Volume 2 — CHAPTER XI THE STATE (B) STATE AND HISTORY

I

Within the world-as-history, in which we are so livingly woven that our perception and our reason constantly obey our feelings, the cosmic flowings appear as that which we call actuality, real life, being-streams in bodily form. Their common badge is Direction. But they can be grasped differently according as it is the movement or the thing moved that is looked at. The former aspect we call history and the latter family or stock or estate or people, but the one is only possible and existent through the other. History exists only as the history of something. If we are referring to the history of the great Cultures, then nation is the thing moved. State, status, means condition, and we obtain our impression of the State when, as a Being in moved Form flows past us, we fix in our eyes the Form as such, as something extended and timelessly standing fast, and entirely ignore direction and Destiny. State is history regarded as at the halt, history the State regarded as on the move. The State of actuality is the physiognomy of a historical unit of being; only the planned State of the theorist is a system.

A movement has form, and that which is moved is “in form,” or, to use another sporting expression, when it is “going all out” it is in perfect condition. This is equally true for a racehorse or a wrestler and for an army or a people. The form abstracted from the life-stream of a people is the “condition” of that people with respect to its wrestle in and with history. But only the smallest part of this can be got at and identified by means of the reason. No real constitution, when taken by itself and brought down to paper as a system, is complete. The unwritten, the indescribable, the usual, the felt, the self-evident, so outweigh everything else that—though theorists never see it—the description of a state or its constitutional archives cannot give us even the silhouette of that which underlies the living actuality of a state as its essential form; an existence-unit of history is spoilt when we seriously subject its movement to the constraint of a written constitution.

The individual class or family is the smallest, the nation the largest unit in the stream of history.⁠[626] Primitive peoples are subject to a movement that is not historical in the higher sense—the movement may be a jog-trot or may be a charge, but it has no organic character and no profound importance. Nevertheless, these primitive peoples are in motion through and through, to such an extent, indeed, as to seem perfectly formless to the hasty observer. Fellaheen, on the contrary, are the rigid objects of a movement that comes from outside and impinges on them unmeaningly and fortuitously. The former includes the “State” of the Mycenæan period; that of the Thinite period; that of the Shang dynasty in China up to, say, the migration to Yin (1400); the Frankish realm of Charlemagne; the Visigothic Kingdom to Eurich; and Petrine Russia—state-forms often ample and efficient, but still destitute of symbolism and necessity. To the latter belong the Roman, Chinese, and other Imperia, whose form has ceased to have any expressive content whatever.

But between primitive and fellah lies the history of the great Culture. A people in the style of a Culture—a historical people, that is—is called a Nation.⁠[627] A nation, as a living and battling thing, possesses a State not merely as a condition of movement, but also (above all) as an idea. The State in the simplest sense of the term may be as old as free-moving life itself. Swarms and herds of even very lowly animal genera may have “constitutions” of some sort—and those of the ants, of the bees, of many fish, or migrating birds, of beavers, have reached an astounding degree of perfection—but the State of the grand style is as old as and no older than its two prime Estates, nobility and priesthood. These emerge with the Culture, they vanish into it, their Destinies are to a high degree identical. Culture is the being of nations in State-form.

A people is as State, a kindred is as family, “in form”—that is, as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history, public and private life, res publica and res privata. And both, moreover, are symbols of care.⁠[628] The woman is world-history. By conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is “in form” as marriage. The man, however, makes history, which is an unending battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is the other grand emblem of the will-to-duration. A people “in condition” is originally a band warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man, it is Care for the preservation of the whole (including the spiritual self-preservation called honour and self-respect), the thwarting of attacks, the foreseeing of dangers, and, above all, the positive aggressiveness which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar.

If all life were one uniform being-stream, the words “people,” “state,” “war,” “policy,” “constitution,” would never have been heard of. But the eternal forceful variety of life, which the creative power of the Culture elevates to the highest intensities, is a fact, and historically we have no choice but to accept it as such, with all that flows therefrom. Plant-life is only plant-life in relation to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition one another. A people is only really such in relation to other peoples, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defence, hostility and war. War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.

A people shapes history inasmuch as it is “in condition” for the task of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history—which gets it into this “condition,” in which alone it becomes creative—and an outward history, which consists in this creation. Peoples as State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They are Destiny.

Res publica, the public life, the “sword side” of human being-currents, is in actuality invisible. The alien sees merely the men and not their inner connexion, for indeed this resides very deep in the stream of life, and even there is felt rather than understood. Similarly, we do not in actuality see the family, but only certain persons, whose cohesion in a perfectly definite sense we know and grasp by way of our own inward experience. But for each such mental picture there exists a group of constituent persons who are bound together as a life-unit by a like constitution of outer and inner being. This form in the flow of existence is called customary ethic (Sitte) when it arises of itself in the beat and march and is unconscious before it is conscious; and law (Recht) when it is deliberately stated and put forth for acceptance.

Law—irrespective of whether its authority derives from the feelings and impulse (unwritten law, customary law, English “equity”) or has been abstracted by reflection, probed, and brought into system as Statute Law (Gesetz)—is the willed form of Being. The jural facts that it embraces are of the two kinds, though both possess time-symbolism—Care in two modes, prevision and provision—but, from the very difference in the proportions of consciousness that they respectively contain, it follows that throughout real history there must be two laws in opposition—the law of the fathers, of tradition, the inherited, grown, and well-tried law, sacrosanct because immemorially old, derived from the experience of the blood and therefore dependable; and the thought and planned law of reason, nature, and broad humanity, the product of reflection and therefore first cousin to mathematics, a law that may not be very workable, but is at any rate “just.” It is in these two orders of law that the opposition between land-life and city-life, life-experience and study-experience, ripens till it bursts out in that revolutionary embitterment in which men take a law instead of being given it, and break a law that will not yield.

A law that has been laid down by a community expresses a duty for every member, but it is no proof of every member’s power. On the contrary, it is a question of Destiny, who makes the law and for whom it is made. There are subjects and there are objects in the making of laws, although everyone is an object as to the validity thereof—and this holds good without distinction for the inner law of families, guilds, estates, and states. But for the State, which is the highest law-subject existing in historical actuality, there is, besides, an external law that it imposes upon aliens by hostilities. Ordinary civil law is a case of the first kind, a peace treaty of the second. But in all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To “have the right” is an expression of power. This is a historical fact that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right, therefore, as in other things, being and waking-being, Destiny and Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic moral of good and evil belongs the moral distinction of right and wrong, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all philosophies—but the fact-world of history knows only the success which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power of the moment in order to remain righteous—then, certainly, his or its theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth, but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to another life-power that has better understood realities.

So long as a historical power is so superior to its constituent units—as the State or the estate so often is to families and calling-classes, or the head of the family to its children—a just law between the weaker is possible as a gift from the all-powerful hand of the disinterested. But Estates seldom, and states almost never, feel a power of this magnitude over themselves, and consequently between them the law of the stronger acts with immediate force—as is seen in a victor’s treaty, unilateral in terms and still more so in interpretation and observance. That is the difference between the internal and the external rights of historical life-units. In the first the will of an arbiter to be impartial and just can be effective—although we are apt to deceive ourselves badly as to the degree of effective impartiality even in the best codes of history, even in those which call themselves “civil” or “bürgerlich,” for the very adjective indicates that an estate has possessed the superior force to impose them on everyone.⁠[629] Internal laws are the result of strict logical-causal thought centring upon truths, but for that very reason their validity is ever dependent upon the material power of their author, be this Estate or State. A revolution that annihilates this power annihilates also these laws—they remain true, but they are no longer actual. External laws on the other hand, such as all peace treaties, are essentially never true and always actual—indeed appallingly so. They set up no pretension whatever of being just—it is quite enough that they are valid. Out of them speaks Life, which possesses no causal and moral logic, but is organically all the more consistent and consequent for the lack of it. Its will is to possess validity itself; it feels with an inward certainty what is required to that end and, seeing that, knows what is law for itself and has to be made law for others. This logic is seen in every family, and particularly in old true-born peasant families as soon as authority is shattered and someone other than the head tries to determine “what is.” It appears in every state, as soon as one party therein dominates the position. Every feudal age is filled with the contests between lords and vassals over the “right to rights.” In the Classical world this conflict ended almost everywhere with the unconditional victory of the First Estate, which deprived the kingship of its legislative powers and made it an object of its own law-making—as the origin and significance of the Archons in Athens and the Ephors in Sparta prove beyond doubt. But the same happened in the Western field too—for a moment in France (institution of the States-General, 1302), and for good in England, where in 1215 the Norman baronage and the higher clergy imposed Magna Charta and thus sowed the seed that was to ripen into the effective sovereignty of Parliament. Hence it was that the old Norman law of the Estates here remained permanently valid. In Germany, on the contrary, the weak Imperial power, hard-pressed by the claims of the great feudatories, called in the “Roman” law of Justinian (that is, the law of the unlimited central power) to aid it against the early German land-laws.⁠[630]

The Draconian Constitution, the πατρίος πολιτεία of the Oligarchs, was dictated by the nobility like the strictly patrician law of the Twelve Tables in Rome;⁠[631] but by then the Late period of the Culture was well under way and the power of the city and of money were already fully developed, so that laws directed against these powers necessarily gave way very promptly to laws of the Third Estate (Solon, the Tribunate). Yet these, too, were estate-founded laws not less than their predecessors. The struggle between the two primary estates for the right of law-making has filled the entire history of the West, from the early Gothic conflict of secular and canon law for supremacy, to the controversy (not ended even to-day) concerning civil marriage.⁠[632] And, for that matter, what are the constitutional conflicts that have occurred since the end of the eighteenth century but the acquisition by the Tiers État (which, according to Sieyès’s famous remark in 1789, “was nothing, but could be all”) of the right to legislate bindingly upon all, producing a law that is just as much burghers law as ever Gothic was nobles’ law. The nakedest form in which right appears as the expression of might is (as I have already observed) in interstate treaty-making, in peace treaties, and in that Law of Nations of which already Mirabeau could say it is the law of the strong of which the observance is imposed upon the weak. A large part of the decisions of world-history is contained in laws of this kind. They are the constitution under which militant history progresses, so long as it does not revert to the original form of the armed conflict—original, and also basic; for every treaty that is valid and is meant to have real effects is an intellectual continuation thereof. If policy is war by other means,⁠[633] the “right to give the law” is the spoil of the successful party.

II

It is clear, then, that on the heights of history two such life-forms, Estate and State, contend for supremacy, both being-streams of great inward form and symbolic force, each resolved to make its own destiny the Destiny of the whole. That—if we try to understand the matter in its depths and unreservedly put aside our everyday conceptions of people, economy, society, and politics—is the meaning of the opposition between the social and the political conduct of events. Social and political ideas do not begin to be differentiated till a great Culture has dawned, or even till feudalism is declining and the lord-vassal relation represents the social, and the king-people relation the political, side. But the social powers of the early time (nobility and priesthood) not less actively than those of the later (money and mind)—and the vocational groups of the craftsmen and officials and workers, too, as they were rising to their power in the growing cities—sought, each for itself, to subordinate the State-ideal to its own Estate-ideal, or more usually to its estate interests. And so there arose, at all planes from that of the national unit to that of the individual consciousness, a fight over the respective limits and claims of each—the result of which, in extreme cases, is that the one element succeeds so completely as to make the other its tool.⁠[634]

In all cases, however, it is the State that determines the external position, and therefore the historical relations between peoples are always of a political and not a social nature. In domestic politics, on the contrary, the situation is so dominated by class-oppositions that at first sight social and political tactics appear inseparable, and indeed, in the thought of people who (as, for example, a bourgeoisie) equate their own class-ideal with historical actuality—and consequently cannot think in external politics at all—identical. In the external battle the State seeks alliances with other States, in the internal it is always in alliance with one or another Estate—the sixth-century Tyrannis, for instance, rested upon the combination of the State-idea with the interests of the Third Estate vis-à-vis the ancient noble oligarchy, and the French Revolution became inevitable from the moment that the Tiers—that is, intellect and money—left its friend the Crown in the lurch and joined the two other Estates (from the Assembly of Notables, 1787). We are thoroughly right therefore in feeling a distinction between State-history and class-history,⁠[635] between political (horizontal) and social (vertical) history, war and revolution.⁠[636] But it is a grave error of modern doctrinaires to regard the spirit of domestic history as that of history in general. World-history is, and always will be, State-history. The inner constitution of a nation aims always at being “in condition” for the outer fight (diplomatic, military, or economic) and anyone who treats a nation’s constitution as an aim and ideal in itself is merely ruining the nation’s body. But, from the other point of view, it falls to the inner-political pulse-sense of a ruling stratum (whether belonging to the First or to the Fourth Estate) so to manage the internal class-oppositions that the focus and ideas of the nation are not tied up in party conflict, nor treason to the country thought of as an ace of trumps.

And here it becomes manifest that the State and the first Estate are cognate down to the roots—akin, not merely by reason of their symbolism of Time and Care, their common relation to race and the facts of genealogical succession, to the family and to the primary impulses of all peasantry (on which in the last analysis every State and every nobility is supported)—not merely in their relation to the soil, the clan-domain (be this heritable estate or fatherland), which even in nations of the Magian style is lowered in significance only because there the dignity of orthodoxy so completely surpasses everything else—but above all in high practice amidst all the facts of the historical world, in the unforced unity of pulse and impulse, diplomacy, judgment of men, the art of command and masculine will to keep and extend power, which even in earliest times differentiated a nobility and a people out of the one and the same war-gathering; and, lastly, in the feeling for honour and bravery. Hence, right up to the latest phases, that State stands firmest in which the nobility or the tradition shaped by the nobility is wholly at the service of the common cause—as it was in Sparta as compared with Athens, in Rome vis-à-vis Carthage, in Tsin as against the tao-coloured state of Tsu.

The distinction is that a nobility self-contained as a class—or for that matter any Estate—experiences the residue of the nation only with reference to itself, and only desires to exercise power in that sense, whereas the very principle of the State is that it cares for all, and cares for the nobility as such only in relation to the major care. But a genuine old nobility assimilates itself to the State, and cares for all as though for a property. This care, in fact, is one of its grandest duties and one of which it is most deeply conscious; it feels it, indeed, an innate privilege, and regards service in the army and the administration as its special vocation.

It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as between the State-idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates. All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State-ideals that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the spirit and the political forces of actual history—hence, indeed, the conscious emphasis with which they are labelled as social. And while in Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the Church-community in its efforts to actualize religious ideals, in Late periods both the business ideal of the free economic life, and the Utopian ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that abstraction, also come into the field.

But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts—no truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should write books on politics—let him not try to make politics. In the real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only states that have grown, and these are nothing but living peoples “in form.” No doubt it is “the form impressed that living doth itself unfold,” but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a being, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding, if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own convictions—in other words, the way to nullity.

But the destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or structure, but that of their inner authority, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief—of friend and foe—in their effectiveness. The decisive problems lie, not in the working-out of constitutions, but in the organization of a sound working government; not in the distribution of political rights according to “just” principles (which at bottom are simply the idea that a class forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership. The more self-evident all these things are, the less is said or argued about them; the more fully matured the State, the higher the standing, the historical capacity, and therefore the Destiny of the Nation. State-majesty, sovereignty, is a life-symbol of the first order. It distinguishes subjects and objects⁠[637] in political events not only in inner, but also (which is far more important) in external, history. Strength of leadership, which comes to expression in the clear separation of these two factors, is the unmistakable sign of the life-force in a political unity—so much so that the shattering of existing authority (for example, by the supporters of an opposed constitutional ideal) almost always results not in this new party’s making itself the subject of domestic policy, but in the whole nation’s becoming the object of alien policy—and not seldom for ever.

For this reason, in every healthy State the letter of the written constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the living constitution, the “form” (to use again the sporting term), which has developed of itself out of the experience of Time, the situation, and, above all, the race-properties of the Nation. The more powerfully the natural form of the body politic has built itself up, the more surely it works in unforeseen situations; indeed, in the limit, it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever.⁠[638] The leader’s responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.

The fact, therefore, express and unequivocal, is that class-States—that is, States in which particular classes rule—are the only States. This must not be confused with the class-States to which the individual is merely attached in view of belonging to an estate, as in the case of the older Polis, the Norman States of England and Sicily, the France of the Constitution of 1791, and Soviet Russia to-day. The true class-State is an expression of the general historical experience that it is always a single social stratum which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading. It is always a definite minority that represents the world-historical tendency of a State; and, within that again, it is a more or less self-contained minority that in virtue of its aptitudes (and often enough against the spirit of the Constitution) actually holds the reins. And, if we ignore, as exceptions proving the rule, revolutionary interregna and Cæsarian conditions, in which individuals and fortuitous groupings maintain their power merely by material means (and often without any aptitude for ruling), it is always the minority within an Estate that rules by tradition. In by far the greater number of cases this minority is one within the nobility—for example, the “gentry” which governed the Parliamentary style of England, the nobiles at the helm of Roman politics in Punic War times, the merchant-aristocracy of Venice, the Jesuit-trained (nobles who conducted the diplomacy of the Papal Curia in the Baroque).⁠[639] Similarly, we find the political aptitude in self-contained groups within the religious Estate—not only in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in Egypt and India and still more in Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. In the Third Estate—though this seldom produces it, not being in itself a life-unit—there are cases such as those of third-century Rome, where a stratum of the plebs contains men trained in commerce, and France since 1789, where an element of the bourgeoisie has been trained in law; in these cases, it is ensured by a closed circle of persons possessing homogeneous practical gifts, which constantly recruits itself and preserves in its midst the whole sum of unwritten political tradition and experience.

That is the organization of actual states in contradistinction to those conceived on paper and in the minds of pedants. There is no best, or true, or right State that could possibly be actualized according to plan. Every State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different, whatever the rigidity of its legal-constitutional crust. Therefore, words like “republic,” “absolutism,” “democracy,” mean something different in every instance, and what turns them into catchwords is their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A history of States is physiognomic and not systematic. Its business is not to show how “humanity” advances to the conquest of its eternal rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist in the fact-world, how they grow and flourish and fade, and how they are really nothing but actual life “in form.” Let us make the attempt on this basis.

III

History in the high style begins in every Culture with the feudal State, which is not a State in the coming sense of the word, but an ordering of the common life with reference to an Estate. The noblest fruit of the soil, its race in the proudest sense, here builds itself up in a rank-order from the simple knighthood to the primus inter pares, the feudal Overlord amongst his Peers. This sets in simultaneously with the architecture of the great cathedrals and the Pyramids—the stone and the blood elevated into symbols, the one meaning, the other being. The idea of feudalism, which has dominated all Springtimes, is the transition from the primitive, purely practical and factual, relationship of potentate to those who obey him (whether they have chosen him or have been subdued by him) into the private-law (and, therefore, deeply symbolical) relation of the lord to the vassal. This relation rests entirely upon the ethic of nobility, honour, and loyalty, and conjures up the cruellest conflicts between duty to one’s lord and duty to one’s own family. The decadence of Henry the Lion⁠[640] is a tragic example of it.

The “State” exists here only to the extent of the limits of the feudal tie, and it expands its domain by the entry of alien vassals therein. Service to, and agency for, the ruler—originally personal and limited in time—very soon became the permanent fief which, if it escheated, had to be reassigned (already by 1000 the principle of the West was “No land without a lord”), and from that presently passed to the stage of being hereditary (law of Emperor Conrad II, 28th May 1037). Thereby the formerly immediate subjects of the ruler were mediatized, and henceforth they were only his subjects as being subjects of a vassal of his. Nothing but the strong social interbonding of the Estate ensured the cohesion of what must be called, even under these conditions, the State.

The idea of power and booty are seen here in classic union. When, in 1066, William and his Norman chivalry conquered England, the whole land was made King’s property and fee, and it remains so in name to this day. Here is a true Viking delight in “having,” the care of an Odysseus who begins by counting his treasure.⁠[641] From this booty-sense of shrewd conquerors there came, quite suddenly, the famous exchequer-practice and officialdom of the early Cultures. It is well to distinguish these officials from the incumbents of the great confidential offices which had arisen out of the older personal agency;⁠[642] they were clerici or clerks, and not ministeriales or ministers—“servants,” but in a prouder sense now. The financial and clerical officialdom is an expression of Care, and it develops in exact proportion with the development of the dynastic idea. Thus in Egypt it reached an astonishingly high level at the very beginning of the Old Kingdom.⁠[643] The early Chinese official-State described in the Tshou-li is so comprehensive and complicated that the authenticity of the book has been doubted,⁠[644] but in spirit and tendency it corresponds exactly with that of Diocletian, which enabled a feudal order to arise out of an immense fiscal machinery.⁠[645] In the early Classical world it is markedly absent. “Carpe diem” was the motto of Classical economics from the first to last, and in this domain as in others Improvidence, the autarkeia of the Stoics, was elevated into a principle. Even the best calculators were no exception—thus Eubulus in Athens, 330 B.C., managed business with an eye to surpluses, but only to distribute them, when gained, amongst the citizens.

The extreme contrast to Eubulus’s finance is afforded by the canny Vikings of the early West, who by the financial administration of their Norman states laid the foundations of the Faustian economics that extend to-day over the whole world. It is from the chequered table in the Norman counting-house of Robert the Devil (1028–35) that we have the name of the English “Exchequer” and hence the word “cheque.” Here also originated the words “control,” “quittance,” “record.”⁠[646] Here it was that after 1066 England was organized as booty, with ruthless reduction of the Anglo-Saxons, to serfdom, and here too originated the Norman State of Sicily—for it was not upon nothing that Frederick II of Hohenstaufen later built; his most personal work, the constitutions of Melfi (1231) he did not create, but only (by methods borrowed from the money-economics of high Arabian Civilization) polished and perfected. From this centre the methodic and descriptive technique of finance spread into the business world of Lombardy and so into all the trading cities and administrations of the West.

But in Feudalism build-up and breakdown lie close together. When the primary estates were still in full bloom and vigour, the future nations, and with them the germ of the State-idea proper, were stirring into life. The opposition between temporal and spiritual power and that between crown and vassals was cut across again and again by oppositions of nationhood—German-French even from Otto the Great’s times; German-Italian, which rent Italy between the Guelphs and Ghibellines and destroyed the German Empire; French-English, which brought about the English dominion over western France. Still, all this was far less important than the great decisions within the feudal order itself, where the idea of nationality was unknown. England was broken up into 60,251 fiefs, catalogued in the Domesday Book of 1084 (consulted even to-day upon occasion), and the strictly organized central power required allegiance to itself even from the sub-tenants of the peers, but all the same it was less than a hundred and fifty years later that Magna Charta was forced through (1215), and actual power transferred from the King to the Parliament of the vassals—made up of great barons and ecclesiastics in the Upper house, gentry and patricians in the Lower—which thenceforward became the support and champion of national development. In France the baronage, in conjunction with the clergy and the towns, forced the calling of the States-General in 1302; the General Privilege of Saragossa in 1283 made Aragon into a quasi-republic of nobles ruled by its Cortes, and in Germany a few decades earlier a group of great vassals made the election of the German Kingship dependent upon themselves as Electors.

The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself—not merely in the West, but in any Culture—came out in the struggle between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin.

The idea of a Ruler whose writ should run throughout the whole historical world, whose Destiny should be that of all mankind, has taken visible shape in, so far, three instances—firstly, in the conception of the Pharaoh as Horus;⁠[647] secondly, in the great Chinese imagining of the Ruler of the Middle, whose domain is tien-hia, everything lying below the heavens;⁠[648] and, thirdly, in early Gothic times. In 962 Otto the Great, answering to the deep mystical sense and yearning for historical and spatial infinity that was sweeping through the world of those days, conceived the idea of the “Holy Roman Empire, German by nation.” But even earlier, Pope Nicolas I (860), still completely involved in Augustinian—that is, Magian—lines of thought, had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world-dominion under the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals (to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble oligarchy. But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory VII actually obtained feudal supremacy over the Norman states of England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto the Great had awarded the tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstaufen succeeded in the opposite sense; even Richard Cœur-de-Lion swore the vassal’s oath to him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198–1216) made the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England became a Papal fief in 1213; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire in Byzantium followed. But with Innocent’s death disintegration set in within the Church itself, and the great spiritual dignitaries, whom their investitures turned into vassals of the Pope as overlord, soon followed the lay vassals’ example and set about limiting him by means of representative institutions for their order.⁠[649] The notion that a General Council stood higher than a pope was not of religious origin, but arose primarily out of the feudal principle. Its tendency corresponded precisely to that which the English magnates had made good in Magna Charta. In the councils of Constance (1414) and Basel (1431) the last attempts were made to turn the Church, under its temporal aspect, into a clerical feudalism, in which an oligarchy of cardinals would have become the representative of the whole Clerical Estate of the West and taken the place hitherto held by the Roman nobility. But by that time the feudal idea had long taken second place to that of the State, and so the Roman barons won the victory. The field of candidature for the Papacy was limited to the narrowest environs of Rome, and unlimited power over the organizations of the Church was ipso facto secured to the centre. As for the Empire, it had long ago become a venerated shadow, like the Egyptian and the Chinese.

In comparison with the immense dynamism of these decisions, the building-up of feudalism in the Classical world was slow, static, almost noiseless, so that it is hardly recognizable save from the traces of transition. In the Homeric epos as we have it now, every locality possesses its Basileus, who, it is fairly evident, was once a great vassal—we can see in the figure of Agamemnon the conditions in which the ruler of a wide region took the field with the train of his peers. But in the Greek world the dissolution of the feudal world was associated with the formation of the city-state, the political “point.” In consequence, the hereditary court-offices, the archai and timai, the prytaneis, the Archons, and perhaps the original Prætor,⁠[650] were all urban in nature; and the great families therefore developed, not separately in their counties, as in Egypt, China, and the West, but in the closest touch with the city, where they obtained possession of the rights of the King, one after the other, until nothing was left to the ruling house but that which could not be touched because of the gods—namely, the title attaching to its sacrificial function (hence the rex sacrorum). In the later parts of the Homeric epic (c. 800) it is the nobles who invite the king to take his seat, and even unseat him. The Odyssey really knows the kingship only as part of the saga—the actual Ithaca that it shows us is a city dominated by oligarchs.⁠[651] The Spartiates, like the Roman partriciate of the Comitia Curiata, are the product of a feudal relation.⁠[652] In the phiditiæ⁠[653] there are evident remains of the old open table of the noble, but the power of the king has sunk to the shadowy dignity of the rex sacrorum of Rome, or the “kings” of Sparta, who were liable to be imprisoned or removed at any time by the Ephors. The essential similarity of these conditions forces us to presume that in Rome the Tarquinian Tyrannis of 500 was preceded by a period of oligarchical dominance, and this view is supported by the unquestionably genuine tradition of the Interrex, a person appointed by the council of the nobles (the Senate) from amongst its own members to act until it should please them to elect a king again.

Here, as elsewhere, there comes a time in which feudalism is falling into decay, but the coming State is not yet completed, the nation not yet “in form.” This is the fearful crisis that emerges everywhere in the shape of the Interregnum, and forms the boundary between the feudal union and the class-State. In Egypt feudalism was fully developed by about the middle of the Vth Dynasty. The Pharaoh Asosi gave away his domains literally piece by piece to the vassals, and, further, the rich fiefs of the priesthood were (exactly as in the West) free of taxation and gradually became the permanent property (“mortmain,” as we should say) of the great temples.⁠[654] With the Vth Dynasty (c. 2530 B.C.) the “Hohenstaufen” age comes to an end. Under the shadow-kingship of the short-lived VIth Dynasty the princes (rpati) and counts (hetio) become independent; the high offices are all hereditary and the tomb-inscriptions show us more and more proud stress upon ancient lineage. That which later Egyptian historians have hidden under the reputed VIIth and VIIIth dynasties⁠[655] is really half a century of anarchy and lawless conflicts between princes for each other’s domains or for the Pharaoh-title. In China, even I-Wang (934–909) was obliged by his vassals to give out all conquered lands, and to do so to sub-tenants nominated by them. In 842 Li-Wang was forced, with his heir, to flee, and the administration of the Empire was carried on by two individual princes. In this interregnum began the fall of the House of Chóu and the decline of the Imperial name into an honourable but meaningless title. It is the corresponding picture to that of the Interregnum in Germany, which began in 1254 and brought the Imperial power to its nadir of 1400 under Wenceslaus, simultaneously with the Renaissance-style of the condottieri and the complete decay of the Papal power. After the death of Boniface VIII, who in 1302 had once again asserted the feudal power of the Papacy in the Bull Unam sanctam and had consequently been arrested by the representatives of France, the Papacy experienced a century of banishment, anarchy, and impotence, while in the following century the Norman nobility of England for the most part perished in the contest of the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne.

IV

What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the feeling that the purpose of existence was that a “life” should be led in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that there was something else besides, something to which even nobility was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea. Events came to be viewed, no longer from a frankly private-law standpoint, but under a “public”-law aspect. The State might (and almost without exception did) remain aristocratic to its core; its outward appearance might be scarcely altered by the transition from the feudal group to the Class-State; the idea that those outside the Estates possessed rights as well as duties might be still unknown; but the feeling had become different, and the consciousness that Life existed to be lived on the heights of history had given way to the other sentiment, that it contained a task. The difference becomes very distinct when we contrast the policy of Rainald van Dassel (d. 1167)—one of the greatest German statesmen of all periods—with that of the Emperor Charles IV (d. 1378), and consider in parallel therewith the transition in Classical feeling from the “Themis” of the knightly age to the “Dike” of the growing Polis.⁠[656] Themis involves only a claim, Dike implies a task as well.

The State-idea in its sturdy youth is always—and self-evidently, with a naturalness rooted deep in animality itself—bound up with the conception of an individual ruler. The same holds good, with the same self-evidence, for every roused crowd in every decisive situation—as every riotous assembly and every moment of sudden danger demonstrates afresh.⁠[657] Such crowds are units of feeling, but blind. They are “in form” for the onrush of events only when they are in the hands of the leader, who suddenly appears in their midst, is set at the head in a moment by that very unity of feeling, and finds an unconditional obedience. This process repeats itself in the formation of the great life-units that we call peoples and States, only more slowly and with surer meaning. In the high Cultures it is sometimes set aside or set back in favour of other modes of being “in form,” for the sake of a great symbol and artificially; but even then under the mask of these forms we practically always find de facto an individual rulership, whether it be that of a King’s adviser or a party leader; and in every revolutionary upheaval the original state of things reappears.

With this cosmic fact is bound up one of the most intimately inward traits of all directional life, the inherited will, which presents itself with the force of a natural phenomenon in every strong race and compellingly urges even the momentary leader (often quite unconsciously) to uphold his rank for the duration of his personal existence or, beyond it, for that of his blood streaming on through children and grandchildren. The same deep and plantlike trait inspires every real following, which feels in the continuance of the blood of leadership both a surety for and a symbol of the continuance of its own. It is precisely in revolutions that this primitive instinct comes out, full and strong and regardless of all principles. Precisely because of it the France of 1800 saw not only Napoleon, but also his hereditary position, as the true fulfilment of the Revolution. Theorists who, like Marx and Rousseau, start from conceptual ideals instead of from blood-facts have never grasped this immense force that dwells in the historical world, and have in consequence labelled its manifested effects as damnable and reactionary. But they are there, and with a force so insistent that even the symbolism of the high Cultures can only override them temporarily and artificially, as is shown in the engrossing of elective officers by particular families in the Classical, and the nepotism of the Baroque popes in our own case. Behind the fact that leadership is very often freely resigned, and the saying that “merit should rule,” there is practically always the rivalry of magnates, who have no objection in principle to hereditary rulership, but prevent it in practice because each one of them secretly claims it for his own blood. This state of active, creative jealousy is the foundation on which the forms of Classical oligarchy are built up.

The combination of both elements produces the idea of Dynasty. This is so deeply rooted in the Cosmic and so closely interwoven into the factual web of historical life that the State-ideas of each and all the Cultures are modifications of this one principle, from the passionate affirmative of the Faustian to the resolute negative of the Classical Soul. The ripening of the State-idea of a Culture is associated with the city and even the adolescence of the city. Nations, historical peoples, are town-building peoples.⁠[658] The capital takes the place of the castle and the palace as the centre of high history, and in it the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of Sovereignty.

And so, with the sinking of feudalism, Faustian history becomes dynastic history. From little centres where princely families have their seats (whence they “spring,” as the phrase goes, reminding us of plant and property), the shaping of nations proceeds—nations of strictly aristocratic constitution, but yet so that the State conditions the being of the Estate. The genealogical principle already ruling in the feudal nobility and the yeoman families, the expression of the feeling for expanse and the will-to-history, has become so powerful that the appearance of nations transcending the strong unities of language and landscape is dependent upon the destinies of ruling houses. Marriages and deaths sever or unite the blood of whole populations.⁠[659] Where a Lotharingian and a Burgundian dynasty failed to take shape, there also nations already embryonic failed to develop. The doom that overhung the Hohenstaufen involved more than the imperial crown. For Germany and Italy it meant for centuries a deep unsatisfied longing for a united German-Italian nation, while the House of Habsburg, on the contrary, enabled, not a German, but an Austrian nation to develop.

In the Magian world, with its cavern-feeling, the dynastic principle was quite otherwise constituted. The Classical princeps, the legitimate successor of tyrants and tribunes, was the embodiment of the Demos. As Janus was the door and Vesta the hearth, so Cæsar was the people. He was the last creation of Orphic religiousness. The “Dominus et Deus,” on the contrary, was Magian, a Shah participating in the divine Fire (the hvareno of the Mazdaist empire of the Sassanids, which becomes the aureole in Pagan and Christian Byzantium), which radiates about him and makes him pius, felix, invictus (the last-named, from Commodus’s reign, his official title).⁠[660] In Byzantium in the third century of our era the ruler-type underwent the same transition as was implied in the taking-down of Augustus’s civil-service state to build Diocletian’s feudalism. “The new creation begun by Aurelian and Probus and built up on the ruins by Diocletian and Constantine was about as alien to the Classical world and the principate as the empire of Charlemagne.”⁠[661] The Magian ruler governed the visible portion of the general Consensus of the orthodox, which was Church, State, and Nation in one,⁠[662] as Augustine described it in his Civitas Dei. The Western ruler is by the grace of God monarch in the historical world; his people is subordinated to him because God has invested him with it. But in matters of faith he is himself a subordinate—to God’s Vicar on earth, or to his own conscience, as the case may be. That is the separation of State authority and Church authority, the great Faustian conflict between Time and Space. When, in 800, the Pope crowned the Emperor, he chose a new ruler for himself in order that he himself might thrive. Whereas the Emperor in Byzantium was, according to Magian world-feeling, his spiritual as well as his secular superior, an Emperor in the Frank lands was his servant in spiritual matters, besides being (perhaps) his arm in secular affairs. As an idea, the Papacy could arise only by separation from the Caliphate, for the Pope is included in the Caliph.

For this very reason, however, the choice of the Magian ruler cannot be bound down to a genealogical succession-law. It issues from the consensus of the ruling blood-kindred, out of whom the Holy Ghost speaks and designates the Chosen One. When Theodosius died, in 550, a relative, the nun Pulcheria, formally gave her hand to the old senator Marcianus, thereby incorporating this statesman in the family and securing the throne to him and continuance to the “dynasty”;⁠[663] and this act, like many similar occurrences in the Sassanid and Abbassid houses, was taken as the outcome of a hint from above.

In China, the Emperor-idea of the early Chóu period, which was strictly bound up with feudalism, soon became a dream, which, rapidly and with increasing distinctness, came to reflect a whole preceding world in the form of three dynasties of Emperors and myth-Emperors more ancient still.⁠[664] But, for the dynasties of the system of states that thereupon grew up (in which the title King, Wang, came at last into perfectly general use) strict rules came into force for royal successions, legitimacy—a notion quite alien to the early time—became a power to conjure with,⁠[665] and extinction of lines, adoptions and mésalliances led, as in the Baroque of the West, to innumerable wars of succession.⁠[666] Some principle of legitimacy, too, surely underlay the remarkable fact that the rulers of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty, with whom the late period of the Culture ended, had their sons crowned during their own lifetime.⁠[667] The inward relationship between these three dynastic ideas is yet another proof that Being in these three Cultures was akin.

It requires a close insight into the political form-language of the Classical world to perceive that here also the course of things was exactly the same, and that it comprised not only the transition from feudal union to class-State, but even the dynastic principle as well. Classical being, indeed, said no to everything that might draw it into distances either of space or of time, and even in the fact-world of history ringed itself with creations that had something of the defensive in them. But all this narrowing and curtailing presupposes the thing against which it is striving to maintain itself. The Dionysiac squandering, and the Orphic negation, of the Classical body contained in the very form of their protest the Apollinian ideal of perfect bodily being.

Individual rulership and the will to transmit to heirs were unmistakably taken for granted in the oldest kingship.⁠[668] But they had become questionable even by 800, as the rôle of Telemachus in the older parts of the Odyssey indicates. The royal title was frequently borne by great vassals and the most conspicuous of the nobles. In Sparta and in Lycia there were two of them, and in the Phæacian city of the epic and in many actual cities there were more. Next comes the splitting-off of offices from dignities. Lastly, the kingship itself becomes an office which the nobility confers (though at first, perhaps, only upon members of the old royal family); thus in Sparta the Ephors, as representing the First Estate, were in no wise limited in their choice by rule; and in Corinth from about 750 the royal clan of the Bacchiadæ abolished hereditary succession, and on each occasion set up a prytaneus with royal rank from within their own body. The great offices, which likewise were hereditary at first, came to be for one life only, then were limited to a term, and lastly became annual, and, further, were so arranged that there were more holders than offices, and the leadership was exercised by each in turn—the custom which, as is well known, led to the disaster of Cannæ. These annual offices, from the Etruscan annual dictature⁠[669] to the Doric ephorate (which is found in Heraclea and Messene as well as Sparta) are firmly bound up with the essence of the Polis, and they reach their full structure about 650. Exactly at the corresponding date of the Western class-State (end of the fifteenth century), the hereditary power of dynasties was being secured by the Emperor Maximilian and his marriage-politics (against the claims of the Electors), by Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VII of England, and Louis XI of France.⁠[670]

But with the increasing emphasis upon the Classical here and now, the priesthood, which had the beginnings of an Estate in it, became pari passu a mere aggregate of city officials. The capital, so to call it, of the Homeric kingship, instead of being the centre for the radiation of State influence in all directions into the distance, contracted its magic circle until State and city became identical. Thereby, of course, the nobility was fused with the patriciate, and if even in the Gothic the representation of the young cities (for example, the English Commons or the French States-General) was exclusively by patricians, how much more so in the powerful city-state of the Classical! Not indeed in idea, but in fact, it was a pure kingless aristocratic State. The strictly Apollinian “form” of the growing Polis is called oligarchy.

And thus, at the close of the early periods of both these Cultures, we see two principles parallel and contrasted, the Faustian-genealogical and the Apollinian-oligarchic; two kinds of constitutional law, of Dike. The one is supported by an unmeasured sense of expanse, reaches back deep into the past with form-tradition, thinks forward with the same intense will-to-endure into the remotest future; but in the present, too, works for political effectiveness over broad expanses by well-considered dynastic marriages and by the truly Faustian, dynamic, and contrapuntal politics that we call diplomacy. The other, wholly corporeal and statuesque, is self-limited by its policy of autarkeia to the nearest and the most immediate present, and at every point stoutly denies that which Western being affirms.

Both the dynastic state and the city-state presuppose the city itself. But there is this difference, that a seat of government in the West, though it may be (and frequently is) far from being the greatest city of the land, is a force-centre in a field of political tensions such that every occurrence, in however remote a corner, vibrates generally throughout the whole—whereas in the Classical, life huddles closer and closer until it reaches the grotesque phenomenon of Synœcism—the very acme of the Euclidean will-to-form in the political world. It is impossible to imagine the State unless and until the nation sits physically concentrated in one heap, as one body; it must be seen, and even seen “at a glance.” And while the Faustian tendency is more and more to diminish the number of dynastic centres—so that even Maximilian I could see looming in the distance a dynastically secure universal monarchy of his house—the Classical world fell apart into innumerable petty points, which, almost as soon as they came into existence, started to do that which for Classical mankind was almost a necessity of thought and the purest expression of autarkeia—to destroy one another.⁠[671]

Synœcism with its consequence, the creation of the Polis-type proper, was exclusively the work of aristocracy. It was they that established the Classical city-state, and for themselves alone; it was the drawing-together of country nobility and patriciate that brought it into form. The vocational classes were already on the spot, and the peasantry ceased to count from the class point of view. And by the concentration of noble power at one point the kingship of the feudal period was shattered.

With these glimpses into Greece to go upon, we may venture, though under all reserves of course, to outline the history of primitive Rome. The Roman synœcism—the assembling of widely scattered noble families—is identical with the “founding” of the city, an Etruscan undertaking of the beginning of the seventh century.⁠[672] Facing the royal stronghold of the Capitol, there had long been two other settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal. To the first of these belonged the ancient goddess Diva Rumina⁠[673] and the Etruscan Ruma clan;⁠[674] the god of the second was Quirinus Pater. From these comes the dual name of Romans and “Quirites,” and the dual priesthoods of the Salii and Luperci, which adhered to the two hills. Now, as the three blood-tribes named Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres are in all probability common to all Etruscan localities,⁠[675] they must have existed in both of those which concern us here; and thus are explained, on the one hand, the number six of centuries of equites, of military tribunes, of aristocratic Vestals, and, on the other, the number two of the prætors (or consuls) who were, quite early, attached to the King as representatives of the nobles and gradually deprived him of all influence. Already by 600 the constitution of Rome must have been a strong oligarchy of “Patres” with a shadow-kingship⁠[676] as figure-head. Thus both the older theory of an expulsion of the kings, and the newer of a slow disintegration of the royal power, can stand side by side after all, the former as referring to the fall of the Tarquinian Tyrannis, which (as everywhere else in the Classical world—Pisistratus in Athens, for example) had set itself up in opposition to the oligarchy about the middle of the sixth century; the latter as referring to the slow disintegration of the feudal power of the (may we say) Homeric kingship by the aristocratic city-state, before the “foundation,” so-called—the crisis, probably, in which the prætors emerged, as the Archons and Ephors emerged elsewhere.

This Polis was no less strictly aristocratic than the Western class-State, with its nobility, clergy, and higher burgesses. The residue of the people belonging to it was merely its object, but—in the West the object of its political care, and in the Classical the object of its political carelessness. For here “Carpe diem” was the motto of the oligarchy as well as of others. It proclaims itself aloud in the poems of Theognis and the Song of Hybrias the Cretan. It made Classical finance till right into its latest phases—from the piracy practised by Polycrates upon his own people to the proscriptions of the Roman Triumvirs—into a more or less hand-to-mouth seizing of resources for the moment. In jurisprudence it emerges with unparalleled logic in the limitation of Roman edict-law to the term of office of the one-year prætor.⁠[677] And, lastly, it is seen in the ever-growing practice of filling military, legal, and administrative offices (particularly the more important of them) by lot—a kind of homage to Tyche, the goddess of the Moment.

This was the Classical world’s manner of being politically “in form” and, correspondingly, of thinking and feeling. There are no exceptions. The Etruscans were as much under its domination as the Dorians and the Macedonians.⁠[678] When Alexander and his successors dotted the Orient far and wide with their Hellenistic cities, they did so without conscious choice, for they could not imagine any other form of political organization. Antioch was to be Syria, and Alexandria Egypt. The latter, under the Ptolemies and later under the Cæsars, was, not indeed legally, but certainly in practice, a Polis on a vast scale—for the country outside, long reverted to townless fellahdom and managed by immemorial precedents, stood at its gates like an alien frontier.⁠[679] The Roman Imperium was nothing but the last and greatest Classical city-state standing on foundations of a colossal synœcism. Under Marcus Aurelius the rhetor Aristides could say with perfect justification that it had “brought together this world in the name of one city: wheresoever a man may be born in it, it is at its centre that he dwells.” Even the conquered populations of the Empire—the wandering desert-tribes, the upland-valley communities of the Alps—were constituted as civitates. Livy thinks invariably in the forms of the city-state, and for Tacitus provincial history simply does not exist. When, in 49, Pompey, withdrawing before Cæsar, gave up Rome as militarily unimportant and betook himself to the East to create there a firm base of operations, he was doomed. Giving up the city, he had, in the eyes of the ruling classes, given up the State. To them Rome was all.⁠[680]

These city-states were in principle inextensible. Their number could increase, but not their ambit. The notion that the transformation of the Roman clientela into a voting plebs, and the creation of the country tribes, meant a breach in the Polis-idea is incorrect. It was in Rome as in Attica—the whole life of the State remained as before limited to one point, which was the Agora, the Forum. However far away those to whom citizenship was granted might live—in Hannibal’s day it might be anywhere in Italy, and later anywhere in the world—the exercise of his political right depended upon personal presence in the Forum. Hence the majority of the citizens were, not legally, but practically without influence in political business.⁠[681] What citizenship meant for them, therefore, was simply the duty of military service and the enjoyment of the city’s domestic law.⁠[682] But even for the citizen coming to Rome, political power was limited by a second and artificial synœcism which came into existence after, and as the result of, enfranchisement of the peasant, and can only be understood as an unconscious effort to maintain the idea of the Polis strictly unimpaired; the new citizens were inscribed, regardless of their numbers, in a very few tribes (eight, under the Lex Julia), and were always, therefore, in a minority in the Comitia relatively to the citizens of the older franchise.

And naturally so, for this civitas was regarded through and through as one body, a σῶμα. That which did not belong to it was out of its law, hostis. The gods and the heroes stood above, the slave (not quite to be called human, according to Aristotle) below, this aggregate of persons.⁠[683] But the individual was a ζῶον πολιτικόν in a sense that would be regarded by us, who think and live in our expanse-feeling, as an utter slavery; he existed only by reason of his membership of an individual Polis. Owing to this Euclidean feeling, the nobility as a self-contained body was at first synonymous with the Polis—to such an extent, indeed, that even in the Twelve Tables marriage between patricians and plebeians was forbidden and the Spartan Ephors began their term of office, according to ancient custom, with a declaration of war against the Helots. The relation was reversed whenever in consequence of a revolution the non-noble became the Demos—but its meaning remained. As in inward, so also in outward relationships, the body politic was the foundation of all events throughout Classical history. The cities, hundreds of them, lay in wait for each other, each as self-gathered, politically and economically, as it was possible to make it, ready to bite, letting fly on the smallest excuse, and having as its war-aim, not the extension of its own state, but the extinction of the other side’s. Wars ended with the destruction of the enemy’s city and the killing or enslavement of his citizens, just as revolutions ended with the massacre or expulsion of the losers and the confiscation of their property by the victorious party. The natural interstate condition of the West is a close network of diplomatic relations, which may be broken through by wars; but the Classical law of nations assumes war as a normal condition, interrupted from time to time by peace treaties, and a declaration of war merely re-established the natural state of policy. Only so do the forty- and fifty-year peace treaties, spondai (such as the famous one of Nicias in 421), become intelligible, as temporary guarantee-treaties.

These two State-forms, with the styles of policy appropriate to each, are assured by the close of the Early period. The State-idea has triumphed over the feudal union, but it is the Estates that carry that idea, and the nation has political existence only as their sum.

V

With the beginning of the Late period there is a decisive turn, where city and country are in equilibrium and the powers proper to the city, money and brains, have become so strong that they feel themselves, as non-estate, an equal match for the old Estates. It is the moment when the State-idea finally rises superior to the Estates and begins to set up in their place the concept of the Nation.

The State has fought and won to its rights along a line of advance from feudal union to the aristocratic State. In the latter the Estates exist only with reference to the State, instead of vice versa, but, on the other hand, the disposition of things is such that the Government only meets the governed nation when and in so far as the nation is class-ordered. Everyone belongs to the nation, but only an élite to the classes, and these alone count politically.

But the nearer the State approaches its pure form, and the more it becomes absolute—that is, independent of any other form-ideal—the more heavily the concept of the nation tells against that of class, and there comes a moment when the nation is governed as such, and distinctions of “standing” become purely social. Against this evolution—which is one of the necessities of the Culture, inevitable, irrevocable—the old noble and priestly classes make one more effort of resistance. For them, now, everything is at stake—the heroic and the saintly, the old law, rank, blood—and, from their point of view, against what?

In the West this struggle of the old Estates against the State-power took the form of the Fronde. In the Classical world, where there was no dynasty to represent the future and the aristocracy alone had political existence, we find that a dynastic or quasi-dynastic embodiment of the State-idea actually formed itself, and, supported by the non-privileged part of the nation, raised this latter for the first time to power. That was the mission of the Tyrannis.

In this change from the class-State to the absolute State, which allowed no measures of validity but its own, the dynasties of the West—and those of Egypt and of China likewise—called the non-estate to their aid, thereby recognizing it as a political quantity. Herein lies the real importance of the struggle against the Fronde, in which, initially, the powers of the greater cities could not but see advantage to themselves, for here the ruler was standing forth in the name of the State, the care of all, and he was fighting the nobility because it wanted to uphold the Estate as a political magnitude.

In the Polis, on the contrary, where the State consisted exclusively in the form and embodied no hereditary head, the necessity of bringing out the unclassed on behalf of the State-idea produced the Tyrannis, in which a family or a faction of the nobility itself assumed the dynastic rôle, without which action on the part of the Third Estate would have been impossible. Late Classical historians were too remote from this process to seize its meaning, and dealt with it merely in terms of externals of private life. In reality, the Tyrannis was the State, and oligarchy opposed it under the banner of class. It rested, therefore, upon the support of peasants and burghers—in Athens (c. 580) the Diakrii and Paralii parties. Therefore, again, it backed the Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollinian; thus in Attica Pisistratus forced the worship of Dionysus⁠[684] on the peasantry, in Sicyon Clisthenes forbade the recital of the Homeric poems,⁠[685] and in Rome it was almost certainly in the time of the Tarquins that the trinity Demeter (Ceres)-Dionysus-Kore was introduced.⁠[686] Its temple was dedicated in 483 by Spurius Cassius, the same who perished later in an attempt to reintroduce the Tyrannis. The Ceres temple was the sanctuary of the Plebs, and its managers, the ædiles, were their trusted spokesmen before the tribunate was ever heard of.⁠[687] The Tyrants, like the princes of the Western Baroque, were liberals in a broad sense of the word that ceased to be possible for them in the subsequent stage of bourgeois dominance. But the Classical also began at that time to pass round the word that “money makes the man (χρήματ’ ἀνήρ).”⁠[688] The sixth-century Tyrannis brought the Polis-idea to its conclusions and created the constitutional concept of the Citizen, the Polites, the Civis, the sum of these, irrespective of their class-provenance, forming the soma of the city-state. When, therefore, the oligarchy contrived to win after all—thanks once more to the Classical craving for the present, and the consequent fear and hatred evoked by the quasi-will-to-duration of the dynasts—the concept of the citizen was there, firmly established, and the non-patrician had learned to regard himself as an estate vis-à-vis a “rest.” He had become a political party—the word “democracy” (in its specifically Classical sense) now acquired a really serious content—and what he set himself to do was, no longer to come to the aid of the State, but to be himself the State as the nobility had been before. He began to count—money and heads, for the money-census and the general franchise are alike bourgeois weapons—whereas an aristocracy does not count, but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes. As the absolute State came out of Fronde and First Tyrannis, so it perished in French Revolution and Second Tyrannis. In this second conflict, which is already one of defence, the dynasty returns to the side of the nobility in order to guard the State-idea against a new class-rule, that of the bourgeois.

In Egypt, too, the period between Fronde and Revolution is hall-marked. It is the Middle Kingdom. The XIIth Dynasty (2000–1788)—in particular Amenemhet I and Sesostris I—had established the absolute State in severe conflicts with the baronage. The first of these rulers, as a famous poem of the time relates, barely escaped from a court conspiracy, and the biography of Sinuhet⁠[689] shows us that after his death, which was kept secret for a time, rebellion threatened. The third was murdered by palace officials. We learn from the inscriptions in the family grave of the earl Chmenotep⁠[690] that the cities had become rich and almost independent, and warred with each other. Certainly they cannot have been smaller at that time than the Greek cities at the time of the Persian Wars. It was on them and on a certain number of loyal magnates that the dynasty rested.⁠[691] Finally, Sesostris III (1887–1850) succeeded in completely abolishing feudal nobility. Thenceforward there was only a court-nobility and a single, admirably ordered bureau-State;⁠[692] but already some lamented that people of standing were reduced to misery and that the “sons of nobodies” enjoyed rank and consideration.⁠[693] Democracy was beginning and the great social evolution of the Hyksos period was brewing.

The corresponding place in China is that of the Ming-Chu (or Pa, 685–591). These were Protectors of princely origin, who exercised an unconstitutional, but none the less real, power over a world of states weltering in anarchy, and called congresses of princes for the restoration of order and the recognition of stable political principles, even summoning the “Ruler of the Middle” himself (now become totally unimportant) out of the house of Chóu. The first was Hwang of Tsi (d. 645), who called the Diet of 659 and of whom Confucius wrote that he had rescued China from a reversion to barbarism. Their name Ming-dshu became later, like the word “tyrant,” a term of obloquy, because later men were unwilling to see in the phenomenon anything but a power unauthorized by law—but it is beyond all question that these great diplomatists were an element working with a devoted care for the State and the historical future against the old Estates, and supported by the young classes of mind and money. It is a high Culture that speaks to us in the little that we so far know about them from Chinese sources. Some were writers; others selected philosophers to be their ministers. It is a matter of indifference whether we mentally parallel them with Richelieu or with Wallenstein or with Periander—in any case it is with them that the “people” first emerges as a political quantity.⁠[694] It is the outlook and high diplomacy of genuine Baroque—the absolute State sets itself up in principle as the opponent of the aristocratic State, and wins through.

In this lies the close parallelism of these events with the Fronde of Western Europe. In France the Crown after 1614 ceased to summon the State-General, this body having shown itself to be too strong for the united forces of State and bourgeoisie. In England Charles I similarly tried to govern without Parliament after 1628. In Germany, at the same time, the Thirty Years’ War broke out. The magnitude of its religious significance is apt to overshadow for us the other issue involved, and it must not be forgotten that it was also an effort to bring to a decision the struggle between imperial power and the Fronde of the great electors, and that between the individual princes and the lesser Frondes of their local estate-assemblies. But the centre of world-politics then lay in Spain. There, in conjunction with the high courtesies generally, the diplomatic style of the Baroque had evolved in the cabinet of Philip II; and the dynastic principle—which embodied the absolute State vis-à-vis the Cortes—had attained to its highest development in the course of the long struggle with the House of Bourbon. The attempt to align England also in the Spanish system had failed under Philip II, when Queen Mary, his wife, was disappointed of an heir already expected and announced. But now, under Philip IV, the idea of a universal monarchy spanning the oceans revived—no longer the mystic dream-monarchy of the early Gothic, the “Holy Roman Empire, German by nation,” but the tangible ideal of a world-dominion in Habsburg hands, which was to centre in Madrid and to have the solid possession of India and America and the already sensible power of money as its foundations. It was at this time, too, that the Stuarts were tempted to secure their endangered position by marrying the heir of the English and Scottish thrones to a Spanish Infanta; but in the end Madrid preferred to link itself with its own collateral line in Vienna, and so James I readdressed his marriage-alliance proposals to the opposition party of the Bourbons. The futile complications of this family policy contributed more than anything else to bind the Puritan movement and the English Fronde into one great Revolution.

In these great decisions the actual occupants of the thrones were—as in “contemporary” China—only secondary figures compared with great individual statesmen, in whose hands the fate of the West rested for whole decades. Olivarez in Madrid and the Spanish Ambassador Oñate in Vienna were then the most powerful personages in Europe. Their opponents were Wallenstein, standing for the Empire-idea in Germany, and Richelieu, standing for the absolute State in France—and these were succeeded a little later by Mazarin in France, Cromwell in England, Oldenbarneveldt in Holland, Oxenstierna in Sweden. Not until the Great Elector of Brandenburg do we meet again a monarch having political importance of his own.

Wallenstein, unconsciously, began where the Hohenstaufen had stopped. Since the death of Frederick II, in 1250, the power of the Estates of the Empire had become unlimited, and it was against them, and as champion of an absolute emperor’s state, that he fought during the first tenure of command. Had he been a greater diplomatist, had he been clearer and above all more resolute (for actually he was timid in the presence of decisive turnings), and had he, in particular, taken the trouble as Richelieu did to bring the person of the monarch under his influence—then probably it would have been all up with princedom within the Empire. He saw in these princes rebels, to be unseated and dispossessed of their lands; at the peak of his power (end of 1629), when militarily he held Germany in the hollow of his hand, he said aloud in conversation that the Emperor ought to be master in the Empire as the Kings of France and Spain were masters of their own. His army, which was “self-supporting” and by reason of its numbers also independent of the Estates, was the first instance in German history of an Imperial army of European significance; in comparison with it Tilly’s army of the Fronde (for that was what the League really was) counted for little. When Wallenstein, in 1628, leaguered before Stralsund, visualizing a Habsburg sea-power in the Baltic wherewith to take the Bourbon system in the rear—and just then Richelieu was besieging La Rochelle, with better fortune—hostilities between himself and the League had become almost unavoidable. He absented himself from the Diet of Regensburg in 1630, saying that its seat “would presently be in Paris.” This was the most serious political error of his life, for in his absence the Frondist Electors defeated the Emperor by threatening to displace him in favour of Louis XIII, and forced him to dismiss his general. And with that, though it did not realize the consequence of the step, the central power in Germany gave away its army. Henceforth Richelieu supported the greater Fronde in Germany with the object of breaking the Spanish power there, while on the other side Olivarez, and Wallenstein as soon as he regained his power, allied themselves with the French aristocrats, who thereupon took the offensive under the Queen-mother and Gaston of Orléans. But the Imperial power had missed its grand chance. The Cardinal won in both games. In 1632 he executed the last of the Montmorencys⁠[695] and brought the Catholic Electors of Germany into open alliance with France. And thenceforward Wallenstein, becoming unsure of his own final purposes, learned more and more against the Spanish idea, thinking that he could keep the Empire-idea clear of it, and so ipso facto approached nearer and nearer to the standpoint of the Estates—like Marshal Turenne in the French Fronde a few years later. This was the decisive turn in later German history. With Wallenstein’s secession the absolute emperor-state became impossible, and his murder in 1634 did not remedy matters, for the Emperor had no substitute to take his place.

And yet it was just then that the conjuncture was favourable once more. For in 1640 the decisive conflict between Crown and estates broke out simultaneously in Spain, France, and England. In almost every Spanish province the Cortes rose against Olivarez; Portugal, and with it India and Africa, fell away for ever, and it took years to regain even Catalonia and Naples. In England—just as in the Thirty Years’ War—the constitutional conflict between the Crown and the gentry who dominated the Commons was carefully separated from the religious side of the Revolution, deep as was the interpenetration of the two. But the growing resistance that Cromwell encountered in the lower class in particular—which drove him, all unwillingly, into military dictatorship—and the later popularity of the restored monarchy show the extent to which, over and above all religious differences, aristocratic interest had been concerned in bringing about the fall of the dynasty.

At the very time of Charles I’s trial and execution an insurrection in Paris was forcing the French Court to flee. Men shouted for a republic and built barricades. Had Cardinal de Retz been more of a Cromwell, victory of the Estates over Mazarin would have been at least a possibility. But the issue of this grand general crisis of the West was determined by the weight and the destinies of a few personalities, and took shape in such a way that it was in England alone that the Fronde (represented by Parliament) subjected the State and the kingship to its control—confirming this control, in the “glorious Revolution” of 1688, so permanently that even to-day essential parts of the old Norman State continue established. In France and Spain the kingship won unqualified victory. In Germany the Peace of Westphalia placed the Fronde of the greater princes in an English relation towards the Emperor and in the French relation towards the lesser Fronde of the local princes. In the Empire as such, the Estates ruled; in its provinces, the Dynasty. Thenceforth the Imperial dignity, like the English kingship, was a name, surrounded by relics of Spanish stateliness dating from the early Baroque; while the individual princes, like the leading families of the English aristocracy, succumbed to the model of Paris and their duodecimo absolutism was, politically and socially, bound in the Versailles style. So, in this field and in that, the decision fell in favour of the Bourbons and against the Habsburgs, a decision already visible to all men in the Peace of the Pyrenees of 1659.

With this epochal turn the State, which as a possibility is inherent in every Culture, was actualized and attained to such a height of “condition” as could neither be surpassed nor for long maintained. Already there is a quiet breath of autumn in the air when Frederick the Great is entertaining at Sans Souci. These are the years too, in which the great special arts attain to their last, most refined, and most intellectual maturity—side by side with the fine orators of the Athenian Agora there are Zeuxis and Praxiteles, side by side with the filigree of Cabinet-diplomacy the music of Bach and Mozart.

This cabinet-politics has itself become a high art, an artistic satisfaction to all who have a finger in it, marvellous in its subtlety and elegance, courtly, refined, working mysteriously at great distances—for already Russia, the North American colonies, even the Indian states are put into play in order by the mere weight of surprising combinations to bring about decisions at quite other points on the globe. It is a game with strict rules, a game of intercepted letters and secret confidants, of alliances and congresses within a system of governments which even then was called (with deep meaning) the “concert” of the powers—full of noblesse and esprit, to use the phrases of the period, a mode of keeping history “in form” never and nowhere else imagined, or even imaginable.

In the Western world, whose sphere of influence is already almost the sphere itself, the period of the absolutist State covers scarcely a century and a half—from 1660, when Bourbon triumphed over Habsburg in the Peace of the Pyrenees and the Stuarts returned to England, to the Coalition Wars directed against the French Revolution, in which London triumphed over Paris, or, if one prefers it so, over that Congress of Vienna in which the old diplomacy, that of blood and not money, gave the world its grand farewell performance. Corresponding periods are the Age of Pericles between the First and the Second Tyrannis, and the Tshun-tsiu, “Spring and Autumn,” as the Chinese call the time, between the Protectors and the “Contending States.”

In this last phase of dignified politics with forms traditional but not popular, familiar but not smiled at, the culminating points are marked by the extinction of the two Habsburg lines in quick succession and the diplomatic and warlike events that throng in 1700–10 round the Spanish, and in 1740–60 round the Austrian succession.⁠[696] It is the climax also of the genealogical principle. Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube! was indeed “an extension of war by other means.” The phrase indeed was coined long before (in connexion with Maximilian I), but it was not until now that it reached its fullest effects. Fronde Wars pass over into Succession Wars, decided upon in cabinets and fought out chivalrously by small armies and according to strict conventions.⁠[697] What was contended for was the heritage of half the world which the marriage-politics of early Baroque had brought together in Habsburg hands. The State is still “well up to form”; the nobility has become a loyal aristocracy of court and service, carrying on the wars of the Crown and organizing its administration. Side by side with the France of Louis XIV, there presently arose in Prussia a masterpiece of State organization. From the conflicts of the Great Elector with his Estates (1660) to the death of Frederick the Great (who received Mirabeau in audience three years before the Fall of the Bastille) Prussia’s road is the same as France’s, and the outcome in each case is a State which was in every point the opposite of the English order.

For the situation was otherwise in the Empire and in England. There the Frondes had won, and the nations were governed, not absolutely, but aristocratically. But between England and the Empire, again, there was the immense difference that England, as an island, could largely dispense with governmental watchfulness, and that her peers in the Upper House and her gentry in the Lower founded their actions on the self-evidentness of England’s greatness;⁠[698] whereas in the Empire the upper stratum of the land-princes—with the Diet at Regensburg as their Upper House—were chiefly concerned with educating into distinct “peoples” the fragments of the nation that had accidentally fallen to their respective hands, and with marking off their scattered bits of fatherland as strictly as possible from other “peoples’” bits. In place of the world-horizon that there had been in Gothic days, provincial horizon was cultivated by thought and deed. The idea of the Nation itself was abandoned to the realm of dreams—that other world which is not of race but of language, not of Destiny but of Causality. And in it arose the idea, and finally the fact, of the “people” as conceived by poets and thinkers, who founded themselves a republic in the clouds of verse and logic and at last came to believe that politics consisted in idealistic writing and reading and speaking, and not in deed and resolve—so that even to-day real deeds and resolves are confused with mere expressions of inclination.

In England the victory of the gentry and the Declaration of Rights (1689) in reality put an end to the State. Parliament put William III on his throne, just as later it prevented George I and George II from vacating theirs, in the interest of its class. The word “State,” which had been current as early as the Tudors, fell into disuse—it has become impossible to translate into English either Louis XIV’s “L’état c’est moi” or Frederick the Great’s “Ich bin der erste Diener meiner Staates.” On the other hand, the word “society” established itself as the expression of the fact that the nation was “in form” under the class- and not under the state-régime; the same word that with a significant misunderstanding Rousseau and the Continental rationalists generally took over to express the hatred of the Third Estate for authority.⁠[699] But in England authority as “the Government” was clear-cut and well understood. From George I onwards its centre was the Cabinet, a body which constitutionally did not exist at all⁠[700] and factually was an executive committee of the faction of the nobility in command for the time being. Absolutism existed, but it was the absolutism of a class-delegation. The idea of “lèse-majeste” was transferred to Parliament, as the immunity of the Roman kings passed to the tribunes. The genealogical principle is there, too, but it is expressed in the family relations within the higher nobility and the influence of the same upon the parliamentary situation. Even in 1902 Lord Salisbury acted as a Cecil in proposing his nephew Balfour as his successor as against Joseph Chamberlain. The noble factions of Tory and Whig separated themselves more and more distinctly, very often, indeed, within the same family, according to whether the “power-” outweighed the “booty-” outlook—that is, according as land was valued above money⁠[701]—or vice versa, a contrast that even in the eighteenth century was expressed within the higher bourgeoisie by the words “respectable” and “fashionable,” standing for two opposed conceptions of the gentleman. The State’s care for all is frankly replaced by class-interest. It is for this that the individual claims his freedom—that is what “freedom” means in English—but the insular existence and the build of “society” have created such relations that in the last resort everyone who belongs to it (which is a matter of moment in a status-dictatorship) finds his interests represented by those of one or the other noble party.

This steadiness of last, deepest, and ripest form, which springs from the historical feeling of Western mankind, was denied to the Classical. Tyrannis vanished. Strict oligarchy vanished. The Demos which the politics of the sixth century had created as the sum of all men belonging to the Polis burst into factions and spasmodic shocks of noble versus non-noble, and conflicts began within states, and between states, in which each party tried to exterminate the other lest it should itself be exterminated. When in 511—that is, still in the age of the Tyrants—Sybaris was annihilated by the Pythagoreans, the event, the first of its kind, shocked the entire Classical world; even in distant Miletus mourning was worn. But now the elimination of a Polis or a party was so usual that a regular form and choice of methods—corresponding to the typical peace-treaties of Western Baroque—arose for the disposal of the vanquished—for example, the inhabitants might be massacred or sold into slavery, the houses razed or divided as spoil. The will to absolutism is there—after the Persian Wars it is universal, in Rome and Sparta no less than in Athens—but the willed narrowness of the Polis, the point-politic, and the willed brevity of office-holding and immediacy of schemes made it impossible ever to reach a firm decision as to who should be “the State.”⁠[702] The high craft of diplomacy, which in the West was practised by cabinets inspired by a tradition, was here handicapped by an amateurism founded not on any accidental inadequacy of persons—the men were available—but solely in the political form itself. The course of this form from the First to the Second Tyrannis is unmistakable and corresponds to the same evolution in all other Late periods; but the specifically Classical style of it appears in the disorder and subjection to incidentals which naturally and inevitably followed from a life that could not and would not dissociate itself from the moment.

The most important example of this is the evolution of Rome during the fifth century—a period over which hitherto historians have wrangled, precisely because they have tried to find in it a consistency that can no more have existed there than anywhere else in the Classical State. A further source of misunderstanding is that the conditions of that development have been regarded as something quite primitive, whereas in fact even the city of the Tarquins must have already been in a very advanced state, and primitive Rome lay much further back. The relations of the fifth century are on a small scale in comparison with those of Cæsar’s age, but they were not antiquated. Because written tradition is defective (as it was everywhere save in Athens), the literary movement which followed the Punic Wars set itself to fill the blanks with poetry and in particular (as was to be expected in the Hellenistic age) with the evocation of an idyllic past, as, for example, in the story of Cincinnatus. And modern scholarship, though it has ceased to believe these legends, has nevertheless remained under the influence of the taste that inspired their invention, and continues to look at the conditions of the time through its eyes—the more readily as Greek and Roman history are treated as two separate worlds, and the evil practice of identifying the beginning of history with the beginning of sure documentation is followed as usual. In truth, the conditions of 500 B.C. are anything but Homeric. The trace of its walls shows that Rome under the Tarquins was, with Capua, the greatest city in Italy and bigger than the Athens of Themistocles.⁠[703] A city that concludes commercial treaties with Carthage is no peasant commune. And it follows that the population in the four city tribes of 471 must have been very numerous, probably greater than the whole total of the sixteen country tribes scattered insignificantly in space.

The great success of the landowning nobility in overthrowing a Tyrannis that was almost certainly very popular, and establishing unrestricted senatorial rule, was nullified again by a series of violent events about 471—the replacement of the family tribes by four great city-wards, the representation of these by tribunes (who were sacrosanct—i.e., who enjoyed a royal privilege that no single official of the aristocratic administration possessed) and lastly the liberation of the small peasantry from the clientela of the nobility.