Saga which relates the introduction of Christianity. King Olaf
Tryggvason, the most brilliant of all the Norwegian sovereigns, who,
having been himself converted some ten years before, was hard at work
converting the stubborn Norwegians by burning their houses and torturing
themselves, had sent two missionaries to Iceland, one of whom, the
priest Thangbrand, had been obliged to leave Norway on account of his
violent life, and who signalized himself in Iceland by committing two
murders in the course of his five months’ stay, which was then summarily
shortened. The unworthiness of the minister, however, does not seem to
have injured the cause he championed. Several men of note embraced the
new faith, which was of course well known to the Icelanders from their
intercourse with Ireland and Britain, and had the promise of the future
to recommend it. These men, and also some heathen chieftains who thought
that acceptance was the best way of avoiding civil war, supported the
envoys of Olaf, when, at the Alþing of the year 1000, they urged upon
the assembly to decree the abolition of paganism. A story goes that,
while the debate was at its height, a messenger arrived to tell that a
volcano had broken out thirty miles to the south, and was pouring a
flood of lava over the pastures. The heathen party accepted the news as
an omen, and exclaimed, ‘This is the wrath of the gods at these new
rites; see what you have to expect from their anger!’ ‘With whom, then,’
said Snorri, a leading Goði who had not yet declared himself, ‘with whom
were the gods angry when this rock was molten on which we stand?’
(pointing to the deep lava rifts that lay around the Lögberg). By the
interposition of the Law-Speaker Thorgeir, that which he described as a
compromise, but which was in reality a surrender by the heathen party,
was at the same Alþing accepted. The people were to be baptized and
declare themselves Christians, and the temples and images of the old
gods were to be destroyed; but those who liked to sacrifice at home
might continue to do so; and two heathen customs, the exposure of
new-born infants and the eating of horse-flesh, were to be permitted.
Some difficulty arose over the reluctance of those who came from the
North and East Quarters of the island to submit to immersion in cold
water; but this difficulty was happily overcome by the use of the hot
springs at Reykir for the rite.
The century and a half that followed the introduction of Christianity
was the most brilliant period in the history of the island. It was not
indeed a time of peace, for the old passions and the old superstitions
were but little altered. Slayings and burnings of houses with their
inmates went on pretty much as before. But there was now added to the
stimulus which their free republican life and their piratical
expeditions gave to the national spirit the influence of the learning
and ideas which came in the train of the new faith. The use of writing
soon spread, and the magnificent Sagas, which are among the noblest
monuments of Northern genius, were nearly all of them produced in this
age, though some were not committed to parchment before the end of the
twelfth century.
For many years the Constitution of the Republic seems to have
undergone no great alteration. The establishment of Christianity did
indeed throw considerable power into the hands of the two bishops, and
eventually produced a strife between the Church and the temporal
magnates resembling that which distracted both the Romano-Germanic
Empire and England. This scarcely affected the position of the Goði,
whose authority had now lost so much as it originally possessed of a
religious character. Snorri, whose appeal to geology is said to have
decided the Alþing against paganism, was himself the priest of the
most famous heathen sanctuary of the island. But in the beginning of
the thirteenth century the delicately-framed fabric of the Republican
Constitution began to break up. The tendency of a federation usually
is to become less of a federation and more of a single united state.
But in Iceland the federal bond, if one can use this name, was always
weak, and when a powerful member became disobedient, there were no
legal means of reducing him to submission. By degrees the number of
priest-chieftainships diminished, the Goðorðs, which passed not only
by inheritance but also by gift or sale, coming to be accumulated in
the hands of a few great families, who thus acquired a predominant
influence at the Alþing, were virtually masters of large districts of
the country, and marched about like feudal lords attended by petty
armies. Thus the old blood-feuds assumed more and more the aspect of
civil wars. Piracy was now less practised, because the countries which
had formerly been ravaged were better prepared for defence, so the
energy that used to spend itself upon the coasts of Scotland and
Ireland, of North Germany and Gaul, was now turned inward, and with
fatal results.
I am not writing the history of Iceland, though indeed I wish I were
doing so, for the theme is a fascinating one. But before closing these
scattered observations, intended to stimulate rather than to satisfy
curiosity, I will add three remarks suggested by the sketch that has
been given.
The first remark is that Iceland presents one of the few instances in
history of a breach in the continuity of institutional development. The
settlers were all of Norse stock; and Norway had in its petty
communities a rudimentary system of institutions not unlike that
described by Tacitus in his account of Germany, or that which the
conquering Angles and Saxons brought to Britain. Each community was an
independent Fylki (folk). In each Fylki there was a number of nobles,
one of whom stood foremost as hereditary chieftain, and a body of
warlike freemen, as well as a certain number of slaves. In each there
was a popular assembly, the Þing, corresponding to our Saxon Folk Mot.
Now owing to the way in which the settlers had planted themselves along
the coasts of Iceland, and to the fact that they were less closely
aggregated there than men had been in Norway, this organization did not
reappear in the new land. There was indeed everywhere a Þing, for the
habit of meeting to deal with lawsuits and other matters of common
interest was cherished as the very foundation of society. But an
Icelandic community was not a Fylki. It was not an old natural growth,
but rather a group of families whose tie was at first only that of local
proximity and thereafter that also of worship at a common temple. The
Goði, though he became the centre of this group, was not a chieftain
with a hereditary claim to leadership, and was not necessarily of any
higher lineage than some of his þingmen. Such eminent and high-born men
as Njál for instance and Egil Skallagrimsson were not Goðis. The Goðorð
was really a new institution, due to the special circumstances of
Iceland, and apparently without precedent among the Teutonic races.
Still more plainly was the organization of the Republic with its scheme
of Courts and its Lögrétta a new creation, due to the wisdom and public
spirit of the leading men of the nation, and not a purely natural
growth.
Secondly, as the Icelandic Republic is a new form of political society,
so the Alþing, in which the unity of the Republic found visible
expression, is a unique body, which cannot be referred to any one of the
familiar types of assembly. It is not a Primary Assembly, for though all
freemen are present, only a limited number of persons are entitled to
exercise either judicial or legislative functions. Neither is it a
Representative Assembly, for no one was elected to sit in it as a
delegate from others. The Goðis sat each by his own right, and the other
members as nominees of the Goðis. Neither again is it a sort of King’s
Council, like the Curia Regis of mediaeval England, consisting of
magnates and official advisers summoned by a monarch. If parallels to it
are to be sought, they are to be sought rather in bodies such as the
Roman Senate may have been in its earlier form, a sort of council of the
heads of organized communities; yet the differences between the Roman
_gentes_ and the Icelandic Þingmen, and the absence of an executive
magistrate like the Roman king, make the parallel anything but close.
Still more remote is the resemblance which the Alþing might be deemed to
bear to the council of a league, such as was the Swiss Confederation
before 1799, or such as the Diet of the Romano-Germanic Empire in its
later days.
The comparison of Iceland to a federation suggests a third question. Why
did not the Republic develop into a united State, whether republican or
monarchical, as did most of the nations of mediaeval Europe?
Out of several reasons that might be assigned I will mention three only,
two of them political, the third physical.
In Iceland there was no single great family with any hereditary claim to
stand above the others, while all the leading families were animated by
a high sense of pride and a pervading sentiment of equality. This love
of equality remains among the sons of the old Norsemen both in Iceland
and in Norway, and is indeed stronger there than anywhere else in
Europe.
Iceland had not, and could not have, any foreign wars. There was
therefore no external strife to consolidate her people, no opportunity
for any leader to win glory against an enemy, or to create an army on
which to base his power. All the wars were civil wars, and tended to
disunion.
The third reason is to be found in the nature of the country. The
island, larger than Ireland, has practically no land fit for tillage,
and very little fit even for pasture. Neither has it any internal trade.
The interior is occupied by snow mountains and glaciers and lava-fields
and wastes of black volcanic sand or pebbles. Iceland is really one huge
desert with some habitable spots scattered along its coasts. It was the
Desert that most of all destroyed the chances of political unity under a
republic by dividing the people into numerous small groups, far removed
from one another, and in many places severed by rugged and barren
wastes, or by torrents difficult to cross.
Nevertheless, although the Republic was evidently destined to perish, it
is possible that had Iceland been left to herself the rivalry of the two
or three great factions which divided it, and were usually in arms
against one another, would have ended in the triumph of one of them, and
in the establishment of a monarchy, or (less probably) of several
independent rival principalities. But a new and more formidable figure
now appeared on the scene. The successors of King Harald the Fairhaired
had always held that the Icelanders, since their ancestors had come from
Norway, ought to own their supremacy[139], and they argued that as
monarchical government was divinely appointed, and prevailed everywhere
in Continental Europe, no republic had a right to exist. King Hákon
Hákonsson (Hákon IV), one of the greatest among the kings of Norway, now
found in the distracted state of the island a better opportunity of
carrying out the plans which his predecessors Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf
the Saint had been obliged, by the watchfulness of the Alþing, to
abandon. By bribes and by threats, by drawing the leading Icelanders to
his Court, and sending his own emissaries through the island, he
succeeded in gaining over the few chiefs who now practically controlled
the Alþing, and at the meeting of midsummer, A.D. 1262 (one year before
the battle of Largs, which saved Scotland from the invasion of this very
Hákon), the Southern, Western and Northern Quarters accepted the King of
Norway as their sovereign, while in 1264 (the year of the summoning of
the first representative Parliament of England by Earl Simon de
Montfort) the remaining districts which had not yet recognized the
Norwegian Crown, now held by Magnus son of Hákon, made a like
submission. Thenceforward Iceland has followed the fortunes first of
Norway and then of Denmark. In 1814, when Norway was severed from the
Danish and transferred to the Swedish Crown, Iceland ought to have gone
with Norway. But nobody at the Congress of Vienna knew or cared about
the matter[140]: and so Iceland remains attached to Denmark, for which
she has little love.
-----
Footnote 139:
This claim of a Crown to the allegiance of emigrants who had passed
into new lands reminds one of that made by the British Government,
down to 1852 and 1854, as respects the Dutch farmers who had gone
forth into the wilderness of South Africa in 1836.
Footnote 140:
The preliminaries to the Treaty of Kiel by which Norway was severed
from the Danish Crown to be attached to the Swedish refer to Iceland,
the Faeroe Isles, and Greenland as having ‘never belonged to Norway.’
-----
With the free republic the literature which had given it lustre withered
up and disappeared. Only one work of high merit, the religious poem
called _The Lily_, was produced in the centuries that succeeded down to
the Reformation, when the spirit of the people was again stirred, and a
succession of eminent writers began which has never failed down to our
own day. But in the darkest times, in the ignorance and gloom of the
fifteenth century, in the pestilences and famine caused by the terrible
volcanic eruptions of the eighteenth, which are said to have destroyed
one-fifth of the population, the Icelanders never ceased to cherish and
enjoy their ancient Sagas. No farmhouse wanted its tiny store of
manuscripts, which were and still are read aloud in the long nights of
winter, while the women spin and the men make nets and harness. And it
is beyond doubt chiefly owing to the profusion and the literary
splendour of these works of a remote antiquity—works produced in an age
when England and Germany, Italy and France had nothing better than dull
monkish annalists or the reciters of such a tedious ballad epic as the
_Song of the Nibelungs_—that the Icelandic language has preserved its
ancient strength and purity, and that the Icelandic nation, a handful of
people scattered round the edge of a vast and dreary wilderness, has
maintained itself, in face of the overwhelming forces of nature, at so
high a level of culture, virtue and intelligence.
VI
THE
UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
AS SEEN IN THE PAST
THE PREDICTIONS OF HAMILTON AND TOCQUEVILLE
He who desires to discover what have been the main tendencies ruling and
guiding the development of American institutions, will find it
profitable to examine what were the views held and predictions
delivered, at different epochs in the growth of the Republic, by acute
and well-informed observers. There is a sort of dramatic interest in
this method of inquiry, and it is calculated to temper our
self-confidence in judging the phenomena of to-day. Besides, it helps us
to realize, better than we can do merely by following the course of
events, what aspect the political landscape wore from time to time. When
we read a narrative, we read into the events our knowledge of all that
actually flowed from them. When we read what the contemporary observer
expected from them as he saw them happening we reach a truer
comprehension of the time.
To collect and set forth a representative anthology of political
prophecies made at critical epochs in the history of the United States,
would be a laborious undertaking, for one would have to search through a
large number of writings, some of them fugitive writings, in order to
present adequate materials for determining the theories and beliefs
prevalent at any given period. I attempt nothing so ambitious. I desire
merely to indicate, by a comparatively simple example, how such a method
may be profitably followed, disclaiming any pretensions to dig deep into
even the obvious and familiar materials which students of American
history possess.
For this purpose, then, I will take two famous books—the one written at
the very birth of the Union by those who watched its cradle, and
recording incidentally, and therefore all the more faithfully, the
impressions and anticipations of the friends and enemies of the infant
Constitution; the other a careful study of its provisions and practical
working by a singularly fair and penetrating European philosopher. I
choose these books not only because both are specially representative
and of rare literary merit, but because they are easily accessible to
European as well as American readers, who may, by referring to their
pages, supply the omissions which want of space will compel me to make,
and may thereby obtain a more full and graphic transcript of
contemporary opinion. One of these books is _The Federalist_[141]—a
series of letters recommending the proposed Constitution for adoption to
the people of New York, written in 1788 by Alexander Hamilton,
afterwards Secretary of the Treasury, James Madison, afterwards
President from 1809 to 1817, and John Jay, afterwards Chief Justice from
1789 to 1795. They were all signed _Publius_. The other, which falls not
quite halfway between 1788 and our own time, is the _Democracy in
America_ of Alexis de Tocqueville.
-----
Footnote 141:
There are several good editions of _The Federalist_. The latest and
one of the best known to me is that edited by Mr. Paul Leicester Ford
(New York, 1898).
-----
I. THE UNITED STATES AT THE ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION.
I begin by briefly summarizing the record which _The Federalist_
preserves for us of the beliefs of the opponents and advocates of the
Draft Constitution of 1787 regarding the forces then at work in American
politics and the probable future of the nation.
To understand those beliefs, however, we must bear in mind what the
people of the United States then were, and for that purpose I will
recall the reader’s attention to some of the more salient aspects of the
Republic at the epoch when its national life began.
In 1783 the last British soldier quitted New York, the last stronghold
that was held for King George. In 1787 the present Constitution of the
United States was framed by the Convention at Philadelphia, and in 1788
accepted by the requisite number of States (nine). In 1789 George
Washington entered on his Presidency, the first Congress met and the
machine began to work. It was a memorable year for Europe as well as for
America—a year which, even after the lapse of more than a century, we
are scarcely yet ripe for judging, so many sorrows as well as blessings,
πολλὰ μὲν ἐσθλlὰ μεμιγμένα, πολλὰ δὲ λυγρά, were destined to come upon
mankind from those elections of the States-General which were proceeding
in France while Washington was being installed at Philadelphia.
All of the thirteen United States lay along the Atlantic coast. Their
area was 827,844 square miles, their population 3,929,214, little more
than half the population of New York State in 1900. Settlers had already
begun to cut the woods and build villages beyond the Alleghanies; but
when Kentucky was received as a State into the Union in 1792, she had a
population of only 80,000. The population was wholly of English (or
Anglo-Scottish) stock, save that a few Dutch were left in New York, a
few persons of Swedish blood in Delaware, and some isolated German
settlements in Pennsylvania. But in spite of this homogeneity the
cohesion of the States was weak. Communication was slow, difficult and
costly. The jealousies and suspicions which had almost proved fatal to
Washington’s efforts during the War of Independence were still rife.
There was some real conflict, and a far greater imagined conflict, of
interests between the trading and the purely agricultural States, even
more than between the slave States and those in which slavery had
practically died out. Many competent observers doubted whether the new
Federal Union, accepted only because the Confederation had proved a
failure and the attitude of foreign powers was threatening, could
maintain itself in the face of the strong sentiment of local
independence animating the several colonies, each of which, after
throwing off the yoke of Britain, was little inclined to brook any
control but that of its own legislature. The new Constitution was an
experiment, or rather a bundle of experiments, whose working there were
few data for predicting. It was a compromise, and its own authors feared
for it the common fate of compromises—to satisfy neither party and to
leave open rents which time would widen. In particular, it seemed most
doubtful whether the two branches of the Legislature, drawn from so wide
an area and elected on different plans, would work harmoniously, and
whether general obedience would be yielded to an executive President who
must necessarily belong to and seem to represent one particular State
and section of the country. Parties did not yet exist, for there was as
yet hardly a nation; but within a decade they grew to maturity and
ferocity. One of them claimed to defend local self-government, the
rights of the people, democratic equality; the other, the principle of
national unity and the authority of the Federal power. One sympathized
with France, the other was accused of leaning to an English alliance.
They were, or soon came to be, divided not merely on burning questions
of foreign policy and home policy, but also—and this was an issue which
mixed itself up with everything else—as to the extent of the powers to
be allowed to the central Government and its relations to the
States—questions which the curt though apparently clear language of the
Constitution had by no means exhausted.
Slavery was not yet a burning question—indeed it existed to some slight
extent in the Middle as well as in the Southern States, but the
opposition of North and South was already visible. The Puritanism of New
England, its industries and its maritime commerce, gave it different
sentiments as well as different interests from those which dominated the
inhabitants of the South, a population wholly agricultural, among whom
the influence of Jefferson was strong, and theories of extreme democracy
had made progress.