[21] One pretended proof of a decline is found in the supposed
substitution of slave labour for free Italian labour. This began, it is
urged, on the opening of the Nile corn trade. Unfortunately, that is a
mere romance. Ovid, describing rural appearances in Italy when as yet
the trade was hardly in its infancy, speaks of the rustic labourer as
working in fetters. Juvenal, in an age when the trade had been vastly
expanded, notices the same phenomenon almost in the same terms.
[22] 'The best raw material.' Some people hold that the Romans and
Italians were a cowardly nation. We doubt this on the whole. Physically,
however, they were inferior to their neighbours. It is certain that the
Transalpine Gauls were a conspicuously taller race. Cæsar says: 'Gallis,
præ magnitudine corporum quorum, brevitas nostra contemptui est' ('Bell.
Gall.' 2, 30 _fin_.); and the Germans, in a still higher degree, were
both larger men and every way more powerful. The kites, says Juvenal,
had never feasted on carcases so huge as those of the Cimbri and
Teutones. But this physical superiority, though great for special
purposes, was not such absolutely. For the more general uses of the
legionary soldier, for marching, for castrametation, and the daily
labours of the spade or mattock, a lighter build was better. As to
single combats, it was one effect from the Roman (as from every good)
discipline--that it diminished the openings for such showy but perilous
modes of contest.
[23] '_Any considerable portion of this provincial corn growth,' i.e._,
of the provincial culture which was pursued on account of Rome, meaning
not the government of Rome, but, in a rigorous sense, on account of Rome
the city. For here lies a great oversight of historians and economists.
Because Rome, with a view to her own _privileged_ population, _i.e._,
the urban population of Rome, the metropolis, in order that she might
support her public distributions of grain, almost of necessity depended
on foreign supplies, _we are not to suppose that the great mass of
Italian towns and municipia did so_. Maritime towns, having the benefit
of ports or of convenient access, undoubtedly were participators in the
Roman advantage. But inland towns would in those days have forfeited the
whole difference between foreign and domestic grain by the enormous cost
of inland carriage. Of canals there was but one; the rivers were not
generally navigable, and ports as well as river shipping were wanting.
[24] '_Heraclius._' The same prosodial fault affects this name as that
of _Alexandria_. In each name the Latin _i_ represents a Greek _ei_, and
in that situation (viz., as a penultimate syllable) should receive the
emphasis in pronunciation as well as the sound of a long _i_ (that sound
which is heard in Long_i_nus). So again Academ_i_a, not Acad_e_mia. The
Greek accentuation may be doubted, but not the Roman.
[25] We have already said that Heraclius, who and whose family filled
the throne of Eastern Cæsar for exactly one hundred years (611-711),
consequently interesting in this way (if in no other), that he, as the
reader will see by considering the limits in point of time, must have
met and exhausted the first rage of the Mahometan _avalanche_, merits
according to our estimate the title of first and noblest amongst the
Oriental Cæsars. There are records or traditions of his earliest acts
that we could wish otherwise. Which of us would _not_ offend even at
this day, if called upon to act under one scale of sympathies, and to be
judged under another? In his own day, too painfully we say it, Heraclius
could not have followed what we venture to believe the suggestions of
his heart, in relation to his predecessor, because a policy had been
established which made it dangerous to be merciful, and a state of
public feeling which made it effeminate to pardon. First make it safe to
permit a man's life, before you pronounce it ignoble to authorize his
death. Strip mercy of ruin to its author, before you affirm upon a
judicial punishment of death (as then it was) cruelty in the adviser or
ignobility in the approver. Escaping from these painful scenes at the
threshold of his public life, we find Heraclius preparing for a war, the
most difficult that in any age any hero has confronted. We call him the
earliest of Crusaders, because he first and _literally_ fought for the
recovery of the Cross. We call him the most prosperous of Crusaders,
because he first--he last--succeeded in all that he sought, bringing
back to Syria (ultimately to Constantinople) that sublime symbol of
victorious Christianity which had been disgracefully lost at Jerusalem.
Yet why, when comparing him not with Crusaders, but with Cæsars, do we
pronounce him the noblest? Reader, which is it that is felt by a
thoughtful man--supposing him called upon to select one act by
preference before all others--to be the grandest act of our own
Wellesley? Is it not the sagacious preparation of the lines at Torres
Vedras, the self-mastery which lured the French on to their ruin, the
long-suffering policy which reined up his troops till that ruin was
accomplished? '_I bide my time_,' was the dreadful watchword of
Wellington through that great drama; in which, let us tell the French
critics on Tragedy, they will find _the most_ absolute unity of plot;
for the forming of the lines as the fatal noose, the wiling back the
enemy, the pursuit when the work of disorganization was perfect, all
were parts of one and the same drama. If he (as another Scipio) saw
another Zama, in this instance he was not our Scipio or Marcellus, but
our Fabius Maximus:
'Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem.'--'Ann.' 8, 27.
Now, such was the Emperor Heraclius. He also had his avenging Zama. But,
during a memorable interval of eleven years, he held back; fiercely
reined up his wrath; brooded; smiled often balefully; watched in his
lair; and then, when the hour had struck, let slip his armies and his
thunderbolts as no Cæsar had ever done, except that one who founded the
name of Cæsar.
[26] A brutal outrage on a Captain Jenkins--i.e., cutting off his
ears--was the cause of a war with Spain in the reign of George II.--ED.
_XVIII. NATIONAL MANNERS AND FALSE JUDGMENT OF THEM._
Anecdotes illustrative of manners, above all of national manners, will
be found on examination, in a far larger proportion than might be
supposed, rank falsehoods. Malice is the secret foundation of all
anecdotes in that class. The ordinary course of such falsehoods is, that
first of all some stranger and alien to those feelings which have
prompted a particular usage--incapable, therefore, of entering fully
into its spirit or meaning--tries to exhibit its absurdity more forcibly
by pushing it into an extreme or trying case. Coming himself from some
gross form of _Kleinstädtigkeit_, where no restraints of decorum exist,
and where everybody speaks to everybody, he has been utterly confounded
by the English ceremony of 'introduction,' when enforced as the _sine
quâ non_ condition of personal intercourse. If England is right, then
how clownishly wrong must have been his own previous circles! If England
is not ridiculously fastidious, then how bestially grovelling must be
the spirit of social intercourse in his own land! But no man reconciles
himself to this view of things in a moment. He kicks even against his
own secret convictions. He blushes with shame and anger at the thought
of his own family perhaps brought suddenly into collision with polished
Englishmen; he thrills with wrath at the recollection of having himself
trespassed upon this code of restriction at a time when he was yet
unwarned of its existence. In this temper he is little qualified to
review such a regulation with reason and good sense. He seeks to make it
appear ridiculous. He presses it into violent cases for which it was
never intended. He supposes a case where some fellow-creature is
drowning. How would an Englishman act, how _could_ he act, even under
such circumstances as these? _We_ know, we who are blinded by no spite,
that as a bar to personal communication or to any interchange of good
offices under appeals so forcible as these, this law of formal
presentation between the parties never did and never will operate. The
whole motive to such a law gives way at once.
_XIX. INCREASED POSSIBILITIES OF SYMPATHY IN THE PRESENT AGE._
Some years ago I had occasion to remark that a new era was coming on by
hasty strides for national politics, a new organ was maturing itself for
public effects. Sympathy--how great a power is that! Conscious
sympathy--how immeasurable! Now, for the total development of this
power, _time_ is the most critical of elements. Thirty years ago, when
the Edinburgh mail took ninety-six hours in its transit from London, how
slow was the reaction of the Scottish capital upon the English! Eight
days for the _diaulos_[27] of the journey, and two, suppose, for getting
up a public meeting, composed a cycle of _ten_ before an act received
its commentary, before a speech received its refutation, or an appeal
its damnatory answer. What was the consequence? The sound was
disconnected from its echo, the kick was severed from the
recalcitration, the '_Take you this!_' was unlinked from the '_And take
you that!_' Vengeance was defeated, and sympathy dissolved into the air.
But now mark the difference. A meeting on Monday in Liverpool is by
possibility reported in the London _Standard_ of Monday evening. On
Tuesday, the splendid merchant, suppose his name were Thomas Sands, who
had just sent a vibration through all the pulses of Liverpool, of
Manchester, of Warrington, sees this great rolling fire (which hardly
yet has reached his own outlying neighbourhoods) taken up afar off,
redoubled, multiplied, peal after peal, through the vast artilleries of
London. Back comes rolling upon him the smoke and the thunder--the
defiance to the slanderer and the warning to the offender--groans that
have been extorted from wounded honour, aspirations rising from the
fervent heart--truth that had been hidden, wisdom that challenged
co-operation.
And thus it is that all the nation, thus 'all that mighty heart,'
through nine hundred miles of space, from Sutherlandshire by London to
the myrtle climate of Cornwall, has become and is ever more becoming one
infinite harp, swept by the same breeze of sentiment, reverberating the
same sympathies
'Here, there, and in all places at one time.'[28]
Time, therefore, that ancient enemy of man and his frail purposes, how
potent an ally has it become in combination with great mechanic changes!
Many an imperfect hemisphere of thought, action, desire, that could not
heretofore unite with its corresponding hemisphere, because separated by
ten or fourteen days of suspense, now moves electrically to its
integration, hurries to its complement, realizes its orbicular
perfection, spherical completion, through that simple series of
improvements which to man have given the wings and _talaria_ of Gods,
for the heralds have dimly suggested a future rivalship with the
velocities of light, and even now have inaugurated a race between the
child of mortality and the North Wind.