THE AGE OF DISCUSSION.

The greatest living contrast is between the old Eastern and customary

civilisations and the new Western and changeable civilisations. A year

or two ago an inquiry was made of our most intelligent officers in the

East, not as to whether the English Government were really doing good

in the East, but as to whether the natives of India themselves thought

we were doing good; to which, in a majority of cases, the officers who

wore the best authority, answered thus: 'No doubt you are giving the

Indians many great benefits: you give them continued peace, free trade,

the right to live as they like, subject to the laws; in these points

and others they are far better off than, they ever were; but still they

cannot make you out. What puzzles them is your constant disposition to

change, or as you call it, improvement. Their own life in every detail

being regulated by ancient usage, they cannot comprehend a policy which

is always bringing something new; they do not a bit believe that the

desire to make them comfortable and happy is the root of it; they

believe, on the contrary, that you are aiming at something which they

do not understand--that you mean to "take away their religion;" in a

word, that the end and object of all these continual changes is to make

Indians not what they are and what they like to be, but something new

and different from what they are, and what they would not like to be.'

In the East, in a word, we are attempting to put new wine into old

bottles-to pour what we can of a civilisation whose spirit is progress

into the form of a civilisation whose spirit is fixity, and whether we

shall succeed or not is perhaps the most interesting question in an age

abounding almost beyond example in questions of political interest.

Historical inquiries show that the feeling of the Hindoos is the old

feeling, and that the feeling of the Englishman is a modern feeling.

'Old law rests,' as Sir Henry Maine puts it, 'not on contract but on

status.' The life of ancient civilisation, so far as legal records go,

runs back to a time when every important particular of life was settled

by a usage which was social, political, and religious, as we should now

say, all in one--which those who obeyed it could not have been able to

analyse, for those distinctions had no place in their mind and

language, but which they felt to be a usage of imperishable import, and

above all things to be kept unchanged. In former papers I have shown,

or at least tried to show, why these customary civilisations were the

only ones which suited an early society; why, so to say, they alone

could have been first; in what manner they had in their very structure

a decisive advantage over all competitors. But now comes the farther

question: If fixity is an invariable ingredient in early civilisations,

how then did any civilisation become unfixed? No doubt most

civilisations stuck where they first were; no doubt we see now why

stagnation is the rule of the world, and why progress is the very rare

exception; but we do not learn what it is which has caused progress in

these few cases, or the absence of what it is which has denied it in

all others.

To this question history gives a very clear and very remarkable answer.

It is that the change from the age of status to the age of choice was

first made in states where the government was to a great and a growing

extent a government by discussion, and where the subjects of that

discussion were in some degree abstract, or, as we should say, matters

of principle. It was in the small republics of Greece and Italy that

the chain of custom was first broken. 'Liberty said, Let there be

light, and, like a sunrise on the sea, Athens arose,' says Shelley, and

his historical philosophy is in this case far more correct than is

usual with him. A free state--a state with liberty--means a state, call

it republic or call it monarchy, in which the sovereign power is

divided between many persons, and in which there is a discussion among

those persons. Of these the Greek republics were the first in history,

if not in time, and Athens was the greatest of those republics.

After the event it is easy to see why the teaching of history should be

this and nothing else. It is easy to see why the common discussion of

common actions or common interests should become the root of change and

progress. In early society, originality in life was forbidden and

repressed by the fixed rule of life. It may not have been quite so much

so in Ancient Greece as in some other parts of the world. But it was

very much so even there. As a recent writer has well said, 'Law then

presented itself to men's minds as something venerable and

unchangeable, as old as the city; it had been delivered by the founder

himself, when he laid the walls of the city, and kindled its sacred

fire.' An ordinary man who wished to strike out a new path, to begin a

new and important practice by himself, would have been peremptorily

required to abandon his novelties on pain of death; he was deviating,

he would be told, from the ordinances imposed by the gods on his

nation, and he must not do so to please himself. On the contrary,

others were deeply interested in his actions. If he disobeyed, the gods

might inflict grievous harm on all the people as well as him. Each

partner in the most ancient kind of partnerships was supposed to have

the power of attracting the wrath of the divinities on the entire firm,

upon the other partners quite as much as upon himself. The quaking

bystanders in a superstitious age would soon have slain an isolated

bold man in the beginning of his innovations, What Macaulay so relied

on as the incessant source of progress--the desire of man to better his

condition--was not then permitted to work; man was required to live as

his ancestors had lived.

Still further away from those times were the 'free thought' and the

'advancing sciences' of which we now hear so much. The first and most

natural subject upon which human thought concerns itself is religion;

the first wish of the half-emancipated thinker is to use his reason on

the great problems of human destiny--to find out whence he came and

whither he goes, to form for himself the most reasonable idea of God

which he can form. But, as Mr. Grote happily said--'This is usually

what ancient times would not let a man do. His _gens_ or his _phratria_

required him to believe as they believed.' Toleration is of all ideas

the most modern, because the notion that the bad religion of A cannot

impair, here or hereafter, the welfare of B, is, strange to say, a

modern idea. And the help of 'science,' at that stage of thought, is

still more nugatory. Physical science, as we conceive it--that is, the

systematic investigation of external nature in detail--did not then

exist. A few isolated observations on surface things--a half-correct

calendar, secrets mainly of priestly invention, and in priestly

custody--were all that was then imagined; the idea of using a settled

study of nature as a basis for the discovery of new instruments and new

things, did not then exist. It is indeed a modern idea, and is peculiar

to a few European countries even yet. In the most intellectual city of

the ancient world, in its most intellectual age, Socrates, its most

intellectual inhabitant, discouraged the study of physics because they

engendered uncertainty, and did not augment human happiness. The kind

of knowledge which is most connected with human progress now was that

least connected with it then.

But a government by discussion, if it can be borne, at once breaks down

the yoke of fixed custom. The idea of the two is inconsistent. As far

as it goes, the mere putting up of a subject to discussion, with the

object of being guided by that discussion, is a clear admission that

that subject is in no degree settled by established rule, and that men

are free to choose in it. It is an admission too that there is no

sacred authority--no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom

in that matter the community is bound to obey. And if a single subject

or group of subjects be once admitted to discussion, ere long the habit

of discussion comes to be established, the sacred charm of use and wont

to be dissolved. 'Democracy,' it has been said in modern times, 'is

like the grave; it takes, but it does not give.' The same is true of

'discussion.' Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal, and you

can never withdraw it again; you can never again clothe it with

mystery, or fence it by consecration; it remains for ever open to free

choice, and exposed to profane deliberation.

The only subjects which can be first submitted, or which till a very

late age of civilisation can be submitted to discussion in the

community, are the questions involving the visible and pressing

interests of the community; they are political questions of high and

urgent import. If a nation has in any considerable degree gained the

habit, and exhibited the capacity, to discuss these questions with

freedom, and to decide them with discretion, to argue much on politics

and not to argue ruinously, an enormous advance in other kinds of

civilisation may confidently be predicted for it. And the reason is a

plain deduction from the principles which we have found to guide early

civilisation. The first pre-historic men were passionate savages, with

the greatest difficulty coerced into order and compressed into a state.

For ages were spent in beginning that order and founding that state;

the only sufficient and effectual agent in so doing was consecrated

custom; but then that custom gathered over everything, arrested all

onward progress, and stayed the originality of mankind. If, therefore,

a nation is able to gain the benefit of custom without the evil--if

after ages of waiting it can have order and choice together--at once

the fatal clog is removed, and the ordinary springs of progress, as in

a modern community we conceive them, begin their elastic action.

Discussion, too, has incentives to progress peculiar to itself. It

gives a premium to intelligence. To set out the arguments required to

determine political action with such force and effect that they really

should determine it, is a high and great exertion of intellect. Of

course, all such arguments are produced under conditions; the argument

abstractedly best is not necessarily the winning argument. Political

discussion must move those who have to act; it must be framed in the

ideas, and be consonant with the precedent, of its time, just as it

must speak its language. But within these marked conditions good

discussion is better than bad; no people can bear a government of

discussion for a day, which does not, within the boundaries of its

prejudices and its ideas, prefer good reasoning to bad reasoning, sound

argument to unsound. A prize for argumentative mind is given in free

states, to which no other states have anything to compare.

Tolerance too is learned in discussion, and, as history shows, is only

so learned. In all customary societies bigotry is the ruling principle.

In rude places to this day any one who says anything new is looked on

with suspicion, and is persecuted by opinion if not injured by penalty.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It

is, as common people say, so 'upsetting;' it makes you think that,

after all, your favourite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs

ill-founded; it is certain that till now there was no place allotted in

your mind to the new and startling inhabitant, and now that it has

conquered an entrance you do not at once see which of your old ideas it

will or will not turn out, with which of them it can be reconciled, and

with which it is at essential enmity. Naturally, therefore, common men

hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the

original man who brings it. Even nations with long habits of discussion

are intolerant enough. In England, where there is on the whole probably

a freer discussion of a greater number of subjects than ever was before

in the world, we know how much power bigotry retains. But discussion,

to be successful, requires tolerance. It fails wherever, as in a French

political assembly, any one who hears anything which he dislikes tries

to howl it down. If we know that a nation is capable of enduring

continuous discussion, we know that it is capable of practising with

equanimity continuous tolerance.

The power of a government by discussion as an instrument of elevation

plainly depends--other things being equal--on the greatness or

littleness of the things to be discussed. There are periods when great

ideas are 'in the air,' and when, from some cause or other, even common

persons seem to partake of an unusual elevation. The age of Elizabeth

in England was conspicuously such a time. The new idea of the

Reformation in religion, and the enlargement of the MOENIA MUNDI by the

discovery of new and singular lands, taken together, gave an impulse to

thought which few, if any, ages can equal. The discussion, though not

wholly free, was yet far freer than in the average of ages and

countries. Accordingly, every pursuit seemed to start forward. Poetry,

science, and architecture, different as they are, and removed as they

all are at first sight from such an influence as discussion, were

suddenly started onward. Macaulay would have said you might rightly

read the power of discussion 'in the poetry of Shakespeare, in the

prose of Bacon, in the oriels of Longleat, and the stately pinnacles of

Burleigh.' This is, in truth, but another case of the principle of

which I have had occasion to say so much as to the character of ages

and countries. If any particular power is much prized in an age, those

possessed of that power will be imitated; those deficient in that power

will be despised. In consequence an unusual quantity of that power will

be developed, and be conspicuous. Within certain limits vigorous and

elevated thought was respected in Elizabeth's time, and, therefore,

vigorous and elevated thinkers were many; and the effect went far

beyond the cause. It penetrated into physical science, for which very

few men cared; and it began a reform in philosophy to which almost all

were then opposed. In a word, the temper of the age encouraged

originality, and in consequence original men started into prominence,

went hither and thither where they liked, arrived at goals which the

age never expected, and so made it ever memorable.

In this manner all the great movements of thought in ancient and modern

times have been nearly connected in time with government by discussion.

Athens, Rome, the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, the COMMUNES

and states-general of feudal Europe, have all had a special and

peculiar quickening influence, which they owed to their freedom, and

which states without that freedom have never communicated. And it has

been at the time of great epochs of thought--at the Peloponnesian war,

at the fall of the Roman Republic, at the Reformation, at the French

Revolution--that such liberty of speaking and thinking have produced

their full effect.

It is on this account that the discussions of savage tribes have

produced so little effect in emancipating those tribes from their

despotic customs. The oratory of the North American Indian--the first

savage whose peculiarities fixed themselves in the public

imagination--has become celebrated, and yet the North American Indians

were scarcely, if at all, better orators than many other savages.

Almost all of the savages who have melted away before the Englishman

were better speakers than he is. But the oratory of the savages has led

to nothing, and was likely to lead to nothing. It is a discussion not

of principles, but of undertakings; its topics are whether expedition A

will answer, and should be undertaken; whether expedition B will not

answer, and should not be undertaken; whether village A is the best

village to plunder, or whether village B is a better. Such discussions

augment the vigour of language, encourage a debating facility, and

develop those gifts of demeanour and of gesture which excite the

confidence of the hearers. But they do not excite the speculative

intellect, do not lead men to argue speculative doctrines, or to

question ancient principles. They, in some material respects, improve

the sheep within the fold; but they do not help them or incline them to

leap out of the fold.

The next question, therefore, is, Why did discussions in some cases

relate to prolific ideas, and why did discussions in other cases relate

only to isolated transactions? The reply which history suggests is very

clear and very remarkable. Some races of men at our earliest knowledge

of them have already acquired the basis of a free constitution; they

have already the rudiments of a complex polity--a monarch, a senate,

and a general meeting of citizens. The Greeks were one of those races,

and it happened, as was natural, that there was in process of time a

struggle, the earliest that we know of, between the aristocratical

party, originally represented by the senate, and the popular party,

represented by the 'general meeting.' This is plainly a question of

principle, and its being so has led to its history being written more

than two thousand years afterwards in a very remarkable manner. Some

seventy years ago an English country gentleman named Mitford, who, like

so many of his age, had been terrified into aristocratic opinions by

the first French Revolution, suddenly found that the history of the

Peloponnesian War was the reflex of his own time. He took up his

Thucydides, and there he saw, as in a mirror, the progress and the

struggles of his age. It required some freshness of mind to see this;

at least, it had been hidden for many centuries. All the modern

histories of Greece before Mitford had but the vaguest idea of it; and

not being a man of supreme originality, he would doubtless have had

very little idea of it either, except that the analogy of what he saw

helped him by a telling object-lesson to the understanding of what he

read. Just as in every country of Europe in 1793 there were two

factions, one of the old-world aristocracy, and the other of the

incoming democracy, just so there was in every city of ancient Greece,

in the year 400 B.C., one party of the many and another of the few.

This Mr. Mitford perceived, and being a strong aristocrat, he wrote a

'history,' which is little except a party pamphlet, and which, it must

be said, is even now readable on that very account. The vigour of

passion with which it was written puts life into the words, and retains

the attention of the reader. And that is not all. Mr. Grote, the great

scholar whom we have had lately to mourn, also recognising the identity

between the struggles of Athens and Sparta and the struggles of our

modern world, and taking violently the contrary side to that of

Mitford, being as great a democrat as Mitford was an aristocrat, wrote

a reply, far above Mitford's history in power and learning, but being

in its main characteristic almost identical, being above all things a

book of vigorous political passion, written for persons who care for

politics, and not, as almost all histories of antiquity are and must

be, the book of a man who cares for scholarship more than for anything

else, written mainly if not exclusively, for scholars. And the effect

of fundamental political discussion was the same in ancient as in

modern times. The whole customary ways of thought were at once shaken

by it, and shaken not only in the closets of philosophers, but in the

common thought and daily business of ordinary men. The 'liberation of

humanity,' as Goethe used to call it--the deliverance of men from the

yoke of inherited usage, and of rigid, unquestionable law--was begun in

Greece, and had many of its greatest effects, good and evil, on Greece.

It is just because of the analogy between the controversies of that

time and those of our times that some one has said, 'Classical history

is a part of modern history; it is mediaeval history only which is

ancient.'

If there had been no discussion of principle in Greece, probably she

would still have produced works of art. Homer contains no such

discussion. The speeches in the 'Iliad,' which Mr. Gladstone, the most

competent of living judges, maintains to be the finest ever composed by

man, are not discussions of principle. There is no more tendency in

them to critical disquisition than there is to political economy. In

Herodotus you have the beginning of the age of discussion. He belongs

in his essence to the age which is going out. He refers with reverence

to established ordinance and fixed religion. Still, in his travels

through Greece, he must have heard endless political arguments; and

accordingly you can find in his book many incipient traces of abstract

political disquisition. The discourses on democracy, aristocracy, and

monarchy, which he puts into the mouth of the Persian conspirators when

the monarchy was vacant, have justly been called absurd, as speeches

supposed to have been spoken by those persons. No Asiatic ever thought

of such things. You might as well imagine Saul or David speaking them,

as those to whom Herodotus attributes them. They are Greek speeches,

full of free Greek discussion, and suggested by the experience, already

considerable, of the Greeks in the results of discussion. The age of

debate is beginning, and even Herodotus, the least of a wrangler of any

man, and the most of a sweet and simple narrator, felt the effect. When

we come to Thucydides, the results of discussion are as full as they

have ever been; his light is pure, 'dry light,' free from the 'humours'

of habit, and purged from consecrated usage. As Grote's history often

reads like a report to Parliament, so half Thucydides reads like a

speech, or materials for a speech, in the Athenian Assembly. Of later

times it is unnecessary to speak. Every page of Aristotle and Plato

bears ample and indelible trace of the age of discussion in which they

lived; and thought cannot possibly be freer. The deliverance of the

speculative intellect from traditional and customary authority was

altogether complete.

No doubt the 'detachment' from prejudice, and the subjection to reason,

which I ascribe to ancient Athens, only went down a very little way

among the population of it. Two great classes of the people, the slaves

and women, were almost excluded from such qualities; even the free

population doubtless contained a far greater proportion of very

ignorant and very superstitious persons than we are in the habit of

imagining. We fix our attention on the best specimens of Athenian

culture--on the books which have descended to us, and we forget that

the corporate action of the Athenian people at various critical

junctures exhibited the most gross superstition. Still, as far as the

intellectual and cultivated part of society is concerned, the triumph

of reason was complete; the minds of the highest philosophers were then

as ready to obey evidence and reason as they have ever been since;

probably they were more ready. The rule of custom over them at least

had been wholly broken, and the primary conditions of intellectual

progress were in that respect satisfied.

It may be said that I am giving too much weight to the classical idea

of human development; that history contains the record of another

progress as well; that in a certain sense there was progress in Judaea

as well as in Athens. And unquestionably there was progress, but it was

only progress upon a single subject. If we except religion and omit

also all that the Jews had learned from foreigners, it may be doubted

if there be much else new between the time of Samuel and that of

Malachi. In Religion there was progress, but without it there was not

any. This was due to the cause of that progress. All over antiquity,

all over the East, and over other parts of the world which preserve

more or less nearly their ancient condition, there are two classes of

religious teachers--one, the priests, the inheritors of past accredited

inspiration; the other, the prophet, the possessor of a like present

inspiration. Curtius describes the distinction well in relation to the

condition of Greece with which history first presents us:--

'The mantic art is an institution totally different from the

priesthood. It is based on the belief that the gods are in constant

proximity to men, and in their government of the world, which

comprehends every thing both great and small, will not disdain to

manifest their will; nay, it seems necessary that, whenever any hitch

has arisen in the moral system of the human world, this should also

manifest itself by some sign in the world of nature, if only mortals

are able to understand and avail themselves of these divine hints.

'For this a special capacity is requisite; not a capacity which can be

learnt like a human art or science, but rather a peculiar state of

grace in the case of single individuals and single families whose ears

and eyes are opened to the divine revelations, and who participate more

largely than the rest of mankind in the divine spirit. Accordingly it

is their office and calling to assert themselves as organs of the

divine will; they are justified in opposing their authority to every

power of the world. On this head conflicts were unavoidable, and the

reminiscences living in the Greek people, of the agency of a Tiresias

and Calchas, prove how the Heroic kings experienced not only support

and aid, but also opposition and violent protests, from the mouths of

the men of prophecy.'

In Judaea there was exactly the same opposition as elsewhere. All that

is new comes from the prophets; all which is old is retained by the

priests. But the peculiarity of Judaea--a peculiarity which I do not

for a moment pretend that I can explain--is that the prophetic

revelations are, taken as a whole, indisputably improvements; that they

contain, as time goes on, at each succeeding epoch, higher and better

views of religion. But the peculiarity is not to my present purpose. My

point is that there is no such spreading impetus in progress thus

caused as there is in progress caused by discussion. To receive a

particular conclusion upon the ipse dixit, upon the accepted authority

of an admired instructor, is obviously not so vivifying to the

argumentative and questioning intellect as to argue out conclusions for

yourself. Accordingly the religious progress caused by the prophets did

not break down that ancient code of authoritative usage. On the

contrary, the two combined. In each generation the conservative

influence 'built the sepulchres' and accepted the teaching of past

prophets, even while it was slaying and persecuting those who were

living. But discussion and custom cannot be thus combined; their

'method,' as modern philosophers would say, is antagonistic.

Accordingly, the progress of the classical states gradually awakened

the whole intellect; that of Judaea was partial and improved religion

only. And, therefore, in a history of intellectual progress, the

classical fills the superior and the Jewish the inferior place; just as

in a special history of theology only, the places of the two might be

interchanged.

A second experiment has been tried on the same subject--matter. The

characteristic of the Middle Ages may be approximately--though only

approximately--described as a return to the period of authoritative

usage and as an abandonment of the classical habit of independent and

self-choosing thought. I do not for an instant mean that this is an

exact description of the main mediaeval characteristic; nor can I

discuss how far that characteristic was an advance upon those of

previous times; its friends say it is far better than the peculiarities

of the classical period; its enemies that it is far worse. But both

friends and enemies will admit that the most marked feature of the

Middle Ages may roughly be described as I have described it. And my

point is that just as this mediaeval characteristic was that of a

return to the essence of the customary epoch which had marked the

pre-Athenian times, so it was dissolved much in the same manner as the

influence of Athens, and other influences like it, claim to have

dissolved that customary epoch.

The principal agent in breaking up the persistent medieval customs,

which were so fixed that they seemed likely to last for ever, or till

some historical catastrophe overwhelmed them, was the popular element

in the ancient polity which was everywhere diffused in the Middle Ages.

The Germanic tribes brought with them from their ancient dwelling-place

a polity containing, like the classical, a king, a council, and a

popular assembly; and wherever they went, they carried these elements

and varied them, as force compelled or circumstances required. As far

as England is concerned, the excellent dissertations of Mr. Freeman and

Mr. Stubbs have proved this in the amplest manner, and brought it home

to persons who cannot claim to possess much antiquarian learning. The

history of the English Constitution, as far as the world cares for it,

is, in fact, the complex history of the popular element in this ancient

polity, which was sometimes weaker and sometimes stronger, but which

has never died out, has commonly possessed great though varying power,

and is now entirely predominant. The history of this growth is the

history of the English people; and the discussions about this

constitution and the discussions within it, the controversies as to its

structure and the controversies as to its true effects, have mainly

trained the English political intellect, in so far as it is trained.

But in much of Europe, and in England particularly, the influence of

religion has been very different from what it was in antiquity. It has

been an influence of discussion. Since Luther's time there has been a

conviction more or less rooted, that a man may by an intellectual

process think out a religion for himself, and that, as the highest of

all duties, he ought to do so. The influence of the political

discussion, and the influence of the religious discussion, have been so

long and so firmly combined, and have so effectually enforced one

another, that the old notions of loyalty, and fealty, and authority, as

they existed in the Middle Ages, have now over the best minds almost no

effect.

It is true that the influence of discussion is not the only force which

has produced this vast effect. Both in ancient and in modern times

other forces cooperated with it. Trade, for example, is obviously a

force which has done much to bring men of different customs and

different beliefs into close contiguity, and has thus aided to change

the customs and the beliefs of them all. Colonisation is another such

influence: it settles men among aborigines of alien race and usages,

and it commonly compels the colonists not to be over-strict in the

choice of their own elements; they are obliged to coalesce with and

'adopt' useful bands and useful men, though their ancestral customs may

not be identical, nay, though they may be, in fact, opposite to their

own. In modern Europe, the existence of a cosmopolite Church, claiming

to be above nations, and really extending through nations, and the

scattered remains of Roman law and Roman civilisation co-operated with

the liberating influence of political discussion. And so did other

causes also. But perhaps in no case have these subsidiary causes alone

been able to generate intellectual freedom; certainly in all the most

remarkable cases the influence of discussion has presided at the

creation of that freedom, and has been active and dominant in it.

No doubt apparent cases of exception may easily be found. It may be

said that in the court of Augustus there was much general intellectual

freedom, an almost entire detachment from ancient prejudice, but that

there was no free political discussion at all. But, then, the ornaments

of that time were derived from a time of great freedom: it was the

republic which trained the men whom the empire ruled. The close

congregation of most miscellaneous elements under the empire, was, no

doubt, of itself unfavourable to inherited prejudice, and favourable to

intellectual exertion. Yet, except in the instance of the Church, which

is a peculiar subject that requires a separate discussion, how little

was added to what the republic left! The power of free interchange of

ideas being wanting, the ideas themselves were barren. Also, no doubt,

much intellectual freedom may emanate from countries of free political

discussion, and penetrate to countries where that discussion is

limited. Thus the intellectual freedom of France in the eighteenth

century was in great part owing to the proximity of and incessant

intercourse with England and Holland. Voltaire resided among us; and

every page of the 'Esprit des Lois' proves how much Montesquieu learned

from living here. But, of course, it was only part of the French

culture which was so derived: the germ might be foreign, but the tissue

was native. And very naturally, for it would be absurd to call the

ancien regime a government without discussion: discussion abounded

there, only, by reason of the bad form of the government, it was never

sure with ease and certainty to affect political action. The despotism

'tempered by epigram,' was a government which permitted argument of

licentious freedom within changing limits, and which was ruled by that

argument spasmodically and practically, though not in name or

consistently.

But though in the earliest and in the latest time government by

discussion has been a principal organ for improving mankind, yet, from

its origin, it is a plant of singular delicacy. At first the chances

are much against its living. In the beginning, the members of a free

state are of necessity few. The essence of it requires that discussion

shall be brought home to those members. But in early time, when writing

is difficult, reading rare, and representation undiscovered, those who

are to be guided by the discussion must hear it with their own ears,

must be brought face to face with the orator, and must feel his

influence for themselves. The first free states were little towns,

smaller than any political division which we now have, except the

Republic of Andorre, which is a sort of vestige of them. It is in the

market-place of the country town, as we should now speak, and in petty

matters concerning the market-town, that discussion began, and thither

all the long train of its consequences may be traced back. Some

historical inquirers, like myself, can hardly look at such a place

without some sentimental musing, poor and trivial as the thing seems.

But such small towns are very feeble. Numbers in the earliest wars, as

in the latest, are a main source of victory. And in early times one

kind of state is very common and is exceedingly numerous. In every

quarter of the globe we find great populations compacted by traditional

custom and consecrated sentiment, which are ruled by some

soldier--generally some soldier of a foreign tribe, who has conquered

them, and, as it has been said, 'vaulted on the back' of them, or whose

ancestors have done so. These great populations, ruled by a single

will, have, doubtless, trodden down and destroyed innumerable little

cities who were just beginning their freedom.

In this way the Greek cities in Asia were subjected to the Persian

Power, and so OUGHT the cities in Greece proper to have been subjected

also. Every schoolboy must have felt that nothing but amazing folly and

unmatched mismanagement saved Greece from conquest both in the time of

Xerxes and in that of Darius. The fortunes of intellectual civilisation

were then at the mercy of what seems an insignificant probability. If

the Persian leaders had only shown that decent skill and ordinary

military prudence which it was likely they would show, Grecian freedom

would have been at an end. Athens, like so many Ionian cities on the

other side of the AEgean, would have been absorbed into a great

despotism; all we now remember her for we should not remember, for it

would never have occurred. Her citizens might have been ingenious, and

imitative, and clever; they could not certainly have been free and

original. Rome was preserved from subjection to a great empire by her

fortunate distance from one. The early wars of Rome are with cities

like Rome--about equal in size, though inferior in valour. It was only

when she had conquered Italy that she began to measure herself against

Asiatic despotisms. She became great enough to beat them before she

advanced far enough to contend with them. But such great good fortune

was and must be rare. Unnumbered little cities which might have

rivalled Rome or Athens doubtless perished without a sign long before

history was imagined. The small size and slight strength of early free

states made them always liable to easy destruction.

And their internal frailty is even greater. As soon as discussion

begins the savage propensities of men break forth; even in modern

communities, where those propensities, too, have been weakened by ages

of culture, and repressed by ages of obedience, as soon as a vital

topic for discussion is well started the keenest and most violent

passions break forth. Easily destroyed as are early free states by

forces from without, they are even more liable to destruction by forces

from within.

On this account such states are very rare in history. Upon the first

view of the facts a speculation might even be set up that they were

peculiar to a particular race. By far the most important free

institutions, and the only ones which have left living representatives

in the world, are the offspring either of the first constitutions of

the classical nations or of the first constitutions of the Germanic

nations. All living freedom runs back to them, and those truths which

at first sight would seem the whole of historical freedom, can be

traced to them. And both the Germanic and the classical nations belong

to what ethnologists call the Aryan race. Plausibly it might be argued

that the power of forming free states was superior in and peculiar to

that family of mankind. But unfortunately for this easy theory the

facts are inconsistent with it. In the first place, all the so-called

Aryan race certainly is not free. The eastern Aryans--those, for

example, who speak languages derived from the Sanscrit--are amongst the

most slavish divisions of mankind. To offer the Bengalese a free

constitution, and to expect them to work one, would be the maximum of

human folly. There then must be something else besides Aryan descent

which is necessary to fit men for discussion and train them for

liberty; and, what is worse for the argument we are opposing, some

non-Aryan races have been capable of freedom. Carthage, for example,

was a Semitic republic. We do not know all the details of its

constitution, but we know enough for our present purpose. We know that

it was a government in which many proposers took part, and under which

discussion was constant, active, and conclusive. No doubt Tyre, the

parent city of Carthage, the other colonies of Tyre besides Carthage,

and the colonies of Carthage, were all as free as Carthage. We have

thus a whole group of ancient republics of non-Aryan race, and one

which, being more ancient than the classical republics, could not have

borrowed from or imitated them. So that the theory which would make

government by discussion the exclusive patrimony of a single race of

mankind is on the face of it untenable.

I am not prepared with any simple counter theory. I cannot profess to

explain completely why a very small minimum of mankind were, as long as

we know of them, possessed of a polity which as time went on suggested

discussions of principle, and why the great majority of mankind had

nothing like it. This is almost as hopeless as asking why Milton was a

genius and why Bacon was a philosopher. Indeed it is the same, because

the causes which give birth to the startling varieties of individual

character, and those which give birth to similar varieties of national

character, are, in fact, the same. I have, indeed, endeavoured to show

that a marked type of individual character once originating in a nation

and once strongly preferred by it, is likely to be fixed on it and to

be permanent in it, from causes which were stated. Granted the

beginning of the type, we may, I think, explain its development and

aggravation; but we cannot in the least explain why the incipient type

of curious characters broke out, if I may so say, in one place rather

than in another. Climate and 'physical' surroundings, in the largest

sense, have unquestionably much influence; they are one factor in the

cause, but they are not the only factor; for we find most dissimilar

races of men living in the same climate and affected by the same

surroundings, and we have every reason to believe that those unlike

races have so lived as neighbours for ages. The cause of types must be

something outside the tribe acting on something within--something

inherited by the tribe. But what that something is I do not know that

any one can in the least explain.

The following conditions may, I think, be historically traced to the

nation capable of a polity, which suggests principles for discussion,

and so leads to progress. First, the nation must possess the PATRIA

POTESTAS in some form so marked as to give family life distinctness and

precision, and to make a home education and a home discipline probable

and possible. While descent is traced only through the mother, and

while the family is therefore a vague entity, no progress to a high

polity is possible. Secondly, that polity would seem to have been

created very gradually; by the aggregation of families into clans or

GENTES, and of clans into nations, and then again by the widening of

nations, so as to include circumjacent outsiders, as well as the first

compact and sacred group--the number of parties to a discussion was at

first augmented very slowly. Thirdly, the number of 'open' subjects--as

we should say nowadays--that is, of subjects on which public opinion

was optional, and on which discussion was admitted, was at first very

small. Custom ruled everything originally, and the area of free

argument was enlarged but very slowly. If I am at all right, that area

could only be enlarged thus slowly, for Custom was in early days the

cement of society, and if you suddenly questioned such custom you would

destroy society. But though the existence, of these conditions may be

traced historically, and though the reason of them may be explained

philosophically, they do not completely solve the question why some

nations have the polity and some not; on the contrary, they plainly

leave a large 'residual phenomenon' unexplained and unknown.