CHAPTER XI

THE STATE

(B)

STATE AND HISTORY

I

Within the world-as-history, in which we are so livingly woven that

our perception and our reason constantly obey our feelings, the

cosmic flowings appear as that which we call actuality, real life,

being-streams in bodily form. Their common badge is Direction. But

they can be grasped differently according as it is the _movement_ or

_the thing moved_ that is looked at. The former aspect we call history

and the latter family or stock or estate or people, but the one is

only possible and existent through the other. History exists only as

the history of something. If we are referring to the history of the

great Cultures, then nation is the thing moved. State, _status_, means

condition, and we obtain our impression of the State when, as a Being

in moved Form flows past us, we fix in our eyes the Form as such, as

something extended and timelessly standing fast, and entirely ignore

direction and Destiny. State is history regarded as at the halt,

history the State regarded as on the move. The State of actuality is

the physiognomy of a historical unit of being; only the planned State

of the theorist is a system.

A movement _has_ form, and that which is moved is “_in form_,” or, to

use another sporting expression, when it is “going all out” it is in

perfect condition. This is equally true for a racehorse or a wrestler

and for an army or a people. The form abstracted from the life-stream

of a people is the “condition” of that people with respect to its

wrestle in and with history. But only the smallest part of this can be

got at and identified by means of the reason. No real constitution,

when taken by itself and brought down to paper as a system, is

complete. The unwritten, the indescribable, the usual, the felt, the

self-evident, so outweigh everything else that--though theorists never

see it--the description of a state or its constitutional archives

cannot give us even the silhouette of that which underlies the

living actuality of a state as its essential form; an existence-unit

of history is spoilt when we seriously subject its movement to the

constraint of a written constitution.

The individual class or family is the smallest, the nation the largest

unit in the stream of history.[626] Primitive peoples are subject to

a movement that is not historical in the higher sense--the movement

may be a jog-trot or may be a charge, but it has no organic character

and no profound importance. Nevertheless, these primitive peoples are

in motion through and through, to such an extent, indeed, as to seem

perfectly formless to the hasty observer. Fellaheen, on the contrary,

are the rigid objects of a movement that comes from outside and

impinges on them unmeaningly and fortuitously. The former includes

the “State” of the Mycenæan period; that of the Thinite period;

that of the Shang dynasty in China up to, say, the migration to Yin

(1400); the Frankish realm of Charlemagne; the Visigothic Kingdom to

Eurich; and Petrine Russia--state-forms often ample and efficient, but

still destitute of symbolism and necessity. To the latter belong the

Roman, Chinese, and other Imperia, whose form has ceased to have any

expressive content whatever.

But between primitive and fellah lies the history of the great Culture.

A people in the style of a Culture--a historical people, that is--is

called a Nation.[627] A nation, as a living and battling thing,

possesses a State not merely as a condition of movement, but also

(above all) _as an idea_. The State in the simplest sense of the term

may be as old as free-moving life itself. Swarms and herds of even very

lowly animal genera may have “constitutions” of some sort--and those of

the ants, of the bees, of many fish, or migrating birds, of beavers,

have reached an astounding degree of perfection--but the State of the

grand style is as old as and no older than its two prime Estates,

nobility and priesthood. These emerge _with_ the Culture, they vanish

into it, their Destinies are to a high degree identical. Culture is the

being of nations in State-form.

A people is _as_ State, a kindred is _as_ family, “in form”--that is,

as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history,

public and private life, _res publica_ and _res privata_. And both,

moreover, are symbols of care.[628] The woman _is_ world-history. By

conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the

blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of

cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is “in form”

as marriage. The man, however, _makes_ history, which is an unending

battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is

supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is

the other grand emblem of the will-to-duration. A people “in condition”

is originally a band warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community

of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man, it is Care for the

preservation of the whole (including the spiritual self-preservation

called honour and self-respect), the thwarting of attacks, the

foreseeing of dangers, and, above all, the positive aggressiveness

which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar.

If all life were _one_ uniform being-stream, the words “people,”

“state,” “war,” “policy,” “constitution,” would never have been heard

of. But the eternal forceful _variety_ of life, which the creative

power of the Culture elevates to the highest intensities, is a fact,

and historically we have no choice but to accept it as such, with

all that flows therefrom. Plant-life is only plant-life in relation

to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition

one another. _A people is only really such in relation to other

peoples_, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and

ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defence, hostility and war.

War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the

stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.

A people shapes history inasmuch as it is “in condition” for the task

of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history--which gets

it into this “condition,” in which alone it becomes creative--and

an outward history, which _consists_ in this creation. Peoples as

State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the

world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They _are_ Destiny.

_Res publica_, the public life, the “sword side” of human

being-currents, is in actuality invisible. The alien sees merely the

men and not their inner connexion, for indeed this resides very deep

in the stream of life, and even there is felt rather than understood.

Similarly, we do not in actuality see the family, but only certain

persons, whose cohesion in a perfectly definite sense we know and grasp

by way of our own inward experience. But for each such mental picture

there exists a group of constituent persons who are bound together as

a life-unit by a like constitution of outer and inner being. This form

in the flow of existence is called _customary ethic_ (_Sitte_) when it

arises of itself in the beat and march and is unconscious before it is

conscious; and _law_ (_Recht_) when it is _deliberately stated_ and put

forth for _acceptance_.

Law--irrespective of whether its authority derives from the feelings

and impulse (unwritten law, customary law, English “equity”) or has

been abstracted by reflection, probed, and brought into system as

Statute Law (_Gesetz_)--is the _willed_ form of Being. The jural

facts that it embraces are of the two kinds, though both possess

time-symbolism--Care in two modes, prevision and provision--but,

from the very difference in the proportions of consciousness that

they respectively contain, it follows that throughout real history

there must be two laws in opposition--the law of the fathers, of

tradition, the inherited, grown, and well-tried law, sacrosanct

because immemorially old, derived from the experience of the blood

and therefore dependable; and the thought and planned law of reason,

nature, and broad humanity, the product of reflection and therefore

first cousin to mathematics, a law that may not be very workable,

but is at any rate “just.” It is in these two orders of law that

the opposition between land-life and city-life, life-experience and

study-experience, ripens till it bursts out in that revolutionary

embitterment in which men take a law instead of being given it, and

break a law that will not yield.

A law that has been laid down by a community expresses a _duty_ for

every member, but it is no proof of every member’s _power_. On the

contrary, it is a question of Destiny, who makes the law and for whom

it is made. There are subjects and there are objects in the _making_ of

laws, although everyone is an object as to the validity thereof--and

this holds good without distinction for the inner law of families,

guilds, estates, and states. But for the State, which is the highest

law-subject existing in historical actuality, there is, besides, an

external law that it imposes upon aliens by hostilities. Ordinary civil

law is a case of the first kind, a peace treaty of the second. But in

all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To

“have the right” is an expression of power. This is a historical fact

that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm

of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right,

therefore, as in other things, being and waking-being, Destiny and

Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic

moral of good and evil belongs the _moral distinction of right and

wrong_, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is

between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea

of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble

and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all

philosophies--but the fact-world of history knows only the _success_

which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it

marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power

of the moment in order to remain righteous--then, certainly, his or its

theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth,

but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to

another life-power that has better understood realities.

So long as a historical power is so superior to its constituent

units--as the State or the estate so often is to families and

calling-classes, or the head of the family to its children--a just law

_between_ the weaker is possible as a gift from the all-powerful hand

of the disinterested. But Estates seldom, and states almost never,

feel a power of this magnitude over themselves, and consequently

between them the law of the stronger acts with immediate force--as

is seen in a victor’s treaty, unilateral in terms and still more so

in interpretation and observance. That is the difference between

the _internal_ and the _external_ rights of historical life-units.

In the first the will of an arbiter to be impartial and just can be

effective--although we are apt to deceive ourselves badly as to the

degree of effective impartiality even in the best codes of history,

even in those which call themselves “civil” or “_bürgerlich_,” for the

very adjective indicates that _an estate_ has possessed the superior

force to impose them on everyone.[629] Internal laws are the result of

strict logical-causal thought centring upon truths, but for that very

reason their validity is ever dependent upon the material power of

their author, be this Estate or State. A revolution that annihilates

this power annihilates also these laws--they remain true, but they

are no longer actual. External laws on the other hand, such as all

peace treaties, are essentially never true and always actual--indeed

appallingly so. They set up no pretension whatever of being just--it

is quite enough that they are valid. Out of them speaks _Life_, which

possesses no causal and moral logic, but is organically all the more

consistent and consequent for the lack of it. Its will is to possess

validity _itself_; it feels with an inward certainty what is required

to that end and, seeing that, knows what is law for itself and _has

to be made_ law for others. This logic is seen in every family, and

particularly in old true-born peasant families as soon as authority is

shattered and someone other than the head tries to determine “what is.”

It appears in every state, as soon as one party therein dominates the

position. Every feudal age is filled with the contests between lords

and vassals over the “right to rights.” In the Classical world this

conflict ended almost everywhere with the unconditional victory of the

First Estate, which deprived the kingship of its legislative powers and

made it an object of its own law-making--as the origin and significance

of the Archons in Athens and the Ephors in Sparta prove beyond doubt.

But the same happened in the Western field too--for a moment in France

(institution of the States-General, 1302), and for good in England,

where in 1215 the Norman baronage and the higher clergy imposed Magna

Charta and thus sowed the seed that was to ripen into the effective

sovereignty of Parliament. Hence it was that the old Norman law of the

Estates here remained permanently valid. In Germany, on the contrary,

the weak Imperial power, hard-pressed by the claims of the great

feudatories, called in the “Roman” law of Justinian (that is, the law

of the unlimited central power) to aid it against the early German

land-laws.[630]

The Draconian Constitution, the πατρίος πολιτεία of the Oligarchs,

was dictated by the nobility like the strictly patrician law of

the Twelve Tables in Rome;[631] but by then the Late period of the

Culture was well under way and the power of the city and of money were

already fully developed, so that laws directed against these powers

necessarily gave way very promptly to laws of the Third Estate (Solon,

the Tribunate). Yet these, too, were estate-founded laws not less than

their predecessors. The struggle between the two primary estates for

the right of law-making has filled the entire history of the West, from

the early Gothic conflict of secular and canon law for supremacy, to

the controversy (not ended even to-day) concerning civil marriage.[632]

And, for that matter, what are the constitutional conflicts that have

occurred since the end of the eighteenth century but the acquisition

by the _Tiers État_ (which, according to Sieyès’s famous remark in

1789, “was nothing, but could be all”) of the right to legislate

bindingly upon all, producing a law that is just as much burghers

law as ever Gothic was nobles’ law. The nakedest form in which right

appears as the expression of might is (as I have already observed) in

interstate treaty-making, in peace treaties, and in that Law of Nations

of which already Mirabeau could say it is the law of the strong of

which the observance is imposed upon the weak. A large part of the

decisions of world-history is contained in laws of this kind. They are

the constitution under which militant history progresses, so long as it

does not revert to the original form of the armed conflict--original,

and also basic; for every treaty that is valid and is meant to have

real effects is an intellectual continuation thereof. If policy is war

by other means,[633] the “right to give the law” is the spoil of the

successful party.

II

It is clear, then, that on the heights of history two such life-forms,

Estate and State, contend for supremacy, both being-streams of great

inward form and symbolic force, each resolved to make its own destiny

the Destiny of the whole. _That_--if we try to understand the matter

in its depths and unreservedly put aside our everyday conceptions

of people, economy, society, and politics--_is the meaning of the

opposition between the social and the political conduct of events_.

Social and political ideas do not begin to be differentiated till a

great Culture has dawned, or even till feudalism is declining and

the lord-vassal relation represents the social, and the king-people

relation the political, side. But the social powers of the early time

(nobility and priesthood) not less actively than those of the later

(money and mind)--and the vocational groups of the craftsmen and

officials and workers, too, as they were rising to their power in the

growing cities--sought, each for itself, to subordinate the State-ideal

to its own Estate-ideal, or more usually to its estate interests. And

so there arose, at all planes from that of the national unit to that of

the individual consciousness, a fight over the respective limits and

claims of each--the result of which, in extreme cases, is that the one

element succeeds so completely as to make the other its tool.[634]

In all cases, however, it is the State that determines the _external_

position, and therefore the historical relations between peoples

are always of _a political and not a social nature_. In domestic

politics, on the contrary, the situation is so dominated by

class-oppositions that at first sight social and political tactics

appear inseparable, and indeed, in the thought of people who (as, for

example, a bourgeoisie) equate their own class-ideal with historical

actuality--and consequently cannot think in external politics at

all--identical. In the external battle the State seeks alliances

with other States, in the internal it is always in alliance with one

or another Estate--the sixth-century Tyrannis, for instance, rested

upon the combination of the State-idea with the interests of the

Third Estate _vis-à-vis_ the ancient noble oligarchy, and the French

Revolution became inevitable from the moment that the _Tiers_--that

is, intellect and money--left its friend the Crown in the lurch and

joined the two other Estates (from the Assembly of Notables, 1787).

We are thoroughly right therefore in feeling a distinction between

State-history and class-history,[635] between political (horizontal)

and social (vertical) history, war and revolution.[636] But it is a

grave error of modern doctrinaires to regard the spirit of domestic

history as that of history in general. _World-history is, and always

will be, State-history._ The inner constitution of a nation aims always

at being “_in condition_” for the outer fight (diplomatic, military,

or economic) and anyone who treats a nation’s constitution as an aim

and ideal in itself is merely ruining the nation’s body. But, from the

other point of view, it falls to the inner-political pulse-sense of a

ruling stratum (whether belonging to the First or to the Fourth Estate)

so to manage the internal class-oppositions that the focus and ideas

of the nation are not tied up in party conflict, nor treason to the

country thought of as an ace of trumps.

And here it becomes manifest that _the State and the first Estate_

are cognate down to the roots--akin, not merely by reason of their

symbolism of Time and Care, their common relation to race and the

facts of genealogical succession, to the family and to the primary

impulses of all peasantry (on which in the last analysis every State

and every nobility is supported)--not merely in their relation to

the soil, the clan-domain (be this heritable estate or fatherland),

which even in nations of the Magian style is lowered in significance

only because there the dignity of orthodoxy so completely surpasses

everything else--but above all in high practice amidst all the facts

of the historical world, in the unforced unity of pulse and impulse,

diplomacy, judgment of men, the art of command and masculine will to

keep and extend power, which even in earliest times differentiated a

nobility and a people out of the one and the same war-gathering; and,

lastly, in the feeling for honour and bravery. Hence, right up to the

latest phases, that State stands firmest in which the nobility or the

tradition shaped by the nobility is wholly at the service of the common

cause--as it was in Sparta as compared with Athens, in Rome _vis-à-vis_

Carthage, in Tsin as against the _tao_-coloured state of Tsu.

The distinction is that a nobility self-contained as a class--or for

that matter _any_ Estate--experiences the residue of the nation only

with reference to itself, and only desires to exercise power in that

sense, whereas the very principle of the State is that it cares for

all, and cares for the nobility as such only in relation to the major

care. But a genuine old nobility _assimilates itself_ to the State,

and cares for all as though for a property. This care, in fact, is one

of its grandest duties and one of which it is most deeply conscious;

it feels it, indeed, an innate _privilege_, and regards service in the

army and the administration as its special vocation.

It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as

between the State-idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates.

All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State-ideals

that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the

spirit and the political forces of actual history--hence, indeed, the

conscious emphasis with which they are labelled as social. And while in

Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the

Church-community in its efforts to actualize _religious_ ideals, in

Late periods both the _business_ ideal of the free economic life, and

the _Utopian_ ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that

abstraction, also come into the field.

But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts--no

truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no

final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should

write books on politics--let him not try to _make_ politics. In the

real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only

states that have _grown_, and these are nothing but living peoples

“in form.” No doubt it is “the form impressed that living doth itself

unfold,” but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a

_being_, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding,

if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction

inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own

convictions--in other words, the way to nullity.

But the destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not

merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or

structure, _but that of their inner authority_, which cannot in the

long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief--of

friend _and_ foe--in their effectiveness. The decisive problems lie,

not in the working-out of constitutions, but in the organization of

a sound working government; not in the distribution of political

rights according to “just” principles (which at bottom are simply the

idea that a _class_ forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the

efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play

of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears

the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius

into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the

steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership. The

more self-evident all these things are, the less is said or argued

about them; the more fully matured the State, the higher the standing,

the historical capacity, and therefore the Destiny of the Nation.

State-majesty, sovereignty, is a life-symbol of the first order. It

distinguishes _subjects and objects_[637] in political events not

only in inner, but also (which is far more important) in external,

history. Strength of leadership, which comes to expression in the

clear separation of these two factors, is the unmistakable sign of

the life-force in a political unity--so much so that the shattering

of existing authority (for example, by the supporters of an opposed

constitutional ideal) almost always results not in this new party’s

making itself the subject of domestic policy, but in the whole nation’s

becoming the object of alien policy--and not seldom for ever.

For this reason, in every healthy State the letter of the written

constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the

living constitution, the “form” (to use again the sporting term), which

has developed of itself out of the experience of Time, the situation,

and, above all, the race-properties of the Nation. The more powerfully

the _natural_ form of the body politic has built itself up, the more

surely it works in unforeseen situations; indeed, in the limit, it

does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister

or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has

no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman

politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of

view of constitutional law, no existence whatever.[638] The leader’s

responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of

statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of

history.

The fact, therefore, express and unequivocal, is that

class-States--that is, States in which particular classes rule--are

the _only_ States. This must not be confused with the class-States

to which the individual is merely _attached_ in view of belonging to

an estate, as in the case of the older Polis, the Norman States of

England and Sicily, the France of the Constitution of 1791, and Soviet

Russia to-day. The true class-State is an expression of the general

historical experience that it is always a single social stratum

which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading.

It is always a definite minority that represents the world-historical

tendency of a State; and, within that again, it is a more or less

self-contained minority that in virtue of its aptitudes (and often

enough against the spirit of the Constitution) actually holds the

reins. And, if we ignore, as exceptions proving the rule, revolutionary

interregna and Cæsarian conditions, in which individuals and fortuitous

groupings maintain their power merely by material means (and often

without any aptitude for ruling), it is always the minority _within an

Estate_ that rules by tradition. In by far the greater number of cases

this minority is one within the nobility--for example, the “gentry”

which governed the Parliamentary style of England, the _nobiles_ at the

helm of Roman politics in Punic War times, the merchant-aristocracy

of Venice, the Jesuit-trained (nobles who conducted the diplomacy of

the Papal Curia in the Baroque).[639] Similarly, we find the political

aptitude in self-contained groups within the religious Estate--not only

in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in Egypt and India and still

more in Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. In the Third Estate--though

this seldom produces it, not being in itself a life-unit--there are

cases such as those of third-century Rome, where a stratum of the

plebs contains men trained in commerce, and France since 1789, where

an element of the bourgeoisie has been trained in law; in these cases,

it is ensured by a closed circle of persons possessing homogeneous

practical gifts, which constantly recruits itself and preserves in its

midst the whole sum of unwritten political tradition and experience.

That is the organization of _actual_ states in contradistinction to

those conceived on paper and in the minds of pedants. There is no best,

or true, or right State that could possibly be actualized according to

plan. Every State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and

for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different,

whatever the rigidity of its legal-constitutional crust. Therefore,

words like “republic,” “absolutism,” “democracy,” mean something

different in every instance, and what turns them into catchwords is

their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A

history of States is physiognomic and not systematic. Its business is

not to show how “humanity” advances to the conquest of its eternal

rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and

super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist

in the fact-world, how they grow and flourish and fade, and how they

are really nothing but actual life “in form.” Let us make the attempt

on this basis.

III

History in the high style begins in every Culture with the feudal

State, which is not a State in the coming sense of the word, but

an ordering of the common life with reference to an _Estate_. The

noblest fruit of the soil, its race in the proudest sense, here

builds itself up in a rank-order from the simple knighthood to the

_primus inter pares_, the feudal Overlord amongst his Peers. This

sets in simultaneously with the architecture of the great cathedrals

and the Pyramids--the stone and the blood elevated into symbols, the

one _meaning_, the other _being_. The idea of feudalism, which has

dominated all Springtimes, is the transition from the primitive, purely

practical and factual, relationship of potentate to those who obey him

(whether they have chosen him or have been subdued by him) into the

_private-law_ (and, therefore, deeply symbolical) relation of the lord

to the vassal. This relation rests entirely upon the ethic of nobility,

honour, and loyalty, and conjures up the cruellest conflicts between

duty to one’s lord and duty to one’s own family. The decadence of Henry

the Lion[640] is a tragic example of it.

The “State” exists here only to the extent of the limits of the feudal

tie, and it expands its domain by the entry of alien vassals therein.

Service to, and agency for, the ruler--originally personal and limited

in time--very soon became the permanent fief which, if it escheated,

_had_ to be reassigned (already by 1000 the principle of the West was

“No land without a lord”), and from that presently passed to the stage

of being hereditary (law of Emperor Conrad II, 28th May 1037). Thereby

the formerly immediate subjects of the ruler were mediatized, and

henceforth they were only his subjects as being subjects of a vassal of

his. Nothing but the strong social interbonding of the Estate ensured

the cohesion of what must be called, even under these conditions, the

State.

The idea of power and booty are seen here in classic union. When, in

1066, William and his Norman chivalry conquered England, the whole

land was made King’s property and fee, and it remains so in name

to this day. Here is a true Viking delight in “having,” the care

of an Odysseus who begins by counting his treasure.[641] From this

booty-sense of shrewd conquerors there came, quite suddenly, the

famous exchequer-practice and officialdom of the early Cultures. It

is well to distinguish these officials from the incumbents of the

great confidential offices which had arisen out of the older personal

agency;[642] they were _clerici_ or clerks, and not _ministeriales_ or

ministers--“servants,” but in a prouder sense now. The financial and

clerical officialdom is an expression of Care, and it develops in exact

proportion with the development of the dynastic idea. Thus in Egypt

it reached an astonishingly high level at the very beginning of the

Old Kingdom.[643] The early Chinese official-State described in the

_Tshou-li_ is so comprehensive and complicated that the authenticity

of the book has been doubted,[644] but in spirit and tendency it

corresponds exactly with that of Diocletian, which enabled a feudal

order to arise out of an immense fiscal machinery.[645] In the early

Classical world it is markedly absent. “_Carpe diem_” was the motto of

Classical economics from the first to last, and in this domain as in

others Improvidence, the _autarkeia_ of the Stoics, was elevated into a

principle. Even the best calculators were no exception--thus Eubulus in

Athens, 330 B.C., managed business with an eye to surpluses, but only

to distribute them, when gained, amongst the citizens.

The extreme contrast to Eubulus’s finance is afforded by the canny

Vikings of the early West, who by the financial administration of their

Norman states laid the foundations of the Faustian economics that

extend to-day over the whole world. It is from the chequered table in

the Norman counting-house of Robert the Devil (1028-35) that we have

the name of the English “Exchequer” and hence the word “cheque.” Here

also originated the words “control,” “quittance,” “record.”[646] Here

it was that after 1066 England was organized as booty, with ruthless

reduction of the Anglo-Saxons, to serfdom, and here too originated the

Norman State of Sicily--for it was not upon nothing that Frederick II

of Hohenstaufen later built; his most personal work, the constitutions

of Melfi (1231) he did not create, but only (by methods borrowed

from the money-economics of high Arabian Civilization) polished and

perfected. From this centre the methodic and descriptive technique of

finance spread into the business world of Lombardy and so into all the

trading cities and administrations of the West.

But in Feudalism build-up and breakdown lie close together. When

the primary estates were still in full bloom and vigour, the future

nations, and with them the germ of the State-idea proper, were stirring

into life. The opposition between temporal and spiritual power and that

between crown and vassals was cut across again and again by oppositions

of nationhood--German-French even from Otto the Great’s times;

German-Italian, which rent Italy between the Guelphs and Ghibellines

and destroyed the German Empire; French-English, which brought about

the English dominion over western France. Still, all this was far less

important than the great decisions within the feudal order itself,

where the idea of nationality was unknown. England was broken up into

60,251 fiefs, catalogued in the Domesday Book of 1084 (consulted

even to-day upon occasion), and the strictly organized central power

required allegiance to itself even from the sub-tenants of the peers,

but all the same it was less than a hundred and fifty years later that

Magna Charta was forced through (1215), and actual power transferred

from the King to the Parliament of the vassals--made up of great

barons and ecclesiastics in the Upper house, gentry and patricians

in the Lower--which thenceforward became the support and champion of

_national_ development. In France the baronage, in conjunction with

the clergy and the towns, forced the calling of the States-General

in 1302; the General Privilege of Saragossa in 1283 made Aragon into

a quasi-republic of nobles ruled by its Cortes, and in Germany a few

decades earlier a group of great vassals made the election of the

German Kingship dependent upon themselves as Electors.

The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself--not

merely in the West, but in any Culture--came out in the struggle

between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in

which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so

intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of

feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin.

The idea of a Ruler whose writ should run throughout the whole

historical world, whose Destiny should be that of all mankind, has

taken visible shape in, so far, three instances--firstly, in the

conception of the Pharaoh as Horus;[647] secondly, in the great Chinese

imagining of the Ruler of the Middle, whose domain is _tien-hia_,

everything lying below the heavens;[648] and, thirdly, in early Gothic

times. In 962 Otto the Great, answering to the deep mystical sense and

yearning for historical and spatial infinity that was sweeping through

the world of those days, conceived the idea of the “Holy Roman Empire,

German by nation.” But even earlier, Pope Nicolas I (860), still

completely involved in Augustinian--that is, Magian--lines of thought,

had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes

of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of

his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world-dominion under

the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy

itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal

State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election

of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals

(to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble

oligarchy. But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory

VII actually _obtained_ feudal supremacy over the Norman states of

England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and

actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto the Great had awarded the

tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstaufen succeeded in the

opposite sense; even Richard Cœur-de-Lion swore the vassal’s oath to

him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming

a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198-1216) made

the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England

became a Papal fief in 1213; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark

and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire

in Byzantium followed. But with Innocent’s death disintegration set

in within the Church itself, and the great spiritual dignitaries,

whom their investitures turned into vassals of the Pope as overlord,

soon followed the lay vassals’ example and set about limiting him by

means of representative institutions for their order.[649] The notion

that a General Council stood higher than a pope was not of religious

origin, but arose primarily out of the feudal principle. Its tendency

corresponded precisely to that which the English magnates had made good

in Magna Charta. In the councils of Constance (1414) and Basel (1431)

the last attempts were made to turn the Church, under its temporal

aspect, into a clerical feudalism, in which an oligarchy of cardinals

would have become the representative of the whole Clerical Estate of

the West and taken the place hitherto held by the Roman nobility.

But by that time the feudal idea had long taken second place to that

of the State, and so the Roman barons won the victory. The field of

candidature for the Papacy was limited to the narrowest environs of

Rome, and unlimited power over the organizations of the Church was

_ipso facto_ secured to the centre. As for the Empire, it had long ago

become a venerated shadow, like the Egyptian and the Chinese.

In comparison with the immense dynamism of these decisions, the

building-up of feudalism in the Classical world was slow, static,

almost noiseless, so that it is hardly recognizable save from the

traces of transition. In the Homeric epos as we have it now, every

locality possesses its Basileus, who, it is fairly evident, was once

a great vassal--we can see in the figure of Agamemnon the conditions

in which the ruler of a wide region took the field with the train

of his peers. But in the Greek world the dissolution of the feudal

world was associated with the formation of the _city_-state, the

political “point.” In consequence, the hereditary court-offices,

the _archai_ and _timai_, the _prytaneis_, the Archons, and perhaps

the original Prætor,[650] were all urban in nature; and the great

families therefore developed, not separately in their counties, as in

Egypt, China, and the West, but in the closest touch with the city,

where they obtained possession of the rights of the King, one after

the other, until nothing was left to the ruling house but that which

could not be touched because of the gods--namely, the title attaching

to its sacrificial function (hence the _rex sacrorum_). In the later

parts of the Homeric epic (_c._ 800) it is the nobles who invite the

king to take his seat, and even unseat him. The Odyssey really knows

the kingship only as part of the saga--the actual Ithaca that it shows

us is a city dominated by oligarchs.[651] The Spartiates, like the

Roman partriciate of the Comitia Curiata, are the product of a feudal

relation.[652] In the _phiditiæ_[653] there are evident remains of

the old open table of the noble, but the power of the king has sunk

to the shadowy dignity of the _rex sacrorum_ of Rome, or the “kings”

of Sparta, who were liable to be imprisoned or removed at any time by

the Ephors. The essential similarity of these conditions forces us to

presume that in Rome the Tarquinian Tyrannis of 500 was preceded by a

period of oligarchical dominance, and this view is supported by the

unquestionably genuine tradition of the _Interrex_, a person appointed

by the council of the nobles (the Senate) from amongst its own members

to act until it should please them to elect a king again.

Here, as elsewhere, there comes a time in which feudalism is falling

into decay, but the coming State is not yet completed, the nation not

yet “in form.” This is the fearful crisis that emerges everywhere

in the shape of the Interregnum, and forms the boundary _between

the feudal union and the class-State_. In Egypt feudalism was fully

developed by about the middle of the Vth Dynasty. The Pharaoh Asosi

gave away his domains literally piece by piece to the vassals, and,

further, the rich fiefs of the priesthood were (exactly as in the

West) free of taxation and gradually became the permanent property

(“mortmain,” as we should say) of the great temples.[654] With the

Vth Dynasty (_c._ 2530 B.C.) the “Hohenstaufen” age comes to an end.

Under the shadow-kingship of the short-lived VIth Dynasty the princes

(_rpati_) and counts (_hetio_) become independent; the high offices are

all hereditary and the tomb-inscriptions show us more and more proud

stress upon ancient lineage. That which later Egyptian historians have

hidden under the reputed VIIth and VIIIth dynasties[655] is really

half a century of anarchy and lawless conflicts between princes for

each other’s domains or for the Pharaoh-title. In China, even I-Wang

(934-909) was obliged by his vassals to give out all conquered lands,

and to do so to sub-tenants nominated by them. In 842 Li-Wang was

forced, with his heir, to flee, and the administration of the Empire

was carried on by two individual princes. In this interregnum began the

fall of the House of Chóu and the decline of the Imperial name into an

honourable but meaningless title. It is the corresponding picture to

that of the Interregnum in Germany, which began in 1254 and brought the

Imperial power to its nadir of 1400 under Wenceslaus, simultaneously

with the Renaissance-style of the _condottieri_ and the complete decay

of the Papal power. After the death of Boniface VIII, who in 1302 had

once again asserted the feudal power of the Papacy in the Bull _Unam

sanctam_ and had consequently been arrested by the representatives

of France, the Papacy experienced a century of banishment, anarchy,

and impotence, while in the following century the Norman nobility of

England for the most part perished in the contest of the houses of York

and Lancaster for the throne.

IV

What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State

over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the

feeling that the purpose of existence was that a “life” should be led

in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised

in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that

there was _something else_ besides, something to which even nobility

was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether

of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea. Events

came to be viewed, no longer from a frankly private-law standpoint,

but under a “public”-law aspect. The State might (and almost without

exception did) remain aristocratic to its core; its outward appearance

might be scarcely altered by the transition from the feudal group to

the Class-State; the idea that those outside the Estates possessed

rights as well as duties might be still unknown; _but_ the feeling

had become different, and the consciousness that Life existed to be

lived on the heights of history had given way to the other sentiment,

that it contained a _task_. The difference becomes very distinct when

we contrast the policy of Rainald van Dassel (d. 1167)--one of the

greatest German statesmen of all periods--with that of the Emperor

Charles IV (d. 1378), and consider in parallel therewith the transition

in Classical feeling from the “Themis” of the knightly age to the

“Dike” of the growing Polis.[656] Themis involves only a claim, Dike

implies a task as well.

The State-idea in its sturdy youth is always--and self-evidently,

with a naturalness rooted deep in animality itself--bound up with the

conception of an individual ruler. The same holds good, with the same

self-evidence, for every roused crowd in every decisive situation--as

every riotous assembly and every moment of sudden danger demonstrates

afresh.[657] Such crowds are units of feeling, but blind. They are

“in form” for the onrush of events only when they are in the hands of

the leader, who suddenly appears in their midst, is set at the head

in a moment by that very unity of feeling, and finds an unconditional

obedience. This process repeats itself in the formation of the great

life-units that we call peoples and States, only more slowly and with

surer meaning. In the high Cultures it is sometimes set aside or set

back in favour of other modes of being “in form,” for the sake of a

great symbol and artificially; but even then under the mask of these

forms we practically always find _de facto_ an individual rulership,

whether it be that of a King’s adviser or a party leader; and in every

revolutionary upheaval the original state of things reappears.

With this cosmic fact is bound up one of the most intimately inward

traits of all directional life, the _inherited will_, which presents

itself with the force of a natural phenomenon in every strong race

and compellingly urges even the momentary leader (often quite

unconsciously) to uphold his rank for the duration of his personal

existence or, beyond it, for that of his blood streaming on through

children and grandchildren. The same deep and plantlike trait inspires

every real following, which feels in the continuance of the blood

of leadership both a surety for and a symbol of the continuance of

its own. It is precisely in revolutions that this primitive instinct

comes out, full and strong and regardless of all principles. Precisely

because of it the France of 1800 saw not only Napoleon, but also

his hereditary position, as the true fulfilment of the Revolution.

Theorists who, like Marx and Rousseau, start from conceptual ideals

instead of from blood-facts have never grasped this immense force that

dwells in the historical world, and have in consequence labelled its

manifested effects as damnable and reactionary. But they are there,

and with a force so insistent that even the symbolism of the high

Cultures can only override them temporarily and artificially, as is

shown in the engrossing of elective officers by particular families in

the Classical, and the nepotism of the Baroque popes in our own case.

Behind the fact that leadership is very often freely resigned, and

the saying that “merit should rule,” there is practically always the

rivalry of magnates, who have no objection in principle to hereditary

rulership, but prevent it in practice because each one of them secretly

claims it for his own blood. This state of active, creative jealousy is

the foundation on which the forms of Classical oligarchy are built up.

The combination of both elements produces the idea of Dynasty. This

is so deeply rooted in the Cosmic and so closely interwoven into the

factual web of historical life that the State-ideas of each and all the

Cultures are _modifications of this one principle_, from the passionate

affirmative of the Faustian to the resolute negative of the Classical

Soul. The ripening of the State-idea of a Culture is associated with

the city and even the adolescence of the city. Nations, historical

peoples, are town-building peoples.[658] The _capital_ takes the place

of the castle and the palace as the centre of high history, and in it

the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into

that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by

national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and

here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of

_Sovereignty_.

And so, with the sinking of feudalism, Faustian history becomes

dynastic history. From little centres where princely families have

their seats (whence they “spring,” as the phrase goes, reminding us

of plant and property), the shaping of nations proceeds--nations

of strictly aristocratic constitution, but yet so that the State

conditions the being of the Estate. The genealogical principle already

ruling in the feudal nobility and the yeoman families, the expression

of the feeling for expanse and the will-to-history, has become so

powerful that the appearance of nations transcending the strong

unities of language and landscape is dependent upon the destinies

of ruling houses. Marriages and deaths sever or unite the blood of

whole populations.[659] Where a Lotharingian and a Burgundian dynasty

failed to take shape, there also nations already embryonic failed to

develop. The doom that overhung the Hohenstaufen involved more than the

imperial crown. For Germany and Italy it meant for centuries a deep

unsatisfied longing for a united German-Italian nation, while the House

of Habsburg, on the contrary, enabled, not a German, but an Austrian

nation to develop.

In the Magian world, with its cavern-feeling, the dynastic principle

was quite otherwise constituted. The Classical princeps, the legitimate

successor of tyrants and tribunes, was the embodiment of the Demos.

As Janus was the door and Vesta the hearth, so Cæsar was the people.

He was the last creation of Orphic religiousness. The “Dominus et

Deus,” on the contrary, was Magian, a Shah participating in the divine

Fire (the _hvareno_ of the Mazdaist empire of the Sassanids, which

becomes the aureole in Pagan and Christian Byzantium), which radiates

about him and makes him _pius, felix, invictus_ (the last-named, from

Commodus’s reign, his official title).[660] In Byzantium in the third

century of our era the ruler-type underwent the same transition as

was implied in the taking-down of Augustus’s civil-service state to

build Diocletian’s feudalism. “The new creation begun by Aurelian and

Probus and built up on the ruins by Diocletian and Constantine was

about as alien to the Classical world and the principate as the empire

of Charlemagne.”[661] The Magian ruler governed the visible portion of

the general Consensus of the orthodox, which was Church, State, and

Nation in one,[662] as Augustine described it in his _Civitas Dei_. The

Western ruler is by the grace of God monarch in the _historical_ world;

his people is subordinated to him because God has invested him with it.

But in matters of faith he is himself a subordinate--to God’s Vicar

on earth, or to his own conscience, as the case may be. That is the

separation of State authority and Church authority, the great Faustian

conflict between Time and Space. When, in 800, the Pope crowned the

Emperor, he _chose_ a new ruler for himself in order that he himself

might thrive. Whereas the Emperor in Byzantium was, according to

Magian world-feeling, his spiritual as well as his secular superior,

an Emperor in the Frank lands was his _servant_ in spiritual matters,

besides being (perhaps) his arm in secular affairs. As an idea, the

Papacy could arise only by separation from the Caliphate, for the Pope

is _included_ in the Caliph.

For this very reason, however, the choice of the Magian ruler cannot

be bound down to a genealogical succession-law. It issues from the

consensus of the ruling blood-kindred, out of whom the Holy Ghost

speaks and designates the Chosen One. When Theodosius died, in 550, a

relative, the nun Pulcheria, formally gave her hand to the old senator

Marcianus, thereby incorporating this statesman in the family and

securing the throne to him and continuance to the “dynasty”;[663] and

this act, like many similar occurrences in the Sassanid and Abbassid

houses, was taken as the outcome of a hint from above.

In China, the Emperor-idea of the early Chóu period, which was strictly

bound up with feudalism, soon became a dream, which, rapidly and with

increasing distinctness, came to reflect a whole preceding world

in the form of three dynasties of Emperors and myth-Emperors more

ancient still.[664] But, for the dynasties of the system of states

that thereupon grew up (in which the title King, _Wang_, came at last

into perfectly general use) strict rules came into force for royal

successions, legitimacy--a notion quite alien to the early time--became

a power to conjure with,[665] and extinction of lines, adoptions and

_mésalliances_ led, as in the Baroque of the West, to innumerable wars

of succession.[666] Some principle of legitimacy, too, surely underlay

the remarkable fact that the rulers of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty,

with whom the late period of the Culture ended, had their sons crowned

during their own lifetime.[667] The inward relationship between these

three dynastic ideas is yet another proof that Being in these three

Cultures was akin.

It requires a close insight into the political form-language of the

Classical world to perceive that here also the course of things was

exactly the same, and that it comprised not only the transition from

feudal union to class-State, but even the dynastic principle as well.

Classical being, indeed, said no to everything that might draw it

into distances either of space or of time, and even in the fact-world

of history ringed itself with creations that had something of the

defensive in them. But all this narrowing and curtailing presupposes

the thing against which it is striving to maintain itself. The

Dionysiac squandering, and the Orphic negation, of the Classical body

contained in the very _form_ of their protest the Apollinian ideal of

perfect bodily being.

Individual rulership and the will to transmit to heirs were

unmistakably taken for granted in the oldest kingship.[668] But they

had become questionable even by 800, as the rôle of Telemachus in the

older parts of the Odyssey indicates. The royal title was frequently

borne by great vassals and the most conspicuous of the nobles. In

Sparta and in Lycia there were two of them, and in the Phæacian city

of the epic and in many actual cities there were more. Next comes the

splitting-off of offices from dignities. Lastly, the kingship itself

becomes an office which the nobility confers (though at first, perhaps,

only upon members of the old royal family); thus in Sparta the Ephors,

as representing the First Estate, were in no wise limited in their

choice by rule; and in Corinth from about 750 the royal clan of the

Bacchiadæ abolished hereditary succession, and on each occasion set up

a _prytaneus_ with royal rank from within their own body. The great

offices, which likewise were hereditary at first, came to be for one

life only, then were limited to a term, and lastly became annual, and,

further, were so arranged that there were more holders than offices,

and the leadership was exercised by each in turn--the custom which,

as is well known, led to the disaster of Cannæ. These annual offices,

from the Etruscan annual dictature[669] to the Doric ephorate (which

is found in Heraclea and Messene as well as Sparta) are firmly bound

up with the essence of the Polis, and they reach their full structure

about 650. Exactly at the corresponding date of the Western class-State

(end of the fifteenth century), the hereditary power of dynasties was

being secured by the Emperor Maximilian and his marriage-politics

(against the claims of the Electors), by Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VII

of England, and Louis XI of France.[670]

But with the increasing emphasis upon the Classical here and now, the

priesthood, which had the beginnings of an Estate in it, became _pari

passu_ a mere aggregate of city officials. The capital, so to call it,

of the Homeric kingship, instead of being the centre for the radiation

of State influence in all directions into the distance, contracted

its magic circle until State and city became identical. Thereby, of

course, the nobility was fused with the patriciate, and if even in the

Gothic the representation of the young cities (for example, the English

Commons or the French States-General) was exclusively by patricians,

how much more so in the powerful city-state of the Classical! Not

indeed in idea, _but in fact_, it was a pure kingless aristocratic

State. The strictly Apollinian “form” of the growing Polis is called

_oligarchy_.

And thus, at the close of the early periods of both these Cultures, we

see two principles parallel and contrasted, the Faustian-genealogical

and the Apollinian-oligarchic; two kinds of constitutional law, of

Dike. The one is supported by an unmeasured sense of expanse, reaches

back deep into the past with form-tradition, thinks forward with the

same intense will-to-endure into the remotest future; but in the

present, too, works for political effectiveness over broad expanses by

well-considered dynastic marriages and by the truly Faustian, dynamic,

and contrapuntal politics that we call _diplomacy_. The other, wholly

corporeal and statuesque, is self-limited by its policy of _autarkeia_

to the nearest and the most immediate present, and at every point

stoutly denies that which Western being affirms.

Both the dynastic state and the city-state presuppose the city itself.

But there is this difference, that a seat of government in the West,

though it may be (and frequently is) far from being the greatest city

of the land, is a force-centre in a field of political tensions such

that every occurrence, in however remote a corner, vibrates generally

throughout the whole--whereas in the Classical, life huddles closer

and closer until it reaches the grotesque phenomenon of Synœcism--the

very acme of the Euclidean will-to-form in the political world. It

is impossible to imagine the State unless and until the nation sits

physically concentrated in one heap, as one _body_; it must be _seen_,

and even seen “at a glance.” And while the Faustian tendency is more

and more to diminish the number of dynastic centres--so that even

Maximilian I could see looming in the distance a dynastically secure

universal monarchy of his house--the Classical world fell apart into

innumerable petty points, which, almost as soon as they came into

existence, started to do that which for Classical mankind was almost

a necessity of thought and the purest expression of _autarkeia_--to

destroy one another.[671]

Synœcism with its consequence, the creation of the Polis-type proper,

was exclusively the work of _aristocracy_. It was they that established

the Classical city-state, and for themselves alone; it was the

drawing-together of country nobility and patriciate that brought it

into form. The vocational classes were already on the spot, and the

peasantry ceased to count from the class point of view. And by the

concentration of noble power at one point the kingship of the feudal

period was shattered.

With these glimpses into Greece to go upon, we may venture, though

under all reserves of course, to outline the history of primitive

Rome. The Roman synœcism--the assembling of widely scattered noble

families--is identical with the “founding” of the city, an Etruscan

undertaking of the beginning of the seventh century.[672] Facing

the royal stronghold of the Capitol, there had long been two other

settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal. To the first of these

belonged the ancient goddess Diva Rumina[673] and the Etruscan Ruma

clan;[674] the god of the second was Quirinus Pater. From these comes

the dual name of Romans and “Quirites,” and the dual priesthoods

of the Salii and Luperci, which adhered to the two hills. Now, as

the three blood-tribes named Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres are in all

probability common to all Etruscan localities,[675] they must have

existed in both of those which concern us here; and thus are explained,

on the one hand, the number _six_ of centuries of equites, of military

tribunes, of aristocratic Vestals, and, on the other, the number

_two_ of the prætors (or consuls) who were, quite early, attached

to the King as representatives of the nobles and gradually deprived

him of all influence. Already by 600 the constitution of Rome must

have been a strong oligarchy of “Patres” with a shadow-kingship[676]

as figure-head. Thus both the older theory of an expulsion of the

kings, and the newer of a slow disintegration of the royal power, can

stand side by side after all, the former as referring to the fall of

the Tarquinian Tyrannis, which (as everywhere else in the Classical

world--Pisistratus in Athens, for example) had set itself up in

opposition to the oligarchy about the middle of the sixth century;

the latter as referring to the slow disintegration of the feudal power

of the (may we say) Homeric kingship by the aristocratic city-state,

_before_ the “foundation,” so-called--the crisis, probably, in which

the prætors emerged, as the Archons and Ephors emerged elsewhere.

This Polis was no less strictly aristocratic than the Western

class-State, with its nobility, clergy, and higher burgesses. The

residue of the people belonging to it was merely its _object_, but--in

the West the object of its political _care_, and in the Classical the

object of its political _carelessness_. For here “_Carpe diem_” was the

motto of the oligarchy as well as of others. It proclaims itself aloud

in the poems of Theognis and the Song of Hybrias the Cretan. It made

Classical finance till right into its latest phases--from the piracy

practised by Polycrates upon his own people to the proscriptions of the

Roman Triumvirs--into a more or less hand-to-mouth seizing of resources

for the moment. In jurisprudence it emerges with unparalleled logic in

the limitation of Roman edict-law to the term of office of the one-year

prætor.[677] And, lastly, it is seen in the ever-growing practice of

filling military, legal, and administrative offices (particularly

the _more_ important of them) by lot--a kind of homage to Tyche, the

goddess of the Moment.

This was the Classical world’s manner of being politically “in form”

and, correspondingly, of thinking and feeling. There are no exceptions.

The Etruscans were as much under its domination as the Dorians and

the Macedonians.[678] When Alexander and his successors dotted the

Orient far and wide with their Hellenistic cities, they did so

without conscious choice, for they could not imagine any other form

of political organization. Antioch was to be Syria, and Alexandria

Egypt. The latter, under the Ptolemies and later under the Cæsars,

was, not indeed legally, but certainly in practice, a Polis on a vast

scale--for the country outside, long reverted to townless fellahdom

and managed by immemorial precedents, stood at its gates like an alien

frontier.[679] The Roman Imperium was nothing but the last and greatest

Classical city-state standing on foundations of a colossal synœcism.

Under Marcus Aurelius the rhetor Aristides could say with perfect

justification that it had “brought together this world in the name of

one city: wheresoever a man may be born in it, it is at its centre that

he dwells.” Even the conquered populations of the Empire--the wandering

desert-tribes, the upland-valley communities of the Alps--were

constituted as _civitates_. Livy thinks invariably in the forms of

the city-state, and for Tacitus provincial history simply does not

exist. When, in 49, Pompey, withdrawing before Cæsar, gave up Rome as

militarily unimportant and betook himself to the East to create there

a firm base of operations, he was doomed. Giving up the city, he had,

in the eyes of the ruling classes, given up the State. To them Rome was

all.[680]

These city-states were in principle inextensible. Their number could

increase, but not their ambit. The notion that the transformation of

the Roman _clientela_ into a voting _plebs_, and the creation of the

country tribes, meant a breach in the Polis-idea is incorrect. It was

in Rome as in Attica--the whole life of the State remained as before

limited to one point, which was the Agora, the Forum. However far away

those to whom citizenship was granted might live--in Hannibal’s day

it might be anywhere in Italy, and later anywhere in the world--the

_exercise_ of his political right depended upon _personal presence_

in the Forum. Hence the majority of the citizens were, not legally,

but practically without influence in political business.[681] What

citizenship meant for them, therefore, was simply the duty of military

service and the enjoyment of the city’s domestic law.[682] But even

for the citizen coming to Rome, political power was limited by a

second and _artificial_ synœcism which came into existence after, and

as the result of, enfranchisement of the peasant, and can only be

understood as an unconscious effort to maintain the idea of the Polis

strictly unimpaired; the new citizens were inscribed, regardless of

their numbers, in a very few tribes (eight, under the Lex Julia), and

were always, therefore, in a minority in the Comitia relatively to the

citizens of the older franchise.

And naturally so, for this _civitas_ was regarded through and through

as one body, a σῶμα. That which did not belong to it was out of

its law, _hostis_. The gods and the heroes stood above, the slave

(not quite to be called human, according to Aristotle) below, this

aggregate of persons.[683] But the individual was a ζῶον πολιτικόν

in a sense that would be regarded by us, who think and live in our

expanse-feeling, as an utter slavery; he existed _only_ by reason of

his membership of an individual Polis. Owing to this Euclidean feeling,

the nobility as a self-contained body was at first synonymous with

the Polis--to such an extent, indeed, that even in the Twelve Tables

marriage between patricians and plebeians was forbidden and the Spartan

Ephors began their term of office, according to ancient custom, with

a declaration of war against the Helots. The relation was reversed

whenever in consequence of a revolution the non-noble became _the_

Demos--but its meaning remained. As in inward, so also in outward

relationships, the _body_ politic was the foundation of all events

throughout Classical history. The cities, hundreds of them, lay in wait

for each other, each as self-gathered, politically and economically,

as it was possible to make it, ready to bite, letting fly on the

smallest excuse, and having as its war-aim, not the extension of its

own state, but the extinction of the other side’s. Wars ended with the

destruction of the enemy’s city and the killing or enslavement of his

citizens, just as revolutions ended with the massacre or expulsion of

the losers and the confiscation of their property by the victorious

party. The natural interstate condition of the West is a close network

of diplomatic relations, which may be broken through by wars; but the

Classical law of nations assumes war as a normal condition, interrupted

from time to time by peace treaties, and a declaration of war merely

re-established the natural state of policy. Only so do the forty- and

fifty-year peace treaties, _spondai_ (such as the famous one of Nicias

in 421), become intelligible, as temporary guarantee-treaties.

These two State-forms, with the styles of policy appropriate to each,

are assured by the close of the Early period. The State-idea has

triumphed over the feudal union, but it is the Estates that carry that

idea, and the nation has political existence only as their sum.

V

With the beginning of the Late period there is a decisive turn, where

city and country are in equilibrium and the powers proper to the city,

money and brains, have become so strong that they feel themselves, as

non-estate, an equal match for the old Estates. It is the moment when

the State-idea finally rises superior to the Estates and begins to set

up _in their place_ the concept of the Nation.

The State has fought and won to its rights along a line of advance

from feudal union to the aristocratic State. In the latter the Estates

exist only with reference to the State, instead of vice versa, but, on

the other hand, the disposition of things is such that the Government

only meets the governed nation when and in so far as the nation is

class-ordered. Everyone belongs to the nation, but only an élite to the

classes, and these alone count politically.

But the nearer the State approaches its pure form, and the more it

becomes _absolute_--that is, independent of any other form-ideal--the

more heavily the concept of the nation tells against that of class,

and there comes a moment when the nation is governed _as such_,

and distinctions of “standing” become purely social. Against this

evolution--which is one of the necessities of the Culture, inevitable,

irrevocable--the old noble and priestly classes make one more effort

of resistance. For them, now, _everything_ is at stake--the heroic and

the saintly, the old law, rank, blood--and, from their point of view,

against what?

In the West this struggle of the old Estates against the State-power

took the form of the _Fronde_. In the Classical world, where there

was no dynasty to represent the future and the aristocracy alone

had political existence, we find that a dynastic or quasi-dynastic

embodiment of the State-idea actually _formed itself_, and, supported

by the non-privileged part of the nation, raised this latter for the

first time to power. That was the mission of the _Tyrannis_.

In this change from the class-State to the absolute State, which

allowed no measures of validity but its own, the dynasties of the

West--and those of Egypt and of China likewise--called the non-estate

to their aid, _thereby recognizing it as a political quantity_. Herein

lies the real importance of the struggle against the Fronde, in which,

initially, the powers of the greater cities could not but see advantage

to themselves, for here the ruler was standing forth in the name of the

State, the care of all, and he was fighting the nobility because it

wanted to uphold the _Estate_ as a political magnitude.

In the Polis, on the contrary, where the State consisted exclusively

in the form and embodied no hereditary head, the necessity of bringing

out the unclassed on behalf of the State-idea produced the Tyrannis,

in which a family or a faction of the nobility itself assumed the

dynastic rôle, without which action on the part of the Third Estate

would have been impossible. Late Classical historians were too remote

from this process to seize its meaning, and dealt with it merely in

terms of externals of private life. In reality, the Tyrannis was _the

State_, and oligarchy opposed it under the banner of class. It rested,

therefore, upon the support of peasants and burghers--in Athens (_c._

580) the Diakrii and Paralii parties. Therefore, again, it backed the

Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollinian; thus in Attica

Pisistratus forced the worship of Dionysus[684] on the peasantry,

in Sicyon Clisthenes forbade the recital of the Homeric poems,[685]

and in Rome it was almost certainly in the time of the Tarquins that

the trinity Demeter (Ceres)-Dionysus-Kore was introduced.[686] Its

temple was dedicated in 483 by Spurius Cassius, the same who perished

later in an attempt to reintroduce the Tyrannis. The Ceres temple

was the sanctuary of the Plebs, and its managers, the ædiles, were

their trusted spokesmen before the tribunate was ever heard of.[687]

The Tyrants, like the princes of the Western Baroque, were liberals

in a broad sense of the word that ceased to be possible for them in

the subsequent stage of bourgeois dominance. But the Classical also

began at that time to pass round the word that “money makes the man

(χρήματ’ ἀνήρ).”[688] The sixth-century Tyrannis brought the Polis-idea

to its conclusions and created the constitutional concept of the

Citizen, the _Polites_, the _Civis_, the sum of these, irrespective of

their class-provenance, forming the _soma_ of the city-state. When,

therefore, the oligarchy contrived to win after all--thanks once more

to the Classical craving for the present, and the consequent fear and

hatred evoked by the quasi-will-to-duration of the dynasts--the concept

of the citizen was there, firmly established, and the non-patrician had

learned to regard _himself_ as an estate _vis-à-vis_ a “rest.” He had

become a political party--the word “democracy” (in its specifically

Classical sense) now acquired a really serious content--and what he

set himself to do was, no longer to come to the aid of the State, but

_to be himself the State_ as the nobility had been before. He began to

count--money and heads, for the money-census and the general franchise

are alike bourgeois weapons--whereas an aristocracy does not count,

but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes. As the absolute

State came out of Fronde and First Tyrannis, so it perished in French

Revolution and Second Tyrannis. In this second conflict, which is

already one of defence, the dynasty returns to the side of the nobility

in order to guard the State-idea against a new class-rule, that of the

bourgeois.

In Egypt, too, the period between Fronde and Revolution is hall-marked.

It is the Middle Kingdom. The XIIth Dynasty (2000-1788)--in particular

Amenemhet I and Sesostris I--had established the absolute State

in severe conflicts with the baronage. The first of these rulers,

as a famous poem of the time relates, barely escaped from a court

conspiracy, and the biography of Sinuhet[689] shows us that after

his death, which was kept secret for a time, rebellion threatened.

The third was murdered by palace officials. We learn from the

inscriptions in the family grave of the earl Chmenotep[690] that the

cities had become rich and almost independent, and warred with each

other. Certainly they cannot have been smaller at that time than the

Greek cities at the time of the Persian Wars. It was on them and on

a certain number of loyal magnates that the dynasty rested.[691]

Finally, Sesostris III (1887-1850) succeeded in completely abolishing

feudal nobility. Thenceforward there was only a court-nobility and a

single, admirably ordered bureau-State;[692] but already some lamented

that people of standing were reduced to misery and that the “sons of

nobodies” enjoyed rank and consideration.[693] Democracy was beginning

and the great social evolution of the Hyksos period was brewing.

The corresponding place in China is that of the Ming-Chu (or Pa,

685-591). These were Protectors of princely origin, who exercised

an unconstitutional, but none the less real, power over a world of

states weltering in anarchy, and called congresses of princes for

the restoration of order and the recognition of stable political

principles, even summoning the “Ruler of the Middle” himself (now

become totally unimportant) out of the house of Chóu. The first was

Hwang of Tsi (d. 645), who called the Diet of 659 and of whom Confucius

wrote that he had rescued China from a reversion to barbarism. Their

name Ming-dshu became later, like the word “tyrant,” a term of obloquy,

because later men were unwilling to see in the phenomenon anything

but a power unauthorized by law--but it is beyond all question that

these great diplomatists were an element working with a devoted care

for the State and the historical future against the old Estates, and

supported by the young classes of mind and money. It is a high Culture

that speaks to us in the little that we so far know about them from

Chinese sources. Some were writers; others selected philosophers to be

their ministers. It is a matter of indifference whether we mentally

parallel them with Richelieu or with Wallenstein or with Periander--in

any case it is with them that the “people” first emerges as a political

quantity.[694] It is the outlook and high diplomacy of genuine

Baroque--the absolute State sets itself up in principle as the opponent

of the aristocratic State, and wins through.

In this lies the close parallelism of these events with the Fronde

of Western Europe. In France the Crown after 1614 ceased to summon

the State-General, this body having shown itself to be too strong

for the united forces of State and bourgeoisie. In England Charles I

similarly tried to govern without Parliament after 1628. In Germany,

at the same time, the Thirty Years’ War broke out. The magnitude of

its religious significance is apt to overshadow for us the other issue

involved, and it must not be forgotten that it was also an effort to

bring to a decision the struggle between imperial power and the Fronde

of the _great_ electors, and that between the individual princes and

the lesser Frondes of their local estate-assemblies. But the centre

of world-politics then lay in _Spain_. There, in conjunction with the

high courtesies generally, the diplomatic style of the Baroque had

evolved in the cabinet of Philip II; and the dynastic principle--which

embodied the absolute State _vis-à-vis_ the Cortes--had attained to its

highest development in the course of the long struggle with the House

of Bourbon. The attempt to align England also in the Spanish system had

failed under Philip II, when Queen Mary, his wife, was disappointed of

an heir already expected and announced. But now, under Philip IV, the

idea of a universal monarchy spanning the oceans revived--no longer

the mystic dream-monarchy of the early Gothic, the “Holy Roman Empire,

German by nation,” but the tangible ideal of a world-dominion in

Habsburg hands, which was to centre in Madrid and to have the solid

possession of India and America and the already sensible power of

money as its foundations. It was at this time, too, that the Stuarts

were tempted to secure their endangered position by marrying the heir

of the English and Scottish thrones to a Spanish Infanta; but in the

end Madrid preferred to link itself with its own collateral line in

Vienna, and so James I readdressed his marriage-alliance proposals to

the opposition party of the Bourbons. The futile complications of this

family policy contributed more than anything else to bind the Puritan

movement and the English Fronde into one great Revolution.

In these great decisions the actual occupants of the thrones were--as

in “contemporary” China--only secondary figures compared with great

individual statesmen, in whose hands the fate of the West rested for

whole decades. Olivarez in Madrid and the Spanish Ambassador Oñate

in Vienna were then the most powerful personages in Europe. Their

opponents were Wallenstein, standing for the Empire-idea in Germany,

and Richelieu, standing for the absolute State in France--and these

were succeeded a little later by Mazarin in France, Cromwell in

England, Oldenbarneveldt in Holland, Oxenstierna in Sweden. Not until

the Great Elector of Brandenburg do we meet again a monarch having

political importance of his own.

Wallenstein, unconsciously, began where the Hohenstaufen had stopped.

Since the death of Frederick II, in 1250, the power of the Estates

of the Empire had become unlimited, and it was against them, and as

champion of an absolute emperor’s state, that he fought during the

first tenure of command. Had he been a greater diplomatist, had he

been clearer and above all more resolute (for actually he was timid in

the presence of decisive turnings), and had he, in particular, taken

the trouble as Richelieu did to bring the person of the monarch under

his influence--then probably it would have been all up with princedom

within the Empire. He saw in these princes rebels, to be unseated

and dispossessed of their lands; at the peak of his power (end of

1629), when militarily he held Germany in the hollow of his hand, he

said aloud in conversation that the Emperor ought to be master in the

Empire as the Kings of France and Spain were masters of their own. His

army, which was “self-supporting” and by reason of its numbers also

independent of the Estates, was the first instance in German history

of an Imperial army of European significance; in comparison with

it Tilly’s army of the Fronde (for that was what the League really

was) counted for little. When Wallenstein, in 1628, leaguered before

Stralsund, visualizing a Habsburg sea-power in the Baltic wherewith

to take the Bourbon system in the rear--and just then Richelieu was

besieging La Rochelle, with better fortune--hostilities between himself

and the League had become almost unavoidable. He absented himself

from the Diet of Regensburg in 1630, saying that its seat “would

presently be in Paris.” This was the most serious political error

of his life, for in his absence the Frondist Electors defeated the

Emperor by threatening to displace him in favour of Louis XIII, and

forced him to dismiss his general. And with that, though it did not

realize the consequence of the step, the central power in Germany gave

away its army. Henceforth Richelieu supported the greater Fronde in

Germany with the object of breaking the Spanish power there, while on

the other side Olivarez, and Wallenstein as soon as he regained his

power, allied themselves with the French aristocrats, who thereupon

took the offensive under the Queen-mother and Gaston of Orléans. But

the Imperial power had missed its grand chance. The Cardinal won in

both games. In 1632 he executed the last of the Montmorencys[695]

and brought the Catholic Electors of Germany into open alliance with

France. And thenceforward Wallenstein, becoming unsure of his own final

purposes, learned more and more against the Spanish idea, thinking

that he could keep the Empire-idea clear of it, and so _ipso facto_

approached nearer and nearer to the standpoint of the Estates--like

Marshal Turenne in the French Fronde a few years later. _This was the

decisive turn in later German history._ With Wallenstein’s secession

the absolute emperor-state became impossible, and his murder in 1634

did not remedy matters, for the Emperor had no substitute to take his

place.

And yet it was just then that the conjuncture was favourable once more.

For in 1640 the decisive conflict between Crown and estates broke

out simultaneously in Spain, France, and England. In almost every

Spanish province the Cortes rose against Olivarez; Portugal, and with

it India and Africa, fell away for ever, and it took years to regain

even Catalonia and Naples. In England--just as in the Thirty Years’

War--the constitutional conflict between the Crown and the gentry

who dominated the Commons was carefully separated from the religious

side of the Revolution, deep as was the interpenetration of the two.

But the growing resistance that Cromwell encountered in the lower

class in particular--which drove him, all unwillingly, into military

dictatorship--and the later popularity of the restored monarchy

show the extent to which, over and above all religious differences,

aristocratic interest had been concerned in bringing about the fall of

the dynasty.

At the very time of Charles I’s trial and execution an insurrection in

Paris was forcing the French Court to flee. Men shouted for a republic

and built barricades. Had Cardinal de Retz been more of a Cromwell,

victory of the Estates over Mazarin would have been at least a

possibility. But the issue of this grand general crisis of the West was

determined by the weight and the destinies of a few personalities, and

took shape in such a way that it was in England _alone_ that the Fronde

(represented by Parliament) subjected the State and the kingship to its

control--confirming this control, in the “glorious Revolution” of 1688,

so permanently that even to-day essential parts of the old Norman State

continue established. In France and Spain the kingship won unqualified

victory. In Germany the Peace of Westphalia placed the Fronde of the

greater princes in an English relation towards the Emperor and in the

French relation towards the lesser Fronde of the local princes. In

the Empire as such, the Estates ruled; in its provinces, the Dynasty.

Thenceforth the Imperial dignity, like the English kingship, was a

name, surrounded by relics of Spanish stateliness dating from the early

Baroque; while the individual princes, like the leading families of

the English aristocracy, succumbed to the model of Paris and their

duodecimo absolutism was, politically and socially, bound in the

Versailles style. So, in this field and in that, the decision fell in

favour of the Bourbons and against the Habsburgs, a decision already

visible to all men in the Peace of the Pyrenees of 1659.

With this epochal turn the State, which as a possibility is inherent

in every Culture, was actualized and attained to such a height of

“condition” as could neither be surpassed nor for long maintained.

Already there is a quiet breath of autumn in the air when Frederick

the Great is entertaining at Sans Souci. These are the years too, in

which the great special arts attain to their last, most refined, and

most intellectual maturity--side by side with the fine orators of the

Athenian Agora there are Zeuxis and Praxiteles, side by side with the

filigree of Cabinet-diplomacy the music of Bach and Mozart.

This cabinet-politics has itself become a high art, an artistic

satisfaction to all who have a finger in it, marvellous in its

subtlety and elegance, courtly, refined, working mysteriously at great

distances--for already Russia, the North American colonies, even

the Indian states are put into play in order by the mere weight of

surprising combinations to bring about decisions at quite other points

on the globe. It is a game with strict rules, a game of intercepted

letters and secret confidants, of alliances and congresses within a

system of governments which even then was called (with deep meaning)

the “concert” of the powers--full of _noblesse_ and _esprit_, to use

the phrases of the period, a mode of keeping history “in form” never

and nowhere else imagined, or even imaginable.

In the Western world, whose sphere of influence is already almost the

sphere itself, the period of the absolutist State covers scarcely a

century and a half--from 1660, when Bourbon triumphed over Habsburg in

the Peace of the Pyrenees and the Stuarts returned to England, to the

Coalition Wars directed against the French Revolution, in which London

triumphed over Paris, or, if one prefers it so, over that Congress of

Vienna in which the old diplomacy, that of blood and not money, gave

the world its grand farewell performance. Corresponding periods are

the Age of Pericles between the First and the Second Tyrannis, and the

Tshun-tsiu, “Spring and Autumn,” as the Chinese call the time, between

the Protectors and the “Contending States.”

In this last phase of dignified politics with forms traditional but

not popular, familiar but not smiled at, the culminating points are

marked by the extinction of the two Habsburg lines in quick succession

and the diplomatic and warlike events that throng in 1700-10 round the

Spanish, and in 1740-60 round the Austrian succession.[696] It is the

climax also of the genealogical principle. _Bella gerant alii; tu,

felix Austria, nube!_ was indeed “an extension of war by other means.”

The phrase indeed was coined long before (in connexion with Maximilian

I), but it was not until now that it reached its fullest effects.

Fronde Wars pass over into Succession Wars, decided upon in cabinets

and fought out chivalrously by small armies and according to strict

conventions.[697] What was contended for was the heritage of half the

world which the marriage-politics of early Baroque had brought together

in Habsburg hands. The State is still “well up to form”; the nobility

has become a loyal aristocracy of court and service, carrying on the

wars of the Crown and organizing its administration. Side by side with

the France of Louis XIV, there presently arose in Prussia a masterpiece

of State organization. From the conflicts of the Great Elector with

his Estates (1660) to the death of Frederick the Great (who received

Mirabeau in audience three years before the Fall of the Bastille)

Prussia’s road is the same as France’s, and the outcome in each case is

a State which was in every point the opposite of the English order.

For the situation was otherwise in the Empire and in England. There

the Frondes had won, and the nations were governed, not absolutely,

but aristocratically. But between England and the Empire, again, there

was the immense difference that England, as an island, could largely

dispense with governmental watchfulness, and that her peers in the

Upper House and her gentry in the Lower founded their actions on the

self-evidentness of England’s greatness;[698] whereas in the Empire

the upper stratum of the land-princes--with the Diet at Regensburg as

their Upper House--were chiefly concerned with educating into distinct

“peoples” the fragments of the nation that had accidentally fallen to

their respective hands, and with marking off their scattered bits of

fatherland as strictly as possible from other “peoples’” bits. In place

of the world-horizon that there had been in Gothic days, provincial

horizon was cultivated by thought and deed. The idea of the Nation

itself was abandoned to the realm of dreams--that _other_ world which

is not of race but of language, not of Destiny but of Causality. And in

it arose the idea, and finally the fact, of the “people” as conceived

by poets and thinkers, who founded themselves a republic in the clouds

of verse and logic and at last came to believe that politics consisted

in idealistic writing and reading and speaking, and not in deed and

resolve--so that even to-day real deeds and resolves are confused with

mere expressions of inclination.

In England the victory of the gentry and the Declaration of Rights

(1689) in reality put an end to the State. Parliament put William III

on his throne, just as later it prevented George I and George II from

vacating theirs, in the interest of its class. The word “State,” which

had been current as early as the Tudors, fell into disuse--it has

become impossible to translate into English either Louis XIV’s “_L’état

c’est moi_” or Frederick the Great’s “_Ich bin der erste Diener meiner

Staates_.” On the other hand, the word “society” established itself

as the expression of the fact that the nation was “in form” under

the class- and not under the state-régime; the same word that with a

significant misunderstanding Rousseau and the Continental rationalists

generally took over to express the hatred of the Third Estate for

authority.[699] But in England authority as “the Government” was

clear-cut and well understood. From George I onwards its centre was the

Cabinet, a body which constitutionally did not exist at all[700] and

factually was an executive committee of the faction of the nobility

in command for the time being. Absolutism existed, but it was the

absolutism of a class-delegation. The idea of “_lèse-majeste_” was

transferred to Parliament, as the immunity of the Roman kings passed

to the tribunes. The genealogical principle is there, too, but it

is expressed in the family relations within the higher nobility and

the influence of the same upon the parliamentary situation. Even in

1902 Lord Salisbury acted as a Cecil in proposing his nephew Balfour

as his successor as against Joseph Chamberlain. The noble factions

of Tory and Whig separated themselves more and more distinctly, very

often, indeed, within the same family, according to whether the

“power-” outweighed the “booty-” outlook--that is, according as land

was valued above money[701]--or vice versa, a contrast that even in

the eighteenth century was expressed within the higher bourgeoisie by

the words “respectable” and “fashionable,” standing for two opposed

conceptions of the gentleman. The State’s care for all is frankly

replaced by class-interest. It is for this that the individual claims

his freedom--that is what “freedom” means in English--but the insular

existence and the build of “society” have created such relations that

in the last resort everyone _who belongs to it_ (which is a matter of

moment in a status-dictatorship) finds his interests represented by

those of one or the other noble party.

This steadiness of last, deepest, and ripest form, which springs

from the historical feeling of Western mankind, was denied to the

Classical. Tyrannis vanished. Strict oligarchy vanished. The Demos

which the politics of the sixth century had created as the sum of all

men belonging to the Polis burst into factions and spasmodic shocks

of noble _versus_ non-noble, and conflicts began within states, _and

between states_, in which each party tried to exterminate the other

lest it should itself be exterminated. When in 511--that is, still in

the age of the Tyrants--Sybaris was annihilated by the Pythagoreans,

the event, the first of its kind, shocked the entire Classical world;

even in distant Miletus mourning was worn. But now the elimination

of a Polis or a party was so usual that a regular form and choice

of methods--corresponding to the typical peace-treaties of Western

Baroque--arose for the disposal of the vanquished--for example, the

inhabitants might be massacred or sold into slavery, the houses

razed or divided as spoil. The will to absolutism is there--after

the Persian Wars it is universal, in Rome and Sparta no less than in

Athens--but the _willed_ narrowness of the Polis, the point-politic,

and the _willed_ brevity of office-holding and immediacy of schemes

made it impossible ever to reach a firm decision as to who should be

“the State.”[702] The high craft of diplomacy, which in the West was

practised by cabinets inspired by a tradition, was here handicapped by

an amateurism founded not on any accidental inadequacy of persons--the

men were available--but solely in the political form itself. The course

of this form from the First to the Second Tyrannis is unmistakable

and corresponds to the same evolution in all other Late periods; but

the specifically Classical style of it appears in the disorder and

subjection to incidentals which naturally and inevitably followed from

a life that could not and would not dissociate itself from the moment.

The most important example of this is the evolution of Rome during the

fifth century--a period over which hitherto historians have wrangled,

precisely because they have tried to find in it a consistency that can

no more have existed there than anywhere else in the Classical State.

A further source of misunderstanding is that the conditions of that

development have been regarded as something quite primitive, whereas

in fact even the city of the Tarquins must have already been in a very

advanced state, and primitive Rome lay much further back. The relations

of the fifth century are on a small scale in comparison with those of

Cæsar’s age, but they were not antiquated. Because written tradition

is defective (as it was everywhere save in Athens), the literary

movement which followed the Punic Wars set itself to fill the blanks

with poetry and in particular (as was to be expected in the Hellenistic

age) with the evocation of an idyllic past, as, for example, in the

story of Cincinnatus. And modern scholarship, though it has ceased to

believe these legends, has nevertheless remained under the influence

of the taste that inspired their invention, and continues to look at

the conditions of the time through its eyes--the more readily as Greek

and Roman history are treated as two separate worlds, and the evil

practice of identifying the beginning of history with the beginning of

sure documentation is followed as usual. In truth, the conditions of

500 B.C. are anything but Homeric. The trace of its walls shows that

Rome under the Tarquins was, with Capua, the greatest city in Italy

and bigger than the Athens of Themistocles.[703] A city that concludes

commercial treaties with Carthage is no peasant commune. And it follows

that the population in the four city tribes of 471 must have been very

numerous, probably greater than the whole total of the sixteen country

tribes scattered insignificantly in space.

The great success of the landowning nobility in overthrowing a

Tyrannis that was almost certainly very popular, and establishing

unrestricted senatorial rule, was nullified again by a series of

violent events about 471--the replacement of the family tribes by

four great city-wards, the representation of these by tribunes (who

were sacrosanct--i.e., who enjoyed a _royal_ privilege that no single

official of the aristocratic administration possessed) and lastly the

liberation of the small peasantry from the _clientela_ of the nobility.

The Tribunate was the happiest inspiration, not only of this period,

but of the Classical Polis generally. It was _the Tyrannis raised

to the position of an integral part of the Constitution_, and set

in parallel, moreover, with the old oligarchical offices, all of

which continued in being. This meant that the social revolution also

was carried out in _legal forms_, so that what was elsewhere a wild

discharge in shock and countershock became here a forum-contest,

limited as a rule to debate and vote. There was no need to evoke

the tyrant, for he was there already. The Tribune possessed rights

inherent in position, not rights arising out of an office, and with his

immunity he could carry out revolutionary acts that would have been

inconceivable without street-fighting in any other Polis. This creation

was an incident, but no other of its creations helped Rome to rise as

this did. In Rome alone the transition from the First to the Second

Tyrannis, and the further development therefrom till beyond the days

of Zama, was accomplished, not indeed without shocks, but at any rate

without catastrophe. The Tribune was the link between the Tarquins and

Cæsar. With the Lex Hortensia of 287 he became all-powerful, _he is

the Second Tyrannis in constitutional “form.”_ In the second century,

tribunes caused consuls and censors to be arrested. The Gracchi were

tribunes, Cæsar assumed the perpetual tribunate, and in the principate

of Augustus the tribunician dignity was the essential element of his

position, the only one in virtue of which he possessed sovereign rights.

The crisis of 471 was not unique but generically Classical. Its

target was the oligarchy, which even now, within the Demos created

by the Tyrannis, strove to be the impulsive force in affairs. It

was no longer, as in Hesiod’s day, the oligarchy as estate _versus_

non-estate, but the _oligarchic party against a second party_--both in

the cadre of the absolute state, which as such was not brought into

the controversy. In Athens, 487 B.C., the archons were overthrown and

their rights transferred to the college of strategi.[704] In 461 the

Areopagus, the Athenian equivalent of the Senate, was overthrown. In

Sicily (where relations with Rome were close) the democracy triumphed

at Acragas (Agrigentum) in 471, at Syracuse in 465, at Rhegium and

Messana in 461. In Sparta the kings Cleomenes (488) and Pausanias (470)

tried in turn, without success, to free the Helots--in Roman terms,

the Clientela--and thereby to acquire for the kingship, _vis-à-vis_

the oligarchic Ephors, the importance of the tribunate in Rome. The

missing element in this case, which was present (though overlooked

by our scholars) in that of Rome, was the population-strength of the

mercantile city that gives such movements both weight and leadership;

it was on this that even the great Helot rising of 464 broke down (an

event which probably inspired the Roman legends of a secession of the

Plebs to the Mons Sacer).

In a Polis, the country nobility and the patriciate fuse (that is the

object of synœcism, as we have seen), but not so the burgher and the

peasant. So far as concerns their struggle with the oligarchy these

are a single party--namely, the democratic--but otherwise they are

_two_. This is what comes to expression in the next crisis. In this

(_c._ 450) the Roman patriciate sought to re-establish its power _as a

party_--for so we must interpret the introduction of the Decemvirs and

the abolition of the Tribunate; the legislation of the Twelve Tables by

which the plebs, which had recently attained political existence, was

denied “Connubium” and “Commercium”; and above all the creation of the

small country tribes in which the influence of the old families (not

legally but in fact) predominated and which (in the Comitia Tributa

now set up alongside the old Centuriata) enjoyed the unchallengeable

majority of 16 to 4. This, of course, meant the disfranchisement of the

townspeople by the peasantry, and there can be no doubt that it was a

move of the Patrician party to make effective in one common blow the

common antipathy of the countryside and themselves towards the money

economics of the city.

The counterstroke came quickly; it is recognizable in the number _ten_

of the tribunes who appear after the withdrawal of the Decemvirs,[705]

but there were other events too that cannot but have belonged with

it--the attempt of Sp. Mælius to set up a Tyrannis (439), the

setting-up of Consular Tribunes by the army in place of the civil

officials (438), and the Lex Canuleia (445) which made an end of the

prohibition of connubium between patricians and plebeians.