Part 2 — PART II

THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

LECTURE IV

THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

[Tuesday, May 29th, 1900]

Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men, and towards the State. To-day a subject of more pressing interest confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm, arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears which compose the instant of man's life. We are in the thick of the deed—how are we to judge it? How conjure the phantoms inimical to truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event?

Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this aspect I propose to direct your attention. The separate incidents of the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers, politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, the wavering or the resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years, alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not this—all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired to see or imagined they saw.

But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?—these it is possible even now to consider, sine ira et studio. What is its historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the presage of this great war—if it be a great war—for the future?

§ I. THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

Now the magnitude of a war does not depend upon the numbers, relative or absolute, of the opposing forces. Fewer men fell at Salamis than at Towton, and in the battle of Bedr[1] the total force engaged did not exceed two thousand, yet Mohammed's victory changed the history of the world. The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a handful compared with the army which marched with de Saxe to Toumay, but the achievement of the Tyrolese is enduring as Fontenoy. War is the supreme act in the life of a State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act. It is the cause, the principles in collision which make it for ever glorious, or swiftly forgotten. What, then, are the principles at issue in the present war?

The war in South Africa, as we saw in the opening lecture, is the first event or series of events upon a great scale, the genesis of which lies in this force named Imperialism. It is the first conspicuous expression of this ideal in the world of action—of heroic action, which now as always implies heroic suffering. No other war in our history is in its origins and its aims so evidently the realization, so exclusively the result of this imperial ideal. Whatever may have been the passing designs of the Government, lofty or trivial, whatever the motives of individual politicians, this is the cause and this the ideal by which, consciously or unconsciously, the decision of the State has been prescribed and controlled. But the present war is not merely a war for an idea, which of itself would be enough to make the war, in M. Thiers' refrain, digue de l'attention des hommes; but, like the wars of the sixteenth century or the French Revolutionary Wars, it is a war between two ideals, between two principles that strike deep into the life-history of modern States.

In the religious wars of the sixteenth century the principle of freedom was arrayed against the principle of authority. The conflict rolled hither and thither for two centuries, and was illustrated by the valour and genius of Europe, by characters and incidents of imposing grandeur, sublime devotion, or moving pity. So in the war of the French Revolution the dying principle of Monarchism was arrayed against the principle of Democracy, and the tragic heroism with which the combatants represented these principles, whether Austria, Russia, Spain, England, Germany, or France, makes that war one of the most precious memories of mankind.

In the tragedies of art, in stage-drama, the conflict, the struggle is between two principles, two forces, one base, the other exalted. But in the world-drama a conflict of a profounder kind reveals itself, the conflict between heroism and heroism, between ideal and ideal, often equally lofty, equally impressive.

Such is the eternal contrast between the tragic in Art and the tragic in History, and this characteristic of these two great conflicts of the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries reappears in the present war. There also two principles equally lofty and impressive are at strife—the dying principle of Nationality, and the principle which, for weal or woe, is that of the future, the principle of Imperialism. These are the forces contending against each other on the sterile veldt; this is the first act of the drama whose dénouement—who dare foretell? What distant generation shall behold that curtain?

§ 2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM

In political life, in the life-history of states, as in religious, as in intellectual and social history, change and growth, or what we now name Evolution, are perpetual, continuous, unresting. The empire which has ceased to advance has begun to recede. Motion is the law of its being, if not towards a fuller life, motion toward death. Thus in a race dowered with the genius for empire, as Rome was, as Britain is, Imperialism is the supreme, the crowning form, which in this process of evolution it attains. The civic, the feudal, or the oligarchic State passes into the national, the national into the imperial, by slow or swift gradations, but irresistibly, as by a fixed law of nature. No great statesman is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age. The patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest form, to the actualized ideal of his time. Eliot in the seventeenth century died for the constitutional rights of a nation; in the thirteenth he would have stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the nineteenth he would have added his great name to imperialism.

The national is thus but a phase in the onward movement of an imperial State, of a race destined to empire. In such a State, Nationality has no peculiar sanctity, no fixed, immutable influence, no absolute sway. The term National, indeed, has recently acquired in politics and in literature something of the halo which in the beginning of the century belonged to the idea of liberty alone. The part which it has played in Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and, above all, in the unity of Italy and the realization after four centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a living witness of its power. In the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics of the Balance-of-Power[2] theory, a disruption occurred between these ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.

Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revolution of 1848 presents itself ever more definitely as it appeared to certain of its actors, and to a few of the more speculative onlookers, as but an aftermath of 1789 and 1793, as the net return, the practical result to France and to Europe of the glorious sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era. Nationality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; but the ideal was a shadow from the past. The men of that time do not differ more widely from the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ from the great figures of the earlier revolution, Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.[3] The amazing confusion which attends the efforts of French and German publicists to expand the concept of the Nation supports the evidence of history that the great rôle which it has played is transient and accidental, and that it is not the final and definite form towards which the life of a State moves. It is one thing to exalt the grandeur of this ideal for Italy or for France, but it is another to assume that it has final and equal grandeur in every land and to every State.

Nor are the endeavours of such writers as Mancini or Bluntschli to trace the principle of Nationality to the deepest impulses of man's life more auspicious. Not to Humanity, but to Imperial Rome, must be ascribed the origin of nationality as the prevailing form in the State system of modern Europe. For Roman policy was, so to speak, a Destiny, not merely to the present, but to the future world. Rome effaced the distinctions, the fretting discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the bounds of that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and Bourbon, made it their ambition to reach, and their glory to maintain. To the cities of the Italian allies Rome granted immunities, privileges, of municipal independence; and from the gift, as from a seed of hate, grew the interminable strife, the petty wars of the Middle Age. For this, Machiavelli, in many a bitter paragraph, has execrated the Papacy—"the stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"—but the political creed of the great Ghibellines, Farinata, or Dante himself, shows that Italian republicanism, like French nationality, derives not from papal, but from imperial Rome.

The study of Holland, of the history of Denmark, of Prussia, of Sweden, of Scotland, does but illustrate the observation that in the principle of Nationality, whether in its origin or its ends, no ideal wide as humanity is involved, nothing that is not transient, local, or derived. Poetry and heroism have in the past clothed it with undying fame; but recent history, by instance and by argument from Europe and from other continents, has proved that a young nation may be old in corruption, and a small State great in oppression, that right is not always on the side of weakness, nor injustice with the strong.

Not for the first time in history are these two principles, Nationality and Imperialism, or principles strikingly analogous, arrayed against each other. Modern Europe, as we have seen, is a complexus of States, of which the Nation is the constituent unit. Ancient Hellas presents a similar complexus of States, of which the unit was not the Nation but the City. There, after the Persian Wars, these communities present a conflict of principles similar to this which now confronts us, a conflict between the ideals of civic independence and civic imperialism. And the conflict is attended by similar phenomena, covert hostility, jealous execration, and finally, universal war. The issue is known.

The defeat of Athens at Syracuse, involving inevitably the fall of her empire, was a disaster to humanity. The spring of Athenian energy was broken, and the one State which Hellas ever produced capable at once of government and of a lofty ideal, intellectual and political, was a ruin. Neither Sparta nor Macedon could take its place, and after the lingering degradation of two centuries Hellas succumbs to Rome.

A disaster in South Africa would have been just such a disaster as this, but on a wider and more terrible scale.

For this empire is built upon a design more liberal even than that of Athens or the Rome of the Antonines. Britain conquers, but by the testimony of men of all races who have found refuge within her confines, she conquers less for herself than for humanity. "The earth is Man's" might be her watchword, and, as if she had caught the Ocean's secret, her empire is the highway of nations. That province, that territory, that state which is added to her sway, seems thereby redeemed for humanity rather than conquered for her own sons.

This, then, is the first characteristic of the war, a conflict between the two principles, the moribund principle of Nationality—in the Transvaal an oppressive, an artificial nationality—and the vital principle of the future.

§ 3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY

But the war in South Africa has a second characteristic not less significant. It is the first great war waged by the completely constituted democracy of 1884. In the third Reform Bill, as we have seen, the efforts of six centuries of constitutional history find their realization. The heroic action and the heroic insight, the energy, the fortitude, the suffering, from the days of Langton and de Montfort, Bigod and Morton, to those of Canning and Peel, Russell and Bright, attain in this Act their consummation and their end. The wars waged by the unreformed or partially reformed constituencies continue in their constitutional character the wars waged by the Monarchy or by the Whig or Tory oligarchies of last century. But in the present conflict a democracy, at once imperial, self-governing and warlike, and actuated by the loftiest ideals, confronts the world.

Twice and twice only in recorded history have these qualities appeared together and simultaneously in one people, in the Athens of Pericles and the Islam of Omar.[4]

Revolutionary France was inspired by a dazzling dream, an exalted purpose, but its imperialism was the creation of the genius or the ambition of the individual; it was not rooted in the heart of the race. It was not Clive merely who gained India for England. French incapacity for the government of others, for empire, in a word, fought on our side. Napoleon knew this. What a study are those bulletins of his! After Austerlitz, after Jena, Eyiau, Friedland, one iteration, assurance and reassurance, "This is the last, the very last campaign!" and so on till Waterloo. His Corsican intensity, the superhuman power of that mighty will, transformed the character of the French race, but not for ever. The Celtic element was too strong for him, and in the French noblesse he found an index to the whole nation. The sarcasm, which if he did not utter he certainly prompted, has not lost its edge—"I showed them the path to glory and they refused to tread it; I opened my drawing-room doors and they rushed in, in crowds." There is nothing more tragic in history than the spectacle of this man of unparalleled administrative and political genius, fettered by the past, and at length grown desperate, abandoning himself to his weird. The march into Russia is the return upon the daimonic spirit of its primitive instincts. The beneficent ruler is merged once more in the visionary of earlier times, dreaming by the Nile, or asleep on the heel of a cannon on board the Muiron.[5] Napoleon was fighting for a dead ideal with the strength of the men who had overthrown that ideal—how should he prosper? Conquest of England, Spain, Austria, the Rhine frontier, Holland, Belgium, point by point his policy repeats Bourbon policy, the policy that led Louis XVI to the scaffold and himself to Ste Hélène. Yet his first battles were for liberty, and his last made the return of mediaeval despotism impossible. Dying, he bequeaths imperialism to France as Euphorion leaves his vesture in the hands of Faust and Helena. How fatal was that gift of a spurious imperialism Metz, Sedan, and Paris made clear to all men.

The Rome of the Caesars presents successively a veiled despotism, a capricious military tyranny, or an oriental absolutism. The "Serrar del Consiglio" made Venice and her empire the paragon of oligarchic States.

The rise of the empire of Spain seems in its national enthusiasm to offer a closer parallel to this of Britain. But a ruthless fanaticism, religious and political, stains from the outset the devotion of the Spanish people to their Hapsburg monarchs. Spain fought with grandeur, heroism, and with chivalrous resolution; but her dark purpose, the suppression throughout Europe of freedom of the soul, made her valour frustrate and her devotion vain. She warred against the light, and the enemies of Spain were the friends of humanity, the benefactors of races and generations unborn. What criterion of truth, what principle even of party politics, can then incite a statesman and an historian to assert and to re-assert that in our war in South Africa we are acting as the Spanish acted against the ancestors of the Dutch, and that our fate and our retribution will be as the fate and the retribution of Spain? England's ideal is not the ideal of Spain, nor are her methods the methods of Spain. The war in Africa—is it then a war waged for the destruction of religious freedom throughout the world, or will the triumph of England establish the Inquisition in Pretoria? But, it is urged, "the Dutch have never been conquered, they are of the same stubborn, unyielding stock as our own." In the sense that they are Teutons, the Dutch are of the same stock as the English; but the characteristics of the Batavian are not those of the Jute, the Viking, and the Norseman. The best blood of the Teutonic race for six centuries went to the making of England. At the period when the Batavians were the contented dependents of Burgundy or Flanders, the English nation was being schooled by struggle and by suffering for the empire of the future. As for the former clause of the assertion, it is accurate of no race, no nation. The history of the United Provinces does not close with John de Witt and William III. Can those critics of the war who still point to William the Silent, and to the broken dykes, and to Leyden, have reviewed, even in Schlosser, the history of Holland in the eighteenth century, the part of the Dutch in Frederick's wars, the turpitudes of the Peace of 1783, unequalled in modern history, and in world-history never surpassed, or of the surrender of Namur to Joseph II, or of the braggadocio patriotism which that monarch tested by sending his ship down the Scheldt, or of the capitulation of Amsterdam to Brunswick?

The heroic period of the United Provinces in action, art, and literature began and ended in the deep-hearted resolution of the race to perish rather than forgo the right to worship God in their own way. In the history of this State, from Philip II to Louis XIV, religious oppression seems to play a part almost like that of individual genius in Macedon or in modern France. When that force is withdrawn, there is an end to the greatness of Holland, as when a Charlemagne, an Alexander, or a Napoleon dies, the greatness of their empires dies also. In the passion for political greatness as such, the Dutch have never found the spur, the incitement to heroic action or to heroic self-renunciation which religion for a time supplied.

From false judgments false deeds follow, else it were but harsh ingratitude to recall, or even to remember, the decay, the humiliations of the land within whose borders Rembrandt and Spinoza, Vondel and Grotius, Cornelius and John de Witt lived, worked, and suffered.

But in the empire which fell at Syracuse we encounter resemblances to the democratic Empire of Britain, deeper and more organic, and of an impressive and even tragic significance. For though the stage on which Athens acts her part is narrower, the idea which informs the action is not less elevated and serene. A purpose yet more exultant, a hope as living, and an impulse yet more mystic and transcendent, sweeps the warriors of Islam beyond the Euphrates eastward to the Indus, then through Syria, beyond the Nile to Carthage and the Western Sea, tracing within the quarter of a century dominated by the genius of Omar the bounds of an empire which Rome scarce attains in two hundred years. But this empire-republic, the Islam of Omar, passes swifter than a dream; the tyranny and the crimes of the palaces of Damascus and Bagdad succeed.

And now after twelve centuries a democratic Empire, raised up and exalted for ends as mystic and sublime as those of Athens and the Islam of Omar, appears upon the world-stage, and the question of questions to every student of speculative politics at the present hour is—Whither will this portent direct its energies? Will it press onward towards some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint, sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically inexhaustible forces to waste unused?

The deeds on the battlefield, the spirit which fires the men from every region of that empire and from every section of that society of nations, the attitude which has marked that people and that race towards the present war, are not without deep significance. Now at last the name English People is co-extensive and of equal meaning with the English race. The distinctions of rank, of intellectual or social environment, of birth, of political or religious creeds, professions, are all in that great act forgotten and are as if they were not. Rivals in valour, emulous in self-renunciation, contending for the place of danger, hardship, trial, they seem as if every man felt within his heart the emotion of Aeschines seeing the glory of Macedon—"Our life scarce seemed that of mortals, nor the achievements of our time." Contemplating this spectacle, this Empire thrilled throughout its vast bulk, from bound to bound of its far-stretched greatness, with one hope, one energy, one aspiration and one fear, one sorrow and one joy, is not this some warrant, is not this some presage of the future, and of the course which this people will pursue?

Let us pause here for a moment upon the transformation which this word English People has undergone. When Froissart, for instance, in the fourteenth century, speaks of the English People, he sees before him the chivalrous nobles of the type of Chandos or Talbot, the Black Prince or de Bohun. The work of the archers at Creçy and Poitiers extended the term to English yeomen, and with the rise of towns and the spread of maritime adventure the merchant and the trader are included under the same great designation as feudal knight and baron.

Puritanism and the Civil Wars widened the term still further, but as late as the time of Chatham its general use is restricted to the ranks which it covered in the sixteenth century. Thus when Chatham or Burke speaks of the English People, it is the merchants of a town like Bristol, as opposed to the English nobles, that he has in view. And Wellington declared that Eton and Harrow bred the spirit which overcame Napoleon, which stormed Badajoz, and led the charge at Waterloo. The Duke's hostility to Reform, his reluctance to extend the term, with its responsibilities and its privileges, its burdens and its glory, to the whole race, is intelligible enough. But in this point the admirers of the Duke were wiser or more reckless than their hero, and the followers of Pitt than the followers of Chatham. The hazard of enfranchising the millions, of extending the word People to include every man of British blood, was a great, a breathless hazard. Might not a mob arise like that which gathered round the Jacobins, or by their fury and their rage added another horror to the horror of the victim on the tumbril, making the guillotine a welcome release?

But the hazard has been made, the enfranchisement is complete, and it is a winning hazard. To Eton and Harrow, as nurseries of valour, the Duke would now require to add every national, every village school, from Bethnal Green to Ballycroy! Populus Anglicanus—it has risen in its might, and sent forth its sons, and not a man of them but seems on fire to rival the gallantry, the renunciation of Chandos and Talbot, of Sidney and Wolfe. Has not the present war given a harvest of instances? The soldier after Spion Kop, his jaw torn off, death threatening him, signs for paper and pencil to write, not a farewell message to wife or kin, but Wolfe's question on the Plains of Abraham—"Have we won?" Another, his side raked by a hideous wound, dying, breathes out the undying resolution of his heart, "Roll me aside, men, and go on!" Nor less heroic that sergeant, ambushed and summoned at great odds to surrender. "Never!" was the brief imperative response, and made tranquil by that word and that defiance, shot through the heart, he falls dead. This is the spirit of the ranks, this the bearing in death, this the faith in England's ideal of the enfranchised masses.

Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated. Neither the Peninsular nor the Marlborough wars, conspicuous by their examples of daring, exhibit anything that within a brief space quite equals the self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous openings of this war by those youths, the gens Fabia of modern days, prodigal of their blood, rushing into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man had sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like the rose, fertilizing it with the rich drops of his heart, since the rain is powerless!

§ 4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM

Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which inspires it, shut within the tented field or confined to the battle-line. The eyes of the race are upon that drama, and the heart of the race beats within the breasts of the actors. There is something Roman in the nation's unmoved purpose, the concentration of its whole force upon one fixed mark, disregarding the judgment of men, realizing, however bitter the wisdom, that the Empire which the sword and the death-defiant valour of the past have upraised can be maintained only by the sword and a valour not less death-defiant, a self-renunciation not less heroic. Such manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.

But a widespread error still confounds this imperial patriotism with Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism. Now what is Cosmopolitanism? It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races. It passes easily into political indifference, political apathy. It is the negation of patriotism; but it offers no constructive ideal in its stead. Imperialism is active, is constructive.[6] It is the passion of Marathon and Trafalgar, it is the patriotism of a de Montfort or a Grenville, at once intensified and heightened by the aspirations of humanity, by the ideals of a Shelley, a Wilberforce, or a Canning. But between mere war-fever, Jingoism, and such free, unfettered enthusiasm, a nation's unaltering loyalty in defeat or in triumph to an ideal born of its past, and its joy in the actions in which this ideal is realized, the gulf is wide. Napoleon knew this. Nothing in history is more illuminating than the bitter remark with which he turned away from the sight of the enthusiasm with which Vienna welcomed its defeated sovereign, Francis II. All his victories could not purchase him that!

Would the critics of "music-hall madness" prefer to see a city stand sullen, silent, indifferent, cursing in the bitterness of its heart the government, the army, the empire? Or would they have it like the Roman mob of the first Caesars, cluster in crowds, careless of empire, battles, or the glory of Rome's name, shouting for a loaf of bread and a circus ticket? Between the cries, the laughter, the tears of a mob and the speech or the silence of a statesman there is a great space; but it were rash to assume that the dissonant clamour of the crowds is but an ignorant or a transient frenzy. In religion itself have we not similar variety of expression? Those faces gathered under the trees or in a public thoroughfare—the expression of emotion there is not that which we witness, say, in Santa Croce, at prime, when the first light falls through the windows on Giotto's frescoes, Herod and Francis, St. Louis and the Soldan, and on the few, the still worshippers—but dare we assert that this alone is sincere, the other unfelt because loud?

§ 5. MILITARISM

And yet beneath this joy, the tumultuous joy of this hour of respite from a hope that in the end became harder to endure than despair, there is perhaps not a single heart in this Empire which does not at moments start as at some menacing, some sinister sound, a foreboding of evil which it endeavours to shake off but cannot, for it returns, louder and more insistent, tyrannously demanding the attention of the most reluctant. Once more on this old earth of ours is witnessed the spectacle of a vast people stirred by one ideal impulse, prepared for all sacrifices for that ideal, prepared to face war, and the outcry of a misunderstanding or envious antagonism. Whither is this impulse to be directed? What minister or parliament is to dare the responsibility of turning this movement, this great and spontaneous movement, to this people's salvation, to this Empire's high purposes? How shall its bounds be made secure against encroachment, its own shores from coalesced foes?

Let me approach this matter from the standpoint of history, the sole standpoint from which I have the right—to use a current phrase—to speak as an expert. First of all let me say, that an axiom or maxim which appears to guide the utterances if not the actions of statesmen, the maxim that the British people will under no circumstances tolerate any form of compulsory service for war, is unjustified by history. It has no foundation in history at all. Nothing in the past justifies the ascription of such a limit to the devotion of this people. Of an ancient lineage, but young in empire, proud, loving freedom, not disdainful of glory, perfectly fearless—who shall assign bounds to its devotion or determine the limits of its endurance? I go further, I affirm that the records of the past, the heroic sacrifices which England made in the sixteenth, in the seventeenth century, and in later times, justify the contrary assumption, justify the assumption that at this crisis—this grave and momentous crisis, a crisis such as I think no council of men has had to face for many centuries, perhaps not since the embassy of the Goths to the Emperor Valens—the ministry or cabinet which but dares, dares to trust this people's resolution, will find that this enthusiasm is not that of men overwrought with war-fever, but the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to defend the heritage of its fathers, and not to swerve from the path which fate itself has marked out for it amongst the empires of the earth. This, I maintain, is the verdict of history upon the matter.

There is a second prominent argument against compulsory service, an argument drawn by analogy from the circumstances of other nations. Men point to Rennes, to the petty tyrannies of military upstarts over civilians in Germany, and cry, "Behold what awaits you from conscription!" Such arguments have precisely the same value as the arguments against Parliamentary Reform fifty years ago, based on the terror of Jacobinism. We might as well condemn all free institutions because of Tammany Hall, as condemn compulsory service because of its abuses in other countries. And an appeal to the Pretorians of Rome or to the Janizzaries of the Ottoman empire would be as relevant as an appeal for warning to the major-generals of Oliver Cromwell. Nor is there any fixed and necessary hostility between militarism and art, between militarism and culture, as the Athens of Plato and of Sophocles, a military State, attests.

All institutions are transfigured by the ideal which calls them into being. And this ideal of Imperial Britain—to bring to the peoples of the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher justice—the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St. Louis died. There is nothing in our annals which warrants evil presage from the spread of militarism, nothing which precludes the hope, the just confidence that our very blood and the ineffaceable character of our race will save us from any mischief that militarism may have brought to others, and that in the future another chivalry may arise which shall be to other armies and other systems what the Imperial Parliament is to the parliaments of the world—a paragon and an example.

With us the decision rests. If we should decide wrongly—it is not the loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is the judgment of the dead, the despair of the living, of the inarticulate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraigning eyes of the unborn. Who can confront this unappalled?

LECTURE V

WHAT IS WAR?

[Tuesday, June 12th, 1900]

Assuming then that the imperialistic is the supreme form in the political development of the national as of the civic State, and that to the empires of the world belongs the government of the world in the future, and that in Britain a mode of imperialism which may be described as democratic displays itself—a mode which in human history is rarely encountered, and never save at crises and fraught with consequences memorable to all time—the problem meets us, will this form of government make for peace or for war, considering peace and war not as mutual contradictories but as alternatives in the life of a State? Even a partial solution of this problem requires a consideration of the question "What is War?"

§ 1. THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY

The question "What is War?" has been variously answered, according as the aim of the writer is to illustrate its methods historically, or from the operations of the wars of the past to deduce precepts for the tactics or the strategy of the present, or as in the writings of Aristotle and Grotius, of Montesquieu and Bluntschli, to assign the limits of its fury, or fix the basis of its ethics, its distinction as just or unjust. But another aspect of the question concerns us here—What is War in itself and by itself? And what is its place in the life-history of a State considered as an entity, an organic unity, distinct from the unities which compose it? Is war a fixed or a transient condition of the political life of man, and if permanent, does its relation to the world-force admit of description and definition?

If we were to adopt the method by which Aristotle endeavoured to arrive at a correct conception of the nature of a State, and review the part which war has played in world-history, and, disregarding the mechanical enumeration of causes and effects, if we were to examine the motives, impulses, or ideals embodied in the great conflicts of world-history, the question whether war be a necessary evil, an infliction to which humanity must resign itself, would be seen to emerge in another shape—whether war be an evil at all; whether in the life-history of a State it be not an attestation of the self-devotion of that State to the supreme end of its being, even of its power of consecration to the Highest Good?

Every great war known to history resolves itself ultimately into the conflict of two ideals. The Cavalier fights in triumph or defeat in a cause not less exalted than that of the Puritan, and Salamis acquires a profounder significance when considered, not from the standpoint of Athens and Themistocles merely, but from the camp of Xerxes, and the ruins of the mighty designs of Cyrus and Hystaspes, an incident which Aeschylus found tragic enough to form a theme for one of his loftiest trilogies.[1] The wars against Pisa and Venice light with intermittent gleams the else sordid annals of Genoa; and through the grandeur and ferocity of a century of war Rome moves to world-empire, and Carthage to a death which throws a lustre over her history, making its least details memorable, investing its merchants with an interest beyond that of princes, and bequeathing to mankind the names of Hamilcar and Hannibal as a strong argument of man's greatness if all other records were to perish. Qui habet tenam habet bellum is but a half-truth. No war was ever waged for material ends only. Territory is a trophy of battle, but the origin of war is rooted in the character, the political genius, the imagination of the race. One of the profoundest of modern investigators in mediaeval history, Dr. Georg Waitz, insists on the attachment of the Teutonic kindred to the soil, and on the measures by which in the primitive constitutions the war-instinct was checked.[2] The observation of Waitz is just, but a change in environment develops the latent qualities of a race. The restless and melancholy surge, the wide and desolate expanse of the North Sea exalted the imagination of the Viking as the desert the imagination of the Arab. Not the cry of "New lands" merely, but the adventurous heart of his race, lured on by the magic of the sea, its receding horizons, its danger and its change, spread the fame and the terror of the Norsemen from the basilicas, the marbles, and the thronging palaces of Byzantium to the solitary homestead set in the English forest-clearing, or in the wastes of Ireland which the zeal of her monasteries was slowly reclaiming. To the glamour of war for its own sake the Crusades brought the transforming power of a new ideal. The cry "Deus vult!" at Clermont marks for the whole Teutonic race the final transition from the type of Alaric and Chlodovech, of Cerdic and Hrolf, to that of Godfrey and Tancred, Richard Lion-heart and Saint Louis, from the sagas and the war-songs of the northern skalds to the chivalrous verse of the troubadours, a Bertrand or a Rudel, to the epic narrative of the crusades which transfigures at moments the prose of William of Tyre or of Orderic, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or of Joinville.

The wide acceptance of the territorial theory of the origin of war as an explanation of war, and the enumeration by historians of causes and results in territory or taxation, can be ascribed only to that indolence of the human mind, the subtle inertia which, as Tacitus affirms, lies in wait to mar all high endeavour—"Subit quippe etiam ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur."

The wars of the Hebrews, if territorial in their apparent origin, reveal in their course their true origin in the heart of the race, the consciousness of the high destiny reserved for it amongst the Semitic kindred, amongst the nations of the earth. If ever there were a race which seemed destined to found a world-empire by the sword it is the Hebrew. They make war with Roman relentlessness and with more than Roman ideality, the Lord God of Hosts guiding their march or their retreat by day and by night ceaselessly. Every battle is a Lake Regillus, and for the great Twin Brethren it is Jehovah Sabaoth that nerves the right arm of his faithful. The forms of Gideon and Joshua, though on a narrower stage, have a place with those other captains of their race—Hannibal, Bar-Cochab, Khalid, Amr, Saad,[3] and Mothanna. The very spirit of war seems to shape their poetry from the first chant for the defeat of Egypt to that last song of constancy in overthrow, of unconquerable resolve and sure vengeance, a march music befitting Judas Maccabaeus and his men, beside which all other war-songs, even the "Marseillaise," appear of no account—the Al Naharoth Babel—"Let my sword-hand forget, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem"—passing from the mood of pity through words that are like the flash of spears to a rapture of revenge known only to the injured spirits of the great when baulked of their God-appointed fate. Yet on the shores of the Western Sea the career of this race abruptly ends, as if in Palestine they found a Capua, as the Crusaders long afterwards, Templars and Hospitallers, found in that languid air, the Syrian clime, a Capua. Thus the Hebrews missed the world-empire which the Arabs gained, but even out of their despair created another empire, the empire of thought; and the power to found this empire, whether expressed in the character of their warriors, or in that unparalleled conviction which marks the Hebrew in the remotest lands and most distant centuries, the certainty of his return, the refusal, unyielding, to believe that he has missed the great meed which, there in Palestine, there in the Capua of his race, seemed within his grasp, but attests further that it is in no lust for territory that these wars originate.

In the historical and speculative literature of Hellas and Rome war occupies a position essentially identical with that which it occupies in the Hebrew. It is the assertion of right by violence, or it is the pursuit of a fate-appointed end. Aristotle, with his inveterate habit of subjecting all things—art, statesmanship, poetry—to ethics, regards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a protection against the enervating influence of peace. As the life of the individual is divided between business and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the life of the State is divided between war and peace. But to greatness in peace, greatness in war is a primal condition. The State which cannot quit itself greatly in war will achieve nothing great in peace. "The slave," he bitterly remarks, "knows no leisure, and the State which sets peace above war is in the condition of a slave." Aristotle does not mean that the slave is perpetually at work, or that war is the sole duty of a great State, but as the soul destined to slavery is incapable even in leisure of the contemplations of the soul destined to freedom, so to the nation which shrinks from war the greatness that belongs to peace can never come. Courage, Plato defines as "the knowledge of the things that a man should fear and that he should not fear," and in a state, a city, or an empire courage consists in the unfaltering pursuit of its being's end against all odds, when once that end is manifest. This ideal element, this formative principle, underlies the Hellenic conception of war throughout its history, from its first glorification in Achilles to the last combats of the Achaean League—from the divine beauty of the youthful Achilles, dazzling as the lightning and like the lightning pitiless, yet redeemed to pathos by the certainty of the quick doom that awaits him, on to the last bright forms which fall at Leuctra, Mantinea, and Ipsus. It requires a steadfast gaze not to turn aside revolted from the destroying fury of Greeks against Greeks—Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, and Macedon—and yet even their claim to live, their greatness, did in this consist, that for so light yet so immortal a cause they were content to resign the sweet air and the sight of the sun, and of this wondrous fabric of a world in which their presence, theirs, the children of Hellas, was the divinest wonder of all.

Of the grandeur and elevation which Rome imparted to war and to man's nature it is superfluous to speak. As in statesmanship, so in war, he who would greatly praise another describes his excellence as Roman, and thinks that all is said. The silver eagle which Caius Marius gave as an ensign to the legions is for once in history the fit emblem of the race that bore it to victory and world-dominion. History by fate or chance added a touch of the supernatural to the action of Marius. The silver eagle announced the empire of the Caesars; the substitution of the Labarum by Constantine heralded its decline. With the emblem of humiliation and peace, the might of Rome sinks, yet throughout the centuries that follow, returns of galvanic life, recollections of its ancient valour—as in Stilicho, Belisarius, Heraclius, and Zimisces[4]—bear far into the Middle Age the dread name of the Roman legion, though the circuit of the eagle's flight, once wide as the ambient air, is then narrowed to a league or two on either side of the Bosphorus.

§ 2. DEFINITION OF WAR

To push the survey further would but add to the instances, without deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the present. Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny and in after ages, a profound enough significance. Behind the immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the destiny of the race, like the Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, advancing relentlessly, pursuing its own far-off and lofty ends, constantly reveals itself.

War, therefore, I would define as a phase in the life-effort of the State towards completer self-realization, a phase of the eternal nisus, the perpetual omnipresent strife of all being towards self-fulfilment. Destruction is not its aim, but the intensification of the life, whether of the conquering or of the conquered State. War is thus a manifestation of the world-spirit in the form the most sublime and awful that can enthrall the contemplation of man. It is an action radiating from the same source as the heroisms, the essential agonies, +agôníai+, conflicts, of all life. "In this theatre of a world," as Calderon avers, "all are actors, todos son representantes." There too the State enacts its tragedy. Nation, city, or empire, it too is a representante. Though the stage is of more imposing dimensions, the Force of which each wears the mask is one with the Force which sets the stars their path and guides the soul of man to its appointed goal. A war then is in the development of the consciousness of the State analogous to those moments in the individual career when, in Hamlet's phrase, his fate "crying out," death is preferable to a disregard of the Summoner. The state, the nation, or the empire hazards death, is content to resign existence itself, if so be it fulfil but its destiny, and swerve not from its being's law. Not to be envied is that man who, in the solemn prayer of two embattled hosts, can discern but an organized hypocrisy, a mockery, an insult to God! God is the God of all the earth, but dark are the ways, obscure and tangled the forest-paths, in which He makes His children walk. A mockery? That cry for guidance in the dread ordeal, that prayer by the hosts, which is but the formulated utterance of the still, the unwhispered prayer in the heart of each man on the tented field—"Through death to life, even through death to life, as my country fares on its great path through the thickening shadows to the greater light, to the higher freedom!"—is this a mockery? Yet such is the prayer of armies. War so considered ceases to be an action continually to be deplored, regretted, or forgiven, ceases to be the offspring of human weakness or human crime, and the sentence of the Greek orator recovers its living and consoling power—"Of the dead who have fallen in battle the wide earth itself is the sepulchre; their tomb is not the grave in which they are laid, but the undying memory of the generations that come after them. They perish, snatched in a moment, in the height of achievement, not from their fear, but from their renown. Fortunate! And you who have lost them, you, who as mortal have been born subject unto disaster, how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!"

Thus the great part which war has played in human history, in art, in poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence for existence' sake—his pursuit of an ideal, perpetually.

§ 3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR

Those critics of the relations of State to State, of nation to nation, to whom I have more than once referred, have recently found in their condemnation of diplomacy and war a remarkable and powerful ally. Amongst the rulers of thought, the sceptred sovereigns of the modern mind, Count Tolstoi occupies, in the beginning of the twentieth century, a unique position, not without exterior resemblance to that of Goethe in the beginning of the nineteenth, or to that of Voltaire in the great days of Louis XV. In the gray and neutral region where the spheres of religion and ethics meet and blend, his words, almost as soon as spoken, rivet the attention, quicken the energies, or provoke the hostility of one-half the world—when he speaks, he speaks not to Russia merely, but to Europe, to America, and to the wide but undefined limits of Greater Britain. Of no other living writer can this be said. Carlyle had no such extended sway in his lifetime, nor had Hugo so instantly a universal hearing.

How then does Tolstoi regard War? For on this high matter the judgment of such a man cannot but claim earnest scrutiny. Examining his writings, even from The Cossacks, through such a masterpiece as War and Peace, colossal at once in design and in execution, on to his latest philosophical pamphlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his thought reveals itself—gradually increasing vehemence in the expression of his abhorrence of all war as the instrument of oppression, the enemy of man's advance to the ideal state, forbidden by God, forbidden above all by Christ, and by its continued existence turning our professed faith in Christ into a derision. This general impression is deepened by his treatment of individual incidents and characters. Has Count Tolstoi a campaign to narrate, or a battle, say the Borodino, to describe? That which rivets his attention, absorbs his energies, is the fatuity of all the generals indiscriminately, even of Kutusov; it is the supremacy of Hazard; and in the hour of battle itself he sees no heroisms, no devotions, or he turns aside from such spectacles to fasten his gaze upon the shuddering heart, the blanched countenance, the agonizing effort of the combatants to conquer their own terror, their own dismay; and to close the scene he throws wide the hospital, and points to the wounds, the mutilated bodies, the amputated limbs yet quivering, to the fever, and the revel of death. Has he the enigma of modern times to solve, Napoleon I? In Napoleon, who in the sphere of action is to Modern History what Shakespeare is in the sphere of art, Tolstoi sees no more than the clerical harlequin, Abbé de Pradt, sees, a stage conqueror, a charlatan devoured by vanity, without greatness, dignity, without genius for war yet impatient of peace, shallow of intellect, tricking and tricked by all around him, dooming myriads to death for the amusement of an hour, yet on the dread morning of Borodino anxious only about the quality of the eau de Cologne with which he lavishly sprinkles his handkerchief, vest, and coat. And the campaigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial? Lodi, Arcola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig, Champaubert, and Montmirail? These all are the deeds of Chance, of happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark, unthinking force resident in masses of men. This is Tolstoi's conception of the man who is to the Aryan race what Hannibal is to the Semitic—its crowning glory in war.

Consider in contrast with this the attitude towards war of a thinker, a visionary, not less great than Tolstoi—Carlyle. Like Tolstoi, Carlyle is above all things a prophet, that is to say, he feels as the Hebrew prophet felt deeply and with resentful passionateness, the contrast between what his race, nation, or people is, and what, by God's decrees, it is meant to be. Yet what is Carlyle's judgment upon war? His work is the witness. After the brief period of Goethe-worship, from 1834 on through forty years of monastic seclusion and labour not monastic, but as of a literary Hercules, the shaping thought of his work, tyrannous and all-pervading, is that of the might, the majesty, and the mystery of war. One flame-picture after another sets this principle forth. What a contrast are his battle-paintings to those of Tolstoi! Consider the long array of them from the first engagements of the French Revolutionary chiefs at Valmy and Jemappes. These represent Carlyle in the flush of manhood. His fiftieth year ushers in the battle-pictures of the Civil War—Marston Moor, Naseby, and Dunbar, when Cromwell defeats the men of Carlyle's own nation. The greatest epoch of Carlyle's life, the epoch of the writing of Frederick, is also that of the mightiest series of his battle-paintings. And finally, when his course is nearly run, he rouses himself to write the last of all his battles, yet at once in characterization and vividness of heroic vision one of his finest, the death of the great Berserker, Olaf Tryggvason, the old Norse king. In the last sea-fight of Olaf there flames up within Carlyle's spirit, now in extreme age,[5] the same glory and delight in war as in the days of his early manhood when he wrote Valmy and Jemappes. Since the heroic age there are no such battle-pictures as these. The spirit of war that leaps and laughs within these pages is the spirit of Homer and Firdusi, of Beowulf and the Song of Roland, and when it sank, it was like the going down of a sun. The breath that blows through the Iliad stirs the pages of Cromwell and of Frederick; Mollwitz, Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf, Leignitz, and Torgau, these are to the delineation, the exposition of modern warfare, the warfare of strategy and of tactics, what the combats drawn by Homer are to the warfare of earlier times.

Now in a mind not less profoundly religious than that of Tolstoi, not less fixedly conscious of the Eternal behind the transient, of the Presence unseen that shapes all this visible universe, whence comes this exaltation of war, this life-long pre-occupation with the circumstance of war? To Carlyle, nineteen centuries after Christ, as to Thucydides, four centuries before Christ, war is the supreme expression of the energy of a State as such, the supreme, the tragic hour, in the life-history of the city, the nation, as such. To Carlyle war is therefore neither anti-religious nor inhuman, but the evidence in the life of a State of a self-consecration to an ideal end; it is that manifestation of the world-spirit of which I have spoken above—a race, a nation, an empire, conscious of its destiny, hazarding all upon the fortunes of the stricken field! Carlyle, as his writings, as his recorded actions approve, was not less sensitive than Tolstoi to the pity of human life, to the "tears of things" as Virgil would say; but are there not in every city, in every town, hospitals, wounds, mangled limbs, fevers, that make of every day of this sad earth of ours a day after Borodino? The life that pants out its spirit, exultant on the battlefield, knows but its own suffering; it is the eye of the onlooker which discovers the united agony. It was a profounder vision, a wider outlook, not a harder heart, which made Carlyle[6] apparently blind to that side of war which alone rivets the attention of Tolstoi—the pathological. And yet Tolstoi and his house have for generations been loyal to the Czars; he has proved that loyalty on the battlefield as his fathers before him have done. Tolstoi has no system to crown, like Auguste Comte or Mr. Herbert Spencer, with the coping-stone of universal peace and a world all sunk in bovine content. Whither then shall we turn for an explanation of his arraignment of war?

§ 4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS

Considering Tolstoi as a world-ruler, as Goethe was, as Voltaire was, a characteristic differentiating him from such men at once betrays itself. The nimble spirit of Voltaire in its airy imaginings seems a native, or at least a charming visitant, of every clime, of every epoch; Goethe, impelled more by his innate disposition than by any plan of culture, draws strength and inspiration from a circuit even wider than Voltaire's—Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, the Middle Age, Mediaeval Germany; Carlyle's work made him, at least in spirit, a native of France for three or four years, and for twelve a German; even Dr. Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a Catiline, and in later life seeks the subject of what is perhaps his masterpiece, the Emperor and Galilean, in the Rome of the fourth century. But in Russia Tolstoi begins, and in Russia he ends. As volume after volume proceeds from his prolific pen—essays, treatises theological or social, tales, novels, diaries, or confessions—all alike are Russian in scenery, Russian in character, Russian in temperament, Russian in their aspirations, their hopes, or their despairs. Nowhere is there a trace of Hellas, Rome does not exist for him, the Middle Age which allured Hugo has for Tolstoi no glamour. In this he but resembles the Russian writers from Krilov to the present day. It is equally true of Gogol, of Poushkine, of Tourgenieff, of Herzen, of Lermontoff, of Dostoievsky. If Tourgenieff has placed the scene of one of his four longer works at Baden, yet it is in the Russian coterie that the tragedy of Irene Pavlovna unfolds itself. Thus confined in his range, and in his inspiration, to his own race, the work of a Russian artist, or thinker, springs straight from the heart of the race itself. When therefore Tolstoi speaks on war, he voices not his own judgment merely but the judgment of the race. In his conception of war the force of the Slavonic race behind him masters his own individual genius. Capacity in a race for war is distinct from valour. Amongst the Aryan peoples, the Slav, the Hindoo, the Celt display valour, contempt for life unsurpassed, but unlike the Roman or the Teuton they have never by war sought the achievement of a great political design, or subordinated the other claims of existence, whether of the nation or the individual, for the realization of a great political ideal. Thus the history of the two western divisions of the Slavonic race, Poland and Bohemia, reads like the history of Ireland. It is studded with combats, but there is no war. The downfall of Bohemia, the surrender of Prague, the Weissenberg, are but an illustration of this thesis. And three centuries earlier Ottokar and his flaunting chivalry go down before the charge of Rudolf of Hapsburg, like Vercingetorix before Caius Julius. Ziska's cry of havoc to all the earth is not redeemed by fanaticism and has no intelligible end. And the noblest figure in Czech history, George of Podiebrad, whose portrait Palacky[7] has etched with laborious care and unerring insight, is essentially a statesman, not a warrior.

Similarly the history of the Russian Slav has marked organic resemblances with that of the Poles and the Czechs. His sombre courage, his enduring fortitude, are a commonplace. Eyiau and Friedland attested this, and many a later field, and the chronicle of his recent wars, from Potiamkin to Skobeleff, from Kutusov to Todleben, illustrate the justice of Napoleon's verdict, "unparalleled heroism in defence." And yet out of the sword the Slav has never forged an instrument for the perfection of a great political ideal. War has served the oppression, the ambition of his governments, not the aspirations of his race. Conceived as the effort within the life of the State towards a higher self-realization, the Slav knows not war. He has used war for defence in a manner memorable for ever to men, or for cold and pitiless aggression, but in the service of a constructive ideal, stretched across generations or across centuries, he has never used it. Even the conquest of Siberia, from the first advance of the Novgorod merchants in the eleventh century, through the wars of Ivan IV, and his successors, attests this. The Don Cossacks destroy the last remnant of the mighty Mongol dynasty, a fragment flung off from the convulsion of the thirteenth century, ruled by a descendant of Ginghis. The government of the Czars astutely annexes the fruits of Cossack valour, but in the administration of its first remarkable conquest the irremediable defect of the Slavonic race declares itself. The innate energy, the determining genius for constructive politics which marks races destined for empire, everywhere is wanting. Indeed the very despotism of the Czars, alien in blood, foreign in character, derives its present security, as once its origin, from the immovable languor, the unconquerable tendency of the Slav towards political indifferentism. Nihilism, the tortured revolt against a secular wrong, is but a morbid expression of emotions and aspirations that have marked the Slav throughout history. Catherine the Great felt this. Its spirit baulked her enterprise in the very hour when Voltaire urged that now if ever was the opportunity to recover Constantinople from "the fanaticism of the Moslem." The impressive designs of Nicholas I left the heart of the race untouched, and in recent times the cynicism which has occasionally startled or revolted Europe is but a pseudo-Machiavellianism. It does not originate, like the policy which a Polybius or a Machiavelli, a Richelieu or a Mirabeau have described or practised, in the pursuit of a majestic design before whose ends all must yield, but from the absence of such design, betraying the camerilla which has neither race nor nation, people nor city, behind it. Russia's mightiest adversary, Napoleon, knew the character of the race more intimately than its idol, Napoleon's adroit flatterer and false friend, the Czar Alexander, knew it; yet the enthusiast of Valérie, supple and calculating even in his mysticism, is still the noblest representative of the oppressive policy of two hundred years.[8]

Such is the light which the temperament of his race and its history throw upon Count Tolstoi's arraignment of war. The government perceives in the solitary thinker its adversary, but an adversary who, unlike a Bakounine, a Nekrasoff, or a Herzen, gives form and utterance not to the theories, the social or political doctrines of an individual or a party, but to the universal instincts of the whole Slavonic people. Therefore he will not die in exile. The bigotry of a priest may deny his remains a hallowed resting-place, but the government, instructed by the craft of Nicholas I, and the fate of Alexander III, will allow the creator of Anna Karenina, of Natascha, and of Ivan Illyitch, to breathe to the last the air of the steppes.

§ 5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR

There remains an aspect of this question, frequently dealt with in the writings of Tolstoi, but by no means confined to these writings, to which I must allude briefly. There are many men within these islands, if I mistake not, who regard with pride and emotion the acts of England in this great crisis, but nevertheless are oppressed with a vague consciousness that war, for whatever cause waged, is, as Tolstoi declares, directly hostile to the commands, to the authority of Christ. This is a subject which I approach with reluctance, with reverence, more for the sake of those amongst you upon whom such conviction may have weighed, than from any value I attach to the suggestions I have now to offer.

First of all, as we have seen from this brief survey of the wars of the past, the most religious of the great races of the world, and the most religious amongst the divisions of those races—the Hebrews, the Romans, the Teutons, the Saracens, the Osmanii—have been the most warlike and have pursued in war the loftiest political ends. This fact is significant, because war, like religion and like language, represents not the individual but the race, the city, or the nation. In a work of art, the Phaedrus of Plato or the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian, the genius of the individual is, in appearance at least, sovereign and despotic. But as a language represents the happy moments of inspiration of myriads of unremembered poets, who divined the fit sound, the perfect word, harmonious or harsh, to embody for ever, and to all succeeding generations of the race, its recurring moods of desire or delight, of pain, or sorrow, or fear; and as in a religion the heart-aspirations towards the Divine of a long series of generations converge, by genius or fortune, into a flame-like intensity in a Zerdusht, a Mohammed, or a Gautama Buddha; so war represents the action, the deed, not of the individual but of the race. Religion incarnates the thought, language the imagination, war the resolution, the will, of a race. Reflecting then on the part which war has played in the history of the most deeply religious races, and of those States in which the attributes of awe, of reverence are salient features, it is surely idle enough to essay an arraignment of war as opposed to religion in general?

Secondly, with regard to a particular religion, the Christian, it is remarkable that Count Tolstoi, who has striven so nobly to reach the faith beyond the creeds, and in his volume entitled My Religion has thrown out several illuminating ideas upon the teachings of Christ as distinct from those of later creeds or sects, should not have perceived, or should have ignored the circumstance that in the actual utterances of Christ there is not to be found one word, not one syllable, condemnatory of war between nation and nation, between State and State. The locus classicus, "All that take the sword," etc., is aimed at the impetuosity of the person addressed, or at its outmost range against civic revolt. It is only by wrenching the words from their context that it becomes possible to extend their application to the relations of one State to another. The organic unity, named a State, is not identical with the units which compose it, nor is it a mere aggregate of those units. If there is a lesson which history enforces it is this lesson. And upon the laws which regulate those unities named States, Christ nowhere breathes a word. The violence of faction or enthusiasm have indeed forced such decision from his utterances. Camille Desmoulins, in a moment of rash and unreasoning rhetoric, styled Him "le bon sans-culotte," and in the days of the Internationale, Michel Bakounine traced the beginnings of Nihilism to Galilee; just as in recent times the Anarchist, the Socialist have in His sanction sought the justification of their crimes or their fantasies. But in His whole teaching there is nothing that affects the politics of State and State. Ethics and metaphysics were outlined in His utterances, but not politics. His solitary reference to war as such contains no reprobation; a perverse ingenuity might even twist it into a maxim of prudence, a tacit assent to war. And the peace upon which Christ dwells in one great phrase after another is not the amity of States, but a profounder, a more intimate thing. It is the peace on which the Hebrew and the Arab poets insist, the peace which arises within the soul, ineffable, wondrous, from a sense of reconciliation, of harmony with the Divine, a peace which may, which does, exist on the battlefield as in the hermit's cell, in the fury of the onset as deep and tranquil as in the heart of him who rides alone in the desert beneath the midnight stars. Tolstoi's criticism here arises from his extension to the more complex and intricate unity of the State of the same laws which regulate the simpler unity of the individuals who compose the State. And of such a war as this in which Britain is now engaged, a war in its origin and course determined by that ideal which in these lectures I have sketched, a war whose end is the larger freedom, the higher justice, a war whose aim is not merely peace, but the full, the living development of those conditions of man's being without which peace is but an empty name, a war whose end is to deepen the life not only of the conquering, but of the conquered State—who shall assert, in the face of Christ's reserve, that such a war is contrary to the teachings of Galilee?

Finally, as the complement of this condemnation of war as the enemy of religion, men are exhorted, by the refusal of military service or other means, to strive as for the attainment of some fair vision towards the establishment of the empire of perpetual peace. The advent of this new era, it is announced, is at hand.

§ 6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE

Now the origins of this ideal are clear. It is ancient as life, and before man was, it was. It is the transference to the sphere of States of the deepest instinctive yearning of all being, from the rock to the soul of man, the yearning towards peace, towards the rest, the immortal leisure which, to apply the phrase of Aristotle, the soul shall know in death, the deeper vision, the unending contemplation, the theôria of eternity. The error of its enthusiasts, from Saint-Pierre and Vauvenargues to Herbart and Count Tolstoi, lies in the interpretation of this cosmic desire, deep as the wells of existence itself, and in the extension to the Conditioned of a phase of the Unconditioned.

Will War then never cease? Will universal peace be for ever but a dream? Upon this question, a consideration of the ideal itself, of the forms in which at various epochs it has presented itself, and of the crises at which, appearing or reappearing, it most profoundly engages the imagination of a race, is instructive.

In Hebrew history, for instance, it arises in the hour of defeat, in the consternation of a great race struck by irretrievable disaster. "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace!" In this and in other splendid pages of Isaiah we possess the first distinct enunciation of this ideal in world-history, and with what a transforming radiance it is invested! In what a majesty of light and insufferable glory it is uplifted! But it is a vision of the future, to be accomplished in ages undreamed of yet. It is the throb of the Hebrew soul beyond this earthly sphere and beyond this temporal dominion, to the immortal spheres of being, inviolate of Time. Yet even this vision, though co-terminous with the world, centres in Judaea—in the triumph of the Hebrew race and the overthrow of all its adversaries.

Similarly, to Plato and to Isocrates, to Aristotle and to Aeschines, if peace is to be extended to all the earth "like a river," Hellas is the fountain from which it must flow. It is an imperial peace bounded by Hellenic civilization, culture, laws. It is a peace forged upon war. Rome with her genius for actuality discovers this.

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces. For my brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, 'Peace be within thee.'" Substituting Hellas for Jerusalem, this is the prayer of a Greek of the age of Isocrates, of Cleanthes, and of Alexander.

Rome by war ends war, and establishes the Pax Romana within her dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, Egypt. Disregarding the dying counsels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war with the world outside those limits. St. Just's proud resignation, "For the revolutionist there is no rest but the grave," is for ever true of those races dowered with the high and tragic doom of empire. To pause is disaster; to recede, destruction. Rome understood this, and her history is its great comment.

To Islam the point at which she can bestow her peace upon men is not less clear, fixed by a power not less unalterable and high. Neither Haroun nor Al-Maimoun could, with all their authority and statecraft, stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom of a race is wiser than the wisdom of a man, and the sword which, in Abu Bekr's phrase, the Lord has drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment. Then and then only shall the Holy War end.

The Peace of Islam, Shalom, which is its designation, is the serenity of soul of the warriors of God whose life is a warfare unending. And Virgil—in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age won for all his works the felicity or the misfortune attached to the suspicion of an inspiration other than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims fired by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the ballad-burthen music of the Georgics, nor the measureless pathos and pity for things human of the Aeneid—has sung the tranquil beauty of the Saturnian age; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic memory or hope is but the peace of Octavianus, the end of civil discord, of the proscriptions, the conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's respite to a war-fatigued world.

Passing from the ancient world to the modern, we encounter in the Middle Age within Europe that which is known amongst mediaeval Latinists as the Treva or Treuga Dei. This "Truce of God" was a decree promulgated throughout Europe for the cessation at certain sacred times of that feudal strife, that war of one noble against another which darkens our early history. It is the mediaeval equivalent of the Pax Romana and is but dimly related to any ideal of Universal Peace. Hildebrand, who gave this Truce of God more support than any other Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the crusades, giving to war one of the greatest consecrations that war has ever received. And the attitude of Mediaeval Europe towards eternal peace is the attitude of Judaea, of Hellas, and of Rome.[9] This is conspicuous in Saint Bernard, the last of the Fathers, and three centuries later in Pius II, the last of the crusading Pontiffs, the desire of whose life was to go even in his old age upon a crusade. This desire uplifts and bears him to his last resting-place in Ancona, where the old man, in his dying dreams, hears the tramp of legions that never came, sees upon the Adriatic the sails of galleys that were to bear the crusaders to Palestine—yet there were neither armies nor ships, it was but the fever of his dream.

During the Reformation the ideal of Universal Peace is unregarded. The wars of religion, the world's debate, become the war of creeds. "I am not come to bring peace among you, but a sword." Luther, for instance, declares war against the revolted peasants of Germany with all the ardour and fury with which Innocent III denounced war against the Albigenses. War in the language and thoughts of Calvin is what it became to Oliver Cromwell, to the Huguenots, and to the Scottish Covenanters, to Jean Chevallier and the insurgents of the Cevennes. As Luther in the sixteenth century represents the religious side of the Reformation, so Grotius in the seventeenth century represents the position of the legists of the Reformation. In his work, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Universal Peace as an object of practical politics is altogether set aside. War is accepted as existent between nation and nation, State and State, and Grotius lays down the laws which regulate it. Similar attempts had been made in the religious councils of Greece, and when the first great Saracen army was starting upon its conquests, the first of the Khalifs delivered to that army instructions which in their humanity have never been surpassed; the utmost observances of chivalry or modern times are there anticipated. But the treatise of Grotius is the first elaboration of the subject in the method of his contemporary, Verulam—the method of the science of the future.

In the eighteenth century the singular work of the mild and amiable enthusiast, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre,[10] made a profound impression upon the thought not only of his own but of succeeding generations. Kings, princes, philosophers, sat in informal conference debating the same argument as has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague. It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the Encyclopédie. It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history arise. Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's History, but its influence disappears as the work advances. It charmed the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious irony, he inflamed by his impassioned argument that war for freedom which is to the undying glory of France.[11]

Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to Voltaire: "Running over the pages of history I see that ten years never pass without a war. This intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but cease, never!" This is the last word of the eighteenth century upon the dream of Universal Peace—a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, looking out with dying eyes upon a world about to close in one of the deadliest yet most heroic and memorable conflicts set down in the annals of our race. The Hundred Days are its epilogue—the war of twenty-five years ending in that great manner! Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once more arises. Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, till six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating in the recent conference at The Hague. Its derisive results, closing the debate of the nineteenth, as Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth century, are too fresh in all men's memories to require a syllable of comment.

Thus then it appears from a glance at its history that this ideal of Universal Peace has stirred the imagination most deeply, first of all in the ages when an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, Hellenic, or Roman, conterminous with earth, wide as the inhabited world, was still in appearance realizable; or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil strife, as in the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the moments of exhaustion following upon long-continued and desolating war, as in Modern Europe after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, the wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough and Eugène, and of Frederick. The familiar poetry in praise of peace, and the Utopias, the composition of which has amused the indolence of scholars or the leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or in such moods. On the other hand, the criticism of war, scornful or ironic, of the great thinkers and speculative writers of modern times, when it is not merely the phantom of their logic, an eidôlon specus created by their system, arises in the most impressive instances less from admiration or desire or hope of perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of men.

Hence the question whether war be a permanent condition of human life is answered by implication. For the history of the ideal of Universal Peace but re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as such, inseparable from man's life here and now. In all these great wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are ultimately phases of one Idea. It is by conflict alone that life realizes itself. That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of Being as such. From the least developed forms of structural or organic nature to the highest form in which the world-force realizes itself, the will and imagination of Man, this law is absolute. The very magic of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, derives something of its potency, one sometimes fancies, from the vast, the silent, mighty strife, the victorious energy, which brings their rays across the abysses and orbits of the worlds.

What is the art of Hellas but the conquest of the rock, the marble, and the fixing there in perennial beauty, perennial calm, the thought born from the travail of the sculptor's brain, or from the unrecorded struggle of dark forces in the past, which emerge now in a vision of transcendent rapture and light? By this conflict, multiplex or simple, the conquering energy of the form, the defeated energy of the material, the serenity of the statues of Phidias, of the tragedies of Sophocles, is attained. They are the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at rest there, a loveliness for ever. And as the aeons recede, as the intensity of the idea of the Divine within man increases, so does this conflict, this agonia increase. It is in the heart of the tempest that the deepest peace dwells.

The power, the place of conflict, thus great in Art, is in the region of emotional, of intellectual and of moral life, admittedly supreme. Doubt, contrition of soul, and the other modes of spiritual agonia, are not these equivalent with the life, not death, of the soul?

And those moments of serenest peace, when the desire of the heart is one with the desire of the world-soul, are not these attained by conflict? In the life of the State, the soul of the State, as composed of such monads, such constituent forms and organic elements, each penetrated and impelled by the divine, self-realizing, omnipresent nisus, how vain to hope, to desire, to pray, that there this mystic all-pervading Force, this onward-striving, this conflict, which is as it were the very essence and necessary law of being, should pause and have an end! War may change its shape, the struggle here intensifying, there abating; it may be uplifted by ever loftier purposes and nobler causes—but cease? How shall it cease?

Indeed, in the light of History, universal peace appears less as a dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless, start from their orbits.

§ 7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR

If war then be a permanent factor in the life of States, how, it may be asked, will it be affected by Imperialism and by such an ideal as this of Imperial Britain? The effects upon war, will, I should say, be somewhat of this nature. It will greaten and exalt the character of war. Not only in constitutional, but in foreign politics, the roots of the present lie deep in the past. In the wars of an imperial State the ideals of all the wars of the past still live, adding a fuller life to the life of the present. From the earliest tribal forays, slowly broadening through the struggles of feudalism and Plantagenet kings to the wars of the nation, one creative purpose, one informing principle links century to century, developing itself at last in the wars of empire, wars for the larger freedom, the higher justice. And this ideal differs from the ideal of primitive times as the vast complexity of races, peoples, religions, climates, traditions, literatures, arts, manners, laws, which the word "Britain" now conceals, differs from the 'companies' and 'hundreds' of daring warriors who followed the fortunes of a Cerdic or an Uffa. For the State which by conquest or submission is merged in the life of another State does not thereby evade that law of conflict of which I have spoken, but becomes subject to that law in the life of the greater State, national or imperial, of which it now forms a constituent and organic part. And looming already on the horizon, the wars of races rise portentous, which will touch to purposes yet higher and more mystic the wars of empires—as these have greatened the wars of nationalities, these again the wars of feudal kings, of principalities, of cities, of tribes or clans.

Secondly, this ideal of Imperial Britain will greaten and exalt the action of the soldier, hallowing the death on the battlefield with the attributes at once of the hero and the martyr. Thus, when M. Bloch and similar writers delineate war as robbed by modern inventions of its pomp and circumstance, when they expatiate upon the isolation resulting from a battle-line extended across leagues, and upon the "zone of death" separating the opposing hosts, one asks in perplexity, to what end does M. Bloch consider that war was waged in the past? For the sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are now by smokeless powder, maxims, long-range rifles, and machine guns abolished? These are but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the cause, the sacred cause, is by this transformation in the methods of war all untouched. Was there then no "zone of death" between the armies at Eyiau or at Gravelotte? Let but the cause be high, and men will find means to cross that zone, now as then—by the sapper's art if by no other! And as the pride and ostentation of battle are effaced, its inner glory and dread sanctity are the more evinced. The battlefield is an altar; the sacrifice the most awful that the human eye can contemplate or the imagination with all its efforts invent. "The drum," says a French moralist, "is the music of battle, because it deadens thought." But in modern warfare the faculties are awake. Solitude is the touchstone of valour, and the modern soldier cast in upon himself, undazzled, unblinded, faces death singly. Fighting for ideal ends, he dies for men and things that are not yet; he dies, knowing in his heart that they may never be at all. Courage and self-renunciation have attained their height.

Nor have strategy and the mechanical appliances of modern warfare turned the soldier into a machine, an automaton, devoid of will and self-directing energy. Contemporary history makes it daily clearer that in modern battles brain and nerve count as heavily as they ever did in the combats by the Scamander or the Simois. Another genius and another epic style than those of Homer may be requisite fitly to celebrate them, but the theme assuredly is not less lofty, the heroism less heroic, the triumph or defeat less impressive.

Twice, and twice only, is man inevitably alone—in the hour of death and the hour of his birth. Man, alone always, is then supremely alone. In that final solitude what are pomp and circumstance to the heart? That which strengthens a man then, whether on the battlefield or at the stake or in life's unrecorded martyrdoms, is not the cry of present onlookers nor the hope of remembering fame, but the faith for which he has striven, or his conception of the purposes, the ends in which the nation for which he is dying, lives and moves and has its being. Made strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to nature's day. And in the great hour, whatever his past hours have been, consecrate to duty or to ease, to the loftiest or to the least-erected aims, whether he is borne on triumphant to the dread pause, the vigil which is the night after a battle, or falling he sinks by a fatal touch, and the noise of victory is hushed in the coming of the great silence, and the darkness swoons around him, and the cry "Press on!" stirs no pulsation any longer—in that great hour he is lifted to the heights of the highest, the prophet's rapt vision, the poet's moment of serenest inspiration, or what else magnifies or makes approximate to the Divine this mortal life of ours.

War thus greatened in character by its ideal, the phrase of the Greek orator, let me repeat, is no longer an empty sound, but vibrates with its original life—"How fortunate the dead who have fallen in battle! And how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!" An added solemnity invests the resolutions of senates, and the prayer on the battlefield, "Through death to life," acquires a sincerity more moving and a simplicity more heroic. And these, I imagine, will be the results of Imperialism and of this deepening consciousness of its destiny in Imperial Britain, whether in war which is the act of the State as a whole, or in the career of the soldier which receives its consummation there in the death on the battlefield.

LECTURE VI

THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES

[Tuesday, July 3rd, 1900]

Having considered in the first lecture a definition of Imperialism, and traced in the second and third the development in religion and in politics of the ideal of Imperial Britain, and having afterwards examined the relations of this ideal to the supreme questions of War and Peace, an inquiry not less momentous, but from its intangible and even mystic character less capable of definite resolution, now demands attention. How is this ideal of the Imperialistic State related to that from which all States originally derive? How is it related to the Divine? From the consideration of this problem two others arise, that of the vicissitudes of States and Empires, and that of the destiny of this Empire of Imperial Britain.

From the analogy of the Past is it possible to apprehend even dimly the curve which this Empire, moved by a new ideal, and impelled by the deepening consciousness of its destiny, will describe amongst the nations and the peoples of the earth?

Empire, we have seen, is the highest expression of the soul of the State; it is the complete, the final consummation of the life of the State. But the State, the soul of the State, is in itself but a unity that is created from the units, the individuals which compose it. Nevertheless the unity of the State which results from those units is not the same unity, nor is it subject to, or governed by, the same laws as regulate the life of the individual. Not only the arraignment of the maxims of statesmen as immoral, but the theories, fantastic or profound, of the rise and fall of States, are marred or rendered idle utterly by the initial confusion of the organic unity of the State with the unity of the individual. But though no composite unity is governed by the same laws as govern its constituent atoms, nevertheless that unity must partake of the nature of its constituent atoms, change as they change, mutually transforming and transformed. So is this unity of the State influenced by the units which compose it, which are the souls of men.

§ I. THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE

Consider then, first of all, in relation to the consciousness which is the attribute of the life of the State, the consciousness which is the soul of man. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we have seen, the saintly ideal which had hitherto controlled man's life dies to the higher thought of Europe. The saint gives place to the crusader and scholastic, and the imagination of the time acknowledges the spell of oriental paganism and oriental culture.

Certain of the most remarkable minds of that epoch, men like Berengarius of Tours, for instance, or St. Victor, and Amalrich, are profoundly troubled by a problem of the following nature. How shall the justice of God be reconciled with the destiny He assigns to the souls of men? They are sent forth from their rest in the Divine to dwell in habitations of mortal flesh, incurring reprobation and exile everlasting, or after a season returning, according as they are appointed to a life dark to the sacrifice on Calvary, or to a life by that Blood redeemed. By what law or criterion of right does God send forth those souls, emanations of His divinity, to a doom of misery or bliss, according as they are attached to a body north of the Mediterranean, or southward of that sea, within the sway of the falsest of false prophets, Mohammed? This trouble in the heart of the eleventh century arose from the insight which compassion gives; the European imagination, at rest with regard to its own safety, is for the first time perplexed by the fate of men of an alien race and faith, whose heroism it has nevertheless learnt to revere, as in after-times it was perplexed in pondering the fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and thought it vainly strove to imitate. Underlying this trouble in their hearts is the assumption to which Plato and certain of his sect have leanings, that within the Divine there is as it were a treasury of souls from which individual essences are sped hither, to dwell within each mortal body immediately on its birth.

Now in an earlier age than the age of Berengarius and St. Victor, there arose within Alexandria one whose thought in its range, in the sweep of its orbit, was perhaps the widest and most distant amongst the children of men. In the most remarkable and sublime of his six Enneads, another theory upon the same subject occurs.[1] The fate of the soul in passing from its home with the Everlasting is like the fate of a child which in infancy has been removed from its parents and reared in a foreign land. The child forgets its country and its kindred as the soul forgets in the joy of its freedom the felicity it knew when one with the Divine. But after the lapse of years if the child return amongst its kindred, at first indeed it shall not know them, but now a word, now a gesture, or again a trick of the hand, a cadence of the voice, will come to it like the murmur of forgotten seas by whose shores it once had dwelt, awaking within it strange memories, and gradually by the accumulation of these the truth will at last flash in upon the child—"Behold my father and my brethren!" So the soul of man, though knowing not whence it came, is by the teachings of Divine wisdom, and by inspired thinkers, quickened to a remembrance of its heavenly origin, and its life henceforth becomes an ever-increasing, ever more vivid memory of the tranced peace, the bliss that it knew there within the Everlasting.