For this reason, an inhabitant of New York can more easily than an inhabitant of London or Paris picture to himself certain aspects of the life of the Athens or Rome of ancient days; especially the continual and frequent succession of elections, and the complete change of interests and of directing forces involved in the change of the magistrates in office. It is true that we in Europe have periodical elections, as in America. Periodically, in the Old, as in the New World, the people assemble to exercise their sovereign right by means of the ballot. But if, regarded superficially, the act and the procedure are identical, their value and importance are different. The populace in the old states of Europe elect only consultative and legislative bodies, while the executive power remains to a great extent independent of the people, residing in a professional bureaucracy whose members cannot be changed from day to day.
In America, on the contrary, as in ancient Athens and Rome, many of the magistrates who hold in their hands and exercise directly governing powers are periodically changed at the will of the people, which, therefore, moulds more directly the government and its different organs and more directly inspires and controls its particular functions, just as it used to control them in the ancient states.
It is not strange, therefore, that we find ancient Rome reappearing in one of the most important juridical institutions of the United States, an institution which we should search for in vain in Europe, great mistress of laws though she be accounted. One of the American institutions which seems to Europeans most contrary to the modern spirit, and for that reason most deserving of severe blame, is the right of “injunctions” with which American magistrates are invested. To Europe, where the bureaucracy, though immovable and little subject to control, cannot step outside the precise prescriptions of the law in the exercise of its functions, this discretionary power of the American magistrates seems little less than an instrument of intolerable tyranny. A brilliant European, who is a distinguished professor of literature in one of the universities of North America, but who, notwithstanding a very lengthy sojourn in the American republic, has preserved intact the ideas and the spirit of the Old World, said to me one day in New York: “In this land of liberty, there is one tyranny more terrible than all the tyrannies of Europe, that of the judicial power!” That a magistrate should have the power to give orders, be they of only momentary validity, which are the expressions of his own will and not of the letter of the law, seems to the European a monstrous thing, a relic of the ancient tyrannies, which harmonises but ill with republican institutions.
A historian of the ancient world, on the other hand, is in a position to understand more easily this seeming contradiction. The injunction is nothing else than the edictum of the Roman magistrate; the power, that is to say, which the Roman magistrate possessed, and which the American magistrate, maybe in a less degree, possesses, of making good with his personal authority the lacunæ and deficiencies in the law, on every occasion when public order or the principles of justice seemed to demand it urgently. In the eyes of ancient Rome, the magistrate was not only, as in the bureaucratic states of Europe, the cautious and impartial servant and executor of the law. He was also the living personification of the State and of the general interest, invested with full powers of exercising his own judgment, over and above the laws, on behalf of the State and of the general interest, when the law was found wanting. In short, by reinforcing the authority of the magistrates, the ancient states endeavoured to make amends for the weakening of the State which was bound to ensue from the continual electoral changes and the instability of all the offices; while Europe, on the other hand, which, with her rigid bureaucracies, has made the power of the State so strong, can rigorously limit the powers of her functionaries with laws of immense scope. But one last remnant of the ancient conception, tempered by the modern spirit of the State, survives in North America, where, the elective principle being more extensively applied than in the states of Europe, the tendency is, by way of compensation, to reinforce by some discretionary power, like the “injunction,” some at least of the judicial offices. Perhaps we may explain in this way the fact that some European writers in the nineteenth century have ventured to assert that the ancients never knew what liberty was, even in what were apparently the most democratic republics; while others have maintained that more liberty is to be found in the constitutional monarchies of Europe than in the authoritative American republics.
Another instance still more curious is afforded us by those dictators who, under varying titles and with varying success, have appeared in almost all the republics of Spanish America, after the emancipation of these territories from the mother country. The latest of these dictators was Porfirio Diaz, who governed Mexico for so many years. Europe has never properly understood these dictators. She has mistaken them for caricatures, now of Nero, now of Napoleon, and has drawn the conclusion that the republics in question were impregnated with the disease of tyranny, and could not exist in a state of liberty. But a historian of the ancient world recognises at once in these dictators a modern incarnation of a figure which constantly appears in ancient history, the Greek τύραννος, the Roman princeps. Pisistratus and Augustus, not Nero and Napoleon, are the prototypes of these dictators. States based on an electoral system which is not controlled by organised parties or by other social forces calculated to ensure its working in conformity with precise and certain rules, are subject to eruptions of disorder, which end in establishing the personal power of that individual who succeeds in making the political and administrative machine work with comparative regularity. Augustus was throughout forty-one years re-elected every five or ten years head of the republic, because he had succeeded, by his influence and personal ability, in making the machine of the comitia and senate run smoothly, at a time when the Roman aristocracy, which had controlled it for centuries, could no longer, owing to its own discords, do so. The reason why the power of Augustus was prolonged and extended in all directions until it became a dictatorship for life, cloaked under legal forms, was that he alone seemed capable of ensuring a wise government and of preventing civil wars. And was not just this the real reason for the long tenure of power by Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, and for his prolonged presidency, which was merely a dictatorship masquerading under republican forms? Anyone who wishes to understand the government of Mexico during the last forty years might find the history of Augustus of great service; just as a profound knowledge of the recent history of Mexico might help to the understanding of the ancient history of Augustus.
A profound study of ancient history is, therefore, an excellent preparation for the rapid understanding of certain parts, at any rate, of the American constitution and of American society; just as a knowledge of America should be an excellent aid to the study of ancient history. In fact, in the course of my travels and observations in America, after having devoted ten years to the study of a large section of ancient history, I have realised how much the ancient history, which I had studied in Europe, helped me to understand America; and how much the America which I had before my eyes helped me to a better understanding of the distant reality of that vanished world of long ago. And if we follow the track of these studies and reflections, I think that we shall be able to attribute also a more precise meaning to that epithet of “young,” which is constantly applied to America. Who does not talk a hundred times a year of old Europe and young America? Now what do these two much-used and much-abused epithets mean? That Europe has a longer history than America? In that case the contrasting terms would not mean much. For that is a simple chronological statement, which only demands a knowledge of the fact that America was not discovered till 1492 A.D. Do they mean that America is more vigorous, more active, more daring than Europe, just as young men usually possess these qualities in a greater degree than the old? As a matter of fact, many people do use the two adjectives in this sense. But, in that case, they assume as proved one of the most complex, one of the deepest and most difficult problems of modern life, that is to say, the problem whether a comparison can be struck between Europe and America, and if so, on the basis of what criterion? That there should be those who strike this comparison and resolve it in this way, is not surprising. But no one will be found to pretend that the judgment contained in those two words “young” and “old,” thus interpreted, can or ought to be accepted as true by everyone.
On the other hand, it is possible to agree on a more narrow and precise interpretation of these words; to say that America is young and Europe old, because America reproduces some of the characters and phenomena which we find in antiquity, that is to say, in the remotest epochs of our history. European civilisation, as the result of her migration to America, there to found new states and societies, has really become, in a certain sense, regenerated, because she has again become, in the light of certain characteristics and certain institutions, what she was twenty centuries ago. And if the “youth” of America is understood in this sense, it is not rash to argue that it too will grow old. The study of ancient history can be of a certain practical value to those who consider America with the object of divining, in this great community, the tendencies and inclinations of the future. For students of that history can bring a plausible criterion of prevision to their observations. In fact, it is not rash to suppose, at least if some unknown force does not unexpectedly divert the course of events in the New World, that all the parts of American life and society which most resemble ancient society are destined to disappear gradually, as America grows older and elaborates a complex and artificial civilisation; just as the ancient institutions and ideas of which we find so many traces in America gradually disappeared in Europe in the progress of time, as civilisation in the Old World became artificial and complex. If this prophecy is not fallacious, we should expect history, which eternally repeats herself, to require the man of the New World to witness the same phenomena whose more gradual realisation they have already witnessed in the ancient world. In the New World also, we should expect to see a society regulated by elective and authoritative institutions gradually become bureaucratic and at the same time fetter every branch of political and administrative powers with the tight bonds of rigid juridical principles. This will be a slow, but profound transformation, in the course of which many things will change their position and value. Perhaps the inexhaustible public munificence of the millionaires will become exhausted, and the State will grow in prestige and influence, if not in power.
II
QUANTITY AND QUALITY
Suetonius recounts that one day a man presented himself to the Emperor Vespasian, and showed him the models of a machine, thanks to which the Emperor could have finished off the construction of certain of his great public works with fewer labourers, and at a great saving of expense. Vespasian was full of praise for the man’s ingenuity, and recompensed him with a sum of money; but he subsequently had the model destroyed, saying that he did not wish to have any machines which would cause his people to go hungry. Applying the standard of modern ideas, how should we judge this sentiment and act? Of course, we should consider it a strange and absurd mistake. Suetonius, on the contrary, quotes the incident to prove how wise Vespasian was. In this divergence of opinion is revealed the essential difference between ourselves and the ancients, between modern civilisation and Greco-Roman civilisation, for all that these resemble each other in so many particulars; the principal difference between the ancient world and America. Although, as I have shown in my preceding essay, America in certain of its institutions and forms of social life resembles the ancient world more than Europe, this comparison does not hold true so far as the instruments of economic production are concerned. In this respect America is much further removed from the ancient world than is Europe, and represents to-day the beginning of a new era and a new civilisation, whose spirit and tendencies would be quite incomprehensible to a re-embodied Greek or Roman.