Greece, the Roman Republic was ruined, not by its enemies, for there was
no enemy it did not conquer, but by its own vices. It was free from many
causes of instability and dissolution that were active in Greece--the
eager quickness, the philosophic thought, the independent belief, the
pursuit of unsubstantial grace and beauty. It was protected by many
subtle contrivances against the sovereignty of numbers and against
legislation by surprise. Constitutional battles had to be fought over
and over again; and progress was so slow, that reforms were often voted
many years before they could be carried into effect. The authority
allowed to fathers, to masters, to creditors, was as incompatible with
the spirit of freedom as the practice of the servile East. The Roman
citizen revelled in the luxury of power; and his jealous dread of every
change that might impair its enjoyment portended a gloomy oligarchy. The
cause which transformed the domination of rigid and exclusive patricians
into the model Republic, and which out of the decomposed Republic built
up the archetype of all despotism, was the fact that the Roman
Commonwealth consisted of two States in one. The constitution was made
up of compromises between independent bodies, and the obligation of
observing contracts was the standing security for freedom. The plebs
obtained self-government and an equal sovereignty, by the aid of the
tribunes of the people, the peculiar, salient, and decisive invention of
Roman statecraft. The powers conferred on the tribunes, that they might
be the guardians of the weak, were ill defined, but practically were
irresistible. They could not govern, but they could arrest all
government. The first and the last step of plebeian progress was gained
neither by violence nor persuasion, but by seceding; and, in like
manner, the tribunes overcame all the authorities of the State by the
weapon of obstruction. It was by stopping public business for five years
that Licinius established democratic equality. The safeguard against
abuse was the right of each tribune to veto the acts of his colleagues.
As they were independent of their electors, and as there could hardly
fail to be one wise and honest man among the ten, this was the most
effective instrument for the defence of minorities ever devised by man.
After the Hortensian law, which in the year 286 gave to the plebeian
assembly co-ordinate legislative authority, the tribunes ceased to
represent the cause of a minority, and their work was done.
A scheme less plausible or less hopeful than one which created two
sovereign legislatures side by side in the same community would be hard
to find. Yet it effectually closed the conflict of centuries, and gave
to Rome an epoch of constant prosperity and greatness. No real division
subsisted in the people, corresponding to the artificial division in the
State. Fifty years passed away before the popular assembly made use of
its prerogative, and passed a law in opposition to the senate. Polybius
could not detect a flaw in the structure as it stood. The harmony seemed
to be complete, and he judged that a more perfect example of composite
government could not exist. But during those happy years the cause which
wrought the ruin of Roman freedom was in full activity; for it was the
condition of perpetual war that brought about the three great changes
which were the beginning of the end--the reforms of the Gracchi, the
arming of the paupers, and the gift of the Roman suffrage to the people
of Italy.
Before the Romans began their career of foreign conquest they possessed
an army of 770,000 men; and from that time the consumption of citizens
in war was incessant. Regions once crowded with the small freeholds of
four or five acres, which were the ideal unit of Roman society and the
sinew of the army and the State, were covered with herds of cattle and
herds of slaves, and the substance of the governing democracy was
drained. The policy of the agrarian reform was to reconstitute this
peasant class out of the public domains, that is, out of lands which the
ruling families had possessed for generations, which they had bought and
sold, inherited, divided, cultivated, and improved. The conflict of
interests that had so long slumbered revived with a fury unknown in the
controversy between the patricians and the plebs. For it was now a
question not Of equal rights but of subjugation. The social restoration
of democratic elements could not be accomplished without demolishing the
senate; and this crisis at last exposed the defect of the machinery and
the peril of divided powers that were not to be controlled or
reconciled. The popular assembly, led by Gracchus, had the power of
making laws; and the only constitutional check was, that one of the
tribunes should be induced to bar the proceedings. Accordingly, the
tribune Octavius interposed his veto. The tribunician power, the most
sacred of powers, which could not be questioned because it was founded
on a covenant between the two parts of the community and formed the
keystone of their union, was employed, in opposition to the will of the
people, to prevent a reform on which the preservation of the democracy
depended. Gracchus caused Octavius to be deposed. Though not illegal,
this was a thing unheard of, and it seemed to the Romans a sacrilegious
act that shook the pillars of the State, for it was the first
significant revelation of democratic sovereignty. A tribune might burn
the arsenal and betray the city, yet he could not be called to account
until his year of office had expired. But when he employed against the
people the authority with which they had invested him, the spell was
dissolved. The tribunes had been instituted as the champions of the
oppressed, when the plebs feared oppression. It was resolved that they
should not interfere on the weaker side when the democracy were the
strongest. They were chosen by the people as their defence against the
aristocracy. It was not to be borne that they should become the agents
of the aristocracy to make them once more supreme. Against a popular
tribune, whom no colleague was suffered to oppose, the wealthy classes
were defenceless. It is true that he held office, and was inviolable,
only for a year. But the younger Gracchus was re-elected. The nobles
accused him of aiming at the crown. A tribune who should be practically
irremovable, as well as legally irresistible, was little less than an
emperor. The senate carried on the conflict as men do who fight, not for
public interests but for their own existence. They rescinded the
agrarian laws. They murdered the popular leaders. They abandoned the
constitution to save themselves, and invested Sylla with a power beyond
all monarchs, to exterminate their foes. The ghastly conception of a
magistrate legally proclaimed superior to all the laws was familiar to
the stern spirit of the Romans. The decemvirs had enjoyed that arbitrary
authority; but practically they were restrained by the two provisions
which alone were deemed efficacious in Rome, the short duration of
office, and its distribution among several colleagues. But the
appointment of Sylla was neither limited nor divided. It was to last as
long as he chose. Whatever he might do was right; and he was empowered
to put whomsoever he pleased to death, without trial or accusation. All
the victims who were butchered by his satellites suffered with the full
sanction of the law.
When at last the democracy conquered, the Augustan monarchy, by which
they perpetuated their triumph, was moderate in comparison with the
licensed tyranny of the aristocratic chief. The Emperor was the
constitutional head of the Republic, armed with all the powers requisite
to master the senate. The instrument which had served to cast down the
patricians was efficient against the new aristocracy of wealth and
office. The tribunician power, conferred in perpetuity, made it
unnecessary to create a king or a dictator. Thrice the senate proposed
to Augustus the supreme power of making laws. He declared that the power
of the tribunes already supplied him with all that he required. It
enabled him to preserve the forms of a simulated republic. The most
popular of all the magistracies of Rome furnished the marrow of
Imperialism. For the Empire was created, not by usurpation, but by the
legal act of a jubilant people, eager to close the era of bloodshed and
to secure the largess of grain and coin, which amounted, at last, to
900,000 pounds a year. The people transferred to the Emperor the
plenitude of their own sovereignty. To limit his delegated power was to
challenge their omnipotence, to renew the issue between the many and the
few which had been decided at Pharsalus and Philippi. The Romans upheld
the absolutism of the Empire because it was their own. The elementary
antagonism between liberty and democracy, between the welfare of
minorities and the supremacy of masses, became manifest. The friend of
the one was a traitor to the other. The dogma, that absolute power may,
by the hypothesis of a popular origin, be as legitimate as
constitutional freedom, began, by the combined support of the people and
the throne, to darken the air.
Legitimate, in the technical sense of modern politics, the Empire was
not meant to be. It had no right or claim to subsist apart from the will
of the people. To limit the Emperor's authority was to renounce their
own; but to take it away was to assert their own. They gave the Empire
as they chose. They took it away as they chose. The Revolution was as
lawful and as irresponsible as the Empire. Democratic institutions
continued to develop. The provinces were no longer subject to an
assembly meeting in a distant capital. They obtained the privileges of
Roman citizens. Long after Tiberius had stripped the inhabitants of Rome
of their electoral function, the provincials continued in undisturbed
enjoyment of the right of choosing their own magistrates. They governed
themselves like a vast confederation of municipal republics; and, even
after Diocletian had brought in the forms as well as the reality of
despotism, provincial assemblies, the obscure germ of representative
institutions, exercised some control over the Imperial officers.
But the Empire owed the intensity of its force to the popular fiction.
The principle, that the Emperor is not subject to laws from which he can
dispense others, _princeps legibus solutus_, was interpreted to imply
that he was above all legal restraint. There was no appeal from his
sentence. He was the living law. The Roman jurists, whilst they adorned
their writings with the exalted philosophy of the Stoics, consecrated
every excess of Imperial prerogative with those famous maxims which have
been balm to so many consciences and have sanctioned so much wrong; and
the code of Justinian became the greatest obstacle, next to feudalism,
with which liberty had to contend.
Ancient democracy, as it was in Athens in the best days of Pericles, or
in Rome when Polybius described it, or even as it is idealised by
Aristotle in the Sixth Book of his _Politics_, and by Cicero in the
beginning of the Republic, was never more than a partial and insincere
solution of the problem of popular government. The ancient politicians
aimed no higher than to diffuse power among a numerous class. Their
liberty was bound up with slavery. They never attempted to found a free
State on the thrift and energy of free labour. They never divined the
harder but more grateful task that constitutes the political life of
Christian nations.
By humbling the supremacy of rank and wealth; by forbidding the State to
encroach on the domain which belongs to God; by teaching man to love his
neighbour as himself; by promoting the sense of equality; by condemning
the pride of race, which was a stimulus of conquest, and the doctrine of
separate descent, which formed the philosopher's defence of slavery; and
by addressing not the rulers but the masses of mankind, and making
opinion superior to authority, the Church that preached the Gospel to
the poor had visible points of contact with democracy. And yet
Christianity did not directly influence political progress. The ancient
watchword of the Republic was translated by Papinian into the language
of the Church: "Summa est ratio quae pro religione fiat:" and for eleven
hundred years, from the first to the last of the Constantines, the
Christian Empire was as despotic as the pagan.
Meanwhile Western Europe was overrun by men who in their early home had
been Republicans. The primitive constitution of the German communities
was based on association rather than on subordination. They were
accustomed to govern their affairs by common deliberation, and to obey
authorities that were temporary and defined. It is one of the desperate
enterprises of historical science to trace the free institutions of
Europe and America, and Australia, to the life that was led in the
forests of Germany. But the new States were founded on conquest, and in
war the Germans were commanded by kings. The doctrine of
self-government, applied to Gaul and Spain, would have made Frank and
Goth disappear in the mass of the conquered people. It needed all the
resources of a vigorous monarchy, of a military aristocracy, and of a
territorial clergy, to construct States that were able to last. The
result was the feudal system, the most absolute contradiction of
democracy that has coexisted with civilisation.
The revival of democracy was due neither to the Christian Church nor to
the Teutonic State, but to the quarrel between them. The effect followed
the cause instantaneously. As soon as Gregory VII. made the Papacy
independent of the Empire, the great conflict began; and the same
pontificate gave birth to the theory of the sovereignty of the people.
The Gregorian party argued that the Emperor derived his crown from the
nation, and that the nation could take away what it had bestowed. The
Imperialists replied that nobody could take away what the nation had
given. It is idle to look for the spark either in flint or steel. The
object of both parties was unqualified supremacy. Fitznigel has no more
idea of ecclesiastical liberty than John of Salisbury of political.
Innocent IV. is as perfect an absolutist as Peter de Vineis. But each
party encouraged democracy in turn, by seeking the aid of the towns;
each party in turn appealed to the people, and gave strength to the
constitutional theory. In the fourteenth century English Parliaments
judged and deposed their kings, as a matter of right; the Estates
governed France without king or noble; and the wealth and liberties of
the towns, which had worked out their independence from the centre of
Italy to the North Sea, promised for a moment to transform European
society. Even in the capitals of great princes, in Rome, in Paris, and,
for two terrible days, in London, the commons obtained sway. But the
curse of instability was on the municipal republics. Strasburg,
according to Erasmus and Bodin, the best governed of all, suffered from
perpetual commotions. An ingenious historian has reckoned seven thousand
revolutions in the Italian cities. The democracies succeeded no better
than feudalism in regulating the balance between rich and poor. The
atrocities of the Jacquerie, and of Wat Tyler's rebellion, hardened the
hearts of men against the common people. Church and State combined to
put them down. And the last memorable struggles of mediaeval liberty--the
insurrection of the Comuneros in Castile, the Peasants' War in Germany,
the Republic of Florence, and the Revolt of Ghent--were suppressed by
Charles V. in the early years of the Reformation.
The middle ages had forged a complete arsenal of constitutional maxims:
trial by jury, taxation by representation, local self-government,
ecclesiastical independence, responsible authority. But they were not
secured by institutions, and the Reformation began by making the dry
bones more dry. Luther claimed to be the first divine who did justice to
the civil power. He made the Lutheran Church the bulwark of political
stability, and bequeathed to his disciples the doctrine of divine right
and passive obedience. Zwingli, who was a staunch republican, desired
that all magistrates should be elected, and should be liable to be
dismissed by their electors; but he died too soon for his influence, and
the permanent action of the Reformation on democracy was exercised
through the Presbyterian constitution of Calvin.
It was long before the democratic element in Presbyterianism began to
tell. The Netherlands resisted Philip II. for fifteen years before they
took courage to depose him, and the scheme of the ultra-Calvinist
Deventer, to subvert the ascendency of the leading States by the
sovereign action of the whole people, was foiled by Leicester's
incapacity, and by the consummate policy of Barnevelt. The Huguenots,
having lost their leaders in 1572, reconstituted themselves on a
democratic footing, and learned to think that a king who murders his
subjects forfeits his divine right to be obeyed. But Junius Brutus and
Buchanan damaged their credit by advocating regicide; and Hotoman, whose
_Franco-Gallia_ is the most serious work of the group, deserted his
liberal opinions when the chief of his own party became king. The most
violent explosion of democracy in that age proceeded from the opposite
quarter. When Henry of Navarre became the next heir to the throne of
France, the theory of the deposing power, which had proved ineffectual
for more than a century, awoke with a new and more vigorous life.
One-half of the nation accepted the view, that they were not bound to
submit to a king they would not have chosen. A Committee of Sixteen made
itself master of Paris, and, with the aid of Spain, succeeded for years
in excluding Henry from his capital. The impulse thus given endured in
literature for a whole generation, and produced a library of treatises
on the right of Catholics to choose, to control, and to cashier their
magistrates. They were on the losing side. Most of them were
bloodthirsty, and were soon forgotten. But the greater part of the
political ideas of Milton, Locke, and Rousseau, may be found in the
ponderous Latin of Jesuits who were subjects of the Spanish Crown, of
Lessius, Molina, Mariana, and Suarez.
The ideas were there, and were taken up when it suited them by extreme
adherents of Rome and of Geneva; but they produced no lasting fruit
until, a century after the Reformation, they became incorporated in new
religious systems. Five years of civil war could not exhaust the
royalism of the Presbyterians, and it required the expulsion of the
majority to make the Long Parliament abandon monarchy. It had defended
the constitution against the crown with legal arts, defending precedent
against innovation, and setting up an ideal in the past which, with all
the learning of Selden and of Prynne, was less certain than the Puritan
statesmen supposed. The Independents brought in a new principle.
Tradition had no authority for them, and the past no virtue. Liberty of
conscience, a thing not to be found in the constitution, was more prized
by many of them than all the statutes of the Plantagenets. Their idea
that each congregation should govern itself abolished the force which is
needed to preserve unity, and deprived monarchy of the weapon which made
it injurious to freedom. An immense revolutionary energy resided in
their doctrine, and it took root in America, and deeply coloured
political thought in later times. But in England the sectarian democracy
was strong only to destroy. Cromwell refused to be bound by it; and John
Lilburne, the boldest thinker among English democrats, declared that it
would be better for liberty to bring back Charles Stuart than to live
under the sword of the Protector.
Lilburne was among the first to understand the real conditions of
democracy, and the obstacle to its success in England. Equality of power
could not be preserved, except by violence, together with an extreme
inequality of possessions. There would always be danger, if power was
not made to wait on property, that property would go to those who had
the power. This idea of the necessary balance of property, developed by
Harrington, and adopted by Milton in his later pamphlets, appeared to
Toland, and even to John Adams, as important as the invention of
printing, or the discovery of the circulation of the blood. At least it
indicates the true explanation of the strange completeness with which
the Republican party had vanished, a dozen years after the solemn trial
and execution of the King. No extremity of misgovernment was able to
revive it. When the treason of Charles II. against the constitution was
divulged, and the Whigs plotted to expel the incorrigible dynasty, their
aspirations went no farther than a Venetian oligarchy, with Monmouth for
Doge. The Revolution of 1688 confined power to the aristocracy of
freeholders. The conservatism of the age was unconquerable.
Republicanism was distorted even in Switzerland, and became in the
eighteenth century as oppressive and as intolerant as its neighbours.
In 1769, when Paoli fled from Corsica, it seemed that, in Europe at
least, democracy was dead. It had, indeed, lately been defended in books
by a man of bad reputation, whom the leaders of public opinion treated
with contumely, and whose declamations excited so little alarm that
George III. offered him a pension. What gave to Rousseau a power far
exceeding that which any political writer had ever attained was the
progress of events in America. The Stuarts had been willing that the
colonies should serve as a refuge from their system of Church and State,
and of all their colonies the one most favoured was the territory
granted to William Penn. By the principles of the Society to which he
belonged, it was necessary that the new State should be founded on
liberty and equality. But Penn was further noted among Quakers as a
follower of the new doctrine of Toleration. Thus it came to pass that
Pennsylvania enjoyed the most democratic constitution in the world, and
held up to the admiration of the eighteenth century an almost solitary
example of freedom. It was principally through Franklin and the Quaker
State that America influenced political opinion in Europe, and that the
fanaticism of one revolutionary epoch was converted into the rationalism
of another. American independence was the beginning of a new era, not
merely as a revival of Revolution, but because no other Revolution ever
proceeded from so slight a cause, or was ever conducted with so much
moderation. The European monarchies supported it. The greatest statesmen
in England averred that it was just. It established a pure democracy;
but it was democracy in its highest perfection, armed and vigilant, less
against aristocracy and monarchy than against its own weakness and
excess. Whilst England was admired for the safeguards with which, in the
course of many centuries, it had fortified liberty against the power of
the crown, America appeared still more worthy of admiration for the
safeguards which, in the deliberations of a single memorable year, it
had set up against the power of its own sovereign people. It resembled
no other known democracy, for it respected freedom, authority, and law.
It resembled no other constitution, for it was contained in half a dozen
intelligible articles. Ancient Europe opened its mind to two new
ideas--that Revolution with very little provocation may be just; and
that democracy in very large dimensions may be safe.