LECTURE VI.
THE WORLD ROMELESS.
I said in the opening lecture of this series that one of the most wonderful features of the age in which we live, an age which will assuredly take its place in the Universal History of times to come as one of the most memorable of ages, is that the world is Romeless. I said too that this feature of the most modern times is, by one of the great cycles of history, a feature which takes us back to the earliest days of European life. The world from which Rome has passed away has something in common with the world in which Rome had never shown herself. It has something in common with it which it has not in common with those later ages during which Rome, in one shape or another, under one form of influence or another, was the acknowledged centre of all European and Christian lands. But this is one of those many truths which can be grasped only by those who look at European history as a whole, and who are not led away by the delusive voices which would teach them that this or that fragment of the unbroken tale can be mastered by itself apart from the other acts of the one drama. He who shuts up his books and he who opens his books at any arbitrary point in Rome’s long story are alike shut out from any true conception of the place of Rome in the world’s history; they are shut out from understanding the difference between an age in which Rome is and an age in which Rome is not. To their eyes the fact that the world is Romeless will not seem anything wonderful, anything distinctive, because they have never looked with any searching gaze at the ages in which the world was otherwise. Such an one will never see that the great feature of the most modern times, a feature which has reached its height in the times in which we ourselves live, is the absence of any such centre as the world so long gathered itself around. And if he will not see that the world is Romeless, still less will he see that even the Romeless world is not as though Rome had never been. Rome is still eternal in her influence; the world in truth has been for ages so steeped in Roman influences that those influences have ceased to be Roman. But Rome, as a visible and acknowledged centre, has passed away. No longer does an undivided world look to a single Rome as its one undoubted head. No longer does a divided world look to an Eastern and a Western Rome as each the undoubted head of half the world of civilized man. Rome œcumenical in either of her seats has become a thing that is no longer. The younger Rome has passed from us to be the spoil of the barbarian. The elder, by a fate at once more and less hopeful, has sunk to be the local capital of a single European kingdom. The younger, in her present distress, has the loftier hopes for the future. Her very oppressors have in some sort kept on her traditions; they have kept her in her old place as the head of something more than a mere local realm. We are far more likely to see Christian Constantinople again step into her old heritage as the head of Eastern Christendom than to see the lands of the West again accept the headship of the elder Rome by the Tiber. The line of her Cæsars is broken, broken, we may be sure, for ever. Her Pontiffs have not wisdom enough to see how their œcumenical position has been raised by deliverance from the shackles of local sovereignty. But to him who begins at the middle or at the end, to him who leaves off at the middle—to him who, under the influence of either error, has not given his mind to grasp the whole tale from the kingship on the Palatine to the kingship on the Quirinal—the things which make our own age so wonderful are things which lack a meaning. He who vainly dreams that he will better understand his own times by beginning his historic work with the times immediately before them—he who listens to false charmers who bid him seek, perhaps historic honours but assuredly not historic knowledge, by preferring the flashy glitter of some sixth or seventh period to the solid work of his Gregory or his Einhard—he will find out—no, he will never learn enough to find out—that there is no royal road to the knowledge even of his own times. His penalty will be to walk in an age as strange and memorable as any that went before it, and not to know in how strange and memorable an age it is in which he is walking.
We live then in a Romeless age, and to those who have eyes to see it is one of the chief wonders of our age that it is Romeless. But our age is Romeless because we live in a world from which Rome has passed away; those far-gone ages were Romeless because Rome had not yet made her way to the place which the world’s destiny had marked for her. The position of those ages in the general tale of European history was the subject of the first lecture of this course six weeks back. In that lecture and in the one which followed it I strove to point out how Rome, having by slow steps risen to the first place in the West, burst suddenly into the midst of another political system, a system of kingdoms and commonwealths which was in many points a forestalling of the political system of the world in which we now live. And we may go yet further back, to days when Rome was so far from being the head of the world that her name could hardly have been known in the world. By one of the strange cycles of history, we who dwell in the wide world of modern times, the world of continents and oceans—nothing better shows its vastness than that we are driven to form a plural for this last primæval name—have in some points come back to the state of those who dwelled in the narrow world of the earliest times, the little world of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas. We have come back to the state of things that was, not only before Rome stood forth to rule the nations, but before Macedonian kingdoms and Greek confederations had cut short the right of every single town on its hill or in its island to act as a sovereign state in the affairs of the world. Each nation now, like each city then, does what is right in its own eyes. A nation now, like a city then, may be kept back from the exercise of its inherent powers by dread of the physical strength of some mightier neighbour. But the nations now, like the cities then, acknowledge no common centre of lawful rule, no power which can speak to all with an authority higher than that of physical strength. From our age the great vision of Dante’s Monarchy has passed away, and we have so far gone back to the condition of the ages before whose eyes that wondrous vision had never shown itself. The best witness to this fact is to be found in the acknowledged importance and the confessed difficulty of the doctrine of International Law. At no time has it ever been more needful than it is now to have a system of rules by which a number of independent powers shall acknowledge themselves to be bound. At no time has it been found harder to enforce that system of rules by any practical sanction. The simplest way perhaps is that the weak state shall be held bound to the strictest observance of every international rule in its dealings with the stronger, but that the stronger shall be held to be absolved from the like pedantic minuteness in its dealings with the weaker. A fancied insult, for instance, at the hands of Greece is held to demand a humiliating atonement which would certainly not be asked for in the like case at the hands of Germany. But the most subtle International lawyer has failed to devise any means, save the last argument of all, for bringing a great power to reason which, to put it delicately, puts its own construction on international rules, and is so fully convinced of the truth of that construction that it declines to submit their interpretation to the decision of any arbiter. So it was in the days when the civilized world was bounded by the independent commonwealths of Greece. In theory certain rules or customs were held to bind every Greek state in its dealings with every other Greek state. Certain acts which were deemed lawful if done towards barbarians were deemed unlawful if done towards fellow-Greeks. Such rules differed in no essential respect from the International Law of modern times. There is simply a verbal difficulty in applying the name to the old Greek world, a difficulty arising out of the fact that, in our present state of things, nations have taken the place of cities. But among Greek cities there was just the same difficulty in finding a sanction for the wholesome rules laid down by Greek tradition or religion which there is in finding the like sanction now. There was no common temporal authority; we can hardly say that there was a common spiritual authority. The Amphiktyonic Council had but feeble claims even to the last position; its decrees went practically for nothing, unless some powerful state undertook to carry them out for its own purposes, and claimed in return to determine what they should be. In the days of the great Peloponnesian war we do not hear of the Amphiktyons at all. Then and later, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, could trifle at pleasure with the rights of a weaker city, subject only to the chance that some other among the stronger cities might find it suit its interests to assert the rights of the weaker. Every Greek city had in theory an equal right to independence; but Messênê, Skiônê, and Plataia felt how hard it sometimes was to assert that right. A treaty graven on a stone went for little, an Amphiktyonic decree went for less, when a powerful and ambitious city had other purposes to carry out. Such a treaty, such a decree, went for about as much as the agreement of a modern European congress when it binds itself to secure the freedom of Epeiros and the good government of Armenia. The voice of some one overbearing city, say Sparta backed by the will of the Great King, counted for far more. The rise of the Macedonian power under two renowned princes gave the Greek world for a short space a centre and a head. International law or its substitutes went for little when Alexander, flushed with Asiatic conquest, wrote to all the cities of Greece to restore their exiles. But when the Macedonian kingdom again became only one power among many, the old state of things came back again with the needful changes. The world of Greece was no longer a world of cities only; it was a world in which cities, kingdoms, and confederations all played their part, a world in which diplomacy had its full run, in which the eastern seas of Europe were ever covered by embassies crossing one another in their endless voyages to the court of this or that prince, to the assembly of this or that confederation. It was into this busy world of complicated International dealings that the power of Rome burst like a thunderbolt. All was at once changed. Under the Roman Peace, indeed in days long before the Roman Peace was formally established, as soon as Rome became by common consent the arbiter of the Mediterranean world, International Law had small opportunities left of showing its strength or its weakness. For a while the independent powers of the civilized world received as law whatever decrees the mightiest among them, the Roman Senate, thought good to put forth in each particular case. As kingdoms sank into provinces, as independent cities sank into municipalities, the law of the one commonwealth into whose substance they were in a manner merged became the immediate law of the whole civilized world, with the might of Cæsar Augustus as its sanction. There might still be a jus gentium between Rome and Parthia; to settle such questions as might arise at Antioch, at Gades, or at Eboracum, there was only the law of the Roman city of which all other cities had become suburbs.
As long as any shadow of Roman power lasted, the theory that there lived on at Rome a central judgement-seat for the world was never wholly forgotten. As East and West became, not only separate but hostile, as the Western Pontiff stepped for many purposes into the place of the Western Emperor, it was the ecclesiastical rather than the Imperial Rome to which the nations sought as their common judge. Still in either case it was Rome that spoke; the world at least of Western Europe still acknowledged a centre by the Tiber, though that centre might have shifted from the Regia and the Septizonium to the Lateran and the Vatican. The world of which the Lateran and the Vatican were centres was presently cut short by a spiritual revolt. And that spiritual revolt was largely measured by national distinctions. As Eastern Europe, Greek and Slavonic Europe, had never admitted the spiritual dominion of the Western Rome, so now Teutonic Europe cast that dominion aside. Nations which had, in the teeth of Emperors, asserted their independence in the affairs of the world, now asserted their independence no less in the range of man’s spiritual being. The Church of Rome remained, like the Empire of Rome, a power mighty and venerable, but a power confined, if not within the bounds of a single nation, at least within the bounds of a group of nations closely connected in history and speech. As there was a Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, so there was now a Holy Roman Church of the Latin-speaking folk. In one important point indeed we may say that the range of the new Roman power was narrowed yet further. There was a time when the bishopric of Rome, with all that the bishopric of Rome carried with it, was, in practice as well as in theory, open to men of all nations that admitted the spiritual power of Rome. Now, though no law forbids the election of a Pope of any nation, in practice the choice of the electors has long been confined to men of Italian birth. This privilege indeed might be looked on as in some sort a survival or revival of local Roman supremacy; more truly it is a falling back on days before the spiritual supremacy of Rome began. It is a falling back on times when the Roman church, still a local church though the first of local churches, naturally sought for its chiefs among its own members. But so far as it is a falling back in either sense, it is a falling back in a shape better fitted for later times; here again the nation takes the place of the city; Italy takes the place of Rome. In short the Roman Church, still in theory coextensive with the world, once really coextensive with Western Europe, has shrunk up into a body mainly Latin with a head exclusively Italian. It is indeed only in a broad and general sense that we can take such propositions as that the Latin nations clave to Rome while the Teutonic nations fell away. That there are many exceptions needs no proof. It is plain that the Roman Church can still boast herself of not a few Teutonic and Slavonic subjects. It is no less plain that there are here and there, though in smaller numbers, men of Latin speech, both in East and West, who are not her subjects. Still the general proposition is none the less true in its general sense. It marks, to say the least, general tendencies which run a certain course wherever there is no special cause to hinder them. If we look narrowly into each case of exception, we shall often see some special cause, commonly some political cause, which accounts for the anomaly. We may note further that, as the Empire became more purely German and the Papacy became more purely Latin, the old feuds between Empire and Papacy died out. The Austrian Emperors, Catholic chiefs of an Empire mainly Protestant, had no such warfare to wage with the Roman see as had been waged by the Franconians and the Swabians. But as Empire and Papacy alike came to be thus shut up within narrowed and definite limits, neither could any longer act as a common centre, even for the Western lands. For better or for worse, the world has fallen back on an older state of things. Instead of a single Rome as the acknowledged head of all, instead of two rival Romes, each claiming the headship of its own half of the civilized world, it is now open to every nation, as in the earlier day it was open to every city, to do, as far as it finds to do it, that which is right in its own eyes. Every nation now, as every city then, may play the part of Rome for the years or for the moments through which it may keep enough of physical strength to play that part.
The latest times then are in truth a return to the earliest times, with this difference, that nations have taken the place of cities. Two of the masters of history in later times have pointed out the close analogy between the mutual relations of the cities of old Greece and those of the nations of modern Europe. The lesson has been taught us in its fulness alike by Arnold and by Grote. It hardly fell within the scope of either master to point out how truly the likeness is a cycle, how the later state of things is a return to the earlier, after the existence for many ages of a state of things wholly unlike either. They were hardly called on to dwell upon the causes which have brought about this return to an earlier state of things, or on the causes which made that return, as every return to an earlier state of things must be, a return only partial, a return largely modified by the events which have taken place in the meanwhile. It was enough for them to point the analogy. And the analogy is answer enough to those shallowest of the shallow who go about winning cheers from half-taught audiences by declaiming on the uselessness of studying the institutions of “petty states” and by asking what can be gained by knowing about battles fought two thousand years ago. The substitution of the nation for the city is, from one side, part of the process which we may, for our purposes, call the physical growth of the world. The world in which we live is in physical extent vastly bigger than the first civilized world of old Greece, vastly bigger than the far wider Mediterranean world of Rome. What the Ægæan and its borderlands once were, what the Mediterranean and its borderlands once were, Ocean and his borderlands, his borderlands spread over so many continents and islands, are now. No one ought to be more ready than students of political history to welcome every modern scientific invention. The discoveries which have gone so far to annihilate distance ought to call up our deepest thankfulness. But we are perhaps thankful for them on other grounds than those for which they are prized by their own inventors; we are certainly thankful for them on other grounds from those for which they are prized by those who go about bragging about the worthlessness even of the knowledge of times when those inventions were unknown. The steamer, the railway, the telegraph, are wholesome and necessary institutions; they are wholesome and necessary in order to hinder man’s intellectual and political life from being crushed by mere physical extension. They allow the England of our day to come nearer to the Athens of Periklês than the England of a hundred years back, of fifty years back. They allow the United States of America, spread over a world wider than any age of Roman empire, to abide as a Confederation free and united, the true fellow of the old Achaia shut up within the bounds of Peloponnêsos. They are needful in an age when nations have taken the place of cities, that they may make the nations really the political equals of the cities. You may again, some of you, chance to hear some smatterer sneering at petty states ignorant of the great discoveries of natural science. Tell him that the highest use of the discoveries of natural science has been to raise large states to the political level of small ones.
The causes which have led to the substitution of nations for cities in the modern world are many, many more than I can attempt to deal with in this lecture; but not a few of them are nearly connected with the main subject of this course, the condition of Europe in its three great stages, before Rome, under Rome, and after Rome. I long ago defined modern history, if the formula has any meaning at all, to mean the history of the times in which the Teutonic and Slavonic nations have held the foremost place. Now among both these races the tendency to look to the city as the natural centre of social and political life has always been far less developed than it was among the southern nations. We may say southern nations in general; for if the highest developement of the city belongs to Greece, yet it is also very strong in Italy—let Rome and Capua bear witness; and if the growth of the city life was much less perfect among Gauls and Iberians than it was among Greeks and Italians, yet Gauls and Iberians had certainly made a nearer approach to it than Slaves or Teutons. The causes of this difference, the detailed shapes in which this difference shows itself, if I ever speak of them at all, I must speak of some other time, and after all they perhaps rather belong to the province of the Reader in Anthropology than to mine. For the present purpose we may simply accept the fact. Take the highest type of each class. Greek political society starts from the city; separate cities may be grouped into confederations. Teutonic political society starts from the tribe; separate tribes may be fused into nations. I use the word group in one case, the word fuse in the other, because in the Teutonic case the union has both happened far more universally and has been far more perfect than in the Greek case. We must take one more glance at the old free Hellas, before the growth of Rome, before the growth of Macedonia. Its ideal is the perfectly independent city; it is only the experience of a later age which leads cities to join into confederations. The process is in some sort an unwilling one; we may be sure that Sikyôn and Corinth would never have given up one jot of their perfect separate independence through any smaller motive than the need of union among cities that had to escape or to throw off Macedonian domination. The Teutonic political unit, the tribe, or whatever we call the body of settlers who occupy a shire or gá, holds another position. Neighbouring and kindred tribes join into a nation—at first most likely they join into some group greater than the tribe and less than the nation—with far greater ease than Greek cities join into confederations. Some of the reasons are obvious. A city has in the nature of things a more distinct and abiding political being than a mere district, a mere space on the map. Two shires may be physically rolled into one, and the rolling into one does not carry with it any necessary political subjection of one part of the new whole to the other. Two cities can seldom be physically rolled into one; the political union of two cities is necessarily more imperfect than that of two districts, and it is hard to unite them at all without giving some degree of superiority to one over the other. Again, the tendency of a tribe, whether wandering or settled in its district, is to the headship of a personal chief, whether hereditary or elective; if the assembly is the body of the tribe, the duke, judge, ealdorman, is the head. The tendency of a city, whether aristocratic or democratic, is to mere temporary magistrates, who are not in the same sense heads either of the city or of its assembly. Two or more dukes or ealdormen can give way to a single king, or they can go on exercising their office under a common king, with very little shock to the constitution and habits of the land and its folk. The assembly of the enlarged district is simply an enlargement of the separate assemblies of the two districts. It is by no means so easy to fuse the assemblies and the magistracies of two separate cities into one. The attempt is recorded to have been once made in historic Greece; Corinth for a while, no very long while, merged her separate being in that of Argos; but before long Argos and Corinth were again separate and independent cities. In our own country the process by which the great kingdoms of the Angles and Saxons were joined into the one kingdom of England is perfectly well known; we know nothing of the details of the process by which those seven or eight great kingdoms, those three specially great kingdoms, were gradually formed by the union of earlier and smaller settlements. In most cases we can see that such an union did take place; we can even see that the process of union took different shapes in one kingdom and in another; but the details are hidden from us. One reason of our ignorance among many may well be that the process was gradual and easy, carrying with it no great immediate change. We need not suppose that the union of Wessex or of Mercia was wrought by a series of treacherous murders like those which united the whole Frankish nation under Chlodowig. But the ease with which Chlodowig could root out all the other Frankish kings, the seeming good will with which he was received as king by each division of the nation, shows that the process was an easy one. Even when it was done by force, it would carry with it no special wrong beyond the force by which it was done. The Ripuarians really lost nothing by accepting the Salian king.
At a later time the opposite process has taken place in many lands. Gaul and Germany after a very near approach to union, Italy after an approach far more distant, split up again into a crowd of states, practically if not formally independent. The still abiding theory of the Empire forbade either the free city or the duchy or county to put on that avowed independence which had belonged to every free Greek city, to every barbarian kingdom, in the days before the Empire was. But practically cities and principalities took to themselves all the powers of independent states, even to that of making war on their overlord. In Gaul indeed, besides the splitting up of the land among the dukes and counts, there was the splitting off of the land itself from the body of the Empire. As the German poet sings;
“Et simul a nostro secessit Gallia regno,
Nos priscum regni morem servamus, at illa
Jure suo gaudet, nostræ jam nescia legis.”