corruption, not to Nero's or Caligula's wickedness, nor to the
futility of Constantine's descendants. It began at Philippi,
where the spirit of domination overcame the spirit of freedom.
It was forecast still earlier in the rise of consuls and
triumvirs incident to the thinning out of the sturdy and
self-sufficient strains who brooked no arbitrary rule. While
the best men were falling in war, civil or foreign, or remained
behind in faraway colonies, the stock at home went on repeating
its weakling parentage. A condition significant in Roman
history is marked by the gradual swelling of the mob, with the
rise in authority of the Emperor who was the mob's exponent.
Increase of arbitrary power went with the growing weakness of
the Romans themselves. Always the "Emperor" serves as a sort of
historical barometer by which to measure the abasement of the
people. The concentrated power of Julius Caesar, resting on his
own tremendous personality, showed that the days of Cincinnatus
and of Junius Brutus were past. The strength of Augustus rested
likewise in personality. The rising authority of later emperors
had its roots in the ineffectiveness of the mob, until it came
to pass that "the little finger of Constantine was thicker than
the loins of Augustus." This was due not to Constantine's
force, but to the continued reversal of selection among the
people over whom he ruled. The emperor, no longer the strong
man holding in check all lesser men and organizations, became
the creature of the mob; and "the mob, intoxicated with its own
work, worshipped him as divine." Doubtless the last emperor,
Augustulus Romulus, before the Goths threw him into the
scrap-heap of history, was regarded by the mob and himself as
the most god-like of the whole succession.
The Romans of the Republic might perhaps have made a history
very different. Had they held aloof from world-conquering
schemes Rome might have remained a republic, enduring even down
to our day. The seeds of Rome's fall lay not in race nor in
form of government, nor in wealth nor in senility, but in the
influences by which the best men were cut off from parenthood,
leaving its own weaker strains and strains of lower races to be
fathers of coming generations.
"The Roman Empire," says Professor Seely, "perished for want of
men." Even Julius Caesar notes the dire scarcity of men, while
at the same time there were people enough. The population
steadily grew; Rome was filling up like an overflowing marsh.
Men of a certain type were plenty, but self-reliant farmers,
"the hardy dwellers on the flanks of the Apennines," men of the
early Roman days, these were fast going, and with the change in
type of population came the turn in Roman history.
The mainspring of the Roman army for centuries has been the
patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships,
instinctive submission to military discipline of the population
that lined the Apennines.
"The effect of the wars was that the ranks of the small farmers
were decimated, while the number of slaves who did not serve in
the army multiplied," says Professor Bury. Thus "Vir gave place
to Homo," thus the mob filled Rome and the mob-hero rose to the
imperial throne. No wonder that Constantine seemed greater than
Augustus. No wonder that "if Tiberius chastised his subjects
with whips, Valentinian chastised them with scorpions."[2]
[2] The point of this is that the cruel Tiberius was less
severe on the Romans of his day than was the relatively
benevolent Valentinian on his decadent people.
With Marcus Aurelius and the Antonines came a "period of
sterility and barrenness in human beings." Bounties were
offered for marriage. Penalties were devised against
race-suicide. "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty which,
however painful, every citizen ought manfully to discharge."
Wars were conducted in the face of a declining birth-rate, and
the decline in quality and quantity in the human breed engaged
very early the attention of Roman statesmen. Deficiencies of
numbers were made up by immigration, willing or enforced.
Failure in quality was beyond remedy.
Says Professor Zumpt:
'Government having assumed godhead, took at the same time the
appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their
rights. Abject fear paralyzed the people and those that ruled
were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty.... The worst
government is that which is most worshipped as divine. . . .
The emperor possessed in the army an overwhelming force over
which citizens had no influence, which was totally deaf to
reason or eloquence, which had no patriotism because it had no
country, which had no humanity because it had no domestic ties.
. . . There runs through Roman literature a brigand's and
barbarian's contempt for honest industry. . . . Roman
civilization was not a creative kind, it was military, that is,
destructive.'
What was the end of it all? The nation bred Romans no more. To
cultivate the Roman fields "whole tribes were borrowed." The
man with quick eye and strong arm gave place to the slave, the
scullion, the pariah, whose lot is fixed because in him there
lies no power to alter it. So at last the Roman world, devoid
of power to resist, was overwhelmed by the swarming Ostrogoths.
The barbarian settled and peopled the empire rather than
conquered it. It was the weakness of war-worn Rome that gave
the Germanic races their first opportunity.
"The nation is like a bee," wisely observes Bernard Shaw, "as
it stings it dies."
In his monumental history of the "Downfall of the Ancient
World" (Der Untergang der Antikenwelt) Dr. Otto Seeck of the
University of Munster in Westphalia, treats in detail the
causes of such decline. He first calls attention to the
intellectual stagnation which came over the Roman Empire about
the beginning of the Christian Era. This manifested itself in
all fields of intellectual activity. No new idea of any
importance was advanced in science nor in technical and
political studies. In the realm of literature and art also one
finds a complete lack of originality and a tendency to imitate
older models. All this Seeck asserts, was brought about by the
continuous "rooting out (Ausrottung) of the best"[3] through
war.
[3] "Die Ausrottung der Besten, die jenen schwacheren Volken
die Vernichtung brachte, hat die starken Germanen erst
befahigt, auf den Trummern der antiken Welt neue dauerende
Gemeinschaften zu errichten." Seeck.
Such extermination which took place in Greece as well as in
Rome, was due to persistent internal conflicts, the constant
murderous struggle going on between political parties, in
which, in rapid succession, first one and then the other was
victorious. The custom of the victors being to kill and banish
the leaders and all prominent men in the defeated party, often
destroying their children as well, it is evident that in time
every strain distinguished for moral courage, initiative or
intellectual strength was exterminated. By such a systematic
killing off of men of initiative and brains, the intellectual
level of a nation must necessarily be lowered more and more. In
Rome as in Greece observes Seeck:
'A wealth of force of spirit went down in the suicidal wars. .
. . In Rome, Marius and Cinna slew the aristocrats by hundreds
and thousands. Sulla destroyed the democrats, and not less
thoroughly. Whatever of strong blood survived, fell as an
offering to the proscription of the Triumvirate. . . . The
Romans had less of spontaneous force to lose than the Greeks.
Thus desolation came sooner to them. Whoever was bold enough to
rise politically in Rome was almost without exception thrown to
the ground. ONLY COWARDS REMAINED, AND FROM THEIR BLOOD CAME
FORWARD THE NEW GENERATIONS.[4] Cowardice showed itself in lack
of originality and in slavish following of masters and
traditions.'
[4] Author's italics.
Certain authors, following Varro, have maintained that Rome
died a "natural death," the normal result of old age. It is
mere fancy to suppose that nations have their birth, their
maturity and their decline under an inexorable law like that
which determines the life history of the individual. A nation
is a body of living men. It may be broken up if wrongly led or
attacked by a superior force. When its proportion of men of
initiative or character is reduced, its future will necessarily
be a resultant of the forces that are left.
Dr. Seeck speaks with especial scorn of the idea that Rome died
of "old age." He also repudiates the theory that her fall was
due to the corruption of luxury, neglect of military tactics or
over-diffusion of culture.
'It is inconceivable that the mass of Romans suffered from
over-culture.[5] In condemning the sinful luxury of wealthy
Romans we forget that the trade-lords of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries were scarcely inferior in this regard to
Lucullus and Apicius, their waste and luxury not constituting
the slightest check to the advance of the nations to which
these men belonged. The people who lived in luxury in Rome were
scattered more thinly than in any modern state of Europe. The
masses lived at all times more poorly and frugally because they
could do nothing else. Can we conceive that a war force of
untold millions of people is rendered effeminate by the luxury
of a few hundreds? . . . Too long have historians looked on the
rich and noble as marking the fate of the world. Half the Roman
Empire was made up of rough barbarians untouched by Greek or
Roman culture.
Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have been, the
immediate cause to which the fall of the empire can be traced
is a physical, not a moral decay. In valor, discipline and
science the Roman armies remained what they had always been,
and the peasant emperors of Illyricum were worthy successors of
Cincinnatus and Calus Marius. But the problem was, how to
replenish those armies. Men were wanting. The empire perished
for want of men.'
[5] "Damitsprechend hat man das Wort `Ueberkultur' uberhaupt
erfunden, als wenn ein zu grosses Maass von Kultur uberhaupt
denkbar ware."
In a volume entitled "Race or Mongrel" published as I write
these pages, Dr. Alfred P. Schultz of New York, author of "The
End of Darwinism," takes essentially the same series of facts
as to the fall of Rome and draws from them a somewhat different
conclusion. In his judgment the cause was due to "bastardy," to
the mixing of Roman blood with that of neighboring and
subjective races. To my mind, bastardy was the result and not
the cause of Rome's decline, inferior and subject races having
been sucked into Rome to fill the vacuum left as the Romans
themselves perished in war. The continuous killing of the best
left room for the "post-Roman herd," who once sold the imperial
throne at auction to the highest bidder. As the Romans vanished
through warfare at home and abroad, came an inrush of foreign
blood from all regions roundabout. As Schultz graphically
states:
'The degeneration and depravity of the mongrels was so great
that they deified the emperors. And many of the emperors were
of a character so vile that their deification proves that the
post-Roman soul must have been more depraved than that of the
Egyptian mongrel, who deified nothing lower than dogs, cats,
crocodiles, bugs and vegetables.'
It must not be overlooked, however, that the Roman race was
never a pure race. It was a union of strong elements of
frontier democratic peoples, Sabines, Umbrians, Sicilians,
Etruscans, Greeks, being blended in republican Rome. Whatever
the origins, the worst outlived the best, mingling at last with
the odds and ends of Imperial slavery, the "Sewage of Races"
("cloaca gentium") left at the Fall.
Gibbon says:
'This diminutive stature of mankind was daily sinking below the
old standard and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race
of pygmies when the fierce giants of the north broke in and
mended the puny breed. They restored the manly spirit of
freedom and after the revolutions of ten centuries, freedom
became the parent of taste and science.'
But again, the redeemed Italian was of no purer blood than the
post-Roman-Ostrogoth ancestry from which he sprang. The "puny
Roman" of the days of Theodoric owed his inheritance to the
cross of Roman weaklings with Roman slaves. He was not weak
because he was "mongrel" but because he sprang from bad stock
on both sides. The Ostrogoth and the Lombard who tyrannized
over him brought in a great strain of sterner stuff, followed
by crosses with captive and slave such as always accompany
conquest. To understand the fall of Rome one must consider the
disastrous effects of crossings of this sort. Neither can one
overlook the waste of war which made them inevitable through
the wholesale influx of inferior tribes. Neither can one speak
of the Roman, the Italian, the Spaniard, the French, the
Roumanian, nor of any of the so-called "Latin" peoples as
representing a simple pure stock, or as being, except in
language, direct descendants of those ancient Latins who
constituted the Roman Republic. The failure of Rome arose not
from hybridization, but from the wretched quality on both sides
of its mongrel stock, descendants of Romans unfit for war and
of base immigrants that had filled the vacancies.
Greece.--Once Greece led the world in intellectual pursuits, in
art, in poetry, in philosophy. A large and vital part of
European culture is rooted directly in the language and thought
of Athens. The most beautiful edifice in the world was the
Peace Palace of the Parthenon, erected by Pericles, to
celebrate the end of Greece's suicidal wars. This endured 2,187
years, to be wrecked at last (1687) in Turkish hands by the
Christian bombs of the Venetian Republic.
But the glory of Greece had passed away long before the fall of
the Parthenon. Its cause was the one cause of all such
downfalls--the extinction of strong men by war. At the best,
the civilization of Greece was built on slavery, one freeman to
ten slaves. And when the freemen were destroyed, the slaves, an
original Mediterranean stock, overspread the territory of
Hellas along with the Bulgarians, Albanians and Vlachs,
barbarians crowding down from the north.
The Grecian language still lives, the tongue of a spirited and
rising modern people. But the Greeks of the classic period--the
Hellenes of literature, art and philosophy--will never be known
again. Says Mr. W. H. Ireland:
'Most of the old Greek race has been swept away, and the
country is now inhabited by persons of Slavonic descent.
Indeed, there is a strong ground for the statement that there
was more of the old heroic blood of Hellas in the Turkish army
of Edhem Pasha than in the soldiers of King George.'
The modern Greek has been called a "Byzantinized Slav." King
George himself and Constantine his son are only aliens placed
on the Grecian throne to suit the convenience of outer powers,
being in fact descendants of tribes which to the ancient Greeks
were merely barbarians.
It is maintained that the modern Greeks are in the main the
descendants of the population that inhabited Greece in the
earlier centuries of Byzantine rule. Owing to the operation of
various causes, historical, social and economic, that
population was composed of many heterogeneous elements and
represented in very limited degree the race which repulsed the
Persians and built the Parthenon. The internecine conflicts of
the Greek communities, wars with foreign powers, and the deadly
struggles of factions in the various cities had to a large
extent obliterated the old race of free citizens by the
beginning of Roman period. The extermination of the Plataeans
by the Spartans and of the Melians by the Athenians during the
Peloponnesian war, the proscription of the Athenian citizens
after the war, the massacre of the Coreyrean oligarchs by the
democratic party, the slaughter of the Thebans by Alexander and
of the Corinthians by Mummius are among the more familiar
instances of the catastrophes which overtook the civic element
in the Greek cities. The void can only have been filled from
the ranks of the metics or resident aliens and of the
descendants of the far more numerous slave population. In the
classic period four fifths of the population of Attica were
slaves; of the remainder, half were meties In A.D. 100 only
three thousand free arm-bearing men were in Greece. (James D.
Bourchier.)
The constant little struggles of the Greeks among themselves
made no great showing as to numbers compared to other wars, but
they wiped out the most valuable people, the best blood, the
most promising heredity on earth. This cost the world more than
the killing of millions of barbarians. In two centuries there
were born under the shadow of the Parthenon more men of genius
than the Roman Empire had in its whole existence. Yet this
empire included all the civilized world, even Greece herself.
(La Pouge.)
The downfall of Greece,[6] like that of Rome, has been ascribed
by Schultz to the crossing of the Greeks with the barbaric
races which flocked into Hellas from every side. These resident
aliens, or metics, steadily increased in number as the free
Greeks disappeared. Selected slaves or helots were then made
free in order to furnish fighting men, and again as these fell
their places were taken by immigrants.
[6] Certain recent writers who find in environment the causes
of the rise and fall of nations, ascribe the failure of Greece
to the introduction in Athens and Sparta of the malaria-bearing
mosquito. As to the facts in question, we have little evidence.
But while the prevalence of malaria may have affected the
general activity of the people, it could in no way have
obliterated the mental leadership which made the strength of
classic Hellas, nor could it have injected its poison into the
stream of Greek heredity.
It is doubtless true at this day that "no race inhabits
Greece," and the main difference between Greeks and other
Balkan peoples is that, inhabiting the mountains and valleys of
Hellas, they speak in dialects of the ancient tongue.
Environment, except through selection and segregation, can not
alter race inheritance and the modern "Greeks" have not been
changed by it. Schultz observes:
'We are told that the Hellenes owed their greatness largely to
the country it was their fortune to dwell in. To that same
country, with the same wonderful coast line and harbors,
mountains and brooks, and the same sun of Homer, the modern
Greeks owe their nothingness.'
In other words, it is quite true that the Greece of Pericles
owed its strength to Greek blood, not to Hellenic scenery. When
all the good Greek blood was spent in suicidal wars, only
slaves and foreign-born were left. " 'Tis Greece, but living
Greece no more."[7]
[7] In contrasting a new race with the old--as the modern
Greeks with the incomparable Hellenes--we must not be unjust to
the men of to-day whose limitations are evident, contrasted
with a race we know mainly by its finest examples. In spite of
poverty, touchiness and vanity characteristic of the modern
Greek, there is good stuff in him. He is frank, hopeful,
enthusiastic. The mountain Greek, at least, knows the value of
freedom, and has more than once put up a brave fight for it.
The valleys breed subserviency, and the Greeks of Thessaly are
said to be less independent than the mountain-born.
Furthermore, we do not know that even the first Hellenes of
Mycenae were an unmixed race, or that any unmixed races ever
rose to such prominence as to command the world's attention. We
do know that when war depletes a nation slaves and foreigners
come in to fill the vacuum, and that the decline of a great
race in history has always been accompanied by a debasing of
its blood.
Yet out of this decadence natural selection may in time bring
forward better strains, and with normal conditions of security
and peace nature may begin again her work of recuperation.
In the fall of Greece we have another count against war,
scarcely realized until the facts of Louvain and Malines, of
Rheims and Ypres, have brought it again so vividly before us.
War respects nothing, while the human soul increasingly demands
veneration for its own noble and beautiful achievements. As I
write this, there rise before me the paintings in the "Neue
Pinakothek" at Munich, representing the twenty-one Cities of
Ancient Greece, from Sparta to Salamis, from Eleusis to
Corinth, not as they were, "in the glory which was Greece," not
as they are now, largely fishing hamlets by the blue Aegean
Sea, but as ruined arches and broken columns half hid in the
ashes of war, wars which blotted out Greece from world history.
ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS AND WAR
BY ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
NEW YORK CITY
ONE of the most curious of those misstatements of fact and
confusions of thought the conservative seems even more prone to
make than the radical has to do with a certain suppositiously
historical relation between women and war. It is assumed[1]
that early society is ever militant and that because of its
militarism it excludes women, women not being fighters, not
only from its government, but from all its privileges, even
making of them its drudges and its beasts of burden. And so,
argues the conservative, women are for the same reasons
disfranchised, and properly disfranchised, to-day. Whether more
or less militant than it was, society is still founded on
force, and because women are not as strong as men, men will not
give them the vote. Besides it is only right, since they can
not fight, they should not vote. It has always been so, and so
it should continue to be, at any rate until war becomes a thing
of the past, and that will never be, you can't change human
nature, etc., etc.
[1] And, let us admit, not merely by the conservative
anti-feminist. As radical and discerning a feminist as Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, after asserting that physical strength was
once "sole ruler," cites in agreement Walter Bagehot's
reference to "the contempt for physical weakness and for women
which marks early society." ("Women and the Alphabet," p. 49.
Boston and New York, 1900.)
There are of course various answers to this militarist
anti-suffrage argument, answers which in spite of the logic of
current events are still likely to be satisfactory or not
according to previous convictions, but the only point I wish to
challenge is the appeal in this connection to the past. Let the
militarist anti-suffragist assert his belief in government by
force if he likes, but let him not try to justify it by the
precedents of primitive life. Nor may he--or she--explain the
exclusion of women to-day as a survival of their subjection in
primitive society to brute force. The government of primitive
society is not based on physical prowess, and although modern
woman is excluded from men's activities for the same reason as
primitive woman was excluded, the reason is not muscular
inferiority.
It is a pity in the feminist controversies of the last hundred
years or so that the "exclusion of women" did not become a more
popular phrase than the "subjection of women." That term gave a
fallacious twist both to observation and analysis. Primitive
and modern men alike commonly EXCLUDE women, they seldom
subject them. Similarly, in some societies, children and young
people, all in fact but the elderly, are treated to methods of
exclusion rather than of subjection.
Early society is dominated by the elders; its practices and
customs have been determined by them and, in the most primitive
society, government is nothing but a gerontocracy, a government
of old men. Even with chieftaincy the council of the elders is
weighty and the heads of households have considerable
influence. Are the elders the fighters or raiders of the tribe?
No, they are its judges, its legislators and, most important of
all, its magicians. Nor is the chief or king the fighter par
excellence of the tribe. But he too may be and often is the
tribal magician. Through their powers of magic elders and
chiefs are responsible for the weather, for the reproduction of
plants and animals, for the success of the crops, of hunts and
catches, for the health and general welfare of the people. And
in war? In war they are the most important personages too.
Because they fight? No, because in war too they make magic;
they charm the approaches to the village, they "doctor" the
trails or the weapons or the canoes, they make war medicine,
they invoke and propitiate the war gods. The warriors are the
younger men, men whose efforts would be vain without the
backing of their magic-working seniors or chiefs. The elders
make peace and declare war. And it is at their dictate that the
young men take to head-hunting or to raiding or even to
stealing women.
As to the subjection of women, what exists of it the elders are
responsible for. It is they who scare a girl or shame her into
being docile. It is they who marry her off against her will, it
is they who set her unending tasks or shut her up in idleness.
It is they who make her undergo the discomforts or miseries of
what we call conventional life or bully her into exile or
death.