American ideals, and other essays, social and political

by Theodore Roosevelt

The book is replete with vivid writing, and with sentences and paragraphs which stand out in the memory as marvels in the art of presenting the vital features of a subject with a few master-strokes. The story of the Crusades, the outline of the English conquest of India, and the short tale of the rise of the house of Rothschild, are masterpieces. Nowhere else is it possible to find in the same compass any description of the Crusades so profound in its appreciation of the motives behind them, so startling in the vigor with which the chief actors, and the chief events, are portrayed. Indeed, one is almost tempted to say that it is in the description of the Crusades that Mr. Adams is at his best. He is dealing with a giant movement of humanity; and he grasps not only the colossal outward manifestations, but also the spirit itself, and, above all, the strange and sinister changes which that spirit underwent. His mere description of the Baronies set up by the Crusaders in the conquered Holy Land, with their loose feudal government, brings them before the reader’s eyes as few volumes specially devoted to the subject could. It is difficult to write of a fortress and make a pen-picture which will always stay in the mind; yet this is what Mr. Adams has done in dealing with the grim religious castles, terrible in size and power, which were built by the Knights of the Temple and the Hospital as bulwarks against Saracen might. He is not only a scholar of much research, but a student of art, who is so much more than a mere student as to be thrilled and possessed by what he studies. He shows, with a beauty and vigor of style not unbecoming his subject, how profoundly the art of Europe was affected by the Crusades. It is not every one who can write with equal interest of sacred architecture and military engineering, who can appreciate alike the marvels of Gothic cathedrals and the frowning strength of feudal fortresses, and who furthermore can trace their inter-relation.

The story of the taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders who followed the lead of the blind Doge Dandolo is told with an almost brutal ruthlessness quite befitting the deed itself. Nowhere else in the book is Mr. Adams happier in his insistence upon the conflict between what he calls the economic and the imaginative spirits. The incident sets well with his favorite theory of the inevitable triumph of the economic over the imaginative man, as societies grow centralized, and the no less inevitable fossilization and ruin of the body politic which this very triumph itself ultimately entails. The history of the English conquest of India is only less vividly told. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that one of Mr. Adams’s many merits is his contemptuous refusal to be misled by modern criticism of Macaulay. He sees Macaulay’s greatness as a historian, and his essential truthfulness on many of the very points where he has been most sharply criticised.

Mr. Adams’s book, however, is far more than a mere succession of brilliant episodes. He fully sees that the value of facts lies in their relation to one another; and from the facts as he sees them he deduces certain laws with more than a Thucydidean indifference as to his own individual approval or disapproval of the development. The life of nations, like any other form of life, is but one manifestation of energy; and Mr. Adams’s decidedly gloomy philosophy of life may be gathered from the fact that he places fear and greed as the two forms of energy which stand conspicuously predominant; fear in the earlier, and greed in the later, stages of evolution from barbarism to civilization. Civilization itself he regards merely as the history of the movement from a condition of physical distribution to one of physical concentration. During the earlier stages of this movement the imaginative man—the man who stands in fear of a priesthood—is, in his opinion, the representative type, while with him, and almost equally typical, stand the soldier and the artist. As consolidation advances, the economic man—the man of industry, trade, and capital—tends to supplant the emotional and artistic types of manhood, and finally himself develops along two lines,—“the usurer in his most formidable aspect, and the peasant whose nervous system is best adapted to thrive on scanty nutriment.” These two very unattractive types are, in his belief, the inevitable final products of all civilization, as civilization has hitherto developed; and when they have once been produced there follows either a stationary period, during which the whole body politic gradually ossifies and atrophies, or else a period of utter disintegration.

This is not a pleasant theory; it is in many respects an entirely false theory; but nevertheless there is in it a very ugly element of truth. One does not have to accept either all Mr. Adams’s theories or all his facts in order to recognize more than one disagreeable resemblance between the world as it is to-day, and the Roman world under the Empire, or the Greek world under the successors of Alexander. Where he errs is in his failure to appreciate the fundamental differences which utterly destroy any real parallelism between the two sets of cases. Indeed, his zeal in championing his theories leads him at times into positions which are seen at a glance to be untenable.

Probably Mr. Adams’s account of the English Reformation, and of Henry VIII. and his instruments, is far nearer the truth than Froude’s. But his view of the evils upon which the reformers as a whole waged war, and of the spirit which lay behind the real leaders and spurred them on, is certainly less accurate than the view given by Froude in his Erasmus and Council of Trent. It can be partly corrected by the study of a much less readable book—Mr. Henry C. Lea’s work on The Inquisition. Yet Mr. Adams’s description of the English Reformation is very powerful, and has in it a vein of bitter truth; though on the whole it is perhaps not so well done as his account of the suppression of the Templars in France. If he can be said to have any heroes, the Templars must certainly be numbered among them.

He is at his best in describing the imaginative man, and especially the imaginative man whose energy manifests itself in the profession of arms. His description of the tremendous change which passed over Europe during the centuries which saw, what is commonly called, the decay of faith is especially noteworthy. In no other history are there to be found two sentences which portray more vividly the reasons for the triumph of the great Pope Hildebrand over the Emperor Henry, than these:

“To Henry’s soldiers the world was a vast space peopled by those fantastic beings which are still seen on Gothic towers. These demons obeyed the monk of Rome, and his army, melting from the Emperor under a nameless horror, left him helpless.”

His account of the contrast between the relations of Philip Augustus and of Philip the Fair with the Church is dramatic in its intensity. To Mr. Adams, Philip the Fair, even more than Henry VIII., is the incarnation of the economic spirit in its conflict with the Church; and he makes him an even more repulsive, though perhaps an abler, man than Henry. In this he is probably quite right. His account of the hounding down of Boniface, and the cruel destruction of the Templars, is as stirring as it is truthful; but he certainly pushes his theory to an altogether impossible extreme when he states that the moneyed class, the bourgeoisie, was already the dominant force in France. The heroes of Froissart still lay in the future; and for centuries to come the burgher was to be outweighed by king, priest, and noble. The economic man, the man of trade and money, was, at that time, in no sense dominant.

That there is grave reason for some of Mr. Adams’s melancholy forebodings, no serious student of the times, no sociologist or reformer, and no practical politician who is interested in more than momentary success, will deny. A foolish optimist is only less noxious than an utter pessimist; and the pre-requisite for any effort, whether hopeful or hopeless, to better our conditions is an accurate knowledge of what these conditions are. There is no use in blinding ourselves to certain of the tendencies and results of our high-pressure civilization. Some very ominous facts have become more and more apparent during the present century, in which the social movement of the white race has gone on with such unexampled and ever-accelerating rapidity. The rich have undoubtedly grown richer; and, while the most careful students are inclined to answer with an emphatic negative the proposition that the poor have grown poorer, it is nevertheless certain that there has been a large absolute, though not relative, increase of poverty, and that the very poor tend to huddle in immense masses in the cities. Even though these masses are, relatively to the rest of the population, smaller than they formerly were, they constitute a standing menace, not merely to our prosperity, but to our existence. The improvement in the means of communication, moreover, has so far immensely increased the tendency of the urban population to grow at the expense of the rural; and philosophers have usually been inclined to regard the ultimate safety of a nation as resting upon its peasantry. The improvement in machinery, the very perfection of scientific processes, cause great, even though temporary, suffering to unskilled laborers. Moreover, there is a certain softness of fibre in civilized nations which, if it were to prove progressive, might mean the development of a cultured and refined people quite unable to hold its own in those conflicts through which alone any great race can ultimately march to victory. There is also a tendency to become fixed, and to lose flexibility. Most ominous of all, there has become evident, during the last two generations, a very pronounced tendency among the most highly civilized races, and among the most highly civilized portions of all races, to lose the power of multiplying, and even to decrease; so much so as to make the fears of the disciples of Malthus a century ago seem rather absurd to the dweller in France or New England to-day.

Mr. Adams does not believe that any individual or group of individuals can influence the destiny of a race for good or for evil. All of us admit that it is very hard by individual effort thus to make any alteration in destiny; but we do not think it impossible; and Mr. Adams will have performed a great service if he succeeds in fixing the eyes of the men who ought to know thoroughly the problems set us to solve, upon the essential features of these problems. I do not think his diagnosis of the disease is in all respects accurate. I believe there is an immense amount of healthy tissue as to the existence of which he is blind; but there is disease, and it is serious enough to warrant very careful examination.