WHY ORIENTALS ARE NOT REPUBLICANS.
That grass does not grow on stones is not the fault of the
rain.—_Oriental Proverb._
It seems strange that Republicanism should never have commended itself
to the minds of Orientals. Some of the conditions to which they have
been subjected, and some of their ideas ought, one might have thought,
to have engendered the wish to give a trial to this form of polity.
Socially, ideas of aristocratic exclusiveness have little weight with
them, and, politically, none at all. The expression of ‘taking a man
from the dung-hill and setting him among princes’ is old, and represents
an old practice; and it is a proceeding with which they are to this day
in their government, and the hierarchy of office, quite familiar. This
ultra-democratic idea of the equal fitness, even for the highest places,
of men taken from any class in society, offends none of their sentiments,
or instincts. They would not be shocked at seeing one who had begun life
as a donkey-boy, or a barber, so long as he was an Arab, or Osmanlee, and
a true believer, raised to be a Pasha. Then, too, no people in the world
have suffered so much, and so long, from their respective governments
as the Orientals have from their despotic monarchies, administered by a
descending series of hardly responsible governors. And as to general
manners and ideas, there is probably a greater amount of uniformity in
the East among all classes, than is to be found elsewhere. One might have
supposed that all this, at one time or another, sooner or later, would
have disposed them to take refuge in Republicanism. We have, however, no
instance of the idea having been entertained. It seems as if they had
no capacity for apprehending it, for the account Herodotus gives us of
the proposal to democratize the Government of Persia is a transparent
Greek fable. At all events, taking the story as we have it, the mover was
unable to find a seconder for his proposal.
This phenomenon in their history surprises us: it is, however, their
history which enables us to understand it, and to understand it
completely. They never possessed a legislature. This, which every little
Greek city possessed, which was the very soul of Greek political life,
and has ever been, more or less, a necessity of European political
life, never could have been known in the East. There the idea never
had any place in men’s minds; or, if it had, was aborted in the embryo
stage, and never saw the light. In short, with them a legislature was an
impossibility; for, as their laws have always been a revelation from God,
any attempt to legislate would have been nothing less than a direct and
formal denial, and renunciation of their religion.
In their systems, therefore, there has been room only for the
administrative, and executive departments of government. These, of
course, are secondary. With that which was first and highest, and
regulative of the whole, man had nothing at all to do. Under such a state
of things the administrative, and executive would naturally fall into the
hands of those who were best acquainted with the law, that is, of those
who were its constituted guardians, as priests, elders, doctors of the
law, &c., and of those who in any way, by force or favour, could attain
to power and office. Here is no place for republican, or democratic
ideas. The whole ground in every man’s mind is pre-occupied with ideas
that are antagonistic to them. If Orientals had had to make their own
laws, Republicanism would have been as common in the East as in the West;
perhaps more so.
In the Mosaic polity, though it was in some respects very favourable
to democracy, we see the absence of the legislative function leading
necessarily in the end to a monarchy; the monarchy having been preceded
by a rude exercise of administrative and executive functions, based in
the main on such moral and intellectual qualifications as the system
required. That the people in general assemblies, or through any other
machinery, should take into their own hands the management of their own
affairs was an idea that never at any time appears to have occurred to
them. It was alien to their system to imagine that the will of the people
was the source of power, or that law was the best reason of the community
made binding on all.
One can hardly understand, without some personal observation, and
thinking out what has been observed, how completely these oriental
systems extinguish liberty in every matter. Not only do they deny to
nations the right to frame their laws in conformity with the varying
needs of times and circumstances, but they even abrogate the liberty
of the individual to exercise his own judgment with respect to almost
everything he has to do, and almost to say, throughout life. Law being
a fixed immutable thing, it becomes unavoidable but that customs and
manners should be equally fixed and immutable. The extent to which this
is carried is, till one has witnessed it oneself, something difficult to
believe, indeed to comprehend. Every thought and emotion must be swathed
up in a certain prescribed form of words. The mummy of an Egyptian of
the old times tightly bandaged, stiff and lifeless, is the image of the
modern Egyptian’s mind. He has no kind of freedom. He is but a walking
and breathing mummy. Everything in the political, social, moral, and
intellectual order has been arranged and settled for everybody; and
everybody thoroughly and completely accepts the whole settlement, because
it comes to him from God, because it is the same to all classes and
individuals as to himself, and because the reasons, and, as far as they
go, the advantages, of the settlement are obvious, and commend themselves
to his understanding. In no mind, therefore, is there anything to give
rise to the germ of a desire to disturb the settlement. Here, then, there
is nothing which can cause the idea of political liberty to germinate.
Let the seed be sown again and again, it will fall always upon the rock.