Part 22

These two tendencies, which I have referred to as Obedience and Individualism, are so familiar, and the former is a disposition of human nature so generally pervasive, as to need no further discussion. The other tendencies which may operate either centrifugally or centripetally may be classed under the two heads of Interest and Sympathy. Under the head of Interest there fall all those influences which belong to the sphere of Property, including of course Industry and Commerce as means of acquiring property. These influences usually make for consolidation and assimilation. It is a gain to the trader or the producer that the area of consumers which he supplies without the hindrance of an interposed customs tariff should be as wide as possible. It is a gain that communications by sea and land should be safe, easy, swift, and cheap, and these objects are better secured in a large country under a strong government. It is a gain that coinage, weights, and measures should be uniform over the largest possible area and that the standard of the currency should be upheld. It is a gain that the same laws and the same system of courts should prevail in every part of a State—and the larger the State the better, so far as these matters are concerned—and that the law should be steadily enforced and complete public order secured. All these things make not only for the growth of industry and the spread of trade, but also for the value of all kinds of property. And all these influences, derived from the consideration of such gains, which play upon the citizen’s mind, are usually aggregative influences, disposing him to desire the extension of the State and the strength of its central authority. Considerations of Interest, therefore, usually operate as a centripetal force. It was through commercial interests that the States of Germany were, after the fall of the old Romano-Germanic Empire, drawn into that Zollverein which became a stage towards, and ultimately the basis of, the present German Empire. It was the increase of trade, after the union of Scotland and England, that by degrees reconciled the Scotch to a measure which was at first most unpopular among them as threatening to extinguish their national existence. It is the absence of any strong commercial motives for political union that has hampered the efforts of those who have striven, so far successfully, to keep Norway and Sweden united.

In exceptional cases, however, the influences of Interest may be centrifugal. A particular group of traders or landowners, for instance, living in a particular district, may think they will gain more by having the power to enact special laws for the conduct of their own affairs or for the exclusion of competing persons than they will by entering or by remaining under the uniform system of a large State[100]. Trade considerations counted for something in making the planters of the Slave States of America desire to sever themselves from a government in which the protectionist party was generally dominant. It is partly on economic grounds that the various provinces of the Cis-Leithanian part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy have been allowed, and desire to maintain, each its autonomy. It was largely a divergence of economic views and interests that so long deterred the free trade colony of New South Wales from linking its fortunes in a federation with the protectionist colonies; nor were there wanting industrial grounds which made the adhesion of Queensland long doubtful.

Footnote 100:

The case of Ireland shows the same forces of industrial or commercial interest, real or supposed, operating partly as centripetal, partly as centrifugal. The Nationalist party conceive that economic benefits would result from a local legislature, which could aid local industries. The mercantile class, especially in the north-eastern part of the island, fear commercial loss from anything which could hamper their trade intercourse with Scotland and England, or which might be deemed prejudicial to commercial credit. With the soundness of either view I am not concerned; it is sufficient to note the facts.

To the head of Sympathy we must refer all the influences which flow not from calculation and the desire of gain, but from emotion or sentiment. The sense of community, whether of belief, or of intellectual conviction, or of taste, or of feeling (be it affection or aversion towards given persons or things), engenders sympathy, and draws men together. To the same class belong the recognition of a common ancestry, the use of a common speech, the enjoyment of a common literature. The importance of these factors has often been exaggerated. Some of the keenest Irish revolutionaries have been English by blood and Protestants by faith. The Borderers of Northumberland and those of Berwickshire did not hate one another less because they were of the same stock and spoke the same tongue. The Celts of Inverness-shire and the Teutons of Lothian are now equally enthusiastic Scotchmen, though they disliked and despised one another almost down to the days of Walter Scott[101]. Mere identity of origin does not count for much, as witness the ardent Hungarian patriotism of most of the Germans and Jews settled in Hungary, with perhaps no drop of Magyar blood in their veins. Community of language does not any more than a common ancestry necessarily make for love, and indeed may increase hatred, because in an age of newspapers each of two disputant parties can read the injurious things said of it by the other. Civil wars are, like family quarrels, proverbially embittered. Tocqueville wrote, in 1833, that he could imagine no more venomous hatred than the Americans then felt for England. So it may be said that though the want of these elements of community is usually an obstacle to unity, their presence is no guarantee for its existence. Somewhat greater value belongs to identity of traditions and historical recollections, and to the possession of the materials for a common pride in past achievements. Most men find a personal satisfaction and take a personal pride in recalling the feats and the struggles of the nation, or the tribe, or the party, or the sect, to which they belong, so the recollection of exploits or sufferings becomes an effective rallying point for a group. We all know how powerful a force such memories have been at various times in stimulating national feeling in Italy, in Germany, in Hungary, in Scotland, in Portugal, in Ireland.

Footnote 101:

A curious survival of the dislike of the Lowlander to the Highlander may be found in Carlyle’s comments upon the Highland wife of his friend Thomas Campbell the poet.

Still less necessary is it to dwell upon the influence of Religion, which, as it touches the deepest chords of man’s nature, is capable of educing the maximum of harmony or discord. No force has been more efficient in knitting factions and States together, or in breaking them up and setting the parts of a State in fierce antagonism to one another. Religion held together the Eastern Empire, originally a congeries of diverse races, in the midst of dangers threatening it from every side for eight hundred years. Religion now holds together the Turkish Empire in spite of the hopeless incompetence of its government. Religion split up the Romano-Germanic Empire after the time of Charles the Fifth. The instances of the Jews and the Armenians are even more familiar.

There remains a large and rather miscellaneous category of sources of sympathy which we may call by the general name of Elements of Compatibility. Traits of character, ideas, social customs, similarity of intellectual culture, of tastes, and even of the trivial usages of daily life, all contribute to link men together, and to assimilate them further to one another, as the absence of these things tends to differentiation and dissimilation, because it supplies points in which the members of one group, racial or local or social, feel themselves out of touch with the members of another, and possibly inclined to show contempt, or to think themselves contemned, on the ground of the divergence. The natural repulsion which the Germans usually feel for the Slavs, and the Slavs for the Germans, seems to have its root in a difference of character and temperament which makes it hard for either race to do full justice to the other. That repulsion is powerfully operative to-day in the Austrian Empire. In the ancient world the obstinate and passionate Egyptians seem to have displayed, and provoked, a similar antagonism in their contact with other races, and particularly with the arrogant Persians.

These influences of Sympathy, like those of Interest, may figure either as centripetal or centrifugal forces, according as the centre round which they group and towards which they draw men is the main centre of that larger circle represented by the State or the centre of the smaller circle represented by the tribe, the district, the province, the faith, the sect, the faction. The same feeling may play the one part or the other according to the accident of individual view, or taste, or environment. Thus in a University consisting of a number of autonomous colleges, one man may be a centralizer, and seek to bring the colleges into subordination, pecuniary and administrative, to the University, while another man may desire to maintain their independence, and yet both may set a high value on corporate spirit, and be filled with it themselves. In one man this spirit clings to the college, in another it glorifies the University. The patriotism which makes a Magyar desire that Hungary should absorb Croatia, and that which makes a Croat desire to sever his country from Hungary, are essentially the same sentiment, though, as regards the monarchy of the Hungarian Crown, the sentiment operates with the Magyar as an attractive, with the Croat as a repulsive force. This statement is generally true of that complex feeling, based upon affinities of race, of speech, of literature, of historic memories, of ideas, which we call the Sentiment of Nationality, a sentiment comparatively weak in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, and which did not really become a factor of the first moment in politics till the religious passions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had almost wholly subsided, and the gospel of political freedom preached in the American and French Revolutions had begun to fire men’s minds. As regards the historical States of Europe, it is a sentiment which is both aggregative and segregative. It has contributed to create the German Empire: yet it is also a sentiment which makes Bavaria unwilling to merge in that Empire her individual existence. In Bavaria, and still more in the case of Scotland, which had a long and brilliant national history, the sentiment of local has been found compatible with a sentiment of imperial patriotism.

It is a remarkable feature of recent times that the tendency of a common interest to draw groups together and make them prize the unity of the State is often accompanied by the parallel development of an opposite tendency, based on sentiment, to intensify the life of the smaller group and in so far to draw it apart, and thereby weaken the unity of the State. This arises from the fact that the march of civilization is material on the one hand, intellectual and moral on the other. So far as it is material, it generally makes for unity. On its intellectual and social or moral side it works in two ways. It tends to break down local prejudices and to create a uniform type of habits and character over a wide area. But it also heightens the influence of historical memories. It is apt to rekindle resentment at old injuries. Filling men’s minds with the notion of social and political equality, it disposes them to feel more keenly any social or political inferiority to which they may be subjected. Raising the estimate they set upon themselves as individuals and as a race, it makes them more bold in organizing themselves and claiming what they deem their rights. And so one notes the singular phenomenon that men are stirred to disaffection, or impelled towards separation, by grievances less acute than those which their ancestors, sunk in ignorance and despondency, bore almost without a murmur. The Roman Catholic Irish since 1782 and the Transylvanian Rumans since 1848 are instances in point.

All these tendencies, pulling this way and that, are among the facts which a given Constitution has to deal with, are forces which it must use in order to secure its own strength and permanence. Where, in a free country, the system of government has grown up naturally, and can be readily modified by the normal action of the normal sovereign authority, _i.e._ where the Constitution is a Flexible one, the presumption is that the rules and usages of the Constitution conform to and represent the actual forces, and draw strength therefrom. Yet even in countries governed on this system there is a risk that the Constitution which the will of a majority has established may leave a minority discontented and unrestful, and that such discontent and unrest may impede the working of the machinery and create an element of instability. In such countries, it may be the part of wisdom for the majority to yield something to the minority, modifying the Constitution, so far as it can safely be modified, in order to remove the obstacles to harmony. A centrifugal force which is not strong enough to disrupt the State, because the centripetal forces are on the whole more powerful, may nevertheless be able to cause a harmful friction, and may even, if the State be exposed to external attacks, become a source of peril. Everybody can now see that Rome ought to have admitted the Italian allies to the franchise long before the Social War, that Catholic Emancipation ought to have been enacted by the Irish Parliament in 1796 or by the British Parliament immediately after the Union of 1800, that Denmark ought not to have waited till 1874 before she conceded a qualified autonomy to Iceland, that the same country might probably have retained Schleswig-Holstein if she had yielded long before the war of 1864 some of the demands made by the German inhabitants of those duchies. And, if we may apply the same principle to despotically governed countries, most people will agree that Austria ought to have retired from Lombardy before 1859, and that the Turks gained nothing by clinging to Bulgaria, and may be gaining nothing now by clinging to Macedonia.

III. HOW CONSTITUTIONS MAY USE THE CENTRIPETAL FORCES TO PROMOTE NATIONAL UNITY.

As we are here dealing with constitutions considered in their relation to the forces and tendencies that rule in politics (_i.e._ as a part of political dynamics), we may now inquire what it is that Constitutions can accomplish in the way of regulating or controlling these forces.

Every political Constitution has three main objects.

One is to establish and maintain a frame of government under which the work of the State can be efficiently carried on, the aims of such a frame of government being on the one hand to associate the people with the government, and, on the other hand, to preserve public order, to avoid hasty decisions and to maintain a tolerable continuity of policy.

Another is to provide due security for the rights of the individual citizen as respects person, property, and opinion, so that he shall have nothing to fear from the executive or from the tyranny of an excited majority. This object has fallen into the background since these rights came to be fully recognized. But in earlier times it was the chief purpose of constitutional provisions from Magna Charta down to the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The safeguard for these rights which the Constitution of England provided, was the thing which, more perhaps than anything else, moved the admiration of foreign observers who studied that constitution during the eighteenth century.

The third object is to hold the State together, not only to prevent its disruption by the revolt or secession of a part of the nation, but to strengthen the cohesiveness of the country by creating good machinery for connecting the outlying parts with the centre, and by appealing to every motive of interest and sentiment that can lead all sections of the inhabitants to desire to remain united under one government.

In pursuing these objects, a constitution seeks to achieve by means of legal provisions that which in ruder times it was often necessary to accomplish by physical force. No doubt at all times the natural disposition to obey (the sources of which I have analysed elsewhere[102]) was an agent more constant and effective than physical force. Nevertheless, the latter was needed, sometimes from the side of the government to maintain order and compel subjects to bear their share of the public burdens, sometimes from the side of the subjects to abate the abuses into which the possession of power tempts rulers. Troops to keep order and quell revolts, and men handy with their weapons and ready to rise in insurrection to dethrone bad monarchs or expel bad ministers, were a necessary part of the equipment of political societies in the ruder ages.

Footnote 102:

See Essay IX, vol. ii. p. 6 sqq.

A good constitution relieves the government from the necessity of frequently resorting to military force by securing that those who govern shall be persons approved by the bulk of the citizens, as well as by providing for the purposes of coercion machinery so promptly and effectively applicable, that the elements of disturbance either do not break forth or are quickly suppressed. Similarly it relieves the subjects from the need of rising in rebellion by providing machinery whereby the complaints of those who think themselves aggrieved shall be fully made known, and shall, if well founded, have due effect on the rulers by warning them to remove the grievances, or by displacing them if they fail to do so.

How constitutional machinery should be framed and worked for the attainment of the two former objects enumerated above, viz. the establishment of a proper frame of government and the safeguarding of private rights, is a matter which does not fall within the scope of our present inquiry. The third object does, so we have to ask how a constitution should be framed in order to enable it to maintain and strengthen the unity of a State.

It may do this in two ways. One is by setting various centripetal forces to work. The other is by preventing all or some of the centrifugal forces from working.

I have already enumerated the tendencies or influences which operate to draw men together and bind them into a community, be it greater or smaller, and have pointed out that these tendencies may in any given case operate in favour either of the State as a whole, in which case they preserve it, or in favour of some group or section within it, in which case they sap its unity. Let us now consider how the constitutional arrangements of a State may be so devised as to draw together all its members and all the minor groups within it.

The most generally available of these centripetal tendencies is trade, that interchange of commodities which benefits all the producers, by giving them a market, all the consumers by giving them the means of getting what they want, all the middlemen by supplying them with occupation. A Constitution can render no greater service to the unity as well as to the material progress of a nation than by enabling the freest interchange of products to go on within its limits. Nothing did more to keep the districts of each of the great European countries divided during the Middle Ages than the levying of tolls along the rivers and highways by petty potentates, or than the insecurity of those rivers and highways, as well as the want of good roads, for thus the market for the producers of the cheaper articles was narrowed to the small area immediately around them, and men were prevented from realizing, or benefiting by, the greatness of the country they belonged to. England, with an exceptionally strong and centralized government, suffered less from these tolls and this insecurity than did the large States of the Continent, and England arrived at unity sooner than they did. And so, conversely, nothing has done more to unify the vast territories of the United States than the provisions of the Federal Constitution which secure perfect freedom of trade within its limits, and empower the National Government to regulate the means of communication between the several States of the Union. So the Customs Union of the Germanic States, formed under the auspices of Prussia in A.D. 1829, did a great work in stimulating industry, while it showed the people the benefits of united action, and prepared the way for the formation of the new German Empire.

Another influence of moment is the establishment of a common law and a common system of courts. It is not an influence which can be reckoned on so invariably or confidently as can the influence of commerce, for any hasty attempt to change the law (whether customary or statutory) to which men are accustomed may provoke resistance and retard the growth of unity. Great Britain has wisely forborne to impose her own law on the dominions she has acquired by conquest or purchase. Roman-Dutch law remains in South Africa, in Ceylon, and in Guiana; Roman-French law in Lower Canada. So the French Code was left in force not only in Alsace-Lorraine which Germany took in 1871 but also in the German country all along the left bank of the Lower Rhine, when that region was reunited to Germany in 1814. So Roman law has remained in Louisiana, which was once French. But where one legal system can, without exciting resentment, be extended over the whole of a country, it becomes a valuable unifying force. As respects the substance of law, this happens by the formation of certain habits of thought and action, certain ideas of justice and utility. As respects the administration of law, it happens by giving to the central executive an engine for making its power felt, and usually felt for good. In the Middle Ages, the jurisdiction of the king’s courts was found the most effective means both in England, from Henry II onward, and (somewhat later) in France, of extending the power of the central government and accustoming the people to rally round the Crown as the representative of national unity as well as of justice. A somewhat similar process has been in progress during the last thirty years among those petty principalities which we call the Laos States, and which lie to the north of the kingdom of Siam. The princes of these States were practically independent, living in a country of forests and hills, and recognizing only a vague titular suzerainty as vested in the Siamese king at Bangkok. But when foresters from British Burma had come among them, desiring to cut down and export the teak trees in those forests which make their only wealth, and when disputes had arisen between the Laos chiefs and these timber traders, the Government of India found it needful to make treaties with the king of Siam, under which a Court presided over by Siamese officials was set up in Chiengmai, the principal State. By means of this Court the Siamese Government has been able gradually to obtain complete control of the forest administration and the revenues thence arising, and incidentally to strengthen its general authority over these Laos States.