pushful nineteenth-century (A.D.) monarch, and consider this visit to
Jupiter Ammon as a master-stroke of policy. He was, we are asked to
believe, deliberately and cynically acquiring divinity as a “unifying
idea.” The writer is totally unable to accept anything of the sort. For
a discussion of the question, see Ferguson’s _Greek Imperialism_.
[147] “His reforming zeal made him unpopular with the upper classes.
Schoolmen and pedants held up to the admiration of the people the heroes
of the feudal times and the advantages of the system they administered.
Seeing in this propaganda danger to the state, Shi Hwang-ti determined
to break once and for all with the past. To this end he ordered the
destruction of all books having reference to the past history of the
empire, and many scholars were put to death for failing in obedience to
it.”--The late Sir R. K. Douglas in the _Encyclopædia Brit._, article
_China_.
Mr. L. Y. Chen does not agree with Sir R. K. Douglas here. He thinks
that the motives of Shi Hwang-ti were obscurantist. His object was the
intellectual slavery of the people. He collected a library for his own
use.
[148] There were literary expressions of social discontent in Egypt
before 2000 B.C. See “Social Forces and Religion” in Breasted’s
_Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_ for some of the earliest
complaints of the common man under the ancient civilizations.
[149] The student should compare with this J. J. Atkinson’s account (in
his _Primal Law_) of the significance of marriage by capture and his
theory of the origin of marriage.
[150] See also his shorter _Social Life of the Babylonians and
Assyrians_.
[151] See Mary Austin, _The Flock_.
[152] J. L. M. says this is the view of a Londoner. In a village or
small town where everyone knows everyone, long credits are possible with
barter. In Asia Minor there is much reckoning with quite imaginary money
of account.
[153] From _casta_, a word of Portuguese origin; the Indian word is
_varna_, colour.
[154] In the time of Confucius classes were much more fixed than later.
Under the Han Dynasty the competitive examination system was not yet
established. Scholars were recommended for appointments by local
dignitaries, etc.--L. Y. C.
[155] The Grand Canal of China, the longer portion of which was made in
the sixth century A.D., has a total length of nearly 900 miles. It was
begun in the fifth century B.C. “Between Su-chow and Chin-kiang the
canal is often 100 feet wide and its sides are, in many places, faced
with stone. It is spanned by fine stone bridges, and near its banks are
many memorial arches and lofty pagodas.” The Great Wall of China, which
was begun in the third century B.C., was built originally to defend
China against the Huns. It is about 1500 miles long; its average height
is between 20 and 30 feet, and every 200 yards there are towers 40 feet
high.
[156] Damascus was already making Damask, and “Damascening” steel.
[157] _The Encyclopædia Biblica_ has been of great use here.
[158] This is probably much too early an estimate. The Book of Daniel
was not written until 167-5 B.C. Ecclesiastes and several Psalms are
later than Alexander.--G. W. B.
[159] See also G. B. Gray, _A Critical Introduction to the Old
Testament_.
[160] This may seem to contradict Genesis xx. 15, and xxi. and xxvi.
various verses, but compare with this the _Encyclopædia Biblica_ article
_Philistines_.
[161] So this name should be spelt in English. It is now the fashion
among the learned and among the sceptical to spell it Yahwe or Jahveh or
Jahve, or in some such fashion. There is a justification for this in the
fact that at first only the consonants were written in Hebrew, and then,
for reasons into which we will not enter here, the wrong vowels were
inserted in this name. But ever since the days of Tyndale’s Bible,
Jehovah has been established in English literature as the name of the
God of Israel, and it is not to be lightly altered. There is at present
a deplorable tendency to strange spelling among historians. Attention
has already been called to the confusion that is being accumulated in
people’s minds by the variable spelling of Egyptologists, but the
tendency is now almost universal among historical writers. In an
otherwise admirable little book, _The Opening-up of Africa_, by Sir H.
H. Johnston, for example, one finds him spelling Saul as Sha’ul and
Solomon as Shelomoh; Jerusalem becomes Yerusalim and the Hebrews, Habiru
or Ibrim. Historians do not realize how the mind of the general reader
is distressed and discouraged by these constantly fluctuating attempts
to achieve phonetic exactitude. This treatment of old forms has much the
same effect as the dazzle-painting of ships that went on during the
submarine warfare. It is dazzle-spelling. The ordinary educated man is
so confused that he fails altogether to recognize even his oldest
friends under their modern disguises. He loses his way in the story
hopelessly. The old events occur to novel names in unfamiliar places. He
conceives a disgust for history in which no record seems to tally with
any other record. Still more maddening and confusing is the variable
spelling of Chinese names. A large part of the popular indifference to
Chinese history may be due to the impossibility of holding on to the
thread of a story in which one narrator talks of T’sin and another of
Sin, and both forms mix themselves with Chin and T’chin. A boldly
Europeanized name, such as Confucius, is far more readily grasped.
Modern writers in their zeal for phonetics seem to have lost their sense
of proportion. It is of far more importance not merely to civilization,
but to the welfare, respect, and endowment of historians, that the
general community should form clear and sound ideas of historical
processes, than that it should pronounce the name Jehovah exactly as
this or that learned gentleman believes it was pronounced by the Hebrews
of the days of Ezra. A day may come in the future for one final,
conclusive reform in the spelling of historical names. Meanwhile, it
will probably save school teachers of history from endless confusion and
muddle if they adhere firmly to the time-established spelling. Yet we
have attempted no pedantic classicalism. The reader will find
Peisistratus for Goldsmith’s Pisistratus, the Arabic spelling of
Muhammad, Kelt for Celt, and Habsburg taking the place of the older
Hapsburg.
[162] Figures certainly exaggerated.--G. M.
[163] That is, where is the glory?
[164] But upon the question whether its “Centralization” was the work of
Solomon or a much later idea, cp. S. R. Driver, _Deuteronomy_ (Int.
Crit. Commentary).--G. W. B.
[165] Estimates of the cubit vary. The greatest is 44 inches. This would
extend the width to seventy-odd feet.
[166] But one version of the Creation story and the Eden story, though
originally from Babylon, seem to have been known to the Hebrews before
the Exile.--G. W. B.
[167] For early Egyptian anticipations of the idea of a Messiah and of
the prophetic style, see Breasted’s _Development of Religion and Thought
in Ancient Egypt_. A very good book on the Hebrew prophets is W. A. C.
Allen’s _Old Testament Prophets_.
[168] Fletcher H. Swift’s _Education in Ancient Israel from Earliest
Times to A.D. 70_ is an interesting account of the way in which the
Jewish religion, because it was a literature-sustained religion, led to
the first efforts to provide elementary education for all the children
in the community.
[169] Ridgeway’s _Early History of Greece_ has been used here, and
Gilbert Murray’s _Rise of the Greek Epic_.
[170] Roger Pocock’s _Horses_ is a good and readable book on these
questions.
[171] This is a little misleading. I may quote from C. D. Buch,
_Introduction to the Study of Greek Dialects_ (_a_) “The great majority
of the dialects play no rôle whatever in literature” (p. 14); (_b_) “In
the course of literary development the dialects” (in a mixed and
artificial form, _e.g._ the “epic” dialect) “came to be characteristic
of certain classes of literature; and their rôle once established, the
choice usually depended upon this factor, rather than upon the native
dialect of the author.” (p. 12.) Speaking generally, each class of
literature preserved the dialect of the region where it was first
cultivated.
The following work is a most illuminating one on this subject: A.
Meillet, _Aperçu d’une Histoire de la Langue Grecque_ (Paris, 1913).--H.
L. J.
[172] Vowels were less necessary for the expression of a Semitic
language. In the early Semitic alphabets only A, I, and U were provided
with symbols, but for such a language as Greek, in which many of the
inflectional endings are vowels, a variety of vowel signs was
indispensable.
[173] See Zimmern’s _Greek Commonwealth_, Bury’s _History of Greece_,
and Barker’s _Greek Political Theory_.
[174] “For them the state did not exist.” This needs qualification.
Cephalus, at whose house the conversation of Plato’s _Republic_ is
placed, was a resident alien. He was a wealthy man in the best society,
and taken as a type of the “happy man.” His son, Lysias, was a leading
orator. Even in the matter of the slaves: the Old Oligarch, in the
“Constitution of Athens,” complains that the Athenian slaves had no
distinctive dress or manners, and so a gentleman could not even push one
of them! In the _Republic_ itself there is a description of the
Democratic State, in which the slaves push you off the pavement.
Moreover, even during the Peloponnesian War, there was no persecution of
aliens and no expulsion of aliens from Athens. They were evidently a
loyal and contented class. True, in time of food shortage, the claims of
everybody to true citizenship were scrutinized more and more closely;
but that was unavoidable.--G. M.
[175] I do not agree with “hereditary barristers” or “fee-hunting.” The
Athenian dicasts were not barristers, but judges: they sat in panels
(sometimes a panel of some hundreds) and judged. They had to be paid for
attendance as judges (don’t we pay jurymen?) because it took them away
from their work as potters, dyers, and stone-masons. Pay was a genuine
and good democratic institution; it was just what made possible the
ordinary citizen’s co-operation in the life of the state, and stopped
its business from being the perquisite of the rich. I feel strongly that
the text is unjust to Athens.--E. B.
See Zimmern’s _Greek Commonwealth_, and Barker’s _Greek Political
Theory_, pp. 29-30.
[176] From ostrakon, a tile; the voter wrote the name on a tile or
shell.
[177] 776 B.C. is the year of the First Olympiad, a valuable
starting-point in Greek chronology.
[178] It is, at least, doubtful whether any change of climate expelled
either lion or elephant from southeast Europe and Asia Minor; the cause
of their gradual disappearance was--I think--nothing but Man,
increasingly well armed for the chase. Lions lingered in the Balkan
peninsula till about the fourth century B.C., if not later. Elephants
had perhaps disappeared from western Asia by the eighth century B.C. The
lion (much bigger than the existing form) stayed on in southern Germany
till the Neolithic period. The panther inhabited Greece, southern Italy,
and southern Spain likewise till the beginning of the historical period
(say 1000 B.C.).--H. H. J.
[179] But a thousand years earlier the Hittites seem to have had paved
high roads running across their country.
[180] But cp. Bury’s _History of Greece_, ch. vi., § 5.
[181] Winckler, in Helmolt’s _Universal History_.
[182] See in relation to this chapter, Zimmern’s _Greek Commonwealth_. A
very handy book for the student in this section is Abbott’s _Skeleton
Outline of Greek History_.
[183] _Ancient Greek Literature_, by Gilbert Murray (Heinemann, 1911).
[184] _Plutarch._
[185] For an account of his views, see Burnet’s _Early Greek
Philosophy_. Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_ is also a good book for this
section.
[186] “But it was not only against the lives, properties, and liberties
of Athenian citizens that the Thirty made war. They were not less
solicitous to extinguish the intellectual force and education of the
city, a project so perfectly in harmony both with the sentiment and
practice of Sparta, that they counted on the support of their foreign
allies. Among the ordinances which they promulgated was one, expressly
forbidding any one ‘to teach the art of words.’ The edict of the Thirty
was, in fact, a general suppression of the higher class of teachers or
professors, above the rank of the elementary (teacher of letters or)
grammatist. If such an edict could have been maintained in force for a
generation, combined with the other mandates of the Thirty--the city out
of which Sophocles and Euripides had just died, and in which Plato and
Isocrates were in vigorous age, would have been degraded to the
intellectual level of the meanest community in Greece. It was not
uncommon for a Grecian despot to suppress all those assemblies wherein
youths came together for the purpose of common training, either
intellectual or gymnastic, as well as the public banquets and clubs or
associations, as being dangerous to his authority, tending to elevation
of courage, and to a consciousness of political rights among the
citizens.”--Grote’s _History of Greece_.
[187] A very good and useful account of this great literature for the
reader who is not a classical student is Norwood’s _Greek Tragedy_.
[188] Mahaffy.
[189] There is not a single sentence in praise of Alexander, no
dedication, no compliments, in all Aristotle. On the other hand, he
never mentions Demosthenes nor quotes him in the Rhetoric.--G. M.
[190] Wheeler.
[191] Bauer, in _Vom Griechentum zum Christentum_, says that Alexander
sent a mission of exploration to Abyssinia to enable Aristotle to settle
the question of the cause of the Nile inundations (melting of mountain
snows), and that he also had tropical flora and other material collected
for him--E. B.
[192] _Ancient Greek Literature._
[193] Jung in his _Psychology of the Unconscious_ is very good in his
chapter I on the differences between ancient (pre-Athenian) thought and
modern thought. The former he calls Undirected Thinking, the latter
Directed Thinking. The former was a thinking in images, akin to
dreaming; the latter a thinking in words. Science is an organization of
directed thinking. The Antique spirit (before the Greek thinkers,
_i.e._) created not science but mythology. The ancient human world was a
world of subjective fantasies like the world of children and uneducated
young people to-day, and like the world of savages and dreams. Infantile
thought and dreams are a re-echo of the prehistoric and savage. Myths
are the mass dreams of peoples, and dreams the myths of individuals. The
work of hard and disciplined thinking by means of carefully analyzed
words and statements which was begun by the Greek thinkers and resumed
by the scholastic philosophers of whom we shall tell in the middle ages,
was a necessary preliminary to the development of modern science.
[194] “For the proper administration of justice and for the distribution
of authority it is necessary that the citizens be acquainted with each
other’s characters, so that, where this cannot be, much mischief ensues,
both in the use of authority and in the administration of justice; for
it is not just to decide arbitrarily, as must be the case with excessive
population.” Aristotle’s _Politics_, quoted by Wheeler, who adds,
“Aristotle comes to the conclusion that the natural ‘limit to the size
of the state must be found in the capability of being easily taken in at
a glance.’” But Murray notes that the word Eusunopton means also
“capable of being comprehended as a unity”--a very different and wider
idea.
[195] Benjamin Ide Wheeler’s _Alexander the Great_ and G. D. Hogarth’s
_Philip and Alexander_ have been very useful here.
[196] To the common Athenians, that is. But to many thoughtful Greeks
the rôle of Macedonia in their future was a matter of earnest
speculation. Herodotus (viii. 137) tells a long story of a prophecy by
which the inheritance of Perdiccas, the ancestor of the Macedonian
kings, was to embrace at last the whole round world. This was written a
hundred years before Philip and Alexander.
[197] Goldsmith’s _History of Greece_. The picturesque disposition of
the novelist rather than the austere method of the historian, is
apparent here.
[198] But Phocis was treated in the same way by Philip and his friends
in 346, and Mantinea by Sparta in 385. It was a regular Greek punishment
of a city to break it up into villages; and as for selling into slavery,
Callicratidas the Spartan, in the Peloponnesian War, was held to be very
noble when he said he would not sell Greeks into slavery. Anyhow, the
destruction of Thebes was due to the _Greek_ enemies of Thebes, who
pressed it on Alexander.--E. B.
[199] Mahaffy. Their names have undergone various changes--_e.g._
Candahar (Iskender) and Secunderabad.
[200] D. G. Hogarth.
[201] The stages by which Bactria degenerated into Afghanistan may be
studied neatly in the progressive deterioration of its coinage from a
decent standard of Hellenic accomplishment into the vague flourishes of
Orientalism; it began by displaying a Heracles of pure Greek blood and a
pair of horsemen who would hardly have seemed out of place on the frieze
of the Parthenon, and it fell steadily to a level of incompetence only
equalled by the crude imitations of Roman currency that were being made
in pre-Roman Britain about the same time.--P. G.
[202] Before that time. But such speculation was going on then. There is
some interesting economic theory in Plato’s _Republic_, and Aristotle
was writing the _œconomica_. Xenophon wrote on Athenian revenues and
other economic matters. Thucycides wrote an excellent passage on the
Greek past, and Aristotle dealt with barbaric customs.--E. B.
[203] _Vide_ Mahaffy’s _Greek Life and Thought and his Progress of
Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire_, Marvin’s _Living Past_, Legge’s
_Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity_, and Reinach’s _Orpheus_.
[204] The question whether the vivisection of human beings, or, indeed,
whether any vivisection at all occurred at Alexandria, is one of
considerable importance because of the light it throws upon the moral
and intellectual quality of the time. One of the editors of this book
was inclined to throw doubt upon it, as a thing antipathetic to the
Greek spirit. The writer has taken some pains to find out the facts of
the case, and he has been so fortunate as to have the help of Dr.
Singer, one of the greatest living authorities upon the history of
medicine. There are statements made by Tertullian (_De Anima_, chap.
xxv.), but he was a biased and untrustworthy witness. The conclusive
passage is taken from Celsus, who wrote during the reign of Tiberius,
three centuries after the great days of Alexandria. “If you are to have
one witness,” writes Dr. Singer, “you could hardly have a better. In my
own mind I am satisfied with the evidence of Celsus, and I have asked
Dr. E. T. Wittrington, our best authority on Greek medicine, and he also
is satisfied.”
The following is a translation of the passage in Celsus, _De Re Medica_.
One school says that “it is necessary to dissect the bodies of the dead,
and to examine their viscera and intestines. Herophilus and Erasistratus
adopted by far the best method, for they obtained criminals from prison
by royal permission, and dissected them alive, and they examined, while
they still breathed, the parts which Nature had concealed, noting their
position, warmth (or possibly ‘colour’--_colorem_ instead of _calorem_),
shape, size, relation, hardness, softness, smoothness, and feel; also
the projections and depressions of each and how they fit into one
another. For if there happen any inward pain, he who has not learned
where the viscera and intestines are placed, cannot know where the pain
is; nor can the diseased part be cured by one who does not know what
part it is. Again, if the viscera of any one are exposed by a wound, he
who is ignorant of the natural colour of that part in the healthy state
cannot know whether it be sound or corrupted, and therefore cannot cure
the corrupted part. Moreover remedies can be applied more appropriately
externally when the position, shape, and size of the internal parts is
known, and the same argument holds for all the other matters that we
have mentioned. Nor is it a cruel act, as many would have it, to seek
remedies for innocent mankind throughout the ages by torture of a few
criminals.”
Against this view, says Celsus, the other school argues that “to cut
open the abdomen and thorax of living men, and thus to turn that art
which concerns itself with the health of mankind not only into an
instrument of death (_pestem_--lit. ‘a plague’), but (death) in its most
horrible form, and this although some of the things that we seek thus
barbarously can by no means be known, while others may be learned
without cruelty. For the colour, smoothness, softness, hardness, and all
their like are not the same when the body is cut open as when it is
whole; and, moreover, even in bodies that have not been thus ravaged,
these properties are often changed by fear, grief, want of food, or of
digestion, fatigue and a thousand other lesser causes. It is thus more
likely that the inner organs, which are more tender, and to which the
light is a new experience, are changed by serious wounds and by
mangling.
“Further, nothing can be more foolish than to think that any things are
the same in a live man as in a moribund one, or, rather, in one
practically dead. It is indeed true that the abdomen, with which our
argument is less concerned, can be opened while a man yet lives, but as
soon as the knife reaches the thorax (præcordium), and outs the
transverse septum, which is a membrane dividing the superior parts from
the inferior and called diaphragma by the Greeks, the man at once gives
up the ghost, and thus it is the breast and its viscera of a dead and
not a living man which the murderous physician examines. He has thus but
performed a cruel murder, and has not learned what the viscera of a
living man are like.”
Celsus’ own judgment is given a little later: “To dissect a living body
is both cruel and unnecessary; to dissect dead bodies is necessary.”
It is to be noted, says Professor Murray, that Herophilus and
Erasistratus were not living in a Greek city state, but under an
_oriental despot_.
[205] Mahaffy.
[206] It has been suggested that new books were perhaps dictated to a
roomful of copyists, and so issued in a first edition of some hundreds
at least. In Rome, Horace and Virgil seem to have been issued in quite
considerable editions.
[207] See Ferguson’s _Hellenistic Athens_.
[208] Serapis sounds like a compound of Apis and Osiris, but there is
reason for supposing that the name is really of Chaldean origin. See
Cumont, _Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism_.
[209] Legge, _Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity_.
[210] See for much light on the syncretic religions before Christianity
Franz Cumont, _Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism_. This is a very
able and thoroughly interesting book.
[211] Rhys Davids’ _Buddhism_ and other writings by him have been our
chief guide here.
[212] Pronounced Ashoka.
[213] The _Burmese Chronicle_, quoted by Rhys Davids.
[214] The _Madhurattha Vilasini_, quoted by Rhys Davids.
[215] Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_.
[216] See R.F. Johnston, _Buddhist China_.--L.C.B.
[217] Hue’s _Travels in Tartary, Tibet, and China_.
[218] Rhys Davids. He was the son of a king by a low-caste mother.
[219] See Giles, _Confucianism and its Rivals_.
[220] S. N. Fu.
[221] Hirth’s _The Ancient History of China_.
[222] The reader will find a footnote to Chap. XXXI, § 8, signed L. C.
B., which gives the main differences between the teachings of Confucius
and Lao Tse.
[223] See Hue’s _Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China_.
[224] A very convenient handbook for this and the next two chapters is
Matheson’s _Skeleton Outline of Roman History_.
[225] For Italian pre-history see Modestov’s _Introduction à l’histoire
Romaine_, and Peet’s _Stone and Bronze Age in Italy and Sicily_.
[226] See Lloyd’s _Making of the Roman People_.
[227] Latin _Pœni_ = Carthaginians. _Punicus (adj.)_ = Carthaginian,
_i.e._ Phœnician.
[228] See Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_; Mommsen, _History of
Rome_; and the histories of the Roman Empire by Bury, H. Stuart Jones,
and W. E. Heitland.
[229] Ferrero, _The Greatness and Decline of Rome_.
[230] J. Wells, _Short History of Rome to the Death of Augustus_.
[231] J. Wells.
[232] But note that Athens had (1) no taxes on foreigners, and inflicted
no disabilities on them except absence of citizenship. No “expulsions of
aliens” such as were regular at Sparta, and common in most places. This
is a frequent Athenian boast. Cp. Thucydides, ii. 39, “Our city is
thrown open to the world. We never expel a foreigner or prevent him from
seeing and learning anything of which the secret, if revealed, might be
useful to an enemy.” (2) Practically Free Trade; only a general 5 per
cent. import duty. (3) Great interest in foreign places, constitutions,
customs, etc. Athens was very oppressive--by modern standards--to its
subject-allies; chiefly because there was no representation, and because
she was so much at war. But even here, after her defeat in 404, they
voluntarily gathered to her again. The second Athenian Empire was not in
any way forced upon them.--G. M.
[233] Haverfield says--and I think he is right--that Rome had a great
advantage in her imperial development--viz., that she was a city and not
a nation. A nation implies some unity of race, and race prejudice. A
city is based on the mere fact of citizenship. We should have said to
St. Paul: “Citizen or no citizen, you are only a Levantine Jew.” But a
Roman, apparently, did not think of saying so. Hence the great freedom
with which emperors and senators are taken from other races.--G. M.
[234] The point raised here that Rome never developed representation is
a very interesting one. There was a golden chance in the Social War (90
B.C.). The allies of Rome (socii) revolted, and set up a counter Rome in
Corfinium. Now, to our minds, the obvious thing for them to do was (1)
to make Corfinium just a capital; (2) to set up a parliament there,
consisting of representatives drawn from the allies, who lived, of
course, all over Italy. Not a bit of it. They made Corfinium a city
state (not a capital), and feigned themselves all to be citizens of it,
meeting in a primary assembly there. They also set up, it is true, a
senate of 500; but this was just a copy of the Roman senate, and not a
representative body (see Mommsen, vol. iii. pp. 237-8, Eng. trans.).
Under the Roman Empire there were germs of representation in provincial
assemblies: see Bury, _Student’s Roman Empire_, on the _concilium
Lugdunense_ in Gaul and τἁ κοιγἁ in Asia Minor.--E. B.
[235] Seyffert’s _Dictionary of Classical Antiquities_. (Nettleship
Sandys.)
[236] Aristotle, _Politics_, Bk. ii. ch. xi.; and J. Wells, _Rome to the
Death of Augustus_.
[237] J. Wells, _op. cit._
[238] Plutarch, _Life of Cato_.
[239] Mommsen says the other provinces cost as much as they paid.
[240] But it was this Scipio Nasica who was responsible for the killing
of Tiberius Gracchus. On the whole, he seems to have been a statesman of
very distinguished abilities. He was the means of bringing the Asiatic
Great Mother Goddess to Rome. “People at Rome generally were beginning
to see that they would have to take over Asia. Had they any right?
Nasica was sent on a mission to invite the Magna Mater at Pessinus to
come to Rome. Her image nodded ‘yes.’ She was brought and installed in
Rome. Now this is a policy of peaceful assimilation. Just as in Babylon
you get gods of other cities brought to Babylon, just as Nabonidus (see
Chap. xix. § 6) was trying to get an amicable pantheon as a way of
peaceful assimilation, and failing to do so because he did not bring the
priesthoods as well as the gods, so Rome was at this time thinking on
the same lines. Camillus had shown the way when he suggested the
invitation of Juno of Veii to Rome. Now Nasica, it may be suggested,
wanted to treat Carthage in the same fashion. He opposed the destruction
of Carthage in 146 (Mommsen, iii. p. 23, p. 39). If he had had his way,
one may guess, he would have invited the Carthaginian gods to Rome, and
the corollary would have been the enfranchisement of the Carthaginian
population--the treatment of the Carthaginians as equals, whose gods had
been received in Rome, and stood in Rome. Mummius did the same in
carrying off the statues of Greek gods to Rome, only, being stupid, he
did not understand why (146 B.C.).”
Nasica’s visit to Pessinus was as important as the testament of Attalus.
His policy is not the policy of Rome the conqueror, but Rome the
assimilator. He is trying to get a nexus by a common pantheon. If this
had been done, the Republic might have survived. As it was, the
deification of the ruler had to provide the nexus, as in Alexander’s
empire. The “Synœcism of gods” or the “deification of rulers,” those are
the only ways of amalgamating peoples. It is a pity Alexander and Rome
did not attempt the former.--J. L. M. and E. B.
[241] The intervening Scipio was a man of learning and high character
who died young.--G. M.
[242] Julius Cæsar (60 B.C.) caused the proceedings of the Senate to be
published by having them written up upon bulletin boards, _in albo_
(upon the white). It had been the custom to publish the annual edict of
the prætor in this fashion. There were professional letter-writers who
sent news by special courier to rich country correspondents, and these
would copy down the stuff upon the Album (white board). Cicero, while he
was governor in Cilicia, got the current news from such a professional
correspondent. He complains in one letter that it was not what he
wanted; the expert was too full of the chariot races and other sporting
intelligence, and failed to give any view of the political situation.
Obviously this news-letter system was available only for public men in
prosperous circumstances.
[243] Seyffert, _op. cit._
[244] Authorities differ here. Mayor says thumbs up (to the breast)
meant death and thumbs down meant “Lower that sword.” The popular
persuasion is that thumbs down meant death. Seyffert’s _Dict. Class.
Antiq._ gives this view. See the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article
“Gladiators.”
[245] “A little more needs to be said on this matter. The Greeks cited
gladiatorial shows as a reason for regarding the Romans as _Barbaroi_,
and there were riots when some Roman proconsul tried to introduce them
in Corinth. Among Romans, the better people evidently disliked them, but
a sort of shyness prevented them from frankly denouncing them as cruel.
For instance, Cicero, when he had to attend the Circus, took his tablets
and his secretary with him, and didn’t look. He expresses particular
disgust at the killing of an elephant; and somebody in Tacitus (Drusus,
Ann. 1. 76) was unpopular because he was too fond of gladiatorial
bloodshed--“_quamquam vili sanguine nimis gaudens_” (“rejoicing too much
in blood, worthless blood though it was”). The games were unhesitatingly
condemned by Greek philosophy, and at different times two Cynics and one
Christian gave their lives in the arena, protesting against them, before
they were abolished.
“I do not think Christianity had any such relation to slavery as is here
stated. St. Paul’s action in sending back a slave to his master, and his
injunction, ‘Slaves, obey your masters,’ were regularly quoted on the
pro-slavery side, down to the nineteenth century; on the other hand,
both the popular philosophies and the Mystery religions were against
slavery in their whole tendency, and Christianity of course in time
became the chief representative of these movements. Probably the best
test is the number of slaves who occupied posts of honour in the
religious and philosophic systems, like Epictetus, for instance, or the
many slaves who hold offices in the Mithraic Inscriptions. I do not
happen to know if any slaves were made Christian bishops, but by analogy
I should think it likely that some were. In all the Mystery religions,
as soon as you entered the community, and had communion with God,
earthly distinctions shrivelled away.”--G. M.
The Spirit of Jesus is something different from formal Christianity,
which I regard as the vehicle, the largely unsympathetic vehicle, by
which that spirit was carried about the world.--H. G. W.
[246] _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, bk. i. ch. xi.
[247] There is no evidence of forgery and no contemporary suggestion of
the sort. The bequest of Attalus, even if it was a forgery (Mommsen
accepts it, iii. p. 55), is of importance, as showing that a great many
people did think that Rome was the best administrator. Otherwise, the
story (if it is only a story) could not have caught on. _A priori_ there
seems good reason for the testament. The Attalid dynasty was “petering
out”; there were troublesome Gauls about (Mommsen, iii. p. 53).--J. L.
M. and E. B.
[248] Ferrero.
[249] Ferrero.
[250] Plutarch. To which, however, G. M. adds the following note. “It is
generally believed that Sulla died through bursting a blood-vessel in a
fit of temper. The story of abominable vices seems to be only the
regular slander of the Roman mob against anyone who did not live in
public.”
[251] Plutarch.
[252] The bow was probably the composite bow, so called because it is
made of several plates (five or so) of horn, like the springs of a
carriage: it discharges a high-speed arrow with a twang. This was the
bow the Mongols used. This short composite bow (it was not a long bow)
was quite old in human experience. It was the bow of Odysseus; the
Assyrians had it in a modified form. It went out in Greece, but it
survived as the Mongol bow. It was quite short, very stiff to pull, with
a flat trajectory, a remarkable range, and a great noise (cp. Homer’s
reference to the twang of the bow). It went out in the Mediterranean
because the climate was not good for it, and because there were
insufficient animals to supply the horn.--J. L. M.
[253] For a good compact account of Cæsar, much more appreciative of him
than our text, see Warde Fowler’s _Julius Cæsar_.
[254] See Strachan Davidson’s _Cicero_, or, better, his own letters to
Atticus.
[255] H. S. Jones, in _The Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Rome.” His
contribution is admirably verified and exact, and we are greatly
indebted to it.
[256] The best book in a compact compass for expanding this chapter is
H. Stuart Jones’s _The Roman Empire_.
[257] Gibbon.
[258] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Rome.”
[259] See _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Longinus.” The Syrian
queen referred to by Gibbon is Zenobia. Longinus was put to death by
Aurelian. See ch. xxxii., § 2.
[260] The natural result of a plutocratic rule above was a vigorous
trade-unionism intent only on short hours and high wages below, and as
indifferent as the rich to the common weal. See Hubbard’s _Fate of
Empires_, a very stimulating book, differing widely in its spirit and
conclusions from those of the writer.
[261] See Legge, _Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity_.
[262] No really good, full, and popular descriptive history, with maps
and illustrations, of early and medieval China, nor of the Mongol (Hun)
and Turkish peoples, seems to exist in the English language. The writer
has consulted Skrine and Ross’s _Heart of Asia_, Hirth’s _Ancient
History of China_, S. Wells Williams’ _History of China_, _A Thousand
Years of the Tartars_, by E. H. Parker, H. H. Howorth’s History of the
Mongols, and has found much useful material scattered through Ratzel and
Helmolt. He has later on made a useful section from Watters’ translation
and commentary upon the _Travels of Yuan Chwang_, supplemented by the
_Life of Yuan Chwang_, edited by L. Cranmer Byng. Yule’s edition of
Marco Polo has also been a very inspiring source of material.
[263] E. H. Parker, _A Thousand Years of the Tartars_.
[264] Even in eastern Turkestan there are still strong evidences of
Nordic blood in the physiognomy of the people. See Ella and Percy Sykes,
_Through Deserts and Oases of Central Asia_.
[265] See Roger Pocock, _Horses_, a very interesting and picturesque
little book.
[266] _The History of Mankind_, book v., C.
[267] _The History of Mankind_, book v., C.
[268] See _Migrations_, by Flinders Petrie, the 1906 Huxley Lecture of
the Royal Anthrop. Institute.
[269] E. B.
[270] In Helmolt’s _History of the World_.
[271] E. B. disagrees with this view. He regards it as the pro-Teutonic
view of the German historians.
[272] Gibbon.
[273] Gibbon.
[274] The spread and the vitality of the place-name “Rome” were even
greater than the vogue of the title “Cæsar.” All the countries which had
formed part of the Eastern and Western divisions of the Roman Empire
(excepting the ephemeral extension of Roman rule over Mesopotamia) were
known to the Saracens, the Arabs, the Berbers as “Rum,” and their
peoples as “Rumis,” “Rumas.” And this name was applied without, in all
cases, carrying with it the signification of “Christian” or
“Christendom.” Thus the Spanish Moors were, and their descendants are,
styled by the Moroccan Moors and the Algerians and Tunisians: “Rumas.”
When expelled from Spain most of them took service under the Sharifian
Emperors of Morocco, and brought with them a European knowledge of
fire-arms. Thus you are told in Algeria that “Romans” (_i.e._ Spanish
Moors) conquered the Upper Niger basin for Morocco in the seventeenth
century; their descendants remain there till to-day between Jenné and
Timbuktu, still known to the French as “Roumas.” Some Spanish Moors even
penetrated to the coast of eastern equatorial Africa and carried the
name of “Rome” into the fierce expulsion of the Portuguese from those
parts which was begun by the Omani Arabs.--H. H. J.
[275] Josephus.
[276] See _Encyclopædia Biblica_; article “Jesus.”
[277] Matt. xii. 46-50.
[278] Mark x. 17-25.
[279] Mark. vii. 1-9.
[280] Mark xii. 13-17.
[281] Mark x. 35-45.
[282] For the connexion of Jesus with the Messiah idea, see E. F.
Scott’s _Kingdom of the Messiah_.
[283] Hirth, _The Ancient History of China_. Chap. viii.
[284] “St. Paul understood what most Christians never realize, namely,
that the Gospel of Christ is not a religion, but religion itself in its
most universal and deepest significance.”--Dean Inge in _Outspoken
Essays_.
[285] Authorities vary considerably upon this date, and upon most of the
dates of the life of Jesus. See _Encyclopædia Biblica_, art.
“Chronology.”
[286] See _Judaism and St. Paul_, by C. G. Montefiore, for some
interesting speculations on the religion of Paul before his conversion.
See also the very interesting paper on St. Paul in Dean Inge’s
_Outspoken Essays_ already quoted in a footnote. An excellent book
widely divergent from the opinions expressed in the text is W. Morgan’s
_Religion and Theology of St. Paul_.
[287] Paul’s Greek is very good. He is affected by the philosophical
jargon of the Hellenistic schools and by that of Stoicism. But his
mastery of sublime language is amazing.--G. M.
[288] The spirit of Jesus, the animating spirit of Christianity, which
breathes through the gospels, was flatly opposed both to private
property and slavery, but the attitude of the Christians was never so
definite. Generally they ameliorated rather than abolished.--H. G. W.
Patristic theory justified slavery as a result of the Fall. See Carlyle,
_Medieval Political Theory in the West_.--E. B.
[289] Serapis was a synthesis of Osiris and Apis.
[290] See Legge, _Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity_, chap. xii.
See also Cumont’s _Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism_ for a very
clear account of the gradual development of Roman Paganism into a
religion very similar to Christianity _pari passu_ with the development
of Christianity.
[291] Cp. Father Hugh Benson’s account of the procession of the Host in
his book _Lourdes_.
[292] In any prayer book of the Episcopalian Church. The Athanasian
Creed embodies the view of Athanasius, but probably was not composed by
him.
[293] Gibbon, _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, chap. xvi.
[294] Here, from another point of view, are some remarks upon the
acceptance of Christianity by the empire. Let us remember that the
Church, an object so familiar to us, was to the decent Roman a very
strange thing. It was a vast society for mutual help, quite outside the
state and the recognized corporations; it was secret (hence the frequent
inquisitions and the praise given by Church historians to those who
“confessed Christ”); it drew its main strength from a class “not well
thought of by the police, the proletariat of the big manufacturing towns
of Syria and the Levant, like Antioch.” Alternately proscribed and
connived at, much subjected to pogroms, it gradually increased in
strength. Diocletian summoned his two associated Cæsars to a conference
on the subject, and they decided to crush the society by a drastic
persecution. They persecuted and failed, and Diocletian resigned.
Constantine the Great, the next claimant to the empire, made terms with
the society and succeeded. He established it as official, and overcame
its hatred of Rome by showering wealth and power on it. Eventually, when
in fear of death, he got baptized. All modern analogies are fallacious,
but if you imagine a blend of pacifist international socialists with
some mystical Indian sect, drawing its supporters mainly from an
oppressed and ill-liked foreign proletariat, such as the “hunkey”
population of some big American towns, full of the noblest moral
professions but at the same time alien, or even hostile, to the whole
established order of society, I think you will get the sort of
impression that the Christian society made on a Roman. The conception of
the blameless and saintly Early Christian is, I think, hugely romance.
Of course, like most religious reformers, they were in the main seekers
after righteousness and above the average of their contemporaries. Also
the Christian writers are apt to have more life and vision than their
conventional or reactionary Pagan contemporaries. But consider the
appalling accusations made by all the Christian sects against each
other, and the furious denunciation of the turbulent Christian monastics
by Augustine. Also consider what a spirit lies behind the Book of
Revelation! Read especially Chapters 17-19, a series of elaborate and
horrific curses upon Rome (including repeated threats of its destruction
by fire, which the Christians were believed to have attempted), or the
end of Chapter 14 where the ministers of the Son of Man tread the
winepress of the world till the blood comes “even to the bridles of the
horses.” If we found such a book now circulating in India, with England
taking the place of Rome, I fear there would be some shooting and
hanging. The fact that the Christians actually prayed for the
destruction of the whole world by fire seemed to the average
non-Christian evidence of almost maniacal wickedness.
I do not of course write to blame the Revelationist; such visions of
hatred are the natural outcome of persecution and great suffering. I am
merely trying to make intelligible the dislike and even dread of the
Christians which seems to have been commonly felt. (See also Seek,
_Untergang der Antiken Welt_, vol. 3, esp. the notes.)--G.M.
[295] q.v., _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, chap. xiv.
[296] On the rise of dogma or tradition in the Church, especially at
Rome, see Davis, _Mediæval Europe_ (Home University Library).--E. B.
[297] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, art. “Church History,” p. 336.
[298] E. B. (quoted from Tröltsch).
[299] See Haverfield. _The Romanization of Roman Britain_.--E. B.
[300] No literature! I demur entirely. Apuleius, Ammianus, St.
Augustine, the Vulgate, Claudian, Sidonius Apollinaris, Ausonius--I
mention but a few names--are not these literature?--E. B.
I forgot the _Golden Ass_ and St. Augustine as coming into the Imperial
period, but do these two names save the situation? E. B. ekes out with
one second-rate historian, a translation, three court poets. Yet we are
dealing here with the literature of a “world” empire.--H. G. W.
[301] A very interesting and suggestive book bearing on this question of
disease in relation to political history is _Malaria: a Neglected Factor
in the History of Greece and Rome_, by W. H. S. Jones.
[302] Baring Gould’s _Lives of the Saints_.
[303] On Benedictinism, see Dom. Berlière’s _L’Ordre Monastique_.--E. B.
[304] See Holmes’ _Justinian and Theodora_.--E. B.
[305] Great importance is attached to this task by historians, including
one of the editors of this history. We are told that the essential
contribution of Rome to the inheritance of mankind is the idea of
society founded on law, and that this exploit of Justinian was the crown
of the gift. The writer is ill-equipped to estimate the peculiar value
of Roman legalism to mankind. Existing law seems to him to be based upon
a confused foundation of conventions, arbitrary assumptions, and working
fictions about human relationship, and to be a very impracticable and
antiquated system indeed; he is persuaded that a time will come when the
whole theory and practice of law will be recast in the light of a
well-developed science of social psychology in accordance with a
scientific conception of human society as one developing organization
and in definite relationship to a system of moral and intellectual
education. He contemplates the law and lawyers of to-day with a
temperamental lack of appreciation. This may have made him negligent of
Justinian and unjust to Rome as a whole.
[306] _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, chap. xxiii.
[307] Turanians from Turkestan or Avars from the Caucasus.
[308] There is a good account of Mithraism in C. Bigg’s _The Church’s
Task in the Roman Empire_.--E. B.
[309] Julian was not so much a Mithraist as a syncretist. See Alice
Gardner, _Julian the Apostate_.--E. B.
[310] The Ephthalites on the Oxus produced a coinage in silver and
copper consisting of three denominations: heavy silver, light silver,
and copper. Thirteen specimens are known to survive, the light silver
denomination being represented by two specimens in the British Museum
and one at Petrograd, until I was fortunate enough to add two to their
number by a _trouvaille_ in Oxford Street.--P. G.
Our illustration shows one of these two coins. It may have been struck
in India in some state under Ephthalite dominion. Its interest for us
lies in the figure it gives of a Hun horseman. He seems to wear a
feather head-dress, reminding one of a Red Indian or a Moscow hotel
porter, and his leg gear suggests an American cow-boy. Note his great
quiver of arrows.--H. G. W.
[311] I am greatly indebted to Mr. S. N. Fu and to Mr. Duyvendak for
much information and criticism upon the matter of this and the next
section. They have both been rewritten since the appearance of the
_Outline_ in parts.
[312] There were girl slaves who did domestic work and women who were
bought and sold.--J.J.L.D.
[313] It is doubtful if the Chinese knew of the mariner’s compass.
Hirth, _Ancient History of China_, p. 126 sqq. comes to the conclusion,
after a careful examination of all data, that, although it is probable
something like the compass was known in high antiquity, the knowledge of
it was lost for a long time afterwards, until, in the Middle Ages, it
reappears as an instrument in the hands of geomancers (people who
selected favourable sites for graves, etc). The earliest unmistakable
mention of its use as a guide to mariners occurs in a work of the 12th
century and refers to its use on foreign ships trading between China and
Sumatra. Hirth is rather inclined to assume that Arab travellers may
have seen it in the hands of Chinese geomancers and applied its use to
navigation, so that it was afterwards brought back by them to China as
the “mariner’s compass.”--J. J. L. D.
[314] Helmolt.
[315] The reason for the stationariness of China goes, we think, deeper
than a script. China has formed a social-economic system which (1)
cannot be transplanted, and (2) cannot be changed without tremendous
effort. She lives by agriculture--rice-growing. (There is some tea among
the foot hills, but it has to grow _with_ rice to support the
population.) Towns exist--on the edge of the rice-fields, for their
needs. The town is dependent on the country, not, as elsewhere, country
on town. There are small properties; all the hands are wanted, and can
be absorbed, in old ancestral agricultural jobs. A state of small
peasants, tilling, tilling, tilling, has no source of initiative towards
change. If coal is to be mined in the future, and China industrialized,
then a society that has not fundamentally changed for thousands of years
may be changed. China is like an Egypt or Sumeria, so big that the
nomads--those terrible agents of change--beat on its mass in vain. What
the nomads have not done, modern industrialism may do.--J. L. M. and E.
B.
Both Mr. Chen and Mr. Fu lay considerable stress upon the institution of
the patriarchal Chinese family clan, which retains its sons at home,
marrying them at an early age before they achieve economic independence,
as a retarding influence upon Chinese progress. Mr. Chen and Mr.
Duyvendak are also inclined to lay stress upon the paralyzing effect of
the classical examinations upon the Chinese mind. These examinations
have subdued or rejected all innovating intelligences. Mr. Duyvendak
also points out that J. L. M. and E. B. have overlooked the fact that
rice is grown only in South China.
L. C. B. disagrees with J. L. M. and E. B. in his analysis of the
Chinese problem. His sympathies are with the south; with the philosophy
of Lao Tse. He writes as follows:--
“In order to answer the question--why China achieved so much under the
T’ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties, and thereafter failed to achieve more,
it is necessary to consider what were the principal factors of culture
and progress under these dynasties, and how they came to be
extinguished.
“From the earliest times there have always been two widely differing
types of Chinese mind--the Northern or Confucian, and the Southern or
Taoist. As Mr. Okakura has pointed out, the Yangtse-Kiang and the
Hwang-Ho rivers are respectively, from the point of view of thought and
culture, the Mediterranean and the Baltic of China. Taoism was the
idealism of the south, Confucianism the practice of the north. Both
stood for adjustment; but the adjustment of Confucius was the adjustment
of the individual in his social and ceremonial relations to others,
while that of Lao Tse was the adjustment of the individual soul in its
relation to the Infinite. The history of China is bound up with the
struggle of those two forces, culminating in the practically complete
defeat of Taoism after centuries of ebb and flow. Chu Hsi, A.D.
1130-1200, was the later St. Paul of modern Confucianism. During the
T’ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties China was temporarily united, and free
play was allowed to the thought of both schools. Each played its part
and each reacted upon the other, to the great benefit of the Empire. Yet
both systems carried within them the seeds of decay. Taoism, divorced
from the affairs of everyday life and the education of the people, lost
itself in art, literature, and mythology. Confucianism added layer after
layer of hard shell about the inert organism of social life. The end was
finally reached in 1421 under the Mings with the transference of the
capital from Nanking to Peking, and the dominance of the Confucian party
who had brought it about. Only in the later Ming period does the great
solitary figure of Wang Yang Ming arise. His central doctrine that
thought and learning are of small value unless translated into action
had little immediate effect in China, but it fell upon Japanese soil,
quickened the drooping Samurai spirit, and reached maturity with the
Russo-Japanese war and the advance of modern Japan.
“The imprisonment of the Chinese mind in the ancient script is merely
one aspect of Confucianism in its bondage to the past. The statement of
J. L. M. and E. B. that China is a nation of peasants is
incomprehensible to me. There has always been a great urban
industrialism and a great commerce. ‘The Chinese,’ as Dyer Ball says,
‘are pre-eminently a trading race.... Nor has the trade of China been
simply a modern affair. From remote antiquity the Chinese have been true
to their commercial instincts, and have not only been the civilizers of
Eastern Asia, supplying them with their letters and literature’ [and
artistic products], ‘but they have also provided for their more material
wants, and received in exchange the commodities which they required from
the neighbouring nations.’ Trade with India was developed to a great
extent in the ninth century A.D.”
This interesting question is also discussed very ably and interestingly
in Hubbard’s _The Fate of Empires_.
In discussing §§ 7 and 8, Mr. S. N. Fu has pointed out that little or
nothing is said in this Outline of the period of confusion before
Shi-Hwang-ti. It was an age of political division indeed, but of very
great intellectual initiatives. Unhappily there exists as yet little or
no material in Europe available for the purposes of this history, upon
this equivalent to the Athenian period of mental vigour in Europe.
[316] See Watters’ _Travels of Yuan Chwang_ and Beal’s _Life of Hiuen
Tsiang_ (= Yuan Chwang).
[317] There is some little doubt about this identification. See Watters.
[318] The _British Encyclopædia_ article (Hsuan Tsang) is full and good
on his Indian travels.
[319] See Margoliouth’s _Mahommedanism_ and his _Life of Mahomet_.--E.
B.
[320] Should be spelt Mădina and Măkka.--H. H. J.
[321] Mark Sykes.
[322] Should be spelt and pronounced Hijra.--H. H. J.
[323] From the year of this flight (= Hegira) from Mecca through the
desert to Medina, the Moslem world dates its era. The Moslem year is a
year of twelve lunar months (354 days), and is therefore shorter than
the year of Western chronology by eleven days. A.H. (the Moslem
reckoning) gains a year on A.D. once in every 33 years (about). A.D.
1920 is A.H. 1338 until September 15, when A.H. 1339 begins. A.D. 20,526
and A.H. 20,526 will be partly coincident.
[324] Published by the _Islamic Review_.
[325] But Schurtz, in Helmolt’s _History of the World_, says that the
private life of the gallant Khalid was a scandal to the faithful. He
committed adultery, a serious offence in a world of polygamy.
[326] At Ctesiphon.
[327] Paraphrased from Schurtz in Helmolt’s _History of the World_.
[328] Mark Sykes.
[329] St. John’s Gospel, chap. i. 1.
[330] Thus Sykes. But Skrine and Ross say only that seventy members of
the Omayyad family were invited to a feast under promise of amnesty, and
then massacred by the attendants. Gibbon gives eighty victims, and tells
his story thus: “Four score of the Omayyads, who had yielded to the
faith or clemency of their foes, were invited to a banquet at Damascus.
The laws of hospitality were violated by a promiscuous massacre; the
board was spread over their fallen bodies; and the festivity of their
guests were enlivened by the music of their dying groans.” History is
not yet an exact science.
[331] Harun-ar-Rashid = Aaron the Just.--H. H. J.
[332] _The Caliph’s Last Heritage._
[333] _A General History of Europe._
[334] Alcohol as “spirits of wine” was known to Pliny (100 A.D.) The
studentof the history of science should consult Campbell Brown’s
_History of Chemistry_ and check these statements in the text.
[335] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Feudalism,” by Professor G. B.
Adams.
[336] The Franks differed from the Swabians and South Germans, and came
much nearer the Anglo-Saxons in that they spoke a “Low German” and not a
“High German” dialect. Their language resembled plattdeutsch and
Anglo-Saxon, and was the direct parent of Dutch and Flemish. In fact,
the Franks where they were not Latinized became Flemings and “Dutchmen”
of South Holland (North Holland is still Friesisch--_i.e._ Anglo-Saxon).
The “French” which the Latinized Franks and Burgundians spoke in the
seventh to the tenth centuries was remarkably like the Rumansch language
of Switzerland, judging from the vestiges that remain in old
documents.--H. H. J.
[337] _A General History of Europe_, Thatcher and Schwill.
[338] N. B.--Vik-ings, not Vi-kings. Vik = a fiord or inlet.
[339] _Vide_ Stubbs’ _History of Germany in the Middle Ages_, and
Bryce’s _Holy Roman Empire_.
[340] The Lateran was the earlier palace of the Popes in Rome. Later
they occupied the Vatican.
[341] Eginhard’s _Life of Karl the Great_. (Glaister.)
[342] The addition was discreetly opposed by Leo III. “In the
correspondence between them the Pope assumes the liberality of a
statesman and the prince descends to the prejudice and passions of a
priest.”--Gibbon, chap. lx.
[343] The Byzantine style in Gaul is, I fancy, much earlier than
Charlemagne, and goes back to the 4th century or earlier. See Rivoira’s
_History of Lombard Architecture_, or T. G. Jackson’s _History of Gothic
Architecture_.--E. B.
[344] See L. Brechier, _L’Eglise et l’Orient au Moyen Age_.
[345] Gibbon mentions a second Theodora, the sister of Marozia.
[346] This period is a tangled one. The authority is Gregorovius,
_History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages_ (an excellent general
book from A.D. 400 to 1527), vol. iii of the Eng. trans., p. 249 seq.
John X owed the tiara to his mistress, the elder Theodora, but he was
“the foremost statesman of his age” (Gregorovius, p. 259). He fell in
928 owing to Marozia. John XI became Pope in 931 (after two Popes had
intervened in the period 928-931); he was Marozia’s son, possibly by
Pope Sergius III. John XII did not come at once after John XI, who died
in 936; there were several Popes in between; and he became Pope in
955.--E. B.
[347] There were three dynasties of emperors in the early Middle Ages:
Saxon: Otto I (962) to Henry II, ending 1024.
Salian: Conrad II to Henry V, ending about 1125.
Hohenstaufen: Conrad III to Frederic II, ending in 1250.
The Hohenstaufens were Swabian in origin. Then came the Habsburgs with
Rudolph I in 1273, who lasted until 1918.
[348] These dates are from Gibbon. Beazley gives 865, 904-7, 935, 944,
971-2. (_History of Russia_, Clarendon Press.)
[349] “A Turkish people whose leaders had adopted Judaism,” says Harold
Williams.
[350] For the development of the papacy, see H. W. C. Davis, _Mediæval
Europe_.
[351] E. Barker, art. “Crusades,” _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[352] Technically only twice, the excommunication of 1245 was a renewal
by Innocent IV of that of 1239.--E. B.
[353] “The custody of the _True Cross_, which on Easter Sunday was
solemnly exposed to the people, was entrusted to the Bishop of
Jerusalem; and he alone might gratify the curious devotion of the
pilgrims, by the gift of small pieces, which they encased in gold or
gems, and carried away in triumph to their respective countries. But, as
this gainful branch of commerce must soon have been annihilated, it was
found convenient to suppose that the marvellous wood possessed a secret
power of vegetation, and that its substance, though continually
diminished, still remained entire and unimpaired.”--Gibbon.
[354] The Popes inhabited the palace of the Lateran until 1305, when a
French Pope set up the papal court at Avignon. When the Pope returned to
Rome in 1377 the Lateran was almost in ruins, and the palace of the
Vatican became the seat of the papal court. It was, among other
advantages, much nearer to the papal stronghold, the Castle of San
Angelo.
[355] He was crowned emperor in 1220 by Honorius III, the successor of
Innocent.
[356] Some authorities deny his authorship of this letter. See A. L.
Smith’s _Church and State in the Middle Ages_.
[357] Perhaps parchment, rather than leather. Such promises on parchment
were also used by the Carthaginians. Was Frederick’s money an
inheritance from an old tradition living on in Sicily since Carthaginian
times?--E. B.
[358] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, art. “Frederick II.”
[359] In relation to this section, see the chapter on the “Unity of the
Middle Ages” in F. S. Marvin’s _Unity of Western Civilization_.
[360] See Paul Sabatier’s _Vie de S. Francois d’Assise_ (English trans.
by Houghton).
[361] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, art. “Dominic.”
[362] J. H. Robinson.
[363] Sir Mark Sykes, _The Caliphs’ Last Heritage_.
[364] Sir Mark Sykes, _The Caliphs’ Last Heritage_.
[365] But see Pastor, _History of the Popes_, Vol. I.
[366] See Beazley, Forbes and Birkett’s _Russia_ for a fuller account of
the Cossacks and also see later chap. xxxvi, § 10.
[367] See Malleson’s _Akbar_, in the _Rulers of India_ series.
[368] “Mogul” is our crude rendering of the Arabic spelling Mughal,
which itself was a corruption of Mongol, the Arabic alphabet having no
symbol for _ng_.--H. H. J.
[369] Dr. Schmit in Helmolt’s _History of the World_.
[370] I do not think this is fair. See _Edinburgh Review_ for January,
1920, article on Calcutta University Commission.--E. B.
But popular education!--H. G. W.
[371] Renascence here means rebirth, and it is applied to the recovery
of the entire Western world. It is not to be confused with “the
Renaissance,” an educational, literary, and artistic revival that went
on in Italy and the Western world affected by Italy during the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Renaissance was only a part of
the Renascence of Europe. The Renaissance was a revival due to the
exhumation of classical art and learning; it was but one factor in the
very much larger and more complicated resurrection of European capacity
and vigour, with which we are dealing in this chapter.
[372] The early Frankish and other German kings were not elective. They
were hereditary; but as there was no primogeniture, there was either
partition among the sons, or a struggle to decide which son or relative
should succeed. In such a struggle the nobles might take part, and this
might mean some form of election. But heredity is the thing: _reges ex
nobilitate sumunt_, says Tacitus: the king must have the nobility of
being Woden-born, or he cannot be king. The genealogies of our early
Saxon kings all go back to Woden, and George V is Woden-born.--E. B.
[373] But the Jews were already holding their community together by
systematic education at least as early as the beginning of the Christian
era.
[374] The Greeks had this idea.--E. B.
[375] I do not think this is just. The Anglo-Saxons were not
anti-monastic. They were converted by Benedictine monks in 600; just
after 700 they sent out monks to convert Germany; about 960, under
Dunstan and Edgar, they experienced a monastic revival. The Normans
after 1066 introduced the Cluniac and Cistercian orders, and spread
monasticism, while the earlier Northmen, after 900, were quite
favourable to the Church in England.
Note that Gregory’s imposition of celibacy on the clergy was accepted,
and willingly accepted, by the contemporary lay world. William the
Conqueror, through Archbishop Lanfranc, enforced celibacy in
England.--E. B.
[376] Wycliffe believed in a real presence--but he held that it was
spiritual and not substantial. The host was two things--bread, and at
the same time a spiritual Christ. This is not the “memorial” view.--E.
B.
[377] Lützow’s _Bohemia_.
[378] Dr. C. O. Stallybrass says that this plague reached China thirty
or forty years after its first appearance in Europe. Ibn Batuta, the
Arab traveller, who was in China from 1342 to 1346, first met with it on
his return to Damascus. The Black Death is the human form of a disease
endemic among the jerboas and other small rodents in the districts round
the head of the Caspian Sea.
[379] The seeds of conflict which grew up into the Peasants’ Revolt of
1381 were sown upon ground which is strangely familiar to any writer in
1920. A European catastrophe had reduced production and consequently
increased the earnings of workers and traders. Rural wages had risen by
48 per cent in England, when an unwise executive endeavored to enforce
in the Ordinance and Statute of Labourers (1350-51) a return to the
pre-plague wages and prices of 1346, and aimed a blow in the Statute of
1378 against labour combinations. The villeins were driven to
desperation by the loss of their recent increase of comfort, and the
outbreak came, as Froissart saw it from the angle of the Court, “all
through the too great comfort of the commonalty.” Other ingredients
which entered into the outbreak were the resentment felt by the new
working class at the restrictions imposed on its right to combine, the
objection of the lower clergy to papal taxes, and a frank dislike of
foreigners and landlords. There was no touch of Wycliffe’s influence in
the rising. It was at its feeblest in Leicestershire, and it murdered
one of the only other Liberal churchmen in England.--P. G.
[380] See article “Typography” in the _Encyclo. Brit._
[381] Standard Italian dates from Dante (1300); standard English from
Chaucer and Wycliffe (1380); standard German from Luther (1520).--E. B.
[382] But Nonconformity was stamped out in Germany. See § 11 B of this
chapter.
[383] “If I were writing a history of democracy,” comments E. B., “I
should deal first with democracy in religion, which is Calvinism,
founded by a great Frenchman at Geneva, and then with democracy in
politics, which is the French Revolution, inaugurated by another great
Frenchman at Geneva, Rousseau. (The parallel of these two is
striking--both typical exponents of the French genius, in its ardent
logic and its apostolic fervour which gives in a burning lava to the
world the findings of its logic.) It is noticeable in England how
democracy in religion (Presbyterianism, which is simply Calvinism, plus
Independency or Congregationalism) leads straight under the Stuarts to
the English democratic ideas of the seventeenth century. I do not think
the democratic element in Protestantism is sufficiently appreciated in
the text. Even Luther, in the early days of 1520, could write _The
Freedom of a Christian Man_ and champion the priesthood of each believer
and his direct access to his Maker. Luther, it is true, changed by 1525,
and became a monarchist, the apostle of a state religion, under a godly
prince who was _summus episcopus_. Anglicanism was from the first a
monarchist religion, under a Henry VIII who was _supremum caput_. But if
Lutheranism became, and Anglicanism was from the first, a religion of
the State, Calvinism was always the religion of resistance to the
State--in Holland and in Scotland most especially. The Reformation thus
produced two opposite effects in politics; so far as it was Lutheran and
Anglican it was monarchist; so far as it was Calvinistic, it was
democratic. It is at first sight curious, but it is really quite
natural, that the Catholics of the counter-reformation should also have
been democratic. The Catholics could not admit the control of the
monarch in the sphere of religion any more than the Calvinist; and here,
as in other things (_e.g_. in the claim to possession of infallible
truth), the Catholic priest and the Calvinistic presbyter were agreed.
Filmer, an exponent of Anglican monarchism, expresses this well when he
says, in speaking of the doctrine of a social contract, that ‘Cardinal
Bellarmine and Calvin both look asquint this way.’ For the doctrine of a
social contract was the democratic doctrine put forward by Catholics and
Calvinists in opposition to the Lutheran and Anglican doctrine of divine
right.”
[384] Aristotle’s _Organon_, or logic, had always been in part known to
the West and was known as a whole after about 1130. In the thirteenth
century the rest of his writings became known, in two ways. One way was
that of direct translation from the Greek into Latin: it was in this way
that St. Thomas Aquinas knew the _Ethics_ and the _Politics_ (the latter
translated about 1260 by William of Moerbeke, Archbishop of Corinth in
the Latin Empire of Constantinople started under Baldwin of Flanders in
1204, and a Fleming himself). The other way was that of indirect
translation, that is to say, of translations of Arabic paraphrases of,
or commentaries on, the works of Aristotle, such as had been made by
Averroes and by Avicenna before him. It was Aristotle’s _Physics_ and (I
think) _Metaphysics_ that first became known in this way. In this latter
way the West received a version of Aristotle which, like Bottom the
Weaver, was strangely “translated.” Sometimes translations were made
direct from Arabic into Latin; sometimes they were made first into
Hebrew, and then new translations were made from Hebrew into Latin. As
the Arabic version of Aristotle was not always itself direct, but
sometimes made from Syriac versions of the Greek, confusion became
confounded. The Latin translations of the Arabic Aristotle sometimes
contained not translation, but _transliteration_ of Arabic words or
sentences; and Roger Bacon very naturally objected to their
unintelligibility. What is more, Aristotle’s views, as well as his
words, were transmogrified in the process. But the important thing is
that for Aristotle’s _Organon_, _Ethics_, and _Politics_ there were
direct translations from the Greek. (See Sandys’ _History of Classical
Scholarship_ and Renan’s _Averroes et l’Averroisme_.)--E. B.
[385] I do not agree with this paragraph. In the first sentence things
are alleged about Realism which are not justified. It was the philosophy
of the priests and most humane thinkers of the Middle Ages, of St.
Anselm and of John Wycliffe. Nor is it true that Realism was the
philosophy of the church. It was, in the early Middle Ages; but after
Occam (1330) Nominalism triumphed, and was the philosophy of the church
till the Reformation. Luther denounced Nominalism.--E. B.
[386] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article “Scholasticism.”
[387] _The Medieval Mind_, by Henry Osborn Taylor.
[388] This gives a wrong impression about Nominalism, that it was banned
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The contrary is the case. The
attempt of 1339 came to nothing; that of 1473 was belated and
unsuccessful. Except Wycliffe, there is no considerable thinker of these
centuries, so far as I know, who is not Nominalist. The triumph of
Nominalism was no unmixed benefit. Its insistence on study of the
individual was indeed favourable to natural science; and Harnack says
that it led to good work in psychology. But its nescience about
Universals led to obscurantism in theology. Wycliffe as a Realist could
hold that God acted _secundum rationes exemplares_, by certain and known
universal rules; the Nominalists reduced God to inscrutable omnipotence.
They went on to add that He could therefore only be known at all by the
miraculous intervention of the mass through the priesthood. Their
scepticism about Universals thus overleapt itself, and fell on the other
side, into obscurantist ecclesiasticism.--E. B.
[389] _Cp._ chap. ii, § 1, towards the end.
[390] See Gregory’s _Discovery_, chap. vi.
[391] Not from 1340-1360, under Edward III, but later under Henry V,
1413-1422.--E. B.
Edward had Flemish and Bavarian allies.--H. G. W.
[392] From Dr. Tille in Helmolt’s _History of the World_.
[393] Charles Dickens in his _American Notes_ mentions swine in
Broadway, New York, in the middle nineteenth century.
[394] In these maritime adventures in the eastern Atlantic and the west
African coast the Portuguese were preceded in the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries by Normans, Catalonians, and
Genoese. See Raymond Beazley, _History of Exploration in the Middle
Ages_.--H. H. J.
[395] See Guillemard’s _Ferdinand Magellan_.
[396] For an interesting account of these American civilizations, see L.
Spence, _The Civilization of Ancient Mexico and Myths of Mexico and
Peru_.
[397] See Prescott’s _History of the Conquest of Mexico_ and his
_History of the Conquest of Peru_.
[398] See Cunninghame Graham’s _A Vanished Arcadia_.
[399] Machiavelli examines the causes of Cæsar’s collapse, but he holds
that it was due to _fortuna_, against which Cæsar’s _virtú_ could not
prevail.--E. B.
[400] E. B. writes as follows: “I think better of Machiavelli than you
do, and especially on two points. (1) He raises a real issue--whether,
when a crisis besets the State, the ruler is not bound to abandon the
rules of private morality, if by doing so he can preserve the State. If
he abandons those rules, he does _wrong_--and Machiavelli admits
that--but, at the same time, as the agent and organ of the State, he
does _right_ by preserving it, so far, at any rate, as it is right that
it should be preserved. This is a real issue, which one cannot simply
dismiss. _E.g._, all war is wrong, by the rules of private morality,
because it is killing; but it may have a qualified and conditioned
rightness if it is necessary to preserve the State, and if the State, as
a scheme of good life, ought to be preserved. (2) Machiavelli did
believe in the people. He only exalts the _new_ prince, who arises to
restore order and security in a troubled State. In normal times he
believes that the people is a good judge of men: that ‘better than many
fortresses is not to be hated by the people’; that the trite proverb,
‘He who founds himself on the people founds himself on mud,’ is untrue,
except as applied to demagogues.”
[401] But he had a better reason for doing this in the fact that there
was no heir to the throne. The Wars of the Roses, a bitter dynastic war,
were still very vivid in the minds of English people.--F. H. H.
[402] Prescott’s Appendix to Robertson’s _History of Charles V._
[403] Prescott.
[404] It was private _conscience_, rather than private property, that
quarrelled with and limited princes. The Puritan Revolution in England
(1640-1660) was a puritan revolution--it sprang from the religious
motive first and foremost. The economic motive was secondary. The
“economic interpretation of history” is always tempting, but men’s souls
have always mattered more than their pockets. Englishmen fought Charles
I for the sake of free consciences rather than for the sake of free
pockets. This is a large issue, on which much could be written; but I
feel sure that religion came first in our Civil War.--E. B.
I do not agree. Loath as I am to differ from E. B., I can find no
evidence of any religious issue as important as the issue of taxation
either in the English Civil War or the American War of Independence.--H.
G. W.
I did not mention the Americans. I will surrender them to H. G. W.--E.
B.
[405] Englishmen did try to control the foreign policy of James I,
because it involved questions of religion, and because their primary
concern was religious. They wanted foreign policy to be directed to the
militant defence of Protestantism. James I, a good internationalist (in
his way), and at any rate a lover of peace, wanted to secure European
peace by diplomacy--and failed to do so. His parliaments, and all
seventeenth-century parliaments, were vitally interested in foreign
policy.--E. B.
[406] A very good general history of Great Britain, too little known as
yet, is A. D. Innes’ _History of the British Nation_ (1912).
[407] This is not the same Simon de Montfort as the leader of the
crusades against the Albigenses, but his son.
[408] But Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hogarth, Gray, Gibbon, for instance!--G.
M. And the golden age of the great cabinet-makers!--P. G.
Exactly! Culture taking refuge in the portraits, libraries, and
households of a few rich people. No national culture in the court, nor
among the commonalty; a steady decay.--H. G. W.
[409] _Rise of the Dutch Republic._
[410] See his fragment of autobiography (_The Autobiography of Edward
Gibbon_, edited by John Murray).
[411] Frederick the Great of Prussia.
[412] Catherine the Great of Russia.
[413] Louis XVI of France and Charles III of Spain.
[414] Gibbon forgets here that cannon and the fundamentals of modern
military method came to Europe with the Mongols.
[415] See for the expansion of the topics of this section, Hammond’s
_Town Labourer_, _Village Labourer_, and _Skilled Labourer_. These three
books are too little known to the general reader. They are not
dry-as-dust compilations of statistics, but full of interesting matter
and delightfully well written.
[416] “Our present public school system is candidly based on training a
dominant master class. But the uprising of the workers and modern
conditions are rapidly making the _dominant method_ unworkable.... The
change in the aim of schools will transform all the organizations and
methods of schools, and my belief is that this change will make the new
era.”--F. W. Sanderson, Head Master of Oundle, in an address at Leeds,
February 16, 1920.
[417] The student who looks up the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, article
“Goldsmith,” instead of going to the poem itself, will find some hostile
comments thereon which are themselves now literature and history; they
were written by Lord Macaulay (1800-59).
[418] Channing’s excellent new _History of the United States_ to vol.
iv. has been our handbook here.
[419] You are, I think, unjust to Great Britain and her “great power
game.” She was not playing that game--or, so far as she was, she was
acting against “France” to liberate the colonies from the French menace
in the hinterland which alarmed them. Once liberated, they broke loose,
somewhat selfishly, refusing to pay the piper, though they had enjoyed,
and done much to call, the tune. Great Britain was indeed to blame, not
on the “great power” ground, but on the “sovereignty” ground, which made
her stickle for the “sovereignty” of the British parliament over
colonial legislature. It wasn’t diplomatists, it was lawyers in both
countries, who precipitated the struggle of 1776.--E. B.
But see §§ 2 and 3.--H. G. W.
[420] See Channing’s _History of the United States_, vol. ii.
[421] _John Smith’s Travels._
[422] There is some doubt about the name of Carolina. Channing, in his
short history, says it was named in honour of Charles II. Bassett says
it was named originally Carolana, in honour of Charles I, in 1629, and
kept the name, under the new form of Carolina in honour of Charles II.
Fiske, _Old Virginia and Her Neighbors_, vol. i. p. 265, speaks of
Carolina, in 1629, as named “either in honour of Charles I or because
the name had been given by Huguenots in 1562 in honour of Charles IX of
France.” Another authority speaks of the name as used before, and now no
doubt retained in honour of the English king; but, according to him, the
name had not been used for the country (called, by the French, Florida),
but for a fort in it, the arx Carolana. He adds that in 1629 the name
Carolana is used, but Carolina appears afterwards, and becomes normal
after 1662.--E. B.
[423] From the Spanish word Sabaña = “meadow.”--H. H. J.
[424] See for the fundamental differences of north and south, W. Wilson,
_The State_, the historical sections at the beginning of the chapter on
the United States Government.--E. B.
[425] An admirable account of negro slavery is to be found in Sir H. H.
Johnston’s _The Negro in the New World_.
[426] I disbelieve in this “commercial selfishness” emphasized in the
text. Modern American historians, such as Beer, themselves rebut the
charge. On the whole, English commercial policy was fair. (1) If the
colonists could only export certain “enumerated” commodities to England,
the English market was the best, and they were given privileges there;
while non-enumerated commodities could be exported anywhere, and even
“enumerated” articles were in practice smuggled everywhere. (2) If the
colonists had to import from England, it was their best market, and they
got “drawbacks” on dutiable goods imported into England from the
Continent when they took them out of England; while again in practice
they freely smuggled goods from any country to America. (3) The English
navigation laws, in the long run, encouraged American shipbuilding; and
if some colonial manufactures were stopped in order that they might not
compete with English manufactures, the amount of such restriction was
slight. On all this, see Sir William Ashley, _Surveys Historic and
Economic_, pp. 300 _seqq._--E. B.
[427] See Tudor’s _Life of James Otis_.
[428] I disagree entirely with this. George, with the bulk of Parliament
behind him, was out to insist on the sovereignty of the British
Parliament (not of himself) over the colonists. Nor was it the Whig
noblemen who opposed him, but Burke (conservatively inclined, and
therefore up in arms for the traditional rights of the colonial
legislatures) and Chatham (liberally inclined, and therefore up in arms
for the principle of “no representation, no taxation”).--E. B.
[429] This again in my view is wrong. The system proposed, I read in an
American writer, meant cheaper tea in the colonies. The objection taken
by the colonists was legal.--E. B.
[430] I think this gives an erroneous impression that there was no real
chance of reconciliation in 1776. There was. And indeed the whole
separation was far from inevitable. If the British had (1) recognized
the autonomy in each colony of its legislature, and (2) granted to the
colonies cabinet government in place of government by governors sent
from England, there would have been no schism. By 1839, the time of Lord
Durham’s report, the British had learned to make the recognition and the
grant; and with greater wisdom they could have made both in 1776. A
great statesman in 1776 could have stopped the separation, and made
history different. I am inclined to say that nothing is inevitable in
history--except that when you don’t have good men, you don’t get good
results. And that was the position under George III and Lord North.--E.
B.
[431] The Tripoli Treaty, see Channing, vol. iii. chap. xviii.
[432] Wells, _The Future in America_.
[433] In 1776 Lord Dartmouth wrote that the colonists could not be
allowed “to check or discourage a traffic so beneficent to the nation.”
[434] A very readable and remarkably well-illustrated book for the
general reader upon the French Revolution is Wheeler’s _French
Revolution_. Carlyle’s _French Revolution_ has some splendid passages,
but it is often unjust and evil-spirited. Madelin’s _French Revolution_
is a good recent book.
[435] But see Rocquain’s _L’Esprit révolutionnaire avant la Révolution_.
He traces the growth of a revolutionary spirit in the 18th century, and
points to many predictions of a debacle in 18th-century French
literature.--E. B.
[436] I disagree utterly and entirely with this view of Rousseau, which
is quite unfair to the man who wrote _Du Contrat Social_. (1) He did
_not_ believe in the “state of nature”; he believed in the State, which
had lifted man from being a brute that followed its nose into a
reasoning being and a man. (2) He did not write to excuse breakers of
the covenant. On the contrary, he wrote to preach the sovereignty of the
general will, and he believed in the entire control of the individual by
that will. Rousseau has been much misrepresented, and the text follows
the misrepresentations. See Vaughan, _The Political Writings of
Rousseau_, introduction to _Du Contrat Social_.--E. B.
[437] Article “France,” _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[438] There is a very picturesque account of the storming of the
Bastille in Carlyle’s _French Revolution_, book v, chap. vi.
[439] Carlyle is at his best on this flight, _French Revolution_, book
iv, chaps. iv and v.
[440] Wiriath.
[441] The Declaration of Pillnitz was a diplomatic _démarche_ that
failed. Great Britain had definitely refused to intervene in favour of
the French monarchy, and Austrian statesmanship proposed to save the
collective face of European monarchy by a sounding announcement of
sympathy with the French Bourbons, followed by a proviso that unanimity
should be secured before intervention was attempted. French opinion (and
most historians) concentrated on the announcement and overlooked the
proviso.--P.G.
[442] The sour grapes of Champagne spread dysentery in the Prussian
army.--P.G.
[443] The intelligence of the French army of the Revolution was largely
due to a period of intelligent military thinking and writing which set
in among French soldiers after the defeats of the army of Louis XV in
the Seven Years War. Napoleon himself was full of traces of this
inspiration.--P. G.
[444] I cannot agree that England was ever, at any moment, “a
prospective ally” of France. There was a deep divergence of interests;
and it is impossible to think of Pitt and the Whig nobles being in any
way the allies of the France of 1793.--E. B.
[445] In his article, “French Revolutionary Wars,” in the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_.
[446] In the thirteen months before June, 1794, there were 1220
executions; in the following seven weeks there were 1376.--P. G.
[447] Channing, vol. iii. chap. xviii.
[448] Two very useful books have been Holland Rose’s _Personality of
Napoleon_ and his _Life of Napoleon I_. A compact and convenient
biography, with good battle maps, is R. M. Johnston’s _Napoleon_. Thomas
Hardy’s great epic-drama, _The Dynasts_, is a magnificent picture of
Napoleon’s career, historically very exact. It is one of the great stars
of English literature, too little known as yet to the general public.
[449] See Mahan’s _Life of Nelson_.
[450] Gourgaud quoted by Holland Rose.
[451] The resumption of war was more directly due to the publication in
France of the Sebastiani Report, a full account by the staff officer of
the ports and strong places of Egypt and Syria. The alarm occasioned by
this document hardened the determination of the British government to
retain a garrison at Malta in spite of the obligation to evacuate it
imposed by the Peace of Amiens.--P. G.
[452] All this is admirably told in Tolstoy’s wonderful _War and Peace_.
[453] The best textbook to follow in expanding this chapter is W. A.
Phillips’ _Confederation of Europe_.
[454] See J. W. Headlam’s _Life of Bismarck_.
[455] W. A. Phillips’ _Confederation of Europe_ is the leading textbook
here. H. E. Egerton’s _British Foreign Policy in the Nineteenth Century_
and L. S. Woolf’s _International Government_ are very illuminating. See
also Thatcher and Schwill’s convenient _General History of Europe_ and
Philip Guedalla’s _Partition of Europe; 1715-1815_.
[456] The Dukes of Savoy (ancestors of the present Italian kings) had
been astride the Alps, ruling in France and Italy, for centuries; and
their strategic position had long given them a European importance. The
Dukes of Savoy had been kings since 1713, first as Kings of Sicily,
1713-20, and then (when Sicily was exchanged for Sardinia in 1720) as
Kings of Sardinia.--E. B.
[457] An excellent book on the substance of this chapter is F. S.
Marvin’s _Century of Hope_. Another is R. A. Gregory’s _Discovery_. See
also Seignobos’ _Political History of Contemporary Europe_.
[458] But note Boyle and Sir Wm. Hamilton as conspicuous scientific men
who were Irishmen.
[459] It is worth noting that nearly all the great inventors in England
during the eighteenth century were working men, that inventions
proceeded from the workshop, and not from the laboratory. It is also
worth noting that only two of these inventors accumulated fortunes and
founded families.--E. B.
[460] Here America led the old world.
[461] In Northumberland and Durham in the early days of coal mining they
were so cheaply esteemed that it was unusual to hold inquests on the
bodies of men killed in mine disasters.
[462] It is sometimes argued against Marx that the proportion of people
who have savings invested has increased in many modern communities.
These savings are technically “capital” and their owners “capitalists”
to that extent, and this is supposed to contradict the statement of Marx
that property concentrates into few and fewer hands. Marx used many of
his terms carelessly and chose them ill, and his ideas were better than
his words. When he wrote property he meant “property so far as it is
power.” The small investor has remarkably little power over his invested
capital.
[463] See J. H. Noyes, _History of American Socialisms_, and Eastlake,
_The Oneida Community_.
[464] See his _A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principles of the
Formation of the Human Character_.
[465] See F. Podmore, _Life of Robert Owen_, or his own _Life of Robert
Owen, Written by Himself_.
[466] Increases or diminutions of the passive shareholding class would
not affect this concentration very materially. A shareholder has very
little power over his property.
[467] I find in a book of essays and addresses by Professor Soddy an
interesting and compact statement of certain resemblances in spirit
between scientific research and modern socialism. I venture to quote a
passage here because of its great significance at the present time.
“The immense acquisition,” he says, “to the wealth and resources of
mankind which has been the result of the past century of science, should
have been the golden opportunity of statesmen and humanitarians and the
raw material out of which the sum total of human happiness could have
been augmented. Instead, it has but revealed a growing incapacity and
failure on the part of the altruist to appreciate the nature and power
of the new weapon that science has placed in his hands, and an
ever-increasing rapacity and far-sightedness on the part of the egotist
to secure it for his own ends.
“For many a decade now, owing primarily and indisputably to the
intellectual achievements of a comparative handful of men of communistic
and cloisteral habit of thought, a steady shower of material benefits
has been raining down upon humanity, and for these benefits men have
fought in the traditional manner of the struggle when the fickle
sunlight was the sole hazardous income of the world. The strong have fed
and grown fat upon a larger and ever larger share of the manna. Initial
slight differences of strength and sagacity have become so emphasized by
the virile stream that the more successful are becoming monstrously so,
and the unsuccessful less and less able to secure a full meal than
before the shower began.
“Already it savours of indelicacy and tactlessness to recall that the
exploiters of all this wealth are not its creators; that the spirit of
acquisitiveness which has ensured success to them, rather than to their
immediate neighbours, is the antithesis of the spirit by which the
wealth was won.
“Amid all the sneers at the impracticability and visionary character of
communist schemes, let it not be forgotten that science is a communism,
neither theoretical nor on paper, but actual and in practice. The
results of those who labour in the fields of knowledge for its own sake
are published freely and pooled in the general stock for the benefit of
all. Common ownership of all its acquisitions is the breath of its life.
Secrecy or individualism of any kind would destroy its fertility.”
So far Professor Soddy, but let the writer add that there is this point
about the scientific world not to be overlooked. Every worker in the
latter is a specially educated man, and he is free to leave the
communism of science if he thinks fit. This is very different from a
communism imposed upon an unprepared mass of people containing large
recalcitrant minorities or majorities. A communism sustained by a
community of will based on education--an extension, that is, of the
communism of scientific research to human affairs generally--is the
ideal underlying the political ideas of most intelligent modern men.
[468] We may note a very interesting experiment in wages payment here
that has been made by the American Oneida silver company. A committee on
which the workers are strongly represented makes a summary week by week
of the current prices of staple commodities and common necessities. Week
by week it is noted that prices are so much per cent, above the normal
figure of January, 1914 (or some such date), which is taken as the
standard. On pay-day every worker receives his wages _plus_ a percentage
representing the higher prices, so that though the actual sums paid vary
week by week, the purchasing power of the wages paid remains practically
constant. Here, perhaps, we have a germ of a system that may grow to
considerable importance. The burthen of rising prices is shifted to the
employer, who can take them into account in fixing his prices.
[469] For a closely parallel view of religion to that given here, see
that admirable book, _Outspoken Essays_, by Dean Inge, Essays VIII and
IX on _St. Paul_ and on _Institutionalism and Mysticism_.
[470] _Town Topics_, November 26th, 1919.
[471] Kropotkin’s _Mutual Aid_ is worth noting here as one of the
earliest correctives to these popular misconceptions of Darwinism.--G.
M.
[472] Morley’s _Life of Gladstone_.
[473] R. A. Gregory’s _Discovery_.
[474] The great Oxford school of _Literæ Humaniores_, which means a
serious study of Ancient Philosophy and Ancient History, was already
thirty years old in Gladstone’s time, and was a really serious training
in solid philosophy and solid history. It was all the more serious, as
every candidate for Honours had to take _two_ schools and to offer
Mathematics as well as _Literæ Humaniores_. Both Peel (about 1810) and
Gladstone (about 1830) took these two schools, and both gained Firsts in
both. (This, by the way, is the only true and genuine “double first.”)
Men with such a training were genuinely and nobly trained for
statesmanship.--E. B.
With no knowledge of ethnology, no vision of history as a whole,
misconceiving the record of geology, ignorant of the elementary ideas of
biological science, of modern political, social, and economic science
and modern thought and literature!--H. G. W.
[475] The old classical training had great faults, but not quite those
which are here imputed to it. It was the education of an aristocratic
leisured class who had not to earn their living. Hence it was (1)
entirely idealist and non-utilitarian. It aimed not at fitting people
for a paid profession, but at culture and inner development. (2) It
depended enormously on _leisure_. The work done in compulsory work-hours
was small in range, but severe, almost entirely classics and
mathematics. These were intended as a training of the mind and a test of
ability, but were not the real field of ambition. That lay in the large
amount of time allotted to _free study_. Peel, Gladstone, Macaulay,
Hallam, etc., show what was expected of the best men. Literature, modern
history, French and Italian, theology and philosophy, and even a good
deal of generalised science, were things you read in your free time.
Think what Macaulay’s “schoolboy” was supposed to know, and reflect that
practically none of it was taught in school hours! Some of the best
papers on English literature that I ever read were done by a certain
sixth form which had, I was told, no time at all given to the subject in
the time-table. As the Head Master told me, “A good man was rather
laughed at if he did not know Shakespeare and Milton.”
This conception of a small hard nucleus of compulsory work, combined
with a wide margin of leisure, was very good for the best men, who used
their free time in the right way, but left the weak men thoroughly
uneducated. The reaction against it came with long hours, wide
curriculum, and compulsory games, leaving no leisure either for study or
for mischief.
The modern idea that school should teach _all_ that a boy ought to know,
is educationally disastrous; but it is the natural result of boys coming
from uneducated homes. The home, not the school, is the real key to the
wider and higher side of education. But this raises large questions.--G.
M.
G. M., I submit, has not grasped the modern idea in education. The
modern idea of a public school as exemplified in such a case as Oundle
does not fill up the time of the boy with prescribed work and games; it
leaves large spaces for self-development; but also it provides museums,
a good collection of pictures, libraries, and an abundance of good music
in addition to the mere “playing fields” of the old type of public
school. And it inquires into the use a boy is making of his free
energies. The phase of “cram” is over, but the new schools do provide
good pasture, show the way thither, and “vet” a boy who displays no
appetite. G. M. ignores entirely the clear statement in the text that
Gladstone was a grossly _ignorant_ man, and the instances given of the
feebleness and worthlessness of the “generalized science” these boys of
the old persuasion picked up. So far from the old classical training
being the education of an aristocratic class, it was, as G. M. admits
within a line or so, the education of a few individuals, the rest of the
class remaining barbarians. It may have aimed at culture and inner
development, but it missed its aim. Consequently, the bright lads of the
Gladstone-Macaulay-Peel type who did not pick up a few enlightened ideas
by accident or at home, were quite unable to carry their own class with
them; it remained politically boorish. They had to appeal for
understanding to classes whose education had been free from “classical”
pretentiousness....
These notes submitted to E. B. at this stage provoked him to a warm
protest. His sympathies were “heart and soul with G. M.,” and Mr.
Gladstone, he declared with emphasis, was not an ignorant man. A little
more must be said on this question. If the reader realize, what we have
been trying to make clear in this history, that human progress is
largely mental progress, a clearing and an enlargement of ideas, then he
will understand why it is that the compiler of this _Outline_ has given
so much space here to these controversial notes upon the education of
Mr. Gladstone. For the education of Mr. Gladstone was typical of that
ruling-class education which has dominated British and European affairs,
so far as they have been dominated by ideas, up to the present time. It
is most significant of the differences and difficulties of our age that
the statement, which seemed to the writer a simple statement of an
obvious fact, that Mr. Gladstone was a profoundly ignorant man, should
have so scandalized two of the editors of this work. No doubt Mr.
Gladstone knew much and knew many things, and it is just because he did
so and was in many respects the fine flower of the education of his
period, that his ignorance is so interesting to us. Many Chinese
mandarins knew much and many things--beautifully. And were ignorant men.
Mr. Gladstone’s was not the ignorance of deficiency, but the ignorance
of excess, a copious ignorance; it was not a failure to know this or
that particular fact, an ignorance excusable enough, but a profound and
sought-after and established ignorance of reality, so that he did not
grasp the bearing of definite facts presented to him or of far-reaching
ideas put before him, upon the great issues with which he was concerned.
He lived, as it were, in a luminous and blinding cloud. That cloud,
which I call his ignorance, my two editors call his wonderful and
abounding culture. It was a culture that wrapped about and adorned the
great goddess Reality. But indeed he is not to be adorned but stripped.
She ceases to be herself or to bless her votary unless she is faced
stark and faced fearlessly.--H. G. W.
[476] The impression made on me, an old Gladstonian, by Gladstone’s
politics, was mainly twofold. (1) A strong assertion that politics were
(as Aristotle said) a development of ethics, and concerned with
discovering and doing what is Right, not what is convenient or
profitable to any particular class or nation. (2) A strong subconscious
suggestion that the highest education and culture and knowledge were
useful for politics, which was in fact a very high practical art,
demanding the highest qualities. Hence largely the horror we had of
Dizzy. (3) A general sanguine conviction that Honesty was the best
policy; that what was right would also prove to be ultimately the most
profitable, so that there was no real conflict.
I do not say that Mr. G. acted consistently up to these principles, or
that they could be acted up to; but they formed the milk of the word for
most of us.--G. M.
I cannot agree that Gladstone was a prophet of nationalism. He was a
prophet of Liberalism, and, as such, a hater of oppression. He protested
against Bourbon oppression in Naples or Turkish oppression in Bulgaria
or Armenia; but to protest against oppression is not to champion
nationalism. Gladstone championed not nationalism, but internationalism;
he emphasized the idea that “public right” should control the relations
of states. The fine words which Mr. Asquith used to state the British
cause in August, 1914, were (unless I am mistaken) an echo of
Gladstone’s own words. A noble objection to oppression; a noble
championing of the rule of public right--these were the staples of
Gladstone’s prophecy. The pity was that, when it came to the actual
handling of foreign affairs (_e.g._ in Egypt about 1884), Gladstone
could not translate his ideals into practice.--E. B.
[477] G. B. Stern’s _Children of No Man’s Land_ is a novel of this topic
of British nationality in relation to German Jews written with great
insight.
[478] The doctrine of nationalities was in reality a legacy of French
revolutionary theory. From the men of the First Republic, who found it a
useful excuse for a forward foreign policy in the best Richelieu
tradition, it passed into the possession of Napoleon, who gave more
attention to it at St. Helena than he had ever done at the Tuileries.
Thence it came naturally into the political inheritance of Napoleon III,
who sacrificed France to his belief in it. Gladstone only got it by a
side wind, the theory having drifted into the British tradition by
reason of the accident of Canning’s anti-interventionist foreign policy
during the Spanish-American War of Independence.--P. G.
[479] This is a paradox to which I cannot subscribe. Please put me down
as convinced of the opposite.--E. B.
[480] Albert Thomas in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[481] There were also hopes of an Italian alliance for France, and
these, combined with the anti-Prussian direction of Austrian policy, and
the Franco-Russian _rapprochement_ which had followed the Crimean War,
almost justified Napoleon in believing that he would not be left
entirely alone.--P. G.
[482] Hence “Jingo” for any rabid patriot.
[483] See _England’s Debt to India_ by Lajpat Rai for a good statement
of India’s economic grievance.
[484] Now a French Protectorate.--P. G.
[485] See Putnam Weale’s _Indiscreet Letters from Pekin_, a partly
fictitious book, but true and vivid in its effects.
[486] With the exception of one wretched Dutch factory on the minute
island of Deshima in the harbour of Nagasaki. The Dutch were exposed to
almost unendurable indignities. They had no intercourse with any
Japanese except the special officials appointed to deal with them.
[487] A new and much more liberal Maltese constitution was promulgated
in June, 1920, practically putting Malta on the footing of a
self-governing colony.
[488] All intelligent Englishmen or Englishwomen with a vote owe it to
the Empire and themselves to read at least one book dealing with India
or Egypt from the native point of view. For India, Lajpat Rai’s
Political Future of India is to be recommended. A compact book running
counter to the views in this text, and giving the Church missionary
point of view, is the Rev. W. E. S. Holland’s Goal of India. William
Archer’s _India and the Future_ is an interesting display of the
temperamental clash of a Nordic writer with things Dravidian. It
sustains the argument that even the most high-minded Nordic type cannot
be trusted to govern other races sympathetically. (See also in that
matter Archer’s _In Afro-America_.) The Aga Khan’s _India in Transition_
gives very admirably the views of a liberal Indian gentleman. Sidney
Low’s _A Vision of India_ is still not yet superseded as a picture of
India in 1905-6, when the present stir was only brewing.
[489] A very good book for the expansion of this chapter is Stearns
Davis’ (with Anderson and Tyler) _Armed Peace_, a history of Europe from
1870 to 1914. Even more illuminating is G. P. Gooch’s _History of Our
Time (1885-1911)_. This is quite a tiny book, but very clear and
thorough. It was revised in its present form in February, 1914, so that
its title is misleading; it comes up to 1914. It contains an excellent
student’s bibliography.
[490] See F. M. Hueffer’s able but badly named book, _When Blood is
their Argument_. It gives an admirable account of just how the pressure
was applied to the teaching organization.
[491] These quotations are from Sir Thomas Barclay’s article “Peace” in
_The Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[492] St. John Ervine’s novel, _Changing Winds_, gives a good account of
the mentality of this time.
[493] See the various publications of the Irish Dominion League, St.
Stephen’s Green, Dublin. A good recent account of Irish ideas is to be
found in Lynd’s _Ireland a Nation_ (1919).
[494] Wilfred Scawen Blunt regards the English remaining in Egypt, when
they had pledged themselves to go, as the greatest cause of the troubles
that culminated in 1914. To pacify the French over Egypt, England
connived at the French occupation of Morocco, which Germany had looked
upon as her share of North Africa. Hence Germany’s bristling attitude to
France, and the _revival_ in France of the _revanche_ idea, which had
died down. See Blunt’s _My Diaries_, vol. i, September 30th, 1891.--A.
C. W.
[495] It should not be forgotten that Italian action against Turkey was
precipitated by the granting of a charter by the Sultan to an
Austro-German company or syndicate for the “taking over” of the
Tripolitaine: a process which could only have ended by the hoisting of
the Imperial German flag on the southern shores of the Mediterranean,
opposite Italy. Also, that through Morocco the Germans were attempting
to undermine the French position in Algeria and Tunis by supplying the
Moroccans with arms and money, and inducing them to attack French rule
separately in Western Algeria, and even by way of Saharan oases in
Southern Tunis. The writer of this note has actually witnessed this
process going on between 1898 and 1911. He asserts that, whether from
right or wrong motives, Germany forced France to tackle the thorny
problem of Morocco. Either she had to do so or prepare for the
evacuation of Algeria. France may have made a few mistakes, but she has
conferred enormous benefits on North Africa. Under her control the
indigenous population has increased remarkably.--H. H. J.
[496] The general reader who wants some picture in his mind of the
recent state of Russia should read Ernest Poole’s _The Village_.
Pre-revolutionary Russia is admirably sketched in Maurice Baring’s
_Mainsprings of Russia_, _The Russian People_, and _A Year in Russia_. A
small, very illuminating book on the Russian revolution is M. H.
Barber’s _A British Nurse in Bolshevik Russia_.
[497] One very good reason for the provisional retention of the
Philippines under American control is the certainty that the “Moros,”
the Muhammadan peoples of Palawan, and the southern islands of the main
groups would proceed to conquer the “Christian” Filipinos, and that
after a welter of civil war and destruction, Japan or some other outside
power would be appealed to to intervene.--H. H. J.
[498] An unfriendly critic might denounce the treaty-making power of the
United States, and the machinery by which it operates, as complicated
and cumbersome, ill adapted to the complex demands of international
intercourse, slow in action and uncertain in outcome. The requirement of
a two-thirds rather than a majority vote in the Senate he might
criticize not unjustly as a dubious excess of caution.... Believe me,
the American people are like for many years to accomplish through this
means their compacts with mankind. The checks and balances by which it
is surrounded, the free and full debate which it allows, are in their
eyes virtues rather than defects. They rejoice in the fact that all
engagements which affect their destinies must be spread upon the public
records, and that there is not, and there never can be, a secret treaty
binding them either in law or in morals. Looking back upon a diplomatic
history which is not without its chapters of success, they feel that on
the whole the scheme the fathers builded has served the children well.
With a conservatism in matters of government as great perhaps as that of
any people in the world, they will suffer much inconvenience and run the
risk of occasional misunderstanding before they make a change.--J. W.
Davis (U. S. A. Ambassador to Britain), _The Treaty Making Power of the
United States_. (Oxf. Univ. Brit. Am. Club. Paper No. 1.)
[499] I think his policy was quite clear. He said to Germany, “If you
bring on war, you must expect England to support France and Russia.” To
France and Russia he said: “If you are unreasonable, do not expect
England to support you.” He thus brought pressure to bear on both
sides.--G. M.
An illuminating book on the causes of the war is Lord Loreburn’s _How
the War Came_.--H. H. J.
[500] Kautsky’s report on the origin of the war.
[501] For the common soldier’s view of the war there is no better book
than _Le Feu_ by Barbusse. An illustrated book of great quaintness,
beauty, and veracity is André Hellé’s _Le Livre des Heures_. No other
book recalls so completely the _feel_ and effect of the phases of the
war. An admirably written and very wise book is Philip Gibbs’ _Realities
of War_. Some light upon the peculiar difference of the fighting of the
Great War from any previous warfare will be found in McCurdy’s _War
Neuroses_ and Eder’s book on the same subject.
[502] “What mainly was wrong with our generalship was the system which
put the High Command into the hands of a group of men belonging to the
old school of war, unable by reason of their age and traditions to get
away from rigid methods, and to become elastic in face of new
conditions. Our Staff College had been hopelessly inefficient in its
system of training, if I am justified in forming such an opinion from
specimens produced by it, who had the brains of canaries and the manners
of Potsdam. There was also a close corporation among the officers of the
Regular Army, so that they took the lion’s share of Staff appointments,
thus keeping out brilliant young men of the New Armies, whose brain
power, to say the least of it, was on a higher level than that of the
Sandhurst standard.” Philip Gibbs, _Realities of War_.
[503] “The smart society of G.H.Q. was best seen at the Officers’ Club
at dinnertime. It was as much like musical comedy as any stage setting
of war at the Gaiety. The band played rag-time and light music while the
warriors fed, and all these generals and staff officers, with their
decorations and Army bands, and polished buttons and crossed swords,
were waited upon by little W.A.A.C.s., with the G.H.Q. colours tied up
in bows on their hair, and khaki stockings under their short skirts, and
fancy aprons. Such a chatter! Such bursts of light-hearted laughter!
Such whisperings of secrets, of intrigues, and scandals in high places!
Such callous-hearted courage when British soldiers were being blown to
bits, gassed, blinded, maimed, and shell-shocked in places that were
far, so very far, from G.H.Q.”--Phillip Gibbs, _The Realities of War_.
[504] But see Roch, _Mr. Lloyd George and the War_, and Arthur’s _Life
of Lord Kitchener_.
[505] “The want of an unlimited quantity of high explosives was a fatal
bar to our success.”--_The Times_, May 14th, 1915.
[506] But compare the British bombardment of Japanese towns noted in
Chap. xxxix, § 11. And aeroplane bombs and machine-gun fire have since
been used by the British military authorities against Indian village
crowds _suspected_ of sedition.
[507] _E.g._ in hand grenades.
[508] For the flighty incapacity of the British military authorities in
this adventure, see Sir Ian Hamilton’s _Gallipoli Diary_. It is only
fair to the British commander to add that the incapacity was that of the
home authorities to understand his demands for men and material.--P. G.
[509] See Stern, _Tanks 1914-1918_. See also Fuller, _Tanks in the Great
War_.
[510] “I found a general opinion among officers and men under the
command of the Fifth Army that they had been victims of atrocious staff
work, tragic in its consequence. From what I saw of some of the Fifth
Army staff officers, I was of the same opinion. Some of these young
gentlemen, and some of the elderly officers, were arrogant and
supercilious, without revealing any sign of intelligence. If they had
wisdom, it was deeply camouflaged by an air of inefficiency. If they had
knowledge, they hid it as a secret of their own. General Gough in
Flanders, though personally responsible for many tragic happenings, was
badly served by some of his subordinates, and battalion officers and
divisional staffs raged against the whole of the Fifth Army
organization, or lack of organization, with an extreme passion of
speech.”--Philip Gibbs, _Realities of War_.
[511] A very good account of the state of mind of Paris during and after
the war is in W. P. Adams’ _Paris Sees it Through_.
[512] _The Times_, December 8th, 1919.
[513] Authorities vary between 250,000 and a million houses.
[514] J. M. Keynes, _op. cit._
[515] They debauched the currency, _i.e._ and wasted money recklessly.
[516] Mr. Keynes ignores the fortunes made by deliberately cornering and
withholding commodities in a time of shortage.
[517] Among the books consulted here, for this and the two following
sections, were Dr. Dillon’s _Peace Conference_; H. Wilson Harris’s _The
Peace in the Making_ and _President Wilson, his Problems and his
Policy_; J. M. Keynes’s _Economic Consequences of the Peace_; Weyl’s
_The End of the War_; Stallybrass’s _Society of States_; Brailsford’s _A
League of Nations_; F. C. Howe’s _Why War?_ L. S. Woolf’s _International
Government_; J. A. Hobson’s _Towards International Government_; Lowes
Dickinson’s _The Choice before Us_; Sir Walter Phillimore’s _Three
Centuries of Treaties_, and C. E. Fayle’s _Great Settlement_.
[518] “The Allied Governments,” the effective passage ran, “have given
careful consideration to the correspondence which has passed between the
President of the United States and the German Government. Subject to the
qualifications which follow, they declare their readiness to make peace
with the Government of Germany on the terms of peace laid down in the
President’s Address to Congress of January 8th, 1918, and the principles
of settlement enunciated in his subsequent Addresses.”
(Note transmitted to the German Government by the Allies through the
Swiss Minister on November 5th, 1918.)
[519] In his book, _The Peace Conference_.
[520] Dillon.
[521] Dillon. And see his _The Peace Conference_, Chapter III, for
instances of the amazing ignorance of various delegates.
[522] See _Clemenceau_, by C. Ducray.
[523] He wrote several novels. They are not very good novels; they
incline to sentimental melodrama. _Le Plus Fort_ is now available to
English readers in a translation under the title of “The Stronger.” It
is tawdry and dull. A cinematograph version has been shown.
[524] Keynes.
[525] Checked by subsequent comparison with the published article in the
_Jour. of the Roy. United Service Institution_, vol. lxv., No. 457,
February, 1920.
[526] Cp. Psalm cxxxvi.
[527] Here is another glimpse of the agreeable dreams that fill the
contemporary military mind. It is from Fuller’s recently published
_Tanks in the Great War_. Colonel Fuller does not share that hostility
to tanks characteristic of the older type of soldier. In the next war,
he tells us: “Fast-moving tanks, equipped with tons of liquid gas ...
will cross the frontier and obliterate every living thing in the fields
and farms, the villages, and cities of the enemy’s country. Whilst life
is being swept away around the frontier, fleets of aeroplanes will
attack the enemy’s great industrial and governing centres. All these
attacks will be made, at first, not against the enemy’s army ... but
against the civil population, in order to compel it to accept the will
of the attacker.”
For a good, well-balanced account of what modern war really means, see
Philip Gibbs, _Realities of War_, already cited in two footnotes to § 8.
[528] A suggestive book here containing a good account of the drift of
modern religious thought is G. W. Cooke’s _Social Evolution of
Religion_.
[529] Compare Basil Thompson, _The Fijians, a Study of the Decay of
Custom_; Introduction and opening chapters. This is a fine study of an
ancient “heliolithic” culture breaking up under modernization.
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Volume I.
parellel=> parellel {pg 618}
Justianian=> Justinian {pg 618}
Kaniska=> Kanishka {pg 646}
Volume II.
agressive=> aggressive {pg 503}
completer=> complete {pg 527}
Arisona=> Arizona {index}
Vimeiro=> Vimiero {index}