Chapter XVI: Are New Constitutions Likely to Arise?

The remaining question, also somewhat speculative, relates to the prospects the future holds out to us of seeing new States with new Constitutions arise.

New States may arise in one of two ways, either by their establishment in new countries where settled and civilized government has been hitherto unknown, or by the breaking up of existing States into smaller ones, fragments of the old.

The opportunities for the former process have now been sadly curtailed through the recent appropriation by a few great civilized States of some two-thirds of the surface of the globe outside Europe. North America is in the hands of three such States. Central and South America, though the States are all weak and most of them small in population, are so far occupied that no space is left. The last chance disappeared when the Argentine Republic asserted a claim to Patagonia, where it would have been better that some North European race should have developed a new colony, as the Welsh settlers were doing on a small scale. Australia is occupied. Asia, excluding China and Japan in the East, and the two dying Musulman powers in the West, is virtually partitioned between Britain and Russia, with France holding a bit of the south-east corner. So Africa has now been (with trifling exceptions) divided between five European Powers (Portugal, England, France, Germany, Italy). Thus there is hardly a spot of earth left on which a new independent community can establish itself, as the Greeks founded a multitude of new commonwealths in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., and as the Teutonic invaders founded kingdoms during the dissolution of the Roman Empire.

If we turn to the possibilities of new States arising from the ruins of existing ones, whether by revolt or by peaceful separation, the prospect is not much more encouraging. There is indeed Turkey. Five out of the six new States that have arisen in Europe during this century have been carved out of the territories she claimed—viz. Greece, Rumania, Servia, Bulgaria, Montenegro: and there is material for one or two more in Europe and possibly for one or two in Asia, though it is more probable that both the Asiatic and European dominions of the Sultan will be partitioned among existing States than that new ones will spring out of them. The ill-compacted fabric of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy may fall to pieces. Parts of the Asiatic dominions of Russia may possibly (though in a comparatively distant future) become independent of the old Muscovite motherland, and the less civilized among the republics of Central and South America may be broken into parts or combined into new States, though the saying ‘plus cela change, plus c’est la même chose’ is even more true of those countries than of that to which it was originally applied, and gives little hope of interesting novelties. But on the whole the tendency of modern times is rather towards the aggregation of small States than towards the division of large ones. Commerce and improved facilities of communication are factors of constantly increasing importance which work in this direction, and this general tendency for the larger States to absorb the smaller forbids us to expect the rise, within the next few generations, of more than a few new Constitutions which will provide matter for study to the historian or lawyer of the future.

What type of Constitution will these new States, whatever they be and whenever they come, be disposed to prefer? Upon this point it is relevant to observe that all the new States that have appeared since 1850 have adopted Rigid Constitutions, with the solitary exception of Montenegro, which has no Constitution at all, but lives under the paternal autocracy of the temporal ruler who has succeeded the ancient ecclesiastical Vladika[95]. Each of them, on beginning its independent life, has felt the need of setting out the lines of its government in a formal instrument which it has consecrated as fundamental by placing it above ordinary legislation. Similar conditions are likely to surround the birth of any new States, similar motives to influence those who tend their infancy. The only cases in which a Flexible Constitution is likely to arise would be the division of a country having such a Constitution into two or more fragments, each of which should cleave to the accustomed system; or the revolt of a people or community among whom, as they grow into a State, usages of government that had naturally sprung up might, when independence had been established, continue to be observed and so ripen into a Constitution. The chance that either of these cases will present itself is not very great. New States will more probably adopt documentary Constitutions, as did the insurgent colonies of England after 1776 and of Spain after 1811, and as the Christians of South-Eastern Europe did when they had rid themselves of the Turk. Upon the whole, therefore, it would seem that the future is rather with Rigid Constitutions than with those of the Flexible type.

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Footnote 95:

As to Italy, however, see above, pp. 202 and 208.

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It is hardly necessary to close these speculations by adding the warning that all prophecies in politics must be highly conjectural. Circumstances change, opinion changes; knowledge increases, though the power of using it wisely may not increase[96].

The subtlety of nature, and especially the intricacy of the relations she develops between things that originally seemed to lie wide apart, far surpasses the calculating or predicting wit of man. Accordingly many things, both in the political arrangements of the world and in the beliefs of mankind, which now seem permanent may prove transitory. Democracy itself, though most people treat it as a thing likely to grow stronger and advance further, may suffer an eclipse. Human nature no doubt remains. But human nature has clothed itself in the vesture of every sort of institution, and may change its fashions as freely in the future as it has done in the past.

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Footnote 96:

Ἅπανθ’ ὁ μακρὸς κἀναρίθμητος χρόνος
φύει τ’ ἄδηλα καὶ φανέντα κρύπτεται.
Soph. _Ajax_, 646.

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NOTE TO ESSAY III

CONSTITUTIONAL AND OTHER GOVERNMENTS

The races and nations of the world may, as respects the forms of
Government under which they live, be distributed into four classes:—

I. Nations which have created and maintain permanent political
institutions, allotting special functions to each organ of Government,
and assigning to the citizens some measure of participation in the
business of Government.

In these nations we discover Constitutions in the proper sense of the
term. To this class belong all the States of Europe except Russia and
Montenegro, and, outside Europe, the British self-governing Colonies,
the United States and Mexico, the two republics of South Africa, Japan
and Chili, possibly also the Argentine Republic.

II. Nations in which the institutions aforesaid exist in theory, but
are seldom in normal action, because they are in a state of chronic
political disturbance and mostly ruled, with little regard to law, by
military adventurers. This class includes the republics of Central and
South America, with the exception of Chili, and possibly of Argentina,
whose condition has latterly been tolerably stable.

III. Nations in which, although the upper class is educated, the bulk
of the population, being backward, has not begun to desire such
institutions as aforesaid. Such Nations therefore remain under
autocratic monarchies. To this class belong Russia and Montenegro.
Japan has lately emerged from it: and two or three of the newest
European States might, but for the interposition of other nations,
have remained in it.

IV. Nations which are, for one reason or another, below the level of
intellectual life and outside the sphere of ideas which the permanent
political institutions aforesaid presuppose and need for their proper
working. This class includes all the remaining peoples of the world,
from intelligent races like the Chinese, Siamese, and Persians, down
to the barbarous tribes of Africa.

Constitutions, in the sense in which the term is used in the preceding
Essay, belong only to the first class, and in a qualified sense to the
second. In the modern world they are confined to Europe and her
Colonies, adding Japan, which has imitated Europe. In the ancient
world they were confined to three races, Greeks, Italians, and
Phoenicians, to whom one may perhaps add such races as the Lycians,
who had learnt from the Greeks. Their range is somewhat narrower than
that of law, that is to say, there are peoples which, like the
Musulmans of Turkey, Egypt, and Persia, have law, but have no
Constitutions.

No race that has ever lived under a regular constitutional Government
has permanently lost it, except those parts of the Roman Empire which
now form part of the Turkish Empire; and the Roman Empire, though its
Government never ceased to be in a certain sense constitutional,
ultimately extinguished the habit of self-government among its
subjects.

IV

THE ACTION OF CENTRIPETAL
AND CENTRIFUGAL FORCES ON
POLITICAL CONSTITUTIONS[97]

As every government and every constitution is the result of certain forces and tendencies which bring men together in an organized community, so every government and every constitution tends when formed to hold men together thenceforth, training them to direct their efforts to a common end and to sacrifice for that purpose a certain measure of the exercise of their individual wills. So strong is the aggregative tendency, that each community naturally goes on by a sort of law of nature to expand and draw in others, whether persons or groups, who have not previously belonged to it: nor is physical force the prime agent, for the great majority of mankind prefer some kind of political society, even one in whose management they have little or no share, to mere isolation. As this process of expansion and aggregation continues, the different political groups which it has called into being come necessarily in contact with one another. The weaker ones are overcome or peacefully absorbed by the stronger ones, and thus the number of groups is continually lessened. Where two communities of nearly equal strength encounter each other, each may for a time succeed in resisting the attraction of the other. But in this changeful world it almost always happens that sooner or later one becomes so much stronger that the other yields to it: and thus in course of time the number of detached communities, _i.e._ of groups each with its own centre of attraction, becomes very small, because the weak have been swallowed up by the strong. This is the general, though, as we shall see, not the universal course of events. There is also another force at work, which has at some moments in history developed great strength.

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Footnote 97:

This Essay was composed in the early part of 1885. It has been revised
throughout, but the substance remains the same.

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