The Evolution of States Part 7

It is surely time that this palaeo-theological fas.h.i.+on of explaining human affairs were superseded by the more fruitful method of positive science, even as regards China, which is perhaps the worst explained of all sociological cases. Like others, it had been intelligently taken up by sociologists of the eighteenth century before the conservative reaction (see the _Esprit des Lois_, vii, 6; viii, 21; x, 15; xiv, 8; xviii, 6; xix, 13-20; Dunbar's _Essays_, as cited, pp. 257, 258, 262, 263, 321; and Walckenaer, _Essai_ cited, pp. 175, 176); but that impetus seems to have been thus far almost entirely lost. Voltaire's fallacy is remembered and his truth ignored; and the methods of theology continue to be applied to many questions of moral science after they have been wholly cast out of physics and biology. The old "falsisms" of empirical politics are repeated even by professed biologists when they enter on the field of social science. Thus we have seen them accepted by Dr. Draper, and we find Professor Huxley (_Evolution and Ethics_, Romanes Lecture for 1893, p. 4) rhetorically putting "that successive rise, apogee, and fall of dynasties and states which is the most prominent topic of civil history," as scientifically a.n.a.logous to the process of growth and decay and death in the human organism. Any comparative study of history shows the a.n.a.logy to be spurious. Professor Whitney was doubtless influenced, like Dr. Draper, by the American habit of regarding European and ancient civilisations as necessarily decrepit because "slow" and "old." Cp. Draper as cited, ii, 393-98.

In the cases above dealt with, however, and in many others, there is seen to have been _intellectual_ decay, in the sense of, first, a cessation of forward movement, and, next, a loss of the power to appreciate ideas once current. A common cause of such paralysis of the higher life is the malignant action of dogmatic religious systems, as in the cases of Persia, Jewry, Byzantium, Islam, Spain under Catholicism, and Scotland for two centuries under Protestantism. Such paralysis by religion may arise alike in a highly-organised but isolated State like Byzantium, and in a semi-civilised country like Anglo-Saxon England.[145] The special malignity of dogma in these cases is itself of course a matter for a.n.a.lysis and explanation. Other cases are partly to be explained by (_a_) the subst.i.tution of systematic militarism, always fatal to progressive culture, for a life of only occasional warfare, favourable to study among the leisured cla.s.s.[146] But (_b_) there is reason to surmise a further and profoundly important cause of intellectual retrogression in the usage which develops the culture of a people for the most part in one s.e.x only. The thesis may be ventured that whereas vigorous and creative brains may arise in abundance in a young civilisation, where the s.e.xes are physiologically not far removed from the approximate equality of the semi-barbarous stage, the psychological divergence set up by mentally and physically training the males and not the females is likely to be unfavourable to the breeding of mentally energetic types.

(12) Whether or not the last hypothesis be valid, it is clear that the co-efficient or const.i.tuent of intellectual progress in a people, given the necessary conditions of peace and sufficient food, is multiplication of ideas; and this primarily results from international contact, or the contact of wholly or partly independent communities of one people.

Multiplication of arts and crafts is of course included under the head of ideas. But unless the stock of ideas is not merely in constant process of being added to among the studious or leisured cla.s.s, but disseminated among the other cla.s.ses, stagnation will take place among these, and will inevitably infect the educated cla.s.s.

De Tocqueville, balancing somewhat inconclusively, because always _in vacuo_, the forces affecting literature in aristocratic and democratic societies, says decisively enough (_Democratie en Amerique_, ed. 1850, ii, 62-63) that "Toute aristocratie qui se met entierement a part du peuple devient impuissante. Cela est vrai dans les lettres aussi bien qu'en politique." This holds clearly enough of Italian literature in the despotic period. Mr. G.o.dkin's criticism (_Problems of Modern Democracy_, p. 56) that "M. de Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the great incentive to excellence, in all countries in which excellence is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy," is hardly accurate. De Tocqueville puts the case judicially enough, so far as he goes; and Mr. G.o.dkin falls into strange extravagance in his counter statement that there is "hardly a single historical work composed prior to the end of the last [eighteenth] century, except perhaps Gibbon's, which, judged by the standard that the criticism of our day has set up, would not, though written for the 'few,' be p.r.o.nounced careless, slipshod, or superficial."

Tillemont, by the testimony of Professor Bury, was a more thorough worker in his special line than Gibbon. It would be easy to name scores of writers in various branches of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whom no good critic to-day would call careless or slipshod; and if Hume and Robertson, Clarendon and Burnet, be termed superficial, the "standard" will involve a similar characterisation of most historical writers of our own day.

As regards present-day literary productions, De Tocqueville and Mr.

G.o.dkin alike omit the necessary economic a.n.a.lysis.

(13) In the intellectual infectiousness of all cla.s.s degradation, properly speaking, lies the final sociological (as apart from the primary ethical) condemnation of slavery. The familiar argument that slavery first secured the leisure necessary for culture, even were it wholly instead of being merely partially true, would not rebut the censure that falls to be pa.s.sed on slavery in later stages of civilisation. All the ancient States, before Greece, stood on slavery: then it was not slavery that yielded her special culture. What she gained from older civilisations was the knowledge and the arts developed by _specialisation_ of pursuits; and such specialisation was not necessarily dependent on slavery, which could abound without it. It was in the special employment, finally, of the exceptionally large _free_ population of Athens that the greatest artistic output was reached.[147]

In later periods, the slave population was the great nucleus of superst.i.tion and anti-culture.

Inasmuch, then, as education is in only a small degree compatible with toilsome poverty, the betterment of the material conditions of the toiling cla.s.s is essential to progress in ideas. That is to say, continual progress implies gradual elimination of cla.s.s inequality, and cannot subsist otherwise. At the same time, a culture-cla.s.s must be maintained by new machinery when leisured wealth is got rid of.[148]

(14) Again, it follows from the foregoing (4-10) that the highest civilisation will be that in which the greatest number of varying culture-influences meet,[149] in the most happily-crossed stock, under climatic conditions favourable to energy, on a basis of a civilisation sufficiently matured.[150] But in order to the effectual action of such various culture-influences through all cla.s.ses of the nation in which they meet, there is needed a constant application of social or political regimen. In the lack of that, a great conflux of culture-forces may miss fruition. A mere fortuitous depression of the rich cla.s.s, and elevation of the poor, will not suffice to place a society on a sound or even on an improved footing. Such a change occurred in ancient Athens after Salamis, when the poorer sort, who had const.i.tuted the navy, flourished[151] as against the richer, who had been the land soldiery, and whose lands had been ravaged. But the forces of disintegration played afresh. Yet again, transient financial conditions, such as those of Italy before the Reformation, of Holland until the decline of its fis.h.i.+ng and trade, and of Venice until its final commercial decay, may sustain a great artistic life, art having always depended on private or public demand. Thus with a change in the geographical course of trade, a great phase of culture-life may dwindle. So many and so complex are the forces and conditions of progress in civilisation.

-- 2

It will readily be seen that most of the foregoing propositions have direct reference to well-known facts of history. Thus (_a_) ancient Egypt represents a primary civilisation, marked indeed by some fluctuations connected with dynastic changes which involved mixture of stocks, but on the whole singularly fixed; while ancient Greek civilisation was emphatically a secondary one, the fruit of much race-mixture and many interacting culture-forces, all facilitated by the commercial position and coast-conformation of h.e.l.las.

This view is partly rejected by Grote in two pa.s.sages (pt. i, chs.

xvi, xvii, ed. 1888, i, 326, 413) in which he gives to the "inherent and expansive force" of "the Greek mind" the main credit of Greek civilisation. But his words, to begin with, are confused and contradictory: "The transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its comparatively positive stage was self-operated, accomplished by its own inherent and expansive force--_aided indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked_ from without." In the second place, there is no basis for the denial of "impression or provocation" from without. And finally, what is decisive, the historian himself has in other pa.s.sages acknowledged that the Greeks received from Asia and Egypt just such "provocation" as is seen to take place in varying degrees in the culture-contacts of all nations (chs. xv, xvi, pp. 307, 329). Of the contact with Egypt he expressly says that it "enlarged the range of their thoughts and observations." His whole treatment of the rise of culture, however, is meagre and imperfect relatively to his ample study of the culture itself. Later students grow more and more unanimous as to the composite character of the Greek-speaking stock in the earliest traceable periods of h.e.l.lenic life (cp. Bury, _History of Greece_, ed. 1906, pp. 39-42, and Professor Burrows, _The Discoveries in Crete_, 1907, p. 144), and the consequent complexity of the entire h.e.l.lenic civilisation. The case is suggestively put by Eduard Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 155) in the observation that while the west coast of Greece had as many natural advantages as the eastern, it remained backward in civilisation when the other had progressed far. "_Here there lacked the foreign stimulus_: the west of Greece is away from the source of culture. Here, accordingly, primitive conditions continued to rule, while in the east a higher culture evolved itself.... Corinth in the older period played no part whatever, whether in story or in remains." The same proposition was put a generation ago by A.

Bertrand, who pointed out that the coasts of Elis and Messenia are "incomparably more fertile" than those of Argolis and Attica (_etudes de mythologie et d'archeologie grecques_, 1858, pp.

40-41); and again by Winwood Reade in _The Martyrdom of Man_ (1872, p. 64): "A glance at the map is sufficient to explain why it was that Greece became civilised before the other European lands. It is nearest to those countries in which civilisation first arose ...

compelled to grow towards Asia as a tree grows towards the light."

But to this generalisation should be put the qualifying clause (above, p. 55) that fertile coasts when developed are defensible only by a strongly organised community. Thus an early exploitation of Elis and Messenia would be checked by piracy.

The question as to the originality of Greek culture, it is interesting to note, was already discussed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, Misc. iii, ch. i.

(_b_) The Greek land as a whole, especially the Attic, was only moderately fertile, and therefore not so cheaply and redundantly populated as Egypt.

The bracing effect of their relative poverty was fully recognised by the Greeks themselves. Cp. Herodotus, vii, 102, and Thucydides, i, 123. See on the same point Heeren, _Political History of Ancient Greece_, Eng. tr. pp. 24-33; Thirlwall, _History of Greece_, small ed. i, 12; Duncker, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, iii, ch. i, -- 1; Wachs.m.u.th, _Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks_, -- 8; Duruy, _Hist.

Grecque_, 1851, p. 7; Grote, part ii, ch. i (ed. 1888, ii, 160); Boeckh, _Public Economy of Athens_, B. i, c. 8; Niebuhr, _Lectures_, li (Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 265); Mahaffy, _Rambles and Studies in Greece_, 4th ed. pp. 137, 164-67. Dr. Grundy (_Thucydides and the History of his Age_, 1911, p. 58 _sq._) lays stress on the fertility of the valleys, but recognises the smallness of the fertile areas.

(_c_) h.e.l.las was further so decisively cut up into separate cantons by its mountain ranges, and again in respect of the mult.i.tude of the islands, that the Greek districts were largely foreign to each other,[152] and their cultures had thus the advantage of reacting and interacting, as against the disadvantage of their incurable political separateness--that disadvantage in turn being correlative with the advantage of insusceptibility to a despotism.

The effect of geographical conditions on Greek history is discussed at length in Conrad Bursian's essay, _Ueber den Einfluss des griechischen Landes auf den Charakter seiner Bewohner_, which I have been unable to procure or see; but I gather from his _Geographie von Griechenlands_ that he takes the view here set forth. Cp. Senior's _Journal kept in Turkey and Greece_, 1859, p.

255, for a modern Greek's view of the state of his nation, "divided into small districts by mountain ranges intersecting each other in all directions without a road or ca.n.a.l"; the deduction from the same perception made by the young Arthur Stanley (Prothero's _Life of Dean Stanley_, 1-vol. ed. p. 143); and the impression retained from his travels by M. Bertrand, _etudes de mythologie et d'archeologie grecques_, 1858, p. 199.

The profound importance of the geographical fact has been recognised more or less clearly and fully by many writers--_e.g._, Hume, essay Of the _Rise and Progress of the Arts and the Sciences_ (ed. 1825 of _Essays_, i, 115-16); Gillies, _History of Greece_, 1-vol. ed. p. 5; Heeren, as cited, pp. 35, 75; Duncker, as last cited, also ch. iii, -- 12 (2te Aufl. 1860, p. 601); Duruy, ch. i; c.o.x, _General History of Greece_, bk. i, ch. i; Thirlwall, ch. x; Wachs.m.u.th, Eng. tr. i, 87; Comte, _Cours de Philosophie Positive_, Lecon 53ieme; Grote, pt. ii, ch. i (ii, 155); Finlay, _History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 28; K.O. Muller, _Introd. to Scientific Mythology_, Eng. tr. p. 179; Hegel, as last cited; Hertzberg, _Geschichte von h.e.l.las und Rom_, 1879 (in Oncken's series), i, 9; Winwood Reade, _The Martyrdom of Man_, 1872, p. 65 sq.; Bury, _History of Greece_, ed. 1906, pp. 2-4; Fyffe (very explicitly), _Primer of Greek History_, p. 8--but it is strangely overlooked by writers to whom one turns for a careful study of causes. Even Grote, after having clearly set forth (ii, 150) the predetermining influence of land-form, attributes Greek divisions to the "character of the race," which even in this connection, however, he describes as "splitting _by natural fracture_ into a mult.i.tude of self-administering, indivisible cities" (pt. ii, ch. 28, beginning); and Sir George c.o.x, after specifying the geographical factor, speaks of it as merely "fostering" a love of isolation _resulting_ from "political creed." Freeman (_History of Federal Government_) does not seem to apply the geographical fact to the explanation of any phase of Greek history, though he sees in Greece (ed. 1893, pp. 92, 554) "each valley and peninsula and island marked out by the hand of nature for an independent being," and quotes (p. 559) Cantu as to the effect of land-form on history in Italy. In so many words he p.r.o.nounces (p. 101) that the love of town-autonomy was "inherent in the Greek mind." Mr. Warde Fowler (_City-State of the Greeks and Romans_) does not once give heed to the geographical conditions of causation, always speaking of the Greeks as lacking the "faculty" of union as compared with the Latins, though the Eastern Empire finally showed greater cohesive power than the Western. Even Mr. Fyffe (_Primer_ cited, p. 127), despite his preliminary recognition of the facts, finally speaks of the Greeks as relatively lacking in the "gift for government."

The same a.s.sumption is made in Lord Morley's _Compromise_ (ed.

1888, p. 108) in the allusion to "peoples so devoid of the sovereign faculty of political coherency as were the Greeks and the Jews." Lord Morley's proposition is that such peoples may still evolve great civilising ideas; but though that is true, the implied thesis as to "faculty" weakens even the truth. The case of the Jews is to be explained in exactly the same way as that of the Greeks, the face of Palestine being disjunct and segregate in a peculiar degree. Other "Semites," living in great plains, were united in great monarchies. The sound view of the case as to Rome is put by Hertzberg: "Soll man im Gegensatze zu der h.e.l.lenischen Geschichte es in kurzester Fa.s.sung bezeichnen, so kann man etwa sagen, die italische Landesnatur stellte der Ausbildung eines grossen _einheitlich_ geordneten Staates durchaus nicht die gewaltigen Hindernisse entgegen, wie das in Griechenland der Fall war" (_Gesch. von h.e.l.las und Rom_, ii, 7). Cp. Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 9, as to "the vast heights which effectually separate tribes." Dr. Cunningham puts it (_Western Civilisation_, i, 152, 160) that Roman expansion in Italy came of the need to reach a true frontier of defence, in the lack of physical barriers to the early States. (So Lord Cromer, _Anc. and Mod. Imperialism_, 1910, p. 19.) It seems more plausible to say that all of the States concerned were positively disposed to conquest, and that the physical conditions of Italy made possible an overrunning which in early Greece was impossible.

The theory of "faculty," consistently applied on Mr. Fowler's and Lord Morley's lines, would credit the French with an innate gift of union much superior to that of the Germans--at least in the modern period--and the Chinese with the greatest "faculty" of all. But the long maintenance of one rule over all China is clearly due in large part to the "great facility of internal intercourse" (Davis, _The Chinese_, Introd.) so long established. The Roman roads were half the secret of the cohesion of the Empire. Dr. Draper suggests, ingeniously but inaccurately, that Rome had strength and permanence because of lying east and west, and thus possessing greater racial h.o.m.ogeneity than it would have had if it lay north and south (_Intel. Devel. of Europe_, _i_, 11). On the other hand, mountainous Switzerland remains still cantonally separate, though the pressure of surrounding States, beginning with that of Austria, forced a political union. Compare the case of the clans of the Scottish Highlands down to the road-making period after the last Jacobite rising. See the principle discussed in Mr. Spencer's _Principles of Sociology_, i, -- 17.

It may be well, before leaving the subject, to meet the important criticism of the geographical principle by Fustel de Coulanges (_La Cite antique_, liv. iii, ch. xiv, p. 238, edit. 1880). Noting that the incurable division of the Greeks has been attributed to the nature of their land, and that it has been said that the intersecting mountains established lines of natural demarcation among men, he goes on to argue: "But there are no mountains between Thebes and Plataea, between Argos and Sparta, between Sybaris and Crotona. There were none between the towns of Latium, or between the twelve cities of Etruria. Physical nature has doubtless some influence on the history of peoples, but the beliefs of men have a much greater. Between two neighbouring cities there was something more impa.s.sable than a mountain--to wit, the series of sacred limits, the difference of cults, the barrier which each city set up between the stranger and its G.o.ds."

All this, so far as it goes, is substantially true, but it does not at all conflict with the principle as above set forth. Certainly all cities, like all tribes, were primarily separatist; though even in religious matters there was some measure of early peaceful inter-influence, and a certain tendency to syncresis as well as to separateness. (Cp. K.O. Muller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. i, 228.) But the principle is not special to the cities of Greece. Cities and tribes were primarily separatist in Babylonia and in Egypt. How, then, were these regions nevertheless monarchised at an early period? Clearly by reason of the greater invitingness and feasibility of conquest in such territories--for their unification was forcible. The conditions had thus both an objective and a subjective, a suggestive and a permissive force, both lacking in Greece. Again, the twelve cities of Etruria _formed a league_. If they did so more readily and effectually than the Greeks, is not the level character of their territory, which made them collectively open to attack, and facilitated intercourse, one of the obviously probable causes? No doubt the close presence of hostile and alien races was a further unifying force which did not arise in Greece. Etruria, finally, like Latium, was unified by conquest; the question is, Why was not Greece? There is no answer save one--that in the pre-Alexandrian period no Greek State had acquired the military and administrative skill and resources needed to conquer and hold such a divided territory. Certainly the conditions conserved the ideal of separateness and non-aggression or non-a.s.similation, so that cities which had easy access to each other respected each other's ideal. But here again it was known that an attempt at conquest would probably lead to alliances between the attacked State and others; and the physical conditions prevented any State save Macedonia from becoming overwhelmingly strong. To these conditions, then, we always return, not as to sole causes, but as to determinants.

(_d_) In Egypt, again, culture was never deeply disseminated, and before Alexander was hardly at all fecundated by outside contact. In Greece there was always the great uncultured slave substratum; and the arrest of freedom, to say nothing of social ignorance, female subjection, and s.e.xual perversion, ultimately kept vital culture stationary. In Rome, militarism and the multiplication of the slave cla.s.s, along with the deletion of the independent and industrious middle cla.s.s, made progressive culture impossible, as surely as it broke down self-government. In all cases alike, over-population, not being met by science, either bred poverty or was obviated by crime and vice.

The so-called regeneration of Europe by the barbarian conquest, finally, was simply the beginning of a long period of corrupted and internecine barbarism, the old culture remaining latent; and not till after many centuries did the maturing barbaric civilisation in times of compulsory peace reach the capacity of being fecundated by the intelligent a.s.similation of the old. But after the Renaissance, as before, the diseases of militarism and cla.s.s privilege and the political subjection caused a backthrow and intellectual stagnation, which was a.s.sisted by the commercial decline brought upon Italy; so that in the feudal period, in one State after another, we have the symptoms of, as it were, senile "decay" and retrogression.[153] In all cases this is to be set down proximately to the deficit of new ideas, and in some to excess of strife, which exhausted spare energy among the leisured cla.s.s, deepened the misery of the toilers, and normally prevented the intelligent intercourse of peoples. It is become a commonplace of historical philosophy that the Crusades wrought for good inasmuch as they meant fresh communication between East and West. Yet it may be doubted whether much more was not done through the quiet contacts of peace between Saracen and Christian in Western Europe, and by the commerce with the East which preceded the Crusades,[154] than by the forced intercourse following on religious war. In any case, the transition from quasi-decay to progress in Christendom is clearly due to the entrance of new ideas of many species from many directions into the common stock; Greek letters, Saracen physics, and new geographical discovery all combining to generate thought.

The case of j.a.pan, again, compares with both that of ancient Greece and that of modern Europe. Its separate civilisation, advantageously placed in an archipelago, drew stimulus early in the historic period from that of China; and, while long showing the Chinese unprogressiveness in other respects, partly in virtue of the peculiar burdensomeness of the Chino-j.a.panese system of ideograms, it made remarkable progress on the side of art. The recent rapid industrial development (injurious to the artistic life) is plainly a result of the European and American contact; and if only the mechanism of reading and writing be made manageable on the European lines, and the snare of militarism be escaped, the j.a.panese civilisation may develop mentally as much as it is doing industrially and in military organisation.

It suffices the practical political student, then, to note that progress is thus always a matter of intelligible causation; and, without concerning himself about predicting the future or estimating the sum of possibilities, to take up the tasks of contemporary politics as all other tasks are taken up by practical men, as a matter of adaptation of means to ends. The architect and engineer have nothing to do with calculating as to when the energy of the solar system will be wholly trans.m.u.ted. As little has the politician to do with absolute estimates of the nature of progress. All alike have to do with the study of laws, forces, and economics.

-- 3

We may now, then, set forth the all-pervading biological forces or tendencies of attraction and repulsion in human affairs as the main primary factors in politics or corporate life, which it is the problem of human science to control by counteracting or guiding; and we may without further ill.u.s.tration set down the princ.i.p.al modes in which these instincts appear. They are, broadly speaking:--

(_a_) Animal pugnacities and antipathies of States or peoples, involving combinations, sanctified from the first by religion, and surviving as racial aspirations in subject peoples.

(_b_) Cla.s.s divisions, economically produced, resulting in cla.s.s combinations and hostilities within a State, and, in particular, popular desire for betterment.

(_c_) The tendency to despotism as a cure for cla.s.s oppression or anarchy; and the spirit of conquest.

(_d_) The beneficent lure of commerce, promoting intercourse, countered by the commercial jealousies of States.

(_e_) Designs of rulers, giving rise to popular or aristocratic factions--complicated by questions of succession and loyalism.

(_f_) Religious combinations, antipathies, and ambitions, international or sectarian. In more educated communities, ideals of government and conduct.

In every one of these modes, be it observed, the instinct of repulsion correlates with the instinct of attraction. The strifes are the strifes of combinations, of groups or ma.s.ses united in themselves by sympathy, in antipathy to other groups or ma.s.ses. The _esprit de corps_ arises alike in the species, the horde, the tribe, the community, the cla.s.s, the faction, the nation, the trade or profession, the Church, the sect, the party. Always men unite to oppose; always they must love to hate, fraternise to struggle.

The a.n.a.logies in physics are obvious, but need not here be dwelt upon. There is a risk of losing concrete impressions, which are here in view, in a highly generalised statement of cosmic a.n.a.logies. But it may be well to point out that a general view will perfectly reconcile the superficially conflicting doctrines of recent biologists, as to "progress by struggle" and "progress by co-operation." Both statements hold good, the two phases being correlatives.

I have said that it is extremely difficult to imagine a state of society in which there shall be no public operation of any one of these forces.

I am disposed to say it is impossible, but for scientific purposes prefer to put simply the difficulties of the conception. A cessation of war is not only easily conceivable, but likely; but a cessation of strife of aspiration would mean a state of biological equilibrium throughout the civilised world. Now, pure equilibrium is by general consent a state only momentarily possible; and the state of dissolution of unions, were that to follow, would involve strife of opinion at least up to a certain point. But just as evolution is now visibly towards an abandonment of brute strife among societies, so may it be reasonably expected that the strife of ideals and doctrines within societies, though now perhaps emotionally intense in proportion to the limitation of brute warfare, will gradually be freed of malevolent pa.s.sion as organisms refine further. Pa.s.sion, in any case, has. .h.i.therto been at once motive-power and hindrance--the omnipresent force, since all ideas have their correlative emotion. A perception of this has led to some needless dispute over what is called the "economic theory" of history; critics insisting that men are ruled by non-economic as well as economic motives.[155] The solution is perfectly simple. Men are proximately ruled by their pa.s.sions or emotions; and the supremacy of the economic factor consists in its being, for the majority, the most permanent director or stimulant of feeling. Therefore, the great social rectification, if it ever come, must needs be economic.

Certainly, on the principle laid down, there is a likelihood that strife of ideals and doctrines may be for a time intensified by the very process of social reform, should that go to lessen the stress of the industrial struggle for existence. It is easy to see that England has in the past hundred and twenty years escaped the stress of domestic strife which in France wrought successive revolutions, not so much by any virtue in its partially democratic const.i.tution as by the fact that on the one hand a war was begun with France by the English ruling cla.s.ses at an early stage of the first revolution, and that on the other hand the animal energies of the middle and lower cla.s.ses were on the whole freer than those of the French to run in the channels of industrial compet.i.tion. People peacefully fighting each other daily in trade, not to speak of sports, were thereby partly safeguarded from carrying the instincts of attraction and repulsion in politics to the length of insurrection and civil war. When the strife of trade became congested, the spirit of political strife, fed by hunger, broke out afresh, to be again eased off when the country had an exciting foreign war on hand. So obvious is this that it may be the last card of Conservatism to play off the war spirit against the reform spirit, as was done with some temporary success in England by Beaconsfield, and as is latterly being done by his successors.[156] The climaxing movement of political rationalism is evidently dependent on the limitation of the field of industrial growth and the absence of brute warfare. And if, as seems conceivable, political rationalism attains to a scientific provision for the well-being of the ma.s.s of the people, we shall have attained a condition in which the forces of attraction and repulsion, no longer flowing freely in the old social channels, may be expected to dig new ones or deepen those lately formed. The future channels, generally speaking, would tend to lie in the regions of political, ethical, and religious opinion; and the partial disuse of any one of these will tend to bring about the deepening of the others.

But this is going far ahead; and it is our business rather to make clear, with the help of an a.n.a.lysis of a.n.a.logous types of civilisation, what has happened in the modern past of our country. The simple general laws under notice are universal, and will be found to apply in all stages of history, though the interpretation of many phases of life by their means may be a somewhat complex matter.

For instance, the life of China[157] (above discussed) and that of India may at first sight seem to give little colour to the a.s.sumption of a constant play of social attraction and repulsion. The "unprogressiveness of Asia" is dwelt on alike by many who know Asia and many who do not.

But this relative unprogressiveness is to be explained, like European progress, in terms of the conditions. China is simply a case of comparative culture-stability and culture-isolation. The capital condition of progress in civilisation has always been, as aforesaid, the contact of divergent races whose independent culture-elements, though different, are not greatly different in grade and prestige. Now, the outside contacts of China, down till the eighteenth century, had been either with races which had few elements of civilisation to give her, like the Mongols, or with a civilisation little different from or less vigorous than her own, like that of India. Even these contacts counted for much, and Chinese history has been full of political convulsions, despite--or in keeping with--the comparative stagnation of Chinese culture. (On this see Peschel, _Races of Men_, Eng. tr. pp. 361-74. Cp.

Huc, _Chinese Empire_, Eng. tr. ed. 1859, p. xvii; Walckenaer, _Essai sur l'histoire de l'espece humaine_, 1798, pp. 175, 176; and Maine, _Early History of Inst.i.tutions_, pp. 226, 227). The very pigtail which for Europe is the symbol of Chinese civilisation is only two hundred years old, having come in with the Mantchoo dynasty; and the policy of systematically excluding foreigners dates from the same period (Huc, p.

236). "No one," writes Professor Flint, "who has felt interest enough in that singular nation to study the researches and translations of Remusat, Pauthier, Julien, Legge, Plath, Faber, Eitel, and others, will hesitate to dismiss as erroneous the commonplace that it has been an unprogressive nation" (_History of the Philosophy of History_, vol. i, 1893, p. 88).

China was in fact progressive while the variety of stocks scattered over her vast area reacted on each other in virtue of variety of government and way of life:[158] it was when they were reduced under one imperial government that unity of state-system, coupled with the exclusion of foreign contacts, imposed stagnation. But the stagnation was real, and other factors contributed to its continuance. The fecundity of the soil has always maintained a redundant and therefore a poor and ignorant population--a condition which we have described as fatal to progress in culture if not counteracted, and which further favours the utter subjection of women and the consequent arrest of half the sources of variation. Mencius, speaking to the rulers of his day (3rd c. B.C.), declared with simple profundity that "They are only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart.

As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood it follows that they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a fixed heart there is nothing they will not do in the way of self-abandonment, of moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license" (Legge, _Life and Works of Mencius_, 1875, p. 49). That lesson the rulers of China could not learn, any more than their European congeners.

We cannot, therefore, accede to Professor Flint's further remark that "The development and filiation of thought is scarcely less traceable in the history and literature of China than of Greece"--that is, if it be meant that Chinese history down till our own day may be so compared with the history of pagan Greece. The forces of fixation in China have been too strong to admit of this. The same factors have been at work in India, where, further, successive conquests, down till our own, had results very similar to those of the barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire. Yet at length, next door to China, in j.a.pan, there has rapidly taken place a national transformation that is not to be paralleled in the world's history; and in India the Congress movement has developed in a way that twenty years ago was thought impossible.[159] And while these things are actually happening before the world's eyes, certain Englishmen vociferate more loudly than ever the formula of the "unchangeableness of Asia." A saner, though still a speculative view, is put forth by Mr. C.H. Pearson in his work on _National Character_. It was antic.i.p.ated by--among others--M. Philarete Chasles. See his _L'Angleterre politique_, edit. 1878, pp. 250, 251. And Walckenaer, over a hundred years ago (_Essai_ cited, p. 368), predicted the future civilisation of the vast plains of Tartary.