these cases have been made in the United States, where the latest
amendments to the Federal Constitution provide protection for the
negroes and forbid the States to exclude any person from the electoral
suffrage in respect of race or colour, and where several recent State
Constitutions have devised ingenious schemes for disfranchising the vast
mass of those whom these very amendments have sought to protect. So far
as political rights are concerned, the problem is very far from having
been solved in the United States. But as regards private civil rights,
it has certainly been an advantage to the negroes that the Federal
Constitution guarantees such rights to all citizens: and probably in any
country where marked differences, with possible antagonisms, of race
exist, it will be prudent to place the private civil rights of every
class of persons under the equal protection of the laws, and to make the
rights themselves practically identical. It would lead me too far from
the main subject to describe the ways in which similar problems have
been dealt with in Algeria, in South Africa, and in some of the other
colonies of European nations. Nowhere has any quite satisfactory
solution been found[108]. But the case of New Zealand deserves to be
mentioned as one in which the experiment has been tried of giving
parliamentary representation to the natives, who mostly live apart on
their own reserved lands. So far, the results have been good. The
conditions are favourable, for the Maoris are a brave and intelligent
race, and they are now too few in number to excite disquiet.
-----
Footnote 108:
In Algeria the electoral suffrage is limited; but in some of the
French tropical colonies it seems to have been granted irrespective of
colour.
-----
It was the good fortune of the Roman Empire that the vast majority of
the races whom it conquered and absorbed had no conspicuous physical
differences from the Italians which prevented intermarriage and fusion.
Race and birthplace were no great obstacle to a man of force. Two or
three of the Emperors were of African or Arab extraction. Moreover, the
peoples of Southern Europe seem to have less repulsion of sentiment
towards the dark-skinned races than the Teutons have. The Spanish and
Portuguese intermarry not only with the native Indians of Central and
Southern America, but also with the negroes. The French of Canada
intermarried more freely with the Indians of North America than the
English have done.
Summing up, we may say that the aim of a well-framed Constitution will
presumably be to give the maximum of scope to the centripetal and the
minimum to the centrifugal forces. But this presumption is subject to
two countervailing considerations. One is that the energy of civic life
may be better secured by giving ample range and sphere of play to local
self-government, which will stimulate and train the political interest
of the members of the State, and relieve the central authority of some
onerous duties. The other is that the centrifugal forces may, if too
closely pent up, like heated water in the heart of the earth, produce at
untoward moments explosions like those of a volcano. Hence it is well to
provide, in the Constitution, such means of escape for the steam as can
be made compatible with the general safety of the State. Where a
Constitution, and especially a Rigid Constitution, has been framed with
due regard to these considerations, and turns to account the methods
already discussed, it may itself become a new centripetal force, a
factor making for the unity and coherence of the community which lives
under it. The Rigid Constitution has in this respect one advantage over
the Flexible one, that it is more easily understood by the mass of the
people, and more capable of coming to form a part of their political
consciousness. When such a Constitution is so contrived and worked as to
satisfy the bulk of the nation—and it will do so all the more if no
single section dislikes it—it attracts the affection and pride of the
people, their pride because it is their work, their affection because
they enjoy good government under it. Time, if it does not weaken these
feelings, strengthens them, because reverence comes with age. By
providing a convenient channel or medium through or in which the
centripetal forces may act, the Constitution increases the effective
strength of those forces. It is a reservoir of energy, an accumulator,
if the comparison be permissible, which has been charged by a dynamo,
and will go on for some time discharging the energy stored up in it.
But, like an accumulator, its energy becomes exhausted if there is not
behind it an engine generating fresh power, that is to say, if the real
social and political forces which called it into being have become
feebler, and those which oppose it have become stronger.
V. ILLUSTRATIONS FROM MODERN HISTORY OF THE ACTION OF CONSTITUTIONS.
The best instance of the capacity of a Constitution to reinforce and
confirm existing centripetal tendencies is supplied by the history of
the Rigid Constitution of the United States. That instrument was at
first received with so little favour by the people that its ratification
was, in many States, obtained with the greatest possible difficulty, and
the original document secured acceptance only on the understanding,
which was loyally carried out, that it should forthwith receive a number
of amendments. Within fifteen years the party which had advocated it was
overthrown in the country, and ultimately broke up and vanished. A
generation passed away before it began to be generally popular. But
after a time it secured so widespread a respect that even during the
fierce and protracted struggle which ushered in the Civil War few
attacked the Constitution itself, nearly all the combatants on one side
or the other claiming that its provisions were really in their favour.
It was not round the merits, but round the true construction, of the
instrument that controversy raged. Since the Civil War, and the
amendments which embodied the results of the Civil War, it has been
glorified and extolled in all quarters[109], and has unquestionably been
a most potent influence in consolidating the nation, as well as in
extending the range and the activity of the central government.
-----
Footnote 109:
Only since 1890 have complaints begun to be made: see Essay III, p.
239, _ante_.
-----
To what is this success due? Regarded as a Frame of Government, _i.e._
as a piece of mechanism for distributing powers between the Executive,
the Legislature and the Judiciary, the American system has probably been
praised beyond its deserts. Both the mode of electing the President and
the working of Congress leave much to be desired. But the Constitution
has had two conspicuous merits. It so judiciously estimated the
centripetal and centrifugal forces as they actually stood at the time
when it was framed, frankly recognizing the latter and leaving free play
for them, and while throwing its own weight into the scale of the
centripetal, doing this only so far as not to provoke a disjunctive
reaction, that it succeeded in winning respect from the advocates both
of States’ Rights and of National Unity[110]. Thus it was able to add
more strength to the centripetal tendency than it could have done had it
been originally drawn on more distinctly centripetal lines. For—and here
comes in the second merit—its provisions defining the functions of the
central Government were expressed in such wide and elastic terms as to
be susceptible of interpretation either in a more restricted or in a
more liberal way, _i.e._ so as to allow either a less wide or a more
wide scope of action for the Central Government. During the earlier
years, when State sentiment was still stronger than National sentiment,
the scope remained limited, because both the executive and the
legislature wished to keep it so, and such extensions as there were came
from judicial construction. But latterly, and especially since the
prodigious development of internal communications has stimulated
commerce, and since the death blow given to States’ Rights doctrines by
the Civil War, the scope has been widened, and has widened quite
naturally and gradually, with no violence to the words of the
Constitution, but according to that expansive interpretation of them
which changing conditions and a corresponding change in national
sentiment prescribed[111].
-----
Footnote 110:
It has been accused of having caused a civil war by omitting to deal
with the questions out of which the Civil War arose, and by failing to
negative the right of secession. But to this it may be answered that
an attempt to deal with those questions or to negative that right
might possibly have prevented it from having ever been accepted.
Footnote 111:
This interpretation has sometimes been at variance with the views of
the older interpreters, but no instance occurs to me in which an
impartial jurist could have pronounced it inadmissible.
-----
Nowadays one hears in the United States less about the Constitution than
about the Flag[112]. But that is partly because the Constitution has
done its work, and made the Flag the popular badge of a Unity which it
took nearly a century to endear to the nation.
-----
Footnote 112:
This is still more so to-day (1900) than it was when this Essay was
first composed.
-----
One might go on to illustrate the efficiency of a Constitution in
consolidating a people composed of disparate elements from the parallel
case of Switzerland, where communities speaking three (it might almost
be said four) different languages have been brought much closer together
by the Constitutions of 1848 and 1874 than they were before, or could
have been without some such arrangement. Switzerland, however, is a more
complicated case, because much has turned on the external pressure
towards unity exerted by the fear felt for several great bordering
Powers. The formidable neighbours of the Confederation have, so to
speak, squeezed together into a Swiss people the originally dissimilar
Alemannic, Celto-Burgundian, Italian, and Romansch communities.
The two instances of the United States and Switzerland[113], compared
with those of unitary countries living under Rigid Constitutions, such
as France, Belgium, Holland and Denmark, suggest the observation that
the service which Rigid Constitutions may render in strengthening the
centripetal tendency can best be rendered where a Federation is to be
constructed. For in these cases what is needed is an arrangement by
which the several rights of the component communities which are to form
the State may be so protected that they need not fear to give their
allegiance to the State and cordially support its Central Government.
The existence of such communities is an expression of forces actually
operative which are centrifugal as towards the State as a whole, and
therefore need to be studied. By giving a carefully limited scope to
these forces, and thereby diminishing their possibilities of danger, the
Constitution subserves the cohesion of the States. In a truly unitary
country this service is not needed. But there are cases in which States
endeavouring to become unitary would have done better had they sought to
apply the federal principle, placing it under the protection of a Rigid
Constitution. I have already referred to Denmark. Holland might probably
have saved Belgium by a concession of some such kind. Whether a similar
contrivance might not have been profitably employed within the British
Isles in A.D. 1782, or in A.D. 1800, or again later, is a question which
will already have presented itself to one who has followed the argument
thus far.
-----
Footnote 113:
One would like to refer to the cases of the numerous so-called
republics, most of them federal, of Spanish America. But apart from
the difficulty of ascertaining their constitutional history, little of
which has been written, some of these republics seem to pay so little
regard to their constitutions, living generally in a state of
revolution, whether subsiding, or actually raging, or apprehended,
like the Atlantic during a series of cyclones following one another
along the same track from the Bermudas to the Fastnet, that it is hard
to draw any conclusions of value from them. They are in fact republics
only in name: and it is surprising that Sir H. Maine in his _Popular
Government_ condescended to go to them for arguments to discredit
democracy. They are military tyrannies, the product of peculiar
historical, territorial and racial conditions.
-----
In dwelling upon the services which Constitutions may render, by
fostering the centripetal forces, or by restraining the violence and
softening the action of the centrifugal forces, we must not forget that
no scheme of government can hope permanently to resist the action of
either tendency if either develops much greater strength than it
possessed when the Constitution was framed. If the centripetal forces
grow, the Constitution whose provisions have recognized and given scope
to the centrifugal will be practically, in some of those provisions,
superseded. If the centrifugal grow, it may be overthrown. It is where
the forces are nearly balanced, that the weight of the Constitution may
turn the scale, and avert conflicts which would have rent the community,
or caused a violent subjection of one part of it to the other. And in
any case the Constitution ought, where dissimilative and disruptive
forces are feared, to be so drawn as to enlist all available motives of
interest, to shelter the law behind popular sentiment where possible, to
oppose it to sentiment as little as possible, and to avoid challenging
at the same time the hostility of several kinds of sentiment.
VI. THE PROBABLE ACTION OF THE AGGREGATIVE AND THE DISJUNCTIVE
TENDENCIES IN THE FUTURE.
Whether in the long run it is the centripetal or the centrifugal force
that will prevail in politics, or, in other words, whether large States
or small States are more likely to commend themselves to mankind, is a
question which belongs rather to history than to the doctrine of
constitutions, and which could be adequately discussed only after a long
investigation. History shows us first one force dominant, then the
other, though no doubt the centrifugal is usually more powerful in rude
times and in hilly or mountainous countries, the centripetal in
countries comparatively advanced in civilization, and in level and
fertile regions where wealth is more easily acquired and stored, and
where military operations are easier. When the mists of antiquity begin
to rise sufficiently to show us the Mediterranean and south-west Asiatic
world, we discover both a few great States and a multitude of small
ones. The former have a low, the latter a high and intense political
vitality. From the time of Menes down to that of Attila the tendency is
generally towards aggregation: and the history of the ancient nations
shows us, not only an enormous number of petty monarchies and republics
swallowed up in the Empire of Rome, but that empire itself far more
highly centralized than any preceding one had been. When the Roman
dominion began to break up the process was reversed, and for seven
hundred years or more the centrifugal forces had it their own way.
Europe and Western Asia were divided up among innumerable petty
potentates, and even the large monarchies, such as the two Khalifates,
the Romano-Germanic Empire, the kingdoms of France and Hungary,
possessed so feeble a royal authority that the real organs of government
and centres of attraction were to be sought rather in the vassals than
in the nominal sovereign. From the thirteenth century onwards the tide
begins to set the other way. One great State indeed—the Empire—first
decays and then disappears under the action of centrifugal forces, but
all the other chief States expand, absorbing their smaller neighbours,
and giving themselves a compact and well-knit organization which makes
the central power effective through the whole sphere of its action. This
process culminates in the despotic monarchies of the eighteenth century,
when the strength of feudal localism has been completely broken, though
the picturesque relics of it still cumber the ground, and when at the
same time the foundations are laid in the West of a gigantic State which
proceeds to cover the temperate area of North America between the two
oceans, and, in the East, of the dominion of a European nation which has
absorbed the numerous and populous principalities of India. Immediately
afterwards the doctrine of popular self-government and the doctrine of
nationalities come upon the scene, threatening a disruption of some
existing political aggregates. In point of fact, however, these new
principles have done as much to unite as to sever, for though five
States—Greece, Rumania, Servia, Montenegro and Bulgaria—have been cut
off from an effete monarchy, and sixteen republics have been carved out
of the American dominions of Spain and Portugal, the doctrine of
nationality has substituted two new great States, more important than
all the last-mentioned twenty-one put together, for the multitude of
kingdoms and principalities which so late as 1859 filled Italy and
Germany.
Thus neither Democracy nor the principle of Nationalities has, on the
balance of cases, operated to check the general movement towards
aggregation which marks the last six centuries.
It may, however, be said—and this question should be faced before we
proceed to inquire whether the aggregative movement is likely to
continue—that in all this inquiry we have been ignoring two potent
factors. One is Conquest—that is to say, military power. We have been
examining the forces of Interest and Sympathy, which cover a number of
influences social or economic, racial or sentimental. But after all it
is Conquest, _i.e._ the might of the strongest, which has created most
States as we find them. Is Conquest one of the centripetal forces? and
if so, is it not the greatest of them?
The other factor is Family Succession, which both during the Middle Ages
and since has done a great deal to consolidate principalities and
kingdoms. The United Kingdom owes much to this agency, Austria and
France even more.
Conquest and Dynastic Succession are hardly fit to be classed among the
centripetal forces, because they are not susceptible of scientific
treatment like the other influences. The disposition of the stronger to
subdue and annex the weaker neighbour is of course a permanent fact in
human nature, and therefore in history. But in each particular instance
the success of one or other combatant depends on what may be called
historical accidents—on the numbers or the discipline of troops, on the
possession of a commander of military genius, on alliances with other
States, on the internal dissensions of one State as compared with the
unity of another. Physical force belongs to a different sphere from that
in which political constitutions work. Constitutions may result from a
conquest or may be maintained for a time by arms; but if they are
obliged to rely on and have constant recourse to physical force in order
to prevent their overthrow, they are, considered as Constitutions,
failures; because the very nature and object of a constitutional Frame
of Government is so to express and so to adjust to existing conditions
the wishes and aims of the citizens as to make the majority, and if
possible the vast majority, of the people desire to support it.
According to the proverb, you can do anything with bayonets except sit
down on them. Physical force is of course needed to punish occasional
infractions of the Constitution or to quell revolts against it. But the
system of government which _ex hypothesi_ corresponds to the permanently
strongest among the moral forces, else it has no right to prevail in a
free country, ought not to be surrounded by cannon.
Similarly, the devolution of princedoms or kingdoms by marriage and
inheritance, much as it has done to bring States originally independent
under one government, lies outside political science in the proper sense
of the term. Like conquest, it brings about a new state of things by an
event with which the ordinary political and constitutional phenomena of
national life have nothing to do, coming into these phenomena as an
incommensurable and (so to speak) irrational factor[114].
-----
Footnote 114:
The fact that the custom of a country permits or forbids succession
through females makes a great difference in the importance of
succession. The union of Castile with Aragon, like the union of
England with Scotland, would not have occurred under a different rule
of succession. So it may make a difference whether the throne of the
larger country passes to the dynasty of the smaller, or vice versa.
Had a king of England inherited the throne of Scotland, Scotland might
have been more hostile to England. Had a king of Portugal inherited
the throne of Spain, the two countries might have remained united.
-----
So soon as either conquest or a union due to hereditary succession has
taken place, the normal centripetal and centrifugal tendencies resume
their action. Where the territory of one people has been forcibly
acquired by another, as Lombardy was acquired by Austria in 1815, or has
been occupied in virtue of a title based on succession, as Portugal was
claimed by Spain in 1580, such centripetal forces as may exist have the
advantage of physical force behind them. But this advantage may be
unavailing against the stronger forces which sentiment sends forth to
dissever the connexion. Austria lost Lombardy after forty-four years;
Spain lost Portugal after sixty. In both cases there was fighting, but
it was not so much the balance of military strength as the settled
hostility of the subjected people which in both caused the severance. So
the acquisition by the English kings of Aquitaine and the subsequent
conquest of large part of France, the conquest by the Turks of
Transylvania, the union of Holstein with Denmark, the union of Belgium
with Holland, the union of Alsace with France, all effected without
regard to the will of the people, were all in time brought to an end.
The last-mentioned case is a peculiar one. It was not because the
Alsatians wished to be reunited to Germany, but because the Germans
wished to be reunited to Alsace that a connexion which had lasted nearly
two centuries was dissolved in 1871. Military motives, decisive as
regards the annexed part of Lorraine, had something to do with the
taking of Alsace also; but if Alsace had not been German in language and
habits, though not in sentiment, the popular voice of Germany would not
have insisted on recovering it against the will of its inhabitants.
Speaking broadly, one may say that Conquest and Inheritance give an
opportunity, better in the latter than in the former case, for
centripetal forces to work. If the peoples on which they operate are
backward, with no pronounced national feeling, that chance may be a good
one, and the influences of free commerce, joint government (especially
if it is good government), together with the kind of pride which common
service in war often produces, may operate to weld two peoples together
into a united State. Much depends on language, much on geographical
position, much on external pressure from powerful neighbours. But if one
of the peoples (or both) has already developed a strong sentiment of
nationality, the prospect of fusion is but slender.
The Roman Empire is the capital instance of a vast dominion established
by conquest. But there it was the weakness of the centrifugal forces
that secured the cohesion of the Empire. The conquered countries were
either, like Gaul, Spain and Britain, occupied by tribes between whom
there existed so weak a bond that no general national feeling or
combined national action was possible, or had been, as in the Eastern
Mediterranean World, ruled by dynasties, most of them sprung from
military adventurers[115], so that the sentiment of national life had
not centred in the monarchy. The centrifugal forces of interest—the
desire for peace, good government, facilities for commerce, and so
forth—obtained free play under the imperial administration, and to these
was added after a time the sense of pride in Roman citizenship, and in
the greatness of a State which included all the highest civilization of
the world. So too during the Middle Ages not a few conquests ended in an
assimilation of the vanquished, which enlarged without weakening the
conquering nation. But during the last three centuries the experience of
military powers has been that the acquisition of masses of subjects who,
being already civilized, are likely to resist absorption and to remain
disaffected, is a doubtful gain and may become a danger to the
conquering State. The last conspicuous instance is Poland, partitioned
between three Powers, to all of whom her provinces have brought trouble.
Conquests continue to be made, but they are now mostly of barbarous or
semi-civilized races, so inferior to the conquerors in force and in
national spirit that the centrifugal forces are, or at least seem to be,
practically negligible.
-----
Footnote 115: