5.
If these remarks upon the difference between barbarism and civilization be in the main correct, they have prepared the way for answering the question which I have raised concerning the principle of life and the mode of dissolution proper or natural to barbarous and civilized powers respectively. Ratiocination and its kindred processes, which are the necessary instruments of political progress, are, taking things as we find them, hostile to imagination and auxiliary to sense. It is true that a St. Thomas can draw out a whole system of theology from principles impalpable and invisible, and fix upon the mind by pure reason a vast multitude of facts and truths which have no pretence to a bodily form. But, taking man as he is, we shall commonly find him dissatisfied with a demonstrative process from an undemonstrated premiss, and, when he has once begun to reason, he will seek to prove the point from which his reasoning starts, as well as that at which it arrives. Thus he will be forced back from immediate first principles to others more remote, nor will he be satisfied till he ultimately reaches those which are as much within his own handling and mastery as the reasoning apparatus itself. Hence it is that civilized states ever tend to substitute objects of sense for objects of imagination, as the basis of their existence. The Pope's political power was greater when Europe was semi-barbarous; and the divine right of the successors of the English St. Edward received a death-blow in the philosophy of Bacon and Locke. At present, I suppose, our own political life, as a nation, lies in the supremacy of the law; and that again is resolvable into the internal peace, and protection of life and property, and freedom of the individual, which are its result; and these I call objects of sense.
For the very same reason, objects of this nature will not constitute the life of a barbarian community; prudence, foresight, calculation of consequences do not enter into its range of mental operations; it has no talent for analysis; it cannot understand expediency; it is impressed and affected by what is direct and absolute. Religion, superstition, belief in persons and families, objects, not proveable, but vivid and imposing, will be the bond which keeps its members together. I have already alluded to the divinity which in the imagination of the Huns encircled the hideous form of Attila. Zingis claimed for himself or his ancestry a miraculous conception, and received from a prophet, who ascended to heaven, the dominion of the earth. He called himself the son of God; and when the missionary friars came to his immediate successor from the Pope, that successor made answer to them, that it was the Pope's duty to do him homage, as being earthly lord of all by divine right. It was a similar pretension, I need hardly say, which was the life of the Mahometan conquests, when the wild Saracen first issued from the Arabian desert. So, too, in the other hemisphere, the Caziques of aboriginal America were considered to be brothers of the Sun, and received religious homage as his representatives. They spoke as the oracles of the divinity, and claimed the power of regulating the seasons and the weather at their will. This was especially the case in Peru; "the whole system of policy," says Robertson, "was founded on religion. The Incas appeared, not only as a legislator, but as the messenger of heaven."[73] Elsewhere, the divine virtue has been considered to rest, not on the monarch, but on the code of laws, which accordingly is the social principle of the nation. The Celts ascribed their legislation to Mercury;[74] as Lycurgus and Numa in Sparta and Rome appealed to a divine sanction in behalf of their respective institutions.
This being the case, imperfect as is the condition of barbarous states, still what is there to overthrow them? They have a principle of union congenial to the state of their intellect, and they have not the ratiocinative habit to scrutinize and invalidate it. Since they admit of no mental progress, what serves as a bond to-day will be equally serviceable to-morrow; so that apparently their dissolution cannot come from themselves. It is true, a barbarous people, possessed of a beautiful country, may be relaxed in luxury and effeminacy; but such degeneracy has no obvious tendency to weaken their faith in the objects in which their political unity consists, though it may render them defenceless against external attacks. And here indeed lies their real peril at all times; they are ever vulnerable from without. Thus Sparta, formed deliberately on a barbarian pattern, remained faithful to it, without change, without decay, while its intellectual rival was the victim of successive revolutions. At length its power was broken externally by the Theban Epaminondas; and by the restoration of Messenia, the insurrection of the Laconians, and the emancipation of the Helots. Agesilaus, at the time of its fall, was as good a Spartan as any of his predecessors. Again, the ancient Empire of the Huns in Asia is said to have lasted 1,500 years; at length its wanton tyranny was put an end to by the Chinese King plunging into the Tartar desert, and thus breaking their power. Thrace, again, a barbarous country, lasted many centuries, with kings of great vigour, with much external prosperity, and then succumbed, not to internal revolution, but to the permanent ascendancy of Rome. Similar too is the instance of Pontus, and again of Numidia and Mauritania; they may have had great or accomplished sovereigns, but they have no history, except in the wars of their conquerors. Great leaders are necessary for the prosperity, as great enemies for the destruction, of barbarians; they thrive, as they come to nought, by means of agents external to themselves. So again Malek Shah died, and his empire fell to pieces. Hence, too, the unexpected and utter catastrophes which befall barbarous people, analogous to a violent death, which I have alluded to in speaking of the sudden rise and fall of Tartar dynasties; for no one can anticipate results, which, instead of being the slow evolution of political principles, proceed from the accident of external quarrels and of the relative condition of rival powers.