The State (B): State and History

Within the world-as-history, in which we are so livingly woven that our perception and our reason constantly obey our feelings, the cosmic flowings appear as that which we call actuality, real life, being-streams in bodily form. Their common badge is Direction. But they can be grasped differently according as it is the movement or the thing moved that is looked at. The former aspect we call history and the latter family or stock or estate or people, but the one is only possible and existent through the other. History exists only as the history of something. If we are referring to the history of the great Cultures, then nation is the thing moved. State, status, means condition, and we obtain our impression of the State when, as a Being in moved Form flows past us, we fix in our eyes the Form as such, as something extended and timelessly standing fast, and entirely ignore direction and Destiny. State is history regarded as at the halt, history the State regarded as on the move. The State of actuality is the physiognomy of a historical unit of being; only the planned State of the theorist is a system.

A movement has form, and that which is moved is “in form,” or, to use another sporting expression, when it is “going all out” it is in perfect condition. This is equally true for a racehorse or a wrestler and for an army or a people. The form abstracted from the life-stream of a people is the “condition” of that people with respect to its wrestle in and with history. But only the smallest part of this can be got at and identified by means of the reason. No real constitution, when taken by itself and brought down to paper as a system, is complete. The unwritten, the indescribable, the usual, the felt, the self-evident, so outweigh everything else that—though theorists never see it—the description of a state or its constitutional archives cannot give us even the silhouette of that which underlies the living actuality of a state as its essential form; an existence-unit of history is spoilt when we seriously subject its movement to the constraint of a written constitution.

The individual class or family is the smallest, the nation the largest unit in the stream of history.⁠⁶²⁶ Primitive peoples are subject to a movement that is not historical in the higher sense—the movement may be a jog-trot or may be a charge, but it has no organic character and no profound importance. Nevertheless, these primitive peoples are in motion through and through, to such an extent, indeed, as to seem perfectly formless to the hasty observer. Fellaheen, on the contrary, are the rigid objects of a movement that comes from outside and impinges on them unmeaningly and fortuitously. The former includes the “State” of the Mycenæan period; that of the Thinite period; that of the Shang dynasty in China up to, say, the migration to Yin (1400); the Frankish realm of Charlemagne; the Visigothic Kingdom to Eurich; and Petrine Russia—state-forms often ample and efficient, but still destitute of symbolism and necessity. To the latter belong the Roman, Chinese, and other Imperia, whose form has ceased to have any expressive content whatever.

But between primitive and fellah lies the history of the great Culture. A people in the style of a Culture—a historical people, that is—is called a Nation.⁠⁶²⁷ A nation, as a living and battling thing, possesses a State not merely as a condition of movement, but also (above all) as an idea. The State in the simplest sense of the term may be as old as free-moving life itself. Swarms and herds of even very lowly animal genera may have “constitutions” of some sort—and those of the ants, of the bees, of many fish, or migrating birds, of beavers, have reached an astounding degree of perfection—but the State of the grand style is as old as and no older than its two prime Estates, nobility and priesthood. These emerge with the Culture, they vanish into it, their Destinies are to a high degree identical. Culture is the being of nations in State-form.

A people is as State, a kindred is as family, “in form”—that is, as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history, public and private life, res publica and res privata. And both, moreover, are symbols of care.⁠⁶²⁸ The woman is world-history. By conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is “in form” as marriage. The man, however, makes history, which is an unending battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is the other grand emblem of the will-to-duration. A people “in condition” is originally a band warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man, it is Care for the preservation of the whole (including the spiritual self-preservation called honour and self-respect), the thwarting of attacks, the foreseeing of dangers, and, above all, the positive aggressiveness which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar.

If all life were one uniform being-stream, the words “people,” “state,” “war,” “policy,” “constitution,” would never have been heard of. But the eternal forceful variety of life, which the creative power of the Culture elevates to the highest intensities, is a fact, and historically we have no choice but to accept it as such, with all that flows therefrom. Plant-life is only plant-life in relation to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition one another. A people is only really such in relation to other peoples, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defence, hostility and war. War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.

A people shapes history inasmuch as it is “in condition” for the task of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history—which gets it into this “condition,” in which alone it becomes creative—and an outward history, which consists in this creation. Peoples as State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They are Destiny.

Res publica, the public life, the “sword side” of human being-currents, is in actuality invisible. The alien sees merely the men and not their inner connexion, for indeed this resides very deep in the stream of life, and even there is felt rather than understood. Similarly, we do not in actuality see the family, but only certain persons, whose cohesion in a perfectly definite sense we know and grasp by way of our own inward experience. But for each such mental picture there exists a group of constituent persons who are bound together as a life-unit by a like constitution of outer and inner being. This form in the flow of existence is called customary ethic (Sitte) when it arises of itself in the beat and march and is unconscious before it is conscious; and law (Recht) when it is deliberately stated and put forth for acceptance.

Law—irrespective of whether its authority derives from the feelings and impulse (unwritten law, customary law, English “equity”) or has been abstracted by reflection, probed, and brought into system as Statute Law (Gesetz)—is the willed form of Being. The jural facts that it embraces are of the two kinds, though both possess time-symbolism—Care in two modes, prevision and provision—but, from the very difference in the proportions of consciousness that they respectively contain, it follows that throughout real history there must be two laws in opposition—the law of the fathers, of tradition, the inherited, grown, and well-tried law, sacrosanct because immemorially old, derived from the experience of the blood and therefore dependable; and the thought and planned law of reason, nature, and broad humanity, the product of reflection and therefore first cousin to mathematics, a law that may not be very workable, but is at any rate “just.” It is in these two orders of law that the opposition between land-life and city-life, life-experience and study-experience, ripens till it bursts out in that revolutionary embitterment in which men take a law instead of being given it, and break a law that will not yield.

A law that has been laid down by a community expresses a duty for every member, but it is no proof of every member’s power. On the contrary, it is a question of Destiny, who makes the law and for whom it is made. There are subjects and there are objects in the making of laws, although everyone is an object as to the validity thereof—and this holds good without distinction for the inner law of families, guilds, estates, and states. But for the State, which is the highest law-subject existing in historical actuality, there is, besides, an external law that it imposes upon aliens by hostilities. Ordinary civil law is a case of the first kind, a peace treaty of the second. But in all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To “have the right” is an expression of power. This is a historical fact that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right, therefore, as in other things, being and waking-being, Destiny and Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic moral of good and evil belongs the moral distinction of right and wrong, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all philosophies—but the fact-world of history knows only the success which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power of the moment in order to remain righteous—then, certainly, his or its theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth, but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to another life-power that has better understood realities.

So long as a historical power is so superior to its constituent units—as the State or the estate so often is to families and calling-classes, or the head of the family to its children—a just law between the weaker is possible as a gift from the all-powerful hand of the disinterested. But Estates seldom, and states almost never, feel a power of this magnitude over themselves, and consequently between them the law of the stronger acts with immediate force—as is seen in a victor’s treaty, unilateral in terms and still more so in interpretation and observance. That is the difference between the internal and the external rights of historical life-units. In the first the will of an arbiter to be impartial and just can be effective—although we are apt to deceive ourselves badly as to the degree of effective impartiality even in the best codes of history, even in those which call themselves “civil” or “bürgerlich,” for the very adjective indicates that an estate has possessed the superior force to impose them on everyone.⁠⁶²⁹ Internal laws are the result of strict logical-causal thought centring upon truths, but for that very reason their validity is ever dependent upon the material power of their author, be this Estate or State. A revolution that annihilates this power annihilates also these laws—they remain true, but they are no longer actual. External laws on the other hand, such as all peace treaties, are essentially never true and always actual—indeed appallingly so. They set up no pretension whatever of being just—it is quite enough that they are valid. Out of them speaks Life, which possesses no causal and moral logic, but is organically all the more consistent and consequent for the lack of it. Its will is to possess validity itself; it feels with an inward certainty what is required to that end and, seeing that, knows what is law for itself and has to be made law for others. This logic is seen in every family, and particularly in old true-born peasant families as soon as authority is shattered and someone other than the head tries to determine “what is.” It appears in every state, as soon as one party therein dominates the position. Every feudal age is filled with the contests between lords and vassals over the “right to rights.” In the Classical world this conflict ended almost everywhere with the unconditional victory of the First Estate, which deprived the kingship of its legislative powers and made it an object of its own law-making—as the origin and significance of the Archons in Athens and the Ephors in Sparta prove beyond doubt. But the same happened in the Western field too—for a moment in France (institution of the States-General, 1302), and for good in England, where in 1215 the Norman baronage and the higher clergy imposed Magna Charta and thus sowed the seed that was to ripen into the effective sovereignty of Parliament. Hence it was that the old Norman law of the Estates here remained permanently valid. In Germany, on the contrary, the weak Imperial power, hard-pressed by the claims of the great feudatories, called in the “Roman” law of Justinian (that is, the law of the unlimited central power) to aid it against the early German land-laws.⁠⁶³⁰

The Draconian Constitution, the πατρίος πολιτεία of the Oligarchs, was dictated by the nobility like the strictly patrician law of the Twelve Tables in Rome;⁠⁶³¹ but by then the Late period of the Culture was well under way and the power of the city and of money were already fully developed, so that laws directed against these powers necessarily gave way very promptly to laws of the Third Estate (Solon, the Tribunate). Yet these, too, were estate-founded laws not less than their predecessors. The struggle between the two primary estates for the right of law-making has filled the entire history of the West, from the early Gothic conflict of secular and canon law for supremacy, to the controversy (not ended even to-day) concerning civil marriage.⁠⁶³² And, for that matter, what are the constitutional conflicts that have occurred since the end of the eighteenth century but the acquisition by the Tiers État (which, according to Sieyès’s famous remark in 1789, “was nothing, but could be all”) of the right to legislate bindingly upon all, producing a law that is just as much burghers law as ever Gothic was nobles’ law. The nakedest form in which right appears as the expression of might is (as I have already observed) in interstate treaty-making, in peace treaties, and in that Law of Nations of which already Mirabeau could say it is the law of the strong of which the observance is imposed upon the weak. A large part of the decisions of world-history is contained in laws of this kind. They are the constitution under which militant history progresses, so long as it does not revert to the original form of the armed conflict—original, and also basic; for every treaty that is valid and is meant to have real effects is an intellectual continuation thereof. If policy is war by other means,⁠⁶³³ the “right to give the law” is the spoil of the successful party.

It is clear, then, that on the heights of history two such life-forms, Estate and State, contend for supremacy, both being-streams of great inward form and symbolic force, each resolved to make its own destiny the Destiny of the whole. That—if we try to understand the matter in its depths and unreservedly put aside our everyday conceptions of people, economy, society, and politics—is the meaning of the opposition between the social and the political conduct of events. Social and political ideas do not begin to be differentiated till a great Culture has dawned, or even till feudalism is declining and the lord-vassal relation represents the social, and the king-people relation the political, side. But the social powers of the early time (nobility and priesthood) not less actively than those of the later (money and mind)—and the vocational groups of the craftsmen and officials and workers, too, as they were rising to their power in the growing cities—sought, each for itself, to subordinate the State-ideal to its own Estate-ideal, or more usually to its estate interests. And so there arose, at all planes from that of the national unit to that of the individual consciousness, a fight over the respective limits and claims of each—the result of which, in extreme cases, is that the one element succeeds so completely as to make the other its tool.⁠⁶³⁴

In all cases, however, it is the State that determines the external position, and therefore the historical relations between peoples are always of a political and not a social nature. In domestic politics, on the contrary, the situation is so dominated by class-oppositions that at first sight social and political tactics appear inseparable, and indeed, in the thought of people who (as, for example, a bourgeoisie) equate their own class-ideal with historical actuality—and consequently cannot think in external politics at all—identical. In the external battle the State seeks alliances with other States, in the internal it is always in alliance with one or another Estate—the sixth-century Tyrannis, for instance, rested upon the combination of the State-idea with the interests of the Third Estate vis-à-vis the ancient noble oligarchy, and the French Revolution became inevitable from the moment that the Tiers—that is, intellect and money—left its friend the Crown in the lurch and joined the two other Estates (from the Assembly of Notables, 1787). We are thoroughly right therefore in feeling a distinction between State-history and class-history,⁠⁶³⁵ between political (horizontal) and social (vertical) history, war and revolution.⁠⁶³⁶ But it is a grave error of modern doctrinaires to regard the spirit of domestic history as that of history in general. World-history is, and always will be, State-history. The inner constitution of a nation aims always at being “in condition” for the outer fight (diplomatic, military, or economic) and anyone who treats a nation’s constitution as an aim and ideal in itself is merely ruining the nation’s body. But, from the other point of view, it falls to the inner-political pulse-sense of a ruling stratum (whether belonging to the First or to the Fourth Estate) so to manage the internal class-oppositions that the focus and ideas of the nation are not tied up in party conflict, nor treason to the country thought of as an ace of trumps.

And here it becomes manifest that the State and the first Estate are cognate down to the roots—akin, not merely by reason of their symbolism of Time and Care, their common relation to race and the facts of genealogical succession, to the family and to the primary impulses of all peasantry (on which in the last analysis every State and every nobility is supported)—not merely in their relation to the soil, the clan-domain (be this heritable estate or fatherland), which even in nations of the Magian style is lowered in significance only because there the dignity of orthodoxy so completely surpasses everything else—but above all in high practice amidst all the facts of the historical world, in the unforced unity of pulse and impulse, diplomacy, judgment of men, the art of command and masculine will to keep and extend power, which even in earliest times differentiated a nobility and a people out of the one and the same war-gathering; and, lastly, in the feeling for honour and bravery. Hence, right up to the latest phases, that State stands firmest in which the nobility or the tradition shaped by the nobility is wholly at the service of the common cause—as it was in Sparta as compared with Athens, in Rome vis-à-vis Carthage, in Tsin as against the tao-coloured state of Tsu.

The distinction is that a nobility self-contained as a class—or for that matter any Estate—experiences the residue of the nation only with reference to itself, and only desires to exercise power in that sense, whereas the very principle of the State is that it cares for all, and cares for the nobility as such only in relation to the major care. But a genuine old nobility assimilates itself to the State, and cares for all as though for a property. This care, in fact, is one of its grandest duties and one of which it is most deeply conscious; it feels it, indeed, an innate privilege, and regards service in the army and the administration as its special vocation.

It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as between the State-idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates. All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State-ideals that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the spirit and the political forces of actual history—hence, indeed, the conscious emphasis with which they are labelled as social. And while in Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the Church-community in its efforts to actualize religious ideals, in Late periods both the business ideal of the free economic life, and the Utopian ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that abstraction, also come into the field.

But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts—no truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should write books on politics—let him not try to make politics. In the real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only states that have grown, and these are nothing but living peoples “in form.” No doubt it is “the form impressed that living doth itself unfold,” but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a being, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding, if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own convictions—in other words, the way to nullity.

But the destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or structure, but that of their inner authority, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief—of friend and foe—in their effectiveness. The decisive problems lie, not in the working-out of constitutions, but in the organization of a sound working government; not in the distribution of political rights according to “just” principles (which at bottom are simply the idea that a class forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership. The more self-evident all these things are, the less is said or argued about them; the more fully matured the State, the higher the standing, the historical capacity, and therefore the Destiny of the Nation. State-majesty, sovereignty, is a life-symbol of the first order. It distinguishes subjects and objects⁠⁶³⁷ in political events not only in inner, but also (which is far more important) in external, history. Strength of leadership, which comes to expression in the clear separation of these two factors, is the unmistakable sign of the life-force in a political unity—so much so that the shattering of existing authority (for example, by the supporters of an opposed constitutional ideal) almost always results not in this new party’s making itself the subject of domestic policy, but in the whole nation’s becoming the object of alien policy—and not seldom for ever.

For this reason, in every healthy State the letter of the written constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the living constitution, the “form” (to use again the sporting term), which has developed of itself out of the experience of Time, the situation, and, above all, the race-properties of the Nation. The more powerfully the natural form of the body politic has built itself up, the more surely it works in unforeseen situations; indeed, in the limit, it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever.⁠⁶³⁸ The leader’s responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.

The fact, therefore, express and unequivocal, is that class-States—that is, States in which particular classes rule—are the only States. This must not be confused with the class-States to which the individual is merely attached in view of belonging to an estate, as in the case of the older Polis, the Norman States of England and Sicily, the France of the Constitution of 1791, and Soviet Russia to-day. The true class-State is an expression of the general historical experience that it is always a single social stratum which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading. It is always a definite minority that represents the world-historical tendency of a State; and, within that again, it is a more or less self-contained minority that in virtue of its aptitudes (and often enough against the spirit of the Constitution) actually holds the reins. And, if we ignore, as exceptions proving the rule, revolutionary interregna and Cæsarian conditions, in which individuals and fortuitous groupings maintain their power merely by material means (and often without any aptitude for ruling), it is always the minority within an Estate that rules by tradition. In by far the greater number of cases this minority is one within the nobility—for example, the “gentry” which governed the Parliamentary style of England, the nobiles at the helm of Roman politics in Punic War times, the merchant-aristocracy of Venice, the Jesuit-trained (nobles who conducted the diplomacy of the Papal Curia in the Baroque).⁠⁶³⁹ Similarly, we find the political aptitude in self-contained groups within the religious Estate—not only in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in Egypt and India and still more in Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. In the Third Estate—though this seldom produces it, not being in itself a life-unit—there are cases such as those of third-century Rome, where a stratum of the plebs contains men trained in commerce, and France since 1789, where an element of the bourgeoisie has been trained in law; in these cases, it is ensured by a closed circle of persons possessing homogeneous practical gifts, which constantly recruits itself and preserves in its midst the whole sum of unwritten political tradition and experience.

That is the organization of actual states in contradistinction to those conceived on paper and in the minds of pedants. There is no best, or true, or right State that could possibly be actualized according to plan. Every State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different, whatever the rigidity of its legal-constitutional crust. Therefore, words like “republic,” “absolutism,” “democracy,” mean something different in every instance, and what turns them into catchwords is their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A history of States is physiognomic and not systematic. Its business is not to show how “humanity” advances to the conquest of its eternal rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist in the fact-world, how they grow and flourish and fade, and how they are really nothing but actual life “in form.” Let us make the attempt on this basis.

History in the high style begins in every Culture with the feudal State, which is not a State in the coming sense of the word, but an ordering of the common life with reference to an Estate. The noblest fruit of the soil, its race in the proudest sense, here builds itself up in a rank-order from the simple knighthood to the primus inter pares, the feudal Overlord amongst his Peers. This sets in simultaneously with the architecture of the great cathedrals and the Pyramids—the stone and the blood elevated into symbols, the one meaning, the other being. The idea of feudalism, which has dominated all Springtimes, is the transition from the primitive, purely practical and factual, relationship of potentate to those who obey him (whether they have chosen him or have been subdued by him) into the private-law (and, therefore, deeply symbolical) relation of the lord to the vassal. This relation rests entirely upon the ethic of nobility, honour, and loyalty, and conjures up the cruellest conflicts between duty to one’s lord and duty to one’s own family. The decadence of Henry the Lion⁠⁶⁴⁰ is a tragic example of it.

The “State” exists here only to the extent of the limits of the feudal tie, and it expands its domain by the entry of alien vassals therein. Service to, and agency for, the ruler—originally personal and limited in time—very soon became the permanent fief which, if it escheated, had to be reassigned (already by 1000 the principle of the West was “No land without a lord”), and from that presently passed to the stage of being hereditary (law of Emperor Conrad II, 28th May 1037). Thereby the formerly immediate subjects of the ruler were mediatized, and henceforth they were only his subjects as being subjects of a vassal of his. Nothing but the strong social interbonding of the Estate ensured the cohesion of what must be called, even under these conditions, the State.

The idea of power and booty are seen here in classic union. When, in 1066, William and his Norman chivalry conquered England, the whole land was made King’s property and fee, and it remains so in name to this day. Here is a true Viking delight in “having,” the care of an Odysseus who begins by counting his treasure.⁠⁶⁴¹ From this booty-sense of shrewd conquerors there came, quite suddenly, the famous exchequer-practice and officialdom of the early Cultures. It is well to distinguish these officials from the incumbents of the great confidential offices which had arisen out of the older personal agency;⁠⁶⁴² they were clerici or clerks, and not ministeriales or ministers—“servants,” but in a prouder sense now. The financial and clerical officialdom is an expression of Care, and it develops in exact proportion with the development of the dynastic idea. Thus in Egypt it reached an astonishingly high level at the very beginning of the Old Kingdom.⁠⁶⁴³ The early Chinese official-State described in the Tshou-li is so comprehensive and complicated that the authenticity of the book has been doubted,⁠⁶⁴⁴ but in spirit and tendency it corresponds exactly with that of Diocletian, which enabled a feudal order to arise out of an immense fiscal machinery.⁠⁶⁴⁵ In the early Classical world it is markedly absent. “Carpe diem” was the motto of Classical economics from the first to last, and in this domain as in others Improvidence, the autarkeia of the Stoics, was elevated into a principle. Even the best calculators were no exception—thus Eubulus in Athens, 330 B.C., managed business with an eye to surpluses, but only to distribute them, when gained, amongst the citizens.

The extreme contrast to Eubulus’s finance is afforded by the canny Vikings of the early West, who by the financial administration of their Norman states laid the foundations of the Faustian economics that extend to-day over the whole world. It is from the chequered table in the Norman counting-house of Robert the Devil (1028–35) that we have the name of the English “Exchequer” and hence the word “cheque.” Here also originated the words “control,” “quittance,” “record.”⁠⁶⁴⁶ Here it was that after 1066 England was organized as booty, with ruthless reduction of the Anglo-Saxons, to serfdom, and here too originated the Norman State of Sicily—for it was not upon nothing that Frederick II of Hohenstaufen later built; his most personal work, the constitutions of Melfi (1231) he did not create, but only (by methods borrowed from the money-economics of high Arabian Civilization) polished and perfected. From this centre the methodic and descriptive technique of finance spread into the business world of Lombardy and so into all the trading cities and administrations of the West.

But in Feudalism build-up and breakdown lie close together. When the primary estates were still in full bloom and vigour, the future nations, and with them the germ of the State-idea proper, were stirring into life. The opposition between temporal and spiritual power and that between crown and vassals was cut across again and again by oppositions of nationhood—German-French even from Otto the Great’s times; German-Italian, which rent Italy between the Guelphs and Ghibellines and destroyed the German Empire; French-English, which brought about the English dominion over western France. Still, all this was far less important than the great decisions within the feudal order itself, where the idea of nationality was unknown. England was broken up into 60,251 fiefs, catalogued in the Domesday Book of 1084 (consulted even to-day upon occasion), and the strictly organized central power required allegiance to itself even from the sub-tenants of the peers, but all the same it was less than a hundred and fifty years later that Magna Charta was forced through (1215), and actual power transferred from the King to the Parliament of the vassals—made up of great barons and ecclesiastics in the Upper house, gentry and patricians in the Lower—which thenceforward became the support and champion of national development. In France the baronage, in conjunction with the clergy and the towns, forced the calling of the States-General in 1302; the General Privilege of Saragossa in 1283 made Aragon into a quasi-republic of nobles ruled by its Cortes, and in Germany a few decades earlier a group of great vassals made the election of the German Kingship dependent upon themselves as Electors.

The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself—not merely in the West, but in any Culture—came out in the struggle between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin.

The idea of a Ruler whose writ should run throughout the whole historical world, whose Destiny should be that of all mankind, has taken visible shape in, so far, three instances—firstly, in the conception of the Pharaoh as Horus;⁠⁶⁴⁷ secondly, in the great Chinese imagining of the Ruler of the Middle, whose domain is tien-hia, everything lying below the heavens;⁠⁶⁴⁸ and, thirdly, in early Gothic times. In 962 Otto the Great, answering to the deep mystical sense and yearning for historical and spatial infinity that was sweeping through the world of those days, conceived the idea of the “Holy Roman Empire, German by nation.” But even earlier, Pope Nicolas I (860), still completely involved in Augustinian—that is, Magian—lines of thought, had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world-dominion under the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals (to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble oligarchy. But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory VII actually obtained feudal supremacy over the Norman states of England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto the Great had awarded the tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstaufen succeeded in the opposite sense; even Richard Cœur-de-Lion swore the vassal’s oath to him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198–1216) made the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England became a Papal fief in 1213; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire in Byzantium followed. But with Innocent’s death disintegration set in within the Church itself, and the great spiritual dignitaries, whom their investitures turned into vassals of the Pope as overlord, soon followed the lay vassals’ example and set about limiting him by means of representative institutions for their order.⁠⁶⁴⁹ The notion that a General Council stood higher than a pope was not of religious origin, but arose primarily out of the feudal principle. Its tendency corresponded precisely to that which the English magnates had made good in Magna Charta. In the councils of Constance (1414) and Basel (1431) the last attempts were made to turn the Church, under its temporal aspect, into a clerical feudalism, in which an oligarchy of cardinals would have become the representative of the whole Clerical Estate of the West and taken the place hitherto held by the Roman nobility. But by that time the feudal idea had long taken second place to that of the State, and so the Roman barons won the victory. The field of candidature for the Papacy was limited to the narrowest environs of Rome, and unlimited power over the organizations of the Church was ipso facto secured to the centre. As for the Empire, it had long ago become a venerated shadow, like the Egyptian and the Chinese.

In comparison with the immense dynamism of these decisions, the building-up of feudalism in the Classical world was slow, static, almost noiseless, so that it is hardly recognizable save from the traces of transition. In the Homeric epos as we have it now, every locality possesses its Basileus, who, it is fairly evident, was once a great vassal—we can see in the figure of Agamemnon the conditions in which the ruler of a wide region took the field with the train of his peers. But in the Greek world the dissolution of the feudal world was associated with the formation of the city-state, the political “point.” In consequence, the hereditary court-offices, the archai and timai, the prytaneis, the Archons, and perhaps the original Prætor,⁠⁶⁵⁰ were all urban in nature; and the great families therefore developed, not separately in their counties, as in Egypt, China, and the West, but in the closest touch with the city, where they obtained possession of the rights of the King, one after the other, until nothing was left to the ruling house but that which could not be touched because of the gods—namely, the title attaching to its sacrificial function (hence the rex sacrorum). In the later parts of the Homeric epic (c. 800) it is the nobles who invite the king to take his seat, and even unseat him. The Odyssey really knows the kingship only as part of the saga—the actual Ithaca that it shows us is a city dominated by oligarchs.⁠⁶⁵¹ The Spartiates, like the Roman partriciate of the Comitia Curiata, are the product of a feudal relation.⁠⁶⁵² In the phiditiæ⁠⁶⁵³ there are evident remains of the old open table of the noble, but the power of the king has sunk to the shadowy dignity of the rex sacrorum of Rome, or the “kings” of Sparta, who were liable to be imprisoned or removed at any time by the Ephors. The essential similarity of these conditions forces us to presume that in Rome the Tarquinian Tyrannis of 500 was preceded by a period of oligarchical dominance, and this view is supported by the unquestionably genuine tradition of the Interrex, a person appointed by the council of the nobles (the Senate) from amongst its own members to act until it should please them to elect a king again.

Here, as elsewhere, there comes a time in which feudalism is falling into decay, but the coming State is not yet completed, the nation not yet “in form.” This is the fearful crisis that emerges everywhere in the shape of the Interregnum, and forms the boundary between the feudal union and the class-State. In Egypt feudalism was fully developed by about the middle of the Vth Dynasty. The Pharaoh Asosi gave away his domains literally piece by piece to the vassals, and, further, the rich fiefs of the priesthood were (exactly as in the West) free of taxation and gradually became the permanent property (“mortmain,” as we should say) of the great temples.⁠⁶⁵⁴ With the Vth Dynasty (c. 2530 B.C.) the “Hohenstaufen” age comes to an end. Under the shadow-kingship of the short-lived VIth Dynasty the princes (rpati) and counts (hetio) become independent; the high offices are all hereditary and the tomb-inscriptions show us more and more proud stress upon ancient lineage. That which later Egyptian historians have hidden under the reputed VIIth and VIIIth dynasties⁠⁶⁵⁵ is really half a century of anarchy and lawless conflicts between princes for each other’s domains or for the Pharaoh-title. In China, even I-Wang (934–909) was obliged by his vassals to give out all conquered lands, and to do so to sub-tenants nominated by them. In 842 Li-Wang was forced, with his heir, to flee, and the administration of the Empire was carried on by two individual princes. In this interregnum began the fall of the House of Chóu and the decline of the Imperial name into an honourable but meaningless title. It is the corresponding picture to that of the Interregnum in Germany, which began in 1254 and brought the Imperial power to its nadir of 1400 under Wenceslaus, simultaneously with the Renaissance-style of the condottieri and the complete decay of the Papal power. After the death of Boniface VIII, who in 1302 had once again asserted the feudal power of the Papacy in the Bull Unam sanctam and had consequently been arrested by the representatives of France, the Papacy experienced a century of banishment, anarchy, and impotence, while in the following century the Norman nobility of England for the most part perished in the contest of the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne.

What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the feeling that the purpose of existence was that a “life” should be led in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that there was something else besides, something to which even nobility was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea. Events came to be viewed, no longer from a frankly private-law standpoint, but under a “public”-law aspect. The State might (and almost without exception did) remain aristocratic to its core; its outward appearance might be scarcely altered by the transition from the feudal group to the Class-State; the idea that those outside the Estates possessed rights as well as duties might be still unknown; but the feeling had become different, and the consciousness that Life existed to be lived on the heights of history had given way to the other sentiment, that it contained a task. The difference becomes very distinct when we contrast the policy of Rainald van Dassel (d. 1167)—one of the greatest German statesmen of all periods—with that of the Emperor Charles IV (d. 1378), and consider in parallel therewith the transition in Classical feeling from the “Themis” of the knightly age to the “Dike” of the growing Polis.⁠⁶⁵⁶ Themis involves only a claim, Dike implies a task as well.

The State-idea in its sturdy youth is always—and self-evidently, with a naturalness rooted deep in animality itself—bound up with the conception of an individual ruler. The same holds good, with the same self-evidence, for every roused crowd in every decisive situation—as every riotous assembly and every moment of sudden danger demonstrates afresh.⁠⁶⁵⁷ Such crowds are units of feeling, but blind. They are “in form” for the onrush of events only when they are in the hands of the leader, who suddenly appears in their midst, is set at the head in a moment by that very unity of feeling, and finds an unconditional obedience. This process repeats itself in the formation of the great life-units that we call peoples and States, only more slowly and with surer meaning. In the high Cultures it is sometimes set aside or set back in favour of other modes of being “in form,” for the sake of a great symbol and artificially; but even then under the mask of these forms we practically always find de facto an individual rulership, whether it be that of a King’s adviser or a party leader; and in every revolutionary upheaval the original state of things reappears.

With this cosmic fact is bound up one of the most intimately inward traits of all directional life, the inherited will, which presents itself with the force of a natural phenomenon in every strong race and compellingly urges even the momentary leader (often quite unconsciously) to uphold his rank for the duration of his personal existence or, beyond it, for that of his blood streaming on through children and grandchildren. The same deep and plantlike trait inspires every real following, which feels in the continuance of the blood of leadership both a surety for and a symbol of the continuance of its own. It is precisely in revolutions that this primitive instinct comes out, full and strong and regardless of all principles. Precisely because of it the France of 1800 saw not only Napoleon, but also his hereditary position, as the true fulfilment of the Revolution. Theorists who, like Marx and Rousseau, start from conceptual ideals instead of from blood-facts have never grasped this immense force that dwells in the historical world, and have in consequence labelled its manifested effects as damnable and reactionary. But they are there, and with a force so insistent that even the symbolism of the high Cultures can only override them temporarily and artificially, as is shown in the engrossing of elective officers by particular families in the Classical, and the nepotism of the Baroque popes in our own case. Behind the fact that leadership is very often freely resigned, and the saying that “merit should rule,” there is practically always the rivalry of magnates, who have no objection in principle to hereditary rulership, but prevent it in practice because each one of them secretly claims it for his own blood. This state of active, creative jealousy is the foundation on which the forms of Classical oligarchy are built up.

The combination of both elements produces the idea of Dynasty. This is so deeply rooted in the Cosmic and so closely interwoven into the factual web of historical life that the State-ideas of each and all the Cultures are modifications of this one principle, from the passionate affirmative of the Faustian to the resolute negative of the Classical Soul. The ripening of the State-idea of a Culture is associated with the city and even the adolescence of the city. Nations, historical peoples, are town-building peoples.⁠⁶⁵⁸ The capital takes the place of the castle and the palace as the centre of high history, and in it the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of Sovereignty.

And so, with the sinking of feudalism, Faustian history becomes dynastic history. From little centres where princely families have their seats (whence they “spring,” as the phrase goes, reminding us of plant and property), the shaping of nations proceeds—nations of strictly aristocratic constitution, but yet so that the State conditions the being of the Estate. The genealogical principle already ruling in the feudal nobility and the yeoman families, the expression of the feeling for expanse and the will-to-history, has become so powerful that the appearance of nations transcending the strong unities of language and landscape is dependent upon the destinies of ruling houses. Marriages and deaths sever or unite the blood of whole populations.⁠⁶⁵⁹ Where a Lotharingian and a Burgundian dynasty failed to take shape, there also nations already embryonic failed to develop. The doom that overhung the Hohenstaufen involved more than the imperial crown. For Germany and Italy it meant for centuries a deep unsatisfied longing for a united German-Italian nation, while the House of Habsburg, on the contrary, enabled, not a German, but an Austrian nation to develop.

In the Magian world, with its cavern-feeling, the dynastic principle was quite otherwise constituted. The Classical princeps, the legitimate successor of tyrants and tribunes, was the embodiment of the Demos. As Janus was the door and Vesta the hearth, so Cæsar was the people. He was the last creation of Orphic religiousness. The “Dominus et Deus,” on the contrary, was Magian, a Shah participating in the divine Fire (the hvareno of the Mazdaist empire of the Sassanids, which becomes the aureole in Pagan and Christian Byzantium), which radiates about him and makes him pius, felix, invictus (the last-named, from Commodus’s reign, his official title).⁠⁶⁶⁰ In Byzantium in the third century of our era the ruler-type underwent the same transition as was implied in the taking-down of Augustus’s civil-service state to build Diocletian’s feudalism. “The new creation begun by Aurelian and Probus and built up on the ruins by Diocletian and Constantine was about as alien to the Classical world and the principate as the empire of Charlemagne.”⁠⁶⁶¹ The Magian ruler governed the visible portion of the general Consensus of the orthodox, which was Church, State, and Nation in one,⁠⁶⁶² as Augustine described it in his Civitas Dei. The Western ruler is by the grace of God monarch in the historical world; his people is subordinated to him because God has invested him with it. But in matters of faith he is himself a subordinate—to God’s Vicar on earth, or to his own conscience, as the case may be. That is the separation of State authority and Church authority, the great Faustian conflict between Time and Space. When, in 800, the Pope crowned the Emperor, he chose a new ruler for himself in order that he himself might thrive. Whereas the Emperor in Byzantium was, according to Magian world-feeling, his spiritual as well as his secular superior, an Emperor in the Frank lands was his servant in spiritual matters, besides being (perhaps) his arm in secular affairs. As an idea, the Papacy could arise only by separation from the Caliphate, for the Pope is included in the Caliph.

For this very reason, however, the choice of the Magian ruler cannot be bound down to a genealogical succession-law. It issues from the consensus of the ruling blood-kindred, out of whom the Holy Ghost speaks and designates the Chosen One. When Theodosius died, in 550, a relative, the nun Pulcheria, formally gave her hand to the old senator Marcianus, thereby incorporating this statesman in the family and securing the throne to him and continuance to the “dynasty”;⁠⁶⁶³ and this act, like many similar occurrences in the Sassanid and Abbassid houses, was taken as the outcome of a hint from above.

In China, the Emperor-idea of the early Chóu period, which was strictly bound up with feudalism, soon became a dream, which, rapidly and with increasing distinctness, came to reflect a whole preceding world in the form of three dynasties of Emperors and myth-Emperors more ancient still.⁠⁶⁶⁴ But, for the dynasties of the system of states that thereupon grew up (in which the title King, Wang, came at last into perfectly general use) strict rules came into force for royal successions, legitimacy—a notion quite alien to the early time—became a power to conjure with,⁠⁶⁶⁵ and extinction of lines, adoptions and mésalliances led, as in the Baroque of the West, to innumerable wars of succession.⁠⁶⁶⁶ Some principle of legitimacy, too, surely underlay the remarkable fact that the rulers of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty, with whom the late period of the Culture ended, had their sons crowned during their own lifetime.⁠⁶⁶⁷ The inward relationship between these three dynastic ideas is yet another proof that Being in these three Cultures was akin.

It requires a close insight into the political form-language of the Classical world to perceive that here also the course of things was exactly the same, and that it comprised not only the transition from feudal union to class-State, but even the dynastic principle as well. Classical being, indeed, said no to everything that might draw it into distances either of space or of time, and even in the fact-world of history ringed itself with creations that had something of the defensive in them. But all this narrowing and curtailing presupposes the thing against which it is striving to maintain itself. The Dionysiac squandering, and the Orphic negation, of the Classical body contained in the very form of their protest the Apollinian ideal of perfect bodily being.

Individual rulership and the will to transmit to heirs were unmistakably taken for granted in the oldest kingship.⁠⁶⁶⁸ But they had become questionable even by 800, as the rôle of Telemachus in the older parts of the Odyssey indicates. The royal title was frequently borne by great vassals and the most conspicuous of the nobles. In Sparta and in Lycia there were two of them, and in the Phæacian city of the epic and in many actual cities there were more. Next comes the splitting-off of offices from dignities. Lastly, the kingship itself becomes an office which the nobility confers (though at first, perhaps, only upon members of the old royal family); thus in Sparta the Ephors, as representing the First Estate, were in no wise limited in their choice by rule; and in Corinth from about 750 the royal clan of the Bacchiadæ abolished hereditary succession, and on each occasion set up a prytaneus with royal rank from within their own body. The great offices, which likewise were hereditary at first, came to be for one life only, then were limited to a term, and lastly became annual, and, further, were so arranged that there were more holders than offices, and the leadership was exercised by each in turn—the custom which, as is well known, led to the disaster of Cannæ. These annual offices, from the Etruscan annual dictature⁠⁶⁶⁹ to the Doric ephorate (which is found in Heraclea and Messene as well as Sparta) are firmly bound up with the essence of the Polis, and they reach their full structure about 650. Exactly at the corresponding date of the Western class-State (end of the fifteenth century), the hereditary power of dynasties was being secured by the Emperor Maximilian and his marriage-politics (against the claims of the Electors), by Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VII of England, and Louis XI of France.⁠⁶⁷⁰

But with the increasing emphasis upon the Classical here and now, the priesthood, which had the beginnings of an Estate in it, became pari passu a mere aggregate of city officials. The capital, so to call it, of the Homeric kingship, instead of being the centre for the radiation of State influence in all directions into the distance, contracted its magic circle until State and city became identical. Thereby, of course, the nobility was fused with the patriciate, and if even in the Gothic the representation of the young cities (for example, the English Commons or the French States-General) was exclusively by patricians, how much more so in the powerful city-state of the Classical! Not indeed in idea, but in fact, it was a pure kingless aristocratic State. The strictly Apollinian “form” of the growing Polis is called oligarchy.

And thus, at the close of the early periods of both these Cultures, we see two principles parallel and contrasted, the Faustian-genealogical and the Apollinian-oligarchic; two kinds of constitutional law, of Dike. The one is supported by an unmeasured sense of expanse, reaches back deep into the past with form-tradition, thinks forward with the same intense will-to-endure into the remotest future; but in the present, too, works for political effectiveness over broad expanses by well-considered dynastic marriages and by the truly Faustian, dynamic, and contrapuntal politics that we call diplomacy. The other, wholly corporeal and statuesque, is self-limited by its policy of autarkeia to the nearest and the most immediate present, and at every point stoutly denies that which Western being affirms.

Both the dynastic state and the city-state presuppose the city itself. But there is this difference, that a seat of government in the West, though it may be (and frequently is) far from being the greatest city of the land, is a force-centre in a field of political tensions such that every occurrence, in however remote a corner, vibrates generally throughout the whole—whereas in the Classical, life huddles closer and closer until it reaches the grotesque phenomenon of Synœcism—the very acme of the Euclidean will-to-form in the political world. It is impossible to imagine the State unless and until the nation sits physically concentrated in one heap, as one body; it must be seen, and even seen “at a glance.” And while the Faustian tendency is more and more to diminish the number of dynastic centres—so that even Maximilian I could see looming in the distance a dynastically secure universal monarchy of his house—the Classical world fell apart into innumerable petty points, which, almost as soon as they came into existence, started to do that which for Classical mankind was almost a necessity of thought and the purest expression of autarkeia—to destroy one another.⁠⁶⁷¹

Synœcism with its consequence, the creation of the Polis-type proper, was exclusively the work of aristocracy. It was they that established the Classical city-state, and for themselves alone; it was the drawing-together of country nobility and patriciate that brought it into form. The vocational classes were already on the spot, and the peasantry ceased to count from the class point of view. And by the concentration of noble power at one point the kingship of the feudal period was shattered.

With these glimpses into Greece to go upon, we may venture, though under all reserves of course, to outline the history of primitive Rome. The Roman synœcism—the assembling of widely scattered noble families—is identical with the “founding” of the city, an Etruscan undertaking of the beginning of the seventh century.⁠⁶⁷² Facing the royal stronghold of the Capitol, there had long been two other settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal. To the first of these belonged the ancient goddess Diva Rumina⁠⁶⁷³ and the Etruscan Ruma clan;⁠⁶⁷⁴ the god of the second was Quirinus Pater. From these comes the dual name of Romans and “Quirites,” and the dual priesthoods of the Salii and Luperci, which adhered to the two hills. Now, as the three blood-tribes named Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres are in all probability common to all Etruscan localities,⁠⁶⁷⁵ they must have existed in both of those which concern us here; and thus are explained, on the one hand, the number six of centuries of equites, of military tribunes, of aristocratic Vestals, and, on the other, the number two of the prætors (or consuls) who were, quite early, attached to the King as representatives of the nobles and gradually deprived him of all influence. Already by 600 the constitution of Rome must have been a strong oligarchy of “Patres” with a shadow-kingship⁠⁶⁷⁶ as figure-head. Thus both the older theory of an expulsion of the kings, and the newer of a slow disintegration of the royal power, can stand side by side after all, the former as referring to the fall of the Tarquinian Tyrannis, which (as everywhere else in the Classical world—Pisistratus in Athens, for example) had set itself up in opposition to the oligarchy about the middle of the sixth century; the latter as referring to the slow disintegration of the feudal power of the (may we say) Homeric kingship by the aristocratic city-state, before the “foundation,” so-called—the crisis, probably, in which the prætors emerged, as the Archons and Ephors emerged elsewhere.

This Polis was no less strictly aristocratic than the Western class-State, with its nobility, clergy, and higher burgesses. The residue of the people belonging to it was merely its object, but—in the West the object of its political care, and in the Classical the object of its political carelessness. For here “Carpe diem” was the motto of the oligarchy as well as of others. It proclaims itself aloud in the poems of Theognis and the Song of Hybrias the Cretan. It made Classical finance till right into its latest phases—from the piracy practised by Polycrates upon his own people to the proscriptions of the Roman Triumvirs—into a more or less hand-to-mouth seizing of resources for the moment. In jurisprudence it emerges with unparalleled logic in the limitation of Roman edict-law to the term of office of the one-year prætor.⁠⁶⁷⁷ And, lastly, it is seen in the ever-growing practice of filling military, legal, and administrative offices (particularly the more important of them) by lot—a kind of homage to Tyche, the goddess of the Moment.

This was the Classical world’s manner of being politically “in form” and, correspondingly, of thinking and feeling. There are no exceptions. The Etruscans were as much under its domination as the Dorians and the Macedonians.⁠⁶⁷⁸ When Alexander and his successors dotted the Orient far and wide with their Hellenistic cities, they did so without conscious choice, for they could not imagine any other form of political organization. Antioch was to be Syria, and Alexandria Egypt. The latter, under the Ptolemies and later under the Cæsars, was, not indeed legally, but certainly in practice, a Polis on a vast scale—for the country outside, long reverted to townless fellahdom and managed by immemorial precedents, stood at its gates like an alien frontier.⁠⁶⁷⁹ The Roman Imperium was nothing but the last and greatest Classical city-state standing on foundations of a colossal synœcism. Under Marcus Aurelius the rhetor Aristides could say with perfect justification that it had “brought together this world in the name of one city: wheresoever a man may be born in it, it is at its centre that he dwells.” Even the conquered populations of the Empire—the wandering desert-tribes, the upland-valley communities of the Alps—were constituted as civitates. Livy thinks invariably in the forms of the city-state, and for Tacitus provincial history simply does not exist. When, in 49, Pompey, withdrawing before Cæsar, gave up Rome as militarily unimportant and betook himself to the East to create there a firm base of operations, he was doomed. Giving up the city, he had, in the eyes of the ruling classes, given up the State. To them Rome was all.⁠⁶⁸⁰

These city-states were in principle inextensible. Their number could increase, but not their ambit. The notion that the transformation of the Roman clientela into a voting plebs, and the creation of the country tribes, meant a breach in the Polis-idea is incorrect. It was in Rome as in Attica—the whole life of the State remained as before limited to one point, which was the Agora, the Forum. However far away those to whom citizenship was granted might live—in Hannibal’s day it might be anywhere in Italy, and later anywhere in the world—the exercise of his political right depended upon personal presence in the Forum. Hence the majority of the citizens were, not legally, but practically without influence in political business.⁠⁶⁸¹ What citizenship meant for them, therefore, was simply the duty of military service and the enjoyment of the city’s domestic law.⁠⁶⁸² But even for the citizen coming to Rome, political power was limited by a second and artificial synœcism which came into existence after, and as the result of, enfranchisement of the peasant, and can only be understood as an unconscious effort to maintain the idea of the Polis strictly unimpaired; the new citizens were inscribed, regardless of their numbers, in a very few tribes (eight, under the Lex Julia), and were always, therefore, in a minority in the Comitia relatively to the citizens of the older franchise.

And naturally so, for this civitas was regarded through and through as one body, a σῶμα. That which did not belong to it was out of its law, hostis. The gods and the heroes stood above, the slave (not quite to be called human, according to Aristotle) below, this aggregate of persons.⁠⁶⁸³ But the individual was a ζῶον πολιτικόν in a sense that would be regarded by us, who think and live in our expanse-feeling, as an utter slavery; he existed only by reason of his membership of an individual Polis. Owing to this Euclidean feeling, the nobility as a self-contained body was at first synonymous with the Polis—to such an extent, indeed, that even in the Twelve Tables marriage between patricians and plebeians was forbidden and the Spartan Ephors began their term of office, according to ancient custom, with a declaration of war against the Helots. The relation was reversed whenever in consequence of a revolution the non-noble became the Demos—but its meaning remained. As in inward, so also in outward relationships, the body politic was the foundation of all events throughout Classical history. The cities, hundreds of them, lay in wait for each other, each as self-gathered, politically and economically, as it was possible to make it, ready to bite, letting fly on the smallest excuse, and having as its war-aim, not the extension of its own state, but the extinction of the other side’s. Wars ended with the destruction of the enemy’s city and the killing or enslavement of his citizens, just as revolutions ended with the massacre or expulsion of the losers and the confiscation of their property by the victorious party. The natural interstate condition of the West is a close network of diplomatic relations, which may be broken through by wars; but the Classical law of nations assumes war as a normal condition, interrupted from time to time by peace treaties, and a declaration of war merely re-established the natural state of policy. Only so do the forty- and fifty-year peace treaties, spondai (such as the famous one of Nicias in 421), become intelligible, as temporary guarantee-treaties.

These two State-forms, with the styles of policy appropriate to each, are assured by the close of the Early period. The State-idea has triumphed over the feudal union, but it is the Estates that carry that idea, and the nation has political existence only as their sum.

With the beginning of the Late period there is a decisive turn, where city and country are in equilibrium and the powers proper to the city, money and brains, have become so strong that they feel themselves, as non-estate, an equal match for the old Estates. It is the moment when the State-idea finally rises superior to the Estates and begins to set up in their place the concept of the Nation.

The State has fought and won to its rights along a line of advance from feudal union to the aristocratic State. In the latter the Estates exist only with reference to the State, instead of vice versa, but, on the other hand, the disposition of things is such that the Government only meets the governed nation when and in so far as the nation is class-ordered. Everyone belongs to the nation, but only an élite to the classes, and these alone count politically.

But the nearer the State approaches its pure form, and the more it becomes absolute—that is, independent of any other form-ideal—the more heavily the concept of the nation tells against that of class, and there comes a moment when the nation is governed as such, and distinctions of “standing” become purely social. Against this evolution—which is one of the necessities of the Culture, inevitable, irrevocable—the old noble and priestly classes make one more effort of resistance. For them, now, everything is at stake—the heroic and the saintly, the old law, rank, blood—and, from their point of view, against what?

In the West this struggle of the old Estates against the State-power took the form of the Fronde. In the Classical world, where there was no dynasty to represent the future and the aristocracy alone had political existence, we find that a dynastic or quasi-dynastic embodiment of the State-idea actually formed itself, and, supported by the non-privileged part of the nation, raised this latter for the first time to power. That was the mission of the Tyrannis.

In this change from the class-State to the absolute State, which allowed no measures of validity but its own, the dynasties of the West—and those of Egypt and of China likewise—called the non-estate to their aid, thereby recognizing it as a political quantity. Herein lies the real importance of the struggle against the Fronde, in which, initially, the powers of the greater cities could not but see advantage to themselves, for here the ruler was standing forth in the name of the State, the care of all, and he was fighting the nobility because it wanted to uphold the Estate as a political magnitude.

In the Polis, on the contrary, where the State consisted exclusively in the form and embodied no hereditary head, the necessity of bringing out the unclassed on behalf of the State-idea produced the Tyrannis, in which a family or a faction of the nobility itself assumed the dynastic rôle, without which action on the part of the Third Estate would have been impossible. Late Classical historians were too remote from this process to seize its meaning, and dealt with it merely in terms of externals of private life. In reality, the Tyrannis was the State, and oligarchy opposed it under the banner of class. It rested, therefore, upon the support of peasants and burghers—in Athens (c. 580) the Diakrii and Paralii parties. Therefore, again, it backed the Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollinian; thus in Attica Pisistratus forced the worship of Dionysus⁠⁶⁸⁴ on the peasantry, in Sicyon Clisthenes forbade the recital of the Homeric poems,⁠⁶⁸⁵ and in Rome it was almost certainly in the time of the Tarquins that the trinity Demeter (Ceres)-Dionysus-Kore was introduced.⁠⁶⁸⁶ Its temple was dedicated in 483 by Spurius Cassius, the same who perished later in an attempt to reintroduce the Tyrannis. The Ceres temple was the sanctuary of the Plebs, and its managers, the ædiles, were their trusted spokesmen before the tribunate was ever heard of.⁠⁶⁸⁷ The Tyrants, like the princes of the Western Baroque, were liberals in a broad sense of the word that ceased to be possible for them in the subsequent stage of bourgeois dominance. But the Classical also began at that time to pass round the word that 387“money makes the man (χρήματ’ ἀνήρ).”⁠⁶⁸⁸ The sixth-century Tyrannis brought the Polis-idea to its conclusions and created the constitutional concept of the Citizen, the Polites, the Civis, the sum of these, irrespective of their class-provenance, forming the soma of the city-state. When, therefore, the oligarchy contrived to win after all—thanks once more to the Classical craving for the present, and the consequent fear and hatred evoked by the quasi-will-to-duration of the dynasts—the concept of the citizen was there, firmly established, and the non-patrician had learned to regard himself as an estate vis-à-vis a “rest.” He had become a political party—the word “democracy” (in its specifically Classical sense) now acquired a really serious content—and what he set himself to do was, no longer to come to the aid of the State, but to be himself the State as the nobility had been before. He began to count—money and heads, for the money-census and the general franchise are alike bourgeois weapons—whereas an aristocracy does not count, but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes. As the absolute State came out of Fronde and First Tyrannis, so it perished in French Revolution and Second Tyrannis. In this second conflict, which is already one of defence, the dynasty returns to the side of the nobility in order to guard the State-idea against a new class-rule, that of the bourgeois.

In Egypt, too, the period between Fronde and Revolution is hall-marked. It is the Middle Kingdom. The XIIth Dynasty (2000–1788)—in particular Amenemhet I and Sesostris I—had established the absolute State in severe conflicts with the baronage. The first of these rulers, as a famous poem of the time relates, barely escaped from a court conspiracy, and the biography of Sinuhet⁠⁶⁸⁹ shows us that after his death, which was kept secret for a time, rebellion threatened. The third was murdered by palace officials. We learn from the inscriptions in the family grave of the earl Chmenotep⁠⁶⁹⁰ that the cities had become rich and almost independent, and warred with each other. Certainly they cannot have been smaller at that time than the Greek cities at the time of the Persian Wars. It was on them and on a certain number of loyal magnates that the dynasty rested.⁠⁶⁹¹ Finally, Sesostris III (1887–1850) succeeded in completely abolishing feudal nobility. Thenceforward there was only a court-nobility and a single, admirably ordered bureau-State;⁠⁶⁹² but already some lamented that people of standing were reduced to misery and that the “sons of nobodies” enjoyed rank and consideration.⁠⁶⁹³ Democracy was beginning and the great social evolution of the Hyksos period was brewing.

The corresponding place in China is that of the Ming-Chu (or Pa, 685–591). These were Protectors of princely origin, who exercised an unconstitutional, but none the less real, power over a world of states weltering in anarchy, and called congresses of princes for the restoration of order and the recognition of stable political principles, even summoning the “Ruler of the Middle” himself (now become totally unimportant) out of the house of Chóu. The first was Hwang of Tsi (d. 645), who called the Diet of 659 and of whom Confucius wrote that he had rescued China from a reversion to barbarism. Their name Ming-dshu became later, like the word “tyrant,” a term of obloquy, because later men were unwilling to see in the phenomenon anything but a power unauthorized by law—but it is beyond all question that these great diplomatists were an element working with a devoted care for the State and the historical future against the old Estates, and supported by the young classes of mind and money. It is a high Culture that speaks to us in the little that we so far know about them from Chinese sources. Some were writers; others selected philosophers to be their ministers. It is a matter of indifference whether we mentally parallel them with Richelieu or with Wallenstein or with Periander—in any case it is with them that the “people” first emerges as a political quantity.⁠⁶⁹⁴ It is the outlook and high diplomacy of genuine Baroque—the absolute State sets itself up in principle as the opponent of the aristocratic State, and wins through.

In this lies the close parallelism of these events with the Fronde of Western Europe. In France the Crown after 1614 ceased to summon the State-General, this body having shown itself to be too strong for the united forces of State and bourgeoisie. In England Charles I similarly tried to govern without Parliament after 1628. In Germany, at the same time, the Thirty Years’ War broke out. The magnitude of its religious significance is apt to overshadow for us the other issue involved, and it must not be forgotten that it was also an effort to bring to a decision the struggle between imperial power and the Fronde of the great electors, and that between the individual princes and the lesser Frondes of their local estate-assemblies. But the centre of world-politics then lay in Spain. There, in conjunction with the high courtesies generally, the diplomatic style of the Baroque had evolved in the cabinet of Philip II; and the dynastic principle—which embodied the absolute State vis-à-vis the Cortes—had attained to its highest development in the course of the long struggle with the House of Bourbon. The attempt to align England also in the Spanish system had failed under Philip II, when Queen Mary, his wife, was disappointed of an heir already expected and announced. But now, under Philip IV, the idea of a universal monarchy spanning the oceans revived—no longer the mystic dream-monarchy of the early Gothic, the “Holy Roman Empire, German by nation,” but the tangible ideal of a world-dominion in Habsburg hands, which was to centre in Madrid and to have the solid possession of India and America and the already sensible power of money as its foundations. It was at this time, too, that the Stuarts were tempted to secure their endangered position by marrying the heir of the English and Scottish thrones to a Spanish Infanta; but in the end Madrid preferred to link itself with its own collateral line in Vienna, and so James I readdressed his marriage-alliance proposals to the opposition party of the Bourbons. The futile complications of this family policy contributed more than anything else to bind the Puritan movement and the English Fronde into one great Revolution.

In these great decisions the actual occupants of the thrones were—as in “contemporary” China—only secondary figures compared with great individual statesmen, in whose hands the fate of the West rested for whole decades. Olivarez in Madrid and the Spanish Ambassador Oñate in Vienna were then the most powerful personages in Europe. Their opponents were Wallenstein, standing for the Empire-idea in Germany, and Richelieu, standing for the absolute State in France—and these were succeeded a little later by Mazarin in France, Cromwell in England, Oldenbarneveldt in Holland, Oxenstierna in Sweden. Not until the Great Elector of Brandenburg do we meet again a monarch having political importance of his own.

Wallenstein, unconsciously, began where the Hohenstaufen had stopped. Since the death of Frederick II, in 1250, the power of the Estates of the Empire had become unlimited, and it was against them, and as champion of an absolute emperor’s state, that he fought during the first tenure of command. Had he been a greater diplomatist, had he been clearer and above all more resolute (for actually he was timid in the presence of decisive turnings), and had he, in particular, taken the trouble as Richelieu did to bring the person of the monarch under his influence—then probably it would have been all up with princedom within the Empire. He saw in these princes rebels, to be unseated and dispossessed of their lands; at the peak of his power (end of 1629), when militarily he held Germany in the hollow of his hand, he said aloud in conversation that the Emperor ought to be master in the Empire as the Kings of France and Spain were masters of their own. His army, which was “self-supporting” and by reason of its numbers also independent of the Estates, was the first instance in German history of an Imperial army of European significance; in comparison with it Tilly’s army of the Fronde (for that was what the League really was) counted for little. When Wallenstein, in 1628, leaguered before Stralsund, visualizing a Habsburg sea-power in the Baltic wherewith to take the Bourbon system in the rear—and just then Richelieu was besieging La Rochelle, with better fortune—hostilities between himself and the League had become almost unavoidable. He absented himself from the Diet of Regensburg in 1630, saying that its seat “would presently be in Paris.” This was the most serious political error of his life, for in his absence the Frondist Electors defeated the Emperor by threatening to displace him in favour of Louis XIII, and forced him to dismiss his general. And with that, though it did not realize the consequence of the step, the central power in Germany gave away its army. Henceforth Richelieu supported the greater Fronde in Germany with the object of breaking the Spanish power there, while on the other side Olivarez, and Wallenstein as soon as he regained his power, allied themselves with the French aristocrats, who thereupon took the offensive under the Queen-mother and Gaston of Orléans. But the Imperial power had missed its grand chance. The Cardinal won in both games. In 1632 he executed the last of the Montmorencys⁠⁶⁹⁵ and brought the Catholic Electors of Germany into open alliance with France. And thenceforward Wallenstein, becoming unsure of his own final purposes, learned more and more against the Spanish idea, thinking that he could keep the Empire-idea clear of it, and so ipso facto approached nearer and nearer to the standpoint of the Estates—like Marshal Turenne in the French Fronde a few years later. This was the decisive turn in later German history. With Wallenstein’s secession the absolute emperor-state became impossible, and his murder in 1634 did not remedy matters, for the Emperor had no substitute to take his place.

And yet it was just then that the conjuncture was favourable once more. For in 1640 the decisive conflict between Crown and estates broke out simultaneously in Spain, France, and England. In almost every Spanish province the Cortes rose against Olivarez; Portugal, and with it India and Africa, fell away for ever, and it took years to regain even Catalonia and Naples. In England—just as in the Thirty Years’ War—the constitutional conflict between the Crown and the gentry who dominated the Commons was carefully separated from the religious side of the Revolution, deep as was the interpenetration of the two. But the growing resistance that Cromwell encountered in the lower class in particular—which drove him, all unwillingly, into military dictatorship—and the later popularity of the restored monarchy show the extent to which, over and above all religious differences, aristocratic interest had been concerned in bringing about the fall of the dynasty.

At the very time of Charles I’s trial and execution an insurrection in Paris was forcing the French Court to flee. Men shouted for a republic and built barricades. Had Cardinal de Retz been more of a Cromwell, victory of the Estates over Mazarin would have been at least a possibility. But the issue of this grand general crisis of the West was determined by the weight and the destinies of a few personalities, and took shape in such a way that it was in England alone that the Fronde (represented by Parliament) subjected the State and the kingship to its control—confirming this control, in the “glorious Revolution” of 1688, so permanently that even to-day essential parts of the old Norman State continue established. In France and Spain the kingship won unqualified victory. In Germany the Peace of Westphalia placed the Fronde of the greater princes in an English relation towards the Emperor and in the French relation towards the lesser Fronde of the local princes. In the Empire as such, the Estates ruled; in its provinces, the Dynasty. Thenceforth the Imperial dignity, like the English kingship, was a name, surrounded by relics of Spanish stateliness dating from the early Baroque; while the individual princes, like the leading families of the English aristocracy, succumbed to the model of Paris and their duodecimo absolutism was, politically and socially, bound in the Versailles style. So, in this field and in that, the decision fell in favour of the Bourbons and against the Habsburgs, a decision already visible to all men in the Peace of the Pyrenees of 1659.

With this epochal turn the State, which as a possibility is inherent in every Culture, was actualized and attained to such a height of “condition” as could neither be surpassed nor for long maintained. Already there is a quiet breath of autumn in the air when Frederick the Great is entertaining at Sans Souci. These are the years too, in which the great special arts attain to their last, most refined, and most intellectual maturity—side by side with the fine orators of the Athenian Agora there are Zeuxis and Praxiteles, side by side with the filigree of Cabinet-diplomacy the music of Bach and Mozart.

This cabinet-politics has itself become a high art, an artistic satisfaction to all who have a finger in it, marvellous in its subtlety and elegance, courtly, refined, working mysteriously at great distances—for already Russia, the North American colonies, even the Indian states are put into play in order by the mere weight of surprising combinations to bring about decisions at quite other points on the globe. It is a game with strict rules, a game of intercepted letters and secret confidants, of alliances and congresses within a system of governments which even then was called (with deep meaning) the “concert” of the powers—full of noblesse and esprit, to use the phrases of the period, a mode of keeping history “in form” never and nowhere else imagined, or even imaginable.

In the Western world, whose sphere of influence is already almost the sphere itself, the period of the absolutist State covers scarcely a century and a half—from 1660, when Bourbon triumphed over Habsburg in the Peace of the Pyrenees and the Stuarts returned to England, to the Coalition Wars directed against the French Revolution, in which London triumphed over Paris, or, if one prefers it so, over that Congress of Vienna in which the old diplomacy, that of blood and not money, gave the world its grand farewell performance. Corresponding periods are the Age of Pericles between the First and the Second Tyrannis, and the Tshun-tsiu, “Spring and Autumn,” as the Chinese call the time, between the Protectors and the “Contending States.”

In this last phase of dignified politics with forms traditional but not popular, familiar but not smiled at, the culminating points are marked by the extinction of the two Habsburg lines in quick succession and the diplomatic and warlike events that throng in 1700–10 round the Spanish, and in 1740–60 round the Austrian succession.⁠⁶⁹⁶ It is the climax also of the genealogical principle. Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube! was indeed “an extension of war by other means.” The phrase indeed was coined long before (in connexion with Maximilian I), but it was not until now that it reached its fullest effects. Fronde Wars pass over into Succession Wars, decided upon in cabinets and fought out chivalrously by small armies and according to strict conventions.⁠⁶⁹⁷ What was contended for was the heritage of half the world which the marriage-politics of early Baroque had brought together in Habsburg hands. The State is still “well up to form”; the nobility has become a loyal aristocracy of court and service, carrying on the wars of the Crown and organizing its administration. Side by side with the France of Louis XIV, there presently arose in Prussia a masterpiece of State organization. From the conflicts of the Great Elector with his Estates (1660) to the death of Frederick the Great (who received Mirabeau in audience three years before the Fall of the Bastille) Prussia’s road is the same as France’s, and the outcome in each case is a State which was in every point the opposite of the English order.

For the situation was otherwise in the Empire and in England. There the Frondes had won, and the nations were governed, not absolutely, but aristocratically. But between England and the Empire, again, there was the immense difference that England, as an island, could largely dispense with governmental watchfulness, and that her peers in the Upper House and her gentry in the Lower founded their actions on the self-evidentness of England’s greatness;⁠⁶⁹⁸ whereas in the Empire the upper stratum of the land-princes—with the Diet at Regensburg as their Upper House—were chiefly concerned with educating into distinct “peoples” the fragments of the nation that had accidentally fallen to their respective hands, and with marking off their scattered bits of fatherland as strictly as possible from other “peoples’” bits. In place of the world-horizon that there had been in Gothic days, provincial horizon was cultivated by thought and deed. The idea of the Nation itself was abandoned to the realm of dreams—that other world which is not of race but of language, not of Destiny but of Causality. And in it arose the idea, and finally the fact, of the “people” as conceived by poets and thinkers, who founded themselves a republic in the clouds of verse and logic and at last came to believe that politics consisted in idealistic writing and reading and speaking, and not in deed and resolve—so that even to-day real deeds and resolves are confused with mere expressions of inclination.

In England the victory of the gentry and the Declaration of Rights (1689) in reality put an end to the State. Parliament put William III on his throne, just as later it prevented George I and George II from vacating theirs, in the interest of its class. The word “State,” which had been current as early as the Tudors, fell into disuse—it has become impossible to translate into English either Louis XIV’s “L’état c’est moi” or Frederick the Great’s “Ich bin der erste Diener meiner Staates.” On the other hand, the word “society” established itself as the expression of the fact that the nation was “in form” under the class- and not under the state-régime; the same word that with a significant misunderstanding Rousseau and the Continental rationalists generally took over to express the hatred of the Third Estate for authority.⁠⁶⁹⁹ But in England authority as “the Government” was clear-cut and well understood. From George I onwards its centre was the Cabinet, a body which constitutionally did not exist at all⁠⁷⁰⁰ and factually was an executive committee of the faction of the nobility in command for the time being. Absolutism existed, but it was the absolutism of a class-delegation. The idea of “lèse-majeste” was transferred to Parliament, as the immunity of the Roman kings passed to the tribunes. The genealogical principle is there, too, but it is expressed in the family relations within the higher nobility and the influence of the same upon the parliamentary situation. Even in 1902 Lord Salisbury acted as a Cecil in proposing his nephew Balfour as his successor as against Joseph Chamberlain. The noble factions of Tory and Whig separated themselves more and more distinctly, very often, indeed, within the same family, according to whether the “power-” outweighed the “booty-” outlook—that is, according as land was valued above money⁠⁷⁰¹—or vice versa, a contrast that even in the eighteenth century was expressed within the higher bourgeoisie by the words “respectable” and “fashionable,” standing for two opposed conceptions of the gentleman. The State’s care for all is frankly replaced by class-interest. It is for this that the individual claims his freedom—that is what “freedom” means in English—but the insular existence and the build of “society” have created such relations that in the last resort everyone who belongs to it (which is a matter of moment in a status-dictatorship) finds his interests represented by those of one or the other noble party.

This steadiness of last, deepest, and ripest form, which springs from the historical feeling of Western mankind, was denied to the Classical. Tyrannis vanished. Strict oligarchy vanished. The Demos which the politics of the sixth century had created as the sum of all men belonging to the Polis burst into factions and spasmodic shocks of noble versus non-noble, and conflicts began within states, and between states, in which each party tried to exterminate the other lest it should itself be exterminated. When in 511—that is, still in the age of the Tyrants—Sybaris was annihilated by the Pythagoreans, the event, the first of its kind, shocked the entire Classical world; even in distant Miletus mourning was worn. But now the elimination of a Polis or a party was so usual that a regular form and choice of methods—corresponding to the typical peace-treaties of Western Baroque—arose for the disposal of the vanquished—for example, the inhabitants might be massacred or sold into slavery, the houses razed or divided as spoil. The will to absolutism is there—after the Persian Wars it is universal, in Rome and Sparta no less than in Athens—but the willed narrowness of the Polis, the point-politic, and the willed brevity of office-holding and immediacy of schemes made it impossible ever to reach a firm decision as to who should be “the State.”⁠⁷⁰² The high craft of diplomacy, which in the West was practised by cabinets inspired by a tradition, was here handicapped by an amateurism founded not on any accidental inadequacy of persons—the men were available—but solely in the political form itself. The course of this form from the First to the Second Tyrannis is unmistakable and corresponds to the same evolution in all other Late periods; but the specifically Classical style of it appears in the disorder and subjection to incidentals which naturally and inevitably followed from a life that could not and would not dissociate itself from the moment.

The most important example of this is the evolution of Rome during the fifth century—a period over which hitherto historians have wrangled, precisely because they have tried to find in it a consistency that can no more have existed there than anywhere else in the Classical State. A further source of misunderstanding is that the conditions of that development have been regarded as something quite primitive, whereas in fact even the city of the Tarquins must have already been in a very advanced state, and primitive Rome lay much further back. The relations of the fifth century are on a small scale in comparison with those of Cæsar’s age, but they were not antiquated. Because written tradition is defective (as it was everywhere save in Athens), the literary movement which followed the Punic Wars set itself to fill the blanks with poetry and in particular (as was to be expected in the Hellenistic age) with the evocation of an idyllic past, as, for example, in the story of Cincinnatus. And modern scholarship, though it has ceased to believe these legends, has nevertheless remained under the influence of the taste that inspired their invention, and continues to look at the conditions of the time through its eyes—the more readily as Greek and Roman history are treated as two separate worlds, and the evil practice of identifying the beginning of history with the beginning of sure documentation is followed as usual. In truth, the conditions of 500 B.C. are anything but Homeric. The trace of its walls shows that Rome under the Tarquins was, with Capua, the greatest city in Italy and bigger than the Athens of Themistocles.⁠⁷⁰³ A city that concludes commercial treaties with Carthage is no peasant commune. And it follows that the population in the four city tribes of 471 must have been very numerous, probably greater than the whole total of the sixteen country tribes scattered insignificantly in space.

The great success of the landowning nobility in overthrowing a Tyrannis that was almost certainly very popular, and establishing unrestricted senatorial rule, was nullified again by a series of violent events about 471—the replacement of the family tribes by four great city-wards, the representation of these by tribunes (who were sacrosanct—i.e., who enjoyed a royal privilege that no single official of the aristocratic administration possessed) and lastly the liberation of the small peasantry from the clientela of the nobility.

The Tribunate was the happiest inspiration, not only of this period, but of the Classical Polis generally. It was the Tyrannis raised to the position of an integral part of the Constitution, and set in parallel, moreover, with the old oligarchical offices, all of which continued in being. This meant that the social revolution also was carried out in legal forms, so that what was elsewhere a wild discharge in shock and countershock became here a forum-contest, limited as a rule to debate and vote. There was no need to evoke the tyrant, for he was there already. The Tribune possessed rights inherent in position, not rights arising out of an office, and with his immunity he could carry out revolutionary acts that would have been inconceivable without street-fighting in any other Polis. This creation was an incident, but no other of its creations helped Rome to rise as this did. In Rome alone the transition from the First to the Second Tyrannis, and the further development therefrom till beyond the days of Zama, was accomplished, not indeed without shocks, but at any rate without catastrophe. The Tribune was the link between the Tarquins and Cæsar. With the Lex Hortensia of 287 he became all-powerful, he is the Second Tyrannis in constitutional “form.” In the second century, tribunes caused consuls and censors to be arrested. The Gracchi were tribunes, Cæsar assumed the perpetual tribunate, and in the principate of Augustus the tribunician dignity was the essential element of his position, the only one in virtue of which he possessed sovereign rights.

The crisis of 471 was not unique but generically Classical. Its target was the oligarchy, which even now, within the Demos created by the Tyrannis, strove to be the impulsive force in affairs. It was no longer, as in Hesiod’s day, the oligarchy as estate versus non-estate, but the oligarchic party against a second party—both in the cadre of the absolute state, which as such was not brought into the controversy. In Athens, 487 B.C., the archons were overthrown and their rights transferred to the college of strategi.⁠⁷⁰⁴ In 461 the Areopagus, the Athenian equivalent of the Senate, was overthrown. In Sicily (where relations with Rome were close) the democracy triumphed at Acragas (Agrigentum) in 471, at Syracuse in 465, at Rhegium and Messana in 461. In Sparta the kings Cleomenes (488) and Pausanias (470) tried in turn, without success, to free the Helots—in Roman terms, the Clientela—and thereby to acquire for the kingship, vis-à-vis the oligarchic Ephors, the importance of the tribunate in Rome. The missing element in this case, which was present (though overlooked by our scholars) in that of Rome, was the population-strength of the mercantile city that gives such movements both weight and leadership; it was on this that even the great Helot rising of 464 broke down (an event which probably inspired the Roman legends of a secession of the Plebs to the Mons Sacer).

In a Polis, the country nobility and the patriciate fuse (that is the object of synœcism, as we have seen), but not so the burgher and the peasant. So far as concerns their struggle with the oligarchy these are a single party—namely, the democratic—but otherwise they are two. This is what comes to expression in the next crisis. In this (c. 450) the Roman patriciate sought to re-establish its power as a party—for so we must interpret the introduction of the Decemvirs and the abolition of the Tribunate; the legislation of the Twelve Tables by which the plebs, which had recently attained political existence, was denied “Connubium” and “Commercium”; and above all the creation of the small country tribes in which the influence of the old families (not legally but in fact) predominated and which (in the Comitia Tributa now set up alongside the old Centuriata) enjoyed the unchallengeable majority of 16 to 4. This, of course, meant the disfranchisement of the townspeople by the peasantry, and there can be no doubt that it was a move of the Patrician party to make effective in one common blow the common antipathy of the countryside and themselves towards the money economics of the city.

The counterstroke came quickly; it is recognizable in the number ten of the tribunes who appear after the withdrawal of the Decemvirs,⁠⁷⁰⁵ but there were other events too that cannot but have belonged with it—the attempt of Sp. Mælius to set up a Tyrannis (439), the setting-up of Consular Tribunes by the army in place of the civil officials (438), and the Lex Canuleia (445) which made an end of the prohibition of connubium between patricians and plebeians.

There can be no doubt, of course, that there were factions within both the patrician and the plebeian parties which would have liked to upset this fundamental trait of the Roman Polis, the opposition of Senate and Tribunate, by abolishing the one or the other; but the form turned out to be so right that it was never seriously challenged. With the enforcement by the Army of plebeian eligibility to the highest offices (399) the contest took a quite different turn. The fifth century may be summed up, under the aspect of internal politics, as that of the struggle for lawful Tyrannis; thenceforward the polarity of the constitution was admitted, and the parties contended no longer for the abolition, but for the capture, of the great offices. This was the substance of the revolution that took place in the period of the Samnite Wars. From 287 the Plebes had the entrée to all offices, and the proposals of the tribunes, when approved by them, automatically became law; on the other hand, it was thenceforward always practicable for the Senate by corruption or otherwise to induce some one tribune to exercise his veto and thus to deprive the institution of its power. It was in the struggle of two competent authorities that the juristic subtlety of the Romans was developed. Elsewhere decisions were usually by way of fist and bludgeon—the technical word is “Cheirocracy”—but in this “best” period of Roman constitutional law, the fourth century, the habit was formed of using the weapons of thesis and interpretation, a mode of contest in which the slightest points of legal wording could be decisive.

But Rome was unique in all Classical history in this equilibrium of Senate and Tribunate. Everywhere else it was a matter not of swaying balance, but of sheer alternatives, namely Oligarchy or Ochlocracy. The absolute Polis and the Nation which was identical with it were accepted as given premisses, but of the inward forms none possessed stability. The victory of one party meant the abolition of all the institutions of the other, and people became accustomed to regard nothing as either venerable enough or useful enough to be exempt from the chances of the day’s battle. Sparta’s “form,” so to say, was senatorial, Athens’s tribunician, and by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, in 431, the idea that forms must be alternative was so firmly fixed that only radical solutions were henceforth possible.

With this, the future was set for Rome. It was the one state in which political passions had persons only, and no longer institutions, as their target; the only one which was firmly in “form.” Senatus Populusque Romanus—that is, Senate and Tribunate—was the form of forged bronze that no party would henceforward batter, whereas all the rest, with the narrowness of their individual power-horizons in the world of Classical states, were only able to prove once more the fact that domestic politics exist simply in order that foreign politics may be possible.

At this point, when the Culture is beginning to turn itself into the Civilization, the non-Estate intervenes in affairs decisively—and for the first time—as an independent force. Under the Tyrannis and the Fronde, the State has invoked its aid against the Estates proper, and it has for the first time learned to feel itself a power. Now it employs its strength for itself, and does so as a class standing for its freedom against the rest. It sees in the absolute State, in the Crown, in rooted institutions, the natural allies of the old Estates and the true and last representatives of symbolic tradition. This is the difference between the First and the Second Tyrannis, between Fronde and Bourgeois Revolution, between Cromwell and Robespierre.

The State, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by urban reason as a burden. So, in the same phase, the great forms of the Baroque arts begin to be felt as restrictive and become Classicist or Romanticist—that is, sickly or unformed; German literature from 1770 is one long revolt of strong individual personalities against strict poetry. The idea of the whole nation being “in training” or “in form” for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly is no longer in condition. This holds good in morals, in arts, and in modes of thought, but most of all in politics. Every bourgeois revolution has as its scene the great city, and as its hall-mark the incomprehension of old symbols, which it replaces by tangible interests and the craving (or even the mere wish) of enthusiastic thinkers and world-improvers to see their conceptions actualized. Nothing now has value but that which can be justified by reason. But, deprived thus of the exaltation of a form that is essentially symbolical and works metaphysically, the national life loses the power of keeping its head up in the being-streams of history. Follow the desperate attempts of the French Government—the handful of capable and farsighted men under the mediocre Louis XVI—to keep their country in “condition” when, after the death of Vergennes in 1787, the whole gravity of the external situation had become manifest. With the death of this diplomatist France disappeared for years from the political combinations of Europe; at the same time the great reform that the Crown had carried through against all resistances—above all, the general administrative reform of that year, based on the freest self-management—remained completely ineffective, because in view of the pliancy of the State, the question of the moment for the Estates became, suddenly, the question of power.⁠⁷⁰⁶ As a century before and a century afterwards, European war was drawing visibly nearer with an inexorable necessity, but no one now took any notice of the external situation. The nobility as an Estate had rarely, but the bourgeoisie as an Estate had never, thought in terms of foreign policy and world-history. Whether the State in its new form would be able to hold its own at all amongst the other States, no one asked. All that mattered was whether it secured men’s “rights.”

But the bourgeoisie, the class of urban “freedom,” strong as its class-feeling remained for generations (in West Europe even beyond 1848), was at no time wholly master of its actions. For, first of all, it became manifest in every critical situation that its unity was a negative unity, only really existent in moments of opposition to something, anything, else—“Tiers État” and “Opposition” are almost synonymous—and that when something constructive of its own had to be done, the interests of the various groups pulled all ways. To be free from something—that, all wanted. But the intellectual desired the State as an actualization of “justice” against the force of historical facts; or the “rights of man”; or freedom of criticism as against the dominant religion. And Money wanted a free path to business success. There were a good many who desired rest and renunciation of historical greatness, or wished this and that tradition and its embodiments, on which physically or spiritually they lived, to be spared. But there was another element, now and henceforth, that had not existed in the conflicts of the Fronde (the English Civil War included) or the first Tyrannis, but this time stood for a power—namely, that which is found in all Civilizations under different contemptuous labels—dregs, canaille, mob, Pöbel—but with the same tremendous connotation. In the great cities, which alone now spoke the decisive words—the open land can at most accept or reject faits accomplis, as our eighteenth century proves⁠⁷⁰⁷—a mass of rootless fragments of population stands outside all social linkages. These do not feel themselves as attached either to an Estate or to a vocational class, nor even to the real working-class, although they are obliged to work. Elements drawn from all classes and conditions belong to it instinctively—uprooted peasantry, literates, ruined business men, and above all (as the age of Catiline shows with terrifying clarity) derailed nobles. Their power is far in excess of their numbers, for they are always on the spot, always on hand at the big decisions, ready for anything, devoid of all respect for orderliness, even the orderliness of a revolutionary party. It is from them that events acquire the destructive force which distinguishes the French Revolution from the English, and the Second Tyrannis from the First. The bourgeoisie looks at these masses with real uneasiness, defensively, and seeks to separate itself from them—it was to a defensive act of this category, the 13th Vendémiaire, that Napoleon owed his rise.⁠⁷⁰⁸ But in the pressure of facts the separating frontier cannot be drawn; wherever the bourgeoisie throws into the scale against the older orders its feeble weight of aggressiveness—feeble in relative numbers and feeble because its inner cohesion is risked at every moment—this mass has forced itself into their ranks, pushed to the front, imparted most of the drive that wins the victory, and very often managed to secure the conquered position for itself—not seldom with the continued idealistic support of the educated who are intellectually captivated, or the material backing of the money powers, which seek to divert the danger from themselves on to the nobility and the clergy.

There is another aspect, too, under which this epoch has its importance—in it for the first time abstract truths seek to intervene in the world of facts. The capital cities have become so great, and urban man so superior and influential over the waking-consciousness of the whole Culture (this influence is what we call Public Opinion) that the powers of the blood and the tradition inherent in the blood are shaken in their hitherto unassailable position. For it must be remembered that the Baroque State and the absolute Polis in their final development of form are thoroughly living expressions of a breed, and that history, so far as it accomplishes itself in these forms, possesses the full pulse of that breed. Any theory of the State that may be fashioned here is one that is deduced from the facts, that bows to the greatness of the facts. The idea of the State had finally mastered the blood of the first Estate, and put it wholly and without reserve at the State’s service. “Absolute” means that the great being-stream is as a unit in form, possesses one kind of pulse and instinct, whether the manifestations of that pulse be diplomatic or strategic flair, dignity of moral and manners, or fastidious taste in arts and thoughts.

As the contradictory to this grand fact, now, Rationalism appears and spreads, that which has been described above⁠⁷⁰⁹ as the community of waking-consciousness in the educated, whose religion is criticism and whose numina are not deities but concepts. Now begins the influence of books and general theories upon politics—in the China of Lao-tse as in the Athens of the Sophists and the Europe of Montesquieu—and the public opinion formed by them plants itself in the path of diplomacy as a political magnitude of quite a new sort. It would be absurd to suppose that Pisistratus or Richelieu or even Cromwell determined their actions under the influence of abstract systems, but after the victory of “Enlightenment” that is what actually happens.

Nevertheless the historical rôle of the great concepts of the Civilization is very different from the complexion that they presented in the minds of the ideologues who conceived them. The effect of a truth is always quite different from its tendency. In the world of facts, truths are simply means, effective in so far as they dominate spirits and therefore determine actions. Their historical position is determined not by whether they are deep, correct, or even merely logical, but by whether they tell. We see this in the phrase “catchword,” “Schlagwort.” What certain symbols, livingly experienced, are for the Springtime religions—the Holy Sepulchre for the Crusader, the Substance of Christ for the times of the Council of Nicæa—that two or three inspiriting word-sounds are for every Civilized revolution. It is only the catchwords that are facts—the residue of the philosophical or sociological system whence they come does not matter to history. But, as catchwords, they are for about two centuries powers of the first rank, stronger even than the pulse of the blood, which in the petrifying world of the outspread cities is beginning to be dulled.

But—the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which emerge out of the chaotic mass of the Non-Estate. Along with abstract concepts abstract Money,—money divorced from the prime values of the land—along with the study the counting-house, appear as political forces. The two are inwardly cognate and inseparable—the old opposition between priest and noble continued, acute as ever, in the bourgeois atmosphere and the city framework.⁠⁷¹⁰ Of the two, moreover, it is the Money that, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally superior to the ideal truths, which so far as the fact-world is concerned exist (as I have just said) only as catchwords, as means. If by “democracy” we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world-improvers’ and freedom-teachers’ desperate fight against money that they are ipso facto assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number—expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage—is just as much a class-ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. It was the Equites, the big-money party, which made Tiberius Gracchus’s popular movement possible at all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous to themselves had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and the movement collapsed. Cæsar and Crassus financed the Catilinarian movement, and so directed it against the Senatorial party instead of against property. In England politicians of eminence laid it down as early as 1700 that “on ’Change one deals in votes as well as in stocks, and the price of a vote is as well known as the price of an acre of land.”⁠⁷¹¹ When the news of Waterloo reached Paris, the price of French government stock rose⁠⁷¹²—the Jacobins had destroyed the old obligations of the blood and so had emancipated money; now it stepped forward as lord of the land.⁠⁷¹³ There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money—and that, without the idealist amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.⁠⁷¹⁴ Intellect rejects, money directs—so it runs in every last act of a Culture-drama, when the megalopolis has become master over the rest. And, in the limit, intellect has no cause of complaint. For, after all, it has won its victory—namely, in its own realm of truths, the realm of books and ideals that is not of this world. Its conceptions have become venerabilia of the beginning Civilization. But Money wins, through these very concepts, in its realm, which is only of this world.

In the Western world of States, it was in England that both sides of Third-Estate politics, the ideal and the real, graduated. Here alone it was possible for the Third Estate to avoid the necessity of marching against an absolute State in order to destroy it and set up its own dominion on the ruins. For here it could grow up into the strong form of the First Estate, where it found a fully developed form of interest-politics, and from whose methods it could borrow for its own purposes a traditional tactic such as it could hardly wish to improve upon. Here was the home of Parliamentarism, genuine and quite inimitable, which had insular position instead of the state as its starting-point, and the habits of the First and not the Third Estate as its background. Further, there was the circumstance that this form had grown up in the full bloom of Baroque and, therefore, had Music in it. The Parliamentary style was completely identical with that of cabinet-diplomacy;⁠⁷¹⁵ and in this anti-democratic origin lay the secret of its successes.

But it was on British soil, too, that the rationalistic catchwords had, one and all, sprung up, and their relation to the principles of the Manchester School was intimate—Hume was the teacher of Adam Smith. “Liberty” self-evidently meant intellectual and trade freedom. An opposition between fact-politics and enthusiasm for abstract truths was as impossible in the England of George III as it was inevitable in the France of Louis XVI. Later, Edmund Burke could retort upon Mirabeau that “we demand our liberties, not as rights of man, but as rights of Englishmen.” France received her revolutionary ideas without exception from England, as she had received the style of her absolute monarchy from Spain. To both she imparted a brilliant and irresistible shape that was taken as a model far and wide over the Continent, but of the practical employment of either she had no idea. The successful utilization of the bourgeois catchwords⁠⁷¹⁶ in politics presupposes the shrewd eye of a ruling class for the intellectual constitution of the stratum which intends to attain power, but will not be capable of wielding it when attained. Hence in England it was successful. But it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in politics—not the bribery of individual high personages which had been customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the “nursing” of the democratic forces themselves. In eighteenth-century England, first the Parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected Commons were systematically managed by money;⁠⁷¹⁷ England, too, discovered the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread “free” opinion—it generates it.

Both together constitute liberalism (in the broad sense); that is, freedom from the restrictions of the soil-bound life, be these privileges, forms, or feelings—freedom of the intellect for every kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But both, too, unhesitatingly aim at the domination of a class, a domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the State. Mind and money, being both inorganic, want the State, not as a matured form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a purpose. Thus the difference between these forces and those of Frondism is fundamental, for the latter’s reaction had been a defence of the old Gothic against the intrusive Baroque way of living and being “in form,”—and now both these are on the defensive together and almost indistinguishable. Only in England (it must be emphasized again and again) the Fronde had disarmed, not only the State in open battle, but also the Third Estate by its inward superiority, and so attained to the one kind of first-class form that democracy is capable of working up to, a form neither planned nor aped, but naturally matured, the expression of an old breed and an unbroken sure tact that can adapt itself to the use of every new means that the changes of Time put into its hands. Thus it came about that the English Parliament, while taking part in the Succession-Wars of the Absolute States, handled them as economic wars with business aims. The mistrust felt for high form by the inwardly formless Non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to rescue its freedom—from all form—by means of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up, which, moreover, in virtue of its mechanizing tendency, is acceptable to the taste both of intellect and of money—consider, for example, the structure of the state-machine of France which Robespierre began and Napoleon completed. Dictatorship in the interests of a class-ideal appealed to Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Rodbertus, and Lassalle as it had to the Classical ideologues of the fourth century—Xenophon in the Cyropædia and Isocrates in the Nicocles.⁠⁷¹⁸

But the well-known saying of Robespierre that “the Government of the Revolution is the despotism of freedom against tyranny” expresses more than this. It lets out the deep fear that shakes every multitude which, in the presence of grave conjunctures, feels itself “not up to form.” A regiment that is shaken in its discipline will readily concede to accidental leaders of the moment powers of an extent and a kind which the legitimate command could never acquire, and which if legitimate would be utterly intolerable. But this, on a larger scale, is the position of every commencing Civilization. Nothing reveals more tellingly the decline of political form than that upspringing of formless powers which we may conveniently designate, from its most conspicuous example, Napoleonism. How completely the being of Richelieu or of Wallenstein was involved in the unshakable antecedents of their period! And how instinct with form, under all its outer unform, was the English Revolution! Here, just the reverse; the Fronde fights about the form, the absolute State in the form, but the bourgeoisie against the form. The mere abolition of an order that had become obsolete was no novelty—Cromwell and the heads of the First Tyrannis had done that. But, that behind the ruins of the visible there is no longer the substance of an invisible form; that Robespierre and Napoleon find nothing either around or in them to provide the self-evident basis essential to any new creation; that for a government of high tradition and experience they have no choice but to substitute an accidental régime, whose future no longer rests secure on the qualities of a slowly and thoroughly trained minority, but depends entirely on the chance of the adequate successor turning up—such are the distinguishing marks of this turning of the times, and hence comes the immense superiority that is enjoyed for generations still by those states which manage to retain a tradition longer than others.

The First Tyrannis had completed the Polis with the aid of the non-noble; the latter now destroyed it with the aid of the Second Tyrannis. As an idea, it perishes in the bourgeois revolutions of the fourth century, for all that it may persist as an arrangement or a habit or an instrument of the momentary powers that be. Classical man never ceased, in fact, to think and live politically in its form. But never more was it for the multitude a symbol to be respected and venerated, any more than the Divine Right of Kings was venerated in the West after Napoleon had almost succeeded in making his own dynasty “the oldest in Europe.”

Further, in these revolutions too, as ever in Classical history, there were only local and temporary solutions—nothing resembling the splendid sweep of the French Revolution from the Bastille to Waterloo—and the scenes in them were more atrocious still, for the reason that in this Culture, with its basically Euclidean feeling, the only possible way seemed to be that of physical collision of party against party, and the only possible end for the loser, not functional incorporation in the victor’s system as in the West, but destruction root and branch. At Corcyra (427) and Argos (370) the possessing classes were slaughtered en masse; in Leontini (422) they were expelled from the city by the lower classes, which carried on affairs for a while with slaves until, in fear of an avenging return, they evacuated altogether and migrated to Syracuse. The refugees from hundreds of these revolutions inundated the cities, recruited the mercenary armies of the Second Tyrannis, and infested the routes by land and sea. The readmission of such exiled fractions is a standing feature in the peace-terms offered by the Diadochi and later by the Romans. But the Second Tyrannis itself secured its positions by acts of this kind. Dionysius I (407–367) secured his hegemony over Syracuse—the city in whose higher society, along with that of Athens, centred the ripest culture of Hellas, the city where Æschylus had produced his Persian trilogy in 470—by wholesale executions of educated people and confiscations of their property; this he followed up by entirely rebuilding the population, in the upper levels by granting large properties to his adherents, and in the lower by raising masses of slaves to the citizenship and distributing amongst them (as was not uncommon) the wives and daughters of the victims.⁠⁷¹⁹

After the characteristically Classical fashion, the type of these revolutions was such as to produce always an increase of number, never of extent. Multitudes of them happened, but each proceeded purely for itself and at one point of its own, and it is only the fact that they were contemporary with one another that gives them the character of a collective phenomenon, which marks an epoch. Similarly with Napoleonism; here again, a formless regimen for the first time raised itself above the framework of the State, yet without being able to attain to complete inward detachment therefrom. It supported itself on the Army, which, vis-à-vis the nation that had lost its “form,” began to feel itself as an independent power. That is the brief road from Robespierre to Bonaparte—with the fall of the Jacobins the centre of gravity passed from the administration to the ambitious generals. How deeply this new tendency implanted itself in the West may be seen from the example of Bernadotte and Wellington, and even more from the story of Frederick William III’s “call to my People” in 1813—in this case the continuance of the dynasty would have been challenged by the military had not the King stiffened himself to break with Napoleon.⁠⁷²⁰

This anti-constitutionality of the Second Tyrannis declared itself also in the position taken by Alcibiades and Lysander in the armed forces of their respective cities during the latter stages of the Peloponnesian War, a position incompatible with the basic form of the Polis. The first-named, destitute as an exile of official position, and against the will of the home authorities, exercised from 411 the de facto command of the Athenian Navy; the second, though not even a Spartiate, felt himself entirely independent at the head of an army devoted to his person. In the year 408 the contest of the two powers for the supremacy over the Ægean world took the form of a contest between these two individuals.⁠⁷²¹ Shortly after this, Dionysius of Syracuse built up the first large-scale professional army and introduced engines of war (artillery)⁠⁷²²—a new form which served as a model for the Diadochi and Rome also. Thereafter the spirit of the army was a political power on its own account, and it became a serious question how far the State was master, and how far tool, of its army. The fact that the government of Rome was exclusively in the hands of a military committee⁠⁷²³ from 390 to 367⁠⁷²⁴ reveals pretty clearly that the army had a policy of its own. It is well known that Alexander, the Romanticist of the Second Tyrannis, fell more and more under the influence of his generals, who not only compelled the retreat from India but also disposed of his inheritance amongst themselves as a matter of course.

This is essentially Napoleonism, and so is the extension of personal rule over regions united by ties neither national nor jural, but merely military and administrative. But extension was just what was essentially incompatible with the Polis. The Classical State is the one State that was incapable of any organic widening, and the conquests of the Second Tyrannis therefore resolved themselves into a juxtaposition of two political units, the Polis and the subjugated territory, the cohesion of which was initially accidental and perpetually in danger. Thus arose that strange picture of the Hellenistic-Roman world, the true significance of which is not even yet recognized—a circle of border-regions, and within them a congeries of Poleis to which, small as they were, the conception of the State proper, the res publica, continued to be bound as exclusively as ever. In this middle (indeed, so far as concerned each individual, hegemony was in one point) was the theatre of all real politics. The “orbis terrarum”—a significant expression—was merely a means or object to it. The Roman notions of “imperium”—dictatorial powers of administration outside the city moat (which were automatically extinguished when its holder entered the Pomœrium)—and of “provincia” as the opposite of “res publica,” express the common Classical instinct, which knew only the city’s body as the State and political subject, and the “outside” only in relation to it, as object to it. Dionysius made his city of Syracuse into a fortress surrounded by a “scrap-heap of states,” and extended his field of power thence, over Upper Italy and the Dalmatian coast, into the northern Adriatic, where he possessed Ancona and Hatria at the mouth of the Po. Philip of Macedon, following the example of his teacher Jason of Pheræ (murdered in 370), adopted the reverse plan, placing his centre of gravity in the periphery (that is, practically in the army) and thence exercising a hegemony over the Hellenic world of States. Thus Macedonia came to extend to the Danube, and after Alexander’s death there were added to this outer circle the empires of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies—each governed from a Polis (Antioch, Alexandria), but through the intermediary of existing native machinery, which, be it said, was at its lowest better than any Classical administration of it could have been. Rome herself in the same period (c. 326–265) built up her Middle-Italian territory as a border state, secured in all directions by a system of colonies, allies, and settlements with Latin right. Then, from 237, we find Hamilcar Barca winning for Carthage, a city old established in the Classical way of life, an empire in Spain; C. Flaminius (225) conquering the Po Valley for Rome; and finally Cæsar making his Gallic empire. These were the foundations upon which rested, first, the Napoleonic struggles of the Diadochi in the East, then those of Scipio and Hannibal in the West—the limits of the Polis outgrown in both cases—and lastly the Cæsarian struggles of the Triumvirs, who supported themselves on the total of all the border states and used their means, in order to be—“the first in Rome.”

In Rome the strong and happily conceived form of the State that was reached about 340 kept the social revolution within constitutional limits. A Napoleonic figure like Appius Claudius the Censor of 310, who built the first aqueduct and the Appian Way, and ruled in Rome almost as a tyrant, very soon failed when he tried to eliminate the peasantry by means of the great-city masses and so to impart the one-sided Athenian direction to politics—for that was his aim in taking up the sons of slaves into the Senate, in reorganizing the Centuries on a money instead of a land-assessment basis,⁠⁷²⁵ and in distributing freedmen and landless men amongst the country tribes, so that they might outvote the rustics (as they were always able to do, since the latter rarely attended). But his successors in the censorship lost no time in reversing this, and relegated the landless to the great city-tribes again. The non-estate itself, well led by a minority of distinguished families, saw its aim (as has been said before) not in the destruction, but in the acquisition, of the senatorial organs of administration. In the end, it forced its way into all offices (even, by the Lex Ogulnia, of 300, into the politically important priesthoods of the Pontifices and Augurs), and by the outbreak of 287 it secured force of law for plebiscita even without the Senate’s approval.

The practical result of this freedom-movement was precisely the reverse of that which ideologues would have expected—there were no idealogues in Rome. The greatness of its success robbed the non-estate of its object and thereby deprived it of its driving force, for positively, when not “in opposition,” it was null. After 287 the state-form existed for the purpose of being politically used, and used, too, in a world in which only the states of the great fringe—Rome, Carthage, Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt—really counted. It had ceased to be in any danger of becoming the passive of “peoples’-rights” activities. And it was precisely this security that formed the basis on which the one people that had remained “in form” rose to its grandeur.

On the one hand, it had developed within the Plebs, formless and long weakened in its race-impulses by the mass-intake of freedmen,⁠⁷²⁶ an upper stratum distinguished by great practical aptitudes, rank, and wealth, which joined forces with a corresponding stratum within the patriciate. Hence there came into existence a very narrow circle of men of the strongest race-quality, dignified life, and broad political outlook, in whom the whole stock of experience in governing and generalship and negotiation was concentrated and transmitted; who regarded the direction of the State as the one profession worthy of their status, considered themselves as inheritors of a privilege to exercise it, and educated their children solely in the art of ruling and the convictions of a measurelessly proud tradition. This nobility, which as such had no constitutional existence, found its constitutional engine in the Senate, which had originally been a body representing the interests of the patricians (that is, the “Homeric” aristocracy), but in which from the middle of the fourth century ex-consuls—men who had both ruled and commanded—sat as life-members, forming a close group of eminent talents that dominated the assembly and, through it, the State. Even by 279 the Senate appeared to Cineas, the ambassador of Pyrrhus, like a council of kings, and finally its kernel was a small group of leading men, holding the titles “princeps” and “clarissimus,” men in every respect—rank, power, and public dignity—the peers of those who reigned over the empires of the Diadochi.⁠⁷²⁷ There came into being a government such as no megalopolis in any other Culture whatsoever has possessed, and a tradition to which it would be impossible to find parallels save perhaps in the Venice and the Papal Curia of the Baroque, and there under a wholly different set of conditions. Here were no theories such as had been the ruin of Athens, none of the provincialism that had made Sparta in the long run contemptible, but simply a praxis in the grand style. If “Rome” is a perfectly unique and marvellous phenomenon in world-history, it is due, not to the Roman 410“people,” which in itself, like any other, was raw material without form, but to this class which brought Rome into condition and kept her so, willy-nilly—with the result that this particular stream of being, which in 350 was still without importance save to middle Italy, gradually drew into its bed the entire history of the Classical, and made the last great period of that history a Roman period.

It was the very perfection of political flair that was displayed by this small circle (which possessed no sort of public rights) in managing the democratic forms created by the Revolution—forms that here as elsewhere derive all value from the use that is made of them. The only factor in them that if mishandled would have been dangerous in an instant—namely, the interpenetration of two mutually exclusive powers—was handled so superbly and so quietly that it was always the higher experience that gave the note, while the people remained throughout convinced that decisions were made by, and in the sense desired by, itself. To be popular, and yet historically successful in the highest degree—here is the secret of this policy, and for that matter the only possibility of policy existing at all in such times, an art in which the Roman régime has remained unequalled to this day.

Nevertheless, on the other side of the picture, the result of the Revolution was the emancipation of Money. Thenceforward money was master in the Comitia Centuriata. That which called itself “populus” there became more and more a tool in the hands of big money, and it required all the tactical superiority of the ruling circles to maintain a counterpoise in the Plebs, and to keep effective a representation of the yeomanry, under the leadership of the noble families, in the thirty-one country tribes from which the great city mass continued to be excluded. Hence the drastic energy with which the arrangements made by Appius Claudius were revoked. The natural alliance between high finance and the mass, though we see it actually at work later (under the Gracchi and Marius) for the destruction of the tradition of the blood,⁠⁷²⁸ was at any rate made impossible for many generations. Bourgeoisie and yeomanry, money and landowning, maintained a reciprocal equilibrium of separate organisms, and were held together and made efficient by the State-idea (of which the nobility was the incarnation) until this inward form fell to pieces, and the two tendencies broke apart in enmity. The First Punic War was a traders’ war and directed against the agrarian interest, and, therefore, the consul Appius Claudius (a descendant of the great Censor) laid the decision of the matter in 284 before the Comitia Centuriata. The conquest of the Po plain, on the other hand, was in the interests of the peasantry and it was, therefore, in the Comita Tributa that it was carried by the Tribune C. Flaminius—the first genuinely Cæsarian type in Roman history, builder of the Via Flaminia and the Circus Flaminius. But when in pursuance of his policy he (as Censor in 220) forbade the Senators to engage in trade, and also at the same time made the old noble centuries accessible to plebeians, he was practically benefiting only the new financial nobility of the First Punic War period, and thus (entirely in spite of himself) he became the creator of high finance organized as an Estate—that is, that of the Equites, who a century later put an end to the great age of the nobility. Henceforth, when Hannibal (before whom Flaminius had fallen on the field of battle) had been disposed of, money steadily became, even for the government as such, the “ultima ratio” in the accomplishment of its policy—the last true State-policy that the Classical world was to know.

When the Scipios and their circle had ceased to be the governing influence, nothing remained but the private policies of individuals, who followed their own interests without scruple, and looked upon the “orbis terrarum” as passive booty. The historian Polybius (who belonged to that circle) regarded Flaminius as a mere demagogue and traced to him all the misfortunes of the Gracchan period. He was wholly in error as to Flaminius’s intentions, but he was right as to his effect. Flaminius—like the elder Cato, who with the blind zeal of the agrarian overthrew the great Scipio on account of his world-policy—achieved the reverse of what he intended. Money stepped into the place of blood-leadership, and money took less than three generations to exterminate the yeomanry.

If it was an improbable piece of good luck in the destinies of the Classical peoples that Rome was the only city-state to survive the Revolution with an unimpaired constitution, it was, on the contrary, almost a miracle that in our West—with its genealogical forms deep-rooted in the idea of duration—violent revolution broke out at all, even in one place—namely, Paris. It was not the strength, but the weakness of French Absolutism which brought the English ideas, in combination with the power of money, to the point of an explosion which gave living form to the catchwords of the “Enlightenment,” which bound together virtue and terror, freedom and despotism, and which echoed still even in the minor catastrophes of 1830 and 1848 and the more recent Socialistic longing for catastrophe.⁠⁷²⁹ In England itself, when the aristocracy ruled more absolutely than ever in France, there was certainly a small circle round Fox and Sheridan which was enthusiastic for the ideas of the Revolution—all of which were of English provenance—and men talked of universal suffrage and Parliamentary reform.⁠⁷³⁰ But that was quite enough to induce both parties, under the leadership of a Whig (the younger Pitt), to take the sharpest measures to defeat any and every attempt to interfere in the slightest degree with the aristocratic régime for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The English nobility let loose the twenty-year war against France, and mobilized all the monarchs of Europe to bring about in the end, not the fall of Napoleon, but the fall of the Revolution—the Revolution that had had the naïve daring to introduce the opinions of private English thinkers into practical politics, and so to give a position to the Tiers État of which the consequences were all the better foreseen in the English lobbies for having been overlooked in the Paris salons.⁠⁷³¹

What was called “Opposition” in England was—the attitude of one aristocratic party while the other was running the Government. It did not mean there, as it meant all over the Continent, professional criticism of the work which it was someone else’s profession to do, but the practical endeavour to force the activity of Government into a form in which the opposition was ready and fit at any moment to take it over. But this Opposition was at once—and in complete ignorance of its social presuppositions—taken as a model for that which the educated in France and elsewhere aimed at creating, namely, a class-domination of the Tiers État under the eyes of a dynasty, no very clear idea being formed as to the latter’s future. The English dispositions were, from Montesquieu onwards, lauded with enthusiastic misunderstanding—although these Continental countries, not being islands, lacked the first condition precedent for an “English” evolution. Only in one point was England really a model. When the bourgeoisie had got so far as to turn the absolute state back again into an Estate-state, they found over there a picture which in fact had never been other than it was. True, it was the aristocracy alone who ruled in it—but at least it was not the Crown.

The result of the turn, and the basic form of the Continental States at the beginning of the Civilization, is “Constitutional Monarchy,” the extremest possibility of which appears as what we call nowadays a Republic. It is necessary to get clear, once and for all, of the mumblings of the doctrinaires who think in timeless and therefore unreal concepts and for whom “Republic” is a form-in-itself. The republican ideal of the nineteenth century has no more resemblance to the Classical res publica, or even to Venice or the original Swiss cantons, than the English constitution to a “constitution” in the Continental sense. That which we call republic is a negation, which of inward necessity postulates that the thing denied is an ever-present possibility. It is non-monarchy in forms borrowed from the monarchy. The genealogical feeling is immensely strong in Western mankind; it strains its conscience so far as to pretend that Dynasty determines its political conduct even when Dynasty no longer exists at all. The historical is embodied therein, and unhistorically we cannot live. It makes a great difference whether, as in the case of the Classical world, the dynastic principle conveys absolutely nothing to the inner feelings of a man, or, as in the case of the West, it is real enough to need six generations of educated people to fight it down in themselves. Feeling is the secret enemy of all constitutions that are plans and not growths; they are in last analysis nothing but defensive measures born of fear and mistrust. The urban conception of freedom—freedom from something—narrows itself to a merely anti-dynastic significance, and republican enthusiasm lives only on this feeling.

Such a negation inevitably involves a preponderance of theory. While Dynasty and its close congener Diplomacy conserve the old tradition and pulse, Constitutions contain an overweight of systems, bookishness, and framed concepts—such as is entirely unthinkable in England, where nothing negative and defensive adheres to the form of government. It is not for nothing that the Faustian is par excellence the reading and writing Culture. The printed book is an emblem of temporal, the Press of spatial, infinity. In contrast with the immense power and tyranny of these symbols, even the Chinese Civilization seems almost empty of writing. In Constitutions, literature is put into the field against knowledge of men and things, language against race, abstract right against successful tradition—regardless of whether a nation involved in the tide of events is still capable of work and “maintaining its form.” Mirabeau was quite alone and unsuccessful in combating the Assembly, which “confused politics with fiction.” Not only the three doctrinaire constitutions of the age—the French of 1791, the German of 1848 and 1919—but practically all such attempts shut their eyes to the great Destiny in the fact-world and imagine that that is the same as defeating it. In lieu of unforeseen happenings, the incidents of strong personality and imperious circumstances, it is Causality that is to rule—timeless, just, unvarying, rational cohesion of cause and effect. It is symptomatic that no written constitution knows of money as a political force. It is pure theory that they contain, one and all.

This rift in the essence of constitutional monarchy is irremediable. Here actual and conceptual, work and critique, are frontally opposed, and it is their mutual attrition that constitutes what the average educated man calls internal politics. Apart from the cases of Prussia-Germany and Austria—where constitutions did come into existence at first,⁠⁷³² but in the presence of the older political traditions were never very influential—it was only in England that the practice of government kept itself homogeneous. Here, race held its own against principle. Men had more than an inkling that real politics, politics aiming at historical success, is a matter of training and not of shaping. This was no aristocratic prejudice, but a cosmic fact that emerges much more distinctly in the experience of any English racehorse-trainer than in all the philosophical systems in the world. Shaping can refine training, but not replace it. And thus the higher society of England, Eton and Balliol, became training-grounds where politicians were worked up with a consistent sureness the like of which is only to be found in the training of the Prussian officer-corps—trained, that is, as connoisseurs and masters of the underlying pulse of things (not excluding the hidden course of opinions and ideas). Thus prepared, they were able, in the great flood of bourgeois-revolutionary principles that swept over the years after 1832, to preserve and control the being-stream which they directed. They possessed “training,” the suppleness and collectedness of the rider who, with a good horse under him, feels victory coming nearer and nearer. They allowed the great principles to move the mass because they knew well that it is money that is the “wherewithal” by which motion is imparted to these great principles, and they substituted, for the brutal methods of the eighteenth century, methods more refined and not less effective—one of the simpler of these being to threaten their opponents with the cost of a new election. The doctrinaire constitutions of the Continent saw only the one side of the fact democracy. Here, where there was no constitution, but men were in “condition,” it was seen as a whole.

A vague feeling of all this was never quite lost on the Continent. For the absolute State of the Baroque there had been a perfectly clear form, but for “constitutional monarchy” there were only unsteady compromises, and Conservative and Liberal parties were distinguished—not, as in England after Canning, by the possession of different but well-tested modes of government, applied turn-and-turn-about to the actual work of governing—but according to the direction in which they respectively desired to alter the constitution—namely, towards tradition or towards theory. Should the Parliament serve the Dynasty, or vice versa?—that was the bone of contention, and in disputing over it it was forgotten that foreign policy was the final aim. The “Spanish” and the misnamed “English” sides of a constitution would not and could not grow together, and thus it befell that during the nineteenth century the diplomatic service outwards and the Parliamentary activity inwards developed in two divergent directions. Each became in fundamental feeling alien to, and contemptuous of, the other. Life fretted itself to soreness in a form that it had not developed out of itself. After Thermidor, France succumbed to the rule of the Bourse, mitigated from time to time by the setting up of a military dictature (1800, 1851, 1871, 1918). Bismarck’s creation was in fundamentals of a dynastic nature, with a parliamentary component of decidedly subordinate importance, and in it the inner friction was so strong as to monopolize the available political energy, and finally, after 1916, to exhaust the organism itself. The Army had its own history, with a great tradition going back to Frederick William I,⁠⁷³³ and so also had the administration. In them was the source of Socialism as one kind of true political “training,” diametrically opposed to the English⁠⁷³⁴ but, like it, a full expression of strong race-quality. The officer and the official were trained high. But the necessity of breeding up a corresponding political type was not recognized. Higher policy was handled “administratively” and minor policy was hopeless squabbling. And so army and administration finally became aims in themselves, after Bismarck’s disappearance had removed the one man who even without a supply of real politicians to back him (this tradition alone could have produced) was big enough to treat both as tools of policy. When the issue of the World War removed the upper layers, nothing remained but parties educated for opposition only, and these brought the activity of Government down to a level hitherto unknown in any Civilization.

But to-day Parliamentarism is in full decay. It was a continuation of the Bourgeois Revolution by other means, the revolution of the Third Estate of 1789 brought into legal form and joined with its opponent the Dynasty as one governmental unit. Every modern election, in fact, is a civil war carried on by ballot-box and every sort of spoken and written stimulus, and every great party-leader is a sort of Napoleon. In this form, meant to remain infinitely valid, which is peculiar to the Western Culture and would be nonsensical and impossible in any other, we discern once more our characteristic tendency to infinity, historical foresight⁠⁷³⁵ and forethought, and will to order the distant future, in this case according to bourgeois standards of the present.

All the same, Parliamentarism is not a summit as the absolute Polis and the Baroque State were summits, but a brief transition—namely, between the Late-Culture period with its mature forms and the age of great individuals in a formless world. It contains, like the houses and furniture of the first half of the nineteenth century, a residue of good Baroque. The parliamentary habit is English Rococo—but, no longer un-self-conscious and in the blood, but superficial-initiative and at the mercy of goodwill. Only in the brief periods of first enthusiasms has it an appearance of depth and duration, and then only because in the flush of victory respect for one’s newly-won status makes it incumbent to adopt the high manners of the defeated class. To preserve the form, even when it contradicts the advantage, is the convention which makes parliamentarism possible. But when this convention comes to be fully observed, the very fact that it is so means that the essence of parliamentarism has already been evaporated. The Non-Estate falls apart again into its natural interest-groups, and the passion of stubborn and victorious defence is over. And as soon as the form ceases to possess the attractiveness of a young ideal that will summon men to the barricades, unparliamentary methods of attaining an object without (and even in spite of) the ballot-box will make their appearance—such as money, economic pressure, and, above all, the strike. Neither the megalopolitan masses nor the strong individuals have any real respect for this form without depth or past, and when the discovery is made that it is only a form, it has already become a mark and shadow. With the beginning of the twentieth century Parliamentarism (even English) is tending rapidly towards taking up itself the rôle that it once assigned to the kingship. It is becoming an impressive spectacle for the multitude of the Orthodox, while the centre of gravity of big policy, already de jure transferred from the Crown to the people’s representatives, is passing de facto from the latter to unofficial groups and the will of unofficial personages. The World War almost completed this development. There is no way back to the old parliamentarism from the domination of Lloyd George and the Napoleonism of the French militarists. And for America, hitherto lying apart and self-contained, rather a region than a State, the parallelism of President and Congress which she derived from a theory of Montesquieu has, with her entry into world politics, become untenable, and must in times of real danger make way for formless powers such as those with which Mexico and South America have long been familiar.

With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find ourselves to-day. It is the transition from Napoleonism to Cæsarism, a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two centuries and can be shown to exist in all the Cultures. The Chinese call it Shan-Kwo, the “period of the Contending States” (480–230, corresponding to the Classical 300–50).⁠⁷³⁶ At the beginning are reckoned seven great powers, which, first planlessly, but later with clearer and clearer purpose, tend to the inevitable final result of this close succession of vast wars and revolutions. A century later there are still five. In 441 the ruler of the Chóu dynasty became a state-pensioner of the “Eastern Duke,” and the remains of territory that he possessed ceased accordingly to figure in later history. Simultaneously began in the unphilosophical north-west⁠⁷³⁷ the swift rise of the “Roman” state of Tsin, which extended its influence westward and southward over Tibet and Yunnan and enclosed the other states in a great arc. The focus of the opposition was in the kingdom of Tsu in the Taoist south,⁠⁷³⁸ whence the Chinese Civilization pressed slowly outwards into the still little-known lands south of the great river. Here we have in fact the opposition of Rome and the Hellenistic—on the one side, hard, clear will-to-power; on the other, the tendency to dreaming and world-improvement. In 368–320 (corresponding to the Second Punic War) the contest intensified itself into an uninterrupted struggle of the whole Chinese world, fought with mass armies, for which the population was strained to the extreme limit. “The allies, whose lands were ten times as great as those of Tsin, in vain rolled up a million men—Tsin had ever reserves in hand still. From first to last a million men fell,” writes Sze-ma-tsien. Su-tsin, who began by being Chancellor of Tsin, but later became a supporter of the League of Nations (hoh-tsung) idea and went over to the Opposition, worked up two great coalitions (333 and 321), which, however, collapsed from inward disunity at the first battles. His great adversary, the Chancellor Chang-I, resolutely Imperialist, was in 311 on the point of bringing the Chinese world to voluntary subjection when a change of occupancy of the throne caused his combination to miscarry. In 294 began the campaigns of Pe-Ki.⁠⁷³⁹ It was in the prestige of his victories that the King of Tsin took the mystic Emperor-title of the legendary age,⁠⁷⁴⁰ which openly expressed the claim to world-rule, and was at once imitated by the ruler of Tsi in the east.⁠⁷⁴¹ With this began the second maximum phase of the decisive struggles. The number of independent states grew steadily less. In 255 even the home state of Confucius, Lu, vanished, and in 249 the Chóu dynasty came to an end. In 246 the mighty Wang-Cheng became, at the age of thirteen, Emperor of Tsin, and in 241, with the aid of his Chancellor Lui-Shi (the Chinese Mæcenas⁠⁷⁴²), he fought out to victory the last bout that the last opponent, the Empire of Tsu, ventured to challenge. In 221, sole ruler in actual fact, he assumed the title Shi (Augustus). This is the beginning of the Imperial age in China.

No era confronts its mankind so distinctly with the alternative of great form or great individual powers as this “Period of the Contending States.” In the degree in which the nations cease to be politically in “condition,” in that degree possibilities open up for the energetic private person who means to be politically creative, who will have power at any price, and who as a phenomenon of force becomes the Destiny of an entire people or Culture. Events have become unpredictable on the basis of form. Instead of the given tradition that can dispense with genius (because it is itself cosmic force at highest capacity), we have now the accident of great fact-men. The accident of their rise brings a weak people (for example, the Macedonians), to the peak of events overnight, and the accident of their death (for example, Cæsar’s) can immediately plunge a world from personally secured order into chaos.

This indeed had been manifested earlier in critical times of transition. The epoch of the Fronde, the Ming-shu, the First Tyrannis, when men were not in form, but fought about form, has always thrown up a number of great figures who grew too big for definition and limitation in terms of office. The change from Culture to Civilization, with its typical Napoleonism, does so too. But with this, which is the preface to unredeemed historical formlessness, dawns the real day of the great individual. For us this period attained almost to its climax in the World War; in the Classical World it began with Hannibal, who challenged Rome in the name of Hellenism (to which inwardly he belonged), but went under because the Hellenistic East, in true Classical fashion, apprehended the meaning of the hour too late, or not at all. With his downfall began that proud sequence that runs from the Scipios through Æmilius Paullus, Flamininus, the Catos, the Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla to Pompey, Cæsar, and Augustus. In China, correspondingly, during the period of the “Contending States,” a like chain of statesmen and generals centred on Tsin as the Classical figures centred on Rome. In accordance with the complete want of understanding of the political side of Chinese history that prevails, these men are usually described as Sophists.⁠⁷⁴³ They were so, but only in the same sense as leading Romans of the same period were Stoics—that is, as having been educated in the philosophy and rhetoric of the Greek East. All were finished orators and all from time to time wrote on philosophy, Cæsar and Brutus no less than Cato and Cicero, but they did so not as professional philosophers, but because otium cum dignitate was the habit of cultivated gentlemen. In business hours they were masters of fact, whether on battle-field or in high politics, and precisely the same is true of the Chancellors Chang-I and Su-tsin;⁠⁷⁴⁴ the dreaded diplomatist Fan-Sui who overthrew Pe-Ki, the general; Wei-Yang the legislator of Tsin; Lui-Shi, the first Emperor’s Mæcenas, and others.

The Culture had bound up all its forces in strict form. Now they were released, and “Nature”—that is, the cosmic—broke forth immediate. The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations that marks the beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists and ideologues what they like—in the world of facts it means the transition from government in the style and pulse of a strict tradition to the sic volo, sic jubeo of the unbridled personal régime. The maximum of symbolic and super-personal form coincides with that of the Late period of the Culture—in China about 600, in the Classical about 450, for ourselves about 1700. The minimum in the Classical lies in the time of Sulla and Pompey, and for us will be reached (and possibly passed) in the next hundred years. Great interstate and internal conflicts, revolutions of a fearful kind, interpenetrate increasingly, but the questions at issue in all of them without exception are (consciously and frankly or not) questions of unofficial, and eventually purely personal, power. It is historically of no importance what they themselves aimed at theoretically, and we need not know the catchwords under which the Chinese and Arabian revolutions of this stage broke out, nor even whether there were such catchwords. None of the innumerable revolutions of this era—which more and more become blind outbreaks of uprooted megalopolitan masses—has ever attained, or ever had the possibility of attaining, an aim. What stands is only the historical fact of an accelerated demolition of ancient forms that leaves the path clear for Cæsarism.

But the same is true also of the wars, in which the armies and their tactical methods become more and more the creation, not of the epoch, but of uncontrolled individual captains, who in many cases discovered their genius very late and by accident. While in 300 there were Roman armies, in 100 there were the armies of Marius and Sulla and Cæsar; and Octavian’s army, which was composed of Cæsar’s veterans, led its general much more than it was led by him. But with this the methods of war, its means, and its aims assumed raw-natural and ferocious forms,⁠⁷⁴⁵ very different from those prevailing before. Their duels were not eighteenth-century Trianon duels, encounters in knightly forms with fixed rules to determine when a man might declare himself exhausted, what maximum of force might be employed, and what conditions the chivalry permitted a victor to impose. They were ring-battles of infuriated men with fists and teeth, fought to the bodily collapse of one and exploited without reserve or restraint by the victor. The first great example of this “return to Nature” is afforded by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, which, instead of artificial manœuvres with small bodies, practised the mass-onset without regard to losses and thereby shattered to atoms the refined strategy of the Rococo. To bring the whole muscular force of a nation on to the battlefields by the universal-service system was an idea utterly alien to the age of Frederick the Great.⁠⁷⁴⁶

Similarly, in every Culture, the technique of war hesitatingly followed the advance of craftsmanship, until at the beginning of the Civilization it suddenly takes the lead, presses all mechanical possibilities of the time relentlessly into its service, and under pressure of military necessity even opens up new domains hitherto unexploited—but at the same time renders largely ineffectual the personal heroism of the thoroughbred, the ethos of the noble, and the subtle intellect of the Late Culture. In the Classical world, where the Polis made mass-armies essentially impossible—for relatively to the general smallness of Classical forms, tactical included, the numbers of Cannæ, Philippi, and Actium were enormous and exceptional—the second Tyrannis (Dionysius of Syracuse leading) introduced mechanical technique into warfare, and on a large scale.⁠⁷⁴⁷ Then for the first time it became possible to carry out sieges like those of Rhodes (305), Syracuse (213), Carthage (146), and Alesia (52), in which also the increasing importance of rapidity, even for Classical strategy, became evident. It was in line with this tendency that the Roman legion, the characteristic structure of which developed only in the Hellenistic age, worked like a machine as compared with the Athenian and Spartan militias of the fifth century. In China, correspondingly, iron was worked up for cutting and thrusting weapons from 474, light cavalry of the Mongolian model displaced the heavy war-chariot, and fortress warfare suddenly acquired outstanding importance.⁠⁷⁴⁸ The fundamental craving of Civilized mankind for speed, mobility, and mass-effects finally combined, in the world of Europe and America, with the Faustian will to domination over Nature and produced dynamic methods of war that even to Frederick the Great would have seemed like lunacy, but to us of to-day, in close proximity to our technics of transportation and industry, are perfectly natural. Napoleon horsed his artillery and thereby made it highly mobile (just as he broke up the mass army of the Revolution into a system of self-contained and easily moved corps), and already at Wagram and Borodino it had augmented its purely physical effectiveness to the point of what we should call rapid-fire and drum fire.⁠⁷⁴⁹ The second stage is—most significantly—marked by the American Civil War of 1861–5—which even in the numbers of troops it involved far surpassed the order of magnitude of the Napoleonic Wars⁠⁷⁵⁰ and in which for the first time the railway was used for large troop-movements, the telegraph-network for messages, and a steam fleet, keeping the sea for months on end, for blockade, and in which armoured ships, the torpedo, rifled weapons, and monster artillery of extraordinary range were discovered.⁠⁷⁵¹⁠⁷⁵² The third stage is that of the World War, preluded by the Russo-Japanese conflict;⁠⁷⁵³ here submarine and aircraft were set to work, speed of invention became a new arm in itself, and the extent (though most certainly not the intensity) of the means used attained a maximum. But to this expenditure of force there corresponds everywhere the ruthlessness of the decisions. At the very outset of the Chinese Shan-Kwo period we find the utter annihilation of the State of Wu—an act which in the preceding Chun-tsiu period chivalry would have made impossible. Even in the peace of Campo Formio Napoleon outraged the convenances of the eighteenth century, and after Austerlitz he introduced the practice of exploiting military success without regard to any but material restrictions. The last step still possible is being taken in the peace treaty of the Versailles type, which deliberately avoids finality and settlement, and keeps open the possibility of setting up new conditions at every change in the situation. The same evolution is seen in the chain of the three Punic Wars. The idea of wiping out one of the leading great powers of the world—which eventually became familiar to everyone through Cato’s deliberately dry insistence on his “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam”—never crossed the mind of the victor of Zama and, for all the wild war-ethics of the Classical Poleis, it would have seemed to Lysander, as he stood victorious in Athens, an impiety towards every god.

The Period of the Contending States begins for the Classical world with the battle of Ipsus (301) which established the trinity of Eastern great powers, and the Roman victory over the Etruscans and Samnites at Sentinum (295), which created a mid-Italian great power by the side of Carthage. Then, however, the characteristic Classical preference for things near and in the present resulted in eyes’ being shut while Rome won, first the Italian south in the Pyrrhic adventure, then the sea in the first Punic War, and then the Celtic north through C. Flaminius. The significance even of Hannibal (probably the only man of his time who clearly saw the trend of events) was ignored by all, the Romans themselves not excepted. It was at Zama, and not merely later at Magnesia and Pydna, that the Hellenistic Eastern powers were defeated. All in vain the great Scipio, truly anxious in the presence of the destiny to which a Polis overloaded with the tasks of a world-dominion was marching, sought thereafter to avoid all conquest. In vain his entourage forced through the Macedonian War, against the will of every party, merely in order that the East could thenceforth be ignored as harmless. Imperialism is so necessary a product of any Civilization that when a people refuses to assume the rôle of master, it is seized and pushed into it. The Roman Empire was not conquered—the “orbis terrarum” condensed itself into that form and forced the Romans to give it their name. It is all very Classical. While the Chinese states defended even the mere remnants of their independence with the last bitterness, Rome after 146 only took upon herself to transform the Eastern land-masses into provinces because there was no other resource against anarchy left. And even this much resulted in the inward form of Rome—the last which had remained upright—melting in the Gracchan disorders. And (what is unparalleled elsewhere) it was not between states that the final rounds of the battle for Imperium were fought, but between the parties of a city—the form of the Polis allowed of no other outcome. Of old it had been Sparta versus Athens, now it was Optimate versus Popular Party. In the Gracchan revolution, which was already (134) heralded by a first Servile War, the younger Scipio was secretly murdered and C. Gracchus openly slain—the first who as Princeps and the first who as Tribune were political centres in themselves amidst a world become formless. When, in 104, the urban masses of Rome for the first time lawlessly and tumultuously invested a private person, Marius, with Imperium, the deeper importance of the drama then enacted is comparable with that of the assumption of the mythic Emperor-title by the ruler of Tsin in 288. The inevitable product of the age, Cæsarism, suddenly outlines itself on the horizon.

The heir of the Tribune was Marius, who like him linked mob and high finance and in 87 murdered off the old aristocracy in masses. The heir of the Princeps was Sulla, who in 82 annihilated the class of the great merchants by his proscriptions. Thereafter the final decisions press on rapidly, as in China after the emergence of Wang Cheng. Pompey the Princeps and Cæsar the Tribune—tribune not in office, but in attitude—were still party-leaders, but nevertheless, already at Lucca, they were arranging with Crassus and each other for the first partition of the world amongst themselves. When the heirs of Cæsar fought his murderers at Philippi, both had ceased to be more than groups. By Actium the issue was between individuals, and Cæsarism will out, even in such a process as this.

In the corresponding evolution within the Arabian world it is, of course, the Magian Consensus that takes the place of the bodily Polis as the basic form in and through which the facts accomplish themselves; and this form, as we have seen, excluded any separation of political and religious tendencies to such an extent that even the urban bourgeois urge towards freedom (marking, here as elsewhere, the beginning of the Period of Contending States) presents itself in orthodox disguise, and so has hitherto almost escaped notice.⁠⁷⁵⁴ It appeared as a will to break loose from the Caliphate, which the Sassanids, and Diocletian following them, had created in the forms of the feudal state. From the times of Justinian and Chosroës Nushirvan this had had to meet the onset of Frondeurs—led by the heads of the Greek and Mazdaist Churches, the nobility, both Persian-Mazdaist (above all Irak) and Greek (particularly the Asiatic), and the high chivalry of Armenia, which was divided into two parts by the difference of religion. The absolutism almost attained in the seventh century was then suddenly destroyed by the attack of Islam. In its political beginnings Islam was strictly aristocratic; the handful of Arabian families⁠⁷⁵⁵ who everywhere kept the leading in their hands, very soon formed in the conquered territories a new higher nobility of strong breed and immense self-sufficingness which thrust the dynasty down to the same level as its English “contemporaries” thrust theirs. The Civil War between Othman and Ali (656–661) was the expression of a true Fronde, and its movements were all in the interests of two clans and their respective adherents. The Islamic Whigs and Tories of the eighth century, like the English of the eighteenth, alone practised high politics, and their coteries and family quarrels are more important to the history of the time than any events in the reigning house of the Ommaiyads (661–750).

But with the fall of the gay and enlightened dynasty that has resided in Damascus—that is, West-Aramæan and Monophysite Syria—the natural centre of gravity of the Arabian Culture reappeared; it was the East-Aramæan region. Once the basis of Sassanid and now of Abbassid power, but always—irrespective of whether its shaping was Persian or Arabian, or its religion Mazdaist, Nestorian, or Islamic—it expressed one and the same grand line of development and was the exemplar for Syria as for Byzantium alike. From Kufa the movement started which led to the downfall of the Ommaiyads and their ancien régime, and the character of this movement—of which the whole extent has never to this day been observed—was that of a social revolution directed against the primary orders of society and the aristocratic tradition.⁠⁷⁵⁶ It began among the Mavali, the small bourgeoisie in the East, and directed itself with bitter hostility against the Arabs, not qua champions of Islam but qua new nobility. The recently converted Mavali, almost all former Mazdaists, took Islam more seriously than the Arabs themselves, who represented also a class-ideal. Even in the army of Ali the wholly democratic and Puritan Qaraites had split off,⁠⁷⁵⁷ and in their ranks we see for the first time the combination of fanatic sectarianism and Jacobinism. Here and now there emerged not only the Shiite tendency, but also the first impulses towards the Communistic Karramiyya movement, which can be traced to Mazdak⁠⁷⁵⁸ and later produced the vast outbreaks under Babek. The Abbassids were anything but favourites with the insurgents of Kufa, and it was only owing to their great diplomatic skill that they were first allowed a footing as officers and then—almost like Napoleon—were able to enter into the heritage of a Revolution that had spread over the whole East. After their victory they built Baghdad—a resurrected Ctesiphon, symbol of the downfall of feudal Arabism—and this first world-city of the new Civilization became from 800 to 1050 the theatre of the events which led from Napoleonism to Cæsarism, from the Caliphate to the Sultanate, which, in Baghdad no less than in Byzantium, is the Magian type of power without form—here also the only kind of power still possible.

We have to recognize quite clearly, then, that in the Arabian world as elsewhere democracy was a class-ideal—the outlook of townsmen and the expression of their will to be free from the old linkages with land, be it a desert or plough-land. The “no” which answered the Caliph-tradition could disguise itself in very numerous forms, and neither free-thought nor constitutionalism in our sense was necessary to it. Magian mind and Magian money are “free” in quite a different way. The Byzantine monkhood was liberal to the point of turbulence, not only against court and nobility, but also against the higher ecclesiastical powers, which had developed a hierarchy (corresponding to the Gothic) even before the Council of Nicæa. The consensus of the Faithful, the “people” in the most daring sense, was looked upon as willed by God (“Nature,” Rousseau would have said), as equal and free from all powers of the blood. The celebrated scene in which the Abbot Theodore of Studion adjured the Emperor Leo V to obey (813) is a Storming of the Bastille in Magian forms.⁠⁷⁵⁹ Not long afterwards there began the revolt of the Paulicians, very pious and in social matters wholly radical,⁠⁷⁶⁰ who set up a state of their own beyond the Taurus, ravaged all Asia Minor, defeated one Imperial levy after another, and were not subjugated till 874. This corresponds in every way to the communistic-religious movement of the Karramiyya, which extended from the Tigris to Merv and whose leader Babek succumbed only after a twenty years’ struggle (817–837);⁠⁷⁶¹ and the other like outbreak of the Carmathians⁠⁷⁶² in the West (890–904), whose liaisons reached from Arabia into all the Syrian cities and who propagated rebellion as far as the Persian coast. But, besides these, there were still other disguises of the political party-battle. When now we are told that the Byzantine army was Iconoclast and that the military party was consequently opposed by an Iconodule monkish party, we begin to see the passions of the century of the image-controversy (740–840) in quite a new light, and to understand that the end of the crisis (843)—the final defeat of the Iconoclasts and simultaneously of the free-church monkish policy—signifies a Restoration in the 1815 sense of the word.⁠⁷⁶³ And, lastly, this period is the time of the fearful slave-rebellion in Irak—the kernel of the Abbassids’ realm—which throws sudden light upon a series of other social upheavals. Ali, the Spartacus of Islam, founded in 869, south of Baghdad, a veritable Negro state out of the masses of runaways, built himself a capital, Muktara, and extended his power far in the directions of Arabia and Persia alike, where he gained the support of whole tribes. In 871 Basra, the first great port of the Islamic world, inhabited by nearly a million souls, was taken, deluged in massacre, and burnt. Not till 883 was this slave-state destroyed.

Thus slowly the Sassanid-Byzantine forms were hollowed out, and in the place of the ancient traditions of the higher officialdom and nobility there arose the inconsequent and wholly personal power of incidental geniuses—the Sultanate. For this is the specifically Arabian form, and it appears simultaneously in Byzantium and Baghdad and takes its steady course from the Napoleonic beginnings about 800 to the completed Cæsarism of the Seljuk Turks about 1050. This form is purely Magian, belongs only to that Culture, and is incomprehensible without the most fundamental axioms of its soul. The Caliphate, a synthesis of political (not to say cosmic) beat and style, was not abolished—for the Caliph as the representative of God recognized by the Consensus of the elect is sacred—but he was deprived of all powers that Cæsarism needed to possess, just as Pompey and Augustus in fact, and Sulla and Cæsar in fact and in name, abstracted these powers from the old constitutional forms of Rome. In the end there remained to the Caliph about as much power as the Senate and the Comitias had under Tiberius. The whole richness of being in high form—in law, costume, ethic—that had once been a symbol, was now mere trappings covering a formless and purely factual régime.

So we find by the side of Michael III (842–867) Bardas, and by Constantine VII (912–959) Romanos—the latter even formally Co-Emperor.⁠⁷⁶⁴ In 867 the ex-groom Basileios, a Napoleonic figure, overthrew Bardas and founded the sword-dynasty of the Armenians (to 1081), in which generals instead of Emperors mostly ruled—force-men like Romanos, Nicephorus, and Bardas Phocas. The greatest amongst them was John Tzimisces (969–976) in Armenian Kiur Zan. In Baghdad it was the Turks who played the Armenian rôle; in 842 the Caliph Vathek invested one of their leaders for the first time with the title of Sultan. From 862 the Turkish prætorians held the ruler in tutelage, and in 945 Achmed, the founder of the Sultan-dynasty of the Buyids, formally restricted the Abbassid Caliph to his religious dignities. And then there set in, in both the world-cities, an unrestrained competition between the mighty provincial families for possession of the supreme power. In the case of the Christian we find, indeed, Basileios II and others challenging the great latifundia lords, but this does not in the least mean social purposes in the legislator. It was an act of self-defence on the part of the momentary potentate against possible heirs, and closely analogous, therefore, to the proscriptions of Sulla and the Triumvirs. Half Asia Minor belonged to the Dukas, Phocas, and Skleros connexions; the Chancellor Basileios, who could keep an army on pay out of his own fabulous resources, has long ago been compared with Crassus.⁠⁷⁶⁵ But the imperial age proper begins only with the Seljuk Turks.⁠⁷⁶⁶ Their leader Togrulbek won Irak in 1043 and Armenia in 1049, and in 1055 forced the Caliph to grant him the hereditary Sultanate. His son Alp Arslan conquered Syria and, by the victory of Manzikert, gained eastern Asia Minor. The remnant of the Byzantine Empire thenceforward possessed no importance to, or influence on, the further destinies of the Turkish Islamic Imperium.

This is the phase, too, which in Egypt is concealed under the name of the “Hyksos.” Between the XIIth and the XVIIIth Dynasties lay two centuries,⁠⁷⁶⁷ which began with the collapse of the ancien régime which had culminated with Sesostris III,⁠⁷⁶⁸ and ended with the beginning of the New Empire. The numbering of the dynasties itself suffices to disclose something catastrophic. In the lists of kings the names appear successive or parallel, usurpers of obscurest origin, generals, people with strange titles, often reigning only a few days. With the very first king of the XIIIth Dynasty the high-Nile records at Semne break off, and with his successor the archives at Kahun come to an end. It is the time out of which the Leiden Papyrus portrays the great social revolution.⁠⁷⁶⁹ The fall of the Government and the victory of the mass is followed by outbreaks of the army and the rise of ambitious soldiers. In Egypt from about 1680 appears the name of the “Hyksos,”⁠⁷⁷⁰ a designation with which the historians of the New Empire, who no longer understood or wished to understand the meaning of the epoch, covered up the shame of these years. These Hyksos, there can be no doubt whatever, played the part that the Armenians played in Byzantium; and in the Classical world too, the destinies of the Cimbri and Teutones, would have gone the same way had they defeated Marius and his legions of city canaille; they would have filled the armies of the Triumvirs again and again, and in the end probably set up barbarian chieftains in their place—for the case of Jugurtha shows the lengths to which foreigners dared to go with the Rome of those days. The provenance or constitution of the intruders does not matter—they might be body-guards, insurgent slaves, Jacobins, or purely alien tribes. What does matter is what they were for the Egyptian world in that century of theirs. In the end they set up a state in the Western Delta and built a capital, Auaris, for it.⁠⁷⁷¹ One of their leaders, Khyan by name, who styled himself, not Pharaoh, but “Embracer of the Country” and “prince of the young men” (names as essentially revolutionary as the Consul sine collega or dictator prepetuus of Cæsar’s time) a man probably of the stamp of John Tzimisces, ruled over all Egypt and spread his renown as far as Crete and the Euphrates. But after him began a fight of all the districts for the Imperium, and out of that fight Amasis and the Theban dynasty eventually emerged victorious.

For us this time of Contending States began with Napoleon and his violent-arbitrary government by order. His head was the first in our world to make effective the notion of a military and at the same time popular world-domination—something altogether different from the Empire of Charles V and even the British Colonial Empire of his own day. If the nineteenth century has been relatively poor in great wars—and revolutions—and has overcome its worst crises diplomatically by means of congresses, this has been due precisely to the continuous and terrific war-preparedness which has made disputants, fearful at the eleventh hour of the consequences, postpone the definitive decision again and again, and led to the substitution of chess-moves for war. For this is the century of gigantic permanent armies and universal compulsory service. We ourselves are too near to it to see it under this terrifying aspect. In all world-history there is no parallel. Ever since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and latterly millions, of men have stood ready to march, and mighty fleets renewed every ten years have filled the harbours. It is a war without war, a war of overbidding in equipment and preparedness, a war of figures and tempo and technics, and the diplomatic dealings have been not of court with court, but of headquarters with headquarters. The longer the discharge was delayed, the more huge became the means and the more intolerable the tension. This is the Faustian, the dynamic, form of “the Contending States” during the first century of that period, but it ended with the explosion of the World War. For the demand of these four years has been altogether too much for the principle of universal service—child of the French Revolution, revolutionary through and through, as it is in this form—and for all tactical methods evolved from it.⁠⁷⁷² The place of the permanent armies as we know them will gradually be taken by professional forces of volunteer war-keen soldiers; and from millions we shall revert to hundreds of thousands. But ipso facto this second century will be one of actually Contending States. These armies are not substitutes for war—they are for war, and they want war. Within two generations it will be they whose will prevails over that of all the comfortables put together. In these wars of theirs for the heritage of the whole world, continents will be staked, India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counterplayed. The great cosmopolitan foci of power will dispose at their pleasure of smaller states—their territory, their economy and their men alike—all that is now merely province, passive object, means to end, and its destinies are without importance to the great march of things. We ourselves, in a very few years, have learned to take little or no notice of events that before the War would have horrified the world; who to-day seriously thinks about the millions that perish in Russia?

Again and again between these catastrophes of blood and terror the cry rises up for reconciliation of the peoples and for peace on earth. It is but the background and the echo of the grand happening, but, as such, so necessary that we have to assume its existence even if, as in Hyksos Egypt, in Baghdad and Byzantium, no tradition tells of it. Esteem as we may the wish towards all this, we must have the courage to face facts as they are—that is the hall-mark of men of race-quality and it is by the being of these men that alone history is. Life if it would be great, is hard; it lets choose only between victory and ruin, not between war and peace, and to the victory belong the sacrifices of victory. For that which shuffles querulously and jealously by the side of the events is only literature,—written or thought or lived literature—mere truths that lose themselves in the moving crush of facts. History has never deigned to take notice of these propositions. In the Chinese world Hiang-Sui tried, as early as 535, to found a peace league. In the period of the Contending States, imperialism (Lien-heng) was opposed by the League of Nations idea 430(Hoh-tsung),⁠⁷⁷³ particularly in the southern regions, but it was foredoomed like every half-measure that steps into the path of a whole, and it had vanished even before the victory of the North. But both tendencies alike rejected the political taste of the Taoists, who, in those fearful centuries, elected for intellectual self-disarmament, thereby reducing themselves to the level of mere material to be used up by others and for others in the grand decisions. Even Roman politics—deliberately improvident as the Classical spirit was in all other respects—at least made one attempt to bring the whole world into one system of equal co-ordinated forces which should do away with all necessity for further wars—that is, when at the fall of Hannibal Rome forwent the chance of incorporating the East. But reluctance was useless; the party of the younger Scipio went over to frank Imperialism in order to make an end of chaos, although its clear-sighted leader foresaw therein the doom of his city, which possessed (and in a high degree) the native Classical incapacity for organizing anything whatever. The way from Alexander to Cæsar is unambiguous and unavoidable, and the strongest nation of any and every Culture, consciously or unconsciously, willing or unwilling, has had to tread it.

From the rigour of these facts there is no refuge. The Hague Conference of 1907 was the prelude of the World War; the Washington Conference of 1921 will have been that of other wars. The history of these times is no longer an intellectual match of wits in elegant forms for pluses and minuses, from which either side can withdraw when it pleases. The alternatives now are to stand fast or to go under—there is no middle course. The only moral that the logic of things permits to us now is that of the climber on the face of the crag—a moment’s weakness and all is over. To-day all “philosophy” is nothing but an inward abdication and resignation, or a craven hope of escaping realities by means of mysticisms. It was just the same in Roman times. Tacitus tells us⁠⁷⁷⁴ how the famous Musonius Rufus tried, by exhortations on the blessings of peace and the evils of war, to influence the legions that in 70 stood before the gates of Rome, and barely escaped alive from their blows. The military commander Avidius Cassius called the Emperor Marcus Aurelius a “philosophical old woman.”

In these conditions so much of old and great traditions as remains, so much of historical “fitness” and experience as has got into the blood of the twentieth-century nations, acquires an unequalled potency. For us creative piety, or (to use a more fundamental term) the pulse that has come down to us from first origins, adheres only to forms that are older than the Revolution and Napoleon,⁠⁷⁷⁵ forms which grew and were not made. Every remnant of them, however tiny, that has kept itself alive in the being of any self-contained minority whatever will before long rise to incalculable values and bring about historical effects which no one yet imagines to be possible. The traditions of an old monarchy, of an old aristocracy, of an old polite society, in so much as they are still healthy enough to keep clear of professional or professorial politics, in so far as they possess honour, abnegation, discipline, the genuine sense of a great mission (race-quality, that is, and training), sense of duty and sacrifice—can become a centre which holds together the being-stream of an entire people and enables it to outlast this time and make its landfall in the future. To be “in condition” is everything. It falls to us to live in the most trying times known to the history of a great Culture. The last race to keep its form, the last living tradition, the last leaders who have both at their back, will pass through and onward, victors.

By the term “Cæsarism” I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that Augustus in Rome, and Hwang-ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead,⁠⁷⁷⁶ and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised by the Cæsar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place. It is the récidive of a form-fulfilled world into primitivism, into the cosmic-historyless. Biological stretches of time once more take the place vacated by historical periods.⁠⁷⁷⁷

At the beginning, where the Civilization is developing to full bloom (to-day), there stands the miracle of the Cosmopolis, the great petrifact, a symbol of the formless—vast, splendid, spreading in insolence. It draws within itself the being-streams of the now impotent countryside, human masses that are wafted as dunes from one to another or flow like loose sand into the chinks of the stone. Here money and intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs. It is the most artificial, the cleverest phenomenon manifested in the light-world of human eyes—uncanny, “too good to be true,” standing already almost beyond the possibilities of cosmic formation.

Presently, however, the idea-less facts come forward again, naked and gigantic. The eternal-cosmic pulse has finally overcome the intellectual tensions of a few centuries. In the form of democracy, money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost its preserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming—the Cæsar-men. Before them the money collapses. The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race” springs forth, pure and irresistible—the strongest win and the residue is their spoil. They seize the management of the world, and the realm of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory. From now on, new destinies in the style of the pre-Culture time are possible afresh, and visible to the consciousness without cloaks of causality. There is no inward difference more between the lives of Septimius Severus and Gallienus and those of Alaric and Odoacer. Rameses, Trajan, Wu-ti belong together in a uniform up-and-down of historyless time-stretches.⁠⁷⁷⁸

Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. A hundred years more, and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies. Already by Cæsar’s time reputable people had almost ceased to take part in the elections.⁠⁷⁷⁹ It embittered the life of the great Tiberius that the most capable men of his time held aloof from politics, and Nero could not even by threats compel the Equites to come to Rome in order to exercise their rights. This is the end of the great politics. The conflict of intelligences that had served as substitute for war must give place to war itself in its most primitive form.

It is, therefore, a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the period to presume, as Mommsen did,⁠⁷⁸⁰ a deep design of subdivision in the “dyarchy” fashioned by Augustus, with its partition of powers between Princeps and Senate. A century earlier this constitution would have been a real thing, but that would in itself suffice to make it impossible for such an idea to have entered the heads of the present force-men. Now it meant nothing but the attempt of a weak personality to deceive itself as to inexorable facts by mantling them in empty forms. Cæsar saw things as they were and was guided in the exercise of his rulership by definite and unsentimental practical considerations. The legislation of his last months was concerned wholly with transitional provisions, none of which were intended to be permanent. This precisely is what has generally been overlooked. He was far too deep a judge of things to anticipate development or to settle its definitive forms at this moment, with the Parthian War impending. But Augustus, like Pompey before him, was not the master of his following, but thoroughly dependent upon it and its views of things. The form of the Principate was not at all his discovery, but the doctrinaire execution of an obsolete party-ideal that Cicero—another weakling—had formulated.⁠⁷⁸¹ When, on the 13th January 27, Augustus gave back the state-power to the “Senate and People” of Rome—a scene all the more meaningless because of its sincerity—he kept the Tribunate for himself. In fact, this was the one element of the polity that could manifest itself in actuality. The Tribune was the legitimate successor of the Tyrant,⁠⁷⁸² and as long ago as 122 B.C. Caius Gracchus had put into the title a connotation limited no longer by the legal bounds of the office, but only by the personal talents of the incumbent. From him it is a direct line through Marius and Cæsar to the young Nero, who set himself to defeat the political purposes of his mother Agrippina. The Princeps,⁠⁷⁸³ on the other hand, was thenceforth only a costume, a rank—very likely a fact in society, certainly not a fact in politics. And this, precisely, was the conception invested with light and glamour by the theory of Cicero, and already—and by him of all people—associated with the Divus-idea.⁠⁷⁸⁴ The “co-operation” of the Senate and People, on the contrary, was an antiquated ceremonial, with about as much life in it as the rites of the Fratres Arvales—also restored by Augustus. The great parties of the Gracchan age had long become retinues—Cæsarians and Pompeians—and finally there only remained on the one side the formless omnipotence, the plain brutal “fact,” the Cæsar—or whoever managed to get the Cæsar under his influence—and on the other side the handful of narrow ideologues who concealed dissatisfaction under philosophy and thenceforward sought to advance their ideals by conspiracy. What these Stoics were in Rome, the Confucians were in China—and, seen thus, the episode of the “Burning of the Books,” decreed by the Chinese Augustus in 212, begins to be intelligible through the reproach of immense vandalism that the minds of later literates fastened upon it. But, after all, these Stoic enthusiasts for an ideal that had become impossible had killed Cæsar:⁠⁷⁸⁵ to the Divus-cult they opposed a Cato- and Brutus-cult; the philosophers in the Senate (which by then was only a noble club) never wearied of lamenting the downfall of “freedom” and fomenting conspiracies such as Piso’s in 65. Had this been the state of things at Nero’s death, it would have been Sulla over again; and that is why Nero put to death the Stoic Thrasea Pætus, why Vespasian executed Helvidius Priscus, and why copies of the history of Cremutius Cordus, which lauded Brutus as the last of the Romans, were collected and burnt in Rome. These were acts of defensive State necessity vis-à-vis blind ideology—acts such as those we know of Cromwell and Robespierre—and it was in exactly the same position that the Chinese Cæsars found themselves vis-à-vis the school of Confucius, which had formerly worked out their ideal of a state-constitution and now had no notion of enduring the actuality. This great Burning of the Books was nothing but the destruction of one part of the politico-philosophical literature and the abolition of propaganda and secret organizations.⁠⁷⁸⁶ This defensive lasted in both Imperia for a century, and then even reminiscences of party-political passions faded out and the two philosophies became the ruling world-outlook of the Imperial age in its maturity.⁠⁷⁸⁷ But the world was now the theatre of tragic family-histories into which state-histories were dissolved; the Julian-Claudian house destroyed Roman history, and the house of Shi-hwang-ti (even from 206 B.C.) destroyed Chinese, and we darkly discern something of the same kind in the destinies of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut and her brothers (1501–1447). It is the last step to the definitive. With world-peace—the peace of high policies—the “sword side”⁠⁷⁸⁸ of being retreats and the “spindle side” rules again; henceforth there are only private histories, private destinies, private ambitions, from top to bottom, from the miserable troubles of fellaheen to the dreary feuds of Cæsars for the private possession of the world. The wars of the age of world-peace are private wars, more fearful than any State wars because they are formless.

For world-peace—which has often existed in fact—involves the private renunciation of war on the part of the immense majority, but along with this it involves an unavowed readiness to submit to being the booty of others who do not renounce it. It begins with the State-destroying wish for universal reconciliation, and it ends in nobody’s moving a finger so long as misfortune only touches his neighbour. Already under Marcus Aurelius each city and each land-patch was thinking of itself, and the activities of the ruler were his private affair as other men’s were theirs. The remoter peoples were as indifferent to him and his troops and his aims as they were to the projects of Germanic war-bands. On this spiritual premiss a second Vikingism develops. The state of being “in form” passes from nations to bands and retinues of adventurers, self-styled Cæsars, seceding generals, barbarian kings, and what not—in whose eyes the population becomes in the end merely a part of the landscape. There is a deep relation between the heroes of the Mycenæan primitive age and the soldier-emperors of Rome, and between, say, Menes and Rameses II. In our Germanic world the spirits of Alaric and Theodoric will come again—there is a first hint of them in Cecil Rhodes—and the alien executioners of the Russian preface, from Jenghiz Khan to Trotski (with the episode of Petrine Tsarism between them) are, when all is said and done, very little different from most of the pretenders of the Latin-American republics, whose private struggles have long since put an end to the form-rich age of the Spanish Baroque.

With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the “eternal” peasant⁠⁷⁸⁹ reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth—a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are trampled on in the conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts for ever.⁠⁷⁹⁰ There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual—and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it—but it is there.