Ὥσπερ τελεωθὲν βέλτιστον τῶν ζῴων ἄνθρωπος οὕτω καὶ χωρισθὲν νόμου καὶ δίκης χείριστον πάντων.—Aristotle.

History, whether founded on reliable record, or on monuments, or on the scientific analysis of the great fossil tradition called language, knows nothing of the earliest beginnings. The seed of human society, like the seed of the vegetable growth, lies under ground in darkness, and its earliest processes are invisible to the outward eye. Speculations about the descent of the primeval man from a monkey, of the primeval monkey from an ascidian, and of the primeval ascidian from a protoplastic bubble, though they may act as a potent stimulus to the biological research of the hour, certainly never can form the starting-point of a profitable philosophy of history.

As revealed in history, man is an animal, not only generically different from, but characteristically antagonistic to the brute. That which makes him a man is precisely that which no brute possesses, or can by any process of training be made to possess. The man can no more be developed out of the brute than the purple heather out of the granite rock which it clothes. The relation of the one to the other is a relation of mere outward attachment or dependency—like the relation which exists between the painter’s easel and the picture which is painted on it. The easel is essential to the picture, but it did not make the picture, nor give even the smallest hint towards the making of it. So the monkey, as a basis, may be essential to the man without being in any way participant of the divine indwelling λόγος which makes a man a man. The two are related only as all things are related, inasmuch as they are all shot forth from the great fountain-head of all vital forces, whom we justly call God.

The distinctive character of man as revealed in history is threefold. Man is an inventive animal, and he does not invent from a compulsion of nature, as bees make cells or as swallows build nests. These are all prescribed operations which the animal must perform; but the inventive faculty in man is free, in such a manner that the course of its action cannot be foreseen or calculated. It revels in variety, and, above all things, shuns that uniformity which is the servile province of brute activity. A man may live in a hole like a fox, but his proper humanity is shown by building a house and inventing a style of architecture. A man can sing like a bird, but—what the bird cannot do—he can make a harp or an organ. He can scrape with his nails like a terrier, but, as a man manifesting his proper manhood, he prefers to make a shovel of wood and a hatchet of stone or iron. The other animals, however cunning, and often wonderfully adaptable in their instincts, are mere machines. Man makes machines. In this respect he is justly entitled to look upon himself as the God to the lower animals, just as the sheriff in the counties by delegated right represents the supreme authority of the Crown. But, above all things, man is a progressive animal,—not merely progressive as the grass grows from root to blade and from blade to blossom to perfect its individual type of vegetable life, but advancing from stage to stage and mounting from platform to platform for the perfectionation of the race; nor even progressive as plants and fruits are improved by culture and favourable surroundings, and what is called forcing, or as the breed of sheep and cattle is improved by selection. No doubt progress of this kind is made by man as well as by plants and brutes; but his most distinctive human progress is made, not by imposition from without, but by projection from within. These projections from within are what in philosophical language is called the idea; they proceed from the essential nature of mind, whose imperial function it is to dictate forms, as it is the servile function of the senses to receive impressions. These intelligent forms, coming directly from the divine source of all excellence, and projected from within with sovereign authority to shape for themselves an outward embodiment, constitute what in art, in literature, in religion, and in social organisms, is called the ideal; and man may accordingly be defined as an animal that lives by the conception of ideals, and whose destiny it is to spend his strength, and, if need be, to lay down his life, for the realisation of such ideals. The steps of this realisation, often slow and painful, and always difficult, are what we mean by human progress; and it is the dominant characteristic of man, of which amongst the lower animals there is not a vestige, neither indeed could be; for so long as they have no ideas, neither reason nor the outward expression of reason in language—two things so closely bound together that the wise Greeks expressed them both by one word, λόγος—so long must it be ridiculous to think of them shaping their career according to an inborn type of progressive excellence. To do so is exclusively human. Hence our poems, our high art, our churches, our legislations, our apostleships, our philosophies, our social arrangements and devices, our speculations and schemes of all kinds, which, though they are sometimes foolish, and always more or less inadequate, deliver the strongest possible proof that man is an animal who will rather die and embrace martyrdom than be content to live as the brutes do, neither spurred with the hope of progress nor borne aloft on the wings of the ideal.

Of the very earliest state of human society, as we have already said, history teaches nothing; but, as man is a progressive animal, and the plan of Providence with regard to him seems plain to let him shift for itself and learn to do right by blundering, as children learn to walk by tumbling, we may safely say that the easier, more obvious, and more rude forms of living together must have preceded the more difficult, the more complex, and the more polished. And in perfect consistency with this presumption, we find three social platforms rising one above the other in human value, duly accredited either by monuments, by popular tradition, or by the evidence of comparative philology. These three are—(1) The prehistoric or stone period, from which such a rich store of monuments has been set up in the Copenhagen Museum, and the existence of which is indicated in Gen. iv. 22 as antecedent to Tubal Cain, the instructor of every artificer in brass and iron. (2) The shepherd or pastoral stage, represented by Abel (Gen. iv. 2), in which men subsisted from the easy dominance which they asserted over wild animals, and from fruits of the earth requiring no culture. (3) The agricultural stage, when cereal crops were systematically and scientifically cultivated, which, of course, implied the limitation of particular districts of ground to particular proprietors, and those agrarian laws which caused the Greek Demeter to be honoured with the title of θεσμοφόρος, or lawgiver—a step of marked and decided advance, insomuch that we may justly attribute to it the redemption of society from the vagus concubitus of the earliest times, and the firm establishment of the family, with all its sanctities and all its binding power, as the prime social monad. To the priestess of this goddess accordingly, amongst the Greeks, was assigned the function of ushering in the newly-married pair to the peculiar duties of their new social relation.[1]

The fact that the family is the great social monad, as it is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most accredited facts in human tradition, so it presents to us perhaps the most important of all the lessons that history teaches—a lesson as necessary to be inculcated at the present hour as at the earliest stages of social advance; and Aristotle certainly was never more in the right than when he emphasised this truth strongly in traversing Plato’s fancy of making the state the universal family, to the utter absorption of all subordinated family monads. Here, as in one or two other matters, the great idealist would be wiser than God; and so his philosophy, so far as that point was concerned, became only a more sublime attitude of folly. The importance of the family, as the divinely instituted social monad, depends manifestly on the happy combination and harmonious blending of authority and love which grow out of its constitution—two elements with the full development and true balance of which the well-being and happiness of all societies is intimately bound up. The fine moral training which the family relation alone can inspire we find not only at our own door, in the fidelity and self-sacrificing devotion of our noble Highlanders, who derived their inspiration from the clan system, of which the family love and respect is the binding element,[2] as contrasted with the slavish system of vassalage, the badge of feudalism; but in the habits and institutions of the three great ancient peoples to whom modern Europe owes its higher civilisation, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, specially the last,[3] the great masters of the difficult art of government, who, to use Mommsen’s phrase, carried out the unity of the family through the virtue of paternal authority “with an inexorable consistency,” the beneficial effect of which could not fail to display itself in social life far beyond the sphere from which it originally emanated; for obedience to authority is the fundamental postulate of all possibie societies. With the family, if not absolutely, certainly with the best and normal state of it, most closely connected is monogamy; for, though instances of bigamy and polygamy, from Lamech downwards (Gen. iv. 19) to King David and Solomon in the Old Testament history, crop up here and there in the oldest times, and even in the post-Babylonian period, without any formal mark of disapprobation, yet it is quite certain that the Greeks and Romans were guided by a sound social instinct when they held the practice of bigamy to be inconsistent with the proper constitution of a family. What troubles are apt to arise from a multiplication of contending wives and ambitious mothers the latter story of King David tells in more unhappy episodes than one; and generally it may be laid down as one of the great lessons of history that polygamy, in every shape, is one of those acts of Oriental self-indulgence which may be sweet in the mouth but has a very strong tendency to be bitter in the belly, and therefore ought by all means to be avoided.

By the instinct of aggregation, which belongs to an essentially social animal, families will club together into townships or villages, and townships will be centralised into states. Humanity without townships would degenerate into tigerhood, or whatever type of animal existence might express an essentially self-contained, solitary, and selfish creature; townships without that sort of headship which the word State implies, would make society cry halt at a stage of loosely-connected aggregates which would render common action for any high human purpose extremely difficult, and, in the general case, as human beings are, impossible. Hence the centralisation of the Attic townships at Athens in the legendary traditions of the Athenians attributed to Theseus;[4] hence also the lax confederation of the earliest Latin states under the headship of Albalonga; and, after the humiliation of that old stronghold, the more closely cemented union of those states under the hegemony of Rome.[5] Whatever may be the evils connected with the growth of large towns, especially when, as in modern times, they have been allowed to swell to enormous magnitude without regulation or control, it is one of the undoubted lessons of universal history that the social stimulus necessary for the creation of vigorous thought, no less than the centralised force indispensable to great achievement, is found only in the large towns. The Christians were called Christian first at Antioch; and, had there been no Rome to unify a little Latium, there would have been no great Roman Empire to amalgamate the rude barbarians of the North with the smooth civilisation of the South by the force of a common law and common language.[6]

The form of government natural to such infant states as the expansion of the original social monad, the family, is a loose but not unkindly mixture of monarchy, democracy, and aristocracy—the aristocracy being always the preponderating element. In the single family, of course, we have only the monarchical element in the father, and the democratic element in the children; but, as families expand into townships, it could not be but that the heads of the families composing it, partly from their age and experience, partly from the force of individual character, should form a sort of natural aristocracy, while the less notable and less prominent members would form the δῆμος, or great body of the constantly increasing multitude of the associated families. Below these three dominant elements of the body social, there would always be found a loose company of dependents and onhangers—the class called Θῆτες in Homer (Od., iv. 644), and in the Solonian constitution—who had no civic rights any more than the serfs and vassals of our medieval feudalism. The weakness of the monarchical and the strength of the aristocratic elements in the early societies arose from the original equality of the heads of families, and from the jealousy with which they would naturally look on any functions of superiority exercised by any of their order naturally no better than themselves. The king, accordingly, like Agamemnon in Homer, would claim the homage which the title implies only for purposes of common action; and even in such cases would always be kept in check by a βουλή, or council of the aristocracy, of whose will properly he was only the executive hand; while the great mass of the people, occupied with the labours that belong to an agricultural and pastoral population, and unaccustomed to the large views which statesmanship and generalship require, would come together only on rare occasions of peculiar urgency.

The element in that loose triad of social forces that was first formulated into a more distinct type, and endowed with more imperative efficiency, was the kingship. The power of the king was increased, which of course implies that the power of the people, and specially of the aristocracy, was diminished. And here let it be observed generally that the progress of civilisation in its natural and healthy career is the progress of limitation and the curtailment in various ways of that freedom which originally belonged to every member of the community. The tanned savage of the backwoods is the freest man in existence; next to him, the nomad or the wandering gipsy, such as may still be seen in their glory at St. James’ fair in Kelso, whose house is at once his dwelling-place, his manufactory or place of business, and his travelling car; least free is the civilised citizen hemmed in on all sides by police-officers, soldiers, sentinels, door-keepers, and game-keepers, and the whole fraternity of dignified but unpopular officials of various kinds whose business it is to the general public to say No! This accretion of strength to the king proceeded first from his mere personal influence and the general deference paid to him during the continuance of a prolonged and easily-exercised sovereignty; all classes, even the aristocracy, whose ambition is thus kept in check and their perilous enmities softened, feel the benefit of a wise head and a firm hand; but the party specially benefited by the kingship is the demos; for this body, from its position peculiarly liable to be trampled on by an insolent aristocracy, naturally looks up to the king as the father of the whole family, who, on his part, feels his position strengthened and his respect increased by performing with tact and firmness the delicate functions of a mediator. But the great social force which operates in giving prominence and predominance to the monarchy is War; and, though war is unquestionably an evil, it is an evil only as death is, and a form of dying accompanied not seldom with an exhibition of more manhood than the experience of many a peaceful deathbed can show. In fact, as stout old Balmerino said on the scaffold in 1746, “The man who is not ready to die is not fit to live;” that is, we hold our life under the condition that we may at any time be called on to sacrifice it, whether for the preservation of our own self-respect, or for the integrity of the community of which we are a member. All great nations, in fact, have been cradled in war, the Hebrews no less than the Greeks and Romans; and it is only an amiable sentimentalism, pardonable in women, but inexcusable in men, that, in contemplation of the hard blows, red wounds, and gashed bodies with which war is accompanied, will allow itself to forget the hardihood, endurance, courage, self-sacrifice, and devotion to public duty, of which, under Providence, it has always been the great training school.[7] There is no profession that I know more favourable to the growth of noble sentiment and manly action than that of the soldier; and to its beneficial action in the formation of States every page of history bears flaming testimony. War, in fact, is the principal agent in producing that unification so absolutely necessary to social existence, but which is lost so soon as the headship of the common father of the expanded clan ceases to be recognised. Thus it was under the compulsion of war from their Lombardian neighbours on the west and Sclavonians on the east that the petty democratic communities, which after the disruption of the Roman Empire occupied the Venetian isles, found themselves, in the year 697, obliged to elect a king for life, wisely masking his absolute authority under the name of Doge or Duke. And in a similar fashion the situation of the Piedmontese, constantly forced to defend themselves against Gallican and Teutonic ambition, begot in them a stoutness of self-assertion and a general manhood of character which up to the present hour has placed them in favourable contrast to the inhabitants of the southern half of the peninsula; and the manhood displayed by the Counts of Savoy in asserting their independence against great odds was no doubt the cause why, in the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, their lords were allowed to assume and maintain the title of kings—a circumstance which gave rise to the saying of Frederick the Great of Prussia, that the lords of Savoy were kings by virtue of their locality.[8] This is certainly true, not only of Sardinia, but of all States that ever rose above the loose aggregation of the original townships. It was the necessity of adjusting matters with troublesome neighbours that caused a perpetual succession of petty wars; and these could not be conducted without a prolongation of the power of the successful general, which acted practically as a kingship. The successful general in such times did not require to usurp a title which the people were forward to force upon him; and only a few, we may imagine, like Gideon (Judges viii. 22), had virtue enough to remain contented with the distinction belonging to a private station when the grace of the crown and the authority of the sceptre were formally pressed upon them by a grateful people. So in Greece we find an early kingship signalised by the names of Ægeus, Theseus, and Codrus; so in Rome a succession of seven kings, more or less distinctly outlined, the last of whom, Tarquin the Proud, stands forward as the head of the great Latin league, and entering in this capacity into a formal treaty with Carthage, the great commercial State of the Mediterranean. Closely connected with war, or, more properly, as the natural development of it in its more advanced stages, we must mention Conquest; that is, the violent imposition of the results of a foreign civilisation on the native social foundations of any country. Here, no doubt, there may often be on the conquering side something very different from a manly self-assertion—viz. self-aggrandisement at the expense of an innocent neighbour, greed of territory, lust of power, and the vanity of mere military glory, which our brilliant neighbours the French were so fond to have in their mouth. The virtue of war as a training school of civic manhood does by no means exclude the operation of many forces far from admirable in their motive; and it is the presence of these unholy influences, no doubt piously brooded over, that has generated in the breasts of our mild friends the Quakers that anti-bellicose gospel which they preach with such lovable persistency. But whatever the motives of famous conquerors have been, the results of their achievements in the great history of society have been most important. The imposition of a foreign type on the peoples of Western Asia by the brilliant conquests of Alexander the Great, gave to the whole of that valuable part of the world, along with the rich coast of Northern Africa, a common medium of culture of the utmost importance to the future civilisation of the race. The imposition of the Norman yoke 900 years ago on this island gave to the contentious Saxon kingdoms, by a single vigorous stroke from without, that social consistency which the bloody strife of five centuries of petty kings and kinglets among themselves had failed to produce; while in India the imposition of the most highly advanced mercantile and Christian civilisation of the West on crude masses of an altogether diverse type of Asiatic society, presents to the thoughtful student of history a problem of assimilation of an altogether unique character, the final solution of which, under the action of many complex forces, no most sagacious human intellect at the present moment can divine. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the blessings which conquest brings with it, when vigorously managed and wisely used, are lightly turned into a bane whenever the power which has the force to conquer has not the wisdom to administer; of which unblissful lack of administrative capacity and assimilating genius the conquests of the Turks in Europe, and of the English in Ireland, present a most instructive example.

The monarchies created in the above fashion, by the combination of old patriarchal habits with military necessities, however firmly rooted they may appear at the start, carry with them a certain germ of dissatisfaction, which, under the influence of popular irritability, seriously endangers their permanence, and may at any time break up their consistency. The causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly the following:—(1) The original motive for creating a king, the pressure of foreign war, as war cannot last for ever, in time of peace will cease to operate, and the instinct of individual liberty, which belongs to all men, unless when violently stamped out, will revive, and cause the subjection of all men to the will of one to be looked on with disfavour. (2) This feeling will be specially strong with the ἄριστοι, or natural aristocracy, whose individual importance must diminish as the power of the king increases. (3) A great danger will arise from the fixation of the order of succession to the throne. The natural tendency will be to follow the example of succession in private families, and recognise the right of the son to walk into the public heritage of his father; but the additional influence thus given to the king will have a tendency to sharpen the jealousy of the nobles. And, again, the son may be a weakling or a fool, and utterly unfit to play the part of a supreme ruler with that mixture of intelligence, firmness, and tact which the royal function for its fair and full action requires. (4) And if, in order to avoid these evils, the elective principle is maintained, either absolutely or within certain limits, the tendency to faction inherent in all aristocracies, stimulated by the potent spur of a competition for power, will be increased; and this factious yeast will work so potently in the blood of the nobles that they will either reduce the power of the king to a mere name, and change the government into an exclusive oligarchy, as in Venice, or they will even go the length of calling in foreign arbiters to heal their dissensions, which, as in the case of Poland, will naturally end in subjection to some foreign power; or, lastly, they will dispense with the kingship altogether, and return to their original mixture of aristocracy and democracy with more firmly-defined functions and more reliable guarantees. (5) This result may be precipitated by some outbreak of that insolence which is so naturally fostered by the possession of absolute power; the sacredness of personal property and the reverence of ancestral possession will not be respected by some Ahab of the day; some young Tarquin or Hipparchus may cast his lustful eye on the fair daughter of an humble citizen; and then will be unsheathed the sword of a Brutus, and then uprise the song of a Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which will sound a long knell to monarchy, during the manhood of a free, an independent, a self-reliant, and a self-governing people.