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Table of Contents | |
Section | Page |
Start of eBook | 1 |
I. | 1 |
II. | 1 |
III. | 2 |
AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEAS. | 4 |
I. | 4 |
II. | 20 |
III. | 39 |
INDEX. | 62 |
Quebec, Wolfe’s victory at | 64 |
THE END. | 65 |
THE TOWN-MEETING.
Differences in outward aspect between a village in England and a village in Massachusetts. Life in a typical New England mountain village. Tenure of land, domestic service, absence of poverty and crime, universality of labour and of culture, freedom of thought, complete democracy. This state of things is to some extent passing away. Remarkable characteristics of the Puritan settlers of New England, and extent to which their characters and aims have influenced American history. Town governments in New England. Different meanings of the word “city” in England and America. Importance of local self-government in the political life of the United States. Origin of the town-meeting. Mr. Freeman on the cantonal assemblies of Switzerland. The old Teutonic “mark,” or dwelling-place of a clan. Political union originally based, not on territorial contiguity, but on blood-relationship. Divisions of the mark. Origin of the village Common. The mark-mote. Village communities in Russia and Hindustan. Difference between the despotism of Russia and that of France under the Old Regime. Elements of sound political life fostered by the Russian village. Traces of the mark in England. Feudalization of Europe, and partial metamorphosis of the mark or township into the manor. Parallel transformation of the township, in some of its features, into the parish. The court leet and the vestry-meeting. The New England town-meeting a revival of the ancient mark-mote.
Vicissitudes of local self-government in the various portions of the Aryan world illustrated in the contrasted cases of France and England. Significant contrast between the aristocracy of England and that of the Continent. Difference between the Teutonic conquests of Gaul and of Britain. Growth of centralization in France. Why the English have always been more successful than the French in founding colonies. Struggle between France and England for the possession of North America, and prodigious significance of the victory of England.
THE FEDERAL UNION.
Wonderful greatness of ancient Athens. Causes of the political failure of Greek civilization. Early stages of political aggregation,—the hundred, the [Greek: phratria], the curia; the shire, the deme, and the pagus. Aggregation of clans into tribes. Differences in the mode of aggregation in Greece and Rome on the one hand, and in Teutonic countries on the other. The Ancient City. Origin of cities in Hindustan, Germany, England, and the United States. Religious character of the ancient city. Burghership not granted to strangers. Consequences of the political difference between the Graeco-Roman city and the Teutonic shire. The folk-mote, or primary assembly, and the witenagemote,
“MANIFEST DESTINY.”
The Americans boast of the bigness of their country. How to “bound” the United States. “Manifest Destiny” of the “Anglo-Saxon Race.” The term “Anglo-Saxon” slovenly and misleading. Statements relating to the “English Race” have a common interest for Americans and for Englishmen. Work of the English race in the world. The prime feature of civilization is the diminution of warfare, which becomes possible only through the formation of great political aggregates in which the parts retain their local and individual freedom. In the earlier stages of civilization, the possibility of peace can be guaranteed only through war, but the preponderant military strength is gradually concentrated in the hands of the most pacific communities, and by the continuance of this process the permanent
THE TOWN-MEETING.
The traveller from the Old World, who has a few weeks at his disposal for a visit to the United States, usually passes straight from one to another of our principal cities, such as Boston, New York, Washington, or Chicago, stopping for a day or two perhaps at Niagara Falls,—or, perhaps, after traversing a distance like that which separates England from Mesopotamia, reaches the vast table-lands of the Far West and inspects their interesting fauna of antelopes and buffaloes, red Indians and Mormons. In a journey of this sort one gets a very superficial view of the peculiarities, physical and social, which characterize the different portions of our country; and in this there is nothing to complain of, since the knowledge gained in a vacation-journey cannot well be expected to be thorough or profound. The traveller, however, who should visit the United States in a more leisurely way, with the purpose of increasing his knowledge of history and politics, would find it well to proceed somewhat differently. He would find himself richly repaid for a sojourn in some insignificant place the very name of which is unknown beyond sea,—just as Mr. Mackenzie Wallace—whose book on Russia is a model of what such books should be—got so much invaluable experience from his months of voluntary exile at Ivanofka in the province of Novgorod. Out of the innumerable places which one might visit in America, there are none which would better reward such careful observation, or which are more full of interest for the comparative historian, than the rural towns and mountain villages of New England; that part of English America which is oldest in civilization (though not in actual date of settlement), and which, while most completely English in blood and in traditions, is at the same time most completely American in so far as it has most distinctly illustrated and most successfully represented those political ideas which have given to American history its chief significance in the general work of civilization.
The United States are not unfrequently spoken of as a “new country,” in terms which would be appropriate if applied to Australia or New Zealand, and which are not inappropriate as applied to the vast region west of the Mississippi River, where the white man had hardly set foot before the beginning of the present century. New England, however, has a history which carries us back to the times of James I.; and while its cities are full of such bustling modern life as one sees in Liverpool or Manchester or Glasgow, its rural towns show us much that is old-fashioned in aspect,—much that one can approach in an antiquarian spirit. We are there introduced to a phase of social life which is highly interesting on its own account and which has played an important part in the world, yet which, if not actually passing
In the outward aspect of a village in Massachusetts or Connecticut, the feature which would be most likely first to impress itself upon the mind of a visitor from England is the manner in which the village is laid out and built. Neither in England nor anywhere else in western Europe have I ever met with a village of the New England type. In English villages one finds small houses closely crowded together, sometimes in blocks of ten or a dozen, and inhabited by people belonging to the lower orders of society; while the fine houses of gentlemen stand quite apart in the country, perhaps out of sight of one another, and surrounded by very extensive grounds. The origin of the village, in a mere aggregation of tenants of the lord of the manor, is thus vividly suggested. In France one is still more impressed, I think, with this closely packed structure of the village. In the New England village, on the other hand, the finer and the poorer houses stand side by side along the road. There are wide straight streets overarched with spreading elms and maples, and on either side stand the houses, with little green lawns in front, called in rustic parlance “door-yards.” The finer houses may stand a thousand feet apart from their neighbours on either side, while between the poorer ones there may be intervals of from twenty to one hundred feet, but they are never found crowded together in blocks. Built in this capacious fashion, a village of a thousand inhabitants may have a main street more than a mile in length, with half a dozen crossing streets losing themselves gradually in long stretches of country road. The finest houses are not ducal palaces, but may be compared with the ordinary country-houses of gentlemen in England. The poorest houses are never hovels, such as one sees in the Scotch Highlands. The picturesque and cosy cottage at Shottery, where Shakespeare used to do his courting, will serve very well as a sample of the humblest sort of old-fashioned New England farm-house. But most of the dwellings in the village come between these extremes. They are plain neat wooden houses, in capaciousness more like villas than cottages. A New England village street, laid out in this way, is usually very picturesque and beautiful, and it is highly characteristic. In comparing it with things in Europe, where one rarely finds anything
Now this generous way in which a New England village is built is very closely associated with the historical origin of the village and with the peculiar kind of political and social life by which it is characterized. First of all, it implies abundance of land. As a rule the head of each family owns the house in which he lives and the ground on which it is built. The relation of landlord and tenant, though not unknown, is not commonly met with. No sort of social distinction or political privilege is associated with the ownership of land; and the legal differences between real and personal property, especially as regards ease of transfer, have been reduced to the smallest minimum that practical convenience will allow. Each householder, therefore, though an absolute proprietor, cannot be called a miniature lord of the manor, because there exists no permanent dependent class such as is implied in the use of such a phrase. Each larger proprietor attends in person to the cultivation of his own land, assisted perhaps by his own sons or by neighbours working for hire in the leisure left over from the care of their own smaller estates. So in the interior of the house there is usually no domestic service that is not performed by the mother of the family and the daughters. Yet in spite of this universality of manual labour, the people are as far as possible from presenting the appearance of peasants. Poor or shabbily-dressed people are rarely seen, and there is no one in the village whom it would be proper to address in a patronizing tone, or who would not consider it a gross insult to be offered a shilling. As with poverty, so with dram-drinking and with crime; all alike are conspicuous by their absence. In a village of one thousand inhabitants there will be a poor-house where five or six decrepit old people
A state of society so completely democratic as that here described has not often been found in connection with a very high and complex civilization. In contemplating these old mountain villages of New England, one descries slow modifications in the structure of society which threaten somewhat to lessen its dignity. The immense productiveness of the soil in our western states, combined with cheapness of transportation, tends to affect seriously the agricultural interests of New England as well as those of our mother-country. There is a visible tendency for farms to pass into the hands of proprietors of an inferior type to that of the former owners,—men who are content with a lower standard of comfort and culture; while the sons of the old farmers go off to the universities to prepare for a professional career, and the daughters marry merchants or lawyers in the cities. The mountain-streams of New England, too, afford so much water-power as to bring in ugly factories to disfigure the beautiful ravines, and to introduce into the community a class of people very different from the landholding descendants of the Puritans. When once a factory is established near a village, one no longer feels free to sleep with doors unbolted.
It will be long, however, I trust, before the simple, earnest and independent type of character that has been nurtured on the Blue Hills of Massachusetts and the White Hills of New Hampshire shall cease to operate like a powerful leaven upon the whole of American society. Much has been said and sung in praise of the spirit of chivalry, which, after all, as a great historian reminds us, “implies the arbitrary choice of one or two virtues, to be practised in such an exaggerated degree as to become vices, while the ordinary laws of right and wrong are forgotten.” [1] Quite enough has been said, too, in discredit of Puritanism,—its narrowness of aim, its ascetic proclivities, its quaint affectations of Hebraism. Yet these things were but the symptoms of the intensity of its reverence for that grand spirit of Hebraism, of which Mr. Matthew Arnold speaks, to which we owe the Bible and Christianity. No loftier ideal has ever been conceived than that of the Puritan who would fain have made of the world a City of God. If we could sum up all that England owes to Puritanism, the story would be a great one indeed. As regards the United States, we may safely say that what is noblest in our history to-day, and of happiest augury for our social and political future, is the impress left upon the character of our people by the heroic men who came to New England early in the seventeenth century.
The settlement of New England by the Puritans occupies a peculiar position in the annals of colonization, and without understanding this we cannot properly appreciate the character of the purely democratic society which I have sought to describe. As a general rule colonies have been founded, either by governments or by private enterprise, for political or commercial reasons. The aim has been—on the part of governments—to annoy some rival power, or to get rid of criminals, or to open some new avenue of trade, or—on the part of the people—to escape from straitened circumstances at home, or to find a refuge from religious persecution. In the settlement of New England none of these motives were operative except the last, and that only to a slight extent. The Puritans who fled from Nottinghamshire to Holland in 1608, and twelve years afterwards crossed the ocean in the Mayflower, may be said to have been driven from England by persecution. But this was not the case with the Puritans who between 1630 and 1650 went from Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and from Dorset and Devonshire, and founded the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. These men left their homes at a time when Puritanism was waxing powerful and could not be assailed with impunity. They belonged to the upper and middle classes of the society of that day, outside of the peerage. Mr. Freeman has pointed out the importance of the change by which, after the Norman Conquest, the Old-English nobility or thegnhood was pushed down into “a secondary place in the political
Out of such a colonization as that here described nothing but a democratic society could very well come, save perhaps in case of a scarcity of arable land. Between the country gentleman and the yeoman who has become a landed proprietor, the difference is not great enough to allow the establishment of permanent distinctions, social or political. Immediately on their arrival in New England, the settlers proceeded to form for themselves a government as purely democratic as any that has ever been seen in the world. Instead of scattering about over the country, the requirements of education and of public worship, as well as of defence against Indian attacks, obliged them to form small village communities. As these villages multiplied, the surface of the country came to be laid out in small districts (usually from six to ten miles in length and breadth) called townships. Each township contained its village together with
From the outset the government of the township was vested in the TOWN-MEETING,—an institution which in its present form is said to be peculiar to New England, but which, as we shall see, has close analogies with local self-governing bodies in other ages and countries. Once in each year—usually in the month of March—a meeting is held, at which every adult male residing within the limits of the township is expected to be present, and is at liberty to address the meeting or to vote upon any question that may come up.
In the first years of the colonies it seems to have been attempted to hold town-meetings every month, and to discuss all the affairs of the community in these assemblies; but this was soon found to be a cumbrous way of transacting public business, and as early as 1635 we find selectmen chosen to administer the affairs of the township during the intervals between the assemblies. As the system has perfected itself, at each annual town-meeting there are chosen not less than three or more than nine selectmen, according to the size of the township. Besides these, there are chosen a town-clerk, a town-treasurer, a school-committee, assessors of taxes, overseers of the poor, constables, surveyors of highways, fence-viewers, and other officers. In very small townships the selectmen themselves may act as assessors of taxes or overseers of the poor. The selectmen may appoint police-officers if such are required; they may act as a Board of Health; in addition to sundry specific duties too numerous to mention here, they have the general superintendence of all public business save such as is expressly assigned to the other officers; and whenever circumstances may seem to require it they are authorized to call a town-meeting. The selectmen are thus the principal town-magistrates; and through the annual election their responsibility to the town is maintained at the maximum. Yet in many New England towns re-election of the same persons year after year has very commonly prevailed. I know of an instance where the office of town-clerk was filled by three members of one family during one hundred and fourteen consecutive years.
Besides choosing executive officers, the town-meeting has the power of enacting by-laws, of making appropriations of money for town-purposes, and of providing for miscellaneous emergencies by what might be termed special legislation. Besides the annual meeting held in the spring for transacting all this local business, the selectmen are required to call a meeting in the autumn of each year for the election of state and county officers, each second year for the election of representatives to the federal Congress, and each fourth year for the election of the President of the United States.
It only remains to add that, as an assembly of the whole people becomes impracticable in a large community, so when the population of a township has grown to ten or twelve thousand, the town-meeting is discontinued, the town is incorporated as a city, and its affairs are managed by a mayor, a board of aldermen, and a common council, according to the system adopted in London in the reign of Edward I. In America, therefore, the distinction between cities and towns has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a cathedral, but refers solely to differences in the communal or municipal government. In the city the common council, as a representative body, replaces (in a certain sense) the town-meeting; a representative government is substituted for a pure democracy. But the city officers, like the selectmen of towns, are elected annually; and in no case (I believe) has municipal government fallen into the hands of a self-perpetuating body, as it has done in so many instances in England owing to the unwise policy pursued by the Tudors and Stuarts in their grants of charters.
It is only in New England that the township system is to be found in its completeness. In several southern and western states the administrative unit is the county, and local affairs are managed by county commissioners elected by the people. Elsewhere we find a mixture of the county and township systems. In some of the western states settled by New England people, town-meetings are held, though their powers are somewhat less extensive than in New England. In the settlement of Virginia it was attempted to copy directly the parishes and vestries, boroughs and guilds of England. But in the southern states generally the great size of the plantations and the wide dispersion of the population hindered the growth of towns, so that it was impossible to have an administrative unit smaller than the county. As Tocqueville said fifty years ago, “the farther south we go the less active does the business of the township or parish become; the population exercises a less immediate influence on affairs; the power of the elected magistrate is augmented and that of the election diminished, while the public spirit of the local communities is less quickly awakened and less influential.” This is almost equally true to-day; yet with all these differences in local organization, there is no part of our country in which the spirit of local self-government can be called weak or uncertain. I have described the Town-meeting as it exists in the states where it first grew up and has since chiefly flourished. But something very like the “town-meeting principle” lies at the bottom of all the political life of the United States. To maintain vitality in the centre without sacrificing it in the parts; to preserve tranquillity in the mutual relations of forty powerful states, while keeping the people everywhere as far as possible in direct contact with the government; such is the political problem which the American Union exists for the purpose of solving; and of this great truth every American citizen is supposed to have some glimmering, however crude.
It has been said that the town-governments of New England were established without any conscious reference to precedent; but, however this may be, they are certainly not without precedents and analogies, to enumerate which will carry us very far back in the history of the Aryan world. At the beginning of his essay on the “Growth of the English Constitution,” Mr. Freeman gives an eloquent account of the May assemblies of Uri and Appenzell, when the whole people elect their magistrates for the year and vote upon amendments to the old laws or upon the adoption of new ones. Such a sight Mr. Freeman seems to think can be seen nowhere but in Switzerland, and he reckons it among the highest privileges of his life to have looked upon it. But I am unable to see in what respect the town-meeting in Massachusetts differs from the Landesgemeinde or cantonal assembly in Switzerland, save that it is held in a town-hall and not in the open air, that it is conducted with somewhat less of pageantry, and that the freemen who attend do not carry arms even by way of ceremony. In the Swiss assembly, as Mr. Freeman truly observes, we see exemplified the most democratic phase of the old Teutonic constitution as described in the “Germania” of Tacitus, “the earliest picture which history can give us of the political and social being of our own forefathers.” The same remark, in precisely the same terms, would be true of the town-meetings of New England. Political institutions, on the White Mountains and on the Alps, not only closely resemble each other, but are connected by strict bonds of descent from a common original.
The most primitive self-governing body of which we have any knowledge is the village-community of the ancient Teutons, of which such strict counterparts are found in other parts of the Aryan world as to make it apparent that in its essential features it must be an inheritance from prehistoric Aryan antiquity. In its Teutonic form the primitive village-community (or rather, the spot inhabited by it) is known as the Mark,—that is, a place defined by a boundary-line. One characteristic of the mark-community is that all its free members are in theory supposed to be related to each other through descent from a common progenitor; and in this respect the mark-community agrees with the gens, [Greek: ginos], or clan. The earliest form of political union in the world is one which rests, not upon territorial contiguity, but upon I blood-relationship, either real or assumed through the legal fiction of adoption. In the lowest savagery blood-relationship is the only admissible or conceivable ground for sustained common action among groups of men. Among peoples which wander about, supporting themselves either by hunting, or at a somewhat more advanced stage of development by the rearing of flocks and herds, a group of men, thus permanently associated through ties of blood-relationship, is what we call a clan. When by the development
Territorially the old Teutonic mark consisted of three divisions. There was the village mark, where the people lived in houses crowded closely together, no doubt for defensive purposes; there was the arable mark, divided into as many lots as there were householders; and there was the common mark, or border-strip of untilled land, wherein all the inhabitants of the village had common rights of pasturage and of cutting firewood. All this land originally was the property not of any one family or individual, but of the community. The study of the mark carries us back to a time when there may have been private property in weapons, utensils, or trinkets, but not in real estate.[3] Of the three kinds of land the common mark, save where curtailed or usurped by lords in the days of feudalism, has generally remained public property to this day. The pleasant green commons or squares which occur in the midst of towns and cities in England and the United States most probably originated from the coalescence of adjacent mark-communities, whereby the border-land used in common by all was brought into the centre of the new aggregate. In towns of modern date this origin of the common is of course forgotten, and in accordance with the general law by which the useful thing after discharging its functions survives for purposes of ornament, it is introduced as a pleasure-ground. In old towns of New England, however, the little park where boys play ball or children and nurses “take the air” was once the common pasture of the town. Even Boston Common did not entirely cease to be a grazing-field until 1830. It was in the village-mark, or assemblage of homesteads, that private property in real estate naturally began. In the Russian villages to-day the homesteads are private property, while the cultivated land is owned in common. This was the case with the arable mark of our ancestors. The arable mark belonged to the community, and was temporarily
Such was the mark-community of the ancient Teutons, as we gather partly from hints afforded by Tacitus and partly from the comparative study of English, German, and Scandinavian institutions. In Russia and in Hindustan we find the same primitive form of social organization existing with very little change at the present day. Alike in Hindu and in Russian village-communities we find the group of habitations, each despotically ruled by a pater-familias; we find the pasture-land owned and enjoyed in common; and we find the arable land divided into separate lots, which are cultivated according to minute regulations established by the community. But in India the occasional redistribution of lots survives only in a few localities, and as a mere tradition in others; the arable mark has become private property, as well as the homesteads. In Russia, on the other hand, re-allotments occur at irregular intervals averaging something like fifteen years. In India the local government is carried on in some places by a Council of Village Elders, and in other places by a Headman whose office is sometimes described as hereditary, but is more probably elective, the choice being confined, as in the case of the old Teutonic kingship, to the members of a particular family. In the Russian village, on the other hand, the government is conducted by an assembly at which every head of a household is expected to be present and vote on all matters of public concern. This assembly elects the Village Elder, or chief executive officer, the tax-collector, the watchman, and the communal herd-boy; it directs the allotment of the arable land; and in general matters of local legislation its power is as great as that of the New England town-meeting,—in some respects perhaps even greater, since the precise extent
From these illustrations we see that the mark, or self-governing village-community, is an institution which must be referred back to early Aryan times. Whether the mark ever existed in England, in anything like the primitive form in which it is seen in the Russian mir, is doubtful. Professor Stubbs (one of the greatest living authorities on such a subject) is inclined to think that the Teutonic settlers of Britain had passed beyond this stage before they migrated from Germany.[4] Nevertheless the traces of the mark, as all admit, are plentiful enough in England; and some of its features have survived down to modern times. In the great number of town-names that are formed from patronymics, such as Walsingham “the home of the Walsings,” Harlington
This metamorphosis of the township into the manor, however, was but partial: along with it went the partial metamorphosis of the township into the parish, or district assigned to a priest. Professor Stubbs has pointed out that “the boundaries of the parish and the township or townships with which it coincides are generally the same: in small parishes the idea and even the name of township is frequently, at the present day, sunk in that of the parish; and all the business that is not manorial is despatched in vestry-meetings, which are however primarily meetings of the township for church purposes.” [7] The parish officers, including overseers of the poor, assessors, and way-wardens, are still elected in vestry-meeting by the freemen of the township. And while the jurisdiction of the manorial courts has been defined by charter, or by the customary law existing at the time of the manorial grant, “all matters arising outside that jurisdiction come under the management of the vestry.”
In England, therefore, the free village-community, though perhaps nowhere found in its primitive integrity, has nevertheless survived in partially transfigured forms which have played no unimportant part in the history of the English people. In one shape or another the assembly of freemen for purposes of local legislation has always existed. The Puritans who colonized New England, therefore, did not invent the town-meeting. They were familiar already with the proceedings of the vestry-meeting and the manorial courts, but they were severed now from church and from aristocracy. So they had but to discard the ecclesiastical and lordly terminology, with such limitations as they involved, and to reintegrate the separate jurisdictions into one,—and forthwith the old assembly of the township, founded in immemorial tradition, but revivified by new thoughts and purposes gained through ages of political training, emerged into fresh life and entered upon a more glorious career.
It is not to an audience which speaks the English language that I need to argue the point that the preservation of local self-government is of the highest importance for the maintenance of a rich and powerful national life. As we contemplate the vicissitudes of local self-government in the various portions of the Aryan world, we see the contrasted fortunes of France and England illustrating for us most forcibly the significance of this truth. For the preservation of local self-government in England various causes may be assigned;
In France the course of events has brought about very different results. I shall defer to my next lecture the consideration of the vicissitudes of local self-government under the Roman Empire, because that point is really incident upon the study of the formation of vast national aggregates. Suffice it now to say that when the Teutons overcame Gaul, they became rulers over a population which had been subjected for five centuries to that slow but mighty process of trituration which the Empire everywhere brought to bear upon local self-government. While the Teutons in Britain, moreover, enslaved their slightly romanized subjects and gave little heed to their language, religion, or customs; the Teutons in Gaul, on the other hand, quickly adopted the language
The slow conversion of the feudal monarchy of the early Capetians into the absolute despotism of Louis XIV. was accomplished by the king gradually conquering his vassals one after another, and adding their domains to his own. As one vassal territory after another was added to the royal domain, the king sent prefects, responsible only to himself, to administer its local affairs, sedulously crushing out, so far as possible, the last vestiges of self-government. The nobles, deprived of their provincial rule, in great part flocked to Paris to become idle courtiers. The means for carrying on the gigantic machinery of centralized administration, and for supporting the court in its follies, were wrung from the groaning peasantry with a cynical indifference like that with which tribute is extorted by barbaric chieftains from a conquered enemy. And thus came about that abominable state of things which a century since was abruptly ended by one of the fiercest convulsions of modern times. The prodigious superiority—in respect to national vitality—of a freely governed country over one that is governed by a centralized despotism, is nowhere more brilliantly illustrated than in the contrasted fortunes of France and England as colonizing nations. When we consider the declared rivalry between France and England in their plans for colonizing the barbarous regions of the earth, when we consider that the military power of the two countries has been not far from equal, and that France has at times shown herself a maritime power by no means to be despised, it seems to me that her overwhelming and irretrievable defeat by England in the struggle for colonial empire is one of the most striking and one of the most instructive facts in all modern history. In my lectures of last year (at University College) I showed that, in the struggle for the possession of North America, where the victory of England was so decisive as to settle the question for all coming time, the causes of the French failure are very plainly to be seen. The French colony in Canada was one of the most complete
THE FEDERAL UNION.
The great history of Thukydides, which after twenty-three centuries still ranks (in spite of Mr. Cobden) among our chief text-books of political wisdom, has often seemed to me one of the most mournful books in the world. At no other spot on the earth’s surface, and at no other time in the career of mankind, has the human intellect flowered with such luxuriance as at Athens during the eighty-five years which intervened
We may console ourselves, however, for the premature overthrow of the power of Athens, by the reflection that that power rested upon political conditions which could not in any case have been permanent or even long-enduring. The entire political system of ancient Greece, based as it was upon the idea of the sovereign independence of each single city, was one which could not fail sooner or later to exhaust itself through chronic anarchy. The only remedy lay either in some kind of permanent federation, combined with representative government; or else in what we might call “incorporation and assimilation,” after the Roman fashion. But the incorporation of one town with another, though effected with brilliant results in the early history of Attika, involved such a disturbance of all the associations which in the Greek mind clustered about the conception of a city that it was quite impracticable on any large or general scale. Schemes of federal union were put into operation, though too late to be of avail against the assaults of Macedonia and Rome. But as for the principle of representation, that seems to have been an invention of the Teutonic mind; no statesman of antiquity, either in Greece or at Rome, seems to have conceived the idea of a city sending delegates armed with plenary powers to represent its interests in a general legislative assembly. To the Greek statesmen, no doubt, this too would have seemed derogatory to the dignity of the sovereign city.
This feeling with which the ancient Greek statesmen, and to some extent the Romans also, regarded the city, has become almost incomprehensible to the modern mind, so far removed are we from the political circumstances which made such a feeling possible. Teutonic civilization, indeed, has never passed through a stage in which the foremost position has been held by civic communities. Teutonic civilization passed directly from the stage of tribal into that of national organization, before any Teutonic city had acquired sufficient importance to have claimed autonomy for itself; and at the time when Teutonic nationalities were forming, moreover, all the cities in Europe had so long been accustomed to recognize a master outside of them in the person of the Roman emperor that the very tradition of civic autonomy, as it existed in ancient Greece, had become extinct. This difference between the political basis of Teutonic and of Graeco-Roman civilization is one of which it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance; and when thoroughly understood it goes farther, perhaps, than anything else towards accounting for the successive failures of the Greek and Roman political systems, and towards inspiring us with confidence in the future stability of the political system which has been wrought out by the genius of the English race.
We saw, in the preceding lecture, how the most primitive form of political association known to have existed is that of the clan, or group of families held together by ties of descent from a common ancestor. We saw how the change from a nomadic to a stationary mode of life, attendant upon the adoption of agricultural pursuits, converted the clan into a mark or village-community, something like those which exist to-day in Russia. The political progress of primitive society seems to have consisted largely in the coalescence of these small groups into larger groups. The first series of compound groups resulting from the coalescence of adjacent marks is that which was known in nearly all Teutonic lands as the hundred, in Athens as the [Greek: phratria] or brotherhood, in Rome as the curia. Yet alongside of the Roman group called the curia there is a group whose name, the century, exactly translates the name of the Teutonic group; and, as Mr. Freeman says, it is difficult to believe that the Roman century did not at the outset in some way correspond to the Teutonic hundred as a stage in political organization. But both these terms, as we know them in history, are survivals from some prehistoric state of things; and whether they were originally applied to a hundred of houses, or of families, or of warriors, we do not know.[8] M. Geffroy, in his interesting essay on the Germania of Tacitus, suggests that the term canton may have a similar origin.[9] The outlines of these primitive groups are, however, more obscure than those of the more primitive mark, because in most cases they have
Sir Henry Maine tells us that in Hindustan nearly all the great towns and cities have arisen either from the simple expansion or from the expansion and coalescence of primitive village-communities; and such as have not arisen in this way, including some of the greatest of Indian cities, have grown up about the intrenched camps of the Mogul emperors.[10] The case has been just the same in modern Europe. Some famous cities of England and Germany—such as Chester and Lincoln, Strasburg and Maintz,—grew up about the camps of the Roman legions. But in general the Teutonic city has been formed by the expansion and coalescence of thickly-peopled townships and hundreds. In the United States nearly all cities have come from the growth and expansion of villages, with such occasional cases of coalescence as that of Boston with Roxbury and Charlestown. Now and then a city has been laid out as a city ab initio, with full consciousness of its purpose, as a man would build a house; and this was the case not merely with Martin Chuzzlewit’s “Eden,” but with the city of Washington, the seat of our federal government. But, to go back to the early ages of England—the country which best exhibits the normal development of Teutonic institutions—the point which I wish especially to emphasize is this: in no case does the city appear as equivalent to the dwelling-place of a tribe or of a confederation of tribes. In no case does citizenship, or burghership, appear to rest upon the basis of a real or assumed community of descent from a single real or mythical progenitor. In the primitive mark, as we have seen, the bond which kept the community together and constituted it a political unit was the bond of blood-relationship, real or assumed; but this was not the case with the city or borough. The city did not correspond with the tribe, as the mark corresponded with the clan. The aggregation of clans into tribes corresponded with the aggregation of marks, not into cities but into shires. The multitude of compound political units, by the further compounding of which a nation was to be formed, did not consist of cities but of shires. The city was simply a point in the shire distinguished by greater density of population. The relations sustained by the thinly-peopled rural townships and hundreds to the general government of the shire were co-ordinate with the relations sustained to the same government by those thickly-peopled townships and hundreds which upon their coalescence were known as cities or boroughs. Of course I am speaking now in a broad and general way, and without reference to such special privileges or immunities as cities and boroughs frequently obtained by royal charter in feudal times. Such special privileges—as for instance the exemption of boroughs from the ordinary sessions of the county court, under Henry I.[11]—were in their nature grants from an external source, and were in nowise inherent in the position or mode of origin
Very different from this was the embryonic growth of political society in ancient Greece and Italy. There the aggregation of clans into tribes and confederations of tribes resulted directly, as we have seen, in the City. There burghership, with its political and social rights and duties, had its theoretical basis in descent from a common ancestor, or from a small group of closely-related common ancestors. The group of fellow-citizens was associated through its related groups of ancestral household-deities, and through religious rites performed in common to which it would have been sacrilege to have admitted a stranger. Thus the Ancient City was a religious as well as a political body, and in either character it was complete in itself and it was sovereign. Thus in ancient Greece and Italy the primitive clan-assembly or township-meeting did not grow by aggregation into the assembly of the shire, but it developed into the comitia or ecclesia of the city. The chief magistrate was not the ealdorman of early English history, but the rex or basileus who combined in himself the functions of king, general, and priest. Thus, too, there was a severance, politically, between city and country such as the Teutonic world has never known. The rural districts surrounding a city might be subject to it, but could neither share its franchise nor claim a co-ordinate franchise with it. Athens, indeed, at an early period, went so far as to incorporate with itself Eleusis and Marathon and the other rural towns of Attika. In this one respect Athens transgressed the bounds of ancient civic organization, and no doubt it gained greatly in power thereby. But generally in the Hellenic world the rural population in the neighbourhood of a great city were mere [Greek: perioikoi], or “dwellers in the vicinity”; the inhabitants of the city who had moved thither from some other city, both they and their descendants, were mere [Greek: metoikoi], or “dwellers in the place”; and neither the one class nor the other could acquire the rights and privileges of citizenship. A revolution, indeed, went on at Athens, from the time of Solon to the time of Kleisthenes, which essentially modified the old tribal divisions and admitted to the franchise all such families resident from time immemorial as did not belong to the tribes of eupatrids by whom the city was founded. But this change once accomplished, the civic exclusiveness of Athens remained very much what it was before. The popular assembly was
The deep-seated difference between the Teutonic political system based on the shire and the Graeco-Roman system based on the city is now, I think, sufficiently apparent. Now from this fundamental difference have come two consequences of enormous importance,—consequences of which it is hardly too much to say that, taken together, they furnish the key to the whole history of European civilization as regarded purely from a political point of view.
The first of these consequences had no doubt a very humble origin in the mere difference between the shire and the city in territorial extent and in density of population. When people live near together it is easy for them to attend a town-meeting, and the assembly by which public business is transacted is likely to remain a primary assembly, in the true sense of the term. But when people are dispersed over a wide tract of country, the primary assembly inevitably shrinks up into an assembly of such persons as can best afford the time and trouble of attending it, or who have the strongest interest in going, or are most likely to be listened to after they get there. Distance and difficulty, and in early times danger too, keep many people away. And though a shire is not a wide tract of country for most purposes, and according to modern ideas, it was nevertheless quite wide enough in former times to bring about the result I have mentioned. In the times before the Norman conquest, if not before the completed union of England under Edgar, the shire-mote or county assembly, though in theory still a folk-mote or primary assembly, had shrunk into what was virtually a witenagemote or assembly of the most important persons in the county. But the several townships, in order to keep their fair share of control over county affairs, and not wishing to leave the matter to chance, sent to the meetings each its representatives in the persons of the town-reeve and four “discreet men.” I believe it has not been determined at what precise time this step was taken, but it no doubt long antedates the Norman conquest. It is mentioned by Professor Stubbs as being already, in the reign of Henry III., a custom of immemorial antiquity.[12] It was one of the greatest steps ever taken in the political history of mankind. In these four discreet men we have the forerunners of the two burghers from each town
In the ancient city, on the other hand, the extreme compactness of the political structure made representation unnecessary and prevented it from being thought of in circumstances where it might have proved of immense value. In an aristocratic Greek city, like Sparta, all the members of the ruling class met together and voted in the assembly; in a democratic city, like Athens, all the free citizens met and voted; in each case the assembly was primary and not representative. The only exception, in all Greek antiquity, is one which emphatically proves the rule. The Amphiktyonic Council, an institution of prehistoric origin, concerned mainly with religious affairs pertaining to the worship of the Delphic Apollo, furnished a precedent for a representative, and indeed for a federal, assembly. Delegates from various Greek tribes and cities attended it. The fact that with such a suggestive precedent before their eyes the Greeks never once hit upon the device of representation, even in their attempts at framing federal unions, shows how thoroughly their whole political training had operated to exclude such a conception from their minds.
The second great consequence of the Graeco-Roman city-system was linked in many ways with this absence of the representative principle. In Greece the formation of political aggregates higher and more extensive than the city was, until a late date, rendered impossible. The good and bad sides of this peculiar phase of civilization have been often enough commented on by historians. On the one hand the democratic assembly of such an imperial city as Athens furnished a school of political training superior to anything else that the world has ever seen. It was something like what the New England town-meeting would be if it were continually required to adjust complicated questions of international polity, if it were carried on in the very centre or point of confluence of all contemporary streams of culture, and if it were in the habit every few days of listening to statesmen and orators like Hamilton or Webster, jurists like Marshall, generals like Sherman, poets like Lowell, historians like Parkman. Nothing in all history has approached the high-wrought intensity and brilliancy of the political life of Athens.
On the other hand, the smallness of the independent city, as a political aggregate, made it of little or no use in diminishing the liability to perpetual warfare which is the curse of all primitive communities. In a group of independent cities, such as made up the Hellenic world, the tendency to warfare is almost as strong, and the occasions for warfare are almost as frequent, as in a congeries of mutually hostile tribes of barbarians. There is something almost lurid in the sharpness of contrast with which the wonderful height of humanity attained by Hellas is set off against the fierce barbarism which characterized the relations of its cities to one another. It may be laid down as a general rule that in an early state of society, where the political aggregations are small, warfare is universal and cruel. From the intensity of the jealousies and rivalries between adjacent self-governing groups of men, nothing short of chronic warfare can result, until some principle of union is evolved by which disputes can be settled in accordance with general principles admitted by all. Among peoples that have never risen above the tribal stage of aggregation, such as the American Indians, war is the normal condition of things, and there is nothing fit to be called peace,—there are only truces of brief and uncertain duration. Were it not for this there would be somewhat less to be said in favour of great states and kingdoms. As modern life grows more and more complicated and interdependent, the Great State subserves innumerable useful purposes; but in the history of civilization its first service, both in order of time and in order of importance, consists in the diminution of the quantity of warfare and in the narrowing of its sphere. For within the territorial limits of any great and permanent state, the tendency is for warfare to become the exception and peace the rule. In this direction the political careers of the Greek cities assisted the progress of civilization but little.
Under the conditions of Graeco-Roman civic life there were but two practicable methods of forming a great state and diminishing the quantity of warfare. The one method was conquest with incorporation, the other method was federation. Either one city might conquer all the others and endow their citizens with its own franchise, or all the cities might give up part of their sovereignty to a federal body which should have power to keep the peace, and should represent the civilized world of the time in its relations with outlying barbaric peoples. Of these two methods, obviously the latter is much the more effective, but it presupposes for its successful adoption a higher general state of civilization than the former. Neither method was adopted by the Greeks in their day of greatness. The Spartan method of extending its power was conquest without incorporation: when Sparta conquered another Greek city, she sent a harmost to govern it like a
In the century following the death of Alexander, in the closing age of Hellenic independence, the federal idea appears in a much more advanced stage of elaboration, though in a part of Greece which had been held of little account in the great days of Athens and Sparta. Between the Achaian federation, framed in 274 B.C., and the United States of America, there are some interesting points of resemblance which have been elaborately discussed by Mr. Freeman, in his “History of Federal Government.” About the same time the Aetolian League came into prominence in the north. Both these leagues were instances of true federal government, and were not mere confederations; that is, the central government acted directly upon all the citizens and not merely upon the local governments. Each of these leagues had for its chief executive officer a General elected for one year, with powers similar to those of an American President. In each the supreme assembly was a primary assembly at which every citizen from every city of the league had a right to be present, to speak, and to vote; but as a natural consequence these assemblies shrank into comparatively aristocratic bodies. In AEtolia, which was a group of mountain cantons similar to Switzerland, the federal union was more complete than in Achaia, which was a group of cities. In Achaia cases occurred in which a single city was allowed to deal separately with foreign powers. Here, as in earlier Greek history, the instinct of autonomy was too powerful to admit of complete federation. Yet the career of the Achaian League was not an inglorious one. For nearly a century and a half it gave the Peloponnesos a larger measure of orderly government than the country had ever known before, without infringing upon local liberties. It defied successfully the threats and assaults of Macedonia, and yielded at last only to the all-conquering might of Rome.
Thus in so far as Greece contributed anything towards the formation of great and pacific political aggregates, she did it through attempts at federation. But in so low a state of political development as that which prevailed throughout the Mediterranean world in pre-Christian times, the more barbarous method of conquest with incorporation was more likely to be successful on a great scale. This was well illustrated in the history of Rome,—a civic community of the same generic type with Sparta and Athens, but presenting specific differences of the highest importance. The beginnings of Rome, unfortunately, are prehistoric. I have often thought that if some beneficent fairy could grant us the power of somewhere raising the veil of oblivion which enshrouds the earliest ages of Aryan dominion in Europe, there is no place from which the historian should be more glad to see it lifted than from Rome in the centuries which saw the formation of the city, and which preceded the expulsion of the kings. Even the legends, which were uncritically accepted from the days of Livy to those of our grandfathers, are provokingly silent upon the very points as to which we would fain get at least a hint. This much is plain, however, that in the embryonic stage of the Roman commonwealth some obscure processes of fusion or commingling went on. The tribal population of Rome was more heterogeneous than that of the great cities of Greece, and its earliest municipal religion seems to have been an assemblage of various tribal religions that had points of contact with other tribal religions throughout large portions of the Graeco-Italic world. As M. de Coulanges observes,[13] Rome was almost the only city of antiquity which was not kept apart from other cities by its religion. There was hardly a people in Greece or Italy which it was restrained from admitting to participation in its municipal rites.
However this may have been, it is certain that Rome early succeeded in freeing itself from that insuperable prejudice which elsewhere prevented the ancient city from admitting aliens to a share in its franchise. And in this victory over primeval political ideas lay the whole secret of Rome’s mighty career. The victory was not indeed completed until after the terrible Social War of B.C. 90, but it was begun at least four centuries earlier with the admission of the plebeians. At the consummation of the conquest of Italy in B.C. 270 Roman burghership already extended, in varying degrees of completeness, through the greater part of Etruria and Campania, from the coast to the mountains; while all the rest of Italy was admitted to privileges for which ancient history had elsewhere furnished no precedent. Hence the invasion of Hannibal half a century later, even with its stupendous victories of Thrasymene and Cannae, effected nothing toward detaching the Italian subjects from their allegiance to Rome; and herein we have a most instructive contrast
The benefits conferred upon the world by the, universal dominion of Rome were of quite inestimable value. First of these benefits, and (as it were) the material basis of the others, was the prolonged peace that was enforced throughout large portions of the world where chronic warfare had hitherto prevailed. The pax romana has perhaps been sometimes depicted in exaggerated colours; but as compared with all that had preceded, and with all that followed, down to the beginning of the nineteenth century, it deserved the encomiums it has received. The second benefit was the mingling and mutual destruction of the primitive tribal and municipal religions, thus clearing the way for Christianity,—a step which, regarded from a purely political point of view, was of immense importance for the further consolidation of society in Europe. The third benefit was the development of the Roman law into a great body of legal precepts and principles leavened throughout with ethical principles of universal applicability, and the gradual substitution of this Roman law for the innumerable local usages of ancient communities. Thus arose the idea of a common Christendom, of a brotherhood of peoples associated both by common beliefs regarding the unseen world and by common principles of action in the daily affairs of life. The common ethical and traditional basis thus established for the future development of the great nationalities of Europe is the most fundamental characteristic distinguishing modern from ancient history.
While, however, it secured these benefits for mankind for all time to come, the Roman political system in itself was one which could not possibly endure. That extension of the franchise which made Rome’s conquests possible, was, after all, the extension of a franchise which could only be practically enjoyed within the walls of the imperial city itself. From first to last the device of representation was
As regards the provinces the change from senatorial to imperial government at Rome was a great gain, inasmuch as it substituted an orderly and responsible administration for irregular and irresponsible extortion. For a long time, too, it was no part of the imperial policy to interfere with local customs and privileges. But, in the absence of a representative system, the centralizing tendency inseparable from the position of such a government proved to be irresistible. And the strength of this centralizing tendency was further enhanced by the military character of the government which was necessitated by perpetual frontier warfare against the barbarians. As year after year went by, the provincial towns and cities were governed less and less by their local magistrates, more and more by prefects responsible to the emperor only. There were other co-operating causes, economical and social, for the decline of the empire; but this change alone, which was consummated by the time of Diocletian, was quite enough to burn out the candle of Roman strength at both ends. With the decrease in the power of the local governments came an increase in the burdens of taxation and conscription that were laid upon them.[14] And as “the dislocation of commerce and industry caused by the barbarian inroads, and the increasing demands of the central administration for the payment of its countless officials and the maintenance of its troops, all went together,” the load at last became greater “than human nature could endure.” By the time of the great invasions of the fifth century, local political life had gone far towards extinction throughout Roman Europe, and the tribal organization of the Teutons prevailed in the struggle simply because it had come to be politically stronger than any organization that was left to oppose it.
We have now seen how the two great political systems that were founded upon the Ancient City both ended in failure, though both achieved enormous and lasting results. And we have seen how largely both these political failures were due to the absence of the principle of representation from the public life of Greece and Rome. The chief problem of civilization, from the political point of view, has always been how to secure concerted action among men on a great scale without sacrificing local independence. The ancient history of Europe shows that it is not possible to solve this problem without the aid of the principle of representation. Greece, until overcome by external force, sacredly maintained local self-government, but in securing permanent concert of action it was conspicuously unsuccessful. Rome secured concert of action on a gigantic scale, and transformed the thousand unconnected tribes and cities it conquered into an organized European world, but in doing this it went far towards extinguishing local self-government. The advent of the Teutons upon the scene seems therefore to have been necessary, if only to supply the indispensable element without which the dilemma of civilization could not be surmounted. The turbulence of Europe during the Teutonic migrations was so great and so long continued, that on a superficial view one might be excused for regarding the good work of Rome as largely undone. And in the feudal isolation of effort and apparent incapacity for combined action which characterized the different parts of Europe after the downfall of the Carolingian empire, it might well have seemed that political society had reverted towards a primitive type of structure. In truth, however, the retrogradation was much slighter than appeared on the surface. Feudalism itself, with its curious net-work of fealties and obligations running through the fabric of society in every direction, was by no means purely disintegrative in its tendencies. The mutual relations of rival baronies were by no means like those of rival clans or tribes in pre-Roman days. The central power of Rome, though no longer exerted politically through curators and prefects, was no less effective in the potent hands of the clergy and in the traditions of the imperial jurisprudence by which the legal ideas of mediaeval society were so strongly coloured. So powerful, indeed, was this twofold influence of Rome, that in the later Middle Ages, when the modern nationalities had fairly taken shape, it was the capacity for local self-government—in spite of all the Teutonic reinforcement it had had—that had suffered much more than the capacity for national consolidation. Among the great modern nations it was only England—which in its political development had remained more independent of the Roman law and the Roman church than even the Teutonic fatherland itself—it was only England that came out of the mediaeval crucible with its Teutonic self-government substantially intact. On the main-land only two
Until the nineteenth century, however, the federal form of government had given no clear indication of its capacity for holding together great bodies of men, spread over vast territorial areas, in orderly and peaceful relations with one another. The empire of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius still remained the greatest known example of political aggregation; and men who argued from simple historic precedent without that power of analyzing precedents which the comparative method has supplied, came not unnaturally to the conclusions
Yet even by men of English race, working with out let or hindrance from any foreign source, and with the better part of a continent at their disposal for a field to work in, so great a political problem as that of the American Union has not been solved without much toil and trouble. The great puzzle of civilization—how to secure permanent concert of action without sacrificing independence of action—is a puzzle which has taxed the ingenuity of Americans as well as of older Aryan peoples. In the year 1788 when our Federal Union was completed, the problem had already
The first great compromise answered to the initial difficulty of securing approximate equality of weight in the federal councils between states of unequal size. The simple device by which this difficulty was at last surmounted has proved effectual, although the inequalities between the states have greatly increased. To-day the population of New York is more than eighty times that of Nevada. In area the state of Rhode Island is smaller than Montenegro, while the state of Texas is larger than the Austrian empire with Bavaria and Wuertemberg thrown in. Yet New York and Nevada, Rhode Island and Texas, each send two senators to Washington, while on the other hand in the lower house each state has a number of representatives proportioned to its population. The upper house of Congress is therefore a federal while the lower house is a national body, and the government is brought into direct contact with the people without endangering the equal rights of the several states.
The second great compromise of the American constitution consists in the series of arrangements by which sovereignty is divided between the states and the federal government. In all domestic legislation and jurisdiction, civil and criminal, in all matters relating to tenure of property, marriage and divorce, the fulfilment of contracts and the punishment of malefactors, each separate state is as completely a sovereign state as France or Great Britain. In speaking to a British audience a concrete illustration may not be superfluous. If a criminal is condemned to death in Pennsylvania, the royal prerogative of pardon resides in the Governor of Pennsylvania: the President of the United States has no more authority in the case than the Czar of Russia. Nor in civil cases can an appeal lie from the state courts to the Supreme Court of the United States, save where express provision has been made in the Constitution. Within its own sphere the state is supreme. The chief attributes of sovereignty with which the several states have parted are the coining of money, the carrying of mails, the imposition of tariff dues, the granting of patents and copyrights, the declaration of war, and the maintenance of a navy. The regular army is supported and controlled by the federal government, but each state maintains its own militia which it is bound to use in case of internal disturbance before calling upon the central government for aid. In time of war, however, these militias come under the control of the central government. Thus every American citizen lives under two governments, the functions of which are clearly and intelligibly distinct.
To insure the stability of the federal union thus formed, the Constitution created a “system of United States courts extending throughout the states, empowered to define the boundaries of federal authority, and to enforce its decisions by federal power.” This omnipresent federal judiciary was undoubtedly the most important creation of the statesmen who framed the Constitution. The closely-knit relations which it established between the states contributed powerfully to the growth of a feeling of national solidarity throughout the whole country. The United States today cling together with a coherency far greater than the coherency of any ordinary federation or league. Yet the primary aspect of the federal Constitution was undoubtedly that of a permanent league, in which each state, while retaining its domestic sovereignty intact, renounced forever its right to make war upon its neighbours and relegated its international interests to the care of a central council in which all the states were alike represented and a central tribunal endowed with purely judicial functions of interpretation. It was the first attempt in the history of the world, to apply on a grand scale to the relations between states the same legal methods of procedure which, as long applied in all civilized countries to the relations between individuals, have rendered private warfare obsolete. And it was so far successful that, during a period of seventy-two years in which the United States increased fourfold in extent, tenfold in population, and more than tenfold in wealth and power, the federal union maintained a state of peace more profound than the pax romana.
Twenty years ago this unexampled state of peace was suddenly interrupted by a tremendous war, which in its results, however, has served only to bring out with fresh emphasis the pacific implications of federalism. With the eleven revolted states at first completely conquered and then reinstated with full rights and privileges in the federal union, with their people accepting in good faith the results of the contest, with their leaders not executed as traitors but admitted again to seats in Congress and in the Cabinet, and with all this accomplished without any violent constitutional changes,—I think we may fairly claim that the strength of the pacific implications of federalism has been more strikingly demonstrated than if there had been no war at all. Certainly the world never beheld such a spectacle before. In my next and concluding lecture I shall return to this point while summing up the argument and illustrating the part played by the English race in the general history of civilization.
“MANIFEST DESTINY.”
Among the legends of our late Civil War there is a story of a dinner-party given by the Americans residing in Paris, at which were propounded sundry toasts concerning not so much the past and present as the expected glories of the great American nation. In the general character of these toasts geographical considerations were very prominent, and the principal fact which seemed to occupy the minds of the speakers was the unprecedented bigness of our country. “Here’s to the United States,” said the first speaker, “bounded on the north by British America, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, on the east by the Atlantic, and on the west by the Pacific, Ocean.” “But,” said the second speaker, “this is far too limited a view of the subject: in assigning our boundaries we must look to the great and glorious future which is prescribed for us by the Manifest Destiny of the Anglo-Saxon Race. Here’s to the United States,—bounded on the north by the North Pole, on the south by the South Pole, on the east by the rising and on the west by the setting sun.” Emphatic applause greeted this aspiring prophecy. But here arose the third speaker—a very serious gentleman from the Far West. “If we are going,” said this truly patriotic American, “to leave the historic past and present, and take our manifest destiny into the account, why restrict ourselves within the narrow limits assigned by our fellow-countryman who has just sat down? I give you the United States,—bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, on the east by the primeval chaos, and on the west by the Day of Judgment!”
I offer this anecdote at the outset by way of self-defence, inasmuch as I shall by and by have myself to introduce some considerations concerning the future of our country, and of what some people, without the fear of Mr. Freeman before their eyes, call the “Anglo-Saxon” race; and if it should happen to strike you that my calculations are unreasonably large, I hope you will remember that they are quite modest after all, when compared with some others.
The “manifest destiny” of the “Anglo-Saxon” race and the huge dimensions of our country are favourite topics with Fourth-of-July orators, but they are none the less interesting on that account when considered from the point of view of the historian. To be a citizen of a great and growing state, or to belong to one of the dominant races of the world, is no doubt a legitimate source of patriotic pride, though there is perhaps an equal justification for such a feeling in being a citizen of a tiny state like Holland, which, in spite of its small dimensions, has nevertheless achieved so much,—fighting at one time the battle of freedom for the world, producing statesmen like William and Barneveldt, generals like Maurice, scholars like Erasmus and Grotius, and thinkers like Spinoza, and taking the lead even to-day in the study of Christianity and in the interpretation of the Bible. But my course in the present lecture is determined by historical or philosophical rather than by patriotic interest, and I shall endeavour to characterize and group events as impartially as if my home were at Leyden in the Old World instead of Cambridge in the New.
First of all, I shall take sides with Mr. Freeman in eschewing altogether the word “Anglo-Saxon.” The term is sufficiently absurd and misleading as applied in England to the Old-English speech of our forefathers, or to that portion of English history which is included between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. But in America it is frequently used, not indeed by scholars, but by popular writers and speakers, in a still more loose and slovenly way. In the war of independence our great-great-grandfathers, not yet having ceased to think of themselves as Englishmen, used to distinguish themselves as “Continentals,” while the king’s troops were known as the “British.” The quaint term “Continental” long ago fell into disuse, except in the slang phrase “not worth a Continental” which referred to the debased condition of our currency at the close of the Revolutionary War; but “American” and “British” might still serve the purpose sufficiently whenever it is necessary to distinguish between the two great English nationalities. The term “English,” however, is so often used with sole reference to people and things in England as to have become in some measure antithetical to “American;” and when it is found desirable to include the two in a general expression, one often hears in America the term “Anglo-Saxon” colloquially employed for this purpose. A more slovenly use of language can hardly be imagined. Such a compound term as “Anglo-American” might perhaps be logically defensible, but that has already become restricted to the English-descended inhabitants of the United States and Canada alone, in distinction from Spanish Americans and red Indians. It is never so used as to include Englishmen. Refraining from all such barbarisms, I prefer to call the English race by the name which it has always applied to itself, from the time when it inhabited the little district of Angeln on the Baltic coast of Sleswick down to the time when it had begun to spread itself over three great continents. It is a race which has shown a rare capacity for absorbing slightly foreign elements and moulding them into conformity with a political type that was first wrought out through centuries of effort on British soil; and this capacity it has shown perhaps in a heightened degree in the peculiar circumstances in which it has been placed in America. The American has absorbed considerable quantities of closely kindred European blood, but he is rapidly assimilating it all, and in his political habits and aptitudes he remains as thoroughly English as his forefathers in the days of De Montfort, or Hampden, or Washington. Premising this, we may go on to consider some aspects of the work which the English race has done and is doing in the world, and we need not feel discouraged if, in order to do justice to the subject, we have to take our start far back in ancient history. We shall begin, it may be said, somewhere near the primeval chaos, and though we shall indeed stop short of the day of judgment, we shall hope at all events to reach the millennium.
Our eloquent friends of the Paris dinner-party seem to have been strongly impressed with the excellence of enormous political aggregates. We, too, approaching the subject from a different point of view, have been led to see how desirable it is that self-governing groups of men should be enabled to work together in permanent harmony and on a great scale. In this kind of political integration the work of civilization very largely consists. We have seen how in its most primitive form political society is made up of small self-governing groups that are perpetually at war with one another. Now the process of change which we call civilization means quite a number of things. But there is no doubt that on its political side it means primarily the gradual substitution of a state of peace for a state of war. This change is the condition precedent for all the other kinds of improvement that are connoted by such a term as “civilization.” Manifestly the development of industry is largely dependent upon the cessation or restriction of warfare; and furthermore, as the industrial phase of civilization slowly supplants the military phase, men’s characters undergo, though very slowly, a corresponding change. Men become less inclined to destroy life or to inflict pain; or—to use the popular terminology which happens here to coincide precisely with that of the Doctrine of Evolution—they become less brutal and more humane. Obviously then the prime feature of the process called civilization is the general diminution of warfare. But we have seen that a general diminution of warfare is rendered possible only by the union of small political groups into larger groups that are kept together by community of interests, and that can adjust their mutual relations by legal discussion without coming to blows. In the preceding lecture we considered this process of political integration as variously exemplified by communities of Hellenic, of Roman, and of Teutonic race, and we saw how manifold were the difficulties which the process had to encounter. We saw how the Teutons—at least in Switzerland, England, and America—had succeeded best through the retention of local self-government combined with central representation. We saw how the Romans failed of ultimate success because by weakening self-government they weakened that community of interest which is essential to the permanence of a great political aggregate. We saw how the Greeks, after passing through their most glorious period in a state of chronic warfare, had begun to achieve considerable success in forming a pacific federation when their independent career was suddenly cut short by the Roman conqueror.
This last example introduces us to a fresh consideration, of very great importance. It is not only that every progressive community has had to solve, in one way or another, the problem of securing permanent concert of action without sacrificing local independence of action; but while engaged in this difficult work the community has had to defend itself against the attacks of other communities. In the case just cited, of the conquest of Greece by Rome, little harm was done perhaps. But under different circumstances immense damage may have been done in this way, and the nearer we go to the beginnings of civilization the greater the danger. At the dawn of history we see a few brilliant points of civilization surrounded on every side by a midnight blackness of barbarism. In order that the pacific community may be able to go on doing its work, it must be strong enough and warlike enough to overcome its barbaric neighbours who have no notion whatever of keeping peace. This is another of the seeming paradoxes of the history of civilization, that for a very long time the possibility of peace can be guaranteed only through war. Obviously the permanent peace of the world can be secured only through the gradual concentration of the preponderant military strength into the hands of the most pacific communities. With infinite toil and trouble this point has been slowly gained by mankind, through the circumstance that the very same political aggregation of small primitive communities which makes them less disposed to quarrel among themselves tends also to make them more than a match for the less coherent groups of their more barbarous neighbours. The same concert of action which tends towards internal harmony tends also towards external victory, and both ends are promoted by the co-operation of the same sets of causes. But for a long time all the political problems of the civilized world were complicated by the fact that the community had to fight for its life. We seldom stop to reflect upon the imminent danger from outside attacks, whether from surrounding barbarism or from neighbouring civilizations of lower type, amid which the rich and high-toned civilizations of Greece and Rome were developed. When the king of Persia undertook to reduce Greece to the condition of a Persian satrapy, there was imminent danger that all the enormous fruition of Greek thought in the intellectual life of the European world might have been nipped in the bud. And who can tell how often, in prehistoric times, some little gleam of civilization, less bright and steady than this one had become, may have been quenched in slavery or massacre? The greatest work which the Romans performed in the world was to assume the aggressive against menacing barbarism, to subdue it, to tame it, and to enlist its brute force on the side of law and order. This was a murderous work, and in doing it the Romans became excessively cruel, but it had to be done by some one before you could expect to have great and peaceful civilizations
In this brief survey of the advancing frontier of European civilization, I have said nothing about the danger that has from time to time been threatened by the followers of Mohammed,—of the overthrow of the Saracens in Gaul by the grandfather of Charles the Great, or their overthrow at Constantinople by the image-breaking Leo, of the great mediaeval Crusades, or of the mischievous but futile career of the Turks. For if I were to attempt to draw this outline with anything like completeness, I should have no room left for the conclusion of my argument. Considering my position thus far as sufficiently illustrated, let us go on to contemplate for a moment some of the effects of all this secular turmoil upon the political development of the progressive nations of Europe. I think we may safely lay it down, as a large and general rule, that all this prodigious warfare required to free the civilized world from peril of barbarian attack served greatly to increase the difficulty of solving the great initial problem of civilization. In the first place, the turbulence thus arising was a serious obstacle to the formation of closely-coherent political aggregates; as we see exemplified in the terrible convulsions of the fifth and sixth centuries, and again in the ascendency acquired by the isolating features of feudalism between the time of Charles the Great and the time of Louis VI. of France. In the second place, this perpetual turbulence was a serious obstacle to the preservation of popular liberties. It is a very difficult thing for a free people to maintain its free, constitution if it has to keep perpetually fighting for its life. The “one-man-power.” less fit for, carrying on the peaceful pursuits of life, is sure to be brought into the foreground in a state of endless warfare. It is a still more difficult thing for a free people to maintain its free constitution when it undertakes to govern a dependent
Chronologically the discovery of America coincides precisely with the close of the Middle Ages, and with the opening of the drama of what is called modern history. The coincidence is in many ways significant. The close of the Middle Ages—as we have seen—was characterized by the increasing power of the crown in all the great countries of Europe, and by strong symptoms of popular restlessness in view of this increasing power. It was characterized also by the great Protestant outbreak against the despotic pretensions of the Church, which once, in its antagonism to the rival temporal power, had befriended the liberties of the people, but now (especially since the death of Boniface VIII.) sought to enthrall them with a tyranny far worse than that of irresponsible king or emperor. As we have seen Aryan civilization in Europe struggling for many centuries to prove itself superior to the assaults of outer barbarism, so here we find a decisive struggle beginning between the antagonist tendencies which had grown up in the midst
Let us consider now to what conclusions the rapidity and unabated steadiness of the increase of the English race in America must lead us as we go on to forecast the future. Carlyle somewhere speaks slightingly of the fact that the Americans double their numbers every twenty years, as if to have forty million dollar-hunters in the world were any better than to have twenty million dollar-hunters! The implication that Americans are nothing but dollar-hunters, and are thereby distinguishable from the rest of mankind, would not perhaps bear too elaborate scrutiny. But during the present lecture we have been considering the gradual transfer of the preponderance of physical strength from the hands of the war-loving portion of the human race into the hands of the peace-loving portion,—into the hands of the dollar-hunters, if you please, but out of the hands of the scalp-hunters. Obviously to double the numbers of a pre-eminently industrious, peaceful, orderly, and free-thinking community, is somewhat to increase the weight in the world of the tendencies that go towards making communities free and orderly and peaceful and industrious. So that, from this point of view, the fact we are speaking of is well worth considering, even for its physical dimensions. I do not know whether the United States could support a population everywhere as dense as that of Belgium; so I will suppose that, with ordinary improvement in cultivation and in the industrial arts, we might support a population half as dense as that of Belgium,—and this is no doubt an extremely moderate supposition. Now a very simple operation in arithmetic will show that this means a population of fifteen hundred millions, or more than the population of the whole world at the present date. Another very simple operation in arithmetic will show that if we were to go on doubling our numbers, even once in every twenty-five years, we should reach that stupendous figure at about the close of the twentieth century,—that
It used to be said that so huge a people as this could not be kept together as a single national aggregate,—or, if kept together at all, could only be so by means of a powerful centralized government, like that of ancient Rome under the emperors. I think we are now prepared to see that this is a great mistake. If the Roman Empire could have possessed that political vitality in all its parts which is secured to the United States by the principles of equal representation and of limited state sovereignty, it might well have defied all the shocks which tribally-organized barbarism could ever have directed against it. As it was, its strong centralized government did not save it from political disintegration. One of its weakest political features was precisely this,—that its “strong centralized government” was a kind of close corporation, governing a score of provinces in its own interest rather than in the interest of the provincials. In contrast with such a system as that of the Roman Empire, the skilfully elaborated American system of federalism appears as one of the most important contributions that the English race has made to the general work of civilization. The working out of this feature in our national constitution, by Hamilton and Madison and their associates, was the finest specimen of constructive statesmanship that the world has ever seen. Not that these statesmen originated the principle, but they gave form and expression to the principle which was latent in the circumstances under which the group of American colonies had grown up, and which suggested itself so forcibly that the clear vision of these thinkers did not fail to seize upon it as the fundamental principle upon which alone could the affairs of a great people, spreading over a vast continent, be kept in a condition approaching to something like permanent peace.
And now we may begin to see distinctly what it was that the American government fought for in the late civil war,—a point which at the time was by no means clearly apprehended outside the United States. We used to hear it often said, while that war was going on, that we were fighting not so much for the emancipation of the negro as for the maintenance of our federal union; and I well remember that to many who were burning to see our country purged of the folly and iniquity of negro slavery this used to seem like taking a low and unrighteous view of the case. From the stand-point of universal history it was nevertheless the correct and proper view. The emancipation of the negro, as an incidental result of the struggle, was a priceless gain which was greeted warmly by all right-minded people. But deeper down than this question, far more subtly interwoven with the innermost fibres of our national well-being, far heavier laden too with weighty consequences for the future weal of all mankind, was the question whether this great pacific principle of union joined with independence should be overthrown by the first deep-seated social difficulty it had to encounter, or should stand as an example of priceless value to other ages and to other lands. The solution was well worth the effort it cost. There have been many useless wars, but this was not one of them, for more than most wars that have been, it was fought in the direct interest of peace, and the victory so dearly purchased and so humanely used was an earnest of future peace and happiness for the world.
The object, therefore, for which the American government fought, was the perpetual maintenance of that peculiar state of things which the federal union had created,—a state of things in which, throughout the whole vast territory over which the Union holds sway, questions between states, like questions between individuals, must be settled by legal argument and judicial decisions and not by wager of battle. Far better to demonstrate this point once for all, at whatever cost, than to be burdened hereafter, like the states of Europe, with frontier fortresses and standing armies and all the barbaric apparatus of mutual suspicion! For so great an end did this most pacific people engage in an obstinate war, and never did any war so thoroughly illustrate how military power may be wielded, when necessary, by a people that has passed entirely from the military into the industrial stage of civilization. The events falsified all the predictions that were drawn from the contemplation of societies less advanced politically. It was thought that so peaceful a people could not raise a great army on demand; yet within a twelvemonth the government had raised five hundred thousand men by voluntary enlistment. It was thought that a territory involving military operations at points as far apart as Paris and Moscow could never be thoroughly conquered; yet in April 1865 the federal armies might have inarched from end to end of the Gulf States without meeting any force to oppose them. It was thought that the maintenance of a great army would beget a military temper in the Americans and lead to manifestations of Bonapartism,—domestic usurpation and foreign aggression; yet the moment the work was done the great army vanished, and a force of twenty-five thousand men was found sufficient for the military needs of the whole country. It was thought that eleven states which had struggled so hard to escape from the federal tie could not be re-admitted to voluntary co-operation in the general government, but must henceforth be held as conquered territory,—a most dangerous experiment for any free people to try. Yet within a dozen years we find the old federal relations resumed in all their completeness, and the disunion party powerless and discredited in the very states where once it had wrought such mischief. Nay more, we even see a curiously disputed presidential election, in which the votes of the southern states were given almost with unanimity to one of the candidates, decided quietly by a court of arbitration; and we see a universal acquiescence in the decision, even in spite of a general belief that an extraordinary combination of legal subtleties resulted in adjudging the presidency to the candidate who was not really elected.
Such has been the result of the first great attempt to break up the federal union in America. It is not probable that another attempt can ever be made with anything like an equal chance of success. Here were eleven states, geographically contiguous, governed by groups of men who for half a century had pursued a well-defined policy in common, united among themselves and marked off from most of the other states by a difference far more deeply rooted in the groundwork of society than any mere economic difference,—the difference between slave-labour and free-labour. These eleven states, moreover, held such an economic relationship with England that they counted upon compelling the naval power of England to be used in their behalf. And finally it had not yet been demonstrated that the maintenance of the federal union was something for which the great mass of the people would cheerfully fight. Never could the experiment of secession be tried, apparently, under fairer auspices; yet how tremendous the defeat! It was a defeat that wrought conviction,—the conviction that no matter how grave the political questions that may arise hereafter, they must be settled in accordance with the legal methods the Constitution has provided, and that no state can be allowed to break the peace. It is the thoroughness of this conviction that has so greatly facilitated the reinstatement of the revolted states in their old federal relations; and the good sense and good faith with which the southern people, in spite of the chagrin of defeat, have accepted the situation and acted upon it, is something unprecedented in history, and calls for the warmest sympathy and admiration on the part of their brethren of the north. The federal principle in America has passed through this fearful ordeal and come out stronger than ever; and we trust it will not again be put to so severe a test. But with this principle unimpaired, there is no reason why any further increase of territory or of population should overtask the resources of our government.
In the United States of America a century hence we shall therefore doubtless have a political aggregation immeasurably surpassing in power and in dimensions any empire that has as yet existed. But we must now consider for a moment the probable future career of the English race in other parts of the world. The colonization of North America by Englishmen had its direct effects upon the eastern as well as upon the western side of the Atlantic. The immense growth of the commercial and naval strength of England between the time of Cromwell and the time of the elder Pitt was intimately connected with the colonization of North America and the establishment of plantations in the West Indies. These circumstances reacted powerfully upon the material development of England, multiplying manifold the dimensions of her foreign trade, increasing proportionately her commercial marine, and giving her in the eighteenth century the dominion
If we look next to Australia, we find a country of more than two-thirds the area of the United States, with a temperate climate and immense resources, agricultural and mineral,—a country sparsely peopled by a race of irredeemable savages hardly above the level of brutes. Here England within the present century has planted six greatly thriving states, concerning which I have not time to say much, but one fact will serve as a specimen. When in America we wish to illustrate in one word the wonderful growth of our so-called north-western states, we refer to Chicago,—a city of half-a-million inhabitants standing on a spot which fifty years ago was an uninhabited marsh. In Australia the city of Melbourne was founded in 1837, the year when the present queen of England began to reign, and the state of which it is the capital was hence called Victoria. This city, now[16] just forty-three years old, has a population half as great as that of Chicago, has a public library of 200,000 volumes, and has a university with at least
It is not necessary to dwell upon such considerations as these. It is enough to point to the general conclusion, that the work which the English race began when it colonized North America is destined to go on until every land on the earth’s surface that is not already the seat of an old civilization shall become English in its language, in its political habits and traditions, and to a predominant extent in the blood of its people. The day is at hand when, four-fifths of the human race will trace its pedigree to English forefathers, as four-fifths of the white people in the United States trace their pedigree to-day. The race thus spread over both hemispheres, and from the rising to the setting sun, will not fail to keep that sovereignty of the sea and that commercial supremacy which it began to acquire when England first stretched its arm across the Atlantic to the shores of Virginia and Massachusetts. The language spoken by these great communities will not be sundered into dialects like the language of the ancient Romans, but perpetual intercommunication and the universal habit of reading and writing will preserve its integrity; and the world’s business will be transacted by English-speaking people to so great an extent, that whatever language any man may have learned in his infancy he will find it necessary sooner or later to learn to express his thoughts in English. And in this way it is by no means improbable that, as Grimm the German and Candolle the Frenchman long since foretold, the language of Shakespeare may ultimately become the language of mankind.
In view of these considerations as to the stupendous future of the English race, does it not seem very probable that in due course of time Europe—which has learned some valuable lessons from America already—will find it worth while to adopt the lesson of federalism? Probably the European states, in order to preserve their relative weight in the general polity of the world, will find it necessary to do so. In that most critical period of American history between the winning of independence and the framing of the Constitution, one of the strongest of the motives which led the confederated states to sacrifice part of their sovereignty
Now a century hence, with a population of six hundred millions in the United States, and a hundred and fifty millions in Australia and New Zealand, to say nothing of the increase of power in other parts of the English-speaking world, the relative weights will be very different from what they were in 1788. The population of Europe will not increase in anything like the same proportion, and a very considerable part of the increase will be transferred by emigration to the English-speaking world outside of Europe. By the end of the twentieth century such nations as France and Germany can only claim such a relative position in the political world as Holland and Switzerland now occupy. Their greatness in thought and scholarship, in industrial and aesthetic art, will doubtless continue unabated. But their political weights will severally have come to be insignificant; and as we now look back, with historic curiosity, to the days when Holland was navally and commercially the rival of England, so people will then need to be reminded that there was actually once a time when little France was the most powerful nation on the earth. It will then become as desirable for the states of Europe to enter into a federal union as it was for the states of North America a century ago.
It is only by thus adopting the lesson of federalism that Europe can do away with the chances of useless warfare which remain so long as its different states own no allegiance to any common authority. War, as we have seen, is with barbarous races both a necessity and a favourite occupation. As long as civilization comes into contact with barbarism, it remains a too frequent necessity. But as between civilized and Christian nations it is a wretched absurdity. One sympathizes keenly with wars such as that which Russia has lately concluded, for setting free a kindred race endowed with capacity for progress, and for humbling the worthless barbarian who during four centuries has wrought such incalculable damage to the European world. But a sanguinary struggle for the Rhine frontier, between two civilized Christian nations who have each enough work to do in ithe world without engaging in such a strife as this, will, I am sure, be by and by condemned by the general opinion of mankind. Such questions will have to be settled by discussion
Thus we may foresee in general outline how, through the gradual concentration of the preponderance of physical power into the hands of the most pacific communities, the wretched business of warfare must finally become obsolete all over the globe. The element of distance is now fast becoming eliminated from political problems, and the history of human progress politically will continue in the future to be what it has been in the past,—the history of the successive union of groups of men into larger and more complex aggregates. As this process goes on, it may after many more ages of political experience become apparent that there is really no reason, in the nature of things, why the whole of mankind should not constitute politically one huge federation,—each little group managing its local affairs in entire independence, but relegating all questions of international interest to the decision of one central tribunal supported by the public opinion of the entire human race. I believe that the time will come when such a state of things will exist upon the earth, when it will
[Footnote 1: Freeman, “Norman Conquest,” v. 482.]
[Footnote 2: Freeman, “Comparative Politics,” 264.]
[Footnote 3: This is disputed, however. See Ross, “Early History of Landholding among the Germans.”]
[Footnote 4: Stubbs, “Constitutional History,” i. 84.]
[Footnote 5: Kemble, “Saxons in England,” i. 59.]
[Footnote 6: Maine, “Village Communities,” Lond., 1871, p. 132.]
[Footnote 7: Stubbs, “Constitutional History,” i. 85.]
[Footnote 8: Freeman, “Comparative Politics,” 118.]
[Footnote 9: Geffroy, “Rome et les Barbares,” 209.]
[Footnote 10: Maine, “Village Communities,” 118.]
[Footnote 11: Stubbs, “Constitutional History,” i. 625.]
[Footnote 12: Stubbs, “Select Charters,” 401.]
[Footnote 13: “La Cite Antique,” 441.]
[Footnote 14: Arnold, “Roman Provincial Administration,” 237.]
[Footnote 15: Stubbs, “Select Charters,” 401.]
[Footnote 16: In 1880.]
Abderrahman
Achaian league
Aden
Adoption
Aetolian league
Africa, English colonies in
Albany Congress
Amphiktyonic Council
Angeln
Angles
Anglo-American
Anglo-Saxon
Appomattox
Arable mark
Ariovistus
Armada, the Invincible
Armies of Europe will be disbanded
Arminius
Arnold, M.
Asiaticization
Athens, grandeur of
incorporated demes of Attika,
old tribal divisions modified,
school of political training
maritime empire of
Attila
Australia
Austria
Baker, Sir S.
Bancroft, Hubert
Barons, war of the
Basileus
Batu
Belgium
Benefices
Bern
Bonaparte, N.
Bonapartism
Boroughs, special privileges of
Boston, growth of
its Common
Boundaries of United States
Burgundians
By-laws
Caesar, J.
California, social experiments in
Canada under Old Regime
Candolle, A. de,
Canton,
Carlyle on dollar-hunters,
Centralized government, weakness of,
Century,
Ceylon,
Chalons, battle of,
Charles I.,
Charles the Bold,
Charles Martel,
Charles the Great,
Chatham, Lord,
Chester,
Chicago,
Chinese,
Christianity,
Church, mediaeval,
Cities in England and America,
origin of,
City, the ancient,
Civilization, its primary phase,
long threatened by neighbouring barbarism,
Clan-system of political union,
Claudius, emperor,
Clement IV.,
Cleveland, city of.
Colenso, J.W.
Colonies, how founded,
Comitia,
Commendation,
Commons, House of,
Commons, origin of,
Communal farming in England,
Communal landholding,
Competition, industrial, between Europe and America,
Confederation, articles of,
Connecticut, men of, defy James II.,
Constitution of the United States,
Continentals and British,
Cromwell, O.,
Curia,
Delian confederacy,
Derne,
Departments of France,
Dependencies, danger of governing them despotically,
Didius Julianus,
Diocletian,
Domestic service in a New England village,
Dorset,
Dover, men of, throw papal bull into sea,
Duke,
Dutch republic,
Ealdorman,
Ecclesia,
Eden, Chuzzlewit’s,
Electoral commission,
Emancipation of slaves,
England, maritime supremacy of
English colonization
language, future of
self-government, how preserved,
villages
Famines
Federal union on great scale,
conditions of
its durableness lies in its flexibility
Federalism, pacific implications of
will be adopted by Europe
Federation and conquest
Federations in Greece
Feudal system, origin of
Fick, A.
France, political development of
contrasted with England as a colonizer
France and Germany, their late war
their political weight a century hence
Francis I.
Franklin, B.
Franks
Freeman, E.A.
Freiburg
French villages
Gau
Gaul, Roman conquest of
Geneva
Gens
Georgia
Germany conquered and converted by Charles the Great
Gibraltar
Goths
Great states, method of forming,
notion of their having an inherent tendency
to break up
difficulty of forming
Grimm, J.
Haddon Hall
Hamburg
Hamilton, A.
Hampden, J.
Hannibal’s invasion of Italy
Hearn, Professor
Henry VIII.
Heretoga
Hindustan, village communities in
cities in
Holland
Howard of Effingham
Hundred
Hungary
Hunnish invasion of Europe
Incorporation
Iroquois tribes
James II.
Jinghis Khan,
Judiciary, federal,
Kansas,
Kemble, J.,
Kingship among ancient Teutons,
La Salle, R.,
Lausanne,
Leo’s defeat of the Saracens,
Lewes, battle of,
Liegnitz, battle of,
Lincoln, A.,
Lincoln, city of,
Livingstone, Dr.,
Lombards,
London, growth of,
Louis VI.,
Louis XIV.,
Madison, J.,
Maine, Sir II.,
Maintz,
Malta,
Manorial courts,
Manors, origin of,
March meetings in New England,
Marius, C.,
Mark,
in England,
meaning of the word,
Mark-mote,
Massachusetts,
May assemblies in Switzerland,
Melbourne, city of,
Middle Ages, turbulence of,
Military strength of civilized world, its increase,
Minnesota,
Mir, or Russian village,
Mongolian Khans in Russia,
Mongols,
Montenegro,
Montfort, S. de,
Naseby, battle of,
Navies less dangerous than standing armies,
Nebraska,
Nelson’s statue in Trafalgar Square,
Nevada,
New England confederacy,
New York,
New Zealand,
Norman conquest,
North America, struggle for possession of,
Omar,
Pagus,
Paris, American dinner-party in,
Parish, its relation to township,
Parkman, F.
Pax romana
Peace of the world, how secured,
Peerage of England
Peloponnesian war
Persian war against Greece
Pestilences
Petersham
Philip, King
Phratries
Pictet, A.
Poland
Pontiac
Population of United States a century hence
Private property in land
Problem of political civilization
Protestantism and Catholicism, political question
at stake between
Prussia conquered by Teutonic knights
Puritanism
Puritans of New England, their origin
Rebellion against Charles I.
Redivision of arable lands
Re-election of town officers
Representation unknown to Greeks and Romans
origin of
federal, in United States
Rex
Rhode Island
Roman law
Rome, plebeian revolution at
early stages of
secret of its power
advantages of its dominion
causes of its political failure,
powerful influence of, in Middle Ages
meaning of its great wars
Roses, wars of the
Ross, D.
Russia, Mongolian conquest of
village communities in
its late war against the Turks
its despotic government contrasted with
that of France under Old Regime
SARACENS
Scandinavia
Secession, war of
Selectmen
Self-government preserved in England
lost in France
Shakespeare
Shires
Shottery, cottage at
Smith, J.
Social war
South Carolina
Spain, Roman conquest of
Sparta
State sovereignty in America
Strasburg
Strategic position of England
Stubbs, W.
Suez
Swiss cantonal assemblies
Switzerland, lesson of its history
self-government preserved in
Tacitus
Tariff in America
Tax-taking despotisms
Tennyson, A.
Teutonic civilization contrasted with Graeco-Roman
Teutonic knights
Teutonic village communities
Texas
Thegnhood
Thirty Years’ War
Thukydides
Tocqueville
Tourist in United States
Town, meaning of the word
Town-meetings, origin of
Town-names formed from patronymics
Township in New England,
in western states
Tribe and shire
Turks
Versailles
Vestry-meetings
Victoria, Australia
Village-mark
Villages of New England
Virginia, parishes in
Visigoths
Wallace, D.M.
War of independence
Warfare, universal in early times
how diminished
interferes with political development
less destructive now than in ancient times
how effectively waged by the most pacific
of peoples
Washington, city of
Washington, G.
William III.
Witenagemote
Wolfe’s victory at Quebec
Yorktown