because the details are lost in the wilderness of years, must we
disregard the political economy in the early Assyrian combinations of
the human race. The details are lost for political economy as a cause,
and the details are equally lost of the wars and the revolutions which
were its effects. But in coming more within the light of authentic
history, I contend that political economy is better known, and that in
that proportion it explains much of what ought to be known. For example,
I contend that the condition of Athens, for herself and for the rest of
the Greek confederacy, nay, the entire course of the Athenian wars, of
all that Athens did or forbore to do, her actions alike, and her
omissions, are to be accounted for, and lie involved in the statistics
of her fiscal condition.
IX.--_Geography._--Look next at geography. The consideration of this
alone throws a new light on history. Every country that is now or will
be, has had some of its primary determinations impressed upon its policy
and institutions; nay, upon its feeling and character, which is the well
of its policy, by its geographical position: that is, by its position
as respects climate in the first place, secondly, as respects neighbours
(_i.e._, enemies), whether divided by mountains, rivers, deserts, or the
great desert of the sea--or divided only by great belts of land--a
passable solitude. Thirdly, as respects its own facilities and
conveniences for raising food, clothing, luxuries. Indeed, not only is
it so moulded and determined as to its character and aspects, but
oftentimes even as to its very existence.
Many have noticed wisely and truly in the physical aspect of Asia and
the South of Caucasus, that very destiny of slavery and of partition
into great empires, which has always hung over them. The great plains of
Asia fit it for the action of cavalry and vast armies--by which the fate
of generations is decided in a day; and at the same time fit it for the
support of those infinite myriads without object, which make human life
cheap and degraded. That this was so is evident from what Xenophon
tells.
On the other hand, many have seen in the conformation of Greece
revolving round a nucleus able to protect in case of invasion, yet cut
up into so many little chambers, of which each was sacred from the
intrusion of the rest during the infancy of growth, the solution of all
the marvels which Grecian history unfolds.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] This distinction is of some consequence. Else the student would be
puzzled at finding [which is really the truth] that, after the Twelve
Cæsars and the five patriotic emperors who succeeded them, we know less
of the Roman princes through centuries after the Christian era, than of
the Roman Consuls through a space of three centuries preceding the
Christian era. In fact, except for a few gossiping and merely _personal_
anecdotes communicated by the Augustan History and a few other
authorities, we really know little of the most illustrious amongst the
Roman emperors of the West, beyond the fact (all but invariable) that
they perished by assassination. But still this darkness is not of the
same nature, nor owing to the same causes, as the Grecian darkness prior
to the Olympiads.
[21] Except, indeed, by the barbarous contrivance of cutting away some
letters from a name, and then filling up their place with other letters
which, by previous agreement, have been rendered significant of
arithmetic numbers. This is the idea on which the _Memoria Technica_ of
Dr. Grey proceeds. More appropriately it might have been named _Memoria
Barbarica_, for the dreadful violence done to the most beautiful,
rhythmical, and melodious names would, at any rate, have remained as a
repulsive expression of barbarism to all musical ears, had the practical
benefits of this machinery been all that they profess to be. Meantime
these benefits are really none at all. They offer us a mere mockery,
defeating with one hand what they accomplish with the other.
[22] It is all but an impossible problem for a nation in the situation
of Greece to send down a record to a posterity distant by five
centuries, to overlap the gulf of years between the point of
starting--the absolute now of commencement and the remote generation at
which you take aim. Trust to tradition, not to the counsel of one man.
But tradition is buoyant.
[23] _Crusade._--There seems a contradiction in the very terms of
Pagan--that is, non-Christian, and Crusade--that is, warfare
symbolically Christian. But, by a license not greater than is often
practised in corresponding circumstances, the word Crusade may be used
to express any martial expedition amongst a large body of confederate
nations having or representing an imaginative (not imaginary) interest
or purpose with no direct profession of separate or mercenary object for
each nation apart.
[24] The truths of Scripture are of too vast a compass, too much like
the Author of those truths--illimitable and incapable of verbal
circumscription, and, besides, are too much diffused through many
collateral truths, too deeply echoed and reverberated by trains of
correspondences and affinities laid deep in nature, and above all, too
affectingly transcribed in the human heart, ever to come within the
compass or material influence of a few words this way or that; any more
than all eternity can be really and locally confined within a little
golden ring which is assumed for its symbol. The same thing, I repeat,
may be said of chronology and its accidents. The chronologies of
Scripture, its prophetic weeks of Daniel, and its mysterious æons of the
Apocalypse, are too awful in their realities, too vast in their sweep
and range of application, to be controlled or affected by the very
utmost errors that could arise from lapse of time or transcription
unrevised. And the more so, because errors that by the supposition are
errors of accident, cannot all point in one direction: one would be
likely in many cases to compensate another. But, finally, I would make
this frank acknowledgment to a young pupil without fear that it could
affect her reverence for Scripture. It is of the very grandeur of
Scripture that she can afford to be negligent of her chronology. Suppose
this case: suppose the Scriptures protected by no special care or
providence; suppose no security, no barrier to further errors, to have
arisen from the discovery of printing--suppose the Scriptures to be in
consequence transcribed for thousands of years--even in that case the
final result would be this: it would be (and in part perhaps it really
is) true or not true as to its minor or petty chronology--not true, as
having been altered insensibly like any human composition where the
internal sense was not of a nature to maintain its integrity. True, even
as to trifles, in that sense which the majestic simplicity and
self-conformity of truth in a tale originally true would guarantee, it
might yet be, because of the grandeur of the main aim, and the sense of
deeper relations and the perception of verisimilitude.
[25] '_A New Slave Country_'--and this for more reasons than one. Slaves
were growing dearer in Rome; secondly, a practice had been for some time
increasing amongst the richest of the noble families in Rome, of growing
household bodies of gladiators, by whose aid they fought the civic
battles of ambition; and thirdly, as to Cæsar in particular, he had
raised and equipped a whole legion out of his own private funds, and, of
course, for his own private service; so that he probably looked to
Britain as a new quarry from which he might obtain the human materials
of his future armies, and also as an arena or pocket theatre, in which
he could organize and discipline these armies secure from jealous
observation.
[26] Here the pupil will naturally object--was not Judæa an Asiatic
land? And did not Judæa act upon Europe? Doubtless; and in the sublimest
way by which it is possible for man to act upon man; not only through
the highest and noblest part of man's nature, but (as most truly it may
be affirmed) literally creating, in a practical sense, that nature. For,
to say nothing of the sublime idea of Redemption as mystically involved
in the types and prophecies of Jewish prophets, and in the very
ceremonies of the Jewish religion, what was the very highest ideal of
God which man--philosophic man even--had attained, compared with that of
the very meanest Jew? It is false to say that amongst the philosophers
of Greece or Rome the Polytheistic creed was rejected. No Pagan
philosopher ever adopted, ever even conceived, the sublime of the Jewish
God--as a being not merely of essential unity, but as deriving from that
unity the moral relations of a governor and a retributive judge towards
human creatures. So that Judæa bore an office for the human race of a
most awful and mysterious sanctity. But (and partly for that reason) the
civil and social relations of Judæa to the human race were less than
nothing. And thence arose the intolerant scorn of such writers as
Tacitus for the Christians, whom, of course, they viewed as Jews, and
nothing _but_ Jews. Thus far they were right--that, as a nation, valued
upon the only scale known to politicians, the Jews brought nothing at
all to the common fund of knowledge or civilization. One element of
knowledge, however, the Jews did bring, though at that time unknown, and
long after, for want of historic criticism in the history of chronologic
researches, viz., a chronology far superior to that of the Septuagint,
as will be shown farther on, and far superior to the main guides of
Paganism. But the reason why this superiority of chronology will, after
all, but little avail the general student is, that it relates merely to
the Assyrian or Persian princes in their intercourse with the courts of
Jerusalem or of Samaria.
[27] Juba, King of Mauritania, during the struggle of Cæsar and Pompey.
[28] Which clannish feeling, be it observed, always depends for its life
and intensity upon the comparison with others; as they are despised, in
that ratio rises the clannish self-estimation. Whereas the nobler pride
of a Roman patriotism is [Greek: autarkês] and independent of external
relations. Nothing is more essentially opposed, though often confounded
under the common name of patriotism, than the love of country in a Roman
or English sense, and the spirit of clannish jealousy.
[29] This it was (a circumstance overlooked by many who have written on
the Roman literature), this destiny announced and protected by early
auguries, which made the idea of Rome a great and imaginative idea. The
patriotism of the Grecian was, as indicated in an earlier note, a mean,
clannish feeling, always courting support to itself, and needing support
from imaginary 'barbarism' in its enemies, and raising itself into
greatness by means of _their_ littleness. But with the nobler Roman
patriotism was a very different thing. The august destiny of his own
eternal city [observe--'_eternal_,' not in virtue of history, but of
prophecy, not upon the retrospect and the analogies of any possible
experience, but by the necessity of an aboriginal doom], a city that was
to be the centre of an empire whose circumference is everywhere, did not
depend for any part of its majesty upon the meanness of its enemies; on
the contrary, in the very grandeur of those enemies lay, by a rebound of
the feelings inevitable to a Roman mind, the paramount grandeur of that
awful Republic which had swallowed them all up.
[30] I do not mean to deny the casual intercourse between Rome and
particular cities of Greece, which sometimes flash upon us for a moment
in the earliest parts of the Roman annals: what I am insisting upon, is
the absence of all national or effectual intercourse.
[31] Even an attorney, however [according to an old story, which I much
fear is a Joe Miller, but which ought to be fact], is not so rigorous as
to allow of no latitude, for, having occasion to send a challenge with
the stipulation of fighting at twelve paces, upon 'engrossing' this
challenge the attorney directed his clerk to add--'Twelve paces, be the
same more or less.' And so I say of the Olympiad--'777 years, be the
same more or less.'
[32] And finally, were it necessary to add one word by way of
reconciling the student to the substitution of 777 for 776, it might be
sufficient to remind him that, even in the rigour of the minutest
calculus, when the 776 years are fully accomplished--to prove which
accomplishment we must suppose some little time over and above the 776
to have elapsed--then this surplus, were it but a single hour, throws us
at once into the 777th year. This was, in fact, the oversight which
misled a class of disputants, whom I hope the reader is too young to
remember, but whom I, alas! remember too well in the year 1800. They
imagined and argued that the eighteenth century closed upon the first
day of the year 1800. New Year's Day of the year 1799, they understood
as the birthday of the Christian Church, proclaiming it to be then 1799
years old, not as commencing its 1799th year. And so on. Pye, the Poet
Laureate of that day, in an elaborate preface to a secular ode, argued
the point very keenly. It is certain (though not evident at first sight)
that in the year 1839 the Christian period of time is not, as children
say, '_going of_' 1840, but going of 1839: whereas the other party
contend that it is in its 1840th year, tending in short to become that
which it will actually be on its birthday, _i.e._, on the calends of
January, or _le Jour de l'an_, or New Year's Day of 1840.
[33] See note immediately preceding on previous page.
[34] '_With impunity._'--There is no one point in which I have found a
more absolute coincidence of opinion amongst all profound thinkers,
English, German, and French, when discussing the philosophy of
education, than this great maxim--_that the memory ought never to be
exercised in a state of insulation_, that is, in those blank efforts of
its strength which are accompanied by no law or logical reason for the
thing to be remembered; by no such reason or principle of dependency as
could serve to recall it in after years, when the burthen may have
dropped out of the memory. The reader will perhaps think that I, the
writer of this little work, have a pretty strong and faithful memory,
when I tell him that every word of it, with all its details, has been
written in a situation which sternly denied me the use of books bearing
on my subject. A few volumes of rhetorical criticism and of polemic
divinity, that have not, nor, to my knowledge, could have furnished me
with a solitary fact or date, are all the companions of my solitude.
Other voice than the voice of the wind I have rarely heard. Even my
quotations are usually from memory, though not always, as one out of
three, perhaps, I had fortunately written down in a pocket-book; but no
one date or fact has been drawn from any source but that of my
unassisted memory. Now, this useful sanity of the memory I ascribe
entirely to the accident of my having escaped in childhood all such
mechanic exercises of the memory as I have condemned in the text--to
this accident, combined with the constant and severe practice I have
given to my memory, in working and sustaining immense loads of facts
that had been previously brought under logical laws.
[35] '_The long careering of an earthquake._'--It is remarkable, and was
much noticed at the time by some German philosophers, that the
earthquake which laid Lisbon in ruins about ninety-five years ago, could
be as regularly traced through all its stages for some days previous to
its grand _finale_, as any thief by a Bow Street officer. It passed
through Ireland and parts of England; in particular it was dogged
through a great part of Leicestershire; and its rate of travelling was
not so great but that, by a series of telegraphs, timely notice might
have been sent southwards that it was coming. [The Lisbon earthquake
occurred in 1755; so that this paper must have been written about 1849
or 1850.--ED.]
[36] '_The exact personality._'--The historical personality, or complete
identification of an individual, lies in the whole body of circumstances
that would be sufficient to determine him as a responsible agent in a
court of justice. Archbishop Usher and others fancy that Sardanapalus
was the son of Pul; guided merely by the sound of a syllable.
Tiglath-Pileser, some fancy to be the same person as Sardanapalus;
others to be the very rebel who overthrew Sardanapalus. In short, all is
confused and murky to the very last degree. And the reader who fancies
that some accurate chronological characters are left, by which the era
of Sardanapalus can be more nearly determined than it is determined
above, viz., as generally coinciding with the era of Romulus and of the
Greek Olympiad, is grossly imposed upon.
[37] '_And Asiatic._'--_Asiatic_, let the pupil observe, and not merely
Assyrian; for the Assyria of this era represents all that was afterwards
Media, Persia, Chaldæa, Babylonia, and Syria. No matter for the exact
limits of the Assyrian empire, which are as indistinct in space as in
time. Enough that no Asiatic State is known as distinct from this
empire.
[38] And this is so exceedingly striking, that I am much surprised at
the learned disputants upon the era of Homer having failed to notice
this argument; especially when we see how pitiably poor they are in
probabilities or presumptions of any kind. The miserable shred of an
argument with those who wish to carry up Homer as high as any colourable
pretext will warrant, is this, that he must have lived pretty near to
the war which he celebrates, inasmuch as he never once alludes to a
great revolutionary event in the Peloponnesus. Consequently, it is
argued, Homer did not live to witness that revolution. Yet he must have
witnessed it, if he had lived at the distance of eighty years from the
capture of Troy; for such was the era of that event, viz., the return of
the Heraclidæ. Now, in answer to this, it is obvious to say that
negations prove little. Homer has failed to notice, has omitted to
notice, or found no occasion for noticing, scores of great facts
contemporary with Troy, or contemporary with himself, which yet must
have existed for all that. In particular, he has left us quite in the
dark about the great empires, and the great capitals on the Euphrates
and the Tigris, and the Nile; and yet it was of some importance to have
noticed the relation in which the kingdom of Priam stood to the great
potentates on those rivers. The argument, therefore, drawn from the
non-notice of the Heraclidæ, is but trivial. On the other hand, an
argument of some strength for a lower era as the true era of Homer, may
be drawn from the much slighter colouring of the marvellous, which in
Homer's treatment of the story attaches to the _Iliad_, than to the
_Seven against Thebes_. In the Iliad we have the mythologic marvellous
sometimes; the marvellous of necessity surrounding the gods and their
intercourse with men; but we have no Amphiaraus swallowed up by the
earth, no Oedipus descending into a mysterious gulf at the summons of an
unseen power. And beyond all doubt the shield of Achilles, supposing it
no interpolation of a later age, argues a much more advanced state of
the arts of design, etc., than the shields, (described by Æschylus, as
we may suppose, from ancient traditions preserved in the several
families), of the seven chiefs who invaded Thebes.
[39] '_Seven-gated_,' both as an expression which recalls the subject of
the Romance (the Seven Anti-Theban Chieftains), and as one which
distinguishes this Grecian Thebes from the Egyptian Thebes; that being
called _Hekatómpylos_, or _Hundred-gated_. Of course some little
correction will always be silently applied to the general expression, so
as to meet the difference between the two generations that served at
Troy and in the Argonautic expedition, and again between David and his
son. If the elder generation be fixed to the year 1000, then 1000
_minus_ 30 will express the era of the younger; if the younger be fixed
to the year 1000, then 1000 _plus_ 30 will express the era of the elder.
Or, better still, 1000 may be taken as the half-way era in which both
generations met; that era in which the father was yet living and active,
whilst the son was already entering upon manhood; that era, for
instance, at which David was still reigning, though his son Solomon had
been crowned. On this plan, no correction at all will be required; 15
years on each side of the 1000 will mark the two terms within which the
events and persons range; and the 1000 will be the central point of the
period.
[40] Elam is the Scriptural name for Persia.
[41] 'Alala! Alala!' the war cry of Eastern armies.
[42] And for the very reason that political economy had but a small
share in determining the war of the year A, it became not so much a
great force as the sole force for putting an end to the war of the year
D.
_VI. CHRYSOMANIA; OR, THE GOLD-FRENZY IN ITS PRESENT STAGE._
Some time back I published in this journal a little paper on the
Californian madness--for madness I presumed it to be, and upon two
grounds. First, in so far as men were tempted into a lottery under the
belief that it was _not_ a lottery; or, if it really _were_ such, that
it was a lottery without blanks. Secondly, in so far as men were tempted
into a transitory speculation under the delusion that it was not
transitory, but rested on some principle of permanence. We have since
seen the Californian case repeated, upon a scale even of exaggerated
violence, in Australia. There also, if great prizes seemed to be won in
a short time, it was rashly presumed that something like an equitable
distribution of these prizes took place. Supposing ten persons to have
obtained £300 in a fortnight, people failed to observe that, if divided
amongst the entire party of which these ten persons formed a section,
the £300 would barely have yielded average wages. In one instance a very
broad illustration of this occurred in the early experience of Victoria.
A band of seven thousand people had worked together; whether simply in
the sense of working as neighbours in the same local district, or in the
commercial sense of working as partners, I do not know, nor is it
material to know. The result sounded enormous, when stated in a
fragmentary way with reference to particular days, and possibly in
reference also to particular persons, distinguished for luck, but on
taking the trouble to sum up the whole amount of labourers, of days, and
of golden ounces extracted, it did not appear that the wages to each
individual could have averaged quite so much as twenty shillings a week,
supposing the total product to have been on that principle of
participation. Very possibly it was _not_; and in that case the gains of
some individuals may have been enormous. But a prudent man, if he quits
a certainty or migrates from a distance, will compute his prospects upon
this scale of averages, and assuredly not upon the accidents of
exceptional luck. The instant objection will be, that such luck is _not_
exceptional, but represents the ordinary case. Let us consider. The
reports are probably much exaggerated; and something of the same
machinery for systematic exaggeration is already forming itself as
operated so beneficially for California. As yet, however, it is not
absolutely certain that the reports themselves, taken literally, would
exactly countenance the romantic impressions drawn from those reports by
the public.