J. M. Robertson

“ The aristocrats were but slighter egoists with a varnish of education, as far as he from a worthy philosophy. And the philosophers par excellence, Plato and Aristotle, were equally incapable of practical statesmanship. The central truth of the entire process is that free Greece fell because her children never transcended, in conception or in practice, that primary ethic of egoism in which even love for one's country is only a reflex of hate for another people. This is clear in the whole play of the astounding hatreds of Athenians for Athenians through every struggle of Athens for her life. ”

“ Without any such constant reversion to the instinct of racial pride, let us say that "the things that are most excellent" have no dependence on mere material magnitude. Given a saner and juster distribution of wealth and culture-machinery, each one of the smaller States may be more civilised, more worth living in, than the larger, even as Athens was better worth living in than Rome, and Goethe's Weimar than the Berlin of 1800. It was a poet of one of the larger nations—though it had to be a poet—who saw not hardship but happiness in the thought of "leaving great verse unto a little clan." ”

“ It was simply the self-assertion of energetic men of whom some were in some respects ahead of their time; while the others were as bad as their time, and in some respects rather behind it—men bewildered by fanaticism, and incapable of a consistent ethic, whose failure was due as distinctly to their own intellectual vices as to their environment. No serious poetry of any age is more devoid of moral principle than the verses in which Marvell and Waller exult over the wanton attack on Spain, and kindle at the prospect of a future of unscrupulous conquest. ”

“ James was a Scotchman—a member, albeit a king, of a hostile nation long evilly spoken of; a prince without personal dignity; a pedant without gravity; and the indulgence paid to falsehood and folly in the capriciously headstrong Elizabeth ceased to be accorded to the unmanly and unregal ways of her not unconscientious successor, whose plans for pacifying Europe were much more creditable to him than were her diplomacies to her. But the very preservation of peace served to undo the king's prestige, inasmuch as it furthered the growth of sects and the spirit of criticism. ”

“ The appearance of Italy in the fifteenth century recalls most fully the picture of ancient Greece. And yet in Italy, political theories were as few as in Greece they had been many!—a result both unexpected and difficult to explain. Still, however, I think that this phenomenon may be in great part accounted for, if we remember that there never was a philosophical system of character or influence which prospered under the sky of Italy. No nation of civilised Europe has given birth to so few theories as the Italian: none has had less genius for such pursuits. ”

“ And though we doubtless exaggerate when we conceive of a transition from what we are apt to figure as the fierce and laughterless Florence of Dante to the gay Florence of the Medici, it is hard to hold that life was worsened when men changed the ways which made them collectively capable of rending with their teeth the carcases of those they hated, and which left the Viscontis of Milan capable of torturing their political prisoners to death through forty days. ”

“ Early Rome was strong as against strong enemies, because not only were its people hardily bred, but the majority were on the whole satisfied that they had just laws: the reciprocal sense of recognised rights sustained public spirit at the possible maximum. But the rights are thoroughly selfish at best; and it is the diversion of their selfishness to the task of continuous conquest that "saves" the community from early dissolution, preserving it for the life of dominion, which in turn destroys the old forces of cohesion, and leaves a community fit only for subjection to a military autocracy. ”

“ A tyranny may indeed give economic encouragement to art and culture, and a republic may fail to do so; but the work of the tyranny is inevitably undone or kept within a fixed limit by its own character; while, if the free community be but fairly well guided, its potentialities are unlimited. This is the solution of much modern dispute between the schools of laissez-faire and protection. A Velasquez, who might otherwise have been condemned to seek his market with coarser wares, may develop to perfection at the court of an autocrat of fine taste ”

“ There is no security that the scientific form will make any ideal more viable than another; every ideal, after all, has stood for what social science there was among its devotees. The hope of a moral transformation of the world is a state of mind so often seen arising in human history that some distrust of it is almost a foregone condition of reflection on any new ideal for thoughtful men. A dream of deliverance pervades the earliest purposive literature of the Hebrews; a fabled salvation in the past is made the ground for trust in one to come. ”

“ Thus we have on one hand the Spartan kings, concerned for the well-being of the mass of the people (always excepting the helots) as a means to restore Spartan pre-eminence; and on the other hand the Achaian federation of oligarchies, hating the doctrine of sympathy for the demos as much as they hated Sparta—the forces of union and strife always repelling the regimen of peace, to say nothing of fraternity. The spectacle of Cleomenes and Philopœmen at deadly odds is the dramatic summary of the situation; the ablest men of the later Greek age could not transcend their barbarian heredity. ”

“ When all is said, the whole Italian civilisation of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance represents a clear political gain over that of ancient Hellas in that it had transcended slavery, while failing to attain or to aim at the equality and fraternity which alone realise liberty. Despite, too, all the scandals of the Renaissance in general, and of papal Rome in particular, the life of such a city as Florence was morally quite on a par with that of any northern city. ”

“ The fullest command of physical science, however great be the resulting power of wealth-production, means no solution of the social problem, which must breed its own science. The new ground for hope is that the great discipline of physical science has brought with it the twofold conception of the reign of law in all things and the sequence of power upon comprehension, even to the controlling of the turbulent sea of human life. With the science of universal evolution has come the faith in unending betterment. ”

“ A hundred times has the hope flowered, and withered again. Confident rebellions, eager revolutions, mark at once its rise and its fall. In our own age the new birth of hope arises in the face of what might have seemed the most definitive frustration; it becomes [Pg 470] an ideal of peaceful transformation under the sole spell of social science, with no weapons save those of reason and persuasion. The science of natural forces has widened and varied life without greatly raising it in mass. Yet the new science, we would fain believe, will conquer the heightened task. ”

“ Seeley goes on to argue that "what the plague had been to the population, that the fiscus was to industry. It broke the bruised reed; it converted feebleness into utter and incurable debility. Roman finance had no conception of the impolicy of laying taxation so as to depress enterprise and trade. The fiscus destroyed capital in the Roman Empire. The desire of accumulation languished where the Government lay in wait for all savings—locupletissimus quisque in prædam correptus. All the intricate combinations by which man is connected to man in a progressive society disappeared." ”

“ Politics, in its most general and fundamental character, is the strife of wills on the ground of social action. As international politics is the sum of the strifes and compromises of States, so home politics is the sum of the strifes and compromises of classes, interests, factions, sects, theorists, in all countries and in all ages. In studying it, then, we study the evolution of an aggregate, a quasi-organism, in terms of the clashing forces of its units and of their spontaneous combinations. ”

“ And no less does he incarnate for ever its fatal incapacity for some political compromise. For Dante, politics is first and last a question of the dominance of his faction: his fellow-citizens are for him Guelphs or Ghibellines, and he shares the Florentine rabies against rival or even neighbouring towns; his imperialism serving merely to extend the field of blind strife, never to subject strife to the play of reason. Exiled for faction by the other faction, he foreshadows the doom of Florence. ”

“ It remains to trace, under successive statesmen and in the doctrine of successive politicians, the fluctuations of English progress towards the great Utopia, the state of reconciliation of all the lower social antipathies and interests, and of free scope for the inevitable but haply bloodless strifes of ideals, which must needs clash so far as we can foresee human affairs. The progress, we shall see, is only in our own day beginning to be conscious or calculated: it has truly been, so far as most of the actors are concerned, by unpath'd waters to undream'd shores. ”

“ And this difference had itself been wrought by long mutations—from the day of Sulla to the day of Tiberius in Rome, from the day of Alexander to that of Sulla in Greece. No one generation had been born in full "freedom," to pass away in complete subordination to an autocrat. The earlier generations, like the later, had been habituated to slave-owning, superstition, and the thought of war. The substantial and fatal change was in the degree of simple average manhood among the free. National decadence, in a word, is loss of manhood—a thing not easily lost. ”

“ Nay, in a country where the great parties in our own time perpetually accuse each other of gross and unscrupulous misgovernment, disparagements of the politics of countries which only recently attained self-government are obviously open to discount. Suffice it that Portugal, albeit by a via dolorosa of violence trodden by other peoples before her, has reaffirmed her part in the movement of civilisation towards a larger and a better life, thus giving the hundredth disproof to the formulas which deny the potentiality of advance to States which have known decadence. ”

“ The disputes of the Christians were indeed the most absurd that had ever been carried on in the Greek tongue; and in comparing the competing insanities it is hard to imagine how from among themselves they could have evoked any form of rational thought. But as in Northern Europe in a later age, so in the Byzantine Empire, the insensate strifes of fanatics, after exhausting and decimating themselves, might have bred in a saner minority a conviction of the futility of all wars of creed—this if only external peace could have been secured. ”

“ War is precisely the blindest, the least rational, the least human of all the forms of human conflict, inasmuch as it is the collective clashing of communities whose members, divided among themselves by many real differences of interest, bias, and attraction, are set against each other, as wholes—if by anything higher than animal pugnacity—either by the mere ideals or appetites of rulers or leaders, or by more or less imaginary differences of interest, seen under the moral illusion of the most primitive of social instincts—the sensus gregis. ”

“ Finding Athens exalted by circumstances to empire, and the allies degraded into subjects, the Athenian statesmen grasped at the exaltation as a matter of pride as well as profit. Even Pericles, the most prudent and far-sighted of them, betrayed no consciousness that an empire without the cement of some all-pervading interest or attachment, although not practically oppressive, must nevertheless have a natural tendency to become more and more unpopular, and ultimately to crumble in pieces. ”

“ Wherein lies the felicity of a world wholly at the mercy of the chance of the election of a good emperor by a mercenary soldiery? To fall back on phrases about the Empire "respecting local feelings, encouraging local government," and being "accepted by the conquered as the natural organisation of the world," is merely to burke the real issue as to the political viability of communities satisfied with such a system, content to rest the social pyramid forever on its apex. ”

“ The State must needs go on seeking conquest, by reason alike of the lower-class and the upper-class problem. The administrators must administer, or rust. The moneyed men must have fresh plunder, fresh sources of profit. The proletaries must be either fed or set fighting, else they would clamour and revolt. And as the frontiers of resistance receded, and new war was more and more a matter of far-reaching campaigns, the large administering class at home, men of action devoid of progressive culture, ran to brutal vice and frantic sedition as inevitably as returned sailors to debauch ”

“ But the instruction is deepened in the ratio of our realisation of the decay. Though it is clear that before Rome many a civilisation had gone to violent wreck, there is in recorded history no more overwhelming memory of long triumph and long downfall than that "from the far-distant morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled the forests on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the tragic hour in which the sun of Græco-Latin civilisation set over the deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant, and brutalised peoples of Latin Europe." ”

“ Followed through cycle after cycle of illusory progress and conscious decline, all nevertheless as full of pulsation, of the pride of life and the passion of suffering, as the human tide that beats to-day on the shores of our own senses, the history of organised mankind, in its trivially long-drawn immensity, grows to be unspeakably disenchanting. ”

“ As for the mass of the town people, slave or free, which ought on common-sense principles to have been employed either in industry or on the land, it was by a series of hand-to-mouth measures on the part of the government, and by the operation of ordinary self-interest on the part of the rich class, made age by age more unproductive industrially and more worthless politically. ”

“ But it is not through the complicated archæology of the Roman constitution, latterly compiled with such an infinity of scholarly labour, that the nature of Roman evolution is really to be known. The technique of the system resulted from an endless process of compromise among social forces; and it is in the actual clash and play of those forces, as revealed in the simple records, that the human significance of it all is to be felt. In this way we substitute for a vague and false conception of unitary growth one of perpetual strife of classes, interests, and individualities. ”