THE UNITY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Essays Arranged and Edited by

F. S. MARVIN

Sometime Senior Scholar of St. John's College, OxfordAuthor of _The Living Past_

Humphrey MilfordOxford University PressLondon Edinburgh Glasgow New YorkToronto Melbourne Bombay

1915

PREFACE

The following essays are the substance of a course of lectures deliveredat a Summer School at the Woodbrooke Settlement, near Birmingham, inAugust 1915. The general purpose of the course will be apparent from theessays themselves. No forced or mechanical uniformity of view was aimedat. The writers will be found, very naturally and properly, to differ indetail and in the stress they lay on different aspects of the case. Butthey agree in thinking that while our country's cause and the cause ofour Allies is just and necessary and must be prosecuted with the utmostvigour, it is not inopportune to reflect on those common andineradicable elements in the civilization of the West which tend to forma real commonwealth of nations and will survive even the most shatteringof conflicts. That we on the Allied side stand fundamentally for thisideal is one of our most valuable assets. 

The fact that the lectures were delivered at a settlement for trainingpersons for social work in a religious spirit, suggested to more thanone of those who took part in the course, how similar is the task whichnow lies before us in international affairs to that which Canon Barnettinitiated thirty years ago for the treatment of the social question athome. We need in both cases to associate ourselves mentally with othersin order to realize the common elements which underlie the seemingdiversity in the civilization of the West. 

The method of the course was primarily historical, though certain essayshave been added of a more idealist type. It is hoped that the point ofview suggested, though prompted by current events, may be found to havesome permanent value. It could obviously be applied to many otheraspects of European life, e. G. Morality and politics, to whichconditions of space have only permitted indirect reference to be made inthis volume. 

F. S. M. 

CONTENTS

 I. INTRODUCTORY: THE GROUNDS OF UNITY By F. S. MARVIN. 

 II. UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES By J. L. MYRES, Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, Oxford. 

 III. THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME By J. A. SMITH, Waynflete Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, Oxford. 

 IV. UNITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES By ERNEST BARKER, Fellow of New College, Oxford. 

 V. UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW By W. M. GELDART, Vinerian Professor of English Law, Oxford. 

 VI. THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART By the Rev. Dr. A. J. CARLYLE, University College, Oxford. 

 VII. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES By L. T. HOBHOUSE, White Professor of Sociology, University of London. 

VIII. THE UNITY OF WESTERN EDUCATION By J. W. HEADLAM, late Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. 

 IX. COMMERCE AND FINANCE AS INTERNATIONAL FORCES By HARTLEY WITHERS. 

 X. INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION By CONSTANCE SMITH, sometime British Delegate on International Bureau for Industrial Legislation. 

 XI. COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM By C. DELISLE BURNS. 

 XII. THE POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE By J. A. HOBSON. 

XIII. RELIGION AS A UNIFYING INFLUENCE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION By H. G. WOOD, late Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. 

 XIV. THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY By F. S. MARVIN. 

ANALYSIS

CHAPTER I. THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

The appeal to history. Previous great schisms in Europe which have beensurmounted give hope for the present. The Reformation. The NapoleonicWars. 

The two points of view, (1) Man's nature itself tending to unity throughconflict. (2) The stages in the process developed in history. 

In pre-history conflict and diversity are predominant, though thenecessities of life prescribe certain uniformities. Consolidation comesin favoured physical conditions, especially great river-basins like theNile and the Euphrates. 

The possibility of a world-unity first consciously envisaged in theGreco-Roman world. Greece gives unity in thought, Rome in practice. Order with a solid intellectual foundation established with the RomanEmpire. In the mediaeval world a unity mainly spiritual is reached inthe same framework. The position of Germany in this development. Thebreak-up of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. The enlargement of theknown world and the growth of wealth and knowledge. This crisis stillcontinues and has been recently accentuated by the birth-throes ofnationalities. The supreme problem for international unity is now thereconciliation of national units with the interests of the whole. Underneath the superficial turmoil the great unifying forces of scienceand of common sentiments continue to grow and will ultimately prevail. 

CHAPTER II. UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

Retrospect of the search for unity in man's affairs, in its politicaland scientific bearings. 

The Unity of Man as an Animal Species. Ancient beliefs, doubts suggestedby the practice of slavery, their solution, and the modern conception ofa 'Human Family'. 

The unity of man as a rational animal struggling against nature forsubsistence. Archaeological evidence as to the reasonableness ofprimitive culture on its material side; doubts raised by man'sirrational 'barbarities' on the social plane. Lévy Bruhl's hypothesis ofa 'savage logic' and the Greek analysis of wrongdoing as rooted inignorance. 

Man's struggle with Nature in the N. W. Quadrant of the Old World. Unityhere not to be found in the Food Quest. Prehistoric Europe shows varietyof regimens, hoe-agriculture, pastoral nomadism. The wheel and theplough and the composite bread and cheese culture. 

Race, Language, and Culture as Factors of Unity. The spread of theEuropean Bread Culture is earlier than that of Indo-European Speech andprobably than that of the 'Alpine' type of man. Race in Europe has lednot to unity but to discord, and linguistic affinity does not ensuremutual intelligibility. 

CHAPTER III. THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

Contemporary history is the only genuine and important history, thepresent is the only object of historical knowledge; what the present isand how, properly conceived, it gives history its unity and justifiesthe study of what is past (ancient history); all history is _our_history, and otherwise without meaning or value to us. The history ofclassical antiquity is the history of the youth of the modern world, ofthe formation of the now latent but still potent hopes, fears, designsand thoughts which constitute the substratum of the European mind; howthis still unites a divided Europe and affords a ground of hope for arestored and deepened union. Our debt to the Greeks: (_a_) the verynotion of civilization, (_b_) the idea of its realization throughknowledge, (_c_) the ideal of freedom as the inner spirit of truecivilization. How the Greeks failed to work all this out in both theoryand practice, and how nevertheless they taught their lesson to theworld; the services of Greece to the world in the creation of Art, theSciences, and Philosophy; the Greek ideal of a life beyond 'civilized'life, but rendered possible by it, and thus giving to civilized life anew and higher value; defects and merits of this ideal. 

The Romans are inheritors of all this; how, while making it moreprosaic, they rendered it more practical and more effectually realizedit. All this most visible in the Imperial period. The Roman ideal:(_a_) world-wide peace, (_b_) secured and maintained by a centralizedsystem of laws issuing from and enforced by a single power. Influence ofthis ideal on later and modern thought and practice. Causes of itsdecline and fall: (_a_) ignorance of the economic substructure ofcivilized life, (_b_) neglect of opportunities to extend and defend it, (_c_) the rise of the idea of nationality. The Revolution as the lastgreat attempt to reinstate the full Roman ideal in its outworn form. 

Lessons still to be learned by us from the study of both the success andthe failure of Greco-Roman civilization; how the consideration of thesemay at once sober our expectations and inspire us with hope in thepresent. The forces which created it still maintain it and show no signsof exhaustion. But that they may continue in effect we must study theseforces and learn the lessons the ancient experience of their workingconveys, exerting ourselves first to understand Greco-Roman thought andpractice and then to better their instruction. 

CHAPTER IV. THE MIDDLE AGES

I. The mediaeval world. Geographical extent. Economic structure: itsfeatures of uniformity and isolation: the effect of the rise of anational economy on mediaeval society. Linguistic basis. Mediaevalscheme that of a general European system of estates rather than of abalance of powers. 

II. The unity of mediaeval civilization in its great period (1050-1300)ecclesiastical. The attempt of the Church to achieve a general synthesisof human life by the application of Christian principle. (1) The controlof war and peace and the feudal world: the Truce of God and theCrusades: the papacy as an international authority: the mediaevalconception of war. (2) The control of trade and commerce and theeconomic world: just wages and prices: the mediaeval town. (3) Thecontrol of learning and education and the world of thought:reconciliation of Greek science and the Christian faith: allegoricalinterpretation of the world and its effects on natural science. 

III. The mediaeval theory of society. The organic conception of society:mediaeval thought _naturaliter Platonica_. The one society of mankind. Hence (1) little conception of the State or sovereignty or State law;but the universal society has nevertheless to be reconciled in some waywith the existence of different kingdoms. Hence, again, (2) nodistinction of Church and State as two separate societies: these aretwo separate authorities, _regnum_ and _sacerdotium_, but they governthe same society. The one society of mankind an ecclesiastical schemeuniting a great variety of personal groupings. 

IV. The influence of law on the development of the kingdom into thestate--a process begun early in England and France, but only generallyachieved about 1500. The new conditions--geographical, economic, linguistic--which prepare the way for the new world of the sixteenthcentury. The gulf between that world and the old mediaeval world. Thehope of unity to-day. 

CHAPTER V. UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

The Problem in the Ancient World. Law universal and supreme over mankind(Sophocles, Antigone). Law arbitrary and varying from place to place(Herodotus). Nature and convention. The 'rightlessness' of the strangerin antiquity. The law was a 'law of citizens'. Admission of theforeigner to legal protection. Rome develops a law of the men of allnations (_ius gentium_), which reacts upon the law of citizens (_iuscivile_), and ultimately coalesces with it. The law of nature. 

The break-up of the Ancient World; the Middle Ages. The invaders bringtheir own law with them. In the kingdoms which they founded each man hadhis 'personal law'. Local Law. Feudal Law. The beginnings of NationalLaw: England, France, Germany. Roman Law in the Middle Ages. The CanonLaw. 

The Modern World. The reception of Roman Law. State Sovereignty. TheModern Codes. Unity and diversity of law within the political unit. Theworld divided into territories of the English Common Law and lands whereRoman Law conceptions prevail. Forces making for unity: the notion of a'law of nature'; the pursuit of common ends. International law, privateand public. 

CHAPTER VI. THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

The question of the place of nationality in art and literature. It haslittle or no place in the Middle Ages. The mediaeval epic; itscharacter. The mediaeval romance. Modern European art and literaturetranscends national conditions. The characteristics of the new Europeanliterature of the fourteenth century: Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer. Thedrama of England and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Painting and sculpture from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. The classical mind, and the principle of good taste and common sense. The realism of Defoe and Hogarth, and the Spanish Picaresque novel. Sentimentalism in the eighteenth century. The poetry and painting ofnature. The great revolution and the romantic movement. Great literatureand art are not national but human. 

CHAPTER VII. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Western civilization possesses a certain unity (1) in the sense of unityof character, (2) in the fact that it has a common origin, ultimately inthe Greco-Roman civilization but more immediately in mediaevalChristendom, and (3) in the sense that its parts have maintained aconstant intercommunication of ideas. (4) The different qualities ofGerman, French, and English thinkers have in large measure complementedone another, (5) and the history of science and of speculativephilosophy is largely a history of the interaction of distinct nationalschools. (6) The same thing is true of political thought. (7) Thus theworld of thought forms a commonwealth which is superior to all nationaldifferences and, in spite of the war, remains a foundation of a verygenuine unity. 

CHAPTER VIII. UNITY IN EDUCATION

Distinction between Unity and Uniformity. Historical Unity; the originof the School and the University. Both instruments of the mediaevalChurch for maintaining a common system throughout Western Christendom. Importance of Latin as the universal language of education. Suppressionof the vernacular and of national movements. The Reformation; a commonEuropean movement. Erasmus. The new teaching based on classicalliterature. Tendency to disunion; the influence of the Reformation andthe national Churches. Growth of national literature. Politicalinfluences, the French Revolution, and the National State. The essentialUnity still preserved, not merely in the study of the natural sciences, but in the historical unity given by Christianity and the spirit ofGreece. 

CHAPTER IX. COMMERCE AND FINANCE

Commerce and finance practical expressions of the instinct ofself-preservation which is common not only to all men, but to all livingcreatures. Early appearance of trading habit in boys. Early examples oftrade. Abraham's purchase of a burying-ground from Ephron the Hittite. Solomon's trade with Hiram of Tyre. Herodotus, the first historian, opens his history with an allusion to trade. Trade is based onspecialization, and is at once a cause of unity and of disunion. Itsextension from individuals to communities. Foreign trade stimulated byvariations of value in different communities. Specialization increasesefficiency, but makes the worker a machine, and a speculator on thechance that others will want what he makes. International trade alsopromotes both unity and friction. On the whole, commerce a greatpromoter of unity. Likewise finance, or money-dealing. Its origin anddevelopment. London's catholic taste in foreign securities: sometimesprefers them to the home-made article. Effect of foreign investment onhome production and consumption. Foreign finance and productivespecialization. 

CHAPTER X. INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION

Interdependence true of countries as of classes. A fact brought home tous by the European War. Importance of international action in relationto the raising of social and industrial standards. This truth perceivedby Robert Owen a century ago. Work of Owen and his successors in thedirection of an international minimum of labour conditions. Action ofthe Swiss Federal Council. The German Emperor calls the first Conferenceon workmen's protection 1890. Formal failure and substantial achievementof this Conference. Founding of International Association for LabourLegislation and International Labour Office. Constitution and work ofthese bodies. Biennial conferences of the association: subjects andmethods. International Conventions of 1906, their scope and value. Subsequent labours of the Association. Its present position and futurehopes. 

CHAPTER XI. COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM

Ideals arise from perceived social evils. They have caused in recentyears (_a_) Common action by European Governments and (_b_) action byseparate Governments influenced by foreign experience. There has alsobeen a growth of sentiment, not yet embodied in law or institutions, with regard to (i) the position of women and children, (ii) socialcaste, and (iii) the increase of common action for reform by civilizedstates. 

CHAPTER XII. THE POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE

The nineteenth century has made three great contributions towards thepossibility of International Government, the political realization ofnationality, the growth in substance and method of international law, and the progress of federalism. In other fields outside politics, especially in commerce and finance, a network of internationalco-operation has grown up. Closer political union is needed for threepurposes: first, the consolidation, extension, and improved sanctions ofexisting international law; secondly, the settlement of differencesbetween nations; thirdly, positive co-operation for the common good. This progress involves some further diminution of 'sovereignty' and'independence'. But these concepts have no absolute validity. In theHague Conventions and other intergovernmental instruments the rudimentsof international government already exist. In order to establisheffective security for peace, what is needed is a general treatyproviding that all disputes be submitted to arbitration or conciliation, with such guarantees for acceptance of the award as will establishconfidence. The test of confidence is the voluntary reduction ofarmaments. Internationalists differ as to the nature and rigour of thesanctions. Some rely entirely on a 'moratorium' and the pressure ofpublic opinion: others would compel the submission of all issues, butnot the acceptance of awards: others, again, would apply force, diplomatic, economic, or military, to both processes. 

Internationalism, to be effective, would require a machinery for dealingwith new issues before they ripened into disputes. How far will thestate of mind following this war assist this progress ofinternationalism? Is a spiritual conversion, corresponding to theprocess of biological mutatism, possible or probable?

CHAPTER XIII. RELIGION

The history of Europe suggests that, though the Church exerted aconsiderable influence on the growth of a common type of civilization inthe West, in modern times religion has proved a divisive rather than aunifying factor. During the last generation or two, however, there hasbeen a decline of the dogmatic and sectarian tempers. This change islargely due to the growth of the scientific spirit, and, as in otherrealms of inquiry so in the study of religion, internationalco-operation has steadily developed. Both literary criticism andpsychological analysis have contributed to the widening of sympathy. Thebetter understanding of certain elements in the Christian ideal and theChristian hope must also be taken into consideration as a factor makingfor a new catholicism which finds expression in movements like the AdultSchool Movement and the Student Christian Movement, and in theever-growing demand for closer co-operation in missionary work. 

Beyond this, partly through the comparative study of religions, we areconscious that religious thought in the West possesses some commoncharacteristics, notably, faith in the solidarity of mankind and in thereality of progress. Of themselves, these two convictions do notconstitute any very close bond of union, and both beliefs need to bedefined and enforced by the sense of sin and the consciousness of Godwhich the West has learned from Jesus. 

CHAPTER XIV. THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY

The need of a basis of right sentiments even greater than that ofimproved political machinery to secure international union. We muststart from patriotism and enlighten and enlarge it. Of the three Westernnations which lead in the arts and sciences, France and England throughthe war become closely allied in defence of a policy of the union offree and pacific people throughout the world. The position of Italy, Russia, and the United States. The increase of arbitral methods and theformation of leagues of peace or even of a world-state are matterscalling for earnest thought; but the spread of the notion of humanity, the co-operation of all mankind in a common work is more fundamental andmay be begun by any one at home. This idea, starting with the Stoics, isfully developed with the advent of modern science. It shows itself inmany forms and the spread of exact science is its most powerful aid. This is entirely independent of nationality and will be increasinglyconcerned with the alleviation of human suffering and the improvement oflife. 

The final test of a high international aim is the joint effort of thestronger peoples to protect and assist the weaker and less advanced. Thecase of Africa and the Brussels Conference of 1889. Analogy with thetreatment of the young at home. 

I

THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

In face of the greatest tragedy in history, it is to history that wemake appeal. What does it teach us to expect as the issue of theconflict? How far and in what form may we anticipate that the unity ofmankind, centring as it must round Europe, will emerge from the trial?

Only two occasions occur to the mind on which, since the break up of theRoman Empire, a schism so serious as the present has threatened theunity of the Western world. The first was the Reformation and the warwhich it entailed down to the Peace of Westphalia. The second was thestruggle against Napoleon, terminated a hundred years ago. The latterwas in many respects a closer parallel. It was a struggle of theindependent nations of Europe against the overweening ambition andaggression of one Power. It united them in an alliance which achievedits purpose and survived the successful issue of the war for some years. Some such course, with a comity of nations far wider and more enduringthan the Holy Alliance as its sequel, we hope and predict for thepresent war. 

The struggle at the Reformation was less like the present, either in itscauses or its course, but it has some features which make it a usefulpoint for a survey of the permanent unifying elements which hold andwill hold the West together in spite of occasional cataclysms and theclash of rival interests and passion. A man like Erasmus, tremblingbefore the catastrophe, willing to make immense sacrifices to avoid anopen breach, uncertain of any final readjustment which might restore theharmony of the world, was not unlike some among us who hoped againsthope that the enemy might be appeased, who thought that almost any peacewas better than any war, who still fear that the breach in unity isvital or irreparable for generations. 

And the issue three hundred years ago may also inspire us with acautious optimism, a strong though not unmeasured trust. The right causetriumphed, fully in the end. Freedom was secured, both for churches andfor individuals, throughout the world. The evil features in the papalsystem, against which the attack was really levelled, quietly butcompletely disappeared, and the institution survived, itself reformed. Before a hundred years were out the world had moved on to the conquestof new vantage points and the establishment of a wider unity on a firmerbase. 

Both previous occasions are therefore full of hope. The European systemis, as we shall see throughout these essays, the necessary nucleus ofany civilized order embracing the whole world; and the great convulsionswhich have hitherto continued to occur in it from time to time aremoments of especial value for the study of the conditions under which itexists. They are the pathological experiences which reveal the strengthand the weaknesses of the normal functions. We strive and hope for amore lasting state of general health, and do not despair of the patienteven in this grave attack. He has survived even more serious illness. For though the present war is the most gigantic that the world has everseen, its very greatness is the result of some of those moderndevelopments--scientific skill, improved communications, nationalcohesion--on which ultimately the better organization of the wholecommonwealth of nations will be built. _Passi graviora_; we haveweathered the storms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whenthe old Roman order and its sequel in the Catholic Church were at theirweakest and the recuperative power of science and social reform andnationalism had hardly begun its work. We shall not fail with ourgreater forces of the present to regain and create a Europe freer, stronger, and more united than that which now seems to be shaken to thedepths. 

The process of gaining a greater unity among the leading nations of theworld, like all the aspects of human evolution, must be regarded fromtwo points of view, distinct in theory, inextricable in life. What doesthe nature of man itself demand? How has this nature expressed itself, and been affected in history by the external conditions, the geography, climate, conflict and commingling of races, which the theatre of itsappearance has imposed?

Looked at in itself, so far as we can isolate it from its surroundings, man's nature is distinguished from that of lower animals by twofeatures, both of them essentially social and tending to unity. He ismore deeply and permanently attached to members of his own species, byaffection, sympathy, veneration, tradition, than any other creature. Andhe is a reasoning being, reason itself requiring the contact andagreement of various minds. The incomparably greater force which he hasacquired in the world, over all other species and over nature itself, isdue to the working of these two factors. At starting he was physicallyless strong than many other creatures, and if he fought with others ofhis own kind, other animal species did the same. He was ahead of them byhis reason, and reason acted, and must act, through the concert ofthinking beings. This concert is not merely, or even mainly, anattachment among those living at the same time to co-operate for somecommon end; it is with man a conscious sequence of one generation onanother. Sometimes the movement of adaptation is slower, sometimesquicker, but in every case the living are carrying on the work of thedead, and their co-operation in time as well as space is due to theworking of the same qualities of attachment and reason, the socialfactors, by which at any moment a community of men is bound together. 

Still looking at the matter _a priori_, it is clear that the vastcommunity of mankind, though it has come more closely in contact inrecent years over all the planet, yet acts, and must act, habitually andmomentarily, through many smaller aggregates. Of these the leading typesare the family and the country or nation. The former is not directlyrelevant to our inquiry, the latter plays a leading part in it. Theformer is less dependent on external conditions of land-formation andthe like, and is in consequence more universal, more purely human. Thelatter has been shaped by geographical conditions, by racial qualities, by the apparent accidents of history. Its relation to the larger unitsof human society raises the most difficult, fundamental and unavoidablequestions. To curb aggressive nationalism is the root-problem of thepresent war. To reconcile permanently nationalism with humanity would beto establish the everlasting peace. 

Western society, indeed the whole community of mankind, is built up ofthese smaller units, the family and the nation, with their variousintermediate groupings, but the historical process has by no meansconformed at all exactly to this logical order. Society has not beenmade in orderly fashion by forming families and then combining familiesto make hundreds, and hundreds to make counties, and counties nations, and so on to the whole. A German god might have done this, but the wayof nature and history was less perfect. The minor forms of humanassociation have been taking shape, being altered and on the wholeimproved, throughout the process. At one point, of high importance forour argument, a larger form of association was achieved before thenecessary constituent elements were articulated. This was theGreco-Roman world encircling the Mediterranean and completed in theRoman Empire of the second century A. D. It was the nucleus from whichthe Western world of modern civilization has been developed; yet it wasthere, settled in its main outlines, before the national units which itrequired for internal harmony and cohesion had taken any definite shape. It is to the difficulties of their growth and mutual adjustment that weowe most of the conflicts of modern history. 

We shall in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage ofpre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with superhuman insightand prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilizationwould pursue. All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, aculture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by asimilarity which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widelysevered by distance and climatic conditions. The raw material of thehuman product in science, art, and invention was alike in texturealthough often exuberant in detail and imagination. But it had not yetthe unity of an organic whole, knit by a common purpose and conscious ofitself. 

To gain the cohesion of large numbers of men by whom wealth could becreated and sufficient leisure and independence secured for anintellectual life, not dictated by the necessities of existence, aspecial concurrence of favourable physical conditions was required. Therich and secluded river-basins of many parts of the world provided this, and in consequence we find similar large communities arising at the endof the Stone Age in such places as China, Peru, Mexico, and above all inMesopotamia and Egypt. The last named derived their special importancefor the sequel from their proximity to the Mediterranean, which was toact as the great meeting-place and training-school for adventurousspirits and inquiring minds. From the busy intercourse of theseland-locked waters arose the civilization called Minoan, or Aegean, centring in Crete, itself to be surpassed by the trading activity of thePhoenicians and the art and science of the Greeks. 

It is with the advent of the Greek that the seal is placed upon theclaim of the Mediterranean to be the birthplace of the highest type ofhuman civilization, the centre from which a unity of the spirit was tospread, until, by material force as well as by the conquering mind, theEuropean or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race. The supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions, as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the city-state. Forour present purpose the first and the last are the most important andthe first the most important of all. 

The city-state was important as the first example of a free, self-governing community in which the individual realized his powers byliving--and dying--with and for his fellows. This new type of humancommunity was of the highest moment in the sequel. In many points it wasa model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movementof the Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers, especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest and some ofthe deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. Butit never acquired the permanence of the political units needed to buildup the European Commonwealth. For this nations were required, and theGreeks were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked thesize, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on which amodern nation rests. 

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above allin their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental andlasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind. When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legalgenius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established, which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth andconflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greekunification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted acorresponding work of organization in the human world which lay nearestto him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts wereof priceless value and continuing effect, but both were, from theconditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant butprecocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first onthe material accumulated by generations of Chaldean and Egyptianpriests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexactobservations of geometry and astronomy the elements of unity indiversity which constitute science. Inquiring for causes, comparing andcorrecting individual facts, he arrived at the first equations inmathematics, the first laws of nature. His work in this sphere and inthat of medicine went on continuously until after the Roman occupationof the Mediterranean world was complete. It died out gradually in thetheological atmosphere of Alexandria, and on the purely human side endedin Stoicism with an amalgam of universal philosophy and Roman law. TheStoic Empire of the second century A. D. Was the high-water mark of thejoint efforts of Greeks and Romans to attain unity and humanism inthought and practice. Its brilliance while it lasted the nobility ofits leading men, the persistence of the main lines of its structure, arethe measure of our debt to the builders of the Greco-Roman world. 

The Roman contribution to the result which in the end so perfectlycombined both movements was, in its origin and nature, singularly unlikethe Greek. The Roman did not analyse his conceptions. He accepted whatcame to him, either from his ancestors or from other peoples, withoutscrutiny, except so far as to see that new matter could be worked intoold forms without a dislocation in practice. He was the pragmatist, theGreek the idealist. This instinct of adaptation and sequence made theRoman the pioneer in law as the Greek was the pioneer in science. Itrendered possible the holding together in one political system of themultifarious territories and peoples from the Tigris to the Solway Firthfor long enough to enable the greater part of that area to bepermanently civilized on Roman lines. But, like the artist's sketch ofhis picture, the whole was outlined before the parts were worked out intheir final form; and the sketch itself was seriously imperfect in morethan one point. The set-back which Augustus received on the eastern sideof the Rhine was never made good, and the Germanic tribes thereforeremained un-Romanized until the Church in the seventh and eighthcenturies resumed the work on other lines. This defeat of Varus and thelegend of Hermann became to the German a symbol of national greatness ina sense which none of the other national conflicts with Rome everassumed. To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude andpleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman occupation. To usthe Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regretthat we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taughtus. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer theEmpire which had founded the unity of Europe. It was a German Empire, and though the ancient world fired his imagination, he always saw itthrough German eyes. 

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited theframework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral andcivilized life which Rome had initiated. 

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Romanmissionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than theRoman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest. Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all thePope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants. Themoral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing tosides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, wasnowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thuslifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, butpolitically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and militarynation of the West. 

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievementof the Middle Ages. Rome had given the framework of a great system, andinto this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks, Huns, Moors, Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks whenthey swept down to the Aegean. They came as migrant hordes, and in thearea civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down asnations, mingling with the earlier population and divided up by thegeographical configurations of the Continent. Among them France andEngland had the advantage. They gained their unity as nations earlierthan any other countries of the West--England in a form which has lastedsubstantially unaltered for six hundred years. Spain, which had beentorn asunder by the Moors, was not consolidated fully till the end ofthe fifteenth century, in time to send the last of the crusaders underColumbus in quest of fresh worlds to conquer across the Atlantic. ButItaly and Germany--and especially the latter--remained disintegrateduntil our own time. Both gained their union about the same time, fiftyyears ago, but by different methods and in a different spirit. Italy, naturally a compact geographical unit, was welded by a democraticenthusiasm, of which Cavour and Mazzini were the soul and Garibaldi theright arm. Germany, vast in power and numbers, lay strongly entrenchedin the central area of the Continent, but failed to kindle into nationallife at the same democratic moment. She was fashioned into politicalexistence by a Thor's hammer, which, as it rose and fell, dealtshattering blows on friends as well as foes, in Austria as well asFrance, on Danes and Poles, on Liberals and Socialists, on little kingsand great ecclesiastics. And now this Frankenstein creation among statesoffers the most serious problem in adjusting national claims withEuropean unity. We have to check and to assimilate--if the world is tolive as one--the one Power which has hitherto developed mostpersistently and successfully its own resources, but least insubordination to the interests of the whole. 

There are those who would regard all national barriers and organizationas somewhat of an obstruction, who would prefer a simpleinternationalism to the world as we know it, with its pent-up passionsand attachments, its constant liability to explosion, its slow progressby tortuous channels towards the larger view and the surer hold. Manyreformers, from Plato downwards, have taken up a similar attitude inregard to the smaller institution, the family, which is often found tobe an obstruction in the way of short cuts to social utopias at home. Kant's ideal of a cosmopolitan constitution as the goal of all humaneffort rather leans to this side of the balance. But a due balance mustbe kept and the full value both of family and nation maintained againsttheories or tendencies which would roll us all out into cosmopolitanitems. A glance at other elements which go to make up the unity ofEuropean society will tend to correct the perspective. 

The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. Itlasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity whichsupervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and enduredfor a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching andpervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in fullforce over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legalstructure has to be sought for in formal institutions which haveabsorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actualfabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of cognate andderivative institutions which have served the cause of unity in themoral and intellectual sphere. We shall speak later of the more perfectand lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages andthe Renascence tended to the same end, using a material in philosophyand theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of knowledgeand the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing amore complete community of scholars than has perhaps been ever witnessedin Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine loveof truth, or even of honest disputation, was independent of differencesof race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from Oxford toParis, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sitat the feet of some world-famous teacher. 

And the wandering scholar was by no means the only social link. Many ofthe trade-routes surprise us by the length and adventurousness of theircourse. Amber from the Baltic found its way to the south of Italy andSpain, while small boats from Ireland were brought into the mouths ofthe Loire and the Garonne when the coasts of the Channel were impassablethrough barbarians from the North. 

Mediaeval Europe was, in fact, much more of a unity than the moderntraveller would expect, and this was mainly due to the influence of theChurch. The spiritual unity went deep on one side of man's nature, andwhen a man like Erasmus surveyed the prospect at the beginning of thesixteenth century we can well understand his horror, and his determinedabstention from any step which would precipitate the break-up of the oneorganized body which represents the old united culture of Christendomand might check the new forces which were threatening selfishness anddisorder in ever-widening circles on the globe. For it must be notedthat new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the unityof the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers wereextending, East and West, the sphere in which the European was to imposehis influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenthcentury thus becomes one, perhaps the most critical, of all theturning-points in the history of the West. Danger was mixed with hope, disorder with new knowledge and fresh power, and the crisis has not yetbeen surmounted. But we have gained by now some insight into the natureof the new forces and see that they should, and one day will, work morefully in the direction of unity in the civilized world, of healthyindependence in the parts and a growing harmony in the whole. Little ofthis could have been seen by the observer at the outbreak of theReformation. 

Nationalism, democracy, colonial expansion, religious change, thegrowth of knowledge and its application to industry and social reform, these are the salient features which distinguish our modern from themediaeval world, and we have to consider how far they make for the unityof mankind. 

The sixteenth century saw both the strengthening of national governmentsand the beginning of European colonization. England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, all settled down under a central government strongerand more independent than they had previously enjoyed, and pegged outestates for themselves beyond the seas. In each case wars have beenentailed in the process, and, as we know, the backwardness of Germany atthis period has been visited upon the rest of Europe tenfold in recenttimes. National expansion thus appears to be an eminent provocation ofinternational strife. It is with no intention either of ignoring factsor minimizing dangers that one turns here to the other side of theaccount. Where was the spark actually fired which led to the presentconflagration? In that part of Europe where the national units wereleast stable and developed, where the conditions of government andsocial order are most remote from our own. Who can doubt that if in theBalkans the Turks had been able to establish even the sort of governmentwe maintain in India, or if, still better, the Balkan States, apart fromthe Turks, had gained their own independence in a federation like theSwiss, the aggression of the Central Powers would have been checked? Thecompact, well-established national unit is not in itself a danger, butthere is a danger in weak, oppressed, or disjointed nationalities, whohave not found safety and offer a bait to their expansive neighbours. 

Thus strong and independent nations, as Kant postulates in his_Perpetual Peace_, are guarantees of peace, stones in the Temple ofHumanity. Another consideration not generally recognized, strengthensthis conclusion. In recent years all leading and progressive nationshave been devoting their first thought to social reform. This has beenconspicuously the case with ourselves, with the French, with the UnitedStates, with the smaller, more advanced countries in Europe. Germany, too, though her first energies have been given to organizing war, hashad in this matter two distinct souls. Her social democrats and part ofher governing class have been consistent and successful in working forthe amelioration of the condition of the people, and have oftenanticipated other nations in her process. It is self-evident, first, that a strong national government is needed to carry out wide socialreform, second, that in proportion as governments devote themselveswhole-heartedly to this, their energies are less likely to be devoted tomolesting their neighbours. Germany, unfortunately for herself and theworld, had no government which could speak for the whole people and beresponsible to it. A truly national government in Germany, or anywhereelse, would not have willed this war. 

The colonial expansion which was connected with the outburst of nationalsentiment in the sixteenth century, and has led to frequent conflictsbetween European nations ever since, also appears in a different lightif we study it in view of facts not dreamt of in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries. The Americas, which appeared to the earlynavigators as rich estates to be cultivated for the benefit ofproprietors at home, have developed into powerful and independentcountries, eminently pacific (except for internal brawls), lookingforward to producing new types of life and government, hoping perhaps tohold the balance in a long-drawn contest of the Old World Powers. Thecircle, therefore, of the Mediterranean world which was enlarged by thediscoveries of the sixteenth century, finds its completion to-day innew states across the Atlantic, which are on the whole enormouslypreponderant on the side of peace, and wish to hold their own in Westerncivilization by force of wealth and industry, and not by arms. To us, too, it is clear, and will be one day to the Germanic Powers, that theBritish Empire, the largest political aggregate on the globe, isessentially a league of free peoples, under no compulsion from thecentre, but responsive to attack upon their power or liberty by anythird party, strong from their general contentment with the conditionsand institutions of their life, and not through any systematicregulations imposed from above. Even India and other protected statesand dominions, though not yet self-governing, are moving steadily in thedirection of responsibility and of willing association with the BritishEmpire or Commonwealth as a whole. 

Such is the much vaster community of nations which has succeeded to theWestern Europe of the sixteenth century; and no mention has been made ofthe place of Russia or the countries still further east. The picturedoes not suggest a welter of conflicting passions and ambitionthroughout the world. On the whole a mass of men and women labouringwith fair contentment at their daily task, not concerned that theirstate or nation should extend its boundaries, least of all that itshould provoke attack; little conscious of the historic debt of nationsto one another, but wishing well to others except when they cross thepath of a personal desire; gaining rapidly more sense of actualcommunity among living men, but hardly realizing yet how man's power hasbeen built up in the past and how infinitely it might be advanced andthe world improved by harmony and steadily directed efforts in thefuture. That the sense of brotherhood has gained ground in the world, especially since the middle of the eighteenth century, is certain. Voices of protest reach us even from Germany through the storm ofhatred. But the vague sympathy, the desire for peace and shrinking fromthe horrors of war need to be enlightened, to have a reasoned basis inthe belief that all nations, and especially those of the vanguard, arepartners in a common work and essential one to another, above all, perhaps, to have institutions which tend to co-operation and make asudden and disastrous breach as difficult as possible. Many of theseinstruments of peace were being forged when the war broke out. Many ofthe most profound ties between nations are not understood or are kept inthe background by nationalist teachers or a nationalist press. 

Of all the modern steps towards international unity, the mostindisputable, the most firmly based and furthest-reaching, is science, and the various applications of science, both in promoting intercoursebetween different parts of the world and in alleviating suffering andstrengthening and illuminating human life. The more prominence, therefore, that we can secure for the growth of science in the teachingof history, the larger place humanity, or the united mind of mankind, will take in the moving picture which every one of us has, more or lessfull and distinct, of the progress of the world. For some hundreds ofyears, culminating in the three or four centuries A. D. , the dominantfeature in the picture was of a triumphant city-state, Rome, graduallysubduing and embracing the world. Then for some thousand years thepicture was of a religious organization leading the civilized world, andnationalities were only emerging as somewhat dim and ill-definedfigures. Then, with the rupture in the Church and the upspringing ofother religious bodies and forms of thought, national figures becomepredominant in the scene, and attract nearly all the attention, which isgiven, except by a few curious persons, to the study of history. Nationalism, once in defect in Western Europe, has been for some timein excess. The remedy is not directly to attack it, except in the casein which it gave us no choice, but to supply the limiting andcontrolling ideas. Of all these, science fits the case most exactly, because, as science, it can know no distinction between French orGerman, English or Russian. There is no French physics or Germanchemistry, and if we are told that the Prussians have their own theoryof anthropology, based on the predominance of a particular type of skullwhich other anthropologists dispute, we are quite sure that in that casescience has not yet said her last word. 

We put physical science first because it contains the largest number ofcertain and accepted laws. The further we get from mathematicalexactness the more liable we are to differences of opinion, which may, as in the case of anthropology, cluster round some question of nationalpique. But it would be easy to trace through all the sciences, and intophilosophy and religion, a growing unity of method and result beforewhich national differences often resolve themselves into a difference ofstyle. The style is the nation's, but the truth is mankind's. 

We could not, indeed, be sure that if every one in Western Europe were atrained scientist, wars would cease from the earth: certain professorshave taught us too well for that. But in so far as men come to recognizethat the great body of organized knowledge is a common possession, dueto the united efforts of different nations, and that it can only beincreased by joint action and may be increased to such a point that thewhole of life is a happier and nobler thing, so far they will be averseto war. And in its various applications, to increasing production andquickening communication, to lengthening life and healing sickness, toprotecting workers and cheapening food, men see the natural fruits of anactivity whose basis is common thought and its ultimate purpose thecommon good. 

It has been said with truth that it is easier to trace the growth ofscience as a joint product of co-operating minds, than to find a growthof common sentiments among the men and the nations who have created it. True among individuals, it must be at least as true among groups andnations. We may work successfully with some one at a problem or learnfrom a teacher or a companion when we dislike him personally and do notseek his society apart from the needs of our common work. It has oftenhappened, and will happen again in private and public. But thoughparticular antipathies may increase, the tendency to dislike others is adiminishing quality among civilized men. In the long run common senseand necessity will prevail. We are born to live a while before we die;and we must live on the same planet, sometimes next door to those whohave sworn a never-dying hate. 

II

UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES[1]

The new perspective, with all its shift of values, which is forced on usby the war, touches the past no less than the present and the future. However objectively we try to present to ourselves the data of history, we cannot emancipate ourselves from the need to present them from apoint of view which must in the last resort be our own. We may bringourselves by training and criticism nearer to the centre of things, moreintimate with essential factors and remote from the trivial periphery;but it is a matter of degree, and historical study an affair after allof mental triangulation. Like a surveyor in the field, we are safest inour determination of any third position if we have already knowledge oftwo, and of how the third looks from both of them. And even if we wereindeed at the centre of things, I suppose we might take our round ofangles quite uselessly, unless we had also some divine gift of judgingdistances. 

So the historian accepts his limitations as the rules of the game, and sets out to see unity askance. It is his rare chance, if eventsshift _him_, and set him gazing at a world in which, as now, halfhis own career is inside the picture; not perhaps very easy tofind in a moment--as one might fail to recognize oneself in agroup-photograph--but none the less there, and intelligible only inrelation to its actual surroundings. 

Looking back, indeed, over the course of anthropology and prehistoricarchaeology, much of which lies in the years since 1870, and nearly allof it since 1815, the first thing which strikes us now is the frequencyand delicacy of its response to contemporary thoughts and aspirations. Afew of the greatest men have recognized this at the time. I quote fromKarl Ernst von Baer, the founder of comparative embryology, and in greatmatters the master of men as different as Huxley, Spencer, and FrancisBalfour. He died in 1876, when political anthropology was still young;but in his great book on Man he 'appeals to the experience of allcountries and ages, that if a people has power, and attempts wrongdoingagainst another, it also does not omit to conceive the other as veryworthless and incompetent, and to repeat this conviction often andemphatically' (_Der Mensch_, ii. 235). It is easy for us to dot the _i_and cross the _t_ here; less easy perhaps to realize that what troubledvon Baer was the persistence of British and American ethnologists in thepolygenist heresy, which he traced (and rightly) to their reluctance totreat their 'black brother' as if he were their relative at all. Judgement in that ethnological controversy went by default, with thevictory of the North in the American Civil War; and in 1871 the lion laydown with the lamb, even in London; inveterate foes in the EthnologicalSociety and the Anthropological merging their fate in oneAnthropological Institute. In 1915 the reluctance of the 'tall fairpeople who come from the north'--I borrow a phrase from ProfessorRidgeway--to fraternize with mere brunettes, beyond Rhine and Danube, comes in its turn before the same tribunal as polygenism in 1862. 

Our subject, 'Unity in Prehistoric Times', embraces three main topics:(1) the unity of human effort and reason everywhere in Man's strugglewith Nature and with his Fellow-man; (2) the special conditions whichfavoured or hindered unity of prehistoric culture in what has beencalled elsewhere the 'north-west quadrant' of the Old-World land-masswest of Ararat and the Median hills and north of Sahara, the cradle andnursery of the modern 'western world'; and (3) the convergent lines ofadvancement within that region, which can be traced through thecenturies before Roman policy let Greek culture penetrate almost as deepinto peninsular Europe as Alexander's conquests had opened to it theinlands of the Near East. 

When we speak of unity in human affairs, and particularly just now, whenthe supreme unity seems to some to be nationalism, and to others thenegation, or rather the supersession of nationalism, we mean the rathercomplex outcome of several distinct things. This complexity wasconfessed, unwittingly perhaps, in the first humanist creed: 'I believein one Blood, one Speech, one Cult, one congruous Way of Living. '[2]Modern ethnology, indeed, tends to subsume cult under way-of-living, asa peculiarly delicate test of conformity--and to regard language, alongside of both cult and way-of-living, as another manifestation ofthe same human reason; distinguishing therefore two kinds of unity--onephysical or morphological, as of one animal species in an animalkingdom, the other cultural or psychological, as of the sole incarnateoccupant of a realm of mind; and classifying the 'Science of Man'accordingly. But, in essentials, that Athenian creed will serve: ourlatest ethnologists, and statesmen too, are faced with the same leagueof problems. 

THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS AN ANIMAL SPECIES

Whatever Greek statesmen thought about the gulf between Greek andPersian, or Greek and Barbarian generally, Greek ethnologists raised nofundamental barrier between the different sorts of Man. Good naturalistsas they were, and experienced breeders of farm-stock, they acceptedwhite, brown, and black men; and were prepared to accept any other breedthat Nearchus or Pytheas might confront them with, as members of onebrotherhood, just as they accepted white, brown, or black sheep, withhorns of Ammon or with none. Eratosthenes, most philosophical, andtherewith most _political_ of them all, was bred in Cyrene, where someGreeks seem to have been black; and he worked in Alexandria, where theUniversity was a human Zoo like that of London or Berlin. Their simplefarmer's theory of natural selection attributed 'scorched-faced'Aethiopians to sunburn, and other racial types to large factors ofregion and régime. The classical treatise is that of Hippocrates 'OnAir, Water, and Places'. [3]

In the modern world, too, no serious doubt was cast on the specificunity of mankind, handed down from antiquity, until Linnaeus and Buffonhad refined upon the biological notions of genus and species (for bothof which there is only one word in Greek), and had defined species bythe criterion of fertility. Now not only the great explorers, but everyship's captain, knew by this time that white men, at all events, wouldform fertile unions with all known kinds of humanity. But in theeighteenth century it became known also, and in the same empirical way, that the fertility of unions between white men and black was imperfect;and as this was the only human cross for which there was any largequantity of evidence, the impression grew that the zoological distancebetween these races was greater than had been supposed. On the otherhand, eighteenth-century formulators of the 'Rights of Man' challengedreconsideration of the current practice of negro slavery; and the upshotwas a controversy. Abolitionists contended that the 'black brother' wasindeed a blood brother, and entitled to the 'Rights of Man'; theiropponents replied that the negro, being (as they held) of anotherspecies, might justly be treated in all respects as one of white man'sdomestic animals, and be his property as well as his drudge. At the turnof the century, the adherence of Cuvier gave prestige to Polygenesis onits scientific side: and it took all the reasonableness of Prichard inthe next generation to turn the tide even in England. But the issue ofthe American Civil War, to which reference has already been made, coincided so closely in time with the work of Darwin and Lyell on thereal meaning of species and on the antiquity of man, that thecontroversy was closed without bitterness. The new phase of Polygenismwhich seems now to be opening, with successive discoveries of thequaternary stratification of races, and Keith's analysis of the familytree of the _Hominidae_, starts from wholly different data, unembarrassed by fears or hopes of a 'Neanderthal' origin for the Negro, or for any living or recent _Homo_. 

The 'human family' then seems re-established as something more than aplatform phrase; and separatists (who are always with us) have had tofall back upon another criterion of disunity. 

THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS A RATIONAL ANIMAL

Omitting language for a moment (which since first telling of the 'Towerof Babel' story has somewhat fallen from grace as a symptom of unityamong mankind), or rather, subsuming it as one of the most essentialexhibitions of rationality, and indeed its chief instrument, we come toMan's unity as a creature possessed of reason, and expressing thisreasoning habit in specific modes of living, under whatever externalsurroundings. These being almost infinitely various, it is not alwayseasy to compare examples of Man's reaction to them. For proof of theuniformity of human reasoning, indeed, we have to begin almost from ananimal plane. 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed andcooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?' And not onlyis men's hunger, and their sensitiveness to 'the same summer and winter'similar: their ways of satisfying hunger, their conduct of thefood-quest, their elementary organizations 'for the sake of maintaininglife', as Aristotle expressed it, exhibit one mental type throughout. Inthe domestication of nature's gifts it is the same: in the fashioning ofimplements and weapons, the improvisation of clothing and shelter, thealmost instinctive impulse to 'play with fire' which repels otheranimals. Style and finish may vary, and do vary widely from one provinceof culture to another; but in their last mechanical analysis, a spade isa spade all the world over, and a celt a celt. 

It was the service of the late General Pitt-Rivers in this country, andof Klemm more laboriously abroad, to establish this aspect of the'Evolution of Culture' beyond controversy: as it was the work of Boucherde Perthes, and of Sir John Evans and Sir John Lubbock to proceed in thereverse direction, from a criterion of utility to a hypothesis ofdesign, and the conclusion that certain stones, of reputedly prehumanantiquity, must be the work of human hands, geared to human brains likeours. Tylor's wider range of observation, conspicuously supplemented byother work of Lubbock, embraced all human activities in one formula ofcomparison, which is indeed as old as Thucydides. [4] We can infer, thatis, something about early stages of an advanced culture from thepresent-day practices of savagery. 

Yet, across this 'primitive culture', to use a phrase which has becomeclassical, so reasonable, and therewith so full of uniformities, in itsintimate interplay of hand and tongue with brain, patches of shadowfall; a chaos of such incredible absurdities and (in the widest sense)of 'barbarities', that the charitable hypothesis that here and there manhas lost his way and just _stopped thinking_ hardly seems adequate toaccount for things, and writers like Lévy-Bruhl are provoked to thepessimist guess that there can be a savage logic which is different fromours and yet is 'logical' in some coherent sense; which _stets verneint_the conclusions, and even the axioms, which are clear as day to us; andis a 'knowledge of evil' side by side with the knowledge of good. 

But examples of this 'primitive thought', when we come to analyse them, all seem to resolve themselves into one or other of the ordinary sortsof fallacy, as our own logic-books expound them. If the study of themproves anything at all, it is the familiar aphorism that, while there isonly one right way of doing and thinking, there are countless ways ofgoing wrong. Among the most reasonable people (at their highest) thatthe world has yet seen, there were some of the worst miscarriages ofreason and of morals; and throughout their great centuries there was noword either for the devil or for sin in their language. For the Greekall human wrongdoing came under the one simple category of [Greek:hamartia], 'making a mistake', or better 'making a miss'. It is theslang of target-practice, for the correlative [Greek: otochazein], usedof all happy guesses at truth, is likewise only the word for '_aiming_straight'. 

But why make mistakes? Why these failures of co-ordination betweendesign and execution, between nature's truth and man's theory andpractice? Why this declining from the best into sloppy or antiquatedwork, to name only two main sorts of technological fallacy? Again theanswer comes down, past Lucretius, from the Ionian physicist. It is onlyin superficial appearance that 'though reason is common to all, most menlive as if they had a way of thinking of their own', [5] Heraclitus'momentary despair anticipating Lévy-Bruhl almost verbally. Oncepenetrate, with Heraclitus himself, below the surface, and 'all men haveit in them to understand themselves and to think straight'. [6] It isfailure to think, not some distinct and illogical sort of thinking, thatis the cause of the trouble: the lapse of that 'organized common sense'which is the content of all 'science'. 

Such disorganization of common sense, 'idiotic' thinking, in theHeraclitan sense of an [Greek: idia phronêsis], can be as cumulative, fallacy on fallacy, and as elaborately wrong, as the fabric of knowledgeis cumulatively and elaborately right. 'Hath this man sinned, or hisparents, that he was born blind?' That is the tragedy of primitiveculture: for the brains are there and the eyes; only they have neverseen anything straight, because in the world they were bred up in therewas nothing left straight to be seen. 

Lucretius hit upon half the trouble when he referred the organizedabsurdities of his contemporaries to hereditary fear: which in the lastanalysis is a derangement of the higher activities extending toabdication. Its onset is an ataxy; and its culmination a paralysis. Inits mental aspect it is failure of the Will-to-know; acceptance of aninferiority to which ignorance consigns us. 

The other half of the trouble, less clearly diagnosed by Lucretius, butdetected, as we have seen, by Heraclitus, is hereditary pride, based onignorance no less than is Lucretian fear. It is the 'lie-in-the-soul', the conviction, assailed by Socrates and before his time as well asafter, that we know how things stand, when in fact we do not. Like fear, in its mental aspect, it is a failure of the Will-to-know; once again, an acceptance of the inferior status of the ignorant. 

Organized fears, then, lead to _tabu_, the systematic inhibition ofexperiment which might conflict with hypothesis; and organized pride, to_magic_, with its systematic disregard of the results of each experimentthat is made, when it does so conflict with hypothesis. And it is thesetwo superstructures of ignorance, inhibiting and insisting by turns, which add the glamour of irrationality to so much of the behaviour ofmankind, and disguise its native rationalism and its morality too. Besetby fear and pride, craftsman and cultivator and explorer and reformeralike are in the same predicament. 'I could do this or that and do itthus, but may I?' and if such opinion as counts says 'Thou shalt not', the fallacious substitution of 'shalt not' for 'mayst' cannot fail toendanger advancement. It may be over the chipping of a flint axe, or atrade-union rule about a high-speed lathe; but if the craftsman conformsto opinion as such, and not through positive concurrence of his ownjudgement with it, he has accepted the fallacious conclusion as his own, and lets his work fall to second-hand and to second-best. 

Wide uniformities of conduct and of material culture may thereforeresult from ignorance, no less than from knowledge, and unless we havevery full acquaintance with the region and external conditions, it isnot easy to decide whether any one of these uniformities is wiselyuniform or not. The record of the dealings of quite well-meaningconquerors with the institutions and arts of their subjects is full oftragedies of this kind. I call to mind an example in Paraguay, whereabstention from infanticide, after conversion to Christianity, nearlywrought the extinction of a native tribe, for the population at oncebegan to exceed the means of subsistence; and it was only when thecommittee in London was induced (just in time) to apply mission funds tothe purchase of seeds and implements of agriculture that the danger wasaverted. It is not my purpose here to commend infanticide; only toindicate that while man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot go onliving, even a good life, if he really falls short of bread. So withdevotion to an ideal unity of culture, we are to combine toleration ofwide diversity, seeing how diverse are the surroundings which make upthe Home of Man. Were Nature uniform, in a geographical sense, from poleto pole, civilization might be practically as well as ideally one, though it may fairly be doubted whether in such a world civilization, such as we know, would arise; but with the present distribution of landand water, temperature and rainfall, and the complex of plants andanimals which results from their interaction, unity among the phenomenaof culture ceases to be practicable, and it has become hard for some (aswe have seen) even to keep their faith in the unity of human reason. 

It was not, in fact, till a rather later stage in the growth of science, either in the old world, or in our own, that anyone troubled himselfabout the existence of such unity at all. That men of alien blood shouldbehave in alien and incomprehensible ways seemed to the Greek and to thenavigators of the Renaissance equally natural. And Herodotus and Bodin, to name only pioneers and masters, are agreed as to the cause. Varietyin Man's behaviour is no impish trick of original sin: it is theresponse of his single reason to variety in Nature. Only when experienceadded intimacy with alien individuals to observations of their habits oflife, did a common humanity in their behaviour begin to be so frequentand obvious as to cause surprise. Acquiescence in the discovery isimplicit in Thucydides and Hobbes, and confessed in Aristotle and Locke. Had Europe broken into the Great East in Locke's day, as the Greeksbroke into Persia in Aristotle's, we might have had completer analogybetween the ethnology of Montesquieu and that of Eratosthenes than wecan actually trace. The defect in the writer of the _Lettres Persanes_is in his knowledge of Persia, not of Paris and London: Eratosthenes, aswe remember, was born in Cyrene and worked in Alexandria. 

MAN IN CONFLICT WITH NATURE IN THE NORTH-WEST QUADRANT OF THE OLD WORLD

We come now, from this rather general survey of human faculty, to themore pertinent question, what sort of unity do we find in humanachievement within that region, or rather within those regions, of theOld World where the stream-heads of our modern culture seem to taketheir rise? The qualification which has slipped from my pen is half theanswer already, for we are to deal not with one homogeneous region butwith a cluster of regions in all climates from Arctic tundra to Saharaand the Nile, and in all altitudes from alpine to maritime. Unity ofprehistoric culture, in such conditions, can at best be but a questionof degree. 

Modern ethnology, emancipated from a belief in an immediateconsanguinity of mankind, by the spread of less infantile views aboutNoah's Ark, goes on to question the sufficiency of language as a bondof union, and forthwith stumbles over the Tower of Babel. 

Two contemporary lines of discovery have tended to determine the result. Geology gives us a very long margin of time since the north-westquadrant began to be reinhabited by human beings after the Ice Age, andassumed approximately its present distribution of land and water. Archaeology, which in this aspect is the special stratigraphy of man, sanctions an extension of time, since not merely human beings butorganized societies of men made their appearance in Europe, which farexceeds the period required, or commonly assumed, for the spread of anyknown Indo-European language, from any possible 'home' to any regionwhere it was spoken at the beginning of historic time. And not only doesarchaeological evidence enable us to detect such societies sedentary fora while on this or that site over the face of Europe and itsneighbourhood; it traces not merely one 'prehistoric culture', but anumber of distinct types of such culture, each with its own geographicaldistribution, and with distributions which expand and contract atdifferent times, superseding one type of culture here, and anotherthere, and in turn superseded by others. 

It is not easy to bring home the extent of this diversity to those whoare not familiar with the physical condition of a Europe which was asyet largely in the 'backwood' stage of exploitation. But it will givesome idea of the range of contrast, if we revert to the method ofThucydides, [7] and compare the unexploited Europe of the days beforeagriculture, with unexploited America at the time of its discovery byEuropeans. Here, within the same geographical limits of the northtemperate zone, and with the far simpler scheme of surface relief whichcharacterizes the New World, we have civilizations as different as thoseof the Eskimo, the Algonkin peoples of the coniferous forests, the Huronand Iroquois of the deciduous hardwoods, horticultural Muscogeans in thesouth-east, buffalo-hunting Sioux on the prairie, predatory Apaches andBlackfeet in the foothills, and littoral and riparian fisher-folk on thePacific slope: just as recognizable now, in their distributions andoverlaps, by the fashions of their pipe-bowls and other débris, as arethe representatives of the 'row-grave' culture or the makers of'band-keramik' in Central Europe. 

Keeping in mind this analogy of prehistoric Europe with pre-ColumbianNorth America, let us classify the problems of subsistence which theseOld World regions offered to prehistoric man; and consider, granting himall the reason in the world, and uniform physique (if you please) aswell, how he is to formulate solutions which shall show any trace ofuniformity, and yet be solutions for him of the one Protean problem, howto sustain life here and now?

Along the Arctic seaboard, homogeneous from Behring Strait nearly to theNorth Cape, we have the frozen tundra region, with a characteristictundra culture; pushed now far north since Europe mellowed into ahabitable world, but formerly widespread about the skirts of theshrinking ice-sheet. Here we hunt large animals and sea-shore beasts, and trap small-deer very ingeniously; we fish in the largenorthward-flowing rivers; and eventually (heaven knows after how long, or how far back from now) we borrowed a notion, probably from pastoralsimprudently straying too far along those northward river-lanes throughthe forests, and domesticated our best of beasts, the reindeer; stealinga march here on our Alaskan cousins, who call them caribou and treatthem so: _they_ had no pastorals on the prairie southward to teach themotherwise, and when the Russians came and brought reindeer over fromAsia, the silly fellows turned them loose and hunted them till they hadeaten them all. 

South of the tundra, the Great Northern Woodland encircles the planet, interrupted only by the treeless sea. Here too we hunt, and trap, andeat berries of the undergrowth, like Algonkins or Tacitean Germans, manyof whom had no more skill in cattle than Algonkins. But we have not theplace to ourselves, like the tundra folk and the Algonkins. Our forestworld is in ever-present danger of disintegration, and our wood-craftwith it. Fond folk with tame animals (poor sport, both of them, forsportsmen like us) come blundering in off the parkland away south, upthe grassy glades, trampling undergrowth and scaring the game. Peopleare saved from all that 'over there', because no one can tame theprairie buffalo and drive _him_ over the hunting grounds; some sport, too, the prairie buffalo! And worse still, there are the people who comehacking and burning our great trees, and tearing up the turf andunderwood, and all to plant their fancy grasses with the fat seeds, thatthe deer like to browse over; and that is the only thing to make thosepeople show fight, if we or the deer go among their fat-grass plots. Those people come up, too, from the south and the south-east, and haveto go back thither for seed if their sowings fail. Of course they liketheir animals tame, like the other fellows; but the grasses are theirfirst string, as we bow-men say. 

Southward, enveloping the Alpine ridges, except where the snow peaksperforate its carpet covering, the Woodland changes its character, rather than gives place to anything fresh along the shores of the LakeRegion of the Old World. Here and there, in detached plateaux enfoldedamong the ranges (like the Salt Lake basin and the Shoshonean plateauxin America), there are isolated grassy plains, repeating on a smallerscale the great grassland which skirts the Black Sea and the Caspian. Examples are the heart of Spain and of Asia Minor, and the miniaturegrasslands of the Balkan Peninsula, such as Thessaly and Eastern Thrace. 

It is in the southern third, or thereabouts, of the continuous Woodland, where the deciduous forest trees begin to give place to evergreens, asthey themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutelysubdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize theMediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate itsscale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical _Hackbau_, asthe Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with ploughand spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more thanearth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in whichthe Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen worktheir Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than acabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize howtruly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to apoor man. For the house-slave could handle a _zappa_, the spadelikeLevantine hoe, where an ox would fail to turn round, yet wherefood-plants could be coaxed to grow, and an olive-tree would luxuriate. 

This kind of garden-cultivation indeed repeats very closely thefoodquest of the Muskogean cultivators in the South-eastern States, whomake up the so-called 'civilized tribes' and, almost alone among theRedskins, 'are all self-supporting and prosperous'. [8] In the Old World, as in the New, its distribution is closely defined by certain limits ofrainfall and temperature, and most of all by the extent to which therainfall is concentrated into a few winter months, so that a dry warmsummer is assured, which Man can mitigate and even exploit if he hasaccess to perennial water. It extended, therefore, in quite early times, and still predominates, all round the mountainous shores of theMediterranean, from Syria by Southern Europe to Algeria and Tunis, andpenetrates inland and upland into the forests till summer clouds andrainfall check it. In this region of its distribution Greek and Romanlegends betray the belief that grain-cultivation came late, andsuperseded a staple diet of tree produce, chestnut, walnut, filbert, andacorn. [9] And when the 'nobler grasses' came, it was barley and redwheat that predominated, as indeed they predominate still. 

But this is only one part of the distribution of the garden-culture. Farnorth along the Atlantic seaboard, and as far inland as the mildAtlantic climate is perceptible, the same type prevails. Its ancientlimit is traced meteorologically in Tacitus' complaints (for example) ofthe austerity of the lands beyond the Rhine. In this northern regiongrain crops pass from red to white wheat, from barley to oats, and fromboth to rye. The ease with which the Muskogean potato and tomato havebeen acclimatized, and their respective prevalence now in the Atlanticand Mediterranean sections, illustrate exactly the place which primitivehoe-culture held in the economy of the Old-World region. Early monumentsof this culture, in which hoe and ox-plough are equally conspicuous, arethe 'meraviglie' rock-carvings above Ventimiglia. [10] The fine flower ofit is the Minoan civilization of the Crete and the South Aegean. Egyptian agriculture is also in great part hoe-work. 

South-eastward, outside the Carpathians, and within them also, in thegreat plain of Hungary, we meet a totally different régime; vastfeatureless and treeless grasslands, extending past the Black Sea andCaspian to the foot of the mountains of North Persia and the spurs ofthe Central Asian highlands. Here, if Man is to maintain himself at all, he must be master of tame animals which can eat the grass, and in turnsustain him. South of the eastward continuation of the woodland MountainZone, through Asia Minor into Persia, and also south of theMediterranean lake-region and the ridges of Syria and the 'Africa Minor'of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, which partly enclose it, lies anothergroup of grasslands, Arabia and Sahara, desert-hearted, but capable ofsustaining a considerable population of nomad pastoral folk round theirmargins and in oases, and of emitting them in volcanic emigrations nowand then. 

From the human point of view, the profound difference between thenorthern and the southern group of these grasslands, which collectivelylie athwart the great east-and-west mountain zone of the Old World, isthis. The southern grassland sustains sheep and goats almostexclusively; it acquired its domesticated horses recently (at earliestabout 2000 B. C. ) and from the north-east; and it relies, for transport, on camels and asses, not on wheeled vehicles. The northern, on the otherhand, has sufficient perennial pasture to permit of oxen; it uses horseshabitually; and it has utilized the timber of its parkland margin, whereit passes over into the northern forest, to construct wheeled carts andox-ploughs. Equipped with these fundamental implements of civilization, wheel-borne nomads have penetrated the Mountain Zone from the northagain and again, introducing the cart into Egypt rather late, andperhaps even into Babylonia; though with these exceptions no secondarycentre of cart-folk was ever established in the south. Obvious reasonsfor this failure lie in the scarcity of parkland and of perennialpasture for large cattle. At best, Assyria and Syria adopted the horsedchariot for war; but these regions, like the Hittite chariot-users ofAsia Minor, the Achaean conquerors of the Greek peninsula, and the Gaulsin West-Central Europe, are rather within the parkland fringes of theMountain Zone, and among those intermont plateaux which we have notedalready, than borderers of the Grassland itself. In particular, they areall sedentary, and stand in this respect contrasted with the migratoryScythian cart-folk in the northern Grassland. The only nomad cart-folkwithin the Mountain Zone are the Gipsies, [11] and they seem mainly tohave formed their habit of life in the largest intermont plateau of all, the vast table-land of Persia. 

The plough is less easy to trace. All that can be safely said at presentis that it is a device for applying the strength of large cattle tobreak up the soil for a grain crop, deeply and uniformly, and above allmore rapidly than a man can dig it with a hoe. By his own effort a mancan barely break up enough ground to supply his home with grain, exceptin irrigated land. With the simplest of ploughs he can do this and more, and yet have leisure for other pursuits within the ploughing season. Butit is not yet clear in what region ploughing first began. Probably itwas in the comparatively well-watered and well-wooded margin of one ofthe large grasslands; but whether north or south of the Mountain Zone, or round the discontinuous plateaux within it, is not clear. Thepresumption of large cattle favours the north, yet Babylonia, and evenEgypt, had large cattle from very early times. North Syria seems todispute with Babylonia priority in the production of wheat. Somewherein this region we may provisionally place the cradle of what I mayperhaps describe as the Bread-and-Cheese culture, in which the staplefoods are provided by grain-plants and cattle, the latter being valuedfor their strength and their milk products, but not primarily for theirflesh. 

Disseminated westward, the Bread-and-Cheese culture is found to sufferregional modification. Southward, among the Mediterranean evergreenflora and old hoe-cultivation, the dearth of summer grass makes thelarge cattle useless for milking, as well as for beef; they are bredexclusively for draught, as their gait and structure show, and whilecheese is supplied by the sheep and goats, butter and animal-fats arereplaced by the vegetable oils, of which the olive is the chief, acharacteristic Mediterranean product, evergreen, deep-rooted againstsummer drought, and fleshy-fruited. A Bread-and-Olive culture results, familiar to all visitors to Mediterranean lands. In the deciduousforests of South-Central Europe there is grass in the clearings, andmilk enough; but goats and sheep are restricted, as the undergrowthbecomes deeper and denser, and the prime giver of fats is theforest-bred pig: in a land rolling with ham and sausages we reach theBread-and-Bacon culture. Further afield still, and later, in proportionas the forest is opened out by semi-pastoral folk, the moister summerpermits open meadow-land, with perennial grass, and the possibility ofhay. Here too the grain crops may be so large that there is somethingover to fatten stock; and to Bread and Cheese the farmer of thenorth-western plains adds Beef. When there is coarse grain in plenty, ofcourse, the large-boned horse of the north gradually replaces the ox atthe plough, and permits him to be bred, as with ourselves, not fordraught at all, but for milking and killing exclusively. It is in thisfinal phase that the Bread-and-Beef culture passes over eventually intothe New World, and into the South Temperate Zone. It has been rather along story to tell, and full of platitudes, but the gist of it is bythis time clear. Whatever be the superstructure of social institutions, of arts and sciences, of religion and philosophy, that European men havebuilt upon it, the régime which has made the Western World what it is, from before the dawn of metallurgy until now, has been generically aBread culture; based on that combination of pastoral and agriculturallife in which large cattle co-operate with man in the laboriouspreparation of the soil which cereal crops require. But the Breadculture itself is always supplemented by some form of milk product, ofwhich cheese is typical. It is almost always supplemented further bysome special provision of fats; in Mediterranean conditions by olivesand oil, involving extensive tree culture; in the forest region by pig'smeat; and on the Atlantic seaboard by butter and beef. 

The exhilarants show the same geographic control; with the olive culturego the wines and brandies of the south; with the forest culture, theciders and the cherry brandies of Central Europe; with the copiouscereals and meadow-grass, the beers and whiskies of the North. Indetails, of course, the distribution of types is intricately confused;but the main outline is clear; and we reach a first glimpse of acoherent European culture, on the almost animal plane of regionalfoodquests. 

RACE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE AS FACTORS OF UNITY

Precedence has been given in our inquiry to the mere animal struggle ofman with nature for bare subsistence, for two distinct reasons. Thefirst is economic, namely, that just because this struggle is withoutqualification that of a highly intelligent animal species to maintainitself under these or those conditions, it is one which befalls equallyevery breed or race of that species which is ever exposed to thoseconditions; and further, is no more mitigated by considerations oflanguage than by considerations of race. The second reason is historicalor archaeological. The spread of the Bread culture is dated so far backin the history of man in this region, as to make it certain that itpreceded not merely the spread of the prevalent Indo-European group oflanguages, but even the present distribution of racial types. Itcertainly reached Italy, and the Atlantic seaboard as the British Isles, before the brachycephalic 'Alpine' men arrived there; and still morebefore the Boreal invasions of Britain and the opposite coasts. Indeed, it would be truer to say that in general each breed of man which haschanged its distribution has had to adopt sooner or later the types ofculture appropriate to the regions into which it has penetrated, than toassociate the spread of any element of culture so fundamental as thefood-quest with the migrations of any racial type. 

Race, indeed, in Europe, as well as further afield, has been anythingbut a factor of unity. When we speak (on platforms) of Europeans as'white men', we are in danger of forgetting, what every practical man inour audience knows, that we are dealing with at least three distinctbreeds of mankind, which agree, indeed, rather imperfectly in thewhiteness of their skin, but differ greatly in other points of structureand physique, including resistance to certain types of climate andregional diseases, and not least in temperament and the quality of theirresponse to Nature's challenges of hardship or indulgence. Of thesethree breeds of man, only one, the blond Boreal giants (the only 'whitemen' in the strict sense of defect of pigment in skin, hair, and eyes)is exclusively European now, and has his habitat within the area of the'Boreal' groups of animals and plants. His champions in ethnologicalpropaganda seem to be of two minds about his earlier distribution;either his 'home' was round the Baltic, in which case it is difficult tosee why he should be represented as a civilizing agency, in view of thecultural backwardness of that region; or else it was out on the Eurasiangrassland, in which case he is as much an intruder into peninsularEurope as his brachycephalic 'Alpine' rival, and his claim to representindigenous European man must go. The large part which he has played inEuropean history seems to result partly from his great physicalstrength, surpassed (I believe) only by that of the Negro, partly fromhis reluctance, not so much to interbreed with more pigmented strains, but to admit the crossbred offspring to full partnership with himself. Even among his like, he has his own criteria by which one 'white man'knows another, and coheres with him politically. 

Most strongly contrasted externally with the 'Boreal' type is theslight-built Mediterranean brunet. That his home is in the south, thathe is closely related with the men of the African and Arabiangrasslands, and that he was among the first post-glacial explorers ofthe Atlantic seaboard, is admitted. More doubt arises as to the extentto which he penetrated from these southern and western bases into theheart of peninsular Europe. Certainly as we trace him to the south-easthe seems more and more restricted to the Mediterranean coastline, and atlast has no early monopoly even of the islands. The contrast betweenCrete and Cyprus is instructive as to this. The 'Mediterranean' type, infact, reaffirms to the anthropologist the close zoological affinitybetween South-west Europe and North-west Africa. 

But if Europe 'ends at the Pyrenees', it ends also anthropologically atthe Balkans, or even at the Carpathians; for the whole Balkan Peninsula, and most of the highland core of peninsular Europe, is essentiallycontinuous with Asia Minor and the next eastward sections of theMountain Zone, so far as its human population is concerned, no less thanin its animals and plants. Biological continuity is as complete at theBosphorus as it is at Gibraltar. Here, what remains in dispute is not somuch whether 'Alpine' types are ultimately of Anatolian origin, aswhether their spread in Europe has been early or late, and whether theirpredecessors here were predominantly 'Boreal' or 'Mediterranean'. It isdifficult, and perhaps needless, to decide whether lack of evidence orpolitical enthusiasm is more to blame for this; for the Roundheads ofprehistoric and of modern Europe are as contentious matter as theirEnglish namesakes in the seventeenth century. 

To this broadly threefold analysis of European man, add only this, thatever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions andleft the grasslands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there hasbeen a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enoughMuscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also therehas been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it willbe clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniformbasis of our European culture. 

Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak ofIndo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinitywith mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifyinginfluence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, anda Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe'amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so inFrench, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language;while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just achance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three. 

There is no need to labour this point further than to recall thefateful bisection of the culture of the European peninsula whichresulted from the linguistic alienation of Constantinople from Rome; ofthe Mediterranean base which understood Latin, from that which thoughtin Greek. In this tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with itslinguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate, Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters havereconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And there-incorporation of Britain, too, into the comity of nations isconcurrent with the Latinization of its speech, on which the seal wasset in 1611. Late as it was, then, in any case, in the prehistory of theregion, the spread of a single type of linguistic structure over Europehas brought not peace, but a sword. 

What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the rightlines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) theyco-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of theNorth? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselvesof enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near tothe Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that weget our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. Ifnorthern genealogies are any guide, --and they are not likely to havereduced the real interval wittingly--Rome's empire reached its fullextent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was inbuilding, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War. In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historicaltransactions; it was not in finished societies like these that GreatGods (or their votaries either) set out from 'home' over the face ofEurope to unite it. 

And when we pass behind Olympian structures, and look into the cultswhich they served to federate, such uniformities as they present provefar too much. The open-air gods of Tacitus (_Germania_, chap. 9) arecommon to Semitic folk, and to many peoples further afield, who areeither not sedentary or are themselves not easily 'confined withinwalls', but haunt 'forests and groves'. 

Leaving, then, these high works of the mind, Language and Religion, which have proved but blind guides, and 'of a short stay' in thislabyrinth, let us turn to the material evidence of industrial andaesthetic activity. Here we begin at least to get something likefirst-hand evidence, for we have the manufactured object itself, notCaesar's impression of a Celtic god, or Herodotus' transcript of aScythian word. We can judge for ourselves of fabrics and styles, andthough, of course, we have only objects of the least perishable sorts, stone, metal, pottery, we have, at all events, in the pottery the mostimitative of arts, and therefore the widest basis for conclusions as tothe principles of a style. Moreover, outside the sea-borne culture ofthe Mediterranean, pottery does not travel far: its uses are domestic, not commercial. John Gilpin's fate is typical of those who would carrythings on horseback in bottles. Like words, however, potsherds enlightenus more about frontiers and contrasts than about uniformities. They areterribly provincial and tell their tale with a twang. We can trace our_Bandkeramik_ and _Schnurkeramik_ and _Urfirnissmalerei_ and all thatsort of technological idiom, across the map, as we can trace the_centum_ and _satem_ languages. But even if we could collate the'Bandkeramiker' with the 'Satemvölker' as recent enthusiasts propose, weshould be no nearer to a common technology for Europe than we were to acommon language. 

Metal, and even stone, implements do not help us much further, thoughthey were traded more widely than pottery, and form larger provinces. Inmodern Europe, in the same way, pocket-knives are rather more uniformthan milk-jugs; and where they differ, are referable to fewer types. Butthere is no unity, nor for the present any prospect of it. For anythingmore, we are reduced to the great crises of material culture, such asthe introduction of bronze, of iron, of glass and glazed earthenware;and these we perceive increasingly not as turning points of the whole, but as processes within it, affecting now one region, now another, in asequence which is clearly geographical and at very variable speed. Bronze, for example, took some thousands of years to permeate thecontinent of Europe; iron perhaps as many hundreds; platinum a littlemore than fifty years; and radium less than five. 

What we do get from this material evidence, however, is a quiteindisputable sequence of styles in time in each locality where we canhit upon stratified remains. Dead men, they say, tell no tales;potsherds are as truthful and eloquent as they are, for the very reasonthat, once broken, they are dead and done with, and are allowed to liequiet in their rubbish heaps. Intervals indeed we cannot so easilymeasure; but of sequences we can be sure, and by comparing the sequenceson different sites we can go far towards tracing the spread andsupersession of a style, sometimes over wide areas, and occasionally, with the help of the geography, we can be pretty sure of the routes bywhich innovations travelled. We can infer nothing, however, from this asto the movements of people: the vogue of the willow-pattern plate is nomeasure of our 'yellow-peril'. But where works of art can travel, ideascan travel too; and can travel right across the frontiers of race andlanguage and even of religion; meaning at all events by these, thecustomary observance of each region, and of its endemic population. Afew merchants, or craftsmen, or philosophers, work transformations inculture and bring about uniformities, of which language, orcult-edifices give us no indication at all, or at best an aftermath ofdecadence. 

It is not a merely ephemeral interest which draws attention at thispoint to the significance of engines of war, among this class oftransferable inventions. Little has been done in a systematic way onthis topic, but the rapidity with which a really important change inequipment and organization passes from camp to camp, and revolutionizesnot only armies but states, when it is a question of survival or defeat, has its illustration in many phases of warfare, and ranks among thegreat levellers of national or regional pride. 

The recorded movements of peoples in historic times, and the previousmovements inferred from language, and other symptoms, indicate along-established distribution of what might be described inmeteorological phrase as _man-pressure_; certain regions beingcharacterized either always or repeatedly by high man-pressure, and anoutward flow of men into the cyclonic areas or vortexes of lowman-pressure in the human covering (or biosphere) of the planet. Typicalhigh-pressure regions are the Arabian peninsula with its repeated crisesof Semitic eruption, and the great Eurasian grasslands. Typical regionsof low man-pressure, and repeated irruption, are the South Europeanpeninsulas. Occasionally a region plays both parts, alternatelyaccepting inhabitants, and unloading them on to other lands; examplesare the Hungarian plain, Scandinavia, and Britain. Others again canhardly be said to have a population of their own at all, but are simpleavenues of transmission, like Western Switzerland and the HellespontRegion. I am speaking now, of course, about ancient times. The causes ofthese recurrent movements are not clearly made out; but the movementsthemselves, and the fact that they are of regional recurrence, arematters of history. 

Conspicuous among such movements are the westward drift from Asia intopeninsular Europe, in its three parallel columns, through tundra, forest, and steppe; and the southward drifts, subsidiary to this, fromEast Central Europe into the Balkan lands and round the head of theAdriatic. The course of these drifts is laid out in detail, as we haveseen, by the physique of the regions; and therewith is determined thekind of life which each set of folk must be living if it is to survivethe journey. 

And here we come at once upon a new factor making strongly for a moregeneral uniformity of culture within peninsular Europe than its physicalcharacter would at all prepare us to expect. For although individual menoften respond very rapidly to fresh surroundings, and can change theirmode of life almost as they change their clothes, societies react farmore slowly; at the pace, in fact, usually of their most obstinatemembers. Confronted therefore with the opportunity, or the need, for achange of habit, in the course of a migration for example, they musteither refuse it, like a shy horse, or (if they accept it) enter ontheir new career imperfectly trained, and extemporizing adjustments hereand there in very unworkmanlike fashion. Only rarely does the statesmanor 'lawgiver' appear, just when he is wanted, to bring Israel up out ofEgypt into the desert, and out of the desert into the good land beyondJordan, and to canonize a new code of behaviour suited to a new set ofneeds. This social inertia, of which political history is the sorryrecord, is of course least perceptible, and most effective, when theregion of transition is graduated gently; and we have already seen thatthis is conspicuously so around the parkland margin of the northerngrassland, where it faces on peninsular Europe. Let us follow this cluein detail. 

We may safely assume, as we have seen, that for a long while past, everygroup of newcomers into peninsular Europe has come equipped with theparticular type of social organization which enabled it to make good, either on the tundra, or in the northern woodland, or on the steppe, or(if it came across the Bosphorus) on the enclosed plateaux of Asia Minorand beyond. The tundra does not greatly concern us, for the White Seacuts through it, and deep into the woodland, and bars off the Lapps fromthe Samoyeds and their kin. Classical descriptions of the inhabitants ofthe North German plain make it clear that its culture, even so late asthe first century B. C. , was at its best a broken prolongation of thepastoral life of the steppe margin, and that less fortunate tribeseither had never had cattle, like the hunting Redskins of thecorresponding forest zone of North America, or had lost them since theyentered the forest, and maintained themselves by hunting and robberylike the broken pastorals who infest the east edge of the Congo basin;the Chatti of Tacitus' day enjoying tyrannous hegemony not unlike thatof the Five Nations. 

It is probably to this westward drift from more purely pastoralcondition to less, that we must attribute the only really large unity ofEuropean civilization in the later prehistoric ages, namely, its socialorganization in patriarchal households linked into clans and tribes. Wemay doubt whether this social type is permanently adaptable to a forestrégime, any more than to industrial life. Certainly forest folk outsidepeninsular Europe only display it rarely and imperfectly. But it ischaracteristic of all pastoral folk; once established, it coheres andpersists under great external stresses; and in early Europe itsliability (strong though its structure is) to break up sooner or laterinto a more individualistic order, was counteracted by the recurrentdrift of new grassland peoples westward from one of its principal homes. Grassland Arabia, let us note in passing, has been performing the samefunction, since history began, for its own marginal neighbours fromBabylonia to Palestine and Egypt. 

On the other hand, we now see why the feminism which recursintermittently in our 'western' world culminates in those phases of itshistory when that world has been strong enough to close its avenues ofintrusion for a while; in the far past which has left us the greatgoddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; inthe Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanesjoins with Euripides to admit, and Euripides with Plato to advocate; inthe _Femmes savantes_ of renascent Europe; in eighteenth-century France, which seemed to itself so impregnable; and in the _fin-de-siècle_ Europeof yesterday, pulling down its barns to build greater. 

No one would suggest that this patriarchal and tribal structure favouredpolitical unity or large enterprises of any kind. In fact, throughoutthe early history of Europe these coherent kinship groups, with theirinner insulation and their inability to offer anything but passiveresistance to the forces which were to dissolve them, were aninsuperable bar to anything politically larger. 'If only these couldhold together, they would rule the world' is the judgement of Herodotuson Scythia, of Thucydides on Thrace, of Polybius and Caesar upon Gaul, of Tacitus on Germany: each with the unspoken afterthought 'but thankgoodness that they cannot!'

But while it hindered larger growths of political structure, so long asit remained intact, and furnished a strong social skeleton upon which toframe manners and ideals which are among man's highest achievements, patriarchal society had its own dangers, and has now so nearly succumbedto them, that to see its institutions in working order we have topenetrate into Albania or amongst the least modern backwoods of theSlav-speaking east. To take only the leading instance, Greek tribalsociety dissolved within historic times under the double attack ofindividualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of thefederalism of the city state, at the other. For Aristotle thevillage-community was the 'colony' ([Greek: apoikia]) or directoffspring of the patriarchal household, but he nowhere admits thecity-state to be the 'colony' of the village-community. On the contrary, at the risk of upsetting his own theory of the state as a naturaloutgrowth of man's political nature, he lays stress on 'the man whofirst introduced them to each other' as the 'author of the greatestadvantages'. And it was precisely this process of 'introducing them toone another', so that the members of hitherto autonomous clans becamefriends instead of enemies, and were thenceforth citizens all, in oneand the same city-state, that terminated that period of migrations andpolitical chaos which separates the Minoan from the Hellenic Age inGreek lands. Rome's mission among the tribal societies of Italy isessentially the same; and it is the lack of any such missionary ofpolitical enlightenment beyond the frontier of the Roman State in itsimperial fullness, that makes early mediaeval problems, which wereessentially the same, so slow to be solved. 

We are now hard upon the borderland of history, and we take leave of apeninsular Europe--for the grassland stands still outside, as a distinctgeographic entity--in which the diverse races, and languages, andreligious schemes, and material cultures, are almost wholly propagatedunder the forms of societies of one homogeneous type, autonomous, indeed, like the states in the loosest of federations, and involvedannually, somewhere or other, in intertribal feuds and war; butsufficiently acquainted with each other's customs to know that they werebased on the same large needs, not merely of 'living' somehow but of'living well', and to respect this common heritage of intertribalcustoms, so far that in their uttermost dealings with admitted aliensthey were wont to 'make war like gentlemen'. To Homer's audience it wassure proof that Odysseus was really 'at the back of nowhere', when theCyclops was unable to behave when a stranger came to his cave: he was 'amonster, of knowledge not according to the rules'. [12] It was acriticism of despair, like that of M. Lévy-Bruhl: for the Cyclops hadthe 'will to power'. [13]

Here, then, was a social structure and a political world, an _oikoumené_where _men_ could _live_, tolerant of fairly wide variations in detail, within a general uniformity: for tribal society in Middle Italy or evenin Western Greece, as we first catch sight of it, was by no meanshomogeneous with tribal society beyond the Alps in the times of Caesarand Tacitus. But apart from these variations, tribal Europe was acoherent whole; and it was so because, and as long as, no new problemsof adjustment between Man and Nature arose to upset the balance struckby that Bread-culture with which we were concerned just now. For thepatriarchal tribal societies, as we watch them still in Albania forexample, are neither more nor less than the political aspect of thatculture, and their varieties and deviations stand in close correlationwith the varieties which we have seen the Bread-culture assume. 

In the same way, the break-down of this social structure proceeds, stepby step, in relation with the two great changes to which normalBread-culture is exposed. On the one hand, primitive self-sufficiency(the retrospective ideal of Greek political thought) was infringedirrevocably as soon as contact was made with a region, like ancientScythia, where, as Herodotus puts it, 'there are no earthquakes and theygrow wheat to sell'; for in the Mountain Zone you are never secureagainst shocks, and almost never have any surplus of grain. Once inoversea contact with lands like these, it became more economical to buygrain thence, and to pay for it by increasing the production of oil andwine, than to grow everything at home; and a new and 'limitless' sourceof wealth emerged in the process of exchange. 

On the other hand, oil and wine needing far less labour than grain-cropsand offering longer leisure (which for Greeks meant the chance to startdoing something else), the contemporary revelation of mineral wealth, and of many forms of craftsmanship, again largely (though not wholly)introduced from oversea, created another source of wealth, no less'limitless' and dangerously unmanageable, in a world where wealth of anykind was literally 'so little good'. And this industrial wealth, likeits commercial counterpart, was personal wealth, owed wholly to skilland push, and in no way due to your clansmen or your clan. When the poetcursed the discovery of metals, he put his finger on the 'key-industry'of the whole industrial development; and when he cursed the invention ofshipping, he struck at the root-trouble of all, which had revealed toautonomous Bread-cultured tribes in peninsular Europe lands otherwiseconstituted and endowed by Nature, the exploitation of which seemed inthe beginning so easy and obvious, but is, in fact, so profound arevolution for the societies whose members have attempted it. The treeof the knowledge of good and evil was for him the shipbuilding pine. [14]

But the dissolution of early European society and culture under thestress of contact with regions outside Europe is no matter ofprehistoric times. The task of this essay is over when it has presentedthat society and culture as Man's reasoned attempt to 'live well' in anexclusively European world. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Marett, _Anthropology_. Home University Library. 

J. L. Myres, _The Dawn of History_. Home University Library. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This chapter has not had the advantage of Prof. Myres'srevision, in view of the rest of the book which he has not seen. Beingfor some time abroad on war-work, it was impossible to communicate withhim; and it is therefore thought best to print his paper just as it waswritten some months before the lectures were delivered. ]

[Footnote 2: Herodotus, viii. 144. After the battle of Salamis, when theAthenians are invited by Xerxes' envoy to desert the Greek cause, theysay they cannot betray what 'is of one blood and of one speech, and hasestablishments of gods in common, and sacrifices, and habits of life ofsimilar mode'. ]

[Footnote 3: For details see the section on Herodotus in _Anthropologyand the Classics_; and E. E. Sikes, _The Anthropology of the Greeks_. ]

[Footnote 4: Thucydides i. 6 (Greek: polla d' an kai alla tisapodeixeie, to palaion Hellênikon omoiotropa tô nun barbarikôdiaitômenon). ]

[Footnote 5: (Greek: tou gar logon eontos xynon, zôousin oi polloi ôsidian echoutes phronêsin). ]

[Footnote 6: (Greek: anthrôpoisi pasi metesti ginôskein eautous kaisôphroneein). ]

[Footnote 7: Thucydides, i. 5. He too, as it happens, is illustrating aprimitive Old World, round the Aegean shores of Greece, by thecontemporary West in the backwoods of Aetolia. ]

[Footnote 8: Farrand, _The Basis of American History_, 1904, p. 270. ]

[Footnote 9: The [Greek: balanêphagoi andres], 'acorn-eating men', ofGreek traditional ethnology. ]

[Footnote 10: Bicknell, _The Prehistoric Rock Engravings in the ItalianMaritime Alps_, Bordighera, 1902; _Further Explorations_, 1903. I beginto suspect that the stippled and shaded enclosures which accompany thedrawings of oxen, ploughs, and men with hoes may represent thecultivation plots. ]

[Footnote 11: I owe valuable information about the Gipsies to my friendDr. John Sampson, of the University of Liverpool; but he is in no wayresponsible for this interpretation of it. ]

[Footnote 12: _Odyssey_ ix. 428 (Greek: pelôr, athemistia eidôs). ]

[Footnote 13: _Odyssey_ ix. 214-15:

 (Greek: andr' epeleusesthai megalên epieimenon alkên, agrion, oute dikas en eidota oute themistas. )]

[Footnote 14: Horace, _Epode_ xvi. In his 'better land'--

 Non huc Argoo contendit remige pinus, Neque impudica Colchis intulit pedem.... Iuppiter illa piæ _secrevit_ litora genti, Ut inquinavit ære tempus aureum;

 Ære, dehinc ferro duravit sæcula; quorum Piis secunda, vate me, datur fuga. ]

III

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

It might appear the height of paradox to preface a discourse on theAncient World by asserting the conviction that the only genuine andimportant history is contemporary history. Yet reflection on thisdoctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious andsteady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past ingeneral), but its only rational basis and justification. Were the pastreally past it were dead--dead and done with, and it were wisdom for uswho are alive to let the dead bury their dead. Much of what has beendone and suffered under the sun is indeed gone beyond recall, and iswell buried in forgetfulness. In such forgetfulness lies the fact andevidence of progress. 'Vex not its ghost'; no necromancy will or shouldevoke the departed spirits or avail to make them utter significantspeech to living men. The chain of links which once bound stage to stageof human history is somewhere for ever broken; and as we retrace, in thememory of the race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which wehere call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our visioninto the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology andAnthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing alittle deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins ofour civilization; but before that dimly illuminated region ofpre-history there still lies, and will always lie, an impenetrable pall. As again in thought we move forward down the stream of time, the lightavailable to us for a while increases, increases till we reach thepresent where it threatens to blind us with its dazzling excess, andthen suddenly fades and is quenched in the twilight and final darknessby which the future is hidden from us. Of the whole stream of historyour best or utmost intelligence illuminates but a short reach, and thatimperfectly. 

'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge, ' and the wisehistorian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limitsof his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distantfuture can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, thesubjects of judgement. If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thuseternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is noteither in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are actedupon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, whatwe suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the realalone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also sothat of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. Whatwe have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are andwhere we now stand. All other so-called knowledge or understanding, saveas it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning ourpresent selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity orlumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves orothers what we so judge concerning the one and the other. Genuineunderstanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, isalways of the present or nothing. 

But this present is not the momentary meeting-place of two eternities orthe brief span of time which psychologists have named 'the speciouspresent'. Its content is whatsoever is not the dead past or the unbornfuture; it is whatever is still or already alive, whatever is yet oralready operative and formative in our inward selves or our outwardenvironment--in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with ourpresent doings and sufferings. To such a present it is idle to attemptto fix limits of date before or behind. A new conception of the unity ofHistory rises before us as we realize that the Past and the Future arenot _severed_ by the Present, but that these meet and are made one inits living and concrete actuality. This is the fact, the centre to whichall radii converge and from which they diverge again; and in the Presentthe Past and the Future live and are, together and all at once. 

Bearing this in mind, we approach the records of history in a new spiritand with a new hope. We desire to know neither origins nor ends, weexpect no cosmogony and we look for no apocalyptic vision. What we aimat understanding is what we now are and where we now stand, and werealize that to understand this we must not restrict our study to whatis merely of recent acquisition or growth. Neither ourselves nor ourenvironment are bounded by chronological limits; both are contemporarywith the Pyramids just as much as with the Eiffel Tower. We are notmerely the heirs but the epitomes of the ages. As our bodies are but thepresent forms on which the secular forces of the earth continue theirdateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are theforms in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered stilllive and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, whilestill their names were named, they initiated or advanced. Not in piousgratitude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-comingoblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselvesand our world which is to us as living men all and alone important. Norwill such study deny to us the reward we seek. So approaching thelabours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comesbefore us with a tale, or as we call it, with a 'story'--a narrative of'old unhappy things and battles long ago'. For though he so puts it, spacing it out in sections, half-concealing, half-revealing its logicalconnexions and ultimate unity, its real meaning, its ultimate--which isalso its present--import is an account of what we now are and thesituation in which we now stand; and unless somehow for each of us itsmessage comes into such an account, distils and sublimates into such aquintessential judgement on the present, History remains but 'a tale ofsound and fury, signifying nothing'. It is in the profoundest senseuseless to us unless in the end we can say '_De nobis fabulanarratur_'--it is _our_ history to which we have been listening. 

This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World--the worldof classical antiquity. It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughtsare not past but still live, still 'breathe and burn' in us. They arelargely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world aremade. Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundationsof both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the laboursof our ancestors. We _are_ the Greeks and the Romans, made what we noware by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world, at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one andsingle. Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in theunbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is thehero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of thehistory of Humanity. Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially ofClassical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our ownyouth. 

 Our deeds (and also our thoughts) still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are. 

This is the spirit and the conviction in which I would invite you toapproach the study of Classical Antiquity--not merely in that ofgratitude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futilecuriosity, but as seekers for knowledge of yourselves and your world. For what other knowledge matters?

This quest is but the beginning of a search which is and must belifelong. Perhaps I am wrong in calling it the beginning, and there areothers who would and do bid you begin earlier. I can only ask you tobegin where I began or begin myself. At any rate if you begin later orelsewhere I am confident that you will lose much light on your presentselves and your present world. My own temptation has been rather to stoptoo soon and so to overleap the intervening period--the 'MiddleAges'--between such Antiquity and the Present. Fortunately for you, youhave guides who will point out to you the way of a profitable andinstructive journey across the--to me--unknown or imperfectly exploredland. I must, however, in no controversy with any of my fellow lecturershere, say a word on the contention that the true beginning of the modernmind and its world--our mind and our world--lies later and elsewherethan in Classical Antiquity. The birthday and birthplace of that mindand its world have been variously fixed. We have been bidden to find theone, say, as late as the sixteenth century and the other--not from thesame point of view--in the plains and woods of Northern Europe or in thedeserts of Arabia or in some still more vaguely indicated region of theEast. But I must avow my conviction that our civilization--and Ispecially remember that we are Englishmen--is not only in origin but inessence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that inits earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature anda clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the samevital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightenedby reflection upon its own past. It is a true instinct that in thiscountry still bases our system of higher education upon a study of thelanguages and literature of Classical Antiquity. We are, as Englishmen, co-heirs, because co-descendants of Classical Antiquity, with France andItaly and Greece, yes also with Germany, for European civilization--andnot European civilization only--is, I reiterate, in essence stillGreco-Roman, not Teutonic or Semitic. At least, if this inheritance isnot ours by descent it is ours by adoption, and we are equallylegitimate members of the household. And the bonds of such spiritualkinship are closer and more durable than those of blood, if indeed thoseof blood provably exist at all. 

The works and thoughts of which I am to speak--the dreams, the plans, the hopes and aspirations--are assuredly ours also, the stuff andsubstance of our being, our inner _genius_, our guiding and controllingselves, what we in our first youth imagined and conceived, what webelieved, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed. If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters aresmall and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is byprofessional historians, we recognize it as the record of a past whichis our very own, while at the same time it is a past which we share withother nations who are our co-partners in the work of conserving, deepening, extending, enriching the present-day civilization of Europeand the world. 

In most of us at all times, and in all of us at most times, theseinfluences and their operations lie deep below the threshold ofconsciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-analysis cansound. They are also the unseen foundations of the social and politicalsuperstructure in which we live. Or, to use another figure, they formthe fertile soil in which we, with all our activities and institutions, are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritualsustenance. Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them, for in this identity of foundation is to be found the primary unity ofthe now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and sowidely divergent currents of national life. We all come spiritually fromthe same ancient home, and it is well and wise to recall its memories. So we and others shall be the more disposed to re-knit the old bonds andto weave new ones which may one day restore on a grander scale, in moreorganized fullness and more efficacious potency, the primordial unitywhich interests and passions have with rude violence, at least inappearance, disrupted and dissolved and so for a time arrested orenfeebled. 

I have many predecessors in the task of answering the question, What dowe owe to the Greeks? Any answer which I have to offer, must, in thecompass at my disposal, be imperfect; it must also be abstract; andlastly it cannot but be in form dogmatic. But I think it is not too muchto say that it is to the Greeks that we owe the very conception ofcivilization and through that in large measure its very existence. Thetruth of this is more evident if we put the truth in another way, sayingthat the Greeks first explicitly recognized the contrast between thebarbarous and the civilized state of mankind, and delivered themselvesand us from the former by defining the latter and attempting, notwithout success, to establish it in actual reality. No doubt before themmen had felt the pressure of barbarism within and without, and hadframed dreams of something better, but it was the Greeks who firstdefined and conceived the ideal and so made it possible to realize it. Their distinctive peculiarity lay in their setting themselves not merelyto imagine but to think out an ideal of civilized life, and narrowlyand abstractly as to the end they conceived this ideal, they discernedthe main essential lines of its structure, the permanent laws of itsdevelopment and well-being. In doing this they discovered the need andefficacy of knowledge for the conduct of human life, individual andcollective; and found in knowledge no mere means to living but a new andheightened form of life itself, lifted above the trammelling conditions, the disillusionments and disappointments of the merely practicallife. Thus they created Science and Philosophy, bequeathing tous the ideals and the results of the one and the other. We mayso far define their contribution as consisting in the thought ofCivilization-through-knowledge, a thought which was not a thought onlybut a potent and effective instrument of action, not a mere ideal but anideal governing, directing, and realized, in action and life. 

We have also to recognize another most powerful influence of which theywere the vehicles--closely related to the other. The Greeks firstarticulately conceived and deliberately pursued the ideal of Freedom. Itwas, I say, closely related to the other, for they meant by it notmerely freedom from physical or political constraint but also inwardfreedom from prejudice and passion, and they held that knowledge andfreedom rendered one another possible. We may amend our formula andre-state their contribution as the idea and fact of civilizationregarded as a process in and to Freedom under the control of Knowledgeor Reason, each inspiring, guiding, and fertilizing the other. Theoryand practice thus co-operate and help one another forward; each in itsadvance liberates the other for a further effort. The several facultiesof the human spirit work harmoniously together in mutual respect andreciprocal alliance. Hence arises another distinctive feature of theGreek ideal, namely, that of wholeness or all-round completeness; thereis in it no one-sided insistence on this or that element in humannature, no tendency to ascetic mutilation, no fear or jealousy of whatis merely human, tainted by its animal origin or its secularassociations. 

But we must not exaggerate. This ideal was imperfectly defined, stillmore imperfectly executed or realized. It would be absurd to supposethat it was held by all Greeks; it was indeed advocated by and for aminority only. Those who now find in it the impulse and guide of Greekhistory might be hard put to it if they were obliged to produce evidenceof their faith, and they would be forced to confess that there was muchto be said against their interpretation. There is to be acknowledgedfirst the apparent want of internal unity in the Greek world, split upas it was into small and mutually hostile civic groups; and secondly, the loose coherence of each of these groups within itself (for each, wemight almost say normally, was torn by intestine faction). It is acommonplace also that Greek civilization rested upon slavery, so thatbarbarism was not expelled but remained as a domestic and ever-presentevil. Freedom and enlightenment was not in thought or practice designedfor all men, but only for Greeks, and among them only in reality for aprivileged minority. The notion of a civilized world or even a civilizedGreece was, if present at all, present only in feeling or imagination, not in clear vision or distinct thought, still less as an ideal ofpractical politics. On the other hand the ideal so narrowly conceivedwas not _in principle_ confined to a 'chosen people', or to one strainof blood. It supplied a programme extensible to all who could show theirtitle to be regarded as members of the common race of humanity. As thespecial features of Greek civilization faded, the lineaments of thiscommon humanity emerged more clearly into view, and the Greek, when hewas compelled to give up his parochialism and provincialism, foundhimself already in spirit prepared to take his place as a citizen of theworld. He had learned his lesson, and to him the whole world went toschool, first to learn of him what civilization meant and then to betterhis instructions. 

This the world did, but not once for all; for every time since thatmankind, or at least European mankind, has begun to lose faith in itsdream of civilization or has again to shake itself free from the menaceof outward or inward barbarism, it has always reverted to the thoughtand life of Greece and drawn inexhaustibly from it new light and newfruit, for it is its own thought and its own life, while still there ranin its veins the freshness and the vigour, the blitheness andhopefulness of its immortal youth. In meditating upon the unforgottendebt which we owe to Greece, we revive in memory what the spirit whichnow lives and moves in us not only once accomplished but still in eachnew generation accomplishes, accomplishing ever the better if it repeatsits former achievements with increased consciousness and more deliberatecare. We too here and now have to define what we mean by civilization, by knowledge, by freedom. Otherwise our future will be determined forus, and not by us. 'What is to come out of this struggle? Just anythingthat may come out of it, or something we mean _shall_ come out of it?'Assuredly, if we are not to stand bankrupt before our present problem, we must go to school with Greece, with Rome, with Classical Antiquity, and in the end with all History, that is to say, with our own experienceas a whole; or out of the spreading chaos no civilized cosmos will bere-born. Our civilization has been shaken to its foundations, the taskbefore us and our descendants is to rebuild once more in Europe ahabitable city for the mind of man; and in designing and reconstructingit we must take counsel with our predecessors who first found the way ofescape from outward and inward barbarism, doing for and in us what wewould do for and in our successors. 

The first and most obvious achievement of the Greek mind was thedeliverance of itself in the sphere of the imagination. Behind the faircreations of Greek art lies a dark and ugly background, but it does liebehind them. That was its first conquest. Under the magic spell of Artthe hateful and terrifying shapes of barbarous religion retreated andthe world of imagination was peopled with gracious and attractivefigures. The Greek Pantheon is, for all its defects, a world ofdignified and beautiful humanity. 'No thorn or threat stains its beautybright. ' On the whole the gods which are its denizens are humanized andhumane, the friends and allies of men, who therefore feel themselves notabased or helpless in their relations with them. 'Of one kind are godsand men, ' and their common world is one in which men feel themselves athome. Dark shadows there are, but they hide no mysteries to appal andunman. The imagination is free to follow its own laws, and so to createwhat is lovely and lovable. Language is no longer a tyrant but a willingand dexterous servant, and the Greek language reflecting, as alllanguage does, the spirit of its users, is the most perfect instrumentthat the human mind has ever devised for the expression of its dreams. The works which were then created have ever since haunted the mind ofEurope like a passion, and we are right in speaking of them as immortal, 'a joy for ever'. 

In such a manner the Greek mind humanized its world, and in doing sohumanized itself, or rather divinized itself, without stretching to thebreaking-point the strands which bound itself to its world. But it didnot stop there, and we do it wrong if we dwell too exclusively on itstriumphant achievements in literature and art. For 'speech createdthought, which is the measure of the universe'. The Greeks were not onlysupreme artists but also the pioneers of thought. They first took themeasure of the Universe in which they lived, asserting the mind of manto be its measure, and it amenable and subject to reason. The world theylived in was not only beautiful to the imagination, it was alsoreasonable, penetrable, and governable by the intellect. The ways of itand everything in it were regular and orderly, predictable, explicablenot eccentric, erratic, baffling and inscrutable. Not only was Natureknowable; it was also through knowledge of it manageable, a realm overwhich man could extend his sway, making it ever a more and morehabitable home. In it and availing himself of its offered aid he builthis households and his cities, dwelling comfortably in his habitations. But the thought which enabled him to lay a secure basis, economic andsocial or political, for his life had other issues and promised otherfruit. The Greek mind became interested in knowledge for its own sakeand in itself as the knower of its world. 

The second and more important creation of the Greek mind was Science orthe Sciences. In no earlier civilization can we trace anything but thefaintest germs of this, while in Greek civilization it comes almost atonce to flower and fruit. First and foremost we have to think ofMathematics, of Arithmetic and Geometry and Optics and Acoustics andAstronomy, but we must not forget also their later and perhaps notwholly so successful advances in Physics and Chemistry, in Botany andZoology, in Anatomy and Physiology. Doubtless, especially in the case ofthe Sciences where experiments are required and have proved so fertilein the extension of our knowledge, there were grave defects, and toomuch trust was placed in mere observation and hasty speculation; butwhat they accomplished in Science is no less but more marvellous thanwhat they accomplished in Art. The idea of Science was there, disengagedfrom the limiting restrictions of practical necessities, the idea offree and therefore all the more potent Science. The whole physical--andmuch more than the physical--environment of human life was proclaimedpermeable to human thought and therefore governable by human will or atany rate already amicable and amenable to human purposes. 

But yet a third advance was made. The Greek mind became conscious ofitself as the knower and therefore the lord and master of its world. Turning inward upon itself it discovered itself as the centre of itsuniverse and set itself to explore this new inner realm of being. In theconsciousness of itself it found inexhaustible interest and strength. Thus it created Philosophy, its last and greatest gift to humanity. Inso doing it freed itself from the trammels even of Science, which thusbecame its servant and not its master--at the same time finallyliberating itself from the narrowing and blinding influences of passionand imagination and all the shackles of merely practical needs anddisabilities. Here too it fixed the idea or the ideal. 'Life withoutreflection upon life, without self-examination and self-study andself-knowledge, is a life not worth living by man. ' In doing so itrevealed a self deeper than the physical being of man and an environmentwider and more real--more stable and permanent--than the physicalcosmos, finding in the one and the other something more enduring, substantial, and precious than shows itself either to Science or theeconomic and political prudence, yet which alone gives meaning and worthto the one and the other. Thus for the first time arose before the mindof man the conception of a life not sunk in nature and practice, butsuperior to them and the end or meaning of their existence--a life ofintense activity, of unfailing interest, of inexhaustible and eternalvalue. 

This life was throughout the duration of Greek thought too narrowlyconceived. It was frequently thought and spoken of as the life of aspectator or bystander or onlooker, as a life withdrawn or isolated, cutoff from what we should call ordinary human business and concerns, alife into which we, or at least a few of us, could escape or betransported at rare intervals and under exceptionally favourablecircumstances. Yet in principle it was open to all, and certainly notconfined to those privileged by birth or wealth or social position. Itwas not the reward of magical favour or ascetic exercises, it wasreached by the beaten path of the loyal citizen and the resolutestudent. There was about it no esoteric mystery or other-worldliness. And if to reach it was a high privilege its attainment brought with itthe imperative duty of a descent into the ordinary world to instruct, toenlighten, to comfort and help and console, to play a part in the greatbusiness and work of human civilization. In a sense this was, and is, the most permanent and fruitful gift of Greece to the European world. 

These then were the three ideas or ideals which the Greeks wrought intothe very texture and substance of the modern mind, the idea of Art, theidea of Science, the idea of Philosophy; in all three introducing andstill more deeply implanting the ideas of Freedom as the motive and endof civilized life and of Knowledge as its guide and ally. It may bethought that I have dwelt too much on theory, and have not said enoughof the specific contribution of Greece as working out in practice acertain type or types of corporate life such as the City State; but thefact is that in Greek civilization theory continually outran practiceand that it endowed mankind much more with ideas or ideals than withpractical illustrations or models for our imitation. Yet again we mustnot exaggerate or imagine these ideas as merely Utopian or such stuff asdreams are made of. The ferment which they set up burst the fabric ofGreek social and political institutions, but it clarified and steadieddown, as the enthusiasms of youth may do, into the sober designs ofgrave and energetic manhood. 

The spectacle of the dissolution of the Greek civilization is not apleasant one. 'The glory that was Greece' fades out of the world andleaves it grey and dull, and there was worse than this; there was alsodecay and degeneracy and corruption. To dwell upon it is as the sin ofHam. Nevertheless what took place was not a mere relapse towardsbarbarism, but on the contrary the supersession of a form ofcivilization which had done its work by another form less attractive, but more sound and solid. The Romans have the airs of grown and gravemen beside the perpetual youth of Greece, (the Greeks were 'alwayschildren') but they are well aware of how much they learned and had tolearn from their predecessors in the task of civilizing the world. Somuch is this so that in many departments of civilized life they lookupon themselves as imitating the Greeks and carrying out their ideas. Inthis they were less than just to themselves, for even in the world ofart they continued to create; and certainly in literature they producedworks not unworthy to stand beside their chosen models. Especially theycreated a prose style, which without ceasing to be artistic served thesober and serious purposes of political oratory and historic record. Buttheir peculiar genius showed itself most in the applied arts whichpressed Greek science into the ministry of life in architecture andengineering. Their roads and bridges and aqueducts still stand to bearwitness of them. It would be a great error to deny to them fertileadvance in the sciences, because their discoveries are so immediatelyput to the proof in practice and so little disengage themselves intoexpress theory from their applications. 

But before we proceed to reckon up their contributions to Europeancivilization it is well to correct a misconception which arises only tooeasily from an accident of our education. It is the custom in England toconcentrate attention upon a brief period in the history of Rome, ignoring on the one hand the early Republican period and on the otherthe later Imperial. There is thus lost to our imaginations those figuresand their deeds which seemed for example to Shakespeare mostcharacteristically Roman and to our more thoughtful consideration thoseachievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe. The latteris the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of_Imperial_ Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and mostinformative. Under the Empire Rome worked as a master, no longer as anapprentice or a journeyman. The theatre of her civilizing activities washere little less than the whole world then known, and the boast is notunjustified that she made into a city what had formerly been but aworld, as we might say, merely a geographical expression. The record ofthat progress reads to us too much as a narrative of incessant warfare, and we are accustomed to think of her empire as a gigantic militarypower, but in reality it was in aim and result essentially pacific, andso appeared to those who lived under her sway. To them the name of herempire was the 'Roman peace'. It was as such that the memory of ithaunted the minds of men when it too broke down from internal economicdisorders and external pressure, and a distracted and divided Europelooked back to it as the pattern for a restored civilization. 

The aim and result of the Roman Empire was peace, a world-wide peace. It is true that this end was not very articulately defined by those whopursued it, but (perhaps just because of that) the means to it were morepractically designed and more effectively executed. The civilized worldwas one and to be treated as one; it was still Rome under a singlegovernment and a single head. There arose then the idea of a supremesovereignty one and indivisible, that was the absolutely indispensablecondition of a world peace. But the necessity of organization wasequally grasped, insisted upon, realized. The civilized world wascovered with a network of institutions through which the will of theEmperor flowed and circulated throughout the Empire. Peace throughsystem and order--that was the secret of the Roman success. But twoother ideas must be added to complete the explanation. The one was theidea or ideal of Justice; no system and no order could work unless itwas, and commended itself to its subjects as being, scrupulously andexactly just. The second idea was that in order to be this it must be alegal system, based upon a known body of legal rights and duties, determining and controlling the whole conduct of the subjects to thesovereign and to one another. The notion which the Romans, not so muchby their thought or speech, but by their acts, added to the world'sstock was that of a peace secured and maintained by the just operationthroughout the civilized world of a system of law the same for all, issuing from and enforced by a single central power. 

The notion is at least grandiose, and so stated seems almost too highand difficult for human nature to realize. Yet for centuries it wasapplied, and applied with marvellous success. Nor in spite of itsapparent failure in the end has the idea of it ceased to dominate men'sminds. I do not speak here of the transitory imitation of it by theCarolingians or of the attempt at the restitution or copy of it in thespiritual sphere of the Church, or again of its phantom survival in theghostly form of the Holy Roman Empire. But I would point to the way inwhich it still--in thought--controls us when without essentialalteration of the idea we transfer its application to the nation andstill look for the secret of _its_ peace and strength in an organizationof all its activities under a law proceeding from and enforced by asovereign will resident somewhere within its structure, a law demandingand receiving obedience from all loyal subjects. Nor is the hope extinctthat the way to a wider or world-wide peace lies through the restorationof a similar system in its application to international relations. Though I am unable to share this hope (or indeed the desire that itsrealization should be endeavoured after), I find it impossible to judgethat it has yet lost its hold on men's minds or is without elements ofimportance in view of our present problem and perplexity. 

It is perhaps more profitable to ask what we have to learn from thehistory both of its success and its failure. Of its success for a timeand long time in the history of Europe there can be no doubt, and on itspermanent effects rests much of what is most sound and stable in thecivilization of modern Europe. Peace there was because of it, and againbecause of it and what it accomplished Europe resisted and survivedinternal disorder and barbarian invasion so that, as I said above, whatstill exists as a united or allied Europe is the Roman or Romanizedworld. Roman ideas and ideals still hold it together, although the RomanEmpire has declined and fallen, and no other Empire has risen or, Itrust, may rise, upon its ruins. It is not my business to analyse thecauses of that decline and fall, though a few words on them may not beout of place. In the first place it declined and fell because those whoadministered ignored its economic substructure, paying no attention tothe causes which were undermining its very material basis, or theenormous suffering which the neglect and consequent disorganization ofthat entailed. In the second, and partly because of that neglect, theydid not sufficiently strengthen its defences against external attack; Ido not so much mean in the way of remissness in military preparation asby a surcease of the former policy of bringing their barbarous orsemi-civilized neighbours into the higher system, and so extending therange of civilization. It is perhaps fanciful to suggest that we are nowsuffering the penalty of the failure of Rome to Romanize, that is tosay, to civilize their Teutonic neighbours. In the third place, theyerred by not recognizing and taking account of new forces which in theway of ideas were entering into the conception of civilized life, theideas which we mass together under the head of feudalism, the idea ofnationality. Under the influence of the one and the other the ideal of asingle world State, with a uniform or rigid system of laws resting upona sovereign will, one and indivisible, dissolved, or at least enteredupon dissolution, approving itself unadapted or unadaptable to the needsof a novel and immensely more complex situation of the world. No meretinkering at it did or could suffice to save it; and the organization ofEurope based upon it collapsed. 

The Revolution of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of thenineteenth centuries was in many ways the last attempt to reinstate it, and failure to do so pronounced its doom. We cannot now look forward tothe reorganization of civilized Europe on the model of the Roman Empireor of an Empire at all, and the more definitely formulated hope ofsalvation by the erection or re-erection of an international system oflaw in any real sense seems to me an unsubstantial dream--theadministration of a belated nostrum for our disease, not a panacea. Notthat way do the lessons of history point. The Roman ideal must betransformed, must be reborn, if it is not to lead our anticipations andour actions wholly astray. No more in the political or secular spherethan in the spiritual or ecclesiastical is 'Romanism' a possible guideto the reconstruction of modern European civilization. For that far toomuch water (and blood) has run under the bridge. Yet the spirit whichgave it life and efficacy is immortal, and the study of the secret ofits vitality and power is a necessity for us. In the work ofreconstruction we must learn from the Romans the value of System andOrder, of Justice and Law, as from Greece we have ever afresh to learnthe love of Freedom and Truth. 

The Greeks have given us the idea of a life worth living whichcivilization renders possible, but does not directly produce. This lifein its essential features they rightly conceived, but its content theyfailed to articulate, and whether because of that or not, they failed torealize its indispensable conditions, material, economic, political, &c. The Romans did more effectively realize this, but they lost sight of theends in the means, securing a peace, a comfort, an ease, a leisure ofwhich they made no particularly valuable use. It has been said that atno time in the world's history were civilized men so happy as under theRoman Empire. It might be said with greater truth that at no time werecivilized men so unhappy, for the happiness that was theirs was empty, mere dead-sea fruit, dust and ashes in the mouth; a very Death in Life. Life was without savour, and they turned away from it in weariness anddisgust and despair, seeking and finding in Philosophy--the fruits ofreflection upon life--nothing better than consolation for the wounds anddisillusions of life. Thus those who gave their lives to Rome lostheart, and retreating into themselves found nothing there but solitudeand emptiness. Civilization was but the husk of a life that had fled. 

Nevertheless, as it is necessary for the living body to deposit a bonyskeleton and for the living soul to harden its impulses into habits andstiffen its aspirations into rules and plans of action, so civilizationas a whole must create within and around it a structure of ordered andsystematic thought and action within which the higher forces nowrecognized and disengaged may be all the more free to do their work. Without such a mechanical or apparently unspiritual basis these forcescan only work fugitively, erratically, and so ineffectively, as they didin the Greek world. To the prosaic business of creating or recreatingand maintaining in being such a structure a large part of our energiesmust be devoted, and in all this from the Romans we have still much tolearn. If we decline to learn and digest this lesson, turning from suchconcernment in disgust or disdain, our lives will be lost in vaindreams, in idle longings and empty regrets; and the kingdom of Freedomand Truth will be taken from us and given to others who have known howto grow up and to face like men the hardships and hazards without whichit cannot be won or held. From the inspiring visions of these ideals wemust turn as we did when we and our world were Roman, to the serious andsober task of creating a political and legal structure on which theeternal spirit of European civilization can resume its work ofextending, deepening, enriching, the common life of Humanity. 

It seems as if we--the heirs of their experience--bound to face a moreappalling problem, are bankrupt, even of hopes, having lost both theideal of a life worth living on this earth and that of some large andcomplex organization rendering this life possible. But this is not so, for the forces which in Antiquity created and for long maintained acivilization at first desirable and then strong, are not spent. Stillthey make the Greco-Roman civilization which is ours a thing worthliving and dying for; still they hold us together in a unity and concorddeeper than ever plummet can sound, obscured but not destroyed by thepresent noise and confusion of battle. Still at heart we care--and notwe only but also our enemies and all neutrals benevolent ormalevolent--for the ends for which civilization exists, for the peaceand order and justice which are their necessary conditions: we stillhave minds to devise and wills to execute whatever is necessary to itsprogress. Still we are willing to learn of history and resolved tobetter its instruction, to know ourselves and our world and adjust ourideas and our acts to the situation in which we find ourselves. Thecivilized world has not lost heart or hope; and will not, so long as thedreams of its immortal youth and the plans of its immortal manhood arenot lost to its memory or passed beyond its retrospective reflection. 

 _Note_. The doctrine that all History is contemporary History has been best set forth by Benedetto Croce, of Naples, from whose works several expressions have here been borrowed, with a profound acknowledgement of indebtedness to him. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Hegel, _Philosophy of History_, Parts II and III (to be read not asphilosophy, but as history guided and enlightened by philosophy). Translation in Bohn's Library. 

Marvin, _The Living Past_. Clarendon Press. 

Adamson, _The Development of Greek Philosophy_. W. Blackwood. (For abrief but pregnant account consult Webb's _History of Philosophy. _ HomeUniversity Library. )

Butcher's _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius_ ('What we owe to Greece'). Macmillan. 

Murray's _Rise of the Greek Epic_. Clarendon Press. 

Warde Fowler's _Rome_. Home University Library. 

Bryce's _Holy Roman Empire_. Macmillan. 

IV

UNITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES[15]

 Ergo humanum genus bene se habet et optime, quando secundum quod potest Deo adsimilatur. Sed genus humanum maxime Deo adsimilatur quando maxime est unum; vera enim ratio unius in solo illo est. Propter quod scriptum est: 'Audi, Israel, Dominus Deus tuus unus est'. DANTE, _De Monarchia_, i. Viii. 

I

He who shuts his eyes to-day to make a mental picture of the world seesa globe in which the mass of Asia, the bulk of Africa, and the length ofAmerica vastly outweigh in the balance the straggling and sea-sowncontinent of Europe. He sees all manner of races, white and yellow, brown and black, toiling, like infinitesimal specks, in every manner ofway over many thousands of miles; and he knows that an infinite varietyof creeds and civilizations, of practices and beliefs--some immemoriallyold, some crudely new; some starkly savage, and some softlyhumane--diversify the hearts of a thousand million living beings. But ifwe would enter the Middle Ages, in that height and glory of theirachievement which extended from the middle of the eleventh to the end ofthe thirteenth century, we must contract our view abruptly. The knownworld of the twelfth century is a very much smaller world than ours, andit is a world of a vastly greater unity. It is a Mediterranean world;and 'Rome, the head of the world, rules the reins of the round globe'. From Rome the view may travel to the Sahara in the south; in the east tothe Euphrates, the Dniester, and the Vistula; in the north to the Soundand the Cattegat (though some, indeed, may have heard of Iceland), andin the west to the farther shores of Ireland and of Spain. Outside thesebounds there is something, at any rate to the east, but it is somethingshadowy and wavering, full of myth and fable. Inside these bounds thereis the clear light of a Christian Church, and the definite outline of asingle society, of which all are baptized members, and by which all areknit together in a single fellowship. 

Economically the world was as different from our own as it wasgeographically. Money, if not unknown, was for the most part unused. Ithad drifted eastwards, in the latter days of the Roman Empire, topurchase silks and spices; and it had never returned. From the days ofDiocletian, society had been thrown back on an economy in kind. Taxestook the form either of payments of personal service or of quotas ofproduce: rents were paid either in labour or in food. The presence ofmoney means a richly articulated society, infinitely differentiated bydivision of labour, and infinitely connected by a consequent nexus ofexchange. The society of the Middle Ages was not richly articulated. There were merchants and artisans in the towns; but the great bulk ofthe population lived in country villages, and gained subsistencedirectly from the soil. Each village was practically self-sufficing; atthe most it imported commodities like iron and salt; for the rest, itdrew on itself and its own resources. This produced at once a greatuniformity and a great isolation. There was a great uniformity, becausemost men lived the same grey, quiet life of agriculture. The peasantryof Europe, in these days when most men were peasants, lived in the sameway, under the same custom of the manor, from Berwick to Carcassonne, and from Carcassonne to Magdeburg. But there was also a great isolation. Men were tied to their manors; and the men of King's Ripton could eventalk of the 'nation' of their village. If they were not tied byconditions of status and the legal rights of their lord, they were stilltied, none the less, by the want of any alternative life. There weretowns indeed; but towns were themselves very largely agricultural--thehomes of _summa rusticitas_--and what industry and commerce theypractised was the perquisite and prerogative of local guilds. Custom wasking of all things, and custom had assorted men in compartments in whichthey generally stayed. The kaleidoscopic coming and going of a societybased on monetary exchanges--its speedy riches and speedy bankruptcies, its embarrassment of alternative careers all open to talents--these wereunthought and undreamed of. The same uniformity and the same isolationmarked also, if in a less degree, the knightly class which followed theprofession of arms. A common feudal system, if we can call that a systemwhich was essentially unsystematic, reigned over the whole of WesternEurope, and, when Western Europe went crusading into Syria, establisheditself in Syria. Historians have tried to establish distinctions betweenthe feudalism of one country and that of another--between the feudalismof England, for instance, and that of France. It is generally heldnowadays that they have failed to establish the distinction. A fief inEngland was uniform with a fief in France, as a manor in one country wasuniform with manors in other countries, and a town in one country withtowns in others. 'One cannot establish a line of demarcation betweenGerman and French towns, ' says a famous Belgian historian, 'just as onecannot distinguish between French and German feudalism. '[16] Thehistorian of the economic and institutional life of the Middle Ageswill err unless he proceeds on the assumption of its general uniformity. But the uniformity of the fief, like that of the manor and the town, wascompatible with much isolation. Each fief was a centre of local life anda home of local custom. The members of the feudal class lived, for themost part, local and isolated lives. Fighting, indeed, would bring themtogether; but when the 'season' was over, and the forty days of servicewere done, life ran back to its old ruts in the manor-hall, and if someof the summer was spent in company, much of the winter was spent inisolation. On a society of this order--stable, customary, uniform, withits thousands of isolated centres--the Church descended with aquickening inspiration and a permeating unity. Most of us find a largeplay for our minds to-day in the competition of economics or thestruggles of politics. The life of the mind was opened to the MiddleAges by the hands of the Church. We may almost say that there was anexact antithesis between those days and these latter days, if it werenot that exact antitheses never occur outside the world of logic. But itis as nearly true as are most antitheses that while our modern world iscuriously knit together by the economic bonds of international finance, and yet sadly divided (and never more sadly than to-day) by the clash ofdifferent national cultures and different creeds, the mediaeval world, sundered as it was economically into separate manors and separate towns, each leading a self-sufficing life on its own account, was yet linkedtogether by unity of culture and unity of faith. It had a single mind, and many pockets. We have a single pocket, and many minds. That is whythe wits of many nowadays will persist in going wool-gathering into theMiddle Ages, to find a comfort which they cannot draw from the goldenage of international finance. 

But retrogression was never yet the way of progress. It is probable, for instance, that the sanitation of the Middle Ages was veryinadequate, and their meals sadly indigestible; and it would be uselessto provoke a revolt of the nose and the stomach in order to satisfy acraving of the mind. An uncritical mediaevalism is the child ofignorance of the Middle Ages. Sick of vaunting national cultures, we mayrecur to an age in which they had not yet been born--the age of a singleand international culture; but we must remember, all the same, that thestrength of the Middle Ages was rooted in weakness. They were on a lowstage of economic development; and it was precisely because they were ona low stage of economic development that they found it so easy tobelieve in the unity of civilization. Unity of a sort is easy when thereare few factors to be united; it is more difficult, and it is a higherthing, when it is a synthesis of many different elements. The MiddleAges had not attained a national economy: their economy was at the bestmunicipal, and for the most part only parochial. A national economy hasa higher economic value than a municipal or parochial economy, becauseit means the production of a greater number of utilities at a less cost, and a richer and fuller life of the mind, with more varied activitiesand more intricate connexions. A national economy could only developalong with--perhaps we may say it could only develop through--a nationalsystem of politics; and the national State, which is with us to-day, andwith some of whose works we are discontented, was a necessary conditionof economic progress. With the coming of the national State the facileinternationalism of the Middle Ages had to disappear; and as economicsand politics ran into national channels, the life of the spirit, hitherto an international life, suffered the same change, and nationalreligions, if such a thing be not a contradiction in terms, were dulyborn. But a national economy, a national State, a national Church wereall things unknown to the Middle Ages. Its economy was a villageeconomy: its mental culture was an international culture bestowed by auniversal Church (a village culture there could not be, and with auniversal Church the only possible culture was necessarilyinternational); while, as for its politics, they were something betwixtand between--sometimes parochial, when a local feudal lord drew tohimself sovereignty; sometimes national, when a strong king arose inIsrael; and sometimes, under a Charlemagne, almost international. 

A consideration of the linguistic factor may help to throw light on thepoint in question. Here again we may trace the same isolation and thesame uniformity which we have also seen in the world of economics. Therewas an infinity of dialects, but a paucity of languages, in the MiddleAges. One is told that to-day there are dialects in the Bight ofHeligoland and among the Faroes which are peculiar to a single family. Something of the same sort must have existed in the Middle Ages. Just asthere were local customs of the manor, the town, and the fief, theremust have been local dialects of villages and even of hamlets. But hereagain isolation was compatible with uniformity. There were perhaps onlytwo languages of any general vogue in the central epoch of the MiddleAges, and they were confined by no national frontiers. First there wasLatin, the language of the Church, and since learning belonged to theChurch, the language of learning. Scholars used the same language inOxford and Prague, in Paris and Bologna; and within the confines ofLatin Christianity scholarship was an undivided unity. Besides Latin theonly other language of any general vogue in the middle of the MiddleAges was vulgar Latin, or Romance. To Dante, writing at the close ofthe thirteenth century, Romance was still one _idioma_--even if it were_trifarium_, according as its 'yes' was _oïl_, or _oc_, or _sì_. [17] Ofthe three branches of this _idioma_, that of _oïl_, or Northern France, was easily predominant. The Norman conquest of England carried it toLondon: the Norman conquest of Sicily carried it to Palermo: theCrusades carried it to Jerusalem. With it you might have travelled mostof the mediaeval world from end to end. It was the language of courts;it was the language of chansons; it was the language of all lay culture. It was the language of England, France, and Italy; and St. Francishimself had delighted in his youth in the literature which it enshrined. 

The linguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was thus Latin, either inits classical or in its vulgar form. There were of course otherlanguages, and some of these had no small vogue. Just before the periodof which we are treating--the period which extends from 1050 to1300--Icelandic had a wide scope. It might have been heard not only inScandinavia and the Northern Isles, but in a great part of the BritishIslands, in Normandy, in Russia--along the river-road that ran toConstantinople--and in Constantinople itself. But the fact remains thatthe linguistic basis of mediaeval thought and literature was a Latinbasis. The Romance University of Paris was the capital of learning: theRomance tongue of Northern France was the tongue of society. And as thelinguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was Romance, so, too, wasmediaeval civilization itself. The genius of Latin Christianity was thesource of its inspiration: the spirit of the Romance peoples was thebreath of its being. The souvenir of the old Roman Empire provided thescheme of its political ideas; and the Holy Roman Empire, if a religiousconsecration had given it a new sanctity, was Roman still. Yet theirruption of the Teutons into the Empire had left its mark; and theemperor of the Middle Ages was always of Teutonic stock. It was perhapsat this point that the unity of the mediaeval scheme betrayed a fatalflaw. It would be futile to urge that the dualism which showed itself inthe struggles of papacy and empire had primarily, or even to anyconsiderable extent, a racial basis. Those struggles are struggles ofprinciples rather than of races; they are contentions between a secularand a clerical view of life, rather than between the genius of Rome andthe genius of Germany. Hildebrand stood for a free Church--a Church freefrom secular power because it was controlled by the papacy. Henry IVstood for the right of the secular power to use the clergy for purposesof secular government, and to control the episcopacy as one of theorgans of secular administration. But the fact remains that a schemewhich rested on a Teutonic emperor and a Roman pontiff was already athing internally discordant, before these other and deeper dissensionsappeared to increase the discord. 

Such were the bases on which the unity of mediaeval civilization had todepend. There was a contracted world, which men could regard as a unity, with a single centre of coherence. There was a low stage of economicdevelopment, which on the one hand meant a general uniformity of life, in fief and manor and town, and on the other hand meant a localisolation, that needed, and in the unity of the Church found, somemethod of unification. With many varieties of dialect, there was yet ageneral identity of language, which made possible the development, andfostered the dissemination, of a single and identical culture. Nationalism, whether as an economic development, or as a way of life anda mode of the human spirit, was as yet practically unknown. Races mightdisagree; classes might quarrel; kings might fight; there was hardlyever a national conflict in the proper sense of the word. The mediaevallines of division, it is often said, were horizontal rather thanvertical. There were different estates rather than different states. Thefeudal class was homogeneous throughout Western Europe: the clericalclass was a single corporation through all the extent of LatinChristianity; and the peasantry and the townsfolk of England were verylittle different from the peasantry and the townsfolk of France. We haveto think of a general European system of estates rather than of anybalance of rival powers. 

II

The unity which rested on these bases begins to appear, as a reality andnot only an idea, about the middle of the eleventh century, and laststill the end of the thirteenth. That unity, as we have seen, wasessentially ecclesiastical. It was the product of the Church: we mayalmost say that it was the Church. Before 1050 the Catholic Church, however universal in theory, had hardly been universal in fact. Theperiod of the Frankish, the Saxon, and the early Salian emperors hadbeen a period of what German writers call the _Landeskirche_. The powerof the Bishop of Rome had not yet been fully established; and the greatchurches of Reims and Mainz and Milan were practically independentcentres. Independent of the papacy, they were not independent of the layrulers within whose dominions they lay. On the contrary, their memberswere deeply engaged in lay activities; they were landlords, feudatories, and officials in their various countries. In the face of these facts, the Gregorian movement of the eleventh century pursues two closelyinterconnected objects. It aims at asserting the universal primacy ofthe papacy; it aims at vindicating the freedom of the clergy from allsecular power. The one aim is a means to the other: the pope cannot beuniversal primate, unless the clergy he controls are free from secularcontrol; and the clergy cannot be free from secular control, unless theuniversal primacy of the papacy effects their liberation. Gregorianismwins a great if not a thorough triumph. It establishes the theory, andin a very large measure the practice, of ecclesiastical unity. The daysof the _Landeskirche_ are numbered: the days of the Church Universalunder the universal primacy of Rome are begun. But when the universalityof the Church has once been established in point of extension, it beginsto be also asserted in point of intensity. Once ubiquitous, the papacyseeks to be omnicompetent. Depositary of the truth, and only depositaryof the truth, by divine revelation, the Church, under the guidance ofthe papacy, seeks to realize the truth in every reach of life, and tocontrol, in the light of Christian principle, every play of humanactivity. Learning and education, trade and commerce, war and peace, areall to be drawn into her orbit. By the application of Christianprinciple a great synthesis of human life is to be achieved, and the_lex Christi_ is to be made a _lex animata in terris_. 

This was the greatest ambition that has ever been cherished. It meantnothing less than the establishment of a _civitas Dei_ on earth. Andthis kingdom of God was to be very different from that of which St. Augustine had written. His city of God was neither the actual Church northe actual State, nor a fusion of both. It was a spiritual society ofthe predestined faithful, and, as such, thoroughly distinct from theState and secular society. The city of God which the great mediaevalpopes were seeking to establish was a city of this world, if not of thisworld only. It was a fusion of the actual Church, reformed by papaldirection and governed by papal control, with actual lay society, similarly reformed and similarly governed. Logically this meant atheocracy, and the bull of Boniface VIII, by which he claimed that everyhuman creature was subject to the Roman pontiff, was its necessaryoutcome. But a theocracy was only a means, and a means that was nevergreatly emphasized in the best days of the papacy. It was the end thatmattered; and the end was the moulding of human life into conformitywith divine truth. The end may appear fantastic, unless one remembersthe plenitude of means which stood at the command of the mediaevalChurch. The seven sacraments had become the core of her organization. Central among the seven stood the sacrament of the Mass, in which breadand wine were transubstantiated into the divine body and blood of ourLord. By that sacrament men could touch God; and by its mediation thebeliever met the supreme object of his belief. Only the priest couldcelebrate the great mystery; and only those who were fit could beadmitted by him to participation. The sacrament of penance, which becamethe antechamber, as it were, to the Mass, enabled the priest todetermine the terms of admission. Outside the sacraments stood theChurch courts, exercising a large measure of ethical and religiousdiscipline over all Christians; and in reserve, most terrible of allweapons, were the powers of excommunication and interdict, which couldshut men and cities from the rites of the Church and the presence of theLord. Who shall say, remembering these things, that the aims of themediaeval Church were visionary or impracticable?

For a time, and in some measure, they were actually accomplished. Let uslook at each estate in turn, and measure the accomplishment--speakingfirst of the knightly world, and the Church's control of war and peace;then of the world of the commons, and the Church's control of trade andcommerce; and last of the clerical world and the Church's control oflearning and education. 

The control of war and peace was a steady aim of the Church from thebeginning of the eleventh century. The evil of feudalism was itspropensity to private war. To cure that evil the Church invented theTruce of God. The Truce was a diocesan matter. The 'form' of Truce wasenacted in a diocesan assembly, and the people of the diocese formed a_communitas pacis_ for its enforcement. There was no attempt to put anabsolute stop to private war; the Truce was only directed to alimitation of the times and seasons in which feuds could be waged, and adefinition of the persons who were to be exempted from their menace. Butfrom seeking to limit the fighting instinct of a feudal society, theChurch soon rose to the idea of enlisting that instinct under her ownbanner and directing it to her own ends. So arose chivalry, which, likemost of the institutions of the Middle Ages, was the invention of theChurch. Chivalry was the consecration of the fighting instinct to thedefence of the widow, the fatherless, and the oppressed; and by thebeginning of the eleventh century liturgies already contain the form ofreligious service by which neophytes were initiated into knighthood. This early and religious form of chivalry (there was a later and layform, invented by troubadour and trouvère, which was chiefly concernedwith the rules for the loves of knights and ladies) culminated in theCrusades. In the Crusades we touch perhaps the most typical expressionof the mediaeval spirit. Here we may see the clergy moulding intoconformity with Christian principle the apparently unpromising andintractable stuff of feudal pugnacity: here we may see the papacyasserting its primacy of a united Europe by gathering Christian mentogether for the common purpose of carrying the flag of their faith tothe grave of their Redeemer. Here the permeating influence of Christianrevelation may be seen attempting to permeate even foreign policy (forwhat are the Crusades but the foreign policy of a Christian commonwealthcontrolled and directed by the papacy?); and here again even theinstinct for colonial expansion, so often the root of desperate wars, was brought into line with the unity of all nations in Christ, and madeto serve the cause of Him 'in whom alone is to be found the true natureof the One'. 

There is another aspect of the clerical control of peace and war in theinterest of Christian unity which must not be forgotten. The papacysought to become an international tribunal. The need for such a tribunalwas as much a mediaeval as it is a modern commonplace. Dante, who soughtto vindicate for the emperor, rather than for the pope, the position andpower of an international judge, has started the argument in famouswords. 'Between any two princes, of whom the one is in no way subject tothe other, disputes may arise, either by their own fault, or by that oftheir subjects. Judgement must therefore be given between them. Andsince neither can have cognizance of the other, because neither issubject to the other, there must be a third of ampler jurisdiction, tocontrol both by the ambit of his power. '[18] Such ampler jurisdiction, which might indeed be claimed for the emperor, but which he had neverthe power to exercise, was both claimed and exercised by the papacy. Thepapacy, which sought to enforce the Christian canon of conduct in everyreach of life and every sphere of activity, would never admit thatdisputes between sovereign princes lay outside the rule of that canon. Innocent III, in a letter to the French bishops defending his claim toarbitrate between France and England, stands very far from any suchadmission. 'It belongs to our office', he argues, 'to correct allChristian men for every mortal sin, and if they despise correction, tocoerce them by ecclesiastical censure. And if any shall say, that kingsmust be treated in one way, and other men in another, we appeal inanswer to the law of God, wherein it is written, "Ye shall judge thegreat as the small, and there shall be no acceptance of persons amongyou. " But if it is ours to proceed against criminal sin, we areespecially bound so to do when we find a sin against peace. '[19] Here, in these words of Innocent, the clerical claim to control of peace andwar touches its highest point. In the name of a Christian principle, permeating all things, and reducing all things to unity, the dreadarbitrament of war is itself to be submitted to a higher and finerarbitration. The claim was too high to be sustained or translated intoeffect. It is not too high to be admired. 

Nor was it altogether remote from the actual life of the day. Even tothe laity of the Middle Ages, war was not a mere conflict of powers, inwhich the strongest power must necessarily prevail. It was a conflict ofrights before a watching God of battles, in which the greatest rightcould be trusted to emerge victorious. War between States was analogousto the ordeal of battle between individuals: it was a legal way oftesting rights. Now ordeal by battle was a mode of procedure in courtsof law, and a mode of procedure whose conduct and control belonged tothe clergy. If, therefore, war between States is analogous to ordeal, itfollows, first, that it is a legal procedure which needs a high courtfor its interpretation (and what court could be more competent than thepapal curia?), and, next, that it is a matter which in its naturetouches the clergy. Such ideas were a natural basis for the Church'sattempt to control the issues of war and peace; and if we remember theseideas, we shall acquit the Church of any impracticable quixotism. 

The attempt to control trade and commerce was no less lofty and no lessarduous. It is perhaps still easier to stop war than to stopcompetition; and yet the Church made the attempt. The Christian law oflove was set against the economic law of demand and supply. It wascanonical doctrine that the buyer should take no more, and the selleroffer no less, than the just price of a commodity--a price which wouldin practice depend on the cost of production. The rule for prices wasalso the rule for wages: the just wage was the natural complement of thejust price. The prohibition of usury and of the taking of interest wasanother factor in the same circle of ideas. If prices and wages are bothto be returns for work done, and returns of an exact equivalence, then, on the assumptions which the canonists made--that the usurer does nowork, and that his loan is unproductive of any new value--it necessarilyfollows that no return is due, or can be justly paid, for the use ofborrowed money. Work is the one title of all acquisition, and allacquisition should be in exact proportion to the amount of work done. This is the basic principle, and it is the principle of the Divine Law:_In sudore frontis tuae comedes panem tuum_. Once more, therefore, andonce more in an unpromising and intractable material, we find the Churchseeking to enforce the unity of the Christian principle and to reducethe Many to the One. In the same way, and from the same motive, thatprivate war was to be banished from the feudal class in the country, competition--the private war of commerce--was to be eliminated from thetrading classes in the towns. Nor was the attack on competition, anymore than the attack on war, so much of a forlorn hope as it may seem toa modern age. Even to-day, custom is still a force which checks theoperation of competition, and custom covered a far greater area in theMiddle Ages than it does to-day. The rent of land, whether paid inlabour or in kind, was a customary rent; and in every mediaevalcommunity the landed class was the majority. It was an easy transitionfrom fixed and customary rents to the fixing of just prices forcommodities and services. Lay sentiment supported clerical principle. Guilds compelled their members to sell commodities at a level price, andin a spirit of collectivism endeavoured to prevent the making of cornersand the practice of undercutting. Governments refused to recognize the'laws' of demand and supply, and sought, by Statutes of Labourers, toforce masters to give, and workman to receive, no more and no less thana 'just' and proper wage. 

It was not only by the regulation of trade and commerce that the Churchsought to penetrate the life of the towns. The friars made their homesin the towns in the thirteenth century; and the activity of thefriars--Franciscan and Dominican, Austin and Carmelite--enabled theChurch to exercise an influence on municipal life no less far-reachingthan that which she sought to exert on the feudal classes. Towns becametrustees of property for the use of the mendicant orders; and the ordersof Tertiaries, which flourished among them, enabled the townsfolk toattach themselves to religious societies without quitting the pursuitsof lay life. A mediaeval town--with its trade and commerce regulated, however imperfectly, by Christian principle; with its town councilacting as trustee for religious orders; and with its members attached asTertiaries to those orders--might be regarded as something of a type ofChristian society; and St. Thomas, partly under the influence of theseconditions, if partly also under the influence of the Aristotelianphilosophy of the [Greek: polis], is led to find in the life of the townthe closest approach to the ethics of Christianity. 

The control of learning and education by the Church is the most peculiarand essential aspect of her activity. The control of war and peace was amatter of guiding the estate of the baronage; the control of trade andcommerce was a way of directing the estate of the commons; but thecontrol of learning and education was nothing more nor less than theChurch's guidance of herself and her direction of her own estate. _Studium_ may be distinguished from _sacerdotium_ by mediaeval writers;but the students of a mediaeval university are all 'clergy', and thecurricula of mediaeval universities are essentially clerical. Allknowledge, it is true, falls within their scope; but every branch ofknowledge, from dialectic to astronomy, is studied from the same angle, and for the same object--_ad maiorem Dei gloriam_. Here, as elsewhere, the penetrating and assimilative genius of the Church moulded andinformed a matter which was not, in its nature, easily receptive of aclerical impression. The whole accumulated store of the lay learning ofthe ages--geometry, astronomy, and natural science; grammar andrhetoric; logic and metaphysics--this was the matter to be moulded andthe stuff to be permeated; and on this stuff St. Thomas wrought thegreatest miracle of genuine alchemy which is anywhere to be found in theannals of learning. 

The learning which the Church had to transform was essentially thelearning of the Hellenic world. Created by the centuries of nimble andinventive thought which lie between the time of Thales and that ofHipparchus, this learning had been systematized into a _corpusscientiae_ during that age of Greek scholasticism which generally goesby the name of Hellenistic. In its systematized Hellenistic form, it hadbeen received by the Roman world, and had become the culture of theRoman Empire. By writers ranging from Ptolemy to Boethius the body ofall known knowledge had been arranged in a digest or series of pandects;and along with the legal codification of Justinian it had been handed tothe Christian Church as the heritage of the ancient world. The attitudeof the Church to that heritage was for long unfixed and uncertain. Thelogic, and still more the metaphysics, of Aristotle were not the mostcomfortable of neighbours to the new body of Christian revelationcommitted to the Church's keeping. In the hand of Berengar of Tours themethods of Greek logic proved a corrosive to the received doctrine ofthe Mass. In the hands of Abelard, in the _Sic et Non_, they served tosuggest the need of criticism of the text of Christian tradition. Ifunity was to be preserved, a bridge must be built between the secularscience of the Greeks and the religious faith of the Church. In thethirteenth century that bridge was built. Aristotle was reconciled withSt. Augustine; the _Organon_, the _Ethics_, and the _Politics_ wereincorporated in the body of Christian culture; and the mediaevalinstinct for unification celebrated its greatest and perhaps its mostarduous triumph. 

The thirteenth century thus witnessed a unity of civilization alike as astructure of life and as a content of the human mind. On the one hand, there rose a single governing scheme of society, which culminated in theuniversal primacy of Rome and the Roman pontiff. On the other hand, setin this scheme, and contained in this structure, there was a singlestuff of thought, directed to the manifestation of the eternal glory ofGod. The framework we may chiefly ascribe to Gregory VII; the content toSt. Thomas Aquinas. But the whole resultant unity is less the product ofgreat personalities than of a common instinct and a common conviction. Men saw the world _sub specie unitatis_; and its kaleidoscopic varietywas insensibly focused into a single scheme under the stress of theirvision. The heavens showed forth the glory of God, and the firmamentdeclared His handiwork. Zoology became, like everything else, a willingservant of Christianity; and _bestiaria moralizata_ were written toshow how all beasts were made for an ensample, and served for a type, of the one and only truth. All things, indeed, were types and allegoriesto this way of thinking; and just as every text in the Bible was anallegory to mediaeval interpretation, so all things in the world ofcreation, animate and inanimate, the jewel with its 'virtue' as well asthe beast with its 'moral', became allegories and parables of heavenlymeanings. Thus the world of perception became unreal, that it might betransmuted into the real world of faith; and symbolism like that of Hughof St. Victor dominated men's thought, making all things (like the Massitself, if in a less degree) into _signa rei sacrae_. 

The unity of knowledge was thus purchased at a price. Things must ceaseto be studied in themselves, and must be allegorized into types, inorder that they might be reduced to a unity. Perhaps the purchase ofunity on terms such as these is a bad bargain; and it is at any rateobvious that in such an atmosphere scientific thought will not flourish, or man learn to adjust himself readily to the laws of his environment. From the standpoint of natural science we may readily condemn the MiddleAges and all their works; and we may prefer a single _Opus_ of RogerBacon to the whole of the _Summa_ of St. Thomas. But it is necessary tojudge an age which was destitute of natural science by some othercriterion than that of science; nor must we hasten to say that theMiddle Ages found the Universal so easily, because they ignored theParticular so absolutely. The truth is, that though mediaeval thinkersknew far more of the writings of Aristotle than they did of those ofPlato, they were none the less far better Platonists than they wereAristotelians. If they had been better Aristotelians, they would havebeen better biologists; but as they were good Platonists, they had aconception of the purpose and system of human life in society, whichperhaps excuses all, and more than all, the defects of their biology. Any survey, however brief, of the political theory of the Middle Ageswill show at once its Platonic character and its incessant impulsetowards the achievement of unity. 

III

To mediaeval thought, as to Plato, the unity of society is an organicunity, in the sense that each member of society is an organ of the wholeto which he belongs, and discharges a function at once peculiar tohimself and necessary to the full life of the whole. Monasticism, sooften misrepresented, attains its true meaning in the light of thisconception. The monk is a necessary organ of Christian society, discharging his function of prayer and devotion for the benefit not ofhimself solely, or primarily, but rather of every member of thatsociety. He prays for the sins of the whole world, and by his prayer hecontributes to the realization of the end of the world, which is theattainment of salvation. In the same way the conception of a treasury ofmerits, afterwards perverted in the system of indulgences, belongs to anorganic theory and practice of society. The merits which Christ and thesaints have accumulated are a fund for the use of the whole of Christiansociety, a fund on which any member can draw for his own salvation, justbecause each is fitly joined and knit together with all the rest in asingle body for the attainment of a single purpose. But we need not takeisolated instances of the Platonism of mediaeval thought. The wholebasic conception of a system of estates, which recurs everywhere inmediaeval life, is a Platonic conception. The estates of clergy, baronage, and commons are the Platonic classes of guardians, auxiliaries, and farmers. The Platonic creed of [Greek: to autonprattein] ('Do thine own duty') is the Christian creed of 'doing myduty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call me'. TheMiddle Ages are full of a spontaneous Platonism, and inspired by an_anima naturaliter Platonica_. The control which the mediaeval clergyexercised over Christian society in the light of divine revelationrepeats the control which the guardians of Plato were to exercise overcivic society in the light of the Idea of the Good. The communism of themediaeval monastery is reminiscent of the communism of the Platonicbarracks. And if there are differences between the society imagined byPlato and the society envisaged by the mediaeval Church, thesedifferences only show that the mediaeval Church was trying to raisePlatonism to a higher power, and to do so in the light of conceptionswhich were themselves Greek, though they belonged to a Greece posteriorto the days of Plato. These conceptions--which were cherished by Stoicthinkers; which penetrated into Roman Law; and which from Roman Lawflowed into the teaching and theory of the early fathers of theChurch--are mainly two. One is the conception of human equality; theother, and correlative, conception is that of a single society of allthe human race. The equality of men, and the universality of the city ofGod in which they are all contained, are conceptions which were no lesspresent to Marcus Aurelius than they were to St. Augustine. They areconceptions which made the instinctive Platonism of the mediaeval Churcheven more soaring than that of Plato. While the Republic of Plato hadhalted at the stage of a civic society, the _respublica Christiana_ ofthe Middle Ages rose to the height of a single _humana civilitas_. WhilePlato had divided the men of his Republic into classes of gold andsilver and bronze, and had reserved the ecstasy of the aspect of thedivine Idea for a single class, the mediaeval Church opened the mysteryof the Mass and the glory of the fruition of God to all believers, and, if she believed in three estates, nevertheless gathered the three in onearound the common altar of the Redeemer. Serfdom might still remain, andfind tolerance, in the economic working of society; but in the Churchherself, assembled together for the intimate purposes of her own life, there was 'neither bond nor free'. 

The prevalence of Realism, which marks mediaeval metaphysics down to theend of the thirteenth century, is another Platonic inheritance, andanother impulse to unity. The Universal _is_, and is a veritable thing, in which the Particular shares, and acquires its substance by its degreeof sharing. The One transcends the Many; the unity of mankind is greaterthan the differences between men; and the university of mortal men, asOckham writes, is one community. If there be thus one community, and oneonly, some negative results follow, which have their importance. In thefirst place, we can hardly say that the Middle Ages have any conceptionof the State. The notion of the State involves plurality; but pluralityis _ex hypothesi_ not to be found. The notion of the State furtherinvolves sovereignty, in the sense of final and complete control of itsmembers by each of a number of societies. But this, again, is _exhypothesi_ not to be found. There is one final control, and one only, inthe mediaeval system--the control of Christian principle, exerted in thelast resort, and exerted everywhere, without respect of persons, by theruling vicar of Christ. But if plurality and sovereignty thus disappearfrom our political philosophy, we need a new orientation of all ourtheory. We must forget to speak of nations. We must forget, as probablymany of us would be very glad to forget, the claims of nationalcultures, each pretending to be a complete satisfaction and fulfilmentof the national mind; and we must remember, with Dante, that culture(which he called 'civility') is the common possession of Christianhumanity. We must even forget, to some extent, the existence ofdifferent national laws. It is true that mediaeval theory admitted thefact of customary law, which varied from place to place. But thiscustomary law was hardly national: it varied not only from country tocountry, but also from fief to fief, and even from manor to manor. Itwas too multiform to be national, and too infinitely various to squarewith political boundaries. Nor was customary law, in mediaeval theory, anything of the nature of an ultimate command. Transcending all customs, and supreme over all enactments, rose the sovereign majesty of naturallaw, which is one and indivisible, and runs through all creation. 'Allcustom, ' writes Gratian, the great canonist, 'and all written law, thatare adverse to natural law, are to be counted null and void. ' Here, inthis conception of a natural law upholding all creation, we may findonce more a Stoic legacy to the Christian Church. 'Men ought not to livein separate cities, distinguished one from another by different systemsof justice'--so Zeno the Stoic had taught--'but there should be one wayand order of life, like that of a single flock feeding on a commonpasture. ' Zeno, like St. Paul, came from Cilicia. [20] Like St. Paul, hetaught the doctrine of the one society, in which there was neither Jewnor Gentile, neither Greek nor barbarian. We shall not do wrong torecognize in his teaching, and in that of his school, one of thegreatest influences, outside the supreme and controlling influence ofthe Christian principle itself, which made for the dominance of the ideaof unity in mediaeval thought. 

Before we proceed to draw another negative conclusion from the principleof the one community, we must enter a brief caveat in regard to theconclusion which has just been drawn. We cannot altogether take away theState from the Middle Ages by a stroke of the pen and the sweep of aparadox. There were states in mediaeval Europe, and there were kings whoclaimed and exercised _imperium_. These things caused the theorists, andparticularly the Roman lawyers, no little trouble. It was difficult toreconcile the unity of the _imperium_ with the multiplicity of kings. Some had recourse to the theory of delegation, and this seems to be thetheory of the _De Monarchia_ of Dante. But there was one contemporary ofDante who said a wise thing, prophetic of the future. _Rex est in regnosuo_, wrote Bartolus of Sassoferrato, _imperator regni sui_. In thatsentence we may hear the cracking of the Middle Ages. When kings become'entire emperors of their realms' (the phrase was used in England byRichard II, and the imperial style was affected by Henry VIII), unitysoon prepares to fly out of the window. But she never entirely tookflight until the Reformation shattered the fabric of the Church, andmade kings into popes as well as emperors in their dominions. 

We may now turn to draw another conclusion from the mediaeval principleof unity. To-day the world recognizes, and has recognized for nearlyfour centuries, not only a distinction between States, but also adistinction between two societies in each State--the secular and thereligious. These two societies may have different laws (for instance, inthe matter of marriage), and conflicts of duties and of jurisdictionsmay easily arise in consequence. The State may permit what the Churchforbids; and in that case the citizen who is also a churchman mustnecessarily revolt against one or other of the societies to which hebelongs. The conflict between the two societies and the differentobligations which they impose was a conflict unknown to the Middle Ages. Kings might indeed be excommunicated, and in that event their subjectswould be compelled to decide whether they should disobey excommunicatedking or excommunicating pope. But that was only a conflict between twodifferent allegiances to two different authorities; it was not aconflict between two different memberships of two different societies. The conflict between the two societies--Church and State--was one whichcould hardly arise in the Middle Ages, because there was only a singlesociety, an undivided Christian commonwealth, which was at one and thesame time both Church and State. Because there was only one society, baptism counted as admission both to churchmanship and to citizenship, which were one thing, and one only, in the Christian commonwealth; andfor the same reason excommunication, which shut the offender from allreligious life, excluded him equally and by the same act from everycivil right. The excommunicated person could not enter either the Churchor the law court; could not receive either the eucharist or a legacy;could not own either a cure of souls or an acre of soil. Civil right andreligious status implied one another; and not only was _extra ecclesiamnulla salus_ a true saying, but _extra ecclesiam nullum ius_ would alsobe very near the truth. Here again is a reason for saying that the Stateas such can hardly be traced in the Middle Ages. The State is anorganization of secular life. Even if it goes beyond its elementarypurpose of security for person and property, and devotes itself tospiritual purposes, it is concerned with the development of the spiritin its mortal existence, and confined to the expansion of the mind inthe bounds of a mortal society. The Middle Ages thought more ofsalvation than of security, and more of the eternal society of all thefaithful, united together in Christ their Head, than of any passingsociety of this world only. They could recognize kings, who bore thesword for the sake of security, and did justice in virtue of theiranointing. But kings were not, to their thinking, the heads of secularsocieties. They were agents of the one divine commonwealth--defendersof the Faith, who wielded the secular sword for the furtherance of thepurposes of God. Thus there was one society, if there were two orders ofministering agents; and thus, though _regnum_ and _sacerdotium_ might bedistinguished, the State and the Church could not be divided. Stephen ofTournai, a canonist of the twelfth century, recognizes the two powers;but he only knows one society, under one king. That society is theChurch: that king is Christ. 

Under conditions such as these--with the plurality of Statesunrecognized by theory, even if it existed in practice, and withdistinction between State and Church unknown and unenforced--we maytruly say with a German writer, whose name I should like to mention_honoris causa_, Professor Tröltsch, that 'there was no feeling for theState; no common and uniform dependence on a central power; noomnicompetent sovereignty; no equal pressure of a public civil law; noabstract basis of association in formal and legal rules--or at any rate, so far as anything of the sort was present, it was a matter only for theChurch, and in no wise for the State'. [21] So far as social life wasconsciously articulated in a scheme, the achievement was that of theclergy, and the scheme was that of the Church. The interdependencies andassociations of lay life--kingdoms and fiefs and manors--were onlypersonal groupings, based on personal sentiments of loyalty andunconscious elements of custom. A mixture of uniformity and isolation, as we have seen, was the characteristic of these groupings: they were atonce very like one another, throughout the extent of Western Europe, and(except for their connexion in a common membership of the ChurchUniversal) very much separated from one another. But with one at anyrate of these groupings--the kingdom, which in its day was to become themodern State--the future lay; and we shall perhaps end our inquiry mostfitly by a brief review of the lines of its future development. 

IV

The development of the kingdom into the State was largely the work ofthe lawyers. The law is a tenacious profession, and in England at anyrate its members have exercised a large influence on politics from thetwelfth to the twentieth century--from the days of Glanville, thejusticiar of Henry II, to the days of Mr. Asquith, the prime minister ofGeorge V. It is perhaps in England that we may first see the germs ofthe modern State emerging to light under the fostering care of the royaljudges. Henry II is something of a sovereign: his judges formulate aseries of commands, largely in the shape of writs, which became thecommon law of the land; and in the Constitutions of Clarendon we mayalready see the distinction between Church and State beginning to beattempted. With a sovereign, a law, and a secular policy all present, wemay begin to suspect the presence of a State. In France also a similardevelopment, if somewhat later than the English, occurs at acomparatively early date. By the end of the thirteenth century thelegists of Philippe le Bel have created something of _étatisme_ in theirmaster's dominions. The king's court begins to rule the land; and proudof its young strength it enters the lists against Boniface VIII, thegreat prophet of the Church Universal, who proclaimed that every humancreature was subject to the Roman pontiff. The collapse of Boniface atAnagni in 1303 is the traditional date of the final defeat of themediaeval papacy. Everywhere, indeed, the tide seemed on the turn at theclose of the thirteenth century. The Crusades ended with the fall ofAcre in 1291. The suppression of the great international order of theTemplars twenty years later marked a new leap of the encroaching waves. The new era of the modern national State might seem already to havebegun. 

But tides move slowly and by gradual inches. It needed two centuriesmore before the conditions in which the modern State could flourish hadbeen fully and finally established. Economic conditions had to change--aprocess always gradual and slow; and a national economy based on moneyhad to replace the old local economy based on kind. Languages had to beformed, and local dialects had to be transformed into national andliterary forms, before national States could find the means ofutterance. The revival of learning had to challenge the old clericalstructure of knowledge, and to set free the progress of secular science, before the minds of men could be readily receptive of new forms ofsocial structure and new modes of human activity. But by 1500 the workof preparation had been largely accomplished. The progress of discoveryhad enlarged the world immeasurably. The addition of America to the maphad spiritual effects which it is difficult to estimate in any properterms. If the old world of the Mediterranean regions could be thoughtinto a unity, it was more difficult to reduce to the One the new worldwhich swam into men's ken. Still more burdened with fate for the futuregenerations was the vast volume of commerce, necessarily conducted on anational basis, which the age of discoveries went to swell. Meanwhile, men had begun to think and to write in national languages. Already bythe reign of Richard II the dialect of the East Midlands, which wasspoken in the capital and the universities, had become a literarylanguage in which Chaucer and Wyclif had spoken to all the nation. Stillearlier had come the development of Italian, and a little more than acentury after the days of Wyclif, Luther was to give to Germany a commonspeech and a common Bible. It was little wonder that in such times theold unity of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages shivered intofragments, or that, side by side with a national language, theredeveloped--at any rate in England and in Germany--a national Church. Theunity of a common Roman Church and a common Romance culture was gone. _Cuius regio eius religio_. To each region its religion; and to eachnation, we may add, its national culture. The Renaissance may have begunas a cosmopolitan movement, and have found in Erasmus a cosmopolitanrepresentative. It ended in national literatures; and a hundred yearsafter Erasmus, Shakespeare was writing in England, Ariosto in Italy, andLope de Vega in Spain. 

In the sixteenth century the State was active and doing after its kind. It was engaged in war. France was fighting Spain: England was seeking tomaintain the balance: Turkey was engaged in the struggle. It is a worldwith which we are familiar--a world of national languages, nationalreligions, national cultures, national wars, with the national Statebehind all, upholding and sustaining every form of national activity. But unity was not entirely dead. Science might still transcend thebounds of nations, and a Grotius or Descartes, a Spinoza or a Leibniz, fill the European stage. Religion, which divided, might also unite; anda common Calvinism might bind together the Magyars of Hungary and theFrench of Geneva, the Dutchman and the Scot. Leyden in the seventeenthcentury could serve, as The Hague in the twentieth century may yetserve, if in a different way, for the meeting ground of the nations; itcould play the part of an international university, and provide a commoncentre of medical science and classical culture. But the old unity ofthe Middle Ages was gone--gone past recall. Between those days and thenew days lay a gulf which no voice or language could carry. Much waslost that could never be recovered; and if new gold was added to thecurrency of the spirit, new alloys were wrought into its substance. Itwould be a hard thing to find an agreed standard of measurement, whichshould cast the balance of our gain and loss, or determine whether thenew world was a better thing than the old. One will cry that the oldworld was the home of clericalism and obscurantism; and another will sayin his bitterness that the new world is the abode of two other evilspirits--nationalism and commercialism. One thing is perhaps certain. Wecannot, as far as human sight can discern, ever hope to reconstructunity on the old basis of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages. Yet need is upon us still--need urgent and importunate--to find someunity of the spirit in which we can all dwell together in peace. Somehave hoped for unity in the sphere of economics, and have thought thatinternational finance and commerce would build the foundations of aninternational polity. Their hopes have had to sleep, and a year of warhas shown that 'a synchronized bank-rate and reacting bourses' imply nofurther unity. Some again may hope for unity in the field of science, and may trust that the collaboration of the nations in the building ofthe common house of knowledge will lead to co-operation in the buildingof a greater mansion for the common society of civilized mankind. Butnationalism can pervert even knowledge to its own ends, turninganthropology to politics, and chemistry to war. There remains a lasthope--the hope of a common ethical unity, which, as moral convictionsslowly settle into law, may gradually grow concrete in a common publiclaw of the world. Even this hope can only be modest, but it is perhapsthe wisest and the surest of all our hopes. _Idem scire_ is a goodthing; but men of all nations may know the same thing, and yet remainstrangers one to another. _Idem velle idem nolle in re publica, ea demumfirma amicitia est_. The nations will at last attain firm friendshipone with another in the day when a common moral will controls the scopeof public things. And when they have attained this friendship, then on afar higher level of economic development and with an improvement by eachnation of its talent which is almost entirely new--they will have foundagain, if in a different medium, something of the unity of mediaevalcivilization. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

W. J. Ashley, _An Introduction to English Economic History_, vol. I, pt. 2, ch. 3; vol. I, pt. 2, ch. 6. Longmans. 

Lord Bryce, _The Holy Roman Empire_. Macmillan. 

A. J. And R. W. Carlyle, _Mediaeval Political Theory in the West_. W. Blackwood. 

H. W. C. Davis, _Mediaeval Europe_ (Home University Library). Williams &Norgate. 

_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (11th edition), articles on 'Crusades' and'Empire'. 

J. N. Figgis, _Churches in the Modern State_, Appendix I. Longmans. 

Bede Jarrett; _Socialist Theories in the Middle Ages_. T. C. And E. C. Jack. 

E. Jenks, _Law and Politics in the Middle Ages_. Murray. 

F. W. Maitland, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_, translated fromGierke's _Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht_. Maitland. CambridgeUniversity Press. 

R. L. Poole, _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_. Williams & Norgate. 

H. Rashdall, _Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages_. ClarendonPress. 

A. L. Smith, _Church and State in the Middle Ages_. Clarendon Press. 

H. O. Taylor, _The Mediaeval Mind_. Macmillan. 

E. Tröltsch, _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen_ (II. Kapitel). 

P. Vinogradoff, _Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe_. Harper. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: I should like to dedicate this essay to my friend and oldpupil, the Rev. Bede Jarrett, O. P. , to whom I owe much, and to whosebook on _Mediaeval Socialism_ I should like to refer my readers. ]

[Footnote 16: Pirenne, _Revue Historique_, liii. P. 82. ]

[Footnote 17: _De Vulgari Eloquio_, 1. Viii. ]

[Footnote 18: _De Monarchia_, 1. X. ]

[Footnote 19: Cf. Carlyle, _Mediaeval Political Theory in the West_, ii. 219-22. ]

[Footnote 20: Cf. E. R. Bevan, _Stoics and Sceptics_. ]

[Footnote 21: _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen_, p. 242. ]

V

UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

You know the story of Sophocles' _Antigone_: how, when two brothersdisputed the throne of Thebes, one, Polynices, was driven out andbrought a foreign host against the city. Both brothers fall in battle. Their uncle takes up the government and publishes an edict that no oneshall give burial to the traitor who has borne arms against his nativeland. The obligation to give or allow decent burial, even to an enemy, was one which the Greeks held peculiarly sacred. Yet obedience to theorders of lawful authority is an obligation binding on every citizen. Noone dares to disregard the king's order save the dead man's sister. Sheis caught in the act and brought before the king. 'And thou, ' he says, 'didst indeed dare to transgress this law?' 'Yes, ' answers Antigone, 'for it was not Zeus that published me that edict; not such are the lawsset among men by the Justice who dwells with the Gods below; nor deemedI that thy decrees were of such force that a mortal could override theunwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not ofto-day or yesterday but from all time, and no man knows when they werefirst put forth. '[22]

There you have the assertion of a law supreme and binding on all men, eternal, not to be set aside by human enactment. 

And now turn to this passage from the traveller and historian Herodotus, an almost exact contemporary of Sophocles. He has been telling howCambyses, king of the Persians, has been wantonly insulting thereligion and customs of the Egyptians. 'The man must have been mad, ' hesays:

 'For if one was to set men of all nations to make a choice of the best laws out of all the laws there are, each one upon consideration would choose those of his own country: so far do men go in thinking their own laws the best. Therefore it is not likely that any but a madman would cast ridicule on such things. And that all men do think thus about their laws may be shown by many proofs, and above all by this story. For when Darius was king he called to him the Greeks who were at his court and asked them, 'How much money would you take to eat your fathers when they die?' And they answered that they would not do this at any price. After this Darius called the men of an Indian tribe called the Kallatiai, who eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of the Greeks, who were told by an interpreter what was said, 'How much money would you take to burn with fire your fathers when they die?' And they cried with a great voice that he should speak no such blasphemy. Thus it is that men think, and I hold that Pindar spoke rightly in his poem when he said that law was king over all. '[23]

There you have law, king over men and gods, but a capricious monarchcommanding here this, there that. 

This capricious arbitrary aspect of law was a thing which much impressedthe Greeks. They contrasted the varying, artificial arrangements made bymankind with the constancy and simplicity of nature. We speak of natureand convention; they contrasted things that are by nature with thingsthat are by law. It was a contrast that bore fruit later on. 

Now law, whose arbitrariness and variety so much impressed the Greekswas the law not so much of this place or that, as of this or thatcommunity and its members. This is a conception quite different fromthat of the modern world. We may paraphrase 'English law' by saying thelaw of England, because it is the law which will be applied (with, itmay be, some exceptions or modifications) by the English courts to allpersons, be they English or aliens, who come before them. But Athenianlaw is not in this sense the law of Athens, nor, to begin with, is Romanlaw the law of Rome. What we find is a law of Athenian or Romancitizens. The stranger to the city is a stranger to its law. As a matterof principle he is without rights by that law. His life is not protectedby the blood-feud which his family can pursue, or by the compensationwith which it may be bought off. His marriage with a citizen will be nomarriage, or at best a sort of half marriage. He can acquire no landwithin the city's territory, and what goods he brings with him arepretty much at the mercy of the first taker. 

Such, at any rate, is the theory of the 'law of citizens'. 

We need not, it is true, believe that it was logically formulated inprimitive times and ruthlessly applied. Some of its applications werethe result of positive legislation due to a growing consciousness of theself-sufficiency of the city state and of the privileges of citizenship, as when Athens passed a law excluding from citizenship the offspring ofcitizens who had married foreign wives. But in its broad outlines theprinciple is sufficiently borne out by the exceptions which werenecessary to make human intercourse possible. The stranger within yourgates is protected just because he is within your gates, and you throwyour protection about him, as is indeed your duty, for suppliants andstrangers come from Zeus. The foreigner, even at a distance, may have acitizen as representative who can and will defend his rights. A strangermay be allowed to take up a permanent residence in the city, and by themediation of a patron or guardian enjoy private rights not much inferiorto those of a citizen. His legal position will not be very differentfrom that of a woman citizen, who needs the like mediation. Cities may, again, by treaty confer on each other's citizens reciprocal rights oflegal protection. 

In the middle of the third century B. C. , Rome, after its firstsuccessful war against Carthage, took special measures to deal with theproblem of the alien litigant. The great and growing commerce which camefrom all parts of the Mediterranean called for something more than amere admission to treaty privileges. A special officer was fromhenceforth appointed to deal with the law-suits to which foreigners wereparties, and the judgement was given by a body (which we may comparewith our jury) which might include fellow-citizens of the foreignsuitor. 

But here a difficulty arose: what law was to be applied to a transactionbetween a Roman and a foreigner, or between two foreigners? The Romanlaw, the law of citizens, had been codified two centuries earlier, andits outline had been hardened by the practice of two centuries. Theforms for a transfer of property, for instance, were rigid and solemn;the foreigner would hardly know them, and if he did, his alien handcould not effectively do the prescribed acts nor his alien mouth speakthe almost sacred words. The answer was that behind the forms of the lawof this city or that, there was 'a law of the men of all nations'. Thecommon elements in the ordinary transactions of life, in whatever formthey were clothed, could be taken into account and given effect to. Thus, side by side with the ownership according to the law of Romancitizens, the solemn words of promise which only a Roman citizen couldutter, the marriage which only a Roman citizen could enter into, theremight be property, contract, marriage to which any one, citizen oralien, might be a party. 

This 'law of the men of all nations' (_ius gentium_) was of course notan international law, it was a law administered by Roman officers, andit was coloured by Roman conceptions, however much it may have drawnfrom a comparison of foreign laws with which the Romans were broughtinto contact. In turn it reacted upon the more narrow law of Romancitizens (_ius civile_), broadening its conceptions and enabling it tofree itself from primitive formalism. It also made easier the task ofRoman governors who were called upon to administer the various laws ofthe different countries which came to form the Roman empire. 

The gradual extension of the citizenship (completed at the end of thesecond century A. D. ) to the whole of the inhabitants of the empire madepossible, at least in outward appearance, the application of a uniformsystem of law throughout what was then the civilized world, thoughbeneath an apparent uniformity local traditions and customs survived tothe end, at any rate in the east. The 'civil law', as the Roman law inits final form has been called down to the present day, consists ofelements of the narrowly Roman and the more universal law inextricablyinterlaced. 

This Roman solution of the problem of the foreign litigant is of muchmore than merely practical importance. The Stoic philosophy which grewup amid the decay of the old city life, whose adherents spoke ofthemselves as citizens of the world, had fastened upon the oldantithesis of law (or convention) and nature, and formed the conceptionof a law of nature, which should have a reasonable basis and a validitysuperior to the arbitrariness of the city law. To this ideal conceptionthe Roman law of the men of all nations gave a body and a reality. Stoicism became the 'established' philosophy of Rome, and Roman lawyerswell-nigh identified the '_ius gentium_' with the ideal law of nature, describing it as that which natural reason has established among allmen. Yet for at least one of the great classical lawyers, whose wordshave been enshrined in Justinian's legislation, the identification wasincomplete. By nature, it was said, all men are free, and mankind hasdeparted from what natural reason requires, in permitting slavery. Thusthe law of nature must be sought in something more universal than thepractice of mankind. More than fifteen hundred years later in an Englishcourt an argument against the recognition of the rights of a slave-ownerwas successfully founded on the law of nature. 

Before the Roman law had been put (at Constantinople) into the finalshape in which it is preserved to us, the Roman empire in the west hadalready been broken up by barbarian invasions. The invaders brought withthem their tribal laws and customs, rude, often cruel, narrow ratherthan simple, for simplicity is the work of civilization. They did notunderstand, and could not adopt, the law of the world into which theyhad come. Yet neither could they, if they would, force their laws uponthe conquered inhabitants. Among these the old civilization lingered onin a degenerate form, and with it the Roman law. One of the first thingsthat happened was that the conquerors drew up for their Roman subjectsshort codes of the Roman law as it survived in a debased form, as theydrew up statements of their own law for their followers. For a long timeeach man, according to the community to which he belonged, had a'personal' law. As late as A. D. 850 we hear that in France it mighthappen that five men met together and each would have a different law. Of course such a state of things means before very long that there mustbe at any rate one set of common legal rules which must be appliedthroughout a territory, namely rules to decide which kind of personallaw is to be used when there is a dispute between two persons whosepersonal law is different. 

Gradually the different populations within the same area coalesce, andlaw from being personal becomes local. But the local area will not bethe same for all purposes. The law or custom which determines the rightsof the small, often unfree or half-free tenant, whether as between himand his neighbour or as between him and his lord, may extend no furtherthan a very small area, such as in England we call a manor. The law bywhich great men held their land from a king, though perhaps not uniformthroughout the kingdom, will cover a much larger area. The fact that agreat man may hold land in far distant places, it may be in differentkingdoms, and that men of this class have connexions with differentparts of Western Europe will lead to the formation of common notions offeudal law, which make possible even the scientific study of a law offeuds, though no complete uniformity was ever attained. 

England was the first western country to attain political unity with aterritory substantially the same as at the present day; and thedetermination of the English kings that in the more important mattersjustice should be done throughout the land in the king's name, either byhis courts at Westminster or by judges sent by him to the counties, secured the formation of an English Common Law which left comparativelylittle play for local custom, and which at an early time became strongenough to resist attempts to introduce foreign law. As early as the timeof Henry III the barons proclaimed with one voice that they would nothave the laws of England altered in favour of a rule--the legitimationof bastards by the subsequent marriage of their parents--which in oneform or another has been adopted in Western Christendom, and even in theneighbouring kingdom of Scotland. 

In France political unity was reached only later and bit by bit, andwhen it came the difference of law in the various provinces was toofirmly established to make uniformity possible until the time of theRevolution. In Germany the shadowy unity of the Holy Roman Empire wasnever enough to afford any effective central administration of justice. National law in the strict sense was impossible under such conditions:the most that can be expected is such a degree of unity as results fromcommon traditions inherited from more primitive times, and a communityof language and national feeling. 

Amid local and national diversities of law there were at any rate twounifying influences, the Roman and the Canon law. In some parts ofEurope, as in the South of France and Italy, the traditions of the Romanlaw had never died out, and in a debased form, with much admixture ofthe law of the invaders, it had come to form the basis of the local law. In others it was the barbarian law which formed the groundwork. But justas behind the new languages, whether in the main founded on Latin or onTeutonic, Latin remained the medium of intercourse between the countriesof the West, and the instrument of thought and learning, so Roman lawremained a tradition which was ever ready to exert an influence. It isnot only in law courts that law is learnt and developed. Transactionshave to be drawn up in writing, and will largely be made in Latin, andfounded on precedents. The grants of land to and from ecclesiasticalbodies especially will be in a form which borrows much from Roman orromanesque models; and they will form models for the transactions ofothers. Even the formulation of native law in the early codes will becarried out by men who know of no written law except the Roman. In thetwelfth century Roman law becomes a subject of University studythroughout Western Europe, in Italy, at Paris, even at Oxford, and formsa part of that international learning which scholars carry from land toland. Men trained in the Roman law rise to high positions in the publicservice. As judges and administrators they will not forget what theyhave learnt as students or taught as doctors. Yet it would be easy toexaggerate its influence, great as it was. It was certainly more as aform and method of legal thought than as an actual source of legal rulesthat it made itself felt, for instance, in our own country, and thestrength and cohesion which it helped to give to our law enabled thatlaw later to resist its further advance. 

The Canon law was the law of the Western Church, a truly internationalsociety. It was formed largely on the model of the Roman law, and itlargely borrowed from it, though it is full of non-Roman elements. Itgoverned not merely what we should call purely ecclesiastical matters, but dealt or attempted to deal with other things, such as marriage andthe disposition of the goods of the deceased. Our own law of marriageand divorce, and of probate of wills, has a history which goes back tothe ecclesiastical law of the Middle Ages. Like the Roman law itexercised an influence as a model and a repository of maxims, all thegreater because in every country it was a law in actual force within asphere of which the boundaries were constantly being disputed betweenthe lay and the church powers. 

The beginnings of modern Europe with which we associate such things asthe revival of learning and the Reformation brought with them on theContinent the event which is known as the reception of Roman law. Thetraditions of the ancient world had been seen in mediaeval times throughmediaeval eyes, and had been moulded to mediaeval needs. The new ageinsisted on going back direct to the classical tradition. It was theactual Roman law of Justinian, not the Roman law as interpreted bymediaeval commentators, that was to be studied and applied. Thebreak-up of the institutions of the Middle Ages, the growth of absolutemonarchical power, the centralization of government, all favoured thetendency. Roman law contained doctrines eminently pleasing to anabsolute ruler, e. G. 'the decision of the monarch has the force of law'. In Germany above all, where law was divided into countless localcustoms, the movement had its fullest effect. Roman law comes to be thelaw which is to be applied in the absence of positive enactment orjustifiable custom. The native law finds itself driven to plead for itslife, and is lucky if it can satisfy the conditions which are requiredto enable it to continue as a recognized custom. In every country of theWest outside England, in greater or less degree, the Roman law comes inas something which will at least fill up the gaps, and will purge orremodel the native law. Even in Scotland texts of the Roman law may bequoted as authorities. The strength of our own law, and the successfulresistance of our public institutions to monarchical power saved usalone from a 'reception', in the continental sense, of Roman law. Andeven our Blackstone will quote Roman law with respect where it tends toconfirm our own rules. 

If this reception was a movement which brought about a greater unity inthe form and substance of the laws of Western Europe, there was anotherfactor at work which tended in the opposite direction. The claims of theEmpire to universal authority become more and more unreal: the claims ofthe Pope are either rejected entirely, or the ecclesiastical sphere isstrictly delimited. The State becomes sovereign. For this purpose itmakes no difference whether it is a High Court of Parliament or anabsolute monarch which is the supreme authority: law comes to be thoughtof as the command of a sovereign person or assembly. 'No law', we aretold, 'can be unjust', for law is the standard of justice, and there isno other standard by which the justice of law can be measured. The factthat there is in every State a sovereign power which can make and unmakethe law at its pleasure makes possible the creation of a uniform law forall the subjects of a State, and so far as the State coincides with thenation, makes for the creation of a national unity in law. ThusFrederick the Great gave a code to Prussia, thus Napoleon gave France acode which swept away the diversities of the provincial customs; yet itserved more than merely national purposes, for it found its way not onlyinto the countries conquered by him, where it survived his conquests, but even into lands where he never held sway. Our French fellow-citizensin Quebec use an adaptation of it as a statement of their law. It tooklonger before Germany as a whole obtained a uniformity of law. The verystrength of the national aspirations roused by the war against Napoleonstood for a time in the way of codification. The great German lawyer ofthat time, Savigny, thought of national law as a half-unconsciousproduct of the national feeling of right. The Code of Napoleon had beena revolutionary code, founded (imperfectly, no doubt) on the doctrinesof the rights of man; codification for Germany would mean the adoptionof something abstract, not specifically national. It was only a centuryof extraordinary fruitful learned activity, bringing with it at the sametime a new and intense study of the Roman law, and a revival of theknowledge and application of the native conceptions of law, that madepossible the German civil code which came into force fifteen years ago. 

England has never seriously undertaken the work of codification, and itslaw, uniform and national already in the Middle Ages, has become in themodern world something far wider than a merely national law. The Englishsettlers in the new world brought their law with them. To-day Englishlaw, modified no doubt by State and Federal legislation, is the CommonLaw of the great republic of the United States. The colonies which stillremain within our Empire are territories of the English law, save where, as in South Africa or Quebec, civilized settlers had already establishedand retained their own law. Throughout these lands, it matters littleunder which flag, an English lawyer finds the Courts speaking a languagewhich he understands. 

Thus it came about that the world, which derives its civilization fromWestern Europe, may be divided into lands of the English law, and landswhere in outward form at least the law is Roman. And yet we must notmake too much of this division. In the first place it cuts acrossnational boundaries. It unites us with the United States of America, itseparates us from some of our own colonies while it unites them withcontinental Europe. In the second place law is, like language, a form ofthought; and diversity of form, though it hinders, does not prevent aunity of substance. 

Among the forces which have made for unity something should be said ofthe conception of a law of nature. The phrase has been out of fashion inthis country since the days of Bentham and Austin, who laid stress uponthe positive, one might say arbitrary, character of the only law whichthey would recognize as law in the proper sense of the word. I am notconcerned here to discuss its philosophical validity. But it has neverbeen lost sight of. It is one of the inheritances of the Roman lawtradition. Alike in the Middle Ages, and since their close, it has beenthe subject of speculation and an influence guiding the legislator, thethinker, and the administrator of law. There is a whole literature uponit on the Continent. It bulks pretty largely in Blackstone: you can seeits influence on the judges of the eighteenth century in this country;the founders of the American Republic put a good deal of it into theirconstitution, and American judges will still refer to it without shame. What it really means is a standard by which the law here and now may bejudged, a standard founded on the needs of human nature. That thestandard becomes a different one, as the needs and possibilities ofhumanity develop, has not prevented the seeking after such a standard. 

It is perhaps only another way of putting the same thing to say that lawhas developed and is developing constantly by reference to the pursuitof ends more or less consciously arrived at by mankind. So far as theseends are common, and I take it that in the main, amid national andindividual diversity and conflict they are common ends, law has beenformed for their attainment. On the whole what men have asked law to dofor them has been the same at any given stage in civilization. Theeighteenth century asked for liberty, property, and happiness. We areputting a rather different meaning, or perhaps a different stress on thewords, not only here but throughout the civilized world, and the mainmovements of legal change are in the same direction everywhere. 

One word about the two kinds of law known as Public and PrivateInternational law. 

The fact that the laws of different countries are different gives riseto problems whenever the Courts of one country have to deal with a setof facts where some foreign element is involved, for instance a citizenor an inhabitant of another country, or property which is in anothercountry, or a contract or transaction which took place abroad. Now wehave long got past the stage at which the Courts could simply disregardthe foreign element, could say this man is a foreigner, therefore he hasno rights; or this event took place abroad, and therefore we will treatit as if it had never happened. On the other hand it will not do forthe Court to apply simply its own law. Grave injustice would be done, for instance, if a transaction made on the faith of law which will givea certain effect to it, were treated as made under another law whichwill give it a different effect or no effect at all. For this reason theCourts of every country have formed rules (sometimes called PrivateInternational Law; sometimes, and as some hold, more properly, called'Conflict of Laws') by which they determine how far, where a foreignelement is involved, the foreign law is to be carried out rather thanthe law which the Court applies in ordinary cases. These rules are notthe same in every country, because differences of opinion are possibleas to what justice requires. But the very existence of such rules showsthat the Courts hold that the world of law is one, however muchdiversified, and that no one territorial law can blindly go on its waywithout taking account of its neighbours. 

International law in the more proper sense of the word, that is PublicInternational Law, or the law which governs the relations betweenStates, is a very different thing. Something of the kind was not unknownin the ancient world; the Greeks, for instance, had rules against thepoisoning of wells, the proper treatment of envoys, and the making andkeeping of treaties. But in its modern form it dates just from the timewhen States were waking up to the consciousness of sovereignty, and whenthe horrors of the wars which followed the Reformation showed that evensovereign powers ought to conform to some rules of conduct. It has beenthe work in its origin of writers and teachers of law, and has beenbuilt up more recently by agreement between States. Unlike the lawbetween man and man, which modern states enforce by organizedcompulsion, there is no standing organization whose business it is tosee that it is kept. It is not true to say that for this reason it isnot law at all, for in primitive times the recognized rules of privatelaw were enforced not by State sanction but by the action ofindividuals, with the support of the opinions and at times the activehelp of their neighbours and friends. But a law which is defied withsuccess and impunity is no law. The reality and strength ofInternational Law has lain in the fact that its breach brought at leastthe risk of suffering, through the common disapprobation of civilizednations; its preservation and maintenance for the future must lie in acertainty of disaster, not greatly less than that which awaits thetransgressor of private law. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Jethro Brown, _The Austinian Theory of Law_. Murray. 

Maine, _Ancient Law_. Murray. 

Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_. Cambridge UniversityPress. 

Vinogradoff, _Common Sense in Law_. Home University Library, Williams &Norgate. 

Vinogradoff, _Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe_. Harper's Library of LivingThought. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 22: Sophocles, _Antigone_, 449-57 (Jebb's translation). ]

[Footnote 23: Herodotus, iii. 38. ]

VI

THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

For some hundred years past it has been common to lay great stress uponthe importance of national characteristics in art. This has been verynatural, for they represent one main aspect and justification of therevolt against the conception of the one permanent and immutablestandard of perfection of the Neo-classicists of the Renaissance. Lessing and Herder, who were the critical protagonists of the new world, had indeed a knowledge and admiration of ancient art which was probablysuperior to that of the classicists, but they refused to admit that artwas bound to follow the forms of antiquity, and maintained rather thatits forms would necessarily change with the changing conditions of theworld, and with the varying characteristics of different nationalitiesor races. 

From their time down to our own, then, this conception of art, as beingcoloured or affected strongly and continually by nationality, has becomealmost a commonplace of criticism, and it will not be denied that thereis real importance in the conception. For though nothing is really artwhich is not distinctive and personal and unique, yet just so far as thepersonality of the artist is conditioned by his nationality, so far alsowill his artistic work reflect the characteristics of his nation orcountry. And yet, while this is true, it really needs very littleconsideration to see that when we consider a great work of art, we arevery little concerned with the question of the nationality of theartist, but with something which is deeper and larger than hisnationality. The great artist no doubt represents life under the formsor terms of his concrete experience, but it is life and the world itselfwhich he represents. He is not greatly concerned with the merelysuperficial or passing aspects of human nature and the world, but withthat which is essential and continuing under these terms. 

It may indeed be urged that there is some real and fundamentaldifference between the art of the East and that of the West, but as wehave come to know eastern art better, we have become more doubtful evenof this, and are rather impressed with the unity of the artisticexpression even of East and West. I am far from wishing to say thatnationality or race has no significance in art, but I think that we havebeen in danger of greatly exaggerating its importance. I am at leastcertain that we have very constantly made too much of the supposeddifferences in the literature and art of the different Europeancountries, and that we must make clear to ourselves that European artand literature are really one. 

It is not unimportant to observe this at the present time, to considerwhether literature and art are dividing or uniting forces. As far as wecan understand, what indeed seems a little unintelligible, the Germansdesire to impress upon Europe their culture or civilization, an attemptas absurd as it would be impossible, for German culture is, after all, only a part of the great European civilization, and the part cannot takethe place of the whole. But on the other hand it is not less importantfor us to understand that what we desire to do is not to destroy thoseelements which Germany contributes to European civilization, but onlythat they should take their natural and appropriate place in thatgreater unity which is enriched and enlarged by the contribution ofevery separate national society. European art is one; that is, thecommon characteristics are far more important than the nationaldifferences. And further, we often take to be national, characteristicswhich happen to show themselves at one time in one place, while they mayhave existed at another time in another place. The history of Europeanart is in a great measure the history of successive influences ormovements which were for the most part common to all Europe, but whichdid not always exactly synchronize in the different European countries. 

 * * * * *

So far as there is such a thing as nationalism in literature it iswholly modern, while in mediaeval literature and art there is hardlyanything of it. This may seem strange to those who imagine that it isonly the railway and the steamship which have brought the worldtogether, but the truth is that the movement of ideas and fashions wasprobably at least as rapid in the Middle Ages as it is to-day. Howeverthis may be, the fact is, I think, clear, that when we come to examinemediaeval literature we find that it is practically homogeneous, thatwhether we look at it in England or France, in Germany or inScandinavia, it has practically the same qualities. I do not speak ofItaly yet, for Italian literature is the latest-born of the greatEuropean literatures, it has not at least come down to us in any formsearlier than those of the thirteenth century. 

Mediaeval literature is known to us primarily under two forms, theheroic epic and the romance, and it is to these that we must first turnour attention. We know the heroic epic in different languages throughouta period which extends roughly from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. The earliest example is the English Beowulf; among the latest are theGerman Nibelungenlied and some of the French Chansons de Geste, whichbelong to the end of the twelfth century. This epic literature is notleast interesting to us because it has, as far as we can judge, notrace of that great classical influence of which you have already heard, and which plays so great a part in the later developments of Europeanliterature. Now what is the epic? Its materials are the stories ofnorthern mythology, the traditions of the great migrations whichoverthrew the Roman empire in the west, and the legends which grew upround the name of Charles the Great. They are stories of the gods anddemigods, of the Burgundian and the Hun, of the English people possiblywhile still settled on the Baltic coasts, of the conflicts of the Frankand the Saracen, of the earliest settlers in Iceland; and they vary intheir temper and their tone. 

But they all represent the sense of the glory and splendour of the greatfighting man, of the stout heart, which rises with rising danger and isnever so great or so splendid as when it faces overwhelming odds anddefies the inexorable fates. The epic poet is so possessed by this senseof the greatness of human nature that it does not matter much evenwhether the man is wrong or perverse: he loves the obstinacy of Roland, who will not, till too late, sound his horn to call Charlemagne and hisarmies, but prefers to face the enemy, and if need be to die, byhimself, rather than to ask for help; he is filled with the sense of themagnificence of the stark figure of Hagen, who had indeed treacherouslymurdered the great Siegfried, but whose heart is so high and his hand soheavy, that when he is overpowered, and Chriemhilda at last avenges uponhim the murder of her husband, the old knight standing by killsChriemhilda herself--it was not meet that so great a fighter should beslain by a woman. These are the men of the epics. 

And beside them stand the figures of women great and gracious, women forwhose love men die and perish, but who themselves also can hate andlove passionately and fiercely. It has sometimes been said by those whoonly know the epics in one or other of the various languages, that womenand the love of women have no place in the epic, but belong to theromance, but this is a mistake. In the mediaeval epic there is littletalk about emotion, but in the Nibelungenlied and in some of theIcelandic sagas the woman is, like Helen in the Homeric epic, the motiveand source of all the action. 

The epic is the story of great and heroic figures, abstracted in thatsense from the common or ordinary circumstances of life, but thebackground of the action is always realistic and even detailed in itsrealism, so that, just as again in the Homeric poems, we can frequentlyreconstruct the life and manners of the time to which the poems belongfrom that which they tell us. And it is impossible to say that there isany really national difference between the epics as we find them indifferent languages; they are indeed the expression of the temperamentand personality of the great artists who produced them, and they areeach unique and individual in proportion to the greatness of theirauthors, but in their general characteristics they are the same. 

There are few changes in the history of literature more remarkable thanthat which came over European art in the later years of the eleventhcentury and the beginning of the twelfth. The epic is concerned with theworld of action, the romance is occupied almost exclusively with theworld of feeling and emotion. For this is the real character of theromance. It has sometimes been said that the essence of the romance liesin the strange and mysterious circumstances of the world, in stories ofmystery and wonder, of fairyland and magic. And it is quite true that itoften uses these forms of human experience. But this is not its realquality. From the story of Tristan and the 'lais' of Mary of France, down to the _Vita Nuova_ of Dante, that with which it is occupied is thehuman heart, its hopes and fears, its joys and sorrows, its exultationand despair. We have only to read the earliest and greatest forms inwhich the story of Tristan and Iseult have come down to us to see thisfor ourselves. It is indeed true that we can see or that we canconjecture that behind the present romance there may have lain an epicstory of the hero's actions, but what we see now is nothing but thestory of the 'infinite passion', the 'infinite pain' of the human heart. It is the story of their fatal love, of the passion which drives themout of the homes of men into the wilderness, the fatal passion whichseparation only makes deeper, which nothing can change, nothing can end, the story of a man and woman to whom the world is well lost for love. And if you wish to see the whole meaning of life as the romance actuallyunderstood it, you have but to turn again to that 'lai' of Mary ofFrance, which tells us in a few lines how Tristan and Iseult, longparted, succeed in meeting in the forest for a few moments--meet andthen part--and over it all there is nothing but a certain exquisitesentiment of love and pain, of love and tears. 

This romance poetry is indeed strange, so strange that no one has yetsucceeded in finding or explaining its real origin. Only the day before, the great artists were singing the gallant deeds of men, but now theycan see nothing, think of nothing but the human heart. And what isperhaps strangest of all, this great reality of feeling, of passion, ispresented under the form of a world almost wholly unreal andconventional. The men and women of the epic were great heroic figures, of larger stature, of greater passions than the common run, but theywere quite real people, moving and acting in the real world. The figuresof romance are for the most part, but for the intense reality of theirlove, the unreal, conventional figures of a world of knights and ladies, of unreal and conventional actions. We understand the epic world, we seeand recognize their people, their dwellings, their ways of acting andthinking, but the romantic knights and ladies are mere conventions. 

The truth is that the chivalrous or romantic world is unreal, partlyperhaps because the artists are occupied with nothing but the emotions, and profound though these are, it is perhaps because of theirabstraction that the romance ended in the strange allegorical movementof the thirteenth century. In the hands of the later and lesser poets, the romantic method finally loses almost all sense of personality, andbecomes a picture and analysis of abstract emotion. It is to theseabstractions that Guillaume de Lorris gave a new life and a singulargrace in the personifications of the _Romance of the Rose_, and thecharm and grace of his art carried Europe off its feet, so that fornearly three hundred years it tended to dominate European poetry. Eventhe greatest artists of these centuries, Dante and Chaucer, at leaststarted with this method, and at the very end of the fifteenth centuryWilliam Dunbar in Scotland still used it with grace and vivacity. 

But I have lingered too long in the Middle Ages. I have done so because, if we could only make more clear to ourselves the homogeneity of theEurope out of which we all came, it would, I think, greatly help toclear up the superstitious exaggeration of the conception of nationalityin art. There is not time to deal with it, or we might stay to observethat the characteristic of mediaeval literature is that of all mediaevalart and life. To myself, indeed, it is clear that the notion that thepeople of the Middle Ages desired or worked for a unified politicalorganization is indeed a great mistake. But, on the other hand, it isequally certain that in general civilization, as in religion, there wasa real unity, and that it was only very slowly indeed that theself-conscious nationalities of the modern world were formed out of thewelter of the confused races and tribes of Europe: indeed, in some partsof Europe this development was not reached till the nineteenth centuryand in south-eastern Europe it is only coming to-day. 

 * * * * *

European art still transcends nationality; in its essence it isdifferentiated by the personality of the artist, not by the distinctionof nationality. This may seem at first sight a paradox, for you may beinclined to say that surely the modern national literatures are in manyways different, you will say that there is surely some great differencebetween Dutch and Italian painting, some great contrast between Englishand French poetry. Many people used to speak, perhaps some do still, ofthe warm and passionate and romantic south, and of the cold andungracious and passionless north. But this is merely a delusion. Danteis not more imaginative or passionate than Shakespeare. 

What is it then which has produced this impression? The answer to thequestion and the best evidence of the unity of European art will perhapsbe found in examining some of the great movements in its history, sincethe time when the civilization of the Middle Ages reached its highestpoint in the thirteenth century. 

With the fourteenth century we come to the beginning of a movement whichculminated in the greatest literature of the modern world, in the dramaof England and Spain. But its beginnings are at first sight strangelydifferent from its fulfilment, and it is almost impossible therefore tofind any phrase or term under which we can justly represent it. Thefirst great master of the new world was Dante, but not the Dante of theexquisite sentiment but artificial form of the _Vita Nuova_, but thegreat imaginative realist of the _Divine Comedy_, the artist who couldportray the passion and pain of Francesca and her lover, and with equalpower the masterful figure of Farinata, whose dauntless soul not hellitself could quell; who could pass from the vivid drama of the fiercecontemporary life of Italy to the infinite peace of those to whom 'lasua voluntade è nostra pace'. For indeed it is this which places Danteamong the supreme poets of the world, that there is no aspect of thereality of human life and experience which is strange to him, and whichthe greatness of his imagination cannot make living to us. It has oftenbeen said that Dante is the greatest and most representative artist ofthe Middle Ages, but so far as this is true, and it is only partiallytrue, it may make plain to us that there are no boundaries of time inart any more than of race or country. Dante is the first great artist ofa new world, but it was not till three centuries had passed, it was notuntil Shakespeare, that the whole meaning of the new literature was madeclear. The new literature has been thought to begin with two greatartists, an Italian and an Englishman: with Boccaccio in the south andChaucer in the north. 

What is, then, the characteristic quality or note of the _Decameron_ andthe _Canterbury Tales_? It is not, as some absurd persons think, to bediscovered in the licentiousness or grossness of some of these tales, this only represents one aspect of their realism, and indeed in thisthey do little more than continue the characteristics of what we know asthe 'Fabliaux' of the Middle Ages. The quality of the new art lies justin this, that there is nothing in human life which is uninteresting orinsignificant to these great artists, that they are bound by notraditions, hampered by no conventions. They had begun as artists ofromance, and the romantic sentiment of life never ceased to interestand move them, but they had learned to go beyond the romanticconventions, and to find the material of their art in everything whichwas part of the reality of life. To them, as to the other tale-writersof these centuries, it was quite immaterial whether they were retellinga story which had come down from immemorial antiquity, or relatingsomething which had happened but yesterday in their own town or village, and they knew nothing of distinctions of class or rank or circumstance;it is the universal human interest which arrests them. The example whichwe shall find most representative is that which is to us English peoplethe most familiar, that is the 'Prologue' to the _Canterbury Tales_. Wasthere ever anything greater of its kind than this? Who can ever forgetthese figures: the Knight, the Franklyn, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath?As we read there passes before us all the company of human life, wiseand foolish, grave and gay, good and bad. Chaucer and Boccaccio are thegreatest artists of what has often been called the 'realistic' type, they are at least very easy to distinguish from the epic and romanticartists. 

They are great artists, but it is also clear enough that their powersand their insight into human life were limited. What they began wascarried out to its fulfilment by the great dramatists of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. For this is indeed the relation of thetale-writers to the dramatists, that they furnish the materials uponwhich the dramatists built up their presentation of human life, orrather, the elements which are transformed by the imagination of thegreat dramatists from bare 'realism' into the highest expression ofreality. No doubt the dramatists take into their work other materialsand influences, but the substantial quality whether of the tragedy orthe comedy is intimately related to that of the tales. How often werethe great dramas built up on materials which they drew from Bandello orthe other Italians who continued the tradition of Boccaccio, or fromsimilar northern sources. But the great dramatists gave their stories alife, a passion, a breadth and fullness which is far removed from thatof their sources. In their hands, or rather in their creativeimagination, we see not merely the external circumstance, the bare fact, but we see all the fullness and completeness, all the exquisite graceand beauty, all the passion and terror of human experience. We may callBoccaccio and Chaucer 'realists', but it is only in Marlowe and Webster, and above all in Shakespeare, that we reach reality itself. 

We all know the world of Shakespeare, how he ranges from Falstaff toHamlet, from Bottom to Lear, from Mrs. Quickly and Doll Tearsheet toRosalind and Imogen and Cordelia; we know how to Shakespeare, and in alesser degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe andWebster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothingwhich the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform, transmute, from mere dross into pure gold. We say, and we say rightly, that here is the greatest thing that England has brought forth, and wethink of it as representing the splendid youth and the first maturity ofa great nation. 

But now, do we remember and understand that alongside of the Englishdrama there is another drama, not indeed so great as that ofShakespeare, but greater, I think, than that of any other Elizabethan, the drama of Spain, of Lope de Vega and Calderon, a drama of the samecharacter, inspired by the same spirit, living under the power of thesame creative imagination, a drama in which the same vivid reality isinformed by the same breath of magical romance. In the tragedy of Lopede Vega, in the comedies of Calderon, with all the distinctiveindividuality of the great artists, and of each great work of art, wehave a poetic drama which is in its essential characteristics the sameas that of England. 

And yet how different were the circumstances of the two nations, Spainwas decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supremeheights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell. At the end of thesixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and wasfalling into the grey obscurity of a clouded evening. It had quicklylost the great place which for a few years it had held in the world, every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the greatArmada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders and Holland, onthe cliffs of Scotland and Ireland; a handful of valiant Dutchmen haddefied its power and broken its wealth; the real enemy of Spain, that isFrance, had gathered itself together after forty years of ruin andmisery, and had driven out the Spanish power. Indeed, so great, sooverwhelming, was--as we can now see it--the ruin, that Philip II, whoto the English imagination has stood for the embodiment of cruel andmasterful malignity, has become to the historical student one of thetragic figures in history, a sincere, stupid, bigoted man, vainlystriving to hold together the great empire which had been created byFerdinand and Isabella, by Cortez and Pizarro and Charles V. 

England, on the other hand, was rising from obscurity to its place asthe mistress of the seas; Englishmen were raiding and plundering the NewWorld, which Spain and Portugal had looked on as their own; England wassending out its sailors and merchants to all the seas, and to all lands, from the frozen north to the Indies. 

And again, Spain was possessed by a fierce and passionate love for theold religious order, it was the one country in which devotion to theforms and conceptions of mediaeval religion had proved unshakeable, while England was the representative power of the new religious temper, and was soon to hold almost the foremost place in the new intellectuallife of Europe. 

And yet the drama of Spain is in all its most essential and intimatecharacteristics the same as that of England; represents on the one sidethe same overwhelming sense of the tragic conflicts of life, the samesense of the greatness, the splendour of human nature, which is mosttriumphant when most it seems to fail; and on the other side at leastsomething of that exquisite, that almost unimaginable grace of theromantic comedy, of the world of Portia and Viola and Beatrice andMiranda. I do not think that the unity of the great art of Europe, thecomparative insignificance of merely national characteristics andhistorical circumstances can find a more convincing illustration. 

 * * * * *

I could wish that I were able to deal adequately with the parallelmovements of painting and sculpture during these centuries, but I haveneither the capacity nor is there now the time to deal with them. Thismuch only may be said, that the movement of these arts is very closelyparallel during these centuries, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth, to that of literature. I cannot discuss the characteristics of mediaevalsculpture and painting, but I would remind you that the notion thatthese were merely conventional and abstract is just as mistaken as thenotion that mediaeval literature deals only with conventions orallegories. It is of course obviously true that the ecclesiastical orreligious purpose served by the greater part of the decorative art ofthe Middle Ages which has survived to us, limits and restrains itssubjects and its forms. But no one who is at any pains to considermediaeval sculpture and mosaic painting can fail to see that alongsideof much which became conventional, and was fixed in what has beencalled the 'Byzantine' style, there is an immense amount of work both insculpture and in mosaic which expresses the determination of themediaeval artist to represent the world as he experienced and saw it, and that the main obstacle to the free expression of this spirit was notthe acquiescence or satisfaction of the mediaeval artist in conventionalforms, but the lack of technical dexterity. This will become evident toany one who will turn his attention, in studying the mosaics, from whatare no doubt the somewhat conventional and hieratic figures of saintsand angels to the realistic attempts to portray the stories of theBible. And it will be clear to any one who will study, for instance, thesculpture of Wells or Amiens or Chartres that by the thirteenth centurythe artists were rapidly learning how to represent the world as theyknew it, and something of its grace and beauty. If we say that thehistory of the plastic arts in Europe from the fourteenth to theseventeenth centuries is the history of the discovery and presentationfirst of reality, and then of reality as transformed by the highestimaginative conception of beauty, this must not be understood to meanthat reality and beauty had been absent from those arts in the MiddleAges. 

If then we trace the development of Italian art, we shall first observein such work as that of Masaccio in the Brancacci chapel at Florencejust the same characteristic interest in the appearance and thevarieties of human life as we find in the work of Boccaccio and Chaucer, and in the succession of the great Tuscan and Umbrian and Venetianpainters and sculptors the same transformation of the bare reality oflife by the magic of the imaginative sense of beauty and of passion asin the great drama. It is not, I think, merely fanciful to say that thereal counterpart of the English and Spanish drama is to be found in theItalian painters and sculptors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuriesand in the Flemish artists of the early seventeenth. It is certainlytrue that each of these great artists had his own individual anddistinctive genius, but the exquisite grace and beauty of the Umbriansand Tuscans have never been matched save in the romantic comedy ofShakespeare, and the presentation of the tragic passion of the humansoul in _King Lear_ has only once been equalled, and that is in thedreadful beauty and horror of the Night and Day, the Evening and theMorning of Michelangelo. 

 * * * * *

I do not think I need say much about the classical movement in art andliterature, for we all know that it was international. It was begun byPetrarch, not indeed the Petrarch of the sonnets, for these are only alater form of the Troubadour lyric, and do not show any special trace ofthe classical influence, but the Petrarch whose letters were the firstsummons of Europe to a new and indefatigable work of the rediscovery ofthe ancient world. It was an Italian with whom the classical movementbegan, but it was only in the hands of two northern artists that itachieved a satisfying development in literature: the one a Frenchman, Racine, the other an Englishman, Milton. Neither are, I imagine, reallyclassical at all, but of the two, Milton, as he was by far the morelearned in ancient art, was also probably nearer to the ancient worldboth in form and in spirit. 

Nor need I say anything about the deplorable ravages of the movement ofgood taste and common sense, which produced Boileau and, in somemeasure, Pope. It did some good, but far more evil, but happily it islong past and dead and done with, and we can afford to remember thelittle good and to forget the evil. Good or evil, it was at least veryclearly a European and not a national movement. 

I must ask you now to consider the extraordinary changes which passedover Europe in the eighteenth century, to trace the beginnings of thatchange which culminated in what we generally call the Romantic movement. 

We all know, though not as well as we should, the work of Defoe, andbeside Defoe there stands a painter whom also we all know, the greatHogarth. We all at least have read _Robinson Crusoe_, and we haveprobably all seen Hogarth's engravings of the good and bad apprentices, and the series of paintings in the National Gallery known as the'Marriage à la mode'. 

What is it now that we find in Defoe and Hogarth? An infinite multitudeof detail--we all remember the 'three Dutch cheeses' and the'fowling-pieces' which Robinson carefully ferried on his raft from thewreck to the island--an unsparing presentation of all the ugly andsordid realities of life; you might almost say, by preference the uglyrealities, the squalid vices, the stupid and brutal ferocity of humannature. It is not a pretty or a pleasing world which we see in Hogarthor in Defoe's _Colonel Jack_. But they are great artists. If you seehuman nature often on its most repulsive side, in its harshest and mostrepellent form, at least you see in their novels or pictures, the worldas they saw it in the streets and taverns, in the police courts andprisons of their day, as for that matter you can still see it everywherein town or country. The world which they see may often, perhaps usually, be ugly, but at least there is no conventional prettiness, there is nosmug veneer of an artificial good taste which refuses to call a spade aspade, and which deliberately turns away from those things in life whichare irritating to its sense of decorum and propriety. 

Here there is something new, and we can imagine a defender of thenationalist conception of art saying that here at last we have anobvious example of the revolt of northern realism against the southernor classical grace. But there could not be a greater delusion. Forthough it is true that the new realism was not fully developed all overEurope until the eighteenth century, it had its beginnings in thesixteenth century, and not in the 'cold' north, but in the 'romantic'south. The first signs of the new movement are to be found not inEngland or in Flanders, but in Spain in the sixteenth century. It wasthe _Lazarillo de Tormes_, the first of the Picaresque novels whichstruck the new note, which turned from the fantastic and conventionalworld of the romances in which Don Quixote had nourished his soul, andfrom the heroic world of beauty and grace of the dramatists, to the bareand hard reality of the life of the beggar and the vagabond. Not evenDefoe himself ever surpassed the clearness and precision of the_Lazarillo_, and it was the first work of a type, whose slow developmentcan be traced in almost every country in Europe: in England, in therealistic attempts of Greene and Nash and Deloney, in Germany in_Simplicissimus_, in France in the _Roman comique_ of Scarron and in the_Gil Blas_ of Le Sage, who was an almost exact contemporary of Defoe. 

And all this can be traced just as clearly in the history of painting. The great Italian painting had ended with the gorgeous magnificence ofthe Venetian school, with Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto, and itsmastery passed for a few years to Flanders, to Rubens and Vandyck; butin the painting of Spain and of the Low Countries in the laterseventeenth century we find ourselves in another world. The littlebeggar boys of Murillo may perhaps show a somewhat mannered realism, butthe Spanish painting, as a whole, while it would be absurd to try todescribe it under any one phrase, shows very clearly the determinationto present the reality of the world under terms which are verydifferent from those of the great Italians of the fifteenth andsixteenth centuries. And when we turn to the art of the Low Countries inthe latter part of the seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries, leaving for the moment out of account the new art of landscape painting, we find ourselves in the same world as that of Defoe and Hogarth. 

What was this, then, that had come to European art and literature?Clearly what we see is the transition from the heroic world of thetragedy, from the splendid beauty and force of the Italian painters, from the infinite grace of the romantic comedy, to some other artisticapprehension of the world. The movement was not indeed wholly dependentupon a reaction, but in its development it corresponds with the reactionagainst the continuance of a great tradition which had become merely aconvention, when it had lost its vitality and sincerity. The bestexamples of this may perhaps be found in Dryden's attempt to carry onthe heroic tradition in English tragedy, and in Voltaire's strenuous andmeritorious efforts to continue the work of Racine and Corneille. Theymeant well, and their tragic dramas are not without merit, but it isclear enough that they could not bend the bow of Ulysses. They weregreat artists, as we can see clearly enough in _Absalom and Ahitophel_, or in _Candide_, but their genius lay in other directions. 'Il fautcultiver notre jardin' is a great judgement of life, one very wholesomeand necessary for all time, but it was not the mood of Othello or ofHamlet. 

European art had to come down from the empyrean, and though the descentwas great, yet it gained new life by once again touching mother earth. 

No doubt, however, the harsh reality of Hogarth and Defoe was not thewhole of life, and, by a strange transition, before the middle of theeighteenth century we find the novelists and, though they are lessimportant, the dramatists, turning from the faithful and minute study ofthe outward appearance and form of things to the study of sensibilityand emotion, and the world, which had seemed so hard and unmoved, wasdissolved in tears. 

We find this a strange and even a ridiculous spectacle, the men who hadprided themselves on their common sense and reasonableness, whoseliterature had sparkled with wit and epigram, blubbering and crying likegreat children; but whatever we think of it, that is what happened. Thefirst artist of the new type was a Frenchman, Marivaux, and his _Vie deMarianne_ is a study of a young woman who is the embodiment ofsensibility and self-consciousness, an amiable and virtuous girl, who ishardly able to enjoy the good that life brings her, for fear lest sheshould miss the opportunity of renunciation. The first great novel ofsentiment is also French, the Abbé Prévost's _Manon Lescaut_, and hereindeed we are in the deep waters of affliction; there are but fewmoments between the beginning and the end of his sad story when the herois not in tears. And yet it is a great novel, for there are few studiesof human nature, as absorbed and almost lost in emotion, which are moremoving. 

These novels, however, which appeared between 1730 and 1740, areovershadowed by the works of the great Englishmen, by Richardson andSterne and Goldsmith, for these are not artists of England alone, but ofall Europe, known and loved and imitated in every country in Europe. Thesorrows of _Clarissa_, the pathetic or maudlin humour of Sterne, theidyllic grace and gentle laughter of Goldsmith, these, as they movedevery heart, influenced even the greatest of European artists. Theinfluence of _Clarissa_ on Rousseau, of Goldsmith on Goethe and JeanPaul Richter need no exposition. 

The sentimental movement reached almost its highest level in the greatand morbid genius of Rousseau, who was himself the living embodiment ofthe movement. Far more than even his creations, more than Julie orSaint-Preux, was he himself possessed by an emotionalism which finallybecame a disease. But, strangely enough, it was the Olympic genius ofGoethe which gave its supreme form to the treatment of life under theterms of feeling. In _Werther_ this whole phase of art passed beyonditself into the tragedy of the vain and hopeless efforts of an honestbut over-sensitive nature to control his emotion and to master his life. Not indeed that it was with _Werther_ the movement ended: it wascontinued in Byron: it was perhaps the most important element in whatthe Germans call specifically their _Romantische Schule_, and in thework of the French Romantic artists from Chateaubriand to Alfred deMusset. If you wish to see it in painting you have only to look at thework of Greuze, and at the engravings in our grandmothers''Forget-me-nots'. In spite of all its absurdities this sentimentalmovement played a great part in preparing men for the great revolutionitself, for it opened men's hearts, it set free their emotions; if therealism of Defoe and Hogarth had enabled men to escape from conventionand the mannerisms of good taste into a world of reality, the emotionalmovement gave this reality fullness and content, represented a largerand more intimate apprehension of life. 

This brings us to another aspect of the art of the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, to the poetry and painting of 'nature', to thebeginnings of that great artistic movement which culminates inWordsworth and Turner, and whose influence dominated all Europe in theeighteenth century and continues to do so in our own time. It seems astrange thing, but it is true, that it was not till the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries that there appeared a school of painting which tooklandscape, and a poetry which took 'nature' specifically for itssubject. There is indeed frequent reference to 'nature' in the poetry ofthe Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, and this is oftensignificant in the early English poetry and charming in the romances andin Petrarch and Chaucer, while in Dante and the Elizabethans, andespecially in Shakespeare, it reaches an almost incomparable beauty; yetin all these it is, as in the backgrounds of the great Tuscan andUmbrian painters, exquisite and significant and true, but not the primesubject which engages their attention. 

There are indeed two great poets in whom we begin to feel that thebackground begins to be almost as important as the figures of theforeground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalryand honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whetherthe most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light andshade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and thegloom of his caverns and dungeons. Spenser's poetry is like a tapestryon which indeed some story of human life is presented, but which is inthe end a great work of decorative art, to which the immediate subjectcontributes form and pattern and colour, but in which it is in a measurelost. 

In Milton the matter is different: no one can doubt that he is a greatartist of human life and fate; even if _Paradise Lost_ were to leave usin some uncertainty, the _Samson_ would convince us all. But, while Ithink this is true, it is also clear that not only in the grace of hisearlier poetry, but in the maturity of his genius, in the _Lycidas_ andeven in the _Paradise_, Milton is at least as great an artist of natureand its beauty as he is of life. And near Milton there stands a poet, lesser indeed, but individual and unique, that is Henry Vaughan, who hadunhappily strayed into the 'metaphysical' maze, and who helplesslyenough tries to endue himself with the giant armour of Donne, but who, when he is himself, is one of the most exquisite and gracious poets ofnature. 

We may perhaps, without being fanciful, find a parallel to these poetsin the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, in whose workwe see the landscape of Venetia and the Cadore compelling more and moreour attention, as not a mere background, but as an integral part of thepicture; but it was not till the seventeenth century and the Flemish andDutch painters that we see the transition complete, and the artist setsbefore us not some scene in human life, but simply the beauty andsplendour of 'nature' herself. 

It was not till Thomson began to publish _The Seasons_ in 1726 that thedevelopment was complete in poetry. Thomson is a difficult poet toappreciate rightly, for though his subject was 'nature' his method wasoften as conventional and artificial as that of any Augustan; but he wasa lover of the fields and woods, and his imagination, if it is not verypowerful, is often very sincere. What was begun by Thomson was carriedon with greater sincerity and reality by Cowper, and was transformed bythe imagination of Gray and Collins. We sometimes think of thisdevelopment as specifically English, and it is true that in Wordsworthand Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique andunmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of Wordsworth as thoughit were the only form under which nature can be presented. That would beto ignore the qualities, in England of Keats and Tennyson, and in Europeof great artists in whom the treatment of nature assumed other forms. The great poetry of nature began in England, but it was carried on inall the European countries, and for more than a century it was dominatedmainly by the genius of Rousseau in France and of Goethe in Germany. Icannot here pretend to deal with the treatment of nature in Rousseau, or with the outcome of his influence first in Bernardin de Saint-Pierreand Chateaubriand, and then in the elegiac beauty of Lamartine and deMusset's _Nuits_; nor can I deal with the poetry of nature in Goethe, and its lesser but often beautiful expression in the German'Romanticists', and in Heine. It is only possible here to remindourselves that neither the poetry nor the painting of nature belongs toany one country, but is an intimate part of all modern art. 

 * * * * *

And thus at last we come to the great revolution itself, that greatrevolution in art and thought and life, of which the political andsocial revolution is one form, and of which we are all the children. Inthis, all the elements of which we have been thinking are gathered upand come to perfection; reality, sentiment, nature. And this was of noone country or nationality. The first and also the greatest artist ofthe revolution is Goethe himself, for it all culminates and reaches itshighest expression in _Faust_. The passion for freedom, for the completeexperience of life, for life itself, and not mere knowledge or merewords--this is the motive which drives Faust till he is willing to makehis bargain with any power which will give him this. The infinite, theinsatiable desire of the human soul, which can never be whollysatisfied, which can never reach its term, this is the passion whichpossesses Faust, this is the rock upon which the hopes of the poor devilare shipwrecked, the poor devil who in the limitation of the merelycritical and negative temper cannot understand that Faust can never besatisfied, will never say to the moment, 'Verweile doch, du bist zuschön. ' For the drama of _Faust_ is not a drama of damnation, but ofredemption, and though the breadth and scope of the whole conceptionpass beyond all presentation in complete and rounded form, the greattragedy of Gretchen takes us from the splendid but abstract world ofideas into the simplest experience of human life, where Faust becomeshuman through love itself, but too slowly, too late to avert thetragedy. 

If Goethe represents the great humane conceptions of the revolution mostprofoundly, Wordsworth comes very near him in the depth of his knowledgeof humanity, and in his supreme sense of the unity of all life andnature with the living spirit who is in all things; and the greatromantic artists of France are governed by the same sense of nature andlove and the spiritual, and in Victor Hugo this reaches a level onlyjust below that of Goethe himself. 

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You must not misunderstand me, nationality has real meaning, it hassomething akin, but distantly, to personality; but in the main itaffects the more superficial aspects of art. In painting and sculpturethe European artists use a language which we can all understand, imaginelife and nature under terms which we all feel and know to be true. And, though in literature the language creates a real difference, and causesa difficulty in recognizing the unity which lies behind the difference, yet the moment we begin to overcome that difficulty we find ourselves ina world intelligible, familiar, moving to us all; and intelligible justin proportion to the greatness of the artist. 

It is idle for us to dispute about the relative greatness of ournational arts, for their greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies, but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the uniquequality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to thiscountry or nation or to that, but to us all. It is not to Frenchmen onlythat the intellectual passion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and thelove of the honest man of Molière or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all. It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of humanexperience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart, but we all. And the spectacle of the tempest in the heart of Lear, thattempest of the soul, of which the storms of nature are but a faintreflection, or the exquisite serenity and humanity of the recognition ofCordelia, these are not the prerogative possessions of England, but theyspeak to the heart and soul of the whole world. 

We may be divided from each other by many things, material or political, but in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctionsand are only men and women, with the earth under our feet and theheavens above us. 

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BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

The subject treated in the essay may be considered in relation to thefollowing works:

_Beowulf_; _The Song of Roland_; _The Nibelungenlied_. 

_Tristan and Iseult_ (Thomas, or Béroul); Mary of France, _Lais_. 

Dante, _Divina Commedia_. 

Boccaccio, _Decameron_; Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_. 

Shakespeare; Lope de Vega; Calderon. 

Defoe, _Robinson Crusoe_; Le Sage, _Gil Blas_. 

Marivaux, _Marianne_; Prévost, _Manon Lescaut_. 

Richardson, _Clarissa_; Goethe, _Werther_. 

Goethe, _Faust_; Wordsworth, _Michael_, &c.. 

Victor Hugo, _Légende des Siècles_. 

There are English translations of the greater number of these. 

VII

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES

Some political thinkers have taken the State for the highest form ofhuman association. Humanity is for them a mere abstract idea. It is noorganized whole; owns, they think, no common allegiance, pursues nocommon aim. To find such an organized whole, such an allegiance, such anaim, we must look to the State and to nothing beyond it. We find such awhole in Germany, in France, in England, but not in anything common tothe three and to other States as well. This opinion, due in its modernshape to Hegel and his followers, is false to history, false inpolitical theory, and mischievous in ethics, but it is nowhere morefalse than in relation to the world of thought. The essential unity ofWestern civilization as an intellectual, moral, and spiritualcommonwealth is indeed illustrated--unfortunately illustrated as ithappens--by this very theory of the State which denies it. For thetheory is of German make. It arose out of the historical conditions ofPrussia in the early years of the nineteenth century, was fostered inGermany by the peculiar method by which the unity of the nation waseffected, and, setting out from its home, has permeated much of thethought of the West, effectively combating the Liberal humanitarianismwhich was the especial contribution of England to the movement of thenineteenth century. The reaction of the German idea of the State on theEnglish conception of liberty is the dominating influence of the lastforty years in English political thought and progress. There can hardlybe a more striking testimony to the reality of that unity which thetheorists who embody it seek to depreciate or deny. 

When we speak of unity in this connexion we may mean one of threethings. There is a unity of character or type. There is the unityinvolved in continuous unbroken descent from a common origin, and thereis unity of effective interconnexion and mutual dependence. These sensesof the term unity are confused by some writers, but must clearly bedistinguished before any useful inquiry can be made. Unity of character, for example, is a different thing from continuity of historicaldevelopment, for a civilization might radically change its character inthe course of generations. It might lose all the specific features ofits own family and come into closer resemblance with others of quitedistinct parentage. Again unity of character is not the same thing asthe effective interconnexion and co-operation of different centres. Onthe contrary, such co-operation is of most value where there is markeddifference of character, where, for instance, a lack of a quality in onenation is counteracted by a surplus in another. Thus these three formsof unity are distinct, but if distinct they are not unrelated. Naturally, where there is a common origin, many traits of the primitiveunity of character are likely to persist, and where there is effectiveintercommunication, many differences may be rubbed off. So, where westart with unity of origin, we are likely to find some measure of unityin other respects, and this is what we do find, in fact, in the case ofWestern civilization. It does possess a certain unity of character, andthis is largely due to unity of origin, and is maintained in spite ofmarked divergences, which have not impeded an effectiveintercommunication but have tended rather to add interest and value tothe results which that intercommunication has produced. 

SECTION I. --UNITY OF CHARACTER

There is a certain unity of character running through all civilization, and indeed through all humanity. Certain fundamental institutions andprinciples of organization are common to East and West, to the ancientand modern world, to civilization and savagery, and there is not theleast evidence that the similarities are the result of historicconnexion. On the contrary, they arise from a human nature which isfundamentally the same, adjusting itself to conditions of life which arefundamentally the same. But of course it is only the broadest and mostgeneral characters that are thus common to all the world. Within themthere is every sort and degree of specific difference. There are typeswithin types, worlds within worlds, and what we call Westerncivilization is one of these. That is to say, it is at the present day afamily or group of nations sharing in common certain things whichdistinguish it from the rest of the world, such things, for instance, asa certain degree of social order, a certain outlook upon life, certainfundamentals of religion and ethics, and an industrial organizationbased on applied science. Now to mention any of these points is at onceto provoke a criticism. In each respect, it will be said, the nations ofWestern Europe and the lands that have been colonized from them differvastly among themselves. The social order of Germany is by no means thatof England. The industrial development of southern Italy is verydifferent from that of Belgium. The Prussian outlook upon life--this inparticular will be emphasized just now--is quite another thing from theFrench. This is true enough, but once again it means only that there arefurther specific differences within the genus. We could pursue thedifferences as far down as we like. For the United Kingdom, say, is byno means one homogeneous whole. Even within England alone deepcontrasts reveal themselves between the agricultural South and theindustrial North. Yet we do not hesitate to think of the Englishcharacter, English institutions, the English type as distinct from therest of the world, and we are right in so doing because there is a realunity pervading all the differences. Just in the same way at a higherremove there is a certain unity of character pervading the deeper andwider differences that appear in the various centres of Westerncivilization. 

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SECTION II. --UNITY OF ORIGIN

This unity of character is very largely due to continuous descent from acommon cultural ancestor. The civilization of the West is fundamentallyone not because the peoples of the West are one racially. They are notso. They comprise every branch of the Aryan family and a considerableadmixture of quite other stocks. Their civilization owes its commoncharacteristics mainly to a common origin and continued interaction. That is why it is in the mass a community of ideas, for ideas pass fromman to man and from nation to nation more readily than institutions, more readily far than character, more readily perhaps than anythingexcept material goods. In the realm of ideas Western civilization formsa single commonwealth of informal but of exceeding democraticconstitution. This freedom, indeed, it owes in large measure to itsinternational character, for there are constantly arising local andtemporary dictators, arbiters of fashion in the ideas of politics, philosophy, and even of science. Within a narrow circle such a dictatoroften has it all his own way, but it is seldom that he can maintain aprolonged ascendancy throughout the international commonwealth unlessthere is some pretty solid foundation for his doctrine. 

This commonwealth has its foundations in the past. It derives in thefirst instance from the unity of mediaeval Christendom, where it enjoyedthe advantage of a common language of learning, the gradual loss ofwhich is imperfectly compensated by the possession of two or threemodern languages alone by the educated man of the present day. Throughmediaeval Christendom and through the Arabic schools, which can hardlybe regarded as a part of Western civilization but in the Middle Ageswere rather its teachers, it derives from the Greco-Roman world, andthrough the Greco-Roman world from the Greeks themselves. The Greeks intheir turn were aware that they owed the rudiments of their science tothe ancient civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates. Thus in theintellectual world there is a continuity stretching back six thousandyears or more to the beginnings of recorded civilization. More than oncethe continuity is nearly broken, but some strand is always preserved, and it is in this continuity in the world of ideas that we get the mainevidence of such progress as human history reveals. 

The foundations of material civilization were laid in Egypt and inBabylonia, where the progress made in agriculture and the industrialarts implies a considerable body of empirical knowledge of physics andchemistry at an early date. We have Egyptian textbooks of arithmeticdating from the eighteenth and perhaps from the twelfth dynasty. We havetexts dealing with the rudiments of geometry. Empirical chemistryappears to be of Egyptian origin, the word itself is referred to theEgyptian term for black earth--and to have passed to the Arabs, who madeit into a quantitative science, without greatly interesting thescientific mind of Greece. Careful astronomical records extending overthousands of years were kept both in Egypt and Babylonia, and upon thema considerable body of astronomical knowledge was built up. But thereis no evidence of a scientific interest detached at once from theologyand industry. In theology itself Egyptian learning early becamedissatisfied with the popular deities, and sought for a unity of thegodhead either in some one supreme deity such as the sun or, more often, in a mystical identification of all the gods as so many incarnations orimpersonations of a single principle. But though these and kindredspeculations were not without influence on Greek thought, the entireachievement of Egypt in this direction, so far as known to us, was oflittle importance as compared with that of other oriental civilizations. 

Thus without underestimating a debt which the Greeks themselvesacknowledged, it remains true to regard science and philosophy alike asin essence an original creation of the Greek genius. What grew up inGreece during the sixth and fifth centuries B. C. Was the spirit ofdisinterested inquiry proceeding on rational methods. By the termdisinterested I mean detached from ulterior objects. Geometry for theGreek was something more than the art of land measurement, astronomysomething more than a means of regulating the calendar or foretelling aneclipse. It was a study of the nature of the heavens, an attempt topenetrate the construction of the material universe. So with geometry. It might begin as an investigation of the relations of particulartriangles, squares, and oblongs, but it developed into an attempt tograsp the nature of space relations and to understand them as dependingon simple common principles. This is to say that in the hands of theGreeks these subjects first became sciences. But a still greater subjectalso became in their hands matter for disinterested rational inquiry. They developed what Aristotle called the science of Reality, or, as wecall it, Philosophy--the attempt to approach by the rational criticismof experience the problem of the nature and origin of the universe andof man's place therein. They propounded the fundamental questions whichstill occupy the highest intellects of mankind. They laid thefoundations of method and bequeathed to Europe the terminology which allexact thinking requires. Even when we speak of method we are using anAristotelian term, and when we distinguish one subject from another weare employing the Latin translation of the word which Aristotleintroduced. In a word, modern thought, scientific and philosophic alike, has a unitary origin. It is derived from the Greek. 

The mode of this derivation is not simple, and would requireconsiderable space to examine in detail. In outline it must suffice tosay that the Greek culture was spread over the Eastern Mediterraneanthrough the conquests of Alexander, and that as its capital Alexandriagradually replaced Athens. It flowed westward with the Roman conquests, when, as the Roman poet said, captured Greece took captive her barbarousconqueror and introduced the arts into rustic Latium. It shared in thegeneral decline which accompanied the rebarbarization and final collapseof the Roman Empire. But now occurred a division in the stream ofhistoric tendency. The fortunes of East and West were separated. TheWestern Empire was overrun by Germanic tribes, and after the sixthcentury the tradition of the old culture was maintained for the mostpart in the monasteries. Greek was forgotten in the West. Greek authorswere known only in Latin translations, and science and philosophy cameto a standstill. In the East the Mohammedan conquests brought the Arabsinto touch with Greek learning. They preserved the tradition andextended the work, and it was the contact with Arabic culture throughthe crusades which initiated the first renaissance in the West in thetwelfth century. There followed the epoch of the great mediaevalsystems, the rediscovery of Aristotle and the attempt to fuse theChristian faith with the Aristotelian system. The later Middle Age wasthe period at which Western civilization was most distinctly a culturalunit, the scene of a great attempt to unify all the aspects of life, thereligious, the philosophic, the political, on the basis of a religiousfaith made articulate and systematic with the aid of Greek philosophy, speaking the Latin tongue as the common possession of all educated men. 

The paradox of thought is that while unity is its ideal, freedom is itsnecessary condition, and endless divergence the inevitable consequence. There could not be much thinking about matters of faith without heresy, nor about matters of politics without disaffection, rebellions and newpolitical grouping. Heresy and schism broke up the mediaeval unity andreinforced the political tendencies making towards the modern statesystem. The rise of modern literature displaced the classics from theirunique position as literary models. After the seventeenth century thehabit of writing in the vernacular tended more and more to oustLatinity, and culture in each country began to assume more of adistinctively national character. Specific national characteristicsbegan to appear in science and philosophy as well as in literature andeducation, and a large part of the history of modern thought depends onthe partial independence on the one hand and the frequent interactionson the other of these centres. 

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SECTION III. --UNITY OF INTERCONNEXION

This brings us to the third sense in which unity can be predicated of acultural group. The unity that depends on the interconnexion of distinctparts implies some differences of character. Western civilization haslost something of the unity of character which it owed to its commonorigin, though it still retains enough of it to figure as a singlewhole in contrast to the rest of the world. We may be sure that thedifferences between German, French, and English seem much less marked tothe intelligent Chinese than they are to Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishthemselves. We ourselves habitually think of China and Japan together asdenizens of the Far East, and it is only personal acquaintance whichmakes us begin to mark the differences between them. Few Europeans, Iimagine, get as far in their discrimination as to appreciate thedistinctions between the Northern and Southern Chinese, which are asclear to the Chinese themselves as the difference between English andScottish is to us. Western civilization does retain a generic unity ofcharacter, though national differences have had an increasing influencein the sphere of thought. Meanwhile the unity of interconnexion has onthe whole grown closer with the spread of education, the multiplicationof learned magazines and the facilities of travel. One of the mostinteresting chapters in the development of modern thought can bewritten, as Dr. Merz has shown by example as well as by precept, on thetheme of the mutual influence of the great national centres of thought, and in particular of France, England, and Germany. These nations mightseem as though designed, whether by nature or by the unconscious hand ofpolitical history, to be half-willing, half-reluctant complements toeach other. English common sense, French lucidity, German idealism;English liberty, French equality, German organization; English breadth, French exactitude, German detail, --how much poorer the world would be ifany one of these had been allowed to develop on its own lines withoutthe criticism of the other two. What a special providence gave theeasy-going Englishman a northern neighbour to lecture him on Germanmetaphysics in his own tongue and compel him to the definiteness whichhe instinctively detests. Without Scotland as a link, the connexionbetween English and German thought would hardly have been effective andcontinuous, and it was a Scotsman who aroused the greatest of Germanmetaphysicians--himself of Scottish descent--from his dogmatic slumbers. 

This international division of labour is more significant in the regionsof metaphysics and political thought than of physical science. Toscience, every modern nation has contributed both great names and usefuljourneyman work. Through the medium of the learned reviews and ofperiodical congresses science has become more and more international. Itis still possible now and again for a great discovery like that ofMendel or an important hypothesis like that of the kinetic theory ofgases to be ignored for a whole generation. But this does not seem todepend especially on difficulties of language or of internationalcommunication. There is a queer element of arbitrary fashion in thescientific world which every now and then decrees that certain peopleshall be ignored, no matter how sound their work, or that certainhypotheses shall be treated as matters of faith, no matter how flimsytheir structure. Man does not all at once become a creature of purereasoning by assuming the robe of science and entering the laboratory. But national prejudices are not pre-eminent among the forces whichdictate these fashions. Indeed in the English intellectual world thereoperates, if anything, a certain anti-national prejudice. It hassometimes been easier for an Englishman to get a hearing in Germany thanin England, and it is certain that in many subjects a respect is paid toGerman writers which they would not have been able to win if they hadwritten either in French or in English. This is due to a certainencyclopaedic minuteness which is the peculiar property of Germanindustry. If you want an exhaustive negative, I remember anarchaeologist saying once, you must go to the Germans. That is to say, on almost any subject you will find some German, and a German only, whohas taken the trouble to go through the whole matter from beginning toend, not attending merely to what is interesting or important, butwriting down _all_ that is to be found out in all the authoritiesbearing on that subject. And this work will be insufferably tedious and, taken by itself, may be very unilluminating. But it is much less tediousfor the reader than it was for the writer, and, if suitably indexed, such a work will in permanence serve as a guide-book to those who aregoing to exercise real thought and insight upon that subject. It is theelement of disinterested drudgery which the Germans have contributed toscience. Not that they have lacked men of genius, but that they haveadded to genius that which, Carlyle notwithstanding, it so oftenlacks--the infinite capacity for taking pains. Take up any scientifictreatise in any language and on almost any subject, cast your eye downthe references to authorities in the footnotes on a few pages at random, and you will find probably three out of four of those cited bearingGerman names. They will outbalance English, American, French, Dutch, andItalian added together. If you pass from quantity to quality, if youtake the leading ideas contributed to the subject, you will find thebalance redressed. Here French and English and others hold their own, and perhaps a little more than their own. But in bulk of work, andespecially in the faithful, unrepaying service of the hard dry fact, theGermans have set a standard to the world. It may be that their verymerit is due in part to a lack of certain qualities as well as to asuperabundance of others. There is a want of proportion in some of thesevast Teutonic treatises that takes the heart out of the English student. Some witty person has said that German science consists in demonstratingover again with enormously elaborate apparatus what an Englishman hasalready made plain enough to any sensible person with the aid of agingerbeer bottle and an old sardine tin. But I suspect there is anotherside to the question. The German has probably worked out his figures tothe twentieth decimal where the Englishman was content with the second, and it may always turn out that the twentieth decimal has its value. Bethat as it may, the co-operation of both types of mind is necessary, andpatient endeavour in the elaboration of detail is the peculiar functionwhich the German academic tradition has developed in the service of thegeneral cause of the advancement of learning. 

In more speculative thought the equipoise of international co-operationreveals itself in the changes which national thought has undergone underforeign influence. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuriesEnglish and Scottish metaphysics developed in the main on lines of theirown. It was the heyday of the so-called English school of experience. This school was influential in France, and in Germany acted as theferment which dissolved the older academic tradition and stimulated thegrowth of the new idealism. German idealism first became an influence inEngland through the medium of Coleridge and later of Carlyle. But it hadlittle effect on the national philosophy except in shaking the youngerMill out of the narrow rut in which he had been educated andcontributing to his thought that stream of influence which throughoutlife he tried in vain to merge harmoniously with the paternal teaching. But in the last third of the nineteenth century new channels ofinfluence were opened. The authority of Green at Oxford and of Caird inthe Scottish universities brought the tide of Hegelian influence, on theebb in Germany, in full flood over the intellectual world of GreatBritain and America. English empiricism was rapidly swept out ofexistence. Mill and Spencer, the dominating figures of the sixties andseventies were reduced to the position of dummies used for targetpractice by beginners. Being intelligible they could be read by thefirst-year student, and the exposition of their fallacies provided aneasy task for the lecturer's wit. There was none so poor to do themreverence, or if any did he was relegated to a fourth class in the FinalSchools. It would be a very interesting study in our object to analysethe Anglo-Scottish idealism in close relation to the German original, and measure the changes which a philosophy undergoes in the process ofassimilation by a people of very different intellectual tradition. Lackof sympathy with German and particularly with Hegelian idealismdisqualifies me from the task, but this much in spite of this lack I cansee. The German philosophers had a hold on those large and general ideaswhich the English mind seems instinctively to distrust, and whichEnglish philosophy had sought to resolve away into component parts. TheEnglishman as a philosopher is by nature very much like the Englishmanas a mechanic or as a business man. He wants to touch and see, to testand handle, before he is convinced of reality. 'I desire that it beproduced' is the frequent remark of Hume--Scotsman in some respects, butvery English in this--whenever he is dealing with some conception notreadily verifiable in experience. English philosophy left to itself wasnot inclined to do justice to the subtler, more evasive notions that arenot readily defined. It did not allow enough for what we may call theimponderable elements. German idealism has had just the opposite fault. It has been too ready to take its thoughts for realities, too prone touse large and perhaps vague conceptions as if they were solid coin andnot tokens that needed a good deal of scrutiny to determine their value. We may see an example in a branch of political thought which has been agood deal under discussion of late. To some German thinkers theconception of the State presents itself in a manner which by no meanscomes natural to the Englishman. To the German the State is an entity asobvious, real, and apparent as the individual citizen. It is not justthe head of Germany, or the sixty-five millions of Germans, or theKaiser, or the army, or the Government. It is just itself, the State, and it has attributes and powers, is the object of duties and possessorof rights just like any Hamburg merchant or Prussian Junker. To thenatural Englishman all this seems half mystical, half superficial. Talkto him of the State and if he is to grasp the conception at all he mustget it into terms of persons or things. He pictures it perhaps as theGovernment, perhaps simply as the income-tax collector, perhaps as themiscellaneous millions living in the United Kingdom. If he discusses itswell-being, its success or its failure, he does so under the reservethat all this is a shorthand for the well-being of great numbers of menand women. If its honour and good faith are in question what he will askis whether Sir E. Grey fulfilled a definite pledge at a given momentafter the manner of an English gentleman. Now for my own part, whetherthrough national prejudice or not, I believe this habit of checking andresolving large conceptions to be the safest and most scientific way ofdealing with them. Yet I can also see that it may lead to a good deal ofcrudity and may lead men to ignore important elements for which theycannot readily find some concrete expression. In this very matter of theState, for example, we are dealing with an organization of individuals, and if our way of talking about it makes us overlook the flesh and bloodof which it is composed, the other way may obscure in our minds thevital differences introduced by the very fact of organization. TheGermans have often seen the wood more clearly when the Englishman wasmore careful to distinguish and name the trees. So I cannot doubt thatit will prove in the end to have been good for us to have been compelledby a few leading thinkers to go to school with the Germans for a coupleof generations, even at the cost of the temporary depreciation of muchthat was most vital in our own social philosophy. Perhaps the best thingthat can be wished for Germany, and through her for Europe, in the nextgeneration, is that she should learn as much from our tradition as wehave learned from her. 

The whole history of political thought in the last two centuries is astudy of complex interactions between processes going forward in each ofthe leading nations. The liberalism of Locke and the principles of theWhig revolution profoundly influenced France, and the very fact thatdistance lent them enchantment and allowed them to be idealized gavethem a value as a stimulus to the French critic of absolute governmentwhich they could hardly exercise at home, where their real limitationswere better known. The French revolution bore on the entire thought ofEurope, alike by sympathy and antipathy, producing the reactionaryphilosophies of Burke in England and of Hegel in Germany, and theendeavour to formulate a new and safer line of Radicalism by Bentham. Philosophical Radicalism expressed in the main by the distinct butrelated Manchester school had two generations of development in England, and was felt as a real influence abroad during the period of comparativepeace that followed Waterloo and that raised men's hopes of an era thatshould put wars aside and devote itself to the essential progress ofmankind. French influences again, particularly that of Comte actingthrough J. S. Mill, brought new life into this school as the first flushof its youth was fading. Finally, as we have seen, German influencesoverwhelmed it, and England, fascinated as much by the prestige ofGermany as by her thought, gravitated more and more to the doctrine ofthe self-contained, military, Protectionist, all-powerful State. In thisstory of political thought events have been no less potent thanarguments. The failure and success of institutions, the victories anddefeats of countries identified with certain principles have repeatedlybrought new strength and resolution to the adherents or opponents ofthose principles as the case might be in all lands. The successive stepsby which Italy secured unity and freedom were a perpetual encouragementto believers in national right and liberal government throughout themiddle of the century. The triumph of Germany in 1870 was a victory forautocratic power, for discipline, for unscrupulous statesmanship, forblood and iron, which effected a conversion, only half conscious andvery slow in producing its result, but all the more complete for thatreason, in the attitude of men to fundamental questions of socialethics. Looking back on the hundred years that separate the two Europeancataclysms, the historian will discover a rise of liberal andhumanitarian opinions to ascendancy in the earlier period and a reactionagainst them towards the close. The causes of such a change aremultifarious and tangled, but he will, I believe, recognize the year1870 and the victory of Bismarck as the dividing line. May it be so thathe will find in the present war another turning-point from which a newmovement is to begin. 

Be this as it may, we may rest assured that the political thought ofEurope, like its philosophy and its science, will go forward or backwardas a unity. It may move by peaceful and friendly co-operation or by thestimulus of embittered rivalry. But its many centres are related by somany strands of connexion that the movement in any one of these isreflected in the rest. The liberties of England are fostered by theemancipation of the Alsatian, the Slovak, or the Pole. They areenfeebled by the victories of political autocracy or the militarymachine. Thinkers, it may be said, ought to be above these mundaneinfluences. Philosophy should deal with what is in itself and eternallyrational and just and wise. But philosophy as it exists on earth is thework of philosophers, who, authority tells us, suffer as much fromtoothache as other mortals, and are, like others, open to theimpressions of near and striking events and to the seductions ofintellectual fashion. Yet, if the larger thought is worth anything, itshould enable those who follow it to look a little further beyond thepresent and a little deeper below the surface differences that distractthe kindred peoples. If the thinkers are true to their thought it may bethat from them will come the beginnings of the healing process whichEurope will need. Much is being and will be said of the politicalreconstruction which is needed to restore and secure the civilizedorder. But the commonwealth of thought will revive of itself from theday when peace is concluded. German physiology will not be less learned, German scientists will not be less expert, German chemists will not beless pre-eminent because their military lords have plunged Europe into adisastrous war. We shall need their services, shall watch theirexperiments, read their records, and utilize their brains as before. Perhaps it may be some years before the international congresses can beresumed, but the internationalism of learning will revive of itself, against our wills if not by and with our wills, and in the world ofscience, and in this world alone, the event of war will make nodifference. Conqueror and conquered will work at the same task and meetas equals. The scientific demonstration knows no more of the nationalityof its originator than of his caste or colour, age or sex. In this onereal democracy the idea, the hypothesis, the proof, whatever it may be, stands or falls on its own merits with no questions asked as to itsancestors or country of origin. In the growth of this commonwealth waris but a momentary check. Its destiny is to become wider in extent, closer in its interconnexions, and not less rich in the diversities ofits national centres. Whether it is also destined to grow into apolitical unity the future must decide. At least we can say that for anysuch unity it provides the only sure and solid foundation. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Merz, _History of European Thought in the 19th Century_. W. Blackwood. 

Marvin, _The Living Past_. Clarendon Press. 

VIII

THE UNITY OF WESTERN EDUCATION

I have been asked to address you on the Unity of Education in WesternEurope. The task is not an easy one, for what do we mean by unity? Itwould be easy for me to spend my time in talking on the technical aspectof the subject; I could deal with curriculum and organization, withschool buildings and class-rooms, black-boards, and all the material ofschoolmastering, and could show you how great is the similarity in thesematters in all civilized countries. I doubt, however, whether this wouldinterest you; I doubt whether this is the unity of which you are insearch. You would tell me that you asked for unity and I had given youuniformity. Uniformity you can have anywhere; in modern life all isstandardized and stereotyped; you have it in the great hotel and theAtlantic liner--there you have men of all nations, they do the samething at the same time, they eat the same food and wear the sameclothes; you find it in the factory and on the battle-field. Go to atextile factory, whether in Oldham or in Chemnitz, or in Bombay, theprocesses are the same and the product is the same, except as there maybe more or less adulteration. 

And so in education, if you care to do so, you can find the mechanicaluniformity of modern civilization. A new form of school-desk makes theround of the world as quickly as a new chemical process or a newbattleship. The pictures on the walls of the rooms may be thereproduction of some modern German work, and the atlases you use may besecond-rate copies of the products of Gotha or Leipzig; you can have, too, uniformity in time-table and curriculum; but, after all, thisuniformity may be merely superficial. Go along the streets of an oldtown and you may see the regular façade of a modern street, but behindthis you will find all the variety of the mediaeval buildings which itencloses--the façade is mere paint and stucco. 

Uniformity is not necessarily unity, and unity is not inconsistent withvariety. That which I presume we are searching for is a morefundamental, spiritual, and intellectual unity--internal not external;not a painted and stucco resemblance, but a unity of origin and of life. 

Let us see what we can learn from history. 

The history of European education is centred round two institutions, theSchool and the University. Both have their origin in the remote past, and both have maintained themselves with singular fidelity to theiroriginal type. 

The School goes back to the very origin of our civilization; if we areto understand its nature, we must transfer ourselves in thought to thoseearly days when the first missionaries planted in the Somerset valleysand on the stern Northumberland coast the Cross of Christ. They came toa people still on the verge of barbarism, with a language still unformedby literature, with a religion that gave no clue to the mysteries oflife by which they were oppressed. They came to these men full of theenthusiasm of the Gospel--coming not only as teachers of religion, butas the apostles of a higher civilization, for they had behind them theawful name of Rome. 

Wherever they came, among their first duties was to found schools inwhich to train men who would succeed them; we must always remember thatthe education which they gave had one supreme object--it was to bring upthe boys of the rude and barbarous communities in which they foundthemselves, to become teachers and servants of the Church. The substanceof the teaching was always the same, whether in Spain, in Gaul, inIreland or in Britain; it was the Bible, the services of the Church, andthe writings of the Fathers. It was by the school that the boys wereinitiated into the common system of Western Christendom, and were madecitizens of the greater world the centre of which was in Rome. 

But if the substance and the object was identical throughout Europe, soalways was the form in which the teaching was given; at a time when alllearning and all religion came from Rome, the foundation of knowledgewas the Latin tongue. In these early days was established the traditionthat still subsists; the gateway to learning and to culture lay by thenarrow road of the Latin grammar. The schoolboy who still tells out hislongs and shorts can compare them with the ruder efforts of his Saxonforefathers thirteen centuries ago. Never have authors attained a fameand a circulation equal to that of the great grammarians who, during thedecline of the Empire, codified the rules of Latin speech; generationafter generation passed, and down almost to our own days every schoolboybegan his career on the lines laid down in the works of Donatus andPriscian. 

We must, however, guard ourselves against a mistake into which it wouldbe easy to fall. It is true that in the early mediaeval days educationwas based on the study of the Latin language; and it was only throughliterature that the language could be learnt. The study of classicalliterature as we understand it was, however, far removed from the idealsof this time. The most authoritative teachers never neglected to warntheir pupils against the moral dangers which arose from the study ofheathen writers; Ovid and Cicero were only admitted under protest, andthey were merely the stepping-stone to the study of Augustine andPrudentius. 

On this common basis--the Bible, the Church, and the Latinlanguage--was then established the education of Western Europe, and theform it then assumed it retained for over a thousand years, almostwithout change. By this a common cast was given to the intellect, andthe nations were disciplined by common spiritual teaching. It wasextraordinarily effective. It kept down, and in many countries almostdestroyed, the vigorous and aspiring local and national life which, inevery country, was striving after self-expression. In our own countrythis effect was most conspicuous. The English, illiterate though theymight be, were not without the promise of a great future. In the remainsof the Saxon poems we can see the beginnings of what under happiercircumstances might have grown into a great national literature. Itsorigins were deep seated in the life of the people. It proved itselfquickly able to absorb the new teaching of the Gospel, and, as theChristian Epics show, here was the basis on which might have been builta national interpretation of Christianity. All that was required was theadoption of English as the language of the Church and the School. Thebeginning was made when Alfred, during the few years which he securedfrom the Danish inroads, began his great work of founding an Englishliterature in which the teaching of the Church and the works ofantiquity were included. The attempt was ruined for the time by therenewal of the Danish inroads, permanently by the Norman Conquest. ForWilliam brought with him not only his French knights, but also Italianpriests. Once more, under the influence of Lanfranc and his successors, the Church and the School were brought under the full control of therevived power of Rome, and all prospect of a spontaneous and indigenousnational intellectual life was destroyed. Unity was re-established, andthe School was the instrument by which England was fully incorporated inthe culture and religion of the Western Church. 

As it was with the School so also with the university. The second, asthe first, was the creation of the Church, and even more conspicuouslyit was the vehicle for fostering and maintaining the control of commoninstitutions and a common learning, and thereby of crushing out the richvariety of local life which everywhere was springing up. In its veryconstitution the University of Paris, the mother and model of all lateruniversities (at least in northern Europe), showed its internationalcharacter; the students who flocked to it from all countries wereorganized in 'nations' a system which, at least in name, still remainsin many of the universities to this day; the whole instruction was andremained in Latin, and the whole course of instruction was a longapprenticeship to the study of theology. It was from the universitiesthat emanated the great system of philosophy in which a Frenchman asAbelard, an Italian as Thomas of Aquinas, an Englishman as William ofOckham each took his part. 

We may regard with admiration the great intellectual achievements of theScholastic philosophy which, for over two centuries, dominated theofficial education, but we must not forget that its ascendancy impliedthe exclusion from all public recognition of the local and nationalthought and literature which now, as before, was struggling into life. The Troubadours and the Minnesänger, the Chanson de Roland and theNibelungenlied, the Chronicles of Froissard, Chaucer, and Piers Plowman, each of them so full of fresh vigorous local life, were not only outsidethe official system of education, but in their essence opposed to it. This was clearly seen as soon as the free and uncontrolled mind wasdirected to the highest subjects of thought. National idiosyncrasies, asthey found expression in the domain of philosophy and theology, producedresults different from the established teaching of the school. To theChurch truth was always one and the same. Truth was one, error wasmanifold; in unity was salvation, and divergence was heresy. And soevery attempt at national and local thought was not only suppressed ineducation, but fell under the ban of discipline. In Languedoc theAlbigenses ventured the assertion of their independence; Huss inBohemia, in England Wyclif. What happened? The Albigenses weremassacred, Huss was burnt, Wyclif was condemned, and his followerssuffered under the new law of heresy. 

This system, which had originated as a part of a great spiritualmovement, long outlived its usefulness. It became an intolerabletyranny. Its effects were to be seen in the teaching of the humblestgrammar school, and every boy who began the study of the Latin grammarwas being initiated into the abstractions or the Scholastic logic. Itbecame a dead and iron crust by which the mind of man was confined, andit was the school and the university which were the peculiarinstitutions by which this system was maintained. Unity of educationthere was, but at what a price had it been won. 

One thing had, however, been secured: the common Christian basis of ourmodern civilization had been stamped upon the peoples; so long as Europeremains Europe this cannot be forgotten or obliterated. No nation canrepudiate its own past, and, whether they will or no, all Westernnations are irrevocably bound together by the ties of the home in whichtheir childhood and youth was passed. 

At last the change came: it came in that double revolution which we callthe Renaissance and the Reformation. In considering them we must confineourselves as closely as we can to their effect on education. 

The revival of learning was essentially an educational movement, it hadfrom the beginning to do primarily with the school. It had as its objecta complete change both in the subject-matter and in the spirit ofeducation. Always it drew its inspiration from the literature of Greece, and this meant the fullest freedom of the human intellect, freedom ofspeculation, freedom of inquiry on the conditions of human life, and inparticular it was a revolt from the ascetic ideas of the mediaevalChurch; it was the assertion of the dignity of the body and mind of man. Now whereas in Italy, its original home, this took a warp definitelyantagonistic to Christian faith and Christian ethics, in Northern Europethe new classical learning was harmonized with Christianity, andclassical learning was applied to the interpretation of the Bible. Itwas the synthesis of what mediaeval Europe had regarded asirreconcilable opponents. That was the inspiration of the school reform, and this is the guiding principle of all higher education for the nextthree centuries. It was a movement that originally was not local ornational but European, and in its first form was not in opposition tothe maintenance of the ecclesiastical unity of Western Europe. Thefigure in whom it reaches its clearest expression is that of Erasmus. Standing at the transition between two epochs, he was the last of thegreat European scholars, and belongs to the undivided Catholic Church asmuch as did Abelard or Anselm. The wandering scholar of the Renaissance, without father, without mother, completely freed from ties of family orcountry, at home equally in Deventer or Cambridge, in Basel or in Parisor in Rome, without even a native language, for to him Latin was theonly vernacular (he has, I believe, left no word written in any otherlanguage), he saw the vision of a Europe still united in obedience tothe one Church, but a Europe in which the culture of the humanist wouldgo side by side with the common faith inherited from early days. 

The hopes of Erasmus were not to be fulfilled. It is indeed true that helaid the foundation on which the recognized and official scheme ofeducation has continued almost to our own day; the Latin schools ofGermany and the Grammar Schools of England were each alike conducted onthe basis of the Church and the classics, but even before thefoundations had been completed the real unity was gone. The Renaissancewas met by two forces, each stronger than itself, and the common streamwas broken into a number of smaller currents. These have since increasedin strength till the sense of the common origin has almost disappeared. 

The common mediaeval system (and in this the spirit of the Renaissancewas still mediaeval) depended on the common Church, and especially ineducation, in the use of Latin as the universal language of learning. During the sixteenth century both were overthrown. Luther was strongerthan Erasmus, and the new languages, Italian, French, Spanish, English, quickly began to encroach on the claims of Latin to be the one languageof the school. 

The religious revolution need not detain us. It is sufficient to recallthat in many parts of Europe the divergence of creed tended to become ifnot identical with, at least closely to follow the boundaries of statesand nations. In every land the school was still strictly under thecontrol of the Church, acting now as the delegate of the temporal ruler, and in each country a whole body of teaching and discipline was evolved, the result of which was a fundamental difference in the attitude ofmind. The English bishops, the German consistories, the Scotchpresbytery, set their seal on the schools, as much as did the Jesuitsand Port Royal in France. The Shorter Catechism, the English PrayerBook, the German hymns, each gave a distinct character to the religionsof the country, and this character was the basis of the teaching in theschools. 

Religion, which had been the great unifier, became the chief engine ofseparation. 

Equally important was the growth of national literature. This indeedgoes back far beyond the sixteenth century, but none the less it is fromthis time that the writers not only of imagination, but also oflearning, began to express themselves each in his own vernacular. SirThomas More, it is true, wrote his _Utopia_ in Latin, but it was inEnglish that it had its great circulation. Bacon used both languages, but it is on English editions of his works that his fame chiefly rests. In particular we find that works on religion and theology are nowproduced not only in Latin, but one hundred years before Hooker wouldhave discoursed on 'ecclesiastical polity' in the learned language, andPascal would never have thought of using French for discussing thephilosophy of the Jesuits. 

The influence of these changes upon the school is remarkable. Strictlyspeaking, for many generations they seemed to have little immediateeffect upon it. In every country in Europe Latin remained both thesubject and the vehicle of higher education, but it is just for thisreason that we find that, during the seventeenth century and the greaterpart of the eighteenth, the schools are more and more falling out oftouch with the intellectual life of the times. They continued in the oldway; for them Shakespeare and Milton, Montaigne and Molière, Cervantesand Tasso, seemed to have written in vain. They maintained the form ofan older period, but they had lost the spirit by which it had beeninspired. Their learning remained purely classical; but even though thenew national literature was long in winning for itself a definite placein the recognized school system, the growth of this literature and theevolution of national consciousness of which it was a part could not infact take place without altering the whole spirit of the teaching. If weare to understand how this was we must keep in mind one of the chiefcharacteristics of what is called a classical education. 

The study of the classics means the study of the whole life of the twogreat nations of antiquity as preserved in the extant literature. Nowthis does not contain a definite and formulated doctrine, it does noteven, as might be said of the Middle Ages, mean one attitude towards theworld; it opens to the student a field of extraordinary wealth andvariety, and from this each will take that which he is able toappropriate. To one it may be the mysticism of the Cambridge Platonists, to another the frank and pagan joy in life of Anacreon and Horace. Rousseau and Grote will each in his own way appropriate the lesson ofLiberty, while others will turn to the story of the militant anddominant aristocracy of Rome. Goethe and Keats, Milton and Gibbon, Berkeley and Schopenhauer, will each draw their inspiration from theclassics, but the result will not be to make them resemble one another, it will be to give vigour, decision, form, resolution, and dignity tothe qualities of each. 

And as it is with individuals, so it is with nations. The schools of allnations maintained their classical curriculum; boys still began, andoften ended, their schooling with the Latin grammar, but this did notmean, as it had meant in the earlier days, that the influence was thesame. There was indeed little in common between what we may venture tocall the pedantry of Germany and the superficial elegancy of the Jesuitschools. And so the classical basis did not prevent the school assuminga national complexion. Let me give one illustration of the manner inwhich the classical teaching could take a markedly national spirit. Perhaps the most effective classical teaching that we find in theeighteenth century is that at Eton, and it was on it that was foundedthe great school of oratory and statesmanship. It was on Cicero andHomer and Demosthenes that Pitt and Fox and Canning and Gladstone (forthe tradition continued to his day) formed their minds and their style, but they emerged from their training above all Englishmen, butEnglishmen who had learnt how to give to their own national feelings adignity of expression and nobility of form equal to that of theexemplars whom they had studied. 

Now just as the finest expression of the English national spirit isfound in those whose school training had been based on the classics, just as the Girondists based their revolutionary doctrines on Hellenicmodels, so almost at the same time the great political awakening ofGermany and Prussia was inspired by what has been called the secondRenaissance; and yet how profound is the divergence between Wellesleyand Pitt, Humboldt and Stein, St. Just, Demousin, and Vergniaud; allwere children of the common classical tradition, but how different isthe use to which they put it. During the centuries that passed betweenthe Renaissance and the Revolution, the education of the differentcountries had then in fact been drifting far apart. What has been doneduring the nineteenth century has been openly to carry into effectchanges which had long been overdue and were already to a large extentoperative. 

It was inevitable that the new literature and thought would eventuallyfind its way into the schools and universities. Before this change hadbeen accomplished, a fresh and even stronger influence asserted itself. Democracy had come, and a democracy which based the state on theprinciple of nationality. It seized on the school as the means to holdthe minds of men in fief, just as had the mediaeval Church, and in doingso enforced and perpetuated the national differences. 

In the eighteenth century rulers troubled themselves little aboutmatters apparently of such minor importance as the languages in whichtheir subjects conversed and read. Even the French did not try to touchthe German-speaking inhabitants of Alsace, and Copenhagen could becomea centre of German letters, while French maintained itself at the Courtof Berlin. All this was changed by the Revolution, and Napoleon was thefirst deliberately to convert the whole fabric of French schools and theuniversity into an instrument for the organized propaganda of the cultof the Empire. Since then there is scarcely a government (always exceptthat of England, which alone has been strong enough to rest on thenative and undisciplined political sense of the people) which has notfollowed in his path. In particular when the state is founded on thenation the school is used to develop in the children the fullconsciousness of nationality. That institution that was for so long thehome of European unity has become the most useful agent for theperpetuation and exaggeration of national differences. It is in theschool that the immigrant to the United States is taught to reverencethe institutions of his new fatherland, and from generation togeneration the school labours to keep alive the memory of thehalf-forgotten struggle of the new republic and the British monarchy. InFrance each successive government has used the school to force on thenation its interpretation of the national history and ideals. And thevictories of Prussian armies were cemented and confirmed by the officialexposition of the Prussian state and the cult of the Hohenzollern. Tothe school is transferred the conflict between the doctrines ofauthority and the revolution, of the secular state and of the Kingdom bythe Grace of God. Every nation rightly struggling to be free has seen inthe school the instrument for securing the allegiance of the young, andthe school has become the centre of political struggle. In Trieste andin Poland, in Alsace and in Macedonia, we find kings and politicianscontending for the minds and souls of children, and it is in the school, the college, and the university that has been prepared the conflict thatis now devastating Europe. 

What has been done in the nineteenth century has really been only tocarry into effect the change which was long overdue and was implicit inearlier years. The national culture and national authors have at lengthforced their way into the schools, and the result has been thatinstitutions which originally in reality, and for so long in appearance, were the vehicles for the expression of the common Europeancivilization, have been almost entirely won over to the cause of thenational expression. 

This is indeed inevitable. Education, as we have seen, can only beeffective when it is the vehicle for strong beliefs, and is informed bythe conscious expression of an attitude towards the world. Now, inmodern days, the consciousness of a common European spirit has, in fact, almost disappeared. In its place we find the intense consciousness ofthe nation. Even religion has become national, and God has once againbecome a tribal deity. The new consciousness of the common interests ofwhat is called Labour have no recognition in the approved teaching. Ifthe work of the school was not to be merely the dead instruction inuseless knowledge, if the work was to be directed towards informing theminds of the pupils with ideals and beliefs, it was only in theidealization of the national thought that this could be attained. 

Is the older union of thought to be permanently lost? If not, you mustfind it again in some higher synthesis. There are many who would do soin the pursuit of mathematics and the natural sciences; in them, atleast, no divisions of country can be found. The student in his chemicallaboratory, the doctor in his hospital, the mathematician in his study, finds his colleagues in every country in the civilized world, and itmatters not to him whether the next step in penetrating the secrets ofnature have been made in Vienna, or in Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bologna. 

There are many who believe that on this basis will be established theUnion of Civilization. If we look, however, more critically, we may findreason to doubt whether this optimistic view is justified. I do notshare this hope and this belief, I do not look forward to a spiritualand intellectual unity of the nations established on the basis ofscientific education. It is, indeed, impossible to over-estimate notonly the practical but also the intellectual influence of what we maycall the scientific spirit. It is indeed true that those who areaccustomed to the careful and systematic investigation of causes, whohave been trained from their earliest years to recognize in the pomp andpageantry of the external world--and even to some extent in the workingof the human mind and the structure of human society--the orderlysequence of natural law, will have a type and character of mindessentially different from those who have not passed through thisdiscipline. The civilization (I scarcely dare to use the word culture)of those nations who have this in common will have a unity of their own, and will differ fundamentally from their own past and from that of otherraces. 

On the other hand there are two considerations that I should like to putbefore you, as leading to a less important position, the one arisingfrom the practical nature of science, the other connected with itsessential intellectual origin. 

It is a characteristic of all work in physical science that however itmay originate in the pure desire for truth, it is very quickly availablefor practical use, personal comfort, the acquisition of wealth, andnational efficiency. The physicist who calculates the stresses andstrains of an aeroplane finds that in teaching man how to control naturehe is also providing the means for his struggle, whether in peace orwar, in commerce or on the battle-field. We soon find that the progressof technical skill is curiously inoperative in its effect on humanthought and feeling. Men remain the same whether they ride in a coach, or a train, or a motor-car; it matters little whether they use bows andarrows, or rifles, or hand-grenades, or liquid fire. 

Now in education it is the technical side of scientific progress whichalmost inevitably becomes most prominent, and the greater the advance inknowledge the more will this be true. The wider the domain of knowledgethe greater is the number of those who will be chiefly occupied with theuse of the processes and materials that have been discovered and thesmaller is the proportion of those who will have reached the border ofthe known, and will begin the work of exploration into the unknown. Thatis, the greater will be the number of those who are the servants and notthe masters of science. A unity of a certain kind we shall have, theunity of those who have learned to pilot an aeroplane, to apply X-rays, to extract the phosphate from iron, or to test cattle for tubercle. Allthis may produce a uniformity in the machinery of life, it passes byuntouched the motives of action, the beliefs, affections, and interests. How many illustrations of this do we see around us! What more gloriousillustration of the power of the human intellect can be found than thelater developments of electricity, but scarcely had the discoveries beenmade when we find them seized upon by the man of affairs, and wirelesstelegraphy becomes the subject of speculation on the Stock Exchange, anda chief instrument of war. That which the chemist finds in hislaboratory is, within a few years, sometimes even a few months, foundagain in the factory, and perhaps on the field of battle. 

Do not let it be supposed that I would underrate the possibility of adeeper unity, but if we would find it we must carry our analysis furtherback. The progress of science is in truth not a cause but a result, notan ultimate fact but the symptom of a state of mind. It springs fromthat which was brought into Europe consciously at the Renaissance andwhich we may call the spirit of Greece. It is that to which we owe notonly the investigation and subjection of nature, but equally with it allprogress in every department of thought, the analysis of society, whether political or economic, the investigations of the working ofhuman reason, the probing of human passions, and their record in art andliterature. 

What is this spirit? Is it not the confidence in the spirit of man, thespirit which in intellectual matters bends to no authority, andrecognizes no limit to its enterprise, which probes all things, testsall things, and follows fearlessly where the argument leads it? This iswhat I mean by the spirit of Greece, it is that which Sophocles hasimmortalized. Of all this, what we call science is but a part, perhapsat present the most striking and important part, but still a part only;to look to it as the key of our civilization and the sole basis of oureducation would be to set up a partial and, therefore, a false ideal. Anideal, moreover, which, if pursued to its logical conclusion, wouldbecome the basis for the most appalling tyranny, by which the freespirit of investigation, to which we owe all our scientific progress, would be buried in the structure that itself had reared. For what is theend to which it must lead? Is it not a society which is held together bytechnical skill, a society of organized efficiency, where eachindividual holds his place, not as a living spirit, but as a slave ofthe great machine, tied throughout his life to the perfect performanceof his limited and specialized task? I can imagine such a society; it isthe ideal which some modern German writers have definitely put beforeus. It may be that this will be the Europe of the future, a Europe witha common government and a universal system of education by which eachchild will be trained to take his allotted part in an organized slavery. I hope I shall not live to see it. 

None the less, a unity there is, but it is a deeper unity than this. Itis the unity inherited from the past. Here we may find, not indeed asuperficial uniformity, but a real unity of life and spirit. Nocivilization can repudiate its own origin, and whatever the future mayhave in store the childhood of Europe was nourished on the Bible andChristianity, and in the more mature years there was added the impulseto the boldest use of the human intellect that came from Greece. Thesetwo elements give us that which is the peculiar characteristic ofWestern Europe, and as we are told that the growth of each individualrepeats the evolution of the race, so the education of each individualrepeats in childhood and boyhood the education of the nation. It is fromthese two elements that the whole of modern culture springs, and it isfrom them that again and again they regain their strength. 

And if we recollect this we need not be much disturbed by our apparentdifferences and misunderstandings. After all, they are the necessaryresult of freedom, and what do the Bible and Greece mean but moral andintellectual freedom? We want no formal and artificial unity: to uschange, progress, conflict and division are the breath of our life. Justas the cluster of little towns in the Aegean islands and valleys prizedbefore all things their political and intellectual independence, so isit with these small countries nestling on the shores of the Atlantic. Politically they have always refused to acquiesce in the establishmentof any common authority over them, whether it comes from outside or evenfrom among themselves, and so also they always repudiate the ascendancyof any single or partial intellectual doctrine. Each party and eachnation adds its own contribution; all have a common origin, and allspring from the same root. Since the bonds have been relaxed and thedominion of the Universal Church overthrown, we see nothing from therivalry of political systems and passing schemes of thought; they chaseeach other like the storms which arise from the Atlantic and pass inquick succession over our shores. It is this change and succession whichis to us the breath of our life: we know nothing of the steady staticweather of the great continents, where rain and drought have each theirmeasured and settled space: and we know nothing, and will know nothing, of the formal and authoritative rule combining all Europe into onerealm, whether political or intellectual. For we know that unity andpermanence does not belong to this life, and our nearest approach totruth is to be found not in a settled system but in the thousandfoldinteractions of half-truths and partial systems. 

 Life like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of eternity Until death shatters it to fragments. 

A unity there is, but it is the unity of the countless and variedflowers that carpet the meadows in spring, the unity of the commonspirit of life which animates them all. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Leach, _The Schools of Medieval England_. Methuen. 

Mullinger, J. Bass, _The Schools of Charles the Great_. 

Paulsen, _Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts_. 

Rashdall, _Universities in the Middle Ages_. Clarendon Press. 

Foster Watson, _Grammar Schools_. Cambridge University Press

Woodward, _Erasmus_. Cambridge University Press. 

IX

COMMERCE AND FINANCE AS INTERNATIONAL FORCES

Commerce and finance are departments of life in which mankind approachesnearer to unity than in any other. They are practical expressions of theinstinct of self-preservation which is the first law of nature. Theyspring straight from the acquisitiveness which is a universalcharacteristic of human nature and indeed of animal and vegetablenature. Every living thing wants to acquire food. Adam Smith indeedrestricts the trading instinct to mankind. 'The propensity', he says, 'to truck, barter, or exchange one thing for another ... Is common toall men and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to knowneither this nor any other species of contracts. Two greyhounds inrunning down the same hare have sometimes the appearance of acting insome sort of concert. Each turns her towards his companion or endeavoursto intercept her when his companion turns her towards himself. This, however, is not the effect of any contract, but of the accidentalconcurrence of their passions in the same object at that particulartime. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of onebone for another with another dog. '[24]

Mr Cannan, in his edition of the _Wealth of Nations_, very judiciouslypoints out in a note on this passage that 'it is by no means clear whatobject there could be in exchanging one bone for another'. Probably ifone rummaged the literature of dog stories one would find plenty ofexamples of commerce between dogs, and when they perform tricks to getfood, we detect the germ of the exchange of a service for a commodity. 

When a bee takes honey from a flower and leaves in exchange the pollenfrom a flower of an opposite sex, it may be said to be at once amerchant, a carrier, and a matrimonial agent, and the brilliant colourswith which flowers attract these merchants have been compared to theadvertising posters of the human trader. But however the case may be inthe animal and vegetable world, there can be no question that thetrading instinct appears at a very early stage of human development. Inboys the instinct to trade or swop articles appears long before theyfeel any inclination to fall in love or to give much serious thought toreligion. The classical example is given by Mark Twain, who relates howTom Sawyer exchanged one of his own teeth, which had been pulled outthat morning, for a tick in the possession of Huckleberry Finn, and then'the two boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before'. In fact, of course, they both were wealthier than before, because each had gotsomething that he wanted more than the article with which he had parted;and this pleasant result sums up the whole genesis and basis ofcommerce. 

But though commerce is thus merely an expression of an instinct which isprimitive and universal, it does not follow that it is its only or evenits earliest expression. Perhaps its earliest and most naturalexpression was through robbery, with or without violence. A primitivesavage who saw something that he wanted would probably, if strongenough, hit its owner on the head and take it, and this short and simplemethod of acquisition still occasionally reappears in the realms of themost highly civilized diplomacy. Nevertheless, at a very early stage itslimitations became obvious, and quite at the dawn of recorded history wefind commercial transactions referred to as an established branch ofhuman intercourse. The Old Testament story has not gone far before ittells us of buying and selling. In the twenty-third chapter of Genesiswe find a very interesting bargain recorded between Abraham and Ephron. Sarah had died in Kirjath-arba:

 'the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan: and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her. And Abraham stood up from before his dead, and spake unto the sons of Heth, saying, I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight. And the children of Heth answered Abraham, saying unto him, Hear us, my lord: thou art a mighty prince among us: in the choice of our sepulchres bury thy dead; none of us shall withhold from thee his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy dead. And Abraham stood up and bowed himself to the people of the land, even to the children of Heth. And he communed with them, saying, If it be your mind that I should bury my dead out of my sight; hear me, and intreat for me to Ephron the son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he hath, which is in the end of his field; for as much money as it is worth he shall give it me for a possession of a buryingplace amongst you. And Ephron dwelt among the children of Heth: and Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of Heth, even of all that went in at the gate of his city, saying, Nay, my lord, hear me: the field give I thee, and the cave that is therein, I give it thee; in the presence of the sons of my people give I it thee: bury thy dead. And Abraham bowed down himself before the people of the land. And he spake unto Ephron in the audience of the people of the land, saying, But if thou wilt give it, I pray thee, hear me: I will give thee money for the field; take it of me, and I will bury my dead there. And Ephron answered Abraham, saying unto him, My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver; what is that betwixt me and thee? bury therefore thy dead. And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant. '

In this very early and curious example of a bargain we find the sellercontinually expressing reluctance to sell and asking the buyer to acceptas a gift the commodity that he wants. It appears from the sequel thatthis is merely an example of Oriental politeness. At any rate, the endof the bargain was that Abraham paid the money, four hundred shekels ofsilver, which is described as 'current money with the merchant', thusapparently showing that this system of payment in metals was already aregular feature of commercial transactions. Coined currency had not yetbeen developed, for we may note that Abraham weighed the silver. 

When we come to the days of Solomon we find something like a developedinternational trade. The fifth chapter of the first book of Kingsdescribes how Solomon, on taking the throne of his father, sent toHiram, king of Tyre, and stated his purpose to build a house unto thename of the Lord his God, asking Hiram to send his servants to hew cedartrees out of Lebanon, and saying that he would give hire for Hiram'sservants according to all that he should appoint. Hiram replied that hewould do all that Solomon desired concerning timber of cedar andconcerning timber of fir. 'My servants shall bring them down fromLebanon unto the sea: and I will convey them by sea in floats unto theplace that thou shalt appoint me, and will cause them to be dischargedthere, and thou shalt receive them: and thou shalt accomplish my desire, in giving food for my household. So Hiram gave Solomon cedar trees andfir trees according to all his desire. And Solomon gave Hiram twentythousand measures of wheat for food to his household, and twentymeasures of pure oil: thus gave Solomon to Hiram year by year. '

According to this arrangement it would appear that Solomon paid for thetimber that he imported by exporting to Hiram wheat and oil, but it isshown in a later chapter that the transaction was not a purelycommercial one. At the end of twenty years, when Solomon had finishedthe building of the temple, he gave Hiram as further considerationtwenty cities in the land of Galilee, 'and Hiram came out from Tyre tosee the cities which Solomon had given him; and they pleased him not. And he said, What cities are these which thou hast given me, my brother?And he called them the land of Cabul [explained in the margin as meaning"displeasing" or "dirty"] unto this day. And Hiram sent to the kingsixscore talents of gold. '[25]

Apart from this transaction between the two kings, Solomon appears tohave developed a very considerable foreign trade, presumably exportingwheat and oil and other agricultural products. His imports appear tohave been various. Chapter ten of the first book of Kings states that'the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once inthree years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks. ' ... 'And the king made silver to be inJerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to be as the sycomore trees thatare in the vale, for abundance. And Solomon had horses brought out ofEgypt, and linen yarn: the king's merchants received the linen yarn at aprice. '

The whole question of Solomon's balance of trade is a very interestingone, and deserves the attention of some Hebrew scholar who may be ableto throw light upon it. In these days it is rather difficult to see howa purely agricultural country could have found the means of paying forall these articles of pure luxury which Solomon imported so freely. Itmust be noted, however, that 'all the earth sought to Solomon, to hearhis wisdom, which God had put in his heart. And they brought every manhis present, vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and garments, andarmour, and spices, horses, and mules, a rate year by year'. From thisit appears that Solomon was able to exchange his wisdom for a veryconsiderable part of the imports which came into his country, and soperhaps we may take it that Solomon's wisdom is the earliest recordedexample of what is now known as an invisible export. A modern equivalentwould be the articles which English writers contribute to Americannewspapers and are paid for, ultimately, by the shipment to England ofAmerican wheat and cotton. It is also interesting to note in these days, when personal economy and simplicity of life are so freely preached, that Solomon's very luxurious imports were followed by evilconsequences, imports of an enormous number of strange women, and aconsequent turning away of his heart after false gods. 

When we come to secular history, the very first chapter of the firstbook of the first history ever written deals with a question ofcommerce. Herodotus, who has been called the Father of History, openshis work with a few introductory words stating that 'these are theresearches which he publishes in the hope of thereby preventing thegreat and wonderful actions of the Greeks and Barbarians from losingtheir due meed of glory, and withal to put on record what were theirgrounds of feud'. And then he plunges straight into his story, asfollows: 'According to the Persians best informed in history, thePhoenicians began the quarrel. This people, who had formerly dwelt onthe shores of the Erythræan Sea, having migrated to the Mediterraneanand settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, theysay, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with thewares of Egypt and Assyria. They landed at many places on the coast, andamong the rest at Argos, which was then pre-eminent above all thestates included now under the common name of Hellas. Here they exposedtheir merchandise, and traded with the natives for five or six days; atthe end of which time, when almost everything was sold, there came downto the beach a number of women, and among them the daughter of the king, who was, they say, agreeing in this with the Greeks, Io, the child ofInachus. The women were standing by the stern of the ship intent upontheir purchases, when the Phoenicians, with a general shout, rushed uponthem. The greater part made their escape, but some were seized andcarried off. Io herself was among the captives. The Phoenicians put thewomen on board their vessel, and set sail for Egypt. Thus did Io passinto Egypt, according to the Persian story, which differs widely fromthe Phoenician: and thus commenced, according to their authors, theseries of outrages. '[26]

Commerce is thus a striking example of the unity of mankind, being apractically universal form of human activity which arises as soon as manverges from the earliest stages of barbarism. In the case of individualsit is easy to see how this desire to exchange commodities between oneindividual and another meant so great an increase in human efficiencythat it had only to be thought of to be universally adopted. Theprimitive savage, doing everything for himself, building his own hut, killing or finding his own food, and making his own clothes, such asthey were, was an extremely versatile and self-sufficing person. At thesame time the comforts that he enjoyed were probably not verysatisfactory. His hut was almost certain to be draughty and to let inrain through the roof; his hunting and finding of food must have veryoften left him with his larder empty, and the state of his wardrobe wasprobably simple rather than satisfying. It would inevitably happen thatcertain members of the tribe would show greater efficiency than othersin doing a certain one of these various businesses which are essentialeven to the simplest form of human life. Thus the tendency tospecialization begins to show itself. The skilful hut-builder buildshuts not only for himself but for other members of the tribe; heacquires further skill by constant practice and the huts are morequickly built and better when finished. The other tribesmen, in effect, pay him by supplying him with a certain amount of food and clothes. Thetendency for specialization would make very rapid progress, and it iseasy to see how at a very early date and in the most primitivecommunities there would be bowyers, arrow-makers, and leather-dressers, and how various kinds of artificers would arise, supplying the wants ofthe community in some special line, and receiving from the community allthe commodities which they required apart from those which they producedthemselves. The individuals of the community thus become mutuallydependent, and live by one another's production. Hence comes unity, andwith it a fresh cause of disunion, owing to the likelihood ofquarrelling over the exchanges effected. 

As progress developed and the communities at a greater distance becameacquainted with one another's wants and the various kinds of goods thatcertain districts supplied, this tendency to specialization andconsequent exchange of goods would grow in an ever-widening circle. Instead of the tribe being a commercial unity, the zone in which theinterchange of goods went on would widen as far as the geographical andother boundaries allowed it. In the same country one district would befound to be specially well adapted for agriculture, and another forpasture; another, being well supplied with metals, would naturallyprovide a race of smiths and producers of rough tools for industry, andthe exchange of commodities between districts with these variouscapacities would mean that the specialization of production would gosteadily further, and that a whole town or village would be found inwhich the great majority of the inhabitants were at work upon oneparticular form of industry, relying for the other kinds of commoditiesthat they required upon the activity of a similar community living inthe next valley or on the other side of the river. This widening-outprocess would naturally extend itself over the borders of differentcountries. Obstacles to this process would be found in the differencesof language and probably in the difficulties of transport. On the otherhand, it would be greatly stimulated by the different ideas of valuethat prevailed in different communities. Value depends upon the extentto which anybody wants a thing, also on what he thinks it is worth, thatis to say, the number of commodities in his possession with which he isprepared to part in order to secure it. Obviously commodities coming infrom foreign countries, and being unknown or rare in the country inwhich they are offered, if they are otherwise at all attractive, possessa certain amount of what is called scarcity value, which makes themeasily saleable by adventurous merchants who arrive with the cargo. 

The stories of fortunes made by merchants who travelled among simplenative tribes with cargoes of glass beads and were able to exchangethese gaudy baubles for gold or rubber or other commodities which arevaluable in civilized countries, have often been told, and opportunitiesfor trading of this kind must have been very much more frequent whencommunication was comparatively difficult. Value to a great extent beingdetermined by local convention and local habit, the profits of thetrader were likely to be considerably increased the further he got fromhis home market. If he took away with him plenty of things which werein abundant supply at home and consequently cheap, he would almostcertainly be able to bring back a large number of things which wereplentiful in a far-away community, and consequently cheap for him toacquire, and scarce in his own district and consequently sure of a goodmarket. This difference of standard of value in different countries wasa great stimulus to foreign trade, also a great help to bringing mankindtogether, though it sometimes ended in disillusionment. It has beenasserted that even within the memory of man an English merchant tradedwith a primitive community in which gold and silver were exchangeableweight for weight. For some years he did a very pleasant and profitabletrade by taking a cargo of silver and bringing back with him the sameweight in gold, the value of which in England happened to be sixteentimes as great, or more. Unfortunately, when he made his last voyage hewas met at the mouth of the river by a friendly native, who informed himthat the community was waiting for him with tomahawks, and he hastilyput to sea again. For the rest of his life he cherished a grievanceagainst this curious people with which he had dealt, according to hisown view, on perfectly equitable terms, having sold them a commodity ata price to which they were accustomed, and which they regarded as quitecorrect, with the result that they proposed to murder him because theyfound that the price was not in accordance with that current in otherparts of the world. 

By this business of exchange of commodities between one community andanother, the process of specialization or division of labour which hasalready been referred to as its basis has been developed toextraordinary lengths. Its effect has been to increase enormously thewealth available, while at the same time the concentration of theindividual has narrowed down his work so that he now no longerspecializes on making one commodity, but on making a part of a fractionof a commodity. 

Adam Smith's chapters on division of labour are so well known that thereis no need to point out the very great economic benefits that arise fromit. Clearly, any man who spends all his working time upon one particularprocess of productive activity acquires thereby a skill and rapidity incarrying out his part of the operation which would be impossible to anyworker who has to carry the manufacture of an article from the beginningto its end. Just as we saw, when the primitive savage left off doingeverything for himself and took to building huts for the rest of thecommunity, that the huts became much more water-tight and comfortable, so the process goes still further, and building becomes very much morerapid and very much more cheap and efficient when a large number ofspecialists are set to work on the various very different processesrequired for the construction of a house. The consequence is that theproduction of goods is very greatly cheapened and made much more rapid, but at the same time the worker tends to become an artisan instead of acraftsman, and his work is likely to be much more monotonous and muchmore trying. Instead of seeing his product grow under his hand from itsbeginning to its end, with constant changes in the nature of its call onhis energy and care, he is employed during the whole of his working timeon some mechanical process, with the result that he himself becomessomething very like a machine. What he has gained in the power to makeand acquire commodities cheaply and quickly is offset to a certainextent by the less interesting and varied nature of his work. 

It also follows that as the worker becomes a specialist he becomesdependent upon other members of the community for the supply to him of alarge number of things which he requires for his own existence. If hespends his life in making one commodity or in making part of onecommodity, it is clear that his requirements of all the things that arenecessary for life apart from what he makes himself can only besatisfied by the willingness of the community to take the commodity thathe makes in payment for those which it produces and of which he is inneed. When he works for himself, he only makes things that he knowshimself to need; when he works to sell to others, he has to speculate onthe hope that the others will want what he makes. 

Commerce thus not only shows the unity of mankind by being a universalfeature of his existence, but increases that unity by making eachindividual dependent upon the exertions of his fellows, and on theirwillingness to take from him stuff which he is turning out; but ifcommerce thus promotes unity, it also tends to create a certain amountof friction and disagreement between one man and another whendifferences of opinion arise concerning the value of the product whicheach man is making, that is to say, concerning the amount of goods whichthe rest of the community is prepared to give him in exchange. 

This consideration is also very strongly evident with regard tointernational trade. Here the division of labour is assisted by thedifference in the products of different countries. There can be no doubtthat the exchange of commodities between one nation and another tends tobring them together and to promote unity and harmony of interests. Atthe same time it is also likely to be fruitful in quarrels andbickering. We saw that Hiram was very much dissatisfied with the citiesin Galilee which Solomon presented to him in the course of theirsemi-commercial transactions. He appears to have retaliated by makingSolomon a very handsome present in gold; but Hiram seems to have been avery exceptional person, and it is probable that most traders who aredissatisfied with the consideration received would not have been sogenerous in expressing themselves. 

International commerce has also been a fruitful cause of disunion ratherthan unity when various nations have quarrelled with one anotherconcerning the right to trade with a third people. If one nation istrading with another greatly to its profit, it feels that it has agrievance when it finds that a neighbouring nation is sending cargoes tothe same destination and undercutting it and taking the cream of thetrade. After religion, it is probable that trade has produced morebloodshed than any other form of human activity. At the same time therecan be no doubt that on the whole its influence has been strongly on theside of unity and that it has done more to break down internationalbarriers than any other influence that has operated in the course ofhistory. The trader, as such, believes entirely and whole-heartedly inthe unity of mankind. All that he wants to do is to buy his products ascheaply as he can and to sell them at the best possible price. Whetherhe buys at home or abroad, or whether he sells at home or abroad, is amatter of complete indifference to him except that, as has been shown, owing to variations in value in different parts of the world, he isprobably likely to be able to make larger profits from foreign tradethan in commerce at home. National preferences sometimes induce him toencourage home industry by buying home products when foreign goods wouldhave paid him better, but in so far as this happens, he ceases to be atrader as such and becomes a mixture of trader and patriot. As buyersand sellers, however, mankind is, on the whole, singularly free frominternational prejudices. It was thought at one time that importation offoreign goods into England would be considerably checked by insistingupon marks of origin, that is to say, that imported goods should bestamped as such. This expectation, however, seems to have been entirelydisappointed, since most buyers were not concerned with the question ofthe country whence the commodity that they bought came, and onlyconsidered whether it suited their purses and was what they wanted. Sometimes there is actually a prejudice in favour of foreign goods, and, curiously enough, this is found to be so even in countries in which aprotective policy has been very highly developed. It is, or was a fewyears ago, common to see in American newspapers, flaming advertisementsheralding sales of imported goods, which were definitely stated to besuch obviously because the sellers thought that they were likely to beable to sell them better because they were stated to be so. It is also aproud boast of English manufacturers that in many countries on theContinent it is common, or was until quite lately, for nativemanufacturers to sell their goods more easily in their home markets bydescribing them as English. Political and national prejudice seems to beoverruled by the common human desire for something new and strange, andconsequently, in spite of all friction that has arisen frominternational trade, and of the number of wars which have had theirorigin in commercial questions, there is good reason for the assertionthat on the whole commerce has been a mighty promoter of intercourseamong the nations and of the unity of mankind. If it had not been forcommerce, the cheapening and quickening of communication could neverhave been carried out. The trader goes first, and after him thetraveller and the tourist. 

This claim can be made with perhaps even more certainty when we proceedto the realm of finance. If commerce is international and unifying, finance is perhaps even more so. Finance, of course, arises out ofcommerce and is an essential part of its machinery. By finance we meanthe machinery of money--money-dealing and money-lending. Money becomesnecessary as soon as the exchange of commodities, which is the meaningof trade, becomes fairly developed. At first, primitive peoplesexchanged their commodities one for another, but a difficulty arose whenout of a pair of possible traders one had something which the otherwanted but the other had not. For example, if the arrow-maker had arrowsto sell and wanted to buy fish, there obviously could be no bargain ifhis friend who wanted to buy arrows had only got deerskins to give inexchange. It was essential to the development of trade that somecommodity should be hit on which could always be taken in exchange andso form a circulating medium. We have seen from the twenty-third chapterof Genesis that a certain weight of silver had in Abraham's time begunto assume this function. Economic text-books tell us that many othercommodities had the form and function of money before the metals cameinto use. Until quite lately there were many places in which the use ofan agreed medium of exchange had not been adopted to facilitate thepurposes of commerce. Jevons begins his very interesting book on moneyby relating how

 Some years since, Mdlle Zélie, a singer of the Théâtre Lyrique at Paris, made a professional tour round the world, and gave a concert in the Society Islands. In exchange for an air from _Norma_ and a few other songs, she was to receive a third of the receipts. When counted, her share was found to consist of three pigs, twenty-three turkeys, forty-four chickens, five thousand cocoa-nuts, besides considerable quantities of bananas, lemons, and oranges. At the Halles in Paris, as the prima donna remarks in her lively letter, ... This amount of live stock and vegetables might have brought four thousand francs [£160], which would have been good remuneration for five songs. In the Society Islands, however, pieces of money were very scarce; and as Mademoiselle could not consume any considerable portion of the receipts herself, it became necessary in the meantime to feed the pigs and poultry with the fruit, '[27] and so her receipts consumed one another. 

This is an example of the inconvenience which the invention of moneyovercame. In primitive communities it took the form of cowry-shells ortobacco or gunpowder or any commodity which was in universal request inthe place. All the seller wanted to do was to be able to obtain for hisproduct a certain amount of stuff which he could rely on being able toexchange for other things that he wanted. In the end the preciousmetals, with their strong appeal to human vanity, and their utility foradorning temples and so propitiating divine favour, ousted all othercommodities which had been used for money; and they are now to a greatextent ousted by pieces of paper, which still, however, represent claimsto so much gold. 

The discovery of a circulating medium enormously facilitated theprogress of commerce, and it was not long before a class of people grewup who specialized in this particular form of business and becamefinanciers and moneylenders. Bankers and financiers were known in Romeand Athens, and we know that some machinery existed by which themonetary claims of one country on another could be settled by somethingthat fulfilled the functions of the modern bill of exchange. The actualprovision of metallic currency has from the earliest times been almostentirely under the control of the government which took into its ownhands, as an essential part of the police protection which it gives tothe people, the coining of currency, stamping the coin in such a waythat anybody who took one might know that he was getting a certainweight of a precious metal. But the money-dealing business very soondeveloped the machinery of credit by which anybody who had an enterpriseor a venture out of which he expected to make an attractive profitcould, if he had sufficient property to pledge, provide himself with themeans to finance it between the day that he started on his operationsand the day when he brought home his profits: and this business alsobecame international, though not, perhaps, as rapidly as commerce hadoverstepped the boundaries between one people and another. 

In the _Merchant of Venice_ we find Antonio trading with all thecountries of the then known world, From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England, From Lisbon, Barbary, and India, but we do not find that Shylock was lending money on at all the sameinternational scale. When communication was slow, difficult, anduntrustworthy, money-lending at a distance was made very risky, becauseit was impossible for the lender to keep the watchful eye on theborrower's operations and credit that is required if he is to feelcomfortable in his venture. For a Lombard Street banker to lend money toa merchant in Cheapside payable at a year hence was, until comparativelylately, a much safer enterprise than to lend it to a merchant in Paris, because the local borrower was always under the lender's observation. Ifhe were overtrading or living on too lavish a scale it would at once benoticed and reported. 

Nevertheless, international finance made steady progress throughsomewhat obscure beginnings. We know that Philip II of Spain was heavilyindebted to moneylenders all over the Continent, and that by his famousrepudiation he carried consternation throughout Europe. [28] Edward IIIwas also heavily indebted to Florentine bankers, and he also omitted topay his debt; and it is said that the descendants of the Florentinebankers still have a claim against the English Crown inconsequence[29]; but it was not until after the creation of stockexchanges and the machinery of a public market in securities thatinternational finance became a question of general importance. 

Here also the effect has been for unity combined with a good deal ofdisunion. Twenty years ago it used to be said that feeling in theWestern States of America was very strongly anti-English because most ofthe Western farmers were indebted to English moneylenders, and on thewhole it may be said that the relations between the borrower and lenderare not likely to be so friendly and so likely to promote unity as thosebetween buyer and seller. There is really no logical reason why thisshould be so: the basis of the bargain between the two is exactly thesame. In commercial transactions one man sells to another because theother man wants something that he has got more than he does. It isexactly the same with the borrower and lender of money. A man borrowsbecause he wants money and is prepared to pay a rate of interest for it. The lender lends because he has money to lend and wants to earn intereston it. Nevertheless there is something in this relationship which seemsto produce discord. It is not many years since the Australian newspapersused to talk of England as John Bull Cohen, implying that the Englishmoney market made more than it ought to do by developing, with the helpof its financial resources, the production and commerce of the youngcountries of the world. Perhaps it is human to feel a grudge against acreditor, because the money has to be paid back, whereas a commercialbargain is done with. Nevertheless, after allowing for all the frictionthat money-lending seems to produce, there can be no question that theestablishment of the international market in securities has enormouslywidened the world's output of commodities, and it has greatly promotedthat unity of interests which has brought mankind together more thananything else. 

Englishmen are always supposed to be particularly insular. Nevertheless, any one who looks at the Official List daily published by the LondonStock Exchange and sees the enormous number of Government and municipalloans from all parts of the world, the number of foreign railways, andthe number of foreign enterprises of all kinds which are dealt in on theLondon Stock Exchange, cannot avoid the conclusion that this practice ofinvesting money abroad, which has been followed here to a greater extentthan in any other country, must have very greatly widened theEnglishman's horizon and forced him to confess that at least from onepoint of view dwellers in foreign countries have some right to exist. Atany rate, in practice English investors not only have shown that they donot recognize international barriers, but there have even been timeswhen foreign securities have actually been preferred to English. A fewyears ago it was reported by stockbrokers that many of their clientswould not invest money at home and insisted whenever possible that itshould be placed abroad. To such an extent has this process been carriedon that it is now calculated by statisticians that no less than fourthousand millions of English money have been placed outside England, about one-half of this having been lent to foreign countries, and aboutone-half to our own colonies. Here again, as in commerce, there arises apossibility of quarrelling, not only between the lender and borrower butalso between rival groups of lenders in different countries. When aneconomically backward country is being developed with the assistance ofcapital from nations which are at a further stage of economic progress, the moneylender is supposed to acquire a certain amount of politicalprestige and privilege which makes other nations, which have an eye toincreasing their influence in the borrowing country, jealous concerningsuch operations. A curious example was presented not long ago by China. China wanted to borrow, and probably the only countries which had anygenuine surplus of capital available for export were England and France. Nevertheless, owing to the political side issues involved, Russia, Germany, and the United States also all insisted on taking part in thebusiness of lending money to China. China was compelled to borrow moremoney than it wanted, so that all these so-called civilized Powers couldshare in the operation, and the absurdity of the position was increasedby the fact that some at least of the Powers which lent the money wouldhave had to borrow it somewhere before they could do so. 

This freedom with which England has furnished financial resources to therest of the world is sometimes called in question as having had, orbeing likely to have, bad effects upon the activity of production athome. It is quite clear that the progress of international commerce andthe division of labour among nations by which commodities of all kindshave been very greatly cheapened could not have been carried out ifEngland and other comparatively far developed countries had not suppliedthe necessary capital for the development of the relatively backwardparts of the earth. If English money had not gone into building railwaysin America, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and all over the world, andsupplying capital to the farmers and others who opened up thesecountries, food could not have been nearly as cheap as it is or as itwas before the war, and clothes and other necessaries of life would havebeen at a very different price. In fact, it may be said that if Englandhad not acted as she has, as the world's financier, the development ofthe world's trade to anything like its present scale would have beenaltogether impossible. If we could feel sure that the distribution ofthe world's production had been as satisfactory as the wonderfulincrease in its output, there would be no question that all classes inEngland had been very greatly benefited by its financial activitiesabroad. As it is, it is sometimes argued that English capital goingabroad stimulates production in other countries and increases the demandfor labour there, but that the demand for labour in England and itsreward might have been on a higher scale if English capital had beenkept at home. This is a question which is, happily perhaps, outside myprovince at present, but it is one which demands serious attention. Thismuch can be said, that the years in which English capital has goneabroad with the greatest rapidity have also been those in which ourexport trade has been most active, and it is obvious that this must beso, because when England exports capital it does so in the form oflending money either to a foreign Government or to a foreignmunicipality, or to some company, English or foreign, which isconducting some enterprise in a foreign country. 

In whatever way the money is lent the result is that the country towhich it is lent is given so much buying power in England andconsequently its demand for English goods is to that extent stimulated. It does not follow, of course, that the whole amount of money that itborrows is actually spent in England. It is possible that the Canadianrailway which is raising money in England may spend it by buying steelrails in Belgium, but in practical fact the net result is that somebodyor other abroad is given a claim on England which finally, by someroundabout process, takes effect in a demand for English goods andservices. At the same time, when one does admit that internationalfinance is essential to international commerce and that thespecialization, which is an essential product of commerce, is therebyquickened, we have to remember that the objections, such as they are, which can be put forward against the division of labour amongindividuals cannot be overlooked altogether when the division of labouris applied to nations. 

Dr. Bowley, in his book on England's foreign trade, puts the matterdramatically as follows:--

 The limit to the indefinite division of labour is to be found in the social, intellectual, and moral objections to specialization. It is not pleasant to contemplate England as one vast factory, an enlarged Manchester, manufacturing in semi-darkness, continual uproar, and at intense pressure for the rest of the world. Nor would the Continent of America, divided into square, numbered fields, and cultivated from a central station by electricity, be an ennobling spectacle. '[30]

This is a picturesque expression of the objections to the unity ofmankind if carried too far through the process of specialization. Whileadmitting their force, it is not necessary to admit that thespecialization process need go quite to that length. Even if Englandbecame one vast factory, it need not necessarily follow that it mustwork in semi-darkness, continual uproar, or at intense pressure, but itis all to the good that a specialist of Dr. Bowley's eminence shouldcall our attention to certain things which have to be guarded against. On the other hand, we may contend that if England became one vastfactory, it would only do so because it paid it so well to do so, thatthat vast factory might be made more in accordance with William Morris'sideal than the picture of Inferno drawn by Dr. Bowley. We might imagineEngland one vast Garden City, dotted over with factories, each of whichmight be as beautiful as a cathedral, embowered and surrounded by fruittrees and gardens, in which a highly educated and technically trainedpopulation would work for five or six hours a day, and spend the rest oftheir time in intellectual leisure and healthy exercise and home lifeunder ideally happy conditions. 

It is interesting to note that the result of the present war is likely, if anything, to check the export of capital for a time, not only owingto the very obvious reason that for the present all our availablecapital is going into the war and for some time to come will have to gointo expenses connected with the war, but also because this war has seta new precedent with regard to the duty of belligerents in the matter ofmaking payments to one another. In olden times, when war was agentlemanly business, trade and finance were very little interrupted byit. At the time of the Crimean War the Russian Government punctuallypaid the interest due on Russian loans to English holders and therebyestablished a prestige amongst English investors which was cherished forseveral decades. Now that nations have taken to going to war with toothand nail, throwing their whole available population into the field andusing every possible device, military, commercial, and financial, tobeat their enemies, any such pleasant decencies as paying money due fromone country to another in the shape of interest or otherwise have beenabandoned. When the war is over it is possible that investors willremember this fact to a certain extent and will be more chary than theywere before of investing their money abroad, at any rate in any countrywith which there is the remotest possibility of our being involved inwar. 

War has also shown the great inconvenience that arises when the mutualdependence of nations one on another for certain products leaves themcrippled because international exchange is interrupted. Internationaltrade and finance, in their full and free development, have been shownto depend on the assumption that peace is secure. Unless the present warshould be so ended as to secure peace for all time, it seems likely thatall nations will aim at being able to rely, at least for the essentialsof life and of defence, on home production or on a supply from countrieswith which war may be regarded as impossible. If this be so, then unitythrough trade and finance will be less universal, but more close-knit inits narrower scope. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

A. L. Bowley, _England's Foreign Trade_. Swan Sonnenschein. 

C. K. Hobson, _The Export of Capital_. Constable. 

W. S. Jevons, _Money and the Mechanism of Exchange_. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 

Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, chs. I-iv. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 24: _Wealth of Nations_, Bk. I, ch. Ii. ]

[Footnote 25: 1 Kings ix. ]

[Footnote 26: Rawlinson's translation. ]

[Footnote 27: Jevons, _Money as Mechanism of Exchange_, p. 1. ]

[Footnote 28: Motley, _United Netherlands_, ch. Xxxiii. ]

[Footnote 29: Thorold Rogers, _Economic Interpretation of History_, ch. Xx. ]

[Footnote 30: _England's Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century_, byA. L. Bowley. ]

X

INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION

We have learned to look upon the doctrine of interdependence of classeswithin the nation as a truth self-evident to all eyes unblinded bywilful prejudice or ignorance of that disabling kind charitably definedby the Roman Catholic Church as invincible. To say that unemployment inthe mills of Lancashire or the shipyards of the Clyde not only affectsthe happiness and well-being of cotton operatives and boiler-makers andthe great businesses which are carried on by their means, but depressesthe national vitality and puts a drag on the national energy throughoutthe kingdom--to assert that no people can be wholly strong and vigorouswhile any corner of its territory or any layer in its social strataremains in the possession of a group physically weak, mentallyundeveloped, and morally below the standard of ethics which, as apeople, it has tacitly agreed to accept as necessary, seems to many ofus in these days to state truisms. Yet it is not so long ago that factswhich we now presume to be familiar, at least to every undergraduate, were the dangerous discovery of the few who, in an age when people said'Socialist' as Mr. Pecksniff said 'Pagan', had the temerity to pointout, that in things human and political as in mechanics, a chain was andcould be no stronger than its weakest link. Even now, in the reaction, often only half conscious, of the employing class against any forcewhich tends to raise the employed to a social plane less removed fromthat on which they themselves move, in the genuine dislike ofeducation, concealed under ceremonial phrases in days of peace butbreaking into fire and fury when the natural man is roused by a touch ofexcitement, we can see how skin-deep in many cases is the general beliefin the widely proclaimed creed that economically as well as spiritually, we are all members one of another. And if the truth of ourinterdependence as citizens has won acceptance slowly and grudgingly, because the facts that prove it lie other-where than on the surface, itis easy to understand that the interdependence which is international, resulting as it does from the meeting, and crossing, and twining in theweb of national life of innumerable fine threads drawn from the utmostcorners of the civilized world, has scarcely yet come within theconsideration of the ordinary man as an influence from which he cannotescape, and with which, therefore, he is bound to reckon. That, doubtless, is why international movements in general arouse so littleinterest in the mind of the average reader of newspapers. He does notregard them as practical. The persons engaged in promoting them hedefines as cranks, dividing them into two classes, of whom one may bedismissed as harmlessly absurd, while the other ought probably to besuppressed as dangerous. 

The events of the first week of August 1914, where the interdependenceof countries is concerned, might and did throw some light on thejournalistic mirror into which civilized man looks morning by morning, but it was light of the crudest kind. The result of the illumination, innumerous instances, was only to make a great number of people reflectwith astonishment on the number of things which this country is in thehabit of purchasing from abroad, comment with indignation on her follyin not having made them all at home, and, when passion rose sufficientlyhigh, express a resolution that, however deeply they might need theenemy's products, they would never buy any of them again. To do themjustice, this was not the attitude of the men confronted with the actualdifficulty of inventing substitutes for raw materials of which thesource had suddenly dried up. Those who sat in factory offices ruefullycontemplating models of goods to the making of which Germany, Belgium, and Austria had hitherto sent some indispensable contribution, did not, even while they set about inventing something that should replace thiscontribution, belittle what they had lost. They knew, and said, thatwhile they were confident of producing a working substitute, they didnot pretend to offer in every case the precise quality which seemed tobe the special gift of the German, or Belgian, or Austrian trader. Perhaps it was not after all only sheer laziness on the part of theBritish manufacturer, and sheer lack of patriotism on the part ofBritish governments which induced our commercial leaders to concentrateon one field of production and abandon another. To each nation, as toeach man, his gift. Some realization of this law may have comeinstinctively to practical workers engaged in practical tasks. 

If the organizers of production among us have not been forward in thepast to promote international action in the matter of labourlegislation, this is not from any failure to realize the effect ofinequality of industrial conditions upon nations competing in themarkets of the world. This effect was naturally greatest in cases wherethe countries concerned were geographically contiguous and engaged indirect rivalry with one another in respect of manufactures falling underthe same trade category. Here is the perfect case of competition, inwhich any circumstance tending to lessen production on the one side isimmediately counted as an advantage to the other. But the pressure isfelt even where the territory of the rival is situated at the other sideof the world, even where the article produced belongs to a differentclass of manufacture. In normal times long distance transport is easyand long distance freight rates cheap, so that the question of distance, although still to be reckoned with, is no longer a determining factor inthe sum of consideration. Again, the network of prices which controlsthe ultimate cost of production of any finished article is so complexthat it is difficult in many cases to rule out this or that set ofindustrial conditions in one country as being without importance for agiven factory in another. The price of a pair of corsets sold retail inParis may have been subtly influenced by a strike of smelters of ironore in Silesia; and your china tea-set may be dearer to-morrow by reasonof a sudden outbreak of foot and mouth disease among the herds of theArgentine. Quite naturally, therefore, it has come about thatmanufacturers, in opposing proposals to make existing labour legislationeither more stringent in detail or wider-reaching in scope, have putforward, as their principal objection, the plea that such reforms infavour of the worker would place British industry at a disadvantage withthat of countries where the action of the manufacturer remainedcomparatively unfettered. The distrust, as well as the dislike of longhours as a means of increasing production, together with the belief thathealthy and pleasant surroundings conduce to the development of theworker's powers as well as to the satisfactory maintenance of hisphysical condition, has made remarkable progress among the moreintelligent of the employing class since the twentieth century began. But there is still, in nearly every trade, a considerable mass ofmasters who rarely think and never experiment, who turn a deaf ear tothe representations of their managers and foremen when these, cominginto direct personal contact with the employed, take note of results dueto over-strain which are invisible to the head of the business in hisoffice, and who continue to suppose, with their fathers, that limitationof the working period necessarily restricts output and spellscommercial loss. Such men, hearing that their own manufacture isproduced, let us say in Russia, by men working twelve hours a day totheir men's nine, and paid at a considerably lower rate than that whichobtains in their own works, would certainly not dream of drawing anyother conclusion than the, to them, obvious one that the result of thisdifference must be a lowered cost of production. Inquiries which shouldprove, as did those of Sir Alfred Mond's firm when confronted with sucha case, that the cost of production per ton was actually higher underthe long hour and low wage system would never be instituted by them, andtheir results, when made by others, leave them sceptical if notsuspicious. 

Recognizing this mental attitude in a large section of the business menof every country, and bearing in mind that, in order to secure theefficient administration of labour laws, the legislator must be able tocarry with him at least the general consent of the majority of thoseemployers to whose trades they apply, it becomes clear that if we wouldremove all objection to complete and adequate protective law for theworkers we must first dispel the fear of the manufacturer that such lawwould handicap him unfairly in the international market. And what way soapt to this end as the bringing of his competitors under a law similarin character and as far as possible uniform in its provisions?

It is a proof of the prescience of Robert Owen that, even before he hadsucceeded in planting the first small seed which was to grow into theflourishing tree of British industrial legislation, he had grasped thenecessity and formulated the demand for international action in thematter of Factory Laws. Owen's labours at home have, naturally enough, bulked so large in the estimation of historians and publicists in theirwritings on this subject, that the continental side of his activitieshas received comparatively little attention at their hands. Nevertheless his correspondence with European governments on the abusesand needs of industrialism as it existed in the early years of thenineteenth century are among the most remarkable he ever wrote; and hisappeal to the Congress of the Holy Alliance in 1818 shows how thoroughlyprepared he was to treat national reform as the first step to a systemwhich should be international. Had the statesmen of his time, too busyin their making and unmaking of kingdoms to heed his arguments andappeals, turned their attention from those high matters (in which, afterall, their achievement was for the most part neither brilliant norbeneficial) to the homelier details of their people's lives, socialprogress would have been indefinitely hastened, and we might have beenspared the sorry spectacle of one industrial nation after anothercommitting the blunders and painfully learning the lesson of itspredecessors at the cost of much avoidable human suffering. For, in thismatter of industrial legislation, as in many others, men areastonishingly slow to learn by example. Perhaps the most remarkable casein point that has occurred is that of Japan, at this hour still incourse of being worked out before our eyes. Here we have a nationbrimful of intelligence, quick of apprehension, with a genius forselecting from the polity and procedure of other States exactly thosefeatures best fitted to promote prosperity and efficiency and anunmatched power for assimilating and reproducing them in the formsuitable to its own tradition of development, following the WesternPowers along the crooked path of their early dealings with industrialismand allowing the very conditions which stunted and degraded theLancashire cotton operative of the 'thirties to be created in the millsof Osaka. 

Since the days of Owen ideals of industrial conditions have mightilygrown and developed. This was inevitable, since the standards of socialcomfort and hygiene have undergone complete transformation during thelast century. But the important points to note are, first, that it isnot only 'reformers' who put forward these ideals, but that they havebecome to a large extent common to all classes of the people, and, secondly, that the raising of the standard which proceeded at a slow, irregular rate for, roughly speaking, a hundred years, quickening in onedecade and remaining almost stationary during the next, is nowproceeding with comparative rapidity. Already such a rate of mortalityand sickness as was common in the trades technically called dangeroustwenty years ago has come to be regarded as monstrous and would nolonger be tolerated with patience. This acceleration in the raising ofindustrial standards is doubtless largely due to the consciousparticipation of the workers themselves in the business of providing fortheir own protection; but it may also be referred in some degree to aquickened conscience and a more intelligent appreciation of theimportance of the manual worker in the national economy on the part ofthe public as a whole. The same movement has been taking place, indifferent degrees according to their differing circumstances, among theother industrial peoples of the Old World and the New. The quicker thisadvance on the part of some nations the more keenly was the failure ofothers to make progress in the same _ratio_ felt by those belonging tothe first group. An uneasy consciousness that the backward nations werebeginning to constitute an obstacle to progressive domestic legislationon the part of the advanced nations began to manifest itself. Itappeared that the lame ducks were setting the pace for the whole fleet, and it was seen that self-defence no less than concern for the welfareof the human race at large demanded the devising of some machinery bywhich the movements of these laggards should be quickened. 

Thus, seventy years after Owen had appealed in vain to the Powers insession at Aix-la-Chapelle, a definite step was taken towards aninternational agreement directed to the benefit of the working classesof Europe. It must not be supposed that during this interval noinheritor of Owen's tradition had been found or that his doctrine hadbeen altogether forgotten for want of a preacher. Now and again prophetsarose who, if they did not share Owen's genius, were at least his equalsin sincerity and energy. Dr. Ernst Francke, in the article reprintedfrom the _Economic Journal_ of June 1909, which I have recommended forreference at the end of this chapter, names one of these devotedpioneers, Daniel Legrand, an Alsatian manufacturer who for thirty yearsdid his best to induce France, Great Britain, Prussia, and Switzerlandto agree on a minimum of industrial legislation. Some very useful workin the same direction was done, during the years following theFranco-German War, by a Belgian publicist; and in 1876 Colonel Frey, President of the Swiss Federal Council, took the first official step inthe direction of international labour treaties, by a speech in theCouncil recommending that Switzerland should take the lead in anendeavour to establish them. To the Swiss Government belongs the honourof addressing the first circular note to the governments of Europeproposing the calling of a conference as a first step towards this end. This conference never met. The idea of international labour legislationwas in the air, and voluntary societies composed of social reformerswere beginning not only to discuss but to support it. The internationalmeetings of organized workmen, such as the miners and cotton operatives, in different countries had familiarized the continental mind with thepossibility of common action between peoples in respect of labourquestions. Nowhere did the proposal for the conference arouse moregeneral interest than in Germany, where the present German Emperor, then at the beginning of his career, was showing an active interest inGerman conditions of industry. It seemed that he too desired to call aconference, and on his request that he should be given precedence in thematter, the Swiss Government gracefully gave way. So it fell out thatthe first conference on workmen's protection met in Berlin, at theinvitation of the German Government, in March 1890. There were fifteendelegates, all the governments of Europe, except those of Russia and theBalkan States, being represented. The chair was occupied by the thenMinister of Commerce, Freiherr von Berlepsch, a man of broad andenlightened views and singularly sympathetic character, who subsequentlybecame one of the founders of the International Association for LabourLegislation, and has probably, more than any other individual, securedthe success of its biennial meetings. 

At this conference, which the German Emperor stated in precise terms tohave been called in view of the problems raised by internationalcompetition, a wide range of subjects was discussed by the delegates ofthe different States, including employment in mines, Sunday work, childlabour, the employment of women and young persons, and administrativemeasures. While on many points agreement was found to be possible, andthe general principles which should underlie industrial legislation wereaccorded ready acceptance, there was enough of objection, reservation, and allegation of constitutional difficulty to prevent the conclusion ofanything in the nature of an international treaty. At the time theconference appeared to have failed of its object. Subsequent eventshave, however, shown that this was not the case. The failure to frame anofficial agreement probably showed that the ground had not yet beensufficiently laboured, and that further action in the direction ofinquiry and discussion was necessary before the taking of so novel astep could be justified to the official mind; but it is certain that therecognition by the representatives of all the Western States thatinternational action in labour questions was desirable in itself, and agoal at which governments should aim, not only laid the foundation forfuture State action, but gave to the voluntary work of obtaining thematerials for building on that foundation an impetus and a sanctionwhich it could have obtained in no other way. 

That work was speedily set on foot and continued during the next tenyears. It was greatly aided by the action of the International LabourCongress held at Zurich in 1897, when the trade unionists who composedthe gathering passed resolutions in favour of the establishment of anInternational Labour Office, and by the Congress of Brussels whichassembled at the invitation of Freiherr von Berlepsch, soon afterwards. At the latter gathering, which included a number of distinguishedmembers of parliament, men of science, lawyers, and economists fromFrance, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium, the viewthat for the present progress must be made by the way of privateinitiative prevailed, and the creation of three national committees, having for their object the foundation of an international associationfor labour legislation, quickly followed. These committees, which hadtheir head-quarters in Brussels, Berlin, and Vienna respectively, wereby the good offices of Professors Cauwès and Jay enabled to call aninternational congress in Paris in the year of the Great Exhibition, andat this congress the Association was actually founded, and its statutes, provisionally drafted by Professor Mahaim and presented by the Belgiancommittee, were adopted. A president, a general secretary, and aninternational committee were provisionally appointed. The functions ofthe Association were also defined. It was designed to serve as a bondbetween all those who, in industrial countries, are convinced supportersof the principle of protective legislation; to facilitate the study oflabour legislation by the publication of the labour laws of thedifferent States, and of reports on their administration; to assist inthe compilation of international statistics of labour and of all studiestending to bring into harmony the existing national industrial codes;and finally, it was charged with the duty of organizing the meetings ofinternational congresses in which labour legislation should beconsidered. A very important part of its business was to consist in thepublication in German, French, and English of a periodical collection ofall labour laws newly in force in different countries. 

This has been, from the first, the work of the International LabourOffice, the fixed head-quarters of the Association, which serves as anexchange and clearing-house for all information pertinent to theAssociation's work. It is in perpetual session at Basle, and to it allreports and inquiries are addressed by the national sections, while fromit issue circulars for the sections' consideration and requests fornational investigation of problems which appear ripe for internationaltreaty. The spade work of the Association is done by the nationalsections in their own countries, all action of the Association beingnecessarily based in the first instance on the reports received fromthem at head-quarters. There are now fifteen[31] such nationalsections--an increase of eight on the original group of seven formed in1901. The actual membership of the Association has trebled in ten years. The seven sections to which belongs the place of honour at the head ofthe roll, are those of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, France, and Switzerland. Great Britain did not form a section till1904, and it was not till 1910 that the British Government sent officialrepresentatives to the biennial meetings. The official representativesconstitute a very important element at those gatherings. They attend theplenary meetings and take part in discussions, often contributing hintson their governments' attitude towards a given reform which areinvaluable to those who are framing or modifying proposals with a viewto government acceptance; and are also frequently present at the sittingof commissions charged with the consideration of detail, where they canhear the opinions and arguments of experts on every important point indebate. When resolutions are before the conference they do notvote--although in respect of voting right they stand on the same footingas other delegates. But on occasion they are not afraid to expressopinions on the merits and tendencies of those resolutions which mayhave a determining effect on the votes of their fellow members, and Ihave known a few weighty words from such a man as M. ArthurFontaine, [32] commending a proposal on which feeling was largelydivided, to turn the scale at once in its favour. 

The delegates of a section are elected by the section itself. They maybe either men or women, and their number is in proportion to the size ofthe section, the maximum figure being eight, as far as voting delegatesare concerned, but substitute members and experts may be present inaddition. The following is a list of the fifteen sections represented atZurich in 1912: Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, the United States, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. In addition the following countries anddominions sent government representatives only: Russia, Rumania, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, and the AustralianCommonwealth. 

A brief account of the Association's method of doing business may beinteresting. Meetings are held once in two years, in the month ofSeptember, different towns in Switzerland being selected in turn for theplace of assembly. The four conferences which I personally attended asBritish delegate took place in Geneva, Lucerne, Lugano, and Zurich. There are two plenary assemblies, the first having as chief business, apart from the hearing of introductory addresses, the appointment of thefive commissions into which the conference splits up for actual work;the second meeting to receive the reports of these commissions and theirrecommendations, and decide upon the adoption or rejection of thelatter. The trilingual rule is followed, delegates addressing theassembly either in French, German, or English, as they prefer, eachspeech being followed by a brief _résumé_ in the other two languagesfrom the interpreter. In the commissions, by an unwritten but generallyaccepted custom, French and German are the only languages used. (Latterly the representatives of the United States of America, with theindividualistic courage that becomes them, have shown a disposition torebel against this custom and defy it; but the close of the Zurichmeeting left it uncertain whether in this particular the New World willbe able to prevail over the Old. ) In the dignified speech-making of theGeneral Assembly the recurrent changes of language, if a littledisconcerting at first, can be faced with tolerable equanimity; but whenit is a question of the quicker verbal sword-play which goes on in thecommissions, the member imperfect in the tongues finds his positionoccasionally difficult. The sympathies of every humane person must goout to the expert who, having just made a telling _exposé_ of his casein French well practised for the occasion, encounters a crushingrejoinder in German of which he can barely follow the general drift. 

The composition of these commissions--in which all the real work of theconferences is done--is truly heterogeneous. A commission may representa dozen nationalities; it will certainly contain specimens of everysocial class, members of the most varied shades of thought in politics, religion, and sociology. I can still remember the constituents of myfirst commission at Geneva in 1906. Our subject was the night-work ofyoung persons. At the head of the table was a professor of Civil Law inthe University of Louvain. On either side of him sat a Catholic clericalmember of the German Reichstag; a German Protestant pastor from Bavaria;a distinguished Parisian engineer; an Austrian nobleman interested insocial reform; a Hungarian man of science; a Dutch factory inspector; aSwiss Trade Union secretary; and myself. We were a motley crew, but thestrange 'pattern' which we must have presented to the observation of anyhigher intelligences interested in our deliberations had no effect onthe goodwill and good humour with which they were conducted. 

The range of subjects considered at international meetings is very wide. It includes all questions relating to the labour of women, young personsand children; matters of health and hygiene, with special reference tothe use of poisonous material in industry, and the regulation ofdangerous trades; workmen's insurance; the establishment of wages boardsand minimum rates as preventives against sweating; the extension of theten-hours' day and the Saturday half-holiday to be the legal rule in allindustrial countries; and the introduction of the three-shift system andthe eight-hour working day in continuous industries. As it is obviousthat questions so large, touching so deeply the domestic life and habitsof every people, cannot possibly be settled either out of hand or allat once, the Association's study of each separate problem is alwaysprolonged and, according to the circumstances and the difficulty of thecase, more prolonged in one instance than in another. Like the oldpioneers of National Factory legislation, the Association has proceededalong the line of least resistance: not because it lacks courage, butfor reasons of sheer prudence. If it was to become, in the words of M. Millerand, the present French Minister of War, one of its oldest andstaunchest members, 'the laboratory in which international treaties aremade', it was clear that it must not propose for internationalacceptance reforms which even among the most progressive peoples werelooked upon as doubtful or dangerous. Accordingly it chose for thesubject of its first great efforts two reforms in relation to which itcould count with certainty upon a considerable amount of sympathy, andproposed international legislation prohibiting the night-work of womenin factories, and the manufacture, importation, and sale of matches madewith white phosphorus. Information on both these subjects was collectedby means of the national sections; the Association in conference drew upproposals and recommendations to the governments concerned; thegovernments consented to a diplomatic conference at Berne, and theconventions concluded in 1906 were the happy result of their meeting. 

But it must not be supposed that these results were reached withoutdifficulty. Even as regards so comparatively simple a reform as theabolition of the night-work of women--to be carried out, afterconsiderable 'delays' in favour of those countries in which night-workby women had hitherto been an accepted industrial custom--the adjustmentof the change to the varying circumstances of each State proved adelicate business, and agreement could never have been reached but forthe willingness of the more backward States to make substantialsacrifices and encounter possible risks. For this reason, the allowanceof some years of grace before adherence to the treaty should becomepractically binding was a measure almost of necessity. It would havebeen unreasonable and might have been cruel to insist on Belgium andHungary assimilating their practice in such a matter to that of GreatBritain without ample time to prepare for the change. Thirteen Statesadhered to this treaty. 

The difficulties in the white phosphorus case were at first sight evenmore striking, and, to begin with, only seven States--Germany, France, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Luxemburg--were signatories ofthis convention. Of these, the first five had previously prohibited theuse of white phosphorus within their own frontiers. Room was, however, left for the entry of other States into the convention at a subsequentdate, with the result that the scope of the treaty has been graduallyextended, and that we now find ourselves fairly within sight of thebanishment from manufacture of one of the most deadly of all industrialpoisons, and the consequent disappearance of an industrial diseasepeculiarly dreadful in its nature and symptoms. The tardy adhesion ofthe United Kingdom to this treaty remains a matter of regret; but theprocedure of the Indian Government and of all the British self-governingdominions in following the mother country when at last she determined totake action has done much to redeem that tardiness. Obviously, it wasthe prohibition of the importation and sale of phosphorus matches inIndia and the Dominions which has forced the Scandinavian and Belgianmanufacturers who were opposing complete prohibition to seek forsubstitutes for white phosphorus. At the present moment only Japan andSweden among manufacturing countries stand outside the convention, theUnited States, whose constitution forbade her to impose prohibition bydirect legislation, having brought about the desired result by theimposition of a prohibitive tax. 

Is this all? it may be asked. If the question be of treaties signed, sealed, and ratified, the answer must be 'Yes'. On the subject of thenight-work of boys and the hours of women and young persons, proposalswere actually considered and conventions drafted by an officialconference at Berne in 1913. The draft conventions were far fromadmirable: their framers went so far in the spirit of compromise to meetthe objections of the backward States that the provisions laid down, hadthey been accepted without modification, would have tended to depressrather than to raise the standard of international opinion on thequestions to be affected by them. We need not, therefore, feel muchregret that the war has swept them, with so many other pre-war schemes, into the wastepaper-basket. The vast question of minimum rates of wagesand their regulation by the State is obviously still too much in theexperimental stage of its solution (even in this country whereexperiments have been boldest) for it to be possible to make it thesubject of international agreement. As a subject of internationaldiscussion it has had its place, and an increasingly important place, for at least eight years past in the studies of the sections and thediscussions of the Association meeting. Upon no question has publicinternational opinion ripened more rapidly. In 1906, at Geneva, wherethe conditions of home workers were first under discussion, a few daringdelegates met in corners and whispered under their breath the words'Wages board'. By 1910, at Lugano, an English woman delegate was electedjoint president of the Association's Home Work Committee, 'as arecognition of Great Britain's achievement in passing the first TradeBoards Act'; at Zurich, in 1912, a two-day conference on the legalminimum wage preceded the meeting of the Association, and a whole sheafof minimum wage bills introduced by private members into the Chambers ofdifferent countries was before the delegates, together with an officialmeasure of the French Government. To watch this change of attitude wasto see international thought in the making. To appreciate its fullsignificance, it is necessary to bear in mind the different aspectspresented by the 'sweating' difficulty in this country and in the greatindustrial States of the Continent. The French or German social reformersees it mainly, if no longer exclusively, as a problem of home work. Nowhome work in Great Britain is a by-product of a strictly limited classof industries, affecting a comparatively small class of the population;in France and Germany it forms a highly important section of the generalindustrial structure, it is interwoven, to an extent rarely grasped byBritish students, with the life, and habits, and productive power of thenation. Much more courage--and greater freedom from prejudice--wasrequired in the one case than the other. The remarkable advance towardsdefinite action on the part of the State in relation to theestablishment of minimum rates for home workers which took place between1906 and 1913 could not have been achieved in so short a time but forthe labours of certain voluntary associations led by men of insight, candour, and indefatigable devotion. In this connexion the pioneer workof the late Comte de Mun and Professor Raoul Jay has been of inestimablevalue. Realizing themselves, as did few unofficial reformers, the widenature of the movement in which they had engaged and the impossibilityof confining it in its sweep and effects to a section of the manualworkers, they succeeded in gradually bringing home to the ablest amongtheir fellow-workers the necessity for closing the gulf which Frenchmental habit had fixed between factory and home workers and preparingto treat both classes on a similar footing of equity. InGermany, --where, as we might expect, there was less forwardness tolaunch unofficial schemes and a disposition to work rather from thefirst through authoritative channels--experiments were being made underthe Home Work Act which, if of little value in themselves, seemed theearnest of much better things. 

If this result only had been attained, the meetings of the Associationand the labours of the sections would not have been in vain. But farmore was in process of achievement when the work of the Association wasinterrupted by the catastrophe of the European War. The adoption in allindustrial countries of the 'English week', with its half-holiday somuch coveted by the continental worker--the establishment of a uniformworking day--the gradual introduction of the eight-hours shift into such'continuous industries' as steel-smelting and glass-blowing--aninternational agreement to eliminate the use of lead from many branchesof the pottery industry and to limit and safeguard its use in allothers, --these were only some among the questions which study andinvestigation and discussion had brought to a stage at which theAssociation could look upon them as fit matter for potentialinternational conventions in August 1914. Now that its activities are, for the most part, in suspense, it is well to remember that its greatestachievement was the proof, again and again renewed, that it is possiblefor persons of twenty different nationalities, holding the most diverseopinions on nearly every subject under the sun, not only to act togetherbut to find common motives of action so strong as to break down everysundering barrier of political doctrine and religious creed. Whatever ofsuspicion or antipathy might flourish outside the boundaries of theinternational association, these evil weeds have never taken root insidethem. Is it Utopian to dream, when the days of peace shall havereturned, of a reconciliation within its borders for those between whomat present the great gulf of division seems hopelessly fixed?

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

_History of Factory Legislation_, Harrison and Hutchins. Macmillan. Revised edition. 

Frederic Keeling, _Child Labour in the United Kingdom_. P. S. King. 

Clementina Black, _Sweating_. Duckworth. 

R. H. Tawney, _Studies in the Minimum Wage_: (i) _Chainmaking_; (ii)_Tailoring_. G. Bell & Sons. 

J. A. Hobson, _Work and Wealth_. Macmillan. 

Edward Howarth and Mona Wilson, _West Ham: A Study_. Dent. 

Sir Thomas Oliver, M. D. , _Dangerous Trades_. John Murray. 

_Annual Reports of International Association for Labour Legislation_(_British Section_), 1906-14. To be obtained of the Secretary, QueenAnne's Chambers, 28 Broadway, Westminster. 

Ernest Barker, _Nationalism and Internationalism_. C. S. U. Pamphlets, Mowbray, Oxford. 

Dr. Bauer, _International Legislation_. Mowbray, Oxford. 

Ernest Francke, 'International Labour Treaties, ' _Economic Journal_(June, 1909). Reprinted separately, Macmillan. 

Albert Métin, _Les Traités Ouvriers_. Armand Colin: Paris. 

E. Mahaim, _Le Droit International Ouvrier_. Librairie Recueil-Sirey:Paris. 

Fagnot, Millerand et Strohl, _La Durée légale du Travail_. Félix Alcan:Paris. 

Paul Boyaval, _La Lutte contre le Sweating System_. Félix Alcan: Paris. 

Students might also consult the following Reports:

_Le Travail à Domicile en France_. Ministère du Travail: Paris. 

_Le Travail à Domicile en Belgique_. Ministère du Travail: Bruxelles. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 31: These figures represent the position at the last meetingof the Association held at Zurich, 1912. ]

[Footnote 32: The distinguished Permanent Head of the French LabourOffice. ]

XI

COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM

Earlier ages were more able than ours to believe in the good old days. We, knowing more of the past than our forefathers did, can find in it nogolden age. But our eyes do not rest even upon the present. In thenineteenth century men thought they were at the end of a process, andtheir evolutionary creed was often only a polite method of saying whatfine fellows they were. Now we look forward. The future seems to uslonger than the past and more important than the present; and weourselves seem to be at the beginning rather than at the end of time. Aknowledge of the past has made it impossible to believe that growth hasstopped, and we understand how different the future may be, in part atleast, by perceiving how different even this grimy and blood-stainedpresent is from the still more inhuman past. 

Among the recorded changes the Economists write of an increasinginterchange of goods, and we can see as well an increasing interchangeof ideas across the frontiers of States. Music, painting, literature, and science have all been influenced; and ideas concerning political, economic, and social facts have been affected by that interchange whichhas developed our philosophy, our science, and our art. No one nationhas originated all; and each nation has depended on hints and hypotheseswhich have arisen in others. 

But the interchange of ideas on social life has led to an increase ofideals, which are plans of action emotionally appreciated and thereforemotive forces. Some of these are the Utopias of individual thinkers;but we shall consider here only those more powerful ideals which areshared, however vaguely, by many. In this case also, as in the purelyintellectual sphere, the fire spreads from group to group, from nationto nation; and as the interchange of ideas increases knowledge, so theexchange of enthusiasm makes action more powerful. A really effectiveideal, however, cannot arise except from the perception of definiteevil. Vague discontents may cause such revolution as leads to reaction;but the clear sight of evil is the only source of reform. We may take itfor granted, then, that although an ideal is nerveless if it is notpassionate, it is futile unless it is based on knowledge. Therefore ahint must be given of the evils from the knowledge of which ideals ofsocial reform now rise. That all is not well in the relations of man toman or of group to group must be fairly obvious to any one withimagination enough for sympathy. General dissatisfaction and universalcures for society are childish; but the perception of this and that evilgives rise to different plans for reform which all originate in theenthusiasm which is an ideal. We may put aside the long history of thegrowth of this shared enthusiasm for better relations between men, whatever their ability, their rank, their race, or their government. 

The common ideals of the present are the result of a gradualdevelopment, but we shall consider them here as attempts to deal withexisting evils and plans for a better future. 

 * * * * *

Some social evils of the present are perhaps as old as any settledcivilization. Such are disease and personal violence. Some are due toforces which have come into existence recently, owing to increasedcommunication and accumulated wealth. Such are extreme poverty and thedehumanizing of social relations. With both kinds of evil we are movedto deal, and we are not deterred from the attempt to reform evenlong-established evil; for we feel that we do not know what is possible. Nothing is inevitable. This is not the place to give in detail thedescription of those evils which are being dealt with. It is enough ifwe recognize that it is no abstract or airy theory of equality or humannature which moves us to action. All real theories are intenselypersonal: and no theory has ever yet moved men unless they saw throughit to the crude facts. However it may be phrased in a theory of society, we recognize it as evil that disease, leading to premature death, shouldbe as common as it is. As a social evil it may be said to disturbseriously the relations between men. We see also that it is a socialevil that men should use fraud or violence in compelling labour or inthe pursuit of riches. Of the newer social evils there is the physicaland spiritual deterioration which seems to result from the massing ofmen in great cities. There is also the dehumanizing of the relationsbetween master and man. And this is like in kind to the dehumanizing ofall functions in the vast institutions of modern times. The director ofa company comes to regard himself as part of a machine; and so does theshareholder. So eventually does the agent of the State. Until at last wereach the immense evil that human action is done for which no moralresponsibility is felt. How then shall we act? What has been done andwhat is still hoped for? The answer to such questions will be astatement of ideals. 

One may speak of ideals of social reform from two different points ofview; either with respect to (1) the changing sentiment which producesmovements for reform or with respect to (2) the institutional changewhich embodies that sentiment. The two are complementary parts of onehistorical movement: and it is difficult to divide them as cause andeffect. For sentiment, becoming enthusiasm, certainly causesinstitutional change, and yet the reformed institution invariablycreates a new sentiment. The province of law and of social custom is tolead as well as to register--a dynamic as well as a static influence, toincrease order and to incite to liberty. In actual life, therefore, itis often impossible to separate the sentiment from its embodiment inmeasures of social reform. 

For purposes of study, however, one may divide. We may put aside themoving sentiments--the passions, however faint, which urge men to wishfor a better future--and we may consider first the particular instancesof reform. 

 * * * * *

One definite and in some sense new departure in the results of theshared enthusiasms of nations has been the industrial legislation ofrecent years. That has been already dealt with. But, although in aneconomic age such as ours industrial reform may seem the most striking, it is not the only effect of our shared enthusiasm and later ages maynot think it the most important. There has been reform of social evilsowing to the interchange between nations of ideas on education, religious toleration, medicine, and sanitation, the treatment ofcriminals, the suppression of slavery and many other subjects. All theseand many more reforms are, as it were, registered in institutional(legal or administrative) change. 

Perhaps it is better to begin with a definite instance of the working ofan ideal, lest it may seem that we are speaking only of an emptyaspiration. We may take as an example the reforms connected withmedicine and sanitation, and those only in so far as they have beenofficially established by the joint action of states. This is a veryrestricted embodiment of a social ideal, since of course we may findthe same use of common labour between men of different races in theprivate contest with disease or in the municipal preventive medicinewhich in every great city owes much to investigators and practitionersof other nations. But it is better to take the most tangible effect inpurely governmental action. 

The French Government proposed an international conference, which met in1851, to deal with infectious disease; and a second conference met in1856. In 1865 the outburst of cholera in the East led to a thirdcongress at Constantinople. Great Britain opposed treaties forregulating quarantine, &c. , because of the delay which might be causedto the pursuit of shipping interests. But at last a treaty was made in1892 at Venice for protection against cholera. Further and moreeffective treaties were agreed to by civilized states in 1897 and 1903. A bureau of information concerning infectious disease was established atParis, and commissions to supervise were established in Turkey andEgypt. With regard to sleeping sickness Great Britain took theinitiative; and a conference met in 1907, in London, at which sixcountries were represented. So much with respect to disease; we may nowturn to examples of the joint action of states as regards crime. 

The African slave traffic has been dealt with since 1885 (BerlinConference) by the European States acting together on certain generalprinciples. And what is known as the White Slave traffic was the subjectof arrangement between fifteen states in the conference at Paris in1902. 

Again, the reform of prisons and penitentiaries has been much assistedby international congresses since 1846. The last was held in 1910 inAmerica, at which twenty-eight states were represented. A secretariathas been established at Berne for the exchange of expert opinion and formaking suggestions to governments. 

These are examples of a very numerous class of reforms undertaken bythe _joint action_ of governments. They are all comparatively recent andmost of the twenty-eight unions between governments for concerted actionhave been established during the years of European peace between 1871and 1914. In these instances the States of Europe have put theirprecious sovereignties into their pockets; although the lawyers anddiplomatists explain the situation in the old terms. 

With respect to all these movements for social reform three points mustbe noticed: first, the initiative in most reform has come from privateenterprise and not from diplomacy or governments. Secondly, this privateinterest has spread from the few of one nation to the few of anotherbefore any effective result was attained. Thirdly, the states have notacted together because of any general theory of international action, but simply because certain social evils could not be dealt with at allby any state acting separately. Whatever hampers common action, then, also hinders effective reform in dealing with disease or crime. I neednot elaborate the conclusion. 

 * * * * *

There are also instances of governmental action being _directlyinfluenced_ by the practice of other states, even when there has been nocommon action. The two most striking reforms of recent years have beenin education and religious toleration. Of education enough has alreadybeen said. The interest from our point of view here is chiefly in theeffect of education on social structure. It is increasingly evident thatof all forces for transforming a nation, education is the most powerful;but no one nation can transform its education effectively withoutrespect to the mistakes and successes of its neighbours. This has beenperceived and acted upon. The influence, for example, of Germany onEngland is sufficiently well known. German precedents were quoted in theHouse of Commons in the early days of state education for England: andthe Education Acts of 1870 and 1876 were largely due to the impressionmade in England by the success of state education in Prussia. Coleridge, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold definitely acknowledged a debt to Germany. But Germany owed something to England in the perception of the value ofsurroundings and corporate life in schools. France also was affected byEnglish education; and, in fact, French educators had to come to Englandto find the thing for which the French gave us the name--_Esprit deCorps_. 

The United States have been very definitely influenced in theirUniversity education both by Germany and England; and their Governmenthas in primary education certainly established for all states thetransforming possibilities of a school system. It must be rememberedthat the crudity of civilization and its apparent corruption in theUnited States are European not American. It is because Europe hasneglected its duty, enslaved and brutalized its peoples, that social andpolitical evil enters with the immigrants; and all this mass of Europeanincompetence, the result of neglect or evil-doing in Ireland, Poland, the Slavonic Countries and Italy, the Government of the United Statesexorcises with education: and the effect is spreading beyond thefrontiers of the States. A further effect of influence passing fromnation to nation has been the change with regard to the relations ofState and Church. In England it is some years since the State persecutedin the supposed interest of religion; but we remember that the abolitionof tests against Roman Catholics was as late as 1830 and as against Jewsas late as 1850. Even the most backward of European countries have beenaffected by the general feeling. In 1874 Austria for the first timeallowed any creed, not dangerous to morals, to be preached; andecclesiastical power is not any longer to be used against any butmembers of the particular Church which is offended. In Spain there arestill some obstacles to public manifestations of any religious beliefbut that which is most prevalent; free worship in private, however, isat last allowed. Thus, the general tendency, spreading from the nationswhich are most intricately divided in religion, has been towards what iscalled toleration. Connected with this has been the gradual recognitionof civil marriage; in which the old privilege of the most powerfulChurch is no longer recognized by the modern State. Law and custom haveboth changed. 

Perhaps the general attitude has not really changed. We persecute morefor political than for religious unorthodoxy; or it may be that in ourmore economic age we forbear to burn heretics only because we cannotafford the faggots. But in any case the relations between men in societyare more justly arranged, even where religion is concerned. 

 * * * * *

We have thus examples of (1) joint governmental action and (2) separateactions of governments influenced directly by foreign governments. 

There are also certain results of the interchange of ideals betweennations which are not yet, or only in part, registered in legal orpolitical institutions. Such for example is the changed position givento women. A change has occurred quite outside the political or even theeconomic sphere, both in the habits of western humanity and in theirguiding conceptions. 

The change is affecting the meaning of marriage, since we are becominginclined to suppose that man and woman are not simply male and female. Human individuality is given a new value; and there is no telling yetwhat the new attitude may involve in lessening the friction due toprimitive and obsolete tradition or in making society more reasonableand civilized. The source of the change is undoubtedly an enthusiasmwhich has been influenced by men and women of all nations. Ibsen has aplace in the history of social transformation. And besides, the contactbetween nations has made it possible for the freer position of women inone group to affect the domestic slavery of another. 

In the position of children, also, an immense change is proceeding. Wecannot fail to call it social reform, that the child should be given somuch more definite a place in the social organism. Aristotle thoughtwoman was a mistake of nature's in the attempt to make man; and nearlyall philosophers have treated children as if they ought to be ratherashamed of themselves for not being grown up. I speak of philosophers inthe wide sense of the term, for I do not think the metaphysicians knewthat there was such a thing as a child in the universe. However that maybe, we can hardly believe that as late as the nineteenth century parentsreally imagined that they knew what was good for their children. In ourmore sceptical age, children have generally to be careful not to allowtheir parents to read certain books, and in every well brought upfamily, it is thought that parents should be seen and not heard. Asocial change has occurred in the comparative importance we assign tochildhood and age. 

Thirdly, there is gradually coming about a transformation of socialcastes. One must speak carefully; for in the West we are supposed not tohave castes. There is, however, an uncomfortable feeling that society isnot one, that the two cities which Plato said would divide and destroythe true city of men are now established--the rich and the poor. I donot mean those with £3, 000 a year, and those with £160 a year. It is nota question for the Exchequer. I mean that great numbers in all'civilized' nations are ill-fed and ill-clothed from birth, and dieprematurely. To perceive it is to desire action which perhaps no statecan perform. But that we perceive it is something. Read the complacentrhymes of Lord Tennyson about 'freedom slowly broadening down' and thenturn to contemporary literature, to Jean Richepin or John Galsworthy, and you will acknowledge that a common ideal of social reform has comeinto existence. We are at least restless in face of a socialorganization which wastes humanity during long years of peace almost ascompletely, though not so recklessly, as during a few months of war. 

Something has been already done--English writers and English experiencehave given a motive power to Hungarian, Russian, Finnish, Turkish, Persian, and Indian democracy. Groups of men have claimed, for examplein South America, their right to free development. And everywhere duringthe period of European peace the contact between nations was teachingevery nation the force of its own character, while the new complexitiesof society were weakening the old dividing lines of caste betweenindividuals. 

In all these matters we seem to be moved by a desire for a freer socialatmosphere. Whether law or administration changes or not, it is clearthat most European nations have undergone in the years of peace from1871 to 1914 considerable social changes. How far they are effective inall nations and in all classes it is very difficult for a contemporaryto judge. It may be that the social structure of the decorative upperfringe or of the bedraggled hem of society is much the same as it wasbefore communication was easy and transit rapid. But the central bodyof European society is certainly changed; and, after all, between thescum and the dregs is the good soup. 

 * * * * *

Such are the changes which have been introduced into social life owingto the interdependence of nations. But we should not understand what hashappened if we accepted the mere record of achievements. The future isbuilt not only upon what we have done, but upon what we hope to do. Reforms accomplished do not make us more satisfied to endure evil notyet reformed--for always working in the achieved present is the idealwhich transformed the past into what we now see. 

We may turn, then, to consider some general features of the forceworking in social reform which is not yet achieved. And for that purposewe put aside established law and custom to consider the impliedattitude. 

Now that political privilege and inequality before the law are more orless removed, there is a greater concentration upon the underlyingsocial injustice. We all accept it as good that the activities ofgovernment should not be for the benefit of the few, or that the moneyshould not be drawn from one class. We suppose at least that thereshould be one law for rich and poor. 

To any one with a knowledge of history this seems an immense step sincesmall classes in every nation held political privilege, made law forothers, and forced tribute from the majority. Not that all is justiceand liberty. The law still, with noble impartiality, forbids both themillionaire and the pauper to steal bread. Of course it is not directedagainst the poor. The law never forbids the poor man to cheat the stateout of more than £3, 000 a year. Again, political power still depends onthe social position of your cousins and your aunts. But something hasbeen done. 

We hear much more nowadays about social than about political or legalreform. That, in itself, is a sign of a change of attitude. In therevolution of 1381 the crowds came marching to London swearing, in thewords of the old chronicle, that there would be no peace in the landtill each and every lawyer was slain. In the revolutions of 1830 and1848 it was 'death to the politicians'. Now--it may be that we despairof lawyers or politicians, dead or alive. In any case the attention ofthose in every state who are moved by enthusiasm for a better society isconcentrated less upon votes and laws than upon the distribution ofwell-being. 

Secondly, there has been a transference of enthusiasm of the religiousor poetic kind from the sphere of contemplation or aloofness to that ofearthly and even material action. Ideals of social reform do not anylonger involve a neglect of food and clothing: we are all more and moreconvinced that it is idle to preach culture to a starving man, or totalk of liberty to one whose whole life is a bestial struggle for barefood and covering. I speak of normal times. In England, France, andGermany, social betterment means giving to a greater number security ofbare life, upon which alone the good life can be built. 

It will be seen that I imply a disagreement with the Tolstoianconception of reform; in so far as that involves a neglect of food andclothing and generally of what are called material goods. Thatconception is not perhaps powerful among those who deal with what isusually called social reform. It is not 'modern', and it is alsodependent upon a mistaken argument in ethical theory. An unfortunateconfusion made by what is called Eastern, Stoic, or Mediaeval asceticismled to the idea that because the mind is more important than the body, the body has no importance at all. But we need not deal with this theoryin detail, especially as the general attitude of to-day is opposed toit. There is undoubtedly a concentration upon the bare necessities ofhuman life with a view to discovering how these can be shared moregenerally. 

We are fully aware of the immense social danger in the desire forriches; but that is no objection to the desire for bread and clothingand the bare necessities of human life. And the seemingly materialisticenthusiasm which will gradually transform our semi-bestial civilizationis no less poetic or religious than any Eastern aloofness or Tolstoiansimplicity. Poetry is not all rhyming couplets: religion is not all forthe intellectually or artistically incompetent. So, a world in whichtwenty per cent. Of humanity did not slowly starve to death would notnecessarily be less worthy of admiration. Nor would religion disappearif every one were healthy, unless religion means the result ofneurasthenia or dyspepsia or premature ageing. No doubt there is someexaggeration in this element of the common social ideals. Not even apoor man lives on bread alone; and it is indeed possible to have aperfectly well-fed society which would be quite barbarous. But we mustregard the fine flower of culture as purchased at too high a price if, for the sake of a few connoisseurs and courtiers not to say bourgeoisplutocrats, the majority in every nation must lack a bare human life. Some declare that the division between nations is more important thanthat between the rich and the poor. It may be so; but the only reasonmust be that what the few have, the many, however dimly, may hope toshare or may be induced to think they do share. Humanity is infinitelygullible. But in every nation there is rising a murmur which may yetbecome an articulate cry. 

The writers of modern Utopias in their detailed conception of what isdesirable may speak only for themselves; but it is a sign of the commonenthusiasm that they all attach so much importance to organization andto physical health. This indicates that we all, in every nation, lookforward, however vaguely, to a society in which human life shall be lessdifficult for the majority to obtain. We speak sometimes of theredistribution of leisure--August Bebel made it one of the chiefarticles of his creed. But this as an ideal does not indicate any desirethat the dock-labourer should have time to loaf in a club, or his wifetime to play bridge, except in so far as time to loaf is an opportunityfor some other employment than the mere struggle for food. There isnothing inevitable in a situation which makes the development of most ofthe human faculties a privilege of a few and an impossibility for thegreater number. Nor is it correct to suppose that the half-starved andthe ill-clothed should be satisfied with being 'virtuous', and leave itto others, possibly wicked and certainly far from simple, to cultivateart and science. 

Nor again is it absurd to hope for a world in which all should have atleast the opportunity for the development of any faculties they maypossess. The social gain would be immense. It would be like the changefrom a harmony which is produced by a few amateurs to one of a fullorchestra. 

Thirdly, it is increasingly evident that no one state or nation can acteffectively in social reform unless it acts in concert with others. Treaties of commerce, common prison legislation, and common measures forsanitation and medicine have proved effective because they are in thenature of things. They are necessary means for the desired prosperityeven of the most selfish and segregated state. 

But ignorance and prejudice and irrational violence spread as easily asdisease or crime. Knowledge is not secure until it is widespread; andcivilization perishes, which is segregated in a world of barbarism. Therefore education also, in its widest sense, must be contrived incommon. Not merely school systems influenced by foreign ideas, but thevery atmosphere of thought must change in harmony among all nations, ifwe are not to go toppling down into the abyss from which by painfulcenturies we have ascended. 

 * * * * *

This ideal of social reform then seems to be agreed upon between somemen of all nations, that more common action should be taken. It is not avague sentiment for the abolition of conflict between states; nor is ita pious aspiration for peace. It is the clear perception that the statecannot fulfil its functions in modern life if it continues to act asisolated or segregated. That for which the state itself stands cannot beattained even within the frontiers of one state by any state actingalone. 

This is not the place to distinguish those subjects upon which statesshould act together from those on which they should act separately. Thatis simply the problem as to the limits of political regionalism. Thefact which is sufficient for our argument here is that certain forces, chiefly economic, have come into existence in recent years, whichdisregard state boundaries. In concrete terms, these are internationaltrusts and international labour interests. But it is increasinglyevident that these cannot be effectively dealt with by any one stateacting separately. The isolated sovereign state of earlier times issimply helpless before the elaborate world-system of economics; andcontrol can only be secured by an established world-system of politics. The states, one supposes, exist for justice and liberty. Divided, theywill perish or become mere playthings in the hands of non-moral economic'interests'. 

To save itself and all it stands for, the state must cease to pose as apossible opponent to any other state, and must deliberately co-operatein an increasing number of reforms. 

It is better to put into the coldest terms a conception which has toooften hitherto proved futile, because it arose rather from vaguediscontent, than from the perception of a definite evil. The fire ofenthusiasm must indeed work upon that conception before any effectivechange can be made in the attitude of governments or of peoples. Butenthusiasm will be wasted if we cannot pause to see against what we arecontending. 

We are struggling with the greatest of all obstacles to social reformwhen we attack the isolation of nations. Unless that is overcome weshall perhaps patch and prop; but, time and again, we shall be enslavedto the immensely powerful non-moral forces, in the midst of whichhumanity finds its way. I cannot speak more clearly--[Greek: bous epiglôssê]. The nations face each other in conflict, while death, disease, violence, bestial indolence and docility corrode every state. 

 * * * * *

But when war was at its brutish worst Grotius spoke with effect of amoral bond which survived between men who in physical conflict had beentrying to take their 'enemies' for beasts and stones. And humanity beganonce more its long struggle with the beast in man. So now--I leave it toyour imagination. 

We have made immense progress by assisting each other across thefrontiers of states in such science as may provide high explosive andsubmarine warfare. In these the nations have co-operated. The guns whichkill the English at the Dardanelles were made by Englishmen. There mayyet come a time when high explosives will be out of date, and the statewill use the careful dissemination of disease among its enemies. Theonly reason, I think, why it is not now done, is that no group can becertain of making itself immune from the disease it may spread amongits enemies. 

 * * * * *

Our conclusion, therefore, is that one of the elements in the presentattitude towards social reform is a tendency to co-operation betweennations. We have seen that this has already had effect in variousdetails of law and administration; and there is every reason to supposethat the method will be carried further. 

But the problem cannot be left there. Co-operation as a word is a merecharm, like Evolution. There has been, and there may be co-operation indoing wrong. That action has become common does not prove that it isright; and an ideal implies at least some ethical judgement. Therefore, in every nation there are some few who are convinced of the necessityfor more deliberately moral action in common between men of differentraces. If there can be so much co-operation in the making of armamentsor the defrauding of shareholders, there may yet be more co-operation inthe elimination of disease and poverty. And not only may there be suchco-operation, but it must be. The situation no longer exists in whichmost of the effects of an evil régime are confined within frontiers. Thesocial distress of European nations must be dealt with as a wholebecause it is a whole. Therefore whatever militates against the unity ofwestern civilization destroys the possibility of social reform. 

Many times before it has been seen that there are nobler conflicts thanthe struggle for markets or for the political domination of one cliqueor one nation. Many times before it has been felt, at least by a few, that man is deceived when he imagines that man is his enemy. And manytimes when the deliverance seemed near we have been enslaved again by anevil magic. A hundred years ago, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, thedreamers imagined that humanity would have done with its false prophetsand lay the ghosts which have haunted it since it began to shake off themanners of the beasts. But a dismal succession of new falsehoods and newblind guides appeared. And now, in this so advanced age, we have to facethe same possibility. There is much to excuse a despair; from whichnothing can free us but a new enthusiasm. The evil magic must beovercome by magic of another kind, and how acute the crisis seems it ishardly possible to indicate. 

The quality of our age was its expectancy. For that reason men of everynation were moved to desire a transformed society. But perhaps thatquality of expectancy was the quality of youth. For the first time inhistory, in the early twentieth century, age was giving place to youthin the political equilibrium of the generations. Now--I dare not speaktoo plainly. The young men of the western world are already, sinceAugust 1914, noticeably fewer. Death may have made no difference tothem. It has made an immense difference to the future. It means that theeager expectancy of youth, which is the source of so much enthusiasm fora better world, is being lost. The crisis is here. As yet the commonideals of civilized nations still survive; but the desire for a betterfuture is at ebb and flow with a tired acquiescence in the establishedorder. It is in our hands to decide which shall overcome. No generationhas faced a greater issue. We cannot tell what will be the outcome; butto hope too much is at least a more generous fault than to despair toosoon. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

C. D. Burns, _Political Ideals_. Clarendon Press. 

P. Geddes, _Cities in Evolution_. Williams & Norgate. 

J. A. Hobson, _Towards International Government_. Allen & Unwin. 

P. S. Reinsch, _Public International Unions_. Ginn & Co. 

XII

POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE

World-state is a term likely to be offensive in its arrogance, if it betaken to mean the substitution of a single political community andgovernment for the numerous separate national states which have hithertoexisted. I therefore hasten to say that I intend no such meaning, butuse the term as a convenient expression to cover any body of politicalarrangements, to which most of the principal nations of the world areparties, sufficiently stable in character and wide in scope to merit thetitle of international government. 

Towards such a possibility the nineteenth century has made three greatcontributions. During that century great advances have been made in thesettlement of political government upon a basis of nationality. Thisprocess has been accomplished partly by throwing off the dominion ofsome foreign power, as in the case of Belgium, Greece, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Serbia, and the South American colonies of Spain;partly by the closer federal union of independent states, as in the caseof Germany and Switzerland; partly by a blend of the two methods as inthe case of Italy; and partly by the peaceful dissolution of anunnatural union, as with Norway and Sweden. Though much still remains tobe done before the identification of statehood with nationality even forEurope is completed, and some backward steps have been taken, thegrowing acceptance of the conception of nationality as a just andexpedient basis of government is a powerful guarantee for thepersistence of this joint work of liberation and of union. If, as theresult of the settlement following this war, political readjustments aremade which fairly satisfy the remaining aspirations after nationalautonomy, the more pacific atmosphere will favour all opportunities forco-operation between nations. 

The second contribution of the nineteenth century towards politicalinternationalism is of a more positive character. It consists in aseries of inchoate and fragmentary but genuine attempts of the GreatPowers to work together upon critical occasions in the interests of'justice and order', as they understood those terms, and to embody inacts or conventions some policy which is the result of theirdeliberations. This flickering light, called the Concert of Europe, first kindled at the Congress of Vienna, has reappeared fitfullythroughout the century. The treaties, declarations, and conventions, proceeding from these conferences or congresses of the Powers, havemarked important advances, not only in the substance of internationallaw, but in the method of legislation. For whereas, before the Congressof Vienna, all the treaties between states which helped to form the bodyof international law were the acts of two or, at the most, a small groupof states, since that time law-making treaties of general applicationand of world-wide importance have come into being. The most noteworthyexamples of these general treaties are the Final Act of the ViennaCongress in 1815, the Declaration of Paris in 1856, the GenevaConvention of 1864, the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the General Act of theCongo Conference in 1885, and the two Hague Conferences of 1899 and1907. Having regard to the general character of many of the rules laiddown at these conferences, as, for instance, the abolition of the slavetrade, the neutralization of certain lands and waters, and theregulation of the rules of war, it is clear that we have to recognizethroughout last century the existence of a rudimentary organ ofinternational legislation, very irregular in its operation, veryimperfect in structure and authority, but none the less a genuineexperiment in international government. 

Hardly less significant for our purpose has been the prominent assertionof the principle of federalism in the formation or growth of nationalgovernment. The great example of the United States has been followed bySwitzerland and Germany, by Mexico, Argentine, Brazil, and Venezuela, and by the dominions of the British Empire in Canada, Australia, andSouth Africa. I must not in this brief survey even touch upon thedifferent forms of federalism. It must suffice to remark that, whetheras a a principle of devolution, as in the case of the proposal of HomeRule for the constituent parts of Great Britain, or as a principle ofcloser union, as in the proposal for a federated British Empire, federalism is very much alive. It furnishes a hopeful mode not only forreconciling demands for local autonomy with effective centralsovereignty among the provinces or districts of a single national state, but even for harmonizing the claims of separate nationality with thoseof wider racial, linguistic, and traditional sympathy. But even moreimportant than these distinctively political movements and events, as apledge of the coming world-state, is the manifold structure ofindustrial and commercial internationalism which has been growing duringthe last few generations at an ever accelerating pace. The network ofmaterial, financial, and intellectual communications, connecting allparts of the developed world, and establishing quick, constant, cheap, and reliable modes of transport for men, goods, money, and information, form the actual basis of what may not improperly be called an economicworld-state. Though much of this machinery, with the great work ofinternational trade and capitalistic co-operation which it assists toperform, lies outside the sphere of politics, there are innumerablepoints of political contact and pressure. The realities of foreignpolicy in every state are more and more concerned with issues of trade, communications, and concessions, and the treaties and other formalarrangements between states are to a growing extent the instruments andthe expressions of the internationalism of economic interests. Theimperialism and the colonial policy of each great Power, though composedof various ingredients, are mainly directed by commerce and finance. Most of the disagreements and conflicts between governments relate tointerferences with the free play of economic internationalism by stateswhose policy is still dominated by foolish and obsolescent rules of anarrowly national economy. An enlightened interpretation of the needsand interests of modern man demands that all such national economicbarriers be removed and replaced by governmental co-operation to secure, by free trade and an open door, for capital and labour the fullest andbest development and distribution of the economic resources of theworld. 

While, therefore, the most impressive political events of the nineteenthcentury have been the expression and the successful realization ofnationalism, many powerful undercurrents of internationalism have beengathering force. The pressures of civilization have been more and moretowards extra-national activities. Thoughtful men and women in our timerecognize the urgent need of closer international communion for threerelated purposes: First, the consolidation, extension, and effectivesanction of the existing body of international law; secondly, theestablishment of peace on a basis of reliable methods for the justsettlement of differences; thirdly, the provision of regular acceptedmeans for the co-operation of nations in all sorts of positiveconstructive work for the human commonwealth. 

These general considerations I will ask you to regard as introductoryto the grave practical question which confronts us. Is this essentialwork of internationalism consistent with the preservation of thesovereignty and independence of the present national state, or does itsperformance involve some definite cession of these national state-rightsto the requirements of an international government?

The terrible events which are passing to-day ripen and sharpen thisissue. They bring into powerful relief the inherent defects of aninternational polity based upon the absolute independence of the severalstates, and the futile mechanical balances and readjustments by whichforeign policy has been conducted hitherto. But how far do they offerassistance or security for the achievement of organic reform? After thiswar has come to a close, will the nations and governments be enabled tolay a sound basis for pacific settlement of disputes and for activeco-operation in the common cause of humanity for the future? Noconfident answer to this question is possible. For nobody can predictthe composition and the relative strength of the feelings and ideaswhich will constitute 'the state of mind' of the several nations andtheir statesmen. As regards immediate or early policy, much will, ofcourse, depend upon the definiteness of the victory and defeat, and theconsequent distribution and intensity of the passions of elation anddepression, anger and revenge, which peace may leave behind. It is, ofcourse, part of the fighting strength of every belligerent to persuadehimself that an overwhelming victory for himself affords the bestsecurity of peace and progress in the future. But this conclusion, basedon the prior assumption, equally liable to error, that one's own causeis entirely right and one's enemy's entirely wrong, is unlikely to besound. A peace which brings the least intensity of triumph andhumiliation, the most even distribution of gains and losses, would seemto give an atmosphere most favourable to the growth of pacificinternationalism. This, of course, will be sharply contested, and thosewho contest it will exhibit the usual excessive confidence of thosewhose mind moves in a shut oven of heated but unmeaning phrases aboutfighting to a finish, crushing German militarism, and 'a war to endwar'. But there is no stronger evidence of the intellectual and moralhavoc of war than the easy acceptance of what Ruskin called 'maskedwords' in lieu of thinking. 

"There are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, butwhich everybody uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, oreven die for, fancying they mean this or that or other of the thingsdear to them. There were never creatures of prey so mischievous, neverdiplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as these maskedwords; they are the unjust stewards of all men's ideas; whatever fancyor favourite instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his favouritemasked word to take care of for him; the word at last comes to have aninfinite power over him--you cannot get at him but by its ministry. " Inwar-time this domination of 'masked words' is all-powerful, and islikely to leave the thinking powers of all Europe seriously impairedwhen the war is over. 

There are those who hold that sheer exhaustion, nervous and economic, will compel the nations to seek concerted action against the recurrenceof so shattering an experience, that some sheer instinct ofself-preservation will find expression in adequate politicalarrangements. I should be the last to deny the reality of the collectiveinstinct. But remember that, as an instinct, it works blindly, and isliable to be diverted and frustrated in a thousand ways by theconflicting streams of narrow passion amongst which it moves. Mereexhaustion and a general feeling of insecurity cannot yield asufficient motive and directing force for the work of internationalconstruction. It is necessary to rationalize this instinct ofself-preservation and co-operation, in order to make it of effectiveservice. Here lies the heart of our difficulty. War is the mostintensely derationalizing process, and the long steeping of Europeancivilization in the boiling cauldron will have twisted and blunted thevery instruments of thought. As Professor Murray points out in apowerful essay, war rapidly undoes the slow secular process by whichliberty and capacity for individual thought have grown up, and plungesthe personal judgement into the common trough of the herd-mind. It is, Itake it, the recognition of this peril to the human mind, this necessityof safeguarding the powers of individual thought and personalresponsibility, that brings us here. We seek to fortify the separatecentres of personal judgement, to inform the individual mind, becausethe work of making a positive contribution to the unity of civilizationdepends upon the vigorous independent functioning of many minds. 

This consideration brings me directly to confront the enemy, that is tosay, those who contend that a world-state or any real internationalgovernment is now and must always remain an impossibility, anunrealizable Utopian dream. The process of social evolution on itspolitical side ends with the national state. It is a final product. National states cannot, will not, and ought not, to abate one jot ortittle of their inherent sovereignty and independence, and theexperience of history shows that all attempts at internationalfederation or union are pre-doomed to failure. 

It is evidently quite impossible for me to present here a full formalrefutation of these positions. I will therefore content myself withbrief demurrers. To the argument from social evolution I would replythat evolution knows no finality of type, and that the presumption liesin favour of those who hold that the centripetal or co-operative powers, which have forged the national state out of the smaller social unities, are not exhausted, but are capable of carrying the organizing processfurther. To those who rely upon the authority of history, citing thecollapse of the experiments in federation which followed the Congress ofVienna as proof that similar experiments will similarly fail to-day orto-morrow, I reply that this view is based on a false interpretation ofthe statement that 'history repeats itself'. A psychological orsociological experiment is not the same when fundamental changes havetaken place in the psychical and social conditions. We have alreadyrecognized that the nineteenth century has seen a series of vitalchanges in the economic and spiritual structure of civilization. Theevidence of 1815 cannot, therefore, be conclusive as regards thepossibilities of 1915. To those who insist on the sovereignty andindependence of the national state as an eternal verity, I will make nofurther reply than to say that such language has for me no more meaningthan talk of 'the divine right of kings', 'the natural rights of man', or any other phrase of the abracadabra of metaphysical politics. Theactual world in which we live knows no such absolutes. Sovereignty andindependence, like all other legal claims, are subject to modificationand compromise. Every bargain made by treaty or agreement with anotherstate, every acceptance of international law or custom, involves somereal diminution of sovereign independence, unless indeed the liberty tobreak all treaties and to violate all laws is expressly reserved as aninalienable right of nations. Moreover, within the limits of a singlenation, sovereignty is itself divided and distributed. Alike in theUnited States of America, the Swiss Republic, and the German Empire, theconstituent states as well as the nations are recognized as sovereign, possessing certain rights or powers safeguarded by the constitutionagainst all encroachments of the central or federal government. So againwithin the state itself, the sovereignty is often no longer concentratedin a single person or a single body of persons, but is exercised by thejoint action of several organs, as in Great Britain, where the king andthe Houses of Parliament are the joint administrators of the sovereigntyof the state. Sovereignty thus becomes more and more a question ofdegree and of adjustment. International lawyers will doubtless insistthat neither treaties nor international laws involve any derogation ofsovereign powers. But when the substantial liberties of action arecurtailed by any binding agreement, the unimpaired sovereignty is anidle abstraction. 

When, therefore, we ask whether it is not possible to extend andconsolidate the agreements between so-called sovereign states into someform of effective international government, we broach a proposition lessrevolutionary in substance than in sound. If all the separate treaties, conventions, and other agreements, existing now between pairs of nationsfor the performance of specific acts and the settlement of differences, were modified and gathered into the forms of general treaties signed byall the treaty-making states; if all international laws and usages werecodified and brought under the surveillance of some singlerepresentative court or council, --we should discover that there existedalready the substance of an international government, not indeedadequate to our needs, but far ampler than we had suspected. In theHague conventions and courts, again, and in certain otherintergovernmental instruments, such as the Postal and TelegraphicBureaux at Berne, we already possess the nucleus of the general formsrequired. We possess already the beginnings alike of the legislative, judicial, and administrative apparatus of international government. Butit is slight in substance, fragmentary in its application, andexceedingly imperfect in its sanctions. Moreover, it has just shownitself quite inadequate to perform the first function of a government, viz. To keep the public peace. 

The task of converting so feeble a structure of government into aneffective instrument of international peace and progress is evidentlyone of great magnitude and difficulty. But it is the task which liespersistently before us, and upon its performance the safety ofcivilization itself depends. It is, therefore, well not to exaggerateits difficulties, but to measure them as closely as we can. This canbest be done by means of a brief survey of the principal lines ofadvance which have been proposed. In this country, in America, inHolland, and elsewhere, the air is thickening with schemes for obtainingbetter international relations after the war. All of them have this, Ithink, in common, that they concern themselves primarily not with idealor practical plans for the general co-operation of nations in advancingthe welfare of the world, but with methods of preventing future wars andsecuring relief against the burden of armaments. All agree that somegeneral formal arrangements between nations must be substituted for 'theclash of competing ambitions, of groupings and alliances and aprecarious equipoise', and that only by such stable agreement candisarmament be got and peace rendered secure. All agree that theinstrument of this international government must be a general treaty towhich a number of states must be parties and that the terms of thistreaty must require them to submit all forms of disputes to some pacificmode of settlement. Nearly all, moreover, accept the distinction drawnbetween justiciable issues, relating to the application orinterpretation of laws or to the ascertainment of facts by means oflegal evidence, which are suitable for settlement by a judicial orarbitral process, and those which, not being capable of such settlement, are better suited for a looser process of inquiry and conciliation. 

But the proposals differ widely, both as regards the scope they assignto the work of preventing war, and as regards the measures they advocatefor securing the fulfilment of international agreement. They may begrouped, I think, in three classes on an ascending scale of rigour. Thefirst class envisages a general treaty, by which the signatory statesshall undertake to submit all differences between them to processes ofarbitration or conciliation conducted by impartial courts orcommissions, and to abstain from all acts of hostility during theprogress of such investigation. This principle has recently found animportant expression in the treaties signed last year by the UnitedStates with Great Britain and France, and other nations. The firstarticle of these treaties reads as follows: 'The High ContractingParties agree that all disputes between them, of every naturewhatsoever, other than disputes the settlement of which is provided for, and in fact achieved, under existing agreements between the HighContracting Parties, shall, when diplomatic methods of adjustment havefailed, be referred for investigation and report to a PermanentInternational Commission to be constituted in the manner prescribed inthe next succeeding article; and they agree not to declare war or beginhostilities during such investigation and before the report issubmitted. ' The objects of this method of pacific settlement are three:first, to provide impartial and responsible bodies for a reasonableinquiry into all disputes; secondly, to secure a 'cooling off' time forthe heated feelings of the contestants; thirdly, to inform the publicopinion of the world and to make effective its moral pressure for asound pacific settlement. 

The efficacy of any such arrangement evidently depends upon twoconditions, first, the confidence of the signatory states that each andall will abide by their undertaking, and, secondly, the uncovenantedcondition that they will accept and carry into effect the awards orrecommendations of the arbitral and conciliation commissions. Theseproposals, however, furnish no sanctions or guarantees other than thoseof conscience and public opinion for the due performance of the treatyobligations, and make no attempt to bind the parties to an acceptance ofthe decision of the commissions. Moreover, regarded as a means ofsecuring world-peace and disarmament, all such proposals appeardefective in that they make no provision for disputes between one ormore of the signatory states and outside states which are no parties tothe arrangement. 

Such considerations have moved many to seek to strengthen the bond ofthe alliance, and to make it available for mutual support againstoutside aggression. The vital issue here is one of sanctions or the useof joint force, diplomatic, economic, or military, to compel thefulfilment of treaty obligations and the execution of the awards. Manyhold that, while most civilized states might be relied upon to carry outtheir undertakings, some powerful state--Germany, or Russia, orJapan--could not be trusted, and that this want of confidence wouldoblige all nations to maintain large armaments with all their attendantrisks and burdens. To obviate this difficulty, it is proposed by somethat the signatories shall pledge themselves to take joint action, diplomatic, economic, or forcible, against any of their members who, indefiance of the treaty obligations, makes or proposes an armed attackupon another member. This is the measure of stiffening added by Mr. Lowes Dickinson in his constructive pamphlet _After the War_: 'ThePowers entering into the arrangement' are to 'pledge themselves toassist, if necessary, by their national forces, any member of the Leaguewho should be attacked before the dispute provoking the attack has beensubmitted to arbitration or conciliation. ' A state, however, by Mr. Dickinson's scheme, is still to remain at liberty to refuse an award, and after the prescribed period, even to make war for the enforcement ofits demands. Other peace-leaguers go somewhat further, assigning to theleague an obligation to use economic or forcible pressure for securingthe acceptance of the award of the Court of Arbitration, though leavingthe acceptance of the recommendations of the Conciliation Court to thefree option of the parties. This is the proposal made by Mr. RaymondUnwin, and by the League of Peace. 

Now a definite halt at this position is intelligible and defensible. While binding by strict sanctions the States to submit all disputes tothe pacific machinery that is provided, to await the conclusion of thearbitral and conciliatory processes, and even to accept the legal awardsof arbitration, it leaves a complete formal freedom to refuse therecommendations of the Commission of Conciliation. Yet it must be bornein mind that most of the really dangerous disputes, involving likelihoodof war, are not arbitrable in their nature, and will come before theCommission of Conciliation. If no provision is made for enforcing theacceptance of the recommendations of this body, what measure of realsecurity for peace has been attained? An incendiary torch, like thatkindled last year in the Balkans, may once again put Europe in flames. The defenders of the position we are now considering have three replies. They admit that their proposal still leaves open the possibility of war, but they contend that if a sufficient cooling-off time or 'moratorium'is secured, the likelihood of an ultimate recourse to war by rejectionof the award will be reduced to a minimum. They urge that no schemewhich can be devised will preclude the possibility of a strong criminalor reckless State violating its treaty obligations and seeking toenforce its will by force. Finally they urge that many self-respectingStates would refuse to abandon the ultimate right of declaring war, incases where they deemed their vital interests were affected, and thatany invitation to take this step might wreck the possibility of a lesscomplete but very valuable arrangement. 

Now it would be a considerable advance towards world government, if allor most powerful States would consent to abandon separate alliances, orsubordinate them to a general alliance binding them to submit alldisputes to a process of impartial inquiry before attempting to enforcetheir national will by arms. It may be that this is as far as it ispossible to go in the direction of securing world-peace andinternational co-operation in the early future. If States will not carrytheir co-operation so far as to agree upon united action to put down allwars between their members, and to take a united stand against allattacks from outside, it would be necessary to respect their scruples, and to rely upon the softening influence of the moratorium and informedpublic opinion to render a final recourse to arms unlikely amongcivilized States. But, in considering the measure of security thusachieved, we must remember that we must look to the weakest link in thechain of the alliance, and ask ourselves how far the plan ofconciliation represented in the recent treaties between the UnitedStates and several friendly European nations can be considered equallysecure in dealing with Germany, Russia, or Japan. If our internationalarrangement is to dispense with all forcible pressure in the lastresort, and to rely upon purely moral pressure, it seems evident thatthe validity of the arrangement depends upon the degree of confidencewhich other States will entertain as to the bona fides and pacificdisposition of the least scrupulous of the powerful signatory States. For if the opinion held of any one or two powerful States is that underthe stimulus of greed or ambition they would be likely, in defiance ofan award or of the public opinion of other States, to enforce their willupon some weaker neighbour, such an opinion will keep alive so strong afeeling of insecurity that no considerable reduction of militarypreparations will be possible. 

In assessing the early value of all proposals for better internationalrelations, the best practical test is afforded by the question, 'Willthe proposal lead nations to reduce their armaments?' For it will beadmitted that any settlement or international agreement, which leavesthe claims of militarism and navalism upon the vital and financialresources of the several nations unimpaired, affords little hope of apacific future. A return to the era of competing armaments will destroythe moral strength of any formal international agreements, howeverspecious. The importance of this consideration has led many to insistthat an explicit agreement for proportional disarmament should take aprominent place in any settlement. This proposal, however, seems to medefective in that it presumes in all or some of the nations apersistence of the motives which have hitherto led them to strengthentheir fighting forces. Now the primary object of such internationalarrangements as we are discussing, is to bring about a state of thingsin which the past motives to arm will weaken and tend to disappear. Ifnations, actuated either by arrogance or greed or fear, continue todesire to increase their fighting strength, no arrangements forproportionate disarmament are likely to be effective. On the other hand, if the basis of a really valid league or federation can be laid, precluding the most ambitious State from any reasonable hope ofindulging dreams of successful conquest, while relieving timid Statesfrom the apprehensions under which they have lived hitherto, the naturalplay of political forces within each State will favour disarmament. Aninternational arrangement that meets our requirements must be strongenough to reverse the motives, aggressive and defensive, which in thepast have caused nations to arm. Nations will not pile up armaments ifthey believe that they will have no need or opportunity to use them. Toproduce this belief in the uselessness of national armies and navies istherefore a prime object of international policy. The successfulestablishment of this belief involves, however, a change of dispositionamong national governments amounting to the process known in religiouscircles as conversion. They must be induced to forgo that right of warwhich according to past statecraft has been the brightest jewel in thecrown of sovereignty. 

Thus we are again brought round to our vital issue, that of the amountand kind of cession of sovereignty required for an effectiveInternational Government. It may be the case that it will be impossibleto induce a sufficient number of the great States to transfer theultimate right of waging war to a representative InternationalGovernment, or to cede to such a Government the right to legislate oninternational relations with power to enforce obedience to these laws. There are, however, many of us who hold that these powers are essentialto an international arrangement which shall effectively guarantee thepeace of the world. The abandonment of the sovereign right to make waris essential for the future security of peace. Legislative and executivepowers for an International Government are essential to obtain bypacific means those changes in the political and economic relations ofpeoples which hitherto have only been attainable by war. No merelystatical settlement will suffice. Great new issues of nationalcontroversy or of economic needs will certainly come up afresh forsettlement, and until some stable method of government is establishedwith power to determine and enforce the equities and the utilities theyrepresent, recourse to the arbitrament of war will still be likely. 

But granting that national government does not represent a final form ofpolitical structure, and that some federal internationalism is nowpracticable, is it possible to hope or to expect that by a singlestride, or by a series of rapid strides, the sovereignty of nationalstates will submit to so much diminution as is involved in the moreadvanced scheme of international government? Most historians, statesmen, and political philosophers will, I think, hold that so large and rapid aprocess of development is impracticable, however desirable in theory itmight be. It will be necessary, they insist, to take one step at a time, to preserve as closely as possible the principle of continuity, and notto attempt to move further and faster than circumstances and thenecessities of the time compel. 

But do circumstances and necessities always compel us to move slowly andto take one step at a time? Though normal growth is slow and continuous, modern science tends to lay increasing stress upon discontinuous andsudden larger variations in the production of organic changes. Biologydistinguishes these mutations by which new species arise from the normalprocess of evolution by insensible gradations. There is, as I understandit, no real breach of continuity, no miraculous creation, but a suddenremoval from a structural position which by slow accumulation of priorchanges had become unstable, or to a new position of stability, involving a swift readjustment of organic parts. May not similarlyimportant mutations occur in the evolution of political institutions, when a similar stress of circumstances makes itself felt? Nay, we mayfurther ask, whether the special function of man's reasonable will isnot to bring about these changes in the direction of individual andcollective conduct. The power of making new quick and complexadaptations to new environments is the essential economy of the humanbrain. Freedom of thought and of will are continually producing newjudgements and new determinations for action which contain this qualityof sudden mutation. Quick conversions of thought and will are of theessence of our conscious life. When they carry important consequences toour conduct they appear to be, and in fact are, breaches of the normalconduct of our life which proceeds by custom, repetition, and insensiblemodifications. 

In politics, as in religion, sudden conversions under the stress ofcircumstances are not unknown, and they may be genuine and lasting. Andwhat holds of individual wills and judgements holds also of thecollective mind. That human nature in its fundaments of thought andfeeling, its primary needs, desires and emotions, will not beappreciably changed even by this shattering experience of war must beconceded. But what we may call the general state of mind, or the moraland intellectual atmosphere, will be profoundly affected. This will bein part the result of the great economic and political disturbanceswhich are occurring, and which will have undermined and loosened the oldideas and valuations in relation to such important institutions asproperty, the control of industry, the activities of woman, the partysystem, the State itself. But more profound still will be the directreaction of sorrow and suffering of war, the revelation of the power ofthe organized destructiveness and cruelty, and of the inadequacy ofreason, justice, and goodwill as defences of civilization. The veryfoundations of organized religion in the hearts of men will be shaken. The patent failure of the State to perform its primary function ofsafeguarding life and property is likely to feed currents ofrevolutionism in every country. The sudden changes produced in thebalance of age and of sex by the destruction of so large a proportionof the young and energetic men of every nation, will affect allprocesses of thought and policy. Some of these changes will seemfavourable to conservatism, timidity, and reaction. Everywhere, at theclose of the war, military and official autocracy will be enthroned inthe seats of power, and the spirit of political authority will bestoking the fires of fevered nationalism which war evokes. But otherforces will be making for bold political experiments. Not only the fearof restive and impoverished workmen, who have recently acquired the useof arms and perhaps the taste for risks, but the havoc wrought uponindustry and commerce, and above all the crushing burden of taxation, will dispose the controlling and possessing classes to seek alternativesto a return to the era of competing alliances and armaments. Mild andconservative measures will be obviously unavailing. During the years ofexhaustion following the war, resolute leaders of public opinion will besetting themselves everywhere to frame schemes of internationalrelations which shall yield adequate guarantees of peace. For the firsttime in history great reading and thinking communities will give theirchief attention to international politics. They will recognize theurgency of the work of building the society of nations upon a basis ofgenuinely representative government. Behind this reasonable process ofconstructive thinking, carried on in every country by politicallyconvinced individuals and groups, will be the powerful support of theunthinking, suffering masses, motived by no clear conception of causesor remedies, but by that collective instinct of self-preservation whichimpels the herd to avoid destruction and to follow leaders who point theway to safety. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

_The International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects_. Humphrey Milford. 

G. Lowes Dickinson, _After the War_. Fifield. 

C. E. Hooper, _The Wider Outlook beyond the World-War_. Watts & Co. 

F. N. Keen, _The World in Alliance_. Southwood. 

Norman Angell, _Prussianism and its Destruction_. Heinemann. 

Allison Phillips, _The Confederation of Europe_. Longmans. 

_The New Statesman_. Special Supplement. Suggestions for the Preventionof War. 

J. A. Hobson, _Towards International Government_. Allen & Unwin. 

XIII

RELIGION AS A UNIFYING INFLUENCE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

The argument of these essays has been to prove that even now, in thegreatest armed conflict of the world, the term 'Christendom' is notinapplicable to Europe. There is a real unity in Western civilization--aunity due in large measure to the influence of religious faith andorganization. The mediaeval Church gave the Teutonic peoples of NorthernEurope, and the barbarians who overran the Roman Empire, their firstmomentous introduction into the great inheritance formed by the uneasyblending of Christian faith and literature with Greco-Romancivilization. The spiritual achievements of Greek and Roman, Jew andChristian have remained the common possessions of the West, thefoundation of what is still Christendom. In so far as it existsChristendom witnesses to the formative power of a religious faith: in sofar as it remains a dream, we may suspect it demands the renewed impulseof a faith enlightened and chastened by all the experience of the past. 

If, however, we ask, Is there any likelihood that a common religiousfaith and life will contribute to raise Western civilization to a yethigher unity? modern as contrasted with mediaeval history seems at firstsight to demonstrate the futility of any such inquiry. 

Since the Reformation, religion has made for division rather thanco-operation. The modern period of European history begins indisruption. Not only was Europe rent by the conflict of Catholic andProtestant, but the dream of an international reformed Church which atone time floated before the mind of Cranmer was dissipated by thestrength of nationalism and the cleavage in the ranks of the reformersthemselves. In our own country, what is euphemistically termed theElizabethan Settlement proved to be the source of further dissension, and reform appeared as the prolific mother of sects and schisms. TheProtestant Churches were organized on national and state lines. Theyceased to retain any international character in their constitution, while international intercourse became a diminishing influence. TheChurch of Rome in the conflict with Gallicanism found herself at gripswith the spirit of nationalism, and to-day the strength of nationalfeeling within Roman Catholicism hinders the Pope from exerting a moralauthority over sovereign states that would parallel the judicialfunctions successfully asserted by Innocent III. No Christian Churchto-day so rises above the national states of Europe, as to control oreven adequately to criticize the claims of those states. The Churches nolonger serve to embody and express an European conscience. 

The break-up of a common ecclesiastical organization was not perhaps themost serious loss of unifying power which religion in the West sufferedat the time of the Reformation. If it be true that the Bible and theGreek spirit are the great common factors of Western civilization, thenwe must recognize that these two great influences tended to fall apartand even to oppose each other in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. The humanist element in the Reform-movement grew less andless, while humanism itself became more definitely secular. The Europeanmind has ever since been conscious of a disturbing division betweenreligion and culture. A development of religion which should render toWestern civilization services comparable to those rendered by themediaeval Church demands not only a heightened internationalconsciousness among Christians, which shall be able to find organizedexpression, but also some fresh synthesis of religion and culture, somereunion of the spirit of Hellas, the Greek delight in beauty and faithin reason, with the moral strength and religious insight of Hebrewprophecy. 

Those who are concerned for the future of our civilization will lookeagerly for signs of any such development in the religious life andthought of our time. Do recent history and present experience discoverany influences at work which may yet restore a unifying power toreligion? Naturally any answer to such a question will be of asubjective character. The personal equation cannot easily be eliminated;we may be duped by our hopes or deceived by our fears. In the lastanalysis we cannot safely predict the future of religion. We may, however, take stock of our present situation, and survey its significantelements, even if our value-judgements as to their relative importancewill inevitably vary. 

While religious divisions have not vanished from the West, and indeedshow no prospect of immediate reconciliation, and while the formation ofnew sects, of which the Christian Science Movement offers an example, has not altogether ceased, there has been an admitted decline of thedogmatic and sectarian tempers, and this decline has opened the way forknitting up severed friendships. The revolt against the dogmaticattitude of mind and even against religious dogma itself is widespread. The sense of loss involved in the isolation of any sect, and the wish topass beyond the limits of any denominational tradition, are bothappreciably affecting the religious situation. In England MatthewArnold's somewhat unhappy criticism of Dissent expressed a dislike bothof dogma and sectarian narrowness. His profounder contribution to thebetter understanding of St. Paul derives its worth precisely from hiselevation of the mystic and the saint in Paul at the expense of thedoctrinal theologian of Calvinist tradition. The wish to be rid of dogmacontinues to find vigorous intellectual expression, of which Mr. LowesDickinson's _Religion, a Criticism and a Forecast_, may be taken as anexample. In another direction the Brotherhood Movement and the AdultSchool Movement represent the search, if not for an altogetherundogmatic faith, yet at least for a broader basis of association thanis compatible with the insistence on definite statements of belief. Bothwould unite in the prayer

 God send us men whose aim will be Not to defend some outworn creed, and some members of both entertain the suspicion that all creeds areoutworn. 

This dislike of dogma may cloak an unwarranted scepticism as to thepossibility of reaching truth in religion, but it is symptomatic of thelonging for larger sympathy and broader fellowship. It is but theextreme expression of a temper which has reduced the angularity of thosewho are very far from surrendering or belittling definite beliefs anddoctrines. The denominationalist who used to have no hesitation inclaiming a monopoly of the truth for his particular Church, now falterswhere he firmly stood. We are more ready to recognize our limitations. Agrowing number of thoughtful minds appreciate Lord Acton's position whenhe wrote to Mary Gladstone: 'I scarcely venture to make points againstthe religion of other people, from a curious experience that they havemore to say than I know, and from a sense that it is safer to reservecensure for one's own which one understands more intimately, having ashare in responsibility and action. ' This more chastened mood opens theway to fresh understandings in the religious world. Whence does thischange in atmosphere originate?

In tracing out the causes of this new temper in religion, a first placemay legitimately be assigned to the growth of the scientific spirit. Inconsidering science as a source of unity, it is a mistake to dwellexclusively on the creation of a body of common knowledge. To know thesame thing may do little to unite men. To attack problems in the sameway, and to share the same spirit of free inquiry, the same reverencefor fact, the same resolute endeavour to surmount prejudice, issue in afar closer bond of union. Science unites men even more closely by itsspirit than by its achievement. The application of scientific method tothe literary and historical study of the Bible, as well as in thepsychological analysis of religious experience, has called into being inevery Church and every land, groups of people who approach thesubject-matter of their faith from the same angle and under the guidanceof the same mental discipline. As a result of the critical movement aman finds his foes in his own and his friends in his neighbours'ecclesiastical household. The study of religion renews internationalcontact and requires international co-operation as much as any otherbranch of science. It is possible to detect differing characteristics inthe scholarship of the leading nations, though it may be doubted whetherthese are fundamental differences. The volume of critical work publishedin Germany is so considerable as to foster the illusion that itconstitutes a self-sufficing world. Thus it is possible for Dr. Schweitzer in his brilliant survey of research into the life of Jesus, to represent the whole inquiry as the work of German genius and as theendeavour of German liberalism to picture Jesus in accordance with itsown half-unconscious bias. Yet even so the cloven-hoof of internationalinterdependence makes its appearance, for he has to devote oneunsympathetic chapter to Renan, even if he contrives to ignore Seeley's_Ecce Homo_. But the debt of English scholarship to Germany isundeniable, and must not be repudiated in war-time. Nor is the debtentirely on one side. It is worth recalling that Adolph Harnack, perhapsthe greatest living German scholar in the realm of New Testamentcriticism and Church History, derived no little inspiration from thework of Edwin Hatch. At any rate the acceptance of the critical methodassociates scholars in all lands, produces International Congresses forthe study of Religions, and fosters personal friendships which even warwill not destroy. 

Beyond the internationalism of scholarship, we must remember thereaction of criticism on popular religious thought. Slowly but surelythe judgements of believers, lay and clerical, are being permeated withsome sense of historical perspective. The mere attempt to recognize theliterary character of the various books of the Bible has effected aliberation. The variation of the different parts of the Bible inliterary quality, in evidential value for history and in spiritualsignificance, are at last being freely recognized outside the study andthe lecture-room. Men are ceasing to regard the Bible as a series oflegal enactments or common-law precedents of equal authority. This isleading to a revision of inherited traditions, that were based on a viewof the Bible which is no longer tenable. In general this developmentfavours a more modest assertion of one's own beliefs and a morecharitable consideration of other people's. When we continue to differ, we differ with a more sympathetic understanding of those from whom wediffer. 

It is impossible to trace here in any detail the influence of thecritical movement on traditional beliefs or even on the conception ofauthority in religion. It may, however, be worth while to point out thatthe psychological study of religion has tended to broaden sympathy bypromoting the frank recognition of the varieties of religiousexperience. More allowance is made for temperament, and there is lessanxiety to force all spiritual life into the same mould or scheme. Thesacramentalist and the non-sacramentalist, the mystic and theintellectualist, the man of feeling and the man of action, those whoexperience sudden changes and those who are the subjects of more gradualgrowth--each receives his due, and neither need despise the other. Thereare dangers associated with our constant reference to temperament. It isreally a condemnation of a Church to say that its position appeals to aparticular temperament, while it is often no real kindness to anindividual to be excused from attempting to enter into a particularphase of religious life on the ground that he is temperamentallydisqualified. But it is clearly a gain to challenge an over-rigidstandardization of religious life. It is pathetic to hear people protestthat they have no religious experience, when they are simply blinded bytoo narrow an interpretation of the term. In so far as the psychology ofreligion throws into relief the manifold appeal of religious ideas todifferent minds, it helps to create a new sense of unity in difference. 

Accompanying the growth of the scientific spirit and in part stimulatedby it, more distinctly religious and philosophical influences are atwork quickening the desire for wider and deeper fellowship. Consideringfirst the problem within the borders of the Christian Church, I think wemay claim that there is a growing willingness to co-operate and arevival of the hope of reunion. We may further claim that certainadvances in thought, in the understanding of Christianity itself, havealready been made, and render co-operation if not reunion less Utopianthan before. Of these I would put first the acceptance of the principleof toleration as an essential element of Christian faith. It has beensuggested by Mr. Norman Angell that the religious wars of theseventeenth century came to an end through economic exhaustion andthrough rationalism. Toleration was accepted as a state-principle on thestrength of a common-sense calculation as to the uselessness ofrepression. I am not disposed to ignore the forcefulness of theargument, 'You will starve or go bankrupt, if you do not cease topersecute heretics or fight Protestants, ' nor would I underestimate theinfluence of common-sense in closing the era of religious wars, but Icannot help thinking that an intense religious conviction of the duty oftoleration and a kind of philosophic liberalism, though entertained byfew, contributed to the triumph of the principle. For the Christian, theduty has become clearer through the influence of the gospels. Some ofthe Churches have begun to take to heart the rebuke of Jesus to thedisciples who wished to call down fire on the Samaritans. Nor is it aquestion of a particular incident. A deep respect for individuality isfound to lie at the centre of the gospel. For the Christian, theattitude of toleration, the reliance on persuasion, on the appeal toevery man's conscience, has become more and more clearly theindispensable qualification of the ambassador for Christ. As theacceptance of the principle of toleration is by no means universal inthe Church, its fuller recognition in some quarters may serve at firstto intensify division. It may emphasize, e. G. The continued necessityfor Protestantism, by bringing into clearer light the moral obstacle toreunion in the Inquisition and disciplinary methods of the Church ofRome. But in the long run, this development of thought must make forbetter understanding and wider fellowship. 

Still confining our survey to the Christian Church, there has been asignificant fastening of attention on those parts of the New Testamentin which the idea of Catholicity is fully developed. The epistle to theEphesians and the seventeenth chapter of John are beginning to haunt theChristian consciousness as never before since the days of theReformation. It is clear that the present position of the Church, inwhich divisions have crystallized into separate organizations, does notreflect and envisage the ideal that 'they all may be one'. The unity ofthe Church appears to be a condition precedent to the success of itstestimony. The scandal and the impotence of division are more acutelyfelt. Unless the Church of Christ can heal herself or find healing forherself, it is little enough which she will be able to contribute to thehealing of the nations. 

There is hope then for closer fellowship within the Church, because theproblem is being more and more definitely laid upon the consciences ofher members. A further advance in thought which makes possible a closerapproximation of the severed fragments of the Christian Church, is to befound in the process of sifting the essential from the accidental in theChristian tradition. It would be idle to pretend that the process hasreached its conclusion, or that there is any large measure of agreementas to what constitutes the essence of Christianity. No one indeedbelieves any longer in the whole Bible from cover to cover--not eventhose who say they do. The fight for the creeds is more strenuous, whileRome cannot afford to admit that any article of faith which has beenauthoritatively defined may be treated as non-essential. But if I mayventure a personal judgement, I cannot see that even the Apostles' creedwill be able to retain its place as a summary of essential Christianity. The articles which deal with the Descent into Hades and the Resurrectionof the Body, and perhaps those which deal with the Virgin-Birth andAscension of our Lord, are dubious, if not false, and cannot fairly beregarded as indispensable. If I may attempt to forecast, I would saythat the ultimate cleavage is coming not over particular articles of theApostles' Creed, but over the value we set on the history and person ofJesus. The choice will lie between a conception of God for which thestory and character of Jesus are final and determinative, and a vaguerspiritual theism for which Jesus has no supreme significance. This isnot even the division between Trinitarian and Unitarian. The ultimateparting of the ways turns on the question whether a man's faith in Godis Christ-centred or not. The significant cleavage of the future willcome between those who believe that Christianity--the belief in theFatherhood of God through Jesus Christ--is the final religion, and thosewho hold that Christianity in this sense is destined to be swallowed upin some still broader faith in God for which other revelations, throughnature and through other figures in history, are as significant as thecreed embodied in a tale in Galilee and on Golgotha nineteen centuriesago. But whatever cleavage may appear hereafter in the religion of theWest, the search for the essence of Christianity, even when it worksthrough controversy, will contribute to lop off idle dissensions andreveal fellowship in fundamentals where men had previously supposedthemselves to be hopelessly divided. 

It is a little invidious to choose out any particular movements forspecial reference, and in so doing I may merely betray personal biasrather than critical judgement. Yet it is perhaps permissible to pointout that the genesis of the Adult School movement is the naturaldevelopment of the Quaker respect for that of God in every man. Itrepresents the longing for a religious fellowship which does not forceopinion but offers the most favourable conditions for the formation ofindependent judgement and the growth of individual faith. How far themovement realizes its ideal, I forbear to inquire, but its veryexistence affords some evidence of the belief in the positive virtue oftoleration as an essential element of the Christian character. Anotherpowerful factor making for co-operation and better understanding amongChristians may be found in the Student Christian movement. For thiscountry its value has been enhanced if not created by the opening of theolder Universities to Nonconformists. The future leaders of all ourChurches are now being educated together, and through the StudentChristian movement, they are educating each other and facing togetherold controversies and inherited problems at a time when their judgementsare least hampered either by tradition or responsibility. What this maymean for the religious life of this country, we cannot yet tell, but itis certain that a new temper will be brought to bear on our divisions. The men who learn to appreciate one another through this association, tend to hold together when they pass out of the Universities into theirlife-work. There are springing up through the Student movement newassociations or fellowships which conserve and continue the unifyingimpetus of the movement itself. Nor is that unifying power confined tothis country. It forms a world-wide federation whose lines ofcommunication have not been cut even by the present war. In every land, the Student movement intends to resume international intercourse at theearliest possible moment. I think it is not simply the bias of a studentin favour of his own class, which makes me regard the Student Christianmovement as one of the most hopeful developments in the religious lifeof our age. 

Perhaps the influence of this movement itself may be traced in thegrowing demand for co-operation in the missionary task of the Church. This demand has no doubt arisen in part through the changes in the meansof transport and communication which have made the world a smallerplace. Missionary effort is less sporadic than it was. The Churches aredeveloping a _Weltpolitik_. The exact proportions of the task beforethem are now more clearly grasped. The difficulty of overtaking the taskeven when united, and the impossibility of discharging it effectivelywhile divided are also more apparent. But the demand for unity and thepower of co-operation have also been strengthened by the men and womenwho have gone abroad under the influence of the Student VolunteerMissionary Union. High Churchmen and Nonconformist having learnt to worktogether on a Christian Student executive do not find it difficult toco-operate, where opportunity offers, in India or China. Ahalf-involuntary revolution of sentiment is proceeding under our eyes. The strength of the new spirit of co-operation was revealed in theEdinburgh Conference of 1910. That date will stand out as supremelysignificant in the growth of a new Catholicism in the West. 

We have so far been concerned with influences making for a deeper senseof unity within the Christian Church. But if we attempt a wider survey, we shall discover that religious thought and feeling in the West, whether definitely Christian or no, possess some common characteristics, bear the impress of convictions which are ever struggling forexpression. 

First among these characteristic features of religious thought in theWest I would place faith in the solidarity of mankind. The origin ofthis faith probably passes beyond our analysis. I should suspect thatthere is a universal impulse stimulating this belief which I should beinclined to regard as instinctive. Yet it has certainly found fullerexpression in the West than in the civilization of India or China. It ispossible to point to traditions, to philosophies, and to particularevents which have carried this faith in human solidarity deep into theconsciousness of the West. Dr. Prichard, whose scientific labours, wewere told in an earlier lecture, refuted the heresy of polygenism, wasmoved to undertake his inquiries by a desire to maintain the accuracy ofthe Mosaic tradition as to the common origin of mankind. It is a littlecurious to reflect that illusory anthropology, accepted on the authorityof Moses and of Rousseau, the belief in Adam, and the belief in the freeand happy savage, have perhaps done more than scientific research intoprimitive culture to maintain our faith in human brotherhood andequality. We must not, however, attach too much weight to the story ofAdam. The Western sense of the dignity of ordinary manhood owes muchmore to the great Stoic conception of humanity, as Mr. Barker remindedus in his lecture on the Middle Ages. Perhaps even more significant isthe feeling for humanity engendered by regarding all men as the objectsof a common redemption. The poorest of men have been protected fromtheir fellows where they have been recognized as brothers for whomChrist died. It would be worth while, if one had the time and theknowledge, to follow the growth of this sentiment in modern times, totrace the influence of the doctrine of Natural Rights, of the FrenchRevolution, of the philosophy of Comte, and of the Evangelical Revival, upon its development. But whatever the sources and phases of its growth, the existence and strength of this faith in humanity are undeniable. Itis this faith which compels us to refuse to think of Westerncivilization as merely Western. For we believe that the West holds intrust for mankind, not only a right knowledge of nature, not only acorrect scientific method, but also an essential conception of the worthand unity of human life. Whatever we are to gain from the East, this isone of the gifts we bring to the other half of the world. 

In speaking of this faith in human solidarity as Western, I am awarethat I am making broad statements which badly need qualification. I amfar from wishing to suggest that there is no such sentiment of humanityin the great structures of Asiatic civilization, particularly in theethical systems of China. But I am persuaded that there is a broadcontrast between West and East in this respect, and that in particularthere is a significant gulf between the West and Hinduism. In the West, this often inarticulate faith in humanity has acted as a spring ofprogress. It inspires our faith in democracy, it acts as a perpetualchallenge to privilege and oppression, as a constant denial ofpermanence to divisions of class, nationality, and race. The verydifficulty which the orthodox Hindu experiences in appreciating thespiritual meaning of democracy--his feeling that the democratic movementis an irrational blindly selfish confusing of a divine appointed socialorder--discloses the existence of this gulf. It is not for nothing thatthe religious traditions of Hinduism trace the four castes back todivine appointment and regard them as coeval with the race. Nor is itwithout significance that India rejected Buddhism--a movement whichchallenged caste and whose missionary enthusiasm embodied a broadersentiment of humanity than has yet been woven into Indian civilization. The influence of the West is now renewing the attack on caste whichBuddha initiated and failed to accomplish. 

Without serious injustice we may claim that this faith in humansolidarity has attained clearer expression and exerts greater influencein the West than in the East. To detail its influence is impossible. Itunderlies our hopes of social reform, it refuses to believe in thesubhuman--at least it refuses to believe in the necessity of hiscontinued existence. It inspires the religious enthusiasm with which menembrace Socialism as 'a hope for mankind'. It turns the brotherhood ofman into a 'masked word. ' As a character in one of St. John Ervine'snovels puts it, 'Brother'ood of man, my boy--that's my motter. Brother'ood of man! the 'ole world, see! Not a little bit like England!the 'ole world! all of us! see? No fightin or nothink! Just peace an''appiness! Takes your breath away when you think on it. It do, straight. ' The same religious impulse is at work in that disease ofhumanitarianism which distresses Chauvinists--the humanitarianism whichBernhardi denounces in Germany and Mr. Moreton Fullerton deplores inFrance. It is reflected in the religious life alike of Russia and ofFrance. Paul Sabatier's book is largely concerned with following out theinfluence of this sense of solidarity in all philosophic and religiousschools and in all classes in France. He notes, for example, theanti-clericalism of the French peasant, which does not, however, leadhim to embrace the dogmatic negations of Free-thought. The peasant stillclings to the rites of the Church through 'the perhaps unconsciousdesire to perform an act of social solidarity, to meet our fellow-menelsewhere than on the field of material interests and distractions, toaccept the rendezvous which they offer to us and we to them, that we maydraw together and, more than that--unite and unify'. In another quarterwe may witness a new feeling for humanity resulting from the throwingtogether of diverse racial elements in the melting-pot of the UnitedStates. Zangwill's play might be cited as a document of this largerfaith, while Jane Addams has sympathetically described its genesis inher _Newer Ideals of Peace_. Yet another expression of this instinctivefaith may be discovered in the broad human interest of much of ourmodern literature and art. For the standard of orthodoxy in thisconnexion requires not only that we respond to a grand conception ofhumanity as a whole, but that also in particulars we are loyal to theTerentian tag, 'Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. ' The worthierside of modern realism has done full justice to this motto. 

The expressions of this faith in human solidarity are so various, andits influence so pervading, that it is not surprising to find somemodern thinkers looking to it as the essence of religion. In thesociological theory of religion, it is suggested that to become aware ofsociety and its claims constitutes religion itself. A man is convertedwhen his soul is 'congregationalized'. There is even a tendency to findthe highest element in religious experience in a strong feeling of one'sunity with one's fellows. Such a feeling of endless sympathy andtolerance is so large a part of love that it is easily mistaken for thewhole. For this starting-point, we might readily imagine a Western faithin humanity with Walt Whitman as its prophet. But a secondcharacteristic of Western thought about religion forbids anyidealization of humanity as we know it, and draws us beyond theindiscriminate catholicism of 'The Open Road'. This characteristic maybe defined as our faith in the worth of activity and in the reality ofprogress. We believe in the unity of mankind much more as a task to beachieved than as an accomplished or given fact to be enjoyed. Nietzschesays somewhere, 'if the goal of humanity be wanting, do we not lackhumanity itself?' We look for the ultimate unity of mankind in thepursuit of a common end. The search for such a goal, and the effort toachieve it, lend worth to history and to present action. 

This faith, often blind and unreasoned, is distinctly Western andmodern. We do not derive it even from Greece. It comes to us throughChristianity and modern science. The absence of any such faith inactivity and progress creates the pessimism of the East. Hinduism andBuddhism are alike in their bankruptcy on this side. The majesticreligious philosophy of India sees in history only an endless andmeaningless repetition. Thucydides and Plato assume the same view, if Imistake not. As Eucken says, 'Ancient views of life bore throughout anunhistorical character. The numerous philosophical doctrines of theprocession of endless similar cycles, which continually return to thestarting-point, were only the expression of the conviction that allmovement at bottom brings nothing new and that life offers no prospectof further improvement. ' When Paul discovered that the law was aschoolmaster to bring men to Christ, he enunciated a profounderphilosophy of history than Plato ever knew. 

The very fact that Christianity sprang out of Judaism means that itenshrines and suggests the idea of progress in the very circumstances ofits origin. But its hold on the idea is something deeper than itsconnexion with Judaism. Christianity claims to be the final religion, but its claim differs in kind from the parallel claim of Mohammedanism. The world of Islam is held in mortmain by the prophet. It cannot advancebeyond the forms in which he embodied his message without denying theclaims he made for himself. But to the early Christians the synopticgospels were the record of all that Jesus _began_ to do and to say, while the highest development of Christian experience and reflection inthe New Testament, the gospel of John, contemplates the greater thingswhich the followers of Jesus shall accomplish and the fuller revelationswhich shall come as the disciples are able to bear them. The claim ofChristianity to finality rests on its opening up endless possibilitiesof spiritual growth to mankind. To some of us it seems that part of thisfuller revelation has come through modern knowledge and discovery. Thefaith in progress which Christians have often held falteringly and havesometimes denied, appears to be confirmed and clarified by all that weare learning of creative evolution. In any case, the influence ofmodern science has tended to produce a faith in progress in the West--afaith which some regard as essentially different from the Christian viewof the world and history, but which for others seems more and more tocoalesce with that earlier if in some respects cruder Christianconviction. No doubt when the facts of evolution were held to point togradual and continuous development, they favoured a view of steadyprogress which was antagonistic to the Christian belief in the suddenintroduction of new elements into history. But the later advances ofevolutionary theory seem more akin to the early Christian attitude. Theelement of apocalyptic is seen not to be so alien from nature as hadbeen at first supposed. 

However it arises and whatever form it takes, this faith in progress ischaracteristic of the Western outlook, and gives a positive answer tothe question, Is life worth living? That such a faith is strange toIndia may be evidenced by the reception accorded to the poet Tagore inIndia itself. Mr. Yeats gives us the judgement of a Bengali who said ofTagore, 'He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love. 'Now Tagore's genius is thoroughly Indian, but his originality in thisrespect is due directly or indirectly to contact with the influence ofthe West. It is our belief in action and in the worth of humanachievement which is voiced in his poems and in his philosophy, and thenote is new in India. 

Illustrations of this belief in progress and activity are superfluous, though I may remind you of the prevalence of this temper in the realm ofphilosophy as well as of religion at the present time. Perhaps it isworth recalling that Harnack's great history of dogma ends with thissignificant sentence from Zwingli: 'It is not the part of a Christianman to be for ever talking grandly about dogma, but always to beattempting big things in fellowship with God. ' This represents as wellas anything our Western insistence on the worth of effort. As anadmirable embodiment at once of the faith in humanity and the faith inprogress, the close of Matthew Arnold's poem 'Rugby Chapel' recurs tothe mind. You remember how he conceives the function of great men to liein preserving the union of mankind, and how he conceives the life ofmankind as a journey towards a city that hath foundations. 

These two characteristics, faith in the oneness of mankind and in thereality of progress, do add a sense of common aspiration to thecivilization of the West. But of themselves they do not create a veryclose unity. Men may believe in human solidarity and in the worth ofeffort, and yet be following divergent ideals and divisive enthusiasms. These beliefs are surrounded by haze and indefiniteness. In themselvesthey scarcely constitute a religion that will satisfy, much less onethat can effectively unite us. However fully we share them, they willnot enable us to meet and surmount the present crisis. So far as I canjudge, these vaguer beliefs in humanity and progress are largely thedeposit of Christian faith, and to be rendered effective they need to beever reconnected with the central elements in that faith; in particular, with the Christian judgement on sin and with the Christian devotion tothe historic Jesus. 

The sense of sin has received a peculiar impress in the West. We owe itlargely to the religious experience of the Jew and to the seriousness ofthe Latin mind. There is a curious coincidence of the seventh chapter ofRomans with a famous quotation from Ovid. The Latin fathers, particularly Augustine, have developed, not to say over-developed, theanalysis of sin. The concept of sin never had the same significance forthe Greek, and humanism has always resented the severity of thetradition that comes from Paul through Augustine and Calvin. Mr. Holmes's stimulating books on education are inspired by a theologicalpolemic against the doctrine of original sin. He not unnaturally takesrefuge in Buddhism, for Buddhism makes suffering, not sin, the roottrouble of human life. 'The division between the will and the power, thestruggle of the senses against our better judgement, the falling belowthe moral ideal--none of all this comes within the horizon of Buddha. 'Now it may freely be confessed that the Calvinist view of sin led to adistrust of human nature, and incidentally of child-nature, which had anot altogether healthy reaction on home discipline and school-life. Itis very difficult to maintain the right balance, and the danger ofmorbidity through emphasis on sin is undeniable. Yet it seems to me thatthe worst errors of Calvinism and Evangelicalism in this regard havelain in a tendency to theological formalism and a failure to keep intouch with real life. In consequence, those who most deplore our waningsense of sin try us by a perverted or antiquated standard, and fastenoften on changes of sentiment and habit which are by no meansnecessarily or largely sinful. They are least conscious of the want of asense of sin, in modern society, where that want is most serious. But Ido not doubt that our often old-fashioned friends are right on the mainissue. I do not believe that we shall see the progress we desire, unlesswe recover a heightened sense of sin. I hold with Lord Acton that ourinternal conflicts are due to indifference to sin and not to a religiousidea. We judge ourselves and our race too lightly. We quench our hope ofprogress by a leniency and indulgence towards our failings which involvean underestimate of our powers and responsibilities. The present crisiswill not issue in a hopeful reaction through regret but only throughrepentance. 

The sense of sin which Christianity has brought to the West is not, Ithink, to be found elsewhere. It only appears where men feel they havean assured knowledge of God's will. It is intense only where men areconscious of God's presence. The vision of the Holiest reveals to Isaiahthat he is a man of unclean lips. Such a conviction of sin seems to meinexplicable apart from contact with the living God. Two things arerequired to bring home to men a true estimate of their moral failure, first a right standard of judgement, and, second, a conviction of thereality of God. Is it too much to say that we are not likely to reacheither, apart from Jesus of Nazareth? 'It is through Jesus and not fromAdam that we know sin. ' It is through Him that men discover their moralideal and learn not simply to believe that there is a God, but to say, OGod, Thou art my God even for ever and ever. 

Surely there is something providential in the resolute endeavour of thelast century to get back to Christ. The whole movement has succeeded indisentangling the authority of Christ from that either of Moses or ofPaul. We are almost where the disciples were when they saw no man saveJesus only. Some things in the traditions remain obscure and baffling. But we see enough to measure afresh our distance from Him. And when thepeoples of Europe are thoroughly weary of the work of destruction, itmay be they will turn to Him again for the secret of rest, and find thatHe alone can guide their feet into the way of peace. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Sabatier, _L'Orientation religieuse de la France actuelle_. ArmandColin: Paris. 

W. K. L. Clarke, _Facing the Facts; or, an Englishman's Religion_. Nisbet. 

E. C. Moore, _Christian Thought since Kant_. Duckworth's Studies inTheology. 

XIV

THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY

The preceding chapter has recalled attention to the need of deeperelements of unity in civilization than can be afforded by anycommercial, financial or political ties. Plans for a political union ofnations, common tendencies in social reform, even the essential unity ofcommerce and science, will be of no avail, unless there is a basis incommon sentiments of a religious kind, in the consciousness that we areall members one of another and can only advance and realize ourselves bythe help and sympathy of other members of the same body. It is to thispoint then that we will address ourselves in the concluding section ofthe subject. The mechanics of unity need both earnest advocacy andcareful study. But beneath and beyond them a motive force has to befound in ideals and sentiments by which alone in the end the working ofall such mechanical arrangements is rendered possible. Right sentimentsare not a sufficient safeguard, but they are an essential foundation, and it is of the first importance to realize the things to which themass of mankind are most deeply attached, how they are affected towardsone another, the channels through which the tide of feeling mostnaturally flows and is extended. Looked at from this point of view theproblem becomes primarily an educational one. We study mankind as wefind it in order to effect an improvement in the direction which wedesire. 

We find then in the first place that men as a rule are most stronglyattached to the localities and the people with whom they are firstbrought closely in contact. Here in the family is the first truemicrocosm, the first community in which the individual is developed byassociation with his fellows. On the value of this earliest socialtraining there are hardly two opinions, and we need not dwell upon it. It is at the next stage that divergence, both of definite opinion andstill more of emphasis, begins to be apparent. How far is attachment tocountry a valuable thing, how far should it be cultivated, what are thenecessary limitations and controlling ideas? As to the reality of thesentiment every man can examine himself. We know, most of us, with whatintense satisfaction we return to the country, the district, of ourbirth and home. The feeling is one of the strongest and deepest thingsin us, even if our reason deprecates and disallows the claim. AsEnglishmen, perhaps even more as Scotchmen and Irish, we love with anindefinable and ineradicable passion our sea-coast, our hills andvalleys, the fields and cottages, even the sometimes sordid, nearlyalways ill-assorted, congeries of houses which we have thrown togetheras towns. We fight among ourselves, we have more religious, political, and social differences than any other people. Yet when we needcompanionship for work or pleasure, at home or abroad, we would soonerhave an Englishman at our side than any other man. Men andcountry--'dear souls and dear, dear land'--these are the elements whichmake up the real thing called patriotism and which, in spite of all ourcurses and all our self-seeking, lead us in millions to work or die forour country, and will, while life lasts, bring us home at last. 

To those who know the local narrowness, the jealousies and pettiness ofmuch of our own national life, it will seem a primary duty in educationto present the country as an object of education and service, imperfectindeed and limited by larger ends, but yet supreme over the selfishinterests of trade, town, or individual. This, with all its terriblelosses, the war is doing for us with mighty and irresistible strokes, and it is a tragic truth that in our present imperfect social state, itis only a war, hurling us against other great and really co-operatingcommunities of men, which can make us bear with comparative ease andcheerfulness the most serious burdens of loss and suffering. We actinstantly as one people in war, we haggle and hesitate about the mostmoderate sacrifices to secure an advance in peace. It is this quality inpatriotism, and in war as its stimulus, which largely and naturallybiases our view. But to the ideal of a united Western civilization or aunited mankind it is only one step. We cannot do without patriotism, butwe must immediately proceed beyond it. We cannot reform the troubles andconflicts of mankind by attempting to root up some of our most tenaciouspassions; we progress by mastering and not mutilating our being. We haveto advance beyond the limits of patriotism by wider sympathy, by seeinganalogies, by recognizing the facts of common interests and co-operationin the world. 

But here again, looking at the question from an educational rather thanan abstract point of view, we have to recognize that actual realizationof the life and services of other nations is a slow, difficult, and, atbest, a limited process. It was really easier for the travelling studentof the Middle Ages to enter into the simple and similar life ofuniversities abroad than for the modern traveller to grasp the complexrelations of a great foreign city or state. We have therefore, inpractice, to select and concentrate. For the modern Englishman aknowledge of one or two other countries and languages is as much as thepressure of life will permit, and it is greatly to be regretted thatpoverty and hard work limit even this acquisition to very few. A_Wanderjahr_ for the working-man would do much to cement the unity ofwestern civilization. 

Until the recent acute rivalry with Germany developed, Englishsympathies were fairly evenly divided. Your Liberal, as a rule, was aFrenchman, and your Conservative a German. George Meredith and JohnMorley sang the praises of France, Coleridge and Carlyle would have uslearn from Germany. Now for many years the die is cast. We shall facethe settlement and the dangers of the future side by side with France. 

This becomes, then, one of the fixed points in our orientation. Historyand geography both dictate it. Just as in the building of our fatherlandand its attendant sentiments, the process is not a purely logical one, but comes to its completion by most irregular courses, with all sorts ofbypaths due to the odd configuration of our nature and the world we livein, so in widening out from patriotism to humanity we have to follow aline given, for the most part, by external facts. The French as ournearest neighbours have always had a special interest for us. They, likeourselves, have inherited a mixed race and a mixed civilization, partlyTeutonic, partly Celtic, partly Roman, but with elements variouslycombined. To us a more predominantly Teutonic stock and an insularposition have given a more independent and unique character, history, and constitution. France, as being continental and more central, wasalso more completely Romanized, and has at all periods of her historybeen more in touch with the general stream of thought than ourselves. Often she has led it, always she has reflected it more quickly andperfectly. Our traditional rivalry has been a chivalrous one, marked bymany episodes of real admiration and close friendship. To Elizabeth, toCromwell, to the Crusaders of the twelfth and the philosophers of theeighteenth century, France and England seemed as naturally allied asthey are now in repelling a common aggression on their homes andliberty. But for the future the strongest links will be the two greatcommon ideals, self-government and individual freedom at home, and thecommunity of free peoples abroad. In the practical democracy alreadyrealized at home, and in the ideal of a humanity built up of suchself-governing and co-operating states, France and England stand for theunity of western civilization in the sense in which it has been tracedin this volume, the only sense which makes it worth the sacrifice ofwealth and toil and life. 

 ERRATUM. 

 Page 305, line 14 from bottom

 _for_ cannot it abolish _read_ it cannot abolish

 _Marvin: The Unity of Western Civilization_. 

[** Transcriber's Note: The text below was modified to reflect theERRATUM above. The original ERRATUM is left in the document forhistorical purposes. **]

The unity of which we believe ourselves to be now the champions musttherefore be a real thing based on freedom and realized by consciouseffort; but it must also be truly comprehensive, not exclusive of anywilling co-operator, not aimed against any one but for the whole. It isnot intended in this volume to discuss any burning questions of the day, and therefore the briefest indications must be given of how the nucleusof western culture has been formed and how it must reform itself afterthe war. France, Germany, and England have been for many years, collectively far the most important centres of science and socialprogress in the world, and it would have been the ideal policy for themto give a united lead to the rest of the world. The war has alteredthat, but it cannot abolish the fundamental facts on which thecivilization of the West is based, science, power over nature, andsocial organization. In these the same three countries will still have acertain primacy, though the position of the United States will beenormously strengthened. No peace can, of course, be permanent whichcontemplates the excommunication of a leading member of the humanfamily. 

Italy in science, philosophy, and literature, is a worthy colleague, andRussia makes a great stride forward by allying herself with the forcesof progress and European unity. 

Now it is clear that there are two distinct lines of approach to ourgoal of a united mankind. We may cultivate for ourselves, as an idealbased on love and reason, the notion of all men as brothers workingtogether, helping one another even when unknown, strengthening oneanother's powers, and gradually advancing towards a higher goal. This, though not a complete religion for most people, at least partakes of thenature of religion. The other line is concerned with the practical taskof reconciling actual difficulties, bringing nations together forvarious purposes--arbitration, international trade, boards ofconciliation and the like. This is the slow and thorny path, and onaccount of its very difficulty is apt to engross the thoughts and energyof the best brains which devote themselves to the cause. But the firstline, of self-cultivation and the promotion of a favourable spirit amongothers, though open to any one and easy of approach, is apt to beneglected. Such 'mere idealism', like pure benevolence, runs some riskof being choked by the multiplicity of details and agencies andorganizations which beset the modern world. Humanity, as an idea, wasperhaps more easily apprehended in the days of Turgot and Condorcet thanit is with us when the implements of a united mankind have beenimmeasurably augmented and improved. All the greater, then, the need tore-integrate the notion. Just as in science the dispersive effect ofspecialism has led many thinkers to desire another order of mindsspecially devoted to generalism, to knitting together the results of thedetailed investigations of others, so in conduct, morals and politics, it is more and more imperative to recall men's minds, and, in the firstplace, our own, to the large governing ideas by which after all ourlesser rules and objects must stand or fall. For who will dispute thatall our alliances and international action and the war itself can onlybe ultimately justified if they are seen to serve the highest interestsof mankind as a whole?

A volume, and a very valuable one, might be written on the evolution ofthis idea of Humanity in history. We should need in the first place toanalyse, with some care, in what sense it is in each case used. There isthe simple sense of brotherhood such as we know to be deeply felt amongour allies in Russia. Of this there must have been germs from theearliest appearance of mankind upon earth. It is one of those mostprecious things which the development of wealth and class anddistinctive culture has tended to blunt in more elaborate civilizations. But when we consider that the full conception of Humanity involves aknowledge of man's evolution, his growth in power, and organizationthroughout history, as well as the simple but indispensable sense ofman's brotherhood, we shall see how long a road the Russian moujik--aswell as multitudes of his fellows in all other lands--must travel beforehe comes in view of the goal. In the fuller sense of a self-consciousand developing being, the idea of Humanity first appears with theStoics, after the Greeks had put their leaven of abstract thought intothe world. The whole inhabited world as the City of Man was the Stoicideal, and it embraced both the idea of the [Greek: polis] whichPlatonic and Aristotelian thought had reached in the fourth centuryB. C. , and the extension to the rest of mankind which was in the air justbefore the Christian era. Christianity affected the conception in atwofold manner. On the one hand it limited it, for the Stoic City of Manbecame the City of God, who was to be sought and worshipped in oneprescribed order. On the other hand it deepened it, for the springs of acommon humanity were found to go beneath the superficial facts of acitizen life into the depths of souls which have identical relationswith eternal things, with sin and suffering and hopes of the future. 

It is not till after the outburst of science in the fifteenth andsixteenth centuries, after that reawakening of the hopes of human powerswhich takes our minds back to the Greeks, that we find the conception ofHumanity appearing in something like the form in which we can nowimagine it. It will have been gathered from our chapter on Science andPhilosophy how essential is the growth of organized thought to therealization of any unity in a progressive world. For the realm ofthought is the only one in which no distinctions of race or nation arepossible, but it must be thought in which agreement is reached. So longas men can differ, as they still do, on questions of human affairs, politics, social arrangements, or even archaeological matters where raceor national predominance is involved, so far science does not exert herunifying sway. But in mathematics, physics, chemistry, all the mattersin which it is impossible for a man to take another view because he is aFrenchman or a German--here we reach a haven of intellectual peace; andthese calm waters are spreading over the world, in spite of thetempests. 

To return to the educational point from which we started, we can see nowanother line of approach to unity in training our own minds and those ofothers. In some respects it is a surer way, though less direct. Whenstudying the political life and history of other nations, even if we doso deliberately in order to find out what we owe to them, we are boundto be arrested here and there by things that we do not like, even amongour best friends. The French may seem frivolous or less self-restrainedthan ourselves; they have had their sanguinary outbursts of revolution. Where they have impeded our own movements, as in colonization, we arethe more conscious of their faults. Or we may feel that Americans havetheir materialistic vein. And so on. This with our best friends, who, nodoubt, feel the same about us. But on the other line of approach, thestudy of the things on which men now agree without question, which theyhave built up steadily with co-operating hands, the mental effect isquite different. The opening vista leads us on, with growing admirationand confidence in the unbreakable solidarity of mankind. We know thatNewton who completes Galileo, Maxwell who follows Laplace, Helmholtz whouses the results of Joule, can have no conflicting jealousies. Herequite obviously and indisputably all are fellow-workers, and before thegreatness of their work the passions of rival domination in materialthings, the differences of national taste and habit, the quarrels of thepast or the future, appear contemptible and insignificant. 

They are not insignificant, as we know to our cost. But by dwelling onthe things of greater moment and solidity, we train ourselves and othersto reduce the elements of discord to their true proportion and allay thestorm. The progress of a united mankind is thus an ideal, slowlyrealizing itself in time. But its realization is quickened and renderedwider and more beneficent, the more we think of it and believe in it. Ablow comes, such as the present war, and seems to shatter the wholepicture which so many hands have limned and so many eyes admired. Thosewho have followed its growth through the ages, know well that no suchblow can finally destroy a living growth or even go very deep ininjuring its features. 

It is surely a commonplace that in proportion as western populations, from statesmen downwards, are animated by sentiments of comradeshipwhich arise from considerations such as these, the danger of war mustdiminish and the possibilities of fruitful common action increase. Yetthere is probably no country in Europe where any deliberate attempt ismade to instruct the people in ideas which would most surely broadentheir sympathies and lay the foundations of peace. 

The argument takes us back for a moment to the essay on education. Weleft off there at a point where the old unity based on Greco-Romanculture was seen to be disappearing in a confused mass of new studies, partly suggested by modern languages and history, still more by thegrowth of science and the application of science to the problems ofcontemporary life. It may well be that in this conception of humanity, the co-operation of mankind in a growing structure of thought, we shallultimately find the _idée-mère_ under which all the other subordinateideas in education may be grouped and inspired. This might take place ifthe notion were grasped in no narrow sense, but so broadly that allhuman thought, religion, and philosophy, art as well as science, mightfind their justification in it. 

The advantage of putting the educational issue first has been alreadyindicated. We can all get to work on it at once for ourselves, and it isa far more fundamental and, in some respects, easier thing to introducea new idea into the minds of others than to alter the boundaries andpolitical conditions of States. If we once achieved a general atmosphereof co-operation and goodwill in the world, the practical problems wouldbe already more than half solved. 

Discussion will take place, with more and more vigour as years go on, asto the various measures which have been described collectively as theestablishment of a World-State. At what point could it be said that aWorld-State is in being? How can such a World-State be reconciled withthe independent sovereignty of the several States comprised in it? Whatis to be the sanction imposing the decisions of the larger community onits constituent members? Such are a few of the problems involved in anyadvance towards the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism. None of them admitof a single definite answer. They do not belong to questions of puretheory, and we shall have to solve them slowly and with difficulty, seizing every favourable opportunity of a slight advance, avoiding graveobstacles, compromising with every possible friend. 

But for the moment we seem likely to be overwhelmed by unchainedpassions which are the practical denial of everything that the ideal ofhumanity implies. Instead of co-operation we are faced by schemes ofconquest and domination, and the simplest notion of brotherhood islimited to comradeship in arms for defence or attack. Many will be foundto ridicule the idea that any real progress in unity has ever been made, or that the world can ever be envisaged except as an irksome enclosureof rival armed forces thirsting for the fray. But to those who are notprepared to accept this as the last word in human association theargument of this volume may have some weight. It will lead those whofollow it to a quiet but well-grounded belief that the forces tending tounity in the world are different in quality, incomparably greater inscope than those which make for disruption. Discord is explosive andtemporary, harmony rises slowly but dominates the final chord. 

Like the great common purposes of science, the common tendencies ofhuman action have in recent years suffered some eclipse through thebustle of our activity and the multiplicity of its detail. The colours, too, of a conflict of any kind are so much more vivid and arresting thanthe quiet and monotonous tones of a long piece of harmonious andco-operative work. The labours of such a bureau of international effortas is described in Chapter X appear to our pressmen and publicists solittle interesting that they are practically ignored, and the results ofscientific congresses, being of a highly specialized kind, are leftperforce to those who can understand them. Yet it is precisely in thesethings, if our diagnosis is correct, that the most characteristicfeatures of the age are to be found. For in them and in similarmovements we see united the two fundamental human traits from which westarted, reason and sympathy: reason winning triumphs over nature, sympathy realizing itself at last in a community of men devoting theirpowers to mutual aid. 'Idle dreams', it will be said, as we hurl moreand more millions of our best youth to destruction by the most highlydeveloped resources of science. Yes, but the same nations were onlyyesterday celebrating the services of Pasteur, Virchow, and Lister to acommon humanity, and will do so again to-morrow or the day after. 

It is in truth one of the most poignant features of the tragedy in whichwe are manfully and rightly bearing our part, that the community-sensein the world had never been so highly developed, or found so manychannels in which to diffuse itself, as just at the moment when the blowfell. The socialist movements in all civilized countries have always hadthis as a leading motive; comrades and poor among themselves, these menhave always been eager to stretch out a hand to those of like mindabroad. And in the last chapter we saw how among Christian communitiesthroughout the world there has been in recent years a growingapproximation. Neither the cause nor the effects of such forces can dieaway. They will reappear when the storm has passed and rebuild thewreck. 

One large aspect of the united action of the western world has receivedno notice in this volume, though it might very well be the subject of adetailed study in itself. This is the relation of the more advanced andpowerful nations of the West towards the weaker and less progressivepeoples. It might, indeed, be treated as the touchstone of ourcivilization, just as the education of the young is a good, perhaps thebest, test of the advancement of any single people. For it involves somejoint action of the western nations; it shows how far they aredisinterested and how far skilful in their treatment of the lessadvanced. 

The record is not a good one, but it confirms, on the whole, the view wehave suggested that a growth of the sense and conception of humanity maybe traced from the time when modern science was born in the sixteenthcentury. The Middle Ages hardly furnish us with any examples of theaction of Christendom towards heathen and weaker people until theCrusades, in which, with rare examples of personal chivalry, the earlierattitude was one of contempt and hatred of the unbeliever. In theconquest of the New World, which was to some of its earliest conquerorsa new Crusade, there is the same general savagery marked by rare casesof Christian kindness, such as Las Casas showed. But after theReformation, when the Church itself had been purified and more humantolerance and care and interest in life prevailed, we find theenlightened Jesuit missions to China and Paraguay, St. Francis Xavier'swork in India, and the Quaker dealings with Red Indians in the NewWorld. From the middle of the seventeenth century, slavery, which hadfallen into abeyance during the Middle Ages as a domestic institution, began to be denounced as a trade. We are on the threshold of the greathumanitarian outburst of the eighteenth century. It is impossible tobelieve that this growth of human feeling in dealing with other men isunconnected with that new gospel of human power which Bacon andDescartes had just proclaimed. Except for the occasional superman, thegreater the powers a man possesses and the higher he rates humancapacity at its best, the more careful he is to cherish and develop thegerms of humanity in the young and weak. 

This was undoubtedly the case with the 'philosophers' of the eighteenthcentury; it is equally true of the nineteenth century, an age wonderfulalike for its unexampled development of science and for the rise ofactivities, national and international, for the betterment of the race. Jointly the western nations have in this period put down the slavetrade, and in the Brussels Conference of 1890 we see the highest pointyet reached by the united humanity of the West expressed by theassembled states in regard to backward people. The point therefore is anotable one, and Englishmen will be glad to remember that it was LordSalisbury, then Foreign Secretary, who took the first step. The previousConference at Berlin, in 1884, had secured freedom of trade for thebasins of the Congo and the Niger, and in 1889 Lord Salisbury, throughthe Belgian Government, called the Powers together to consider questionsrelating to the slave trade in Africa. For Africa, home of the blackrace, last exploited of the continents, discovered after the white manhad discovered science, was pre-eminently the part of the world wherethe co-operation of leading peoples in civilizing backward races wasmost needed and most to be expected. The Congo, the Herreros, Morocco, Tripoli, Omdurman, offer a blood-stained record in reply. 

But the general act of the Brussels Conference is clear and adequate asto what the purpose of the Powers should be. "To put an end to thecrimes and devastations engendered by the traffic in African slaves, toprotect effectively the aboriginal populations of Africa, to ensure forthat vast continent the benefits of peace and civilization", is in factthe whole duty of a united western civilization when dealing with theless civilized. The results achieved may well seem small compared withthe magnitude of the purpose, but those who know most about it do notdespise them. Slave-raiding and tribal wars have been diminished andsome check put on importing arms and spirits. 

It is not a topic on which it is easy to keep a cheerful mind. SomePutumayo will constantly occur to remind us of the fierce brutality ofstrength unsupervised and unrestrained. We compare the actualperformance of mankind when free to try their best or wreak their worston comparatively defenceless folk, with the noble rivalry which we canimagine between the nations of the world in leading the weaker people todevelop their resources and themselves, on paths which may tend to thegreatest prosperity and happiness of all, advanced and backwardtogether: and the comparison leaves us sick at heart. But a soberjudgement will not deny that even here advance is being made. The idealhas been admitted. The rights of smaller States are being made, as inthe present conflict, the subject of the concern of their strongestneighbours. Steps are being taken all over the world to preserve andameliorate the remnants of primitive people. Horrors when revealed aremore strongly reprobated. Missionaries are pursuing their labours withmore enlightenment and zeal, and in wider spheres. In spite of cynicsand doubters, it is true in this as in the other activities of a unitedmankind, _e pur si muove_. And as the work moves on it is seen toinvolve the same guiding thoughts that inspire us in the case of theyoung and feeble at home--pity for their weakness, love for theirhumanity, hope for the future. 

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

_Kant's Perpetual Peace_ (new edition just published). 

_International Policy_. Chapman & Hall. 

Fayle, _The Great Settlement_. Murray. 

_The Leadership of the World_. (Oxford pamphlet. )