“And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched,

... saying, ... all the people that we saw in it are men of great

stature.

“And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, ... and we were in our

own sight as grasshoppers, and so were we in their sight.”

Had Moses been gifted with military talent, or with any of the higher

instincts of the soldier, he would have arranged to have received this

report in private and would then have acted as he thought best. Above

all he would have avoided anything like a council of war by the whole

congregation, for a vast popular meeting of that kind was certain to

become unmanageable the moment a division appeared in their command,

upon a difficult question of policy.

Moses did just the opposite. He convened the people to hear the

report of the “spies.” And immediately the majority became dangerously

depressed, not to say mutinous.

“And all the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the

people wept that night.

“And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against

Aaron: and the whole congregation said unto them, Would God that we

had died in the land of Egypt! Or would God we had died in this

wilderness!...

“And they said one to another, Let us make a captain, and let us return

into Egypt.

“Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembly of the

congregation of the children of Israel.”

But Joshua, who was a soldier, when Moses thus somewhat ignominiously

collapsed, retained his presence of mind and his energy. He and Caleb

“rent their clothes,” and reiterated their advice.

“And they spake unto all the company of the children of Israel, saying,

The land which we passed through to search it, is an exceeding good

land.

“If the Lord delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and

give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey.

“Only rebel not ye against the Lord, neither fear ye the people of the

land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from them...

fear them not.

“But all the congregation bade stone them with stones.”

By this time Moses seems to have recovered some composure. Enough, at

least, to repeat certain violent threats of the “Lord.”

Nothing is so impressive in all this history as the difference between

Moses when called upon to take responsibility as a military commander,

and Moses when, not to mince matters, he acted as a quack. On the one

hand, he was all vacillation, timidity, and irritability. On the other,

all temerity and effrontery.

In this particular emergency, which touched his very life, Moses vented

his disappointment and vexation in a number of interviews which he

pretended to have had with the “Lord,” and which he retailed to the

congregation, just at the moment when they needed, as Joshua perceived,

to be steadied and encouraged.

“How long,” vociferated the Lord, when Moses had got back his power of

speech, “will this people provoke me? and how long will it be ere they

believe me, for all the signs which I have shewed among them?

“I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will

make of thee a greater nation and mightier than they.”

But when Moses had cooled a little and came to reflect upon what he had

made the “Lord” say, he fell into his ordinary condition of hesitancy.

Supposing some great disaster should happen to the Jews at Kadesh,

which lay not so very far from the Egyptian border, the Egyptians would

certainly hear of it, and in that case the Egyptian army might pursue

and capture Moses. Such a contingency was not to be contemplated, and

accordingly Moses began to make reservations. It must be remembered that

all these ostensible conversations with the “Lord” went on in public;

that is to say, Moses proffered his advice to the Lord aloud, and then

retailed his version of the answer he received.

“Now if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations

which have heard the fame of thee will speak, saying,

“Because the Lord was not able to bring this people into the land which

he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness....

“Pardon, I beseech thee, the iniquity of this people according unto the

greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this people from Egypt

even until now.

“And the Lord said, I have pardoned according to thy word.”

Had Moses left the matter there it would not have been so bad, but he

could not contain his vexation, because his staff had not divined his

wishes. Those men, though they had done their strict duty only, must be

punished, so he thought, to maintain his ascendancy.

Of the twelve “spies” whom Moses had sent into Canaan to report to him,

ten had incurred his bitter animosity because they failed to render

him such a report as would sustain him before the people in making

the campaign of invasion to which he felt himself pledged, and on the

success of which his reputation depended. Of these ten men, Moses,

to judge by the character of his demands upon the Lord, thought it

incumbent on him to make an example, in order to sustain his own credit.

To simply exclude these ten spies from Palestine, as he proposed to do

with the rest of the congregation, would hardly be enough, for the

rest of the Hebrews were, at most, passive, but these ten had wilfully

ignored the will of Moses, or, as he expressed it, of the Lord.

Therefore it was the Lord’s duty, as Moses saw it, to punish them.

And this Moses proposed that the Lord should do in a prompt and awful

manner: the lesson being pointed by the immunity of Joshua and

Caleb, the two spies who had had the wit to divine the will of

Moses. Therefore, all ten of these men died of the plague while the

congregation lay encamped at Kadesh, though Joshua and Caleb remained

immune.

Moses, as the commanding general of an attacking army, took a course

diametrically opposed to that of Joshua, and calculated to be fatal

to victory. He vented his irritation in a series of diatribes which he

attributed to the “Lord,” and which discouraged and confused his men at

the moment when their morale was essential to success.

Therefore, the Lord, according to Moses, went on:

“But as truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of

the Lord.

“Because all those men which have seen my glory, and my miracles, which

I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, have tempted me now these ten

times, and have not hearkened to my voice;

“Surely they shall not see the land which I swear unto their fathers,

neither shall any of them that provoked me see it:

“But my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and hath

followed me fully, him will I bring into the land whereinto he went;...”

Having said all this, and, as far as might be, disorganized the army,

Moses surrendered suddenly his point. He made the “Lord” go on to

command: “Tomorrow turn you, and get you into the wilderness by the way

of the Red Sea.” But, not even yet content, Moses assured them that this

retreat should profit them nothing.

“And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, How long shall I

bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against me? I have heard

the murmurings of the children of Israel, which they murmur against me.”

And the Lord continued:

“Say unto them, As truly as I live, ... as ye have spoken in mine ears,

so will I do to you.

“Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered

of you, ... from twenty years old and upward, which have murmured

against me.

“Doubtless ye shall not come into the land....

“But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness....

“And the men which Moses sent to search the land, who returned, and made

all the congregation to murmur against him, by bringing up a slander

upon the land,--

“Even those men that did bring up the evil report upon the land, died by

the plague before the Lord.

“But Joshua ... and Caleb, ... which were of the men that went to search

the land, lived still.

“And Moses told these sayings unto all the children of Israel and the

people mourned greatly.”

The congregation were now completely out of hand. They knew not what

Moses wanted to do, nor did they comprehend what Moses was attempting to

make the Lord threaten: except that he had in mind some dire mischief.

Accordingly, the people decided that the best thing for them was to go

forward as Joshua and Caleb proposed. So, early in the morning, they

went up into the top of the mountain, saying, “We be here, and will go

up unto the place which the Lord hath promised: for we have sinned.”

But Moses was more dissatisfied than ever. “Wherefore now do you

transgress the commandment of the Lord? But it shall not prosper.”

Notwithstanding, “they presumed to go up unto the hilltop: nevertheless

the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and Moses, departed not out of the

camp.

“Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites, which dwelt in that

hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah”; which was

at a very considerable distance,--perhaps not less than thirty miles,

though the positions are not very well established.

This is the story as told by the priestly chronicler, who, of course,

said the best that could be said for Moses. But he makes a sorry tale

of it. According to him, Moses, having been disappointed with the report

made by his officers on the advisability of an immediate offensive,

committed the blunder of summoning the whole assembly of the people to

listen to it, and then, in the midst of the panic he had created, he

lost his self-possession and finally his temper. Whereupon his soldiers,

not knowing what to do or what he wanted, resolved to follow the advice

of Joshua and advance.

But this angered Moses more than ever, who committed the unpardonable

crime in the eyes of the soldier; he abandoned his men in the presence

of the enemy and by this desertion so weakened them that they sustained

the worst defeat the Israelites suffered during the whole of their

wanderings in the wilderness. Such a disaster brought on a crisis. The

only wonder is that it had been so long delayed. Moses had had since the

exodus a wonderful opportunity to test the truth of his theories. He had

asserted that the universe was the expression of a single and supreme

mind, which operated according to a fixed moral law. That he alone, of

all men, understood this mind, and could explain and administer its law,

and that this he could and would do were he to obtain absolute obedience

to the commands which he uttered. Were he only obeyed, he would win

for his followers victory in battle, and a wonderful land to which

they should march under his guidance, which was the Promised Land, and

thereafter all was to be well with them.

The disaster at Hormah had demonstrated that he was no general, and even

on that very day the people had proof before their eyes that he knew

nothing of the desert, and that the Lord knew no more than he, since

there was no water at Kadesh, and to ask the congregation to encamp in

such a spot was preposterous. Meanwhile Moses absorbed all the

offices of honor and profit for his family. Aaron and his descendants

monopolized the priesthood, and this was a bitter grievance to

other equally ambitious Levites. In short, the Mosaic leadership was

vulnerable on every hand. Attack on Moses was, therefore, inevitable,

and it came from Korah, who was leader of the opposition.

Korah was a cousin of Moses, and one of the ablest and most influential

men in the camp, to whom Dathan and Abiram and “two hundred and fifty”

princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown,

joined themselves. “And they gathered themselves together against Moses

and against Aaron, and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing

all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among

them: wherefore then lift you up yourselves above the congregation of

the Lord?”

Koran’s grievance was that he had been, although a Levite, excluded from

the priesthood in favor of the demands of Aaron and his sons.

“And when Moses heard it, he fell upon his face.”

And yet something had to be done. Moses faced an extreme danger. His

life hung upon the issue. As between him and Korah he had to demonstrate

which was the better sorcerer or magician, and he could only do this by

challenging Korah to the test of the ordeal: the familiar test of the

second clause of the code of Hammurabi; “If the holy river makes that

man to be innocent, and has saved him, he who laid the spell upon him

shall be put to death. He who plunged into the holy river shall take to

himself the house of him who wove the spell upon him.” [Footnote: Code

of Laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon. Translated by C. H.

W. Johns, M.A., Section 2.] And so with Elijah, to whom Ahaziah sent a

captain of fifty to arrest him. And Elijah said to the captain of fifty,

“If I be a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven, and consume

thee and thy fifty. And there came down fire from heaven, and consumed

him and his fifty.” [Footnote: 2 Kings I, 10.]

In a word, the ordeal was the common form of test by which the

enchanter, the sorcerer, or the magician always was expected to prove

himself. Moses already had tried the test by fire at least once, and

probably oftener. So now Moses reproached Korah because he was jealous

of Aaron; “and what is Aaron, that ye murmur against him?... This do;

Take you censers, Korah, and all his company; and put fire therein, and

put incense in them before the Lord to-morrow; and ... whom the Lord

doth choose, he shall be holy: ye take too much upon you, ye sons of

Levi.”

But it was not only about the priesthood that Moses had trouble on

his hands. He had undertaken, with the help of the Lord, to lead the

Israelites through the wilderness. But at every step of the way his

incompetence became more manifest. Even there, at that very camp of

Kadesh, there was no water, and all the people clamored. And, therefore,

Dathan and Abiram taunted him with failure, and with his injustice to

those who served him. And Moses had no reply, except that he denied

having abused his power.

“And Moses sent to call Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab: which

said, We will not come up:

“Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that

floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou

make thyself altogether a prince over us?

“Moreover, thou hast not brought us into a land that floweth with milk

and honey, or given us inheritance of fields and vineyards: wilt thou

put out the eyes of these men [probably alluding to the “spies”]? We

will not come up.”

This was evidently an exceedingly sore spot. Moses had boasted that,

because the “spies” had rendered to the congregation what they believed

to be a true report instead of such a report as he had expected, the

“Lord” had destroyed them by the plague. And it is pretty evident

that the congregation believed him. It could hardly have been by pure

accident that out of twelve men, the ten who had offended Moses should

have died by the plague, and the other two alone should have escaped.

Moses assumed to have the power of destroying whom he pleased by the

pestilence through prayer to the “Lord,” and he, indeed, probably had

the power, in such a spot as an ancient Jewish Nomad camp, not indeed

by prayer, but by the very human means of communicating so virulent a

poison as the plague: means which he very well understood.

Therefore it is not astonishing that this insinuation should have stung

Moses to the quick.

“And Moses was very wroth, and said unto the Lord, Respect not thou

their offering: I have not taken one ass from them, neither have I hurt

one of them.”

Then Moses turned to Korah, “Be thou and all thy company before the

Lord, thou, and they, and Aaron, to-morrow:

“And take every man his censer, and put incense in them, and bring ye

before the Lord every man his censer, two hundred and fifty censers.”

And Korah, on the morrow, gathered all the congregation against them

unto the door of the tabernacle. And the “Lord” then as usual intervened

and advised Moses to “separate yourselves from among this congregation,

that I may consume them in a moment.” And Moses did so. That is to say,

he made an effort to divide the opposition, who, when united, he seems

to have appreciated, were too strong for him.

What happened next is not known. That Moses partially succeeded in his

attempt at division is admitted, for he persuaded Dathan and Abiram and

their following to “depart ... from the tents of these wicked men, and

touch nothing of theirs, lest ye be consumed in all their sins.”

Exactly what occurred after this is unknown. The chronicle, of course,

avers that “the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and

their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their

goods.” But it could not have been this or anything like it, for the

descendants of Korah, many generations after, were still doing service

in the Temple, and at the time of the miracle the spectators were not

intimidated by the sight, although all “Israel that were round about

them fled at the cry of them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us

up also.

“And there came out a fire from the Lord, and consumed the two hundred

and fifty men that offered incense.”

Notwithstanding all which, the congregation next day were as hostile and

as threatening as ever.

“On the morrow all the congregation of the children of Israel murmured

against Moses and against Aaron, saying, Ye have killed the people of

the Lord....

“And they fell upon their faces.”

In this crisis of his fate, when it seemed that nothing could save Moses

from a conflict with the mass of his followers, who had renounced him,

Moses showed that audacity and fertility of resource, which had hitherto

enabled him, and was destined until his death to enable him, to maintain

his position, at least as a prophet, among the Jewish people.

The plague was always the most dreaded of visitations among the ancient

Jews: far more terrible than war. It was already working havoc in the

camp, as the death of the “spies” shows us. Moses always asserted his

ability to control it, and at this instant, when, apparently, he and

Aaron were lying on their faces before the angry people, he conceived

the idea that he would put his theurgetic powers to the proof. Suddenly

he called to Aaron to “take a censer and put fire therein from off the

altar, and put on incense, and go quickly unto the congregation, and

make an atonement for them: for there is wrath gone out from the Lord;

the plague is begun.”

“And Aaron took as Moses commanded, and ran into the midst of the

congregation; and, behold, the plague was begun among the people: ...

and made an atonement for the people.

“And he stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was

stayed.

“Now they that died in the plague were fourteen thousand and seven

hundred, beside them that died about the matter of Korah.”

Even this was not enough. The discontent continued, and Moses went on to

meet it by the miracle of Aaron’s rod.

Moses took a rod from each tribe, twelve rods in all and on Aaron’s rod

he wrote the name of Levi, and Moses laid them out in the tabernacle.

And the next day Moses examined the rods and showed the congregation how

Aaron’s rod had budded. And Moses declared that Aaron’s rod should

be kept for a token against the rebels: and that they must stop their

murmurings “that they die not.”

This manipulation of the plague by Moses, upon what seems to have been

a sudden inspiration, was a stroke of genius in the way of quackery.

He was, indeed, in this way almost portentous. It had a great and

terrifying effect upon the people, who were completely subdued by it.

Against corporeal enemies they might hope to prevail, but they were

helpless against the plague. And they all cried out with one accord,

“Behold we die, we perish, we all perish. Whosoever cometh anything near

unto the tabernacle of the Lord shall die: shall we be consumed with

dying?”

As I have already pointed out, Moses was a very great theurgist, as many

saints and prophets have been. When in the actual presence of others he

evidently had the power of creating a belief in himself which approached

the miraculous, so far as disease was concerned. And he presumed on

this power and took correspondingly great risks. The case of the brazen

serpent is an example. The story is--and there is no reason to doubt its

substantial truth--that the Hebrews were attacked by venomous serpents

probably in the neighborhood of Mount Hor, where Aaron died, and

thereupon Moses set up a large brazen serpent on a pole, and declared

that whoever would look upon the serpent should live. Also, apparently,

it did produce an effect upon those who believed: which, of course,

is not an unprecedented phenomenon among faith healers. But what is

interesting in this historical anecdote is not that Moses performed

certain faith cures by the suggestion of a serpent, but that the

Israelites themselves, when out of the presence of Moses, recognized

that he had perpetrated on them a vulgar fraud. For example, King

Hezekiah destroyed this relic, which had been preserved in the Temple,

calling it “Nehushtan,” “a brazen thing,” as an expression of his

contempt. And what is more remarkable still is that although Hezekiah

reigned four or five centuries after the exodus, yet science had made no

such advance in the interval as to justify this contempt. Hezekiah seems

to have been every whit as credulous as were the pilgrims who looked on

the brazen serpent and were healed. Hezekiah “was sick unto death, and

Isaiah came to see him, and told him to set his house in order; for thou

shalt die, and not live.... And Hezekiah wept sore.”

Then, like Moses, Isaiah had another revelation in which he was directed

to return to Hezekiah, and tell him that he was to live fifteen years

longer. And Isaiah told the attendants to take “a lump of figs.” “And

they took it and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.”

Afterward Hezekiah asked of Isaiah how he was to know that the Lord

would keep his word and give him fifteen additional years of life.

Isaiah told him that the shadow should go back ten degrees on the dial.

And Isaiah “cried unto the Lord,” and he brought the shadow ten degrees

backward “by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” [Footnote:

2 Kings xx, 11.] And yet this man Hezekiah, who could believe in this

marvellous cure of Isaiah, repudiated with scorn the brazen serpent as

an insult to credulity. The contrast between Moses, who hesitated not

to take all risks in matters of disease with which he felt himself

competent to cope, and his timidity and hesitation in matters of war,

is astounding. But it is a common phenomenon with the worker of miracles

and indicates the limit of faith at which the saint or prophet has

always betrayed the impostor. For example: Saint Bernard, when he

preached in 1146 the Second Crusade, made miraculous cures by the

thousand, so much so that there was danger of being killed in the crowds

which pressed upon him. And yet this same saint, when chosen by the

crusaders four years later, in 1150, to lead them because of his power

to constrain victory by the intervention of God, wrote, after the

crusaders’ defeat, in terror to the pope to protect him, because he was

unfit to take such responsibility.

But even with this reservation Moses could not gain the complete

confidence of the congregation and the insecurity of his position

finally broke him down.

At this same place of Kadesh, Miriam died, “and the people chode with

Moses because there was no water for the congregation.” [Footnote:

Numbers xx, 8.] Moses thereupon withdrew and, as usual, received a

revelation. And the Lord directed him to take his rod, “and speak ye

unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water.”

And Moses gathered the congregation and said unto them, “Hear now, ye

rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?”

“And he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly.”

But Moses felt that he had offended God, “Because ye believed me not,

to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall

not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.”

Moses had become an old man, and he felt himself unequal to the burden

he had assumed. He recognized that his theory of cause and effect

had broken down, and that the “Lord” whom at the outset he had firmly

believed to be an actual and efficient power to be dominated by him,

either could not or would not support him in emergency. In short, he

had learned that he was an adventurer who must trust to himself. Hence,

after Hormah he was a changed man. Nothing could induce him to lead

the Jews across the Jordan to attack the peoples on the west bank, and

though the congregation made a couple of campaigns against Sihon and Og,

whose ruthlessness has always been a stain on Moses, the probability is

that Moses did not meddle much with the active command. Had he done so,

the author of Deuteronomy would have given the story in more detail and

Moses more credit. All that is attributed to Moses is a division of the

conquests made together with Joshua, and a fruitless prayer to the Lord

that he might be permitted to cross the Jordan.

Meanwhile life was ending for him. His elder sister Miriam died at

Kadesh, and Aaron died somewhat later at Mount Hor, which is supposed

to lie about as far to the east of Kadesh as Hormah is to the west, but

there are circumstances about the death of Aaron which point to Moses

as having had more to do with it than of having been a mere passive

spectator thereof.

The whole congregation is represented as having “journeyed from Kadesh

and come unto Mount Hor ... by the coast of the land of Edom,” and there

the “Lord” spoke unto Moses and Aaron, and explained that Aaron was to

be “gathered unto his people, ... because ye rebelled ... at the water

of Meribah.” Therefore Moses was to “take Aaron and Eleazar his son, and

bring them up unto Mount Hor: and strip Aaron of his garments, and put

them upon Eleazar,” ... and that Aaron ... shall die there.

“And they went up into Mount Hor in the sight of all the congregation.

And Moses stripped Aaron of his garments, and put them upon Eleazar his

son; and Aaron died there in the top of the mount: and Moses and Eleazar

came down from the mount.” [Footnote: Numbers xx, 22-28.]

Now it is incredible that all this happened as straightforwardly as

the chronicle would have us believe. Aaron was an old man and probably

failing, but his death was not imminent. On the contrary, he had

strength to climb Mount Hor with Moses, without aid, and there is no

hint that he suffered from any ailment likely to end his life suddenly.

Moses took care that he and Eleazar should be alone with Aaron so that

there should be no witness as to what occurred, and Moses alone knew

what was expected.

Moses had time to take off the priestly garments, which were the

insignia of office and to put them on Eleazar, and then, when all was

ready, Aaron simply ceased to breathe at the precise moment when it was

convenient for Moses to have him die, for the policy of Moses evidently

demanded that Aaron should live no longer. Under the conditions of

the march Moses was evidently preparing for his own death, and for a

complete change in the administration of affairs. Appreciating that

his leadership had broken down and that the system he had created was

collapsing, he had dawdled as long on the east side of the Jordan as

the patience of the congregation would permit. An advance had become

inevitable, but Moses recognized his own inability to lead it. The

command had to be delegated to a younger man and that man was Joshua.

Eleazar, on the other hand, was the only available candidate for

the high priesthood, and Moses took the opportunity of making the

investiture on Mount Hor. So Aaron passed away, a sacrifice to the

optimism of Moses. Next came the turn of Moses himself. The whole story

is told in Deuteronomy. Within, probably, something less than a year

after Aaron’s death the “Lord” made a like communication to Moses.

“Get thee up ... unto Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, that is

over against Jericho;

“And die in the Mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy

people; as Aaron, thy brother died in Mount Hor;

“Because ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at

the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin, because ye

sanctified me not in the midst of the children of Israel.

“And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo,

... And the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan.

“And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab,

according to the word of the Lord.... But no man knoweth of his

sepulchre unto this day.

“And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was

not dim, nor his natural force abated.”

The facts, as preserved by Josephus, appear to have been these: Moses

ascended the mountain with only the elders, the high priest Eleazar, and

Joshua. At the top of the mountain he dismissed the elders, and then, as

he was embracing Joshua and Eleazar and still speaking, a cloud covered

him, and he disappeared in a ravine. In other words, he killed himself.

Such is the story of Moses, a fragment of history interesting enough

in itself, but especially material to us not only because of the

development of the thought dealt with in the following volumes, but

of the inferences which, at the present time, it permits us to draw

touching our own immediate future.

Moses was the first great optimist of whom any record remains, and one

of the greatest. He was the prototype of all those who have followed.

He was a visionary. All optimists must be visionaries. Moses based the

social system which he tried to organize, not on observed facts, but

on _a priori_ theories evolved out of his own mind, and he met with the

failure that all men of that cast of mind must meet with when he sought

to realize his visions. His theory was that the universe about him was

the expression of an infinite mind which operated according to law.

That this mind, or consciousness, was intelligent and capable of

communicating with man. That it did, in fact, so communicate through

him, as a medium, and that other men had only to receive humbly and obey

implicitly his revelations to arrive at a condition nearly approaching,

if not absolutely reaching, perfection, while they should enjoy

happiness and prosperity in the land in which they should be permitted,

by an infinite and supernatural power and wisdom, to dwell. All this is

not alien to the attitude of scientific optimists at the present day,

who anticipate progressive perfection.

Let us consider, for a moment, whither these _a priori_ theories led,

when put in practice upon human beings, including himself. And, in the

first place, it will probably be conceded that no optimist could have,

or ever hope to have, a fairer opportunity to try his experiment than

had Moses on that plastic Hebrew community which he undertook to lead

through Arabia. Also it must be admitted that Moses, as an expounder of

a moral code, achieved success. The moral principles which he laid down

have been accepted as sound from that day to this, and are still written

up in our churches, as a standard for men and women, however slackly

they may be observed. But when we come to mark the methods by which

Moses obtained acceptance of his code by his contemporaries, and, above

all, sought to constrain obedience to himself and to it, we find the

prospect unalluring. To begin with, Moses had only begun the exodus when

he learned from his practical father-in-law that the system he employed

was fantastic and certain to fail: his notion being that he should sit

and judge causes himself, as the mouthpiece of the infinite, and that

therefore each judgment he gave would demand a separate miracle

or imposture. This could not be contemplated. Therefore Moses was

constrained to impose his code in writing, once for all, by one

gigantic fraud which he must perpetrate himself. This he tried at Sinai,

unblushingly declaring that the stone tablets which he produced were

“written with the finger of God”; wherefore, as they must have been

written by himself, or under his personal supervision, he brazenly and

deliberately lied. His good faith was obviously suspected, and this

suspicion caused disastrous results. To support his lie Moses caused

three thousand unsuspecting and trusting men to be murdered in cold

blood, whose only crime was that they would have preferred another

leadership to his, and because, had they been able to effect their

purpose, they would have disappointed his ambition.

To follow Moses further in the course which optimism enforced upon him

would be tedious, as it would be to recapitulate the story which has

already been told. It suffices to say shortly that, at every camp, he

had to sink to deeper depths of fraud, deception, lying, and crime in

order to maintain his credit. It might be that, as at Meribah, it was

only claiming for himself a miracle which he knew he could not work,

and for claiming which, instead of giving the credit to God, he openly

declared he deserved and must receive punishment; or it might be some

impudent quackery, like the brazen serpent, which at least was harmless;

or it might have been complicated combinations which suggest a deeper

shade; as, for example, the outbreak of the plague, after Korah’s

rebellion, which bears the aspect of a successful effort at intimidation

to support his own wavering credit. But the result was always the same.

Moses had promised that the supernatural power he pretended to control

should sustain him and give victory. Possibly, when he started on the

exodus he verily believed that such a power existed, was amenable and

could be constrained to intervene. He found that he had been mistaken

on all these heads, and when he accepted these facts as final, nothing

remained for him but suicide, as has been related. It only remains

to glance, for a single moment, at what befell, when he had gone, the

society he had organized on the optimistic principle of the approach of

human beings toward perfection. During the period of the Judges, when

“there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in

his own eyes,” [Footnote: Judges xvii, 6.] anarchy supervened, indeed,

but also the whole Mosaic system broke down because of the imbecility of

the men on whom Moses relied to lift the people toward perfection.

Eli, a descendant of Aaron, was high priest, and a judge, being the

predecessor of Samuel, the last of the judges. Now Eli had two sons who

“were sons of Belial; they knew not the Lord.”

Eli, being very old, “heard all that his sons did unto all Israel;

and how they lay with the women that assembled at the door of the

tabernacle....” And Eli argued with them; “notwithstanding they harkened

not unto the voice of their father.”

Samuel succeeded Eli. He was not a descendant of Aaron, but became

a judge, apparently, upon his own merits. But as a judge he did not

constrain his sons any better than Eli had his, for “they took bribes,

and perverted judgment.” So the elders of Israel came to Samuel and

said, “Give us a king to judge us.” “And Samuel prayed unto the Lord,”

though he disliked the idea. Yet the result was inevitable. The kingdom

was set up, and the Mosaic society perished. Nothing was left of Mosaic

optimism but the tradition. Also there was the Mosaic morality, and what

that amounted to may best, perhaps, be judged by David, who was the most

perfect flower of the perfection to which humanity was to attain

under the Mosaic law, and has always stood for what was best in Mosaic

optimism. David’s morality is perhaps best illustrated by the story of

Uriah the Hittite.

One day David saw Uriah’s wife taking a bath on her housetop and took a

fancy to her. The story is all told in the Second of Samuel. How David

sent for her, took her into the palace, and murdered Uriah by sending

him to Joab who commanded the army, and instructing Joab to set Uriah in

the forefront of the hottest battle, and “retire ye from him that he may

be smitten and die.” And Uriah was killed.

Then came the famous parable by Nathan of the ewe lamb. “And David’s

anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the

Lord liveth, the man who hath done this thing shall surely die.

“And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.”

And Nathan threatened David with all kinds of disaster and even with

death, and David was very repentant and “he fasted and lay all night

upon the earth.” But for all that, when assured that nothing worse was

to happen to him than the loss of the son Bathsheba had borne him, David

comforted Bathsheba. He by no means gave her up. On the contrary, “he

went in unto her ... and she bare him a son, and he called his name

Solomon: and the Lord loved him.”

Again the flesh had prevailed. And so it has always been with each new

movement which has been stimulated by an idealism inspired by a belief

that the spirit was capable of generating an impulse which would

overcome the flesh and which could cause men to move toward perfection

along any other path than the least resistant. And this because man is

an automaton, and can move no otherwise. In this point of view nothing

can be more instructive than to compare the Roman with the Mosaic

civilization, for the Romans were a sternly practical people and

worshipped force as Moses worshipped an ideal.

As Moses dreamed of realizing the divine consciousness on earth by

introspection and by prayer, so the Romans supposed that they could

attain to prosperity and happiness on earth by the development of

superior physical force and the destruction of all rivals. Cato the

Censor was the typical Roman landowner, the type of the class which

built up the great vested interest in land which always moved and

dominated Rome. He expressed the Roman ideal in his famous declaration

in the Senate, when he gave his vote for the Third Punic War; “_Delenda

est Carthago_,” Carthage must be destroyed. And Carthage was destroyed

because to a Roman to destroy Carthage was a logical competitive

necessity. Subsequently, the Romans took the next step in their

social adjustment at home. They deified the energy which had destroyed

Carthage. The incarnation of physical force became the head of the

State;--the Emperor when living, the Divus, when dead. And this

conception gained expression in the law. This godlike energy found vent

in the Imperial will; “_Quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem_.”

[Footnote: Inst. 1, 2, 6.]

Nothing could be more antagonistic to the Mosaic philosophy, which

invoked the supernatural unity as authority for every police regulation.

Moreover, the Romans carried out their principle relentlessly, to their

own destruction. That great vested interest which had absorbed the land

of Italy, and had erected the administrative entity which policed it,

could not hold and cultivate its land profitably, in competition with

other lands such as Egypt, North Africa, or Assyria, which were worked

by a cheaper and more resistant people. Therefore the Roman landowners

imported this competitive population from their homes, having first

seized them as slaves, and cultivated their own Italian fields with

them after the eviction of the original native peasants, who could

not survive on the scanty nutriment on which the eastern races throve.

[Footnote: I have dealt with this subject at length in my _Law of

Civilization and Decay_, chapter II, to which I must refer the reader.

More fully still in the French translation. “This unceasing emigration

gradually changed the character of the rural population, and a similar

alteration took place in the army. As early as the time of Cæsar, Italy

was exhausted; his legions were mainly raised in Gaul, and as the

native farmers sank into serfdom or slavery, and then at last vanished,

recruits were drawn more and more from beyond the limits of the empire.”

I cannot repeat my arguments here, but I am not aware that they have

been seriously controverted.]

The Roman law, the _Romana lex_, was as gigantic, as original, and as

comprehensive a structure as was the empire which gave to it expression.

Modern European law is but a dilution thereof. The Roman law attained

perfection, as I conceive, about the time of the Antonines, through the

great jurists who then flourished. If one might name a particular moment

at which so vast and complex a movement culminated, one would be tempted

to suggest the reign of Hadrian, who appointed Salvius Julianus to draw

up the _edictum perpetuum_, or permanent edict, in the year 132 A.D.

Thenceforward the magistrate had to use his discretion only when the

edict of Julianus did not apply.

I am not aware that any capital principle of municipal law has been

evolved since that time, and the astonishing power of the Roman mind

can only be appreciated when it is remembered that the whole of this

colossal fabric was original. Modern European law has been only a

servile copy. But, regard being had to the position of the emperor in

relation to the people, and more especially in relation to the vast

bureaucracy of Rome, which was the embodiment of the vested interest

which was Rome itself, the adherence of Roman thought to the path of

least resistance was absolute. “So far as the cravings of Stoicism found

historical and political fulfilment, they did so in the sixty years of

Hadrian and the Antonines, and so far again as an individual can embody

the spirit of an age, its highest and most representative impersonation

is unquestionably to be found in the person of Marcus Antoninus....

Stoicism faced the whole problem of existence, and devoted as searching

an investigation to processes of being and of thought, to physics and

to dialectic, as to the moral problems presented by the emotions and the

will.” [Footnote: _Marcus Aurelius Antoninus_, in English, by Gerald H.

Rendall, Introduction, xxvii.]

Such was stoicism, of which Marcus Aurelius was and still remains the

foremost expression. He admitted that as emperor his first duty was to

sacrifice himself for the public and he did his duty with a constancy

which ultimately cost him his life. Among these duties was the great

duty of naming his successor. The Roman Empire never became strictly

hereditary. It hinged, as perhaps no other equally developed system

ever hinged, upon the personality of the emperor, who incarnated the

administrative bureaucracy which gave effect to the _Pax Romana_ and the

_Romana lex_ from the Euphrates to the Atlantic and from Scotland to the

Tropic of Cancer. Of all men Marcus Aurelius was the most conscientious

and the most sincere, and he understood, as perhaps no other man in like

position ever understood, the responsibility which impinged on him, to

allow no private prevention to impose an unfit emperor upon the empire

But Marcus had a son Commodus, who was nineteen when his father

died, and who had already developed traits which caused foreboding.

Nevertheless, Marcus associated Commodus with himself in the empire

when Commodus was fourteen and Commodus attained to absolute power when

Marcus died. Subsequently, Commodus became the epitome of all that was

basest and worst in a ruler. He was murdered by the treachery of Marcia,

his favorite concubine, and the Senate decreed that “his body should

be dragged with a hook into the stripping room of the gladiators, to

satiate the public fury.” [Footnote: _Decline and Fall_, chap. iv.]

From that day Rome entered upon the acute stage of her decline, and

she did so very largely because Marcus Aurelius, the ideal stoic, was

incapable of violating the great law of nature which impelled him

to follow not reason, but the path of least resistance in choosing a

successor; or, in other words, the instinct of heredity. Moreover,

this instinct and not reason is or has been, among the strongest which

operate upon men, and makes them automata. It is the basis upon which

the family rests, and the family is the essence of social cohesion.

Also the hereditary instinct has been the prime motor which has created

constructive municipal jurisprudence and which has evolved religion.

With the death of Marcus Aurelius individual competition may be judged

to have done its work, and presently, as the population changed its

character under the stress thereof, a new phase opened: a phase which is

marked, as such phases usually are, by victory in war. Marcus Aurelius

died in 180 A.D. Substantially a century later, in 312, Constantine

won the battle of the Milvian Bridge with his troops fighting under

the Labarum, a standard bearing a cross with the device “_In hoc signo

vinces_”; By this sign conquer. Probably Constantine had himself scanty

faith in the Labarum, but he speculated upon it as a means to arouse

enthusiasm in his men. It served his purpose, and finding the step he

had taken on the whole satisfactory, he followed it up by accepting

baptism in 337 A.D.

From this time forward the theory of the possibility of securing divine

or supernatural aid by various forms of incantation or prayer gained

steadily in power for about eight centuries, until at length it became

a passion and gave birth to a school of optimism, the most overwhelming

and the most brilliant which the world has ever known and which evolved

an age whose end we still await.

The Germans of the fourth century were a very simple race, who

comprehended little of natural laws, and who therefore referred

phenomena they did not understand to supernatural intervention. This

intervention could only be controlled by priests, and thus the invasions

caused a rapid rise in the influence of the sacred class. The power of

every ecclesiastical organization has always rested on the miracle, and

the clergy have always proved their divine commission as did Moses.

This was eminently the case with the mediæval Church. At the outset

Christianity was socialistic, and its spread among the poor was

apparently caused by the pressure of servile competition; for the

sect only became of enough importance to be persecuted under Nero,

contemporaneously with the first signs of distress which appeared

through the debasement of the denarius. But socialism was only a passing

phase, and disappeared as the money value of the miracle rose, and

brought wealth to the Church. Under the Emperor Decius, about 250, the

magistrates thought the Christians opulent enough to use gold and silver

vessels in their service, and by the fourth century the supernatural so

possessed the popular mind that Constantine, as we have seen, not only

allowed himself to be converted by a miracle, but used enchantment as an

engine of war.

The action of the Milvian Bridge, fought in 312, by which Constantine

established himself at Rome, was probably the point whence nature

began to discriminate decisively against the vested interest of Western

Europe. Capital had already abandoned Italy; Christianity was soon after

officially recognized, and during the next century the priest began to

rank with the soldier as a force in war.

Meanwhile, as the population sank into exhaustion, it yielded less and

less revenue, the police deteriorated, and the guards became unable to

protect the frontier. In 376, the Goths, hard pressed by the Huns, came

to the Danube and implored to be taken as subjects by the emperor. After

mature deliberation the Council of Valens granted the prayer, and some

five hundred thousand Germans were cantoned in Moesia. The intention of

the government was to scatter this multitude through the provinces as

_coloni,_ or to draft them into the legions; but the detachment detailed

to handle them was too feeble, the Goths mutinied, cut the guard to

pieces, and having ravaged Thrace for two years, defeated and killed

Valens at Hadrianople. In another generation the disorganization of the

Roman army had become complete, and Alaric gave it its death-blow in his

campaign of 410.

Alaric was not a Gothic king, but a barbarian deserter, who, in 392, was

in the service of Theodosius. Subsequently he sometimes held imperial

commands, and sometimes led bands of marauders on his own account, but

was always in difficulty about his pay. Finally, in the revolution in

which Stilicho was murdered, a corps of auxiliaries mutinied and

chose him their general. Alleging that his arrears were unpaid, Alaric

accepted the command, and with this army sacked Rome.

During the campaign the attitude of the Christians was more interesting

than the strategy of the soldiers. Alaric was a robber, leading

mutineers, and yet the orthodox historians did not condemn him. They

did not condemn him because the sacred class instinctively loved the

barbarians whom they could overawe, whereas they could make little

impression on the materialistic intellect of the old centralized

society. Under the empire the priests, like all other individuals, had

to obey the power which paid the police; and as long as a revenue could

be drawn from the provinces, the Christian hierarchy were subordinate to

the monied bureaucracy who had the means to coerce them.

Yet only very slowly, as the empire disintegrated, did the theocratic

idea take shape. As late as the ninth century the pope prostrated

himself before Charlemagne, and did homage as to a Roman emperor.

[Footnote: Perz, _Annales Lauressenses_, I, 188.]

Saint Benedict founded Monte Cassino in 529, but centuries elapsed

before the Benedictine order rose to power. The early convents were

isolated and feeble, and much at the mercy of the laity, who invaded

and debauched them. Abbots, like bishops, were often soldiers, who

lived within the walls with their wives and children, their hawks, their

hounds, and their men-at-arms; and it has been said that, in all France,

Corbie and Fleury alone kept always something of their early discipline.

Only in the early years of the most lurid century of the Middle Ages,

when decentralization culminated, and the imagination began to gain its

fullest intensity, did the period of monastic consolidation open with

the foundation of Cluny. In 910 William of Aquitaine draw a charter

[Footnote: Bruel, _Recueil des Chartes de l’Abbaye de Cluny_, I, 124.]

which, so far as possible, provided for the complete independence of his

new corporation. There was no episcopal visitation, and no interference

with the election of the abbot. The monks were put directly under

the protection of the pope, who was made their sole superior. John

XI confirmed this charter by his bull of 932, and authorized the

affiliation of all converts who wished to share in the reform.

[Footnote: _Bull. Clun._ p. 2, col. 1. Also Luchaire, _Manuel des

Institutions Françaises_, 93, 95, where the authorities are collected.]

The growth of Cluny was marvellous; by the twelfth century two thousand

houses obeyed its rule, and its wealth was so great, and its buildings

so vast, that in 1245 Innocent IV, the Emperor Baldwin, and Saint

Louis were all lodged together within its walls, and with them all the

attendant trains of prelates and nobles with their servants.

In the eleventh century no other force of equal energy existed. The

monks were the most opulent, the ablest, and the best organized society

in Europe, and their effect upon mankind was proportioned to their

strength. They intuitively sought autocratic power, and during the

centuries when nature favored them, they passed from triumph to triumph.

They first seized upon the papacy and made it self-perpetuating;

they then gave battle to the laity for the possession of the secular

hierarchy, which had been under temporal control since the very

foundation of the Church.

According to the picturesque legend, Bruno, Bishop of Toul, seduced by

the flattery of courtiers and the allurements of ambition, accepted the

tiara from the emperor, and set out upon his journey to Italy with a

splendid retinue, and with his robe and crown. On his way he turned

aside at Cluny, where Hildebrand was prior. Hildebrand, filled with the

spirit of God, reproached him with having seized upon the seat of

the vicar of Christ by force, and accepted the holy office from the

sacrilegious hand of a layman. He exhorted Bruno to cast away his pomp,

and to cross the Alps humbly as a pilgrim, assuring him that the priests

and people of Rome would recognize him as their bishop, and elect him

according to canonical forms. Then he would taste the joys of a pure

conscience, having entered the fold of Christ as a shepherd and not as a

robber. Inspired by these words, Bruno dismissed his train, and left the

convent gate as a pilgrim. He walked barefoot, and when after two months

of pious meditations he stood before Saint Peter’s, he spoke to the

people and told them it was their privilege to elect the pope, and since

he had come unwillingly he would return again, were he not their choice.

He was answered with acclamations, and on February 2, 1049, he was

enthroned as Leo IX. His first act was to make Hildebrand his minister.

The legend tells of the triumph of Cluny as no historical facts could

do. Ten years later, in the reign of Nicholas II, the theocracy made

itself self-perpetuating through the assumption of the election of

the pope by the college of cardinals, and in 1073 Hildebrand, the

incarnation of monasticism, was crowned under the name of Gregory VII.

With Hildebrand’s election, war began. The Council of Rome, held

in 1075, decreed that holy orders should not be recognized where

investiture had been granted by a layman, and that princes guilty of

conferring investiture should be excommunicated. The Council of the

next year, which excommunicated the emperor, also enunciated the famous

propositions of Baronius--the full expression of the theocratic idea.

The priest had grown to be a god on earth.

“So strong in this confidence, for the honour and defence of your

Church, on behalf of the omnipotent God, the Father, the Son, and the

Holy Ghost, by your power and authority, I forbid the government of

the German and Italian kingdoms, to King Henry, the son of the Emperor

Henry, who, with unheard-of arrogance, has rebelled against your Church.

I absolve all Christians from the oaths they have made or may make to

him, and I forbid that any one should obey him as king.” [Footnote:

Migne, CXLVIII, 790.]

Henry marched on Italy, but in all European history there has been

no drama more tremendous than the expiation of his sacrilege. To his

soldiers the world was a vast space, peopled by those fantastic beings

which are still seen on Gothic towers. These demons obeyed the monk

of Rome, and his army, melting from about the emperor under a nameless

horror, left him helpless.

Gregory lay like a magician in the fortress of Canossa: but he had no

need of carnal weapons, for when the emperor reached the Alps he was

almost alone. Then his imagination also took fire, the panic seized him,

and he sued for mercy.

On August 7, 1106, Henry died at Liège, an outcast and a mendicant, and

for five long years his body lay at the church door, an accursed thing

which no man dared to bury.

Gregory prevailed because, to the understanding of the eleventh century,

the evidence at hand indicated that he embodied in a high degree the

infinite energy. The eleventh century was intensely imaginative and the

evidence which appealed to it was those phenomena of trance, hypnotism,

and catalepsy which are as mysterious now as they were then, but whose

effect was then to create an overpowering demand for miracle-working

substances. The sale of these substances gradually drew the larger

portion of the wealth of the community into the hands of the clergy, and

with wealth went temporal power. No vested interest in any progressive

community has probably ever been relatively stronger, for the Church

found no difficulty, when embarrassed, in establishing and operating a

thorough system for exterminating her critics.

Under such a pressure modern civilization must have sunk into some form

of caste had the mediæval mind resembled any antecedent mind, but

the middle age, though superficially imaginative, was fundamentally

materialistic, as the history of the crusades showed.

At Canossa the laity conceded as a probable hypothesis that the Church

could miraculously control nature; but they insisted that if the Church

possessed such power, she must use that power for the common good.

Upon this point they would not compromise, nor would they permit delay.

During the chaos of the ninth century turmoil and violence reached

a stage at which the aspirations of most Christians ended with

self-preservation; but when the discovery and working of the Harz

silver had brought with it some semblance of order, an intense yearning

possessed both men and women to ameliorate their lot. If relics could

give protection against oppression, disease, famine, and death, then

relics must be obtained, and, if the cross and the tomb were the most

effective relics, then the cross and the tomb must be conquered at any

cost. In the north of Europe especially, misery was so acute that

the people gladly left their homes upon the slenderest promise of

betterment, even following a vagrant like Peter the Hermit, who was

neither soldier nor priest. There is a passage in William of Tyre

which has been often quoted to explain a frenzy which is otherwise

inexplicable, and in the old English of Caxton the words still glow with

the same agony which makes lurid the supplication of the litany,--“From

battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord deliver us”:

“Of charyte men spack not, debates, discordes, and warres were nyhe

oueral, in suche wyse, that it seemed, that thende of the world

was nyghe, by the signes that our lord sayth in the gospell, ffor

pestylences and famynes were grete on therthe, ferdfulness of heuen,

tremblyng of therthe in many places, and many other thinges there were

that ought to fere the hertes of men....

“The prynces and the barons brente and destroyed the contrees of theyr

neyghbours, yf ony man had saved ony thynge in theyr kepyng, theyr owne

lordes toke them and put them in prison and in greuous tormentis, for to

take fro them suche as they had, in suche qyse that the chyldren of them

that had ben riche men, men myght see them goo fro dore to dore, for

to begge and gete theyr brede, and some deye for hungre and mesease.”

[Footnote: Godeffroy of Bologne, by William, Archbishop of Tyre,

translated from the French by William Caxton, London, 1893, 21, 22.]

Throughout the eleventh century the excitement touching the virtues

of the holy places in Judea grew, until Gregory VII, about the time of

Canossa, perceived that a paroxysm was at hand, and considered leading

it, but on the whole nothing is so suggestive of the latent scepticism

of the age as the irresolution of the popes at this supreme moment. The

laity were the pilgrims and the agitators. The kings sought the relics

and took the cross; the clergy hung back. Robert, Duke of Normandy, for

example, the father of William the Conqueror, died in 1035 from hardship

at Nicæa when returning from Palestine, absorbed to the last in the

relics which he had collected, but the popes stayed at home. Whatever

they may have said in private, neither Hildebrand nor Victor nor Urban

moved officially until they were swept forward by the torrent. They

shunned responsibility for a war which they would have passionately

promoted had they been sure of victory. The man who finally kindled the

conflagration was a half-mad fanatic, a stranger to the hierarchy.

No one knew the family of Peter the Hermit, or whence he came, but he

certainly was not an ecclesiastic in good standing. Inflamed by fasting

and penance, Peter followed the throng of pilgrims to Jerusalem, and

there, wrought upon by what he saw, he sought the patriarch. Peter asked

the patriarch if nothing could be done to protect the pilgrims, and to

retrieve the Holy Places. The patriarch replied, “Nothing, unless God

will touch the heart of the western princes, and will send them to

succor the Holy City.” The patriarch did not propose meddling himself,

nor did it occur to him that the pope should intervene. He took a

rationalistic view of the Moslem military power. Peter, on the contrary,

was logical, arguing from eleventh-century premises. If he could but

receive a divine mandate, he would raise an invincible army. He prayed.

His prayer was answered. One day while prostrated before the sepulchre

he heard Christ charge him to announce in Europe that the appointed hour

had come. Furnished with letters from the patriarch, Peter straightway

embarked for Rome to obtain Urban’s sanction for his design. Urban

listened and gave a consent which he could not prudently have withheld,

but he abstained from participating in the propaganda. In March,

1095, Urban called a Council at Piacenza, nominally to consider the

deliverance of Jerusalem, and this Council was attended by thirty

thousand impatient laymen, only waiting for the word to take the vow,

but the pope did nothing. Even at Clermont eight months later, he showed

a disposition to deal with private war, or church discipline, or with

anything in fact rather than with the one engrossing question of the

day, but this time there was no escape. A vast multitude of determined

men filled not only Clermont but the adjacent towns and villages, even

sleeping in the fields, although the weather was bitterly cold,

who demanded to know the policy of the Church. Urban seems to have

procrastinated as long as he safely could, but, at length, at the tenth

session, he produced Peter on the platform, clad as a pilgrim, and,

after Peter had spoken, he proclaimed the war. Urban declined, however,

to command the army. The only effective force which marched was a body

of laymen, organized and led by laymen, who in 1099 carried Jerusalem

by an ordinary assault. In Jerusalem they found the cross and the

sepulchre, and with these relics as the foundation of their power, the

laity began an experiment which lasted eighty-eight years, ending in

1187 with the battle of Tiberias. At Tiberias the infidels defeated the

Christians, captured their king and their cross, and shortly afterward

seized the tomb.

If the eleventh-century mind had been as rigid as the Roman mind of the

first century, mediæval civilization could hardly, after the collapse

of the crusades, have failed to degenerate as Roman civilization

degenerated after the defeat of Varus. Being more elastic, it began,

under an increased tension, to develop new phases of thought. The effort

was indeed prodigious and the absolute movement possibly slow, but a

change of intellectual attitude may be detected almost contemporaneously

with the fall of the Latin kingdom in Palestine. It is doubtless true

that the thirteenth century was the century in which imaginative thought

reached its highest brilliancy, when Albertus Magnus and Saint Thomas

Aquinas taught, when Saint Francis and Saint Clara lived, and when

Thomas of Celano wrote the _Dies Iræ_. It was then that Gothic

architecture touched its climax in the cathedrals of Chartres and

Amiens, of Bourges and of Paris; it was then also that Blanche of

Castile ruled in France and that Saint Louis bought the crown of thorns,

but it is equally true that the death of Saint Louis occurred in 1270,

shortly after the thorough organization of the Inquisition by Innocent

IV in 1252, and within two years or so of the production by Roger Bacon

of his _Opus Majus_.

The establishment of the Inquisition is decisive, because it proves

that sceptical thought had been spread far enough to goad the Church

to general and systematic repression, while the _Opus Majus_ is a

scientific exposition of the method by which the sceptical mind is

trained.

Roger Bacon was born about 1214, and going early to Oxford fell under

the influence of the most liberal teachers in Europe, at whose head

stood Robert Grosseteste, afterward Bishop of Lincoln. Bacon conceived

a veneration for Grosseteste, and even for Adam de Marisco his disciple,

and turning toward mathematics rather than toward metaphysics he eagerly

applied himself, when he went to Paris, to astrology and alchemy, which

were the progenitors of the modern exact sciences. In the thirteenth

century a young man like Bacon could hardly stand alone, and Bacon

joined the Franciscans, but before many years elapsed he embroiled

himself with his superiors. His friend, Grosseteste, died in 1253, the

year after Innocent IV issued the bull _Ad extirpanda_ establishing the

Inquisition, and Bacon felt the consequences. The general of his order,

Saint Bonaventura, withdrew him from Oxford where he was prominent, and

immured him in a Parisian convent, treating him rigorously, as Bacon

intimated to Pope Clement IV. There he remained, silenced, for some ten

years, until the election of Clement IV, in 1265. Bacon at once wrote to

Clement complaining of his imprisonment, and deploring to the pope the

plight into which scientific education had fallen. The pope replied

directing Bacon to explain his views in a treatise, but did not order

his release. In response Bacon composed the _Opus Majus_.

The _Opus Majus_ deals among other things with experimental science, and

in the introductory chapter to the sixth part Bacon stated the theory of

inductive thought quite as lucidly as did Francis Bacon three and a half

centuries later in the _Novum Organum_. [Footnote: Positis radicibus

sapientiae Latinorum penes Linguas et Mathematicam et Perspectivam,

nunc volo revolvere radices a parte Scientiae Experimentalis, quia

sine experientia nihil sufficienter scire protest. Duo enim simt

modi cognoscendi, scilicet per argumentum et experimentum. Argumentum

concludit et facit nos concedere conclusionem, sed non certificat neque

removet dubitationem ut quiescat animus in intuitu veritatis, nisi eam

inveniat via experientiae; quia multi habent argumenta ad scibilia,

sed quia non habent experientiam, negligunt ea, nee vitant nociva

nex persequuntue bona. J. H. Bridges, _The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon_

(Oxford, 1897), II, 167.]

Clement died in 1268. The papacy remained vacant for a couple of years,

but in 1271 Gregory X came in on a conservative reaction. Bacon

passed most of the rest of his life in prison, perhaps through his own

ungovernable temper, and ostensibly his writings seem to have had little

or no effect on his contemporaries, yet it is certain that he was not

an isolated specimen of a type of intelligence which suddenly bloomed

during the Reformation. Bacon constantly spoke of his friends, but his

friends evidently did not share his temperament. The scientific man

has seldom relished martyrdom, and Galileo’s experience as late as 1633

shows what risks men of science ran who even indirectly attacked the

vested interests of the Church. After the middle of the thirteenth

century the danger was real enough to account for any degree of

secretiveness, and a striking case of this timidity is related by Bacon

himself. No one knows even the name of the man to whom Bacon referred as

“Master Peter,” but according to Bacon, “Master Peter” was the greatest

and most original genius of the age, only he shunned publicity. The

“Dominus experimentorum,” as Bacon called him, lived in a safe retreat

and devoted himself to mathematics, chemistry, and the mechanical arts

with such success that, Bacon insisted, he could by his inventions have

aided Saint Louis in his crusade more than his whole army. [Footnote:

Émile Charles, _Roger Bacon. Sa vie et ses ouvrages_, 17.] Nor is

this assertion altogether fantastic. Bacon understood the formula

for gunpowder, and if Saint Louis had been provided with even a poor

explosive he might have taken Cairo; not to speak of the terror which

Greek fire always inspired. Saint Louis met his decisive defeat in a

naval battle fought in 1250, for the command of the Nile, by which he

drew supplies from Damietta, and he met it, according to Matthew Paris,

because his ships could not withstand Greek fire. Gunpowder, even in a

very simple form, might have changed the fate of the war.

Scepticism touching the value of relics as a means for controlling

nature was an effect of experiment, and, logically enough, scepticism

advanced fastest among certain ecclesiastics who dealt in relics. For

example, in 1248 Saint Louis undertook to invade Egypt in defence of

the cross. Possibly Saint Louis may have been affected by economic

considerations also touching the eastern trade, but his ostensible

object was a crusade. The risk was very great, the cost enormous, and

the responsibility the king assumed of the most serious kind. Nothing

that he could do was left undone to ensure success. In 1249 he captured

Damietta, and then stood in need of every pound of money and of every

man that Christendom could raise; yet at this crisis the Church thought

chiefly of making what it could in cash out of the war, the inference

being that the hierarchy suspected that even if Saint Louis prevailed

and occupied Jerusalem, little would be gained from an ecclesiastical

standpoint. At all events, Matthew Paris has left an account, in his

chronicle of the year 1249, of how the pope and the Franciscans

preached this crusade, which is one of the most suggestive passages in

thirteenth-century literature:

“About the same time, by command of the pope, whom they obeyed

implicitly, the Preacher and Minorite brethren diligently employed

themselves in preaching; and to increase the devotion of the Christians,

they went with great solemnity to the places where their preaching was

previously indicated, and granted many days of indulgence to those who

came to hear them.... Preaching on behalf of the cross, they bestowed

that symbol on people of every age, sex and rank, whatever their

property or worth, and even on sick men and women, and those who were

deprived of strength by sickness or old age; and on the next day, or

even directly afterwards, receiving it back from them, they absolved

them from their vow of pilgrimage, for whatever sum they could obtain

for the favour. What seemed unsuitable and absurd was, that not many

days afterwards, Earl Richard collected all this money in his treasury,

by the agency of Master Bernard, an Italian clerk, who gathered in the

fruit; whereby no slight scandal arose in the Church of God, and amongst

the people in general, and the devotion of the faithful evidently

cooled.” [Footnote: Matthew Paris, _English History_, translated by the

Rev. J. A, Giles, II, 309.]

When the unfortunate Baldwin II became Emperor of the East in 1237, the

relics of the passion were his best asset. In 1238, while Baldwin was

in France trying to obtain aid, the French barons who carried on the

government at Constantinople in his absence were obliged to pledge the

crown of thorns to an Italian syndicate for 13,134 perpera, which Gibbon

conjectures to have been besants. Baldwin was notified of the pledge

and urged to arrange for its redemption. He met with no difficulty.

He confidently addressed himself to Saint Louis and Queen Blanche, and

“Although the king felt keen displeasure at the deplorable condition of

Constantinople, he was well pleased, nevertheless, with the opportunity

of adorning France with the richest and most precious treasure in all

Christendom.” More especially with “a relic, and a sacred object which

was not on the commercial market.” [Footnote: Du Cange, _Histoire de

L’empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs Français_, edition de

Buchon, I, 259.]

Louis, beside paying the loan and the cost of transportation which came

to two thousand French pounds (the mark being then coined into £2, 15

sous and 6 pence), made Baldwin a present of ten thousand pounds for

acting as broker. Baldwin was so well contented with this sale which he

closed in 1239, that a couple of years later he sent to Paris all the

contents of his private chapel which had any value. Part of the treasure

was a fragment of what purported to be the cross, but the authenticity

of this relic was doubtful; there was beside, however, the baby linen,

the spear-head, the sponge, and the chain, beside several miscellaneous

articles like the rod of Moses.

Louis built the Sainte Chapelle at a cost of twenty thousand marks as a

shrine in which to deposit them. The Sainte Chapelle has usually

ranked as the most absolutely perfect specimen of mediaeval religious

architecture. [Footnote: On this whole subject of the inter-relation

of mediæval theology with architecture and philosophy the reader is

referred to _Mont-Saint-Michel et Chartres_, by Henry Adams, which is

the most philosophical and thorough exposition of this subject which

ever has been attempted.]

When Saint Louis bought the Crown of Thorns from Baldwin in 1239, the

commercial value of relics may, possibly, be said to have touched its

highest point, but, in fact, the adoration of them had culminated with

the collapse of the Second Crusade, and in another century and a half

the market had decisively broken and the Reformation had already begun,

with the advent of Wycliffe and the outbreak of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in

1381. For these social movements have always a common cause and reach a

predetermined result.

In the eleventh century the convent of Cluny, for example, had an

enormous and a perfectly justified hold upon the popular imagination,

because of the sanctity and unselfishness of its abbots. Saint Hugh

won his sainthood by a self-denial and effort which were impossible to

ordinary men, but with Louis IX the penitential life had already

lost its attractions and men like Arnold rapidly brought religion and

religious thought into contempt. The famous Grosseteste, Bishop of

Lincoln, born, probably, in 1175, died in 1253. He presided over the

diocese of Lincoln at the precise moment when Saint Louis was building

the Sainte Chapelle, but Grosseteste in 1250 denounced in a sermon at

Lyons the scandals of the papal court with a ferocity which hardly was

surpassed at any later day.

To attempt even an abstract of the thought of the English Reformation

would lead too far, however fascinating the subject might be. It must

suffice to say briefly that theology had little or nothing to do with

it. Wycliffe denounced the friars as lazy, profligate impostors, who

wrung money from the poor which they afterwards squandered in ways

offensive to God, and he would have stultified himself had he admitted,

in the same breath, that these reprobates, when united, formed a

divinely illuminated corporation, each member of which could and did

work innumerable miracles through the interposition of Christ. Ordinary

miracles, indeed, could be tested by the senses, but the essence of

transubstantiation was that it eluded the senses. Thus nothing could

be more convenient to the government than to make this invisible and

intangible necromancy a test in capital cases for heresy-Hence Wycliffe

had no alternative but to deny transubstantiation, for nothing could be

more insulting to the intelligence than to adore a morsel of bread which

a priest held in his hand. The pretension of the priests to make the

flesh of Christ was, according to Wycliffe, an impudent fraud, and

their pretension to possess this power was only an excuse by which they

enforced their claim to collect fees, and what amounted to extortionate

taxes, from the people. [Footnote: Nowhere, perhaps, does Wycliffe

express himself more strongly on this subject than in a little tract

called _The Wicket_, written in English, which he issued for popular

consumption about this time.] But, in the main, no dogma, however

incomprehensible, ever troubled Protestants, as a class. They easily

accepted the Trinity, the double procession, or the Holy Ghost itself,

though no one had the slightest notion what the Holy Ghost might be.

Wycliffe roundly declared in the first paragraph of his confession

[Footnote: Fasciculi Zizaniorum, 115.] that the body of Christ which was

crucified was truly and really in the consecrated host, and Huss, who

inherited the Wycliffian tradition, answered before the Council of

Constance, “Verily, I do think that the body of Christ is really and

totally in the sacrament of the altar, which was born of the Virgin

Mary, suffered, died, and rose again, and sitteth on the right hand of

God the Father Almighty.” [Footnote: Foxe, _Acts and Monuments_, III,

452.] That which has rent society in twain and has caused blood to

flow like water, has never been abstract opinions, but that economic

competition either between states or classes, that lust for power and

wealth, which makes a vested interest. Thus by 1382 the eucharist had

come to represent to the privileged classes power and wealth, and they

would have repudiated Wycliffe even had they felt strong enough to

support him. But they were threatened by an adversary equally formidable

with heresy in the person of the villeins whom the constantly increasing

momentum of the time had raised into a position in which they undertook

to compete for the ownership of the land which they still tilled as

technical serfs.

CHAPTER III.

Now the courts may say what they will in support of the vested

interests, for to support vested interests is what lawyers are paid

for and what courts are made for. Only, unhappily, in the process of

argument courts and lawyers have caused blood to flow copiously, for

in spite of all that can be said to the contrary, men have practically

proved that they do own all the property they can defend, all the courts

in Christendom notwithstanding, and this is an issue of physical force

and not at all of words or of parchments. And so it proved to be in

England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, alike in Church and

State. It was a matter of rather slow development. After the conquest

villeins could neither in fact nor theory acquire or hold property as

against their lord, and the class of landlords stretched upwards from

the owner of a knight’s fee to the king on his throne, who was the chief

landlord of all, but by so narrow a margin that he often had enough to

do to maintain some vestige of sovereignty. So, to help himself, it came

to pass that the king intrigued with the serfs against their restive

masters, and the abler the king, the more he intrigued, like Henry I,

until the villeins gained very substantial advantages. Thus it was that

toward 1215, or pretty nearly contemporaneously with the epoch when

men like Grosseteste began to show restlessness under the extortionate

corruption of the Church, the villein was discovered to be able to

defend his claim to some portion of the increment in the value of the

land which he tilled and which was due to his labor: and this title the

manorial courts recognized, because they could not help it, as a sort of

tenant right, calling it a customary tenancy by base service. A century

later these services in kind had been pretty frequently commuted into

a fixed rent paid in money, and the serf had become a freeman, and a

rather formidable freeman, too. For it was largely from among these

technical serfs that Edward III recruited the infantry who formed his

line at Crécy in 1346, and the archers of Crécy were not exactly the

sort of men who take kindly to eviction, to say nothing of slavery. As

no one meddled much with the villeins before 1349, all went well until

after Crécy, but in 1348 the Black Death ravaged England, and so many

laborers died that the cost of farming property by hired hands exceeded

the value of the rent which the villeins paid. Then the landlords, under

the usual reactionary and dangerous legal advice, tried coercion. Their

first experiment was the famous Statute of Laborers, which fixed wages

at the rates which prevailed in 1347, but as this statute accomplished

nothing the landlords repudiated their contracts, and undertook to force

their villeins to render their ancient customary services. Though the

lay landlords were often hard masters, the ecclesiastics, especially the

monks, were harder still, and the ecclesiastics were served by lawyers

of their own cloth, whose sharp practice became proverbial. Thus the

law declined to recognize rights in property existing in fact, with the

inevitable result of the peasant rising in 1381, known as Wat Tyler’s

Rebellion. Popular rage perfectly logically ran highest against the

monks and the lawyers. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon de

Sudbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Chief Justice were killed, and the

insurgents wished to kill, as Capgrave has related, “all the men that

had learned ony law.” Finally the rebellion was suppressed, chiefly by

the duplicity of Richard II. Richard promised the people, by written

charters, a permanent tenure as freemen at reasonable rents, and so

induced them to go home with his charters in their hands; but they were

no sooner gone than vengeance began. Though Richard had been at the

peasants’ mercy, who might have killed him had they wished, punitive

expeditions were sent in various directions. One was led by Richard

himself, who travelled with Tresilian, the new Chief Justice, the man

who afterward was himself hanged at Tyburn. Tresilian worked so well

that he is said to have strung up a dozen villeins to a single beam

in Chelmsford because he had no time to have them executed regularly.

Stubbs has estimated that seven thousand victims hardly satisfied the

landlords’ sense of outraged justice. What concerns us, chiefly, is

that this repression, however savage, failed altogether to bring

tranquillity. After 1381 a full century of social chaos supervened,

merging at times into actual civil war, until, in 1485, Henry Tudor

came in after his victory at Bosworth, pledged to destroy the whole

reactionary class which incarnated feudalism. For the feudal soldier was

neither flexible nor astute, and allowed himself to be caught between

the upper and the nether millstone. While industrial and commercial

capital had been increasing in the towns, capitalistic methods of

farming had invaded the country, and, as police improved, private and

predatory warfare, as a business, could no longer be made to pay. The

importance of a feudal noble lay in the body of retainers who followed

his banner, and therefore the feudal tendency always was to overcharge

the estate with military expenditure. Hence, to protect themselves from

creditors, the landlords passed the Statute _De Donis_ [Footnote: 13

Edw. I, c. I (A.D. 1284).] which made entails inalienable. Toward the

end of the Wars of the Roses, however, the pressure for money, which

could only be raised by pledging their land, became too strong for

the feudal aristocracy. Edward IV, who was a very able man, perceived,

pretty early in his reign, that his class could not maintain themselves

unless their land were put upon a commercial basis. Therefore he

encouraged the judges, in the collusive litigation known to us as

Taltarum’s Case, decided in 1472, to set aside the Statute _De Donis_,

by the fiction of the Common Recovery. The concession, even so, came too

late. The combination against them had grown too strong for the soldiers

to resist. Other classes evolved by competition wanted their property,

and these made Henry Tudor king of England to seize it for them.

Henry’s work was simple enough. After Bosworth, with a competent police

force at hand to execute process, he had only to organize a political

court, and to ruin by confiscatory fines all the families strong enough,

or rash enough, to maintain garrisoned houses. So Henry remodelled the

Star Chamber, in 1486, [Footnote: 3 Henry 7, C 1.] to deal with the

martial gentry, and before long a new type of intelligence possessed the

kingdom.

The feudal soldiers being disposed of, it remained to evict the monks,

who were thus left without their natural defenders. No matter of faith

was involved. Henry VIII boasted that in doctrine he was as orthodox as

the pope. There was, however, an enormous monastic landed property to

be redistributed This was confiscated, and appropriated, not to public

purposes, but, as usually happens in revolutions, to the use of the

astutest of the revolutionists. Among these, John Russell, afterward

Earl of Bedford, stood preeminent. Russell had no particular pedigree or

genius, save the acquisitive genius, but he made himself useful to

Henry in such judicial murders as that of Richard Whiting, Abbot of

Glastonbury. He received in payment, among much else, Woburn Abbey,

which has since remained the Bedford country seat, and Covent Garden

or Convent Garden, one of the most valuable parcels of real estate in

London. Covent Garden the present duke recently sold, anticipating,

perhaps, some such legislation as ruined the monks and made his

ancestor’s fortune. As for the monks whom Henry evicted, they wandered

forth from their homes beggars, and Henry hanged all of them whom he

could catch as vagrants. How many perished as counterpoise for the

peasant massacres and Lollard burnings of the foregoing two centuries

can never be known, nor to us is it material. What is essential to

mark, from the legal standpoint, is that while this long and bloody

revolution, of one hundred and fifty years, displaced a favored class

and confiscated its property, it raised up in their stead another class

of land monopolists, rather more greedy and certainly quite as cruel as

those whom they superseded. Also, in spite of all opposition, labor did

make good its claim to participate more or less fully in the ownership

of the property it cultivated, for while the holding of the ancient

villein grew to be well recognized in the royal courts as a copyhold

estate, villeinage itself disappeared.

Yet, unless I profoundly err, in the revolution of the sixteenth

century, the law somewhat conspicuously failed in its function of

moderating competition, for I am persuaded that competition of another

kind sharpened, and shortly caused a second civil war bloodier than the

Wars of the Roses.

Fifteen years before the convents were seized, Sir Thomas More wrote

_Utopia_, in whose opening chapter More has given an account of a dinner

at Cardinal Morton’s, who, by the way, presided in the Star Chamber.

At this dinner one of the cardinal’s guests reflected on the thievish

propensities of Englishmen, who were to be found throughout the country

hanged as felons, sometimes twenty together on a single gallows. More

protested that this was not the fault of the poor who were hanged, but

of rich land monopolists, who pastured sheep and left no fields for

tillage. According to More, these capitalists plucked down houses and

even towns, leaving nothing but the church for a sheep-house, so that

“by covin and fraud, or by violent oppression, ... or by wrongs and

injuries,” the husbandmen “be thrust out of their own,” and, “must

needs depart away, poor, wretched souls, men, women, husbands,

wives, fatherless children, widows.” The dissolution of the convents

accelerated the process, and more and more of the weaker yeomanry were

ruined and evicted. It is demonstrated that the pauperization of the

feebler rural population went on apace by the passage of poor-laws

under Elizabeth, which, in the Middle Ages, had not been needed and,

therefore, were unknown. This movement, described by More, was the

beginning of the system of enclosing common lands which afterward

wrought havoc among the English yeomen, and which, I suppose,

contributed more than any other single cause to the Great Rebellion of

the seventeenth century. In the mediæval village the owners of small

farms enjoyed certain rights in the common land of the community,

affording them pasturage for their cattle and the like, rights without

which small farming could not be made profitable. These commons the land

monopolists appropriated, sometimes giving some shadow of compensation,

sometimes by undisguised force, but on the whole compensation

amounted to so little that the enclosure of the commons must rank as

confiscation. Also this seizure of property would doubtless have caused

a convulsion as lasting as that which followed the insurrection of 1381,

or as did actually occur in Ireland, had it not been for an unparalleled

contemporaneous territorial and industrial expansion. Thorold Rogers

always insisted that between 1563, the year of the passage of the

Statute of Apprentices, [Footnote: 5 Eliz. c. 4.] and 1824, a regular

conspiracy existed between the lawyers “and the parties interested in

its success ... to cheat the English workman of his wages, ... and to

degrade him to irremediable poverty.” [Footnote: _Work and Wages_, 398.]

Certainly the land monopolists resorted to strong measures to accumulate

land, for something like six hundred and fifty Enclosure Acts were

passed between 1760, the opening of the Industrial Revolution, and 1774,

the outbreak of the American War. But without insisting on Rogers’s

view, it is not denied that the weakest of the small yeomen sank into

utter misery, becoming paupers or worse. On the other hand, of those

stronger some emigrated to America, others, who were among the ablest

and the boldest, sought fortune as adventurers over the whole earth,

and, like the grandfather of Chatham, brought home from India as

smugglers or even as pirates, diamonds to be sold to kings for their

crowns, or, like Clive, became the greatest generals and administrators

of the nation. Probably, however, by far the majority of those who were

of average capacity found compensation for the confiscated commons in

domestic industry, owning their houses with lots of land and the tools

of their trade. Defoe has left a charming description of the region

about Halifax in Yorkshire, toward the year 1730, where he found

the whole population busy, prosperous, healthy, and, in the main,

self-sufficing. He did not see a beggar or an idle person in the whole

country. So, favored by circumstances, the landed oligarchy met with

no effective resistance after the death of Cromwell, and achieved what

amounted to being autocratic power in 1688. Their great triumph was the

conversion of the House of Commons into their own personal property,

about the beginning of the eighteenth century, with all the guaranties

of law. In the Middle Ages the chief towns of England had been summoned

by the king to send burgesses to Westminster to grant him money, but

as time elapsed the Commons acquired influence and, in 1642, became

dominant. Then, after the Restoration, the landlords conceived the idea

of appropriating the right of representation, as they had appropriated

and were appropriating the common lands. Lord John Russell one day

observed in the House of Commons that the burgesses were originally

chosen from among the inhabitants of the towns they represented, but

that, in the reign of Anne, the landlords, to depress the shipping

interest, opened the borough representation to all qualified persons

without regard to domicile. [Footnote: 36 Hansard, Third Series, 548.]

Lord John was mistaken in his date, for the change occurred earlier, but

he described correctly enough the persistent animus of the landlords.

An important part of their policy turned on the so-called Determination

Acts of 1696 and 1729, which defined the franchises and which had

the effect of confirming the titles of patrons to borough property,

[Footnote: Porritt, _Unreformed House of Commons_, I, 9, _et seq._] thus

making a seat in the House of Commons an incorporeal hereditament fully

recognized by law. On this point so high an authority as Lord Eldon was

emphatic. [Footnote: 12 Hansard, Third Series, 396.] By the time of the

American War the oligarchy had become so narrow that one hundred and

fifty-four peers and commoners returned three hundred and seven members,

or much more than a majority of the House as then organized. [Footnote:

Grey’s motion for Reform, 30 _Parl. Hist._ 795 (A.D. 1793)] With the

privileged class reduced to these contemptible numbers a catastrophe

necessarily followed. Almost impregnable as the position of the

oligarchy appeared, it yet had its vulnerable point. As Burke told the

Duke of Portland, a duke’s power did not come from his title, but from

his wealth, and the landlords’ wealth rested on their ability to draw a

double rent from their estates, one rent for themselves, and another to

provide for the farmer to whom they let their acres. Evidently British

land could not bear this burden if brought in competition with other

equally good land that paid only a single rent, and from a pretty

early period the landlords appear to have been alive to this fact.

Nevertheless, ocean freights afforded a fair protection, and as long as

the industrial population remained tolerably self-supporting, England

rather tended to export than to import grain. But toward 1760 advances

in applied science profoundly modified the equilibrium of English

society. The new inventions, stimulated by steam, could only be utilized

by costly machinery installed in large factories, which none but

considerable capitalists could build, but once in operation the product

of these factories undersold domestic labor, and ruined and evicted the

population of whole regions like Halifax. These unfortunate laborers

were thrust in abject destitution into filthy and dark alleys in cities,

where they herded in masses, in misery and crime. In consequence grain

rose in value, so much so that in 1766 prayers were offered touching its

price. Thenceforward England imported largely from America, and in 1773

Parliament was constrained to reduce the duty on wheat to a point lower

than the gentry conceded again, until the total repeal of the Corn Laws

in 1846. [Footnote: John Morley, _The Life of Richard Cobden_, 167,

note 5.] The situation was well understood in London. Burke, Governor

Pownall, and others explained it in Parliament, while Chatham implored

the landlords not to alienate America, which they could not, he told

them, conquer, but which gave them a necessary market,--a market as

he aptly said, both of supply and demand. And Chatham was right, for

America not only supplied the grain to feed English labor, but bought

from England at least one third of all her surplus manufactures.

This brings us to the eighteenth century, which directly concerns us,

because the religious superstition, which had previously caused men to

seek in a conscious supreme energy the effective motor in human affairs,

had waned, and the problem presented was reduced to the operation of

that acceleration of movement by the progress of applied science which

always has been, and always must be, the prime cause of the quickening

of economic competition either as between communities or as between

individuals. And this is the capital phenomenon of civilization. For it

is now generally admitted that war is nothing but economic competition

in its acutest form. When competition reaches a certain intensity it

kindles into war or revolution, precisely as when iron is raised to

a certain heat it kindles into flame. And, for the purposes of

illustration, possibly the best method of showing how competition

was quickened, and how it affected adjacent communities during the

eighteenth century, is to take navigation, not only because navigation

was much improved during the first three quarters of that period, but

because both England and France competed for control in America by means

of ships. It suffices to mention, very succinctly, a few of the more

salient advances which were then made.

Toward 1761 John Harrison produced the chronometer, by which longitude

could be determined at sea, making the ship independent in all parts of

the world. At the same time more ingenious rigging increased her power

of working to windward. With such advantages Captain Cook became a

mighty discoverer both in the southern and western oceans, charted New

Zealand and much else, and more important than all, in 1759 he surveyed

the Saint Lawrence and piloted ships up the river, of which he had

established the channel. Speaking of Cook naturally leads to the

solution of the problem of the transportation of men, sailors, soldiers,

and emigrants, on long voyages, thereby making population fluid. Cook,

in his famous report, read before the Royal Society in March, 1776,

after his second voyage, established forever the hygienic principles

by observing which a ship’s company may safely be kept at sea for any

length of time. Previously there had always been a very high mortality

from scurvy and kindred diseases, which had, of course, operated as

a very serious check to human movement. On land the same class of

phenomena were even more marked. In England the Industrial Revolution is

usually held to date from 1760, and, by common consent, the Industrial

Revolution is attributed altogether to applied science, or, in other

words, to mechanical inventions. In 1760 the flying-shuttle appeared,

and coal began to replace wood for smelting. In 1764 Hargreaves invented

the spinning-jenny; in 1779 Crompton contrived the mule; and in 1768

Watt brought the steam-engine to maturity. In 1761 the first boat-load

of coals sailed over the Barton viaduct, which James Brindley built for

the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal, to connect Worsley with Manchester,

thus laying the foundation of British inland navigation, which before

the end of the century had covered England; while John Metcalf, the

blind road-builder, began his lifework in 1765. He was destined

to improve English highways, which up to that time had been mostly

impossible for wheeled traffic. In France the same advance went on.

Arthur Young described the impression made on him in 1789 by the

magnificence of the French roads which had been built since the

administration of Colbert, as well as by the canal which connected the

Mediterranean with the Atlantic.

In the midst of this activity Washington grew up. Washington was a born

soldier, engineer, and surveyor with the topographical instinct peculiar

to that temperament. As early as 1748 he was chosen by Lord Fairfax,

who recognized his ability, though only sixteen years old, to survey

his vast estate west of the Blue Ridge, which was then a wilderness.

He spent three years in this work and did it well. In 1753 Governor

Dinwiddie sent Washington on a mission to the French commander on the

Ohio, to warn him to cease trespassing on English territory, a mission

which Washington fulfilled, under considerable hardship and some peril,

with eminent success. Thus early, for he was then only twenty-two,

Washington gained that thorough understanding of the North American

river system which enabled him, many years afterward, to construct

the Republic of the United States upon the lines of least resistant

intercommunication. And Washington’s conception of the problem and his

solution thereof were, in substance, this:

The American continent, west of the mountains and south of the Great

Lakes, is traversed in all directions by the Mississippi and its

tributaries, but we may confine our attention to two systems of

watercourses, the one to the west, forming by the Wisconsin and the main

arm of the Mississippi, a thoroughfare from Lake Michigan to the Gulf;

and the other by French Creek and the Allegheny, broken only by one easy

portage, affording a perfect means of access to the Ohio, a river which

has always operated as the line of cleavage between our northern and

southern States. The French starting from Quebec floated from Lake Erie

down the Allegheny to Pittsburgh, the English ascended the Potomac to

Cumberland, and thence, following the most practicable watercourses,

advanced on the French position at the junction of the Allegheny and

the Monongahela. There Washington met and fought them in 1754, and ever

after Washington maintained that the only method by which a stable

union among the colonies could be secured was by a main trunk system of

transportation along the line of the Ohio and the Potomac. This was to

be his canal which should bind north and south, east and west, together

by a common interest, and which should carry the produce of the west,

north, and south, to the Atlantic coast, where it should be discharged

at the head of deep-water navigation, and which should thus stimulate

industry adjacent to the spot he chose for the Federal City, or, in our

language, for the City of Washington. Thus the capital of the United

States was to become the capital of a true nation, not as a political

compromise, but because it lay at the central point of a community made

cohesive by a social circulation which should build it up, in his own

words, into a capital, or national heart, if not “as large as London,

yet of a magnitude inferior to few others in Europe.” [Footnote:

Washington to Mrs. Fairfax, 16 May, 1798; Sparks, xi, 233.] Maryland and

Virginia abounded, as Washington well knew, in coal and iron. His canal

passing through this region would stimulate industry, and these States

would thus become the focus of exchanges. Manufacturing is incompatible

with slavery, hence slavery would gradually and peacefully disappear,

and the extremities of the Union would be drawn together at what he

described as “the great emporium of the United States.” To crown all,

a national university was to make this emporium powerful in collective

thought.

Doubtless Grenville and Townshend had not considered the American

problem as maturely as had Washington, but nevertheless, most

well-informed persons now agree that Englishmen in 1763 were quite alive

to the advantages which would accrue to Great Britain, by holding

in absolute control a rich but incoherent body of colonies whose

administrative centre lay in England, and were as anxious that London

should serve as the heart of America as Washington was that America

should have its heart on the Potomac.

Accordingly, England attempted to isolate Massachusetts and pressed an

attack on her with energy, before the whole thirteen colonies should

be able to draw to a unity. On the other hand, Washington, and most

sensible Americans, resisted this attack as resolutely as might be under

such disadvantages, not wishing for independence, but hoping for some

compromise like that which Great Britain has since effected with her

remaining colonies. The situation, however, admitted of no peaceful

adjustment, chiefly because the imbecility of American administration

induced by her incapacity for collective thought, was so manifest, that

Englishmen could not believe that such a society could wage a successful

war. Nor could America have done so alone. She owed her ultimate victory

altogether to Washington and France.

It would occupy too much space for me to undertake to analyze, even

superficially, the process by which, after the Seven Years’ War,

competition between America and England reached an intensity which

kindled the American Revolution, but, shortly stated, the economic

tension arose thus: As England was then organized, the estates of the

English landlords had to pay two rents, one to the landlord himself, the

other to the farmer who leased his land, and this it could not do were

it brought into direct competition with equally good land which paid

but one profit, and which was not burdened by an excessive cost of

transportation in reaching its market. As freights between England and

America fell because of improved shipping and the greater safety of the

seas, England had to have protection for her food and she proposed to

get it thus: If competing Continental exports could be excluded from

America, and, at the same time, Americans could be prevented from

manufacturing for themselves, the colonists might be constrained to take

what they needed from England, at prices which would enable labor to

buy food at a rate which would yield the double profit, and thus America

could be made to pay the cost of supporting the landlords. As Cobden

afterward observed, the fortunes of England have turned on American

competition. A part of these fortunes were represented by the

Parliamentary boroughs which the landlords owned and which were

confiscated by the Reform Bill, and these boroughs were held by Lord

Eldon to be incorporeal hereditaments: as truly a part of the private

property of the gentry who owned them as church advowsons, or the like.

And the gentry held to their law-making power which gave them such

a privilege with a tenacity which precipitated two wars before they

yielded; but this was naught compared to the social convulsion which

rent France, when a population which had been for centuries restrained

from free domestic movement, burst its bonds and insisted on levelling

the barriers which had immobilized it.

The story of the French Revolution is too familiar to need

recapitulation here: indeed, I have already dealt with it in my _Social

Revolutions_; but the effects of that convulsion are only now beginning

to appear, and these effects, without the shadow of a doubt, have been

in their ultimate development the occasion of that great war whose

conclusion we still await.

France, in 1792, having passed into a revolution which threatened the

vested interests of Prussia, was attacked by Prussia, who was defeated

at Valmy. Presently, France retaliated, under Napoleon, invaded Prussia,

crushed her army at Jena, in 1807, dismembered the kingdom and imposed

on her many hardships. To obtain their freedom the Prussians found it

needful to reorganize their social system from top to bottom, for this

social system had descended from Frederic William, the Great Elector of

Brandenburg (1640-1688), and from Frederic the Great (1740-1786), and

was effete and incapable of meeting the French onset, which amounted,

in substance, to a quickened competition. Accordingly, the new Prussian

constitution, conceived by Stein, put the community upon a relatively

democratic and highly developed educational basis. By the Emancipating

Edict of 1807, the peasantry came into possession of their land, while,

chiefly through the impulsion of Scharnhorst, who was the first chief

of staff of the modern army, the country adopted universal military

service, which proved to be popular throughout all ranks. Previous to

Scharnhorst, under Frederic the Great, the qualification of an officer

had been birth. Scharnhorst defined it as education, gallantry, and

intelligence. Similarly, Gneisenau’s conception of a possible Prussian

supremacy lay in its army, its science, and its administration. But the

civil service was intended to incarnate science, and was the product

of the modernized university, exemplified in the University of Berlin

organized by William von Humboldt. Herein lay the initial advantage

which Germany gained over England, an advantage which she long

maintained. And the advantage lay in this: Germany conceived a system of

technical education matured and put in operation by the State. Hence,

so far as in human affairs such things are possible, the intelligence of

Germans was liberated from the incubus of vested interests, who always

seek to use education to advance themselves. It was so in England. The

English entrusted education to the Church, and the Church was, by the

necessity of its being, reactionary and hostile to science, whereas the

army, in the main, was treated in England as a social function, and the

officers, speaking generally, were not technically specially educated

at all. Hence, in foreign countries, but especially in Germany which

was destined to be ultimately England’s great competitor, England laid

herself open to rather more than a suspicion of weakness, and indeed,

when it came to a test, England found herself standing, for several

years of war, at a considerable disadvantage because of the lack of

education in those departments wherein Germany had, by the attack of

France, been forced to make herself proficient. This any one may see

for himself by reading the addresses of Fichte to the German nation,

delivered in 1807 and 1808, when Berlin was still occupied by the

French. In fine, it was with Prussia a question of competition,

brought to its ultimate tension by war. Prussia had no alternative as a

conquered land but to radically accelerate her momentum, or perish. And

so, at the present day, it may not improbably be with us. Competition

must grow intenser.

With England the situation in 1800 was very different. It was less

strenuous. Nothing is more notable in England than to observe how, after

the Industrial Revolution began, there was practically no means by

which a poor man could get an education, save by educating himself.

For instance, in February 1815, four months before Waterloo, George

Stephenson took out a patent for the locomotive engine which was to

revolutionize the world. But George Stephenson was a common laborer in

the mines, who had no state instruction available, nor had he even any

private institution at hand in which the workmen whom he employed in

practical construction could be taught. He and his son Robert, had to

organize instruction for themselves and their employees independently.

So it was even with a man like Faraday, who began life as an errand boy,

and later on who actually went abroad as a sort of valet to Sir

Humphry Davy. Davy himself was a self-made man. In short, England, as

a community, did little or nothing by education for those who had no

means, and but little to draw any one toward science. It was at

this precise moment that Germany was cast into the furnace of modern

competition with England, who had, because of a series of causes,

chiefly geographical, topographical, and mineralogical, about a century

the start of her. Against this advantage Germany had to rely exclusively

upon civil and military education. At first this competition by Germany

took a military complexion, and very rapidly wrought the complete

consolidation of Germany by the Austrian and the French wars. But this

phase presently passed, and after the French campaign of 1870 the purely

economic aspect of the situation developed more strenuously still,

so much so that intelligent observers, among whom Lord Roberts was

conspicuous, perceived quite early in the present century that the heat

generated in the conflict must, probably, soon engender war. Nor could

it either theoretically or practically have been otherwise, for the

relations between the two countries had reached a point where they

generated a friction which caused incandescence automatically. And,

moreover, the inflammable material fit for combustion was, especially

in Germany, present in quantity. From the time of Fichte and Scharnhorst

downward to the end of the century, the whole nation had learned, as

a sort of gospel, that the German education produced a most superior

engine of economic competition, whereas the slack education and

frivolous amusements of English civil and military life alike, had

gradually created a society apt to crumble. And it is only needful for

any person who has the curiosity, to glance at the light literature of

the Victorian age, which deals with the army, to see how dominant a part

such an amusement as hunting played in the life of the younger officers,

especially in the fashionable regiments, to be impressed with the

soundness of much of this German criticism.

Assuming, then, for the sake of argument, that these historical premises

are sound, I proceed to consider how they bear on our prospective

civilization.

This is eminently a scientific age, and yet the scientific mind, as it

is now produced among us, is not without tendencies calculated to cause

uneasiness to those a little conversant with history or philosophy. For

whereas no one in these days would dream of utilizing prayer, as did

Moses or Saint Hugh, as a mechanical energy, nevertheless the search

for a universal prime motor goes on unabated, and yet it accomplishes

nothing to the purpose. On the contrary, the effect is one which could

neither be expected nor desired. Instead of being an aid to social

coordination, it stimulates disintegration to a high degree as the war

has shown. It has stimulated disintegration in two ways. First, it

has enormously quickened physical movement, which has already been

discussed, and secondly, it has stimulated the rapidity with which

thought is diffused. The average human being can only absorb and

assimilate safely new forms of thought when given enough time for

digestion, as if he were assimilating food. If he be plied with new

thought too rapidly he fails to digest. He has a surfeit, serious in

proportion to its enormity. That is to say, his power of drawing correct

conclusions from the premises submitted to him fails, and we have all

sorts of crude experiments in sociology attempted, which end in that

form of chaos which we call a violent revolution. The ordinary result

is infinite waste fomented by fallacious hopes; in a word, financial

disaster, supplemented usually by loss of life. The experience is an old

one, and the result is almost invariable.