H.G. Wells - A Short History of The World

A Short History of the World.
H.G. Wells
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
I. The World in Space

II. The World in Time
III. The Beginnings of Life
IV. The Age of Fishes
V. The Age of the Coal Swamps
VI. The Age of Reptiles
VII. The First Birds and the First Mammals
VIII. The Age of Mammals
IX. Monkeys, Apes and Sub-men
X. The Neanderthaler and the Rhodesian Man
XI. The First True Men
XII. Primitive Thought
XIII. The Beginnings of Cultivation
XIV. Primitive Neolithic Civilizations
XV. Sumeria, Early Egypt and Writing
XVI. Primitive Nomadic Peoples
XVII. The First Sea-going Peoples
XVIII. Egypt, Babylon and Assyria
XIX. The Primitive Aryans
XX. The Last Babylonian Empire and the Empire of
Darius I
XXI. The Early History of the Jews
XXII. Priests and Prophets in Judea
XXIII. The Greeks
XXIV. The Wars of the Greeks and Persians
XXV. The Splendour of Greece
XXVI. The Empire of Alexander the Great
XXVII. The Museum and Library at Alexandria
XXVIII. The Life of Gautama Buddha
XXIX. King Asoka
XXX. Confucius and Lao Tse
XXXI. Rome Comes into History
XXXII. Rome and Carthage
XXXIII. The Growth of the Roman Empire
XXXIV. Between Rome and China
XXXV. The Common Man's Life under the Early Roman
Empire
XXXVI. Religious Developments under the Roman
Empire
XXXVII. The Teaching of Jesus
XXXVIII. The Development of Doctrinal Christianity
XXXIX. The Barbarians Break the Empire into East and
West
XL. The Huns and the End of the Western Empire
XLI. The Byzantine and Sassanid Empires
XLII. The Dynasties of Suy and Tang in China
XLIII. Muhammad and Islam
XLIV. The Great Days of the Arabs
XLV. The Development of Latin Christendom
XLVI. The Crusades and the Age of Papal Dominion
XLVII. Recalcitrant Princes and the Great Schism
XLVIII. The Mongol Conquests
XLIX. The Intellectual Revival of the Europeans
L. The Reformation of the Latin Church
LI. The Emperor Charles V
LII. The Age of Political Experiments; of Grand Monarchy
and Parliaments and Republicanism in Europe
LIII. The New Empires of the Europeans in Asia and
Overseas
LIV. The American War of Independence
LV. The French Revolution and the Restoration of
Monarchy in France
LVI. The Uneasy Peace in Europe That Followed the Fall
of Napoleon
LVII. The Development of Material Knowledge
LVIII. The Industrial Revolution
LIX. The Development of Modern Political and Social
Ideas
LX. The Expansion of the United States
LXI. The Rise of Germany to Predominance in Europe
LXII. The New Overseas Empires of Steamship and
Railway
LXIII. European Aggression in Asia, and the Rise of
Japan
LXIV. The British Empire in 1914
LXV. The Age of Armament in Europe, and the Great
War of 1914-18
LXVI. The Revolution and Famine in Russia
LXVII. The Political and Social Reconstruction of the
World
THE STORY of our world is a story that is still very
imperfectly known. A couple of hundred years ago men
possessed the history of little more than the last three
thousand years. What happened before that time was a
matter of legend and speculation. Over a large part of the
civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had
been created suddenly in 4004 B.C., though authorities
differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or
autumn of that year. This fantastically precise
misconception was based upon a too literal interpretation
of the Hebrew Bible, and upon rather arbitrary theological
assumptions connected therewith. Such ideas have long
since been abandoned by religious teachers, and it is
universally recognized that the universe in which we live has
to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time
and possibly for endless time. Of course there may be
deception in these appearances, as a room may be made
to seem endless by putting mirrors facing each other at
either end. But that the universe in which we live has
existed only for six or seven thousand years may be
regarded as an altogether exploded idea.
The earth, as everybody knows nowadays, is a spheroid, a
sphere slightly compressed, orange fashion, with a
diameter of nearly 8,000 miles. Its spherical shape has
been known at least to a limited number of intelligent
people for nearly 2,500 years, but before that time it was
supposed to be flat, and various ideas which now seem
fantastic were entertained about its relations to the sky and
the stars and planets. We know now that it rotates upon its
axis (which is about 24 miles shorter than its equatorial
diameter) every twenty-four hours, and that this is the cause
of the alternations of day and night, that it circles about the
sun in a slightly distorted and slowly variable oval path in a
year. Its distance from the sun varies between ninety-one
and a half millions at its nearest and ninety-four and a half
million miles.
About the earth circles a smaller sphere, the moon, at an
average distance of 239,000 miles. Earth and moon are
not the only bodies to travel round the sun. There are also
the planets, Mercury and Venus, at distances of thirty-six
and sixty-seven millions of miles; and beyond the circle of
the earth and disregarding a belt of numerous smaller
bodies, the planetoids, there are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus and Neptune at mean distances of 141, 483, 886,
1,782, and 1,793 millions of miles respectively. These
figures in millions of miles are very difficult for the mind to
grasp. It may help the reader's imagination if we reduce the
sun and planets to a smaller, more conceivable scale.
If, then, we represent our earth as a little ball of one inch
diameter, the sun would be a big globe nine feet across
and 323 yards away, that is about a fifth of a mile, four or
five minutes' walking. The moon would be a small pea two
feet and a half from the world. Between earth and sun there
would be the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, at
distances of one hundred and twenty-five and two hundred
and fifty yards from the sun. All round and about these
bodies there would be emptiness until you came to Mars, a
hundred and seventy-five feet beyond the earth; Jupiter
nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter; Saturn, a little
smaller, two miles off; Uranus four miles off and Neptune six
miles off. Then nothingness and nothingness except for
small particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for
thousands of miles. The nearest star to earth on this scale
would be 40,000 miles away.
These figures will serve perhaps to give one some
conception of the immense emptiness of space in which
the drama of life goes on.
For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know
certainly of life only upon the surface of our earth. It does not
penetrate much more than three miles down into the 4,000
miles that separate us from the centre of our globe, and it
does not reach more than five miles above its surface.
Apparently all the limitlessness of space is otherwise empty
and dead.
The deepest ocean dredgings go down to five miles. The
highest recorded flight of an aeroplane is little more than
four miles. Men have reached to seven miles up in
balloons, but at a cost of great suffering. No bird can fly so
high as five miles, and small birds and insects which have
been carried up by aeroplanes drop off insensible far
below that level.
IN the last fifty years there has been much very fine and
interesting speculation on the part of scientific men upon
the age and origin of our earth. Here we cannot pretend to
give even a summary of such speculations because they
involve the most subtle mathematical and physical
considerations. The truth is that the physical and
astronomical sciences are still too undeveloped as yet to
make anything of the sort more than an illustrative
guesswork. The general tendency has been to make the
estimated age of our globe longer and longer. It now seems
probable that the earth has had an independent existence
as a spinning planet flying round and round the sun for a
longer period than 2,000,000,000 years. It may have been
much longer than that. This is a length of time that
absolutely overpowers the imagination.
Before that vast period of separate existence, the sun and
earth and the other planets that circulate round the sun may
have been a great swirl of diffused matter in space. The
telescope reveals to us in various parts of the heavens
luminous spiral clouds of matter, the spiral nebulae, which
appear to be in rotation about a centre. It is supposed by
many astronomers that the sun and its planets were once
such a spiral, and that their matter has undergone
concentration into its present form. Through majestic aeons
that concentration went on until in that vast remoteness of
the past for which we have given figures, the world and its
moon were distinguishable. They were spinning then much
faster than they are spinning now; they were at a lesser
distance from the sun; they travelled round it very much
faster, and they were probably incandescent or molten at
the surface. The sun itself was a much greater blaze in the
heavens.
If we could go back through that infinitude of time and see
the earth in this earlier stage of its history, we should
behold a scene more like the interior of a blast furnace or
the surface of a lava flow before it cools and cakes over
than any other contemporary scene. No water would be
visible because all the water there was would still be
superheated steam in a stormy atmosphere of sulphurous
and metallic vapours. Beneath this would swirl and boil an
ocean of molten rock substance. Across a sky of fiery
clouds the glare of the hurrying sun and moon would sweep
swiftly like hot breaths of flame.
Slowly by degrees as one million of years followed another,
this fiery scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. The
vapours in the sky would rain down and become less dense
overhead; great slaggy cakes of solidifying rock would
appear upon the surface of the molten sea, and sink under
it, to be replaced by other floating masses. The sun and
moon growing now each more distant and each smaller,
would rush with diminishing swiftness across the heavens.
The moon now, because of its smaller size, would be
already cooled far below incandescence, and would be
alternately obstructing and reflecting the sunlight in a series
of eclipses and full moons.
And so with a tremendous slowness through the vastness
of time, the earth would grow more and more like the earth
on which we live, until at last an age would come when, in
the cooling air, steam would begin to condense into clouds,
and the first rain would fall hissing upon the first rocks
below. For endless millenia the greater part of the earth's
water would still be vaporized in the atmosphere, but there
would now be hot streams running over the crystallizing
rocks below and pools and lakes into which these streams
would be carrying detritus and depositing sediment.
At last a condition of things must have been attained in
which a man might have stood up on earth and looked
about him and lived. If we could have visited the earth at
that time we should have stood on great lava-like masses
of rock without a trace of soil or touch of living vegetation,
under a storm-rent sky. Hot and violent winds, exceeding
the fiercest tornado that ever blows, and downpours of rain
such as our milder, slower earth to-day knows nothing of,
might have assailed us. The water of the downpour would
have rushed by us, muddy with the spoils of the rocks,
coming together into torrents, cutting deep gorges and
canyons as they hurried past to deposit their sediment in
the earliest seas. Through the clouds we should have
glimpsed a great sun moving visibly across the sky, and in
its wake and in the wake of the moon would have come a
diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval. And the moon,
which nowadays keeps one constant face to earth, would
then have been rotating visibly and showing the side it now
hides so inexorably.
The earth aged. One million years followed another, and the
day lengthened, the sun grew more distant and milder, the
moon's pace in the sky slackened; the intensity of rain and
storm diminished and the water in the first seas increased
and ran together into the ocean garment our planet
henceforth wore.
But there was no life as yet upon the earth; the seas were
lifeless, and the rocks were barren.
AS everybody knows nowadays, the knowledge we
possess of life before the beginnings of human memory
and tradition is derived from the markings and fossils of
living things in the stratified rocks. We find preserved in
shale and slate, limestone, and sandstone, bones, shells,
fibres, stems, fruits, footmarks, scratchings and the like,
side by side with the ripple marks of the earliest tides and
the pittings of the earliest rain-falls. It is by the sedulous
examination of this Record of the Rocks that the past
history of the earth's life has been pieced together. That
much nearly everybody knows to-day. The sedimentary
rocks do not lie neatly stratum above stratum; they have
been crumpled, bent, thrust about, distorted and mixed
together like the leaves of a library that has been
repeatedly looted and burnt, and it is only as a result of
many devoted lifetimes of work that the record has been
put into order and read. The whole compass of time
represented by the record of the rocks is now estimated as
1,600,000,000 years.
The earliest rocks in the record are called by geologists the
Azoic rocks, because they show no traces of life. Great
areas of these Azoic rocks lie uncovered in North America,
and they are of such a thickness that geologists consider
that they represent a period of at least half of the
1,600,000,000 which they assign to the whole geological
record. Let me repeat this profoundly significant fact. Half
the great interval of time since land and sea were first
distinguishable on earth has left us no traces of life. There
are ripplings and rain marks still to be found in these rocks,
but no marks nor vestiges of any living thing.
Then, as we come up the record, signs of past life appear
and increase. The age of the world's history in which we
find these past traces is called by geologists the Lower
Palaeozoic age. The first indications that life was astir are
vestiges of comparatively simple and lowly things: the
shells of small shellfish, the stems and flowerlike heads of
zoophytes, seaweeds and the tracks and remains of sea
worms and crustacea. Very early appear certain creatures
rather like plant-lice, crawling creatures which could roll
themselves up into balls as the plant-lice do, the trilobites.
Later by a few million years or so come certain sea
scorpions, more mobile and powerful creatures than the
world had ever seen before.
None of these creatures were of very great size. Among the
largest were certain of the sea scorpions, which measured
nine feet in length. There are no signs whatever of land life
of any sort, plant or animal; there are no fishes nor any
vertebrated creatures in this part of the record. Essentially
all the plants and creatures which have left us their traces
from this period of the earth's history are shallow-water and
intertidal beings. If we wished to parallel the flora and fauna
of the Lower Palaeozoic rocks on the earth to-day, we
should do it best, except in the matter of size, by taking a
drop of water from a rock pool or scummy ditch and
examining it under a microscope. The little crustacea, the
small shellfish, the zoophytes and algae we should find
there would display a quite striking resemblance to these
clumsier, larger prototypes that once were the crown of life
upon our planet.
It is well, however, to bear in mind that the Lower
Palaeozoic rocks probably do not give us anything at all
representative of the first beginnings of life on our planet.
Unless a creature has bones or other hard parts, unless it
wears a shell or is big enough and heavy enough to make
characteristic footprints and trails in mud, it is unlikely to
leave any fossilized traces of its existence behind. To-day
there are hundreds of thousands of species of small
softbodied creatures in our world which it is inconceivable
can ever leave any mark for future geologists to discover. In
the world's past, millions of millions of species of such
creatures may have lived and multiplied and flourished and
passed away without a trace remaining. The waters of the
warm and shallow lakes and seas of the so-called Azoic
period may have teemed with an infinite variety of lowly,
jelly-like, shell-less and boneless creatures, and a multitude
of green scummy plants may have spread over the sunlit
intertidal rocks and beaches. The Record of the Rocks is
no more a complete record of life in the past than the books
of a bank are a record of the existence of everybody in the
neighbourhood. It is only when a species begins to secrete
a shell or a spicule or a carapace or a lime-supported
stem, and so put by something for the future, that it goes
upon the Record. But in rocks of an age prior to those
which bear any fossil traces, graphite, a form of
uncombined carbon, is sometimes found, and some
authorities consider that it may have been separated out
from combination through the vital activities of unknown
living things.
IN the days when the world was supposed to have endured
for only a few thousand years, it was supposed that the
different species of plants and animals were fixed and final;
they had all been created exactly as they are to-day, each
species by itself. But as men began to discover and study
the Record of the Rocks this belief gave place to the
suspicion that many species had changed and developed
slowly through the course of ages, and this again expanded
into a belief in what is called Organic Evolution, a belief that
all species of life upon earth, animal and vegetable alike,
are descended by slow continuous processes of change
from some very simple ancestral form of life, some almost
structureless living substance, far back in the so-called
Azoic seas.
This question of Organic Evolution, like the question of the
age of the earth, has in the past been the subject of much
bitter controversy. There was a time when a belief in
organic evolution was for rather obscure reasons supposed
to be incompatible with sound Christian, Jewish and
Moslem doctrine. That time has passed, and the men of the
most orthodox Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and
Mohammedan belief are now free to accept this newer and
broader view of a common origin of all living things. No life
seems to have happened suddenly upon earth. Life grew
and grows. Age by age through gulfs of time at which
imagination reels, life has been growing from a mere
stirring in the intertidal slime towards freedom, power and
consciousness.
Life consists of individuals. These individuals are definite
things, they are not like the lumps and masses, nor even the
limitless and motionless crystals, of non-living matter, and
they have two characteristics no dead matter possesses.
They can assimilate other matter into themselves and make
it part of themselves, and they can reproduce themselves.
They eat and they breed. They can give rise to other
individuals, for the most part like themselves, but always
also a little different from themselves. There is a specific
and family resemblance between an individual and its
offspring, and there is an individual difference between
every parent and every offspring it produces, and this is
true in every species and at every stage of life.
Now scientific men are not able to explain to us either why
offspring should resemble nor why they should differ from
their parents. But seeing that offspring do at once resemble
and differ, it is a matter rather of common sense than of
scientific knowledge that, if the conditions under which a
species live are changed, the species should undergo
some correlated changes. Because in any generation of
the species there must be a number of individuals whose
individual differences make them better adapted to the new
conditions under which the species has to live, and a
number whose individual differences make it rather harder
for them to live. And on the whole the former sort will live
longer, bear more offspring, and reproduce themselves
more abundantly than the latter, and so generation by
generation the average of the species will change in the
favourable direction. This process, which is called Natural
Selection, is not so much a scientific theory as a necessary
deduction from the facts of reproduction and individual
difference. There may be many forces at work varying,
destroying and preserving species, about which science
may still be unaware or undecided, but the man who can
deny the operation of this process of natural selection upon
life since its beginning must be either ignorant of the
elementary facts of life or incapable of ordinary thought.
Many scientific men have speculated about the first
beginning of life and their speculations are often of great
interest, but there is absolutely no definite knowledge and
no convincing guess yet of the way in which life began. But
nearly all authorities are agreed that it probably began upon
mud or sand in warm sunlit shallow brackish water, and that
it spread up the beaches to the intertidal lines and out to
the open waters.
That early world was a world of strong tides and currents.
An incessant destruction of individuals must have been
going on through their being swept up the beaches and
dried, or by their being swept out to sea and sinking down
out of reach of air and sun. Early conditions favoured the
development of every tendency to root and hold on, every
tendency to form an outer skin and casing to protect the
stranded individual from immediate desiccation. From the
very earliest any tendency to sensitiveness to taste would
turn the individual in the direction of food, and any
sensitiveness to light would assist it to struggle back out of
the darkness of the sea deeps and caverns or to wriggle
back out of the excessive glare of the dangerous shallows.
Probably the first shells and body armour of living things
were protections against drying rather than against active
enemies. But tooth and claw come early into our earthly
history.
We have already noted the size of the earlier water
scorpions. For long ages such creatures were the supreme
lords of life. Then in a division of these Palaeozoic rocks
called the Silurian division, which many geologists now
suppose to be as old as five hundred million years, there
appears a new type of being, equipped with eyes and teeth
and swimming powers of an altogether more powerful kind.
These were the first known backboned animals, the earliest
fishes, the first known Vertebrata.
These fishes increase greatly in the next division of rocks,
the rocks known as the Devonian system. They are so
prevalent that this period of the Record of the Rocks has
been called the Age of Fishes. Fishes of a pattern now
gone from the earth, and fishes allied to the sharks and
sturgeons of to-day, rushed through the waters, leapt in the
air, browsed among the seaweeds, pursued and preyed
upon one another, and gave a new liveliness to the waters
of the world. None of these were excessively big by our
present standards. Few of them were more than two or
three feet long, but there were exceptional forms which
were as long as twenty feet.
We know nothing from geology of the ancestors of these
fishes. They do not appear to be related to any of the forms
that preceded them. Zoologists have the most interesting
views of their ancestry, but these they derive from the study
of the development of the eggs of their still living relations,
and from other sources. Apparently the ancestors of the
vertebrata were soft-bodied and perhaps quite small
swimming creatures who began first to develop hard parts
as teeth round and about their mouths. The teeth of a skate
or dog-fish cover the roof and floor of its mouth and pass at
the lip into the flattened toothlike scales that encase most of
its body. As the fishes develop these teeth scales in the
geological record, they swim out of the hidden darkness of
the past into the light, the first vertebrated animals visible in
the record.
THE LAND during this Age of Fishes was apparently quite
lifeless. Crags and uplands of barren rock lay under the sun
and rain. There was no real soil-for as yet there were no
earthworms which help to make a soil, and no plants to
break up the rock particles into mould; there was no trace
of moss or lichen. Life was still only in the sea.
Over this world of barren rock played great changes of
climate. The causes of these changes of climate were very
complex and they have still to be properly estimated. The
changing shape of the earth's orbit, the gradual shifting of
the poles of rotation, changes in the shapes of the
continents, probably even fluctuations in the warmth of the
sun, now conspired to plunge great areas of the earth's
surface into long periods of cold and ice and now again for
millions of years spread a warm or equable climate over
this planet. There seem to have been phases of great
internal activity in the world's history, when in the course of
a few million years accumulated upthrusts would break out
in lines of volcanic eruption and upheaval and rearrange the
mountain and continental outlines of the globe, increasing
the depth of the sea and the height of the mountains and
exaggerating the extremes of climate. And these would be
followed by vast ages of comparative quiescence, when
frost, rain and river would wear down the mountain heights
and carry great masses of silt to fill and raise the sea
bottoms and spread the seas, ever shallower and wider,
over more and more of the land. There have been "high and
deep" ages in the world's history and "low and level" ages.
The reader must dismiss from his mind any idea that the
surface of the earth has been growing steadily cooler since
its crust grew solid. After that much cooling had been
achieved, the internal temperature ceased to affect surface
conditions. There are traces of periods of superabundant
ice and snow, of "Glacial Ages," that is, even in the Azoic
period.
It was only towards the close of the Age of Fishes, in a
period of extensive shallow seas and lagoons, that life
spread itself out in any effectual way from the waters on to
the land. No doubt the earlier types of the forms that now
begin to appear in great abundance had already been
developing in a rare and obscure manner for many scores
of millions of years. But now came their opportunity.
Plants no doubt preceded animal forms in this invasion of
the land, but the animals probably followed up the plant
emigration very closely. The first problem that the plant had
to solve was the problem of some sustaining stiff support to
hold up its fronds to the sunlight when the buoyant water
was withdrawn; the second was the problem of getting
water from the swampy ground below to the tissues of the
plant, now that it was no longer close at hand. The two
problems were solved by the development of woody tissue
which both sustained the plant and acted as water carrier to
the leaves. The Record of the Rocks is suddenly crowded
by a vast variety of woody swamp plants, many of them of
great size, big tree mosses, tree ferns, gigantic horsetails
and the like. And with these, age by age, there crawled out
of the water a great variety of animal forms. There were
centipedes and millipedes; there were the first primitive
insects; there were creatures related to the ancient king
crabs and sea scorpions which became the earliest
spiders and land scorpions, and presently there were
vertebrated animals.
Some of the earlier insects were very large. There were
dragon flies in this period with wings that spread out to
twenty-nine inches.
In various ways these new orders and genera had adapted
themselves to breathing air. Hitherto all animals had
breathed air dissolved in water, and that indeed is what all
animals still have to do. But now in divers fashions the
animal kingdom was acquiring the power of supplying its
own moisture where it was needed. A man with a perfectly
dry lung would suffocate to-day; his lung surfaces must be
moist in order that air may pass through them into his
blood. The adaptation to air breathing consists in all cases
either in the development of a cover to the old-fashioned
gills to stop evaporation, or in the development of tubes or
other new breathing organs lying deep inside the body and
moistened by a watery secretion. The old gills with which
the ancestral fish of the vertebrated line had breathed were
inadaptable to breathing upon land, and in the case of this
division of the animal kingdom it is the swimming bladder
of the fish which becomes a new, deep-seated breathing
organ, the lung. The kind of animals known as amphibia,
the frogs and newts of to-day, begin their lives in the water
and breathe by gills; and subsequently the lung, developing
in the same way as the swimming bladder of many fishes
do, as a baglike outgrowth from the throat, takes over the
business of breathing, the animal comes out on land, and
the gills dwindle and the gill slits disappear. (All except an
outgrowth of one gill slit, which becomes the passage of the
ear and ear-drum.) The animal can now live only in the air,
but it must return at least to the edge of the water to lay its
eggs and reproduce its kind.
All the air-breathing vertebrata of this age of swamps and
plants belonged to the class amphibia. They were nearly all
of them forms related to the newts of to-day, and some of
them attained a considerable size. They were land animals,
it is true, but they were land animals needing to live in and
near moist and swampy places, and all the great trees of
this period were equally amphibious in their habits. None of
them had yet developed fruits and seeds of a kind that
could fall on land and develop with the help only of such
moisture as dew and rain could bring. They all had to shed
their spores in water, it would seem, if they were to
germinate.
It is one of the most beautiful interests of that beautiful
science, comparative anatomy, to trace the complex and
wonderful adaptations of living things to the necessities of
existence in air. All living things, plants and animals alike,
are primarily water things. For example all the higher
vertebrated animals above the fishes, up to and including
man, pass through a stage in their development in the egg
or before birth in which they have gill slits which are
obliterated before the young emerge. The bare, water-
washed eye of the fish is protected in the higher forms from
drying up by eyelids and glands which secrete moisture.
The weaker sound vibrations of air necessitate an ear-
drum. In nearly every organ of the body similar
modifications and adaptations are to be detected, similar
patchings-up to meet aerial conditions.
This Carboniferous age, this age of the amphibia, was an
age of life in the swamps and lagoons and on the low
banks among these waters. Thus far life had now extended.
The hills and high lands were still quite barren and lifeless.
Life had learnt to breathe air indeed, but it still had its roots
in its native water; it still had to return to the water to
reproduce its kind.
THE ABUNDANT life of the Carboniferous period was
succeeded by a vast cycle of dry and bitter ages. They are
represented in the Record of the Rocks by thick deposits of
sandstones and the like, in which fossils are comparatively
few. The temperature of the world fluctuated widely, and
there were long periods of glacial cold. Over great areas
the former profusion of swamp vegetation ceased, and,
overlaid by these newer deposits, it began that process of
compression and mineralization that gave the world most of
the coal deposits of to-day.
But it is during periods of change that life undergoes its
most rapid modifications, and under hardship that it learns
its hardest lessons. As conditions revert towards warmth
and moisture again we find a new series of animal and
plant forms established. We find in the record the remains
of vertebrated animals that laid eggs which, instead of
hatching out tadpoles which needed to live for a time in
water, carried on their development before hatching to a
stage so nearly like the adult form that the young could live
in air from the first moment of independent existence. Gills
had been cut out altogether, and the gill slits only appeared
as an embryonic phase.
These new creatures without a tadpole stage were the
Reptiles. Concurrently there had been a development of
seed-bearing trees, which could spread their seed,
independently of swamp or lakes. There were now palmlike
cycads and many tropical conifers, though as yet there
were no flowering plants and no grasses. There was a
great number of ferns. And there was now also an
increased variety of insects. There were beetles, though
bees and butterflies had yet to come. But all the
fundamental forms of a new real land fauna and flora had
been laid down during these vast ages of severity. This new
land life needed only the opportunity of favourable
conditions to flourish and prevail.
Age by age and with abundant fluctuations that mitigation
came. The still incalculable movements of the earth's crust,
the changes in its orbit, the increase and diminution of the
mutual inclination of orbit and pole, worked together to
produce a great spell of widely diffused warm conditions.
The period lasted altogether, it is now supposed, upwards
of two hundred million years. It is called the Mesozoic
period, to distinguish it from the altogether vaster
Palaeozoic and Azoic periods (together fourteen hundred
millions) that preceded it, and from the Cainozoic or new
life period that intervened between its close and the
present time, and it is also called the Age of Reptiles
because of the astonishing predominance and variety of
this form of life. It came to an end some eighty million years
ago.
In the world to-day the genera of Reptiles are comparatively
few and their distribution is very limited. They are more
various, it is true, than are the few surviving members of the
order of the amphibia which once in the Carboniferous
period ruled the world. We still have the snakes, the turtles
and tortoises (the Chelonia), the alligators and crocodiles,
and the lizards. Without exception they are creatures
requiring warmth all the year round; they cannot stand
exposure to cold, and it is probable that all the reptilian
beings of the Mesozoic suffered under the same limitation.
It was a hothouse fauna, living amidst a hothouse flora. It
endured no frosts. But the world had at least attained a real
dry land fauna and flora as distinguished from the mud and
swamp fauna and flora of the previous heyday of life upon
earth.
All the sorts of reptile we know now were much more
abundantly represented then, great turtles and tortoises, big
crocodiles and many lizards and snakes, but in addition
there was a number of series of wonderful creatures that
have now vanished altogether from the earth. There was a
vast variety of beings called the Dinosaurs. Vegetation was
now spreading over the lower levels of the world, reeds,
brakes of fern and the like; and browsing upon this
abundance came a multitude of herbivorous reptiles, which
increased in size as the Mesozoic period rose to its climax.
Some of these beasts exceeded in size any other land
animals that have ever lived; they were as large as whales.
The Diplodocus Carnegii for example measured eighty-four
feet from snout to tail; the Gigantosaurus was even greater;
it measured a hundred feet. Living upon these monsters
was a swarm of carnivorous Dinosaurs of a corresponding
size. One of these, the Tyrannosaurus, is figured and
described in many books as the last word in reptilian
frightfulness.
While these great creatures pastured and pursued amidst
the fronds and evergreens of the Mesozoic jungles, another
now vanished tribe of reptiles, with a bat-like development
of the fore limbs, pursued insects and one another, first
leapt and parachuted and presently flew amidst the fronds
and branches of the forest trees. These were the
Pterodactyls. These were the first flying creatures with
backbones; they mark a new achievement in the growing
powers of vertebrated life.
Moreover some of the reptiles were returning to the sea
waters. Three groups of big swimming beings had invaded
the sea from which their ancestors had come: the
Mososaurs, the Plesiosaurs, and Ichthyosaurs. Some of
these again approached the proportions of our present
whales. The Ichthyosaurs seem to have been quite
seagoing creatures, but the Plesiosaurs were a type of
animal that has no cognate form to-day. The body was stout
and big with paddles, adapted either for swimming or
crawling through marshes, or along the bottom of shallow
waters. The comparatively small head was poised on a
vast snake of neck, altogether outdoing the neck of the
swan. Either the Plesiosaur swam and searched for food
under the water and fed as the swan will do, or it lurked
under water and snatched at passing fish or beast.
Such was the predominant land life throughout the
Mesozoic age. It was by our human standards an advance
upon anything that had preceded it. It had produced land
animals greater in size, range, power and activity, more
"vital" as people say, than anything the world had seen
before. In the seas there had been no such advance but a
great proliferation of new forms of life. An enormous variety
of squid-like creatures with chambered shells, for the most
part coiled, had appeared in the shallow seas, the
Ammonites. They had had predecessors in the Palaeozoic
seas, but now was their age of glory. To-day they have left
no survivors at all; their nearest relation is the pearly
Nautilus, an inhabitant of tropical waters. And a new and
more prolific type of fish with lighter, finer scales than the
plate-like and tooth-like coverings that had hitherto
prevailed, became and has since remained predominant in
the seas and rivers.
IN a few paragraphs a picture of the lush vegetation and
swarming reptiles of that first great summer of life, the
Mesozoic period, has been sketched. But while the
Dinosaurs lorded it over the hot selvas and marshy plains
and the Pterodactyls filled the forests with their flutterings
and possibly with shrieks and croakings as they pursued
the humming insect life of the still flowerless shrubs and
trees, some less conspicuous and less abundant forms
upon the margins of this abounding life were acquiring
certain powers and learning certain lessons of endurance,
that were to be of the utmost value to their race when at last
the smiling generosity of sun and earth began to fade.
A group of tribes and genera of hopping reptiles, small
creatures of the dinosaur type, seem to have been pushed
by competition and the pursuit of their enemies towards the
alternatives of extinction or adaptation to colder conditions
in the higher hills or by the sea. Among these distressed
tribes there was developed a new type of scale-scales that
were elongated into quill-like forms and that presently
branched into the crude beginnings of feathers. These quill-
like scales lay over one another and formed a heat-
retaining covering more efficient than any reptilian covering
that had hitherto existed. So they permitted an invasion of
colder regions that were otherwise uninhabited. Perhaps
simultaneously with these changes there arose in these
creatures a greater solicitude for their eggs. Most reptiles
are apparently quite careless about their eggs, which are
left for sun and season to hatch. But some of the varieties
upon this new branch of the tree of life were acquiring a
habit of guarding their eggs and keeping them warm with
the warmth of their bodies.
With these adaptations to cold other internal modifications
were going on that made these creatures, the primitive
birds, warm-blooded and independent of basking. The very
earliest birds seem to have been seabirds living upon fish,
and their fore limbs were not wings but paddles rather after
the penguin type. That peculiarly primitive bird, the New
Zealand Ki-wi, has feathers of a very simple sort, and
neither flies nor appears to be descended from flying
ancestors. In the development of the birds, feathers came
before wings. But once the feather was developed the
possibility of making a light spread of feathers led
inevitably to the wing. We know of the fossil remains of one
bird at least which had reptilian teeth in its jaw and a long
reptilian tail, but which also had a true bird's wing and which
certainly flew and held its own among the pterodactyls of
the Mesozoic time. Nevertheless birds were neither varied
nor abundant in Mesozoic times. If a man could go back to
typical Mesozoic country, he might walk for days and never
see or hear such a thing as a bird, though he would see a
great abundance of pterodactyls and insects among the
fronds and reeds.
And another thing he would probably never see, and that
would be any sign of a mammal. Probably the first
mammals were in existence millions of years before the
first thing one could call a bird, but they were altogether too
small and obscure and remote for attention.
The earliest mammals, like the earliest birds, were
creatures driven by competition and pursuit into a life of
hardship and adaptation to cold. With them also the scale
became quill-like, and was developed into a heat-retaining
covering; and they too underwent modifications, similar in
kind though different in detail, to become warm-blooded
and independent of basking. Instead of feathers they
developed hairs, and instead of guarding and incubating
their eggs they kept them warm and safe by retaining them
inside their bodies until they were almost mature. Most of
them became altogether vivaparous and brought their
young into the world alive. And even after their young were
born they tended to maintain a protective and nutritive
association with them. Most but not all mammals to-day
have mammae and suckle their young. Two mammals still
live which lay eggs and which have not proper mammae,
though they nourish their young by a nutritive secretion of
the under skin; these are the duck-billed platypus and the
echidna. The echidna lays leathery eggs and then puts
them into a pouch under its belly, and so carries them about
warm and safe until they hatch.
But just as a visitor to the Mesozoic world might have
searched for days and weeks before finding a bird, so,
unless he knew exactly where to go and look, he might have
searched in vain for any traces of a mammal. Both birds
and mammals would have seemed very eccentric and
secondary and unimportant creatures in Mesozoic times.
The Age of Reptiles lasted, it is now guessed, eighty million
years. Had any quasi-human intelligence been watching the
world through that inconceivable length of time, how safe
and eternal the sunshine and abundance must have
seemed, how assured the wallowing prosperity of the
dinosaurs and the flapping abundance of the flying lizards!
And then the mysterious rhythms and accumulating forces
of the universe began to turn against that quasi-eternal
stability. That run of luck for life was running out. Age by
age, myriad of years after myriad of years, with halts no
doubt and retrogressions, came a change towards
hardship and extreme conditions, came great alterations of
level and great redistributions of mountain and sea. We find
one thing in the Record of the Rocks during the decadence
of the long Mesozoic age of prosperity that is very
significant of steadily sustained changes of condition, and
that is a violent fluctuation of living forms and the
appearance of new and strange species. Under the
gathering threat of extinction the older orders and genera
are displaying their utmost capacity for variation and
adaptation. The Ammonites for example in these last
pages of the Mesozoic chapter exhibit a multitude of
fantastic forms. Under settled conditions there is no
encouragement for novelties; they do not develop, they are
suppressed; what is best adapted is already there. Under
novel conditions it is the ordinary type that suffers, and the
novelty that may have a better chance to survive and
establish itselfƒ.
There comes a break in the Record of the Rocks that may
represent several million years. There is a veil here still,
over even the outline of the history of life. When it lifts again,
the Age of Reptiles is at an end; the Dinosaurs, the
Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs, the Pterodactyls, the
innumerable genera and species of Ammonite have all
gone absolutely. In all their stupendous variety they have
died out and left no descendants. The cold has killed them.
All their final variations were insufficient; they had never hit
upon survival conditions. The world had passed through a
phase of extreme conditions beyond their powers of
endurance, a slow and complete massacre of Mesozoic life
has occurred, and we find now a new scene, a new and
hardier flora, and a new and hardier fauna in possession of
the world.
It is still a bleak and impoverished scene with which this
new volume of the book of life begins. The cycads and
tropical conifers have given place very largely to trees that
shed their leaves to avoid destruction by the snows of
winter and to flowering plants and shrubs, and where there
was formerly a profusion of reptiles, an increasing variety of
birds and mammals is entering into their inheritance.
THE OPENING of the next great period in the life of the
earth, the Cainozoic period, was a period of upheaval and
extreme volcanic activity. Now it was that the vast masses
of the Alps and Himalayas and the mountain backbone of
the Rockies and Andes were thrust up, and that the rude
outlines of our present oceans and continents appeared.
The map of the world begins to display a first dim
resemblance to the map of to-day. It is estimated now that
between forty and eighty million years have elapsed from
the beginnings of the Cainozoic period to the present time.
At the outset of the Cainozoic period the climate of the
world was austere. It grew generally warmer until a fresh
phase of great abundance was reached, after which
conditions grew hard again and the earth passed into a
series of extremely cold cycles, the Glacial Ages, from
which apparently it is now slowly emerging.
But we do not know sufficient of the causes of climatic
change at present to forecast the possible fluctuations of
climatic conditions that lie before us. We may be moving
towards increasing sunshine or lapsing towards another
glacial age; volcanic activity and the upheaval of mountain
masses may be increasing or diminishing; we do not know;
we lack sufficient science.
With the opening of this period the grasses appear; for the
first time there is pasture in the world; and with the full
development of the once obscure mammalian type, appear
a number of interesting grazing animals and of carnivorous
types which prey upon these.
At first these early mammals seem to differ only in a few
characters from the great herbivorous and carnivorous
reptiles that ages before had flourished and then vanished
from the earth. A careless observer might suppose that in
this second long age of warmth and plenty that was now
beginning, nature was merely repeating the first, with
herbivorous and carnivorous mammals to parallel the
herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs, with birds
replacing pterodactyls and so on. But this would be an
altogether superficial comparison. The variety of the
universe is infinite and incessant; it progresses eternally;
history never repeats itself and no parallels are precisely
true. The differences between the life of the Cainozoic and
Mesozoic periods are far profounder than the
resemblances.
The most fundamental of all these differences lies in the
mental life of the two periods. It arises essentially out of the
continuing contact of parent and offspring which
distinguishes mammalian and in a lesser degree bird life,
from the life of the reptile. With very few exceptions the
reptile abandons its egg to hatch alone. The young reptile
has no knowledge whatever of its parent; its mental life,
such as it is, begins and ends with its own experiences. It
may tolerate the existence of its fellows but it has no
communication with them; it never imitates, never learns
from them, is incapable of concerted action with them. Its
life is that of an isolated individual. But with the suckling and
cherishing of young which was distinctive of the new
mammalian and avian strains arose the possibility of
learning by imitation, of communication, by warning cries
and other concerted action, of mutual control and
instruction. A teachable type of life had come into the world.
The earliest mammals of the Cainozoic period are but little
superior in brain size to the more active carnivorous
dinosaurs, but as we read on through the record towards
modern times we find, in every tribe and race of the
mammalian animals, a steady universal increase in brain
capacity. For instance we find at a comparatively early
stage that rhinoceros-like beasts appear. There is a
creature, the Titanotherium, which lived in the earliest
division of this period. It was probably very like a modern
rhinoceros in its habits and needs. But its brain capacity
was not one tenth that of its living successor.
The earlier mammals probably parted from their offspring
as soon as suckling was over, but, once the capacity for
mutual understanding has arisen, the advantages of
continuing the association are very great; and we presently
find a number of mammalian species displaying the
beginnings of a true social life and keeping together in
herds, packs and flocks, watching each other, imitating
each other, taking warning from each other's acts and
cries. This is something that the world had not seen before
among vertebrated animals. Reptiles and fish may no
doubt be found in swarms and shoals; they have been
hatched in quantities and similar conditions have kept them
together, but in the case of the social and gregarious
mammals the association arises not simply from a
community of external forces, it is sustained by an inner
impulse. They are not merely like one another and so found
in the same places at the same times; they like one another
and so they keep together.
This difference between the reptile world and the world of
our human minds is one our sympathies seem unable to
pass. We cannot conceive in ourselves the swift
uncomplicated urgency of a reptile's instinctive motives, its
appetites, fears and hates. We cannot understand them in
their simplicity because all our motives are complicated;
ours are balances and resultants and not simple urgencies.
But the mammals and birds have self-restraint and
consideration for other individuals, a social appeal, a self-
control that is, at its lower level, after our own fashion. We
can in consequence establish relations with almost all sorts
of them. When they suffer they utter cries and make
movements that rouse our feelings. We can make
understanding pets of them with a mutual recognition. They
can be tamed to self-restraint towards us, domesticated
and taught.
That unusual growth of brain which is the central fact of
Cainozoic times marks a new communication and
interdependence of individuals. It foreshadows the
development of human societies of which we shall soon be
telling.
As the Cainozoic period unrolled, the resemblance of its
flora and fauna to the plants and animals that inhabit the
world to-day increased. The big clumsy Uintatheres and
Titanotheres, the Entelodonts and Hyracodons, big clumsy
brutes like nothing living, disappeared. On the other hand a
series of forms led up by steady degrees from grotesque
and clumsy predecessors to the giraffes, camels, horses,
elephants, deer, dogs and lions and tigers of the existing
world. The evolution of the horse is particularly legible upon
the geological record. We have a fairly complete series of
forms from a small tapir-like ancestor in the early
Cainozoic. Another line of development that has now been
pieced together with some precision is that of the llamas
and camels.
NATURALISTS divide the class Mammalia into a number
of orders. At the head of these is the order Primates, which
includes the lemurs, the monkeys, apes and man. Their
classification was based originally upon anatomical
resemblances and took no account of any mental qualities.
Now the past history of the Primates is one very difficult to
decipher in the geological record. They are for the most
part animals which live in forests like the lemurs and
monkeys or in bare rocky places like the baboons. They
are rarely drowned and covered up by sediment, nor are
most of them very numerous species, and so they do not
figure so largely among the fossils as the ancestors of the
horses, camels and so forth do. But we know that quite
early in the Cainozoic period, that is to say some forty
million years ago or so, primitive monkeys and lemuroid
creatures had appeared, poorer in brain and not so
specialized as their later successors.
The great world summer of the middle Cainozoic period
drew at last to an end. It was to follow those other two great
summers in the history of life, the summer of the Coal
Swamps and the vast summer of the Age of Reptiles. Once
more the earth spun towards an ice age. The world chilled,
grew milder for a time and chilled again. In the warm past
hippopotami had wallowed through a lush sub-tropical
vegetation, and a tremendous tiger with fangs like sabres,
the sabre-toothed tiger, had hunted its prey where now the
journalists of Fleet Street go to and fro. Now came a
bleaker age and still bleaker ages. A great weeding and
extinction of species occurred. A woolly rhinoceros,
adapted to a cold climate, and the mammoth, a big woolly
cousin of the elephants, the Arctic musk ox and the
reindeer passed across the scene. Then century by century
the Arctic ice cap, the wintry death of the great Ice Age,
crept southward. In England it came almost down to the
Thames, in America it reached Ohio. There would be
warmer spells of a few thousand years and relapses
towards a bitterer cold.
Geologists talk of these wintry phases as the First, Second,
Third and Fourth Glacial Ages, and of the interludes as
Interglacial periods. We live to-day in a world that is still
impoverished and scarred by that terrible winter. The First
Glacial Age was coming on 600,000 years ago; the Fourth
Glacial Age reached its bitterest some fifty thousand years
ago. And it was amidst the snows of this long universal
winter that the first man-like beings lived upon our planet.
By the middle Cainozoic period there have appeared
various apes with many quasi-human attributes of the jaws
and leg bones, but it is only as we approach these Glacial
Ages that we find traces of creatures that we can speak of
as "almost human." These traces are not bones but
implements. In Europe, in deposits of this period, between
half a million and a million years old, we find flints and
stones that have evidently been chipped intentionally by
some handy creature desirous of hammering, scraping or
fighting with the sharpened edge. These things have been
called "Eoliths" (dawn stones). In Europe there are no
bones nor other remains of the creature which made these
objects, simply the objects themselves. For all the certainty
we have it may have been some entirely unhuman but
intelligent monkey. But at Trinil in Java, in accumulations of
this age, a piece of a skull and various teeth and bones
have been found of a sort of ape man, with a brain case
bigger than that of any living apes, which seems to have
walked erect. This creature is now called Pithecanthropus
erectus, the walking ape man, and the little trayful of its
bones is the only help our imaginations have as yet in
figuring to ourselves the makers of the Eoliths.
It is not until we come to sands that are almost a quarter of
a million years old that we find any other particle of a sub-
human being. But there are plenty of implements, and they
are steadily improving in quality as we read on through the
record. They are no longer clumsy Eoliths; they are now
shapely instruments made with considerable skill. And they
are much bigger than the similar implements afterwards
made by true man. Then, in a sandpit at Heidelberg,
appears a single quasi-human jaw-bone, a clumsy jaw-
bone, absolutely chinless, far heavier than a true human
jaw-bone and narrower, so that it is improbable the
creature's tongue could have moved about for articulate
speech. On the strength of this jaw-bone, scientific men
suppose this creature to have been a heavy, almost human
monster, possibly with huge limbs and hands, possibly with
a thick felt of hair, and they call it the Heidelberg Man.
This jaw-bone is, I think, one of the most tormenting objects
in the world to our human curiosity. To see it is like looking
through a defective glass into the past and catching just
one blurred and tantalizing glimpse of this Thing, shambling
through the bleak wilderness, clambering to avoid the
sabre-toothed tiger, watching the woolly rhinoceros in the
woods. Then before we can scrutinize the monster, he
vanishes. Yet the soil is littered abundantly with the
indestructible implements he chipped out for his uses.
Still more fascinatingly enigmatical are the remains of a
creature found at Piltdown in Sussex in a deposit that may
indicate an age between a hundred and a hundred and fifty
thousand years ago, though some authorities would put
these particular remains back in time to before the
Heidelberg jaw-bone. Here there are the remains of a thick
sub-human skull much larger than any existing ape's, and a
chimpanzee-like jaw-bone which may or may not belong to
it, and, in addition, a bat-shaped piece of elephant bone
evidently carefully manufactured, through which a hole had
apparently been bored. There is also the thigh-bone of a
deer with cuts upon it like a tally. That is all.
What sort of beast was this creature which sat and bored
holes in bones?
Scientific men have named him Eoanthropus, the Dawn
Man. He stands apart from his kindred; a very different
being either from the Heidelberg creature or from any living
ape. No other vestige like him is known. But the gravels
and deposits of from one hundred thousand years onward
are increasingly rich in implements of flint and similar stone.
And these implements are no longer rude "Eoliths." The
archaeologists are presently able to distinguish scrapers,
borers, knives, darts, throwing stones and hand axesƒ.
We are drawing very near to man. In our next section we
shall have to describe the strangest of all these precursors
of humanity, the Neanderthalers, the men who were almost,
but not quite, true men.
But it may be well perhaps to state quite clearly here that no
scientific man supposes either of these creatures, the
Heidelberg Man or Eoanthropus, to be direct ancestors of
the men of to-day. These are, at the closest, related forms.
ABOUT fifty or sixty thousand years ago, before the climax
of the Fourth Glacial Age, there lived a creature on earth so
like a man that until a few years ago its remains were
considered to be altogether human. We have skulls and
bones of it and a great accumulation of the large
implements it made and used. It made fires. It sheltered in
caves from the cold. It probably dressed skins roughly and
wore them. It was right-handed as men are.
Yet now the ethnologists tell us these creatures were not
true men. They were of a different species of the same
genus. They had heavy protruding jaws and great brow
ridges above the eyes and very low foreheads. Their
thumbs were not opposable to the fingers as men's are;
their necks were so poised that they could not turn back
their heads and look up to the sky. They probably slouched
along, head down and forward. Their chinless jaw-bones
resemble the Heidelberg jaw-bone and are markedly unlike
human jaw-bones. And there were great differences from
the human pattern in their teeth. Their cheek teeth were
more complicated in structure than ours, more complicated
and not less so; they had not the long fangs of our cheek
teeth; and also these quasi-men had not the marked
canines (dog teeth) of an ordinary human being. The
capacity of their skulls was quite human, but the brain was
bigger behind and lower in front than the human brain. Their
intellectual faculties were differently arranged. They were
not ancestral to the human line. Mentally and physically they
were upon a different line from the human line.
Skulls and bones of this extinct species of man were found
at Neanderthal among other places, and from that place
these strange proto-men have been christened
Neanderthal Men, or Neanderthalers. They must have
endured in Europe for many hundreds or even thousands of
years.
At that time the climate and geography of our world was
very different from what they are at the present time.
Europe for example was covered with ice reaching as far
south as the Thames and into Central Germany and
Russia; there was no Channel separating Britain from
France; the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were great
valleys, with perhaps a chain of lakes in their deeper
portions, and a great inland sea spread from the present
Black Sea across South Russia and far into Central Asia.
Spain and all of Europe not actually under ice consisted of
bleak uplands under a harder climate than that of Labrador,
and it was only when North Africa was reached that one
would have found a temperate climate. Across the cold
steppes of Southern Europe with its sparse arctic
vegetation, drifted such hardy creatures as the woolly
mammoth, and woolly rhinoceros, great oxen and reindeer,
no doubt following the vegetation northward in spring and
southward in autumn.
Such was the scene through which the Neanderthaler
wandered, gathering such subsistence as he could from
small game or fruits and berries and roots. Possibly he was
mainly a vegetarian, chewing twigs and roots. His level
elaborate teeth suggest a largely vegetarian dietary. But we
also find the long marrow bones of great animals in his
caves, cracked to extract the marrow. His weapons could
not have been of much avail in open conflict with great
beasts, but it is supposed that he attacked them with
spears at difficult river crossings and even constructed
pitfalls for them. Possibly he followed the herds and preyed
upon any dead that were killed in fights, and perhaps he
played the part of jackal to the sabre-toothed tiger which
still survived in his day. Possibly in the bitter hardships of
the Glacial Ages this creature had taken to attacking
animals after long ages of vegetarian adaptation.
We cannot guess what this Neanderthal man looked like.
He may have been very hairy and very inhuman-looking
indeed. It is even doubtful if he went erect. He may have
used his knuckles as well as his feet to hold himself up.
Probably he went about alone or in small family groups. It is
inferred from the structure of his jaw that he was incapable
of speech as we understand it.
For thousands of years these Neanderthalers were the
highest animals that the European area had ever seen; and
then some thirty or thirty-five thousand years ago as the
climate grew warmer a race of kindred beings, more
intelligent, knowing more, talking and co-operating
together, came drifting into the Neanderthaler's world from
the south. They ousted the Neanderthalers from their caves
and squatting places; they hunted the same food; they
probably made war upon their grisly predecessors and
killed them off. These newcomers from the south or the
east-for at present we do not know their region of origin-
who at last drove the Neanderthalers out of existence
altogether, were beings of our own blood and kin, the first
True Men. Their brain-cases and thumbs and necks and
teeth were anatomically the same as our own. In a cave at
Cro-Magnon and in another at Grimaldi, a number of
skeletons have been found, the earliest truly human
remains that are so far known.
So it is our race comes into the Record of the Rocks, and
the story of mankind begins.
The world was growing liker our own in those days though
the climate was still austere. The glaciers of the Ice Age
were receding in Europe; the reindeer of France and Spain
presently gave way to great herds of horses as grass
increased upon the steppes, and the mammoth became
more and more rare in southern Europe and finally receded
northward altogetherƒ.
We do not know where the True Men first originated. But in
the summer of 1921, an extremely interesting skull was
found together with pieces of a skeleton at Broken Hill in
South Africa, which seems to be a relic of a third sort of
man, intermediate in its characteristics between the
Neanderthaler and the human being. The brain-case
indicates a brain bigger in front and smaller behind than the
Neanderthaler's, and the skull was poised erect upon the
backbone in a quite human way. The teeth also and the
bones are quite human. But the face must have been ape-
like with enormous brow ridges and a ridge along the
middle of the skull. The creature was indeed a true man, so
to speak, with an ape-like, Neanderthaler face. This
Rhodesian Man is evidently still closer to real men than the
Neanderthal Man.
This Rhodesian skull is probably only the second of what in
the end may prove to be a long list of finds of sub-human
species which lived on the earth in the vast interval of time
between the beginnings of the Ice Age and the appearance
of their common heir, and perhaps their common
exterminator, the True Man. The Rhodesian skull itself may
not be very ancient. Up to the time of publishing this book
there has been no exact determination of its probable age.
It may be that this sub-human creature survived in South
Africa until quite recent times.
THE EARLIEST signs and traces at present known to
science, of a humanity which is indisputably kindred with
ourselves, have been found in western Europe and
particularly in France and Spain. Bones, weapons,
scratchings upon bone and rock, carved fragments of bone,
and paintings in caves and upon rock surfaces dating, it is
supposed, from 30,000 years ago or more, have been
discovered in both these countries. Spain is at present the
richest country in the world in these first relics of our real
human ancestors.
Of course our present collections of these things are the
merest beginnings of the accumulations we may hope for in
the future, when there are searchers enough to make a
thorough examination of all possible sources and when
other countries in the world, now inaccessible to
archaeologists, have been explored in some detail. The
greater part of Africa and Asia has never even been
traversed yet by a trained observer interested in these
matters and free to explore, and we must be very careful
therefore not to conclude that the early true men were
distinctively inhabitants of western Europe or that they first
appeared in that region.
In Asia or Africa or submerged beneath the sea of to-day
there may be richer and much earlier deposits of real
human remains than anything that has yet come to light. I
write in Asia or Africa, and I do not mention America
because so far there have been no finds at all of any of the
higher Primates, either of great apes, sub-men,
Neanderthalers nor early true men. This development of life
seems to have been an exclusively old world development,
and it was only apparently at the end of the Old Stone Age
that human beings first made their way across the land
connexion that is now cut by Behring Straits, into the
American continent.
These first real human beings we know of in Europe
appear already to have belonged to one or other of at least
two very distinct races. One of these races was of a very
high type indeed; it was tall and big brained. One of the
women's skulls found exceeds in capacity that of the
average man of to-day. One of the men's skeletons is over
six feet in height. The physical type resembled that of the
North American Indian. From the Cro-Magnon cave in
which the first skeletons were found these people have
been called Cro-Magnards. They were savages, but
savages of a high order. The second race, the race of the
Grimaldi cave remains, was distinctly negroid in its
characters. Its nearest living affinities are the Bushmen and
Hottentots of South Africa. It is interesting to find at the very
outset of the known human story, that mankind was already
racially divided into at least two main varieties; and one is
tempted to such unwarrantable guesses as that the former
race was probably brownish rather than black and that it
came from the East or North, and that the latter was
blackish rather than brown and came from the equatorial
south.
And these savages of perhaps forty thousand years ago
were so human that they pierced shells to make necklaces,
painted themselves, carved images of bone and stone,
scratched figures on rocks and bones, and painted rude
but often very able sketches of beasts and the like upon the
smooth walls of caves and upon inviting rock surfaces.
They made a great variety of implements, much smaller in
scale and finer than those of the Neanderthal men. We
have now in our museums great quantities of their
implements, their statuettes, their rock drawings and the
like.
The earliest of them were hunters. Their chief pursuit was
the wild horse, the little bearded pony of that time. They
followed it as it moved after pasture. And also they followed
the bison. They knew the mammoth, because they have left
us strikingly effective pictures of that creature. To judge by
one rather ambiguous drawing they trapped and killed it.
They hunted with spears and throwing stones. They do not
seem to have had the bow, and it is doubtful if they had yet
learnt to tame any animals. They had no dogs. There is one
carving of a horse's head and one or two drawings that
suggest a bridled horse, with a twisted skin or tendon round
it. But the little horses of that age and region could not have
carried a man, and if the horse was domesticated it was
used as a led horse. It is doubtful and improbable that they
had yet learnt the rather unnatural use of animal's milk as
food.
They do not seem to have erected any buildings though
they may have had tents of skins, and though they made
clay figures they never rose to the making of pottery. Since
they had no cooking implements their cookery must have
been rudimentary or nonexistent. They knew nothing of
cultivation and nothing of any sort of basket work or woven
cloth. Except for their robes of skin or fur they were naked
painted savages.
These earliest known men hunted the open steppes of
Europe for a hundred centuries perhaps, and then slowly
drifted and changed before a change of climate. Europe,
century by century, was growing milder and damper.
Reindeer receded northward and eastward, and bison and
horse followed. The steppes gave way to forests, and red
deer took the place of horse and bison. There is a change
in the character of the implements with this change in their
application. River and lake fishing becomes of great
importance to men, and fine implements of bone
increased. "The bone needles of this age," says de
Mortillet, "are much superior to those of later, even
historical times, down to the Renaissance. The Romans, for
example, never had needles comparable to those of this
epoch."
Almost fifteen or twelve thousand years ago a fresh people
drifted into the south of Spain, and left very remarkable
drawings of themselves upon exposed rock faces there.
These were the Azilians (named from the Mas d'Azil cave).
They had the bow; they seem to have worn feather
headdresses; they drew vividly; but also they had reduced
their drawings to a sort of symbolism-a man for instance
would be represented by a vertical dab with two or three
horizontal dabs-that suggest the dawn of the writing idea.
Against hunting sketches there are often marks like tallies.
One drawing shows two men smoking out a bees' nest.
These are the latest of the men that we call Palaeolithic
(Old Stone Age) because they had only chipped
implements. By ten or twelve thousand years a new sort of
life has dawned in Europe, men have learnt not only to chip
but to polish and grind stone implements, and they have
begun cultivation. The Neolithic Age (New Stone Age) was
beginning.
It is interesting to note that less than a century ago there still
survived in a remote part of the world, in Tasmania, a race
of human beings at a lower level of physical and intellectual
development than any of these earliest races of mankind
who have left traces in Europe. These people had long ago
been cut off by geographical changes from the rest of the
species, and from stimulation and improvement. They
seem to have degenerated rather than developed. They
lived a base life subsisting upon shellfish and small game.
They had no habitations but only squatting places. They
were real men of our species, but they had neither the
manual dexterity nor the artistic powers of the first true men.
AND now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation;
how did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human
adventure? How did men think and what did they think in
those remote days of hunting and wandering four hundred
centuries ago before seed time and harvest began. Those
were days long before the written record of any human
impressions, and we are left almost entirely to inference
and guesswork in our answers to these questions.
The sources to which scientific men have gone in their
attempts to reconstruct that primitive mentality are very
various. Recently the science of psycho-analysis, which
analyzes the way in which the egotistic and passionate
impulses of the child are restrained, suppressed, modified
or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of social life, seems
to have thrown a considerable amount of light upon the
history of primitive society; and another fruitful source of
suggestion has been the study of the ideas and customs of
such contemporary savages as still survive. Again there is
a sort of mental fossilization which we find in folk-lore and
the deep-lying irrational superstitions and prejudices that
still survive among modern civilized people. And finally we
have in the increasingly numerous pictures, statues,
carvings, symbols and the like, as we draw near to our own
time, clearer and clearer indications of what man found
interesting and worthy of record and representation.
Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks,
that is to say in a series of imaginative pictures. He
conjured up images or images presented themselves to his
mind, and he acted in accordance with the emotions they
aroused. So a child or an uneducated person does to-day.
Systematic thinking is apparently a comparatively late
development in human experience; it has not played any
great part in human life until within the last three thousand
years. And even to-day those who really control and order
their thoughts are but a small minority of mankind. Most of
the world still lives by imagination and passion.
Probably the earliest human societies, in the opening
stages of the true human story, were small family groups.
Just as the flocks and herds of the earlier mammals arose
out of families which remained together and multiplied, so
probably did the earliest tribes. But before this could
happen a certain restraint upon the primitive egotisms of
the individual had to be established. The fear of the father
and respect for the mother had to be extended into adult
life, and the natural jealousy of the old man of the group for
the younger males as they grew up had to be mitigated.
The mother on the other hand was the natural adviser and
protector of the young. Human social life grew up out of the
reaction between the crude instinct of the young to go off
and pair by themselves as they grew up, on the one hand,
and the dangers and disadvantages of separation on the
other. An anthropological writer of great genius, J. J.
Atkinson, in his Primal Law, has shown how much of the
customary law of savages, the Tabus, that are so
remarkable a fact in tribal life, can be ascribed to such a
mental adjustment of the needs of the primitive human
animal to a developing social life, and the later work of the
psycho-analysts has done much to confirm his
interpretation of these possibilities.
Some speculative writers would have us believe that
respect and fear of the Old Man and the emotional reaction
of the primitive savage to older protective women,
exaggerated in dreams and enriched by fanciful mental
play, played a large part in the beginnings of primitive
religion and in the conception of gods and goddesses.
Associated with this respect for powerful or helpful
personalities was a dread and exaltation of such
personages after their deaths, due to their reappearance in
dreams. It was easy to believe they were not truly dead but
only fantastically transferred to a remoteness of greater
power.
The dreams, imaginations and fears of a child are far more
vivid and real than those of a modern adult, and primitive
man was always something of a child. He was nearer to the
animals also, and he could suppose them to have motives
and reactions like his own. He could imagine animal
helpers, animal enemies, animal gods. One needs to have
been an imaginative child oneself to realize again how
important, significant, portentous or friendly, strangely
shaped rocks, lumps of wood, exceptional trees or the like
may have appeared to the men of the Old Stone Age, and
how dream and fancy would create stories and legends
about such things that would become credible as they told
them. Some of these stories would be good enough to
remember and tell again. The women would tell them to the
children and so establish a tradition. To this day most
imaginative children invent long stories in which some
favourite doll or animal or some fantastic semihuman being
figures as the hero, and primitive man probably did the
same-with a much stronger disposition to believe his hero
real.
For the very earliest of the true men that we know of were
probably quite talkative beings. In that way they have
differed from the Neanderthalers and had an advantage
over them. The Neanderthaler may have been a dumb
animal. Of course the primitive human speech was
probably a very scanty collection of names, and may have
been eked out with gestures and signs.
There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of
science of cause and effect. But primitive man was not very
critical in his associations of cause with effect; he very
easily connected an effect with something quite wrong as
its cause. "You do so and so," he said, "and so and so
happens." You give a child a poisonous berry and it dies.
You eat the heart of a valiant enemy and you become
strong. There we have two bits of cause and effect
association, one true one false. We call the system of
cause and effect in the mind of a savage, Fetish; but Fetish
is simply savage science. It differs from modern science in
that it is totally unsystematic and uncritical and so more
frequently wrong.
In many cases it is not difficult to link cause and effect, in
many others erroneous ideas were soon corrected by
experience; but there was a large series of issues of very
great importance to primitive man, where he sought
persistently for causes and found explanations that were
wrong but not sufficiently wrong nor so obviously wrong as
to be detected. It was a matter of great importance to him
that game should be abundant or fish plentiful and easily
caught, and no doubt he tried and believed in a thousand
charms, incantations and omens to determine these
desirable results. Another great concern of his was illness
and death. Occasionally infections crept through the land
and men died of them. Occasionally men were stricken by
illness and died or were enfeebled without any manifest
cause. This too must have given the hasty, emotional mind
of primitive man much feverish exercise. Dreams and
fantastic guesses made him blame this, or appeal for help
to that man or beast or thing. He had the child's aptitude for
fear and panic.
Quite early in the little human tribe, older, steadier minds
sharing the fears, sharing the imaginations, but a little more
forceful than the others, must have asserted themselves, to
advise, to prescribe, to command. This they declared
unpropitious and that imperative, this an omen of good and
that an omen of evil. The expert in Fetish, the Medicine
Man, was the first priest. He exhorted, he interpreted
dreams, he warned, he performed the complicated hocus
pocus that brought luck or averted calamity. Primitive
religion was not so much what we now call religion as
practice and observance, and the early priest dictated what
was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical science.
WE are still very ignorant about the beginnings of cultivation
and settlement in the world although a vast amount of
research and speculation has been given to these matters
in the last fifty years. All that we can say with any confidence
at present is that somewhen about 15,000 and 12,000 B.C.
while the Azilian people were in the south of Spain and
while the remnants of the earlier hunters were drifting
northward and eastward, somewhere in North Africa or
Western Asia or in that great Mediterranean valley that is
now submerged under the waters of the Mediterranean
sea, there were people who, age by age, were working out
two vitally important things: they were beginning cultivation
and they were domesticating animals. They were also
beginning to make, in addition to the chipped implements
of their hunter forebears, implements of polished stone.
They had discovered the possibility of basketwork and
roughly woven textiles of plant fibre, and they were
beginning to make a rudely modelled pottery.
They were entering upon a new phase in human culture, the
Neolithic phase (New Stone Age) as distinguished from the
Palaeolithic (Old Stone) phase of the Cro-Magnards, the
Grimaldi people, the Azilians and their like. Slowly these
Neolithic people spread over the warmer parts of the world;
and the arts they had mastered, the plants and animals they
had learnt to use, spread by imitation and acquisition even
more widely than they did. By 10,000 B.C., most of
mankind was at the Neolithic level.
Now the ploughing of land, the sowing of seed, the reaping
of harvest, threshing and grinding, may seem the most
obviously reasonable steps to a modern mind just as to a
modern mind it is a commonplace that the world is round.
What else could you do? people will ask. What else can it
be? But to the primitive man of twenty thousand years ago
neither of the systems of action and reasoning that seem
so sure and manifest to us to-day were at all obvious. He
felt his way to effectual practice through a multitude of trials
and misconceptions, with fantastic and unnecessary
elaborations and false interpretations at every turn.
Somewhere in the Mediterranean region, wheat grew wild;
and man way have learnt to pound and then grind up its
seeds for food long before he learnt to sow. He reaped
before he sowed.
And it is a very remarkable thing that throughout the world
wherever there is sowing and harvesting there is still
traceable the vestiges of a strong primitive association of
the idea of sowing with the idea of a blood sacrifice, and
primarily of the sacrifice of a human being. The study of the
original entanglement of these two things is a profoundly
attractive one to the curious mind; the interested reader will
find it very fully developed in that monumental work, Sir J.
G. Frazer's Golden Bough. It was an entanglement, we
must remember, in the childish, dreaming, myth-making
primitive mind; no reasoned process will explain it. But in
that world of 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, it would seem
that whenever seed time came round to the Neolithic
peoples there was a human sacrifice. And it was not the
sacrifice of any mean or outcast person; it was the sacrifice
usually of a chosen youth or maiden, a youth more often
who was treated with profound deference and even worship
up to the moment of his immolation. He was a sort of
sacrificial god-king, and all the details of his killing had
become a ritual directed by the old, knowing men and
sanctioned by the accumulated usage of ages.
At first primitive men, with only a very rough idea of the
seasons, must have found great difficulty in determining
when was the propitious moment for the seed-time
sacrifice and the sowing. There is some reason for
supposing that there was an early stage in human
experience when men had no idea of a year. The first
chronology was in lunar months; it is supposed that the
years of the Biblical patriarchs are really moons, and the
Babylonian calendar shows distinct traces of an attempt to
reckon seed time by taking thirteen lunar months to see it
round. This lunar influence upon the calendar reaches down
to our own days. If usage did not dull our sense of its
strangeness we should think it a very remarkable thing
indeed that the Christian Church does not commemorate
the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ on the proper
anniversaries but on dates that vary year by year with the
phases of the moon.
It may be doubted whether the first agriculturalists made
any observation of the stars. It is more likely that stars were
first observed by migratory herdsmen, who found them a
convenient mark of direction. But once their use in
determining seasons was realized, their importance to
agriculture became very great. The seed-time sacrifice was
linked up with the southing or northing of some prominent
star. A myth and worship of that star was for primitive man
an almost inevitable consequence.
It is easy to see how important the man of knowledge and
experience, the man who knew about the blood sacrifice
and the stars, became in this early Neolithic world.
The fear of uncleanness and pollution, and the methods of
cleansing that were advisable, constituted another source
of power for the knowledgeable men and women. For there
have always been witches as well as wizards, and
priestesses as well as priests. The early priest was really
not so much a religious man as a man of applied science.
His science was generally empirical and often bad; he kept
it secret from the generality of men very jealously; but that
does not alter the fact that his primary function was
knowledge and that his primary use was a practical use.
Twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, in all the warm and
fairly well-watered parts of the Old World these Neolithic
human communities, with their class and tradition of priests
and priestesses and their cultivated fields and their
development of villages and little walled cities, were
spreading. Age by age a drift and exchange of ideas went
on between these communities. Eliot Smith and Rivers
have used the term "Heliolithic culture" for the culture of
these first agricultural peoples. "Heliolithic" (Sun and
Stone) is not perhaps the best possible word to use for this,
but until scientific men give us a better one we shall have to
use it. Originating somewhere in the Mediterranean and
western Asiatic area, it spread age by age eastward and
from island to island across the Pacific until it may even
have reached America and mingled with the more primitive
ways of living of the Mongoloid immigrants coming down
from the North.
Wherever the brownish people with the Heliolithic culture
went they took with them all or most of a certain group of
curious ideas and practices. Some of them are such queer
ideas that they call for the explanation of the mental expert.
They made pyramids and great mounds, and set up great
circles of big stones, perhaps to facilitate the astronomical
observation of the priests; they made mummies of some or
all of their dead; they tattooed and circumcized; they had
the old custom, known as the couvade, of sending the
father to bed and rest when a child was born, and they had
as a luck symbol the well-known Swastika.
If we were to make a map of the world with dots to show
how far these group practices have left their traces, we
should make a belt along the temperate and sub-tropical
coasts of the world from Stonehenge and Spain across the
world to Mexico and Peru. But Africa below the equator,
north central Europe, and north Asia would show none of
these dottings; there lived races who were developing
along practically independent lines.The term Palaeolithic
we may note is also used to cover the Neanderthaler and
even the Eolithic implements. The pre-human age is called
the "Older Palaeolithic," the age of true men using
unpolished stones in the "Newer Palaeolithic."
ABOUT 10,000 B.C. the geography of the world was very
similar in its general outline to that of the world to-day. It is
probable that by that time the great barrier across the
Straits of Gibraltar that had hitherto banked back the ocean
waters from the Mediterranean valley had been eaten
through, and that the Mediterranean was a sea following
much the same coastlines as it does now. The Caspian
Sea was probably still far more extensive than it is at
present, and it may have been continuous with the Black
Sea to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. About this
great Central Asian sea lands that are now steppes and
deserts were fertile and habitable. Generally it was a
moister and more fertile world. European Russia was much
more a land of swamp and lake than it is now, and there
may still have been a land connexion between Asia and
America at Behring Straits.
It would have been already possible at that time to have
distinguished the main racial divisions of mankind as we
know them to-day. Across the warm temperate regions of
this rather warmer and better-wooded world, and along the
coasts, stretched the brownish peoples of the Heliolithic
culture, the ancestors of the bulk of the living inhabitants of
the Mediterranean world, of the Berbers, the Egyptians and
of much of the population of South and Eastern Asia. This
great race had of course a number of varieties. The Iberian
or Mediterranean or "dark-white" race of the Atlantic and
Mediterranean coast, the "Hamitic" peoples which include
the Berbers and Egyptians, the Dravidians, the darker
people of India, a multitude of East Indian people, many
Polynesian races and the Maoris are all divisions of various
value of this great main mass of humanity. Its western
varieties are whiter than its eastern. In the forests of central
and northern Europe a more blonde variety of men with
blue eyes was becoming distinguishable, branching off
from the main mass of brownish people, a variety which
many people now speak of as the Nordic race. In the more
open regions of northeastern Asia was another
differentiation of this brownish humanity in the direction of a
type with more oblique eyes, high cheek-bones, a yellowish
skin, and very straight black hair, the Mongolian peoples. In
South Africa, Australia, in many tropical islands in the south
of Asia were remains of the early negroid peoples. The
central parts of Africa were already a region of racial
intermixture. Nearly all the coloured races of Africa to-day
seem to be blends of the brownish peoples of the north with
a negroid substratum.
We have to remember that human races can all interbreed
freely and that they separate, mingle and reunite as clouds
do. Human races do not branch out like trees with branches
that never come together again. It is a thing we need to
bear constantly in mind, this remingling of races at any
opportunity. It will save us from many cruel delusions and
prejudices if we do so. People will use such a word as race
in the loosest manner, and base the most preposterous
generalizations upon it. They will speak of a "British" race
or of a "European" race. But nearly all the European
nations are confused mixtures of brownish, dark-white,
white and Mongolian elements.
It was at the Neolithic phase of human development that
peoples of the Mongolian breed first made their way into
America. Apparently they came by way of Behring Straits
and spread southward. They found caribou, the American
reindeer, in the north and great herds of bison in the south.
When they reached South America there were still living the
Glyptodon, a gigantic armadillo, and the Megatherium, a
monstrous clumsy sloth as high as an elephant. They
probably exterminated the latter beast, which was as
helpless as it was big.
The greater portion of these American tribes never rose
above a hunting nomadic Neolithic life. They never
discovered the use of iron, and their chief metal
possessions were native gold and copper. But in Mexico,
Yucatan and Peru conditions existed favourable to settled
cultivation, and here about 1000 B.C. or so arose very
interesting civilizations of a parallel but different type from
the old-world civilization. Like the much earlier primitive
civilizations of the old world these communities displayed a
great development of human sacrifice about the processes
of seed time and harvest; but while in the old world, as we
shall see, these primary ideas were ultimately mitigated,
complicated and overlaid by others, in America they
developed and were elaborated to a very high degree of
intensity. These American civilized countries were
essentially priest-ruled countries; their war chiefs and rulers
were under a rigorous rule of law and omen.
These priests carried astronomical science to a high level
of accuracy. They knew their year better than the
Babylonians of whom we shall presently tell. In Yucatan they
had a kind of writing, the Maya writing, of the most curious
and elaborate character. So far as we have been able to
decipher it, it was used mainly for keeping the exact and
complicated calendars upon which the priests expended
their intelligence. The art of the Maya civilization came to a
climax about 700 or 800 A.D. The sculptured work of these
people amazes the modern observer by its great plastic
power and its frequent beauty, and perplexes him by a
grotesqueness and by a sort of insane conventionality and
intricacy outside the circle of his ideas. There is nothing
quite like it in the old world. The nearest approach, and that
is a remote one, is found in archaic Indian carvings.
Everywhere there are woven feathers and serpents twine in
and out. Many Maya inscriptions resemble a certain sort of
elaborate drawing made by lunatics in European asylums,
more than any other old-world work. It is as if the Maya
mind had developed upon a different line from the old-world
mind, had a different twist to its ideas, was not, by old-world
standards, a rational mind at all.
This linking of these aberrant American civilizations to the
idea of a general mental aberration finds support in their
extraordinary obsession by the shedding of human blood.
The Mexican civilization in particular ran blood; it offered
thousands of human victims yearly. The cutting open of
living victims, the tearing out of the still beating heart, was
an act that dominated the minds and lives of these strange
priesthoods. The public life, the national festivities all turned
on this fantastically horrible act.
The ordinary existence of the common people in these
communities was very like the ordinary existence of any
other barbaric peasantry. Their pottery, weaving and dyeing
was very good. The Maya writing was not only carven on
stone but written and painted upon skins and the like. The
European and American museums contain many
enigmatical Maya manuscripts of which at present little has
been deciphered except the dates. In Peru there were
beginnings of a similar writing but they were superseded by
a method of keeping records by knotting cords. A similar
method of mnemonics was in use in China thousands of
years ago.
In the old world before 4000 or 5000 B.C., that is to say
three or four thousand years earlier, there were primitive
civilizations not unlike these American civilizations;
civilizations based upon a temple, having a vast quantity of
blood sacrifices and with an intensely astronomical
priesthood. But in the old world the primitive civilizations
reacted upon one another and developed towards the
conditions of our own world. In America these primitive
civilizations never progressed beyond this primitive stage.
Each of them was in a little world of its own. Mexico it
seems knew little or nothing of Peru, until the Europeans
came to America. The potato, which was the principal food
stuff in Peru, was unknown in Mexico.
Age by age these peoples lived and marvelled at their
gods and made their sacrifices and died. Maya art rose to
high levels of decorative beauty. Men made love and tribes
made war. Drought and plenty, pestilence and health,
followed one another. The priests elaborated their calendar
and their sacrificial ritual through long centuries, but made
little progress in other directions.
THE OLD world is a wider, more varied stage than the new.
By 6000 or 7000 B.C. there were already quasi-civilized
communities almost at the Peruvian level, appearing in
various fertile regions of Asia and in the Nile valley. At that
time north Persia and western Turkestan and south Arabia
were all more fertile than they are now, and there are traces
of very early communities in these regions. It is in lower
Mesopotamia however and in Egypt that there first appear
cities, temples, systematic irrigation, and evidences of a
social organization rising above the level of a mere
barbaric village-town. In those days the Euphrates and
Tigris flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf, and
it was in the country between them that the Sumerians built
their first cities. About the same time, for chronology is still
vague, the great history of Egypt was beginning.
These Sumerians appear to have been a brownish people
with prominent noses. They employed a sort of writing that
has been deciphered, and their language is now known.
They had discovered the use of bronze and they built great
tower-like temples of sun-dried brick. The clay of this
country is very fine; they used it to write upon, and so it is
that their inscriptions have been preserved to us. They had
cattle, sheep, goats and asses, but no horses. They fought
on foot, in close formation, carrying spears and shields of
skin. Their clothing was of wool and they shaved their
heads.
Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally to have been
an independent state with a god of its own and priests of its
own. But sometimes one city would establish an
ascendancy over others and exact tribute from their
population. A very ancient inscription at Nippur records the
"empire," the first recorded empire, of the Sumerian city of
Erech. Its god and its priest-king claimed an authority from
the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea.
At first writing was merely an abbreviated method of
pictorial record. Even before Neolithic times men were
beginning to write. The Azilian rock pictures to which we
have already referred show the beginning of the process.
Many of them record hunts and expeditions, and in most of
these the human figures are plainly drawn. But in some the
painter would not bother with head and limbs; he just
indicated men by a vertical and one or two transverse
strokes. From this to a conventional condensed picture
writing was an easy transition. In Sumeria, where the writing
was done on clay with a stick, the dabs of the characters
soon became unrecognizably unlike the things they stood
for, but in Egypt where men painted on walls and on strips
of the papyrus reed (the first paper) the likeness to the thing
imitated remained. From the fact that the wooden styles
used in Sumeria made wedge-shaped marks, the
Sumerian writing is called cuneiform ([fig] = wedge-
shaped).
An important step towards writing was made when pictures
were used to indicate not the thing represented but some
similar thing. In the rebus dear to children of a suitable age,
this is still done to-day. We draw a camp with tents and a
bell, and the child is delighted to guess that this is the
Scotch name Campbell. The Sumerian language was a
language made up of accumulated syllables rather like
some contemporary Amerindian languages, and it lent itself
very readily to this syllabic method of writing words
expressing ideas that could not be conveyed by pictures
directly. Egyptian writing underwent parallel developments.
Later on, when foreign peoples with less distinctly syllabled
methods of speech were to learn and use these picture
scripts they were to make those further modifications and
simplifications that developed at last into alphabetical
writing. All the true alphabets of the later world derived from
a mixture of the Sumerian cuneiform and the Egyptian
hieroglyphic (priest writing). Later in China there was to
develop a conventionalized picture writing, but in China it
never got to the alphabetical stage.
The invention of writing was of very great importance in the
development of human societies. It put agreements, laws,
commandments on record. It made the growth of states
larger than the old city states possible. It made a
continuous historical consciousness possible. The
command of the priest or king and his seal could go far
beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death. It is
interesting to note that in ancient Sumeria seals were
greatly used. A king or a nobleman or a merchant would
have his seal often very artistically carved, and would
impress it on any clay document he wished to authorize. So
close had civilization got to printing six thousand years ago.
Then the clay was dried hard and became permanent. For
the reader must remember that in the land of Mesopotamia
for countless years, letters, records and accounts were all
written on comparatively indestructible tiles. To that fact we
owe a great wealth of recovered knowledge.
Bronze, copper, gold, silver and, as a precious rarity,
meteoric iron were known in both Sumeria and Egypt at a
very early stage.
Daily life in those first city lands of the old world must have
been very similar in both Egypt and Sumeria. And except
for the asses and cattle in the streets it must have been not
unlike the life in the Maya cities of America three or four
thousand years later. Most of the people in peace time
were busy with irrigation and cultivation-except on days of
religious festivity. They had no money and no need for it.
They managed their small occasional trades by barter. The
princes and rulers who alone had more than a few
possessions used gold and silver bars and precious
stones for any incidental act of trade. The temple
dominated life; in Sumeria it was a great towering temple
that went up to a roof from which the stars were observed;
in Egypt it was a massive building with only a ground floor.
In Sumeria the priest ruler was the greatest, most splendid
of beings. In Egypt however there was one who was raised
above the priests; he was the living incarnation of the chief
god of the land, the Pharaoh, the god king.
There were few changes in the world in those days; men's
days were sunny, toilsome and conventional. Few strangers
came into the land and such as did fared uncomfortably.
The priest directed life according to immemorial rules and
watched the stars for seed time and marked the omens of
the sacrifices and interpreted the warnings of dreams. Men
worked and loved and died, not unhappily, forgetful of the
savage past of their race and heedless of its future.
Sometimes the ruler was benign. Such was Pepi II, who
reigned in Egypt for ninety years. Sometimes he was
ambitious and took men's sons to be soldiers and sent
them against neighbouring city states to war and plunder,
or he made them toil to build great buildings. Such were
Cheops and Chephren and Mycerinus, who built those vast
sepulchral piles, the pyramids at Gizeh. The largest of
these is 450 feet high and the weight of stone in it is
4,883,000 tons. All this was brought down the Nile in boats
and lugged into place chiefly by human muscle. Its erection
must have exhausted Egypt more than a great war would
have done.
IT was not only in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley that
men were settling down to agriculture and the formation of
city states in the centuries between 6000 and 3000 B.C.
Wherever there were possibilities of irrigation and a steady
all-the-year-round food supply men were exchanging the
uncertainties and hardships of hunting and wandering for
the routines of settlement. On the upper Tigris a people
called the Assyrians were founding cities; in the valleys of
Asia Minor and on the Mediterranean shores and islands,
there were small communities growing up to civilization.
Possibly parallel developments of human life were already
going on in favourable regions of India and China. In many
parts of Europe where there were lakes well stocked with
fish, little communities of men had long settled in dwellings
built on piles over the water, and were eking out agriculture
by fishing and hunting. But over much larger areas of the
old world no such settlement was possible. The land was
too harsh, too thickly wooded or too arid, or the seasons
too uncertain for mankind, with only the implements and
science of that age to take root.
For settlement under the conditions of the primitive
civilizations men needed a constant water supply and
warmth and sunshine. Where these needs were not
satisfied, man could live as a transient, as a hunter
following his game, as a herdsman following the seasonal
grass, but he could not settle. The transition from the
hunting to the herding life may have been very gradual.
From following herds of wild cattle or (in Asia) wild horses,
men may have come to an idea of property in them, have
learnt to pen them into valleys, have fought for them against
wolves, wild dogs and other predatory beasts.
So while the primitive civilizations of the cultivators were
growing up chiefly in the great river valleys, a different way
of living, the nomadic life, a life in constant movement to
and fro from winter pasture to summer pasture, was also
growing up. The nomadic peoples were on the whole
hardier than the agriculturalists; they were less prolific and
numerous, they had no permanent temples and no highly
organized priesthood; they had less gear; but the reader
must not suppose that theirs was necessarily a less highly
developed way of living on that account. In many ways this
free life was a fuller life than that of the tillers of the soil. The
individual was more self-reliant; less of a unit in a crowd.
The leader was more important; the medicine man perhaps
less so.
Moving over large stretches of country the nomad took a
wider view of life. He touched on the confines of this settled
land and that. He was used to the sight of strange faces. He
had to scheme and treat for pasture with competing tribes.
He knew more of minerals than the folk upon the plough
lands because he went over mountain passes and into
rocky places. He may have been a better metallurgist.
Possibly bronze and much more probably iron smelting
were nomadic discoveries. Some of the earliest
implements of iron reduced from its ores have been found
in Central Europe far away from the early civilizations.
On the other hand the settled folk had their textiles and their
pottery and made many desirable things. It was inevitable
that as the two sorts of life, the agricultural and the nomadic
differentiated, a certain amount of looting and trading
should develop between the two. In Sumeria particularly
which had deserts and seasonal country on either hand it
must have been usual to have the nomads camping close
to the cultivated fields, trading and stealing and perhaps
tinkering, as gipsies do to this day. (But hens they would
not steal, because the domestic fowl-an Indian jungle fowl
originally-was not domesticated by man until about 1000
B.C. They would bring precious stones and things of metal
and leather. If they were hunters they would bring skins.
They would get in exchange pottery and beads and glass,
garments and suchlike manufactured things.
Three main regions and three main kinds of wandering and
imperfectly settled people there were in those remote days
of the first civilizations in Sumeria and early Egypt. Away in
the forests of Europe were the blonde Nordic peoples,
hunters and herdsmen, a lowly race. The primitive
civilizations saw very little of this race before 1500 B.C.
Away on the steppes of eastern Asia various Mongolian
tribes, the Hunnish peoples, were domesticating the horse
and developing a very wide sweeping habit of seasonal
movement between their summer and winter camping
places. Possibly the Nordic and Hunnish peoples were still
separated from one another by the swamps of Russia and
the greater Caspian Sea of that time. For very much of
Russia there was swamp and lake. In the deserts, which
were growing more arid now, of Syria and Arabia, tribes of
a dark white or brownish people, the Semitic tribes, were
driving flocks of sheep and goats and asses from pasture
to pasture. It was these Semitic shepherds and certain
more negroid people from southern Persia, the Elamites,
who were the first nomads to come into close contact with
the early civilizations. They came as traders and as raiders.
Finally there arose leaders among them with bolder
imaginations, and they became conquerors.
About 2750 B.C. a great Semitic leader, Sargon, had
conquered the whole Sumerian land and was master of all
the world from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.
He was an illiterate barbarian and his people, the
Akkadians, learnt the Sumerian writing and adopted the
Sumerian language as the speech of the officials and the
learned. The empire he founded decayed after two
centuries, and after one inundation of Elamites a fresh
Semitic people, the Amorites, by degrees established their
rule over Sumeria. They made their capital in what had
hitherto been a small up-river town, Babylon, and their
empire is called the first Babylonian Empire. It was
consolidated by a great king called Hammurabi (circa 2100
B.C.) who made the earliest code of laws yet known to
history.
The narrow valley of the Nile lies less open to nomadic
invasion than Mesopotamia, but about the time of
Hammurabi occurred a successful Semitic invasion of
Egypt and a line of Pharaohs was set up, the Hyksos or
"shepherd kings," which lasted for several centuries. These
Semitic conquerors never assimilated themselves with the
Egyptians; they were always regarded with hostility as
foreigners and barbarians; and they were at last expelled
by a popular uprising about 1600 B.C.
But the Semites had come into Sumeria for good and all,
the two races assimilated and the Babylonian Empire
became Semitic in its language and character.
THE EARLIEST boats and ships must have come into use
some twenty-five or thirty thousand years ago. Man was
probably paddling about on the water with a log of wood or
an inflated skin to assist him, at latest in the beginnings of
the Neolithic period. A basketwork boat covered with skin
and caulked was used in Egypt and Sumeria from the
beginnings of our knowledge. Such boats are still used
there. They are used to this day in Ireland and Wales and in
Alaska; sealskin boats still make the crossing of Behring
Straits. The hollow log followed as tools improved. The
building of boats and then ships came in a natural
succession.
Perhaps the legend of Noah's Ark preserves the memory of
some early exploit in shipbuilding, just as the story of the
Flood, so widely distributed among the peoples of the
world, may be the tradition of the flooding of the
Mediterranean basin.
There were ships upon the Red Sea long before the
pyramids were built, and there were ships on the
Mediterranean and Persian Gulf by 7000 B.C. Mostly these
were the ships of fishermen, but some were already trading
and pirate ships-for knowing what we do of mankind we
may guess pretty safely that the first sailors plundered
where they could and traded where they had to do so.
The seas on which these first ships adventured were inland
seas on which the wind blew fitfully and which were often at
a dead calm for days together, so that sailing did not
develop beyond an accessory use. It is only in the last four
hundred years that the well-rigged, ocean-going, sailing
ship has developed. The ships of the ancient world were
essentially rowing ships which hugged the shore and went
into harbour at the first sign of rough weather. As ships
grew into big galleys they caused a demand for war
captives as galley slaves.
We have already noted the appearance of the Semitic
people as wanderers and nomads in the region of Syria
and Arabia, and how they conquered Sumeria and set up
first the Akkadian and then the first Babylonian Empire. In
the west these same Semitic peoples were taking to the
sea. They set up a string of harbour towns along the
Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, of which Type and
Sidon were the chief; and by the time of Hammurabi in
Babylon, they had spread as traders, wanderers and
colonizers over the whole Mediterranean basin. These sea
Semites were called the Phoenicians. They settled largely
in Spain, pushing back the old Iberian Basque population
and sending coasting expeditions through the straits of
Gibraltar; and they set up colonies upon the north coast of
Africa. Of Carthage, one of these Phoenicians cities, we
shall have much more to tell later.
But the Phoenicians were not the first people to have
galleys in the Mediterranean waters. There was already a
series of towns and cities among the islands and coasts of
that sea belonging to a race or races apparently connected
by blood and language with the Basques to the west and
the Berbers and Egyptians to the south, the aegean
peoples. These peoples must not be confused with the
Greeks, who come much later into our story; they were pre-
Greek, but they had cities in Greece and Asia Minor,
Mycenae and Troy for example, and they had a great and
prosperous establishment at Cnossos in Crete.
It is only in the last half century that the industry of
excavating archaeologists has brought the extent and
civilization of the aegean peoples to our knowledge.
Cnossos has been most thoroughly explored; it was happily
not succeeded by any city big enough to destroy its ruins,
and so it is our chief source of information about this once
almost forgotten civilization.
The history of Cnossos goes back as far as the history of
Egypt; the two countries were trading actively across the
sea by 4000 B.C. By 2500 B.C., that is between the time of
Sargon I and Hammurabi, Cretan civilization was at its
zenith.
Cnossos was not so much a town as a great palace for the
Cretan monarch and his people. It was not even fortified. It
was only fortified later as the Phoenicians grew strong, and
as a new and more terrible breed of pirates, the Greeks,
came upon the sea from the north.
The monarch was called Minos, as the Egyptian monarch
was called Pharaoh; and he kept his state in a palace fitted
with running water, with bathrooms and the like
conveniences such as we know of in no other ancient
remains. There he held great festivals and shows. There
was bull-fighting, singularly like the bull-fighting that still
survives in Spain; there was resemblance even in the
costumes of the bull-fighters; and there were gymnastic
displays. The women's clothes were remarkably modern in
spirit; they wore corsets and flounced dresses. The pottery,
the textile manufactures, the sculpture, painting, jewellery,
ivory, metal and inlay work of these Cretans was often
astonishingly beautiful. And they had a system of writing,
but that still remains to be deciphered.
This happy and sunny and civilized life lasted for some
score of centuries. About 2000 B.C. Cnossos and Babylon
abounded in comfortable and cultivated people who
probably led very pleasant lives. They had shows and they
had religious festivals, they had domestic slaves to look
after them and industrial slaves to make a profit for them.
Life must have seemed very secure in Cnossos for such
people, sunlit and girdled by the blue sea. Egypt of course
must have appeared rather a declining country in those
days under the rule of her half-barbaric shepherd kings, and
if one took an interest in politics one must have noticed how
the Semitic people seemed to be getting everywhere,
ruling Egypt, ruling distant Babylon, building Nineveh on the
upper Tigris, sailing west to the Pillars of Hercules (the
straits of Gibraltar) and setting up their colonies on those
distant coasts.
There were some active and curious minds in Cnossos,
because later on the Greeks told legends of a certain skilful
Cretan artificer, Daedalus, who attempted to make some
sort of flying machine, perhaps a glider, which collapsed
and fell into the sea.
It is interesting to note some of the differences as well as
the resemblances between the life of Cnossos and our
own. To a Cretan gentleman of 2500 B.C. iron was a rare
metal which fell out of the sky and was curious rather than
useful-for as yet only meteoric iron was known, iron had not
been obtained from its ores. Compare that with our modern
state of affairs pervaded by iron everywhere. The horse
again would be a quite legendary creature to our Cretan, a
sort of super-ass which lived in the bleak northern lands far
away beyond the Black Sea. Civilization for him dwelt
chiefly in aegean Greece and Asia Minor, where Lydians
and Carians and Trojans lived a life and probably spoke
languages like his own. There were Phoenicians and
aegeans settled in Spain and North Africa, but those were
very remote regions to his imagination. Italy was still a
desolate land covered with dense forests; the brown-
skinned Etruscans had not yet gone there from Asia Minor.
And one day perhaps this Cretan gentleman went down to
the harbour and saw a captive who attracted his attention
because he was very fair-complexioned and had blue eyes.
Perhaps our Cretan tried to talk to him and was answered
in an unintelligible gibberish. This creature came from
somewhere beyond the Black Sea and seemed to be an
altogether benighted savage. But indeed he was an Aryan
tribesman, of a race and culture of which we shall soon
have much to tell, and the strange gibberish he spoke was
to differentiate some day into Sanskrit, Persian, Greek,
Latin, German, English and most of the chief languages of
the world.
Such was Cnossos at its zenith, intelligent, enterprising,
bright and happy. But about 1400 B.C. disaster came
perhaps very suddenly upon its prosperity. The palace of
Minos was destroyed, and its ruins have never been rebuilt
or inhabited from that day to this. We do not know how this
disaster occurred. The excavators note what appears to be
scattered plunder and the marks of the fire. But the traces
of a very destructive earthquake have also been found.
Nature alone may have destroyed Cnossos, or the Greeks
may have finished what the earthquake began.
THE EGYPTIANS had never submitted very willingly to the
rule of their Semitic shepherd kings and about 1600 A.D. a
vigorous patriotic movement expelled these foreigners.
Followed a new phase or revival for Egypt, a period known
to Egyptologists as the New Empire. Egypt, which had not
been closely consolidated before the Hyksos invasion, was
now a united country; and the phase of subjugation and
insurrection left her full of military spirit. The Pharaohs
became aggressive conquerors. They had now acquired
the war horse and the war chariot, which the Hyksos had
brought to them. Under Thothmes III and Amenophis III
Egypt had extended her rule into Asia as far as the
Euphrates.
We are entering now upon a thousand years of warfare
between the once quite separated civilizations of
Mesopotamia and the Nile. At first Egypt was ascendant.
The great dynasties, the Seventeenth Dynasty, which
included Thothmes III and Amenophis III and IV and a great
queen Hatasu, and the Nineteenth, when Rameses II,
supposed by some to have been the Pharaoh of Moses,
reigned for sixty-seven years, raised Egypt to high levels of
prosperity. In between there were phases of depression for
Egypt, conquest by the Syrians and later conquest by the
Ethiopians from the South. In Mesopotamia Babylon ruled,
then the Hittites and the Syrians of Damascus rose to a
transitory predominance; at one time the Syrians
conquered Egypt; the fortunes of the Assyrians of Nineveh
ebbed and flowed; sometimes the city was a conquered
city; sometimes the Assyrians ruled in Babylon and
assailed Egypt. Our space is too limited here to tell of the
comings and goings of the armies of the Egyptians and of
the various Semitic powers of Asia Minor, Syria and
Mesopotamia. They were armies now provided with vast
droves of war chariots, for the horse-still used only for war
and glory-had spread by this time into the old civilizations
from Central Asia.
Great conquerors appear in the dim light of that distant time
and pass, Tushratta, King of Mitanni, who captured
Nineveh, Tiglath Pileser I of Assyria who conquered
Babylon. At last the Assyrians became the greatest military
power of the time. Tiglath Pileser III conquered Babylon in
745 B.C. and founded what historians call the New
Assyrian Empire. Iron had also come now into civilization
out of the north; the Hittites, the precursors of the
Armenians, had it first and communicated its use to the
Assyrians, and an Assyrian usurper, Sargon II, armed his
troops with it. Assyria became the first power to expound
the doctrine of blood and iron. Sargon's son Sennacherib
led an army to the borders of Egypt, and was defeated not
by military strength but by the plague. Sennacherib's
grandson Assurbanipal (who is also known in history by his
Greek name of Sardanapalus) did actually conquer Egypt
in 670 B.C. But Egypt was already a conquered country
then under an Ethiopian dynasty. Sardanapalus simply
replaced one conqueror by another.
If one had a series of political maps of this long period of
history, this interval of ten centuries, we should have Egypt
expanding and contracting like an amoeba under a
microscope, and we should see these various Semitic
states of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites and
the Syrians coming and going, eating each other up and
disgorging each other again. To the west of Asia Minor
there would be little aegean states like Lydia, whose capital
was Sardis, and Caria. But after about 1200 B.C. and
perhaps earlier, a new set of names would come into the
map of the ancient world from the north-east and from the
north-west. These would be the names of certain barbaric
tribes, armed with iron weapons and using horsechariots,
who were becoming a great affliction to the aegean and
Semitic civilizations on the northern borders. They all spoke
variants of what once must have been the same language,
Aryan.
Round the north-east of the Black and Caspian Seas were
coming the Medes and Persians. Confused with these in
the records of the time were Scythians and Samatians.
From north-east or north-west came the Armenians, from
the north-west of the sea-barrier through the Balkan
peninsula came Cimmerians, Phrygians and the Hellenic
tribes whom now we call the Greeks. They were raiders
and robbers and plunderers of cities, these Ayrans, east
and west alike. They were all kindred and similar peoples,
hardy herdsmen who had taken to plunder. In the east they
were still only borderers and raiders, but in the west they
were taking cities and driving out the civilized aegean
populations. The aegean peoples were so pressed that
they were seeking new homes in lands beyond the Aryan
range. Some were seeking a settlement in the delta of the
Nile and being repulsed by the Egyptians; some, the
Etruscans, seem to have sailed from Asia Minor to found a
state in the forest wildernesses of middle Italy; some built
themselves cities upon the south-east coasts of the
Mediterranean and became later that people known in
history as the Philistines.
Of these Aryans who came thus rudely upon the scene of
the ancient civilizations we will tell more fully in a later
section. Here we note simply all this stir and emigration
amidst the area of the ancient civilizations, that was set up
by the swirl of the gradual and continuous advance of these
Aryan barbarians out of the northern forests and
wildernesses between 1600 and 600 B.C.
And in a section to follow we must tell also of a little Semitic
people, the Hebrews, in the hills behind the Phoenician and
Philistine coasts, who began to be of significance in the
world towards the end of this period. They produced a
literature of very great importance in subsequent history, a
collection of books, histories, poems, books of wisdom and
prophetic works, the Hebrew Bible.
In Mesopotamia and Egypt the coming of the Aryans did
not cause fundamental changes until after 600 B.C. The
flight of the aegeans before the Greeks and even the
destruction of Cnossos must have seemed a very remote
disturbance to both the citizens of Egypt and of Babylon.
Dynasties came and went in these cradle states of
civilization, but the main tenor of human life went on, with a
slow increase in refinement and complexity age by age. In
Egypt the accumulated monuments of more ancient times-
the pyramids were already in their third thousand of years
and a show for visitors just as they are to-day-were
supplemented by fresh and splendid buildings, more
particularly in the time of the seventeenth and nineteenth
dynasties. The great temples at Karnak and Luxor date
from this time. All the chief monuments of Nineveh, the
great temples, the winged bulls with human heads, the
reliefs of kings and chariots and lion hunts, were done in
these centuries between 1600 and 600 B.C., and this
period also covers most of the splendours of Babylon.
Both from Mesopotamia and Egypt we now have abundant
public records, business accounts, stories, poetry and
private correspondence. We know that life, for prosperous
and influential people in such cities as Babylon and the
Egyptian Thebes, was already almost as refined and as
luxurious as that of comfortable and prosperous people to-
day. Such people lived an orderly and ceremonious life in
beautiful and beautifully furnished and decorated houses,
wore richly decorated clothing and lovely jewels; they had
feasts and festivals, entertained one another with music
and dancing, were waited upon by highly trained servants,
were cared for by doctors and dentists. They did not travel
very much or very far, but boating excursions were a
common summer pleasure both on the Nile and on the
Euphrates. The beast of burthen was the ass; the horse
was still used only in chariots for war and upon occasions
of state. The mule was still novel and the camel, though it
was known in Mesopotamia, had not been brought into
Egypt. And there were few utensils of iron; copper and
bronze remained the prevailing metals. Fine linen and
cotton fabrics were known as well as wool. But there was
no silk yet. Glass was known and beautifully coloured, but
glass things were usually small. There was no clear glass
and no optical use of glass. People had gold stoppings in
their teeth but no spectacles on their noses.
One odd contrast between the life of old Thebes or Babylon
and modern life was the absence of coined money. Most
trade was still done by barter. Babylon was financially far
ahead of Egypt. Gold and silver were used for exchange
and kept in ingots; and there were bankers, before
coinage, who stamped their names and the weight on
these lumps of precious metal. A merchant or traveller
would carry precious stones to sell to pay for his
necessities. Most servants and workers were slaves who
were paid not money but in kind. As money came in slavery
declined.
A modern visitor to these crowning cities of the ancient
world would have missed two very important articles of diet:
there were no hens and no eggs. A French cook would
have found small joy in Babylon. These things came from
the East somewhere about the time of the last Assyrian
empire.
Religion like everything else had undergone great
refinement. Human sacrifice for instance had long since
disappeared; animals or bread dummies had been
substituted for the victim. (But the Phoenicians and
especially the citizens of Carthage, their greatest
settlement in Africa, were accused later of immolating
human beings.) When a great chief had died in the ancient
days it had been customary to sacrifice his wives and
slaves and break spear and bow at his tomb so that he
should not go unattended and unarmed in the spirit world. In
Egypt there survived of this dark tradition the pleasant
custom of burying small models of house and shop and
servants and cattle with the dead, models that give us to-
day the liveliest realization of the safe and cultivated life of
these ancient people, three thousand years and more ago.
Such was the ancient world before the coming of the
Aryans out of the northern forests and plains. In India and
China there were parallel developments. In the great valleys
of both these regions agricultural city states of brownish
peoples were growing up, but in India they do not seem to
have advanced or coalesced so rapidly as the city states of
Mesopotamia or Egypt. They were nearer the level of the
ancient Sumerians or of the Maya civilization of America.
Chinese history has still to be modernized by Chinese
scholars and cleared of much legendary matter. Probably
China at this time was in advance of India. Contemporary
with the seventeenth dynasty in Egypt, there was a dynasty
of emperors in China, the Shang dynasty, priest emperors
over a loose-knit empire of subordinate kings. The chief
duty of these early emperors was to perform the seasonal
sacrifices. Beautiful bronze vessels from the time of the
Shang dynasty still exist, and their beauty and workmanship
compel us to recognize that many centuries of civilization
must have preceded their manufacture.
FOUR thousand years ago, that is to say about 2000 B.C.,
central and south-eastern Europe and central Asia were
probably warmer, moister and better wooded than they are
now. In these regions of the earth wandered a group of
tribes mainly of the fair and blue-eyed Nordic race,
sufficiently in touch with one another to speak merely
variations of one common language from the Rhine to the
Caspian Sea. At that time they may not have been a very
numerous people, and their existence was unsuspected by
the Babylonians to whom Hammurabi was giving laws, or
by the already ancient and cultivated land of Egypt which
was tasting in those days for the first time the bitterness of
foreign conquest.
These Nordic people were destined to play a very
important part indeed in the world's history. They were a
people of the parklands and the forest clearings; they had
no horses at first but they had cattle; when they wandered
they put their tents and other gear on rough ox waggons;
when they settled for a time they may have made huts of
wattle and mud. They burnt their important dead; they did
not bury them ceremoniously as the brunette peoples did.
They put the ashes of their greater leaders in urns and then
made a great circular mound about them. These mounds
are the "round barrows" that occur all over north Europe.
The brunette people, their predecessors, did not burn their
dead but buried them in a sitting position in elongated
mounds; the "long barrows."
The Aryans raised crops of wheat, ploughing with oxen, but
they did not settle down by their crops; they would reap and
move on. They had bronze, and somewhen about 1500
B.C. they acquired iron. They may have been the
discoverers of iron smelting. And somewhen vaguely about
that time they also got the horse-which to begin with they
used only for draught purposes. Their social life did not
centre upon a temple like that of the more settled people
round the Mediterranean, and their chief men were leaders
rather than priests. They had an aristocratic social order
rather than a divine and regal order; from a very early stage
they distinguished certain families as leaderly and noble.
They were a very vocal people. They enlivened their
wanderings by feasts, at which there was much
drunkenness and at which a special sort of man, the bards,
would sing and recite. They had no writing until they had
come into contact with civilization, and the memories of
these bards were their living literature. This use of recited
language as an entertainment did much to make it a fine
and beautiful instrument of expression, and to that no doubt
the subsequent predominance of the languages derived
from Aryan is, in part, to be ascribed. Every Aryan people
had its legendary history crystallized in bardic recitations,
epics, sagas and vedas, as they were variously called.
The social life of these people centred about the
households of their leading men. The hall of the chief where
they settled for a time was often a very capacious timber
building. There were no doubt huts for herds and outlying
farm buildings; but with most of the Aryan peoples this hall
was the general centre, everyone went there to feast and
hear the bards and take part in games and discussions.
Cowsheds and stabling surrounded it. The chief and his
wife and so forth would sleep on a dais or in an upper
gallery; the commoner sort slept about anywhere, as
people still do in Indian households. Except for weapons,
ornaments, tools and suchlike personal possessions there
was a sort of patriarchal communism in the tribe. The chief
owned the cattle and grazing lands in the common interest;
forest and rivers were the wild.
This was the fashion of the people who were increasing
and multiplying over the great spaces of central Europe and
west central Asia during the growth of the great civilization
of Mesopotamia and the Nile, and whom we find pressing
upon the heliolithic peoples everywhere in the second
millennium before Christ. They were coming into France
and Britain and into Spain. They pushed westward in two
waves. The first of these people who reached Britain and
Ireland were armed with bronze weapons. They
exterminated or subjugated the people who had made the
great stone monuments of Carnac in Brittany and
Stonehenge and Avebury in England. They reached Ireland.
They are called the Goidelic Celts. The second wave of a
closely kindred people, perhaps intermixed with other racial
elements, brought iron with it into Great Britain, and is
known as the wave of Brythonic Celts. From them the
Welsh derive their language.
Kindred Celtic peoples were pressing southward into
Spain and coming into contact not only with the heliolithic
Basque people who still occupied the country but with the
Semitic Phoenician colonies of the sea coast. A closely
allied series of tribes, the Italians, were making their way
down the still wild and wooded Italian peninsula. They did
not always conquer. In the eighth century B.C. Rome
appears in history, a trading town on the Tiber, inhabited by
Aryan Latins but under the rule of Etruscan nobles and
kings.
At the other extremity of the Aryan range there was a
similar progress southward of similar tribes. Aryan
peoples, speaking Sanskrit, had come down through the
western passes into North India long before 1000 B.C.
There they came into contact with a primordial brunette
civilization, the Dravidian civilization, and learnt much from
it. Other Aryan tribes seem to have spread over the
mountain masses of Central Asia far to the east of the
present range of such peoples. In Eastern Turkestan there
are still fair, blue-eyed Nordic tribes, but now they speak
Mongolian tongues.
Between the Black and Caspian Seas the ancient Hittites
had been submerged and "Aryanized" by the Armenians
before 1000 B.C., and the Assyrians and Babylonians were
already aware of a new and formidable fighting barbarism
on the north-eastern frontiers, a group of tribes amidst
which the Scythians, the Medes and the Persians remain
as outstanding names.
But it was through the Balkan peninsula that Aryan tribes
made their first heavy thrust into the heart of the old-world
civilization. They were already coming southward and
crossing into Asia Minor many centuries before 1000 B.C.
First came a group of tribes of whom the Phrygians were
the most conspicuous, and then in succession the aeolic,
the Ionic and the Dorian Greeks. By 1000 B.C. they had
wiped out the ancient aegean civilization both in the
mainland of Greece and in most of the Greek islands; the
cities of Mycenae and Tiryns were obliterated and Cnossos
was nearly forgotten. The Greeks had taken to the sea
before 1000 A.D., they had settled in Crete and Rhodes,
and they were founding colonies in Sicily and the south of
Italy after the fashion of the Phoenician trading cities that
were dotted along the Mediterranean coasts.
So it was, while Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II and
Sardanapalus were ruling in Assyria and fighting with
Babylonia and Syria and Egypt, the Aryan peoples were
learning the methods of civilization and making it over for
their own purposes in Italy and Greece and north Persia.
The theme of history from the ninth century B.C. onward for
six centuries is the story of how these Aryan peoples grew
to power and enterprise and how at last they subjugated the
whole Ancient World, Semitic, aegean and Egyptian alike.
In form the Aryan peoples were altogether victorious; but
the struggle of Aryan, Semitic and Egyptian ideas and
methods was continued long after the sceptre was in Aryan
hands. It is indeed a struggle that goes on through all the
rest of history and still in a manner continues to this day.
XX. The Last Babylonian Empire and the Empire of
Darius I
WE have already mentioned how Assyria became a great
military power under Tiglath Pileser III and under the
usurper Sargon II. Sargon was not this man's original name;
he adopted it to flatter the conquered Babylonians by
reminding them of that ancient founder of the Akkadian
Empire, Sargon I, two thousand years before his time.
Babylon, for all that it was a conquered city, was of greater
population and importance than Nineveh, and its great god
Bel Marduk and its traders and priests had to be treated
politely. In Mesopotamia in the eighth century B.C. we are
already far beyond the barbaric days when the capture of a
town meant loot and massacre. Conquerors sought to
propitiate and win the conquered. For a century and a half
after Sargon the new Assyrian empire endured and, as we
have noted, Assurbanipal (Sardanapalus) held at least
lower Egypt.
But the power and solidarity of Assyria waned rapidly.
Egypt by an effort threw off the foreigner under a Pharoah
Psammetichus I, and under Necho II attempted a war of
conquest in Syria. By that time Assyria was grappling with
foes nearer at hand, and could make but a poor resistance.
A Semitic people from south-east Mesopotamia, the
Chaldeans, combined with Aryan Medes and Persians
from the north-east against Nineveh, and in 606 B.C.-for
now we are coming down to exact chronology-took that city.
There was a division of the spoils of Assyria. A Median
Empire was set up in the north under Cyaxares. It included
Nineveh, and its capital was Ecbatana. Eastward it
reached to the borders of India. To the south of this in a
great crescent was a new Chaldean Empire, the Second
Babylonian Empire, which rose to a very great degree of
wealth and power under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar the
Great (the Nebuchadnezzar of the Bible). The last great
days, the greatest days of all, for Babylon began. For a
time the two Empires remained at peace, and the daughter
of Nebuchadnezzar was married to Cyaxares.
Meanwhile Necho II was pursuing his easy conquests in
Syria. He had defeated and slain King Josiah of Judah, a
small country of which there is more to tell presently, at the
battle of Megiddo in 608 B.C., and he pushed on to the
Euphrates to encounter not a decadent Assyria but a
renascent Babylonia. The Chaldeans dealt very vigorously
with the Egyptians. Necho was routed and driven back to
Egypt, and the Babylonian frontier pushed down to the
ancient Egyptian boundaries.
From 606 until 539 B.C. the Second Babylonian Empire
flourished insecurely. It flourished so long as it kept the
peace with the stronger, hardier Median Empire to the
north. And during these sixty-seven years not only life but
learning flourished in the ancient city.
Even under the Assyrian monarchs and especially under
Sardanapalus, Babylon had been a scene of great
intellectual activity. Sardanapalus, though an Assyrian, had
been quite Babylonized. He made a library, a library not of
paper but of the clay tablets that were used for writing in
Mesopotamia since early Sumerian days. His collection
has been unearthed and is perhaps the most precious
store of historical material in the world. The last of the
Chaldean line of Babylonian monarchs, Nabonidus, had
even keener literary tastes. He patronized antiquarian
researches, and when a date was worked out by his
investigators for the accession of Sargon I he
commemorated the fact by inscriptions. But there were
many signs of disunion in his empire, and he sought to
centralize it by bringing a number of the various local gods
to Babylon and setting up temples to them there. This
device was to be practised quite successfully by the
Romans in later times, but in Babylon it roused the jealousy
of the powerful priesthood of Bel Marduk, the dominant god
of the Babylonians. They cast about for a possible
alternative to Nabonidus and found it in Cyrus the Persian,
the ruler of the adjacent Median Empire. Cyrus had already
distinguished himself by conquering Croesus, the rich king
of Lydia in Eastern Asia Minor. He came up against
Babylon, there was a battle outside the walls, and the gates
of the city were opened to him (538 B.C.). His soldiers
entered the city without fighting. The crown prince
Belshazzar, the son of Nabonidus, was feasting, the Bible
relates, when a hand appeared and wrote in letters of fire
upon the wall these mystical words: "Mene, Mene, Tekel,
Upharsin," which was interpreted by the prophet Daniel,
whom he summoned to read the riddle, as "God has
numbered thy kingdom and finished it; thou art weighed in
the balance and found wanting and thy kingdom is given to
the Medes and Persians." Possibly the priests of Bel
Marduk knew something about that writing on the wall.
Belshazzar was killed that night, says the Bible. Nabonidus
was taken prisoner, and the occupation of the city was so
peaceful that the services of Bel Marduk continued without
intermission.
Thus it was the Babylonian and Median empires were
united. Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, subjugated Egypt.
Cambyses went mad and was accidentally killed, and was
presently succeeded by Darius the Mede, Darius I, the son
of Hystaspes, one of the chief councillors of Cyrus.
The Persian Empire of Darius I, the first of the new Aryan
empires in the seat of the old civilizations, was the greatest
empire the world had hitherto seen. It included all Asia
Minor and Syria, all the old Assyrian and Babylonian
empires, Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian regions,
Media, Persia, and it extended into India as far as the
Indus. Such an empire was possible because the horse
and rider and the chariot and the made-road had now been
brought into the world. Hitherto the ass and ox and the
camel for desert use had afforded the swiftest method of
transport. Great arterial roads were made by the Persian
rulers to hold their new empire, and post horses were
always in waiting for the imperial messenger or the traveller
with an official permit. Moreover the world was now
beginning to use coined money, which greatly facilitated
trade and intercourse. But the capital of this vast empire
was no longer Babylon. In the long run the priesthood of Bel
Marduk gained nothing by their treason. Babylon though still
important was now a declining city, and the great cities of
the new empire were Persepolis and Susa and Ecbatana.
The capital was Susa. Nineveh was already abandoned
and sinking into ruins.
AND now we can tell of the Hebrews, a Semitic people, not
so important in their own time as in their influence upon the
later history of the world. They were settled in Judea long
before 1000 B.C., and their capital city after that time was
Jerusalem. Their story is interwoven with that of the great
empires on either side of them, Egypt to the south and the
changing empires of Syria, Assyria and Babylon to the
north. Their country was an inevitable high road between
these latter powers and Egypt.
Their importance in the world is due to the fact that they
produced a written literature, a world history, a collection of
laws, chronicles, psalms, books of wisdom, poetry and
fiction and political utterances which became at last what
Christians know as the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible.
This literature appears in history in the fourth or fifth century
B.C.
Probably this literature was first put together in Babylon.
We have already told how the Pharaoh, Necho II, invaded
the Assyrian Empire while Assyria was fighting for life
against Medes, Persians and Chaldeans. Josiah King of
Judah opposed him, and was defeated and slain at
Megiddo (608 B.C.). Judah became a tributary to Egypt,
and when Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the new Chaldean
king in Babylon, rolled back Necho into Egypt, he
attempted to manage Judah by setting up puppet kings in
Jerusalem. The experiment failed, the people massacred
his Babylonian officials, and he then determined to break
up this little state altogether, which had long been playing
off Egypt against the northern empire. Jerusalem was
sacked and burnt, and the remnant of the people was
carried off captive to Babylon.
There they remained until Cyrus took Babylon (538 B.C.).
He then collected them together and sent them back to
resettle their country and rebuild the walls and temple of
Jerusalem.
Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very
civilized or united people. Probably only a very few of them
could read or write. In their own history one never hears of
the early books of the Bible being read; the first mention of
a book is in the time of Josiah. The Babylonian captivity
civilized them and consolidated them. They returned aware
of their own literature, an acutely self-conscious and
political people.
Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the
Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Old
Testament as we know it. In addition, as separate books
they already had many of the other books that have since
been incorporated with the Pentateuch into the present
Hebrew Bible, Chronicles, the Psalms and Proverbs for
example.
The accounts of the Creation of the World, of Adam and
Eve and of the Flood, with which the Bible begins, run
closely parallel with similar Babylonian legends; they seem
to have been part of the common beliefs of all the Semetic
peoples. So too the stories of Moses and of Samson have
Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But with the story of
Abraham and onward begins something more special to
the Jewish race.
Abraham may have lived as early as the days of
Hammurabi in Babylon. He was a patriarchal Semitic
nomad. To the book of Genesis the reader must go for the
story of his wanderings and for the stories of his sons and
grandchildren and how they became captive in the Land of
Egypt. He travelled through Canaan, and the God of
Abraham, says the Bible story, promised this smiling land
of prosperous cities to him and to his children.
And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after fifty years of
wandering in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses,
the children of Abraham, grown now to a host of twelve
tribes, invaded the land of Canaan from the Arabian
deserts to the East. They may have done this somewhen
between 1600 B.C. and 1300 B.C.; there are no Egyptian
records of Moses nor of Canaan at this time to help out the
story. But at any rate they did not succeed in conquering
any more than the hilly backgrounds of the promised land.
The coast was now in the hands, not of the Canaanites but
of newcomers, those aegean peoples, the Philistines; and
their cities, Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon and Joppa
successfully withstood the Hebrew attack. For many
generations the children of Abraham remained an obscure
people of the hilly back country engaged in incessant
bickerings with the Philistines and with the kindred tribes
about them, the Moabites, the Midianites and so forth. The
reader will find in the book of Judges a record of their
struggles and disasters during this period. For very largely
it is a record of disasters and failures frankly told.
For most of this period the Hebrews were ruled, so far as
there was any rule among them, by priestly judges selected
by the elders of the people, but at last somewhen towards
1000 B.C. they chose themselves a king, Saul, to lead
them in battle. But Saul's leading was no great
improvement upon the leading of the Judges; he perished
under the hail of Philistine arrows at the battle of Mount
Gilboa, his armour went into the temple of the Philistine
Venus, and his body was nailed to the walls of Beth-shan.
His successor David was more successful and more
politic. With David dawned the only period of prosperity the
Hebrew peoples were ever to know. It was based on a
close alliance with the Phoenician city of Tyre, whose King
Hiram seems to have been a man of very great intelligence
and enterprise. He wished to secure a trade route to the
Red Sea through the Hebrew hill country. Normally
Phoenician trade went to the Red Sea by Egypt, but Egypt
was in a state of profound disorder at this time; there may
have been other obstructions to Phoenician trade along this
line, and at any rate Hiram established the very closest
relations both with David and with his son and successor
Solomon. Under Hiram's auspices the walls, palace and
temple of Jerusalem arose, and in return Hiram built and
launched his ships on the Red Sea. A very considerable
trade passed northward and southward through Jerusalem.
And Solomon achieved a prosperity and magnificence
unprecedented in the experience of his people. He was
even given a daughter of Pharaoh in marriage.
But it is well to keep the proportion of things in mind. At the
climax of his glories Solomon was only a little subordinate
king in a little city. His power was so transitory that within a
few years of his death, Shishak the first Pharaoh of the
twenty-second dynasty, had taken Jerusalem and looted
most of his splendours. The account of Solomon's
magnificence given in the books of Kings and Chronicles is
questioned by many critics. They say that it was added to
and exaggerated by the patriotic pride of later writers. But
the Bible account read carefully is not so overwhelming as
it appears at the first reading. Solomon's temple, if one
works out the measurements, would go inside a small
suburban church, and his fourteen hundred chariots cease
to impress us when we learn from an Assyrian monument
that his successor Ahab sent a contingent of two thousand
to the Assyrian army. It is also plainly manifest from the
Bible narrative that Solomon spent himself in display and
overtaxed and overworked his people. At his death the
northern part of his kingdom broke off from Jerusalem and
became the independent kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem
remained the capital city of Judah.
The prosperity of the Hebrew people was short-lived. Hiram
died, and the help of Tyre ceased to strengthen Jerusalem.
Egypt grew strong again. The history of the kings of Israel
and the kings of Judah becomes a history of two little states
ground between, first, Syria, then Assyria and then Babylon
to the north and Egypt to the south. It is a tale of disasters
and of deliverances that only delayed disaster. It is a tale of
barbaric kings ruling a barbaric people. In 721 B.C. the
kingdom of Israel was swept away into captivity by the
Assyrians and its people utterly lost to history. Judah
struggled on until in 604 B.C., as we have told, it shared the
fate of Israel. There may be details open to criticism in the
Bible story of Hebrew history from the days of the Judges
onward, but on the whole it is evidently a true story which
squares with all that has been learnt in the excavation of
Egypt and Assyria and Babylon during the past century.
It was in Babylon that the Hebrew people got their history
together and evolved their tradition. The people who came
back to Jerusalem at the command of Cyrus were a very
different people in spirit and knowledge from those who
had gone into captivity. They had learnt civilization. In the
development of their peculiar character a very great part
was played by certain men, a new sort of men, the
Prophets, to whom we must now direct our attention. These
Prophets mark the appearance of new and remarkable
forces in the steady development of human society.
THE FALL of Assyria and Babylon were only the first of a
series of disasters that were to happen to the Semitic
peoples. In the seventh century B.C. it would have seemed
as though the whole civilized world was to be dominated by
Semitic rulers. They ruled the great Assyrian empire and
they had conquered Egypt; Assyria, Babylon, Syria were all
Semitic, speaking languages that were mutually intelligible.
The trade of the world was in Semitic hands. Tyre, Sidon,
the great mother cities of the Phoenician coast, had thrown
out colonies that grew at last to even greater proportion in
Spain, Sicily and Africa. Carthage, founded before 800
B.C., had risen to a population of more than a million. It was
for a time the greatest city on earth. Its ships went to Britain
and out into the Atlantic. They may have reached Madeira.
We have already noted how Hiram co-operated with
Solomon to build ships on the Red Sea for the Arabian and
perhaps for the Indian trade. In the time of the Pharaoh
Necho, a Phoenician expedition sailed completely round
Africa.
At that time the Aryan peoples were still barbarians. Only
the Greeks were reconstructing a new civilization of the
ruins of the one they had destroyed, and the Medes were
becoming "formidable," as an Assyrian inscription calls
them, in central Asia. In 800 B.C. no one could have
prophesied that before the third century B.C. every trace of
Semitic dominion would be wiped out by Aryan-speaking
conquerors, and that everywhere the Semitic peoples
would be subjects or tributaries or scattered altogether.
Everywhere except in the northern deserts of Arabia, where
the Bedouin adhered steadily to the nomadic way of life,
the ancient way of life of the Semites before Sargon I and
his Akkadians went down to conquer Sumeria. But the
Arab Bedouin were never conquered by Aryan masters.
Now of all these civilized Semites who were beaten and
overrun in these five eventful centuries one people only held
together and clung to its ancient traditions and that was little
people, the Jews, who were sent back to build their city of
Jerusalem by Cyrus the Persian. And they were able to do
this, because they had got together this literature of theirs,
their Bible, in Babylon. It is not so much the Jews who
made the Bible as the Bible which made the Jews. Running
through this Bible were certain ideas, different from the
ideas of the people about them, very stimulating and
sustaining ideas, to which they were destined to cling
through five and twenty centuries of hardship, adventure
and oppression.
Foremost of these Jewish ideas was this, that their God
was invisible and remote, an invisible God in a temple not
made with hands, a Lord of Righteousness throughout the
earth. All other peoples had national gods embodied in
images that lived in temples. If the image was smashed
and the temple razed, presently that god died out. But this
was a new idea, this God of the Jews, in the heavens, high
above priests and sacrifices. And this God of Abraham, the
Jews believed, had chosen them to be his peculiar people,
to restore Jerusalem and make it the capital of
Righteousness in the World. They were a people exalted by
their sense of a common destiny. This belief saturated
them all when they returned to Jerusalem after the captivity
in Babylon.
Is it any miracle that in their days of overthrow and
subjugation many Babylonians and Syrians and so forth
and later on many Phoenicians, speaking practically the
same language and having endless customs, habits, tastes
and traditions in common, should be attracted by this
inspiring cult and should seek to share in its fellowship and
its promise? After the fall of Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and the
Spanish Phoenician cities, the Phoenicians suddenly
vanish from history; and as suddenly we find, not simply in
Jerusalem but in Spain, Africa, Egypt, Arabia, the East,
wherever the Phoenicians had set their feet, communities
of Jews. And they were all held together by the Bible and by
the reading of the Bible. Jerusalem was from the first only
their nominal capital; their real city was this book of books.
This is a new sort of thing in history. It is something of which
the seeds were sown long before, when the Sumerians and
Egyptians began to turn their hieroglyphics into writing. The
Jews were a new thing, a people without a king and
presently without a temple (for as we shall tell Jerusalem
itself was broken up in 70 A.D.), held together and
consolidated out of heterogeneous elements by nothing but
the power of the written word.
And this mental welding of the Jews was neither planned
nor foreseen nor done by either priests or statesmen. Not
only a new kind of community but a new kind of man comes
into history with the development of the Jews. In the days of
Solomon the Hebrews looked like becoming a little people
just like any other little people of that time clustering around
court and temple, ruled by the wisdom of the priest and led
by the ambition of the king. But already, the reader may
learn from the Bible, this new sort of man of which we
speak, the Prophet, was in evidence.
As troubles thicken round the divided Hebrews the
importance of these Prophets increases.
What were these Prophets? They were men of the most
diverse origins. The Prophet Ezekiel was of the priestly
caste and the Prophet Amos wore the goatskin mantle of a
shepherd, but all had this in common, that they gave
allegiance to no one but to the God of Righteousness and
that they spoke directly to the people. They came without
licence or consecration. "Now the word of the Lord came
unto me;" that was the formula. They were intensely
political. They exhorted the people against Egypt, "that
broken reed," or against Assyria or Babylon; they
denounced the indolence of the priestly order or the flagrant
sins of the King. Some of them turned their attention to what
we should now call "social reform." The rich were "grinding
the faces of the poor," the luxurious were consuming the
children's bread; wealthy people made friends with and
imitated the splendours and vices of foreigners; and this
was hateful to Jehovah, the God of Abraham, who would
certainly punish this land.
These fulminations were written down and preserved and
studied. They went wherever the Jews went, and wherever
they went they spread a new religious spirit. They carried
the common man past priest and temple, past court and
king and brought him face to face with the Rule of
Righteousness. That is their supreme importance in the
history of mankind. In the great utterances of Isaiah the
prophetic voice rises to a pitch of splendid anticipation and
foreshadows the whole earth united and at peace under
one God. Therein the Jewish prophecies culminate.
All the Prophets did not speak in this fashion, and the
intelligent reader of the prophetic books will find much hate
in them, much prejudice, and much that will remind him of
the propaganda pamphlets of the present time.
Nevertheless it is the Hebrew Prophets of the period round
and about the Babylonian captivity who mark the
appearance of a new power in the world, the power of
individual moral appeal, of an appeal to the free
conscience of mankind against the fetish sacrifices and
slavish loyalties that had hitherto bridled and harnessed our
race.
XXIII. The Greeks
NOW while after Solomon (whose reign was probably
about 960 B.C.) the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah
were suffering destruction and deportation, and while the
Jewish people were developing their tradition in captivity in
Babylon, another great power over the human mind, the
Greek tradition, was also arising. While the Hebrew
prophets were working out a new sense of direct moral
responsibility between the people and an eternal and
universal God of Right, the Greek philosophers were
training the human mind in a new method and spirit of
intellectual adventure.
The Greek tribes as we have told were a branch of the
Aryan-speaking stem. They had come down among the
aegean cities and islands some centuries before 1000
B.C. They were probably already in southward movement
before the Pharaoh Thothmes hunted his first elephants
beyond the conquered Euphrates. For in those days there
were elephants in Mesopotamia and lions in Greece.
It is possible that it was a Greek raid that burnt Cnossos,
but there are no Greek legends of such a victory though
there are stories of Minos and his palace (the Labyrinth)
and of the skill of the Cretan artificers.
Like most of the Aryans these Greeks had singers and
reciters whose performances were an important social link,
and these handed down from the barbaric beginnings of
their people two great epics, the Iliad, telling how a league
of Greek tribes besieged and took and sacked the town of
Troy in Asia Minor, and the Odyssey, being a long
adventure story of the return of the sage captain, Odysseus,
from Troy to his own island. These epics were written down
somewhen in the eighth or seventh century B.C., when the
Greeks had acquired the use of an alphabet from their
more civilized neighbours, but they are supposed to have
been in existence very much earlier. Formerly they were
ascribed to a particular blind bard, Homer, who was
supposed to have sat down and composed them as Milton
composed Paradise Lost. Whether there really was such a
poet, whether he composed or only wrote down and
polished these epics and so forth, is a favourite quarrelling
ground for the erudite. We need not concern ourselves with
such bickerings here. The thing that matters from our point
of view is that the Greeks were in possession of their epics
in the eighth century B.C., and that they were a common
possession and a link between their various tribes, giving
them a sense of fellowship as against the outer barbarians.
They were a group of kindred peoples linked by the spoken
and afterwards by the written word, and sharing common
ideals of courage and behaviour.
The epics showed the Greeks a barbaric people without
iron, without writing, and still not living in cities. They seem
to have lived at first in open villages of huts around the halls
of their chiefs outside the ruins of the aegean cities they
had destroyed. Then they began to wall their cities and to
adopt the idea of temples from the people they had
conquered. It has been said that the cities of the primitive
civilizations grew up about the altar of some tribal god, and
that the wall was added; in the cities of the Greeks the wall
preceded the temple. They began to trade and send out
colonies. By the seventh century B.C. a new series of cities
had grown up in the valleys and islands of Greece, forgetful
of the aegean cities and civilization that had preceded
them; Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Samos, Miletus
among the chief. There were already Greek settlements
along the coast of the Black Sea and in Italy and Sicily. The
heel and toe of Italy was called Magna Graecia. Marseilles
was a Greek town established on the site of an earlier
Phoenician colony.
Now countries which are great plains or which have as a
chief means of transport some great river like the
Euphrates or Nile tend to become united under some
common rule. The cities of Egypt and the cities of Sumeria,
for example, ran together under one system of government.
But the Greek peoples were cut up among islands and
mountain valleys; both Greece and Magna Graecia are very
mountainous; and the tendency was all the other way. When
the Greeks come into history they are divided up into a
number of little states which showed no signs of
coalescence. They are different even in race. Some consist
chiefly of citizens of this or that Greek tribe, Ionic, aeolian or
Doric; some have a mingled population of Greeks and
descendants of the pre-Greek "Mediterranean" folk; some
have an unmixed free citizenship of Greeks lording it over
an enslaved conquered population like the "Helots" in
Sparta. In some the old leaderly Aryan families have
become a close aristocracy; in some there is a democracy
of all the Aryan citizens; in some there are elected or even
hereditary kings, in some usurpers or tyrants.
And the same geographical conditions that kept the Greek
states divided and various, kept them small. The largest
states were smaller than many English counties, and it is
doubtful if the population of any of their cities ever
exceeded a third of a million. Few came up even to 50,000.
There were unions of interest and sympathy but no
coalescences. Cities made leagues and alliances as trade
increased, and small cities put themselves under the
protection of great ones. Yet all Greece was held together
in a certain community of feeling by two things, by the epics
and by the custom of taking part every fourth year in the
athletic contests at Olympia. This did not prevent wars and
feuds, but it mitigated something of the savagery of war
between them, and a truce protected all travellers to and
from the games. As time went on the sentiment of a
common heritage grew and the number of states
participating in the Olympic games increased until at last
not only Greeks but competitors from the closely kindred
countries of Epirus and Macedonia to the north were
admitted.
The Greek cities grew in trade and importance, and the
quality of their civilization rose steadily in the seventh and
sixth centuries B.C. Their social life differed in many
interesting points from the social life of the aegean and
river valley civilizations. They had splendid temples but the
priesthood was not the great traditional body it was in the
cities of the older world, the repository of all knowledge, the
storehouse of ideas. They had leaders and noble families,
but no quasi-divine monarch surrounded by an elaborately
organized court. Rather their organization was aristocratic,
with leading families which kept each other in order. Even
their so-called "democracies" were aristocratic; every
citizen had a share in public affairs and came to the
assembly in a democracy, but everybody was not a citizen.
The Greek democracies were not like our modern
"democracies" in which everyone has a vote. Many of the
Greek democracies had a few hundred or a few thousand
citizens and then many thousands of slaves, freedmen and
so forth, with no share in public affairs. Generally in Greece
affairs were in the hands of a community of substantial
men. Their kings and their tyrants alike were just men set in
front of other men or usurping a leadership; they were not
quasi-divine overmen like Pharaoh or Minos or the
monarchs of Mesopotamia. Both thought and government
therefore had a freedom under Greek conditions such as
they had known in none of the older civilizations. The
Greeks had brought down into cities the individualism, the
personal initiative of the wandering life of the northern
parklands. They were the first republicans of importance in
history.
And we find that as they emerge from a condition of
barbaric warfare a new thing becomes apparent in their
intellectual life. We find men who are not priests seeking
and recording knowledge and enquiring into the mysteries
of life and being, in a way that has hitherto been the
sublime privilege of priesthood or the presumptuous
amusement of kings. We find already in the sixth century
B.C.—perhaps while Isaiah was still prophesying in
Babylon—such men as Thales and Anaximander of Miletus
and Heraclitus of Ephesus, who were what we should now
call independent gentlemen, giving their minds to shrewd
questionings of the world in which we live, asking what its
real nature was, whence it came and what its destiny might
be, and refusing all ready-made or evasive answers. Of
these questionings of the universe by the Greek mind, we
shall have more to say a little later in this history. These
Greek enquirers who begin to be remarkable in the sixth
century B.C. are the first philosophers, the first "wisdom-
lovers," in the world.
And it may be noted here how important a century this sixth
century B.C. was in the history of humanity. For not only
were these Greek philosophers beginning the research for
clear ideas about this universe and man's place in it and
Isaiah carrying Jewish prophecy to its sublimest levels, but
as we shall tell later Gautama Buddha was then teaching in
India and Confucius and Lao Tse in China. From Athens to
the Pacific the human mind was astir.
WHILE the Greeks in the cities in Greece, South Italy and
Asia Minor were embarking upon free intellectual enquiry
and while in Babylon and Jerusalem the last of the Hebrew
prophets were creating a free conscience for mankind, two
adventurous Aryan peoples, the Medes and the Persians,
were in possession of the civilization of the ancient world
and were making a great empire, the Persian empire,
which was far larger in extent than any empire the world had
seen hitherto. Under Cyrus, Babylon and the rich and
ancient civilization of Lydia had been added to the Persian
rule; the Phoenician cities of the Levant and all the Greek
cities in Asia Minor had been made tributary, Cambyses
had subjected Egypt, and Darius I, the Mede, the third of
the Persian rulers (521 B.C.), found himself monarch as it
seemed of all the world. His couriers rode with his decrees
from the Dardanelles to the Indus and from Upper Egypt to
Central Asia.
The Greeks in Europe, it is true, Italy, Carthage, Sicily and
the Spanish Phoenician settlements, were not under the
Persian Peace; but they treated it with respect and the only
people who gave any serious trouble were the old parent
hordes of Nordic people in South Russia and Central Asia,
the Scythians, who raided the northern and north-eastern
borders.
Of course the population of this great Persian empire was
not a population of Persians. The Persians were only the
small conquering minority of this enormous realm. The rest
of the population was what it had been before the Persians
came from time immemorial, only that Persian was the
administrative language. Trade and finance were still
largely Semitic, Tyre and Sidon as of old were the great
Mediterranean ports and Semitic shipping plied upon the
seas. But many of these Semitic merchants and business
people as they went from place to place already found a
sympathetic and convenient common history in the Hebrew
tradition and the Hebrew scriptures. A new element which
was increasing rapidly in this empire was the Greek
element. The Greeks were becoming serious rivals to the
Semites upon the sea, and their detached and vigorous
intelligence made them useful and unprejudiced officials.
It was on account of the Scythians that Darius I invaded
Europe. He wanted to reach South Russia, the homeland of
the Scythian horsemen. He crossed the Bosphorus with a
great army and marched through Bulgaria to the Danube,
crossed this by a bridge of boats and pushed far
northward. His army suffered terribly. It was largely an
infantry force and the mounted Scythians rode all round it,
cut off its supplies, destroyed any stragglers and never
came to a pitched battle. Darius was forced into an
inglorious retreat.
He returned himself to Susa but he left an army in Thrace
and Macedonia, and Macedonia submitted to Darius.
Insurrections of the Greek cities in Asia followed this failure,
and the European Greeks were drawn into the contest.
Darius resolved upon the subjugation of the Greeks in
Europe. With the Phoenician fleet at his disposal he was
able to subdue one island after another, and finally in 490
B.C. he made his main attack upon Athens. A considerable
Armada sailed from the ports of Asia Minor and the eastern
Mediterranean, and the expedition landed its troops at
Marathon to the north of Athens. There they were met and
signally defeated by the Athenians.
An extraordinary thing happened at this time. The bitterest
rival of Athens in Greece was Sparta, but now Athens
appealed to Sparta, sending a herald, a swift runner,
imploring the Spartans not to let Greeks become slaves to
barbarians. This runner (the prototype of all "Marathon"
runners) did over a hundred miles of broken country in less
than two days. The Spartans responded promptly and
generously; but when, in three days, the Spartan force
reached Athens, there was nothing for it to do but to view
the battlefield and the bodies of the defeated Persian
soldiers. The Persian fleet had returned to Asia. So ended
the first Persian attack on Greece.
The next was much more impressive. Darius died soon
after the news of his defeat at Marathon reached him, and
for four years his son and successor, Xerxes, prepared a
host to crush the Greeks. For a time terror united all the
Greeks. The army of Xerxes was certainly the greatest that
had hitherto been assembled in the world. It was a huge
assembly of discordant elements. It crossed the
Dardanelles, 480 B.C., by a bridge of boats; and along the
coast as it advanced moved an equally miscellaneous fleet
carrying supplies. At the narrow pass of Thermopylae a
small force of 1400 men under the Spartan Leonidas
resisted this multitude, and after a fight of unsurpassed
heroism was completely destroyed. Every man was killed.
But the losses they inflicted upon the Persians were
enormous, and the army of Xerxes pushed on to Thebes
and Athens in a chastened mood. Thebes surrendered and
made terms. The Athenians abandoned their city and it was
burnt.
Greece seemed in the hands of the conqueror, but again
came victory against the odds and all expectations. The
Greek fleet, though not a third the size of the Persian,
assailed it in the bay of Salamis and destroyed it. Xerxes
found himself and his immense army cut off from supplies
and his heart failed him. He retreated to Asia with one half
of his army, leaving the rest to be defeated at Platea (479
B.C.) what time the remnants of the Persian fleet were
hunted down by the Greeks and destroyed at Mycalae in
Asia Minor.
The Persian danger was at an end. Most of the Greek
cities in Asia became free. All this is told in great detail and
with much picturesqueness in the first of written histories,
the History of Herodotus. This Herodotus was born about
484 B.C. in the Ionian city of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor,
and he visited Babylon and Egypt in his search for exact
particulars. From Mycalae onward Persia sank into a
confusion of dynastic troubles. Xerxes was murdered in
465 B.C. and rebellions in Egypt, Syria and Media broke
up the brief order of that mighty realm. The history of
Herodotus lays stress on the weakness of Persia. This
history is indeed what we should now call propaganda-
propaganda for Greece to unite and conquer Persia.
Herodotus makes one character, Aristagoras, go to the
Spartans with a map of the known world and say to them:
"These Barbarians are not valiant in fight. You on the other
hand have now attained the utmost skill in war ƒ. No other
nations in the world have what they possess: gold, silver,
bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and slaves. All this
you might have for yourselves, if you so desired."
THE CENTURY and a half that followed the defeat of
Persia was one of very great splendour for the Greek
civilization. True that Greece was torn by a desperate
struggle for ascendancy between Athens, Sparta and other
states (the Peloponnesian War 431 to 404 B.C.) and that in
338 B.C. the Macedonians became virtually masters of
Greece; nevertheless during this period the thought and the
creative and artistic impulse of the Greeks rose to levels
that made their achievement a lamp to mankind for all the
rest of history.
The head and centre of this mental activity was Athens. For
over thirty years (466 to 428 B.C.) Athens was dominated
by a man of great vigour and liberality of mind, Pericles,
who set himself to rebuild the city from the ashes to which
the Persians had reduced it. The beautiful ruins that still
glorify Athens to-day are chiefly the remains of this great
effort. And he did not simply rebuild a material Athens. He
rebuilt Athens intellectually. He gathered about him not only
architects and sculptors but poets, dramatists,
philosophers and teachers. Herodotus came to Athens to
recite his history (438 B.C.). Anaxagoras came with the
beginnings of a scientific description of the sun and stars.
aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides one after the other
carried the Greek drama to its highest levels of beauty and
nobility.
The impetus Pericles gave to the intellectual life of Athens
lived on after his death, and in spite of the fact that the
peace of Greece was now broken by the Peloponnesian
War and a long and wasteful struggle for "ascendancy" was
beginning. Indeed the darkling of the political horizon
seems for a time to have quickened rather than
discouraged men's minds.
Already long before the time of Pericles the peculiar
freedom of Greek institutions had given great importance
to skill in discussion. Decision rested neither with king nor
with priest but in the assemblies of the people or of leading
men. Eloquence and able argument became very desirable
accomplishments therefore, and a class of teachers arose,
the Sophists, who undertook to strengthen young men in
these arts. But one cannot reason without matter, and
knowledge followed in the wake of speech. The activities
and rivalries of these Sophists led very naturally to an acute
examination of style, of methods of thought and of the
validity of arguments. When Pericles died a certain
Socrates was becoming prominent as an able and
destructive critic of bad argument-and much of the teaching
of the Sophists was bad argument. A group of brilliant
young men gathered about Socrates. In the end Socrates
was executed for disturbing people's minds (399 B.C.), he
was condemned after the dignified fashion of the Athens of
those days to drink in his own house and among his own
friends a poisonous draught made from hemlock, but the
disturbance of people's minds went on in spite of his
condemnation. His young men carried on his teaching.
Chief among these young men was Plato (427 to 347 B.C.)
who presently began to teach philosophy in the grove of the
Academy. His teaching fell into two main divisions, an
examination of the foundations and methods of human
thinking and an examination of political institutions. He was
the first man to write a Utopia, that is to say the plan of a
community different from and better than any existing
community. This shows an altogether unprecedented
boldness in the human mind which had hitherto accepted
social traditions and usages with scarcely a question. Plato
said plainly to mankind: "Most of the social and political ills
from which you suffer are under your control, given only the
will and courage to change them. You can live in another
and a wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and work it
out. You are not awake to your own power." That is a high
adventurous teaching that has still to soak in to the common
intelligence of our race. One of his earliest works was the
Republic, a dream of a communist aristocracy; his last
unfinished work was the Laws, a scheme of regulation for
another such Utopian state.
The criticism of methods of thinking and methods of
government was carried on after Plato's death by Aristotle,
who had been his pupil and who taught in the Lyceum.
Aristotle came from the city of Stagira in Macedonia, and
his father was court physician to the Macedonian king. For
a time Aristotle was tutor to Alexander, the king's son, who
was destined to achieve very great things of which we shall
soon be telling. Aristotle's work upon methods of thinking
carried the science of Logic to a level at which it remained
for fifteen hundred years or more, until the mediaeval
schoolmen took up the ancient questions again. He made
no Utopias. Before man could really control his destiny as
Plato taught, Aristotle perceived that he needed far more
knowledge and far more accurate knowledge than he
possessed. And so Aristotle began that systematic
collection of knowledge which nowadays we call Science.
He sent out explorers to collect facts. He was the father of
natural history. He was the founder of political science. His
students at the Lyceum examined and compared the
constitutions of 158 different states ƒ.
Here in the fourth century B.C. we find men who are
practically "modern thinkers." The child-like, dream-like
methods of primitive thought had given way to a disciplined
and critical attack upon the problems of life. The weird and
monstrous symbolism and imagery of the gods and god
monsters, and all the taboos and awes and restraints that
have hitherto encumbered thinking are here completely set
aside. Free, exact and systematic thinking has begun. The
fresh and unencumbered mind of these newcomers out of
the northern forests has thrust itself into the mysteries of the
temple and let the daylight in.
FROM 431 to 404 B.C. the Peloponnesian War wasted
Greece. Meanwhile to the north of Greece, the kindred
country of Macedonia was rising slowly to power and
civilization. The Macedonians spoke a language closely
akin to Greek, and on several occasions Macedonian
competitors had taken part in the Olympic games. In 359
B.C. a man of very great abilities and ambition became
king of this little country-Philip. Philip had previously been a
hostage in Greece; he had had a thoroughly Greek
education and he was probably aware of the ideas of
Herodotus-which had also been developed by the
philosopher Isocrates-of a possible conquest of Asia by a
consolidated Greece.
He set himself first to extend and organize his own realm
and to remodel his army. For a thousand years now the
charging horse-chariot had been the decisive factor in
battles, that and the close-fighting infantry. Mounted
horsemen had also fought, but as a cloud of skirmishers,
individually and without discipline. Philip made his infantry
fight in a closely packed mass, the Macedonian phalanx,
and he trained his mounted gentlemen, the knights or
companions, to fight in formation and so invented cavalry.
The master move in most of his battles and in the battles of
his son Alexander was a cavalry charge. The phalanx held
the enemy infantry in front while the cavalry swept away the
enemy horse on his wings and poured in on the flank and
rear of his infantry. Chariots were disabled by bowmen,
who shot the horses.
With this new army Philip extended his frontiers through
Thessaly to Greece; and the battle of Chaeronia (338
B.C.), fought against Athens and her allies, put all Greece
at his feet. At last the dream of Herodotus was bearing fruit.
A congress of all the Greek states appointed Philip
captain-general of the Graeco-Macedonian confederacy
against Persia, and in 336 B.C. his advanced guard
crossed into Asia upon this long premeditated adventure.
But he never followed it. He was assassinated; it is
believed at the instigation of his queen Olympias,
Alexander's mother. She was jealous because Philip had
married a second wife.
But Philip had taken unusual pains with his son's education.
He had not only secured Aristotle, the greatest philosopher
in the world, as this boy's tutor, but he had shared his ideas
with him and thrust military experience upon him. At
Chaeronia Alexander, who was then only eighteen years
old, had been in command of the cavalry. And so it was
possible for this young man, who was still only twenty years
old at the time of his accession, to take up his father's task
at once and to proceed successfully with the Persian
adventure.
In 334 B.C.-for two years were needed to establish and
confirm his position in Macedonia and Greece-he crossed
into Asia, defeated a not very much bigger Persian army at
the battle of the Granicus and captured a number of cities
in Asia Minor. He kept along the sea-coast. It was
necessary for him to reduce and garrison all the coast
towns as he advanced because the Persians had control of
the fleets of Tyre and Sidon and so had command of the
sea. Had he left a hostile port in his rear the Persians might
have landed forces to raid his communications and cut him
off. At Issus (333 B.C.) he met and smashed a vast
conglomerate host under Darius III. Like the host of Xerxes
that had crossed the Dardanelles a century and a half
before, it was an incoherent accumulation of contingents
and it was encumbered with a multitude of court officials,
the harem of Darius and many camp followers. Sidon
surrendered to Alexander but Tyre resisted obstinately.
Finally that great city was stormed and plundered and
destroyed. Gaza also was stormed, and towards the end of
332 B.C. the conqueror entered Egypt and took over its
rule from the Persians.
At Alexandretta and at Alexandria in Egypt he built great
cities, accessible from the land and so incapable of revolt.
To these the trade of the Phoenician cities was diverted.
The Phoenicians of the western Mediterranean suddenly
disappear from history-and as immediately the Jews of
Alexandria and the other new trading cities created by
Alexander appear.
In 331 B.C. Alexander marched out of Egypt upon Babylon
as Thothmes and Rameses and Necho had done before
him. But he marched by way of Tyre. At Arbela near the
ruins of Nineveh, which was already a forgotten city, he met
Darius and fought the decisive battle of the war. The
Persian chariot charge failed, a Macedonian cavalry
charge broke up the great composite host and the phalanx
completed the victory. Darius led the retreat. He made no
further attempt to resist the invader but fled northward into
the country of the Medes. Alexander marched on to
Babylon, still prosperous and important, and then to Susa
and Persepolis. There after a drunken festival he burnt
down the palace of Darius, the king of kings.
Thence Alexander presently made a military parade of
central Asia, going to the utmost bounds of the Persian
empire. At first he turned northward. Darius was pursued;
and he was overtaken at dawn dying in his chariot, having
been murdered by his own people. He was still living when
the foremost Greeks reached him. Alexander came up to
find him dead. Alexander skirted the Caspian Sea, he went
up into the mountains of western Turkestan, he came down
by Herat (which he founded) and Cabul and the Khyber
Pass into India. He fought a great battle on the Indus with
an Indian king, Porus, and here the Macedonian troops met
elephants for the first time and defeated them. Finally he
built himself ships, sailed down to the mouth of the Indus,
and marched back by the coast of Beluchistan, reaching
Susa again in 324 B.C. after an absence of six years. He
then prepared to consolidate and organize this vast empire
he had won. He sought to win over his new subjects. He
assumed the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch, and
this roused the jealousy of his Macedonian commanders.
He had much trouble with them. He arranged a number of
marriages between these Macedonian officers and
Persian and Babylonian women: the "Marriage of the East
and West." He never lived to effect the consolidation he
had planned. A fever seized him after a drinking bout in
Babylon and he died in 323 B.C.
Immediately this vast dominion fell to pieces. One of his
generals, Seleucus, retained most of the old Persian
empire from the Indus to Ephesus; another, Ptolemy,
seized Egypt, and Antigonus secured Macedonia. The rest
of the empire remained unstable, passing under the control
of a succession of local adventures. Barbarian raids began
from the north and grew in scope and intensity. Until at last,
as we shall tell, a new power, the power of the Roman
republic, came out of the west to subjugate one fragment
after another and weld them together into a new and more
enduring empire.
BEFORE the time of Alexander Greeks had already been
spreading as merchants, artists, officials, mercenary
soldiers, over most of the Persian dominions. In the
dynastic disputes that followed the death of Xerxes, a band
of ten thousand Greek mercenaries played a part under the
leadership of Xenophon. Their return to Asiatic Greece
from Babylon is described in his Retreat of the Ten
Thousand, one of the first war stories that was ever written
by a general in command. But the conquests of Alexander
and the division of his brief empire among his subordinate
generals, greatly stimulated this permeation of the ancient
world by the Greeks and their language and fashions and
culture. Traces of this Greek dissemination are to be found
far away in central Asia and in north-west India. Their
influence upon the development of Indian art was profound.
For many centuries Athens retained her prestige as a
centre of art and culture; her schools went on indeed to 529
A.D., that is to say for nearly a thousand years; but the
leadership in the intellectual activity of the world passed
presently across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, the new
trading city that Alexander had founded. Here the
Macedonian general Ptolemy had become Pharaoh, with a
court that spoke Greek. He had become an intimate of
Alexander before he became king, and he was deeply
saturated with the ideas of Aristotle. He set himself, with
great energy and capacity, to organize knowledge and
investigation. He also wrote a history of Alexander's
campaigns which, unhappily, is lost to the world.
Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to
finance the enquiries of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first
person to make a permanent endowment of science. He
set up a foundation in Alexandria which was formerly
dedicated to the Muses, the Museum of Alexandria. For
two or three generations the scientific work done at
Alexandria was extraordinarily good. Euclid, Eratosthenes
who measured the size of the earth and came within fifty
miles of its true diameter, Apollonius who wrote on conic
sections, Hipparchus who made the first star map and
catalogue, and Hero who devised the first steam engine
are among the greater stars of an extraordinary
constellation of scientific pioneers. Archimedes came from
Syracuse to Alexandria to study, and was a frequent
correspondent of the Museum. Herophilus was one of the
greatest of Greek anatomists, and is said to have practised
vivisection.
For a generation or so during the reigns of Ptolemy I and
Ptolemy II there was such a blaze of knowledge and
discovery at Alexandria as the world was not to see again
until the sixteenth century A.D. But it did not continue. There
may have been several causes of this decline. Chief
among them, the late Professor Mahaffy suggested, was
the fact that the Museum was a "royal" college and all its
professors and fellows were appointed and paid by
Pharaoh. This was all very well when Pharaoh was Ptolemy
I, the pupil and friend of Aristotle. But as the dynasty of the
Ptolemies went on they became Egyptianized, they fell
under the sway of Egyptian priests and Egyptian religious
developments, they ceased to follow the work that was
done, and their control stifled the spirit of enquiry
altogether. The Museum produced little good work after its
first century of activity.
Ptolemy I not only sought in the most modern spirit to
organize the finding of fresh knowledge. He tried also to set
up an encyclopaedic storehouse of wisdom in the Library of
Alexandria. It was not simply a storehouse, it was also a
book-copying and book-selling organization. A great army
of copyists was set to work perpetually multiplying copies of
books.
Here then we have the definite first opening up of the
intellectual process in which we live to-day; here we have
the systematic gathering and distribution of knowledge. The
foundation of this Museum and Library marks one of the
great epochs in the history of mankind. It is the true
beginning of Modern History.
BOTH the work of research and the work of dissemination
went on under serious handicaps. One of these was the
great social gap that separated the philosopher, who was a
gentleman, from the trader and the artisan. There were
glass workers and metal workers in abundance in those
days, but they were not in mental contact with the thinkers.
The glass worker was making the most beautifully coloured
beads and phials and so forth, but he never made a
Florentine flask or a lens. Clear glass does not seem to
have interested him. The metal worker made weapons and
jewellery but he never made a chemical balance. The
philosopher speculated loftily about atoms and the nature of
things, but he had no practical experience of enamels and
pigments and philters and so forth. He was not interested in
substances. So Alexandria in its brief day of opportunity
produced no microscopes and no chemistry. And though
Hero invented a steam engine it was never set either to
pump or drive a boat or do any useful thing. There were few
practical applications of science except in the realm of
medicine, and the progress of science was not stimulated
and sustained by the interest and excitement of practical
applications. There was nothing to keep the work going
therefore when the intellectual curiosity of Ptolemy I and
Ptolemy II was withdrawn. The discoveries of the Museum
went on record in obscure manuscripts and never, until the
revival of scientific curiosity at the Renascence, reached
out to the mass of mankind.
Nor did the Library produce any improvements in book
making. That ancient world had no paper made in definite
sizes from rag pulp. Paper was a Chinese invention and it
did not reach the western world until the ninth century A.D.
The only book materials were parchment and strips of the
papyrus reed joined edge to edge. These strips were kept
on rolls which were very unwieldy to wind to and fro and
read, and very inconvenient for reference. It was these
things that prevented the development of paged and
printed books. Printing itself was known in the world it
would seem as early as the Old Stone Age; there were
seals in ancient Sumeria; but without abundant paper there
was little advantage in printing books, an improvement that
may further have been resisted by trades unionism on the
part of the copyists employed. Alexandria produced
abundant books but not cheap books, and it never spread
knowledge into the population of the ancient world below
the level of a wealthy and influential class.
So it was that this blaze of intellectual enterprise never
reached beyond a small circle of people in touch with the
group of philosophers collected by the first two Ptolemies. It
was like the light in a dark lantern which is shut off from the
world at large. Within the blaze may be blindingly bright, but
nevertheless it is unseen. The rest of the world went on its
old ways unaware that the seed of scientific knowledge that
was one day to revolutionize it altogether had been sown.
Presently a darkness of bigotry fell even upon Alexandria.
Thereafter for a thousand years of darkness the seed that
Aristotle had sown lay hidden. Then it stirred and began to
germinate. In a few centuries it had become that
widespread growth of knowledge and clear ideas that is
now changing the whole of human life.
Alexandria was not the only centre of Greek intellectual
activity in the third century B.C. There were many other
cities that displayed a brilliant intellectual life amidst the
disintegrating fragments of the brief empire of Alexander.
There was, for example, the Greek city of Syracuse in
Sicily, where thought and science flourished for two
centuries; there was Pergamum in Asia Minor, which also
had a great library. But this brilliant Hellenic world was now
stricken by invasion from the north. New Nordic barbarians,
the Gauls, were striking down along the tracks that had
once been followed by the ancestors of the Greeks and
Phrygians and Macedonians. They raided, shattered and
destroyed. And in the wake of the Gauls came a new
conquering people out of Italy, the Romans, who gradually
subjugated all the western half of the vast realm of Darius
and Alexander. They were an able but unimaginative
people, preferring law and profit to either science of art.
New invaders were also coming down out of central Asia to
shatter and subdue the Seleucid empire and to cut off the
western world again from India. These were the Parthians,
hosts of mounted bowmen, who treated the Graeco-
Persian empire of Persepolis and Susa in the third century
B.C. in much the same fashion that the Medes and
Persians had treated it in the seventh and sixth. And there
were now other nomadic peoples also coming out of the
north-east, peoples who were not fair and Nordic and
Aryan-speaking but yellow-skinned and black-haired and
with a Mongolian speech. But of these latter people we
shall tell more in a subsequent chapter.
BUT now we must go back three centuries in our story to
tell of a great teacher who came near to revolutionizing the
religious thought and feeling of all Asia. This was Gautama
Buddha, who taught his disciples at Benares in India about
the same time that Isaiah was prophesying among the
Jews in Babylon and Heraclitus was carrying on his
speculative enquiries into the nature of things at Ephesus.
All these men were in the world at the same time, in the
sixth century B.C.-unaware of one another.
The sixth century B.C. was indeed one of the most
remarkable in all history. Everywhere-for as we shall tell it
was also the case in China-men's minds were displaying a
new boldness. Everywhere they were waking up out of the
traditions of kingships and priests and blood sacrifices and
asking the most penetrating questions. It is as if the race
had reached a stage of adolescence-after a childhood of
twenty thousand years.
The early history of India is still very obscure. Somewhen
perhaps about 2000 B.C., an Aryan-speaking people came
down from the north-west into India either in one invasion or
in a series of invasions; and was able to spread its
language and traditions over most of north India. Its peculiar
variety of Aryan speech was the Sanskrit. They found a
brunette people with a more elaborate civilization and less
vigour of will, in possession of the country of the Indus and
Ganges. But they do not seem to have mingled with their
predecessors as freely as did the Greeks and Persians.
They remained aloof. When the past of India becomes
dimly visible to the historian, Indian society is already
stratified into several layers, with a variable number of sub-
divisions, which do not eat together nor intermarry nor
associate freely. And throughout history this stratification
into castes continues. This makes the Indian population
something different from the simple, freely inter-breeding
European or Mongolian communities. It is really a
community of communities.
Siddhattha Gautama was the son of an aristocratic family
which ruled a small district on the Himalayan slopes. He
was married at nineteen to a beautiful cousin. He hunted
and played and went about in his sunny world of gardens
and groves and irrigated rice-fields. And it was amidst this
life that a great discontent fell upon him. It was the
unhappiness of a fine brain that seeks employment. He felt
that the existence he was leading was not the reality of life,
but a holiday-a holiday that had gone on too long.
The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the
unsatisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the
mind of Gautama. While he was in this mood he met one of
those wandering ascetics who already existed in great
numbers in India. These men lived under severe rules,
spending much time in meditation and in religious
discussion. They were supposed to be seeking some
deeper reality in life, and a passionate desire to do
likewise took possession of Gautama.
He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when
the news was brought to him that his wife had been
delivered of his first-born son. "This is another tie to break,"
said Gautama.
He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fellow
clansmen. There was a great feast and a Nautch dance to
celebrate the birth of his new tie, and in the night Gautama
awoke in a great agony of spirit, "like a man who is told that
his house is on fire." He resolved to leave his happy
aimless life forthwith. He went softly to the threshold of his
wife's chamber, and saw her by the light of a little oil lamp,
sleeping sweetly, surrounded by flowers, with his infant son
in her arms. He felt a great craving to take up the child in
one first and last embrace before he departed, but the fear
of waking his wife prevented him, and at last he turned
away and went out into the bright Indian moonshine and
mounted his horse and rode off into the world.
Very far he rode that night, and in the morning he stopped
outside the lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a
sandy river. There he cut off his flowing locks with his
sword, removed all his ornaments and sent them and his
horse and sword back to his house. Going on he presently
met a ragged man and exchanged clothes with him, and so
having divested himself of all worldly entanglements he was
free to pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way
southward to a resort of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur
of the Vindhya Mountains. There lived a number of wise
men in a warren of caves, going into the town for their
simple supplies and imparting their knowledge by word of
mouth to such as cared to come to them. Gautama became
versed in all the metaphysics of his age. But his acute
intelligence was dissatisfied with the solutions offered him.
The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that
power and knowledge may be obtained by extreme
asceticism, by fasting, sleeplessness, and self-torment,
and these ideas Gautama now put to the test. He betook
himself with five disciple companions to the jungle and
there he gave himself up to fasting and terrible penances.
His fame spread, "like the sound of a great bell hung in the
canopy of the skies." But it brought him no sense of truth
achieved. One day he was walking up and down, trying to
think in spite of his enfeebled state. Suddenly he fell
unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness of
these semi-magical ways to wisdom was plain to him.
He horrified his companions by demanding ordinary food
and refusing to continue his mortifications. He had realized
that whatever truth a man may reach is reached best by a
nourished brain in a healthy body. Such a conception was
absolutely foreign to the ideas of the land and age. His
disciples deserted him, and went off in a melancholy state
to Benares. Gautama wandered alone.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem,
it makes its advances step by step, with but little realization
of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of
abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory. So it happened to
Gautama. He had seated himself under a great tree by the
side of a river to eat, when this sense of clear version came
to him. It seemed to him that he saw life plain. He is said to
have sat all day and all night in profound thought, and then
he rose up to impart his vision to the world.
He went on to Benares and there he sought out and won
back his lost disciples to his new teaching. In the King's
Deer Park at Benares they built themselves huts and set up
a sort of school to which came many who were seeking
after wisdom.
The starting point of his teaching was his own question as a
fortunate young man, "Why am I not completely happy?" It
was an introspective question. It was a question very
different in quality from the frank and self-forgetful
externalized curiosity with which Thales and Heraclitus
were attacking the problems of the universe, or the equally
self-forgetful burthen of moral obligation that the culminating
prophets were imposing upon the Hebrew mind. The Indian
teacher did not forget self, he concentrated upon self and
sought to destroy it. All suffering, he taught, was due to the
greedy desires of the individual. Until man has conquered
his personal cravings his life is trouble and his end sorrow.
There were three principal forms that the craving for life
took and they were all evil. The first was the desire of the
appetites, greed and all forms of sensuousness, the
second was the desire for a personal and egotistic
immortality, the third was the craving for personal success,
worldliness, avarice and the like. All these forms of desire
had to be overcome to escape from the distresses and
chagrins of life. When they were overcome, when self had
vanished altogether, then serenity of soul, Nirvana, the
highest good was attained.
This was the gist of his teaching, a very subtle and
metaphysical teaching indeed, not nearly so easy to
understand as the Greek injunction to see and know
fearlessly and rightly and the Hebrew command to fear God
and accomplish righteousness. It was a teaching much
beyond the understanding of even Gautama's immediate
disciples, and it is no wonder that so soon as his personal
influence was withdrawn it became corrupted and
coarsened. There was a widespread belief in India at that
time that at long intervals Wisdom came to earth and was
incarnate in some chosen person who was known as the
Buddha. Gautama's disciples declared that he was a
Buddha, the latest of the Buddhas, though there is no
evidence that he himself ever accepted the title. Before he
was well dead, a cycle of fantastic legends began to be
woven about him. The human heart was always preferred a
wonder story to a moral effort, and Gautama Buddha
became very wonderful.
Yet there remained a substantial gain in the world. If
Nirvana was too high and subtle for most men's
imaginations, if the myth-making impulse in the race was
too strong for the simple facts of Gautama's life, they could
at least grasp something of the intention of what Gautama
called the Eight-fold way, the Aryan or Noble Path in life. In
this there was an insistence upon mental uprightness, upon
right aims and speech, right conduct and honest livelihood.
There was a quickening of the conscience and an appeal
to generous and self-forgetful ends.
XXIX. King Asoka
FOR some generations after the death of Gautama, these
high and noble Buddhist teachings, this first plain teaching
that the highest good for man is the subjugation of self,
made comparatively little headway in the world. Then they
conquered the imagination of one of the greatest monarchs
the world has ever seen.
We have already mentioned how Alexander the Great
came down into India and fought with Porus upon the Indus.
It is related by the Greek historians that a certain
Chandragupta Maurya came into Alexander's camp and
tried to persuade him to go on to the Ganges and conquer
all India. Alexander could not do this because of the refusal
of his Macedonians to go further into what was for them an
unknown world, and later on (321 B.C.) Chandragupta was
able to secure the help of various hill tribes and realize his
dream without Greek help. He built up an empire in North
India and was presently (303 B.C.) able to attack Seleucus
I in the Punjab and drive the last vestige of Greek power out
of India. His son extended this new empire. His grandson,
Asoka, the monarch of whom we now have to tell, found
himself in 264 B.C. ruling from Afghanistan to Madras.
Asoka was at first disposed to follow the example of his
father and grandfather and complete the conquest of the
Indian peninsula. He invaded Kalinga (255 B.C.), a country
on the east coast of Madras, he was successful in his
military operations and-alone among conquerors-he was
so disgusted by the cruelty and horror of war that he
renounced it. He would have no more of it. He adopted the
peaceful doctrines of Buddhism and declared that
henceforth his conquests should be the conquests of
religion.
His reign for eight-and-twenty years was one of the
brightest interludes in the troubled history of mankind. He
organized a great digging of wells in India and the planting
of trees for shade. He founded hospitals and public
gardens and gardens for the growing of medicinal herbs.
He created a ministry for the care of the aborigines and
subject races of India. He made provision for the education
of women. He made vast benefactions to the Buddhist
teaching orders, and tried to stimulate them to a better and
more energetic criticism of their own accumulated
literature. For corruptions and superstitious accretions had
accumulated very speedily upon the pure and simple
teaching of the great Indian master. Missionaries went from
Asoka to Kashmir, to Persia, to Ceylon and Alexandria.
Such was Asoka, greatest of kings. He was far in advance
of his age. He left no prince and no organization of men to
carry on his work, and within a century of his death the great
days of his reign had become a glorious memory in a
shattered and decaying India. The priestly caste of the
Brahmins, the highest and most privileged caste in the
Indian social body, has always been opposed to the frank
and open teaching of Buddha. Gradually they undermined
the Buddhist influence in the land. The old monstrous gods,
the innumerable cults of Hinduism, resumed their sway.
Caste became more rigorous and complicated. For long
centuries Buddhism and Brahminism flourished side by
side, and then slowly Buddhism decayed and Brahminism
in a multitude of forms replaced it. But beyond the confines
of India and the realms of caste Buddhism spread-until it
had won China and Siam and Burma and Japan, countries
in which it is predominant to this day.
WE have still to tell of two other great men, Confucius and
Lao Tse, who lived in that wonderful century which began
the adolescence of mankind, the sixth century B.C. In this
history thus far we have told very little of the early story of
China. At present that early history is still very obscure, and
we look to Chinese explorers and archaeologists in the
new China that is now arising to work out their past as
thoroughly as the European past has been worked out
during the last century. Very long ago the first primitive
Chinese civilizations arose in the great river valleys out of
the primordial heliolithic culture. They had, like Egypt and
Sumeria, the general characteristics of that culture, and
they centred upon temples in which priests and priest kings
offered the seasonal blood sacrifices. The life in those
cities must have been very like the Egyptian and Sumerian
life of six or seven thousand years ago and very like the
Maya life of Central America a thousand years ago.
If there were human sacrifices they had long given way to
animal sacrifices before the dawn of history. And a form of
picture writing was growing up long before a thousand
years B.C.
And just as the primitive civilizations of Europe and western
Asia were in conflict with the nomads of the desert and the
nomads of the north, so the primitive Chinese civilizations
had a great cloud of nomadic peoples on their northern
borders. There was a number of tribes akin in language
and ways of living, who are spoken of in history in
succession as the Huns, the Mongols, the Turks and
Tartars. They changed and divided and combined and re-
combined, just as the Nordic peoples in north Europe and
central Asia changed and varied in name rather than in
nature. These Mongolian nomads had horses earlier than
the Nordic peoples, and it may be that in the region of the
Altai Mountains they made an independent discovery of
iron somewhen after 1000 B.C. And just as in the western
case so ever and again these eastern nomads would
achieve a sort of political unity, and become the conquerors
and masters and revivers of this or that settled and civilized
region.
It is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was
not Mongolian at all any more than the earliest civilization of
Europe and western Asia was Nordic or Semitic. It is quite
possible that the earliest civilization of China was a
brunette civilization and of a piece with the earliest
Egyptian, Sumerian and Dravidian civilizations, and that
when the first recorded history of China began there had
already been conquests and intermixture. At any rate we
find that by 1750 B.C. China was already a vast system of
little kingdoms and city states, all acknowledging a loose
allegiance and paying more or less regularly, more or less
definite feudal dues to one great priest emperor, the "Son
of Heaven." The "Shang" dynasty came to an end in 1125
B.C. A "Chow" dynasty succeeded "Shang," and
maintained China in a relaxing unity until the days of Asoka
in India and of the Ptolemies in Egypt. Gradually China
went to pieces during that long "Chow" period. Hunnish
peoples came down and set up principalities; local rulers
discontinued their tribute and became independent. There
was in the sixth century B.C., says one Chinese authority,
five or six thousand practically independent states in China.
It was what the Chinese call in their records an "Age of
Confusion."
But this Age of Confusion was compatible with much
intellectual activity and with the existence of many local
centres of art and civilized living. When we know more of
Chinese history we shall find that China also had her
Miletus and her Athens, her Pergamum and her
Macedonia. At present we must be vague and brief about
this period of Chinese division simply because our
knowledge is not sufficient for us to frame a coherent and
consecutive story.
And just as in divided Greece there were philosophers and
in shattered and captive Jewry prophets, so in disordered
China there were philosophers and teachers at this time. In
all these cases insecurity and uncertainty seemed to have
quickened the better sort of mind. Confucius was a man of
aristocratic origin and some official importance in a small
state called Lu. Here in a very parallel mood to the Greek
impulse he set up a sort of Academy for discovering and
teaching Wisdom. The lawlessness and disorder of China
distressed him profoundly. He conceived an ideal of a
better government and a better life, and travelled from state
to state seeking a prince who would carry out his legislative
and educational ideas. He never found his prince; he found
a prince, but court intrigues undermined the influence of the
teacher and finally defeated his reforming proposals. It is
interesting to note that a century and a half later the Greek
philosopher Plato also sought a prince, and was for a time
adviser to the tyrant Dionysius who ruled Syracuse in Sicily.
Confucius died a disappointed man. "No intelligent ruler
arises to take me as his master," he said, "and my time
has come to die." But his teaching had more vitality than he
imagined in his declining and hopeless years, and it
became a great formative influence with the Chinese
people. It became one of what the Chinese call the Three
Teachings, the other two being those of Buddha and of Lao
Tse.
The gist of the teaching of Confucius was the way of the
noble or aristocratic man. He was concerned with personal
conduct as much as Gautama was concerned with the
peace of self-forgetfulness and the Greek with external
knowledge and the Jew with righteousness. He was the
most public-minded of all great teachers. He was
supremely concerned by the confusion and miseries of the
world, and he wanted to make men noble in order to bring
about a noble world. He sought to regulate conduct to an
extraordinary extent; to provide sound rules for every
occasion in life. A polite, public-spirited gentleman, rather
sternly self-disciplined, was the ideal he found already
developing in the northern Chinese world and one to which
he gave a permanent form.
The teaching of Lao Tse, who was for a long time in charge
of the imperial library of the Chow dynasty, was much more
mystical and vague and elusive than that of Confucius. He
seems to have preached a stoical indifference to the
pleasures and powers of the world and a return to an
imaginary simple life of the past. He left writings very
contracted in style and very obscure. He wrote in riddles.
After his death his teachings, like the teachings of Gautama
Buddha, were corrupted and overlaid by legends and had
the most complex and extraordinary observances and
superstitious ideas grafted upon them. In China just as in
India primordial ideas of magic and monstrous legends out
of the childish past of our race struggled against the new
thinking in the world and succeeded in plastering it over
with grotesque, irrational and antiquated observances.
Both Buddhism and Taoism (which ascribes itself largely to
Lao Tse) as one finds them in China now, are religions of
monk, temple, priest and offering of a type as ancient in
form, if not in thought, as the sacrificial religions of ancient
Sumeria and Egypt. But the teaching of Confucius was not
so overlaid because it was limited and plain and
straightforward and lent itself to no such distortions.
North China, the China of the Hwang-ho River, became
Confucian in thought and spirit; south China, Yang-tse-
Kiang China, became Taoist. Since those days a conflict
has always been traceable in Chinese affairs between
these two spirits, the spirit of the north and the spirit of the
south, between (in latter times) Pekin and Nankin, between
the official-minded, upright and conservative north, and the
sceptical, artistic, lax and experimental south.
The divisions of China of the Age of Confusion reached
their worst stage in the sixth century B.C. The Chow dynasty
was so enfeebled and so discredited that Lao Tse left the
unhappy court and retired into private life.
Three nominally subordinate powers dominated the
situation in those days, Ts'i and Ts'in, both northern powers,
and Ch'u, which was an aggressive military power in the
Yangtse valley. At last Ts'i and Ts'in formed an alliance,
subdued Ch'u and imposed a general treaty of
disarmament and peace in China. The power of Ts'in
became predominant. Finally about the time of Asoka in
India the Ts'in monarch seized upon the sacrificial vessels
of the Chow emperor and took over his sacrificial duties.
His son, Shi-Hwang-ti (king in 246 B.C., emperor in 220
B.C.), is called in the Chinese Chronicles "the First
Universal Emperor."
More fortunate than Alexander, Shi-Hwang-ti reigned for
thirty-six years as king and emperor. His energetic reign
marks the beginning of a new era of unity and prosperity for
the Chinese people. He fought vigorously against the
Hunnish invaders from the northern deserts, and he began
that immense work, the Great Wall of China, to set a limit to
their incursions.
THE READER will note a general similarity in the history of
all these civilizations in spite of the effectual separation
caused by the great barriers of the Indian north-west frontier
and of the mountain masses of Central Asia and further
India. First for thousands of years the heliolithic culture
spread over all the warm and fertile river valleys of the old
world and developed a temple system and priest rulers
about its sacrificial traditions. Apparently its first makers
were always those brunette peoples we have spoken of as
the central race of mankind. Then the nomads came in from
the regions of seasonal grass and seasonal migrations and
superposed their own characteristics and often their own
language on the primitive civilization. They subjugated and
stimulated it, and were stimulated to fresh developments
and made it here one thing and here another. In
Mesopotamia it was the Elamite and then the Semite, and
at last the Nordic Medes and Persians and the Greeks who
supplied the ferment; over the region of the aegean
peoples it was the Greeks; in India it was the Aryan-
speakers; in Egypt there was a thinner infusion of
conquerors into a more intensely saturated priestly
civilization; in China, the Hun conquered and was absorbed
and was followed by fresh Huns. China was Mongolized just
as Greece and North India were Aryanized and
Mesopotamia Semitized and Aryanized. Everywhere the
nomads destroyed much, but everywhere they brought in a
new spirit of free enquiry and moral innovation. They
questioned the beliefs of immemorial ages. They let
daylight into the temples. They set up kings who were
neither priests nor gods but mere leaders among their
captains and companions.
In the centuries following the sixth century B.C. we find
everywhere a great breaking down of ancient traditions and
a new spirit of moral and intellectual enquiry awake, a spirit
never more to be altogether stilled in the great progressive
movement of mankind. We find reading and writing
becoming common and accessible accomplishments
among the ruling and prosperous minority; they were no
longer the jealously guarded secret of the priests. Travel is
increasing and transport growing easier by reason of
horses and roads. A new and easy device to facilitate trade
has been found in coined money.
Let us now transfer our attention back from China in the
extreme east of the old world to the western half of the
Mediterranean. Here we have to note the appearance of a
city which was destined to play at last a very great part
indeed in human affairs, Rome.
Hitherto we have told very little about Italy in our story. It was
before 1000 B.C. a land of mountain and forest and thinly
populated. Aryan-speaking tribes had pressed down this
peninsula and formed little towns and cities, and the
southern extremity was studded with Greek settlements.
The noble ruins of Paestum preserve for us to this day
something of the dignity and splendour of these early Greek
establishments. A non-Aryan people, probably akin to the
aegean peoples, the Etruscans, had established
themselves in the central part of the peninsula. They had
reversed the usual process by subjugating various Aryan
tribes. Rome, when it comes into the light of history, is a
little trading city at a ford on the Tiber, with a Latin-speaking
population ruled over by Etruscan kings. The old
chronologies gave 753 B.C. as the date of the founding of
Rome, half a century later than the founding of the great
Phoenician city of Carthage and twenty-three years after
the first Olympiad. Etruscan tombs of a much earlier date
than 753 B.C. have, however, been excavated in the
Roman Forum.
In that red-letter century, the sixth century B.C., the Etruscan
kings were expelled (510 B.C.) and Rome became an
aristocratic republic with a lordly class of "patrician"
families dominating a commonalty of "plebeians." Except
that it spoke Latin it was not unlike many aristocratic Greek
republics.
For some centuries the internal history of Rome was the
story of a long and obstinate struggle for freedom and a
share in the government on the part of the plebeians. It
would not be difficult to find Greek parallels to this conflict,
which the Greeks would have called a conflict of aristocracy
with democracy. In the end the plebeians broke down most
of the exclusive barriers of the old families and established
a working equality with them. They destroyed the old
exclusiveness, and made it possible and acceptable for
Rome to extend her citizenship by the inclusion of more and
more "outsiders." For while she still struggled at home, she
was extending her power abroad.
The extension of Roman power began in the fifth century
B.C. Until that time they had waged war, and generally
unsuccessful war, with the Etruscans. There was an
Etruscan fort, Veii, only a few miles from Rome which the
Romans had never been able to capture. In 474 B.C.,
however, a great misfortune came to the Etruscans. Their
fleet was destroyed by the Greeks of Syracuse in Sicily. At
the same time a wave of Nordic invaders came down upon
them from the north, the Gauls. Caught between Roman
and Gaul, the Etruscans fell-and disappear from history.
Veii was captured by the Romans. The Gauls came through
to Rome and sacked the city (390 B.C.) but could not
capture the Capitol. An attempted night surprise was
betrayed by the cackling of some geese, and finally the
invaders were bought off and retired to the north of Italy
again.
The Gaulish raid seems to have invigorated rather than
weakened Rome. The Romans conquered and assimilated
the Etruscans, and extended their power over all central
Italy from the Arno to Naples. To this they had reached
within a few years of 300 B.C. Their conquests in Italy were
going on simultaneously with the growth of Philip's power in
Macedonia and Greece, and the tremendous raid of
Alexander to Egypt and the Indus. The Romans had
become notable people in the civilized world to the east of
them by the break-up of Alexander's empire.
To the north of the Roman power were the Gauls; to the
south of them were the Greek settlements of Magna
Graecia, that is to say of Sicily and of the toe and heel of
Italy. The Gauls were a hardy, warlike people and the
Romans held that boundary by a line of forts and fortified
settlements. The Greek cities in the south headed by
Tarentum (now Taranto) and by Syracuse in Sicily, did not
so much threaten as fear the Romans. They looked about
for some help against these new conquerors.
We have already told how the empire of Alexander fell to
pieces and was divided among his generals and
companions. Among these adventurers was a kinsman of
Alexander's named Pyrrhus, who established himself in
Epirus, which is across the Adriatic Sea over against the
heel of Italy. It was his ambition to play the part of Philip of
Macedonia to Magna Graecia, and to become protector
and master-general of Tarentum, Syracuse and the rest of
that part of the world. He had what was then a very efficient
modern army; he had an infantry phalanx, cavalry from
Thessaly-which was now quite as good as the original
Macedonian cavalry-and twenty fighting elephants; he
invaded Italy and routed the Romans in two considerable
battles, Heraclea (280 B.C.) and Ausculum (279 B.C.), and
having driven them north, he turned his attention to the
subjugation of Sicily.
But this brought against him a more formidable enemy than
were the Romans at that time, the Phoenician trading city of
Carthage, which was probably then the greatest city in the
world. Sicily was too near Carthage for a new Alexander to
be welcome there, and Carthage was mindful of the fate
that had befallen her mother city Tyre half a century before.
So she sent a fleet to encourage or compel Rome to
continue the struggle, and she cut the overseas
communications of Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus found himself freshly
assailed by the Romans, and suffered a disastrous repulse
in an attack he had made upon their camp at Beneventum
between Naples and Rome.
And suddenly came news that recalled him to Epirus. The
Gauls were raiding south. But this time they were not
raiding down into Italy; the Roman frontier, fortified and
guarded, had become too formidable for them. They were
raiding down through Illyria (which is now Serbia and
Albania) to Macedonia and Epirus. Repulsed by the
Romans, endangered at sea by the Carthaginians, and
threatened at home by the Gauls, Pyrrhus abandoned his
dream of conquest and went home (275 B.C.), and the
power of Rome was extended to the Straits of Messina.
On the Sicilian side of the Straits was the Greek city of
Messina, and this presently fell into the hands of a gang of
pirates. The Carthaginians, who were already practically
overlords of Sicily and allies of Syracuse, suppressed
these pirates (270 B.C.) and put in a Carthaginian garrison
there. The pirates appealed to Rome and Rome listened to
their complaint. And so across the Straits of Messina the
great trading power of Carthage and this new conquering
people, the Romans, found themselves in antagonism, face
to face.
IT was in 264 B.C. that the great struggle between Rome
and Carthage, the Punic Wars, began. In that year Asoka
was beginning his reign in Behar and Shi-Hwang-ti was a
little child, the Museum in Alexandria was still doing good
scientific work, and the barbaric Gauls were now in Asia
Minor and exacting a tribute from Pergamum. The different
regions of the world were still separated by insurmountable
distances, and probably the rest of mankind heard only
vague and remote rumours of the mortal fight that went on
for a century and a half in Spain, Italy, North Africa and the
western Mediterranean, between the last stronghold of
Semitic power and Rome, this newcomer among Aryan-
speaking peoples.
That war has left its traces upon issues that still stir the
world. Rome triumphed over Carthage, but the rivalry of
Aryan and Semite was to merge itself later on in the conflict
of Gentile and Jew. Our history now is coming to events
whose consequences and distorted traditions still maintain
a lingering and expiring vitality in, and exercise a
complicating and confusing influence upon, the conflicts
and controversies of to-day.
The First Punic War began in 264 B.C. about the pirates of
Messina. It developed into a struggle for the possession of
all Sicily except the dominions of the Greek king of
Syracuse. The advantage of the sea was at first with the
Carthaginians. They had great fighting ships of what was
hitherto an unheard-of size, quinqueremes, galleys with five
banks of oars and a huge ram. At the battle of Salamis, two
centuries before, the leading battleships had only been
triremes with three banks. But the Romans, with
extraordinary energy and in spite of the fact that they had
little naval experience, set themselves to outbuild the
Carthaginians. They manned the new navy they created
chiefly with Greek seamen, and they invented grappling and
boarding to make up for the superior seamanship of the
enemy. When the Carthaginian came up to ram or shear
the oars of the Roman, huge grappling irons seized him
and the Roman soldiers swarmed aboard him. At Mylae
(260 B.C.) and at Ecnomus (256 B.C.) the Carthaginians
were disastrously beaten. They repulsed a Roman landing
near Carthage but were badly beaten at Palermo, losing
one hundred and four elephants there-to grace such a
triumphal procession through the Forum as Rome had
never seen before. But after that came two Roman defeats
and then a Roman recovery. The last naval forces of
Carthage were defeated by a last Roman effort at the battle
of the aegatian Isles (241 B.C.) and Carthage sued for
peace. All Sicily except the dominions of Hiero, king of
Syracuse, was ceded to the Romans.
For twenty-two years Rome and Carthage kept the peace.
Both had trouble enough at home. In Italy the Gauls came
south again, threatened Rome-which in a state of panic
offered human sacrifices to the Gods!-and were routed at
Telamon. Rome pushed forward to the Alps, and even
extended her dominions down the Adriatic coast to Illyria.
Carthage suffered from domestic insurrections and from
revolts in Corsica and Sardinia, and displayed far less
recuperative power. Finally, an act of intolerable
aggression, Rome seized and annexed the two revolting
islands.
Spain at that time was Carthaginian as far north as the river
Ebro. To that boundary the Romans restricted them. Any
crossing of the Ebro by the Carthaginians was to be
considered an act of war against the Romans. At last in
218 B.C. the Carthaginians, provoked by new Roman
aggressions, did cross this river under a young general
named Hannibal, one of the most brilliant commanders in
the whole of history. He marched his army from Spain over
the Alps into Italy, raised the Gauls against the Romans,
and carried on the Second Punic War in Italy itself for
fifteen years. He inflicted tremendous defeats upon the
Romans at Lake Trasimere and at Cannae, and throughout
all his Italian campaigns no Roman army stood against him
and escaped disaster. But a Roman army had landed at
Marseilles and cut his communications with Spain; he had
no siege train, and he could never capture Rome. Finally
the Carthaginians, threatened by the revolt of the
Numidians at home, were forced back upon the defence of
their own city in Africa, a Roman army crossed into Africa,
and Hannibal experienced his first defeat under its walls at
the battle of Zama (202 B.C.) at the hands of Scipio
Africanus the Elder. The battle of Zama ended this Second
Punic War. Carthage capitulated; she surrendered Spain
and her war fleet; she paid an enormous indemnity and
agreed to give up Hannibal to the vengeance of the
Romans. But Hannibal escaped and fled to Asia where
later, being in danger of falling into the hands of his
relentless enemies, he took poison and died.
For fifty-six years Rome and the shorn city of Carthage
were at peace. And meanwhile Rome spread her empire
over confused and divided Greece, invaded Asia Minor,
and defeated Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch, at
Magnesia in Lydia. She made Egypt, still under the
Ptolemies, and Pergamum and most of the small states of
Asia Minor into "Allies," or, as we should call them now,
"protected states."
Meanwhile Carthage, subjugated and enfeebled, had been
slowly regaining something of her former prosperity. Her
recovery revived the hate and suspicion of the Romans.
She was attacked upon the most shallow and artificial of
quarrels (149 B.C.), she made an obstinate and bitter
resistance, stood a long siege and was stormed (146
B.C.). The street fighting, or massacre, lasted six days; it
was extraordinarily bloody, and when the citadel capitulated
only about fifty thousand of the Carthaginian population
remained alive out of a quarter of a million. They were sold
into slavery, and the city was burnt and elaborately
destroyed. The blackened ruins were ploughed and sown
as a sort of ceremonial effacement.
So ended the Third Punic War. Of all the Semitic states
and cities that had flourished in the world five centuries
before only one little country remained free under native
rulers. This was Judea, which had liberated itself from the
Seleucids and was under the rule of the native Maccabean
princes. By this time it had its Bible almost complete, and
was developing the distinctive traditions of the Jewish
world as we know it now. It was natural that the
Carthaginians, Phoenicians and kindred peoples
dispersed about the world should find a common link in
their practically identical language and in this literature of
hope and courage. To a large extent they were still the
traders and bankers of the world. The Semitic world had
been submerged rather than replaced.
Jerusalem, which has always been rather the symbol than
the centre of Judaism, was taken by the Romans in 65
B.C.; and after various vicissitudes of quasi-independence
and revolt was besieged by them in 70 A.D. and captured
after a stubborn struggle. The Temple was destroyed. A
later rebellion in 132 A.D. completed its destruction, and
the Jerusalem we know to-day was rebuilt later under
Roman auspices. A temple to the Roman god, Jupiter
Capitolinus, stood in the place of the Temple, and Jews
were forbidden to inhabit the city.
NOW this new Roman power which arose to dominate the
western world in the second and first centuries B.C. was in
several respects a different thing from any of the great
empires that had hitherto prevailed in the civilized world. It
was not at first a monarchy, and it was not the creation of
any one great conqueror. It was not indeed the first of
republican empires; Athens had dominated a group of
Allies and dependents in the time of Pericles, and
Carthage when she entered upon her fatal struggle with
Rome was mistress of Sardinia and Corsica, Morocco,
Algiers, Tunis, and most of Spain and Sicily. But it was the
first republican empire that escaped extinction and went on
to fresh developments.
The centre of this new system lay far to the west of the more
ancient centres of empire, which had hitherto been the river
valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This westward position
enabled Rome to bring in to civilization quite fresh regions
and peoples. The Roman power extended to Morocco and
Spain, and was presently able to thrust north-westward over
what is now France and Belgium to Britain and north-
eastward into Hungary and South Russia. But on the other
hand it was never able to maintain itself in Central Asia or
Persia because they were too far from its administrative
centres. It included therefore great masses of fresh Nordic
Aryan-speaking peoples, it presently incorporated nearly all
the Greek people in the world, and its population was less
strongly Hamitic and Semitic than that of any preceding
empire.
For some centuries this Roman Empire did not fall into the
grooves of precedent that had so speedily swallowed up
Persian and Greek, and all that time it developed. The
rulers of the Medes and Persians became entirely
Babylonized in a generation or so; they took over the tiara
of the king of kings and the temples and priesthoods of his
gods; Alexander and his successors followed in the same
easy path of assimilation; the Seleucid monarchs had much
the same court and administrative methods as
Nebuchadnezzar; the Ptolemies became Pharaohs and
altogether Egyptian. They were assimilated just as before
them the Semitic conquerors of the Sumerians had been
assimilated. But the Romans ruled in their own city, and for
some centuries kept to the laws of their own nature. The
only people who exercised any great mental influence upon
them before the second or third century A.D. were the
kindred and similar Greeks. So that the Roman Empire
was essentially a first attempt to rule a great dominion upon
mainly Aryan lines. It was so far a new pattern in history, it
was an expanded Aryan republic. The old pattern of a
personal conqueror ruling over a capital city that had grown
up round the temple of a harvest god did not apply to it. The
Romans had gods and temples, but like the gods of the
Greeks their gods were quasi-human immortals, divine
patricians. The Romans also had blood sacrifices and even
made human ones in times of stress, things they may have
learnt to do from their dusky Etruscan teachers; but until
Rome was long past its zenith neither priest nor temple
played a large part in Roman history.
The Roman Empire was a growth, an unplanned novel
growth; the Roman people found themselves engaged
almost unawares in a vast administrative experiment. It
cannot be called a successful experiment. In the end their
empire collapsed altogether. And it changed enormously in
form and method from century to century. It changed more
in a hundred years than Bengal or Mesopotamia or Egypt
changed in a thousand. It was always changing. It never
attained to any fixity.
In a sense the experiment failed. In a sense the experiment
remains unfinished, and Europe and America to-day are
still working out the riddles of world-wide statescraft first
confronted by the Roman people.
It is well for the student of history to bear in mind the very
great changes not only in political but in social and moral
matters that went on throughout the period of Roman
dominion. There is much too strong a tendency in people's
minds to think of the Roman rule as something finished and
stable, firm, rounded, noble and decisive. Macaulay's Lays
of Ancient Rome, S.P.Q.R. the elder Cato, the Scipios,
Julius Caesar, Diocletian, Constantine the Great, triumphs,
orations, gladiatorial combats and Christian martyrs are all
mixed up together in a picture of something high and cruel
and dignified. The items of that picture have to be
disentangled. They are collected at different points from a
process of change profounder than that which separates
the London of William the Conqueror from the London of to-
day.
We may very conveniently divide the expansion of Rome
into four stages. The first stage began after the sack of
Rome by the Goths in 390 B.C. and went on until the end of
the First Punic War (240 B.C.). We may call this stage the
stage of the Assimilative Republic. It was perhaps the
finest, most characteristic stage in Roman history. The age-
long dissensions of patrician and plebeian were drawing to
a close, the Etruscan threat had come to an end, no one
was very rich yet nor very poor, and most men were public-
spirited. It was a republic like the republic of the South
African Boers before 1900 or like the northern states of the
American Union between 1800 and 1850; a free-farmers
republic. At the outset of this stage Rome was a little state
scarcely twenty miles square. She fought the sturdy but
kindred states about her, and sought not their destruction
but coalescence. Her centuries of civil dissension had
trained her people in compromise and concessions. Some
of the defeated cities became altogether Roman with a
voting share in the government, some became self-
governing with the right to trade and marry in Rome;
garrisons full of citizens were set up at strategic points and
colonies of varied privileges founded among the freshly
conquered people. Great roads were made. The rapid
Latinization of all Italy was the inevitable consequence of
such a policy. In 89 B.C. all the free inhabitants of Italy
became citizens of the city of Rome Formally the whole
Roman Empire became at last an extended city. In 212
A.D. every free man in the entire extent of the empire was
given citizenship; the right, if he could get there, to vote in
the town meeting in Rome.
This extension of citizenship to tractable cities and to whole
countries was the distinctive device of Roman expansion. It
reversed the old process of conquest and assimilation
altogether. By the Roman method the conquerors
assimilated the conquered.
But after the First Punic War and the annexation of Sicily,
though the old process of assimilation still went on, another
process arose by its side. Sicily for instance was treated
as a conquered prey. It was declared an "estate" of the
Roman people. Its rich soil and industrious population was
exploited to make Rome rich. The patricians and the more
influential among the plebeians secured the major share of
that wealth. And the war also brought in a large supply of
slaves. Before the First Punic War the population of the
republic had been largely a population of citizen farmers.
Military service was their privilege and liability. While they
were on active service their farms fell into debt and a new
large-scale slave agriculture grew up; when they returned
they found their produce in competition with slave-grown
produce from Sicily and from the new estates at home.
Times had changed. The republic had altered its character.
Not only was Sicily in the hands of Rome, the common man
was in the hands of the rich creditor and the rich
competitor. Rome had entered upon its second stage, the
Republic of Adventurous Rich Men.
For two hundred years the Roman soldier farmers had
struggled for freedom and a share in the government of
their state; for a hundred years they had enjoyed their
privileges. The First Punic War wasted them and robbed
them of all they had won.
The value of their electoral privileges had also evaporated.
The governing bodies of the Roman republic were two in
number. The first and more important was the Senate. This
was a body originally of patricians and then of prominent
men of all sorts, who were summoned to it first by certain
powerful officials, the consuls and censors. Like the British
House of Lords it became a gathering of great landowners,
prominent politicians, big business men and the like. It was
much more like the British House of Lords than it was like
the American Senate. For three centuries, from the Punic
Wars onward, it was the centre of Roman political thought
and purpose. The second body was the Popular Assembly.
This was supposed to be an assembly of all the citizens of
Rome. When Rome was a little state twenty miles square
this was a possible gathering. When the citizenship of
Rome had spread beyond the confines in Italy, it was an
altogether impossible one. Its meetings, proclaimed by
horn-blowing from the Capitol and the city walls, became
more and more a gathering of political hacks and city riff-
raff. In the fourth century B.C. the Popular Assembly was a
considerable check upon the Senate, a competent
representation of the claims and rights of the common man.
By the end of the Punic Wars it was an impotent relic of a
vanquished popular control. No effectual legal check
remained upon the big men.
Nothing of the nature of representative government was
ever introduced into the Roman republic. No one thought of
electing delegates to represent the will of the citizens. This
is a very important point for the student to grasp. The
Popular Assembly never became the equivalent of the
American House of Representatives or the British House of
Commons. In theory it was all the citizens; in practice it
ceased to be anything at all worth consideration.
The common citizen of the Roman Empire was therefore in
a very poor case after the Second Punic War; he was
impoverished, he had often lost his farm, he was ousted
from profitable production by slaves, and he had no political
power left to him to remedy these things. The only methods
of popular expression left to a people without any form of
political expression are the strike and the revolt. The story
of the second and first centuries B.C., so far as internal
politics go, is a story of futile revolutionary upheaval. The
scale of this history will not permit us to tell of the intricate
struggles of that time, of the attempts to break up estates
and restore the land to the free farmer, of proposals to
abolish debts in whole or in part. There was revolt and civil
war. In 73 B.C., the distresses of Italy were enhanced by a
great insurrection of the slaves under Spartacus. The
slaves of Italy revolted with some effect, for among them
were the trained fighters of the gladiatorial shows. For two
years Spartacus held out in the crater of Vesuvius, which
seemed at that time to be an extinct volcano. This
insurrection was defeated at last and suppressed with
frantic cruelty. Six thousand captured Spartacists were
crucified along the Appian Way, the great highway that runs
southward out of Rome (71 B.C.).
The common man never made head against the forces that
were subjugating and degrading him. But the big rich men
who were overcoming him were even in his defeat
preparing a new power in the Roman world over
themselves and him, the power of the army.
Before the Second Punic War the army of Rome was a levy
of free farmers, who, according to their quality, rode or
marched afoot to battle. This was a very good force for
wars close at hand, but not the sort of army that will go
abroad and bear long campaigns with patience. And
moreover as the slaves multiplied and the estates grew, the
supply of free-spirited fighting farmers declined. It was a
popular leader named Marius who introduced a new factor.
North Africa after the overthrow of the Carthaginian
civilization had become a semi-barbaric kingdom, the
kingdom of Numidia. The Roman power fell into conflict
with Jugurtha, king of this state, and experienced enormous
difficulties in subduing him. Marius was made consul, in a
phase of public indignation, to end this discreditable war.
This he did by raising paid troops and drilling them hard.
Jugurtha was brought in chains to Rome (106 B.C.) and
Marius, when his time of office had expired, held on to his
consulship illegally with his newly created legions. There
was no power in Rome to restrain him.
With Marius began the third phase in the development of
the Roman power, the Republic of the Military
Commanders. For now began a period in which the
leaders of the paid legions fought for the mastery of the
Roman world. Against Marius was pitted the aristocratic
Sulla who had served under him in Africa. Each in turn
made a great massacre of his political opponents. Men
were proscribed and executed by the thousand, and their
estates were sold. After the bloody rivalry of these two and
the horror of the revolt of Spartacus, came a phase in which
Lucullus and Pompey the Great and Crassus and Julius
Caesar were the masters of armies and dominated affairs.
It was Crassus who defeated Spartacus. Lucullus
conquered Asia Minor and penetrated to Armenia, and
retired with great wealth into private life. Crassus thrusting
further invaded Persia and was defeated and slain by the
Parthians. After a long rivalry Pompey was defeated by
Julius Caesar (48 B.C.) and murdered in Egypt, leaving
Julius Caesar sole master of the Roman world.
The figure of Julius Caesar is one that has stirred the
human imagination out of all proportion to its merit or true
importance. He has become a legend and a symbol. For us
he is chiefly important as marking the transition from the
phase of military adventurers to the beginning of the fourth
stage in Roman expansion, the Early Empire. For in spite
of the profoundest economic and political convulsions, in
spite of civil war and social degeneration, throughout all this
time the boundaries of the Roman state crept outward and
continued to creep outward to their maximum about 100
A.D. There had been something like an ebb during the
doubtful phases of the Second Punic War, and again a
manifest loss of vigour before the reconstruction of the
army by Marius. The revolt of Spartacus marked a third
phase. Julius Caesar made his reputation as a military
leader in Gaul, which is now France and Belgium. (The
chief tribes inhabiting this country belonged to the same
Celtic people as the Gauls who had occupied north Italy for
a time, and who had afterwards raided into Asia Minor and
settled down as the Galatians.) Caesar drove back a
German invasion of Gaul and added all that country to the
empire, and he twice crossed the Straits of Dover into
Britain (55 and 54 B.C.), where however he made no
permanent conquest. Meanwhile Pompey the Great was
consolidating Roman conquests that reached in the east to
the Caspian Sea.
At this time, the middle of the first century B.C., the Roman
Senate was still the nominal centre of the Roman
government, appointing consuls and other officials, granting
powers and the like; and a number of politicians, among
whom Cicero was an outstanding figure, were struggling to
preserve the great traditions of republican Rome and to
maintain respect for its laws. But the spirit of citizenship
had gone from Italy with the wasting away of the free
farmers; it was a land now of slaves and impoverished men
with neither the understanding nor the desire for freedom.
There was nothing whatever behind these republican
leaders in the Senate, while behind the great adventurers
they feared and desired to control were the legions. Over
the heads of the Senate Crassus and Pompey and Caesar
divided the rule of the Empire between them (The First
Triumvirate). When presently Crassus was killed at distant
Carrhae by the Parthians, Pompey and Caesar fell out.
Pompey took up the republican side, and laws were
passed to bring Caesar to trial for his breaches of law and
his disobedience to the decrees of the Senate.
It was illegal for a general to bring his troops out of the
boundary of his command, and the boundary between
Caesar's command and Italy was the Rubicon. In 49 B.C.
he crossed the Rubicon, saying "The die is cast" and
marched upon Pompey and Rome.
It had been the custom in Rome in the past, in periods of
military extremity, to elect a "dictator" with practically
unlimited powers to rule through the crisis. After his
overthrow of Pompey, Caesar was made dictator first for
ten years and then (in 45 B.C.) for life. In effect he was
made monarch of the empire for life. There was talk of a
king, a word abhorrent to Rome since the expulsion of the
Etruscans five centuries before. Caesar refused to be king,
but adopted throne and sceptre. After his defeat of
Pompey, Caesar had gone on into Egypt and had made
love to Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, the goddess
queen of Egypt. She seems to have turned his head very
completely. He had brought back to Rome the Egyptian
idea of a god-king. His statue was set up in a temple with
an inscription "To the Unconquerable God." The expiring
republicanism of Rome flared up in a last protest, and
Caesar was stabbed to death in the Senate at the foot of
the statue of his murdered rival, Pompey the Great.
Thirteen years more of this conflict of ambitious
personalities followed. There was a second Triumvirate of
Lepidus, Mark Antony and Octavian Caesar, the latter the
nephew of Julius Caesar. Octavian like his uncle took the
poorer, hardier western provinces where the best legions
were recruited. In 31 B.C., he defeated Mark Antony, his
only serious rival, at the naval battle of Actium, and made
himself sole master of the Roman world. But Octavian was
a man of different quality altogether from Julius Caesar. He
had no foolish craving to be God or King. He had no queen-
lover that he wished to dazzle. He restored freedom to the
Senate and people of Rome. He declined to be dictator.
The grateful Senate in return gave him the reality instead of
the forms of power. He was to be called not King indeed,
but "Princeps" and "Augustus." He became Augustus
Caesar, the first of the Roman emperors (27 B.C. to 14
A.D.).
He was followed by Tiberius Caesar (14 to 37 A.D.) and he
by others, Caligula, Claudius, Nero and so on up to Trajan
(98 A.D.), Hadrian (117 A.D.), Antonius Pius (138 A.D.)
and Marcus Aurelius (161-180 A.D.). All these emperors
were emperors of the legions. The soldiers made them,
and some the soldiers destroyed. Gradually the Senate
fades out of Roman history, and the emperor and his
administrative officials replace it. The boundaries of the
empire crept forward now to their utmost limits. Most of
Britain was added to the empire, Transylvania was brought
in as a new province, Dacia; Trajan crossed the Euphrates.
Hadrian had an idea that reminds us at once of what had
happened at the other end of the old world. Like Shi-
Hwang-ti he built walls against the northern barbarians; one
across Britain and a palisade between the Rhine and the
Danube. He abandoned some of the acquisitions of Trajan.
2 The expansion of the Roman Empire was at an end.
THE SECOND and first centuries B.C. mark a new phase
in the history of mankind. Mesopotamia and the eastern
Mediterranean are no longer the centre of interest. Both
Mesopotamia and Egypt were still fertile, populous and
fairly prosperous, but they were no longer the dominant
regions of the world. Power had drifted to the west and to
the east. Two great empires now dominated the world, this
new Roman Empire and the renascent Empire of China.
Rome extended its power to the Euphrates, but it was
never able to get beyond that boundary. It was too remote.
Beyond the Euphrates the former Persian and Indian
dominions of the Seleucids fell under a number of new
masters. China, now under the Han dynasty, which had
replaced the Ts'in dynasty at the death of Shi-Hwang-ti, had
extended its power across Tibet and over the high
mountain passes of the Pamirs into western Turkestan. But
there, too, it reached its extremes. Beyond was too far.
China at this time was the greatest, best organized and
most civilized political system in the world. It was superior
in area and population to the Roman Empire at its zenith. It
was possible then for these two vast systems to flourish in
the same world at the same time in almost complete
ignorance of each other. The means of communication both
by sea and land was not yet sufficiently developed and
organized for them to come to a direct clash.
Yet they reacted upon each other in a very remarkable way,
and their influence upon the fate of the regions that lay
between them, upon central Asia and India, was profound.
A certain amount of trade trickled through, by camel
caravans across Persia, for example, and by coasting
ships by way of India and the Red Sea. In 66 B.C. Roman
troops under Propey followed in the footsteps of Alexander
the Great, and marched up the eastern shores of the
Caspian Sea. In 102 A.D. a Chinese expeditionary force
under Pan Chau reached the Caspian, and sent
emissaries to report upon the power of Rome. But many
centuries were still to pass before definite knowledge and
direct intercourse were to link the great parallel worlds of
Europe and Eastern Asia.
To the north of both these great empires were barbaric
wildernesses. What is now Germany was largely forest
lands; the forests extended far into Russia and made a
home for the gigantic aurochs, a bull of almost elephantine
size. Then to the north of the great mountain masses of
Asia stretched a band of deserts, steppes and then forests
and frozen lands. In the eastward lap of the elevated part of
Asia was the great triangle of Manchuria. Large parts of
these regions, stretching between South Russia and
Turkestan into Manchuria, were and are regions of
exceptional climatic insecurity. Their rainfall has varied
greatly in the course of a few centuries. They are lands
treacherous to man. For years they will carry pasture and
sustain cultivation, and then will come an age of decline in
humidity and a cycle of killing droughts.
The western part of this barbaric north from the German
forests to South Russia and Turkestan and from Gothland
to the Alps was the region of origin of the Nordic peoples
and of the Aryan speech. The eastern steppes and deserts
of Mongolia was the region of origin of the Hunnish or
Mongolian or Tartar or Turkish peoples-for all these several
peoples were akin in language, race, and way of life. And
as the Nordic peoples seem to have been continually
overflowing their own borders and pressing south upon the
developing civilizations of Mesopotamia and the
Mediterranean coast, so the Hunnish tribes sent their
surplus as wanderers, raiders and conquerors into the
settled regions of China. Periods of plenty in the north
would mean an increase in population there; a shortage of
grass, a spell of cattle disease, would drive the hungry
warlike tribesmen south.
For a time there were simultaneously two fairly effective
Empires in the world capable of holding back the
barbarians and even forcing forward the frontiers of the
imperial peace. The thrust of the Han empire from north
China into Mongolia was strong and continuous. The
Chinese population welled up over the barrier of the Great
Wall. Behind the imperial frontier guards came the Chinese
farmer with horse and plough, ploughing up the grass lands
and enclosing the winter pasture. The Hunnish peoples
raided and murdered the settlers, but the Chinese punitive
expeditions were too much for them. The nomads were
faced with the choice of settling down to the plough and
becoming Chinese tax-payers or shifting in search of fresh
summer pastures. Some took the former course and were
absorbed. Some drifted north-eastward and eastward over
the mountain passes down into western Turkestan.
This westward drive of the Mongolian horsemen was going
on from 200 B.C. onward. It was producing a westward
pressure upon the Aryan tribes, and these again were
pressing upon the Roman frontiers ready to break through
directly there was any weakness apparent. The Parthians,
who were apparently a Scythian people with some
Mongolian admixture, came down to the Euphrates by the
first century B.C. They fought against Pompey the Great in
his eastern raid. They defeated and killed Crassus. They
replaced the Seleucid monarchy in Persia by a dynasty of
Parthian kings, the Arsacid dynasty.
But for a time the line of least resistance for hungry nomads
lay neither to the west nor the east but through central Asia
and then south-eastward through the Khyber Pass into
India. It was India which received the Mongolian drive in
these centuries of Roman and Chinese strength. A series
of raiding conquerors poured down through the Punjab into
the great plains to loot and destroy. The empire of Asoka
was broken up, and for a time the history of India passes
into darkness. A certain Kushan dynasty founded by the
"Indo-Scythians"-one of the raiding peoples-ruled for a time
over North India and maintained a certain order. These
invasions went on for several centuries. For a large part of
the fifth century A.D. India was afflicted by the Ephthalites or
White Huns, who levied tribute on the small Indian princes
and held India in terror. Every summer these Ephthalites
pastured in western Turkestan, every autumn they came
down through the passes to terrorize India.
In the second century A.D. a great misfortune came upon
the Roman and Chinese empires that probably weakened
the resistance of both to barbarian pressure. This was a
pestilence of unexampled virulence. It raged for eleven
years in China and disorganized the social framework
profoundly. The Han dynasty fell, and a new age of division
and confusion began from which China did not fairly
recover until the seventh century A.D. with the coming of the
great Tang dynasty.
The infection spread through Asia to Europe. It raged
throughout the Roman Empire from 164 to 180 A.D. It
evidently weakened the Roman imperial fabric very
seriously. We begin to hear of depopulation in the Roman
provinces after this, and there was a marked deterioration
in the vigour and efficiency of government. At any rate we
presently find the frontier no longer invulnerable, but giving
way first in this place and then in that. A new Nordic people,
the Goths, coming originally from Gothland in Sweden, had
migrated across Russia to the Volga region and the shores
of the Black Sea and taken to the sea and piracy. By the
end of the second century they may have begun to feel the
westward thrust of the Huns. In 247 they crossed the
Danube in a great land raid, and defeated and killed the
Emperor Decius in a battle in what is now Serbia. In 236
another Germanic people, the Franks, had broken bounds
upon the lower Rhine, and the Alemanni had poured into
Alsace. The legions in Gaul beat back their invaders, but
the Goths in the Balkan peninsula raided again and again.
The province of Dacia vanished from Roman history.
A chill had come to the pride and confidence of Rome. In
270-275 Rome, which had been an open and secure city
for three centuries, was fortified by the Emperor Aurelian.
XXXV. The Common Man's Life under the Early
Roman Empire
BEFORE we tell of how this Roman empire which was built
up in the two centuries B.C., and which flourished in peace
and security from the days of Augustus Caesar onward for
two centuries, fell into disorder and was broken up, it may
be as well to devote some attention to the life of the
ordinary people throughout this great realm. Our history has
come down now to within 2000 years of our own time; and
the life of the civilized people, both under the Peace of
Rome and the Peace of the Han dynasty, was beginning to
resemble more and more clearly the life of their civilized
successors to-day.
In the western world coined money was now in common
use; outside the priestly world there were many people of
independent means who were neither officials of the
government nor priests; people travelled about more freely
than they had ever done before, and there were high roads
and inns for them. Compared with the past, with the time
before 500 B.C., life had become much more loose. Before
that date civilized men had been bound to a district or
country, had been bound to a tradition and lived within a
very limited horizon; only the nomads traded and travelled.
But neither the Roman Peace nor the Peace of the Han
dynasty meant a uniform civilization over the large areas
they controlled. There were very great local differences and
great contrasts and inequalities of culture between one
district and another, just as there are to-day under the
British Peace in India. The Roman garrisons and colonies
were dotted here and there over this great space,
worshipping Roman gods and speaking the Latin
language; but where there had been towns and cities
before the coming of the Romans, they went on,
subordinated indeed but managing their own affairs, and,
for a time at least, worshipping their own gods in their own
fashion. Over Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt and the
Hellenized East generally, the Latin language never
prevailed. Greek ruled there invincibly. Saul of Tarsus, who
became the apostle Paul, was a Jew and a Roman citizen;
but he spoke and wrote Greek and not Hebrew. Even at the
court of the Parthian dynasty, which had overthrown the
Greek Seleucids in Persia, and was quite outside the
Roman imperial boundaries, Greek was the fashionable
language. In some parts of Spain and in North Africa, the
Carthaginian language also held on for a long time in spite
of the destruction of Carthage. Such a town as Seville,
which had been a prosperous city long before the Roman
name had been heard of, kept its Semitic goddess and
preserved its Semitic speech for generations, in spite of a
colony of Roman veterans at Italica a few miles away.
Septimius Severus, who was emperor from 193 to 211
A.D., spoke Carthaginian as his mother speech. He learnt
Latin later as a foreign tongue; and it is recorded that his
sister never learnt Latin and conducted her Roman
household in the Punic language.
In such countries as Gaul and Britain and in provinces like
Dacia (now roughly Roumania) and Pannonia (Hungary
south of the Danube), where there were no pre-existing
great cities and temples and cultures, the Roman empire
did however "Latinize." It civilized these countries for the
first time. It created cities and towns where Latin was from
the first the dominant speech, and where Roman gods
were served and Roman customs and fashions followed.
The Roumanian, Italian, French and Spanish languages, all
variations and modifications of Latin, remain to remind us
of this extension of Latin speech and customs. North-west
Africa also became at last largely Latin-speaking. Egypt,
Greece and the rest of the empire to the east were never
Latinized. They remained Egyptian and Greek in culture
and spirit. And even in Rome, among educated men,
Greek was learnt as the language of a gentleman and
Greek literature and learning were very properly preferred
to Latin.
In this miscellaneous empire the ways of doing work and
business were naturally also very miscellaneous. The chief
industry of the settled world was still largely agriculture. We
have told how in Italy the sturdy free farmers who were the
backbone of the early Roman republic were replaced by
estates worked by slave labour after the Punic wars. The
Greek world had had very various methods of cultivation,
from the Arcadian plan, wherein every free citizen toiled
with his own hands, to Sparta, wherein it was a dishonour
to work and where agricultural work was done by a special
slave class, the Helots. But that was ancient history now,
and over most of the Hellenized world the estate system
and slavegangs had spread. The agricultural slaves were
captives who spoke many different languages so that they
could not understand each other, or they were born slaves;
they had no solidarity to resist oppression, no tradition of
rights, no knowledge, for they could not read nor write.
Although they came to form a majority of the country
population they never made a successful insurrection. The
insurrection of Spartacus in the first century B.C. was an
insurrection of the special slaves who were trained for the
gladiatorial combats. The agricultural workers in Italy in the
latter days of the Republic and the early Empire suffered
frightful indignities; they would be chained at night to
prevent escape or have half the head shaved to make it
difficult. They had no wives of their own; they could be
outraged, mutilated and killed by their masters. A master
could sell his slave to fight beasts in the arena. If a slave
slew his master, all the slaves in his household and not
merely the murderer were crucified. In some parts of
Greece, in Athens notably, the lot of the slave was never
quite so frightful as this, but it was still detestable. To such a
population the barbarian invaders who presently broke
through the defensive line of the legions, came not as
enemies but as liberators.
The slave system had spread to most industries and to
every sort of work that could be done by gangs. Mines and
metallurgical operations, the rowing of galleys, road-
making and big building operations were all largely slave
occupations. And almost all domestic service was
performed by slaves. There were poor freemen men and
there were reed-men in the cities and upon the country
side, working for themselves or even working for wages.
They were artizans, supervisors and so forth, workers of a
new money-paid class working in competition with slave
workers; but we do not know what proportion they made of
the general population. It probably varied widely in different
places and at different periods. And there were also many
modifications of slavery, from the slavery that was chained
at night and driven with whips to the farm or quarry, to the
slave whose master found it advantageous to leave him to
cultivate his patch or work his craft and own his wife like a
free-man, provided he paid in a satisfactory quittance to his
owner.
There were armed slaves. At the opening of the period of
the Punic wars, in 264 B.C., the Etruscan sport of setting
slaves to fight for their lives was revived in Rome. It grew
rapidly fashionable; and soon every great Roman rich man
kept a retinue of gladiators, who sometimes fought in the
arena but whose real business it was to act as his
bodyguard of bullies. And also there were learned slaves.
The conquests of the later Republic were among the highly
civilized cities of Greece, North Africa and Asia Minor; and
they brought in many highly educated captives. The tutor of
a young Roman of good family was usually a slave. A rich
man would have a Greek slave as librarian, and slave
secretaries and learned men. He would keep his poet as
he would keep a performing dog. In this atmosphere of
slavery the traditions of modern literary criticism were
evolved. The slaves still boast and quarrel in our reviews.
There were enterprising people who bought intelligent boy
slaves and had them educated for sale. Slaves were
trained as book copyists, as jewellers, and for endless
skilled callings.
But there were very considerable changes in the position of
a slave during the four hundred years between the opening
days of conquest under the republic of rich men and the
days of disintegration that followed the great pestilence. In
the second century B.C. war-captives were abundant,
manners gross and brutal; the slave had no rights and there
was scarcely an outrage the reader can imagine that was
not practised upon slaves in those days. But already in the
first century A.D. there was a perceptible improvement in
the attitude of the Roman civilization towards slavery.
Captives were not so abundant for one thing, and slaves
were dearer. And slave-owners began to realize that the
profit and comfort they got from their slaves increased with
the self-respect of these unfortunates. But also the moral
tone of the community was rising, and a sense of justice
was becoming effective. The higher mentality of Greece
was qualifying the old Roman harshness. Restrictions upon
cruelty were made, a master might no longer sell his slave
to fight beasts, a slave was given property rights in what
was called his peculium, slaves were paid wages as an
encouragement and stimulus, a form of slave marriage was
recognized. Very many forms of agriculture do not lend
themselves to gang working, or require gang workers only
at certain seasons. In regions where such conditions
prevailed the slave presently became a serf, paying his
owner part of his produce or working for him at certain
seasons.
When we begin to realize how essentially this great Latin
and Greek-speaking Roman Empire of the first two
centuries A.D. was a slave state and how small was the
minority who had any pride or freedom in their lives, we lay
our hands on the clues to its decay and collapse. There
was little of what we should call family life, few homes of
temperate living and active thought and study; schools and
colleges were few and far between. The free will and the
free mind were nowhere to be found. The great roads, the
ruins of splendid buildings, the tradition of law and power it
left for the astonishment of succeeding generations must
not conceal from us that all its outer splendour was built
upon thwarted wills, stifled intelligence, and crippled and
perverted desires. And even the minority who lorded it over
that wide realm of subjugation and of restraint and forced
labour were uneasy and unhappy in their souls; art and
literature, science and philosophy, which are the fruits of
free and happy minds, waned in that atmosphere. There
was much copying and imitation, an abundance of artistic
artificers, much slavish pedantry among the servile men of
learning, but the whole Roman empire in four centuries
produced nothing to set beside the bold and noble
intellectual activities of the comparatively little city of Athens
during its one century of greatness. Athens decayed under
the Roman sceptre. The science of Alexandria decayed.
The spirit of man, it seemed, was decaying in those days.
XXXVI. Religious Developments under the Roman
Empire
THE SOUL of man under that Latin and Greek empire of
the first two centuries of the Christian era was a worried
and frustrated soul. Compulsion and cruelty reigned; there
were pride and display but little honour; little serenity or
steadfast happiness. The unfortunate were despised and
wretched; the fortunate were insecure and feverishly eager
for gratifications. In a great number of cities life centred on
the red excitement of the arena, where men and beasts
fought and were tormented and slain. Amphitheatres are
the most characteristic of Roman ruins. Life went on in that
key. The uneasiness of men's hearts manifested itself in
profound religious unrest.
From the days when the Aryan hordes first broke in upon
the ancient civilizations, it was inevitable that the old gods
of the temples and priesthoods should suffer great
adaptations or disappear. In the course of hundreds of
generations the agricultural peoples of the brunette
civilizations had shaped their lives and thoughts to the
temple-centred life. Observances and the fear of disturbed
routines, sacrifices and mysteries, dominated their minds.
Their gods seem monstrous and illogical to our modern
minds because we belong to an Aryanized world, but to
these older peoples these deities had the immediate
conviction and vividness of things seen in an intense
dream. The conquest of one city state by another in
Sumeria or early Egypt meant a change or a renaming of
gods or goddesses, but left the shape and spirit of the
worship intact. There was no change in its general
character. The figures in the dream changed, but the dream
went on and it was the same sort of dream. And the early
Semitic conquerors were sufficiently akin in spirit to the
Sumerians to take over the religion of the Mesopotamian
civilization they subjugated without any profound alteration.
Egypt was never indeed subjugated to the extent of a
religious revolution. Under the Ptolemies and under the
Caesars, her temples and altars and priesthoods remained
essentially Egyptian.
So long as conquests went on between people of similar
social and religious habits it was possible to get over the
clash between the god of this temple and region and the
god of that by a process of grouping or assimilation. If the
two gods were alike in character they were identified. It was
really the same god under another name, said the priests
and the people. This fusion of gods is called theocrasia;
and the age of the great conquests of the thousand years
B.C. was an age of theocrasia. Over wide areas the local
gods were displaced by, or rather they were swallowed up
in, a general god. So that when at last Hebrew prophets in
Babylon proclaimed one God of Righteousness in all the
earth men's minds were fully prepared for that idea.
But often the gods were too dissimilar for such an
assimilation, and then they were grouped together in some
plausible relationship. A female god-and the aegean world
before the coming of the Greek was much addicted to
Mother Gods-would be married to a male god, and an
animal god or a star god would be humanized and the
animal or astronomical aspect, the serpent or the sun or the
star, made into an ornament or a symbol. Or the god of a
defeated people would become a malignant antagonist to
the brighter gods. The history of theology is full of such
adaptations, compromises and rationalizations of once
local gods.
As Egypt developed from city states into one united
kingdom there was much of this theocrasia. The chief god
so to speak was Osiris, a sacrificial harvest god of whom
Pharaoh was supposed to be the earthly incarnation. Osiris
was represented as repeatedly dying and rising again; he
was not only the seed and the harvest but also by a natural
extension of thought the means of human immortality.
Among his symbols was the wide-winged scarabeus beetle
which buries its eggs to rise again, and also the effulgent
sun which sets to rise. Later on he was to be identified with
Apis, the sacred bull. Associated with him was the
goddess Isis. Isis was also Hathor, a cow-goddess, and the
crescent moon and the Star of the sea. Osiris dies and she
bears a child, Horus, who is also a hawk-god and the dawn,
and who grows to become Osiris again. The effigies of Isis
represent her as bearing the infant Horus in her arms and
standing on the crescent moon. These are not logical
relationships, but they were devised by the human mind
before the development of hard and systematic thinking
and they have a dream-like coherence. Beneath this triple
group there are other and darker Egyptian gods, bad gods,
the dog-headed Anubis, black night and the like, devourers,
tempters, enemies of god and man.
Every religious system does in the course of time fit itself to
the shape of the human soul, and there can be no doubt
that out of these illogical and even uncouth symbols,
Egyptian people were able to fashion for themselves ways
of genuine devotion and consolation. The desire for
immortality was very strong in the Egyptian mind, and the
religious life of Egypt turned on that desire. The Egyptian
religion was an immortality religion as no other religion had
ever been. As Egypt went down under foreign conquerors
and the Egyptian gods ceased to have any satisfactory
political significance, this craving for a life of
compensations hereafter, intensified.
After the Greek conquest, the new city of Alexandria
became the centre of Egyptian religious life, and indeed of
the religious life of the whole Hellenic world. A great temple,
the Serapeum, was set up by Ptolemy I at which a sort of
trinity of gods was worshipped. These were Serapis (who
was Osiris-Apis rechristened), Isis and Horus. These were
not regarded as separate gods but as three aspects of one
god, and Serapis was identified with the Greek Zeus, the
Roman Jupiter and the Persian sun-god. This worship
spread wherever the Hellenic influence extended, even into
North India and Western China. The idea of immortality, an
immortality of compensations and consolation, was eagerly
received by a world in which the common life was
hopelessly wretched. Serapis was called "the saviour of
souls." "After death," said the hymns of that time, "we are
still in the care of his providence." Isis attracted many
devotees. Her images stood in her temples, as Queen of
Heaven, bearing the infant Horus in her arms. Candles
were burnt before her, votive offerings were made to her,
shaven priests consecrated to celibacy waited on her altar.
The rise of the Roman empire opened the western
European world to this growing cult. The temples of
Serapis-Isis, the chanting of the priests and the hope of
immortal life, followed the Roman standards to Scotland
and Holland. But there were many rivals to the Serapis-Isis
religion. Prominent among these was Mithraism. This was
a religion of Persian origin, and it centred upon some now
forgotten mysteries about Mithras sacrificing a sacred and
benevolent bull. Here we seem to have something more
primordial than the complicated and sophisticated Serapis-
Isis beliefs. We are carried back directly to the blood
sacrifices of the heliolithic stage in human culture. The bull
upon the Mithraic monuments always bleeds copiously from
a wound in its side, and from this blood springs new life.
The votary to Mithraism actually bathed in the blood of the
sacrificial bull. At his initiation he went beneath a
scaffolding upon which a bull was killed so that the blood
could actually run down on him.
Both these religions, and the same is true of many other of
the numerous parallel cults that sought the allegiance of the
slaves and citizens under the earlier Roman emperors, are
personal religions. They aim at personal salvation and
personal immortality. The older religions were not personal
like that; they were social. The older fashion of divinity was
god or goddess of the city first or of the state, and only
secondarily of the individual. The sacrifices were a public
and not a private function. They concerned collective
practical needs in this world in which we live. But the
Greeks first and now the Romans had pushed religion out
of politics. Guided by the Egyptian tradition religion had
retreated to the other world.
These new private immortality religions took all the heart
and emotion out of the old state religions, but they did not
actually replace them. A typical city under the earlier
Roman emperors would have a number of temples to all
sorts of gods. There might be a temple to Jupiter of the
Capitol, the great god of Rome, and there would probably
be one to the reigning Caesar. For the Caesars had learnt
from the Pharaohs the possibility of being gods. In such
temples a cold and stately political worship went on; one
would go and make an offering and burn a pinch of incense
to show one's loyalty. But it would be to the temple of Isis,
the dear Queen of Heaven, one would go with the burthen
of one's private troubles for advice and relief. There might
be local and eccentric gods. Seville, for example, long
affected the worship of the old Carthaginian Venus. In a
cave or an underground temple there would certainly be an
altar to Mithras, attended by legionaries and slaves. And
probably also there would be a synagogue where the Jews
gathered to read their Bible and uphold their faith in the
unseen God of all the Earth.
Sometimes there would be trouble with the Jews about the
political side of the state religion. They held that their God
was a jealous God intolerant of idolatry, and they would
refuse to take part in the public sacrifices to Caesar. They
would not even salute the Roman standards for fear of
idolatry.
In the East long before the time of Buddha there had been
ascetics, men and women who gave up most of the
delights of life, who repudiated marriage and property and
sought spiritual powers and an escape from the stresses
and mortifications of the world in abstinence, pain and
solitude. Buddha himself set his face against ascetic
extravagances, but many of his disciples followed a
monkish life of great severity. Obscure Greek cults
practised similar disciplines even to the extent of self-
mutilation. Asceticism appeared in the Jewish communities
of Judea and Alexandria also in the first century B.C.
Communities of men abandoned the world and gave
themselves to austerities and mystical contemplation. Such
was the sect of the Essenes. Throughout the first and
second centuries A.D. there was an almost world-wide
resort to such repudiations of life, a universal search for
"salvation" from the distresses of the time. The old sense of
an established order, the old confidence in priest and
temple and law and custom, had gone. Amidst the
prevailing slavery, cruelty, fear, anxiety, waste, display and
hectic self-indulgence, went this epidemic of self-disgust
and mental insecurity, this agonized search for peace even
at the price of renunciation and voluntary suffering. This it
was that filled the Serapeum with weeping penitents and
brought the converts into the gloom and gore of the Mithraic
cave.
IT was while Augustus Caesar, the first of the Emperors,
was reigning in Rome that Jesus who is the Christ of
Christianity was born in Judea. In his name a religion was
to arise which was destined to become the official religion
of the entire Roman Empire.
Now it is on the whole more convenient to keep history and
theology apart. A large proportion of the Christian world
believes that Jesus was an incarnation of that God of all the
Earth whom the Jews first recognized. The historian, if he is
to remain historian, can neither accept nor deny that
interpretation. Materially Jesus appeared in the likeness of
a man, and it is as a man that the historian must deal with
him.
He appeared in Judea in the reign of Tiberius Caesar. He
was a prophet. He preached after the fashion of the
preceding Jewish prophets. He was a man of about thirty,
and we are in the profoundest ignorance of his manner of
life before his preaching began.
Our only direct sources of information about the life and
teaching of Jesus are the four Gospels. All four agree in
giving us a picture of a very definite personality. One is
obliged to say, "Here was a man. This could not have been
invented."
But just as the personality of Gautama Buddha has been
distorted and obscured by the stiff squatting figure, the
gilded idol of later Buddhism, so one feels that the lean and
strenuous personality of Jesus is much wronged by the
unreality and conventionality that a mistaken reverence has
imposed upon his figure in modern Christian art. Jesus was
a penniless teacher, who wandered about the dusty sun-bit
country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is
always represented clean, combed and sleek, in spotless
raiment, erect and with something motionless about him as
though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made
him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot
distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and
unwise additions of the unintelligently devout.
We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult
accessories. with the figure of a being, very human, very
earnest and passionate, capable of swift anger, and
teaching a new and simple and profound doctrine-namely,
the universal loving Fatherhood of God and the coming of
the Kingdom of Heaven. He was clearly a person-to use a
common phrase-of intense personal magnetism. He
attracted followers and filled them with love and courage.
Weak and ailing people were heartened and healed by his
presence. Yet he was probably of a delicate physique,
because of the swiftness with which he died under the
pains of crucifixion. There is a tradition that he fainted
when, according to the custom, he was made to bear his
cross to the place of execution. He went about the country
for three years spreading his doctrine and then he came to
Jerusalem and was accused of trying to set up a strange
kingdom in Judea; he was tried upon this charge, and
crucified together with two thieves. Long before these two
were dead his sufferings were over.
The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the
main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most
revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed
human thought. It is small wonder if the world of that time
failed to grasp its full significance, and recoiled in dismay
from even a half apprehension of its tremendous
challenges to the established habits and institutions of
mankind. For the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, as
Jesus seems to have preached it, was no less than a bold
and uncompromising demand for a complete change and
cleansing of the life of our struggling race, an utter
cleansing, without and within. To the gospels the reader
must go for all that is preserved of this tremendous
teaching; here we are only concerned with the jar of its
impact upon established ideas.
The Jews were persuaded that God, the one God of the
whole world, was a righteous god, but they also thought of
him as a trading god who had made a bargain with their
Father Abraham about them, a very good bargain indeed
for them, to bring them at last to predominance in the earth.
With dismay and anger they heard Jesus sweeping away
their dear securities. God, he taught, was no bargainer;
there were no chosen people and no favourites in the
Kingdom of Heaven. God was the loving father of all life, as
incapable of showing favour as the universal sun. And all
men were brothers-sinners alike and beloved sons alike-of
this divine father. In the parable of the Good Samaritan
Jesus cast scorn upon that natural tendency we all obey, to
glorify our own people and to minimize the righteousness of
other creeds and other races. In the parable of the
labourers he thrust aside the obstinate claim of the Jews to
have a special claim upon God. All whom God takes into
the kingdom, he taught, God serves alike; there is no
distinction in his treatment, because there is no measure to
his bounty. From all, moreover, as the parable of the buried
talent witnesses, and as the incident of the widow's mite
enforces, he demands the utmost. There are no privileges,
no rebates and no excuses in the Kingdom of Heaven.
But it is not only the intense tribal patriotism of the Jews that
Jesus outraged. They were a people of intense family
loyalty, and he would have swept away all the narrow and
restrictive family affections in the great flood of the love of
God. The whole kingdom of Heaven was to be the family of
his followers. We are told that, "While he yet talked to the
people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without,
desiring to speak with him. Then one said unto him,
Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring
to speak with thee. But he answered and said unto him that
told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?
And he stretched forth his hands towards his disciples, and
said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever
shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same
is my brother, and sister, and mother."
And not only did Jesus strike at patriotism and the bonds of
family loyalty in the name of God's universal fatherhood and
brotherhood of all mankind, but it is clear that his teaching
condemned all the gradations of the economic system, all
private wealth, and personal advantages. All men belonged
to the kingdom; all their possessions belonged to the
kingdom; the righteous life for all men, the only righteous
life, was the service of God's will with all that we had, with
all that we were. Again and again he denounced private
riches and the reservation of any private life.
"And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one
running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master,
what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said
to him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but
one, that is God. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not
commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false
witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and mother. And he
answered and said unto him, Master, all these things have I
observed from my youth. Then Jesus beholding him loved
him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest; go thy way,
sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou
shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross,
and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went
away grieved: for he had great possessions.
"And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his
disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into
the Kingdom of God! And the disciples were astonished at
his words. But Jesus answered again, and saith unto them,
Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter
into the Kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into
the Kingdom of God."
Moreover, in his tremendous prophecy of this kingdom
which was to make all men one together in God, Jesus had
small patience for the bargaining righteousness of formal
religion. Another large part of his recorded utterances is
aimed against the meticulous observance of the rules of the
pious career. "Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him,
Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the
elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands? He answered
and said unto them, Well hath Isaiah prophesied of you
hypocrites, as it is written,
"This people honoureth me with their lips, "But their heart is
far from me. "Howbeit in vain do they worship me,
"Teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
"For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the
tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and
many other such things ye do. And he said unto them, Full
well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep
your own tradition."
It was not merely a moral and a social revolution that Jesus
proclaimed; it is clear from a score of indications that his
teaching had a political bent of the plainest sort. It is true
that he said his kingdom was not of this world, that it was in
the hearts of men and not upon a throne; but it is equally
clear that wherever and in what measure his kingdom was
set up in the hearts of men, the outer world would be in that
measure revolutionized and made new.
Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers
may have missed in his utterances, it is plain they did not
miss his resolve to revolutionize the world. The whole tenor
of the opposition to him and the circumstances of his trial
and execution show clearly that to his contemporaries he
seemed to propose plainly, and did propose plainly, to
change and fuse and enlarge all human life.
In view of what he plainly said, is it any wonder that all who
were rich and prosperous felt a horror of strange things, a
swimming of their world at his teaching? He was dragging
out all the little private reservations they had made from
social service into the light of a universal religious life. He
was like some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out
of the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the
white blaze of this kingdom of his there was to be no
property, no privilege, no pride and precedence; no motive
indeed and no reward but love. Is it any wonder that men
were dazzled and blinded and cried out against him? Even
his disciples cried out when he would not spare them the
light. Is it any wonder that the priests realized that between
this man and themselves there was no choice but that he or
priestcraft should perish? Is it any wonder that the Roman
soldiers, confronted and amazed by something soaring
over their comprehension and threatening all their
disciplines, should take refuge in wild laughter, and crown
him with thorns and robe him in purple and make a mock
Caesar of him? For to take him seriously was to enter upon
a strange and alarming life, to abandon habits, to control
instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible
happiness.ƒMatt. xii, 46-50.Mark x. 17-25.Mark vii. 1-9.
IN the four gospels we find the personality and teachings of
Jesus but very little of the dogmas of the Christian church. It
is in the epistles, a series of writings by the immediate
followers of Jesus, that the broad lines of Christian belief
are laid down.
Chief among the makers of Christian doctrine was St. Paul.
He had never seen Jesus nor heard him preach. Paul's
name was originally Saul, and he was conspicuous at first
as an active persecutor of the little band of disciples after
the crucifixion. Then he was suddenly converted to
Christianity, and he changed his name to Paul. He was a
man of great intellectual vigour and deeply and
passionately interested in the religious movements of the
time. He was well versed in Judaism and in the Mithraism
and Alexandrian religion of the day. He carried over many
of their ideas and terms of expression into Christianity. He
did very little to enlarge or develop the original teaching of
Jesus, the teaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. But he
taught that Jesus was not only the promised Christ, the
promised leader of the Jews, but also that his death was a
sacrifice, like the deaths of the ancient sacrificial victims of
the primordial civilizations, for the redemption of mankind.
When religions flourish side by side they tend to pick up
each other's ceremonial and other outward peculiarities.
Buddhism, for example, in China has now almost the same
sort of temples and priests and uses as Taoism, which
follows in the teachings of Lao Tse. Yet the original
teachings of Buddhism and Taoism were almost flatly
opposed. And it reflects no doubt or discredit upon the
essentials of Christian teaching that it took over not merely
such formal things as the shaven priest, the votive offering,
the altars, candles, chanting and images of the Alexandrian
and Mithraic faiths, but adopted even their devotional
phrases and their theological Osiris, was a god who died to
rise again and give men immortality. And presently the
spreading Christian community was greatly torn by
complicated theological disputes about the relationship of
this God Jesus to God the Father of Mankind. The Arians
taught that Jesus was divine, but distant from and inferior to
the Father. The Sabellians taught that Jesus was merely an
aspect of the Father, and that God was Jesus and Father at
the same time just as a man may be a father and an
artificer at the same time; and the Trinitarians taught a
more subtle doctrine that God was both one and three,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For a time it seemed that
Arianism would prevail over its rivals, and then after
disputes, violence and wars, the Trinitarian formula
became the accepted formula of all Christendom. It may be
found in its completest expression in the Athanasian
Creed.
We offer no comment on these controversies here. They do
not sway history as the personal teaching of Jesus sways
history. The personal teaching of Jesus does seem to mark
a new phase in the moral and spiritual life of our race. Its
insistence upon the universal Fatherhood of God and the
implicit brotherhood of all men, its insistence upon the
sacredness of every human personality as a living temple
of God, was to have the profoundest effect upon all the
subsequent social and political life of mankind. With
Christianity, with the spreading teachings of Jesus, a new
respect appears in the world for man as man. It may be
true, as hostile critics of Christianity have urged, that St.
Paul preached obedience to slaves, but it is equally true
that the whole spirit of the teachings of Jesus preserved in
the gospels was against the subjugation of man by man.
And still more distinctly was Christianity opposed to such
outrages upon human dignity as the gladiatorial combats in
the arena.
Throughout the first two centuries after Christ, the Christian
religion spread throughout the Roman Empire, weaving
together an ever-growing multitude of converts into a new
community of ideas and will. The attitude of the emperors
varied between hostility and toleration. There were
attempts to suppress this new faith in both the second and
third centuries; and finally in 303 and the following years a
great persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. The
considerable accumulations of Church property were
seized, all bibles and religious writings were confiscated
and destroyed, Christians were put out of the protection of
the law and many executed. The destruction of the books is
particularly notable. It shows how the power of the written
word in holding together the new faith was appreciated by
the authorities. These "book religions," Christianity and
Judaism, were religions that educated. Their continued
existence depended very largely on people being able to
read and understand their doctrinal ideas. The older
religions had made no such appeal to the personal
intelligence. In the ages of barbaric confusion that were
now at hand in western Europe it was the Christian church
that was mainly instrumental in preserving the tradition of
learning.
The persecution of Diocletian failed completely to suppress
the growing Christian community. In many provinces it was
ineffective because the bulk of the population and many of
the officials were Christian. In 317 an edict of toleration was
issued by the associated Emperor Galerius, and in 324
Constantine the Great, a friend and on his deathbed a
baptized convert to Christianity, became sole ruler of the
Roman world. He abandoned all divine pretensions and put
Christian symbols on the shields and banners of his troops.
In a few years Christianity was securely established as the
official religion of the empire. The competing religions
disappeared or were absorbed with extraordinary celerity,
and in 390 Theodosius the Great caused the great statue
of Jupiter Serapis at Alexandria to be destroyed. From the
outset of the fifth century onward the only priests or temples
in the Roman Empire were Christian priests and temples.
XXXIX. The Barbarians Break the Empire into East
and West
THROUGHOUT the third century the Roman Empire,
decaying socially and disintegrating morally, faced the
barbarians. The emperors of this period were fighting
military autocrats, and the capital of the empire shifted with
the necessities of their military policy. Now the imperial
headquarters would be at Milan in north Italy, now in what is
now Serbia at Sirmium or Nish, now in Nicomedia in Asia
Minor. Rome halfway down Italy was too far from the centre
of interest to be a convenient imperial seat. It was a
declining city. Over most of the empire peace still prevailed
and men went about without arms. The armies continued to
be the sole repositories of power; the emperors,
dependent on their legions, became more and more
autocratic to the rest of the empire and their state more and
more like that of the Persian and other oriental monarchs.
Diocletian assumed a royal diadem and oriental robes.
All along the imperial frontier, which ran roughly along the
Rhine and Danube, enemies were now pressing. The
Franks and other German tribes had come up to the Rhine.
In north Hungary were the Vandals; in what was once Dacia
and is now Roumania, the Visigoths or West Goths. Behind
these in south Russia were the East Goths or Ostrogoths,
and beyond these again in the Volga region the Alans. But
now Mongolian peoples were forcing their way towards
Europe. The Huns were already exacting tribute from the
Alans and Ostrogoths and pushing them to the west.
In Asia the Roman frontiers were crumpling back under the
push of a renascent Persia. This new Persia, the Persia of
the Sassenid kings, was to be a vigorous and on the whole
a successful rival of the Roman Empire in Asia for the next
three centuries.
A glance at the map of Europe will show the reader the
peculiar weakness of the empire. The river Danube comes
down to within Vandals, being pressed by the Goths, asked
to be received into the Roman Empire. They were
assigned lands in Pannonia, which is now that part of
Hungary west of the Danube, and their fighting men
became nominally legionaries. But these new legionaries
remained under their own chiefs. Rome failed to digest
them.
Constantine died working to reorganize his great realm,
and soon the frontiers were ruptured again and the
Visigoths came almost to Constantinople. They defeated
the Emperor Valens at Adrianople and made a settlement
in what is now Bulgaria, similar to the settlement of the
Vandals in Pannonia. Nominally they were subjects of the
emperor, practically they were conquerors.
From 379 to 395 A.D. reigned the Emperor Theodosius the
Great, and while he reigned the empire was still formally
intact. Over the armies of Italy and Pannonia presided
Stilicho, a Vandal, over the armies in the Balkan peninsula,
Alaric, a Goth. When Theodosius died at the close of the
fourth century he left two sons. Alaric supported one of
these, Arcadius, in Constantinople, and Stilicho the other,
Honorius, in Italy. In other words Alaric and Stilicho fought
for the empire with the princes as puppets. In the course of
their struggle Alaric marched into Italy and after a short
siege took Rome (410 A.D.).
The opening half of the fifth century saw the whole of the
Roman Empire in Europe the prey of robber armies of
barbarians. It is difficult to visualize the state of affairs in the
world at that time. Over France, Spain, Italy and the Balkan
peninsula, the great cities that had flourished under the
early empire still stood, impoverished, partly depopulated
and falling into decay. Life in them must have been shallow,
mean and full of uncertainty. Local officials asserted their
authority and went on with their work with such conscience
as they had, no doubt in the name of a now remote and
inaccessible emperor. The churches went on, but usually
with illiterate priests. There was little reading and much
superstition and fear. But everywhere except where looters
had destroyed them, books and pictures and statuary and
such-like works of art were still to be found.
The life of the countryside had also degenerated.
Everywhere this Roman world was much more weedy and
untidy than it had been. In some regions war and pestilence
had brought the land down to the level of a waste. Roads
and forests were infested with robbers. Into such regions
the barbarians marched, with little or no opposition, and set
up their chiefs as rulers, often with Roman official titles. If
they were half civilized barbarians they would give the
conquered districts tolerable terms, they would take
possession of the towns, associate and intermarry, and
acquire (with an accent) the Latin speech; but the Jutes, the
Angles and Saxons who submerged the Roman province of
Britain were agriculturalists and had no use for towns, they
seem to have swept south Britain clear of the Romanized
population and they replaced the language by their own
Teutonic dialects, which became at last English.
It is impossible in the space at our disposal to trace the
movements of all the various German and Slavonic tribes
as they went to and fro in the disorganized empire in
search of plunder and a pleasant home. But let the Vandals
serve as an example. They came into history in east
Germany. They settled as we have told in Pannonia.
Thence they moved somewhen about 425 A.D. through the
intervening provinces to Spain. There they found Visigoths
from South Russia and other German tribes setting up
dukes and kings. From Spain the Vandals under Genseric
sailed for North Africa (429), captured Carthage (439), and
built a fleet. They secured the mastery of the sea and
captured and pillaged Rome (455), which had recovered
very imperfectly from her capture and looting by Alaric half
a century earlier. Then the Vandals made themselves
masters of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and most of the other
islands of the western Mediterranean. They made, in fact, a
sea empire very similar in its extent to the sea empire of
Carthage seven hundred odd years before. They were at
the climax of their power about 477. They were a mere
handful of conquerors holding all this country. In the next
century almost all their territory had been reconquered for
the empire of Constantinople during a transitory blaze of
energy under Justinian I.
The story of the Vandals is but one sample of a host of
similar adventures. But now there was coming into the
European world the least kindred and most redoubtable of
all these devastators, the Mongolian Huns or Tartars, a
yellow people active and able, such as the western world
had never before encountered.
THIS appearance of a conquering Mongolian people in
Europe may be taken to mark a new stage in human
history. Until the last century or so before the Christian era,
the Mongol and the Nordic peoples had not been in close
touch. Far away in the frozen lands beyond the northern
forests the Lapps, a Mongolian people, had drifted
westward as far as Lapland, but they played no part in the
main current of history. For thousands of years the western
world carried on the dramatic interplay of the Aryan,
Semitic and fundamental brunette peoples with very little
interference (except for an Ethiopian invasion of Egypt or
so) either from the black peoples to the south or from the
Mongolian world in the far East.
It is probable that there were two chief causes for the new
westward drift of the nomadic Mongolians. One was the
consolidation of the great empire of China, its extension
northward and the increase of its population during the
prosperous period of the Han dynasty. The other was some
process of climatic change; a lesser rainfall that abolished
swamps and forests perhaps, or a greater rainfall that
extended grazing over desert steppes, or even perhaps
both these processes going on in different regions but
which anyhow facilitated a westward migration. A third
contributary cause was the economic wretchedness,
internal decay and falling population of the Roman Empire.
The rich men of the later Roman Republic, and then the tax-
gatherers of the military emperors had utterly consumed its
vitality. So we have the factors of thrust, means and
opportunity. There was pressure from the east, rot in the
west and an open road.
The Hun had reached the eastern boundaries of European
Russia by the first century A.D., but it was not until the fourth
and fifth centuries A.D. that these horsemen rose to
predominance upon the steppes. The fifth century was the
Hun's century. The first Huns to come into Italy were
mercenary bands in the pay of Stilicho the Vandal, the
master of Honorius. Presently they were in possession of
Pannonia, the empty nest of the Vandals.
By the second quarter of the fifth century a great war chief
had arisen among the Huns, Attila. We have only vague and
tantalizing glimpses of his power. He ruled not only over the
Huns but over a conglomerate of tributary Germanic tribes;
his empire extended from the Rhine cross the plains into
Central Asia. He exchanged ambassadors with China. His
head camp was in the plain of Hungary east of the Danube.
There he was visited by an envoy from Constantinople,
Priscus, who has left us an account of his state. The way of
living of these Mongols was very like the way of living of the
primitive Aryans they had replaced. The common folk were
in huts and tents; the chiefs lived in great stockaded timber
halls. There were feasts and drinking and singing by the
bards. The Homeric heroes and even the Macedonian
companions of Alexander would probably have felt more at
home in the camp-capital of Attila than they would have
done in the cultivated and decadent court of Theodosius II,
the son of Arcadius, who was then reigning in
Constantinople.
For a time it seemed as though the nomads under the
leadership of the Huns and Attila would play the same part
towards the Graeco-Roman civilization of the
Mediterranean countries that the barbaric Greeks had
played long ago to the aegean civilization. It looked like
history repeating itself upon a larger stage. But the Huns
were much more wedded to the nomadic life than the early
Greeks, who were rather migratory cattle farmers than true
nomads. The Huns raided and plundered but did not settle.
For some years Attila bullied Theodosius as he chose. His
armies devastated and looted right down to the walls of
Constantinople, Gibbon says that he totally destroyed no
less than seventy cities in the Balkan peninsula, and
Theodosius bought him off by payments of tribute and tried
to get rid of him for good by sending secret agents to
assassinate him. In 451 Attila turned his attention to the
remains of the Latin-speaking half of the empire and
invaded Gaul. Nearly every town in northern Gaul was
sacked. Franks, Visigoths and the imperial forces united
against him and he was defeated at Troyes in a vast
dispersed battle in which a multitude of men, variously
estimated as between 150,000 and 300,000, were killed.
This checked him in Gaul, but it did not exhaust his
enormous military resources. Next year he came into Italy
by way of Venetia, burnt Aquileia and Padua and looted
Milan.
Numbers of fugitives from these north Italian towns and
particularly from Padua fled to islands in the lagoons at the
head of the Adriatic and laid there the foundations of the
city state of Venice, which was to become one of the
greatest of the trading centres in the middle ages.
In 453 Attila died suddenly after a great feast to celebrate
his marriage to a young woman, and at his death this
plunder confederation of his fell to pieces. The actual Huns
disappear from history, mixed into the surrounding more
numerous Aryan-speaking populations. But these great
Hun raids practically consummated the end of the Latin
Roman Empire. After his death ten different emperors ruled
in Rome in twenty years, set up by Vandal and other
mercenary troops. The Vandals from Carthage took and
sacked Rome in 455. Finally in 476 Odoacer, the chief of
the barbarian troops, suppressed a Pannonian who was
figuring as emperor under the impressive name of Romulus
Augustulus, and informed the Court of Constantinople that
there was no longer an emperor in the west. So ingloriously
the Latin Roman Empire came to an end. In 493 Theodoric
the Goth became King of Rome.
All over western and central Europe now barbarian chiefs
were reigning as kings, dukes and the like, practically
independent but for the most part professing some sort of
shadowy allegiance to the emperor. There were hundreds
and perhaps thousands of such practically independent
brigand rulers. In Gaul, Spain and Italy and in Dacia the
Latin speech still prevailed in locally distorted forms, but in
Britain and east of the Rhine languages of the German
group (or in Bohemia a Slavonic language, Czech) were
the common speech. The superior clergy and a small
remnant of other educated men read and wrote Latin.
Everywhere life was insecure and property was held by the
strong arm. Castles multiplied and roads fell into decay.
The dawn of the sixth century was an age of division and of
intellectual darkness throughout the western world. Had it
not been for the monks and Christian missionaries Latin
learning might have perished altogether.
Why had the Roman Empire grown and why had it so
completely decayed? It grew because at first the idea of
citizenship held it together. Throughout the days of the
expanding republic, and even into the days of the early
empire there remained a great number of men conscious
of Roman citizenship, feeling it a privilege and an
obligation to be a Roman citizen, confident of their rights
under the Roman law and willing to make sacrifices in the
name of Rome. The prestige of Rome as of something just
and great and law-up-holding spread far beyond the
Roman boundaries. But even as early as the Punic wars
the sense of citizenship was being undermined by the
growth of wealth and slavery. Citizenship spread indeed but
not the idea of citizenship.
The Roman Empire was after all a very primitive
organization; it did not educate, did not explain itself to its
increasing multitudes of citizens, did not invite their co-
operation in its decisions. There was no network of schools
to ensure a common understanding, no distribution of news
to sustain collective activity. The adventurers who struggled
for power from the days of Marius and Sulla onward had no
idea of creating and calling in public opinion upon the
imperial affairs. The spirit of citizenship died of starvation
and no one observed it die. All empires, all states, all
organizations of human society are, in the ultimate, things
of understanding and will. There remained no will for the
Roman Empire in the World and so it came to an end.
But though the Latin-speaking Roman Empire died in the
fifth century, something else had been born within it that
was to avail itself enormously of its prestige and tradition,
and that was the Latin-speaking half of the Catholic Church.
This lived while the empire died because it appealed to the
minds and wills of men, because it had books and a great
system of teachers and missionaries to hold it together,
things stronger than any law or legions. Throughout the
fourth and fifth centuries A.D. while the empire was
decaying, Christianity was spreading to a universal
dominion in Europe. It conquered its conquerors, the
barbarians. When Attila seemed disposed to march on
Rome, the patriarch of Rome intercepted him and did what
no armies could do, turning him back by sheer moral force.
The Patriarch or Pope of Rome claimed to be the head of
the entire Christian church. Now that there were no more
emperors, he began to annex imperial titles and claims. He
took the title of pontifex maximus, head sacrificial priest of
the Roman dominion, the most ancient of all the titles that
the emperors had enjoyed.
THE GREEK-SPEAKING eastern half of the Roman
Empire showed much more political tenacity than the
western half. It weathered the disasters of the fifth century
A.D., which saw a complete and final breaking up of the
original Latin Roman power. Attila bullied the Emperor
Theodosius II and sacked and raided almost to the walls of
Constantinople, but that city remained intact. The Nubians
came down the Nile and looted Upper Egypt, but Lower
Egypt and Alexandria were left still fairly prosperous. Most
of Asia Minor was held against the Sassanid Persians.
The sixth century, which was an age of complete darkness
for the West, saw indeed a considerable revival of the
Greek power. Justinian I (527-565) was a ruler of very great
ambition and energy, and he was married to the Empress
Theodora, a woman of quite equal capacity who had begun
life as an actress. Justinian reconquered North Africa from
the Vandals and most of Italy from the Goths. He even
regained the south of Spain. He did not limit his energies to
naval and military enterprises. He founded a university, built
the great church of Sta. Sophia in Constantinople and
codified the Roman law. But in order to destroy a rival to his
university foundation he closed the schools of philosophy in
Athens, which had been going on in unbroken continuity
from the days of Plato, that is to say for nearly a thousand
years.
From the third century onwards the Persian Empire had
been the steadfast rival of the Byzantine. The two empires
kept Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt in a state of perpetual
unrest and waste. In the first century A.D., these lands were
still at a high level of civilization, wealthy and with an
abundant population, but the continual coming and going of
armies, massacres, looting and war taxation wore them
down steadily until only shattered and ruinous cities
remained upon a countryside of scattered peasants. In this
melancholy process of impoverishment and disorder lower
Egypt fared perhaps less badly than the rest of the world.
Alexandria, like Constantinople, continued a dwindling
trade between the east and the west.
Science and political philosophy seemed dead now in both
these warring and decaying empires. The last philosophers
of Athens, until their suppression, preserved the texts of the
great literature of the past with an infinite reverence and
want of understanding. But there remained no class of men
in the world, no free gentlemen with bold and independent
habits of thought, to carry on the tradition of frank statement
and enquiry embodied in these writings. The social and
political chaos accounts largely for the disappearance of
this class, but there was also another reason why the
human intelligence was sterile and feverish during this age.
In both Persia and Byzantium it was an age of intolerance.
Both empires were religious empires in a new way, in a
way that greatly hampered the free activities of the human
mind.
Of course the oldest empires in the world were religious
empires, centring upon the worship of a god or of a god-
king. Alexander was treated as a divinity and the Caesars
were gods in so much as they had altars and temples
devoted to them and the offering of incense was made a
test of loyalty to the Roman state. But these older religions
were essentially religions of act and fact. They did not
invade the mind. If a man offered his sacrifice and bowed
to the god, he was left not only to think but to say practically
whatever he liked about the affair. But the new sort of
religions that had come into the world, and particularly
Christianity, turned inward. These new faiths demanded not
simply conformity but understanding belief. Naturally fierce
controversy ensued upon the exact meaning of the things
believed. These new religions were creed religions. The
world was confronted with a new word. Orthodoxy, and with
a stern resolve to keep not only acts but speech and private
thought within the limits of a set teaching. For to hold a
wrong opinion, much more to convey it to other people, was
no longer regarded as an intellectual defect but a moral
fault that might condemn a soul to everlasting destruction.
Both Ardashir I who founded the Sassanid dynasty in the
third century A.D., and Constantine the Great who
reconstructed the Roman Empire in the fourth, turned to
religious organizations for help, because in these
organizations they saw a new means of using and
controlling the wills of men. And already before the end of
the fourth century both empires were persecuting free talk
and religious innovation. In Persia Ardashir found the
ancient Persian religion of Zoroaster (or Zarathushtra) with
its priests and temples and a sacred fire that burnt upon its
altars, ready for his purpose as a state religion. Before the
end of the third century Zoroastrianism was persecuting
Christianity, and in 277 A.D. Mani, the founder of a new
faith, the Manichaeans, was crucified and his body flayed.
Constantinople, on its side, was busy hunting out Christian
heresies. Manichaean ideas infected Christianity and had
to be fought with the fiercest methods; in return ideas from
Christianity affected the purity of the Zoroastrian doctrine.
All ideas became suspect. Science, which demands
before all things the free action of an untroubled mind,
suffered a complete eclipse throughout this phase of
intolerance.
War, the bitterest theology, and the usual vices of mankind
constituted Byzantine life of those days. It was picturesque,
it was romantic; it had little sweetness or light. When
Byzantium and Persia were not fighting the barbarians from
the north, they wasted Asia Minor and Syria in dreary and
destructive hostilities. Even in close alliance these two
empires would have found it a hard task to turn back the
barbarians and recover their prosperity. The Turks or
Tartars first come into history as the allies first of one power
and then of another. In the sixth century the two chief
antagonists were Justinian and Chosroes I; in the opening
of the seventh the Emperor Heraclius was pitted against
Chosroes II (580).
At first and until after Heraclius had become Emperor (610)
Chosroes II carried all before him. He took Antioch,
Damascus and Jerusalem and his armies reached
Chalcedon, which is in Asia Minor over against
Constantinople. In 619 he conquered Egypt. Then Heraclius
pressed a counter attack home and routed a Persian army
at Nineveh (627), although at that time there were still
Persian troops at Chalcedon. In 628 Chosroes II was
deposed and murdered by his son, Kavadh, and an
inconclusive peace was made between the two exhausted
empires.
Byzantium and Persia had fought their last war. But few
people as yet dreamt of the storm that was even then
gathering in the deserts to put an end for ever to this
aimless, chronic struggle.
While Heraclius was restoring order in Syria a message
reached him. It had been brought in to the imperial outpost
at Bostra south of Damascus; it was in Arabic, an obscure
Semitic desert language, and it was read to the Emperor, if
it reached him at all, by an interpreter. It was from someone
who called himself "Muhammad the Prophet of God." It
called upon the Emperor to acknowledge the One True
God and to serve him. What the Emperor said is not
recorded.
A similar message came to Kavadh at Ctesiphon. He was
annoyed, tore up the letter, and bade the messenger
begone.
This Muhammad, it appeared, was a Bedouin leader
whose headquarters were in the mean little desert town of
Medina. He was preaching a new religion of faith in the
One True God.
"Even so, O Lord!" he said; "rend thou his Kingdom from
Kavadh."
THROUGHOUT the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth
centuries, there was a steady drift of Mongolian peoples
westward. The Huns of Attila were merely precursors of this
advance, which led at last to the establishment of
Mongolian peoples in Finland, Esthonia, Hungary and
Bulgaria, where their descendants, speaking languages
akin to Turkish, survive to this day. The Mongolian nomads
were, in fact, playing a rôle towards the Aryanized
civilizations of Europe and Persia and India that the Aryans
had played to the aeean and Semitic civilizations ten or
fifteen centuries before.
In Central Asia the Turkish peoples had taken root in what
is now Western Turkestan, and Persia already employed
many Turkish officials and Turkish mercenaries. The
Parthians had gone out of history, absorbed into the
general population of Persia. There were no more Aryan
nomads in the history of Central Asia; Mongolian people
had replaced them. The Turks became masters of Asia
from China to the Caspian.
The same great pestilence at the end of the second century
A.D. that had shattered the Roman Empire had overthrown
the Han dynasty in China. Then came a period of division
and of Hunnish conquests from which China arose
refreshed, more rapidly and more completely than Europe
was destined to do. Before the end of the sixth century
China was reunited under the Suy dynasty, and this by the
time of Heraclius gave place to the Tang dynasty, whose
reign marks another great period of prosperity for China.
Throughout the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries China
was the most secure and civilized country in the world. The
Han dynasty had extended her boundaries in the north; the
Suy and Tang dynasties now spread her civilization to the
south, and China began to assume the proportions she has
to-day. In Central Asia indeed she reached much further,
extending at last, through tributary Turkish tribes, to Persia
and the Caspian Sea.
The new China that had arisen was a very different land
from the old China of the Hans. A new and more vigorous
literary school appeared, there was a great poetic revival;
Buddhism had revolutionized philosophical and religious
thought. There were great advances in artistic work, in
technical skill and in all the amenities of life. Tea was first
used, paper manufactured and wood-block printing began.
Millions of people indeed were leading orderly, graceful
and kindly lives in China during these centuries when the
attenuated populations of Europe and Western Asia were
living either in hovels, small walled cities or grim robber
fortresses. While the mind of the west was black with
theological obsessions, the mind of China was open and
tolerant and enquiring.
One of the earliest monarchs of the Tang dynasty was Tai-
tsung, who began to reign in 627, the year of the victory of
Heraclius at Nineveh. He received an embassy from
Heraclius, who was probably seeking an ally in the rear of
Persia. From Persia itself came a party of Christian
missionaries (635). They were allowed to explain their
creed to Tai-tsung and he examined a Chinese translation
of their Scriptures. He pronounced this strange religion
acceptable, and gave permission for the foundation of a
church and monastery.
To this monarch also (in 628) came messengers from
Muhammad. They came to Canton on a trading ship. They
had sailed the whole way from Arabia along the Indian
coasts. Unlike Heraclius and Kavadh, Tai-tsung gave these
envoys a courteous hearing. He expressed his interest in
their theological ideas and assisted them to build a
mosque in Canton, a mosque which survives, it is said, to
this day, the oldest mosque in the world.
APROPHETIC amateur of history surveying the world in the
opening of the seventh century might have concluded very
reasonably that it was only a question of a few centuries
before the whole of Europe and Asia fell under Mongolian
domination. There were no signs of order or union in
Western Europe, and the Byzantine and Persian Empires
were manifestly bent upon a mutual destruction. India also
was divided and wasted. On the other hand China was a
steadily expanding empire which probably at that time
exceeded all Europe in population, and the Turkish people
who were growing to power in Central Asia were disposed
to work in accord with China. And such a prophecy would
not have been an altogether vain one. A time was to come
in the thirteenth century when a Mongolian overlord would
rule from the Danube to the Pacific, and Turkish dynasties
were destined to reign over the entire Byzantine and
Persian Empires, over Egypt and most of India.
Where our prophet would have been most likely to have
erred would have been in under-estimating the recuperative
power of the Latin end of Europe and in ignoring the latent
forces of the Arabian desert. Arabia would have seemed
what it had been for times immemorial, the refuge of small
and bickering nomadic tribes. No Semitic people had
founded an empire now for more than a thousand years.
Then suddenly the Bedouin flared out for a brief century of
splendour. They spread their rule and language from Spain
to the boundaries of China. They gave the world a new
culture. They created a religion that is still to this day one of
the most vital forces in the world.
The man who fired this Arab flame appears first in history
as the young husband of the widow of a rich merchant of
the town of Mecca, named Muhammad. Until he was forty
he did very little to distinguish himself in the world. He
seems to have taken considerable interest in religious
discussion. Mecca was a pagan city at that time
worshipping in particular a black stone, the Kaaba, of great
repute throughout all Arabia and a centre of pilgrimages;
but there were great numbers of Jews in the country-indeed
all the southern portion of Arabia professed the Jewish
faith-and there were Christian churches in Syria.
About forty Muhammad began to develop prophetic
characteristics like those of the Hebrew prophets twelve
hundred years before him. He talked first to his wife of the
One True God, and of the rewards and punishments of
virtue and wickedness. There can be no doubt that his
thoughts were very strongly influenced by Jewish and
Christian ideas. He gathered about him a small circle of
believers and presently began to preach in the town against
the prevalent idolatry. This made him extremely unpopular
with his fellow townsmen because the pilgrimages to the
Kaaba were the chief source of such prosperity as Mecca
enjoyed. He became bolder and more definite in his
teaching, declaring himself to be the last chosen prophet of
God entrusted with a mission to perfect religion. Abraham,
he declared, and Jesus Christ were his forerunners. He had
been chosen to complete and perfect the revelation of
God's will.
He produced verses which he said had been
communicated to him by an angel, and he had a strange
vision in which he was taken up through the Heavens to
God and instructed in his mission.
As his teaching increased in force the hostility of his fellow
townsmen increased also. At last a plot was made to kill
him; but he escaped with his faithful friend and disciple,
Abu Bekr, to the friendly town of Medina which adopted his
doctrine. Hostilities followed between Mecca and Medina
which ended at last in a treaty. Mecca was to adopt the
worship of the One True God and accept Muhammad as
his prophet, but the adherents of the new faith were still to
make the pilgrimage to Mecca just as they had done when
they were pagans. So Muhammad established the One
True God in Mecca without injuring its pilgrim traffic. In 629
Muhammad returned to Mecca as its master, a year after
he had sent out these envoys of his to Heraclius, Tai-tsung,
Kavadh and all the rulers of the earth.
Then for four years more until his death in 632, Muhammad
spread his power over the rest of Arabia. He married a
number of wives in his declining years, and his life on the
whole was by modern standards unedifying. He seems to
have been a man compounded of very considerable vanity,
greed, cunning, self-deception and quite sincere religious
passion. He dictated a book of injunctions and expositions,
the Koran, which he declared was communicated to him
from God. Regarded as literature or philosophy the Koran
is certainly unworthy of its alleged Divine authorship.
Yet when the manifest defects of Muhammad's life and
writings have been allowed for, there remains in Islam, this
faith he imposed upon the Arabs, much power and
inspiration. One is its uncompromising monotheism; its
simple enthusiastic faith in the rule and fatherhood of God
and its freedom from theological complications. Another is
its complete detachment from the sacrificial priest and the
temple. It is an entirely prophetic religion, proof against any
possibility of relapse towards blood sacrifices. In the Koran
the limited and ceremonial nature of the pilgrimage to
Mecca is stated beyond the possibility of dispute, and
every precaution was taken by Muhammad to prevent the
deification of himself after his death. And a third element of
strength lay in the insistence of Islam upon the perfect
brotherhood and equality before God of all believers,
whatever their colour, origin or status.
These are the things that made Islam a power in human
affairs. It has been said that the true founder of the Empire
of Islam was not so much Muhammad as his friend and
helper, Abu Bekr. If Muhammad, with his shifty character,
was the mind and imagination of primitive Islam, Abu Bekr
was its conscience and its will. Whenever Muhammad
wavered Abu Bekr sustained him. And when Muhammad
died, Abu Bekr became Caliph = successor), and with that
faith that moves mountains, he set himself simply and
sanely to organize the subjugation of the whole world to
Allah-with little armies of 3,000 or 4,000 Arabs-according
to those letters the prophet had written from Medina in 628
to all the monarchs of the world.
THERE follows the most amazing story of conquest in the
whole history of our race. The Byzantine army was
smashed at the battle of the Yarmuk (a tributary of the
Jordan) in 634; and the Emperor Heraclius, his energy
sapped by dropsy and his resources exhausted by the
Persian war, saw his new conquests in Syria, Damascus,
Palmyra, Antioch, Jerusalem and the rest fall almost without
resistance to the Moslim. Large elements in the population
went over to Islam. Then the Moslim turned east. The
Persians had found an able general in Rustam; they had a
great host with a force of elephants; and for three days they
fought the Arabs at Kadessia (637) and broke at last in
headlong rout.
The conquest of all Persia followed, and the Moslem
Empire pushed far into Western Turkestan and eastward
until it met the Chinese. Egypt fell almost without resistance
to the new conquerors, who full of a fanatical belief in the
sufficiency of the Koran, wiped out the vestiges of the book-
copying industry of the Alexandria Library. The tide of
conquest poured along the north coast of Africa to the
Straits of Gibraltar and Spain. Spain was invaded in 710
and the Pyrenees Mountains were reached in 720. In 732
the Arab advance had reached the centre of France, but
here it was stopped for good at the battle of Poitiers and
thrust back as far as the Pyrenees again. The conquest of
Egypt had given the Moslim a fleet, and for a time it looked
as though they would take Constantinople. They made
repeated sea attacks between 672 and 718 but the great
city held out against them.
The Arabs had little political aptitude and no political
experience, and this great empire with its capital now at
Damascus, which stretched from Spain to China, was
destined to break up very speedily. From the very
beginning doctrinal differences undermined its unity. But
our interest here lies not with the story of its political
disintegration but with its effect upon the human mind and
upon the general destinies of our race. The Arab
intelligence had been flung across the world even more
swiftly and dramatically than had the Greek a thousand
years before. The intellectual stimulation of the whole world
west of China, the break-up of old ideas and development
of new ones, was enormous.
In Persia this fresh excited Arabic mind came into contact
not only with Manichaean, Zoroastrian and Christian
doctrine, but with the scientific Greek literature, preserved
not only in Greek but in Syrian translations. It found Greek
learning in Egypt also. Everywhere, and particularly in
Spain, it discovered an active Jewish tradition of
speculation and discussion. In Central Asia it met
Buddhism and the material achievements of Chinese
civilization. It learnt the manufacture of paper-which made
printed books possible-from the Chinese. And finally it
came into touch with Indian mathematics and philosophy.
Very speedily the intolerant self-sufficiency of the early days
of faith, which made the Koran seem the only possible
book, was dropped. Learning sprang up everywhere in the
footsteps of the Arab conquerors. By the eighth century
there was an educational organization throughout the whole
"Arabized" world. In the ninth learned men in the schools of
Cordoba in Spain were corresponding with learned men in
Cairo, Bagdad, Bokhara and Samarkand. The Jewish
mind assimilated very readily with the Arab, and for a time
the two Semitic races worked together through the medium
of Arabic. Long after the political break-up and
enfeeblement of the Arabs, this intellectual community of
the Arab-speaking world endured. It was still producing very
considerable results in the thirteenth century.
So it was that the systematic accumulation and criticism of
facts which was first begun by the Greeks was resumed in
this astonishing renascence of the Semitic world. The seed
of Aristotle and the museum of Alexandria that had lain so
long inactive and neglected now germinated and began to
grow towards fruition. Very great advances were made in
mathematical, medical and physical science.
The clumsy Roman numerals were ousted by the Arabic
figures we use to this day and the zero sign was first
employed. The very name algebra is Arabic. So is the word
chemistry. The names of such stars as Algol, Aldebaran
and Boötes preserve the traces of Arab conquests in the
sky. Their philosophy was destined to reanimate the
medieval philosophy of France and Italy and the whole
Christian world.
The Arab experimental chemists were called alchemists,
and they were still sufficiently barbaric in spirit to keep their
methods and results secret as far as possible. They
realized from the very beginning what enormous
advantages their possible discoveries might give them,
and what far-reaching consequences they might have on
human life. They came upon many metallurgical and
technical devices of the utmost value, alloys and dyes,
distilling, tinctures and essences, optical glass; but the two
chief ends they sought, they sought in vain. One was "the
philosopher's stone"-a means of changing the metallic
elements one into another and so getting a control of
artificial gold, and the other was the elixir vitoe, a stimulant
that would revivify age and prolong life indefinitely. The
crabbed patient experimenting of these Arab alchemists
spread into the Christian world. The fascination of their
enquiries spread. Very gradually the activities of these
alchemists became more social and co-operative. They
found it profitable to exchange and compare ideas. By
insensible gradations the last of the alchemists became the
first of the experimental philosophers.
The old alchemists sought the philosopher's stone which
was to transmute base metals to gold, and an elixir of
immortality; they found the methods of modern
experimental science which promise in the end to give man
illimitable power over the world and over his own destiny.
IT is worth while to note the extremely shrunken dimensions
of the share of the world remaining under Aryan control in
the seventh and eighth centuries. A thousand years before,
the Aryan-speaking races were triumphant over all the
civilized world west of China. Now the Mongol had thrust as
far as Hungary, nothing of Asia remained under Aryan rule
except the Byzantine dominions in Asia Minor, and all
Africa was lost and nearly all Spain. The great Hellenic
world had shrunken to a few possessions round the nucleus
of the trading city of Constantinople, and the memory of the
Roman world was kept alive by the Latin of the western
Christian priests. In vivid contrast to this tale of
retrogression, the Semitic tradition had risen again from
subjugation and obscurity after a thousand years of
darkness.
Yet the vitality of the Nordic peoples was not exhausted.
Confined now to Central and North-Western Europe and
terribly muddled in their social and political ideas, they
were nevertheless building up gradually and steadily a new
social order and preparing unconsciously for the recovery
of a power even more extensive than that they had
previously enjoyed.
We have told how at the beginning of the sixth century there
remained no central government in Western Europe at all.
That world was divided up among numbers of local rulers
holding their own as they could. This was too insecure a
state of affairs to last; a system of co-operation and
association grew up in this disorder, the feudal system,
which has left its traces upon European life up to the
present time. This feudal system was a sort of
crystallization of society about power. Everywhere the lone
man felt insecure and was prepared to barter a certain
amount of his liberty for help and protection. He sought a
stronger man as his lord and protector; he gave him military
services and paid him dues, and in return he was
confirmed in his possession of what was his. His lord again
found safety in vassalage to a still greater lord. Cities also
found it convenient to have feudal protectors, and
monasteries and church estates bound themselves by
similar ties. No doubt in many cases allegiance was
claimed before it was offered; the system grew downward
as well as upward. So a sort of pyramidal system grew up,
varying widely in different localities, permitting at first a
considerable play of violence and private warfare but
making steadily for order and a new reign of law. The
pyramids grew up until some became recognizable as
kingdoms. Already by the early sixth century a Frankish
kingdom existed under its founder Clovis in what is now
France and the Netherlands, and presently Visigothic and
Lombard and Gothic kingdoms were in existence.
The Moslim when they crossed the Pyrenees in 720 found
this Frankish kingdom under the practical rule of Charles
Martel, the Mayor of the Palace of a degenerate
descendant of Clovis, and experienced the decisive defeat
of Poitiers (732) at his hands. This Charles Martel was
practically overlord of Europe north of the Alps from the
Pyrenees to Hungary. He ruled over a multitude of
subordinate lords speaking French-Latin, and High and
Low German languages. His son Pepin extinguished the
last descendants of Clovis and took the kingly state and
title. His grandson Charlemagne, who began to reign in
768, found himself lord of a realm so large that he could
think of reviving the title of Latin Emperor. He conquered
North Italy and made himself master of Rome.
Approaching the story of Europe as we do from the wider
horizons of a world history we can see much more distinctly
than the mere nationalist historian how cramping and
disastrous this tradition of the Latin Roman Empire was. A
narrow intense struggle for this phantom predominance
was to consume European energy for more than a
thousand years. Through all that period it is possible to
trace certain unquenchable antagonisms; they run through
the wits of Europe like the obsessions of a demented mind.
One driving force was this ambition of successful rulers,
which Charlemagne (Charles the Great) embodied, to
become Caesar. The realm of Charlemagne consisted of a
complex of feudal German states at various stages of
barbarism. West of the Rhine, most of these German
peoples had learnt to speak various Latinized dialects
which fused at last to form French. East of the Rhine, the
racially similar German peoples did not lose their German
speech. On account of this, communication was difficult
between these two groups of barbarian conquerors and a
split easily brought about. The split was made the more
easy by the fact that the Frankish usage made it seem
natural to divide the empire of Charlemagne among his
sons at his death. So one aspect of the history of Europe
from the days of Charlemagne onwards is a history of first
this monarch and his family and then that, struggling to a
precarious headship of the kings, princes, dukes, bishops
and cities of Europe, while a steadily deepening
antagonism between the French and German speaking
elements develops in the medley. There was a formality of
election for each emperor; and the climax of his ambition
was to struggle to the possession of that worn-out,
misplaced capital Rome and to a coronation there.
The next factor in the European political disorder was the
resolve of the Church at Rome to make no temporal prince
but the Pope of Rome himself emperor in effect. He was
already pontifex maximus; for all practical purposes he held
the decaying city; if he had no armies he had at least a vast
propaganda organization in his priests throughout the
whole Latin world; if he had little power over men's bodies
he held the keys of heaven and hell in their imaginations
and could exercise much influence upon their souls. So
throughout the middle ages while one prince manoeuvred
against another first for equality, then for ascendancy, and
at last for the supreme prize, the Pope of Rome,
sometimes boldly, sometimes craftily, sometimes feebly-for
the Popes were a succession of oldish men and the
average reign of a Pope was not more than two years-
manoeuvred for the submission of all the princes to himself
as the ultimate overlord of Christendom.
But these antagonisms of prince against prince and of
Emperor against Pope do not by any means exhaust the
factors of the European confusion. There was still an
Emperor in Constantinople speaking Greek and claiming
the allegiance of all Europe. When Charlemagne sought to
revive the empire, it was merely the Latin end of the empire
he revived. It was natural that a sense of rivalry between
Latin Empire and Greek Empire should develop very
readily. And still more readily did the rivalry of Greek-
speaking Christianity and the newer Latin-speaking version
develop. The Pope of Rome claimed to be the successor
of St. Peter, the chief of the apostles of Christ, and the
head of the Christian community everywhere. Neither the
emperor nor the patriarch in Constantinople were disposed
to acknowledge this claim. A dispute about a fine point in
the doctrine of the Holy Trinity consummated a long series
of dissensions in a final rupture in 1054. The Latin Church
and the Greek Church became and remained thereafter
distinct and frankly antagonistic. This antagonism must be
added to the others in our estimate of the conflicts that
wasted Latin Christendom in the middle ages.
Upon this divided world of Christendom rained the blows of
three sets of antagonists. About the Baltic and North Seas
remained a series of Nordic tribes who were only very
slowly and reluctantly Christianized; these were the
Northmen. They had taken to the sea and piracy, and were
raiding all the Christian coasts down to Spain. They had
pushed up the Russian rivers to the desolate central lands
and brought their shipping over into the south-flowing rivers.
They had come out upon the Caspian and Black Seas as
pirates also. They set up principalities in Russia; they were
the first people to be called Russians. These Northmen
Russians came near to taking Constantinople. England in
the early ninth century was a Christianized Low German
country under a king, Egbert, a protégé and pupil of
Charlemagne. The Northmen wrested half the kingdom
from his successor Alfred the Great (886), and finally under
Canute (1016) made themselves masters of the whole
land. Under Rolph the Ganger (912) another band of
Northmen conquered the north of France, which became
Normandy.
Canute ruled not only over England but over Norway and
Denmark, but his brief empire fell to pieces at his death
through that political weakness of the barbaric peoples-
division among a ruler's sons. It is interesting to speculate
what might have happened if this temporary union of the
Northmen had endured. They were a race of astonishing
boldness and energy. They sailed in their galleys even to
Iceland and Greenland. They were the first Europeans to
land on American soil. Later on Norman adventurers were
to recover Sicily from the Saracens and sack Rome. It is a
fascinating thing to imagine what a great northern sea-
faring power might have grown out of Canute's kingdom,
reaching from America to Russia.
To the east of the Germans and Latinized Europeans was
a medley of Slav tribes and Turkish peoples. Prominent
among these were the Magyars or Hungarians who were
coming westward throughout the eighth and ninth centuries.
Charlemagne held them for a time, but after his death they
established themselves in what is now Hungary; and after
the fashion of their kindred predecessors, the Huns, raided
every summer into the settled parts of Europe. In 938 they
went through Germany into France, crossed the Alps into
North Italy, and so came home, burning, robbing and
destroying.
Finally pounding away from the south at the vestiges of the
Roman Empire were the Saracens. They had made
themselves largely masters of the sea; their only formidable
adversaries upon the water were the Northmen, the
Russian Northmen out of the Black Sea and the Northmen
of the west.
Hemmed in by these more vigorous and aggressive
peoples, amidst forces they did not understand and
dangers they could not estimate, Charlemagne and after
him a series of other ambitious spirits took up the futile
drama of restoring the Western Empire under the name of
the Holy Roman Empire. From the time of Charlemagne
onward this idea obsessed the political life of Western
Europe, while in the East the Greek half of the Roman
power decayed and dwindled until at last nothing remained
of it at all but the corrupt trading city of Constantinople and
a few miles of territory about it. Politically the continent of
Europe remained traditional and uncreative from the time
of Charlemagne onward for a thousand years.
The name of Charlemagne looms large in European history
but his personality is but indistinctly seen. He could not read
nor write, but he had a considerable respect for learning; he
liked to be read aloud to at meals and he had a weakness
for theological discussion. At his winter quarters at Aix-la-
Chapelle or Mayence he gathered about him a number of
learned men and picked up much from their conversation.
In the summer he made war, against the Spanish
Saracens, against the Slavs and Magyars, against the
Saxons, and other still heathen German tribes. It is doubtful
whether the idea of becoming Caesar in succession to
Romulus Augustulus occurred to him before his acquisition
of North Italy, or whether it was suggested to him by Pope
Leo III, who was anxious to make the Latin Church
independent of Constantinople.
There were the most extraordinary manoeuvres at Rome
between the Pope and the prospective emperor in order to
make it appear or not appear as if the Pope gave him the
imperial crown. The Pope succeeded in crowning his
visitor and conqueror by surprise in St. Peter's on
Christmas Day 800 A.D. He produced a crown, put it on the
head of Charlemagne and hailed him Caesar and
Augustus. There was great applause among the people.
Charlemagne was by no means pleased at the way in
which the thing was done, it rankled in his mind as a defeat;
and he left the most careful instructions to his son that he
was not to let the Pope crown him emperor; he was to
seize the crown into his own hands and put it on his own
head himself. So at the very outset of this imperial revival
we see beginning the age-long dispute of Pope and
Emperor for priority. But Louis the Pious, the son of
Charlemagne, disregarded his father's instructions and
was entirely submissive to the Pope.
The empire of Charlemagne fell apart at the death of Louis
the Pious and the split between the French-speaking
Franks and the German-speaking Franks widened. The
next emperor to arise was Otto, the son of a certain Henry
the Fowler, a Saxon, who had been elected King of
Germany by an assembly of German princes and prelates
in 919. Otto descended upon Rome and was crowned
emperor there in 962. This Saxon line came to an end early
in the eleventh century and gave place to other German
rulers. The feudal princes and nobles to the west who
spoke various French dialects did not fall under the sway of
these German emperors after the Carlovingian line, the line
that is descended from Charlemagne, had come to an end,
and no part of Britain ever came into the Holy Roman
Empire. The Duke of Normandy, the King of France and a
number of lesser feudal rulers remained outside.
In 987 the Kingdom of France passed out of the
possession of the Carlovingian line into the hands of Hugh
Capet, whose descendants were still reigning in the
eighteenth century. At the time of Hugh Capet the King of
France ruled only a comparatively small territory round
Paris.
In 1066 England was attacked almost simultaneously by an
invasion of the Norwegian Northmen under King Harold
Hardrada and by the Latinized Northmen under the Duke of
Normandy. Harold King of England defeated the former at
the battle of Stamford Bridge, and was defeated by the
latter at Hastings. England was conquered by the Normans,
and so cut off from Scandinavian, Teutonic and Russian
affairs, and brought into the most intimate relations and
conflicts with the French. For the next four centuries the
English were entangled in the conflicts of the French feudal
princes and wasted upon the fields of France.
IT is interesting to note that Charlemagne corresponded
with the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, the Haroun-al-Raschid
of the Arabian Nights. It is recorded that Haroun-al-Raschid
sent ambassadors from Bagdad-which had now replaced
Damascus as the Moslem capital-with a splendid tent, a
water clock, an elephant and the keys of the Holy
Sepulchre. This latter present was admirably calculated to
set the Byzantine Empire and this new Holy Roman Empire
by the ears as to which was the proper protector of the
Christians in Jerusalem.
These presents remind us that while Europe in the ninth
century was still a weltering disorder of war and pillage,
there flourished a great Arab Empire in Egypt and
Mesopotamia, far more civilized than anything Europe
could show. Here literature and science still lived; the arts
flourished, and the mind of man could move without fear or
superstition. And even in Spain and North Africa where the
Saracenic dominions were falling into political confusion
there was a vigorous intellectual life. Aristotle was read and
discussed by these Jews and Arabs during these centuries
of European darkness. They guarded the neglected seeds
of science and philosophy.
North-east of the Caliph's dominions was a number of
Turkish tribes. They had been converted to Islam, and they
held the faith much more simply and fiercely than the
actively intellectual Arabs and Persians to the south. In the
tenth century the Turks were growing strong and vigorous
while the Arab power was divided and decaying. The
relations of the Turks to the Empire of the Caliphate
became very similar to the relations of the Medes to the last
Babylonian Empire fourteen centuries before. In the
eleventh century a group of Turkish tribes, the Seljuk Turks,
came down into Mesopotamia and made the Caliph their
nominal ruler but really their captive and tool. They
conquered Armenia. Then they struck at the remnants of the
Byzantine power in Asia Minor. In 1071 the Byzantine army
was utterly smashed at the battle of Melasgird, and the
Turks swept forward until not a trace of Byzantine rule
remained in Asia. They took the fortress of Nicaea over
against Constantinople, and prepared to attempt that city.
The Byzantine emperor, Michael VII, was overcome with
terror. He was already heavily engaged in warfare with a
band of Norman adventurers who had seized Durazzo, and
with a fierce Turkish people, the Petschenegs, who were
raiding over the Danube. In his extremity he sought help
where he could, and it is notable that he did not appeal to
the western emperor but to the Pope of Rome as the head
of Latin Christendom. He wrote to Pope Gregory VII, and
his successor Alexius Comnenus wrote still more urgently
to Urban II.
This was not a quarter of a century from the rupture of the
Latin and Greek churches. That controversy was still vividly
alive in men's minds, and this disaster to Byzantium must
have presented itself to the Pope as a supreme opportunity
for reasserting the supremacy of the Latin Church over the
dissentient Greeks. Moreover this occasion gave the Pope
a chance to deal with two other matters that troubled
western Christendom very greatly. One was the custom of
"private war" which disordered social life, and the other
was the superabundant fighting energy of the Low Germans
and Christianized Northmen and particularly of the Franks
and Normans. A religious war, the Crusade, the War of the
Cross, was preached against the Turkish captors of
Jerusalem, and a truce to all warfare amongst Christians
(1095). The declared object of this war was the recovery of
the Holy Sepulchre from the unbelievers. A man called
Peter the Hermit carried on a popular propaganda
throughout France and Germany on broadly democratic
lines. He went clad in a coarse garment, barefooted on an
ass, he carried a huge cross and harangued the crowd in
street or market-place or church. He denounced the
cruelties practised upon the Christian pilgrims by the Turks,
and the shame of the Holy Sepulchre being in any but
Christian hands. The fruits of centuries of Christian
teaching became apparent in the response. A great wave
of enthusiasm swept the western world, and popular
Christendom discovered itself.
Such a widespread uprising of the common people in
relation to a single idea as now occurred was a new thing
in the history of our race. There is nothing to parallel it in the
previous history of the Roman Empire or of India or China.
On a smaller scale, however, there had been similar
movements among the Jewish people after their liberation
from the Babylonian captivity, and later on Islam was to
display a parallel susceptibility to collective feeling. Such
movements were certainly connected with the new spirit
that had come into life with the development of the
missionary-teaching religions. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus
and his disciples, Mani, Muhammad, were all exhorters of
men's individual souls. They brought the personal
conscience face to face with God. Before that time religion
had been much more a business of fetish, of
pseudoscience, than of conscience. The old kind of religion
turned upon temple, initiated priest and mystical sacrifice,
and ruled the common man like a slave by fear. The new
kind of religion made a man of him.
The preaching of the First Crusade was the first stirring of
the common people in European history. It may be too
much to call it the birth of modern democracy, but certainly
at that time modern democracy stirred. Before very long we
shall find it stirring again, and raising the most disturbing
social and religious questions.
Certainly this first stirring of democracy ended very pitifully
and lamentably. Considerable bodies of common people,
crowds rather than armies, set out eastward from France
and the Rhineland and Central Europe without waiting for
leaders or proper equipment to rescue the Holy Sepulchre.
This was the "people's crusade." Two great mobs
blundered into Hungary, mistook the recently converted
Magyars for pagans, committed atrocities and were
massacred. A third multitude with a similarly confused
mind, after a great pogrom of the Jews in the Rhineland,
marched eastward, and was also destroyed in Hungary.
Two other huge crowds, under the leadership of Peter the
Hermit himself, reached Constantinople, crossed the
Bosphorus, and were massacred rather than defeated by
the Seljuk Turks. So began and ended this first movement
of the European people, as people.
Next year (1097) the real fighting forces crossed the
Bosphorus. Essentially they were Norman in leadership
and spirit. They stormed Nicaea, marched by much the
same route as Alexander had followed fourteen centuries
before, to Antioch. The siege of Antioch kept them a year,
and in June 1099 they invested Jerusalem. It was stormed
after a month's siege. The slaughter was terrible. Men
riding on horseback were splashed by the blood in the
streets. At nightfall on July 15th the Crusaders had fought
their way into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and
overcome all opposition there: blood-stained, weary and
"sobbing from excess of joy" they knelt down in prayer.
Immediately the hostility of Latin and Greek broke out
again. The Crusaders were the servants of the Latin
Church, and the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem found himself
in a far worse case under the triumphant Latins than under
the Turks. The Crusaders discovered themselves between
Byzantine and Turk and fighting both. Much of Asia Minor
was recovered by the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin
princes were left, a buffer between Turk and Greek, with
Jerusalem and a few small principalities, of which Edessa
was one of the chief, in Syria. Their grip even on these
possessions was precarious, and in 1144 Edessa fell to
the Moslim, leading to an ineffective Second Crusade,
which failed to recover Edessa but saved Antioch from a
similar fate.
In 1169 the forces of Islam were rallied under a Kurdish
adventurer named Saladin who had made himself master
of Egypt. He preached a Holy War against the Christians,
recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, and so provoked the Third
Crusade. This failed to recover Jerusalem. In the Fourth
Crusade (1202-4) the Latin Church turned frankly upon the
Greek Empire, and there was not even a pretence of
fighting the Turks. It started from Venice and in 1204 it
stormed Constantinople. The great rising trading city of
Venice was the leader in this adventure, and most of the
coasts and islands of the Byzantine Empire were annexed
by the Venetians. A "Latin" emperor (Baldwin of Flanders)
was set up in Constantinople and the Latin and Greek
Church were declared to be reunited. The Latin emperors
ruled in Constantinople from 1204 to 1261 when the Greek
world shook itself free again from Roman predominance.
The twelfth century then and the opening of the thirteenth
was the age of papal ascendancy just as the eleventh was
the age of the ascendancy of the Seljuk Turks and the tenth
the age of the Northmen. A united Christendom under the
rule of the Pope came nearer to being a working reality
than it ever was before or after that time.
In those centuries a simple Christian faith was real and
widespread over great areas of Europe. Rome itself had
passed through some dark and discreditable phases; few
writers can be found to excuse the lives of Popes John XI
and John XII in the tenth century; they were abominable
creatures; but the heart and body of Latin Christendom had
remained earnest and simple; the generality of the common
priests and monks and nuns had lived exemplary and
faithful lives. Upon the wealth of confidence such lives
created rested the power of the church. Among the great
Popes of the past had been Gregory the Great, Gregory I
(590-604) and Leo III (795-816) who invited Charlemagne
to be Caesar and crowned him in spite of himself. Towards
the close of the eleventh century there arose a great clerical
statesman, Hildebrand, who ended his life as Pope
Gregory VII (1073-1085). Next but one after him came
Urban II (1087-1099), the Pope of the First Crusade. These
two were the founders of this period of papal greatness
during which the Popes lorded it over the Emperors. From
Bulgaria to Ireland and from Norway to Sicily and
Jerusalem the Pope was supreme. Gregory VII obliged the
Emperor Henry IV to come in penitence to him at Canossa
and to await forgiveness for three days and nights in the
courtyard of the castle, clad in sackcloth and barefooted to
the snow. In 1176 at Venice the Emperor Frederick
(Frederick Barbarossa), knelt to Pope Alexander III and
swore fealty to him.
The great power of the church in the beginning of the
eleventh century lay in the wills and consciences of men. It
failed to retain the moral prestige on which its power was
based. In the opening decades of the fourteenth century it
was discovered that the power of the Pope had
evaporated. What was it that destroyed the naïve
confidence of the common people of Christendom in the
church so that they would no longer rally to its appeal and
serve its purposes?
The first trouble was certainly the accumulation of wealth by
the church. The church never died, and there was a frequent
disposition on the part of dying childless people to leave
lands to the church. Penitent sinners were exhorted to do
so. Accordingly in many European countries as much as a
fourth of the land became church property. The appetite for
property grows with what it feeds upon. Already in the
thirteenth century it was being said everywhere that the
priests were not good men, that they were always hunting
for money and legacies.
The kings and princes disliked this alienation of property
very greatly. In the place of feudal lords capable of military
support, they found their land supporting abbeys and
monks and nuns. And these lands were really under foreign
dominion. Even before the time of Pope Gregory VII there
had been a struggle between the princes and the papacy
over the question of "investitures," the question that is of
who should appoint the bishops. If that power rested with
the Pope and not the King, then the latter lost control not
only of the consciences of his subjects but of a
considerable part of his dominions. For also the clergy
claimed exemption from taxation. They paid their taxes to
Rome. And not only that, but the church also claimed the
right to levy a tax of one-tenth upon the property of the
layman in addition to the taxes he paid his prince.
The history of nearly every country in Latin Christendom
tells of the same phase in the eleventh century, a phase of
struggle between monarch and Pope on the issue of
investitures and generally it tells of a victory for the Pope.
He claimed to be able to excommunicate the prince, to
absolve his subjects from their allegiance to him, to
recognize a successor. He claimed to be able to put a
nation under an interdict, and then nearly all priestly
functions ceased except the sacraments of baptism,
confirmation and penance; the priests could neither hold
the ordinary services, marry people, nor bury the dead.
With these two weapons it was possible for the twelfth
century Popes to curb the most recalcitrant princes and
overawe the most restive peoples. These were enormous
powers, and enormous powers are only to be used on
extraordinary occasions. The Popes used them at last with
a frequency that staled their effect. Within thirty years at the
end of the twelfth century we find Scotland, France and
England in turn under an interdict. And also the Popes
could not resist the temptation to preach crusades against
offending princes-until the crusading spirit was extinct.
It is possible that if the Church of Rome had struggled
simply against the princes and had had a care to keep its
hold upon the general mind, it might have achieved a
permanent dominion over all Christendom. But the high
claims of the Pope were reflected as arrogance in the
conduct of the clergy. Before the eleventh century the
Roman priests could marry; they had close ties with the
people among whom they lived; they were indeed a part of
the people. Gregory VII made them celibates; he cut the
priests off from too great an intimacy with the laymen in
order to bind them more closely to Rome, but indeed he
opened a fissure between the church and the commonalty.
The church had its own law courts. Cases involving not
merely priests but monks, students, crusaders, widows,
orphans and the helpless were reserved for the clerical
courts, and so were all matters relating to wills, marriages
and oaths and all cases of sorcery, heresy and blasphemy.
Whenever the layman found himself in conflict with the
priest he had to go to a clerical court. The obligations of
peace and war fell upon his shoulders alone and left the
priest free. It is no great wonder that jealousy and hatred of
the priests grew up in the Christian world.
Never did Rome seem to realize that its power was in the
consciences of common men. It fought against religious
enthusiasm, which should have been its ally, and it forced
doctrinal orthodoxy upon honest doubt and aberrant
opinion. When the church interfered in matters of morality it
had the common man with it, but not when it interfered in
matters of doctrine. When in the south of France Waldo
taught a return to the simplicity of Jesus in faith and life,
Innocent III preached a crusade against the Waldenses,
Waldo's followers, and permitted them to be suppressed
with fire, sword, rape and the most abominable cruelties.
When again St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) taught the
imitation of Christ and a life of poverty and service, his
followers, the Franciscans, were persecuted, scourged,
imprisoned and dispersed. In 1318 four of them were burnt
alive at Marseilles. On the other hand the fiercely orthodox
order of the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic (1170-
1221) was strongly supported by Innocent III, who with its
assistance set up an organization, the Inquisition, for the
hunting of heresy and the affliction of free thought.
So it was that the church by excessive claims, by
unrighteous privileges, and by an irrational intolerance
destroyed that free faith of the common man which was the
final source of all its power. The story of its decline tells of
no adequate foemen from without but continually of decay
from within.
ONE very great weakness of the Roman Church in its
struggle to secure the headship of all Christendom was the
manner in which the Pope was chosen.
If indeed the papacy was to achieve its manifest ambition
and establish one rule and one peace throughout
Christendom, then it was vitally necessary that it should
have a strong, steady and continuous direction. In those
great days of its opportunity it needed before all things that
the Popes when they took office should be able men in the
prime of life, that each should have his successor-
designate with whom he could discuss the policy of the
church, and that the forms and processes of election should
be clear, definite, unalterable and unassailable. Unhappily
none of these things obtained. It was not even clear who
could vote in the election of a Pope, nor whether the
Byzantine or Holy Roman Emperor had a voice in the
matter. That very great papal statesman Hildebrand (Pope
Gregory VII, 1073-1085) did much to regularize the
election. He confined the votes to the Roman cardinals and
he reduced the Emperor's share to a formula of assent
conceded to him by the church, but he made no provision
for a successor-designate and he left it possible for the
disputes of the cardinals to keep the See vacant, as in
some cases it was kept vacant, for a year or more.
The consequences of this want of firm definition are to be
seen in the whole history of the papacy up to the sixteenth
century. From quite early times onward there were disputed
elections and two or more men each claiming to be Pope.
The church would then be subjected to the indignity of going
to the Emperor or some other outside arbiter to settle the
dispute. And the career of every one of the great Popes
ended in a note of interrogation. At his death the church
might be left headless and as ineffective as a decapitated
body. Or he might be replaced by some old rival eager only
to discredit and undo his work. Or some enfeebled old man
tottering on the brink of the grave might succeed him.
It was inevitable that this peculiar weakness of the papal
organization should attract the interference of the various
German princes, the French King, and the Norman and
French Kings who ruled in England; that they should all try
to influence the elections, and have a Pope in their own
interest established in the Lateran Palace at Rome. And
the more powerful and important the Pope became in
European affairs, the more urgent did these interventions
become. Under the circumstances it is no great wonder
that many of the Popes were weak and futile. The
astonishing thing is that many of them were able and
courageous men.
One of the most vigorous and interesting of the Popes of
this great period was Innocent III (1198-1216) who was so
fortunate as to become Pope before he was thirty-eight. He
and his successors were pitted against an even more
interesting personality, the Emperor Frederick II; Stupor
mundi he was called, the Wonder of the world. The struggle
of this monarch against Rome is a turning place in history.
In the end Rome defeated him and destroyed his dynasty,
but he left the prestige of the church and Pope so badly
wounded that its wounds festered and led to its decay.
Frederick was the son of the Emperor Henry VI and his
mother was the daughter of Roger I, the Norman King of
Sicily. He inherited this kingdom in 1198 when he was a
child of four years. Innocent III had been made his guardian.
Sicily in those days had been but recently conquered by the
Normans; the Court was half oriental and full of highly
educated Arabs; and some of these were associated in the
education of the young king. No doubt they were at some
pains to make their point of view clear to him. He got a
Moslem view of Christianity as well as a Christian view of
Islam, and the unhappy result of this double system of
instruction was a view, exceptional in that age of faith, that
all religions were impostures. He talked freely on the
subject; his heresies and blasphemies are on record.
As the young man grew up he found himself in conflict with
his guardian. Innocent III wanted altogether too much from
his ward. When the opportunity came for Frederick to
succeed as Emperor, the Pope intervened with conditions.
Frederick must promise to put down heresy in Germany
with a strong hand. Moreover he must relinquish his crown
in Sicily and South Italy, because otherwise he would be
too strong for the Pope. And the German clergy were to be
freed from all taxation. Frederick agreed-but with no
intention of keeping his word. The Pope had already
induced the French King to make war upon his own
subjects in France, the cruel and bloody crusade against
the Waldenses; he wanted Frederick to do the same thing
in Germany. But Frederick being far more of a heretic than
any of the simple pietists who had incurred the Pope's
animosity, lacked the crusading impulse. And when
Innocent urged him to crusade against the Moslim and
recover Jerusalem he was equally ready to promise and
equally slack in his performance.
Having secured the imperial crown Frederick II stayed in
Sicily, which he greatly preferred to Germany as a
residence, and did nothing to redeem any of his promises
to Innocent III, who died baffled in 1216.
Honorius III, who succeeded Innocent, could do no better
with Frederick, and Gregory IX (1227) came to the papal
throne evidently resolved to settle accounts with this young
man at any cost. He excommunicated him. Frederick II was
denied all the comforts of religion. In the half-Arab Court of
Sicily this produced singularly little discomfort. And also the
Pope addressed a public letter to the Emperor reciting his
vices (which were indisputable), his heresies, and his
general misconduct. To this Frederick replied in a
document of diabolical ability. It was addressed to all the
princes of Europe, and it made the first clear statement of
the issue between the Pope and the princes. He made a
shattering attack upon the manifest ambition of the Pope to
become the absolute ruler of all Europe. He suggested a
union of princes against this usurpation. He directed the
attention of the princes specifically to the wealth of the
church.
Having fired off this deadly missile Frederick resolved to
perform his twelve-year-old promise and go upon a
crusade. This was the Sixth Crusade (1228). It was, as a
crusade, farcical. Frederick II went to Egypt and met and
discussed affairs with the Sultan. These two gentlemen,
both of sceptical opinions, exchanged congenial views,
made a commercial convention to their mutual advantage,
and agreed to transfer Jerusalem to Frederick. This indeed
was a new sort of crusade, a crusade by private treaty.
Here was no blood splashing the conqueror, no "weeping
with excess of joy." As this astonishing crusader was an
excommunicated man, he had to be content with a purely
secular coronation as King of Jerusalem, taking the crown
from the altar with his own hand-for all the clergy were
bound to shun him. He then returned to Italy, chased the
papal armies which had invaded his dominions back to
their own territories, and obliged the Pope to grant him
absolution from his excommunication. So a prince might
treat the Pope in the thirteenth century, and there was now
no storm of popular indignation to avenge him. Those days
were past.
In 1239 Gregory IX resumed his struggle with Frederick,
excommunicated him for a second time, and renewed that
warfare of public abuse in which the papacy had already
suffered severely. The controversy was revived after
Gregory IX was dead, when Innocent IV was Pope; and
again a devastating letter, which men were bound to
remember, was written by Frederick against the church. He
denounced the pride and irreligion of the clergy, and
ascribed all the corruptions of the time to their pride and
wealth. He proposed to his fellow princes a general
confiscation of church property-for the good of the church. It
was a suggestion that never afterwards left the imagination
of the European princes.
We will not go on to tell of his last years. The particular
events of his life are far less significant than its general
atmosphere. It is possible to piece together something of
his court life in Sicily. He was luxurious in his way of living,
and fond of beautiful things. He is described as licentious.
But it is clear that he was a man of very effectual curiosity
and inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Moslem as well as
Christian philosophers at his court, and he did much to
irrigate the Italian mind with Saracenic influences. Through
him the Arabic numerals and algebra were introduced to
Christian students, and among other philosophers at his
court was Michael Scott, who translated portions of
Aristotle and the commentaries thereon of the great Arab
philosopher Averroes (of Cordoba). In 1224 Frederick
founded the University of Naples, and he enlarged and
enriched the great medical school at Salerno University. He
also founded a zoological garden. He left a book on
hawking, which shows him to have been an acute observer
of the habits of birds, and he was one of the first Italians to
write Italian verse. Italian poetry was indeed born at his
court. He has been called by an able writer, "the first of the
moderns," and the phrase expresses aptly the unprejudiced
detachment of his intellectual side.
A still more striking intimation of the decay of the living and
sustaining forces of the papacy appeared when presently
the Popes came into conflict with the growing power of the
French King. During the lifetime of the Emperor Frederick
II, Germany fell into disunion, and the French King began to
play the rôle of guard, supporter and rival to the Pope that
had hitherto fallen to the Hohenstaufen Emperors. A series
of Popes pursued the policy of supporting the French
monarchs. French princes were established in the kingdom
of Sicily and Naples, with the support and approval of
Rome, and the French Kings saw before them the
possibility of restoring and ruling the Empire of
Charlemagne. When, however, the German interregnum
after the death of Frederick II, the last of the Hohenstaufens,
came to an end and Rudolf of Habsburg was elected first
Habsburg Emperor (1273), the policy of Rome began to
fluctuate between France and Germany, veering about with
the sympathies of each successive Pope. In the East in
1261 the Greeks recaptured Constantinople from the Latin
emperors, and the founder of the new Greek dynasty,
Michael Palaeologus, Michael VIII, after some unreal
tentatives of reconciliation with the Pope, broke away from
the Roman communion altogether, and with that, and the fall
of the Latin kingdoms in Asia, the eastward ascendancy of
the Popes came to an end
In 1294 Boniface VIII became Pope. He was an Italian,
hostile to the French, and full of a sense of the great
traditions and mission of Rome. For a time he carried
things with a high hand. In 1300 he held a jubilee, and a
vast multitude of pilgrims assembled in Rome. "So great
was the influx of money into the papal treasury, that two
assistants were kept busy with the rakes collecting the
offerings that were deposited at the tomb of St. Peter." But
this festival was a delusive triumph. Boniface came into
conflict with the French King in 1302, and in 1303, as he
was about to pronounce sentence of excommunication
against that monarch, he was surprised and arrested in his
own ancestral palace at Anagni, by Guillaume de Nogaret.
This agent from the French King forced an entrance into the
palace, made his way into the bedroom of the frightened
Pope-he was lying in bed with a cross in his hands-and
heaped threats and insults upon him. The Pope was
liberated a day or so later by the townspeople, and returned
to Rome; but there he was seized upon and again made
prisoner by the Orsini family, and in a few weeks' time the
shocked and disillusioned old man died a prisoner in their
hands.
The people of Anagni did resent the first outrage, and rose
against Nogaret to liberate Boniface, but then Anagni was
the Pope's native town. The important point to note is that
the French King in this rough treatment of the head of
Christendom was acting with the full approval of his people;
he had summoned a council of the Three Estates of France
(lords, church and commons) and gained their consent
before proceeding to extremities. Neither in Italy, Germany
nor England was there the slightest general manifestation
of disapproval at this free handling of the sovereign pontiff.
The idea of Christendom had decayed until its power over
the minds of men had gone.
Throughout the fourteenth century the papacy did nothing to
recover its moral sway. The next Pope elected, Clement V,
was a Frenchman, the choice of King Philip of France. He
never came to Rome. He set up his court in the town of
Avignon, which then belonged not to France but to the
papal See, though embedded in French territory, and there
his successors remained until 1377, when Pope Gregory XI
returned to the Vatican palace in Rome. But Gregory XI did
not take the sympathies of the whole church with him. Many
of the cardinals were of French origin and their habits and
associations were rooted deep at Avignon. When in 1378
Gregory XI died, and an Italian, Urban VI, was elected,
these dissentient cardinals declared the election invalid,
and elected another Pope, the anti-Pope, Clement VII. This
split is called the Great Schism. The Popes remained in
Rome, and all the anti-French powers, the Emperor, the
King of England, Hungary, Poland and the North of Europe
were loyal to them. The anti-Popes, on the other hand,
continued in Avignon, and were supported by the King of
France, his ally the King of Scotland, Spain, Portugal and
various German princes. Each Pope excommunicated and
cursed the adherents of his rival (1378-1417).
Is it any wonder that presently all over Europe people
began to think for themselves in matters of religion?
The beginnings of the Franciscans and the Dominicans,
which we have noted in the preceding chapters, were but
two among many of the new forces that were arising in
Christendom, either to hold or shatter the church as its own
wisdom might decide. Those two orders the church did
assimilate and use, though with a little violence in the case
of the former. But other forces were more frankly
disobedient and critical. A century and a half later came
Wycliffe (1320-1384). He was a learned Doctor at Oxford.
Quite late in his life he began a series of outspoken
criticisms of the corruption of the clergy and the unwisdom
of the church. He organized a number of poor priests, the
Wycliffites, to spread his ideas throughout England; and in
order that people should judge between the church and
himself, he translated the Bible into English. He was a more
learned and far abler man than either St. Francis or St.
Dominic. He had supporters in high places and a great
following among the people; and though Rome raged
against him, and ordered his imprisonment, he died a free
man. But the black and ancient spirit that was leading the
Catholic Church to its destruction would not let his bones
rest in the grave. By a decree of the Council of Constance
in 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burnt,
an order which was carried out at the command of Pope
Martin V by Bishop Fleming in 1428. This desecration was
not the act of some isolated fanatic; it was the official act of
the church.J. H. Robinson.
BUT in the thirteenth century, while this strange and finally
ineffectual struggle to unify Christendom under the rule of
the Pope was going on in Europe, far more momentous
events were afoot upon the larger stage of Asia. A Turkish
people from the country to the north of China rose suddenly
to prominence in the world's affairs, and achieved such a
series of conquests as has no parallel in history. These
were the Mongols. At the opening of the thirteenth century
they were a horde of nomadic horsemen, living very much
as their predecessors, the Huns, had done, subsisting
chiefly upon meat and mare's milk and living in tents of skin.
They had shaken themselves free from Chinese dominion,
and brought a number of other Turkish tribes into a military
confederacy. Their central camp was at Karakorum in
Mongolia.
At this time China was in a state of division. The great
dynasty of Tang had passed into decay by the tenth century,
and after a phase of division into warring states, three main
empires, that of Kin in the north with Pekin as its capital
and that of Sung in the south with a capital at Nankin, and
Hsia in the centre, remain. In 1214 Jengis Khan, the leader
of the Mongol confederates, made war on the Kin Empire
and captured Pekin (1214). He then turned westward and
conquered Western Turkestan, Persia, Armenia, India
down to Lahore, and South Russia as far as Kieff. He died
master of a vast empire that reached from the Pacific to the
Dnieper.
His successor, Ogdai Khan, continued this astonishing
career of conquest. His armies were organized to a very
high level of efficiency; and they had with them a new
Chinese invention, gunpowder, which they used in small
field guns. He completed the conquest of the Kin Empire
and then swept his hosts right across Asia to Russia
(1235), an altogether amazing march. Kieff was destroyed
in 1240, and nearly all Russia became tributary to the
Mongols. Poland was ravaged, and a mixed army of Poles
and Germans was annihilated at the battle of Liegnitz in
Lower Silesia in 1241. The Emperor Frederick II does not
seem to have made any great efforts to stay the advancing
tide.
"It is only recently," says Bury in his notes to Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, "that European
history has begun to understand that the successes of the
Mongol army which overran Poland and occupied Hungary
in the spring of A.D. 1241 were won by consummate
strategy and were not due to a mere overwhelming
superiority of numbers. But this fact has not yet become a
matter of common knowledge; the vulgar opinion which
represents the Tartars as a wild horde carrying all before
them solely by their multitude, and galloping through
Eastern Europe without a strategic plan, rushing at all
obstacles and overcoming them by mere weight, still
prevailsƒ.
"It was wonderful how punctually and effectually the
arrangements were carried out in operations extending
from the Lower Vistula to Transylvania. Such a campaign
was quite beyond the power of any European army of the
time, and it was beyond the vision of any European
commander. There was no general in Europe, from
Frederick II downward, who was not a tyro in strategy
compared to Subutai. It should also be noticed that the
Mongols embarked upon the enterprise with full knowledge
of the political situation of Hungary and the condition of
Poland-they had taken care to inform themselves by a well-
organized system of spies; on the other hand, the
Hungarians and the Christian powers, like childish
barbarians, knew hardly anything about their enemies."
But though the Mongols were victorious at Liegnitz, they did
not continue their drive westward. They were getting into
woodlands and hilly country, which did not suit their tactics;
and so they turned southward and prepared to settle in
Hungary, massacring or assimilating the kindred Magyar,
even as these had previously massacred and assimilated
the mixed Scythians and Avars and Huns before them.
From the Hungarian plain they would probably have made
raids west and south as the Hungarians had done in the
ninth century, the Avars in the seventh and eighth and the
Huns in the fifth. But Ogdai died suddenly, and in 1242
there was trouble about the succession, and recalled by
this, the undefeated hosts of Mongols began to pour back
across Hungary and Roumania towards the east.
Thereafter the Mongols concentrated their attention upon
their Asiatic conquests. By the middle of the thirteenth
century they had conquered the Sung Empire. Mangu Khan
succeeded Ogdai Khan as Great Khan in 1251, and made
his brother Kublai Khan governor of China. In 1280 Kublai
Khan had been formally recognized Emperor of China, and
so founded the Yuan dynasty which lasted until 1368. While
the last ruins of the Sung rule were going down in China,
another brother of Mangu, Hulagu, was conquering Persia
and Syria. The Mongols displayed a bitter animosity to
Islam at this time, and not only massacred the population of
Bagdad when they captured that city, but set to work to
destroy the immemorial irrigation system which had kept
Mesopotamia incessantly prosperous and populous from
the early days of Sumeria. From that time until our own
Mesopotamia has been a desert of ruins, sustaining only a
scanty population. Into Egypt the Mongols never
penetrated; the Sultan of Egypt completely defeated an
army of Hulagu's in Palestine in 1260.
After that disaster the tide of Mongol victory ebbed. The
dominions of the Great Khan fell into a number of separate
states. The eastern Mongols became Buddhists, like the
Chinese; the western became Moslim. The Chinese threw
off the rule of the Yuan dynasty in 1368, and set up the
native Ming dynasty which flourished from 1368 to 1644.
The Russians remained tributary to the Tartar hordes upon
the south-east steppes until 1480, when the Grand Duke of
Moscow repudiated his allegiance and laid the foundation
of modern Russia.
In the fourteenth century there was a brief revival of Mongol
vigour under Timurlane, a descendant of Jengis Khan. He
established himself in Western Turkestan, assumed the title
of Grand Khan in 1369, and conquered from Syria to Delhi.
He was the most savage and destructive of all the Mongol
conquerors. He established an empire of desolation that
did not survive his death. In 1505, however, a descendant
of this Timur, an adventurer named Baber, got together an
army with guns and swept down upon the plains of India.
His grandson Akbar (1556-1605) completed his
conquests, and this Mongol (or "Mogul" as the Arabs called
it) dynasty ruled in Delhi over the greater part of India until
the eighteenth century.
One of the consequences of the first great sweep of
Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century was to drive a
certain tribe of Turks, the Ottoman Turks, out of Turkestan
into Asia Minor. They extended and consolidated their
power in Asia Minor, crossed the Dardanelles and
conquered Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, until at last
Constantinople remained like an island amongst the
Ottoman dominions. In 1453 the Ottoman Sultan,
Muhammad II, took Constantinople, attacking it from the
European side with a great number of guns. This event
caused intense excitement in Europe and there was talk of
a crusade, but the day of the crusades was past.
In the course of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Sultans
conquered Bagdad, Hungary, Egypt and most of North
Africa, and their fleet made them masters of the
Mediterranean. They very nearly took Vienna, and they
exacted a tribute from the Emperor. There were but two
items to offset the general ebb of Christian dominion in the
fifteenth century. One was the restoration of the
independence of Moscow (1480); the other was the
gradual reconquest of Spain by the Christians. In 1492,
Granada, the last Moslem state in the peninsula, fell to King
Ferdinand of Aragon and his Queen Isabella of Castile.
But it was not until as late as 1571 that the naval battle of
Lepanto broke the pride of the Ottomans, and restored the
Mediterranean waters to Christian ascendancy.
THROUGHOUT the twelfth century there were many signs
that the European intelligence was recovering courage and
leisure, and preparing to take up again the intellectual
enterprises of the first Greek scientific enquiries and such
speculations as those of the Italian Lucretius. The causes of
this revival were many and complex. The suppression of
private war, the higher standards of comfort and security
that followed the crusades, and the stimulation of men's
minds by the experiences of these expeditions were no
doubt necessary preliminary conditions. Trade was
reviving; cities were recovering ease and safety; the
standard of education was arising in the church and
spreading among laymen. The thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries were a period of growing, independent or quasi-
independent cities; Venice, Florence, Genoa, Lisbon,
Paris, Bruges, London, Antwerp, Hamburg, Nuremberg,
Novgorod, Wisby and Bergen for example. They were all
trading cities with many travellers, and where men trade
and travel they talk and think. The polemics of the Popes
and princes, the conspicuous savagery and wickedness of
the persecution of heretics, were exciting men to doubt the
authority of the church and question and discuss
fundamental things.
We have seen how the Arabs were the means of restoring
Aristotle to Europe, and how such a prince as Frederick II
acted as a channel through which Arabic philosophy and
science played upon the renascent European mind. Still
more influential in the stirring up of men's ideas were the
Jews. Their very existence was a note of interrogation to
the claims of the church. And finally the secret, fascinating
enquiries of the alchemists were spreading far and wide
and setting men to the petty, furtive and yet fruitful
resumption of experimental science.
And the stir in men's minds was by no means confined now
to the independent and well educated. The mind of the
common man was awake in the world as it had never been
before in all the experience of mankind. In spite of priest
and persecution, Christianity does seem to have carried a
mental ferment wherever its teaching reached. It
established a direct relation between the conscience of the
individual man and the God of Righteousness, so that now
if need arose he had the courage to form his own judgment
upon prince or prelate or creed.
As early as the eleventh century philosophical discussion
had begun again in Europe, and there were great and
growing universities at Paris, Oxford, Bologna and other
centres. There medieval "schoolmen" took up again and
thrashed out a series of questions upon the value and
meaning of words that were a necessary preliminary to
clear thinking in the scientific age that was to follow. And
standing by himself because of his distinctive genius was
Roger Bacon (circa 1210 to circa 1293), a Franciscan of
Oxford, the father of modern experimental science. His
name deserves a prominence in our history second only to
that of Aristotle.
His writings are one long tirade against ignorance. He told
his age it was ignorant, an incredibly bold thing to do.
Nowadays a man may tell the world it is as silly as it is
solemn, that all its methods are still infantile and clumsy and
its dogmas childish assumptions, without much physical
danger; but these peoples of the middle ages when they
were not actually being massacred or starving or dying of
pestilence, were passionately convinced of the wisdom, the
completeness and finality of their beliefs, and disposed to
resent any reflections upon them very bitterly. Roger
Bacon's writings were like a flash of light in a profound
darkness. He combined his attack upon the ignorance of
his times with a wealth of suggestion for the increase of
knowledge. In his passionate insistence upon the need of
experiment and of collecting knowledge, the spirit of
Aristotle lives again in him. "Experiment, experiment," that
is the burthen of Roger Bacon.
Yet of Aristotle himself Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of
him because men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in
rooms and pored over the bad Latin translations which
were then all that was available of the master. "If I had my
way," he wrote, in his intemperate fashion, "I should burn all
the books of Aristotle, for the study of them can only lead to
a loss of time, produce error, and increase ignorance," a
sentiment that Aristotle would probably have echoed could
he have returned to a world in which his works were not so
much read as worshipped-and that, as Roger Bacon
showed, in these most abominable translations.
Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of
seeming to square it all with orthodoxy for fear of the prison
and worse, Roger Bacon shouted to mankind, "Cease to
be ruled by dogmas and authorities; look at the world!"
Four chief sources of ignorance he denounced; respect for
authority, custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the
vain, proud unteachableness of our dispositions. Overcome
but these, and a world of power would open to men:—
"Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so
that great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one
man, may be borne with greater speed than if they were full
of men. Likewise cars may be made so that without a
draught animal they may be moved cum impetu
inoestimable, as we deem the scythed chariots to have
been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are
possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some
device by which artificial wings may beat the air in the
manner of a flying bird."
So Roger Bacon wrote, but three more centuries were to
elapse before men began any systematic attempts to
explore the hidden stores of power and interest he realized
so clearly existed beneath the dull surface of human affairs.
But the Saracenic world not only gave Christendom the
stimulus of its philosophers and alchemists; it also gave it
paper. It is scarcely too much to say that paper made the
intellectual revival of Europe possible. Paper originated in
China, where its use probably goes back to the second
century B.C. In 751 the Chinese made an attack upon the
Arab Moslems in Samarkand; they were repulsed, and
among the prisoners taken from them were some skilled
papermakers, from whom the art was learnt. Arabic paper
manuscripts from the ninth century onward still exist. The
manufacture entered Christendom either through Greece or
by the capture of Moorish paper-mills during the Christian
reconquest of Spain. But under the Christian Spanish the
product deteriorated sadly. Good paper was not made in
Christian Europe until the end of the thirteenth century, and
then it was Italy which led the world. Only by the fourteenth
century did the manufacture reach Germany, and not until
the end of that century was it abundant and cheap enough
for the printing of books to be a practicable business
proposition. Thereupon printing followed naturally and
necessarily, for printing is the most obvious of inventions,
and the intellectual life of the world entered upon a new and
far more vigorous phase. It ceased to be a little trickle from
mind to mind; it became a broad flood, in which thousands
and presently scores and hundreds of thousands of minds
participated.
One immediate result of this achievement of printing was
the appearance of an abundance of Bibles in the world.
Another was a cheapening of school-books. The
knowledge of reading spread swiftly. There was not only a
great increase of books in the world, but the books that
were now made were plainer to read and so easier to
understand. Instead of toiling at a crabbed text and then
thinking over its significance, readers now could think
unimpeded as they read. With this increase in the facility of
reading, the reading public grew. The book ceased to be a
highly decorated toy or a scholar's mystery. People began
to write books to be read as well as looked at by ordinary
people. They wrote in the ordinary language and not in
Latin. With the fourteenth century the real history of the
European literature begins.
So far we have been dealing only with the Saracenic share
in the European revival. Let us turn now to the influence of
the Mongol conquests. They stimulated the geographical
imagination of Europe enormously. For a time under the
Great Khan, all Asia and Western Europe enjoyed an open
intercourse; all the roads were temporarily open, and
representatives of every nation appeared at the court of
Karakorum. The barriers between Europe and Asia set up
by the religious feud of Christianity and Islam were lowered.
Great hopes were entertained by the papacy for the
conversion of the Mongols to Christianity. Their only religion
so far had been Shumanism, a primitive paganism. Envoys
of the Pope, Buddhist priests from India, Parisian and
Italian and Chinese artificers, Byzantine and Armenian
merchants, mingled with Arab officials and Persian and
Indian astronomers and mathematicians at the Mongol
court. We hear too much in history of the campaigns and
massacres of the Mongols, and not enough of their curiosity
and desire for learning. Not perhaps as an originative
people, but as transmitters of knowledge and method their
influence upon the world's history has been very great. And
everything one can learn of the vague and romantic
personalities of Jengis or Kublai tends to confirm the
impression that these men were at least as understanding
and creative monarchs as either that flamboyant but
egotistical figure Alexander the Great or that raiser of
political ghosts, that energetic but illiterate theologian
Charlemagne.
One of the most interesting of these visitors to the Mongol
Court was a certain Venetian, Marco Polo, who afterwards
set down his story in a book. He went to China about 1272
with his father and uncle, who had already once made the
journey. The Great Khan had been deeply impressed by the
elder Polos; they were the first men of the "Latin" peoples
he had seen; and he sent them back with enquiries for
teachers and learned men who could explain Christianity to
him, and for various other European things that had
aroused his curiosity. Their visit with Marco was their
second visit.
The three Polos started by way of Palestine and not by the
Crimea, as in their previous expedition. They had with them
a gold tablet and other indications from the Great Khan that
must have greatly facilitated their journey. The Great Khan
had asked for some oil from the lamp that burns in the Holy
Sepulchre at Jerusalem; and so thither they first went, and
then by way of Cilicia into Armenia. They went thus far north
because the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Mongol
domains at this time. Thence they came by way of
Mesopotamia to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, as if they
contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz they met merchants
from India. For some reason they did not take ship, but
instead turned northward through the Persian deserts, and
so by way of Balkh over the Pamir to Kashgar, and by way
of Kotan and the Lob Nor into the Hwang-ho valley and on
to Pekin. At Pekin was the Great Khan, and they were
hospitably entertained.
Marco particularly pleased Kublai; he was young and
clever, and it is clear he had mastered the Tartar language
very thoroughly. He was given an official position and sent
on several missions, chiefly in south-west China. The tale
he had to tell of vast stretches of smiling and prosperous
country, "all the way excellent hostelries for travellers," and
"fine vineyards, fields and gardens," of "many abbeys" of
Buddhist monks, of manufactures of "cloth of silk and gold
and many fine taffetas," a "constant succession of cities
and boroughs," and so on, first roused the incredulity and
then fired the imagination of all Europe. He told of Burmah,
and of its great armies with hundreds of elephants, and how
these animals were defeated by the Mongol bowmen, and
also of the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of Japan, and
greatly exaggerated the amount of gold in that country. For
three years Marco ruled the city of Yang-chow as governor,
and he probably impressed the Chinese inhabitants as
being very little more of a foreigner than any Tartar would
have been. He may also have been sent on a mission to
India. Chinese records mention a certain Polo attached to
the imperial council in 1277, a very valuable confirmation of
the general truth of the Polo story.
The publication of Marco Polo's travels produced a
profound effect upon the European imagination. The
European literature, and especially the European romance
of the fifteenth century, echoes with the names in Marco
Polo's story, with Cathay (North China) and Cambulac
(Pekin) and the like.
Two centuries later, among the readers of the Travels of
Marco Polo was a certain Genoese mariner, Christopher
Columbus, who conceived the brilliant idea of sailing
westward round the world to China. In Seville there is a
copy of the Travels with marginal notes by Columbus. There
were many reasons why the thought of a Genoese should
be turned in this direction. Until its capture by the Turks in
1453 Constantinople had been an impartial trading mart
between the Western world and the East, and the Genoese
had traded there freely. But the "Latin" Venetians, the bitter
rivals of the Genoese, had been the allies and helpers of
the Turks against the Greeks, and with the coming of the
Turks Constantinople turned an unfriendly face upon
Genoese trade. The long forgotten discovery that the world
was round had gradually resumed its sway over men's
minds. The idea of going westward to China was therefore
a fairly obvious one. It was encouraged by two things. The
mariner's compass had now been invented and men were
no longer left to the mercy of a fine night and the stars to
determine the direction in which they were sailing, and the
Normans, Catalonians and Genoese and Portuguese had
already pushed out into the Atlantic as far as the Canary
Isles, Madeira and the Azores.
Yet Columbus found many difficulties before he could get
ships to put his idea to the test. He went from one
European Court to another. Finally at Granada, just won
from the Moors, he secured the patronage of Ferdinand
and Isabella, and was able to set out across the unknown
ocean in three small ships. After a voyage of two months
and nine days he came to a land which he believed to be
India, but which was really a new continent, whose distinct
existence the old world had never hitherto suspected. He
returned to Spain with gold, cotton, strange beasts and
birds, and two wild-eyed painted Indians to be baptized.
They were called Indians because, to the end of his days,
he believed that this land he had found was India. Only in
the course of several years did men begin to realize that
the whole new continent of America was added to the
world's resources.
The success of Columbus stimulated overseas enterprise
enormously. In 1497 the Portuguese sailed round Africa to
India, and in 1515 there were Portuguese ships in Java. In
1519 Magellan, a Portuguese sailor in Spanish
employment, sailed out of Seville westward with five ships,
of which one, the Vittoria, came back up the river to Seville
in 1522, the first ship that had ever circumnavigated the
world. Thirty-one men were aboard her, survivors of two-
hundred-and-eighty who had started. Magellan himself had
been killed in the Philippine Isles.
Printed paper books, a new realization of the round world
as a thing altogether attainable, a new vision of strange
lands, strange animals and plants, strange manners and
customs, discoveries overseas and in the skies and in the
ways and materials of life burst upon the European mind.
The Greek classics, buried and forgotten for so long, were
speedily being printed and studied, and were colouring
men's thoughts with the dreams of Plato and the traditions
of an age of republican freedom and dignity. The Roman
dominion had first brought law and order to Western
Europe, and the Latin Church had restored it; but under
both Pagan and Catholic Rome curiosity and innovation
were subordinate to and restrained by organization. The
reign of the Latin mind was now drawing to an end.
Between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century the
European Aryans, thanks to the stimulating influence of
Semite and Mongol and the rediscovery of the Greek
classics, broke away from the Latin tradition and rose
again to the intellectual and material leadership of mankind.
THE LATIN CHURCH itself was enormously affected by
this mental rebirth. It was dismembered; and even the
portion that survived was extensively renewed.
We have told how nearly the church came to the autocratic
leadership of all Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, and how in the fourteenth and fifteenth its power
over men's minds and affairs declined. We have described
how popular religious enthusiasm which had in earlier ages
been its support and power was turned against it by its
pride, persecution s and centralization, and how the
insidious scepticism of Frederick II bore fruit in a growing
insubordination of the princes. The Great Schism had
reduced its religious and political prestige to negligible
proportions. The forces of insurrection struck it now from
both sides.
The teachings of the Englishman Wycliffe spread widely
throughout Europe. In 1398 a learned Czech, John Huss,
delivered a series of lectures upon Wycliffe's teachings in
the university of Prague. This teaching spread rapidly
beyond the educated class and aroused great popular
enthusiasm. In 1414-18 a Council of the whole church was
held at Constance to settle the Great Schism. Huss was
invited to this Council under promise of a safe conduct from
the emperor, seized, put on trial for heresy and burnt alive
(1415). So far from tranquillizing the Bohemian people, this
led to an insurrection of the Hussites in that country, the first
of a series of religious wars that inaugurated the break-up
of Latin Christendom. Against this insurrection Pope Martin
V, the Pope specially elected at Constance as the head of
a reunited Christendom, preached a Crusade.
Five Crusades in all were launched upon this sturdy little
people and all of them failed. All the unemployed ruffianism
of Europe was turned upon Bohemia in the fifteenth century,
just as in the thirteenth it had been turned upon the
Waldenses. But the Bohemian Czechs, unlike the
Waldenses, believed in armed resistance. The Bohemian
Crusade dissolved and streamed away from the battlefield
at the sound of the Hussites' waggons and the distant
chanting of their troops; it did not even wait to fight (battle of
Domazlice, 1431). In 1436 an agreement was patched up
with the Hussites by a new Council of the church at Basle in
which many of the special objections to Latin practice were
conceded.
In the fifteenth century a great pestilence had produced
much social disorganization throughout Europe. There had
been extreme misery and discontent among the common
people, and peasant risings against the landlords and the
wealthy in England and France. After the Hussite Wars
these peasant insurrections increased in gravity in
Germany and took on a religious character. Printing came
in as an influence upon this development. By the middle of
the fifteenth century there were printers at work with
movable type in Holland and the Rhineland. The art spread
to Italy and England, where Caxton was printing in
Westminster in 1477. The immediate consequence was a
great increase and distribution of Bibles, and greatly
increased facilities for widespread popular controversies.
The European world became a world of readers, to an
extent that had never happened to any community in the
past. And this sudden irrigation of the general mind with
clearer ideas and more accessible information occurred
just at a time when the church was confused and divided
and not in a position to defend itself effectively, and when
many princes were looking for means to weaken its hold
upon the vast wealth it claimed in their dominions.
In Germany the attack upon the church gathered round the
personality of an ex-monk, Martin Luther (1483-1546), who
appeared in Wittenberg in 1517 offering disputations
against various orthodox doctrines and practices. At first he
disputed in Latin in the fashion of the Schoolmen. Then he
took up the new weapon of the printed word and scattered
his views far and wide in German addressed to the
ordinary people. An attempt was made to suppress him as
Huss had been suppressed, but the printing press had
changed conditions and he had too many open and secret
friends among the German princes for this fate to overtake
him.
For now in this age of multiplying ideas and weakened faith
there were many rulers who saw their advantage in
breaking the religious ties between their people and Rome.
They sought to make themselves in person the heads of a
more nationalized religion. England, Scotland, Sweden,
Norway, Denmark, North Germany and Bohemia, one after
another, separated themselves from the Roman
Communion. They have remained separated ever since.
The various princes concerned cared very little for the
moral and intellectual freedom of their subjects. They used
the religious doubts and insurgence of their peoples to
strengthen them against Rome, but they tried to keep a grip
upon the popular movement as soon as that rupture was
achieved and a national church set up under the control of
the crown. But there has always been a curious vitality in
the teaching of Jesus, a direct appeal to righteousness and
a man's self-respect over every loyalty and every
subordination, lay or ecclesiastical. None of these princely
churches broke off without also breaking off a number of
fragmentary sects that would admit the intervention of
neither prince nor Pope between a man and his God. In
England and Scotland, for example, there was a number of
sects who now held firmly to the Bible as their one guide in
life and belief. They refused the disciplines of a state
church. In England these dissentients were the Non-
conformists, who played a very large part in the politics of
that country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In
England they carried their objection to a princely head to
the church so far as to decapitate King Charles I (1649),
and for eleven prosperous years England was a republic
under Non-conformist rule.
The breaking away of this large section of Northern Europe
from Latin Christendom is what is generally spoken of as
the Reformation. But the shock and stress of these losses
produced changes perhaps as profound in the Roman
Church itself. The church was reorganized and a new spirit
came into its life. One of the dominant figures in this revival
was a young Spanish soldier, Inigo Lopez de Recalde,
better known to the world as St. Ignatius of Loyola. After
some romantic beginnings he became a priest (1538) and
was permitted to found the Society of Jesus, a direct
attempt to bring the generous and chivalrous traditions of
military discipline into the service of religion. This Society
of Jesus, the Jesuits, became one of the greatest teaching
and missionary societies the world has ever seen. It carried
Christianity to India, China and America. It arrested the
rapid disintegration of the Roman Church. It raised the
standard of education throughout the whole Catholic world;
it raised the level of Catholic intelligence and quickened the
Catholic conscience everywhere; it stimulated Protestant
Europe to competitive educational efforts. The vigorous
and aggressive Roman Catholic Church we know to-day is
largely the product of this Jesuit revival.
LI. The Emperor Charles V
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE came to a sort of climax in
the reign of the Emperor Charles V. He was one of the
most extraordinary monarchs that Europe has ever seen.
For a time he had the air of being the greatest monarch
since Charlemagne.
His greatness was not of his own making. It was largely the
creation of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I
(1459-1519). Some families have fought, others have
intrigued their way to world power; the Habsburgs married
their way. Maximilian began his career with Austria, Styria,
part of Alsace and other districts, the original Habsburg
patrimony; he married-the lady's name scarcely matters to
us-the Netherlands and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy
slipped from him after his first wife's death, but the
Netherlands he held. Then he tried unsuccessfully to marry
Brittany. He became Emperor in succession to his father,
Frederick III, in 1493, and married the duchy of Milan.
Finally he married his son to the weak-minded daughter of
Ferdinand and Isabella, the Ferdinand and Isabella of
Columbus, who not only reigned over a freshly united Spain
and over Sardinia and the kingdom of the two Sicilies, but
over all America west of Brazil. So it was that this Charles
V, his grandson, inherited most of the American continent
and between a third and a half of what the Turks had left of
Europe. He succeeded to the Netherlands in 1506. When
his grandfather Ferdinand died in 1516, he became
practically king of the Spanish dominions, his mother being
imbecile; and his grandfather Maximilian dying in 1519, he
was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still comparatively
tender age of twenty.
He was a fair young man with a not very intelligent face, a
thick upper lip and a long clumsy chin. He found himself in a
world of young and vigorous personalities. It was an age of
brilliant young monarchs. Francis I had succeeded to the
French throne in 1515 at the age of twenty-one, Henry VIII
had become King of England in 1509 at eighteen. It was
the age of Baber in India (1526-1530) and Suleiman the
Magnificent in Turkey (1520), both exceptionally capable
monarchs, and the Pope Leo X (1513) was also a very
distinguished Pope. The Pope and Francis I attempted to
prevent the election of Charles as Emperor because they
dreaded the concentration of so much power in the hands
of one man. Both Francis I and Henry VIII offered
themselves to the imperial electors. But there was now a
long established tradition of Habsburg Emperors (since
1273), and some energetic bribery secured the election for
Charles.
At first the young man was very much a magnificent puppet
in the hands of his ministers. Then slowly he began to
assert himself and take control. He began to realize
something of the threatening complexities of his exalted
position. It was a position as unsound as it was splendid.
From the very outset of his reign he was faced by the
situation created by Luther's agitations in Germany. The
Emperor had one reason for siding with the reformers in
the opposition of the Pope to his election. But he had been
brought up in Spain, that most Catholic of countries, and he
decided against Luther. So he came into conflict with the
Protestant princes and particularly the Elector of Saxony.
He found himself in the presence of an opening rift that was
to split the outworn fabric of Christendom into two
contending camps. His attempts to close that rift were
strenuous and honest and ineffective. There was an
extensive peasant revolt in Germany which interwove with
the general political and religious disturbance. And these
internal troubles were complicated by attacks upon the
Empire from east and west alike. On the west of Charles
was his spirited rival, Francis I; to the east was the ever
advancing Turk, who was now in Hungary, in alliance with
Francis and clamouring for certain arrears of tribute from
the Austrian dominions. Charles had the money and army
of Spain at his disposal, but it was extremely difficult to get
any effective support in money from Germany. His social
and political troubles were complicated by financial
distresses. He was forced to ruinous borrowing.
On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was
successful against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief
battlefield was North Italy; the generalship was dull on both
sides; their advances and retreats depended mainly on the
arrival of reinforcements. The German army invaded
France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back into Italy, lost
Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long
and unsuccessful siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh
German forces, defeated, wounded and taken prisoner. But
thereupon the Pope and Henry VIII, still haunted by the fear
of his attaining excessive power, turned against Charles.
The German troops in Milan, under the Constable of
Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather than followed their
commander into a raid upon Rome. They stormed the city
and pillaged it (1527). The Pope took refuge in the Castle
of St. Angelo while the looting and slaughter went on. He
bought off the German troops at last by the payment of four
hundred thousand ducats. Ten years of such confused
fighting impoverished all Europe. At last the Emperor found
himself triumphant in Italy. In 1530, he was crowned by the
Pope-he was the last German Emperor to be so crowned-
at Bologna.
Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in
Hungary. They had defeated and killed the king of Hungary
in 1526, they held Buda-Pesth, and in 1529 Suleiman the
Magnificent very nearly took Vienna. The Emperor was
greatly concerned by these advances, and did his utmost to
drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest difficulty in
getting the German princes to unite even with this
formidable enemy upon their very borders. Francis I
remained implacable for a time, and there was a new
French war; but in 1538 Charles won his rival over to a
more friendly attitude after ravaging the south of France.
Francis and Charles then formed an alliance against the
Turk. But the Protestant princes, the German princes who
were resolved to break away from Rome, had formed a
league, the Schmalkaldic League, against the Emperor,
and in the place of a great campaign to recover Hungary for
Christendom Charles had to turn his mind to the gathering
internal struggle in Germany. Of that struggle he saw only
the opening war. It was a struggle, a sanguinary irrational
bickering of princes, for ascendancy, now flaming into war
and destruction, now sinking back to intrigues and
diplomacies; it was a snake's sack of princely policies that
was to go on writhing incurably right into the nineteenth
century and to waste and desolate Central Europe again
and again.
The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces
at work in these gathering troubles. He was for his time and
station an exceptionally worthy man, and he seems to have
taken the religious dissensions that were tearing Europe
into warring fragments as genuine theological differences.
He gathered diets and councils in futile attempts at
reconciliation. Formulae and confessions were tried over.
The student of German history must struggle with the details
of the Religious Peace of Nuremberg, the settlement at the
Diet of Ratisbon, the Interim of Augsburg, and the like. Here
we do but mention them as details in the worried life of this
culminating Emperor. As a matter of fact, hardly one of the
multifarious princes and rulers in Europe seems to have
been acting in good faith. The widespread religious trouble
of the world, the desire of the common people for truth and
social righteousness, the spreading knowledge of the time,
all those things were merely counters in the imaginations of
princely diplomacy. Henry VIII of England, who had begun
his career with a book against heresy, and who had been
rewarded by the Pope with the title of "Defender of the
Faith," being anxious to divorce his first wife in favour of a
young lady named Anne Boleyn, and wishing also to loot
the vast wealth of the church in England, joined the
company of Protestant princes in 1530. Sweden, Denmark
and Norway had already gone over to the Protestant side.
The German religious war began in 1546, a few months
after the death of Martin Luther. We need not trouble about
the incidents of the campaign. The Protestant Saxon army
was badly beaten at Lochau. By something very like a
breach of faith Philip of Hesse, the Emperor's chief
remaining antagonist, was caught and imprisoned, and the
Turks were bought off by the promise of an annual tribute. In
1547, to the great relief of the Emperor, Francis I died. So
by 1547 Charles got to a kind of settlement, and made his
last efforts to effect peace where there was no peace. In
1552 all Germany was at war again, only a precipitate flight
from Innsbruck saved Charles from capture, and in 1552,
with the treaty of Passau, came another unstable
equilibriumƒ.
Such is the brief outline of the politics of the Empire for
thirty-two years. It is interesting to note how entirely the
European mind was concentrated upon the struggle for
European ascendancy. Neither Turks, French, English nor
Germans had yet discovered any political interest in the
great continent of America, nor any significance in the new
sea routes to Asia. Great things were happening in
America; Cortez with a mere handful of men had
conquered the great Neolithic empire of Mexico for Spain,
Pizarro had crossed the Isthmus of Panama (1530) and
subjugated another wonder-land, Peru. But as yet these
events meant no more to Europe than a useful and
stimulating influx of silver to the Spanish treasury.
It was after the treaty of Passau that Charles began to
display his distinctive originality of mind. He was now
entirely bored and disillusioned by his imperial greatness.
A sense of the intolerable futility of these European rivalries
came upon him. He had never been of a very sound
constitution, he was naturally indolent and he was suffering
greatly from gout. He abdicated. He made over all his
sovereign rights in Germany to his brother Ferdinand, and
Spain and the Netherlands he resigned to his son Philip.
Then in a sort of magnificent dudgeon he retired to a
monastery at Yuste, among the oak and chestnut forests in
the hills to the north of the Tagus valley. There he died in
1558.
Much has been written in a sentimental vein of this
retirement, this renunciation of the world by this tired
majestic Titan, world-weary, seeking in an austere solitude
his peace with God. But his retreat was neither solitary nor
austere; he had with him nearly a hundred and fifty
attendants; his establishment had all the splendour and
indulgences without the fatigues of a court, and Philip II was
a dutiful son to whom his father's advice was a command.
And if Charles had lost his living interest in the
administration of European affairs, there were other
motives of a more immediate sort to stir him. Says
Prescott: "In the almost daily correspondence between
Quixada, or Gaztelu, and the Secretary of State at
Valladolid, there is scarcely a letter that does not turn more
or less on the Emperor's eating or his illness. The one
seems naturally to follow, like a running commentary, on the
other. It is rare that such topics have formed the burden of
communications with the department of state. It must have
been no easy matter for the secretary to preserve his
gravity in the perusal of despatches in which politics and
gastronomy were so strangely mixed together. The courier
from Valladolid to Lisbon was ordered to make a detour,
so as to take Jarandilla in his route, and bring supplies to
the royal table. On Thursdays he was to bring fish to serve
for the jour maigre that was to follow. The trout in the
neighbourhood Charles thought too small, so others of a
larger size were to be sent from Valladolid. Fish of every
kind was to his taste, as, indeed, was anything that in its
nature or habits at all approached to fish. Eels, frogs,
oysters, occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare.
Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great favour with
him; and he regretted that he had not brought a better
supply of these from the Low Countries. On an eel-pasty he
particularly doted."ƒ
In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III
granting him a dispensation from fasting, and allowing him
to break his fast early in the morning even when he was to
take the sacrament.
Eating and doctoring! it was a return to elemental things.
He had never acquired the habit of reading, but he would
make what one narrator describes as a "sweet and
heavenly commentary." He also amused himself with
mechanical toys, by listening to music or sermons, and by
attending to the imperial business that still came drifting in
to him. The death of the Empress, to whom he was greatly
attached, had turned his mind towards religion, which in his
case took a punctilious and ceremonial form; every Friday
in Lent he scourged himself with the rest of the monks with
such good will as to draw blood. These exercises and the
gout released a bigotry in Charles that had hitherto been
restrained by considerations of policy. The appearance of
Protestant teaching close at hand in Valladolid roused him
to fury. "Tell the grand inquisitor and his council from me to
be at their posts, and to lay the axe at the root of the evil
before it spreads further."ƒ He expressed a doubt whether
it would not be well, in so black an affair, to dispense with
the ordinary course of justice, and to show no mercy; "lest
the criminal, if pardoned, should have the opportunity of
repeating his crime." He recommended, as an example,
his own mode of proceeding in the Netherlands, "where all
who remained obstinate in their errors were burned alive,
and those who were admitted to penitence were
beheaded."
And almost symbolical of his place and rôle in history was
his preoccupation with funerals. He seems to have had an
intuition that something great was dead in Europe and
sorely needed burial, that there was a need to write Finis,
overdue. He not only attended every actual funeral that was
celebrated at Yuste, but he had services conducted for the
absent dead, he held a funeral service in memory of his
wife on the anniversary of her death, and finally he
celebrated his own obsequies.
"The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of hundreds
of wax-lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness.
The brethren in their conventual dress, and all the
Emperor's household clad in deep mourning, gathered
round a huge catafalque, shrouded also in black, which had
been raised in the centre of the chapel. The service for the
burial of the dead was then performed; and, amidst the
dismal wail of the monks, the prayers ascended for the
departed spirit, that it might be received into the mansions
of the blessed. The sorrowful attendants were melted to
tears, as the image of their master's death was presented
to their minds-or they were touched, it may be, with
compassion by this pitiable display of weakness. Charles,
muffled in a dark mantle, and bearing a lighted candle in his
hand, mingled with his household, the spectator of his own
obsequies; and the doleful ceremony was concluded by his
placing the taper in the hands of the priest, in sign of his
surrendering up his soul to the Almighty."
Within two months of this masquerade he was dead. And
the brief greatness of the Holy Roman Empire died with
him. His realm was already divided between his brother
and his son. The Holy Roman Empire struggled on indeed
to the days of Napoleon I but as an invalid and dying thing.
To this day its unburied tradition still poisons the political
air.Appendix to Robertson's History of Charles V.
LII. The Age of Political Experiments; of Grand
Monarchy and Parliaments and Republicanism in
Europe
THE LATIN CHURCH was broken, the Holy Roman Empire
was in extreme decay; the history of Europe from the
opening of the sixteenth century onward in a story of
peoples feeling their way darkly to some new method of
government, better adapted to the new conditions that were
arising. In the Ancient World, over long periods of time,
there had been changes of dynasty and even changes of
ruling race and language, but the form of government
through monarch and temple remained fairly stable, and still
more stable was the ordinary way of living. In this modern
Europe since the sixteenth century the dynastic changes
are unimportant, and the interest of history lies in the wide
and increasing variety of experiments in political and social
organization.
The political history of the world from the sixteenth century
onward was, we have said, an effort, a largely unconscious
effort, of mankind to adapt its political and social methods
to certain new conditions that had now arisen. The effort to
adapt was complicated by the fact that the conditions
themselves were changing with a steadily increasing
rapidity. The adaptation, mainly unconscious and almost
always unwilling (for man in general hates voluntary
change), has lagged more and more behind the alterations
in conditions. From the sixteenth century onward the history
of mankind is a story of political and social institutions
becoming more and more plainly misfits, less comfortable
and more vexatious, and of the slow reluctant realization of
the need for a conscious and deliberate reconstruction of
the whole scheme of human societies in the face of needs
and possibilities new to all the former experiences of life.
What are these changes in the conditions of human life that
have disorganized that balance of empire, priest, peasant
and trader, with periodic refreshment by barbaric conquest,
that has held human affairs in the Old World in a sort of
working rhythm for more than a hundred centuries?
They are manifold and various, for human affairs are
multitudinously complex; but the main changes seem all to
turn upon one cause, namely the growth and extension of a
knowledge of the nature of things, beginning first of all in
small groups of intelligent people and spreading at first
slowly, and in the last five hundred years very rapidly, to
larger and larger proportions of the general population.
But there has also been a great change in human
conditions due to a change in the spirit of human life. This
change has gone on side by side with the increase and
extension of knowledge, and is subtly connected with it.
There has been an increasing disposition to treat a life
based on the common and more elementary desires and
gratifications as unsatisfactory, and to seek relationship
with and service and participation in a larger life. This is the
common characteristic of all the great religions that have
spread throughout the world in the last twenty odd
centuries, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam alike. They
have had to do with the spirit of man in a way that the older
religions did not have to do. They are forces quite different
in their nature and effect from the old fetishistic blood-
sacrifice religions of priest and temple that they have in part
modified and in part replaced. They have gradually evolved
a self-respect in the individual and a sense of participation
and responsibility in the common concerns of mankind that
did not exist among the populations of the earlier
civilizations.
The first considerable change in the conditions of political
and social life was the simplification and extended use of
writing in the ancient civilizations which made larger
empires and wider political understandings practicable and
inevitable. The next movement forward came with the
introduction of the horse, and later on of the camel as a
means of transport, the use of wheeled vehicles, the
extension of roads and the increased military efficiency due
to the discovery of terrestrial iron. Then followed the
profound economic disturbances due to the device of
coined money and the change in the nature of debt,
proprietorship and trade due to this convenient but
dangerous convention. The empires grew in size and
range, and men's ideas grew likewise to correspond with
these things. Came the disappearance of local gods, the
age of theocrasia, and the teaching of the great world
religions. Came also the beginnings of reasoned and
recorded history and geography, the first realization by man
of his profound ignorance, and the first systematic search
for knowledge.
For a time the scientific process which began so brilliantly
in Greece and Alexandria was interrupted. The raids of the
Teutonic barbarians, the westward drive of the Mongolian
peoples, convulsive religious reconstruction and great
pestilences put enormous strains upon political and social
order. When civilization emerged again from this phase of
conflict and confusion, slavery was no longer the basis of
economic life; and the first paper-mills were preparing a
new medium for collective information and co-operation in
printed matter. Gradually at this point and that, the search
for knowledge, the systematic scientific process, was
resumed
And now from the sixteenth century onward, as an
inevitable by-product of systematic thought, appeared a
steadily increasing series of inventions and devices
affecting the intercommunication and interaction of men
with one another. They all tended towards wider range of
action, greater mutual benefits or injuries, and increased
co-operation, and they came faster and faster. Men's minds
had not been prepared for anything of the sort, and until the
great catastrophes at the beginning of the twentieth century
quickened men's minds, the historian has very little to tell of
any intelligently planned attempts to meet the new
conditions this increasing flow of inventions was creating.
The history of mankind for the last four centuries is rather
like that of an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and
uneasily while the prison that restrains and shelters him
catches fire, not waking but incorporating the crackling and
warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams,
than like that of a man consciously awake to danger and
opportunity.
Since history is the story not of individual lives but of
communities, it is inevitable that the inventions that figure
most in the historical record are inventions affecting
communications. In the sixteenth century the chief new
things that we have to note are the appearance of printed
paper and the sea-worthy, ocean-going sailing ship using
the new device of the mariner's compass. The former
cheapened, spread, and revolutionized teaching, public
information and discussion, and the fundamental
operations of political activity. The latter made the round
world one. But almost equally important was the increased
utilization and improvement of guns and gunpowder which
the Mongols had first brought westward in the thirteenth
century. This destroyed the practical immunity of barons in
their castles and of walled cities. Guns swept away
feudalism. Constantinople fell to guns. Mexico and Peru fell
before the terror of the Spanish guns.
The seventeenth century saw the development of
systematic scientific publication, a less conspicuous but
ultimately far more pregnant innovation. Conspicuous
among the leaders in this great forward step was Sir
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) afterwards Lord Verulam, Lord
Chancellor of England. He was the pupil and perhaps the
mouthpiece of another Englishman, Dr. Gilbert, the
experimental philosopher of Colchester (1540-1603). This
second Bacon, like the first, preached observation and
experiment, and he used the inspiring and fruitful form of a
Utopian story, The New Atlantis, to express his dream of a
great service of scientific research.
Presently arose the Royal Society of London, the Florentine
Society, and later other national bodies for the
encouragement of research and the publication and
exchange of knowledge. These European scientific
societies became fountains not only of countless inventions
but also of a destructive criticism of the grotesque
theological history of the world that had dominated and
crippled human thought for many centuries.
Neither the seventeenth nor the eighteenth century
witnessed any innovations so immediately revolutionary in
human conditions as printed paper and the ocean-going
ship, but there was a steady accumulation of knowledge
and scientific energy that was to bear its full fruits in the
nineteenth century. The exploration and mapping of the
world went on. Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand
appeared on the map. In Great Britain in the eighteenth
century coal coke began to be used for metallurgical
purposes, leading to a considerable cheapening of iron
and to the possibility of casting and using it in larger pieces
than had been possible before, when it had been smelted
with wood charcoal. Modern machinery dawned.
Like the trees of the celestial city, science bears bud and
flower and fruit at the same time and continuously. With the
onset of the nineteenth century the real fruition of science-
which indeed henceforth may never cease-began. First
came steam and steel, the railway, the great liner, vast
bridges and buildings, machinery of almost limitless power,
the possibility of a bountiful satisfaction of every material
human need, and then, still more wonderful, the hidden
treasures of electrical science were opened to men.ƒ
We have compared the political and social life of man from
the sixteenth century onward to that of a sleeping prisoner
who lies and dreams while his prison burns about him. In
the sixteenth century the European mind was still going on
with its Latin Imperial dream, its dream of a Holy Roman
Empire, united under a Catholic Church. But just as some
uncontrollable element in our composition will insist at
times upon introducing into our dreams the most absurd
and destructive comments, so thrust into this dream we find
the sleeping face and craving stomach of the Emperor
Charles V, while Henry VIII of England and Luther tear the
unity of Catholicism to shreds.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dream
turned to personal monarchy. The history of nearly all
Europe during this period tells with variations the story of an
attempt to consolidate a monarchy, to make it absolute and
to extend its power over weaker adjacent regions, and of
the steady resistance, first of the landowners and then with
the increase of foreign trade and home industry, of the
growing trading and moneyed class, to the exaction and
interference of the crown. There is no universal victory of
either side; here it is the King who gets the upper hand
while there it is the man of private property who beats the
King. In one case we find a King becoming the sun and
centre of his national world, while just over his borders a
sturdy mercantile class maintains a republic. So wide a
range of variation shows how entirely experimental, what
local accidents, were all the various governments of this
period.
A very common figure in these national dramas is the
King's minister, often in the still Catholic countries a prelate,
who stands behind the King, serves him and dominates
him by his indispensable services.
Here in the limits set to us it is impossible to tell these
various national dramas in detail. The trading folk of
Holland went Protestant and republican, and cast off the
rule of Philip II of Spain, the son of the Emperor Charles V.
In England Henry VIII and his minister Wolsey, Queen
Elizabeth and her minister Burleigh, prepared the
foundations of an absolutism that was wrecked by the folly
of James I and Charles I. Charles I was beheaded for
treason to his people (1649), a new turn in the political
thought of Europe. For a dozen years (until 1660) Britain
was a republic; and the crown was an unstable power,
much overshadowed by Parliament, until George III (1760-
1820) made a strenuous and partly successful effort to
restore its predominance. The King of France, on the other
hand, was the most successful of all the European Kings in
perfecting monarchy. Two great ministers, Richelieu (1585-
1642) and Mazarin (1602-1661), built up the power of the
crown in that country, and the process was aided by the
long reign and very considerable abilities of King Louis
XIV, "the Grand Monarque" (1643-1715).
Louis XIV was indeed the pattern King of Europe. He was,
within his limitations, an exceptionally capable King; his
ambition was stronger than his baser passions, and he
guided his country towards bankruptcy through the
complication of a spirited foreign policy with an elaborate
dignity that still extorts our admiration. His immediate
desire was to consolidate and extend France to the Rhine
and Pyrenees, and to absorb the Spanish Netherlands; his
remoter view saw the French Kings as the possible
successors of Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman
Empire. He made bribery a state method almost more
important than warfare. Charles II of England was in his
pay, and so were most of the Polish nobility, presently to be
described. His money, or rather the money of the tax-
paying classes in France, went everywhere. But his
prevailing occupation was splendour. His great palace at
Versailles with its salons, its corridors, its mirrors, its
terraces and fountains and parks and prospects, was the
envy and admiration of the world.
He provoked a universal imitation. Every king and princelet
in Europe was building his own Versailles as much beyond
his means as his subjects and credits would permit.
Everywhere the nobility rebuilt or extended their chateaux to
the new pattern. A great industry of beautiful and elaborate
fabrics and furnishings developed. The luxurious arts
flourished everywhere; sculpture in alabaster, faience, gilt
woodwork, metal work, stamped leather, much music,
magnificent painting, beautiful printing and bindings, fine
crockery, fine vintages. Amidst the mirrors and fine furniture
went a strange race of "gentlemen" in tall powdered wigs,
silks and laces, poised upon high red heels, supported by
amazing canes; and still more wonderful "ladies," under
towers of powdered hair and wearing vast expansions of
silk and satin sustained on wire. Through it all postured the
great Louis, the sun of his world, unaware of the meagre
and sulky and bitter faces that watched him from those
lower darknesses to which his sunshine did not penetrate.
The German people remained politically divided throughout
this period of the monarchies and experimental
governments, and a considerable number of ducal and
princely courts aped the splendours of Versailles on varying
scales. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48), a devastating
scramble among the Germans, Swedes and Bohemians
for fluctuating political advantages, sapped the energies of
Germany for a century. A map must show the crazy
patchwork in which this struggle ended, a map of Europe
according to the peace of Westphalia (1648). One sees a
tangle of principalities, dukedoms, free states and the like,
some partly in and partly out of the Empire. Sweden's arm,
the reader will note, reached far into Germany; and except
for a few islands of territory within the imperial boundaries
France was still far from the Rhine. Amidst this patchwork
the Kingdom of Prussia-it became a Kingdom in 1701-rose
steadily to prominence and sustained a series of
successful wars. Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740-86)
had his Versailles at Potsdam, where his court spoke
French, read French literature and rivalled the culture of the
French King.
In 1714 the Elector of Hanover became King of England,
adding one more to the list of monarchies half in and half
out of the empire.
The Austrian branch of the descendants of Charles V
retained the title of Emperor; the Spanish branch retained
Spain. But now there was also an Emperor of the East
again. After the fall of Constantinople (1453), the grand
duke of Moscow, Ivan the Great (1462-1505), claimed to
be heir to the Byzantine throne and adopted the Byzantine
double-headed eagle upon his arms. His grandson, Ivan IV,
Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584), assumed the imperial title of
Caesar (Tsar). But only in the latter half of the seventeenth
century did Russia cease to seem remote and Asiatic to
the European mind. The Tsar Peter the Great (1682-1725)
brought Russia into the arena of Western affairs. He built a
new capital for his empire, Petersburg upon the Neva, that
played the part of a window between Russia and Europe,
and he set up his Versailles at Peterhof eighteen miles
away, employing a French architect who gave him a
terrace, fountains, cascades, picture gallery, park and all
the recognized appointments of Grand Monarchy. In Russia
as in Prussia French became the language of the court.
Unhappily placed between Austria, Prussia and Russia
was the Polish kingdom, an ill-organized state of great
landed proprietors too jealous of their own individual
grandeur to permit more than a nominal kingship to the
monarch they elected. Her fate was division among these
three neighbours, in spite of the efforts of France to retain
her as an independent ally. Switzerland at this time was a
group of republican cantons; Venice was a republic; Italy
like so much of Germany was divided among minor dukes
and princes. The Pope ruled like a prince in the papal
states, too fearful now of losing the allegiance of the
remaining Catholic princes to interfere between them and
their subjects or to remind the world of the commonweal of
Christendom. There remained indeed no common political
idea in Europe at all; Europe was given over altogether to
division and diversity.
All these sovereign princes and republics carried on
schemes of aggrandizement against each other. Each one
of them pursued a "foreign policy" of aggression against its
neighbours and of aggressive alliances. We Europeans still
live to-day in the last phase of this age of the multifarious
sovereign states, and still suffer from the hatreds, hostilities
and suspicions it engendered. The history of this time
becomes more and more manifestly "gossip," more and
more unmeaning and wearisome to a modern intelligence.
You are told of how this war was caused by this King's
mistress, and how the jealousy of one minister for another
caused that. A tittle-tattle of bribes and rivalries disgusts
the intelligent student. The more permanently significant
fact is that in spite of the obstruction of a score of frontiers,
reading and thought still spread and increased and
inventions multiplied. The eighteenth century saw the
appearance of a literature profoundly sceptical and critical
of the courts and policies of the time. In such a book as
Voltaire's Candide we have the expression of an infinite
weariness with the planless confusion of the European
world.
LIII. The New Empires of the Europeans in Asia and
Overseas
WHILE Central Europe thus remained divided and
confused, the Western Europeans and particularly the
Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the
French and the British were extending the area of their
struggles across the seas of all the world. The printing
press had dissolved the political ideas of Europe into a
vast and at first indeterminate fermentation, but that other
great innovation, the oceangoing sailing ship, was
inexorably extending the range of European experience to
the furthermost limits of salt water.
The first overseas settlements of the Dutch and Northern
Atlantic Europeans were not for colonization but for trade
and mining. The Spaniards were first in the field; they
claimed dominion over the whole of this new world of
America. Very soon however the Portuguese asked for a
share. The Pope-it was one of the last acts of Rome as
mistress of the world-divided the new continent between
these two first-comers, giving Portugal Brazil and
everything else east of a line 370 leagues west of the Cape
Verde islands, and all the rest to Spain (1494). The
Portuguese at this time were also pushing overseas
enterprise southward and eastward. In 1497 Vasco da
Gama had sailed from Lisbon round the Cape to Zanzibar
and then to Calicut in India. In 1515 there were Portuguese
ships in Java and the Moluccas, and the Portuguese were
setting up and fortifying trading stations round and about
the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Mozambique, Goa, and two
smaller possessions in India, Macao in China and a part of
Timor are to this day Portuguese possessions.
The nations excluded from America by the papal settlement
paid little heed to the rights of Spain and Portugal. The
English, the Danes and Swedes, and presently the Dutch,
were soon staking out claims in North America and the
West Indies, and his Most Catholic Majesty of France
heeded the papal settlement as little as any Protestant. The
wars of Europe extended themselves to these claims and
possessions.
In the long run the English were the most successful in this
scramble for overseas possessions. The Danes and
Swedes were too deeply entangled in the complicated
affairs of Germany to sustain effective expeditions abroad.
Sweden was wasted upon the German battlefields by a
picturesque king, Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant "Lion
of the North." The Dutch were the heirs of such small
settlements as Sweden made in America, and the Dutch
were too near French aggressions to hold their own against
the British. In the far East the chief rivals for empire were
the British, Dutch and French, and in America the British,
French and Spanish. The British had the supreme
advantage of a water frontier, the "silver streak" of the
English Channel, against Europe. The tradition of the Latin
Empire entangled them least.
France has always thought too much in terms of Europe.
Throughout the eighteenth century she was wasting her
opportunities of expansion in West and East alike in order
to dominate Spain, Italy and the German confusion. The
religious and political dissensions of Britain in the
seventeenth century had driven many of the English to seek
a permanent home in America. They struck root and
increased and multiplied, giving the British a great
advantage in the American struggle. In 1756 and 1760 the
French lost Canada to the British and their American
colonists, and a few years later the British trading company
found itself completely dominant over French, Dutch and
Portuguese in the peninsula of India. The great Mongol
Empire of Baber, Akbar and their successors had now far
gone in decay, and the story of its practical capture by a
London trading company, the British East India Company,
is one of the most extraordinary episodes in the whole
history of conquest.
This East India Company had been originally at the time of
its incorporation under Queen Elizabeth no more than a
company of sea adventurers. Step by step they had been
forced to raise troops and arm their ships. And now this
trading company, with its tradition of gain, found itself
dealing not merely in spices and dyes and tea and jewels,
but in the revenues and territories of princes and the
destinies of India. It had come to buy and sell, and it found
itself achieving a tremendous piracy. There was no one to
challenge its proceedings. Is it any wonder that its captains
and commanders and officials, nay, even its clerks and
common soldiers, came back to England loaded with
spoils?
Men under such circumstances, with a great and wealthy
land at their mercy, could not determine what they might or
might not do. It was a strange land to them, with a strange
sunlight; its brown people seemed a different race, outside
their range of sympathy; its mysterious temples sustained
fantastic standards of behaviour. Englishmen at home were
perplexed when presently these generals and officials
came back to make dark accusations against each other of
extortions and cruelties. Upon Clive Parliament passed a
vote of censure. He committed suicide in 1774. In 1788
Warren Hastings, a second great Indian administrator, was
impeached and acquitted (1792). It was a strange and
unprecedented situation in the world's history. The English
Parliament found itself ruling over a London trading
company, which in its turn was dominating an empire far
greater and more populous than all the domains of the
British crown. To the bulk of the English people India was a
remote, fantastic, almost inaccessible land, to which
adventurous poor young men went out, to return after many
years very rich and very choleric old gentlemen. It was
difficult for the English to conceive what the life of these
countless brown millions in the eastern sunshine could be.
Their imaginations declined the task. India remained
romantically unreal. It was impossible for the English,
therefore, to exert any effective supervision and control over
the company's proceedings.
And while the Western European powers were thus fighting
for these fantastic overseas empires upon every ocean in
the world, two great land conquests were in progress in
Asia. China had thrown off the Mongol yoke in 1360, and
flourished under the great native dynasty of the Mings until
1644. Then the Manchus, another Mongol people,
reconquered China and remained masters of China until
1912. Meanwhile Russia was pushing East and growing to
greatness in the world's affairs. The rise of this great central
power of the old world, which is neither altogether of the
East nor altogether of the West, is one of the utmost
importance to our human destiny. Its expansion is very
largely due to the appearance of a Christian steppe
people, the Cossacks, who formed a barrier between the
feudal agriculture of Poland and Hungary to the west and
the Tartar to the east. The Cossacks were the wild east of
Europe, and in many ways not unlike the wild west of the
United States in the middle nineteenth century. All who had
made Russia too hot to hold them, criminals as well as the
persecuted innocent, rebellious serfs, religious secretaries,
thieves, vagabonds, murderers, sought asylum in the
southern steppes and there made a fresh start and fought
for life and freedom against Pole, Russian and Tartar alike.
Doubtless fugitives from the Tartars to the east also
contributed to the Cossack mixture. Slowly these border
folk were incorporated in the Russian imperial service,
much as the highland clans of Scotland were converted into
regiments by the British government. New lands were
offered them in Asia. They became a weapon against the
dwindling power of the Mongolian nomads, first in
Turkestan and then across Siberia as far as the Amur.
The decay of Mongol energy in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries is very difficult to explain. Within two or
three centuries from the days of Jengis and Timurlane
Central Asia had relapsed from a period of world
ascendancy to extreme political impotence. Changes of
climate, unrecorded pestilences, infections of a malarial
type, may have played their part in this recession-which
may be only a temporary recession measured by the scale
of universal history-of the Central Asian peoples. Some
authorities think that the spread of Buddhist teaching from
China also had a pacifying influence upon them. At any
rate, by the sixteenth century the Mongol, Tartar and Turkish
peoples were no longer pressing outward, but were being
invaded, subjugated and pushed back both by Christian
Russia in the west and by China in the east.
All through the seventeenth century the Cossacks were
spreading eastward from European Russia, and settling
wherever they found agricultural conditions. Cordons of
forts and stations formed a moving frontier to these
settlements to the south, where the Turkomans were still
strong and active; to the north-east, however, Russia had
no frontier until she reached right to the Pacificƒ.
LIV. The American War of Independence
THE THIRD quarter of the eighteenth century thus saw the
remarkable and unstable spectacle of a Europe divided
against itself, and no longer with any unifying political or
religious idea, yet through the immense stimulation of
men's imaginations by the printed book, the printed map,
and the opportunity of the new ocean-going shipping, able
in a disorganized and contentious manner to dominate all
the coasts of the world. It was a planless, incoherent
ebullition of enterprise due to temporary and almost
accidental advantages over the rest of mankind. By virtue
of these advantages this new and still largely empty
continent of America was peopled mainly from Western
European sources, and South Africa and Australia and
New Zealand marked down as prospective homes for a
European population.
The motive that had sent Columbus to America and Vasco
da Gama to India was the perennial first motive of all
sailors since the beginning of things-trade. But while in the
already populous and productive East the trade motive
remained dominant, and the European settlements
remained trading settlements from which the European
inhabitants hoped to return home to spend their money, the
Europeans in America, dealing with communities at a very
much lower level of productive activity, found a new
inducement for persistence in the search for gold and
silver. Particularly did the mines of Spanish America yield
silver. The Europeans had to go to America not simply as
armed merchants but as prospectors, miners, searchers
after natural products, and presently as planters. In the north
they sought furs. Mines and plantations necessitated
settlements. They obliged people to set up permanent
overseas homes. Finally in some cases, as when the
English Puritans went to New England in the early
seventeenth century to escape religious persecution, when
in the eighteenth Oglethorpe sent people from the English
debtors' prisons to Georgia, and when in the end of the
eighteenth the Dutch sent orphans to the Cape of Good
Hope, the Europeans frankly crossed the seas to find new
homes for good. In the nineteenth century, and especially
after the coming of the steamship, the stream of European
emigration to the new empty lands of America and
Australia rose for some decades to the scale of a great
migration.
So there grew up permanent overseas populations of
Europeans, and the European culture was transplanted to
much larger areas than those in which it had been
developed. These new communities bringing a ready-
made civilization with them to these new lands grew up, as
it were, unplanned and unperceived; the statecraft of
Europe did not foresee them, and was unprepared with any
ideas about their treatment. The politicians and ministers of
Europe continued to regard them as essentially
expeditionary establishments, sources of revenue,
"possessions" and "dependencies," long after their
peoples had developed a keen sense of their separate
social life. And also they continued to treat them as
helplessly subject to the mother country long after the
population had spread inland out of reach of any effectual
punitive operations from the sea.
Because until right into the nineteenth century, it must be
remembered, the link of all these overseas empires was
the oceangoing sailing ship. On land the swiftest thing was
still the horse, and the cohesion and unity of political
systems on land was still limited by the limitations of horse
communications.
Now at the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century
the northern two-thirds of North America was under the
British crown. France had abandoned America. Except for
Brazil, which was Portuguese, and one or two small islands
and areas in French, British, Danish and Dutch hands,
Florida, Louisiana, California and all America to the south
was Spanish. It was the British colonies south of Maine and
Lake Ontario that first demonstrated the inadequacy of the
sailing ship to hold overseas populations together in one
political system.
These British colonies were very miscellaneous in their
origin and character. There were French, Swedish and
Dutch settlements as well as British; there were British
Catholics in Maryland and British ultra-Protestants in New
England, and while the New Englanders farmed their own
land and denounced slavery, the British in Virginia and the
south were planters employing a swelling multitude of
imported negro slaves. There was no natural common unity
in such states. To get from one to the other might mean a
coasting voyage hardly less tedious than the transatlantic
crossing. But the union that diverse origin and natural
conditions denied the British Americans was forced upon
them by the selfishness and stupidity of the British
government in London. They were taxed without any voice
in the spending of the taxes; their trade was sacrificed to
British interests; the highly profitable slave trade was
maintained by the British government in spite of the
opposition of the Virginians who-though quite willing to hold
and use slaves-feared to be swamped by an evergrowing
barbaric black population.
Britain at that time was lapsing towards an intenser form of
monarchy, and the obstinate personality of George III
(1760-1820) did much to force on a struggle between the
home and the colonial governments.
The conflict was precipitated by legislation which favoured
the London East India Company at the expense of the
American shipper. Three cargoes of tea which were
imported under the new conditions were thrown overboard
in Boston harbour by a band of men disguised as Indians
(1773). Fighting only began in 1775 when the British
government attempted to arrest two of the American
leaders at Lexington near Boston. The first shots were fired
in Lexington by the British; the first fighting occurred at
Concord.
So the American War of Independence began, though for
more than a year the colonists showed themselves
extremely unwilling to sever their links with the mother land.
It was not until the middle of 1776 that the Congress of the
insurgent states issued "The Declaration of Independence."
George Washington, who like many of the leading colonists
of the time had had a military training in the wars against
the French, was made commander-in-chief. In 1777 a
British general, General Burgoyne, in an attempt to reach
New York from Canada, was defeated at Freemans Farm
and obliged to surrender at Saratoga. In the same year the
French and Spanish declared war upon Great Britain,
greatly hampering her sea communications. A second
British army under General Cornwallis was caught in the
Yorktown peninsula in Virginia and obliged to capitulate in
1781. In 1783 peace was made in Paris, and the Thirteen
Colonies from Maine to Georgia became a union of
independent sovereign States. So the United States of
America came into existence. Canada remained loyal to
the British flag.
For four years these States had only a very feeble central
government under certain Articles of Confederation, and
they seemed destined to break up into separate
independent communities. Their immediate separation
was delayed by the hostility of the British and a certain
aggressiveness on the part of the French which brought
home to them the immediate dangers of division. A
Constitution was drawn up and ratified in 1788 establishing
a more efficient Federal government with a President
holding very considerable powers, and the weak sense of
national unity was invigorated by a second war with Britain
in 1812. Nevertheless the area covered by the States was
so wide and their interests so diverse at that time, that-
given only the means of communication then available-a
disintegration of the Union into separate states on the
European scale of size was merely a question of time.
Attendance at Washington meant a long, tedious and
insecure journey for the senators and congressmen of the
remoter districts, and the mechanical impediments to the
diffusion of a common education and a common literature
and intelligence were practically insurmountable. Forces
were at work in the world however that were to arrest the
process of differentiation altogether. Presently came the
river steamboat and then the railway and the telegraph to
save the United States from fragmentation, and weave its
dispersed people together again into the first of great
modern nations.
Twenty-two years later the Spanish colonies in America
were to follow the example of the Thirteen and break their
connection with Europe. But being more dispersed over the
continent and separated by great mountainous chains and
deserts and forests and by the Portuguese Empire of
Brazil, they did not achieve a union among themselves.
They became a constellation of republican states, very
prone at first to wars among themselves and to revolutions.
Brazil followed a rather different line towards the inevitable
separation. In 1807 the French armies under Napoleon had
occupied the mother country of Portugal, and the monarchy
had fled to Brazil. From that time on until they separated,
Portugal was rather a dependency of Brazil than Brazil of
Portugal. In 1822 Brazil declared itself a separate Empire
under Pedro I, a son of the Portuguese King. But the new
world has never been very favourable to monarchy. In 1889
the Emperor of Brazil was shipped off quietly to Europe,
and the United States of Brazil fell into line with the rest of
republican America.
LV. The French Revolution and the Restoration of
Monarchy in France
BRITAIN had hardly lost the Thirteen Colonies-in America
before a profound social and political convulsion at the very
heart of Grand Monarchy was to remind Europe still more
vividly of the essentially temporary nature of the political
arrangements of the world.
We have said that the French monarchy was the most
successful of the personal monarchies in Europe. It was the
envy and model of a multitude of competing and minor
courts. But it flourished on a basis of injustice that led to its
dramatic collapse. It was brilliant and aggressive, but it was
wasteful of the life and substance of its common people.
The clergy and nobility were protected from taxation by a
system of exemption that threw the whole burden of the
state upon the middle and lower classes. The peasants
were ground down by taxation; the middle classes were
dominated and humiliated by the nobility.
In 1787 this French monarchy found itself bankrupt and
obliged to call representatives of the different classes of the
realm into consultation upon the perplexities of defective
income and excessive expenditure. In 1789 the States
General, a gathering of the nobles, clergy and commons,
roughly equivalent to the earlier form of the British
Parliament, was called together at Versailles. It had not
assembled since 1610. For all that time France had been
an absolute monarchy. Now the people found a means of
expressing their long fermenting discontent. Disputes
immediately broke out between the three estates, due to
the resolve of the Third Estate, the Commons, to control the
Assembly. The Commons got the better of these disputes
and the States General became a National Assembly,
clearly resolved to keep the crown in order, as the British
Parliament kept the British crown in order. The king (Louis
XVI) prepared for a struggle and brought up troops from the
provinces. Whereupon Paris and France revolted.
The collapse of the absolute monarchy was very swift. The
grim-looking prison of the Bastille was stormed by the
people of Paris, and the insurrection spread rapidly
throughout France. In the east and north-west provinces
many chateaux belonging to the nobility were burnt by the
peasants, their title-deeds carefully destroyed, and the
owners murdered or driven away. In a month the ancient
and decayed system of the aristocratic order had
collapsed. Many of the leading princes and courtiers of the
queen's party fled abroad. A provisional city government
was set up in Paris and in most of the other large cities,
and a new armed force, the National Guard, a force
designed primarily and plainly to resist the forces of the
crown, was brought into existence by these municipal
bodies. The National Assembly found itself called upon to
create a new political and social system for a new age.
It was a task that tried the powers of that gathering to the
utmost. It made a great sweep of the chief injustices of the
absolutist regime; it abolished tax exemptions, serfdom,
aristocratic titles and privileges and sought to establish a
constitutional monarchy in Paris. The king abandoned
Versailles and its splendours and kept a diminished state
in the palace of the Tuileries in Paris.
For two years it seemed that the National Assembly might
struggle through to an effective modernized government.
Much of its work was sound and still endures, if much was
experimental and had to be undone. Much was ineffective.
There was a clearing up of the penal code; torture, arbitrary
imprisonment and persecutions for heresy were abolished.
The ancient provinces of France, Normandy, Burgundy and
the like gave place to eighty departments. Promotion to the
highest ranks in the army was laid open to men of every
class. An excellent and simple system of law courts was set
up, but its value was much vitiated by having the judges
appointed by popular election for short periods of time.
This made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the
judges, like the members of the Assembly, were forced to
play to the gallery. And the whole vast property of the church
was seized and administered by the state; religious
establishments not engaged in education or works of
charity were broken up, and the salaries of the clergy made
a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad thing
for the lower clergy in France, who were often scandalously
underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in
addition the choice of priests and bishops was made
elective, which struck at the very root idea of the Roman
Church, which centred everything upon the Pope, and in
which all authority is from above downward. Practically the
National Assembly wanted at one blow to make the church
in France Protestant, in organization if not in doctrine.
Everywhere there were disputes and conflicts between the
state priests created by the National Assembly and the
recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who were loyal to Rome.
In 1791 the experiment of Constitutional monarchy in
France was brought to an abrupt end by the action of the
king and queen, working in concert with their aristocratic
and monarchist friends abroad. Foreign armies gathered
on the Eastern frontier and one night in June the king and
queen and their children slipped away from the Tuileries
and fled to join the foreigners and the aristocratic exiles.
They were caught at Varennes and brought back to Paris,
and all France flamed up into a passion of patriotic
republicanism. A Republic was proclaimed, open war with
Austria and Prussia ensued, and the king was tried and
executed (January, 1793) on the model already set by
England, for treason to his people.
And now followed a strange phase in the history of the
French people. There arose a great flame of enthusiasm
for France and the Republic. There was to be an end to
compromise at home and abroad; at home royalists and
every form of disloyalty were to be stamped out; abroad
France was to be the protector and helper of all
revolutionaries. All Europe, all the world, was to become
Republican. The youth of France poured into the
Republican armies; a new and wonderful song spread
through the land, a song that still warms the blood like wine,
the Marseillaise. Before that chant and the leaping columns
of French bayonets and their enthusiastically served guns
the foreign armies rolled back; before the end of 1792 the
French armies had gone far beyond the utmost
achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on
foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy,
they had raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt
from Holland. Then the French Government did an unwise
thing. It had been exasperated by the expulsion of its
representative from England upon the execution of Louis,
and it declared war against England. It was an unwise thing
to do, because the revolution which had given France a
new enthusiastic infantry and a brilliant artillery released
from its aristocratic officers and many cramping conditions
had destroyed the discipline of the navy, and the English
were supreme upon the sea. And this provocation united all
England against France, whereas there had been at first a
very considerable liberal movement in Great Britain in
sympathy with the revolution.
Of the fight that France made in the next few years against
a European coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove
the Austrians for ever out of Belgium, and made Holland a
republic. The Dutch fleet, frozen in the Texel, surrendered to
a handful of cavalry without firing its guns. For some time
the French thrust towards Ita'y was hung up, and it was only
in 1796 that a new general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the
ragged and hungry republican armies in triumph across
Piedmont to Mantua and Verona. Says C. F. Atkinson,
"What astonished the Allies most of all was the number and
the velocity of the Republicans. These improvised armies
had in fact nothing to delay them. Tents were unprocurable
for want of money, untransportable for want of the
enormous number of wagons that would have been
required, and also unnecessary, for the discomfort that
would have caused wholesale desertion in professional
armies was cheerfully borne by the men of 1793-94.
Supplies for armies of then unheard-of size could not be
carried in convoys, and the French soon became familiar
with 'living on the country.' Thus 1793 saw the birth of the
modern system of war-rapidity of movement, full
development of national strength, bivouacs, requisitions
and force as against cautious manoeuvring, small
professional armies, tents and full rations, and chicane. The
first represented the decision-compelling spirit, the second
the spirit of risking little to gain a littleƒ."
And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting
the Marseillaise and fighting for la France, manifestly never
quite clear in their minds whether they were looting or
liberating the countries into which they poured, the
republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending itself in a far
less glorious fashion. The revolution was now under the
sway of a fanatical leader, Robespierre. This man is
difficult to judge; he was a man of poor physique, naturally
timid, and a prig. But he had that most necessary gift for
power, faith. He set himself to save the Republic as he
conceived it, and he imagined it could be saved by no other
man than he. So that to keep in power was to save the
Republic. The living spirit of the Republic, it seemed, had
sprung from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the
king. There were insurrections; one in the west, in the
district of La Vendée, where the people rose against the
conscription and against the dispossession of the orthodox
clergy, and were led by noblemen and priests; one in the
south, where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the
royalists of Toulon had admitted an English and Spanish
garrison. To which there seemed no more effectual reply
than to go on killing royalists.
The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady
slaughtering began. The invention of the guillotine was
opportune to this mood. The queen was guillotined, most of
Robespierre's antagonists were guillotined, atheists who
argued that there was no Supreme Being were guillotined;
day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine
chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of
Robespierre lived, it seemed, on blood; and needed more
and more, as an opium-taker needs more and more opium.
Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was
overthrown and guillotined. He was succeeded by a
Directory of five men which carried on the war of defence
abroad and held France together at home for five years.
Their reign formed a curious interlude in this history of
violent changes. They took things as they found them. The
propagandist zeal of the revolution carried the French
armies into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, south Germany
and north Italy. Everywhere kings were expelled and
republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated
the Directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures
of the liberated peoples to relieve the financial
embarrassment of the French Government. Their wars
became less and less the holy wars of freedom, and more
and more like the aggressive wars of the ancient regime.
The last feature of Grand Monarchy that France was
disposed to discard was her tradition of foreign policy. One
discovers it still as vigorous under the Directorate as if
there had been no revolution.
Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who
embodied in its intensest form this national egotism of the
French. He gave that country ten years of glory and the
humiliation of a final defeat. This was that same Napoleon
Bonaparte who had led the armies of the Directory to
victory in Italy.
Throughout the five years of the Directorate he had been
scheming and working for self-advancement. Gradually he
clambered to supreme power. He was a man of severely
limited understanding but of ruthless directness and great
energy. He had begun life as an extremist of the school of
Robespierre; he owed his first promotion to that side; but
he had no real grasp of the new forces that were working in
Europe. His utmost political imagination carried him to a
belated and tawdry attempt to restore the Western Empire.
He tried to destroy the remains of the old Holy Roman
Empire, intending to replace it by a new one centring upon
Paris. The Emperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy
Roman Emperor and became simply Emperor of Austria.
Napoleon divorced his French wife in order to marry an
Austrian princess.
He became practically monarch of France as First Consul
in 1799, and he made himself Emperor of France in 1804
in direct imitation of Charlemagne. He was crowned by the
Pope in Paris, taking the crown from the Pope and putting
it upon his own head himself as Charlemagne had directed.
His son was crowned King of Rome.
For some years Napoleon's reign was a career of victory.
He conquered most of Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia
and Austria, and dominated all Europe west of Russia. But
he never won the command of the sea from the British and
his fleets sustained a conclusive defeat inflicted by the
British Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar (1805). Spain rose
against him in 1808 and a British army under Wellington
thrust the French armies slowly northward out of the
peninsula. In 1811 Napoleon came into conflict with the
Tsar Alexander I, and in 1812 he invaded Russia with a
great conglomerate army of 600,000 men, that was
defeated and largely destroyed by the Russians and the
Russian winter. Germany rose against him, Sweden turned
against him. The French armies were beaten back and at
Fontainebleau Napoleon abdicated (1814). He was exiled
to Elba, returned to France for one last effort in 1815 and
was defeated by the allied British, Belgians and Prussians
at Waterloo. He died a British prisoner at St. Helena in
1821.
The forces released by the French revolution were wasted
and finished. A great Congress of the victorious allies met
at Vienna to restore as far as possible the state of affairs
that the great storm had rent to pieces. For nearly forty
years a sort of peace, a peace of exhausted effort, was
maintained in Europe.In his article, "French Revolutionary
Wars," in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
LVI. The Uneasy Peace in Europe That Followed the
Fall of Napoleon
TWO main causes prevented that period from being a
complete social and international peace, and prepared the
way for the cycle of wars between 1854 and 1871. The first
of these was the tendency of the royal courts concerned,
towards the restoration of unfair privilege and interference
with freedom of thought and writing and teaching. The
second was the impossible system of boundaries drawn by
the diplomatists of Vienna.
The inherent disposition of monarchy to march back
towards past conditions was first and most particularly
manifest in Spain. Here even the Inquisition was restored.
Across the Atlantic the Spanish colonies had followed the
example of the United States and revolted against the
European Great Power System, when Napoleon set his
brother Joseph on the Spanish throne in 1810. The George
Washington of South America was General Bolivar. Spain
was unable to suppress this revolt, it dragged on much as
the United States War of Independence had dragged on,
and at last the suggestion was made by Austria, in
accordance with the spirit of the Holy Alliance, that the
European monarch should assist Spain in this struggle.
This was opposed by Britain in Europe, but it was the
prompt action of President Monroe of the United States in
1823 which conclusively warned off this projected
monarchist restoration. He announced that the United
States would regard any extension of the European system
in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile act. Thus arose the
Monroe Doctrine, the doctrine that there must be no
extension of extra-American government in America, which
has kept the Great Power system out of America for nearly
a hundred years and permitted the new states of Spanish
America to work out their destinies along their own lines.
But if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies, it could at
least, under the protection of the Concert of Europe, do
what it chose in Europe. A popular insurrection in Spain
was crushed by a French army in 1823, with a mandate
from a European congress, and simultaneously Austria
suppressed a revolution in Naples.
In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by Charles X.
Charles set himself to destroy the liberty of the press and
universities, and to restore absolute government; the sum
of a billion francs was voted to compensate the nobles for
the chateau burnings and sequestrations of 1789. In 1830
Paris rose against this embodiment of the ancient regime,
and replaced him by Louis Philippe, the son of that Philip,
Duke of Orleans, who was executed during the Terror. The
other continental monarchies, in face of the open approval
of the revolution by Great Britain and a strong liberal
ferment in Germany and Austria, did not interfere in this
affair. After all, France was still a monarchy. This man Louis
Philippe (1830-48) remained the constitutional King of
France for eighteen years.
Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the
Congress of Vienna, which were provoked by the
reactionary proceedings of the monarchists. The stresses
that arose from the unscientific boundaries planned by the
diplomatists at Vienna gathered force more deliberately,
but they were even more dangerous to the peace of
mankind. It is extraordinarily inconvenient to administer
together the affairs of peoples speaking different
languages and so reading different literatures and having
different general ideas, especially if those differences are
exacerbated by religious disputes. Only some strong
mutual interest, such as the common defensive needs of
the Swiss mountaineers, can justify a close linking of
peoples of dissimilar languages and faiths; and even in
Switzerland there is the utmost local autonomy. When, as in
Macedonia, populations are mixed in a patchwork of
villages and districts, the cantonal system is imperatively
needed. But if the reader will look at the map of Europe as
the Congress of Vienna drew it, he will see that this
gathering seems almost as if it had planned the maximum
of local exasperation.
It destroyed the Dutch Republic, quite needlessly, it lumped
together the Protestant Dutch with the French-speaking
Catholics of the old Spanish (Austrian) Netherlands, and
set up a kingdom of the Netherlands. It handed over not
merely the old republic of Venice, but all of North Italy as far
as Milan to the German-speaking Austrians. French-
speaking Savoy it combined with pieces of Italy to restore
the kingdom of Sardinia. Austria and Hungary, already a
sufficiently explosive mixture of discordant nationalities,
Germans, Hungarians, Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs,
Roumanians, and now Italians, was made still more
impossible by confirming Austria's Polish acquisitions of
1772 and 1795. The Catholic and republican-spirited
Polish people were chiefly given over to the less civilized
rule of the Greek-orthodox Tsar, but important districts went
to Protestant Prussia. The Tsar was also confirmed in his
acquisition of the entirely alien Finns. The very dissimilar
Norwegian and Swedish peoples were bound together
under one king. Germany, the reader will see, was left in a
particularly dangerous state of muddle. Prussia and Austria
were both partly in and partly out of a German
confederation, which included a multitude of minor states.
The King of Denmark came into the German confederation
by virtue of certain German-speaking possessions in
Holstein. Luxembourg was included in the German
confederation, though its ruler was also King of the
Netherlands, and though many of its peoples talked French.
Here was a complete disregard of the fact that the people
who talk German and base their ideas on German
literature, the people who talk Italian and base their ideas
on Italian literature, and the people who talk Polish and
base their ideas on Polish literature, will all be far better off
and most helpful and least obnoxious to the rest of mankind
if they conduct their own affairs in their own idiom within the
ring-fence of their own speech. Is it any wonder that one of
the most popular songs in Germany during this period
declared that wherever the German tongue was spoken,
there was the German Fatherland!
In 1830 French-speaking Belgium, stirred up by the current
revolution in France, revolted against its Dutch association
in the kingdom of the Netherlands. The powers, terrified at
the possibilities of a republic or of annexation to France,
hurried in to pacify this situation, and gave the Belgians a
monarch, Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. There were
also ineffectual revolts in Italy and Germany in 1830, and a
much more serious one in Russian Poland. A republican
government held out in Warsaw for a year against Nicholas
I (who succeeded Alexander in 1825), and was then
stamped out of existence with great violence and cruelty.
The Polish language was banned, and the Greek Orthodox
church was substituted for the Roman Catholic as the state
religionƒ.
In 1821 there was an insurrection of the Greeks against the
Turks. For six years they fought a desperate war, while the
governments of Europe looked on. Liberal opinion
protested against this inactivity; volunteers from every
European country joined the insurgents, and at last Britain,
France and Russia took joint action. The Turkish fleet was
destroyed by the French and English at the battle of
Navarino (1827), and the Tsar invaded Turkey. By the treaty
of Adrianople (1829) Greece was declared free, but she
was not permitted to resume her ancient republican
traditions. A German king was found for Greece, one
Prince Otto of Bavaria, and Christian governors were set
up in the Danubian provinces (which are now Roumania)
and Serbia (a part of the Jugo-Slav region). Much blood
had still to run however before the Turk was altogether
expelled from these lands.
LVII. The Development of Material Knowledge
THROUGHOUT the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and the opening years of the nineteenth century, while these
conflicts of the powers and princes were going on in
Europe, and the patchwork of the treaty of Westphalia
(1648) was changing kaleidoscopically into the patchwork
of the treaty of Vienna (1815), and while the sailing ship
was spreading European influence throughout the world, a
steady growth of knowledge and a general clearing up of
men's ideas about the world in which they lived was in
progress in the European and Europeanized world.
It went on disconnected from political life, and producing
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no
striking immediate results in political life. Nor was it
affecting popular thought very profoundly during this period.
These reactions were to come later, and only in their full
force in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was a
process that went on chiefly in a small world of prosperous
and independent-spirited people. Without what the English
call the "private gentleman," the scientific process could not
have begun in Greece, and could not have been renewed in
Europe. The universities played a part but not a leading
part in the philosophical and scientific thought of this
period. Endowed learning is apt to be timid and
conservative learning, lacking in initiative and resistent to
innovation, unless it has the spur of contact with
independent minds.
We have already noted the formation of the Royal Society
in 1662 and its work in realizing the dream of Bacon's New
Atlantis. Throughout the eighteenth century there was much
clearing up of general ideas about matter and motion,
much mathematical advance, a systematic development of
the use of optical glass in microscope and telescope, a
renewed energy in classificatory natural history, a great
revival of anatomical science. The science of geology-
foreshadowed by Aristotle and anticipated by Leonardo da
Vinci (1452-1519)-began its great task of interpreting the
Record of the Rocks.
The progress of physical science reacted upon metallurgy.
Improved metallurgy, affording the possibility of a larger
and bolder handling of masses of metal and other
materials, reacted upon practical inventions. Machinery on
a new scale and in a new abundance appeared to
revolutionize industry.
In 1804 Trevithick adapted the Watt engine to transport and
made the first locomotive. In 1825 the first railway, between
Stockton and Darlington, was opened, and Stephenson's
"Rocket," with a thirteen-ton train, got up to a speed of forty-
four miles per hour. From 1830 onward railways multiplied.
By the middle of the century a network of railways had
spread all over Europe.
Here was a sudden change in what had long been a fixed
condition of human life, the maximum rate of land transport.
After the Russian disaster, Napoleon travelled from near
Vilna to Paris in 312 hours. This was a journey of about
1,400 miles. He was travelling with every conceivable
advantage, and he averaged under 5 miles an hour. An
ordinary traveller could not have done this distance in twice
the time. These were about the same maximum rates of
travel as held good between Rome and Gaul in the first
century A.D. Then suddenly came this tremendous change.
The railways reduced this journey for any ordinary traveller
to less than forty-eight hours. That is to say, they reduced
the chief European distances to about a tenth of what they
had been. They made it possible to carry out administrative
work in areas ten times as great as any that had hitherto
been workable under one administration. The full
significance of that possibility in Europe still remains to be
realized. Europe is still netted in boundaries drawn in the
horse and road era. In America the effects were
immediate. To the United States of America, sprawling
westward, it meant the possibility of a continuous access to
Washington, however far the frontier travelled across the
continent. It meant unity, sustained on a scale that would
otherwise have been impossible.
The steamboat was, if anything, a little ahead of the steam
engine in its earlier phases. There was a steamboat, the
Charlotte Dundas, on the Firth of Clyde Canal in 1802, and
in 1807 an American named Fulton had a steamer, the
Clermont, with British-built engines, upon the Hudson River
above New York. The first steamship to put to sea was also
an American, the Phoenix, which went from New York
(Hoboken) to Philadelphia. So, too, was the first ship using
steam (she also had sails) to cross the Atlantic, the
Savannah (1819). All these were paddle-wheel boats and
paddlewheel boats are not adapted to work in heavy seas.
The paddles smash too easily, and the boat is then
disabled. The screw steamship followed rather slowly.
Many difficulties had to be surmounted before the screw
was a practicable thing. Not until the middle of the century
did the tonnage of steamships upon the sea begin to
overhaul that of sailing ships. After that the evolution in sea
transport was rapid. For the first time men began to cross
the seas and oceans with some certainty as to the date of
their arrival. The transatlantic crossing, which had been an
uncertain adventure of several weeks-which might stretch to
months-was accelerated, until in 1910 it was brought down,
in the case of the fastest boats, to under five days, with a
practically notifiable hour of arrival.
Concurrently with the development of steam transport upon
land and sea a new and striking addition to the facilities of
human intercourse arose out of the investigations of Volta,
Galvani and Faraday into various electrical phenomena.
The electric telegraph came into existence in 1835. The
first underseas cable was laid in 1851 between France and
England. In a few years the telegraph system had spread
over the civilized world, and news which had hitherto
travelled slowly from point to point became practically
simultaneous throughout the earth.
These things, the steam railway and the electric telegraph,
were to the popular imagination of the middle nineteenth
century the most striking and revolutionary of inventions, but
they were only the most conspicuous and clumsy first fruits
of a far more extensive process. Technical knowledge and
skill were developing with an extraordinary rapidity, and to
an extraordinary extent measured by the progress of any
previous age. Far less conspicuous at first in everyday life,
but finally far more important, was the extension of man's
power over various structural materials. Before the middle
of the eighteenth century iron was reduced from its ores by
means of wood charcoal, was handled in small pieces, and
hammered and wrought into shape. It was material for a
craftsman. Quality and treatment were enormously
dependent upon the experience and sagacity of the
individual iron-worker. The largest masses of iron that could
be dealt with under those conditions amounted at most (in
the sixteenth century) to two or three tons. (There was a
very definite upward limit, therefore, to the size of cannon.)
The blast-furnace rose in the eighteenth century and
developed with the use of coke. Not before the eighteenth
century do we find rolled sheet iron (1728) and rolled rods
and bars (1783). Nasmyth's steam hammer came as late
as 1838.
The ancient world, because of its metallurgical inferiority,
could not use steam. The steam engine, even the primitive
pumping engine, could not develop before sheet iron was
available. The early engines seem to the modern eye very
pitiful and clumsy bits of ironmongery, but they were the
utmost that the metallurgical science of the time could do.
As late as 1856 came the Bessemer process, and
presently (1864) the open-hearth process, in which steel
and every sort of iron could be melted, purified and cast in
a manner and upon a scale hitherto unheard of. To-day in
the electric furnace one may see tons of incandescent steel
swirling about like boiling milk in a saucepan. Nothing in the
previous practical advances of mankind is comparable in
its consequences to the complete mastery over enormous
masses of steel and iron and over their texture and quality
which man has now achieved. The railways and early
engines of all sorts were the mere first triumphs of the new
metallurgical methods. Presently came ships of iron and
steel, vast bridges, and a new way of building with steel
upon a gigantic scale. Men realized too late that they had
planned their railways with far too timid a gauge, that they
could have organized their travelling with far more
steadiness and comfort upon a much bigger scale.
Before the nineteenth century there were no ships in the
world much over 2,000 tons burthen; now there is nothing
wonderful about a 50,000-ton liner. There are people who
sneer at this kind of progress as being a progress in "mere
size," but that sort of sneering merely marks the intellectual
limitations of those who indulge in it. The great ship or the
steel-frame building is not, as they imagine, a magnified
version of the small ship or building of the past; it is a thing
different in kind, more lightly and strongly built, of finer and
stronger materials; instead of being a thing of precedent
and rule-of-thumb, it is a thing of subtle and intricate
calculation. In the old house or ship, matter was dominant-
the material and its needs had to be slavishly obeyed; in
the new, matter had been captured, changed, coerced.
Think of the coal and iron and sand dragged out of the
banks and pits, wrenched, wrought, molten and cast, to be
flung at last, a slender glittering pinnacle of steel and glass,
six hundred feet above the crowded city!
We have given these particulars of the advance in man's
knowledge of the metallurgy of steel and its results by way
of illustration. A parallel story could be told of the metallurgy
of copper and tin, and of a multitude of metals, nickel and
aluminum to name but two, unknown before the nineteenth
century dawned. It is in this great and growing mastery over
substances, over different sorts of glass, over rocks and
plasters and the like, over colours and textures, that the
main triumphs of the mechanical revolution have thus far
been achieved. Yet we are still in the stage of the first fruits
in the matter. We have the power, but we have still to learn
how to use our power. Many of the first employments of
these gifts of science have been vulgar, tawdry, stupid or
horrible. The artist and the adaptor have still hardly begun
to work with the endless variety of substances now at their
disposal.
Parallel with this extension of mechanical possibilities the
new science of electricity grew up. It was only in the
eighties of the nineteenth century that this body of enquiry
began to yield results to impress the vulgar mind. Then
suddenly came electric light and electric traction, and the
transmutation of forces, the possibility of sending power,
that could be changed into mechanical motion or light or
heat as one chose, along a copper wire, as water is sent
along a pipe, began to come through to the ideas of
ordinary peopleƒ.
The British and French were at first the leading peoples in
this great proliferation of knowledge; but presently the
Germans, who had learnt humility under Napoleon, showed
such zeal and pertinacity in scientific enquiry as to overhaul
these leaders. British science was largely the creation of
Englishmen and Scotchmen working outside the ordinary
centres of erudition.
The universities of Britain were at this time in a state of
educational retrogression, largely given over to a pedantic
conning of the Latin and Greek classics. French education,
too, was dominated by the classical tradition of the Jesuit
schools, and consequently it was not difficult for the
Germans to organize a body of investigators, small indeed
in relation to the possibilities of the case, but large in
proportion to the little band of British and French inventors
and experimentalists. And though this work of research and
experiment was making Britain and France the most rich
and powerful countries in the world, it was not making
scientific and inventive men rich and powerful. There is a
necessary unworldliness about a sincere scientific man; he
is too preoccupied with his research to plan and scheme
how to make money out of it. The economic exploitation of
his discoveries falls very easily and naturally, therefore, into
the hands of a more acquisitive type; and so we find that
the crops of rich men which every fresh phase of scientific
and technical progress has produced in Great Britain,
though they have not displayed quite the same passionate
desire to insult and kill the goose that laid the national
golden eggs as the scholastic and clerical professions,
have been quite content to let that profitable creature
starve. Inventors and discoverers came by nature, they
thought, for cleverer people to profit by.
In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German
"learned" did not display the same vehement hatred of the
new learning. They permitted its development. The German
business man and manufacturer again had not quite the
same contempt for the man of science as had his British
competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be
a cultivated crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did
concede, therefore, a certain amount of opportunity to the
scientific mind; their public expenditure on scientific work
was relatively greater, and this expenditure was abundantly
rewarded. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the
German scientific worker had made German a necessary
language for every science student who wished to keep
abreast with the latest work in his department, and in
certain branches, and particularly in chemistry, Germany
acquired a very great superiority over her western
neighbours. The scientific effort of the sixties and seventies
in Germany began to tell after the eighties, and the German
gained steadily upon Britain and France in technical and
industrial prosperity.
A fresh phase in the history of invention opened when in the
eighties a new type of engine came into use, an engine in
which the expansive force of an explosive mixture replaced
the expansive force of steam. The light, highly efficient
engines that were thus made possible were applied to the
automobile, and developed at last to reach such a pitch of
lightness and efficiency as to render flight-long known to be
possible-a practical achievement. A successful flying
machine-but not a machine large enough to take up a
human body-was made by Professor Langley of the
Smithsonian Institute of Washington as early as 1897. By
1909 the aeroplane was available for human locomotion.
There had seemed to be a pause in the increase of human
speed with the perfection of railways and automobile road
traction, but with the flying machine came fresh reductions
in the effective distance between one point of the earth's
surface and another. In the eighteenth century the distance
from London to Edinburgh was an eight days' journey; in
1918 the British Civil Air Transport Commission reported
that the journey from London to Melbourne, halfway round
the earth, would probably in a few years' time be
accomplished in that same period of eight days.
Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking
reductions in the time distances of one place from another.
They are merely one aspect of a much profounder and
more momentous enlargement of human possibility. The
science of agriculture and agricultural chemistry, for
instance, made quite parallel advances during the
nineteenth century. Men learnt so to fertilize the soil as to
produce quadruple and quintuple the crops got from the
same area in the seventeenth century. There was a still
more extraordinary advance in medical science; the
average duration of life rose, the daily efficiency increased,
the waste of life through ill-health diminished.
Now here altogether we have such a change in human life
as to constitute a fresh phase of history. In a little more than
a century this mechanical revolution has been brought
about. In that time man made a stride in the material
conditions of his life vaster than he had done during the
whole long interval between the palaeolithic stage and the
age of cultivation, or between the days of Pepi in Egypt and
those of George III. A new gigantic material framework for
human affairs has come into existence. Clearly it demands
great readjustments of our social, economical and political
methods. But these readjustments have necessarily waited
upon the development of the mechanical revolution, and
they are still only in their opening stage to-day.
LVIII. The Industrial Revolution
THERE is a tendency in many histories to confuse together
what we have here called the mechanical revolution, which
was an entirely new thing in human experience arising out
of the development of organized science, a new step like
the invention of agriculture or the discovery of metals, with
something else, quite different in its origins, something for
which there was already an historical precedent, the social
and financial development which is called the industrial
revolution. The two processes were going on together, they
were constantly reacting upon each other, but they were in
root and essence different. There would have been an
industrial revolution of sorts if there had been no coal, no
steam, no machinery; but in that case it would probably
have followed far more closely upon the lines of the social
and financial developments of the later years of the Roman
Republic. It would have repeated the story of dispossessed
free cultivators, gang labour, great estates, great financial
fortunes, and a socially destructive financial process. Even
the factory method came before power and machinery.
Factories were the product not of machinery, but of the
"division of labour." Drilled and sweated workers were
making such things as millinery cardboard boxes and
furniture, and colouring maps and book illustrations and so
forth, before even water-wheels had been used for
industrial purposes. There were factories in Rome in the
days of Augustus. New books, for instance, were dictated
to rows of copyists in the factories of the book-sellers. The
attentive student of Defoe and of the political pamphlets of
Fielding will realize that the idea of herding poor people
into establishments to work collectively for their living was
already current in Britain before the close of the
seventeenth century. There are intimations of it even as
early as More's Utopia (1516). It was a social and not a
mechanical development.
Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social
and economic history of western Europe was in fact
retreading the path along which the Roman state had gone
in the last three centuries B.C. But the political disunions of
Europe, the political convulsions against monarchy, the
recalcitrance of the common folk and perhaps also the
greater accessibility of the western European intelligence
to mechanical ideas and inventions, turned the process into
quite novel directions. Ideas of human solidarity, thanks to
Christianity, were far more widely diffused in the newer
European world, political power was not so concentrated,
and the man of energy anxious to get rich turned his mind,
therefore, very willingly from the ideas of the slave and of
gang labour to the idea of mechanical power and the
machine.
The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical
invention and discovery, was a new thing in human
experience and it went on regardless of the social, political,
economic and industrial consequences it might produce.
The industrial revolution, on the other hand, like most other
human affairs, was and is more and more profoundly
changed and deflected by the constant variation in human
conditions caused by the mechanical revolution. And the
essential difference between the amassing of riches, the
extinction of small farmers and small business men, and the
phase of big finance in the latter centuries of the Roman
Republic on the one hand, and the very similar
concentration of capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries on the other, lies in the profound difference in the
character of labour that the mechanical revolution was
bringing about. The power of the old world was human
power; everything depended ultimately upon the driving
power of human muscle, the muscle of ignorant and
subjugated men. A little animal muscle, supplied by draft
oxen, horse traction and the like, contributed. Where a
weight had to be lifted, men lifted it; where a rock had to be
quarried, men chipped it out; where a field had to be
ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it; the Roman equivalent
of the steamship was the galley with its bank of sweating
rowers. A vast proportion of mankind in the early
civilizations were employed in purely mechanical drudgery.
At its onset, power-driven machinery did not seem to
promise any release from such unintelligent toil. Great
gangs of men were employed in excavating canals, in
making railway cuttings and embankments, and the like.
The number of miners increased enormously. But the
extension of facilities and the output of commodities
increased much more. And as the nineteenth century went
on, the plain logic of the new situation asserted itself more
clearly. Human beings were no longer wanted as a source
of mere indiscriminated power. What could be done
mechanically by a human being could be done faster and
better by a machine. The human being was needed now
only where choice and intelligence had to be exercised.
Human beings were wanted only as human beings. The
drudge, on whom all the previous civilizations had rested,
the creature of mere obedience, the man whose brains
were superfluous, had become unnecessary to the welfare
of mankind.
This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture
and mining as it was of the newest metallurgical processes.
For ploughing, sowing and harvesting, swift machines
came forward to do the work of scores of men. The Roman
civilization was built upon cheap and degraded human
beings; modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap
mechanical power. For a hundred years power has been
getting cheaper and labour dearer. If for a generation or so
machinery has had to wait its turn in the mine, it is simply
because for a time men were cheaper than machinery.
Now here was a change-over of quite primary importance
in human affairs. The chief solicitude of the rich and of the
ruler in the old civilization had been to keep up a supply of
drudges. As the nineteenth century went on, it became
more and more plain to the intelligent directive people that
the common man had now to be something better than a
drudge. He had to be educated-if only to secure "industrial
efficiency." He had to understand what he was about. From
the days of the first Christian propaganda, popular
education had been smouldering in Europe, just as it had
smouldered in Asia wherever Islam has set its foot,
because of the necessity of making the believer understand
a little of the belief by which he is saved, and of enabling
him to read a little in the sacred books by which his belief is
conveyed. Christian controversies, with their competition
for adherents, ploughed the ground for the harvest of
popular education. In England, for instance, by the thirties
and forties of the nineteenth century, the disputes of the
sects and the necessity of catching adherents young had
produced a series of competing educational organizations
for children, the church "National" schools, the dissenting
"British" schools, and even Roman Catholic elementary
schools. The second half of the nineteenth century was a
period of rapid advance in popular education throughout all
the Westernized world. There was no parallel advance in
the education of the upper classes-some advance, no
doubt, but nothing to correspond-and so the great gulf that
had divided that world hitherto into the readers and the non-
reading mass became little more than a slightly perceptible
difference in educational level. At the back of this process
was the mechanical revolution, apparently regardless of
social conditions, but really insisting inexorably upon the
complete abolition of a totally illiterate class throughout the
world.
The economic revolution of the Roman Republic had never
been clearly apprehended by the common people of Rome.
The ordinary Roman citizen never saw the changes through
which he lived, clearly and comprehensively as we see
them. But the industrial revolution, as it went on towards the
end of the nineteenth century, was more and more distinctly
seen as one whole process by the common people it was
affecting, because presently they could read and discuss
and communicate, and because they went about and saw
things as no commonalty had ever done before.
LIX. The Development of Modern Political and Social
Ideas
THE INSTITUTIONS and customs and political ideas of the
ancient civilizations grew up slowly, age by age, no man
designing and no man foreseeing. It was only in that great
century of human adolescence, the sixth century B.C., that
men began to think clearly about their relations to one
another, and first to question and first propose to alter and
rearrange the established beliefs and laws and methods of
human government.
We have told of the glorious intellectual dawn of Greece
and Alexandria, and how presently the collapse of the
slave-holding civilizations and the clouds of religious
intolerance and absolutist government darkened the
promise of that beginning. The light of fearless thinking did
not break through the European obscurity again effectually
until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We have tried to
show something of the share of the great winds of Arab
curiosity and Mongol conquest in this gradual clearing of
the mental skies of Europe. And at first it was chiefly
material knowledge that increased. The first fruits of the
recovered manhood of the race were material
achievements and material power. The science of human
relationship, of individual and social psychology, of
education and of economics, are not only more subtle and
intricate in themselves but also bound up inextricably with
much emotional matter. The advances made in them have
been slower and made against greater opposition. Men will
listen dispassionately to the most diverse suggestions
about stars or molecules, but ideas about our ways of life
touch and reflect upon everyone about us.
And just as in Greece the bold speculations of Plato came
before Aristotle's hard search for fact, so in Europe the first
political enquiries of the new phase were put in the form of
"Utopian" stories, directly imitated from Plato's Republic
and his Laws. Sir Thomas More's Utopia is a curious
imitation of Plato that bore fruit in a new English poor law.
The Neapolitan Campanella's City of the Sun was more
fantastic and less fruitful.
By the end of the seventeenth century we find a
considerable and growing literature of political and social
science was being produced. Among the pioneers in this
discussion was John Locke, the son of an English
republican, an Oxford scholar who first directed his
attention to chemistry and medicine. His treatises on
government, toleration and education show a mind fully
awake to the possibilities of social reconstruction. Parallel
with and a little later than John Locke in England,
Montesquieu (1689-1755) in France subjected social,
political and religious institutions to a searching and
fundamental analysis. He stripped the magical prestige
from the absolutist monarchy in France. He shares with
Locke the credit for clearing away many of the false ideas
that had hitherto prevented deliberate and conscious
attempts to reconstruct human society.
The generation that followed him in the middle and later
decades of the eighteenth century was boldly speculative
upon the moral and intellectual clearings he had made. A
group of brilliant writers, the "Encyclopaedists," mostly
rebel spirits from the excellent schools of the Jesuits, set
themselves to scheme out a new world (1766). Side by
side with the Encyclopaedists were the Economists or
Physiocrats, who were making bold and crude enquiries
into the production and distribution of food and goods.
Morelly, the author of the Code de la Nature, denounced the
institution of private property and proposed a communistic
organization of society. He was the precursor of that large
and various school of collectivist thinkers in the nineteenth
century who are lumped together as Socialists.
What is Socialism? There are a hundred definitions of
Socialism and a thousand sects of Socialists. Essentially
Socialism is no more and no less than a criticism of the
idea of property in the light of the public good. We may
review the history of that idea through the ages very briefly.
That and the idea of internationalism are the two cardinal
ideas upon which most of our political life is turning.
The idea of property arises out of the combative instincts of
the species. Long before men were men, the ancestral ape
was a proprietor. Primitive property is what a beast will
fight for. The dog and his bone, the tigress and her lair, the
roaring stag and his herd, these are proprietorship blazing.
No more nonsensical expression is conceivable in
sociology than the term "primitive communism." The Old
Man of the family tribe of early palaelithic times insisted
upon his proprietorship in his wives and daughters, in his
tools, in his visible universe. If any other man wandered into
his visible universe he fought him, and if he could he slew
him. The tribe grew in the course of ages, as Atkinson
showed convincingly in his Primal Law, by the gradual
toleration by the Old Man of the existence of the younger
men, and of their proprietorship in the wives they captured
from outside the tribe, and in the tools and ornaments they
made and the game they slew. Human society grew by a
compromise between this one's property and that. It was a
compromise with instinct which was forced upon men by
the necessity of driving some other tribe out of its visible
universe. If the hills and forests and streams were not your
land or my land, it was because they had to be our land.
Each of us would have preferred to have it my land, but that
would not work. In that case the other fellows would have
destroyed us. Society, therefore, is from its beginning a
mitigation of ownership. Ownership in the beast and in the
primitive savage was far more intense a thing than it is in
the civilized world to-day. It is rooted more strongly in our
instincts than in our reason.
In the natural savage and in the untutored man to-day there
is no limitation to the sphere of ownership. Whatever you
can fight for, you can own; women-folk, spared captive,
captured beast, forest glade, stone-pit or what not. As the
community grew, a sort of law came to restrain internecine
fighting, men developed rough-and-ready methods of
settling proprietorship. Men could own what they were the
first to make or capture or claim. It seemed natural that a
debtor who could not pay should become the property of
his creditor. Equally natural was it that after claiming a
patch of land a man should exact payments from anyone
who wanted to use it. It was only slowly, as the possibilities
of organized life dawned on men, that this unlimited
property in anything whatever began to be recognized as a
nuisance. Men found themselves born into a universe all
owned and claimed, nay! they found themselves born
owned and claimed. The social struggles of the earlier
civilization are difficult to trace now, but the history we have
told of the Roman Republic shows a community waking up
to the idea that debts may become a public inconvenience
and should then be repudiated, and that the unlimited
ownership of land is also an inconvenience. We find that
later Babylonia severely limited the rights of property in
slaves. Finally, we find in the teaching of that great
revolutionist, Jesus of Nazareth, such an attack upon
property as had never been before. Easier it was, he said,
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the
owner of great possessions to enter the kingdom of
heaven. A steady, continuous criticism of the permissible
scope of property seems to have been going on in the
world for the last twenty-five or thirty centuries. Nineteen
hundred years after Jesus of Nazareth we find all the world
that has come under the Christian teaching persuaded that
there could be no property in human beings. And also the
idea that "a man may do what he likes with his own" was
very much shaken in relation to other sorts of property.
But this world of the closing eighteenth century was still only
in the interrogative stage in this matter. It had got nothing
clear enough, much less settled enough, to act upon. One
of its primary impulses was to protect property against the
greed and waste of kings and the exploitation of noble
adventurers. It was largely to protect private property from
taxation that the French Revolution began. But the
equalitarian formulae of the Revolution carried it into a
criticism of the very property it had risen to protect. How
can men be free and equal when numbers of them have no
ground to stand upon and nothing to eat, and the owners
will neither feed nor lodge them unless they toil?
Excessively-the poor complained.
To which riddle the reply of one important political group
was to set about "dividing up." They wanted to intensify and
universalize property. Aiming at the same end by another
route, there were the primitive socialists-or, to be more
exact, communists-who wanted to "abolish" private
property altogether. The state (a democratic state was of
course understood) was to own all property.
It is paradoxical that different men seeking the same ends
of liberty and happiness should propose on the one hand to
make property as absolute as possible, and on the other to
put an end to it altogether. But so it was. And the clue to this
paradox is to be found in the fact that ownership is not one
thing but a multitude of different things.
It was only as the nineteenth century developed that men
began to realize that property was not one simple thing, but
a great complex of ownerships of different values and
consequences, that many things (such as one's body, the
implements of an artist, clothing, toothbrushes) are very
profoundly and incurably one's personal property, and that
there is a very great range of things, railways, machinery of
various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens, pleasure boats,
for example, which need each to be considered very
particularly to determine how far and under what limitations
it may come under private ownership, and how far it falls
into the public domain and may be administered and let out
by the state in the collective interest. On the practical side
these questions pass into politics, and the problem of
making and sustaining efficient state administration. They
open up issues in social psychology, and interact with the
enquiries of educational science. The criticism of property
is still a vast and passionate ferment rather than a science.
On the one hand are the Individualists, who would protect
and enlarge our present freedoms with what we possess,
and on the other the Socialists who would in many
directions pool our ownerships and restrain our proprietary
acts. In practice one will find every gradation between the
extreme individualist, who will scarcely tolerate a tax of any
sort to support a government, and the communist who
would deny any possessions at all. The ordinary socialist of
to-day is what is called a collectivist; he would allow a
considerable amount of private property but put such affairs
as education, transport, mines, land-owning, most mass
productions of staple articles, and the like, into the hands of
a highly organized state. Nowadays there does seem to be
a gradual convergence of reasonable men towards a
moderate socialism scientifically studied and planned. It is
realized more and more clearly that the untutored man does
not co-operate easily and successfully in large
undertakings, and that every step towards a more complex
state and every function that the state takes over from
private enterprise, necessitates a corresponding
educational advance and the organization of a proper
criticism and control. Both the press and the political
methods of the contemporary state are far too crude for any
large extension of collective activities.
But for a time the stresses between employer and
employed and particularly between selfish employers and
reluctant workers, led to a world-wide dissemination of the
very harsh and elementary form of communism which is
associated with the name of Marx. Marx based his theories
on a belief that men's minds are limited by their economic
necessities, and that there is a necessary conflict of
interests in our present civilization between the prosperous
and employing classes of people and the employed mass.
With the advance in education necessitated by the
mechanical revolution, this great employed majority will
become more and more class-conscious and more and
more solid in antagonism to the (class-conscious) ruling
minority. In some way the class-conscious workers would
seize power, he prophesied, and inaugurate a new social
state. The antagonism, the insurrection, the possible
revolution are understandable enough, but it does not follow
that a new social state or anything but a socially destructive
process will ensue. Put to the test in Russia, Marxism, as
we shall note later, has proved singularly uncreative.
Marx sought to replace national antagonism by class
antagonisms; Marxism has produced in succession a First,
a Second and a Third Workers' International. But from the
starting point of modern individualistic thought it is also
possible to reach international ideas. From the days of that
great English economist, Adam Smith, onward there has
been an increasing realization that for world-wide
prosperity free and unencumbered trade about the earth is
needed. The individualist with his hostility to the state is
hostile also to tariffs and boundaries and all the restraints
upon free act and movement that national boundaries seem
to justify. It is interesting to see two lines of thought, so
diverse in spirit, so different in substance as this class-war
socialism of the Marxists and the individualistic freetrading
philosophy of the British business men of the Victorian age
heading at last, in spite of these primary differences,
towards the same intimations of a new world-wide
treatment of human affairs outside the boundaries and
limitations of any existing state. The logic of reality triumphs
over the logic of theory. We begin to perceive that from
widely divergent starting points individualist theory and
socialist theory are part of a common search, a search for
more spacious social and political ideas and
interpretations, upon which men may contrive to work
together, a search that began again in Europe and has
intensified as men's confidence in the ideas of the Holy
Roman Empire and in Christendom decayed, and as the
age of discovery broadened their horizons from the world of
the Mediterranean to the whole wide world.
To bring this description of the elaboration and
development of social, economic and political ideas right
down to the discussions of the present day, would be to
introduce issues altogether too controversial for the scope
and intentions of this book. But regarding these things, as
we do here, from the vast perspectives of the student of
world history, we are bound to recognize that this
reconstruction of these directive ideas in the human mind is
still an unfinished task-we cannot even estimate yet how
unfinished the task may be. Certain common beliefs do
seem to be emerging, and their influence is very
perceptible upon the political events and public acts of
today; but at present they are not clear enough nor
convincing enough to compel men definitely and
systematically towards their realization. Men's acts waver
between tradition and the new, and on the whole they rather
gravitate towards the traditional. Yet, compared with the
thought of even a brief lifetime ago, there does seem to be
an outline shaping itself of a new order in human affairs. It is
a sketchy outline, vanishing into vagueness at this point and
that, and fluctuating in detail and formulae, yet it grows
steadfastly clearer, and its main lines change less and less.
It is becoming plainer and plainer each year that in many
respects and in an increasing range of affairs, mankind is
becoming one community, and that it is more and more
necessary that in such matters there should be a common
world-wide control. For example, it is steadily truer that the
whole planet is now one economic community, that the
proper exploitation of its natural resources demands one
comprehensive direction, and that the greater power and
range that discovery has given human effort makes the
present fragmentary and contentious administration of such
affairs more and more wasteful and dangerous. Financial
and monetary expedients also become world-wide
interests to be dealt with successfully only on world-wide
lines. Infectious diseases and the increase and migrations
of population are also now plainly seen to be world-wide
concerns. The greater power and range of human activities
has also made war disproportionately destructive and
disorganizing, and, even as a clumsy way of settling issues
between government and government and people and
people, ineffective. All these things clamour for controls and
authorities of a greater range and greater
comprehensiveness than any government that has hitherto
existed.
But it does not follow that the solution of these problems
lies in some super-government of all the world arising by
conquest or by the coalescence of existing governments.
By analogy with existing institutions men have thought of the
Parliament of Mankind, of a World Congress, of a
President or Emperor of the Earth. Our first natural reaction
is towards some such conclusion, but the discussion and
experiences of half a century of suggestions and attempts
has on the whole discouraged belief in that first obvious
idea. Along that line to world unity the resistances are too
great. The drift of thought seems now to be in the direction
of a number of special committees or organizations, with
world-wide power delegated to them by existing
governments in this group of matters or that, bodies
concerned with the waste or development of natural wealth,
with the equalization of labour conditions, with world peace,
with currency, population and health, and so forth.
The world may discover that all its common interests are
being managed as one concern, while it still fails to realize
that a world government exists. But before even so much
human unity is attained, before such international
arrangements can be put above patriotic suspicions and
jealousies, it is necessary that the common mind of the
race should be possessed of that idea of human unity, and
that the idea of mankind as one family should be a matter
of universal instruction and understanding.
For a score of centuries or more the spirit of the great
universal religions has been struggling to maintain and
extend that idea of a universal human brotherhood, but to
this day the spites, angers and distrusts of tribal, national
and racial friction obstruct, and successfully obstruct, the
broader views and more generous impulses which would
make every man the servant of all mankind. The idea of
human brotherhood struggles now to possess the human
soul, just as the idea of Christendom struggled to possess
the soul of Europe in the confusion and disorder of the sixth
and seventh centuries of the Christian era. The
dissemination and triumph of such ideas must be the work
of a multitude of devoted and undistinguished missionaries,
and no contemporary writer can presume to guess how far
such work has gone or what harvest it may be preparing.
Social and economic questions seem to be inseparably
mingled with international ones. The solution in each case
lies in an appeal to that same spirit of service which can
enter and inspire the human heart. The distrust, intractability
and egotism of nations reflects and is reflected by the
distrust, intractability and egotism of the individual owner
and worker in the face of the common good. Exaggerations
of possessiveness in the individual are parallel and of a
piece with the clutching greed of nations and emperors.
They are products of the same instinctive tendencies, and
the same ignorances and traditions. Internationalism is the
socialism of nations. No one who has wrestled with these
problems can feel that there yet exists a sufficient depth
and strength of psychological science and a sufficiently
planned-out educational method and organization for any
real and final solution of these riddles of human intercourse
and cooperation. We are as incapable of planning a really
effective peace organization of the world to-day as were
men in 1820 to plan an electric railway system, but for all
we know the thing is equally practicable and may be as
nearly at hand.
No man can go beyond his own knowledge, no thought can
reach beyond contemporary thought, and it is impossible
for us to guess or foretell how many generations of
humanity may have to live in war and waste and insecurity
and misery before the dawn of the great peace to which all
history seems to be pointing, peace in the heart and peace
in the world, ends our night of wasteful and aimless living.
Our proposed solutions are still vague and crude. Passion
and suspicion surround them. A great task of intellectual
reconstruction is going on, it is still incomplete, and our
conceptions grow clearer and more exact-slowly, rapidly, it
is hard to tell which. But as they grow clearer they will
gather power over the minds and imaginations of men.
Their present lack of grip is due to their lack of assurance
and exact rightness. They are misunderstood because they
are variously and confusingly presented. But with precision
and certainty the new vision of the world will gain
compelling power. It may presently gain power very rapidly.
And a great work of educational reconstruction will follow
logically and necessarily upon that clearer understanding.
LX. The Expansion of the United States
THE REGION of the world that displayed the most
immediate and striking results from the new inventions in
transport was North America. Politically the United States
embodied, and its constitution crystallized, the liberal ideas
of the middle eighteenth century. It dispensed with state-
church or crown, it would have no titles, it protected
property very jealously as a method of freedom, and-the
exact practice varied at first in the different states-it gave
nearly every adult male citizen a vote. Its method of voting
was barbarically crude, and as a consequence its political
life fell very soon under the control of highly organized party
machines, but that did not prevent the newly emancipated
population developing an energy, enterprise and public
spirit far beyond that of any other contemporary population.
Then came that acceleration of locomotion to which we
have already called attention. It is a curious thing that
America, which owes most to this acceleration in
locomotion, has felt it least. The United States have taken
the railway, the river steamboat, the telegraph and so forth
as though they were a natural part of their growth. They
were not. These things happened to come along just in time
to save American unity. The United States of to-day were
made first by the river steamboat, and then by the railway.
Without these things, the present United States, this vast
continental nation, would have been altogether impossible.
The westward flow of population would have been far more
sluggish. It might never have crossed the great central
plains. It took nearly two hundred years for effective
settlement to reach from the coast to Missouri, much less
than halfway across the continent. The first state
established beyond the river was the steamboat state of
Missouri in 1821. But the rest of the distance to the Pacific
was done in a few decades.
If we had the resources of the cinema it would be
interesting to show a map of North America year by year
from 1600 onward, with little dots to represent hundreds of
people, each dot a hundred, and stars to represent cities of
a hundred thousand people.
For two hundred years the reader would see that stippling
creeping slowly along the coastal districts and navigable
waters, spreading still more gradually into Indiana,
Kentucky and so forth. Then somewhere about 1810 would
come a change. Things would get more lively along the
river courses. The dots would be multiplying and spreading.
That would be the steamboat. The pioneer dots would be
spreading soon over Kansas and Nebraska from a number
of jumping-off places along the great rivers.
Then from about 1830 onward would come the black lines
of the railways, and after that the little black dots would not
simply creep but run. They would appear now so rapidly, it
would be almost as though they were being put on by some
sort of spraying machine. And suddenly here and then there
would appear the first stars to indicate the first great cities
of a hundred thousand people. First one or two and then a
multitude of cities-each like a knot in the growing net of the
railways.
The growth of the United States is a process that has no
precedent in the world's history; it is a new kind of
occurrence. Such a community could not have come into
existence before, and if it had, without railways it would
certainly have dropped to pieces long before now. Without
railways or telegraph it would be far easier to administer
California from Pekin than from Washington. But this great
population of the United States of America has not only
grown outrageously; it has kept uniform. Nay, it has
become more uniform. The man of San Francisco is more
like the man of New York to-day than the man of Virginia
was like the man of New England a century ago. And the
process of assimilation goes on unimpeded. The United
States is being woven by railway, by telegraph, more and
more into one vast unity, speaking, thinking and acting
harmoniously with itself. Soon aviation will be helping in the
work.
This great community of the United States is an altogether
new thing in history. There have been great empires before
with populations exceeding 100 millions, but these were
associations of divergent peoples; there has never been
one single people on this scale before. We want a new
term for this new thing. We call the United States a country
just as we call France or Holland a country. But the two
things are as different as an automobile and a one-horse
shay. They are the creations of different periods and
different conditions; they are going to work at a different
pace and in an entirely different way. The United States in
scale and possibility is halfway between a European state
and a United States of all the world.
But on the way to this present greatness and security the
American people passed through one phase of dire
conflict. The river steamboats, the railways, the telegraph,
and their associate facilities, did not come soon enough to
avert a deepening conflict of interests and ideas between
the southern and northern states of the Union. The former
were slave-holding states; the latter, states in which all men
were free. The railways and steamboats at first did but
bring into sharper conflict an already established difference
between the two sections of the United States. The
increasing unification due to the new means of transport
made the question whether the southern spirit or the
northern should prevail an ever more urgent one. There was
little possibility of compromise. The northern spirit was free
and individualistic; the southern made for great estates and
a conscious gentility ruling over a dusky subject multitude.
Every new territory that was organized into a state as the
tide of population swept westward, every new incorporation
into the fast growing American system, became a field of
conflict between the two ideas, whether it should become a
state of free citizens, or whether the estate and slavery
system should prevail. From 1833 an American anti-slavery
society was not merely resisting the extension of the
institution but agitating the whole country for its complete
abolition. The issue flamed up into open conflict over the
admission of Texas to the Union. Texas had originally been
a part of the republic of Mexico, but it was largely colonized
by Americans from the slave-holding states, and it seceded
from Mexico, established its independence in 1835, and
was annexed to the United States in 1844. Under the
Mexican law slavery had been forbidden in Texas, but now
the South claimed Texas for slavery and got it.
Meanwhile the development of ocean navigation was
bringing a growing swarm of immigrants from Europe to
swell the spreading population of the northern states, and
the raising of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oregon, all
northern farm lands, to state level, gave the anti-slavery
North the possibility of predominance both in the Senate
and the House of Representatives. The cotton-growing
South, irritated by the growing threat of the Abolitionist
movement, and fearing this predominance in Congress,
began to talk of secession from the Union. Southerners
began to dream of annexations to the south of them in
Mexico and the West Indies, and of a great slave state,
detached from the North and reaching to Panama.
The return of Abraham Lincoln as an anti-extension
President in 1860 decided the South to split the Union.
South Carolina passed an "ordinance of secession," and
prepared for war. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia,
Louisiana and Texas joined her, and a convention met at
Montgomery in Alabama, elected Jefferson Davis
president of the "Confederated States" of America, and
adopted a constitution specifically upholding "the institution
of negro slavery."
Abraham Lincoln was, it chanced, a man entirely typical of
the new people that had grown up after the War of
Independence. His early years had been spent as a drifting
particle in the general westward flow of the population. He
was born in Kentucky (1809), was taken to Indiana as a boy
and later on to Illinois. Life was rough in the backwoods of
Indiana in those days; the house was a mere log cabin in
the wilderness, and his schooling was poor and casual. But
his mother taught him to read early, and he became a
voracious reader. At seventeen he was a big athletic youth,
a great wrestler and runner. He worked for a time as clerk
in a store, went into business as a storekeeper with a
drunken partner, and contracted debts that he did not fully
pay off for fifteen years. In 1834, when he was still only five
and twenty, he was elected member of the House of
Representatives for the State of Illinois. In Illinois particularly
the question of slavery flamed because the great leader of
the party for the extension of slavery in the national
Congress was Senator Douglas of Illinois. Douglas was a
man of great ability and prestige, and for some years
Lincoln fought against him by speech and pamphlet, rising
steadily to the position of his most formidable and finally
victorious antagonist. Their culminating struggle was the
presidential campaign of 1860, and on the fourth of March,
1861, Lincoln was inaugurated President, with the southern
states already in active secession from the rule of the
federal government at Washington, and committing acts of
war.
This civil war in America was fought by improvised armies
that grew steadily from a few score thousands to hundreds
of thousands-until at last the Federal forces exceeded a
million men; it was fought over a vast area between New
Mexico and the eastern sea, Washington and Richmond
were the chief objectives. It is beyond our scope here to tell
of the mounting energy of that epic struggle that rolled to
and fro across the hills and woods of Tennessee and
Virginia and down the Mississippi. There was a terrible
waste and killing of men. Thrust was followed by counter
thrust; hope gave way to despondency, and returned and
was again disappointed. Sometimes Washington seemed
within the Confederate grasp; again the Federal armies
were driving towards Richmond. The Confederates,
outnumbered and far poorer in resources, fought under a
general of supreme ability, General Lee. The generalship of
the Union was far inferior. Generals were dismissed, new
generals appointed; until at last, under Sherman and Grant,
came victory over the ragged and depleted South. In
October, 1864, a Federal army under Sherman broke
through the Confederate left and marched down from
Tennessee through Georgia to the coast, right across the
Confederate country, and then turned up through the
Carolinas, coming in upon the rear of the Confederate
armies. Meanwhile Grant held Lee before Richmond until
Sherman closed on him. On April 9th, 1865, Lee and his
army surrendered at Appomattox Court House, and within a
month all the remaining secessionist armies had laid down
their arms and the Confederacy was at an end.
This four years' struggle had meant an enormous physical
and moral strain for the people of the United States. The
principle of state autonomy was very dear to many minds,
and the North seemed in effect to be forcing abolition upon
the South. In the border states brothers and cousins, even
fathers and sons, would take opposite sides and find
themselves in antagonistic armies. The North felt its cause
a righteous one, but for great numbers of people it was not
a full-bodied and unchallenged righteousness. But for
Lincoln there was no doubt. He was a clear-minded man in
the midst of much confusion. He stood for union; he stood
for the wide peace of America. He was opposed to slavery,
but slavery he held to be a secondary issue; his primary
purpose was that the United States should not be torn into
two contrasted and jarring fragments.
When in the opening stages of the war Congress and the
Federal generals embarked upon a precipitate
emancipation, Lincoln opposed and mitigated their
enthusiasm. He was for emancipation by stages and with
compensation. It was only in January, 1865, that the
situation had ripened to a point when Congress could
propose to abolish slavery for ever by a constitutional
amendment, and the war was already over before this
amendment was ratified by the states.
As the war dragged on through 1862 and 1863, the first
passions and enthusiasms waned, and America learnt all
the phases of war weariness and war disgust. The
President found himself with defeatists, traitors, dismissed
generals, tortuous party politicians, and a doubting and
fatigued people behind him and uninspired generals and
depressed troops before him; his chief consolation must
have been that Jefferson Davis at Richmond could be in
little better case. The English government misbehaved, and
permitted the Confederate agents in England to launch and
man three swift privateer ships-the Alabama is the best
remembered of them-which chased United States shipping
from the seas. The French army in Mexico was trampling
the Monroe Doctrine in the dirt. Came subtle proposals
from Richmond to drop the war, leave the issues of the war
for subsequent discussion, and turn, Federal and
Confederate in alliance, upon the French in Mexico. But
Lincoln would not listen to such proposals unless the
supremacy of the Union was maintained. The Americans
might do such things as one people but not as two.
He held the United States together through long weary
months of reverses and ineffective effort, through black
phases of division and failing courage; and there is no
record that he ever faltered from his purpose. There were
times when there was nothing to be done, when he sat in
the White House silent and motionless, a grim monument of
resolve; times when he relaxed his mind by jesting and
broad anecdotes.
He saw the Union triumphant. He entered Richmond the
day after its surrender, and heard of Lee's capitulation. He
returned to Washington, and on April 11th made his last
public address. His theme was reconciliation and the
reconstruction of loyal government in the defeated states.
On the evening of April 14th he went to Ford's theatre in
Washington, and as he sat looking at the stage, he was
shot in the back of the head and killed by an actor named
Booth who had some sort of grievance against him, and
who had crept into the box unobserved. But Lincoln's work
was done; the Union was saved.
At the beginning of the war there was no railway to the
Pacific coast; after it the railways spread like a swiftly
growing plant until now they have clutched and held and
woven all the vast territory of the United States into one
indissoluble mental and material unity-the greatest real
community-until the common folk of China have learnt to
read-in the world.
LXI. The Rise of Germany to Predominance in Europe
WE have told how after the convulsion of the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic adventure, Europe settled
down again for a time to an insecure peace and a sort of
modernized revival of the political conditions of fifty years
before. Until the middle of the century the new facilities in
the handling of steel and the railway and steamship
produced no marked political consequences. But the social
tension due to the development of urban industrialism grew.
France remained a conspicuously uneasy country. The
revolution of 1830 was followed by another in 1848. Then
Napoleon III, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, became
first President, and then (in 1852) Emperor.
He set about rebuilding Paris, and changed it from a
picturesque seventeenth century insanitary city into the
spacious Latinized city of marble it is to-day. He set about
rebuilding France, and made it into a brilliant-looking
modernized imperialism. He displayed a disposition to
revive that competitiveness of the Great Powers which had
kept Europe busy with futile wars during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. The Tsar Nicholas I of Russia
(1825-1856) was also becoming aggressive and pressing
southward upon the Turkish Empire with his eyes on
Constantinople.
After the turn of the century Europe broke out into a fresh
cycle of wars. They were chiefly "balance-of-power" and
ascendancy wars. England, France and Sardinia assailed
Russia in the Crimean war in defence of Turkey; Prussia
(with Italy as an ally) and Austria fought for the leadership of
Germany, France liberated North Italy from Austria at the
price of Savoy, and Italy gradually unified itself into one
kingdom. Then Napoleon III was so ill advised as to attempt
adventures in Mexico, during the American Civil War; he
set up an Emperor Maximilian there and abandoned him
hastily to his fate-he was shot by the Mexicans-when the
victorious Federal Government showed its teeth.
In 1870 came a long-pending struggle for predominance in
Europe between France and Prussia. Prussia had long
foreseen and prepared for this struggle, and France was
rotten with financial corruption. Her defeat was swift and
dramatic. The Germans invaded France in August, one
great French army under the Emperor capitulated at Sedan
in September, another surrendered in October at Metz, and
in January 1871, Paris, after a siege and bombardment, fell
into German hands. Peace was signed at Frankfort
surrendering the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the
Germans. Germany, excluding Austria, was unified as an
empire, and the King of Prussia was added to the galaxy of
European Caesars, as the German Emperor.
For the next forty-three years Germany was the leading
power upon the European continent. There was a Russo-
Turkish war in 1877-8, but thereafter, except for certain
readjustments in the Balkans, European frontiers remained
uneasily stable for thirty years.
LXII. The New Overseas Empires of Steamship and
Railway
THE END of the eighteenth century was a period of
disrupting empires and disillusioned expansionists. The
long and tedious journey between Britain and Spain and
their colonies in America prevented any really free coming
and going between the home land and the daughter lands,
and so the colonies separated into new and distinct
communities, with distinctive ideas and interests and even
modes of speech. As they grew they strained more and
more at the feeble and uncertain link of shipping that had
joined them. Weak trading-posts in the wilderness, like
those of France in Canada, or trading establishments in
great alien communities, like those of Britain in India, might
well cling for bare existence to the nation which gave them
support and a reason for their existence. That much and no
more seemed to many thinkers in the early part of the
nineteenth century to be the limit set to overseas rule. In
1820 the sketchy great European "empires" outside of
Europe that had figured so bravely in the maps of the
middle eighteenth century, had shrunken to very small
dimensions. Only the Russian sprawled as large as ever
across Asia.
The British Empire in 1815 consisted of the thinly
populated coastal river and lake regions of Canada, and a
great hinterland of wilderness in which the only settlements
as yet were the fur-trading stations of the Hudson Bay
Company, about a third of the Indian peninsula, under the
rule of the East India Company, the coast districts of the
Cape of Good Hope inhabited by blacks and rebellious-
spirited Dutch settlers; a few trading stations on the coast
of West Africa, the rock of Gibraltar, the island of Malta,
Jamaica, a few minor slave-labour possessions in the
West Indies, British Guiana in South America, and, on the
other side of the world, two dumps for convicts at Botany
Bay in Australia and in Tasmania. Spain retained Cuba
and a few settlements in the Philippine Islands. Portugal
had in Africa some vestiges of her ancient claims. Holland
had various islands and possessions in the East Indies and
Dutch Guiana, and Denmark an island or so in the West
Indies. France had one or two West Indian islands and
French Guiana. This seemed to be as much as the
European powers needed, or were likely to acquire of the
rest of the world. Only the East India Company showed any
spirit of expansion.
While Europe was busy with the Napoleonic wars the East
India Company, under a succession of Governors-General,
was playing much the same rôle in India that had been
played before by Turkoman and such-like invaders from the
north. And after the peace of Vienna it went on, levying its
revenues, making wars, sending ambassadors to Asiatic
powers, a quasi-independent state, however, with a
marked disposition to send wealth westward.
We cannot tell here in any detail how the British Company
made its way to supremacy sometimes as the ally of this
power, sometimes as that, and finally as the conqueror of
all. Its power spread to Assam, Sind, Oudh. The map of
India began to take on the outlines familiar to the English
schoolboy of to-day, a patchwork of native states
embraced and held together by the great provinces under
direct British ruleƒ.
In 1859, following upon a serious mutiny of the native troops
in India, this empire of the East India Company was
annexed to the British Crown. By an Act entitled An Act for
the Better Government of India, the Governor-General
became a Viceroy representing the Sovereign, and the
place of the Company was taken by a Secretary of State
for India responsible to the British Parliament. In 1877, Lord
Beaconsfield, to complete the work, caused Queen
Victoria to be proclaimed Empress of India.
Upon these extraordinary lines India and Britain are linked
at the present time. India is still the empire of the Great
Mogul, but the Great Mogul has been replaced by the
"crowned republic" of Great Britain. India is an autocracy
without an autocrat. Its rule combines the disadvantage of
absolute monarchy with the impersonality and
irresponsibility of democratic officialdom. The Indian with a
complaint to make has no visible monarch to go to; his
Emperor is a golden symbol; he must circulate pamphlets
in England or inspire a question in the British House of
Commons. The more occupied Parliament is with British
affairs, the less attention India will receive, and the more
she will be at the mercy of her small group of higher
officials.
Apart from India, there was no great expansion of any
European Empire until the railways and the steamships
were in effective action. A considerable school of political
thinkers in Britain was disposed to regard overseas
possessions as a source of weakness to the kingdom. The
Australian settlements developed slowly until in 1842 the
discovery of valuable copper mines, and in 1851 of gold,
gave them a new importance. Improvements in transport
were also making Australian wool an increasingly
marketable commodity in Europe. Canada, too, was not
remarkably progressive until 1849; it was troubled by
dissensions between its French and British inhabitants,
there were several serious revolts, and it was only in 1867
that a new constitution creating a Federal Dominion of
Canada relieved its internal strains. It was the railway that
altered the Canadian outlook. It enabled Canada, just as it
enabled the United States, to expand westward, to market
its corn and other produce in Europe, and in spite of its
swift and extensive growth, to remain in language and
sympathy and interests one community. The railway, the
steamship and the telegraph cable were indeed changing
all the conditions of colonial development.
Before 1840, English settlements had already begun in
New Zealand, and a New Zealand Land Company had
been formed to exploit the possibilities of the island. In
1840 New Zealand also was added to the colonial
possessions of the British Crown.
Canada, as we have noted, was the first of the British
possessions to respond richly to the new economic
possibilities that the new methods of transport were
opening. Presently the republics of South America, and
particularly the Argentine Republic, began to feel in their
cattle trade and coffee growing the increased nearness of
the European market. Hitherto the chief commodities that
had attracted the European powers into unsettled and
barbaric regions had been gold or other metals, spices,
ivory, or slaves. But in the latter quarter of the nineteenth
century the increase of the European populations was
obliging their governments to look abroad for staple foods;
and the growth of scientific industrialism was creating a
demand for new raw materials, fats and greases of every
kind, rubber, and other hitherto disregarded substances. It
was plain that Great Britain and Holland and Portugal were
reaping a great and growing commercial advantage from
their very considerable control of tropical and sub-tropical
products. After 1871 Germany, and presently France and
later Italy, began to look for unannexed raw-material areas,
or for Oriental countries capable of profitable
modernization.
So began a fresh scramble all over the world, except in the
American region where the Monroe Doctrine now barred
such adventures, for politically unprotected lands.
Close to Europe was the continent of Africa, full of vaguely
known possibilities. In 1850 it was a continent of black
mystery; only Egypt and the coast were known. Here we
have no space to tell the amazing story of the explorers and
adventurers who first pierced the African darkness, and of
the political agents, administrators, traders, settlers and
scientific men who followed in their track. Wonderful races
of men like the pygmies, strange beasts like the okapi,
marvellous fruits and flowers and insects, terrible diseases,
astounding scenery of forest and mountain, enormous
inland seas and gigantic rivers and cascades were
revealed; a whole new world. Even remains (at Zimbabwe)
of some unrecorded and vanished civilization, the
southward enterprise of an early people, were discovered.
Into this new world came the Europeans, and found the rifle
already there in the hands of the Arab slave-traders, and
negro life in disorder.
By 1900, in half a century, all Africa was mapped, explored,
estimated and divided between the European powers.
Little heed was given to the welfare of the natives in this
scramble. The Arab slaver was indeed curbed rather than
expelled, but the greed for rubber, which was a wild product
collected under compulsion by the natives in the Belgian
Congo, a greed exacerbated by the clash of inexperienced
European administrators with the native population, led to
horrible atrocities. No European power has perfectly clean
hands in this matter.
We cannot tell here in any detail how Great Britain got
possession of Egypt in 1883 and remained there in spite of
the fact that Egypt was technically a part of the Turkish
Empire, nor how nearly this scramble led to war between
France and Great Britain in 1898, when a certain Colonel
Marchand, crossing Central Africa from the west coast,
tried at Fashoda to seize the Upper Nile.
Nor can we tell how the British Government first let the
Boers, or Dutch settlers, of the Orange River district and
the Transvaal set up independent republics in the inland
parts of South Africa, and then repented and annexed the
Transvaal Republic in 1877; nor how the Transvaal Boers
fought for freedom and won it after the battle of Majuba Hill
(1881). Majuba Hill was made to rankle in the memory of
the English people by a persistent press campaign. A war
with both republics broke out in 1899, a three years' war
enormously costly to the British people, which ended at last
in the surrender of the two republics.
Their period of subjugation was a brief one. In 1907, after
the downfall of the imperialist government which had
conquered them, the Liberals took the South African
problem in hand, and these former republics became free
and fairly willing associates with Cape Colony and Natal in
a Confederation of all the states of South Africa as one
self-governing republic under the British Crown.
In a quarter of a century the partition of Africa was
completed. There remained unannexed three
comparatively small countries: Liberia, a settlement of
liberated negro slaves on the west coast; Morocco, under a
Moslem Sultan; and Abyssinia, a barbaric country, with an
ancient and peculiar form of Christianity, which had
successfully maintained its independence against Italy at
the battle of Adowa in 1896.
LXIII. European Aggression in Asia, and the Rise of
Japan
IT is difficult to believe that any large number of people
really accepted this headlong painting of the map of Africa
in European colours as a permanent new settlement of the
world's affairs, but it is the duty of the historian to record
that it was so accepted. There was but a shallow historical
background to the European mind in the nineteenth century,
and no habit of penetrating criticism. The quite temporary
advantages that the mechanical revolution in the west had
given the Europeans over the rest of the old world were
regarded by people, blankly ignorant of such events as the
great Mongol conquests, as evidences of a permanent and
assured European leadership of mankind. They had no
sense of the transferability of science and its fruits. They
did not realize that Chinamen and Indians could carry on
the work of research as ably as Frenchmen or Englishmen.
They believed that there was some innate intellectual drive
in the west, and some innate indolence and conservatism
in the east, that assured the Europeans a world
predominance for ever.
The consequence of this infatuation was that the various
European foreign offices set themselves not merely to
scramble with the British for the savage and undeveloped
regions of the world's surface, but also to carve up the
populous and civilized countries of Asia as though these
people also were no more than raw material for
exploitation. The inwardly precarious but outwardly splendid
imperialism of the British ruling class in India, and the
extensive and profitable possessions of the Dutch in the
East Indies, filled the rival Great Powers with dreams of
similar glories in Persia, in the disintegrating Ottoman
Empire, and in Further India, China and Japan.
In 1898 Germany seized Kiau Chau in China. Britain
responded by seizing Wei-hai-wei, and the next year the
Russians took possession of Port Arthur. A flame of hatred
for the Europeans swept through China. There were
massacres of Europeans and Christian converts, and in
1900 an attack upon and siege of the European legations
in Pekin. A combined force of Europeans made a punitive
expedition to Pekin, rescued the legations, and stole an
enormous amount of valuable property. The Russians then
seized Manchuria, and in 1904 the British invaded Tibetƒ.
But now a new Power appeared in the struggle of the Great
Powers, Japan. Hitherto Japan has played but a small part
in this history; her secluded civilization has not contributed
very largely to the general shaping of human destinies; she
has received much, but she has given little. The Japanese
proper are of the Mongolian race. Their civilization, their
writing and their literary and artistic traditions are derived
from the Chinese. Their history is an interesting and
romantic one; they developed a feudal system and a
system of chivalry in the earlier centuries of the Christian
era; their attacks upon Korea and China are an Eastern
equivalent of the English wars in France. Japan was first
brought into contact with Europe in the sixteenth century; in
1542 some Portuguese reached it in a Chinese junk, and in
1549 a Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, began his
teaching there. For a time Japan welcomed European
intercourse, and the Christian missionaries made a great
number of converts. A certain William Adams became the
most trusted European adviser of the Japanese, and
showed them how to build big ships. There were voyages
in Japanese-built ships to India and Peru. Then arose
complicated quarrels between the Spanish Dominicans,
the Portuguese Jesuits, and the English and Dutch
Protestants, each warning the Japanese against the
political designs of the others. The Jesuits, in a phase of
ascendancy, persecuted and insulted the Buddhists with
great acrimony. In the end the Japanese came to the
conclusion that the Europeans were an intolerable
nuisance, and that Catholic Christianity in particular was a
mere cloak for the political dreams of the Pope and the
Spanish monarchy-already in possession of the Philippine
Islands; there was a great persecution of the Christians,
and in 1638 Japan was absolutely closed to Europeans,
and remained closed for over 200 years. During those two
centuries the Japanese were as completely cut off from the
rest of the world as though they lived upon another planet. It
was forbidden to build any ship larger than a mere coasting
boat. No Japanese could go abroad, and no European
enter the country.
For two centuries Japan remained outside the main current
of history. She lived on in a state of picturesque feudalism
in which about five per cent. of the population, the samurai,
or fighting men, and the nobles and their families,
tyrannized without restraint over the rest of the population.
Meanwhile the great world outside went on to wider visions
and new powers. Strange shipping became more frequent,
passing the Japanese headlands; sometimes ships were
wrecked and sailors brought ashore. Through the Dutch
settlement in the island of Deshima, their one link with the
outer universe, came warnings that Japan was not keeping
pace with the power of the Western world. In 1837 a ship
sailed into Yedo Bay flying a strange flag of stripes and
stars, and carrying some Japanese sailors she had picked
up far adrift in the Pacific. She was driven off by cannon
shot. This flag presently reappeared on other ships. One in
1849 came to demand the liberation of eighteen
shipwrecked American sailors. Then in 1853 came four
American warships under Commodore Perry, and refused
to be driven away. He lay at anchor in forbidden waters,
and sent messages to the two rulers who at that time
shared the control of Japan. In 1854 he returned with ten
ships, amazing ships propelled by steam, and equipped
with big guns, and he made proposals for trade and
intercourse that the Japanese had no power to resist. He
landed with a guard of 500 men to sign the treaty.
Incredulous crowds watched this visitation from the outer
world, marching through the streets.
Russia, Holland and Britain followed in the wake of
America. A great nobleman whose estates commanded
the Straits of Shimonoseki saw fit to fire on foreign vessels,
and a bombardment by a fleet of British, French, Dutch and
American warships destroyed his batteries and scattered
his swordsmen. Finally an allied squadron (1865), at
anchor off Kioto, imposed a ratification of the treaties which
opened Japan to the world.
The humiliation of the Japanese by these events was
intense. With astonishing energy and intelligence they set
themselves to bring their culture and organization to the
level of the European Powers. Never in all the history of
mankind did a nation make such a stride as Japan then
did. In 1866 she was a medieval people, a fantastic
caricature of the extremest romantic feudalism; in 1899
hers was a completely Westernized people, on a level with
the most advanced European Powers. She completely
dispelled the persuasion that Asia was in some irrevocable
way hopelessly behind Europe. She made all European
progress seem sluggish by comparison.
We cannot tell here in any detail of Japan's war with China
in 1894-95. It demonstrated the extent of her
Westernization. She had an efficient Westernized army and
a small but sound fleet. But the significance of her
renascence, though it was appreciated by Britain and the
United States, who were already treating her as if she were
a European state, was not understood by the other Great
Powers engaged in the pursuit of new Indias in Asia.
Russia was pushing down through Manchuria to Korea.
France was already established far to the south in Tonkin
and Annam, Germany was prowling hungrily on the look-out
for some settlement. The three Powers combined to
prevent Japan reaping any fruits from the Chinese war. She
was exhausted by the struggle, and they threatened her with
war.
Japan submitted for a time and gathered her forces. Within
ten years she was ready for a struggle with Russia, which
marks an epoch in the history of Asia, the close of the
period of European arrogance. The Russian people were,
of course, innocent and ignorant of this trouble that was
being made for them halfway round the world, and the wiser
Russian statesmen were against these foolish thrusts; but a
gang of financial adventurers, including the Grand Dukes,
his cousins, surrounded the Tsar. They had gambled
deeply in the prospective looting of Manchuria and China,
and they would suffer no withdrawal. So there began a
transportation of great armies of Japanese soldiers across
the sea to Port Arthur and Korea, and the sending of
endless trainloads of Russian peasants along the Siberian
railway to die in those distant battlefields.
The Russians, badly led and dishonestly provided, were
beaten on sea and land alike. The Russian Baltic Fleet
sailed round Africa to be utterly destroyed in the Straits of
Tshushima. A revolutionary movement among the common
people of Russia, infuriated by this remote and reasonless
slaughter, obliged the Tsar to end the war (1905); he
returned the southern half of Saghalien, which had been
seized by Russia in 1875, evacuated Manchuria, resigned
Korea to Japan. The European invasion of Asia was
coming to an end and the retraction of Europe's tentacles
was beginning.
LXIV. The British Empire in 1914
WE may note here briefly the varied nature of the
constituents of the British Empire in 1914 which the
steamship and railway had brought together. It was and is a
quite unique political combination; nothing of the sort has
ever existed before.
First and central to the whole system was the "crowned
republic" of the United British Kingdom, including (against
the will of a considerable part of the Irish people) Ireland.
The majority of the British Parliament, made up of the three
united parliaments of England and Wales, Scotland and
Ireland, determines the headship, the quality and policy of
the ministry, and determines it largely on considerations
arising out of British domestic politics. It is this ministry
which is the effective supreme government, with powers of
peace and war, over all the rest of the empire.
Next in order of political importance to the British States
were the "crowned republics" of Australia, Canada,
Newfoundland (the oldest British possession, 1583), New
Zealand and South Africa, all practically independent and
self-governing states in alliance with Great Britain, but each
with a representative of the Crown appointed by the
Government in office;
Next the Indian Empire, an extension of the Empire of the
Great Mogul, with its dependent and "protected" states
reaching now from Beluchistan to Burma, and including
Aden, in all of which empire the British Crown and the India
Office (under Parliamentary control) played the rôle of the
original Turkoman dynasty;
Then the ambiguous possession of Egypt, still nominally a
part of the Turkish Empire and still retaining its own
monarch, the Khedive, but under almost despotic British
official rule;
Then the still more ambiguous "Anglo-Egyptian" Sudan
province, occupied and administered jointly by the British
and by the (British controlled) Egyptian Government;
Then a number of partially self-governing communities,
some British in origin and some not, with elected
legislatures and an appointed executive, such as Malta,
Jamaica, the Bahamas and Bermuda;
Then the Crown colonies, in which the rule of the British
Home Government (through the Colonial Office) verged on
autocracy, as in Ceylon, Trinidad and Fiji (where there was
an appointed council), and Gibraltar and St. Helena (where
there was a governor);
Then great areas of (chiefly) tropical lands, raw-product
areas, with politically weak and under-civilized native
communities which were nominally protectorates, and
administered either by a High Commissioner set over
native chiefs (as in Basutoland) or over a chartered
company (as in Rhodesia). In some cases the Foreign
Office, in some cases the Colonial Office, and in some
cases the India Office, has been concerned in acquiring the
possessions that fell into this last and least definite class of
all, but for the most part the Colonial Office was now
responsible for them.
It will be manifest, therefore, that no single office and no
single brain had ever comprehended the British Empire as
a whole. It was a mixture of growths and accumulations
entirely different from anything that has ever been called an
empire before. It guaranteed a wide peace and security;
that is why it was endured and sustained by many men of
the "subject" races-in spite of official tyrannies and
insufficiencies, and of much negligence on the part of the
"home" public. Like the Athenian Empire, it was an
overseas empire; its ways were sea ways, and its common
link was the British Navy. Like all empires, its cohesion was
dependent physically upon a method of communication; the
development of seamanship, shipbuilding and steamships
between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries had made it
a possible and convenient Pax-the "Pax Britannica," and
fresh developments of air or swift land transport might at
any time make it inconvenient.
LXV. The Age of Armament in Europe, and the Great
War of 1914-18
THE PROGRESS in material science that created this vast
steamboat-and-railway republic of America and spread this
precarious British steamship empire over the world,
produced quite other effects upon the congested nations
upon the continent of Europe. They found themselves
confined within boundaries fixed during the horse-and-high-
road period of human life, and their expansion overseas
had been very largely anticipated by Great Britain. Only
Russia had any freedom to expand eastward; and she
drove a great railway across Siberia until she entangled
herself in a conflict with Japan, and pushed south-
eastwardly towards the borders of Persia and India to the
annoyance of Britain. The rest of the European Powers
were in a state of intensifying congestion. In order to realize
the full possibilities of the new apparatus of human life they
had to rearrange their affairs upon a broader basis, either
by some sort of voluntary union or by a union imposed upon
them by some predominant power. The tendency of
modern thought was in the direction of the former
alternative, but all-the force of political tradition drove
Europe towards the latter.
The downfall of the "empire" of Napoleon III, the
establishment of the new German Empire, pointed men's
hopes and fears towards the idea of a Europe
consolidated under German auspices. For thirty-six years
of uneasy peace the politics of Europe centred upon that
possibility. France, the steadfast rival of Germany for
European ascendancy since the division of the empire of
Charlemagne, sought to correct her own weakness by a
close alliance with Russia, and Germany linked herself
closely with the Austrian Empire (it had ceased to be the
Holy Roman Empire in the days of Napoleon I) and less
successfully with the new kingdom of Italy. At first Great
Britain stood as usual half in and half out of continental
affairs. But she was gradually forced into a close
association with the Franco-Russian group by the
aggressive development of a great German navy. The
grandiose imagination of the Emperor William II (1888-
1918) thrust Germany into premature overseas enterprise
that ultimately brought not only Great Britain but Japan and
the United States into the circle of her enemies.
All these nations armed. Year after year the proportion of
national production devoted to the making of guns,
equipment, battleships and the like increased. Year after
year the balance of things seemed trembling towards war,
and then war would be averted. At last it came. Germany
and Austria struck at France and Russia and Serbia; the
German armies marching through Belgium, Britain
immediately came into the war on the side of Belgium,
bringing in Japan as her ally, and very soon Turkey followed
on the German side. Italy entered the war against Austria in
1915, and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in the
October of that year. In 1916 Rumania, and in 1917 the
United States and China were forced into war against
Germany. It is not within the scope of this history to define
the exact share of blame for this vast catastrophe. The
more interesting question is not why the Great War was
begun but why the Great War was not anticipated and
prevented. It is a far graver thing for mankind that scores of
millions of people were too "patriotic," stupid, or apathetic
to prevent this disaster by a movement towards European
unity upon frank and generous lines, than that a small
number of people may have been active in bringing it
about.
It is impossible within the space at our command here to
trace the intricate details of the war. Within a few months it
became apparent that the progress of modern technical
science had changed the nature of warfare very profoundly.
Physical science gives power, power over steel, over
distance, over disease; whether that power is used well or
ill depends upon the moral and political intelligence of the
world. The governments of Europe, inspired by antiquated
policies of hate and suspicion, found themselves with
unexampled powers both of destruction and resistance in
their hands. The war became a consuming fire round and
about the world, causing losses both to victors and
vanquished out of all proportion to the issues involved. The
first phase of the war was a tremendous rush of the
Germans upon Paris and an invasion of East Prussia by
the Russians. Both attacks were held and turned. Then the
power of the defensive developed; there was a rapid
elaboration of trench warfare until for a time the opposing
armies lay entrenched in long lines right across Europe,
unable to make any advance without enormous losses. The
armies were millions strong, and behind them entire
populations were organized for the supply of food and
munitions to the front. There was a cessation of nearly
every sort of productive activity except such as contributed
to military operations. All the able-bodied manhood of
Europe was drawn into the armies or navies or into the
improvised factories that served them. There was an
enormous replacement of men by women in industry.
Probably more than half the people in the belligerent
countries of Europe changed their employment altogether
during this stupendous struggle. They were socially
uprooted and transplanted. Education and normal scientific
work were restricted or diverted to immediate military ends,
and the distribution of news was crippled and corrupted by
military control and "propaganda" activities.
The phase of military deadlock passed slowly into one of
aggression upon the combatant populations behind the
fronts by the destruction of food supplies and by attacks
through the air. And also there was a steady improvement
in the size and range of the guns employed and of such
ingenious devices as poison-gas shells and the small
mobile forts known as tanks, to break down the resistance
of troops in the trenches. The air offensive was the most
revolutionary of all the new methods. It carried warfare from
two dimensions into three. Hitherto in the history of mankind
war had gone on only where the armies marched and met.
Now it went on everywhere. First the Zeppelin and then the
bombing aeroplane carried war over and past the front to
an ever-increasing area of civilian activities beyond. The
old distinction maintained in civilized warfare between the
civilian and combatant population disappeared. Everyone
who grew food, or who sewed a garment, everyone who
felled a tree or repaired a house, every railway station and
every warehouse was held to be fair game for destruction.
The air offensive increased in range and terror with every
month in the war. At last great areas of Europe were in a
state of siege and subject to nightly raids. Such exposed
cities as London and Paris passed sleepless night after
sleepless night while the bombs burst, the anti-aircraft guns
maintained an intolerable racket, and the fire engines and
ambulances rattled headlong through the darkened and
deserted streets. The effects upon the minds and health of
old people and of young children were particularly
distressing and destructive.
Pestilence, that old follower of warfare, did not arrive until
the very end of the fighting in 1918. For four years medical
science staved off any general epidemic; then came a
great outbreak of influenza about the world which destroyed
many millions of people. Famine also was staved off for
some time. By the beginning of 1918 however most of
Europe was in a state of mitigated and regulated famine.
The production of food throughout the world had fallen very
greatly through the calling off of peasant mankind to the
fronts, and the distribution of such food as was produced
was impeded by the havoc wrought by the submarine, by
the rupture of customary routes through the closing of
frontiers, and by the disorganization of the transport system
of the world. The various governments took possession of
the dwindling food supplies, and, with more or less
success, rationed their populations. By the fourth year the
whole world was suffering from shortages of clothing and
housing and of most of the normal gear of life as well as of
food. Business and economic life were profoundly
disorganized. Everyone was worried, and most people
were leading lives of unwonted discomfort.
The actual warfare ceased in November, 1918. After a
supreme effort in the spring of 1918 that almost carried the
Germans to Paris, the Central Powers collapsed. They had
come to an end of their spirit and resources.
LXVI. The Revolution and Famine in Russia
BUT a good year and more before the collapse of the
Central Powers the half oriental monarchy of Russia, which
had professed to be the continuation of the Byzantine
Empire, had collapsed. The Tsardom had been showing
signs of profound rottenness for some years before the
war; the court was under the sway of a fantastic religious
impostor, Rasputin, and the public administration, civil and
military, was in a state of extreme inefficiency and
corruption. At the outset of the war there was a great flare
of patriotic enthusiasm in Russia. A vast conscript army
was called up, for which there was neither adequate military
equipment nor a proper supply of competent officers, and
this great host, ill supplied and badly handled, was hurled
against the German and Austrian frontiers.
There can be no doubt that the early appearance of
Russian armies in East Prussia in September, 1914,
diverted the energies and attention of the Germans from
their first victorious drive upon Paris. The sufferings and
deaths of scores of thousands of ill-led Russian peasants
saved France from complete overthrow in that momentous
opening campaign, and made all western Europe the
debtors of that great and tragic people. But the strain of the
war upon this sprawling, ill-organized empire was too heavy
for its strength. The Russian common soldiers were sent
into battle without guns to support them, without even rifle
ammunition; they were wasted by their officers and
generals in a delirium of militarist enthusiasm. For a time
they seemed to be suffering mutely as the beasts suffer; but
there is a limit to the endurance even of the most ignorant.
A profound disgust for Tsardom was creeping through
these armies of betrayed and wasted men. From the close
of 1915 onward Russia was a source of deepening anxiety
to her Western Allies. Throughout 1916 she remained
largely on defensive, and there were rumours of a separate
peace with Germany.
On December 29th, 1916, the monk Rasputin was
murdered at a dinner party in Petrograd, and a belated
attempt was made to put the Tsardom in order. By March
things were moving rapidly; food riots in Petrograd
developed into a revolutionary insurrection; there was an
attempted suppression of the Duma, the representative
body, there were attempted arrests of liberal leaders, the
formation of a provisional government under Prince Lvoff,
and an abdication (March 15th) by the Tsar. For a time it
seemed that a moderate and controlled revolution might be
possible-perhaps under a new Tsar. Then it became
evident that the destruction of popular confidence in Russia
had gone too far for any such adjustments. The Russian
people were sick to death of the old order of things in
Europe, of Tsars and wars and of Great Powers; it wanted
relief, and that speedily, from unendurable miseries. The
Allies had no understanding of Russian realities; their
diplomatists were ignorant of Russian, genteel persons
with their attention directed to the Russian Court rather than
to Russia, they blundered steadily with the new situation.
There was little goodwill among these diplomatists for
republicanism, and a manifest disposition to embarrass the
new government as much as possible. At the head of the
Russian republican government was an eloquent and
picturesque leader, Kerensky, who found himself assailed
by the forces of a profounder revolutionary movement, the
"social revolution," at home and cold-shouldered by the
Allied governments abroad. His Allies would neither let him
give the Russian peasants the land for which they craved
nor peace beyond their frontiers. The French and the British
press pestered their exhausted ally for a fresh offensive, but
when presently the Germans made a strong attack by sea
and land upon Riga, the British Admiralty quailed before
the prospect of a Baltic expedition in relief. The new
Russian Republic had to fight unsupported. In spite of their
naval predominance and the bitter protests of the great
English admiral, Lord Fisher (1841-1920), it is to be noted
that the British and their Allies, except for some submarine
attacks, left the Germans the complete mastery of the Baltic
throughout the war.
The Russian masses, however, were resolute to end the
war. At any cost. There had come into existence in
Petrograd a body representing the workers and common
soldiers, the Soviet, and this body clamoured for an
international conference of socialists at Stockholm. Food
riots were occurring in Berlin at this time, war weariness in
Austria and Germany was profound, and there can be little
doubt, in the light of subsequent events, that such a
conference would have precipitated a reasonable peace
on democratic lines in 1917 and a German revolution.
Kerensky implored his Western allies to allow this
conference to take place, but, fearful of a worldwide
outbreak of socialism and republicanism, they refused, in
spite of the favourable response of a small majority of the
British Labour Party. Without either moral or physical help
from the Allies, the unhappy "moderate" Russian Republic
still fought on and made a last desperate offensive effort in
July. It failed after some preliminary successes, and there
came another great slaughtering of Russians.
The limit of Russian endurance was reached. Mutinies
broke out in the Russian armies, and particularly upon the
northern front, and on November 7th, 1917, Kerensky's
government was overthrown and power was seized by the
Soviets, dominated by the Bolshevik socialists under Lenin,
and pledged to make peace regardless of the Western
powers. On March 2nd, 1918, a separate peace between
Russia and Germany was signed at Brest-Litovsk.
It speedily became evident that these Bolshevik socialists
were men of a very different quality from the rhetorical
constitutionalists and revolutionaries of the Kerensky
phase. They were fanatical Marxist communists. They
believed that their accession to power in Russia was only
the opening of a world-wide social revolution, and they set
about changing the social and economic order with the
thoroughness of perfect faith and absolute inexperience.
The western European and the American governments
were themselves much too ill-informed and incapable to
guide or help this extraordinary experiment, and the press
set itself to discredit and the ruling classes to wreck these
usurpers upon any terms and at any cost to themselves or
to Russia. A propaganda of abominable and disgusting
inventions went on unchecked in the press of the world; the
Bolshevik leaders were represented as incredible
monsters glutted with blood and plunder and living lives of
sensuality before which the realities of the Tsarist court
during the Rasputin regime paled to a white purity.
Expeditions were launched at the exhausted country,
insurgents and raiders were encouraged, armed and
subsidized, and no method of attack was too mean or too
monstrous for the frightened enemies of the Bolshevik
regime. In 1919, the Russian Bolsheviks, ruling a country
already exhausted and disorganized by five years of
intensive warfare, were fighting a British Expedition at
Archangel, Japanese invaders in Eastern Siberia,
Roumanians with French and Greek contingents in the
south, the Russian Admiral Koltchak in Siberia and General
Deniken, supported by the French fleet, in the Crimea. In
July of that year an Esthonian army, under General
Yudenitch, almost got to Petersburg. In 1920 the Poles,
incited by the French, made a new attack on Russia; and a
new reactionary raider, General Wrangel, took over the
task of General Deniken in invading and devastating his
own country. In March, 1921, the sailors at Cronstadt
revolted. The Russian Government under its president,
Lenin, survived all these various attacks. It showed an
amazing tenacity, and the common people of Russia
sustained it unswervingly under conditions of extreme
hardship. By the end of 1921 both Britain and Italy had
made a sort of recognition of the communist rule.
But if the Bolshevik Government was successful in its
struggle against foreign intervention and internal revolt, it
was far less happy in its attempts to set up a new social
order based upon communist ideas in Russia. The Russian
peasant is a small land-hungry proprietor, as far from
communism in his thoughts and methods as a whale is
from flying; the revolution gave him the land of the great
landowners but could not make him grow food for anything
but negotiable money, and the revolution, among other
things, had practically destroyed the value of money.
Agricultural production, already greatly disordered by the
collapse of the railways through war-strain, shrank to a
mere cultivation of food by the peasants for their own
consumption. The towns starved. Hasty and ill-planned
attempts to make over industrial production in accordance
with communist ideas were equally unsuccessful. By 1920
Russia presented the unprecedented spectacle of a
modern civilization in complete collapse. Railways were
rusting and passing out of use, towns were falling into ruin,
everywhere there was an immense mortality. Yet the
country still fought with its enemies at its gates. In 1921
came a drought and a great famine among the peasant
cultivators in the war-devastated south-east provinces.
Millions of people starved.
But the question of the distresses and the possible
recuperation of Russia brings us too close to current
controversies to be discussed here.
LXVII. The Political and Social Reconstruction of the
World
THE SCHEME and scale upon which this History is
planned do not permit us to enter into the complicated and
acrimonious disputes that centre about the treaties, and
particularly of the treaty of Versailles, which concluded the
Great War. We are beginning to realize that that conflict,
terrible and enormous as it was, ended nothing, began
nothing and settled nothing. It killed millions of people; it
wasted and impoverished the world. It smashed Russia
altogether. It was at best an acute and frightful reminder that
we were living foolishly and confusedly without much plan or
foresight in a dangerous and unsympathetic universe. The
crudely organized egotisms and passions of national and
imperial greed that carried mankind into that tragedy,
emerged from it sufficiently unimpaired to make some
other similar disaster highly probable so soon as the world
has a little recovered from its war exhaustion and fatigue.
Wars and revolutions make nothing; their utmost service to
mankind is that, in a very rough and painful way, they
destroy superannuated and obstructive things. The great
war lifted the threat of German imperialism from Europe,
and shattered the imperialism of Russia. It cleared away a
number of monarchies. But a multitude of flags still waves in
Europe, the frontiers still exasperate, great armies
accumulate fresh stores of equipment.
The Peace Conference at Versailles was a gathering very
ill adapted to do more than carry out the conflicts and
defeats of the war to their logical conclusions. The
Germans, Austrians, Turks and Bulgarians were permitted
no share in its deliberations; they were only to accept the
decisions it dictated to them. From the point of view of
human welfare the choice of the place of meeting was
particularly unfortunate. It was at Versailles in 1871 that,
with every circumstance of triumphant vulgarity, the new
German Empire had been proclaimed. The suggestion of a
melodramatic reversal of that scene, in the same Hall of
Mirrors, was overpowering.
Whatever generosities had appeared in the opening
phases of the Great War had long been exhausted. The
populations of the victorious countries were acutely aware
of their own losses and sufferings, and entirely regardless
of the fact that the defeated had paid in the like manner.
The war had arisen as a natural and inevitable
consequence of the competitive nationalisms of Europe
and the absence of any Federal adjustment of these
competitive forces; war is the necessary logical
consummation of independent sovereign nationalities living
in too small an area with too powerful an armament; and if
the great war had not come in the form it did it would have
come in some similar form-just as it will certainly return
upon a still more disastrous scale in twenty or thirty years'
time if no political unification anticipates and prevents it.
States organized for war will make wars as surely as hens
will lay eggs, but the feeling of these distressed and war-
worn countries disregarded this fact, and the whole of the
defeated peoples were treated as morally and materially
responsible for all the damage, as they would no doubt
have treated the victor peoples had the issue of war been
different. The French and English thought the Germans
were to blame, the Germans thought the Russians, French
and English were to blame, and only an intelligent minority
thought that there was anything to blame in the fragmentary
political constitution of Europe. The treaty of Versailles was
intended to be exemplary and vindictive; it provided
tremendous penalties for the vanquished; it sought to
provide compensations for the wounded and suffering
victors by imposing enormous debts upon nations already
bankrupt, and its attempts to reconstitute international
relations by the establishment of a League of Nations
against war were manifestly insincere and inadequate.
So far as Europe was concerned it is doubtful if there would
have been any attempt whatever to organize international
relations for a permanent peace. The proposal of the
League of Nations was brought into practical politics by the
President of the United States of America, President
Wilson. Its chief support was in America. So far the United
States, this new modern state, had developed no
distinctive ideas of international relationship beyond the
Monroe Doctrine, which protected the new world from
European interference. Now suddenly it was called upon for
its mental contribution to the vast problem of the time. It had
none. The natural disposition of the American people was
towards a permanent world peace. With this however was
linked a strong traditional distrust of old-world politics and a
habit of isolation from old-world entanglements. The
Americans had hardly begun to think out an American
solution of world problems when the submarine campaign
of the Germans dragged them into the war on the side of
the anti-German allies. President Wilson's scheme of a
League of Nations was an attempt at short notice to create
a distinctively American world project. It was a sketchy,
inadequate and dangerous scheme. In Europe however it
was taken as a matured American point of view. The
generality of mankind in 1918-19 was intensely weary of
war and anxious at almost any sacrifice to erect barriers
against its recurrence, but there was not a single
government in the old world willing to waive one iota of its
sovereign independence to attain any such end. The public
utterances of President Wilson leading up to the project of
a World League of Nations seemed for a time to appeal
right over the heads of the governments to the peoples of
the world; they were taken as expressing the ripe intentions
of America, and the response was enormous. Unhappily
President Wilson had to deal with governments and not
with peoples; he was a man capable of tremendous flashes
of vision and yet when put to the test egotistical and limited,
and the great wave of enthusiasm he evoked passed and
was wasted.
Says Dr. Dillon in his book, The Peace Conference:
"Europe, when the President touched its shores, was as
clay ready for the creative potter. Never before were the
nations so eager to follow a Moses who would take them to
the long-promised land where wars are prohibited and
blockades unknown. And to their thinking he was just that
great leader. In France men bowed down before him with
awe and affection. Labour leaders in Paris told me that they
shed tears of joy in his presence, and that their comrades
would go through fire and water to help him to realize his
noble schemes. To the working classes in Italy his name
was a heavenly clarion at the sound of which the earth
would be renewed. The Germans regarded him and his
doctrine as their sheet-anchor of safety. The fearless Herr
Muehlon said: 'If President Wilson were to address the
Germans, and pronounce a severe sentence upon them,
they would accept it with resignation and without a murmur
and set to work at once.' In German-Austria his fame was
that of a saviour, and the mere mention of his name brought
balm to the suffering and surcease of sorrow to the
afflictedƒ."
Such were the overpowering expectations that President
Wilson raised. How completely he disappointed them and
how weak and futile was the League of Nations he made is
too long and too distressful a story to tell here. He
exaggerated in his person our common human tragedy, he
was so very great in his dreams and so incapable in his
performance. America dissented from the acts of its
President and would not join the League Europe accepted
from him. There was a slow realization on the part of the
American people that it had been rushed into something for
which it was totally unprepared. There was a corresponding
realization on the part of Europe that America had nothing
ready to give to the old world in its extremity. Born
prematurely and crippled at its birth, that League has
become indeed, with its elaborate and unpractical
constitution and its manifest limitations of power, a serious
obstacle in the way of any effective reorganization of
international relationships. The problem would be a clearer
one if the League did not yet exist. Yet that world-wide
blaze of enthusiasm that first welcomed the project, that
readiness of men everywhere round and about the earth, of
men, that is, as distinguished from governments, for a world
control of war, is a thing to be recorded with emphasis in
any history. Behind the short-sighted governments that
divide and mismanage human affairs, a real force for world
unity and world order exists and grows.
From 1918 onward the world entered upon an age of
conferences. Of these the Conference at Washington
called by President Harding (1921) has been the most
successful and suggestive. Notable, too, is the Genoa
Conference (1922) for the appearance of German and
Russian delegates at its deliberations. We will not discuss
this long procession of conferences and tentatives in any
detail. It becomes more and more clearly manifest that a
huge work of reconstruction has to be done by mankind if a
crescendo of such convulsions and world massacres as
that of the great war is to be averted. No such hasty
improvisation as the League of Nations, no patched-up
system of Conferences between this group of states and
that, which change nothing with an air of settling everything,
will meet the complex political needs of the new age that
lies before us. A systematic development and a systematic
application of the sciences of human relationship, of
personal and group psychology, of financial and economic
science and of education, sciences still only in their infancy,
is required. Narrow and obsolete, dead and dying moral
and political ideas have to be replaced by a clearer and a
simpler conception of the common origins and destinies of
our kind.
But if the dangers, confusions and disasters that crowd
upon man in these days are enormous beyond any
experience of the past, it is because science has brought
him such powers as he never had before. And the scientific
method of fearless thought, exhaustively lucid statement,
and exhaustively criticized planning, which has given him
these as yet uncontrollable powers, gives him also the hope
of controlling these powers. Man is still only adolescent. His
troubles are not the troubles of senility and exhaustion but
of increasing and still undisciplined strength. When we look
at all history as one process, as we have been doing in this
book, when we see the steadfast upward struggle of life
towards vision and control, then we see in their true
proportions the hopes and dangers of the present time. As
yet we are hardly in the earliest dawn of human greatness.
But in the beauty of flower and sunset, in the happy and
perfect movement of young animals and in the delight of ten
thousand various landscapes, we have some intimations of
what life can do for us, and in some few works of plastic
and pictorial art, in some great music, in a few noble
buildings and happy gardens, we have an intimation of
what the human will can do with material possibilities. We
have dreams; we have at present undisciplined but ever
increasing power. Can we doubt that presently our race will
more than realize our boldest imaginations, that it will
achieve unity and peace, that it will live, the children of our
blood and lives will live, in a world made more splendid and
lovely than any palace or garden that we know, going on
from strength to strength in an ever widening circle of
adventure and achievement? What man has done, the little
triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have
told, form but the prelude to the things that man has got to
do.
Table of Contents
XX. The Last Babylonian Empire and the Empire of Darius
I
XXIII. The Greeks
XXIX. King Asoka
XXXV. The Common Man's Life under the Early Roman
Empire
XXXVI. Religious Developments under the Roman Empire
XXXIX. The Barbarians Break the Empire into East and
West

H.G. Wells - A Short History of The World

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

H.G. Wells - A Short History of The World

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

H.G. Wells - A Short History of The World

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Short History of the World.

I. The World in Space

You might also like