Lyman Abbott - "Laicus"

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Kate Douglas Wiggin - "Marm Lisa"

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Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




The line was drawn, under the pressure of a stern necessity, between
civil and military life, and between the rights and duties of each. The
power of the magistrate, jealously limited in the city, was enlarged to
absolutism for the preservation of discipline in the field. But the
distinction between the king or magistrate and the general, and between
the special capacities required for the duties of each, is everywhere of
late growth. We may say the same of departmental distinctions
altogether. The executive, the legislative, the judicial power, civil
authority and military command, all lie enfolded in the same primitive
germ. The king, or the magistrate who takes his place, is expected to
lead the people in war as well as to govern them in peace. In European
monarchies this idea still lingers, fortified no doubt by the personal
unwillingness of the kings to let the military power go out of their
hands. Nor in early times is the difference between the qualifications
of a ruler and those of a commander so great as it afterwards became;
the business of the State is simple, and force of character is the main
requisite in both cases. Annual consulships must have been fatal to
strategical experience, while, on the other hand, they would save the
Republic from being tied to an unsuccessful general. But the storms of
war which broke on Rome from all quarters soon brought about the
recognition of special aptitude for military command in the appointment
of dictators. As to the distinction between military and naval ability,
it is of very recent birth: Blake, Prince Rupert, and Monk were made
admirals because they had been successful as generals, just as Hannibal
was appointed by Antiochus to the command of a fleet.

At Preston Pans, as before at Killiecrankie, the line of the Hanoverian
regulars was broken by the headlong charge of the wild clans, for which
the regulars were unprepared. Taught by the experience of Preston Pans,
the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden formed in three lines, so as to
repair a broken front. The Romans in like manner formed in three lines--
_hastati_, _principes_, and _triarii_--evidently with the
same object. Our knowledge of the history of Roman tactics does not
enable us to say exactly at what period this formation began to
supersede the phalanx, which appears to have preceded it, and which is
the natural order of half-disciplined or imperfectly armed masses, as we
see in the case of the army formed by Philip out of the Macedonian
peasantry, and again in the case of the French Revolutionary columns. We
cannot say, therefore, whether this formation in three lines is in any
way traceable to experience dearly bought in wars with Italian
highlanders, or to a lesson taught by the terrible onset of the Gaul.
Again, the punctilious care in the entrenchment of the camp, even for a
night's halt, which moved the admiration of Pyrrhus and was a material
part of Roman tactics, was likely to be inculcated by the perils to
which a burgher army would be exposed in carrying on war under or among
hills where it would be always liable to the sudden attack of a swift,
sure-footed, and wily foe. The habit of carrying a heavy load of
palisades on the march would be a part of the same necessity.

Even from the purely military point of view, then, the She-wolf and the
Twins seem to us not appropriate emblems of Roman greatness. A better
frontispiece for historians of Rome, if we mistake not, would be some
symbol of the patroness of the lowlands and their protectress against
the wild tribes of the highlands. There should also be something to
symbolize the protectress of Italy against the Gauls, whose irruptions
Rome, though defeated at Allia, succeeded ultimately in arresting and
hurling back, to the general benefit of Italian civilization which, we
may be sure, felt very grateful to her for that service, and remembered
it when her existence was threatened by Hannibal, with Gauls in his
army. Capua, though not so well situated for the leadership of Italy,
might have played the part of Rome; but the plain which she commanded,
though very rich, was too small, and too closely overhung by the fatal
hills of the Samnite, under whose dominion she fell. Rome had space to
organize a strong lowland resistance to the marauding highland powers.
It seems probable that her hills were not only the citadel but the
general refuge of the lowlanders of those parts, when forced to fly
before the onslaught of the highlanders, who were impelled by successive
wars of migration to the plains. The Campagna affords no stronghold or
rallying point but those hills, which may have received a population of
fugitives like the islands of Venice. The city may have drawn part of
its population and some of its political elements from this source. In
this sense the story of the Asylum may possibly represent a fact, though
it has itself nothing to do with history.

Then, as to imperial organization and government. Superiority in these
would naturally flow from superiority in civilization, and in previous
political training, the first of which Rome derived from her comparative
wealth and from the mental characteristics of a city population; the
second she derived from the long struggle through which the rights of
the plebeians were equalized with those of the patricians, and which
again must have had its ultimate origin in geographical circumstance
bringing together different elements of population. Cromwell was a
politician and a religious leader before he was a soldier; Napoleon was
a soldier before he was a politician: to this difference between the
moulds in which their characters were cast may be traced, in great
measure, the difference of their conduct when in power, Cromwell
devoting himself to political and ecclesiastical reform, while Napoleon
used his supremacy chiefly as the means of gratifying his lust for war.
There is something analogous in the case of imperial nations. Had the
Roman, when he conquered the world been like the Ottoman, like the
Ottoman he would probably have remained. His thirst for blood slaked, he
would simply have proceeded to gratify his other animal lusts; he would
have destroyed or consumed everything, produced nothing, delivered over
the world to a plundering anarchy of rapacious satraps, and when his
sensuality had overpowered his ferocity, he would have fallen in his
turn before some horde whose ferocity was fresh, and the round of war
and havoc would have commenced again. The Roman destroyed and consumed a
good deal; but he also produced not a little: he produced, among other
things, first in Italy, then in the world at large, the Peace of Rome
indispensable to civilization, and destined to be the germ and precursor
of the Peace of Humanity.

In two respects, however, the geographical circumstances of Rome appear
specially to have prepared her for the exercise of universal empire. In
the first place, her position was such as to bring her into contact from
the outset with a great variety of races. The cradle of her dominion was
a sort of ethnological microcosm. Latins, Etruscans, Greeks, Campanians,
with all the mountain races and the Gauls, make up a school of the most
diversified experience, which could not fail to open the minds of the
future masters of the world. How different was this education from that
of a people which is either isolated, like the Egyptians, or comes into
contact perhaps in the way of continual border hostility with a single
race! What the exact relations of Rome with Etruria were in the earliest
times we do not know, but evidently they were close; while between the
Roman and the Etruscan character the difference appears to have been as
wide as possible. The Roman was pre-eminently practical and business-
like, sober-minded, moral, unmystical, unsacerdotal, much concerned with
present duties and interests, very little concerned about a future state
of existence, peculiarly averse from human sacrifices and from all wild
and dark superstitions. The Etruscan, as he has portrayed himself to us
in his tombs, seems to have been, in his later development at least, a
mixture of Sybaritism with a gloomy and almost Mexican religion, which
brooded over the terrors of the next world, and sought in the constant
practice of human sacrifice a relief from its superstitious fear. If the
Roman could tolerate the Etruscans, be merciful to them, and manage them
well, he was qualified to deal in a statesmanlike way with the
peculiarities of almost any race, except those whose fierce nationality
repelled all management whatever. In borrowing from the Etruscans some
of their theological lore and their system of divination, small as the
value of the things borrowed was, the Roman, perhaps, gave an earnest of
the receptiveness which led him afterwards, in his hour of conquest, to
bow to the intellectual ascendency of the conquered Greek, and to become
a propagator of Greek culture, though partly in a Latinized form, more
effectual than Alexander and his Orientalized successors.

In the second place, the geographical circumstances of Rome, combined
with her character, would naturally lead to the foundation of colonies
and of that colonial system which formed a most important and beneficent
part of her empire. We have derived the name colony from Rome; but her
colonies were just what ours are not, military outposts of the empire,
_propugnacula imperii_. Political depletion and provision for needy
citizens were collateral, but it would seem, in early times at least,
secondary objects. Such outposts were the means suggested by Nature,
first of securing those parts of the plain which were beyond the
sheltering range of the city itself, secondly of guarding the outlets of
the hills against the hill tribes, and eventually of holding down the
tribes in the hills themselves. The custody of the passes is especially
marked as an object by the position of many of the early colonies. When
the Roman dominion extended to the north of Italy, the same system was
pursued, in order to guard against incursions from the Alps. A
conquering despot would have planted mere garrisons under military
governors, which would not have been centres of civilization, but
probably of the reverse. The Roman colonies, bearing onwards with them
the civil as well as the military life of the Republic, were, with the
general system of provincial municipalities of which they constituted
the core, to no small extent centres of civilization, though doubtless
they were also to some extent instruments of oppression. "Where the
Roman conquered he dwelt," and the dwelling of the Roman was, on the
whole, the abode of a civilizing influence. Representation of
dependencies in the sovereign assembly of the imperial country was
unknown, and would have been impracticable. Conquest had not so far put
off its iron nature. In giving her dependencies municipal institutions
and municipal life, Rome did the next best thing to giving them
representation. A Roman province with its municipal life was far above a
satrapy, though far below a nation.

Then how came Rome to be the foundress and the great source of law?
This, as we said before, calls for a separate explanation. An
explanation we do not pretend to give, but merely a hint which may
deserve notice in looking for the explanation. In primitive society, in
place of law, in the proper sense of the term, we find only tribal
custom, formed mainly by the special exigencies of tribal self-
preservation, and confined to the particular tribe. When Saxon and Dane
settle down in England side by side under the treaty made between Alfred
and Guthurm, each race retains the tribal custom which serves it as a
criminal law. A special effort seems to be required in order to rise
above this custom to that conception of general right or expediency
which is the germ of law as a science. The Greek, sceptical and
speculative as he was, appears never to have quite got rid of the notion
that there was something sacred in ancestral custom, and that to alter
it by legislation was a sort of impiety. We in England still conceive
that there is something in the breast of the judge, and the belief is a
lingering shadow of the tribal custom, the source of the common law. Now
what conditions would be most favourable to this critical effort, so
fraught with momentous consequences to humanity? Apparently a union of
elements belonging to different tribes such as would compel them, for
the preservation of peace and the regulation of daily intercourse, to
adopt some common measure of right. It must be a union, not a conquest
of one tribe by another, otherwise the conquering tribe would of course
keep its own customs, as the Spartans did among the conquered people of
Laconia. Now it appears likely that these conditions were exactly
fulfilled by the primaeval settlements on the hills of Rome. The hills
are either escarped by nature or capable of easy escarpment, and seem
originally to have been little separate fortresses, by the union of
which the city was ultimately formed. That there were tribal differences
among the inhabitants of the different hills is a belief to which all
traditions and all the evidence of institutions point, whether we
suppose the difference to have been great or not and whatever special
theory we may form as to the origin of the Roman people. If the germ of
law, as distinguished from custom, was brought into existence in this
manner, it would be fostered and expanded by the legislative exigencies
of the political and social concordat between the two orders, and also
by those arising out of the adjustment of relations with other races in
the course of conquest and colonization.

Roman law had also, in common with Roman morality, the advantage of
being comparatively free from the perverting influences of tribal
superstition. [Footnote: From religious perversion Roman law was
eminently free: but it could not be free from perverting influences of a
social kind; so that we ought to be cautious, for instance, in borrowing
law on any subject concerning the relations between the sexes from the
corrupt society of the Roman Empire.] Roman morality was in the main a
rational rule of duty, the shortcomings and aberrations of which arose
not from superstition, but from narrowness of perception, peculiarity of
sphere, and the bias of national circumstance. The auguries, which were
so often used for the purposes of political obstruction or intrigue,
fall under the head rather of trickery than of superstition.

Roman law in the same manner was a rule of expediency, rightly or
wrongly conceived, with comparatively little tincture of religion. In
this again we probably see the effect of a fusion of tribes upon the
tribal superstitions. "Rome," it has been said, "had no mythology." This
is scarcely an overstatement; and we do not account for the fact by
saying that the Romans were unimaginative, because it is not the
creative imagination that produces a mythology, but the impression made
by the objects and forces of nature on the minds of the forefathers of
the tribe.

A more tenable explanation, at all events, is that just suggested, the
disintegration of mythologies by the mixture of tribes. A part of the
Roman religion--the worship of such abstractions as Fides, Fortuna,
Salus, Concordia, Bellona, Terminus--even looks like a product of the
intellect posterior to the decay of the mythologies, which we may be
pretty sure were physical. It is no doubt true that the formalities
which were left--hollow ceremonial, auguries, and priesthoods which were
given without scruple, like secular offices, to the most profligate men
of the world--were worse than worthless in a religious point of view.
But historians who dwell on this fail to see that the real essence of
religion, a belief in the power of duty and of righteousness, that
belief which afterwards took the more definite form of Roman Stoicism,
had been detached by the dissolution of the mythologies, and exerted its
force, such as that force was, independently of the ceremonial, the
sacred chickens, and the dissipated high priests. In this sense the
tribute paid by Polybius to the religious character of the Romans is
deserved; they had a higher sense of religious obligation than the
Greeks; they were more likely than the Greeks, the Phoenicians, or any
of their other rivals, to swear and disappoint not, though it were to
their own hindrance; and this they owed, as we conceive, not to an
effort of speculative intellect, which in an early stage of society
would be out of the question, but to some happy conjunction of
circumstances such as would be presented by a break-up of tribal
mythologies, combined with influences favourable to the formation of
strong habits of political and social duty. Religious art was
sacrificed; that was the exclusive heritage of the Greek; but superior
morality was on the whole the heritage of the Roman, and if he produced
no good tragedy himself, he furnished characters for Shakespeare and
Corneille.

Whatever set the Romans free, or comparatively free, from the tyranny of
tribal religion may be considered as having in the same measure been the
source of the tolerance which was so indispensable a qualification for
the exercise of dominion over a polytheistic world. They waged no war on
"the gods of the nations," or on the worshippers of those gods as such.
They did not set up golden images after the fashion of Nebuchadnezzar.
In early times they seem to have adopted the gods of the conquered, and
to have transported them to their own city. In later times they
respected all the religions except Judaism and Druidism, which assumed
the form of national resistance to the empire, and worships which they
deemed immoral or anti-social, and which had intruded themselves into
Rome.

Another grand step in the development of law is the severance of the
judicial power from the legislative and the executive, which permits the
rise of jurists, and of a regular legal profession. This is a slow
process. In the stationary East, as a rule, the king has remained the
supreme judge. At Athens, the sovereign people delegated its judicial
powers to a large committee, but it got no further; and the judicial
committee was hardly more free from political passion, or more competent
to decide points of law, than the assembly itself. In England the House
of Lords still, formally at least, retains judicial functions. Acts of
attainder were a yet more primitive as well as more objectionable relic
of the times in which the sovereign power, whether king, assembly, or
the two combined, was ruler, legislator, and judge all in one. We shall
not attempt here to trace the process by which this momentous separation
of powers and functions was to a remarkable extent accomplished in
ancient Rome. But we are pretty safe in saying that the _praetor
peregrinus_ was an important figure in it, and that it received a
considerable impulse from the exigencies of a jurisdiction between those
who as citizens came under the sovereign assembly and the aliens or
semi-aliens who did not.

Whether the partial explanations of the mystery of Roman greatness which
we have here suggested approve themselves to the reader's judgment or
not, it may at least be said for them that they are _verae causae_,
which is not the case with the story of the foster-wolf, or anything
derived from it, any more than with the story of the prophetic
apparitions of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.

With regard to the public morality of the Romans, and to their conduct
and influence as masters of the world, the language of historians seems
to us to leave something to be desired. Mommsen's tone, whenever
controverted questions connected with international morality and the law
of conquest arise, is affected by his Prussianism; it betokens the
transition of the German mind from the speculative and visionary to the
practical and even more than practical state; it is premonitory not only
of the wars with Austria and France, but of a coming age in which the
forces of natural selection are again to operate without the restraints
imposed by religion, and the heaviest fist is once more to make the law.
In the work of Ihne we see a certain recoil from Mommsen, and at the
same time an occasional inconsistency and a want of stability in the
principle of judgment. Our standard ought not to be positive but
relative. It was the age of force and conquest, not only with the Romans
but with all nations; _hospes_ was _hostis_. A perfectly
independent development of Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, Phoenicians, and
all the other nationalities, might perhaps have been the best thing for
humanity. But this was out of the question; in that stage of the world's
existence contact was war, and the end of war was conquest or
destruction, the first of which was at all events preferable to the
second. What empire then can we imagine which would have done less harm
or more good than the Roman? Greek intellect showed its superiority in
speculative politics as in all other departments of speculation, but as
a practical politician the Greek was not self-controlled or strong, and
he would never have bestowed on the provinces of his empire local self-
government and municipal life; besides, the race, though it included
wonderful varieties in itself, was, as a race, intensely tribal, and
treated persistently all other races as barbarians. It would have
deprived mankind of Roman law and politics, as well as of that vast
extension of the Roman aedileship which covered the world with public
works beneficent in themselves and equally so as examples; whereas the
Roman had the greatness of soul to do homage to Greek intellect, and,
notwithstanding an occasional Mummius, preserved all that was of the
highest value in Greek civilization, better perhaps than it would have
been preserved by the tyrants and condottieri of the Greek decadence. As
to a Semitic Empire, whether in the hands of Syrians or Carthaginians,
with their low Semitic craft, their Moloch-worships and their
crucifixions,--the very thought fills us with horror. It would have
been a world-wide tyranny of the strong box, into which all the products
of civilization would have gone. _Parcere subjectis_ was the rule
of Rome as well as _debellare superbos_; and while all conquest is
an evil, the Roman was the most clement and the least destructive of
conquerors. This is true of him on the whole, though he sometimes was
guilty of thoroughly primaeval cruelty. He was the great author of the
laws of war as well as of the laws of peace. That he not seldom, when
his own interest was concerned, put the mere letter of the social law in
place of justice, and that we are justly revolted on these occasions by
his hypocritical observance of forms, is very true: nevertheless, his
scrupulosity and the language of the national critics in these cases
prove the existence of at least a rudimentary conscience. No compunction
for breach of international law or justice we may be sure ever visited
the heart of Tiglath-Pileser. Cicero's letter of advice to his brother
on the government of a province may seem a tissue of truisms now, though
Warren Hastings and Sir Elijah Impey would hardly have found it so, but
it is a landmark in the history of civilization. That the Roman Republic
should die, and that a colossal and heterogeneous empire should fall
under the rule of a military despot, was perhaps a fatal necessity; but
the despotism long continued to be tempered, elevated, and rendered more
beneficent by the lingering spirit of the Republic; the liberalism of
Trajan and the Antonines was distinctly republican nor did Sultanism
finally establish itself before Diocletian. Perhaps we may number among
the proofs of the Roman's superiority the capacity shown so far as we
know first by him of being touched by the ruin of a rival. We may be
sure that no Assyrian conqueror even affected to weep over the fall of a
hostile city however magnificent and historic. On the whole it must be
allowed that physical influences have seldom done better for humanity
than they did in shaping the imperial character and destinies of Rome.




THE GREATNESS OF ENGLAND

[Footnote: The writer some time ago gave a lecture before the Royal
Institution on "The Influence of Geographical Circumstances on Political
Character," using Rome and England as illustrations. It may perhaps be
right to say that the present paper, which touches here and there on
matters of political opinion, is not identical with the latter portion
of that lecture.]


Two large islands lie close to that Continent which has hitherto been
selected by Nature as the chief seat of civilization. One island is much
larger than the other, and the larger island lies between the smaller
and the Continent. The larger island is so placed as to receive primaeval
immigration from three quarters--from France, from the coast of Northern
Germany and the Low Countries, and from Scandinavia, the transit being
rendered somewhat easier in the last case by the prevailing winds and by
the little islands which Scotland throws out, as resting-places and
guides for the primaeval navigator, into the Northern Sea. The smaller
island, on the other hand, can hardly receive immigration except through
the larger, though its southern ports look out, somewhat ominously to
the eye of history, towards Spain. The western and northern parts of the
larger island are mountainous, and it is divided into two very unequal
parts by the Cheviot Hills and the mosses of the Border. In the larger
island are extensive districts well suited for grain. The climate of
most of the smaller is too wet for grain and good only for pasture. The
larger island is full of minerals and coal, of which the smaller island
is almost destitute. These are the most salient features of the scene of
English history, and, with a temperate climate, the chief physical
determinants of English destiny.