Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

1. The first of these two was set on foot when Bajazet was in the full tide of his victories; and he was able, not only to defeat it, but, by defeating, to damp the hopes, and by anticipation, to stifle the efforts, which might have been used against him with better effect in the day of his reverses. In the year 1394, eight years before Bajazet's misfortunes, Pope Boniface the Ninth proclaimed a Crusade, with ample indulgences for those who engaged in it, to the countries which were especially open to the Ottoman attack. In his Bull, he bewails the sins of Christendom, which had brought upon them that scourge which was the occasion of his invitation. He speaks of the massacres, the tortures, and slavery which had been inflicted on multitudes of the faithful. "The mind is horrified," he says, "at the very mention of these miseries; but it crowns our anguish to reflect, that the whole of Christendom, which, if in concord, might put an end to these and even greater evils, is either in open war, country with country, or, if in apparent peace, is secretly wasted by mutual jealousies and animosities."[66]

The Pontiff's voice, aided by the imminent peril of Hungary and its neighbouring kingdoms, was successful. Not only from Germany, but even from France, the bravest knights, each a fortress in himself, or a man-of-war on land (as he may be called), came forward in answer to his call, and boasted that, even were the sky to fall, they would uphold its canopy upon the points of their lances. They formed the flower of the army of 100,000 men, who rallied round the King of Hungary in the great battle of Nicopolis. The Turk was victorious; the greater part of the Christian army were slain or driven into the Danube; and a part of the French chivalry of the highest rank were made prisoners. Among these were the son of the Duke of Burgundy; the Sire de Coucy, who had great possessions in France and England; the Marshal of France (Boucicault), who afterwards fell on the field of Agincourt; and four French princes of the blood. Bajazet spared twenty-five of his noblest prisoners, whom their wealth and station made it politic to except; then, summoning the rest before his throne, he offered them the famous choice of the Koran or the sword. As they came up one by one, they one by one professed their faith in Christ, and were beheaded in the Sultan's presence. His royal and noble captives he carried about with him in his march through Europe and Asia, as he himself was soon to grace the retinue of Timour. Two of the most illustrious of them died in prison in Asia. As to the rest, he exacted a heavy ransom from them; but, before he sent them away, he gave them a grand entertainment, which displayed both the barbarism and the magnificence of the Asiatic. He exhibited before them his hunting and hawking equipage, amounting to seven thousand huntsmen and as many falconers; and, when one of his chamberlains was accused before him of drinking a poor woman's goat's milk, he literally fulfilled the "castigat auditque" of the poet, by having the unhappy man ripped open, in order to find in his inside the evidence of the charge.

Such was the disastrous issue of the battle of Nicopolis; nor is it wonderful that it should damp the zeal of the Christians and weaken the influence of the Pope, for a long time to come; anyhow, it had this effect till the critical moment of the Turkish misfortunes was over, and the race of Othman was recovering itself after the captivity and death of its Sultan. "Whereas the Turks might have been expelled from Greece on the loss of their Sultan," says Rainaldus, "Christians, torn to pieces by their quarrels and by schism, lost a fit and sufficient opportunity. Whence it followed, that the wound inflicted upon the beast was not unto death, but he revived more ferocious for the devouring of the faithful."

2. However, Christendom made a second attempt still, but when it was too late. The grandson of Bajazet was then on the throne, one of the ablest of the Sultans; and, though the allied Christian army had considerable success against him at first, in vain was the bravery of Hunniades, and the preaching of St. John Capistran: the Turk managed to negotiate with its leaders, to put them in the wrong, to charge them with perjury, and then to beat them in the fatal battle of Varna, in which the King of Hungary and Poland and the Pope's Legate were killed, with 10,000 men. In vain after this was any attempt to make head against the enemy; in vain did Pope after Pope raise his warning voice and point to the judgment which hung over Christendom; Constantinople fell.

6.

Thus things did but go on worse and worse for the interest of Christendom. Even the taking of Constantinople was not the limit of the Ottoman successes. Mahomet the Conqueror, as he is called, was but the seventh of the great Sultans, who carried on the fortunes of the barbarian empire. An eighth, a ninth followed. The ninth, Selim, returned from his Eastern conquests with the last of the Caliphs in his company, and made him resign to himself the prerogatives of Pontiff and Lawgiver, which the Caliph inherited from Mahomet. Then came a tenth, the greatest perhaps of all, Soliman the Magnificent, the contemporary of the Emperor Charles, Francis the First of France, and Henry the Eighth of England. And an eleventh might have been expected, and a twelfth, and the power of the enemy would have become greater and greater, and would have afflicted the Church more and more heavily; and what was to be the end of these things? What was to be the end? why, not a Christian only, but any philosopher of this world would have known what was to be the end, in spite of existing appearances. All earthly power has an end; it rises to fall, it grows to die; and the depth of its humiliation issues out of the pride of its lifting up. This is what even a philosopher would say; he would not know whether Soliman, the tenth conqueror, was also to be the last; but if not the tenth, he would be bold to say it would be the twelfth, who would close their victories, or the fifteenth, or the twentieth. But what a philosopher could not say, what a Christian knows and enjoys, is this, that one earthly power there is which is something more than earthly, and which, while it dies in the individual, for he is human, is immortal in its succession, for it is divine.

It was a remarkable question addressed by the savage Tartars of Zingis to the missionaries whom the Pope sent them in the thirteenth century: "Who was the Pope?" they asked; "was he not an old man, five hundred years of age?"[67] It was their one instinctive notion of the religion of the West; and the Turks in their own history have often had cause to lament over its truth. Togrul Beg first looked towards the West, in the year 1048; twenty years later, between the years 1068 and 1074,[68] his successor, Malek Shah, attracted the attention of the great St. Gregory the Seventh. Time went on; they were thrown back by the impetuosity of the Crusaders; they returned to the attack. Fresh and fresh multitudes poured down from Turkistan; the furious deluge of the Tartars under Zingis spread itself and disappeared; the Turks sunk in it, but emerged; the race seemed indestructible; then Othman began a new career of victory, as if there had never been an old one, and founded an empire, more stable, more coherent than any Turkish rule before it. Then followed Sultan after Sultan, each greater than his predecessor, while the line of Popes had indeed many bright names to show, Pontiffs of learning, and of piety, and of genius, and of zeal and energy; but still where was the destined champion of Christendom, the holy, the inflexible, the lion-hearted, the successor of St. Gregory, who in a luxurious and a self-willed age, among his other high duties and achievements, had the mission, by his prayers and by his efforts, of stopping the enemy in his full career, and of rescuing Catholicism from the pollution of the blasphemer? The five hundred years were not yet completed.

But the five hundred years at length were run out; the long-expected champion was at hand. He appeared at the very time when the Ottoman crescent had passed its zenith and was beginning to descend the sky. The Turkish successes began in the middle of the eleventh century; they ended in the middle of the sixteenth; in the middle of the sixteenth century, just five hundred years after St. Gregory and Malek Shah, Selim the Sot came to the throne of Othman, and St. Pius the Fifth to the throne of the Apostle; Pius became Pope in 1566, and Selim became Sultan in that very same year.

O what a strange contrast, Gentlemen, did Rome and Constantinople present at that era! Neither was what it had been, but they had changed in opposite directions. Both had been the seat of Imperial Power; Rome, where heresy never throve, had exchanged its Emperors for the succession of St. Peter and St. Paul; Constantinople had passed from secular supremacy into schism, and thence into a blasphemous apostasy. The unhappy city, which with its subject provinces had been successively the seat of Arianism, of Nestorianism, of Photianism, now had become the metropolis of the false Prophet; and, while in the West the great edifice of the Vatican Basilica was rising anew in its wonderful proportions and its costly materials, the Temple of St. Sophia in the East was degraded into a Mosque! O the strange contrast in the state of the inhabitants of each place! Here in the city of Constantine a God-denying misbelief was accompanied by an impure, man-degrading rule of life, by the slavery of woman, and the corruption of youth. But there, in the city which Apostles had consecrated with their blood, the great and true reformation of the age was in full progress. There the determinations in doctrine and discipline of the great Council of Trent had lately been promulgated. There for twenty years past had laboured our own dear saint, St. Philip, till he earned the title of Apostle of Rome, and yet had still nearly thirty years of life and work in him. There, too, the romantic royal-minded saint, Ignatius Loyola, had but lately died. And there, when the Holy See fell vacant, and a Pope had to be appointed in the great need of the Church, a saint was present in the conclave to find in it a brother saint, and to recommend him for the Chair of St. Peter, to the suffrages of the Fathers and Princes of the Church.

7.

St Carlo Borromeo,[69] the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, was the nephew of the Pope who was just dead, and though he was only twenty-five years of age at the time, nevertheless, by the various influences arising out of the position which he held, and from the weight attached to his personal character, he might be considered to sway the votes of the College of Cardinals, and to determine the election of a new Pontiff. It is remarkable that Cardinal Alessandrino, as St. Pius was then called, (from Alexandria, in North Italy, near which he was born,) was not the first object of his choice. His eyes were first turned on Cardinal Morone, who was in many respects the most illustrious of the Sacred College, and had served the Church on various occasions with great devotion, and with distinguished success. From his youth he had been reared up in public affairs, he had held many public offices, he had great influence with the German Emperor, he had been Apostolical Legate at the Council of Trent. He had great virtue, judgment, experience, and sagacity. Such, then, was the choice of St. Carlo, and the votes were taken; but it seemed otherwise to the Holy Ghost. He wanted four to make up the sufficient number of votes. St. Carlo had to begin again; and again, strange to say, the Cardinal Alessandrino still was not his choice. He chose Cardinal Sirleto, a man most opposite in character and history to Morone. He was not nobly born, he was no man of the world, he had ever been urgent with the late Pope not to make him Cardinal. He was a first-rate scholar in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; versed in the Scriptures, ready as a theologian. Moreover, he was of a character most unblemished, of most innocent life, and of manners most popular and winning. St. Pius as well as St. Carlo advocated the cause of Cardinal Sirleto, and the votes were given a second time; a second time they came short. It was like holy Samuel choosing Eliab instead of David. Then matters were in confusion; one name and another were mentioned, and no progress was made.

At length and at last, and not till all others were thought of who could enter into the minds of the electors, the Cardinal Alessandrino himself began to attract attention. He seems not to have been known to the Fathers of the conclave in general; a Dominican Friar, of humble rank, ever taken up in the duties of his rule and his special employments, living in his cell, knowing little or nothing of mankind--such a one St. Carlo, the son of a prince and the nephew of a Pope, had no means of knowing; and the intimacy, consequent on their coöperation in behalf of Cardinal Sirleto, was the first real introduction which the one Saint had to the other. It was just at this moment that our own St. Philip was in his small room at St. Girolamo, with Marcello Ferro, one of his spiritual children, when, lifting up his eyes to heaven, and going almost into an ecstasy, he said: "The Pope will be elected on Monday." On one of the following days, as they were walking together, Marcello asked him who was to be Pope. Philip answered, "Come, I will tell you; the Pope will be one whom you have never thought of, and whom no one has spoken of as likely; and that is Cardinal Alessandrino; and he will be elected on Monday evening without fail." The event accomplished the prediction; the statesman and the man of the world, the accomplished and exemplary and amiable scholar, were put aside to make way for the Saint. He took the name of Pius.

I am far from denying that St. Pius was stern and severe, as far as a heart burning within and melting with the fulness of divine love could be so; and this was the reason that the conclave was so slow in electing him. Yet such energy and vigour as his was necessary for his times. He was emphatically a soldier of Christ in a time of insurrection and rebellion, when, in a spiritual sense, martial law was proclaimed. St. Philip, a private priest, might follow his bent, in casting his net for souls, as he expressed himself, and enticing them to the truth; but the Vicar of Christ had to right and to steer the vessel, when it was in rough waters, and among breakers. A Protestant historian on this point does justice to him. "When Pope," he says, "he lived in all the austerity of his monastic life, fasted with the utmost rigour and punctuality, would wear no finer garments than before ... arose at an extremely early hour in the morning, and took no _siesta_. If we doubted the depth of his religious earnestness, we may find a proof of it in his declaration, that the Papacy was unfavourable to his advance in piety; that it did not contribute to his salvation and to his attainment of Paradise; and that, but for prayer, the burden had been too heavy for him. The happiness of a fervent devotion, which often moved him to tears, was granted him to the end of his life. The people were excited to enthusiasm, when they saw him walking in procession, barefooted and bareheaded, with the expression of unaffected piety in his countenance, and with his long snow-white beard falling on his breast. They thought there had never been so pious a Pope; they told each other how his very look had converted heretics. Pius was kind, too, and affable; his intercourse with his old servants was of the most confidential kind. At a former period, before he was Pope, the Count della Trinità had threatened to have him thrown into a well, and he had replied, that it must be as God pleased. How beautiful was his greeting to this same Count, who was now sent as ambassador to his court! 'See,' said he, when he recognized him, 'how God preserves the innocent.' This was the only way in which he made him feel that he recollected his enmity. He had ever been most charitable and bounteous; he kept a list of the poor of Rome, whom he regularly assisted according to their station and their wants." The writer, after proceeding to condemn what he considers his severity, ends thus: "It is certain that his deportment and mode of thinking exercised an incalculable influence on his contemporaries, and on the general development of the Church of which he was the head. After so many circumstances had concurred to excite and foster a religious spirit, after so many resolutions and measures had been taken to exalt it to universal dominion, a Pope like this was needed, not only to proclaim it to the world, but also to reduce it to practice; his zeal and his example combined produced the most powerful effect."[70]

8.

It is not to be supposed that a Saint on whom lay the "solicitude of all the churches," should neglect the tradition, which his predecessors of so many centuries had bequeathed to him, of zeal and hostility against the Turkish power. He was only six years on the Pontifical throne; and the achievement of which I am going to speak was among his last; he died the following year. At this time the Ottoman armies were continuing their course of victory; they had just taken Cyprus, with the active coöperation of the Greek population of the island, and were massacring the Latin nobility and clergy, and mutilating and flaying alive the Venetian governor. Yet the Saint found it impossible to move Christendom to its own defence. How, indeed, was that to be done, when half Christendom had become Protestant, and secretly perhaps felt as the Greeks felt, that the Turk was its friend and ally? In such a quarrel England, France, and Germany were out of the question. At length, however, with great effort, he succeeded in forming a holy league between himself, King Philip of Spain, and the Venetians. Don John, of Austria, King Philip's half brother, was appointed commander-in-chief of the forces, and Colonna admiral. The treaty was signed on the 24th of May; but such was the cowardice and jealousy of the parties concerned, that the autumn had arrived, and nothing of importance was accomplished. With difficulty were the armies united; with difficulty were the dissensions of the commanders brought to a settlement. Meanwhile, the Ottomans were scouring the Gulf of Venice, blockading the ports, and terrifying the city itself.

But the holy Pope was securing the success of his cause by arms of his own, which the Turks understood not. He had been appointing a Triduo of supplication at Rome, and had taken part in the procession himself. He had proclaimed a jubilee to the whole Christian world, for the happy issue of the war. He had been interesting the Holy Virgin in his cause. He presented to his admiral, after High Mass in his chapel, a standard of red damask, embroidered with a crucifix, and with the figures of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the legend, "_In hoc signo vinces_." Next, sending to Messina, where the allied fleet lay, he assured the general-in-chief and the armament, that "if, relying on divine, rather than on human help, they attacked the enemy, God would not be wanting to His own cause. He augured a prosperous and happy issue; not on any light or random hope, but on a divine guidance, and by the anticipations of many holy men." Moreover, he enjoined the officers to look to the good conduct of their troops; to repress swearing, gaming, riot, and plunder, and thereby to render them more deserving of victory. Accordingly, a fast of three days was proclaimed for the fleet, beginning with the Nativity of our Lady; all the men went to confession and communion, and appropriated to themselves the plentiful indulgences which the Pope attached to the expedition. Then they moved across the foot of Italy to Corfu, with the intention of presenting themselves at once to the enemy; being disappointed in their expectations, they turned back to the Gulf of Corinth; and there at length, on the 7th of October, they found the Turkish fleet, half way between Lepanto and the Echinades on the North, and Patras, in the Morea, on the South; and, though it was towards evening, strong in faith and zeal, they at once commenced the engagement.

The night before the battle, and the day itself, aged as he was, and broken with a cruel malady, the Saint had passed in the Vatican in fasting and prayer. All through the Holy City the monasteries and the colleges were in prayer too. As the evening advanced, the Pontifical treasurer asked an audience of the Sovereign Pontiff on an important matter. Pius was in his bedroom, and began to converse with him; when suddenly he stopped the conversation, left him, threw open the window, and gazed up into heaven. Then closing it again, he looked gravely at his official, and said, "This is no time for business; go, return thanks to the Lord God. In this very hour our fleet has engaged the Turkish, and is victorious." As the treasurer went out, he saw him fall on his knees before the altar in thankfulness and joy.

And a most memorable victory it was: upwards of 30,000 Turks are said to have lost their lives in the engagement, and 3,500 were made prisoners. Almost their whole fleet was taken. I quote from Protestant authorities when I say that the Sultan, on the news of the calamity, neither ate, nor drank, nor showed himself, nor saw any one for three days; that it was the greatest blow which the Ottomans had had since Timour's victory over Bajazet, a century and a half before; nay, that it was the turning-point in the Turkish history;[71] and that, though the Sultans have had isolated successes since, yet from that day they undeniably and constantly declined, that they have lost their _prestige_ and their self-confidence, and that the victories gained over them since are but the complements and the reverberations of the overthrow at Lepanto.

Such was the catastrophe of this long and anxious drama; the hosts of Turkistan and Tartary had poured down from their wildernesses through ages, to be withstood, and foiled, and reversed by an old man. It was a repetition, though under different circumstances, of the history of Leo and the Hun. In the contrast between the combatants we see the contrast of the histories of good and evil. The Enemy, as the Turks in this battle, rushing forward with the terrible fury of wild beasts; and the Church, ever combating with the energetic perseverance and the heroic obstinacy of St. Pius.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] Formby's Visit to the East.

[58] The three remaining of the thirty are Orchan, Ibrahim, and Abdoul Achmet.

[59] Gibbon.

[60] Gibbon.

[61] Hume's History.

[62] Ranke, vol. i

[63] Turner's History.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Gieseler's Text Book.

[66] Baronius.

[67] Bergeron.

[68] Gibbon says twenty years: Sharon Turner gives 1074.

[69] Bollandist. Mai. 5.

[70] Ranke's Hist. of the Popes.

[71] "The battle of Lepanto arrested for ever the danger of Mahometan invasion in the south of Europe."--Alison's Europe, vol. ix. p. 95. "The powers of the Turks and of their European neighbours were now nearly balanced; in the reign of Amurath the Third, who succeeded Selim, the advantages became more evidently in favour of the Christians; and since that time, though the Turks have sometimes enjoyed a transitory success, the real stability of their affairs has constantly declined."--Bell's Geography, vol. ii, part 2. Vid. also Ranke, vol. i., pp. 381-2. It is remarkable that it should be passed over by Professor Creasy in his "Fifteen Decisive Battles."

IV.

THE PROSPECTS OF THE TURKS.

LECTURE VII.

_Barbarism and Civilization._

1.

My object in the sketch which I have been attempting, of the history of the Turks, has been to show the relation of this celebrated race to Europe and to Christendom. I have not been led to speak of them by any especial interest in them for their own sake, but by the circumstances of the present moment, which bring them often before us, oblige us to speak of them, and involve the necessity of entertaining some definite sentiments about them. With this view I have been considering their antecedents; whence they came, how they came, where they are, and what title they have to be there at all. When I now say, that I am proceeding to contemplate their future, do not suppose me to be so rash as to be hazarding any political prophecy; I do but mean to set down some characteristics in their existing state (if I have any right to fancy, that in any true measure we at the distance of some thousand miles know it), which naturally suggest to us to pursue their prospective history in one direction, not in another.

Now it seems safe to say, in the first place, that some time or other the Ottomans will come to an end. All human power has its termination sooner or later; states rise to fall; and, secure as they may be now, so one day they will be in peril and in course of overthrow. Nineveh, Tyre, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and Greece, each has had its day; and this was so clear to mankind 2,000 years ago, that the conqueror of Carthage wept, as he gazed upon its flames, for he saw in them the conflagration of her rival, his own Rome. "_Fuit Ilium._" The Saracens, the Moguls, have had their day; those European states, so great three centuries ago, Spain and Poland, Venice and Genoa, are now either extinct or in decrepitude. What is the lot of all states, is still more strikingly fulfilled in the case of empires; kingdoms indeed are of slow growth, but empires commonly are but sudden manifestations of power, which are as short-lived as they are sudden. Even the Roman empire, which is an exception, did not last beyond five hundred years; the Saracenic three hundred; the Spanish three hundred; the Russian has lasted about a hundred and fifty, that is, since the Czar Peter; the British not a hundred; the Ottoman has reached four or five. If there be an empire which does not at all feel the pressure of this natural law, but lasts continuously, repairs its losses, renews its vigour, and with every successive age emulates its antecedent fame, such a power must be more than human, and has no place in our present inquiry. We are concerned, not with any supernatural power, to which is promised perpetuity, but with the Ottoman empire, famous in history, vigorous in constitution, but, after all, human, and nothing more. There is, then, neither risk nor merit in prophesying the eventual fall of the Osmanlis, as of the Seljukians, as of the Gaznevides before them; the only wonder is that they actually have lasted as much as four hundred years.

Such will be the issue and the sum of their whole history; but, certain as this is, and confidently as it may be pronounced, nothing else can be prudently asserted about their future. Times and moments are in the decrees of the All-wise, and known to Him alone; and so are the occurrences to which they give birth. The only further point open to conjecture, as being not quite destitute of data for speculating upon it, is the particular course of events and quality of circumstances, which will precede the downfall of the Turkish power; for, granting that that downfall is to come, it is reasonable to think it will take place in that particular way, for which in their present state we see an existing preparation, if such can be discerned, or in a way which at least is not inconsistent with the peculiarities of that present state.

2.

Hence, in speculating on this question, I shall take this as a reasonable assumption first of all, that the catastrophe of a state is according to its antecedents, and its destiny according to its nature; and therefore, that we cannot venture on any anticipation of the instruments or the conditions of its death, until we know something about the principle and the character of its life. Next I lay down, that, whereas a state is in its very idea a society, and a society is a collection of many individuals made one by their participation in some common possession, and to the extent of that common possession, the presence of that possession held in common constitutes the life, and the loss of it constitutes the dissolution, of a state. In like manner, whatever avails or tends to withdraw that common possession, is either fatal or prejudicial to the social union. As regards the Ottoman power, then, we have to inquire what its life consists in, and what are the dangers to which that life, from the nature of its constitution, is exposed.

Now, states may be broadly divided into _barbarous_ and _civilized_; their common possession, or life, is some object either of _sense_ or of _imagination_; and their bane and destruction is either _external_ or _internal_. And, to speak in general terms, without allowing for exceptions or limitations (for I am treating the subject scientifically only so far as is requisite for my particular inquiry), we may pronounce that _barbarous_ states live in a common _imagination_, and are destroyed _from without_; whereas _civilized_ states live in some common object of _sense_, and are destroyed from _within_.

By _external_ enemies I mean foreign wars, foreign influence, insurrection of slaves or of subject races, famine, accidental enormities of individuals in power, and other instruments analogous to what, in the case of an individual, is called a violent death; by _internal_ I mean civil contention, excessive changes, revolution, decay of public spirit, which may be considered analogous to natural death.

Again, by objects of _imagination_, I mean such as religion, true or false (for there are not only false imaginations but true), divine mission of a sovereign or of a dynasty, and historical fame; and by objects of _sense_, such as secular interests, country, home, protection of person and property.

I do not allude to the conservative power of habit when I speak of the social bond, because habit is rather the necessary result of possessing a common object, and protects all states equally, barbarous and civilized. Nor do I include moral degeneracy among the instruments of their destruction, because this too attaches to all states, civilized and barbarous, and is rather a disposition exposing them to the influence of what is their bane, than a direct cause of their ruin in itself.

3.

But what is meant by the words _barbarous_ and _civilized_, as applied to political bodies? this is a question which it will take more time to answer, even if I succeed in satisfying it at all. By "barbarism," then, I suppose, in itself is meant a state of nature; and by "civilization," a state of mental cultivation and discipline. In a state of nature man has reason, conscience, affections, and passions, and he uses these severally, or rather is influenced by them, according to circumstances; and whereas they do not one and all necessarily move in the same direction, he takes no great pains to make them agree together, but lets them severally take their course, and, if I may so speak, jostle into a sort of union, and get on together, as best they can. He does not improve his talents; he does not simplify and fix his motives; he does not put his impulses under the control of principle, or form his mind upon a rule. He grows up pretty much what he was when a child; capricious, wayward, unstable, idle, irritable, excitable; with not much more of habituation than that which experience of living unconsciously forces even on the brutes. Brutes act upon instinct, not on reason; they are ferocious when they are hungry; they fiercely indulge their appetite; they gorge themselves; they fall into torpor and inactivity. In a like, but a more human way, the savage is drawn by the object held up to him, as if he could not help following it; an excitement rushes on him, and he yields to it without a struggle; he acts according to the moment, without regard to consequences; he is energetic or slothful, tempestuous or calm, as the winds blow or the sun shines. He is one being to-day, another to-morrow, as if he were simply the sport of influences or circumstances. If he is raised somewhat above this extreme state of barbarism, just one idea or feeling occupies the narrow range of his thoughts, to the exclusion of others.

Moreover, brutes differ from men in this; that they cannot invent, cannot progress. They remain in the use of those faculties and methods, which nature gave them at their birth. They are endowed by the law of their being with certain weapons of defence, and they do not improve on them. They have food, raiment, and dwelling, ready at their command. They need no arrow or noose to catch their prey, nor kitchen to dress it; no garment to wrap round them, nor roof to shelter them. Their claws, their teeth, their viscera, are their butcher and their cook; and their fur is their wardrobe. The cave or the jungle is their home; or if it is their nature to exercise some architectural craft, they have not to learn it. But man comes into the world with the capabilities, rather than the means and appliances, of life. He begins with a small capital, but one which admits of indefinite improvement. He is, in his very idea, a creature of progress. He starts, the inferior of the brute animals, but he surpasses them in the long run; he subjects them to himself, and he goes forward on a career, which at least hitherto has not found its limit.

Even the savage of course in some measure exemplifies this law of human nature, and is lord of the brutes; and what he is and man is generally, compared with the inferior animals, such is man civilized compared with the barbarian. Civilization is that state to which man's nature points and tends; it is the systematic use, improvement, and combination of those faculties which are his characteristic; and, viewed in its idea, it is the perfection, the happiness of our mortal state. It is the development of art out of nature, and of self-government out of passion, and of certainty out of opinion, and of faith out of reason. It is the due disposition of the various powers of the soul, each in its place, the subordination or subjection of the inferior, and the union of all into one whole. Aims, rules, views, habits, projects; prudence, foresight, observation, inquiry, invention, resource, resolution, perseverance, are its characteristics. Justice, benevolence, expedience, propriety, religion, are its recognized, its motive principles. Supernatural truth is its sovereign law. Such is it in its true idea, synonymous with Christianity; and, not only in idea, but in matter of fact also, is Christianity ever civilization, as far as its influence prevails; but, unhappily, in matter of fact, civilization is not necessarily Christianity. If we would view things as they really are, we must bear in mind that, true as it is, that only a supernatural grace can raise man towards the perfection of his nature, yet it is possible,--without the cultivation of its spiritual part, which contemplates objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension, and slow of operation, nay, even with an actual contempt of faith and devotion, in comparison of objects tangible and present,--possible it is, I say, to combine in some sort the other faculties of man into one, and to progress forward, with the substitution of natural religion for faith, and a refined expediency or propriety for true morality, just as with practice a man might manage to run without an arm or without sight, and as the defect of one organ is sometimes supplied to a certain extent by the preternatural action of another.

And this is, in fact, what is commonly understood by civilization, and it is the sense in which the word must be used here; not that perfection which nature aims at, and requires, and cannot of itself reach; but a second-rate perfection of nature, being what it is, and remaining what it is, without any supernatural principle, only with its powers of ratiocination, judgment, sagacity, and imagination fully exercised, and the affections and passions under sufficient control. Such was it, in its higher excellences, in heathen Greece and Rome, where the perception of moral principles, possessed by the cultivated and accomplished intellect, by the mind of Plato or Isocrates, of Cleanthes, Seneca, Epictetus, or Antoninus, rivalled in outward pretensions the inspired teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Such is it at the present day, not only in its reception of the elements of religion and morals (when Christianity is in the midst of it as an inexhaustible storehouse for natural reason to borrow from), but especially in a province peculiar to these times, viz., in science and art, in physics, in politics, in economics, and mechanics. And great as are its attainments at present, still, as I have said, we are far from being able to discern, even in the distance, the limit of its advancement and of its perfectibility.

4.

It is evident from what has been said, that barbarism is a principle, not of society, but of isolation; he who will not submit even to himself, is not likely to volunteer a subjection to others; and this is more or less the price which, from the nature of the case, the members of society pay individually for the security of that which they hold in common. It follows, that no polity can be simply barbarous; barbarians may indeed combine in small bodies, as they have done in Gaul, Scythia, and America, from the gregariousness of our nature, from fellowship of blood, from accidental neighbourhood, or for self-preservation; but such societies are not bodies or polities; they are but the chance result of an occasion, and are destitute of a common life. Barbarism has no individuality, it has no history; quarrels between neighbouring tribes, grudges, blood-shedding, exhaustion, raids, success, defeat, the same thing over and over again, this is not the action of society, nor the subject-matter of narrative; it neither interests the curiosity, nor leaves any impression on the memory. "_Labitur et labetur_;" it forms and breaks again, like the billows of the sea, and is but a mockery of unity. When I speak of barbarian states, I mean such as consist of members not simply barbarous, but just so far removed from the extreme of savageness that they admit of having certain principles in common, and are able to submit themselves individually to the system which rises out of those principles; that they do recognize the ideas of government, property, and law, however imperfectly; though they still differ from civilized polities in those main points, which I have set down as analogous to the difference between brutes and the human species.

As instinct is perfect after its kind at first, and never advances, whereas the range of the intellect is ever growing, so barbarous states are pretty much the same from first to last, and this is their characteristic; and civilized states, on the other hand, though they have had a barbarian era, are ever advancing further and further from it, and thus their distinguishing badge is progress. So far my line of thought leads me to concur in the elaborate remarks on the subject put forth by the celebrated M. Guizot, in his "Lectures on European Civilization." Civilized states are ever developing into a more perfect organization, and a more exact and more various operation; they are ever increasing their stock of thoughts and of knowledge: ever creating, comparing, disposing, and improving. Hence, while bodily strength is the token of barbarian power, mental ability is the honourable badge of civilized states. The one is like Ajax, the other like Ulysses; civilized nations are constructive, barbarous are destructive. Civilization spreads by the ways of peace, by moral suasion, by means of literature, the arts, commerce, diplomacy, institutions; and, though material power never can be superseded, it is subordinate to the influence of mind. Barbarians can provide themselves with swift and hardy horses, can sweep over a country, rush on with a shout, use the steel and firebrand, and frighten and overwhelm the weak or cowardly; but in the wars of civilized countries, even the implements of carnage are scientifically constructed, and are calculated to lessen or supersede it; and a campaign becomes co-ordinately a tour of _savants_, or a colonizing expedition, or a political demonstration. When Sesostris marched through Asia to the Euxine, he left upon his road monuments of himself, which have not utterly disappeared even at this day; and the memorials of the rule of the Pharaohs are still engraved on the rocks of Libya and Arabia. Alexander, again, in a later age, crossed from Macedonia to Asia with the disciples of Aristotle in his train. His march was the diffusion of the arts and commerce, and the acquisition of scientific knowledge; the countries he passed through were accurately described, as he proceeded, and the intervals between halt and halt regularly measured.[72] His naval armaments explored nearly the whole distance from Attock on the Upper Indus to the Isthmus of Suez: his philosophers noted down the various productions and beasts of the unknown East; and his courtiers were the first to report to the western world the singular institutions of Hindostan.

Again, while Attila boasted that his horse's hoof withered the grass it trod on, and Zingis could gallop over the site of the cities he had destroyed, Seleucus, or Ptolemy, or Trajan, covered the range of his conquests with broad capitals, marts of commerce, noble roads, and spacious harbours. Lucullus collected a magnificent library in the East, and Cæsar converted his northern expeditions into an antiquarian and historical research.

Nor is this an accident in Roman annals. She was a power pre-eminently military; yet what is her history but the most remarkable instance of a political development and progress? More than any power, she was able to accommodate and expand her institutions according to the circumstances of successive ages, extending her municipal privileges to the conquered cities, yielding herself to the literature of Greece, and admitting into her bosom the rites of Egypt and Phrygia. At length, by an effort of versatility unrivalled in history, she was able to reverse one main article of her policy, and, as she had already acknowledged the intellectual supremacy of Greece, so did she humble herself in a still more striking manner before a religion which she had persecuted.

5.

If these remarks upon the difference between barbarism and civilization be in the main correct, they have prepared the way for answering the question which I have raised concerning the principle of life and the mode of dissolution proper or natural to barbarous and civilized powers respectively. Ratiocination and its kindred processes, which are the necessary instruments of political progress, are, taking things as we find them, hostile to imagination and auxiliary to sense. It is true that a St. Thomas can draw out a whole system of theology from principles impalpable and invisible, and fix upon the mind by pure reason a vast multitude of facts and truths which have no pretence to a bodily form. But, taking man as he is, we shall commonly find him dissatisfied with a demonstrative process from an undemonstrated premiss, and, when he has once begun to reason, he will seek to prove the point from which his reasoning starts, as well as that at which it arrives. Thus he will be forced back from immediate first principles to others more remote, nor will he be satisfied till he ultimately reaches those which are as much within his own handling and mastery as the reasoning apparatus itself. Hence it is that civilized states ever tend to substitute objects of sense for objects of imagination, as the basis of their existence. The Pope's political power was greater when Europe was semi-barbarous; and the divine right of the successors of the English St. Edward received a death-blow in the philosophy of Bacon and Locke. At present, I suppose, our own political life, as a nation, lies in the supremacy of the law; and that again is resolvable into the internal peace, and protection of life and property, and freedom of the individual, which are its result; and these I call objects of sense.

For the very same reason, objects of this nature will not constitute the life of a barbarian community; prudence, foresight, calculation of consequences do not enter into its range of mental operations; it has no talent for analysis; it cannot understand expediency; it is impressed and affected by what is direct and absolute. Religion, superstition, belief in persons and families, objects, not proveable, but vivid and imposing, will be the bond which keeps its members together. I have already alluded to the divinity which in the imagination of the Huns encircled the hideous form of Attila. Zingis claimed for himself or his ancestry a miraculous conception, and received from a prophet, who ascended to heaven, the dominion of the earth. He called himself the son of God; and when the missionary friars came to his immediate successor from the Pope, that successor made answer to them, that it was the Pope's duty to do him homage, as being earthly lord of all by divine right. It was a similar pretension, I need hardly say, which was the life of the Mahometan conquests, when the wild Saracen first issued from the Arabian desert. So, too, in the other hemisphere, the Caziques of aboriginal America were considered to be brothers of the Sun, and received religious homage as his representatives. They spoke as the oracles of the divinity, and claimed the power of regulating the seasons and the weather at their will. This was especially the case in Peru; "the whole system of policy," says Robertson, "was founded on religion. The Incas appeared, not only as a legislator, but as the messenger of heaven."[73] Elsewhere, the divine virtue has been considered to rest, not on the monarch, but on the code of laws, which accordingly is the social principle of the nation. The Celts ascribed their legislation to Mercury;[74] as Lycurgus and Numa in Sparta and Rome appealed to a divine sanction in behalf of their respective institutions.

This being the case, imperfect as is the condition of barbarous states, still what is there to overthrow them? They have a principle of union congenial to the state of their intellect, and they have not the ratiocinative habit to scrutinize and invalidate it. Since they admit of no mental progress, what serves as a bond to-day will be equally serviceable to-morrow; so that apparently their dissolution cannot come from themselves. It is true, a barbarous people, possessed of a beautiful country, may be relaxed in luxury and effeminacy; but such degeneracy has no obvious tendency to weaken their faith in the objects in which their political unity consists, though it may render them defenceless against external attacks. And here indeed lies their real peril at all times; they are ever vulnerable from without. Thus Sparta, formed deliberately on a barbarian pattern, remained faithful to it, without change, without decay, while its intellectual rival was the victim of successive revolutions. At length its power was broken externally by the Theban Epaminondas; and by the restoration of Messenia, the insurrection of the Laconians, and the emancipation of the Helots. Agesilaus, at the time of its fall, was as good a Spartan as any of his predecessors. Again, the ancient Empire of the Huns in Asia is said to have lasted 1,500 years; at length its wanton tyranny was put an end to by the Chinese King plunging into the Tartar desert, and thus breaking their power. Thrace, again, a barbarous country, lasted many centuries, with kings of great vigour, with much external prosperity, and then succumbed, not to internal revolution, but to the permanent ascendancy of Rome. Similar too is the instance of Pontus, and again of Numidia and Mauritania; they may have had great or accomplished sovereigns, but they have no history, except in the wars of their conquerors. Great leaders are necessary for the prosperity, as great enemies for the destruction, of barbarians; they thrive, as they come to nought, by means of agents external to themselves. So again Malek Shah died, and his empire fell to pieces. Hence, too, the unexpected and utter catastrophes which befall barbarous people, analogous to a violent death, which I have alluded to in speaking of the sudden rise and fall of Tartar dynasties; for no one can anticipate results, which, instead of being the slow evolution of political principles, proceed from the accident of external quarrels and of the relative condition of rival powers.

6.

Far otherwise is the history of those states, in which the intellect, not prescription, is recognized as the ultimate authority, and where the course of time is necessarily accompanied by a corresponding course of change. Such polities are ever in progress; at first from worse to better, and then from better to worse. In all human things there is a _maximum_ of advance, and that _maximum_ is not an established state of things, but a point in a career. The cultivation of reason and the spread of knowledge for a time develop and at length dissipate the elements of political greatness; acting first as the invaluable ally of public spirit, and then as its insidious enemy. Barbarian minds remain in the circle of ideas which sufficed their forefathers; the opinions, principles, and habits which they inherited, they transmit. They have the _prestige_ of antiquity and the strength of conservatism; but where thought is encouraged, too many will think, and will think too much. The sentiment of sacredness in institutions fades away, and the measure of truth or expediency is the private judgment of the individual. An endless variety of opinion is the certain though slow result; no overpowering majority of judgments is found to decide what is good and what is bad; political measures become acts of compromise; and at length the common bond of unity in the state consists in nothing really common, but simply in the unanimous wish of each member of it to secure his own interests. Thus the veterans of Sylla, comfortably settled in their farms, refused to rally round Pompey in his war with Cæsar.[75] Thus the municipal cities in the provinces refused to unite together in a later age for the defence of the Empire, then evidently on the way to dissolution.[76] Selfishness takes the place of loyalty, patriotism, and faith; parties grow and strengthen themselves; classes and ranks withdraw from each other more and more; the national energy becomes but a self-consuming fever, and but enables the constituent parts to be their own mutual destruction; and at length such union as is necessary for political life is found to be impossible. Meanwhile corruption of morals, which is common to all prosperous countries, completes the internal ruin, and, whether an external enemy appears or not, the nation can hardly be considered any more a state. It is but like some old arch, which, when its supports are crumbled away, stands by the force of cohesion, no one knows how. It dies a natural death, even though some Alaric or Genseric happens to be at hand to take possession of the corpse. And centuries before the end comes, patriots may see it coming, though they cannot tell its hour; and that hour creates surprise, not because it at length is come, but because it has been so long delayed.