at Rome, on a political mission. During an interval of official business
he delivered two public orations, to give the unlettered conquerors of
his country a taste of the disputations that flourished in the Attic
schools. On the first day he discoursed of natural justice. On the next
he denied its existence, arguing that all our notions of good and evil
are derived from positive enactment. From the time of that memorable
display, the genius of the vanquished held its conquerors in thrall. The
most eminent of the public men of Rome, such as Scipio and Cicero,
formed their minds on Grecian models, and her jurists underwent the
rigorous discipline of Zeno and Chrysippus.
If, drawing the limit in the second century, when the influence of
Christianity becomes perceptible, we should form our judgment of the
politics of antiquity by its actual legislation, our estimate would be
low. The prevailing notions of freedom were imperfect, and the
endeavours to realise them were wide of the mark. The ancients
understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of
liberty. They concentrated so many prerogatives in the State as to leave
no footing from which a man could deny its jurisdiction or assign bounds
to its activity. If I may employ an expressive anachronism, the vice of
the classic State was that it was both Church and State in one. Morality
was undistinguished from religion and politics from morals; and in
religion, morality, and politics there was only one legislator and one
authority. The State, while it did deplorably little for education, for
practical science, for the indigent and helpless, or for the spiritual
needs of man, nevertheless claimed the use of all his faculties and the
determination of all his duties. Individuals and families, associations
and dependencies were so much material that the sovereign power consumed
for its own purposes. What the slave was in the hands of his master, the
citizen was in the hands of the community. The most sacred obligations
vanished before the public advantage. The passengers existed for the
sake of the ship. By their disregard for private interests, and for the
moral welfare and improvement of the people, both Greece and Rome
destroyed the vital elements on which the prosperity of nations rests,
and perished by the decay of families and the depopulation of the
country. They survive not in their institutions, but in their ideas, and
by their ideas, especially on the art of government, they are--
The dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.
To them, indeed, may be tracked nearly all the errors that are
undermining political society--Communism, Utilitarianism, the confusion
between tyranny and authority, and between lawlessness and freedom.
The notion that men lived originally in a state of nature, by violence
and without laws, is due to Critias. Communism in its grossest form was
recommended by Diogenes of Sinope. According to the Sophists, there is
no duty above expediency and no virtue apart from pleasure. Laws are an
invention of weak men to rob their betters of the reasonable enjoyment
of their superiority. It is better to inflict than to suffer wrong; and
as there is no greater good than to do evil without fear of retribution,
so there is no worse evil than to suffer without the consolation of
revenge. Justice is the mask of a craven spirit; injustice is worldly
wisdom; and duty, obedience, self-denial are the impostures of
hypocrisy. Government is absolute, and may ordain what it pleases, and
no subject can complain that it does him wrong, but as long as he can
escape compulsion and punishment, he is always free to disobey.
Happiness consists in obtaining power and in eluding the necessity of
obedience; and he that gains a throne by perfidy and murder, deserves to
be truly envied.
Epicurus differed but little from the propounders of the code of
revolutionary despotism. All societies, he said, are founded on contract
for mutual protection. Good and evil are conventional terms, for the
thunderbolts of heaven fall alike on the just and the unjust. The
objection to wrongdoing is not the act, but in its consequences to the
wrongdoer. Wise men contrive laws, not to bind, but to protect
themselves; and when they prove to be unprofitable they cease to be
valid. The illiberal sentiments of even the most illustrious
metaphysicians are disclosed in the saying of Aristotle, that the mark
of the worst governments is that they leave men free to live as they
please.
If you will bear in mind that Socrates, the best of the pagans, knew of
no higher criterion for men, of no better guide of conduct, than the
laws of each country; that Plato, whose sublime doctrine was so near an
anticipation of Christianity that celebrated theologians wished his
works to be forbidden, lest men should be content with them, and
indifferent to any higher dogma--to whom was granted that prophetic
vision of the Just Man, accused, condemned and scourged, and dying on a
Cross--nevertheless employed the most splendid intellect ever bestowed
on man to advocate the abolition of the family and the exposure of
infants; that Aristotle, the ablest moralist of antiquity, saw no harm
in making raids upon a neighbouring people, for the sake of reducing
them to slavery--still more, if you will consider that, among the
moderns, men of genius equal to these have held political doctrines not
less criminal or absurd--it will be apparent to you how stubborn a
phalanx of error blocks the paths of truth; that pure reason is as
powerless as custom to solve the problem of free government; that it
can only be the fruit of long, manifold, and painful experience; and
that the tracing of the methods by which divine wisdom has educated the
nations to appreciate and to assume the duties of freedom, is not the
least part of that true philosophy that studies to
Assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
But, having sounded the depth of their errors, I should give you a very
inadequate idea of the wisdom of the ancients if I allowed it to appear
that their precepts were no better than their practice. While statesmen
and senates and popular assemblies supplied examples of every
description of blunder, a noble literature arose, in which a priceless
treasure of political knowledge was stored, and in which the defects of
the existing institutions were exposed with unsparing sagacity. The
point on which the ancients were most nearly unanimous is the right of
the people to govern, and their inability to govern alone. To meet this
difficulty, to give to the popular element a full share without a
monopoly of power, they adopted very generally the theory of a mixed
Constitution. They differed from our notion of the same thing, because
modern Constitutions have been a device for limiting monarchy; with them
they were invented to curb democracy. The idea arose in the time of
Plato--though he repelled it--when the early monarchies and oligarchies
had vanished, and it continued to be cherished long after all
democracies had been absorbed in the Roman Empire. But whereas a
sovereign prince who surrenders part of his authority yields to the
argument of superior force, a sovereign people relinquishing its own
prerogative succumbs to the influence of reason. And it has in all times
proved more easy to create limitations by the use of force than by
persuasion.
The ancient writers saw very clearly that each principle of government
standing alone is carried to excess and provokes a reaction. Monarchy
hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy
expands into the supremacy of numbers. They therefore imagined that to
restrain each element by combining it with the others would avert the
natural process of self-destruction, and endow the State with perpetual
youth. But this harmony of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy blended
together, which was the ideal of many writers, and which they supposed
to be exhibited by Sparta, by Carthage, and by Rome, was a chimera of
philosophers never realised by antiquity. At last Tacitus, wiser than
the rest, confessed that the mixed Constitution, however admirable in
theory, was difficult to establish and impossible to maintain. His
disheartening avowal is not disowned by later experience.
The experiment has been tried more often than I can tell, with a
combination of resources that were unknown to the ancients--with
Christianity, parliamentary government, and a free press. Yet there is
no example of such a balanced Constitution having lasted a century. If
it has succeeded anywhere it has been in our favoured country and in our
time; and we know not yet how long the wisdom of the nation will
preserve the equipoise. The Federal check was as familiar to the
ancients as the Constitutional. For the type of all their Republics was
the government of a city by its own inhabitants meeting in the public
place. An administration embracing many cities was known to them only in
the form of the oppression which Sparta exercised over the Messenians,
Athens over her Confederates, and Rome over Italy. The resources which,
in modern times, enabled a great people to govern itself through a
single centre did not exist. Equality could be preserved only by
Federalism; and it occurs more often amongst them than in the modern
world. If the distribution of power among the several parts of the State
is the most efficient restraint on monarchy, the distribution of power
among several States is the best check on democracy. By multiplying
centres of government and discussion it promotes the diffusion of
political knowledge and the maintenance of healthy and independent
opinion. It is the protectorate of minorities, and the consecration of
self-government. But although it must be enumerated among the better
achievements of practical genius in antiquity, it arose from necessity,
and its properties were imperfectly investigated in theory.
When the Greeks began to reflect on the problems of society, they first
of all accepted things as they were, and did their best to explain and
defend them. Inquiry, which with us is stimulated by doubt, began with
them in wonder. The most illustrious of the early philosophers,
Pythagoras, promulgated a theory for the preservation of political power
in the educated class, and ennobled a form of government which was
generally founded on popular ignorance and on strong class interests. He
preached authority and subordination, and dwelt more on duties than on
rights, on religion than on policy; and his system perished in the
revolution by which oligarchies were swept away. The revolution
afterwards developed its own philosophy, whose excesses I have
described.
But between the two eras, between the rigid didactics of the early
Pythagoreans and the dissolving theories of Protagoras, a philosopher
arose who stood aloof from both extremes, and whose difficult sayings
were never really understood or valued until our time. Heraclitus, of
Ephesus, deposited his book in the temple of Diana. The book has
perished, like the temple and the worship, but its fragments have been
collected and interpreted with incredible ardour, by the scholars, the
divines, the philosophers, and politicians who have been engaged the
most intensely in the toil and stress of this century. The most renowned
logician of the last century adopted every one of his propositions; and
the most brilliant agitator among Continental Socialists composed a work
of eight hundred and forty pages to celebrate his memory.
Heraclitus complained that the masses were deaf to truth, and knew not
that one good man counts for more than thousands; but he held the
existing order in no superstitious reverence. Strife, he says, is the
source and the master of all things. Life is perpetual motion, and
repose is death. No man can plunge twice into the same current, for it
is always flowing and passing, and is never the same. The only thing
fixed and certain in the midst of change is the universal and sovereign
reason, which all men may not perceive, but which is common to all. Laws
are sustained by no human authority, but by virtue of their derivation
from the one law that is divine. These sayings, which recall the grand
outlines of political truth which we have found in the Sacred Books, and
carry us forward to the latest teaching of our most enlightened
contemporaries, would bear a good deal of elucidation and comment.
Heraclitus is, unfortunately, so obscure that Socrates could not
understand him, and I won't pretend to have succeeded better.
If the topic of my address was the history of political science, the
highest and the largest place would belong to Plato and Aristotle. The
_Laws_ of the one, the _Politics_ of the other, are, if I may trust my
own experience, the books from which we may learn the most about the
principles of politics. The penetration with which those great masters
of thought analysed the institutions of Greece, and exposed their vices,
is not surpassed by anything in later literature; by Burke or Hamilton,
the best political writers of the last century; by Tocqueville or
Roscher, the most eminent of our own. But Plato and Aristotle were
philosophers, studious not of unguided freedom, but of intelligent
government. They saw the disastrous effects of ill-directed striving for
liberty; and they resolved that it was better not to strive for it, but
to be content with a strong administration, prudently adapted to make
men prosperous and happy.
Now liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are
excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to
a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is
not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required,
but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society,
and of private life. Increase of freedom in the State may sometimes
promote mediocrity, and give vitality to prejudice; it may even retard
useful legislation, diminish the capacity for war, and restrict the
boundaries of Empire. It might be plausibly argued that, if many things
would be worse in England or Ireland under an intelligent despotism,
some things would be managed better; that the Roman Government was more
enlightened under Augustus and Antoninus than under the Senate, in the
days of Marius or of Pompey. A generous spirit prefers that his country
should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than
powerful, prosperous, and enslaved. It is better to be the citizen of a
humble commonwealth in the Alps, without a prospect of influence beyond
the narrow frontier, than a subject of the superb autocracy that
overshadows half of Asia and of Europe. But it may be urged, on the
other side, that liberty is not the sum or the substitute of all the
things men ought to live for; that to be real it must be circumscribed,
and that the limits of circumscription vary; that advancing civilisation
invests the State with increased rights and duties, and imposes
increased burdens and constraint on the subject; that a highly
instructed and intelligent community may perceive the benefit of
compulsory obligations which, at a lower stage, would be thought
unbearable; that liberal progress is not vague or indefinite, but aims
at a point where the public is subject to no restrictions but those of
which it feels the advantage; that a free country may be less capable of
doing much for the advancement of religion, the prevention of vice, or
the relief of suffering, than one that does not shrink from confronting
great emergencies by some sacrifice of individual rights, and some
concentration of power; and that the supreme political object ought to
be sometimes postponed to still higher moral objects. My argument
involves no collision with these qualifying reflections. We are dealing,
not with the effects of freedom, but with its causes. We are seeking out
the influences which brought arbitrary government under control, either
by the diffusion of power, or by the appeal to an authority which
transcends all government, and among those influences the greatest
philosophers of Greece have no claim to be reckoned.
It is the Stoics who emancipated mankind from its subjugation to
despotic rule, and whose enlightened and elevated views of life bridged
the chasm that separates the ancient from the Christian state, and led
the way to freedom. Seeing how little security there is that the laws of
any land shall be wise or just, and that the unanimous will of a people
and the assent of nations are liable to err, the Stoics looked beyond
those narrow barriers, and above those inferior sanctions, for the
principles that ought to regulate the lives of men and the existence of
society. They made it known that there is a will superior to the
collective will of man, and a law that overrules those of Solon and
Lycurgus. Their test of good government is its conformity to principles
that can be traced to a higher legislator. That which we must obey, that
to which we are bound to reduce all civil authorities, and to sacrifice
every earthly interest, is that immutable law which is perfect and
eternal as God Himself, which proceeds from His nature, and reigns over
heaven and earth and over all the nations.
The great question is to discover, not what governments prescribe, but
what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the
conscience of mankind. Before God, there is neither Greek nor barbarian,
neither rich nor poor, and the slave is as good as his master, for by
birth all men are free; they are citizens of that universal commonwealth
which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and children of
God. The true guide of our conduct is no outward authority, but the
voice of God, who comes down to dwell in our souls, who knows all our
thoughts, to whom are owing all the truth we know, and all the good we
do; for vice is voluntary, and virtue comes from the grace of the
heavenly spirit within.
What the teaching of that divine voice is, the philosophers who had
imbibed the sublime ethics of the Porch went on to expound: It is not
enough to act up to the written law, or to give all men their due; we
ought to give them more than their due, to be generous and beneficent,
to devote ourselves for the good of others, seeking our reward in
self-denial and sacrifice, acting from the motive of sympathy and not of
personal advantage. Therefore we must treat others as we wish to be
treated by them, and must persist until death in doing good to our
enemies, regardless of unworthiness and ingratitude. For we must be at
war with evil, but at peace with men, and it is better to suffer than to
commit injustice. True freedom, says the most eloquent of the Stoics,
consists in obeying God. A State governed by such principles as these
would have been free far beyond the measure of Greek or Roman freedom;
for they open a door to religious toleration, and close it against
slavery. Neither conquest nor purchase, said Zeno, can make one man the
property of another.
These doctrines were adopted and applied by the great jurists of the
Empire. The law of nature, they said, is superior to the written law,
and slavery contradicts the law of nature. Men have no right to do what
they please with their own, or to make profit out of another's loss.
Such is the political wisdom of the ancients, touching the foundations
of liberty, as we find it in its highest development, in Cicero, and
Seneca, and Philo, a Jew of Alexandria. Their writings impress upon us
the greatness of the work of preparation for the Gospel which had been
accomplished among men on the eve of the mission of the Apostles. St.
Augustine, after quoting Seneca, exclaims: "What more could a Christian
say than this Pagan has said?" The enlightened pagans had reached nearly
the last point attainable without a new dispensation, when the fulness
of time was come. We have seen the breadth and the splendour of the
domain of Hellenic thought, and it has brought us to the threshold of a
greater kingdom. The best of the later classics speak almost the
language of Christianity, and they border on its spirit.
But in all that I have been able to cite from classical literature,
three things are wanting,--representative government, the emancipation
of the slaves, and liberty of conscience. There were, it is true,
deliberative assemblies, chosen by the people; and confederate cities,
of which, both in Asia and Africa, there were so many leagues, sent
their delegates to sit in Federal Councils. But government by an elected
Parliament was even in theory a thing unknown. It is congruous with the
nature of Polytheism to admit some measure of toleration. And Socrates,
when he avowed that he must obey God rather than the Athenians, and the
Stoics, when they set the wise man above the law, were very near giving
utterance to the principle. But it was first proclaimed and established
by enactment, not in polytheistic and philosophical Greece, but in
India, by Asoka, the earliest of the Buddhist kings, two hundred and
fifty years before the birth of Christ.
Slavery has been, far more than intolerance, the perpetual curse and
reproach of ancient civilisation, and although its rightfulness was
disputed as early as the days of Aristotle, and was implicitly, if not
definitely, denied by several Stoics, the moral philosophy of the Greeks
and Romans, as well as their practice, pronounced decidedly in its
favour. But there was one extraordinary people who, in this as in other
things, anticipated the purer precept that was to come. Philo of
Alexandria is one of the writers whose views on society were most
advanced. He applauds not only liberty but equality in the enjoyment of
wealth. He believes that a limited democracy, purged of its grosser
elements, is the most perfect government, and will extend itself
gradually over all the world. By freedom he understood the following of
God. Philo, though he required that the condition of the slave should be
made compatible with the wants and claims of his higher nature, did not
absolutely condemn slavery. But he has put on record the customs of the
Essenes of Palestine, a people who, uniting the wisdom of the Gentiles
with the faith of the Jews, led lives which were uncontaminated by the
surrounding civilisation, and were the first to reject slavery both in
principle and practice. They formed a religious community rather than a
State, and their numbers did not exceed 4000. But their example
testifies to how great a height religious men were able to raise their
conception of society even without the succour of the New Testament, and
affords the strongest condemnation of their contemporaries.
This, then, is the conclusion to which our survey brings us: There is
hardly a truth in politics or in the system of the rights of man that
was not grasped by the wisest of the Gentiles and the Jews, or that they
did not declare with a refinement of thought and a nobleness of
expression that later writers could never surpass. I might go on for
hours, reciting to you passages on the law of nature and the duties of
man, so solemn and religious that though they come from the profane
theatre on the Acropolis, and from the Roman Forum, you would deem that
you were listening to the hymns of Christian Churches and the discourse
of ordained divines. But although the maxims of the great classic
teachers, of Sophocles, and Plato, and Seneca, and the glorious examples
of public virtue were in the mouths of all men, there was no power in
them to avert the doom of that civilisation for which the blood of so
many patriots and the genius of such incomparable writers had been
wasted in vain. The liberties of the ancient nations were crushed
beneath a hopeless and inevitable despotism, and their vitality was
spent, when the new power came forth from Galilee, giving what was
wanting to the efficacy of human knowledge to redeem societies as well
as men.