folk of the 
 land against which Hengest and Cerdic had to wage so 
 stern a warfare. 
 
 In these last words lies the root of the matter. The 
 Teutonic settlers in Britain had to wage a long and stern 
 warfare with the elder folk of the land, because the 
 land was an island and because the Teutonic settlers 
 therefore came to it by sea. In that age, as in every 
 other, the insular position of Britain has determined the 
 character and history of the land and its people. Because 
 Britain was an island, because the Teutonic invaders 
 came by sea, the Teutonic invaders were quite another 
 kind of people from the Teutonic invaders of Gaul and 
 Spain. For the same cause, the people whom the Angles 
 and Saxons found in Britain were quite another kind of 
 people from those whom the Goths, Franks, and Bur- 
 gundians found in Gaul and Spain. 
 
 Let us stop for a moment to call up such a picture as 
 we can of our earliest forefathers when they made their 
 first great voyage. It is not a very clear or full picture 
 that we can draw ; it will be largely a negative picture • 
 but that our picture is not clear or full, that it is largely 
 negative, is one of the most important features of our 
 case. Our very ignorance is part of our knowledge; 
 the very little that we know of our own forefathers, as 
 compared with the other Teutonic nations who were 
 changing their dwelling-places at the same time, goes far 
 to show the wide differences in their several positions. 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. lOJ 
 
 So it is with those in whose land they settled themselves. 
 Our notices of the state of Britain at tlie time of the 
 English Conquest are of the most meagre kind. We 
 have no contemporary record, English or British, of its 
 earlier stages. We get one or two dry entries in foreign 
 chroniclers, which show that the work was going on, but 
 they help us to no detail. We have a British lamentation, 
 the famous book of Gildas, belonging to a later stage of 
 the Conquest, which gives us a general picture and the 
 names of a few persons ; but its author is too busy 
 preaching strictly to record very many events. The nar- 
 rative in the English Chronicles I believe to preserve a 
 thoroughly trustworthy tradition ; the more we test it by 
 results, the more we compare the narrative with the 
 country in which this and that event is placed, the more 
 we contrast its sober statements with the wild tales of 
 later writers, the more we are inclined to give it its full 
 confidence. I at least, who, in my own West-Saxon 
 home, find my own fields and my own parish bounded 
 by a boundary drawn in the year 577, am not disposed 
 to disbelieve the record of the events which led to the 
 fixing of that boundary. Still, we cannot set down the 
 English Chronicle in the fifth century as a contempo- 
 rary narrative in the same sense in which it has become 
 in the eleventh. Our records then are meagre ; the re- 
 cords of the Teutonic conquests in other lands are hardly 
 so full as we could wish them to be ; but they are wealth 
 compared with any materials that we have for the con- 
 quest of Britain. We should be happy indeed if we had 
 such a portrait of Saxon Ceawlin or Anglian ^thelfrith 
 as Sidonius ApoUinaris gives us of Theodoric the West- 
 Goth. 
 
Io6 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 But, as we just said, our ignorance is our knowledge. 
 If our own settlement had been at all of the same kind 
 as the contemporary settlements elsewhere, we may be 
 sure that the same kind of record would have been in 
 being. It is because the condition of Britain was 
 wholly different from the condition of Gaul and Spain, 
 because the condition of the invaders of Britain was 
 wholly different from the condition of the invaders 
 of Gaul and Spain, that our records of the Teutonic 
 conquest of Gaul and Spain are comparatively rich, 
 while our records of the Teutonic conquest of Brit- 
 ain are so utterly meagre. The wide historic gap on 
 one side of the Channel, while there is no gap on the 
 other side, really teaches us more than any amount of 
 detail could have taught us. We see that the isle of 
 Britain had quite passed away from that general mass 
 of the Roman dominion of which Gaul and Spain still 
 formed parts. We see that the invaders of Britain had 
 not been brought under the same measure of Roman 
 influences as the Teutonic invaders of other lands. In 
 other words, once more, Britain was an island, and its 
 invaders came by sea. 
 
 The power of Rome, beyond the immediate Mediter- 
 ranean lands, was essentially a land power. Caesar was 
 emphatically lord of the sea; we cannot call him lord 
 of the Ocean. The Roman shipmen saw enough of the 
 outer world of waters to know that Ocean was some- 
 thing more than a river running round the world. They 
 had learned that men who lived on the western coast of 
 Spain had no real chance of daily hearing the sun hiss as 
 his fiery ball sank into the waters of the giant stream. 
 But their oceanic voyages were of no great account, and 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 10/ 
 
 were wholly secondary to enterprises by land. Gaul and 
 Spain were reached by land or by voyages across the 
 inner sea. Britain was the only Roman province which 
 needed any dealings with the waters of Ocean, and that 
 only with one of his narrowest straits. . Agricola is com- 
 monly believed to have sailed round the whole north of 
 Britain, but some scholars have called this belief in ques- 
 tion ; it is certain that neither Agricola nor any one else 
 ever brought the whole of Britain under the power of 
 Rome. And the conquest of the other great oceanic 
 island, the conquest of Ireland, though sometimes talked 
 of, was never even attempted. In Germany, the land with 
 which as yet we are more concerned than with Britain, 
 the Roman dominion was still more thoroughly that of a 
 land power. The lasting dominion of Rome was bounded 
 by the Rhine and the Danube. It was bounded by those 
 rivers, though it stretched somewhat beyond them. It 
 stretched beyond them only so far as to keep possession 
 of both banks, and so to make the really Roman side 
 secure. To maintain the frontiers of the Rhine and the 
 Danube was, from the first century to the fifth, the great 
 object of Rome's European policy and warfare ; to cross 
 those rivers into the rich provinces of the Empire was the 
 great longing of the independent nations of Germany. 
 As they grew stronger, as the Empire grew weaker, 
 their wish was carried out. Franks, Alemans, Burgun- 
 dians, Suevians, a crowd of other Teutonic nations, made 
 their way across the rivers in various characters, while 
 the greatest name of all, the Goths, Eastern and Western, 
 came by more roundabout paths from the eastern lands. 
 Some came as captives, to become slaves in Roman 
 households or to be butchered to make a Roman holiday. 
 
I08 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 Some came as plunderers, to work havoc in Roman 
 fields and Roman cities and to carry off the spoil 
 to their own homes. Some came as soldiers in the 
 Roman armies, waging the wars of Rome, perhaps 
 against their own fellows, taking Roman pay, learning 
 Roman discipline, receiving the reward of their services 
 in the shape of lands within the Empire of Csesar to be 
 held as Caesar's liegemen. Their kings deemed them- 
 selves honoured when they bore the titles of Roman civil 
 and military officers. They went on Cesar's errand to 
 win back Caesar's lost provinces, and it was only step by 
 step that they found out that they had become indepen- 
 dent princes, that their followers had become independent 
 nations, that they had in truth torn away Caesar's cities 
 and provinces from his rule. In all these ways, the Teu- 
 tonic settlers in the Roman provinces on the mainland, 
 if they were conquerors, were also disciples. They did 
 not come on an errand of mere destruction. Havoc 
 indeed often marked their course, but only such havoc 
 as must follow the necessities or the caprices of warfare, 
 above all of warfare where men are seeking new lands 
 to dwell in. The Teutonic king, in occupying a Roman 
 land, did without scruple whatever was needful to estab- 
 lish his own power and to reward the services of his fol- 
 lowers. And a large amount of destruction, of confisca- 
 tion, of human suffering generally, is involved in this. 
 But there was no systematic destruction ; there was no 
 abiding warfare waged against the lives, the proper- 
 ties, the monuments, the laws, or the language, of the 
 Roman inhabitants. The Teutonic conquerors, while 
 they only half understood, still respected and admired, a 
 civilization more advanced than their own. Rome, her 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. IO9 
 
 arts and her arms, her laws and her titles, had impressed 
 their minds before they crossed her frontier; they im- 
 pressed them still when they were firmly settled on 
 Roman soil. The Roman cities lived through the storm, 
 losing much doubtless of their ancient wealth and gran- 
 deur, but keeping on an unbroken life as Roman cities. 
 Their inhabitants, the Roman inhabitants generally, kept 
 their own language, laws, and customs, till, by their imi- 
 tation of their Teutonic masters, by their Teutonic mas- 
 ters' imitation of them, the language, laws, and customs 
 of the two were mingled together into a third state of 
 things unlike either the purely Teutonic or the purely 
 Roman. Step by step, more quickly in some lands, 
 more slowly in others, conquerors and conquered were 
 fused into a third people different from either. Instead of 
 two nations side by side, the Teutonic Frank speak- 
 ing his Teutonic tongue, the Romanized Gaul speaking 
 his Latin tongue, there gradually grew up the one 
 French nation, bearing a modified form of the Teu- 
 tonic name, speaking a modified form of the Roman 
 tongue. But before this a change had taken place, while 
 the Frank was still a German, while he still spoke his 
 unmixed Teutonic tongue as his native speech, but 
 spoke Latin alongside of it as the tongue of govern- 
 ment and literature, the great event took place which 
 marked how truly the Teuton had in one sense con- 
 quered the Roman, how truly, in another sense-, the 
 Roman had conquered the Teuton. The solemn inaug- 
 uration of the new state of things, the state of things in 
 which Roman and Teuton were to have an equal share, 
 came on that great day when the Frank Pippin received 
 the title and power of Patrician of the Romans — on that 
 
no THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 greater day when the Frank Charles received the crown 
 of the Roman Empire at the hands of the Roman 
 Bishop, amidst the rejoicing shouts of the Roman 
 people. 
 
 - Now not the least sign of the full greatness of the 
 change is implied in the fact that the Frank king re- 
 ceived his Roman crown at the hands of the Roman 
 bishop. The Holy Roman Empire had begun ; the 
 Galilaean had conquered ; the kingdoms of the world 
 had become the kingdoms of the Lord; the rule of 
 Christ and the rule of Caesar now stretched over well nigh 
 the same portions of the earth's surface, and Caesar was 
 now admitted to his office, not by the auguries which de- 
 clared the will of Jove, but by the holy unction which 
 the Church had borrowed from the practice of the elder 
 Law. By the time that the Teutonic invasions began 
 to grow into Teutonic settlements, Christianity had 
 become the dominant religion in the continental pro- 
 vinces of the West. We must remember that the Old 
 Rome remained pre-eminently a pagan city long after 
 the greater part of the Empire had received the faith. 
 The Teutonic settlers found paganism a creed all but 
 dead, and their coming no doubt helped to stamp 
 out what little life was left in it. For the invaders 
 of the continental lands of the Empire were Christian 
 invaders. Some had become proselytes before their 
 coming; others became proselytes in the course of 
 their coming. True, with the single exception of the 
 Franks, all embraced Christianity in its Arian form; 
 but, save only among the Vandals of Africa, the Catholic 
 believers nowhere suffered any general persecution at the 
 hands of the heretics. And gradually all, save those who 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. Ill 
 
 were rooted out before the work could be done, embraced 
 the faith of their Roman subjects. All, sooner or later, 
 accepted the religion of Rome along with her laws and 
 her general civilization. They accepted it, not by virtue 
 of any conversion from without, but as part of their gene- 
 ral position as settlers in a Roman land. And in northern 
 Gaul, above all, where the Franks accepted, not only Chris- 
 tianity but Catholic Christianity, in the very act of their 
 coming, the Teutonic conquest can hardly be said to have 
 made any change at all in the formal position of the Chris- 
 tian Church. The gradual effects of the change were of 
 the highest moment, and they were by no means always 
 to the advantage of religion. But formal change there 
 was none ; there was no gap in the records of the local 
 churches, no break in the succession of bishops ; the 
 Roman clergy indeed gained an influence over their 
 Teutonic converts greater than they were likely to gain 
 over their Roman brethren. Now and then a righteous 
 bishop might personally suffer for rebuking a wicked 
 king; but the clerical order, as an order, undoubtedly 
 gained in power, wealth, and influence, through the set- 
 tlement of the so-called barbarians. Bishops and abbots 
 held a far more lordly position under the Prankish king 
 than they had ever held under the Roman Augustus. 
 
 The characteristic feature then of the Teutonic set- 
 tlement in the Roman provinces of the mainland is that 
 the amount of change that was made was far less than 
 might have been looked for from the words " barbarian 
 conquest." There is no blank in the record, no break 
 in the course of things, no general beginning afresh of 
 everything. The Roman language, the Roman law, the 
 Roman religion, all lived on, and there can be no doubt 
 
112 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 that the bulk of the modern population is still Roman 
 in the sense which the Roman name bore at the time 
 of the Prankish invasion. The Roman cities lived on 
 with their old names, or with the names of the tribes 
 of which they were the heads ; the Roman divisions of 
 the country lived on in the dioceses of the bishops ; no 
 general change of nomenclature spread over the smaller 
 places ; the Teutonic names, where there are any, belong 
 mainly to a later time, and may be accounted for by spe- 
 cial causes. In particular districts, chiefly those near the 
 old frontier, the amount of change was certainly greater 
 than elsewhere. The cause is obvious. The nearer the 
 invader came to the centre of the land, the more fully 
 could he be brought under Roman influences, the less 
 would he be inclined to play the part of a mere de- 
 stroyer. But the general picture is as I have drawn it, 
 and it is not a picture of universal havoc and rooting up. 
 The Teutonic settlement in Gaul and Spain wrought far 
 more change through the gradual working of the new 
 causes which it set at work than it wrought by the 
 immediate results of the actual work of conquest. To 
 sum all up in a word, the land kept its Christian faith 
 and its Roman speech, and its conquerors embraced 
 both. 
 
 Now all this could be, because the conquerors were 
 conquerors who pressed in step by step by land, who, 
 before they settled on Roman ground, were familiar with 
 all that was Roman both in war and peace, who admired 
 and respected what they were familiar with, who at each 
 step as they advanced learned more what Rome and her 
 work was, and admired and respected more as they 
 learned more. It was conquest, barbarian conquest if 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE' SECOND. I13 
 
 you will, but it was something very different from the 
 sudden sweeping down on a civilized land of conquerors 
 by whom civilization was utterly unknown and despised. 
 To be conquered by Goths and Franks was another 
 thing from being conquered by Huns or Avars. It 
 was also, as we may now go to see, another thing from 
 being conquered by Angles and Saxons. 
 
 To judge of the difference, look first for one moment 
 at the modem map of England and the modern map 
 of France. In one sense the French map is the most 
 modern-looking of the two. For it will show you a 
 land divided into very modern departments, while the 
 English map will show you a land divided into very 
 ancient shires or counties. The one shows you the 
 divisions of the eighteenth century, younger by far than 
 the older States of your own land ; the other shows you 
 divisions of which, in England proper, two or three only 
 are later than the tenth century. But go one step below 
 the surface, and you will see how ancient is the real 
 local nomenclature of France, how comparatively re- 
 cent is that of England. Of the English shires, very 
 few keep names older than the English conquest ; Kent 
 indeed keeps its British name, as Massachusetts keeps 
 its Indian name ; but, as a rule, the older English shires 
 bear names taken from the circumstances of the con- 
 quest, and the later ones are called after towns, many 
 of them of later foundation than the conquest. The 
 nomenclature of the French cities, towns, villages, is 
 mainly handed on from days before the Teutonic con- 
 quest, while in England nearly every name, save those 
 of the rivers and of a few great cities, is purely Teutonic. 
 
114 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 In most parts the names are strictly English ; in some 
 parts they were given at the later coming of the Danes ; 
 nowhere are they British or Roman, save in certain dis- 
 tricts owing to certain special causes. Crowds of places 
 bear descriptive Teutonic names ; crowds of places bear 
 the names of Teutonic tribes ; crowds of places bear the 
 names of personal Teutonic settlers. Except in certain 
 lands affected by special causes, France has nothing 
 like this to show. A glance at the map shows that the 
 mass of the local nomenclature of England begins with 
 the Teutonic conquest, while the mass of the local no- 
 menclature of France is older than the Teutonic con- 
 quest. And, if we turn from the names on the map to 
 the living speech of men, there is the most obvious, but 
 the most important, of all facts, the fact that English- 
 men speak English and that Frenchmen speak French. 
 That is to say, in Gaul the speech of Rome lived through 
 the Teutonic conquest, while in Britain it perished in 
 the Teutonic conquest, if it had not passed away before. 
 And behind this is the fact, very much less obvious, a 
 good deal less important, but still very important, that in 
 Gaul tongues older than Latin live on only in corners as 
 mere survivals, while in Britain, while Latin has utterly 
 vanished, a tongue older than Latin still lives on as the 
 common speech of an appreciable part of the land. 
 
 Here then is the final result open to our own eyes. 
 And it is a final result which could not have come to 
 pass unless the Teutonic conquest of Britain had been 
 something of an utterly different character from the 
 Teutonic conquest of Gaul — unless the amount of 
 change, of destruction, of havoc of every kind, above 
 all, of slaughter and driving out of the existing inhab- 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. II5 
 
 itants, had been far greater in Britain than it was in 
 Gaul. If the Angles and Saxons in Britain had been 
 only as the Goths in Spain, or even as the Franks in 
 Gaul, it is inconceivable that the final results should 
 have been so utterly different in the two cases. There is 
 the plain fact : Gaul remained a Latin-speaking land ; 
 England became a Teutonic-speaking land. The obvious 
 inference is that, while in Gaul the Teutonic conquest 
 led to no general displacement of the inhabitants, in 
 England it did lead to such a general displacement. In 
 Gaul the Franks simply settled among a subject people, 
 among whom they themselves were gradually merged ; 
 in Britain the Angles and Saxons slew or drove out 
 the people whom they found in the land, and settled it 
 again as a new people. 
 
 This is the plain doctrine, which to many seems 
 so hard a saying, but which the existing facts so clear- 
 ly teach us. And when we conie to see who the 
 invaders were, and what was the state of the land 
 which they invaded, it will no longer seem a thing of 
 wonder, but a thing that could hardly fail to be. Let 
 us look, first at those who were to do the work, and 
 then at those upon whom they were to do it. In 
 other words, let us look at the men who made the 
 voyage, and at the island to which they made it. 
 Hitherto, as I have so often impressed on you, we 
 have been speaking of Teutonic conquerors who knew 
 something of Roman arts and manners, and who respect- 
 ed what they knew. Pressing in step by step along the 
 Rhenish and Danubian frontiers, they were able to 
 become disciples in the very act of becoming con- 
 
Il6 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 querors. Not so with the men who lay beyond them, 
 the tribes of the Oceanic coast of Germany and of the 
 marchland of Denmark, the tribes of the long Frisian 
 shore and the Frisian islands, the tribes of the elder 
 Saxony on either side of Elbe, the men of our own 
 special metropolis, the men of the oldest England, the 
 men of the special Angeln, the outlying corner of our 
 race, looking out toward the lands of the Scandinavian 
 and the Slave. It must have been a dim glimmering 
 indeed of the fame of Rome which could have reached 
 them. The memories of the distant time when Rome 
 had for a moment threatened them must have well nigh 
 died out before a single keel set forth to seek a new 
 home in the isle of Britain. In the days of Drusus 
 indeed it had seemed as if even those lands were to be 
 added to the vast domains of the city by the Tiber, as 
 if the Elbe, or some stream beyond the Elbe, was to be 
 what the Rhine came to be. Had it been so, I repeat, 
 we could never have been ; our ancient land would have 
 become a Roman province, the ancient tongue of Ger- 
 many would have given way to the Imperial speech no 
 less than the ancient tongues of Gaul. Had the first 
 home of the English people thus gone to swell the mass 
 of artificial Romans, I could never have had a word to 
 say about their second or their third home. From that 
 doom Arminius saved us ; for that boon I again call on 
 you to honor him. Some years back you were keeping 
 the hundredth year of the first birth of your Federal 
 commonwealth ; this year you are keeping the hun- 
 dredth year of the event which made its new-born being 
 sure. In the blow by the Teutoburg Wood was the 
 germ of the Declaration of Independence, the germ of 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 11/ 
 
 the surrender of Yorktown. But for that blow, we 
 should have been civilized before our time, we should 
 have had our national being civilized out of us; or 
 rather we should have been civilized to death before we 
 had reached the stage of having a national being at all. 
 Arminius saved us from this early promotion to a Buddh- 
 ist paradise ; through his act we were left to grow up 
 for some ages in a youthful and healthy barbarism in 
 our oldest home, till the time came when we were to 
 make our voyage to our second home, there to work 
 out for ourselves a civilization of our own, the common 
 possession of our second home and our third. There 
 we grew up, apart, so to speak, from the history of the 
 world, during all the earlier stages of the Wandering 
 of the Nations. We may have heard the echoes of the 
 names of the great city and its all-powerful princes, but 
 they touched not us. Our forefathers of those days may 
 have heard of them as something vast and distant and 
 wonderful, as our later forefathers heard of the Grand 
 Khan and the Great Mogul. We knew them not either 
 as friends or as enemies. The chained Briton might be 
 led along the Sacred Way, but never the chained Saxon. 
 Constantine might throw his Prankish captives to the 
 wild beasts at Trier; Anglian captives he never had 
 to throw. We served not in Caesar's armies ; we took 
 not Cesar's pay; we held no lands by the tenure of 
 guarding Caesar's frontiers. Our ealdormen, our here- 
 togan, the elders of our folk, the leaders of our hosts — 
 kings we had none in our first home — never sought to 
 be called Patricians of the Roman commonwealth or 
 Masters-general of the Roman army. We knew naught 
 of Caesar's tongue or of Cesar's law ; we never in our 
 
Il8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 old homes bowed to the gods of Rome; we knew 
 naught of the older faith of Jupiter of the Capitol nor 
 yet of the newer faith whose temples presently arose in 
 the Lateran palace and on the Vatican hill. We knew 
 no gods but Woden and Thunder and the rest of the 
 old Teutonic company. We knew no law but the old 
 Teutonic customs ; we knew no speech but the old Teu- 
 tonic tongue, and that in a more ancient shape than it 
 bore on the . lips of the Frank and the Aleman. True, 
 our faith, our customs, our language, were all but frag- 
 ments of the primitive Aryan stock common to Rome 
 and Germany ; but the shape which we had given them 
 was our own ; we had no more borrowed one jot or one 
 tittle from any Roman source than Rome had borrowed 
 from our despised barbarian store. So we lived on un- 
 recorded ; that we lived on unrecorded is the most in- 
 structive part of our history, as best showing what man- 
 ner of life ours was. At last the day came, a day mem- 
 orable in the annals of the world, when we were to begin 
 to lead another life. 
 
 In the latter half of the fifth century came the turn of 
 our forefathers by Weser and Elbe and Slie — perhaps 
 from lands both further westward and further eastward 
 — to share, like their brethren, in the Wandering of the 
 Nations. It is well worth notice that some of our kins- 
 folk seem to have wandered by land, and with nearly the 
 same results as those of their greater wanderings by sea. 
 I know not any other way of explaining the remarkable 
 nomenclature of some parts of Picardy, as very clearly 
 brought out by Mr. Isaac Taylor. There, some way within 
 the bounds of ancient Gaul and even of modern France, 
 we find a local nomenclature, not merely Teutonic, not 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 1 19 
 
 merely Nether-Dutch, but distinctively English, dealing 
 not only in hams but in tons, the only part, as far as I 
 know, of the European mainland where that purely Eng- 
 lish ending is to be found. When Edward the Third 
 won Calais and Guines, when Henry the Eighth won 
 Boulogne, they might have argued that they were win- 
 ning back a lost possession, not indeed of the English 
 crown, but of the English folk. So again at a later 
 time, it would seem that Saxon warriors had a share in 
 that great Lombard wandering which gave a new name 
 to the most northern and the most southern Italy. But 
 these movements by land were exceptional ; they answer 
 to the exceptional voyages here and there recorded of 
 Goths and Franks. Our real and lasting share in the 
 great stirring of the nations was as essentially done by 
 sea as the real and lasting share of the Goths and the 
 Franks was done by land. 
 
 But it was not enough that the course of our wander- 
 ings should be by sea ; it was needful that the object of 
 them should be an island. A great and successful 
 movement often sends before it, as it were, a forerunner 
 of what is coming. Its coming is heralded by move- 
 ments which are great but not successful, by movements 
 which are successful but not great. So it was with the 
 settlement of the Angles and Saxons in the isle of 
 Britain. It was through movements that were success- 
 ful but not great that Saxon settlements were made 
 on the northern coast of Gaul by Bayeux, on the banks 
 of the Loire in Anjou, and even, it is said, at the inland 
 city of Seez. Such settlements as these are matters of 
 mere curiosity ; their utmost importance is as showing 
 the wide range of Saxon enterprise ; they had no effect on 
 
120 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 the general history of the world. Colonies of this kind, 
 occupying small and isolated positions on a mainland 
 inhabited by men of other nations, cannot permanently 
 keep their distinctive character : they are either driven 
 out by the earlier inhabitants or they are lost in the 
 greater mass of the earlier inhabitants. The field on 
 which we were to do deeds which should affect the gen- 
 eral history of the world was not to be found on this or 
 that point of the oceanic shore of Gaul, still less on this 
 or that point of any Gaulish riverside. It was another 
 thing when an invading Saxon fleet was beaten back 
 from the shores of Britain. That a Saxon fleet should 
 come and should be beaten back was perhaps a needful 
 stage in the drama ; it was an earnest that days were in 
 store when Saxon fleets should come and should not be 
 beaten back. That was in the last days of, the Roman 
 power in Britain, when, for a moment, before its last end, 
 the old fire flashed up with a long unwonted blaze, when 
 the elder Theodosius beat back the Saxon, beat back the 
 Scot, and enlarged the Roman dominion in the island by 
 the new province of Valentia. The check was no slight 
 one ; sixty or seventy years seem to have passed before 
 another expedition to the doomed island set forth from 
 the Ocean-coast of Germany. 
 
 The hour at last had come. From the middle of the 
 fifth century the Teutonic invasions of Britain again 
 begin, and this time invasion grows into conquest, into 
 settlement, into full occupation of the greater part of the 
 invaded island. On our forefathers themselves their first 
 unsuccessful encounter with the power of Rome seems to 
 have wrought no change. They may have better learned 
 what the power of Rome was, but assuredly that was all 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 121 
 
 that they learned. No Roman fleet came to wreak the 
 Imperial revenge on the German shore ; no Roman 
 influence was brought in any way to bear on those who 
 had risked their fortunes against the fortunes of Rome 
 two generations too soon. When the time came, the 
 Jute, the Angle, the Saxon, any other kindred tribes 
 that shared in the work, were still untouched by any of 
 those softening powers which had made the coming of 
 the Teutonic conquerors of the mainland less frightful. 
 They were still untouched by the magic of the Roman 
 name ; they kept still in its fulness all that distinguished 
 the untamed Teutonic heathen. They came, cleaving to 
 their old tongue, their old customs, their old gods, or 
 rather not so much consciously cleaving to them as 
 neither knowing nor caring whether there were tongues 
 and customs and gods other than their own. When 
 such men went forth, not advancing step by step, with 
 a chance of falling back if a false step was taken, but 
 trusting themselves to one great effort on the waves, 
 when they set forth for a new land and left the old land 
 for ever behind them, their errand could not fail to 
 be an errand of havoc and destruction to which the 
 movements on the mainland supply no parallel. They 
 could not but find that the choice before them was 
 either to sweep away the men whom they found already 
 in the land or to be themselves swept away from the 
 land which they were striving to make their own 
 possession. 
 
 But who were the men whom they found there, and 
 in what case were they ? In the other provinces of the 
 Empire the Teutonic invaders had found the Roman 
 
122 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 power Still abiding. Weak it might be, decaying it might 
 be, ready to break in pieces at the first touch of a vig- 
 orous assailant; but it was still there, still unchanged 
 in its outward form. Weak as it might be, there was 
 nothing else in the land which had taken its place, there 
 was nothing in the land which was ready to take its 
 place. There was no gap, no breach, no unrecorded 
 intermediate state of things, between the end of the 
 Roman power and the beginning of the Teutonic 
 power. But in Britain the very darkness in which the 
 story is plunged, the very gap in every record, makes us 
 at least see thus much, that in that island there was a 
 time when the Roman power had come to an end, and 
 when the Teutonic power had not yet made a beginning. 
 Franks, Goths, Burgundians, invaded a Roman land ; the 
 Angles and Saxons invaded a land which had ceased 
 to be Roman. We know this at least, that, before the 
 English conquest began, the Roman legions had been 
 withdrawn from Britain. It was not from Romans, but 
 from Britons, that the land had to be won. The darkness 
 which hangs over Britain at this moment is, if possible, 
 still thicker than that which hangs over the invaders of 
 Britain. What was the state of the island at that 
 moment ? That is one of the hardest to answer of all 
 our questions, and it can hardly be answered without 
 grappling with an earlier question equally hard. The 
 little then we can see leads us to think that some Ro- 
 man names, titles, and traditions lingered on — how could 
 they fail to linger on ? — but that the people which our 
 forefathers found in Britain, fifty years and less after the 
 departure of the Roman legions, was essentially a British 
 and not a Roman people. In short, what is now Eng- 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 1 23 
 
 land was then what Wales is still. Or rather, as our 
 forefathers would have put it, what is now England was 
 then Wales, the land of the Welsh or strangers. Now 
 how could this be ? In Gaul and Spain several districts, 
 forsaken by the Roman government, held out for a longer 
 or shorter time against the Teutonic invaders ; but they 
 held out, not as lands of native Gauls or Spaniards, but 
 as detached Roman communities, fragments split off 
 from the great Roman body. The small fragment of the 
 Basques is a real exception ; but they have held out 
 against all comers, Roman, Goth, Saracen, Frank, and 
 Castilian. Britanny is not a real exception ; there the 
 Celtic tongue was kept up by settlements from the 
 greater Britain. The name of the land, unheard of in 
 earlier times, proves the truth of the tradition. Gaul, 
 as a whole, whether forsaken or subdued, remained 
 Roman; Britain, it is perfectly plain, had practically 
 ceased to be Roman in the short time which passed 
 between the departure of the legions and the coming 
 of the English. 
 
 Now this question at once suggests another : Did 
 Britain ever become Roman in the same sense in which 
 Gaul and Spain became Roman ? When I say Britain, 
 of course I except that northern part of the island 
 which never became part of the Roman province. But, 
 south of the fluctuating boundary of the great walls 
 drawn from sea to sea, it is perfectly plain that, as far 
 as political conquest went, as far as occupation went, 
 Britain became as thoroughly Roman as any other part 
 of the Empire. Latin was the stone-cutter's only tongue. 
 Welsh inscriptions are not common at any time, and the 
 few that there are belong, every one of them, I believe, 
 
124 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. - 
 
 to times after the withdrawal of the legions. Still the 
 mass of the people could never have adopted the use 
 of Latin to the extent that they did in Gaul and Spain. 
 The continued life of the Welsh tongue proves the fact. 
 The Welsh tongue is no survival in a corner. It is the 
 tongue of a considerable part of the land, of so much 
 of the land as the English did not occupy. If the Eng- 
 lish had occupied less, the area of the Welsh tongue 
 would have been greater; if the English had never 
 come at all, if no later set of conquerors had come, the 
 land which is now England would, as far as we can see, 
 have remained a British land, speaking the British 
 tongue, keeping on a British nationality and forming a 
 British literature. The Latin tongue lived on in Britain 
 after the withdrawal of the legions, but it lived on, as 
 it lives on in modern countries, as a book-language 
 specially learned. It did not live on, as it did in Gaul, 
 as the tongue of the people, changing from generation 
 to generation, till, some ages later, men of the pen 
 found out that the tongue which they wrote and the 
 tongue which they spoke had practically become two 
 different tongues. It was only step by step that men 
 awoke to the fact that French and Latin were no longer 
 the same tongue. No man at any moment could have 
 fancied that Welsh and Latin were the same. The most 
 obvious facts of all are the most important and the most 
 instructive of all. The main essence of our whole story 
 turns on such every-day truths as that, while the French- 
 man speaks French and the Englishman speaks Eng- 
 lish, so the Welshman still speaks Welsh. 
 
 Now the main reason why Britain was thus less 
 thoroughly Romanized than the provinces of the main- 
 
■ THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 125 
 
 land, why, as soon as the actual Roman dominion 
 was removed, the land could thus fall back on its 
 older life, was undoubtedly because Britain was an 
 island. An island of the size of Britain, an island 
 forming a world of its own, could not be fused into 
 the mass of the Empire in the same way as the lands 
 which are geographically continuous. I believe that, 
 if you had, twenty miles from the port of Boston or of 
 New York, a great island like Britain or Sicily, you 
 would find it far harder to fuse that island into your 
 Federal system than you find it to fuse lands thousands 
 of miles off on the other side of the continent. Your 
 nearest neighbours have actually found it so. The part 
 of British North America which declines to join the Cana- 
 dian confederation is the great island of Newfoundland. 
 Thus the provinces of the mainland became and remain- 
 ed Roman ; the island province never thoroughly became 
 Roman, and at the first chance it ceased to become 
 Roman at all. Of this came the all-important fact 
 that, when we came to make our entry into Britain, 
 we had to strive, not against Roman provincials, but 
 against a British people. We met with what we may 
 fairly call a national resistance, such as our kinsfolk 
 nowhere met with on the mainland. I qualify the 
 words " national resistance," simply because they might 
 be taken as meaning a combined resistance on the part 
 of the whole British people. That there certainly never 
 was, any more than there ever was any combined attack 
 on the part of the whole English people. The whole 
 thing was local : a body of English invaders landed in 
 one district and made their way against the Britons of 
 that district. So did other bands of settlers in other 
 
126 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 districts, with little or no cooperation on the part either of 
 invaders or of defenders. The invaders had never known 
 a common head; the defenders had lost theirs when Caesar 
 left them to themselves. Still the resistance was national, 
 in so far as it was the resistance of men fighting for their 
 own land, and not for the dominion of a distant ruler. 
 Patriotism, as we understand the word, loyalty, as we com- 
 monly understand the word, were feelings almost impos- 
 sible under the Roman dominion. Under that dominion, 
 wherever it was established in its fulness — and nowhere 
 was it more fully established than in the western pro- 
 vinces of the European mainland — national feelings had 
 nearly died out. Men had become Romans ; they were 
 proud of the Roman name ; they had no wish to throw 
 off the Roman dominion ; whatever were the bad points 
 of its rule — and, specially as regarded men's purses, 
 those bad points were neither few nor small — they felt 
 that they were better off as members of a civilized com- 
 munity ordered by law than they could be under the 
 dominion of any barbarian. But they had neither the 
 local patriotism of the mediaeval Italian, nor yet the 
 wider patriotism of the great nations of the modern 
 world. Nor yet had they that personal attachment to 
 the reigning sovereign or his house which in some minds 
 is a substitute for patriotism, and which has led some 
 even to sin against patriotism. They had no wish to fall 
 away from Caesar and his Empire ; but they felt no great 
 call to fight for them. They looked to Caesar and his 
 legions to protect the Empire, and themselves as part 
 of it. If Caesar and his legions could not protect them, 
 there was nothing for them to do but to submit. Hence 
 the Teutonic invaders won the Roman provinces of the 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 12/ 
 
 mainland with wonderfully little fighting. There was a 
 good deal of besieging of cities, but battles in the open 
 field were much oftener fought between Teuton and 
 Teuton than between Teuton and Roman. The invaders 
 had not to win the land by hard fighting, bit by bit. To 
 destroy, to slaughter, to drive out of the land, were forms 
 of conquest to which they had very little temptation. 
 The Roman provincial would gladly have remained a 
 Roman provincial, if Caesar had only been able to keep 
 his provinces. But when Caesar was no longer able to 
 keep his provinces, he, changed into a subject of the 
 Gothic, Burgundian, or Prankish king with very little 
 effort. 
 
 Far different was it in the island world where the 
 Briton fought, not for an idea, not for a name, not for 
 a conviction that the rule of Caesar, with all its faults, 
 was practically the best thing that was to be had, but 
 for his own soil, for his own altars, for all that man 
 loves and cherishes and worships. It is hard to find an 
 exact parallel in other times for the kind of warfare that 
 follows. It is not exactly like the entry of civilized men 
 into a country of savages. For the Britons, still keep- 
 ing much that Rome had taught them, must in all out- 
 ward civilization have been far in advance of the English. 
 Above all, they were Christians, and the English were 
 heathens. Nor was it altogether like an inroad of sav- 
 ages into a land of civilized men. The English were 
 far from being mere savages ; and, though in outward 
 civilization they must have been the inferiors of the 
 Britons, yet they had the capacity, to be shown before 
 long, for a higher civilization than the Briton ever 
 reached. The nearest parallels that I can find are the 
 
128 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 Hebrew conquest of Canaan and the Saracen conquest 
 of Africa. I have sometimes read long passages of the 
 book of Joshua, and I have felt that, by simply changing 
 the local nomenclature of Palestine into the local nomen- 
 clature of Britain, we have a narrative of many a page 
 of the English conquest of Britain written ages before. 
 West-Saxon Ceawlin, like Hebrew Joshua, went on from 
 kingdom to kingdom, from city to city. As he did unto 
 Cirencester and her king, so did he unto Gloucester and 
 her king. But every step was well contested. Hlodwig 
 and his sons win all Gaul, and their main fighting is done 
 against Alemans, Goths, and Burgundians. It takes Hen- 
 gest a life-time, a life-time of battles, to establish the 
 English power in the one little kingdom of Kent. Nor 
 is the warfare always a warfare of success on the part of 
 the invaders. Arthur meets Cerdic face to face, and the 
 West-Saxon advance is checked for a generation. Every 
 English tribe that landed had to win its own fields for 
 itself. But every British tribe that was driven from its 
 fields could find shelter in the land that was still uncon- 
 quered. Then too we came as heathens. The Catholic 
 Frank was ready to worship at once alongside of his 
 Roman subject. The Arian Goth allowed at least full tol- 
 eration to worshippers of the God whom he himself wor- 
 shipped after another form. But the heathen Angle and 
 Saxon, still unweaned from his fierce Teutonic creed, 
 pressed on in the name of Woden and Thunder to over- 
 throw the altars, to uproot the temples, to slay the min- 
 isters, of the despised faith of the stranger. Meagre 
 as is our picture of the conquest, this feature of it is set 
 forth with all clearness by the British Jeremiah. We 
 came as barbarians ; we knew nothing of walled cities 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 1 29 
 
 and their life ; we looked on their defences as prisons. 
 It was a day to be marked in our annals when by sheer 
 force we stormed the strong walls of some Roman town, 
 and set down in boasting that we left not a Bret alive 
 within them. And then we turned away from the walls 
 which to us were useless ; we left them to stand empty, 
 signs that man had once dwelled where he dwelled no 
 longer. And on the lands which we made our own we 
 sat down by houses, by hundreds, by tribes. The sons 
 of some real or mythical patriarch, Wellings, Basings, 
 Readings, crowds of others, sat down on the conquered 
 land ; they traced about them their mark, their boundary, 
 to part off their portion from the portion of their neigh- 
 bours; in the open land, often outside the forsaken 
 walls, they placed their ham, their home — a Teutonic name 
 that needs no comment — or it might be their tun, their 
 town, their place fenced about and hedged for shelter ; 
 it might even be their burh, their bury, their borough, their 
 rude fortress, the mound with its sheltering palisade. 
 Thus came into being an English community, a future 
 township, parish, manor — names all of them marking 
 stages in our history — perhaps a future market-town, 
 a future municipal and parliamentary borough, fated 
 perhaps first to stamp its name on the history of Eng- 
 land, and then to have its name repeated — as the record 
 of nearly the same process — on the shores of America. 
 The name might be the name of the house itself and its 
 mythical forefather ; it might be the name of the actual 
 leader of the settlement ; it might be a descriptive name 
 marking some natural or geographical feature of the spot. 
 In later times, when men again occupied the sites of Roman 
 cities, it might be the British or Roman name turned into 
 
130 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 an English shape ; in later times again, it might, like the 
 Botulfston of which your Boston is a mere shortening, be 
 the name no longer of a patron hero, but of a patron saint. 
 Not a few of the sites of the Roman cities were in after 
 times occupied afresh as English towns ; some doubtless 
 held out so long that no time of desolation fell upon 
 them at all : they remained strongholds of the Briton 
 till the Englishman had learned somewhat of city life, 
 and had enriched his tongue by the Roman loan-words 
 of port, Chester, and street. But others have stood empty 
 to this day ; the vast bulwarks fence in no dwelling-place 
 of man, but dwelling-places of man have arisen under 
 their shadow. Look at the spot on the South-Saxon 
 shore which once was Anderida, the spot where one Nor- 
 man invasion of England began, and where another was 
 beatfen back before it began. There stand the Roman walls 
 which the South-Saxon ealdormen .^Elle and Cissa storm- 
 ed, and slew every living soul within them. The walls 
 stand empty; the Norman castle within them stands 
 no less empty. But at each end an English settlement 
 arose, bearing an English name, each in course of time 
 to have its church, one in later times again to grow to 
 the rank of a borough. West Ham, the home by the 
 west gate of the Roman town, needs no explanation. 
 Pevensey, the ea, the shore, of Peofen, must preserve the 
 name of the leader of the settlement by the eastern gate. 
 Thus, beneath the forsaken works alike of those whom 
 he conquered and of those who conquered him, the Eng- 
 lishman lives on, the true holder of the land, who has 
 made the land his own by giving to it and every spot 
 of it such names as he has thought good. And I shall 
 be both surprised and disappointed ^f from so memorable 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. I3I 
 
 a spot in our second home no settlers have made their 
 way to our third home, to plant again the names, not 
 of fallen Anderida, but of living West Ham and Pe- 
 vensey, on some spot or other of England beyond the 
 Ocean. 
 
 In such lectures as these I cannot enter into minute 
 detail ; I cannot enlarge on every point which brings 
 conviction to my own mind, nor answer at length every 
 cavil or even every serious argument. But I put it to 
 the common sense of all of you, not merely of the spe- 
 cially learned, but of all who choose to use their wits, 
 whether any great body of the conquered people 
 could have lived on in their former dwelling-places 
 through such a conquest as this. If the English people, 
 like the French people, are mainly or largely Celtic, 
 that is, if the Teutonic conquest of Britain was no more 
 than the Teutonic conquest of Gaul, why are the obvi- 
 ous results so unlike in the two cases ? If the English 
 settlers formed merely a ruling class, like the Franks 
 in Gaul, and not, as I hold, a new nation, why did they, 
 how did they, wipe out the language and nomenclature 
 of the country, both of which went on in Gaul ? How 
 again did the religions of the heathen English and the 
 Christian Britons fare in such a conquest as this ? The 
 English certainly were not converted to Christianity: did 
 the Britons apostatize to heathendom ? When we first 
 get any detailed narrative, Christianity appears, within 
 the Teutonic part of Britain, as a thing of the past. The 
 sites and ruins of Christian churches are remembered, 
 just as in many lands the sites and ruins of pagan 
 temples are remembered now. But there is no sign 
 
132 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 that Christianity itself, as a faith believed and practised, 
 existed within the dominions of any Teutonic prince 
 in the island. Nor is there at that stage apy sign 
 within the dominions of any such prince of the use of 
 any tongue but the English, or of any class of peo- 
 ple marked out as not being of English blood. The 
 tongue, the laws, the creed, of our English forefathers, 
 when we first begin to see them more clearly in the last 
 years of the sixth century, are as purely Teutonic as 
 they could have been at any time of their dwelling in 
 their first home. It is for those who argue that a people 
 who were thus to all appearances strictly Teutonic were 
 really something else — Britons perhaps who had cast 
 away their language and had exchanged the faith of 
 Christ for the faith of Woden — to prove their own par- 
 adox. It is certainly not proved by telling us that Welsh 
 is still spoken in Britain, as that fact is one main point 
 of our own case. It is not proved by telling us that in 
 some special parts of England there are many assimi- 
 lated Britons ; we shall see as we go on that that fact 
 also is a main point of our own case. It is not proved 
 by bringing lists of Latin words which passed into the 
 earliest English. When we come to examine those words 
 some prove to be cases of primitive Aryan kindred mis- 
 taken for derivation; some are cases of the process 
 which happens in all conquests, in all cases of inter- 
 course between one nation and another, when men keep 
 the native name of some object which is strange to them. 
 English does not cease to be English in our own day 
 because we very often speak of tea and coffee, and now 
 and then of pahs and wigwams ; nor did it cease to be 
 English then because we took in a few Latin and Welsh 
 
THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 1 33 
 
 names of fruits and other small objects under circum- 
 stances which were essentially the same. 
 
 The plain fact is that, in utter contrast to the phaenom- 
 ena of Teutonic conquest on the mainland, the Britons 
 were, as a race, exterminated within those parts of Bri- 
 tain which the English occupied while they were still 
 heathens. I call your attention to this last qualification ; 
 we shall have to come to it again. I call your attention 
 also to the word exterminate. That is one of a class of 
 words which I never use when I can help it ; but I use 
 it in this case, because it expresses what I wish to insist 
 on, and leaves open what I wish to leave open. How 
 far in any particular district the vanquished were slain, 
 how far they were simply driven out, we never can tell. 
 It is enough that they were exterminated, got rid of in 
 one way or another, within what now became the Eng- 
 lish border. And I say exterminated as a race. No 
 one could ever have said or believed, I am sure that I 
 never said or believed, that every single British man, 
 still less that every single British woman, was extermi- 
 nated in either sense. In such cases some lucky ones 
 among the conquered always contrive to make terms with 
 the conquerors. At the other end, some, whether we call 
 them lucky or unlucky, are spared to be the slaves of the 
 conquerors. And women in all such cases are largely 
 spared, though there is evidence to show that, in their 
 great national migration, our forefathers largely brought 
 their own women with them. But that some slaves and 
 some women were spared is shown by the curious fact, 
 noticed by philologers, that the very few Welsh words 
 which have crept into English are names of small 
 domestic objects such as women and slaves would 
 
134 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 bring with them. My proposition simply is, that none 
 of these changes- happened to such a degree as really 
 to affect the practical purity of our Teutonic national 
 being. We must have taken in some Celtic infusion ; 
 we may likely enough have taken in other infusions of 
 other kinds. All that I maintain is that we took in no 
 infusion so great as to make us another people in our 
 second home from what we were in our first home. The 
 simple facts of language, of nomenclature, of law and 
 custom, prove that, though we cannot claim an impos- 
 sible purity of blood, we can claim as near an approach 
 to it as any other people that has played a considerable 
 part in the world's history. As I said before, we are as 
 pure as the High-Germans ; we are far purer than the 
 French. We are not a Mischvolk, drawing its blood 
 mainly from one source, while it draws its language from 
 another source, and its national name from a third. We 
 are still, both in Britain and in America, the same peo- 
 ple that Hengest and Cerdic led from the lands which 
 then bore the names of England and of Saxony. We 
 have conquered and we have been conquered ; we have 
 settled in other lands and we have received settlers in 
 our own land ; but we have done nothing, we have suf- 
 fered nothing, to take from us a heritage which was ours 
 before we left the cradles of our race. We have never 
 cast aside, we have never exchanged, we have never, in 
 the historian's view, essentially modified, the name, the 
 tongue, the national being, with which we set forth on 
 the first of our voyages to settle ourselves in the second 
 of our homes. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 ffl^t)e iSnglisi) in tijcir S»wont( f^fltne. 
 
 There is a picture well known on my side of the 
 Atlantic, and doubtless still better known on yours, 
 which represents the Pilgrim Fathers, to give them 
 their received name, giving thanks for their safe landing 
 on American soil. There is another familiar picture 
 which represents a scene somewhat later in the history 
 of the English people on this side of the Ocean ; it 
 shows the founder of Pennsylvania buying the soil of 
 his great colony from its Indian occupants. Here we 
 have speaking memorials of what I have called the 
 second voyage, the settlement in the third English 
 home. I do not remember to have seen any such 
 memorials of the first voyage, of the settlement in the 
 second English home. I have indeed seen a picture 
 described as " Vortigern and Rowena,'' and to those who 
 look below the surface such a picture is not without 
 meaning. I need hardly tell you that no Englishwoman, 
 nor, I presume, any woman of any other race, ever bore 
 the purely imaginary name of Rowena either in the fifth 
 century or in the twelfth — for the nineteenth I cannot 
 answer. But the legend about the British duke and the 
 daughter of the English ealdorman, a legend which so 
 curiously turns about the foundation-legends of some 
 other cities and nations, is not without its meaning. 
 
 135 
 
136 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 Elsewhere, whether at Massalia or in Virginia, the 
 stranger woos the daughter of the native prince ; here 
 the native prince woos the daughter of the stranger. 
 That is a mythical way of saying that our Teutonic 
 grandfathers brought our Teutonic grandmothers along 
 with them ; and the late Dr. Rolleston had the privilege 
 of seeing them in their old Teutonic graves. Such a 
 scene, legendary as it is, was perhaps worth the paint- 
 ing ; but surely the actual beginning of our second his- 
 tory was better worth such a display than this romantic 
 episode. Let American skill then, as a sign that the 
 middle stage of our history is not forgotten on these 
 shores, give us a worthy picture of the landing of Hen- 
 gest at Ebbsfleet. The moment when the first English 
 foot was pressed on British soil, the moment which con- 
 tained within itself the germ of all that the English 
 folk have done on either side of Ocean, might seem as 
 well to deserve the exercise of the painter's skill as even 
 the landing in the third home of the men who made 
 the second voyage. The landing of Hengest has at least 
 this claim of precedence over the landing of the Pilgrim 
 Fathers, that the Pilgrim Fathers could not have made 
 their voyage, at least not in the sort in which they did 
 make it, if Hengest had not made his voyage before 
 them. Otherwise, it might seem as if I could hardly 
 directly compare the two events, the landing of Christian 
 men of the seventeenth century in a heathen land, and 
 the landing of heathen men of the fifth century in a 
 Christian land. Yet, making allowance for this great 
 difference, avoiding also anything like personal compar- 
 ison between the shadowy outlines of the fifth century 
 and the well-defined forms of the seventeenth, we shall 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 3/ 
 
 see that in many things the settlements so far removed 
 in time and place did their work in many things in very 
 much the same way. In each case, by whatever means, 
 the native inhabitants disappeared, and new English 
 communities arose on the soil which had once been 
 theirs. And in both cases those new English commu- 
 nities reproduced, with such changes as changed cir- 
 cumstances needed, the life of the land which they left 
 behind. Here in New England indeed one might almost 
 say that the settlers of the seventeenth century forsook 
 in some things the English life of their own age, to fall 
 back on the English life of the earlier time. The demo- 
 cratic details of the early New England constitutions, 
 the townships, the free general assemblies, the public 
 land, the whole simple and primitive life of the colony, 
 seem to carry us back to an earlier stage of Teutonic 
 political history than the days of James and Charles the 
 First. It is the old life, without the heathenism, the bar- 
 barism, the constant waging of war. The ups and downs 
 of the colonies, the constant shiftings, the unions, the 
 divisions, remind us again of the like shiftings, the like 
 unions, the like divisions, in the earlier day. Out of a 
 crowd of scattered settlements arose in process of time 
 the six States of the land which is specially the New 
 England. So, out of a crowd of earlier scattered settle- 
 ments were formed those few great kingdoms whose 
 final union brought into being the single kingdom of 
 the elder England. 
 
 In Britain then, as in Germany, the Teutonic settlers 
 established themselves according to those immemorial 
 divisions which we find common to the whole Teutonic 
 race, or rather to the whole Aryan family. We sat 
 
138 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 down by marks, by hundreds, by gas or shires, answer- 
 ing to the gentes, the curice, the tribes, of primitive 
 Rome. The shire, we must always remember, is an 
 union of marks, and the kingdom is an union of shires. 
 But the circumstances of new settlements planted on the 
 soil of an enemy, the constant need of warfare, first against 
 the Britons from whom more land was to be won or 
 against whom the land already won had to be defended, 
 then against rival settlements of their own- race, no doubt 
 caused union to be speedier, and led to the clothing 
 of rulers with greater power, than was the case among 
 those who stayed behind in the elder land. Long 
 after the English conquest of Britain had begun, 
 when nearly all land was occupied that ever was 
 really occupied, it was noticed that the Old-Saxons of 
 Germany had still no kings to rule over them. In the 
 actual invasion of Britain kings had no share ; the lead- 
 ers of the enterprise were ealdormen or heretogan. But 
 mere ealdormen or heretogan they did not long remain 
 in the conquered land; before the first generation of 
 conquerors had died out, their chiefs had risen to the 
 greater power and higher dignity of kings. And fur- 
 ther still, as one English kingdom grew in power over 
 others, a precarious and temporary supremacy over all 
 the rest became vested in its sovereign. The power of 
 the Bretwaldas, kings of this or that kingdom, holding 
 a superiority more or less real over their fellows, may 
 or may not have looked back to the Empire of the 
 continental Caesars ; it certainly looked forward to the 
 days when, first England and then Britain, should be 
 an united realm. 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 39 
 
 It would be impossible, and it would be needless if it 
 were possible, to attempt even the faintest sketch of the 
 general history of the English kingdom in the space of 
 the present lecture. I will rather choose out some special 
 points, some leading events, which have most to do with 
 the growth of the English nation in its second home, 
 and which may supply some special subjects of com- 
 parison with its history and growth in its third home. 
 
 The first great event then in the history of the Eng- 
 lish people in Britain was their conversion to Christianity. 
 That event in some sort brought Britain back again into 
 that fellowship with the general Roman world from 
 which the English conquest seemed to have altogether 
 torn it away. But that such a conversion was needed is 
 the greatest of all signs of the difference between Teu- 
 tonic conquest in the island and in the mainland ; it is 
 one of the strongest proofs that we are Englishmen of 
 a truth. In Gaul and Spain there is no such plunge 
 back into renewed heathendom ; Mars and Jupiter may 
 have kept on some lingering votaries till the coming of 
 Ataulf or of Hlodwig, but assuredly no Christian altars 
 were overturned to make room for the altars of Thunder 
 and Woden. But Thunder and Woden were the gods 
 of the English folk till well nigh a hundred and fifty 
 years after Hengest had set foot on Kentish soil. We 
 have seen that our kinsfolk on the mainland were either 
 already Christians when they made their entry or became 
 Christians in the process of making it. Sooner or later, 
 from heathendom or from heresy, they turned to the 
 faith of their subjects ; they joined the Church which 
 still lived on among them. They could easily learn 
 from the subjects among whom they dwelled; we 
 
I40 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 could hardly learn from those whom we slew or drove 
 out of the land that we seized. To them we should have 
 thought it scorn to listen ; we did not think it scorn to 
 listen to teachers who came on an errand from the city 
 which, fallen as it was, all men still looked up to as the 
 head of Western Christendom. Disdaining in all ages 
 to be subjects of the Roman Csesar, we did not disdain 
 to become the disciples of the Roman Pontiff. When 
 the first teachers from Rome had begun the work, other 
 teachers from other quarters joined to go on with it. 
 What the Roman planted the Frank and the Scot 
 watered ; the Briton, we must emphatically say, gave no 
 help at all ; but we must no less emphatically add that it 
 would have been hardly reasonable to expect that he 
 should give any. 
 
 By the conversion of the English to Christianity, 
 Britain again entered the commonwealth of European 
 nations. But it entered it, so far as its ruling people was 
 concerned, as a purely Teutonic land. It is indeed 
 wonderful to see how little direct change the conversion 
 made. Take a small point in itself, but one of the best 
 ways of judging of the general workings of men's minds : 
 look at our personal nomenclature. Some other nations, 
 the Scandinavians for instance, seem at once on their con- 
 version to have taken to the use of scriptural and saintly 
 names. In England it is hardly too much to say that they 
 remained utterly unknown. The few cases of men called 
 John or Thomas or the like before the Norman Conquest 
 might almost be counted on one's fingers, and the scrip- 
 tural name seems never to have been a real name given in 
 baptism, but an adopted name taken by a monk or other 
 churchman on his ordination or his entering religion. The 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. I4I 
 
 laity without exception, the clergy with very few excep- 
 tions, clave to the old Teutonic nomenclature of our own 
 people, that nomenclature which after the Norman Con- 
 quest largely gave way, partly to scriptural and saintly 
 names, partly to a nomenclature distinct from our own, 
 but equally. Teutonic. Then men ceased to be called 
 Godwine and ^thelwulf, and began to be called, some- 
 times Robert and William, sometimes John and Peter. 
 In language we naturally received a further Roman 
 infusion into our vocabulary. We adopted a number 
 of technical ecclesiastical terms ; and most likely a fresh 
 stock of names of objects of Roman civilization were 
 brought in by our Roman teachers. It is sometimes 
 hard to tell, out of the small list of Latin words which 
 are quoted to prove that Englishmen are something other 
 than Englishmen, which came in in the days of Hengest 
 and which in the days of Augustine. But at both times 
 we adopted as few as we could ; we translated as many as 
 we could, even of the most hallowed names of the Church. 
 To the English convert the Founder of his faith was not 
 the Saviour, but the Healer ; he did not receive baptism, 
 hut fulluht ; he did not look for a resurrection, but for an 
 again-rising. The cross became the rood ; it is startling 
 to read in Old-English sacred song that Christ was 
 hanged on a gallows. We need not go much further 
 to prove how thoroughly Teutonic were the speech and 
 the feelings of men who adopted the lessons of their 
 teachers from Rome and Tarsus in such a garb as this. 
 There are again some likenesses between the early 
 laws of England and the laws of Rome, which have been 
 held to prove a large adoption of Roman institutions by 
 
 the English conquerors from the beginning. Now, just 
 10 
 
142 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 as in the case of language, some of these hkenesses 
 are really nothing but cases of common Aryan posses- 
 sion by England and Rome which have been mistaken 
 for direct borrowing by England from Rome. Others 
 again are simply cases of like causes leading to like 
 effects. But in some cases there is little doubt that 
 Roman institutions were brought into England by the 
 teachers of Christianity. Making a will seems to us 
 now so obvious a matter that we find it hard to con- 
 ceive a state of things in which it is an exceptional act, 
 needing a special confirmation by the legislature. Yet so 
 it has certainly been among many nations. The earliest 
 principle is that at a man's death his goods revert to the 
 commonwealth, or pass as the custom of the common- 
 wealth ordains. If their owner wishes to keep any con- 
 trol over them after his own death, he must get special 
 leave from the commonwealth. As time goes on, as the 
 convenience of the power of bequest is generally felt, 
 the confirmation of a man's will by the general assembly 
 first becomes a matter of form, and then goes out of use 
 altogether. So, in the early days of Rome, the will of 
 a Roman patrician had to be confirmed by the assembly 
 of the curia:, the assembly of the whole patrician order. 
 At first, we may be sure, the assembly exercised a real 
 power of accepting or rejecting. Gradually the thing 
 became a mere form ; the will was approved as a matter 
 of course, and that, not by the 'curice themselves, but by 
 thirty lictors who were held to represent them. Now 
 we may be sure that this process, or something like it, 
 has been gone through independently in many lands. 
 Men made their wills at Rome and they made them at 
 Athens, but there is no reason to think that Rome bor- 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 43 
 
 rowed the practice of will-making from Athens. And 
 I beheve that we might in the same way have devised 
 the power of bequest for ourselves as soon as it was 
 found that the power of bequest was an useful thing, 
 without needing to go to Rome to learn it. But, as a 
 matter of fact, there is some reason to think that the 
 practice of bequest was learned by our forefathers from 
 Roman teachers. But assuredly they did not learn it 
 from Romans who abode in Britain through the Eng- 
 lish Conquest, but from the Romans who came to teach 
 us the later faith of Rome. If this be so, this is a 
 type of the kind of influence which the conversion 
 exercised upon us. The heathen faith and worship had 
 of course to be put aside altogether ; but in other things 
 the new teaching did little in the way of changing or 
 abolishing; it did but set up some new things along- 
 side of the old ones. The Christian Church and its 
 ministers received a legal position; each kingdom or 
 principality had its bishop, who in no way displaced the 
 king or ealdorman, but took his place alongside of him. 
 The boundaries of the kingdom or principality became 
 the boundaries of the bishop's diocese, and, as king- 
 doms and shires shifted more than bishoprics did, the 
 boundaries of the dioceses became in Britain, as in Gaul, 
 the best guide to the earlier geography of the country. 
 But here again, as in everything else, the difference be- 
 tween the two conquests strikes us. The English diocese 
 represented the extent of an English principality, owing its 
 being to the English conquest. The French diocese repre- 
 sented the extent of the jurisdiction of a Roman city which 
 lived on undisturbed through the Prankish conquest. 
 In early Christian England the conversion was so peace- 
 
144 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 ful, SO thorough, it so easily adapted itself to the existing 
 state of things, that the Church and the nation simply 
 became two names for the same body of men looked at 
 in two diififerent characters. The Church was the nation 
 on its knees in worship, as the army was the nation 
 girded for battle. And the conversion worked mightily 
 towards the union of the divided, and often hostile, king- 
 doms of Teutonic Britain into a single nation. It gave 
 them a common organization and a common head. The 
 Church of England had a common Primate and a com- 
 mon synod long before the people of England had a 
 common king and a common assembly. The Archbishop 
 of Canterbury held a more ancient office than the King 
 of the English : he was the head of Angle-kin before 
 Englishmen had a common king. And the kings, 
 beyond all doubt, received in many things a new cha- 
 racter and position through the conversion. Christian- 
 ity is not favourable to distinctions of birth ; least of all 
 can it regard distinctions of birth which are founded on 
 supposed descent from the gods of heathendom. The 
 king had therefore to put aside his ancient holiness as 
 the son of Woden, and to put on a new form of holiness 
 as the anointed of the Lord. He was now admitted to 
 his office with the religious rites of unction and coro- 
 nation. His office was thus declared, more distinctly 
 than it had been in the days of heathendom, to be essen- 
 tially an office, an office which was bestowed according 
 to law, and which might be taken away according to 
 law. The king was not holier than the bishop, and the 
 bishop was elected, and might be deposed. It was a dis- 
 tinct political gain that, in ages when everything else 
 tended to increase the royal power, the very means which 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 4? 
 
 made the king's office more holy and venerable did at 
 the same time more clearly proclaim it as an office which, 
 like other offices, was given and might be taken away. 
 
 In other matters the conversion left our Teutonic 
 institutions to themselves, to abide or to change accord- 
 ing to influences on which the change of religion had 
 no direct bearing. The general relations between a man 
 and his lord, between a king and his people, the tenure 
 of land, the wergild or price of blood, the fwhde or 
 right of self-defence, the old divisions of eorl and ceorl, 
 the newer nobility of the thegn, — all that belonged to 
 general Teutonic life, all that specially belonged to Teu- 
 tonic life in the conquered isle of Britain, — all went on, 
 all remained untouched, changing, growing, develop- 
 ing, as it was natural that it should change, grow, and 
 develope. War did not cease, whether wars with the 
 Britons or wars among the rival English kingdoms. 
 But here came in the most direct effect of the conver- 
 sion on the general history of the island. The wars of 
 the converted Teuton ceased to be wars of extermina- 
 tion : therefore, in those parts of Britain which the Eng- 
 lish won after their conversion, a real British element 
 was assimilated into the English mass. 
 
 Now I was amused a few months back by reading in 
 a periodical published in England — I am not quite sure 
 whether the contributor is of British or American birth 
 — that this last was a fact which I "grudgingly admitted." 
 To be sure, my critic was one who jumbled together Wes- 
 sex and Mercia, Ine and Offa, as if I should charge an 
 astronomer with grudging something to the satellites 
 of Jupiter, when he was really talking about Saturn or 
 
146 THE EllGLISir PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 Uranus. To be sure, he was one who thought that it 
 went some way to prove that EngHshmen were not 
 Englishmen to say that Daniel O'Connell was an Irish- 
 man. Yet the writer of whom I speak writes in many 
 places, and therefore, I presume, he has many readers. 
 Perhaps I may have some readers too; but it is clear 
 that I cannot number my critic among them. For this 
 point which I am said to admit grudgingly is just 
 one of those on which I have always insisted most 
 emphatically. I have been led to insist on it by local 
 and personal circumstances. I can hardly say that it is 
 a point of my own finding out, but it is a point which 
 has been specially brought home to my own personal 
 knowledge. In my own shire of Somerset I live on the 
 slope of a hill which, like half the hills of that shire, 
 bears a Celtic name. Perhaps if I lived elsewhere, I 
 might be less keenly aware of the long existence of a 
 British remnant in the western shires, and I might have 
 less fully understood the witness to that fact which is 
 supplied by the ancient laws, not of Mercian Offa, accord- 
 ing to the dream of my critic, who has read neither me 
 nor the laws, but of West-Saxon Ine. I mention this 
 little bit of criticism just to show the kind of difficulty 
 under which we students and writers of history labour. 
 About astronomy and chemistry I believe people do not 
 speak, unless they know something of those subjects. 
 I at least, who know nothing whatever of those sub- 
 jects, should not venture to say a word about them. 
 For I know that, if I talked about those subjects, I 
 should be certain to talk nonsense. Least of all should 
 I think of taking the name of a chemical or astronom- 
 ical writer whose writings I had not read, and putting 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 47 
 
 into his mouth some statement about his own subject 
 which he had never made. But about history and phi- 
 lology everybody thinks he may talk, whether he has 
 studied those subjects or not; men are not the least 
 kept back from talking by the certainty of talking 
 nonsense if they have not studied them. So it comes 
 that I find myself charged by those who cannot have 
 read what I have written with saying things which I 
 never did say, with saying grudgingly things on which I 
 have insisted emphatically and systematically. And I 
 am further made to defend my imaginary positions by 
 references to imaginary laws for which Wilkins and 
 Thorpe and Schmid have found no place in their great 
 collections. 
 
 The fact which I am supposed to admit grudgingly is 
 in truth one of the greatest importance for a right know- 
 ledge of the progress of the English Conquest and of 
 its results. The laws of Ine, King of the West-Saxons, 
 dating from the eighth century, set before us a state of 
 things in the W*t-Saxon kingdom which has nothing 
 like it either in our earlier or our later records. It is 
 very likely that, if we had any laws of OfTa, King of the 
 Mercians, later in the same century, they would set be- 
 fore us nearly the same state of things ; but unluckily 
 we have not got any such laws to make us quite sure. 
 That state of things is one in which Briton and English- 
 man appear as living side by side in the land, subjects 
 of the same king, protected by the same law, but still 
 marked off in everything, the one as the conquering, the 
 other as the conquered, race. In the old Teutonic polity 
 every man had his price — not in the sense falsely attrib- 
 uted to Sir Robert Walpole, but in quite another. He 
 
148 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 had his value according to his rank; every man was 
 worth something ; but a man of higher rank was held to 
 be worth more than a man of lower rank, till we come 
 up to the king, who is held to be worth a very great sum 
 indeed. The price of blood for a slain thegn was equal 
 to the price of blood for several slain churls, and the 
 oath of a thegn counted for as much as the oaths of 
 several churls. Now, in the laws of Ine, the blood and 
 the oath of a Briton of a certain rank is systematically 
 rated at a lower price than the blood and the oath of an 
 Englishman of the same rank. And there are provisions 
 in the same code which show us Britons, not as slaves, 
 not as strangers, as men fully under the living protection 
 of the law, but still as forming a class distinct from 
 Englishmen and inferior to Englishmen. Now what 
 does all this prove ? We must remember that there is 
 nothing like this legislation of Ine's either in the earlier 
 or in the later laws, neither in the older laws of Kent 
 nor in the later laws of Wessex. The picture of a land 
 inhabited by two nations still keepin^perfectly distinct 
 belongs only to the legislation of Wessex at one parti- 
 cular time, the time which followed the first conquests 
 made by the West-Saxons in their new character of 
 Christians. The lawgivers of Kent had no Britons to 
 legislate about ; in Kent, a land conquered in the days 
 of heathendom, the British inhabitants had been rooted 
 out. The later lawgivers of Wessex might have to 
 legislate about British eaemies or British captives ; they 
 had not to legislate about a settled British population in 
 their own kingdom. It is plain that conversion to Chris- 
 tianity, though it did not stop warfare, made warfare less 
 frightful. The Christian conqueror did not seek the ex- 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. I49 
 
 termination of his conquered enemies ; he was satisfied 
 with their political subjection. In the lands conquered 
 after the conversion the Briton lived on much as the 
 Roman lived on in Gaul. We see him there in the time 
 of Ine, free, protected by the law, but marked as the 
 inferior of his conqueror. When .(Elfred gave laws to 
 Wessex, things had changed ; the conquerors had assim- 
 ilated the conquered ; the British inhabitants of Wessex 
 had passed into Englishmen. 
 
 It is plain then that, in the shires of Somerset and 
 Devon, the lands for which this legislation of Ine must 
 have been mainly meant, a considerable part of the peo- 
 ple must be English by adoption only. Cornwall, I need 
 hardly say, was a strictly British land, with a British no- 
 menclature, and a British speech which lingered on into 
 the last century. These lands were long known as the 
 Wealh-cyn, the land of the Welsh or British people. 
 There is then an undoubted British infusion in the Eng- 
 lish people, an infusion dating from the seventh century. 
 The fact is undoubted; it is open to any one to make 
 what inferences he chooses from it. Only let him stop 
 and think whether the lands from Elbe to Niemen have 
 not poured a greater foreign infusion into the blood of 
 Germany than the lands from Axe to Tamar have poured 
 into the blood of England. My inferences are these : 
 The presence of legislation about Britons in the laws of 
 Ine, compared with its absence in the earlier laws, points 
 to the difference between heathen conquest which involved 
 the extermination of the conquered and Christian con- 
 quest which did not. And it thereby teaches us how 
 thorough the extermination was in the days of heathen- 
 dom. On the other hand, the fact that the conquered 
 
ISO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 were thoroughly assimilated by the conquerors between 
 the beginning of the eighth century and the end of the 
 ninth shows that the speech and the civilization of Rome 
 had utterly passed away from Western Britain in the 
 seventh century. Britons might be assimilated by their 
 English conquerors ; the analogy of other lands forbids 
 us to believe that such a change could have happened 
 to men who kept aught of the speech and feelings of 
 Romans. The fact therefore which I am supposed to 
 admit so grudgingly, but on which I do in truth insist 
 right willingly, goes far to prove the doctrines for which 
 I am arguing — the doctrine that the English Conquest 
 was, up to the time of the conversion, strictly a con- 
 quest of extermination, and further, that it was strictly 
 a British and not a Roman people who were there to 
 be exterminated. 
 
 Thus in the seventh century, and no doubt for some 
 time later, the English mass did receive a foreign in- 
 fusion ; we took in some strangers whom we made our 
 own by the law of adoption and assimilation. Presently, 
 in the ninth and tenth centuries, the English who had 
 thus invaded the land of the Britons were themselves 
 invaded in the land which they had made their own. 
 In a considerable part of England the conquerors them- 
 selves became the conquered. A new nomenclature was 
 brought in: through a large part of several English 
 shires the names which the English had given to the 
 spots which they wrested from the Briton gave way to 
 new names which marked the coming of another race 
 of conquerors. Wherever names end in by, we see the 
 signs of this new revolution, the signs of the coming 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. I51 
 
 of a new element in the land, an element which indeed 
 supplied a wide field for adoption, but which hardly- 
 stood in need of assimilation. As the English came 
 on the Britons, so the Danes came on the English ; they 
 occupied a considerable part of England; in the end 
 they placed a Danish king on the throne of what by 
 that time had become the united English kingdom. 
 Such an event as this is a mighty one, filling no small 
 space in a narrative history of the English people. A 
 conquest, a heathen conquest, the invasion of a Chris- 
 tian land by men who still clave to the gods whom the 
 land which they invaded had cast aside, it enables us, in 
 its recorded details, better to understand one side of that 
 earlier settlement of the English themselves of which so 
 few details have been recorded. But, in such a sketch 
 as I am now setting before you, the great tale of the 
 Danish invasions goes for but little. Misleading as such 
 a view would be in an ordinary history, I might for my 
 present purpose almost venture to speak of the Danish 
 conquest as the last wave of the English conquest, as 
 the coming of a detachment who came so late that they 
 could settle only at the expense of their comrades who 
 ' had settled already. For the Danes were a kindred folk 
 to the English, hardly differing more from some of the 
 tribes which had taken a part in the English conquest 
 than those tribes differed from one another. The coming 
 of the Dane hardly amounted to more than the addition 
 of a fourth Teutonic element to the Angles, Saxons, and 
 Jutes who had come already. The kindred Dane, speak- 
 ing a kindred tongue, needed only conversion to Chris- 
 tianity to make him in all respects the fellow of the 
 Englishman. The Dane was converted; he sank into 
 
152 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 the general mass of Englishmen ; his tongue became 
 simply one of the local dialects of English. As I 
 before said, he was adopted ; but, as I also said, he 
 was already so like- ourselves that he hardly needed to 
 be assimilated. 
 
 The Danish settlement was hardly over when another 
 invader came, an invader, as it might seem, of quite 
 another kind, and who came to do quite another work. 
 A Norman duke claimed and won the crown of Eng 
 land, and parted out the broadest lands, the highest 
 offices, of the English realm among his foreign fol- 
 lowers. So much history tells us ; romance goes on to 
 tell how he came, with his speech, his laws, his man- 
 ners, his system of government, all strange, foreign, 
 in all things unlike those of England — to subdue 
 the English land, to make bondmen of the English 
 people, to root out all that was English, to put in its 
 place all that was Norman. On this matter let me speak 
 as one who has given the main work of his life to show 
 that no such event ever took place. I have indeed 
 laboured in vain, if I have failed to show that the legend- 
 ary conception of the Norman Conquest as an uproot- 
 ing, as even an overshadowing, of the ancient national 
 life of England is a legendary conception indeed. I am 
 the last man to undervalue the greatness of that mighty 
 event, either in itself or in its results. But its results were 
 not such as these. When I look to the Teutonic lands of 
 the European mainland, I am thankful that the Norman 
 came to enable both the second and the third England 
 to keep on far more of the old Teutonic life than they 
 have done. Writing, as I chance to write, on the very 
 anniversary of the great battle, I can rejoice even in the 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. I S3 
 
 arrow that pierced the eye of England's king and cham- 
 pion, as I see that, in the long and strange course of later 
 days, the death of Harold did more than his life could 
 have done to keep England a Teutonic land and its folk 
 a Teutonic people. I venture to see in the Norman Con- 
 queror a friend disguised in the garb of an enemy. I see 
 in William the Great, to give back to him the worthier 
 title of his own day, not the destroyer of English law, 
 of English freedom, of all that makes England Eng- 
 land, of all that makes this land- a New England in 
 deed as well as in name, but their unwitting preserver. 
 And I may add that, though he doubtless had no fixed 
 purpose to preserve, he assuredly had no fixed purpose 
 to destroy. Such men as he, the giants of our common 
 nature, have no need to stoop to destruction. He had no 
 need to uproot the forms of our ancient freedom, when, 
 without uprooting them, he knew how to make all 
 things and all men obey his will as no king before him 
 or after him could do. And so the forms lived on, to 
 be once more clothed with substance in a happier day. 
 William himself wore a crown which in truth he won 
 by the sword at the head of foreign invaders. But it 
 was a crown which he claimed as his own by a pretended 
 lawful inheritance ; it was a crown which in the end was 
 given him with the strictest outward observance of every 
 lawful form, by the election of the English people, by 
 the consecration of the English Church. The sons of 
 William wore the English crown as a crown which the 
 English people had made fast to them in successful war 
 against Norman rebels. The freedom of England lived 
 through the storm, because the Norman kings found the 
 means of reigning as practical despots under its forms. 
 
154 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 Some branches of the old tree might seem to be lopped 
 away ; but the root kept on the old life, and was present- 
 ly able to put forth new branches crowned with richer 
 fruit than they had ever borne before. The new life of 
 the English nation was first schooled and strengthened 
 in struggles on behalf of a foreign king against nobles 
 more foreign than he. It was again more thoroughly 
 schooled and strengthened in struggles in which nobles 
 who had ceased to be foreign became the true leaders 
 of the people against a king who remained a stranger. 
 In the strifes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the 
 old forms of freedom were gradually shaped into new 
 forms better suited to the altered state of things. By 
 the end of the thirteenth century, the English con- 
 stitution, in its most essential features, had come into 
 being.. The system which other European nations 
 have been content to copy and to borrow stood 
 forth, at once young and old. On this side of Ocean 
 I may not speak of copying or of borrowing. Men 
 do not copy themselves ; they do not borrow their 
 birthright. All that our common fathers won in the 
 struggles of those great ages was won for all branches 
 of the English folk alike. Our common fathers handed 
 on an equal right in their heritage to both branches of 
 their severed descendants. As the apostle says that 
 Levi, still in the loins of his father, paid tithe in Abra- 
 ham, so I may say, following the same figure, that 
 Washington and Hamilton worked out the freedom of 
 the younger as well as the elder England in the loins of 
 Earl Simon and King Edward. 
 
 But it may still be argued ; Let it be that the Norman 
 Conquest was in a wonderful way turned to the gain of 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. IS5 
 
 English freedom ; but did not tlie Norman Conquest 
 none the less bring with it a settlement of strangers, of 
 Romance-speaking strangers, enough to destroy all 
 pretence on the part of the English nation to pure 
 Teutonic descent ? And, above all, did they not bring 
 in such changes in language as to destroy all pretence 
 on the part of the English language to be looked on as 
 a pure Teutonic tongue ? Are not we — and my we takes 
 in you — rather a mixed people, a people compounded 
 of two elements, Saxon and Norman? Do we not 
 speak a mixed language, the English language, a lan- 
 guage made up of two elements, Anglo-Saxon and Nor- 
 man-French ? Now in talk of this kind a great part of 
 the error arises from mere confusion of language, which 
 a little wholesome pedantry might get rid of But there 
 is also some misconception of fact. First of all, who 
 and what were the Normans ? May I answer in an epi- 
 grammatic saying of my own, which is already in print, 
 but which I am vain enough to think will bear saying 
 twice ? The Norman then was a Dane who had stayed 
 a little time in Gaul to put on a slight French varnish, 
 and who came into England to be washed clean again. 
 The Dane who came straight from Denmark had put on 
 no such varnish, and needed no such cleaning. The 
 Danes who had wrested the coast of the French duchy 
 from its own dukes and kings, who had shut up those 
 dukes and kings in an inland city, but who in so doing 
 had taken to the tongue and the manners of the land in 
 which they had settled — those, in short, who had changed 
 from Northmen into Nonnans, — still remained kinsmen, 
 though they may have forgotten the kindred ; but they 
 had put on the garb of strangers, and in that garb they 
 
IS6 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. ' 
 
 came among us. Our work was to strip them of that 
 foreign garb, to bring to Hght the true brotherhood that 
 lurked beneath, to bring back the Saxon of Bayeux and 
 the Dane of Coutances to his natural place alongside 
 of the . Saxon of Winchester and the Dane of York, to 
 teach even the more deeply Romanized Norman of 
 Rouen to come back once more to the Teutonic hearth 
 which he had forsaken. And the work was not a hard 
 one. Legend indeed tells of a long and bitter division 
 of centuries between " Saxons and Normans " in Eng- 
 land ; history, which knows nothing of any opposition 
 between " Saxons and Normans " under those names in 
 any time or place, can only record with wonder the speed 
 with which, both the actual Norman conquerors and 
 the peaceful Norman settlers who came in their wake, 
 were absorbed into the general mass of Englishmen. 
 In opposition to all the pictures of romance, I can go 
 only by the direct contemporary statement, borne out 
 by every kind of incidental witness, that, before the end 
 of the twelfth century, Normans and English could no 
 longer be distinguished. Of course this does not mean 
 that men had forgotten who they were, that they did not 
 know whether their forefathers had fought under William 
 or under Harold. It does mean that all practical distinc- 
 tion was wiped out ; it means that the conquerors and 
 the conquered had ceased to be distinct, much more to 
 be hostile, classes, or rather nations, on the same soil ; 
 they had been fused together into one united nation. 
 The pectiliar circumstances of the Norman Conquest, 
 not least among them the personal wisdom of the great 
 Conqueror, did much to make such a work easier, but 
 we may be sure that it was also made easier by the real, 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 57 
 
 if forgotten, kindred between the two bodies which were 
 to be fused together. But mark the form which the 
 fusion took: the smaller Norman body was absorbed in 
 the greater English body ; it was not a co-ordinate ele- 
 ment, but an infusion into a body already in being. The 
 English did not become Normans, but the Normans be- 
 came English. In becoming English, they doubtless 
 modified the English mass into which they were ab- 
 sorbed, and they modified it far more largely than it had 
 been modified by the assimilation of a certain body of 
 Britons in Wessex or the adoption of a certain body of 
 Danes in Northumberland. The Englishman who lived 
 after the Norman had come could never again be quite 
 the same as the Englishman had been who lived before 
 his coming. But the change was mainly on the outside ; 
 the Normans in a wonderfully short time became Eng- 
 lishmen in every essential point, worthy fellow-workers 
 with Englishmen of older settlement in preserving, in 
 restoring, under new forms, but without any change of 
 substance, all that it was well to preserve and to restore 
 in the England of the days before they came. 
 
 The change, I have said, that the Normans wrought 
 was mainly on the outside. In the matter of law, and 
 of all that gathers about law and its administration, the 
 features which distinguish England before the Norman 
 Conquest from England after it are many and important. 
 And they are results of the Norman Conquest, though 
 not perhaps in the way which those words would at first 
 sight suggest. Such changes as were made were not, 
 for the most part, things which the Normans brought 
 over ready made from Normandy, as we brought our 
 11 
 
IS8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 old Teutonic institutions ready made from the oldest 
 England. They were changes which, under the cir- 
 cumstances of the Norman rule in England, grew up 
 on English ground. I trust that no one now believes, 
 as Blackstone once believed, that William the Con- 
 queror introduced a ready-made feudal system into 
 England. Still less, I would hope, does any one be- 
 lieve that he introduced it by that great law of Salis- 
 bury which for ever hindered any feudal system, in the 
 sense which those words would bear in other lands, from 
 growing up in England. 
 
 But of all outside changes, that which is most striking 
 at first sight, and than which few are more important in 
 very truth, is the change in language. Mark that I say 
 change in language, not change of language. There was 
 no change of language ; one language was not made to 
 give way to another. In one sense, partially and for a 
 time, one language did give way to another ; that is to 
 say, English did for a while, for some purposes, give 
 way to French. What I mean is that there was no time 
 when a so-called Anglo-Saxon language gave way to a 
 so-called English language, a mixed language made up 
 out of Teutonic and Romance elements. There are no 
 mixed languages ; a language is whatever its grammar is, 
 even though foreign infusions into its vocabulary may, 
 as in some languages has really happened, outnumber 
 its native store. Not that the English language needs 
 to rest its claim to an unbroken continuity between its 
 earliest and its latest forms on any such ground as this. 
 The effects of the Norman Conquest on language were 
 gradual and indirect. The Normans brought with them 
 into England the French tongue, which they had adopt- 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. I $9 
 
 ed instead of their native Scandinavian. For a while 
 both languages, French and English, lived on side by 
 side, English as the popular, French as the polite, lan- 
 guage, while Latin lived by the side of both as the 
 tongue of learning. The notion that William the Con- 
 queror or any other Norman king tried to root out the 
 English tongue, that he made French the tongue of 
 government, is so far from history that it is hardly 
 romance ; it is pure fiction. William himself tried to 
 learn English; he took care that his English-born son 
 Henry should learn it as his natural speech ; Henry the 
 Second, a king neither English nor Norman, but Ange- 
 vin, whether he spoke it or not, certainly understood it. 
 Ailer the Norman Conquest, English gradually goes out 
 of use in public documents; but it gives way, not to 
 French, but to the Latin which, ever since the conver- 
 sion of the English to Christianity, had been used along- 
 side of English. By the end of the twelfth century, 
 English was undoubtedly in familiar use among all 
 classes in England. Then came a time which we may 
 call a French period of language, as distinguished from 
 a Norman period. A tide of fashion set in in favour 
 of French in the England of the thirteenth century, just 
 as happened in Germany, Russia, and other European 
 countries in much later times. Nor was such a fashion 
 wonderful. The Kings of England at the beginning of 
 that century were not only Kings of England, not only 
 Kings of England and Dukes of Normandy, but masters 
 of a French-speaking dominion far greater than that of 
 the King of France himself The hereditary attachments 
 of those kings lay in Anjou and Aquitaine far more than 
 in England, or even in Normandy. Meanwhile a crowd 
 
l6o THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 of events, the crusades prominent among them, had 
 spread the French tongue to the utmost bounds of 
 Europe and beyond the bounds of Europe ; it was the 
 polite and courtly speech from Dunfermline to Jerusa- 
 lem. It is not wonderful then that, just at the moment 
 when it seemed likely to give way to English, just at the 
 moment when its ascendency as the tongue of the con- 
 quering Norman was over, it gained a new ascendency as 
 a courtly and fashionable speech. But English all the 
 while remained the popular speech, the one speech of 
 the mass of the people, a speech perfectly familiar to the 
 mass of those who spoke French as a matter of fashion. 
 A reaction naturally set in, and it was no doubt strength- 
 ened by the long wars with France, which brought 
 French and English nationality into more direct oppo- 
 sition, and gave French, in the eyes of patriotic Eng- 
 lishmen, the air of a hostile tongue. By the end of the 
 fourteenth century English was again the one ordinary 
 speech of England; French was a foreign tongue used 
 only for special purposes. Its use in public documents, 
 unknown in the really Norman days, began, with other 
 French fashions, in the thirteenth century ; from the lat- 
 ter years of the fourteenth it gradually died, if it can be 
 said to have quite died out. For a few French phrases 
 still linger in the set forms of English law and govern- 
 ment, and therefore a few such survivals linger still on 
 this side of the Ocean also. 
 
 Thus the English tongue, which had ceased to be a 
 polite and courtly speech in the second half of the 
 eleventh century, came back again to be a polite and 
 courtly speech in the second half of the fourteenth. It 
 had undergone what we may call a three hundred years' 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. l6l 
 
 banishment. Through all that time it had lived on as 
 strictly the vulgar tongue, while two other tongues held 
 a higher place, the one as the polite, the other as the 
 learned, language. This position of our language is not 
 wholly without parallelism in modern Europe. The posi- 
 tion of Welsh in Wales is something, but not exactly, 
 like it; the position of the Slavonic tongues in a large 
 part of the lands on the Hadriatic sea is more like it. 
 English remained the tongue of common discourse ; 
 with the mass of the people it was the only tongue 
 of common discourse. It was the tongue of popular 
 rimes and popular religious writings, the tongue very 
 often of political satire, but not the tongue of either 
 speaking or writing for any purpose of supposed culture 
 and refinement. It suffered the kind of changes which 
 were likely to happen to a language so placed. Its 
 grammatical inflexions broke down ; it took in a great 
 number of borrowed words from the rival tongue which 
 was deemed more polite. Now in this matter, as in many 
 others, the Norman Conquest did but strengthen and 
 hasten the working of causes which were at work 
 already. The loss of inflexions is in no way pecu- 
 liar to English ; it has affected all the other Teutonic 
 tongues more or less ; some of them, above all the kin- 
 dred Frisian, without the help of any Norman Conquest, 
 without the help of foreign influences of any kind, have 
 been affected by it fully as much eis English has been. 
 What specially distinguishes English is the vast Ro- 
 mance infusion which it has taken into its vocabulary at 
 various times from the eleventh century to the nineteenth, 
 but in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries perhaps more 
 than in any other. But even in this there is nothing dis- 
 
1 62 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 tinctive except the amount of the infusion. Other Teu- 
 tonic tongues have adopted some Romance words ; the 
 modern High-Dutch is at this day adopting them at a 
 rate which cannot be pleasing to any lover of the old 
 Teutonic speech in any of its forms. We had ourselves 
 adopted some Latin words before the eleventh century, 
 more, in fact, than we adopted in the eleventh and twelfth. 
 But undoubtedly neither any other Teutonic language, 
 nor our own language at any earlier stage, ever adopted 
 so many Romance words as we have done from the four- 
 teenth century onward. And we have done something 
 beyond merely adopting a great infusion of foreign words 
 at some particular times. We have picked up a habit of 
 adopting foreign words without the least need. We have 
 taken in a vast number of foreign words as names for 
 things for which we had perfectly good English names ; 
 we go on doing so still. And we have gone far to lose — 
 happily we have not quite lost — the power of making 
 new words in our own tongue when we want a new 
 name for a new thing. Our tongue is crowded with 
 strange and needless names for new thoughts, new 
 inventions, new sciences, which it would have been 
 just as easy to name in our own tongue. The 'ologies 
 wax more and more daily, because men find it easier 
 to run to their Greek lexicon than to think in their own 
 tongue. But I am not without hope, as long as I can 
 cross the Ocean in a steamship and go my way by land 
 on a railroad. Those are words which the lips of .(Elfred 
 might have been fain to frame. 
 
 But great as all this is, it is all change in language, 
 not change <?/■ language ; it is all change which has taken 
 place within a language which has never lost what we 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 63 
 
 may call its unbroken personal identity. There was no 
 time when a so-called English language displaced a so- 
 called Anglo-Saxon language. There has been one lan- 
 guage, call it English, Anglo-Saxon, or anything else, 
 spoken throughout. It is of some importance that no 
 man at any time, in the eleventh century, the fourteenth, 
 or any other, would have called the language which he 
 spoke by any name but English ; it is of much more 
 importance that the language which they spoke remain- 
 ed one language throughout all changes. The changes 
 were made, one by one, in an existing tongue ; the for- 
 eign words were adopted, one by one, into an existing 
 tongue. But the tongue itself did not change ; it kept 
 its Teutonic grammar; it kept its essentially Teutonic 
 vocabulary. Ingenious men have tried to show that in 
 the present English vocabulary there are more Romance 
 words than Teutonic. Likely enough it is so in the way 
 in which they go to work. They take a modern dic- 
 tionary ; they count the words, and- they say that they 
 find more Romance words there than Teutonic. Let 
 it be so ; what then ? Let us try the words — non 
 numero, sed pondere. Let us weigh them, I do not 
 say by their weight in syllables, a test which would 
 certainly go against me, but by their real weight and 
 value for purposes of speech. The Teutonic words 
 are all of them real words, words which we are always 
 wanting, words which, if their use were forbidden, would 
 leave us altogether dumb. The Romance words are 
 some of them words which we cannot do without for 
 some particular purposes, but which are not, by the first 
 needs of speech, always on our lips : some of them are 
 words which we might perfectly well do without ; some 
 
164 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 of them are words which, for the general purposes of 
 language, are not words at all. The professors of par- 
 ticular sciences have a perfect right to use for their own 
 particular purposes any technical terms, formed from 
 any language, which they may think good. But I deny 
 that those technical terms, which millions of us go 
 through the world without ever hearing or uttering, are 
 any real part of language. They are not words in the 
 same sense as the words which clothe the thoughts 
 without which the speech of men cannot go on at all. 
 Let there be a Romance majority in this or that dic- 
 tionary. That majority is, I doubt not, swelled by tri- 
 gonometry, trignometrical, trigonometrically ; it contains 
 zootomy and zygodactylous ; it takes in helminthology , 
 which is in English worm-talk, and entomology, which 
 is in English bug-talk. I should not be surprised if it 
 takes in all the healing things in the pharmacopoeia ; I 
 can believe that it takes in the jargon of diplomacy, the 
 prestige and the pourparlers, the rapprochements and the 
 denouements, the offices for which plain English cannot 
 find a name, the attaches and the charges d'affaires, and 
 the imbroglios and the fiascos into which they lead unwary 
 nations. Nay, I should not wonder if it took in the jargon 
 of advertisements, the rhypophagon soap and the rhadio- 
 graphic pen. In the Teutonic minority we have those old 
 and dear and hallowed words without which no speech 
 can be a speech at all, the words with which we clothe our 
 inmost thoughts, the words of worship, the words of love, 
 the words of the fireside, the words of the highest ora- 
 tory and the highest poetry. In that minority' come 
 the names of God and man, of father and mother, of 
 son and daughter, of wife and husband. It takes in the 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 16$ 
 
 names of heaven and earth, of land and sea, of sun and 
 moon ; it takes in the bread we eat, the water we drink, 
 the clothes we wear, the plough with which we till the 
 furrow, the ship that bears us on the wave, the horse 
 that we ride or drive, the cow that gives us milk, the 
 sheep that give us wool, and the trusty dog that 
 watches them. In the minority too are all those parts 
 of speech, those pronouns, those particles, those verbs 
 of every moment's use, without which speech would at 
 once break down. We can put together sentence after 
 sentence of clear and strong English without a single 
 Romance word; we cannot form the shortest really 
 complete grammatical sentence without Teutonic words. 
 Where then is the real majority? Let us reckon afresh, 
 but let us reckon by another standard. The Roman 
 may have the greater number in a show of hands of 
 slaves, strangers, barbarians, trooping in from all cor- 
 ners of the world ; the Teuton will win at the poll 
 where the votes of duly qualified citizens alone are 
 reckoned. 
 
 Whatever then the Norman did, whatever came of 
 the many and great consequences of his coming, he 
 did not wipe out, he did not change, he did not even 
 undermine, the national life of the English people. He 
 modified our law ; he modified our language : he did 
 not destroy either; he did not stop the unbroken life 
 of either. A day came when men of Norman blood, 
 thoroughly changed into Englishmen on English soil, 
 could be the worthy leaders of the English people. 
 Sons of the soil, of either race, rose against the foreign 
 favorites of foreign-hearted Kings. The Great Charter 
 
1 66 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 was wrested from John by the descendants of the men 
 who fought for Wilham, working hand in hand with the 
 descendants of the men who fought for Harold. In the 
 struggle against the foreign favourites of foreign-hearted 
 kings, all earlier grievances, all earlier differences, were 
 forgotten. We could even choose as a national leader, 
 one who through Norman female descent had a claim to 
 English honours, but who by birth and direct descent 
 was neither English nor Norman, but strictly French. 
 The champion of our rights, the martyr of our freedom, 
 the man who lived and died for England, whom when 
 alive Englishmen followed as a leader, whom when dead, 
 in the teeth of the ban of Rome, they worshipped as a 
 saint, whose praise was sung on English lips, in Latin 
 and French and English, was, as I have already hinted, 
 our own by adoption only, but by adoption our own in 
 the truest sense. Two men of the thirteenth century 
 gave the law and constitution of England that later form 
 which the work of six hundred years on both sides 
 of the Ocean has been, not to pull down, not to build 
 afresh, but simply to reform in detail, as reform in detail 
 has been called for by the circumstances of this age or 
 the other. By a strange decree of destiny the man who 
 finished the work was the slayer of him who began it. 
 The victor of Evesham was, if the destroyer, yet the 
 disciple, of the uncle and teacher whom he overthrew. 
 Wherever, in the Old World or the New, we see a free 
 assembly, a constitutional executive, wherever we see 
 Lords and Commons, Senate and Representatives, 
 wherever we see a chief ruler, be he King, President, 
 or Governor, bound by the law and ruling according 
 to the law, there we see the work of "the men of 
 
THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 67 
 
 England in the thirteenth century; there, above all, 
 we see the work of the leaders of the men of England 
 in the thirteenth century. That work was the joint 
 work of the victor of Lewes and his prisoner, of the 
 victor of Evesham and his victim. What Earl Simon 
 began and sealed with the martyr's death, King Edward 
 brought to its full growth in the life which he lived for 
 England and her people. 
 
 The Norman kings then practically ruled as despots, 
 but as despots under whom the old forms of freedom still 
 lived on, to grow up once more into a fuller life when 
 the nation, strengthened and cleansed in the furnace, 
 came forth ready for the strife for freedom in the thir- 
 teenth century. By one of those cycles of history in 
 which one age seems so strangely to reproduce another, 
 a second time came when English kings were practically 
 despots, but when the forms of freedom in their second 
 shape still lived on. Under the kings of the house of 
 York, still more under the kings of the house of Tudor, 
 the royal power became again as great and terrible as it 
 had been under the Conqueror himself As we once 
 indirectly owed our freedom to the mighty strength, to 
 the deep wisdom, of William the Norman, so we indi- 
 rectly owed it again, partly to the caprice, partly to the 
 inborn English feeling, of Henry the Eighth. He too 
 would be a despot, but he too would be a despot under 
 the forms of freedom ; he loved to do his worst crimes 
 with every outward sanction of law. Once more then 
 the forms lived on, again to be clothed with substance 
 in better times. What the struggle of the thirteenth 
 century was to the despotism of the eleventh and 
 
1 68 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 twelfth, the struggle of the seventeenth century was to 
 the despotism of the sixteenth. But, while the despot- 
 ism of the sixteenth century ran its course, when it 
 sank into the weaker, the less English, despotism of 
 the seventeenth, a new world was brought within 
 sight of the old. The range of our story widens ; the 
 bounds of the civilized world itself widen ; the law 
 and freedom of England win new realms for them- 
 selves in the third home of the English folk. The 
 strife of the thirteenth century was waged by the men 
 and on the soil of the second England only. In 
 the struggle of the seventeenth century the third Eng- 
 land had its share also; that struggle indeed had no 
 small share in bringing that third England into being. 
 This evening we have passed with a swift step over 
 those ages of our history in which the field of action 
 of the English people gathered wholly round their 
 home in Britain. We will wind up with a glance at 
 its twofold fortunes since its field of action, without 
 forsaking the Old World, has been extended to the 
 New. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 I AM now fast nearing the end of my course. I have 
 reached the last evening of my appearance among you, 
 and in our historic survey we have reached our last stage. 
 The third home of the English people is in sight, and 
 one part of the English people is making ready for its 
 second voyage. Metaphor apart, I have now to enter 
 on the hardest part of my task, to say to you whatever 
 I may venture directly to say to you about your own 
 land and yourselves who dwell in it. On that head I 
 must, even more than in earlier parts of my subject, 
 stick close to those aspects of the land and people 
 among whom I now find myself which specially con- 
 cern me, with those which help to connect that land 
 and its people with the other branches of the English 
 folk and the lands in which they dwell. And let me 
 tell you at the beginning that, in the time which I 
 have as yet spent in the third England, it is the likeness, 
 not the unlikeness, to the second England which strikes 
 me. I know not how it might be with one who had 
 come straight from Britain to America, and who had 
 seen nothing of the mainland of Europe. Such an one- 
 might perhaps be most struck by points of difference 
 between the third England and the second. But as I 
 happen to have seen a good deal of other European lands, 
 
 169 
 
I70 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 as I am therefore used to things far more unlike my own 
 land, what mainly strikes me is how little the English 
 people have changed by making their second voyage. 
 I have often to go through a distinct process of thought 
 to remind myself that I am in New England, and not in 
 Middle England still. I know not how it might be if I 
 had entered your Union by the other end, and had seen 
 its western, its newer portions, first. I do not doubt that 
 I should there find points of difference from my own 
 England which I do not find here in these eastern • 
 states. But assuredly, in all that I have seen, my 
 main feeling is one of wonder how little the younger 
 England differs from the elder. But in truth, if I 
 thoroughly grasp my own leading doctrine, I ought 
 not to wonder. Why should it differ ? Differ of 
 course it must in smaller points which depend on cli- 
 mate and local circumstances. But such differences are 
 found in different parts of Britain, of England itself: 
 such differences are found in different parts of the United 
 States. I do not notice more difference, in some points 
 I notice less difference, than if I go into Northern Eng- 
 land, especially into that part of Northern England to 
 which an innovation of a few centuries past insists on 
 extending the name of Scotland. In public forms and 
 notices I mark the differences which necessarily follow on 
 the differences in your central and local government ; but 
 they seem to me to be hardly so great as those which 
 strike me if I pass from the kingdom of England into 
 the kingdom of Scotland. I hear some words used in 
 ways which are new to me; I hear no words that are 
 absolutely new ; I hear no words so sounded that I can- 
 not catch their meaning. It has not as yet happened to 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 171 
 
 me in this land, as it once happened to me in the bishop- 
 ric of Durham, to Hsten — for philological purposes only 
 — to a conversation of some sentences between the 
 natives, and to carry off only a single word. That word 
 in my Durham case was one that did not tell me much 
 of the subject of discourse. It was the very short word 
 " bob," which might mean either a man or a coin or a 
 blow dealt with the hand, or which, in a dialect a little 
 further north, might even be a verb, according to the 
 good practical counsel, " If it's nae weel bobbit, we'll 
 bob it again." I am of course struck with the neces- 
 sary lack of antiquities in the way of buildings ; not so 
 much with the lack of work of earlier times, for which of 
 course I did not look, but at the rarity of what I might 
 have expected to find, characteristic work of the seven- 
 teenth century. But I see that the reason is to be found 
 in the habit, natural in a newly-settled land, of chiefly 
 building in wood. And of course there are large parts 
 of elder countries also in which the same lack strikes us. 
 Ancient buildings do not form the main feature of Lon- 
 don or Paris ; they are as unknown at Liverpool as they 
 are. at New York. And here too the standard of anti- 
 quity fluctuates. What passes for old in England passes 
 for modern in Italy or Greece. So we may set up a 
 standard of comparative antiquity even here in America. 
 You have things here as distinctly ancient as anything 
 in Europe, if by ancient we mean belonging to a state 
 of things which has passed away, or at all events to a 
 state of things which could not now begin afresh. If 
 the student of early institutions goes to Switzerland 
 and Northern Germany, he comes to New England 
 also. To say nothing of smaller local institutions, the 
 
172 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES; 
 
 state of Rhode Island, the state of Delaware, are things 
 as distinctly old as the cantons of Uri and Unterwalden. 
 That is to say, nothing of the kind could come into being 
 for the first time now. Even in the matter of buildings, 
 my mind has not often been more puzzled in the old 
 world than it has been over that mysterious tower, mill, 
 whatever it is, which stands on the green at Newport. 
 And among the elder houses of that city of timber, I 
 have lighted on a few which might have stood very well 
 in my native Staffordshire. One point however I must 
 mention, in which it would seem that America does very 
 distinctly differ, not only from Britain, but from Europe 
 as a whole. I had heard of " the almighty dollar ;" I am 
 amazed at its lack of might. I find that it has no more 
 strength than coins so much smaller as a shilling, a 
 mark, a franc, have in the old world. Yet even on this 
 head I had gone a kind of apprenticeship, in certain 
 familiarity with an intermediate coin, the Austrian florin. 
 I know not whether it is good political economy or not, 
 but in all these lands prices seem to have a remarkable 
 way of adapting themselves to the coinage. If in the next 
 or any meeting of Congress, any of your political parties 
 should propose an imitation of Europe on one small 
 point, the substitution of the franc for the dollar, at all 
 events when visitors have to pay, that political party 
 should earn, not my vote —for I am not quite enough 
 at home among you to have one — but my best thanks 
 and good wishes. 
 
 To turn to more serious matters, in my last lecture 
 we reached, by a somewhat capricious and desultory- 
 road, the point at which part of the English people took 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 73 
 
 their second voyage. I pointed out at an earlier stage, 
 that the main difference between that second voyage and 
 the first was this ; the first voyage was made when all that 
 was in being was the-g£xaia_aLEnglishnational life, while, 
 when the second voyage was made, English national life had 
 long reached its full growth. Herein, I said, lay the cause 
 of the obvious fact that the first separation wrought so 
 much wider a gap between the first and second England 
 than the second separation made between the second 
 and the third. The English of the seventeenth century 
 were not only the same people as ourselves in the sense 
 in which the English of the fifth century were the same 
 people. They were, in all essential respects, the same 
 kind of people that we are now. Our language was 
 thoroughly formed; the English of the seventeenth 
 century simply sounds a httle old-fashioned; everybody 
 can understand it; while the English of the fifth cen- 
 tury, like any equally distant form of any other lan- 
 guage, has to be learned like another tongue. If I were 
 to say that our political constitution was the same, some 
 one would tell me first, that the present American and the 
 present English constitution are quite different from one 
 another, and then that both are quite different from the 
 English constitution in the seventeenth century. Both 
 these sayings are, in one sense, very obvious truths, and 
 yet there is a sense in which they in no way contradict 
 the position — the paradox, if you will — at which I just 
 hinted. I venture to say that the English and American 
 constitutions are, in a sense, the same. To this perhaps 
 specially strange paradox I will presently come back; 
 but to say that the English constitution was the same in 
 the seventeenth and in the nineteenth is hardly a paradox. 
 12 
 
174 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 The working is very different ; but the machine is essen- 
 tially the same. A general view of the English constitution 
 in its later form might run thus : Its great leading prin- 
 ciples were established by Earl Simon and King Edward 
 the First. It had been wrought into its present shape by 
 the beginning of the fourteenth century. As far as the 
 written law goes, the main features of the constitution 
 and law of England were the same then that they are 
 now. Then came the Yorkist, Tudor, and Stewart times, 
 times of progress in many ways, but in a strictly consti- 
 tutional view, times of backsliding. The law was trod- 
 den under foot ; kings habitually broke the law accord- 
 ing to which they were sworn to govern. The two 
 struggles of the seventeenth century, the great revolt 
 against Charles the First and the milder revolt against 
 James the Second, really brought back the state of things 
 which was at the beginning of the fourteenth century; 
 William the Third holds, in a wonderful way, the 
 same position as Henry the Fourth. Since that time the 
 work of progress in England has consisted, not in formal 
 changes in the constitution, but in bringing its practical 
 working in harmony with the changing needs of the 
 time. As far as the written law goes, as far as anything 
 goes that a court of law can take notice of, the relations 
 among the powers of the state in England have hardly 
 changed at all since the days of William the Third, or 
 even since the days of Henry the Fourth. The change 
 which has taken place since those days is that each 
 power in the state now acts, not only according to the 
 written law, but according to certain constitutional rules 
 which are not written in any law-book, but which are 
 in practice perfectly understood, and which amount to a 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 75 
 
 practical acknowledgement ofthe supremacy of the House 
 of Commons, and thereby of the people whom that house 
 represents. It would be thoroughly unfair to blame 
 Charles the First or James the Second for not ruling 
 according to conventional understandings which have 
 been established since their time. It is thoroughly fair 
 to blame them for trampling under foot the written law 
 which had been established long before their time, and 
 which some earlier kings had at least tried to carry out. 
 It is equally unfair to attempt to defend Charles the 
 First on the ground that most, perhaps all, of his 
 breaches of law can be matched by some act of some 
 earlier reign. There is a wide difference between occa- 
 sional breaches of law done by a king in irregular times 
 when breaches of law are common on the part of every- 
 body, and systematic breaches of law done in settled times 
 by a king who is strong enough to make everybody 
 else keep the law, but who keeps for himself the privilege 
 of breaking it. The revolution of 1688 brought things 
 back to the point which was established by the revolu- 
 tion of 1 399. The king henceforth obeys the law ; but, 
 withihTHe^mits of the powers which the law gives 
 him, he can still act according to his personal will. 
 The work of the time which has passed since the revolu- 
 tion of 1688 has been to substitute for the personal will 
 of the king the indirectly expressed will of the people. 
 ^Jt^as whiLeJi£_law and constitutipn of England were 
 at this special point that most of the American colonies, 
 those above all in this part of the continent, were found- 
 ed. As Englishmen settling in a new land, the colonists 
 brought with them the law of England ; but they naturally 
 brought it with them only in such modified shapes as were 
 
176 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 made necessary by settlement in a new land. Will it jar on 
 any theory of progress if I say that many of the changes 
 which settlement in a new land made needful were 
 changes backward ? I certainly find that the best way 
 of going forward very often is to go backward. Many 
 of the very best reforms in English law have been mere 
 fallings back on the simpler principles of earlier times ; 
 and this fact is all the more valuable because I am sure 
 that, in some cases at least, the authors of those reforms 
 did not know that they were falling back on the princi- 
 ples of earlier times. The seventeenth century was in- 
 deed a time in which men consciously fell back on the 
 principles of earlier times. Through all English history 
 the cry has never been for new laws, but for the firmer 
 establishment, the stricter observance, of the old laws. 
 The patriots of the seventeenth century went back for 
 their precedents to the fifteenth. But those among tbem 
 who founded the American colonies often went back 
 further still, and often went back unconsciously. The 
 conditions of the earliest times had largely come back 
 again. The settlers of the seventeenth century differed 
 from the settlers of the fifth in being Christian and civ- 
 ilized men, bringing with them all that man learned in 
 the space of twelve hundred years. But they were like 
 the settlers of the fifth century in this, that they were 
 settlers in a new land, settling in small bodies, founding 
 a great number of small and separate settlements. This 
 is quite another process from conquest on a large scale, 
 such conquests, for instance, as the Spaniards made in 
 other parts of the American continent. I must hold 
 that the advance of your great Union has been all the 
 wider, all the surer, because the beginnings were small, 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. \J7 
 
 because advance was for a long time slow. The small 
 beginnings, the slow advance, is an essential part of 
 the history, and it was an element which, more than 
 any other, helped toward the establishment and main- 
 tenance of free institutions. Let us suppose that a king 
 of England, clothed with great powers by law, and tak- 
 ing to himself great further powers in the teeth of the 
 law, had won the same kind of dominion in this part of 
 America as the Kings of Spain won in other parts. In 
 one sense England would have been more directly repro- 
 duced on American soil than it was. That is to say, 
 there might have been as near a reproduction as change 
 of place allowed of the state of England as it then stood, 
 with the abuses of the royal power as part of that 
 state. The course which events really took allowed of 
 the reproduction of England in a much truer and 
 healthier shape. It was because the land was not con- 
 quered by kings, but was settled by small companies 
 of men, many of whom actually went to be out of the 
 king's way, that more truly English institutions could 
 grow up. It was not the existing England that was 
 reproduced, but a new England that was founded. But 
 the new England that was founded Was in a certain 
 sense an old England. The conditions of earlier 
 times had largely come back, and the settlers, while 
 bringing English feelings and English laws with them, 
 worked those laws and feelings in many respects into 
 institutions of an earlier type than those which they 
 left behind in the mother-country. The circumstances 
 of the settlements allowed each little new-born home of 
 Englishmen to grow up for itself after its own fashion. 
 The same circumstances shut out any great interference 
 
178 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 on the part of the government at home. The great 
 historic interest of these settlements, above all of the 
 New England settlements, lies in the fact that they were 
 driven, even if they had not wished, to give their insti- 
 tutions a more primitive character than the existing in- 
 stitutions of England; that is, as I should venture to 
 put it, to advance by going back. All local institutions 
 were necessarily of a simpler kind than they were in the 
 elder country. That is to say, the settlers were driven 
 to cast off many of the improvements or corruptions, 
 as we may choose to call them, which had overshadowed 
 the elder institutions of the mother-country, and largely 
 to fall back on the primitive form of those institutions. 
 In some settlements the primitive democracy, the direct 
 share of every citizen in the political assembly of his 
 people, which had died out or had been utterly over- 
 shadowed everywhere in Europe save in a few of the 
 Swiss cantons, appeared again on American soil in all 
 its fulness. 
 
 Thus in the seventeenth century, exactly as in the 
 fifth and sixth, English settleriient took the form of a 
 great number of small, distinct, to a large extent prac- 
 tically independent, , settlements. Herein lay the root 
 of the matter ; the third England was not made, but 
 grew. The history of the settlements, the migrations, 
 the quarrels, the shiftings, the unions, the divisions, is 
 somewhat hard to carry in the head. But their gen- 
 eral character and their place in the history of the 
 world is plain enough. That character, that place, 
 assuredly lies among ancient events. It is as essen- 
 tially an old piece of history as anything in old 
 Greece or in mediaeval Switzerland. It is the small- 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 79 
 
 ness of scale which is the beauty of the whole thing. 
 It is so, not only because it really heightens the history 
 of the story ; it is so in a more practical way also. 
 You will say that I am again at my paradoxes if I say 
 that the present greatness of your Confederation is 
 mainly owing to the littleness of its beginnings. A 
 stage may come when it is the right thing to admit a 
 state like Texas ; but I am much more sure that Rhode 
 Island is the right kind of thing to begin with. I look 
 at the map of Rhode Island with admiration mingled 
 with a certain measure of regret. I regret that another 
 Rhode Island cannot come into being now. I see no 
 room for it either in Europe or in America ; I am not 
 clear that there is room for it even in Australia. I am 
 half afraid that we have got too civilized for the growth 
 of emother Rhode Island. I am not sure that a little 
 privacy, a little isolation, is not needed for such a 
 growth ; it might not be healthy for it to have the 
 world staring at it through the spectacles of the daily 
 newspaper and the electric telegraph. In these little 
 new-made settlements there was a strength and fresh- 
 ness of political life which can hardly be in states of a 
 larger scale. They gave to the body of which they 
 were one chief element, and certainly the most whole- 
 some element, a certain keenness, a certain variety, of 
 political experience which a greater physical scale 
 would have gone far to blunt and to dim. A number 
 of these small communities, separate from one another, 
 connected with the mother-country by a very lax tie, 
 not without local jealousies and rivalries, were the best 
 conceivable materials out of which to construct a fed- 
 eral system. Newer and larger States, admitted into a 
 
l8o THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES, 
 
 Federal Union already formed, can never have the same 
 political schooling. They are, as it were, born grown- 
 up; they have not had the wholesome discipline of such 
 a childhood as that of New England. It is no fault of 
 theirs ; like the Frenchman in my little story, they can't 
 help it. They had not the good luck to be born at the 
 same lucky moment and under the same lucky sur- 
 roundings as the New England States. I have some- 
 times wished that I could find myself no older than I 
 was thirty or forty years back, keeping all that I have 
 learned in those thirty or forty years. Something like 
 this singular good luck did really happen to Massachu- 
 setts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and their fellows. 
 Armed and strengthened with all the experience and 
 civilization of the seventeenth century, they were driven 
 to start afresh from nearly the same conditions as the 
 
 men of the fifth and sixth centuries. • ^ 
 
 ~' The founders of the third England thus brought with 
 them the institutions of the second England, but modified 
 by the circumstances of the settlement in a manner which 
 went some way to recall the primitive institutions of the 
 first England. And I may say this for evil as well as for 
 good. I believe that the great mass of mankind have not 
 the faintest notion that slavery was an ancient English 
 institution. Of course I do not mean that it was in any 
 way specially English. It was simply common to the 
 English with all other nations who have the chance to 
 get slaves and who have not yet found out that slavery 
 is either wrong or unprofitable. In an early stage of 
 society slavery is the doom of the prisoner of war ; it is 
 often the legal doom of the criminal. In both cases it 
 often passes as a merciful substitute for death. The chil- 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE ANt) THE THIRD HOME. l8l 
 
 dren of the slave are slaves; a slave-class is thus formed; 
 in England it was formed, partly out of British captives 
 and their descendants, partly out of English criminals and 
 their descendants. The very name of slave points to the 
 main origin of the state of slavery. It is no Latin word ; 
 it is no Teutonic word. It is the name of the great race 
 of the Slaves, a name which in its. own tongue means, per- 
 haps glorious, perhaps speaking to be understood, but which, 
 both in Eastern and in Western Europe, became the com- 
 mon name for bondmen, when the wars of both Eastern and 
 Western Emperors had filled all lands with bondsmen of 
 Slavonic blood. So in England, where we had no chance 
 of Slavonic captives, the name which we gave to our 
 British neighbours served the same purpose. We first 
 called them Welsh or strangers ; we then used the Welsh 
 name to mean bondmen. In England both slavery in 
 the strict sense, and villainage, that middle state between 
 mere slavery and full freedom, died out step by step 
 without ever being abolished by law. Step by step the 
 slaves became villains, and the villains became freemen. 
 They could easily do so ; the descendant either of the 
 English criminal or of the Welsh captive, when he was 
 once set free, differed in nothing from his master. Pure 
 slavery died out so early in England that men forgot that 
 such a thing had ever been. Villainage was remembered 
 as a thing of the past, but the state of the slave passed 
 out of memory. When slavery appeared again in a 
 new form, when English colonists brought their slaves 
 of another race and colour to the mother-country, the 
 question was gradually stirred, and English judges, with 
 more regard to abstract right than to the past history of 
 England, declared that in England slavery could not be, 
 
1 82 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE I-N ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 and that the first breath of Enghsh air set the slave 
 free. I would have you notice three things : First, 
 there was an early time when there was white slavery in 
 England, just as there was in old Greece, or old Italy, or 
 any other part of the world. Secondly, there was a 
 much later time when there was black slavery in Eng- 
 land, though only on a small scale, as when it was fash- 
 ionable for fine ladies to be waited on by negro boys. 
 Thirdly, when slavery appeared again in the colonies, it 
 appeared again in its oldest shape. Both Cromwell and 
 James the Second sent criminals, rebels, even Scottish 
 prisoners of war, to be slaves, both in the American 
 mainland and in the West India islands. I am con- 
 cerned with this matter only to show how, both for 
 good and for evil, the force of circumstances drove the 
 colonists to reproduce in many things the conditions of 
 far earlier times. The thing that gives the fact its his- 
 toric value is that this was done altogether unconsciously. 
 The men who set up free townships and the men who 
 took to themselves bondmen were assuredly not think- 
 ing that the followers of Hengest and Cerdic had done 
 the like. 
 
 But the institutions which thus grew up in the Ameri- 
 can colonies, and which grew into their most perfect 
 shape in the New England colonies, were, after all, insti- 
 tutions essentially local. Even those which reached what 
 we may call the greatest physical size, the legislatures 
 of the greater colonies, were still, in the strictest sense, 
 provincial. They were not the institutions of a great 
 nation. They could not be so as long as local freedom, 
 though carried perhaps to the furthest point that a merely 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 83 
 
 local freedom could be, was still merely local. There 
 could be no national institutions till a nation was formed, 
 and a nation could not be formed as long as any trace 
 remained of dependence on a power beyond the Ocean. 
 The colonies, as long as they remained provinces, might 
 be practically free in all that concerned their own internal 
 affairs ; in the general affairs of the whole English people 
 they had no voice. Matters of peace and war were 
 settled for them by a power over which they had not 
 even an indirect control. In the war of a hundred and 
 twenty years back, the war in which some of your revo- 
 lutionary heroes first tried their 'prentice hands, the 
 colonial, provincial, continental, troops served with a 
 good will. There was every reason why they should 
 serve with a good will. But, willing or unwilling, they 
 had no share in settling such matters. Whether Vir- 
 ginia and Louisiana should be at war or at peace 
 depended, not on Virginia and Louisiana, not on any 
 greater wholes of which Virginia and Louisiana formed 
 parts, but on two kings far away in Europe. At last the 
 mother-country went a step too far in reminding her dis- 
 tant provinces that they were provinces. Englishmen on 
 this side of Ocean had no more mind than Englishmen 
 on the other side to be taxed by an assembly in which 
 they were not represented. The political tie was snapped ; 
 thirteen settlements of Englishmen became free and 
 independent states, no longer provinces of the British 
 crown, but colonies of the English people more truly 
 than ever. 
 
 No sane person in Great Britain now approves of the 
 attempt to tax the colonies. No sane person does other- 
 wise than rejoice that the colonies became free and inde- 
 
1 84 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 pendent. But let us, in common fairness, say a word for 
 King George. In all that he did he was backed by the 
 great mass of the British nation. And let us even say a 
 word for the British nation also. Had the King and the 
 nation been really wise, they would have let the colonies 
 go without striking a blow. But then no king and no 
 nation ever was really wise after that fashion. King 
 George and the British nation were simply not wiser than 
 other people. I believe that you may turn the pages of 
 history from the earliest to the latest times, without finding 
 a time when any king or any commonwealth, freely and will- 
 ingly, without compulsion or equivalent, gave up power 
 or dominion, or even mere extent of territory on the map, 
 when there was no real power or dominion. Remember 
 that, seventeen years after the acknowledgement of Amer- 
 ican independence, King George still called himself King 
 of France. Remember that, when the title Was given up, 
 some people thought it unwise to give it up. Remember 
 that some people in our own day regretted the separation 
 between the crowns of Great Britain and Hannover. If 
 they lived to see the year 1866, perhaps they grew 
 wiser. 
 
 In the third England, as in the second, strictly national 
 union came from the joining together of many smaller 
 local bodies. And the work of union was in both cases 
 largely advanced by a struggle with a common enemy. 
 But the different circumstances of the two cases caused 
 the process of union to take two quite different forms in 
 Britain and in America. In Britain, beyond the occa- 
 sional and precarious supremacy of the Bretwaldas, there 
 was no political tie of any kind among the many Teu- 
 tonic states. Up to the conversion Englishmen had no 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 8$ 
 
 acknowledged and abiding head in any shape ; after the 
 conversion they had a head ; but he did not appear in the 
 shape of a civil or political ruler ; the head of Angle-kin 
 was the first bishop in the land. But in America the 
 several colonies were, after all, members of a greater 
 whole; they had a common tie in their allegiance to 
 the King of Great Britain. Again, in Britain the com- 
 mon enemy was a foreign invader ; in the first stages of 
 the strife, he was a heathen invader. In America the 
 common enemy was no other than the common head, 
 the King of Great Britain himself In Britain union 
 took the form of annexation of the several states by 
 one greater state. All the Teutonic states in Britain be- 
 came, first dependencies of the West-Saxon king, then 
 integral parts of his kingdom. The King of the West- 
 Ssixons grew into the King of the English. We may 
 believe that the early stages of this process were not 
 much liked by the kingdoms which thus lost their inde- 
 pendent being. But in the later stages, when the com- 
 ing of the Dane had left the West-Saxon king the only 
 English and Christian King in the land, the men of 
 other parts of England welcomed his rule, as that of a 
 deliverer from the heathen yoke. Thus the effect of the 
 struggle with a foreign enemy was the absorption of sev- 
 eral separate powers into one. But when the common 
 enemy was the prince whose common headship was the 
 only political tie among the separate settlements, things 
 naturally took another course. That course did not lead 
 to the same complete union among the English settle- 
 ments in America which had come to pass ages before 
 among the English settlements in Britain. Absorption 
 of the lesser colonies by one larger one could not hap- 
 
1 86 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 pen while all alike admitted the supremacy of a common 
 king. It could not happen in the face of the common dan- 
 ger, when the common king had changed into the com- 
 mon enemy to be withstood. The struggle showed the 
 need of union ; but for the moment — at least in idea — it 
 brought perfect disunion. When the one tie was snapped, 
 there was no other ready made. A new tie had to be 
 created ; among states which felt the need of union, but 
 which had no mind to give up local independence, that tie 
 naturally took a federal shape. First came the laxer union, 
 which needed to declare that it was to be perpetual. 
 Then came the more perfect union, which needed not to 
 declare itself perpetual, seeing perpetuity was implied 
 in its increased perfection. And the federal union neces- 
 sarily took a republican form. That a federal monarchy 
 is not impossible has been since proved by the experience 
 of Germany. But a federal monarchy could hardly arise, 
 except where the particular states were used to mon- 
 archic government. A federal Emperor is a perfectly 
 natural head for a company of kings and grand dukes. 
 A federal king would have been a very unnatural head 
 for a company of states which, even when nominally 
 subject, had been practically commonwealths. The cir- 
 cumstances of the tenth century led the English king- 
 domS in Britain, naturally and necessarily, to coalesce 
 in the shape of a consolidated kingdom. The circum- 
 stances of the eighteenth century led the English com- 
 monwealths in America, as naturally and necessarily, to 
 coalesce in the shape of a federal commonwealth. 
 
 Will it now be set down as yet another paradox, if I 
 say that the constitution of the federal commonwealth 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 8/ 
 
 is really not a new thing, but only a modification of the 
 constitution of the consolidated kingdom ? The differ- 
 ences are many, as could not fail to be when the change 
 of circumstances was so great; but I see far more to 
 wonder at in the amount of likeness than in the amount 
 of unlikeness. It would have been nothing strange, if 
 the founders of the American constitution had made it 
 as unlike as they possibly could to the constitution of 
 Great Britain. Instead of so doing, they made it as like 
 to the elder model as the circumstances of the two cases 
 allowed. Read what the founders of the constitution say 
 for themselves in the Federalist. Never were men fur- 
 ther removed from the character of reckless innovators 
 than Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. I suspect that in their 
 hearts they were a trifle more conservative than they 
 thought it wise to proclaim to the world. Anyhow 
 they preserved the main outlines of the old model. 
 The three great elements of Teutonic polity, the ruling 
 chief, the council of elders, and the popular assembly, are 
 there in the newer work, no less than in the older. The 
 vulgar mind thinks that the diiiference must be something 
 amazingly great, because the ruling chief is a hereditary 
 king in the one land and an elective president in the 
 other. The student of constitutional history looks on 
 this as a small difference compared with that which 
 parts off both king and president from a state of things 
 where there is no ruling chief at all. The Swiss federal 
 constitution, which in many points so closely follows 
 the American model, has no personal head at all. The 
 powers of the executive, much smaller in their range 
 than those of either king or president, are vested in a 
 council of seven, of whom the so-called President of 
 
1 88 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 the Confederation is simply chairman. Your Senate, 
 your " other house," is something more than " another 
 house." It is not merely traditional, like the British 
 House of Lords, nor merely ornamental, like the French 
 Senate. It is an essential part of the federal system, as 
 much needed to embody the rights of the several free 
 and independent States as the House of Representa- 
 tives is needed to embody the national being of the uni- 
 ted people. And yet I doubt whether the idea of the 
 Senate would have come into the head of any man who 
 was not familiar with the British House of Lords. Remem- 
 ber that national assemblies composed of two houses were 
 not so common then throughout the world as the com- 
 bined example of Britain and America has made them 
 since. In fact, the American examples, both in the fed- 
 eral constitution and in the constitutions of particular 
 states, must have been among the first in which the 
 system of two houses was deliberately adopted. I say 
 deliberately, because it should always be borne in mind 
 that the system of two Houses of Parliament came about 
 in England, like most other things, by the force of cir- 
 cumstances. There was no moment in English history 
 when either the people of England or any king of Eng- 
 land said, We will have two Houses of Parliament rather 
 tlian one or three. The existing constitution of Lords 
 and Commons settled itself, after showing tendencies 
 quite unlike the shape which it took in the end. 
 But it is to be supposed that the many cases in 
 which the system of two houses has been adopted 
 in America, not only in the constitutions of States, 
 but in the local constitutions of cities, show a distinct 
 conviction that two houses do the work better than 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 89 
 
 either one or three. But bear in mind that, both 
 in the State and in the city, it is simply a question 
 in what way the work will be best done. If you 
 should ever think that either one house or three houses 
 would manage your affairs better than two houses, there 
 is no reason why you should not change your two 
 houses for one or three. Tfcis is true of the city ; it is 
 true of the State ; but it is not true of the Union. There 
 it is of the essence of the federal system that the whole 
 nation as such and the States as such should both be 
 represented. And this can be done only by having two 
 Houses. One house or three would not do. ^ 
 
 The main point of uijlikeness between the English 
 and the American constitutions may be said, if I may 
 be allowed another journey into the regions of paradox, 
 to consist in this, that there is a constitution in America 
 and that there is no constitution iji England. I mean 
 that in America there is a written document called the 
 Federal Constitution, which lays down the ejjact powers 
 of the different federal authorities, a document which 
 cannot be altered by ordinary legislation, but only in a 
 special way laid down in the constitution itself In Eng- 
 land there is no constitution in this sense ; there is no 
 one document placed beyond ordinary legislation ; there 
 is nothing which King, Lords and Commons, acting to- 
 gether, cannot change at any mopient, in the form of an 
 ordinary act of parliament. What we commonly call the 
 British constitution is simply a system of silent under- 
 standings as to the way in which the poiyers which the 
 law gives to the several authorities of the state are to 
 be exercised. In England therefore conduct may be 
 highly unconstitutional which is in no way illegal. It 
 
 13 
 
1 90 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 may be deserving of parliamentary censure, while it 
 would be no ground for proceedings in any court of 
 law. In America conduct cannot be unconstitutional 
 without being illegal. This, I apprehend, is true in a 
 strict sense, though I am aware that something like a 
 system of unwritten understandings, answering to our 
 unwritten constitution, has^grown up round about your 
 great written document. Now this main distinction, that 
 the constitution of the one country is written and that 
 of the other is unwritten follows necessarily from the 
 circumstances of each. The English constitution had 
 grown up, bit by bit, out of the primitive germs of our 
 political institutions ; it was never even revised in any 
 formal way. The only time when anything like a writ- 
 ten constitution was set up in England was under the 
 Protectorate. But the acts of the Protectorate were 
 held to be null alike by the partisans of the King and 
 by the partisans of the Parliament. At the Restoration 
 of Charles the Second the old constitution revived of 
 itself, without any formal re-enactment. A new nation, 
 such as the English settlements in America became by 
 the fact of independence, found itself in a different posi- 
 tion. Even had there been only one state, and not 
 thirteen, it would probably have been found convenient 
 to define the range of each of the powers of the com- 
 monwealth in a written document. But when there 
 were thirteen states to be joined together in a fed- 
 eral union, the written document was not only conve- 
 nient, but necessary. A federal constitution is of the 
 nature of a treaty. It is an agreement by which certain 
 political communities, in themselves independent and 
 sovereign, agree to surrender certain of the attributes 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. I9I 
 
 of independence and sovereignty to a central authority, 
 while others of these attributes they keep in their own 
 hands. A written document is absolutely necessary as 
 an authoritative record to declare which powers are 
 ceded to the Union and which are kept in the hands 
 of the States. In a federal state then a written constitu- 
 tion is matter of necessity ; in a state of any other form, 
 whether monarchy or commonwealth, it is a mere mat- 
 ter of circumstances and convenience in each particular 
 case. Your several States have found it convenient to 
 draw up written constitutions ; but it should be remem- 
 bered that Rhode Island lived on for many years after 
 the Declaration of Independence with no constitution 
 
 beyond its original charter. 
 
 ' From the fact that the United States have a written 
 constitution some- points of difference between them 
 and England have directly followed. I will mention 
 two only. One is the great powers with which your 
 Supreme Federal Court is clothed. It is, I believe, 
 the only national tribunal in the world which can sit 
 in judgement on a national law, and can declare an 
 act of all the three powers of the Union to be null 
 and void. No such power does or can exist in 
 England. Any one of the three powers of the state, 
 King, Lords, or Commons, acting alone, may act il- 
 legally; the three acting together cannot act illegally. 
 An act of parliament is final ; it may be repealed 
 by the power which enacted it; it cannot be ques- 
 tioned by any other power. For in England there is 
 no written constitution; the powers of Parliament, of 
 King, Lords, and Commons, acting together, are liter- 
 ally boundless. But in your Union, it is not only poa- 
 
192 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 sible that President, Senate, or House of Represent- 
 atives, acting alone, may act illegally ; the three acting 
 together may act illegally. For their powers are not 
 boundless ; they have no powers but such as the terms 
 of the constitution, that is, the original treaty between 
 the States, have given them. Congress may pass, the 
 President may assent to, a measure which contradicts 
 the terms of the constitution. If they so act, they act 
 illegally, and the Supreme Court can declare such an act 
 to be null and void. This difference flows directly from 
 the difference between a written and an unwritten con- 
 stitution. It does not follow that every state which has 
 a written constitution need vest in its highest court such 
 powers as are vested in yours, though it certainly seems 
 to me that, in a federal constitution, such a power is 
 highly expedient. My point is simply that such a 
 power can exist where there is a written constitution : 
 where there is no written constitution, it cannot. 
 
 The other point of difference which follows from the 
 presence or absence of a written constitution is perhaps 
 more obvious at first sight. This is the position of the 
 chief magistrate of the Union. The President replaces 
 the King, but his position really comes nearer to that 
 of the Prime Minister. But he differs a good deal from 
 either the one or the other. The powers of the Presi- 
 dent, the mode of his election, the duration of his office, 
 are all laid down in your federal constitution. The posi- 
 tion of the King of Great Britain and Ireland is equally 
 laid down by law. He comes to the crown by heredi- 
 tary succession, not by virtue of any divine right, but 
 by virtue of a certain act of parliament. As King, he 
 holds certain powers defined by law. But here steps 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. I93 
 
 in the unwritten constitution. That great traditional 
 authority decrees that, of the powers which the King 
 holds by law, some shall never be exercised at all, 
 while the others shall be exercised only by the advice 
 of a person called the Prime Minister, a member of one 
 or the other house of Parliament, tacitly approved by 
 the House of Commons. In short the kingly power 
 can be exercised only by the advice of the leader of 
 that party which has the majority in the House of 
 Commons. He keeps office as long as the House of 
 Commons approves of his policy ; if the House of Com- 
 mons ceases to approve of his policy, he finds it neces- 
 sary to resign. He may indeed, under some circum- 
 stances, dissolve Parliament; but if the new House of 
 Commons disapproves of his policy, then he must resign. 
 Now there never is any doubt in England who is Prime 
 Minister, any more than there is any doubt here who is 
 President. Mr. Gladstone is as certainly Prime Minister 
 of the United Kingdom as Mr. Arthur is President of 
 the United States. But while Mr. Arthur holds a posi- 
 tion which is carefully defined by the written constitu- 
 tion, Mr. Gladstone holds, as Prime Minister, a position 
 which the written law of England knows nothing about. 
 The law knows him as a British subject, as a member of 
 the House of Commons, as a member of the Queen's 
 Privy Council. All these things Sir Stafford Northcote 
 is equally. The law assumes that every act of the Queen 
 is done by the advice of some Privy Councillor, who 
 takes the responsibility of the act on himself But, as 
 far as the law knows, Sir Stafford Northcote is as likely 
 to be the adviser of any act of the Queen as Mr. Glad- 
 stone. But the law further knows Mr. Gladstone as one 
 
194 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 of certain Commissioners named by the Queen to dis- 
 charge the office of Lord High Treasurer, an office 
 which for a long time back has never been held by a 
 single person. In that commission his name stands first; 
 he is First Lord of the Treasury. And to the First 
 Lord of the Treasury — an officer inferior in rank to 
 many of his colleagues, who has no precedence beyond 
 that of any other privy councillor — that system of tacit 
 understandings which is all that we mean in England by 
 the word " constitution " entrusts the practical exercise 
 of most of those powers of the crown which the same 
 system allows to be exercised at all. But the law knows 
 nothing of him as Prime Minister ; it knows nothing of 
 his colleagues as a " Government " or a '" cabinet." The 
 whole thing is conventional. No man is appointed to 
 the office of Prime Minister, for no such office exists. 
 And, as he comes into power without any formal elec- 
 tion or nomination, so he can be deprived of power 
 without any formal deposition. Let the House of 
 Commons show that it no longer trusts him, and he 
 and his colleagues must resign. 
 
 Such is the working of an unwritten constitution, the 
 working of a set of rules which are perfectly well under- 
 stood, but which it would be impossible to set down in 
 the shape of a written law. The position of your President 
 under your written constitution differs greatly from that 
 either of the King or of the Prime Minister. It is plain 
 that the powers of the President are smaller than those 
 of the King, but that he can exercise such powers as he 
 has much more freely according to his own personal will. 
 He is not bound to follow the advice of a minister who 
 may not be of his own choosing, and whose advice may 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. I9S 
 
 be directly opposite to his personal wishes. On the other 
 hand he acts more directly than the Prime Minister, who 
 can do nothing except through the formal agency of the 
 King whom he advises. But the main difference lies in 
 this. Your President is chosen for a definite time : it is 
 hard to see how a magistrate acting under a written con- 
 stitution can be other than chosen or appointed for a 
 definite time. But from the appointment for a definite 
 time it follows that he cannot, under ordinary circum- 
 stances, be got rid of before the end of that time — that 
 he cannot, except by formal re-election, be continued 
 beyond the end of that time. Let the policy of a Presi- 
 dent be disapproved by both houses of Congress and 
 by the nation at large, still, unless some definite crime 
 can be legally proved against him, you cannot get rid 
 of him till the end of four years. Let the policy of a 
 President be approved by everybody, still you cannot 
 keep him in office beyond four years, except by a formal 
 re-election, except by making the chief of the state descend 
 to the position of a candidate. With us the House of 
 Commons can at any moment, by means which are 
 indirect but thoroughly effectual, get rid of a minister 
 whose policy it disapproves. And a minister whose 
 policy the House of Commons continues to approve 
 may be kept in office indefinitely, without any formal 
 act on the part of anybody. Here, to my mind, lies 
 the greatest point of difference between our unwritten 
 and your written constitution, between our kingly and 
 your republican constitution. And it is a point which, 
 if you ask my personal mind, is the one great advantage 
 of our system over yours. Our way, it seems to me, 
 is the more republican of the two ; we are less tied and 
 
196 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 bound to a single man. But the question comes, on the 
 other side, whether this great advantage is or is not out- 
 weighed by certain evils which are the natural outcome 
 of our system, but which can have no place in yours. 
 And, if I may speak from my very heart of hearts, I 
 / must say that yet another question lies behind : the 
 question whether a more excellent way than either is 
 not to be found in the position of the Executive in the 
 present federal constitution of the Everlasting League. 
 
 But mark that, if I speak of this or that, in the con- 
 stitution of England, of America, or of Switzerland, as 
 being better or worse than something in one of the other 
 two constitutions, I am speaking as one who has got into 
 the habit of studying a political constitution, as a kind 
 of work of art, very much as I study a building. And, 
 if I say that this or that church or castle or hall of 
 government is better than another in this or that point, 
 the last thing that I should wish would be that the one 
 which I think not so good should be rebuilt or altered 
 according to the pattern of that which I think better. 
 As with buildings, so with constitutions, I should lose 
 my subjects for study in both lines, if either all buildings 
 or all constitutions were to be reconstructed after one 
 model, even if that should be the most perfect of models. 
 But, far more than this, I believe that each country is 
 likely to do best by keeping to the institutions which 
 its own special history has given it. Let it reform 
 and develope within its own lines; do not let it go 
 and blindly copy what it finds elsewhere. We will, 
 if you please, keep our King and our Minister; you 
 shall keep your President; the Swiss shall keep their 
 Federal Council : that each exists in a particular coun- 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. I97 
 
 try, that each has come through the course of events 
 in that country, is the strongest argument in its favour 
 as an institution of that particular country; it is to 
 some extent an argument against transplanting it to 
 any other country. It is natural that England should 
 have kings, because it has had kings from the begin- 
 ning. It is natural that America should not have a 
 king, but that it should still have a personal chief, 
 because England had a king, while a king on this 
 side of the Ocean was neither desirable nor possible. 
 The change from king to president was, what I con- 
 ceive the founders of your constitution to have aimed 
 at, as much change as was needful, and not more than 
 was needful. It is equally natural that Switzerland 
 should have neither king nor president nor personal 
 chief in any shape. While Englishmen in Britain were 
 used to an immediate king dwelling among them, while 
 Englishmen in America were used to an immediate king 
 not dwelling among them, the men of the Cantons had not 
 for ages acknowledged any king at all, and had in earlier 
 times known no king but Caesar. Each country may be 
 fairly expected to prosper most under the system which 
 has come naturally to it ; none of the three need seek to 
 imitate the systems of the others ; each should strive to 
 work its own system in the best way in which it can be 
 worked. 
 
 And now it is time that I should come to an end. I 
 have as yet seen but • little of your vast country, but I 
 have seen enough to teach me its vastness. And it is 
 indeed a thrilling thought for a man of the elder England 
 to see what a home the newest home of his people is. 
 
ipS THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 
 
 The heart swells, the pride of kinship rises, as ■ he sees 
 that it is his own folk which has done more than any 
 other folk to replenish the earth and to subdue it. He 
 is no Englishman at heart, he has no true feeling of the 
 abiding tie of kindred, who deems that the glory and 
 greatness of the child is other than part of the glory 
 and greatness of the parent. Let him rise above purely 
 local and political distinctions to the thought of the 
 greater whole of which my native land and yours alike 
 form parts, and he will even be able to track out the 
 scenes of the war which parted them with his feelings 
 enlisted on the side of those who were geographically 
 the furthest away from himself. I have gone Up your 
 Bunker Hill; I cannot honestly say that the spot kindled 
 in me quite the enthusiasm which I had felt on the 
 heights of Lewes and of Evesham — they are parts of 
 my own story, and I am a geographical Britisher, after 
 all — but certainly such enthusiasm as I did feel was 
 on the side of those who threw up the redoubt, not 
 on the side of those who attacked it. I can see one 
 thing only which, if I had been present at your late 
 gathering at York Town, would have gone at all to 
 mar my thorough sympathy with the victorious side. I 
 have so much of the John Bull in me that I could have 
 wished that the French had been somewhere else. I 
 could have wished that two armies of Englishmen could 
 have fought out their quarrel without foreign help, 
 as armies of Englishmen had done in so many earlier 
 fields of civil war. And yet, after we had turned 
 Hessian mercenaries loose upon you, we could hardly 
 complain if you welcomed the alliance of France or of 
 any other power. Anyhow, you won your independence, 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 99 
 
 and we rejoice at it. Another English nation came 
 into being. 
 
 But perhaps some one may arise, even at this stage of 
 our argument, to prove that you are not an English nation. 
 Some one may stand up to argue that, however close the 
 tie may have been ages back, it has been relaxed, per- 
 haps it has been severed, since the American States have 
 stood open to receive citizens from every quarter of the 
 world. We may remember, by the way, that England 
 has done so just as freely, though naturally the flow of 
 strangers into the elder land has not been so fast as the 
 flow of strangers into the new. Perhaps some may even 
 urge this last fact as a proof that we have separated more 
 than ever. I deny the inference. I wish to tread as 
 lightly as possible on any matters which may stir up 
 political questions ; but some of the facts out of which 
 political questions have grown or seem likely to grow 
 are scientific facts which we must look in the face. You 
 receive all strangers, but do you assimilate all strangers 
 with equal ease? Do you not, as a matter of fact, 
 find that some settlers can, with very little trouble, be 
 changed into good Englishmen, good Americans, or 
 whatever we choose to call them, while with others the 
 work is, whether impossible or not, at any rate a great 
 deal harder? I assume that you are ready to welcome 
 any of our Teutonic kinsfolk, High-Dutch, Low-Dutch, 
 or Scandinavian. Truly they are not strangers at all ; 
 they are members of the house who stayed behind, who 
 have made the two voyages in one in a later age, instead 
 of making the first in a very early age. Surely, when 
 they have rubbed off" their little local angles, they can 
 
200 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES, 
 
 sit down at the common hearth and feel themselves quite 
 at home. I do think that you find a settler from Utrecht, 
 we will say, from Hamburg, from Christiania, something 
 different from a settler from Pekin. I tremble as I speak 
 of Aryan settlers who are not of the Teutonic race ; I 
 have heard of other lecturers in this city who have 
 suffered some persecution for not speaking with due 
 respect of some who come under that head. I will 
 therefore avoid dangerous ground. I will say only that, 
 while all Teutons are very near to us, no European Aryan 
 is very far from us ; there is enough of kindred, enough 
 of likeness, left among all whose forefathers took part 
 in the great migration to make assimilation among them 
 easy, natural, and wholesome. No doubt it takes place 
 faster with our nearer kinsfolk, but surely it takes place 
 sooner or later with all who are kinsfolk at all. Surely 
 I am right in saying that with all Dutchmen — the wider 
 meaning of that good old word is still not forgotten 
 in some of your States — assimilation is easy ; that with 
 other Western Aryans it is at least possible ; with others 
 beyond that pale I will not say what it is, for it might be 
 dangerous; I will leave you to draw the distinction 
 instead of me. And what form does assimilation take 
 where assimilation is possible ? Surely the settlers are 
 assimilated and absorbed into the pre-existing body; 
 they learn your tongue, they are admitted into your 
 national being ; you do not learn their tongue or pass 
 into their national being. The infusion may be greater 
 in degree, but it is really only of the same kind, as the 
 infusion which the elder England has during the last 
 three hundred years received from other European lands. 
 We have welcomed Flemings, Huguenots, Palatines, in 
 
THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 20I 
 
 no small measure, to say nothing of stray settlers from 
 every European land. We do not look on our Bou- 
 veries, Bentincks, and Romillies as other than English- 
 men, any more than we should deny the name to a 
 Percy or a Mowbray, if a real Percy or a real Mow- 
 bray were to be found. Some may think that your 
 grants of citizenship are a trifle too lavish ; I will not 
 argue that point ; I will rather say how strong must the 
 English heart be in you when you can grant your citi- 
 zenship so lavishly and yet still abide an English nation. 
 For an English nation you are ; I must part from you in 
 once more reminding you that all that belongs to the 
 older and lesser England in Britain belongs no less to 
 the younger and greater England in the New World. 
 Coming before you, I hailed you as English brethren ; 
 parting from you, I part as from English brethren, 
 sharers in the common history of the English folk. 
 That history, from Arminius to Gladstone and Garfield, 
 is a long one ; it is a stirring one. It has its dark sides 
 and its gloomy periods, but, as a whole, it is one of 
 which neither branch of the common stock needs to be 
 ashamed. And assuredly, of that long and stirring his- 
 tory, not the least memorable, not the least worthy, part 
 has been wrought on the western side of Ocean. 
 
THE PRACTICAL BEARINGS 
 
 GENERAL EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
THE PRACTICAL BEARINGS 
 
 OF 
 
 GENERAL EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 (Causes antr t!)eir 3BfUtts. 
 
 I WAS many years ago talking to a friend who has 
 since risen to a very eminent position in one part of the 
 world on some point or other of the early history of 
 Greece. He put all such inquiries aside with the remark 
 that no practical teaching could be gained from times and 
 places where the art of printing was unknown. I was 
 more lately talking to another friend who has long ago 
 risen to an eminent position in another part of the world 
 on the comparative merits of three forms of execu- 
 tive government, all of them in being in the modern 
 world. Those were the constitutional monarchy of 
 England, the presidential system of the United States, 
 and the federal council of the Swiss Confederation. 
 I ventured to hint that, in the balance of merits and 
 defects, the Swiss system had some advantages over the 
 other two, and that it was at least worthy to be com- 
 pared with them on equal terms. My friend, a man of 
 great practical experience, was quite ready to weigh all 
 
 U 205 
 
2o6 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 that could be said for and against both the English and 
 the American system. Those were the systems of great 
 nations, each of which might perhaps learn something 
 from the other. But to any discussion of the Swiss 
 system he could not listen at all. That was the system 
 of a small nation, from which no practical lesson could 
 be learned. It could not be worth while to discuss the 
 institutions of so small a country as Switzerland. On 
 these terms I did not think it worth while to go on with 
 the argument any longer. 
 
 The former of these stories I believe I have both told 
 and discussed in print. The latter, in its exact shape, I 
 have certainly not discussed in print. But I have dis- 
 cussed at some length the advantages and disadvantages 
 of the three forms of executive of which I was just now 
 speaking, and the objection to any consideration of Swiss 
 matters on the ground that Switzerland is a small coun- 
 try is one which I did not hear for the first time in the 
 conversation of which I have just spoken. I think you 
 will be not be surprised to hear that I look upon both- 
 objections as shallow. But it is well that you should 
 know at the beginning that I am at least fully aware that 
 there are such objections. It may be well to warn gain- 
 sayers at the outset that the doctrines that things are 
 not worth attending to, either because they are small 
 or because they are old, are doctrines which, with me 
 at least, have quite lost the charm of novelty. I have 
 heard them both very often, and I remain unconvinced 
 by either. It may be that this only proves my own 
 obstinacy. It may prove that I am unpractical, senti- 
 mental, pedantic. I am quite used to be called all 
 three on my own side of the Ocean. I may perhaps 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 20/ 
 
 cherish a hope that I shall not be called by those names 
 on this side of the Ocean. But if, by bad luck, I am, 
 I am daring enough to think that I can live through it 
 on one side as well as on the other. For I have long 
 ago been thoroughly convinced, convinced, I almost 
 fear, beyond the reach of argument the other way, that 
 the qualities which are commonly meant by the names 
 unpractical, sentimental, and pedantic, are exactly the 
 qualities which are needed for the sound and thor- 
 ough understanding of any practical matter, be its date 
 past or present, be its scale great or small. For, in the 
 course of a good deal of observation, I have learned to 
 make two remarks : First, things have in the long run 
 a way of turning out much more nearly as the unprac- 
 tical and sentimental men expected them to turn out 
 than as they were expected to turn out by the men 
 who boast themselves to be specially practical. Secondly, 
 I have noticed that arguments from past experience are 
 received in very different ways, according as they fall in 
 with or do not fall in with the notions of the person to 
 whom they are addressed. The most logical argument 
 from the experience of the past, the argument that like 
 causes will probably lead to like effects, is thrust aside 
 as " antiquarian rubbish " if it happens to tell against 
 the ideas of the man M'ho hears it. But the same man 
 will accept with delight some merely sportive illustra- 
 tion, some mere incidental likeness of place or circum- 
 stance, perhaps the mere play or jingle of words and 
 names, if only it happens to have the merit of telling 
 in favour of his own ideas. 
 
 Now the position for which I have always striven is 
 this, that history is past politics, that politics are present 
 
2o8 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 history. The true subject of history, of any history 
 that deserves the name, is man in his political capacity, 
 man as the member of an organized society, governed 
 according to law. History, in any other aspect, hardly 
 rises above antiquarianism, though I am far from hold- 
 ing that even simple antiquarianism, even the merest 
 scraping together of local and genealogical detail, is 
 necessarily antiquarian rubbish. I know not why the 
 pursuits of the antiquary should be called rubbish, any 
 more than the pursuits of the seeker after knowledge of 
 any other kind. Still, the pursuits of the antiquary, the 
 man of local and special detail, the man of buildings or 
 coins or weapons or manuscripts, are not in themselves 
 history, though they are constantly found to be most 
 valuable helps to history. The collections of the anti- 
 quary are not history ; but they are materials for history, 
 materials of which the historian makes grateful use, and 
 without which he would often be sore put to in doing 
 his own work. The simple antiquary is not a histo- 
 rian, but it is always a gain when the historian is an an- 
 tiquary. If he is himself master of any or all branches 
 of antiquarian research, he does his strictly historical 
 work all the better. For by such knowledge he better 
 understands for himself, and he can therefore better set 
 forth to others, what manner of men they were who 
 lived and moved and had their being in the time and 
 place which he takes for the subject of his history. It 
 is not too much to say that no kind of knowledge, of 
 whatever kind, will be useless to the historian. There 
 is none, however seemingly distant from his subject, 
 which may not Stand him in good stead at some pinch, 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 209 
 
 sooner or later. But his immediate subject, that to 
 which all other things are secondary, is man as the 
 member of a political community. Rightly to under- 
 stand man in that character, he must study him in all 
 the forms, in all the developements, that political society 
 has taken. Effects have to be traced up to their causes, 
 causes have to be traced up to their effects ; and we can- 
 not go through either of those needful processes if we 
 confine our studies either to the political societies of 
 our own day or to political societies on a great physical 
 scale. The object of history is to watch the Workings 
 of one side, and that the highest side, of human nature 
 in all its shapes ; and we do not see human nature in all 
 its shapes, unless we follow it into all times and all cir- 
 cumstances under which we have any means of studying 
 it. We do not rightly understand the present, unless we 
 trace the present back to its causes in the past. We do 
 not rightly understand the great political society unless 
 we compare it with smaller political societies, unless 
 we mark the points in which they agree and the points 
 in which they differ, the points in which unlikeness is 
 caused by difference in physical and other circumstances, 
 the points in which likeness is caused by the common 
 human nature working in both. In truth, a very large 
 part of the historian's business is the tracing out and 
 testing of likenesses and unlikenesses. He has no 
 work more constantly on his hand than, on the one 
 hand, to acknowledge likenesses and unlikenesses which 
 are at once real and obvious, and to deal as may be 
 needful with likenesses and unlikenesses which are 
 sometimes real but not obvious, sometimes obvious 
 but not real. It is no small part of the historian's 
 
210 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 business to point out real likeness amidst seeming 
 diversity and real diversity amidst seeming likeness. 
 
 When a historical parallel or a historical contrast — 
 and a contrast is in truth one form of parallel — is sug- 
 gested, whether as a mere illustration or as a practical 
 argument from experience, the first business is to find 
 out whether the suggested likeness or unlikeness is real 
 or only seeming. We may always assume that like causes 
 will produce like effects ; but, when we come to apply 
 this rule to any particular case, we must take care to be 
 sure that the causes are like. It may be that the likeness 
 is real and essential ; it may be that it is merely inci- 
 dental and on the surface. We must find out which it 
 is before we begin to draw any inferences from it And 
 again, we must remember what kind of likeness it is 
 that we must expect between one set of historical causes 
 and effects and another. In one sense it is perfectly true 
 that history is always repeating itself; in another sense 
 it would equally true to say that history never repeats 
 itself at all. No historical position can be exactly the 
 same as any earlier historical position, if only for the 
 reason that the earlier position has gone before it. The 
 exact reproduction of any earlier event, any earlier cha- 
 racter, any earlier political situation, is, strictly speaking, 
 impossible. A conscious imitation differs from the origi- 
 nal in the very important respect that one is an original 
 and the other an imitation. And, even where the repro- 
 duction is unconscious, where the likeness is simply the 
 result of the working of like causes, still the two results 
 can never be exactly the same, if only because the 
 earlier result itself takes its place among the causes of 
 the later result. Differences of this kind must always 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 211 
 
 be borne iii mind, and they are quite enough to hinder 
 any two historical events from being exact doubles of one 
 another. Further points of unlikeness there will always 
 be, caused by differences of time and place, by differences 
 in the national character of particular nations and in the 
 personal character of particular men ; but this one cause 
 of difference is inherent : one event is the earlier and-the 
 other is the later. But this is not difference enough to 
 hinder real, essential, practical, likeness. Between parent 
 and child, between master and scholar, there is the very 
 important difference that one is the parent or the mas- 
 ter, the other the child or the scholar ; but this does 
 not hinder real likeness between parent and child, as dis- 
 tinguished from members of other families ; it does not 
 hinder real likeness between master and scholar, as dis- 
 tinguished from members of other schools of teaching. 
 So again, while we hold that like causes will produce 
 like effects, we mean that like causes will always produce 
 like effects, if the causes are left to their natural work- 
 ing; we must remember that one set of causes is often 
 counterworked by another set, in which case the results 
 will be different, because in truth the causes have ceased 
 to be the same. In this way, even when a present set 
 of causes seems to be, as nearly as the nature of things 
 will allow, the same as a past set of causes, it would still 
 be very rash positively to predict that the same results 
 will follow. For the causes which we know of may be 
 counterworked by other causes which we do not know 
 of, and may thereby in truth cease to be the same causes. 
 But we are perfectly safe in such a case, if we say that 
 the same results which happened before are likely to 
 happen again ; that is, that they will happen, if no coun- 
 
212 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 terworking causes come into play. And we are there- 
 fore perfectly safe in saying that it is the duty of practical 
 good sense to bear in mind that a certain result, though 
 not certain to happen, is likely to happen, and that no 
 wise man will put that likelihood out of sight. Exact 
 likeness between present and past, complete certainty as 
 to the future, are things which never can be in an imper- 
 fect world inhabited by imperfect beings. But such a 
 degree of likeness between past and present as may give 
 us practical lessons for the present, such a likeness as 
 may create a degree of likelihood as to the future, I hold 
 to be a thing which is very often to be found. And I 
 hold further that it is the practical business of historical 
 science, of the philosophy which teaches by example, to 
 distinguish the cases in which such likeness does exist 
 from the cases in which it does not. 
 
 Again, we must carefully distinguish between causes 
 and occasions. It is one of the oldest and one of the 
 wisest remarks of political philosophy that great events 
 commonly arise from great causes, but from small occa- 
 sions. A certain turn of mind, one which is more con- 
 cerned with gossip, old or new, than with real history, 
 delights in telling us how the greatest events spring from 
 the smallest causes, how the fates of nations and empires 
 are determined by some sheer accident, or by the per- 
 sonal caprice or personal quarrel of some perhaps very 
 insignificant person. A good deal of court-gossip, a 
 good deal of political gossip, passes both in past and 
 present times for real history. Now a great deal of this 
 gossip is sheer gossip, and may be cast aside without 
 notice ; but a good deal of it often does contain truth of 
 a certain kind. Only bear in mind the difference between 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 21 3 
 
 causes and occasions, and we may accept a good many 
 of the stories which tell us how very trifling incidents 
 led to very great events. That is, we may admit that the 
 trifling incidents led to the great events in the character 
 of occasions ; we deny that they led to them in the cha- 
 racter of causes. That is, we may admit that the trifling 
 incident may have determined the exact time, the exact 
 place, the exact form, of the great event; we deny 
 that it was, in any true sense, the cause of the great 
 event. It is only in a state of things where predisposing 
 causes are already tending toward the great event that 
 trifling accidents can at all effect the course of events. 
 In such a state of things they may very well slightly 
 delay or slightly hasten the course of events ; they may 
 cause one spot to be the scene instead of another, they 
 may, for a while at least, bring one man to the front 
 rather than another. Where there are no predisposing 
 causes, the trifling incident will not lead to the great 
 event; and where there are predisposing causes, if 
 one occasion does not present itself to lead to the great 
 event, some other occasion will be found to lead to it at 
 no great distance of time and place. As an instance of 
 what I mean, I will not take any gossiping story of the 
 caprices or quarrels of princes, courtiers, or mistresses. 
 I will take a case where the immediate occasion more 
 nearly befits the greatness of the interests at stake. I 
 will take the case of the deliverance of Sicily from the 
 Angevin yoke through the famous Sicilian Vespers. A 
 single outrage done by a single Frenchman led to a 
 general slaughter of Frenchmen, first in Palermo, and 
 then in the rest of the island. But we may be sure 
 of two things : First, A single outrage done by a single 
 
214 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 Frenchman would not have led to a general slaughter of 
 Frenchmen, if there had not already been good grounds 
 for a bitter hatred of Frenchmen in general. Secondly, 
 If that particular outrage had not happened to give the 
 immediate occasion for revolt, some other occasion would 
 presently have been found. What the actual outrage, 
 in its character of immediate occasion, really determined, 
 was that the revolt should begin on that particular day 
 at that particular place, and not on some other day at 
 some other place. So it is with crowds of other cases. 
 It is perfectly right to mark the immediate occasion, and 
 to give it its proper place in the story. But we must 
 never allow ourselves to be misled into mistaking the 
 immediate occasion for the true determining cause. 
 
 Now when I speak of causes and occasions, when I 
 speak of small personal caprices and quarrels, as being 
 not the causes of great events, but merely the occasions, 
 I wish it to be fully understood that I do not at all place 
 the agency of really great men among mere occasions : 
 I fully give it its place among determining causes. In 
 any large view of history, we must always be on our 
 guard against either underrating or overrating the actions 
 of individual men. History is something more than 
 biography; but biography is an essential and a most 
 important part of history. We must not think, on the 
 one hand, that great men, heroes, or whatever we please 
 to call them, can direct the course of histoiy according 
 to their own will and pleasure, perhaps according to 
 their mere caprice, with no danger of their will being 
 thwarted, unless it should run counter to the will of 
 some other great man or hero of equal or greater power. 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 21 5 
 
 The greatest man after all is but a man ; as a man, he is 
 liable to weakness, liable to failure, whether the failure 
 be due to his own fault or to circumstances over which 
 he had no control. And, if we admit that there may be 
 circumstances which even the greatest men cannot 
 control, we admit that the greatest man is after all no 
 angelic or Titanic being, but one of ourselves, more 
 highly gifted doubtless than other men, but still a being 
 of the same nature and the same passions as other men. 
 But, on the other hand, we must not deem that the 
 course of history is so governed by general laws, that 
 it is so completely in bondage to almost mechanical 
 powers, that there is no room for the free agency of 
 great men and of small men too. For it is of no little 
 importance that, while we talk of the influence of great 
 men on the history of the world, we should not forget 
 the influence of the small men. Every man has some 
 influence on the course of history. It may be merely 
 the influence of one unit in the mass, the kind of influ- 
 ence which one vote in a vast constituency has in deter- 
 mining an election. Neither A nor B nor C can say 
 that it was his vote, as distinguished from the vote of 
 any other man, which carried the election of the candi- 
 date whom he supported. But it was only by A, B, and 
 C and all the letters of the alphabet, acting each man 
 exactly as if the election had depended on his vote only, 
 that the election was carried as they all wished. So, not 
 only in elections — which are often no unimportant part 
 of history — but in all other matters, we are all of us 
 constantly influencing history. For history is the record 
 of the condition and doings of mankind, and each one 
 of us, as a part or unit in the general mass of mankind, 
 
2l6 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 helps to determine what the condition and doings of 
 mankind shall be. We must take care not to be led to 
 attach a n^eaning beyond the truth to phrases like laws 
 of history, spirit of the age, national character. They 
 all denote undoubted facts ; but thgy must not be mis- 
 taken for unchanging physical forces, over which per- 
 sonal human agency has no control. We are all of us 
 influenced by the spirit of the age ; but then we all, each 
 in his measure, help to determine, even if quite unknow- 
 ingly, what the spirit of the age shall be. We are apt 
 to forget that all changes, all fashions, be they changes 
 in language, in dress, in politics, are really acts, though 
 very often unconscious acts, of the human will. When- 
 ever there is any change in usage, somebody must have 
 done the act which set the fashion, even though he may 
 have had no kind of notion that he was setting the 
 fashion. The individual acts on the mass, and the mass 
 acts on the individual; but they both act, not by 
 mechanical forces, as the language which we use might 
 sometimes almost make us think, but as moral and intel- 
 lectual agents, by a real, though often unconscious, exer- 
 cise of the human will. So it is with that collection of 
 human beings which we call a state or a nation. Each 
 of its members is influenced by the spirit of the nation, 
 its national character, its circumstances, its traditions, a 
 thousand things which all the members of the nation 
 have in common. But then each man in the nation 
 helps, in his measure, to determine what shall be the 
 character of all these national possessions. He cannot 
 indeed determine what traditions shall be handed down 
 to himself; but he does help to determine what traditions 
 shall be handed on to those who come after him. Not 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 21/ 
 
 only has every man the power to affect, if he chooses, 
 the character of the community in which lives, and 
 thereby of the age in which he lives; as a- matter of 
 fact, he always is affecting it, whether he thinks about 
 what he is doing or^iiot. Every man who steadily obeys 
 the law makes the community in which he lives more 
 peaceful and law-abiding. He does in his measure the 
 good work which our ancient Chroniclers attribute to 
 righteous rulers ; he does justice and makes peace. 
 And every man who disobeys the law makes the com- 
 munity in which he lives less peaceful and law-abiding. 
 It is not merely that his example may lead others 
 astray : his acts themselves of themselves help to 
 change the character of the community for the worse. 
 Natural philosophers tell us that every act done, every 
 motion of the body, every sound uttered, by every man 
 since man came into being has some lasting physical 
 effect on the condition of the physical world. And 
 I am quite sure that this is equally true in the moral 
 world of history. All our actions, all our words, even if 
 they seem to affect ourselves only, do, by affecting our- 
 selves, affect the community of which we are members, 
 and, by affecting that particular community, they affect 
 that greater whole of which that community is a member. 
 If then we are all of us in some sort making history 
 all our lives, where, it may be asked, is the place for 
 those specially great men whom we are used to look 
 on as specially making history ? I answer that the great 
 man is a being of the same nature as the small man, and 
 that his influence is of the same nature as the influence 
 of the small man. It is . greater in degree, but it is 
 essentially the same in kind. We all of us influence 
 
2l8 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 history in some measure, but the influence of most of 
 us remains invisible. Some of us influence it in a 
 greater measure than others, so much so that their influ- 
 ence becomes visible in some particular place or among 
 some particular class of men. So/ne few of us influ- 
 ence it in so great a measure that their influence 
 becomes visible to all men, and their' names and acts 
 are recorded in the general annals of mankind. But 
 the difference between their influence and the influence 
 of smaller men is only a difference of degree. If the 
 great man influences his age, it is because he is himself 
 influenced by his age. That is, if he influences smaller 
 men, it is because he is brought under the same influ- 
 ence as smaller men, or indeed because he is influenced 
 by the smaller men themselves. For a man who stands 
 altogether apart from his age, that is, a man who is not 
 influenced by the other men who help to determine the 
 character of the age, may be a great man in the sense 
 of possessing great natural gifts ; he can hardly be a 
 great man in the sense of having a great effect on his 
 own time, and thereby on later times. He may stand 
 apart from his age in the sense of being far in advance 
 of it; but, if he is very far in advance of his age, he 
 cannot become a leader of his age. Men are led by 
 those who are in advance of themselves, but still only 
 so far in advance that those who follow can at least see 
 the leader, even if they do not know exactly whither he 
 is leading. If the leader is so far in advance that he is 
 himself out of sight, he ceases to be a leader. In this 
 way men who have possessed the highest natural gifts 
 have done but little, they have had but little effect on 
 the world's history, simply because they were too far in 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 219 
 
 advance of their own age to be its leaders. Lesser men 
 who have more in common with those around them, men 
 who are in advance of those around them, but only so far 
 in advance that other men can see and follow them, may 
 really do a greater work, and in that sense may be 
 greater men, than men who by nature are more highly 
 gifted. The opportunity needs the man, and the man 
 needs the opportunity. Sometimes nations have only 
 needed a worthy leader, and have not found one. Some- 
 times men worthy to lead have been useless in their 
 generation because they have found no fitting follow- 
 ing. It has become almost proverbial that no one is so 
 foolish as he who is wise before the time. The first 
 discoverer seldom reaps the fame or the profit of his 
 discovery. Those around him do not understand him, 
 and, because others do not understand him, he hardly 
 understands himself He may scatter his seed ; but it 
 takes no root, because the ground is not yet ripe for it. 
 When the ground has become riper, the seed is again 
 sown ; it takes root and bears fruit. Some one else, 
 when the age is ready for him, brings forward the old 
 discovery again. Perhaps he lights by chance on some 
 record of the forgotten discovery, and makes it his own ; 
 perhaps he strictly makes the same discovery afresh, in 
 utter ignorance that it has ever been made before. For 
 it is an undoubted truth, though some minds find it hard 
 to take it in, that the same discovery may be, and often 
 has been, made independently over and over again, some- 
 times in distant times, sometimes in distant places at the 
 same time. In my own branches of study, I often light 
 on things which I believe to be new, which at any rate 
 are new to me, and about which I may fairly call myself 
 
220 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 an independent discoverer. But I find that it is always 
 wise for any of us, in announcing our discoveries, to be 
 prepared for the chance that some German scholar may 
 have discovered them before us. In such cases I only 
 ask the German scholar to be merciful. I ask him, on 
 the one hand, not to think that I have knowingly stolen 
 his discovery. I ask him, on the other hand, not to 
 despise me for not knowing about his discovery, if, as is 
 most likely the case, he has stowed it away out of reach 
 in some periodical or some local transactions, where I 
 have not the faintest chance of hearing of it. 
 
 But we must go back to the graver subject with which 
 we were dealing, to that influence of great men on 
 their fellows which I hold to differ only in degree and 
 not in kind from the equally real influence of small men. 
 If the great man is to do a great work, he must be a 
 man of his own age, of his own nation ; he must be in 
 the forefront of his age and his nation ; but he must be 
 of them ; if he is so far in advance of them as to be out 
 of sympathy with them, if he cannot understand them 
 nor they him, he cannot be their leader. This may be a 
 rather prosaic way of looking at heroes ; but I am sure 
 that it is a practical way. It is not always the most 
 brilliant characters in history that leave the greatest 
 impress on history. Some of the greatest men, as far 
 as their natural gifts went, some of the noblest men, 
 have had little effect on the history of mankind, because 
 they devoted themselves to impossible causes, because 
 their ideas were too old or too new, or in some other 
 way out of gear with the time and place in which they 
 lived. The man who strives to call back a past state 
 of things, the man who strives to bring in a future 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 221 
 
 State of things which is still so distant that none but 
 himself sees it to be future, will certainly not compass 
 his object ; he may affect the history of mankind inci- 
 dentally ; he will not affect it by doing the particular 
 work which he seeks to do. I was reading a British 
 periodical the other day, in which some shallow man 
 tried to depreciate the personal greatness of Hannibal. 
 Now surely, as far as natural gifts can go, as far as steady 
 application of powers to a certain end can go, there 
 never was a greater man than Hannibal. But he strove 
 for an object which could not be gained ; he was a man 
 striving against a nation, and the nation naturally pre- 
 vailed. The lasting effect of his career was the exact 
 opposite to that which, he sought ; instead of overthrow- 
 ing Rome and exalting Carthage, he schooled the armies 
 and people of Rome till they became the conquerors of 
 Carthage. In the whole Imperial series the most bril- 
 liant name after the first Caesar is the second Frederick. 
 But what work did Frederick do ? Some of his ideas 
 were behind his age, some were before it, some were out 
 of the possible march of things for any age. He lacked 
 too the moral greatness without which mere natural 
 gifts lose half their power ; therefore the most brilliant 
 of the Emperors was, for all practical ends, the last of 
 the Emperors. Again, some great men seem to have 
 done less than they really did, because while part of 
 their work lived after them, part did not. I have known 
 shallow people fancy that Alexander and Charles really 
 did but little, because the vast dominion which they 
 brought together broke in pieces when they themselves 
 were gone. Now if they expected that their dominions 
 would keep together, they erred with the common error 
 
 15 
 
222 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 of great men, who seem often to think that what they 
 themselves can do others will be able to do after them. 
 I suspect that Charles at least did not deceive himself 
 in this way; the division of his dominions which he 
 planned seems to show this. But be this as it may, the 
 career of Charles the Great has influenced the history 
 of the world ever since. As I once put it epigram- 
 matically, he founded the German kingdom, and won 
 the Roman diadem for its kings. All that has come 
 of the great central fact of mediaeval history, the fact 
 that, in men's thoughts and feelings at least, the Roman 
 Empire lived on and had the German king to its Empe- 
 ror, all this, for good and for evil, came of the personal 
 agency of the first Teutonic Caesar, But the personal 
 agency even of the great Charles would have been of 
 -none avail, if he had not come at the right time, and if 
 men's minds had not been ready to receive him. As a 
 long series of effects came of his career, so a long series 
 of causes had made the world ready for it. So with 
 Alexander. His career certainly came to nothing, if he 
 looked forward to leave a dynasty of Macedonian kings 
 reigning from the Hadriatic to the Hyphasis. If this 
 is the way in which we are to look at him, we must 
 certainly say that, in much that he strove to do, he 
 utterly failed. And, if we look at what he undoubtedly 
 did only from the point of view of an Athenian patriot 
 of his own day, we shall not speak of his deeds with 
 much satisfaction. But in the cecuraenical view of his- 
 tory, the man who spread Greek culture over the East, 
 the man who himself founded Alexandria, who made it 
 possible for others to found Antioch and Seleukeia, the 
 man who opened the path for the whole later being of 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 223 
 
 the Greek nation and the Greek mind, the man who in 
 effect founded the Byzantine Empire and the Orthodox 
 Church, is none the less memorable because his abiding 
 work stopped at the Tigris, because it was only for a 
 moment that his power showed itself on the Indus. 
 What seems to be failure is often not really such. It 
 is sometimes real wisdom to take aim a little further 
 than the point which we really wish to hit. If it some- 
 times happens that by striving after too much, we lose 
 what we otherwise might secure, it also sometimes hap- 
 pens that to attempt something more than we really 
 wish to secure, is the best way of securing what we 
 really aim at. In any case, Hannibal, Alexander, and 
 Charles stand forth among the world's greatest men, 
 none the less so because the career of Hannibal was 
 wholly failure, because the career of Alexander and of 
 Charles seems at "first sight to be partly failure. But we 
 have brought in both of them and great men in gen- 
 eral as a kind of episode. I was talking, in a somewhat 
 dry, general, way, about causes and effects, about causes 
 and occasions. I merely said in a kind of parenthesis 
 that the agency of great men might fairly be reckoned 
 among causes. But it may not be amiss, thus early in 
 our discourses, to strive to strike some kind of mean 
 between overdone hero-worship on the one hand, and the 
 tendency on the other hand which seems almost to look 
 on history as a mere succession of mechanical results of 
 mechanical causes. As I am old-fashioned enough to 
 believe in the over-ruling power of the Creator of the 
 world, so I am old-fashioned enough to believe that, in 
 the world which He has created, each man has his place, 
 each man has his influence. While neither a single man 
 
224 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 nor a community of men can choose the circumstances 
 in which they find themselves, yet both a single man and 
 a community of men has free choice of action in those 
 circumstances. As the exercise of each man's will helps 
 to determine the direction of the common will, so every 
 man, however obscure he may deem himself, has laid upon 
 him what I may call a historical responsibility, a share in 
 guiding the course of the world for good or for evil, which 
 he will never find any way to shake off his shoulders. 
 
 Let us then go back to the point from which we 
 turned aside, to our examination of the true bearing 
 of historical parallels, to the practical teaching of real 
 parallels, to the necessity of proving each seeming 
 parallel, to judge whether it be a real parallel or no. 
 I said that the tendency of the human mind is to be 
 pleased with a parallel, however false. If it tells on one's 
 own side, to sneer at a parallel, however true, which tells 
 against one's own side. Now there are some parallels 
 which prove nothing, but which yet are harmless, be- 
 cause no rational person can think that they prove any- 
 thing. A telling quotation, when the whole point lies 
 perhaps in some accidental likeness of words and names, 
 is perfectly fair as a rhetorical point, as long as as it does 
 not pretend to be an argument. But then no one who 
 is worth arguing with can mistake the mere likeness of 
 sounds for an argument. A likeness which is in a cer- 
 tain external sense real, but where the likeness is wholly 
 incidental, where it does not arise from like causes pro- 
 ducing like effects, is in itself equally fair as a rhetorical 
 point ; but here rhetoric begins to be dangerous : some 
 careless person may mistake the illustration for an argu- 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 22$ 
 
 ment. Or he may at least fancy that he who uses the 
 illustration means it for an argument, and may gravely 
 go about to prove its fallacy. In late disputes in my 
 own country I was one of those who did not look on the 
 English occupation of Cyprus as a wise measure. In 
 speaking of its unwisdom, perhaps less calmly than I 
 am doing now, I referred to an earlier English occupa- 
 tion of the same island. It did strike me as a singular 
 coincidence, and one out of which a disputant might 
 fairly make a rhetorical point, that Cyprus has been 
 twice occupied by rulers of England, and that in 
 each case the ruler of England who occupied Cyprus, 
 though in both cases a native of England, was not in 
 the fullest sense an Englishman. I do not mean to 
 carry out the parallel between King Richard the First 
 and the late Earl of Beaconsfield into any minute de- 
 tail ; I fear that I should break down if I tried to do so in 
 the minuter details even of their several occupations of 
 Cyprus. But I thought that the parallel fairly told as a 
 piece of rhetorical banter, which did not pretend to be 
 an argument. For truly if there had been no stronger 
 argument against the occupation of Cyprus, the wisdom 
 of that measure might have remained unchallenged. 
 Between King Richard's occupation of Cyprus and 
 Lord Beaconsfield's occupation of Cyprus there is no 
 real likeness of cause and effect which makes either 
 throw any illustrative light upon the other. It is possi- 
 ble, though not very likely, that one may have suggested 
 the other. If so, the suggestion was purely artificial and 
 arbitrary. There is no real likeness between the two 
 things ; the only practical lesson which the earlier 
 event could supply to bear upon the later would be the 
 
226 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 fact that King Richard, when he had occupied Cyprus, 
 got rid of it again as soon as he could. 
 
 But let us turn from this superficial likeness, fair, I hold, 
 as a rhetorical illustration, fallacious, if arty one were fool- 
 ish enough to take it as a serious argument, to what I 
 believe to be a very real and practical lesson which the 
 past history of the same part of the world may supply 
 for the instruction of those who may have to decide its 
 future history. I presume that nobody, except perhaps a 
 professional diplomatist here and there, sees an eternal set- 
 tlement, a line that will last for ever, in the frontier which 
 is at this moment drawing between free and enslaved 
 Greece. It may be convenient for the moment, and that 
 is all. Some day the wisdom of Europe, instead of hav- 
 ing to decide what parts of Greece shall be allowed to 
 enjoy the benefits of law and freedom, and what parts 
 shall be left in Turkish bondage, will have to grapple 
 with the far harder question. Where shall the line be 
 drawn between free Greece and free Bulgaria ? It must 
 surely be the frightful difficulty of this question, a ques- 
 tion which will never be solved so as to please both sides, 
 which makes diplomatists so anxious to evade it by 
 leaving an enslaved land between the two. But where 
 two regenerate and advancing nations are concerned, 
 such a put-off as this must be felt by every one to be 
 a mere momentary put-off. Some day enslaved Greece 
 must be united to free Greece, enslaved Bulgaria must 
 be united to free Bulgaria. But where shall the line be 
 drawn between the two free states ? Certainly not where 
 Greek enthusiasts would draw it ; certainly not where 
 Bulgarian enthusiasts would draw it. A glance at the 
 map at three or four different periods of the world's 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 22/ 
 
 history will give some practical help towards answering 
 the question. Look at the extent of Greek settlement 
 in those lands, the lands round the ^gaean and the 
 southern part of the Euxine, in the days when the first 
 stage of Greek colonization had done its work under the 
 old Greek commonwealths, and before the later stage 
 under the Macedonian kings has begun. We see that 
 in Greece or Hellas in the narrower sense the whole 
 land is Greek, but that it is only within that narrower 
 Hellas that the Greek race stretches from sea to sea. 
 Elsewhere, coasts, islands, peninsulas, are Greek, but 
 there are no Greek settlements far inland. The inner 
 mass of the land, in Europe and in Asia, is held by 
 some other people. North of Thessaly, there is mere- 
 ly a Greek fringe on a barbarian body. Let us leap 
 over fourteen or fifteen centuries, during which Greek 
 influence advanced and fell back over vast regions of 
 the East. First Macedonia, then Rome, played the part 
 of the armed apostle of Greek culture; the Persian, 
 the Saracen, the Turk, each in his turn, appeared as its 
 armed enemy. What was the result of this long strug- 
 gle? Greek culture, Greek influence, is beaten back, 
 not only from far distant Bactria, but from Syria and 
 Egypt and the inland parts of Asia Minor. Towards 
 the end of the eleventh century, when we may first 
 begin to look on the Roman Empire of the East as 
 becoming definitively a Greek power, we see that its 
 extent differs wonderfully little, in Europe and in Asia, 
 from the extent of the older Greek colonization. It 
 may go a little further here, not quite so far there ; but 
 the general look of the map of the old Greek colonies 
 and of a map of the Empire of Alexios Komnenos is 
 
228 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 wonderfully alike. The Greek still keeps old Greece — 
 a large part of it he has indeed won back from foreign 
 invaders ; he keeps, as of old, the coasts, islands, and 
 peninsulas, in Europe and Asia. But out of old Greece, 
 he nowhere stretches from sea to sea. The Empire, both 
 in Europe and in Asia, reaches further inland than the 
 old colonies ; but its dominion still remains essentially a 
 dominion of the coasts : the massive inland regions of 
 Europe and Asia are held by other powers. But mark 
 that those powers are no longer what they were at the 
 earlier time. The old inhabitants of the inland regions 
 have passed away ; the Bulgarian in Europe, the Turk in 
 Asia, has taken their place. But the Greek keeps his 
 place ; he has lost vast regions which he had won since 
 our former view, but what he had at the time of our 
 former view he keeps still. Let us look again in our 
 day. Endless revolutions have passed over the land 
 since the end of the eleventh century ; the Frank and 
 the Venetian have come and gone ; the Turk — I speak 
 of Europe — has come and has begun to go. At the 
 end of the eleventh century the great political powers 
 answered, only roughly certainly, but still roughly, to 
 national divisions. Since the end of the twelfth century, 
 political divisions in those parts have had no reference 
 to national divisions. Greek, Turk, Bulgarian, Frank, 
 Venetian, simply held what they could, till in the 
 end the Turk swallowed up all. But the disposition of 
 nations and language is still — I speak of course roughly 
 — very much what it was under the Komnenian Empire, 
 very much what it was in the days of the old colonies. 
 The Bulgarian still holds the mainland of Europe ; the 
 Turk still holds the mainland of Asia; the Greek, as 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 229 
 
 he did in days before Turk or Bulgarian was heard of, 
 still fringes the coast of both. 
 
 Now, I would ask, when we look at this long story, is 
 it mere antiquarian rubbish to put together such facts as 
 these, and even to argue that they may have some prac- 
 tical bearing on the affairs of our own time ? Such an 
 argument must of course be prepared for the usual fate 
 of such arguments. It may hope to be warmly welcomed, 
 perhaps even to be looked at as a piece of political wis- 
 dom, by those whose ideas it suits ; it will assuredly be 
 scorned as antiquarian rubbish by those whose ideas it 
 does not suit. But try and look at the matter calmly. 
 Surely such an argnment as this is something quite differ- 
 ent from a mere play upon words, or from the rhetorical 
 use of an odd coincidence. Surely it looks as if there was 
 something more in it than there is in my playful — some 
 perhaps may rather say spiteful — parallel between the 
 two occupations of Cyprus. When we see that, after so 
 many revolutions, the Greek nation keeps essentially the 
 same geographical position which it held more than 
 two thousand years ago — when we see that, when there 
 last was a great Greek power in the world, its extent 
 was nearly the same as the extent of the Greek race and 
 language now — there surely is no absurdity in believing 
 that we have here something very like an indication of 
 manifest destiny. Surely we cannot be wrong in think- 
 ing that something not very far off from this strangely 
 abiding frontier should be the frontier to be finally drawn 
 between the Greek and the barbarian in Asia, between 
 the Greek and his fellow-Aryans in Europe. And, when 
 we speak of a manifest destiny, it is not a blind destiny ; 
 it is a destiny which goes upon very good reasons. We 
 
230 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 can see why the Greeks have so firmly held this par- 
 ticular extent of territory, and why they have not suc- 
 ceeded in holding much more. A scholar of our own 
 day has wisely said that neither the Greeks in any other 
 land nor any other people in the Greek lands could have 
 been what the Greeks in the Greek lands actually were. 
 He was speaking of the Greeks of many ages back ; but 
 between the old Greeks and the new Greeks there is less 
 difference than one might have looked for. There is 
 only that difference which cannot fail to be after so many 
 ages have past, ages crowded with so many and so bale- 
 ful changes in the South-eastern lands. At all events, the 
 old and the new Greek are alike in one thing ; the true 
 home of both is the sea, above all, their own .^gsean. 
 Greek dominion, Greek influence, the Greek tongue 
 itself, were in a manner out of place at any great dis- 
 tance from its coasts. Along its coasts, among its penin- 
 sulas and islands, the Greek and all that pertains to him 
 is at home in the fullest sense. It is on the sea, above 
 all on the ^gaean sea, that the Greek was twice great 
 in former days ; it is on the sea, above all on the .(Egaean 
 sea, that he has his fairest chance of being great again. 
 Among all changes, he has been able to hold the coasts 
 and islands ; no change has made him able to keep a 
 lasting dominion on the mainland. Surely here is a 
 practical lesson from reason and experience. We see ef- 
 fects and we see their cause. And we see that that cause 
 is not a passing or incidental, but a real and abiding, 
 cause. It is a cause which has its roots deep in the 
 physical character of a land, in the national character 
 of its people. From the abiding working of that cause, 
 through so many ages, so many changes, we may surely 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 23 1 
 
 make practical inferences which may deserve another 
 name than that of antiquarian rubbish. From so long 
 a past, a past continued in the present, we may surely 
 learn at least general lessons as to the future. We can 
 hardly be wrong in arguing that, when the day of settle- 
 ment comes for the South-eastern lands of Europe, the 
 share to be allotted to the Greek must be a share not 
 very different in extent from those lands of eastern 
 Europe and Western Asia within which the old Greeks 
 settled as colonists and the house of Komnenos reigned 
 as Emperors. 
 
 From such an instance as this I think you will under- 
 stand the general method which I propose to follow in 
 speaking of the practical bearing of the history of past 
 times. My guide is experience ; my one dogma is that 
 like causes lead to like effects, provided only that those 
 causes are not counterworked by other causes — which 
 is the same as saying that they cease to be like causes. 
 This last limitation is always an important one; it 
 teaches us to use not a little practical caution. We 
 may be sure that our rule will work in every case to 
 which it applies ; but it is often hard to say whether a 
 particular case is one to which it applies or not. With 
 this caution before us, if I am asked how far we can 
 venture, from what we know of the present and the 
 past, to say anything as to the future, I should answer 
 that, if we are wise, we shall say very little positively, 
 but that we may, without rashness, say a good deal 
 negatively. It can hardly ever be safe to say that a 
 thing will happen ; it is very often, not only safe, but 
 the part of practical wisdom, to say that a certain thing 
 
232 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 is not unlikely to happen, and that it is only prudent 
 so to shape our course that we may be ready for it 
 if it does happen. That is to say, putting the matter 
 in a more abstract shape, there are causes at work which, 
 if left to themselves, will bring the expected event to 
 pass ; but it is quite possible that they may be hindered 
 from doing so by other counterworking causes. It is 
 often wise to look forward to a certain event as likely 
 to happen, unwise to pledge ourselves to it as certain 
 to happen. But, if it is so much as likely to happen, it is 
 unwise so to act as it wei-e quite certain not to happen. 
 Our guide experience will often teach us that something 
 is going to happen, when it does not teach us exactly 
 what is going to happen. It often teaches us that the 
 present state of things is going to be changed, without 
 teaching us exactly what state of things is coming in 
 its stead. The little cloud is rising out of the sea ; the 
 chances are that the little cloud is the beginning of the 
 great storm; but what exact direction the storm may 
 take, what exact amount of harm or of good — for storms 
 sometimes do good — the storm may Work, that the 
 really wise man will not undertake to foretell. But, 
 because he cannot tell exactly what will come of the 
 storm, he will not therefore act as if he were sure that 
 no storm was coming. Now this last is what the 
 practical man, the statesmanlike man, the man who is 
 above antiquarian rubbish, so commonly does. The 
 so-called practical man is the man who will not see 
 anything but what is immediately under his nose, who 
 refuses to look either forward or backward. The sen- 
 timental man, the unpractical man, the man of anti- 
 quarian rubbish, does look both forward and backward ; 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 233 
 
 and he is laughed at by the practical man for so doing. 
 But somehow things have a way of turning out as the 
 sentimental man expected them to turn out, not as the 
 practical man expected them to turn out. I think both 
 sides of the Ocean will bear me out in saying that every 
 great cause, every great movement, has first of all to go 
 through the stage of being snubbed and laughed at by 
 practical men, by statesmanlike men. But the great 
 cause, starting with a few sentimental followers, beats 
 the practical men in the end. It is a real historical law, 
 it is almost a physical law, that all great movements 
 should go through this first stage, and a very whole- 
 some stage it is, of scorn on the part of those who think 
 themselves wise. But again mark what is proved and 
 what is not. We may safely argue that a movement 
 may have truth and right on its side, and may succeed 
 in the long run, although practical men sneer at it. But 
 it would not do to argue that every movement which 
 practical men sneer at has therefore truth and right on 
 its side and will succeed in the long run. For the prac- 
 tical man sneers at all proposals ; he therefore sneers at 
 the foolish proposals as well as at the wise ones. And 
 because some of the proposals which he sneers at turn 
 out to be foolish and unsuccessful, he gives himself all 
 the more credit for practical wisdom, and forgets all the 
 wise and successful proposals which he sneered at just 
 as much. Still, though the boasted practical man, 
 though even the hand-to-mouth diplomatist, the man 
 who patches up a thing for a year or two and calls it 
 an eternal settlement, may by some chance be right, the 
 chances are strongly against his being right. For such 
 men always shut their eyes to half the facts of the case; 
 
234 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 the professional diplomatist indeed is professionally 
 bound to do so. It should never be forgotten that it 
 was in the fore part of the year 1870 that the profes- 
 sional diplomatists assured mankind that there never 
 was a time when the peace of Europe ran less chance 
 of being disturbed. 
 
 I spoke just now of the abiding historical boundary 
 of the Greek people and the Greek language. What if 
 I should look forward to a day when a Greek prince may 
 sit on the throne of Constantinople ? What if I should 
 look forward to a day when the nations of South-eastern 
 Europe may be united under some kind of federal sys- 
 tem ? The mention of either of those events as even 
 possible would draw forth the scornful laughter of prac- 
 tical men everywhere. Now to the scornful laughter of 
 the practical men I should simply answer, What you 
 laugh at as impossible commonly comes true. You 
 laugh at the thought of a prince of Athens reigning in 
 the New Rome, Please to remember how you and your 
 like laughed not so long ago at the thought of a prince 
 of Savoy reigning in the Old Rome. You laugh at the 
 thought of an union of South-eastern Europe. Please 
 to remember how you and your like laughed not so 
 long ago at the thought of the union of Germany and 
 the union of Italy, at the thought that the Northern and 
 Southern States of the American Union could ever come 
 together again. All the great events of our day, all the 
 great events of earlier days, have been declared in their 
 turn by practical men to lie beyond the range of practical 
 politics. But the range of practical politics has a strange 
 way of widening, and it commonly widens so as to let in 
 the things which the sentimental men deemed to be at least 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 23S 
 
 likely, while the practical men pronounced that they 
 never could come to pass. Do I say that either of the 
 events which I hinted at will come to pass in our day, or 
 come to pass at all ? Far be it from me to say so. I am 
 no prophet neither am I a prophet's son. There are 
 causes at work which may bring about either ; there are 
 other causes at work which may hinder either. I do not 
 say that either of them will happen ; but I do say that 
 I shall not be surprised if either of them does happen. 
 I do say that they both lie within the range of practical 
 politics ; I do say that a really wise man, one who walks 
 by reason and experience, who looks both backward and 
 forward, who looks not only to the present but to the past 
 and the future, will not look at either thought as an ab- 
 surdity to be laughed at, but as a possibility — not more 
 — to be seriously borne in mind. 
 
 In this my opening lecture I have been sometimes de- 
 sultory, sometimes abstract. That has been because it is 
 my opening lecture. In those that follow I trust to be 
 both less desultory and less abstract. I have wished at 
 starting to let you know what will be the general line of 
 thought which you may expect to find in the series of 
 discourses which you have asked me to give among you. 
 I began with two stories which implied that to my mind 
 at least it seemed that the history and institutions of 
 the Greek commonwealths of former days, of the one 
 European federal commonwealth of our own day, were 
 objects from whose study the men of later times, the 
 men of political societies on a greater scale, need think 
 it no scorn to learn something. I hold before all things, 
 that man, civilized and political man, European man — if 
 
236 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 you will allow me so to extend that word so as to take 
 in lands. which are in truth a new and vaster Europe 
 beyond the Ocean — is essentially the same being in all 
 times and in all places, that there is no political commu- 
 nity, whatever may be its form of government, whatever 
 may be its physical scale, from which some political in- 
 struction may not be gained. I have hinted at two 
 classes of communities as rich in such instruction. I 
 have pointed to the commonwealths of old Greece as 
 able to teach us something, though their citizens did not 
 know the art of printing. I have pointed to the federal 
 union of modern Switzerland as able to teach us some- 
 thing, though its territoiy is not so large as the United 
 States or even as the United Kingdom. I trust, as I go 
 on, to carry you along with me in such a view both of 
 these communities and of some others. When I next 
 meet you here, I trust to begin at the beginning, the 
 beginning of history as far as I am concerned. I shall 
 start at a point which is a late period for the geologist, 
 a late period for the primaeval antiquary, a late period 
 for the Eastern scholar, but which is the beginning of 
 things for the political historian, for the historian of 
 man in his highest form. We will begin with the first 
 beginnings of that great chain of events which has 
 made civilized and Christian man all that he now is 
 on both sides of the Ocean. We will meet within 
 that group of islands and peninsulas where man first 
 learned the lesson that freedom is a noble thing. We 
 will make our hearth and home on the sacred hill 
 of the city where men first learned to settle their 
 differences, not by slaughter or banishment of the weak- 
 er side, but by the fair debate and the free vote. There 
 
CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 237 
 
 is no spot on the earth's surface which we can so fit- 
 tingly make the starting-point in our inquiry as the 
 parent state of justice and freedom, the great demo- 
 cracy of Athens. 
 
 16 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 ©i)e ©etnocratic ^itg. 
 
 I BEGAN my first lecture by telling of a remark which 
 seemed to me not a little shallow, namely, that we in 
 modern times could learn nothing from the political 
 experience of the old Greek commonwealths, because 
 the men of those commonwealths had no knowledge 
 of printing. Now he who made that objection did not 
 put his own case so strongly as he might have put it. 
 He might have said with perfect truth, not only that 
 the old Greek commonwealths had no printing, but that 
 they had very little writing. And what a paradox shall 
 I be thought to utter if I say that in some respects the 
 faculties of the men of those old commonwealths were 
 strengthened and quickened by the veiy fact that they 
 had no printing and very little writing. Do not think 
 that I wish to undervalue those two very useful arts, 
 arts of both of which I have made a good deal of use 
 in the course of my own life. I do not wish in the 
 least to call in question the general belief that they have 
 on the whole done much for the intellectual improve- 
 ment of mankind. But I do not the less venture to 
 say that, like many other good things, they have had 
 a bad side as well as a good one ; they have certainly 
 tended to weaken some of man's faculties ; there have 
 
 238 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 239 
 
 been states of society which have been in some respects 
 the better for their absence or their less frequent use. 
 The main use of reading and writing, and of that im- 
 proved form of writing which we call printing, is the 
 accumulation and preservation of knowledge. For that 
 end they are invaluable. If some forms of scientific 
 research might be carried on without them, they could 
 hardly be recorded without them ; of historical research, 
 writing, in some shape or other, is a necessary condition. 
 Yet there can be no doubt that our familiarity with 
 reading and writing has done much to weaken some 
 of our mental faculties. To the power of memory the in- 
 vention of writing dealt a heavy blow, and the invention 
 of printing dealt one yet heavier. As each of those 
 stages made it easier to record events, men took less 
 trouble to remember them. It is easy for us to note 
 down a thing for ourselves ; it is easy for us to turn to 
 the record of it in some book written by another. A man 
 whose whole note-book and whole library is in his own 
 brain is in quite another case. The stores of his know- 
 ledge will be in "one sense much smaller than ours ; but 
 what he does know he will know in a clearer and more 
 abiding way, and in some kinds of knowledge he will 
 actually be ahead of the man of note-books and libra- 
 ries. It is very likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were 
 put together without writing; it is quite certain that 
 not a few men in old Greece knew them by heart. And 
 even if some of these in later times learned them from a 
 written copy, it was because written books were scarce, 
 because they were not in such common use as to have 
 much effect on men's habits, that they learned them by 
 heart at all. Now to compose those poems, even to 
 
240 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 remember those poems, without the help of writing, 
 implies an intellectual developement in some directions 
 far beyond that of any living scholar. It implies the 
 presence in the very highest degree of the two powers 
 of attention and memory. Where writing does not 
 exist, even where it is comparatively rare, where it is a 
 somewhat difficult business, the possession of a distinct 
 class, employed only on special occasions or for special 
 purposes, the powers of attention and memory will, 
 among a people of any intellectual gifts at all, be devel- 
 oped to the very highest point, to a far higher point than 
 they are ever likely to be among a people with whom 
 reading, writing, and printing are matters of everyday 
 use. 
 
 Now, if any of us in modern times, if any existing 
 community in civilized Europe or America, were to lose 
 the arts of reading, writing, and printing, or even to lose 
 their daily and familiar use, that community would, 
 beyond all doubt, suffer an unutterable loss. They 
 would suffer not only intellectually, but politically. 
 They would not only sink in the scale of mental cul- 
 ture; they would find it hard, if not impossible, to car- 
 ry on the machinery of a free constitution. But I will 
 undertake to say that the citizens of the old Greek 
 commonwealths did not suffer in anything like the same 
 degree from being altogether ignorant of printing, and 
 comparatively unfamiliar with reading and writing. In 
 one sense this is a truism : no man, no community of 
 men, suffers in the same way from the mere absence of a 
 thing to which they are not used as they suffer from the 
 positive loss of a thing to which they have already 
 become used. To go back is a much worse business 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 24 1 
 
 than simply not to go forwards. But I hold that my 
 doctrine is true in a much more special sense than this. 
 In the political and social state in which the ancient 
 commonwealths found themselves, the familiar use of 
 reading and writing was by no means of the same para- 
 mount value to them which it is to us. Remem- 
 ber, I am not speaking of a state of things where 
 reading and writing are wholly unknown, but only of 
 a state of things where they are not in familiar use. 
 I mean a state of things in which writing is perfectly 
 well known, where public and private acts are recorded 
 on stone or brass, where there is already a lettered class 
 which reads and writes books ; but where reading and 
 writing are not the common possession of every man, 
 where men of high natural intelligence and of no small 
 amount of acquired culture are still unable to read and 
 write. This must in some sort be the case wherever 
 printing is unknown ; it is printing which brings read- 
 ing and writing really within the reach of every man ; 
 where reading and writing go no further than inscrip- 
 tions and manuscript books, they will always remain the 
 special possession of a particular class. Till printing 
 comes, many men will be unable to read to whom both 
 reading and writing comes naturally when printing is 
 once brought in ; and, what we sometimes forget, many 
 men who can read will not think it their business to 
 learn the special, almost professional, art of writing. 
 Such were our own forefathers before the latter days of 
 the fifteenth century ; and, without in the least wishing 
 to depreciate ages among some of which my own studies 
 have chiefly lain, I could not venture to claim for these 
 in some sort unlettered ages the same average amount 
 
242 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 of intellectual culture which I do claim for those ages 
 of Greece which were unlettered in the same sense. 
 To our medieval forefathers the great diffusion of the 
 arts of reading and writing which followed on the in- 
 vention of printing was a boon beyond all words. I 
 do not believe that it would have been in anything like 
 the same degree a boon to the people of the Athenian 
 commonwealth, or, in its measure, to the people of any 
 other Greek democratic commonwealth in the days of 
 old Greek independence. 
 
 The state of things in those ancient democracies 
 was one to which we have no exact parallel in any part 
 of the modern world; it had no exact parallel in any 
 part of the mediaeval world. Close as are the analogies 
 between the commonwealths of old Greece and the com- 
 monwealths of mediaeval Italy, the points of difference 
 are quite as striking and instructive as the points of like- 
 ness. We must conceive a state of things in which each 
 city is absolutely independent, or at least a state of things 
 in which the absolute independence of each city is the 
 political ideal. For it may easily happen that this or 
 that particular city may, at this or that particular time, 
 be in a state of greater or less dependence on some 
 greater city. But every city either was independent or 
 deemed itself wronged if it was not independent. So 
 strong was the feeling of independence that even a fed- 
 eral union was repugnant to the instincts of the Greek 
 cities, till in later times they found that safety against 
 foreign enemies could be obtained only by that partial 
 surrender of independence by each state which a federal 
 system implies. The older Greek federations are found 
 only among the ruder tribes of the nation, those which 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 243 
 
 had not fully reached the perfection of Greek city life. 
 Among all the more advanced members of the nation 
 the absolutely independent city was the one political 
 ideal. Greek cities planted colonies ; those colonies were 
 as much Greek cities, as much members of the general 
 Greek body, as the mother-cities which planted them ; 
 they were from the beginning free and independent states, 
 and needed not a War of Independence to make them so. 
 Each city had those full powers of action, those powers 
 of war and peace and every other attribute of independ- 
 ence, which we are accustomed to connect, not with single 
 cities, but with nations or other powers of great extent. 
 Above all, in this your great federal continent, you 
 are used to see sovereign states, many of them greater 
 by far in extent on the map than the whole range of 
 continuous Greece, which, while keeping for many pur- 
 poses perfect independence in their own hands, still 
 surrender to a central power those attributes of inter- 
 national action which each Greek city claimed to itself. 
 The independence of each city was a doctrine stamped 
 deep on the Greek political mind by the very nature of 
 the Greek land. How truly this is so is hardly fully 
 understood till we see that land with our own eyes. The 
 map may be do something ; but no map can bring home 
 to us the true nature of the Greek land till we have stood 
 on a Greek hill-top, on the akropolis of Athens or the 
 loftier akropolis of Corinth, and have seen how thor- 
 oughly the land was a land of valleys cut off by hills, of 
 islands and peninsulas cut off by arms of sea, from their 
 neighbours on either side. Or we might more truly say 
 that, while the hills fenced them off from their neigh- 
 bours, the arms of the sea laid them open to their neigh- 
 
244 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 hours. Their waters might bring either friends or ene- 
 mies; but they brought both from one wholly distinct 
 and isolated piece of land to another. Every island, every 
 valley, every promontory, became the seat of a separate 
 city ; that is, according to Greek notions, the seat of an 
 independent power, owning indeed many ties of brother- 
 hood to each of the other cities which helped to make 
 up the whole Greek nation, but each of which claimed 
 the right of war and peace and separate diplomatic inter- 
 course, alike with every other Greek city and with powers 
 beyond the bounds of the Greek world. Corinth could 
 treat with Athens and Athens with Corinth, and Corinth 
 and Athens could each equally treat with the King of the 
 Macedonians and with the Great King of Persia. And, 
 when the time came, such of them as had not given up 
 that power to a central federal authority, could treat, as 
 city to city, with the Senate and People of Rome. How 
 close the Greek states are to one another, and yet how 
 physically distinct they are from one another, it needs, 
 for me at least, a journey to Greece fully to take in. 
 
 Now what has this to do with the presence or absence 
 of reading, writing, and printing ? Much every way. 
 Cities in such a position as those which I have just 
 described were in constant need of those faculties which 
 I have ventured to say that reading, writing, and printing 
 tend to weaken rather than to strengthen. Single cities, 
 not all of them great cities, not all of them like Athens 
 and Corinth, many of them small towns which, according 
 to our notions, would deal at home only with small local 
 matters and would send one or more representatives to 
 a distant capital to give a voice in greater national affairs, 
 had to entertain, each one for itself, questions on an 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 245 
 
 international scale, such questions as in modern times 
 are debated in the cabinets of great kingdoms. And 
 how had they to entertain them ? Herein perhaps come 
 the greatest of all differences between their way of trans- 
 acting public business and ours. In modern times, even 
 in constitutional states, even in highly democratic states, 
 the department of foreign affairs is that which is shrouded 
 in the greatest degree of mystery ; it is that over which 
 the nation and the representatives of the nation exercise 
 the least amount of direct influence. Among the Greek 
 commonwealths the case was directly opposite. Foreign 
 questions were entertained, questions of war, peace, and 
 alliance were decided, by the most popular body known 
 to the constitution. In a democracy such matters came 
 before the judgement of the whole people ; in an aris- 
 tocracy they came before the whole of the privileged 
 class among the people. The cause of the difference is 
 obvious. In a great modern state it is comparatively 
 few who have any direct personal knowledge of foreign 
 affairs or any direct personal interest in them. It is only 
 comparatively few who are directly and personally af- 
 fected even by a foreign war. But in a system of sepa- 
 rate city commonwealths, when the foreign enemy, 
 instead of being perhaps a great empire thousands of 
 miles away, is likely enough to be the nearest market- 
 town — when the campaign, whether offensive or defen- 
 sive, will be waged within a few miles, when every man's 
 house and fields run a chance of being laid waste by the 
 enemy — then foreign affairs directly and personally touch 
 every man ; there is nothing in which every man has a 
 more direct and personal interest, nothing of which every 
 man is more likely to have, or to believe that he has, a 
 
246 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 more direct and personal knowledge. He has little need 
 of newspapers, telegrams, special correspondents, when, 
 by climbing a hill, he can very likely look into an enemy's 
 country on one side and into an ally's country on another. 
 In such a state of things the discussion of foreign affairs 
 cannot be left to any small or secret body ; war and 
 peace, of all things, must come for the judgement of the 
 whole people, or, even in an oligarchy, for the judge- 
 ment of the whole privileged order. For I need hardly 
 say that in these small commonwealths representation 
 is unknown; whatever powers may be entrusted to 
 individual magistrates or to smaller councils, the su- 
 preme authority must rest with an assembly in which 
 every qualified citizen gives his vote in his own person. 
 Now here comes in the widest field for that form of 
 intellectual training which was open to every Athenian 
 citizen, and, which, I feel sure, made the intellectual 
 average of the Athenian citizen higher than that of the 
 average representative in any modern political assembly. 
 In such an assembly in any European or American com- 
 munity we may surely assume that every member can at 
 least read and write ; but I can hardly flatter my own 
 age by believing that there are many modern legislatures 
 where the average standard can be placed so high as it 
 stood in the ekklesia of Athens. Many an Athenian 
 citizen could not write ; if he could read at all, his read- 
 ing hardly went beyond spelling out some legal formula 
 carved in brass or marble. But if he did not read, he 
 heard. He heard those masterpieces of political oratory 
 to which the world turns with admiration after so many 
 ages. What political education could there be like 
 listening to Perikles, and knowing that it was his busi- 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 247 
 
 ness, when he had listened to Perikles, to give his per- 
 sonal vote for or against the proposals of Perikles ? 
 That was quite another thing from simply reading the 
 orator's speech in a newspaper the next morning, and 
 having no opportunity of giving any personal vote at 
 all. We, in the free states of Europe and America, have 
 many opportunities of speaking our minds, many oppor- 
 tunities of indirectly influencing the course of national 
 affairs ; but we none of us have, even those whom we 
 send to represent us in our national assemblies but rarely 
 have, to make it part of our ordinary business to listen 
 with our own ears to the arguments of the greatest mas- 
 ters of human speech, and then to help to decide by our 
 own votes on such issues as whether the Peloponnesian 
 war shall begin or no. 
 
 Among all English-speaking assemblies at this moment, 
 the Congress of the United States is the only one which 
 can ever be called on to give a direct vote in any such 
 matter. And the control of Congress as a whole, even 
 the special control of one branch of it, over matters of 
 war, peace, and foreign affairs generally, though greater 
 than any powers vested in the British Parliament, seems 
 slight, when compared with the direct and constant con- 
 trol exercised by the Athenian Assembly. Or rather 
 " control " is not the right word ; the Assembly did more 
 than control ; the shortest way of putting matters would 
 be to say that the Assembly was Secretary of State, 
 President, Senate, and House of Representatives all in 
 one. As for other assemblies, I need not say that no 
 State legislature, no legislature in any British colony, 
 can deal with such matters at all, while the British Par- 
 liament itself deals with them only indirectly. And I 
 
248 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 cannot help thinking that the average Athenian citizen 
 gave, whether a wiser vote or not, at least a vote more 
 directly affected by the debate, than is often given in 
 any modern assembly. In one sense there was more of 
 party spirit in old Greece than there is in the modern 
 world; in another sense there was less. Setting aside 
 the plots of professed murderers and votaries of anarchy, 
 there is nothing in modern politics at all answering to 
 the furious factions of oligarchs and democrats in old 
 Greece, factions which were seldom satisfied without the 
 driving out, sometimes not without the actual slaughter, 
 of the side which might prove to be the weaker. But 
 on the other hand, I suspect that, within the bounds of 
 an acknowledged democratic constitution, there was less 
 of party spirit, less of mechanical party voting, that votes 
 were more likely to be won by an eloquent and well- 
 reasoned speech, than they are now. Those were indeed 
 the palmy days of speech, when men listened instead of 
 reading, when they were guided by the voice and the 
 tones of the living orator. But mark also that what is true 
 of the Athenian in his political character is true of him also 
 in every other character. In everything the Athenian pub- 
 lic was' a hearing, not a reading, public. Poetry came to 
 them in the same shape as oratory. They did not read 
 Homer ; they heard him recited. They listened to the 
 tragic and comic poets with all the accompaniments of 
 song and dance. The father of their philosophers wrote 
 nothing whatever; he disputed at the corners of the 
 streets with all whom he met. The increased prevalence 
 of reading and writing which is marked by the philo- 
 sophical discourses of Plato, by the political pamphlets 
 of Isokrates, belongs to the time of the decline of Athe- 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 249 
 
 nian political greatness, above all to the time of the 
 marked decline in the public spirit of her citizens. The 
 comparatively illiterate fifth century before Christ is a 
 time of far greater Athenian energy than the compara- 
 tively learned fourth century. But take the two centu- 
 ries together; what the average of Athenian intellect 
 was we may judge by the character of the intellectual 
 food that was set before it. It was no mean order of 
 intellect to which men could venture to address the 
 speeches of Perikles and the tragedies of ^schylus. 
 And remember that .(Eschylus, Perikles, Sophokles, 
 Euripides, Aristophanes, all the poets, all the orators, 
 down to the day when Demosthenes and .(Eschines wran- 
 gled over the Crown and the False Embassy, were all of 
 them poets and orators who did not address any select 
 class, specially learned or specially refined, but spoke 
 to the Athenian people as a whole. Now of both the 
 tragic poets and the orators in the assembly the distin- 
 guishing feature is a certain dignity and austerity, a 
 severe purity of taste and style, the very opposite to 
 anything which could be called popular in any disparag- 
 ing sense. When men would venture to put forth such 
 speeches, such poems, before the general mass of their 
 countrymen, it shows how high the general intellectual 
 level of their countrymen stood. Nor does the licence 
 of the old comedy prove anything to the contrary. 
 There is in it indeed a strong element of buffoonery and 
 indecency, but even that is the buffoonery and indecency 
 of genius, and it alternates, in Aristophanes at least, 
 with poetry so sweet and graceful, with wit of so high 
 and refined an order, that Attic comedy, no less than 
 Attic tragedy, must be accepted as part of the evidence 
 
250 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 for the generally high intellectual level of the Attic 
 people. 
 
 Now, when we look at a people like this, a people 
 who could habitually come together in their own city 
 for the discussion, and, not the mere discussion, for the 
 decision, of public affairs, and, who, when they came to- 
 gether, heard the most weighty questions debated by the 
 greatest of orators — a people the chief attraction of whose 
 holidays was the performance of the loftiest efforts of 
 dramatic poetry in both its branches — a people among 
 whom at the same time the noblest works of architec- 
 ture, painting, sculpture, were coming into being, not at 
 the bidding of private patrons and amateurs, but for 
 the common adornment of the city, — we ask. Was there 
 in such a people any lack which an enlarged familiarity 
 with reading, writing, printing, would have supplied? 
 The press, had it existed in those days, might have pre- 
 served to us some precious pieces of Greek literature 
 which we have lost, but it could have had but little 
 effect on the general character of Athenian political 
 life. A free press might have been a great gain under 
 the despotism of the Roman Empire ; it could not have 
 made political life under the Athenian democracy freer 
 or more open than it was. Athenian life was spent in 
 keeping the powers of attention and memory at their 
 highest point. The habit of trusting to the written 
 record instead of to the living voice might have done 
 something to weaken both of them. It would have been 
 no political gain, but quite the opposite, if the power of 
 reading a speech of Perikles or Demosthenes in the next 
 day's newspaper had led the citizen who lived at Mara- 
 thon or Sounion to stay at Marathon or Sounion, instead 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 25 I 
 
 of coming to listen and vote at Athens. We should 
 have been endless gainers if we could turn to reports, 
 printed or written, of all the debates in the Assembly, 
 instead of having preserved to us only a few of the 
 greatest efforts of the greatest speakers. But we may 
 doubt whether to the living contemporaries of Perikles 
 and Demosthenes our gain in this way would not rather 
 have been a loss. 
 
 But my own argument may perhaps be turned against 
 me. I may be told that I have myself shown more 
 conclusively than anybody else that we in our days can 
 learn nothing from the political experience of these 
 ancient commonwealths. What, it may be said, can we 
 have in common with states with whom not only print- 
 ing was unknown, but even reading and writing were 
 comparatively unfamiliar, with states whose condition 
 was such that it may be doubted whether the invention 
 of printing, whether any enlarged use of reading and 
 writing, would have been any real boon to them ? Sure- 
 ly such men must be as far apart from us, their political 
 experience can be of as little advantage to us, as if they 
 had been inhabitants of another planet. The difference 
 certainly is great, yet I venture to maintain that the 
 points of likeness between us and them are incompar- 
 ably more and greater than the points of difference. It 
 perhaps does not prove very much to say that we have 
 in common with them all that we possess as sharers 
 with them in one common human nature. For that we 
 share no less with other forms of the human race from 
 whose political experience, if they have any, we do not 
 seek for much instruction. And yet it would perhaps 
 
252 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 be dangerous to say that there is any branch of the 
 human race which is absolutely without institutions, or 
 from whose institutions we may not learn something. 
 There has been a good deal of research lately made in 
 this direction, sometimes in a really philosophical spirit, 
 sometimes merely after the fashion of scrap-gathering 
 and reckless guessing. And when such researches are 
 carried on in a really philosophical spirit, we whose 
 studies are of a more special kind, who do not take 
 as our range all mankind, but only some branches of 
 mankind, can only hail those who make them as fellow- 
 workers. If I can show that a certain institution is 
 common to all Teutons or to all Aryans, and if another 
 inquirer can go on further and show that it is common 
 to all men, he has done me no wrong. He has in no 
 way weakened my position ; he has rather enlarged and 
 strengthened it. All I ask of him is that he shall carry 
 into the less known regions of inquiry the same rules of 
 careful and scholarlike reasoning which are looked for 
 in those who deal with the better known regions. We 
 must not be expected to accept facts and to make infer- 
 ences in the case of Red Indians and Australians on 
 evidence which we should set aside as inconclusive if 
 we were making inquiries about Greeks or Germans. 
 Whether we believe in creation or evolution or anything 
 else — and for my part I do not see that creation and 
 evolution are in the least contradictory — there is a deep 
 interest in tracing out how much there is that all forms 
 of man have in common, how large is the common 
 heritage, moral, social, and political. But these wider 
 branches of research are not mine ; I must stop as my 
 ordinary bound at the limit which parts off the Aryan 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 253 
 
 from the non-Aryan; I must not venture so much as 
 to cast my eyes beyond the hmit which parts off the 
 inflected tongues from the non-inflected. So far as this 
 last point we must sometimes look; so far we must 
 look for our immediate purpose of this moment; we 
 cannot take in the position of the Greek people and 
 the Greek mind in the history of the world, without 
 at least some general notion of the position of the 
 PhcEnician, the Hebrew, and the Arab. So, if we were 
 speaking, not of Greeks, not of our intellectual fathers, 
 but of the rudest tribe on the face of the earth that 
 had any institutions at all to show, I should still be 
 loath to say that we could learn nothing from the 
 working of those institutions. But for my Greeks I 
 claim something more. First of all, I claim for them 
 the rights of kinsmen, kinsmen of the common Aryan 
 stock, sharers in the common heritage of speech, of 
 institutions, and of beliefs, which the common fore- 
 fathers of them and us brought from the Eastern cra- 
 dle-land of the common family. To those of us whose 
 minds were trained in youth, fed, guided, strengthened, 
 by the study of old Hellenic lore, ft is a thrilling and 
 an ennobling thought to feel that that old Hellenic lore 
 is but one part of a heritage in which we ourselves are 
 sharers, that the undying tale of Homer has in not a 
 few of its elements a common origin with the tales to 
 which we listened at our mothers' knees. It is no small 
 matter to feel that that deathless tongue — which, be it 
 remembered, was enabled to surpass all other tongues 
 because those who spoke it knew no other tongue — the 
 tongue in which Homer sang the deeds of heroic days 
 in the simple speech of heroic days — the tongue in 
 xr 
 
254 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 which Pindar in more artificial strains recorded the 
 praises of the victors in those national rites which, 
 among bitter rivalries and cruel warfare, still kept up 
 the remembrance that the Hellenic folk was one — 
 the tongue in which the tragic and the comic poet 
 held up the godlike men of past days to the peo- 
 ple's worship, and the party-leaders of their own day to 
 the people's scorn — the tongue in which Thucydides 
 first taught men to prefer the possession for all time to 
 the amusement of a moment, and in which Polybios, 
 walking in his path, recorded the working of that ancient 
 federal power within the bounds of whose vaster repro- 
 duction it is my privilege now to stand — the tongue in 
 which Aristotle set forth for his age, and has so largely 
 handed down to us, the whole sum of the knowledge 
 of his time, and, as its most precious part, the political 
 lessons which he learned from the working of a thou- 
 sand independent commonwealths — above all, the tongue 
 in which the leaders of freemen first spoke to freemen, 
 the tongue in which great speakers first guided great 
 assemblies, the tongue in which Perikles called on the 
 citizens of a ruling state to strain every nerve to keep 
 the dominion which they, had won, and in which the yet 
 nobler voice of Demosthenes called on the citizens of a 
 declining state to strain every nerve, not for dominion, 
 but for freedom — and, may I go on to add, the tongue 
 which was chosen out of Aryan tongues to be the means 
 of handing on to the Aryan nations of Europe and 
 America the oracles of the faith which we learned from 
 Semitic teachers — the tongue which led captive the 
 tongue of Rome — the tongue in which the best of 
 Roman Emperors set down the workings of his wearied 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 255 
 
 spirit — the tongue of Christian fathers and Christian 
 councils, and the tongue of that virtuous and erring 
 prince who strove against them, so gallantly and so 
 vainly, in the cause of the elder gods — the tongue 
 which, as the tongue of the New Rome, ousted the 
 tongue of the Old as the Imperial speech of Eastern 
 Christendom — the tongue which lived on, in sorrow and 
 in hope, through long ages of barbarian bondage — the 
 tongue which has sprung again to life in our own day as the 
 tongue of a regenerate and advancing people — the tongue, 
 if I may speak of myself, which I deem it no small priv- 
 ilege to have myself heard and spoken in rejoicing and 
 sorrowing gatherings of Hellenic freemen, — it is with 
 no small thrill of brotherhood that we feel that the 
 tongue which has such a history as this is, after all, only 
 a sister-dialect with our own tongue, that the. stock is 
 the same, that a crowd of words are the same, that we 
 cannot speak of the earliest and most endearing of 
 human relations, that we cannot speak of father and 
 mother, of brother and daughter, without using words 
 which, from the prae-historic days of the old dispersion, 
 have remained part of the common possession of Hel- 
 lenic and Teutonic man. 
 
 There is then between us and these old Greeks the 
 tie of kindred, the tie of a common origin, a kindred 
 tongue, a common store of beliefs, traditions, primitive 
 customs, primitive institutions. But if we are sharers 
 in all these things with the Greeks, so we. are with the 
 Latins, the Slaves, the Lithuanians, the Celts, even with 
 the Albanians. But towards the Greeks there is a tie 
 which binds us nearer than it binds us to any of these, 
 even to the Latins themselves. To the Greeks we owe 
 
2S6 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 whatever of homage, whatever of thankfulness, we owe to 
 those who were in all things our forerunners, our guides, 
 our teachers. Without ruling which of the Aryan nations 
 was the first to make its way into Europe, without ruling 
 which of the Aryan tongues has parted the least from 
 the primseval mother-speech, for all practical purposes 
 the Greeks are entitled to the respect due from younger 
 brethren to the elder. Brethren as they are in origin 
 and speech, I think that I am justified in the words 
 which I used some time back when I spoke of them as 
 our intellectual fathers. In art, in science, in the song of 
 the poet, in the speculations of the philosopher, in the 
 records of the historian, they led the way. They led 
 the way too in the discipline of the warrior, in substi- 
 tuting the ordered phalanx of Sparta or Thebes for the 
 tumultuous array of an Asiatic army. And they too 
 led the way in the highest work of all : they were the 
 first to estaiblish the true fellowship of law and freedom, 
 to work up the rude elements of primitive institutions 
 into such finished works of political skill as the pure 
 democracy of consolidated Athens and the modified 
 democracy of federal Achaia. They were the first to 
 substitute the influence of speech and reason for the 
 blind bidding of an arbitrary will, the first to decide 
 questions of war and policy by the free vote of the 
 people fairly taken, the first to give to the citizen accused 
 of crime, to the citizen whose rights were disputed, a 
 fair trial before his peers, a trial by the judgement of 
 citizens sworn to give a righteous verdict according to 
 the law. To us at least they are practically the authors 
 of all these things. It might be dangerous, among the 
 endless steps in political progress which the common- 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 257 
 
 wealths of Greece and the commonwealths of Italy 
 took quite independently of one another, to rule in all 
 cases whether this or that step was taken first in Italy 
 or in Greece. The political wisdom of the Latin hardly 
 lagged behind that of the Greek, though the course of 
 political developement often differed widely in the two 
 kindred lands. But to us the Greeks come first; we 
 know from contemporary witnesses what were the in- 
 stitutions of not a few Greek cities at a time when we 
 know the institutions of Rome herself only by the flick- 
 ering light of tradition, or by the ingenious putting 
 together of a crowd of incidental and unconscious 
 notices from this source and that. We see the Athe- 
 nian democracy in its most finished form, listening to 
 its orators, raising its walls and gates and temples, rul- 
 ing over its subject cities, keeping the Great King at 
 three days' distance from its own coasts, — we see all 
 this by the light of contemporary writings and contem- 
 porary inscriptions, at a time when we can at most dimly 
 see that the two orders at Rome were at the height of 
 their long struggle, and that Rome is^iaking the first 
 faint steps towards winning back her lost headship over 
 the Latin cities. The political course of the Athenian 
 democracy is over before the mixed constitution of the 
 Roman commonwealth has reached its full develope- 
 ment. In these points the only question that can be 
 raised is a question of precedence, and that a question 
 of precedence between Aryan kinsfolk. In political mat- 
 ters the Greek may have been before the Italian, or the 
 Italian may have been before the Greek ; but no rational 
 person can think either that the Italian copied from the 
 Greek or that the Greek copied from the Italian ; still 
 
258 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 less can any rational person think that either Greek or 
 Italian needed political lessons from any barbarian mas- 
 ter. As to matters of art, the case is somewhat differ- 
 ent. Let me tell my own experience. I first gained any 
 knowledge of Greek matters at a moment when literal 
 belief in the tales of Kadmos and Kekrops had passed 
 away, and when the wide field which has been opened 
 by modern orientalists had not yet been touched. In 
 those days we made it a kind of point of honor to hold 
 that everything Greek was original, except the alphabet, 
 which we could not deny that the Greeks learned from 
 the Phoenicians. We comforted ourselves by saying 
 that of the gift we had to allow that the Greeks borrowed 
 from the Phoenicians the Greeks made much better use 
 than the Phoenicians had ever made. But now the old 
 belief has come up 'again in a more scientific shape. 
 We hear much of the influence of Egyptians, Chal- 
 dseans, Phoenicians, and of the last discovered candi- 
 dates for greatness, the Hittites. I could almost wish 
 to leave these questions to the decision of a generation 
 yet to come. Xhe new teaching is so eagerly pressed 
 by its votaries as the only scientific teaching, yet it 
 grates so unpleasantly on ears used to what in my 
 younger days we deemed to be scientific teaching, that 
 I could almost wish to hand over the whole matter to 
 those who may some day be able to look more impar- 
 tially into the whole question than either side can look 
 just now. But I suppose that we shall be at least safe in 
 saying that, even if the first rudiments of architecture or 
 of any other art were brought to Hellas from some bar- 
 barian soil, the Greek at least gave to all that he bor- 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 259 
 
 rowed a life, a force, a grace, which made it wholly his 
 own. This will be only applying to other things the 
 measure we have all along applied to the alphabet. How 
 little the mere possession of a gift can do is seen if we 
 compare the history of Carthage with the history of 
 Greece and Italy. In the hands of the men of Tyre and 
 Sidon the alphabet remained in a literal sense a dead let- 
 ter ; in the hands of tlie Greek it became clothed with the 
 spirit that giveth life. In fact, the question whether 
 Greece did or did not borrow from this or that barba- 
 rian people some rude germs of art which in Greece 
 alone were taught to grow into flowers and fruit has 
 little more than an antiquarian interest. It is very far 
 from being a matter of antiquarian rubbish, but it is 
 not a question of the same inborn and living interest 
 as the tracing up the tongues and the institutions of the 
 kindred nations to the common stock. Whatever the 
 Greeks may have borrowed in some rude shape became 
 their own in its higher developement. They borrowed 
 the alphabet from the land of Canaan ; let it be, if any 
 one wishes it, that they borrgwed some rude approach 
 to the Doric column from the land of Ham. Yet none 
 the less the literature and the art of Greece is, in every 
 higher sense, as strictly original as its political develope- 
 ment. As no man of Tyre or Sidon, no man of Memphis 
 or hundred-gated Thebes, ever devised aught like the 
 Athenian assembly and the Athenian court of justice, so 
 neither could he write a Prometheus or build a Parthenon ; 
 he could not breathe into the stone the human life of 
 Hellenic deity ; he could not bid the work of his hands 
 stand forth in the virgin dignity of the Athenian Pallas 
 or in the imperial majesty of Olympian Zeus. 
 
26o PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 Let us now run, hastily as it must needs be, through 
 the main hnes of the poHtical experience of these com- 
 monwealths, so far removed from us in time and place 
 and scale, and which, we are assured, because they were 
 small, because they were ignorant of printing, can teach 
 us nothing. Yet surely something may be learned by 
 seeing how closely the general develojjement of political 
 institutions follows essentially the same lines, and at the 
 same time how widely such institutions are modified in 
 detail by differences of time, place, and circumstance. The 
 more than likeness, the absolute sameness, of the earliest 
 Hellenic and the earliest Teutonic institutions has often 
 been pointed out ; it is a subject on which I have my- 
 self enlarged in more shapes than one. In both we see 
 the same three essential political elements — the king or 
 chief, the inner council of elders or nobles, the general 
 assembly of the people. One is tempted to say that we 
 have here the rough foreshadowing of King, Lords, and 
 Commons, of President, Senate, and House of Repre- 
 sentatives. And from some points of view it may not 
 be inaccurate to say so. In strict historical succession I 
 suspect that the inner council is more truly represented 
 by the Privy Council than by the House of Lords or the 
 Senate ; but in a rough general view of things we see in 
 the primitive and in the modern constitutions the same 
 great essential elements. To the Greek mind these three 
 elements seemed so necessarily implied in the mere idea 
 of any political society that the polity of the Gods on 
 Olympos is coloured after the type of the polity of their 
 worshippers in Ithake or before IHon; Zeus, no less 
 than Agamemnon, has his inner council and his popular 
 assembly. I need not say that, whether the chief. 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 261 
 
 whether the inner council, is hereditary or elective, 
 holding office for life or only for a season, is purely a 
 question of detail. As far as we can go back, the Greek 
 king is hereditary, the Roman king is elective, and the 
 earliest republican magistrates, both in Greece and in 
 Italy, carried on the kingly power, hardly lessened as to 
 its mere range of its authority, but hampered by repub- 
 lican conditions, perhaps by the presence of a colleague, 
 perhaps by a fixed term of office, in any case by a more 
 distinct responsibility to the nation in some shape or 
 other. So is your President an elective, responsible, 
 four years, king, representing the King of Great Britain 
 exactly as the archon represented the Athenian king and 
 the consul the Roman king, keeping an authority essen- 
 tially kingly, an authority narrower in its range than the 
 authority of a King of Great Britain, but in the exercise 
 of which the President can follow his personal will far 
 more freely than the King can. And, though the change 
 from King to President was recorded in printed books, 
 while the change from King to archon was at most 
 graven on a stone, I would still ask whether there is not 
 some instruction in marking how, in siich distant times 
 and places, the process of change took so very nearly 
 the same form. Have we not here a political lesson ? 
 have we not here a moral lesson ? Do we not better 
 understand the essential unity of man's nature among 
 all differences of time and place and circumstance ? Do 
 we not see how like causes may be reasonably looked to 
 produce like effects ? Have we not hit on one of those 
 real and practical parallels, which may act as real beacons 
 or real warnings, and which, I venture to think, rise not 
 a little above the level of merely antiquarian rubbish ? 
 
262 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 The general truth is that wise and healthy political 
 societies, whether large or small, whether acquainted 
 with printing or ignorant of it, while always ready to 
 change when change is really needed, never change for 
 the sake of change ; and when change is needed, they 
 work their changes, as far as possible, within the ancient 
 lines. They prefer to reform what is old, rather than to 
 devise something which is wholly new. So did the 
 Athenian, the Roman, and the American reformers.' 
 Shallow observers are, I believe, chiefly struck with 
 the difference between the political systems of Great 
 Britain and of the United States. What amazes me is 
 their wonderful likeness, the small amount of change 
 which it was found needful to make, the loving retention 
 of ancient principles, the general careful working within 
 the ancient lines. And in all this I see a witness to the 
 wisdom of the famous men who reformed, rather than 
 devised, the political system of this great commonwealth. 
 And I see in it too a witness to the wisdom of those 
 shadowy beings, as they seem to us, who in the same 
 sort, in days before the first light of history, reformed 
 the constitutions of Rome and Athens. 
 
 Of the three elements in the primaeval polity, we may 
 safely say that in a free and healthy developement, it is 
 the power of the king or chief which has a tendency to 
 lessen, the power of the popular assembly which has a 
 tendency to grow. It was, I think, an error in the 
 greatest English-speaking expounder of old Hellenic 
 politics, to undervalue the ruder forms of the popular 
 assembly, such as we see in the Homeric poems, because 
 they have not reached the full developement of the ek- 
 klesia of Athens. This is really like blaming a child 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 263 
 
 because he has not yet reached the full stature of a man. 
 The Homeric assembly, we are told, is submissive, and 
 does not dispute the will of the king. So as a rule it 
 is ; but it is the submission of a child, not the submission 
 of a slave ; it is the submission of a body which has not 
 yet formed the wish to oppose, not the submission of a 
 body which wishes to oppose, but dares not. The kings 
 and great men undoubtedly sway the Homeric assembly 
 in a way in which none but the chosen leader of the 
 people could sway the Athenian assembly ; but that 
 again is simply the difference between childhood and full 
 growth ; the child willingly and becomingly accepts 
 guidance in matters in which it is the duty of the full- 
 grown man to learn how to guide himself But the 
 men of the Homeric time have already found their way 
 to all the essential attributes of a free assembly. Free- 
 dom does not necessarily imply opposition ; it only 
 implies the power of opposition, if ever opposition 
 should be needful. The Homeric assembly has in its 
 possession that hidden power which belongs to every 
 assembly which has the free use of its voice. The crowd 
 which to-day iJiouts Yea, Yea, to every proposal, has 
 the power of shouting Nay, Nay, to-morrow, if proposals 
 should be made to-morrow to which the shout of Nay, 
 Nay, would be the right answer. 
 
 In the fully-developed Athenian constitution we see 
 the three Homeric elements still in force, though vastly 
 changed in relative force. The popular assembly is 
 supreme ; its will decides everything. The people is in 
 the strictest sense sovereign ; magistrates are but the 
 ministers who carry out its will. And those magistrates 
 who historically represent the ancient kings have hardly 
 
264 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 SO high a function as to be the ministers of its will. The' 
 king has gradually changed into the archon for life, the 
 archon for ten years, the nine archons for a single year. 
 Election has displaced hereditary succession ; by another 
 change, the lot has displaced election. The archons do 
 not even preside in the political assembly ; it is only in 
 the courts of justice that the faintest shadow of their 
 ancient majesty cleaves to them. Yet all has been done 
 by gradual, regular, constitutional, change. Violence, 
 revolution, conspiracy, illegal action of any kind, is at 
 Athens always the weapon, not of the democratic 
 reformer who grows into the democratic conservative, 
 but of the oligarch who first withstands change and 
 then seeks to change things back again. Meanwhile the 
 other element of the primitive polity, the inner council, 
 survives under the Athenian democracy in a twofold 
 shape. There is the immemorial council of Areiopagos, 
 which may well have been the primitive council living 
 on. Beside it there is the special council of the matured 
 democracy, the Council of Five Hundred. This is an off- 
 shoot from the popular assembly ; but it is an offshoot 
 which could hardly have come into |j,eing, either at 
 Athens or in other democratic commonwealths, if the 
 notion of a council of some kind had not been handed 
 down from the earliest times as something no less essen- 
 tial to a finished polity than the general assembly and 
 the king or magistrate. The three elements, chief, 
 council, assembly, lived on, in some shape or other, alike 
 in aristocratic and in democratic constitutions, as long 
 as Greek independence lasted. Nay they lived on as 
 long as the shadow of independence lived on in those 
 Greek cities of Roman times, which, ^fter real freedom 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 265 
 
 had passed away, still kept the form of sovereign com- 
 monwealths, allies of Rome, when their real position was 
 that of municipalities of the all-conquering Empire. 
 
 But before those days came, one change had taken 
 place which for American students of political history 
 must ever have a special interest. The system of per- 
 fectly independent cities was proved and found wanting. 
 In the best times of Greece the perfect independence of 
 every city, great and small, had been a political ideal 
 and no more. It had been constantly interfered with by 
 the supremacy of greater cities over smaller. But mark 
 that it remained strictly the supremacy of city over city, 
 of commonwealth over commonwealth. The dependent - 
 commonwealth which Athens or Sparta or Thebes re- 
 duced to the payment of tribute or to the contribution of 
 men and ships to wars waged in the sole interest of the 
 ruling city, did not thereby cease to be a commonwealth. 
 It remained a separate commonwealth, shorn indeed of 
 many of the attributes of an independent state, but still 
 preserving all such of them as were not formally sur- 
 rendered to the ruling city. Chalkis submitted to the 
 power of Athens, and by a formal treaty accepted Athe- 
 nian superiority. But Chalkis still remained a common- 
 wealth, keeping every power of a commonwealth which 
 was not formally transferred to Athens. You on this 
 side of the Ocean will understand me when I say that 
 the reserved rights of Chalkis were but small, but that 
 they were reserved rights. Athens claimed that all 
 causes of importance between Chalkidian citizens should 
 be carried to Athens to be judged by Athenian courts 
 according to Athenian law. But none the less was 
 
266 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 Chalkidian authority the rule, and Athenian authority 
 the exception. All causes which the treaty did not form- 
 ally transfer to Athenian authority remained as before 
 to be judged by Ghalkidian courts according to Chal- 
 kidian law. Thus, even in bondage, the separate city 
 remained the ideal. A city in the strict sense it must be ; 
 a mere village is not enough ; not a few of the cities of 
 Greece arose out of the joining of several neighbouring 
 villages to form a common city. But of the union of sev- 
 eral distinct cities, standing apart, each with its own terri- 
 tory, to form one greater political whole, Greek history 
 contains one example only. The twelve cities of Attica, 
 at some time to which we cannot give a date, merged 
 their independent being in the one political community 
 of Athens. Eleusis, Marathon, and the rest, did not 
 become subjects of Athens or dependencies of Athens. 
 Their citizens received the full Athenian franchise ; all 
 Attica in a manner became Athens. And of this unique 
 event largely came the greatness and the power of 
 Athens. Sparta had a far larger territory ; but it was a 
 territory chiefly inhabited by unwilling subjects.' Thebes 
 stood out among the cities of Bceotia, as the encroaching 
 and unpopular chief of an ill-assorted federation. Athens 
 alone had a territory within which every freeman was a 
 citizen of Athens, a territory as large as could possibly 
 be administered according to the political doctrine of all 
 Greece, that the franchise of the citizen must be exercised 
 personally by himself in the general assembly. Sparta 
 then had a greater number of subjects ; Thebes had an 
 equal number of doubtful allies ; no city could boast 
 like Athens of so great a number of free and equal 
 citizens. 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 267 
 
 But it was found at last that the system of absolutely 
 independent cities broke down when Greece was threat- 
 ened by a kindred and civilized enemy on her own 
 borders. I do not hesitate to give those names to 
 Macedonia, as Macedonia stood in the days of Alex- 
 ander and his successors. In my view of things, the 
 kings of Macedonia had all along been the Greek kings 
 of a quasi Greek people. I look on the old Macedonians 
 as a people more nearly akin to the Greeks, and endowed 
 with a greater power of adopting Greek culture, not only 
 than the Semitic Phoenician, but than the Aryan kins- 
 folk of Persia, Thrace, and Western Asia. Against Greek 
 kings, commanding a powerful and united kingdom, a 
 kingdom which had begun to be penetrated by Greek 
 culture, and in which Greek military discipline had been 
 carried to a perfection surpassing that of Thebes or Spar- 
 ta, the separate cities of Greece could no longer bear up. 
 They could beat back the undisciplined myriads of Asiatic 
 empires ; they could not beat back kings like Philip and 
 Alexander, Demetrios and Antigonos. And besides the 
 Macedonian there was now the Epeirot. The Molossian 
 Pyrrhos might pass for an enemy of Greece when he 
 joined Korkyra to his realm and make Ambrakia his 
 capital ; but he at least deemed himself the champion of 
 Greeks beyond the sea in his warfare against the bar- 
 barians of Carthage and of Rome. Against such foes 
 union was needful ; but what form was union to take ? 
 Mere dominion, supremacy thinly veiled under the name 
 of alliance, had been found not to be enough. Thebes 
 called herself the head of a Boeotian confederacy ; but 
 who were so eager in the work of wiping away Thebes 
 from the earth as the men of Thespia and .Plataia, cities 
 
268 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 which had been wiped away from the earth by Thebes 
 herself in her day of might ? A form of union at once 
 closer and more willing had to be found, a form under 
 which many commonwealths might, in the face of com- 
 mon enemies or allies, be as one commonwealth, without 
 destroying the freedom and separate being of each, 
 without making any city the subject or dependant of any 
 other city. The key was found in the wider extension 
 of that form of polity with which all of you must neces- 
 sarily be better acquainted than I can be, even though 
 it is a form of polity which I have long made a special 
 object of study. This is, I need hardly say, that system 
 of Federal Government by which the attributes of sove- 
 reignty are divided, by which many commonwealths 
 agree to become one commonwealth in all matters which 
 concern their relations to other powers, while they agree 
 to remain many commonwealths in all matters which 
 concern the internal affairs of each only. Such a system, 
 or at least close approaches to it, had long been known 
 in Greece, but hitherto it had been prevalent only among 
 the more backward members of the Greek nation ; never 
 till the Macedonian times were any of the great and 
 famous cities of Greece bound to one another by a tie 
 of this kind. The reason is plain ; for a great city, per- 
 haps a ruling city, to surrender the most cherished 
 attribute of independence was no small sacrifice. And 
 the most cherished attribute of independence was sur- 
 rendered when a city agreed to have all its relations to 
 other cities and powers settled for it by some council or 
 assembly in which it had only one voice among others. 
 It is not wonderful then that the Federal system began in 
 Greece among the more backward tribes among which 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 269 
 
 the full growth of Greek city life had never shown 
 itself — that it was next extended to the smaller cities 
 which sooner learned that there was no strength but in 
 union, and which found that equal federation was a better 
 ■form of union than subjection to a ruling head. But it 
 was only slowly, and in some cases unwillingly, that the 
 great cities consented to sink their absolute independence 
 in any federal union, and some of them, Athens above 
 all, never entered intq any federal connexion at all. Still 
 in the later days of Greek independence by far the 
 greater part of the soil of Greece was mapped out among 
 a system of federal unions. Of these the great- 
 est and most illustrious, the League of Achaia, which 
 gradually grew into a League of all Peloponnesos, has 
 always struck me as being one of the most striking and 
 instructive political phaenomena in history, and not the 
 least as being in many respects a wonderful foreshadow- 
 ing of the greater Confederation on whose soil I now 
 stand. 
 
 The League of Achaia was a league of small states, 
 of states which did not know the art of printing ; yet 
 surely there is something well worthy of our study in 
 the fact that two confederations, so widely removed in 
 time and place and scale, should show so many points 
 of likeness as are shown between the United States of 
 Peloponnesos and the United States of North America. 
 But at present it will suit my purpose better to speak 
 of a point of unlikeness. While the position of the 
 Peloponnesian cities and of the American colonies had 
 enough of likeness to lead to much of likeness in the 
 federal constitutions which they severally devised, they 
 differed in one important point, in that point in which 
 
 18 
 
270 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 the old Greek commonwealths differ as a class from the 
 states of modern Europe and America. The unwilling- 
 ness of many of the greatest cities of Greece to enter 
 the Achaian League or any other of the Greek federal 
 systems was not wholly unreasonable. When Corinth, 
 Argos, Sparta, Elis, joined the League, some willingly, 
 some unwillingly, the sacrifice which they had to make 
 was greater than that which a smaller city had to make. 
 In the federal assembly, the sovereign authority of the 
 League in matters of peace and war, every citizen of every 
 confederate city had a right to appear; but the votes 
 were taken, not by heads but by cities. Each city had 
 one vote, and no more. The greatest city and the small- 
 est, the city from which one citizen was present and the 
 city from which a thousand citizens were present, had 
 the same voice in deciding the general judgement of the 
 assembly. Such an arrangement was manifestly unfair 
 to the great cities ; it was unfair that Corinth should 
 have no greater voice in the affairs of the League than 
 Tritaia ; it was unfair that Corinth should have to sub- 
 mit to a declaration of war or to the conclusion of a 
 peace against which Corinth had given her single voice, 
 and which had been decided against her by the single 
 voice of Tritaia. But the only other arrangement which 
 was possible according to Greek political ideas would 
 have been no less unfair to the smaller cities, and still 
 more unfair to the distant cities. This would have been 
 to count, not by cities but by heads, to let the decision 
 of the assembly go by the simple majority of those who 
 happened to be present in it. This would clearly have 
 been to give an unfair advantage to the great cities, and 
 still more to the neighbouring cities. If the assembly 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 2/1 
 
 was held in one of the great cities, its citizens, who 
 could come in a body, could easily have out-voted all 
 the rest of the League. A city which was at once small 
 and distant would have had practically no influence 
 whatever. The system actually followed was certainly 
 less unfair than this would have been. For though it 
 was unreasonable that Corinth should have formally no 
 greater voice in the affairs of the League than Tritaia, 
 we may be sure that Corinth always enjoyed a much 
 greater share of practical influence than Tritaia. 
 
 Now in your federal system, and in the federal system 
 of Switzerland, which in this respect follows yours, both 
 these forms of unfairness are avoided. The problem is 
 this : Given a confederation the members of which are 
 in one sense equal, in another sense unequal. Such are 
 the cities of Achaia, the cantons of Switzerland, the 
 states of North America. As members of an equal 
 union, entering it willingly on equal terms, enjoying 
 equal rights, the cities, cantons, states, are in the strictest 
 sense equal. But, on the other hand, in all the three 
 confederations the members are manifestly unequal in 
 extent of territory, in wealth, in population, in military 
 resources. The question is how to respect both the 
 equality and the inequality. The states are equal in 
 rights and dignity; no state therefore must be treated 
 in any way as inferior to any other state. But it would 
 be practically unreasonable to give the smallest state 
 exactly the same influence in the affairs of the Confed- 
 eration as the greatest. You have solved the problem, 
 the Swiss have adopted your solution of it, by the estab- 
 lishment of a federal assembly formed of two houses. 
 One of these embodies the equality of the states, the 
 
272 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 ■ other embodies their inequality. You have one house 
 which represents the states as states, in which each state, 
 great and small, has an equal voice. You have another 
 house which represents the federal nation directly as a 
 nation, and in which each state is represented strictly in 
 proportion to its population. Thus both dangers are 
 avoided ; the small states are not swamped by the great 
 ones, neither are the great ones swamped by the small 
 ones. Perfect fairness can be dealt out to both classes, 
 while in Achaia some measure of unfairness would not 
 fail to be done to one or the other class, and in the system 
 which was actually adopted some unfairness was actually 
 done to the greater cities. Now wherein lies the differ- 
 ence, what is it that has enabled America and Switzerland 
 better to deal with this great problem in federal govern- 
 ment than Achaia did or could deal ? This whole differ- 
 ence lies in the one word " represent." In the Greek 
 cities there was no representation ; they knew not the 
 political device of later times by which certain chosen 
 citizens are commissioned to act on behalf of their fel- 
 lows, by which a select assembly is entitled to act in the 
 name of the people. Hence comes the real difference 
 between those ancient commonwealths and the states of 
 our own day. The citizens of a Greek commonwealth, 
 consisting of a single city and its surrounding territory, 
 could and did habitually meet in one place. The rule 
 applies alike to oligarchic and to democratic constitu- 
 tions. In both alike the sovereign authority was vested 
 in the general assembly of all qualified citizens. Whether 
 this last phrase was or was not equivalent to all citizens, 
 a most important difference for many purposes, made no 
 difference for this purpose. In either jase all who were 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 2/3 
 
 qualified to vote at all voted directly, and not through 
 representatives, in the greatest affairs of state. Such a 
 constitution as this is now unknown except in six of the 
 smallest Swiss cantons ; it was the primitive constitution 
 of some of your states ; it is so no longer. This is simply 
 because, with these few exceptions, the political commu- 
 nities of modern Europe and America, small as some of 
 them seem as compared with others, are still too large 
 to allow of all their citizens habitually meeting in one 
 place. As compared with the city commonwealths of 
 Greece, they may all pass for great states. They were 
 therefore all used to representation in their internal con- 
 stitutions. When therefore the American constitution 
 was framed in the last century, when the Swiss consti- 
 tution was framed in the present, the states which formed 
 the two Confederations were perfectly familiar with re- 
 presentation in their local constitutions ; they could there- 
 fore easily apply that system to the federal constitution, and 
 could apply it in such a way as to represent the two great 
 facts of the federal union, the equality of the states and 
 their inequality. The Achaians, unused to representa- 
 tion in their several cities, failed to take the great step 
 of inventing it as something new for use in their federal 
 system. Here comes the real difference between small 
 states and great ones. Modern Switzerland, though it 
 certainly knows the use of printing, is, we are told, too 
 small for England or America to learn anything from its 
 political experience. Yet I think that I have shown that, 
 in some not unimportant respects, the political experience 
 of America is exactly the same as that of Switzerland. 
 Small as Switzerland may be, I think you will hardly 
 despise the witness which that land bears to the wisdom. 
 
274 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 of your institutions in adopting some of them foi^ its own 
 use. And the witness is the more valuable because the 
 tribute which Switzerland has paid to America fs not 
 the tribute of blind imitators. Switzerland has adopted 
 some of the institutions of America, those which suited 
 its condition and agreed with its political traditions. 
 Other American institutions, which did not suit the con- 
 dition of Switzerland and did not fall in with its political 
 traditions, it has not adopted. That is, once more, like 
 causes produce like results, so far as they are like causes. 
 And the rule works all the same, even though both the 
 causes and the results may differ a good deal in physi- 
 cal size. Wisdom, freedom, regard to the conditions of 
 one state and of another, are elements which go further 
 towards the making of political constitutions than differ- 
 ences in extent on the map or distance in the chronolog- 
 ical table. And these great moral influences themselves 
 seem hardly capable of physical measurement. 
 
 And now one word to wind up with regard to the matter 
 with which we began, the presence or absence of print- 
 ing — I might perhaps add the presence or absence of 
 the electric telegraph. When the remark about printing 
 which I quoted was made, the most advanced regions of 
 Europe and America were as ignorant of the electric 
 telegraph as the old Athenians and Achaians were of 
 the art of printing. For aught I know, some very go- 
 ahead persons of the new generation may by this time 
 despise the times before the electric telegraph in as lordly 
 a style as my friend older than myself despised the times 
 before printing. The contempt would be about equally 
 rational in the two cases. Yet both printing and the 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 275 
 
 electric telegraph have their use, and their political use. 
 We have seen that the most important political dif- 
 ference between larger and smaller states is that 
 representation, which has no necessary place in the 
 smaller states, has a necessary place in the larger. 
 Now comes in the main use of the invention of the 
 fifteenth century and the invention of the nineteenth. 
 A state so small as to allow of all its citizens habitu- 
 ally coming together in one place can, as far as its 
 own affairs are concerned, do very well without either. 
 Printing and telegraphs are at most needed for foreign 
 affairs ; about domestic affairs every citizen can learn 
 everything for himself without their help. I do not 
 believe that printing and telegraphs would have been 
 any great gain in the Athenian democracy; I even 
 believe that in some respects they would have brought 
 with them a certain loss. But I believe that both those 
 inventions would have been useful in the Achaian 
 League, simply because all the free citizens of the Pelo- 
 ponnesian cities could not habitually appear in the federal 
 assembly. It would therefore have been useful for them 
 to have full and speedy reports of what was done by 
 those who did appear there, those who, whether they 
 were formally chosen or not, were practically their repre- 
 sentatives. Still all these things are merely external dif- 
 ferences ; the real likenesses, the real unlikenesses, be- 
 tween the political experience of one state and that of 
 another lie a good deal deeper in the great facts of 
 man's nature and man's history. Printing, telegraphs, 
 all such like external accidents, have their use and their 
 importance, but they hardly touch the root of any mat- 
 ter. Both England and other parts of Europe contrived 
 
276 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 to do some things which are not wholly to be despised 
 in days when neither printing nor telegraph was known. 
 And some parts of North America contrived to do some 
 things which are not wholly to be despised in days when 
 printing was known, but when the telegraph was not. 
 When we are tempted to despise the days of Perikles or 
 Aratos as too far removed from us in accidental circum- 
 stances for their political experiences to be of any use, 
 it would be as well to remember that the deeds of Simon 
 of Montfort were not announced to the public by the 
 press, and that the deeds of Washington were not an- 
 nounced by the electric telegraph. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 2Cte aristocratic (ftitg. 
 
 From Greece we naturally pass into Italy. In a sur- 
 vey of general European history it is as much a matter 
 of obvious order to give Italy the second place as it is 
 to give Greece the first. So to do is simply to obey the 
 laws laid upon us by the geographical position of the 
 two lands. The history of Europe, the history of Aryan 
 man in Europe, the history of man as a really civilized 
 and political being, begins in the lands round the Med- 
 iterranean, and of them it begins in the islands and pen- 
 insulas of Greece. It was Greece that had to bear the 
 first brunt of the struggle between East and West, 
 between Asia and Europe, between despotism and free- 
 dom, the struggle which, heightened and sharpened by 
 the teaching of a new religion on either side, grew into 
 the strife between Christendom and Islam, into the Cru- 
 sades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, into the 
 eternal Eastern question of our own day. It was Greece 
 to whose lot it fell to lead in the way in art, in literature, 
 and in philosophy, and in things better than art and litera- 
 ture and philosophy, in civil justice and political freedom. 
 In all these things Greece, we may say, is given unto us 
 for an ensample. But it is almost wholly as an ensample 
 that Greece is given to us. Of instruction in the way 
 of analogy, in the way of instances from which general 
 
 277 
 
278 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 principles may be inferred, no history is richer than that 
 of Greece. But we can hardly say that the history of 
 Greece has any great direct bearing, in the way of cause 
 and effect, on the history of our own people or on that 
 of any of the other nations of the modern world. The 
 great chain of direct cause and effect which stretches 
 on without a break to the latest events of our own day 
 begins in the seven hills by the Tiber. The whole his- 
 tory of the world has been determined by the geological 
 fact that at a point a little below the junction of the Ti- 
 ber and the Anio the isolated hills stand nearer to one 
 another than most of the other hills, of Latium. On a 
 site marked out above all other sites for dominion, the 
 centre of Italy, the centre of Europe, as Europe then 
 was, a site at the junction of three of the great nations 
 of Italy, and which had the great river as its highway 
 to lands beyond the bounds of Italy, stood two low hills, 
 the hill which bore the name of Latin Saturn, and the 
 hill at the meaning of whose name of Palatine scholars 
 will perhaps guess for ever. These two hills, occupied 
 by men of two of the nations of Italy, stood so near to 
 one another that a strait choice indeed was laid on those 
 who dwelled on them. They must either join together 
 on terms closer than those which commonly united 
 Italian leagues, or they must live a life of border warfare 
 more ceaseless, more bitter, than the ordinary warfare of 
 Italian enemies. Legend, with all likelihood, tells us 
 that warfare was tried; history, with all certainty, tells 
 us that the final choice was union. The two hills were 
 fenced with a single wall ; the men who dwelled on them 
 changed from wholly separate communities into tribes 
 of a single city. Changes of the same kind took place on 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 279 
 
 not a few spots both of Greece and Italy; not a few of the 
 most famous cities of both lands grew on this wise out of 
 the union of earlier detached settlements. But no other 
 union of the kind, not even that which called Sparta into 
 being out of five villages of an older day, could compare 
 in its effects on all later time with the union of those 
 two small hill-fortresses into a single city. For that city 
 was Rome; the hill of Saturn became the site of Rome's 
 capitol, the scene of her triumphs, the home of her 
 patron gods. The hill on the other side of the swampy 
 dale became the dwelling-place of Rome's Caesars, and 
 handed on its name of Palathun as the name for the 
 homes of all the kings of the earth. Around those 
 hills as a centre, Latium, Italy, Mediterranean Europe, 
 were gathered in, till the world was Roman, or rather till 
 the world was Rome. If Greece was given to us as an 
 ensample, Rome was given to us as a mistress or rather 
 as a queen. Athens might guide the nations as a 
 model ; the mission of Rome was to rule them as an 
 Imperial lady. Wherever we go, in Europe or in the 
 lands beyond the Ocean which have been settled from 
 Europe, we cannot escape from Rome, or rather wherever 
 we go we carry Rome with us. What Rome has been 
 in the history of the world, what Rome has been to our- 
 selves and to our forefathers, I cannot better set forth 
 than in words which I once addressed to another audi- 
 ence. " Wherever men speak her tongue, wherever men 
 revere her law, wherever men profess the faith which 
 Europe and European colonies have learned of her, there 
 Rome is still." 
 
 But it is not on the great oecumenical position of 
 Rome that I wish chiefly to enlarge this evening. I 
 
28o PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 wish now rather to dwell on some other and earlier 
 aspects of the' Roman commonwealth, looked at more 
 directly as a commonwealth, and specially as compared 
 with the commonwealths of Greece. On one side of the 
 Greek commonwealths I said but little, because it is a 
 side of them which can really be better studied from the 
 point of view of Rome. I refer to the disputes between 
 orders in the same city, a side of political life on which 
 the history of Rome, legendary as it is in many of its 
 stages, gives us more instruction than any other history. 
 And it is a side which supplies us with abundance of il- 
 lustrations for the history of Switzerland and mediaeval 
 Germany, with some even for the history of England. 
 No city gives us so many lessons as Rome gives with 
 regard to the origin of hereditary distinctions between 
 man and man. And on another side, Rome, as having 
 formed a greater dominion than any other city ever 
 formed, has more to tell us than any other city as to the 
 various relations of alliance, dependence, and subjection, 
 between one city and another. 
 
 One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the 
 great commonwealth where I now find myself is the 
 absence of all hereditary distinctions between one man 
 and another. And I have no doubt that to many minds, 
 in America and out of it, it would be thought quite 
 enough explanation of the fact to say that the United 
 States have a republican form of government. It seems 
 to be somehow taken for granted that, wherever there 
 is a republic, that is, I imagine, where there is no hered- 
 itary king, there can be no such things as nobility, aris- 
 tocracy, or hereditary distinctions of any kind. Yet 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 28 1 
 
 there have been in the history of the world such cities 
 as Sparta and Corinth, as Bern and Freiburg, as Genoa 
 and Lucca, as Venice and Ragusa, above all, as Rome 
 herself. And I shall perhaps be thought to be setting 
 forth a strange paradox, if I should say that, instead of 
 a republic necessarily shutting out aristocracy, it is only 
 in a republic that a true aristocracy can exist. And I 
 should be thought to be putting forth a strangef para- 
 dox still, if I were to say that I am inclined to bless the 
 institution of peerage in England because it saved us 
 from the curse of a nobility, and if I were further to add 
 that I believe that it is mainly owing to the institution 
 of peerage in England that there are no hereditary dis- 
 tinctions in the United States. 
 
 As it is often supposed that aristocracy and a republi- 
 can form of government are inconsistent with one 
 another, so it is ofteh supposed that aristocracy neces- 
 sarily implies a system of titles. Now to my paradox 
 that it is only in a republic that aristocracy can exist, I 
 must add the further paradox that, where titles, mere 
 titles, become needful, true aristocracy has come to an 
 end. Perhaps my meaning may become a little plainer 
 if I tell you how, a few months back, poring about in 
 a Dalmatian churchyard, I lighted on the tomb of one 
 who was described as having been at one stage of his 
 life. Patrician and Senator of the Republic of Ragusa, 
 and at another as having been Count this or that, and 
 Chamberlain to his Imperial, Royal, and Apostolic 
 Majesty. Which, I would ask, of those states of life 
 was the more noble, the more aristocratic? Which 
 came nearest to having a share in the rule of the best, 
 the Patrician and Senator of the Republic, or the Count 
 
282 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 and Chamberlain of the Apostolic King? Or, I may 
 ask, would Francesco Morosini have been more noble, 
 more exalted in any way, if instead of the simple 
 " Peloponnesiacus " upon his tomb, he could have added 
 the titles of a hundred lordships and earldoms ? Would 
 ought have been added to the dignity, the nobility, the 
 long patrician pedigree, of Publius Cornelius Scipio and 
 Quintys Fabius Maximus, if the one had been made, 
 English fashion, into a Duke of Zama, and the other, 
 Spanish fashion, into a Duke of Delay ? 
 
 The proofs of my paradoxes may be found in various 
 parts of the world's history. My present business is to 
 deal with the light which is thrown on such matters by 
 the histoiy of the Roman commonwealth. There we 
 shall see, in a strictly republican city which shuddered 
 at the name of king, the long-abiding sway of a power- 
 ful and exclusive aristocracy, an aristocracy whose power 
 rested on immemorial legal sanctions, and which it needed 
 a long constitutional struggle to overthrow. We shall 
 then see the growth of a second aristocracy, almost as 
 powerful, almost as exclusive, but whose power rested 
 on no legal sanction at all. We shall see, in short, as we 
 may see in the earlier history of England, an immemorial 
 nobility of birth give way to a new nobility of office, 
 and the nobility of office again grow into a new nobility 
 of birth. 
 
 In the oldest forms of nobility, the origin of the dis- 
 tinction i5 strictly immemorial ; there is no record of the 
 way it began, no record how this and that house in a state 
 came to be looked on as more noble than others. In 
 the later nobility of office, the origin of the distinction 
 is matter of record ; at least it will be matter of actual 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 283 
 
 record in some cases, and matter of unavoidable infer- 
 ence in others. Both these forms of nobility we see at 
 Rome, and the histoiy of Rome sets before us one very 
 usual way in which the older form of nobility arose. 
 The beginning of the distinction between patricians and 
 plebeians at Rome is, strictly speaking, unrecorded ; but 
 there can be no doubt that it was in its origin a local 
 division. It was the division between the old citizens 
 and the new, between the dwellers on certain of the 
 hills and dales by the Tiber and the dwellers on certain 
 others. Dim as is the only light which we have as to 
 the early history of Rome, thus much at least we can 
 see. We can easily believe that in the very beginning of 
 the settlements by the Tiber, new settlers would be wel- 
 come from any quarter. But, in all such cases, as soon 
 as the new community felt itself strong in possession, as 
 soon as its own constitution was thoroughly organized, 
 as soon as local associations, local traditions, local wor- 
 ships, had grown up, the tale was made up, and the 
 gate was shut against new comers. The commonwealth 
 now takes the form of a hereditary tribe, formed of he- 
 reditary ^^«^^j. The members of the commonwealth have 
 political rights, political power, common possessions, as 
 the commonwealth. The well-known Horatian quotation, 
 
 " Privatus illis census erat brevis, 
 Commune magnum ; " 
 
 is, in these early societies, true in the most literal 
 sense. Common property is the rule ; private property 
 is an exception. Do not think that I am arguing 
 against the institution of private property. There is 
 such a thing as progress. I once asked a friend specially 
 
284 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 learned in early institutions and customs whether he did 
 not look on private property as an innovation. He 
 answered, " Yes, as man is an innovation." But as it is 
 possible to look on the existence of man, however great 
 an innovation, as an improvement on the state of 
 things before man came into being, so private pro- 
 perty, though an innovation, may still be a wholesome 
 innovation. But an innovation it certainly is ; the pro- 
 perty of the tribe is older than the property of the in- 
 dividual. The property of the individual consists in 
 the beginning of the portion of the common property 
 granted by common consent to this or that man, either 
 as his share in a general allotment or as the special 
 reward of some service done to the community. The 
 reward of Horatius is typical ; 
 
 " They gave him of the corn-land 
 That was of public right 
 As much as two stout oxen 
 
 Could plough from morn till night." 
 
 And for a long time the aggregate of such lots and 
 grants in private hands will be less than the amount 
 of land still held by the community. This is a most 
 important point to be borne in mind in studying the 
 history of the early commonwealths ; every tribe, city, 
 or the like, was, not only a body possessed of political 
 rights, but a body possessed of common lands. The 
 admission of new citizens to equal rights not only 
 affected the exclusive political rights of the old, but, if 
 they were admitted to equal rights in the common land, 
 it actually lessened their property. Those who have 
 watched the politics of Switzerland in later times will 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 285 
 
 have noticed the frequent disputes with regard to the 
 Niedergelassenen, those who have moved from one 
 Genieinde, Commune, or parish, to another, whether in 
 their own canton or elsewhere. A man who thus 
 changed from one canton to another acquired by the 
 federal constitution now in force full political rights in 
 the canton of his adoption. But he did not therefore 
 acquire full local rights in the commune of his adoption. 
 For that commune was a body of hereditary possessors, 
 holding their common land by as good a right as a pri- 
 vate man holdj his. So we are tempted to speak; but 
 historically it would be more accurate to say that the 
 utmost that we can say of the private man is that he 
 holds his land by as good a right as the commune holds 
 theirs. ■ In the property of the hereditary burghers of 
 the commune the newly settled stranger had no share ; 
 he could obtain a share only by special favour, as the 
 reward of special services, or by such a payment as might 
 make it worth the while of the hereditary burghers to 
 admit him into their number. The questions which have 
 been raised on these points are well worthy the heed of 
 students of comparative politics ; they throw no small 
 light on the agrarian disputes at Rome. 
 
 Thus, we may be sure, the hills of Rome were first 
 settled by separate bodies, which gradually joined 
 into one political body, and formed the original Roman 
 People with its ox\^vs\i\. folkland or ager publicus. Three 
 tribes, settlers on three hills, were the elements of which 
 the original commonwealth was made. Whether there 
 was anything like a nobility within the tribes themselves, 
 whether certain houses had any precedence, any prefer- 
 ence in the disposal of offices, we have no means of 
 
 19 
 
286 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 judging. That certain houses are far more prominent 
 in legend and history than others may suggest such a 
 thought, but does not prove it. But one thing is certain ; 
 these three tribes, these older settlers, were the original 
 Roman People, which for awhile numbered no members 
 but themselves. They were the patres, the fathers, a 
 name which in its origin meant no more than such plain 
 names as goodman, housefather, and the like. In the 
 Roman polity the father only could be looked on as 
 a citizen in the highest sense ; his children, his grand- 
 children, were in his power, from which,»just like slaves, 
 they could be released only by his own special act. 
 Such was the origin of the name fathers, patres, patri- 
 cians, a name round which such proud associations 
 gathered, as the three tribes who had once been the 
 whole Roman people shrank up into a special noble 
 class in the midst of a new Roman people which grew 
 up around them, but which they did not admit to the 
 same rights as themselves. 
 
 The incorporation of a third tribe marks the end of 
 the first period of Roman history. These were the Lu- 
 ceres of the Ccelian, admitted perhaps at first with rights 
 not quite on a level with those of the two earlier tribes, 
 the Ramnes of the Palatine, the oldest Romans of all, 
 and the Titles of the Capitoline or hill of Saturn. The 
 oldest Roman people was now formed. No fourth tribe 
 was ever admitted ; the later tribes of Rome, it must be 
 remembered, are a separate division which have nothing 
 to do with these old patrician tribes. And it must have 
 been a most rare favour for either individuals or whole 
 houses to be received into any of the three original tribes. 
 The legend of the admission of the famous Claudian 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 287 
 
 house into the tribe of the Tities, whether we accept it 
 as historical or not, at least marks such an adoption as 
 possible ; it marks it also as most rare and exceptional. 
 The constitution of the early commonwealth may be 
 called democratic, but democratic of a type strongly 
 tempered by that reverence for age and office which was 
 at all times characteristic of the Roman people. It was 
 democratic so far as the supreme power lay in the gen- 
 eral assembly of the people, the Roman popuhis. But 
 all the three elements of the ancient polity were there in 
 their fulness. If there was the assembly, there was also 
 the chief, taking neither the form of a hereditary mon- 
 arch nor of a republican magistrate ; he was a king, but 
 a king chosen for life only. And surely nowhere did 
 the third element in the state, the power intermediate 
 between chief and people, appear in greater dignity 
 than in the shape of the Senate of Rome from its very 
 first beginnings. 
 
 Now I must ask you to take notice that there is no 
 kind of inconsistency in a government being democratic 
 as far as the privileged order is concerned, and oligarchic 
 as far as concerns all who lie outside the privileged 
 order. Take for instance the old constitution of Poland. 
 When sixty thousand gentlemen on horseback came 
 together to choose a king, and were required to choose 
 him by an unanimous vote, it was the narrowest of 
 oligarchies as regarded the rest of the nation ; but it 
 was surely the wildest of democracies as regarded the 
 equestrian order itself But, what concerns us more, 
 there was a point of view from which every Greek 
 democracy, Athens among the foremost of them, might 
 be called oligarchic. The citizens might everywhere be 
 
288 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 called a privileged order. If they were a privileged 
 order as regarded no one else, they were a privileged 
 order as regarded the slaves. But in most Greek cities, 
 and specially in the great trading cities, there was a large 
 class of inhabitants, personally free, but enjoying no po- 
 litical rights and often only very imperfect civil rights. 
 For mere residence went for nothing ; mere birth in the 
 land went for nothing ; citizenship could be had only by 
 descent from citizen parents or by special grant from 
 the sovereign body. Some cities were more liberal of 
 their citizenship than others ; sometimes a city found 
 it expedient to make a large creation of citizens ; but 
 nowhere did mere residence, even from generation to 
 generation, of itself convey any right. The case was 
 exactly analogous to the case of the Swiss Gemeinden 
 of which I just spoke; it was exactly analogous to the 
 case of the freemen in many English boroughs. In all 
 these cases there are some common rights, there is some 
 common property, which belongs exclusively to the 
 privileged burghers, to which mere residence gives no 
 right, but admission to which can be obtained only by 
 birth or by such other means, purchase, marriage, ser- 
 vitude, as the custom of the place prescribes. In all 
 these cases the hereditary burghers feel no more call to 
 give a share of their political rights or of their common 
 property to the stranger within their gates than a private 
 land-owner feels himself called on to divide his estate 
 with the new comer who settles in his neighbourhood. 
 Owing to the circumstances of English boroughs — owing 
 in truth to the strength of the central power which hin- 
 dered even the greatest English cities from being like 
 the cities of Greece or of Switzerland, — in not a few Eng- 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 289 
 
 lish towns the hereditary freemen have become an infe- 
 rior and despised class. But they are none the less 
 historically the representatives of the original burghers 
 of the town, around whom all other classes have grown 
 up. They are in truth the old citizens, the fellows of 
 the Ejipatridai of Atliens and of the patricians of Rome. 
 Now, if the privileged body of citizens is small, and 
 if circumstances tend to make the settlement of non- 
 privileged residents large, here is one of the means by 
 which a privileged order in the narrower sense, a nobility 
 in the rnidst of a nation or people, may arise. An order 
 which takes in few or no new members tends to extinc- 
 tion ; if it does not die out, it will at least sensibly 
 lessen. But there is no limit to the growth of the non- 
 privileged class outside. Thus the number of the old 
 burghers will be daily getting smaller, the number of 
 the new residents will be daily getting larger, till those 
 who once formed the whole people put on step by step 
 the character of an exclusive nobility in the midst of the 
 extended nation which has grown up around them. By 
 this time they have acquired all the attributes of nobil- 
 ity, smallness of. numbers, antiquity, privilege. And 
 their possession of the common land — a possession 
 shared constantly by a smaller number — is«likely to give 
 them a fourth attribute which, vulgarly at least, goes to 
 swell the conception of nobility, the attribute of wealth. 
 And this character of a nobility within a nation comes out 
 yet more strongly if, as often happens, the non-privileged 
 class is gradually admitted to some share in the rights 
 of citizenship, but not to all. They may for instance re- 
 ceive the civil rights, but not the political. Indeed in the 
 Greek commonwealths the best definition of democracy 
 
290 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 and oligarchy would be that in the democracy political 
 rights are enjoyed by all who enjoy civil rights, while in 
 the oligarchy political rights are confined to a part only 
 of those who enjoy civil rights. Or again, the non- 
 privileged class may advance a step further; it may 
 obtain a share of political rights, but not their fulness. 
 The new citizens may form an organized body with an 
 assembly of its own, clothed with authority over its own 
 members. Or they may be admitted into the general as- 
 sembly of the commonwealth, but they may be refused a 
 share in the public land, and may be held unqualified for 
 high office. But when the excluded order has got as far 
 as this, we may say that oligarchy is doomed. The great 
 principle of human nature which leads him who has taken 
 the inch to go on to take the ell makes it certain that, 
 when such an advance as this has been made, all other 
 barriers will presently be broken down. But a wise and 
 moderate aristocracy, which honestly admits the rest of 
 the people to civil rights, which gives them the protection 
 of just laws in their private affairs while it shuts them 
 out from all share in public affairs, which treats them 
 personally with kindness and consideration, as its chil- 
 dren rather than its subjects — such an aristocracy may 
 keep its excl^give political power for ages. So it seems 
 to have been 'at Corinth, at Rhodes, at Massalia, and 
 others of the more moderate and better governed Greek 
 aristocratic cities. So it was at Venice and at Ragusa, 
 though at Venice at least the patricians were not a body 
 of old citizens round whom an unrepresented people had 
 grown, but rather a group of families which had drawn 
 all power into their own hands" to the exclusion of the 
 rest of the people. 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 29 1 
 
 Thus around the original people of Rome, the popjilus, 
 the patres, the three ancient tribes, the settlers on the 
 three earliest hills of Rome, arose a second people, the 
 plebs. The whole history of Rome is a history of incor- 
 poration. The first union between the Capitoline and 
 Palatine hills was the first stage of the process which at 
 last made Romans of all the nations round the Mediter- 
 ranean sea. But the equal incorporation of which that 
 union was the type had now ceased, not to begin again 
 for ages. Whatever amount of belief we give to the 
 legends of Roman wars and conquests under the kings, 
 we can hardly doubt that the territory of several neigh- 
 bouring towns was incorporated with the Roman state, 
 and that their people, whether they removed to Rome or 
 went on occupying their own lands elsewhere, became 
 Romans, but not as yet full Romans. They were Romans 
 in so far as they ceased to be members of any other state, 
 in so far as they obeyed the laws of Rome, and served in 
 the Roman armies. But they were not Romans in the 
 sense of being admitted into the original Roman body ; 
 they had no votes in the original Roman assembly ; they 
 had no share in its public land ; they were not admissible 
 to the high offices of the state. They had an organization 
 of their own ; they had their own assemblies, their own 
 magistrates, their own sacred rites, different in many 
 things from those of the older Roman People. And we 
 must remember that, throughout the Roman history, 
 when any town or district was admitted to any stage, per- 
 fect or imperfect, of Roman citizenship, its people were 
 admitted without regard to any distinctions which had 
 existed among them in their elder homes. The patricians 
 of a Latin town admitted to the Roman franchise became 
 
292 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 plebeians at Rome. Thus, from the beginning, the Roman 
 plebs contained families which, if the word " noble " has 
 any real meaning, were fully as noble as any house of 
 the three elder tribes. Not a few too of the plebeians 
 were rich ; rich and poor, they were the more part land- 
 owners ; no mistake can be greater than that which looks 
 on the Roman plebs as the low multitude of a town. 
 As we first see them, the truest aspect of them is that 
 of a second nation within the Roman state, an inferior, a 
 subject, nation, shut out from all political power, subject 
 in many things to practical oppression, but which, by its 
 very organization as a subject nation, was the more stirred 
 up to seek, and the better enabled to obtain, full equality 
 with the elder nation to which it stood side by side as a 
 subject neighbour. 
 
 Into the details of the struggle it is no part of my 
 business to enter. It may be, as some stories hint, that, 
 either during the time of the kings or at the time of the 
 change from kings to consuls, many members of the sub- 
 ject order were raised to a place among the elder tribes. 
 If this be so, it marks the distinction between the old and 
 the new citizens, and the inferior position of the latter, as 
 firmly established. And the transfer of particular men 
 or particular families from the lower rank to the higher, 
 would be no gain to the lower order, but rather a loss.. 
 It would really be the transfer of some of their own leaders 
 to the ranks of their masters. But the legislation which 
 bears the name of Servius Tullius, which for several 
 purposes, both military and political, united the two 
 orders in a single body, marks a real, and the first, step 
 in advance. Practically it did but little; but it opened the 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 293 
 
 way for much. On the other hand, we must remember 
 that the change from kings to consuls was no immediate 
 gain to the subject order. Both here and in many other 
 cases We must beware of being led away by the mere 
 names, liberty and republic. There can be no doubt that 
 the transfer of those Vast powers with which Rome 
 entrusted her rulers from a king chosen for life to two 
 responsible magistrates chosen for a year was, in its final 
 results, a great step in advance ; but it Was an immediate 
 loss for the excluded plebs. A king, ruling in the interest 
 of the whole people, was far more likely to overlook dis- 
 tinctions among his people, far more likely to shelter the 
 subject order from wrong, than magistrates chosen out of 
 the ruling order, chosen largely by the ruling order, and 
 in no small degree chosen for the purpose of maintaining 
 the exclusive dominion of that order. . 
 
 In the struggle between the two nations in the Roman 
 state we see two marked stages. In the first the struggle 
 is to win deliverance from actual oppression. In the 
 second the object is to obtain political equality with the 
 former oppressors. The great stage in the former struggle 
 is when the patricians, the elder citizens, were brought 
 to consent to the treaty of the Sacred Hill. This whole 
 story, though it belongs to a time before the beginning 
 of contemporary records, so thoroughly illustrates the 
 position of the two orders that we may be sure that the 
 main outline at least of the story comes from a trust- 
 worthy tradition. The plebs, wearied out with oppres- 
 sion, left Rome and proposed to found a new city on the 
 hills beyond the Anio. The effect of this migration 
 Would have been to leave the patricians once more the 
 whole Roman people, the only possessors of the Roman 
 
294 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 hills. The plebeians, naturally enough, could still bear 
 the thought of ceasing to be Romans ; they had found 
 their Roman character more burthensome than profitable. 
 But the patricians could no longer fall back on their old 
 position as the only Romans. They had too long been 
 the dominant order in an enlarged city to be ready to 
 fall back on the time when their forefathers first sat 
 down on the three hills. But we must do them the jus- 
 tice to allow that their position was not wholly a selfish 
 one ; if they sought their own exclusive greatness, they 
 sought it only in the character of Romans. While the 
 plebeians could still bear the thought of ceasing to be 
 Romans, the patricians could not bear that Rome should 
 be weakened by the secession of the plebeians. The 
 Treaty of the Sacred Mount, the Sacred Laws, ordained 
 and sworn to with all the solemnities of a treaty between 
 two nations, ended this first period of strife ; but the 
 distinction between the orders, as two nations in one 
 city, was marked more clearly than ever. To pur- 
 chase the return of the plebs, the patricians brought 
 themselves to acknowledge the plebs as an order, if 
 inferior to themselves, yet in some sort co-ordinate 
 with themselves, to acknowledge the tribunes, the ma- 
 gistrates of the plebs, as persons sacred and inviolable, to 
 acknowledge their power to summon before the assem- 
 bly of the plebs any man of the patricians who did any- 
 thing contrary to the agreement between the orders. 
 This was strictly according to the Italian law of nations ; 
 but at the same time no power helped more towards the 
 advance of the plebs, not only by its practical use in pun- 
 ishing offenders against the plebeian order, but by asserting 
 the position and powers of the plebeian assembly, and 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 295 
 
 helping to win for it the place of an assembly whose 
 resolves affected the whole Roman people, and not merely 
 the plebeian part of it. 
 
 In all the early disputes between the orders, the ques- 
 tion of the folkland, the ager publicus, held the first place. 
 On this matter it is not hard to throw ourselves into the 
 position of the disputants on either side. We can quite 
 understand the position of the patricians. Their simple 
 argument would be, " This is our land, the common land 
 of the original Roman people, which was theirs while 
 you were still strangers and enemies to Rome. It is ours ; 
 we deal with it as we choose; it is no affair of yours how 
 we deal with what is our own." How they did choose to 
 deal with it was this. They found that it best paid their 
 purpose to keep the land as a common possession of the 
 order, and to allow individual patricians to occupy it as 
 tenants. For the common land paid no tax ; the patri- 
 cian therefore, whose real wealth consisted in his occu- 
 pation of the folkland, paid only on his small separate 
 freehold, while the plebeian, all whose land was freehold, 
 paid on his whole substance. Conquered land again was 
 added to the patrician folkland, as the common land of 
 the Roman people ; spoils went into the patrician hoard, 
 as the common hoard of the Roman people, just as when 
 the three patrician tribes had formed the whole Roman 
 people. The patrician position therefore had become 
 practically unjust, though it had about it a kind of for- 
 mal justice, and though we can quite understand that the 
 patricians would look on any meddling with their exclu- 
 sive posession as a real act of wrong. But the practical 
 aspect of the case was that the burthens of the state fell 
 mainly on the plebeians, while the profits, as well as the 
 
296 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 honours, fell wholly to the patricians. The real justice 
 of the case therefore lay with the plebeian argument. 
 The plebs might answer: "This land is the land of the 
 Roman people. You may once have been the whole 
 Roman people ; but you are so no longer. We are part 
 of the Roman people no less than you. The land of 
 the people ought not to be turned to the private profit 
 of one part of the people. Let lots of the folkland be 
 booked to those citizens who have no land, and let the 
 rest be applied to the public purposes of the state, and 
 not to the enrichment of particular persons." This is one 
 of a thousand cases in which formal and substantial 
 justice are thoroughly opposed, but in which the plea 
 of merely formal justice is at least plausible, and where 
 it may be, and doubtless was, urged with perfect good 
 faith. The exclusive patrician occupation of the folkland 
 was not an usurpation or an innovation ; the patricians, 
 the old citizens, had taken nothing from the plebeians, 
 the new citizens ; they simply refused to share something 
 with them. What they refused to share was formally 
 their own, and had once been rightly their own. Things 
 had so changed that their exclusive possession was no 
 longer just; but it was not likely that they would be 
 quick to see that it was no longer just. And the change 
 had been gradual. As the plebeians became more' and 
 more an essential part of the Roman people, it became 
 more and more clearly unjust that the public land should 
 be turned to the profit of one part of the people only. 
 But no one could have pointed out the particular 
 moment when the exclusive patrician possession first 
 became an unjust thing. Questions of the same kind 
 have often been raised in other times and places, and 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 297 
 
 they may teach us to deal tenderly both with individuals 
 and with whole orders who cleave to antiquated rights, 
 which once were just, but which have ceased to be just. 
 Their case must never be confounded with mere usur- 
 pations, fraudulent or forcible. It may be needful to 
 withstand both alike, but the two are to be withstood 
 with very different feelings towards the adversary. 
 There is no baseness in a man or a class of men cleav- 
 ing to rights and possessions which they honestly hold 
 to be their own, which in a sense are their own,, even 
 though it may, for the public good, be needful that they 
 should be their own no longer. The dissensions between 
 the Roman orders are on the whole honourable to both 
 parties. It is possible to understand both sides, to enter 
 into the feelings of both sides. To the plebeian order 
 the strife is specially honourable. On the plebeian side 
 there seems to have been no violence at all. On the pa- 
 trician side there was some ; but certainly less than in 
 many other commonwealths in the like case. In many 
 Greek cities each order often sought, and sometimes 
 wrought, the utter destruction of the other. The 
 commons strove to slay or drive out the nobles, and 
 to keep the city wholly for themselves. The nobles 
 strove to slay or drive out the commons, and to keep 
 the city for themselves, with their slaves and imme- 
 diate dependents. There is no sign of this kind 
 of feeling on either side at Rome. The patricians 
 seek to keep the plebs in subjection ; but, as the story 
 of the Sacred Mount shows, as every story of secession 
 goes, they had no wish to get rid of them. The ple- 
 beians strive to win perfect equality with the patricians ; 
 but they are ready to leave to the patricians equal rights 
 
298 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 with themselves. They do not seek, like the commons 
 in many a city of mediaeval Italy, to deprive them of 
 political rights, but only of exclusive political rights. 
 Still less was there, as there often was in the Greek 
 cities, any cry for the slaughter or banishment of the 
 dominant order, or for a general confiscation of their 
 lands or goods.- In demanding that the exclusive 
 patrician possession of the folkland should come to 
 an end, the plebeian argument was simply that the folk- 
 land was the general property of the Roman people, 
 not the exclusive property of the patrician order, now 
 that they had become only a part of the Roman people. 
 The true position of the Roman plebs, and the nature 
 of the strife which they waged, come out in a striking 
 way in one of the few moments of the strife which is not 
 honourable to them. In the decisive struggle over the 
 laws of Licinius and Sextius there was for moment a 
 division in the plebeian ranks. Three measures of reform 
 were proposed ; one to settle the grievances of the debt- 
 ors ; another, an agrarian law to restrict the occupation 
 of the folkland ; a third, which decreed that one of the 
 two consuls should always be a plebeian. The patri- 
 cians had brought themselves to consent to the first two 
 measures, which touched only their pockets ; they stood 
 out against the third, which touched their pride and their 
 political monopoly. And the great mass of the plebs were 
 ready to agree to this compromise. The measures about 
 the debts and the folkland concerned the general mass ; 
 they were measures which removed practical grievances 
 which touched every man; but the proposal to have 
 plebeian consuls concerned, it might be argued, only 
 Licinius and Sextius themselves and the other leading 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 299 
 
 men of their order, who had a chance of being chosen 
 consuls. This somewhat base fit lasted only for a 
 moment. Licinius, with his homely proverb, that they 
 must eat if they would drink, insists that his three 
 bills shall all stand or fall together; the mass of the 
 plebs stands by him, and plebeian equality is won. 
 The story illustrates a general weakness of human 
 nature ; but it also shows us that jealousies had al- 
 ready begun to spring up between the mass of the 
 plebeian order and its untitled and unprivileged, but 
 essentially noble, leaders. These last were, in all but 
 political privilege, the equals of the patricians. Since 
 the Canuleian law, which legitimated marriages between 
 the two orders, they must have been on a level of social 
 equality with them. There is at this moment no exact 
 parallel in the modern world to the distinctions of pa- 
 trician and plebeian at this time; though it is well to 
 remember that, at the beginning of this century, several 
 exact parallels still survived in the aristocratic common- 
 wealths of Europe. But a general idea of the true posi- 
 tion of Licinius may be gained if we conceive a wealthy 
 and long-descended English baronet or esquire, married 
 possibly to the daughter of an earl or duke, as Licinius 
 was married to a Fabia, withstanding some exclusive 
 pretension of the House of Lords. Such an one is a 
 commoner, with no legal privilege over the humblest 
 commoner. But in many things he has much more in 
 common with those whom he opposes than with those 
 whom he represents. The comparison is not exact ; 
 but it comes much nearer to the truth of the case than 
 the old delusion which painted Licinius and Sextius as 
 vulgar leaders of a mere mob. 
 
300 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 And the thing to be noticed is that this jealousy on 
 the part of the humbler plebeians, unjust as it certainly 
 was at the time, was fully justified by the facts of his- 
 tory. The class of plebeians of whom Licinius was the 
 type, did in the end practically go over to the patricians. 
 They and the remnant of the patricians did in the end 
 form a nobility whose position was purely conventional, 
 which had no legal privilege of any kind, but which was 
 practically as exclusive as the old nobility of the patri- 
 cians. Still the passing of the Licinian laws was none 
 the less one of the greatest steps in the history of Rome 
 and in the history of the world. The effects of the 
 winning of plebeian equality are shown in the two 
 great centuries which followed, in the slow advance of 
 Rome while she was still weakened by dissensions at 
 home, as compared with her speedy march to greatness 
 ■as soon as worn-out distinctions were removed, as soon 
 as the commonwealth was united and was able to put 
 forth its full strength. The Licinian laws, formally only 
 one step, were practically the winning of the victory. 
 They laid down a principle which was carried out bit by 
 bit, but which, when it was once laid down, could not fail 
 to be carried out bit by bit. By the Licinian laws them- 
 selves only a single office was immediately opened to 
 plebeians. But when one of the two consuls, the direct 
 successors of the ancient kings, was of necessity a ple- 
 beian, other offices could not be kept as an exclusively 
 patrician possession. But it was characteristic of Rome, 
 and one of the points of likeness between Rome and 
 England, that there was no one general act wiping out 
 all distinctions between patrician and plebeian. Every 
 office of any political importance, first the civil, then the 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 30I 
 
 religious offices, was thrown open to the commons. But 
 they were thrown open one by one, and some offices of 
 great dignity but of no political importance were never 
 thrown open at all. Pontiffs and augurs, in themselves 
 religious officers, had indirect political powers ; their 
 posts therefore were thrown open to plebeian holders. 
 But the flamens of the chief gods held an office, sacred 
 and venerable indeed, but of no importance in temporal 
 affairs ; no one therefore ever troubled himself to throw 
 open their office to plebeians, and the chief flamens 
 remained to the end purely patrician. So with the in- 
 teri'ex, the occasional magistrate whose existence of 
 itself proves that Rome once had kings. An interreg- 
 num came so seldom that no one thought of proposing 
 a bill to allow a plebeian interrex, and that office too 
 remained purely patrician. On the other hand, the 
 tribunes of the plebs, once the defenders of the plebs 
 against the patricians, had now become, so far as their 
 office kept any useful functions, defenders of the whole 
 people against any wrong on the part of the Senate 
 or magistrates. But they still remained exclusively ple- 
 beian. A patrician could not be tribune at Rome, any 
 more than a peer can be Chancellor of the Exchequer in 
 England. When we remember the great powers of the 
 tribune's office, when we further remember that both 
 consuls might be plebeians, while both could not be 
 patricians, we might be inclined to say that the tables 
 were turned, that plebeians had the upper hand, and 
 that, to make all citizens equal, a Licinian law the other 
 way was needed. 
 
 But practically it was not so. By the time of the 
 second civil struggles of Rome, struggles so unlike 
 20 
 
302 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 the elder struggles of patricians and plebeians, so im- 
 measurably more violent and bloody, the patriciate had 
 practically gone out of memory. The few occasions on 
 which a distinction was drawn between the orders, were, 
 with the single exception of the tribuneship, mere curious 
 survivals. But the new nobility which had arisen gradually 
 became as exclusive in feeling as the old. This new nobil- 
 ity took in all plebeians whose forefathers had held any of 
 the great offices of the state. It was thus a nobility of of- 
 fice growing into a new nobility of birth. It differed from 
 the old patriciate in having no legal privilege. Proud and 
 exclusive as it became, it existed wholly by sufferance. 
 The nobles, patrician and plebeian alike, despised the 
 new man whose family could show no images of consuls 
 and praetors ; but they could not, as the patricians had 
 once done toward the plebeians, say that the election of 
 such an one was contrary to the law of the common- 
 wealth and the will of the gods. The noble plebeian 
 Metellus deemed it as monstrous for the ignoble plebeian 
 Marius to aspire to the consulship as any Appius Clau- 
 dius of old could have deemed it for a forefather of 
 Metellus to do the like. But Appius Claudius had at 
 least the letter of the law on his side. It needed the 
 enactment of the Licinian laws to enable a Metellus to 
 be consul. To make a Marius consul nothing was 
 needed but a will on the part of the people firm enough 
 to bear down all opposition to a course which might 
 seem strange, but which was perfectly legal. 
 
 The Roman history thus enables us to see, in the 
 course of the history of one commonwealth, two of the 
 ways in which a noble class is formed. There is a re- 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 303 
 
 markable parallel in the history of England and of some 
 other Teutonic lands. In these also a newer nobility 
 of office supplanted an older nobility of birth. Only in 
 this case the older nobility is strictly immemorial, which 
 we cannot say that the Roman patriciate was. Teu- 
 tonic sagas set before us the three classes of mankind 
 — the eorl or noble, the ceoid or simple freeman, and the 
 thrall or slave — as brought into being by three separate 
 acts of creation on the part of the gods. That is to say, 
 the distinction was immemorial ; we cannot explain it 
 with anything like the same likelihood with which we 
 can explain the origin of the Roman patriciate. We 
 must simply accept the distinction as being as old as the 
 earliest glimpses that we get of our own forefathers. 
 Nor can we even see in what the privileges of this 
 immemorial nobility consisted, whether it strictly had 
 any privilege at all, or whether its nobility consisted, 
 simply in that reverence for ancient and illustrious 
 descent which has often been a powerful agent even in 
 societies which politically were purely democratic. So 
 it was at Athens, where men of old Eupatrid family were 
 long preferred for the great offices of the state ; so it 
 was in Uri and Glarus, where the chief magistrate was 
 chosen year after year from certain great and respected 
 houses. But at Athens, as at Rome, the nobility of the 
 Eupatrids was that of old citizens ; in the Swabian lands 
 the origin of the great houses is part of the question of 
 the general origin of the later Teutonic nobility, the 
 very question which we have now reached. That nobil- 
 ity arose, largely at least, out of personal service to the 
 king. As kings grew in power and dignity, their imme- 
 diate following, their comitatus, their thegns, grew along 
 
304 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 with them. They came to form a nobility of office, as 
 distinguished from the older nobility of birth. This 
 answers sjngularly to the later nobility of Rome, with 
 the single difference which necessarily arises out of the 
 difference of political constitution. In the one case it is 
 office bestowed by the king : in the other case it is office 
 bestowed by the people. Biit in either case we can distinct- 
 ly see whence the nobility comes. It is a not an immemo- 
 rial nobility, as to whose origin we can say nothing. And, 
 again, it is not, like the old patriciate, a nobility which 
 cannot receive any increase of members, or can at most re- 
 ceive them by an act of its own. When nobility depends 
 on office bestowed by the king, it is plain that the king 
 can ennoble ; so at Rome, where nobility depended on 
 office bestowed by the people, it would not be too much 
 to say that the people could ennoble. I am here brought 
 round to my former paradox, that it is only in a republic 
 that a real aristocracy can exist. Aristocracy is the rule 
 of the best. We will not dispute about the standard of 
 best. If it were the morally best, then aristocracy, in 
 that sense, would be the ideal form of government ; only 
 unluckily no such aristocracy ever existed. We must 
 put up with some of the substitutes for the morally best. 
 And there is one such substitute which is well worth 
 some study. In old and well-ordered aristocratic com- 
 monwealths, as Venice, Bern, Ragusa, hereditary posses- 
 sion of power, early training for its exercise, does really 
 seem to call into being a certain hereditary capacity for 
 government, which does make the rule of such a body, 
 in a certain secondary sense, a rule of the best. I need 
 not, least of all in this land, stop to point out the faults 
 of such a form of government : what I wish to point out 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 305 
 
 is that it has some merits. But what is more important 
 is that no other form of government has so good a claim 
 to the name of aristocracy. A body of men who, in a 
 certain secondary sense, may be called the best, do rule. 
 They really rule, and they rule of themselves ; no exter- 
 nal power can thrust new members into their order ; if 
 any such are ever admitted, it must be by the act of the 
 order itself It is plain that such an aristocracy as this 
 can exist only in a commonwealth ; it is inconsistent 
 with the presence of a king. In a kingdom there may 
 be an aristocratic element in the constitution ; there can 
 be no aristocracy in the strict sense. The old nobility 
 of France, with all its pride and exclusiveness, was in no 
 sense an aristocracy. The French nobles were in no 
 sense the best, and they did not rule. The oppressors 
 of the people were the slaves of the king. They sought 
 to be marked out by titles of his bestowing. Yet in 
 that large body of French nobility which was privileged 
 but untitled, we see another sign that nobility does not, 
 as is often vulgarly thought, need titles or depend upon 
 them. 
 
 In England things in the end took a course quite 
 unlike anything that ever happened elsewhere. The 
 British peerage is something uni_que in the world. In 
 England there is, strictly speaking, no nobility. This 
 saying may indeed sound like a paradox. The English 
 nobility, the British aristocracy, are phrases which are in 
 everybody's mouth. Yet, in strictness, there is no such 
 thing as an aristocracy or a nobility in England. There 
 is undoubtedly an aristocratic element in the English 
 constitution; the House of Lords is that aristocratic 
 element. And there have been times in English history 
 
306 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 when there has been a strong tendency to aristocracy, 
 when the lords have been stronger than either the king 
 or the people. And it is not to be denied that some of 
 the lordly families of England have shown from genera- 
 tion to generation all the higher qualities of an aristo- 
 cracy, among them that hereditary capacity for govern- 
 ment which we see at Rome and at Venice. But a real 
 aristocracy, like that of Venice, an aristocracy not only 
 stronger than either king or people, but which had 
 driven out both king and people, an aristocracy from 
 whose ranks no man can come down and into whose 
 ranks no man can rise save by the act of the privileged 
 body itself, — such an aristocracy as this England has 
 never seen. Nor has England ever seen a nobility in 
 the true sense, the sense which the word bears in every 
 continental land, a body into which men may be raised 
 by the king, but from which no man may come down, 
 a body which hands on to all its members, to the lat- 
 est generations, some kind of privilege or distinction, 
 whether its privileges consist in substantial political 
 power, or in bare titles and precedence. In England 
 there is no nobility. The so-called noble family is not 
 noble in the continental sense; privilege does not go 
 on from generation to generation; titles and prece- 
 dence are lost in the second or third generation ; sub- 
 stantial privilege exists in only one member of the fam- 
 ily at a time. The powers and privileges of the peer 
 himself are many ; but they belong to himself only ; his 
 children are legally commoners ; his grandchildren are 
 in most cases undistinguishable from other commoners. 
 The remotest descendant of a continental noble keeps 
 all the privileges of nobility; the reniote descendant 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 307 
 
 of an English peer has no privilege beyond his faint 
 chance of succeeding to the peerage ; till he succeeds, 
 he differs in notliing from another man. The English 
 peerage, if we must call it a nobility at all, is a nobility 
 so exclusive that it shuts out from its privileges even its 
 own children, even those who will or may be some day 
 be peers themselves. In other words, it is not a nobility 
 at all. A certain great position in the state is hereditary ; 
 but nobility in the strict sense there is none. The actual 
 holder of the peerage has, as it were, drawn to his own 
 person the whole nobility of the family. His position is 
 so great that it allows of nothing that can be even the 
 shadow of itself The only distinction that the law of 
 England knows is the distinction between peer and 
 commoner — commoner being a name which takes in 
 even the eldest son of the peer, even the younger 
 children of the king, if they are not specially raised to 
 the peerage. Any distinctions below that of the peer- 
 age convey no legal privilege. Gentilhomme in France 
 was the name of a well-defined and privileged class : gen- 
 tieman in England means whatever meaning we choose 
 to put upon the word; it assuredly does not mean a 
 defined class fenced in by legal privileges. Strictly it 
 means one who has a real right to bear coat-armour; 
 but the bearer of coat-armour by the best of rights has 
 no advantage in the eye of the law. To me at least it 
 seems that it is the extraordinary greatness of the peer- 
 age, gathering together all nobility in itself, which has 
 hindered the existence in England of any privileged 
 class answering to the nobility of continental lands. 
 Where even the children of the peer were unprivileged, 
 no lower class could assert any exclusive claim. The 
 
308 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 peerage has its faults; but I am far less inclined to 
 curse it for its faults than to bless it for having saved 
 England from a far greater curse. It is because England 
 has a peerage that she has no nobility. 
 
 My paradox then, I think, is made out. It is the 
 existence of the English peerage which has made class 
 distinctions impossible in the American commonwealth. 
 They were impossible in the colony, because they had 
 no existence in the mother- country, except in a form 
 which no man thought of transferring to the colony. 
 In Old England all men under the rank of peerage were 
 legally equal. There was no peerage in New England ; 
 therefore all men in New England were legally equal. 
 But if the growth of a real nobility in England had 
 not been hindered by the existence of peerage, if there 
 had grown up in England a real nobility like the conti- 
 nental nobility, such a nobility as that might easily have 
 been transplanted to the colonies. A gentleman in the 
 foreign sense would not have ceased to be a gentleman 
 by crossing the Ocean, Not a few of the colonists were 
 gentlemen of England in every sense of the word, and 
 assuredly they did not cease to be gentlemen of Eng- 
 land by crossing the Ocean. But then their position 
 as gentlemen gave them no legal privilege. The social 
 condition of different colonies differed; the gentleman, 
 as such, might be of more account in one colony than 
 another ; the town's meeting might be more prominent 
 in one, the lord and his manor in another. But a class 
 fenced in by hereditary privileges known to the law was 
 not, and could not be, formed anywhere. Men could 
 not bring with them to the new land distinctions which 
 
THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 309 
 
 did not exist in their old land. The one distinction which 
 did exist in their own land, the distinction of peerage, 
 they did not bring ; they hardly could have brought it. 
 And they had no other distinction to bring. If then in 
 America there has never been any really privileged class 
 to be brought down to the level of its fellows, you may 
 for that, in quite a new sense of a well-known saying, 
 "thank God there is a House of Lords." 
 
 No one, I trust, will infer from anything that I have 
 said this evening that the two ways of which I have 
 spoken are the only ways in which distinctions of rank 
 have grown up. The nobility of office and what I may 
 perhaps call the nobility of elder settlement, such as that 
 of the Roman patriciate, are only two ways out of many 
 in which certain families have risen to hereditary pre- 
 eminence over their fellows. I have simply chosen 
 Rome as illustrating two of the most remarkable forms 
 which the process has taken. I have hinted at other 
 forms, as in the great case of Venice. It would be an 
 useful exercise to trace out the various ways in which 
 nobility has grown up, distinguishing the civic nobility, 
 the patriciate of a free city, from the scattered nobility 
 of a kingdom or other large territory. It is in the civic 
 nobility only that the true aristocracy or any near ap- 
 proach to it can exist. Exclusive as it is, it may, among 
 the privileged class, be a school of republican virtue, 
 hardly less than the democracy. It is essentially legal 
 and orderly, and towards subject towns and districts its 
 rule has often been found less harsh than that of a ruling 
 democracy. Far be it from me to defend any exclusive 
 system ; but it may be well to remember even the better 
 
310 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 side of a kind of polity which just now seems the most 
 impossible of any, but which flourished in several illus- 
 trious cities even within living memory. Where the old 
 patrician street of Bern looks forth upon her subject 
 mountains, where the palaces of Venice rise as by magic 
 from her waters, where the less famous but not less love- 
 ly palace of enslaved Ragusa still groans under the rule 
 of the oppressor whom Venice has cast forth, even a con- 
 vinced votary of popular rights may be allowed to look 
 back for a moment to the fallen glories of those old patri- 
 ciates. Bern and Venice are free ; Ragusa still wears 
 the chain, and when we see her under the yoke of the 
 stranger, we may be tempted to look only on the 
 brighter side of days when her masters were at least 
 her countrymen. But Bern, Venice, Ragusa, what are 
 they all but children of Rome? It is from the Eternal 
 City that we set forth, and it is with the Eternal City 
 that we must carry on our tale. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 Ei)Z lauUng ditg atiti its IBmpite. 
 
 In our last lecture we spoke of Rome, but we spoke of 
 Rome mainly with regard to her internal state ; we spoke 
 of Rome as a city, as the city from whose history we may 
 learn more than from any other history as to the origin, 
 the growth, the dying out, the rising up again, of dis- 
 tinctions of orders in the same commonwealth. But this 
 is only one side of Rome, and, in the general history of 
 the world, it is not the most important side. The com- 
 monwealth of Rome gave way to the Empire of Rome. 
 That change may be looked at in two lights. From the 
 point of view of the local Roman city, it was a change 
 from a commonwealth to a practical monarchy — I say 
 a practical monarchy, for it must ever be borne in mind 
 that the Roman Empire did not put on any of the outward 
 forms of a monarchy till it had been in being for three cen- 
 turies. But the change brought with it whatever conse- 
 quences are implied in the change from a commonwealth 
 to a monarchy, remembering the special circumstances 
 and position of that particular commonwealth and of 
 the monarchy into which it changed. At the moment, 
 even a republican on principle, even a citizen of the Athe- 
 nian democracy, might have allowed that the change 
 from the anarchy of the civil wars to the mild rule of 
 Augustus was a change for the better. But then, look- 
 
 311 
 
312 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 ing at the Roman city only, it may be that the evils of 
 the commonwealth could have been reformed in some 
 other way, and it must be borne in mind that it was the 
 rule of Augustus which made the rule of Caius and 
 Nero possible. It is from the wider view of general 
 history that the great change in the Roman government 
 puts on another look. If we look beyond the Roman 
 city and those who anywhere enjoyed its franchise 
 to the vast range of the lands which formed the 
 dominion of the Roman city, then we must look on 
 the change from the commonwealth to the Empire 
 with other eyes. As things stood, if the Roman 
 dominion was to be kept together, it could be kept 
 together only by the sacrifice of the freedom of the 
 Roman city. " Imperium et libertas " were, as usual, 
 found to be things which it is not easy to reconcile. 
 The Romans boasted that they were lords of the world ; 
 they found that they could not remain lords of the 
 world, except by making one of their own number a 
 lord over themselves. From such a choice as this two 
 questions arise : Was the Roman dominion a thing 
 which it was wise and right to maintain ? Secondly, 
 How came it about that there was no means of main- 
 taining it, except by setting aside the free constitution 
 of the Roman city? 
 
 Of these questions we will look to the second first. 
 The Roman dominion is the central fact in the history 
 of the world. This is a truth on which I have in all 
 times and in all places striven to insist. Rome is the 
 lake in which all the streams of older history lose them- 
 selves, and out of which all the streams of later history 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 313 
 
 flow. To estimate the good or evil of the Roman 
 dominion in the general history of the world, we must 
 look both forwards and backwards. We must look, not 
 only to those things to which the Roman dominion put 
 an end, but to those things also to which the Roman 
 dominion gave the chance of beginning. But we have 
 not yet reached the stage of looking forwards. At this 
 point we must take the Roman dominion as a fact, as a 
 colourless fact; we will draw our moral afterwards. We 
 have now to see how that dominion came about, and 
 why its existence necessarily involved the change from 
 the commonwealth to the Empire. 
 
 The dominion of Rome grew up as the greatest 
 example of the dominion of a ruling city which the 
 world has ever seen. In her character as a ruling city 
 Rome is not solitary; there have been many such before 
 and since. Indeed, we might say that the disposition to 
 try to reconcile the two incompatible things, to enjoy at 
 once " imperium et libertas," is so strong in" mankind 
 that every city that has had the chance has been a rul- 
 ing city. That is to say, every city that has been able 
 so to do has kept some other city or people out of the 
 enjoyment of the freedom which it claims and cherishes 
 for itself But mark that this is more excusable in the 
 city than in any other form of political community. A 
 district or land, whether kingdom or commonwealth, if 
 it extends its borders, can with perfect ease admit the 
 inhabitants of the new territory to equal rights. This 
 is less easy on the part of a city ; for a city has a com- 
 pact local being which can hardly be in this way indefi- 
 nitely enlarged. Distinct cities, standing quite apart 
 from one another, may be enemies, allies, confederates ; 
 
314 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 they may be ruling city and subject city ; but they can 
 hardly be merged into a single city. Yet some of the 
 older cities, before they began their career of dominion 
 strictly so called, went through a stage of incorporation. 
 We have seen that several Greek cities arose from the 
 incorporation of older villages or small towns standing 
 near together. Incorporation was carried as far as it 
 could be carried under the ancient system of city-com- 
 munities, when the Athenian franchise was extended to 
 the freemen of all the Attic towns. But when in later 
 times Athens found herself at the head of a confederacy 
 of distant and many of them insular cities, her headship 
 gradually changed into dominion. Incorporation was im- 
 possible; representation, though possible, had not occur- 
 red to men's minds ; federation, though both possible and 
 existing, had never been tried on such a scale. Athens 
 became, hardly of set purpose, a ruling city ; but, when 
 she became aware of the fact, she had no mind to part 
 with the 'dominion which she had won. So it was with 
 other cities, Sparta, Thebes, Olynthos ; so beyond the 
 Greek world with Carthage ; so it was in later times with 
 a crowd of German, Italian, Burgundian, and other cities, 
 among which Venice by sea and Bern by land stand out 
 conspicuous. The scattered dominions of Venice formed 
 a power which ranked with great kingdoms ; Genoa, in 
 times which seem almost recent, bore rule over Corsica ; 
 it was only because the ruling city handed over its rights 
 to a neighbouring king that Napoleone Buonaparte was 
 not born either a free Corsican or a Genoese subject. 
 All these, and crowds of others, are strictly cases of 
 ruling cities. The city, whether aristocratic or demo- 
 cratic at home, was a corporate sovei'eign abroad. The 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRi:. 31S 
 
 subject lands and towns might be in various degrees of 
 subjection ; they might be absolute bondmen, or they 
 might keep full local freedom ; they might be ruled by 
 magistrates of their own chosing or by governors sent 
 by the ruling city ; but in any case they were subject so 
 far as this, that questions of peace and war, and all that 
 concerns peace and war, were settled for them by the 
 ruling city without their having any part or lot in the 
 matter. 
 
 But at the head of all these cities stands Rome, the 
 greatest of incorporating cities, the greatest of ruling 
 cities. Athens extended her citizenship over all Attica ; 
 she extended her dominion over the greater part of the 
 .^gaean coasts and islands, and over some points beyond. 
 But Rome first extended her citizenship over all Italy, and 
 her dominion over the whole Mediterranean world, and 
 then, by another stage, she made her citizenship coexten- 
 sive with her dominion. Some steps of her incorporating 
 process we have already followed. We have seen " the 
 great group of village-communities by the Tiber " first 
 form itself into a single city by the union of the detached 
 settlements on the seven hills. We have next seen it 
 incorporate not a few of the neighbouring towns and dis- 
 tricts, and admit their people to an imperfect citizenship. 
 We have seen the men who were thus admitted to an im- 
 perfect citizenship win their way step by step to full equal- 
 ity with the elder burghers. By these means Rome grew 
 to the, foremost place, first in Latium, then in Italy. 
 There can be little doubt that Rome was, almost from 
 the beginning, the foremost of Latin cities. These last, 
 a fluctuating league of thirty towns, were, one by one, 
 immeasureably less than Rome. And, more than this, 
 
3l6 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 they belonged to an earlier stage in the growth of man- 
 kind than Rome did. Not a few of them were towns 
 of the very earliest type, forts on the tops of lofty 
 hills, away from the sea, away from any river, seeking 
 safety by isolating themselves from their neighbours on 
 sites which were deemed impregnable. Rome, on her 
 low hills by the great river, keeping the mouth of the 
 great river with her haven, belongs to a far later stage 
 of progress. Tusculum, on her mountain-top, could be 
 no real rival to the mistress of the Tiber. Rome had a 
 seeming rival in Etruscan Veil, a city physically as great 
 as herself, and enriched doubtless with far more of 
 wealth and culture. But Veil was only a seeming rival ; 
 away from the sea, away from the Tiber, she might 
 check the course of Rome, but she could never herself 
 hold the place which was Rome's destiny. The dif- 
 ference between Rome and any other Latin city appears 
 at once in the fact that Rome by herself always deals on at 
 least equal terms with the Latin league as a whole. There 
 seems no reason to doubt that Rome, in the days of her 
 kings, had won a federal headship over all Latium, and 
 that she lost that headship through her change from 
 kings to consuls. She then won back something more 
 than federal headship over all Latium by the gradual 
 working of various and even conflicting causes. The 
 pressure of the .^quians and Volscians drove, first the 
 Latins, alike of the hills and of the coast, and then the 
 stout hill-folk of the Hernicans, to join with Rome in a 
 triple alliance. In that alliance Rome, the single city, 
 held, even in form, an equal place with the two leagues, 
 and she gradually grew into their chief As in the 
 early history of England Wessex grew by the invasions 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 317 
 
 of the Danes, so Rome grew by the attacks of the 
 ^quians and Volscians. In each case the power which 
 was in the end to be the ruhng power had to go through 
 . a heavy struggle, and to be sometimes brought to the 
 brink of overthrow ; but the main stress of the war fell 
 on the allied and subject states, by whose misfortunes 
 the ruling power gained in the end. The allied leagues 
 were broken up : Rome stood forth more distinctly than 
 ever as the one great city amidst a crowd of allies and 
 enemies, none of whom singly could compare with her. 
 The great Latin war, the war in which the first Decius 
 gave himself for Rome, marks the last struggle of 
 Rome's immediate kinsfolk against her ascendency. 
 The Latin cities, the other cities of Rome's immediate 
 neighbourhood, receive whatever doom Rome thought 
 good. In the end we may say that all gradually rose, 
 often through the intermediate stage of the imperfect 
 franchise specially known as Latin, to the full citizen- 
 ship of Rome. 
 
 The five-and-thirty tribes of Rome, the tribes of the 
 Roman commons as distinguished from the three ancient 
 patrician tribes which were now well nigh forgotten, 
 mark the extreme point of incorporation of this kind. 
 The territory to whose free population Roman citizen- 
 ship was now extended was of very unusual size accord- 
 ing to the measure of ancient cities. We must remember 
 that the franchise to which they were admitted was the 
 local franchise of the Roman city ; their votes at elec- 
 tions and in the passing of laws could be given nowhere 
 but in the Roman city. Just as in the case of the 
 Achaian cities, the votes in the Roman assembly were 
 taken, not by heads but by tribes. In no other way 
 21 
 
3l8 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 could the distant tribes have kept any voting power at 
 all ; they would have been swamped by the four tribes 
 of the city. The Roman territory was now far too large 
 for all citizens to appear habitually in their own persons ; . 
 and it may be, as some scholars have thought, that those 
 who appeared at Rome and gave the vote of a distant 
 tribe were practically the representatives of their neigh- 
 bours who stayed at home. Be this as it may, formal 
 representation was unknown ; the citizen who wished to 
 take any share in public affairs could do so only by 
 going to Rome and giving his vote in person. It was 
 the city of Rome thus formed, with its vast citizen popu- 
 lation spread over a large district, a population which 
 more and more put on the character of a privileged race 
 among the gradually descending ranks of Latins, Ital- 
 ians, and provincials, which became mistress of Italy 
 and of the Mediterranean world. 
 
 The Latin franchise, a franchise not confined to the 
 old Latium, but which belonged to not a few of the 
 colonies which Rome planted, was, either for an individ- 
 ual or a community, a step to the full Roman franchise. 
 The citizen of a Latin town could, under certain defined 
 circumstances, specially by holding certain magistracies 
 in his own town, claim Roman citizenship of right. 
 This marks the Latin communities as children of Rome, 
 as distinguished from Italians and provincials, both of 
 whom were strictly subject, though in very different 
 degrees of subjection. Rome, already the head of La- 
 tium, went on to the headship of Italy. Step by step, 
 all the Italian towns and leagues, Satnnite, Etruscan, 
 Greek, or any other, became allies of Rome. But the 
 days of incorporation were now past. Alliance now 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 3X9 
 
 meant subjection ; but it was the subjection of one com- 
 monwealth to another. The old pqhtical communities 
 of Italy lived on as political communities, bound to 
 follow the lead of Rome in war and peace, liable to 
 interference whenever the policy of Rome dictated inter- 
 ference, but still keeping their being as separate though 
 dependent commonwealths, with their own laws, magis- 
 trates, and assemblies, controlled from time to time 
 by orders from the Roman Senate, but not held down 
 by the constant presence of a Roman governor. In this 
 case the greater part of Italy remained for two hundred 
 years. A galling position it must have been, above all 
 to the leading men in each commonwealth. The Italians 
 had lost the old freedom of their several towns and 
 leagues, with very little chance of admission to the citi- 
 zenship of the city which ruled over all. The Etruscan 
 Lucumo, the Samnite Imperator, the natural equal of the 
 proudest Roman patrician, counted at Rome for less than 
 an emancipated slave. Still the Italian towns remained 
 commonwealths, though dependent commonwealths; 
 they kept all those powers of separate commonwealths 
 which the ruling city did not deem it for her interest to 
 keep to herself 
 
 In the next stage Rome, already the head of Italy, 
 advances to be the head of the Mediterranean world. 
 The territory which she acquired out of Italy she made 
 into provinces. Now the word province, in any accurate 
 use of language, implies dependence ; there is no greater 
 vulgarism than when the word is appHed, commonly 
 contemptuously applied, to the whole mass of any 
 kingdom or country, in opposition to its biggest town. 
 When a whole country enjoys equal rights, no part 
 
320 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 of it can strictly be called a province. But the word 
 provincial was, with a near approach to accuracy, often 
 applied to your Thirteen Colonies, while they were 
 still dependencies of Great Britain, and not free and 
 independent states. It was, with strict accuracy, ap- 
 plied to the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, 
 lands which were not only dependencies, but were con- 
 quered from another power. So in the new-fangled 
 Empire of India there are provinces, conquered and 
 subject lands, dependent on the absolute will of a 
 distant power. But in Great Britain there are no pro- 
 vinces, for every spot of the land has equal rights with 
 every other. Little Peddlington is no more provincial 
 than London. Still less is there any room for provinces 
 in your federal system. A province, in the Roman sy- 
 stem, was a subject land, a land beyond the bounds of 
 Italy, a land of which the Roman People was the cor- 
 porate sovereign. Indeed the soil itself was strictly the 
 property of the Roman People ; the provincials held it 
 only on such terms and by such payments as the Roman 
 people thought good. The corporate sovereign was 
 represented in the subject land by a governor, proconsul, 
 propraetor, or other, armed with powers pretty well des- 
 potic, responsible in theory for his acts, but a suit against 
 whom was seldom successful, because it was tried before 
 judges whose interest it was to screen him. Thus among 
 those inhabitants of the Roman dominion who were 
 personally free, there were four classes, ranged in an 
 ascending scale — provincials, Italians, Latins, Romans. 
 For any one of these to be raised to the rank next above 
 his own was in its measure promotion. And we must 
 bear in mind that, within any territory which appears on 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 32 1 
 
 the map as a Roman province, there was a wide differ- 
 ence of pohtical conditions; all that appears geographi- 
 cally as the province was not in the provincial condition. 
 Particular families, particular cities and districts, might 
 have been raised to the Italian, the Latin, or even the 
 full Roman, franchise. Or again, some cities might never 
 have been brought into the provincial relation at all. Not 
 a few cities remained till a wonderfully late time nomi- 
 nally free, geographically included within the Roman do- 
 minions, but in theory independent allies of the Roman 
 people. Such cities kept on all the forms of the old free 
 commonwealths, which seem to have in many cases died 
 out gradually without any moment of formal abolition. 
 Such a city was Athens, for ages in theory an ally, not 
 a subject, of Rome, a confederate commonwealth, of 
 which one year Hadrian was archon and another year 
 Constantine was general. And even the strictly subject 
 cities kept up their old forms, their old magistracies, 
 though they had sunk from free Commonwealths to 
 municipalities or something less. If we are to name a 
 day when the cities of Greece lost their last traces of in- 
 dependence, we can name no day earlier than the reign 
 of Justinian. 
 
 Now all these distinctions are of great importance 
 and interest ; they illustrate the kind of way in which 
 a city bears rule over other cities, cities standing to it in 
 endless different relations of alliance, dependence, and 
 absolute subjection. We shall presently see exactly the 
 same kind of relations in the case of other ruling cities ; 
 Rome simply does on a gigantic scale what other cities 
 before and after did in their measure. But for that rea- 
 son Rome is the type ; it is the grandest developement 
 
322 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 of tendencies which Athens and Carthage, Bern and 
 Venice, carried out as far as they could, but which they 
 had not the opportunity of carrying out to the same 
 extent as Rome. In the days of Roman dominion, 
 and never before or after, did a single city, with its 
 allied, dependent, and subject cities and lands, take up 
 the whole of the civilized world. There is nothing like 
 it in the world now ; but remember that, up to the time 
 of the French Revolution, Venice and Bern and a crowd 
 of other free and ruling cities, as they kept up a lively 
 image of Rome in their internal constitutions, also kept 
 up a lively image of Rome in their relations to their 
 allies, dependents, and subjects. And let me point again 
 to a single small state of the modern world, which still 
 keeps up an image of the position of the free common- 
 wealths which lay within the geographical border of the 
 Roman dominion. The commonwealth of San Marino, 
 the last of many and more famous Italian common- 
 wealths, still abides, surrounded by the kingdom of Italy, 
 but forming no part of that kingdon. International law- 
 yers can tell you whether there is any particular engage- 
 ment to the contrary ; otherwise I conceive that it is open 
 to San Marino, if the fancy took her, to declare war 
 against the Empire of Russia or against the United 
 States. The difficulty would be that San Marino could not 
 get at her enemies, and that her enemies could not get 
 at San Marino, without the leave of the King of Italy. 
 Now San Marino stands by itself; it is more of a polit- 
 ical curiosity than anything else-; it is perfectly harm- 
 less, and the King of Italy has no kind of temptation to 
 interfere with its rights. But let us suppose that there 
 was several San Marinos geographically placed within 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 323 
 
 the Italian kingdom. Let us suppose that, not a small 
 rural district, but several of the chief Italian cities, were 
 as independent of the Italian kingdom as San Marino 
 is. Such a state of things would be fruitful of many 
 difficulties and disputes, and the King of Italy would 
 lie under great temptations to interfere with their lib- 
 erties. So it was with the free cities which remained 
 within the Roman dominion. Any real political danger 
 was prevented by their helplessness; but it is certain 
 that their nominal independence did not secure them 
 from much interference, sometimes rising into actual 
 oppression, whenever the policy or the caprice, either 
 of the Roman government or of particular Roman 
 governors, dictated such interference or oppression. 
 Another special point of interest to us is the way in 
 which the relations between Rome and the lands under 
 her dominion are constantly referred to in the New Tes- 
 tament. Nowhere does the absolute power of a Roman 
 governor over the provincials, his narrowly restricted 
 power over a Roman citizen, the way in which Roman 
 citizenship was held by this or that man in the provinces 
 by birth, grant, or purchase, the relations between the 
 Roman governors and the native princes who reigned 
 under Roman _ supremacy, come out more strongly. 
 Pilate, Festus, Felix, the Herods, Saul of Tarsus, the 
 Jew who has inherited the Roman franchise, Claudius 
 Lysias, the Greek who has bought it, the regard shown 
 by the Roman officer to the privileges of his Roman 
 fellow-citizen, the fear of the Philippian magistrates, 
 when they find that they have broken those privileges, 
 are all among the most living bits of Roman history 
 that we have. They are almost our only glimpses of 
 
324 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 Roman political life from the point of view of the ordi- 
 nary provincial. In some things they give us a lively 
 image of British rule in India, while in other things the 
 two systems of rule are wholly different. The Herods 
 exactly answer to an Indian prince under British su- 
 premacy; but the distinction of provincials, Italians, 
 Latins, and Romans, has no parallel under British rule. 
 In theory the Hindoo is as much a British subject as the 
 Englishman, and in theory one British subject is as good 
 as another. That such a theory is not, and cannot be, 
 practically carried out, I need hardly stop to prove. 
 Perhaps I need not go so far as either India or Rome 
 for examples of the same law of human nature. 
 
 Some of our instances have carried us a little beyond 
 the time which we had reached. We have passed from 
 the days of the commonwealth into the days of the 
 Empire. At the beginning of the first century before 
 Christ the Roman power was far from having reached 
 the full measure of its geographical extent. It was still 
 far from taking in the whole of the coasts of the Medi- 
 terranean sea. But it was already spread over a very 
 large part of the three continents. From its European 
 centre it commanded or influenced the greater part of 
 the three peninsulas of southern Europe, and it had won 
 large provinces both in Asia and Africa. In fact, though 
 the destiny of Rome was not yet carried out, yet it had 
 become perfectly plain what that destiny was to be. 
 Rome had advanced and was advancing. The only two 
 powers which had once been able to meet her on equal 
 terms, Carthage and Macedonia, had come to be part of 
 her foreign dominion. Macedonia under her own name 
 was a Roman province. ,0f Carthage the very name was 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMFIRE. 325 
 
 blotted out, the very site was left desolate. The Roman 
 province of Africa had taken the place of the greatest 
 of the cities of Canaan. The Mediterranean sh'ores 
 were studded with cities and kingdoms, some nomi- 
 nally independent, some under a greater or less amount 
 of Roman influence, some even with which Rome had 
 as yet hardly had any dealings. But there was no 
 power which, standing alone, could withstand Rome, 
 and there was no chance of any general union against 
 Rome on the part of a crowd of scattered cities and 
 lands, differing in language and manners and all that 
 keeps cities and lands apart from one another. The fate 
 of all was plain ; all were to be swallowed up sooner or 
 later, later it might be rather than sooner. For Rome 
 never hurried. It is the manner of governments of that 
 class, aristocratic in feeling and action, whether aristo- 
 cratic or not in the actual form of government, not to 
 hurry. A king is eager to distinguish his own reign ; 
 a popular assembly is eager to see great things done in 
 its own day ; an aristocracy has more of corporate feel- 
 ing ; it does not risk a greater future gain by clutching 
 too greedily at a present gain. Rome let down her vic- 
 tims very easily. It was commonly by slow stages of 
 dependence in various degrees that her once equal ene- 
 mies or allies .sank to the fate of provinces. Some, as 
 we have seen, as far as names and formulae were con- 
 cerned, never sank to it at all. But all, in substance if 
 not in name, were sooner or later to be swallowed up 
 in the vast gulf of Roman dominion. By the beginning 
 of the first century before Christ the great ruling city, 
 the type of ruling cities, had already stretched her rule 
 over so many lands and cities that it was plain that all 
 
326 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 that remained in this her destined range, within the 
 civilized world of the time, within the lands round the 
 Mediterranean sea, were only waiting for their turn. 
 
 While Rome had thus waxed mighty in distant lands, 
 her dominion was threatened for the last time in her 
 own peninsula. Threatened indeed she was as she had 
 never been threatened even by Pyrrhos or Hannibal. 
 The old local warfare of the first days of the common- 
 wealth, the older local warfare of the first kings, seemed 
 to have come back, when Rome had again to fight, not 
 only for dominion but for life, against Italian enemies at 
 her own gates. The Italian allies, who had borne so 
 great a share of the burthen of Rome's conquests and 
 who had reaped so small a share of their fruits, were 
 naturally dissatisfied with their dependent position. It 
 must have been specially galling to them to see the 
 Roman franchise lavished as it was on enfranchised 
 slaves, strangers from every corner of the earth, while 
 it was refused to tried fellow-soldiers, children of Italy 
 no less than the proudest Roman. They demanded full 
 admission to the ruling commonwealth in the building 
 up of whose greatness they had had no small share. 
 The gift was refused; the Social War followed, the 
 war between Rome and her allies, which became so 
 strangely mixed up with the civil wars of the Romans 
 themselves. Then for the last time the stubborn Sam- 
 nite rose with the avowed purpose of destroying Rome, 
 and was himself destroyed by the strong arm of Sulla. 
 The Samnite people, we may safely say, were wiped 
 off the face of Italy. The other Italian nations 
 won the boon for which they strove, the citizenship 
 of Rome. 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 327 
 
 Now mark again, all that was given, all that was 
 asked, all that was seemingly thought of on either side, 
 was the local franchise of the local Roman city. When 
 this was first denied, the allies set up a new Rome of 
 their own as a rival of the old, the city Italy. The city 
 Italy was but for a moment ; the end of the struggle was 
 that such of the allies as lived through it became citi- 
 zens of Rome. That is, they obtained a franchise which 
 could be exercised only by the citizen going to Rome 
 and there giving his vote in person. The thought of any 
 other system seems not to have come into men's heads. 
 The only questions raised were into which of the exist- 
 ing tribes the new citizens should be admitted, or whether 
 new tribes — and, if so, in what number — should be cre- 
 ated to receive them. No thought of representation 
 suggested itself Yet representation would at once have 
 solved the difficulty. When a commonwealth is spread 
 over so large a space as all Italy, the right of choosing 
 a representative becomes far more really valuable than 
 what in theory is the higher right of appearing in per- 
 son in a national assembly. This last right, when spread 
 over all Italy, was in truth a mockery. The citizen could 
 do no act of citizenship without going to Rome. If he 
 went to Rome, he found himself a member, not of the 
 comparatively small assembly of Athens, but of a multi- 
 tude which might number its hundreds of thousands, a 
 multitude which could at most say Yea or Nay, and 
 which, unlike the smaller assemblies of earlier times, was 
 beo-inning to show no small tendency to substitute the 
 strong hand for the free vote. There is no more in- 
 structive lesson in all history than this. It shows that, 
 even when there is no doubt as to the existence of a 
 
328 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 political disease, it is not always easy to find the rem- 
 edy. No doubt representation was the remedy that was 
 wanted ; to us, used as we have been to representation for 
 many ages, that remedy seems so obvious that we wonder 
 that no man thought of it. But no man did think of it. 
 Representation at last grew up, casually, as most things 
 did grow up, in other lands, at other times, and by other 
 means. Now that the evil was felt is plain. The first 
 Emperor passed a reform bill. Augustus devised some 
 means by which the votes of citizens in distant parts of 
 Italy might be taken without calling on all of them to 
 come to Rome. The pity is that this reform was not 
 thought of till it had ceased to be of any moment 
 whether men gave any votes or no. 
 
 Representation was as yet unknown ; what we wonder 
 at is that no man was found to invent it just when it was 
 wanted. We may be still more inclined to wonder that 
 no one thought of solving the difficulty by the intro- 
 duction of a federal system. Why could not the several 
 commonwealths of Italy have been united in a federal 
 bond, with Rome as the federal head? Precedents 
 abounded both in Italy and in Greece. It is perhaps 
 less easy to see why the allies did not ask for some sy- 
 stem of this kind ; it is very easy to see why Rome would 
 never have consented to such a change except under 
 compulsion. Not a few federal unions had been already 
 formed, but they had been mainly formed among cities 
 which felt the need of union for defence against threat- 
 ening enemies. Each city saw in each of its fellows a 
 helper and defender. We cannot conceive Rome, at 
 this stage, entering into an equal federal bond with her 
 Italian allies, or even being satisfied with any reasonable 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 329 
 
 kind of federal headship. A federal union of Italy 
 under Rome would have been too much like the federal 
 union of Boiotia under Thebes. The president would have 
 been too nearly akin to a tyrant. And yet such a position 
 would hardly have satisfied Roman pride. Rome had 
 been so long used to look upon direct dominion as her 
 right that the limited power of a federal head would 
 have seemed less than her due. To admit the allies to 
 her own citizenship was doubtless some sacrifice ; but it 
 it was a smaller sacrifice tkan this. But nothing shows 
 more strongly how all political thinking in those days 
 started from the idea of the city as the primary unit than 
 this extension of the local franchise of the Roman city 
 to all the free inhabitants of Italy. A scheme which to 
 our notions seems utterly preposterous was the only 
 means that could be hit upon for raising the Italian 
 to the level of the Roman. 
 
 Thus all Italy became Roman, as all Latium had 
 become Roman long before. Swiftly on the Social 
 war followed those conquests of Pomp^ius, Caesar, 
 and others, which carried the Roman dominion round 
 the whole Mediterranean. Pre-eminent among them 
 stand the annexations of Pompeius in Syria, of the 
 elder Caesar in Gaul, of the younger Cassar in Egypt. 
 The lyork of Rome was now practically done. At the 
 beginning of the century no power was left which was 
 in the least able to withstand Rome on equal terms ; by 
 the end of the century those lands and cities which had 
 not been practically incorporated with the Roman terri- 
 tory were mere survivals of a past state of things, scat- 
 tered exceptions to the general rule of Roman dominion. 
 
330 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 Then, just at the time when the dominion of the Roman 
 city had reached its height, its position as a ruhng city 
 was undermined by the silent change in its own govern- 
 ment. In other words, the Roman Empire had begun. 
 The series of Emperors, Augusti, Patres Patrice, and the 
 like, had begun with Caius Julius Csesar Octavianus, and 
 it was not to end till the second Francis of Lorraine. 
 The differences between the first and the last Emperor 
 speak for themselves. But we must carefully distinguish 
 the position of either the first or the last from the posi- 
 tion of the central members of the series. The posi- 
 tion of Diocletian and Constantine was one into which 
 the position of the first Augustus gradually grew; it 
 was one which gradually changed into the position of 
 the last Francis. In the long journey from the sub- 
 stance without the form to the form without the sub- 
 stance, we have to pass through the central stage where 
 form and substance were joined together. Imperator, 
 Emperor, came to be a higher title than King, because 
 it came to be the special title of the master of that 
 dominion which was greater than all kingdoms. But 
 in the beginning Imperator simply expressed one side of 
 an extraordinary magistrate, whom the Roman Senate 
 and People, by a special vote, clothed with extraordi- 
 nary powers. Offices hitherto deemed incompatible with 
 each other, powers hitherto meant to be a check on one 
 another, were, by a special vote, united in a single man. 
 By a succession of such votes, the extraordinary magis- 
 tracy became perpetual ; the union of conflicting powers 
 made their holder a practical sovereign ; after three hun- 
 dred years the holders of practical sovereignty assumed 
 the outward badges and titles of sovereigns. A Roman 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 33 1 
 
 Augustus in tlie first days of the Empire held himself 
 to be domimis to his slaves, imperator to the soldiers, 
 princcps to the citizens. Before three hundred years 
 had passed, he had become imperator and domimis to the 
 the citizens also. But by that time the name of Roman 
 citizen had been vastly extended. When the early 
 Caesar described his relation to slaves, soldiers, and 
 citizens, he marked that the soldier was becoming a 
 distinct class from the citizen. Of his relation to the 
 provinces he needed not specially to speak. They were 
 the possession of the Roman Senate and the People, and 
 the power of the Roman Senate and People was wielded 
 by their princeps and imperator. Before three hundred 
 years were gone, the distinction between citizen and pro- 
 vincial had passed away, as the distinctions of Romans, 
 Latins, and Italians had passed away long before, or 
 survived only in legal theories. By the famous edict 
 of Antoninus Caracalla all the free inhabitants of the 
 Roman Empire became Romans. It is hardly a figure to 
 say that all the Mediterranean lands had become Rome. 
 It may be doubted whether those who were thus 
 raised from the rank of provincials to the rank of 
 Romans really gained anything by the change. It may 
 be doubted whether he who raised them meant them to 
 gain anything. But the edict of Antoninus is none the 
 less one of the great stages in the history of Rome and 
 of the world. It looks both backwards and forwards. 
 It marked that the distinction between Roman and pro- 
 vincial had practically lost its significance. Ever since the 
 Empire began, it had lost its political significance. The 
 citizen, as the Acts of the Apostles alone would teach us, 
 had valuable personal privileges ; but the private citizen 
 
332 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 had no more voice in directing the affairs of the Empire 
 than the provincial. The popular Assembly died out 
 very early ; the Senate, the Consuls, the other magis- 
 trates, went on ; but all that they did was by the Empe- 
 ror's sufferance or at his bidding. Citizens and provin- 
 cials were practically alike the Emperor's subjects, though 
 citizens were undoubtedly in some things a favoured class 
 of subjects. But there can be no doubt that the prov- 
 inces had greatly gained by the silent change from a 
 commonwealth to a practical monarchy. To the Roman 
 Senate and People the provinces were simply possessions. 
 They were possessions out of which all who went to 
 make up the corporate landlord had to make spoil. 
 The proconsul who was sent to rule the province was 
 sure to make a great deal ; any Roman citizen who 
 visited it might hope to make something. Everywhere 
 and in everything the Roman was a member of a ruling 
 class, the provincial was a member of a subject class. 
 The provinces were ruled, or rather plundered, in the 
 interest of the privileged class, above all in the inter- 
 est of the leading members of the privileged class. 
 There can be no doubt that the establishment of the 
 Empire did something to better the condition of the 
 provinces. A monarch may rule in his own interest, 
 and not in the interest of his subjects, but a wise 
 monarch soon learns that his interest and the interest 
 of his subjects are commonly the same; at any rate 
 he is not so likely to rule in the interest of an exclusive 
 class as when the exclusive class rules itself The Em- 
 perors, practically niasters alike of citizens and provin- 
 cials, had no temptation beyond the natural prejudices 
 of their Roman birth to oppress the provincials for the 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 333 
 
 sake of the citizens. Such oppression as was done was 
 done, not so much in the interest of Roman citizens as a 
 class as in the interest of the local city as the seat of 
 government. Rome had still to be adorned, the Roman 
 mob had still to be pampered, at the cost of the subject 
 lands. But the subject lands themselves gained by the 
 fall of the liberties of the ruling city. The good Em- 
 perors gradually came to rule in the interest of the 
 whole Roman dominion, and not of the Roman city 
 only, and the bad Emperors were most to be dreaded 
 by those to whom they were nearest. Some Emperors 
 who bear a very bad character as rulers of Rome 
 were popular as rulers of the Roman provinces. That 
 the Roman Empire should go on, that all the Mediter- 
 ranean lands should become Roman, would seem to 
 have been for the general interests of mankind; at all 
 events, it was a necessary step for the future course of 
 histoiy, a necessary step towards the establishment of the 
 modern world in which we live. And to that end it 
 was, before all things, needful that the exclusive do- 
 minion of the Roman Senate and People should be 
 broken down. Representation, federation, constitutional 
 monarchy, were remedies unheard of or impracticable. 
 The despotism of the Ceesars, with all its faults, was a 
 needful step towards the creation of modern Europe, 
 of modern Christendom. 
 
 What then is the political lesson to be drawn from 
 the fall of the Roman commonwealth, the establishment 
 of the Roman Empire ? Shallow indeed would he be 
 who should draw from those facts any inferences unfa- 
 vourable to freedom in any of its forms. The Roman 
 22 
 
334 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 commonwealth fell, because it had become to a great 
 extent hostile to freedom. It fell, because men who 
 boasted of being themselves citizens of a free common- 
 wealth made it their pride to hold other cities and lands 
 in bondage. It is idle to enlarge on the inconsistency 
 of so doing; human nature, in all times and places, 
 and under all forms of government, is inconsistent in 
 such matters. What the story of Rome tells is twofold. 
 First it tells us the fitting limits for a state of the prim- 
 itive type, a single city or land whose citizens habitually 
 meet together to exercise their franchise in their own 
 persons. It sounds almost like a truism to say that the 
 territory of such a state should not be so great that its 
 citizens cannot thus habitually come together. But this 
 is really the lesson which the comparison of Athens and 
 Rome ieaches us. Attica was as large a territory as 
 could be administered on that system; Italy was far 
 too large. For a state of the size of Italy representa- 
 tion or federation is needful. We may suspect that 
 the establishment of the Empire was a gain, not only 
 for the provinces, but for the more distant parts of 
 Italy, for all that lay beyond the old Latium and the 
 other lands in the near neighbourhood of the city. 
 
 The other lesson might be made the theme of much 
 moral exhortation which would be of little practical 
 effect. The inconsistency of free states holding other 
 lands in bondage is in itself a very obvious truth ; but 
 it is a truth which always ceases to be obvious to the 
 particular state which needs to profit by its teaching. 
 It would be one degree more practical to quote the 
 example of Rome as showing the danger of an enlarged 
 dominion to the freedom of the ruling city itself The 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 33$ 
 
 municipal constitution of the Roman city, an admirable 
 constitution for the Roman city and its original small 
 territory, a constitution which had come in the best pos- 
 sible way, by gradually growing up as it was wanted, 
 failed, as it was almost sure to fail, as a government for 
 the whole Mediterranean world, or even for the whole 
 of Italy. There was nothing in it to attach the subject 
 nations to it; in some cases it supplanted really free com- 
 monwealths, in others it supplanted national kings ; in 
 either case the Roman provincial sank to a lower level 
 than he had held before he became a Roman provincial. 
 To forestall for a moment, the rule of the Roman city 
 offered to the subject lands no such advantages as the 
 rule of the Venetian city offered in after days to its 
 subject lands. The rule of Venice, with all its faults, 
 was in Italy better than the rule of local oppressors ; 
 out of Italy Venice was the champion of Europe 
 and Christendom against the barbarian. The Roman 
 Empire came in after days to hold this last place; 
 it held it from the moment that barbarian invasions 
 of any kind began ; but such can hardly be said 
 to have been at any time the calling of the Roman 
 commonwealth. Greece and Greek Asia did not call 
 on Rome for help against Mithridates; they rather 
 looked on Mithridates as a deliverer from Roman 
 oppression. We cannot disguise the fact that, in the 
 rule of foreign dependencies, the rule of a common- 
 wealth, unless there are some special circumstances 
 like those of Venice, is commonly worse than that of 
 a king. For the very essence of monarchy is rule over 
 others ; the essence of a commonwealth is self-rule ; if 
 it takes on itself the rule of others, it becomes a cor- 
 
33^ PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 porate king. There is no doubt that the Roman com- 
 monwealth in its last days, even as an Italian, even as 
 a local Roman, institution, needed the most sweeping 
 of reforms. But no reforms could ever have made the 
 municipality of Rome, under any shape, a good ruler 
 over all lands from the Euphrates to the Ocean. The 
 Imperial rule, with all its faults, was a gain to the sub- 
 ject lands. ' 
 
 The extension of the citizenship to the whole Empire 
 by the edict of Antoninus Caracalla was the natural 
 completion of the change to practical monarchy. All 
 the subjects of Caesar were now alike Romans. And, 
 if this promotion was at the time little more than a 
 shadow, it had most important effects on times to come. 
 Hitherto the Roman power had been the very contra- 
 diction of all nationality ; it had been the holding down 
 of subject nations under the rule of a single city. But 
 now a kind of artificial nationality was spread over the 
 whole Empire; all its free inhabitants, if not fellow- 
 countrymen, were at least fellow-subjects ; they bore a 
 common name ; all were proud to be able to call them- 
 selves Romans; the Empire itself gradually came to 
 take the geographical name of Romania ; the Gaul and 
 the Spaniard, won to Roman culture, called himself a 
 Roman in opposition to his Teutonic invaders ; even 
 the Greek adopted the Roman name, and kept it till the 
 classical fancy of later times revived the name of Hellen. 
 The Latinized Thracian has stuck to the Roman name to 
 our own times, and this very year a new Roman king- 
 dom on the lower Danube has taken its place among the 
 powers of Europe. The subject nations, if they found 
 little practical gain in the boon of citizenship, were at 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 337 
 
 least raised in their own eyes ; they were at least raised 
 to equahty of servitude ; they no longer saw a master 
 in every Roman citizen ; the old Romans and the new 
 had at least a common master in the prince who was 
 fast passing from a supposed republican magistrate into 
 an avowed monarch. 
 
 When all had alike become Romans, all might alike 
 become Emperor^. The Empire, in its origin an ex- 
 traordinary commission which circumstances caused to 
 become perpetual, passed by no definite law of election, 
 by no definite law of hereditary succession. Formally, 
 the Imperial power was bestowed by a special grant of the 
 Senate; practically, it was the prize of any Roman that 
 could grasp it. And now that the provincials were Ro- 
 mans, it became the prize of the most valiant among them. 
 Above all, it became the prize of stout soldiers from the 
 Illyrian lands, whose swords saved Rome now that the 
 inroads of our own kinsfolk had begun. Proud of the 
 Roman name, proud of the Roman dominion, zealous 
 in their calling as its defenders, they were little touched 
 by the local associations of the eternal city, or were at 
 mOst touched by them as strangers. They girded the 
 local Rome with the walls which again were needed ; 
 but they found that the local Rome was no longer fitted 
 to be the seat of the Roman power. Untrammelled by 
 the worn-out traditions of the commonwealth, finding 
 themselves practically monarchs, they felt as monarchs. 
 They forsook the local Rome for spots better fitted for 
 the dwelling-place of monarchs who had a boundless 
 frontier to defend against restless enemies. Emperors 
 dwelled at various cities of Italy, of Europe, of Asia ; 
 at Rome itself hardly ever. Under Diocletian the Em- 
 
338 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 perors, already for a long while more than kings in 
 power, took to themselves the outward pomp, the out- 
 ward badges, of kingship, all save that one forbidden 
 monosyllable, that one title of Rex, at which every Ro- 
 man still shuddered. For the Imperial power, now at last 
 acknowledged for what it really was, Constantine found 
 a fitting and an abiding home. His New Rome by the 
 Bosporos became, as a seat of unbroken dominion, under 
 whatever holders, far more truly eternal than the elder 
 Rome by the Tiber. In all divisions of the Empire, 
 whether among Imperial colleagues or among rival 
 Emperors, other cities, Milan, Ravenna, Antioch, York, 
 Trier, Aachen, Nikaia, Trebizond, the Old Rome her- 
 self, might be at this or that time a seat of Empire ; at 
 Constantinople alone dominion was abiding. As long 
 as even the shadow of the Roman power lasted in the 
 East, Constantinople remained the seat of Empire. The 
 city which beat back the Avar, the Persian, the Bulga- 
 rian, was at last stormed by the arms of Western Eu- 
 rope. But the Frank still reigned in the New Rome as 
 an Emperor of Romania; his rule soon gave way to the 
 revived rule of the Greek still disguised under the Ro- 
 man name ; and when the Greek at last gave way to the 
 Turk, the Asiatic barbarian, as he seems to us, still kept 
 up in some sort the succession of Augustus, Diocletian, 
 and Constantine. In the eyes of his fellow-barbarians, 
 the Sultan of the Ottomans, the boasted Caliph of the 
 Prophet, still held the rank of the Caesar of Rome. 
 
 What I have in this course to say about the Eastern 
 lands of Rome will come at another stage. In those lands 
 the Roman Empire, the Roman power, went on in its 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 339 
 
 unbroken fulness. We have now to deal with that side 
 of the Roman dominion which supplies us with illus- 
 trations for the history of the older Roman common- 
 wealths and of the later commonwealths which, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, arose after its pattern. Let 
 no man, I would warn you, believe, as shallow books 
 will tell you, that the Roman Empire, or even the 
 Western Roman Empire, came to an end in the year 
 476. The formal aspect of the act of that year was the 
 reunion of the Western Empire with the Eastern, and 
 that formal aspect, purely nominal at the time, became 
 a living and practical thing, when, in the next century, 
 Justinian won back Italy, Africa, and part of Spain, and 
 reigned from the throne of Constantinople, over land and 
 sea, from the Euphrates to the Ocean. Days of distress 
 came ; the Empire which had beaten back the Persian 
 and the Avar lost its provinces to the Saracen and the 
 Bulgarian ; 'still the Old and the New Rome knew but 
 one master, the Old Rome acknowledged the master 
 who reigned in the New, in very truth for some way 
 into the eighth century, in formal language till its last 
 year. Then the Empire was split asunder for ever. 
 The Frank received the crown of the West; for the 
 first time the world beheld a Teutonic Augustus. In 
 fact, though not yet in name, the Holy Roman Empire 
 of the German Nation began with the coronation of the 
 German Charles. Step by step, the Roman Empire 
 of the West became practically a German power ; the 
 Roman Empire of the East became practically a Greek 
 power. Step by step, by slow steps — for it took more 
 than six hundred years — the Eastern Empire was broken 
 in pieces from without. Step by step, by slower steps 
 
340 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 still — for it took more than a thousand years — the 
 Western Empire fell in pieces from within. Out of its 
 broken pieces gradually grew up the states and nations 
 of modern Europe. And what specially concerns us 
 now, some of those states took the shape of free cities, 
 of ruling cities, of confederations of lands and cities, 
 furnishing us with a lively image of the free cities, the 
 ruling cities, the confederate cities, of the earlier days 
 of Greece and Italy. 
 
 The mediaeval world of Europe differed from the 
 older world of Greece and Italy in the days before the 
 Roman power, chiefly in those points of difference which 
 arose out of the fact of the existence of the Roman' 
 power. Not the least of these was the existence of that 
 religion of which Rome was first the persecutor and then 
 the missionary. In the elder state of things, every city, 
 every land, every kingdom where kings still lingered, 
 clave to absolute independence as a cherished ideal, even 
 though in fact absolute independence might be cut short 
 by the predominance of some ruling city or other 
 power. In the mediaeval world, on the other hand, the 
 theory was that the Roman Emperor was lord of the 
 world, that every city, every principality, every kingdom, 
 was under at least the external supremacy of the one 
 prince who alone was Emperor, who alone was Monarch, 
 who alone claimed to be the temporal Vicar of God upon 
 earth. That some cities, some kingdoms — the English 
 kingdom pre-eminent among them — emphaticaily, even 
 ostentatiously, denied the Imperial supremacy, is the 
 best of all signs that the existence of that supremacy 
 was everywhere the received theory. But the Empire, 
 placed in the hands of a Teutonic king, took another 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 341 
 
 character from that which it had held in the hands of a 
 Roman citizen. Step by step, while its boundless dig- 
 nity remained, its practical authority lessened. If theory 
 asserted everywhere at least its outward supremacy, in 
 practice it kept little beyond that outward supremacy 
 anywhere. Cities, lands, dukes, kings, might acknow- 
 ledge Csesar as a theoretical superior, they might even 
 take their place in some great assembly summoned at 
 his bidding, and yet they might in every-day life, act 
 as freely in matters of war, peace, and alliance, as could 
 Athens, Sparta, Aitolia, Achaia, cities and leagues which 
 knew no superior on earth. This was largely the case 
 in Germany, where the exercise of the Imperial su- 
 premacy and the gathering of assemblies at the Impe- 
 rial bidding never quite died out, till the Empire ceased, 
 even in name, to be. It was still more thoroughly the 
 case in Italy, where the Imperial supremacy gradually left 
 no traces beyond the occasional appearance of a king to 
 be changed into an Emperor by his coronation, and his 
 occasional bestowal of a formal title. So it was for a while 
 in the lands which once formed the Burgundian kingdom, 
 lands where, in those parts which have escaped French 
 annexation, local freedom has kept on a very stubborn 
 life down to our own day. In England, almost alone, 
 strong national unity and the strong power of the Crown 
 hindered the growth either of free cities or of indepen- 
 dent principalities. One or two earls, one or two bi- 
 shops, had rights which, if all earls and bishops had held 
 the like, would have made England split up as Ger- 
 many did split up. And not a few English cities and 
 boroughs had local constitutions, local privileges, local 
 powers, which might well have grown into independent 
 
342 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 commonwealths, if the powers of the English kings had 
 ever become as small as the practical powers of the 
 Western Emperors. So much the" better for England. 
 What was lost in local freedom and local greatness was 
 won for the common freedom and greatness of the 
 whole land. 
 
 There is perhaps a more excellent way still, of which 
 I hope to speak hereafter. As yet I have only to say a 
 few words on the free cities of the Middle Ages, and 
 specially on those among them which rose to the rank 
 of ruling cities. Two regions of Europe stand out 
 before all others as the homes of free cities, especially 
 of ruling cities. There is Italy, northern and central ; 
 there are those border-lands of Germany and Burgundy 
 at whose cities and other states we shall have to look 
 again in another character, as they grow into the Confed- 
 eration of Switzerland. We have now to look at them 
 only in their character of free cities and lands, of ruling 
 cities and lands. The districts which made up the Old 
 League of High Germany, the Swiss Confederation of 
 later times, show us a varied picture of every kind of 
 relation of alliance, dependence, and subjection. This 
 or that town or land was subject to this or that other 
 town or land, or to several towns or lands in joint 
 dominion. And it should specially be noticed that, in 
 those dependent lands of Switzerland to which several 
 cantons in turn sent a governor, a vogt or bailiff, it was 
 always found that the subject lands were better off 
 when the bailiff came from an aristocratic canton. A 
 patrician of Bern or Basel, even if he did not forget his 
 own interests, had gained experience at home in the art 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 343 
 
 of government. A landman of Uri, who had too often 
 bought his office in the Landesgemeinde, sought for no- 
 thing but to recover with interest what he had spent, and 
 proved a far more oppressive ruler. Here we have the 
 same lesson : the local government of a democratic city 
 or a democratic land is, by its very nature, unsuited to act 
 as the ruler of other cities or lands. So in Italy, demo- 
 cratic Florence deemed it one chief object of her policy 
 to keep Pisa in bondage ; when Pisa was set free from 
 Florence, and Florence was set free from her own 
 tyrants, the first desire of every Florentine was to take 
 away from Pisa the freedom which he rejoiced to have 
 won back for his own city. In truth, there was hardly 
 a free city which had not something of a subject terri- 
 tory attached to it. I may add that there is a survival 
 of something very like this rule even in England. The 
 county of Middlesex is in some sort a subject district to 
 the city of London. It is a clear mark of subjection 
 when any town or district has to receive magistrates 
 who are neither of its own choosing nor yet appointed 
 by the general government of the whole country. Now, 
 the Sheriffs of the city of London, chosen by the citi- 
 zens of London, act also as Sheriffs of the county of 
 Middlesex. That is, so far as the chief executive officers 
 of the county are concerned, the people of Middlesex 
 have magistrates who are neither chosen by themselves 
 nor appointed by the Crown, but who are put upon 
 them by their neighbours of London. So far as its 
 Sheriffs are concerned, the county of Middlesex is cer- 
 tainly a province of London ; it is, like Triphylia or the 
 Levantine Valley, a subject land. 
 
 This is of course a mere survival without practical 
 
344 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 importance; except in this purely formal matter, the- 
 Middle-Saxons have the same rights as the rest of 
 the people of the United Kingdom. A much more 
 remarkable case of a ruling city, or rather of two cities 
 ruling in partnership, was still in being sixteen years 
 back; whether it is in being still I know not; most 
 likely later changes have swept it away. When I was 
 in North Germany in 1865, the two Hanseatic cities of 
 Liibeck and Hamburg held the small district of Vier- 
 lande in joint sovereignty, what is technically called con- 
 dominium. This was exactly like the holding of subject 
 districts by two or more cities or lands of the Old League 
 of High Germany till masters and subjects became mem- 
 bers of the Swiss Confederation on equal terms. But 
 among all ruling cities of the later world, we may pick 
 out two, cities, both of them cities whose names we have 
 already often spoken, one of them a ruler by land, the 
 other a ruler by sea and land, one of the Teutonic 
 tongue, the other of the Romance, but each bearing 
 rule over cities and lands of other tongues than its own. 
 Bern on her peninsula, looking forth upon her subject 
 mountains, is the queen of ruling cities of the mainland, 
 queen of ruling cities of Teutonic speech. Venice on 
 her islands, looking forth upon her subject mountains 
 and yet more upon her subject seas, is the queen of 
 ruling cities of the waters, queen of ruling cities of the 
 Romance speech. Of Romance speech she is, and she 
 was ruler over wide and fair lands of that speech, wide 
 and fair lands and noble cities of the Western Empire. 
 But Venice herself grew into being as a city, not of the 
 Western Empire, but of the Eastern. And the most 
 glorious part of her history belongs to lands beyond 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 345 
 
 our present immediate range, but lands at which we 
 may well take a glance before we have done. Venice 
 is, before all things, 
 
 Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite. 
 
 And that character of the Republic gives to one side of 
 her a nobler aspect than belongs to any other ruling 
 city. In a large part of her dominion, Venice was not 
 only a ruler, but a defender and deliverer. Whatever 
 were the faults of her rule, and in not a few of her 
 possessions those faults were many and great, she at 
 at least kept out something far worse. She saved a 
 large part of the Eastern lands from the dominion of 
 the barbarian. One might say something almost the 
 same with regard to her later possessions on the Italian 
 mainland. When the independence of the several cities 
 had passed away, the rule of the wise oligarchy was felt 
 to be at least better than that either of local tyrants or 
 of foreign kings. The men of the subject lands of 
 Venice felt a loyalty towards Saint Mark which they 
 did not feel towards either a Visconti or a Habsburg. 
 Venice, with her earliest and greatest possessions lying 
 apart from herself beyond the sea, in the lands of the 
 Eastern Rome, shows us the greatest of all examples of 
 the ruling city of later times, the widest in its dominion, 
 the most abiding in its rule, the most far-reaching in its 
 relations to other lands. But Bern, not to be compared 
 to Venice in any of these points, is the more lively image 
 of the elder Rome. Bern and Venice fell almost at the 
 same moment, and at the hands of the same enemy. 
 Bern was a city of the Western Empire in every sense 
 
346 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 of the word. The city itself and its subject territory all 
 lay within both the earlier and the later bounds of the 
 Western Empire, within the Gaulish province of the first 
 Augustus, within one or other of the kingdoms of his 
 Prankish and Swabian successors. While Venice, as 
 long as she owned any lord, bowed to the Eastern 
 Caesar only, Bern, from her birth to the day when all 
 external superiority was disowned, was a free Imperial 
 city of the West. Bern, as a city of comparatively late 
 foundation, founded on the borders of Germany and 
 Burgundy, as Rome was founded on the borders of 
 Latium and Etruria, a land city, growing by land, with 
 the Leman lake as her miniature Mediterranean, grow- 
 ing step by step, annexing town after town, land after 
 land, in various relations of alliance, dependence, and 
 subjection, till she had formed a continuous dominion, 
 small indeed as compared with that of Rome and 
 Venice, but large indeed among the neighbours of her 
 own immediate world, — the city of the Bear, rather than 
 the city of the Winged Lion, is the truest representative 
 in the later world of at least the earlier growth of the city 
 of the Wolf and the Eagle. But Bern and Venice alike are 
 true parallels of Rome as examples of the long and abid- 
 ing rule of a civic aristocracy. For in the mixed consti- 
 tution of Rome, it was the aristocratic rather than the 
 democratic side which showed itself towards the subject 
 lands. Neither the Bernese nor the Venetian patriciate 
 had the same origin as either the earlier patriciate or the 
 later nobility of Rome; indeed, the origin of the Roman 
 and the Venetian patriciate are, as we have seen, exactly 
 opposite to each other. But in all three we may study 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 347 
 
 the growth and the nature of civic aristocracies, above 
 all in their relation to subject lands. All three show us 
 the special feature of aristocratic commonwealths, that 
 to which mainly they owe their permanence, the rich 
 crop of men who are great enough for the work that 
 they have to do, but not too great. Men of the greatest 
 stamp of all, whether for good or for evil, are more at 
 home either in the kingdom or in the democracy. Peri- 
 kles would have found but little scope in any one of the 
 three. When Rome at last produced a citizen too great 
 to be a citizen, her own freedom fell, if her subject lands 
 gained. Venice fell by the hands of a man of the same 
 mould; Caesar and Buonaparte both display the same 
 union of 'the highest natural gifts with the utter lack of 
 moral feeling. And Bern fell, if not by the same hand 
 as Venice, at least as part of the same course of events. 
 The later fate of Bern has been the happier of the two. 
 She was never handed over to a mere foreign oppressor, 
 and she and the whole of her once subject lands — save 
 her momentary possessions beyond the lake — have long 
 flourished as equal members of a free confederation. 
 Venice has twice groaned under a foreign yoke; she 
 and part of her once subject lands are free ; part of them 
 still bear unwillingly the rule of the foreign oppressor 
 to whom they have been twice betrayed. At this very 
 moment, in one small corner of Europe, men stand in 
 arms, as they have so often stood in other lands in other 
 ages, against the selfish tyranny of the House of Habs- 
 burg. The brave men of the Bocche di Cattaro stand 
 ready, not for the first time, to guard their homes and 
 their chartered rights against the base faithlessness of 
 their Austrian oppressor. They had no such need in 
 
348 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 the three centuries when the Lion of Saint Mark was 
 their defender against every enemy. 
 
 And now what immediate practical lessons may we 
 learn from all this ? Are we to say that it is all matter 
 of mere curiosity, and that no lessons of practical poli- 
 tics can be learned from it at all ? Can we, in a world 
 on so great a scale as our present world, a world so 
 richly endowed with modern inventions, a world not 
 only of writing and printing, but a world of steamers, 
 railways, and electric telegraphs, learn anything from 
 times when everything was on so small a scale, and 
 when none of these great, inventions were known ? I 
 venture to think that we may learn much ; and I am 
 strongly tempted to make one general inference, though 
 an inference which I fully admit can be made only with 
 some very important exceptions. The great lesson to 
 be drawn from the history of these ruling cities seems 
 to me to be this : that, as a rule, the fitting extent of 
 territory for any power or nation is so much, and no 
 more, as a national government can administer from a 
 common centre. This rule applies to great states and 
 to small, to single cities and to great nations. The ter- 
 ritory of a single city should not be so great as to hin- 
 der its citizens from appearing personally in one place. 
 Attica, not all Italy, is the measure of a city-common- 
 wealth. By the same rule, the territory of a greater 
 power or nation should not be so great or so geogra- 
 phically disposed as to hinder its representatives from ha- 
 bitually appearing in one place. I should be inclined to 
 lay these down as general rules for all times and places. 
 The system of provinces, of dependencies, of territories 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 349 
 
 which cannot be brought into the general system of 
 government, which need to be administered by some 
 special delegated power, seems to me to be vicious in 
 idea. Where there is need of a proconsul, satrap, pasha, 
 governor, lord high commissioner, or any one of that 
 kind, it seems to me to be a prima facie presumption 
 that there is something wrong in the state of things 
 which needs his presence. There is a pmnd facie ob- 
 jection to the very notion of a dependency. Dependen- 
 cies are either colonies or foreign dependencies. One is 
 tempted to say. Let colonies be free from the beginning, 
 and let foreign dependencies not exist at all. Yet there 
 is no rule without exception. In some cases the depend- 
 ent relation has worked for good ; in some special and 
 exceptional cases, it would seem to be practically the 
 best position for some particular lands. When Bern 
 conquered Vaud from the dukes of Savoy, it may be 
 doubted whether Vaud gained or lost at the time by 
 passing from the rule of a despot to that of an oligarchy. 
 But had Vaud remained part of the Savoyard territoiy, 
 it is hardly likely that it would now be a free member 
 of the Everlasting League. I suspect that, when a 
 Spanish dependency in the Netherlands was incorpor- 
 ated with France, it gained at the moment; but had it 
 remained a Spanish dependency, it would now help to 
 swell the strength of independent Belgium. The pecu- 
 liar position of Venice in her Eastern dependencies, her 
 mission as the champion of Europe and of Christendom, 
 tends to put out of the sight the darker side of her rule, 
 as it showed itself in many times and places, but not in 
 all. Yet all that we can say for Venice at her best is, 
 that she kept out things that were worse at a time when 
 
 23 
 
3SO PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 there was no chance of anything better; it would he 
 absurd to compare the state of her most favoured depen- 
 dencies with that of either a free city or a constitutional 
 kingdom. Or, to come nearer home, while no thought- 
 ful Englishman can defend the acquisition of India, yet 
 a thoughtful Englishman may easily defend its retention. 
 We may leave the babble about honour and glory and 
 empire and the outlandish thing called prestige to the 
 Jingoes of " society " and the newspapers. But a thought- 
 ful man might argue that, if it was a crime to take it, it 
 would be a worse crime to throw it up ; he might argue 
 that the British people has taken on its shoulders the 
 frightful responsibility of governing millions of people 
 who cannot govern themselves, and that no man can 
 rightly, simply to ease himself of a burthen, cast aside 
 that responsibility, with the strong chance before him 
 that, whatever may be the evils of the present system, 
 the evils of anything that could take its place would be 
 greater. But I will rather take a case within the bounds 
 of Europe where it is plain to me that a singular com- 
 bination of causes has made the dependent relation the 
 right thing. That may easily be the case with a state 
 or people too small to stand by itself, and yet having 
 too marked a separate life to be merged in any greater 
 whole. Such is surely the case with those parts of the 
 duchy of Normandy which, after so many ages, are still 
 held by the cfown of Great Britain. I was once asked in 
 England, " When did we get the Channel Islands ?" I was 
 driven to answer, " We never got them ; they got us in 
 1066." Jersey, Guernsey, and their fellows are simply 
 that part of the Norman duchy which clave to its dukes 
 when the rest fell away. Their people are those Nor- 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 35 1 
 
 mans who remained Normans while the rest stooped 
 to become Frenchmen. The Queen of Great Britain 
 has a perfect right, if she will, to call herself Duchess 
 of the Normans, a title which, in my ears at least, sounds 
 better than that of Empress of India. Those islands, 
 keeping their own tongue, their own constitution, their 
 own laws, would lose not a little by being merged in 
 either of their greater neighbours. They would lose 
 much by becoming an English county ; they would lose 
 yet more by becoming a French department. Yet they 
 are not strong enough to stand by themselves; an 
 attempt on their part at perfect independence could 
 lead to nothing but absorption in one direction or 
 another. For a people in this case the dependent rela- 
 tion is clearly the most healthy. They can keep local 
 freedom only by giving up all claim to external inde- 
 pendence. And the power on which they are to be 
 dependent can be none but Great Britain. Union with 
 France, whose whole history and spirit tends to the 
 absolute incorporation of every new territory, would 
 mean the extinction of all local freedom. England, 
 used to dependencies of all kinds, has no temptation to 
 meddle with local freedom. As dependencies of Great 
 Britain, the Channel Islands practically unite the local 
 freedom of a small commonwealth with the safety of a 
 great kingdom. 
 
 In your federal system the provincial or dependent re- 
 lation has no place. The position of the territories, as 
 distinguished from that of the States, is in point of fact 
 somewhat like that of provinces, but in point of sentiment 
 it is quite different. The territory is an infant state, de- 
 pendent only till it is able to walk by itself. It is I'ather 
 
352 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 like a Latin colony, not yet admitted to the full Roman 
 franchise, but hoping some day to be promoted to it. 
 But the history of dependencies is no small part of the 
 history of the world ; it is no small part of it if we do 
 not look beyond the dependencies of Rome only. And 
 I think that the general result of its study will be that 
 there is a strong presumption against the dependent 
 relation, that it is justifiable and beneficial in certain 
 exceptional cases, but that it needs to have a case made 
 out for it in each instance ; till such a case is made out, 
 our first impression is the other way. Among the dark- 
 est pages of history are those which record the evil 
 deeds of princes and of commonwealths too toward 
 their subject and dependent lands. Among the brightest 
 pages of history are those which record the struggles 
 by which subject and dependent lands have won their 
 perfect independence. We can even rejoice when sub- 
 ject lands have been set free by means which on every 
 other ground are most alien to our feelings. We mourn 
 for the overthrow alike of Bern and of Uri, but we 
 must not forget that the overthrow of Bern was the 
 deliverance of Vaud, that the overthrow of Uri was the 
 deliverance of Ticino. The fall of Venice has no such 
 redeeming side ; there all was the deepest and blackest 
 treachery that the Corsican and the Lorrainer could 
 devise between them. The wrong indeed has been 
 partly undone in later times. One region of the old 
 subject lands is now part of free Italy, another region 
 is now part of free Greece. Between them, yearning to 
 be like them, lie the shores and islands which have 
 been twice betrayed to the Austrian intruder. 
 
 I just now defined the fitting extent for the territory 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 353 
 
 of a single city to be that which is not too great to 
 allow of the citizens habitually assembling in their own 
 persons. In the present state of Europe and America 
 this is a question which it is hardly worth while to press 
 further. The day of free cities seems to be past, unhap- 
 pily, I think, but I fear beyond recovery. Of all that 
 once were, three only remain, and of those three the 
 freedom is not a little cut short. But the other rule 
 which I laid down, that the limit of territory for a 
 greater commonwealth or kingdom should be fixed by 
 the limit within which habitual representation of the 
 whole territory is possible, seems to be of constant 
 and practical application. I assume of course national 
 . unity, or some of those substitutes for it which history 
 sometimes provides. I assume, that is, either a nation 
 in the strict sense, like France or Germany, or else, like 
 Switzerland, an artificial nation, formed by the will and 
 act of those who have formed it. I am not speaking of 
 powers which are in no sense nations, but mere gath- 
 erings of odds and ends of nations, stitched together 
 to patch up the family estate of a single man. It may 
 be that this qualification will confine the supposed 
 state within very narrow limits. It may be that it 
 will allow it a boundless range of space. It may, in 
 short, be as small as Switzerland or as vast as your 
 own Union. But what I wish specially to point out 
 is that here is the point where the practical effect 
 of the great modern inventions steps in. Railways, 
 telegraphs, and the like, really alter the scale of the 
 world and of the things in it. The real measure of 
 extent is not the area on the map, but the means of 
 communication. A large area on the modern map is 
 
354 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 practically only of the same size as a much smaller area 
 on the ancient map. Without railways, without tele- 
 graphs, a land like yours, stretching from the one Ocean 
 to the other, could not form one free state, even on the 
 federal pattern. Your system could not be carried over 
 so vast a region, if there was no quicker means of com- 
 municating between Washington and San Francisco than 
 the speed of a horse. One may doubt whether, even with 
 railways and telegraphs, so great a territory could* be 
 kept together except by a federal system. No single par- 
 liament could deal with all the local affairs of so many 
 communities which, with so much in common, have so 
 many differences of position and circumstances. This is 
 the real way in which these great mechanical inventions • 
 affect history and politics. They allow the same moral 
 forces which once affected only a smaller area to affect a 
 much greater. That is, they lessen the importance of 
 space and distance. The very inventions which are 
 boastingly referred to as making an impassable gap 
 between one age and another, and as proving the im- 
 measureable inferiority of the later age, are simply the 
 means of putting the two upon a level. We are enabled 
 to keep on a political life essentially the same as that of 
 the old commonwealths, by the very means which are 
 thought to part them and us hopelessly asunder. 
 
 We have in this short sketch and comment passed 
 through many ages and many lands; but we have 
 never gone beyond the ken of the great centre of the 
 world's history : we have never lost sight of the seven 
 hills ; we have ever had Rome to look to, whether as 
 the direct cause of the events of which we speak or 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 355 
 
 simply as illustrating our familiar law that like causes 
 produce like effects. No fact in all history is plainer 
 than the abiding influence of the Roman power, as the 
 centre of the whole thought, one might say of the 
 whole being, of the middle ages. And yet, save the 
 even simple doctrine that we, men of English stock 
 and speech, are really ourselves and not somebody else, 
 no doctrine seems harder for the mass of men to take 
 in. I remember once being looked at with dumb amaze- 
 ment, as if I had been an object of preternatural anti- 
 quity, because I said that I had been for some years 
 contemporary with a man who had been Roman Empe- 
 ror. Yet as the Roman Empire came to an end only 
 seventeen years before my birth, and as the man who 
 had been its last sovereign endured to live on in his 
 abasement some ten or a dozen years after I came into 
 the world, there was nothing very wonderful in the 
 statement. The very badge of Rome is forgotten ; 
 when, on tomb or tower or trophy, men see her two- 
 headed eagle marking the dominion of her Caesars, to 
 not a few minds the Imperial bird suggests only a shame- 
 less imposture of our own times; they cry "Austria" in- 
 stead of" Rome." Because a certain German duke chooses 
 to call himself " Emperor " of his duchy, the grotesque 
 title that he has devised is carried back into past times : 
 I have heard the name of " Emperor of Austria " thrust 
 upon Roman Caesars and German Kings who had no- 
 thing to do with the Austrian duchy except to receive its 
 homage. The last Emperor but two did indeed go to 
 Rome and come away without his crown ; but, if the 
 reforming Joseph had forgotten who he was, others 
 remembered it for him. The Roman people, in a fit of 
 
356 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 abiding Ghibelinism, shouted greetings to " our Empe- 
 ror," and bade him welcome to his own house. And in 
 the amphitheatre of Verona the inscription may still be 
 read which tells how " Imperator Caesar Josephus Se- 
 cundus, Pius, Felix, Pater Patriae, Semper Augustus," 
 and all the rest of it, saw the ancient building restored 
 to its old bloody purpose, how with pleased eyes, like 
 Claudius or Constantine, he looked upon a bull-fight, 
 and, like Claudius or Constantine, received the applause 
 of the people. Bear in mind, I would again ask you, 
 that the Roman Empire did not end when Augustulus 
 resigned the purple; bear in mind that it lived on in 
 name for thirty years after the declaration of indepen- 
 dence of the United States — thatvyour Jefferson and 
 your Adams survived it by twenty years — and that, if 
 long before that time, it had become only a name, the 
 survival of the name is no small witness to the long 
 survival of the thing. The Empire of Frederick Bar- 
 barossa was in a sense an unreal thing ; that is, the 
 words " Roman Empire " meant in his day something 
 widely different from what they had meant in the days 
 of Trajan. But it was not unreal in this sense, that the 
 Roman Empire was still a name which influenced men's 
 thoughts and actions, that it was still a thing for which 
 men were ready to live and die. Never then forget 
 this cardinal fact in the history of fourteen hundred 
 years, that the Roman Empire lived on, during the 
 whole of that time as a venerable name, during many 
 ages of it as a living thing round which the history of 
 Western Europe still gathered. And remember too 
 that for a thousand years of that time it lived on in 
 Eastern Europe with a more unbroken life. Of that 
 
THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 35/ 
 
 life of " Rome transplanted " I shall have again to speak ; 
 let me only remind you now that, as the Empire of 
 Constantine Palaiologos fell with a more worthy fall 
 than the Empire of Francis of Lorraine and Austria, 
 so the Empire which had the nobler end was also the 
 truer representative of the power which grew up on the 
 seven hills by the Tiber and flitted to the seven hills by 
 the Bosporos. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 E\)t &ltitx anlr ii)t ^etocr OJnglatttr.. 
 
 The history of Rome, commonwealth and empire, has 
 been found, in the researches which we have already made, 
 to throw light on not a few of the greatest political ques- 
 tions in the general history of mankind. But the two 
 great branches of the English people, those who made 
 only their first voyage from the European mainland to 
 an European island and those who made the further voy- 
 age from that European island to the American mainland, 
 have been less directly touched by Rome and her power 
 than most of the nations of Europe. Britain fell away 
 from the elder Roman dominion before any part of the 
 island had become England, and England never admitted 
 the supremacy of that younger Roman dominion which 
 begins with Charles the Great. Britain fell back into 
 her old character of a world apart from the world of 
 Rome, and it was only in a very slight measure that 
 England ever gave up this character of insular inde- 
 pendence. We came under the influence of Rome, but 
 not under her rule. Neither our conversion to Chris- 
 tianity by Roman teachers, nor our conquest by the 
 Latin-speaking Norman, ever brought us within the 
 Latin world in the same sense as the Latin-speaking 
 lands of Italy, Gaul, and Spain. Neither were we 
 
 358 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 3 59 
 
 brought within it in the same sense as those Teutonic 
 lands whose kings added the Imperial crown of Rome 
 to their own Teutonic kingship. We became the disci- 
 ples of the Roman Pontiff; we never became the sub- 
 jects of the Roman Caesar. The Roman law had less 
 effect on the law of England than on the law of any- 
 other part of Western Europe. Less purely Teutonic 
 in our tongue — more affected, that is, by a Romance 
 infusion — we are really more Teutonic in our history 
 than the Teutonic realm itself We stand in some 
 measure apart both from those lands, whether Ro- 
 mance or Teutonic in speech, which became part of 
 the renewed Western Empire, and from those lands, 
 whether parts of the Empire or not, whose speech was 
 of Latin origin. On the lands of both those classes 
 Rome had an amount of direct influence which she 
 never had on England. Yet even the direct influence 
 of Rome on England was not small. It was something 
 quite different from the indirect influence which is all 
 that we can claim for old Greece. If neither Latin nor 
 any of its daughter-tongues ever displaced the Teu- 
 tonic speech of England, yet the English tongue re- 
 ceived a large Romance infusion into its vocabulary ; a 
 Romance speech became for three hundred years the 
 polite and courtly speech of England, and Latin itself 
 became the received speech of learning, in England no 
 less than in the other lands of Western Europe. And 
 if the Roman law never became the groundwork of the 
 law of England, as it became the groundwork of the 
 law of some other European lands, yet not a small 
 infusion, both from the Roman law itself and from the 
 institutions of the Romance-speaking lands, made its 
 
360 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY.- 
 
 way into the body of our primitive Teutonic institu- 
 tions. Ours, I say, because whatever is ours is yours 
 also. Whatever belongs to the elder England in the 
 European island belongs no less to the younger Eng- 
 land on the American mainland. If there is one point 
 more than another on which I wish to insist with all 
 emphasis, it is that our history is yours also — that the 
 history of the United States does not begin with the 
 landing of the English in America in the seventeenth 
 century, but with the landing of the English in Britain 
 in the fifth. The two great branches of the English 
 people, geographically and politically divided of late 
 years, but still none the less branches of the same peo- 
 ple, had for thirteen hundred years a common history ; 
 for the last hundred years they have had a parallel his- 
 tory. To you, citizens of this newer England, trans- 
 planted children of the elder England, common chil- 
 dren with us of the oldest England of all, I would, 
 before all things, preach this lesson. When you read 
 the history of Aryan Europe, or of any of the nations 
 of Aryan Europe, you are reading the records of a 
 kindred folk, in which you have the interest of kins- 
 men. When you read the history of old Greece, you 
 are reading the records of that eldest branch of the 
 common stock which was given to be a political and 
 intellectual example to all that followed. When you 
 read the history of Rome, you are reading the records, 
 not only of a kindred power, but of the power which 
 has stamped its direct impress for all time on all Europe 
 and on all the lands colonized from Europe. But when 
 you read the history of the English folk, whether in the 
 isle of Britain or in the older time before any part of 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 36 1 
 
 the isle of Britain became English, you are reading the 
 records of yourselves. You are reading the records of 
 the time when the two now severed branches were still 
 unsevered, the time whose events, whose institutions, 
 whose worthies, are the common possession of one 
 branch of the common stock no less than of another. 
 In the ups and downs, the defeats and the victories, of 
 the earliest days of England, your share is no less than 
 ours ; the long struggle with foreign invaders, with for- 
 eign conquerors, with foreign-hearted kings, was waged 
 by your forefathers no less than ours ; the men who 
 built up the fabric of English freedom built up the 
 fabric of American freedom also as part of their build- 
 ing. Our blood, our speech, our memories, the long 
 glories of our common ancestry, are yours no less than 
 ours. As of old wherever Hellenes dwelled, there was 
 Hellas, so we should deem that, wherever the English 
 folk dwell, there is England. Whatever be the geo- 
 graphical or the political division, be the rule that of 
 a king or of a commonwealth, be the land dwelled in the 
 old world or in the new, or in that newer southern world 
 which has risen to take its place beside them, in all 
 times and in all places the speakers of the English 
 tongue, the inheritors of the English blood, are one. 
 It is said that the sun never sets on the dominions of 
 the British crown ; it is a higher truth that he never 
 sets on the dwelling-places of the English people. 
 
 In the present lecture I wish to say somewhat, from 
 our special point of view, of the history, especially the 
 constitutional history, of the English people. And I 
 wish to look at that history with a special reference to 
 
362 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 that branch of the English people which forms the great 
 commonwealth in which I now find myself And I wish 
 more specially still to look at it with reference to the 
 character of that commonwealth as a federal common- 
 wealth. In other words, I wish to run swiftly over, from 
 my own point of view, the common history of the Eng- 
 lish people down to the separation between the English 
 in Britain and the English in America, and then to speak 
 somewhat of those special points in your American 
 polity which suggest a comparison with other federal 
 systems, specially those of ancient Achaia and modern 
 Switzerland. I have purposely touched already on 
 some particular points in all these branches of the sub- 
 ject, as supplying instances of the way in which the 
 history of one age and country may be illustrated by 
 the history of very distant ages and countries. I shall 
 now deal with them more directly as parts of a con- 
 nected tale. And here mark how connexion by di- 
 rect cause and effect differs from mere analogy brought 
 about by the independent working of like causes lead- 
 ing to like effects. The constitution of the United 
 States has manifest points of likeness to the constitu- 
 tion of England ; it has manifest points of likeness to 
 the constitution of Switzerland. But the likeness to 
 England and the likeness to Switzerland are two distinct 
 kinds of likeness. Or rather, I would say that likeness 
 is not the right word to use between England and 
 America. Your American constitution is really our 
 English constitution, first put into a formal written 
 shape, and then modified in those points in which the 
 circumstances of the American States required it to be 
 modified. I decline to look upon it as a new thing ; I 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 363 
 
 look upon it as an old thing, largely changed indeed in 
 detail, but still keeping its essential identity, with its 
 own older forms. The men of the eighteenth century 
 reformed, as the men of the thirteenth and of the seven- 
 teenth century had reformed before them. Some might 
 say that the likeness is the likeness between parent and 
 child ; I would rather call it the likeness between a man 
 at one stage of his growth and the same man at some 
 earlier or later stage. But the likeness between the 
 American and the Swiss system is of another kind, or 
 rather of more than one other kind. Neither has any 
 direct connexion with the other, neither has had any 
 direct influence on the other, in the way of cause and 
 effect. But each has that likeness to the other which 
 comes of like causes leading to like effects. And each 
 has had over the other the direct influence of example. 
 The Swiss Union is in one sense older, in another sense 
 younger, than the American Union. The older and 
 laxer form of the Everlasting League was undoubtedly 
 before the ages of the men who drew up your Declara- 
 tion of Independence and your first Articles of Con- 
 federation. But the American Constitution of 1789 was 
 still more plainly before the eyes of the men who drew 
 up the Swiss Constitution of 1848. As I have already 
 said, its founders, like the wise men that they were, fol- 
 lowed your American model in some points that suited 
 them and forbore to follow it in some other points that 
 did not suit them. And so, before them, the founders 
 of the American constitution, like the wise men that 
 they were, I will not say followed, but rather preserved, 
 the constitution of England in those points in which it 
 still suited the changed circumstances of .^merica, and 
 
364 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 modified it in those points in which it no longer suited 
 those changed circumstances. 
 
 In this inquiry, be it observed, that side of it which 
 deals with analogy and example still keeps us in the 
 strictest sense within the bounds of Rome and her 
 Empire. If we look back to old Achaia, we look back 
 to one of the powers which lost itself in the mass of the 
 elder Roman Empire ; if we look to more modern 
 Switzerland, g.nd to the German realm from which 
 Switzerland did but part off, we are looking at one of 
 the powers which arose out of the break-up of the later 
 Roman Empire. That side therefore of your polity 
 which is most modern connects itself more directly with 
 illustrations, analogies, conscious and unconscious repro- 
 ductions, which keep us within the Roman range, or 
 which, if they pass its bounds, carry us on to the older 
 days of Greece. That side of your polity which is 
 older, that which is English by direct and unbroken 
 continuity, takes us into the world which lay beyond 
 the world of the Csesars. It takes us into the world of 
 those Teutonic tribes which, having lived beyond Cae- 
 sar's rule on the European mainland, went forth to carry 
 their Teutonic speech, their Teutonic polity, their Teu- 
 tonic creed, into the island from which the rule of Caesar 
 had passed away. We cannot, by any reckoning of 
 dates, carry back any records of this primitive Eng- 
 lish polity into days so ancient as the days of your 
 old Achaian model and of the earlier Greek confede- 
 rations which were its models. But if not in years, 
 yet in idea, it is far older. Not only Aratos and Philo- 
 poimen, but Agamemnon and Achilleus, belong to a 
 later stage of political developement than Hengest and 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 365 
 
 Cerdic. The federal General, the forerunner of the fed- 
 eral President, marks a far later stage than the king of 
 the city. But the king of the city marks a later stage 
 than the ealdorman of the tribe. And remember that 
 it was not by kings, but by ealdormen, that the land 
 of Britain was won for the English folk. Their king- 
 ship began in the conquered island ; it was again to 
 yield to the rule of ealdormen under other names, of 
 Presidents and Governors, when Englishmen had won 
 themselves a third home beyond the Ocean ; it was to 
 live on in the island of its birth, as an useful formula 
 and an useful pageant. It is well to remember in how 
 many things, both you in this later England and we in 
 our older one, have advanced by going back. And 
 among them it is well not to forget that, when, like the 
 men of Rome and the men of Athens, you exchanged 
 the rule of kings for that of magistrates, you did but 
 fall back on the most ancient polity of the English 
 folk. 
 
 Let us then start from those earliest times, from that 
 primitive polity. Look at our own forefathers, yours 
 alike and ours, settling themselves in small communities, 
 each living its own life, each making its way by its own 
 strength, upon the conquered shores of Britain. Ages 
 afterwards, your immediate forefathers, that part of the 
 English people which made the second of their great 
 voyages, did the like upon the shores of America. 
 Mark, I leave out the epithet " conquered." Conquest 
 in the strictest sense played a far smaller part in the 
 second migration than it played in the first. For the 
 English settlers in America found no such enemies in 
 the land to strive against as the earlier English had 
 
 24 
 
366 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 found. The native Indian was not as the Briton, him- 
 self an Aryan kinsman, and still keeping some traces of 
 the arts of Rome learned in three hundred and fifty 
 years of Roman rule. Yet in many things the men of 
 the seventeenth century, while bringing with them the 
 civilization and experience of the seventeenth century, 
 were driven to play over again the parts of the men of 
 the fifth and sixth centuries. Not a few of the primi- 
 tive institutions of the Teutonic people sprang again 
 to life when the English settlements were made on 
 American soil. In this case, unless we go so far as to 
 call in any notion of abiding, though unconscious, tend- 
 encies in the race, the likeness comes wholly from the 
 rule of like causes producing like effects. Assuredly 
 the settlers of the seventeenth century had not the 
 faintest thought of consciously following the example, 
 or of reproducing the institutions, of the settlers of the 
 fifth century. What they did consciously reproduce 
 was the institutions of England in their own time, so 
 far as they could be reproduced under the circumstances 
 of their new land. And it so happened that the circum- 
 stances of their new land caused them in some points 
 unconsciously to reproduce the English institutions of 
 the fifth century rather than the English institutions of 
 the seventeenth. 
 
 Between the fifth century and the seventeenth, the 
 institutions of England and the whole national life of 
 England had grown up to full maturity. Or rather we 
 may say that they had reached their full maturity at a 
 time a good deal earlier, and that at the actual moment 
 of the settlements in America the genuine institutions 
 of England had, not so much gone backward as rather 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 367 
 
 in a manner fallen into abeyance. Between the days of 
 the first settlement in Britain and the end of the four- 
 teenth century the main outlines of the English con- 
 stitution, very much as it still stands in outward form, 
 had been already traced. The endless small settlements 
 of the English in Britain were merged, first into seven 
 chief kingdoms, then into a single kingdom of all Eng- 
 land. With each advance of territory the kingly power 
 had grown; the king of a great kingdom, withdrawn 
 from all daily contact with the great body of his sub- 
 jects, becomes, by the mere force of distance and mys- 
 tery, more of a king than his predecessor who reigned 
 only over a small i.sland or a single shire. And, in the 
 same way, without any formal change, the democratic 
 character of the primitive Teutonic assembly passed 
 away. The law which we have seen working in Greece 
 and Italy found full play in England also ; with each 
 advance of territory, it became more and more impos- 
 sible for all the freemen of the kingdom habitually to 
 come together in one place. The national assembly, 
 the Witenagembt, the Meeting of the Wise Men, shrank 
 up insensibly into a gathering of the great men of the 
 land and of the king's immediate followers, that later 
 nobility of the thegnhood which, as we have seen, sup- 
 planted the ancient nobility of the eorls. The ancient 
 popular character of the assembly revived only now and 
 then, when some special cause brought together unusual 
 numbers, or when the assembly was held in or near a 
 great city, whose citizens could without difficulty appear 
 in person. The English assembly in short passed through 
 that change which must happen to the assembly of every 
 state which has passed the limit which allows all freemen 
 
368 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 habitually to meet together, and in which the device of 
 representation has not been thought of. Presently came 
 the great blow of the Norman Conquest, one of whose 
 chief immediate results was to hasten and strengthen a 
 crowd of tendencies which were already at work, and 
 among them all that in any way tended to the increase 
 of the kingly power. But the final result was to call 
 up again the old national life in new shapes, to open 
 the way for a second growth of English freedom more 
 lasting than the first. The Norman nobles changed 
 on English ground into worthy leaders of the Eng- 
 lish people, champions of English freedom against 
 kings who remained or became foreign after all their 
 subjects had become English. Kings seeking their own 
 ends, patriots seeking to curb the power of kings, alike 
 hit on the device of calling on communities of men, 
 shires, cities, boroughs, to send a few of their number 
 to act on behalf of the whole. Thus did representatives 
 of the people come to take their place in the national 
 councils alongside of those great men of the realm who 
 had never lost the ancient right of every freeman to 
 appear in his own person. In place of that ancient 
 right, the very shadow of which was now passing out 
 of mind, the freemen of the land gained the far more 
 practical privilege of choosing representatives to appear 
 and act in their names. The Witenagemot, the Great 
 Council, now, under the .name of Parliament, took the 
 shape and won for itself the powers, which it has kept 
 ever since. A series of experiments, a series of acci- 
 dents, gave that Parliament the shape of two distinct 
 chambers, and the two illustrious names of House of 
 Lords and House of Commons were added to the po- 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 369 
 
 litical vocabulary of England and of the world. The 
 House of Lords, a house of great official personages, 
 spiritual and temporal, among whom the temporal mem- 
 bers soon developed a strong tendency to hereditary 
 succession, continued the ancient Witenagemot unbro- 
 ken. By its side arose the House of Commons, the 
 elective house of the knights, citizens, and burgesses. 
 Step by step, the houses established their positions as 
 powers co-ordinate with one another and with the king. 
 The king remained, clothed with many and mighty 
 powers, which he might still exercise according to his 
 personal discretion, but which he must exercise within 
 the limits of the law of his kingdom. To that law he 
 might not add or take away, nor might he lay any tax 
 or burthen upon his subjects, without the consent of the 
 two Houses of Parliament. That is, he could make no 
 law, he could lay on no tax, without the combined con- 
 sent of the great men of the realm speaking with their 
 own mouths and of the whole commons of the land 
 speaking through the mouths of their representatives. 
 Thus we may say that the constitution of England 
 was fixed by the change which, after a season of unlaw, 
 gave England a constitutional king in Henry the Fourth. 
 To this point it was brought back three hundred years 
 later by the revolution which, after another and longer 
 season of unlaw, again gave England a constitutional 
 king in William the Third. The last two hundred years 
 of constitutional progress in England have been spent, 
 not in changing the legal powers of the three great ele- 
 ments of the state, but in fixing, by the silent under- 
 standings of an unwritten constitution, the way in which 
 those powers arc to be exercised. Nothing has been 
 
370 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 taken away, as far as the written law goes, from the 
 powers of the crown or of the House of Lotds, but it 
 is known, as well as if it had been formally proclaimed, 
 that the will of the people expressed by their represent- 
 atives in the House of Commons is in the end to pre- 
 vail. The powers of the crown are untouched, but the 
 principle is fully established that some of its powers 
 shall never be exercised at all, and that the rest shall 
 be exercised only by the advice of a Minister approved 
 by the House of Commons, a Minister whom that House 
 virtually, though not formally, appoints, and whom it can 
 virtually, though not formally, remove. Silently to estab- 
 lish these principles has been the work of English states- 
 men since the last English revolution. The thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries drew the great outlines of the 
 constitution ; the eighteenth and nineteenth have filled 
 in the details. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 
 called the skeleton into being ; the eighteenth and nine- 
 teenth clothed it with full flesh and life. It is not the least 
 wonderful thing in the wonderful history of our people, 
 that the bones of freedom lay for nearly two hundred 
 years, almost like the bones in the prophet's vision, dry 
 and seemingly lifeless, and that they then were able to 
 rise up again with a revived life, to take up a renewed 
 being, almost at the exact point at which they had prac- 
 tically all but ceased to be. 
 
 In a strictly constitutional point of view, the constitu- 
 tional king who landed on the errand of deliverance at 
 Torbay steps exactly into the place of the constitu- 
 tional king who landed on the errand of deliverance 
 at Ravenspur. William of Orange takes up the work 
 of Henry of Bolingbroke. The Yorkist, Tudor, and 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 37 1 
 
 Stewart reigns become a long time of unlaw, during which 
 little more than the forms of the elder days were left ; 
 but, because the forms were left, it was possible again to 
 breathe life into them in the later days. During a suc- 
 cession of reigns law was openly trampled on, not sim- 
 ply in the way of irregular acts on the part of the king 
 at a tim.e when irregular acts were common on the part 
 of all men, but as the deliberate system of kings who 
 were strong enough to compel others to obey the law, 
 but who were fully purposed not to obey it themselves. 
 During this reign of unlaw, largely by the efforts of 
 men who were seeking shelter from the reign of unlaw, 
 the American colonies of England first came into being 
 as local and isolated settlements, with institutions simply 
 local and isolated. As one of the great powers of the 
 world, shaping its institutions into forms suiting one of the 
 great powers of the world, the United States of America 
 came into being at the time when the unwritten consti- 
 tution of England was fast growing, but was not yet fully 
 grown, round the older fabric of her written law. 
 
 At each of these stages the direct influence of Eng- 
 land, the direct and conscious influence of cause and 
 effect, comes in. In the time of the first settlers the 
 notion of imitation is out of place. The English set- 
 tlers in America brought the institutions of England 
 with them, modifying them only as new circumstances 
 needed, and, as I have already said, modifying them 
 largely, though unwittingly, in the direction of institu- 
 tions more primitive than those of the England of the 
 seventeenth century. The institutions of the American 
 colonies were not made, but grew. But the institutions 
 
372 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 of the United States of America had in a certain sense 
 to be made. I altogether decline to look on your fed- 
 eral constitution as a new thing ; I maintain that it is 
 in truth the existing constitution of England, largely- 
 modified indeed, but modified only so far as the circum- 
 stances of a new state of things called for. Still the 
 original settlers could hardly have done anything else but 
 bring the institutions of England with them. The authors 
 of the federal constitution, might, if they had chosen, 
 instead of reproducing the constitution of the mother- 
 country with the needful changes, have followed some 
 other model or produced something wholly out of their 
 own heads. In this sense the federal constitution was 
 made, in a sense in which the local institutions of the 
 several states could hardly be said to be made. The 
 elaborate schemes which were drawn up at home for 
 some of the later colonies hardly came to much. Some- 
 times institutions which more truly grew supplanted 
 the institutions which were more strictly made. The 
 different positions and characters of the earlier settlers 
 led them to reproduce different sides, and even different 
 stages, of English life ; but it was natural growth either 
 way. But the work of the eighteenth century was a 
 conscious and deliberate work, in a sense in which the 
 work of the seventeenth century hardly was any more 
 than that of the fifth and sixth. I do not like to use 
 the word imitation; but the later reproduction was a 
 matter of choice, while in the earlier time there was 
 hardly any choice in the matter. 
 
 I may be thought to undervalue the amount of change 
 between the British and the American systems, if I apply 
 so small a word as modify to constitutions which dif- 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 373 
 
 fer with all the differences which part off a federal com- 
 monwealth from a consolidated kingdom. The differ- 
 ences truly are great ; but I am always far more struck 
 with the amount of likeness that was kept than with the 
 amount of unlikeness that was brought in. Compare 
 for a moment your very conservative revolution with 
 the really destructive revolution which happened a lit- 
 tle later in France. If you contrast the sober action of 
 your wise men, preserving with a good reason here, 
 changing with a good reason there,, with the frantic 
 havoc wrought by men bent on changing everything, 
 good or bad, for the mere love of changing, you will 
 see what I mean when I say that the real wonder is that 
 the institutions of the United States remained so like 
 the institutions of Great Britain. As it was, the cir- 
 cumstances of the American colonies, needing union, 
 but not minded to carry union so far as to destroy local 
 independence, made a federal commonwealth the neces- 
 sary form of government. The wonderful and instruc- 
 tive thing is that a federal commonwealth could have 
 been devised which differed so little from the consoli- 
 dated kingdom which furnished its model. 
 
 But the fact that the new power did become a fed- 
 eral commonwealth carries us away to another line 
 of thought; it sets us down within another range of 
 parallels. The federal commonwealth of America is at 
 once connected with the other federal commonwealths 
 of the world, not, as in our comparison between Britain 
 and America, by the law of direct cause and effect, but 
 by the law that like causes lead to like effects. Alike 
 in Achaia, in Switzerland, and in America, a number of 
 
374 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 small states, having enough in common to feel the need 
 of a certain amount of union, but not enough in com- 
 mon to make them inchned for absolute consolidation, 
 feeling too the special need of union for external pur- 
 poses against a common enemy, were led, were almost 
 driven, to the federal system as the true intermediate 
 point, as the system which gives as much of union as 
 was wanted and not more than was wanted. And let 
 me add — what I personally hope may not happen — if 
 circumstances either in Switzerland or in America should 
 ever lead to the forsaking of the federal system for any 
 closer form of union, that will not be, -as shallow people 
 talk, an argument against the federal system, but rather 
 a strong argument in its favour. It would only show 
 that the federal system was needed as an intermediate 
 stage, as a means to make that closer union possible 
 which at the beginning was certainly impossible. Every- 
 thing in the position, the circumstances, the traditions, 
 of the American colonies suggested the federal union as 
 the one system which met the circumstances of the case. 
 And, exactly as in the other case, a certain amount of 
 experience and of experiment was needed before the 
 most perfect shape of the institution was reached. 
 
 Between the federations of Achaia and America some 
 of the points of likeness are most striking. They seem 
 to me to come as near to one another as could be, con- 
 sidering the difference of scale between the two terri- 
 tories, and considering that representation was known 
 in the one case and not in the other. Long before the 
 eighteenth century, long before the seventeenth, the 
 system of representation had been firmly established in 
 the elder England by the work alike of wise kings and 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 3/5 
 
 of patriotic leaders. It was thoroughly familiar in the 
 local constitutions of the American colonies, in some 
 of which indeed it had supplanted the primitive Teu- 
 tonic democracy which had again sprung to life in the 
 institutions of the first settlers. But for its establish- 
 ment, it would, as I said long ago, have been impossible 
 to remedy the main evil of the Achaian and other 
 ancient federal systems, and to represent in two houses 
 the two elements of the federal system, the separate 
 states and the united nation. But it is well worthy of 
 notice that this application of the principle of represen- 
 tation was not thought of when the first articles of con- 
 federation were drawn up. In that earlier and laxer 
 form of the federal union, each state, great and small, 
 had an equal voice, exactly as in old Achaia. It was 
 only in the second and more perfect attempt that this 
 great triumph of political skill was compassed. The 
 way of compassing the object was undoubtedly sug- 
 gested to the founders of the federal constitution by 
 the two houses of the British Parliament. That system, 
 itself the result of accident, was turned about to fulfil a 
 certain end which had assuredly never been thought of 
 in its elder home. And, as the forms of the English 
 constitution supplied the means for correcting an un- 
 avoidable defect in the Achaian system, so those forms 
 also made possible the revival, I feel sure the unwilling 
 revival, of a most characteristic feature of that system. 
 The position of the President of the United States is, I 
 think, one which would hardly have occurred to men 
 whose political experience was purely republican. The 
 President is, beyond all doubt, the English king modified 
 by the necessities of a state of things in which heredi- 
 
37^ PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 tary succession was out of the question, and in which 
 even a life term of office would have awakened the 
 greatest jealousy. But in transplanting this modified 
 republican image of the English King, the founders of 
 the American constitution stumbled on a no less lively 
 image of the Achaian General. I should say that no 
 republican constitution, certainly no earlier federal con- 
 stitution, ever entrusted such large powers to a single 
 man as Achaia gave'to her General and as the United 
 States give to their President. The Roman dictator 
 indeed held greater powers still, but then his office 
 was not a standing magistracy, but a special commission 
 granted in some moment of extraordinary need. The 
 powers of the earlier Roman consuls and of the later 
 Spartan ephors must have been quite as great, but then 
 they were not held by a single man. And in the case 
 of Achaia the great position of the federal General is 
 the more remarkable, because the single generalship was 
 deliberately introduced after some experience of a sy- 
 stem like that of Rome, by which the chief magistracy 
 was put into the hands of two holders. Had the foun- 
 ders of the constitution lived a little later, they might 
 possibly have been led to make the likeness between 
 the Achaian General and the American President still 
 closer. When the federal constitution of the United 
 States was drawn up in writing, the unwritten constitu- 
 tion ofi Great Britain was fast growing, but was not yet- 
 fully grown. The state of things established by the 
 revolution of 1399, and established again by the revo- 
 lution of 1688, amounted pretty much to this, that the 
 king was strictly bound by the law, but that, within the 
 limits of the authority which the law gave him, he could 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 377 
 
 rule according to his own personal will. Mark you 
 that this is very much the position of your own Presi- 
 dent ; it is the natural position of any republican magis- 
 trate, indeed of any elective officer, who is supposed, in 
 courtesy at least, to be chosen to his office on account 
 of his personal fitness. But in the course of the hun- 
 dred years between the English revolution and the 
 enactment of your federal constitution considerable steps 
 have been taken toward the establishment of the modern 
 doctrine that the king must rule only by the advice of 
 ministers approved by the House of Commons. It is 
 quite certain — you know it well enough in this land and 
 we know it well enough in ours from another side — that 
 George the Third did exercise a will of his own in pub- 
 lic affairs. Indeed it is a great mistake to fancy that the 
 will of a king in any case goes for nothing. It must 
 always go for a good deal in the case of the most con- 
 stitutional king of the most constitutional kingdom. If 
 a king cannot enforce a policy, he can do a great deal to 
 hinder one. It is certain that George the Third could 
 act more freely than his modern successors, and, through 
 his special circumstances, more freely than his imme- 
 diate predecessors ; still he was certainly in a different 
 position from Henry the Fourth or William the Thii'd. 
 When Lord North found it necessary to disclaim the 
 name of Prime Minister, it was proof enough that he 
 was Prime Minister. The system of Cabinet Govern- 
 ment, though it had not reached its full developement, 
 was fully established. But the fact was hardly recog- 
 nized eithet in Britain or in America. Writers like De 
 Lolme, as Macaulay long ago remarked, take no notice 
 of it; the writers in the Federalist take no notice of it; 
 
378 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 they suppose throughout that a King of Great Britain 
 exercises, and exercises according to his personal will, 
 every power which the letter of the law entrusts to him. 
 The relations between a modern King and a modern 
 Prime Minister seem not to have come into their minds. 
 The result is that your President, while holding powers 
 smaller than those of a King of Great Britain, can 
 exercise such powers as he has far more freely than a 
 king can. Now the Achaian General, while in most 
 things a lively forerunner of your President, did in some 
 things come nearer to the position of an English Prime 
 Minister. Here again comes in the difference between 
 representation and no-representation. Both the Houses 
 of your Congress are strictly representative, the Senate 
 no less than that which is specially called the House of 
 Representatives. From those houses the Ministers of 
 the President are shut out. In the earlier times of the 
 Union the President addressed Congress in a speech — 
 like a king's speech ; in later times he has sent only a 
 written message. But at neither stage could the Presi- 
 dent or his ministers be members of either house or 
 take part in its debates. But it is of the essence of 
 the unwritten English constitution that the Prime Min- 
 ister and his colleagues in the Cabinet should be mem- 
 bers of one or the other house of Parliament. There 
 they are called in question; there they defend them- 
 selves. I will not now discuss the comparative merits 
 of the two systems ; my point is that the British system 
 was also the Achaian system. A representative system 
 can, at pleasure, admit the members of the executive 
 Government to the assembly, or it can shut them out. 
 But from a primary assembly, where every citizen has 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 379 
 
 a right to attend, the chief magistrate and his colleagues 
 can no more be shut out than any other citizens. Thus 
 the Achaian General, a member of the assembly but not 
 the president of the assembly, held the exact parliamen- 
 tary position of an English Prime Minister, a position 
 which was not thoroughly grasped by the founders of 
 your federal constitution nor by any of their contempo- 
 raries. It is possible that, had they completely seen the 
 working of the British cabinet system, they might have 
 made the President less of a king and more of a prime 
 minister. I shall presently say a word or two about the 
 Swiss Federal Council, the executive of the Confedera- 
 tion. I have here only to notice that, while with you 
 the Ministers of the President are shut out from both 
 houses of Congress, the members of the Swiss executive, 
 though not members of the assembly and not having 
 the right of voting, can attend at pleasure in either 
 house and take part in its debates. Thus the Achaian, 
 the English, and the Swiss systems all allow the policy 
 of the Government to be stated and defended in Par- 
 liament by the members of the Government, which the 
 American system does not allow. 
 
 In this way then the position of the Achaian General 
 did, in its practical working, come nearer to that of an 
 English Prime Minister than to that of an American Pres- 
 ident. But his formal position was that of a President, 
 not that of a Prime Minister. The General, like the 
 President, like any republican magistrate — indeed like 
 any magistrate strictly so called — exercised openly in 
 his own name such powers as the law of the confedera- 
 tion gave him." The minister of a king necessarily acts 
 indirectly in the name of the king who is the legal 
 
380 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 holder of power. The General, like the President, was 
 formally chosen, chosen for a definite time, and, under 
 ordinary circumstances, incapable of removal till the end 
 of that time. The Prime Minister, as such, is neither 
 formally appointed nor formally removed, for no such 
 office as Prime Minister is known to the law. Nor does 
 he hold power for any definite time. We may say that 
 he is informally chosen and informally removed by the 
 House of Commons ; that is, he holds power for such a 
 time, long or short, as the House of Commons continues 
 to approve of his policy. This I myself have always 
 held to be the great advantage —balanced by some dis- 
 advantages — of our informal republic called a constitu- 
 tional monarchy over your avowed republic. The 
 existence of the king gives our House of Commons 
 the power of practically dismissing the executive gov- 
 ernment, as soon as it simply ceases to. approve of its 
 policy. Your chief magistrate, because he is a chief 
 magistrate and not a minister, cannot be removed from 
 office without the formal proof of some definite crime, 
 nor can he be continued in office beyond his term except 
 by a formal re-election. This difficulty seems to be 
 inherent in the position of any republican magistrate, 
 but it must be felt far more strongly in the case of a 
 chief magistrate chosen for four years than in the case 
 of one chosen, as in Achaia, for one year, or, as in some 
 other commonwealths, for a shorter time. And may I 
 hint that the Achaian system may on one point throw 
 some light on a point in your federal system which I 
 have heard debated on both sides of the Ocean ? Is it 
 well to re-elect a President ? It is undoubtedly in itself 
 well to continue a good President in office as long as 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 38 1 
 
 you can keep him. But then he can be kept in office 
 only by making the chief magistrate of the state, while 
 still in office, become a candidate for renewed office. To 
 this there are surely manifest objections. The constitu- 
 tion of the defunct Southern Confederacy — which we 
 may refer to as a political scheme just as much as to 
 any other — forbade re-election, but gave the President 
 a longer term of office. This would get rid of one evil ; 
 but it would aggravate two others. The chief of the 
 state could no longer be a candidate ; but then it would 
 Ije harder than before to get rid of a bad President and 
 absolutely impossible to keep on a good one. Is not 
 the Achaian plan worth considering — always bearing in 
 mind the difference between one year and four ? The 
 General, elected for a year, could not be elected for the 
 year next following : he could be elected, and often was, 
 over and over again in later years, but always with a 
 year's interval between his terms of office. Would not 
 such an arrangement as this work better than your 
 existing system, a system, by the way, purely traditional, 
 and in no way ordained by the letter of the constitution ? 
 The tradition is that a President may be re-elected once 
 and once only. Several Presidents have held office for 
 two consecutive terms ; no President has held it for 
 three consecutive terms or for two terms with an in- 
 terval between them. Might it not be on the whole 
 a better system to forbid immediate re-election, but to 
 allow re-election at any later vacancy ? The chief of 
 the state would no longer, while still in office, be an 
 immediate candidate for the next vacancy. You would 
 indeed sometimes have to part with a President whom 
 you would gladly keep; but you would not be 
 
 25 
 
382 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 parting with him for ever ; you could call him back to 
 power at the end of four years. There is something to 
 be said for and against all these systems; but it has 
 sometimes struck me that this Achaian system, under 
 which Aratos was, for a large part of his life, chosen 
 general in alternate years, is the one which has most 
 to be said for it, and least to be said against it. 
 
 In the Confederation of Switzerland these questions 
 cannot arise in anything like the same shape. Neither 
 in its oldest nor in its latest form has the Everlasting 
 League ever known a personal head. There we find no 
 king, no minister, no president even, in the sense which 
 the word president bears on this side of the Ocean. 
 But there we do find something which, if I am freely to 
 speak my own mind, I must call a more excellent way 
 than either. The Swiss executive, the Federal Council, 
 is most like a ministry without a king, a ministry form- 
 ally, instead of virtually, elected by the assembly of the 
 nation. We will come back to the details presently ; let 
 us first, by a sketch of the history of the Confederation, 
 see how it comes that Switzerland has altogether dis- 
 pensed with the personal chief whom both Britain and 
 America have kept in different shapes. Is it a par- 
 adox to say that the American Union has a personal 
 chief because its states were once subject to a king, and 
 that the Swiss Union has no personal chief because its 
 states also were once subjects of a king? The Ameri- 
 can states kept a personal chief, a king, one might say, 
 under republican conditions, because, large as were their 
 local liberties, they had had a king, an immediate though 
 an absent king. The Swiss cantons felt no need of 
 
THE ELBER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 383 
 
 a personal chief, because, though they once had a 
 king, they never had an immediate king, because, in a 
 word, they had no king but CsEsar. Of all the delusions 
 against which history and historical geography have to 
 strive there is none more deeply rooted than the notion 
 that there has always been a land called Switzerland 
 and a people called the Swiss. And there is another 
 delusion like unto it, namely that the freedom of the 
 Swiss lands and towns was won from personages un- 
 known to history, but who figure in fiction, sometimes 
 as Emperors of Germany, sometimes even as Emperors 
 of Austria. Be it remembered that Sir Thomas Erskine 
 May, K. C. B., Chief Clerk of the House of Commons, 
 wrote a History of Democracy, which records the fact, 
 quite unknown in the fourteenth century, that Duke 
 Leopold at Morgarten commanded an Imperial army. I 
 wonder what any professor of astronomy would say if I 
 were to write a History of the Planets, and put out state- 
 ments equally odd about the doings of Jupiter and Mars. 
 I will not venture on any statement by way of specimen, 
 lest, in trying to choose a statement that should be quite 
 wrong, I might casually stumble on one which should 
 be quite right. I will take for granted that it is needless 
 to explain yet again the nature of the mediaeval Empire, 
 and the position of its chosen chief, lord of the world, 
 Emperor of the Romans, King of his three kingdoms of 
 Germany, Italy, and Burgundy, but immediate sovereign 
 only of those parts of his Empire which might form the 
 hereditary possession of his own house. The choice of 
 the electors might fall at one time on a Duke of Austria, 
 at another time on a Duke of Bavaria. But whatever land 
 it was which, at any particular moment, supplied Ger- 
 
384 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 many with her king, Rome with her Emperor, and West- 
 ern Christendom with its temporal chief, his supremacy 
 in no way interfered with the full local independence, 
 whether of principalities, of free cities, or of free lands. 
 Three such lands on the borders of the three kingdoms 
 of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy, the famous lands of 
 Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, towards the end of the 
 thirteenth century, formed or more probably simply 
 renewed, a strict alliance, the germ of the federal com- 
 monwealth of two-and-twenty, more truly of five-and- 
 twenty states, which still abides. The fight of Morgar- 
 ten secured their freedom against the Austrian duke, to 
 the delight of their Bavarian King, who deemed that, in 
 smiting the supposed commander of an Imperial army, 
 they were fighting the battles of the Empire as well as 
 their own. Cities like Luzern, Zurich, Bern itself, did not 
 scorn to join the mountain alliance, and in the course of 
 the fourteenth century, the Old League of High Ger- 
 many, the League of the Eight Ancient Cantons, had 
 come into being. Early in the sixteenth century the 
 tale was made up, and the Confederation consisted of 
 the thirteen cities and lands, whose number remained 
 unchanged till the last year of the eighteenth. Of some 
 of the cities, specially of Bern, I have already spoken 
 from other points of view ; I have now to look at them 
 as a contribution to strictly federal history. It must be 
 specially borne in mind that there was as yet no such 
 thing as a Swiss nation, apart from the German nation. 
 The Old League of High Germany was purely German ; 
 it was simply one of many German leagues, whose des- 
 tiny it was to win a longer life and greater independence 
 than its fellows. The land of Schwj'z had, as early as 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 385 
 
 the days of Philip of Comines, begun, in popular use, to 
 give its name to the whole alliance, but the name was 
 never accepted as a formal title till within the present 
 century. 
 
 The federal tie, if one can call it a federal tie 
 which bound together the old Thirteen Cantons, was 
 of the very laxest. Not only did the cantons vary as 
 widely as any states could, both in their political con- 
 stitutions and, after the Reformation, in their religiqus 
 establishments ; each acted as an independent state in its 
 relations with other powers ; each could make conquests 
 for itself; those whose geographical position allowed it 
 had each of them its own following of allies and subjects, 
 besides those districts which were allies or subjects of seve- 
 ral cantons or of the League as a whole. In no part of the 
 world, in no age of the world, were so many forms of 
 political life, so many shades of political relation, to be 
 seen within so small a space. There was the pure de- 
 mocracy of Unterwalden and the close oligarchy of 
 Basel ; there was the Levantine valley, held in bondage 
 by the freemen of Uri who never dreamed of extend- 
 ing their own freedom to their subjects ; there were the 
 prince and the people of Neufchatel, each so bound by 
 treaties to Bern, that, if the prince oppressed his people 
 or the people rose up against their prince, the Bear 
 might in either case put forth his paw and bring back 
 order. Within the bounds of the League and its allied 
 states, there were the five cantons round the lake, firm 
 and unbroken in their adhesion to their ancient faith ; 
 there was Zurich, home of Zwingli, and Geneva home 
 of Calvin, Geneva where to worship according to the 
 elder rite was a crime for which death only coUld atone. 
 
386 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 There was Zug, unable to spread herself beyond her 
 ancient limits, and Bern, mistress of a dominion which 
 in old Greece would have passed for a mighty empire. 
 There were the encircling allies, princely churchmen 
 like the Bishop of Basel and the Abbot of Saint Gallen, 
 free cities like Geneva and isolated Muhlhausen, kindred 
 confederations like Wallis by the young Rhone and the 
 Three Leagues by the young Rhine, still sheltering the 
 tongue of Rome among the Rstian hills. But in all 
 this busy and shifting drama two points specially con- 
 cern us. The League became independent of the Em- 
 pire, and it ceased to be purely German. It was shown 
 to be practically independent by the end of the fifteenth 
 century; by the Peace ofWestfalia its independence was 
 formally acknowledged. Then the conquests and alli- 
 ances made both by varions cantons and by the con- 
 federation itself in the Romance-speaking lands of Bur- 
 gundy and Italy, while they left the ruling bodies still 
 German, brought a large extent of non-German territory 
 within the range of the League. Pre-eminent among 
 these lands were the territories on the Italian lakes ceded 
 by the dukes of Milan, and the great dominion wrested 
 by Bern from the dukes of Savoy, her short-lived con- 
 quests south of the Leman lake,- her abiding dominion to 
 the north of it. On the League thus formed came the 
 storm of the French Revolution; the true democracy 
 of the mountains stood face to face with the sham 
 democracy of the bloody city. Then men stood forth 
 to show how nobility in the highest sense could live on 
 for ages in commonwealths of either form, handing on 
 the great inheritance of illustrious names, names all the 
 more illustrious because no titles that kings can give 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 387 
 
 overshadowed their unbroken traditions. Aristocratic 
 Bern sent forth her Erlach, democratic Uri sent forth 
 her Reding, to do, in all but the accident of success, as 
 Erlachs and Redings had done so many ages earlier. 
 In the classical cant of the time, the Old League of High 
 Germany became a Helvetic republic-; the federal tie, 
 convicted of the crime of antiquity, was swept away ; 
 the patrician of Bern and the landman of Uri, stretched 
 and pared to one Procrustean model, found their lands 
 degraded from states into departments. At the preach- 
 ing of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the eternal 
 democracy of the Three Lands ceased for a moment 
 to exist. At the bidding of the reformers of Paris, the 
 free Teuton was constrained to turn away from fashions 
 that were old in the days of Tacitus ; the Rights of 
 Man forbade the gatherings of a sovereign people be- 
 neath the open canopy of heaven. Yet even in the 
 triumph of wrong right had some share. The madness 
 that swept away all that was old swept away ancient 
 bondage as well cis ancient freedom ; the men of Bellin- 
 zona and Lausanne became the equals of their ancient 
 masters. The card-house of empty theorists fell to the 
 ground ; Napoleon Buonaparte had at all events the eye 
 of a statesman, and towards the Swiss commonwealths 
 he showed a degree of thoughtfulness which he showed 
 towards few other lands. He had clearly no mind to deal 
 more harshly with them than was needful for the objects 
 of his selfish policy. His Act of Mediation undoubt- 
 edly gave to such of the confederate, allied, and subject 
 lands as escaped French annexation a better general 
 constitution than they had ever had before. The old 
 communities again rose to the rank of independent 
 
388 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 states ; but the old distinctions of confederates, allies, 
 and subjects, did not revive with them. Allies and sub- 
 jects rose to the rank of Confederates. By this means, 
 while the Federal character of the Union revived, its 
 distinctively German character passed away. Romance 
 lands, Burgundian, Italian, Raetian, stood side by side 
 on equal terms with their old German allies and masters. 
 An artificial nation was thus formed, a nation not 
 marked out by the usual signs of blood or language, 
 but still a nation by adoption. But it is adoption with- 
 out assimilation. The Lombard of Ticino, the Bur- 
 gundian of Vaud, has been raised to the level of his 
 former German masters, but he has not adopted their 
 tongue, neither have they adopted his. In your Union 
 you adopt citizens from all parts, but what you adopt 
 you assimilate, wherever the physical laws of nature 
 allow of assimilation. All, sooner or later, are merged 
 in one body ; all become members of what I venture 
 still to call the English people. To you the sight must 
 seem strange to see two states of the same union side 
 by side, speaking wholly distinct languages ; it must 
 seem yet more strange to you to find one state all but 
 wholly Catholic, another all but wholly Protestant, and 
 to learn that the laws which in either case secure civil 
 equality to the minority are in most cantons of recent 
 date. Yet, with all this diversity, the Swiss people, Teu- 
 tonic and Romance, Catholic and Protestant, undoubt- 
 edly forms a nation, though a nation artificially put 
 together out of fragments of three elder nations. That 
 nation needed a name, and, at the reconstruction of 
 the Confederation after the general European war the 
 name which had been in popular use for more than three 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 389 
 
 centuries came into formal use also. The Swiss Con- 
 federation of twenty-two cantons — now practically of 
 twenty-five — began its renewed course. The federal 
 tie was lax : the governments of many cantons were 
 oligarchic. Local revolutions upset the oligarchies; 
 a civil war, not without points of likeness to the civil 
 war among your own States, led to a general recon- 
 struction of the federal system. The constitution of 
 1848, the parallel of your constitution sixty years ear- 
 lier, began a new order of things, which, with some 
 lesser changes, is still in vigorous being. 
 
 In one sense it is needless to show that the Swiss 
 Confederation is older than the American ; in another 
 sense the American Confederation is older than the 
 Swiss. Your first articles of confederation are nearly 
 five hundred years younger than the first recorded 
 alliance of the Three Lands ; they are more than two 
 hundred and fifty years younger than the full establish- 
 lishment of the Thirteen Cities and Lands. And the 
 Thirteen cities and lands were undoubtedly before the 
 eyes of those who framed the first laxer union of the 
 Thirteen colonies which had just grown into thirteen 
 free and independent States. But it is yet clearer that 
 the " more perfect union " established by the later federal 
 constitution of America was before tjie eyes of those who 
 established the more perfect union of the Swiss federal con- 
 stitution. Like wise men, they adopted whatever in your 
 constitution suited their circumstances and traditions; 
 like wise men too, they did not blindly transplant things 
 which had naturally sprung from the circumstances and 
 traditions of America, but which did not suit the cir- 
 cumstances and traditions of Switzerland. The two 
 
390 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 houses of their federal assembly are modelled exactly 
 on the pattern of the two houses of your Congress. 
 The Senate, representatives of the States, reappears in 
 the Standerath, or Conseil des Etats, to which each can- 
 ton, great and small, sends two members. The House 
 of Representatives, representing the whole federal na- 
 tion, reappears in the Nationalrath or Conseil National, 
 to which each canton sends a greater or less number 
 strictly apportioned to its population. But, as I have 
 already implied, the form of the Swiss executive wholly 
 departs from yours. I venture to think that it departs 
 from yours far more widely than yours departs from 
 ours. The change from King to President seems to 
 me a much slighter change than the change from 
 the President to the Bundesrath or Conseil Federal, 
 Such powers as the Swiss constitution gives to its 
 executive, powers far less than those of either King 
 or President, are entrusted to a council of seven. Of 
 that council the so-called Bundespr'dsident, or President 
 of the Confederation, is simply chairman. He is not 
 President in the same sense as the President of the 
 United States. He is not personally an element in the 
 commonwealth, holding important powers in his own 
 hands. The nearest approach — and a very distant 
 approach it is — to either King or President which 
 the Swiss system allows is found in the Federal Coun- 
 cil as a whole. And here to my mind comes in the 
 great virtue of the Swiss system. I hold that the 
 great advantage of our practical republic over your 
 avowed republic — an advantage purchased by some 
 disadvantages — is the power of changing the actual ruler 
 at any moment, while you must keep the chief magis- 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 39 1 
 
 trate once chosen till the end of a fixed term. This last 
 difficulty seems inherent in any republican form of gov- 
 ernment ; but the Swiss seem to me to have cut down 
 that difficulty almost to a vanishing point. Under their 
 system there is less likelihood of the nation wishing to 
 get rid of its actual chiefs than under any other. There 
 is more chance than under any other system of the 
 executive and legislative branches of the government 
 living together in unity. The first act of each federal 
 Assembly is to choose the federal executive for the term 
 of its own life ; that is, for a term of three years. The 
 greatest chance of harmony between the two branches 
 is thus gained. The executive and legislative branches 
 are in constant intercourse with one another. And, as 
 we have seen, through the power of the members of the 
 Federal Council to attend and speak in either house, 
 the Swiss Assembly can therefore hear, while the Amer- 
 ican Congress cannot hear, what in England we call 
 a ministerial statement. Nothing again is more com- 
 mon than for the Assembly, when any question comes 
 up for discussion, to ask the federal Council to put 
 it before them in the shape of a definite bill which 
 they may discuss and vote upon. No system seems 
 to me to be' better devised as a mere political ma- 
 chine, and to my mind at least the Federal Council 
 has certain incidental advantages above kings or presi- 
 dents either. You cannot turn a council of seven men 
 into an object of social worship ; and the election by 
 the Assembly gets rid of what I confess seems to be 
 a weakness in your American system. The founders 
 of your constitution, less far-sighted on that point than 
 on most others, meant the President to be chosen by 
 
392 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 wise men specially picked Out for that purpose. As it 
 is, he is practically chosen by the people, but with the 
 modification that he may happen not to be the real 
 choice of a majority of the people. 
 
 On the other hand, the Swiss system lacks two points 
 which I have always looked on as among the wisest in 
 yours. I mean the great position held by your Supreme 
 federal Court, and those special powers which are held 
 by the Senate, and which are not shared by the other 
 branch of the federal legislature. In the Swiss consti- 
 tution of 1848 the great deficiency was on the side of 
 the federal judiciary. Later constitutional amendments 
 have in some measure remedied this fault; but there 
 is still nothing in Switzerland at all like that great tri- 
 bunal which can judge between State and State and 
 can declare an act of the combined three powers of the 
 Union to be null and void. The special powers of the 
 Senate seem to me to be wise on this ground. In any 
 constitution which has two houses and an executive, the 
 " other house," be its title Senate, House of Lords, or 
 any other, is in its own nature the weakest of the three. 
 There must be some kind of executive, some kind of 
 popular assembly; men may propose to change the 
 form of either, but no one will propose wholly to get 
 rid of either. But the " other house " is something 
 much less obvious ; it is something artificial, some might 
 say something purely ornamental. The British House 
 of Lords rests on its traditional dignity; the American 
 Senate rests on its absolute necessity for the full carry- 
 ing out of the federal idea. But the Senates of other 
 lands have, in every revolution, been the first elements 
 of the state to give way. Even here in the United 
 
TME ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 393, 
 
 States, though a little thought will show that the Senate 
 is absolutely necessary, yet it needs that little thought 
 to see the necessity ; it is not so simply obvious at the 
 first glance as the necessity for some House of Repre- 
 sentatives and for some kind of executive, whether in 
 the shape of a President or in any other. It was there- 
 fore a great stroke of wisdom to give the Senate a spe- 
 cial stability by making it something more than a branch 
 of the Legislature, by vesting in it certain powers in 
 which the other branch of the Legislature does not 
 share. The Swiss Stiinderath has not those special 
 powers ; the simpler relations of the three elements in 
 the Swiss system, the greater power vested in the Fed- 
 eral Assembly as a whole, perhaps hardly allowed it to 
 hold quite the same position as your Senate. But it is 
 a fact to be remembered that the abolition of the Stdn- 
 derath has been proposed, and proposed within the walls 
 of the Federal Assembly. The proposal indeed met 
 with no support, but it is an instructive fact that it 
 should ever have been made. 
 
 I have used some freedom in speaking of the working 
 of political institutions of which, as matters of every-day 
 experience, every man here present must have more 
 knowledge than myself Yet there may be something 
 to learn from the light in which these things seem to an 
 outsider who has made political constitutions a study, 
 and who has certainly given some special heed to the 
 constitution of the United States. I have always looked 
 on both what I may call the conscious and what I may 
 call the unconscious side of that constitution with spe- 
 cial interest. Looking at it from my point of view, as a 
 
394 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN PIISTORY. 
 
 political study, there is something very instructive, some- 
 thing especially instructive for the immediate purpose of 
 these lectures, in both those sides. Wherever the found- 
 ers of the constitution preserved the institutions of the 
 older England, there was conscious reflexion. Wherever 
 the needs of the case caused them to fall back on uncon- 
 scious reproduction of the institutions of times long past, 
 there was the working of my pet rule that like causes 
 produce like effects. They strove to preserve the tradi- 
 tions of English kingship, so far as they were consistent 
 with the changed circumstances in which they found 
 themselves. In so doing they unwittingly lighted on a 
 lively image of the old Achaian generalship. From my 
 point of view the reproduction is all the more valuable 
 because it was unwitting. If the founders of your con- 
 stitutions had been, like the founders of some other 
 constitutions, theorists cumbered with more learning 
 than was good for them, your institutions might have 
 been crowded, like the institutions of some other lands, 
 with grotesque imitations of inapplicable models, with 
 grotesque misapplications of misunderstood names and 
 phrases. I speak of political, not of local nomenclature. 
 You have none of the follies of France, no Councils of 
 Ancients, no Prefects, no Consuls, best of all, no Em- 
 perors. I might perhaps wish that, with so many good 
 Teutonic names to choose from, the meeting-place of 
 your Union had been called by some other name than 
 that of the Roman Capitol. It is some comfort, on the 
 other hand, that the man whom you all reverence, your 
 first general, your first chief magistrate, bore a good 
 Teutonic surname, and gave to your federal capital a 
 sterling English name, the name of an English gens 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 395 
 
 which had ages before fenced in the town of the Was- 
 cingas on British ground. Yet on the other I may- 
 wonder why, if one of the heroes of old Rome was to 
 be canonized, Licinius and the Gracchi were left out 
 in the cold, while an order and a great city received 
 the name of a fierce and stubborn oligarch like Lucius 
 Quinctius Cincinnatus. But things like these are mere 
 trifles compared with the essentially wise and essentially 
 conservative spirit of the founders of your common- 
 wealth ; and it is certainly not by virtue of any article 
 of the federal constitution that either the Capitol or the 
 city of Cincinnati bears its name. The founders of your 
 commonwealth were not great scholars. They had the 
 wisdom to see that the records of past times were worth 
 searching into, but they had not enough of acquired 
 learning always to guide them aright as to matters of facts 
 when searching into those records. This was not very 
 wonderful in an age when the single mind of Gibbon 
 seemed to have absorbed into itself the stock of know- 
 ledge tha,t was meant for the whole century. Nor do I be- 
 lieve that their deficiencies in minute historical scholar- 
 ship did them any harm. At all events, whenever they 
 did stumble on any reproduction of ancient institutions, 
 it made such reproduction the more valuable, because it 
 was unwitting. If, in paring down a king into a presi- 
 dent, they did just what Athens and Rome had done 
 before them, if the result was the erection on American 
 soil of a lively image of Aratos and Philopoimen, the 
 likeness is all the more precious because its authors did 
 not know exactly what they were doing. It causes us 
 more ground for musing, perhaps even some ground for 
 regret, that they seem not to have fully understood the 
 
396 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 working of their own century in Great Britain, and not 
 to have fully grasped the relations which even then 
 existed between a King of Great Britain and his chief 
 minister. Anyhow, either the British or the American 
 form of executive is better than the odd confusion of 
 the two which passes for a republican magistracy in the 
 eyes of the ingenious people of France. 
 
 I have thus said what I have to say of the federal 
 constitutions of America and of Switzerland. To my 
 mind, those two constitutions seem two of the most me- 
 morable works of man's wisdom. They show that man's 
 political faculties are not deadened, that the men of the 
 eighteenth century and of the nineteenth could do as 
 much for the advancement of freedom and good govern- 
 ment, and could do it in as wise a way, as the men of 
 any earlier age. What I see in England, in America, in 
 Switzerland, is stability, the power to make changes, 
 when change is needed, without pulling the w:hole 
 political fabric down on the heads of the reformers. 
 Your constitution above all has gone through the 
 most frightful of trials, and it has stood the test. I 
 remember twenty years ago how shallow people were 
 crying out that the principle of a federal system was 
 proved to be worthless because certain members of a 
 particular confederation wished to separate from it. 
 I can only suppose that they fancied that no revolts, 
 no separations, no dismemberments, had ever taken 
 ^ place in lands governed by kings. The retort is so 
 obvious that I need hardly point out that the recent 
 experience of Greece, of Belgium, of Poland, of Lom- 
 bardy, of Sicily, of half a dozen European lands, proved 
 at least as much against monarchy as the secession of 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 397 
 
 the Southern states proved against federalism. At all 
 events, they did not stop to think that, after all, they 
 were only backing up one federal commonwealth against 
 another. They must have shut their eyes to the fact 
 that the Southern Confederacy, in its short-lived consti- 
 tution, re-enacted all the essential features of the consti- 
 tution of the United States. That fact is one which I 
 should turn about another way. I can conceive no more 
 speaking tribute to the wisdom of any political system 
 than the fact that the men who were most dissatis- 
 fied with its actual administration, the men who were 
 most anxious to escape from its actual fellowship, of 
 set purpose re-enacted its chief provisions for their own 
 separate use. 
 
 In looking back again to our earlier subject of this 
 evening, to the historic relations of England and her 
 great Western colony, I must above all things, as a man 
 of the older England, rejoice, as every man of the older 
 England should rejoice, in the greatness of the newer 
 England beyond the Ocean which men went out from 
 his own land to found. It is something to see the insti- 
 tutions of England copied, successfully or unsuccess- 
 fully, by men of other races and other tongues. But it 
 is far more to see the first place in a vast continent held 
 by a mighty commonwealth founded by men of the Eng- 
 lish stock, not borrowing — for men do not borrow what 
 is their own — but carrying on as their own heritage, 
 developing, expanding, adapting to new circumstances, 
 the institutions of the elder land. I have been present 
 at local elections in more than one State of your Union. 
 Those elections were a study in institutions, and some- 
 
 26 
 
398 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 thing more than a mere study of institutions. I marked 
 how some offices still bore the ancient English names 
 and pretty much the ancient English functions. There 
 was the immemorial Sheriff, the origin of whose office 
 is lost in the gloom which gathers round the earliest 
 institutions of Angle and Saxon on British ground. 
 There was the Coroner, one of the gifts which the wis- 
 dom of the great Edward gave to his people. Nor did 
 I wonder to find the place of sheriff, as well as the place 
 of coroner, bestowed, according to the law of the great 
 Edward, by the voice of the people. And if, alongside 
 of these ancient English offices, I found some, others 
 which had grown up on this Western continent, I could 
 but say. Here is a people who are not afraid to change 
 when change is needed, to devise new things when new 
 things are needed, but who cleave to old things, to old 
 names, to old offices, if the need of change, the need of 
 new devices, is not clearly made out. When I look at 
 the great work of your federal constitution, at the whole 
 system, so complicated and yet so simple, of your insti- 
 tutions, federal, cantonal, local, I feel that it is no small 
 matter that it should have been the English folk on a 
 new soil which has wrought this great work of later 
 times. It is something to hear the English tongue 
 spoken as the tongue of so many free commonwealths, 
 of so many free commonwealths knit into one free com- 
 monwealth, a commonwealth stretching from the Eastern 
 Ocean to the Western. And to you I would say, men 
 of this younger and vaster England, above all, men of 
 this land which boasts itself to be specially New Eng- 
 land, never forget whence you came. In the greatness 
 of your new Western continent, do not forget the old 
 
THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 399 
 
 European island, do not forget the older European 
 mainland. Remember that the English folk could 
 hardly have made their way to the mainland of Amer- 
 ica in the seventeenth century, if they had not made 
 their way to the isle of Britain in the fifth. Remember 
 that the work of Washington and Hamilton implied the 
 earlier work of Earl Simon and King Edward. Re- 
 member too that neither Washington nor Simon could 
 have had an English people to deliver, that neither the 
 settlers of the seventeenth century nor the settlers of 
 the fifth could have found an English people to lead 
 to new homes, if, in the very childhood of our race, 
 Arminius had not kept back the legions of Rome from 
 engulfing our earliest home in her universal dominion. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 In the present series of discourses we have, under the 
 guidance of our wide subject, learned the habit of taking 
 bold leaps over no small spaces, both of time and of dis- 
 tance. Our subject has been nothing short of the his- 
 tory of Europe and of the lands colonized from Europe. 
 In other words, it has been the history of the dominion 
 and the influence of Rome. The power of Rome, the 
 law of Rome, the creed of Rome, have brought no small 
 part of the world under their obedience. The sway of 
 Christ and Caesar has been from one sea. to the other, 
 and from the flood unto the world's end. In following 
 its track we have had to span the Ocean ; we have had 
 to mark the way in which the chief nations of Europe 
 have reproduced the tongues, the laws, the arts, of Eu- 
 rope, on the soil of this New World ; above all, we have 
 had to mark how one group of European settlements, 
 the settlements of the English folk, have grown on its 
 soil into a second English nation, the peer of the elder 
 English nation which still abides in its European home. 
 We have spanned the Ocean in the natural course of our 
 story; let me now ask you to span the Ocean back again 
 — for to me at least it seems to be back again— if not in 
 the natural course of our story, yet in order to give our 
 treatment of our general story some faint approach to 
 
 400 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 4OI 
 
 completion. We have said something about the fortunes 
 of the Roman Empire, its growth, its divisions, its break- 
 up, the powers which arose out of its ruins, the powers 
 which arose beyond the bounds of its poHtical rule, but 
 not beyond the bounds of its moral influence. But in 
 all this we have been dealing with one side only of the 
 Eternal City and its dominion. We have been dealing 
 wholly, or nearly so, with the Rome of the West, with a 
 dominion and an influence whose centre was the local 
 Rome on the seven hills by the Tiber. But the tale of 
 Rome, the tale of Christendom, the tale of European 
 civilization, is not fully told, its barest outline is left 
 utterly imperfect, unless we cast at least a glance at 
 that long and stirring part of the world's history the 
 centre of which is the New Rome, the translated Rome, 
 the Rome which had moved from the seven hills by the 
 Tiber to the seven hills by the Bosporos. I must there- 
 fore now, before we finally part, ask you once more to 
 span the Ocean with me, and not merely to span the 
 Ocean, not merely to land on the native soil of your 
 forefathers, but to span Europe in its length and 
 breadth. I must ask you to journey on to those fur- 
 ther lands of Europe where, in these days of progress, 
 Europe is still in bondage to Asia, the civilized man in 
 bondage to the barbarian, the follower of Christ to the 
 follower of Mahomet, and where the powers of Europe 
 still love to have it so. There still abides that " eternal 
 Eastern Question" — that epithet given in blind good 
 luck by the shallow sneerer who so named it — that eter- 
 nal question which was old when the Eternal City was 
 not yet, the question which was hardly new in the days 
 of Achilleus and Odysseus, the question between the 
 
402 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 West and the East, between light and darkness, be- 
 tween civihzation and barbarism, between freedom and" 
 bondage, in these later ages between Christendom and 
 Islam. So old is that question that it seems but as 
 yesterday's stage of it when Rome, so to speak, parted 
 her being asunder, when her greatest fortress, her 
 greatest colony, rather her second self, the New Rome 
 of Constantine, arose at the junction of two worlds, to 
 be for eleven hundred years the foremost bulwark of all 
 for which man can think it worth to live and die. On 
 this side of the history of Rome, that is, on this side 
 of the history of the world, I wish specially to insist. 
 I wish to insist on it because there is no side of the his- 
 tory of the world which has been so unreasonably neg- 
 lected and despised, while there is none more important, 
 if we are to keep the different parts of the general his- 
 tory of the world in their true relation. And, in our 
 present way of looking at things, I wish to insist on it 
 even more, because there is no part of history in which 
 a knowledge of the past is more absolutely necessary 
 for the understanding of the present, because there is 
 no part in which history is more truly past politics, and 
 ■politics more truly present history. And there is no 
 part in which a little wholesome pedantry is more useful, 
 no part, that is, where we more need somewhat of care to 
 make our thoughts correspond with facts and our words 
 correspond with our thoughts. There is no part of the 
 world, no part of its history, in which so many have been 
 led astray by the use of words which do not answer 
 to facts. A crowd of familiar phrases, phrases which 
 either in America or in Western Europe have a mean- 
 ing, are every day transferred to South-eastern Eu- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 403 
 
 rope, where they either have no meaning at all or 
 else an exactly opposite meaning. Above all, the con- 
 ventional jargon of diplomacy, misleading everywhere, 
 becomes tenfold more misleading in those parts of the 
 world. Everywhere does that conventional jargon look 
 only to courts and princes and forgets the people ; but 
 in South-eastern Europe to look only to courts and 
 princes and to forget the people is a tenfold greater 
 evil than it is elsewhere. In those lands eveiy one of 
 the conventional phrases of diplomatists is a falsehood 
 alike as to the present and as to the past. So are many 
 of the popular forms of speech which we unconsciously 
 transfer from lands where they express facts to lands 
 where they express the opposite to facts. Let me go on 
 with a few simple illustrations, of all of which, I doubt not, 
 I have made use before, but which may be new to some in 
 a new place, and which in any case I venture to think will 
 bear setting forth more than once. They are good in- 
 stances of the way in which lack of pedantry, failure 
 that is to make words correspond with thoughts and 
 thoughts correspond with facts, leads to utter misap- 
 prehension of things both present and past. 
 
 I would first of all ask you to look at the so-called 
 six great powers of Europe, a list by the way in which 
 several of the most respectable nations of Europe are left 
 out, merely because they do not happen to be so big as 
 some of their neighbours. That list takes in five great 
 nations. The powers of Great Britain, France, Italy, 
 Germany, and Russia are strictly national powers. In 
 some of them the power coincides as nearly as is ever 
 likely to be possible with a nation in the strictest sense. 
 In all of them a nation gives the tone to the power ; the 
 
404 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 power may fairly pass for the exponent of the will of a 
 particular nation. Of these five again four rank as con- 
 stitutional powers, where we may fairly expect that the 
 government for the time being speaks the will of the 
 people, where, if at any moment it fails to do so, it is 
 the people themselves who are to blame. Even in the 
 fifth, in despotic Russia, the nation is far from dead, far 
 from silent. Though the government of the Russian Em- 
 peror is not under the same popular control as the free 
 governments of England and France, yet the acts of 
 the Emperor do in a general way represent the wishes 
 of the Russian people; he could not venture on any 
 course against which the heart of the Russian people 
 was steadily set. But there is a sixth power on the list 
 which has a wholly different character, and whose pres- 
 ence alongside of the five national powers always re- 
 minds me of the words of the prophet : " I will provoke 
 you to jealousy by them that are no nation." Alongside 
 of the five nations stands a mere family estate, a collec- 
 tion of odds and ends, a motley gathering of scraps of 
 nations, with no interests or feelings in common, whose 
 single tie is that this or that lucky marriage, this or that 
 piece of military or diplomatic robbery, has brought them 
 together as the possession of a single man. Queen Vic- 
 toria, President Grevy, King Humbert, the Emperor Wil- 
 liam, and the Emperor Alexander, may all be fairly looked 
 on as speaking in the name of the several nations of which 
 they are severally the chiefs. But Francis Joseph of Lor- 
 raine, archduke of Austria, king of Hungary, king, duke, 
 count, and lord of endless kingdoms, duchies, counties, 
 and lordships, which the above-mentioned marriages, the 
 above-mentioned robberies, have at one time or another 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 405 
 
 brought together, speaks only in the name of his own 
 desire to keep all that he has got and to get more if he 
 can. I need not tell that he calls himself Emperor of 
 Austria ; but you know very well that his right to call 
 himself Emperor of Austria because four men of his 
 house were chosen Emperors of the Romans is much as 
 if a man who has had one or more forefathers Presidents 
 of the United States should, on the strength of that fact, 
 call himself President of his own private estate. You 
 know that he takes as his badge the eagle of the Cse- 
 sars ; this is very much as if such a man as I have imag- 
 ined should take the stars and stripes as the private 
 arms of his family. Now these titles and badges are 
 not trifles ; they confound and mislead ; they falsify 
 history ; they throw a shadow of antiquity, respectabil- 
 ity, and conservatism over a power which is essentially 
 modern, upstart, and revolutionary, a power whose mis- 
 sion seems to be to wipe out within its range all that is 
 ancient and venerable, a power which exists only by 
 trampling on every historic right and every national 
 memory. Of the six powers this power of Austria, 
 Austro-Hungary, or whatever it is to be called, is the 
 only one which can be fairly asked to give a reason for its 
 existence. The other five speak for themselves. In some 
 of them we may wish the form of government to be al- 
 tered ; in some of them we may wish the territorial bound- 
 aries to be altered ; but no sane person would wish any 
 one of the five to cease to exist. For they all are nations ; 
 they all have a right to exist as nations. If any of us 
 holds that some of the lands belonging to some of these 
 powers might well cease to belong them, it is purely on 
 the ground that those lands are not really possessions of 
 
406 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 the nations which form the kernel of those powers. The 
 worst enemy of Germany or of Russia could only ask that 
 those powers should be made more German, more Rus- 
 sian, by taking away from them whatever was not strictly 
 German or Russian. But if we take away from the so- 
 called Austria whatever is not Austrian, there will be 
 mighty little left indeed. A simple Archduke of Austria 
 would have his intelligible place. He would take his 
 place in the German Federal Council alongside of the 
 Duke of Oldenburg and the Prince of Reuss-Schleiz. 
 A simple King of Hungary would have an intelligible 
 place. He would take his place among the princes of 
 South-eastern Europe alongside of the King of the 
 Greeks, the King of Roumania, the King of Servia, and 
 the Prince of Bulgaria. But, as no historical reason can 
 be given why an archduke of Austria and king of Hun- 
 gary should call himself Emperor, so no practical reason 
 can be given why such an archduke and king should 
 reign over the Italian of Trent, the Czech of Prag, the 
 Pole of Cracow, the Russian of Gallicia, the Rouman of 
 Transsilvania, or the Serb of Dalmatia. There is no 
 greater case of successful imposture on record ; it 
 shows the wonderful way in which names and titles 
 become facts and influence events. The barefaced 
 stealing of the Imperial title and badge leads people 
 to fancy that the so-called Empire of Austria has 
 something to do with that Roman Empire which has 
 become wholly a thing of the past, with that ancient 
 German kingdom which is not unfairly represented by 
 the federal Emperor at Berlin. Or, more truly, men do not 
 altogether look on the '" Austrian Empire " as being the old 
 Roman Empire and German kingdom. They more com- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 407 
 
 monly forget that there ever was a Roman Empire and 
 German kingdom, and fancy that there has been an 
 "Empire of Austria" from the beginning. Then too 
 the habitual and cunning use by an unnational and 
 anti-national power of language which is true only 
 when applied to a nation tends to make men believe 
 that there is an Austrian nation, as there is a French 
 or an Italian nation, to believe in short that the power of 
 Austria has as good a right to exist as the power of 
 France or of Italy. I have heard of "Austrian national 
 honour," a thing which cannot exist, because there is no 
 Austrian nation. I have heard of the " interests of Aus- 
 tria," a phrase which commonly means something dan- 
 gerous to free Slaves or free Roumans. I ask what, in 
 such a phrase, is meant by "Austria"? Does it mean 
 the very respectable German duchy to which alone the 
 name of Austria properly belongs ? I do not see how 
 its inhabitants can have any interest whatever in doing 
 any damage to people who are not so much as their 
 neighbours. Or does "Austria" in this phrase mean 
 all the lands of which the Archduke of Austria chances 
 to be ruler ? Of those lands the majority of the inhab- 
 itants are themselves Slaves and Roumans, and they as- 
 suredly have no interest in furthering the plots of their 
 foreign master against their own kinsfolk. The " inter- 
 ests of Austria" then mean simply the personal and 
 family interests of Archduke Francis Joseph himself 
 But the use of phrases like these tends to mislead peo- 
 ple. Talk about the " honour of Austria," the " inter- 
 ests of Austria," and the like, makes people think, 
 sometimes even unconsciously, that "Austria" is a 
 word of the same kind as " France " or " Italy," and 
 
408 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 that "the interests of Anstria'' mean something which 
 would be for the advantage of some people, nation, or 
 language, in some part of the world or other. It is a 
 fact that a British traveller, landing in a Dalmatian, that 
 is diplomatically an "Austrian," haven, expected to find 
 its Slavonic and Italian-speaking inhabitants speaking 
 the "Austrian language.'' He had been' always used 
 to hear "Austria" spoken of in the same kind of way 
 as France and Italy; and he leaped to the conclusion 
 that, as there is a French and an Italian language, so 
 there must be an "Austrian" language also. 
 
 But let us go on a step further. In the language of 
 diplomatists, newspapers, and telegrams, a way of speak- 
 ing has come in within my memory which easily lends 
 itself to this kind of confusion. The phrase which I 
 have already quoted, " the interests of Austria," may 
 pass as a specimen of it, though that form is not quite 
 so characteristic of the style as another form, " Austria's 
 interests." I mean a fashion of personifying nations, 
 powers, and the like, in a way which has always been 
 usual in poetry and in rhetorical prose, but which has 
 lately become common in the driest and most business- 
 like forms of speech. England, France, Germany, any 
 other nation or power, is spoken of as if it were a per- 
 son which walked and talked and did this and that. 
 Now in some phrases this is a mere question of style 
 which does not affect facts. Whether we talk of " the 
 interests of the French" or of "the interests of France," 
 or even, in the newest fashion, of " France's interests," all 
 these forms mean exactly the same thing. But let us pass 
 to the other end of Europe. Endless confusions, miscon- 
 ceptions, misrepresentations, delusions of the most im- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 409 
 
 portant practical kind, have all come out of a mere silly use 
 of the one word "Turkey," an use which has come into 
 fashion long since my boyhood. If the word " Turkey " 
 has any meaning at all, it is an awkward geographical 
 name for the still anslaved part of Greece, the still enslaved 
 part of Bulgaria, the still enslaved part of Servia, and 
 any other lands that still remain in bondage to the Turk. 
 It means in short a space on the earth's surface, a space 
 happily a good deal smaller now than it was some years 
 back. But people see " Turkey " marked on the map, 
 as they see France, Germany, Italy, and they fancy that 
 " Turkey " is a word of the same meaning as France, 
 Germany, and Italy. They think that, as France is the 
 land of the French, so " Turkey " is the land of the 
 Turks. They think that, as the interests of France and 
 the interests of the French are the same thing, so the 
 " interests of Turkey " and the " interests of the Turks " 
 are the same thing. Or perhaps they do not really think 
 so ; if they were examined, they would show that they 
 know better ; but they practically think so ; that is, they 
 speak and act — for speech, even if it goes no further, is 
 action — as if they thought so. And so they help to in- 
 crease the general mass of confusion, and, in their de- 
 gree, by that invisible influence of each unit of which I 
 spoke long ago, to strengthen and prolong a vast mass 
 of practical oppression. 
 
 For my own part, I have not for many years used the 
 word " Turkey," though newspaper reporters are often 
 kind enough to put it into my mouth, sometimes just 
 after I have said that I never do use it. I find that I 
 can speak of the affairs of South-eastern Europe, even 
 of the affairs of the lands which are marked on the map 
 
4IO PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. , 
 
 as Turkey — enslaved Greece, enslaved Bulgaria, and the 
 rest — without using the misleading word. The word is 
 misleading in this way. It makes people fancy that 
 Turkey and the Turks stand to each other in the same 
 relation as, for instance, Italy and the Italians, whereas 
 in truth they stand-to each other in an exactly opposite 
 relation. Italy is the land of the Italians ; the Italians 
 are the people of Italy. But Turkey is not the land of 
 the Turks, neither are the Turks the people of Turkey. 
 " Turkey " is that extent of territory within which the 
 Turks, as foreign oppressors, hold the people of the land 
 in bondage in their own land. We hear of " the honour 
 of Turkey," " the dignity of Turkey," the " susceptibility 
 of Turkey," " the interests of Turkey," " the friends of 
 Turkey," " the enemies of Turkey," the " debts of Tur- 
 key," or perhaps, in more poetical phrase, " Turkey's 
 debt." Now, if these phrases mean anything, they mean 
 the exact opposite of what they are designed to mean. 
 If by the honour, the dignity, the susceptibility of Tur- 
 key, is meant the honour, the dignity, the susceptibility 
 of the Turk, I can only say that the Turk has no hon- 
 our or dignity, and that his susceptibility does not mat- 
 ter. If what is meant is the honour, the dignity, the 
 susceptibility, of the people of the lands marked Turkey 
 on the map, then I can only say that the presence of the 
 Turk in their land keeps them from having any honour 
 or dignity, but that their susceptibility is very strong, 
 and that it is most keenly called out by the presence 
 of the Turk among them. As for " the interests of Tur- 
 key," we again ask what is meant ; for the interests of the 
 Turk and the interests of the people of Turkey are the 
 two most opposite things in the whole world. The in- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 4I I 
 
 terest of the Turk is to keep the land called Turkey in 
 bondage as long as he can ; the interest of the people 
 of Turkey is to free themselves from the bondage of the 
 Turk. The phrase " friends of Turkey " commonly 
 means the enemies of the people of " Turkey," those 
 who would prolong their bondage to the Turk ; and, on the 
 other hand, by " enemies of Turkey " is most commonly 
 meant people who wish to free Turkey from the Turk's 
 oppression. And as for " Turkey's debt," the case is a 
 very serious one. I do not mean serious for the bond- 
 holders ; never mind them ; I mean that it is a very 
 serious case for both the enslaved and the liberated na- 
 tions. Diplomatists, bound by the custom of their trade 
 to look at words instead of facts, seem to have persuaded 
 themselves that " Turkey's debt " is something of the 
 same kind as a debt contracted by Great Britain or by 
 the United States, by France or Germany or Italy, or 
 any other civilized power. Now when the government 
 of a civilized power contracts a debt, it presumably con- 
 tracts that debt in the interest of the nation which it rep- 
 resents. If, as the result of any war or any treaty, part 
 of the territory of that power should either become an 
 independent power or should be ceded to some other 
 power, there is nothing unreasonable in transferring to 
 the new administration a proportional share of the debt 
 which had been contracted by the old administration. 
 But in the case of the Turk we need not say anything 
 presumably ; there is no presumption in the matter. We 
 know perfectly well why the Turk contracts his debts. 
 Every penny which the Turk has borrowed has been 
 borrowed for one or other of two purposes. It has been 
 borrowed to gratify the personal pleasures, commonly 
 
4' 2 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 the infamous pleasures, of successive Sultans, to buy 
 them slaves or to build them palaces. Or else it has 
 been borrowed for military purposes ; that is, it has 
 been borrowed to make the Turk better able to hold the 
 people of the land called " Turkey " in bondage. When 
 Christian men are not ashamed to lend their money for 
 such purposes as these, it is well that they should lose it. 
 But it is not reasonable that such parts of th'e people of 
 the land as are set free should be saddled with any part of 
 the debt which was contracted to hinder them from be- 
 coming free. It sounds very neat and diplomatic when 
 we read that free Bulgaria or enlarged Montenegro is to 
 take upon itself a share of the Turk's debt proportional 
 to the extent of the territory ceded by the Turk. What 
 is really meant is that the people who have escaped from 
 bondage are to be made answerable for debts which were 
 contracted by the oppressor from whom they have just 
 escaped for the express purpose of keeping them in 
 bondage. A more glaring case of injustice cannot be 
 conceived. And it all comes out of the diplomatic 
 fashion of putting words instead of facts. 
 
 So it is with other phrases in common use. We hear 
 of " the Turkish government ;" we hear the Turkish 
 Sultan spoken of as the " sovereign " of the people of 
 those parts of South-eastern Europe which he still keeps 
 under his power. And this " government," this " sov- 
 ereign," is held, after the analogy of other governments 
 and sovereigns, to have "rights," It is even argued 
 that the " subjects " of this " sovereign" owe him some 
 kind of duty, perhaps even the duty of " loyalty." Now 
 all this kind of talk leads to utter misconceptions and to 
 real practical evils. For it is all mere talk, which has 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 413 
 
 nothing answering to it in the world of fact. If by " gov- 
 ernment," "sovereign," "subject," "rights," "loyalty," 
 etc., we mean the things which bear those names in 
 America or in Western Europe, the words are out of 
 place anywhere where the Turk rules, because the things 
 do not exist. By " government " we understand an in- 
 stitution which serves a great many ends, the chief of 
 which are to protect life, property, and other valuable 
 things at home, and to speak in the name of the nation 
 abroad. If the head of such a government be a prince, an 
 emperor, king, or any other, we call him a " sovereign." 
 And the people who live under such a government we 
 call " subjects " or " citizens," according to its form. 
 And such a government undoubtedly has " rights " — 
 whatever rights the law of the particular country gives 
 it; the subjects or citizens have undoubted duties 
 towards it, the duty of obedience to all the lawful com- 
 mands of the ruling authority, whatever may be its 
 form. And a government which does its duty, which 
 exercises its rights only according to law, will surely 
 call forth that feeling of " loyalty," which some people 
 seem to think can be called forth only by a prince, but 
 which, it seems to me — and I doubt not seems to you 
 also — can be no less fully called forth by a common- 
 wealth or by its chief. 
 
 In short, in civihzed lands the duties of the ruler and 
 the subject are reciprocal. The whole thing is of the 
 nature of a bargain ; lawful obedience is given in return 
 for lawful protection, lawful protection is given in return 
 for lawful obedience. Now in Western Europe one gov- 
 ernment may be better than another, either in the form of 
 its constitution or in the character of its administration at 
 
 27 
 
414 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 any particular moment. But the worst government in 
 Western Europe is much better than no government at 
 all ; it does on the whole more good than harm ; it may 
 be desirable to change its constitution or to reform its 
 administration ; it cannot be desirable to sweep it away 
 altogether. There must be an English, a French, an 
 Italian, a German, and a Russian government, of some 
 kind. But we may fairly ask. Need there be a Turkish 
 government of any kind ? Or rather we may ask. Is 
 there such a thing as a Turkish government? Is not 
 the word " government " altogether misapplied to any- 
 thing that exists in enslaved Greece, enslaved Bulgaria, 
 or any other land where the Turk bears rule? The 
 truth is that there is no government in those lands ; 
 there is not even mis-government. There is the opposite 
 to government. The business of government is to make 
 life and property safe. The so-called Turkish govern- 
 ment simply makes life and property unsafe in enslaved 
 Greece and enslaved Bulgaria. The business of govern- 
 ment is to represent the nation in dealings with other na- 
 tions. The so-called Turkish government exists simply 
 to hinder the people of enslaved Greece and enslaved 
 Bulgaria, not only from having any dealings with other 
 nations, but from union with the nations to which 
 they ought to belong and to which they are eager to 
 belong. In a well-ordered state the government will 
 speak the will of the people. The so-called Turkish 
 government must, in its very nature, always speak the 
 opposite to the will of the people. The sovereign of a 
 civilized kingdom is the chief of the nation, the personal 
 embodiment of the nation. The Turkish Sultan, the so- 
 called sovereign of enslaved Greece and enslaved Bui- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 415 
 
 garia, is not the chief or embodiment of either of those 
 nations ; he is the foreign enemy who hinders those 
 nations from having any national being. Wherever the 
 Turk is in power there is no government ; the presence of 
 the Turk hinders the existence of government. As soon 
 as he is turned out, government begins. There is gov- 
 ernment, better or worse, but government of some kind, 
 in free Greece, free Servia, free Bulgaria. There will be 
 government, better or worse, but government of some 
 kind, in enslaved Greece, enslaved Servia, enslaved Bul- 
 garia, when the Turk is driven out of those lands, but 
 not before. 
 
 In short there is no such thing as a Turkish gov- 
 ernment. There is, in certain parts of Greece, Bul- 
 garia, and some other lands, an organized system of 
 foreign oppression which .hinders the existence of 
 government. The head of that system of foreign op- 
 pression is the Turkish Sultan. But the Turkish Sul- 
 tan is not the sovereign of those lands, in the sense 
 in which Queen Victoria is the sovereign of Great Brit- 
 ain and King Humbert the sovereign of Italy; he is 
 the sovereign of those lands only in the sense in which 
 a burglar who has broken into a house might be called 
 a sovereign of that house. He has no rights, for 
 wrong can have no rights, and his whole position is 
 the embodiment of wrong. The people of enslaved 
 Greece and enslaved Bulgaria are not his subjects 
 in the sense in which an Englishman of Britain is a 
 subject of Queen Victoria or an Italian a subject of 
 King Humbert. The Englishman or the Italian is a 
 " subject " only in a sense in which " subject " means the 
 same thing as " citizen." But the enslaved Greek, the 
 
4l6 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 enslaved Bulgarian, is a subject of the Sultan only in 
 the sense in which the lawful owners of the house 
 into which the burglar has broken may be said to be 
 the subjects of the burglar. They owe him no duties, 
 except the duties which orderly citizens owe to burg- 
 lars, that is, to hand them over to the police. Only for 
 the people of enslaved Greece and enslaved Bulgaria 
 there is no police ; they must be their own police ; for 
 them there is no law but the law of Mr. Justice Lynch. 
 His vigorous arm has already done a good deal of 
 justice in those lands ; but there is a good deal more 
 for him still to do. 
 
 Remember then that all these words, "Turkey," 
 " Turkish government," " rights of the Sultan," and the 
 like, are mere delusions, words which answer to no 
 facts, wordjs which every time they are used tend to 
 promote misconceptions and practically to strengthen 
 the hands of oppression. I would say, dare to be senti- 
 mental ; that is, dare to look at the facts themselves and 
 not at the conventional formulae which misrepresent 
 them. Dare to be pedantic ; that is, dare to make your 
 thoughts answer to the facts, and your words answer to 
 your thoughts. Leave misleading phrases to the cun- 
 ning people who use them in order to mislead, and to 
 the careless people who use them because they will not 
 take the trouble to avoid being misled. Above all, do 
 not be taken in when any Turk, when any Greek or Ar- 
 menian traitor, talks about his " sovereign " and his 
 "country." There is his Excellency Musurus Pasha, 
 Ambassador from the Grand Turk to the court of Great 
 Britain. He talked big at a Lord Mayor's dinner about 
 his " august sovereign " and his " Ottoman fatherland." 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 417 
 
 That means that he is hired by the Turk, with gold 
 which the Turk wrings from Greek and Bulgarian 
 households, to do all that his Greek subtlety can do to 
 prolong the oppression of his own people and to patch 
 up the tottering throne of their oppressor. And there 
 is the more famous Midhat, whether the assassin of 
 Abd-ul-aziz or not matters very little — in any case the 
 assassin of countless Bulgarian lives, the dishonourer of 
 countless Bulgarian homes, the man who planned those 
 deeds of Batak over which Lord Beaconsfield jested so 
 merrily, and who, crowned with such merits as these, 
 naturally became the cherished guest of the polite so- 
 ciety of London. Midhat too could talk at a public 
 dinner about "my country." Where Midhat's real 
 country may be, from what corner he or his father may 
 have been first imported as slave or minion, it is not 
 very important to inquire. But when Midhat applies 
 the words " my country " to any spot of Christian soil, 
 he can mean " my country " only in the sense in which 
 a master of fox-hounds talks of "my country." He 
 can mean only that space on the map which furnishes 
 him with victims. 
 
 Now at this stage some one may perhaps put in a 
 very common cavil. I am quite prepared to be told that 
 the rule of the Turk in South-eastern Europe is simply 
 a case of a very common class, a case of a government 
 which had its origin in conquest. I am prepared to be 
 told that there have been and still are many governments 
 of that class, and that, however wrongful they have been 
 in their beginning, they are legitimated by time. I have 
 often heard the question. If five hundred years of un- 
 broken possession does not legitimate a government. 
 
41 8 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 what can legitimate it ? Now when I put the question 
 in this shape, and make the gainsayer talk about " five 
 hundred years," I am paying the gainsayer a compliment 
 which he is not likely to deserve. He is a great deal 
 more likely to say " four hundred years " than " five 
 hundred ;" that is, he is likely to think that the taking 
 of Constantinople was the beginning of Ottoman con- 
 quest in Europe instead of its crown. But let us ex- 
 amine the answer as an answer. No doubt there are 
 many governments in the world which began in con- 
 quest, but which lapse of time has made legitimate ; and 
 we may add that, in most cases, they have become legit- 
 imate in a rtiuch shorter space of time than five hun- 
 dred years. But the truth is that space of time has 
 nothing to do with the matter. A government founded 
 on conquest may become thoroughly legitimate on the 
 morrow of the conquest ; it may remain utterly illegiti- 
 mate five hundred years after it. Now, looked at by this 
 rule the Ottoman power in Europe, whether it has lasted, 
 as it has in different parts, five hundred and thirty years 
 or only a little over sixty years, is in either case a thing 
 as wrongful as it was when the conquest began. The 
 rule of the conqueror is unlawful as long as it remains 
 the rule of a conqueror ; it becomes lawful as soon as it 
 becomes a national government. If the conqueror, from 
 the morrow of his conquest, makes himself one with 
 the people whom he has conquered, if he makes him- 
 self really their national head, if he gives them as good 
 protection as a native ruler could give them, then his 
 rule, if wrongful on the day of conquest, becomes right- 
 ful on the morrow. At whatever time, sooner or later, 
 the conquered can look to their conqueror or his sue- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 419 
 
 cesser as truly the chief of their nation, giving them the 
 benefits of a national government, at that time, whether 
 sooner or later, the government founded on conquest is 
 legitimated. It becomes legitimate whenever it really 
 becomes a government. But the rule of the Turk has 
 never become a government; it has never discharged 
 the duties of government ; it was foreign brigandage 
 five hundred years back, and it remains foreign brigand- 
 age still. There is in truth a good deal of difference 
 between the rule of the Turk now and the rule of the 
 Turk five hundred years back. But the difference is 
 this, that the rule of the Turk is even further from our 
 definition of a government, that it is mord distinctly or- 
 gemized brigandage and nothing else, now that it has 
 lasted five hundred years than it was at the time when 
 it began. 
 
 Akin to this is another fallacy. When we speak of 
 any particular evil doings of the Turk, we are told that 
 Christian rulers. Christian nations, have done things 
 just as bad. And, as a matter of fact, this is perfectly 
 true ; the falsehood lies in the inference. I have little 
 doubt that for every one of the worst deeds of the Turk 
 we could find a parallel in some deed of some Christian 
 power or other. But what then ? The Christian powers 
 have reformed, while the Turk, so far as he has changed 
 at all, has changed only by getting worse. If we look 
 back five hundred years or one hundred years or fifty 
 years or any smaller number of years, we shall find that 
 all Western governments have improved, while the 
 Turk alone has gone back. Perhaps every govern- 
 ment in the world still needs reform : my point is that 
 even those Western governments which we may think 
 
420 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 Still stand in need of most reform have positively re- 
 formed a great deal. The Turk has not reformed, be- 
 cause from the nature of his religion he cannot reform. 
 And a government, like most other things, if it fails to 
 become better, commonly becomes worse. It has been 
 often said that the Hungarians were better off while 
 they were under the Turkish Sultans than they were 
 restored to the rule of their Austrian kings. I am 
 no lover of Austrian kings ; but I must do them jus- 
 tice in this matter. I have no doubt that, as regards 
 the Protestants of Hungary at the actual time of the 
 deliverance of Hungary from the Turk, the saying 
 is strictly true. That deliverance was very little of 
 a deliverance for them. The Turkish Sultans, though 
 in the nature of things oppressors of men of other 
 religions, were not, and hardly could be, persecu- 
 tors in the strictest sense. The Austrian King of 
 Hungary at the time of the deliverance was a per- 
 secutor in the strictest sense. But it is quite certain 
 that) for a long time past, no Hungarian Protestant 
 would have bettered his condition by becoming a 
 rayah — a Christian subject — of the Turk. So an Eng- 
 lish Protestant in the reign of Mary, an English Roman 
 Catholic in the reign of Elizabeth, would certainly have 
 been better off as a rayah under Suleiman the Lawgiver; 
 so would a French Protestant or a Genevese Catholic at 
 a much later time. I need not insult you by telling you 
 that things have become widely different in all these 
 lands. We are used to look upon Spain as a backward 
 country, as one of the most backward countries in 
 Europe. We ever and anon hear stories about religious 
 intolerance in Spain. A Spanish Protestant is subjected 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 42 1 
 
 by law to vexatious restrictions on the public exercise 
 of his religion, and, as usual, when the letter of the law 
 is bad, its administration is worse than its letter. Now 
 the sooner all such restrictions are abolished the better : 
 but let us do justice to Spain also. A hundred years 
 back a Spanish Protestant would undoubtedly have been 
 better off as a rayah of the Turk. In Spain a hundred 
 years back we could not have said that a Protestant was 
 subject to vexatious restrictions on the public exercise 
 of his religion, for any attempt at the public exercise of 
 his religion would have been impossible. He would 
 have run a great risk of being burned alive for its most 
 private profession or confession. As a rayah of the 
 Turk, he would have been liable to great oppression in 
 many ways, but he would have been in no danger of 
 being put to death either for the profession of his re- 
 ligion or for its public exercise. The Jews of Spain 
 bettered themselves by migrating to the dominions of 
 the Turk, and the Protestants of Spain, if there had been 
 any considerable number of them, would have bettered 
 themselves by migrating with them. But assuredly a 
 Spanish Protestant would not better himself now by 
 such a migration. He has still something to complain 
 of; but the greatest ground of complaint is removed. 
 Not only is his life safe, but he is, what as a rayah of 
 the Turk he would not be, the civil equal of his neigh- 
 bours of the dominant religion. That is to say, even 
 Spain, which has still much to reform, has actually re- 
 formed a great deal. But the Turk meanwhile has not 
 reformed, but has, if anything, got worse. It is per- 
 fectly true that Christian governments and Christian na- 
 tions have in times past done things as bad as the worst 
 
422 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 deeds of the Turk. But they have left off doing them, 
 while the Turk goes on doing them still. The worst 
 Christian governments can reform, and they have re- 
 formed. But experience shows that the Turk never has 
 reformed, and reason, arguing from experience, will tell 
 us that the Turk never can reform. 
 
 Now what is the cause of this marked difference be- 
 tween Eastern and Western Europe ? Why is it that 
 in Western Europe government is on the whole a good 
 thing, that at the very worst it is misgovernment, the 
 abuse of a good thing, but that in Eastern Europe, in 
 all those lands which have not been as yet set free from 
 the Turk, that which is conventionally called " govern- 
 ment " is neither a good thing nor even the abuse of a 
 good thing, but a thing purely evil ? Why in short, is it, 
 not government nor even misgovernment, but the direct 
 opposite to government ? Why again cannot the Turk 
 reform, while the worst Christian governments can re- 
 form and have reformed ? The causes for this difference 
 lie down very deep in the history of the South-eastern 
 lands. They are indeed mainly to be found in the spe- 
 cial circumstances of Mahometan conquest. But, fully 
 to grasp them, we must go back many ages earlier than 
 Mahometan conquest in the South-eastern lands, many 
 ages earlier than the beginnings of Mahometan conquest 
 in any lands. The immediate cause of the difference is 
 that the so-called " Turkish government " is the rule of 
 a Mahometan master over subjects of another religion, 
 in this case over subjects of one of the forms of the 
 Christian religion. Now it is certain that Mahometan 
 rule over men of another religion can never be govern- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 423 
 
 ment in the truer and better sense of the word. In such 
 a case we may lay aside all talk about political rights, 
 about parliaments, constitutions, and the like ; no Ma- 
 hometan ruler can really give ordinary civil rights to his 
 subjects who are not of the Mahometan religion. He 
 cannot give them that 'protection against wrong, that 
 redress when wrong has been done, which among civ- 
 ilized nations is looked for no less from a despotic than 
 from a constitutional government. The Turk cannot 
 give them that protection, because the first principles of 
 his religion forbid him to give it to them. A Mahometan 
 government is not bound to be persecuting in the strict 
 sense, or rather it is bound not to be persecuting. While 
 the denial of Christianity, or its profession in some form 
 other than the dominant form, has often been punished 
 with death in Christian countries, the simple profession 
 of Christianity never has been, and according to the 
 principles of the Mahometan religion cannot be, treated 
 in any Mahometan land as a capital crime. The first 
 principle of Mahometan rule is that the Mahometan is 
 to fight against men of other religions till they submit, 
 but that, by submission and tribute, they purchase the 
 right to their lives, their property, and the free exercise 
 of their religion. The Christian subjects- of a Mussul- 
 man ruler are thus condemned in their own land to the 
 condition of a subject and degraded class ; but they are 
 not, strictly speaking, persecuted, in the sense in which 
 Christians of one sect have often been persecuted by 
 Christians of another. Righteous expounders of the 
 Mahometan law have often stepped in to hinder Mahom- 
 etan princes from dealing worse with their Christian sub- 
 jects than the Mahometan law ordains. In the days of 
 
424 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 Sultan Selim, and again in the clays of Sultan Mahmoud, 
 within the lifetime of many of us, the heads of the Ma- 
 hometan law — all honour to them for so doing — stepped 
 in to hinder wholesale massacres of Christians. But if the 
 Christian or other non-Mussulman subject of a Mussul- 
 man power is not strictly persecftted, he is oppressed and 
 degraded. He is a bondman in his own land ; he buys 
 his life and all that he has by payment of tribute to 
 foreign masters. And the Mahometan law hinders him 
 from having any real security even for that which the 
 Mahometan law promises to him. For his oath is not 
 taken against a Mussulman wrong-doer. That- is to say, 
 every Christian is practically at the mercy of every Mus- 
 sulman. His legal condition is bad enough ; his prac- 
 tical condition is worse. This is what always happens ; 
 if the letter of the law condemns a certain class of peo- 
 ple to a certain measure of oppression and degradation, 
 the practical working of the law will always be worse 
 than its letter. The only exception will be when mem- 
 bers of the oppressed class can obtain personal relief 
 through bribery or personal favour. In this way, while 
 most Christians under Mussulman rule have been worse 
 off than the Mussulman law ordained, particular persons 
 and classes have often been better off But there never 
 has been, and never can be, any real reform under Ma- 
 hometan rule. Of course I do not mean that Mahome- 
 tan rule cannot be better and worse in different times 
 and places. At the present moment, in Constantinople 
 and other great cities, where the eyes of Europeans are 
 upon him, the Turk does not dare to do such mon- 
 strous particular acts as were constantly done a hundred 
 or even fifty years back. But in the back parts of Ma- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 425 
 
 cedonia, in the lands which Lord Salisbury rejoiced that 
 he had given back to Turkish rule, the general oppres- 
 sion, done out of European sight, is undoubtedly greater 
 than it was a hundred or five hundred years back. There, 
 if things could go back to what they were in the days 
 of the first Sultans, it would undoubtedly be a change 
 for the better. But real reform, such as we should un- 
 derstand by reform in America or in Western Europe, 
 there never can be. For the principles of the Mahome- 
 tan religion forbid what we understand by real reform ; 
 they forbid the putting of the Christian on a real level 
 with his" Mussulman neighbour. There has been no 
 moment when revolt against his Mussulman lord has 
 not been the right of every Christian subject. There 
 has been no moment when revolt, if only there was any 
 hope of success, has not been the duty of every Christian 
 subject. The Englishmen of other days, your common 
 forefathers and mine, revolted against the yoke of kings 
 of their own people in their own land. Englishmen of 
 later days, your own immediate forefathers, revolted 
 against the yoke of a king of their own people in 
 another land. We do not commonly blame either of them 
 for so revolting. Yet, judged by the standard of South- 
 eastern Europe, they had but small grounds for revolt. 
 Wherever the Turk rules, wherever any Mussulman power 
 rules over men who are not of the Mussulman religion, 
 the rule of George the Third, of Charles the First, of 
 Henry the Third, might be welcomed as a happy deliv- 
 erance. The people of enslaved Macedonia, enslaved 
 by order of Lord Slilisbury when the Russian sword had 
 won their freedom, would hardly lose by exchanging the 
 rule of Abd-ul-Hamid for the rule of John or William 
 
426 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 Rufus. The doom of the South-eastern lands has been 
 the nineteen winters of the anarchy of Stephen pro- 
 longed for five hundred years. 
 
 But, even without the presence of a Mahometan 
 power in the land, in the days before any Mahom- 
 etan power was in being, the state of things in South- 
 eastern Europe, in the Eastern-Roman Empire arid in 
 the lands bordering on it, was widely different from any- 
 thing that was ever seen in Western Europe. Mussul- 
 man rule has in truth continued and strengthened cer- 
 tain tendencies which are already at work, and' which in 
 a very marked way distinguish the history of the Eastern 
 Empire from that of the Western. Oije special feature of 
 the South-eastern lands has ever been the permanence of 
 races, as contrasted with the way in which, in Western 
 Europe, races have been in some cases assimilated and 
 in some cases mixed. Not but that there has been a 
 large amount of assimilation in Eastern Europe also. 
 The Bulgarian has for ages past been Bulgarian only in 
 the sense in which the Romanized Celt of Gaul has 
 given himself and his land the name of his Prankish 
 master, in the sense in which the Slave of Kief and 
 Moscow has given himself and his land the name of his 
 Russian — that is, his Scandinavian — master. The Bul- 
 garians have for ages been a Slavonic people who have 
 taken the name of their conquerors, the old Bulgarians of 
 Finnish race. The conquered people thoroughly assimil- 
 ated the foreign infusion, and the conquest has in no way 
 affected the essentially Slavonic chaf&cter of the modern 
 Bulgarian nation. Still it has made a marked distinction 
 between them and their Servian fellows, who have assim- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 42/ 
 
 ilated no such foreign element, and who must come as 
 near to being purely Slavonic as any people can come to 
 being purely anything. So again, the various processes 
 of old Greek colonization, of Macedonian conquest, of 
 East-Roman dominion, have, from the very beginning 
 of recorded history, spread the Greek name, the Greek 
 tongue, Greek civilization, over millions of men who 
 were not Greek by birth. • At the present moment the 
 best definition of the Greek nation would be to say that 
 it takes in all who speak the Greek tongue and belong 
 to the Orthodox Church. So again the Ottoman Turks, so 
 far as they can be called a nation at all, are most strictly 
 an artificial nation. It is not merely that the Sultans 
 and other chief men have ever been the sons of 
 foreign slave-mothers, the Ottoman caste or army — for 
 it is either of those rather than a people — has ever been 
 largely recruited by renegades of all nations. The 
 Janissaries, while they kept their first strength — that 
 strength which made the Ottoman power what it was — 
 were all kidnapped Christian children. In the most 
 flourishing days of the Ottoman power the great mass 
 of the holders of high office were renegades or sons of 
 renegades ; the native Turk lay almost under a ban. 
 These facts go largely to explain the advance of the 
 Ottomans while they drew into their ranks the best 
 strength of the conquered nations ; but it shows how 
 far they were from being themselves a nation in any 
 strict sense. Yet, notwithstanding these facts, the per- 
 manence of race is the rule in those days, and the Otto- 
 mans themselves are an example of it. There was a 
 genuine Turkish kernel, round which the other elements 
 have gathered and from which they have received their 
 
428 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 character. The Ottomans, if not to be called in strict- 
 ness a nation or a people, are yet a very strongly marked 
 company, strongly marked off, not only from their 
 Christian subjects, but from other Mussulmans and even 
 from other Turks. 
 
 Now in this the Ottomans have simply conformed to 
 the general law of the lands into which they have thrust 
 themselves. All the races of those lands, all the nations 
 which were there when we get our first glimpses of 
 recorded history, all the nations which have in later 
 times settled in those lands in such numbers as really to 
 form nations, still abide as distinct nations. This is a 
 marked contrast to the state of things in Western 
 Europe. There, within the lands which formed part of 
 the Roman Empire, the races earlier than the Roman 
 occupation survive only in remote corners. They sur- 
 vive as fragments which for the most part are without 
 political importance, and which cannot pretend to any 
 distinct national being. The primaeval Basque, at least 
 on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, may perhaps claim 
 a higher position ; but the Briton, whether in his own 
 island or in Gaul, can hardly pretend to a strictly na- 
 tional life. Still keeping a marked distinction in other 
 ways, he has, for all political purposes, become one with 
 his English or French neighbours, and a separation of 
 Wales from England or of Britanny from France would 
 assuredly be a scheme lying quite beyond the range of 
 practical politics. In the rest of Southern Britain, the 
 Teutonic settlers, either exterminating or assimilating 
 every alien element, abide in the form of the English 
 people. In Gaul, so far as Gaul has accepted the fellow- 
 ship of I^aris, we cannot say that either extermination or 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 429 
 
 assimilation has taken place; the original Celts, the 
 Roman and the Teutonic conquerors, have more truly 
 coalesced to form a new and distinct whole, a nation dis- 
 tinct from eitlier of its three component elements, the 
 great nation of the French. We smile at the idea of a 
 journey through a few English shires, and finding here 
 a British settlement, here one of Saxons or Angles, here 
 one of Danes, here one of Normans, here one of later 
 settlers, Flemings, Huguenots, Palatines, each keeping 
 its national being, its national name, its national tongue, 
 each perhaps distinguished from its neighbours by the 
 profession of a separate religion. We smile no less at 
 the idea that a like journey through a few French depart- 
 ments might reveal the existence side by side of settle- 
 ments of Celts, Romans, Franks, perhaps Scandinavian 
 Normans, each keeping its distinctive nationality un- 
 touched. But what seems an absurdity even to think of 
 in Western Europe is the living reality of the East. There 
 all the earlier races, all the later settlers, still exist as dis- 
 tinct nationalities, and there are districts in which several 
 of them may actually be found as distinct settlements 
 side by side in the way of which the very thought 
 sounds so grotesque in Western Europe. The three 
 races which the Roman conqueror found in the South- 
 eastern lands are still there in their distinct national 
 being, still there in all the strength of an abiding and 
 regenerate national life. The great Thracian race, veiled 
 under the Roman name, speaking a Roman tongue, 
 abides alike in its scattered settlements in more south- 
 ern lands and in its great colony beyond the Dan- 
 ube. It abides in both to show how deep was the 
 impress which Rome and her speech made on the 
 
 28 
 
430 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 South-eastern lands. The new-born kingdom of Rou- 
 mania, the only European power to which the Roman 
 name still cleaves, may claim to be a more direct repre- 
 sentative of the Western Rome than the other new-born 
 kingdom which has the Western Rome for it^ capital. 
 West-Roman in speech, East-Roman in creed, the Rou- 
 man people form one of the ties between the Eastern 
 and the Western lands. So, in another way, are the 
 other people who for many ages cast away their own 
 name for the name of Rome, but, who in casting away 
 their name, never cast away the precious heritage of the 
 most perfect form of the speech of man. The Greeks, 
 Hellenes of old on their own lips and now Hellenes 
 again, were for ages content to bear the Roman name,- 
 and to claim that name as their exclusive possession. On 
 the Greek fell the mantle of the Eastern Caesars, as the 
 mantle of the Western Csesars fell on the German. 
 That the Greek still lives, keeping the tongue of his 
 fathers, restored to the name of his fathers ; that he is 
 still in many things the foremost among the nations 
 of the South-eastern lands, I need not stop to show. 
 And his ruder kinsman and neighbour, the Albanian, 
 the Skipetar, the remnant of the old Illyrian stock, still 
 abides among all changes as a vigorous and self-assert- 
 ing folk, keeping a very distinct national being. Divided 
 in religion, Latin, Orthodox, Mussulman, brought under 
 Italian influences at one end and under Greek influences 
 at the other, brought under as full subjection to the 
 Turk as such a people could be brought into subjection 
 to any rule, still speaking the ancient tongue of days 
 before Rome had spanned the Hadriatic, the Albanian, 
 as he never became Roman, as in his own land he 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 43 1 
 
 never became Greek, so even, in accepting the creed 
 of his Ottoman conqueror, never became Turkish. He 
 still abides, the most unchanged representative of the 
 ancient folk of the South-eastern lands. He abides as 
 a relic of days before Illyrian pirates drew on them the 
 vengeance of the mighty commonwealth on the other 
 side of Hadria, and thereby opened a path for Rome her- 
 self, hardly in a figure, to move to the shores of the 
 Bosporos. 
 
 Such are the three primitive races of the land, still 
 keeping each one its national life, two of them keeping 
 their ancient tongues. And, along with the nations 
 which were there before the Roman came, we see too 
 the nations which have come in since the establishment 
 of the Roman power, the nations which came to under- 
 mine and break up the Roman power in its translated 
 home. The Slaves poured into the Roman provinces 
 of the East in nearly the same character in which 
 the Teutons poured into the Roman provinces of the 
 West. Like them, they came as half conquerors, half 
 disciples. But the Slaves have kept up a distinct national 
 being in the provinces of the East such as the Teutons 
 never kept up in the provinces of the West. The Teu- 
 ton abides in his old German and Scandinavian lands ; 
 he abides in the other world of Britain; in the con- 
 quered provinces of the Roman world he has been lost 
 among the folk of the land ; he has at most contributed 
 one element in the formation of new nations of mingled 
 being. The Slave, largely displaced or assimilated by 
 Teutonic advance in his own elder lands, has won for 
 himself new homes within the Eastern provinces of 
 Rome, within some of which he has himself assimilated 
 
432 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 new conquerors. We have already seen how the Serb, 
 the purest Slave, abides side by side with the Bulgarian 
 who has taken the name of alien conquerors whom he 
 won over to his own national life. But the Slave has 
 nowhere lost himself in the nationality either of the 
 Greek or of the Roman ; nor is there in Eastern Eu- 
 rope any nation of mingled national life, made up of 
 mingled primitive, Greek, and Slavonic elements, as in 
 Western Europe the French nation is made up of min- 
 gled primitive, Roman, and Teutonic elements. Nor 
 did any Slavonic prince ever take on himself as it were- 
 the very personality of the Roman power in the East in 
 the way that a whole line of Teutonic princes took on 
 themselves the personality of the Roman power in the 
 West. Not a few Slavonic invaders seemed destined to 
 enter the Imperial City as conquerors from without. 
 Not a few dared to take among their own people the 
 badges and titles of Imperial greatness. But to none of 
 them was it granted to play in the New Rome the part 
 which Alaric and Genseric had played within the Old. 
 Still less was it granted to any Slavonic lord, not even 
 to Bulgarian Simeon or Servian Stephen, to enter the 
 New Rome as a welcome master. For none of them 
 was it in store to receive the Eastern diadem beneath 
 the cupola of Saint Sophia, at the hands of the Byz- 
 antine patriarch, amid the rejoicing shouts of the Byz- 
 antine people, as the, Frankish Charles had received 
 the Western diadem among the long colonnades of the 
 old Saint Peter's, at the hands of the Pontiff of the 
 Western Rome, amid the rejoicing shouts of those 
 who still specially deemed themselves the Roman 
 people. 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 433 
 
 Thus, even within the Aryan and Christian fold, races 
 have kept distinct in the Eastern lands in a way in which 
 they have not kept distinct in the Western lands. The 
 Roman Empire lived on while Slavonic invaders parted 
 its provinces asunder ; but there has never been a Holy 
 Roman Empire of the Servian or Bulgarian Nation as there 
 was within living memory a Holy Roman Empire of the 
 German Nation. The main cause of this marked differ- 
 ence between East and West seems to lie in the different 
 positions which the Roman power held in its Eastern 
 and in its Western provinces. The political conquest 
 was equally thorough in both regions ; indeed the Greek 
 nation came to identify itself with the Roman name and 
 the Roman power, in a way that we cannot say that any 
 people of the West ever did. Even the Frankish wear- 
 ers of the Roman diadem did not keep on the same un- 
 broken tradition of Roman power and Roman political 
 being which was kept on by the Caesars of the East. But 
 in the East there was not, there could not be, the same 
 complete moral and intellectual conquest which Rome 
 made in her Western provinces. To the Gaul and the 
 Spaniard the Roman came, not only as a conqueror, but 
 as a civilizer and a teacher. But wherever men were Greek 
 either by birth or by adoption, whether in old Greece or 
 in the lands which had put on a deeper or a slighter 
 measure of Greek culture, Rome could have no such 
 mission. The work of teaching and civilizing lay all on 
 the other side. In the oft-quoted words of the Roman 
 poet, it was captive Greece that led captive her con- 
 queror. Throughout the Hellenic and hellenized lands, 
 the Greek in a manner became Roman, and the Roman 
 in a manner became Greek. In the end the Eastern- 
 
434 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 Roman power became nearly coextensive with the arti- 
 ficially formed Greek nation. It became a power whose 
 titles and political traditions were all Roman, while its 
 culture, its speech, its literature, its theology, were all 
 Greek. So it was in the end ; but for ages the Roman 
 Empire of the East spoke with two tongues. While 
 Greek was already the tongue of literature and of wor- 
 ship, Latin was still the tongue of law and government 
 and warfare. A power of a twofold nature like this 
 could hardly take up the office of a teacher towards 
 other nations in the same way in which the unroman- 
 ized Greek would in the East or in which the unhellen- 
 ized Roman could in the West. A Macedonian king at 
 Antioch or Alexandria was the missionary of a culture 
 distinctly Greek. A Roman Emperor at Trier or York 
 was the missionary of a culture distinctly Roman. But 
 a Roman Emperor at Constantinople had no errand quite 
 so clearly to be understood. High and great was his 
 calling ; he represented the power of Rome and the cul- 
 ture of Greece; he guarded Europe against the bar- 
 barian, and Christendom against the Fire-worshipper 
 and the Mussulman. But he did not represent any dis- 
 tinct national or quasi-national life, like that artificial 
 nationality of Rome in which the nations of the West 
 were content to merge themselves. Here, it may be, is 
 one great reason why the nations of South-eastern Eu- 
 rope, both those who were in the land before the Roman 
 came and those who came into the land after his coming, 
 kept on every attribute of distinct national being in a 
 way in which the nations of the West failed to keep 
 theirs. 
 
 That this was the case with the Slavonic immigrants 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 435 
 
 was plain from the very beginnings of Slavonic settle- 
 ment. The Slaves, as a mass, never became either 
 Greek or Roman. And that such was the case with the 
 elder nations also became clear to the world about the 
 end of the first millennium of our aera. Nearly seven 
 hundred years had then passed since Byzantium, under 
 its new names, had become the seat of the Roman 
 power. It had been for a while one seat out of several, 
 but the greatest and most abiding seat, the seat of the 
 prince who ranked highest among two or more Impe- 
 rial colleagues. While still only a division of the Em- 
 pire, the Eastern half of the Roman dominion already 
 began to put on a Greek look in the eyes of strangers. 
 Our own Teutonic forefathers and kinsmen apply the 
 Greek name to the Empire of Justinian and of the Em- 
 perors before Justinian. But the great events of his 
 reign, the recovery of Italy, Africa, and Southern Spain, 
 put off for some ages all tendencies on the part of the 
 Roman Empire of the East to develope in a Greek 
 direction or in any direction but one strictly Roman. 
 The one Romem Augustus, the present master of the 
 New Rome, the absent master of the Old, again rules 
 from Ocean to Euphrates. By the early years of the 
 eighth century, the Empire has been cut short by the 
 Lombard, the Saracen, and the Slave. Syria, Egypt, 
 Africa, Southern Spain, Northern Italy, have passed 
 away ; the dominion of the Roman Emperor in the Old 
 Rome has dwindled to a name. On the Eastern borders 
 the rivalry between Rome and Persia, between the vo- 
 tary of Christ and the votary of Zoroaster, has given 
 way to the far more fearful rivalry between Rome and 
 the Saracen, between the votary of Christ and the votary 
 
436 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 of Mahomet. But what the Empire has lost in extent, 
 it has gained in real strength. It gained again when, in 
 the last year of the eighth century, Latin Italy formally 
 fell away, when the Empire was parted asunder for ever, 
 and when a Teutonic Augustus reigned over the Old 
 Rome. Ever falling back, ever advancing, ever losing 
 lands, ever winning them again, restored to much of its 
 old extent and to far more of its old greatness, the Ro- 
 man Empire of the East stood forth in the eleventh cen- 
 tury as the greatest power of the civilized world. The 
 Heraclian Emperors of the seventh century, the Isaurian 
 Emperors of the eighth, had beaten back the Saracen 
 from the walls of Constantinople, and had fixed Mount 
 Tauros as a bulwark beyond which the misbeliever, 
 though he might often harry, might never reign. The 
 Macedonian Emperors won back lost realms in Kilikia, 
 Syria, and Southern Italy ; they won new realms in Ar- 
 menia ; they subdued the Bulgarian ; they beat back the 
 Russian ; the spirit of the second Basil, like the spirit 
 of the great Gustavus, lived on in those to whom he had 
 taught the trade of victory ; of the conquests of each 
 no small part was won when the conqueror was in his 
 grave. 
 
 Nothing could have been further from the thoughts 
 of the great Emperors of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh 
 centuries than that it was a Greek power that they were 
 thus raising to the highest place on earth. Nor can we 
 say with any truth that it was a Greek power that they 
 did so raise. Still signs were not wanting that their 
 Empire was fast putting on a Greek character. " Ro- 
 man " was fast becoming the national name of the arti- 
 ficial Greek nation ; " Romania " was fast becoming the 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 437 
 
 territorial name of the land which that artificial nation 
 occupied. It is at this period that we now begin to see 
 the primitive races of the peninsula, so long merged to- 
 gether under the common name of Romans, stand forth 
 each with a distinct national being of its own. That is 
 to say, as the Empire became silently identified with one 
 of the nationalities within its range, the other national- 
 ities, unconsciously it may be, but none the less effect- 
 ually, began to assert their own position. In the elev- 
 enth century the Albanian for the first time stands forth 
 by that name, no name of his own choosing, but that by 
 which other European nations have ever since thought 
 good to call him. Ever since that time he has kept his 
 place in history, and the end of his history has not come 
 yet. 
 
 A little earlier perhaps than the Albanians, we come 
 across the first distinct appearance of the other primitive 
 race of the peninsula, those whom other nations speak 
 of as Vlachs or Wallachs, but who still keep to them- 
 selves the special possession of the Roman name, as they 
 alone among the South-eastern nations have adopted and 
 kept the Roman tongue. Their existence best gives us 
 the measure of direct Roman influences in the South- 
 eastern lands. That they still speak a Latin tongue 
 shows that there were people in the South-eastern lands 
 who embraced the Roman speech, if not the Roman 
 culture, as Gauls and Spaniards did in the West. But 
 we see who they were who did so. They were those who 
 lagged behind, those who had never received the tongue 
 and culture of Greece. Where that tongue and culture 
 had made their way, nothing Roman could displace 
 them. Where they had not made their way, the field 
 
438 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 lay open for Rome. But the presence of the Greek 
 tongue and culture hindered the Romance speech and 
 Romance folk of the East from ever rising to the level 
 of the Romance speech and Romance folk of the West. 
 Greek-speaking Roman Emperors looked down on those 
 of their subjects and neighbours who kept on the ac- 
 quired tongue of Old Rome, just as they looked down 
 on those of their subjects and neighbours who kept on 
 _the primitive speech of Illyria. In truth, within the 
 South-eastern peninsula, the speech of Old Rome and 
 the speech of Illyria remained on much the same level. 
 While the Greek went on adding to the written litera- 
 ture of his tonglie, while the Slave began the written 
 literature of his tongue, the Albanian and the Rouman 
 went on for ages without any written literature at all. 
 The tongue of Old Rome sank, in the provinces beyond 
 the Hadriatic, to the rank of an unwritten popular 
 dialect. Men went forth from the dominions of the 
 prince who still deemed himself Emperor of the Ro- 
 mans to plant a more truly Roman speech, in some 
 sense a more truly Roman nation, in barbarian lands 
 beyond the Danube. 
 
 Thus, in the course of the eleventh century, we may 
 look on the Eastern Roman Empire as becoming prac- 
 tically a Greek power, a power whose Greek character 
 became strongly marked in opposition alike to the prim- 
 itive races of the Illyrians and Roumans, and to the 
 great immigrant race of the Slaves. In the course of 
 that century too the Empire was first attacked by men 
 of the two races which were presently to break it asun- 
 der. The Norman of Apulia showed himself at one 
 gate of the Empire as the forerunner of its Frankish and 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 439 
 
 Venetian conquerors. The Turk of the house of Sel- 
 "juk showed himself at its other gate as the forerunner 
 of his more fearful kinsmen of the house of Othman. 
 The Empire began to break in pieces. The great 
 islands began to be the prey of Western lords; the 
 inland regions of the great peninsula of Asia Minor 
 passed away to Eastern lords ; the great Bulgarian re- 
 volt, the great Rouman migration, had, before the end 
 of the twelfth century, cut down the Empire to that 
 dominion of coasts, islands, and peninsulas which, as 
 I said long ago, so singularly reproduced the extent of 
 the elder settlements of the Greek people. A Roman 
 Empire which took in little that was not Greek, which 
 no longer took in all that was Greek, began, not un- 
 naturally, to seem in Western eyes as nothing more 
 than a kingdom of Greece. 
 
 Yet when, in the early years of the thirteenth century, 
 the Roman Empire of the East was broken asunder for 
 ever, when a prince from Flanders sat on the throne of 
 Constantinople and a prince from Montferrat on the 
 throne of Thessalonica, the territorial, if not the national 
 title, which the East had borrowed from the West, still 
 lived on. While Emperors of the Romans, Greek in 
 speech, still kept on the Imperial name at Nikaia, in 
 Epeiros, and at Trebizond, a prince of French speech 
 bore in the Imperial city itself the territorial title of Em- 
 peror of Romania. That Empire was not long-lived; 
 the kingdom of Thessalonica was shorter-lived still. 
 Greek princes, still Romans on their own lips, won back 
 the new seat of kingship and the ancient seat of Empire. 
 The revived Empire of the Palaiologoi kept on the titles 
 and traditions of the old Eastern Roman Empire, and 
 
440 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 it remained for a while, in Europe at least, an advancing 
 and conquering power. But it was still only one, though 
 the chief, among many states, Greek, Frank, and Alba- 
 nian, which arose out of the ruins of the Eastern Em- 
 pire of Rome. Frank princes reigned in Cyprus, at 
 Athens, in Achaia, at Naxos. The Sicilian kings and 
 the Venetian commonwealth divided and disputed the 
 possession of the Western coasts and islands. At last, 
 in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Slave of the 
 purer blood arose to shine for a moment as the chief 
 power of the South-eastern world. The revived Bul- 
 garian power was already waning ; but Stephen of Servia, 
 Stephen Dushan, sprang to a might rivalling that of 
 Simeon or Samuel. Bearing himself as Emperor of the 
 Serbs and Greeks, the Slavonic conqueror ruled from 
 the Danube to the Corinthian gulf With the experience 
 of five later ages, one is inclined to mourn that he was 
 not fated to fix his throne in the New Rome. The vig- 
 orous nationality of Servia, strengthened by the position 
 and the traditions of the Imperial City, might perhaps 
 have beaten back even that most fearful of invaders who 
 now threatened alike Greek and Frank and Slave. A 
 body with a head, a kingdom with a capital, might per- 
 haps have withstood even the assault which was now 
 in store. But the invader found a body without a head, 
 a head without a body, a kingdom without a capital, 
 and a capital without a kingdom — and all fell an easy 
 prey. 
 
 That invader was the last of all, the most terrible of 
 all, he who still abides to witness to the permanence of 
 even artificial races in the South-eastern lands. The 
 Ottoman had already swallowed up nearly all Christian 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 441 
 
 Asia ; before the Servian Emperor had passed away he 
 had crossed into Europe also. Slowly but surely he ad- 
 vanced, winning land after land, city after city. Never 
 hurrying, making each land pass through the three stages 
 of mere harrying, of tribute, of absolute incorporation 
 with his dominion, within a hundred years from his 
 entry, the Ottoman, in the shape of his greatest Sultan, 
 of Mahomet the Conqueror, was fully lord of the South- 
 eastern peninsula. There were still lands to gather in, 
 but these were but as the gleaning after the vintage. 
 The Imperial City, so long hemmed in, had at last fallen ; 
 it had changed from the seat of Greek or Roman to the 
 seat of Turkish power. The barbarian sat on the throne 
 of the Caesars ; the infidel practised the rites of his Ara- 
 bian creed beneath the spreading cupola of Justinian. 
 The tale of Rome in the Eastern lands was over ; the 
 mission of her long line of Emperors as guardians of 
 Europe and of Christendom had passed to the city which 
 had grown up under their shadow, to be first their enemy 
 and then their heir. Venice, as we have already seen, 
 with all her faults, had the glory of keeping, here a city, 
 there an island, there a strip of coast, free from barba- 
 rian bondage, under a rule which, if foreign, was at least 
 civilized and Christian. And higher glory still belongs 
 to that heroic remnant which kept up the fire of faith 
 and freedom in the very darkest times. While Greek 
 and Magyar were alike bondmen, while the Turk had 
 his pashas reigning alike in Athens and in Buda, one 
 small fragment of Servian race still kept on the memory 
 of better days on the unconquered heights of the Black 
 Mountain. 
 
 With these exceptions, all the South-eastern nations 
 
442 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 passed under the yoke. It was a yoke of different de- 
 grees of heaviness at different times and places ; but 
 even the most exceptionally favoured spots were tribu- 
 tary to a foreign power, and through the great mass of 
 the Greek and Slavonic lands the men of the land were 
 the bondmen of the stranger on their own soil. On the 
 whole, the yoke grew heavier as the ages passed on ; the 
 rule of the earlier and greater Sultans was not more 
 cruel than the rule of their weaker successors in modern 
 times, and it was certainly far less corrupt. But " gov- 
 ernment " it never was ; the rule of the Ottoman has 
 been an organized brigandage of five hundred years. It 
 has been only when the brigands had become weak as 
 well as wicked that it became the fashion to flatter them 
 with the titles of European royalty, to treat them as ad- 
 mitted within the pale of European civilization, to bol- 
 ster up and guarantee their tyranny as something which 
 in some mysterious way conduced to the good of man- 
 kind. Those Most Christian Kings who did not scruple 
 to ally themselves with the infidel were in those days 
 looked on as traitors. And no man then saw honour- 
 able men, discharging an honourable calling, in those 
 base souls who have sold themselves for barbarian gold, 
 and who abase the wit of the Greek, the sword of the 
 Englishman, to keep the infidel yoke tight down on the 
 necks of their Christian brethren. And yet perhaps the 
 ordinary diplomatic trade has more to answer for than 
 the avowed traitors and hirelings. Every time a Turk 
 is flattered, every time he is called " Majesty " or " High- 
 ness " or " Excellency," every time the wolf is given 
 credit for benevolent intentions towards the lamb, every 
 time the " susceptibility " of the tormentor is alleged as 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 443 
 
 a reason for prolonging the bondage of those whom he 
 torments, the reign of evil is, in a greater or less mea- 
 sure, propped up and prolonged. 
 
 But, from the later years of the seventeenth century on- 
 wards, the range of oppression has, with some counter- 
 workings, steadily lessened. Hungary and its annexed 
 lands, Servia, Greece, Bulgaria — ^parts, that is of Greece 
 and parts of Bulgaria — have been wrested from the fangs 
 of the barbarian. Some of these lands have freed them- 
 selves, some have been set free by friendly helpers; 
 some lands, when set free by friendly helpers, have been 
 thrust back again into bondage by Western statesmen 
 whose boast is that they can do mischief While Bul- 
 garia reveres the name of Alexander, while Thessaly 
 reveres the name of Gladstone, the names of Beacons- 
 field and Salisbury are cursed in the Macedonian homes 
 which they condemned to a slavery the more cruel be- 
 cause it came after a glimpse of freedom. The lands of 
 the Greek, the Rouman, the Servian, have taken their 
 place among the kingdoms of Europe ; free Tzernagora 
 again stretches to her own sea ; but the lands where the 
 first blow was struck for freedom seven years back, the 
 lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina, have been strangely 
 handed over to an Austrian middleman, to be adminis- 
 tered by him in the name of his master the Turk, and to 
 be administered by him in such a sort as to make the 
 rule of the master seem less hateful than the rule of the 
 middleman. 
 
 And now for a word as to the probable future of 
 these nations. At the very beginning of these lectures 
 I spoke of some points in their possible future as illus- 
 
444 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 trating some of the general principles which I began by 
 laying down. I spoke of the possibility of a Greek dy- 
 nasty reigning in Constantinople ; I spoke of the possi- 
 bility of some kind of federal union of the various na- 
 tions of South-eastern Europe. But I spoke of both 
 merely as possible things, as things which some tenden- 
 cies which are manifestly at work make not unlikely, 
 and which therefore a- wise statesman will not pooh-pooh 
 as things which cannot possibly be. Still I said that " not 
 unlikely" is the strongest thing that we can say for 
 either of them. If I were called upon to map out these 
 South-eastern lands, I must assign the New Rome to 
 the people who most nearly represent its old Imperial 
 masters. I must assign the seat of the Basils and the 
 Constantines to the race which still speaks the tongue, 
 and stills keeps on the traditions, of the Basils and the 
 Constantines. That is, if I had to award the throne of 
 Constantinople, I must give it to a Greek prince. But 
 if things should of themselves turn out otherwise, if 
 a successor of Simeon and Samuel should get the 
 start of the successor of Basil and Constantine, that is, 
 if Constantinople were to find itself Bulgarian before I 
 could make it Greek, I should see in the event an " in- 
 dication of Providence " which was not to be withstood. 
 I am bound to the general cause of the independence of 
 the South-eastern nations. I am not bound to any par- 
 ticular form for that independence or to any particular 
 means for bringing it about. I should always say. Do 
 whatever is right at any particular moment, and let 
 events shape themselves. If no blow is ever to be struck 
 till we have a cut-and-dried scheme ready to meet every 
 contingency, we shall never have any contingency to 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 445 
 
 meet. When William the Silent crossed the frontier on 
 his errand of deliverance, he had not the articles of the 
 Union of Utrecht, still less the articles of the Peace of 
 Westfalia, ready written in his pocket. When Washing- 
 ton took the command under the elm at Cambridge, he 
 had not the Federal Constitution, or even the Declaration 
 of Independence, ready wri*;ten in his pocket. The few 
 brave men who seven years back first unsheathed their 
 yataghans amid the hills of Herzegovina did not carry 
 with them a scheme for an independent kingdom of 
 Roumania, an independent principality of Servia, a trib- 
 utary principality of Bulgaria, an autonomous province 
 of Eastern Roumelia. They did not foresee Macedonia 
 delivered and thrust back into bondage, Montenegro 
 stretching to the sea at Antivari and Dulcigno, but 
 bidden to give up Spizza to the big neighbours who 
 had a fancy for it. They did not foresee Larissa with 
 her freedom both promised and granted^ and JoEinnina 
 with her freedom twice promised but never granted. 
 Their simple minds did not look forward to see Cy- 
 prus pass in some mysterious way under British ad- 
 ministration; least of all did they dream that the fruit 
 of their labours on the part of their own land would be 
 to hand it over to the administration of their Imperial, 
 Royal, and Apostolic neighbour, and that they would 
 have to wage again the same warfare against him which 
 they had so lately waged against the older enemy. They 
 could foresee none of these things ; they simply struck 
 a blow, and struck it at the right moment ; and if the 
 Great Powers have not allowed all the good to come of 
 it that might have come, the Great Powers have not 
 been able to hinder a large amount of good from hap- 
 
 2» 
 
446 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 pening, or to hinder a large amount of evil from being 
 swept away. And those other few brave men who lately 
 stood, who perhaps still stand, to defend their rights by 
 the lovely mouths of Cattaro — ^they know not — we know 
 not for them — what a day may bring forth. They may 
 be trampled — they may already have been trampled — 
 under foot by the overwhelming might of their faithless 
 enemy. The odds are of a truth frightfully against them. 
 Or it may be that the little cloud which has arisen on 
 those hills may be like the little cloud which arose seven 
 years back on the hills a little further inland. It may 
 swell step by step into a mighty storm which may cut 
 short the fabric of evil which has its twofold — its " dual " 
 — centre at Pest and at Vienna, as the fabric of evil which 
 has its centre at Constantinople has been cut short al- 
 ready. The odds against the men of the Bocche are yet 
 more frightful than were the odds against the men of 
 Herzegovina ; they are perhaps not more frightful than 
 the odds were more than once against William the Si- 
 lent; and it may be an omen that, if we search our tables 
 of genealogy, we shall find that Philip of Spain had some 
 grandmothers in common with Francis Joseph. Through 
 all these lands the chances are doubtful, because the con- 
 tending forces are many. The forces of the South-east- 
 ern nations, if united, if left to themselves, could, we may 
 believe, easily drive the Turk out of Europe ; certainly 
 they could easily pen him up in the Imperial City. But 
 will those forces be united ? Can Greek and Bulgarian 
 so forget the jealousies of a thousand years as to act 
 together against the common enemy ? Will the Great 
 Powers allow them to act singly or together ? Or again, 
 it may be that Constantinople, the possession which has 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 447 
 
 twice prolonged the life of powers which must otherwise 
 have passed away, whose walls so long sheltered the 
 Frank against the Greek and the Greek against the 
 Turk, may again enable the decaying Turk to prolong 
 his being, after Europe, and even Asia, has passed away 
 from him. Or yet again, it may be that the Ottoman 
 power may be threatened, not only by Christian, but by 
 Mussulman enemies. Can Christian and Mussulman 
 unite in such a cause? Very recent events perhaps 
 may show that such an union is possible. At this mo- 
 ment Christian and Mussulman warriors, both of Sla- 
 vonic blood, united by the old rite of Slavonic brother- 
 hood, are fighting side by side against the Austrian. It 
 may be therefore that the Christians and Mussulmans of 
 other races may be able to make common cause against 
 the Ottoman enemy of both. Or are things to go back 
 to the days when the New Rome had to fight for her 
 being, not against the Turk, the comparatively recent 
 proselyte of Islam, but against the true countrymen and 
 kinsfolk of the Arabian prophet ? It may be that the 
 nations of South-eastern Europe and of the Christian 
 fringe on the coast of Asia may have in the end to 
 strive, not with the decaying Ottoman, but with the 
 regenerate Saracen, marching forth as of old, not at the 
 bidding of a Sultan of Brousa or Constantinople, but of 
 a Caliph of Bagdad or Damascus. All these things may 
 be ; some of them are not unlikely to be ; but we can- 
 not say tiiat any of them will be, any more than that any 
 of them will not be. All that we can say is that the end 
 is not yet. There are forces of great strength on the 
 side of evil ; there are also forces of great strength on 
 the side of good. Keeping within the bounds of Eu- 
 
448 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 rope, leaving as a distant possibility the chance of suc- 
 cessful movements within the bosom of Islam itself, we 
 may say that the cause of South-eastern freedom has 
 three enemies to struggle with. There is the old enemy 
 the Turk, the sick man truly, but not yet a dead man, 
 one who, like his Roman predecessors, has sometimes 
 a strange way of picking up renewed life when he seems 
 to be at his last gasp. Then, worse than the Turk, are 
 the selfish intrigues of the Great Powers of Europe, ever 
 ready to make any free and small people their tool and 
 catspaw, and to throw aside a weak ally when it is con- 
 venient to win the favour of a strong one. Above all 
 there is the ever-grasping, ever-stealthy, ambition of the 
 Austrian house, despising no gain, however base, deeming 
 no course shameful if it tends to the enlargement of the 
 family estate. Lastly, more dangerous than all, because 
 likely to be more lasting than all, there are the dissenr 
 sions among the subject nations themselves. The Great 
 Powers are indeed great forces, great forces for the most 
 part on the side of evil, unless now and then, when, as 
 twice within two years past, the strong will of a right- 
 eous man is enabled to turn even the powers of evil to 
 the ends of good. Yet it may be that there are forces 
 even stronger than the great powers of Europe. Nations 
 after all outlive powers, and the national life of the na- 
 tions of South-eastern Europe is a very stubborn life in- 
 deed. It may be that nations which have lived through 
 the assaults of the Persian and the Saracen, thfough the 
 rule of the Frank and the Turk, may show that they 
 have more in them of the stuff that leads to success than 
 can be found in the intriguing brain of Francis Joseph, 
 even though he may be backed by the mightier hand of 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 449 
 
 Bismarck behind. But if this is to be, it can only be by 
 the union of all the nations whose interest and duty it is 
 to get rid of the common enemy. If South-eastern Eu- 
 rope only were as Italy, the intrigues of Francis Joseph 
 against its union and independence might be as easily 
 shattered as were the intrigues of Louis-Napoleon 
 Buonaparte against the union and independence of 
 Italy. But unhappily South-eastern Europe is not 
 as Italy ; the gap, wide as it is, which parts the man of 
 Piedmont from the man of Calabria, is not so wide as the 
 gap which parts the Greek, the Albanian, the Rouman, 
 the Servian, and the Bulgarian, each of them from all 
 his immediate neighbours. Here is the great difficulty 
 of all. It is a greater difficulty than any of the others, 
 because it does not depend on causes which may be 
 momentary, like the intrigues or the ambition of this or 
 that man or of this or that power, but is inherent in the 
 nature of the case. I can only say once more. Look to 
 the lessons of experience. It was by the disunion of 
 the nations of South-eastern Europe that the Turk first 
 made his way in ; it is by the union of the nations of 
 South-eastern Europe that he must be driven out. 
 
 Among so many and so great contending forces, it 
 would be indeed rash to foretell anything. But the un>- 
 practical man, the sentimental man, that is the man who 
 looks both behind him and before him and who takes 
 reason and experience as his guides in looking both 
 ways, has some advantages over the so-called practical 
 man, say the diplomatist or the clever journalist, whose 
 practical wisdom commonly consists in refusing to look 
 further either way than the length of his own nose. 
 Whatever happens, the practical man is sure to be sur- 
 
45° PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 prised ; for of all the ways in which things may turn 
 out, the way in which he expects them to turn out is 
 always the one which is the least likely of all. It must 
 be so ; for he refuses to listen to reason and experience ; 
 he refuses to take in either the fects of the particular 
 case in hand or the general facts of man's nature. 
 Seven years ago practical men thought that they, or 
 the Turk at their bidding, could at once put down the 
 revolt of Herzegovina. A few months later they were 
 driven to put on record that the war, " contrary to ex- 
 pectation," had lasted through the winter. But at all 
 events, so the wise men told us, the area of war would 
 not be extended. But presently it was extended ; not- 
 withstanding the soothsayings of the wise men, first the 
 Servian and the Montenegrin, then the Russian, stepped 
 in to extend it. But, at all events, so the wise men 
 said, the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Em- 
 pire will remain untouched ; even a tributary province, 
 the oracle told us with all solemnity, lay " beyond the 
 range of practical politics." But the range of practical 
 politics was presently widened. The impossible tribu- 
 tary province is there, and alongside of it are things yet 
 more impossible in the shape of two independent king- 
 doms, while the integrity of the Ottoman Empire has 
 been further cut short by the advance of free Montene- 
 gro, of liberated Greece and Servia, and it is now fur- 
 ther threatened by the Austrian middleman himself And 
 when we remember that the things which the practical 
 men said never could happen are many of them just the 
 things which the sentimental men wished to happen, and 
 some of which they thought not unlikely to happen, the 
 sentimental people may perhaps be excused for doubt- 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 45 I 
 
 ing whether the practical people are, after all, so much 
 wiser than themselves. At least to those who take ex- 
 perience for their guide, the past is not without good 
 hopes for the future. I have seen somewhat in my own 
 life-time, and I have seen some little of it with my own 
 eyes. When I was born, Italy was bowed down under 
 the yoke of foreign and domestic tyrants ; Greece was 
 fighting for her being against her barbarian oppressor. 
 I may say, almost without a figure, that the last echoes 
 of the cannon of Navarino were the first sounds from the 
 great world of present history which fell on my childish 
 ears. I cannot actually remember that great day; I 
 was too young for that; but I can remember when the 
 memory of the fight which three European powers 
 waged for Europe against the barbarian, which three 
 Christian powers waged for Christendom against the 
 infidel, were still matters of comparatively recent men- 
 tion on men's mouths. Since those days free Greece 
 has again taken her place among the nations ; she has 
 twice extended her borders, once by the gift of England, 
 a second time by the untiring energy of England's cho- 
 sen leader. And I, who never saw her in her bondage, 
 have seen her in her freedom. The English poet who 
 died in the cause of Greece sang in her days of bondage : 
 
 " The mountains look on Marathon, 
 
 And Marathon looks on the sea ; 
 And musing there an hour alone, 
 
 I dreamed that Greece might yet be free. 
 For, standing on the Persian's grave, 
 I could not deem myself a slave." 
 
 The dreams of that day have become the truths of 
 ours. I too have stood on the mound of Marathon; 
 
452 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 but it was not to dream that Greece might be free at 
 some distant day, but to rejoice that it was again a free 
 land on which I stood. I stood there to muse, not only 
 on the old deliverance from the Persian, but on the later 
 deliverance which when Byron sang was still a thing 
 of the future. He who now stands on the mound of 
 Marathon should remember that the plain on which he 
 looks has twice played its part in the struggle for Hel- 
 lenic freedom. He should remember that the grave of 
 the Persian has been also the grave of the Turk — that 
 if Miltiades won deathless fame by the earlier victory 
 of freedom, some roses too may be spared for the less 
 famous name of Gouras, who fought and vanquished on 
 that same ground for Athens and for Greece no less 
 than he. The same poet sang again how 
 
 "A king sat on the rocky brow 
 
 That looks on sea-bom Salamis." 
 
 And I have looked on sea-born Salamis from another 
 brow, fast by the home of one greater than kings. It is 
 something to have sat beneath the roof of Constantine 
 Kanares, to have seen and spoken with the la.st of the 
 heroes, to have touched the hand that lighted the fire- 
 ships, the hand that steered his little boat through the 
 barbarian fire, to have listened to the voice that had 
 shouted in barbarian ears the old war-cry of New Rome, 
 the war-cry of Victory to the Cross. And it was some- 
 thing too to stand on the Athenian akropolis, on the 
 highest point of the fallen temple of so many creeds, to 
 hear from below the sound of a gathering multitude, to 
 see the people of Athens fathering round the palace of 
 their king, and to learn that what the voice of the people 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 453 
 
 called for was that, in the hour of need, personal and 
 party jealousies should be cast aside, and that the hero of 
 Greece should again be set to steer the bark of her des^ 
 tiny. Since then the last relic of a mightier time has gone 
 to his rest ; but we may still hope that when the day of 
 trial comes, the race of Kanares, the race of Bptzares, will 
 be found to be not wholly dead. And in other lands of 
 that wide peninsula the line of the old heroes beyond all 
 doubt lives and thrives. If we can no longer sing how 
 
 " On Souli's rock and Parga's shore 
 
 Exist the remnant of the line 
 
 Such as the Doric mothers bore," 
 
 yet on the heights of Tzemagora, amid the rocks of 
 Herzegovina, beside the inland sea of Cattaro, the Slave 
 has ready stout hearts and strong right hands for whom 
 we may trust that Greece too, in her hour of need, may 
 again find worthy yoke-fellows. Seven years they went 
 forth, as in the war-song of the earliest of Crusaders, 
 "with the praises of God in their mouths and a two- 
 edged sword in their hands, to be avenged of the heathen 
 and to rebuke the people." And now Greece free and 
 enlarged, Montenegro again stretching to her own sea, 
 Servia free and enlarged, united Roumania placing a 
 royal crown on her prince's brow, two Bulgarias in only 
 nominal subjection to the oppressor who still works his 
 will upon the third,— all these are changes, changes every 
 one of them done in my day and in the day of much 
 younger men than I. And all that has been won makes 
 us only look on to what has still to be won. We need 
 no longer cry, as we cried six years back, 
 
 "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones 
 Lie scattered on the Balkan mountains cold." 
 
454 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 The doers of the deed of Batak have been slain and 
 banished by one another's hands. But for the land 
 where Lord Salisbury rejoiced over all the Christian 
 flesh that he had handed over to pagan teeth, every 
 Christian may still hear the voice of old, " Come over 
 into Macedonia and help us." And in the heart and 
 centre, the roof and crown of all, the barbarian still de- 
 files the throne of the Caesars, the infidel still profanes 
 the most glorious of Christian temples. There in the 
 New Rome, in the city of Constantine, the mournful 
 psalm may still, after four hundred years, be sung, " O 
 God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance ; thy 
 holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem an 
 heap of stones." Four years back, a Christian army, an 
 Orthodox army, stood in arms within sight of Saint 
 Sophia, and, at the bidding of military discipline, 
 marched back to their homes. The next Christian 
 and Orthodox host that marches in their path may 
 lie under no such hard necessity. To me, to speak 
 once more of mine own self, the Old Rome is now 
 familiar ground. But I never saw it till it was set free 
 from the yoke of the priest and the stranger. And I have 
 never found it in my heart to make my way to the New 
 Rome, bowed down as it still is beneath the yet heavier 
 yoke of the barbarian and the infidel. Yet I have seen 
 so many changes that I dare to hope that, without reach- 
 ing any patriarchal age, I may live to see other changes 
 which may enable me to tread the Rome of Constantine 
 as well as the Rome of Romulus, without seeing matter 
 for sorrow at every step. I should indeed be able to 
 sing my Nunc dimittis should I ever live to see a Chris- 
 tian prince enthroned on the seat of Leo the Isaurian and 
 
ROME TRANSPLANTED. 455 
 
 Basil the Bulgarian-slayer, should I ever live to see the 
 church of the Divine Wisdom swept clear of its defile- 
 ment, with the mosaics of its spreading cupola blazing 
 again like Ravenna and Palermo, and the incense of 
 Christian worship going up once more at the crowning 
 and anointing of the first of a new line of Christian Em- 
 perors. 
 
 THK END.