Barbary States

“ Unlimited power is apt to stretch towards license; and the wives and daughters of Christian slaves were often pressed to be the concubines of their Algerine masters.153
It is well, then, that it has passed away! The Barbary States seem less barbarous, when we no longer discern this cruel oppression!
But the story of slavery there is not yet all told. While the Barbary States received white slaves by sea, stolen by corsairs, they also, from time immemorial, imported black slaves from the south. ”

“ Barbarossa opposed them bravely, but with unequal forces. While slowly yielding to attack from without, his defeat was hastened by unexpected insurrection within. Confined in the citadel were many Christian slaves, who, asserting the rights of freedom, obtained a bloody emancipation, and turned its artillery against their former masters. The place yielded to the Emperor, whose soldiers soon surrendered themselves to the inhuman excesses of war. ”

“ The four Barbary Powers, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, lived by black-mail. So little sense of common interest had the nations of Europe, that they submitted to the demands of those petty Mahometan despots, and paid yearly sums of money, or an equivalent in ships, arms, or warlike stores, in return for which the Barbary Powers permitted them to trade with the ports on the coast and protected their ships and men. ”

“ Four or five such convulsions following each other, at intervals of ten or twelve years, would reduce the most flourishing countries of Europe to the state of Barbary or the Morea.
The civilised part of the world has now nothing to fear from the hostility of savage nations. Once the deluge of barbarism has passed over it, to destroy and to fertilise; and in the present state of mankind we enjoy a full security against that calamity. ”

“ But it was barbarians, without defensive armor, without discipline, without prestige, attacking legions which had been a thousand years learning the art of war. Proh Pudor! The soldiers of the empire must have lost their ancient spirit. They must have represented a most worthless people. We lose our pity in the strength of our indignation and disgust. A civilized nation that will yield to barbarians must deserve their fate. Noble as were the elements of character among the Germanic tribes, they were yet barbarians in arts, in manners, in knowledge, in mechanisms. ”

“ Does, then, the way in which governments generally obtain their power make it at all probable that they will be more favourable to orthodoxy than to heterodoxy? A nation of barbarians pours down on a rich and un warlike empire, enslaves the people, portions out the land, and blends the institutions which it finds in the cities with those which it has brought from the woods. ”

“ The codes of the Barbarians who sat on the ruins of the Roman Empire—the Burgundians, Bavarians, the Allemanni, with the Visigoths and their northern kin—have left enactments certainly more terrible in themselves. But the darkness of that period shrouds all those barbarian legislations in a general and homogeneous gloom; and here, it is "the freest and most enlightened nation of the world," who keeps, extends, and intensifies the dreadful statutes which make men only things, binds them and sells them as brute cattle. ”

“ But on the edges of the Empire this decivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly as things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even [Pg 17] in those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when we are speaking of the old civilization as a whole. ”

“ Barbarism stands directly opposed to the purposes of this Culture wherever it comes in contact with them, and constantly threatens the existence of the State; which thus finds itself, even by the necessity of its own preservation, placed in natural war with the surrounding Barbarism, and is compelled to use every effort for its overthrow,—which latter, indeed, can only be thoroughly accomplished by bringing the Barbarians themselves under the dominion of law and order, and, in so far, cultivating them. ”

“ If the empire had withstood the shock of barbarians, a state would have existed unfavorable to the higher and future triumphs of the cross. Where was hope, when imperial despotism, and disproportionate fortunes, and slavery, and the reign of conventional forms and traditions, and the tyranny of foolish fashions were likely to be perpetuated? How could Christianity have subverted these monstrous evils without producing revolutions more blasting than even barbaric violence? There seem to be some evils so subtle, poisonous, and deeply-rooted that nothing but violence can remove them. ”

“ The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization is, that it makes it a public trust. Barbarism knows only persons; civilization asserts and maintains the state. With barbarians the authority of the patriarch is developed simply by way of explication; in civilized states it is developed by way of transformation. Keeping in mind this distinction, it may be maintained that all systems of government, as a simple historical fact, have been developed from the patriarchal. ”

“ When I speak of barbarian states, I mean such as consist of members not simply barbarous, but just so far removed from the extreme of savageness that they admit of having certain principles in common, and are able to submit themselves individually to the system which rises out of those principles; that they do recognize the ideas of government, property, and law, however imperfectly ”

“ Ignorance as well as anarchy veiled Europe in darkness. The rust of barbarism became harder and thicker. The last hope of man had fled, and glory was succeeded by shame. Even slavery, the curse of the Roman Empire, was continued by the barbarians; only, brute force was not made subservient to intellect, but intellect to brute force. The descendants of ancient patrician families were in bondage to barbarians. The age was the jubilee of monsters. Assassination was common, and was unavenged by law. Every man was his own avenger of crime, and his bloody weapons were his only law. ”

“ You know that I have thought it far wiser for our rulers to attend to the matters immediately around us than to meddle with the Barbarians. For so long as this unbearable burden of taxation and abuse of official power continues in the Roman Empire, so long every conquest, every increase in the number of our subjects, will merely swell the list of unfortunates. Yet if Africa could be restored to the Empire, we ought not to relinquish the proud thought from sheer cowardice! ”

“ Add to this that the boundaries of his empire are those of the civilized world; barbarism begins where slavery ends, and there is not even the sad resource of exile against this despotism. Yet it is the man who possesses this appalling power, whom nothing in his immense empire escapes, and from whose empire it is impossible to escape, it is he who has just told us with a bare-faced assurance that he refused to accept absolute power! ”

“ Cold, poverty, and a life of danger and fatigue fortify the strength and courage of Barbarians. In every age they have oppressed the polite and peaceful nations of China, India, and Persia, who neglected, and still neglect, to counterbalance these natural powers by the resources of military art. The warlike states of antiquity, Greece, Macedonia, and Rome, educated a race of soldiers ”

“ While Barbarism was thus occupying or usurping all the vantage points of the social state, and civil life in the intermediate classes was arrested in its progress, and sinking gradually to the lowest condition, even to that of personal servitude, an ameliorating movement already commenced before the fall of the empire, still continued, and declared itself more and more loudly. ”

“ It was perhaps not within the power of Rome to break once and for all the advance of the Barbarians. Time has been upon our side. To-day if our courage and our endurance are strong enough, if we set our face like a flint, we may once for all rid Europe of this Barbarian peril, which, now as always intent on the destruction and the loot of civilisation, pleads necessity, invokes its gods, and knows neither justice nor mercy. ”

“ But in our political system everybody is comforted. Our guides and governors who have to be elected by the influence of the Barbarians, and who depend on their favour, sing the praises of the Barbarians, and say all the smooth things that can be said of them. With Mr. Tennyson, they celebrate 'the great broad-shouldered genial Englishman,’ with his 'sense of duty,' his 'reverence for the laws,' and his 'patient force,' who saves us from the 'revolts, republics, revolutions, most no graver than a schoolboy's barring out,' which upset other and less broad-shouldered nations. ”

“ Barbarossa, on the contrary, has put about our necks a yoke from which there is no relief. We must build with our own hands the fortresses which threaten us; with our own hands we must construct for these cruel vultures--I mean for the worthy prefects of the Emperor--those nests from which they can swoop down upon us with impunity, to pillage and murder. Will you always submit to slavery? Are you willing to be oppressed until death sets you free? ”

“ During the period which now occupies our attention, the reigning power in the other States founded by the Barbarians was force—disorderly, capricious, and unsettled force, sometimes distributed amongst a multitude of almost independent chieftains; sometimes concentrated, for a brief space, and according to circumstances, in the hands of one man, or of a brutal and transitory aristocracy. ”

“ I never could understand the drift of the people either at Tangier or Mogodor, in asserting that my report of the plague was political. God knows, that our politics in Barbary are never remarkable for refinement: they are, if any thing, rather too much in the John Bull style; and the finesse they gave me such credit for, was absolutely beyond my comprehension, as I never could discover what advantage a genuine well-established plague in Barbary could be to our country. ”

“ You Barbarians, who, a few generations ago, were cattle-thieves on the frontier of our empire, whom we slaughtered, enslaved, threw to the beasts by hundreds of thousands,--naked, starving beggars who gratefully picked up the crumbs flung to them by Roman generosity,--hence with you all, all, you wolves, you bulls, you bears, whom only bestial strength and God's permission--as a punishment for our sins--allowed to break into the Roman Empire! ”

“ The danger of employing foreign barbarians, who remained isolated amidst an innumerable population, and surrounded by hundreds of walled towns, manned [Pg 608] by their own municipal guards, was evidently less than that of entrusting legions of slaves with arms, and teaching them habits of combination and discipline. The servile wars, which inflicted a mortal wound on the Republic, would have been renewed, and would probably have soon destroyed the Empire. [12]
It is customary with historians to discourse on the impolicy of the Roman emperors in employing barbarian mercenaries ”

“ The Barbarians trust to their overwhelming numbers, and to the deafening clamour with which they charge, but if you resist them bravely, you will find them—it shames me to say so—nothing but a cowardly mob. ”

“ In vain you show individuals who do not exert the wickedness of the law. The Barbarism still endures, solemnly, legislatively, judicially attested in the very Slave Code, and proclaiming constantly the character of its authors. ”

“ The conduct of the Barbary powers, though unjust in principle, is suited to their prejudices, situation, and circumstances. The crusades of the church to exterminate them fixed in their minds the unobliterated belief that every Christian power was their mortal enemy. Their religious prejudices, therefore, suggest the policy, which their situation and circumstances protect them in. As a people, they are neither commercial nor agricultural, they neither import nor export, have no property floating on the seas, nor ships and cargoes in the ports of foreign nations. ”

“ Once more life resumed its normal course; but those times were the most wretched that mankind had yet experienced. The barbarians swarmed over the whole Empire. Their ways were uncouth, and as they nurtured feelings of vengeance and greed, they firmly believed in the ransom of sin. ”

“ The barbarians of Barbary had roused the wrath of England to an extreme pitch in consequence of a deed which did not, indeed, much excel their wonted atrocities, but which, being on a large scale, and very public, had attracted unusual attention—all the more that, about the same time, the European nations, having killed as many of each other as they thought advisable for that time, were comparatively set free to attend to so-called minor affairs. ”

“ But now, still another generation is rising up to witness and suffer a yet more perplexing and painful lapse into barbarism. Looking round the whole circuit of Christendom, we perceive, not only symptoms of disturbance and imminent peril of a general war in Europe, but a character of barbarism in both the warfare itself, and in the political facts which occasion it, which make us ask whether we are really living in the nineteenth century, and in the Commercial Period of civilisation. ”

“ Dreadful as the irruption of barbarians into civilized places must always be, even on a small scale, the conquest of civilization by barbarians is always and necessarily impossible. Barbarians may have the weight to destroy the civilization they enter, and in so doing to destroy themselves with it. ”

“ The kings of the Barbarians were frequently resisted, deposed, or murdered, by their native subjects, and the various bands of Italian mercenaries, who associated under the standard of an elective general, claimed a larger privilege of freedom and rapine. ”