There can be no doubt, of course, that there were factions within both

the patrician and the plebeian parties which would have liked to upset

this fundamental trait of the Roman Polis, the opposition of Senate

and Tribunate, by abolishing the one or the other; but the form turned

out to be so right that it was never seriously challenged. With the

enforcement by the Army of plebeian eligibility to the highest offices

(399) the contest took a quite different turn. The fifth century

may be summed up, under the aspect of internal politics, as that of

the struggle for lawful Tyrannis; thenceforward the polarity of the

constitution was admitted, and the parties contended no longer for

the abolition, but for the capture, of the great offices. This was

the substance of the revolution that took place in the period of the

Samnite Wars. From 287 the Plebes had the entrée to _all_ offices, and

the proposals of the tribunes, when approved by them, automatically

became law; on the other hand, it was thenceforward always practicable

for the Senate by corruption or otherwise to induce some one tribune to

exercise his veto and thus to deprive the institution of its power. It

was in the _struggle of two competent authorities_ that the juristic

subtlety of the Romans was developed. Elsewhere decisions were usually

by way of fist and bludgeon--the technical word is “Cheirocracy”--but

in this “best” period of Roman constitutional law, the fourth century,

the habit was formed of using the weapons of thesis and interpretation,

a mode of contest in which the slightest points of legal wording could

be decisive.

But Rome was unique in all Classical history in this equilibrium of

Senate and Tribunate. Everywhere else it was a matter not of swaying

balance, but of sheer alternatives, namely Oligarchy _or_ Ochlocracy.

The absolute Polis and the Nation which was identical with it were

accepted as given premisses, but of the inward forms none possessed

stability. The victory of one party meant the abolition of all the

institutions of the other, and people became accustomed to regard

nothing as either venerable enough or useful enough to be exempt

from the chances of the day’s battle. Sparta’s “form,” so to say,

was senatorial, Athens’s tribunician, and by the beginning of the

Peloponnesian War, in 431, the idea that forms must be alternative was

so firmly fixed that only radical solutions were henceforth possible.

With this, the future was set for Rome. It was the one state in which

political passions had persons only, and no longer institutions,

as their target; the only one which was firmly in “form.” _Senatus

Populusque Romanus_--that is, _Senate and Tribunate_--was the form of

forged bronze that no party would henceforward batter, whereas all the

rest, with the narrowness of their individual power-horizons in the

world of Classical states, were only able to prove once more the fact

that domestic politics exist simply in order that foreign politics may

be possible.

VI

At this point, when the Culture is beginning to turn itself into the

Civilization, the non-Estate intervenes in affairs decisively--and

for the first time--as an independent force. Under the Tyrannis and

the Fronde, the State has invoked its aid against the Estates proper,

and it has for the first time learned to feel itself a power. Now it

employs its strength _for itself_, and does so as a class standing for

its freedom against the rest. It sees in the absolute State, in the

Crown, in rooted institutions, the natural allies of the old Estates

and the true and last representatives of symbolic tradition. This is

the difference between the First and the Second Tyrannis, between

Fronde and Bourgeois Revolution, between Cromwell and Robespierre.

The State, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by

urban reason as a burden. So, in the same phase, the great forms of the

Baroque arts begin to be felt as restrictive and become Classicist or

Romanticist--that is, sickly or unformed; German literature from 1770

is one long revolt of strong individual personalities against strict

poetry. The idea of the whole nation being “in training” or “in form”

for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly

is no longer in condition. This holds good in morals, in arts, and

in modes of thought, but most of all in politics. Every bourgeois

revolution has as its scene the great city, and as its hall-mark the

incomprehension of old symbols, which it replaces by tangible interests

and the craving (or even the mere wish) of enthusiastic thinkers and

world-improvers to see their conceptions actualized. Nothing now has

value but that which can be justified by reason. But, deprived thus

of the exaltation of a form that is essentially symbolical and works

metaphysically, the national life loses the power of keeping its head

up in the being-streams of history. Follow the desperate attempts of

the French Government--the handful of capable and farsighted men under

the mediocre Louis XVI--to keep their country in “condition” when,

after the death of Vergennes in 1787, the whole gravity of the external

situation had become manifest. With the death of this diplomatist

France disappeared for years from the political combinations of Europe;

at the same time the great reform that the Crown had carried through

against all resistances--above all, the general administrative reform

of that year, based on the freest self-management--remained completely

ineffective, because in view of the pliancy of the State, the question

of the moment for the Estates became, suddenly, the question of

power.[706] As a century before and a century afterwards, European war

was drawing visibly nearer with an inexorable necessity, but no one now

took any notice of the external situation. The nobility as an Estate

had rarely, but the bourgeoisie as an Estate had never, thought in

terms of foreign policy and world-history. Whether the State in its new

form would be able to hold its own at all amongst the other States, no

one asked. All that mattered was whether it secured men’s “rights.”

But the bourgeoisie, the class of urban “freedom,” strong as its

class-feeling remained for generations (in West Europe even beyond

1848), was at no time wholly master of its actions. For, first of all,

it became manifest in every critical situation that its unity was a

_negative_ unity, only really existent in moments of opposition to

something, anything, else--“Tiers État” and “Opposition” are almost

synonymous--and that when something constructive of its own had to be

done, the interests of the various groups pulled all ways. To be free

from something--that, all wanted. But the intellectual desired the

State as an actualization of “justice” against the force of historical

facts; or the “rights of man”; or freedom of criticism as against the

dominant religion. And Money wanted a free path to business success.

There were a good many who desired rest and renunciation of historical

greatness, or wished this and that tradition and its embodiments, on

which physically or spiritually they lived, to be spared. But there

was another element, now and henceforth, that had not existed in the

conflicts of the Fronde (the English Civil War included) or the first

Tyrannis, but this time stood for a power--namely, that which is found

in all Civilizations under different contemptuous labels--dregs,

_canaille_, mob, _Pöbel_--but with the same tremendous connotation. In

the great cities, which alone now spoke the decisive words--the open

land can at most accept or reject _faits accomplis_, as our eighteenth

century proves[707]--a mass of rootless fragments of population stands

outside all social linkages. These do not feel themselves as attached

either to an Estate or to a vocational class, nor even to the real

working-class, although they are obliged to work. Elements drawn

from all classes and conditions belong to it instinctively--uprooted

peasantry, literates, ruined business men, and above all (as the age of

Catiline shows with terrifying clarity) derailed nobles. Their power

is far in excess of their numbers, for they are always on the spot,

always on hand at the big decisions, ready for anything, devoid of

all respect for orderliness, even the orderliness of a revolutionary

party. It is from them that events acquire the destructive force

which distinguishes the French Revolution from the English, and the

Second Tyrannis from the First. The bourgeoisie looks at these masses

with real uneasiness, defensively, and seeks to separate itself from

them--it was to a defensive act of this category, the 13th Vendémiaire,

that Napoleon owed his rise.[708] But in the pressure of facts

the separating frontier cannot be drawn; wherever the bourgeoisie

throws into the scale against the older orders its feeble weight of

aggressiveness--feeble in relative numbers and feeble because its inner

cohesion is risked at every moment--this mass has forced itself into

their ranks, pushed to the front, imparted most of the drive that wins

the victory, and very often managed to secure the conquered position

for itself--not seldom with the continued idealistic support of the

educated who are intellectually captivated, or the material backing of

the money powers, which seek to divert the danger from themselves on to

the nobility and the clergy.

There is another aspect, too, under which this epoch has its

importance--in it for the first time abstract truths seek to intervene

in the world of facts. The capital cities have become so great, and

urban man so superior and influential over the waking-consciousness of

the whole Culture (_this influence is what we call Public Opinion_)

that the powers of the blood and the tradition inherent in the blood

are shaken in their hitherto unassailable position. For it must be

remembered that the Baroque State and the absolute Polis in their final

development of form are thoroughly living expressions of a _breed_,

and that history, so far as it accomplishes itself in these forms,

possesses the full pulse of that breed. Any theory of the State that

may be fashioned here is one that is deduced from the facts, that

bows to the greatness of the facts. The idea of the State had finally

mastered the blood of the first Estate, and put it wholly and without

reserve at the State’s service. “Absolute” means that the great

being-stream is _as a unit_ in form, possesses _one_ kind of pulse and

instinct, whether the manifestations of that pulse be diplomatic or

strategic flair, dignity of moral and manners, or fastidious taste in

arts and thoughts.

As the contradictory to this grand fact, now, Rationalism appears and

spreads, that which has been described above[709] as the _community of

waking-consciousness in the educated_, whose religion is criticism and

whose numina are not deities but concepts. Now begins the influence of

books and general theories upon politics--in the China of Lao-tse as

in the Athens of the Sophists and the Europe of Montesquieu--and the

public opinion formed by them plants itself in the path of diplomacy

as a political magnitude of quite a new sort. It would be absurd to

suppose that Pisistratus or Richelieu or even Cromwell determined their

actions under the influence of abstract systems, but after the victory

of “Enlightenment” that is what actually happens.

Nevertheless the historical rôle of the great concepts of the

Civilization is very different from the complexion that they presented

in the minds of the ideologues who conceived them. The effect of

a truth is always quite different from its tendency. In the world

of facts, truths are simply _means_, effective in so far as they

dominate spirits and therefore determine actions. Their historical

position is determined not by whether they are deep, correct, or

even merely logical, but by whether they _tell_. We see this in the

phrase “catchword,” “_Schlagwort_.” What certain symbols, livingly

experienced, are for the Springtime religions--the Holy Sepulchre for

the Crusader, the Substance of Christ for the times of the Council

of Nicæa--that two or three inspiriting word-sounds are for every

Civilized revolution. It is only the catchwords that are facts--the

residue of the philosophical or sociological system whence they come

does not matter to history. But, _as_ catchwords, they are for about

two centuries powers of the first rank, stronger even than the pulse

of the blood, which in the petrifying world of the outspread cities is

beginning to be dulled.

But--the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which

emerge out of the chaotic mass of the Non-Estate. Along with abstract

concepts abstract Money,--money divorced from the prime values of the

land--along with the study the counting-house, appear as political

forces. The two are inwardly cognate and inseparable--the old

opposition between priest and noble continued, acute as ever, in the

bourgeois atmosphere and the city framework.[710] Of the two, moreover,

it is the Money that, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally

superior to the ideal truths, which so far as the fact-world is

concerned exist (as I have just said) only as catchwords, as means.

If by “democracy” we mean the form which the Third Estate as such

wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that

democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of

wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the

tragic comedy of the world-improvers’ and freedom-teachers’ desperate

fight against money that they are _ipso facto_ assisting money to be

effective. Respect for the big number--expressed in the principles of

equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage--is just as

much a class-ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and

more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but

in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation

of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press

brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again

is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in

which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the

ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate

with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in

effective motion only by money. It was the Equites, the big-money

party, which made Tiberius Gracchus’s popular movement possible at

all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous

to themselves had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and

the movement collapsed. Cæsar and Crassus financed the Catilinarian

movement, and so directed it against the Senatorial party instead of

against property. In England politicians of eminence laid it down

as early as 1700 that “on ’Change one deals in votes as well as in

stocks, and the price of a vote is as well known as the price of an

acre of land.”[711] When the news of Waterloo reached Paris, the price

of French government stock rose[712]--the Jacobins had destroyed the

old obligations of the blood and so had emancipated money; now it

stepped forward as lord of the land.[713] There is no proletarian,

not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest

of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time

permitted by money--and that, without the idealist amongst its leaders

having the slightest suspicion of the fact.[714] Intellect rejects,

money directs--so it runs in every last act of a Culture-drama, when

the megalopolis has become master over the rest. And, in the limit,

intellect has no cause of complaint. For, after all, it _has_ won

its victory--namely, in its own realm of truths, the realm of books

and ideals that is not of this world. Its conceptions have become

venerabilia of the beginning Civilization. But Money wins, through

these very concepts, in _its_ realm, which is _only_ of this world.

In the Western world of States, it was in England that both sides

of Third-Estate politics, the ideal and the real, graduated. Here

alone it was possible for the Third Estate to avoid the necessity of

marching against an absolute State in order to destroy it and set up

its own dominion on the ruins. For here it could grow up into the

strong form of the First Estate, where it found a fully developed

form of interest-politics, and from whose methods it could borrow for

its own purposes a traditional tactic such as it could hardly wish to

improve upon. Here was the home of Parliamentarism, genuine and quite

inimitable, which had insular position instead of the state as its

starting-point, and the habits of the First and not the Third Estate

as its background. Further, there was the circumstance that this form

had grown up in the full bloom of Baroque and, therefore, had Music

in it. The Parliamentary style was completely identical with that of

cabinet-diplomacy;[715] and in this _anti-democratic_ origin lay the

secret of its successes.

But it was on British soil, too, that the rationalistic catchwords had,

one and all, sprung up, and their relation to the principles of the

Manchester School was intimate--Hume was the teacher of Adam Smith.

“Liberty” self-evidently meant intellectual _and_ trade freedom. An

opposition between fact-politics and enthusiasm for abstract truths

was as impossible in the England of George III as it was inevitable

in the France of Louis XVI. Later, Edmund Burke could retort upon

Mirabeau that “we demand our liberties, not as rights of man, but as

rights of Englishmen.” France received her revolutionary ideas without

exception from England, as she had received the style of her absolute

monarchy from Spain. To both she imparted a brilliant and irresistible

shape that was taken as a model far and wide over the Continent, but

of the practical employment of either she had no idea. The successful

utilization of the bourgeois catchwords[716] in politics presupposes

the shrewd eye of a ruling class for the intellectual constitution of

the stratum which intends to attain power, but will not be capable

of wielding it when attained. Hence in England it was successful.

But it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in

politics--not the bribery of individual high personages which had been

customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the “nursing” of the

democratic forces themselves. In eighteenth-century England, first the

Parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected Commons

were systematically managed by money;[717] England, too, discovered

the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press

serves him who owns it. It does not spread “free” opinion--it generates

it.

Both _together_ constitute liberalism (in the broad sense); that

is, freedom from the restrictions of the soil-bound life, be these

privileges, forms, or feelings--freedom of the intellect for every

kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But

both, too, unhesitatingly aim at the domination of a _class_, a

domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the State. Mind

and money, being both inorganic, want the State, not as a matured

form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a

purpose. Thus the difference between these forces and those of Frondism

is fundamental, for the latter’s reaction had been a defence of the

old Gothic against the intrusive Baroque way of living and being “in

form,”--and now both these are on the defensive together and almost

indistinguishable. Only in England (it must be emphasized again and

again) the Fronde had disarmed, not only the State in open battle, but

also the Third Estate by its inward superiority, and so attained to

the one kind of first-class form that democracy is capable of working

up to, a form neither planned nor aped, but naturally matured, the

expression of an old breed and an unbroken sure tact that can adapt

itself to the use of every new means that the changes of Time put

into its hands. Thus it came about that the English Parliament, while

taking part in the Succession-Wars of the Absolute States, handled them

as economic wars with business aims. The mistrust felt for high form

by the inwardly formless Non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and

always it is ready to rescue its freedom--_from_ all form--by means

of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore,

hostile to all that has grown up, which, moreover, in virtue of its

mechanizing tendency, is acceptable to the taste both of intellect and

of money--consider, for example, the structure of the state-machine of

France which Robespierre began and Napoleon completed. Dictatorship

in the interests of a class-ideal appealed to Rousseau, Saint-Simon,

Rodbertus, and Lassalle as it had to the Classical ideologues of

the fourth century--Xenophon in the Cyropædia and Isocrates in the

Nicocles.[718]

But the well-known saying of Robespierre that “the Government of the

Revolution is the despotism of freedom against tyranny” expresses

more than this. It lets out the deep fear that shakes every multitude

which, in the presence of grave conjunctures, feels itself “not up

to form.” A regiment that is shaken in its discipline will readily

concede to accidental leaders of the moment powers of an extent and a

kind which the legitimate command could never acquire, and which _if_

legitimate would be utterly intolerable. But this, on a larger scale,

is the position of every commencing Civilization. Nothing reveals

more tellingly the decline of political form than that upspringing

of formless powers which we may conveniently designate, from its

most conspicuous example, _Napoleonism_. How completely the being of

Richelieu or of Wallenstein was involved in the unshakable antecedents

of their period! And how instinct with form, under all its outer

unform, was the English Revolution! Here, just the reverse; the Fronde

fights _about_ the form, the absolute State _in_ the form, but the

bourgeoisie _against_ the form. The mere abolition of an order that had

become obsolete was no novelty--Cromwell and the heads of the First

Tyrannis had done that. But, that behind the ruins of the visible there

is no longer the substance of an invisible form; that Robespierre

and Napoleon find nothing either around or in them to provide the

_self-evident_ basis essential to any new creation; that for a

government of high tradition and experience they have no choice but to

substitute an accidental régime, whose future no longer rests secure on

the qualities of a slowly and thoroughly trained minority, but depends

entirely on the chance of the adequate successor turning up--such are

the distinguishing marks of this turning of the times, and hence comes

the immense superiority that is enjoyed for generations still by those

states which manage to retain a tradition longer than others.

The First Tyrannis had completed the Polis with the aid of the

non-noble; the latter now destroyed it with the aid of the Second

Tyrannis. As an idea, it perishes in the bourgeois revolutions of

the fourth century, for all that it may persist as an arrangement or

a habit or an instrument of the momentary powers that be. Classical

man never ceased, in fact, to think and live politically in its form.

But never more was it for the multitude a symbol to be respected and

venerated, any more than the Divine Right of Kings was venerated in the

West after Napoleon had almost succeeded in making his own dynasty “the

oldest in Europe.”

Further, in these revolutions too, as ever in Classical history,

there were only local and temporary solutions--nothing resembling

the splendid sweep of the French Revolution from the Bastille to

Waterloo--and the scenes in them were more atrocious still, for the

reason that in this Culture, with its basically Euclidean feeling,

the only possible way seemed to be that of physical collision of

party against party, and the only possible end for the loser, not

functional incorporation in the victor’s system as in the West, but

destruction root and branch. At Corcyra (427) and Argos (370) the

possessing classes were slaughtered _en masse_; in Leontini (422) they

were expelled from the city by the lower classes, which carried on

affairs for a while with slaves until, in fear of an avenging return,

they evacuated altogether and migrated to Syracuse. The refugees from

hundreds of these revolutions inundated the cities, recruited the

mercenary armies of the Second Tyrannis, and infested the routes by

land and sea. The readmission of such exiled fractions is a standing

feature in the peace-terms offered by the Diadochi and later by

the Romans. But the Second Tyrannis itself secured its positions

by acts of this kind. Dionysius I (407-367) secured his hegemony

over Syracuse--the city in whose higher society, along with that of

Athens, centred the ripest culture of Hellas, the city where Æschylus

had produced his Persian trilogy in 470--by wholesale executions of

educated people and confiscations of their property; this he followed

up by entirely rebuilding the population, in the upper levels by

granting large properties to his adherents, and in the lower by

raising masses of slaves to the citizenship and distributing amongst

them (as was not uncommon) the wives and daughters of the victims.[719]

After the characteristically Classical fashion, the type of these

revolutions was such as to produce always an increase of number, never

of extent. Multitudes of them happened, but each proceeded purely

for itself and at one point of its own, and it is only the fact that

they were contemporary with one another that gives them the character

of a collective phenomenon, which marks an epoch. Similarly with

Napoleonism; here again, a formless regimen for the first time raised

itself above the framework of the State, yet without being able to

attain to complete inward detachment therefrom. It supported itself

on the Army, which, _vis-à-vis_ the nation that had lost its “form,”

began to feel itself as an independent power. That is the brief road

from Robespierre to Bonaparte--with the fall of the Jacobins the centre

of gravity passed from the administration to the ambitious generals.

How deeply this new tendency implanted itself in the West may be seen

from the example of Bernadotte and Wellington, and even more from the

story of Frederick William III’s “call to my People” in 1813--in this

case the continuance of the dynasty would have been challenged by the

military had not the King stiffened himself to break with Napoleon.[720]

This anti-constitutionality of the Second Tyrannis declared itself

also in the position taken by Alcibiades and Lysander in the armed

forces of their respective cities during the latter stages of the

Peloponnesian War, a position incompatible with the basic form of the

Polis. The first-named, destitute as an exile of official position,

and against the will of the home authorities, exercised from 411 the

_de facto_ command of the Athenian Navy; the second, though not even

a Spartiate, felt himself entirely independent at the head of an army

devoted to his person. In the year 408 the contest of the two powers

for the supremacy over the Ægean world took the form of a contest

between these two individuals.[721] Shortly after this, Dionysius

of Syracuse built up the first large-scale professional army and

introduced engines of war (artillery)[722]--a new form which served as

a model for the Diadochi and Rome also. Thereafter the spirit of the

army was a political power on its own account, and it became a serious

question how far the State was master, and how far tool, of its army.

The fact that the government of Rome was exclusively in the hands of

a military committee[723] from 390 to 367[724] reveals pretty clearly

that the army had a policy of its own. It is well known that Alexander,

the Romanticist of the Second Tyrannis, fell more and more under the

influence of his generals, who not only compelled the retreat from

India but also disposed of his inheritance amongst themselves as a

matter of course.

This is essentially Napoleonism, and so is the extension of _personal_

rule over regions united by ties neither national nor jural, but

merely military and administrative. But extension was just what was

essentially incompatible with the Polis. The Classical State is the one

State that was incapable of any organic widening, and the conquests of

the Second Tyrannis therefore resolved themselves into a _juxtaposition

of two political units_, the Polis and the subjugated territory, the

cohesion of which was initially accidental and perpetually in danger.

Thus arose that strange picture of the Hellenistic-Roman world, the

true significance of which is not even yet recognized--_a circle of

border-regions_, and within them a congeries of Poleis to which, small

as they were, the conception of the State proper, the _res publica_,

continued to be bound as exclusively as ever. In this middle (indeed,

so far as concerned each individual, hegemony was in one point) was the

theatre of all real politics. The “_orbis terrarum_”--a significant

expression--was merely a means or object to it. The Roman notions of

“_imperium_”--dictatorial powers of administration outside the city

moat (which were automatically extinguished when its holder entered the

Pomœrium)--and of “_provincia_” as the opposite of “_res publica_,”

express the common Classical instinct, which knew only the city’s

body as the State and political subject, and the “outside” only in

relation to it, as object to it. Dionysius made his city of Syracuse

into a fortress surrounded by a “scrap-heap of states,” and extended

his field of power thence, over Upper Italy and the Dalmatian coast,

into the northern Adriatic, where he possessed Ancona and Hatria at

the mouth of the Po. Philip of Macedon, following the example of his

teacher Jason of Pheræ (murdered in 370), adopted the reverse plan,

placing his centre of gravity in the periphery (that is, practically

in the army) and thence exercising a hegemony over the Hellenic world

of States. Thus Macedonia came to extend to the Danube, and after

Alexander’s death there were added to this outer circle the empires of

the Seleucids and the Ptolemies--each governed from a Polis (Antioch,

Alexandria), but through the intermediary of existing native machinery,

which, be it said, was at its lowest better than any Classical

administration of it could have been. Rome herself in the same period

(_c._ 326-265) built up her Middle-Italian territory as a _border

state_, secured in all directions by a system of colonies, allies, and

settlements with Latin right. Then, from 237, we find Hamilcar Barca

winning for Carthage, a city old established in the Classical way of

life, an empire in Spain; C. Flaminius (225) conquering the Po Valley

for Rome; and finally Cæsar making his Gallic empire. These were the

foundations upon which rested, first, the Napoleonic struggles of

the Diadochi in the East, then those of Scipio and Hannibal in the

West--the limits of the Polis outgrown in both cases--and lastly the

Cæsarian struggles of the Triumvirs, who supported themselves on the

total of _all_ the border states and used their means, in order to

be--“the first in Rome.”

VII

In Rome the strong and happily conceived form of the State that was

reached about 340 kept the social revolution within constitutional

limits. A Napoleonic figure like Appius Claudius the Censor of 310, who

built the first aqueduct and the Appian Way, and ruled in Rome almost

as a tyrant, very soon failed when he tried to eliminate the peasantry

by means of the great-city masses and so to impart the one-sided

Athenian direction to politics--for that was his aim in taking up the

sons of slaves into the Senate, in reorganizing the Centuries on a

money instead of a land-assessment basis,[725] and in distributing

freedmen and landless men amongst the country tribes, so that they

might outvote the rustics (as they were always able to do, since the

latter rarely attended). But his successors in the censorship lost

no time in reversing this, and relegated the landless to the great

city-tribes again. The non-estate itself, well led by a minority of

distinguished families, saw its aim (as has been said before) not in

the destruction, but in the acquisition, of the senatorial organs of

administration. In the end, it forced its way into all offices (even,

by the Lex Ogulnia, of 300, into the politically important priesthoods

of the Pontifices and Augurs), and by the outbreak of 287 it secured

force of law for _plebiscita_ even without the Senate’s approval.

The practical result of this freedom-movement was precisely the reverse

of that which ideologues would have expected--there were no idealogues

in Rome. The greatness of its success robbed the non-estate of its

object and thereby deprived it of its driving force, for positively,

when not “in opposition,” it was null. After 287 the state-form existed

for the purpose of being politically _used_, and used, too, in a

world in which only the states of the great fringe--Rome, Carthage,

Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt--really counted. It had ceased to be in any

danger of becoming the passive of “peoples’-rights” activities. And

it was precisely this security that formed the basis on which the one

people that had remained “in form” rose to its grandeur.

On the one hand, it had developed within the Plebs, formless and long

weakened in its race-impulses by the mass-intake of freedmen,[726]

an upper stratum distinguished by great practical aptitudes, rank,

and wealth, which joined forces with a corresponding stratum within

the patriciate. Hence there came into existence a very narrow circle

of men of the strongest race-quality, dignified life, and broad

political outlook, in whom the whole stock of experience in governing

and generalship and negotiation was concentrated and transmitted; who

regarded the direction of the State as the one profession worthy of

their status, considered themselves as inheritors of a privilege to

exercise it, and educated their children solely in the art of ruling

and the convictions of a measurelessly proud tradition. This nobility,

which as such had no constitutional existence, found its constitutional

engine in the Senate, which had originally been a body representing the

interests of the patricians (that is, the “Homeric” aristocracy), but

in which from the middle of the fourth century ex-consuls--men who had

both ruled and commanded--sat as life-members, forming a close group of

eminent talents that dominated the assembly and, through it, the State.

Even by 279 the Senate appeared to Cineas, the ambassador of Pyrrhus,

like a council of kings, and finally its kernel was a small group of

leading men, holding the titles “_princeps_” and “_clarissimus_,”

men in every respect--rank, power, and public dignity--the peers

of those who reigned over the empires of the Diadochi.[727] There

came into being a government such as no megalopolis in any other

Culture whatsoever has possessed, and a tradition to which it would

be impossible to find parallels save perhaps in the Venice and the

Papal Curia of the Baroque, and there under a wholly different set

of conditions. Here were no theories such as had been the ruin of

Athens, none of the provincialism that had made Sparta in the long

run contemptible, but simply a praxis in the grand style. If “Rome”

is a perfectly unique and marvellous phenomenon in world-history, it

is due, not to the Roman “people,” which in itself, like any other,

was raw material without form, but to this class which brought Rome

into condition and kept her so, willy-nilly--with the result that this

particular stream of being, which in 350 was still without importance

save to middle Italy, gradually drew into its bed the entire history of

the Classical, and made the last great period of that history a _Roman_

period.

It was the very perfection of political _flair_ that was displayed

by this small circle (which possessed no sort of public rights) in

managing the democratic forms created by the Revolution--forms that

here as elsewhere derive all value from the use that is made of them.

The only factor in them that if mishandled would have been dangerous

in an instant--namely, the interpenetration of two mutually exclusive

powers--was handled so superbly _and so quietly_ that it was always

the higher experience that gave the note, while the people remained

throughout convinced that decisions were made by, and in the sense

desired by, itself. _To be popular, and yet historically successful in

the highest degree_--here is the secret of this policy, and for that

matter the only possibility of policy existing at all in such times, an

art in which the Roman régime has remained unequalled to this day.

Nevertheless, on the other side of the picture, the result of the

Revolution was the _emancipation of Money_. Thenceforward money was

master in the Comitia Centuriata. That which called itself “_populus_”

there became more and more a tool in the hands of big money, and it

required all the tactical superiority of the ruling circles to maintain

a counterpoise in the Plebs, and to keep effective a representation

of the yeomanry, under the leadership of the noble families, in the

thirty-one country tribes from which the great city mass continued

to be excluded. Hence the drastic energy with which the arrangements

made by Appius Claudius were revoked. The natural alliance between

high finance and the mass, though we see it actually at work later

(under the Gracchi and Marius) for the destruction of the tradition of

the blood,[728] was at any rate made impossible for many generations.

Bourgeoisie and yeomanry, money and landowning, maintained a reciprocal

equilibrium of separate organisms, and were held together and made

efficient by the State-idea (of which the nobility was the incarnation)

until this inward form fell to pieces, and the two tendencies broke

apart in enmity. The First Punic War was a traders’ war and directed

against the agrarian interest, and, therefore, the consul Appius

Claudius (a descendant of the great Censor) laid the decision of the

matter in 284 before the Comitia Centuriata. The conquest of the Po

plain, on the other hand, was in the interests of the peasantry and

it was, therefore, in the Comita Tributa that it was carried by the

Tribune C. Flaminius--the first genuinely Cæsarian type in Roman

history, builder of the Via Flaminia and the Circus Flaminius. But when

in pursuance of his policy he (as Censor in 220) forbade the Senators

to engage in trade, and also at the same time made the old noble

centuries accessible to plebeians, he was practically benefiting only

the new financial nobility of the First Punic War period, and thus

(entirely in spite of himself) he became the creator of _high finance

organized as an Estate_--that is, that of the Equites, who a century

later put an end to the great age of the nobility. Henceforth, when

Hannibal (before whom Flaminius had fallen on the field of battle) had

been disposed of, money steadily became, even for the government as

such, the “_ultima ratio_” in the accomplishment of its policy--the

last true State-policy that the Classical world was to know.

When the Scipios and their circle had ceased to be the governing

influence, nothing remained but the private policies of individuals,

who followed their own interests without scruple, and looked upon

the “_orbis terrarum_” as passive booty. The historian Polybius (who

belonged to that circle) regarded Flaminius as a mere demagogue and

traced to him all the misfortunes of the Gracchan period. He was

wholly in error as to Flaminius’s intentions, but he was right as

to his effect. Flaminius--like the elder Cato, who with the blind

zeal of the agrarian overthrew the great Scipio on account of his

world-policy--achieved the reverse of what he intended. Money stepped

into the place of blood-leadership, and money took less than three

generations to exterminate the yeomanry.

If it was an improbable piece of good luck in the destinies of the

Classical peoples that Rome was the only city-state to survive the

Revolution with an unimpaired constitution, it was, on the contrary,

almost a miracle that in our West--with its genealogical forms

deep-rooted in the idea of duration--violent revolution broke out at

all, even in one place--namely, Paris. It was not the strength, but

the weakness of French Absolutism which brought the English ideas,

in combination with the power of money, to the point of an explosion

which gave living form to the catchwords of the “Enlightenment,”

which bound together virtue and terror, freedom and despotism, and

which echoed still even in the minor catastrophes of 1830 and 1848

and the more recent Socialistic longing for catastrophe.[729] In

England itself, when the aristocracy ruled more absolutely than ever

in France, there was certainly a small circle round Fox and Sheridan

which was enthusiastic for the ideas of the Revolution--all of which

were of English provenance--and men talked of universal suffrage and

Parliamentary reform.[730] But that was quite enough to induce both

parties, under the leadership of a Whig (the younger Pitt), to take the

sharpest measures to defeat any and every attempt to interfere in the

slightest degree with the aristocratic régime for the benefit of the

bourgeoisie. The English nobility let loose the twenty-year war against

France, and mobilized all the monarchs of Europe to bring about in the

end, not the fall of Napoleon, but the fall of the Revolution--the

Revolution that had had the naïve daring to introduce the opinions

of private English thinkers into practical politics, and so to give

a position to the Tiers État of which the consequences were all the

better foreseen in the English lobbies for having been overlooked in

the Paris salons.[731]

What was called “Opposition” in England was--the attitude of one

aristocratic party while the other was running the Government. It

did not mean there, as it meant all over the Continent, professional

criticism of the work which it was someone else’s profession to do,

but the practical endeavour to force the activity of Government

into a form in which the opposition was ready and fit at any moment

to take it over. But this Opposition was at once--and in complete

ignorance of its social presuppositions--taken as a model for that

which the educated in France and elsewhere aimed at creating, namely,

a class-domination of the Tiers État under the eyes of a dynasty, no

very clear idea being formed as to the latter’s future. The English

dispositions were, from Montesquieu onwards, lauded with enthusiastic

misunderstanding--although these Continental countries, not being

islands, lacked the first condition precedent for an “English”

evolution. Only in one point was England really a model. When the

bourgeoisie had got so far as to turn the absolute state back again

into an Estate-state, they found over there a picture which in fact had

never been other than it was. True, it was the aristocracy alone who

ruled in it--but at least it was not the Crown.

The result of the turn, and the basic form of the Continental States

at the beginning of the Civilization, is “Constitutional Monarchy,”

the extremest possibility of which appears as what we call nowadays

a Republic. It is necessary to get clear, once and for all, of the

mumblings of the doctrinaires who think in timeless and therefore

unreal concepts and for whom “Republic” is a form-in-itself. The

republican ideal of the nineteenth century has no more resemblance to

the Classical _res publica_, or even to Venice or the original Swiss

cantons, than the English constitution to a “constitution” in the

Continental sense. That which _we_ call republic is a _negation_, which

of inward necessity postulates that the thing denied is an ever-present

possibility. It is non-monarchy in forms borrowed from the monarchy.

The genealogical feeling is immensely strong in Western mankind; it

strains its conscience so far as to pretend that Dynasty determines

its political conduct even when Dynasty no longer exists at all. The

historical is embodied therein, and unhistorically we cannot live.

It makes a great difference whether, as in the case of the Classical

world, the dynastic principle conveys absolutely nothing to the inner

feelings of a man, or, as in the case of the West, it is real enough to

need six generations of educated people to fight it down in themselves.

Feeling is the secret enemy of all constitutions that are plans and not

growths; they are in last analysis nothing but defensive measures born

of fear and mistrust. The urban conception of freedom--freedom _from_

something--narrows itself to a merely anti-dynastic significance, and

republican enthusiasm lives only on this feeling.

Such a negation inevitably involves a preponderance of theory. While

Dynasty and its close congener Diplomacy conserve the old tradition and

pulse, Constitutions contain an overweight of systems, bookishness,

and framed concepts--such as is entirely unthinkable in England, where

nothing negative and defensive adheres to the form of government. It is

not for nothing that the Faustian is _par excellence_ the reading and

writing Culture. The printed book is an emblem of temporal, the Press

of spatial, infinity. In contrast with the immense power and tyranny

of these symbols, even the Chinese Civilization seems almost empty of

writing. In Constitutions, literature is put into the field against

knowledge of men and things, language against race, abstract right

against successful tradition--regardless of whether a nation involved

in the tide of events is still capable of work and “maintaining its

form.” Mirabeau was quite alone and unsuccessful in combating the

Assembly, which “confused politics with fiction.” Not only the three

doctrinaire constitutions of the age--the French of 1791, the German

of 1848 and 1919--but practically all such attempts shut their eyes to

the great Destiny in the fact-world and imagine that that is the same

as defeating it. In lieu of unforeseen happenings, the incidents of

strong personality and imperious circumstances, it is Causality that

is to rule--timeless, just, unvarying, rational cohesion of cause and

effect. It is symptomatic that no written constitution knows of money

as a political force. It is pure theory that they contain, one and all.

This rift in the essence of constitutional monarchy is irremediable.

Here actual and conceptual, work and critique, are frontally

opposed, and it is their mutual attrition that constitutes what the

average educated man calls internal politics. Apart from the cases

of Prussia-Germany and Austria--where constitutions did come into

existence at first,[732] but in the presence of the older political

traditions were never very influential--it was only in England that

the practice of government kept itself homogeneous. Here, race held

its own against principle. Men had more than an inkling that real

politics, politics aiming at historical success, is a matter of

training and not of shaping. This was no aristocratic prejudice, but

a cosmic fact that emerges much more distinctly in the experience

of any English racehorse-trainer than in all the philosophical

systems in the world. Shaping can refine training, but not replace

it. And thus the higher society of England, Eton and Balliol, became

training-grounds where politicians were worked up with a consistent

sureness the like of which is only to be found in the training of the

Prussian officer-corps--trained, that is, as connoisseurs and masters

of the underlying pulse of things (not excluding the hidden course of

opinions and ideas). Thus prepared, they were able, in the great flood

of bourgeois-revolutionary principles that swept over the years after

1832, to preserve and control the being-stream which they directed.

They possessed “training,” the suppleness and collectedness of the

rider who, with a good horse under him, feels victory coming nearer

and nearer. They allowed the great principles to move the mass because

they knew well that it is money that is the “wherewithal” by which

motion is imparted to these great principles, and they substituted,

for the brutal methods of the eighteenth century, methods more refined

and not less effective--one of the simpler of these being to threaten

their opponents with the cost of a new election. The doctrinaire

constitutions of the Continent saw only the one side of the fact

democracy. Here, where there was no constitution, but men were in

“condition,” it was seen as a whole.

A vague feeling of all this was never quite lost on the Continent.

For the absolute State of the Baroque there had been a perfectly

clear form, but for “constitutional monarchy” there were only

unsteady compromises, and Conservative and Liberal parties were

distinguished--not, as in England after Canning, by the possession

of different but well-tested modes of government, applied

turn-and-turn-about to the actual work of governing--but according

to the direction in which they respectively desired to alter the

constitution--namely, towards tradition or towards theory. Should the

Parliament serve the Dynasty, or vice versa?--that was the bone of

contention, and in disputing over it it was forgotten that _foreign_

policy was the final aim. The “Spanish” and the misnamed “English”

sides of a constitution would not and could not grow together, and

thus it befell that during the nineteenth century the diplomatic

service outwards and the Parliamentary activity inwards developed in

two divergent directions. Each became in fundamental feeling alien to,

and contemptuous of, the other. Life fretted itself to soreness in a

form that it had not developed out of itself. After Thermidor, France

succumbed to the rule of the Bourse, mitigated from time to time by the

setting up of a military dictature (1800, 1851, 1871, 1918). Bismarck’s

creation was in fundamentals of a dynastic nature, with a parliamentary

component of decidedly subordinate importance, and in it the inner

friction was so strong as to monopolize the available political energy,

and finally, after 1916, to exhaust the organism itself. The Army had

its own history, with a great tradition going back to Frederick William

I,[733] and so also had the administration. In them was the source

of Socialism as one kind of true political “training,” diametrically

opposed to the English[734] but, like it, a full expression of strong

race-quality. The officer and the official were trained high. But

the necessity of breeding up a corresponding political type was not

recognized. Higher policy was handled “administratively” and minor

policy was hopeless squabbling. And so army and administration finally

became aims in themselves, after Bismarck’s disappearance had removed

the one man who even without a supply of real politicians to back him

(this tradition alone could have produced) was big enough to treat both

as tools of policy. When the issue of the World War removed the upper

layers, nothing remained but parties educated for opposition only,

and these brought the activity of Government down to a level hitherto

unknown in any Civilization.

But to-day Parliamentarism is in full decay. It was a _continuation of

the Bourgeois Revolution by other means_, the revolution of the Third

Estate of 1789 brought into legal form and joined with its opponent

the Dynasty as one governmental unit. Every modern election, in fact,

is a civil war carried on by ballot-box and every sort of spoken and

written stimulus, and every great party-leader is a sort of Napoleon.

In this form, meant to remain infinitely valid, which is peculiar to

the Western Culture and would be nonsensical and impossible in any

other, we discern once more our characteristic tendency to infinity,

historical foresight[735] and forethought, and _will to order the

distant future_, in this case according to bourgeois standards of the

present.

All the same, Parliamentarism is not a summit as the absolute Polis

and the Baroque State were summits, but a brief transition--namely,

between the Late-Culture period with its mature forms and the age of

great individuals in a formless world. It contains, like the houses and

furniture of the first half of the nineteenth century, a residue of

good Baroque. The parliamentary habit is English Rococo--but, no longer

un-self-conscious and in the blood, but superficial-initiative and at

the mercy of goodwill. Only in the brief periods of first enthusiasms

has it an appearance of depth and duration, and then only because

in the flush of victory respect for one’s newly-won status makes it

incumbent to adopt the high manners of the defeated class. To preserve

the form, even when it contradicts the advantage, is the convention

which makes parliamentarism _possible_. But when this convention comes

to be fully observed, _the very fact that it is so means that the

essence of parliamentarism has already been evaporated_. The Non-Estate

falls apart again into its natural interest-groups, and the passion of

stubborn and victorious defence is over. And as soon as the form ceases

to possess the attractiveness of a young ideal that will summon men to

the barricades, unparliamentary methods of attaining an object without

(and even in spite of) the ballot-box will make their appearance--such

as money, economic pressure, and, above all, the strike. Neither

the megalopolitan masses nor the strong individuals have any real

respect for this form without depth or past, and when the discovery

is made that it is _only_ a form, it has already become a mark and

shadow. With the beginning of the twentieth century Parliamentarism

(even English) is tending rapidly towards taking up itself the rôle

that it once assigned to the kingship. It is becoming an impressive

spectacle for the multitude of the Orthodox, while the centre of

gravity of big policy, already _de jure_ transferred from the Crown to

the people’s representatives, is passing _de facto_ from the latter

to unofficial groups and the will of unofficial personages. The World

War almost completed this development. There is no way back to the old

parliamentarism from the domination of Lloyd George and the Napoleonism

of the French militarists. And for America, hitherto lying apart and

self-contained, rather a region than a State, the parallelism of

President and Congress which she derived from a theory of Montesquieu

has, with her entry into world politics, become untenable, and must in

times of real danger make way for formless powers such as those with

which Mexico and South America have long been familiar.

VIII

With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find

ourselves to-day. It is the _transition from Napoleonism to

Cæsarism_, a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two

centuries and can be shown to exist in all the Cultures. The Chinese

call it Shan-Kwo, the “period of the Contending States” (480-230,

corresponding to the Classical 300-50).[736] At the beginning are

reckoned seven great powers, which, first planlessly, but later with

clearer and clearer purpose, tend to the inevitable final result of

this close succession of vast wars and revolutions. A century later

there are still five. In 441 the ruler of the Chóu dynasty became a

state-pensioner of the “Eastern Duke,” and the remains of territory

that he possessed ceased accordingly to figure in later history.

Simultaneously began in the unphilosophical north-west[737] the swift

rise of the “Roman” state of Tsin, which extended its influence

westward and southward over Tibet and Yunnan and enclosed the other

states in a great arc. The focus of the opposition was in the kingdom

of Tsu in the Taoist south,[738] whence the Chinese Civilization

pressed slowly outwards into the still little-known lands south of

the great river. Here we have in fact the opposition of Rome and

the Hellenistic--on the one side, hard, clear will-to-power; on the

other, the tendency to dreaming and world-improvement. In 368-320

(corresponding to the Second Punic War) the contest intensified itself

into an uninterrupted struggle of the whole Chinese world, fought with

mass armies, for which the population was strained to the extreme

limit. “The allies, whose lands were ten times as great as those of

Tsin, in vain rolled up a million men--Tsin had ever reserves in hand

still. From first to last a million men fell,” writes Sze-ma-tsien.

Su-tsin, who began by being Chancellor of Tsin, but later became a

supporter of the League of Nations (_hoh-tsung_) idea and went over to

the Opposition, worked up two great coalitions (333 and 321), which,

however, collapsed from inward disunity at the first battles. His great

adversary, the Chancellor Chang-I, resolutely Imperialist, was in 311

on the point of bringing the Chinese world to voluntary subjection when

a change of occupancy of the throne caused his combination to miscarry.

In 294 began the campaigns of Pe-Ki.[739] It was in the prestige of his

victories that the King of Tsin took the mystic Emperor-title of the

legendary age,[740] which openly expressed the claim to world-rule, and

was at once imitated by the ruler of Tsi in the east.[741] With this

began the second maximum phase of the decisive struggles. The number

of independent states grew steadily less. In 255 even the home state

of Confucius, Lu, vanished, and in 249 the Chóu dynasty came to an end.

In 246 the mighty Wang-Cheng became, at the age of thirteen, Emperor

of Tsin, and in 241, with the aid of his Chancellor Lui-Shi (the

Chinese Mæcenas[742]), he fought out to victory the last bout that the

last opponent, the Empire of Tsu, ventured to challenge. In 221, sole

ruler in actual fact, he assumed the title Shi (Augustus). This is the

beginning of the Imperial age in China.

No era confronts its mankind so distinctly with the alternative of

_great form_ or _great individual powers_ as this “Period of the

Contending States.” In the degree in which the nations cease to be

politically in “condition,” in that degree possibilities open up for

the energetic private person who means to be politically creative,

who will have power at any price, and who as a phenomenon of force

becomes the Destiny of an entire people or Culture. Events have become

unpredictable on the basis of form. Instead of the given tradition that

can dispense with genius (because it is itself cosmic force at highest

capacity), we have now the accident of great fact-men. The accident of

their rise brings a weak people (for example, the Macedonians), to the

peak of events overnight, and the accident of their death (for example,

Cæsar’s) can immediately plunge a world from personally secured order

into chaos.

This indeed had been manifested earlier in critical times of

transition. The epoch of the Fronde, the Ming-shu, the First Tyrannis,

when men were not in form, but fought about form, has always thrown

up a number of great figures who grew too big for definition and

limitation in terms of office. The change from Culture to Civilization,

with its typical Napoleonism, does so too. But with this, which is

the preface to unredeemed historical formlessness, dawns the real

day of the great individual. For us this period attained almost to

its climax in the World War; in the Classical World it began with

Hannibal, who challenged Rome in the name of Hellenism (to which

inwardly he belonged), but went under because the Hellenistic East, in

true Classical fashion, apprehended the meaning of the hour too late,

or not at all. With his downfall began that proud sequence that runs

from the Scipios through Æmilius Paullus, Flamininus, the Catos, the

Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla to Pompey, Cæsar, and Augustus. In China,

correspondingly, during the period of the “Contending States,” a like

chain of statesmen and generals centred on Tsin as the Classical

figures centred on Rome. In accordance with the complete want of

understanding of the political side of Chinese history that prevails,

these men are usually described as Sophists.[743] They were so, but

only in the same sense as leading Romans of the same period were

Stoics--that is, as having been educated in the philosophy and rhetoric

of the Greek East. All were finished orators and all from time to time

wrote on philosophy, Cæsar and Brutus no less than Cato and Cicero,

but they did so not as professional philosophers, but because _otium

cum dignitate_ was the habit of cultivated gentlemen. In business

hours they were masters of fact, whether on battle-field or in high

politics, and precisely the same is true of the Chancellors Chang-I and

Su-tsin;[744] the dreaded diplomatist Fan-Sui who overthrew Pe-Ki, the

general; Wei-Yang the legislator of Tsin; Lui-Shi, the first Emperor’s

Mæcenas, and others.

The Culture had bound up all its forces in strict form. Now they were

released, and “Nature”--that is, the cosmic--broke forth immediate.

The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations

that marks the beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists

and ideologues what they like--in the world of facts it means the

transition from government in the style and pulse of a strict tradition

to the _sic volo, sic jubeo_ of the unbridled personal régime. The

maximum of symbolic and _super_-personal form coincides with that of

the Late period of the Culture--in China about 600, in the Classical

about 450, for ourselves about 1700. The minimum in the Classical

lies in the time of Sulla and Pompey, and for us will be reached (and

possibly passed) in the next hundred years. Great interstate and

internal conflicts, revolutions of a fearful kind, interpenetrate

increasingly, but the questions at issue in all of them without

exception are (consciously and frankly or not) questions of unofficial,

and eventually purely personal, power. It is historically of no

importance what they themselves aimed at theoretically, and we need not

know the catchwords under which the Chinese and Arabian revolutions of

this stage broke out, nor even whether there were such catchwords. None

of the innumerable revolutions of this era--which more and more become

blind outbreaks of uprooted megalopolitan masses--has ever attained, or

ever had the possibility of attaining, an aim. What stands is only the

_historical fact_ of an accelerated demolition of ancient forms that

leaves the path clear for Cæsarism.

But the same is true also of the wars, in which the armies and their

tactical methods become more and more the creation, not of the epoch,

but of uncontrolled individual captains, who in many cases discovered

their genius very late and by accident. While in 300 there were _Roman_

armies, in 100 there were the armies of Marius and Sulla and Cæsar;

and Octavian’s army, which was composed of Cæsar’s veterans, led its

general much more than it was led by him. But with this the methods

of war, its means, and its aims assumed raw-natural and ferocious

forms,[745] very different from those prevailing before. Their duels

were not eighteenth-century Trianon duels, encounters in knightly

forms with fixed rules to determine when a man might declare himself

exhausted, what maximum of force might be employed, and what conditions

the chivalry permitted a victor to impose. They were ring-battles of

infuriated men with fists and teeth, fought to the bodily collapse of

one and exploited without reserve or restraint by the victor. The first

great example of this “return to Nature” is afforded by the French

Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, which, instead of artificial

manœuvres with small bodies, practised the mass-onset without regard

to losses and thereby shattered to atoms the refined strategy of

the Rococo. To bring the whole muscular force of a nation on to the

battlefields by the universal-service system was an idea utterly alien

to the age of Frederick the Great.[746]

Similarly, in every Culture, the technique of war hesitatingly

followed the advance of craftsmanship, until at the beginning of

the Civilization it suddenly takes the lead, presses all mechanical

possibilities of the time relentlessly into its service, and under

pressure of military necessity even opens up new domains hitherto

unexploited--but at the same time renders largely ineffectual the

personal heroism of the thoroughbred, the ethos of the noble, and the

subtle intellect of the Late Culture. In the Classical world, where the

Polis made mass-armies essentially impossible--for relatively to the

general smallness of Classical forms, tactical included, the numbers

of Cannæ, Philippi, and Actium were enormous and exceptional--the

second Tyrannis (Dionysius of Syracuse leading) introduced mechanical

technique into warfare, and on a large scale.[747] Then for the first

time it became possible to carry out sieges like those of Rhodes (305),

Syracuse (213), Carthage (146), and Alesia (52), in which also the

increasing importance of rapidity, even for Classical strategy, became

evident. It was in line with this tendency that the Roman legion, the

characteristic structure of which developed only in the Hellenistic

age, worked like a machine as compared with the Athenian and Spartan

militias of the fifth century. In China, correspondingly, iron was

worked up for cutting and thrusting weapons from 474, light cavalry

of the Mongolian model displaced the heavy war-chariot, and fortress

warfare suddenly acquired outstanding importance.[748] The fundamental

craving of Civilized mankind for speed, mobility, and mass-effects

finally combined, in the world of Europe and America, with the Faustian

will to domination over Nature and produced dynamic methods of war

that even to Frederick the Great would have seemed like lunacy, but

to us of to-day, in close proximity to our technics of transportation

and industry, are perfectly natural. Napoleon horsed his artillery

and thereby made it highly mobile (just as he broke up the mass army

of the Revolution into a system of self-contained and easily moved

corps), and already at Wagram and Borodino it had augmented its purely

physical effectiveness to the point of what we should call rapid-fire

and drum fire.[749] The second stage is--most significantly--marked by

the American Civil War of 1861-5--which even in the numbers of troops

it involved far surpassed the order of magnitude of the Napoleonic

Wars[750] and in which for the first time the railway was used for

large troop-movements, the telegraph-network for messages, and a steam

fleet, keeping the sea for months on end, for blockade, and in which

armoured ships, the torpedo, rifled weapons, and monster artillery

of extraordinary range were discovered.[751][752] The third stage is

that of the World War, preluded by the Russo-Japanese conflict;[753]

here submarine and aircraft were set to work, speed of invention

became a new arm in itself, and the extent (though most certainly

not the intensity) of the means used attained a maximum. But to this

expenditure of force there corresponds everywhere the ruthlessness

of the decisions. At the very outset of the Chinese Shan-Kwo period

we find the utter annihilation of the State of Wu--an act which in

the preceding Chun-tsiu period chivalry would have made impossible.

Even in the peace of Campo Formio Napoleon outraged the _convenances_

of the eighteenth century, and after Austerlitz he introduced the

practice of exploiting military success without regard to any but

material restrictions. The last step still possible is being taken in

the peace treaty of the Versailles type, which deliberately avoids

finality and settlement, and keeps open the possibility of setting up

new conditions at every change in the situation. The same evolution

is seen in the chain of the three Punic Wars. The idea of wiping out

one of the leading great powers of the world--which eventually became

familiar to everyone through Cato’s deliberately dry insistence on his

“_Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam_”--never crossed the mind of

the victor of Zama and, for all the wild war-ethics of the Classical

Poleis, it would have seemed to Lysander, as he stood victorious in

Athens, an impiety towards every god.

The Period of the Contending States begins for the Classical world with

the battle of Ipsus (301) which established the trinity of Eastern

great powers, and the Roman victory over the Etruscans and Samnites at

Sentinum (295), which created a mid-Italian great power by the side of

Carthage. Then, however, the characteristic Classical preference for

things near and in the present resulted in eyes’ being shut while Rome

won, first the Italian south in the Pyrrhic adventure, then the sea in

the first Punic War, and then the Celtic north through C. Flaminius.

The significance even of Hannibal (probably the only man of his time

who clearly saw the trend of events) was ignored by all, the Romans

themselves not excepted. It was at _Zama_, and not merely later at

Magnesia and Pydna, that the Hellenistic Eastern powers were defeated.

All in vain the great Scipio, truly anxious in the presence of the

destiny to which a Polis overloaded with the tasks of a world-dominion

was marching, sought thereafter to avoid all conquest. In vain his

entourage forced through the Macedonian War, against the will of every

party, merely in order that the East could thenceforth be ignored as

harmless. Imperialism is so necessary a product of any Civilization

that when a people refuses to assume the rôle of master, it is seized

and pushed into it. The Roman Empire was _not_ conquered--the “_orbis

terrarum_” condensed itself into that form and forced the Romans to

give it their name. It is all very Classical. While the Chinese states

defended even the mere remnants of their independence with the last

bitterness, Rome after 146 only took upon herself to transform the

Eastern land-masses into provinces because there was no other resource

against anarchy left. And even this much resulted in the inward form

of Rome--the last which had remained upright--melting in the Gracchan

disorders. And (what is unparalleled elsewhere) it was not between

states that the final rounds of the battle for Imperium were fought,

but between the parties of a city--the form of the Polis allowed of

no other outcome. Of old it had been Sparta _versus_ Athens, now it

was Optimate _versus_ Popular Party. In the Gracchan revolution,

which was already (134) heralded by a first Servile War, the younger

Scipio was secretly murdered and C. Gracchus openly slain--the first

who as Princeps and the first who as Tribune were political centres

in themselves amidst a world become formless. When, in 104, the urban

masses of Rome for the first time lawlessly and tumultuously invested

a private person, Marius, with Imperium, the deeper importance of

the drama then enacted is comparable with that of the assumption of

the mythic Emperor-title by the ruler of Tsin in 288. The inevitable

product of the age, Cæsarism, suddenly outlines itself on the horizon.

The heir of the Tribune was Marius, who like him linked mob and high

finance and in 87 murdered off the old aristocracy in masses. The heir

of the Princeps was Sulla, who in 82 annihilated the class of the great

merchants by his proscriptions. Thereafter the final decisions press

on rapidly, as in China after the emergence of Wang Cheng. Pompey

the Princeps and Cæsar the Tribune--tribune not in office, but in

attitude--were still party-leaders, but nevertheless, already at Lucca,

they were arranging with Crassus and each other for the first partition

of the world amongst themselves. When the heirs of Cæsar fought his

murderers at Philippi, both had ceased to be more than groups. By

Actium the issue was between individuals, and Cæsarism will out, even

in such a process as this.

In the corresponding evolution within the Arabian world it is, of

course, the Magian Consensus that takes the place of the bodily

Polis as the basic form in and through which the facts accomplish

themselves; and this form, as we have seen, excluded any separation

of political and religious tendencies to such an extent that even the

urban bourgeois urge towards freedom (marking, here as elsewhere,

the beginning of the Period of Contending States) presents itself in

orthodox disguise, and so has hitherto almost escaped notice.[754]

It appeared as a will to break loose from the Caliphate, which the

Sassanids, and Diocletian following them, had created in the forms of

the feudal state. From the times of Justinian and Chosroës Nushirvan

this had had to meet the onset of Frondeurs--led by the heads of the

Greek and Mazdaist Churches, the nobility, both Persian-Mazdaist (above

all Irak) and Greek (particularly the Asiatic), and the high chivalry

of Armenia, which was divided into two parts by the difference of

religion. The absolutism almost attained in the seventh century was

then suddenly destroyed by the attack of Islam. In its _political_

beginnings Islam was strictly aristocratic; the handful of Arabian

families[755] who everywhere kept the leading in their hands, very soon

formed in the conquered territories a new higher nobility of strong

breed and immense self-sufficingness which thrust the dynasty down

to the same level as its English “contemporaries” thrust theirs. The

Civil War between Othman and Ali (656-661) was the expression of a true

Fronde, and its movements were all in the interests of two clans and

their respective adherents. The Islamic Whigs and Tories of the eighth

century, like the English of the eighteenth, _alone_ practised high

politics, and their coteries and family quarrels are more important to

the history of the time than any events in the reigning house of the

Ommaiyads (661-750).

But with the fall of the gay and enlightened dynasty that has resided

in Damascus--that is, West-Aramæan and Monophysite Syria--the natural

centre of gravity of the Arabian Culture reappeared; it was the

East-Aramæan region. Once the basis of Sassanid and now of Abbassid

power, but always--irrespective of whether its shaping was Persian or

Arabian, or its religion Mazdaist, Nestorian, or Islamic--it expressed

one and the same grand line of development and was the exemplar for

Syria as for Byzantium alike. From Kufa the movement started which led

to the downfall of the Ommaiyads and their _ancien régime_, and the

character of this movement--of which the whole extent has never to this

day been observed--was that _of a social revolution directed against

the primary orders of society and the aristocratic tradition_.[756] It

began among the Mavali, the small bourgeoisie in the East, and directed

itself with bitter hostility against the Arabs, not _qua_ champions of

Islam but _qua_ new nobility. The recently converted Mavali, almost all

former Mazdaists, took Islam more seriously than the Arabs themselves,

who represented also a class-ideal. Even in the army of Ali the wholly

democratic and Puritan Qaraites had split off,[757] and in their ranks

we see for the first time the combination of fanatic sectarianism and

Jacobinism. Here and now there emerged not only the Shiite tendency,

but also the first impulses towards the Communistic Karramiyya

movement, which can be traced to Mazdak[758] and later produced the

vast outbreaks under Babek. The Abbassids were anything but favourites

with the insurgents of Kufa, and it was only owing to their great

diplomatic skill that they were first allowed a footing as officers and

then--almost like Napoleon--were able to enter into the heritage of a

Revolution that had spread over the whole East. After their victory

they built Baghdad--a resurrected Ctesiphon, symbol of the downfall

of feudal Arabism--and this first world-city of the new Civilization

became from 800 to 1050 the theatre of the events which led from

Napoleonism to Cæsarism, _from the Caliphate to the Sultanate_, which,

in Baghdad no less than in Byzantium, is the Magian type of power

without form--here also the only kind of power still possible.

We have to recognize quite clearly, then, that in the Arabian world

as elsewhere democracy was a class-ideal--the outlook of townsmen

and the expression of their will to be free from the old linkages

with land, be it a desert or plough-land. The “no” which answered the

Caliph-tradition could disguise itself in very numerous forms, and

neither free-thought nor constitutionalism in our sense was necessary

to it. _Magian mind and Magian money are “free” in quite a different

way._ The Byzantine monkhood was liberal to the point of turbulence,

not only against court and nobility, but also against the higher

ecclesiastical powers, which had developed a hierarchy (corresponding

to the Gothic) even before the Council of Nicæa. The consensus of the

Faithful, the “people” in the most daring sense, was looked upon as

willed by God (“Nature,” Rousseau would have said), as _equal_ and

free from all powers of the blood. The celebrated scene in which the

Abbot Theodore of Studion adjured the Emperor Leo V to obey (813) is

a Storming of the Bastille in Magian forms.[759] Not long afterwards

there began the revolt of the Paulicians, very pious and in social

matters wholly radical,[760] who set up a state of their own beyond

the Taurus, ravaged all Asia Minor, defeated one Imperial levy after

another, and were not subjugated till 874. This corresponds in every

way to the communistic-religious movement of the Karramiyya, which

extended from the Tigris to Merv and whose leader Babek succumbed only

after a twenty years’ struggle (817-837);[761] and the other like

outbreak of the Carmathians[762] in the West (890-904), whose liaisons

reached from Arabia into all the Syrian cities and who propagated

rebellion as far as the Persian coast. But, besides these, there were

still other disguises of the political party-battle. When now we are

told that the Byzantine army was Iconoclast and that the military party

was consequently opposed by an Iconodule monkish party, we begin to

see the passions of the century of the image-controversy (740-840)

in quite a new light, and to understand that the end of the crisis

(843)--the final defeat of the Iconoclasts and _simultaneously_ of the

free-church monkish policy--signifies a Restoration in the 1815 sense

of the word.[763] And, lastly, this period is the time of the fearful

slave-rebellion in Irak--the kernel of the Abbassids’ realm--which

throws sudden light upon a series of other social upheavals. Ali, the

Spartacus of Islam, founded in 869, south of Baghdad, a veritable Negro

state out of the masses of runaways, built himself a capital, Muktara,

and extended his power far in the directions of Arabia and Persia

alike, where he gained the support of whole tribes. In 871 Basra, the

first great port of the Islamic world, inhabited by nearly a million

souls, was taken, deluged in massacre, and burnt. Not till 883 was this

slave-state destroyed.

Thus slowly the Sassanid-Byzantine forms were hollowed out, and in the

place of the ancient traditions of the higher officialdom and nobility

there arose the inconsequent and wholly personal power of incidental

geniuses--_the Sultanate_. For this is the specifically Arabian form,

and it appears simultaneously in Byzantium and Baghdad and takes its

steady course from the Napoleonic beginnings about 800 to the completed

Cæsarism of the Seljuk Turks about 1050. This form is purely Magian,

belongs only to that Culture, and is incomprehensible without the most

fundamental axioms of its soul. The Caliphate, a synthesis of political

(not to say cosmic) beat and style, was not abolished--for the Caliph

as the representative of God recognized by the Consensus of the elect

is sacred--but he was deprived of all powers that Cæsarism needed to

possess, just as Pompey and Augustus in fact, and Sulla and Cæsar in

fact and in name, abstracted these powers from the old constitutional

forms of Rome. In the end there remained to the Caliph about as much

power as the Senate and the Comitias had under Tiberius. The whole

richness of being in high form--in law, costume, ethic--that had once

been a symbol, was now mere trappings covering a formless and purely

factual régime.

So we find by the side of Michael III (842-867) Bardas, and by

Constantine VII (912-959) Romanos--the latter even formally

Co-Emperor.[764] In 867 the ex-groom Basileios, a Napoleonic figure,

overthrew Bardas and founded the sword-dynasty of the Armenians (to

1081), in which generals instead of Emperors mostly ruled--force-men

like Romanos, Nicephorus, and Bardas Phocas. The greatest amongst them

was John Tzimisces (969-976) in Armenian Kiur Zan. In Baghdad it was

the _Turks_ who played the Armenian rôle; in 842 the Caliph Vathek

invested one of their leaders for the first time with the title of

Sultan. From 862 the Turkish prætorians held the ruler in tutelage,

and in 945 Achmed, the founder of the Sultan-dynasty of the Buyids,

formally restricted the Abbassid Caliph to his religious dignities.

And then there set in, in both the world-cities, an unrestrained

competition between the mighty provincial families for possession

of the supreme power. In the case of the Christian we find, indeed,

Basileios II and others challenging the great latifundia lords, but

this does not in the least mean social purposes in the legislator.

It was an act of self-defence on the part of the momentary potentate

against possible heirs, and closely analogous, therefore, to the

proscriptions of Sulla and the Triumvirs. Half Asia Minor belonged to

the Dukas, Phocas, and Skleros connexions; the Chancellor Basileios,

who could keep an army on pay out of his own fabulous resources, has

long ago been compared with Crassus.[765] But the imperial age proper

begins only with the Seljuk Turks.[766] Their leader Togrulbek won Irak

in 1043 and Armenia in 1049, and in 1055 forced the Caliph to grant him

the _hereditary_ Sultanate. His son Alp Arslan conquered Syria and, by

the victory of Manzikert, gained eastern Asia Minor. The remnant of the

Byzantine Empire thenceforward possessed no importance to, or influence

on, the further destinies of the Turkish Islamic Imperium.

This is the phase, too, which in Egypt is concealed under the name

of the “Hyksos.” Between the XIIth and the XVIIIth Dynasties lay two

centuries,[767] which began with the collapse of the _ancien régime_

which had culminated with Sesostris III,[768] and ended with the

beginning of the New Empire. The numbering of the dynasties itself

suffices to disclose something catastrophic. In the lists of kings the

names appear successive or parallel, usurpers of obscurest origin,

generals, people with strange titles, often reigning only a few days.

With the very first king of the XIIIth Dynasty the high-Nile records

at Semne break off, and with his successor the archives at Kahun come

to an end. It is the time out of which the Leiden Papyrus portrays

the great social revolution.[769] The fall of the Government and the

victory of the mass is followed by outbreaks of the army and the rise

of ambitious soldiers. In Egypt from about 1680 appears the name of

the “Hyksos,”[770] a designation with which the historians of the New

Empire, who no longer understood or wished to understand the meaning

of the epoch, covered up the shame of these years. These Hyksos, there

can be no doubt whatever, played the part that the Armenians played in

Byzantium; and in the Classical world too, the destinies of the Cimbri

and Teutones, would have gone the same way had they defeated Marius and

his legions of city _canaille_; they would have filled the armies of

the Triumvirs again and again, and in the end probably set up barbarian

chieftains in their place--for the case of Jugurtha shows the lengths

to which foreigners dared to go with the Rome of those days. The

provenance or constitution of the intruders does not matter--they might

be body-guards, insurgent slaves, Jacobins, or purely alien tribes.

What does matter is what they were for the Egyptian world in that

century of theirs. In the end they set up a state in the Western Delta

and built a capital, Auaris, for it.[771] One of their leaders, Khyan

by name, who styled himself, not Pharaoh, but “Embracer of the Country”

and “prince of the young men” (names as essentially revolutionary as

the _Consul sine collega_ or _dictator prepetuus_ of Cæsar’s time) a

man probably of the stamp of John Tzimisces, ruled over all Egypt and

spread his renown as far as Crete and the Euphrates. But after him

began a fight of all the districts for the Imperium, and out of that

fight Amasis and the Theban dynasty eventually emerged victorious.

For us this time of Contending States began with Napoleon and his

violent-arbitrary government by order. His head was the first in our

world to make effective the notion of a military and at the same

time popular world-domination--something altogether different from

the Empire of Charles V and even the British Colonial Empire of his

own day. If the nineteenth century has been relatively poor in great

wars--and revolutions--and has overcome its worst crises diplomatically

by means of congresses, this has been due precisely to the continuous

and terrific war-preparedness which has made disputants, fearful at the

eleventh hour of the consequences, postpone the definitive decision

again and again, and led to the substitution of chess-moves for war.

For this is the century of gigantic permanent armies and universal

compulsory service. We ourselves are too near to it to see it under

this terrifying aspect. In all world-history there is no parallel.

Ever since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and latterly millions,

of men have stood ready to march, and mighty fleets renewed every ten

years have filled the harbours. It is a war without war, a war of

overbidding in equipment and preparedness, a war of figures and tempo

and technics, and the diplomatic dealings have been not of court with

court, but of headquarters with headquarters. The longer the discharge

was delayed, the more huge became the means and the more intolerable

the tension. This is the Faustian, the dynamic, form of “the Contending

States” during the first century of that period, but it ended with the

explosion of the World War. For the demand of these four years has been

altogether too much for the principle of universal service--child of

the French Revolution, revolutionary through and through, as it is in

this form--and for all tactical methods evolved from it.[772] The place

of the permanent armies as we know them will gradually be taken by

professional forces of volunteer war-keen soldiers; and from millions

we shall revert to hundreds of thousands. But _ipso facto_ this second

century will be one of _actually_ Contending States. _These_ armies

are not substitutes for war--they are _for_ war, and they want war.

Within two generations it will be they whose will prevails over that

of all the comfortables put together. In these wars of theirs for the

heritage of the whole world, continents will be staked, India, China,

South Africa, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played

and counterplayed. The great cosmopolitan foci of power will dispose at

their pleasure of smaller states--their territory, their economy and

their men alike--all that is now merely province, passive object, means

to end, and its destinies are without importance to the great march of

things. We ourselves, in a very few years, have learned to take little

or no notice of events that before the War would have horrified the

world; who to-day seriously thinks about the millions that perish in

Russia?

Again and again between these catastrophes of blood and terror the cry

rises up for reconciliation of the peoples and for peace on earth.

It is but the background and the echo of the grand happening, but,

as such, so necessary that we have to assume its existence even if,

as in Hyksos Egypt, in Baghdad and Byzantium, no tradition tells of

it. Esteem as we may the wish towards all this, we must have the

courage to face facts as they are--that is the hall-mark of men of

race-quality and it is by the being of these men that _alone_ history

is. Life if it would be great, is hard; it lets choose _only_ between

victory and ruin, not between war and peace, and to the victory belong

the sacrifices of victory. For that which shuffles querulously and

jealously by the side of the events is only literature,--written or

thought or lived literature--mere truths that lose themselves in the

moving crush of facts. History has never deigned to take notice of

these propositions. In the Chinese world Hiang-Sui tried, as early as

535, to found a peace league. In the period of the Contending States,

imperialism (_Lien-heng_) was opposed by the League of Nations idea

(_Hoh-tsung_),[773] particularly in the southern regions, but it was

foredoomed like every half-measure that steps into the path of a whole,

and it had vanished even before the victory of the North. But both

tendencies alike rejected the political taste of the Taoists, who, in

those fearful centuries, elected for intellectual self-disarmament,

thereby reducing themselves to the level of mere material to be

used up by others and for others in the grand decisions. Even Roman

politics--deliberately improvident as the Classical spirit was in all

other respects--at least made one attempt to bring the whole world

into one system of equal co-ordinated forces which should do away with

all necessity for further wars--that is, when at the fall of Hannibal

Rome forwent the chance of incorporating the East. But reluctance was

useless; the party of the younger Scipio went over to frank Imperialism

in order to make an end of chaos, although its clear-sighted

leader foresaw therein the doom of his city, which possessed (and

in a high degree) the native Classical incapacity for organizing

anything whatever. The way from Alexander to Cæsar is unambiguous

and unavoidable, and the strongest nation of any and every Culture,

consciously or unconsciously, willing or unwilling, has had to tread it.

From the rigour of these facts there is no refuge. The Hague Conference

of 1907 was the prelude of the World War; the Washington Conference of

1921 will have been that of other wars. The history of these times is

no longer an intellectual match of wits in elegant forms for pluses

and minuses, from which either side can withdraw when it pleases. The

alternatives now are to stand fast or to go under--there is no middle

course. The only moral that the logic of things permits to us now

is that of the climber on the face of the crag--a moment’s weakness

and all is over. To-day all “philosophy” is nothing but an inward

abdication and resignation, or a craven hope of escaping realities by

means of mysticisms. It was just the same in Roman times. Tacitus tells

us[774] how the famous Musonius Rufus tried, by exhortations on the

blessings of peace and the evils of war, to influence the legions that

in 70 stood before the gates of Rome, and barely escaped alive from

their blows. The military commander Avidius Cassius called the Emperor

Marcus Aurelius a “philosophical old woman.”

In these conditions so much of old and great traditions as remains, so

much of historical “fitness” and experience as has got into the blood

of the twentieth-century nations, acquires an unequalled potency. For

us _creative_ piety, or (to use a more fundamental term) the pulse

that has come down to us from first origins, adheres only to forms

that are older than the Revolution and Napoleon,[775] forms which grew

and were not made. Every remnant of them, however tiny, that has kept

itself alive in the being of any self-contained minority whatever will

before long rise to incalculable values and bring about historical

effects which no one yet imagines to be possible. The traditions of an

old monarchy, of an old aristocracy, of an old polite society, in so

much as they are still healthy enough to keep clear of professional or

professorial politics, in so far as they possess honour, abnegation,

discipline, the genuine sense of a great mission (_race-quality_, that

is, and training), sense of duty and sacrifice--can become a centre

which holds together the being-stream of an entire people and enables

it to outlast this time and make its landfall in the future. To be “in

condition” is everything. It falls to us to live in the most trying

times known to the history of a great Culture. The last race to keep

its form, the last living tradition, the last leaders who have both at

their back, will pass through and onward, victors.

X {sic}

By the term “Cæsarism” I mean that kind of government which,

irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in

its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter

that Augustus in Rome, and Hwang-ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and Alp

Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The

spirit of these forms was dead,[776] and so all institutions, however

carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and

weight. Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised

by the Cæsar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place.

It is the _récidive_ of a form-fulfilled world into primitivism, into

the cosmic-historyless. Biological stretches of time once more take the

place vacated by historical periods.[777]

At the beginning, where the Civilization is developing to full bloom

(to-day), there stands the miracle of the Cosmopolis, the great

petrifact, a symbol of the formless--vast, splendid, spreading in

insolence. It draws within itself the being-streams of the now impotent

countryside, human masses that are wafted as dunes from one to another

or flow like loose sand into the chinks of the stone. Here money and

intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs. It is the

most artificial, the cleverest phenomenon manifested in the light-world

of human eyes--uncanny, “too good to be true,” standing already almost

beyond the possibilities of cosmic formation.

Presently, however, the idea-less facts come forward again, naked

and gigantic. The eternal-cosmic pulse has finally overcome the

intellectual tensions of a few centuries. In the form of democracy,

money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost

its preserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the

Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that

penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming--the Cæsar-men. Before

them the money collapses. _The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike,

signifies the end of the politics of mind and money_. The powers of the

blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race”

springs forth, pure and irresistible--the strongest win and the residue

is their spoil. They seize the management of the world, and the realm

of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory. From now

on, new destinies in the style of the pre-Culture time are possible

afresh, and visible to the consciousness without cloaks of causality.

There is no inward difference more between the lives of Septimius

Severus and Gallienus and those of Alaric and Odoacer. Rameses,

Trajan, Wu-ti belong together in a uniform up-and-down of historyless

time-stretches.[778]

Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political

problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers

that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had

reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths

of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of

rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights

are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to

make use of them. A hundred years more, and even the historians will

no longer understand the old controversies. Already by Cæsar’s time

reputable people had almost ceased to take part in the elections.[779]

It embittered the life of the great Tiberius that the most capable

men of his time held aloof from politics, and Nero could not even

by threats compel the Equites to come to Rome in order to exercise

their rights. This is the end of the great politics. The conflict of

intelligences that had served as substitute for war must give place to

war itself in its most primitive form.

It is, therefore, a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the

period to presume, as Mommsen did,[780] a deep design of subdivision

in the “dyarchy” fashioned by Augustus, with its partition of powers

between Princeps and Senate. A century earlier this constitution would

have been a real thing, but that would in itself suffice to make it

impossible for such an idea to have entered the heads of the present

force-men. Now it meant nothing but the attempt of a weak personality

to deceive itself as to inexorable facts by mantling them in empty

forms. Cæsar saw things as they were and was guided in the exercise of

his rulership by definite and unsentimental practical considerations.

The legislation of his last months was concerned wholly with

transitional provisions, none of which were intended to be permanent.

This precisely is what has generally been overlooked. He was far too

deep a judge of things to anticipate development or to settle its

definitive forms at this moment, with the Parthian War impending. But

Augustus, like Pompey before him, was not the master of his following,

but thoroughly dependent upon it and its views of things. The form

of the Principate was not at all his discovery, but the doctrinaire

execution of an obsolete party-ideal that Cicero--another weakling--had

formulated.[781] When, on the 13th January 27, Augustus gave back

the state-power to the “Senate and People” of Rome--a scene all the

more meaningless because of its sincerity--he kept the Tribunate for

himself. In fact, this was the one element of the polity that could

manifest itself in actuality. The Tribune was the legitimate successor

of the Tyrant,[782] and as long ago as 122 B.C. Caius Gracchus had put

into the title a connotation limited no longer by the legal bounds

of the office, but only by the personal talents of the incumbent.

From him it is a direct line through Marius and Cæsar to the young

Nero, who set himself to defeat the political purposes of his mother

Agrippina. The Princeps,[783] on the other hand, was thenceforth only a

costume, a rank--very likely a fact in society, certainly not a fact in

politics. And this, precisely, was the conception invested with light

and glamour by the theory of Cicero, and _already_--and by him of all

people--associated with the Divus-idea.[784] The “co-operation” of the

Senate and People, on the contrary, was an antiquated ceremonial, with

about as much life in it as the rites of the Fratres Arvales--also

restored by Augustus. The great parties of the Gracchan age had long

become retinues--Cæsarians and Pompeians--and finally there only

remained on the one side the formless omnipotence, the plain brutal

“fact,” the Cæsar--or whoever managed to get the Cæsar under his

influence--and on the other side the handful of narrow ideologues who

concealed dissatisfaction under philosophy and thenceforward sought

to advance their ideals by conspiracy. What these Stoics were in

Rome, the Confucians were in China--and, seen thus, the episode of

the “Burning of the Books,” decreed by the Chinese Augustus in 212,

begins to be intelligible through the reproach of immense vandalism

that the minds of later literates fastened upon it. But, after all,

these Stoic enthusiasts for an ideal that had become impossible

had killed Cæsar:[785] to the Divus-cult they opposed a Cato- and

Brutus-cult; the philosophers in the Senate (which by then was only a

noble club) never wearied of lamenting the downfall of “freedom” and

fomenting conspiracies such as Piso’s in 65. Had this been the state

of things at Nero’s death, it would have been Sulla over again; and

that is why Nero put to death the Stoic Thrasea Pætus, why Vespasian

executed Helvidius Priscus, and why copies of the history of Cremutius

Cordus, which lauded Brutus as the last of the Romans, were collected

and burnt in Rome. These were acts of defensive State necessity

_vis-à-vis_ blind ideology--acts such as those we know of Cromwell

and Robespierre--and it was in exactly the same position that the

Chinese Cæsars found themselves _vis-à-vis_ the school of Confucius,

which had formerly worked out their ideal of a state-constitution

and now had no notion of enduring the actuality. This great Burning

of the Books was nothing but the destruction of one part of the

politico-philosophical literature and the abolition of propaganda and

secret organizations.[786] This defensive lasted in both Imperia for a

century, and then even reminiscences of party-political passions faded

out and the two philosophies became the ruling world-outlook of the

Imperial age in its maturity.[787] But the world was now the theatre of

_tragic family-histories_ into which state-histories were dissolved;

the Julian-Claudian house destroyed Roman history, and the house of

Shi-hwang-ti (even from 206 B.C.) destroyed Chinese, and we darkly

discern something of the same kind in the destinies of the Egyptian

Queen Hatshepsut and her brothers (1501-1447). It is the last step to

the definitive. With world-peace--_the peace of high policies_--the

“sword side”[788] of being retreats and the “spindle side” rules again;

henceforth there are only _private_ histories, private destinies,

private ambitions, from top to bottom, from the miserable troubles of

fellaheen to the dreary feuds of Cæsars for the private possession of

the world. The wars of the age of world-peace are private wars, more

fearful than any State wars because they are formless.

For world-peace--which has often existed in fact--involves the private

renunciation of war on the part of the immense majority, but along with

this it involves an unavowed readiness to submit to being the booty of

others who do _not_ renounce it. It begins with the State-destroying

wish for universal reconciliation, and it ends in nobody’s moving a

finger so long as misfortune only touches his neighbour. Already under

Marcus Aurelius each city and each land-patch was thinking of itself,

and the activities of the ruler were his private affair as other

men’s were theirs. The remoter peoples were as indifferent to him

and his troops and his aims as they were to the projects of Germanic

war-bands. On this _spiritual_ premiss a second Vikingism develops. The

state of being “in form” passes from nations to bands and retinues of

adventurers, self-styled Cæsars, seceding generals, barbarian kings,

and what not--in whose eyes the population becomes in the end merely

a part of the landscape. There is a deep relation between the heroes

of the Mycenæan primitive age and the soldier-emperors of Rome, and

between, say, Menes and Rameses II. In our Germanic world the spirits

of Alaric and Theodoric will come again--there is a first hint of them

in Cecil Rhodes--and the alien executioners of the Russian preface,

from Jenghiz Khan to Trotski (with the episode of Petrine Tsarism

between them) are, when all is said and done, very little different

from most of the pretenders of the Latin-American republics, whose

private struggles have long since put an end to the form-rich age of

the Spanish Baroque.

With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary

to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb

and enduring. The timeless village and the “eternal” peasant[789]

reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth--a busy,

not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors

passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities,

empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless

mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty

thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are trampled on in the

conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil

of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive

fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal

alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with

that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all

doubts for ever.[790] There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of

God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual--and

there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering

which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has

never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being

reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as

the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of

land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at

it or we may lament it--but it is there.