Part 3

I have enlarged on the development and decay of the Roman republic, not only because in point of political achievement Rome is by far the most notable of the great States of the world, but because in the struggle between aristocracy and democracy which was the salient feature of its history from the expulsion of the kings to the battle of Actium, it presents a very close and instructive parallel to what has been going on amongst ourselves from the revolution settlement of 1688 to the present hour. If for annual kings with large power we put hereditary kings with small power, the parallel is complete.[12] Let us now cast a glance, for time and space allow us no more, over some modern developments. The modern States of Europe have good reason, upon the whole, to think themselves fortunate in their having retained the kingship, which the Greeks and Romans rejected, either as their original type, or elevated and glorified from the dukedoms, margravates, and electorates with which they started. There cannot be much doubt, I imagine, that, if the Romans had retained their king in a hereditary or nearly hereditary form, he might have exercised a mediatorial function between the contending parties that would have prevented those bloody strifes and those ugly civic wounds with which the record of their political career stands now so sorrowfully defaced. In the experience of their own earliest story, Servius Tullius had already shown them how a king in the strife of classes might step in by a peaceful new model to open the ranks of a close aristocracy with dignity and safety to a rising democracy; and in modern times the case of Leopold II. of Tuscany does not stand alone as an example of what good service a wise king may do in the adjustment of contending claims and smoothing the march of necessary social transitions. In fact, the most democratic people amongst the ancients, in order to effect such an adjustment in a peaceful way, had been obliged to make Solon a king for the nonce; and the Romans, urged by a like social pressure, named their dictator, or re-elected their consuls and their tribunes, in order to secure for the need of the moment that unity of counsel, energy of conduct, and moral authority which is the grand recommendation of the kingship. No doubt kings in modern as in ancient times have erred; they have not been able always to keep themselves sober under the intoxicating influence of absolute power, and they have paid dearly for their errors; but we were wise in this country, while beheading one despot and banishing another, to punish the offender without abolishing the office. True, a thorough-going and sternly-consistent republican may ask, with an indignant sneer, What is the use of a king, when we have shorn him of all honours save the grace of a crown and the bauble of a sceptre--reduced him, in fact, to a mere machine to register the decrees of a democratic assembly? But such persons require to be reminded that there is nothing more dangerous, not only in political, but in all practical matters, than logical consistency; that the most narrow-minded people are always the most consistent, and this for the very obvious reason that they have only room for one idea in their small brain chambers, whereas God's world contains many ideas, stiff ideas too, and given to battle, which must be brought into some friendly balance or compromise, or set about throat-cutting on a large scale--a process to which consistent republicans have never shown a less bloody inclination than consistent monarchists. They must be reminded also that the person of the monarch is an incarnated, visible, and tangible symbol of the unity of the nation, of which parties and factions are so apt to be forgetful; and if our logically-consistent republican may look on this as a matter of association and sentiment which he will not acknowledge, he must simply be told that the man who does not acknowledge the important place played by associations and sentiments in all matters of Church and State knows nothing of human nature, and is altogether unfit for meddling with the difficult and dangerous art of politics. He may write books, and lecture to coteries, and harangue electoral meetings, and delight himself largely in the reverberation of his own wisdom, but by all means let him not be a prime minister. To what ends logical consistency can lead a politician in high places Charles I. and Archbishop Laud learned when it was too late; and the fate of these two high-perched worthies stands as a speaking lesson to all politicians, whether of the democratic or the monarchical type, how easy a thing it is for a man to be a good Christian and a consistent thinker, and yet on all political matters a perfect fool.

Among the notable modern States three stand before us with an exceptional preference for the democratic form of government--Switzerland, France, and the great trans-Atlantic Republic. These must be regarded with curious interest and kindly human sympathy as great social experiments, by no means to be prejudged and denounced by any sweeping conclusions made from the unfortunate breakdown of the two celebrated ancient republics. The experiment in these cases, as made in altogether different circumstances and under different conditions, cannot warrant any such denunciations. The representative system which now universally prevails, and which enables a most widely-scattered and diverse-minded population to vote with a coolness and a precision and a large survey of which the urban system of Greece and Rome never dreamed; the general growth of intelligence among all classes through the action of cheap education and the large circulation of cheap books; the rapid and ever more rapid travelling of contagious thought from the centre to the extreme limbs and flourishes of social unities; and, above all, let us hope the improved tone of social feeling in all the relations of man to man, which we owe to the great Christian principle of living as brother with brother, and sister with sister, under a common heavenly fatherhood,--these are all forces largely operating in the present day which justify us in hoping that many a social experiment which signally failed with the ancients may be crowned in the centuries which are now being inaugurated with encouraging success. Of the three which we have named, Switzerland is the country in which, from topographical peculiarities, the interests of jealous, neighbours, and the traditional habits of a peasant population well trained to provincial self-government, the permanence of a democratic federation may be prophesied with the greatest safety, but at the same time with the least interest to the general march of humanity. Ancient Rome, had it continued as compact and as little disturbed by external forces and internal fermentations as modern Switzerland, might have remained during the whole course of its career as sober-minded and as stable as in the days of Cincinnatus, and the yeomanry which were displaced by huge absentee landlords, and Syrian or Sicilian slaves. The case of France is altogether different. A republic in an over-civilised, highly-centralised, bureaucratically-governed country, with a religiously hollow, hasty, violent, excitable, and explosive people, seems of all social experiments the least hopeful: and that is all that can wisely be said of it at present. But the social conditions in America are altogether different; and the experiment of a great democratic republic for the first time in the history of the world--for Rome in its best times, as we have seen, was an aristocracy--will be looked on by all lovers of their species with the most kindly curiosity and the most hopeful sympathy. Here we have the stout, self-reliant, sober-minded Anglo-Saxon stock, well trained in the process of the ages to the difficult art of self-government; here we have a constitution framed with the most cautious consideration, and with the most effective checks against the dangers of an over-riding democracy; here also a people as free from any imminent external danger as they have unlimited scope for internal progress. Under no circumstances could the experiment of self-government, on a great scale, have been made with a more promising start. No doubt they have a difficult and slippery problem to perform. The frequent recurrence of elections to the supreme magistracy has always been, and ever must be, the breeder of faction, the nurse of venality, and the spur of ambition. Once already has this Titanic confederacy, though only a hundred years old, by going through a process of a long, bitter, and bloody civil war, shown that the unifying machinery so cunningly put together by the conservative genius of a Washington, an Adams, and a Madison, was insufficient to hold in check the rebellious forces at war within its womb. No doubt also it were in vain to speak America free from those acts of gigantic jobbing, blushless venality, and over-riding of the masses in various ways, which were working the ruin of Rome in the days of Jugurtha. The aristocracy of gold and the tyranny of capitalists in Christian New York has shown itself no less able to usurp the public land and defraud the people of their share in the soil than the lordly aristocracy and the slave-dealing magnates of heathen Rome. Nevertheless we need not despair. The sins of American democracy may serve as a useful hint to us not rashly to tinker our own mixed constitution without waiting for a verdict on issues, which, as Socrates wisely says, lie with the gods; nor, on the other hand, is there any wisdom in ascribing to the American form of government evils which, as belonging to human nature, crop up with more or less abundance under all forms of government, and which may be specially rife among ourselves. We also have our Glasgow banks, our bubble companies of all kinds, our heady speculations, our hot competitions, our over-productions, our haste to be rich, our idol worship of mere material magnificence,--these are evils, and the root of all evil, with the production of which no form of government has anything to do, and against which every form of government will be in vain invoked to contend.

In conclusion, we must bear in mind that democracy or social self-government is the most difficult of all human problems, and must be approached, not with inflated hopes and rosy imaginations, but with sobriety and caution and a sound mind, and at critical moments not without prayer and fasting. Before entering on any scheme for rebuilding our social edifice on a democratic model, we should consider seriously what a democracy really implies, and what we may reasonably promise ourselves from its possible success. Of the two rallying cries which have made it a favourite with persons given to change, equality and liberty, the one is no more true than that all the mountains in the Highlands are as high as Ben Nevis, and can only mean at the best that all men have an equal right to be called men and to be treated as men, while the other is only true so far as concerns the removal of all artificial barriers to the free exercise of each man's function, according to his capacity and opportunities. But this is a mere starting-point in the social life of a great people. When the bird is out of the cage, which it must be in order to be a perfect bird, the more serious question emerges, what use it shall make of its newly-acquired liberty. Here certainly to men, as to birds, there are great dangers to be faced; and with nations the progress of society, as already remarked, is measured to a much larger extent by the increase of limitations than by the extension of liberties. Then, again, the fundamental postulate of extreme democracy that the majority have everywhere a right to govern is manifestly false. No man as a member of society has a natural right to govern: he has a right to be governed, and well governed; and that can only be when the government is conducted by the wisest and best men who compose the society. If the numerical majority is composed of sober-minded, sensible, and intelligent persons who will either govern wisely themselves or choose persons who will do so, then democracy is justified by its deeds; but if it is otherwise, and if, when an appeal is made to the multitude, they will choose the most daring, the most ambitious, and the most unscrupulous, rather than the most sensible, the most moderate, and the most conscientious, then democracy is a bad thing, at least nothing better than the other _ocracies_ which it supplants. It is manifest, therefore, that of all forms of government democracy is that which imperatively requires the greatest amount of intelligence and moderation among the great mass of the people, especially amongst the lower classes, who have always been the most numerous; and, as history can point to no quarter of the world where such a happy condition of the numerical intelligence has been realised, it cannot look with any favour on schemes of universal suffrage, even when qualified with a stout array of effective checks. The system, indeed, of representing every man individually, and giving every member of a society a capitation vote, as they have a capitation tax in Turkey, however popular with the advocates of extreme democracy, seems quite unreasonable. What requires to be represented in a reasonable representative system is not so much individuals as qualities, capacities, interests, and types. Every class should be represented, rather than every man in a class. Besides, the equality of votes which democracy demands, on the principle that I am as good as you and perhaps a little better, is utterly false, and tends to nourish conceit and impertinence, to banish all reverence, and to ignore all distinctions in society. Anyhow, there can be no doubt that great masses of men acting together on exciting occasions are peculiarly liable to hasty resolutions and violent opinions; all democracies, therefore, are unsafe which are unprovided with checks in the form of an upper chamber composed of more cool materials, and planted firmly in a position that makes them independent of the fever and faction of the hour. A strong democracy stands as much in need of an aristocratic rein as a strong aristocracy does of a democratic spur. And let it never be forgotten--what democracies are far too apt to forget--that minorities have rights as well as majorities; nay, that one of the great ends to be achieved by a good government is to protect the few against the natural insolence of a majority glorying in its numbers, and hurried on by the spring-tide of a popular contagion. A state of society is not at all inconceivable in which the many shall make all the laws and monopolise all the offices of a fussy bureaucracy, while the few are burdened with all the taxes. Never too frequently can we repeat, in reference to all public acts, no less than to the conduct of individuals in private life, the great Aristotelian maxim that ALL EXTREMES ARE WRONG; that every force when in full action tends to an excess which for its own salvation must be met by a counterpoising force; that all good government, as all healthy existence, is the balance of opposites and the marriage of contraries; and that the more mettlesome the charger the more need of a firm rein and a cautious rider. He who overlooks this prime postulate of all sane action in this complex world may pile his democratic house tier above tier and enjoy his green conceit for a season; but the day of sore trial and civic storm is not far, when the rain shall descend, and the floods come, and the winds blow and beat upon that house, and it will fall, because it was founded upon a dream.

II. THE CHURCH.

Οὐ πᾶς ὁ λέγων μοι Κύριε, Κύριε, εἰσελεύσεται εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν· ἀλλ᾽ ὁ ποιῶν τὸ θέλημα τοῦ πατρός μου τοῦ ἐν τοῖς οῦρανοῖς.--Ὁ ΣΩΤΗΡ.

MAN is characteristically a religious animal; in fact, as Socrates teaches, the only religious animal;[13] for, though a dog has no doubt reverential emotions, it cannot be said with any propriety that he has religious ideas or ecclesiastical institutions, for a very good reason, because he has no ideas at all: observation he has very keen, and memory also wonderfully retentive; instincts also, like all primal vital forces, divine and miraculous; but ideas certainly none, for ideas mean knowledge; and brutes that have no language properly so called that is a system of significant vocal signs expressive of ideas, but only cries, gesticulations, and visible or audible signs expressive of sensations and feelings, can by no law of natural analogy be credited with the possession of a faculty of which they give no manifestation. Language is the outward body and form of which thought and reason and knowledge and ideas are the inward soul and force; and hence the wise Greeks, unlike our modern scientists, who delight in confounding man with the monkey, expressed language and reason with one word λόγος, while what we dignify with the name of language in birds and other animals was simply φωνή, or significant voice. If, therefore, there is any thing most human that history has to teach, it must be about religion. All the great nations whose names mark the march of human fates have been religious nations. A people without religion does not exist, or, if it does exist, it exists only as an abnormal and deficient specimen of the genus to which it belongs, which is of no more account in the just estimate of the type than a fox without a tail, or a lawyer without a tongue; and as for individual atheists, who have been talked about in ancient times, and specially in these latter days, they are either philosophers like Spinoza, the most pious of men, falsely baptized with an odious title from the stupidity, prejudice, or malice of the community, or, if they really are atheists, they are monsters which a man may stare at as at an ass with three heads or with no head at all in a show.

The form in which religion generally presents itself in early history is what we commonly call Polytheism, though it is quite possible--a matter about which I am not careful curiously to dogmatise--that there may have been in some places an original Dualism, like the ancient Persian, or even a Monotheism, out of which the Polytheism was developed. For there cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever may have been the starting-point, there lay in the popular theology a tendency to multiply and to reproduce itself in kindred but not always easily recognisable forms, like the children of a family or the cousinship of a clan. But, taking Polytheism as the type under which history presents the objects of religious faith in the earliest times, we have to remark that under this common name, as in the case of Christianity, the greatest contrasts, both in speculative idea and in social efficiency, stare us everywhere in the face. In the eye of the Christian or the monotheistic devotee the worships of Aphrodite and of Pallas Athene are equally idolatrous; but, allowing that these anthropomorphic forms of divine forces and functions of the universe are equally destitute of a foundation in fact or reason, the reverence paid to them by a devout people might be as different as passion is from thought, and sense from spirit. As the ideal of wisdom in counsel and in action, the Athenian Pallas no doubt exercised as beneficent a sway over her Hellenic worshippers as the ideal of Christian womanhood, in the person of the Virgin Mary, does at the present day over millions of Christian worshippers. It is only when the cosmic function impersonated in the polytheistic god, being of an inferior order, leaps from its proper position of subordination and usurps the controlling and regulating action belonging to the superior function, that polytheistic idolatry becomes immoral; though, of course, the very facility of this usurpation, and the stamp of a pseudo divinity that may thereby be given to beastly vice, is a sufficient reason for the denunciations of the heathen idolatries so frequent in the Old Testament, which ultimately ripened into the spiritual apostleship and monotheistic aggression of St. Paul. One other striking feature of all polytheistic religions may not be omitted. They are naturally complete--more catholic, more sympathetic with universal nature and universal life than monotheistic religions; if they make a philosophical mistake in worshipping many gods, they do not make a moral mistake in excluding any of his attributes. With the polytheistic worshipper everything is sacred: the sun and the sea and the sky, dark earth and awful night, excite in him an emotion of reverence. If the Greek polytheist was devout at all, he was devout everywhere; whereas, under monotheistic influences, there is a danger that devout feelings may respond exclusively to the stern decrees of an absolute lawgiver and the awful threatenings of a violated law. Polytheistic piety, whatever its defects, was always ready to add a grace to every innocent enjoyment; monotheistic religiousness, as we see its severe features in some modern churches, contents itself with adding a solemn sanction to the moral law--a severity which here and there has not been able to keep itself free from the unlovely phase of regarding the innocent enjoyments and the graceful pleasantries of life as a sin.