Chapter IV

Up to a short time before America was discovered, and Russia emerged on the stage of the world’s affairs under Ivan the Great, Europe had been a social, moral, and spiritual unity. This unity, despised and blackened by the apostles of enlightenment in the eighteenth century, under the title of “the feudal system,” had been developing from the fourteenth century onwards in the wrong direction of nationalist monarchy, instead of in the only right one of such a popularly grounded, elective feudalism as we find foreshadowed in the writings of Plato, More, or Campanella. At its highest and best, it had not succeeded in preventing such purely political wars as the dynastic struggle of the later Plantagenets with France, or the heroic struggle of the Holy Roman Empire with the papacy, or the civil struggle between the burghers of the free towns and the feudal overlords; but it must also be remembered on the credit side of the balance, that it had also promoted the largely idealistic effort of the Crusaders, the unified social and moral enlightenment of monasticism, and had created as well a great common language of art, rooted in popular symbolism, a common faith unified in outward observance, and, in its great revival of Latin, a common speech whereby scholars from all parts of Europe might easily understand each other.

These are compensation enough, in such minds as realize their complete lack of such rallying points to-day, for the failure of those days to achieve telephones or modern sanitation. The same order of thought that had re-established centres of culture and philosophy after the complete breakdown of the old Roman order in the eighth century, continued its effort almost unimpaired up to the close of the fifteenth. We still in a measure to-day partake of as many of its fruits as the failure of discipline, represented by the revival of nationalistic warring powers in the fourteenth, the revival of new learning in the fifteenth, and the Protestant and counter-Catholic reformations of the sixteenth, have left to us. At its apex, in the thirteenth century, life from the North Cape to Palestine, from Cornwall to the Carpathians, was of one piece throughout. As the next world was divided into the realms of heaven, purgatory, and hell, so this world was divided into its appropriate realms: the king’s palace, the feudal castle, the cathedral, the abbey, the market town, the guildhall, the peasant’s hut. Over all lay the spiritual sway of a unified ecclesiastic order, the solid power of Catholic Christianity. Towards the east lay the less intelligent, less rationally disciplined, more thaumaturgic and despotically absolute power of the Orthodox Greek faith, which had been completely separated from the western faith since the ninth century, and which revolved about the decaying court of Constantinople. With the fall of that capital in 1456 and the consequent driving of a wedge by the Turks into the heart of Christianity, the rift between the Eastern and the Western churches had become chronic, and the Eastern Church had grown more and more hidebound and static, remote from anything resembling forward-looking Christianity. A little before this event, there had come about--thanks to the failure of the Crusades and the spirit of growing commercialism--the rise of a new burgher class and their alliance with the purely political and dynastic ambitions of a nationalist monarchy, which took place first in France, and later in England.

It is worth noticing that both these countries lay on the western borders of Europe. In Spain, too, a nationalist monarchy developed, but it was dependent on the support of the old feudal nobility rather than the bourgeoisie, had its own internal problems to settle in the fact that part of the country lay in the hands of the Mohammedans, and did not in any case exert much influence abroad earlier than the sixteenth century. Italy, unable to find a single ruler, was rapidly sinking into the gulf of anarchy through which the torrent of the Renaissance made its way, to peter out on the shoals of academicism and realistic sentimentality. But soon after 1492, the date of Columbus’ discovery of the New World, the most startling sign that a new order had come into being in the world was furnished by Germany. In 1517 in the very heart of the Holy Roman Empire of legend and heroic achievement for the Catholic faith, the Augustinian monk Luther posted his theses to the church door at Wittenberg. This was three years before Cortez completed his conquest of Mexico, or Magellan made the first circumnavigation of the globe. The subsequent process known as the Reformation, whether in its early Protestant or later Catholic manifestation, paid no heed to the great spiritual unity of the past. It rested entirely on social and economic factors. Consciously or not, it either supported or failed to combat the nationalist morality to which religion was to be subservient, of which morality we have reaped the latest fruits in the outburst of unspiritually motivated hatred that accompanied the Great War. Its chief result was the complete separation of Northern Teutonic and Southern Mediterranean Christianity.

If we could construct a thought map as opposed to a nationalist map of Europe about the year 1550, we would find that Europe was no longer in any sense a unity. Europe then, as since, fell readily into two halves. The dividing line was never totally clear, but the northern and western part of Europe was predominantly Protestant, as the eastern and southern remained predominantly Catholic. In the western half of Europe, Spain was the strongest of Catholic outposts; but Spain had her last triumph in 1570, the year of Lepanto, and eighteen years later was to know her first heavy defeat in the destruction of the Armada. In opposition to Catholicism were England, the Scandinavian countries, a considerable portion of France, notably the south-western half, and practically all of northern and western Germany. Southern Germany, like Bavaria, remained Catholic, but Switzerland again became Protestant. On the other hand, Italy, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, remained Catholic to the core.

Thus it came about that America became open--especially after the defeat of the Spanish Armada--to colonization from Western and Protestant European countries, while Russia, despite Ivan the Terrible’s attempt to find a _rapprochement_ with England, became open to influence from Eastern Europe, which was predominantly feudal and Catholic. The outcome was to make Russia more and more feudal and autocratic, while America became more and more _bourgeois_ and Protestant. After Peter the Great’s time, Russia presented to Europe the image of an autocracy of a little more logical and thorough-going stamp than the autocracy practised in France and Spain; after King William’s War, America became a democracy a little more advanced and complete than the type of successful commercial democracy governing England.

Both countries, nevertheless, sought for a common ideal in the past. Russia, as refounded by Ivan the Great, proclaimed its kinship with Rome. It was the “third Rome,” the first being the Rome of Augustus, the second the Rome of Byzantium. The mystic idea that the _pallium_ of world-empire had travelled from Rome to Constantinople and from Constantinople, in the wake of Ivan the Great’s bride, the Empress Sophia, to Moscow, where it was to be firmly established for ever, ruled Russian State policy from 1490 up to the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. It invested the Romanovs and their successors, who were not even Russian in essence, with semi-divine authority and mystery. It was perhaps the basis of such a startling stroke of policy as Catherine the Great’s offering open asylum to the Jesuits after their banishment from France and Spain. At the same time, the thirteen American colonies, newly established, began playing with the notion that they too were Rome--but Rome of the republic, Rome of the Latian league. This idea was markedly materialistic and rationalistic, as the Russian idea was markedly mystical and emotional. It grew to enormous proportions after the Revolution, when the infant Republic was shaken to its foundations by the revelations concerning the Society of the Cincinnati. Thus over the background of Russia and America, the patterns of different Romes grew and spread.

That background was nomadic, centrifugal, primitive in both cases. In America it was a background of hunters and fishers, trappers, traders, and roving Redskins. It was Franco-Spanish, Spanish-Indian. The type of man that this background was producing--and continued to produce after the first Anglo-Saxons crossed the Alleghany barrier--was the self-assertive, independent, inventive, resourceful hunter and fighter. The fact that the country was wilderness, largely forested, with poor communications and few openings for trade, added to Spanish adventurousness, Norman-French daring, and Anglo-Saxon fanaticism a fresh tang. If people could not agree together under law on major points of religion or minor points of social observance, all that was necessary was to kill off or frighten away a few Indians with firearms and to live isolated, far apart. In this respect the North American family soon became a wandering tribe, liable to the most casual accretions from without and to the most arbitrary splits and divisions of sentiment, except in districts early settled, where the common bonds of a unified stock and better communications served to hold the clan together. In the middle and western colonies, the white colonist soon took on, in his dealings with his neighbours, and in his disposition to rove about, the colours of Indian life.

The Russian too had his background, but the background was Tartar. It was a life either agricultural or nomadic, like the American life, but that which made and kept the country productive was not the independent desire to make fortunes and to seek new fields for themselves on the part of an active population, but a profound acceptance of inner necessity on the part of an inert one. The Tartar-Russian temperament was inert, or stung to sudden action under the pressure of crisis, while the American temperament was active, sinking to inertia only under the stimulus of growing prosperity. What drove the Russians to migrate was not the sense of a new horizon to be attained, or a new horizon to be conquered, but the mere desire to escape from an unchanging round, an inner need to stand aloof from the village and its elders, the landowner’s mansion and its barns, the bloodthirsty Cossack, or the life-sapping tax-gatherer. That was because from the beginning the Russian family had not been a family in the American sense, but a great collection of souls: feudal retainers, house and farm serfs, and distant tributaries. In Russia, and more particularly in the steppes of Southern and Eastern Russia, apart from the trading centres of the North Russia forest belt, the peasant tended continually to revert to the colours of pure Tartar and nomad life.

Thus we may safely say, without fear of contradiction, that the European influence, transported to America, lost its ordered English characteristics, and became something more akin to Spanish buccaneering or the loose confederacy of Indian tribes; while the same influence, exerted on Russia from her western borders, made that country a Late-Latin imperium, greatly modified by the spirit of Tartar nomadry. This remarkable transformation was due, after all sociological, racial, religious factors have been weighed and dismissed, primarily to climatic and geological factors. In neither Russia nor North America is nature a friendly factor, nor is it possible there to look on man as an “addition to nature” nor as the “measure of all things” in the Greco-Latin sense. Both countries had climates of exceptional severity, vast stretches of soil of inferior productiveness, a population thinly scattered, and lacking, until the later growth of railways, in means of communication. The most fertile agricultural region of America, the Mississippi valley, lay far inland through enormous forests, at the mercy of floods and malaria, as the most fertile region of Russia, the Volga basin, lay on the remote Caspian frontier, at the mercy of steppe winds, and consequent famine and typhus. Psychologically, the Russian and the American reacted differently to this situation. In Russia, the influx of Tartar blood resulted in making the majority of the race fatalistic, sensual, lazy, with a tendency towards a curious mingling of pantheism and sacramental Christianity. In America, the influx of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism made the majority reckless, highstrung, extremely active, with a tendency towards a mingling of outward practical sense and inward moral fanaticism.

From the date when America and Russia appeared on the horizon, we can trace the steady rise of European individualism. The revolutionary impulse of Europe has always been an affair of outstanding individuals, perhaps of small minorities: even the French Revolution was ultimately accomplished by a few outstanding clever politicians, centering on Paris. The revolutionary impulse, on the other hand, in both America and in Russia, has been an affair of mass-movements. Washington was intellectually merely the ordinary American landowner of his time; Lenin the ordinary provincial noble. Such revolutionary upheavals as Alexander Second’s freeing of the serfs, or America’s Civil War, came about not through the agitation of any single body of men, but by a combination of interests: economic and sentimental. In Russia, it was necessary for the emancipation of the serfs to take place, because the system of Nicholas I, which had relied on foreign conquest to ensure the prosperity of the country, had broken down; and the system of serfdom, which had really only flourished in the black soil belt of South Russia, was, as Alexander II said, “in danger of abolishing itself from below.” In America it became increasingly necessary to limit the field of the slave-holding class to the Lower Southern States, or the economic control of the financier and trading class in the North would be threatened by the irruption of slave-holders into the rich Western territory and the consequent creation of an agrarian imperialism. None of the changes that took place in American or Russian political life during the nineteenth century were so arbitrary as the violent cross-currents that, during the same time, affected Europe.

The advance of Russia and America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not without its influence in Europe, or rather on the type of European genius that Europe was to produce. The rise of the Jesuit order within the Catholic church and the corresponding and opposed rise of mystical non-conformist sects such as swarmed in the latter eighteenth century,--for example, Wesleyanism and Swedenborgianism--were its first symptoms in the religious field. The corresponding decline in architecture into the extravagances of later baroque, or the frigidities of academic classicism, or the false romanticism of the Gothic revival, mark its influx in the field of architecture. Such individual geniuses as Voltaire or Kant, Blake or Beethoven, Carlyle or Nietzsche, Ibsen or Shaw, reveal the same splitting up of Europe into efficiently Americanised revolutionary and sceptically Catholicised reactionary as was going on elsewhere. Henceforth Europe, or European life, was no longer a unity; and only a unity can produce great social movements, such as had culminated in previous centuries in a Dante, a Shakespeare, an Aquinas, a Bach, a Cervantes, or a Racine. From the outset of the nineteenth century, the individual in Europe became more important than his age. It was only outside the frontiers of Europe, in Russia or in America, that the age was to remain more important than the individual.

2

It was through the deliberately exercised will of a minority that Russia and America became independent; and this minority consisted in both cases of people who had been largely Europeanised. Left to themselves, the Russians would have relapsed into nomad savagery; their unity was imposed on them by a long list of ambitious princes, from Ivan the Great down to Peter the Great, whose eyes were directed continually towards Europe. Left to themselves, the true Americans--the early Spanish, French, and English colonists--might have conceivably remained as divided and sparsely scattered settlements surrounded by a fringe of Indians and wilderness: their contact with the outer world was kept up by a long list of Puritan divines and southern aristocrats armed with muskets, law books, and Bibles, and busily transplanting into the wilderness the fundamental contrast between European Whig and Tory. Up to 1688, the date of the Whig revolution in England and its reverberation in the Colonies in the shape of King William’s War, the whole history of the American colonies was nothing but chaos and anarchy. The successive squabbles with governors, the successive acceptance and dismissal of royal proprietors, the successive guerilla wars with the Indians, form a complex labyrinth of greed, intrigue and baseness not easy to match anywhere. It was only through influence and pressure from without, from England, that any civilisation kept itself alive at all. Likewise in Russia, the small body of German, Dutch, Italian artisans, architects, engineers, scholars, soldiers of fortune and sycophants that filled the German suburb at Moscow from 1500 to 1688, transformed Russia under Peter the Great, and continued to do so under Elizabeth and Catherine.

The ruling minority in America curried favour with one or the other of the political parties that happened to be in the ascendant in England; in Russia, as the peasant was illiterate, the minority had to curry favour with the Czar himself. During the reigns of Peter, of Elizabeth, and Catherine, Russian literature--that is to say, literature written in the Russian language, as distinguished from Old Church Slavonic--made its appearance. The most potent weapon of civilisation, the written word, was snatched once and for all from the hands of the Orthodox monks and Metropolitans, whose chronicles had been hitherto the sole means of expression, and given to the secular powers, the outstanding nobles, upon whose support the safety of Czardom really rested. This literature, in both cases, was to take its intellectual tone from Europe, its sentimental pretexts only were Russian or American.

The influence of such Republican speculations as James Harrington’s “Oceana” influenced the one, as the influence of the sentimental naturalism of Diderot and the Encyclopædists influenced the other. At about the same time, and under the same conditions, the power of the Old New England theocracy, and of the Byzantine family-order began to wane, and the control of expression of opinion began to pass to the thriving but new commercial communities of St. Petersburg, New York, Charleston and Odessa.

To both new countries Europe was like a great land-bridge, representing an older, more powerful, more refined civilisation. The ideas that prevailed in America or in Russia were not only derived from this body of thought, but were applied to conditions that were totally different. In the case of Russia, the central authority of the Czar, the nobles and the bureaucracy, attempted to transform an inert mass of semi-Oriental serfdom into something resembling a modern nationalistic monarchy. In the case of America, the most prosperous classes, the independent merchants and bankers, attempted to fuse an inchoate mass of fanatics, planters and frontiersmen into a political unity which was democratic and federal. The ideas upon which both worked came from Europe; in the case of Russia the model sought after was the model of the unified French monarchy, the Prussian State, the Austrian Empire. In the case of America the model unconsciously followed was that of the Greek city-states, or of the principalities of the Italian Renaissance.

Long ago, if we look far enough back in history, the empires of Babylonia-Assyria and of Egypt had been states dependent on great river systems for their unity. They had sprung up independently, while the land-bridge that lay between them, Palestine and Moab, being highland and desert, was not only at a lower stage of culture, but, under the Amorites and Hittites, became a body of traders, borrowing from each in turn, and profiting by their situation in the territory where lay the chief caravan routes between the two great centres of Babylon and Heliopolis, to develop finally an independent viewpoint and a composite race-unity for itself under the Semites. With Russia and America, the same process was reversed. Europe lay as a land-bridge between Russia and America. But this land-bridge, as a unified civilisation, had already passed its maximum, and was headed for decline. Now certain elements of that civilisation were to pass beyond Europe’s frontiers into two countries, hitherto undeveloped, which were founded upon river-systems. In Russia these elements were such as could seek a common centre about the Czardom of Muscovy. In America, these elements were such as could build themselves into harmony with the commercial classes of the Atlantic seaboard controlling the river-ways that led into the interior.

3

The “third Rome” that Russia proclaimed herself to be, at the time when the Muscovite Czars became predominant in its affairs, was essentially the mystical, inner Rome of the Byzantine Cæsars. Deriving its authority from seclusion, intrigue, separation between court and people, it accepted none as leader save he who had passed over the portal of the Cathedral of the Transfiguration and had received on his forehead the holy chrism from the hands of the Orthodox Patriarch; however much he may have despised that patriarch in his heart, as did Peter and Catherine. But America founded a Rome of another sort, and in this Rome, democratic and enterprising, none was to be accepted as leader save he who had turned his back upon the ruling party in England and maintained, in combined political and religious thinking, his independence of the motherland. Thus the two wings of the embodied Imperial idea persisted in separation beyond Europe’s frontiers; and the age of their uprise was the age of the decline of the Imperial idea in Europe. Both America and Russia came on the stage of the world’s affairs at the time of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire; both rose to power during the period of intense nationalism that followed; and both played important parts in the final overthrow of Napoleon, who may be said to have attempted to restore an Empire by the power of his sword alone, when as a social and spiritual ideal, it was already dead.

In order to understand the sort of Rome America founded, we must look back to the legendary sources of England. The study of legendary history is often more valuable to the sociological investigator than the study of actual events. The latter merely tells us what a people were able to accomplish under changes of weather and economic prosperity, the pressure of external influence, the million and one contributory causes which make up the life and state of well or ill-being of the community from day to day. Legendary history, on the other hand, reveals the goal steadily aimed at, the ideal to which all aspired, the psychical centre about which all this activity revolves. Thus we cannot understand the Greeks without a study of Achilles, Odysseus, Theseus. The fatalistic bravery, the wily shiftiness, the adventurous courage of a whole folk, are here summed up. Rama and Krishna tell us more about India than the pages of Indian history, which are, as a matter of fact, mostly blank; nor is America itself comprehensible without reference to such quasi-legendary figures as Parson Weems’ Puritanic fixation of Washington, Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, or Daniel Boone. The legendary history of England is to be found in the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History; and as the story told therein is essentially representative of what many English minds of the twelfth century believed to have been the truth, desired to make the truth, it is necessary to look into it.

According to this account, Britain was founded by a Trojan prince, a grandson of Æneas himself, founder of Rome. That such a thing is doubly impossible, we now know, and we are apt to laugh at Geoffrey for putting it forward. Yet even this legend may contain some substratum of truth. The Latian tribes, from which the Romans came, were undoubtedly subject to much Phœnician influence, and there is reason to suspect that the Western Britons, at least, were also subject to some early Phœnician influence. The “Trojans,” whoever they were, may have been a Phœnician people, or a legend retailed by the Phœnicians. At all events, we need not laugh at Geoffrey for his feeble arch spanning the abyss between little Britain and majestic Rome. The fact is, that almost everybody in England, rich or poor, (except perhaps a few clerics who are by nature adepts at concealing both the truth and their doubts) believed in Geoffrey’s time, and for several hundred years later, that the Britons were the descendants of the Trojans, and that under Arthur, their greatest king, they had conquered thirty other kingdoms, and had been on the point of conquering Rome itself when Mordred, Arthur’s nephew, seized crown and queen. This belief was so strong that Henry II, at the end of the twelfth century, was not only induced to rebuild Glastonbury, but his abbot, Henry of Blois, discreetly “found” the tomb of Arthur there, in order to put a stop to persistent rumors concerning the king’s possible reappearance. And the belief was renewed, when under the Tudors, a remote descendant of ancient British kings mounted the throne of his ancestors, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Merlin.

The belief that prevailed in England after the Norman Conquest and throughout the Middle Ages--and this belief was all the more powerful because it was popular, unformulated, unrecognised by the rationalism of the ruling orders--was that England was once on the point of conquering Rome, and that under the new monarchy it would reassume its position as head of the world’s affairs. This faith came to its flower under the Tudors. Under Henry VIII the conquest of Rome became an accomplished fact. The poets, philosophers and divines of the time hailed the advent of Elizabeth in terms that made of her the equal, if not the superior, of any empress of antiquity. And it was precisely at this time that the newly-discovered realm of Virginia was thrown open; that Puritanic sectaries driven out of England by the machinery of the State Church which Tudors and Stuarts had set in action, Calvinistic upholders of that ascetic intolerance which the Catholics later were themselves to imitate, Congregationalist rebels against episcopal supervision, were to establish overseas a republican form of England--a third Rome. This feeling that the mother country, in alliance with Protestant and Colonial dissent, might become a primitive Roman commonwealth in opposition to the monarchial ideas of Renaissance Europe, prevailed throughout the great struggle of the Commons with Charles I, and the subsequent Cromwellian dictatorship. It is not for nothing that John Milton, before writing “Paradise Lost,” meditated an epic on the old Arthurian story. The “Cromwellian” tone of the old story lay closely akin to the rooted ambitions of his race.

In short where Russia, by a process of unconscious assimilation, became the successor of Byzantium and thus a bulwark against Europe, a mystically isolated bulwark, which only such unorthodox Czars as Peter, Catherine, and Alexander II dared to ignore,--America rose to power precisely by consciously reverting to the Rome of the tribunes and of warring patricians and plebeians, a Rome that found its first test in a conflict with another country that had already previously risen to imperial power. England became America’s Carthage; Poland, Lithuania and Sweden became for Imperial Russia the analogues of the Greek city-states. From this fact, and from a host of subsidiary facts, arose the typical introverted attitude of the Russian and its opposite in the American. About the typical, one hundred per cent American one can learn everything but his feelings. His thoughts, his opinions, are all on the surface. America is to him the greatest of countries. American prosperity is the world’s prosperity, American life is the ideal life, America’s expansion is the expansion of the world’s democratic hope into backward Europe and remote, superstitious Asia. Over this simple creed a Whitman, a Jefferson and an Emerson can shake hands. About a Russian you know only his feelings. His opinions he is able to change with disconcerting completeness. A Tolstoy can change from the creed of “getting the best out of life for oneself and family,” to a creed of ascetic denial of all the world’s goods, with no loss of intensity; a Dostoevsky can somehow reconcile the inner conflict between mystic Slavophilism and underground rebellion against Christianity itself, without ceasing to be Dostoevsky. Only a completely exiled American, like Henry James, or one who hankers after exile, like Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville, can fully exploit his feelings; only a completely exiled Russian, like Herzen, or one who hankers after exile like Turgenev, Tchekhov, or Pushkin himself, can maintain any constancy in opinion.

4

But this is not the place to discuss the mental attitudes implied in being an American and a Russian. That will come out more fully as we go on. For the moment we must revert to the course of our interrupted historical analysis, which was abandoned at the moment that the Americans, under Washington, made themselves the sole masters and controllers of the wealth of an immense continent, left by England in their hands; while at the same time the Russians under Catherine became masters and controllers of the whole of Eastern Europe, and issued their first threat to shake off the power of the Turks from Constantinople. Each had accomplished this at the price of a daring alliance. Catherine had allied herself with Prussia, which in the preceding reign had been Russia’s most important enemy, in order to destroy Poland utterly; America had allied herself with France, which twenty years before had appeared as the colonists’ chief enemy, in order to conquer England. But the elaborate game of eighteenth century diplomacy that both had played, based as it was on balances of power, secret treaties, dynastic successions, bribings and spyings, and a cynical understanding of the foibles of human nature, was about to come to an end. In 1789 the French Revolution broke out, and the cause of eighteenth century monarchy collapsed in ruins. During the same year the first congress of the United States assembled, under the present American Constitution.

During the years that had elapsed since the British Government withdrew from the colonies in 1783, America had hardened from a confederation of semi-independent commonwealths rather on the Polish model, completely lacking in internal unity, to a federal republic. This transformation had come about thanks to three converging causes. In the first place, England, despite the Revolution, still held a vague sway over the interior, and though promising to abandon her outposts in the Great Lake territory, refused to do so. This gave the colonists a reason for continuing to cling together, inasmuch as all were now equally interested in the hunger for land that possessed the settlers pushing forward beyond the Appalachian region. In the second place, without a central government, there was danger that the outlying settlements might be tempted by bribes and intrigue to throw in their lot with England again. Vermont actually attempted to do so; and in the new regions of Kentucky and Tennessee intrigue was going on with the Spaniards in occupation of Louisiana that boded equally ill. Moreover there was the question of the Indian tribes to settle; and the Great Lakes and Mississippi region not only provided the chief backbone of the Indian resistance, but were open to foreign agents ready to arm the Indians, against the Colonists. Lastly, the colonies had come out of the Revolution crippled with debt, and with a worthless currency. It was to the interest of the newly-born, independent banking community of New York, headed by Alexander Hamilton, to fund this debt and replace this currency with legal tender. Thanks to Hamilton and his associates, the Federal Union rested from the start upon the conservative money power. The outbreak of a local rebellion in Massachusetts, the increasing trouble on the frontier, served but to centralise and focus the aims of the Colonists upon Federalism, and hasten the adoption of a constitution.

During the same time, the Russian autocracy under Catherine became more and more a question of the personal whim of whatever sovereign happened to be occupying the throne. Catherine had begun as theoretically liberal, but she had inherited a system that put unlimited power into her hands to play with, and the year before she came to the throne, the gentry were finally liberated from all obligations of state service. This left her free to carry on the machinery of government with the aid of any subordinates that would do her bidding absolutely, undeterred by patriotic, religious, or moral scruples. As Catherine was herself entirely without such scruples, and ruled alone by her passion for vanity and display, her favourites had the easy task of appealing to her baser side. Conquest was what Catherine wanted; whether it was to bedazzle Diderot and Voltaire, or to partition Poland, or to embark on a campaign with Turkey, she could not resist the lure of posing as the mistress of Europe. Frederick the Great, who from his desperate position as the leader of a forlorn hope, gradually built up Prussia into a power to be reckoned with, understood this perfectly, and was not sparing of his flatteries, while at the same time he watched with equal understanding the rise of the colonies, and wrote measured and intelligent eulogies of their leader Washington. The difficulty with Catherine’s system, was that it depended altogether on her iron will, and she could do nothing to ensure the same determination to over-ride opposition for her successors. In order to go on she had to overlook the desperate peasant-rising created by Pugachev, to break with one favourite after another, and to treat with contempt the terrible outbreak of cholera that occurred in Moscow itself during her reign.

To both countries, the French Revolution came as a terrible shock. To Catherine it became apparent that unless the sovereigns of Europe acted in concert to save the French Monarchy, her own game was as good as lost. But unfortunately, the European sovereigns were indisposed to act together, and separately the Revolutionary armies easily beat them. To Washington and the most intelligent Americans, it soon became obvious that although America was in alliance with France, to maintain that alliance under new conditions would only lead to fresh European occupations of American soil, and to the condition that the colonists had already faced in the last years of the Revolution, when only the dwindling and ill-equipped Continental army stood between them and submission. In the outcome both countries, despite their previous embroilments in European politics, took a fresh step backward into isolation. In America that isolation was conscious and proclaimed; in Russia it was instinctive, subconscious, and uneasy. Its course in both cases, was charted and developed by the subsequent career of Napoleon.

We cannot understand Napoleon’s character, nor the tragedy of his career, unless we grasp the fact that he was born in an atmosphere of local rebellion resembling exactly the rebellion of the American colonies under Great Britain. But in Corsica, this sort of thing was bound to fail, because the Corsicans did not have, like the American colonists, the undeveloped wastes and the boundless resources of a remote continent to fall back upon. Napoleon grew to manhood understanding that destiny would not consent to be on the side of European uprisings; and this understanding guided his mental orientation, first towards the idealistic Jacobins, whose real aim was a Constitutional and popular monarchy, then, when that hope failed, towards a military dictatorship. And this military dictatorship took on more and more the outer form of a Roman imperium divested of Byzantine ceremonial, in his own eyes. By combining theoretic liberalism with personal talent he thought he could revive ancient Cæsarism.

The true turning point in Napoleon’s career came when from his camp at Boulogne, he turned East before learning of Trafalgar, and went off to fight Austria and Prussia. The star he then followed led him inevitably to the blazing streets of Moscow, and finally to utter self-destruction, because every step that he took upon the eastward path depended on his ability to create an atmosphere of overwhelming military prestige, in order to overawe all the monarchs of Europe into accepting him as their equal. In thus turning eastward, Napoleon had to go against his own inmost conviction that he was born to save the Revolution. Had he overcome England’s stubborn opposition to change (and there were many people in England half-disposed to pray that he might do so) there would have been nothing against his victorious forward advance but the Atlantic and the new American States, which were unknown quantities in opinion, but which were rapidly dividing into two parties under Washington and Jefferson. But in order to do this, Napoleon would have been obliged to depend on such maritime war genius as his country could bring forth, and since he had no ability or experience in naval war, this decided him. Napoleon must have known that he was not invincible on land--no general ever is--and yet his attempt to create a European empire depended on his being practically invincible, as he well knew. Hence his alternations of desperate hope and disillusionment, hence the tragic epic, logically insane, of his career.

Whether Napoleon was right or wrong in the course he followed, his idea was destined to dominate Europe throughout the nineteenth century and to survive into the twentieth. With prophetic insight he charted the later course Europe was to follow, and laid the foundations of the personal Cæsarism of Mussolini and his followers, as well as anticipating in his continental system of Confederations, the reverse process that has led to the establishment of a League of Nations. But with European nineteenth century history it is not the purpose of this study to deal, nor even with the outward events of American and Russian history, except insofar as each bears upon, reflects and alters the course of the other. The history of Napoleon is, after all, neatly parallelled by the history of those Israelite kings who, caught between Egypt and the Assyrian empire, were forced to turn first against one and then the other. Our concern here is rather with the two forces beyond Europe’s frontier, now at work in Russia and in America; forces that were increasingly to direct the destiny not of Europe alone, but of the world.