A Study of History: Abridgement of Volumes I

OUR inquiry into the cause of the breakdowns of civilizations has led us, so far, to a succession of negative conclusions. We have found out that these breakdowns are not acts of God—at any rate in the sense that lawyers attach to that phrase; nor are they vain repetitions of senseless laws of Nature. We have also found that we cannot attribute them to a loss of command over the environment, physical or human; they are due neither to failures in industrial or artistic techniques nor to homicidal assaults from alien adversaries. In successively rejecting these untenable explanations we have not arrived at the object of our search; but the last of the fallacies we have just cited has incidentally given us a clue. In demonstrating that the broken-down civilizations have not met their death from an assassin’s hand we have found no reason to dispute the allegation that they have been victims of violence, and in almost every instance we have been led, by the logical process of exhaustion, to return a verdict of suicide. Our best hope of making some positive progress in our inquiry is to follow up this clue; and there is one hopeful feature in our verdict which we can observe at once. There is nothing original about it.

The conclusion at which we have arrived at the end of a rather laborious search has been divined with sure intuition by a modern Western poet:

In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.

This flash of insight (from Meredith’s Love’s Grave) was not a new discovery. We can find it in earlier and higher authorities. It reveals itself in the last lines of Shakespeare’s King John:

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
. . . Nought shall makes us rue
If England to itself do rest but true.

‘Whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly and is cast out into the draught. But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart procee.i evil thought’s, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man.’

What is the weakness which exposes a growing civilization to the risk of stumbling and falling in mid-career and losing its Promethean elan} The weakness must be radical; for, although the catastrophe of a breakdown is a risk and not a certainty, the risk is evidently high. We are faced with the fact that, of the twenty-one civilizations that have been born alive and have proceeded to grow, thirteen are dead and buried; that seven of the remaining eight are apparently in decline; and that the eighth, which is our own, may also have passed its zenith for all that we as yet know. On an empirical-test, the career of a growing civilization would appear to be fraught with danger; and, if we recall our analysis of growth, we shall see that the danger lies in the very nature of the course which a growing civilization is bound to take.

Growth is the work of creative personalities and creative minorities; they cannot go on moving forward themselves unless they can contrive to carry their fellows with them in their advance; and the uncreative rank and file of mankind, which is always the overwhelming majority, cannot be transfigured en masse and raised to the stature of their leaders in the twinkling of an eye. That would be in practice impossible; for the inward spiritual grace through which an unillumined soul is fired by communion with a saint is almost as rare as the miracle that has brought the saint himself into the world. The leader’s task is to make his fellows his followers; and the only means by which mankind in the mass can be set in motion towards a goal beyond itself is by enlisting the primitive and universal faculty of mimesis. For this mimesis is a kind of social drill; and the dull ears that are deaf to the unearthly music of Orpheus’ lyre are well attuned to the drill sergeant’s word of command. When the Piper of Hamelin assumes King Frederick William’s Prussian voice, the rank and file, who have stood stolid hitherto, mechanically break into movement, and the evolution which he causes them to execute brings them duly to heel; but they can only catch him up by taking a short cut, and they can only find room to march in formation by deploying on the broad way which leadeth to destruction. When the road to destruction has perforce to be trodden on the quest of life, it is perhaps no wonder that the quest should often end in disaster.

Moreover, there is a weakness in the actual exercise of mimesis, quite apart from the way in which the faculty may be exploited. For, just because mimesis is a kind of drill, it is a kind of mechanization of human life and movement.

When we speak of ‘an ingenious mechanism’ or ‘a skilled mechanic’, the words call up the idea of a triumph of life over matter, of human skill over physical obstacles. Concrete examples suggest the same idea, from the gramophone or the aeroplane back to the first wheel and the first dug-out canoe; for such inventions have extended man’s power over his environment by so manipulating inanimate objects that they are made to carry out human purposes, as the drill sergeant’s commands are executed by his mechanized human beings. In drilling his platoon the sergeant expands himself into a Briareus whose hundred arms and legs obey his will almost as promptly as if they had been organically his own. Similarly the telescope is an extension of the human eye, the trumpet of the human voice, the stilt of the human leg, the sword of the human arm.

Nature has implicitly complimented man on his ingenuity by anticipating him in his use of mechanical devices. She has made extensive use of them in her chef-d’oeuvre, the human body. In the heart and the lungs she has constructed two self-regulating machines that are models of their kind. By adjusting these and other organs so that they work automatically, Nature has released the margin of our energies from the monotonously repetitive tasks these organs perform, and has set these energies free to walk and talk and, in a word, bring into existence twenty-one civilizations! She has arranged that, say, ninety per cent, of the functions of any given organism shall be performed automatically and therefore with the minimum expenditure of energy, in order that the maximum amount of energy may be concentrated on the remaining ten per cent., in which Nature is feeling her way towards a fresh advance. In fact, a natural organism is made up, like a human society, of a creative minority and an uncreative majority of ‘members’ ; and in a growing and healthy organism, as in a growing and healthy society, the majority is drilled into following the minority’s lead mechanically.

But, when we have lost ourselves in admiration of these natural and human mechanical triumphs, it is disconcerting to be reminded that there are other phrases—’machine-made goods’, ‘mechanical behaviour’—in which the connotation of the word ‘machine’ is exactly the reverse, suggesting not the triumph of life over matter but the triumph of matter over life. Though machinery be designed to be the slave of man, it is also possible for man to become the slave of his machines. A living organism which is ninety per cent, mechanism will have greater opportunity or capacity for creativity than an organism which is fifty per cent, mechanism, as Socrates will have more time and opportunity to discover the secret of the Universe if he has not got to cook his own meals, but the organism that is a hundred per cent, mechanism is a robot.

Thus a risk of catastrophe is inherent in the use of the faculty of mimesis which is the vehicle of mechanization in the social relationships of human beings; and it is evident that this risk will be greater when mimesis is called into play in a society which is in dynamic movement than in a society which is in a state of rest. The weakness of mimesis lies in its being a mechanical response to a suggestion from outside, so that the action performed is one which would never have been performed by the performer on his own initiative. Thus mimesis-action is not self-determined, and the best safeguard for its performance is that the faculty should become crystallized in habit or custom—as it actually is in primitive societies in the Yin-state. But when ‘the cake of custom’ is broken, the faculty of mimesis, hitherto directed backward towards elders or ancestors as incarnations of an unchanging social tradition, is reoriented towards creative personalities bent upon leading their fellows with them towards a promised land. Henceforth the growing society is compelled to live dangerously. Moreover the danger is perpetually imminent, since the condition which is required for the maintenance of growth is a perpetual flexibility and spontaneity, whereas the condition required for effective mimesis, which is itself a prerequisite of growth, is a considerable degree of machine-like automatism. The second of these requirements was what Walter Bagehot had in mind when, in his whimsical way, he told his English readers that they owed their comparative successfulness as a nation in large part to their stupidity. Good leaders, yes: but the good leaders would not have had good followers if the majority of these followers had determined to think everything out for themselves. And yet, if all are ‘stupid’, where will be the leadership?

In fact, the creative personalities in the vanguard of a civilization who have recourse to the mechanism of mimesis are exposing themselves to the risk of failure in two degrees, one negative and the other positive.

The possible negative failure is that the leaders may infect themselves with the hypnotism which they have induced in their followers. In that event, the docility of the rank and file will have been purchased at the disastrous price of a loss of initiative in the officers. This is what happened in the arrested civilizations, and in all periods in the histories of other civilizations which are to be regarded as periods of stagnation. This negative failure, however, is not usually the end of the story. When the leaders cease to lead, their tenure of power becomes an abuse. The rank and file mutiny; the officers seek to restore order by drastic action. Orpheus, who has lost his lyre or forgotten how to play it, now lays about him with Xerxes’ whip; and the result is a hideous pandemonium, in which the military formation breaks down into anarchy. This is the positive failure; and we have already, again and again, used another name for it. It is that ‘disintegration’ of a broken-down civilization which declares itself in the ‘secession of the proletariat’ from a band of leaders who have degenerated into a ‘dominant minority’.

This secession of the led from the leaders may be regarded as a loss of harmony between the parts which make up the whole ensemble of the society. In any whole consisting of parts a loss of harmony between the parts is paid for by the whole in a corresponding loss of self-determination. This loss of self-determination is the ultimate criterion of breakdown; and it is a conclusion which should not surprise us, seeing that it is the inverse of the conclusion, reached in an earlier part of this Study, that progress towards self-determination is the criterion of growth. We have now to examine some of the forms in which this loss of self-determination through loss of harmony is manifested.

(2) NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES

One source of disharmony between the institutions of which a society is composed is the introduction of new social forces— aptitudes or emotions or ideas—which the existing set of institutions was not originally designed to carry. The destructive effect of this incongruous juxtaposition of things new and old is pointed out in one of the most famous of the sayings attributed to Jesus:

‘No man putteth a piece of new cloth into an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. Neither do men put new wine into old bottles—else the bottles break and the wine runneth out and the bottles perish; but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.’¹

In the domestic economy from which this simile is taken the precept can, of course, be carried out to the letter; but in the economy of social life men’s power to order their affairs at will on a rational plan is narrowly restricted, since a society is not, like a wineskin or a garment, the property of a single owner but is the common ground of many men’s fields of action; and for that reason the precept, which is common sense in household economy and practical wisdom in the life of the spirit, is a counsel of perfection in social affairs.

Ideally, no doubt, the introduction of new dynamic forces ought to be accompanied by a reconstruction of the whole existing set of institutions, and in any actually growing society a constant readjustment of the more flagrant anachronisms is continually going on. But vis inertiae tends at all times to keep most parts of the social structure as they are, in spite of their increasing incongruity with new social forces constantly coming into action. In this situation the new forces are apt to operate in two diametrically opposite ways simultaneously. On the one hand they perform their creative work either through new institutions that they have established for themselves or through old institutions that they have adapted to their purpose; and in pouring themselves into these harmonious channels they promote the welfare of society. At the same time they also enter, indiscriminately, into any institutions which happen to lie in their path—as some powerful head of steam which had forced its way into an engine-house might rush into the works of any old engine that happened to be installed there.

In such an event, one or other of two alternative disasters is apt to occur. Either the pressure of the new head of steam blows the old engine to pieces, or else the old engine somehow manages to hold together and proceeds to operate in a new manner that is likely to prove both alarming and destructive.

To translate these parables into terms of social life, the explosions of the old engines that cannot stand the new pressures—or the bursting of the old bottles which cannot stand the fermentation of the new wine—are the revolutions which sometimes overtake anachronistic institutions. On the other hand, the baneful performances of the old engines which have stood the strain of being keyed up to performances for which they were never intended are the social enormities which a ‘die-hard’ institutional anachronism sometimes engenders.

Revolutions may be defined as retarded, and proportionately violent, acts of mimesis. The mimetic element is of their essence; for every revolution has reference to something that has happened already elsewhere, and it is always manifest, when a revolution is studied in its historical setting, that its outbreak would never have occurred of itself if it had not been thus evoked by a previous play of external forces. An obvious example is the French Revolution of A.D. 1789, which drew its inspiration in part from the events which had recently occurred in British America—events in which the French Government of the Ancien Regime had most suicidally assisted—and in part from the century-old achievement of England which had been popularized and glorified in France by two generations of philosophes from Montesquieu onwards.

The element of retardation is likewise of the essence of revolutions, and accounts for the violence which is their most prominent feature. Revolutions are violent because they are the belated triumphs of powerful new social forces over tenacious old institutions which have been temporarily thwarting and cramping these new expressions of life. The longer the obstruction holds out the greater becomes the pressure of the force whose outlet is being obstructed; and, the greater the pressure, the more violent the explosion in which the imprisoned force ultimately breaks through.

As for the social enormities that are the alternative to revolutions, they may be defined as the penalties which a society has to pay when the act of mimesis, which ought to have brought an old institution into harmony with a new social force, is not simply retarded but is frustrated altogether.

It is evident, then, that, whenever the existing institutional structure of a society is challenged by a new social force, three alternative outcomes are possible: either a harmonious adjustment of structure to force, or a revolution (which is a delayed and discordant adjustment) or an enormity. It is also evident that each and all of these three alternatives may be realized in different sections of the same society—in different national states, for example, if that is the manner in which the particular society is articulated. If harmonious adjustments predominate, the society will continue to grow; if revolutions, its growth will become increasingly hazardous; if enormities, we may diagnose a breakdown. A series of examples will illustrate the formulae that we have just presented.

Within the last two centuries two new dynamic social forces were set in motion, Industrialism and Democracy, and one of the old institutions on which these forces impinged was slavery. This pernicious institution, which had contributed so largely to the decline and fall of the Hellenic Society, never secured a firm foothold in the homelands of our Western Society, but, from the sixteenth century onwards, when Western Christendom expanded overseas, it came to be established in some of its new overseas dominions. However, for a long time the scale of this recrudescence of plantation slavery was not very formidable. At the moment when, at the end of the eighteenth century, the new forces of Democracy and Industrialism began to radiate out from Great Britain into the rest of the Western World, slavery was still practically confined to the colonial fringes, and even there its area was contracting. Statesmen who were themselves slave-owners, such as Washington and Jefferson, not only deplored the institution but took a fairly optimistic view of the prospects of its peaceful extinction in the coming century.

This possibility, however, was ruled out by the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, which immensely stimulated the demand for raw materials which plantation slave-labour produced. The impact of Industrialism thus gave the languishing and anachronistic institution of slavery a new lease of life. The Western Society was now faced with a choice between taking active steps to put an end to slavery immediately or else seeing this ancient social evil converted, by the new driving force of Industrialism, into a mortal danger to the very life of the society.

In this situation an anti-slavery movement came into action in many different national states of the Western World and achieved a number of pacific successes; but there was one important region in which the anti-slavery movement failed to make peaceful headway, and this was ‘the cotton belt’ in the Southern States of the North American Union. Here the champions of slavery remained in power for one whole generation longer, and in this short interval of thirty years—between 1833 when slavery was abolished in the British Empire and 1863 when it was abolished in the United States—the ‘peculiar institution’ of the Southern States, with the driving force of Industrialism behind it, swelled into a monstrous growth. After that the monster was brought to bay and destroyed; but this belated eradication of slavery in the United States had to be paid for at the price of a shattering revolution, the devastating effects of which are still apparent today. Such has been the price of this particular retardation of mimesis.

Still, our Western Society may congratulate itself that, even at this price, the social evil of slavery has been eradicated from its last Western stronghold; and for this mercy we have to thank the new force of Democracy, which came into the Western World a little in advance of Industrialism—for it is no accidental coincidence that Lincoln, the principal author of the eradication of slavery from its last Western stronghold, should be very widely and rightly regarded as the greatest of’ democratic statesmen. Since Democracy is the political expression of humanitarianism, and since humanitarianism and slavery are obviously mortal foes, the new democratic spirit put drive into the anti-slavery movement at the very time when the new Industrialism was putting drive into slavery. It can safely be said that if, in the struggle over slavery, the drive of Industrialism had not been largely neutralized by the drive of Democracy, the Western World would not have rid itself of slavery so easily.

It is a commonplace to say that the impact of Industrialism has increased the horrors of war as markedly as it increased the horrors of slavery. War is another ancient and anachronistic institution which is condemned on moral grounds almost as widely as slavery has been. On strictly intellectual grounds there is also a widespread school of thought which holds that war, again like slavery, ‘does not pay’ even those who think they profit by it. Just as, on the eve of the American Civil War, a Southerner, H. R. Helper, wrote a book entitled The Impending Crisis of the South to prove that slavery did not pay the slave-owners and, by a curious but easily explained confusion of thought, was condemned by the class whom he sought to enlighten as to their real interests, so, on the eve of the General War of 1914-18, Norman Angell wrote a book entitled Europe’s Optical Illusion to prove that war brought a dead loss to the victors as well as the vanquished, and was condemned by a large section of a public that was as anxious for the preservation of peace as the heretical author himself. Why then has our society been so much less successful up to the present in getting rid of war than in getting rid of slavery? The answer is manifest. In this case, unlike the other, the two driving forces of Democracy and of Industrialism have made their simultaneous impacts in the same direction.

If we cast our minds back to the state of the Western World on the eve of the emergence of Industrialism and Democracy, we shall notice that at that time, in the middle of the eighteenth century, war was in much the same condition as slavery: it was manifestly on the wane, not so much because wars were less frequent—though even that fact could perhaps be statistically proved¹ —as because they were being conducted with more moderation. Our eighteenth-century rationalists looked back with distaste on a recent past in which war had been keyed up to a horrid intensity by the impact of the drive of religious fanaticism. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, this demon had been cast out, and the immediate effect was to reduce the evil of war to a minimum never approached in any other chapter of our Western history before or since. This age of relatively ‘civilized warfare’ came to an end at the close of the eighteenth century when war began to be keyed up once again by the impact of Democracy and Industrialism. If we ask ourselves which of these two forces has played the greater part in the intensification of warfare during the last hundred and fifty years, our first impulse will probably be to attribute the more important role to Industrialism. But we should be wrong. The first of the modern wars in this sense was the cycle of wars inaugurated by the French Revolution, and on these wars the impact of Industrialism was inconsiderable and the impact of Democracy, French Revolutionary Democracy, all-important. It was not so much the military genius of Napoleon as the revolutionary fury of the new French armies that cut through the old-fashioned eighteenth-century defence of the unrevolutionized Continental Powers like a knife through butter and carried French arms all over Europe. If evidence for this assertion is required it can be found in the fact that the raw French levies had accomplished feats too hard for the professional army of Louis XIV before Napoleon appeared on the scene. And we may remind ourselves also that Romans and Assyrians and other keyed-up militarist Powers of bygone ages have destroyed civilizations without the aid of any industrial apparatus, in fact with weapons that would have seemed rudimentary to a sixteenth-century matchlockman.

The fundamental reason why war was less atrocious in the eighteenth century than either before or since was that it had ceased to be a weapon of religious fanaticism and had not yet become an instrument of nationalist fanaticism. During this interval it was merely a ‘sport of kings’. Morally, the use of war for this more frivolous purpose may be all the more shocking, but the effect in mitigating the material horrors of war is undeniable. The royal players knew quite well the degree of licence that their subjects would allow them, and they kept their activities well within these bounds. Their armies were not recruited by conscription; they did not live off the country they occupied like the armies of the Wars of Religion, nor did they wipe the works of peace out of existence like the armies of the twentieth century. They observed the rules of their military game, set themselves moderate objectives and did not impose crushing terms on their defeated opponents. On the rare occasions when these conventions were broken, as by Louis XIV in his devastations of the Palatinate in A.D. 1674 and A.D. 1689, such atrocities were roundly condemned not only by the victims but by neutral public opinion.

The classic description of this state of affairs comes from the pen of Edward Gibbon:

‘In war the European forces are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests. The Balance of Power will continue to fluctuate, and the prosperity of our own or the neighbouring kingdoms may be alternately exalted or depressed; but these partial events cannot essentially injure our general state of happiness, the system of arts and laws and manners which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonists.’¹

The author of this excruciatingly complacent passage lived just long enough to be shaken to the core by the beginning of a new cycle of wars which was to render his verdict obsolete.

Just as the intensification of slavery through the impact of Industrialism led to the launching of the anti-slavery movement, so the intensification of war through the impact of Democracy, and subsequently of course through the impact of Industrialism as well, has led to an anti-war movement. Its first embodiment in the League of Nations after the end of the General War of 1914-18 failed to save the World from having to go through the General War of 1939-45. At the price of this further affliction, we have now bought a fresh opportunity to attempt the difficult enterprise of abolishing war through a co-operative system of world government, instead of letting the cycle of wars run its course until it ends—too badly and too late—in the forcible establishment of a universal state by some single surviving power. Whether we in our world will succeed in achieving what no other civilization has ever yet achieved is a question that lies on the knees of the Gods.

Why is it that Democracy, which its admirers have often proclaimed to be a corollary of the Christian Religion, and which showed itself not altogether unworthy of this high claim in its attitude towards slavery, has had an aggravating influence on the equally manifest evil of war? The answer is to be found in the fact that, before colliding with the institution of war, Democracy collided with the institution of parochial (or local) sovereignty; and the importation of the new driving forces of Democracy and Industrialism into the old machine of the parochial state has generated the twin enormities of political and economic nationalism. It is in this gross derivative form, in which the etherial spirit of Democracy has emerged from its passage through an alien medium, that Democracy has put its drive into war instead of working against it.

Here again, our Western Society was in a happier posture in the Pre-Nationalistic Age of the eighteenth century. With one or two notable exceptions the parochial sovereign states of the Western World were not then the instruments of the general wills of their citizens but were virtually the private estates of dynasties. Royal wars and royal marriages were the two procedures through which conveyances of such estates, or of parts of them, from one dynasty to another were brought about, and, of the two methods, the latter was obviously to be preferred. Hence the familiar line in praise of the foreign policy of the House of Hapsburg: Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube. (‘Let others wage wars; you, happy Austria, go marry.’) The very names of the three chief wars of the first half of the eighteenth century, the Wars of the Spanish, Polish and Austrian Successions’, suggest that wars only occurred when matrimonial arrangements had got into an inextricable tangle.

There was no doubt something rather petty and sordid about this matrimonial diplomacy. A dynastic compact by which provinces and their inhabitants are transferred from one owner to another like estates with their livestock is revolting to the susceptibilities of our democratic age. But the eighteenth-century system had its compensations. It took the shine out of patriotism; but, with the shine, it took the sting. A well-known passage in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey relates how the author went to France quite forgetting that Great Britain and France were engaged in the Seven Years’ War. After a little trouble with the French police, the services of a French nobleman, whom he had never met before, enabled him to resume his journey without any further unpleasantness. When, forty years later, on the rupture of the treaty of Amiens, Napoleon gave orders that all British civilians between the ages of eighteen and sixty who happened to be in France at the moment should be interned, his action was regarded as an example of Corsican savagery and as an illustration of Wellington’s subsequent dictum that he was ‘not a gentleman’, and indeed Napoleon offered excuses for his procedure; yet it was only what even the most humane and liberal government to-day would do as a matter of course and of common sense. War has now become ‘total war’, and it has become so because parochial states have become nationalist democracies.

By total war we mean a war in which it is recognized that the combatants are not only the selected ‘chessmen’ called soldiers and sailors but the whole populations of the countries concerned. Where shall we find the beginnings of this new outlook? Perhaps in the treatment meted out at the end of the Revolutionary War by the victorious British-American colonists to those among themselves who had sided with the mother country. These United Empire Loyalists were expelled bag and baggage—men, women and children—from their homes after the war was over. The treatment they received is in marked contrast with that meted out, twenty years before, by Great Britain, to the conquered French Canadians, who not only retained their homes but were allowed to preserve their legal system and their religious institutions. This first example of ‘totalitarianism’ is significant, for the victorious American colonists were the first democratized nation of our Western Society.¹

The economic nationalism which has grown into as great an evil as our political nationalism has been engendered by a corresponding perversion of Industrialism working within the same constricting bonds of the parochial state.

Economic ambitions and rivalries were, of course, not unknown in the international politics of the pre-Industrial Age; indeed, economic nationalism received its classic expression in the ‘mercantilism’ of the eighteenth century, and the prizes of eighteenth-century warfare included markets and monopolies, as is illustrated by the famous section of the treaty of Utrecht allotting to Great Britain a monopoly of the slave-trade of the Spanish-American colonies. But eighteenth-century economic conflicts affected only small classes and restricted interests. In a predominantly agricultural age, when not only each country but each village community produced nearly all the necessities of life, English wars for markets might be called ‘the sport of merchants’ as reasonably as Continental wars for provinces have been called ‘the sport of kings’.

This general state of economic equilibrium at low tension on a minute scale was violently disturbed by the advent of Industrialism; for Industrialism, like Democracy, is intrinsically cosmopolitan in its operation. If the real essence of Democracy is, as the French Revolution delusively proclaimed, a spirit of fraternity, the essential requirement of Industrialism, if it is to achieve its full potentiality, is world-wide co-operation. The social dispensation which Industrialism demands was truly proclaimed by the eighteenth-century pioneers of the new technique in their famous watchword ‘Laissez faire! Laissez passer!’—freedom to manufacture, freedom to exchange. Finding the World divided into small economic units, Industrialism set to work, a hundred and fifty years ago, to re-shape the economic structure of the World in two ways, both leading in the direction of world unity. It sought to make the economic units fewer and bigger, and also to lower the barriers between them.

If we glance at the history of these efforts we shall find that there was a turning-point in it round about the sixties and seventies of the last century. Down to that date Industrialism was assisted by Democracy in its efforts to diminish the number of economic units and to lower the barriers between them. After that date both Industrialism and Democracy reversed their policies and worked in the opposite direction.

If we consider first the size of the economic units, we find that, at the end of the eighteenth century, Great Britain was the largest free-trade area in the Western World, a fact which goes far to explain why it was in Great Britain and not elsewhere that the Industrial Revolution began. But in A.D. 1788 the ex-British colonies in North America, by adopting the Philadelphian Constitution, irrevocably abolished all commercial barriers between the States and created what was to become, by natural expansion, the largest free-trade area, and by direct consequence the mightiest industrialized community, in the world to-day. A few years later the French Revolution abolished all the provincial tariff-frontiers which had hitherto broken up the economic unity of France. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century the Germans achieved an economic Zollverein which proved the precursor of political union. In the third quarter the Italians, by achieving political unity, secured economic unity at the same time. If we take the other half of the programme, the lowering of tariffs and other parochial barriers in the way of international trade, we find that Pitt, who proclaimed himself a disciple of Adam Smith, set going a movement in favour of free imports which was carried to completion by Peel, Cobden and Gladstone in the middle years of the nineteenth century; that the United States, after experimenting with high tariffs, moved steadily in the free-trade direction from 1832 to i860 and that both the France of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III and pre-Bismarckian Germany steered the same course.

Then the tide turned. Democratic nationalism, which in Germany and in Italy had united many states into one, henceforth set itself to disintegrate the multi-national Hapsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires. After the end of the General War of 1914-18 the old free-trade unit of the Danubian Monarchy was split up into a number of successor-states each striving desperately for economic autarky (self-sufficiency), while another constellation of new states, and by consequence new economic compartments, inserted itself between a close-shorn Germany and a close-shorn Russia. Meanwhile, about a generation earlier, the movement towards free trade had begun to be reversed first in one country and then in another until, at long last, in 1931, the returning tide of ‘mercantilism* reached Great Britain herself.

The causes of this abandonment of free trade are easily discerned. Free trade had suited Great Britain when she was ‘the Workshop of the World’; it had suited the cotton-exporting States which largely controlled the government of the United States between 1832 and i860. It had seemed for various reasons to suit France and Germany during the same period. But, as the nations one by one became industrialized, it suited their parochial interests on a short view to pursue a cut-throat industrial competition with all their neighbours, and, under the prevailing system of parochial state sovereignty, who was to say them nay?

Cobden and his followers had made an immense miscalculation. They had looked forward to seeing the peoples and the states of the World drawn into a social unity by the new and unprecedently close-knit web of world-wide economic relations which was being woven blindly, from a British node, by the youthful energies of Industrialism. It would be an injustice to the Cobdenites to dismiss the Victorian British free-trade movement as simply a masterpiece of enlightened self-interest. The movement was also the expression of a moral idea and of a constructive international policy; its worthiest exponents aimed at something more than making Great Britain the mistress of the world market. They also hoped to promote the gradual evolution of a political world order in which the new economic world order could thrive; to create a political atmosphere in which a world-wide exchange of goods and services could be carried on in peace and security— ever increasing in security and bringing with it at each stage a rise in the standard of living for the whole of mankind.

Cobden’s miscalculation lay in the fact that he failed to forecast the effect of the impact of Democracy and Industrialism on the rivalries of parochial states. He assumed that these giants would lie quiet in the nineteenth century as they had done in the eighteenth until the human spiders who were now spinning a worldwide industrial web had had time to enmesh them all in their gossamer bonds. He relied upon the unifying and pacifying effects which it was in the nature of Democracy and Industrialism to produce in their native and untrammelled manifestations, in which Democracy would stand for fraternity and Industrialism for co-operation. He did not reckon with the possibility that these same forces, by forcing their new ‘heads of steam’ into the old engines of the parochial states, would make for disruption and world anarchy. He did not recall that the gospel of fraternity preached by the spokesmen of the French Revolution had led to the first of the great modern wars of Nationalism; or rather he assumed that this would prove to have been not only the first but also the last war of its kind. He did not realize that, if the narrow mercantile oligarchies of the eighteenth century had been able to set in motion wars for the furtherance of the comparatively unimportant luxury trades which constituted the international commerce of their day, then, a fortiori, the democratized nations would fight one another a outrance for economic objects in an age when the Industrial Revolution had transformed international commerce from an exchange of luxuries into an exchange of the necessities of life.

In fine, the Manchester School misunderstood human nature. They did not understand that even an economi: world order cannot be built on merely economic foundations. In spite of their genuine idealism, they did not realize that ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’. This fatal mistake was not made by Gregory the Great and the other founders of Western Christendom, from whom the idealism of Victorian England was ultimately derived. These men, whole-heartedly dedicated to a supra-mundane cause, had not consciously attempted to found a world order. Their worldly aim had been limited to the more modest material ambition of keeping the survivors of a shipwrecked society alive. The economic edifice raised, as a burdensome and thankless necessity, by Gregory and his peers was avowedly a makeshift; yet, in raising it, they took care to build on a religious rock and not on economic sands; and, thanks to their labours, the structure of the Western Society rested on a solid religious foundation and grew, in less than fourteen centuries, from its modest beginnings in one out-of-the-way corner, into the ubiquitous Great Society of our own day. If a solid religious basis was required for Gregory’s unpretentious economic building, it seems unlikely, on this showing, that the vaster structure of a world order, which it is our task to build to-day, can ever be securely based upon the rubble foundations of mere economic interests.

Private property is an institution which is apt to establish itself in societies in which the single family or household is the normal unit of economic activity, and in such a society it is probably the most satisfactory system for governing the distribution of material wealth. But the natural unit of economic activity is now no longer the single family, the single village or the single national state, but the entire living generation of mankind. Since the advent of Industrialism our modern Western economy has transcended the family unit de facto and has therefore logically transcended the family institution of private property. Yet in practice the old institution has remained in force; and in these circumstances Industrialism has put its formidable ‘drive’ into private property, enhancing the man of property’s social power while diminishing his social responsibility, until an institution which may have been beneficent in the pre-Industrial Age has assumed many of the features of a social evil.

In these circumstances our society to-day is confronted with the task of adjusting the old institution of private property to a harmonious relationship with the new force of Industrialism. The method of pacific adjustment is to counteract the maldistribution of private property which Industrialism inevitably entails by arranging for a deliberate, rational and equitable control and redistribution of private property through the agency of the state. By controlling key industries the state can curb the excessive power over other people’s lives which is conferred by the private ownership of such industries, and it can mitigate the ill effects of poverty by providing social services financed by high taxation of wealth. This method has the incidental social advantage that it tends to transform the state from a war-making machine—which has been its most conspicuous function in the past—into an agency for social welfare.

If this pacific policy should prove inadequate, we may be fairly sure that the revolutionary alternative will overtake us in the shape of some form of Communism which will reduce private property to vanishing-point. This seems to be the only practical alternative to an adjustment, because the maldistribution of private property through the impact of Industrialism would be an intolerable enormity if not effectively mitigated by social services and high taxation. Yet, as the Russian experiment indicates, the revolutionary remedy of Communism might prove little less deadly than the disease itself; for the institution of private property is so intimately bound up with all that is best in the pre-industrial social heritage that its sheer abolition could hardly fail to produce a disastrous break in the social tradition of our Western Society.

One of the greatest social changes that has been brought about by the advent of Democracy has been the spread of education. In the progressive countries a system of universal compulsory gratuitous instruction has made education the birthright of every child—in contrast to the role of education in the pre-Democratic Age, when it was the monopoly of a privileged minority. This new educational system has been one of the principal social ideals of every state that aspires to an honourable position in the modern world-comity of nations.

When universal education was first inaugurated it was greeted by the liberal opinion of the day as a triumph of justice and enlightenment which might be expected to usher in a new era of happiness and well-being for mankind. But these expectations can now be seen to have left out of account the presence of several stumbling-blocks on this broad road to the millennium, and in this matter, as so often happens, it has been the unforeseen factors that have proved the most important.

One stumbling-block has been the inevitable impoverishment in the results of education when the process is made available for ‘the masses’ at the cost of being divorced from its traditional cultural background. The good intentions of Democracy have no magic power to perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Our mass-produced intellectual pabulum lacks savour and vitamins. A second stumbling-block has been the utilitarian spirit in which the fruits of education are apt to be turned to account when they are brought within everybody’s reach. Under a social regime in which education is confined to those who have either inherited a right to it as a social privilege or have proved a right to it by their exceptional gifts of industry and intelligence, education is either a pearl cast before swine or else a pearl of great price which the finder buys at the cost of all that he has. In neither case is it a means to an end: an instrument of worldly ambition or of frivolous amusement. The possibility of turning education to account as a means of amusement for the masses—and of profit for the enterprising persons by whom the amusement is purveyed— has only arisen since the introduction of universal elementary education; and this new possibility has conjured up a third stumbling-block which is the greatest of all. The bread of” universal education is no sooner cast upon the waters than a shoal of sharks arises from the depths and devours the children’s bread under the educator’s very eyes. In the educational history of England the dates speak for themselves. The edifice of universal elementary education was, roughly speaking, completed by Forster’s Act in 1870; and the Yellow Press was invented some twenty years later—as soon, that is, as the first generation of children from the national schools had acquired sufficient purchasing-power—by a stroke of irresponsible genius which had divined that the educational philanthropist’s labour of love could be made to yield a royal profit to a press-lord.

These disconcerting reactions to the impact of Democracy upon education have attracted the attention of the rulers of modern would-be totalitarian national states. If press-lords could make millions by providing idle amusement for the half-educated, serious statesmen could draw, not money perhaps, but power from the same source. The modern dictators have deposed the press-lords and substituted for crude and debased private entertainment an equally crude and debased system of state propaganda. The elaborate and ingenious machinery for the mass-enslavement of semi-educated minds, invented for private profit under British and American regimes of laisser faire, has been simply taken over by the rulers of states who have employed these mental appliances, reinforced by the cinema and the radio, for their own sinister purposes. After Northcliffe, Hitler—though Hitler was not the first in his line.

Thus, in countries where democratic education has been introduced, the people are in danger of falling under an intellectual tyranny engineered either by private exploitation or by public authority. If the people’s souls are to be saved, the only way is to raise the standard of mass-education to a degree at which its recipients will be rendered immune against at any rate the grosser forms of exploitation and propaganda; and it need hardly be said that this is no easy task. Happily, there are certain disinterested and effective educational agencies grappling with it in our Western World to-day—such agencies as the Workers’ Educational Association and the British Broadcasting Corporation in Great Britain and the extra-mural activities of universities in many countries.

All our examples hitherto have been drawn from the latest phase of our Western history. We need do no more than remind the reader of the problem set by the impact of a new force on an old institution in an earlier chapter of that same history, for we have already examined this example in another connexion. The problem here set was how to secure a harmonious adjustment of the Transalpine feudal monarchies to the impact of the political efficiency generated in the city-states of Renaissance Italy. The easier and inferior way of adjustment was through keying up the monarchies themselves into tyrannies or despotisms on the pattern of those despotisms to which so many of the Italian states had already succumbed. The harder but better method was the keying-up of the medieval assemblies of Estates in the Transalpine kingdoms into organs of representative government which would be as efficient as the latter-day Italian despotisms and would at the same time provide, on the national scale, for as liberal a measure of self-government as the self-governing institutions of the Italian city-states in what had been, politically at any rate, their best days.

It was in England, for reasons which we have recalled elsewhere, that these adjustments were most harmoniously achieved, and England accordingly became the pioneer, or creative minority, in the next chapter of Western history, as Italy had been in the preceding one. Under the adroit and nationally minded Tudors the monarchy began to develop-into a despotism, but under the ill-fated Stuarts Parliament drew level with the Crown and finally drew ahead. Even so, the adjustment was not made without two revolutions, which were, however, in comparison with most revolutions, conducted with sobriety and restraint. In France the despotic tendency lasted much longer and went much farther, and the result was a far more violent revolution which ushered in a period of political instability the end of which is not yet in sight. In Spain and Germany the drift towards despotism continued down to our own day and the democratic counter-movements, thus inordinately long delayed, have found themselves involved in all the complications which have been outlined in the previous sections of this chapter.

The Italian political efficiency which made its impact upon the Transalpine countries of the Western World at the transition from the second to the third chapter of Western history had a counterpart in Hellenic history in the economic efficiency which was achieved in certain states of the Hellenic World in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., under the pressure of the Malthusian problem. For this new economic efficiency did not confine itself to Athens and the other states that originated it, but, radiating outwards, made impacts on both the domestic and the international politics of the whole Hellenic city-state cosmos.

We have already described this economic new departure, which may be called the Solonian revolution. Essentially it was a changeover from subsistence farming to cash-crop farming accompanied by a development of commerce and industry. This solution of an economic problem, the pressure of population on land-space, called two new political problems into existence. On the one hand, the economic revolution brought into existence new social classes, urban commercial and industrial workers, artisans and sailors, for whom a place had to be found in the political scheme. On the other hand, the old isolation of one city-state from another gave place to an interdependence on the economic plane, and, when once a number of city-states had become interdependent economically, it was thenceforth impossible that they should remain, without disaster, in their pristine state of isolation on the plane of politics. The former of these problems resembles that which Victorian England solved by a series of parliamentary reform bills; the latter that which she hoped to solve through the free-trade movement. We will take these problems separately and in the order previously observed.

In the domestic political life of the Hellenic city-states the enfranchisement of the new classes involved a radical change in the basis of political association. The traditional kinship basis had to be replaced by a new franchise based on property. In Athens this change-over was carried through effectively, and for the most part smoothly, in a series of constitutional developments between the Age of Solon and the Age of Pericles. The comparative smoothness and effectiveness of the transition is proved by the smallness of the part that the tyrannis played in Athenian history; for it was a general rule in the constitutional history of these city-states that, when the process of following in the footsteps of the pioneer communities was unduly retarded, a condition of stasis (revolutionary class-war) supervened, which could only be resolved by the emergence of a ‘tyrant’ or, in our modern jargon borrowed from Rome, a dictator. At Athens, as elsewhere, a dictatorship proved an indispensible stage in the process of adjustment, but here the tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons was no more than a brief interlude between the Solonian and the Cleisthenean reform.

Other Greek city-states managed their adjustments much less harmoniously. Corinth underwent a prolonged, and Syracuse a repeated, dictatorship. At Corcyra the atrocity of the stasis has been immortalized in the pages of Thucydides.

Finally, we may take the case of Rome, a non-Greek community which was drawn into the Hellenic World as a result of the geographical expansion of the Hellenic Civilization during the period 725-525 B.C. It was not till after this cultural conversion that Rome entered on the course of economic and political development which was the normal career of a Hellenic or Hellenized city-state, and consequently in this chapter Rome passed through every stage with a time-lag of some hundred and fifty years behind the corresponding date in the history of Athens. For this time-lag Rome paid the penalty in an extreme and bitter stasis between the patrician monopolists of power by right of birth and the plebeian claimants to power by right of wealth and numbers. This Roman stasis, which lasted from the fifth century B.C. to the third, went to such lengths that the Plebs, on several occasions, seceded from the Populus by an actual geographical withdrawal, while it permanently established a plebeian anti-state—complete with its own institutions, assemblies and officers—within the bosom of the legitimate commonwealth. It was only thanks to external pressure that Roman statesmanship succeeded, in 287 B.C., in coping with this constitutional enormity by bringing state and anti-state into a working political unity; and, after the century-and-a-half of victorious imperialism which followed, the makeshift character of the settlement of 287 B.C. was rapidly revealed. The unannealed amalgam of patrician and plebeian institutions which the Romans had accepted as their ramshackle constitution proved so inept a political instrument for achieving new social adjustments that the violent and abortive careers of the Gracchi opened a second bout of stasis (131—31 B.C.) worse than the first. This time, after a century of self-laceration, the Roman body politic submitted itself to a permanent dictatorship; and since, by this time, Roman arms had completed their conquest of the Hellenic World, the Roman tyrannis of Augustus and his successors incidentally provided the Hellenic Society with its universal state.

The persistent ineptitude of the Romans in fumbling with their domestic problems presents an extreme contrast to their unrivalled ability in making, retaining and organizing their foreign conquests; and it is to be noticed that the Athenians, who were unrivalled in the success with which they exorcized stasis from their domestic politics, signally failed in the fifth century B.C. to create the then already urgently needed international order which the Romans succeeded in establishing after a fashion four hundred years later.

This international task, in which Athens failed, was the second of the two problems of adjustment set by the Solonian revolution. The obstacle in the way of creating the international political security which Hellenic international trade required was the inherited political institution of city-state sovereignty. From the opening of the fifth century B.C. onwards the whole of the rest of Hellenic political history can be formulated in terms of an endeavour to transcend city-state sovereignty and of the resistance which this endeavour evoked. Before the fifth century closed, the obstinacy of the resistance to this endeavour had brought the Hellenic Civilization to its breakdown, and, though the problem was solved after a fashion by Rome, it was not solved in time to prevent the disintegration of the Hellenic Society from running its course to a final breakdown. The ideal solution of the problem was to be found in a permanent limitation of city-state sovereignty by voluntary agreement between the city-states themselves. Unfortunately the most conspicuous of such attempts, the Delian League, achieved by Athens and her Aegean allies in the course of their victorious counter-offensive against Persia, was vitiated by the intrusion of the older Hellenic tradition of hegemony, the exploitation of an enforced alliance by its leading member. The Delian League became an Athenian Empire and the Athenian Empire provoked the Peloponnesian War. Four centuries later Rome succeeded where Athens had failed; but the chastisement with whips which Athenian imperialism inflicted on its small World was as nothing to the chastisement with scorpions which Roman imperialism inflicted on a much enlarged Hellenic and Hellenized society during the two centuries which followed the Hannibalic War and preceded the establishment of the Augustan Peace.

While the Hellenic Society broke down through failure to transcend in time its traditional parochialism, our Western Society failed—with consequences still hidden in the future—to maintain a social solidarity which was perhaps the most precious part of its original endowment. In the time of transition from the medieval to the modern chapter of our Western history one of the most significant expressions of the current social change was the rise of parochialism. In our generation it is not altogether easy for us to regard this change dispassionately on account of the vast evils which it has brought upon us in our own day, when it has become an anachronistic survival. Yet we can see that there was much to be said in favour of the abandonment of our medieval oecumeni-calism five centuries ago. For all its moral grandeur it was a ghost from the past, a legacy from the universal state of the Hellenic Society, and there was always an unseemly discrepancy between the theoretical supremacy of the oecumenical idea and the actual anarchy of medieval practice. The new parochialism at any rate succeeded in living up to its less ambitious claims. However that may be, the new force won the day. In politics it displayed itself in a plurality of sovereign states; in letters in the form of new vernacular literatures; and in the field of religion it collided with the medieval Western Church.

The violence of this last collision was due to the fact that the Church, elaborately organized under the Papal hierocracy, was the master institution of the medieval dispensation. The problem was probably open to adjustment along lines which the Papacy had already reconnoitred when it was at the height of its power. For instance, in encountering the local impulse to make use of vernacular languages for liturgical purposes instead of Latin, the Roman Church had conceded to the Croats permission to translate the liturgy into their own language, probably because in this frontier district Rome found herself faced with the competition of her Eastern Orthodox rival, who, so far from insisting on her non-Greek converts accepting Greek as their liturgical language, showed a politic generosity in translating her liturgy into many tongues. Again, in dealing with the medieval predecessors of modern sovereign governments, the Popes, engaged, as they were, in a life-and-death struggle against the oecumenical claims of the Holy Roman Emperors, had shown themselves much more accommodating to the parochial claims of the kings of England, France, Castile and other local states to exercise control over the ecclesiastical organization within their own respective frontiers.

Thus the Holy See was not altogether unschooled in rendering unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s by the time when the full-fledged parochial neo-Caesarism asserted itself, and in the century before the so-called Reformation the Papacy went to considerable lengths in negotiating with secular sovereigns concordats which divided between Rome and the parochial rulers the control over the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This system of concordats was the unintended outcome of the abortive oecumenical councils held in the first half of the fifteenth century at Constance (A.D. 1414-18) and at Basel (A.D. 1431-49).

The Conciliar Movement was a constructive effort to neutralize the irresponsible, and often notoriously misused, authority of the self-styled Vicar of Christ by the introduction on an oecumenical scale of a system of ecclesiastical parliamentarism such as on the parochial scale had already proved its usefulness in the Feudal Age as a means of controlling the activities of medieval kings. But the Popes who encountered the Conciliar Movement hardened their hearts; and Papal intransigence proved disastrously successful. It succeeded in bringing the Conciliar Movement to naught, and, by thus rejecting a last opportunity for adjustment, it condemned Western Christendom to be rent by a violent internal discord between its ancient oecumenical heritage and its new parochial proclivities.

The result was a melancholy crop of revolutions and enormities. Among the former we need only mention the violent break-up of the Church into a number of rival churches each denouncing the other as the gang of Antichrist and setting in motion a whole cycle of wars and persecutions. Among the latter may be placed the usurpation by secular sovereigns of the ‘divine right’ supposedly inherent in the Papacy, a ‘divine right’ which is still working havoc in the Western World in the grim shape of a pagan worship of sovereign national states. Patriotism, which Dr. Johnson rather oddly described as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’ and which Nurse Cavell more discerningly declared to be ‘not enough’, has very largely superseded Christianity as the religion of the Western World. In any case, it is difficult to conceive of a sharper contradiction of the essential teaching of Christianity—and of all the other historic higher religions as well—than is embodied in this monstrous product of the impact of parochialism on the Western Christian Church.

The ‘higher religions’ with a mission to all mankind are relatively recent arrivals on the scene of human history. Not only are they unknown in primitive societies; they have not arisen even among societies in process of civilization until after a certain number of civilizations have broken down and travelled far on the way to disintegration. It is in response to the challenge presented by the disintegrations of civilizations that these higher religions have made their appearance. The religious institutions of civilizations of the unaffiliated class, like those of primitive societies, are bound up with the secular institutions of those societies and do not look beyond them. From a higher spiritual standpoint such religions are clearly inadequate, but they have one important negative merit: they foster a spirit of ‘live and let live’ between one religion and another. Under such conditions a plurality of gods and of religions in the world is taken for granted as a natural concomitant of a plurality of states and of civilizations.

In this social condition human souls are blind to the ubiquity and omnipotence of God, but they are immune from the temptation of succumbing to the sin of intolerance in their relations with other human beings who worship God under different forms and titles. It is one of the ironies of human history that the illumination which has brought into religion a perception of the unity of God and the brotherhood of mankind should at the same time have promoted intolerance and persecution. The explanation is, of course, that the idea of unity in its application to religion impresses the spiritual pioneers who embrace it as being so transcendently important that they are apt to plunge into any short cut which promises to hasten the translation of their idea into reality. This enormity of intolerance and persecution has shown its hideous countenance, almost without fail, whenever and wherever a higher religion has been preached. This fanatical temper flared up in the abortive attempt of the Emperor Ikhnaton to impose his vision of monotheism on the Egyptiac World in the fourteenth century B.C. An equally ardent fanaticism casts its lurid light over the rise and development of Judaism. A savage denunciation of any participation in the worships of kindred Syriac communities is the reverse side of that etherialization of the local worship of Yahweh into a monotheistic religion which was the positive and sublime spiritual achievement of the Hebrew Prophets. In the history of Christianity, both in its internal schisms and in its encounters with alien faiths, we see the same spirit breaking out again and again.

On this showing the impact of a sense of unity on religion is apt to beget a spiritual enormity, and the moral adjustment which meets the case is the practice of the virtue of toleration. The right motive for toleration is the recognition that all religions are quests in search of a common spiritual goal and that, even though some of these quests may be more advanced and more on the right lines than others, the persecution of a ‘wrong’ religion by a soi-disant ‘right’ religion is of its very nature a contradiction in terms, since, by indulging in persecution, the ‘right’ religion puts itself in the wrong and denies its own credentials.

In at least one noteworthy case such tolerance was enjoined by a prophet upon his followers on this high ground. Muhammad prescribed the religious toleration of Jews and Christians who had made political submission to the secular arm of Islam, and he gave this ruling expressly on the ground that these two non-Muslim religious communities, like the Muslims themselves, were ‘People of the Book’. It is significant of the tolerant spirit which animated Primitive Islam that, without express sanction from the Prophet himself, a similar toleration was afterwards extended in practice to the Zoroastrians who came under Muslim rule.

The period of religious toleration upon which Western Christendom entered in the second half of the seventeenth century had its origins in a much more cynical mood. It can be called ‘religious toleration’ only in the sense that it was a toleration of religions; if we look to its motives it should rather be styled irreligious toleration. In this half-century the Catholic and Protestant factions rather suddenly abandoned their struggles, not because they had become convinced of the sin of intolerance but because they had come to realize that neither party could any longer make much headway against the other. At the same time they seem to have become aware that they no longer cared sufficiently for the theological issues at stake to relish making any further sacrifices for their sake. They repudiated the traditional virtue of ‘enthusiasm’ (which by derivation means being filled with the spirit of God) and henceforth regarded it as a vice. It was in this spirit that an eighteenth-century English bishop described an eighteenth-century English missionary as ‘a miserable enthusiast’.

Nevertheless toleration, from whatever motive it may derive, is a sovereign antidote to the fanaticism which the impact of a sense of unity on religion is apt to breed. The nemesis of its absence is a choice between the enormity of persecution or a revolutionary revulsion against religion itself. Such a revulsion is expressed in the most famous line of Lucretius: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (‘Such an enormity of evil has religion been able to instigate’); in Voltaire’s ‘ficrasez l’infame’; and in Gambetta’s ‘Le clericalisme, voila Pennemi’.

The Lucretian and Voltairean view that religion is itself an evil—and perhaps the fundamental evil in human life—might be supported by citing, from the annals of Indie and Hindu history, the sinister influence which religion has incontestably exercised, in the lives of these civilizations, upon the institution of caste.

This institution, which consists in the social segregation of two or more geographically intermingled groups of human beings, is apt to establish itself wherever and whenever one community makes itself master of another community without being able or willing either to exterminate the subject community or to assimilate it into its own body social. For example, a caste division has arisen in the United States between the dominant white majority and the negro minority, and in South Africa between the dominant white minority and the negro majority. In the sub-continent of India the institution of caste seems to have arisen out of the irruption of the Eurasian Nomad Aryas into the former domain of the so-called Indus culture in the course of the first half of the second millennium B.C.

It will be seen that this institution of caste has no essential connexion with religion. In the United States and in South Africa, where the Negroes have abandoned their ancestral religions and adopted the Christianity of the dominant Europeans, the divisions between churches cut right across the divisions between races, though the black and white members of each church are segregated from one another in their religious worship as in other social activities. In the Indian case, on the other hand, we may conjecture that from the first the castes were distinguished from one another by differences of religious practice. It is evident, however, that this religious differentiation must have been accentuated when the Indie Civilization developed the strongly religious bent which it has bequeathed to its successor. It is further evident that this impact of religiosity on the institution of caste must have seriously aggravated the banefulness of the institution. Caste is always on the verge of being a social enormity, but, when it is keyed up by receiving a religious interpretation and a religious sanction, its enormity is bound to grow to monstrous proportions.

In the actual event the impact of religion on caste in India has begotten the unparalleled social abuse of ‘untouchability’, and there has never been any effective move to abolish or even to mitigate ‘untouchability’ on the part of the Brahmans, the hieratic caste which has become master of the ceremonies of the whole system. The enormity survives, except in so far as it has been assailed by revolution.

The earliest known revolts against caste are those of Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, and of the Buddha, both about 500 B.C. If either Buddhism or Jainism had succeeded in captivating the Indie World, caste might have been got rid of. As it turned out, however, the role of universal church in the last chapter of the Indie decline and fall was played by Hinduism, a parvenu archa-istic syncretism of things new and old; and one of the old things to which Hinduism gave a new lease of life was caste. Not content with preserving this old abuse, it elaborated it, and the Hindu Civilization has been handicapped from its outset by a far heavier burden of caste than ever weighed upon its predecessor.

In the history of the Hindu Civilization revolts against caste have expressed themselves in secessions from Hinduism under the attraction of some alien religious system. Some of these secessions have been led by Hindu reformers who have founded new churches combining expurgated versions of Hinduism with alien elements. For example Nanak (A.D. 1469-1538), the founder of Sikhism, borrowed elements from Islam, and Ram Mohan Roy (A.D. 1772-1833) created the Brahmo Samaj out of a combination between Hinduism and Christianity. In both these systems caste is rejected. In other cases secessionists have shaken the dust of Hinduism off their feet altogether and have entered the Islamic or the Christian fold; and such conversions have taken place on the largest scale in districts containing a high proportion of members of low castes and depressed classes.

This is the revolutionary retort to the enormity of ‘untouchability’, which has been evoked by the impact of religion on caste; and, as the masses of India are progressively stirred by the economic and intellectual and moral ferment of Westernization, the trickle of conversions among outcastes seems likely to swell to a flood, unless a harmonious adjustment of their religious-social system is achieved, in the teeth of Brahman opposition, by those members of the Hindu Society who honour the religious as well as the political ideals of the Banya Mahatma Gandhi.

We have already observed that the division of labour is not entirely unknown in primitive societies, and it is illustrated by the specialization of smiths, bards, priests, medicine-men and the like. But the impact of civilization on the division of labour tends in a general way to accentuate the division to a degree at which it threatens not merely to bring in diminishing social returns but to become actually anti-social in its working; and this effect is produced in the lives of the creative minority and the uncreative majority alike. The creators are pushed into esoteri-cism and the rank and file into lopsidedness.

Esotericism is a symptom of failure in the careers of creative individuals, and it may be described as an accentuation of the preliminary movement in the rhythm of Withdrawal-and-Return, resulting in a failure to complete the process. The Greeks censured those who failed in this way by applying to them the word

. The

, in fifth-century Greek usage, was a superior personality who committed the social offence of living by and for himself instead of putting his gifts at the service of the common weal; and the light in which such behaviour was regarded in Periclean Athens is illustrated by the fact that, in our modern vernaculars, the derivative of this Greek word (idiot) has come to mean an imbecile. But the real

of our modern Western Society are not to be found in asylums. One group of them, homo sapiens specialized and degraded into homo economicus, supplies the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys of Dickensian satire. Another group believes itself to be at the opposite pole and to be numbered among the children of light, but in fact it falls under the same condemnation; these are the intellectual and aesthetic snobs and high-brows who believe that their art is ‘for art’s sake’, the Bunthornes of Gilbertian satire. Perhaps the difference of date between Dickens and Gilbert exemplifies the fact that the former group were the more conspicuous in Early Victorian England and the latter group in the Late Victorian Age. They are at opposite poles, but it has been remarked of the North and South Poles of our planet that, though they are far apart, they suffer from the same climatic defects.

It remains to consider what we have called lopsidedness, the effect of the impact of civilization on the division of labour in the life of the uncreative majority.

The social problem that awaits the creator when he returns from his withdrawal into a renewed communion with the mass of his fellows is the problem of raising the average level of a number of ordinary human souls to the higher level that has been attained by the creator himself; and as soon as he grapples with this task he is confronted with the fact that most of the rank and file are unable to live on this higher level with all their hearts and wills and souls and strength. In this situation he may be tempted to try a short cut and resort to the device of raising some single faculty to the higher level without bothering about the whole personality. This means, ex hypothesi, the forcing of a human being into a lopsided development. Such results are most easily obtainable on the plane of a mechanical technique, since, of all the elements in a culture, its mechanical aptitudes are easiest to isolate and to communicate. It is not difficult to make an efficient mechanic out of a person whose soul remains in all other departments primitive and barbarous. But other faculties can be specialized and hyper-trophied in the same way. Matthew Arnold’s criticism, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), of the devout middle-class Nonconformist English Philistine in his ‘Hebraizing backwater’ was that he had specialized in what he wrongly believed to be the Christian Religion while neglecting the other—the ‘Hellenic’—virtues which go to the making of a well-balanced personality.

We have come across this lopsidedness already in our examination of the response to the challenge of penalization made by penalized minorities. We have observed that the tyrannical exclusion of these minorities from full citizenship has stimulated them to prosper and excel in the activities left open to them; and we have marvelled at and admired a whole gallery of tours deforce in which these minorities stand out as the very incarnation of the invincibility of human nature. At the same time we cannot ignore the fact that some of these minorities—Levantines and Phanariots and Armenians and Jews—have the reputation of being ‘not as other men are’ for worse as well as for better. In the unhappy relations between Jews and Gentiles, which is the classic case, the Gentile who is disgusted and ashamed at the behaviour of his anti-Semitic fellow Goyyim is also embarrassed at finding himself constrained to admit that there is some element of truth in the caricature which the Jew-baiter draws as a justification for his own bestiality. The heart of the tragedy lies in the fact that a penalization which stimulates a penalized minority to a heroic response is apt to warp its human nature as well. And what is true of these socially penalized minorities is evidently likewise true of those technologically specialized majorities with which we are now concerned. This is a point to be borne in mind when we observe the ever-increasing intrusion of technological studies upon what used to be a liberal, if too unpractical, curriculum of education.

The fifth-century Greeks had a word for this lopsidedness: fiavavoia. The fidvavoos was a person whose activity was specialized, through a concentration on some particular technique, at the expense of his all-round development as a social animal. The kind of technique which was usually in people’s minds when they used the term was some manual or mechanical trade pursued for private profit. But the Hellenic contempt for fiavavoia went farther than this, and implanted in Hellenic minds a contempt for professionalism of all kinds. The Spartan concentration on military technique was, for example, fiavavoia incarnate. Even a great statesman and saviour of his country could not escape the reproach if he lacked an all-round appreciation of the art of life.

‘In refined and cultivated society Themistocles used to be girded at by people of so-called liberal education [for his lack of accomplishments] and used to be driven into making the rather cheap defence that he certainly could do nothing with a musical instrument, but that, if you were to put into his hands a country that was small and obscure, he knew how to turn it into a great country and a famous one.’¹

Against this, perhaps rather mild, example of fiavavoia we may set a picture of Vienna in the golden age of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, where it is recorded that a Hapsburg Emperor and his Chancellor were both accustomed, in their hours of relaxation, to take part in the performance of string quartets.

This Hellenic sensitiveness to the dangers of fiavavoia has also expressed itself in the institutions of other societies. For example, the social function of the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday is to ensure that, for one day out of seven, a creature who has been cramped and blinkered by the professional specialization through which he has been earning his living for six days shall on the seventh remember his Creator and live the life of an integral human soul. Again, it is no accident that, in England, organized games and other sports should have grown in popularity with the rise of Industrialism; for such sport is a conscious attempt to counterbalance the soul-destroying specialization which the division of labour under Industrialism entails.

Unfortunately, this attempt to adjust life to Industrialism through sport has been partially defeated because the spirit and rhythm of Industrialism have invaded and infected sport itself. In the Western World of to-day professional athletes, more narrowly specialized and more extravagantly paid than any industrial technicians, now provide horrifying examples of

at its acme. The writer of this Study recalls two football grounds he visited on the campuses of two colleges in the United States. One of them was flood-lighted in order that football players might be manufactured by night as well as by day, in continuous shifts. The other was roofed over in order that practice might go on, whatever the weather. It was said to be the largest span of roof in the world, and its erection had cost a fabulous sum. Round the sides were ranged beds for the reception of exhausted or wounded warriors. On both these American grounds I found that the players were no more than an infinitesimal fraction of the total student body; and I was also told that these boys looked forward to the ordeal of playing in a match with much the same apprehension as their elder brothers had felt when they went into the trenches in 1918. In truth, this Anglo-Saxon football was not a game at all.

A corresponding development can be discerned in the history of the Hellenic World, where the aristocratic amateurs whose athletic victories are celebrated in Pindar’s Odes were replaced by teams of professionals, while the shows that were purveyed, in the post-Alexandrine Age, from Parthia to Spain by the

Tevirai (‘United Artists Ltd.’) were as different from the performances in Dionysus’s own theatre at Athens as a music-hall revue is different from a medieval mystery play.

It is no wonder that, when social enormities defy adjustment in this baffling fashion, philosophers should dream of revolutionary plans for sweeping the enormities away. Plato, writing in the first generation after the Hellenic breakdown, seeks to cut the root of

by planting his Utopia in an inland region with no facilities for maritime trade and little inducement towards any economic activity except subsistence farming. Thomas Jefferson, the fountain-head of an American idealism that has gone sadly astray, dreams the same dream at the opening of the nineteenth century. ‘Were I to indulge my own theory’, he writes, ‘I should wish the States to practise neither commerce nor navigation but to stand with regard to Europe precisely on the footing of China’¹ (who kept her ports closed to European trade until forced to open them by British arms in 1840). Again, Samuel Butler imagines his Erewhonians deliberately and systematically destroying their machines as the only alternative to being enslaved by them.

A re-orientation of the faculty of mimesis away from the elders towards the pioneers is, as we have seen, the change in the direction of this faculty which accompanies the mutation of a primitive society into a civilization; and the aim in view is the raising of the uncreative mass to the new level reached by the pioneers. But, because this resort to mimesis is a short cut, a ‘cheap substitute’ for the real thing, the attainment of the goal is apt to be illusory. The mass is not really enabled to enter the ‘communion of saints’. Too often the natural primitive man, homo integer antiquae virtutis, is transmogrified into a shoddy ‘man in the street’, homo vulgaris Northcliffii or homo demotions Cleonis. The impact of civilization on mimesis, in that event, begets the enormity of a pseudo-sophisticated urban crowd, signally inferior in many respects to its primitive ancestors. Aristophanes fought Cleon with the weapon of ridicule on the Attic stage, but off the stage Cleon won. The Cleonian ‘man in the street’, whose entry upon the stage of Hellenic history before the end of the fifth century B.C. is one of the unmistakable symptoms of social decline, eventually redeemed his soul by repudiating outright a culture which had failed to satisfy his spiritual hunger because he had only succeeded in filling his belly with the husks. As a spiritually awakened child of a dissident proletariat, he worked out his own salvation at last through the discovery of a higher religion.

Perhaps these examples may suffice to illustrate the part played in the breakdown of civilizations by the intractability of old institutions to the touch of new social forces—or, in biblical language, by the inadequacy of old bottles as receptacles for new wine.

(3) THE NEMESIS OF CREATIVITY: IDOLIZATION OF AN EPHEMERAL SELF

We have now made some study of two aspects of that failure of self-determination to which the breakdowns of civilizations appear to be due. We have considered the mechanicalness of mimesis and the intractability of institutions. We may conclude this part of our inquiry with a consideration of the apparent nemesis of creativity.

It looks as though it were uncommon for the creative responses to two or more successive challenges in the history of a civilization to be achieved by one and the same minority. Indeed, the party that has distinguished itself in dealing with one challenge is apt to fail conspicuously in attempting to deal with the next. This disconcerting yet apparently normal inconstancy of human fortunes is one of the dominant motifs of Attic drama and is discussed by Aristotle in his Poetics under the name of irepnreTeia or ‘the reversal of roles’. It is also one of the principal themes of the New Testament.

In the drama of the New Testament the Christ, whose epiphany on Earth is the true fulfilment of Jewry’s Messianic hope, is nevertheless rejected by the school of the Scribes and Pharisees which, only a few generations back, had come to the front by taking the lead in the heroic Jewish revolt against the triumphal progress of Hellenization. The insight and the uprightness which had brought the Scribes and Pharisees to the fore in that previous crisis desert them now in a crisis of greater import, and the Jews who respond are ‘the publicans and harlots’. The Messiah Himself comes from ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, and the greatest of His executors is a Jew from Tarsus, a pagan Hellenized city beyond the traditional horizon of the Promised Land. If the drama is looked at from a slightly different angle and on a rather broader stage, the role of the Pharisees can be assigned, as in the Fourth Gospel, to Jewry as a whole, and the role of the publicans and harlots to the Gentiles who accept St. Paul’s teaching when it is rejected by the Jews.

The same motif of ‘the reversal of roles’ is the theme of a number of the parables and subsidiary incidents in the Gospel story. It is the point of the parables of Dives and Lazarus, the Pharisee and the Publican, the Good Samaritan in contrast to the Priest and the Levite, and the Prodigal Son in contrast to his respectable elder brother; and the same theme appears in the encounters of Jesus with the Roman centurion and with the Syrophoenician woman. If we include the Old and New Testaments in a single conspectus, we find the Old Testament drama of Esau forfeiting his birthright to Jacob answered by a ‘reversal of roles’ in the New Testament when the descendants of Jacob forfeit their birthright in their turn by rejecting Christ. The motif constantly recurs in the sayings of Jesus: ‘Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased’; ‘The last shall be first and the first last’; ‘Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven’. And He applies the moral to His own mission by quoting a verse from the hundred and eighteenth Psalm: ‘The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.’

The same idea runs all through the great works of Hellenic literature, and is summarily expressed in the formula

—

: ‘Pride goes before a fall.’ Herodotus underlines the lesson in the lives of Xerxes and Croesus and Polycrates. Indeed the whole subject of his History might be taken to be the pride and fall of the Achaemenian Empire; and Thucydides, writing a generation later and in an apparently more objective and ‘scientific’ spirit, portrays much more impressively, because he discards the frank tendentiousness of ‘the Father of History’, the pride and fall of Athens. It is scarcely necessary to cite the favourite themes of Attic tragedy exemplified in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Oedipus and Ajax of Sophocles, or the Pentheus of Euripides. A poet of the Sinic decline and fall expresses the same idea:

He who stands on tip-toe does not stand firm;

He who takes the longest strides does not walk the fastest....

He who boasts of what he will do succeeds in nothing;

He who is proud of his work achieves nothing that endures.¹

Such is the nemesis of creativity; and if the plot of this tragedy is really of common occurrence—if it is true that the successful creator in one chapter finds his very success a severe handicap in endeavouring to resume the creative role in the next chapter, so that the chances are always actually against ‘the favourite’ and in favour of ‘the dark horse’—then it is plain that we have here run to earth a very potent cause of the breakdowns of civilizations. We can see that this nemesis would bring on social breakdowns in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it would diminish the number of possible candidates for playing the creator’s role in face of any possible challenge, since it would rule out those who had successfully responded to the last challenge. On the other hand, this disqualification of those who had played the creator’s part in the former generation would range these same ex-creators in the forefront of the opposition to whoever may be making the successful response to the new challenge; and these ex-creators, by the very fact of their earlier creativity, will now be in occupation of the key positions of power and influence in the society to which they and the potential new creators alike belong. In these positions they will not be helping the society forward any longer; they will be ‘resting on their oars’.

While the attitude of ‘resting on one’s oars’ may be described as a passive way of succumbing to the nemesis of creativity, the negativeness of this mental posture does not certify an absence of moral fault. A fatuous passivity towards the present springs from an infatuation with the past, and this infatuation is the sin of idolatry. For idolatry may be defined as an intellectually and morally blind worship of the creature instead of the Creator. It may take the form of an idolization of the idolater’s own personality or society in some ephemeral phase of the never-ceasing movement through challenge and response to further challenge which is the essence of being alive; or it may take the limited form of an idolization of some particular institution or technique which once stood the idolater in good stead. It will be convenient to examine these different forms of idolatry separately, and we will start with the idolization of the self, because that will offer the clearest illustrations of the sin that we are now setting out to study. If it is indeed the truth

then the idolater who commits the error of treating one dead self not as a stepping-stone but as a pedestal will be alienating himself from life as conspicuously as the Stylite devotee who maroons himself on a lonely pillar from the life of his fellows.

We have now perhaps sufficiently prepared the ground for a few historical illustrations of our present theme.

The most notorious historical example of this idolization of an ephemeral self is the error of the Jews which is exposed in the New Testament. In a period of their history which began in the infancy of the Syriac Civilization and which culminated in the Age of the Prophets, the people of Israel and Judah raised themselves head and shoulders above the Syriac peoples round about by rising to a monotheistic conception of religion. Keenly conscious and rightly proud of their spiritual treasure, they allowed themselves to be betrayed into an idolization of this notable but transitory stage in their spiritual growth. They had indeed been gifted with unparalleled spiritual insight; but, after having divined a truth which was absolute and eternal, they allowed themselves to be captivated by a relative and temporary half-truth. They persuaded themselves that Israel’s discovery of the One True God had revealed Israel itself to be God’s Chosen People; and this half-truth inveigled them into the fatal error of looking upon a momentary spiritual eminence, which they had attained by labour and travail, as a privilege conferred upon them by God in an everlasting covenant. Brooding on a talent which they had perversely sterilized by hiding it in the earth, they rejected the still greater treasure which God offered them in the coming of Jesus of Nazareth.

If Israel succumbed to the nemesis of creativity by idolizing itself as ‘the Chosen People’, Athens succumbed to the same nemesis by idolizing herself as ‘the Education of Hellas’. We have already seen how Athens earned a transitory right to this glorious title by her achievements between the Age of Solon and the Age of Pericles; but the imperfection of what Athens had achieved was, or should have been, made manifest by the very occasion on which this title was conferred upon her by her own brilliant son. Pericles coined the phrase in a funeral oration which, according to Thucy-dides, he delivered in praise of the Athenian dead in the first year of the war which was the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual breakdown in the life of the Hellenic Society in general and of Athens in particular. This fatal war had broken out because one of the problems set by the Solonian economic revolution—the problem of creating a Hellenic political world order—had proved to be beyond the compass of the fifth-century Athenians’ moral stature. The military overthrow of Athens in 404 B.C., and the greater moral defeat which the restored Athenian democracy inflicted on itself five years later in the judicial murder of Socrates, provoked Plato in the next generation to repudiate Periclean Athens and nearly all her works. Yet Plato’s partly petulant and partly affected gesture did not impress his fellow citizens; and the epigoni of the Athenian pioneers who had made their city ‘the Education of Hellas’ sought to vindicate their claim to a forfeited title by the perverse method of proving themselves unteachable—as they continued to prove themselves by their inconsistent and futile policies right through the age of the Macedonian ascendancy down to the bitter end of Athenian history, when Athens subsided into stagnant obscurity as a provincial town of the Roman Empire.

Thereafter, when a new culture dawned on what had once been the free city-states of the Hellenic World, it was not in Athens that the seed fell on good ground. The account given in the Acts of the Apostles of the encounter between the Athenians and Saint Paul suggests that the Apostle to the Gentiles was not insensitive to the ‘academic’ atmosphere of a city which in his day had become the Hellenic Oxford and that when he addressed ‘the dons’ on ‘Mars’ Hill’ he did his best to approach the subject from an angle congenial to this peculiar audience. Yet the narrative makes it appear that his preaching in Athens proved a failure, and, though in the sequel he found occasion to address Epistles to a number of the churches that he had founded in Greek cities, he never, so far as we know, attempted to convert with the pen these Athenians whom he had found so impervious to the spoken word.

If the Athens of the fifth century B.C. could fairly claim to be ‘the Education of Hellas’, a corresponding title might with justice be awarded by the modern Western World to the city-states of Northern Italy on the strength of their achievement in the Renaissance. When we examine the history of our Western Society during the four hundred years from the latter part of the fifteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth, we find that its modern economic and political efficiency, as well as its modern aesthetic and intellectual culture, is of a distinctively Italian origin. This modern movement in the concerto of Western history was set in motion by an Italian impetus, and this impetus was a radiation of the Italian culture of the preceding age. In fact this chapter of Western history might well be called its Italistic Age, on the analogy of the so-called Hellenistic Age of Hellenic history in which the culture of fifth-century Athens was propagated, along the track of Alexander’s armies, from the coasts of the Mediterranean to the remote landward frontier of a submerged Achaemenian Empire.¹ Yet we find ourselves again confronted with the same paradox; for, just as Athens played a part of ever increasing futility in the Hellenistic Age, so the contributions of Italy to the general life of the Western Society in the Modern Age were conspicuously inferior to those of her Transalpine disciples.

The comparative sterility of Italy throughout this Modern Age was manifest in all the medieval hearths and homes of Italian culture—in Florence, in Venice, in Milan, in Siena, in Bologna, in Padua; and the sequel, at the end of this modern period, is perhaps even more remarkable. Towards the close of this chapter the Transalpine nations had become competent to repay the debt they owed to Medieval Italy. The turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the beginning of a new cultural radiation across the Alps, this time in the reverse direction; and this inflow of Transalpine influences into Italy was the first cause of the Italian Risorgimento.

The first strong political stimulus received by Italy from the other side of the Alps was her temporary incorporation into the Napoleonic Empire. The first strong economic stimulus was the reopening of the trade route through the Mediterranean to India, which preceded the cutting of the Suez Canal and arose indirectly out of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. These Transalpine stimuli did not, of course, produce their full effect until they had communicated themselves to Italian agents; but the Italian creative forces by which the Risorgimento was brought to harvest did not arise on any Italian ground that had already borne the harvest of a medieval Italian culture.

In the economic field, for example, the first Italian port to win for itself a share in modern Western maritime trade was neither Venice nor Genoa nor Pisa, but Leghorn; and Leghorn was the post-Renaissance creation of a Tuscan Grand Duke, who had planted there a settlement of crypto-Jews from Spain and Portugal. Though Leghorn was planted within a few miles of Pisa, her fortunes were made by these indomitable refugees from the opposite shore of the Western Mediterranean and not by the supine descendants of the medieval Pisan seafarers.

In the political field the unification of Italy was the achievement of an originally Transalpine principality which, before the eleventh century, had had no foothold on the Italian side of the Alps beyond the French-speaking Val d’Aosta. The centre of gravity of the dominions of the House of Savoy did not finally come to rest on the Italian side of the Alps till the liberty of the Italian city-states and the genius of the Italian Renaissance had successively passed away, and no Italian city that had been of first-class importance in the great age came within the dominions of the King of Sardinia, as the ruler of the dominions of the House of Savoy was now styled, until the acquisition of Genoa after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. The Savoyard ethos was at that time still so alien from the city-state tradition that the Genoese chafed under the rule of His Sardinian Majesty until 1848, when the dynasty won adherents in all parts of the Italian Peninsula by putting itself at the head of the nationalist movement.

In 1848 the Austrian regime in Lombardy and Venetia was threatened simultaneously by a Piedmontese invasion and by risings in Venice and Milan and other Italian cities within the Austrian provinces; and it is interesting to reflect upon the difference in the historical importance of these two anti-Austrian movements, which took place at the same time and which both figure officially as blows struck in the common cause of Italian liberation. The risings in Venice and Milan were strokes for liberty, no doubt; but the vision of liberty which inspired them was the recollection of a medieval past. These cities were, in spirit, resuming their medieval struggles against the Hohenstaufen. Compared with their failures, which were unquestionably heroic, the military performance of the Piedmontese in 1848-9 was far from creditable, and the irresponsible breach of a prudent armistice was punished by the shameful defeat at Novara. But this Piedmontese disgrace proved more fruitful for Italy than the glorious defence of Venice and of Milan; for the Piedmontese army survived to secure its revenge (with very substantial French assistance) at Magenta ten years later, and the newfangled English-fashioned parliamentary constitution granted by King Charles Albert in 1848 became the constitution of a united Italy in i860. On the other hand, the glorious feats performed by Milan and Venice in 1848 were not repeated; thereafter, these ancient cities remained passive under the reimposed Austrian yoke, and allowed their final liberation to be secured by Piedmontese arms and diplomacy.

The explanation of these contrasts would seem to be that the Venetian and Milanese exploits of 1848 were foredoomed to failure because the spiritual driving force behind them was not modern nationalism but an idolization of their own dead selves as medieval city-states. The nineteenth-century Venetians who responded to Manin’s call in 1848 were fighting for Venice alone; they were striving to restore an obsolete Venetian republic, not to contribute to the creation of a united Italy. The Piedmontese, on the other hand, were not tempted to idolize an obsolete ephemeral self, because their past provided no self which could be made an object of idolatry.

The difference is summed up in the contrast between Manin and Cavour. Manin was an unmistakable Venetian who would have found himself quite at home in the fourteenth century. Cavour, with his French mother-tongue and his Victorian outlook, would have been as utterly out of his element in a fourteenth-century Italian city-state as his Transalpine contemporaries, Peel and Thiers, while he could have turned his gift for parliamentary politics and diplomacy, and his interest in scientific agriculture and railway building, to equally good account if fate had chosen to make him a landowner in nineteenth-century England or France instead of in nineteenth-century Italy.

On this showing, the role, in the Italian Risorgimento, of the uprising of 1848-9 was essentially negative, and its failure was a precious and, indeed, indispensable preliminary to the successes of 1859-70. In 1848 the old idols of medieval Milan and medieval Venice were so battered and defaced that now at last they lost their fatal hold on their worshippers’ souls; and this belated effacement of the past cleared the ground for the constructive leadership of the one Italian state that was not handicapped by any medieval memories.

If we extend our survey from the Old World to the New, we shall find a parallel illustration of the nemesis of creativity in the history of the United States. If we make a comparative study of the post-war histories of the several States of ‘the Old South’ which were members of the Confederacy in the Civil War of 1861-5 and were involved in the Confederacy’s defeat, we shall notice a marked difference between them in the extent to which they have since recovered from that common disaster; and we shall notice that this difference is the exact inverse of an equally well-marked difference which had distinguished the same States in the period before the Civil War.

A foreign observer who visited the Old South in the fifth decade of the twentieth century would assuredly pick out Virginia and South Carolina as the two States in which there was least sign or promise of recovery; and he would be astonished to find the effects of even so great a social catastrophe as theirs persisting so starkly over so long a period. In these States the memory of that catastrophe is as green in our generation as if the blow had fallen only yesterday; and ‘the War’ still means the Civil War on many Virginian and South Carolinian lips, though two fearful wars have since supervened. In fact, twentieth-century Virginia or South Carolina makes the painful impression of a country living under a spell, in which time has stood still. This impression will be heightened through contrast by a visit to the State which lies between them. In North Carolina the visitor will find up-to-date industries, mushroom universities and a breath of the hustling, ‘boosting’ spirit which he has learnt to associate with the ‘Yankees’ of the North. He will also find that, in addition to her energetic and successful post-bellum industrialists, North Carolina has given birth to a twentieth-century statesman of the stature of Walter Page.

What explains the springlike burgeoning of life in North Carolina while the life of her neighbours still droops in an apparently unending ‘winter’ of their ‘discontent’? If we turn for enlightenment to the past, we shall find our perplexity momentarily increased when we observe that, right up to the Civil War, North Carolina had been socially barren while Virginia and South first forty years of the history of the American Union Virginia had been beyond comparison the leading State, producing four of the first five Presidents and also John Marshall, who, more than any other single man, adapted the ambiguities of the ‘scrap of paper’, composed by the Philadelphia Convention, to the realities of American life. And if, after 1825, Virginia fell behind, South Carolina, under the leadership of Calhoun, steered the Southern States into the course on which they suffered shipwreck in the Civil War. During all this time North Carolina was seldom heard of. She had a poor soil and no ports. Her impoverished small farmers, mostly descended from squatter immigrants who had failed to make good in either Virginia or South Carolina, were not to be compared with the Virginian squires or the South Carolinian cotton-planters.

The earlier failure of North Carolina in comparison with her neighbours on either side is easily explained; but what of their subsequent failure and her subsequent success? The explanation is that North Carolina, like Piedmont, has not been inhibited by the idolization of a once glorious past; she lost comparatively little by defeat in the Civil War because she had comparatively little to lose; and, having had less far to fall, she had that much less difficulty in recovering from the shock.

These examples of the nemesis of creativity show up in a new light a phenomenon which caught our attention in an earlier part of this Study, and which we called ‘the stimulus of new ground’; for this phenomenon has reappeared in the foregoing examples: Galilaeans and Gentiles compared with Judaeans, Piedmont compared with Milan and Venice, and North Carolina compared with her neighbours to north and south; while, if we had pursued the same inquiry in the case of Athens, we could have shown that it was in Achaia and not in Attica that the Greeks of the third and second century B.C. came nearest to a solution of their intractable problem of federating city-states, in an abortive attempt to maintain their independence against the gigantic parvenu Great Powers that had arisen on the fringes of an expanded Hellenic World. We can now see that the superior fertility of the new ground is not invariably or entirely to be accounted for by the stimulus of the ordeal of breaking virgin soil. There is a negative as well as a positive reason why new ground is apt to be fruitful, namely its freedom from the incubus of ineradicable and no longer profitable traditions and memories.

We can also see the reason for another social phenomenon— the tendency of a creative minority to degenerate into a dominant minority—which we singled out, early in this Study, as a prominent symptom of social breakdown and disintegration. While the creative minority is certainly not predestined to undergo this change for the worse, the creator is decidedly predisposed in this direction ex officio creativitatis. The gift of creativity, which, when originally brought into play, produces a successful response to a challenge, becomes in its turn a new and uniquely formidable challenge to the recipient who has turned this talent to best account.

(4) THE NEMESIS OF CREATIVITY: IDOLIZATION OF AN EPHEMERAL INSTITUTION

In examining the part played in the breakdown and disintegration of the Hellenic Society by the idolization of this institution— so brilliantly successful within its proper limits but at the same time, like all human creations, ephemeral—we shall have to distinguish between two different situations in which the idol stood as a stumbling-block in the way of the solution of a social problem.

The earlier, and graver, of the two problems is one which we have examined already in another context and can now, therefore, briefly dismiss. What we have called the Solonian economic revolution required, as one of its corollaries, some kind of political federation of the Hellenic World. The Athenian attempt to achieve this failed, and resulted in what we have diagnosed as the breakdown of the Hellenic Society. It is obvious that the cause of this failure was an inability on the part of all concerned to get over the stumbling-block of city-state sovereignty. But while this inescapable and central problem was left unsolved a secondary problem, which was of the Hellenic dominant minority’s own seeking, came treading upon its heels when Hellenic history passed over from its second to its third chapter at the turn of the fourth and third centuries B.C.

The chief outward sign of this transition was a sudden increase in the material scale of Hellenic life. A hitherto maritime world, confined to the coasts of the Mediterranean Basin, expanded overland from the Dardanelles to India and from Olympus and the Apennines to the Danube and the Rhine. In a society which had swollen to these dimensions without having solved the spiritual problem of creating law and order between the states into which it was articulated, the sovereign city-state was so utterly dwarfed that it was no longer a practicable unit of political life. This was in itself by no means a misfortune; indeed, the passing of this traditional Hellenic form of parochial sovereignty might have been taken as a heaven-sent opportunity for shaking off the incubus of parochial sovereignty altogether. If Alexander had lived to ally himself with Zeno and Epicurus, it is conceivable that the Hellenes might have succeeded in stepping straight out of the city-state into the Cosmopolis; and in that event the Hellenic Society might have taken on a new lease of creative life. But Alexander’s premature death left the World at the mercy of his successors, and the evenly balanced rivalries of the contending Macedonian warlords kept alive the institution of parochial sovereignty in the new era which Alexander had inaugurated. But on the new material scale of Hellenic life parochial sovereignty could be salvaged only on one condition. The sovereign city-state must make way for new states of higher calibre.

These new states were successfully evolved, but, as the result of a series of knock-out blows which Rome delivered, between 220 and 168 B.C., to all her rivals, the number of these states was abruptly reduced from the plural to the singular. The Hellenic Society, which had missed its opportunity of voluntary federation, now found itself clamped together in the bonds of a universal state. But the point of interest for our present purpose is that both the Roman response to the challenge that had defeated Periclean Athens, and all the preliminary contributions from other hands towards the making of it, were the work of members of the Hellenic Society who were not completely infatuated with the idol of city-state sovereignty.

The structural principle of the Roman state was something quite incompatible with such idolization; for this structural principle was a ‘dual citizenship’ dividing the citizen’s allegiance between the local city-state in which he was born and the wider polity which Rome had created. This creative compromise was psychologically possible only in communities in which city-state idolatry had not acquired a strangle-hold over the citizens’ hearts and minds.

The analogy between the problem of parochial sovereignty in the Hellenic World and the corresponding problem in our own world to-day needs no emphasis here. But this much may be said. On the showing of Hellenic history we may expect that our present Western problem will receive its solution—in so far as it receives one at all—in some quarter or quarters where the institution of national sovereignty has not been erected into an object of idolatrous worship. We shall not expect to see salvation come from the historic national states of Western Europe, where every political thought and feeling is bound up with a parochial sovereignty which is the recognized symbol of a glorious past. It is not in this Epimethean psychological environment that our society can look forward to making the necessary discovery of some new form of international association which will bring parochial sovereignty under the discipline of a higher law and so forestall the otherwise inevitable calamity of its annihilation by a knock-out blow. If this discovery is ever made, the laboratory of political experimentation where we may expect to see it materialize will be some body politic like the British Commonwealth of Nations, which has mated the experience of one ancient European national state with the plasticity of a number of new countries overseas; or else it will be some polity like the Soviet Union, which is attempting to organize a number of non-Western peoples into an entirely new kind of community based on a Western revolutionary idea. In the Soviet Union we may find an analogy to the Seleucid Empire, and in the British Empire to the Roman Commonwealth. Will these or such-like bodies politic on the outskirts of our modern Western cosmos eventually produce some form of political structure which will enable us to give more substance, before it is too late, to “our inchoate international organization, which we are now making a second attempt to build up in place of our first inter-war essay at a League of Nations? We cannot tell; but we can almost feel sure that, if these pioneers fail, the work will never be done by the petrified devotees of the idol of national sovereignty.

A classic case of the idolization of an institution bringing a society to grief is the fatal infatuation of Orthodox Christendom with a ghost of the Roman Empire, an ancient institution which had fulfilled its historic function and completed its natural term of life in serving as the apparented Hellenic Society’s uni/ersal state.

Superficially the East Roman Empire presents an appearance of unbroken continuity as one and the same institution from the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine until the conquest of the Imperial City by the Ottoman Turks in A.D. 1453, more than eleven centuries later—or at any rate until the temporary eviction of the East Roman Imperial Government by the Latin Crusaders who seized Constantinople in A.D. 1204. But it would be more in accordance with realities to distinguish two different institutions insulated from one another in the time-dimension by an intervening interregnum. The original Roman Empire which had served as the Hellenic universal state indisputably came to an end in the West during the Dark Ages: de facto at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries and officially in A.D. 476, when the last puppet Emperor in Italy was deposed by a barbarian war-lord, who thenceforth exercised authority in the name of the Emperor at Constantinople. It is perhaps not so readily recognized that the same fate overtook the original Roman Empire in the East, as well, before the Dark Ages were over. Its dissolution may be equated with the end of the strenuous and disastrous reign of Justinian in A.D. 565. There followed in the East a century-and-a-half of interregnum, by which we do not mean that there were not in fact persons styled Roman Emperors ruling or trying to rule from Constantinople during that period, but that this was an age of dissolution-and-incubation, in which the remains of a dead society were swept away and the foundations of a successor were laid. After that, however, in the first half of the eighth century, a ghost of the dead Roman Empire was conjured up by the genius of Leo Syrus. On this reading of the first chapter of Orthodox Christian history Leo Syrus was a disastrously successful Charlemagne; or, conversely, Charlemagne was a providentially unsuccessful Leo Syrus. Charlemagne’s failure gave scope for the Western Christian Church and for a galaxy of Western parochial states to develop during the Middle Ages along the lines familiar to us. Leo’s success clamped the strait waistcoat of a resuscitated universal state upon the Orthodox Christian body social almost before that infant society had learnt the use of its limbs. But this contrast in the outcome does not reflect any difference of aim, for Charlemagne and Leo alike were Epimethean worshippers of the same ephemeral and obsolete institution.

How are we to account for the fatally precocious superiority of Orthodox Christendom over the West in political constructiveness? One important factor, no doubt, was the difference in the degree of the pressure that was exerted upon both these Christendoms simultaneously by the aggression of the Muslim Arabs. In their assault upon the distant West the Arabs shot their bolt in recapturing for the Syriac Society its lost colonial domain in North Africa and Spain. By the time they had crossed the Pyrenees and were striking at the heart of the infant Western Society, the force of their offensive was already spent; and, when their wild ride round the southern and western rim of the Mediterranean brought them up short at Tours against an Austrasian shield-wall, their thrust glanced harmlessly off the solid target. Yet even this passive victory over a tired assailant was enough to make the fortunes of the Austrasian dynasty. It was the prestige won at Tours in A.D. 732 that marked Austrasia out as the leader among the rudimentary Powers of Western Christendom. If this relatively feeble impact of the Arab steel was able to touch off the Carolingian flash in the pan, it is not surprising that the solid structure of the East Roman Empire should have been called into existence in Orthodox Christendom to withstand the far more violent and far longer sustained assault from the same assailant to which Orthodox Christendom was subjected.

For this reason and for others¹ Leo Syrus and his successors succeeded in attaining a goal which in the West was never approached by Charlemagne or Otto I or Henry III even with Papal acquiescence, and a fortiori not by the later emperors who encountered Papal opposition. The Eastern Emperors, in their own dominions, turned the Church into a department of state and the Oecumenical Patriarch into a kind of under-secretary of state for ecclesiastical affairs, thus restoring the relationship between church and state which had been established by Constantine and maintained by his successors down to Justinian. The effect of this achievement declared itself in two ways, one of them general and the other particular.

The general effect was to check and sterilize the tendencies towards variety and elasticity, experimentation and creativeness in Orthodox Christian life; and we can roughly measure the damage done by noting some of the conspicuous achievements of the sister civilization in the West which have no Orthodox Christian counterpart. In Orthodox Christian history we not only find nothing that corresponds to the Hildebrandine Papacy; we miss also the rise and spread of self-governing universities and of self-governing city-states.

The particular effect was an obstinate unwillingness on the part of the reincarnated Imperial Government to tolerate the existence of independent ‘barbarian’ states within the area over which the civilization which it represented had expanded. This political intolerance led to the Romano-Bulgarian wars of the tenth century in which the East Roman Empire, though superficially the victor, suffered irremediable injury; and, as we have already indicated elsewhere, these wars caused the breakdown of the Orthodox Christian Society.

States of one kind or another, city-states or empires, are not the only kind of political institution that has attracted idolatrous worship. Similar honours have been paid, with similar consequences, to the sovereign power in a state—a ‘divine’ king or an ‘omnipotent’ parliament—or again to some caste or class or profession on whose skill or prowess the existence of some state has been deemed to depend.

A classical example of the idolization of a political sovereignty incarnated in a human being is offered by the Egyptiac Society in the time of ‘the Old Kingdom’. In another connexion we have noticed already that the acceptance, or exaction, of divine honours by the sovereigns of the Egyptiac United Kingdom was one symptom of a ‘great refusal’ of a call to a higher mission, a fatal failure to respond to the second challenge in Egyptiac history, and that this failure brought the Egyptiac Civilization to the early breakdown which cut short its precocious youth. The crushing incubus which this series of human idols imposed upon Egyptiac life is perfectly symbolized in the Pyramids, which were erected by the forced labour of their subjects in order to render the Pyramid-Builders magically immortal. Skill, capital and labour which should have been devoted to extending control over the physical environment in the interests of the whole society were misdirected into this idolatrous channel.

This idolization of a political sovereignty incarnated in a human being is an aberration that can be illustrated elsewhere also. If we look for an analogue in our modern Western history we can easily discern a vulgar version of a royal Son of Re in the French roi soleil, Louis XIV. This Western Sun King’s palace at Versailles weighed as heavily upon the land of France as the Pyramids of Gizeh weighed upon the land of Egypt. ‘L’fitat, c’est moi’ might have been spoken by Cheops and ‘Apres moi le deluge’ by Pepi II. But perhaps the most interesting example that the modern Western World affords of the idolization of a sovereign power is one on which an historical judgement cannot yet be pronounced.

In the apotheosis of ‘the Mother of Parliaments’ at Westminster the object of idolization is not a man but a committee. The incurable drabness of committees has co-operated with the obstinate matter-of-factness of modern English social tradition to keep this idolization of Parliament within reasonable limits; and an Englishman who looked out upon the world in 1938 might claim that his temperate devotion to his own political divinity was being handsomely rewarded. Was not the country which had preserved its loyalty to ‘the Mother of Parliaments’ in a happier case than its neighbours who had gone a-whoring after other gods? Had the Lost Ten Tribes of the Continent found either tranquillity or prosperity in their feverish adulation of outlandish Duces and Fuehrers and Kommissars? Yet at the same time he would have to admit that the recent Continental offspring of the ancient insular institution of parliamentary government had proved a sickly brood, incompetent to bring political salvation to the non-British majority of the living generation of mankind, and incapable of holding their own against a war-begotten plague of dictatorships.

Perhaps the truth is that the very features of the Parliament at Westminster which are the secret of its hold upon an Englishman’s respect and affection are so many stumbling-blocks in the way of making this venerable English institution into a political panacea for the World. Perhaps, in accordance with a law which we have already noticed—that those who respond successfully to one challenge are unfavourably placed for successful response to the next—the unique success of the Parliament at Westminster in outlasting the Middle Ages, by adapting itself to the exigencies of the ‘Modern’ (or Once-Modern) Age now concluded, makes it less likely to achieve another creative metamorphosis to meet the challenge of the post-Modern Age which is now upon us.

If we look into the structure of Parliament, we shall find that it is essentially an assembly of representatives of local constituencies. This is just what we should expect from the date and place of its origin; for the kingdoms of the medieval Western World were each a congeries of village communities, interspersed with small towns. In such a polity the significant grouping for social and economic purposes was that of neighbourhood; and in a society so constituted the geographical group was also the natural unit of political organization. But these medieval foundations of parliamentary representation have been undermined by the impact of Industrialism. To-day the link of locality has lost its significance for political as well as for most other purposes; and the English voter of our own generation, if we ask him who is his neighbour, will probably reply ‘My fellow-railwayman or my fellow-miner, wherever he may live from Land’s End to John o’ Groats’. The true constituency has ceased to be local and has become occupational. But an occupational basis of representation is a constitutional terra incognita which ‘the Mother of Parliaments’ in her comfortable old age feels no inclination to explore.

To all this, no doubt, the twentieth-century English admirer of Parliament may justly reply with a solvitur ambulando. In the abstract he may admit that a thirteenth-century system of Representation is unsuitable to a twentieth-century community, but he will point out that the theoretical misfit seems to work well enough. ‘We English’, he will explain, ‘are so thoroughly at home with the institutions we have built up that, in our own country and among ourselves, we can make them work under any conditions. These foreigners, of course . . .’—and he shrugs his shoulders.

It may be that his confidence in his own political heritage will continue to justify itself, to the amazement of ‘the lesser breeds without the law’ who once so eagerly swallowed what they believed to be his political panacea and then violently rejected it after suffering acute indigestion. But, by the same token, it seems probable that England will not cap her seventeenth-century feat by becoming for a second time the creator of those new political institutions which a new age requires. When a new thing has to be found, there are only two ways of finding it, namely creation or mimesis; and mimesis cannot come into play until somebody has performed a creative act for his fellows to imitate. In the fourth chapter of our Western history, which has opened in our time, who will the new political creator be? We can discern at present no evidence in favour of any particular candidate for this prize; but we can predict with some confidence that the new political creator will not be any worshipper of ‘the Mother of Parliaments’.

We may conclude this survey of institutional idols by glancing at the idolatrous worship of castes and classes and professions; and here we already have something to go upon. In studying the arrested civilizations we have come across two societies of the kind—the Spartans and the ‘Osmanlis—in which the keystone of the arch was a caste that was virtually a corporate idol or deified Leviathan. If the aberration of idolizing a caste is capable of arresting a civilization’s growth, it will also be capable of causing its breakdown; and, if we re-examine the breakdown of the Egyptiac Society with this clue in our hand, we shall perceive that the ‘divine’ kingship was not the only idolized incubus that weighed on the backs of the Egyptian peasantry of ‘the Old Kingdom’. They had also to bear the burden of a bureaucracy of litterati.

The truth is that a deified kingship presupposes an educated secretariat. Without such support it could hardly maintain its statuesque pose on its pedestal. Thus the Egyptiac litterati were the power behind the throne, and, indeed, in point of time they were also before it. They were indispensable and they knew it; and they took advantage of this knowledge to ‘bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne and lay them on men’s shoulders’ while the Egyptiac scribes themselves would not move these same burdens ‘with one of their fingers’. The privileged exemption of the litteratus from the common lot of the sons of toil is the theme of the Egyptiac bureaucracy’s glorification of its own order in every age of Egyptiac history. The note is struck blatantly in The Instruction of Duauf: a work, composed during the Egyptiac time of troubles, which has been preserved to us in copies made a thousand years later, as a writing exercise, by the schoolboys of ‘the New Empire’. In this ‘instruction which a man named Duauf, the son of Khety, composed for his son named Pepi, when he voyaged up to the Residence, in order to put him in the School of Books, among the children of the magistrates’, the gist of the ambitious father’s parting exhortation to his aspiring child is:

‘I have seen him that is beaten, him that is beaten: thou art to set thine heart on books. I have beheld him that is set free from forced labour: behold, nothing surpasseth books Every artisan that wieldeth the chisel, he is wearier than him that delveth.... The stone-mason seeketh for work in all manner of hard stone. When he hath finished it his arms are destroyed, and he is weary.... The field-worker, his reckoning endureth for ever...; he too is wearier than can be told.... The weaver in the workshop, he fareth more ill than any woman. His thighs are upon his belly and he breatheth no air.... Let me tell thee, further, how it fareth with the fisherman. Is not his work upon the river, where it is mixed with the crocodiles?... Behold, there is no calling that is without a director except [that of] the scribe, and he is the director....’

In the Far Eastern World there is a familiar analogue of the Egyptiac ‘litteratocracy’ in the incubus of the mandarin, which the Far Eastern Society inherited from the latest age of its predecessor. The Confucian litteratus used to flaunt his heartless refusal to lift a finger to lighten the load of the toiling millions by allowing his finger-nails to grow to lengths which precluded every use of the hand except the manipulation of the scribal brush, and through all the changes and chances of Far Eastern history he has emulated his Egyptiac confrere’s tenacity in keeping his oppressive seat. Even the impact of Western culture has not unseated him. Though the examinations in the Confucian classics are now no more, the litteratus imposes upon the peasant as effectively as ever by flourishing in his face a diploma of the University of Chicago or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In the course of Egyptiac history the alleviation which the long-suffering people obtained—albeit too late—through the gradual humanization of the sovereign power was offset by successive additions to the class incubus. As though the burden of carrying a bureaucracy had not been enough, they were saddled, under ‘the New Empire’, wi.h a priesthood which was organized into a powerful Pan-Egyptiac corporation under the presidency of a Chief Priest of Amon-Re at Thebes by the Emperor Thothmes III (circa 1480-1450 B.C.). Thenceforth the Egyptiac mandarin had a fellow-rider in the shape of an Egyptiac Brahman; and after that the broken-backed Egyptiac circus-horse was compelled to stumble on upon his everlasting round until the pair of riders was increased to a trio by the mounting of a miles gloriosus on the pillion behind the scribe and the pharisee.

The Egyptiac Society, which had been as free from militarism throughout its natural term of existence as the Orthodox Christian Society was during its time of growth, had been goaded by its encounter with the Hyksos—as the East Roman Empire was goaded by its encounter with Bulgaria—into militaristic courses. Not content with driving the Hyksos beyond the pale of the Egyptiac World, the Emperors of the Eighteenth Dynasty yielded to the temptation of passing over from self-defence to aggression by carving out an Egyptian Empire in Asia. This wanton adventure was easier to embark upon than to withdraw from; and when the tide turned against them the Emperors of the Nineteenth Dynasty found themselves compelled to mobilize the fast-waning strength of the Egyptiac body social to preserve the integrity of Egypt herself. Under the Twentieth Dynasty the aged and tormented frame was smitten with a paralytic stroke as the price of its final tour de force in flinging back the combined hosts of European, African and Asiatic barbarians hurled against it by the impetus of the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung. When the fallen body at’ last lay prostrate on the ground, the native litteratus and priest, who still sat tight in the saddle with no bones broken by the fall, were joined by the grandson of the Libyan invader, who now strolled back as a soldier of fortune into the Egyptiac World from whose frontiers his grandfather had been hurled back by the final feat of native Egyptiac arms. The military caste, begotten of these eleventh-century Libyan mercenaries, which continued to bestride the Egyptiac Society for a thousand years after, may have been less formidable to its opponents in the field than the Janissaries or the Spartiates, but it was doubtless just as burdensome at home to the peasantry beneath its feet.

(5) THE NEMESIS OF CREATIVITY: IDOLIZATION OF AN EPHEMERAL TECHNIQUE

If we now turn to consider the idolization of techniques, we may begin by recalling examples which have already come under our notice in which the extreme penalty has been paid. In the Ottoman and Spartan social systems the key-technique of being shepherds of human cattle or hunters of human game was idolized side by side with the institutions through which these activities were carried on. And when we pass from the arrested civilizations evoked by human challenges to those evoked by the challenges of physical nature we find that the idolatrous worship of a technique comprises the whole of their tragedy. The Nomads and the Eskimos have fallen into arrest through an excessive concentration of all their faculties on their shepherding and hunting techniques. Their single-track lives have condemned them to a retrogression towards an animalism which is the negation of human versatility; and if we now peer back into the pre-human chapters of the history of life on this planet we shall find ourselves confronted by other examples of the same law.

This law is enunciated in the following terms by a modern Western scholar who has made a comparative study of its operation in the non-human and in the human domain:

‘Life starts in the sea. There it attains to an extraordinary efficiency. The fishes give rise to types which are so successful (such, for instance, as the sharks) that they have lasted on unchanged until to-day. The path of ascending evolution did not, however, lie in this direction. In evolution Dr. Inge’s aphorism is probably always right: “Nothing fails like success.” A creature which has become perfectly adapted to its environment, an animal whose whole capacity and vital force is concentrated and expended in succeeding here and now, has nothing left over with which to respond to any radical change. Age by age it becomes more perfectly economical in the way its entire resources meet exactly its current and customary opportunities. In the end it can do all that is necessary to survive without any conscious striving or un-adapted movement. It can therefore beat all competitors in the special field; but equally, on the other hand, should that field change, it must become extinct. It is this success of efficiency which seems to account for the extinction of an enormous number of species. Climatic conditions altered. They had used up all their resources of vital energy in adapting themselves to things as they were. Like unwise virgins, they had no oil left over for further adaptations. They were committed, could not readjust, and so they vanished.’¹

The fatally complete technical success of the fishes in adapting themselves to the physical environment of life in the marine overture to its terrestrial history is enlarged upon by the same scholar in the same context:

‘At the level when life was confined to the sea and the fishes were developing, they threw up forms which evolved a spine, and so represented the vertebrates in the highest form then evolved. From the spine there spread out on each side, to aid the head, that fan of feelers which in them became the fore-fins. In the shark—and almost all the fish— these feelers were specialized so as to become, no longer feelers, but paddles: amazingly efficient flukes for bringing the creature head-foremost on its prey. Rapid reaction was everything, patient negotiation nothing; and these flukes not only ceased to be testers, explorers, examiners; they became increasingly efficient for water-movement and for nothing else. It looks as though pre-piscan pre-vertebrate life must have lived in warm shallow pools and perhaps always have been in touch with the floor, as to-day the gurnet by its feelers keeps contact with the solid bed. Once, however, swift unpremeditated movement became everything, specialization drove the fishes out into water where they lost touch with the bottom and all solids. . . . Water . . . became their only element. This meant [that] their power of being stimulated by new circumstances was greatly limited. . . .

‘That type of fish, then, which gave rise to the next advancing order of animals must have been a creature which did not adopt this extreme specialization of the fin. For, first, it must have been a creature which kept in touch with the floor, and so remained more variously stimulated than the fishes which lost touch with a solid environment. And, secondly, it must have been a creature which, for the same reason, kept in touch with the shallows and kept this touch by means of forelimbs which, because they could not therefore become wholly specialized as water-driving flukes, retained a more generalized “inefficient” exploratory and tentative character. The skeleton of such a creature has been discovered—a creature whose forelimbs are, it might almost be said, rather clumsy hands than proper fins; and through these members it looks as though the transition from shallow pool to flooded shore was made, the deep sea was left behind, the land was invaded and the amphibian arrived.’¹

In this triumph of the fumbling amphibians in their competition with the deft and decisive fishes, we are witnessing an early performance of a drama which has since been re-played many times over with as many different changes in the cast. In the next performance that invites our attention, we shall find the fishes’ part being taken by the amphibians’ formidable progeny of the reptile tribe, while the amphibians’ own part in the preceding performance falls to the ancestors of those mammalian animals in which the Spirit of Man has recently become incarnate. The primitive mammals were weak and puny creatures who unexpectedly inherited the Earth because the heritage had been left derelict by the magnificent reptiles who were the previous lords of creation; and the Mesozoic reptiles—like the Eskimos and the Nomads—were conquerors who forfeited their conquests by straying into the blind alley of over-specialization.

‘[The] apparently abrupt ending up of the reptiles is, beyond all question, the most striking revolution in the whole history of the Earth before the coming of mankind. It is probably connected with the close of a vast period of equable warm conditions and the onset of a new austerer age in which the winters were bitterer and the summers brief but hot. The Mesozoic life, animal and vegetable alike, was adapted to warm conditions and capable of little resistance to cold. The new life, on the other hand, was, before all things, capable of resisting great changes of temperature. . . .

‘As for the mammals competing with and ousting the less fit reptiles... there is not a scrap of evidence of any such direct competition. ... In the later Mesozoic a number of small jawbones are found, entirely mammalian in character. But there is not a scrap, not a bone, to suggest that there lived any Mesozoic mammal which could look a dinosaur in the face. . . . [They] seem to have been all obscure little beasts of the size of mice and rats.’¹

The propositions put forward by Mr. Wells down to this point appear to be generally accepted. The reptiles were supplanted by the mammals because these unwieldy monsters had lost the ability to adapt themselves to new conditions. But, in the ordeal to which the reptiles succumbed, what was it exactly which enabled the mammals to survive? On this supremely interesting question the two writers we have hitherto drawn upon are in disagreement. According to Mr. Wells, the rudimentary mammals survived because they had hair which protected them against the oncoming cold. If this be all that there is to be said, we learn no more than that fur is a more effective armour than scales in certain conditions. Mr. Heard, however, suggests that the armour which saved the mammals’ lives was not physical but psychic, and that the strength of this psychic defence lay in a spiritual defencelessness; in fact, that we have here a pre-human example of that principle of growth which we have called etherialization.

‘The giant reptiles were themselves hopelessly decadent before the rise of the mammals. . . . They had begun [as] small, mobile and lively creatures. They grew so vast that these land-ironclads could scarcely move. . . . Their brains remained practically non-existent. . . . Their heads were no more than periscopes, breathing-tubes and pincers.

‘Meanwhile, as they slowly swelled and hardened up to their doom ... there was already being fashioned that creature which was to leap the boundary and limits then set for life, and start a new stage of energy and consciousness. And nothing could illustrate more vividly the principle that life evolves by sensitiveness and awareness; by being exposed, not by being protected; by nakedness, not by strength; by smallness, not by size. The fore-runners of the mammals ... are minute rat-like creatures. In a world dominated by monsters the future is given to a creature which has to spend its time taking notice of others and giving way to others. It is undefended, given fur instead of scales. It is unspecialized, given again those sensitive feeling forelimbs and, no doubt, those antennae—the long hairs on the face and head—to give it irritating stimulation all the time. Ears and eyes are highly developed. It becomes warm-blooded, so [thatj it may be constantly conscious throughout the cold, when the reptile falls into anaesthetic coma. . . . So its consciousness is blown upon and developed. The varied continuous stimulant is reacted to with varied answer, because the creature, being unprecedented, is capable not of one but of many replies, none of which can settle the question for it.’¹

If this is a faithful likeness of our ancestor, we may agree both that we ought to be proud of him and that we do not always show ourselves worthy of him.

A hundred years ago Great Britain not only claimed to be, but actually was, ‘the Workshop of the World’. To-day she is one of several competing workshops of the World, and her share of the business has tended for a long time past to grow relatively smaller. The thesis ‘Is Britain finished?’ has exercised innumerable pens and received a variety of answers. Perhaps, when all the factors are taken into account, we have done on the whole rather better than might have been expected in the last seventy years, though the subject obviously offers plenty of scope for pessimistic and upbraiding prophets of the type described in one of the most brilliant of Samuel Butler’s inverted quotations.² If, however, one were to single out the point in which we have been most at fault, one would put his finger on the conservatism of our captains of industry who have idolized the obsolescent techniques which had made the fortunes of their grandfathers.

Perhaps a more instructive, because less generalized, example can be found in the United States. There will be no denying that, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the Americans surpassed all other peoples in the variety and ingenuity of their industrial inventions and in their enterprise in exploiting such inventions for practical purposes. The sewing machine, the typewriter, the application of machinery to the craft of boot-making and the McCormick reaping machine are among the first of these ‘Yankee notions’ that spring to the mind. But there was one invention in the exploitation of which the Americans showed themselves decidedly backward in comparison with the British, and their backwardness here is the more striking because this neglected invention was an improvement in a machine which the Americans themselves had invented at the very beginning of the century: namely, the steamship. The American paddle-steamer had proved an immensely important addition to the transport facilities of the rapidly expanding republic, all along the thousands of miles of navigable inland waterways with which North America is so richly endowed. It was no doubt a direct result of this successfulness that the Americans were much slower than the British to avail themselves of the later and superior device of the screw propeller for purposes of oceanic navigation. In this matter they were more strongly tempted to idolize an ephemeral technique.

In military history the analogue of the biological competition between the tiny soft-furred mammal and the massive armoured reptile is the saga of the duel between David and Goliath.

Before the fatal day on which he challenges the armies of Israel, Goliath has won such triumphant victories with his spear whose staff is like a weaver’s beam and whose head weighs six hundred shekels of iron, and he has found himself so completely proof against hostile weapons in his panoply of casque and corselet and target and greaves, that he can no longer conceive of any alternative armament; and he believes that in this armament he is invincible. He feels assured that any Israelite who has the hardihood to accept his challenge will likewise be a spearman armed cap-a-pie, and that any such competitor in his own panoply is bound to be his inferior. So hard set is Goliath’s mind in these two ideas that, when he sees David running forward to meet him with no armour on his body and nothing in his hand that catches the eye except his staff, Goliath takes umbrage instead of alarm and exclaims: ‘Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?’ Goliath does not suspect that this youth’s impertinence is a carefully considered manoeuvre; he does not know that David, having realized, quite as clearly as Goliath himself, that in Goliath’s accoutrements he cannot hope to be his match, has therefore rejected the panoply that Saul has pressed upon him. Nor does Goliath notice the sling, nor wonder what mischief may be hidden in the shepherd’s bag. And so this luckless Philistine triceratops stalks pompously forward to his doom.

But as a matter of historical fact the individual hoplite of the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung—Goliath of Gath or Hector of Troy—did not succumb to David’s sling or Philoctetes’ bow but to the Myrmidons’ phalanx, a Leviathan in which a multitude of hoplites set shoulder to shoulder and shield to shield.¹ While each single phalangite was a replica of Hector or Goliath in his accoutrements, he was the antithesis of the Homeric hoplite in his spirit; for the essence of the phalanx lay in the military discipline which had transformed a rabble of individual warriors into a military formation whose orderly evolutions could accomplish ten times as much as the uncoordinated efforts of an equal number of equally well-armed individual champions.

This new military technique, of which we already catch some anticipatory glimpses in the Iliad, made its indubitable entry upon the stage of history in the shape of the Spartan phalanx which marched through the rhythm of Tyrtaeus’s verses to its socially disastrous victory in the Second Spartano-Messenian War. But this triumph was not the end of the story. After driving all its opposite numbers off the field, the Spartan phalanx ‘rested on its oars’, and in the course of the fourth century B.C. it saw itself ignominiously worsted: first, by an Athenian swarm of peltasts—a host of Davids with which the phalanx of Spartan Goliaths found itself quite unable to cope—and then by the tactical innovation of the Theban column. The Athenian and Theban techniques in their turn, however, were outmoded and overmatched at one stroke, in 338 B.C., by a Macedonian formation in which a highly differentiated skirmisher and phalangite had been skilfully integrated with a heavy cavalryman in a single fighting force.

Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenian Empire is the proof of the pristine efficiency of the Macedonian order of battle, and the Macedonian version of the phalanx remained the last word in military technique for a hundred and seventy years—from the battle of Chaeronea, which terminated the ascendancy of the citizen militias of the city-states of Greece, to the battle of Pydna, when the Macedonian phalanx went down in its turn before the Roman legion. The cause of this sensational irepiireTcia in Macedonian military fortunes was the senile adulation of an ephemeral technique. While the Macedonians were resting on their oars as unchallenged masters of all but the western fringes of the Hellenic World, the Romans had been revolutionizing the art of war in the light of an experience gained through their sufferings in their tremendous struggle with Hannibal.

The Roman legion triumphed over the Macedonian phalanx because it carried the integration of the light infantryman with the phalangite a long stage farther. The Romans, in fact, invented a new type of formation and a new type of armament which made it possible for any soldier, and any unit, to play at will either the light infantryman’s or the hoplite’s part, and to change over from one kind of tactics to the other at a moment’s notice in the face of the enemy.

This Roman efficiency was, at the time of the Battle of Pydna, no more than a generation old; for in this Italian penumbra of the Hellenic World a phalanx of the pre-Macedonian type had been seen in the field as recently as the Battle of Cannae (214 B.C.), when the heavy Roman infantry, reverting to a battle order in the antique Spartan phalanx formation, had been rounded up from the rear by Hannibal’s Spanish and Gallic heavy cavalry and had then been slaughtered like cattle by his African heavy infantry on either flank. This disaster had overtaken a Roman high command which— under the shock of a previous catastrophe at Lake Trasimene— had made up its mind to eschew experiments and play (as it most mistakenly supposed) for safety. In the hard school of their crowning defeat at Cannae the Romans had at last whole-heartedly embraced an improvement in infantry technique which transformed the Roman army, at a stroke, into the most efficient fighting force in the Hellenic World. There followed the triumphs of Zama, Cynoscephalae and Pydna, and then a series of wars of Roman against barbarian and of Roman against Roman in which, under a series of great captains from Marius to Caesar, the legion attained the greatest efficiency possible for infantry before the invention of fire-arms. At this very moment, however, when the legionary had become perfect after his own kind, he received the first of a long series of defeats from a pair of mounted men-at-arms with utterly different techniques, who eventually were to drive the legionary off the field. The victory of the horse-archer over the legionary at Carrhae in 53 B.C. forestalled by five years the classic combat of legionary against legionary at Pharsalus, a battle in which Roman infantry technique was probably at its zenith. The omen of Carrhae was confirmed at Adrianople more than four centuries later, when, in A.D. 378, the cataphract—a mailed cavalryman, armed with a lance—gave the legionary his coup de grace. In this battle a Roman contemporary historian who was also a military officer, Ammianus Marcellinus, vouches for the fact that the Roman casualties amounted to two-thirds of the troops engaged, and expresses the opinion that there had been no military disaster to Roman arms on such a scale since Cannae.

For at least the last four of the six centuries between these two battles the Romans had rested on their oars, and that in spite of the warning given at Carrhae and repeated in the defeats of Valerian in A.D. 260 and of Julian in A.D. 363 by the Persian prototypes of the Gothic cataphracts who were the death of Valens and his legionaries in A.D. 378.

After the catastrophe of Adrianople, the Emperor Theodosius rewarded the barbarian horsemen for having annihilated the Roman infantry by hiring them to fill the yawning gap which they themselves had made in the Roman ranks; and, even when the Imperial Government had paid the inevitable price for this shortsighted policy, and had seen these mercenary barbarian troopers partition its western provinces into barbarian ‘successor-states’, the new native army which, at the eleventh hour, saved the eastern provinces from going the same way, was armed and mounted on the barbarian pattern. The supremacy of this heavy-armed lancer lasted for more than a thousand years and his spatial distribution is even more remarkable. His identity is unmistakable, whether his portrait is presented to us in some fresco, dating from the first century of the Christian Era, in a Crimean tomb; or on a third, fourth, fifth or sixth-century bas-relief cut by a Sasanian king into a cliff in Fars; or in the clay figurines portraying those Far Eastern men-at-arms who were the fighting force of the T’ang dynasty (A.D. 618-907); or in the eleventh-century tapestry at Bayeux which depicts the defeat of the antiquated English foot-soldiers of the day by William the Conqueror’s Norman knights.

If this longevity and ubiquity of the cataphract are astonishing, it is also noteworthy that he becomes ubiquitous only in a degenerate form. The story of his discomfiture is told by an eyewitness.

‘I was in the army of the Under-Secretary when he went forth to meet the Tatars on the western side of the City of Peace [Baghdad] on the occasion of its supreme disaster in the year A.H. 656 [A.D. 1258]. We met at Nahr Bashir, one of the dependencies of Dujayl; and there would ride forth from amongst us, to offer single combat, a knight fully accoutred and mounted on an Arab horse, so that it was as though he and his steed together were [solid as] some great mountain. Then there would come forth to meet him from the Mongols a horseman mounted on a horse like a donkey, and having in his hand a spear like a spindle, wearing neither robe nor armour, so that all who saw him were moved to laughter. Yet ere the day was done the victory was theirs, and they inflicted on us a great defeat, which was the Key of Evil, and thereafter there befell us what befell us.’¹

Thus the legendary encounter between Goliath and David, at the dawn of Syriac history, repeats itself at nightfall, perhaps twenty-three centuries later; and, though on this occasion the giant and the pygmy are on horseback, the outcome is the same.

The invincible Tatar qazaq who overcame the ‘Iraqi cataphract and sacked Baghdad and starved the ‘Abbasid Caliph to death was a light horse-archer of the persistent Nomadic type which had first made itself known and dreaded in South-Western Asia through the Cimmerian and Scyth irruption at- the. turn of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. But if David-on-horseback duly discomfited Goliath-on-horseback at the outset of the Tatar irruption from the Eurasian Steppe, the sequel to their encounter in this repetition of the story was also faithful to the original. We have seen that the mailed champion on foot who was laid low by David’s sling was superseded thereafter not by David himself but by a disciplined phalanx of Goliaths. Hulagu Khan’s Mongol light horse, who had overcome the ‘Abbasid Caliph’s knights under the walls of Baghdad, were subsequently defeated again and again by the Mamluk masters of Egypt. In their accoutrements the Mam-luks were neither better nor worse equipped than their fellow Muslim knights who had been overthrown outside Baghdad, but in their tactics they obeyed a discipline which gave them the mastery over both Mongol sharp-shooters and Frankish Crusaders. The knights of Saint Louis met their defeat at Mansurah ten years before the Mongols received their first lesson from the same master.

By the close of the thirteenth century the Mamluks, having established their superiority over both the French and the Mongols, stood in the same position of unchallenged military supremacy within their own horizon as the Roman legionaries after Pydna. In this eminent but enervating situation the Mamluk, like the legionary, rested on his oars; and it is a curious coincidence that he was allowed to rest on them for almost exactly the same length of time before he was taken unawares by an old adversary armed with a new technique. Pydna is separated from Adrianople by 546 years; 548 years separate the Mamluk victory over Saint Louis from the Mamluk defeat at the hands of his successor Napoleon. During these five-and-a-half centuries, infantry had come into its own again. Before the first of these centuries had run its course the English long-bow had enabled an army of Davidson-foot to defeat an army of Goliaths-on-horseback at Crecy, and the result had been driven home and confirmed by the invention of fire-arms and by a disciplinary system borrowed from the Janissaries.

As for the latter end of the Mamluks, the survivors of the Napoleonic assault and of the final destruction of the corps by Mehmed ‘All, thirteen years later, withdrew to the Upper Nile and bequeathed their armament and technique to those mailed horsemen in the service of the Khalifah of a Sudanese Mahdi who went down under the fire of British infantry at Omdurman in 1898.

The French army which overthrew the Mamluks was already something different from the earliest version of the Western imitation of the Janissaries. It was a recent product of the French levie en masse which had succeeded in superseding, by successfully diluting, the small but superlatively well-drilled new-model Western army which had been brought to perfection by Frederick the Great. But the overthrow of the old Prussian army by the new Napoleonic army at Jena was to stimulate a Prussian pleiad of military and political men of genius to outdo the French in a further tour de force of combining the new numbers with the old discipline. The result was foreshadowed in 1813 and revealed in 1870. But in the next round the Prussian war-machine involved Germany and her allies in defeat by evoking an unforeseen response in the shape of a siege on an unprecedented scale. In 1918 the methods of 1870 went down before the new methods of trench warfare and economic blockade; and by 1945 it had been demonstrated that the technique which had won the war of 1914-18 was not the last link in this ever-lengthening chain. Each link has been a cycle of invention, triumph, lethargy and disaster; and, on the precedents thus set by three thousand years of military history, from Goliath’s encounter with David to the piercing of a Maginot Line and a West Wall by the thrust of mechanical cataphracts and the pinpoint marksmanship of archers on winged steeds, we may expect fresh illustrations of our theme to be provided with monotonous consistency as long as mankind is so perverse as to go on cultivating the art of war.

(6) THE SUICIDALNESS OF MILITARISM

Having concluded our survey of ‘resting on one’s oars’, which is the passive way of succumbing to the nemesis of creativity, we may now go on to examine the active aberration which is described in the three Greek words

. These words have a subjective as well as an objective connotation. Objectively

means ‘surfeit’,

‘outrageous behaviour’, and

‘disaster’.¹ Subjectively

means the psychological condition of being spoilt by success;

means the consequent loss of mental and moral balance; and

means the blind headstrong ungovernable impulse which sweeps an unbalanced soul into attempting the impossible. This active psychological catastrophe in three acts was the commonest theme—if we may judge by the handful of extant masterpieces—in the fifth-century Athenian tragic drama. It is the story of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s play of that name, and of Xerxes in his Persae; the story of Ajax in Sophocles’ play of that name, of Oedipus in his Oedipus Tyrannus, and of Creon in his Antigone; and it is the story of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae. In Platonic language,

‘If one sins against the laws of proportion and gives something too big to something too small to carry it—too big sails to too small a ship, too big meals to too small a body, too big powers to too small a soul— the result is bound to be a complete upset. In an outburst of

the over-fed body will rush into sickness, while the jack-in-office will rush into the unrighteousness which

always breeds.’¹

In order to bring out the difference between the passive and the active methods of courting destruction, let us begin our survey of

—

in the military field, with which we have just brought our survey of ‘resting on one’s oars’ to a close.

Both modes happen to be exemplified in the behaviour of Goliath. On the one hand, we have seen how he incurs his doom by vegetating in the once invincible technique of the individual hoplite champion without foreseeing or forestalling the new and superior technique which David is bringing into action against him. At the same time we may observe that his destruction at David’s hands might have been averted if only his unenterprising-ness in technique had been accompanied by a corresponding passivity of ethos. Unfortunately for Goliath, however, this miles gloriosus’s technological conservatism was not offset by any such moderation of policy; instead, he went out of his way to ask for trouble by issuing a challenge’; he symbolizes a militarism at once aggressive and inadequately prepared. Such a militarist is so confident of his own ability to look after himself in the social—or anti-social—system in which all disputes are settled by the sword that he throws his sword into the scales. Its weight duly tips the balance in his favour and he points to his triumph as a final proof that the sword is omnipotent. In the next chapter of the story, however, it turns out that he has failed to prove his thesis ad hominem in the particular case which exclusively interests him; for the next event is his own overthrow by a stronger militarist than himself. He has proved a thesis which had not occurred to him: ‘They that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’

With this introduction we may pass from the legendary duel of Syriac saga to consider a few of the examples offered by history.

The disaster in which the Assyrian military power met its end in 614-610 B.C. was one of the completest yet known to history. It involved not only the destruction of the Assyrian war-machine but also the extinction of the Assyrian state and the extermination of the Assyrian people. A community which had been in existence for over two thousand years and had been playing an ever more dominant part in South-Western Asia for a period of some two-and-a-half centuries, was blotted out almost completely. Two hundred and ten years later, when Cyrus the Younger’s ten thousand Greek mercenaries were retreating up the Tigris Valley from the battlefield of Cunaxa to the Black Sea coast, they passed in succession the sites of Calah and Nineveh and were struck with astonishment, not so much at the massiveness of the fortifications and the extent of the area they embraced, as at the spectacle of such vast works of man lying uninhabited. The weirdness of these empty shells, which testified by their inanimate endurance to the vigour of a vanished life, is vividly conveyed by the literary art of a member of the Greek expeditionary force who has recounted its experiences. Yet what is still more astonishing to a modern reader of Xeno-phon’s narrative—acquainted as he is with the fortunes of Assyria through the discoveries of modern archaeologists—is the fact that Xenophon was unable to learn even the most elementary facts about the authentic history of these derelict fortress-cities. Although the whole of South-Western Asia, from] Jerusalem to Ararat and from Elam to Lydia, had been dominated and terrorized by the masters of these cities little more than two centuries before Xenophon passed that way, the best account he is able to give, of them has no relation to their real history, and the very name of Assyria is unknown to him.

At first sight the fate of Assyria seems difficult to comprehend; for her militarists cannot be convicted, like the Macedonians, the Romans and the Mamluks, of ‘resting on their oars’. When these other war-machines met with their fatal accidents each was hopelessly obsolete and shockingly out of repair. The Assyrian war-machine, on the other hand, was continuously overhauled, renovated and reinforced right down to the day of its destruction. The fund of military genius which produced the embryo of the hoplite in the fourteenth century before Christ, on the eve of Assyria’s first bid for predominance in South-Western Asia, and the embryo of the cataphract horse-archer in the seventh century before Christ, on the eve of Assyria’s own annihilation, was also productive throughout the seven intervening centuries. The energetic inventiveness and the restless zeal for improvements, which were the notes of the latter-day Assyrian ethos in its application to the art of war, are attested unimpeachably by the series of bas-reliefs, found in situ in the royal palaces, in which the successive phases of the Assyrian military equipment and technique during the last three centuries of Assyrian history are recorded pictorially with careful precision and in minute detail. Here we find recorded continuous experiment and improvement in body armour, in the design of chariots, in the engines of assault and in the differentiation of specialized troops for special purposes. What then was the cause of Assyria’s destruction?

In the first place the policy of the unremitting offensive, and the possession of a potent instrument for putting this policy into effect, led the Assyrian war-lords in the fourth and last bout of their militarism to extend their enterprises and commitments far beyond the bounds which their predecessors had kept. Assyria was subject to a perpetual prior call upon her military resources for the fulfilment of her task as warden of the marches of the Babylonic World against the barbarian highlanders in the Zagros and the Taurus on the one side and against the Aramaean pioneers of the Syriac Civilization on the other. In her three earlier bouts of militarism she had been content to pass from the defensive to the offensive on these two fronts without pressing this offensive a outrance and without dissipating her forces in other directions. Even so, the third bout, which occupied the two middle quarters of the ninth century B.C., evoked in Syria a temporary coalition of Syrian states which checked the Assyrian advance at Qarqar in 853 B.C., and it was met in Armenia by the more formidable riposte of the foundation of the kingdom of Urartu. In spite of these warnings Tiglath-Pileser III (746-727 B.C.), when he inaugurated the last and greatest of the Assyrian offensives, allowed himself to harbour political ambitions and to aim at military objectives which brought Assyria into collision with three new adversaries—Babylon, Elam and Egypt—each of whom was potentially as great a military power as Assyria herself.

Tiglath-Pileser put a conflict with Egypt in store for his successors when he set himself to complete the subjugation of the petty states of Syria; for Egypt could not remain indifferent to an extension of the Assyrian Empire up to her own frontier, and she was in a position to frustrate or undo the Assyrian empire-builders’ work unless they made up their minds to round it off by embarking on the more formidable enterprise of subjugating Egypt herself. Tiglath-Pileser’s bold occupation of Philistia in 734 B.C. may have been a strategic masterstroke which was rewarded by the temporary submission of Samaria in 733 and the fall of Damascus in 732. But it led to Sargon’s brush with the Egyptians in 720 and Sennacherib’s in 700, and these inconclusive encounters led on in their turn to Esarhaddon’s conquest and occupation of Egypt in the campaigns of 675, 674 and 671. Thereupon it became manifest that, while Assyrian armies were strong enough to rout Egyptian armies and occupy the land of Egypt, and to repeat the feat, they were not strong enough to hold Egypt down. Esarhaddon himself was once more on the march for Egypt when death overtook him in 669; and, though the Egyptian insurrection was quelled by Asshurbanipal in 667, he had to reconquer Egypt once again in 663. By this time the Assyrian Government must have realized that in Egypt it was engaged on Psyche’s Task, and when Psammetichus unobtrusively expelled the Assyrian garrisons in 658-651 Asshurbanipal turned a blind eye to what was happening. In thus cutting his Egyptian losses the King of Assyria was undoubtedly wise; yet this wisdom after the event was an admission that the energies expended on five Egyptian campaigns had been wasted. Moreover, the loss of Egypt was a prelude to the loss of Syria in the next generation.

The ultimate consequences of Tiglath-Pileser’s intervention in Babylonia were far graver than those of his forward policy in Syria, since they led, by a direct chain of cause and effect, to the catastrophe of 614-610 B.C.

In the earlier stages of the Assyrian-military aggression against Babylonia there is evidence of a certain political moderation. The conquering Power preferred the establishment of protectorates under puppet princes of native origin to outright annexation. It was only after the great Chaldaean insurrection of 694-689 that Sennacherib formally put an end to the independence of Babylonia by installing his son and designated successor, Esarhaddon, as Assyrian viceroy. But this policy of moderation failed to conciliate the Chaldaeans and merely encouraged them to retort with increasing effect to the Assyrian military challenge. Under the hammer-blows of Assyrian militarism the Chaldaeans set the anarchy of their own house in order and secured an alliance with the neighbouring kingdom of Elam. And, in the next stage, the abandonment of the policy of political moderation and the sacking of Babylon in 689 taught a lesson which was the opposite of that intended. In the white heat of the hatred which this act of Assyrian frightfulness aroused among the ancient urban population as well as among the intrusive Chaldaean nomads, citizens and tribesmen forgot their mutual antipathy and became fused together in a new Babylonian nation which could neither forget nor forgive, and which could never rest until it had brought its oppressor to the ground.

Yet for the best part of a century the stroke of the inevitable drq was postponed by the progressive efficiency of the Assyrian military machine. In 639, for example, Elam was dealt such an annihilating blow that her derelict territory passed under the dominion of Persian highlanders from her eastern border and became the jumping-off ground from which the Achaemenidae made themselves masters of all South-Western Asia a century later. Immediately after Asshurbanipal’s death in 626, however, Babylonia revolted once again, under the leadership of Nabopolassar, who found in the new kingdom of Media a more potent ally than Elam; and within sixteen years Assyria was wiped off the face of the map.

When we gaze back over the century-and-a-half of ever more virulent warfare which begins with Tiglath-Pileser’s accession in 745 B.C. and closes with the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar’s victory over Pharaoh Necho at Carchemish in 605, the historical landmarks which stand out at first sight are the successive knockout blows by which Assyria destroyed entire communities— razing cities to the ground and carrying whole populations away captive: Damascus in 732, Samaria in 722, Musasir in 714, Babylon in 689, Sidon in 677, Memphis in 671, Thebes in 663, Susa circa 639. Of all the capital cities of all the states within reach of Assyria’s arm, only Tyre and Jerusalem remained inviolate at the time of the sack of Nineveh herself in 612. The loss and misery which Assyria inflicted on her neighbours is beyond all calculation ; yet the legendary remark of the canting schoolmaster to the boy whom he is whipping—’It hurts you less than it hurts me’—would be a more pertinent critique of Assyrian military activities than the unashamedly truculent and naively self-complacent narratives in which the Assyrian war-lords have presented their own accounts of their performances. All Assyria’s victims enumerated in this paragraph struggled back to life, and some of them had great futures ahead of them. Nineveh alone fell dead and never rose again.

The reason for this contrast of destinies is not far to seek. Behind the facade of her military triumphs, Assyria had been engaged in committing slow suicide. All that we know of her internal history during the period under review gives conclusive evidence of political instability, economic ruin, declining culture and widespread depopulation. The clearly attested progress of the Aramaic language at the expense of the native Akkadian in the Assyrian homeland during the last century-and-a-half of Assyria’s existence shows that the Assyrian people was being peacefully supplanted by the captives of the Assyrian bow and spear in an age when the Assyrian military power stood at its zenith. The indomitable warrior who stood at bay in the breach at Nineveh in 612 was ‘a corpse in armour’, whose frame was only held erect by the massiveness of the military accoutrements in which this felo de se had smothered himself to death. When the Median and Babylonian storming party reached the stiff and menacing figure and sent it clattering and crashing down the moraine of ruined brickwork into the fosse below, they did not suspect that their terrible adversary was no longer a living man at the moment when they struck their daring, and apparently decisive, blow.

The doom of Assyria is typical of its kind. The tableau of the ‘corpse in armour’ conjures up a vision of the Spartan phalanx on the battlefield of Leuctra in 371 B.C. and of the Janissaries in the trenches before Vienna in A.D. 1683. The ironic fate of the militarist who is so intemperate in waging wars of annihilation against his neighbours that he deals unintended destruction to himself recalls the self-inflicted doom of the Carolingians or the Timurids, who built up great empires out of the agony of their Saxon or Persian victims, only to provide spoils for Scandinavian or Usbeg adventurers who lived to see and take their chance when the empire-builders paid for their imperialism by sinking into impotence within the space of a single lifetime. Another form of suicide which the Assyrian example calls to mind is the self-destruction of those militarists, whether barbarians or peoples of higher culture, who break into and break up some universal state or other great empire which has been giving a spell of peace to the peoples and lands over which it has spread its aegis. The conquerors ruthlessly tear the imperial mantle to shreds and expose the millions whom it has sheltered to the terrors of darkness and the shadow of death, but the shadow descends inexorably on the criminals as well as on their victims. Demoralized by the vastness of their prize, these new masters of a ravished world are apt, like the Kilkenny cats, to perform ‘the friendly office’ for one another until not one brigand of the band is left to feast upon the plunder.

We may watch how the Macedonians, when they have overrun the Achaemenian Empire and pressed beyond its farthest frontiers into India, next turn their arms with equal ferocity upon one another during the forty-two years between the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. and the overthrow of Lysimachus at Corupedium in 281. The grim performance was repeated a thousand years later when the Primitive Muslim Arabs emulated—and thereby undid—the Macedonians’ work by overrunning, in twelve years, the Roman and Sasanian dominions in South-Western Asia over almost as wide a sweep of territory as had once been conquered, in eleven years, by Alexander. In this Arab act of brigandage the twelve years of conquest were followed by twenty-four years of fratricidal strife. Once again the conquerors fell on one another’s swords, and the glory and profit of rebuilding a Syriac universal state was left to the usurping Umayyads and to the interloping ‘Abbasids instead of falling to the companions and descendants of the Prophet whose lightning conquests had prepared the way. The same suicidal Assyrian vein of militarism was displayed by the barbarians who overran the derelict provinces of the decadent Roman Empire, as has been already shown on an early page of this Study. There is yet another variety of militaristic aberration of which we shall also find the prototype in the Assyrian militarism when we envisage Assyria in her proper setting as an integral part of the larger body social which we have called the Babylonic Society. In this society Assyria was a march whose special function was to defend not only herself but the rest of the world of which she formed a part from the predatory highlanders on the north and the east and from the aggressive pioneers of the Syriac Society on the south and the west. In articulating a march of this kind out of a previously undifferentiated social fabric a society stands to benefit in all its members; for while the march is stimulated in so far as it responds successfully to its proper challenge of resisting external pressures, the interior is relieved of pressure and set free to face other challenges and accomplish other tasks. This division of labour breaks down if the frontiersmen turn the arms which they have learnt to use against the outsider into a means of fulfilling ambitions at the expense of the interior members of their own society. What follows is essentially a civil war, and this explains the momentousness of the consequences that ultimately followed from the action of Tiglath-Pileser III in 745 B.C. when he turned his Assyrian arms against Babylonia. The aberration of the march which turns against the interior is, of its very nature, disastrous for the society as a whole, but for the marchman himself it is suicidal. His action is like that of a sword-arm that plunges the blade it wields into the body of which it is a member; or like the woodman who saws off the branch on which he is sitting, and so comes crashing down with it to the ground while the mutilated tree-trunk remains still standing.

It was perhaps an intuitive misgiving at the misdirection of energies discussed in the preceding paragraph that moved the Austrasian Franks to protest so vehemently in A.D. 754 against their war-lord Pepin’s decision to respond to Pope Stephen’s call to arms against their brethren the Lombards. The Papacy had turned its eyes towards this Transalpine Power, and had whetted Pepin’s ambition in 749 by crowning him king and thereby legitimizing his de facto authority, because Austrasia had distinguished herself in Pepin’s generation by her services as a march on two fronts: against the pagan Saxons beyond the Rhine and against the Muslim Arab conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula who were pressing across the Pyrenees. In 754 the Austrasians were invited to divert their energies from the fields in which they had just been finding their true mission in order to destroy the Lombards, who stood in the way of the political ambitions of the Papacy. The misgivings of the Austrasian rank and file with regard to’ this enterprise were proved in the event to have been better justified than their leader’s appetite for it; for in overriding the objections of his henchmen Pepin forged the first link in a chain of military and political commitments which bound Austrasia ever more tightly to Italy. His Italian campaign of 755-6 led on to Charlemagne’s of 773-4, a campaign which disastrously interrupted the conquest of Saxony on which he had then just embarked. Thereafter, in the course of the next thirty years, his laborious operations in Saxony were interrupted again no less than four times by the intrusion of Italian crises which demanded his presence on the spot for periods of varying duration. The burdens imposed upon Charlemagne’s subjects by his mutually contradictory ambitions aggravated to breaking-point the load which weighed upon Austrasia’s back.

Timur in like fashion broke the back of his own Transoxania by squandering on aimless expeditions into Iran and ‘Iraq and India and Anatolia and Syria the slender reserves of Transoxanian strength which ought to have been concentrated upon Timur’s proper mission of imposing his peace on the Eurasian Nomads. Transoxania was the march of the sedentary Iranic Society over against the Eurasian Nomad World, and during the first nineteen years of his reign (A.D. 1362-80) Timur had attended to his proper business as warden of the marches. He had first repulsed and afterwards taken the offensive against the Chagatay Nomads, and he had rounded off his own dominions by liberating the oases of Khwarizm on the Lower Oxus from the Nomads of Juji’s appanage. Upon the completion of this great task in A.D. 1380 Timur had a greater prize within his reach—no less than the succession to the great Eurasian empire of Chingis Khan; for in Timur’s generation the Nomads were in retreat on all sectors of the long frontier between the Desert and the Sown, and the next chapter in the history of Eurasia was to be a race between the resurgent sedentary peoples round about for the prize of Chingis Khan’s heritage. In this competition the Moldavians and Lithuanians were too remote to be in the running; the Muscovites were wedded to their forests and the Chinese to their fields; the Cossacks and the Transoxanians were the only competitors who had succeeded in making themselves at home on the Steppe without uprooting the sedentary foundations of their own way of life, and of the two the Transoxanian competitor seemed to have the better chance. Besides being stronger in himself and nearer to the heart of the Steppe he was also the first in the field, while, as champion of the Sunnah, he had potential partisans among the sedentary Muslim communities who were the outposts of Islam on the Steppe’s opposite coasts.

For an instant Timur appeared to appreciate his opportunity and to grasp it with determination, but after a few bold and brilliant preliminary moves he made a right-about turn, directed his arms towards the interior of the Iranic World and devoted almost the whole of the last twenty-four years of his life to a series of barren and destructive campaigns in this quarter. The range of his victories was as sensational as their results were suicidal.

Timur’s self-stultification is a supreme example of the suicidal-ness of militarism. His empire not only did not survive him but was devoid of all after-effects of a positive kind. Its only traceable after-effect is wholly negative. In sweeping away everything that it found in its path, in order to rush headlong to its own destruction, Timur’s imperialism simply created a political and social vacuum in South-Western Asia; and this vacuum eventually drew the ‘Osmanlis and the Safawis into a collision which dealt the stricken Iranic Society its death-blow.

The Iranic Society’s forfeiture of the heritage of the Nomad World declared itself first on the plane of religion. Throughout the four centuries ending in Timur’s generation Islam had been progressively establishing its hold over the sedentary peoples round the coasts of the Eurasian Steppe and had been captivating the Nomads themselves whenever they trespassed out of the Desert into the Sown. By the fourteenth century it looked as though nothing could now prevent Islam from becoming the religion of all Eurasia. But after Timur’s career had run its course the progress of Islam in Eurasia came to a dead stop, and two centuries later the Mongols and the Calmucks were converted to the Lamaistic form of Mahayanian Buddhism. This astonishing triumph of a fossilized relic of the religious life of the long extinct Indie Civilization gives some measure of the extent to which the prestige of Islam had fallen in the estimation of the Eurasian Nomads during the two centuries that had elapsed since Timur’s day.

On the political plane the Iranic culture which Timur had first championed and then betrayed proved equally bankrupt. The sedentary societies which ultimately performed the feat of taming Eurasian Nomadism politically were the Russians and the Chinese. This final conclusion of the monotonously repeated drama of Nomad history became predictable when, in the middle of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, the Cossack servants of Muscovy and the Manchu masters of China ran into each other as they were feeling their way in opposite directions round the northern edge of the Steppe and fought their first battle for dominion over Eurasia in the neighbourhood of Chingis Khan’s ancestral pastures in the upper basin of the Amur. The partition of Eurasia between these rivals was completed a century later.

It is a curious reflection that, if Timur had not turned his back on Eurasia and his arms against Iran in A.D. 1381, the present relations between Transoxania and Russia might have been the inverse of what they actually are. In those hypothetical circumstances Russia to-day might have found herself included in an empire of much the same extent as the area of the present Soviet Union but with quite a different centre of gravity—an Iranic empire in which Samarqand would be ruling Moscow instead of Moscow ruling Samarqand. This imaginary picture may appear outlandish because the actual course of events for five-and-a-half centuries has been so different, but at least as strange a picture will unfold itself if we plot out an alternative course for Western history on the assumption that Charlemagne’s less violent and fatal diversion of his military energies had proved as disastrous for the Western Civilization as Timur’s proved for the Iranic. On this analogy we shall have to picture Austrasia being submerged by the Magyars and Neustria by the Vikings in the darkness of the tenth century, and the heart of the Carolingian Empire remaining thereafter under this barbarian domination until in the fourteenth century the ‘Osmanlis step in to impose the lesser evil of an alien domination upon these derelict marches of Western Christendom.

But the greatest of all Timur’s acts of destruction was committed against himself. He has made his name immortal at the price of erasing from the mind of posterity all memory of the deeds for which he might have been remembered for good. To how many people in Christendom or Dar-al-Islam does Timur’s name call up the’ image of a champion of civilization against barbarism, who led the clergy and people of his country to a hard-won victory at the end of a nineteen-years-long struggle for independence? To the vast majority of those to whom the name of Timur Lenk or Tamerlane means anything at all, it commemorates a militarist who perpetrated as many horrors in the span of twenty-four years as the last five Assyrian kings perpetrated in a hundred and twenty. We think of the monster who razed Isfara’in to the ground in A.D . 1381; built 2,000 prisoners into a living mound and then bricked them over at Sabzawar in 1383; piled 5,000 human heads into minarets at Zirih in the same year; cast his Luri prisoners alive over precipices in 1386; massacred 70,000 people and piled the heads of the slain into minarets at Isfahan in 1387; massacred 100,000 prisoners at Delhi in 1398; buried alive 4,000 Christian soldiers of the garrison of Sivas after their capitulation in 1400; and built twenty towers of skulls in Syria in 1400 and 1401. In minds which know him only by such deeds Timur has caused himself to be confounded with the ogres of the Steppe—a Chingis and an Attila and the like—against whom he had spent the first and better half of his life in waging a Holy War. The crack-brained megalomania of this homicidal madman whose one idea is to impress the imagination of mankind with a sense of his military power by a hideous abuse of it is brilliantly conveyed in the hyperboles which the English poet Marlowe has placed in the mouth of his Tamburlaine:

The God of war resignes his roume to me,

Meaning to make me Generall of the world;

Jove, viewing me in armes, lookes pale and wan,

Fearing my power should pull him from his throne.

Where ere I come the fatall sisters sweat,

And griesly death by running to and fro,

To do their ceassles homag to my sword....

Millions of soules sit on the bankes of Styx,

Waiting the back returne of Charon’s boat,

Hell and Elysian swarme with ghosts of men,

That I have sent from sundry foughten fields,

To spread my fame through hell and up to heaven.¹

In analysing the careers of Timur and Charlemagne and the later Assyrian kings we have observed the same phenomenon in all three cases. The military prowess which a society develops among its frontiersmen for its defence against external enemies undergoes a sinister transformation into the moral malady of militarism when it is diverted from its proper field in the No-man’s-land beyond the pale and is turned against the frontiersmen’s own brethren in the interior. A number of other examples of this social evil will readily occur to our minds.

We shall think of Mercia turning against the other English ‘successor-states’ of the Roman Empire in Britain the arms which she had sharpened in performance of her original function as the English march against Wales; of the Plantagenet kingdom of England attempting in the Hundred Years’ War to conquer the sister kingdom of France instead of attending to her proper business of enlarging the bounds of their common mother, Latin Christendom, at the expense of the Celtic Fringe; and of the Norman king Roger of Sicily turning his military energies to the extension of his dominions in Italy instead of carrying on his forebears’ work of enlarging the bounds of Western Christendom in the Mediterranean at the expense of Orthodox Christendom and Dar-al-Islam. In like fashion the Mycenaean outposts of the Minoan Civilization on the European mainland misused the prowess which they had acquired in holding their own against the continental barbarians, in order to turn and rend their mother Crete.

In the Egyptiac World the classic Southern March in the section of the Nile Valley immediately below the First Cataract trained itself in arms, in the execution of its duty of damming back the Nubian barbarians up-river, only to turn right-about against the communities of the interior and establish by brute force the United Kingdom of the Two Crowns. This act of militarism has been depicted by its perpetrator, with all the frankness of self-complacency, in one of the earliest records of the Egyptiac Civilization as yet discovered. The palette of Narmer displays the triumphant return of the Upper-Egyptian war-lord from the conquest of Lower Egypt. Swollen to a superhuman stature, the royal conqueror marches behind a strutting file of standard-bearers towards a double row of decapitated enemy corpses, while below, in the image of a bull, he tramples upon a fallen adversary and batters down the walls of a fortified town. The accompanying script is believed to enumerate a booty of 120,000 human captives, 400,000 oxen and 1,422,000 sheep and goats.

In this gruesome work of archaic Egyptiac art we have the whole tragedy of militarism as it has been acted over and over again since Narmer’s time. Perhaps the most poignant of all the performances of this tragedy is that of which Athens was guilty when she transformed herself from ‘the liberator of Hellas’ into a ‘tyrant city’. This Athenian aberration brought upon all Hellas, as well as upon Athens herself, the never-retrieved disaster of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War. The military field, which we have been surveying in this chapter, is illuminating for the study of the fatal chain of

—

because military skill and prowess are edged tools which are apt to inflict fatal injuries on those who misuse them. But what is palpably true of military action is also true of other human activities in less hazardous fields where the train of gunpowder which leads from

through

to anj is not so explosive. Whatever the human faculty or the sphere of its exercise may be, the presumption that, because a faculty has proved equal to the accomplishment of a limited task within its proper field, it may therefore be counted on to produce some inordinate effect in a different set of circumstances, is never anything but an intellectual and moral aberration and never leads to anything but certain disaster. We have now to proceed to an illustration of the working of this same sequence of cause and effect in a non-military field.

(7) THE INTOXICATION OF VICTORY

One of the more general forms in which the tragedy of

—

presents itself is the intoxication of victory—whether the struggle in which the fatal prize is won be a war of arms or a conflict of spiritual forces. Both variants of this drama could be illustrated from the history of Rome: the intoxication of a military victory from the breakdown of the Republic in the second century B.C. and the intoxication of a spiritual victory from the breakdown of the Papacy in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era. But as we have already dealt with the breakdown of the Roman Republic in another connexion we will confine ourselves here to the latter theme. The chapter in the history of the Roman See, the greatest of all Western institutions, with which we are concerned is that which began on the 20th December, A.D. 1046, with the opening of the Synod of Sutri by the Emperor Henry III, and closed on the 20th September, A.D. 1870, with the occupation of Rome by the troops of King Victor Emmanuel.

The Papal Respublica Christiana is unique among human institutions. Attempts to establish its character by analogies with institutions evolved in other societies reveal differences so fundamental that the supposed analogies turn out to be unprofitable. It can best be described, in negative terms, as an exact inversion of the Caesaro-Papal regime, against which it was a social reaction and a spiritual protest; and this description gives, better than any other, the measure of Hildebrand’s achievement.

When the Tuscan Hildebrand took up his abode in Rome in the second quarter of the eleventh century, he found himself in a derelict outpost of the East Roman Empire which was occupied by a degenerate offshoot of the Byzantine Society. These latter-day Romans were militarily contemptible, socially turbulent, financially and spiritually bankrupt. They were unable to cope with their Lombard neighbours; they had lost the whole of the Papal estates at home and overseas; and when it was a question of raising the level of monastic life they had to turn for guidance to Cluny, beyond the Alps. The first attempts to regenerate the Papacy took the form of passing over Romans and appointing Transalpines. In this despised and alien Rome Hildebrand and his successors succeeded in creating the master-institution of Western Christendom. They won for Papal Rome an empire which had a greater hold on the human heart than the Empire of the Antonines, and which on the mere material plane embraced vast tracts of Western Europe beyond the Rhine and the Danube where the legions of Augustus and Marcus Aurelius had never set foot.

These Papal conquests were partly due to the constitution of the Christian Republic whose frontiers the Popes were enlarging; for it was a constitution which inspired confidence instead of evoking hostility. It was based on a combination of ecclesiastical centralism and uniformity with political diversity and devolution; and, since the superiority of the spiritual over the temporal power was a cardinal point in its constitutional doctrine, this combination made the note of unity predominant without depriving the adolescent Western Society of those elements of liberty and elasticity which are the indispensable conditions of growth. Even in those Central Italian territories over which the Papacy claimed secular as well as ecclesiastical authority the twelfth-century Popes gave encouragement to the movement towards city-state autonomy. At the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when this civic movement was in full flood in Italy and when the Papal authority stood at its zenith over Western Christendom, a Welsh poet was ‘pointing out . . . how strange it was that the Pope’s censure, which in Rome could not move trifles, was elsewhere making the sceptres of kings tremble’.¹ Giraldus Cambrensis felt that he was here exposing a paradox which was a theme for satire. But the very reason why in this age a majority of the princes and city-states of Western Christendom accepted the Papal supremacy with so little demur was because the Pope was not then under suspicion of attempting to trespass on the domain of the secular power.

This statesmanlike aloofness from secular and territorial ambitions was combined, in the Papal hierocracy at its zenith, with an energetic and enterprising use of the administrative gift which was the Byzantine legacy to Papal Rome. While in Orthodox Christendom this gift had been fatally applied to the tour deforce of putting substance into a resuscitated ghost of the Roman Empire and thereby crushing an adolescent Orthodox Christian Society under the incubus of an institution too heavy for it to bear, the Roman architects of the Respublica Christiana turned their administrative resources to better account by building a lighter structure, on a new plan, upon broader foundations. The gossamer filaments of the Papal spider’s web, as it was originally woven, drew medieval Western Christendom together into an unconstrained unity which was equally beneficial to the parts and to the whole. It was only later, when the fabric coarsened and hardened in the stress of conflict, that the silken threads changed into iron bands and that these came to weigh so heavily on the local princes and peoples that at last they burst their bonds in a temper in which they hardly cared if, in liberating themselves, they were destroying the oecumenical unity which the Papacy had established and preserved.

In that Papal work of creation it was not, of course, either a capacity for administration or an avoidance of territorial ambitions that was the vital creative force; the Papacy was able to be creative because it threw itself without hesitations or reservations into the task of giving leadership and expression and organization to an adolescent society’s awakening desires for a higher life and a larger growth. It gave these aspirations form and fame, and thereby transformed them from the day-dreams of scattered minorities or isolated individuals into common causes which carried conviction that they were supremely worth striving for, and which swept men off their feet when they heard these causes preached by Popes who were staking upon them the fortunes of the Holy See. The victory of the Christian Republic was won by the Papal campaigns for the purification of the clergy from the two moral plagues of sexual incontinence and financial corruption, for the liberation of the life of the Church from the interference of secular Powers and for the rescue of the Oriental Christians and the Holy Places from the clutches of the Turkish champions of Islam. But this was not the whole of the Hildebrandine Papacy’s work; for even in times of the severest stress the great Popes under whose leadership these ‘Holy Wars’ were fought had a margin of thought and will to spare for works of peace in which the Church was displaying her finest self and exercising her most creative activity: the nascent universities, the new forms of monastic life and the mendicant orders.

The fall of the Hildebrandine Church is as extraordinary a spectacle as its rise; for all the virtues which had carried it to its zenith seemed to change, as it sank to its nadir, into their own exact antitheses. The divine institution which had been fighting and winning a battle for spiritual freedom against material force was now infected with the very evil which it had set itself to cast out. The Holy See which had led the struggle against simony now required the clergy to pay their dues to a Roman receipt of custom for those ecclesiastical preferments which Rome herself had forbidden them to purchase from any local secular power. The Roman Curia which had been the head and front of moral and intellectual progress now turned itself into a fastness of spiritual conservatism. The ecclesiastical sovereign power now suffered itself to be deprived by its local secular underlings—the princes of the rising parochial states—of the lion’s share of the product of the financial and administrative instruments which the Papacy itself had devised in order to make its authority effective. Finally, as the local prince of a Papal principality, the Sovereign Pontiff had to content himself with the paltry consolation-prize of sovereignty over one of the least of the ‘successor-states’ of his own lost empire. Has any institution ever given so great occasion as this to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme? This is surely the most extreme example of the nemesis of creativity that we have yet encountered in our Study. How did this happen, and why?

How it happened is foreshadowed in the first recorded transaction of Hildebrand’s public career.

The creative spirits of the Roman Church who set themselves in the eleventh century to rescue our Western Society from a feudal anarchy by establishing a Christian Republic found themselves in the same dilemma as their spiritual heirs who are attempting in our own day to replace an international anarchy by a world order. The essence of their aim was to substitute spiritual authority for physical force, and the spiritual sword was the weapon with which their supreme victories were won. But there were occasions on which it seemed as though the established regime of physical force was in a position to defy the spiritual sword with impunity; and it was in such situations that the Roman Church Militant was challenged to give its answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx. Was the soldier of God to deny himself the use of any but his own spiritual arms at the risk of seeing his advance brought to a standstill? Or was he to fight God’s battle against the Devil with the adversary’s own weapons? Hildebrand accepted the latter alternative when, on being appointed by Gregory VI to be the guardian of the Papal treasury and finding it constantly looted by brigands, he raised an armed force and routed the brigands manu militari.

At the moment when Hildebrand took this action the inward moral character of his act was difficult to divine. At his last hour, forty years later, the answer to the riddle was already less obscure; for in 1085, when he was dying as a Pope in exile at Salerno, Rome herself lay prostrate under the weight of an overwhelming calamity which her bishop’s policy had brought upon her only the year before. In 1085 Rome had just been looted and burnt by the Normans, whom the Pope had called in to assist him in a military struggle which had spread from the steps of St. Peter’s altar—the Papal treasury—until it had engulfed the whole of Western Christendom. The climax of the physical conflict between Hildebrand and the Emperor Henry IV gave a foretaste of the deadlier and more devastating struggle which was to be fought out a outrance, more than a century-and-a-half later, between Innocent IV and Frederick II; and, by the time we come to the pontificate of Innocent IV, a lawyer turned militarist, our doubts will be at an end. Hildebrand himself had set the Hildebrandine Church upon a course which was to end in the victory of his adversaries—the World, the Flesh and the Devil—over the City of God which he was seeking to bring down to Earth.

No Politick admitteth nor did ever admit

the teacher into confidence; nay ev’n the Church,

with hierarchy in conclave compassing to install

Saint Peter in Caesar’s chair, and thereby win for men

the promises for which they had loved and worship’d Christ,

relax’d his heavenly code to stretch her temporal rule.¹

If we have succeeded in explaining how the Papacy became possessed by the demon of physical violence which it was attempting to exorcize, we have found the explanation of the other changes of Papal virtues into their opposing vices; for the substitution of the material for the spiritual sword is the fundamental change of which all the rest are corollaries. How was it, for example, that a Holy See whose main concern with the finances of the clergy had been the eradication of simony in the eleventh century should in the thirteenth century have become so deeply engaged in allocating for the benefit of its nominees, and by the fourteenth century in taxing for its own benefit, those ecclesiastical revenues which it had once redeemed from the scandal of prostitution to secular Powers for the purchase of ecclesiastical preferment? The answer is simply that the Papacy had turned militarist and war costs money.

The outcome of the great war between the thirteenth-century Popes and the Hohenstaufen was the usual outcome of all wars that are fought out to the bitter end. The nominal victor succeeded in dealing the death-blow to his victim at the cost of sustaining fatal injuries himself; and the real victors over both belligerents were the neutral tertii gaudentes. When, half-a-century after the death of Frederick II, Pope Boniface VIII hurled against the King of France the Pontifical thunderbolt which had blasted the Emperor, the sequel demonstrated that, as a resu’t of the deadly struggle of 1227-68, the Papacy had sunk to the le ‘el of weakness to which it had reduced the Empire, while the King iom of France had become as strong as either the Papacy or the Empire had been before they had destroyed each other. King Philippe le Bel burnt the Bull before Notre-Dame with the general approval of his clergy as well as his people, arranged the kidnapping of the Pope, and, after his victim’s death, secured the transference of the seat of Papal administration from Rome to Avignon. There followed the ‘Captivity’ (1305-78) and the Schism (1379-1415).

It was now certain that the local secular princes would inherit, sooner or later, within their respective territories, the whole of the administrative and financial organization and power which the Papacy had been gradually building up for itself. The process of transfer was only a matter of time. We may notice, as landmarks on the road, the English Statutes of Provisors (A.D. 1351) and Praemunire (1353); the concessions which the Curia was compelled to make, a century later, to the secular Powers in France and Germany as the price of their withdrawal of support from the Council of Basel; the Franco-Papal Concordat of 1516 and the English Act of Supremacy passed in 1534. The transfer of the Papacy’s prerogatives to secular governments had begun two hundred years before the Reformation and it worked itself out in the states which remained Catholic as well as in those which became Protestant. The sixteenth century saw the process completed; and it is, of course, no accident that the same century also saw the laying of the foundations upon which the ‘totalitarian’ states of the modern Western World have been built. The most significant single factor in this process, of which we have indicated some of the external landmarks, was the transference of devotion to these parochial secular states from an oecumenical Church.

This hold upon human hearts is the most precious of all the spoils which these successor-states have taken from the greater and nobler institution which they have plundered, since it is by commanding loyalty much more than by raising revenues and armies that these successor-states have kept themselves alive. By the same token it is this spiritual heritage from the Hildebrandine Church that has turned the once harmless and useful institution of the parochial state into the menace to civilization which it clearly is to-day. For the spirit of devotion, which was a beneficent creative power when directed through the channels of a Civitas Dei to God Himself, has degenerated into a destructive force when diverted from its original object and offered to idols made by human hands. Parochial states, as our medieval forebears knew, are man-made institutions which, being useful and necessary, deserve from us that same conscientious but unenthusiastic performance of minor social duties which we render in our time to our municipalities and county councils. To idolize these pieces of social machinery is to court disaster.

We have now perhaps found some answer to the question how the Papacy came to suffer its extraordinary Trepmereia; but in describing the process we have not explained the cause. Why was it that the medieval Papacy became the slave of its own tools and allowed itself to be betrayed, by its use of material means, into being diverted from the spiritual ends to which those means had been intended to minister? The explanation appears to lie in the untoward effects of an initial victory. The dangerous game of fighting force with force, which is justifiable within limits which may be divined by intuition but which are perhaps impossible to define, had fatal results because, in the first instance, it succeeded all too well. Intoxicated by the successes which their hazardous manoeuvre obtained for them in the earlier stages of their struggle with the Holy Roman Empire, Gregory VII (Hildebrand) and his successors persisted in the use of force until victory on this non-spiritual plane became an end in itself. Thus, while Gregory VII fought the Empire with the object of removing an Imperial obstacle to a reform of the Church, Innocent IV fought the Empire in order to destroy the Empire’s own secular authority.

Can we identify the particular point at which the Hildebrandine policy ‘went off the rails’ or, in the language of an older tradition, turned aside from the strait and narrow way? Let us try to make out where it was that this wrong turning was taken.

By the year 1075 the double crusade against the sexual and the financial corruption of the clergy had been successfully launched throughout the Western World, and a signal victory had been gained by the moral prowess of a Roman See whose profligacy had been the greatest of all the scandals of the Church only half a century earlier. This victory had been Hildebrand’s personal work. He had fought for it beyond the Alps and behind the Papal throne until the fight had carried him at last into the office that he had raised from the dust; and he had fought with every weapon, spiritual and material, that had come to his hand. It was at the moment of triumph, in the third year of his reign as Pope Gregory VII, that Hildebrand took a step which his champions can plausibly represent as having been almost inevitable and his critics—no less plausibly—as having been almost inevitably disastrous. In that year Hildebrand extended the field of’battle from the sure ground of concubinage and simony to the debatable ground of Investiture.

Logically, perhaps, the conflict over Investiture might be justified as an inevitable sequel to the conflicts over concubinage and simony if all three struggles were looked upon as one single struggle for the liberation of the Church. To a Hildebrand at this critical point in his career it might seem labour lost to have freed the Church from her servitude to Venus and Mammon if he were to leave her still fettered by her political subjection to the secular Power. So long as this third shackle lay heavy upon her, would she not be debarred from doing her divinely appointed work for the regeneration of mankind? But this argument begs a question which Hildebrand’s critics are entitled to ask, even though they cannot, in the nature of things, answer it conclusively one way or the other. In 1075, were the circumstances such that any clear-sighted and strong-minded occupant of the Papal throne was bound to assume that there was no longer any possibility of sincere and fruitful co-operation between the reforming party in the Church, as represented by the Roman Curia, and the secular Power in the Christian Commonwealth as represented by the Holy Roman Empire? On this question the onus of proof lies with the Hilde-brandines on at least two accounts.

In the first place neither Hildebrand himself nor his partisans ever sought—either before or after the decree of 1075 prohibiting Lay Investiture—to deny that the secular authorities had a legitimate part to play in the procedure for the election of the clerical officers of the Church from the Pope himself downwards. In the second place, within the thirty years ending in 1075 the Roman See had been working hand in hand with the Holy Roman Empire in the older conflict over the issues of concubinage and simony. It must be admitted that the co-operation of the Empire in these tasks had faltered and fallen short after the death of Henry III and during his son’s minority, and that after Henry IV came of age, in 1069, his conduct had been unsatisfactory. It was in these circumstances that the Papacy embarked on the policy of limiting or prohibiting the intervention of the lay authority in ecclesiastical appointments. This may have been justifiable, but it must be admitted that it was a step of an almost revolutionary character; and if, in spite of all provocations, Hildebrand had forborne to throw down the gauntlet in 1075 it is conceivable that good relations might have been restored. It is difficult to resist the impression that Hildebrand was betrayed into an act of that impatience which is one of the hallmarks of vfipis, and the further impression that his nobler motives were alloyed by a desire to exact vengeance from the Imperial Power for the humiliation that it had inflicted on a degenerate Papacy at the Synod of Sutri in 1046. This last impression is strengthened by the fact that Hildebrand, on assuming the Papal tiara, took the name of Gregory, which had previously been borne by the Pope deposed on that occasion.

To raise the new issue of Investiture with a militancy which was bound to set Empire and Papacy at variance was the more hazardous inasmuch as this third issue happened to be far less clear than those others on which the two authorities had, not so long since, seen eye to eye.

One source of ambiguity arose from the fact that, by Hilde-brand’s day, it had become established that the appointment of a clerical officer of episcopal rank required the concurrence of several different parties. It was one of the primeval rules of ecclesiastical discipline that a bishop must be elected by the clergy and people of his see and must be consecrated by a quorum of the bishops of his province. And the secular Power had never at any time—since the issue had been raised by the conversion of Constantine—attempted to usurp the ritual prerogatives of the bishops or to challenge, at any rate in theory, the electoral rights of the clergy and people. The role which the secular authority had played de facto —without prejudice to the question of what the situation might be de jure —was that of nominating candidates and of exercising a right of veto over elections. Hildebrand had himself explicitly recognized this right on more than one occasion.

Further, by the eleventh century the traditional case for the exercise of some degree of secular control over clerical appointments had been reinforced by considerations of a practical kind. For the clergy had long, and to an increasing degree, been performing secular as well as ecclesiastical duties. By the year 1075 a very large part of the civil administration of Western Christendom was in the hands of clerics who held this secular authority by feudal tenure, so that the exemption of the clergy from Lay Investiture would carry with it an abrogation of the secular Power’s jurisdiction over large tracts of its own proper field and the transformation of the Church into a civil as well as an ecclesiastical imperium in imperio. It is idle to suggest that these civil duties could have been transferred to secular administrators. Both parties to the conflict were well aware that a secular personnel capable of taking over such duties did not exist.

The gravity of Hildebrand’s action in 1075 is revealed by the dimensions of the catastrophe which was its sequel. On this issue of Investiture Hildebrand staked the whole of the moral prestige which he had won for the Papacy in the previous thirty years; and his hold upon the consciences of the Plebs Christiana in Henry IV’s Transalpine dominions was strong enough, in conjunction with the strength of Saxon arms, to bring the Emperor to Canossa. Yet, although Canossa may have dealt the Imperial dignity a blow from which it never quite recovered, the sequel was not an end but a resumption of the struggle. Fifty years of conflict had produced a breach between the Papacy and the Empire too wide and too deep to be closed by any politic compromise on the particular issue over which the conflict had originated. The controversy over Investitures might moulder in its grave after the Concordat of 1122, but the hostility that it had engendered went marching on, finding ever fresh issues in the hardness of men’s hearts and the perversity of their ambitions.

We have examined the decision of Hildebrand in 1075 at some length because we believe it to have been the crucial decision conditioning all that followed. In the intoxication of victory Hildebrand set the institution which he himself had raised from the depths of ignominy to the heights of grandeur on the wrong road, and none of his successors was able to recover the right one. We need not pursue the story farther in any detail. The pontificate of Innocent III (1198-1216) is the Antonine Age or Indian summer of the Hildebrandine Papacy, but that Pope owed his pre-eminent position to accidental circumstances, such as the long minority in the Hohenstaufen line, and his career merely illustrates the fact that a superb administrator may be a purblind statesman. There followed the Papacy’s war a outrance against Frederick II and his offspring; the tragedy of Anagni, which was the secular arm’s vulgar riposte to Canossa; the Captivity and the Schism; the abortive parliamentarism of the Conciliar Movement; the paganization of the Vatican during the Italian Renaissance; the disruption of the Catholic Church through the Reformation; the indecisive but ferocious struggle inaugurated by the Counter-Reformation; the spiritual nullity of the Papacy in the eighteenth century and its active anti-liberalism in the nineteenth.

But the unique institution has survived;¹ and at this hour of decision at which we now live it is meet and right that all men and women in the Western World who ‘have been baptized into Christ’ as ‘heirs according to the promise’, and with us all the Gentiles who have become ‘partakers of the ‘promise’ and ‘fellow heirs of the same body’ through the adoption of our Western way of life, should call upon the Vicar of Christ to vindicate his tremendous title. Did not Peter’s Master say to Peter himself that ‘unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required, and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more’? To the Apostle at Rome our forefathers committed the destiny of Western Christendom, which was the whole of their treasure; and when ‘that servant which knew his Lord’s will’ ‘prepared not himself nor did according to his will’ and was beaten in just retribution ‘with many stripes’, those blows fell with equal weight upon the bodies of ‘the menservants and maidens’ whose souls had been entrusted to the keeping of the Servus Servorum Dei. The punishment for the vppis of the servant has been visited upon us; and it is for him who brought us to this pass to deliver us from it, whosoever we may be: Catholics or Protestants, believers or unbelievers. If, at this crucial moment, a second Hildebrand did arise, would our deliverer this time be forearmed, by the wisdom that is born of suffering, against that fatal intoxication of victory which ruined the great work of Pope Gregory VII?