Note: Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries. See
https://archive.org/details/greatergreecegre00freeuoft
Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Some characters (especially Greek letters) might not
display properly, in which case the reader should consult
the original pages at Internet Archice (see above).
CONTENTS
PAGE
Greater Greece and Greater Britain 1
George Washington, the Expander of Britain 66
Appendix 104
GREATER GREECE AND GREATER BRITAIN
AND
GEORGE WASHINGTON THE EXPANDER OF ENGLAND
Two Lectures
With an Appendix
by
EDWARD A. FREEMAN, D.C.L., LL.D.
Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford
London
Macmillan and Co.
1886
[All rights reserved]
[Illustration]
Oxford
Printed by Horace Hart, Printer to the University
PREFACE.
These two lectures were given quite independently, the former to the
Students’ Association at Edinburgh on December 22nd, 1885, and the
latter as a public lecture in the University of Oxford on Washington’s
birthday, February 22nd, 1886. As they were written for two different
audiences, and as one leading idea ran through both, there was
naturally a good deal of repetition, sometimes even to the very words.
This I have, in revising them for the press, done my best to get rid
of. They appear now as two discourses, looking at the same general
subject from two somewhat different points of view, and each putting
different points more prominently forward. To these I have added,
as an Appendix, such parts as were not immediately temporary of an
article which appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine for April, 1885, under
the heading of “Imperial Federation.” In this article, written only to
be read and not to be heard, some points which were treated in a more
rhetorical way in the lectures are dealt with in a style of more minute
argument. It seemed therefore to make a fitting commentary on the
lectures.
CAHORS,
_April 7th, 1886_.
GREATER GREECE AND GREATER BRITAIN.
The name of Greater Britain is one which of late years has become
strangely familiar. It is possible that a generation back the words
might have fallen harshly on patriotic ears. We were then used to
believe that the Britain in which we lived was so great that there
could be none greater. The name of “Great Britain” was perhaps used
without any very clear notion of its history; but it was at least
accepted as implying greatness of some kind. Whatever may have been
the exact meaning with which the name of “Greater Britain” was first
brought in, it was, we may be sure, suggested by the seemingly older
phrase of “Great Britain.” Those who first spoke of “Greater Britain”
perhaps hardly knew that the name is as old as that of “Great Britain,”
and, more than this, that “Great Britain” and “Greater Britain” are
in truth phrases of exactly the same meaning. I would not venture
to say how much older the name of “Magna Britannia” may be than its
somewhat irregular employment in the royal style by James Sixth and
First. But “Greater Britain,” “Major Britannia,” is undoubtedly as old
as the twelfth century. We perhaps sometimes forget that, besides this
our isle of Britain, there is another Britain on the continent, no
other than the land which, by a slight change of ending, we commonly
call Britanny. But in Latin and in French the two names are the same,
_Britannia_ and _Bretagne_. The one land is _Bretagne_, the other
is _Grande-Bretagne_; the one is _Britannia minor_, the other is
_Britannia major_. In short, the Britain of the island, the Great or
Greater Britain, was so called simply to distinguish it from the Lesser
Britain on the mainland.
Here, be it remarked, the Greater Britain is the older, the Lesser
is the younger; the Greater is the mother-country, the Lesser is the
colony. The Lesser Britain of the mainland never took that name till
it was settled by men fleeing from the Greater Britain in the island.
Now in the sense in which we have of late years heard the phrase
“Greater Britain,” all this has been turned the other way. “Great
Britain” is not simply opposed to a Lesser Britain; it is opposed to a
Britain which is confessedly great, but, it would seem, not so great
as the Greater. And of these the one which is simply Great is the
elder; the Greater is the younger; the Great is the mother-country, the
ruling country; the Lesser is the plantation, the dependency, or rather
an aggregate of plantations and dependencies all over the world. The
change, the contrast, between the old use of “Major Britannia” and the
new use of “Greater Britain” is so very singular that one is driven to
ask whether those who brought in the new use ever had the old one in
their thoughts at all.
But the question becomes more curious still when we bear in mind that
there was in a distant age of the world an use of a kindred phrase
which is strikingly like, not the old, but the new use of the phrase
“Greater Britain.” As there was a Greater and a Lesser Britain, so
there was, perhaps not a Lesser, but assuredly a Greater Greece. And
the Greater Greece did not answer to the “Major Britannia” of our older
use, but to the “Greater Britain” of our newer. The Greater Greece
was not an older Greece from which settlers went forth, as they went
forth from the Greater Britain of old, to found a younger and a lesser.
The Greater Greece, like the Greater Britain of modern times, was an
assemblage of settlements from the elder Greece which were deemed, or
deemed themselves, to have become greater than the mother-country. The
Great or the Greater Greece (Ἡ μεγάλη Ἑλλάς, _Magna Græcia_, _Major
Græcia_) became the received geographical name for the Greek colonies
in Southern Italy. And they may be thought to have deserved the name
in that short and brilliant time when those colonies distinctly
outstripped the mother-country, when Sybaris and Tarentum ranked among
the greatest cities of the earth, more brilliant and flourishing,
beyond doubt, than Athens or Sparta or Corinth or any other of the
cities of the older Hellenic land.
As in the former case the contrast, so in this case the analogy, is so
striking that we again cannot help asking whether those who brought in
the modern phrase of “Greater Britain” ever had it in their minds? One
point of unlikeness however must be mentioned. By “Greater Britain”
seems now to be commonly meant the whole aggregate of the scattered
colonies and dependencies of the Great or Lesser Britain--those
names have in the new use become synonymous--all over the world. But
the name Greater Greece by no means took in all the scattered Greek
colonies all over the world; it was confined to a single group of
them. The name seems hardly to have spread from Southern Italy even
to the neighbouring island of Sicily; it was certainly never applied
to the Greek settlements in Asia or Libya or any other part of the
world. Indeed the name had a peculiar fitness as applied to the Greek
settlements in Southern Italy which it could not have had elsewhere.
The geographical structure of the land enabled Southern Italy to put
on the character of a second Greece in a way in which none other among
the lands in which Greeks settled could put it on. Everywhere else out
of old Greece there was merely a Greek fringe along the coast. For the
Greek settlements were planted mainly on islands and promontories,
along the coasts of solid continents the inland parts of which remained
barbarian. Even in Sicily the Greek settlements strictly so called were
little more than a fringe; the inland parts of the island did indeed in
the end become Greek; but it was not by real Greek settlement, but by
the spread of the Greek tongue and of Greek culture among men of other
nations who became Greek by adoption. In Southern Italy alone, the
shape of the land, branching off into two narrow peninsulas, enabled
Greek settlement to become something more than a fringe on the coast,
and to spread, as in the older Greek land, from sea to sea.
Thus then there were two lands, an older and a newer, in which it might
be said, at all events at the first aspect, that the whole land was
Greek. No doubt there was this difference, that in the older Greece all
was, as far as we can see, Greek in the strictest sense, while in the
younger Greece much was Greek only by assimilation and adoption. In
the older Greece, if any relics lived on from times and people older
than the first Hellenic settlements, they had been assimilated to the
Greek mass before recorded history began. The existence in old Greece
of any people earlier than the Greeks is matter of legend, of guess,
of scientific inference, not matter of direct evidence. In the younger
Greece of the Italian colonies, the existence of earlier inhabitants
whom the Greeks found in possession, and who long lived on by the side
of the Greeks, is as certain as the existence of earlier inhabitants in
our own American and Australian colonies. But the earlier inhabitants
whom the Greek settlers found in Southern Italy were indeed unlike
those whom the English settlers found in America and Australia. Not
very far removed, so some have thought, from the Greeks in blood, in
any case belonging to the same great branch of the human family, the
nations of the extreme south of Italy, like their neighbours of Sicily,
had a special power of adapting themselves to Greek ways, of adopting
Greek culture, of making themselves in short Greeks by adoption. They
did not die out before the new settlers, like the savages of America
or Australia; they were able to rise to the higher civilization of
the strangers who settled down among them, and to become members of
the same body. This is one of the most marked differences between
the old Greek settlements and the settlements of modern Europeans.
The settlements of different European nations have taken different
courses, but there has been nothing exactly answering to the process
by which so large a part of the barbarian neighbours of the old Greek
colonies became adopted Hellênes. In the case of our own settlements,
the spread of British settlement or dominion has meant either the
gradual dying out of the native races, as in America or Australia, or
else, as in India, their survival as a distinct and subject people.
In no case have English settlers mingled to any important extent with
the native races; in no case have the natives to any great extent put
on the outward seeming of Englishmen. Something more like this result
has taken place in the colonies of Spain. There the mingled race, the
natives of unmixed race who have adopted at least the Spanish tongue,
are important elements which have nothing answering to them in the
colonies of England. The nearest approach to these elements to be found
in any English colony must be looked for in the grotesque imitation
of English ways where real assimilation is impossible. This we see,
not on the part of the barbarians whom the English settlers found
dwelling in the settled lands, but on the part of another race of
barbarians whom they afterwards imported for their own ends. The negro
of the Western continent and islands has truly nothing answering to
him in any part of the Hellenic world. And, in the other case, while
the process which made Sicily and Southern Italy Greek was mainly the
raising of the older inhabitants to a higher level, the process which
has made a large part of America in some sort Spanish has been largely
the sinking of the European settler to a lower level. In the Greek and
in the English case, it has been the higher civilization of the time
that has been extended, and that by milder means in the Greek case than
in the English. In the Spanish case we can hardly say that the highest
civilization has been extended. If one race has risen, the other has
fallen. This result nowhere took place in the Greek settlements, even
where the Greek settlers, while communicating so much to the older
inhabitants, did adopt something from them back again. On the whole,
the work was a work of raising, not of sinking; but it is needful to
remember that, when we speak of the narrow peninsulas of Southern Italy
becoming Greek from sea to sea, we mean that they largely became Greek
by the adoption of the earlier inhabitants into the Greek body. When we
speak of the vast mainland of North America becoming wholly European,
mainly English, from Ocean to Ocean, we mean that it has become so,
not by the adoption of the earlier people by invaders who were also
teachers, but by the gradual vanishing of the earlier people before
invaders who to them at least have been destroyers.
Now this difference is one that follows directly from the difference
in scale between the world in which the old Greek settlers lived and
the world in which modern European nations live. This difference in
scale is a thing which we must remember at every step. The Greek, in
planting his settlements round the coasts of his own Mediterranean Sea,
had nowhere to deal with races of men so utterly unlike his own as the
races with whom modern Europeans have had to deal in planting their
settlements in the islands and continents of the Ocean. Those among
whom the Greek settled were mainly men of the same great family as
himself, men capable of being raised, by a swifter or slower process,
to his own level. His world did indeed take in, as ours does, nations
of ancient and rival civilizations altogether distinct from his own,
but it was not among those nations that he planted his colonies.
Where the Egyptian had dwelled from an immemorial antiquity, where
the Phœnician had planted his abiding colonies in the first dawn of
European history, there the Greek in his best days never settled; Egypt
did in the end become in some sort part of the Greek world; but it
was not by settlement from free Greece, but by the conquests of the
Macedonian kings. Egypt under the Ptolemies was like India now, a land
conquered but not, strictly speaking, colonized, a land in which the
older nation kept on its own older life alongside of the intruding life
of the younger settlers. But it marks the narrow area of the old Greek
world, that Egypt, in some sort its India, in some sort its China, came
within the physical limits of that world; it was a land whose shores
were washed by the same waters that washed the shores of Hellas. This
difference of scale must never be forgotten while we are comparing or
contrasting the days of old Greece with our days. But while we ever
bear in mind the difference, we must ever beware of being led away by
the misleading inferences which shallow talkers have often drawn from
that difference. The nature of man is the same, whether he has a wider
or a narrower sphere for his work; and the narrower sphere has some
advantages over the wider. It is in small communities, in commonwealths
of a single city, where men are brought closer together than in greater
states, where every man has a personal share in the political life of
the community, that the faculties of man are raised to the highest
level and sharpened to the finest point. It is, from a political
point of view, the great merit of modern scientific discoveries that
they have enabled the people of a great community, of a kingdom or
commonwealth covering a great space, to have that direct personal
knowledge of the political life of the community of which they are
members, that direct personal share in it, which once could not be had
save where the state was confined to the territory of a single city.
Instead of despising earlier times because they had not printing and
railways and telegraphs, let us rather say that printing and railways
and telegraphs were needed to raise large states to the level of small
ones. By means of those inventions the Englishman of our day has become
far more like an Athenian of the age of Periklês than his forefathers
were in any earlier time. A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago,
the utmost the ordinary Englishman could do was now and then to give
a vote, if he chanced to have one, at a parliamentary election, and
to read or hear the most meagre accounts of what was going on in
Parliament and elsewhere in public life. Very few Englishmen ever
saw or heard Walpole or Pulteney, Pitt or Fox. Now the whole land
has well-nigh become a single city; we see and hear our leading men
almost daily; they walk before us as the leaders of the Athenian
democracy walked before their fellow-citizens; they take us into their
counsels; they appeal to us as their judges; we have in short a share
in political life only less direct than the share of the Athenian
freeman, a share which our forefathers, even two or three generations
back, never dreamed of. But without the help of modern scientific
discoveries, this active share in public affairs on the part of the
mass of the inhabitants of a large country would have been simply a
dream. Or look at a matter which more directly concerns the immediate
subject of this discourse, look at the vast developement of English
political life in the great English land beyond the Ocean; can any
man believe that a hundred years back Maine, Florida, and California
could have been kept together as a political whole by any power short
of a despotism? Could those distant lands have acted as parts of one
free political body, if they had had no means of intercourse with one
another swifter than the speed of a horse? It is by the help of modern
discoveries that the federal systems of old Greece can be reproduced on
a gigantic scale, that a single Union of states can embrace a continent
stretching from Ocean to Ocean instead of a peninsula stretching from
sea to sea. In short, instead of despising those ancient communities
which were the earliest form of European political life, we should
rejoice that in many things we have gone back to the earliest form of
European political life, that the discoveries of modern times have
enabled the free states of old times to arise again, but to arise
again, no longer on the scale of cities but on the scale of nations.
When then we compare the colonial system of modern times, like any
other feature of modern political life, with the thing answering to
it in the political life of the old Greek city-commonwealths, we must
never forget the difference of area on which the political life of the
two periods has been acted; but we must never allow ourselves to fancy
that difference of area, any more than distance of time, wholly shuts
us off from political fellowship with those earlier times or makes
their experience of none effect for our political instruction. The
communities of those days were cities, the communities of our days are
nations; but cities and nations alike share in a common political life
in which many of the ages that went between their days and ours had no
share. The Greek settlements, like the Phœnician settlements before
them, were settlements of cities, not of nations, not of kingdoms or
of commonwealths on the scale of kingdoms. Till the political needs
of a later age taught the Greek that several cities might be combined
in a federal union, his whole political life had gathered round the
single independent city as its essential unit. Every Greek city was
not independent; but every Greek city deemed itself wronged if it was
not independent; when its independence was lost, it was, within all
Hellenic lands, lost by the rule of city over city. And the rule of
city over city, if it took away the independence of the subject city
as an equal power among other powers, did not wipe out its essential
character as a separate city-commonwealth. The dependent city was not
incorporated like an annexed land; it was not held in bondage like a
subject province; it remained a city, with more or less of freedom in
its local affairs, though bound, as against other powers, to follow the
lead of the ruling city. The city was all in all; the smallness of the
community, the narrowness of its area, brought every citizen face to
face with his fellows and his leaders; it brought with it a fulness of
political life, an extension of political power and political interests
to every citizen, to which larger states have reached only by painful
steps and by help of the inventions which have in some sort made time
and distance cease to be. The Greek was before all things a citizen;
his political life was wholly local; his powers and duties as a citizen
could be discharged only in his own city, on some spot hallowed by old
tradition, and hallowed most commonly in the more formal sense by the
abiding presence and guardianship of the patron deity. He felt in the
strongest sense the tie of membership of a community, the tie of all
the duties which spring from membership of a community. For his city
he would live and toil and die, but he would live and toil and die for
it, because it was the whole of which he was himself a part. He owed
faith and loyalty to his city--loyalty in its true and ancient sense
of obeying the law, the law which he might be called on to help to
administer, which he might, in some rare case, be called on to help to
change. He might keep that faith and loyalty far away from his own city
by doing all that he could in foreign lands for the interest and honour
of that city. But in no other sense could he carry his citizenship with
him beyond the bounds of the territory of his city; elsewhere he might
act as a soldier or as an envoy, but hardly in the strictest sense as
a citizen. The tie was local; the duty was local; of a personal tie
of allegiance binding him to a personal superior, bringing with it
personal duties which should everywhere dog his steps, which could not
be cast off in any corner of the world--of loyalty in that sense, the
old Greek, the old Phœnician, had never any thought in his mind.
The change in the meaning of the word “loyalty” well marks that
leading political characteristic of modern Europe which stands out
in the fullest contrast to the political thoughts of the ancient
commonwealths. Loyalty, once simply _legalitas_, obedience to the law,
has for ages meant--when it has not meant something far baser--no
longer obedience to the law, no longer duty to a community as a
community, but faith and duty owed by one man to another man. It may
be simply the personal duty of a man to his lord, the tie of chosen or
hereditary comradeship, the tie known by the oldest Greek and by the
oldest German, an ennobling tie indeed as regards the man himself, a
tie which may lead to lofty prowess or to pure self-sacrifice, the tie
of the true companions of Brihtnoth on the day of Maldon, when on the
place of slaughter each man lay thegn-like, his lord hard by. Or it may
take the less poetic, the more political shape, in which the thought of
the commonwealth does come in, but where the commonwealth is perhaps
overshadowed by its chief, perhaps only embodied in him. The notion of
personal allegiance, a notion which could have been hardly understood
by either the aristocratic or the democratic Greek, has been the
essence of the political system of Europe for many ages. It is a notion
which grows up as naturally in a kingdom as the other notion, the
notion of duty to the community, grows up in a commonwealth which knows
no abiding personal head. It by no means shuts out the notion of duty
to the community; but, as has been just now implied, it has a tendency
to overshadow it. In the higher types of the class, in the French
nobles, for instance, under the old monarchy, the feeling of personal
loyalty, of devotion to the particular man who wore the crown, perhaps
reached its highest point since the days of the old Greek and Teutonic
comradeship. It was a feeling that was by no means wholly degrading;
but it tended to put in the shade, if not wholly to crush out, feelings
higher and worthier. Men looked so much to the King of France, they
looked so much on France as embodied in his person, that there was
small room left in their thoughts for France herself, for France as
embodied in her people. Since kingdoms have put on more nearly the
practical shape of commonwealths, this extravagant devotion to a single
man has been somewhat toned down, and more room is gained for feelings
coming nearer to those which were felt in a free democracy of old. But
the radical distinction still remains between the leading political
ideas of the state which acknowledges a prince as its sovereign and the
state which knows no sovereign but the commonwealth itself. The primary
and formal duty of the member of a state that acknowledges a prince, a
duty to which in many cases he is bound by direct personal promises,
is a personal duty to a person. It is a duty which he cannot throw
off under any circumstances of time and place; it follows him wherever
he goes; on the most distant foreign soil he remains the subject of
the prince in whose dominions he drew his breath. While the active
duties of the citizen of a commonwealth can hardly be discharged beyond
the territories of that commonwealth, the duties of the subject of a
king, the subject, that is, of a personal master, are as binding on
one part of the earth’s surface as on another. I have just used words
which go to the root of the matter. I have used the words “citizen”
and “subject.” The difference between the two conceptions can nowhere
put on a more living shape than in the use of those two names. The
Greek would have deemed himself degraded by the name of “subject.” To
him the word that best translates it expressed the position of men
who, either in their own persons or in the person of the cities to
which they belonged, were shorn of the common rights of every city, of
every citizen. We use the word “subject” daily without any feeling
of being lowered by it. It has become so familiar that it is assumed
as the natural phrase to express membership of a political body, and
it is often used when it is quite out of place. I once read, and that
in a formal document, of a “Swiss subject,” and I had the pleasure
of explaining that there had been no subjects, no _Unterthanen_, in
Switzerland since 1798[1]. And the question comes, What are we to say
instead? “Swiss citizen,” “French citizen,” “citizen of the United
States,” have this awkwardness about them that the community whose
membership they express is not a city. The very awkwardness points
to the main difference between the world of old Hellas and the world
of modern Europe, the difference in scale. Be it kingdom or be it
commonwealth, the state with which modern politics have to deal is not
a city but something vastly greater.
Now there is no branch of political life on which these distinctions
tell with greater force than on the work of planting new homes of any
people beyond the sea. The colonies, the settlements, the plantations,
of that elder world whose range of settlement was the Mediterranean
were settlements of citizens who set forth from cities. The colonies,
the settlements, the plantations of the newer world whose range of
settlement has been the Ocean have been mainly settlements of subjects
who set forth from kingdoms. Hence, while in almost every other point
the two systems of settlement are so wonderfully alike, in all those
points which immediately follow from this essential deference they
stand utterly aloof from each other. The men who planted Greater
Greece--whether we mean thereby the land once really so called or any
other part of the Greek colonial world--were citizens of cities. The
men who planted Greater Britain, if so we are to call it, like the
men who planted Greater Portugal, Greater Spain, or Greater France,
were subjects of kingdoms. There is but one exception. The colonies of
the United Netherlands were colonies planted by a commonwealth, and
of all European colonies they have departed most widely from the old
Greek model. But though colonies of a commonwealth, though colonies
of a commonwealth in which cities played the chief part, they could
hardly be called colonies of cities. They were colonies of a great
confederation, of an aristocratic confederation, which had in many
things more in common with kingdoms than with independent cities. They
were colonies planted in a colonial world in which the colonies of
kingdoms had set the model. The kingdom then, and not the commonwealth,
has been the essential colonizing element in modern Europe. The
colonies of modern Europe have been in the main colonies of subjects,
not of citizens. Each alike, citizen and subject, carried with him that
form of political life which was natural to each. The Greek colonist,
citizen of a city, planted a city. Severed from his native city,
severed perhaps by such a world of waters as that which parts Euboia
from Sicily or by such a wider world of waters as parts Phôkaia from
Gaul, he could no longer remain a citizen of his own city; he could
no longer discharge the duties of citizenship on a distant spot; he
could no longer join in the debates of the old _agorê_; he could no
longer join in the worship of the old temple; but he must still have
some _agorê_ and some temple; he must still have a city to dwell in, a
city in which still to dwell the life of a free Greek, when he could no
longer live that life in the city of his birth. So he planted a city,
a free city, a city that knew no lord, that knew no ruling city, a
city furnished from the first with all that was needed for the life of
a Greek commonwealth, a city free and independent from its birth. And
he dwelled in the new city as he had once dwelled in the old; he gave
himself to make the new worthy of the old, the daughter worthy of the
mother. But did he thereby deem that he had ceased to be a Greek? Did
he deem that he had severed himself from Greece? Did he even deem that
he had broken off from all duty and fellowship towards the city from
whence he had set forth? No; dwell where he might, the Greek remained a
Greek; wherever he went he carried Hellas with him; in Asia, in Libya,
in Sicily, in Italy, in Gaul, far away by the pillars that guarded the
mouth of Ocean, far away in the inmost recesses of the Inhospitable
Sea, wherever he trod, a new Hellas, if we will, a Greater Hellas,
sprang into being; on those new shores of Hellas he kept his old
Hellenic heart, his old Hellenic fellowship; he still kept the tongue
and customs of his folk; he clave to the gods of his folk; he could go
to the old land and consult their oracles, he could claim his place in
their sacred games, as freely as if he still dwelled by the banks of
the Spartan Eurôtas or under the shadow of the holy rock of Athens.
And how fared he towards the city of his birth, the _metropolis_, the
mother-city of his new home, the birthplace and cradle of himself and
his fellow-citizens of his new city? Political tie none remained; no
such tie could remain among a system of cities. Parent and child were
on the political side necessarily parted; the colonist could exercise
no political rights in the mother-city, nor did the mother-city put
forward any claim to be lady and mistress of her distant daughter.
Still the love, the reverence, due to a parent was never lacking.
The tie of memory, the tie of kindred, the tie of religion, were of
themselves so strong that no tie of political allegiance was needed to
make them stronger. The sacred fire on the hearth of the new city was
kindled from the hearth of its mother; the parent was honoured with
fitting honours, her gods were honoured with fitting offerings; her
citizens were welcomed as elder brethren when they visited the younger
city. And when the child itself became a parent, when the new city
itself sent forth its colonies, the mother-city of all was prayed to
share in the work and to send forth elder brethren of her own stock to
be leaders in the enterprise of her children.
In truth the ordinary story of the relations between a Greek colony
and its metropolis, relations that is between a perfectly independent
state and another state to which it looks up with traditional
reverence, is perhaps the most attractive feature of Greek political
life. The history of the relations between Corinth and Syracuse is
a pleasing tale throughout. During all the centuries of the joint
independence of the two cities, the relations between the metropolis
and its great colony are ever fresh, ever friendly. The Syracusan is
not a Corinthian; the sea that rolls between Ortygia and the Isthmus
forbids that. But he never forgets that he is a child of Corinth, a
child of Peloponnêsos; he cleaves with pride to the local speech of
his fathers; he cherishes the worship of the gods and heroes of the
city of his fathers, their names and their legends live on his lips;
Syracuse may grow into a greater and mightier city than her parent;
but that Corinth is the parent is a thought that never dies out from
any Syracusan heart. Yet the child is free and independent, free
and independent from its beginning. Corinth makes not the slightest
claim to authority or superiority over Syracuse; but she is ever
ready to step in when any need on the part of Syracuse calls for her
help; she steps in as bound to something which to her is dearer and
more recked of than the most cherished among allies who are not her
children. The mother-city steps in alike when Syracuse is pressed by
foreign enemies and when she is torn by domestic seditions. She acts
as a mediator between Syracuse and her foes; she shelters alike her
banished patriots, her banished tyrant, even the foreign enemy whom
Syracuse has spared and has given to her mother’s keeping. And, a
gift precious above all, she sends her own deliverer to be in turn
the deliverer of his brethren. And this friendship between Corinth
and Syracuse is no friendship that stands alone; it is the common tie
which binds Greek metropolis and Greek colony to one another. And all
this becomes the more striking when we come to compare the tale of
Corinth and Syracuse with some really exceptional cases in which the
relations of metropolis and colony were less amiable. Strange to say,
we can find them in the history of this very Corinth and this very
Syracuse. No War of Independence, no Declaration of Independence, was
ever needed between Corinth and Syracuse, because Syracuse was from
the beginning independent of her metropolis, and therefore friendly to
her metropolis. But perhaps a declaration of independence, certainly a
war of independence, was needed between Corinth and Korkyra, between
Syracuse and Kamarina. In each of those cases the metropolis did claim
some measure of authority over the colony. The fruit of this departure
from the common system of Greek settlement was that abiding ill-will
between Korkyra and her parent Corinth which stands out among the
best known facts of Grecian history. And yet perhaps in the only case
where we see Corinth and Korkyra acting together in friendly guise, it
shows that something of the better, the more usual, feeling was not
wholly banished from Corinthian and Korkyraian hearts; we once see the
two cities join to do the duty of a parent and a sister as mediators
on behalf of Syracuse against an enemy. As for the other less famous
case, we read that Kamarina, a colony of Syracuse, revolted against her
metropolis and was swept from the earth as a punishment. The doom was
heavy; the fault may have been grave; but between Corinth and Syracuse,
between Phôkaia and Massalia, there was no room for revolt or for its
penalties.
Thus the old Greek citizen, in his settlements beyond the sea, founded
cities, cities free and independent from the beginning. Let us see
now what the modern European colonist, subject of a kingdom, has
founded. He has founded settlements of very various kinds in different
cases; but he has nowhere founded free and independent cities, like
the Greek and the Phœnician before him. Cities indeed in one sense he
has founded, vast and mighty cities, busy seats of arts and industry
and commerce, but not cities in the elder sense, cities independent
from their birth, cities that are born the political equals of the
mightiest kingdoms. Cities like these the subject of a kingdom, bound
wherever he goes to remain the subject of a kingdom, can never found.
But what can be found instead? He cannot, in the nature of things,
found kingdoms; it is the essence of his being that he and all that
he has should remain part of an existing kingdom. His first act on
entering an unknown land is to declare it to be part of the dominions
of the prince from whose territories he has set forth. Wherever he
goes, whatever he does, he is tied and hampered by the necessity of
abiding in the allegiance of his original sovereign. It is wonderful to
see how near some of the founders of modern European settlements came
to the creation of really independent states. A slender line indeed
distinguished the elder colonies of New England from states absolutely
independent. The interference of the mother-country was, in many times
and places, slight indeed. Still the final step was never taken; they
were not absolutely and formally independent states, like the old
settlements of Greece and Phœnicia. As all the world knows, even those
settlements where local freedom was fullest, those which came most
nearly to the level of actual independence, needed a Declaration of
Independence, a War of Independence, to raise them to its full level.
The settlements of modern Europe have not conformed to the pattern
of Syracuse and Massalia; they have followed the exceptional pattern
of Korkyra and Kamarina. In Greek Asia then, in Greek Sicily, in the
Greater Greece itself on the forked peninsulas of Italy, we see a
gathering of Greek settlements, each a free and independent city, each
as a free and independent city carrying on its own political life, its
questions, its disputes, perhaps its wars, with some fellow city; but
all alike Greek, all glorying in the Hellenic name, all looking back
to old Hellas as the motherland, each looking to its own mother-city,
not with the dread of a subject, not with the helplessness of a child
still in tutelage, but with the manly deference of a child of full
age, whose reverence for his parent is none the less because he is no
longer a member of the household. By way of contrast to that national
life abiding in a new land, we see, in vast regions of the American
continent, lands which once were English, which once were Spanish,
which are still English and Spanish as far as common blood and speech
and history can make them so, but which have ceased to be English or
Spanish as political communities, and which grudgingly acknowledge the
English or Spanish name. We see lands that parted in wrath from the
motherland, and by whom the wrath of that parting has not wholly been
forgotten. We see lands whose independence, instead of growing from the
beginning with the good will of a watchful parent, has been won by the
sword from the grasp of a parent who strove to keep her children in
subjection. And all this has been the direct and necessary result of
the theory of political life which the founders of those English and
Spanish settlements carried with them. Subjects of a kingdom could do
no otherwise; the theory of an allegiance which could never be cast
aside obliged their settlements to become provinces, dependencies,
whatever name is chosen, of the motherland. They could not found an
independent kingdom any more than they could found an independent city.
Dependence, tighter or slacker, was the necessity of the case. But it
was no less in the necessity of the case that a day should come when
even the slackest form of dependence could be borne no longer. That
these colonies “are and ought to be free and independent states” was a
voice which could not fail to be heard some day in Massachusetts and
Virginia; there was no need for it ever to be heard in Syracuse or in
Sybaris; for no man doubted their freedom and independence from the day
of their first founding.
The mention of the independent colonies of England, those which, by
the necessity of the Colonial system of modern Europe, were driven
to win their independence by the sword, suggests one question of no
small moment for our present inquiry. Does this popular phrase of
“Greater Britain” take in, or does it not take in, the United States
of America? I say the popular phrase, because, as the phrase was first
used by the writer who I believe invented it, who certainly gave it
its first currency, it undoubtedly did take in the United States. But
I am not at all certain whether it does or does not in the vague and
lax way in which the phrase is now often used to add a flourish to
a period. Now if the phrase “Greater Britain” does not take in the
United States, it is certainly somewhat strange to shut out from that
name the mightiest offshoot of the English folk. If it is meant to
take them in, I am afraid that we may sometimes be met with a little
unwillingness on the part of those whom we would fain welcome within
our pale. There is the speaking fact, that, while the Greek of Spain
or of the Tauric Chersonêsos never doubted as to his being a Greek,
the Englishman even of New England sometimes but grudgingly allows
himself to be an Englishman. This is the result of parting in anger;
under the Greek system, there was no room for parting at all. To the
Greek colonist the names of the motherland from which he had set forth,
of the folk from which he did not sever himself in setting forth from
that motherland, suggested simple brotherhood, without a thought of
subjection or dependence. To the descendant of English settlers in
America, citizen, of a vast commonwealth of English blood and English
speech, the English name has come to suggest--it is hard to say what,
but something which the Greek name did not suggest to the citizen of
any Greek settlement beyond the sea. He may accept it; but he accepts
it with a kind of effort, with a kind of second thoughts. The fact is
that the notion of allegiance has for some centuries taken such root in
men’s minds, it has become so thoroughly the leading idea of political
life, it has become so largely the definition of a separate political
community, that the English name has come, on both sides of the Ocean,
to carry with it some lurking flavour of necessary allegiance to the
English crown. The Englishman of America shrinks from calling himself
an Englishman, lest that name should unwittingly imply an allegiance
which his forefathers cast off. The Englishman of Britain shrinks
from bestowing the English name on the Englishman of America, lest he
should seem to be wounding the national pride of a people the very
root of whose political life was the denial of all English political
allegiance. Neither side seem able freely to grasp the truth that
was so clear to the mind of every Greek, the truth that two or many
communities may be wholly distinct for every political purpose, and may
yet be members of one nation for every other purpose of national life.
I ask again, Do the United States of America come under the definition
of “Greater Britain”? If I rightly understand the use of the phrase,
“Greater Britain” is sometimes held to have the same meaning as the
phrase “British Empire.” If so, then assuredly the United States of
America do not come, and do not seek to come, within such a definition
as that. But sometimes the phrase of “Greater Britain” seems rather to
be used as bearing the same meaning as another phrase that we sometimes
hear, that of “the Federation of the English-speaking People.” Now the
people of the United States of America surely form so large a part of
the English-speaking people that a federation which is meant to take in
all the branches of that people is strangely imperfect if it leaves out
a branch so great and so fruitful as that which has spread the English
tongue from Ocean to Ocean.
Again, if the phrase “Greater Britain” is held to be equivalent, not
to the federation of the English-speaking people but to the “British
Empire,” then another difficulty meets us. The Imperial state of all,
that Empire of India set alone in its august rank above the mere
kingdoms of lowlier Europe, may indeed be looked on as the head and
front of the Imperial power of Britain; it can hardly be looked on as
itself a Greater Britain. Greek Kings, at any rate Macedonian Kings,
once ruled from Pharos to Syênê, from the shores of the Ægæan to the
banks of the Indus, yet no man would ever have applied the name of
Greater Greece, or even of Greater Macedonia, to the Greek dominion
over Egypt and the East. The Greater Greece in Italy was Greater Greece
because it had truly become Greek. The Greek dominion in Egypt and the
East could not be said to form a Greater Greece, because those lands
never became Greek; they received at most a Greek fringe, a Greek
veneer, a slight outer garment of Hellenism spread over an essentially
barbarian body. And if Egypt or Asia was not Greater Greece, surely
India is Greater Britain still less. There is there no abiding British
element drawing to it the science, the learning, the whole art and
skill of the British world. For if Asia and Egypt never became Greek,
yet within their borders Alexandria and Antioch became renowned as the
greatest of Greek colonies, the courts of kings, the universities
of scholars, the centres of the intellectual life of Greece when its
political life was shrinking up within narrow bounds indeed. Greece
looked elsewhere for her greater self, and Britain cannot fail to look
elsewhere for her greater self, and not where the influence of Britain
takes the shape, so largely of dominion, so slightly of assimilation.
All that I am asking for is clearness of speech; I seek to have words
well defined, and that is all. I do not profess myself to define the
phrase “Greater Britain;” I only remark that, if it is held to be the
same as the “British Empire,” it cannot be the same as the “Federation
of English-speaking people;” and that if it be either the one or the
other, certain consequences would seem to follow which it seems to me
are now and then forgotten.