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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10112 ***
+
+AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEAS
+
+VIEWED FROM THE STANDPOINT OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY
+
+Three Lectures
+
+DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN IN MAY 1880
+
+BY JOHN FISKE
+
+_Voici un fait entièrement nouveau dans le monde, et dont l'imagination
+elle-même ne saurait saisir la portée._
+
+
+TOCQUEVILLE
+
+
+TO
+
+EDWARD LIVINGSTON YOUMANS
+
+NOBLEST OF MEN AND DEAREST OF FRIENDS
+
+WHOSE UNSELFISH AND UNTIRING WORK IN EDUCATING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN
+THE PRINCIPLES OF SOUND PHILOSOPHY DESERVES THE GRATITUDE OF ALL MEN
+
+I dedicate this Book
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+In the spring of 1879 I gave at the Old South Meeting-house in Boston a
+course of lectures on the discovery and colonization of America, and
+presently, through the kindness of my friend Professor Huxley, the
+course was repeated at University College in London. The lectures there
+were attended by very large audiences, and awakened such an interest in
+American history that I was invited to return to England in the
+following year and treat of some of the philosophical aspects of my
+subject in a course of lectures at the Royal Institution.
+
+In the three lectures which were written in response to this invitation,
+and which are now published in this little volume, I have endeavoured to
+illustrate some of the fundamental ideas of American politics by setting
+forth their relations to the general history of mankind. It is
+impossible thoroughly to grasp the meaning of any group of facts, in any
+department of study, until we have duly compared them with allied groups
+of facts; and the political history of the American people can be
+rightly understood only when it is studied in connection with that
+general process of political evolution which has been going on from the
+earliest times, and of which it is itself one of the most important and
+remarkable phases. The government of the United States is not the result
+of special creation, but of evolution. As the town-meetings of New
+England are lineally descended from the village assemblies of the early
+Aryans; as our huge federal union was long ago foreshadowed in the
+little leagues of Greek cities and Swiss cantons; so the great political
+problem which we are (thus far successfully) solving is the very same
+problem upon which all civilized peoples have been working ever since
+civilization began. How to insure peaceful concerted action throughout
+the Whole, without infringing upon local and individual freedom in the
+Parts,--this has ever been the chief aim of civilization, viewed on its
+political side; and we rate the failure or success of nations
+politically according to their failure or success in attaining this
+supreme end. When thus considered in the light of the comparative
+method, our American history acquires added dignity and interest, and a
+broad and rational basis is secured for the detailed treatment of
+political questions.
+
+When viewed in this light, moreover, not only does American history
+become especially interesting to Englishmen, but English history is
+clothed with fresh interest for Americans. Mr. Freeman has done well in
+insisting upon the fact that the history of the English people does not
+begin with the Norman Conquest. In the deepest and widest sense, our
+American history does not begin with the Declaration of Independence, or
+even with the settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth; but it descends in
+unbroken continuity from the days when stout Arminius in the forests of
+northern Germany successfully defied the might of imperial Rome. In a
+more restricted sense, the statesmanship of Washington and Lincoln
+appears in the noblest light when regarded as the fruition of the
+various work of De Montfort and Cromwell and Chatham. The good fight
+begun at Lewes and continued at Naseby and Quebec was fitly crowned at
+Yorktown and at Appomattox. When we duly realize this, and further come
+to see how the two great branches of the English race have the common
+mission of establishing throughout the larger part of the earth a higher
+civilization and more permanent political order than any that has gone
+before, we shall the better understand the true significance of the
+history which English-speaking men have so magnificently wrought out
+upon American soil.
+
+In dealing concisely with a subject so vast, only brief hints and
+suggestions can be expected; and I have not thought it worth while, for
+the present at least, to change or amplify the manner of treatment. The
+lectures are printed exactly as they were delivered at the Royal
+Institution, more than four years ago. On one point of detail some
+change will very likely by and by be called for. In the lecture on the
+Town-meeting I have adopted the views of Sir Henry Maine as to the
+common holding of the arable land in the ancient German mark, and as to
+the primitive character of the periodical redistribution of land in the
+Russian village community. It now seems highly probable that these views
+will have to undergo serious modification in consequence of the valuable
+evidence lately brought forward by my friend Mr. Denman Ross, in his
+learned and masterly treatise on "The Early History of Landholding among
+the Germans;" but as I am not yet quite clear as to how far this
+modification will go, and as it can in nowise affect the general drift
+of my argument, I have made no change in my incidental remarks on this
+difficult and disputed question.
+
+In describing some of the characteristic features of country life in New
+England, I had especially in mind the beautiful mountain village in
+which this preface is written, and in which for nearly a quarter of a
+century I have felt myself more at home than in any other spot in
+the world.
+
+In writing these lectures, designed as they were for a special occasion,
+no attempt was made to meet the ordinary requirements of popular
+audiences; yet they have been received in many places with unlooked-for
+favour. The lecture on "Manifest Destiny" was three times repeated in
+London, and once in Edinburgh; seven times in Boston; four times in New
+York; twice in Brooklyn, N.Y., Plainfield, N.J., and Madison, Wis.; once
+in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati,
+Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Milwaukee; in Appleton and Waukesha, Wis.;
+Portland, Lewiston, and Brunswick, Me.; Lowell, Concord, Newburyport,
+Peabody, Stoneham, Maiden, Newton Highlands, and Martha's Vineyard,
+Mass.; Middletown and Stamford, Conn.; Newburg and Poughkeepsie, N.Y.;
+Orange, N.J.; and at Cornell University and Haverford College. In
+several of these places the course was given.
+
+PETERSHAM, _September 13, 1884_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I.
+
+_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 Régime. 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.
+
+
+II.
+
+_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_, or assembly of notables. Origin of representative
+government in the Teutonic shire. Representation unknown to the Greeks
+and Romans. The ancient city as a school for political training.
+Intensity of the jealousies and rivalries between adjacent
+self-governing groups of men. Smallness of simple social aggregates and
+universality of warfare in primitive times. For the formation of larger
+and more complex social aggregates, only two methods are
+practicable,--_conquest_ or _federation_. Greek attempts at employing
+the higher method, that of federation. The Athenian hegemony and its
+overthrow. The Achaian and Aetolian leagues. In a low stage of political
+development the Roman method of _conquest with incorporation_ was the
+only one practicable. Peculiarities of the Roman conquest of Italy.
+Causes of the universal dominion of Rome. Advantages and disadvantages
+of this dominion:--on the one hand the _pax romana_, and the breaking
+down of primitive local superstitions and prejudices; on the other hand
+the partial extinction of local self-government. Despotism inevitable in
+the absence of representation. Causes of the political failure of the
+Roman system. Partial reversion of Europe, between the fifth and
+eleventh centuries, towards a more primitive type of social structure.
+Power of Rome still wielded through the Church and the imperial
+jurisprudence. Preservation of local self-government in England, and at
+the two ends of the Rhine. The Dutch and Swiss federations. The lesson
+to be learned from Switzerland. Federation on a great scale could only
+be attempted successfully by men of English political training, when
+working without let or hindrance in a vast country not preoccupied by an
+old civilization. Without local self-government a great Federal Union is
+impossible. Illustrations from American history. Difficulty of the
+problem, and failure of the early attempts at federation in New
+England. Effects of the war for independence. The "Articles of
+Confederation" and the "Constitution." Pacific implications of American
+federalism.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+"_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 peace of the world will ultimately be secured. Illustrations
+from the early struggles of European civilization with outer barbarism,
+and with aggressive civilizations of lower type. Greece and Persia.
+Keltic and Teutonic enemies of Rome. The defensible frontier of European
+civilization carried northward and eastward to the Rhine by Caesar; to
+the Oder by Charles the Great; to the Vistula by the Teutonic Knights;
+to the Volga and the Oxus by the Russians. Danger in the Dark Ages from
+Huns and Mongols on the one hand, from Mussulmans on the other. Immense
+increase of the area and physical strength of European civilization,
+which can never again be in danger from outer barbarism. Effect of all
+this secular turmoil upon the political institutions of Europe. It
+hindered the formation of closely coherent nations, and was at the same
+time an obstacle to the preservation of popular liberties. Tendency
+towards the _Asiaticization_ of European life. Opposing influences of
+the Church, and of the Germanic tribal organizations. Military type of
+society on the Continent. Old Aryan self-government happily preserved in
+England. Strategic position of England favourable to the early
+elimination of warfare from her soil. Hence the exceptionally normal and
+plastic political development of the English race. Significant
+coincidence of the discovery of America with the beginnings of the
+Protestant revolt against the asiaticizing tendency. Significance of the
+struggle between Spain, France, and England for the possession of an
+enormous area of virgin soil which should insure to the conqueror an
+unprecedented opportunity for future development. The race which gained
+control of North America must become the dominant race of the world, and
+its political ideas must prevail in the struggle for life. Moral
+significance of the rapid increase of the English race in America.
+Fallacy of the notion that centralized governments are needed for very
+large nations. It is only through federalism, combined with local
+self-government, that the stability of so huge an aggregate as the
+United States can be permanently maintained. What the American
+government really fought for in the late Civil War. Magnitude of the
+results achieved. Unprecedented military strength shown by this most
+pacific and industrial of peoples. Improbability of any future attempt
+to break up the Federal Union. Stupendous future of the English
+race,--in Africa, in Australia, and in the islands of the Pacific
+Ocean. Future of the English language. Probable further adoption of
+federalism. Probable effects upon Europe of industrial competition with
+the United States: impossibility of keeping up the present military
+armaments. The States of Europe will be forced, by pressure of
+circumstances, into some kind of federal union. A similar process will
+go on until the whole of mankind shall constitute a single political
+body, and warfare shall disappear forever from the face of the earth.
+
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEAS.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+_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 Ivánofka 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 away, is at least
+becoming so rapidly modified as to afford a theme for grave reflections
+to those who have learned how to appreciate its value. As any
+far-reaching change in the condition of landed property in England, due
+to agricultural causes, might seriously affect the position of one of
+the noblest and most useful aristocracies that has ever existed; so, on
+the other hand, as we consider the possible action of similar causes
+upon the _personnel_ and upon the occupations of rural New England, we
+are unwillingly forced to contemplate the possibility of a
+deterioration in the character of the most perfect democracy the world
+has ever seen.
+
+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 at all like it, one must go to something
+very different from a village. As you stand in the Court of Heroes at
+Versailles and look down the broad and noble avenue that leads to
+Paris, the effect of the vista is much like that of a New England
+village street. As American villages grow into cities, the increase in
+the value of land usually tends to crowd the houses together into blocks
+as in a European city. But in some of our western cities founded and
+settled by people from New England, this spacious fashion of building
+has been retained for streets occupied by dwelling-houses. In
+Cleveland--a city on the southern shore of Lake Erie, with a population
+about equal to that of Edinburgh--there is a street some five or six
+miles in length and five hundred feet in width, bordered on each side
+with a double row of arching trees, and with handsome stone houses, of
+sufficient variety and freedom in architectural design, standing at
+intervals of from one to two hundred feet along the entire length of the
+street. The effect, it is needless to add, is very noble indeed. The
+vistas remind one of the nave and aisles of a huge cathedral.
+
+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 are supported at the common charge; and there will
+be one tavern where it is not easy to find anything stronger to drink
+than light beer or cider. The danger from thieves is so slight that it
+is not always thought necessary to fasten the outer doors of the house
+at night. The universality of literary culture is as remarkable as the
+freedom with which all persons engage in manual labour. The village of a
+thousand inhabitants will be very likely to have a public circulating
+library, in which you may find Professor Huxley's "Lay Sermons" or Sir
+Henry Maine's "Ancient Law": it will surely have a high-school and half
+a dozen schools for small children. A person unable to read and write is
+as great a rarity as an albino or a person with six fingers. The farmer
+who threshes his own corn and cuts his own firewood has very likely a
+piano in his family sitting-room, with the _Atlantic Monthly_ on the
+table and Milton and Tennyson, Gibbon and Macaulay on his shelves, while
+his daughter, who has baked bread in the morning, is perhaps ready to
+paint on china in the afternoon. In former times theological questions
+largely occupied the attention of the people; and there is probably no
+part of the world where the Bible has been more attentively read, or
+where the mysteries of Christian doctrine have to so great an extent
+been made the subject of earnest discussion in every household. Hence we
+find in the New England of to-day a deep religious sense combined with
+singular flexibility of mind and freedom of thought.
+
+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 and social scale." Of the
+far-reaching effects of this change upon the whole subsequent history of
+the English race I shall hereafter have occasion to speak. The proximate
+effect was that "the ancient lords of the soil, thus thrust down into
+the second rank, formed that great body of freeholders, the stout gentry
+and yeomanry of England, who were for so many ages the strength of the
+land." [2] It was from this ancient thegnhood that the Puritan settlers
+of New England were mainly descended. It is no unusual thing for a
+Massachusetts family to trace its pedigree to a lord of the manor in the
+thirteenth or fourteenth century. The leaders of the New England
+emigration were country gentlemen of good fortune, similar in position
+to such men as Hampden and Cromwell; a large proportion of them had
+taken degrees at Cambridge. The rank and file were mostly intelligent
+and prosperous yeomen. The lowest ranks of society were not represented
+in the emigration; and all idle, shiftless, or disorderly people were
+rigorously refused admission into the new communities, the early history
+of which was therefore singularly free from anything like riot or
+mutiny. To an extent unparalleled, therefore, in the annals of
+colonization, the settlers of New England were a body of _picked men_.
+Their Puritanism was the natural outcome of their free-thinking,
+combined with an earnestness of character which could constrain them to
+any sacrifices needful for realizing their high ideal of life. They gave
+up pleasant homes in England, and they left them with no feeling of
+rancour towards their native land, in order that, by dint of whatever
+hardship, they might establish in the American wilderness what should
+approve itself to their judgment as a god-fearing community. It matters
+little that their conceptions were in some respects narrow. In the
+unflinching adherence to duty which prompted their enterprise, and in
+the sober intelligence with which it was carried out, we have, as I said
+before, the key to what is best in the history of the American people.
+
+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 the woodlands surrounding it. In later days
+two or more villages have often grown up within the limits of the same
+township, and the road from one village to another is sometimes bordered
+with homesteads and cultivated fields throughout nearly its whole
+length. In the neighbourhood of Boston villages and small towns crowd
+closely together for twenty miles in every direction; and all these will
+no doubt by and by grow together into a vast and complicated city, in
+somewhat the same way that London has grown.
+
+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 of agricultural pursuits the nomadic mode of
+life is brought to an end, when the clan remains stationary upon some
+piece of territory surrounded by a strip of forest-land, or other
+boundaries natural or artificial, then the clan becomes a
+mark-community. The profound linguistic researches of Pictet, Fick, and
+others have made it probable that at the time when the Old-Aryan
+language was broken up into the dialects from which the existing
+languages of Europe are descended, the Aryan tribes were passing from a
+purely pastoral stage of barbarism into an incipient agricultural stage,
+somewhat like that which characterized the Iroquois tribes in America in
+the seventeenth century. The comparative study of institutions leads to
+results in harmony with this view, showing us the mark-community of our
+Teutonic ancestors with the clear traces of its origin in the more
+primitive clan; though, with Mr. Kemble, I do not doubt that by the time
+of Tacitus the German tribes had long since reached the
+agricultural stage.
+
+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 divided
+into as many fields as there were households, though the division was
+probably not into equal parts: more likely, as in Russia to-day, the
+number of labourers in each household was taken into the account; and at
+irregular intervals, as fluctuations in population seemed to require it,
+a thorough-going redivision was effected. In carrying out such
+divisions and redivisions, as well as in all matters relating to
+village, ploughed field, or pasture, the mark-community was a law unto
+itself. Though individual freedom was by no means considerable, the
+legal existence of the individual being almost entirely merged in that
+of his clan, the mark-community was a completely self-governing body.
+The assembly of the mark-men, or members of the community, allotted land
+for tillage, determined the law or declared the custom as to methods of
+tillage, fixed the dates for sowing and reaping, voted upon the
+admission of new families into the village, and in general transacted
+what was then regarded as the public business of the community. In all
+essential respects this village assembly or _mark-mote_ would seem to
+have resembled the town-meetings of New England.
+
+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 of its powers has never been determined by legislation, and
+(according to Mr. Wallace) "there is no means of appealing against its
+decisions." To those who are in the habit of regarding Russia simply as
+a despotically-governed country, such a statement may seem surprising.
+To those who, because the Russian government is called a bureaucracy,
+have been led to think of it as analogous to the government of France
+under the Old Régime, it may seem incredible that the decisions of a
+village-assembly should not admit of appeal to a higher authority. But
+in point of fact, no two despotic governments could be less alike than
+that of modern Russia and that of France under the Old Régime. The
+Russian government is autocratic inasmuch as over the larger part of the
+country it has simply succeeded to the position of the Mongolian khans
+who from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century held the Russian people
+in subjection. This Mongolian government was--to use a happy distinction
+suggested by Sir Henry Maine--a tax-taking despotism, not a legislative
+despotism. The conquerors exacted tribute, but did not interfere with
+the laws and customs of the subject people. When the Russians drove out
+the Mongols they exchanged a despotism which they hated for one in
+which they felt a national pride, but in one curious respect the
+position of the people with reference to their rulers has remained the
+same. The imperial government exacts from each village-community a tax
+in gross, for which the community as a whole is responsible, and which
+may or may not be oppressive in amount; but the government has never
+interfered with local legislation or with local customs. Thus in the
+_mir_, or village-community, the Russians still retain an element of
+sound political life, the importance of which appears when we consider
+that five-sixths of the population of European Russia is comprised in
+these communities. The tax assessed upon them by the imperial government
+is, however, a feature which--even more than their imperfect system of
+property and their low grade of mental culture--separates them by a
+world-wide interval from the New England township, to the primeval
+embryonic stage of which they correspond.
+
+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_ "the town of the Harlings," etc.,[5] we have unimpeachable
+evidence of a time when the town was regarded as the dwelling-place of a
+clan. Indeed, the comparative rarity of the word _mark_ in English laws,
+charters, and local names (to which Professor Stubbs alludes) may be due
+to the fact that the word _town_ has precisely the same meaning. _Mark_
+means originally the belt of waste land encircling the village, and
+secondarily the village with its periphery. _Town_ means originally a
+hedge or enclosure, and secondarily the spot that is enclosed: the
+modern German _zaun_, a "hedge," preserves the original meaning. But
+traces of the mark in England are not found in etymology alone. I have
+already alluded to the origin of the "common" in English towns. What is
+still more important is that in some parts of England cultivation in
+common has continued until quite recently. The local legislation of the
+mark appears in the _tunscipesmot_,--a word which is simply Old-English
+for "town-meeting." In the shires where the Danes acquired a firm
+foothold, the township was often called a "by"; and it had the power of
+enacting its own "by-laws" or town-laws, as New England townships have
+to-day. But above all, the assembly of the markmen has left vestiges of
+itself in the constitution of the parish and the manor. The mark or
+township, transformed by the process of feudalization, becomes the
+manor. The process of feudalization, throughout western Europe in
+general, was no doubt begun by the institution of Benefices, or "grants
+of Roman provincial land by the chieftains of the" Teutonic "tribes
+which overran the Roman Empire; such grants being conferred on their
+associates upon certain conditions, of which the commonest was military
+service." [6] The feudal régime naturally reached its most complete
+development in France, which affords the most perfect example of a Roman
+territory overrun and permanently held in possession by Teutonic
+conquerors. Other causes assisted the process, the most potent perhaps
+being the chaotic condition of European society during the break-up of
+the Carolingian Empire and the Scandinavian and Hungarian invasions.
+Land was better protected when held of a powerful chieftain than when
+held in one's own right; and hence the practice of commendation, by
+which free allodial proprietors were transformed into the tenants of a
+lord, became fashionable and was gradually extended to all kinds of
+estates. In England the effects of feudalization were different from
+what they were in France, but the process was still carried very far,
+especially under the Norman kings. The theory grew up that all the
+public land in the kingdom was the king's waste, and that all
+landholders were the king's tenants. Similarly in every township the
+common land was the lord's waste and the landholders were the lord's
+tenants. Thus the township became transformed into the manor. Yet even
+by such a change as this the townsmen or tenants of the manor did not in
+England lose their self-government. "The encroachments of the lord," as
+Sir Henry Maine observes, "were in proportion to the want of certainty
+in the rights of the community." The lord's proprietorship gave him no
+authority to disturb customary rights. The old township-assembly
+partially survived in the Court Baron, Court Leet, and Customary Court
+of the Manor; and in these courts the arrangements for the common
+husbandry were determined.
+
+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; but of these
+there are two which may be cited as especially prominent. In the first
+place, owing to the peculiar circumstances of the Teutonic settlement of
+Britain, the civilization of England previous to the Norman Conquest was
+but little affected by Roman ideas or institutions. In the second place
+the thrusting down of the old thegnhood by the Norman Conquest (to which
+I have already alluded) checked the growth of a _noblesse_ or _adel_ of
+the continental type,--a nobility raised above the common people like a
+separate caste. For the old thegnhood, which might have grown into such
+a caste, was pushed down into a secondary position, and the peerage
+which arose after the Conquest was something different from a
+_noblesse_. It was primarily a nobility of office rather than of rank or
+privilege. The peers were those men who retained the right of summons to
+the Great Council, or Witenagemote, which has survived as the House of
+Lords. The peer was therefore the holder of a legislative and judicial
+office, which only one of his children could inherit, from the very
+nature of the case, and which none of his children could share with him.
+Hence the brothers and younger children of a peer were always commoners,
+and their interests were not remotely separated from those of other
+commoners. Hence after the establishment of a House of Commons, their
+best chance for a political career lay in representing the interests of
+the people in the lower house. Hence between the upper and lower strata
+of English society there has always been kept up a circulation or
+interchange of ideas and interests, and the effect of this upon English
+history has been prodigious. While on the continent a sovereign like
+Charles the Bold could use his nobility to extinguish the liberties of
+the merchant towns of Flanders, nothing of the sort was ever possible in
+England. Throughout the Middle Ages, in every contest between the people
+and the crown, the weight of the peerage was thrown into the scale in
+favour of popular liberties. But for this peculiar position of the
+peerage we might have had no Earl Simon; it is largely through it that
+representative government and local liberties have been preserved to the
+English race.
+
+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 and
+religion of their intensely romanized subjects and acquired to some
+extent their way of looking at things. Hence in the early history of
+France there was no such stubborn mass of old Aryan liberties to be
+dealt with as in the early history of England. Nor was there any
+powerful middle class distributed through the country to defend such
+liberties as existed. Beneath the turbulent throng of Teutonic nobles,
+among whom the king was only the most exalted and not always the
+strongest, there lay the Gallo-Roman population which had so long been
+accustomed to be ruled without representation by a distant government
+exercising its authority through innumerable prefects. Such Teutonic
+rank and file as there was became absorbed into this population; and
+except in sundry chartered towns there was nothing like a social stratum
+interposed between the nobles and the common people.
+
+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 examples of a despotic government
+that the world has ever seen. All the autocratic and bureaucratic ideas
+of Louis XIV. were here carried out without let or hindrance. It would
+be incredible, were it not attested by such abundant evidence, that the
+affairs of any people could be subjected to such minute and sleepless
+supervision as were the affairs of the French colonists in Canada. A man
+could not even build his own house, or rear his own cattle, or sow his
+own seed, or reap his own grain, save under the supervision of prefects
+acting under instructions from the home government. No one was allowed
+to enter or leave the colony without permission, not from the colonists
+but from the king. No farmer could visit Montreal or Quebec without
+permission. No Huguenot could set his foot on Canadian soil. No public
+meetings of any kind were tolerated, nor were there any means of giving
+expression to one's opinions on any subject. The details of all this,
+which may be read in Mr. Parkman's admirable work on "The Old Regime in
+Canada," make a wonderful chapter of history. Never was a colony,
+moreover, so loaded with bounties, so fostered, petted, and protected.
+The result was absolute paralysis, political and social. When after a
+century of irritation and skirmishing the French in Canada came to a
+life-and-death struggle with the self-governing colonists of New
+England, New York, and Virginia, the result for the French power in
+America was instant and irretrievable annihilation. The town-meeting
+pitted against the bureaucracy was like a Titan overthrowing a cripple.
+The historic lesson owes its value to the fact that this ruin of the
+French scheme of colonial empire was due to no accidental circumstances,
+but was involved in the very nature of the French political system.
+Obviously it is impossible for a people to plant beyond sea a colony
+which shall be self-supporting, unless it has retained intact the power
+of self-government at home. It is to the self-government of England, and
+to no lesser cause, that we are to look for the secret of that boundless
+vitality which has given to men of English speech the uttermost parts of
+the earth for an inheritance. The conquest of Canada first demonstrated
+this truth, and when--in the two following lectures--we shall have made
+some approach towards comprehending its full import, we shall all, I
+think, be ready to admit that the triumph of Wolfe marks the greatest
+turning-point as yet discernible in modern history.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+_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 between the victory of Marathon and the defeat of
+Ægospotamos. In no other like interval of time, and in no other
+community of like dimensions, has so much work been accomplished of
+which we can say with truth that it is [Greek: ktaema es aei],--an
+eternal possession. It is impossible to conceive of a day so distant, or
+an era of culture so exalted, that the lessons taught by Athens shall
+cease to be of value, or that the writings of her great thinkers shall
+cease to be read with fresh profit and delight. We understand these
+things far better to-day than did those monsters of erudition in the
+sixteenth century who studied the classics for philological purposes
+mainly. Indeed, the older the world grows, the more varied our
+experience of practical politics, the more comprehensive our survey of
+universal history, the stronger our grasp upon the comparative method of
+inquiry, the more brilliant is the light thrown upon that brief day of
+Athenian greatness, and the more wonderful and admirable does it all
+seem. To see this glorious community overthrown, shorn of half its
+virtue (to use the Homeric phrase), and thrust down into an inferior
+position in the world, is a mournful spectacle indeed. And the book
+which sets before us, so impartially yet so eloquently, the innumerable
+petty misunderstandings and contemptible jealousies which brought about
+this direful result, is one of the most mournful of books.
+
+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 Græco-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 been either crossed and effaced or at any rate diminished in
+importance by the more highly compounded groups which came next in order
+of formation. Next above the _hundred_, in order of composition, comes
+the group known in ancient Italy as the_pagus_, in Attika perhaps as the
+_deme_, in Germany and at first in England as the _gau_ or _ga_, at a
+later date in England as the _shire_. Whatever its name, this group
+answers to the _tribe_ regarded as settled upon a certain determinate
+territory. Just as in the earlier nomadic life the aggregation of clans
+makes ultimately the tribe, so in the more advanced agricultural life of
+our Aryan ancestors the aggregation of marks or village-communities
+makes ultimately the _gau_ or _shire_. Properly speaking, the name
+_shire_ is descriptive of division and not of aggregation; but this term
+came into use in England after the historic order of formation had been
+forgotten, and when the _shire_ was looked upon as a _piece_ of some
+larger whole, such as the kingdom of Mercia or Wessex. Historically,
+however, the _shire_ was not made, like the _departments_ of modern
+France, by the division of the kingdom for administrative purposes, but
+the kingdom was made by the union of shires that were previously
+autonomous. In the primitive process of aggregation, the _shire_ or
+_gau_, governed by its _witenagemote_ or "meeting of wise men," and by
+its chief magistrate who was called _ealdorman_ in time of peace and
+_heretoga_, "army-leader," _dux_, or _duke_, in time of war,--the
+_shire_, I say, in this form, is the largest and most complex political
+body we find previous to the formation of kingdoms and nations. But in
+saying this, we have already passed beyond the point at which we can
+include in the same general formula the process of political development
+in Teutonic countries on the one hand and in Greece and Rome on the
+other. Up as far as the formation of the tribe, territorially regarded,
+the parallelism is preserved; but at this point there begins an
+all-important divergence. In the looser and more diffused society of the
+rural Teutons, the tribe is spread over a shire, and the aggregation of
+shires makes a kingdom, embracing cities, towns, and rural districts
+held together by similar bonds of relationship to the central governing
+power. But in the society of the old Greeks and Italians, the
+aggregation of tribes, crowded together on fortified hill-tops, makes
+the _Ancient City_,--a very different thing, indeed, from the modern
+city of later-Roman or Teutonic foundation. Let us consider, for a
+moment, the difference.
+
+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 of the Teutonic city. And they were,
+moreover, posterior in date to that embryonic period of national growth
+of which I am now speaking. They do not affect in any way the
+correctness of my general statement, which is sufficiently illustrated
+by the fact that the oldest shire-motes, or county-assemblies, were
+attended by representatives from all the townships and hundreds in the
+shire, whether such townships and hundreds formed parts of boroughs
+or not.
+
+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 enlarged, and public harmony was secured; but Athenian burghership
+still remained a privilege which could not be acquired by the native of
+any other city. Similar revolutions, with a similarly limited purpose
+and result, occurred at Sparta, Elis, and other Greek cities. At Rome,
+by a like revolution, the plebeians of the Capitoline and Aventine
+acquired parallel rights of citizenship with the patricians of the
+original city on the Palatine; but this revolution, as we shall
+presently see, had different results, leading ultimately to the
+overthrow of the city-system throughout the ancient world.
+
+The deep-seated difference between the Teutonic political system based
+on the shire and the Græco-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
+who were summoned by Earl Simon to the famous parliament of 1265, as
+well as of the two knights from each shire whom the king had summoned
+eleven years before. In these four discreet men sent to speak for their
+township in the old county assembly, we have the germ of institutions
+that have ripened into the House of Commons and into the legislatures of
+modern kingdoms and republics. In the system of representation thus
+inaugurated lay the future possibility of such gigantic political
+aggregates as the United States of America.
+
+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 tyrant; in other words
+she virtually enslaved the subject city. The efforts of Athens tended
+more in the direction of a peaceful federalism. In the great Delian
+confederacy which developed into the maritime empire of Athens, the
+Ægean cities were treated as allies rather than subjects. As regards
+their local affairs they were in no way interfered with, and could they
+have been represented in some kind of a federal council at Athens, the
+course of Grecian history might have been wonderfully altered. As it
+was, they were all deprived of one essential element of
+sovereignty,--the power of controlling their own military forces. Some
+of them, as Chios and Mitylene, furnished troops at the demand of
+Athens; others maintained no troops, but paid a fixed tribute to Athens
+in return for her protection. In either case they felt shorn of part of
+their dignity, though otherwise they had nothing to complain of; and
+during the Peloponnesian war Athens had to reckon with their tendency to
+revolt as well as with her Dorian enemies. Such a confederation was
+naturally doomed to speedy overthrow.
+
+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 Ætolia, 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 Græco-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 to the conduct of the communities subject to Athens
+at several critical moments of the Peloponnesian War. With this
+consolidation of Italy, thus triumphantly demonstrated, the whole
+problem of the conquering career of Rome was solved. All that came
+afterwards was simply a corollary from this. The concentration of all
+the fighting power of the peninsula into the hands of the ruling city
+formed a stronger political aggregate than anything the world had as yet
+seen. It was not only proof against the efforts of the greatest military
+genius of antiquity, but whenever it was brought into conflict with the
+looser organizations of Greece, Africa, and Asia, or with the
+semi-barbarous tribes of Spain and Gaul, the result of the struggle was
+virtually predetermined. The universal dominion of Rome was inevitable,
+so soon as the political union of Italy had been accomplished. Among the
+Romans themselves there were those who thoroughly understood this point,
+as we may see from the interesting speech of the emperor Claudius in
+favour of admitting Gauls to the senate.
+
+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 never
+thought of, and from first to last the Roman _comitia_ remained a
+primary assembly. The result was that, as the burgherhood enlarged, the
+assembly became a huge mob as little fitted for the transaction of
+public business as a town-meeting of all the inhabitants of New York
+would be. The functions which in Athens were performed by the assembly
+were accordingly in Rome performed largely by the aristocratic senate;
+and for the conflicts consequently arising between the senatorial and
+the popular parties it was difficult to find any adequate constitutional
+check. Outside of Italy, moreover, in the absence of a representative
+system, the Roman government was a despotism which, whether more or less
+oppressive, could in the nature of things be nothing else than a
+despotism. But nothing is more dangerous for a free people than the
+attempt to govern a dependent people despotically. The bad government
+kills out the good government as surely as slave-labour destroys
+free-labour, or as a debased currency drives out a sound currency. The
+existence of proconsuls in the provinces, with great armies at their
+beck and call, brought about such results as might have been predicted,
+as soon as the growing anarchy at home furnished a valid excuse for
+armed interference. In the case of the Roman world, however, the result
+is not to be deplored, for it simply substituted a government that was
+practicable under the circumstances for one that had become demonstrably
+impracticable.
+
+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 mediæval crucible with its Teutonic self-government substantially
+intact. On the main-land only two little spots, at the two extremities
+of the old Teutonic world, had fared equally well. At the mouth of the
+Rhine the little Dutch communities were prepared to lead the attack in
+the terrible battle for freedom with which the drama of modern history
+was ushered in. In the impregnable mountain fastnesses of upper Germany
+the Swiss cantons had bid defiance alike to Austrian tyrant and to
+Burgundian invader, and had preserved in its purest form the rustic
+democracy of their Aryan forefathers. By a curious coincidence, both
+these free peoples, in their efforts towards national unity, were led to
+frame federal unions, and one of these political achievements is, from
+the stand-point of universal history, of very great significance. The
+old League of High Germany, which earned immortal renown at Morgarten
+and Sempach, consisted of German-speaking cantons only. But in the
+fifteenth century the League won by force of arms a small bit of Italian
+territory about Lake Lugano, and in the sixteenth the powerful city of
+Bern annexed the Burgundian bishopric of Lausanne and rescued the free
+city of Geneva from the clutches of the Duke of Savoy. Other Burgundian
+possessions of Savoy were seized by the canton of Freiburg; and after
+awhile all these subjects and allies were admitted on equal terms into
+the confederation. The result is that modern Switzerland is made up of
+what might seem to be most discordant and unmanageable elements. Four
+languages--German, French, Italian, and Rhaetian--are spoken within the
+limits of the confederacy; and in point of religion the cantons are
+sharply divided as Catholic and Protestant. Yet in spite of all this,
+Switzerland is as thoroughly united in feeling as any nation in Europe.
+To the German-speaking Catholic of Altdorf the German Catholics of
+Bavaria are foreigners, while the French-speaking Protestants of Geneva
+are fellow-countrymen. Deeper down even than these deep-seated
+differences of speech and creed lies the feeling that comes from the
+common possession of a political freedom that is greater than that
+possessed by surrounding peoples. Such has been the happy outcome of the
+first attempt at federal union made by men of Teutonic descent. Complete
+independence in local affairs, when combined with adequate
+representation in the federal council, has effected such an intense
+cohesion of interests throughout the nation as no centralized
+government, however cunningly devised, could ever have secured.
+
+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 that great political
+aggregates have an inherent tendency towards breaking up, and that great
+political aggregates cannot be maintained except by a strongly-
+centralized administration and at the sacrifice of local self-
+government. A century ago the very idea of a stable federation of forty
+powerful states, covering a territory nearly equal in area to the whole
+of Europe, carried on by a republican government elected by universal
+suffrage, and guaranteeing to every tiniest village its full meed of
+local independence,--the very idea of all this would have been scouted
+as a thoroughly impracticable Utopian dream. And such scepticism would
+have been quite justifiable, for European history did not seem to afford
+any precedents upon which such a forecast of the future could be
+logically based. Between the various nations of Europe there has
+certainly always existed an element of political community, bequeathed
+by the Roman empire, manifested during the Middle Ages in a common
+relationship to the Church, and in modern times in a common adherence to
+certain uncodified rules of international law, more or less im perfectly
+defined and enforced. Between England and Spain, for example, or between
+France and Austria, there has never been such utter political severance
+as existed normally between Greece and Persia, or Rome and Carthage. But
+this community of political inheritance in Europe, it is needless to
+say, falls very far short of the degree of community implied in a
+federal union; and so great is the diversity of language and of creed,
+and of local historic development with the deep-seated prejudices
+attendant thereupon, that the formation of a European federation could
+hardly be looked for except as the result of mighty though quiet and
+subtle influences operating for a long time from without. From what
+direction, and in what manner, such an irresistible though perfectly
+pacific pressure is likely to be exerted in the future, I shall
+endeavour to show in my next lecture. At present we have to observe that
+the experiment of federal union on a grand scale required as its
+conditions, _first_, a vast extent of unoccupied country which could be
+settled without much warfare by men of the same race and speech, and
+_secondly_, on the part of the settlers, a rich inheritance of political
+training such as is afforded by long ages of self-government. The
+Atlantic coast of North America, easily accessible to Europe, yet remote
+enough to be freed from the political complications of the old world,
+furnished the first of these conditions: the history of the English
+people through fifty generations furnished the second. It was through
+English self-government, as I argued in my first lecture, that England
+alone, among the great nations of Europe, was able to found durable and
+self-supporting colonies. I have now to add that it was only England,
+among all the great nations of Europe, that could send forth colonists
+capable of dealing successfully with the difficult problem of forming
+such a political aggregate as the United States have become. For
+obviously the preservation of local self-government is essential to the
+very idea of a federal union. Without the Town-Meeting, or its
+equivalent in some form or other, the Federal Union would become _ipso
+facto_ converted into a centralizing imperial government. Should
+anything of this sort ever happen--should American towns ever come to be
+ruled by prefects appointed at Washington, and should American States
+ever become like the administrative departments of France, or even like
+the counties of England at the present day--then the time will have come
+when men may safely predict the break-up of the American political
+system by reason of its overgrown dimensions and the diversity of
+interests between its parts. States so unlike one another as Maine and
+Louisiana and California cannot be held together by the stiff bonds of a
+centralizing government. The durableness of the federal union lies in
+its flexibility, and it is this flexibility which makes it the only kind
+of government, according to modern ideas, that is permanently applicable
+to a whole continent. If ¸the United States were to-day a consolidated
+republic like France, recent events in California might have disturbed
+the peace of the country. But in the federal union, if California, as a
+state sovereign within its own sphere, adopts a grotesque constitution
+that aims at infringing on the rights of capitalists, the other states
+are not directly affected. They may disapprove, but they have neither
+the right nor the desire to interfere. Meanwhile the laws of nature
+quietly operate to repair the blunder. Capital flows away from
+California, and the business of the state is damaged, until presently
+the ignorant demagogues lose favour, the silly constitution becomes a
+dead-letter, and its formal repeal begins to be talked of. Not the
+smallest ripple of excitement disturbs the profound peace of the country
+at large. It is in this complete independence that is preserved by every
+state, in all matters save those in which the federal principle itself
+is concerned, that we find the surest guaranty of the permanence of the
+American political system. Obviously no race of men, save the race to
+which habits of self-government and the skilful use of political
+representation had come to be as second nature, could ever have
+succeeded in founding such a system.
+
+
+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 occupied the minds of American statesmen for a century and a
+half,--that is to say, ever since the English settlement of
+Massachusetts. In 1643 a New England confederation was formed between
+Massachusetts and Connecticut, together with Plymouth since merged in
+Massachusetts and New Haven since merged in Connecticut. The
+confederation was formed for defence against the French in Canada, the
+Dutch on the Hudson river, and the Indians. But owing simply to the
+inequality in the sizes of these colonies--Massachusetts more than
+outweighing the other three combined--the practical working of this
+confederacy was never very successful. In 1754, just before the outbreak
+of the great war which drove the French from America, a general Congress
+of the colonies was held at Albany, and a comprehensive scheme of union
+was proposed by Benjamin Franklin, but nothing came of the project at
+that time. The commercial rivalry between the colonies, and their
+disputes over boundary lines, were then quite like the similar phenomena
+with which Europe had so long been familiar. In 1756 Georgia and South
+Carolina actually came to blows over the navigation of the Savannah
+river. The idea that the thirteen colonies could ever overcome their
+mutual jealousies so far as to unite in a single political body, was
+received at that time in England with a derision like that which a
+proposal for a permanent federation of European States would excite in
+many minds to-day. It was confidently predicted that if the common
+allegiance to the British crown were once withdrawn, the colonies would
+forthwith proceed to destroy themselves with internecine war. In fact,
+however, it was the shaking off of allegiance to the British crown, and
+the common trials and sufferings of the war of independence, that at
+last welded the colonies together and made a federal union possible. As
+it was, the union was consummated only by degrees. By the Articles of
+Confederation, agreed on by Congress in 1777 but not adopted by all the
+States until 1781, the federal government acted only upon the several
+state governments and not directly upon individuals; there was no
+federal judiciary for the decision of constitutional questions arising
+out of the relations between the states; and the Congress was not
+provided with any efficient means of raising a revenue or of enforcing
+its legislative decrees. Under such a government the difficulty of
+insuring concerted action was so great that, but for the transcendent
+personal qualities of Washington, the bungling mismanagement of the
+British ministry, and the timely aid of the French fleet, the war of
+independence would most likely have ended in failure. After the
+independence of the colonies was acknowledged, the formation of a more
+perfect union was seen to be the only method of securing peace and
+making a nation which should be respected by foreign powers; and so in
+1788, after much discussion, the present Constitution of the United
+States was adopted,--a constitution which satisfied very few people at
+the time, and which was from beginning to end a series of compromises,
+yet which has proved in its working a masterpiece of political wisdom.
+
+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 Würtemberg 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.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+"_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 like our own. The warfare of Rome is by
+no means adequately explained by the theory of a deliberate immoral
+policy of aggression,--"infernal," I believe, is the stronger adjective
+which Dr. Draper uses. The aggressive wars of Rome were largely dictated
+by just such considerations as those which a century ago made it
+necessary for the English to put down the raids of the Scotch
+Highlanders, and which have since made it necessary for Russia to subdue
+the Caucasus. It is not easy for a turbulent community to live next to
+an orderly one without continually stirring up frontier disturbances
+which call for stern repression from the orderly community. Such
+considerations go far towards explaining the military history of the
+Romans, and it is a history with which, on the whole, we ought to
+sympathize. In its European relations that history is the history of the
+moving of the civilized frontier northward and eastward against the
+disastrous encroachments of barbarous peoples. This great movement has,
+on the whole, been steadily kept up, in spite of some apparent
+fluctuation in the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian era, and
+it is still going on to-day. It was a great gain for civilization when
+the Romans overcame the Keltiberians of Spain, and taught them good
+manners and the Latin language, and made it for their interest hereafter
+to fight against barbarians. The third European peninsula was thus won
+over to the side of law and order. Danger now remained on the north. The
+Gauls had once sacked the city of Rome; hordes of Teutons had lately
+menaced the very heart of civilization, but had been overthrown in
+murderous combat by Caius Marius; another great Teutonic movement, led
+by Ariovistus, now threatened to precipitate the whole barbaric force of
+south-eastern Gaul upon the civilized world; and so it occurred to the
+prescient genius of Caesar to be beforehand and conquer Gaul, and
+enlist all its giant barbaric force on the side of civilization. This
+great work was as thoroughly done as anything that was ever done in
+human history, and we ought to be thankful to Caesar for it every day
+that we live. The frontier to be defended against barbarism was now
+moved away up to the Rhine, and was very much shortened; but above all,
+the Gauls were made to feel themselves to be Romans. Their country
+became one of the chief strongholds of civilization and of Christianity;
+and when the frightful shock of barbarism came--the most formidable blow
+that has ever been directed by barbaric brute force against European
+civilization--it was in Gaul that it was repelled and that its force was
+spent. At the beginning of the fifth century an enormous horde of yellow
+Mongolians, known as Huns, poured down into Europe with avowed intent to
+burn and destroy all the good work which Rome had wrought in the world;
+and terrible was the havoc they effected in the course of fifty years.
+If Attila had carried his point, it has been thought that the work of
+European civilization might have had to be begun over again. But near
+Chálons-on-the-Marne, in the year 451, in one of the most obstinate
+struggles of which history preserves the record, the career of the
+"Scourge of God" was arrested, and mainly by the prowess of Gauls and of
+Visigoths whom the genius of Rome had tamed. That was the last day on
+which barbarism was able to contend with civilization on equal terms. It
+was no doubt a critical day for all future history; and for its
+favourable issue we must largely thank the policy adopted by Caesar five
+centuries before. By the end of the eighth century the great power of
+the Franks had become enlisted in behalf of law and order, and the Roman
+throne was occupied by a Frank,--the ablest man who had appeared in the
+world since Caesar's death; and one of the worthiest achievements of
+Charles the Great was the conquest and conversion of pagan Germany,
+which threw the frontier against barbarism eastward as far as the Oder,
+and made it so much the easier to defend Europe. In the thirteenth
+century this frontier was permanently carried forward to the Vistula by
+the Teutonic Knights who, under commission from the emperor Frederick
+II., overcame the heathen Prussians and Lithuanians; and now it began to
+be shown how greatly the military strength of Europe had increased. In
+this same century Batu, the grandson of Jinghis Khan, came down into
+Europe with a horde of more than a million Mongols, and tried to repeat
+the experiment of Attila. Batu penetrated as far as Silesia, and won a
+great battle at Liegnitz in 1241, but in spite of his victory he had to
+desist from the task of conquering Europe. Since the fifth century the
+physical power of the civilized world had grown immensely; and the
+impetus of this barbaric invasion was mainly spent upon Russia, the
+growth of which it succeeded in retarding for more than two centuries.
+Finally since the sixteenth century we have seen the Russians, redeemed
+from their Mongolian oppressors, and rich in many of the elements of a
+vigorous national life,--we have seen the Russians resume the aggressive
+in this conflict of ages, beginning to do for Central Asia in some sort
+what the Romans did for Europe. The frontier against barbarism, which
+Cæsar left at the Rhine, has been carried eastward to the Volga, and is
+now advancing even to the Oxus. The question has sometimes been raised
+whether it would be possible for European civilization to be seriously
+threatened by any future invasion of barbarism or of some lower type of
+civilization. By barbarism certainly not: all the nomad strength of
+Mongolian Asia would throw itself in vain against the insuperable
+barrier constituted by Russia. But I have heard it quite seriously
+suggested that if some future Attila or Jinghis were to wield as a unit
+the entire military strength of the four hundred millions of Chinese,
+possessed with some suddenly-conceived idea of conquering the world,
+even as Omar and Abderrahman wielded as a unit the newly-welded power of
+the Saracens in the seventh and eighth centuries, then perhaps a
+staggering blow might yet be dealt against European civilization. I will
+not waste precious time in considering this imaginary case, further than
+to remark that if the Chinese are ever going to try anything of this
+sort, they cannot afford to wait very long; for within another century,
+as we shall presently see, their very numbers will be surpassed by those
+of the English race alone. By that time all the elements of military
+predominance on the earth, including that of simple numerical
+superiority, will have been gathered into the hands not merely of men of
+European descent in general, but more specifically into the hands of the
+offspring of the Teutonic tribes who conquered Britain in the fifth
+century. So far as the relations of civilization with barbarism are
+concerned to-day, the only serious question is by what process of
+modification the barbarous races are to maintain their foothold upon the
+earth at all. While once such people threatened the very continuance of
+civilization, they now exist only on sufferance.
+
+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
+mediæval 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 people despotically, as has been wont to happen when
+a portion of the barbaric world has been overcome and annexed to the
+civilized world. Under the weight, of these two difficulties combined,
+the free institutions of the ancient Romans succumbed, and their
+government gradually passed into the hands of a kind of close
+corporation more despotic than anything else of the sort that Europe has
+ever seen. This despotic character--this tendency, if you will pardon
+the phrase, towards the _Asiaticization_ of European life--was continued
+by inheritance in the Roman Church, the influence of which was
+beneficent so long as it constituted a wholesome check to the isolating
+tendencies of feudalism, but began to become noxious the moment these
+tendencies yielded to the centralizing monarchical tendency in nearly
+all parts of Europe. The asiaticizing tendency of Roman political life
+had become so powerful by the fourth century, and has since been so
+powerfully propagated through the Church, that we ought to be glad that
+the Teutons came into the empire as masters rather than as subjects. As
+the Germanic tribes got possession of the government in one part of
+Europe after another, they brought with them free institutions again.
+The political ideas of the Goths in Spain, of the Lombards in Italy, and
+of the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul, were as distinctly free as those
+of the Angles in Britain. But as the outcome of the long and
+uninterrupted turmoil of the Middle Ages, society throughout the
+continent of Europe remained predominantly military in type, and this
+fact greatly increased the tendency towards despotism which was
+bequeathed by Rome. After the close of the thirteenth century the whole
+power of the Church was finally thrown into the scale against the
+liberties of the people; and as the result of all these forces combined,
+we find that at the time when America was discovered government was
+hardening into despotism in all the great countries of Europe except
+England. Even in England the tendency towards despotism had begun to
+become quite conspicuous after the wholesale slaughter of the great
+barons and the confiscation of their estates which took place in the
+Wars of the Roses. The constitutional history of England during the
+Tudor and Stuart periods is mainly the history of the persistent effort
+of the English sovereign to free himself from constitutional checks, as
+his brother sovereigns on the continent were doing. But how different
+the result! How enormous the political difference between William III.
+and Louis XIV., compared with the difference between Henry VIII. and
+Francis I.! The close of the seventeenth century, which marks the
+culmination of the asiaticizing tendency in Europe, saw despotism both
+political and religious firmly established in France and Spain and
+Italy, and in half of Germany; while the rest of Germany seemed to have
+exhausted itself in the attempt to throw off the incubus. But in England
+this same epoch saw freedom both political and religious established on
+so firm a foundation as never again to be shaken, never again with
+impunity to be threatened, so long as the language of Locke and Milton
+and Sydney shall remain a living speech on the lips of men. Now this
+wonderful difference between the career of popular liberty in England
+and on the Continent was due no doubt to a complicated variety of
+causes, one or two of which I have already sought to point out. In my
+first lecture I alluded to the curious combination of circumstances
+which prevented anything like a severance of interests between the upper
+and the lower ranks of society; and something was also said about the
+feebleness of the grasp of imperial Rome upon Britain compared with its
+grasp upon the continent of Europe. But what I wish now to point
+out--since we are looking at the military aspect of the subject--is the
+enormous advantage of what we may call the _strategic position_ of
+England in the long mediæval struggle between civilization and
+barbarism. In Professor Stubbs's admirable collection of charters and
+documents illustrative of English history, we read that "on the 6th of
+July [1264] the whole force of the country was summoned to London for
+the 3d of August, to resist the army which was coming from France under
+the queen and her son Edmund. _The invading fleet was prevented by the
+weather from sailing until too late in the season_.... The papal legate,
+Guy Foulquois, who soon after became Clement IV., threatened the barons
+with excommunication, but the bull containing the sentence was taken by
+the men of Dover as soon as it arrived, and was thrown into the
+sea." [15] As I read this, I think of the sturdy men of Connecticut,
+beating the drum to prevent the reading of the royal order of James II.
+depriving the colony of the control of its own militia, and feel with
+pride that the indomitable spirit of English liberty is alike
+indomitable in every land where men of English race have set their feet
+as masters. But as the success of Americans in withstanding the
+unconstitutional pretensions of the crown was greatly favoured by the
+barrier of the ocean, so the success of Englishmen in defying the
+enemies of their freedom has no doubt been greatly favoured by the
+barrier of the British channel. The war between Henry III. and the
+barons was an event in English history no less critical than the war
+between Charles I. and the parliament four centuries later; and British
+and Americans alike have every reason to be thankful that a great French
+army was not able to get across the channel in August, 1264. Nor was
+this the only time when the insular position of England did goodly
+service in maintaining its liberties and its internal peace. We cannot
+forget how Lord Howard of Effingham, aided also by the weather, defeated
+the armada that boasted itself "invincible," sent to strangle freedom in
+its chosen home by the most execrable and ruthless tyrant that Europe
+has ever seen, a tyrant whose victory would have meant not simply the
+usurpation of the English crown but the establishment of the Spanish
+Inquisition at Westminster Hall. Nor can we forget with what longing
+eyes the Corsican barbarian who wielded for mischief the forces of
+France in 1805 looked across from Boulogne at the shores of the one
+European land that never in word or deed granted him homage. But in
+these latter days England has had no need of stormy weather to aid the
+prowess of the sea-kings who are her natural defenders. It is impossible
+for the thoughtful student of history to walk across Trafalgar Square,
+and gaze on the image of the mightiest naval hero that ever lived, on
+the summit of his lofty column and guarded by the royal lions, looking
+down towards the government-house of the land that he freed from the
+dread of Napoleonic invasion and towards that ancient church wherein the
+most sacred memories of English talent and English toil are clustered
+together,--it is impossible, I say, to look at this, and not admire both
+the artistic instinct that devised so happy a symbolism, and the rare
+good-fortune of our Teutonic ancestors in securing a territorial
+position so readily defensible against the assaults of despotic powers.
+But it was not merely in the simple facility of warding off external
+attack that the insular position of England was so serviceable. This
+ease in warding off external attack had its most marked effect upon the
+internal polity of the nation. It never became necessary for the English
+government to keep up a great standing army. For purposes of external
+defence a navy was all-sufficient; and there is this practical
+difference between a permanent army and a permanent navy. Both are
+originally designed for purposes of external defence; but the one can
+readily be used for purposes of internal oppression, and the other
+cannot. Nobody ever heard of a navy putting up an empire at auction and
+knocking down the throne of the world to a Didius Julianus. When,
+therefore, a country is effectually screened by water from external
+attack, it is screened in a way that permits its normal political
+development to go on internally without those manifold military
+hinderances that have ordinarily been so obstructive in the history of
+civilization. Hence we not only see why, after the Norman Conquest had
+operated to increase its unity and its strength, England enjoyed a far
+greater amount of security and was far more peaceful than any other
+country in Europe; but we also see why society never assumed the
+military type in England which it assumed upon the continent; we see how
+it was that the bonds of feudalism were far looser here than elsewhere,
+and therefore how it happened that nowhere else was the condition of the
+common people so good politically. We now begin to see, moreover, how
+thoroughly Professor Stubbs and Mr. Freeman are justified in insisting
+upon the fact that the political institutions of the Germans of Tacitus
+have had a more normal and uninterrupted development in England than
+anywhere else. Nowhere, indeed, in the whole history of the human race,
+can we point to such a well-rounded and unbroken continuity of political
+life as we find in the thousand years of English history that have
+elapsed since the victory of William the Norman at Senlac. In England
+the free government of the primitive Aryans has been to this day
+uninterruptedly maintained, though everywhere lost or seriously impaired
+on the continent of Europe, except in remote Scandinavia and impregnable
+Switzerland. But obviously, if in the conflict of ages between
+civilization and barbarism England had occupied such an inferior
+strategic position as that occupied by Hungary or Poland or Spain, if
+her territory had been liable once or twice in a century to be overrun
+by fanatical Saracens or beastly Mongols, no such remarkable and quite
+exceptional result could have been achieved. Having duly fathomed the
+significance of this strategic position of the English race while
+confined within the limits of the British islands, we are now prepared
+to consider the significance of the stupendous expansion of the English
+race which first became possible through the discovery and settlement of
+North America. I said, at the close of my first lecture, that the
+victory of Wolfe at Quebec marks the greatest turning-point as yet
+discernible in all modern history. At the first blush such an
+unqualified statement may have sounded as if an American student of
+history were inclined to attach an undue value to events that have
+happened upon his own soil. After the survey of universal history which
+we have now taken, however, I am fully prepared to show that the
+conquest of the North American continent by men of English race was
+unquestionably the most prodigious event in the political annals of man
+kind. Let us consider, for a moment, the cardinal facts which this
+English conquest and settlement of North America involved.
+
+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 of this civilization. Having at length won the privilege of living
+without risk of slaughter and pillage at the hands of Saracens or
+Mongols, the question now arose whether the people of Europe should go
+on and apply their intelligence freely to the problem of making life as
+rich and fruitful as possible in varied material and spiritual
+achievement, or should fall forever into the barren and monotonous way
+of living and thinking which has always distinguished the half-civilized
+populations of Asia. This--and nothing less than this, I think--was the
+practical political question really at stake in the sixteenth century
+between Protestantism and Catholicism. Holland and England entered the
+lists in behalf of the one solution of this question, while Spain and
+the Pope defended the other, and the issue was fought out on European
+soil, as we have seen, with varying success. But the discovery of
+America now came to open up an enormous region in which whatever seed of
+civilization should be planted was sure to grow to such enormous
+dimensions as by and by to exert a controlling influence upon all such
+controversies. It was for Spain, France, and England to contend for the
+possession of this vast region, and to prove by the result of the
+struggle which kind of civilization was endowed with the higher and
+sturdier political life. The race which here should gain the victory was
+clearly destined hereafter to take the lead in the world, though the
+rival powers could not in those days fully appreciate this fact. They
+who founded colonies in America as trading-stations or military outposts
+probably did not foresee that these colonies must by and by become
+imperial states far greater in physical mass than the states which
+planted them. It is not likely that they were philosophers enough to
+foresee that this prodigious physical development would mean that the
+political ideas of the parent state should acquire a hundred-fold power
+and seminal influence in the future work of the world. It was not until
+the American Resolution that this began to be dimly realized by a few
+prescient thinkers. It is by no means so fully realized even now that a
+clear and thorough-going statement of it has not somewhat an air of
+novelty. When the highly-civilized community, representing the ripest
+political ideas of England, was planted in America, removed from the
+manifold and complicated checks we have just been studying in the
+history of the Old World, the growth was portentously rapid and steady.
+There were no Attilas now to stand in the way,--only a Philip or a
+Pontiac. The assaults of barbarism constituted only a petty annoyance as
+compared with the conflict of ages which had gone on in Europe. There
+was no occasion for society to assume a military aspect. Principles of
+self-government were at once put into operation, and no one thought of
+calling them in question. When the neighbouring civilization of inferior
+type--I allude to the French in Canada--began to become seriously
+troublesome, it was struck down at a blow. When the mother-country,
+under the guidance of an ignorant king and short-sighted ministers,
+undertook to act upon the antiquated theory that the new communities
+were merely groups of trading-stations, the political bond of connection
+was severed; yet the war which ensued was not like the war which had but
+just now been so gloriously ended by the victory of Wolfe. It was not a
+struggle between two different peoples, like the French of the Old
+Regime and the English, each representing antagonistic theories of how
+political life ought to be conducted. But, like the Barons' War of the
+thirteenth century and the Parliament's War of the seventeenth, it was a
+struggle sustained by a part of the English people in behalf of
+principles that time has shown to be equally dear to all. And so the
+issue only made it apparent to an astonished world that instead of _one_
+there were now _two Englands_, alike prepared to work with might and
+main toward the political regeneration of mankind.
+
+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 is, in the days of our great-greatgrandchildren. I do not
+predict any such result, for there are discernible economic reasons for
+believing that there will be a diminution in the rate of increase. The
+rate must nevertheless continue to be very great, in the absence of such
+causes as formerly retarded the growth of population in Europe. Our
+modern wars are hideous enough, no doubt, but they are short. They are
+settled with a few heavy blows, and the loss of life and property
+occasioned by them is but trifling when compared with the awful ruin and
+desolation wrought by the perpetual and protracted contests of antiquity
+and of the Middle Ages. Chronic warfare, both private and public,
+periodic famines, and sweeping pestilences like the Black Death,--these
+were the things which formerly shortened human life and kept down
+population. In the absence of such causes, and with the abundant
+capacity of our country for feeding its people, I think it an extremely
+moderate statement if we say that by the end of the next century the
+English race in the United States will number at least six or seven
+hundred millions.
+
+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. Stated broadly,
+so as to acquire somewhat the force of a universal proposition, the
+principle of federalism is just this:--that the people of a state shall
+have full and entire control of their own domestic affairs, which
+directly concern them only, and which they will naturally manage with
+more intelligence and with more zeal than any distant governing body
+could possibly exercise; but that, as regards matters of common concern
+between a group of states, a decision shall in every case be reached,
+not by brutal warfare or by weary diplomacy, but by the systematic
+legislation of a central government which represents both states and
+people, and whose decisions can always be enforced, if necessary, by
+the combined physical power of all the states. This principle, in
+various practical applications, is so familiar to Americans to-day that
+we seldom pause to admire it, any more than we stop to admire the air
+which we breathe or the sun which gives us light and life. Yet I believe
+that if no other political result than this could to-day be pointed out
+as coming from the colonization of America by Englishmen, we should
+still be justified in regarding that event as one of the most important
+in the history of mankind. For obviously the principle of federalism, as
+thus broadly stated, contains within itself the seeds of permanent peace
+between nations; and to this glorious end I believe it will come in the
+fulness of time.
+
+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 over the seas. Endowed with this
+maritime supremacy, she has with an unerring instinct proceeded to seize
+upon the keys of empire in all parts of the world,--Gibraltar, Malta,
+the isthmus of Suez, Aden, Ceylon, the coasts of Australia, island after
+island in the Pacific,--every station, in short, that commands the
+pathways of maritime commerce, or guards the approaches to the barbarous
+countries which she is beginning to regard as in some way her natural
+heritage. Any well-filled album of postage-stamps is an eloquent
+commentary on this maritime supremacy of England. It is enough to turn
+one's head to look over her colonial blue-books. The natural outcome of
+all this overflowing vitality it is not difficult to foresee. No one can
+carefully watch what is going on in Africa to-day without recognizing it
+as the same sort of thing which was going on in North America in the
+seventeenth century; and it cannot fail to bring forth similar results
+in course of time. Here is a vast country, rich in beautiful scenery and
+in resources of timber and minerals, with a salubrious climate and
+fertile soil, with great navigable rivers and inland lakes, which will
+not much longer be left in control of tawny lions and long-eared
+elephants and negro fetich-worshippers. Already five flourishing English
+states have been established in the south, besides the settlements on
+the Gold Coast and those at Aden commanding the Red Sea. English
+explorers work their way, with infinite hardship, through its
+untravelled wilds, and track the courses of the Congo and the Nile as
+their forefathers tracked the Potomac and the Hudson. The work of La
+Salle and Smith is finding its counterpart in the labours of Baker and
+Livingstone. Who can doubt that within two or three centuries the
+African continent will be occupied by a mighty nation of English
+descent, and covered with populous cities and flourishing farms, with
+railroads and telegraphs and other devices of civilization as yet
+undreamed of?
+
+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 one professor of
+world-wide renown. When we see, by the way, within a period of five
+years and at such remote points upon the earth's surface, such erudite
+and ponderous works in the English language issuing from the press as
+those of Professor Hearn of Melbourne, of Bishop Colenso of Natal, and
+of Mr. Hubert Bancroft of San Francisco,--even such a little commonplace
+fact as this is fraught with wonderful significance when we think of all
+that it implies. Then there is New Zealand, with its climate of
+perpetual spring, where the English race is now multiplying faster than
+anywhere else in the world unless it be in Texas and Minnesota. And
+there are in the Pacific Ocean many rich and fertile spots where we
+shall very soon see the same things going on.
+
+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 by entering into a federal union was their keen sense
+of their weakness when taken severally. In physical strength such a
+state as Massachusetts at that time amounted to little more than Hamburg
+or Bremen; but the thirteen states taken together made a nation of
+respectable power. Even the wonderful progress we have made in a century
+has not essentially changed this relation of things. Our greatest state,
+New York, taken singly, is about the equivalent of Belgium; our weakest
+state, Nevada, would scarcely be a match for tha county of Dorset; yet
+the United States, taken together, are probably at this moment the
+strongest nation in the world.
+
+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 in some
+sort of federal council or parliament, if Europe would keep pace with
+America in the advance towards universal law and order. All will admit
+that such a state of things is a great desideratum: let us see if it is
+really quite so utopian as it may seem at the first glance. No doubt the
+lord who dwelt in Haddon Hall in the fifteenth century would have
+thought it very absurd if you had told him that within four hundred
+years it would not be necessary for country gentlemen to live in great
+stone dungeons with little cross-barred windows and loopholes from which
+to shoot at people going by. Yet to-day a country gentleman in some
+parts of Massachusetts may sleep securely without locking his
+front-door. We have not yet done away with robbery and murder, but we
+have at least made private warfare illegal; we have arrayed public
+opinion against it to such an extent that the police-court usually makes
+short shrift for the misguided man who tries to wreak vengeance on his
+enemy. Is it too much to hope that by and by we may similarly put public
+warfare under the ban? I think not. Already in America, as wre have
+seen, it has become customary to deal with questions between states just
+as we would deal with questions between individuals. This we have seen
+to be the real purport of American federalism. To have established such
+a system ovrer one great continent is to have made a very good beginning
+towards establishing it over the world. To establish such a system in
+Europe will no doubt be difficult, for here we have to deal with an
+immense complication of prejudices, intensified by linguistic and
+ethnological differences. Nevertheless the pacific pressure exerted upon
+Europe by America is becoming so great that it will doubtless before
+long overcome all these obstacles. I refer to the industrial competition
+between the old and the new worlds, which has become so conspicuous
+within the last ten years. Agriculturally Minnesota, Nebraska, and
+Kansas are already formidable competitors with England, France, and
+Germany; but this is but the beginning. It is but the first spray from
+the tremendous wave of economic competition that is gathering in the
+Mississippi valley. By and by, when our shameful tariff--falsely called
+"protective"--shall have been done away with, and our manufacturers
+shall produce superior articles at less cost of raw material, we shall
+begin to compete with European countries in all the markets of the
+world; and the competition in manufactures will become as keen as it is
+now beginning to be in agriculture. This time will not be long in
+coming, for our tariff-system has already begun to be discussed, and in
+the light of our present knowledge discussion means its doom. Born of
+crass ignorance and self-defeating greed, it cannot bear the light. When
+this curse to American labour--scarcely less blighting than the; curse
+of negro slavery--shall have been once removed, the economic pressure
+exerted upon Europe by the United States will soon become very great
+indeed. It will not be long before this economic pressure will make it
+simply impossible for the states of Europe to keep up such military
+armaments as they are now maintaining. The disparity between the United
+States, with a standing army of only twenty-five thousand men withdrawn
+from industrial pursuits, and the states of Europe, with their standing
+armies amounting to four millions of men, is something that cannot
+possibly be kept up. The economic competition will become so keen that
+European armies will have to be disbanded, the swords will have to be
+turned into ploughshares, and _thus_ the victory of the industrial over
+the military type of civilization will at last become complete. But to
+disband the great armies of Europe will necessarily involve the forcing
+of the great states of Europe into some sort of federal relation, in
+which Congresses--already held on rare occasions--will become more
+frequent, in which the principles of international law will acquire a
+more definite sanction, and in which the combined physical power of all
+the states will constitute (as it now does in America) a permanent
+threat against any state that dares to wish for selfish reasons to break
+the peace. In some such way as this, I believe, the industrial
+development of the English race outside of Europe will by and by enforce
+federalism upon Europe. As regards the serious difficulties that grow
+out of prejudices attendant upon differences in language, race, and
+creed, a most valuable lesson is furnished us by the history of
+Switzerland. I am inclined to think that the greatest contribution which
+Switzerland has made to the general progress of civilization has been to
+show us how such obstacles can be surmounted, even on a small scale. To
+surmount them on a great scale will soon become the political problem of
+Europe; and it is America which has set the example and indicated
+the method.
+
+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 be possible (with our friends of the Paris
+dinner-party) to speak of the UNITED STATES as stretching from pole to
+pole,--or, with Tennyson, to celebrate the "parliament of man and the
+federation of the world." Indeed, only when such a state of things has
+begun to be realized, can Civilization, as sharply demarcated from
+Barbarism, be said to have fairly begun. Only then can the world be said
+to have become truly Christian. Many ages of toil and doubt and
+perplexity will no doubt pass by before such a desideratum is reached.
+Meanwhile it is pleasant to feel that the dispassionate contemplation of
+great masses of historical facts goes far towards confirming our faith
+in this ultimate triumph of good over evil. Our survey began with
+pictures of horrid slaughter and desolation: it ends with the picture of
+a world covered with cheerful homesteads, blessed with a sabbath of
+perpetual peace.
+
+
+
+
+[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 Cité Antique," 441.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Arnold, "Roman Provincial Administration," 237.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Stubbs, "Select Charters," 401.]
+
+[Footnote 16: In 1880.]
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+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 Régime
+Candolle, A. de,
+Canton,
+Carlyle on dollar-hunters,
+Centralized government, weakness of,
+Century,
+Ceylon,
+Châlons, 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
+
+
+Quebec, Wolfe's victory at
+
+
+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 Régime
+
+
+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
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of American Political Ideas Viewed From
+The Standpoint Of Universal History, by John Fiske
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10112 ***