This advantage is One of the greatest in early civilisation--one of the
facts which give a decisive turn to the battle of nations; but there
are many others. A little perfection in POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS may do
it. Travellers have noticed that among savage tribes those seemed to
answer best in which the monarchical power was most predominant, and
those worst in which the 'rule of many' was in its vigour. So long as
war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism--despotism
during the campaign--is indispensable. Macaulay justly said that many
an army has prospered under a bad commander, but no army has ever
prospered under a 'debating society;' that many-headed monster is then
fatal. Despotism grows in the first societies, just as democracy grows
in more modern societies; it is the government answering the primary
need, and congenial to the whole spirit of the time. But despotism is
unfavourable to the principle of variability, as all history shows. It
tends to keep men in the customary stage of civilisation; its very
fitness for that age unfits it for the next. It prevents men from
passing into the first age of progress--the VERY slow and VERY
gradually improving age. Some 'standing system' of semi-free discussion
is as necessary to break the thick crust of custom and begin progress
as it is in later ages to carry on progress when begun; probably it is
even more necessary. And in the most progressive races we find it. I
have spoken already of the Jewish prophets, the life of that nation,
and the principle of all its growth. But a still more progressive
race--that by which secular civilisation was once created, by which it
is now mainly administered--had a still better instrument of
progression. 'In the very earliest glimpses,' says Mr. Freeman, 'of
Teutonic political life, we find the monarchic, the aristocratic, and
the democratic elements already clearly marked. There are leaders with
or without the royal title; there are men of noble birth, whose noble
birth (in whatever the original nobility may have consisted) entitles
them to a pre-eminence in every way; but beyond these there is a free
and armed people, in whom it is clear that the ultimate sovereignty
resides. Small matters are decided by the chiefs alone; great matters
are submitted by the chiefs to the assembled nation. Such a system is
far more than Teutonic; it is a common Aryan possession; it is the
constitution of the Homeric Achaians on earth and of the Homeric gods
on Olympus.' Perhaps, and indeed probably, this constitution may be
that of the primitive tribe which Romans left to go one way, and Greeks
to go another, and Teutons to go a third. The tribe took it with them,
as the English take the common law with them, because it was the one
kind of polity which they could conceive and act upon; or it may be
that the emigrants from the primitive Aryan stock only took with them a
good aptitude--an excellent political nature, which similar
circumstances in distant countries were afterwards to develop into like
forms. But anyhow it is impossible not to trace the supremacy of
Teutons, Greeks, and Romans in part to their common form of government.
The contests of the assembly cherished the principle of change; the
influence of the elders insured sedateness and preserved the mould of
thought; and, in the best cases, military discipline was not impaired
by freedom, though military intelligence was enhanced with the general
intelligence. A Roman army was a free body, at its own choice governed
by a peremptory despotism.
The MIXTURE OF RACES was often an advantage, too. Much as the old world
believed in pure blood, it had very little of it. Most historic nations
conquered prehistoric nations, and though they massacred many, they did
not massacre all. They enslaved the subject men, and they married the
subject women. No doubt the whole bond of early society was the bond of
descent; no doubt it was essential to the notions of a new nation that
it should have had common ancestors; the modern idea that vicinity of
habitation is the natural cement of civil union would have been
repelled as an impiety if it could have been conceived as an idea. But
by one of those legal fictions which Sir Henry Maine describes so well,
primitive nations contrived to do what they found convenient, as well
as to adhere to what they fancied to be right. When they did not beget
they ADOPTED; they solemnly made believe that new persons were
descended from the old stock, though everybody knew that in flesh and
blood they were not. They made an artificial unity in default of a real
unity; and what it is not easy to understand now, the sacred sentiment
requiring unity of race was somehow satisfied: what was made did as
well as what was born. Nations with these sort of maxims are not likely
to have unity of race in the modern sense, and as a physiologist
understands it. What sorts of unions improve the breed, and which are
worse than both the father-race and the mother, it is not very easy to
say. The subject was reviewed by M. Quatrefages in an elaborate report
upon the occasion of the French Exhibition, of all things in the world.
M. Quatrefages quotes from another writer the phrase that South America
is a great laboratory of experiments in the mixture of races, and
reviews the different results which different cases have shown. In
South Carolina the Mulatto race is not very prolific, whereas in
Louisiana and Florida it decidedly is so. In Jamaica and in Java the
Mulatto cannot reproduce itself after the third generation; but on the
continent of America, as everybody knows, the mixed race is now most
numerous, and spreads generation after generation without impediment.
Equally various likewise in various cases has been the fate of the
mixed race between the white man and the native American; sometimes it
prospers, sometimes it fails. And M. Quatrefages concludes his
description thus: 'En acceptant comme vraies toutes les observations
qui tendent a faire admettre qu'il en sera autrement dans les localites
dont j'ai parle plus haut, quelle est la conclusion a tirer de faits
aussi peu semblables? Evidemment, on est oblige de reconnaitre que le
developpement de la race mulatre est favorise, retarde, ou empeche par
des circonstances locales; en d'autres termes, qu'il depend des
influences exercees par l'ensemble des conditions d'existence, par le
MILIEU.' By which I understand him to mean that the mixture of race
sometimes brings out a form of character better suited than either
parent form to the place and time; that in such cases, by a kind of
natural selection, it dominates over both parents, and perhaps
supplants both, whereas in other cases the mixed race is not as good
then and there as other parent forms, and then it passes away soon and
of itself.
Early in history the continual mixtures by conquest were just so many
experiments in mixing races as are going on in South America now. New
races wandered into new districts, and half killed, half mixed with the
old races. And the result was doubtless as various and as difficult to
account for then as now; sometimes the crossing answered, sometimes it
failed. But when the mixture was at its best, it must have excelled
both parents in that of which so much has been said; that is,
variability, and consequently progressiveness. There is more life in
mixed nations. France, for instance, is justly said to be the mean term
between the Latin and the German races. A Norman, as you may see by
looking at him, is of the north; a Provencal is of the south, of all
that there is most southern. You have in France Latin, Celtic, German,
compounded in an infinite number of proportions: one as she is in
feeling, she is various not only in the past history of her various
provinces, but in their present temperaments. Like the Irish element
and the Scotch element in the English House of Commons, the variety of
French races contributes to the play of the polity; it gives a chance
for fitting new things which otherwise there would not be. And early
races must have wanted mixing more than modern races. It is said, in
answer to the Jewish boast that 'their race still prospers, though it
is scattered and breeds in-and-in,' 'You prosper BECAUSE you are so
scattered; by acclimatisation in various regions your nation has
acquired singular elements of variety; it contains within itself the
principle of variability which other nations must seek by
intermarriage.' In the beginning of things there was certainly no
cosmopolitan race like the Jews; each race was a sort of 'parish race,'
narrow in thought and bounded in range, and it wanted mixing
accordingly.
But the mixture of races has a singular danger as well as a singular
advantage in the early world. We know now the Anglo-Indian suspicion or
contempt for 'half-castes.' The union of the Englishman and the Hindoo
produces something not only between races, but BETWEEN MORALITIES. They
have no inherited creed or plain place in the world; they have none of
the fixed traditional sentiments which are the stays of human nature.
In the early world many mixtures must have wrought many ruins; they
must have destroyed what they could not replace--an inbred principle of
discipline and of order. But if these unions of races did not work
thus; if, for example, the two races were so near akin that their
morals united as well as their breeds, if one race by its great numbers
and prepotent organisation so presided over the other as to take it up
and assimilate it, and leave no separate remains of it, THEN the
admixture was invaluable. It added to the probability of variability,
and therefore of improvement; and if that improvement even in part took
the military line, it might give the mixed and ameliorated state a
steady advantage in the battle of nations, and a greater chance of
lasting in the world.
Another mode in which one state acquires a superiority over competing
states is by PROVISIONAL institutions, if I may so call them. The most
important of these--slavery--arises out of the same early conquest as
the mixture of races. A slave is an unassimilated, an undigested atom;
something which is in the body politic, but yet is hardly part of it.
Slavery, too, has a bad name in the later world, and very justly. We
connect it with gangs in chains, with laws which keep men ignorant,
with laws that hinder families. But the evils which we have endured
from slavery in recent ages must not blind us to, or make us forget,
the great services that slavery rendered in early ages. There is a
wonderful presumption in its favour; it is one of the institutions
which, at a certain stage of growth, all nations in all countries
choose and cleave to. 'Slavery,' says Aristotle, 'exists by the law of
nature,' meaning that it was everywhere to be found--was a rudimentary
universal point of polity. 'There are very many English colonies,' said
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, as late as 1848, 'who would keep slaves at
once if we would let them,' and he was speaking not only of old
colonies trained in slavery, and raised upon the products of it, but
likewise of new colonies started by freemen, and which ought, one would
think, to wish to contain freemen only. But Wakefield knew what he was
saying; he was a careful observer of rough societies, and he had
watched the minds of men in them. He had seen that LEISURE is the great
need of early societies, and slaves only can give men leisure. All
freemen in new countries must be pretty equal; every one has labour,
and every one has land; capital, at least in agricultural countries
(for pastoral countries are very different), is of little use; it
cannot hire labour; the labourers go and work for themselves. There is
a story often told of a great English capitalist who went out to
Australia with a shipload of labourers and a carriage; his plan was
that the labourers should build a house for him, and that he would keep
his carriage, just as in England. But (so the story goes) he had to try
to live in his carriage, for his labourers left him, and went away to
work for themselves. In such countries there can be few gentlemen and
no ladies. Refinement is only possible when leisure is possible; and
slavery first makes it possible. It creates a set of persons born to
work that others may not work, and not to think in order that others
may think. The sort of originality which slavery gives is of the first
practical advantage in early communities; and the repose it gives is a
great artistic advantage when they come to be described in history. The
patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could not have had the steady calm
which marks them, if they had themselves been teased and hurried about
their flocks and herds. Refinement of feeling and repose of appearance
have indeed no market value in the early bidding of nations; they do
not tend to secure themselves a long future or any future. But
originality in war does, and slave-owning nations, having time to
think, are likely to be more shrewd in policy, and more crafty in
strategy.
No doubt this momentary gain is bought at a ruinous after-cost. When
other sources of leisure become possible, the one use of slavery is
past. But all its evils remain, and even grow worse. 'Retail'
slavery--the slavery in which a master owns a few slaves, whom he well
knows and daily sees--is not at all an intolerable state; the slaves of
Abraham had no doubt a fair life, as things went in that day. But
wholesale slavery, where men are but one of the investments of large
capital, and where a great owner, so far from knowing each slave, can
hardly tell how many gangs of them he works, is an abominable state.
This is the slavery which has made the name revolting to the best
minds, and has nearly rooted the thing out of the best of the world.
There is no out-of-the-way marvel in this. The whole history of
civilisation, is strewn with creeds and institutions which were
invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards. Progress would not have
been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison. A
full examination of these provisional institutions would need half a
volume, and would be out of place and useless here. Venerable
oligarchy, august monarchy, are two that would alone need large
chapters. But the sole point here necessary is to say that such
preliminary forms and feelings at first often bring many graces and
many refinements, and often tend to secure them by the preservative
military virtue. There are cases in which some step in INTELLECTUAL
progress gives an early society some gain in war; more obvious cases
are when some kind of MORAL quality gives some such gain. War both
needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be
called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of
obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like
them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will
give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in
the race of nations. The Romans probably had as much of these
efficacious virtues as any race of the ancient world,--perhaps as much
as any race in the modern world too. And the success of the nations
which possess these martial virtues has been the great means by which
their continuance has been secured in the world, and the destruction of
the opposite vices insured also. Conquest is the missionary of valour,
and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
In the last century it would have sounded strange to speak, as I am
going to speak, of the military advantage of RELIGION. Such an idea
would have been opposed to ruling prejudices, and would hardly have
escaped philosophical ridicule. But the notion is but a commonplace in
our day, for a man of genius has made it his own. Mr. Carlyle's books
are deformed by phrases like 'infinities' and 'verities' and altogether
are full of faults, which attract the very young, and deter all that
are older. In spite of his great genius, after a long life of writing,
it is a question still whether even a single work of his can take a
lasting place in high literature. There is a want of sanity in their
manner which throws a suspicion on their substance (though it is often
profound); and he brandishes one or two fallacies, of which he has
himself a high notion, but which plain people will always detect and
deride. But whatever may be the fate of his fame, Mr. Carlyle has
taught the present generation many lessons, and one of these is that
'God-fearing' armies are the best armies. Before his time people
laughed at Cromwell's saying, 'Trust in God, and keep your powder dry.'
But we now know that the trust was of as much use as the powder, if not
of more. That high concentration of steady feeling makes men dare
everything and do anything.
This subject would run to an infinite extent if any one were competent
to handle it. Those kinds of morals and that kind of religion which
tend to make the firmest and most effectual character are sure to
prevail, all else being the same; and creeds or systems that conduce to
a soft limp mind tend to perish, except some hard extrinsic force keep
them alive. Thus Epicureanism never prospered at Rome, but Stoicism
did; the stiff, serious character of the great prevailing nation was
attracted by what seemed a confirming creed, and deterred by what
looked like a relaxing creed. The inspiriting doctrines fell upon the
ardent character, and so confirmed its energy. Strong beliefs win
strong men, and then make them stronger. Such is no doubt one cause why
Monotheism tends to prevail over Polytheism; it produces a higher,
steadier character, calmed and concentrated by a great single object;
it is not confused by competing rites, or distracted by miscellaneous
deities. Polytheism is religion IN COMMISSION, and it is weak
accordingly. But it will be said the Jews, who were monotheist, were
conquered by the Romans, who were polytheist. Yes, it must be answered,
because the Romans had other gifts; they had a capacity for politics, a
habit of discipline, and of these the Jews had not the least. The
religious advantage WAS an advantage, but it was counter-weighed.
No one should be surprised at the prominence given to war. We are
dealing with early ages; nation-MAKING is the occupation of man in
these ages, and it is war that makes nations. Nation-CHANGING comes
afterwards, and is mostly effected by peaceful revolution, though even
then war, too, plays its part. The idea of an indestructible nation is
a modern idea; in early ages all nations were destructible, and the
further we go back, the more incessant was the work of destruction. The
internal decoration of nations is a sort of secondary process, which
succeeds when the main forces that create nations have principally done
their work. We have here been concerned with the political scaffolding;
it will be the task of other papers to trace the process of political
finishing and building. The nicer play of finer forces may then require
more pleasing thoughts than the fierce fights of early ages can ever
suggest. It belongs to the idea of progress that beginnings can never
seem attractive to those who live far on; the price of improvement is,
that the unimproved will always look degraded.
But how far are the strongest nations really the best nations? how far
is excellence in war a criterion of other excellence? I cannot answer
this now fully, but three or four considerations are very plain. War,
as I have said, nourishes the 'preliminary' virtues, and this is almost
as much as to say that there are virtues which it does not nourish. All
which may be called 'grace' as well as virtue it does not nourish;
humanity, charity, a nice sense of the rights of others, it certainly
does not foster. The insensibility to human suffering, which is so
striking a fact in the world as it stood when history first reveals it,
is doubtless due to the warlike origin of the old civilisation. Bred in
war, and nursed in war, it could not revolt from the things of war, and
one of the principal of these is human pain. Since war has ceased to be
the moving force in the world, men have become more tender one to
another, and shrink from what they used to inflict without caring; and
this not so much because men are improved (which may or may not be in
various cases), but because they have no longer the daily habit of
war--have no longer formed their notions upon war, and therefore are
guided by thoughts and feelings which soldiers as such--soldiers
educated simply by their trade--are too hard to understand.
Very like this is the contempt for physical weakness and for women
which marks early society too. The non-combatant population is sure to
fare ill during the ages of combat. But these defects, too, are cured
or lessened; women have now marvellous means of winning their way in
the world; and mind without muscle has far greater force than muscle
without mind. These are some of the after-changes in the interior of
nations, of which the causes must be scrutinised, and I now mention
them only to bring out how many softer growths have now half-hidden the
old and harsh civilisation which war made. But it is very dubious
whether the spirit of war does not still colour our morality far too
much. Metaphors from law and metaphors from war make most of our
current moral phrases, and a nice examination would easily explain that
both rather vitiate what both often illustrate. The military habit
makes man think far too much of definite action, and far too little of
brooding meditation. Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work,
and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and
half-involuntary promptings. The mistake of military ethics is to
exaggerate the conception of discipline, and so to present the moral
force of the will in a barer form than it ever ought to take. Military
morals can direct the axe to cut down the tree, but it knows nothing of
the quiet force by which the forest grows. What has been said is
enough, I hope, to bring out that there are many qualities and many
institutions of the most various sort which give nations an advantage
in military competition; that most of these and most warlike qualities
tend principally to good; that the constant winning of these favoured
competitors is the particular mode by which the best qualities wanted
in elementary civilisation are propagated and preserved.