When Constantine the Great carried the seat of empire from
Rome to Constantinople, he set up in the marketplace of the
new capital a porphyry pillar, which had come by raft and
rail from Egypt, and of which a strange tale is told. In
a vault beneath he secretly buried the seven sacred emblems
of the Roman State, which were guarded by the virgins in
the temple of Vesta, with the fire that might never be quenched.
On the summit, he raised a statue of Apollo, representing
himself, and enclosing a fragment of the Cross; and he crowned
it with a diadem of rays consisting of the nails employed
at the Crucifixion, which his mother was believed to have
found at Jerusalem.
The pillar still
stands, the most significant monument that exists of the
converted empire; for the notion that the nails
which had pierced the body of Christ became a fit ornament
for a heathen idol as soon as it was called by the name of
a living emperor, indicates the position designed for Christianity
in the imperial structure of Constantine. Diocletian’s
attempt to transform the Roman government into a despotism
of the Eastern type had brought on the last and most serious
persecution of the Christians; and Constantine, in adopting
their faith intended neither to abandon his predecessor’s
scheme of policy, nor to renounce the fascinations of arbitrary
authority, but to strengthen his throne with the support
of a religion which had astonished the world by its power
of resistance; and to obtain that support absolutely and
without a drawback he fixed the seat of his government in
the East, with a patriarch of his own creation.
Nobody warned him that by promoting the Christian religion
he was tying one of his hands, and surrendering the prerogative
of the Caesars. As the acknowledged author of the liberty
and superiority of the Church, he was appealed to as the
guardian of her unity. He admitted the obligation; he accepted
the trust; and the divisions that prevailed among the Christians
supplied his successors with many opportunities of extending
that protectorate, and preventing any reduction of the claims
or of the resources of imperialism.
Constantine declared
his own will equivalent to a canon of the Church. According
to Justinian, the Roman people had
formally transferred to the emperors the entire plenitude
of its authority, and, therefore, the emperor’s pleasure,
expressed by edict or by letter, had force of law. Even in
the fervent age of its conversion the empire employed its
refined civilization, the accumulated wisdom of ancient sages,
the reasonableness and sublety of Roman law, and the entire
inheritance of the Jewish, the pagan, and the Christian world,
to make the Church serve as a gilded crutch of absolutism.
Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political
wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians
availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity.
Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection
and experience—a faculty of self government and self
control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation,
and growing with its growth. This vital element, which many
centuries of warfare, of anarchy, of oppression, had extinguished
in the countries that were still draped in the pomp of ancient
civilization, was deposited on the soil of Christendom by
the fertilising stream of migration that overthrew the empire
of the West.
In the height of their power the Romans became aware of
a race of men that had not abdicated freedom in the hands
of a monarch; and the ablest writer of the empire pointed
to them with a vague and bitter feeling that, to the institutions
of these barbarians, not yet crushed by despotism, the future
of the world belonged. Their kings, when they had kings,
did not preside [at] their councils; they were sometimes
elective; they were sometimes deposed; and they were bound
by oath to act in obedience to the general wish. They enjoyed
real authority only in war. This primitive Republicanism,
which admits monarchy as an occasional incident, but holds
fast to the collective supremacy of all free men, of the
constituent authority over all constituted authorities, is
the remote germ of parliamentary government. The action of
the state was confined to narrow limits; but, besides his
position as head of the state, the king was surrounded by
a body of followers attached to him by personal or political
ties. In these his immediate dependants, disobedience or
resistance to orders was no more tolerated than in a wife,
a child, or a soldier; and a man was expected to murder his
own father, if his chieftain required it. Thus these Teutonic
communities admitted an independence of government that threatened
to dissolve society; and a dependence on persons that was
dangerous to freedom. It was a system very favourable to
corporations, but offering no security to individuals. The
state was not likely to oppress its subjects; and was not
able to protect them.
The first effect of the great Teutonic migration into the
regions civilized by Rome was to throw back Europe many centuries,
to a condition scarcely more advanced than that from which
the institutions of Solon had rescued Athens. Whilst the
Greeks preserved the literature, the arts, and the science
of antiquity, and all the sacred monuments of early Christianity
with a completeness of which the rended fragments that have
come down to us give no commensurate idea, and even the peasants
of Bulgaria knew the New Testament by heart, Western Europe
lay under the grasp of masters the ablest of whom could not
write their names. The faculty of exact reasoning, of accurate
observation, became extinct for 500 years, and even the sciences
most needful to society, medicine and geometry, fell into
decay, until the teachers of the West went to school at the
feet of Arabian masters. To bring order out of chaotic ruin,
to rear a new civilization and blend hostile and unequal
races into a nation, the thing wanted was not liberty but
force. And for centuries all progress is attached to the
action of men like Clovis, Charlemagne, and William the Norman,
who were resolute and peremptory, and prompt to be obeyed.
The spirit of immemorial paganism which had saturated ancient
society could not be exorcised except by the combined influence
of Church and State; and the universal sense that their union
was necessary created the Byzantine despotism. The divines
of the empire who could not fancy Christianity flourishing
beyond its borders, insisted that the State is not in the
Church, but the Church in the State. This doctrine had scarcely
been uttered when the rapid collapse of the Western empire
opened a wider horizon; and Salvianus, a priest at Marseilles,
proclaimed that the social virtues, which were decaying amid
the civilized Romans, existed in greater purity and promise
among the pagan invaders. They were converted with ease and
rapidity; and their conversion was generally brought about
by their kings.
Christianity, which in earlier times had addressed itself
to the masses, and relied on the principle of liberty, now
made its appeal to the rulers, and threw its mighty influence
into the scale of authority. The barbarians, who possessed
no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the
schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the
rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike
attachment to men whose minds were stored with the knowledge
of Scripture, of Cicero, of St. Augustine; and in the scanty
world of their ideas, the Church was felt to be something
infinitely vaster, stronger, holier, than their newly founded
states. The clergy supplied the means of conducting the new
governments, and were made exempt from taxation, from the
jurisdiction of the civil magistrate, and of the political
administrator. They taught that power ought to be conferred
by election; and the Councils of Toledo furnished the framework
of the parliamentary system of Spain, which is, by a long
interval, the oldest in the world. But the monarchy of the
Goths in Spain, as well as that of the Saxons in England,
in both of which the nobles and the prelates surrounded the
throne with the semblance of free institutions, passed away;
and the people that prospered and overshadowed the rest were
the Franks, who had no native nobility, whose law of succession
to the Crown became for 1,000 years the fixed object of an
unchanging superstition, and under whom the feudal system
was developed to excess.
Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things.
Having no other source of wealth than the produce of the
soil, men depended on the landlord for the means of escaping
starvation; and thus his power became paramount over the
liberty of the subject and the authority of the state. Every
baron, said the French maxim, is sovereign in his own domain.
The nations of the West lay between the competing tyrannies
of local magnates and of absolute monarchs, when a force
was brought upon the scene which proved for a time superior
alike to the vassal and his lord.
In the days of the Conquest, when the Normans destroyed
the liberties of England, the rude institutions which had
come with the Saxons, the Goths, and the Franks from the
forests of Germany were suffering decay, and the new element
of popular government afterwards supplied by the rise of
towns and the formation of a middle class, was not yet active.
The only influence capable of resisting the feudal hierarchy
was the ecclesiastical hierarchy; and they came into collision
when the progress of feudalism threatened the independence
of the Church, by subjecting the prelates severally to that
form of personal dependence on the Kings which was peculiar
to the Teutonic state.
To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of
civil liberty. If the Church had continued to buttress the
thrones of the Kings whom it anointed, or if the struggle
had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe
would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism.
For the aim of both contending parties was absolute authority.
But although liberty was not the end for which they strove,
it was the means by which the temporal and the spiritual
power called the nations to their aid. The towns of Italy
and Germany won their franchises, France got her states general
and England her parliament out of the alternate phases of
the contest; and as long as it lasted it prevented the rise
of Divine Right. A disposition existed to regard the crown
as an estate descending under the law of real property in
the family that possessed it. But the authority of religion,
and especially of the papacy, was thrown to the side that
denied the indefeasible title of kings. In France what was
afterwards called the Gallican theory maintained that the
reigning house was above the law, and that the sceptre was
not to pass away from it as long as there should be princes
of the royal blood of St. Lewis. But in other countries the
oath of fidelity itself attested that it was conditional,
and should be kept only during good behaviour; and it was
in conformity with the public law to which all monarchs were
held subject, that King John was declared a rebel against
the barons; and that the men who raised Edward III to the
throne from which they had deposed his father, invoked the
maxim Vox populi Vox Dei.
And this doctrine
of the Divine Right of the people to raise up and pull
down princes, after obtaining the sanctions of
religion, was made to stand on broader grounds, and was strong
enough to resist both Church and King. In the struggle between
the house of Bruce and the house of Plantagenet for the possession
of Scotland and Ireland, the English claim was backed by
the censures of Rome. But the Irish and the Scots refused
it; and the address in which the Scottish parliament informed
the Pope of their resolution shows how firmly the popular
doctrine had taken root. Speaking of Robert Bruce, they say: “Divine
Providence, the laws and customs of the country, which we
will defend till death, and the choice of the people, have
made him our King. If he should ever betray his principles,
and consent that we should be subjects of the English king,
then we shall treat him as an enemy, as the subverter of
our rights and his own, and shall elect another in his place.
We care not for glory or for wealth, but for that liberty
which no true man will give up but with his life.” This
estimate of royalty was natural among men accustomed to see
those whom they most respected in constant strife with their
rulers. Gregory VII had begun the disparagement of civil
authorities, by saying that they are the work of the devil;
and already in his time both parties were driven to acknowledge
the sovereignty of the people, and appealed to it as the
immediate source of power.
Two centuries
later this political theory had gained both in definiteness
and force among the Guelphs, who were the
Church party, and among the Ghibellines, or Imperialists.
Here are the sentiments of the most celebrated of all the
Guelphic writers:—“A King who is unfaithful to
his duty forfeits his claim to obedience. It is not rebellion
to depose him, for he is himself a rebel whom the nation
has a right to put down. But it is better to abridge his
power, that he may be unable to abuse it. For this purpose,
the whole nation ought to have a share in governing itself;
the constitution ought to combine a limited and elective
monarchy, with an aristocracy of merit, and such an admixture
of democracy as shall admit all classes to office, by popular
election. No government has a right to levy taxes beyond
the limit determined by the people. All political authority
is derived from popular suffrage, and all laws must be made
by the people or their representatives. There is no security
for us as long as we depend on the will of another man.” This
language, which contains the earliest exposition of the Whig
theory of the revolution, is taken from the works of St.
Thomas Aquinas, of whom Lord Bacon says that he had the largest
heart of the school divines. And it is worth while to observe
that he wrote at the very moment when Simon de Montfort summoned
the Commons; and that the politics of the Neapolitan friar
are centuries in advance of the English statesman’s.
The ablest writer
of the Ghibelline party was Marsilius of Padua. “Laws,” he said, “derive their
authority from the nation, and are invalid without its assent.
As the whole is greater than any part, it is wrong that any
part should legislate for the whole; and as men are equal,
it is wrong that one should be bound by laws made by another.
But in obeying laws to which all men have agreed, all men,
in reality, govern themselves. The Monarch, who is instituted
by the legislature, to execute its will, ought to be armed
with a force sufficient to coerce individuals, but not sufficient
to control the majority of the people. He is responsible
to the nation, and subject to the law; and the nation that
appoints him, and assigns him his duties, has to see that
he obeys the constitution, and has to dismiss him if he breaks
it. The rights of citizens are independent of the faith they
profess; and no man may be punished for his religion.” This
writer, who saw in some respects farther than Locke or Montesquieu,
who, in regard to the sovereignty of the nation, representative
government, the superiority of the legislature over the executive,
and the liberty of conscience, had so firm a grasp of the
principles that were to sway the modern world, lived in the
reign of Edward II, 550 years ago.
It is significant that these two writers should agree on
so many of the fundamental points which have been, ever since,
the topic of controversy; for they belonged to hostile schools,
and one of them would have thought the other worthy of death.
St. Thomas would have made the papacy control all Christian
governments. Marsilius would have had the clergy submit to
the law of the land; and would have put them under restrictions
both as to property and numbers. As the great debate went
on, many things gradually made themselves clear, and grew
into settled convictions. For these were not only the thoughts
of prophetic minds that surpassed the level of contemporaries:
there was some prospect that they would master the practical
world. The ancient reign of the barons was seriously threatened.
The opening of the East by the Crusades had imparted a great
stimulus to industry. A stream set in from the country to
the towns; and there was no room for the government of towns
in the feudal machinery. When men found a way of earning
a livelihood without depending for it on the good will of
the class that owned the land, the landowner lost much of
his importance, and it began to pass to the possessors of
moveable wealth. The townspeople not only made themselves
free from the control of prelates and barons, but endeavoured
to obtain for their own class and interest the command of
the state.
The fourteenth century was filled with the tumult of this
struggle between democracy and chivalry. The Italian towns,
foremost in intelligence and civilization, led the way with
democratic constitutions of an ideal and generally impracticable
type. The Swiss cast off the yoke of Austria. Two long chains
of free cities arose, along the valley of the Rhine, and
across the heart of Germany. The citizens of Paris got possession
of the King, reformed the state, and began their tremendous
career of experiments to govern France. But the most healthy
and vigorous growth of municipal liberties was in Belgium,
of all countries on the continent, that which has been, from
immemorial ages the most stubborn in its fidelity to the
principle of self government. So vast were the resources
concentrated in the Flemish towns, so wide spread was the
movement of democracy, that it was long doubtful whether
the new interest would not prevail, and whether the ascendency
of the military aristocracy would not pass over to the wealth
and intelligence of the men that lived by trade. But Rienzi,
Marcel, Artevelde, and the other champions of the unripe
democracy of those days, lived and died in vain. The upheaval
of the middle class had disclosed the need, the passions,
the aspirations of the suffering poor below; ferocious insurrections
in France and England caused a reaction that retarded for
centuries the readjustment of power, and the red spectre
of social revolution arose in the track of democracy. The
armed citizens of Ghent were crushed by the French chivalry;
and monarchy alone reaped the fruit of the change that was
going on in the position of classes, and stirred the minds
of men.
Looking back
over the space of 1,000 years, which we call the Middle
Ages to get an estimate of the work they had done,
if not towards perfection in their institutions, at least
towards attaining the knowledge of political truth, this
is what we find:—Representative government, which was
unknown to the ancients, was almost universal. The methods
of election were crude; but the principle that no tax was
lawful that was not granted by the class that paid it; that
is, that taxation was inseparable from representation, was
recognized, not as the privilege of certain countries, but
as the right of all. Not a prince in the world, said Philip
de Commines, can levy a penny without the consent of the
people. Slavery was almost everywhere extinct; and absolute
power was deemed more intolerable and more criminal than
slavery. The right of insurrection was not only admitted
but defined, as a duty sanctified by religion. Even the principles
of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the method of the Income Tax,
were already known. The issue of ancient politics was an
absolute state planted on slavery. The political produce
of the middle ages was a system of states in which authority
was restricted by the representation of powerful classes,
by privileged associations, and by the acknowledgment of
duties superior to those which are imposed by man.
As regards the realization in practice of what was seen
to be good, there was almost everything to do. But the great
problems of principle had been solved; and we come to the
question: How did the sixteenth century husband the treasure
which the Middle Ages had stored up? The most visible sign
of the times was the decline of the religious influence that
had reigned so long. Sixty years passed after the invention
of printing, and 30,000 books had issued from European presses,
before anybody undertook to print the Greek Testament. In
the days when every state made the unity of faith its first
care, it came to be thought that the rights of men, and the
duties of neighbours and of rulers towards them varied according
to their religion; and society did not acknowledge the same
obligations to a Turk or a Jew, a pagan or a heretic, or
a devil worshipper, as to an orthodox Christian. As the ascendency
of religion grew weaker, this privilege of treating its enemies
on exceptional principles was claimed by the state for its
own benefit; and the idea that the ends of government justify
the means employed, was worked into system by Machiavelli.
He was an acute politician, sincerely anxious that the obstacles
to the intelligent government of Italy should be swept away.
It appeared to him that the most vexatious obstacle to intellect
is conscience, and that the vigorous use of statecraft necessary
for the success of difficult schemes would never be made
if governments allowed themselves to be hampered by the precepts
of the copy-book.
His audacious
doctrine was avowed in the succeeding age, by men whose
personal character otherwise stood high. They
saw that in critical times good men have seldom strength
for their goodness, and yield to those who have grasped the
meaning of the maxim that you cannot make an omelette if
you are afraid to break the eggs. They saw that public morality
differs from private, because no government can turn the
other cheek, or can admit that mercy is better than justice.
And they could not define the difference, or draw the limits
of exception; or tell what other standard for a nation’s
acts there is than the judgment which heaven pronounces in
this world by success.
Machiavelli’s
teaching would hardly have stood the test of parliamentary
government, for public discussion demands
at least the profession of good faith. But it gave an immense
impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very
religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much
alike. Charles V offered 5,000 crowns for the murder of an
enemy. Ferdinand I and Ferdinand II, Henry III and Lewis
XIII, each caused his most powerful subject to be treacherously
despatched. Elizabeth and Mary Stuart tried to do the same
to each other. The way was paved for absolute monarchy to
triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age,
not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy
of crime, and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense
that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed
the morality of paganism.
The clergy who had in so many ways served the cause of freedom
during the prolonged strife against feudalism and slavery,
were associated now with the interest of royalty. Attempts
had been made to reform the Church on the Constitutional
model, they had failed; but they had united the hierarchy
and the crown against the system of divided power as against
a common enemy. Strong kings were able to bring the spirituality
under subjection in France and Spain, in Sicily and in England.
The absolute monarchy of France was built up in the two following
centuries by twelve political cardinals. The Kings of Spain
obtained the same effect almost at a single stroke, by reviving
and appropriating to their own use the tribunal of the Inquisition,
which had been growing obsolete, but now served to arm them
with terrors which effectually made them despotic. One generation
beheld the change all over Europe, from the anarchy of the
days of the Roses to the passionate submission, the gratified
acquiescence in tyranny that marks the reign of Henry VIII
and the kings of his time.
The tide was
running fast when the Reformation began at Wittenberg,
and it was to be expected that Luther’s
influence would stem the flood of absolutism. For he was
confronted everywhere by the compact alliance of the Church
with the State; and great part of his country was governed
by hostile potentates who were prelates of the court of Rome.
He had, indeed, more to fear from temporal than from spiritual
foes. The leading German bishops wished that the Protestant
demands should be conceded; and the Pope himself vainly urged
on the Emperor a conciliatory policy. But Charles V had outlawed
Luther, and attempted to waylay him; and the dukes of Bavaria
were active in beheading and burning his disciples; whilst
the democracy of the towns generally took his side. But the
dread of revolution was the deepest of his political sentiments;
and the gloss by which the Guelphic divines had got over
the passive obedience of the apostolic age, was characteristic
of that mediaeval method of interpretation which he rejected.
He swerved for a moment in his later years; but the substance
of his political teaching was eminently conservative; the
Lutheran states became the stronghold of rigid immobility;
and Lutheran writers constantly condemned the democratic
literature that arose in the second age of the Reformation.
For the Swiss Reformers were bolder than the Germans in mixing
up their cause with politics. Zurich and Geneva were republics,
and the spirit of their governments influenced both Zwingli
and Calvin.
Zwingli indeed did not shrink from the mediaeval doctrine
that evil magistrates must be cashiered; but he was killed
too early to act either deeply or permanently on the political
character of Protestantism. Calvin, although a republican,
judged that the people are unfit to govern themselves, and
declared the popular assembly an abuse that ought to be abolished.
He desired an aristocracy of the elect, armed with the means
of punishing not only crime but vice and error. For he thought
that the severity of the mediaeval laws was insufficient
for the need of the times; and he favoured the most irresistible
weapon which the inquisitorial procedure put into the hand
of the government, the right of subjecting prisoners to intolerable
torture, not because they were guilty, but because their
guilt could not be proved. His teaching, though not calculated
to promote popular institutions, was so adverse to the authority
of the surrounding monarchs, that he softened down the expression
of his political views in the French edition of his Institutes.
The direct political influence of the Reformation effected
less than has been supposed. Most states were strong enough
to control it. Some, by intense exertion, shut out the pouring
flood. Others, with consummate skill, diverted it to their
own uses. The Polish government alone at that time, left
it to its course. Scotland was the only kingdom in which
the Reformation triumphed over the resistance of the state;
and Ireland was the only instance where it failed, in spite
of government support. But in almost every other case, both
the princes that spread their canvas to the gale, and those
that faced it, employed the zeal, the alarm, the passions
it aroused as instruments for the increase of power. Nations
eagerly invested their rulers with every prerogative needed
to preserve their faith, and all the care to keep Church
and State asunder, and to prevent the confusion of their
powers, which had been the work of ages, was renounced in
the intensity of the crisis. Atrocious deeds were done, in
which religious passion was often the instrument, but policy
was the motive.
Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses
were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were
commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.
When the King of France undertook to kill all the Protestants,
he was obliged to do it by his own agents. It was nowhere
the spontaneous act of the population; and in many towns,
and in entire provinces, the magistrates refused to obey.
The motive of the court was so far from mere fanaticism that
the Queen immediately challenged Elizabeth to do the like
to the English Catholics. Francis I and Henry II sent nearly
a hundred Huguenots to the stake; but they were cordial and
assiduous promoters of the Protestant religion in Germany.
Sir Nicholas Bacon was one of the ministers who suppressed
the mass in England. Yet when the Huguenot refugees came
over he liked them so little that he reminded Parliament
of the summary way in which Henry V at Agincourt dealt with
the Frenchmen who fell into his hands. John Knox thought
that every Catholic in Scotland ought to be put to death;
and no man ever had disciples of a sterner or more relentless
temper. But his counsel was not followed.
All through the religious conflict, policy kept the upper
hand. When the last of the Reformers died, religion, instead
of emancipating the nations, had become an excuse for the
criminal art of despots. Calvin preached, and Bellarmine
lectured; but Machiavelli reigned. Before the close of the
century three events occurred which mark the beginning of
a momentous change. The massacre of St. Bartholomew convinced
the bulk of Calvinists of the lawfulness of rebellion against
tyrants, and they became advocates of that doctrine in which
the Bishop of Winchester had led the way, and which Knox
and Buchanan had received, through their master at Paris,
straight from the mediaeval schools. Adopted out of aversion
to the King of France, it was soon put in practice against
the King of Spain. The revolted Netherlands, by a solemn
act, deposed Philip II, and made themselves independent under
the Prince of Orange, who had been, and continued to be styled,
his Lieutenant. Their example was important, not only because
subjects of one religion deposed a monarch of another, for
that had been seen in Scotland, but because moreover it put
a republic in the place of a monarchy, and forced the public
law of Europe to recognise the accomplished revolution. At
the same time, the French Catholics, rising against Henry
III, who was the most contemptible of tyrants, and against
his heir, Henry of Navarre, who, as a Protestant, repelled
the majority of the nation, fought for the same principles
with sword and pen.
Many shelves
might be filled with the books which came out in their
defence during half a century; and they include
the most comprehensive treatises on laws ever written. Nearly
all are vitiated by the defect which disfigured political
literature in the Middle Ages. That literature, as I have
tried to show, is extremely remarkable, and its services
in aiding human progress are very great. But from the death
of St. Bernard until the appearance of Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia,” there
was hardly a writer who did not make his politics subservient
to the interest of either Pope or King. And those who came
after the Reformation were always thinking of laws as they
might affect Catholics or Protestants. Knox thundered against
what he called the “Monstrous Regiment of Women,” because
the Queen went to Mass; and Mariana praised the assassin
of Henry III because the king was in league with Huguenots.
For the belief that it is right to murder tyrants, first
taught among Christians, I believe, by John of Salisbury,
the most distinguished English writer of the twelfth century,
and confirmed by Roger Bacon, the most celebrated Englishman
of the thirteenth, had acquired about this time a fatal significance.
Nobody sincerely thought of politics as a law for the just
and the unjust, or tried to find out a set of principles
that should hold good alike under all changes of religion.
Hooker’s “Ecclesiastical Polity”stands
almost alone among the works I am speaking of, and is still
read with admiration by every thoughtful man, as the earliest
and one of the finest prose classics in our language. But
though few of the others have survived, they contributed
to hand down masculine notions of limited authority and conditional
obedience from the epoch of theory to generations of free
men. Even the coarse violence of Buchanan and Boucher was
a link in the chain of tradition that connects the Hildebrandine
controversy with the Long Parliament, and St. Thomas with
Edmund Burke.
That men should understand that governments do not exist
by divine right, and that arbitrary government is the violation
of divine right, was no doubt the medicine suited to the
malady under which Europe languished. But although the knowledge
of this truth might become an element of salutary destruction,
it could give little aid to progress and reform. Resistance
to tyranny implied no faculty of constructing a legal government
in its place. Tyburn tree may be a useful thing; but it is
better still that the offender should live for repentance
and reformation. The principles which discriminate in politics
between good and evil, and make states worthy to last, were
not yet found.
The French philosopher Charron was one of the men least
demoralised by party spirit, and least blinded by zeal for
a cause. In a passage almost literally taken from St. Thomas,
he describes our subordination under the law of nature, to
which all legislation must conform; and he ascertains it
not by the light of revealed religion, but by the voice of
universal reason, through which God enlightens the consciences
of men. Upon this foundation Grotius drew the lines of real
political science. In gathering the materials of International
law, he had to go beyond national treaties and denominational
interests, for a principle embracing all mankind. The principles
of law must stand, he said, even if we suppose that there
is no God. By these inaccurate terms he meant that they must
be found independently of Revelation. From that time it became
possible to make politics a matter of principle and of conscience,
so that men and nations differing in all other things could
live in peace together, under the sanctions of a common law.
Grotius himself used his discovery to little purpose, as
he deprived it of immediate effect by admitting that the
right to reign may be enjoyed as a freehold, subject to no
conditions.
When Cumberland and Pufendorf unfolded the true significance
of his doctrine, every settled authority, every triumphant
interest recoiled aghast. None were willing to surrender
advantages won by force or skill, because they might be in
contradiction, not with the Ten Commandments, but with an
unknown code, which Grotius himself had not attempted to
draw up, and touching which no two philosophers agreed. It
was manifest that all persons who had learned that political
science is an affair of conscience rather than of might or
expediency, must regard their adversaries as men without
principle, that the controversy between them would perpetually
involve morality, and could not be governed by the plea of
good intentions which softens down the asperities of religious
strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth century
repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas
of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which
every state and every interest must stand or fall, and that
society is knit together by a series of real and hypothetical
contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced
the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible
and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies
and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals,
the baron and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side.
Year after year, the assemblies that represented the self
government of provinces and of privileged classes, all over
the Continent, met for the last time and passed away, to
the satisfaction of the people, who had learned to venerate
the throne as the constructor of their unity, the promoter
of prosperity and power, the defender of orthodoxy and the
employer of talent.
The Bourbons, who had snatched the crown from a rebellious
democracy, the Stuarts, who had come in as usurpers, set
up the doctrine that states are formed by the valour, the
policy and the appropriate marriages of the royal family;
that the king is consequently anterior to the people, that
he is its maker rather than its handiwork, and reigns independently
of consent. Theology followed up divine right with passive
obedience. In the golden age of religious science, Archbishop
Ussher, the most learned of Anglican prelates, and Bossuet,
the ablest of the French, declared that resistance to kings
is a crime, and that they may lawfully employ compulsion
against the faith of their subjects. The philosophers heartily
supported the divines. Bacon fixed his hopes of all human
progress on the strong hand of kings. Descartes advised them
to crush all those who might be able to resist their power.
Hobbes taught that authority is always in the right. Pascal
considered it absurd to reform laws, or to set up an ideal
justice against actual force. Even Spinoza, who was a republican
and a Jew, assigned to the state the absolute control of
religion.
Monarchy exerted
a charm over the imagination, so unlike the unceremonious
spirit of the Middle Ages that, on learning
the execution of Charles I, men died of the shock; and the
same thing occurred at the death of Lewis XVI and of the
Duke of Enghien. The classic land of absolute monarchy was
France. Richelieu held that it would be impossible to keep
the people down if they were suffered to be well off. The
Chancellor affirmed that France could not be governed without
the right of arbitrary arrest and exile; and that in case
of danger to the state it may be well that 100 innocent men
should perish. The Minister of Finance called it sedition
to demand that the crown should keep faith. One who lived
on intimate terms with Lewis XIV says that even the slightest
disobedience to the royal will is a crime to be punished
with death. Lewis employed these precepts to their fullest
extent. He candidly avows that kings are no more bound by
the terms of a treaty than by the words of a compliment;
and that there is nothing in the possession of their subjects
which they may not lawfully take from them. In obedience
to this principle, when Marshal Vauban, appalled by the misery
of the people, proposed that all existing imposts should
be repealed, for a single tax, that would be less onerous,
the King took his advice, but retained all the old taxes,
whilst he imposed the new. With half the present population,
he maintained an army of 450,000 men; nearly twice as large
as that which the late Emperor Napoleon assembled to attack
Germany. Meanwhile the people starved on grass. France, said
Fénelon, is one enormous hospital. French historians
believe that in a single generation six millions of people
died of want. It would be easy to find tyrants more violent,
more malignant, more odious than Lewis XIV; but there was
not one who ever used his power to inflict greater suffering
or greater wrong; and the admiration with which he inspired
the most illustrious men of his time denotes the lowest depth
to which the turpitude of absolutism has ever degraded the
conscience of Europe.
The Republics
of that day were, for the most part, so governed as to
reconcile men with the less opprobrious vices of Monarchy.
Poland was a state made up of centrifugal forces. What the
nobles called liberty was the right of each of them to veto
the acts of the Diet, and to persecute the peasants on his
estates—rights which they refused to surrender up to
the time of the partition, and thus verified the warning
of a preacher spoken long ago: “You will perish, not
by invasion or war, but by your infernal liberties.” Venice
suffered from the opposite evil of excessive concentration.
It was the most sagacious of governments, and would rarely
have made mistakes if it had not imputed to others motives
as wise as its own, and had taken account of passions and
follies of which it had little cognizance. But the supreme
power of the nobility had passed to a committee, from the
committee to a Council of Ten, from the Ten to three Inquisitors
of State; and in this intensely centralized form it became,
about the year 1600, a frightful despotism. I have shown
you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for
the consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy
of Venice required the same assurance against the revolt
of conscience. It was provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli,
who analyzed the wants and resources of aristocracy, and
made known that its best security is poison. As late as a
century ago, Venetian senators of honourable and even religious
lives employed assassins for the public good with no more
compunction than Philip II or Charles IX.
The Swiss Cantons, especially Geneva, profoundly influenced
opinion in the days preceding the French Revolution, but
they had had no part in the earlier movement to inaugurate
the reign of law. That honour belongs to the Netherlands
alone among the Commonwealths. They earned it, not by their
form of government which was defective and precarious, for
the Orange party perpetually plotted against it, and slew
the two most eminent of the Republican statesmen, and William
III himself intrigued for English aid to set the crown upon
his head; but by the freedom of the press, which made Holland
the vantage ground from which, in the darkest hour of oppression,
the victims of the oppressors obtained the ear of Europe.
The ordinance of Lewis XIV that every French Protestant
should immediately renounce his religion went out in the
year in which James II became king. The Protestant refugees
did what their ancestors had done a century before. They
asserted the deposing power of subjects over rulers who had
broken the original contract between them; and all the powers,
excepting France, countenanced their argument, and sent forth
William of Orange on that expedition which was the faint
dawn of a brighter day.
It is to this
unexampled combination of things on the Continent, more
than to her own energy, that England owes her deliverance.
The efforts made by the Scots, by the Irish, and at last
by the Long Parliament to get rid of the misrule of the Stuarts
had been foiled, not by the resistance of Monarchy, but by
the helplessness of the Republic. State and Church were swept
away; new institutions were raised up under the ablest ruler
that had ever sprung from a revolution; and England, seething
with the toil of political thought, had produced at least
two writers who in many directions saw as far and as clearly
as we do now. But Cromwell’s constitution was rolled
up like a scroll; Harrington and Lilburne were laughed at
for a time and forgotten, the country confessed the failure
of its striving, disavowed its aims, and flung itself with
enthusiasm, and without any effective stipulations, at the
feet of a worthless king.
If the people of England had accomplished no more than this,
to relieve mankind from the pervading pressure of unlimited
monarchy, they would have done more harm than good. By the
fanatical treachery with which, violating the parliament
and the law, they contrived the death of King Charles, by
the ribaldry of the Latin pamphlet with which Milton justified
the act before the world, by persuading Europe that the Republicans
were hostile alike to liberty and to authority, and did not
believe in themselves, they gave strength and reason to the
current of Royalism which at the Restoration, overwhelmed
their work. If there had been nothing to make up for this
defect of certainty and of constancy in politics England
would have gone the way of other nations.
At that time
there was some truth in the old joke which describes the
English dislike of speculation by saying that
all our philosophy consists of a short catechism in two questions: “What
is mind? No matter.—What is matter? Never mind.” The
only accepted appeal was to tradition. Patriots were in the
habit of saying that they took their stand upon the ancient
ways, and would not have the laws of England changed. To
enforce their argument they invented a story that the constitution
had come from Troy, and that the Romans had allowed it to
subsist untouched. Such fables did not avail against Strafford;
and the oracle of precedent sometimes gave responses adverse
to the popular cause. In the sovereign question of Religion
this was decisive; for the practice of the sixteenth century,
as well as of the fifteenth, testified in favour of intolerance.
By royal command, the nation had passed four times in one
generation from one faith to another, with a facility that
made a fatal impression on Laud. In a country that had proscribed
every religion in turn, and had submitted to such a variety
of penal measures against Lollard and Arian, against Augsburg
and Rome, it seemed there could be no danger in cropping
the ears of a Puritan.
But an age of stronger conviction had arrived; and men resolved
to abandon the ancient ways that led to the scaffold and
the rack, and to make the wisdom of their ancestors and the
statutes of the land bow before an unwritten law. Religious
liberty had been the dream of great Christian writers in
the age of Constantine and Valentinian, a dream never wholly
realised in the empire, and rudely dispelled when the barbarians
found that it exceeded the resources of their art to govern
civilized populations of another religion, and unity of worship
was imposed by laws of blood and by theories more cruel than
the laws. But from St. Athanasius and St. Ambrose down to
Erasmus and More, each age heard the protest of earnest men
in behalf of the liberty of conscience, and the peaceful
days before the Reformation were full of promise that it
would prevail.
In the commotion that followed, men were glad to get tolerated
themselves by way of privilege and compromise, and willingly
renounced the wider application of the principle. Socinus
was the first who, on the ground that Church and State ought
to be separated, required universal toleration. But Socinus
disarmed his own theory, for he was a strict advocate of
passive obedience.
The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle
of civil, and that civil liberty is the necessary condition
of religious, was a discovery reserved for the seventeenth
century. Many years before the names of Milton and Taylor,
of Baxter and Locke were made illustrious by their partial
condemnation of intolerance, there were men among the Independent
congregations who grasped with vigour and sincerity the principle
that it is only by abridging the authority of states that
the liberty of churches can be assured. That great political
idea, sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching
men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and
to defend them for the love of justice and charity, more
than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great
and good in the progress of the last two hundred years. The
cause of religion, even under the unregenerate influence
of worldly passion, had as much to do as any clear notions
of policy in making this country the foremost of the free.
It had been the deepest current in the movement of 1641,
and it remained the strongest motive that survived the reaction
of 1660.
The greatest writers of the Whig party, Burke and Macaulay,
constantly represented the statesmen of the Revolution as
the legitimate ancestors of modern liberty. It is humiliating
to trace a political lineage to Algernon Sidney, who was
the paid agent of the French king; to Lord Russell, who opposed
religious toleration at least as much as absolute monarchy;
to Shaftesbury, who dipped his hands in the innocent blood
shed by the perjury of Titus Oates; to Halifax, who insisted
that the plot must be supported even if untrue; to Marlborough,
who sent his comrades to perish on an expedition which he
had betrayed to the French; to Locke, whose notion of liberty
involves nothing more spiritual than the security of property,
and is consistent with slavery and persecution; or even to
Addison, who conceived that the right of voting taxes belonged
to no country but his own. Defoe affirms that from the time
of Charles II to that of George I he never knew a politician
who truly held the faith of either party; and the perversity
of the statesmen who led the assault against the later Stuarts,
threw back the cause of progress for a century.
When the purport of the secret treaty became suspected,
by which Lewis XIV pledged himself to support Charles II
with an army for the destruction of parliament, if Charles
would overthrow the Anglican Church, it was found necessary
to make concession to the popular alarm. It was proposed
that whenever James should succeed, great part of the royal
prerogative and patronage should be transferred to parliament.
At the same time, the disabilities of Nonconformists and
Catholics would have been removed. If the Limitation Bill,
which Halifax supported with signal ability, had passed,
the Monarchical constitution would have advanced, in the
seventeenth century, farther than it was destined to do until
the second quarter of the nineteenth. But the enemies of
James, guided by the Prince of Orange, preferred a Protestant
king who should be nearly absolute, to a constitutional king
who should be a Catholic. The scheme failed. James succeeded
to a power which, in more cautious hands, would have been
practically uncontrolled; and the storm that cast him down
gathered beyond the sea.
By arresting the preponderance of France, the Revolution
of 1688 struck the first real blow at Continental despotism.
At home it relieved Dissent, purified justice, developed
the national energies and resources, and ultimately, by the
Act of Settlement, placed the crown in the gift of the people.
But it neither introduced nor determined any important principle,
and, that both parties might be able to work together, it
left untouched the fundamental question between Whig and
Tory. For the divine right of kings it established, in the
words of Defoe, the divine right of freeholders; and their
domination extended for seventy years, under the authority
of John Locke, the philosopher of government by the gentry.
Even Hume did not enlarge the bounds of his ideas; and his
narrow materialistic belief in the connection between liberty
and property captivated even the bolder mind of Fox.
By his idea that
the powers of government ought to be divided according
to their nature, and not according to the division
of classes, which Montesquieu took up and developed with
consummate talent, Locke is the originator of the long reign
of English institutions in foreign lands. And his doctrine
of resistance, or, as he finally termed it, the appeal to
heaven, ruled the judgment of Chatham at a moment of solemn
transition in the history of the world. Our parliamentary
system, managed by the great revolution families, was a contrivance
by which electors were compelled, and legislators were induced,
to vote against their convictions; and the intimidation of
the constituencies was rewarded by the corruption of their
representatives. About the year 1770 things had been brought
back, by indirect ways, nearly to the condition which the
Revolution had been designed to remedy for ever. Europe seemed
incapable of becoming the home of free states. It was from
America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their
own business, and that the nation is responsible to heaven
for the acts of the state, ideas long locked in the breast
of solitary thinkers, and hidden away in Latin folios, burst
forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined
to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man. Whether
the British legislature had a constitutional right to tax
a subject colony was hard to say, by the letter of the law.
The general presumption was immense on the side of authority;
and the world believed that the will of the constituted ruler
ought to be supreme, and not the will of the subject people.
Very few bold writers went as far as to say that lawful power
may be resisted in cases of extreme necessity. But the colonizers
of America, who had gone forth not in search of gain, but
to escape from laws under which other Englishmen were content
to live, were so sensitive even to appearances that the Blue
Laws of Connecticut forbade men to walk to church within
ten feet of their wives. And the proposed tax, of only £12,000
a year, might have been easily borne. But the reasons why
Edward I and his Council were not allowed to tax England,
were reasons why George III and his Parliament should not
tax America. The dispute involved a principle, namely, the
right of controlling government. Furthermore, it involved
the conclusion that the parliament brought together by a
derisive election, had no just right over the unrepresented
nation; and it called on the people of England to take back
its power. Our best statesmen saw that whatever might be
the law, the rights of the nation were at stake. Chatham,
in speeches better remembered than any that have been delivered
in parliament, exhorted America to be firm. Lord Camden,
the late Chancellor, said: “Taxation and representation
are inseparably united. God hath joined them. No British
parliament can separate them.”
From the elements
of that crisis Burke built up the noblest political philosophy
in the world. “I do not know the
method,” said he, “of drawing up an indictment
against a whole people.—The natural rights of mankind
are indeed sacred things, and if any public measure is proved
mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal
to that measure, even if no charter at all could be set up
against it.—Only a sovereign reason, paramount to all
forms of legislation and administration, should dictate.” In
this way, just a hundred years ago, the opportune reticence,
the politic hesitancy of European statesmanship, was at last
broken down; and the principle gained ground, that a nation
can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control.
The Americans placed it at the foundation of their new government.
They did more: for having subjected all civil authorities
to the popular will, they surrounded the popular will with
restrictions that the British legislature would not endure.
During the revolution in France the example of England which
had been held up so long, could not for a moment compete
with the influence of a country whose institutions were so
wisely framed to protect freedom even against the perils
of democracy. When Louis Philippe became King, he assured
the old Republican, Lafayette, that what he had seen in the
United States had convinced him that no government can be
so good as a Republic. There was a time in the presidency
of Monroe, about 55 years ago, which men still speak of as
the era of good feeling, when most of the incongruities that
had come down from the Stuarts had been reformed, and the
motives of later divisions were yet inactive. The causes
of old world trouble, popular ignorance, pauperism, the glaring
contrast between rich and poor, religious strife, public
debts, standing armies and war, were almost unknown. No other
age or country had solved so successfully the problems that
attend the growth of free societies, and time was to bring
no further progress.
But I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come
to the beginning of my task. In the ages of which I have
spoken, the history of freedom was the history of the thing
that was not. But since the Declaration of Independence,
or, to speak more justly, since the Spaniards, deprived of
their king, made a new government for themselves, the only
known forms of Liberty, Republics and Constitutional Monarchy,
have made their way over the world. It would have been interesting
to trace the reaction of America on the Monarchies that achieved
its independence; to see how the sudden rise of political
economy suggested the idea of applying the methods of science
to the art of government; how Lewis XVI, after confessing
that despotism was useless, even to make men happy by compulsion,
appealed to the nation to do what was beyond his skill, and
thereby resigned his sceptre to the middle class, and the
intelligent men of France, shuddering at the awful recollections
of their own experience, struggled to shut out the past,
that they might deliver their children from the prince of
this world, and rescue the living from the clutch of the
dead; until the finest opportunity ever given to the world
was thrown away, because the passion for equality made vain
the hope of freedom.
And I should
have wished to show you that the same deliberate rejection
of the moral code which smoothed the paths of absolute
monarchy and of oligarchy, signalised the advent of the democratic
claim to unlimited power,—that one of its leading champions
avowed the design of corrupting the moral sense of men, in
order to destroy the influence of religion, and a famous
apostle of enlightenment and toleration, wished that the
last king might be strangled with the entrails of the last
priest. I would have tried to explain the connection between
the doctrine of Adam Smith, that labour is the original source
of all wealth and the conclusion that the producers of wealth
virtually compose the nation, by which Sieyes subverted historic
France; and to show that Rousseau’s definition of the
social compact as a voluntary association of equal partners
conducted Marat, by short and unavoidable stages, to declare
that the poorer classes were absolved, by the law of selfpreservation
from the conditions of a contract which awarded to them misery
and death; that they were at war with society, and had a
right to all they could get by exterminating the rich; and
that their inflexible theory of equality, the chief legacy
of the Revolution, together with the avowed inadequacy of
economic science to grapple with the problems of the Poor
revived the idea of renovating society on the principle of
selfsacrifice, which had been the generous aspiration of
the Essenes and the early Christians, of Fathers, and Canonists,
and Friars, of Erasmus the most celebrated precursor of the
Reformation, of Sir Thomas More, its most illustrious victim,
and of Fenelon, the most popular of bishops, but which, during
the forty years of its revival has been associated with envy
and hatred, and bloodshed, and is now the most dangerous
enemy lurking in our path.
Last, and most of all, having told so much of the unwisdom
of our ancestors, having exposed the sterility of the convulsion
that burned what they adored, and made the sins of the Republic
mount up as high as those of the monarchy, having shown that
Legitimacy, which repudiated the Revolution, and Imperialism,
which crowned it, were but disguises of the same clement
of violence and wrong, I should have wished, in order that
my address might not break off without a meaning or a moral,
to relate by whom, and in what connection the true law of
the formation of free states was recognised, and how that
discovery, closely akin to those which, under the names of
development, evolution, and continuity have given a new and
deeper method to other sciences, solved the ancient problem
between stability and change, and determined the authority
of tradition on the progress of thought; how that theory,
which Sir James Mackintosh expressed by saying that Constitutions
are not made, but grow, the theory that custom and the national
qualities of the governed, and not the will of the government,
are the makers of the law, and therefore that the nation,
which is the source of its own organic institutions should
be charged with the perpetual custody of their integrity,
and with the duty of bringing the form into harmony with
the spirit, was made, by the singular co-operation of the
purest Conservative intellect with red-handed revolution,
of Niebuhr with Mazzini, to yield the idea of Nationality,
which, far more than the idea of Liberality, has governed
the movement of the present age.
I do not like to conclude without inviting attention to
the impressive fact that so much of the hard fighting, the
thinking, the enduring that has contributed to the deliverance
of man from the power of man, has been the work of our countrymen,
and of their descendants in other lands. We have had to contend,
as much as any people, against monarchs of strong will and
of resources secured by their foreign possession, against
men of rare capacity, against whole dynasties of born tyrants.
And yet that proud prerogative stands out on the background
of our history. Within a generation of the Conquest, the
Normans were compelled to recognise, in some grudging measure,
the claims of the English people. When the struggle between
Church and State extended to England, our Churchmen learned
to associate themselves with the popular cause; and, with
few exceptions, neither the hierarchical spirit of the foreign
divines, nor the monarchical bias peculiar to the French,
characterized the writers of the English school. The Civil
Law, transmitted from the degenerate Empire to be the common
prop of absolute power, was excluded from England. The Canon
Law was restrained; and this country never admitted the Inquisition,
nor fully accepted the use of torture, which invested Continental
royalty with so many terrors. At the end of the Middle Ages
foreign writers acknowledged our superiority, and pointed
to these causes. After that, our gentry maintained the means
of local self government such as no other country possessed.
Divisions in religion forced toleration. The confusion of
the common law taught the people that their best safeguard
was the independence and the integrity of the judges.
All these explanations
lie on the surface, and are as visible as the protecting
ocean; but they can only be successive
effects of a constant cause which must lie in the same native
qualities of perseverance, moderation, individuality, and
the manly sense of duty, which give to the English race its
supremacy in the stern art of labour, which has enabled it
to thrive as no other can on inhospitable shores, and which,
although no great people has less of the bloodthirsty craving
for glory, and an army of 50,000 English soldiers has never
been seen in battle, caused Napoleon to exclaim, as he rode
away from Waterloo: “It has always been the same since
Crecy.”
Therefore, if
there is reason for pride in the past, there is more for
hope in the time to come. Our advantages increase,
while other nations fear their neighbours, or covet their
neighbours’ goods. Anomalies and defects there are,
fewer and less intolerable, if not less flagrant than of
old.
But I have fixed
my eyes on the spaces that heaven’s
light illuminates, that I may not lay too heavy a strain
on the indulgence with which you have accompanied me over
the dreary and heartbreaking course by which men have passed
to freedom; and because the light that has guided us is still
unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in
the van of free nations have not spent their power; because
the story of the future is written in the past, and that
which hath been is the same thing that shall be.