And now I will make an end of my address by quoting one more remark of Lord Acton, in which he gives his definition of history taken as a whole. 'By universal history,' he says, 'I understand that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in subordination to a higher series, according to the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of mankind.'
FOOTNOTES:
[55] Inaugural Address to the Students of King's College for Women, University of London, October 8, 1909.
RACE AND RELIGION[56]
I propose to offer for consideration some very general views upon the effects and interaction of the ideas of Race and Religion upon the political grouping of the population in various countries of Eastern Europe and of Asia, with the object of showing how they unite and divide mankind over a great portion of the earth. It will be understood, I hope, that it is impossible in a brief discussion to go far or thoroughly over such a wide field. I can only try to indicate some salient points that may be worth attention.
If we look back upon the ancient world, as it was known to Greece and to Rome, and as it can be dimly surveyed through the records of classic antiquity, we find that before the Christian era the populations were divided and subdivided into races or tribes, with names signifying a common origin or descent; at any rate some kind of tribal association. The designation of their country was usually derived from the name of some dominant race, as Gallia from the Gauls or Judea from the Jews; indeed I might say, as France from the Franks or England from the Angles. Religious denominations of any large community were, I venture to suggest, unknown, at any rate in ancient Europe. The polytheism of these ages was too local and miscellaneous to weld together any considerable groups on the basis of a common worship or belief; for although three great religions then existed, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the faith of Zoroaster (still represented by the Parsees), these were confined to Central and Eastern Asia. And, moreover, these religions had not the missionary spirit; I mean that they made no vigorous open attempts to spread and gain proselytes, still less did they use force to convert great multitudes. But after the Christian era a change came over the face of the Western world. The Roman empire—that greatest monument of human power, as Dean Church has called it—began the fusion of races into one vast political society; its dominion extended continuously from Britain on the west to Asia Minor and the countries bordering on the Caspian Sea; it settled the law and language of Southern Europe. The establishment of the Roman empire is a cardinal epoch of the world's political history. Then followed two events of immense political importance that changed the whole aspect and condition of the religious world—the rise and spread of two powerful missionary and militant religions. First came Christianity to overspread the lands which the empire had levelled politically. Islam followed in the seventh century, and the conflict between these two rival faiths, each claiming universal spiritual dominion, altered not only the spiritual but also the temporal order of things in Europe and Western Asia. In Asia the victorious creed of Mohammed imposed upon immense multitudes a religious denomination; they became Mussulmans. In Western Europe the dominion of the Roman empire had by this time fallen to pieces; it was torn asunder by barbarian invaders; but upon the ruins of that empire was built up the great Catholic Church of Rome, which gathered together all races of the West under the common denomination of Christianity. Beneath the canopies of these two great religions the primitive grouping of the people survived; throughout Europe there were no settled kingdoms or nations, but a jumble of races and tribes contending for land and power. Now we know that in Western Europe this strife and confusion of the Middle Ages at last ended in the formation, on a large scale, of separate nationalities, and perhaps we may take, roughly, the end of the fifteenth century as the period when the great territorial kingdoms were definitely marked out, and when the rulers were rounding off their possessions under designations that may be called national. In these countries the subdivisions according to race had now lost almost all political significance; but in the sixteenth century another great disturbing element reappeared. The great wars of religion again made a fresh division of the people into two camps of Roman Catholics and Protestants. This ferment has gradually subsided, and at the present time all minor groups of the population in Western Europe have been absorbed under large national designations; the nations are marked off within clearly cut frontiers, and separated by the paramount distinction of languages. In Western Europe you do not now define a man by his original race or by his religion, you ask whose natural-born subject he is, in whose territory he lives, and you class him accordingly as French, English, Spanish or Italian.
Now it has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts that still have great strength and vitality, may be connected with the influence, in France and England, of a certain school of political philosophy that arose in the eighteenth century, in France. The Encyclopédistes, as they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French Encyclopædia, treated in theory all notions of separate races, religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a common civilisation, which was to unite all peoples on general principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emancipation from local or national prejudices. As a theory this might not have had much practical effect; but at the end of the eighteenth century came the French Revolution, when these philosophical notions took a very seriously practical shape; for the French Republican armies invaded the kingdoms of Western Europe with the war-cry of universal fraternity and equality. Revolutionary France ignored both race and religion. It proclaimed, De Tocqueville says, above and instead of all peculiar nationalities, an intellectual citizenship that was intended to include the people of every country to which it extended, superseding all distinctions of language, tradition, and national character. Under Napoleon this fierce impulse of democratic levelling was transformed into Imperialism: he aimed at restoring an Empire in the West. But this aroused equally fierce resistance, and when Napoleon had been beaten down, the national feeling emerged stronger than ever. The doctrines of the French Encyclopédistes were inherited by the English school of Utilitarians, led by Bentham and the two Mills; and John Stuart Mill in particular, declared that one of the chief obstacles to human improvement was the tendency to regard difference of race as indelible. In fact, all this school, which had considerable influence some forty years ago, treated religious and social distinctions as inconvenient and decaying barriers against rational progress, or as fictions invented by indolent thinkers to save themselves the trouble of investigating the true causes that modify human character.
There is undoubtedly a certain degree of truth underlying this view. In the settled nationalities of the West these distinctions of race and religion have a tendency to become unimportant and obsolete for political purposes, although a glance across the water to Ireland will remind us that they have by no means disappeared. What I wish to lay stress upon is the very serious importance of race and religion, politically, in other parts of the world, and particularly in some Asiatic countries with which England is closely connected and concerned. For, in the first place, there has been a notable revival of the sentiment of race in Eastern Europe. And, secondly, the spread of European dominion over Asia may be regarded as one of the most prominent and powerful movements in the politics of the latter half of the nineteenth century; one which may become the dominant feature of politics in the twentieth century. It is this movement that is forcing upon our serious attention the immense practical importance of race and religion.