from hints afforded by Tacitus and partly from the comparative study of
English, German, and Scandinavian institutions. In Russia and in
Hindustan we find the same primitive form of social organization
existing with very little change at the present day. Alike in Hindu and
in Russian village-communities we find the group of habitations, each
despotically ruled by a _pater-familias;_ we find the pasture-land
owned and enjoyed in common; and we find the arable land divided into
separate lots, which are cultivated according to minute regulations
established by the community. But in India the occasional redistribution
of lots survives only in a few localities, and as a mere tradition in
others; the arable mark has become private property, as well as the
homesteads. In Russia, on the other hand, re-allotments occur at
irregular intervals averaging something like fifteen years. In India the
local government is carried on in some places by a Council of Village
Elders, and in other places by a Headman whose office is sometimes
described as hereditary, but is more probably elective, the choice being
confined, as in the case of the old Teutonic kingship, to the members of
a particular family. In the Russian village, on the other hand, the
government is conducted by an assembly at which every head of a
household is expected to be present and vote on all matters of public
concern. This assembly elects the Village Elder, or chief executive
officer, the tax-collector, the watchman, and the communal herd-boy; it
directs the allotment of the arable land; and in general matters of
local legislation its power is as great as that of the New England
town-meeting,--in some respects perhaps even greater, since the precise
extent of its powers has never been determined by legislation, and
(according to Mr. Wallace) "there is no means of appealing against its
decisions." To those who are in the habit of regarding Russia simply as
a despotically-governed country, such a statement may seem surprising.
To those who, because the Russian government is called a bureaucracy,
have been led to think of it as analogous to the government of France
under the Old Régime, it may seem incredible that the decisions of a
village-assembly should not admit of appeal to a higher authority. But
in point of fact, no two despotic governments could be less alike than
that of modern Russia and that of France under the Old Régime. The
Russian government is autocratic inasmuch as over the larger part of the
country it has simply succeeded to the position of the Mongolian khans
who from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century held the Russian people
in subjection. This Mongolian government was--to use a happy distinction
suggested by Sir Henry Maine--a tax-taking despotism, not a legislative
despotism. The conquerors exacted tribute, but did not interfere with
the laws and customs of the subject people. When the Russians drove out
the Mongols they exchanged a despotism which they hated for one in
which they felt a national pride, but in one curious respect the
position of the people with reference to their rulers has remained the
same. The imperial government exacts from each village-community a tax
in gross, for which the community as a whole is responsible, and which
may or may not be oppressive in amount; but the government has never
interfered with local legislation or with local customs. Thus in the
_mir_, or village-community, the Russians still retain an element of
sound political life, the importance of which appears when we consider
that five-sixths of the population of European Russia is comprised in
these communities. The tax assessed upon them by the imperial government
is, however, a feature which--even more than their imperfect system of
property and their low grade of mental culture--separates them by a
world-wide interval from the New England township, to the primeval
embryonic stage of which they correspond.
From these illustrations we see that the mark, or self-governing
village-community, is an institution which must be referred back to
early Aryan times. Whether the mark ever existed in England, in anything
like the primitive form in which it is seen in the Russian _mir_, is
doubtful. Professor Stubbs (one of the greatest living authorities on
such a subject) is inclined to think that the Teutonic settlers of
Britain had passed beyond this stage before they migrated from
Germany.[4] Nevertheless the traces of the mark, as all admit, are
plentiful enough in England; and some of its features have survived down
to modern times. In the great number of town-names that are formed from
patronymics, such as _Walsingham_ "the home of the Walsings,"
_Harlington_ "the town of the Harlings," etc.,[5] we have unimpeachable
evidence of a time when the town was regarded as the dwelling-place of a
clan. Indeed, the comparative rarity of the word _mark_ in English laws,
charters, and local names (to which Professor Stubbs alludes) may be due
to the fact that the word _town_ has precisely the same meaning. _Mark_
means originally the belt of waste land encircling the village, and
secondarily the village with its periphery. _Town_ means originally a
hedge or enclosure, and secondarily the spot that is enclosed: the
modern German _zaun_, a "hedge," preserves the original meaning. But
traces of the mark in England are not found in etymology alone. I have
already alluded to the origin of the "common" in English towns. What is
still more important is that in some parts of England cultivation in
common has continued until quite recently. The local legislation of the
mark appears in the _tunscipesmot_,--a word which is simply Old-English
for "town-meeting." In the shires where the Danes acquired a firm
foothold, the township was often called a "by"; and it had the power of
enacting its own "by-laws" or town-laws, as New England townships have
to-day. But above all, the assembly of the markmen has left vestiges of
itself in the constitution of the parish and the manor. The mark or
township, transformed by the process of feudalization, becomes the
manor. The process of feudalization, throughout western Europe in
general, was no doubt begun by the institution of Benefices, or "grants
of Roman provincial land by the chieftains of the" Teutonic "tribes
which overran the Roman Empire; such grants being conferred on their
associates upon certain conditions, of which the commonest was military
service." [6] The feudal régime naturally reached its most complete
development in France, which affords the most perfect example of a Roman
territory overrun and permanently held in possession by Teutonic
conquerors. Other causes assisted the process, the most potent perhaps
being the chaotic condition of European society during the break-up of
the Carolingian Empire and the Scandinavian and Hungarian invasions.
Land was better protected when held of a powerful chieftain than when
held in one's own right; and hence the practice of commendation, by
which free allodial proprietors were transformed into the tenants of a
lord, became fashionable and was gradually extended to all kinds of
estates. In England the effects of feudalization were different from
what they were in France, but the process was still carried very far,
especially under the Norman kings. The theory grew up that all the
public land in the kingdom was the king's waste, and that all
landholders were the king's tenants. Similarly in every township the
common land was the lord's waste and the landholders were the lord's
tenants. Thus the township became transformed into the manor. Yet even
by such a change as this the townsmen or tenants of the manor did not in
England lose their self-government. "The encroachments of the lord," as
Sir Henry Maine observes, "were in proportion to the want of certainty
in the rights of the community." The lord's proprietorship gave him no
authority to disturb customary rights. The old township-assembly
partially survived in the Court Baron, Court Leet, and Customary Court
of the Manor; and in these courts the arrangements for the common
husbandry were determined.
This metamorphosis of the township into the manor, however, was but
partial: along with it went the partial metamorphosis of the township
into the parish, or district assigned to a priest. Professor Stubbs has
pointed out that "the boundaries of the parish and the township or
townships with which it coincides are generally the same: in small
parishes the idea and even the name of township is frequently, at the
present day, sunk in that of the parish; and all the business that is
not manorial is despatched in vestry-meetings, which are however
primarily meetings of the township for church purposes." [7] The parish
officers, including overseers of the poor, assessors, and way-wardens,
are still elected in vestry-meeting by the freemen of the township. And
while the jurisdiction of the manorial courts has been defined by
charter, or by the customary law existing at the time of the manorial
grant, "all matters arising outside that jurisdiction come under the
management of the vestry."
In England, therefore, the free village-community, though perhaps
nowhere found in its primitive integrity, has nevertheless survived in
partially transfigured forms which have played no unimportant part in
the history of the English people. In one shape or another the assembly
of freemen for purposes of local legislation has always existed. The
Puritans who colonized New England, therefore, did not invent the
town-meeting. They were familiar already with the proceedings of the
vestry-meeting and the manorial courts, but they were severed now from
church and from aristocracy. So they had but to discard the
ecclesiastical and lordly terminology, with such limitations as they
involved, and to reintegrate the separate jurisdictions into one,--and
forthwith the old assembly of the township, founded in immemorial
tradition, but revivified by new thoughts and purposes gained through
ages of political training, emerged into fresh life and entered upon a
more glorious career.
It is not to an audience which speaks the English language that I need
to argue the point that the preservation of local self-government is of
the highest importance for the maintenance of a rich and powerful
national life. As we contemplate the vicissitudes of local
self-government in the various portions of the Aryan world, we see the
contrasted fortunes of France and England illustrating for us most
forcibly the significance of this truth. For the preservation of local
self-government in England various causes may be assigned; but of these
there are two which may be cited as especially prominent. In the first
place, owing to the peculiar circumstances of the Teutonic settlement of
Britain, the civilization of England previous to the Norman Conquest was
but little affected by Roman ideas or institutions. In the second place
the thrusting down of the old thegnhood by the Norman Conquest (to which
I have already alluded) checked the growth of a _noblesse_ or _adel_ of
the continental type,--a nobility raised above the common people like a
separate caste. For the old thegnhood, which might have grown into such
a caste, was pushed down into a secondary position, and the peerage
which arose after the Conquest was something different from a
_noblesse_. It was primarily a nobility of office rather than of rank or
privilege. The peers were those men who retained the right of summons to
the Great Council, or Witenagemote, which has survived as the House of
Lords. The peer was therefore the holder of a legislative and judicial
office, which only one of his children could inherit, from the very
nature of the case, and which none of his children could share with him.
Hence the brothers and younger children of a peer were always commoners,
and their interests were not remotely separated from those of other
commoners. Hence after the establishment of a House of Commons, their
best chance for a political career lay in representing the interests of
the people in the lower house. Hence between the upper and lower strata
of English society there has always been kept up a circulation or
interchange of ideas and interests, and the effect of this upon English
history has been prodigious. While on the continent a sovereign like
Charles the Bold could use his nobility to extinguish the liberties of
the merchant towns of Flanders, nothing of the sort was ever possible in
England. Throughout the Middle Ages, in every contest between the people
and the crown, the weight of the peerage was thrown into the scale in
favour of popular liberties. But for this peculiar position of the
peerage we might have had no Earl Simon; it is largely through it that
representative government and local liberties have been preserved to the
English race.
In France the course of events has brought about very different results.
I shall defer to my next lecture the consideration of the vicissitudes
of local self-government under the Roman Empire, because that point is
really incident upon the study of the formation of vast national
aggregates. Suffice it now to say that when the Teutons overcame Gaul,
they became rulers over a population which had been subjected for five
centuries to that slow but mighty process of trituration which the
Empire everywhere brought to bear upon local self-government. While the
Teutons in Britain, moreover, enslaved their slightly romanized subjects
and gave little heed to their language, religion, or customs; the
Teutons in Gaul, on the other hand, quickly adopted the language and
religion of their intensely romanized subjects and acquired to some
extent their way of looking at things. Hence in the early history of
France there was no such stubborn mass of old Aryan liberties to be
dealt with as in the early history of England. Nor was there any
powerful middle class distributed through the country to defend such
liberties as existed. Beneath the turbulent throng of Teutonic nobles,
among whom the king was only the most exalted and not always the
strongest, there lay the Gallo-Roman population which had so long been
accustomed to be ruled without representation by a distant government
exercising its authority through innumerable prefects. Such Teutonic
rank and file as there was became absorbed into this population; and
except in sundry chartered towns there was nothing like a social stratum
interposed between the nobles and the common people.
The slow conversion of the feudal monarchy of the early Capetians into
the absolute despotism of Louis XIV. was accomplished by the king
gradually _conquering_ his vassals one after another, and adding their
domains to his own. As one vassal territory after another was added to
the royal domain, the king sent prefects, responsible only to himself,
to administer its local affairs, sedulously crushing out, so far as
possible, the last vestiges of self-government. The nobles, deprived of
their provincial rule, in great part flocked to Paris to become idle
courtiers. The means for carrying on the gigantic machinery of
centralized administration, and for supporting the court in its follies,
were wrung from the groaning peasantry with a cynical indifference like
that with which tribute is extorted by barbaric chieftains from a
conquered enemy. And thus came about that abominable state of things
which a century since was abruptly ended by one of the fiercest
convulsions of modern times. The prodigious superiority--in respect to
national vitality--of a freely governed country over one that is
governed by a centralized despotism, is nowhere more brilliantly
illustrated than in the contrasted fortunes of France and England as
_colonizing_ nations. When we consider the declared rivalry between
France and England in their plans for colonizing the barbarous regions
of the earth, when we consider that the military power of the two
countries has been not far from equal, and that France has at times
shown herself a maritime power by no means to be despised, it seems to
me that her overwhelming and irretrievable defeat by England in the
struggle for colonial empire is one of the most striking and one of the
most instructive facts in all modern history. In my lectures of last
year (at University College) I showed that, in the struggle for the
possession of North America, where the victory of England was so
decisive as to settle the question for all coming time, the causes of
the French failure are very plainly to be seen. The French colony in
Canada was one of the most complete examples of a despotic government
that the world has ever seen. All the autocratic and bureaucratic ideas
of Louis XIV. were here carried out without let or hindrance. It would
be incredible, were it not attested by such abundant evidence, that the
affairs of any people could be subjected to such minute and sleepless
supervision as were the affairs of the French colonists in Canada. A man
could not even build his own house, or rear his own cattle, or sow his
own seed, or reap his own grain, save under the supervision of prefects
acting under instructions from the home government. No one was allowed
to enter or leave the colony without permission, not from the colonists
but from the king. No farmer could visit Montreal or Quebec without
permission. No Huguenot could set his foot on Canadian soil. No public
meetings of any kind were tolerated, nor were there any means of giving
expression to one's opinions on any subject. The details of all this,
which may be read in Mr. Parkman's admirable work on "The Old Regime in
Canada," make a wonderful chapter of history. Never was a colony,
moreover, so loaded with bounties, so fostered, petted, and protected.
The result was absolute paralysis, political and social. When after a
century of irritation and skirmishing the French in Canada came to a
life-and-death struggle with the self-governing colonists of New
England, New York, and Virginia, the result for the French power in
America was instant and irretrievable annihilation. The town-meeting
pitted against the bureaucracy was like a Titan overthrowing a cripple.
The historic lesson owes its value to the fact that this ruin of the
French scheme of colonial empire was due to no accidental circumstances,
but was involved in the very nature of the French political system.
Obviously it is impossible for a people to plant beyond sea a colony
which shall be self-supporting, unless it has retained intact the power
of self-government at home. It is to the self-government of England, and
to no lesser cause, that we are to look for the secret of that boundless
vitality which has given to men of English speech the uttermost parts of
the earth for an inheritance. The conquest of Canada first demonstrated
this truth, and when--in the two following lectures--we shall have made
some approach towards comprehending its full import, we shall all, I
think, be ready to admit that the triumph of Wolfe marks the greatest
turning-point as yet discernible in modern history.
II.
_THE FEDERAL UNION_.
The great history of Thukydides, which after twenty-three centuries
still ranks (in spite of Mr. Cobden) among our chief text-books of
political wisdom, has often seemed to me one of the most mournful books
in the world. At no other spot on the earth's surface, and at no other
time in the career of mankind, has the human intellect flowered with
such luxuriance as at Athens during the eighty-five years which
intervened between the victory of Marathon and the defeat of
Ægospotamos. In no other like interval of time, and in no other
community of like dimensions, has so much work been accomplished of
which we can say with truth that it is [Greek: ktaema es aei],--an
eternal possession. It is impossible to conceive of a day so distant, or
an era of culture so exalted, that the lessons taught by Athens shall
cease to be of value, or that the writings of her great thinkers shall
cease to be read with fresh profit and delight. We understand these
things far better to-day than did those monsters of erudition in the
sixteenth century who studied the classics for philological purposes
mainly. Indeed, the older the world grows, the more varied our
experience of practical politics, the more comprehensive our survey of
universal history, the stronger our grasp upon the comparative method of
inquiry, the more brilliant is the light thrown upon that brief day of
Athenian greatness, and the more wonderful and admirable does it all
seem. To see this glorious community overthrown, shorn of half its
virtue (to use the Homeric phrase), and thrust down into an inferior
position in the world, is a mournful spectacle indeed. And the book
which sets before us, so impartially yet so eloquently, the innumerable
petty misunderstandings and contemptible jealousies which brought about
this direful result, is one of the most mournful of books.
We may console ourselves, however, for the premature overthrow of the
power of Athens, by the reflection that that power rested upon political
conditions which could not in any case have been permanent or even
long-enduring. The entire political system of ancient Greece, based as
it was upon the idea of the sovereign independence of each single city,
was one which could not fail sooner or later to exhaust itself through
chronic anarchy. The only remedy lay either in some kind of permanent
federation, combined with representative government; or else in what we
might call "incorporation and assimilation," after the Roman fashion.
But the incorporation of one town with another, though effected with
brilliant results in the early history of Attika, involved such a
disturbance of all the associations which in the Greek mind clustered
about the conception of a city that it was quite impracticable on any
large or general scale. Schemes of federal union were put into
operation, though too late to be of avail against the assaults of
Macedonia and Rome. But as for the principle of representation, that
seems to have been an invention of the Teutonic mind; no statesman of
antiquity, either in Greece or at Rome, seems to have conceived the idea
of a city sending delegates armed with plenary powers to represent its
interests in a general legislative assembly. To the Greek statesmen, no
doubt, this too would have seemed derogatory to the dignity of the
sovereign city.
This feeling with which the ancient Greek statesmen, and to some extent
the Romans also, regarded the city, has become almost incomprehensible
to the modern mind, so far removed are we from the political
circumstances which made such a feeling possible. Teutonic
civilization, indeed, has never passed through a stage in which the
foremost position has been held by civic communities. Teutonic
civilization passed directly from the stage of tribal into that of
national organization, before any Teutonic city had acquired sufficient
importance to have claimed autonomy for itself; and at the time when
Teutonic nationalities were forming, moreover, all the cities in Europe
had so long been accustomed to recognize a master outside of them in the
person of the Roman emperor that the very tradition of civic autonomy,
as it existed in ancient Greece, had become extinct. This difference
between the political basis of Teutonic and of Græco-Roman civilization
is one of which it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance; and
when thoroughly understood it goes farther, perhaps, than anything else
towards accounting for the successive failures of the Greek and Roman
political systems, and towards inspiring us with confidence in the
future stability of the political system which has been wrought out by
the genius of the English race.