CHAPTER XLI.
WHY ORIENTALS ARE NOT REPUBLICANS.
That grass does not grow on stones is not the fault of the rain.—Oriental Proverb.
It seems strange that Republicanism should never have commended itself to the minds of Orientals. Some of the conditions to which they have been subjected, and some of their ideas ought, one might have thought, to have engendered the wish to give a trial to this form of polity. Socially, ideas of aristocratic exclusiveness have little weight with them, and, politically, none at all. The expression of ‘taking a man from the dung-hill and setting him among princes’ is old, and represents an old practice; and it is a proceeding with which they are to this day in their government, and the hierarchy of office, quite familiar. This ultra-democratic idea of the equal fitness, even for the highest places, of men taken from any class in society, offends none of their sentiments, or instincts. They would not be shocked at seeing one who had begun life as a donkey-boy, or a barber, so long as he was an Arab, or Osmanlee, and a true believer, raised to be a Pasha. Then, too, no people in the world have suffered so much, and so long, from their respective governments as the Orientals have from their despotic monarchies, administered by a descending series of hardly responsible governors. And as to general manners and ideas, there is probably a greater amount of uniformity in the East among all classes, than is to be found elsewhere. One might have supposed that all this, at one time or another, sooner or later, would have disposed them to take refuge in Republicanism. We have, however, no instance of the idea having been entertained. It seems as if they had no capacity for apprehending it, for the account Herodotus gives us of the proposal to democratize the Government of Persia is a transparent Greek fable. At all events, taking the story as we have it, the mover was unable to find a seconder for his proposal.
This phenomenon in their history surprises us: it is, however, their history which enables us to understand it, and to understand it completely. They never possessed a legislature. This, which every little Greek city possessed, which was the very soul of Greek political life, and has ever been, more or less, a necessity of European political life, never could have been known in the East. There the idea never had any place in men’s minds; or, if it had, was aborted in the embryo stage, and never saw the light. In short, with them a legislature was an impossibility; for, as their laws have always been a revelation from God, any attempt to legislate would have been nothing less than a direct and formal denial, and renunciation of their religion.
In their systems, therefore, there has been room only for the administrative, and executive departments of government. These, of course, are secondary. With that which was first and highest, and regulative of the whole, man had nothing at all to do. Under such a state of things the administrative, and executive would naturally fall into the hands of those who were best acquainted with the law, that is, of those who were its constituted guardians, as priests, elders, doctors of the law, &c., and of those who in any way, by force or favour, could attain to power and office. Here is no place for republican, or democratic ideas. The whole ground in every man’s mind is pre-occupied with ideas that are antagonistic to them. If Orientals had had to make their own laws, Republicanism would have been as common in the East as in the West; perhaps more so.
In the Mosaic polity, though it was in some respects very favourable to democracy, we see the absence of the legislative function leading necessarily in the end to a monarchy; the monarchy having been preceded by a rude exercise of administrative and executive functions, based in the main on such moral and intellectual qualifications as the system required. That the people in general assemblies, or through any other machinery, should take into their own hands the management of their own affairs was an idea that never at any time appears to have occurred to them. It was alien to their system to imagine that the will of the people was the source of power, or that law was the best reason of the community made binding on all.
One can hardly understand, without some personal observation, and thinking out what has been observed, how completely these oriental systems extinguish liberty in every matter. Not only do they deny to nations the right to frame their laws in conformity with the varying needs of times and circumstances, but they even abrogate the liberty of the individual to exercise his own judgment with respect to almost everything he has to do, and almost to say, throughout life. Law being a fixed immutable thing, it becomes unavoidable but that customs and manners should be equally fixed and immutable. The extent to which this is carried is, till one has witnessed it oneself, something difficult to believe, indeed to comprehend. Every thought and emotion must be swathed up in a certain prescribed form of words. The mummy of an Egyptian of the old times tightly bandaged, stiff and lifeless, is the image of the modern Egyptian’s mind. He has no kind of freedom. He is but a walking and breathing mummy. Everything in the political, social, moral, and intellectual order has been arranged and settled for everybody; and everybody thoroughly and completely accepts the whole settlement, because it comes to him from God, because it is the same to all classes and individuals as to himself, and because the reasons, and, as far as they go, the advantages, of the settlement are obvious, and commend themselves to his understanding. In no mind, therefore, is there anything to give rise to the germ of a desire to disturb the settlement. Here, then, there is nothing which can cause the idea of political liberty to germinate. Let the seed be sown again and again, it will fall always upon the rock.
CHAPTER XLII.
POLYGAMY.—ITS CAUSE.
Presto maturo, presto marcio.—Italian Proverb.