from calculation and the desire of gain, but from emotion or sentiment.
The sense of community, whether of belief, or of intellectual
conviction, or of taste, or of feeling (be it affection or aversion
towards given persons or things), engenders sympathy, and draws men
together. To the same class belong the recognition of a common ancestry,
the use of a common speech, the enjoyment of a common literature. The
importance of these factors has often been exaggerated. Some of the
keenest Irish revolutionaries have been English by blood and Protestants
by faith. The Borderers of Northumberland and those of Berwickshire did
not hate one another less because they were of the same stock and spoke
the same tongue. The Celts of Inverness-shire and the Teutons of Lothian
are now equally enthusiastic Scotchmen, though they disliked and
despised one another almost down to the days of Walter Scott[101]. Mere
identity of origin does not count for much, as witness the ardent
Hungarian patriotism of most of the Germans and Jews settled in Hungary,
with perhaps no drop of Magyar blood in their veins. Community of
language does not any more than a common ancestry necessarily make for
love, and indeed may increase hatred, because in an age of newspapers
each of two disputant parties can read the injurious things said of it
by the other. Civil wars are, like family quarrels, proverbially
embittered. Tocqueville wrote, in 1833, that he could imagine no more
venomous hatred than the Americans then felt for England. So it may be
said that though the want of these elements of community is usually an
obstacle to unity, their presence is no guarantee for its existence.
Somewhat greater value belongs to identity of traditions and historical
recollections, and to the possession of the materials for a common pride
in past achievements. Most men find a personal satisfaction and take a
personal pride in recalling the feats and the struggles of the nation,
or the tribe, or the party, or the sect, to which they belong, so the
recollection of exploits or sufferings becomes an effective rallying
point for a group. We all know how powerful a force such memories have
been at various times in stimulating national feeling in Italy, in
Germany, in Hungary, in Scotland, in Portugal, in Ireland.
-----
Footnote 101:
A curious survival of the dislike of the Lowlander to the Highlander
may be found in Carlyle’s comments upon the Highland wife of his
friend Thomas Campbell the poet.
-----
Still less necessary is it to dwell upon the influence of Religion,
which, as it touches the deepest chords of man’s nature, is capable of
educing the maximum of harmony or discord. No force has been more
efficient in knitting factions and States together, or in breaking them
up and setting the parts of a State in fierce antagonism to one another.
Religion held together the Eastern Empire, originally a congeries of
diverse races, in the midst of dangers threatening it from every side
for eight hundred years. Religion now holds together the Turkish Empire
in spite of the hopeless incompetence of its government. Religion split
up the Romano-Germanic Empire after the time of Charles the Fifth. The
instances of the Jews and the Armenians are even more familiar.
There remains a large and rather miscellaneous category of sources of
sympathy which we may call by the general name of Elements of
Compatibility. Traits of character, ideas, social customs, similarity of
intellectual culture, of tastes, and even of the trivial usages of daily
life, all contribute to link men together, and to assimilate them
further to one another, as the absence of these things tends to
differentiation and dissimilation, because it supplies points in which
the members of one group, racial or local or social, feel themselves out
of touch with the members of another, and possibly inclined to show
contempt, or to think themselves contemned, on the ground of the
divergence. The natural repulsion which the Germans usually feel for the
Slavs, and the Slavs for the Germans, seems to have its root in a
difference of character and temperament which makes it hard for either
race to do full justice to the other. That repulsion is powerfully
operative to-day in the Austrian Empire. In the ancient world the
obstinate and passionate Egyptians seem to have displayed, and provoked,
a similar antagonism in their contact with other races, and particularly
with the arrogant Persians.
These influences of Sympathy, like those of Interest, may figure either
as centripetal or centrifugal forces, according as the centre round
which they group and towards which they draw men is the main centre of
that larger circle represented by the State or the centre of the smaller
circle represented by the tribe, the district, the province, the faith,
the sect, the faction. The same feeling may play the one part or the
other according to the accident of individual view, or taste, or
environment. Thus in a University consisting of a number of autonomous
colleges, one man may be a centralizer, and seek to bring the colleges
into subordination, pecuniary and administrative, to the University,
while another man may desire to maintain their independence, and yet
both may set a high value on corporate spirit, and be filled with it
themselves. In one man this spirit clings to the college, in another it
glorifies the University. The patriotism which makes a Magyar desire
that Hungary should absorb Croatia, and that which makes a Croat desire
to sever his country from Hungary, are essentially the same sentiment,
though, as regards the monarchy of the Hungarian Crown, the sentiment
operates with the Magyar as an attractive, with the Croat as a repulsive
force. This statement is generally true of that complex feeling, based
upon affinities of race, of speech, of literature, of historic memories,
of ideas, which we call the Sentiment of Nationality, a sentiment
comparatively weak in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, and
which did not really become a factor of the first moment in politics
till the religious passions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
had almost wholly subsided, and the gospel of political freedom preached
in the American and French Revolutions had begun to fire men’s minds. As
regards the historical States of Europe, it is a sentiment which is both
aggregative and segregative. It has contributed to create the German
Empire: yet it is also a sentiment which makes Bavaria unwilling to
merge in that Empire her individual existence. In Bavaria, and still
more in the case of Scotland, which had a long and brilliant national
history, the sentiment of local has been found compatible with a
sentiment of imperial patriotism.
It is a remarkable feature of recent times that the tendency of a common
interest to draw groups together and make them prize the unity of the
State is often accompanied by the parallel development of an opposite
tendency, based on sentiment, to intensify the life of the smaller group
and in so far to draw it apart, and thereby weaken the unity of the
State. This arises from the fact that the march of civilization is
material on the one hand, intellectual and moral on the other. So far as
it is material, it generally makes for unity. On its intellectual and
social or moral side it works in two ways. It tends to break down local
prejudices and to create a uniform type of habits and character over a
wide area. But it also heightens the influence of historical memories.
It is apt to rekindle resentment at old injuries. Filling men’s minds
with the notion of social and political equality, it disposes them to
feel more keenly any social or political inferiority to which they may
be subjected. Raising the estimate they set upon themselves as
individuals and as a race, it makes them more bold in organizing
themselves and claiming what they deem their rights. And so one notes
the singular phenomenon that men are stirred to disaffection, or
impelled towards separation, by grievances less acute than those which
their ancestors, sunk in ignorance and despondency, bore almost without
a murmur. The Roman Catholic Irish since 1782 and the Transylvanian
Rumans since 1848 are instances in point.
All these tendencies, pulling this way and that, are among the facts
which a given Constitution has to deal with, are forces which it must
use in order to secure its own strength and permanence. Where, in a free
country, the system of government has grown up naturally, and can be
readily modified by the normal action of the normal sovereign authority,
_i.e._ where the Constitution is a Flexible one, the presumption is that
the rules and usages of the Constitution conform to and represent the
actual forces, and draw strength therefrom. Yet even in countries
governed on this system there is a risk that the Constitution which the
will of a majority has established may leave a minority discontented and
unrestful, and that such discontent and unrest may impede the working of
the machinery and create an element of instability. In such countries,
it may be the part of wisdom for the majority to yield something to the
minority, modifying the Constitution, so far as it can safely be
modified, in order to remove the obstacles to harmony. A centrifugal
force which is not strong enough to disrupt the State, because the
centripetal forces are on the whole more powerful, may nevertheless be
able to cause a harmful friction, and may even, if the State be exposed
to external attacks, become a source of peril. Everybody can now see
that Rome ought to have admitted the Italian allies to the franchise
long before the Social War, that Catholic Emancipation ought to have
been enacted by the Irish Parliament in 1796 or by the British
Parliament immediately after the Union of 1800, that Denmark ought not
to have waited till 1874 before she conceded a qualified autonomy to
Iceland, that the same country might probably have retained
Schleswig-Holstein if she had yielded long before the war of 1864 some
of the demands made by the German inhabitants of those duchies. And, if
we may apply the same principle to despotically governed countries, most
people will agree that Austria ought to have retired from Lombardy
before 1859, and that the Turks gained nothing by clinging to Bulgaria,
and may be gaining nothing now by clinging to Macedonia.
III. HOW CONSTITUTIONS MAY USE THE CENTRIPETAL FORCES TO PROMOTE
NATIONAL UNITY.
As we are here dealing with constitutions considered in their relation
to the forces and tendencies that rule in politics (_i.e._ as a part of
political dynamics), we may now inquire what it is that Constitutions
can accomplish in the way of regulating or controlling these forces.
Every political Constitution has three main objects.
One is to establish and maintain a frame of government under which the
work of the State can be efficiently carried on, the aims of such a
frame of government being on the one hand to associate the people with
the government, and, on the other hand, to preserve public order, to
avoid hasty decisions and to maintain a tolerable continuity of policy.
Another is to provide due security for the rights of the individual
citizen as respects person, property, and opinion, so that he shall have
nothing to fear from the executive or from the tyranny of an excited
majority. This object has fallen into the background since these rights
came to be fully recognized. But in earlier times it was the chief
purpose of constitutional provisions from Magna Charta down to the Bill
of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The safeguard for these
rights which the Constitution of England provided, was the thing which,
more perhaps than anything else, moved the admiration of foreign
observers who studied that constitution during the eighteenth century.
The third object is to hold the State together, not only to prevent its
disruption by the revolt or secession of a part of the nation, but to
strengthen the cohesiveness of the country by creating good machinery
for connecting the outlying parts with the centre, and by appealing to
every motive of interest and sentiment that can lead all sections of the
inhabitants to desire to remain united under one government.
In pursuing these objects, a constitution seeks to achieve by means of
legal provisions that which in ruder times it was often necessary to
accomplish by physical force. No doubt at all times the natural
disposition to obey (the sources of which I have analysed
elsewhere[102]) was an agent more constant and effective than physical
force. Nevertheless, the latter was needed, sometimes from the side of
the government to maintain order and compel subjects to bear their share
of the public burdens, sometimes from the side of the subjects to abate
the abuses into which the possession of power tempts rulers. Troops to
keep order and quell revolts, and men handy with their weapons and ready
to rise in insurrection to dethrone bad monarchs or expel bad ministers,
were a necessary part of the equipment of political societies in the
ruder ages.
-----
Footnote 102:
See Essay IX, vol. ii. p. 6 sqq.
-----
A good constitution relieves the government from the necessity of
frequently resorting to military force by securing that those who govern
shall be persons approved by the bulk of the citizens, as well as by
providing for the purposes of coercion machinery so promptly and
effectively applicable, that the elements of disturbance either do not
break forth or are quickly suppressed. Similarly it relieves the
subjects from the need of rising in rebellion by providing machinery
whereby the complaints of those who think themselves aggrieved shall be
fully made known, and shall, if well founded, have due effect on the
rulers by warning them to remove the grievances, or by displacing them
if they fail to do so.
How constitutional machinery should be framed and worked for the
attainment of the two former objects enumerated above, viz. the
establishment of a proper frame of government and the safeguarding of
private rights, is a matter which does not fall within the scope of our
present inquiry. The third object does, so we have to ask how a
constitution should be framed in order to enable it to maintain and
strengthen the unity of a State.
It may do this in two ways. One is by setting various centripetal forces
to work. The other is by preventing all or some of the centrifugal
forces from working.
I have already enumerated the tendencies or influences which operate to
draw men together and bind them into a community, be it greater or
smaller, and have pointed out that these tendencies may in any given
case operate in favour either of the State as a whole, in which case
they preserve it, or in favour of some group or section within it, in
which case they sap its unity. Let us now consider how the
constitutional arrangements of a State may be so devised as to draw
together all its members and all the minor groups within it.
The most generally available of these centripetal tendencies is trade,
that interchange of commodities which benefits all the producers, by
giving them a market, all the consumers by giving them the means of
getting what they want, all the middlemen by supplying them with
occupation. A Constitution can render no greater service to the unity as
well as to the material progress of a nation than by enabling the freest
interchange of products to go on within its limits. Nothing did more to
keep the districts of each of the great European countries divided
during the Middle Ages than the levying of tolls along the rivers and
highways by petty potentates, or than the insecurity of those rivers and
highways, as well as the want of good roads, for thus the market for the
producers of the cheaper articles was narrowed to the small area
immediately around them, and men were prevented from realizing, or
benefiting by, the greatness of the country they belonged to. England,
with an exceptionally strong and centralized government, suffered less
from these tolls and this insecurity than did the large States of the
Continent, and England arrived at unity sooner than they did. And so,
conversely, nothing has done more to unify the vast territories of the
United States than the provisions of the Federal Constitution which
secure perfect freedom of trade within its limits, and empower the
National Government to regulate the means of communication between the
several States of the Union. So the Customs Union of the Germanic
States, formed under the auspices of Prussia in A.D. 1829, did a great
work in stimulating industry, while it showed the people the benefits of
united action, and prepared the way for the formation of the new German
Empire.
Another influence of moment is the establishment of a common law and a
common system of courts. It is not an influence which can be reckoned on
so invariably or confidently as can the influence of commerce, for any
hasty attempt to change the law (whether customary or statutory) to
which men are accustomed may provoke resistance and retard the growth of
unity. Great Britain has wisely forborne to impose her own law on the
dominions she has acquired by conquest or purchase. Roman-Dutch law
remains in South Africa, in Ceylon, and in Guiana; Roman-French law in
Lower Canada. So the French Code was left in force not only in
Alsace-Lorraine which Germany took in 1871 but also in the German
country all along the left bank of the Lower Rhine, when that region was
reunited to Germany in 1814. So Roman law has remained in Louisiana,
which was once French. But where one legal system can, without exciting
resentment, be extended over the whole of a country, it becomes a
valuable unifying force. As respects the substance of law, this happens
by the formation of certain habits of thought and action, certain ideas
of justice and utility. As respects the administration of law, it
happens by giving to the central executive an engine for making its
power felt, and usually felt for good. In the Middle Ages, the
jurisdiction of the king’s courts was found the most effective means
both in England, from Henry II onward, and (somewhat later) in France,
of extending the power of the central government and accustoming the
people to rally round the Crown as the representative of national unity
as well as of justice. A somewhat similar process has been in progress
during the last thirty years among those petty principalities which we
call the Laos States, and which lie to the north of the kingdom of Siam.
The princes of these States were practically independent, living in a
country of forests and hills, and recognizing only a vague titular
suzerainty as vested in the Siamese king at Bangkok. But when foresters
from British Burma had come among them, desiring to cut down and export
the teak trees in those forests which make their only wealth, and when
disputes had arisen between the Laos chiefs and these timber traders,
the Government of India found it needful to make treaties with the king
of Siam, under which a Court presided over by Siamese officials was set
up in Chiengmai, the principal State. By means of this Court the Siamese
Government has been able gradually to obtain complete control of the
forest administration and the revenues thence arising, and incidentally
to strengthen its general authority over these Laos States.
Similarly, the jurisdiction of the British Privy Council as a Supreme
Court of Appeal from the Colonies and India, and the action of the
Supreme Court of the United States as the final Court of Appeal for the
whole Union (in certain classes of cases), have done something to make
the members of these vast political aggregates realize the bond that
links them together. In the case of the United States, respect for the
Federal Courts and the keen interest with which their development of the
law by judicial interpretation is followed by a large and powerful
profession has been an important factor in strengthening the sense of
national unity.
After law, religion, not as less potent, for it is more potent, but as
more uncertain, because it has been as often a dissevering as a unifying
influence. There is, however, a marked distinction between the earlier
and the later forms of religion as regards the energy of the force they
exert. In the earlier stages of civilization, when tradition and ritual
counted for much, and abstract theology had not yet come into being, the
worship of the gods of the nation or city was a part, a necessary and
sometimes the most deep-rooted part, of the political constitution and
the national life. In Egypt the rise or fall of a great deity is often
the sign of the rise or fall of a dynasty. Moab, Edom, and Ammon, are
each the people of a peculiar God. After the Captivity, when the minor
Semitic peoples decline or vanish, Israel continues to be held together
by the name of Jehovah, and by the Law He has given. Every Greek and
every Italian city has its own distinctive public State worship. A race
sometimes pays special honour to one out of its various deities, and the
devotion of the Dorians to Apollo, of the Athenians to the Virgin
Goddess, finds a mediaeval parallel in that of the Swedes to Odin, of
the Norwegians to Thor. As the Roman Empire included so many races and
cities that no one deity or group of deities could be worshipped by all,
altars were erected to the Goddess Rome, and the Guardian Spirit or
Genius of the reigning Emperor became a common object of devotion for
the whole mass of his subjects. In modern times the strong religions are
(except Hinduism) World Religions, and therefore not national or local
as were those of antiquity. But they exert an even greater political
power. For monotheistic religions, however they may develop into
elaborate rites and forms of ceremonial observance, are primarily
philosophical religions, in which abstract ideas and beliefs take not
only a firm but an exclusive grasp of the mind and heart of whosoever
holds them. Hence they form a closer tie than did the worships of the
ancient Italo-Hellenic world. Christianity created a new cohesion when
the provinces of the Roman Empire were beginning to fall asunder. Islam
formed a prodigious dominion out of many diverse peoples. The mutually
hostile forms of a World Religion, such as the Sunnite and Shiite sects
in Islam, act as consolidating or dissevering influences just as the
religion itself did before schisms had arisen. When a faith grounded in
peculiar dogmas or observances is held by one section of a people and
hated by another section, it becomes a formidably centrifugal force.
When the great mass of a people have embraced such a faith, their
political cohesion is strengthened, and they may attract from other
communities persons or groups who share their beliefs. The same
principle applies to beliefs which cannot be called religious, but which
exert a similar power over men’s emotions. Even where no question of the
supernatural is involved, the holding in common of certain ideas deemed
supremely valuable whether for the individual or for society, may
operate as a centrifugal or centripetal force.