civilization, I have said nothing about the danger that has from time to
time been threatened by the followers of Mohammed,--of the overthrow of
the Saracens in Gaul by the grandfather of Charles the Great, or their
overthrow at Constantinople by the image-breaking Leo, of the great
mediæval Crusades, or of the mischievous but futile career of the Turks.
For if I were to attempt to draw this outline with anything like
completeness, I should have no room left for the conclusion of my
argument. Considering my position thus far as sufficiently illustrated,
let us go on to contemplate for a moment some of the effects of all this
secular turmoil upon the political development of the progressive
nations of Europe. I think we may safely lay it down, as a large and
general rule, that all this prodigious warfare required to free the
civilized world from peril of barbarian attack served greatly to
increase the difficulty of solving the great initial problem of
civilization. In the first place, the turbulence thus arising was a
serious obstacle to the formation of closely-coherent political
aggregates; as we see exemplified in the terrible convulsions of the
fifth and sixth centuries, and again in the ascendency acquired by the
isolating features of feudalism between the time of Charles the Great
and the time of Louis VI. of France. In the second place, this
perpetual turbulence was a serious obstacle to the preservation of
popular liberties. It is a very difficult thing for a free people to
maintain its free, constitution if it has to keep perpetually fighting
for its life. The "one-man-power." less fit for, carrying on the
peaceful pursuits of life, is sure to be brought into the foreground in
a state of endless warfare. It is a still more difficult thing for a
free people to maintain its free constitution when it undertakes to
govern a dependent people despotically, as has been wont to happen when
a portion of the barbaric world has been overcome and annexed to the
civilized world. Under the weight, of these two difficulties combined,
the free institutions of the ancient Romans succumbed, and their
government gradually passed into the hands of a kind of close
corporation more despotic than anything else of the sort that Europe has
ever seen. This despotic character--this tendency, if you will pardon
the phrase, towards the _Asiaticization_ of European life--was continued
by inheritance in the Roman Church, the influence of which was
beneficent so long as it constituted a wholesome check to the isolating
tendencies of feudalism, but began to become noxious the moment these
tendencies yielded to the centralizing monarchical tendency in nearly
all parts of Europe. The asiaticizing tendency of Roman political life
had become so powerful by the fourth century, and has since been so
powerfully propagated through the Church, that we ought to be glad that
the Teutons came into the empire as masters rather than as subjects. As
the Germanic tribes got possession of the government in one part of
Europe after another, they brought with them free institutions again.
The political ideas of the Goths in Spain, of the Lombards in Italy, and
of the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul, were as distinctly free as those
of the Angles in Britain. But as the outcome of the long and
uninterrupted turmoil of the Middle Ages, society throughout the
continent of Europe remained predominantly military in type, and this
fact greatly increased the tendency towards despotism which was
bequeathed by Rome. After the close of the thirteenth century the whole
power of the Church was finally thrown into the scale against the
liberties of the people; and as the result of all these forces combined,
we find that at the time when America was discovered government was
hardening into despotism in all the great countries of Europe except
England. Even in England the tendency towards despotism had begun to
become quite conspicuous after the wholesale slaughter of the great
barons and the confiscation of their estates which took place in the
Wars of the Roses. The constitutional history of England during the
Tudor and Stuart periods is mainly the history of the persistent effort
of the English sovereign to free himself from constitutional checks, as
his brother sovereigns on the continent were doing. But how different
the result! How enormous the political difference between William III.
and Louis XIV., compared with the difference between Henry VIII. and
Francis I.! The close of the seventeenth century, which marks the
culmination of the asiaticizing tendency in Europe, saw despotism both
political and religious firmly established in France and Spain and
Italy, and in half of Germany; while the rest of Germany seemed to have
exhausted itself in the attempt to throw off the incubus. But in England
this same epoch saw freedom both political and religious established on
so firm a foundation as never again to be shaken, never again with
impunity to be threatened, so long as the language of Locke and Milton
and Sydney shall remain a living speech on the lips of men. Now this
wonderful difference between the career of popular liberty in England
and on the Continent was due no doubt to a complicated variety of
causes, one or two of which I have already sought to point out. In my
first lecture I alluded to the curious combination of circumstances
which prevented anything like a severance of interests between the upper
and the lower ranks of society; and something was also said about the
feebleness of the grasp of imperial Rome upon Britain compared with its
grasp upon the continent of Europe. But what I wish now to point
out--since we are looking at the military aspect of the subject--is the
enormous advantage of what we may call the _strategic position_ of
England in the long mediæval struggle between civilization and
barbarism. In Professor Stubbs's admirable collection of charters and
documents illustrative of English history, we read that "on the 6th of
July [1264] the whole force of the country was summoned to London for
the 3d of August, to resist the army which was coming from France under
the queen and her son Edmund. _The invading fleet was prevented by the
weather from sailing until too late in the season_.... The papal legate,
Guy Foulquois, who soon after became Clement IV., threatened the barons
with excommunication, but the bull containing the sentence was taken by
the men of Dover as soon as it arrived, and was thrown into the
sea." [15] As I read this, I think of the sturdy men of Connecticut,
beating the drum to prevent the reading of the royal order of James II.
depriving the colony of the control of its own militia, and feel with
pride that the indomitable spirit of English liberty is alike
indomitable in every land where men of English race have set their feet
as masters. But as the success of Americans in withstanding the
unconstitutional pretensions of the crown was greatly favoured by the
barrier of the ocean, so the success of Englishmen in defying the
enemies of their freedom has no doubt been greatly favoured by the
barrier of the British channel. The war between Henry III. and the
barons was an event in English history no less critical than the war
between Charles I. and the parliament four centuries later; and British
and Americans alike have every reason to be thankful that a great French
army was not able to get across the channel in August, 1264. Nor was
this the only time when the insular position of England did goodly
service in maintaining its liberties and its internal peace. We cannot
forget how Lord Howard of Effingham, aided also by the weather, defeated
the armada that boasted itself "invincible," sent to strangle freedom in
its chosen home by the most execrable and ruthless tyrant that Europe
has ever seen, a tyrant whose victory would have meant not simply the
usurpation of the English crown but the establishment of the Spanish
Inquisition at Westminster Hall. Nor can we forget with what longing
eyes the Corsican barbarian who wielded for mischief the forces of
France in 1805 looked across from Boulogne at the shores of the one
European land that never in word or deed granted him homage. But in
these latter days England has had no need of stormy weather to aid the
prowess of the sea-kings who are her natural defenders. It is impossible
for the thoughtful student of history to walk across Trafalgar Square,
and gaze on the image of the mightiest naval hero that ever lived, on
the summit of his lofty column and guarded by the royal lions, looking
down towards the government-house of the land that he freed from the
dread of Napoleonic invasion and towards that ancient church wherein the
most sacred memories of English talent and English toil are clustered
together,--it is impossible, I say, to look at this, and not admire both
the artistic instinct that devised so happy a symbolism, and the rare
good-fortune of our Teutonic ancestors in securing a territorial
position so readily defensible against the assaults of despotic powers.
But it was not merely in the simple facility of warding off external
attack that the insular position of England was so serviceable. This
ease in warding off external attack had its most marked effect upon the
internal polity of the nation. It never became necessary for the English
government to keep up a great standing army. For purposes of external
defence a navy was all-sufficient; and there is this practical
difference between a permanent army and a permanent navy. Both are
originally designed for purposes of external defence; but the one can
readily be used for purposes of internal oppression, and the other
cannot. Nobody ever heard of a navy putting up an empire at auction and
knocking down the throne of the world to a Didius Julianus. When,
therefore, a country is effectually screened by water from external
attack, it is screened in a way that permits its normal political
development to go on internally without those manifold military
hinderances that have ordinarily been so obstructive in the history of
civilization. Hence we not only see why, after the Norman Conquest had
operated to increase its unity and its strength, England enjoyed a far
greater amount of security and was far more peaceful than any other
country in Europe; but we also see why society never assumed the
military type in England which it assumed upon the continent; we see how
it was that the bonds of feudalism were far looser here than elsewhere,
and therefore how it happened that nowhere else was the condition of the
common people so good politically. We now begin to see, moreover, how
thoroughly Professor Stubbs and Mr. Freeman are justified in insisting
upon the fact that the political institutions of the Germans of Tacitus
have had a more normal and uninterrupted development in England than
anywhere else. Nowhere, indeed, in the whole history of the human race,
can we point to such a well-rounded and unbroken continuity of political
life as we find in the thousand years of English history that have
elapsed since the victory of William the Norman at Senlac. In England
the free government of the primitive Aryans has been to this day
uninterruptedly maintained, though everywhere lost or seriously impaired
on the continent of Europe, except in remote Scandinavia and impregnable
Switzerland. But obviously, if in the conflict of ages between
civilization and barbarism England had occupied such an inferior
strategic position as that occupied by Hungary or Poland or Spain, if
her territory had been liable once or twice in a century to be overrun
by fanatical Saracens or beastly Mongols, no such remarkable and quite
exceptional result could have been achieved. Having duly fathomed the
significance of this strategic position of the English race while
confined within the limits of the British islands, we are now prepared
to consider the significance of the stupendous expansion of the English
race which first became possible through the discovery and settlement of
North America. I said, at the close of my first lecture, that the
victory of Wolfe at Quebec marks the greatest turning-point as yet
discernible in all modern history. At the first blush such an
unqualified statement may have sounded as if an American student of
history were inclined to attach an undue value to events that have
happened upon his own soil. After the survey of universal history which
we have now taken, however, I am fully prepared to show that the
conquest of the North American continent by men of English race was
unquestionably the most prodigious event in the political annals of man
kind. Let us consider, for a moment, the cardinal facts which this
English conquest and settlement of North America involved.
Chronologically the discovery of America coincides precisely with the
close of the Middle Ages, and with the opening of the drama of what is
called _modern_ history. The coincidence is in many ways significant.
The close of the Middle Ages--as we have seen--was characterized by the
increasing power of the crown in all the great countries of Europe, and
by strong symptoms of popular restlessness in view of this increasing
power. It was characterized also by the great Protestant outbreak
against the despotic pretensions of the Church, which once, in its
antagonism to the rival temporal power, had befriended the liberties of
the people, but now (especially since the death of Boniface VIII.)
sought to enthrall them with a tyranny far worse than that of
irresponsible king or emperor. As we have seen Aryan civilization in
Europe struggling for many centuries to prove itself superior to the
assaults of outer barbarism, so here we find a decisive struggle
beginning between the antagonist tendencies which had grown up in the
midst of this civilization. Having at length won the privilege of living
without risk of slaughter and pillage at the hands of Saracens or
Mongols, the question now arose whether the people of Europe should go
on and apply their intelligence freely to the problem of making life as
rich and fruitful as possible in varied material and spiritual
achievement, or should fall forever into the barren and monotonous way
of living and thinking which has always distinguished the half-civilized
populations of Asia. This--and nothing less than this, I think--was the
practical political question really at stake in the sixteenth century
between Protestantism and Catholicism. Holland and England entered the
lists in behalf of the one solution of this question, while Spain and
the Pope defended the other, and the issue was fought out on European
soil, as we have seen, with varying success. But the discovery of
America now came to open up an enormous region in which whatever seed of
civilization should be planted was sure to grow to such enormous
dimensions as by and by to exert a controlling influence upon all such
controversies. It was for Spain, France, and England to contend for the
possession of this vast region, and to prove by the result of the
struggle which kind of civilization was endowed with the higher and
sturdier political life. The race which here should gain the victory was
clearly destined hereafter to take the lead in the world, though the
rival powers could not in those days fully appreciate this fact. They
who founded colonies in America as trading-stations or military outposts
probably did not foresee that these colonies must by and by become
imperial states far greater in physical mass than the states which
planted them. It is not likely that they were philosophers enough to
foresee that this prodigious physical development would mean that the
political ideas of the parent state should acquire a hundred-fold power
and seminal influence in the future work of the world. It was not until
the American Resolution that this began to be dimly realized by a few
prescient thinkers. It is by no means so fully realized even now that a
clear and thorough-going statement of it has not somewhat an air of
novelty. When the highly-civilized community, representing the ripest
political ideas of England, was planted in America, removed from the
manifold and complicated checks we have just been studying in the
history of the Old World, the growth was portentously rapid and steady.
There were no Attilas now to stand in the way,--only a Philip or a
Pontiac. The assaults of barbarism constituted only a petty annoyance as
compared with the conflict of ages which had gone on in Europe. There
was no occasion for society to assume a military aspect. Principles of
self-government were at once put into operation, and no one thought of
calling them in question. When the neighbouring civilization of inferior
type--I allude to the French in Canada--began to become seriously
troublesome, it was struck down at a blow. When the mother-country,
under the guidance of an ignorant king and short-sighted ministers,
undertook to act upon the antiquated theory that the new communities
were merely groups of trading-stations, the political bond of connection
was severed; yet the war which ensued was not like the war which had but
just now been so gloriously ended by the victory of Wolfe. It was not a
struggle between two different peoples, like the French of the Old
Regime and the English, each representing antagonistic theories of how
political life ought to be conducted. But, like the Barons' War of the
thirteenth century and the Parliament's War of the seventeenth, it was a
struggle sustained by a part of the English people in behalf of
principles that time has shown to be equally dear to all. And so the
issue only made it apparent to an astonished world that instead of _one_
there were now _two Englands_, alike prepared to work with might and
main toward the political regeneration of mankind.
Let us consider now to what conclusions the rapidity and unabated
steadiness of the increase of the English race in America must lead us
as we go on to forecast the future. Carlyle somewhere speaks slightingly
of the fact that the Americans double their numbers every twenty years,
as if to have forty million dollar-hunters in the world were any better
than to have twenty million dollar-hunters! The implication that
Americans are nothing but dollar-hunters, and are thereby
distinguishable from the rest of mankind, would not perhaps bear too
elaborate scrutiny. But during the present lecture we have been
considering the gradual transfer of the preponderance of physical
strength from the hands of the war-loving portion of the human race into
the hands of the peace-loving portion,--into the hands of the
dollar-hunters, if you please, but out of the hands of the
scalp-hunters. Obviously to double the numbers of a pre-eminently
industrious, peaceful, orderly, and free-thinking community, is somewhat
to increase the weight in the world of the tendencies that go towards
making communities free and orderly and peaceful and industrious. So
that, from this point of view, the fact we are speaking of is well worth
considering, even for its physical dimensions. I do not know whether the
United States could support a population everywhere as dense as that of
Belgium; so I will suppose that, with ordinary improvement in
cultivation and in the industrial arts, we might support a population
half as dense as that of Belgium,--and this is no doubt an extremely
moderate supposition. Now a very simple operation in arithmetic will
show that this means a population of fifteen hundred millions, or more
than the population of the whole world at the present date. Another
very simple operation in arithmetic will show that if we were to go on
doubling our numbers, even once in every twenty-five years, we should
reach that stupendous figure at about the close of the twentieth
century,--that is, in the days of our great-greatgrandchildren. I do not
predict any such result, for there are discernible economic reasons for
believing that there will be a diminution in the rate of increase. The
rate must nevertheless continue to be very great, in the absence of such
causes as formerly retarded the growth of population in Europe. Our
modern wars are hideous enough, no doubt, but they are short. They are
settled with a few heavy blows, and the loss of life and property
occasioned by them is but trifling when compared with the awful ruin and
desolation wrought by the perpetual and protracted contests of antiquity
and of the Middle Ages. Chronic warfare, both private and public,
periodic famines, and sweeping pestilences like the Black Death,--these
were the things which formerly shortened human life and kept down
population. In the absence of such causes, and with the abundant
capacity of our country for feeding its people, I think it an extremely
moderate statement if we say that by the end of the next century the
English race in the United States will number at least six or seven
hundred millions.
It used to be said that so huge a people as this could not be kept
together as a single national aggregate,--or, if kept together at all,
could only be so by means of a powerful centralized government, like
that of ancient Rome under the emperors. I think we are now prepared to
see that this is a great mistake. If the Roman Empire could have
possessed that political vitality in all its parts which is secured to
the United States by the principles of equal representation and of
limited state sovereignty, it might well have defied all the shocks
which tribally-organized barbarism could ever have directed against it.
As it was, its strong centralized government did _not_ save it from
political disintegration. One of its weakest political features was
precisely this,--that its "strong centralized government" was a kind of
close corporation, governing a score of provinces in its own interest
rather than in the interest of the provincials. In contrast with such a
system as that of the Roman Empire, the skilfully elaborated American
system of federalism appears as one of the most important contributions
that the English race has made to the general work of civilization. The
working out of this feature in our national constitution, by Hamilton
and Madison and their associates, was the finest specimen of
constructive statesmanship that the world has ever seen. Not that these
statesmen originated the principle, but they gave form and expression to
the principle which was latent in the circumstances under which the
group of American colonies had grown up, and which suggested itself so
forcibly that the clear vision of these thinkers did not fail to seize
upon it as the fundamental principle upon which alone could the affairs
of a great people, spreading over a vast continent, be kept in a
condition approaching to something like permanent peace. Stated broadly,
so as to acquire somewhat the force of a universal proposition, the
principle of federalism is just this:--that the people of a state shall
have full and entire control of their own domestic affairs, which
directly concern them only, and which they will naturally manage with
more intelligence and with more zeal than any distant governing body
could possibly exercise; but that, as regards matters of common concern
between a group of states, a decision shall in every case be reached,
not by brutal warfare or by weary diplomacy, but by the systematic
legislation of a central government which represents both states and
people, and whose decisions can always be enforced, if necessary, by
the combined physical power of all the states. This principle, in
various practical applications, is so familiar to Americans to-day that
we seldom pause to admire it, any more than we stop to admire the air
which we breathe or the sun which gives us light and life. Yet I believe
that if no other political result than this could to-day be pointed out
as coming from the colonization of America by Englishmen, we should
still be justified in regarding that event as one of the most important
in the history of mankind. For obviously the principle of federalism, as
thus broadly stated, contains within itself the seeds of permanent peace
between nations; and to this glorious end I believe it will come in the
fulness of time.
And now we may begin to see distinctly what it was that the American
government fought for in the late civil war,--a point which at the time
was by no means clearly apprehended outside the United States. We used
to hear it often said, while that war was going on, that we were
fighting not so much for the emancipation of the negro as for the
maintenance of our federal union; and I well remember that to many who
were burning to see our country purged of the folly and iniquity of
negro slavery this used to seem like taking a low and unrighteous view
of the case. From the stand-point of universal history it was
nevertheless the correct and proper view. The emancipation of the negro,
as an incidental result of the struggle, was a priceless gain which was
greeted warmly by all right-minded people. But deeper down than this
question, far more subtly interwoven with the innermost fibres of our
national well-being, far heavier laden too with weighty consequences for
the future weal of all mankind, was the question whether this great
pacific principle of union joined with independence should be overthrown
by the first deep-seated social difficulty it had to encounter, or
should stand as an example of priceless value to other ages and to other
lands. The solution was well worth the effort it cost. There have been
many useless wars, but this was not one of them, for more than most wars
that have been, it was fought in the direct interest of peace, and the
victory so dearly purchased and so humanely used was an earnest of
future peace and happiness for the world.