No one who reads the history of the last three hundred years--no one,
above all, who studies attentively the career of Napoleon--can believe
it possible for any State, however great her energy and material
resources, to repeat in modern Europe the part of ancient Rome; to
gather into one vast political body races whose national individuality
has grown more and more marked in each successive age. Nevertheless, it
is in great measure due to Rome and to the Roman Empire of the Middle
Ages that the bonds of national union are on the whole both stronger and
nobler than they were ever before. The latest historian of Rome
[Mommsen], after summing up the results to the world of his hero's
career, closes his treatise with these words:
"There was in the world as Cæsar found it the rich and noble
heritage of past centuries, and an endless abundance of
splendor and glory; but little soul, still less taste, and
least of all, joy in and through life. Truly it was an old
world, and even Cæsar's genial patriotism could not make it
young again. The blush of dawn returns not until the night
has fully descended. Yet with him there came to the
much-tormented races of the Mediterranean a tranquil evening
after a sultry day; and when after long historical night the
new day broke once more upon the peoples, and fresh nations
in free self-guided movement began their course toward new
and higher aims, many were found among them in whom the seed
of Cæsar had sprung up,--many who owed him, and who owe him
still, their national individuality."
If this be the glory of Julius, the first great founder of the Empire,
so is it also the glory of Charles, the second founder, and of more than
one among his Teutonic successors. The work of the mediæval Empire was
self-destructive; and it fostered, while seeming to oppose, the
nationalities that were destined to replace it. It tamed the barbarous
races of the North and forced them within the pale of civilization. It
preserved the arts and literature of antiquity. In times of violence and
oppression, it set before its subjects the duty of rational obedience to
an authority whose watchwords were peace and religion. It kept alive,
when national hatreds were most bitter, the notion of a great European
Commonwealth. And by doing all this, it was in effect abolishing the
need for a centralizing and despotic power like itself; it was making
men capable of using national independence aright; it was teaching them
to rise to that conception of spontaneous activity, and a freedom which
is above law but not against it, to which national independence itself,
if it is to be a blessing at all, must be only a means. Those who mark
what has been the tendency of events since A.D. 1789, and who remember
how many of the crimes and calamities of the past are still but half
redressed, need not be surprised to see the so-called principle of
nationalities advocated with honest devotion as the final and perfect
form of political development. But such undistinguishing advocacy is
after all only the old error in a new shape. If all other history did
not bid us beware the habit of taking the problems and the conditions of
our own age for those of all time, the warning which the Empire gives
might alone be warning enough. From the days of Augustus down to those
of Charles V., the whole civilized world believed in its existence as a
part of the eternal fitness of things, and Christian theologians were
not behind heathen poets in declaring that when it perished the world
would perish with it. Yet the Empire is gone, and the world remains, and
hardly notes the change.