Median Empire

“ Will the Empire, however, last? Does it rest on permanent foundations, or is it only a political organism in a certain stage of decomposition? Will the younger nations as they grow to maturity be content to remain within it, or will they ultimately go the way of the American Colonies before them, as was thought to be inevitable a generation ago? Obviously the Empire is in a state of transition, and if it is to endure, its constitution must undergo great modifications. ”

“ The progress of the people in science and art, in politics and military strength, was only seen in the larger secular territories, which, after 1648, enjoyed their own sovereignty; and even these were checked in their movements at every step by the remnants of the Imperial Constitution. The Members of the Empire alone, in whom the decaying remains of Mediæval existence still lingered on--the Ecclesiastical Princes--the small Counts--the Imperial Knights and the Imperial Towns,--clung to the Emperor and the Imperial Diet. ”

“ It is about the efforts of the Empire—on the whole, the successful efforts of the Empire—to keep itself intact within its walls and to keep the barbarians out. The pressure of those barbarians without, together with the weakened state of the Empire itself, has led to the division of the Eastern from the Western Empire. ”

“ Last among the powers which among them supplanted the Eastern Empire, comes the greatest and most terrible of all, that which overthrew the Empire itself and most of the states which arose out of its ruins, and which stands distinguished from all the rest by its abiding possession of the Imperial city. ”

“ Yet I can not but admit, however reluctantly, that there is some force in the arguments with which you support that course, based as they are upon your special and personal relation to that portion of the controversy which deals with Colonial preference. You have done more than any man, living or dead, to bring home to the citizens of the Empire the consciousness of Imperial obligation, and the interdependence between the various fragments into which the Empire is geographically divided. ”

“ The more powerful Electors and Princes,Condition of States of the Empire. who wished to establish a strong government, met with the same opposition from their vassals, their cities, and even their peasants, which they themselves offered to the Emperor; their provincial Diets were torn with the same dissensions as those which disturbed the Imperial Diet. Yet here, more surely than in the Empire, the authority of the ruler was asserting itself, based upon that principle of independent territorialism which was eventually to triumph. ”

“ Inside the Empire similar tendencies were at work, but with exactly opposite results. The interregnum in the Empire and a succession of weak rulers left the territorial princes free to imitate the rulers of Europe by strengthening their own power at the expense of the lower nobility, the cities, and the peasantry; but, having secured themselves, they used their increased strength to arrest the progress of centralisation and to prevent the development of a strong imperial power. ”

“ This is true only in the sense that the Empire's growth has been slow, normal, and unhurried, and that its strength has lain in the character of the people rather than in any consistent policy of aggression upon the part of their rulers. That it has been unconscious in the sense that it has been unobserved is, of course, disproved by the contemporary literature relating to imperial problems in almost every decade from the sixteenth 281century to the present day; while the wars of the entire seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were largely caused by trade and colonial questions. ”

“ It is not easy in imagination to thrust back the present leading empires of the earth into the contracted spheres of their not remote past. But to feel how a little confederacy of seven provinces loosely tied together by an ill- defined treaty could hold so prominent and often so controlling a place in the European system of the seventeenth century, we must remember that there was then no Germany, no Russia, no Italy, no United States of America, scarcely even a Great Britain in the sense which belongs to that mighty empire now. ”

“ Afterwards there is an internal imbalance, the spirit of conquest is lost, there is disintegration of the empire, reduction of the imperial body and afterwards, the development of the era of great demographic fractionation; if the nucleus of the empire is disintegrated, it is the second cycle. If it were the first, it would follow an evolution up to the phase of relative independence. ”

“ It seems designed as a lesson for the human race in the transitory nature of power applied from without.
The vast fabric passed with himself; was gone like a shadow when he was gone. The unity of the Empire was buried in the grave of its founder. In twenty-nine years (by the treaty of Verdun) three kingdoms emerged from the crumbling mass. France, Italy, Germany, already separated by race repulsions, had taken up each a distinct national existence, the Imperial crown remaining with Germany. ”

“ How much smaller, on the other hand, how much more simple and modest was she in the first century, a time when the Empire really was at its most flourishing epoch, with its frontiers safe, its population on the up-grade, its cities developing themselves by a process of growth which was still a perfectly natural one, agriculture, trade, and industries in a sound condition, and the State well organised and strong. ”

“ Now, as Britons who have felt the attraction of the Imperial ideal dimly see, the reconstituted Empire of their dreams would be specially fitted under the new conditions for the office of mediator between the great combinations around it, specially adapted to be the central or regulating State of the world in the coming time. It is here that we begin to perceive a reach of significance in their ideal wider than the merely esoteric, here that we find the connection between the Imperialism of to-day and the Imperialism of Rome in its grander aspects, or the sublime ideals of the Middle Ages. ”

“ In the seven centuries that had elapsed since the Second Empire had been founded on the shattered remnants of the First, the nobles of the Imperium had come slowly to realize that the empire was not to be judged by the examples of its predecessor. ”

“ The First Empire had conquered most of the known universe by political intrigue and sheer military strength; it had fallen because that same propensity for political intrigue had gained over every other strength of the Empire, and the various branches and sectors of the First Empire had begun to use it against one another. ”

“ Duplessis retains his faith in the Imperial dynasty; and that Imperialist party is much stronger than it appears on the surface. So many of the bourgeoisie recall with a sigh eighteen years of prosperous trade; so many of the military officers, so many of the civil officials, identify their career with the Napoleonic favour; and so many of the Priesthood, abhorring the Republic, always liable to pass into the hands of those who assail religion,—unwilling to admit the claim of the Orleanists, are at heart for the Empire. ”

“ We are trying to discover the germ of a new political organism, to arrive at a new political conception wider than nationality yet capable of finding a place for nationality, to discern a new political ideal. Now, the very breadth of these Empire States lifts them in a sense above mere nationalism, and gives them a certain universality. In all three there is present, in a greater or less degree, the element of nationality; while, on the other hand, all three owe their present breadth and greatness to the movement of conquest or expansion. ”

“ For quite thirty years great discontent with government had been felt by the peasants and lower classes in some of the central provinces of the empire, and a long while before the war with England broke out a peasant emperor had been proclaimed. ”

“ The empire which it had taken more than a millenium to build, which was the most noble and perhaps the most beneficient experiment in government that has ever been made, was in obvious economic and administrative decay by the middle of the fourth century. ”

“ Our Empire could play the part of the Imperator Pacificus for whom the Middle Ages longed, and it could do it, not by holding the nations of the earth in the iron grip of Rome, but while leaving full scope for the free play of the multitudinous forces of humanity in all their legitimate fields of action. ”

“ To the sublime system of the Middle Ages there had succeeded a chaos of warring nationalities and warring religions, amid which all hope of unity speedily disappeared. The very ideals of the Middle Ages perished or ceased to be intelligible. With the Reformation the Universal Church was shattered into fragments, and it soon began to be forgotten that the Universal Empire had ever claimed to be universal. ”

“ At the opening of the sixteenth century every established institution—political, social, and religious—was shaken and showed the rents and fissures caused by time and by the growth of a new life underneath it. The [37] empire—the Holy Roman—was in a parlous way as regarded its cohesion. The power of the princes, the representatives of local centralized authority, was proving itself too strong for the power of the Emperor, the recognized representative of centralized authority for the whole German-speaking world. ”

“ The first few years of his reign, which began in A.D. 306, were devoted to the establishment of his power in Britain, where the flower of the Western army was concentrated,--foreseeing a desperate contest with the five rivals who shared between them the Empire which Diocletian had divided; which division, though possibly a necessity in those turbulent times, would yet seem to have been an unwise thing, since it led to civil wars and rivalries, and struggles for supremacy. It is a mistake to divide a great empire, unless mechanism is worn out, and a central power is impossible. ”

“ The growing tendency towards centralization and the consequent suppression or curtailment of the local autonomies of the Middle Ages in the interests of some kind of national government, of which the political careers of Louis XI in France, of Edward IV in England, and of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain were such conspicuous instances, did not fail to affect in a lesser degree that loosely connected political system of German States known as the Holy Roman Empire. ”

“ But feudalism had at last met its master. With its decline before the national spirit, we are on the threshold of modern times.
The growth of national monarchies. The division of the Empire into local kingdoms, begun at the treaty of Verdun, paved the way for the modern idea of a national state. The Empire stifled the early possibilities of a German nation, and Empire and Papacy combined to make impossible an Italian nation. But in France other prospects arose. Through its virtual exclusion from the Empire, France had been delivered from some very real dangers. ”

“ The tendency of modern civilization is to a union of States, when their language and interests and institutions are identical. Yet Diocletian was wearied and oppressed by the burdens of State, and retired disgusted, dividing the Empire into two parts, the Eastern and Western. But there were subdivisions in consequence, and civil wars; and had the policy of Diocletian been continued, the Empire might have been subdivided, like Charlemagne's, until central power would have been destroyed, as in the Middle Ages. ”

“ Now, it might seem that the great change which has come over men's thoughts in the present generation, and which was alluded to in the opening sentences of this paper—the change that was there summed up in the phrase 'the national ideal has given place to the Imperial'-is nothing more than the transference to the movement of expansion of the political interest and attention that had previously been concentrated on the movement of national reorganization. ”

“ If we examine the constitution of the Empire, not as we should picture it to ourselves in Henry III. 's time, but as it had at length become—the legal independence of the several estates, the emptiness of the imperial dignity, the electiveness of a head, that afterwards exercised certain rights over the electors,—we are led to inquire not so much into the causes of its disintegration, for this concerns us little, as into the way in which it was held together. ”

“ As a result reliance for protection on a common defence and imperial organisation was abandoned. Feudalism replaced the Empire. The strong built fortress castles, the weak became their vassals. Local authorities—counts, dukes, lords, bishops, and abbots—saw new duties and new opportunities. They took a firmer hold, converted a delegated into an independent power, a personal into a territorial jurisdiction. ”

“ In the judgment of many good observers, a dissolution of the empire, so far as the Western colonies are concerned, is inevitable, unless Great Britain, adopting the plan urged by Franklin, becomes an imperial federation, with parliaments distinct and independent, the crown the only bond of union—the crown, and not the English parliament, being the titular and actual sovereign. ”

“ Parallel, however, with the process by which Europe has reorganized herself into national States, and with the movement of enfranchisement which has carried us to democracy, another great movement has been in progress, which is rather extensive than intensive in its significance, and which, though it has attracted far less attention than the former, is hardly less important in its bearing on the general political and international conditions of the time, and even more important in its bearing on the phenomenon with which we are primarily concerned—the British Empire. ”