Chapter XI: The State (3)

But the bourgeoisie, the class of urban “freedom,” strong as its class-feeling remained for generations (in West Europe even beyond 1848), was at no time wholly master of its actions. For, first of all, it became manifest in every critical situation that its unity was a _negative_ unity, only really existent in moments of opposition to something, anything, else--“Tiers État” and “Opposition” are almost synonymous--and that when something constructive of its own had to be done, the interests of the various groups pulled all ways. To be free from something--that, all wanted. But the intellectual desired the State as an actualization of “justice” against the force of historical facts; or the “rights of man”; or freedom of criticism as against the dominant religion. And Money wanted a free path to business success. There were a good many who desired rest and renunciation of historical greatness, or wished this and that tradition and its embodiments, on which physically or spiritually they lived, to be spared. But there was another element, now and henceforth, that had not existed in the conflicts of the Fronde (the English Civil War included) or the first Tyrannis, but this time stood for a power--namely, that which is found in all Civilizations under different contemptuous labels--dregs, _canaille_, mob, _Pöbel_--but with the same tremendous connotation. In the great cities, which alone now spoke the decisive words--the open land can at most accept or reject _faits accomplis_, as our eighteenth century proves[707]--a mass of rootless fragments of population stands outside all social linkages. These do not feel themselves as attached either to an Estate or to a vocational class, nor even to the real working-class, although they are obliged to work. Elements drawn from all classes and conditions belong to it instinctively--uprooted peasantry, literates, ruined business men, and above all (as the age of Catiline shows with terrifying clarity) derailed nobles. Their power is far in excess of their numbers, for they are always on the spot, always on hand at the big decisions, ready for anything, devoid of all respect for orderliness, even the orderliness of a revolutionary party. It is from them that events acquire the destructive force which distinguishes the French Revolution from the English, and the Second Tyrannis from the First. The bourgeoisie looks at these masses with real uneasiness, defensively, and seeks to separate itself from them--it was to a defensive act of this category, the 13th Vendémiaire, that Napoleon owed his rise.[708] But in the pressure of facts the separating frontier cannot be drawn; wherever the bourgeoisie throws into the scale against the older orders its feeble weight of aggressiveness--feeble in relative numbers and feeble because its inner cohesion is risked at every moment--this mass has forced itself into their ranks, pushed to the front, imparted most of the drive that wins the victory, and very often managed to secure the conquered position for itself--not seldom with the continued idealistic support of the educated who are intellectually captivated, or the material backing of the money powers, which seek to divert the danger from themselves on to the nobility and the clergy.

There is another aspect, too, under which this epoch has its importance--in it for the first time abstract truths seek to intervene in the world of facts. The capital cities have become so great, and urban man so superior and influential over the waking-consciousness of the whole Culture (_this influence is what we call Public Opinion_) that the powers of the blood and the tradition inherent in the blood are shaken in their hitherto unassailable position. For it must be remembered that the Baroque State and the absolute Polis in their final development of form are thoroughly living expressions of a _breed_, and that history, so far as it accomplishes itself in these forms, possesses the full pulse of that breed. Any theory of the State that may be fashioned here is one that is deduced from the facts, that bows to the greatness of the facts. The idea of the State had finally mastered the blood of the first Estate, and put it wholly and without reserve at the State’s service. “Absolute” means that the great being-stream is _as a unit_ in form, possesses _one_ kind of pulse and instinct, whether the manifestations of that pulse be diplomatic or strategic flair, dignity of moral and manners, or fastidious taste in arts and thoughts.

As the contradictory to this grand fact, now, Rationalism appears and spreads, that which has been described above[709] as the _community of waking-consciousness in the educated_, whose religion is criticism and whose numina are not deities but concepts. Now begins the influence of books and general theories upon politics--in the China of Lao-tse as in the Athens of the Sophists and the Europe of Montesquieu--and the public opinion formed by them plants itself in the path of diplomacy as a political magnitude of quite a new sort. It would be absurd to suppose that Pisistratus or Richelieu or even Cromwell determined their actions under the influence of abstract systems, but after the victory of “Enlightenment” that is what actually happens.

Nevertheless the historical rôle of the great concepts of the Civilization is very different from the complexion that they presented in the minds of the ideologues who conceived them. The effect of a truth is always quite different from its tendency. In the world of facts, truths are simply _means_, effective in so far as they dominate spirits and therefore determine actions. Their historical position is determined not by whether they are deep, correct, or even merely logical, but by whether they _tell_. We see this in the phrase “catchword,” “_Schlagwort_.” What certain symbols, livingly experienced, are for the Springtime religions--the Holy Sepulchre for the Crusader, the Substance of Christ for the times of the Council of Nicæa--that two or three inspiriting word-sounds are for every Civilized revolution. It is only the catchwords that are facts--the residue of the philosophical or sociological system whence they come does not matter to history. But, _as_ catchwords, they are for about two centuries powers of the first rank, stronger even than the pulse of the blood, which in the petrifying world of the outspread cities is beginning to be dulled.

But--the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which emerge out of the chaotic mass of the Non-Estate. Along with abstract concepts abstract Money,--money divorced from the prime values of the land--along with the study the counting-house, appear as political forces. The two are inwardly cognate and inseparable--the old opposition between priest and noble continued, acute as ever, in the bourgeois atmosphere and the city framework.[710] Of the two, moreover, it is the Money that, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally superior to the ideal truths, which so far as the fact-world is concerned exist (as I have just said) only as catchwords, as means. If by “democracy” we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world-improvers’ and freedom-teachers’ desperate fight against money that they are _ipso facto_ assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number--expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage--is just as much a class-ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. It was the Equites, the big-money party, which made Tiberius Gracchus’s popular movement possible at all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous to themselves had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and the movement collapsed. Cæsar and Crassus financed the Catilinarian movement, and so directed it against the Senatorial party instead of against property. In England politicians of eminence laid it down as early as 1700 that “on ’Change one deals in votes as well as in stocks, and the price of a vote is as well known as the price of an acre of land.”[711] When the news of Waterloo reached Paris, the price of French government stock rose[712]--the Jacobins had destroyed the old obligations of the blood and so had emancipated money; now it stepped forward as lord of the land.[713] There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money--and that, without the idealist amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.[714] Intellect rejects, money directs--so it runs in every last act of a Culture-drama, when the megalopolis has become master over the rest. And, in the limit, intellect has no cause of complaint. For, after all, it _has_ won its victory--namely, in its own realm of truths, the realm of books and ideals that is not of this world. Its conceptions have become venerabilia of the beginning Civilization. But Money wins, through these very concepts, in _its_ realm, which is _only_ of this world.

In the Western world of States, it was in England that both sides of Third-Estate politics, the ideal and the real, graduated. Here alone it was possible for the Third Estate to avoid the necessity of marching against an absolute State in order to destroy it and set up its own dominion on the ruins. For here it could grow up into the strong form of the First Estate, where it found a fully developed form of interest-politics, and from whose methods it could borrow for its own purposes a traditional tactic such as it could hardly wish to improve upon. Here was the home of Parliamentarism, genuine and quite inimitable, which had insular position instead of the state as its starting-point, and the habits of the First and not the Third Estate as its background. Further, there was the circumstance that this form had grown up in the full bloom of Baroque and, therefore, had Music in it. The Parliamentary style was completely identical with that of cabinet-diplomacy;[715] and in this _anti-democratic_ origin lay the secret of its successes.

But it was on British soil, too, that the rationalistic catchwords had, one and all, sprung up, and their relation to the principles of the Manchester School was intimate--Hume was the teacher of Adam Smith. “Liberty” self-evidently meant intellectual _and_ trade freedom. An opposition between fact-politics and enthusiasm for abstract truths was as impossible in the England of George III as it was inevitable in the France of Louis XVI. Later, Edmund Burke could retort upon Mirabeau that “we demand our liberties, not as rights of man, but as rights of Englishmen.” France received her revolutionary ideas without exception from England, as she had received the style of her absolute monarchy from Spain. To both she imparted a brilliant and irresistible shape that was taken as a model far and wide over the Continent, but of the practical employment of either she had no idea. The successful utilization of the bourgeois catchwords[716] in politics presupposes the shrewd eye of a ruling class for the intellectual constitution of the stratum which intends to attain power, but will not be capable of wielding it when attained. Hence in England it was successful. But it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in politics--not the bribery of individual high personages which had been customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the “nursing” of the democratic forces themselves. In eighteenth-century England, first the Parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected Commons were systematically managed by money;[717] England, too, discovered the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread “free” opinion--it generates it.

Both _together_ constitute liberalism (in the broad sense); that is, freedom from the restrictions of the soil-bound life, be these privileges, forms, or feelings--freedom of the intellect for every kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But both, too, unhesitatingly aim at the domination of a _class_, a domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the State. Mind and money, being both inorganic, want the State, not as a matured form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a purpose. Thus the difference between these forces and those of Frondism is fundamental, for the latter’s reaction had been a defence of the old Gothic against the intrusive Baroque way of living and being “in form,”--and now both these are on the defensive together and almost indistinguishable. Only in England (it must be emphasized again and again) the Fronde had disarmed, not only the State in open battle, but also the Third Estate by its inward superiority, and so attained to the one kind of first-class form that democracy is capable of working up to, a form neither planned nor aped, but naturally matured, the expression of an old breed and an unbroken sure tact that can adapt itself to the use of every new means that the changes of Time put into its hands. Thus it came about that the English Parliament, while taking part in the Succession-Wars of the Absolute States, handled them as economic wars with business aims. The mistrust felt for high form by the inwardly formless Non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to rescue its freedom--_from_ all form--by means of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up, which, moreover, in virtue of its mechanizing tendency, is acceptable to the taste both of intellect and of money--consider, for example, the structure of the state-machine of France which Robespierre began and Napoleon completed. Dictatorship in the interests of a class-ideal appealed to Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Rodbertus, and Lassalle as it had to the Classical ideologues of the fourth century--Xenophon in the Cyropædia and Isocrates in the Nicocles.[718]

But the well-known saying of Robespierre that “the Government of the Revolution is the despotism of freedom against tyranny” expresses more than this. It lets out the deep fear that shakes every multitude which, in the presence of grave conjunctures, feels itself “not up to form.” A regiment that is shaken in its discipline will readily concede to accidental leaders of the moment powers of an extent and a kind which the legitimate command could never acquire, and which _if_ legitimate would be utterly intolerable. But this, on a larger scale, is the position of every commencing Civilization. Nothing reveals more tellingly the decline of political form than that upspringing of formless powers which we may conveniently designate, from its most conspicuous example, _Napoleonism_. How completely the being of Richelieu or of Wallenstein was involved in the unshakable antecedents of their period! And how instinct with form, under all its outer unform, was the English Revolution! Here, just the reverse; the Fronde fights _about_ the form, the absolute State _in_ the form, but the bourgeoisie _against_ the form. The mere abolition of an order that had become obsolete was no novelty--Cromwell and the heads of the First Tyrannis had done that. But, that behind the ruins of the visible there is no longer the substance of an invisible form; that Robespierre and Napoleon find nothing either around or in them to provide the _self-evident_ basis essential to any new creation; that for a government of high tradition and experience they have no choice but to substitute an accidental régime, whose future no longer rests secure on the qualities of a slowly and thoroughly trained minority, but depends entirely on the chance of the adequate successor turning up--such are the distinguishing marks of this turning of the times, and hence comes the immense superiority that is enjoyed for generations still by those states which manage to retain a tradition longer than others.

The First Tyrannis had completed the Polis with the aid of the non-noble; the latter now destroyed it with the aid of the Second Tyrannis. As an idea, it perishes in the bourgeois revolutions of the fourth century, for all that it may persist as an arrangement or a habit or an instrument of the momentary powers that be. Classical man never ceased, in fact, to think and live politically in its form. But never more was it for the multitude a symbol to be respected and venerated, any more than the Divine Right of Kings was venerated in the West after Napoleon had almost succeeded in making his own dynasty “the oldest in Europe.”

Further, in these revolutions too, as ever in Classical history, there were only local and temporary solutions--nothing resembling the splendid sweep of the French Revolution from the Bastille to Waterloo--and the scenes in them were more atrocious still, for the reason that in this Culture, with its basically Euclidean feeling, the only possible way seemed to be that of physical collision of party against party, and the only possible end for the loser, not functional incorporation in the victor’s system as in the West, but destruction root and branch. At Corcyra (427) and Argos (370) the possessing classes were slaughtered _en masse_; in Leontini (422) they were expelled from the city by the lower classes, which carried on affairs for a while with slaves until, in fear of an avenging return, they evacuated altogether and migrated to Syracuse. The refugees from hundreds of these revolutions inundated the cities, recruited the mercenary armies of the Second Tyrannis, and infested the routes by land and sea. The readmission of such exiled fractions is a standing feature in the peace-terms offered by the Diadochi and later by the Romans. But the Second Tyrannis itself secured its positions by acts of this kind. Dionysius I (407-367) secured his hegemony over Syracuse--the city in whose higher society, along with that of Athens, centred the ripest culture of Hellas, the city where Æschylus had produced his Persian trilogy in 470--by wholesale executions of educated people and confiscations of their property; this he followed up by entirely rebuilding the population, in the upper levels by granting large properties to his adherents, and in the lower by raising masses of slaves to the citizenship and distributing amongst them (as was not uncommon) the wives and daughters of the victims.[719]

After the characteristically Classical fashion, the type of these revolutions was such as to produce always an increase of number, never of extent. Multitudes of them happened, but each proceeded purely for itself and at one point of its own, and it is only the fact that they were contemporary with one another that gives them the character of a collective phenomenon, which marks an epoch. Similarly with Napoleonism; here again, a formless regimen for the first time raised itself above the framework of the State, yet without being able to attain to complete inward detachment therefrom. It supported itself on the Army, which, _vis-à-vis_ the nation that had lost its “form,” began to feel itself as an independent power. That is the brief road from Robespierre to Bonaparte--with the fall of the Jacobins the centre of gravity passed from the administration to the ambitious generals. How deeply this new tendency implanted itself in the West may be seen from the example of Bernadotte and Wellington, and even more from the story of Frederick William III’s “call to my People” in 1813--in this case the continuance of the dynasty would have been challenged by the military had not the King stiffened himself to break with Napoleon.[720]

This anti-constitutionality of the Second Tyrannis declared itself also in the position taken by Alcibiades and Lysander in the armed forces of their respective cities during the latter stages of the Peloponnesian War, a position incompatible with the basic form of the Polis. The first-named, destitute as an exile of official position, and against the will of the home authorities, exercised from 411 the _de facto_ command of the Athenian Navy; the second, though not even a Spartiate, felt himself entirely independent at the head of an army devoted to his person. In the year 408 the contest of the two powers for the supremacy over the Ægean world took the form of a contest between these two individuals.[721] Shortly after this, Dionysius of Syracuse built up the first large-scale professional army and introduced engines of war (artillery)[722]--a new form which served as a model for the Diadochi and Rome also. Thereafter the spirit of the army was a political power on its own account, and it became a serious question how far the State was master, and how far tool, of its army. The fact that the government of Rome was exclusively in the hands of a military committee[723] from 390 to 367[724] reveals pretty clearly that the army had a policy of its own. It is well known that Alexander, the Romanticist of the Second Tyrannis, fell more and more under the influence of his generals, who not only compelled the retreat from India but also disposed of his inheritance amongst themselves as a matter of course.

This is essentially Napoleonism, and so is the extension of _personal_ rule over regions united by ties neither national nor jural, but merely military and administrative. But extension was just what was essentially incompatible with the Polis. The Classical State is the one State that was incapable of any organic widening, and the conquests of the Second Tyrannis therefore resolved themselves into a _juxtaposition of two political units_, the Polis and the subjugated territory, the cohesion of which was initially accidental and perpetually in danger. Thus arose that strange picture of the Hellenistic-Roman world, the true significance of which is not even yet recognized--_a circle of border-regions_, and within them a congeries of Poleis to which, small as they were, the conception of the State proper, the _res publica_, continued to be bound as exclusively as ever. In this middle (indeed, so far as concerned each individual, hegemony was in one point) was the theatre of all real politics. The “_orbis terrarum_”--a significant expression--was merely a means or object to it. The Roman notions of “_imperium_”--dictatorial powers of administration outside the city moat (which were automatically extinguished when its holder entered the Pomœrium)--and of “_provincia_” as the opposite of “_res publica_,” express the common Classical instinct, which knew only the city’s body as the State and political subject, and the “outside” only in relation to it, as object to it. Dionysius made his city of Syracuse into a fortress surrounded by a “scrap-heap of states,” and extended his field of power thence, over Upper Italy and the Dalmatian coast, into the northern Adriatic, where he possessed Ancona and Hatria at the mouth of the Po. Philip of Macedon, following the example of his teacher Jason of Pheræ (murdered in 370), adopted the reverse plan, placing his centre of gravity in the periphery (that is, practically in the army) and thence exercising a hegemony over the Hellenic world of States. Thus Macedonia came to extend to the Danube, and after Alexander’s death there were added to this outer circle the empires of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies--each governed from a Polis (Antioch, Alexandria), but through the intermediary of existing native machinery, which, be it said, was at its lowest better than any Classical administration of it could have been. Rome herself in the same period (_c._ 326-265) built up her Middle-Italian territory as a _border state_, secured in all directions by a system of colonies, allies, and settlements with Latin right. Then, from 237, we find Hamilcar Barca winning for Carthage, a city old established in the Classical way of life, an empire in Spain; C. Flaminius (225) conquering the Po Valley for Rome; and finally Cæsar making his Gallic empire. These were the foundations upon which rested, first, the Napoleonic struggles of the Diadochi in the East, then those of Scipio and Hannibal in the West--the limits of the Polis outgrown in both cases--and lastly the Cæsarian struggles of the Triumvirs, who supported themselves on the total of _all_ the border states and used their means, in order to be--“the first in Rome.”

VII

In Rome the strong and happily conceived form of the State that was reached about 340 kept the social revolution within constitutional limits. A Napoleonic figure like Appius Claudius the Censor of 310, who built the first aqueduct and the Appian Way, and ruled in Rome almost as a tyrant, very soon failed when he tried to eliminate the peasantry by means of the great-city masses and so to impart the one-sided Athenian direction to politics--for that was his aim in taking up the sons of slaves into the Senate, in reorganizing the Centuries on a money instead of a land-assessment basis,[725] and in distributing freedmen and landless men amongst the country tribes, so that they might outvote the rustics (as they were always able to do, since the latter rarely attended). But his successors in the censorship lost no time in reversing this, and relegated the landless to the great city-tribes again. The non-estate itself, well led by a minority of distinguished families, saw its aim (as has been said before) not in the destruction, but in the acquisition, of the senatorial organs of administration. In the end, it forced its way into all offices (even, by the Lex Ogulnia, of 300, into the politically important priesthoods of the Pontifices and Augurs), and by the outbreak of 287 it secured force of law for _plebiscita_ even without the Senate’s approval.

The practical result of this freedom-movement was precisely the reverse of that which ideologues would have expected--there were no idealogues in Rome. The greatness of its success robbed the non-estate of its object and thereby deprived it of its driving force, for positively, when not “in opposition,” it was null. After 287 the state-form existed for the purpose of being politically _used_, and used, too, in a world in which only the states of the great fringe--Rome, Carthage, Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt--really counted. It had ceased to be in any danger of becoming the passive of “peoples’-rights” activities. And it was precisely this security that formed the basis on which the one people that had remained “in form” rose to its grandeur.

On the one hand, it had developed within the Plebs, formless and long weakened in its race-impulses by the mass-intake of freedmen,[726] an upper stratum distinguished by great practical aptitudes, rank, and wealth, which joined forces with a corresponding stratum within the patriciate. Hence there came into existence a very narrow circle of men of the strongest race-quality, dignified life, and broad political outlook, in whom the whole stock of experience in governing and generalship and negotiation was concentrated and transmitted; who regarded the direction of the State as the one profession worthy of their status, considered themselves as inheritors of a privilege to exercise it, and educated their children solely in the art of ruling and the convictions of a measurelessly proud tradition. This nobility, which as such had no constitutional existence, found its constitutional engine in the Senate, which had originally been a body representing the interests of the patricians (that is, the “Homeric” aristocracy), but in which from the middle of the fourth century ex-consuls--men who had both ruled and commanded--sat as life-members, forming a close group of eminent talents that dominated the assembly and, through it, the State. Even by 279 the Senate appeared to Cineas, the ambassador of Pyrrhus, like a council of kings, and finally its kernel was a small group of leading men, holding the titles “_princeps_” and “_clarissimus_,” men in every respect--rank, power, and public dignity--the peers of those who reigned over the empires of the Diadochi.[727] There came into being a government such as no megalopolis in any other Culture whatsoever has possessed, and a tradition to which it would be impossible to find parallels save perhaps in the Venice and the Papal Curia of the Baroque, and there under a wholly different set of conditions. Here were no theories such as had been the ruin of Athens, none of the provincialism that had made Sparta in the long run contemptible, but simply a praxis in the grand style. If “Rome” is a perfectly unique and marvellous phenomenon in world-history, it is due, not to the Roman “people,” which in itself, like any other, was raw material without form, but to this class which brought Rome into condition and kept her so, willy-nilly--with the result that this particular stream of being, which in 350 was still without importance save to middle Italy, gradually drew into its bed the entire history of the Classical, and made the last great period of that history a _Roman_ period.

It was the very perfection of political _flair_ that was displayed by this small circle (which possessed no sort of public rights) in managing the democratic forms created by the Revolution--forms that here as elsewhere derive all value from the use that is made of them. The only factor in them that if mishandled would have been dangerous in an instant--namely, the interpenetration of two mutually exclusive powers--was handled so superbly _and so quietly_ that it was always the higher experience that gave the note, while the people remained throughout convinced that decisions were made by, and in the sense desired by, itself. _To be popular, and yet historically successful in the highest degree_--here is the secret of this policy, and for that matter the only possibility of policy existing at all in such times, an art in which the Roman régime has remained unequalled to this day.

Nevertheless, on the other side of the picture, the result of the Revolution was the _emancipation of Money_. Thenceforward money was master in the Comitia Centuriata. That which called itself “_populus_” there became more and more a tool in the hands of big money, and it required all the tactical superiority of the ruling circles to maintain a counterpoise in the Plebs, and to keep effective a representation of the yeomanry, under the leadership of the noble families, in the thirty-one country tribes from which the great city mass continued to be excluded. Hence the drastic energy with which the arrangements made by Appius Claudius were revoked. The natural alliance between high finance and the mass, though we see it actually at work later (under the Gracchi and Marius) for the destruction of the tradition of the blood,[728] was at any rate made impossible for many generations. Bourgeoisie and yeomanry, money and landowning, maintained a reciprocal equilibrium of separate organisms, and were held together and made efficient by the State-idea (of which the nobility was the incarnation) until this inward form fell to pieces, and the two tendencies broke apart in enmity. The First Punic War was a traders’ war and directed against the agrarian interest, and, therefore, the consul Appius Claudius (a descendant of the great Censor) laid the decision of the matter in 284 before the Comitia Centuriata. The conquest of the Po plain, on the other hand, was in the interests of the peasantry and it was, therefore, in the Comita Tributa that it was carried by the Tribune C. Flaminius--the first genuinely Cæsarian type in Roman history, builder of the Via Flaminia and the Circus Flaminius. But when in pursuance of his policy he (as Censor in 220) forbade the Senators to engage in trade, and also at the same time made the old noble centuries accessible to plebeians, he was practically benefiting only the new financial nobility of the First Punic War period, and thus (entirely in spite of himself) he became the creator of _high finance organized as an Estate_--that is, that of the Equites, who a century later put an end to the great age of the nobility. Henceforth, when Hannibal (before whom Flaminius had fallen on the field of battle) had been disposed of, money steadily became, even for the government as such, the “_ultima ratio_” in the accomplishment of its policy--the last true State-policy that the Classical world was to know.

When the Scipios and their circle had ceased to be the governing influence, nothing remained but the private policies of individuals, who followed their own interests without scruple, and looked upon the “_orbis terrarum_” as passive booty. The historian Polybius (who belonged to that circle) regarded Flaminius as a mere demagogue and traced to him all the misfortunes of the Gracchan period. He was wholly in error as to Flaminius’s intentions, but he was right as to his effect. Flaminius--like the elder Cato, who with the blind zeal of the agrarian overthrew the great Scipio on account of his world-policy--achieved the reverse of what he intended. Money stepped into the place of blood-leadership, and money took less than three generations to exterminate the yeomanry.

If it was an improbable piece of good luck in the destinies of the Classical peoples that Rome was the only city-state to survive the Revolution with an unimpaired constitution, it was, on the contrary, almost a miracle that in our West--with its genealogical forms deep-rooted in the idea of duration--violent revolution broke out at all, even in one place--namely, Paris. It was not the strength, but the weakness of French Absolutism which brought the English ideas, in combination with the power of money, to the point of an explosion which gave living form to the catchwords of the “Enlightenment,” which bound together virtue and terror, freedom and despotism, and which echoed still even in the minor catastrophes of 1830 and 1848 and the more recent Socialistic longing for catastrophe.[729] In England itself, when the aristocracy ruled more absolutely than ever in France, there was certainly a small circle round Fox and Sheridan which was enthusiastic for the ideas of the Revolution--all of which were of English provenance--and men talked of universal suffrage and Parliamentary reform.[730] But that was quite enough to induce both parties, under the leadership of a Whig (the younger Pitt), to take the sharpest measures to defeat any and every attempt to interfere in the slightest degree with the aristocratic régime for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The English nobility let loose the twenty-year war against France, and mobilized all the monarchs of Europe to bring about in the end, not the fall of Napoleon, but the fall of the Revolution--the Revolution that had had the naïve daring to introduce the opinions of private English thinkers into practical politics, and so to give a position to the Tiers État of which the consequences were all the better foreseen in the English lobbies for having been overlooked in the Paris salons.[731]

What was called “Opposition” in England was--the attitude of one aristocratic party while the other was running the Government. It did not mean there, as it meant all over the Continent, professional criticism of the work which it was someone else’s profession to do, but the practical endeavour to force the activity of Government into a form in which the opposition was ready and fit at any moment to take it over. But this Opposition was at once--and in complete ignorance of its social presuppositions--taken as a model for that which the educated in France and elsewhere aimed at creating, namely, a class-domination of the Tiers État under the eyes of a dynasty, no very clear idea being formed as to the latter’s future. The English dispositions were, from Montesquieu onwards, lauded with enthusiastic misunderstanding--although these Continental countries, not being islands, lacked the first condition precedent for an “English” evolution. Only in one point was England really a model. When the bourgeoisie had got so far as to turn the absolute state back again into an Estate-state, they found over there a picture which in fact had never been other than it was. True, it was the aristocracy alone who ruled in it--but at least it was not the Crown.

The result of the turn, and the basic form of the Continental States at the beginning of the Civilization, is “Constitutional Monarchy,” the extremest possibility of which appears as what we call nowadays a Republic. It is necessary to get clear, once and for all, of the mumblings of the doctrinaires who think in timeless and therefore unreal concepts and for whom “Republic” is a form-in-itself. The republican ideal of the nineteenth century has no more resemblance to the Classical _res publica_, or even to Venice or the original Swiss cantons, than the English constitution to a “constitution” in the Continental sense. That which _we_ call republic is a _negation_, which of inward necessity postulates that the thing denied is an ever-present possibility. It is non-monarchy in forms borrowed from the monarchy. The genealogical feeling is immensely strong in Western mankind; it strains its conscience so far as to pretend that Dynasty determines its political conduct even when Dynasty no longer exists at all. The historical is embodied therein, and unhistorically we cannot live. It makes a great difference whether, as in the case of the Classical world, the dynastic principle conveys absolutely nothing to the inner feelings of a man, or, as in the case of the West, it is real enough to need six generations of educated people to fight it down in themselves. Feeling is the secret enemy of all constitutions that are plans and not growths; they are in last analysis nothing but defensive measures born of fear and mistrust. The urban conception of freedom--freedom _from_ something--narrows itself to a merely anti-dynastic significance, and republican enthusiasm lives only on this feeling.

Such a negation inevitably involves a preponderance of theory. While Dynasty and its close congener Diplomacy conserve the old tradition and pulse, Constitutions contain an overweight of systems, bookishness, and framed concepts--such as is entirely unthinkable in England, where nothing negative and defensive adheres to the form of government. It is not for nothing that the Faustian is _par excellence_ the reading and writing Culture. The printed book is an emblem of temporal, the Press of spatial, infinity. In contrast with the immense power and tyranny of these symbols, even the Chinese Civilization seems almost empty of writing. In Constitutions, literature is put into the field against knowledge of men and things, language against race, abstract right against successful tradition--regardless of whether a nation involved in the tide of events is still capable of work and “maintaining its form.” Mirabeau was quite alone and unsuccessful in combating the Assembly, which “confused politics with fiction.” Not only the three doctrinaire constitutions of the age--the French of 1791, the German of 1848 and 1919--but practically all such attempts shut their eyes to the great Destiny in the fact-world and imagine that that is the same as defeating it. In lieu of unforeseen happenings, the incidents of strong personality and imperious circumstances, it is Causality that is to rule--timeless, just, unvarying, rational cohesion of cause and effect. It is symptomatic that no written constitution knows of money as a political force. It is pure theory that they contain, one and all.

This rift in the essence of constitutional monarchy is irremediable. Here actual and conceptual, work and critique, are frontally opposed, and it is their mutual attrition that constitutes what the average educated man calls internal politics. Apart from the cases of Prussia-Germany and Austria--where constitutions did come into existence at first,[732] but in the presence of the older political traditions were never very influential--it was only in England that the practice of government kept itself homogeneous. Here, race held its own against principle. Men had more than an inkling that real politics, politics aiming at historical success, is a matter of training and not of shaping. This was no aristocratic prejudice, but a cosmic fact that emerges much more distinctly in the experience of any English racehorse-trainer than in all the philosophical systems in the world. Shaping can refine training, but not replace it. And thus the higher society of England, Eton and Balliol, became training-grounds where politicians were worked up with a consistent sureness the like of which is only to be found in the training of the Prussian officer-corps--trained, that is, as connoisseurs and masters of the underlying pulse of things (not excluding the hidden course of opinions and ideas). Thus prepared, they were able, in the great flood of bourgeois-revolutionary principles that swept over the years after 1832, to preserve and control the being-stream which they directed. They possessed “training,” the suppleness and collectedness of the rider who, with a good horse under him, feels victory coming nearer and nearer. They allowed the great principles to move the mass because they knew well that it is money that is the “wherewithal” by which motion is imparted to these great principles, and they substituted, for the brutal methods of the eighteenth century, methods more refined and not less effective--one of the simpler of these being to threaten their opponents with the cost of a new election. The doctrinaire constitutions of the Continent saw only the one side of the fact democracy. Here, where there was no constitution, but men were in “condition,” it was seen as a whole.

A vague feeling of all this was never quite lost on the Continent. For the absolute State of the Baroque there had been a perfectly clear form, but for “constitutional monarchy” there were only unsteady compromises, and Conservative and Liberal parties were distinguished--not, as in England after Canning, by the possession of different but well-tested modes of government, applied turn-and-turn-about to the actual work of governing--but according to the direction in which they respectively desired to alter the constitution--namely, towards tradition or towards theory. Should the Parliament serve the Dynasty, or vice versa?--that was the bone of contention, and in disputing over it it was forgotten that _foreign_ policy was the final aim. The “Spanish” and the misnamed “English” sides of a constitution would not and could not grow together, and thus it befell that during the nineteenth century the diplomatic service outwards and the Parliamentary activity inwards developed in two divergent directions. Each became in fundamental feeling alien to, and contemptuous of, the other. Life fretted itself to soreness in a form that it had not developed out of itself. After Thermidor, France succumbed to the rule of the Bourse, mitigated from time to time by the setting up of a military dictature (1800, 1851, 1871, 1918). Bismarck’s creation was in fundamentals of a dynastic nature, with a parliamentary component of decidedly subordinate importance, and in it the inner friction was so strong as to monopolize the available political energy, and finally, after 1916, to exhaust the organism itself. The Army had its own history, with a great tradition going back to Frederick William I,[733] and so also had the administration. In them was the source of Socialism as one kind of true political “training,” diametrically opposed to the English[734] but, like it, a full expression of strong race-quality. The officer and the official were trained high. But the necessity of breeding up a corresponding political type was not recognized. Higher policy was handled “administratively” and minor policy was hopeless squabbling. And so army and administration finally became aims in themselves, after Bismarck’s disappearance had removed the one man who even without a supply of real politicians to back him (this tradition alone could have produced) was big enough to treat both as tools of policy. When the issue of the World War removed the upper layers, nothing remained but parties educated for opposition only, and these brought the activity of Government down to a level hitherto unknown in any Civilization.

But to-day Parliamentarism is in full decay. It was a _continuation of the Bourgeois Revolution by other means_, the revolution of the Third Estate of 1789 brought into legal form and joined with its opponent the Dynasty as one governmental unit. Every modern election, in fact, is a civil war carried on by ballot-box and every sort of spoken and written stimulus, and every great party-leader is a sort of Napoleon. In this form, meant to remain infinitely valid, which is peculiar to the Western Culture and would be nonsensical and impossible in any other, we discern once more our characteristic tendency to infinity, historical foresight[735] and forethought, and _will to order the distant future_, in this case according to bourgeois standards of the present.

All the same, Parliamentarism is not a summit as the absolute Polis and the Baroque State were summits, but a brief transition--namely, between the Late-Culture period with its mature forms and the age of great individuals in a formless world. It contains, like the houses and furniture of the first half of the nineteenth century, a residue of good Baroque. The parliamentary habit is English Rococo--but, no longer un-self-conscious and in the blood, but superficial-initiative and at the mercy of goodwill. Only in the brief periods of first enthusiasms has it an appearance of depth and duration, and then only because in the flush of victory respect for one’s newly-won status makes it incumbent to adopt the high manners of the defeated class. To preserve the form, even when it contradicts the advantage, is the convention which makes parliamentarism _possible_. But when this convention comes to be fully observed, _the very fact that it is so means that the essence of parliamentarism has already been evaporated_. The Non-Estate falls apart again into its natural interest-groups, and the passion of stubborn and victorious defence is over. And as soon as the form ceases to possess the attractiveness of a young ideal that will summon men to the barricades, unparliamentary methods of attaining an object without (and even in spite of) the ballot-box will make their appearance--such as money, economic pressure, and, above all, the strike. Neither the megalopolitan masses nor the strong individuals have any real respect for this form without depth or past, and when the discovery is made that it is _only_ a form, it has already become a mark and shadow. With the beginning of the twentieth century Parliamentarism (even English) is tending rapidly towards taking up itself the rôle that it once assigned to the kingship. It is becoming an impressive spectacle for the multitude of the Orthodox, while the centre of gravity of big policy, already _de jure_ transferred from the Crown to the people’s representatives, is passing _de facto_ from the latter to unofficial groups and the will of unofficial personages. The World War almost completed this development. There is no way back to the old parliamentarism from the domination of Lloyd George and the Napoleonism of the French militarists. And for America, hitherto lying apart and self-contained, rather a region than a State, the parallelism of President and Congress which she derived from a theory of Montesquieu has, with her entry into world politics, become untenable, and must in times of real danger make way for formless powers such as those with which Mexico and South America have long been familiar.

VIII

With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find ourselves to-day. It is the _transition from Napoleonism to Cæsarism_, a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two centuries and can be shown to exist in all the Cultures. The Chinese call it Shan-Kwo, the “period of the Contending States” (480-230, corresponding to the Classical 300-50).[736] At the beginning are reckoned seven great powers, which, first planlessly, but later with clearer and clearer purpose, tend to the inevitable final result of this close succession of vast wars and revolutions. A century later there are still five. In 441 the ruler of the Chóu dynasty became a state-pensioner of the “Eastern Duke,” and the remains of territory that he possessed ceased accordingly to figure in later history. Simultaneously began in the unphilosophical north-west[737] the swift rise of the “Roman” state of Tsin, which extended its influence westward and southward over Tibet and Yunnan and enclosed the other states in a great arc. The focus of the opposition was in the kingdom of Tsu in the Taoist south,[738] whence the Chinese Civilization pressed slowly outwards into the still little-known lands south of the great river. Here we have in fact the opposition of Rome and the Hellenistic--on the one side, hard, clear will-to-power; on the other, the tendency to dreaming and world-improvement. In 368-320 (corresponding to the Second Punic War) the contest intensified itself into an uninterrupted struggle of the whole Chinese world, fought with mass armies, for which the population was strained to the extreme limit. “The allies, whose lands were ten times as great as those of Tsin, in vain rolled up a million men--Tsin had ever reserves in hand still. From first to last a million men fell,” writes Sze-ma-tsien. Su-tsin, who began by being Chancellor of Tsin, but later became a supporter of the League of Nations (_hoh-tsung_) idea and went over to the Opposition, worked up two great coalitions (333 and 321), which, however, collapsed from inward disunity at the first battles. His great adversary, the Chancellor Chang-I, resolutely Imperialist, was in 311 on the point of bringing the Chinese world to voluntary subjection when a change of occupancy of the throne caused his combination to miscarry. In 294 began the campaigns of Pe-Ki.[739] It was in the prestige of his victories that the King of Tsin took the mystic Emperor-title of the legendary age,[740] which openly expressed the claim to world-rule, and was at once imitated by the ruler of Tsi in the east.[741] With this began the second maximum phase of the decisive struggles. The number of independent states grew steadily less. In 255 even the home state of Confucius, Lu, vanished, and in 249 the Chóu dynasty came to an end. In 246 the mighty Wang-Cheng became, at the age of thirteen, Emperor of Tsin, and in 241, with the aid of his Chancellor Lui-Shi (the Chinese Mæcenas[742]), he fought out to victory the last bout that the last opponent, the Empire of Tsu, ventured to challenge. In 221, sole ruler in actual fact, he assumed the title Shi (Augustus). This is the beginning of the Imperial age in China.

No era confronts its mankind so distinctly with the alternative of _great form_ or _great individual powers_ as this “Period of the Contending States.” In the degree in which the nations cease to be politically in “condition,” in that degree possibilities open up for the energetic private person who means to be politically creative, who will have power at any price, and who as a phenomenon of force becomes the Destiny of an entire people or Culture. Events have become unpredictable on the basis of form. Instead of the given tradition that can dispense with genius (because it is itself cosmic force at highest capacity), we have now the accident of great fact-men. The accident of their rise brings a weak people (for example, the Macedonians), to the peak of events overnight, and the accident of their death (for example, Cæsar’s) can immediately plunge a world from personally secured order into chaos.

This indeed had been manifested earlier in critical times of transition. The epoch of the Fronde, the Ming-shu, the First Tyrannis, when men were not in form, but fought about form, has always thrown up a number of great figures who grew too big for definition and limitation in terms of office. The change from Culture to Civilization, with its typical Napoleonism, does so too. But with this, which is the preface to unredeemed historical formlessness, dawns the real day of the great individual. For us this period attained almost to its climax in the World War; in the Classical World it began with Hannibal, who challenged Rome in the name of Hellenism (to which inwardly he belonged), but went under because the Hellenistic East, in true Classical fashion, apprehended the meaning of the hour too late, or not at all. With his downfall began that proud sequence that runs from the Scipios through Æmilius Paullus, Flamininus, the Catos, the Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla to Pompey, Cæsar, and Augustus. In China, correspondingly, during the period of the “Contending States,” a like chain of statesmen and generals centred on Tsin as the Classical figures centred on Rome. In accordance with the complete want of understanding of the political side of Chinese history that prevails, these men are usually described as Sophists.[743] They were so, but only in the same sense as leading Romans of the same period were Stoics--that is, as having been educated in the philosophy and rhetoric of the Greek East. All were finished orators and all from time to time wrote on philosophy, Cæsar and Brutus no less than Cato and Cicero, but they did so not as professional philosophers, but because _otium cum dignitate_ was the habit of cultivated gentlemen. In business hours they were masters of fact, whether on battle-field or in high politics, and precisely the same is true of the Chancellors Chang-I and Su-tsin;[744] the dreaded diplomatist Fan-Sui who overthrew Pe-Ki, the general; Wei-Yang the legislator of Tsin; Lui-Shi, the first Emperor’s Mæcenas, and others.