SIC vos non vobis mellificatis, apes.’ Thus you bees make honey, but not only for yourselves. 1 The hackneyed quotation expresses through a homely simile the paradoxical position of universal states in the scheme of history. These imposing polities are the last works of dominant minorities in the disintegrating bodies social of moribund civilizations. Their conscious purpose is to preserve themselves by conserving the wasting energies of the society with whose fortunes their own are bound up. This purpose is never in the long run fulfilled. None the less, these by-products of social disintegration have a part to play in fresh acts of creation. They serve others when they fail to save themselves.
If a universal state finds its significance as a means for the performance of services, who are its beneficiaries? They must be one or other of three possible candidates for the part—the internal proletariat or external proletariat of the moribund society itself, or some alien civilization which is its contemporary; and in serving the internal proletariat a universal state will be ministering to one of the higher religions that make their epiphany in the internal proletariat’s bosom. In the words of Bossuet, ‘All the great empires which we have seen on the Earth have contributed by divers means to the good of religion and the glory of God, as God himself has declared by His prophets’.
Our next task is to make an empirical survey of the services involuntarily offered by universal states and of the uses made of these facilities by internal proletariats, external proletariats, and alien civilizations; but we have first to find the answer to a preliminary question: how can any services be rendered to anyone by an institution which is passive, conservative, archaistic, and in fact negative in every respect? How—in the terms of the expressive Sinic notation for the rhythm of the universe—can so unpromising a Yin-state give rise to a new burst of Yang-activity? It is easy, of course, to see that, if once a spark of creative energy has been kindled in the shelter of a universal state, it will have a chance of swelling into a steady flame which it might never have had if it had been exposed to the buffeting blast of a ‘Time of Troubles’. But this service, though valuable, is negative. What feature in the social situation arising under a universal state is the positive source of that new capacity to create which is the supreme benefit that a universal state confers on its beneficiaries, though apparently it cannot profit by it in the long run for its own account? Perhaps one clue is to be found in the tendency shown by Archaism to defeat itself by being inveigled into construction in its efforts to ‘make things work’.
For example, the inclusion of the surviving fabric of the shattered society within the universal state’s political framework does not avail either to restore what has already perished or to prevent the progressive collapse of the remainder; and the menace of this immense and constantly extending social vacuum compels the Government to act against its own inclinations and construct stopgap institutions to fill the void. A classic example of this necessity of stepping ever farther into an ever-widening breach is afforded by the administrative history of the Roman Empire during the two centuries following its establishment. The Roman secret of government was the principle of indirect rule. The Hellenic universal state was conceived of by its Roman founders as an association of self-governing cities with a fringe of autonomous principalities in regions where the Hellenic culture had not yet struck political root. The burden of administration was to be left to these local authorities. This policy was never deliberately revised; yet, if we resurvey the Empire at the end of two centuries of the Roman Peace, we shall find that the administrative structure has been in fact transformed. The client principalities have been turned into provinces, and the provinces themselves have become organs of direct and centralized administration. The human resources for the conduct of local government gradually ran dry, and the central government, faced with this increasing dearth of local administrative talent, found itself constrained not only to replace client princes by imperial governors but to put the administration of the city-states into the hands of appointed ‘managers’. By the end of the story the whole administration of the Empire had passed into the hands of a hierarchically organized bureaucracy.
The central authorities had been no more eager to impose these changes than the local authorities to suffer them; both alike had been victims of force majeure . None the less, the consequences were revolutionary, because these new institutions were highly ‘conductive’. In a previous context (pp. 455–505) we have seen that two leading features of an age of social disintegration are a sense of promiscuity and a sense of unity; and, though these two psychological tendencies may be antithetical from a subjective standpoint, they conspire to produce an identical objective result. This dominant spirit of the age endows these new stop-gap institutions thrown up by a universal state with a ‘conductivity’ comparable to that which the Ocean and the Steppe derive, not from their human psychological atmosphere, but from their own physical nature.
‘As the surface of the Earth bears all mankind, so Rome receives all the peoples of the Earth into her bosom, as the rivers are received by the sea.’ Thus wrote Aelius Aristeides, whom we have quoted already, and the same simile was employed by the writer of this Study in a passage written before he had become acquainted with the work of Aristeides.
‘The writer can best express his personal feeling about the Empire in a parable. It was like the sea round whose shores its network of city-states was strung. The Mediterranean seems at first sight a poor substitute for the rivers that have given their waters to make it. Those were living waters, whether they ran muddy or clear; the sea seems just salt and still and dead. But, as soon as we study the sea, we find movement and life there also. There are silent currents circulating perpetually from one part of the sea to another, and the surface water that seems to be lost by evaporation is not really lost, but will descend in distant places and seasons, with its bitterness all distilled away, as life-giving rain. And, as those surface-waters are drawn off into the clouds, their place is taken by lower layers continually rising from the depths. The sea itself is in constant and creative motion, but the influence of this great body of waters extends far beyond its shores. One finds it softening the extremes of temperature, quickening the vegetation, and prospering the life of animals and men, in the distant heart of continents and among peoples that have never heard its name.’ 1
The social movements that make their way through the conductive medium of a universal state are in fact both horizontal and vertical. Examples of horizontal motion are the circulation of medicinal herbs in the Roman Empire, according to the testimony of the Elder Pliny in his Historia Naturalis , and the spread of the use of paper from the eastern to the western extremity of the Arab Caliphate. Reaching Samarqand from China in A.D. 751, its use had spread to Baghdad by A.D. 793, to Cairo by A.D. 900, to Fez (Fas), almost within sight of the Atlantic, by about A.D. 1100, and to Jativa in the Iberian Peninsula by A.D. 1150.
The vertical movements are sometimes more elusive but often more important in their social effects—as is illustrated by the history of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which was the universal state of the Far Eastern society in Japan. The Tokugawa régime set itself to insulate Japan from the rest of the World, and was successful for nearly two centuries in maintaining this political tour de force; but it found itself powerless to arrest the course of social change within an insulated Japanese Empire, in spite of an effort to petrify a feudal system, inherited from the preceding Time of Troubles, into a permanent dispensation.
‘The penetration of money economy into Japan … caused a slow but irresistible revolution, culminating in the breakdown of feudal government and the resumption of intercourse with foreign countries after more than two hundred years of seclusion. What opened the doors was not a summons from without but an explosion from within…. One of [the] first effects [of the new economic forces] was an increase in the wealth of the townspeople, gained at the expense of the samurai and also of the peasants…. The daimyō and their retainers spent their money on luxuries produced by the artisans and sold by the tradesmen, so that by about the year [A.D.] 1700, it is said, nearly all their gold and silver had passed into the hands of the townspeople. They then began to buy goods on credit. Before long they were deeply in debt to the merchant class, and were obliged to pledge, or to make forced sales of, their tax-rice…. Abuses and disaster followed thick and fast. The merchants took to rice-broking, and then to speculating. … It was the members of one class only, and not all of them, who profited by these conditions. These were the merchants, in particular the brokers and money lenders, despised chonin or townsmen, who in theory might be killed with impunity by any samurai for mere disrespectful language. Their social status still remained low, but they held the purse and they were in the ascendant. By the year 1700 they were already one of the strongest and most enterprising elements in the state, and the military caste was slowly losing its influence.’ 1
If we regard the year A.D. 1590, in which Hideyoshi overcame the last resistance to his dictatorship, as the date of the foundation of the Japanese universal state, we perceive that it took little more than a century for the rising of the lower layers of water from the depths to the surface to produce a bloodless social revolution in a society which Hideyoshi’s successors had sought to freeze into an almost Platonically Utopian immobility. The result is the more impressive by reason of the fact that the universal state of the Tokugawa Shogunate was culturally homogeneous to an unusually high degree.
Illustrations of the ‘conductivity’ of universal states can be drawn from every other instance of which we have sufficient historical knowledge.
A universal state is imposed by its founders, and accepted by its subjects, as a panacea for the ills of a Time of Troubles. In psychological terms it is an institution for establishing and maintaining concord; and this is the true remedy for a rightly diagnosed disease. The disease is that of a house being divided against itself, and this schism cuts both ways. There is the horizontal schism between contending social classes and the vertical schism between warring states. The paramount aim of the empire-builders, in making a universal state out of the Power that emerges as the sole survivor of the wars between the parochial states of the preceding age, is to establish concord with their fellow members of the dominant minorities in the parochial states which they have conquered. Nonviolence, however, is a state of mind and a principle of behaviour that cannot be confined to one compartment of social life. Therefore the concord which a dominant minority is moved to seek in its own domestic relations has to be extended to the dominant minority’s relations with the internal and external proletariats and with any alien civilizations with which the disintegrating civilization is in contact.
This universal concord profits its divers beneficiaries in different degrees. While it enables the dominant minority to recuperate to some extent, it brings a greater relative access of strength to the proletariat. For the life has already gone out of the dominant minority, and ‘all the spices’ of concord can ‘but prolong decay’—to adapt Byron’s irreverent comment on the corpse of King George III; whereas these same spices serve as fertilizers to the proletariat. Accordingly, during the armistice established by a universal state, the proletariat must increase and the dominant minority must decrease. The toleration practised by the founders of a universal state, for the negative purpose of eliminating strife among themselves, gives the internal proletariat a chance to found a universal church, while the atrophy of the martial spirit among the subjects of the universal state gives the external proletariat of barbarians, or a neighbouring alien Civilization, a chance of breaking in and seizing for itself the dominion over an internal proletariat that has been conditioned to be passive on the political plane, however active on the religious.
The relative incapacity of the dominant minority to profit by the conditions that this minority itself has called into existence is illustrated by its almost invariable failure to propagate a philosophy or a ‘fancy religion’ of its own from above downwards. On the other hand, it is remarkable to observe how effective a use the internal proletariat are apt to make of the pacific atmosphere of a universal state for propagating, from below upwards, a higher religion, and eventually establishing a universal church.
‘The Middle Empire’ of Egypt, for instance, which was the original Egyptiac universal state, was used to this effect by the Osirian church. The Neo-Babylonian Empire, which was the Baby-Ionic universal state, and its successive alien successor-states, the Achaemenian (Persian) Empire and the Seleucid Monarchy, were similarly used by Judaism and its sister-religion Zoroastrianism. The opportunities offered by the Roman Peace were seized by a number of competing proletarian religions—by the worships of Cybele and Isis and by Mithraism and Christianity. The corresponding opportunities offered by the Pax Hanica in the Sinic world were competed for by an Indic proletarian religion, the Mahāyāna, and by the indigenous Sinic proletarian religion of Taoism. The Arab Caliphate provided a comparable opportunity for Islam, and the Gupta Rāj in the Indic world for Hinduism. The Mongol Empire, which for a moment extended an effective Pax Nomadica from the west coast of the Pacific to the east coast of the Baltic and from the southern fringes of the Siberian tundra to the northern fringes of the Arabian Desert and the Burmese jungle, struck the imaginations of the missionaries of a host of rival religions with the opportunities that it offered; and, considering how brief this passing moment was, it is remarkable to observe how successfully it was turned to account by the Nestorian and the Western Catholic Christian churches and by Islam, as well as by the Lamaist Tantric sect of Mahāyānian Buddhism.
The exponents of the higher religions that had thus so frequently profited by the favourable social and psychological climate of a universal state had in some cases been conscious of the boon and had ascribed its bestowal to the One True God in whose name they had been preaching. In the eyes of the authors of the Books of Deutero-Isaiah, Ezra, and Nehemiah the Achaemenian Empire was the chosen instrument of Yahweh for the propagation of Judaism, and Pope Leo the Great (A.D. 440–61) similarly regarded the Roman Empire as providentially ordained by God to facilitate the spread of Christianity. In his eighty-second sermon he wrote : ‘In order that the effects of this ineffable act of grace (i.e. the Incarnation) might be spread throughout the World, God’s providence previously brought into existence the Roman Empire.’
The idea became a commonplace of Christian thought, and reappears, for example, in Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity .
No war or battle’s sound
Was heard the world around:
The idle spear and shield were high uphung;
The hookèd chariot stood
Unstain’d by hostile blood;
The trumpet spake not to the armèd throng;
And kings sat still with awful eye,
As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.
An opportunity so marvellous might well seem heaven-sent; yet, in the relation between a successful missionary church and the universal state within which it works, the climate of toleration, which gives it a favourable start, does not always persist till the end of the story, and is sometimes transformed into its opposite. There have, no doubt, been cases in which there was no such sinister outcome. The Osirian church never suffered persecution and was ultimately amalgamated with the religion of the Egyptiac dominant minority. Peace likewise seems to have been preserved in the Sinic world between the Mahāyāna and the Taoist church on the one side and the Han Empire on the other until the Sinic universal state went into dissolution towards the end of the second century of the Christian Era.
When we come to Judaism and Zoroastrianism, we cannot tell what their ultimate relations would have been with either the Neo-Babylonian or the Achaemenian Empire, since each of these universal states had its life cut short at an early stage of its history. We only know that, when the Achaemenian régime was abruptly replaced by the Seleucid and eventually, west of the Euphrates, by the Roman, the impact of an alien Hellenic culture, of which the Seleucid and the Roman Powers were the successive political instruments, deflected both Judaism and Zoroastrianism from their original mission of preaching a gospel of salvation to all Mankind, and transformed them into weapons of cultural warfare in the Syriac society’s retort to the Hellenic society’s aggression. If the Achaemenian Empire, like its post-Hellenic avatar, the Arab Caliphate, had run out its full course, we may conjecture that, under the auspices of a tolerant Achaemenian imperial government, either Zoroastrianism or Judaism would have anticipated the achievement of Islam, which—profiting by the indifference of the Umayyads and the conscientious observance, by the ‘Abbasids, of the tolerance prescribed towards non-Muslims who were ‘Peoples of the Book’—made gradual headway, uncompromised by any frustrating assistance from the civil arm, until the collapse of the ‘Abbasid régime brought a landslide of voluntary mass conversions seeking shelter, in the courtyard of the Mosque, from the storm of an approaching political interregnum.
Similarly, under a Guptan Empire which was a reintegration of the original Mauryan Indic universal state, the ousting of the philosophy of Buddhism by the post-Buddhaic higher religion of Hinduism was not only unopposed by the dynasty but was also unimpeded by any acts of official persecution, which would have been alien to the tolerant and syncretistic religious ethos of the Indic civilization.
In contrast to these cases in which a higher religion, profiting by the peace of a universal state, has been tolerated by its government from first to last, there are others in which its peaceful progress have been interrupted by official persecutions that had either nipped it in the bud or have denatured it by goading it into going into politics or taking up arms. Western Catholic Christianity, for example, was almost completely extirpated in Japan in the seventeenth century and in China in the eighteenth. Islam in China under the Mongols gained a footing only in two provinces, and never became more than an alien minority, goaded by the precariousness of its position into recurrent outbursts of militancy.
The untoward after-effects on Christianity of the trial of strength that was the prelude to its triumph over the Roman Imperial régime were comparatively slight. During the three centuries ending with the conversion of Constantine the Church was never out of danger of falling foul of Roman policy; for, besides the suspicion of private associations of all kinds that haunted the Roman state in the Imperial Age, there was an older and more deeply graven Roman tradition of special hostility to private societies for the practice and propagation of foreign religions; and, though the Roman Government had relaxed this hardset policy in two notable instances—in its official reception of the worship of Cybele at the crisis of the Hannibalic War and in its persistent toleration of Judaism as a religion, even when the Jewish Zealots provoked Rome into obliterating the Jewish state—the suppression of the Bacchanals in the second century B.C. was an augury of what the Christians were to suffer in the third century of their era. But the Christian Church resisted the temptation to retort to official persecution by perverting itself into a politico-military association, and was rewarded by becoming a universal church and an heir of the future.
Yet the Christian Church did not come through this ordeal unscathed. Instead of taking to heart the lesson of the triumph of Christian gentleness over Roman force, she presented her discomfited persecutors with a gratuitous vindication and a posthumous moral revenge by taking to her bosom the sin which had consummated their failure. She quickly became and long remained a persecutor herself.
While the internal proletariat, as the creator of higher religions, is thus the principal beneficiary on the spiritual plane of the dominant minority’s achievement in creating and maintaining universal states, the benefits on the political plane are harvested by other hands. The psychology of peace under the auspices of a universal state unfits its rulers for the task of maintaining their political heritage. Accordingly the beneficiaries of this process of psychological disarmament are neither the rulers nor the ruled, neither the dominant minority nor the internal proletariat; they are the intruders from beyond the imperial frontiers, who may be either members of the disintegrating Society’s external proletariat or representatives of some alien civilization.
At an earlier point in this Study we have observed that the event which registers the extinction of a civilization—as distinct from its antecedent breakdown and disintegration—is usually the occupation of the domain of the defunct Society’s universal state either by barbarian war-lords from beyond the pale or by conquerors coming from another society with a different culture, or in some cases by both kinds, one following at the heels of the other. The benefits secured by barbarian or alien aggressors who have succeeded in taking advantage, for their own predatory purposes, of the psychological climate induced by a universal state are obvious and, on a short view, imposing. Yet we have observed already that the barbarian invaders of the derelict domain of a crumbling universal state are heroes without a future; and Posterity would surely have recognized them as being the disreputable adventurers that they are but for the retrospective glamour cast over their sordid escapades by their gift for writing their own epitaphs in the language of epic poetry. Even an Achilles can be transformed into a ‘hero’ by an Iliad . As for the achievements of the militant missionaries of an alien civilization, these too are delusive and disappointing compared with the historic achievement of the churches.
In two instances in which we know the whole story we have seen that a civilization whose universal state has been prematurely cut short by alien conquerors is capable of going to earth, hibernating for centuries, biding its time, and eventually finding its opportunity to expel the intrusive civilization and resume the universal state phase of its history at the point where this had been interrupted. The Indic civilization achieved this tour de force after nearly six hundred years, and the Syriac after nearly a thousand years, of submergence beneath a Hellenic flood. The monuments of their achievement were the Guptan Empire and the Arab Caliphate, in which they respectively resumed the universal states originally embodied in the Mauryan Empire and the Achaemenian Empire. On the other hand the Babylonic and Egyptiac societies were eventually absorbed into the body social of the Syriac, though the Babylonic succeeded in preserving its cultural identity for about six hundred years after the overthrow of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar by Cyrus, while the Egyptiac society maintained itself for no less than two thousand years after the termination of its natural expectation of life with the collapse of the ‘Middle Kingdom’.
On the evidence of history there are thus two alternative denouements to attempts on the part of one civilization to devour and digest another by force. The evidence shows, however, that, even when the attempt is ultimately successful, there may be a period of centuries or even millennia before the result is assured; and this might incline twentieth-century historians to be chary of forecasting the outcome of the Western civilization’s latter-day attempts to devour its contemporaries, considering how little time had elapsed since even the oldest of these attempts began, and how little had yet been seen of the unfolding story.
In the case of the Spanish conquest of the Middle American world, for example, it might well have been supposed that, when the alien substitute, in the shape of the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain, had been supplanted by a Republic of Mexico, which sought and gained admission into the comity of Western states, the assimilation of the Middle American society into the body social of the Western society had become an irrevocably accomplished fact. Yet the Mexican Revolution of A.D. 1821 had been followed by the Revolution of A.D. 1910, in which the buried but hibernating indigenous society had suddenly bestirred itself, raised its head, and broken through the crust of culture deposited by Castilian hands on the grave into which the conquistadores had thrust the body which they believed themselves to have slain. This portent from Middle America raised the question whether the apparent cultural conquests of Western Christendom in the Andean world and elsewhere might not likewise prove, sooner or later, to have been no more than superficial and temporary.
The Far Eastern civilization in China, Korea, and Japan, which had succumbed to the influence of the West within the last century before the time of writing, was evidently far more potent than the Middle American had ever been; and, if the indigenous culture of Mexico was reasserting itself after four hundred years of eclipse, it would be rash to assume that the Far Eastern culture was destined to be assimilated either by the West or by Russia. As for the Hindu world, the inauguration of two successor-states of the British Rāj in A.D. 1947 might be interpreted as a peacefully accomplished counterpart of the Mexican Revolution of A.D. 1821, and at the time of writing it might be forecast that in this case, as in that, an act of political emancipation which had superficially set the seal on the process of Westernization by bringing the emancipated states into the comity of Western nations, might prove to have been the first step towards the cultural emancipation of a society that had been temporarily submerged by a Western tide.
The Arab countries, again, which had recently been gaining admission to the Western comity of nations as independent states, had been able to achieve this ambition in virtue of their success in shaking off an Ottoman political ascendancy, and an Iranic cultural veneer, by which they had been overlaid for four centuries. Was there any reason to doubt that the latent survival power of the Arabic culture would not assert itself, sooner or later, against the influence of the far more alien culture of the West?
The general effect of this survey of the ultimate consequences of cultural conversions is to confirm our conclusion that the sole sure beneficiary from the services afforded by a universal state is the internal proletariat. The benefits obtained by the external proletariat are always illusory, and those obtained by an alien civilization are apt to prove impermanent.
Having now examined the effects of two general characteristics of universal states—their conductivity and their peace—we may go on to survey the services afforded to their beneficiaries by particular concrete institutions which they themselves deliberately create and maintain, but which are apt to find their historic mission in roles for which they had never been intended by their makers. Using the term institutions in a somewhat generalized sense we may take it to cover the following: communications; garrisons and colonies; provinces; capital cities; official languages and scripts; legal systems; calendars, weights and measures, and money; armies; civil services; citizenships. Each of these will now be passed in review.
Communications head the list because they are the master institution on which a universal state depends for its very existence. They are the instrument not only of its military command over its dominions but also of its political control. These man-made imperial life-lines include much more than man-made roads, for the ‘natural’ highways provided by rivers, seas, and steppes are not practicable means of communication unless they are effectively policed. Means of transportation are also required. In most of the universal states so far known to History these means had taken the form of an imperial postal service, and the ‘postmen’—if we may apply the familiar term to the officials of such a service, central and local—were very often also policemen. A public postal service seems to have been part of the machinery of the government of the Empire of Sumer and Akkad in the third millennium B.C . In the Achaemenian Empire, in the same part of the world two thousand years later, we find the same institutions raised to a higher level of organization and efficiency. The Achaemenian policy of utilizing the imperial communications system for maintaining the central government’s control over the provinces reappears in the administration of the Roman Empire and of the Arab Caliphate.
It is really not surprising that similar institutions were to be found in universal states ‘from China to Peru’. Ts’in She Hwang-ti, the revolutionary founder of the Sinic universal state, was a builder of roads radiating from his capital, and employed an elaborately organized inspectorate. The Incas, likewise, consolidated their conquests by means of roads. A message could travel from Cuzco to Quito, a distance of more than a thousand miles as the crow flies and perhaps half as much again by road, in as short a time as ten days.
Obviously the roads created and maintained by the governments of universal states could be used for all sorts of purposes for which they were not designed. The war-bands of the invading external proletariat would have extended their depredations much less rapidly in the latter days of the Roman Empire if that Empire had not unwittingly provided them with such excellent means of getting over the ground. But more interesting persons than Alaric are to be discerned on the road. When Augustus imposed the Roman Peace on Pisidia he was unconsciously paving the way for Saint Paul, on his first missionary journey, to land in Pamphylia and travel unmolested to Antioch-in-Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. And Pompey had swept the pirates off the seas in order that Paul might make his momentous last voyage from Palestinian Caesarea to Italian Puteoli without having to brave man-made perils in addition to the ordeals of tempest and shipwreck.
The Roman Peace proved as propitious a social environment for Paul’s successors. In the latter part of the second century of the Roman Empire’s existence, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons was paying an implicit tribute to the easy communications of the Empire when he extolled the unity of the Catholic Church throughout the Hellenic world. ‘Having received this gospel and this faith’, he writes, ‘the Church, in spite of her dispersal throughout the World, preserves these treasures as meticulously as if she were living under one single roof.’ Two hundred years later again, a disgruntled pagan historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, complains that ‘crowds of prelates made use of the public post-horses for rushing to and fro on the business of these “synods”, as they call them’.
Our survey 1 has brought to light so many cases in which a system of communications has been turned to account by unintended beneficiaries that we may regard this tendency as illustrating an historical ‘law’; and in A.D. 1952 this conclusion raised a momentous question about the future of the Westernizing world in which the writer of this Study and his contemporaries were living.
By the year A.D. 1952 the initiative and skill of Western Man had been engaged for some four and a half centuries in knitting together the whole habitable and traversable surface of the planet by a system of communications, operated by a technique which was constantly accelerating its pace. The wooden caravels and galleons, rigged for sailing in the eye of the wind, which had enabled the pioneer mariners of Modern Western Europe to make themselves masters of all the oceans, had given way to mechanically propelled iron ships of relatively gigantic size; ‘dirt tracks’ travelled by six-horse coaches had been replaced by macadamized and concrete-floored roads travelled by automobiles; railways had competed with roads, and aircraft with all land-borne and water-borne conveyances. Concurrently, means of communication which did not require the physical transportation of human bodies had been conjured up and put into operation, in the shape of telegraphs, telephones, and wireless transmission—visual as well as auditory—by radio. Never before had so large an area been made so highly conductive to every form of human intercourse.
These developments foreshadowed the eventual unification, on the political level, of the society in which these technological portents had appeared. At the time of writing, however, the political prospects of the Western world were still obscure; for, even though an observer might feel certain that political unity would come about in some form sooner or later, neither the date nor the manner of it could yet be divined. In a world which was still partitioned politically among sixty or seventy self-assertively sovereign parochial states, but which had already invented the atom bomb, it was manifest that political unity might be imposed by the familiar method of the ‘knock-out blow’; and it was also probable that, if peace was thus to be imposed in this case, as it had been in so many others, by the arbitrary fiat of a single surviving Great Power, the price of unification by force, in terms of moral, psychological, social, and political (not to mention material) devastation, would be relatively still higher than it had been in other cases of the same kind. At the same time it was possible that this political unification might be achieved by the alternative method of voluntary co-operation. But, whatever solution might be found for this problem, it could be confidently predicted that the new worldwide network of communications would find its historic mission in the familiar ironic role of being turned to account by unintended beneficiaries.
Who would draw the largest benefits in this case? Hardly the barbarians of the external proletariat. Though we have already developed, and may again develop, Neo-barbarian Attilas, renegades of perverted civilization, in our midst, in the shape of Hitler and his like, our world-wide system has little to fear from the pitiable remnants of the genuine barbarians beyond the pale. 1 On the other hand, the extant higher religions, whose domains had been linked up with one another and with the dwindling tenements of pagan Primitive Man, had already begun to take advantage of their opportunities. Saint Paul, who had once ventured from the Orontes to the Tiber, had been eagerly venturing forth on broader seas than the Mediterranean. On board a Portuguese caravel he had rounded the Cape on his second journey to India, 2 and, farther afield again, through the Straits of Malacca, on his third journey to China. 3 Transhipping to a Spanish galleon, the indefatigable apostle had crossed the Atlantic from Cadiz to Vera Cruz, and the Pacific from Acapulco to the Philippines. Nor had Western Christianity been the only living religion to take advantage of Western communications. Eastern Orthodox Christianity, in the train of Cossack pioneers equipped with Western fire-arms, had been making the long trek from the River Kama to the Sea of Okhotsk. In nineteenth-century Africa, while Saint Paul, in the guise of the Scottish medical missionary David Livingstone, was preaching the gospel, healing the sick, and discovering lakes and waterfalls, Islam was also on the move. It was not inconceivable that the Mahāyāna might one day recollect its marvellous journey over a succession of royal roads from Magadha to Loyang and, in the strength of this buoyant memory, might turn such Western inventions as the aeroplane and the radio to as good account for its own work of preaching salvation as it had once turned the Chinese invention of the printing press.
The issues raised by this stimulation of missionary activities on a world-wide range were not just those of ecclesiastical geopolitics. The entry of established higher religions into new missionary fields brought up the question whether the eternal essence of a religion could be distinguished from its ephemeral accidents. The encounters of the religions with one another brought up the question whether, in the long run, they could live and let live side by side or whether one of them would supersede the rest.
The ideal of religious eclecticism had appealed to certain rulers of universal states—an Alexander Severus and an Akbar—who had happened to combine a sophisticated mind with a tender heart, and their experiments had proved entirely barren of result. A different ideal had inspired the pioneer Jesuit missionaries—a Francis Xavier and a Matteo Ricci—who were the first apostles of any religion to grasp the opportunities offered by the Modern Western technician’s conquest of the high seas. These audacious spiritual pathfinders aspired to captivate for Christianity the Hindu and Far Eastern worlds, as Saint Paul and his successors had captivated the Hellenic world in their time; but—being endowed with an intellectual insight that matched their heroic faith—they did not fail to see that their enterprise could not succeed without fulfilling one exacting condition, and they did not shrink from accepting the consequences. They perceived that a missionary must convey his message in terms—intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional—that would appeal to his prospective converts. The more revolutionary the message in its essence, the more important it would be to clothe it in a familiar and congenial presentation. But this would require that the message should be stripped of the incompatible clothing in which the missionaries themselves happened to have inherited it from their own cultural tradition; and that, in turn, would demand of the missionaries that they should assume the responsibility of determining what was essence and what was accident in the traditional presentation of their religion.
The crux of this policy was that, in removing a stumbling-block from the path of the non-Christian societies that he was setting out to convert, the missionary would be placing another stumbling-block before the feet of his co-religionists; and on this rock the Early Modern Jesuit missions in India and China suffered shipwreck. They were the victims of jealousy on the part of rival missionaries and of conservatism at the Vatican. And yet this might prove to be not the end of the story.
If the local swaddling-clothes in which Christianity had been wrapped when it came into the world in Palestine had not been masterfully removed by Paul of Tarsus, the Christian artists of the Catacombs at Rome and the Christian philosophers of the divinity school at Alexandria would never have had their chance of presenting the essence of Christianity in terms of Greek vision and thought and thereby paving the way for the conversion of the Hellenic world. And, if, in the twentieth century of the Christian Era, Origen’s and Augustine’s Christianity could not divest itself of trappings acquired at those successive Syriac, Hellenic, and Western posting-stations at which it had once paused on its historic journey, it would not be able to take advantage of the worldwide opportunity opened up for every living higher religion at the time of writing. A higher religion that allows itself to become ‘dyed in the wool’ with the imprint of a temporary cultural environment condemns itself to become stationary and earth-bound.
But if Christianity were, after all, to take the other path, it might repeat in a latter-day Oikoumenê what it had once achieved in the Roman Empire. In the spiritual commerce that had been served by Roman means of communication, Christianity had drawn out of, and inherited from, the other higher religions and philosophies which it had thus encountered, the heart of what had been best in them. In a World materially linked together by the many inventions of Modern Western technique, Hinduism and the Mahāyāna might make no less fruitful contributions than Isis-worship and Neoplatonism had once made to Christian insight and practice. And, if, in a Western world too, Caesar’s empire were to rise and fall—as his empire always had collapsed or decayed after a run of a few hundred years—an historian peering into the future in A.D. 1952 could imagine Christianity then being left as the heir of all the philosophies from Ikhnaton’s to Hegel’s and of all the higher religions as far back as the ever-latent worship of a Mother and her Son, who had started their travels along the King’s Highway under the names of Ishtar and Tammuz.
Plantations of loyal supporters of the imperial régime—who may be soldiers on active service, militiamen, discharged veterans, or civilians—are an integral part of any imperial system of communications. The presence, prowess, and vigilance of these human watchdogs provide the indispensable security without which roads, bridges, and the like would be of no use to the imperial authorities. The frontier posts are part of the same system, for frontier lines are always also lateral highways. But, besides planting garrisons for purposes of police or defence, a universal state may be moved to plant colonies for the more constructive purpose of repairing ravages inflicted by the devastating struggle for power during the anterior Time of Troubles.
It was this that was in Caesar’s mind when he planted self-governing colonies of Roman citizens on the desolate sites of Capua, Carthage, and Corinth. In the course of the foregoing struggle for survival between the parochial states of the Hellenic world, the Roman Government of the day had deliberately made an example of Capua for her treacherous secession to Hannibal, and of Carthage for the crime of having almost defeated Rome herself, while Corinth had been arbitrarily singled out for the same treatment among the members of the Achaean League. Under the pre-Caesarian republican régime the conservative party had been stubbornly opposed to the restoration of these three famous cities, not so much from fear as from sheer vindictiveness, and the long-drawn-out controversy over their treatment became in due course the symbol of a wider issue. Was the raison d’être of Roman rule the selfish interest of the particular state which had established it, or did the Empire exist for the common weal of the Hellenic world of which it had become the political embodiment? Caesar’s victory over the Senate was a victory for the more liberal, humane, and imaginative view.
This striking difference of moral character between the régime which Caesar inaugurated and that which he superseded was not a peculiar feature of Hellenic history. A similar change of attitude towards the use and abuse of power had accompanied the transition from a Time of Troubles to a universal state in the histories of other civilizations; but, though this historical ‘law’ may be discernible, it is subject to many exceptions. On the one hand we find Times of Troubles generating not only uprooted and embittered proletariats but also colonizing enterprises on a grand scale—as exemplified by the host of Greek city-states planted far and wide over the former domain of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander the Great. Conversely, the change of heart on the part of the dominant minority, which should be the psychological counterpart of the establishment of a universal state, is seldom so steadfast that it does not occasionally relapse into the brutal practices of the foregoing Time of Troubles. The Neo-Babylonian Empire, which stood on the whole for a moral revolt of the interior of the Babylonic world against the brutality of its Assyrian marchmen, lapsed into uprooting Judah, much as Assyria had uprooted Israel. It might be fanciful to claim a moral superiority for Babylon over Nineveh in this regard, on the score that Babylon’s Judaic exiles were allowed to survive until Babylon’s Achaemenian successor sent them home again, whereas Nineveh’s victims, ‘the Lost Ten Tribes’, were liquidated and lost forever, except in the imaginations of British Israelites.
None the less, and in spite of exceptions, it remains broadly true that a relatively constructive and humane policy of colonization is one of the marks of universal states.
We have drawn a distinction between garrisons with a military or police purpose and colonies with a social or cultural purpose, but in the long run the distinction is one of purpose only and not of consequence. The installation of standing military garrisons along the frontiers and in the interior of a universal state by the empire-builders can hardly fail to bring civilian settlement in its train. The Roman legionaries, though debarred from contracting legal marriages during their term of active service, were permitted in practice to enter into permanent marital relations with concubines and to bring up families; and after their discharge they were able to convert a concubinate into legal marriage and legitimize their children. The Arab military muhājirah were actually allowed to bring their wives and children with them into the cantonments in which they settled. Thus Roman and Arab garrisons became the nuclei of civilian settlements, and the same must have been true of imperial garrison posts in all empires at all times.
But, besides arising as undesigned by-products of military establishments, civilian colonies were also planted as ends in themselves. For example, the north-east Anatolian districts in which the Achaemenidae had granted appanages to Persian barons were colonized by the ‘Osmanlis with Albanian converts to Islam. In commercial centres in the heart of their dominions the ‘Osmanlis settled civilian communities of refugee Sephardi Jews from Spain and Portugal. A long list could be cited of colonies founded by Roman Emperors as centres of civilization (Latinization or Hellenization as the case might be) in the more backward regions of their empire. One example out of many is Adrianople, the name of which to this day recalls the effort of a great Emperor of the second century to debarbarize the traditionally barbarous Thracians. The same policy was pursued by the Spanish empire-builders in Central and South America. These Spanish colonial city-states served as cells of an intrusive alien regime’s administrative and judicial organization, and, like their Hellenic prototypes, they were economically parasitic.
‘In the Anglo-American colonies the towns grew up to meet the needs of the inhabitants of the country: in the Spanish colonies the population of the country grew up to meet the needs of the towns. The primary object of the English colonist was generally to live on the land and derive his support from its cultivation; the primary plan of the Spaniard was to live in town and derive his support from the Indians or Negroes at work on plantations or in the mines…. Owing to the presence of aboriginal labour to exploit in fields and mines, the rural population remained almost entirely Indian. 1
A type of internal colonization which is apt to become prominent in the last phase of the history of a universal state is the plantation of barbarian husbandmen on lands that have come to be depopulated either as the result of raids perpetrated by these barbarians themselves or as the result of some social sickness native to the decaying empire. A classic example is presented in the picture of a post-Diocletianic Roman Empire in the Notitia Dignitatem , which records the presence of a number of German and Sarmatian corporate settlements on Roman soil in Gaul, Italy, and the Danubian provinces. The technical term laeti , by which these barbarian settlers were known, is derived from a West German word denoting semi-servile resident aliens; and we may infer that they were descendants of defeated barbarian adversaries who had been rewarded or punished for past acts of aggression by being coerced or coaxed into becoming peaceful cultivators of the Promised Land which they had formerly devastated as raiders. They were cautiously planted in the interior and not in the neighbourhood of the frontier.
A survey of the garrisons and colonies established by the rulers of universal states, and a consideration of the arbitrary transferences of population that they involve, suggests that these institutions, whatever their merits in other contexts, must have intensified the process of pammixia and proletarianization, which we have already seen to be characteristic of Times of Troubles and universal states alike. Permanent military garrisons installed on frontiers become ‘melting-pots’ in which the dominant minority fuses itself with both the external and the internal proletariat. The wardens of the marches and the opposing barbarian war-bands tend, with the passage of time, to become assimilated to one another, first in military technique and eventually also in culture. But, long before the dominant minority has been barbarized by contact on the frontier with the external proletariat, it will have been vulgarized by fraternization with the internal proletariat. For empire-builders seldom preserve either sufficient manpower or sufficient zest for the profession of arms to contemplate holding and defending their empire unaided. Their first recourse is to reinforce their armies by drawing recruits from subject peoples who have not lost their martial virtues. At a later stage they proceed to draw upon the barbarians beyond the pale as well.
For whose benefit does this process of pammixia and proletarianization chiefly operate? The most conspicuous beneficiaries are obviously the external proletariat; for the education which the barbarians acquire from the military outposts of a civilization—first as adversaries and later as mercenaries—enables them, when the empire collapses, to swoop across the fallen barrier and carve out successor-states for themselves; but we have already dwelt on the ephemeral character of these ‘heroic age’ achievements. The ultimate beneficiaries from the organized redistribution and intermixture of populations in the Roman and the Arab empires were Christianity in the one case and Islam in the other.
The military cantonments and frontier garrisons of the Umayyad Caliphate manifestly served Islam as invaluable points d’appui in that extraordinary deployment of latent spiritual forces by which Islam transfigured itself, and thereby transformed its mission, in the course of six centuries. In the seventh century of the Christian Era Islam had burst out of Arabia as the distinctive sectarian creed of one of the barbarian war-bands that were carving out successor-states for themselves in provinces of the Roman Empire. By the thirteenth century it had become a universal church providing shelter for sheep left without their familiar shepherds through the collapse of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate at the dissolution of the Syriac civilization.
What was the secret of Islam’s power to survive the death of its founder, the downfall of the primitive Arab empire-builders, the decline of the Arabs’ Iranian supplanters, the overthrow of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate, and the collapse of the barbarian successor-states that established themselves for their brief day on the Caliphate’s ruins? The explanation was to be found in the spiritual experience of the converts to Islam among the non-Arab subjects of the Caliphate in the Umayyad Age. Islam, which they had originally adopted mainly for reasons of social self-interest, struck roots in their hearts, and was taken by them more seriously than by the Arabs themselves. A religion which thus succeeded in winning loyalty in virtue of its intrinsic merits was not doomed to stand or fall with the political régimes which had successively sought to exploit it for non-religious purposes. This spiritual triumph was the more remarkable considering that such exploitation for political ends had proved fatal to other higher religions and that Islam had thus been placed in jeopardy not only by its founder’s successors but by Muhammad himself, when he had migrated from Mecca to Medina and had become a brilliantly successful statesman instead of remaining a conspicuously unsuccessful prophet. In this tour de force of surviving the peril to which it had been exposed, through the tragic irony of history, by its own founder, Islam had borne witness, through the ages, to the spiritual value of the religious message which Muhammad had brought to Mankind.
Thus in the history of the Caliphate the carefully considered policy of the empire-builders in planting garrisons and colonies and regulating the transfer and intermingling of populations had the unintended and unexpected effect of expediting the career of a higher religion; and corresponding effects were produced by the same cause in the history of the Roman Empire.
In the first three centuries of the Roman Empire the most conspicuously active conductors of religious influences were the military garrisons along the frontiers, and the religions that were propagated the most rapidly along these channels were the Hellenized Hittite worship of the ‘Iuppiter’ of Dolichê and the Hellenized Syriac worship of the originally Iranian divinity Mithras. We can follow the transmission of these two religions from the Roman garrisons on the Euphrates to those on the Danube, on the German limes , on the Rhine, and on the Wall in Britain, and the spectacle recalls the contemporary journey that the Mahāyāna, in the last stage of its long trek from Hindustan round the western flank of the Tibetan Plateau, was making from the shores of the Tarim Basin to the shores of the Pacific along the chain of garrisons guarding the frontier of a Sinic universal state over against the Nomads of the Eurasian Steppe. In the next chapter of the story the Mahāyāna succeeded in penetrating from the north-western marches of the Sinic world into the interior and thereby becoming the universal church of the Sinic internal proletariat, and eventually one of the four principal higher religions of a latter-day Westernizing world. The destinies of Mithraism and of the worship of Iuppiter Dolichênus were more modest. Bound up, as they had come to be, with the fortunes of the Roman Imperial Army, these two military religions never recovered from the blow dealt them by the army’s temporary collapse in the middle of the third century of the Christian Era; and, as far as they had any permanent historical significance, it was as forerunners of Christianity and as tributaries to the ever-growing stream of religious tradition fed by the confluence of many waters in the bed which Christianity dug for itself as it poured over the Roman Empire along a different channel.
While Iuppiter Dolichênus and Mithras used the frontier garrisons as their stepping-stones in their north-westward march from the Euphrates to the Tyne, Saint Paul made a corresponding use of colonies planted by Caesar and Augustus in the interior of the Empire. On his first missionary journey he sowed seeds of Christianity in the Roman colonies of Antioch-in-Pisidia and Lystra; on his second in the Roman colonies of Troas, Philippi, and Corinth. He was, of course, far from confining himself to such colonies; for example he established himself for two years in the ancient Hellenic city of Ephesus. Corinth, however, where he stayed for eighteen months, played an important part in the life of the Church in the post-Apostolic Age, and we may conjecture that the prominence of the Christian community here was partly due to the cosmopolitan character of the settlement of Roman freedmen that had been planted there by Caesar.
The most signal example, however, of a Roman colony being turned to Christian account is not Corinth but Lyons; for the advance of Christianity from colony to colony did not come to a stop when it had reached the metropolis, nor cease with the death of Saint Paul. Planted in 43 B.C. on a carefully chosen site in the angle formed by the confluence of the Rhone and the Saône, Lugdunum was a Roman colony not only in name but in fact; and this settlement of Roman citizens of genuinely Italian origin on the threshold of the vast tracts of Gallic territory that had been added to the Empire by Caesar’s conquests had been designed to radiate Roman culture through this Gallia Comata, as it had been radiated already through a Gallia Togata by the older Roman colony of Narbonne. Lugdunum was the seat of the only Roman garrison between Rome itself and the Rhine. Moreover, it was not only the administrative centre of one of the three provinces into which Gallia Comata had been divided; it was also the official meeting place of ‘the Council of the Three Gauls’, where the representatives of sixty or more cantons assembled periodically round the Altar of Augustus erected here by Drusus in 12 B.C . In fact, Lug-dunum had been deliberately called into existence to serve important imperial purposes. Yet by A.D. 177 this Roman colony had come to harbour a Christian community of sufficient vitality to provoke a massacre; and here, as elsewhere, the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. For it was as bishop of Lugdunum during the immediately following quarter of a century that Irenaeus—a Greek man of letters, possibly of Syrian origin—worked out the earliest systematic presentation of Catholic Christian theology.
Christianity in the Roman Empire, Islam in the Caliphate, and the Mahāyāna in the Sinic universal state each took advantage of the garrisons and colonies established by secular empire-builders for their own purposes; yet these unintended religious consequences of orderly redistributions of population were not so signal as those of Nebuchadnezzar’s relapse into Assyrian methods of barbarism; for, in carrying Judah away captive, the Neo-Babylonian war-lord did not merely foster the progress of an existing higher religion but virtually called a new one into existence.
Like the garrisons and colonies which the builders of universal states distribute over their dominions, the provinces into which they carve these dominions up have two distinct functions: the preservation of the universal state itself and the preservation of the society for whose body social a universal state provides the political framework. The histories of the Roman Empire and of the British Raj in India could be adduced to show that the two main alternative functions of the political organization of a universal state are to maintain the supremacy of the empire-building Power and to fill a political vacuum arising in the body social of the disintegrating society through the destruction or collapse of its former parochial states.
The extent to which the founders of a universal state are tempted to resort to the devices of annexation and direct administration as measures of insurance against the danger of a resurgence of defeated rivals depends, no doubt, on the degree of the loyalty and regret that the abolished parochial states continue to evoke in the minds of their own former masters and subjects; and this, in turn, depends on the pace of the conquest and on the antecedent history of the society in whose domain the universal state has established itself. Victorious empire-builders have most reason to fear a violent undoing of their work when they have established their rule at one stroke, and when they have imposed it on a world of parochial states long accustomed to enjoy and abuse a status of sovereign independence.
In the Sinic world, for example, effective political unity was imposed for the first time by the empire-building state of Ts’in within a period of no more than ten years (230–221 B.C .). Within that brief span of time King Cheng of Ts’in overthrew the six other till then surviving kingdoms and thereby became the founder of a Sinic universal state, with the title of Ts’in She Hwang-ti. But he could not with equal rapidity extinguish the political self-consciousness of the former ruling elements, and the problem consequently confronting him has been dramatized by the historian Sse-ma Ts’ien in the form of a tournament of set speeches in the Imperial Council. By whatever processes the issue may have been fought out, it is certain that the radical policy prevailed and that in 221 B.C . Ts’in She Hwang-ti decided in favour of redistributing the whole territory of his newly established universal state into thirty-six military commands.
In taking this drastic step the Emperor was applying to the six parochial states which he had conquered the militaristic and non-feudal system that had also prevailed for a hundred years already in his own state of Ts’in. But the conquered states could hardly have been expected to like it, for Ts’in She Hwang-ti was a representative of that familiar figure in the histories of the establishments of universal states, a conquering marchman, and the ruling class in the conquered states regarded him much as fourth-century citizens of the Greek city-states regarded the Kings of Macedón—that is as being little better than a ‘barbarian’. The peoples of the cultural centre of the Sinic world were naturally predisposed to idolize a culture of which they themselves were the principal exponents, and they had latterly been encouraged in this foible by the philosophers of the Confucian school, whose founder had diagnosed the social sickness from which the Sinic society had been suffering as being due to a neglect of the traditional rites and practices, and had prescribed as a sovereign remedy a return to the supposed social and moral order of the early Sinic Feudal Age. This canonization of a half-imaginary past had made little impression on the rulers and people of Ts’in, and the sudden imposition of the institutions of this uncultivated march-state roused violent resentment, to which Ts’in She Hwang-ti’s only response was to take further repressive measures.
Such a policy invited an explosion, and the Emperor’s death in 210 B.C . was followed by a general revolt resulting in the capture of the capital of the Ts’in Empire by one of the rebel leaders, Liu Pang; yet this victory of a violent reaction against the revolutionary work of the founder of the Sinic universal state did not, after all, result in a restoration of the ancien régime . Liu Pang was not a member of the dispossessed feudal nobility but a peasant, and he succeeded in founding an enduring régime because he did not attempt to re-establish either the anachronistic feudal order or Ts’in She Hwang-ti’s revolutionary substitute for it. His policy was to feel his way gradually towards his predecessor’s Caesarian goal through an Augustan semblance of compromise.
In the short interval between the collapse of the Ts’in Power in 207 B.C . and the general recognition of Liu Pang as sole master of the Sinic world in 202 B.C . the experiment of attempting to restore the ancien régime was tried by another rebel leader, Hsiang Yü, and proved unworkable. When, after this failure, Liu Pang made himself sole master of the Sinic world, his first act was to confer fiefs on his most deserving lieutenants, and he even left undisturbed such fief-holders of Hsiang Yü’s régime as had managed to come to terms with him. But, one by one, the enfeofed generals were degraded and put to death, while other fief-holders were frequently transferred from one fief to another and were readily deposed without being given a chance of establishing any dangerously close relations with their temporary subjects. Meanwhile Liu Pang had taken effective measures for maintaining and increasing the preponderance of the Imperial Power. In the upshot, Ts’in She Hwang-ti’s ideal of a universal state controlled from the centre through a hierarchy of artificially mapped out units of local administration was translated into fact, once again, within a hundred years of Ts’in She Hwang-ti’s death; and this time the achievement was definitive, because the Fabian statesmanship of Liu Pang and his successors had given the Imperial Government time to create the human instrument for lack of which the first Ts’in emperor’s grandiose design had come to grief.
A centralized government cannot be operated without a professional civil service, and the Han Dynasty, of which Liu Pang was the founder, succeeded in building up an efficient and acceptable civil service by entering into an alliance with the Confucian school of philosophy and weaning the Confucian philosophers from their former alliance with the old narrow military aristocracy of birth by opening the public service to a new and broader based aristocracy of cultural merit as measured by proficiency in the Confucian lore. The transition was made so gradually and was managed so skilfully that the new aristocracy inherited the old aristocracy’s historic appellation—chun tze —without any overt recognition that a momentous social and political revolution was taking place.
Measured by the durability of his achievement, the founder of the Han Dynasty may be accounted the greatest of all those statesmen whose careers have inaugurated a universal state. A Western world, familiar with the similar but less remarkable achievement of the Roman Augustus, is, apart from its specialists in Sinic history, barely aware of Liu Pang’s historic existence. The historians of an œcumenical society of some future age, with historic roots in all the civilizations of the past, will presumably display a better sense of proportion.
Having examined the significance of provincial organization in the Sinic universal state, we have no space to consider other examples. We pass at once to consider the services unconsciously rendered by such provincial organizations to those for whose benefit they were not primarily designed; and here again we will limit ourselves to a single example, by recalling how the Christian Church turned to its own account the provincial organization of the Roman Empire.
In building up its body ecclesiastic, the Church availed itself of the city states that were the cells of the Hellenic body social and the Roman body politic, and, as the traditions of the Hellenic civilization gradually died out, a city came to mean a town that was the seat of a Christian bishop 1 instead of meaning a town possessing institutions of civil self-government and chartered as a municipality of the Roman Commonwealth. A local bishop whose see was the centre of a Diocletianic Roman province came to be recognized by the other bishops of the same province as their superior. Such metropolitans or archbishops, in their turn, acknowledged as their primate the bishop whose see was the administrative centre of one of those groups of provinces which in the Diocletianic system were called dioceses—a word which the Church took over, but applied to the jurisdiction of a single bishop. Bishops, metropolitans, and primates alike paid allegiance to regional patriarchs who corresponded hierarchically to the Diocletianic praetorian prefects. The Diocletianic prefecture of the East was eventually divided between the four patriarchates of Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople, while the other three prefectures were combined in the single vast but much more thinly populated patriarchate of Rome.
This territorial organization of the Christian Church was not called into existence by any emperor; it was built up by the Church itself in days when the Church was an officially unrecognized and fitfully persecuted institution. In virtue of this original independence of the secular régime whose provincial organization it had adapted to its own purposes, the structure could survive the breakdown of its secular counterpart. In Gaul, where a tottering imperial régime had sought to rehabilitate itself on a novel basis of local support by instituting periodic regional congresses of notables, the Church, after the Empire had faded out of existence, took its cue from this secular precedent by convening regional congresses of bishops.
On the medieval ecclesiastical map of France, for example, an historian could discern in the mosaic of bishoprics the boundaries of the city-states of Gallia Togata and the cantons of Gallia Comata, while the archbishoprics preserved the outlines of the Diocletianic subdivisions of the four Augustan provinces, Narbonensis, Aquitania, Lugdunensis, Bélgica. Even the five patriarchates were all still in existence—four in Eastern Orthodox hands and one in Western Catholic hands—at the time when these lines were being written; and, though the areas of their circumscriptions, and the distribution and nationality of their ecclesiastical subjects, had undergone vast changes during the fifteen centuries since the Fourth Oecumenical Council, held at Calchedon (A.D. 451), their mortifying losses had been offset by gains that could never have been foreseen at the time when the patriarchates took shape.
The seats of the central governments of universal states show a decided tendency to change their locations in course of time. Empire-builders usually begin by ruling their dominions from a seat of government suitable to themselves: either the established capital of their own fatherland (e.g. Rome) or some new site, on the fringe of the subjugated territories, easily accessible from the empire-builder’s home country (e.g. Calcutta). But, as time goes on, the experience of imperial administration or the pressure of events is apt to lead either the original empire-builders or their successors who take their empire over after a temporary collapse, to adopt some new site commended by its convenience, not for the original empire-building Power, but for the empire as a whole. This new ōcumenical outlook will, of course, suggest different new locations in different circumstances. If the chief consideration is administrative convenience, a central site with good communications is likely to be chosen. If the chief consideration is defence against some aggressor, the site chosen is likely to be one convenient for the deployment of strength on the threatened frontier.
We have seen that the founders of universal states are not always of the same origin. Sometimes they are representatives of a civilization which is foreign to the society for whose political needs they are providing. Sometimes they are barbarians who have become morally alienated from the civilization towards which they gravitate : in other words, an external proletariat. Sometimes, and indeed frequently, they are marchmen who have vindicated their claim to be members of a civilization by defending its borders against outer barbarians, before turning their arms against the interior of their own society and endowing it with a universal state. Lastly—and such cases seem to be rare—they may be neither aliens nor barbarians nor marchmen but ‘metropolitans’ from the interior of the society in question.
In universal states founded by aliens or barbarians or marchmen the capital will tend to move from the frontier towards the centre, though in the last-named case it may be held to the frontier by the fact that the marchmen have still to perform their original function. In universal states founded by ‘metropolitans’ the capital will naturally start in the centre, though it may be dcawn to a frontier if a threat of aggression from a particular quarter becomes the government’s most pressing concern. We must now offer illustrations of the rules which appear to regulate the location and migration of capitals.
The British Rāj in India is a conspicuous example of empire-building by aliens. Reaching India from overseas and coming there to trade with the inhabitants long before they ever dreamt of ruling them, the English established trading bases at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. The last-named became the first political capital because the East India Company happened to establish political dominion over two rich provinces in the hinterland of Calcutta a full generation before it made any comparable acquisitions elsewhere. Calcutta remained the capital of British India for more than a hundred years after the design of bringing all India under British rule had been conceived by Wellesley (Governor-General A.D. 1798–1805), and more than fifty years after that design had been carried into execution. But the gravitational pull of a politically unified sub-continent eventually proved strong enough to draw the seat of the British Indian central government from Calcutta to Delhi, which was a natural site for an empire including the basins of both the Indus and the Ganges.
Delhi was, of course, not only a natural site; it was also an historic one, having been from A.D. 1628 onwards the capital of the Mughals. The Mughals, like the British, had provided India with an alien universal state, coming into India, not overseas, but by way of the North-West Frontier. If they had anticipated the British example they might have established their first capital at Kabul. They did not do so, for reasons which a detailed examination of their history would explain. Delhi was not their first capital, but its predecessor, Agra, was a similarly central site.
If we take a glance at Spanish America we find that the empire-builders in Central America made their capital once and for all at Tenochtitlan (Mexico City)—a ‘Delhi’—neglecting the possible claims of their port of entry, Vera Cruz—a ‘Calcutta’. In Peru they pursued the opposite course, making their capital on the coast at Lima in preference to Cuzco, the old capital of the Incas on the inland plateau. The explanation is no doubt to be found in the fact that the Pacific coastlands of Peru were rich and important, whereas the Atlantic coastlands of Mexico were not.
The ‘Osmanlis, the aliens who provided a universal state for the Eastern Orthodox Christian society, put up with a succession of makeshift capitals, first in Asia and then in Europe, until they had secured the peerless site of their Byzantine predecessors.
When the Mongol Khāqān Qubilāy (reigned A.D. 1259–94) achieved the conquest of the whole continental domain of the Far Eastern society he shifted his capital from Mongolian Qaraqorum to Chinese Peking. But, though Qubilāy’s head dictated this move, his heart remained homesick for his ancestral pastures, and the semi-Sinified Mongol statesman indulged his unregenerate Nomad feelings by building himself a subsidiary residence at Chung-tu, a point on the south-eastern rim of the Mongolian Plateau, where the Steppe approached nearest to the new imperial city. But Peking remained the centre of government, and Chung-tu a holiday resort, though business had doubtless to be transacted there also sometimes.
‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree.’
Perhaps we might equate Chung-tu with Simla, for, if Qubilāy sighed for his Steppe, British Viceroys certainly sighed for a temperate clime. We might even equate Chung-tu with Balmoral, for Queen Victoria’s heart was as obviously in the Highlands as Qubilāy’s was in the Steppe. We might go farther and imagine a nineteenth-century Chinese traveller describing the charms of Balmoral with an enthusiasm sufficient to inspire a twenty-fifth-century Chinese poet to enshrine Queen Victoria and her ‘stately pleasure-dome’ in a magical fragment of Chinese verse.
Seleucus Nicator, founder of one of the successor-states of the vast and ephemeral empire of Alexander the Great, furnishes a case of an empire-builder who was in two minds as to the location of his capital city, because he was in two minds as to the direction of his imperial ambitions. To begin with, he set his heart on winning, and in fact won, the rich Babylonian province of the former Achaemenian Empire and established a capital, Seleucia, on the right bank of the Tigris at the point where it comes nearest to the Euphrates. The site was admirably chosen, and Seleucia remained a great city and an important centre of Hellenic culture for more than five centuries following. Its founder, however, led astray by successful ventures at the expense of rival Macedonian generals farther west, shifted his centre of interest to the Mediterranean world and established his principal capital at Antioch in Syria, twenty miles from the mouth of the Orontes. 1 The result was that his successors wasted their energies in wars with the Ptolemies of Egypt and other Powers of the eastern Mediterranean and lost their Babylonian dominions to the Parthians.
All the above examples are taken from empires founded by representatives of alien Civilizations. We now pass on to consider the location of capitals in empires founded by barbarians.
The homeland of the Persian barbarians, whose conquests provided the Syriac society with a universal state in the form of the Achaemenian Empire, was mountainous, barren, and remote from the highways of human intercourse. According to the story with which Herodotus concludes his work, Cyrus the Great, who had created the Achaemenian Empire, deprecated a suggestion that the Persian people, now that they had become masters of the World, should evacuate their bleak highland homeland and settle in one of the more agreeable countries at their disposal. It is a good story, and we have already used it in an earlier part of this Study to illustrate the superiority of hard conditions for stimulating human enterprise. It is a matter of historical fact, however, that, more than a hundred years before Cyrus the Great overthrew his Median suzerain, one of his Achaemenian predecessors had transferred his seat of government from his ancestral highlands to the first piece of lowland territory of which he had gained possession. The place was called Ansan, and it was somewhere near Susa, though its exact location is still unknown. After the Achaemenian Empire was established, its seat of government migrated annually, according to the season, to and from several capitals with different climates, but Persepolis, Ecbatana, and even Susa (the Shushan of the Old Testament) may be regarded as, in the main, capitals of ceremony and sentiment, and for business purposes geographical convenience centred the affairs of the empire on Babylon, the capital of its lowland predecessor.
When the universal state that had been originally provided for the Syriac world by Persian empire-builders from the Iranian Plateau was eventually reconstituted, after nearly a thousand years of Hellenic intrusion, by Hijāzī barbarians from the rim of the Arabian Plateau, history repeated itself with emphasis. Thanks to the intuition of the discordant oligarchs of an oasis state in the Hijāz, who had invited the rejected prophet of a rival community at Mecca to make himself at home with them and try his hand at being their leader, in the hope that he would bring them the concord which they had failed to attain by themselves, Yathrib became, within thirty years of the Hijrah (Hegira), the capital of an empire embracing not only the former Roman dominions in Syria and Egypt but the entire domain of the former Sasanian Empire. Yathrib’s title to remain the seat of government lay in the fact that this remote oasis state was the nucleus out of which the Muslim Arab World Empire had burgeoned with a rapidity strongly suggestive of divine intervention, and it was hallowed as Madīnat-an-Nabī, ‘the City of the Prophet’. Medina remained the capital of the Caliphate de jure , at any rate until the foundation of Baghdad by the ‘Abbasid Caliph Mansūr in A.D. 792, but, more than a hundred years before that date, the Umayyad Caliphs had shifted the capital de facto to Damascus.
We now pass to cases of universal states created by marchmen. In the long history of the Egyptiac civilization, political unity was conferred, or imposed, on the society no less than three times over by marchmen from the upper reaches of the Lower Nile, and on each occasion the aggrandizement of a march into a universal state was followed (though, on the third occasion, not immediately) by the transfer of the capital from an up-river site, Thebes (Luxor) or its equivalent, to a site more easily accessible for the main body of the population : to Memphis (Cairo) or its equivalent on the first two occasions, and on the third occasion to a frontier fortress near the militarily exposed north-eastern corner of the Nile Delta.
In Hellenic history the fortunes of Rome are reminiscent of those of Egyptiac Thebes. Rome won her spurs by taking over from the Etruscans the wardenship of the Hellenic world over against the Gauls, as Thebes had won hers by taking over from Al-Kāb the wardenship of the First Cataract of the Nile over against the barbarians of Nubia. Like Thebes, Rome afterwards turned her arms inwards and imposed political unity on the Hellenic society of which she was a member, and for many centuries she retained her position as capital of the empire that she had created, though it is conceivable that, if Mark Antony had had his way and the battle of Actium had gone differently, she might, in the same generation that had seen the completion of her main range of conquests, have lost her position as capital to Alexandria. Three centuries later, however, a variety of circumstances which cannot here be recorded led to the transfer of the capital of the now rapidly degenerating empire to the far superior site of Constantinople. The city on the Bosphorus had a long future ahead of it as a capital of successive universal states. The city on the Tiber, like Medina, had to resign itself to the role of becoming, in due course, the Holy City of a higher religion.
If Constantinople was a Second Rome, Moscow, in pre-Marxian times, often claimed to be the Third. We may now consider the competition between capitals in the universal state of the Russian Orthodox Christian civilization. Moscow, like Rome, started its career as the capital of a march state over against barbarians. As the threat from the Mongol Nomads retreated, Moscow found herself facing about and repelling attacks from her nearest neighbours in Western Christendom, the Poles and the Lithuanians. At a time when her future as a capital city might have seemed secure, however, she was suddenly deposed by the restless ambition of a Westernizing Czar, in favour of his new creation, Saint Petersburg, the foundations of which, on territory conquered from Sweden, were laid in A.D. 1703. Peter the Great, transferring his seat of government from far inland to a point which opened magic casements on the fairyland of what was, in his judgement, a much more technologically enlightened world, recalls Seleucus Nicator transferring himself from a remote ‘oriental’ Seleucia to Antioch on the Orontes. But, among other differences, this may be noticed. In abandoning his Seleucia for his Antioch, Seleucus, who was an alien empire-builder in south-western Asia, was deserting a new creation of his own, with no strong national sentiment attached to it, in favour of a site within a short day’s journey of the Mediterranean, much nearer the heart of the Hellenic world. He was, in fact, turning homeward. In the Russian case, however, all the sentimental considerations were on the side of abandoned Moscow, and the chilly waterway towards the West on which the windows of Peter’s new experimental capital opened, was a poor equivalent for the Hellenic World’s Mediterranean. Saint Petersburg stood its ground for two hundred years. Then, with the Communist revolution, Moscow came into its own again, and the city of Saint Peter had to console itself with the new name of Leningrad. 1 It is curious to reflect that the fate of this Fourth Rome has been, in the matter of nomenclature, the reverse of that of the First. When Rome ceased to be the capital of a universal state it was in course of becoming what, in spite of Cavour and Mussolini, it still is : a Saint Peter’s Burg or Holy City of Saint Peter.
Such have been the motives which have influenced the rulers of some of the universal states of history in the location of their capitals. When we pass on to the unintended uses that have been made of those capitals by others than the rulers and the dominant minorities surrounding them, we may start with the crudest, namely capture and pillage. That was the standard by which, according to an old story, Field-Marshal Blücher, the soldier of a Power rich only in its military prowess, is said to have measured the use of London as he passed down one of her richer streets when he was a guest of the Prince Regent after the battle of Waterloo. ‘What plunder!’ he is said to have exclaimed. One could make a long list of the sackings of capitals, and, if we estimated the results for the victorious plunderers, we should find, more often than not perhaps, that these Gargantuan feasts had been followed by a bout of indigestion. The Hellenic society of the fourth century B.C. and the Western society of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era were not only put to shame by the barbarism into which their militant apostles relapsed; they were also devastated by it. For a crime which primitive barbarians can commit with comparative impunity does not go unpunished in societies that have risen to a monetary economy. The rifling of the treasure houses of southwestern Asia by the former and of the Americas by the latter put into sudden circulation an avalanche of bullion which produced a catastrophic inflation, and the sins of Macedonian plunderers at Persepolis and Spanish plunderers at Cuzco were expiated by Ionian artisans in the Cyclades and by German peasants in Swabia.
Let us pass on to less sordid themes. The capitals of universal states were obviously convenient stations for the radiation of all kinds of cultural influences. Higher religions found them serviceable for their purpose. During the Babylonish captivity of Nebuchadnezzar’s deportees from Judah, the capital city actually served an embryonic higher religion as the incubator in which it found its soul by exchanging a parochial for an œcumenical outlook.
The seat of government of a universal state is indeed good ground for spiritual seeds to fall on, for such a city is an epitome of a wide world in a small compass. Its walls enfold representatives of all classes and of many nations, besides speakers of many languages, and its gates open on to highways leading in all directions. The same missionary can preach on the same day in the slums and in the palace; and, if he gains the Emperor’s ear, he may hope to see the mighty machine of the Imperial administration placed at his disposal. Nehemiah’s position in the Emperor’s household at Susa gave him his opportunity of enlisting the patronage of Artaxerxes I for the temple-state at Jerusalem; and the Jesuit Fathers who sought and won a footing in the Imperial court at Agra and the Imperial court at Peking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era dreamed of winning India and China for Catholicism by a Nehemian strategy.
Indeed, the historic mission of capital cities in the long run will often be found to lie in the religious field. The potent effect on the destinies of Mankind which the Sinic imperial city of Loyang was still exercising at the time when these lines were being written was not a consequence of her former political role as the seat of the Far Eastern Chóu Dynasty, and subsequently of the Posterior Han. Politically Loyang was ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre’; but she was still exercising her potent effect in virtue of having been the nursery in which the seeds of the Mahāyāna were acclimatized to the Sinic cultural environment, and were thus enabled to sow themselves broadcast over the Sinic world. The desolate site of Qāraqorum, too, was still invisibly alive because, as an undesigned effect of this ephemeral Steppe city’s meteoric political career in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, she had brought missionaries of the Roman Catholic West face to face with Central Asian exponents of Nestorianism and Tibetan exponents of Lamaism.
To come nearer home, it was manifest, in 1952, that Peter and Paul, not Romulus and Remus or Augustus, were the authors of the ‘eternal’ significance of Rome; and Constantinople, the second and Christian Rome, having outrun all her manifestations as the capital of a universal state, owed such influence as she was still exercising in the World in virtue of her being the seat of a Patriarch who was still recognized by the ecclesiastical heads of the other Eastern Orthodox Churches, including the Church of Russia, as being primus inter pares .
It can almost be taken for granted that a universal state will have provided itself with official media of mental communication, and that these will include not only languages transmitted viva voce but also some system of visual records. In nearly all cases the system of visual records had taken the form of a notation of the official language; and, though the Incas had succeeded in maintaining an almost totalitarian régime without the aid of any notational system beyond the wordless semantics of the quipus , this must be regarded as an exceptional tour de force .
There had been cases in which some single language and single script had driven all possible competitors off the field before the universal state had been established. In the Egyptiac ‘Middle Empire’, for example, the language and script were bound to be Classical Egyptian and hieroglyphic characters; in Japan under the Shogunate they were bound to be the Japanese language and the particular selection and usage of Chinese characters that had already been adopted in Japan; in the Russian Empire they were bound to be the Russian language and the Great Russian variety of the Slavonic version of the Greek alphabet. This simple situation has not, however, been the usual one. More often than not the empire-builders find themselves confronted, in this matter of official language and script, not with an accomplished fact to ratify, but with a difficult choice to make between a number of competing candidates.
In these circumstances most empire-builders had given official currency to their own mother tongue, and, if it had hitherto not been provided with a script, they had borrowed or invented one for the purpose. There had, indeed, been cases in which empire-builders had passed over their own mother tongue in favour of another language already current as a lingua franca in their dominions, or even in favour of a revived classical language. The most usual course, however, had been for empire-builders to give official currency to their own national language and script without granting them a monopoly.
These general propositions may now be illustrated in an empirical survey.
In the Sinic world the problem was solved in a characteristically drastic fashion by Ts’in She Hwang-ti. The founder of the Sinic universal state gave exclusive currency to the version of the Chinese characters that had been in official use in his own ancestral state of Ts’in, and thereby succeeded in arresting the tendency, which had gone far by the end of the foregoing Time of Troubles, for each of the Contending States to develop a parochial script only partially intelligible to the literati outside those parochial limits. Since the Sinic characters were ‘ideograms’ conveying meanings, and were not ‘phonemes’ representing sounds, the effect of Ts’in She Hwang-ti’s act was to endow the Sinic society with a uniform visual language, which would continue—even if the spoken languages were to break up into mutually unintelligible dialects—to serve as a means of œcumenical communication, for the small minority who could learn to read or write it—just as, in the Modern Western world, the Arabic numerals conveyed identical meanings on paper to peoples who, viva voce , called the numbers by different names. Yet, as this parallel indicates, Ts’in She Hwang-ti’s standardization of Sinic characters would not have availed to avert a babel of tongues had not other forces been working in favour of uniformity in speech as well as in script.
The standardization of Sinic characters may have been anticipated by the unknown founder of the Minoan universal state. Though none of the scripts in use in the Minoan world had been deciphered at the time when this Study was written, 1 their sequence gave evidence of a revolutionary reform in the art of writing. At the transition from Middle Minoan II to Middle Minoan III two separate hieroglyphic scripts, which had made their appearance simultaneously at the beginning of the former period, were suddenly and completely superseded by a single new linear script (Linear A). 2 In the history of the Syriac society we know that Ts’in She Hwang-ti had a counterpart in the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd-al-Malik (reigned A.D. 685–705), who substituted the Arabic language and script for the Greek in the ex-Roman provinces of the Arab Caliphate, and for the Pehlavi in the ex-Sasanian provinces, as the official vehicle for the public records.
We may now pass on to some examples of the more frequent practice of providing a universal state with several official languages and scripts, including the empire-builders’ own.
In the British Rāj in India the English mother tongue of the empire-builders was for certain purposes substituted for Persian, the official language bequeathed by the Mughals. In A.D. 1829, for instance, the British Indian Government made English the medium for its diplomatic correspondence and in A.D. 1835 the medium for higher education. But when, in A.D. 1837, the final step was taken in the deposition of Persian from its official status in British India, the British Indian Government did not introduce English for all the other purposes that Persian had previously served. In the conduct of judicial and fiscal proceedings, matters that personally concerned all Indians of every nationality, caste, and class, Persian was replaced, not by English, but by the local vernaculars; and the Sanskritized Hindi vernacular known as Hindustani was actually manufactured by British Protestant missionaries to provide the Hindu population of Northern India with a counterpart of the Persianized Hindi vernacular, known as Urdu, which the Indian Muslims had already manufactured for themselves. This humane and politic decision to forbear from misusing political power by giving an exclusive currency to the foreign tongue of an alien empire-builder perhaps partially accounts for the remarkable fact that when, 110 years later, their descendants handed over their rāj to the descendants of their Indian subjects, it was taken as a matter of course, in both of the polyglot successor-states, that the English language would remain at least provisionally in use for the purposes which it had served under the British Rāj.
A contrast is offered by the abortive effort of the Emperor-King Joseph II (reigned 1780–90), one of the so-called enlightened despots of the Western world in the generation before the French Revolution, to impose the use of German on the non-German-speaking peoples of the Danubian Hapsburg monarchy. Though economic utility and cultural amenity told in favour of this political Diktat ,Joseph’s linguistic policy proved a disastrous failure, and evoked the first stirrings of those nationalist movements which, more than a hundred years later, were to tear the Hapsburg Empire to pieces.
The Turkish masters of the Ottoman Empire never embarked on the policy which was successfully applied in the Arab Caliphate and unsuccessfully in the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy. The founders’ native Turkish was the official language of imperial administration, but in the heyday of the Ottoman Power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era the lingua franca of the Pādishāh’s slave-household was Serbo-Croat and the lingua franca of the Ottoman navy Italian. Moreover, on the civil side, the Ottoman Government, like the British Indian Government, followed the policy of allowing its subjects to use languages of their own choice in communal affairs that were largely concerned with the private business of individuals.
A similar restraint was shown by the Romans in the imposition of Latin as an official language in provinces of their empire in which Greek was either the mother tongue or the established lingua franca . They contented themselves with making Latin the exclusive language of military command for units of the Imperial Army, wherever recruited and wherever stationed, and the principal language of municipal administration for colonies of Latin origin on Greek or Oriental ground. For other purposes they continued to employ the Attic koine wherever they found it already in official use, and they made its official status conspicuous by giving it an equal place, side by side with Latin, in the central administration at Rome itself.
The Romans’ forbearance towards the Greek language was something more than a tribute to the pre-eminence of Greek over Latin as a medium of culture; it represented a signal victory of statesmanship over hybris in Roman souls; for, in the far-flung western territories of the empire in which Greek was not in competition with Latin, the triumph of Latin was sensational. So far from having to impose its use on their subjects and allies outside the range of the Greek language, the Romans were in the happy position of being able to enhance its attractiveness by treating its official use as a privilege to be sued for. Nor did Latin win its peaceful victories solely at the expense of languages that had never been reduced to writing. In Italy it had to contend with sister Italic dialects like Oscan and Umbrian, and with Illyrian dialects like Messapian and Venetian, which had once been on a cultural par with Latin—not to speak of Etruscan, freighted with the cultural heritage of its Anatolian homeland. In Africa it had to contend with Punic. In these contests Latin was invariably victorious.
An even more remarkable restraint was shown by the Sumerian founders of ‘the Realm of the Four Quarters’ when they put the upstart Akkadian language on a par with their own Sumerian. Before this universal state came to an end, Akkadian had won the day and Sumerian had become practically a dead language.
The Achaemenidae gave as modest a place in the government of their empire to their Persian mother tongue as to their Persian mother country. Darius the Great’s account of his own acts on the rock of Behistan, overhanging the Empire’s great north-east road, was transcribed in triplicate in three different adaptations of the cuneiform script conveying the three diverse languages of the three imperial capitals: Elamite for Susa, Medo-Persian for Ecbatana, and Akkadian for Babylon. But the winning language within this universal state was none of the three thus officially honoured; it was Aramaic, with its handier alphabetic script. The sequel showed that commerce and culture may be more important than politics in making a language’s fortune; for the speakers of Aramaic were politically of no account in the Achaemenian Empire. The Achaemenian Government accepted a commercial fait accompli by giving to Aramaic a belated official status, but the most remarkable triumph of Aramaic was that its script succeeded in replacing the cuneiform as the medium for conveying the Persian language in its post-Achaemenian phase.
In the Mauryan Empire the philosopher-emperor Açoka (reigned 273–232 B.C .) succeeded in reconciling the demands of impartial justice and practical convenience by employing a number of local vernaculars conveyed in two different scripts, the Brahmī and the Kharoshthī. This catholicity was prompted by the emperor’s single-minded purpose of acquainting his peoples with the way of salvation revealed to Mankind by Açoka’s master, Gautama. Similar motives induced the Spanish conquerors of the Empire of the Incas to allow the use of a Quichuan lingua franca for the propagation of the Catholic Faith among their American subjects.
If we now conclude by asking who were the beneficiaries, we shall find that official languages had been turned to account by restorers of the empires in which these languages had enjoyed official currency, by latter-day secular agencies of all kinds, and by the propagators of higher religions. The finding is, in this matter of languages and scripts, obvious enough not to need detailed illustration.
Of the languages mentioned in the course of our survey, none had a more remarkable after-history than Aramaic, which also owed less than most of them to the patronage of the rulers of the universal state in which its upward career began. On the overthrow of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander it was brusquely deposed, in favour of the Attic koine , from the official status that the Achaemenidae had conferred on it in their western dominions. Though thus deprived of imperial patronage, it completed, nevertheless, the process of cultural conquest which it had begun before receiving official patronage, by supplanting Akkadian on the east and Canaanite on the west as the living language of the entire Semitic-speaking population of ‘the Fertile Crescent’. 1 It was, for example, the language in which Jesus must have conversed with his disciples. As for the Aramaic alphabet, it achieved far wider conquests. In A.D. 1599 it was adopted for the conveyance of the Manchu language on the eve of the Manchu conquest of China. The higher religions sped it on its way by taking it into their service. In its ‘Square Hebrew’ variant it became the vehicle of the Jewish Scriptures and liturgy; in an Arabic adaptation it became the alphabet of Islam; in its Syriac variant it served impartially the antithetical Christian heresies of Nestorianism and Monophysitism; in an Avestan adaptation of its Pehlavi variant it enshrined the sacred books of the Zoroastrian Church; in a Manichaean adaptation it served an heresiarch whom Christians and Zoroastrians agreed in execrating; in a Kharoshthī variant it provided the Emperor Açoka with an instrument for conveying the teachings of the Buddha to his subjects in the former Achaemenian province in the Panjab.
The field of social action which is the domain of Law divides itself into three great provinces : there is an administrative law that lays down the duties of subjects towards a government, and there are a criminal and a civil law, which are alike concerned with acts in which both parties are private persons. No government can, of course, be indifferent to administrative law, since the first concern of a government is to impose its authority and repress all acts of insubordination—from high treason to an omission to pay taxes—in which the subject may show himself recalcitrant to the government’s will. The same considerations lead governments to concern themselves with the criminal law as well; for, though the criminal may not be directly or intentionally attacking the government, he is in fact interfering with it in its task of preserving order. In so far as they concern themselves with civil law, on the other hand, governments are acting for their subjects’ benefit rather than for their own, and it is not surprising that there should be wide differences in the extent to which the governments of universal states have concerned themselves with law in this department.
In the domain of law, universal states are faced with a special problem which does not confront parochial states. Their territories include the subjects of a number of conquered parochial states which do not perish without leaving—in the domain of law as in other fields-—legacies with which their destroyer and successor has to reckon. There had been at least one instance in which the empire-builders, in this case the Mongols, had been so inferior to their conquered subjects that they had, found themselves unable to impose on them any part of their own ancestral law. The ‘Osmanlis took firm control of administrative and criminal law, but took care to avoid interfering with the civil law of their various non-Turkish subject populations. In the Sinic world, on the other hand, Ts’in She Hwang-ti characteristically imposed an œcumenical uniformity of law at one stroke by decreeing that the legislation in force in his own ancestral kingdom of Ts’in should be applied throughout the territories of the six rival states which he had conquered and annexed, and his action had at least two Modern Western parallels. Napoleon introduced his newly minted codification of French law into all the Italian, Flemish, German, and Polish territories of his empire, and the British Government of India introduced the Common Law of England—partly in its original form and partly in adaptations embodied in local legislation—throughout the Indian territories over which it established its direct rule.
The Romans were slower than the British or Napoleon or Ts’in She Hwang-ti in achieving uniformity of law in their empire. To live under Roman Law was one of the reputed privileges of Roman citizenship, and the progressive conferment of citizenship on the Empire’s subjects was not carried to its completion till the promulgation of the Edict of Caracalla in A.D. 212. In the parallel history of the Caliphate the reign of Islamic Law was progressively extended by the conversion of non-Muslim subjects of the Caliphate to the empire-builders’ religion.
In universal states in which a progressive standardization of the law had resulted in the attainment of approximate uniformity there had sometimes been a further stage in which a unified imperial law had been codified by the imperial authorities. In the history of Roman Law the first step towards codification was the ‘freezing’, in A.D . 131, of the Edictum Perpetuum which had hitherto been promulgated afresh by each successive Praetor Urbanus at the beginning of his year of office, and the final steps were the promulgation of the Justinianean Code in A.D. 529, and of the Institutes and Digest in A.D. 533. In the Sumeric ‘Realm of the Four Quarters’ an earlier code compiled under the Sumerian Emperors, ruling from Ur, appears to have been the basis of a later code promulgated by the Amorite restorer of the Empire, Hammurabi of Babylon, which was brought to light in A.D . 1901 by the Modern Western archaeologist, J. de Morgan.
As a rule the demand for codification reaches its climax in the penultimate age before a social catastrophe, long after the peak of achievement in jurisprudence has been passed, and when the legislators of the day are irretrievably on the run in a losing battle with ungovernable forces of destruction. Justinian himself had no sooner turned at bay against Fate and thrown up in her face the imposing barricade of his Corpus Iuris than he was driven by the Fury’s relentless hounds to sprint on again in a paper-chase in which he was constrained to strew the course with the tell-tale sheets of his Novellae . Yet, in the long run, Fate is apt to deal kindly with the codifiers; for the mead of admiration which their outraged predecessors of a better period would certainly have refused to them has been offered to their ghosts by a posterity too remote, too barbarous, or too sentimental to be capable of arriving at a correct appraisal of their work.
Even this uncritically admiring posterity finds, however, that the consecrated codes cannot be applied until they have been translated, and when we say ‘translated’ we refer to a treatment much like that suffered by Shakespeare’s Bottom, when Peter Quince exclaimed, ‘Bless thee, Bottom! thou art translated’, after seeing his friend provided with an ass’s head. Justinian’s reign was promptly followed by a deluge of Lombard, Slav, and Arab invasions; similarly, in the last phase of the Empire of Sumer and Akkad, Hammurabi’s strenuous work of political and social reclamation on the Plains of Shinar was no less promptly waterlogged by the Kassite invasion from the hills. When Leo the Restorer and his successors, after a virtual interregnum of 150 years, set to work to rebuild a Byzantine Empire, they found apter materials in the Mosaic Law than in Justinian’s Corpus Iuris , and in Italy the hope of the future lay not with the Corpus Iuris but with the Rule of Saint Benedict.
So the Code of Justinian died and was buried; but it came to life again, some four hundred years later, in the eleventh-century juristic renaissance at the university of Bologna. From this centre and from that time onwards it radiated its influence into the extremities and extensions of an expanding Western world, far beyond the ken of Justinian. Thanks to Bologna’s capacity for intellectual ‘cold storage’ in the Dark Ages, a version of Roman Law was ‘received’ in Modern Holland, Scotland, and South Africa. In Orthodox Christendom the Corpus Iuris survived a less exacting ordeal of hibernating for three centuries at Constantinople, and re-emerged in the tenth century of the Christian Era as the Code with which the Macedonian Dynasty replaced the Mosaistic legislation of its eighth-century Syrian predecessors.
We will not pause to describe the infiltration of Roman Law into the custom of Teutonic barbarian states which had no future before them. Much more important and striking is its surreptitious and unavowed yet unmistakable infiltration into the Islamic law of the Arab conquerors of various ex-Roman provinces. The two elements that blended here were even more incongruous, and the result of their blending was the creation, not just of a parochial law for a barbarian state, but of an œcumenical law which was to serve the needs of a restored Syriac universal state and, after surviving the break-up of this political framework, was to govern and mould the life of an Islamic society that, after the fall of the Caliphate, was to continue to expand until, at the time of writing, its domain extended from Indonesia to Lithuania and from South Africa to China.
Unlike their Teutonic counterparts, the Primitive Muslim Arabs had been roughly shaken out of their archaic traditional way of life before they administered to themselves the additional shock of a sudden change of social environment by bursting out of the deserts and oases of Arabia into the fields and cities of the Roman and Sasanian empires. A long-continuing radiation of Syriac and Hellenic cultural influences into Arabia had produced a cumulative social effect which had declared itself dramatically in the personal career of the Prophet Muhammad; and his achievements had been so astonishing and his personality so potent that his oracles and acts, as recorded in the Qu’ran and the Traditions, were accepted by his followers as the source of law for regulating, not only the life of the Muslim community itself, but also the relations between Muslim conquerors and their at first many times more numerous non-Muslim subjects. The speed and sweep of the Muslim conquests combined with the irrationality of the accepted basis of the Muslim conquerors’ new-laid law to create a most formidable problem. The task of extracting from the Qu’ran and the Traditions an œcumenical law for a sophisticated society was as preposterous as the demands for welling water in the wilderness which the Children of Israel are said to have addressed to Moses.
For a jurist in search of legal pabulum the Qu’ran was indeed stony ground. The chapters dating from the non-political Meccan period of Muhammad’s mission, before the Hijrah , offered far less matter for a practical jurist than he would find in the New Testament, for they contain little beyond a spiritually crucial and unwearyingly reiterated declaration of the unity of God, and denunciations of polytheism and idolatry. The chapters afterwards delivered at Medina might look, at first sight, more promising; for at the Hijrah Muhammad achieved in his own lifetime a position not attained by any follower of Jesus till the fourth century of the Christian Era. He became the head of a state, and his utterances were henceforth mainly concerned with public business. Yet it would be at least as difficult to elicit a comprehensive system of law even from the Medinese surahs without extraneous reinforcement as it would be to perform the same juristic conjuring trick with the Epistles of Saint Paul.
In these circumstances the men of action who built the Arab Caliphate let theory take its chance and resorted to self-help. They found their way with the aid of common sense, analogy, consensus, and custom. They took what they wanted where they could find it, and, if the pious could suppose that it had come straight out of the Prophet’s mouth, so much the better. Among the sources thus pillaged, Roman Law had an important place. In some cases they borrowed directly from this source in its Syrian provincial version. More frequently, perhaps, Roman law reached Islam through the intermediary of the Jews.
The Jewish Law, which had had so long a history behind it already by the time of Muhammad’s Hijrah , had originated, like the Islamic Sharī‘ah , as the barbarian customary practice of Nomads who had broken out of the steppes of Northern Arabia into the fields and cities of Syria; and, for meeting the same emergency of an abrupt and extreme change of social environment, the primitive Israelites, like the primitive Arabs, had recourse to the existing law of a sophisticated society which they found in operation in the Promised Land.
While the Decalogue would appear to be a purely Hebrew product, the next piece of Israelite legislation, known to scholars as the Covenant Code, 1 betrays its debt to the Code of Hammurabi. This influx of a code of Sumerian law into legislation enacted at least nine centuries later in one of the local communities of a latter-day Syriac society testified to the depth and tenacity of the roots which the Sumeric civilization had struck in Syrian soil during the millennium ending in Hammurabi’s generation. In the course of the near-millennium which followed, a bewildering variety of social and cultural revolutions had supervened, yet the Sumerian Law, embodied in Hammurabi’s Code, had remained in force among the descendants of Hammurabi’s Syrian subjects or satellites—and this in such vigour as to impress itself upon the callow legislation of the Canaanites’ Hebrew barbarian conquerors.
In thus entering into the law of barbarians who happened to be incubators of a higher religion, the Sumerian Law, like the Roman Law, made a greater mark on history than when it was influencing barbarians whose destiny was the inglorious exit usual among their kind. At the time of writing, the Sumerian Law was still a living force in virtue solely of its Mosaic offprint. On the other hand, the Islamic Sharī‘ah was neither the sole nor the liveliest carrier of the Roman Law at the same date. In the twentieth century of the Christian Era the chief direct heirs of Roman Law were the canons of the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Christian churches. Thus, in the domain of law, as in other fields of social action, the master institution created by the internal proletariat was the universal state’s principal beneficiary.
Standard measures of time, distance, length, volume, weight, and value are necessities of social life at any level above the primitive. Social currencies of these kinds are older than governments; they become matters of concern to governments as soon as these latter come into existence. The positive raison d’être of governments is to provide central political leadership for common social enterprises, and these cannot be operated without standard measures. Again, the negative raison d’être of governments is to ensure at least a modicum of social justice between their subjects, and, in most private issues of a ‘business’ kind, standard measures of some sort are involved. Standard measures thus concern governments of all kinds, but they are of particular concern to universal states; for these, by their nature, are confronted with the problem of holding together a far greater diversity of subjects than are usually found under the rule of a parochial state, and they have a special interest in the social uniformity that standard measures promote, if these are effectively enforced.
Of all standard measurements, a system of measuring time is the one for which a need is earliest felt, and the first necessity here is a measurement of the seasons of the year cycle. This calls for a harmonization of the three different natural cycles of the year, the month, and the day. The pioneer chronometrists quickly discovered that the ratios between these cycles are not simple fractions but surds; and the search for a magnus annus , in which these discrepant cycles would all start simultaneously and would then eventually come round again to their next simultaneous starting-point, led to an amazing application of astronomical mathematics in societies as early as the Egyptiac, the Babylonic, and the Mayan. Once embarked on this train of calculation, the budding astronomers were led on to take into account the cyclic movements not only of Sun and Moon but also of the planets and the ‘fixed’ stars, and their chronological horizon receded to a distance which is not easy to express and is still less easy to imagine—narrow-verged though it may seem to a latter-day cosmogonist in whose eyes our particular solar system is no more than one speck of star-dust in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way itself no more than one ci-devant nebula out of myriads of nebulae on their way from a flaming birth to a deathly incineration.
Short of the latest stage in the mental exploration of chronological magnitudes, the least common measure of the recurrent coincidences between the apparent movements of the Sun and those of a single one of the ‘fixed stars’ had generated the Egyptiac ‘Sothic Cycle’ of 1,460 years, and a recurrent common cycle of the Sun, the Moon, and five planets the Babylonic Magnus Annus of 432,000 years, while, in the stupendous Mayan Grand Cycle of 374,440 years, no less than ten distinct constituent cycles were geared together. This marvellously exact, though formidably complex, Mayan calendar was bequeathed by ‘the Old Empire’ of the Mayas to the affiliated Yucatec and Mexic societies.
Governments, like astronomers, find themselves concerned with computations in terms of years as well as with the articulation of the recurrent year-cycle; for the first concern of every government is to keep itself in existence, and the most naïve administration soon discovers that it cannot remain in business without keeping some permanent record of its acts. One method employed by governments was to date their acts by the names of the holders of some annual magistracy, such as the Roman consulate. Thus Horace, in one of his Odes, tells us that he was born consule Manlio , when Manlius was consul, which is as if a Londoner were reduced to dating his birth by the name of the City magnate who was Lord Mayor in his natal year. The inconvenience of such a system is obvious; no one could remember the names of all the consuls nor the order in which they came. 1
The only satisfactory system is to choose some particular year as an initial date and to number the years subsequent to it. Classical examples were the eras starting from the Fascist occupation of Rome; from the establishment of the First French Republic; from the Prophet Muhammad’s Hijrah from Mecca to Medina; from the establishment of the Gupta Dynasty in the Indic world; from the establishment of the Seleucid Empire’s Hasmonaean successor-state in Judaea; from the triumphal re-entry of Seleucus Nicator into Babylon.
There were other cases in which eras had been reckoned from events of which the precise date was disputable. For example, there was no evidence that Jesus had in fact been born in the first year of a Christian Era that did not become current until the sixth century of that Era; there was no evidence that Rome had in fact been founded in 753 B.C., or that the Olympic Festival had first been celebrated in 776 B.C. Still less was there evidence that the World had been created on 7 October 3761 B.C . (according to the Jews), or on 1 September 5509 (according to the Eastern Orthodox Christians), or at 6 p.m. on the evening before 23 October, 4004 B.C. (according to the seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish chronologist, Archbishop Ussher).
In the two preceding paragraphs these eras have been listed in a descending order of the cogency of the evidence for the dates of the events selected; but, if we now resurvey the list from the standpoint of the relative success of these same eras in gaining a wide and lasting currency, we shall observe that the talisman by which their success or failure has been decided is the presence or absence of a religious sanction. In A.D. 1952 the Western Christian Era was in the ascendant all over the World, and its only serious rival was now the Islamic Era, though the Jews, with their usual persistence, still officially reckoned from their estimate of the date of the Creation. There is, in fact, a traditional association between the measurement of time by human intellects and the hold of religion over human souls. The persistence of this superstition in the inaccessible subconscious depths of the Psyche, even in societies that had attained a degree of sophistication at which astrology was professedly discredited, was attested by the rarity of the instances in which a rational reform of a calendar had succeeded in establishing itself. The French Revolution, whose rationalized codes of law went forth to the ends of the Earth and whose pedantically newfangled weights and measures—grammes and kilogrammes and milligrammes, metres and kilometres and millimetres—enjoyed a succès fou , was utterly defeated in its attempt to supersede a pagan Roman calendar which had been consecrated by the Christian Church. Yet the French Revolutionary Calendar was an attractive structure. The months had names which, divided by their terminations into four seasonal batches of three each, indicated the kind of weather which did, or at any rate ought to, occur in them, and each was cut to a uniform length of thirty days grouped in three ten-day weeks. The batch of five supernumerary days that made up the total of the ordinary (non-leap) year ‘hardly marred the most sensible calendar ever invented—too sensible for a country which calls the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months of the year October, November and December’. 1
The Roman misnomers stigmatized in the passage quoted above had an explanation, which is to be found in the military history of the Roman Republic. The six months originally denoted in the Roman calendar by numerals, and not by the names of gods, had not, of course, been wrongly numbered when their names had been first bestowed upon them. Originally the Roman official year had begun on 1st March, a month named after the Roman god of war; and, so long as the Government’s range of action extended no more than a few days’ march from the capital, the newly elected magistrate, taking over his charge on 15th March, could take up the command assigned to him in time for the spring campaigning season. When, however, the field of Roman military operations had expanded to lands beyond Italy, a magistrate appointed to one of these distant commands in March might find himself unable to get into action until the season was far advanced. Oddly enough, during the half-century following the Hannibalic War this calendrical drawback was not of practical significance, for the calendar itself had gone so wildly astray that the month which was supposed to herald the spring had drifted back into the previous autumn. For example, in the year 190 B.C., in which a Roman army defeated a Seleucid army on the Asiatic battlefield of Magnesia, the legions had arrived in good time for the simple reason that the official 15th March was actually 16th November in the preceding year, while in the year 168 B.C., in which another Roman army inflicted an equally decisive defeat on a Macedonian army at Pydna, the official 15th March had been actually the previous 31st December.
The Romans, one perceives, were already, between these two dates, beginning to correct their calendar. Unfortunately, the nearer that it approximated to astronomical correctitude the more apparent was its obsolescence as a military time-table. Accordingly, in 153 B.C ., the day on which the annual magistrates were to enter on their term of office was shifted back from 15th March to 1st January; and, in consequence, January instead of March became the first month of the year. Astronomical improprieties continued until Julius Caesar was in a position to give dictatorial support to the conclusions of the astronomers and introduced a ‘Julian’ calendar which approximated so closely to correctitude that it stood for more than a millennium and a half. At the same time the first of the six numbered months, Quinctilis , was given his name and has become, in English, July. The following month in the following generation became August. After all, Julius and Augustus were officially Divus, and the intrusion of their names by the side of the gods already commemorated was not inappropriate.
The curious association of calendars with religions was illustrated by the subsequent history of the Julian calendar. By the sixteenth century of the Christian Era it was apparent that it had got ten days behindhand, and it was found possible; after the omission of ten days, to reduce its inaccuracy to an infinitesimal quantum by an alteration in the rule about centenary leap-years. In a sixteenth-century Western Christian society, even though the Age of Galileo was now treading on the heels of the Age of Saint Thomas Aquinas, it was felt that only the Pope could, as it were, press the button for the launching of a calendrical reform. Accordingly the amended calendar was inaugurated in the name of Pope Gregory XIII in A.D. 1582. But in Protestant England the once revered Pope had now become merely the scandalous Bishop of Rome, from whose ‘detestable enormities’ the Second Prayer Book of King Edward VI had prayed that we might be delivered. The Elizabethan Prayer Book had omitted from the Litany this offensive petition, but the sentiment remained. The English and Scottish Governments held firmly to their ancient calendrical ways for another 170 years, thus inflicting upon future historians of that period the niggling nuisance of having to distinguish between N.S. and O.S. When at last Britain came into line with her Continental neighbours in 1752, the British public in a professedly rational eighteenth century appear to have made much more fuss than had been made by the Catholic world in the presumably less enlightened sixteenth century of the Christian Era. Was this because, where a calendar was concerned, an Act of Parliament was a poor substitute for Vox Dei in the guise of a Papal Bull?
When we pass from calendars and eras to weights and measures and money, we enter a province of the field of social currencies in which the rationalizing intellect holds sway uncensored by religious scruples. The French revolutionaries who failed so abjectly to implant their new secular calendar scored an œcumenical success with their new weights and measures.
A comparison of the respective fortunes of the French and the Sumeric new model metric systems suggests that the dazzling success of the French reformers’ work was due to their judicious moderation. In reducing the bewilderingly variegated tables of the Ancien Régime to one single system of reckoning, they showed their practical good sense in irrationally following for this purpose the inconvenient decimal system which had been unanimously adopted by all branches of the Human Race, not on its merits but simply because the normal human being had ten fingers and ten toes. It was one of Nature’s unkind practical jokes that she had furnished some of the tribes of her vertebrate brute creation with six digits apiece on each of the four limbs without endowing the possessors of this admirable natural abacus with the reasoning power to use it, while, in endowing the Genus Homo with reason, she had at the same time dealt out to it a niggardly allowance of appendages that added up only to tens and scores. It was unfortunate because, on a decimal count, the basic scale is divisible only by two and by five, while the lowest number divisible alike by two, three, and four is, in fact, twelve. The decimal notation was nevertheless inevitable because, by the time when any wits in any society had come to appreciate the intrinsic superiority of the number twelve, the decimal notation had become ineradicably entrenched in practical life.
The French reformers forbore to kick against these ten-pronged pricks, but their Sumerian predecessors had been less prudent The Sumerian discovery of the virtues of the number twelve was a stroke of genius, and they took the revolutionary step of recasting their system of weights and measures on a duodecimal basis; but apparently they did not realize that, unless they could also achieve the further step of leading their fellow men to adopt a duodecimal notation for all purposes, the convenience of the duodecimal weights and measures would be more than offset by the inconvenience of having two incommensurable scales side by side. The Sumeric duodecimal system spread to the ends of the Earth, but during the last 150 years it has been fighting a losing battle against its youthful French competitor. Ur, like Oxford, has proved a ‘home of lost causes’; though, to be sure, the cause of Ur is not quite lost so long as the English count 12 inches in the foot and 12 pennies in the shilling. 1
As soon as it has come to be recognized that honest dealing is a matter of social concern and that any government worthy of the name must make the giving of false weight and measure a punishable offence, the invention of money lies just round the corner. Yet this corner can only be turned by the taking of certain precise successive steps, and the requisite combination of moves in fact remained unachieved until the seventh century B.C ., though by that time the species of societies called civilizations had already been in existence for perhaps three thousand years.
The first step was the expedient of giving some particular commodities the function of serving as media of exchange, and thereby acquiring a second use independent of their intrinsic utility. But this step did not, in itself, lead on to the invention of money when the commodities selected were multifarious and not exclusively metallic. In the Mexic and Andean worlds, for example, by the time of the Spanish conquest, the substances known and coveted in the Old World as ‘the precious metals’ existed in quantities that seemed fabulous to the Spanish conquistadores , and the natives had long since learnt the art of extracting and refining these metals and using them for works of art; but they had not thought of using them as media of exchange, even though they had hit upon the notion of using for this purpose other special commodities—such as beans, dried fish, salt, and sea-shells.
In the commercially interwoven Egyptiac, Babylonic, Syriac, and Hellenic worlds the use of the precious metals as measures of value, in units of conveniently weighable bars, had been current for hundreds or even thousands of years before the governments of certain Hellenic cities on the Asiatic coast of the Aegean Sea went beyond the existing practice of putting metallic media of exchange on a par with other commodities and thereby including them under the common rule that made it an offence at law to give false weight and measure. These pioneer city-states now took the two revolutionary steps of making the issue of these metallic units of value a government monopoly and of stamping this exclusive governmental currency with a distinctive official image and superscription as a guarantee that the coin was an authentic product of the governmental mint, and that its weight and quality were to be accepted as being what they purported to be on the face of them.
Since the management of a coinage is evidently least difficult in a state with a minimum area and population, it was perhaps no accident that city-states should have been the laboratories in which the experiment was made. At the same time it is equally evident that the utility of a coinage increases with the enlargement of the area in which it is legal tender. Such a step forward was taken when, in the earlier decades of the sixth century B.C. the Lydian monarchy conquered all the Greek city-states along the western coast of Anatolia except Miletus, as well as the interior as far as the River Halys, and issued a coinage based on the local standard of the subjected Greek city-state Phocaea, which was given a general currency throughout the Lydian dominions. The most famous (and the last) of the Lydian kings was Croesus, who thus became and has remained a by-word for riches. More than half-way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era, it still comes more naturally to a Westerner’s tongue to say ‘as rich as Croesus’ than to say ‘as rich as’—Rothschild or Rockefeller or Ford or Morris or any other modern Western millionaire.
The last and decisive step was taken when the Kingdom of Lydia was incorporated, in its turn, in the vast Achaemenian Empire. Thenceforth the future of coined money was assured. The œcumenical Achaemenian gold ‘archer’ coins gave coinage an impetus that sped it on an almost ubiquitous course of conquest. Coined money was launched on its career in India by the Achaemenian annexation of the Punjab. The more distant Sinic world became ripe for adopting it after Ts’in She Hwang-ti’s revolutionary empire-building had been salvaged thanks to being tempered by the tactful hands of Han Liu Pang. In 119 B.C. the Sinic Imperial Government had a brilliant intuition of the hitherto undiscovered truth that metal was not the only stuff of which money could be made.
‘In the imperial park at Ch’ang Ngan the Emperor had a white stag, a very rare beast, which had no fellow in the Empire. On the advice of a minister the Emperor has this animal killed, and made a kind of treasury note out of its skin, which, he believed, could not be copied. These pieces of skin were a foot square, and were made with a fringed border and decorated with a pattern. Each piece was assigned the abitrary value of 400,000 copper coins. The princes, when they came to pay their respects to the Throne, were compelled to buy one of these pieces of skin for cash, and present their gifts to the Emperor upon it. The skin of the white stag was, however, a limited quantity, and the time soon came when this device ceased to supply the Treasury with much needed money.’ 1
The invention of currency notes did not become effectively applicable till it had been associated with the two Sinic inventions of paper and printing. Negotiable paper, in the form of cheques tallying with stubs retained by the Imperial Treasury, was issued by the T’ang Government in A.D. 807 and 809, but there is no evidence that the inscriptions on these cheques were printed. Printed paper money was certainly issued by the Sung Government in A.D. 970.
The invention of money undoubtedly proved beneficial to the subjects of the governments that issued it—in spite of the socially subversive fluctuations of inflation and deflation, and temptations to lend and borrow at usurious rates, which the invention brought in its train. But a greater benefit had assuredly accrued to the issuing governments themselves; for the issue of money is an acte de présence which brings a government into direct and constant contact with at least an active, intelligent, and influential minority of its subjects; and this monetary epiphany not only automatically fosters a government’s prestige, but also gives it a magnificent opportunity for self-advertisement.
This effect of a coinage, even on the minds of a population under alien rule who resent the political yoke imposed upon them, is illustrated by a classic passage in the New Testament.
‘They sent unto Him certain of the Pharisees and the Herodians, to catch Him in His words. And when they were come, they say unto Him: ”Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man; for thou regardest not the person of man, but teachest the way of God in truth. Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? Shall we give, or shall we not give?”
‘But He, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them: ”Why tempt ye me? Bring me a penny, that I may see it.” And they brought it, and He saith unto them: ”Whose is this image and superscription?” And they said unto him: ”Caesar’s.” And Jesus answering said unto them: ”Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
‘And they could not take hold of His words before the people, and they marvelled at His answer, and held their peace.’ 1
This automatic moral profit which the prerogative of issuing money yields, even in a formidably adverse political and religious environment, was of incomparably greater value to the Roman Imperial Government than any mere financial gains which the management of the mint might incidentally bring in. The Emperor’s likeness on the coin gave the Imperial Government a certain status in the minds of a Jewish population which not only regarded Rome’s dominion as illegitimate but treasured, as the second of the ten commandments believed to have been delivered to Moses by Yahweh, engraved on stone tablets by the Deity’s own hand, the explicit injunction:
‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.’ 2
When in 167 B.C . the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, Epiphanes had placed a statue of Olympian Zeus in the Holy of Holies of Yahweh’s temple at Jerusalem, the horror and indignation of the Jews at seeing ‘the abomination that maketh desolate’ 3 ‘standing where it ought not’ 4 were so intense that they could not rest until they had thrown off every vestige of Seleucid rule. Again, when in A.D. 26 the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate smuggled into Jerusalem, draped and under cover of night, Roman military standards bearing the Emperor’s image in medallions, the reaction of the Jews was so vehement as to compel Pilate to remove the offensive emblems. Yet these same Jews had schooled themselves meekly, not only to seeing but to handling, using, earning, and hoarding the abominable image on Caesar’s coinage.
The Roman Government was not slow to perceive the value of an œcumenical coinage as an instrument of policy.
‘From the middle of the first century onwards the Imperial Government had appreciated, as few governments have done before or since, not only the function of coinage as a mirror of contemporary life—of the political, social, spiritual, and artistic aspirations of the age—but also its immense and unique possibilities as a far reaching instrument of propaganda. Modern methods of disseminating news and modern vehicles of propaganda, from postage-stamps to broadcasting and the press, have their counterpart in the imperial coinage, where yearly, monthly—we might almost say, daily—novelties and variations in types record the sequence of public events and reflect the aims and ideologies of those who control the state.’ 1
Universal states have differed very greatly in the extent to which they have required standing armies. A few seem to have been able to dispense with them almost entirely; others have found these expensive institutions a regrettable necessity, both mobile armies and stationary troops on garrison duty. The governments of such universal states have had to wrestle with the difficult and sometimes insoluble problems with which these always cumbrous and often dangerous institutions have confronted them. But these are matters which we cannot pause to explore. We will restrict ourselves in this section to one of the many subjects which might be brought under its title—one, however, that is perhaps the most interesting and the most important, and also the most closely aligned with the general argument of this chapter: namely the influence of the Roman Army on the development of the Christian Church.
The Christian Church was not, of course, the Roman Army’s most obvious or most immediate beneficiary. The most obvious beneficiaries of all the armies of all disintegrating empires had been the aliens and barbarians enrolled in them. The later Achaemenids’ recruitment of a mobile professional force of Greek mercenaries led to the conquest of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander the Great. The enrolment of barbarians in the bodyguard of the ‘Abbasid Caliphs and in the standing armies of the Roman Empire and the ‘New Empire’ of Egypt led to the establishment of Turkish barbarian rule in the Caliphate, Teutonic and Sarmatian barbarian rule in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, and Hyksos barbarian rule in Egypt. It is more surprising to see the mantle of an army descending upon a church—and the more so when the recipient of this inspiration is a church with an anti-military tradition.
In their conscientious objection to the shedding of blood, and consequently to the performance of military service, the Primitive Christians were at variance with Jewish tradition. They believed that the triumphal Second Coming of Christ was at hand, and that they had been instructed to wait for it in patience. In striking contrast to the series of Jewish insurrections, first against Seleucid and then against Roman rule, during the three hundred years running from 166 B.C. to A.D. 135, the Christians never rose in armed revolt against Roman persecutors during the period of approximately equal length between the beginning of Jesus’ mission and the conclusion of peace and alliance between the Roman Imperial Government and the Church in A.D. 313. As for service in the Roman Army, this was a stumbling-block for the Christians because it involved, not only the shedding of blood on active service, but also, among other things, the passing and execution of death sentences, the taking of the military oath of unconditional loyalty to the Emperor, the worship of the Emperor’s genius and the offer of sacrifice to it, and the veneration of military standards as idols. Service in the army was, in fact, forbidden by successive Early Christian Fathers—by Origen, by Tertullian, and even by Lactantius in a work published after the conclusion of the Constantinian Peace.
It is significant that this ostracism of the Roman Army by the Christian Church broke down at a time when the Army was still being recruited by voluntary enlistment—indeed more than a hundred years before the issue was raised on the Roman Imperial Government’s side through the reintroduction in practice of an always theoretically compulsory military service by Diocletian (reigned A.D . 283–305). Down to about the year A.D. 170 occasions for conflict over this issue were, it would seem, avoided. Christian civilians abstained from enlisting, while, if a pagan serving soldier became a convert, the Church tacitly acquiesced in his serving out his time and performing all the duties that the Army required of him. Possibly the Church justified herself for this laxity on the same ground on which she had from the first tolerated other anomalies, such as the continuance of slavery, even in cases where both master and slave were Christians; the inclusion of the Epistle to Philemon in the Sacred Canon is significant on this point. In the Church’s expectation in this age, the time remaining before Christ’s Second Coming was going to be so short that a soldier-convert might as well pass it under arms as a slave-convert in bondage.
In the third century of the Christian Era, when the Christians began to make their way in rapidly increasing numbers into the politically responsible classes of Roman society, partly by themselves rising in the world and partly by winning upper-class converts, they answered in practice the question raised for them by the social importance of the Roman Army without ever solving it in theory or waiting for the conversion of the state of which the army was an organ. In Diocletian’s army the Christian contingent was already so large and so influential that the persecution of A.D. 303 was directed against Christianity in the army in the first instance. Indeed, it would appear that, in the western provinces, the percentage of Christians in the army was higher than the percentage in the civilian population.
Still more significant is the influence of the Army on the Church in the age when the ban on military service was still in force. War calls forth heroic virtues akin to those which the followers of an unpopular religion are called on to display, and many preachers of such religions had drawn upon the vocabulary furnished by the arts and implements of warfare, none more conspicuously than Saint Paul. In the Jewish tradition, which the Christian Church had retained as a treasured part of its own heritage, war was consecrated both in a literal and in a metaphorical sense. While, however, the Jewish martial tradition was a potent literary influence, the Roman martial tradition presented itself as a living and impressive reality. Baneful and hateful as the Roman Army of the Republic might have been in the cruel age of the Roman conquests and the still more cruel age of the Roman civil wars, the Army of the Empire, which lived on its pay instead of looting, and which was stationed on frontiers to defend civilization against the barbarians instead of infesting and devastating the civilized interior of the Hellenic world, came to win the involuntary respect, admiration, and even affection of Rome’s subjects, as an œcumenical institution that ministered to their welfare and that was a legitimate object of pride.
‘Let us observe’, wrote Clement of Rome, about the year A.D. 95, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, ‘the conduct of the soldiers who serve our rulers. Think of the orderliness, the pliancy, the submissiveness with which they carry out their orders. Not all of them are legates or tribunes or centurions or options or officers of the grades below these. But each serving soldier in his own unit carries out the commands of the Emperor and the Government.’
In thus commending military discipline as an example to his Christian correspondents, Clement was seeking to establish order in the Church. Obedience, he was saying, is due from all Christians, not only to God but also to their ecclesiastical superiors. But in the evolution of the Christian Church’s military imagery the ‘soldier of God’ was primarily the missionary. The missionary must disencumber himself from the impedimenta of civilian life, and has the same claim to be supported by his flock as the soldier has to receive his pay out of the contributions of the taxpayer.
Yet, whatever influence the Roman Army may have had on the development of the Church’s institutions, it was less potent in that sphere than the influence of the Roman civil service, and the Army’s example produced its principal effect on the Church in the sphere of ideals.
The Christian initiation-rite of baptism is equated by Saint Cyprian with the military oath (sacramentum ) required of the recruit on enrolment in the Roman Army. Once enrolled, the Christian soldier must wage his warfare ‘in accordance with the regulations’. He must eschew the unpardonable crime of desertion, and likewise the grave misdemeanour of ‘dereliction of duty’. ‘The pay of delinquency is death’ is Tertullian’s adaptation to military language of the phrase in Saint Paul’s epistle to the Romans which appears as ‘the wages of sin’ in the Authorized English Version of the Bible. The ritual and moral obligations of the Christian life are equated by Tertullian with military ‘fatigues’. In his terminology a fast is a stint of sentry-go, and the yoke which is easy, in the language of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, is ‘the Lord’s light pack’. Moreover, the Christian soldier’s faithful service is recompensed, on discharge, with ‘God’s gratuity’; and, short of receiving a gratuity, the soldier can look forward to drawing his rations as long as he gives satisfaction. The Cross is a military standard and Christ the commander-in-chief (Imperator ). In fact, Baring-Gould’s ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and General Booth’s ‘ Salvation Army’ draw in word and in deed a parallel which goes back to the early days of the Church, but the army which originally suggested such a comparison was the non-Christian army which the Roman Empire had created and maintained for very different purposes.
Universal states have differed very greatly in the degree to which they have elaborated their civil services. At the upper end of the scale we find the Ottoman Government, which provided for its administrative needs by doing everything that human ingenuity could devise, and human determination accomplish, to produce a civil service that was to be no mere professional fraternity but a secular equivalent of a religious order, so rigorously segregated, so austerely disciplined, and so potently ‘conditioned’ as to be transfigured into a superhuman, or subhuman, race—as different from the ordinary run of human kind as a thorough-bred and broken-in horse, hound, or hawk is from the wild life that has been the breeder’s and trainer’s raw material.
A problem that often confronts the creators of civil services for universal states is, what use to make of the aristocracy that has often been lording it during the preceding Time of Troubles. There was, for example, an incapable aristocracy in Muscovy at the time when Peter the Great took her Westernization in hand, and a highly capable one in the Roman Empire at the date of the foundation of the Principate. Peter and Augustus each drew upon the aristocracy of his empire as material for the building of an recumenical administrative structure, but their motives were different. While Peter tried to dragoon an old-fashioned nobility into becoming efficient administrators in the Western style, Augustus took the Senatorial Order into partnership, not so much because he needed their services as because he regarded this partnership as an insurance against his suffering the fate that his predecessor, Julius Caesar, had suffered at the hands of a gang of outraged members of the summarily deposed ex-ruling class. The antithetical problems that confronted Augustus and Peter the Great are the horns of a dilemma which is apt to catch the architect of an empire confronted with a pre-imperial aristocracy. If the aristocracy is capable, it will resent the emperor’s service as being, for aristocrats, infra dignitatem . Conversely, if the aristocracy is incompetent, the dictator who employs it will find that the innocuousness of his tool is offset by the bluntness of its edge.
Pre-imperial aristocracies were not the only material that empire-builders required for the recruitment of their civil services. Such grandees, taken by themselves, would have constituted a corps of colonels without regiments. A middle class, consisting of lawyers and other professional men, would be required as the equivalents of the regimental officers, and a host of subordinates for the rank and file. Sometimes the builders of a universal state were in the fortunate position of being able to draw upon the services of a class that it had already called into existence to meet its own domestic needs. The character and achievements of the British Indian civil service can hardly be understood unless looked at against the background of an immediately preceding chapter of administrative history in the United Kingdom.
‘The institution of factory inspection by the Act of 1833 was a stage in the development of a new kind of civil service…. Ben-tham’s passion for substituting science for custom, his view of administration that it was a skilled business, had in this instance results that were wholly satisfactory. Under his inspiration England created a staff that brought to its work training and independence. Unlike the English Justice of the Peace, the new Civil Servant had knowledge: unlike the French Intendant , he was not a mere creature of a government. The English people learnt to use educated men on terms that preserved their independence and their self-respect…. For the moment, the chief occupation of this educated class was to throw a searchlight on the disorder of the new [industrial] world. Nobody can study the history of the generation that followed the passing of the Reform Bill without being struck by the part played by lawyers, doctors, men of science and letters, in exposing abuses and devising plans.’ 1
Such was the new fraternity of middle-class professional administrators which took passage to India. We shall find occasion to consider both their achievement and their limitations in another context in a later chapter.
The achievement of Augustus in calling a new civil service into existence to answer the needs of the devastated, disorganized, and weary world for which he made himself responsible had been equalled, 150 years earlier, in the Sinic world by the work of Han Liu Pang. Judged by the standard of endurance, indeed, the work of this Sinic peasant far surpassed that of the Roman bourgeois Octavian. Augustus’s system went to pieces in the seventh century after its creation, whereas Liu Pang’s system lasted, with at least a thread of continuity, down to A.D. 1911.
The defect of the Roman imperial civil service was its reflection of the discord between the old senatorial aristocracy and the new imperial dictatorship, which the Augustan compromise had glozed over but had not healed. There were two rigidly segregated hierarchies and two mutually exclusive careers in which the senatorial and non-senatorial civil servants went their respective ways. This schism was brought to an end in the third century of the Christian Era by the elimination of the Senatorial Order from all posts of administrative responsibility; but by this time the decay of local civic self-government had so greatly swollen the volume of work that Diocletian found himself compelled to make an inordinate increase in the permanent establishment of the imperial civil service. The social standard required from recruits was, in consequence, lowered. The contrast with the history of the Han Dynasty’s civil service is instructive. The opening of careers to talent, irrespective of rank, prevailed from the first, when the Emperor himself in 196 B.C., six years after his restoration of order, issued an ordinance directing the provincial public authorities to select candidates for the public service on a test of merit, and to send them to the capital for establishment or rejection by the officers of the central government.
This new Sinic civil service received its definitive form when Han Liu Pang’s successor, Han Wuti (reigned 140 B.C -87 B.C .), decided that the merit required of candidates should be proficiency in reproducing the style of the classical literature of the Confucian canon and in interpreting the Confucian philosophy to the satisfaction of the Confucian literati of the day. The Confucian school of the second century B.C., which was thus tactfully coaxed into partnership with the imperial régime, would have astonished Confucius himself, but even this dehydrated political philosophy was a more effective inspiration for a corporate professional way of life than the merely literary archaistic culture of the Hellenic world in the age of Diocletian. However pedantic it might be, it provided a traditional ethic which was lacking among the Roman counterparts of the Sinic civil servants.
While the Han Empire and the Roman Empire created their civil services out of their own social and cultural heritages, Peter the Great was debarred, by the very nature of his problem, from doing anything of the kind. In A.D. 1717–18 he established a number of Administrative Colleges to induct the Russians into new-fangled Western methods of administration. Swedish prisoners-of-war were roped in as instructors, and Russian apprentices sent to acquire a Prussian training at Königsberg.
Where, as in the Petrine Russian Empire, an imperial civil service is called into existence in conscious imitation of alien institutions, the need of special arrangements for training personnel is evident; but the need arises in some degree in all civil services. In the Incaic, Achaemenian, Roman, and Ottoman empires the Emperor’s personal household was both the hub of the wheel of imperial government and the training school for the administrators themselves, and in a number of cases the educational function of the imperial household was provided for through the creation of a corps of ‘pages’ or, in workaday terms, apprentices. At the Inca Emperor’s court at Cuzco there was a regular course of education, with tests at successive stages. In the Achaemenian Empire ‘all Persian boys of noble birth’, according to Herodotus, ‘were educated at the Emperor’s court, from the age of five to the age of twenty, in three things and three only: riding, shooting, and telling the truth’. The Ottoman court made provision for the education of pages in its early days at Brusa, and it was still treading this well-worn path when Sultan Murad II (reigned A.D. 1421–51 ) established a school for princes at Adrianople, which was the capital in his time. His successor, however, Sultan Mehmed II (reigned A.D. 1451–81), struck out a new line when he set about staffing his civil service, no longer with the sons of ‘Osmanli Muslim noblemen but with Christian slaves—including renegades and prisoners-of-war from Western Christendom as well as the ‘tribute children’ levied from the Pādishāh’s own Eastern Orthodox Christian subjects. This peculiar institution has been described in an earlier part of this Study.
While the Ottoman Pādishāhs deliberately expanded their personal slave-household into an instrument for the government of a rapidly growing empire, actually to the exclusion of free ‘Osmanlis, the Roman Emperors, though they found themselves compelled to make a similar use of Caesar’s Household, took steps to limit the role of freedmen in the imperial administration. The freedmen’s stronghold in the administration of the Roman Empire in the early days was the central government, in which five administrative offices in Caesar’s Household had grown into imperial ministries; but, even in these posts, which were traditionally the freedmen’s preserve,’the freedmen became politically impossible as soon as they became conspicuous. The scandal caused by the spectacle of the freedmen-ministers of Claudius and Nero exercising unbridled power led, under the Flavian emperors and their successors, to the transfer of these key posts, one after another, to members of the Equestrian Order.
Thus in the history of the Roman civil service the equestrian, i.e. the commercial, class gained ground at the expense both of the slave underworld and the senatorial aristocracy, and its victory over its rivals was justified by the efficiency and integrity with which the equestrian civil servants performed their duties. This redemption of a class which, during the last two centuries of the republican régime, had risen to wealth and power by exploitation, tax-farming, and usury, was perhaps the most remarkable triumph of the Augustan imperial system. The British Indian civil servants were likewise recruited from a commercial class. They had originated as the employees of a trading company whose purpose had been pecuniary profit; one of their original incentives for taking employment far from home in an uncongenial climate had been the possibility of making fortunes by trading ‘on the side’ for their personal profit; and, when the East India Company was suddenly transformed, by a significantly easy military victory, into ..he sovereign, in all but name, of the richest province of the broken-down Mughal Empire, the Company’s servants had, for a brief period, yielded to the temptation to extort monstrous pecuniary winnings for themselves with the same shamelessness as the Roman Equités had displayed over a much longer period. Yet in the British case, as in the Roman, a band of predatory harpies was converted into a body of public servants whose incentive was now no longer personal gain and who had learnt to make it a point of honour to wield enormous political power without abusing it.
This redemption of the character of the British administration in India was due in part to the East India Company’s decision to educate their servants for bearing the new political responsibilities that had fallen on their shoulders. In A.D. 1806 the Company opened, at Hertford Castle, a college for probationer appointees to its administrative service which it moved, three years later, to Haileybury; and this college played an historic role during the fifty-two years of its existence. In 1853, on the eve of the transference of the Government of India from the Company to the Crown, Parliament’s decision to recruit the service in future by competitive examination opened the door to candidates drawn from the wider field of such non-official institutions as the universities of the United Kingdom and the so-called ‘public schools’ from which the two ancient English universities were at that time mainly recruited. Haileybury College was closed in 1857, and, during the fifty-two years of its existence, Dr. Arnold of Rugby had come and gone, while all that he stood for had been broadcast throughout the public schools by like-minded masters. The average Indian civil servant during the latter half of the nineteenth century had acquired at school and university a training in exact scholarship, based on what were, for Westerners, the ‘classical’ languages and literatures, and a Christian outlook which was not less strong for being often somewhat vague and undogmatic. A not altogether fanciful parallel might be drawn between this moral and intellectual training and the education in the Sinic Confucian classics that was then still being demanded of a Chinese civil service which had been established twenty centuries earlier.
If we turn now to consider who had been the principal beneficiaries from the imperial civil services that universal states had called into existence for their own purposes, the most obvious beneficiaries were evidently those successor-states of these empires which had the intelligence to make use of such a precious legacy. From a list of these we should exclude the successor-states of the Roman Empire in the West. These learnt their lessons much less from the imperial civil service, which they disrupted, than from the Church to which they were converted; but, as we shall see, the Church itself had been a beneficiary of the Roman civil service, so that, even here, the legacy was partially transmitted at one remove. Without attempting a complete list of beneficiary successor-states, one can point, at the time of writing, to the recently formed Indian Union and Pakistan as beneficiaries of the British Indian civil service.
The most important beneficiaries, however, had been the churches. We have already noticed how the hierarchical organization of the Christian Church had been based on that of the Roman Empire. A similar basis was provided by the ‘New Empire’ of Egypt for the Pan-Egyptiac church under the Chief Priest of Amon-Re at Thebes and by the Sasanian Empire for the Zoroastrian church. The Chief Priest of Amon-Re was created in the image of the Theban Pharoah; the Zoroastrian Chief Mobadh in the likeness of the Sasanian Shāhinshāh; and the Pope in the likeness of the post-Diocletianic Roman Emperor. Secular administrative corporations had, however, performed more intimate services for churches than the mere provision of an organizational last. They had also influenced their outlook and ethos, and in some cases these intellectual and moral influences had been conveyed, not merely by example, but by the translation of a person, in whom they had been incarnate, from the secular to the ecclesiastical sphere.
Three historic figures, each of whom gave a decisive turn to the development of the Catholic Church in the West, were recruits from the secular Roman imperial civil service. Ambrosius (lived circa A.D. 340–97) was the son of a civil servant who had reached the peak of his profession by attaining the office of praetorian prefect of the Gauls, and the future Saint Ambrose was following in his father’s footsteps as governor of the province of Liguria and Aemilia when, in A.D. 374, to his consternation, he was dragged out of the rut of an assured official career and hustled into the episcopal see of Milan by a popular impetus that did not wait to ask his leave. Cassiodorus (lived circa A.D. 490–585) spent the first part of his very long life administering Roman Italy in the service of King Theodoric the Ostrogoth. In his later days he turned a rural property of his own in the toe of Italy into a monastic settlement that was the complement of Saint Benedict’s foundation at Monte Cassino. Saint Benedict’s school of monks broken in, by the love of God, to hard physical labour in the fields could not have done all that it did for a nascent Western Christian society if it had not been wedded, at the start, to a Cassiodoran school that was inspired by the same motive to perform the mentally laborious task of copying the pagan Classics and the works of the Fathers. As for Gregory the Great (lived circa A.D. 540–604), he abandoned the secular public service, after serving as Praefectus Urbi , in order to follow Cassiodorus’s example by making a monastery out of his ancestral palace in Rome, and he was thereby led, against his expectation and desire, into becoming one of the makers of the Papacy. Each of these great civil servants found his true vocation in the service of the Church, and brought to the service of the Church aptitudes and traditions acquired in a civil service career.
Since a universal state usually arises in the first instance from the forcible union of a number of contending parochial states, it is apt to start life with a great gulf fixed between rulers and ruled. On the one side stands an empire-building community representing the survivors of a dominant minority after a protracted struggle for existence between the rulers of the competing local communities of the preceding age; on the other side lies a conquered population. It is also common form for the effectively enfranchised element to become, as time passes, a relatively larger fraction as a result of the admission of recruits from the subject majority. It had, however, been unusual for this process to go to the length of completely obliterating the initial division between rulers and ruled.
The outstanding exceptional case, in which a comprehensive political enfranchisement had been achieved—and this within a quarter of a century of the establishment of the universal state—was in the Sinic world. In the Sinic universal state established in 230–221 B.C ., through the conquest of six other parochial states by their victorious competitor Ts’in, the supremacy of Ts’in was brought to an end when Hsien Yang, the capital of the Ts’in Power, was occupied by Han Liu Pang in 207 B.C . The political enfranchisement of the whole population of the Sinic universal state may be dated from 196 B.C. It need hardly be said that this political achievement could not change at one stroke the fundamental economic and social structure of the Sinic society. That society continued to consist of a mass of tax-paying peasants supporting a small privileged ruling class; but henceforth the avenue giving entry to this Sinic official paradise was genuinely open to talent, irrespective of social class.
The unifying effect produced by historical forces operating over a long period of time cannot, of course, be reproduced by a legislative act conferring uniform juridical status. The uniform status of Europeans, Eurasians, and Asiatics under the British Rāj in India, and of Europeans, Creoles, and ‘Indians’ in the Spanish Empire in the Indics, as subjects, in either case, of one Crown, did not have any appreciable effect in diminishing the social gulf between rulers and ruled in either of these polities. The classical instance in which an initial gulf was successfully obliterated by the gradual merger of a once privileged ruling minority in the mass of its former subjects is to be found in the history of the Roman Empire; and here, also, the substance of political equality was not communicated by the mere conferment of the juridical status of Roman citizen. After the promulgation of the Edict of Caracalla in A.D. 212 all free male inhabitants of the Roman Empire, with insignificant exceptions, were Roman citizens, but it still required the political and social revolution of the ensuing century to bring the realities of life into conformity with the law.
The ultimate beneficiary from the political egalitarianism towards which the Roman Empire was moving in the Age of the Principate, 1 and at which it arrived in the time of Diocletian, was of course the Catholic Christian Church. The Catholic Christian Church borrowed the Roman Empire’s master idea of dual citizenship—a constitutional device that had solved the problem how to enjoy the advantages of membership of an œcumenical community without having to repudiate narrower loyalties or to cut local roots. In the Roman Empire under the Principate, which was the framework within which the Christian Church grew up, all citizens of the world-city of Rome (except the small number who actually lived in the metropolis) were also citizens of some local municipality that, though within the Roman body politic, was an autonomous city state with the traditional Hellenic form of city state self-government and the traditional hold of such a local motherland upon the affections of her children. On this Roman secular model a growing and spreading ecclesiastical community built up an organization and a corporate feeling that was simultaneously local and œcumenical. The Church to which a Christian gave his allegiance was both the local Christian community of a particular city and the Catholic Christian community in which all these local churches were embraced in virtue of a uniform practice and doctrine.
1 The ‘only’ is not in the Latin, but it might well be, for the poet must have known that if the bees do not get any honey for themselves they go on strike.
1 Toynbee, A. J., in The Legacy of Greece (Oxford 1922, Clarendon Press), P. 320.
1 Sansom, G. B.: Japan: a Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press), pp. 460–2.
1 In the original work, of which this is an abridgement, Mr. Toynbee surveys the uses made of the communication systems of a large number of universal states.
1 The Mau Mau movement in Kenya might be regarded as the most conspicuous protest of these latter at the moment of writing, A.D. 1954.
1 Reckoning the Nestorian lodgement in Travancore as the first attempt of Christianity to convert India, and the Jesuit mission to the Court of Akbar as the second.
3 Reckoning the seventh-century Nestorian lodgement at Si Ngan as the first attempt of Christianity to convert China; the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Western Christian missions overland as the second; and the sixteenth-century Western Christian missions by sea as the third.
1 Haring, C. H. : The Spanish Empire in America (New York 1947, Oxford University Press), pp. 160 and 159.
1 This was the usage in England until quite modern times. Cities were ‘cathedral cities’: other towns were ‘boroughs’.
1 One of many other Seleucias was also founded in this neighbourhood, to serve as the port of Antioch. From this Seleucia, as recorded in The Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul set sail for Cyprus on his first missionary journey.
1 There is something ridiculous about this topical name-changing. The editor of this abridgement remembers receiving, half a century ago, a letter from a friend who had recently returned to a French provincial town. He wrote: ‘Since I was last here the anti-clericals have secured a majority on the Council and the Rue Jean-Baptiste has become the Rue Emile Zola.’
1 Before this Abridgement of vols, vii-x was published, the Minoan ‘Linear B’ script had been deciphered by Messrs A. Ventris and I. Chadwick as a vehicle for the Greek language (see The Journal of Hellenic Studies , vol. lxxiii, pp. 84–103), and their interpretation had been immediately and almost unanimously recognized by other scholars.
2 Linear A has not yet been deciphered by the time of writing in 1954. It had a wide currency throughout the Island of Crete, and the language conveyed in it is probably the pre-Greek Minoan (to whatever family of languages this may have belonged). The range of the later ‘Linear B’ script, now known to have conveyed the Greek language, was confined, in Crete, to Cnossos, but extended to several centres of the Mycenaean Civilization on the mainland.
1 i.e. the stretch of fertile country round the north of the Arabian Desert from Egypt via Syria, Mesopotamia and Babylonia to the Persian Gulf.
1 Exod. xxxiv. 17–26, and, in a fuller statement, xx. 23 to xxiii. 33.
1 Similarly the clause ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’, which occurs in both the ‘Nicene’ and the ‘Apostles’ ‘ Creed used by Christian Churches, is a statement of a date rather than a charge against an individual. If the authors of the Creeds had wished to indulge in polemics, they would have imputed the crime to the Jews, whom Christians still hated, rather than to a representative of Imperial Rome, with which they had become reconciled. The point of ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’ is the assertion that the Second Person of the Trinity had been an historical figure with a definite date, in contrast to the mythical figures of other religions, such as Mithras or Isis or Cybele.
1 Thompson, J. M.: The French Revolution (Oxford 1943, Blackwell), p. ix.
1 The 24 hours of the day and the 60 minutes of the hour are also of Sumeric origin, and stand a better chance of indefinite survival. Even the French revolutionists did not try to decimalize the clock.
1 Fitzgerald, C. P.: China; a Short Cultural History (London 1935, Cresset Press), pp. 164–5.
1 Mark xii. 13–17. Cp. Matt. xxii. 15–21; Luke xx. 20–25.
2 Exod. xx. 4, 5.
3 Dan. xi. 31 and xii. 11.
4 Mark xiii. 14.
1 Toynbee, J. M. C: Roman Medallions (New York 1944, The American Numismatic Society), p. 15.
1 Hammond, J. L. and Barbara: The Rise of Modern Industry (London 1925, Methuen), pp. 256–7.
1 i.e. the pre-Diocletianic Empire, founded by Augustus, who used the title Princeps, meaning ‘Leader of the House’ (i.e. the Senate).