weight to vicious taxation, which is but one wheel amongst a vast system
of wheels in the machinery of administration, and which, like many
similar agencies, tends oftentimes to react by many corrections upon its
own derangements; but subsequently he views as through a magnifying
glass even these original exaggerations when measured upon the scale of
moral obligations. Not only does false taxation ruin nations and defeat
the possibility of self-defence--which is much--but it cancels the
duties of allegiance. He tells us (p. 408) that 'amidst the ravages of
the Goths, Huns, and Avars, the imperial tax-gatherers had never failed
to enforce payment of the tribute as long as anything remained
undestroyed; though according to the rules of justice, the Roman
government had really forfeited its right to levy the taxes, as soon as
it failed to perform its duty in defending the population.' We do not
believe that the government succeeded in levying tribute vigorously
under the circumstances supposed; the science and machinery of
administration were far from having realized that degree of exquisite
skill. But, if the government _had_ succeeded, we cannot admit that this
relation of the parties dissolved their connection. To have failed at
any time in defending a province or an outwork against an overwhelming
enemy, _that_ for a prince or for a minister is a great misfortune.
Shocking indeed it were if this misfortune could be lawfully
interpreted as his crime, and made the parent of a second misfortune,
ratifying the first by authorizing revolt of the people; and the more
so, as that first calamity would encourage traitors everywhere to
prepare the way for the second as a means of impunity for their own
treason. In the prospect of escaping at once from the burdens of war,
and from the penalties of broken vows to their sovereign, multitudes
would from the first enter into compromise and collusion with an
invader; and in this way they would create the calamity which they
charged upon their rulers as a desertion; they would create the
embarrassments for their government by which they hoped to profit, and
they would do this with an eye to the reversionary benefit anticipated
under the maxim here set up. True, they would often find their heavy
disappointment in the more grievous yoke of that invader whom they had
aided. But the temptation of a momentary gain would always exist for the
improvident many, if such a maxim were received into the law of nations;
and, if it would not always triumph, we should owe it in that case to
the blessing that God has made nations proud. Even in the case where men
had received a license from public law for deserting their sovereign,
thanks be to the celestial pride which is in man, few and anomalous
would be the instances in which they really _would_ do so. In reality it
must be evident that, under such a rule of Publicists, subjects must
stand in perpetual doubt whether the case had emerged or not which law
contemplated as the dissolution of their fealty. No man would say that a
province was licensed to desert, because the central government had lost
a battle. But a whole campaign, or ten campaigns, would stand in the
same predicament as a solitary battle, so long as the struggle was not
formally renounced by the sovereign. How many years of absolute
abandonment might justify a provincial people in considering themselves
surrendered to their own discretion, is a question standing on the
separate circumstances of each separate case. But generally it may be
said, that a ruler will be presumed justly _not_ to have renounced the
cause of resistance so long as he makes no treaty or compromise with the
enemy, and so long as he desists from open resistance only through
momentary exhaustion, or with a view to more elaborate preparation.
Would ten battles, would a campaign, would ten campaigns lost, furnish
the justifying motive? Certainly it would be a false casuistry that
would say so.
Why did the Romans conquer the Greeks? By _why_ we mean, Upon what
principle did the children of Romulus overthrow the children of Ion,
Dorus, Æolus? Why did not these overthrow those? We, speak _Latino
more_--Vellem ostenderes quare _hi_ non profligaverint _illos_? The
answer is brief: the Romans were _one_, the Greeks were _many_. Whilst
no weighty pressure from without had assaulted Greece, it was of
particular service to that little rascally system that they were split
into sections more than ever we _have_ counted or mean to count. They
throve by mutual repulsion, according to the ballad:
When Captain X. kick'd Miss Roe, Miss Roe kick'd Captain X. again.'
Internally, for pleasant little domestic quarrels, the principle of
division was excellent; because, as often as the balance tended to
degravitation (a word we learned, as Juliet tells her nurse, 'from one
we danc'd withal'), _instanter_ it was redressed and trimmed by some
renegade going over to the suffering side. People talk of Athens being
beaten by the Spartans in the person of Lysander; and the vulgar notion
is, that the Peloponnesian war closed by an eclipse total and central
for our poor friend Athens. Nonsense! she had life left in her to kick
twenty such donkeys to death; and, if you look a very little ahead,
gazettes tell you, that before the peace of Antalcidas, those villains,
the Spartans (whom may heaven confound!) had been licked almost too
cruelly by the Athenians. And there it is that we insist upon closing
that one great intestine[18] war of the Greeks. So of other cases:
absolute defeat, final overthrow, we hold to be impossible for a Grecian
state, as against a Grecian state, under the conditions which existed
from the year 500 B.C. But when a foreign enemy came on, the
possibilities might alter. The foreigner, being one, and for the moment
at least united, would surely have a great advantage over the crowd of
little pestilent villains--right and left--that would be disputing the
policy of the case. There lay the original advantage of the Romans;
_one_ they were, and _one_ they were to the end of Roman time. Did you
ever hear of a Roman, unless it were Sertorius, that fought against
Romans? Whereas, scoundrel Greeks were always fighting against their
countrymen. Xenophon, in Persia, Alexander, seventy years later, met
with their chief enemies in Greeks. We may therefore pronounce with
firmness, that unity was one cause of the Roman superiority. What was
the other? Better military institutions. These, if we should go upon the
plan of rehearsing them, are infinite. But let us confine our view to
the separate mode in each people of combining their troops. In Greece,
the _phalanx_ was the ideal tactical arrangement; for Rome, the
_legion_. Everybody knows that Polybius, a Greek, who fled from the
Peloponnesus to Rome a little before the great Carthaginian war,
terminated by Scipio Africanus, has left a most interesting comparison
between the two forms of tactical arrangement: and, waiving the details,
the upshot is this--that the phalanx was a holiday arrangement, a
tournament arrangement, with respect to which you must suppose an excess
of luck if it could be made available, unless by mutual consent, under a
known possibility of transferring the field of battle to some smooth
bowling-green in the neighbourhood. But, on the other hand, the legion
was available everywhere. The _phalanx_ was like the organ, an
instrument almighty indeed where it can be carried; but it cost eight
hundred years to transfer it from Asia Minor to the court of Charlemagne
(_i.e._, Western Europe), so that it travelled at the rate of two miles
_per annum_; but the _legion_ was like the violin, less terrifically
tumultuous, but more infinite than the organ, whilst it is in a perfect
sense portable. Pitch your camp in darkness, on the next morning
everywhere you will find ground for the _legion_, but for the fastidious
_phalanx_ you need as much choice of ground as for the arena of an opera
stage.
And the same influence that had tended to keep the Greeks in division,
without a proper unity, operated also to infect the national character
at last with some lack of what may be called self-sufficiency. They were
in their later phases subtle, but compliant, more ready to adapt
themselves to changes than to assert a position and risk all in the
effort to hold it. Hence it came that even the most honourable and
upright amongst a nation far nobler in a moral sense (nobler, for
instance, on the scale of capacity for doing and suffering) never rose
to a sentiment of respect for the ordinary Grecian. The Romans viewed
him as essentially framed for ministerial offices. Am I sick? Come,
Greek, and cure me. Am I weary? Amuse me. Am I diffident of power to
succeed? Cheer me with flattery. Am I issuing from a bath? Shampoo me.
The point of view under which we contemplate the Romans is one which
cannot be dispensed with in that higher or transcendental study of
history now prompted by the vast ferment of the meditative mind. Oh,
feeble appreciators of the public mind, who can imagine even in dreams
that this generation--self-questioned, agitated, haunted beyond any
other by the elementary problems of our human condition, by the awful
_whence_ and the more awful _whither_, by what the Germans call the
'riddle of the universe,' and oppressed into a rebellious impatience by
'The burthen of the mystery
Of all this unintelligible world,'
--that this, above all generations, is shallow, superficial, unfruitful?
That was a crotchet of the late S. T. Coleridge's; that was a crotchet
of the present W. Wordsworth's, but which we will venture to guess that
he has now somewhat modified since this generation has become just to
himself. No; as to the multitude, in no age can it be other than
superficial. But we do contend, with intolerance and scorn of such
opposition as usually we meet, that the tendencies of this generation
are to the profound; that by all its natural leanings, and even by its
infirmities, it travels upwards on the line of aspiration and downwards
in the direction of the unfathomable. These tendencies had been
awakened and quickened by the vast convulsions that marked the close of
the last century. But war is a condition too restless for sustained
meditation. Even the years _after_ war, if that war had gathered too
abundantly the vintages of tears and tragedy and change, still rock and
undulate with the unsubsiding sympathies which wars such as we have
known cannot but have evoked. Besides that war is by too many issues
connected with the practical; the service of war, by the arts which it
requires, and the burthen of war, by the discussions which it prompts,
almost equally tend to alienate the public mind from the speculation
which looks beyond the interests of social life. But when a new
generation has grown up, when the forest trees of the elder generation
amongst us begin to thicken with the intergrowth of a younger shrubbery
that had been mere ground-plants in the æra of war, _then_ it is, viz.,
under the heavenly lull and the silence of a long peace, which in its
very uniformity and the solemnity of its silence has something analogous
to the sublime tranquillity of a Zaarrah, that minds formed for the
great inquests of meditation--feeling dimly the great strife which they
did not witness, and feeling it the more deeply because for _them_ an
idealized retrospect, and a retrospect besides being potently contrasted
so deeply with the existing atmosphere, peaceful as if it had never
known a storm--are stimulated preternaturally to those obstinate
questionings which belong of necessity to a complex state of society,
turning up vast phases of human suffering under all varieties, phases
which, having issued from a chaos of agitation, carry with them too
certain a promise of sooner or later revolving into a chaos of equal
sadness, universal strife. It is the relation of the immediate isthmus
on which we stand ourselves to a past and (prophetically speaking) to a
coming world of calamity, the relation of the smiling and halcyon calm
which we have inherited to that darkness and anarchy out of which it
arose, and towards which too gloomily we augur its return--this relation
it is which enforces the other impulses, whether many or few, connecting
our own transitional stage of society with objects always of the same
interest for man, but not felt to be of the same interest. The sun, the
moon, and still more the starry heavens alien to our own peculiar
system--what a different importance in different ages have they had for
man! To man armed with science and glasses, labyrinths of anxiety and
study; to man ignorant or barbarous less interesting than glittering
points of dew. At present those 'other impulses,' which the permanent
condition of modern society, so multitudinous and feverish, adds to the
meditative impulses of our particular and casual condition as respects a
terrific revolutionary war, are _not_ few, but many, and are all in one
direction, all favouring, none thwarting, the solemn fascinations by
which with spells and witchcraft the shadowy nature of man binds him
down to look for ever into this dim abyss. The earth, whom with
sublimity so awful the poet apostrophized after Waterloo, as 'perturbed'
and restless exceedingly, whom with a harp so melodious and beseeching
he adjured to rest--and again to rest from instincts of war so deep,
haunting the very rivers with blood, and slumbering not through
three-and-twenty years of woe--is again unsealed from slumber by the
mere reaction of the mighty past working together with the too probable
future and with the co-agencies from the unintelligible present. The
fervour and the strife of human thought is but the more subtle for
being less derived from immediate action, and more so from hieroglyphic
mysteries or doubts concealed in the very shows of life. The centres of
civilization seethe, as it were, and are ebullient with the agitation of
the self-questioning heart.
The fervour is universal; the tumult of intellectual man, self-tormented
with unfathomable questions, is contagious everywhere. And both from
what we know, it might be perceived _à priori_, and from what we see, it
may be known experimentally, that never was the mind of man roused into
activity so intense and almost morbid as in this particular stage of our
progress. And it has added enormously to this result--that it is
redoubled by our own consciousness of our own state so powerfully
enforced by modern inventions, whilst the consciousness again is
reverberated from a secondary mode of consciousness. All studies
prosper; all, with rare exceptions, are advancing only too impetuously.
Talent of every order is almost become a weed amongst us.
But this would be a most unreasonable ground for charging it upon our
time and country that they are unprogressive and commonplace. Nay,
rather, it is a ground for regarding the soil as more prepared for the
seed that is sown broadcast. And before our England lies an ample
possibility--to outstrip even Rome itself in the extent and the grandeur
of an empire, based on principles of progress and cohesion such as Rome
never knew.
FURTHER NOTES FOR ARTICLE ON MR. FINLAY'S HISTORY.
_Civilization._--Now about prisoners, strange as this may seem, it
really is not settled whether and how far it is the duty in point of
honour and reasonable forbearance to make prisoners. At Quatre Bras very
few were made by the French, and the bitterness, the frenzy of hatred
which this marked, led of necessity to a reaction.
But the strangest thing of all is this, that in a matter of such a
nature it should be open to doubt and mystery whether it is or is not
contradictory, absurd, and cancellatory or obligatory to make prisoners.
Look here, the Tartars in the Christian war, not from cruelty--at least,
no such thing is proved--but from mere coercion of what they regarded as
good sense the Tartars thought it all a blank contradiction to take and
not kill enemies. It seemed equal to taking a tiger laboriously and at
much risk in a net, then next day letting him go. Strange it is to say,
but it really requires an express experience to show the true practical
working of the case, and this demonstrates (inconceivable as that would
have been to the Tartars) that the capture is quite equal (quoad damage
to the enemy) to the killing.
(1.) As to durability, was it so? The Arabs were not strong except
against those who were peculiarly weak; and even in Turkey the Christian
Rajah predominates.
(2.) As to bigotry and principles of toleration Mr. Finlay says--and we
do not deny that he is right in saying--they arose in the latter stages.
This, however, was only from policy, because it was not safe to be so;
and repressed only from caution.
(3) About the impetuosity of the Arab assaults. Not what people think.
(4.) About the permanence or continuance of this Mahometan system--we
confound the religious system with the political. The religious movement
engrafted itself on other nations, translated and inoculated itself upon
other political systems, and thus, viz., as a principle travelling
through or along new machineries, propagated itself. But here is a deep
delusion. What should we Europeans think of an Oriental historian who
should talk of the Christians amongst the Germans, English, French,
Spaniards, as a separate and independent nation? My friend, we should
say, you mistake that matter. The Christians are not a local tribe
having an insulated local situation amongst Germans, French, etc. The
Christians _are_ the English, Germans, etc., or the English, Germans,
French, _are_ the Christians. So do many readers confer upon the Moslems
or Mahometans of history a separate and independent unity.
(_a_) Greek administration had a vicarious support.
(_b_) Incapacity of Eastern nations to establish primogeniture.
(_c_) Incapacity of Eastern nations to be progressive.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] '_Lackington's counter_': Lackington, an extensive seller of old
books and a Methodist (see his _Confessions_) in London, viz., at the
corner of Finsbury Square, about the time of the French Revolution,
feeling painfully that this event drew more attention than himself,
resolved to turn the scale in his own favour by a _ruse_ somewhat
unfair. The French Revolution had no counter; he _had_, it was circular,
and corresponded to a lighted dome above. Round the counter on a summer
evening, like Phæton round the world, the Edinburgh, the Glasgow, the
Holyhead, the Bristol, the Exeter, and the Salisbury Royal Mails, all
their passengers on board, and canvas spread, swept in, swept round, and
swept out at full gallop; the proximate object being to publish the
grandeur of his premises, the ultimate object to publish himself.
[13] 'Dependent upon _physical_ circumstances,' and, amongst those
physical circumstances, intensely upon climate. The Jewish ordinances,
multiplied and burthensome as they must have been found under any
mitigations, have proved the awfulness (if we may so phrase it) of the
original projectile force which launched them by continuing to revolve,
and to propagate their controlling functions through forty centuries
under all latitudes to which any mode of civilization has reached. But
the _Greek_ machineries of social life were absolutely and essentially
limited by nature to a Grecian latitude. Already from the earliest
stages of their infancy the Greek cities or rural settlements in the
Tauric Chersonese, and along the shores (Northern and Eastern) of the
Black Sea, had been obliged to unrobe themselves of their native Grecian
costumes in a degree which materially disturbed the power of the Grecian
literature as an influence for the popular mind. This effect of a new
climate to modify the influence of a religion or the character of a
literature is noticed by Mr. Finlay. Temples open to the heavens,
theatres for noonday light and large enough for receiving 30,000
citizens--these could no longer be transplanted from sunny regions of
Hymettus to the churlish atmospheres which overcast with gloom so
perpetual poor Ovid's sketches of his exile. Cherson, it is true, in the
Tauric Chersonese, survived down to the middle of the tenth century; so
much is certain from the evidence of a Byzantine emperor; and Mr. Finlay
is disposed to think that this famous little colonial state retained her
Greek 'municipal organization.' If this could be proved, it would be a
very interesting fact; it is, at any rate, interesting to see this saucy
little outpost of Greek civilization mounting guard, as it were, at so
great a distance from the bulwark of Christianity (the city of
Constantine), under whose mighty shadow she had so long been sheltered,
and maintaining _by whatever means_ her own independence. But, if her
municipal institutions were truly and permanently Greek, then it would
be a fair inference that to a Grecian mechanism of society she had been
indebted for her Grecian tenacity of life. And this is Mr. Finlay's
inference. Otherwise, and for our own parts, we should be inclined to
charge her long tenure of independence upon her strong situation,
rendered for _her_ a thousand times stronger by the two facts of her
commerce in the first place, and secondly, of her commerce being
maritime. Shipping and trade seem to us the two anchors by which she
rode.
[14] 'Nook-shotten,' an epithet applied by Shakspeare to England.
[15] Christianity is a force of unity. But was Paganism such? No. To be
idolatrous is no bond of union.
[16] See Murder as one of the Fine Arts. (Postscript in 1854.)
[17] '_Under the same tactics_'--the tactics of 'refusing' her columns
to the enemy. On this subject we want an elaborate memoir
historico-geographical revising every stage of the Roman warfare in
Pers-Armenia, from Crassus and Ventidius down to Heraclius--a range of
six and a half centuries; and specifically explaining why it was that
almost always the Romans found it mere destruction to attempt a passage
much beyond the Tigris or into central Persia, whilst so soon after
Heraclius the immediate successors of Mahomet overflowed Persia like a
deluge.
[18] 'Intestine war.' Many writers call the Peloponnesian war (by the
way, a very false designation) the great _civil_ war of Greece.
'Civil'!--it might have been such, had the Grecian states had a central
organ which claimed a common obedience.
_III. THE ASSASSINATION OF CÆSAR._