I nj m m : \m I tU § • ( iliji pill i in: ';) i;in all III lii H'! Siiiiii i H m H5 i ^ 1" ill SI \t^\ I iiiii \mi m x-^%W .0 0, o 0^ A c ^A v^ oH -7--; oo \> ^ ^^ « / " > x^^' ax^- "V i¥; .^^ .Oo, ^^ d^ C- .■\' ■i}' *"#f?kj'', '-f-^ -^^ '> V x^^^. ^^ (/ ' \Y •^^' % ^ >0^ c^ ''^/c,r-^°x> . ' = ,^^' ^% ^.% "■^^^>.#' .^/\?^-"'^^- '% ^>^ V ■\^ .-^^ ^'^^ >^ '^ c^ ^ No. f>? ^5 Cts. byH?K'^:^&C^W... February 19, 1886 Subscription Price per Year, 52 Numbers, $15 Extra Entered at the Post-Office at New York, as Second-class Mail Matter WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH! TWO EDWBURGH LECTURES /o^^^^^^l?^^ "EB 10 1886 By JOHN STUAET BLACKIE Books yon may hold readily in your hand are the most icsefnl, after all Dn. Johnson NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 188G a HARPER'S HANDY SERIES. Latest Issues. NO. CENTS. 22. Old-World Questions and New- World Answers. By Daniel Pidgeon, F.G.S., Assoc. Inst. C.E 25 23. In Peril and Privation. By James Payn. Illustrated 25 24. The Flower of Doom, &c. By M. 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By John Stuart Blackie 25 Other volumes in preparation. j@@- Haepee & Beotheeb will send any of the above loorks hy mail, postage pre- paid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. NOXONIHSVA^ SSaUONOO JO, PEEFATORY NOTE. The following Lectures were prepared for the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, and were delivered, with the exception of a few passages, before audiences consisting of Members of that Institution on the evenings of 8th and 11th December in the present year. Edinburgh, December, 1885. THE STATE. THE STATE. "ndnsp teXegoBsv f5eXri6Toy tSv Z,c6oov avBpooito'i ovTGD Hai ;i;ffi?pzd0£r r6/.iov nai diKrji x^'^P'^^''^^'^ Ttdvroov. —Aristotle. HiSTOEY, whether founded on reliable record, or on monuments, or on the scientific analysis of the gi'eat fossil tradition called language, knows nothing of the earliest beginnings. The seed of human society, like the seed of the vegetable growth, lies underground in darkness, and its earliest processes are invisi- ble to the outward eye. Speculations about the descent of the primeval man from a monkey, of the primeval monkey from an ascidian, and of the primeval ascidian from a protoplastic bubble, though they may act as a potent stimulus to the biological research of the hour, certainly never can form the start- ing-point of a profitable philosophy of history. 6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? As revealed in Mstory, man is an animal, not only generically different from, but character- istically antagonistic to tlie brute. That which makes him a man is precisely that which no brute possesses, or can by any process of train- ing be made to possess. The man can no more be developed out of the brute than the purple heather out of the granite rock which it clothes. The relation of the one to the other is a relation of mere outward attachment or dependency — like the relation which exists between the painter's easel and the picture which is painted on it. The easel is essential to the picture, but it did not make the picture, nor give even the smallest hint toward the making of it. So the monkey, as a basis, may be essential to the man without being in any way participant of the divine indwelling X6yo^ which makes a man a man. The two are related only as all things are related, inasmuch as they are all shot forth from the great fountain-head of all vital forces, whom we justly call God. The distinctive character of man as revealed in history is threefold. Man is an inventive animal, and he does not invent from a com- THE STATE. 7 pulsion of nature, as bees make cells or as swallows build nests. These are all prescribed operations which the animal must perform ; but the inventive faculty in man is free, in such a manner that the course of its action cannot be foreseen or calculated. It revels in variety, and, above all things, shuns that uni- formity which is the servile province of brute activity. A man may live in a hole like a fox, but his proper humanity is shown by building a house and inventing a style of architecture. A man can sing like a bird, but — what the bird cannot do — he can make a harp or an organ. He can scrape with his nails like a terrier, but, as a man manifesting his proper manhood, he prefers to make a shovel of wood and a hatchet of stone or iron. The other animals, however cunning, and often wonder- fully adaptable in their instincts, are mere machines. Man makes machines. In this re- spect he is justly entitled to look upon himself as the God to the lower animals, just as the sheriff in the counties by delegated right rep- resents the supreme authority of the Crown. But, above all things, man is a progressive 8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? animal, — not merely progressive as the grass grows from root to blade and from blade to blossom to perfect its individual type of vege- table life, but advancing from stage to stage and mounting from platform to platform for the perfectionation of the race ; nor even pro- gressive as plants and fruits are improved by culture and favorable surroundings, and what is called forcing, or as the breed of sheep and cattle is improved by selection, ^o doabt progress of this kind is made by man as well as by plants and brutes ; but his most dis- tinctive human progress is made, not by im- position from without, but by projection from within. These projections from within are what in philosophical language is called the idea ; they proceed from the essential nature of mind, whose imperial function it is to dic- tate forms, as it is the servile function of the senses to receive impressions. These intelli- gent forms, coming directly from the divine source of all excellence, and projected from within with sovereign authority to shape for themselves an outward embodiment, constitute what in art, in literature, in religion, and in THE STATE. 9 social organisms, is called tlie ideal ; and man may accordingly be defined as an animal that lives by the conception of ideals, and whose destiny it is to spend his strength, and, if need be, to lay down his life, for the realization of snch ideals. The steps of this realization, often slow and painful, and always difficult, are what we mean by human progress ; and it is the dominant characteristic of man, of which among the lower animals there is not a ves- tige, neither indeed could be ; for so long as they have no ideas, neither reason nor the outward expression of reason in language — two things so closely bound together that the wise Greeks expressed them both by one word, Xoyoi — so long must it be ridiculous to think of them shaping their career according to an inborn type of progressive excellence. To do so is exclusively human. Hence our poems, our high art, our churches, our legislations, our apostleships, our philosophies, our social arrangements and devices, our speculations and schemes of all kinds, which, though they are sometimes foolish, and always more or less inadequate, deliver the strongest possible proof 10 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? that man is an animal who will rather die and embrace martyrdom than be content to live as the brntes do, neither spurred with the hope of progress nor borne aloft on the wings of the ideal. Of the very earliest state of human society, as we have already said, history teaches noth- ing ; but, as man is a progressive animal, and the plan of Providence with regard to him seems plain to let him shift for himself and learn to do right by blundering, as children learn to walk by tumbling, we may safely say that the easier, more obvious, and more rude forms of living together must have preceded the more difficult, the more complex, and the more polished. And in perfect consistency with this presumption, we find three social plat- forms rising one above the other in human value, duly accredited either by monuments, by popular tradition, or by the evidence of comparative philology. These three are— (1) The prehistoric or stone period, from which such a rich store of monuments has been set up in the Copenhagen Museum, and the exist- ence of which is indicated in Gen. iv. 22 as THE STATE. 11 antecedent to Tubal Cain, the instructor of every artificer in brass and iron. (2) The shepherd or pastoral stage, represented by Abel (Gen. iv. 2), in which men subsisted from the easy dominance which they asserted over wild animals, and from fruits of the earth requiring no culture. (3) The agricultural stage, when cereal crops were systematically and scientifically cultivated, which, of course, implied the limitation of particular districts of ground to particular proprietors, and those agrarian laws which caused the Greek Demeter to be honored with the title of Qedjaocpopo^, or lawgiver — a step of marked and decided ad- vance, insomuch that we may justly attribute to it the redemption of society from the vagus concuhitus of the earliest times, and the firm establishment of the family, with all its sanctities and all its binding power, as the prime social monad. To the priestess of this goddess accordingly, among the Greeks, was assigned the function of ushering in the newly- married pair to the peculiar duties of their new social relation.^ * Plutarch conjugalia praecepta init. 13 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? The fact that the family is the great social monad, as it is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most accredited facts in human tradition, so it presents to us perhaps the most important of all the lessons that history teaches — a lesson as necessary to be inculcated at the present hour as at the earliest stages of social advance ; and Aristotle certainly was never more in the right than when he emphasized this truth strongly in traversing Plato' s fancy of making the state the universal family, to the utter ab- sorption of all subordinated family monads. Here, as in one or two other matters, the great idealist would be wiser than God ; and so his philosophy, so far as that point was concerned, became only a more sublime attitude of folly. The importance of the family, as the divinely instituted social monad, depends manifestly on the happy combination and harmonious blending of authority and love which grow out of its constitution — two elements with the full development and true balance of which the well-being and happiness of all societies is intimately bo and up. The fine moral training which the family relation alone can inspire we THE STATE. 13 find not only at our own door, in the fidelity and self-sacrificing devotion of onr noble Highlanders, who derived their inspiration from the clan system, of which the family love and respect is the binding element,^ as con- trasted with the slavish system of vassalage, the badge of feudalism ; but in the habits and institutions of the three great ancient peoples to whom modern Europe owes its higher civ- ilization, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, es- pecially the last,^ the great masters of the difficult art of government, who, to use Mommsen's phrase, carried out the unity of the family through the virtue of paternal authority ''with an inexorable consistency," the beneficial effect of which could not fail to display itself in social life far beyond the sphere from which it originally emanated ; for obedience to authority is the fundamental postulate of all possible societies. With the family, if not absolutely, certainly with the best and normal state of it, most closely con- ^ The word clan is the familiar, well-known Celtic word for children. 2 "Nnlli alii sunt homines qui talem in liberos habeant potestatem qualemnoshabemus." Institut. i. 9, 2. 14 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? nected is monogamy ; for, thongli instances of bigamy and polygamy, from Lamecli down- ward (Gen. iv. 19) to King David and Solomon in tlie Old Testament history, crop up here and there in the oldest times, and even in the post-Babylonian period, without any formal mark of disapprobation, yet it is quite certain that the Greeks and Romans were guided by a sound social instinct when they held the practice of bigamy to be incon- sistent with the proper constitution of a family. What troubles are apt to arise from a multiplication of contending wives and am- bitious mothers the latter story of King David tells in more unhappy episodes than one ; and generally it may be laid down as one of the great lessons of history that polygamy, in every shape, is one of those acts of Oriental self-indulgence which may be sweet in the mouth, but has a very strong tendency to be bitter in the belly, and therefore ought by all means to be avoided. By the instinct of aggregation, which be- longs to an essentially social animal, families will club together into townships or villages, THE STATE. 15 and townsMps will be centralized into states. Humanity without townships would degenerate into tigerlioodj or whatever type of animal ex- istence might express an essentially self-con- tained, solitary, and selfish creature ; town- ships without that sort of headship which the word State implies, would make society cry halt at a stage of loosely-connected aggregates which would render common action for any high human purpose extremely difficult, and, in the general case, as human beings are, im- possible. Hence the centralization of the Attic townships at Athens in the legendary tradi- tions of the Athenians attributed to Theseus ;^ hence also the lax confederation of the earliest Latin states finder the headship of Albalonga ; and, after the humiliation of that old strong- hold, the more closely-cemented union of those states under the hegemony of Eome.^ What- ^ Thucyd. ii. 15. The Athenians went further, and attributed to the son of ^geus the creation of their democracy (Pausan., Ait. iii.) ; but this, of course, was only the popular instinct, every- where active, which loves to heap all graces upon the head of a favorite hero. 2 See the words of the Latin league, Dionys. Hal. vi. 95, contrast ing strongly with tlie origiaal collection of autonomous villages described by Strabo, v. 229, Hard Koofxai avTovo/j,ei6Bai, 16 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? ever may be the evils connected with the growth of large towns, especially when, as in modern times, they have been allowed to swell to enormons magnitude without regulation or control, it is one of the undoubted lessons of universal history that the social stimulus necessary for the creation of vigorous thought, no less than the centralized force indispensable to great achievement, is found only in the large towns. The Christians were called Christians first at Antioch ; and, had there been no Rome to unify a little Latium, there would have been no great Roman Empire to amalgamate the rude barbarians of the North with the smooth civilization of the South by the force of a com- mon law and a common language ^ The form of government natural to such in- fant states as the expansion of the original social monad, the familt, is a loose but not unkindly mixture of monarchy, democracy, and aristocracy — the aristocracy being always 1 The influence of the great city in centralizing the villages and making a state possible was in Greece philologically stereotyped by the fact that for city and state the language had only one word, TCoXii. The city was the state in the same sense that the head is the body, for without the head no living body could be. THE STATE. 17 the preponderating element. In the single family, of course, we have only the monarchi- cal element in the father, and the democratic element in the children ; but, as families ex- pand into townships, it could not be but that the heads of the families composing it, partly from their age and experience, partly from the force of individual character, should form a sort of natural aristocracy, while the less nota- ble and less prominent members would form the drji^ioi, or great body of the constantly in- creasing multitude of the associated families. Below these three dominant elements of the body social, there would always be found a loose company of dependents and onhangers — the class called QrjvEi in Homer (Od., iv. 644), and in the Solonian constitution — who had no civic rights any more than the serfs and vas- sals of our medieval feudalism. The weak- ness of the monarchical and the strength of the aristocratic elements in the early societies arose from the original equality of the heads of families, and from the jealousy with which they would naturally look on any functions of superiority exercised by any of their order 18 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? naturally no better tlian themselves. The king, accordingly, like Agamemnon in Homer, wonld claim the homage which the title im- plies only for purposes of common action ; and even in such cases would always be kept in check by a {3ovXri, or council of the aristocracy, of whose will properly he was only the execu- tive hand ; while the great mass of the people, occupied with the labors that belong to an agricultural and pastoral population, and un- accustomed to the large views which states- manship and generalship require, would come together only on rare occasions of peculiar urgency. The element in that loose triad of social forces that was first formulated into a more distinct type, and endowed with more impera- tive efBlciency, was the kingship. The power of the king was increased, which of course im- plies that the power of the people, and specially of the aristocracy, was diminished. And here let it be observed generally that the progress of civilization in its natural and healthy career is the progress of limitation and the curtail- ment in various ways of that freedom which THE STATE. 19 originally belonged to every member of the community. The tanned savage of the back- woods is the freest man in existence ; next to him, the nomad or the wandering gipsy, such as may still be seen in their glory at St. James' fair in Kelso, whose house is at once his dwell- ing-place, his manufactory or place of busi- ness, and his travelling car ; least free is the civilized citizen hemmed in on all sides by police-officers, soldiers, sentinels, door-keep- ers, and game-keepers, and the whole fraternity of dignified but unpopular officials of various kinds whose business it is to the general pub- lic to say No ! This accretion of strength to the king proceeded first from his mere personal influence and the general deference paid to him during the continuance of a prolonged and easily-exercised sovereignty ; all classes, even the aristocracy, whose ambition is thus kept in check and their perilous enmities softened, feel the benefit of a wise head and a firm hand ; but the party specially benefited by the kingship is the demos ; for this body, from its position peculiarly liable to be trampled on by an insolent aristocracy, naturally looks up to so WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? the king as the father of the whole family, who, on his part, feels his position strength- ened and his respect increased by performing with tact and firmness the delicate functions of a mediator. But the great social force which operates in giving prominence and pre- dominance to the monarchy is War ; and, though war is unquestionably an evil, it is an evil only as death is, and a form of dying ac- companied not seldom with an exhibition of more manhood than the experience of many a peaceful deathbed can show. In fact, as stout old Balmerino said on the scaffold in 1746, *' The man who is not ready to die is not fit to live ;" that is, we hold our life under the con- dition that we may at any time be called on to sacrifice it, whether for the preservation of our own self-respect, or for the integrity of the community of which we are a member. All great nations, in fact, have been cradled in war, the Hebrews no less than the Greeks and Eomans ; and it is only an amiable senti- mentalism, pardonable in women, but inexcus- able in men, that, in contemplation of the hard blows, red wounds, and gashed bodies THE STATE. 31 witli wMch war is accompanied, will allow itself to forget the hardiliood, endurance, cour- age, self-sacrifice, and devotion to public duty, of which, under Providence, it has always been the great training school.^ There is no pro- fession that I know more favorable to the growth of noble sentiment and manly action than that of the soldier ; and to its beneficial action in the formation of States every page of history bears flaming testimony. War, in fact, is the principal agent in producing that unification so absolutely necessary to social existence, but which is lost so soon as the headship of the common father of the expand- ed clan ceases to be recognized. Thus it w^as under the compulsion of war from their Lom- bardian neighbors on the west and Sclavonians on the east that the petty democratic com- munities, which after the disruption of the Koman Empire occupied the Yenetian isles, found themselves, in the year 697, obliged to elect a king for life, wisely masking his abso- ^ 6 drpariGOTiKdi (Hoi itoXXd ex^i' fJ-e.prj riji dpErrji. — Aristot. Pol. ii. 9. St. Paul also frequently in the Epistles, and Clemens Romanus (Oxon. 1633, p. 48) refers to the military pro- fession as a great school of manly virtue. SS WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? lute antliority under the name of Doge or Duke. And in a similar fasMon the situation of the Piedmontese, constantly forced to de- fend themselves against Galilean and Teutonic ambition, begot in them a stoutness of self- assertion and a general manhood of character which up to the present hour has placed them in favorable contrast to the inhabitants of the southern half of the peninsula ; and the man- hood displayed by the Counts of Savoy in asserting their independence against great odds was no doubt the cause why, in the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, their lords were allowed to assume and maintain the title of kings — a circumstance which gave rise to the saying of Frederick the Great of Prussia, that the lords of Savoy were kings by virtue of their locality.^ This is certainly true, not only of Sardinia, but of all States that ever rose above the loose aggregation of the original town- ships. It was the necessity of adjusting mat- ters with troublesome neighbors that caused a perpetual succession of petty wars ; and these could not be conducted without a prolongation 1 Spalding's Italy, ii. p. 384. THE STATE. 23 of the power of the successful general, which acted practically as a kingship. The success- ful general in such times did not require to usurp a title which the people were forward to force upon him ; and only a few, we may imagine, like Gideon (Judges viii. 22), had virtue enough to remain contented with the distinction belonging to a private station when the grace of the crown and the authority of the sceptre were formally pressed upon them by a grateful people. So in Greece we find an early kingship signalized by the names of ^geus, Theseus, and Codrus ; so in Rome a succession of seven kings, more or less dis- tinctly outlined, the last of whom, Tarquin the Proud, stands forward as the head of the great Latin league, and entering in this capacity into a formal treaty with Carthage, the great commercial State of the Mediterra- nean. Closely connected with war, or, more properly, as the natural development of it in its more advanced stages, we must mention Conquest ; that is, the violent imposition of the results of a foreign civilization on the native social foundations of any country. 24 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? Here, no doubt, there may often be on fclie conquering side something very different from a manly self-assertion — viz., self-aggrandize- ment at the expense of an innocent neighbor, greed of territory, lust of power, and the vanity of mere military glory, which our brill- iant neighbors the French were so fond to have in their mouth. The virtue of war as a training school of civic manhood does by no means exclude the operation of many forces far from admirable in their motive ; and it is the presence of these unholy influences, no doubt piously brooded over, that has gene- rated in the breasts of our mild friends the Quakers that anti-bellicose gospel which they preach with such lovable persistency. But whatever the motives of famous conquerors have been, the results of their achievements in the great history of society have been most important. The imposition of a foreign type on the peoples of Western Asia by the brill- iant conquests of Alexander the Great, gave to the whole of that valuable part of the world, along with the rich coast of J^orthern Africa, a common medium of culture of the utmost THE STATE. 35 importance to the future civilization of the race. The imposition of the JSTorman yoke 900 years ago on this island gave to the con- tentious Saxon kingdoms, by a single vigorous stroke from without, that social consistency which the bloody strife of ^ve centuries of petty kings and kinglets among themselves had failed to produce ; while in India the im- position of the most highly advanced mercan- tile and Christian civilization of the West on crude masses of an altogether diverse type of Asiatic society, presents to the thoughtful student of history a problem of assimilation of an altogether unique character, the final solu- tion of which, under the action of many com- plex forces, no most sagacious human intel- lect at the present moment can divine. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the blessings which conquest brings with it, when vigorously managed and wisely used, are lightly turned into a bane whenever the power which has the force to conquer has not the wisdom to administer ; of which unblissful lack of administrative capacity and assimilat- ing genius the conquests of the Turks in 26 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? Europe, and of tlie English in Ireland, present a most instructive example. Tlie monarchies created in the above fashion, by the combination of old patriarchal habits with military necessities, however firmly root- ed they may appear at the start, carry with them a certain germ of dissatisfaction, which, under the influence of popular irritability, seriously endangers their permanence, and may at any time break up their consistency. The causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly the following: — (1) The original motive for creating a king, the pressure of foreign war, as war cannot last forever, in time of peace will cease to operate, and the instinct of indi- vidual liberty, which belongs to all men, unless when violently stamped out, will re- vive, and cause the subjection of all men to the will of one to be looked on with disfavor. (2) This feeling will be specially strong with the apidroi^ or natural aristocracy, whose in- dividual importance must diminish as the power of the king increases. (3) A great danger will arise from the fixation of the order of succession to the throne. The natural ten- THE STATE. S7 dency will be to follow tlie example of succes- sion in private families, and recognize the right of the son to walk into the public heritage of his father ; but the additional influence thus given to the king will have a tendency to sharpen the jealousy of the nobles. And, again, the son may be a weakling or a fool, and utterly unfit to play the part of a supreme ruler with that mixture of intelligence, firm- ness, and tact which the royal function for its fair and full action requires. (4) And if, in order to avoid these evils, the elective princi- ple is maintained, either absolutely or within certain limits, the tendency to faction inherent in all aristocracies, stimulated by the potent spur of a competition for power, will be in- creased ; and this factious yeast will work so potently in the blood of the nobles that they will either reduce the power of the king to a mere name, and change the government into an exclusive oligarchy, as in Venice, or they will even go the length of calling in foreign arbiters to heal their dissensions, which, as in the case of Poland, will naturally end in sub- jection to some foreign power ; or, lastly, they 28 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? will dispense with, tlie kingsMp altogether, and return to their original mixture of aris- tocracy and democracy with more firmly- defined functions and more reliable guaran- tees. (5) This result may be precipitated by some outbreak of that insolence which is so naturally fostered by the possession of abso- lute power ; the sacredness of personal prop- erty and the reverence of ancestral possession will not be respected by some Ahab of the day ; some young Tarquin or Hipparchus may cast his lustful eye on the fair daughter of an humble citizen; and then will be unsheathed the sword of a Brutus, and then uprise the song of a Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which will sound a long knell to monarchy, during the manhood of a free, an independent, a self- reliant, and a self-governing people. The system of self-government thus intro- duced, as the natural fruit of the elements out of which it arose, would be a mixture of aris- tocracy and democracy, with a decided pre- dominance of the former element at starting, but with a gradually increasing momentum on the side of the inferior factor in proportion as THE STATE. 39 the mass of the people excluded from aristo- cratic privileges by a necessary law of social growth advanced in numbers and in social im- portance. Greece and Rome, or rather Athens and Rome, present to us here two types from which important lessons may be learned. In both the discarding of the kings w^as the work of the aristocracy ; but, while the germ of the democratic element was equally strong in both, in Athens, partly from the genius of the people, partly from peculiar circumstances, this germ blossomed into an earlier, a more marked, and a more characteristic manhood ; whereas in Rome, in the most brilliant period of its political action, the form of government might rather be defined as a strong aristocracy limited by a strong democracy than a pure de- mocracy, to which category Athens undoubtedly belongs. In both States the aristocratic element did not submit to the necessary curtailment of its power without a struggle ; but in Athens the names of Solon (600 B.C.), Clisthenes, Aristides, and Pericles distinctly marked the early formation of a democracy almost totally purged from any remnant of aristocratic in- 30 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? fluence, at an epoch in its development corre- sponding to which we find Rome pursuing her system of world-wide conquest under a system of compromise between the patrician and the plebeian element, similar in some sort to what we see before our eyes at the present moment in our own country. To Athens, therefore, we look, in the first place, for an answer to the question. What does history teach in regard to the virtue of a purely democratic government? And here we may safely say that, under favorable circumstances, there is no form of government which, while it lasts, has such a virtue to give scope to a vigorous growth and luxuriant fruitage of various man- hood as a pure democracy. Instead of choking and strangling, or at least depressing, the free self-assertion of the individual, by which alone he feels the full dignity of manhood, such a democracy gives a free career to talent and civic efiiciency in the greatest number of capa- ble individuals ; but it does not follow that, though in this regard it has not been surpassed by any other form of government, it is there- fore absolutely the best of all forms of govern- THE STATE. 31 ment. All that we are warranted to say is, as Cornewall Lewis does, ^ that without a strong admixture of the democratic spirit humanity in its social form cannot achieve its highest results ; of which truth, indeed, we have the most striking proof before our eyes in our own happy island, where, even before the time which Mr. Green happily designates as Puri- tan England, powerful kings had received a lesson that as they had been elected so they might be dismissed from office by the voice of London burghers. Neither, on the other hand, does it follow from the shortness of the bright reign of Athenian democracy — not more than 200 years from Clisthenes to the Macedonians — that all democracies are short-lived, and must pay, like dissipated young gentlemen, with premature decay for the feverish abuse of their vital force. Possible no doubt it is that, if the power of what we may call a sort of. Athenian Second Chamber, the Areiopagus, instead of being weakened as it was by Aris- tides and Pericles, had been built up accord- ing to the idea of ^schylus and the intelligent 1 On Method in Political Science. 3S WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? aristocrats of his day, such, a body, armed, like our House of Lords, with an effective negative on all outbursts of popular rashness, might have prevented the ambition of the Athenians from launching on that famous Syracusan expedition which exhausted their force and maimed their action for the future. But the lesson taught by the short-lived glory of Athens, and its subjugation under the rough foot of the astute Macedonian, is not that democracies, under the influence of faction, and, it may be, not free from venality, wiH sell their liberties to a strong neighbor — for aristocratic Poland did this in a much more blushless way than democratic Greece — but that any loose aggregate of independent States, given more to quarrel among themselves than to unite against a common enemy, whether democratic, or aristocratic, or monarchical in their form of government, cannot in the long run maintain their ground against the firm policy and the well-massed force of a strong monarchy. Athens was blotted out from the map of free peoples at Chseronea, not because the Athenian people had too much freedom. THE STATE. 33 but becanse the Greek States had too little unity. They v\^ere used by Philip exactly in the same way that jN'apoleon used the German States at the commencement of the present century. Divide et iinfera is the politician's most familiar maxim, which, when wisely and persistently applied, whether by an ancient Macedonia or a modern Kussia, will always give a strong monarchy a decided advantage over every other form of government. Sur- round me with a belt of petty XDrincipalities, says the despot, however highly civilized and however well governed, and I shall know to make them play my game and work them- selves into confusion, till the hour comes when I may appear as a god to allay by my inter- vention the troubles which I have fostered by my intrigues. So much for Athens. Let us now see what lessons are to be learned from Eome. And here, on the threshold, it is quite plain that the abolition of kingship goes in the first place to strengthen the aristocracy, on whom as a body the supreme functions exercised by the monarch naturally devolve. The highly aris- 34 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? tocratic type of tlie early Roman republic, un- limited from above by any superior power, and with, only a sliglit occasional check from a ple- beian citizenship in the tender bud, is univer- sally admitted. Plainly enough also it stands written on the face of the early history of the Commonwealth that the administration of the aristocracy was marked in no ordinary degree by all that exclusiveness, insolence, selfish- ness, and rapacity, which are the besetting sins of an order of men cradled in hereditary con- ceit, and eating the bread not of labor, but of privilege, " das unwrlyesserliche JunkertJium^ ' ' as Mommsen calls them. To such an extent did they abuse the natural vantage ground of their social position that, while the great body of the substantial yeomanry, who shed their blood in a constant succession of petty wars for the safety of the State, were stinted of their natural reward and degraded from their rightful position, the insolent monopolizers of all dignities and privileges did not blush to take from the people their natural heritage in the public land, and, for the enlargement of their 0V7n order, to deprive the State of its stoutest THE STATE. 35 citizens, and the army of its most effective soldiers. The irritation produced by this in- solent and anti-social procedure of the old Roman landlords, by the law of reaction com- mon to all forces, produced as its natural con- sequence a revolt ; for, as it has been truly said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, no less true is it in all history that the insolence of the aristocracy is the cradle of the democracy. That happened ac- cordingly in ancient Eome which Sismondi prophesied might happen in modern Scotland : "If the mighty thanes who rule in those trans- Grampian regions begin to think that they can do without the people, the people may begin to think they can do without them." ^ So at least the Eoman plebs thought when, in the year of the city 259, they marched in a body out to the Sacred Mount on the banks of the Anio, and refused to return to the city till their just claims had been conceded and their wrongs redressed. Their wrongs were re- dressed: conferences, concessions, and com- promises, in a hurried and blundering sort * Sismondi, Etudes sur V^conoinie politique^ Essai iv. 36 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? of way, were made ; tribunes of tlie plebs were appointed, with the absolute power of stopping the whole machinery of the State with a single negation ; and thus was sown the seed of a democracy destined to grow into monstrous proportions, and ripen into the bloody blossom of a military despotism by the hands of the very class of persons who were chiefly interested in preventing it The different stages of the battle between plebeians and patricians, or, as we term it, Whig and Tory, as they evolved themselves by a social necessity from time to time, belong to the special history of Rome, not to the gen- eral philosophy of history with which we are here concerned. The seed of democracy sown at the Sacred Mount went on from one stage of expansion to another, breaking down every barrier of hereditary privilege between the mass of the people and the old aristocracy, till it ended in the Lex Hortensia^ passed j>. c. 288, which gave to all ordinances passed by the Comitia Trihuta — that is, the people assembled in local tribes and voting inde- pendently of all aristocratic check or cooper- THE STATE. 87 ation — tlie full validity of law. And in this progress of equalization between class and class in a community, the Muse of history sees only a special illustration of a general law that every aristocracy contending for the maintenance of exclusive privilege against natural right fights a losing battle. But the necessity of the adjustment of the opposing claims of a conservative and a progressive body in the State is a very different thing from the fashion in which the adjustment may be made, and from the consequences that may grow out of the adjustment. Here there is room for any amount of wisdom, and unfor- tunately also for a large amount of blundering. H^o man can say that the Roman constitution as it stood, after the plebeians had broken through all aristocratic barriers, was a cun- ningly compacted machine, or that it afforded any strong guarantee against that degeneracy into license toward which all unreined de- mocracies naturally tend. But one thing cer- tainly was achieved. Out of the plebeian and patrician elements of the body social, no longer arrayed in hostile attitude, but front- 38 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? ing one another with eqnal rights before the law, and adjusting their forces in a fairly- balanced equilibrium, there was formed a great political corporation, deliberative and administrative, which for independence, dig- nity, patriotism, and sagacity, used its author- ity in such a masterly style and to such world-wide issues that it has earned from Mommsen the complimentary acknowledg- ment of having been "the first political corpo- ration of all times. "^ This corporation was the Roman Senate, which ruled the policy of Rome for a period of 200 years, from the passing of the Hortensian Law through a long period of African and Asiatic wars down to the civil war of Sulla and Marios, 88 e.g. — a body of which we may perhaps best easily understand the composition and the virtue if we imagine the best elements of our House of Commons and the best elements of the House of Lords merged in one Supreme Assembly of practical wisdom, to the exclusion at once of the feverish factiousness and multitudinous * With which sentence Mr. Freeman agrees. Coinparative Politics, Lecture iii., p. 78. I'HE STATE. 3d babble of the one assembly, and tbe brainless obstructiveness and incurable blindness of hereditary class interests in the other. But there was something else in the mixed consti- tution of Rome besides the tried wisdom and the great practical weight of the Senate. What was that ? There was, in the first place, the evil of an elective kingship — for the Consul was really an annual king under a different name, as the President of the United States is a quadrennial king, with greatly more power while his kingship lasts than the Queen of Great Britain ; and this implied an annual fit of social fever, and the annual sowing of a germ of faction ready to shoot into luxuriance under the strong stimulant of the love of power. Then, as in the natural growth of society, a new aristocracy grew up, formed by the addition of the wealthy plebeian famxilies to the old family aristocracy, and along with it a new and numerous plebeian body, practically though not legally excluded from the privilege of the optimateSj the old antagonism of patri- cian and plebeian would revive, and the ques- tion arose. What machinery had the legislation 40 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? of the previous centuries provided to prevent a collision and a rupture between tlie antago- nistic tendencies of the democratic and oli- garchic elements in the State ? 1 he answer is, None. The authority of the Senate, great as it was both morally and numerically, was antagonized by the coequal legislative author- ity of the Comitia Tributa — an assembly as open to any agitator for factious or revolu- tionary purposes as a meeting of a London mob in Hyde Park, and composed of elements of the most motley and loose description, ready at any moment to give the solemn sanc- tion of a national ordinance to any act of hasty violence or calculated party move which might flatter the vanity or feed the craving of the masses. But this was not all. The tribunate, originally appointed simply for the protection of the commonalty against the rude exercise of patrician power, had now grown to such formidable dimensions that the popular tribune of the day might become the most powerful man in the State, and only require reelection to constitute him into a king whose decrees the consuls and the senators must THE STATE. 41 humiliate themselyes to register. Here was a machinery cunningly, one might think, con- structed for the purpose of working out its own disruption, even supposing both the pop- ular and aristocratic elements had been composed of average good materials. But they were not so. In the age of the Gracchi, 1 33 b. c . , the high sense of honor, the proud inheritance of an uncorrupted patrician body, and the shrewd sense and sobriety of a sound-hearted yeomanry, had equally disappeared. The aristocracy were corrupted by the wealth which flowed in from the spoils of conquest ; they had become lovers of power rather than lovers of Rome ; lords of the soil, not fathers of the people ; banded together for the narrow interests of their own order rather than for the general well-being of the community. The sturdy yeomanry again, of which the mass of the original popular assemblies had been com- posed, had partly dwindled away under mal- administration of the public lands, and partly were mixed up with motley groups of citizens of no fixed residence, and of a town rabble who could be induced to vote for anything by 4S WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH « any man who knew to win their favor by a large distribution of Sicilian corn or the excit- ing luxury of gladiatorial shows ; in a word, the populus had become a plehs, or, in our language, the people a populace. Further- more, let it be noted that this people or popu- lace, tied down to meet only in Kome, as the high seat of Government, was called upon to deal with the administration of countries as far apart and as diverse in character as Madrid and Cairo, or Bagdad and Moscow are from Lon- don. Think of a mob of London artisans, on the motion of a Henry George, or even a ration- al Radical like Mr. Chamberlain, drummed together to pass laws on landed property and taxation through all that vast domain ! But so it was ; and most unfortunately also the original fathers of the agitation which, at the time of the Gracchi, ranged the great rulers of the world into two hostile factions, stabbing one another in the back and cutting one another' s throats, and plotting and coun- ter-plotting in every conceivable style of base- ness, after the fashion which is now being exemplified before us in Ireland, — the authors THE STATE. 43 of tMs agitation were not the demagogues, but tlie aristocracy ; as indeed in all cases of gen- eral discontent, social fret, and illegal violence, the parties who are accused of stirring class against class are not the agitators who appear on the scene, but the maladministrators who made their appearance necessary. Man is an animal naturally inclined to obey and to take things quietly ; insurrection is too exjpensive an affair to be indulged in by way of recrea- tion ; and there is no truth in the philosophy of history more certain than that whenever the multitude of the ruled rebel against their rulers, the original fault — I do not say the whole blame, for as things go on from bad to worse there may be blame and blunders on both sides — but the original fault and germina- tive cause of discontent and revolt unquestion- ably lies with the rulers. Whatever may be said about Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, there can be no doubt that in the case of Rome the original cause of the democratizing of the old constitution and the over-riding of senatorial authority by tribunician ordinances was the senators themselves, who, in direct 44 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? contravention of the, public law of the State, with that greed for more land which is the be- setting sin of every aristocracy, had quartered themselves, after the fashion of colonial squat- ters, on the public lands, and refused to sur- render them to the State till compelled by the cry of popular right against might, raised by such patriotic and self-sacrificing agitators as the Gfracchi — patriotic men who attained their object at last by the only means in their power, but means so drastic that, like doctor's drugs, they drave out one devil by bringing in a score, and paid for the partial healing of an incurable disease by destroying forever the balance of the constitution, and inaugurating with their own martyr blood one of the most woful epochs in human history — an epoch varied by period- ical assassinations and consummated by whole- sale butcheries. I said the Gracchi attained their object, and that by appointing a Commission for a distri- bution of the public lands, such as the friends of the crofters in the Highlands now propose for the repeopling of the old depopulated homes of the clan. But I said also that the THE STATE. 45 disease under which Rome labored was incura- ble. How was this ? Simply because, what- ever might have been the merits of the special Agrarian Law carried by the Gracchi, the vio- lent steam by which the State machine was moved remained the same, the clumsy machine itself remained, and the materials with which it had to deal in a long and critical course of foreign conquest became every year larger and more unmanageable. It was not to be expected either, on the one hand, that a strong and in- fluential aristocracy should die with a single kick, or, on the other, that a democracy, which had once learned the power of a popular flood to break down aristocratic dams, would cease to exercise that power when a convenient oc- casion offered. And so the strife of oligarchic and plebeian factions continued. The politi- cal struggle, as always happens in such cases, became a struggle for personal supremacy ; the sanguinary street battle between the younger Gracchus and the Consul Ojjimius, though fol- lowed by a lull for a season, was renewed after a few years in more startling form and much bloodier issues, first between Marius and Sulla, 46 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? and finally between Csesar and Pompey. Such a succession of embittered civil wars could end only in exhaustion and submission ; and this is the last emphatic lesson which the history of Eome has taught to the governors of the people. Every constitution of mixed aristo- cratic and democratic elements which fails by kindly control on the one side, and reasonable demand on the other, to achieve that balance of those antagonizing forces which means good government, must end in a military despotism. That which will not bridle itself must be bridled ; and when constant irritation, fretful Jars, and cruel collisions are the bloody fruit of unchastened liberty, slavery and stagnation seem not too high a price to pay for peace. I have enlarged on the development and de- cay of the Roman republic, not only because in point of political achievement Eome is by far the most notable of the great States of the world, but because in the struggle between aris- tocracy and democracy which was the salient feature of its history from the expulsion of the kings to the battle of Actium, it presents a very close and instructive parallel to what has been THE STATE. 47 going on among ourselves from tlie revolu- tion settlement of 1688 to the present hour. If for annual kings with large power we put hereditary kings with small power, the paral- lel is complete/ Let us now cast a glance, for time and space allow us no more, over some modern developments. The modern States of Europe have good reason, upon the whole, to think themselves fortunate in their having re- tained the kingship, which the Greeks and Romans rejected, either as their original type, or elevated and glorified from the dukedoms, margravates, and electorates with which they started. There cannot be much doubt, I im- agine, that, if the Eomans had retained their king in a hereditary or nearly hereditary form, he might have exercised a mediatorial function between the contending parties that would have prevented those bloody strifes and those ugly civic wounds with which the record of their political career stands now so sorrowfully defaced. In the experience of their own earli- est story, Servius Tullius had already shown 1 This parallel has been noticed by the thoughtful Germans ; see particularly Zacharia Sulla, i. 40 . 48 "WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? them liow a king in the strife of classes might step in by a jpeacef ul new model to open the ranks of a close aristocracy with dignity and safety to a rising democracy ; and in modern times the case of, Leopold II. of Tuscany does not stand alone as an example of what good service a wise king may do in the adjustment of contending claims and smoothing the march of necessary social transitions. In fact, the most democratic people among the ancients, in order to effect such an adjustment in a peace- ful way, had been obliged to make Solon a king for the nonce ; and the Homans, urged by a like social pressure, named their dictator, or reelected their consuls and their tribunes, in order to secure for the need of the moment that unity of counsel, energy of conduct, and moral authority which is the grand recom- mendation of the kingship. 'No doubt kings in modern as in ancient times have erred ; they have not been able always to keep themselves sober under the intoxicating influence of abso- lute power, and they have paid dearly for their errors ; but we were wise in this country, while beheading one despot and banishing THE STATE. 49 another, to pimisli the offender withont abol- ishing the office. True, a thorough-going and sternly-consistent republican may ask, with an indignant sneer. What is the use of a king, when we have shorn him of all honors save the grace of a crown and the bauble of a sceptre — reduced him, in fact, to a mere machine to register the decrees of a democratic assembly? But such persons require to be reminded that there is nothing more dangerous, not only in political, but in all practical matters, than logical consistency ; that the most narrow- minded people are always the most consistent, and this for the very obvious reason that they have only room for one idea in their small brain chambers, whereas God's world contains many ideas, stiff ideas too, and given to battle, which must be brought into some friendly bal- ance or compromise, or set about throat-cut- ting on a large scale — a process to which con- sistent republicans have never shown a less bloody inclination than consistent monarchists. They must be reminded also that the person of the monarch is an incarnated, visible, and tangible symbol of the unity of the nation, of 50 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? wMcli parties and factions are so apt to be for- getful ; and if onr logically-consistent republi- can may look on tMs as a matter of association and sentiment wMcIl lie will not acknowledge, lie must simply be told tkat the man wlio does not acknowledge the important place played by associations and sentiments in all matters of Church and State knows nothing of human nature, and is altogether unfit for meddling with the difficult and dangerous art of politics. He may write books, and lecture to coteries, and harangue electoral meetings, and delight himself largely in the reverberation of his own wisdom, but by all means let him not be a prime minister. To what ends logical consist- ency can lead a politician in high places Charles I. and Archbishop Laud learned when it was too late ; and the fate of these two high- perched worthies stands as a speaking lesson to all politicians, whether of the democratic or the monarchical type, how easy a thing it is for a man to be a good Christian and a con- sistent thinker, and yet on all political matters a perfect fool. Among the notable modern States three THE STATE. 51 stand before ns with an exceptional prefer- ence for tlie democratic form of government — Switzerland, France, and tlie great trans- At- lantic Republic. These mnst be regarded with cnrious interest and kindly human sym- pathy as great social experiments, by no means to be prejudged and denounced by any sweep- ing conclusions made from the unfortunate breakdown of the two celebrated ancient re- publics. The experiment in these cases, as made in altogether different circumstances and under different conditions, cannot warrant any such denunciations. The representative system which now universally prevails, and which enables a most widely-scattered and diverse - minded population to vote with a coolness and a precision and a large survey of which the urban system of Greece and Rome never dreamed ; the general growth of intelligence among all classes through the ac- tion of cheap education and the large circula- tion of cheap books ; the rapid and ever more rapid travelling of contagious thought from the centre to the extreme limbs and flourishes of social unities; and, above all, let us hope 62 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? the improved tone of social feeling in all the relations of man to man, wMcli we owe to the great Christian principle of living as brother with brother, and sister with sister, under a common heavenly fatherhood, — these are all forces largely operating in the present day which justify us in hoping that many a social experiment which signally failed with the an- cients may be crowned in the centuries which are now being inaugurated with encouraging success. Of the three which we have named, Switzerland is the country in which, from topographical peculiarities, the interests of jealous neighbors, and the traditional habits of a peasant population well trained to pro- vincial self-government, the permanence of a democratic federation may be prophesied with the greatest safety, but at the same time with the least interest to the general march of humanity. Ancient Rome, had it continued as compact and as little disturbed by external forces and internal fermentations as modem Switzerland, might have remained during the whole course of its career as sober-minded and as stable as in the days of Cincinnatus, and THE STATE. 53 the yeomanry wMcli were displaced by huge absentee landlords, and Syrian or Sicilian slaves. The case of France is altogether dif- ferent. A republic in an over-civilized, highly- centralized, bureaucratically-governed coun- try, with a religiously hollow, hasty, violent, excitable, and explosive people, seems of all social experiments the least hopeful : and that is all that can wisely be said of it at present. But the social conditions in America are alto- gether different ; and the experiment of a great democratic republic for the first time in the history of the world — for Rome in its best times, as we have seen, was an aristocracy — will be looked on by all lovers of their species with the most kindly curiosity and the most hopeful sympathy. Here we have the stout, self-reliant, sober-minded Anglo-Saxon stock, well trained in the process of the ages to the difficult art of self-government ; here we have a constitution framed with the most cautious consideration, and with the most effective checks against the dangers of an over-riding democracy ; here also a people as free from any imminent external danger as they have 54 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? unlimited scope for internal progress. Under no circumstances could the experiment of self- government, on a great scale, have been made with a more promising start. 'No doubt they have a difficult and slippery problem to per- form. The frequent recurrence of elections to the supreme magistracy has always been, and ever must be, the breeder of faction, the nurse of venality, and the spur of ambition. Once already has this Titanic confederacy, though only a hundred years old, by going through a process of a long, bitter, and bloody civil war, shown that the unifying machinery so cunningly put together by the conservative genius of a Washington, an Adams, and a Madison, was insufficient to hold in check the rebellious forces at war within its womb. No doubt also it were in vain to speak America free from those acts of gigantic jobbing, blush- less venality, and over-riding of the masses in various ways, which were working the ruin of Rome in the days of Jugurtha. The aristoc- racy of gold and the tyranny of capitalists in Christian New York has shown itself no less able to usurp the public land and defraud the THE STATE. 55 people of their share in the soil than the lordly- aristocracy and the slave-dealing magnates of heathen Rome. Nevertheless we need not despair. The sins of American democracy may serve as a useful hint to us not rashly to tinker our own mixed constitution without waiting for a verdict on issues, which, as Socrates wisely says, lie with the gods ; nor, on the other hand, is there any wisdom in ascribing to the American form of govern- ment evils which, as belonging to human nature, crop up with more or less abundance under all forms of government, and which may be specially rife among ourselves. We also have our Glasgow banks, our bubble companies of all kinds, our heady specula- tions, our hot competitions, our over-produc- tions, our haste to be rich, our idol worship of mere material magnificence, — these are evils, and the root of all evil, with the pro- duction of which no form of government has anything to do, and against which every form of government will be in vain invoked to contend. In conclusion, we must bear in mind that 56 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? democracy or social self-government is the most difficult of all human problems, and must be approached, not with inflated hopes and rosy imaginations, but with sobriety and caution and a sound mind, and at critical moments not without prayer and fasting. Before entering on any scheme for rebuilding our social edifice on a democratic model, we should consider seriously what a democracy really implies, and what we may reasonably promise ourselves from its possible success. Of the two rallying cries which have made it a favorite with persons given to change, equal- ity and liberty, the one is no more true than that all the mountains in the Highlands are as high as Ben ISTevis, and can only mean at the best that all men have an equal right to be called men and to be treated as men, while the other is only true so far as concerns the removal of all artificial barriers to the free exercise of each man' s function, according to his capacity and opportunities. But this is a mere starting- point in the social life of a great people. When the bird is out of the cage, which it must be in order to be a perfect bird, the more serious THE STATE. 57 question emerges, what use it shall make of its newly -acquired liberty. Here certainly to men, as to birds, there are great dangers to be faced ; and with nations the progress of society, as already remarked, is measured to a much larger extent by the increase of limitations than by the extension of liberties. Then, again, the fundamental postulate of extreme democracy that the majority have everywhere a right to govern is manifestly false. ISTo man as a member of society has a natural right to govern : he has a right to be governed, and well governed ; and that can only be when the government is conducted by the wisest and best men who compose the society. If the numerical majority is composed of sober- minded, sensible, and intelligent persons who will either govern wisely themselves or choose persons who will do so, then democracy is Justified by its deeds ; but if it is otherwise, and if, when an appeal is made to the multi- tude, they will choose the most daring, the most ambitious, and the most unscrupulous, rather than the most sensible, the most mod- erate, and the most conscientious, then democ- 58 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? racy is a bad thing, at least notMng better than the other ocracies which it supplants. It is manifest, therefore, that of all forms of gov- ernment democracy is that which imperatively requires the greatest amount of intelligence and moderation among the great mass of the people, especially among the lower classes, who have always been the most numerous ; and, as history can point to no quarter of the world where such a happy condition of the numerical intelligence has been realized, it cannot look with any favor on schemes of uni- versal suffrage, even when qualified with a stout array of effective checks. The system, indeed, of representing every man individually, and giving every member of a society a capi- tation vote, as they have a capitation tax in Turkey, however popular with the advocates of extreme democracy, seems quite unreasona- ble. What requires to be represented in a reasonable representative system is not so much individuals as qualities, capacities, in- terests, and types. Every class should be represented, rather than every man in a class. Besides, the equality of votes which democracy THE STATE. 59 demands, on the principle that I am as good as you and perhaps a little better, is utterly- false, and tends to nourish conceit and imper- tinence, to banish all reverence, and to ignore all distinctions in society. Anyhow, there can be no doubt that great masses of men acting together on exciting occasions are peculiarly liable to hasty resolutions and vio- lent opinions ; all democracies, therefore, are unsafe which are unprovided with checks in the form of an upper chamber composed of more cool materials, and planted firmly in a position that makes them independent of the fever and faction of the hour. A strong de- mocracy stands as much in need of an aristo- cratic rein as a strong aristocracy does of a democratic spur. And let it never be forgot- ten — what democracies are far too apt to for- get — that minorities have rights as well as majorities ; nay, that one of the great ends to be achieved by a good government is to pro- tect the few against the natural insolence of a majority glorying in its numbers, and hur- ried on by the spring- tide of a popular con- tagion. A state of society is not at all incon- 60 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? ceivable in wMch the many shall make all the laws and monopolize all the offices of a fussy bureaucracy, while the few are burdened with all the taxes. Never too frequently can we repeat, in reference to all public acts, no less than to the conduct of individuals in private life, the great Aristotelian maxim that all EXTEEMES ARE WROisG ; that every force when in full action tends to an excess which for its own salvation must be met by a counterpois- ing force ; that all good government, as all healthy existence, is the balance of opposites and the marriage of contraries ; and that the more mettlesome the charger the more need of a firm rein and a cautious rider. He who overlooks this prime postulate of all sane action in this complex world may pile his democratic house tier above tier and enjoy his green conceit for a season ; but the day of sore trial and civic storm is not far, when the rain shall descend, and the floods come, and the winds blow and beat upon that house, and it will fall, because it was founded upon a dream. THE CHURCH, E THE CHURCH. Ov Ttai 6 key GOV fioi Kvpte, KvpiEy eidsXevderai si? TTjv fia6i\.Eiav rwv ovpavwv • aAA.' 6 itoi(Sv to BeXr/fxa rov Ttarpoi juov rov ev roz? ovpavoi V * ^h^ \ f^eutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide f - e.'^*' ^^^^C" '''^- S>- ■''""'™""'''»^ APR 2002 y ^<-^ '§§Si,°. ""^'f PreservationTechnologies p aV '^„ ^ ^pimM^ -- . C,'^ ^ A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESESVATJOW i '^ ■'>, '■ %?l^" * O^ ^' 111 Thomson Park Drive ^ '"<':, -'^^ '■^^^i/-^*^ \ - \ Cranberry Township, PA 16066 ,, N , '/- ' ^ * ^ ^^ . V 1 B „ (724)779-2111 o\^- .s^<^. .v\>' 0^ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 009 435 295 2 m m i ! ml iBit !( m