/* Mffci d3 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION IN EUROPE BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE STUDIES IN NAPOLEONIC STATESMANSHIP BONAPARTISM A POLITICAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 1485-1547 FREDERIC WILLIAM MAITLAND : A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION , IN EUROPE BY H. A. L. FISHER, M.A. FELLOW OP NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD, AND FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY METHUEN & GO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published in igu LITRVITY DRIVERS SAM 1 A iirtii To A. LAWRENCE LOWELL PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY DEAR PRESIDENT LOWELL, This book is the fruit of a course of lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute in the first year of your College Presidency. Will you allow me to dedicate it to you as a token of sincere admiration and friendship, and with every hope that the great University of Harvard may go from strength to strength under your vigorous and enlightened rule ? Though there have been a few alterations and additions, this little volume substantially repre- sents my lectures as they were written for delivery, nor have I attempted to convert a series of discourses intended for a general audience into a complete or systematic treatise. The subject is large, and I do not profess to supply more than a bare outline of the course of Republican thought and action from the downfall of the Roman Empire to the present day. But the matter is comparatively unfamiliar, and, save for Emilio Castelar's " Historia del Movimiento Re- publicano," a characteristic monument of Andalusian exuberance, I am not aware that it has been made the subj ect of a book. To an American audience, nurtured vi THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION in the Republican tradition of the New World, it may be interesting to learn at what epochs, and within what limits, and with what results a political ideal similar to their own has been an operative force in European politics. For even in the Old World there have been moments when some have dreamt the dream of Abraham Lincoln : " Friend, the Lord prefers common-looking people ; that is why He made so many of them." And so I venture to transgress the very sound maxim which reminds us that what will do well enough in a lecture-room is very seldom fit for the society on a book-shelf. Yours sincerely, HERBERT A. L. FISHER NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD January igu CONTENTS PACK I. MEDIEVAL THOUGHT AND ANCIENT TRADITION . i The Monarchical Faith in Europe Bossuet on Louis XIV. and the Qualities of Monarchy Eclipse of the Re- publican Tradition under the Roman Empire The Barbarian Monarchies Monarchy in Early Medieval Literature The Commonwealth of Iceland, 930-1264 Medieval Theory of Politics Papacy and Empire Monarchy the Most Perfect Form Absence of System- atic Democratic Thought in the Middle Ages John Wyclif, d. 1384. II. VENICE AND FLORENCE 13 The Roman Republic, 1155-1354 The Italian Con- ception of Liberty The Rise of the DespotsTyranni- cide Influence of the Classic Spirit Political Re- volutions in Florence, 1494-1530 Venice and Florence Reputation of Venice Donate Giannotti, 1492-1572 His Views on the Republican Experiments in Florence The End of the Republic in Florence The Catholic Reaction in Italy Estimates of Popular Government Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1530 Francesco Guicci- ardini, 1482-1540. III. THE PROTESTANT SPIRIT 34 Protestant Leaders and Political Obedience Political Speculations of the Huguenots Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1568-1581 Its Influence on Political Speculation Triumph of Monarchy in the Seventeenth Century Resistance to the Crown in England, 1603-45 The Democratic Party The Opportunists Ohver Cromwell is offered the Crown, 1657 Aristocratic Character of the Commonwealth Sir James Harrington, 161 1-1677 Milton's " Ready and Easy Way" Algernon Sidney, 1622-83 Republicanism and Classical Litera- ture Republicanism and the Protestant Spirit. viii THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION IV. THE RISE OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC . . 53 Enlightened Despotism - Philosophic View of Monarchy Idea of the Republic in the Writings of the Philosophers Turgot (1727-81) on Republics Influence of America especially in France Practical Character of the Cahiers of 1789 Monarchical Professions, 1789-91 Intellectual Influences making for Republicanism Polemical Advantage of Extreme Opinions First Signs of a Republican Party Influence of the King's Charac- ter Mistakes of the Court The Flight to Varennes The Interregnum Growth of Republican Literature Condorcet's Argument Royalist Reaction, July- September 1791 The Legislative Assembly, September 1791 to September 1792 The Capture of the Tuileries, August 10, 1792 Psychology of the Terror Hesitations of the Assembly The Invasion of France Elections to the Convention, September 1792 The Republic pro- claimed Character of the French Monarchy Influence of the War The Guns atValmy, September 20, 1792 Influence of Cicero and Plutarch on the French Re- volution Classical Character of French Education J. J. Rousseau, 1712-78. V. THE REVOLUTIONARY STATE .... 88 Unique Character of the French Republic Its Sanguine Psychology Centralization of Government Its Anticlericalism Growth of Scepticism in France The Civil Constitution of the Clergy Erastian Char- acter of the Settlement Civil Marriage and Divorce Schism and Separation September 1794 Propagan- dist Character of the French Republic Defiance of Treaty Rights Traditional Ambitions The Rhine Frontier The Humanitarian Strain Condorcet, 1748-94 The First Republican Constitution, 1793 The Machinery of the Terror The Eclipse of Freedom Reversal of Early Principles The Royalist Cause Beginnings of Reaction The Constitution of 1795 Government of the Directory The Crime of Fructidor The Last Two Years, 1797-99 The Fructidorians Phenomena of Revolution Work of the Jacobins. VI. THE SOWER AND THE SEED . . .120 Germany and the French Revolution Discredit attaching to the Republican Idea The Work of Napoleon Italy on the Eve of the Revolution The Risorgimento Influence of France Bonaparte and CONTENTS ix Italy The Cisalpine Republic The Dynastic Tradition broken Flight of the Bourbons from Naples The Par- thenopean Republic Its Constitution Unpopularity of the French Fall of the Republic Permanent Influence of the Napoleonic Policy Course of Political Opinion in England, 1689-1789 Essential Conserva- tism of the English People The Revolution Societies Constitutional Character of the Agitation English Republicans Thomas Paine, 1737-1809 William Godwin, 1756-1836 Robert Southey, 1774-1843 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834 Walter Savage Landor, 1775-1864 William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. VII. AUTOCRACY AND ITS CRITICS . . . .150 The Reaction, 1815-30 Special Influence of the Revolution in the Latin Zone The Restoration in France Antithesis between Social and Political Institutions Insecurity of the Monarchy Coalition of Republicans and Bonapartists Liberals and Ultras Charles X., 1824-1830 Godefroy Cavaignac (1802-57) and the Revolution of 1830 The Duke of Orleans reaps the Fruit Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832 Bentham on Monarchy Current Administration of America, 1 800- 1830 The Belgian Revolution, 1 8 30 Dutch Errors And Belgian Protests The National Congress Arguments for Monarchy. VIII. THE SECOND REPUBLIC IN FRANCE . . -171 The Revolution in Retrospect The Napoleonic Legend Growth of Socialist Ideas St Simon, 1760- 1825 Influence of Socialist Writers C. Fourier, 1772- 1837 Louis Blanc, 18 1 1 -82 Growth of a Socialist Party Defects of the July Monarchy, 1830-48 Agitation against the Government The Paris Revolution, February 1848 Resignation of the King The Birth of the Republic Extraordinary Enthusiasm Work of Lamartine's Government The National Workshops Paris and the Provinces The Days of June The " Red Spectre " The Constitutional Committee The Presidential System Permanent Effects of the Second Republic. IX. ITALY . 193 Europe in 1848 Policy of Metternich, 1815-1848 The Carbonari The Austrian Dead Weight Giuseppe Mazzini, 1808-72 His Distrust of Piedmont THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Source of his Power His Political Ideal Scope and Limits of his Influence The Disunion of the Patriots Italian Union impossible in 1848 The Venetian Republic Flight of Pio Nono from Rome, November 24, 1848 Declaration of the Roman Republic Garibaldi, 1807-82 The Siege of Rome The Retreat of Garibaldi Effects of the Republican Resistance. X. THE GERMAN REVOLUTION . . . .211 Condition of Germany, 1815-48 American Influence Influence of the Polish Dispersion Radical Move- ment hi Switzerland Action of France on Germany Karl Marx (1814-83) on the '48 Confusion of Political Ideals in Germany The Republicans The Baden Rising The Frankfort Parliament and the Danish Question The Last Republican Rally, April-May 1849 The Republican Federalists The Unitarians A Story of the Revolution. XI. THE THIRD REPUBLIC 228 Early Popularity of Napoleon III. And Subsequent Discredit The Autocratic regime The Period of Con- cessions Ollivier and Liberalism The Liberal Empire, 1870 The Republican Opposition The Internationale and the Doctrine of Class War The Individualist Re- publicans and Leon Gambetta Fall of the Empire, September 3, 1870 Origin and Character of the Third Republic The Assembly of Bordeaux Adolphe Thiers, 1797-1877 His Opposition to the Second Empire The Pacte de Bordeaux Outbreak of the Commune Communard Philosophy The Achieve- ment of Thiers Royalism's Last Chance The Re- publican Solution, 3oth January 1875 Orleanist De- fections Gambetta (1838-82) and the Third Republic Gambetta' s Fundamental Beliefs The Latin Schism. XII. AN EXPERIMENT IN SPAIN . . . .255 Charles Bradlaugh (1833-91) in Spain Undercurrent of Republican Feeling in England R. Carlile, 1790-1843 The Spanish Republic Effects of Peninsular War in Spain Working of the Constitutional System The Revolution of 1868 Forced Resignation of Amadeo of Savoy The Federalists Federalist Philosophy The Federal Republic and the Cantonal Insurrection Emilio Castelar, 1832-99 Fate of the Republic, 1874 The Federal Cause. CONTENTS xi XIII. THE REPUBLICAN CAUSE 270 Improvement in the Position of European Monarchies since 1848 This Improvement specially evident in EnglandCauses of the Popularity of Monarchy Ex- pansion of Popular Liberty found to be consistent with the Retention of Monarchy Diversion of Interest to Social Problems The Success of Bismarck Influence of Imperialism Dynastic Alliances The Instance of Norway, 1905 Reasons for preferring a Monarchy to a Republic Influence of Historical Memories in Norway Permanence of the Republican Idea in the Consciousness of Europe. NOTES 287 INDEX 297 NOTE I cannot allow this little book to go out without acknowledging the valuable help which I have received from my friend and colleague, Mr Leopold Wickham Legg, who has been kind enough to read the sheets as they passed through the Press. THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION IN EUROPE CHAPTER I MEDIEVAL THOUGHT AND ANCIENT TRADITION Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque. ENNIUS Let this moment be the beginning of an epoch of austere morality and of immaculate justice. FIRST MANIFESTO OF THE PORTUGUESE REPUBLIC, Oct. 5, 1910 A MONG the political records of Europe there are few documents more instructive than those austere and noble pieces of pedagogic literature which were composed for the only son of Louis XIV. by the greatest Catholic Bishop of the seventeenth century. Of the moral elevation and literary splendour of Bossuet's spacious treatises, of the " Discours sur 1'Histoire Universelle," which first inspired the ambi- tion of the youthful Napoleon, and " La Politique tire"e de 1'Ecriture Sainte," it is needless to speak in this connexion ; they have been appraised by many qualified judges. But some words may be said about the political creed which is expressed with so patient and systematic an intellectual procedure and in terms of such tranquil and unfaltering con- viction. It is the creed of Catholic and Monarchical Europe formulated by a mind which saw in the resplendent triumphs of the French Monarchy fresh 2 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION argument for the design of Providence to bring men under the yoke of Christian and Catholic Kings. " After St Louis," writes Bossuet to Innocent XL, to whom he renders an account of his stewardship, " we exhibit to Monseigneur the actions of Louis the Great and that living history which passes before our eyes : the state strengthened by good laws ; the finances well ordered ; the grand discoveries ; military discipline established with equal prudence and authority ; the magazines ; the new means of besieging towns and keeping armies in the field at all seasons of the year ; the invincible courage of our soldiers ; the natural impetuosity of the nation sustained by extraordinary qualities of firmness and constancy ; the firm belief common to all Frenchmen that nothing is impossible to them under so great a King ; and lastly the King himself, who alone is worth a grand army : the force, the concatenation, the impenetrable secret of his councils ; the hidden springs whose artifice is disclosed by an unending series of surprises ; our enemies panic-stricken and con- founded ; our allies faithfully defended ; peace given to Europe on equitable conditions after an assured victory ; lastly, that incredible attachment to the defence and promotion of religion, combined with a continual effort to attain to all that is grandest and best in life. These are the qualities which we remark in the father, and these are the qualities which we commend to the imitation of the son." 1 To Bossuet the monarchical form of government seemed to be commended alike by the circumstances of human history and by the texts of Divine Scripture. Surveying the political plan of Europe, he descried indeed a few republics the United Provinces, Venice, BOSSUET ON KINGSHIP 8 the Swiss Confederation, the free cities of Germany ; but of these he remarks that since they had previously been subject to hereditary monarchies, and since the greater part of the world was still, as it had been from the beginning, governed by monarchs, it was clear that monarchy was the form most natural to man. Hereditary monarchy had three principal advantages, and was characterized by four essential qualities. Its advantages are that it is natural, dignified, calculated to sustain an identity of interest between ruler and ruled ; its essential qualities, that it is sacred, paternal, absolute, and submitted to reason. If, as an additional precaution against insecurity, females be excluded from the succession, the State attains perfection and realises the declared purpose of God. " And so France, where the succession is regulated according to these maxims, may boast of having the best constitution possible and the one most conformable to that which God Himself has established ; all of which shows the wisdom of our ancestors and the special protection which God extends to this Kingdom." a The course of European history gave some sanction to the sublime but near-sighted confidence of the patriotic divine. Ever since the fall of the Roman Republic the main political tradition of Europe had been monarchical. That an ideal which inspired some of the noblest literature of antiquity was obscured for many centuries is a matter which ceases to cause surprise when we remember the two great facts of the Roman Empire and the Christian Church. The triumphs of the Empire prepared the durable domination of Roman Law and secured the survival of an Imperial 4 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION tradition which coloured the whole political thinking of Europe until the Reformation. The fact that the Founder of Christianity was born in the reign of Augustus was assumed to be an indication that the Roman Empire was the political receptacle preordained by God for the manifestation and the workings of the true religion ; and when Christianity was adopted as the Court religion under Constantine, it became a dominant purpose of Christian policy to support and to control the secular authority. The old republican traditions of the world, whether presented in the romantic rhetoric of Livy, or the mild and humane beauty of the parallel lives of Plutarch, or in the abounding eloquence of Cicero, or in Lucan's passionate verse, or in the bitter aristocratic irony of Tacitus, became obscured, as years went on, by the increasing interest attaching to religious controversy and by the diminishing interest attaching to the criticism of an institution which seemed to be as firmly rooted in the nature of things as the stars of heaven or the sins of men. " Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's " said the Church. " Quod Principi placuit legis habet vigorem " said the State. Against such potent maxims of absolutism the memories and aspirations connected with the Republic were academic and shadowy. Human history was conceived in a retro- spect as a succession of great empires, and the wonderful story of Hellenic liberty was contracted to an insignificant point in the development of man. Indeed, but for the fact that the Hellenic world formed part of the Empire of Alexander, it would hardly have left a mark upon medieval chronicles. Through the most troubled centuries of human history, when BARBARIAN MONARCHIES 5 creed was battling with creed, and the old world was crumbling away, and the old culture was ebbing, and a new society was being founded, one thing remained constant, the political faith of the Medi- terranean nations. Virgil, the poet and prophet of the young Empire, guides the steps of Dante in his visionary pilgrimage. 3 The barbarian world was full of freedom and anarchy. Tacitus, who wrote his account of Germany from full knowledge, remarks that many of the tribes were kingless, and that where Kings existed their powers were strictly limited. The affairs of the tribe were governed by the assemblage of freemen ; the dooms were popular ; the system of cultivation common and extensive, and exhibiting a sharp contrast to the intense several cultivation of the Italian olive-yard or fruit-garden. But as these Teutonic tribes found their way into the Roman Empire and established them- selves in the Roman shell, their polities, partly from the needs of the situation, but partly from conscious reflection of the Roman model, assumed more and more the monarchical form and divested themselves more and more of their democratic character. The successful chieftain becomes a King, and sometimes claims titles drawn from the magnificent vocabulary of Byzantium. Goths and Vandals, Franks and Saxons practise their clumsy monarchies before the broken mirror of the Roman Empire. Great as was the influence of Rome, it combined with instincts and traditions derived from dim Teutonic antiquity. The Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, the old German epics, the chansons de geste, depict an heroic age of which fighting is the main business, and are full of that spirit of hero-worslu'p 6 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION which is the stuff out of which the early monarchies were made. In the nomadic age of Teutonic history and even long afterwards, when feudal conditions were thoroughly established in Europe, the heroic poem made no attempt at historical fidelity. Attila and Theodoric, Charlemagne and Roland are dim, gigantic figures represented without any attempt at psychological consistency or political perspective, and indeed for the most part with a curiously complete oblivion of the actual circumstances of their lives. It is sufficient that in the common consciousness of the Teutonic race these names stood for greatness and power. Legend clustered round them, and unexpected miracles were worked with their names. There is indeed one people and one literature which escapes the common tendency of Europe to find in monarchy the principle of progress. The civilization of Iceland dates from a migration of Norse chieftains, who, to escape the tyranny of Harold the Fair Haired, turned their prows to the west and landed upon the shores of that solitary and distant island. Here, among glaciers and morasses, mountain torrents and geysers, the settlers formed a commonwealth upon a social compact. It was a republic, but unlike any other republic that had ever existed. There were neither taxes nor police, nor an army, nor an admini- strative officer, nor a foreign policy, nor indeed any joint means of coercion ; only the heads of the scattered settlements settlements divided one from another by snow mountains and lava fields and belts of black volcanic sand and pebbles met together once a year in a common assembly and agreed to obey and enforce a common law. It was a society which realised the conditions of the heroic age, save that it MEDIEVAL ICELAND 7 was devoid of the ideal of monarchy a commonwealth rudimentary, robust, and quite unique in its lack of political cohesion and in its preservation in a clear and self-conscious form of its own splendid tradition of aristocratic anarchy. And the prose literature of Iceland is as unique as the story which it relates with so much plain and human circumstance. But in 1264 the commonwealth of Iceland came to an end. It had been founded in 930, some fifty years after the first Norse settlement, and was therefore coeval with the foundation of the strong monarchical tradition of medieval Europe. But upon the general march of European ideas the literature and politics of this remote and singular community exerted no influence whatever. 4 The political conditions of the Middle Ages were unfavourable to the growth of republican sentiment. War was chronic, communication difficult, and social inequality engrained in the necessary institution of feudalism. The countries which were best ordered were those the extent of whose territory did not exceed the powers of a medieval monarchy to control, such as Aragon, Sicily, England ; and the advance of monarchy was a sure indication of national progress. Clerk and burgess looked to the King for protection against the rapacity of the noble, and the whole influence of the Roman Church was enlisted in the support of an institution from which she received and expected material benefits, and which she believed to be founded on the impregnable rock of Scripture. The political theory of the early Middle Ages, forged in the stress of the conflict between the Empire and the Papacy, bears witness to this general belief in the necessity and divinity of Kingship. 8 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION The Papalist controversialists of the twelfth cen- tury neither contested the God-ordained character of the Roman Empire nor questioned its duration. Still less did they propound republican ideals. It was a sufficient step for them to assert that monarchy was an office founded upon a contract, and that if the contract were violated by the sovereign he could be lawfully deposed. In England, constitutional growth was sure and wholesome, and though the Barons' War was stoutly contested, the song of Lewes which proclaims the theory of the opposition to the Crown does not belong to the category of democratic documents. It proclaims no republic, sketches no scheme of natural rights. The remedy for the ills of the harassed nation is that Henry III., whose " gentle soul " flits through Dante's " Purgatory," should govern with the consent of his baronage. 6 Political thought is for the most part the product and not the cause of political conditions. Men describe what they find around them and throw into the form of a deductive philosophy what is in reality the result of their own partial observations. In the centuries of faith, when religion determined the policy of Kings, and every remarkable incident was liable to be regarded as a miracle; when ^ the Church was the sole receptacle of culture, and imposed its canons of belief upon a rude, passionate, and credulous society, political thought was dominated by an idealism which was both dictated and circumscribed by scriptural texts and analogies. It was believed that the world would for ever be controlled by the twin- forces of Papacy and Empire, though it was a matter of keen dispute whether or not the temporal was or was not subject to the spiritual power. Students BELIEF IN MONARCHY 9 of history remarked that the world had passed under a succession of empires Assyrian, Median, Persian, Macedonian, Roman and in a sequence so constantly attested it was an instinct of theology to discover evidence of a polity plotted by God for the well-being of man. As late as the age of Shakespeare a Calabrian monk, arguing from the premise that a universal monarchy was essential to the existence of society and the salvation of souls, contended that the mantle of Rome had fallen upon the shoulders of the Spaniard, whose dominion should accordingly spread over the earth. Having driven the Moors into Africa and exterminated the sectaries of the Low Countries, the new Cyrus would destroy the Ottoman Empire and purge England and France of heresy. So per- sistent was the belief that the monarchical constitution of the Church Catholic should be reflected in the institution of the world empire. 6 The greatest of the Gentile philosophers supported a tenet which was believed to be a part of the divine providence by the doctors of the Catholic Church. Aristotle maintained that of all forms of government the most perfect was the rule of one good man, and the Christian teacher saw in the government of God both the pattern of the perfect monarchy and the exemplar expressly divined for the imitation of His human subjects. A curious instance of the power of this belief is afforded by Savonarola's " Treatise upon the rule and government of States," written in 1494 for the guidance of the city of Florence. It was tlir <>l>jrt ot thi> remarkable discourse to rxpl.iin that the people of Florence, being at once the most intellectual and spirited community in Italy, were unsuited to a monarchical or aristocratical govern- 10 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION ment. A monarchy might do well enough for the Northern races, who were robust but unintellectual, or again it might be adapted to Orientals, whose activity of mind was balanced by physical languor ; but wherever intellect and high spirit were combined, some form of popular government (Governo civile] must be established. Yet this conclusion is prefaced by an elaborate profession of belief in monarchy as the ideal form of government, not only because concentrated power was stronger than dispersed power, but also because monarchy was more like God. " The government of the world," argues the Dominican preacher, "is by nature the best government ; and since Art follows nature, the more closely the govern- ment of human things resembles the government of the world and of nature, the more perfect it is. Since, then, the world is governed by a single Person who is God, and since all natural things in whom some government is seen are governed by One, as the bees by a king and the powers of the soul by reason, and the members of the body by the heart, and similarly with other things which have government, it follows that that government of human things which is administered by a single governor, is of its nature the best of all governments. Whence our Saviour, wishing to give to His Church the best gover- nor, made Peter head of all the faithful, and in every diocese, nay, in every parish and ministry, wished that the government should be through a single person, and that finally all the lesser heads should be under one head, His Vicar." 7 It is true that from time to time the physical miseries of an uncomfortable age produced a crop of speculations which went far beyond the orbit of MEDIEVAL HERESIES 11 respectable thought. The right of the Church to possess wealth, or of the State to exercise coercive power, was questioned in the thirteenth century by the sectaries of Southern France, for whose chastise- ment was invented the terrible weapon of the Inquisition. But such anti-social vagaries were rigidly suppressed. The heresies of the early Middle Ages contained a mixture of wild fancy and obdurate realism, exactly calculated to secure the discomfiture of those who held them. They were in the main the beliefs of the poor and oppressed, of men who felt the full force of the ironic contrast between the promises of the gospel and the performance of the world ; who questioned doctrine where it seemed to conflict with the patent evidence of the senses ; and finding the world full of evils, cried out against the fundamental principles upon which it was arranged. Such a spirit of wholesale revolt is common to every age and clime. In the Middle Ages, when the State was loosely jointed, and the dominant evil was to be found rather in the deficiency than in the ex- cess of governance, the spirit of democratic protest was sporadic and unorganized. No comprehensive political programmes were drawn up ; no revolu- tionary philosophy of the State was formulated. Disciplined minds avoided original speculations, which in that theological atmosphere might easily glide into heresy ; and to the sectary of the mountain valleys the science of political architecture was as hidden as the anatomy of the body or the vast continent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. There can be no clearer proof of the strict limita- tions which the character of the medieval polity imposed upon political speculation than the case 12 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION of John Wyclif. In the whole course of medieval history few thinkers were bolder or were driven by the consecutive employment of a powerful under- standing to more original conclusions. Wyclif attacked pilgrimages and relics, the doctrine of purgatory, and even the central mystery of transub- stantiation. He anticipated all the main positions of Protestantism a century before Luther was born and a generation before the summoning of the first General Council for the reform of the Papacy. Yet his speculations were curiously circumscribed by the character of the society in which he lived. Holding the audacious doctrine that dominion was founded on grace, or, as we should now phrase it, that virtue alone could give a valid title to power and property, Wyclif still conceived of the world as organised in a feudal hierarchy. The King held of God upon a tenure of grace, and forfeited his office upon failure to conform to the conditions of the tenement. In every generation good men have been perplexed by the paradoxical relation between moral and economic values. Wyclif dreamed of a society in which wealth and power would be strictly determined by moral qualities ; but while he denied that a community organized on any other principle could possess an adequate moral sanction, he made no proposals for a political revolution, and cannot be included in the roll of European republicans. CHAPTER II VENICE AND FLORENCE E facil cosa e conoscere donde nasca ne' Popoli questa affezione del vivere libero ; si vede per esperienza le cittadini non aver mai ampliato ne di dominio ne di ricchezza, se non mentre sono state in liberta. MACHIAVELLI, "Discorsi" The free cities of Italy, now delivered from the German yoke, began to enjoy and to abuse the blessings of wealth and liberty. The most trifling incident was sufficient to produce a conspiracy, a tumult, and a revolution. Among these troubles the dark, insidious, vindictive spirit of the Italians was gradually formed. GIBBON, " Miscellaneous Works " IN Italy alone the political conditions helped to sustain the memories of the classical age. Here was a land of ancient cities and splendid monuments, a development of civic life so vivid and powerful that it absorbed the Lombard aristocracy and success- fully affronted the power of the German Emperors. The Lombard towns regarded themselves as part of the Roman Empire, but as enjoying guaranteed rights of substantial independence under it. Venice^ slowly and by degrees shook itself free of Byzantine control, and vied with Genoa in imperial enterprise. But the spirit and meiflury"t>f the ancient Republic were most clearly exhibited in the chequered and violent history of medieyalRjHji^, Here, in the Piddle of the twelfth and ajgain in the middle of the iirteenth century, attempts were made to revive e ancient Respublica Romanonim. The leaders '3 14 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION of these forlorn movements, Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzo, are among the most picturesque figures in history, but they had as little of real statesmanship in their composition as Shelley or Victor Hugo. Arnold held the ascetic doctrine of ecclesiastical poverty ; the mystic Rienzo cherished the ideal of a federation of Italian republics under a Latin Emperor elected by the people of Rome. Neither of them understood the practical conditions of the hour ; yet each made some ineffectual effort to glorify the politics of a grasping age by ideals of justice, piety and patriotism. The tragical fate of these medieval tribunes of the Roman Republic Arnold, executed by the Emperor ; Rienzo, torn to pieces by a city mob illustrates the incon- gruity of these classical memories amid the savage feuds of Guelph and Ghibelline. The enthusiasm of Petrarch was aroused by the sanguine genius of Rienzo, " the tribune of Freedom, Peace, Justice, and the Liberator of the Holy Roman Republic," and the rise of the Roman Republic was hailed in a letter, and celebrated in an ode from the pen of the first humanist in Europe. For a while the fierce feuds of medieval Rome were quelled by the eloquence of a common notary, the son of a washerwoman and a wine-seller. The barons were cowed into submission, the country roads were cleared of bandits ; dicing, blasphemy, and concubinage fell into sudden disfavour. Rienzo dreamed that the union of Italy might grow out of the concord of Rome. He declared that every Italian was a member of the Roman Republic, proudly summoned the Emperor and Electors to submit their claims to the sovereign city, and in a full parliament, attended by deputies from the Tuscan cities, enacted COLA DI RIENZO 15 that no Emperor, King, Prince or Marquis might set foot on Italian soil without licence of the Pope and the Roman people. The fantastic revival of this impracticable polity lasted no more than seven months ; and Rienzo, driven into retirement by a few Neapolitan lances, became in turns a hermit, a Ghibelline, and a Guelph. Returning to Italy in 1353, after seven years' absence, he was enabled, through the aid of the great Cardinal Albornoz, in whose suite he was voyaging, to regain his authority in Rome. But the spare and mystic tribune of Italian independence had now grown into the corpulent officer of a French Pope. He surrounded himself with a bodyguard, exhibited in the quality of his rule the principal attributes of a classical tyranny, and met the doom which is appointed for city tyrants. Some four hundred years afterwards Montesquieu made the just observation that the republics of Italy had done less to secure human liberty than the constitutional monarchy of England. 1 Not dissimilar was the judgment of a great political observer in the opening decades of the sixteenth century. " It is better," writes Guicciardini, " to be the subject of a prince than of a republic, for a republic keeps its subjects under, and gives no share of its greatness save to its own citizens ; a prince is common to all, one man is as much his subject as another, therefore everyone can hope to be favoured or employed." a Liberty was the grandest and most living ideal in the political consciousness of the Italian race, but it was difficult to harmonize with the spirit of the Guelph and Ghibelline, or with that hard treat- ment of subject communities, which was everywhere in Italy attendant on the spread of civic dominion. 16 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION The cynical maxim of Lorenzo de' Medici, that Pisa must be held down by famine, Pistoia by factions, and Volterra by a fortress, would not have been repudiated by the firmest Florentine admirer of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Liberty in the sense of political independence and class privilege was better understood than liberty in the sense of political toleration ; and so ingrained was the spirit of privilege in the morals of the nation, that an Italian patriot of the sixteenth century congratulated himself on the political disunion of his country, being unable to separate in his mind the idea of a single Italian republic from the oppressive rule of a city oligarchy. 3 It is to this spirit of jealous exclusion, operating alike against rival factions, dependent cities, and the humblest elements of society, that we trace the rise of the Italian despotisms. The free cities of the early Middle Ages owe the loss of their liberties as much to the violence of their own inner discords as to the crimes or ambitions of the successful usurper. Nor is it possible to assert that the Italian genius flourished more abundantly in the fierce air of republican freedom than under the shelter of princely rule. 4 But though Italian despotism had its reason for existence and discharged a function in the discipline and development of the race, it was by its very nature associated with frightful evils. The crimes and cap- rices of the despots of Italy from Eccelin da Romano, the viceregent of Frederick II. , to Alessandro de' Medici, the contemporary of Sir Thomas More, form one of the darkest and least credible pages in human history. We read of whole populations barbarously mutilated, of the butchery of all the members of a TYRANNICIDE 17 family, and of torture erected into a fine art and enjoyed as an established diversion. It was natural that the evils of tyranny should become a standard theme with the moralist and the preacher, and that with the growth of a passionate interest in the authors of antiquity the ethics of tyrannicide should be founded on classical example. Brutus and Cassius, whom Dante the imperialist (living in an age which had lost the knowledge of Plutarch's Lives) consigned with Judas Iscariot to the lowest abyss of the Inferno, were heroes to the contemporaries of the Visconti and the Borgia. 6 To kill a tyrant was regarded as a necessary act and a sure passport to immortality. Now the murderer would draw inspiration from the Catilinarians of Cicero, now from the lives of Brutus or Timoleon. When Piero Pagolo Boscoli was condemned to death in 1512 for an attempt on the lives of Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici, he prayed that Christ might displace Brutus from his soul, and was comforted by his confessor's assurance that St Thomas had expressly sanctioned conspiracies against usurping tyrants. In 1536 Lorenzo de' Medici, a youth notorious for his profligate ways, decoyed his kinsman, Duke Alessandro, into a private house by the lure of a disgraceful amour, and slew him at night with the assistance of a professional cut-throat. The brutal act was applauded by all the victims of the Medicean reaction, and Giannotti, the leading publicist of Florence, commended the " glorious deed " of this second Brutus, as " a most noble theme " for the talent of a contemporary poet. The historian Varchi, who recounts the story of the murder in all its cruel circumstance, refuses to pronounce upon the moral 18 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION purity of the deed, but asserts that if it were indeed true, as Lorenzo affirmed, that he was solely desirous of liberating his country, then no praise or reward could be adequate to his merits. To an uneasy youth burning with a desire for immortality no path was so short or certain as tyrannicide, provided only that the slayer might survive the slain and defend his motives to an admiring audience. The puny Lorenzacchio, as he was contemptuously called, lived to write a formal apology for his act, which presents a curious illustration of the moral code of that age. He assumes that it is universally allowed that popular government is better than tyranny, and undertakes to demonstrate that Alessandro was a tyrant more impious than Nero, more flagitious than Caligula, and more cruel than Phalaris. Critics had objected that it was dishonourable to murder a man to whom the slayer was bound by ties of obligation, trust, and kinship. Even if these facts were so, tyrants, however slain, were best dead. Lorenzacchio, however, takes pains to deny the allegation that he had failed to observe the polite statutes of social honour. He was not in any true sense the kinsman of the murdered bastard, but even if he were, did not Timo- leon earn a deathless name by killing his brother in the cause of liberty ? He was under no obligation to a man from whom he had not even received the privilege of exemption from the taxes. He was unfaithful to no trust, for Alessandro was incapable of confidence, and drawn to his doom by the mere force of his own libidinous appetites. His motive had been simple, the liberation of his native city from an intolerable yoke. If the end had not been reached, if one tyrant had been succeeded by another, POWER OF THE CLASSICS 19 that was not his fault. So far as one man might serve liberty, he, at the risk of life, had served the liberties of Florence. 6 Here, as in every other department of Italian thought and feeling in the age of the Renaissance, it is difficult to overestimate the authority of classical tradition. We who are removed by many generations from the twilight of the Middle Ages can afford ourselves the luxury of sentimental sympathy for a social state whose meanness and narrowness of view, whose cruelties, vices, and discomforts we are not called upon to share, and can only with the greatest stretch of historical imagination imperfectly represent to our minds. But the men of the Renaissance were but just emerging from the darkness, the incongruity, the discomfort. That which is distant and gracious to us, was near and sordid to them. That which is an insensible part of our abundance, was to them an imperious necessity and a toilsome conquest. We enjoy a great modern literature, informed alike by the classical and the Christian spirit ; for them the liberating and rational influences could only be won by a devout interrogation of the classical texts them- selves. The black clouds still hung about the sky in stark relief against the brilliant illumination shed from the retrimmed lamps of ancient learning. And the more that ancient world was studied the more did it appear to be a world of giants. The best medieval chronicler, compared with a Polybius, a Livy, or a Tacitus, was childish, empty, and pedestrian. The most powerful modern State sank into insignifi- cance when measured against the imposing fabric of the Roman Empire. For the men of the Renaissance ancient wisdom was the supreme wisdom, ancient 20 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION poetry the consummate art, ancient eloquence the rich and most exquisite music of persuasion. When a Florentine historian wishes to praise a Capponi or a Ferrucci, he says that he deserves to be compared rather with the ancients than with the moderns, regarding ancient virtue as something austere and heroic, grander in scale and purpose, more decorative and more dignified than the humble and retiring graces of the Christian soul. And as the course of Roman history provided the sovereign body of precepts by which communities might prosper to the highest point of affluence and glory, so in the whole field of political prudence everything worth saying had been said by the Greeks and the Romans. Aristotle had praised the mixed state, in which the monarchical, aristocratic, and popular elements were combined in due proportion, and every Italian thinker of the Renaissance followed in his train. He had condemned democracy, and they agreed that popular government was full of dangers. He had recommended the exclusion of tradesmen and artisans from the privilege of citizenship ; and even Varchi, the most democratic of Florentine historians, ac- knowledges that a commercial republic is an anomaly, and argues that the greatness of Florence, a city in which, to the horror of the polite Venetian, silk- mercers were politicians and politicians were silk- mercers, implied an extraordinary degree of merit in its inhabitants, since it was an acknowledged axiom of philosophy that no polity of shop-keepers was ever well ordered. 7 The revival of classical studies, coinciding with an epoch of political revolution, produced in Florence, then the intellectual capital of Europe, an illustrious THE REPUBLIC OF FLORENCE 21 generation of historians and publicists. Political thought flourishes most vigorously in an epoch of change, and at the turn of the fifteenth century the political system of Italy was violently deranged by the invasion of Charles VIII. and by the expulsion of the Medici from Florence. That a city so famous for its intelligence should suddenly throw off a despot- ism and adopt a popular constitution was not only in itself an arresting and impressive fact, but the exciting cause of political speculations which Europe had never entirely consented to neglect. For six and thirty years after the revolution of 1494, the political fate of Florence was in the cauldron. The stormy republic of Savonarola and Soderini was sup- planted in 1512 by a Medicean restoration, and this in turn, after fifteen restless and unquiet years, by a brief, unsteady gust of liberty. Finally, in 1530 the Second Florentine Republic succumbed to the over- whelming power of the Imperial arms, after a defence of eleven months so gallantly and tenaciously conducted as to throw a final ray of glory upon a blemished and a bankrupt cause. After that catastrophe, which was followed by a tale of savage proscriptions, the Medici ruled the State for some two hundred years, upon a system which lasted till the French Revolution, and if the verdict of history is to count for anything, it proves that the Medicean system rather than the Republic was best suited to Florentine conditions. Rare repubbliche popolare si vede essere state diuturne " popular republics are rarely found to be lasting " was the judgment of a Venetian who visited Florence in the last year of its liberty, and predicted the approaching doom of freedom in a State 22 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION " fuller of factions than all the other cities of Italy." 8 Yet it is only just to remember that the experi- ment of a free commonwealth was tried at a crisis of overwhelming difficulty, and only overthrown by an unscrupulous league of Emperor and Pope. The reasons why the republican form of govern- ment flourished in some parts of Italy and not in others furnished matter for speculation as soon as the Humanists of the Renaissance turned the lamp of inquiry on to the field of politics. Machiavelli argued that if the Republic throve in Tuscany and Venice and not in Naples, Lombardy, or the Romagna, the explanation was to be found in the texture of society. A free commonwealth could not consist with a feudal class, and must be established upon the foundation of social equality. When these conditions did not exist, failure could only attend upon a republican experiment, unless indeed it were prefaced by a massacre of nobles. Of this the brief and distracted chronicle of the Ambrosian Republic in Milan (1447-1450) was sufficient evidence. Venice, it is true, was both a republic and the classic city of Italian aristocracy, but the noblemen of Venice were noblemen only in name. They drew no large revenue from lands, they owned no castles, exercised no feudal authority, and such wealth as they possessed existed in the form of merchandise and chattels. Venice therefore constituted no real exception to the rule that social equality was necessary to free government. And yet Venice and Florence, however much they might be forced into the same political category, stood out in the Italian imagination as sharply contrasted types Venice as the model of permanence and stability, Florence of that sick and VENETIAN STABILITY 23 fevered unrest which Dante has denounced in the sixth canto of the " Purgatory." To the political philosopher of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Venice seemed to have solved the great riddle of statecraft. She was admired with the same sincerity with which the ancients admired Lacedemon, and largely for the same reasons. No State was so well- informed either as to its own resources or as to the resources of its neighbours. No State was better served or more generous to its servants or supported by so high and constant a temper of patriotism in its citizens. Dynasties rose and fell, city after city was racked by faction and civil war ; Venice alone of all the Italian States preserved her polity uninjured through every vicissitude. 9 To the mind of Machiavelli and his contemporaries such stability was a sign not of weakness but of vigour and health. The notion that continuous change is a part of improvement, or that States must be always adjusting themselves to conditions which are in turn continually altering, was entirely foreign to that age. History indeed was witness to a constant series of changes which no student of past politics could ignore, but those changes were cyclical, not pro- gressive. The secret of political happiness was not to promote change but to discover and maintain a condition of wholesome equilibrium. And tried by whatever tests were available in that age, Venice seemed to have attained that desirable equipoise. Very rarely had the even current of her life been perplexed by conspiracy. No clusters of embittered exiles menaced her peace or spread the poison of their spited hopes broadcast through Italy. She had won a great empire in land and sea, had fought with 24 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION German, Hungarian and Turk on even terms. Her arsenal was one of the famous sights of Europe, her counsels were secret, her police strict, her justice renowned for competence and equity, and so greatly had she triumphed over the Church within her gates that there was a moment when ardent Protestants, doubting whether so high a spirit of political inde- pendence could consist with a loyal devotion to the Papal See, believed that the Republic of St Mark could be drawn into the circle of the Reformed Communities. 10 To a Florentine who had lived through the first Medicean restoration and the second republic, who had seen the execution of Savonarola, the sack of Prato, the plottings and counter-plottings, the battles and sieges, the executions and proscriptions, and all the uncomfortable accessories of a revolutionary period, the tranquil course of Venetian history must have seemed to be full of instruction. Why was it that Venice succeeded where Florence failed ? What was the inner secret of that marvellous durability which made it possible to compare Republican Venice to its own advantage even with so famous a structure as Republican Rome ? Among the exiles of Florentine liberty, who were cast out after the events of 1530, was a certain Donato Giannotti, born of humble or at least not of illustrious parentage, who was driven by the circumstances of his life to undertake this enquiry in a serious spirit and from whom we may learn something of the quality of Florentine republicanism, as that creed was held by serious and honourable men. Of Giannotti's outward life little need be said here. He was born in 1492, received the best classical education which DONATO GIANNOTTI 25 Florence could provide, and opened his literary career in a delicate shower of Latin verse and light Italian comedy. The first Medicean restoration, coming as it did when he was twenty years of age, and shattering all the brilliant expectations which had been framed out of the triumph of liberty by men of his class and set, forced the central problems of statecraft upon his mind. To think of statecraft was to think of Venice, the supreme mistress of political wisdom. Giannotti visited the city of the lagoons, and in a graceful dialogue, composed in 1526 but not published till 1540, explained the anatomy of the Venetian State and expressed his admiration for its manifold virtues. Using a simile which quickly passed into the general currency of thought, he likened the Venetian con- stitution to a pyramid of which the base was formed by the Gran Consiglio, the apex by the Doge, and the intervening stages by the Collegio and the more numerous Consiglio de' Pregati. Such a union of the many, the few, and the one seemed to him to be the true political compound, conformable alike to the prescriptions of Aristotle and to the natural postulates of political stability. The young Florentine, whose own city had fallen back into the control of a despot, looked with eyes of envy upon the aristocratic republic which had contrived for so many centuries to occupy and inspire the patriotism of its members. Nothing, he asserts, is more calculated to elevate the human soul than the task of government, nothing more certain to debase it than exclusion from public affairs. To live under a tyranny is to live " without high thought," a life " worse than the animals," for what is tyranny but a government framed with the express object of making men " so base and vile that 26 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION they do riot know whether they are awake or asleep in the world " ? There is a fine manly ring in these outbursts of republican sentiment. Giannotti spoke not from books but from a full heart. He knew the grim realities of Italian caprice and had witnessed the pollution of public virtue which comes from the violence of tyrannical lusts. The idea of a free Florentine Republic, which, more than any beauty of art or literature, kindled Giannotti's enthusiasm, was within a measurable distance of being realised during the three years which elapsed between the second expulsion of the Medici and their final restoration. That was the golden period of Giannotti's life, the years that he would have loved to chronicle, when he was Secretary to the Council of Ten, filling the office recently held by Niccolo Machiavelli and himself taking an active part in the di*ama of public affairs. It was a shining interval of liberty, but so brief that the actors of the Republic had hardly settled down to their parts before a new company of players forced their way upon the stage with a dark and hateful tragedy. To Giannotti, pondering afterwards upon the catas- trophe which overtook the free Commonwealth of Florence, it seemed that the lesson was one of misused opportunity. The foundations of the true Republic had been laid ; the soil was sound and holding, the materials all ready to hand and of the proper con- sistency, and yet the building had never been made proof against the weather, but came toppling over at the first big storm. What were the flaws and how could they be corrected ? That was a question upon which Giannotti had written a memorandum when he was an official of the Republic, and which occupied A FLORENTINE IDEAL 27 his mind during the ample leisure of exile. In a treatise upon the Florentine constitution, composed in 1531, the defects of the two unfortunate republican experiments are examined, and a recipe prescribed for a durable and pacific policy in case the Medicean tyranny should for the third time be happily over- thrown. There must be a General Council to fulfil the desire for liberty in the common people, a senate to gratify the appetite for honour in the middle class, a Collegio or Cabinet, and at the head of the State a prince or Gonfalonier of Justice, holding office for life. The secret of a good polity lies in the fact that it gratifies every class of society, the people whose cry is liberty, the middle class who thirst for liberty and honour, the nobles who being brought up in the pride and pomp of wealth must find some element of grandeur in the state. No free government could really be based on an aristocracy alone. ' A city in which the nobles obtain their desire, is nothing else but a company of masters and slaves ordered to the satisfaction of the avarice and dishonest wishes of the ruling class.' In Florence, however, social conditions clearly pointed to a republic. The proscriptions of Cosimo de' Medici had levelled the nobility ; there was a large and powerful middle class equal in strength and influence to the united force of nobles and people ; and if the destiny of Florence had not been fulfilled it was owing to assign- able and removable causes, such as the refusal to make the Gonfalonierate a life-office, the presence of faction, and the unhappy influence of the Convent of St Mark upon the deliberations of the State and the temper of the people. 11 " The pencil of the Holy Ghost," says Bacon, 28 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION "hath laboured more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon," and the final agonies of the Florentine Republic have received more attention from contemporary historians than any period of equal length in the prosperous reign of Lorenzo de' Medici. The city, which was de- fended by the genius of Michael Angelo, stood out as the last bulwark of Italian liberty against Spanish dominion. Deserted by all its allies, tormented by plague, faction and hunger, it affronted the wrath of Pope and Emperor and the famous professional infantry of the Prince of Orange. To defend their liberty from the hated rule of the Medici the republicans of Florence fired the luxurious villas which glistened among the olives and cypresses of their girdling hills, sacrificing a treasury of luxury and art to the military needs of the moment. Such fanaticism in a desperate cause seemed to contem- poraries marvellous and half-insane. Guicciardini, an opponent of the Republic, cites it in his Ricordi as an example of the power of faith working in a population naturally superstitious and fevered by confident prophecies of a holy triumph. Varchi ranks it with the defence of Saguntum as one of the most memorable sieges in history. Yet neither to contemporaries nor to posterity is the last essay in Florentine Republicanism free from severe reproach. Its legislation was hectic, ill-considered and often unjust. Despite the honourable efforts of Niccolo Capponi, its first Gonfalonier, it so failed to exorcise the demon of faction that its course was stained by mock trials and cruel executions. To Varchi, who recounts the story of the struggles for liberty with eloquent enthusiasm, the ultimate cause of THE SPANISH PERIOD 29 failure was rooted in the defects of the Florentine temperament. No good man could rise to eminence without becoming the mark of envy and persecution. No reputation was ever stable. The air was full of mocking wit and fierce jealousy and the quick incessant flash of party spite. " O ingenia magis acria quam matura ! " Guicciardini who looked on at the play with eyes of distaste confirms in his secret notebook Petrarch's famous comment on the Florentine temperament. 12 The Medicean restoration in 1530 ushers in the Spanish period of Italian history. We pass from an age of freedom and grandeur to an epoch of servility and exhaustion marked by the revived power of the Papacy with its Jesuit Order and its Spanish legions. The spirit of republican liberty which had flamed out in the sermons of Savonarola and the speeches of Carducci was henceforth ruthlessly suppressed and the virtues of the antique world were placed upon the Index as only less dangerous than the philosophy of Machiavelli. In 1548 Fran- cesco Burlamacchi, a noble Lucchese, dreamed of a league of Tuscan Republics and of a Church reduced to apostolic poverty ; but such imaginings were of no practical account in this age of schooled compliance and lost ideals. Art swiftly declined ; literature became feeble and sickly. The spirit of manliness and hope passed out of politics. A great Latin scholar struggling day after day with ignorant eccle- siastics for leave to teach Tacitus to his Roman class is a little fact emblematic of the new world of clerical obscurantism into which the most brilliant and creative race in Europe had so suddenly passed. Venice indeed preserved her aristocratic autonomy, 30 and the ancient Republic of San Marino which sur- vives to this day serves to remind us that several civic communities were sheltered by insignificance or timely compliance from the ruin which overtook the aspiring Republic of Florence. Such survivals did not alter the main facts of the political situation. The barbarian was master of Italy and the Pope was his accomplice. 13 The two great political thinkers who lived in this heroic age were both opposed to popular government. Machiavelli indeed served the Republic of Savonarola, as Secretary to the Council of Ten, but thirteen months after the Republic had been destroyed is found cringing to the Medici. The "Prince," his most famous treatise, is dedicated to the grandson of the great Lorenzo, who is recommended to free Italy from the barbarians by a policy compounded of force and fraud. To the staunch Florentine republican no counsel seemed more flagitious, but Machiavelli could find nothing in Italian Republicanism but certain disunion. The case was different with Germany and Switzerland, countries which had little communication with their neighbours and had not learnt corruption from France, Italy and Spain, the three polluting nations of the world. In the city republics of these simple races liberty was still sustained by a reverence for law and by a wholesome lack of territorial ambition ; but in Italy Machiavelli despaired of self-government. He found his country- men, uneasy, factious, tormented by ambition and yet enervated by the long use of mercenary troops and accustomed to luxurious ways of living. A drastic medicine was needed to expel an inveterate malady. The young Lorenzo was invited to take a lesson from GUICCIARDINI 81 Cesare Borgia, the master-adventurer who in a swift and thrilling sequence of plot, battle, siege and murder had built up a short-lived state out of the jarring atoms of the fierce Romagna. Francesco Guicciardini was the younger contem- porary of Machiavelli and lived to see the end of the second Florentine Republic and the final restoration of the Medicean power. Like Machiavelli his life was passed in affairs, and he gained, as men of affairs are apt to do, a shrewd, circumspect habit of mind and a distrust, though not altogether an unsympathetic distrust, of enthusiasm. He had learnt his politics in a bad school, at the court of Ferdinand of Aragon, whose duplicity was a byword through Europe, and for many years of his life was employed in various administrative capacities by the Papal Curia. Being a man of full, minute powers of observation, but deficient on the side of poetic imagination and abstract thought, he was very conscious of the puzzling play of human motive, of the diverse talents, conflicting interests and uneasy humours of the body politic. He thought government a very difficult business, shockingly conducted by tyrants but liable to be terribly mismanaged if the common folk were given a voice in affairs. " Who says people, says a mad animal, prone to a thousand errors, a thousand confusions, without taste, without delight, without stability." But facts were facts, and a city which had once tasted liberty could not be treated as if the appetite for liberty did not exist or had never been gratified. Guicciardini was neither the victim of phrases nor a builder of theories. More than once he compares the function of the political inquirer to that of the grave and expert doctor who 32 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION is called in to diagnose a malady and to prescribe according to the requisites of the case. There was no curative power in catch-words. " The fruit of liberty," he says, " is not that everyone should govern, but that the fit should govern." The ever- lasting talk about the ancient Romans sickened him. As well compare the Florentines with the Romans as expect an ass to run like a horse. Some things Florence could not be. She could not be ancient Rome ; and equality was too deep in her marrow for her ever to acquiesce in the rule of a close aristocracy. The Medicean government had many faults ; so too had the first Republic, though Guicciardini seems willing to admit that the value of the experiment could not be properly judged by the rough and confused beginnings of popular rule. The problem was to find some form of well-ordered polity, sufficiently popular to satisfy the Florentine spirit and yet avoiding the evils inherent in demo- cratic rule the irresolution, confusion and delay of popular deliberation, the liability of democracies to be sparing of money when it was necessary to be lavish, open when it was essential to be secret, neutral when the one rule of safety was to take sides. Guicciardini the aristocrat ends like Giannotti the republican as the prophet of mixed government. We can imagine the sort of constitution he would have framed, a grand council of discreet, well born, substantial citizens speaking only when they were asked for their opinion and electing no one but the fit to offices of state, a patriotic and circumspect senate, a Doge or Gonfalonier chosen for life or a long term of years. His taxes would have been light and equitable, with no unfair discrimination against GUICCIARDINI 88 political enemies, his civil justice uncorrupt and accessible to all, and the poor and weak would have been protected by the whole force of the state against the oppression of the strong. Critics accused him of avarice and pride, and the astonishing record of his secret thoughts shows that he was schooled in the art of self -repression. He was a little cold, a little cowardly and only faintly touched by that great overflow of heart and spirit which swept through the rapt congregations of the Duomo and made Florence for the time a city of penitential ecstasy ; but no Italian of that age had a stronger grasp of those first essentials of public welfare, failing which a state, whether monarchy or republic, can never content its members. 14 CHAPTER III THE PROTESTANT SPIRIT A Popular Assembly without a Senate cannot be wise A Senate without a Popular Assembly will not be honest The reasons why the Nations that have Commonwealths use them so well and cherish them so much, and yet that so few nations have Commonwealths, is that in using a Commonwealth it is not necessary that it should be understood, but in making a Common- wealth that it should be understood is of absolute necessity. HARRINGTON (1611-77), "Political Aphorisms" THE Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was the great dissolvent of European conservatism. A religion which had been accepted with little question for twelve hundred years, which had dominated European thought, moulded European customs, shaped no small part of private law and public policy and delighted the world with exquisite fabrics in stone, glowing altar pieces, and solemn music, was suddenly and sharply questioned in all the progressive communities of the West. Yet the leaders of this great and comprehensive revolt were careful to mark their respect for the secular authority. Their followers might lampoon the Pope and asperse the barbarous monk with a sharp shower of ridicule, but of Princes, rulers and magistrates no evil word must be spoken. Martyrdom was better than Civil War ; the tyranny of the heretic prince should be passively borne by the godly subject. Luther, who railed against the rebellious peasantry, 34 HUGUENOT THEORY 5 was as peremptory in his defence of political obedience as Calvin who dedicated his " Institutes " to Francis I., or William Tyndale who wrote the " Obedience of the Christian Man." There was indeed one exception. Spurred by the persecutions of Queen Mary the fiery Knox broke away from the tenets which were enjoined in Geneva and from his own earlier doctrine and openly supported the assassination of a heretic Prince. But this was an exceptional and temporary lapse : Salmasius was justified in his assertion that John Milton's " Defence of Regicide " found no support from the captains of Protestant theology. If European democracy owes much to the Protestant reformation it owes nothing whatever to the direct teaching of the Protestant leaders. So deeply rooted was the reverence for monarchy that even the wars of religion in France and the Netherlands produced no distinctive republican doctrine. The massacre of St Bartholomew created a feeling of fierce and passionate distrust for the government of Catherine de' Medici, and Huguenot pamphleteers dipped their pens in gall to denounce the Italian poison with which Machiavelli was alleged to have infected the policy of the French state. The old arguments were furbished up with some improve- ments and with the note of asperity which belongs to a period of bitter struggles. That monarchy was not an hereditament but an office, that it was con- ferred by the people and could be withdrawn by its accredited magistrates, that a tyrant who had violated his compact either with God or the people could be lawfully resisted, not indeed by private individuals, but by lawfully appointed magistrates such was the substance of the Vindiciee contra lyrannos, a famous 86 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION pamphlet used in turn to justify the revolt of the United Provinces and the execution of Charles I. But this marks the extreme boundary of Huguenot license. The " religion " possessed a candidate for the French throne and saw in the ultimate triumph of Henry of Navarre a prospect of established security. To demand that the States-general should be sum- moned was a counsel of prudence, to oppose the principle of monarchy would have been madness. Every prominent member of the Huguenot party accepted monarchical government. 1 One new republic emerged from the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century. The Dutch threw off the Spanish yoke after a struggle perhaps un- paralleled in history for its proud and desperate tenacity. They founded a new nation, broke away from the most powerful monarchy in Europe, and out of the nation grew an empire beyond the seas. Incredible material success followed the triumph of liberty, success which stood out in brilliant colours against the growing shadows which were creeping over the older lustre of Spain. A generation had hardly elapsed after the close of the war of Inde- pendence before the Dutch had made themselves the first commercial power in Europe. They carried the sea-borne harvests of the Baltic plains, mastered the spice-trade, and gave Europe its first discipline in the principles of banking and modern commerce. It was a great republican advertisement. Thomas Hobbes, who did not like republics, attributed some part of the English revolution to the admiration which London and other English trading towns had con- ceived for the prosperity of the Low Countries. Voltaire, writing about a century afterwards on the THE DUTCH REVOLT 87 benefits of political liberty, took the Dutch Republic as his text. " The registers of the accounts of the Low countries," he writes, " which are now at Lille, show that Philip II. did not draw 80,000 crowns from the seven United Provinces. An account of the revenues of the single produce of Holland made in 1700 shows a revenue of 22,241,339 florins or in French money 46,706,811 livres 18 sous about the revenue of the King of Spain at the beginning of this century." a Yet neither in its opening nor in its concluding stages was the war of Dutch Independence a con- scious effort to found a republic. The Dutch leader William of Orange had been brought up at the Spanish Court and had served the Spanish throne in diplomacy and in war. He was the most conservative of men and he led the most conservative of races. For a long time he maintained the fiction that he was contending for the King of Spain against his evil advisers. He inscribed upon his banner the words, Pro rege, grege, lege, for the King, for the people, for the law, and at any moment it might have been open to the monarchy of Spain to recover the allegiance of the revolting provinces by the with- drawal of the Spanish troops and by politic concessions to the spirit of religious and constitutional liberty. Those concessions were not made, and ultimately in 1581 the Spanish allegiance was cast off in a solemn act of abjuration. But so far were the Dutch from desiring to found a Republic that while Holland and Zealand insisted upon placing themselves under William of Orange, the remaining provinces invited the Duke of Anjou to step into the place of the King of Spain. The sovereignty of the Dutch provinces 38 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION was offered in turn to the Hapsburg, the Valois and the Tudor Houses ; and in the institution of the Stadholderate the Dutch found a means of gratifying something of that monarchical instinct which the tyranny of Spain had been unavailing to destroy. No great revolution in affairs has had so little foundation or support in revolutionary theory. Johannes Althusius, a Syndic of the town of Emden, published his " Politico methodise Digesta " in its final and expanded form in 1610, with a dedication to the Estates of Frisia. In his preface he alludes with admiration to the laudable conduct of the Confederate Provinces, who by casting off the yoke of a powerful King had recognised that sovereignty was no inseparable property of the prince but belonged to the united multitude and people of the different provinces. But while allowing in most distinct terms the sovereignty of the general will, the German burgess has nothing but contempt for the people through whom that will is made manifest. The masses are credulous, envious, fierce, turbid, seditious, inconstant. There is, luckily it would seem, no modern example of the democratic republic, and for a description of such a polity the philosopher must go back to Aristotle. Althusius has been described as a Radical, and it is true that the fundamental principles of Rousseau's Social Contract are to be found in this scholastic treatise written under the fresh impression of the great Dutch triumph. Althusius, like Rousseau, bases sovereignty upon contract, and sees that all forms of government ultimately rest on popular consent, but in his practical recom- mendations he goes no further than the author of the Vindiciae. Government should be shared between MONARCHIC REACTION 89 the supreme magistrate and the ephors whose duty it is to watch and if necessary to depose the executive head of the State. The merits and demerits of hereditary monarchy are nowhere discussed. 3 The religious convulsions caused by the Protestant Reformation were, so far as the continent of Europe was concerned, appeased by the middle of the seventeenth century. The Treaty of Westphalia acknowledged the independence of the Dutch and the Swiss Confederations, and settled the perplexed confessional frontiers of Germany. In the course of the struggle which led up to the settlement some important ideas were generated or revived ; that the religious might be disengaged from the civil power, that toleration was a necessity, that resistance to tyranny was lawful, that sovereignty was based on contract. But as yet these ideas were on their trial. The Catholic powers were not inclined lightly to surrender the ideal of orthodox unity which had guided Latin Christianity through the long agonies of the Middle Ages. The disruptive forces of Protestantism were met by a challenging effort of concentration not in the Catholic world alone. Ab- solute monarchy, its praises heralded by Bodin and Bacon, seemed to many minds to be the true guarantee of material force and progress. Men whose grandfathers told them of the glorious days of Queen Elizabeth, and who themselves witnessed the triumphs of Louis Quatorze, may well have thought that Kingship could not be too strong or power too absolute. It was a common belief that the world was settling down to an age of despotism, and that the superiority of monarchies over republics had been patently exhibited in the course of history. 40 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION This view was contested in England. Here two strong currents had combined to wash away the fabric of absolutism which it had been the design of Charles I. and his advisers to erect ; the traditional reverence for parliamentary and civil liberties and the hostility of a Puritan majority to the ecclesiastical innovations of Archbishop Laud. Whether the great rebellion or anything approaching to it would ever have come to pass if Laud had not interfered with the Church may be gravely doubted ; for it is seldom that revolu- tions arise from political causes alone ; but when the Long Parliament found itself on the eve of war with the King, it was compelled to advance political claims which no English Parliament had ever before made. Gradually and by reluctant stages the leaders of the parliamentary cause were driven to see that it might be necessary to depose the King and to create a Republic. A contest which began over a battle of precedents, an issue which Coke thought might be settled by an appeal to the Common Law and Prynne was prepared to determine by the musty archives in the Tower of London, widened out until the monarchy itself was shaken to its foundations. First Parliament lopped away the new excrescences of the prerogative ; then it claimed guarantees that the odious claims would not be revived ; then it prepared a scheme which would have so weakened and limited the executive power that it would have left England a monarchy only in name. In 1644 some forward members were asking the Venetian Ambassador for a model of his famous Republic. The idea of a Commonwealth was freely sown throughout the land before Naseby crushed the last army of King Charles. For some forty years, till the head of Algernon THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH 41 Sidney fell upon the scaffold, there was a republican party in England. It took its origin in the New Model Army, a body of men who were for the most part Independents, or believers in the complete auto- nomy of the religious congregation. Schooled and hardened by the experience of war, and prepared by the very nature of their religious convictions for the extreme conclusions of democratic logic, these men argued that no trust could be placed in the man of blood, that no trust could be placed in a Presbyterian Parliament, and that the state must be built up afresh by an agreement of the people. They desired not only to abolish the monarchy, but that nothing in the nature of monarchy should be put in its place. They believed in a Parliament, but they thought that a Parliament should consist of one House ; they would have neither lords nor bishops nor any national or centralised organization of the Church. Man had natural rights which it was the duty of the State to convert into laws, and one of these was the right of choosing his own religious belief and of freely professing its tenets. Among the superior officers of the army there was a school of thought less radical, less absolute, more English and opportunist. It was represented by Oliver Cromwell himself and by Ireton, his son-in- law, who had the principal hand in drafting the Instrument of Government/ the first constitution of the Commonwealth. Ireton held that " men are corrupt and will be so," and that laws must be invented to check and balance the original and ineradicable perversion of human nature. Property was given neither by the Law of God nor by the Law of Nature : it was the result of human contrivance. No one had 42 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION a right to it ; wherever it was useful, it should be respected. To those who argued that monarchy was destined to disappear from the face of the earth, Ireton replied that he was confident that if ever the power of monarchy were destroyed it would not be by the hand of man but by " the breaking forth of the power of God among men to make such forms needless." The debates in the army were rough and obstinate, but finally the moderate party triumphed. 4 The Instrument of Government lodged the executive power in the hands of a single person, and took good care that the franchise should not fall into the hands of Cavalier ploughmen. Oliver Cromwell was King in all but name and a party arose which demanded that, wielding as he did the substance of power, he should also assume the title. There was much to be said in favour of such a course. The whole machinery of English law assumed the existence of the monarchy. The writs ran in the name of the King. The Statutes were enacted by the King with the advice of the Lords and the assent of his faithful Commons. The King was the fountain of justice, prosecuted criminals, named the judges, touched for the King's evil. The assumption of the royal title by the Protector would solve many difficulties and quiet many scrupulous consciences. Oliver hesitated and refused. He consented to restore the second Chamber and acquiesced in the petition that he should name his successor ; but he would not take the crown. The son of the Huntingdon brewer who had proved himself the first soldier and the first statesman in England, who had made England the greatest military power in Europe, who, for the first time, had gathered the British Islands into a OLIVER CROMWELL 48 legislative union, who had wrested Jamaica from Spain and humbled the navies of the Dutch, would not take the crown of Elizabeth. Again and again in the spring of 1657 he resisted the pressure not only of a majority in Parliament but of his own solid conviction that " something with monarchical power in it would be most effectual for the settlement of the nation." In a dim way he felt that to assume the Crown of England would be an act of treachery to a devoted following, and with this loyal scruple there was mingled a shrewd suspicion that he could not estrange one half of the Party which had made him Protector without weakening the foundations of his rule. 6 The Commonwealth then remained, growing in the lineaments of its outward structure more and more like the ancient monarchy and less and less like the radical ideal of the army. In no sense could it be called a Democratic Republic. Sir Henry Vane, who led the Parliamentary Republicans, doubted if it could be called a republic at all. The parlia- mentary franchise was limited to men of substantial fortune, and the Protector's actual powers were far in excess of those which had been wielded by Charles I. To John Milton, the official Apologist of the Commonwealth, the image of the Republic came in the splendid garb in which it had been invested by the historians of " the old and elegant humanity of Greece." He defended the deposition of the tyrant, argued in his " Defence of the English People " against Salmasius that Hereditary Government was contrary to the law of nature, since no man had a right to exercise Kingship unless he exceeded all others in wisdom and courage ; but his ideal republic was no 44 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION more democratic than the actual commonwealth which was arousing the impatient disgust of Lilburne and Vane. His " Defensio Secunda " reveals alike his aversion from the rule of a single person and con- tempt for the principle of popular sovereignty. How could he trust " the besotted and degenerate baseness " which upon the appearance of the Eikon Basilike was " ready to fall flat and give adoration to the image and memory of this man who hath offered at more cunning fetches to undermine our liberties and put tyranny into an art than any British king before him " ? But the course of history clearly showed that the days of the aristocratic classical republic were over. Among those who held republican opinions at this period there was none more ingenious than Sir James Harrington, the founder and leading spirit of the Rota Club, a society of gentlemen, who, while Parliament was sitting, would meet every night in the New Palace Yard at Westminster to discuss constitutional problems. In an effort to account for the origin of the Civil War Harrington had made a discovery of some importance : it was due, he thought, to a change in the balance of property. Formerly the balance of property had been with the Crown and nobility ; gradually, owing to the policy of the Tudor Kings, it had passed from the aristocracy to the Commons. The balance of power in other words depends upon the balance of property ; and con- sequently if a State is to be stable, it must repose upon an equal distribution of wealth. Now a monarchical restoration would in Harrington's view be inadvisable, because a King trying to govern in England by Parliament would find the nobility of no effect at all ; but a Parliament where the OCEANA 45 nobility is of no effect at all is a mere popular Council, and such a Council will never receive law from a King. A republic, therefore, England must have, but a republic based upon principles which were not to be found in the Cromwellian Protectorate. That was a Government based upon a system of exclusions ; Oceana the ideal Commonwealth must comprehend all parties in the State. The Protectorate began with a single chamber ; Oceana must have a Senate as well as a popular assembly. A popular assembly without a Senate cannot be wise ; a Senate without a popular assembly cannot be honest. The one body could not be too small ; the other could not be too numerous. Harrington in other words rejected both that type of republican opinion which found its ideal in the Long Parliament and that which looked back with regret upon the rule of an elect Council of Saints. Two special pieces of mechanism would secure the continuity and stability of his ideal State, a rota and an " Agrarian." By the system of the rota which Harrington was the first to recommend, a third of the Senate and Popular Assembly was to retire every year and their places to be filled by the ballot. By the " Agrarian " the land of Oceana was divided into five thousand lots yielding an income of 2000 apiece, primogeniture abolished and equal division at death enjoined by law. It was a fanciful polity drawn largely from the example of Venice, a state which Harrington preferred to all other governments in the world. Such speculations were too fantastic for practical politics, and were forgotten in the wild joy which heralded the Restoration. One more treatise of enduring interest belongs to that short period of political uncertainty which lies 46 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION between the death of Cromwell and the return of Charles II. In 1659 and again in the spring of 1660 Milton published his " Ready and Easy way to establish a Free Commonwealth." The Royalist banners were advancing, the line of the Puritan defence was clearly shaken, and a blast of the old trumpet was needed to rally the wavering courage of the godly host. The thoughts of the thoughtless were turning to Kingship, " a government burdensome, expensive, useless and dangerous." " Where," asks Milton, " is this godly tower of Commonwealth, which the English boasted they would build to overshadow Kings and be another Rome in the West ? " Was England to lose " in a strange after game of folly " all the battles she had won, all the treasure she had spent ? Was she to prove herself inferior to " our neighbours of the United Provinces, to us inferior in all outward advantages, who notwithstanding in the midst of greater difficulties courageously, wisely, constantly went through the same work and are settled in all the happy enjoyments of a potent and flourishing ' Republic ' to this day ? " Was she to renounce that free Commonwealth " not only held by wisest men in all ages the noblest, the manliest, the equallest, the justest government, the most agreeable to all due liberties and pro- portionate equality, both humane, civil and Christian, most cherishing to virtue and true religion, but also (I may say it with greatest probability) plainly commended or rather enjoined by our Saviour Himself to all Christians not without remarkable disallowance and the hand of Providence upon Kingship ? " He could not doubt that all " ingenious and knowing men " would easily agree with him that " a free Common- THE REPUBLIC OF MILTON 47 wealth without single person or house of Lords " was by far the best government that could be had. But the free Commonwealth of Milton's dream would be governed neither by the mob nor even by short Parliaments but by a permanent Council of " ablest men chosen by the people." An imagination nourished on the heroic figures of Plutarch could never rest in the flat and equal levels of democratic arithmetic. " The enjoyment of civil rights," he says, " would be best and soonest obtained if every county in the land were made a little Commonwealth and their chief town a city, where the nobility and chief gentry may build houses or palaces befitting their quality, may bear part in the government, make their own judicial laws and execute them by their elected judicatures without appeal in all things of civil government between man and man." In this, as in other passages, the feeling for aristocracy is shown to be as essential a part of Milton's political enthusiasm as his fierce ardour for political and civil liberty. The shires of England might be " little Commonwealths," but never, if Milton were to have his way, " little democracies." He conceived them to be controlled by the " nobility and chief gentry " of the county, expert horsemen, fine and catholic scholars, fashioned in that elaborate mould of poly- glot learning and finished courtesy which he depicts in his essay on education, and living in " houses or palaces befitting their quality " at the seat of govern- ment, with no less of pride and power than the long- descended rulers of Genoa or Venice. In striking contrast to these two writers, in whose dreams there was little that could possibly be applied in the public temper which then prevailed, is the 48 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION figure of Algernon Sidney. Loudly as the Restoration was acclaimed it did not and could not put an end to the Commonwealth^ men. Republicanism survived in covert forms, finding its principal professors in the sectaries against whom the Cavalier Parliament enacted the Clarendon Code and in the active supporters of the Cromwellian rule. 6 Of these last there was none more resolute, adventurous, or ill-judged, than Algernon Sidney, the last Englishman whose head has fallen on the scaffold for the Republican cause. Sidney was one of that band of politicians led by the adroit and versatile Shaftesbury who saw in the prospect of the Duke of York's succession a grave peril to the liberty of England and to the Protestant cause. He realized with the force of a powerful and vehement imagination the comprehensive designs of the Counter- reformation, how, after the Protestants had been, dragooned out of France, steps would be taken to have them dragooned out of England, how the policy of the greatest military monarchy in Europe was dictated by the Jesuit Order, and how the accession of James II. to the English throne would bring the Jesuits to Whitehall and place the policy of England at the disposal of Louis XIV. It is not necessary here to consider how far these expectations were overdrawn or how far they were consciously magnified by the demon of faction. Partisan spirit ran high in King Charles' reign, and the country party who encouraged the libels of Titus Oates and accepted money from the French ambassador does not go down to history with pure hands. Sidney undoubtedly plotted to take King Charles' life and paid the price, leaving behind him a record of political opinion and aspiration which is one of the classical monuments of the ALGERNON SIDNEY 49 Republican faith. Few people care to read folios, and Sidney's " Discourses on Government " form a weighty folio. It is a rich, vigorous, noble book, the work of a man who had served a great Common- wealth and treasured the memory of its liberty and power. It is full of irony and eloquence and governed by the plain and masculine logic which is nourished by the strong impulses of a combative nature. Sidney knows what he wants, and, writing courageous English, writes English which posterity can read with delight. He holds that monarchy is founded upon human depravity and says it very plainly. To those who object that republics are only suited to small states he pertinently asks when it was that God ordained that great nations should be slaves. To those who pointed to the prosperity of the French monarchy he replied in a memorable and prophetic passage that " the beauty of it is false and painted. There is a rich and haughty King who is blessed with such neighbours as are not likely to disturb him and has nothing to fear from his miserable subjects ; but the whole body of that state is full of boils and wounds and putrid sores. There is no real strength in it. The people are so unwilling to serve him that he is said to have put to death above four score thousand of his own soldiers within the space of fifteen years for flying from their colours, and if he were vigorously attacked, little help could be expected from a dis- contented nobility or a starving and despairing people." Such was the reply of the English republican to the glowing panegyric of the French divine drawn up in the sumptuous palace of St Germain for the education of the Dauphin of France. Liberty, according to Sidney, bore a very different crop. The United 4 50 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Provinces of the Low Countries afforded " an example of such steadiness in practice and principle as is hardly to be paralleled in the world." The Swiss Cantons, despite every defect which could be imagined in the constitution of their Federation, had, " ever since they cast off the insupportable yoke of the Earls of Hapsburg, enjoyed more peace than any other state in Europe, and from the most inconsiderable people are grown to such a power that the greatest monarchs do most solicitously seek their friendship." But there was an example nearer home still Sidney cast his eyes back upon the Commonwealth of which he had been the servant. " We need no other proof . . . than what we have seen in our own country, where in a few years good discipline and a just en- couragement given to those who did well, produced more examples of pure, compleat, incorruptible and invincible virtue than Rome or Greece could ever boast." 7 There is a famous lament in Hobbes' " Leviathan " to the effect that the civil troubles of England in the seventeenth century were due to the study of the Greek and Latin classics. Aubrey traces Milton's Republicanism to " his being so conversant with Livy and the Roman Authors," and in the writings of Harrington and Sidney we may equally trace the influence of classical tradition. Sidney's examples of popular government are taken from Rome, Athens, and Sparta. He decides on the testimony of the classical authors that an aristocratical republic is better than one in which " the demo- cratical part " is supreme. The " best and wisest of the Ancients " are still for him the supreme guides in political prudence. And this liberal influence INFLUENCE OF THE CLASSICS 51 of the Greek and Roman classics was not confined to professed republicans and revolutionaries. No two men were more unlike Algernon Sidney in their outlook on life and in the colour of their convictions than Montaigne and Dryden, the one an exquisite epicurean, the other a Tory Roman Catholic. Yet both felt the force of that ancient literature of political freedom which is one of the precious heirlooms of the modern world. " When we hear this author speaking," writes Dryden of Polybius, " we think ourselves engaged in a conversation with Cato the Censor, with Lelius, with Massinissa and with the two Scipios ; that is with the greatest heroes and most prudent men of the greatest age in the Roman Commonwealth. This sets me so on fire when I am reading here or in any ancient author their lives and actions, that I cannot hold from breaking out with Montaigne into this expression : " It is just," says he, " for every honest man to be content with the government and laws of his native country, without endeavouring to alter or subvert them ; but if I were to choose where I would have been born, it should have been in a Commonwealth." 8 To glorify liberty is one thing, to prompt revolution, another. The republics of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries rose out of practical grievances and were the work of men steering to no certain goal, but driven onward by the stress of unexpected tides. Geneva throws off the yoke of Charles III. of Savoy just in time to become the republican capital of the Calvinist faith ; the Dutch Republic is the reluctant answer of an oppressed people to the cruelties of a persecuting Church and an alien army ; the English Commonwealth the protest of a contentious, con- 52 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION servative, and divided nation against innovations, making for tyranny, in Church and State. Wherever we find it to flourish, the tree of liberty grows from the root of injured interests. Nor was it in the countries of Latin speech and of the classical tradition that the principle of monarchy was first openly repudiated. European Republicanism, which, ever since the French Revolution, has been in the main a phenomenon of the Latin races, was a creature of Teutonic civilization in the age of the sea-beggars and the Roundheads. It is true that the absolute monarchies of Spain and France were severely tested in the seventeenth century. Portugal broke away from Spain, revolution blazed out in Catalonia and Naples, and for five years the French monarchy was paralyzed by the troubles of the Fronde. The word republic was timidly whispered in Lisbon, lightly spoken in Paris. Yet through all the wars and tur- moils which followed in the wake of the Reforma- tion, the monarchical faith of the Romance nations was firmly maintained. The only partial exception was the half-Latin city of Geneva, the source of that stream of democratic opinion in Church and State which, flowing to England under Queen Elizabeth, was repelled by persecution to Holland and thence directed to the continent of North America. There, out of the original principle of religious independency, men of the English race built up free communities whose history and example have ever since been of account in the fortunes of Europe. 9 CHAPTER IV THE RISE OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC Lc Republicain en France est un tre classlque. MICHKLET THE eighteenth century has rightly been regarded as the age of enlightened despotism. In almost every quarter of Europe, from the Ural mountains to the Lusitanian coast, from Stockholm to Naples, from Vienna to Berlin, it was possible at one time or another to admire the operations of a vigorous and progressive monarchy. In Russia there was Peter the Great, and after an interval Catherine II. ; in Naples and Spain Charles III. ; in the Austrian dominions, Maria Theresa, Joseph II., and Leopold ; in Prussia, Frederick the Great ; in Sweden, Gustavus III. In each of these different countries the problems to be attacked, the abuses to be swept away had their own peculiar character, but one feature was common to the general malady. The evils of European society were rooted in feudalism and entrenched in privilege. It followed from this that the power of the monarchy to cure the disease varied in direct proportion to the inability of the aristocracy to arrest its operations. Where the monarchy was absolute, where it was unfettered by the opposition of privileged corporations or estates, a campaign could be planned on a comprehensive design and pressed to a victorious and efficient conclusion. But in proportion as these S3 54 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION conditions were unrealized, the struggle was likely to be long, arduous, and perplexed. Nowhere was progress so swift and palpable as in Russia, where the Tsar united in his own person the supreme and absolute authority both in Church and State ; nowhere so slow as in France, where the royal will was impeded by a powerful judicial corporation and by the great and opulent interests of a numerous and privileged aristocracy and a mundane and privileged Church. There are two tests which may be applied to any Government, the test of efficiency and the test of education. The philosophers of the eighteenth century, impressed as they naturally were with the achieve- ments of monarchy in their own age, and holding as they did that politics was a deductive science, a series of immutable principles discoverable by reason, valid for all time and place, and containing infinite potentiality of happiness for the human race, primarily regarded the test of efficiency. They did not care to ask themselves what form of government was likely to enlist the greatest amount of civic energy or to impart to the members of the State the most valuable political education. Their principal concern was to discover the most efficient instrument for the rapid diffusion of rational ideas, and with few exceptions they recommended monarchy. In his beautiful life of Turgot, Condorcet describes the views of the great French reformer in the following terms : " The equal right of contributing to the formation of laws is doubtless an essential, inalienable, and imprescriptible right which belongs to all proprietors. But in the actual state of society the exercise of this right would be almost illusory for the greater part of the people, and the free and assured enjoyment TURGOT AND MONTESQUIEU 55 of the other rights of society has a much more extensive influence on almost all citizens. Besides, this right has no longer the same importance, if laws be regarded not as the expression of the arbitrary will of the majority, but as truths deduced by reason from principles of natural law and adopted as such by the majority. The sole difference then is that the consent to these truths is tacit in one constitution, while in another it is public and subjected to legal and regular forms." Pursuing this general line of reasoning, Turgot concludes that monarchies are peculiarly adapted to promote the general happiness of mankind, since the monarch has not and cannot have any interest in making bad laws, since he can often act in pursuance of enlightened opinion without waiting upon the slow march of the common mind, and since there was reason to hope that bad laws could be attacked to best advantage under an unfettered monarchy. 1 It was no part of the philosophical programme of the eighteenth century to regenerate humanity by hoisting the republican flag over the capitals of Europe. The philosopher still drew his ideas of the republic from the writings of the ancients, and after distributing some academic commendations, proceeded to enunciate the traditional warnings against the opposite evils of the demagogue and the despot. The republic, according to Montesquieu, postulated a large supply of public virtue, a small territory, and an absence of luxury and large fortunes. If small, it was liable to destruction at>3Erhands of a foreign power ; if great, it was inevitably corroded by internal decay. Federation alone could preserve the existence of so delicate and precarious an organism : 56 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION and federation, as exemplified in Holland, in Germany, and in the Swiss Leagues, had undoubtedly succeeded in giving stability to many republican polities which would otherwise have succumbed to the dangers incidental to their constitution. Rousseau was not, like Montesquieu, a professor of the doctrine of relativity. His prescriptions were made up for humanity at large in royal independence of time and space ; but he agreed with the witty author of the " Esprit des Lois," in thinking that democracy could only properly belong to small and poor States. With this opinion, much as he despised Rousseau's political masterpiece, Vojjtau'-is in substantial agree- ment. Premising that there has never been a perfect democracy, because men have passions, he holds that the people are likely to receive more attention and to enjoy more prosperity in a small than in a large republic. It is easier, he observes, to get people to listen to reason in an assembly of a thousand than in an assembly of forty thousand. Such an observa- tion shows clearly that Voltaire's mind was pre- occupied by the city republics of ancient or of medieval times. When he thinks of a republic, his mind naturally conjures up the image of a market- place crowded with enfranchised citizens or of a podesta summoned in to adjust the griefs of the Montagues and Capulets. He will allow to such a government certain merits ; and when shaking himself free from these associations, he turns to the green and thriving pastures of Switzerland or to the busy marts of the Netherlands and contrasts them with the Roman Campagna, once crowded with glittering marble villas and now, under the desolating paralysis of papal rule, so solitary and plague-stricken that you THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 57 may voyage a whole day without seeing man or beast, he acknowledges the triumphs of political liberty. But the modern republic lacks grandeur : it is no seminary of statesmen. It can show no Oxenstiern or Sully or Burleigh on its civic rolls. To the monarchy, aided by the wisdom of the wise, Voltaire looked for the regeneration of France. 2 Turgot used often to say that he had never known a really republican constitution. The communities which boasted of the name of republic, turned out, upon a close examination of their political anatomy, to be no better than vicious aristocracies. He had never known a community in which the proprietors had an equal right of contributing to the formation of laws and of regulating the public institutions of the State. If the life of that noble reformer had been prolonged for eleven years, he would have witnessed the formation of a great democratic polity on the other side of the Atlantic. He would have seen the principles of the true republic fixed and embodied in living institutions, and he would have realised that it is possible for communities of free men to form diplomatic alliances, to carry on war, to frame the terms of a triumphant peace, and finally to construct a state upon original lines suited to their own peculiar needs and proclivities, without the support of an aristocracy or the shelter of a crown. 3 The foundation of the United States of America was a fact the magnitude and import of which was at once perceived in Europe. It proved that a great modern State could adopt the republican form ; it showed that a pure democracy was capable of avoiding the follies and dangers which were considered to be peculiar to democratic government. The 58 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION example given by the New World might be copied in the obsolescent states of Europe. In the New World a whole continent, stretching from the Atlantic to the shore of the Pacific, would in the inevitable march of time be brought into one great democratic federa- tion. A whole continent would be rescued from the barbarism of dynastic wars by the simple expedient of having no dynasties. The principle which in America secured the everlasting peace of a great section of the globe, by establishing a system of federated republics, might eventually be extended to Europe. If Kings could be made to vanish, with their absurd family ambitions, their costly armies, and their intriguing diplomats ; if every State in Europe could be governed by the popular voice, it was reasonable to expect that the gravest obstacles to international union would disappear. It was argued that States with homogeneous constitutions must themselves be homogeneous ; that the interests of democracies are essentially identical ; and that communities regulated upon the principles of natural justice would find their ethical satisfaction in the sentiment of human fraternity. 4 No country in Europe was so quick as France in appropriating morals from the American Revolution. The war of American independence had been waged against England, the enemy of many centuries, and seemed in the eyes of patriotic Frenchmen to be the retribution of Providence for the British conquest of Canada, and a triumph of natural right over force and fraud. A French army had helped to procure the American triumph, and returned to its native land saturated with republican spirit. The French navy had recaptured some of its lost prestige. By INFLUENCE OF FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 59 an ironic coincidence the last military triumph of the old dynasty was combined with the first practical demonstration of those principles of natural right which, passing from the writings of the French philosophers into the common mind of France, with all the splendid corroboration of the Peace of Versailles and the American Constitution, helped to undermine the fabric of the monarchy. We must not, however, overrate the influence of philosophy upon the generation which preceded the great awakening of the French Revolution. Even now, if account be held of the general mass of men, philosophers claim a small audience, and their audience was far smaller in the eighteenth century. There was no system of compulsory education ; there were few public libraries ; a book was still something of a luxury. It is questionable whether Voltaire in his long lifetime numbered as many readers for his seventy volumes as a successful American novel would find in the course of a single season. The vast mass of the French population was still illiterate, and of the people who read books only a small pro- portion was interested in politics. Madame Roland was a literary lady of the middle class. She read Shakespeare, and Plutarch's " Lives," and Thomson's " Seasons," besides assisting a prosaic husband in the compilation of a " Dictionary of Arts and Crafts " ; yet in the whole course of her correspondence, which has recently been published, there is no single allusion to public affairs before the summoning of the States General. The Revolution seems to cut a clean chasm across her mental life. Before it she knows nothing about politics, and after it she lives for nothing else.* We shall not therefore be surprised to find that when, 60 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION in 1789, all France was invited to formulate its griev- ances, those grievances took a very practical shape. The cahiers of 1789, in so far as they reveal the mind of France, and the revelation is certainly authentic and comprehensive within the sphere of public policy, are very realistic documents. The men who compile them do not argue from first principles. They do not say, " We must have Equality, Liberty, Fraternity ! " They do not demand a republic or make any pro- fession of principle inconsistent with the continuance of the French monarchy. They nowhere demand the abolition of the nobility or clergy as separate orders of the State. Most of the cahiers express a wish that the Catholic religion should remain the State religion. " France," says M. Champion, who has read more of the cahiers than anyone else, " remains so profoundly Catholic that she has much difficulty in ridding herself of her ancient intolerance." It is not only the Church which ten years after the death of Voltaire with difficulty resigns itself to the edict in favour of the protestants and wishes that " the national religion should preserve all its privileges as the State religion " ; this view is shared by a great portion of the Third Estate. In general, while admit- ting that protestants should obtain civil rights and that they should be qualified to hold certain appoint- ments, it refuses them any place in the judicial administration, in educational work, or in the police. They are to have no churches, no public assemblies or ceremonies ; they must keep silence on religious questions. There is indeed a whole revolution contained in the cahiers, but it is not a republican revolution. France desires a better administration, a better judicial system, the abolition of privilege, THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY 61 of feudal dues, of the militia service, the elimination of caprice from the system of government. The republic is so little in the mind of the country that the peasants fire the castles and destroy the muniments uTThe belief that their actions are countenanced by the King. 8 How then did the French Republic come to be established four years later, seeing that republicanism had never been recommended by the philosophers and was no part of the general creed or tradition of the country ? The Constituent Assembly was profoundly monarchist, and left as the final monument of its labours a constitution which preserved the monarchy though with diminished and diluted powers. The Church of course was monarchical, the aristo- cracy was monarchical, the peasantry monarchical. Mirabeau, who was certainly one of the most impressive figures in the early history of the revolution, not only by reason of his sonorous and powerful eloquence, but also by reason of the fact that he had grasped the transcendent necessity of plucking privilege out by the roots without surrendering the country to anarchy, urged again and again on the Constituent Assembly the doctrine that the King was the direct representative of the people and that it was to the interest of the people that his power should be strong. The man who had written the classical treatise against the Lettres de Cachet, who had championed the claims of the Third Estate against the Clergy and the Nobles, and has told the King's usher that the National Assembly would not disperse save at the point of the bayonet, claimed that the King should possess an absolute veto on legislation, that he should be empowered to declare war, and to make peace, and that 62 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION his ministers should have a place in the Legislative Assembly. To give a complete account of the causes which secured the triumph of the Republican principle in France would involve the whole story of the early stages of the revolution. Some of them belong to the intellectual tissue of the age ; others were grounded in human character ; others again proceeded from political developments which were beyond the scope of abstract philosophy or common prudence to foretell. So far as the moral and intellectual causes were concerned it may be sufficient to note that the men who wrote for the newspapers in Paris and the summoning of the States General was the signal for a sudden and altogether unprecedented output of newspapers and pamphlets the men who orated to the mob in the gardens of the Palais Royal, who harangued at the street corners, and in the clubs, and who howled down the moderate speakers in the Assembly, were possessed by a fierce hatred for privilege and by a passion for social equality. They had taken from Rousseau either at first, or at second, or at third hand, the doctrine that the General Will is sovereign, that man is by nature free but everywhere in chains, equal but everywhere affronted by distinc- tions of caste, and that it was the one and only function of government to restore the lost code of Nature in all its simple harmonies. From Voltaire, whose influence was assisted by the intolerance of the Church, the literary class of Paris had long learnt to despise the priests and to discount the alleged religious sanctions of the French monarchy. They believed nothing in a tradition, which was the legacy of pre- judice, or in a history which was the record of crime. THE LOGIC OF EXTREMES 63 Holding that man was infinitely perfectible, and believing that it was in the power of law to effect vast and immediate improvements in human nature and society, they were impatient of any arguments based upon grounds of national temperament, or vested interest. Society was rotten at the core, and it was the duty of France to effect a thorough revolution. They had an array of first principles which would do the business, but if the principles were rigidly applied there would be no place for an hereditary monarchy in France. The first French democrats started with an advantage which in any deliberative assembly is more precious than numbers. Accepting the pre- mises which the majority of French intellectual men accepted, the premises about the Rights of Man and the sovereignty of the People and so forth, they drew a strict conclusion against which there was no logical defence, if once it were admitted that tradition was to count for nothing and logic for everything in the control of human affairs. In England extreme opinions are seldom listened to because English deliberative assemblies are too stupid or too prudent to believe that the world is helped forward by strict logical deductions. But in the Constituent Assembly, the more extreme an opinion the more logical it was likely to be and therefore the more cogent. This might indeed have been otherwise had the founders of the first revolutionary constitution of France been privileged to deliberate with shut doors and in the tranquil atmosphere of the Philadelphia Con- vention. Had such been their good fortune they would not indeed have given France a second Chamber, for they regarded the noble with some 64 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION justice as the great culprit of French history and were not prepared to create for him a fortified position from which he might carry devastation over the wide fields of democratic reform ; but they would have left the monarchy a real instead of an illusory force in the constitution. Unfortunately they were never free agents. Their business was conducted to a running accompaniment of savage and excited com- mentary from benches crowded with as violent a mob as any city in Europe could produce. They could not record a vote without the certain chance of being held up to execration if it were given on the unpopular side ; and, being in no ways above the general level of human courage but probably some- what below it, they permitted themselves to be carried further than their own cool judgment would have allowed down the path which led to the republic. M. Aulard, who has investigated so closely the development of political opinion in France during the French Revolution, finds the first traces of an avowed republican party in the autumn of 1790. There was a certain Mme. Robert, wife of a Jacobin advocate from Liege, who held a political salon in Paris, and inspired the politics of a newspaper called the Mercure national. On October I, 1790, the Mercure declared for the Republic, and the ball was set rolling. It was a fine theme for debate. In December M. Robert himself entered the lists with a pamphlet entitled Le Republicanisme adapte d la France, but the republicans were neither numerous nor influential. There was still an immense reserve force in the French monarchy if only the King knew how to use it. 7 There are some occasions in history in which every- LOUIS XVI 65 thing seems to depend upon the character of an individual. The continuance of the monarchy in France depended on the character of Louis XVI. That it would have been in his power to avert a com- prehensive economic and administrative revolution is scarcely credible ; the great part of the nation demanded it with passionate unanimity. But a man of strength and clearness of vision, a man whose character, bearing, and intellect would have appealed to the imagination of France as of one who was resolved to control the storm rather than to be driven hither and thither by every gust, would have certainly saved a throne which was rooted in some of the deepest instincts of the nation. The unfortunate Louis committed almost every error which it was possible for him to commit. Having invited the whole population to formulate its grievances, and having thus aroused through the length and breadth of the country a consciousness of the evils which it suffered only less profound than its resolve that these evils must forthwith be cured, he summoned the States General to Versailles without having framed in advance a scheme of reform or a plan of concessions. When the financial needs of the realm had been made known to the three orders, the King withdrew and left them to their own devices. His mother was a Saxon and he possessed his* full share of Teutonic phlegm. He preferred the chase in the fine spring air to weary lucubrations in the Cabinet. It never occurred to him that by putting himself at the head of a constitutional movement he might control the assembly and- hold the citadel of his ancestors. So he let things glide on ; hunted while the Third Estate wrangled with nobles and clergy ; 5 66 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION hunted while they declared themselves the National Assembly of France ; and then tardily and mal- adroitly intervened with a scheme of constitutional reform which on May 5, 1789, would have been saluted as a splendid gift, and on June 23 was viewed as a grudging and insufficient concession. But this was only part of his error or misfortune. It would perhaps have required a great man and a hard man to shake himself free from the aristocratic influences which had hitherto surrounded him and to make it clear to the world that neither the Queen nor the court camarilla had any part in shaping his course. Louis was not capable of such a determina- tion. He could not clear himself from the meshes in which he was fatally implicated, by showing a frank, continuous and unreserved goodwill to the cause of reasonable constitutional reform. The Queen was his more determined half, and she hated the assembly with a hate which was not dissembled from the world. On July 12, 1789, she obtained a victory over her husband. Necker, the popular Swiss minister, was dismissed, and troops were massed under the Marshal de Broglie to overawe the Paris mob. A really effective display of force would at this time have secured great benefits to France, but Louis was not the man to impress upon his sub- ordinate officers the supreme necessity for vigour. The troops were slackly handled, the Paris mob was allowed to storm the Bastille, and, overwhelmed by popular clamour and disturbance, the unfortunate King recalled Necker to his counsels. He now appeared in the eyes of the club politicians of the capital as the centre of a military conspiracy against the principles of the revolution. That conspiracy THE KING IN PARIS 67 had been foiled, thanks to the heroes of the Bastille, but so long as Louis was in Versailles, Paris might again be imperilled. In October a mob marched upon the palace of Versailles and brought the King and Queen helpless captives to the Tuileries. Al- ready the Princes of the blood, followed by a crowd of nobles, had taken wing for the frontiers. Paris, filled with starving workmen and indifferently policed by Lafayette's national guard, was no place for quiet men. In a memoir submitted to the Count of Provence on October 16, Mirabeau, clearly perceiving that, unless the Assembly were removed from the surround- ing sea of anarchy, ill work would be made of the Constitution, recommended the King to escape to Rouen and thence to publish a manifesto declaring his adhesion to the principles of the revolution and summoning the Assembly to assist him in converting them into law. In view of the prevailing disturbance of the country districts and of the suspicious temper of the Assembly itself, it is doubtful whether this, or any other of the numerous plans devised by Mirabeau for the rescue of the monarchy, would have met with success. But in truth there were only two courses open to the King. He must either enforce law and order in the capital or he must escape. The election which he made and how it prospered is the most famous and dramatic episode of the French Revolution. Mirabeau was dead ; and the warning voice against a flight to the frontier died with him. The position of the King in Paris was steadily made more difficult and intolerable. He had been forced against the promptings of his conscience, August 24, 1790, to sign the Civil Con- stitution of the clergy, and was informed that none 68 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION save constitutional priests would be permitted to administer the sacrament to him in his private chapel. To satisfy a scrupulous conscience he made an attempt to spend Easter at St Cloud, and was driven by the Paris mob into the Tuileries. Finding that a public departure was impossible, he and the Queen deter- mined to put into practice a scheme, which had long been before their minds, of escaping to Metz, where they would find a loyal army, and whence they might use the instrument of a military demonstration to bring Paris to its senses. On the night of June 20-1, 1791, the King and Queen made their escape, the King leaving behind him a criticism of the Con- stitution and a formal retractation of the measures which he had been forced to pass in his captivity. Five days later the fugitives were brought back to Paris. A great multitude was in the streets. " Every citizen kept his hat on his head as by a common understanding." When the intelligence was first spread about in Paris that the King had escaped there was a feeling, first of stupor, then of indignation, then of panic. France had never been without a King and imagined that every conceivable form of horror might ensue from the lack of one. The country would be invaded by foreign armies ; the nation dissolved in unspeak- able anarchy. Accordingly when King and Queen were recovered a great relief spread through the country as if it had recovered a familiar talisman against misfortune. And yet the flight to Varennes may almost be described as the first provisional stage of the French Republic. When the news of the King's escape was received the executive authority devolved upon the Assembly. The Assembly declared THE REPUBLICAN INTERIM 69 itself en permanence, sent representatives through the departments, notified its accession to foreign powers, gave orders to the ministers, insisted on hearing the diplomatic correspondence, and caused the name of the King to be omitted from the civil oath. The King returned, but the Assembly did not abdicate. It decreed that the King should be given a guard, or in other words that he should be held in strict captivity. And the King was suspended from his functions. It was, as 290 deputies of the right protested, " a republican Interim." The sudden interruption of a long-established convention has an effect quite out of proportion to its duration in time. France woke up to find itself without a King and realised that the earth still revolved in its accustomed orbit. A letter from Paris written on June 24, 1791, says, " The wise measures taken by the Assembly make even the poor people believe that they can get on without a King, and everywhere I found people saying, ' We have no need of a King : the Assembly and its ministers are good enough for us. Why should we have an executive power which costs 25 millions when the work can be done for 2 or 3 ? ' The extreme newspapers break out into open professions of republican faith. " Louis XVI. has broken his own crown," says the Patriote Francis, the organ of Brissot, " After such an act of perjury the King cannot be made to harmonize with the constitution." The Revolutions de Paris, the Annales Patriotiques, the Bouche de Per pronounced against monarchy. The Cordeliers petitioned the Assembly to establish a Republic. About a fifth of the Jacobin Club concurred. " No King, or a King with an elective or removable Council, such in two words is my pro- 70 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION fession of faith," wrote Brissot in the Patriote Fran- fats. Republican pamphlets were scattered abroad, I' Acephalocratie ou Louis XVI. roi des Franfais detrone par lui-meme. A special Republican paper was started, Le Republicain, with Thomas Paine and Condorcet for principal editors. A controversy was engaged between Sieyes and Tom Paine in the Moniteur. Sieyes defended monarchy. " A monarch- ical government finished in a point, a republican in a superficies, and the monarchical triangle was better adapted to that division of powers which was the real bulwark of public liberty than the flat sur- face of the republic." On July 8, 1791, there was a meeting of the Federal Assembly of the Friends of Truth addressed by Condorcet, who pointed out that this unexpected event had freed France from any obligations to the King and that they could therefore consider whether monarchy was essential to liberty. He proceeds to refute the current objections brought against a Republic. The size was no obstacle ; on the contrary a recommendation, as it prevented the idol of the capital from becoming the tyrant of the Nation. It had been argued that a republic would lead to tyranny, but, given the freedom of the press and the division of powers, how could tyranny arise ? It was said that a King was necessary to prevent the usurpations of the Legis- lature ; but if the Legislature was frequently renewed and the constitution revised at stated intervals by a National Convention, how could these usurpations be conducted ? To those who argued that it was better to have one master than many, Condorcet replied that there was no necessity to have a master at all. It was alleged that without a king the CONDORCET ON REPUBLICS 71 executive power could not receive the necessary degree of force. In the days when powerful associa- tions could resist the laws, the executive power did undoubtedly require to be very strong, and even despotism was not strong enough. But now that the corporations were abolished, that equality reigned, very little force would be required to induce obedience to the law. The force of the executive would in fact be strengthened rather than weakened by the abolition of the hereditary monarchy, since a King necessarily excites against himself the suspicions of the friends of liberty. Lastly it had been argued that a Republic would lead to a military dictatorship. In a passage memorable for its lack of foresight Condorcet addresses himself to the refutation of this favourite thesis. " What conquered provinces," he asks, " will a French general despoil to buy our votes ? Will an ambitious man propose to us, as an ambitious man once proposed to the Athenians, that we should levy tributes on our allies, that we may raise temples or give festivals ? Will he promise our soldiers the pillage of Spain or Syria ? Surely no, and it is because we cannot be a people-king that we should remain a free people." 8 How it might have been for France, if, after the return from Varennes, a republic had been proclaimed, it is idle to guess ; there are some who think that such a course would have saved the country from great disaster. As it was, the Republic was proclaimed in the midst of a desperate war, and was therefore from its origin associated with all the passions and evils which war brings in its train. But opinion would never have sanctioned the deposition of Louis in the summer of 1791. Gravely as the Con- 72 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION stituent Assembly had disapproved of his action, and ignominious as were the restrictions which it proceeded to place upon his liberty, it was not prepared to alter the foundations of the work upon which it had been so actively engaged. Four-fifths at least of the Jacobin club were still monarchist, and, though there were no means of actually probing the opinion of the provinces, there was no reason to imagine that the common man had faltered in his allegiance to the crown. A republican demonstration in the Champ de Mars was put down with a display of force which for the moment drove the violent spirits into hiding and produced a marked reaction in the tone of the panic-stricken press. When in September 1791 the Constituent Assembly concluded its labours and the King formally accepted the Constitution, he enjoyed a brief St Martin's summer of popularity. Condorcet, who did not wane in his belief that a republic was preferable to a monarchy, confessed that France did not seem to like the prospect, that it preferred to make trial of the new constitution, and that the new constitution made adequate provision for liberty. There is perhaps no more crucial episode in the annals of modern Europe than the history of the Legislative Assembly which met in September 1791, and for the space of one year governed the destinies of France. It was this Assembly which declared war upon Austria and thus began that great duel between the French Revolution and the dynasts of Europe, which received its final settlement in the field of Waterloo. It was this Assembly which by its decrees against the emigres and the priests drove the King into a position in which he was bound to THE MARSEILLAIS 78 sacrifice either the last shreds of his honour or the last shreds of his popularity. While this Assembly was deliberating in Paris, and not a little as the result of its deliberations, the storm arose which uprooted the ancient trunk of the Bourbon monarchy. A decree was passed ordaining the formation of a camp of twenty thousand federes in the outskirts of Paris. Louis vetoed it. In Marseilles, where republican spirit ran high, a body of five hundred patriots marched on the capital, disregarding the royal veto, and chaunting a war song written for the army of the Rhine and destined to be the baptismal hymn of the young Republic. They found Paris aglow with the passion and tremor of war, volunteers tramping off to the frontier, the forty-eight sections en permanence, and a central committee of the sections plotting in- surrection at the Hotel de Ville. As they marched in by the Quartier St Antoine they were received with acclamations and brigaded with the forces of revolu- tion. The plotters were men of action, not visionaries. They had no scheme for the government of France, they had drafted no plan of a Republic, but they argued with a rough and true instinct that no war can be conducted to a successful issue if the head of the executive sympathizes with the enemy. That this was the case with Louis was a matter which had long been established to the satisfaction of Danton and his followers. Had he not designed to stifle the revolution at its birth by throwing Broglie's army into Paris ? Had he not attempted to escape to the frontier ? Had he not repudiated the con- stitution and openly advertised his alliance with the enemies of the nation by vetoing the punitive decrees against the emigres and the priests ? Such arguments 74 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION ran through Paris and, since the Assembly was too timid to act, the Directory of Insurrection resolved to act for it. On August 10, 1792, an assault was made on the Tuileries. The King, taking refuge with the Assembly, ordered the Swiss troops, who, if left to themselves, might have saved the palace and cowed the riot, to retire to their barracks, and by this final act of clemency or cowardice signed the doom of a dynasty which had reigned over France for more than eight hundred years. Surprised and frightened by the violence of the streets, the members of the Legislature strained their ears for tidings of the conflict. But when the issue was assured, when it was known that the last loyal regiment of the monarchy was hacked to pieces in its desperate and forlorn retirement, that an insurrectionary commune flushed with victory was established at the Hotel de Ville, and that the mob was pillaging the treasures of the Tuileries, the Legislature of France affixed its seal to the event. They decided that the chief of the executive power should be provisionally suspended, and that a National Convention should be summoned to take such measures as might secure the sovereignty of the people and the reign of liberty and equality. The Commune demanded that Louis and his wife should be imprisoned within the grim walls of the Temple, and, as the Commune was master of Paris, its will was done. It is a matter of common observation that a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for them- selves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional PSYCHOLOGY OF CROWDS 75 and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who com- pose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours, and can rehearse the emotion in solitude. Conduct then seems silly, or wicked, or incomprehensible, which in the excitement of collective action was so instinctive and immediate as to fall outside the area of self- consciousness altogether. Empty phrases and maxims exert a power which the individual in a cool hour of reflection finds it impossible to explain ; and what is there which a crowd will not do when a panic strikes it or when the poison of suspicion is in the air ? " We were cowards " " Nous tiions des laches " said Barere in simple but adequate ex- planation of the Terror. It must not therefore be assumed that the Legis- lative Assembly was republican because the whole course of its policy was directly calculated to destroy the monarchy. Such a supposition would be the reverse of the truth. The Assembly contained some avowed republicans, and a large number of men whose political principles would more easily harmonize with a republic than with a monarchy, but at no time previous to the loth August did it record any distinct affirmation of the republican principle. Strong language was used by democratic rhetoricians, but even the most violent orator did not propose a constitutional revolution. The most eloquent orator of the Legislature was Vergniaud. " From this window," he cried on March 10, 1792, " we see the palace where the King is misled by perfidious 76 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION counsels. Terror and fear have often issued from yon palace : let them return to-day in the name of the law, and let all those who inhabit that palace know that the King is alone inviolable, that the law will strike down the guilty without respect of persons, and that there is not a guilty head which can escape its sword." Yet on July 20 the author of those vague and pompous threats joins with Guadet and Gensonne in a petition to the King to form a Jacobin ministry, and even on August 10 the Assembly does not definitely dethrone the King. It votes for provisional suspension ; it contemplates a governor for the Dauphin, and it became a matter of accusation against the Girondins that by voting for suspension rather than deposition they had aimed at preserving the monarchy. Forty-two days elapsed between the capture of the Tuileries and the gathering of the National Con- vention. The Assembly upon whom the government of France now devolved entrusted the executive power to a committee of ministers and marked its acquiescence in the latest popular revolution by giving to Danton the portfolio of Justice. The word Republic was not pronounced, but a kingless govern- ment conducting a national war is a republic in fact if not in deed. In the life and death wrestle which was now beginning there was not much time to spin theories. The Austrians and Prussians crossed the frontier on August 19 and opened their campaign with a series of easy and alarming victories. On August 20 the Duke of Brunswick invested Longwy, on September 2 he took Verdun ; on September 6 his army was in leaguer before Thionville, and as LIBERTY AND THE CONVENTION 77 the enemy advanced, the character of the struggle in which France was engaged became more and more apparent. The new democracy was pitted against the old dynasties of Europe, an experiment against a tradition, an aspiration against an instinct, a reason against a romance, a theory of human equality against the stubborn fact of human deference. Catching the general spirit in the air, the Assembly voted that the seal of State should bear a figure of Liberty, the cap of freedom on her head and a pike in her hand with the legend, " In the name of the French nation." Then on September 4, in a moment of excitement, it took a step which was even more decisive. Rising to their feet the members swore that they would fight to the death Kings and Kingship. " Their oath," says a newspaper, " was repeated by the spectators, and with cries of Vive la Libertt. It is graven in the heart of all Frenchmen and they will keep it." Meanwhile France was in the throes of a general election. The Legislative had been elected upon a restricted franchise : it decided that restrictions upon the franchise were inconsistent with the true spirit of democracy. The Convention was to be elected upon a scheme of universal suffrage (universal save for the exclusion of domestic servants) and by the indirect methods of electoral councils. It is idle to consider what sort of an Assembly France would have returned but for the pressure of the war and the clubs. M. Aulard, whose learned history is composed with a strong revolutionary bias, maintains that the Convention was as freely elected as any French Assembly down to 1848. That may or may not be so ; the fact remains that the elections were dominated by the clubs and that but a small portion of the 78 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION voting power of France went to the polls. An instance which M. Aulard quotes in favour of freedom is, in reality, a complete demonstration of the pressure which was applied from Jacobin headquarters. In a number of the Annales published on September I, and freely distributed among the electoral assemblies, Carra, a man who had previously suggested that the Duke of York might be invited to take the crown of France, declared that any future deputy who should propose to re-establish the monarchy should be buried alive. Upon the strength of this civilized proposition Carra was elected in eight departments. He stood above the philosopher Condorcet who was elected in five departments, above Tom Paine who was elected in four, above Brissot who was elected in three, above Cloots who was elected in two. This obscure journalist, who had proposed burying alive as the proper treatment for monarchical deputies, was, if these September elections are to be taken as reflecting the real voice of the country, the most popular man in France. The inference is irresistible. The elections represented not the country but the violent group who had captured the electoral machine. According to one calculation the Convention which proclaimed the French Republic was elected on the mandate of about 6 per cent, of the electors of France. The first session of the Convention was held on September 20, 1792, a date twice memorable in the annals of France since it was also the day of Valmy. Out of 749 members only 371 had arrived in Paris on the day of opening, and the attendance is hardly likely to have been greatly increased on the following day. Yet, despite the fact that its numbers were incomplete and that it was only in the second day THE FRENCH REPUBLIC PROCLAIMED 79 of its session, the Convention unanimously decreed the abolition of monarchy. " Kings," said Gre*goire, " are in morality what monsters are in the world of nature." When the decree was passed, " cries of joy," said the Gazette de France, " filled the hall, and all arms were raised to heaven, as if to thank it for having delivered the land of France from the greatest curse which had affected it." On the next day it was resolved that all acts of State should henceforth bear the date, " The first year of the French Republic." But there were no fireworks or solemn promulgation. Some of the papers fail to mention these important decrees. " It seems," writes M. Aulard, " that the French Republic was introduced furtively into history, as if the Convention were saying to the nation, ' There is no other course possible.' ' To quiet a very prevalent apprehension that a republic must be either a small city or a loose federation, the Convention, upon the motion of Danton, passed, on September 25, 1792, the famous resolution that the Republic is one and indivisible. But no one of these important decrees, neither the decree abolishing the monarchy, nor that establishing a Republic, nor that which declared against the federal solution, was submitted to a plebiscite of the French nation. In a private letter, written after the outbreak of the war, a democratic monarchist, who had taken a large share in the making of the first revolutionary constitution, declared that the Constituent Assembly had made a mistake in not at once dethroning Louis XVI. and transferring the crown to another dynasty. The development of events taught Sieys a lesson in history a department of knowledge which he affected to despise. A monarch is the creature of 80 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION a tradition and the symbol of a faith. The tradition may be absurd, the* faith may be injurious to the dignity of man ; but there they are and you must reckon with them. The French monarchy had not suffered the salutary interruptions which had secured the liberties of England. It was not the gift of a Parliament or the result of a contract. It had not been limited by a Magna Carta or a Bill of Rights. It was a monarchy claiming to be based upon divine right, and deriving its credentials from an unbroken record of service dating back to a distant and barbaric age. It was closely associated with the Catholic Church, and, since the decline of Spain, had been the most powerful promoter of its interests. No royal house was so national, if long association with a nation's history deserves the epithet, and no royal house was so international. The Bourbons ruled in Madrid, in Naples, in Parma. The two brothers of Louis XVI. were married to Savoyard princesses. The King himself had taken a bride from Vienna as a symbol of that Austrian alliance which, despite all the disasters it entailed, was still the corner-stone of French diplomacy. Situated thus, Louis XVI. could not be, in any genuine sense, the King of a revolution which regarded the monarch as the agent, not of God but of the people, which despoiled the Church of its property, and violated the Catholic con- science by abruptly severing the connexion with Rome. Even if the King himself could show the requisite degree of elasticity, there was his wife, there were his brothers, there was the tradition of the family recommended from the allied thrones and certain to be one of the most powerful ingredients in the education of the infant Dauphin. These incom- CAUSES OF THE WAR 81 patibilities were indeed evident from the first, but it needed the stern stress of war to strain them to a rupture. The war out of which the French Republic arose was not entirely the result of dynastic interests. The annexation of Avignon, the abolition of the feudal dues in Alsace despite express treaty stipula- tions that the German princes who held land in that quarter should be protected in all their sovereign rights and privileges, the open encouragement given to a rebellion in the Austrian Netherlands, the wild language used against crowned heads, the pronounce- ment of subversive principles of public law all these acts and symptoms created a feeling of acute tension which might have led to difficulties even if the royal house in France had not been closely connected with the Imperial family. But the treatment of the French royal family was the main grievance which weighed with Austria and the other courts of Europe. The Emperor Leopold, faced as he was with the difficult problems bequeathed to him by the in- judicious administration of his quixotic brother, had no wish to draw the sword ; but he could not turn a deaf ear to the entreaties of his sister. It was her belief that some sharp external pressure would school the strange impudence of the French Democrats and restore the throne to its former position. Leopold acquiesced. He issued a circular to the monarchs of Europe calling them to free the King from the restraints of the Paris mob ; and then, meeting the King of Prussia at Pillnitz, in August 1791, concerted a demonstration intended to impose upon the fears of the French. The two monarchs addressed an invitation to all the powers of Europe, calling upon 6 82 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION them to aid in the restoration of the French King to his lawful position ; and subjoined an undertaking to mobilize their forces in the event of such aid being given by all the Powers. No nation is so lost to pride as to submit the conduct of its internal affairs to the arbitrament of foreign powers. To the proud and sensitive demo- cracy of France the declaration of Pillnitz was not a discipline, but an irritant : and so far from mending the position of the royal family it only helped to make it worse. At the same moment elections were held all over France to the Legislative Assembly. The men who were returned had no acquaintance with the subtle and complicated undercurrents of European policy. They were not aware that nothing was further from the wishes or designs of the Emperor than a war with France, and that he would anxiously clutch at the King's acceptance of the Constitution to wash his hands of a troublesome business. They only knew that France had been insulted by two crowned heads and that there was no reason in the ultimate nature of things, seeing that all men were free and equal, why crowned heads should exist at all. The collection of armed bodies of emigres in the electorates of Trier-Mainz gave a pretext for a quarrel, which Francis, who succeeded the pacific Leopold in March 1792, was not anxious to avoid. In Paris war was eagerly desired partly by the royalists who thought that a military success might retrieve the fortunes of the Crown, partly by the Girondins who argued that at the call of revolutionary France the peoples of Europe would throw off their chains. Both expectations were falsified in the event. Europe declined to accept the new gospel from France, and VALMY 88 by an inexorable sequence of cause and effect the war led to the deposition of Louis XVI. and the pro- clamation of the French Republic. On the morning of that twentieth day of September in which the members of the Convention held their first session in the riding school at Paris, the Duke of Brunswick, whose advance from the frontier had been a series of uninterrupted successes, came into collision with the army of Dumouriez and Kellermann. The French gunners, posted on the heights of Valmy, were so handled that Brunswick, failing to silence them with his own batteries, refused to permit his men to attempt a frontal attack upon the position. The losses on either side were slight, since the forces were never closely engaged, and the credit of the success belongs, not to the volunteers of the revolu- tion, but to the batteries formed under the ancien regime ; yet Goethe, who saw the engagement, correctly divined in it the beginning of a new epoch. Revolutionary France had given a check to the famous army of Prussia, showing that the new democracy was not merely a thing made up of frothy speeches and newspaper articles, of mad and extravagant follies which could leave no durable print upon the tablets of history. As the last wreath of smoke dissolved in the September air a new France revealed itself to the discerning eye of the German poet, a France neither self-enveloped in a cloud of amiable speculations nor so hopelessly divided by the fury of faction as to present a passive resistance to her foes, but hard, warlike, patriotic. In France the effect of the victory was decisive. In the first thrill of triumphant excitement the Republic was pro- claimed, and, to those who cherished the Republican 84 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION tradition during the reaction which followed the downfall of the Empire, the Republic was indelibly associated with victorious patriotism, with the defence of the nation's frontiers, and the humiliation of foreign kings. " the fair And fierce Republic with the feet of fire." The oratory and journalism of the French Revolution are greatly influenced by the work of three writers, of whom two belong to the ancient and one to the modern world. Cicero died in 43 B.C. ; Plutarch flourished at the end of the first, Rousseau in the middle of the eighteenth, century. The first was the oracle of the dying Roman Republic ; the second was a Greek who wrote when the Roman Empire was in its fresh and splendid youth, and while yet the memory of Freedom remained alive and fragrant in the world ; the third was the son of a French watchmaker and was born in the free city of Geneva. In the Middle Ages the works of Cicero were the favourite quarry for the grammarian and the school- master, and it was only by slow degrees that he re- conquered his fame as the supreme master of Latin eloquence. Once established, his ascendancy was as unchallenged in the sphere of prose style as that of Aristotle in the sphere of thought. Preachers formed themselves on Cicero ; advocates studied his methods as part of their professional education ; his literary work was found to contain a whole discipline in philosophy and politics. Mirabeau denounces the Court in a speech modelled on the second " Catiline " ; Robespierre replies to Louvet in the manner of the " Pro Sulla." And hardly less influential in another way were the " Parallel Lives of Plutarch," a bio- POWER OF ANTIQUITY 85 graphical work which, more than any other single book, has nourished the passion for the public virtues among the nations of the West. To imitate ancient heroism, as it was revealed in grand and simple outlines by the Greek biographer, became a govern- ing passion. Politicians would adopt ancient names and be half persuaded that they had recaptured the grand gesture of antiquity. Brissot was the younger Brutus, Roland the younger Cato, Mme. Roland was Marcia, and Vergniaud was Cicero. " Since the Romans," exclaimed St Just, " the world has been empty." The fatal pall of monarchy had fallen over Europe. And it was for the Revolution to continue the work which had been begun by the expulsion of the Tarquins and was broken by the usurpation of Julius Caesar. 9 That the authors of antiquity should have exerted so great an influence in the later half of the eighteenth century need cause no surprise when we remember not only that the education of boys then ran almost exclusively in the old classical groove, but that the knowledge of the current politics of the world was the privilege of a small aristocracy of birth and office. A boy at school, who knew nothing of the civil and military history of his own country, would be familiar with Marathon and Cannae, the Gerousia and the Senate ; and in a secretive despotism there was no common and obvious means of redressing the balance. There was neither a free press, nor a formed habit of political discussion, nor indeed any method, short of official employment itself, by which the ordinary citizen could become acquainted with the springs of government. Men grew old and grey in this strange, and to us almost inconceivable, ignorance, carrying 86 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION about with them through life-, as their principal casket of political knowledge, the recollection of the Greek and Roman history which they had learnt at school. The French Revolution burst upon a generation of young people who had received this, and little else, for intellectual food, and the learning of the school- room foamed out into the street. The young advocate who threw himself into the maelstrom of politics naturally found his standards and analogies in the only literature of public life with which he was acquainted. A legislator must be a Lycurgus or a Minos, a King a Nero or a Caligula, a patriot a Pericles or a Brutus. The writings of the Ancients were " nearer to nature." To be as they were was to be free, to breathe the air of liberty flowing straight and fresh from the far blue mountains of Hellas. This pose or vanity of Classicism was associated with a fiery democratic sentiment derived, so far as its origin is to be sought elsewhere than in the stress of outward circumstance, from the political teaching of Rousseau. A style so clear, passionate and musical, has never been placed at the service of a body of doctrine at once so coherent with itself and so congruous with the sentiments and appetites of the age. Rousseau was the prophet of Nature. From the complicated artifice of civilized life, he appealed to the simpler conditions of the natural state, preaching, for instance, that Education must follow the instinctive proclivities of the child, that the God of Nature can be worshipped without the formal and obscuring mechanism of theologies, and that the wholesome State must be founded on the natural rights of the individual. Equality, liberty, the sovereignty of the general will, the three cardinal ROUSSEAU 87 premises of a democratic civilization, acquired for the first time in Rousseau's teaching a coercive power over the thought of a whole nation. Con- sciously or unconsciously everyone in politics used his language and debated his ideas. His thoughts, his catchwords, his sentiment, permeated the atmos- phere ; and so far as the creation of the Republic can be referred to any one intellectual influence, it may be traced to the mind of the shiftless, brilliant and corrupt adventurer who had carefully explained that the Republican form of government is only perfectly adapted to a small State. CHAPTER V THE REVOLUTIONARY STATE By the soul Only the nations shall be great and free. WORDSWORTH La France est le pays du monde le plus orthodoxe, car c'est le pays du monde le moins religieux. RENAN THE French Republic was a new phenomenon in the history of the world. The republics hitherto known to Europe had either been civic, or federal, or essentially aristocratic, or a combination of all three. Milton's ideal republic was an aristo- cracy, Cromwell's very practical Commonwealth a mixture of aristocracy and dictatorship. The Swiss cantons, the Dutch provinces, the ancient Republic of Venice, were all governed upon aristocratic principles. But the French Republic was very different from all these. It was a great unitary democratic State, founded in a sudden revolution and by a wonderful manifestation of national energy. Compared with the long process by which Venice had freed herself from the Byzantine, and Switzerland from the Austrian Empire ; compared with the protracted struggle which had heralded the Dutch Act of Abjuration, and in sharp contrast with the complete absence of formed political doctrine which had accompanied all these movements, the political conversion of France had all the air of a catastrophe. Everything about it 88 PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION 89 was new and startling, from its comprehensive and attractive philosophy to the phraseology of its politics and the manners of its politicians. As early as October 1790, Edmund Burke had proclaimed the fact that the French Revolution, being entirely unlike any previous revolution in history, being at once more logical, more self-conscious, more com- prehensive, more destructive, and, above all, more contagious, was a danger to the whole fabric of European civilization : and what Burke said in 1790 the conservatives of Europe have believed ever since. The doctrine of the perfectibility of men, which was one of the central convictions of the new French philosophy, was sharply opposed to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. It is impossible to reconcile the view that man is infinitely perfectible through human agencies and institutions with the dogma that man is born in original sin, and that only through the practices of his religion can he succeed in wiping away some part of the evil which is inherent in human nature itself. It is an ancient, perennial controversy. The dispute is always with us, though it does not always use the same terminology. There is the school of heredity and the school of environment ; there are those men who incline to the view that education can effect nothing, and those who would fain believe that it can produce angels out of ogres. We have learnt now that we cannot expect too much from human nature ; that happiness is only to a limited degree dependent upon the political mechanism, and that, legislate as we may, vice and crime, illness and want refuse to be legislated out of existence. The politicians who carried out the 90 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Revolution in France were subject to none of these misgivings. They believed that there was no case of vice or crime or want or misery which could not be attributed to defective institutions ; they believed that bad men were the product of bad laws, and, conversely, that if the laws were good, the men would be good also. They did not regard happiness as dependent on individual temperament ; they viewed it as a compound of social chemistry, which could be manufactured as easily as bread or sugar and distributed in equal amounts to every member of Society ; and, starting from this foundation of sanguine psychology, they regarded it as being within the compass of human achievement to bring, first their own country, and then, through a necessary process of emulation, every other country in Europe into a state of Society so natural and perfect that war, poverty and injustice would be unknown. Proceeding on this fundamental hypothesis, the Constituent Assembly had created a body politic which was different in almost every important particular from the old monarchy of France. What- ever may have been the virtues of the ancien regime and it was not all composed of baseness and folly efficiency was not among them. It was impossible for a King of France, however vigorous and well- intentioned, to carry on his trade with competence under the conditions which existed in the ancien regime. The action of the central power was thwarted either by the organized body of the Church or by the great legal corporations, or by the provincial estates or by the tenacious opposition of the nobility. An edict issued by the King might be rendered inoperative in Normandy by the refusal of the Parliament of CENTRALIZATION 91 Rouen to ratify it. A measure, acknowledged to be expedient by all his ministers, might be quite outside the range of practical politics owing to the anticipated opposition of one of the great vested interests of the realm. All these obstacles the Constituent Assembly brushed away. It abolished the legal and industrial cor- porations, obliterated every trace of the old provincial system of France, its names, its boundaries, its historic assemblies, stripped the nobility of their titles, their exemptions, their privileges, and deprived the Church of its position as a great landed corporation specially exempted from the visits of the tax collector. Under the old monarchy French Society was constituted in privileged groups, which placed impediments in the path of individual liberty and central power. The new philosophy viewed the corporation as an infringement of human liberty and privilege as in- consistent with the equality of man, and so, abolishing all those intermediate groups which had sheltered the individual from despotism though not from the irregular action of caprice, it left nothing standing but the individual on the one hand and the State on the other. Among the qualities which distinguished the revolutionary State there was one which, as it aroused the greatest consternation among contemporaries, so has continued from that time onward to be an enduring element in the republican movements of the Continent. The French Republic was anti- clerical. In its opposition to the Church it was very different from the republican movements of which the world up till then had taken principal note, from the struggle for Dutch independence, from the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, from the revolt 92 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION of the American Colonies, in all of which instances a community struggling for its rights and liberties found a cordial and a solace in religion. There is no mystery about the chain of causes which led to this result. Roman Catholicism as a creed is essentially absolute and exclusive. It claims that God has given to the world a single depository of inflexible truth, and, finding this depository in the Catholic Church, argues that no other creed can be tolerated because no other creed can possibly be true. The Protestant and the Jew can hardly be saved, but they can be sup- pressed or converted, and it is the business of the Christian State to suppress or convert them. Nothing but error and confusion can result from the policy of tolerating the public worship of dissidents. No State tolerates crime ; no State should tolerate that which is more serious than crime, the error which destroys souls and defeats the beneficent purpose of God. From these premises it follows that every member of the Christian State must necessarily be considered as a member of the Catholic Church. He is baptized, married and buried with Catholic rites. His education is conducted under Catholic supervision. No one save a priest possessing the appointed orders of the Church may wed him ; no one may dissolve his marriage. At all the solemn moments of life the Church intervenes with her holy sacraments and her imperious injunctions, emphasizing the original sin and depravity of man, and exhibiting, in contrast to this imperfection and reluctancy of fallen nature, the splendour of a spiritual renewal following upon an easy acquiescence in her rites. Long before the outbreak of the Revolution this conception of the unity and fixity of truth had lost RELIGIOUS TOLERATION 93 its hold upon educated minds in France. Scepticism was at work, eating the heart out of the old doctrine and exhibiting it to the contempt and amusement of the world in its motley guises of obscurantism, ^ cruelty and folly. The judicial murder of Galas ; the protracted and degrading wrangle between the Jesuits and the Jansenists ; the wealth and frivolity of the upper clergy, exhibiting itself in startling contrast against the misery of the village cure\ whose life was one long battle with starvation all these circumstances tended to produce an anti-clerical feeling in the minds of the intellectual laity. The day for despotism in Church and State was over, and the time had come for full and fair investigation. "It is an insult," wrote Voltaire, " to reason and the laws to pronounce the words, ' Civil and Ecclesi- astical Government.' The phrase should be ' Civil Government and Ecclesiastical Regulations,' and no regulation should be made save by the civil power." f Toleration was in the air, and when once this was granted, even to the smallest and most insignificant sect, the keys of the Catholic fortress had been given away ; for the civil power, which has granted liberty of worship to different professions, stands above the churches and outside them. Now, in 1787, civil rights were granted to the Protestants in France. Two years later, a tract, by a young lawyer named [ Camille Desmoulins, was selling, edition after edition, \ in Paris. JLz France Libre is not a great monument of literature, but it is an admirable example of the fiery kind of stuff which was being swallowed eagerly all over France in the first months of the Revolution. " Instead of a gay religion, of a religion friendly to enjoyment, to women, to population, and to liberty ; 94 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION in place of a religion which makes dances, spectacles and festivities a part of its ritual, as was the case with the Greeks and the Romans, we have a sad, austere religion ; a religion which wishes men to be poor, poor in goods, poor in mind ; a religion which hates wealth and the sweetest promptings of nature, which will have one walk backwards, like the Carmelites, or live like an owl, as the Anthonys, Pauls and Hilarions, which promises no recompense save to poverty and pain, which is only good, in a word, for the hospitals. Can one tolerate its anti-national maxim ? Obey tyrants : Subditi estote non tantum bonis et modestis sed etiam dyscolis. Paganism had every recommendation except reason ; but reason is scarcely more content with our theology, and folly for folly, I prefer Hercules killing the boar of Erimanthus to Jesus of Nazareth drowning two thousand swine." The Assembly which met at Versailles two years later, in May 1789, contained a majority which was hostile to the existing ecclesiastical order. Some were Jansenists, others were Protestants, many had derived their theology from Voltaire. It was no part of their intention to disturb the doctrine or the ceremonial of the Catholic Church, however slight may have been the value which they placed upon orthodox ministrations. Even the most advanced free thinker knew that France was a Catholic country. But it was intended that the Church should be reduced in wealth and influence, that it should be shorn of its endowments and made powerless to arrest the progress of a democratic State. Holding the doctrine that the property of the Church was the treasure of the nation a thesis stoutly opposed by THE CIVIL CONSTITUTION OF THE CLERGY 95 the defenders of the ecclesiastical establishment the Assembly proceeded to strip it, first of its feudal dues, then of its tithes, and finally of its land. For a great, endowed, independent corporation it substituted a humble and salaried dependent of the State. In the work of transformation the most sacred scruples and historic associations were rudely violated. The monastic orders were abolished ; the monastic vows declared to be invalid, as contra- vening the principle of human liberty. Since the Church was subservient to the State, it was argued that a French citizen could not safely be permitted to acknowledge any jurisdiction or authority outside the limits of his diocese. A bishop on his appointment might write to Rome to signify his communion with the Catholic faith, but there the connexion must end. The Pope was a foreign priest who had no authority within the French dominions. Bishops and cur 6s were to be elected by the people, the bishop by the electors of the department, the cure by the Assembly of the district. And the Apostolic Church was invoked to support an arrangement whereby an atheist might choose the successor of Bossuet, and a local council of radical politicians regulate the length of his holidays. If the principle be conceded that religions are all of equal value in the eye of the civil governor, or that all citizens, whatever may be their religious belief, have an equal claim on his justice and benevolence, it would seem to follow that the State should confine itself to the secular sphere and leave the confessions to regulate their own concerns. The Constituent Assembly did not accept this conclusion. Its zeal for liberty did not run to " a Free Church in a Free State." 96 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION It did not recommend, or dream of recommend- ing, a scheme of disestablishment. A disestablished Church must necessarily depend upon the endow- ments of the faithful, and in a Catholic and orthodox country such endowments would be generous and perennial. It would be a labour of Sisyphus to attempt to weaken a body which could draw from a bottomless reservoir of treasure : and it was the distinct aim of the Constituent Assembly to weaken the Catholic Church. No other organized body in the State was based upon principles so antagonistic to the Revolution, or had so large an interest in defending the established order against them. The Church claimed a monopoly of the truth, protested against the toleration which had been recently given to the Protestants, and sided with the cause of the vested interests. Such a body could not be allowed to enjoy liberty. The interests of the Revolution demanded that it should be the hireling of the State, that instead of being rich it should be poor, that instead of rioting on endowments it should starve on salaries, that its ancient chapters should be abolished, its wealthy monasteries dissolved, and that its ministers should exchange the dignified security of royal or territorial patronage for the votes of a popular constituency. The old religious monopoly was broken down and could never again be mended. The Constitution of 1791 stated that in the eye of the law marriage was simply a civil contract. The eye of the law was no longer the eye of the Church. The civil and religious elements in marriage were declared, not for the first time to be theoretically distinct, but for the first time to be practically separable. To the Church belonged the sacrament ; to the State a contract which could be made without the inter- BREACH WITH THE CHURCH 97 vention of a priest, and could be dissolved in express defiance of the canons. These two institutions, Civil Marriage and Divorce, were incorporated in the law of France in September 1792. They are characteristic of the new democracy, and mark a stage in the growth of the Secular State. 2 Seldom has a political assembly embarked on a more momentous course than did the Constituent Assembly when it agreed to accept those rules as to payment, discipline, and regulation of the Church which are known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. There is always a democratic side to the Roman Catholic Church, and in the first ecstasies of revolutionary excitement the sympathies of the village cures, who were drawn for the most part from the peasantry, were influenced rather by the miseries of the class to which they belonged than by the traditions of the profession into which they had been promoted. The curb had his own grievances, and those no less bitter and substantial than the grudges of the artizan or the peasant. He worked at starveling wages while the honey went to the drones. Proposals to reduce the great ecclesiastical establishments, to bring down the pride of the bishop or abbot, to restore the tithe to its proper purpose, and even to mulct the general revenues of the Church, provided the surplus were more equitably distributed, would have commanded a large measure of assent among the lower clergy. But the Civil Constitution of the Clergy drove hard through some of the intimate convictions of the Church. No scrupulous Catholic could accept an arrangement devised to sever the connection of the Church with Rome, or assent to the view that a 98 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Bishop could be lawfully elected save by the faithful of his diocese. A schism was the inevitable result. The scrupulous minds refused to swear the oath to the Constitution ; the timid, the careless, the time- serving, the men who were Frenchmen first and priests afterwards accepted it. The refractory priests became outlaws and suffered all the glories and hardships of persecution. The constitutional priests became officials, not much to be distinguished from the mayors and procureurs, and suffering under the stigma which always attaches to those who under a sudden stress abandon a point of honour and the principle of their caste. When the war broke out the gulf between the Revolution and the Church became wider than ever. The priest was the national enemy, the friend of the Kings and the e'migre's, and the prime source of the civil convulsions which spread over the west and south of France. The embarrassed Treasury ceased even to pay the salaries of those who had sacrificed so much to accept the Constitution, and the Church was severed from the State, not from any conscious change of principle, but from the force of events, which had rendered it unwilling and unable to subsidize an alien and a suspect power. The new Republic was distinguished by a third characteristic of equal novelty. It was inherently, and by nature of the principles which it possessed, an organ of propaganda. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, copied from America, was regarded as applicable to man in general, apart from all circumstances of time and place. Condorcet, who expresses in logical and coherent form the floating thought of the early revolutionary idealism, expressly controverts the idea of Montesquieu, that it is the ARMED DOCTRINE 99 business of a legislator to find out what laws may suit certain latitudes, or to adjust them to the passions, interests, and prejudices of certain classes. His duty is in fact just the opposite. He is not called to adapt laws to situations but to change situations by laws. " Whatever be the constitution of a country, freedom of commerce and industry, a -direct land-tax, simple civil laws, humane and just penal laws founded on the nature of man and society and deduced from these principles by reason ought to be the same everywhere." ..." Political writers therefore should try to discover what these laws should be and how they can be made as simple and perfect as possible." 8 The student of modern comparative legislation will acknowledge the substantial truth which underlies these observations. With the progress of civilization the laws and institution of different countries are becoming more and more alike ; the palpable cruelties of medieval juris- prudence have disappeared from our codes, together with those grave and capricious inequalities in justice., and finance which characterized the declining age of feudalism in all the countries of Europe. There is all the difference in the world between the slow process of peaceful penetration and the effort to propagate ideas by force of arms. If the leading principles of the French Revolution have converted Europe, if religious toleration and social equality and popular government are diffused over a wider surface of the globe, this is not because of, but in spite of, the wars of propaganda. Violence never makes genuine converts. The public law of Europe may have been ridiculous, but then it should have been changed by the agreement of the contracting 100 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION powers. To close a great and noble river to the commerce of the world, as the Scheldt was closed under an international agreement, was doubtless a deplorable expedient ; but if no other means could be found of adjusting acute national jealousies, if it was a necessary condition of peace between England, Austria, and Holland, that Antwerp should remain sterile, then the price may have been worth paying. The young Republic did not stoop to such a posture of circumspection. It claimed to alter the public law of Europe in virtue of principles which were anterior to all treaties. It declared the navigation of the Scheldt to be opened : it professed itself ready to annex any territories the inhabitants of which should freely desire to be conjoined with France. The destiny of nations was no longer to be determined by diplomats, but by the voice of the people, by that unknown, unfathomed general will which now at last, after centuries of silence and deference to a servile convention, was invited to express itself. As for the tyrants who make war upon a people to arrest the progress of liberty and destroy the rights of man, iwere they not the outlaws of society ? " They should ; be attacked," said Robespierre, " not as ordinary 'enemies, but as assassins and rebellious brigands. Kings, aristocrats, tyrants whoever they may be, are slaves in revolt against the sovereign of the land, who is the human race, and against the legislator of the Universe, who is Nature." 4 " Nature, the legislator of the Universe.," But what if Englishmen, Germans, Italians would not accept her law ? In his speech against the War delivered in 1792 Robespierre had himself pointed out that the Belgians were unripe for liberty ; and THE RHINE FRONTIER 101 when France found herself with England, Austria, and Prussia on her hands, there was a school of prudence which preferred the methods of diplomacy to the Quixotic enterprize of the indiscriminate crusade. Narbonne, Talleyrand, Danton wished to limit the warlike liabilities of the country. In pursuance of an immemorial national ambition, they argued that the interest of France lay in the acquisition of Belgium and the Rhine frontier, and not in a philanthropic endeavour to free the suffering peoples of Europe. It was therefore the object of their policy to pacify England and Prussia, and to concentrate their efforts on a war with Austria to recover the national and classical frontier of ancient Gaul. The propagandist strain in French foreign policy was blended with the engrained national ambition of a proud and warlike people, greedy of that very glory which Voltaire despised as a senseless folly, and filled with that very spirit of territorial conquest, which its philosophy had so often condemned as inconsistent with the oracles of reason and of nature. These two distinct aspirations continued to form part of the French Republican creed until the great disaster of 1870. There was the humanitarian impulse on the one hand ; the warlike, the Chauvin impulse on the other. The early propagandist illusions soon blew away, for it became obvious that the walls of the royalist Jerichos would not tumble at the first blast of the Marseillaise. In 1795 iFrance made peace with the monarchy of Prussia, the same year with the King of Spain who had drawn his very ineffectual sword in favour of a family connection ; and then, two years later, the coveted prize of centuries 102 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION was in the clasp of the Republic. The Italian victories of Bonaparte brought Austria to her knees so that she ceded to France the Rhine frontier and the Netherlands. Republicans did not forget that these territories were won under the Republic, held under the Empire, and lost at the Restoration, and all through the age of Metternich and long afterwards when Bismarck was laying the foundation of a United Germany, the Rhine was a symbol and a watchword no less sacred than the Rights of Man. Such then were the characteristics of the Republic which was founded in September 1792. It was apt for centralization ; it was anticlerical, it was military and propagandist, full at once of new humanitarian ideas and of inherited instincts of territorial acquisition. The humanitarian principle which in the Christian, Buddhistic and Tolstoian systems is accompanied with the ascetic doctrine of Renunciation was, in the philosophy of the French Revolution, associated with an affirmation of the Rights of Man. It was founded not on humility, but on pride, not upon con- viction of sin, but on an assertion of dignity. The pure gospel of fraternity has sometimes been the rule of saints and sometimes the profession of sinners, but it has never governed political societies ; least of all could it be expected to dominate a country boiling with a sense of social injustice and barbarized by centuries of misgovernment. It is therefore no matter for surprise if the ideal of peace, fraternity, and goodwill should have failed to be realised in France, seeing that it has never been realised by any nation in the world's history. The cause for surprise is that the emotion should have been felt, that the HUMANITARIAN IDEALS 103 idea should have been diffused, and that the principle should have been proclaimed by a great European community. Infinite are the ironies of history ; and the ironic contrasts of the French revolution, the professions of peace, the realities of war, the Federations of Man, the Massacres of September, the prelude of liberty, the finale of despotism, have been often described as the bankruptcy of idealism. Yet a treasure-trove is not disgraced because the seeker has missed his way. Of these humanitarian aspirations we can find no better incarnation than the. Girondin philosopher, : Condorcet, to whom was entrusted the principal share in the drafting of the first Republican Con- [stitution. Condorcet, like John Stuart Mill, is one of the saints of Radicalism. He was a savant of austere YMt 1 "* the friend and disciple of Turgot, a man consumed with a passion for the public welfare and animated by the most sanguine expectations of the future of humanity. Defective on the side of observation, and knowing little of the real workings of human nature, Condorcet paid the penalty of his ignorance. The every day world cannot be governed by the geometrician's compass ; and those who would draft constitutions for states must know something of the vulgar forces out of which states are composed. Condorcet, like John Locke, framed plans which were incapable of execution, indulged in many in- substantial speculations, and drew a horoscope of a golden future which no man has yet seen. But he possessed the quality which belongs to the clear, powerful, and independent intelligence of divining some of the great lines of human progress. His plan of free, secular, gratuitous education was only 104 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION realized in France under the Third Republic through the efforts of Jules Ferry and has still to be realized in England. He was the first eminent Frenchman to champion the rights of women and to propose a scheme of co-education ; and in his thorough grasp of the fact that a sound democratic polity must necessarily depend upon a good system of national education he exhibited a truth which did not become the common property of the country till it was preached from a hundred platforms by the organ voice of Gambetta. Yet the Constitution which Condorcet devised for the French Republic contains every defect which an unflinching pursuit of the principle of popular sovereignty is calculated to produce. The supreme executive council of the state was to consist of seven ministers elected by the primary assemblies and changing its president every fortnight. A president chosen on the American plan would not only be too powerful ; he would be demoralizing. He would excite respect and deference for his person ; feeble imaginations would forget the office in the man ; and blind instincts of personal devotion would supersede the exclusive use of enlightened reason. " A man, the living image of the law " : such words were void of sense and devised on the assumption that man is to be governed not by reason but by seductive fiction. So Condorcet proposed that the President of the French Republic should hold office for a fortnight. As for the legislature it was to be chosen for one year by universal suffrage. A legis- lature, however, even in the course of a year, may cease to represent the general will. To meet the difficulty two expedients had been discussed. The THE GIRONDIN CONSTITUTION 105 constituents might recall their deputies and choose others in their place so that every undulation of popular feeling might be transmitted to the Parliament, or else the electorate might demand that certain measures should be submitted to its own immediate decision. It was the latter plan which Condorcet favoured. He proposed the Referendum, and this in a form so extreme that, if adopted, it must have produced a complete legislative deadlock. He actually recommended that, upon the requisition of two departments demanding an amendment or a law or a measure of general policy, the legislature should be forced to summon all the primary assemblies of the Republic, and that, if the majority of these assemblies agreed to the proposition, a general election should be held. 5 Such was the last word of practical wisdom bequeathed by the Girondin philosopher. A few months later, after a bitter struggle, his party was proscribed by the Jacobins, and lie died by his own hand to escape the guillotine. His constitutional scheme was taken up by a Jacobin committee and rapidly revised by the facile pen of He"rault de Se"chelles. Universal suffrage was retained but the referendum made more difficult. The executive council was enlarged to twenty-four and was still chosen by a system of popular election, the Legislature naming the members from lists of candidates drawn up by the electoral assemblies of the departments. The assembly was still to consist of a single chamber ; but whereas Condorcet had spread out a programme of democratic propaganda abroad, the final draft proclaimed the principle of non-intervention. Such provisions were calculated to please the democracy ; 106 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION and their electoral value was enhanced by an express recognition of the " sacred right of insurrection," and of the duty of the State to find work or sustenance for all its members. Submitted to a plebiscite, the Constitution of 1793 was accepted by 1,801,918 votes ; but as war was raging on the frontiers, as the great city of Lyons was in insurrection, as the Vendee was in flame, and the whole fabric of the State was in imminent peril of dissolution, there was no intention of carrying its provisions into effect. On October 10 a decree was issued to the effect that " the provisional govern- ment of France is revolutionary until the conclusion of peace." The Constitution of 1793 was never I put into force. It remained an ideal and a war cry with the working classes ; and of all the constitutions which have been devised on the popular model, none has sought to give so literal an expression to the view that government should be directly controlled by every momentary determination of the General Will. The real French Republic which stamped itself upon history and upon the imagination of men was a very different thing from this airy scheme of popular anarchy. Formed under the stress of foreign war and civil discord, and relying upon the support K>f a small minority of resolute men, it created armies, ^cleared the frontiers, and saved the unity of France ; but this achievement, one of the most memorable in history, was accompanied by an organized system of atrocities, few, if we compare them with the crimes of the Inquisition, but enough to make the Committee of Public Safety a synonym for all that is despotic and sinister in the use or abuse of public power. In outline the scheme of this revolutionary Govern- THE TERROR 107 ment was a small executive committee of the Con- vention, exercising plenary administrative powers over the armies and in the provinces through its delegates or representatives en mission. The Com- mittee of Public Safety, as it was called, was the brain centre of France ; from it proceeded the orders which provisioned the armies, directed their move- ments, raised the supplies and carried on the adminis- tration of the country. It was assisted in its task by a subordinate police committee, known as the Committee of General Security, and specially devised to counteract reactionary movements in the capital. The Jacobins, who in virtue of their greater audacity had overawed the moderate and timid members of the Convention, had hold of the helm and did not intend to lose it. Violent themselves, they had reason to fear the violence of others. A mania of murderous suspicion seized upon the capital of the most civilized country in Europe, and was re- peated in many a country town and village, with hideous and original variatibns, noyades at Nantes and mitraillades at Lyons, matching if not exceeding the atrocities in Paris. 6 In each one of the forty-eight sections of the capital a revolutionary committee of Jacobin politicians, hired at the rate of forty sous a day, carried on a trade of blackmail and delation. The helpless victims of their suspicions or animosities were brought before a revolutionary tribunal, condemned without a shadow of honest investigation, and sent to the guil- lotine. The city government, fallen into the hands of that insurrectionary Commune which had established itself on August 10, 1792, was one of the principal centres of profligate terrorism, though for a time, 108 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION under the influence of Chaumette, murder and the public profession of atheism were mingled with sentimental schemes for the relief of the poor. To complete the picture, we must imagine a starving population, a tyrannical interference with the prices not only of bread but of many of the necessaries of life, trade and commerce prostrate, credit annihilated, the country flooded with depreciated paper, a band of six thousand ruffians, styled " the revolutionary army," patrolling the streets of Paris, and, in their appointed and lucrative task of executing revolutionary laws, respecting no consideration of common decency or justice. In this grim and terrible period, dating from August 10, 1792, though not reaching its highest point of severity until May 1794, and extending to the fall of Robespierre in the following July, freedom was an empty word. The last honest and inde- pendent paper the Mercure de France of Mallet du Pan came to an end with the fall of the monarchy ; the Vieux Cordelier, the first newspaper which ventured to appeal for clemency and the only piece of real literature in all the Revolution, brought its editor to the block. The city which had feted Voltaire was condemned to tolerate the foul and vulgar blasphemies of the Pere Duchesne and to look on while two thousand six hundred and twenty-five judicial murders were perpetrated by the Revolutionary tribunal. " Terror," as Barere phrased it, " was the order of the day," but not the wish of the majority. The young and the brave were with the armies ; the members of the administration absorbed in their tremendous task ; and the general mass of moderate men too numbed and . broken by the sudden and ! * anomalous calamity to concert resistance to this ECLIPSE OF LIBERTY 109 campaign of purposeless and irrelevant crime. To the quiet bourgeois what did it matter if the Jacobin proscribed the Girondin or the Girondin the Jacobin ? Jacobins, He*bertists, Dantonists, Girondins were all revolutionaries. They adopted the September massacres ; they constructed the Revolutionary tribunal ; they declared war ; they sanctioned the Commune ; they sent Louis XVI. to the block. Let the wolves rend one another ! The passive majority which washed its hands of politics did not care to follow the swift and thrilling vicissitudes of the deadly struggle in the Convention. It was neither moved by the destruction of the Girondins, nor enlisted in the triangular contest be- ; tween Robespierre, Hebert, and Danton. And so it per- mitted the fair name of the Republic to be stained by the atrocities of a faction which in the estimate of a careful observer never exceeded six thousand men. 7 In this provisional and haphazard government every principle of the early revolution seemed to be violated. The Constitution of 1791 had provided a plan of extreme decentralization ; but under the terror the wheel had gone round full circle and all executive authority was gathered into the hands of the Committee of Public Safety. The division of powers had been one of the most cherished doctrines of the early revolution. The Committee of Public Safety was a committee of the Convention. The first Assembly had introduced the jury into France and attempted to accredit it ; the men of 1793 made the jury a farce and so far compromised its reputation that it ran a risk of disappearing under the Consulate. The first Assembly believed in freedom of commerce. The government of the Terror enacted the law of 110 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION the maximum. In every department of govern- ment a despotic extension of State interference had superseded the legislative recognition of individual right. In the reaction which followed upon the death of Robespierre the continuance of the French Republic was promoted by a crime. Partly through neglect and partly through ill-treatment, the Dauphin of France died in the Temple prison. The child was sickly, and it may well be that he would never have crossed the threshold of manhood ; but he was the hope of the Bourbon cause, and that could be said of him which could be said of no living male of his house, that he was clear of the contagion of Coblentz, and that he had had no part or lot in the camps or the counsels of the enemy. His uncle the Count of Provence, who now assumed the title of Louis XVI 1 1., was not so situated. He had committed the crime of emigration in June 1791, and gave no sign that he was prepared to accept those parts of the new regime which were irrevocably fixed in the acceptation of France. It is open to argument that concessions would not have helped him, that they would only have estranged his friends without conciliating his enemies, and that in view of the fate of Philippe 6galite, the chief of the royalist House was wise to avoid the faintest suspicion of apostacy. That had not been the view of the Bearnais who held that Paris was worth a mass ; but Louis XVIII. was not Henry IV. And yet it seems that the chances of a royalist restoration were never so bright as in the months which succeeded the fall of the Jacobin tyrant, when in the sudden revulsion against the horrors of the last two years the country would gladly A LOST OPPORTUNITY 111 have seen a constitutional monarchy provided that it were guaranteed against the restoration of the ancien regime. Louis XVIII. failed to grasp the opportunity. He would not promise an amnesty. He would never treat with a regicide republic ; he would have nothing short of unconditional surrender, believing that the chief of the 6migr&s could recover the allegiance of France by the old forlorn expedients of armed incursions and foreign gold, and perhaps in his indolent vein of Pyrrhonism not very seriously wishing to risk a plunge into the central maelstrom. However this may be, the cause of the monarchy was conducted as badly as possible, and a fruitless effort to rekindle the flames of the Vendee, coupled with a mad descent on Quiberon, completed the discomfiture of the royalist hopes, and established the French Republic in a fresh term of existence. What particular shape that Republic should assume was by far the most important question which con- fronted France, when the murderous cloud 6f the terror had been rolled away. A fierce revolt known as the Insurrection of Prairial (May 20, 1795), and having for its war-cry " Bread and the Constitution," only deepened the conviction which was now the common property of all sensible men that the scheme of 1793 was but an alias for anarchy. But if this scheme were abandoned, and if monarchy were impossible, how should the Republic be organized ? It is the nemesis of civil war that it does not admit of an immediate sequel in the free working of a democratic constitution. In France, where passions had run so high and careers had been so deeply engaged, there was no swift and easy road to liberty. The Convention which had voted the death of the King - 112 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION could not afford to risk elections which very possibly might result in a royalist majority. Between the abstract principle of electoral liberty and the preserva- tion of their own very concrete skins the members of this Assembly had no difficulty in making a choice. The earlier schemes of the Revolution had been the fruit of youth and idealism ; the Constitution of 1795 was the product of a tragic experience. " We have lived," said Boissy d'Anglas as he introduced the measure, " six centuries in six years. Let not this costly experience be lost on you. It is time to profit by the crimes of the monarchy, the errors of the Constituent Assembly, .the vacillations and eccentricities of the Legislative Assembly, the misdeeds of the decemviral tyranny, the calamities of anarchy and the misfortunes of civil war." The misfortune most keenly remembered and bitterly bewailed had been the tyranny of Robespierre. That such a calamity might never recur the executive power was vested in a Directory of five, who were to hold office for a term of five years and were expressly debarred from the control of the Treasury, the personal command of an army or a seat in the Legislature. American experience was before the minds of the Con- stitutional Committee who knew that the executive head of the United States is chosen by the votes of the people. But, though the American plan was discussed, two considerations were fatal to its adoption. An Executive Committee depending on the direct vote of the people might easily defy the Legislature, and would not improbably be a royalist body. It was determined then that the Directory should be chosen not by the primary assemblies but by the Legislature of France. This body, unlike all the legislatures THE DIRECTORY 118 which had preceded it, was to consist of two Councils, renewable by a third every year and protected by a series of excellent provisions from the intimidation and disturbance of the mob. A few months before, an orator proposing a bicameral constitution would have expiated his temerity on the scaffold. Now the two Councils passed through the Convention almost unopposed. A single Chamber had failed to express the true will or the sober sense of the people. It had been the slave of the Commune, of the Mountain, of Robespierre, and had made itself the accomplice of a thousand acts of temerity, cowardice, and crime. Even the critics admitted that there could be no stable constitution with a single legislative chamber. Against the mob rule which had been the special curse of recent times the Constitution of the year III. took rigorous precautions. Universal suffrage was abandoned for a scheme which was both limited and indirect ; the large towns were broken into manage- able districts ; the clubs and armed assemblies and tumultuous petitions peremptorily forbidden. It was the general design that power should be transferred from the democracy and lodged in the hands of the enlightened middle class. So great was the force of the reaction that only three members of the Con- vention rose to defend universal suffrage. This Constitution was frequently and persistently violated. Whatever potency of virtue may have been implicit in its provisions, that potency was never allowed to develop. The experiment of the bourgeois Republic was shorter and far less honourable than the subsequent essay of the bourgeois monarchy. A regicide Directory, backed by a regicide party in the Legislature, could not permit the reactionary 8 v 114 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION feeling in the country to flow freely and at its appointed intervals into the central cistern of govern- ment. Engaged throughout the whole of this period in foreign war, unwilling to make an honourable peace, but possessing in its powerful armies a defence against the royalist reaction, the Directory did not scruple to preserve the ascendency of its principles by a military coup d'etat, and afterwards by official candi- datures and systematic interference with elections. The life of the Directory is divided into two halves by the coup d'etat of 18 Fructidor (September 4, 1797). In the earlier period there was a struggle carried on within the walls of the Chambers and under the forms of the Constitution between the party which desired to relax and the party which was resolved to maintain the penal laws against the priests and the emigres. Throughout the country the tide was running in favour of clemency, moderation, and peace, and the partial elections of 1797 gave to the Con- stitutionalists a working majority in both Chambers. Carnot, the most eminent of the Directors, though as a former member of the Committee of Public Safety he had been associated with the horrors of the Terror, favoured the cause of clemency, and the new Director Barthelemy, who had the honour of negotiating the peace with Prussia, was of the same opinion. The laws against the priests were relaxed ; the relations of emigres were released from police supervision and restored to civil rights. Then the Revolutionary party struck their blow. Representing, what has never been established and is indeed contradicted by all the evidence, that their opponents were working for the restoration of the monarchy, the Jacobin directors appealed to Bonaparte to save the Republic. THE FRUCTIDORIANS 115 The young general of the army of Italy found it convenient to believe the charge and sent Augereau to Paris to do the business. The Constitutionalists of the Chambers were seized, sent across France in open iron cages, and despatched with every circum- stance of rigour and barbarity to expiate their virtues in the torrid and fever-stricken village of Sinamary. Carnot, the organizer of victory, fled to Switzerland ; Barthelemy was deported to Cayenne ; the elections in forty-nine departments were summarily quashed. In every district a military tribunal was established to identify and to shoot imigris. Then ensued a period unredeemed by any gleam of grandeur, and marked by every species of corrup- tion and violence. The laws against the imigris and the priests were sharpened and enforced with increasing rigour, and for the first time since the age of Diocle- tian the whole mechanism of a powerful government was employed to destroy Christianity. In the fury of party feeling the instinct of good sense and public policy disappeared. The Fructidorians, playing for their own hand and aware that foreign war supported the armies of the Republic, rejected a fair occasion for a general and an honourable peace. After the victories of Bonaparte had driven Austria to con- clude the peace of Campo-Formio and to recognize the acquisition by France of Belgium, of Ancona, and the Ionian Islands, England sent Lord Malmesbury to treat at Lille. The British Government was prepared to make astonishing concessions, to recognize the European conquests of France, and to restore the captured French colonies, save only the Cape of Good Hope taken from the Dutch, and Surinam taken from the Spaniards. The Directory broke off negotiations 116 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION upon the point of the Cape. It declined to make a peace which would have left France the most powerful State in Europe, mistress of Belgium, and exercising through the medium of the Cisalpine Republic a predominant influence in Northern Italy. And so the duel between the Republic and Europe endured, and the Directory repudiated two-thirds of its debt, furnishing to Europe the first example of republican bankruptcy. In many of the careers which were fashioned in the great tempest of the French Revolution there is a high and stern note of civic passion, an austere moral beauty sometimes a little injured to our Teuton taste by a certain stiff classic affectation verging on the ridiculous. Victor Hugo has painted the type in that grand picture of the dying Conventionnel which he has set into the framework of " Les Miserables " ; and there is an image, not out of fiction but out of history, from the life of Jean Bon St Andre, who controlled the Naval Department during the Terror, which may hang as a pendant to that picture. But of all this high and strenuous purpose there is little trace during the last two years of the French Republic. The large issues had disappeared from the vision of the party which had secured its tenure of power by a crime. The Fructidorians cared only for them- selves, for their own pockets and their own lives. They were a faction, and they fought for the ascendancy of a faction, believing, or affecting to believe, that the welfare of France was bound up with their interest. Few Governments have been less pure, less equitable, less honest. The spirit of plunder permeated the whole administration. Diplomatists extorted bribes from foreign powers ; the generals squeezed money THE COURSE OF REVOLUTIONS 117 and plate and pictures from conquered territories ; and in his sumptuous rooms in the Luxembourg, Barras, the most profligate of the Directors, gave an example which was faithfully copied through all the descending circles of the official hierarchy. In the history of revolutions certain broad pheno- mena constantly present themselves. They rise out of real and admitted grievances, and receive support from the generous emotions and sometimes from the most enlightened speculation of the age ; they begin in moderation, they steadily increase in violence, they end in the ostracism of their opponents. Then an inevitable revulsion sets in. Men begin to ask themselves why they have been carried so far, and whether the policy into which they have been driven really expresses their original meaning. In proportion as their initial ideal was high, their disappointment is great at the harsh and ugly close of so many pleasant sentiments and hopes. But meanwhile the Revolution has created a mass of vested interests, swelling in proportion to its duration and dangerous to disturb ; and in this fact lies a problem of infinite difficulty. Hateful as is the present, the past was still more odious : the interests menaced by reaction coalesce together to defend their new acquisitions, and a dangerous period of uncertainty and oscillation ensues, marked often by a recrudescence of severity as one or other party obtains the mastery, and con- tinuing until out of weariness or statesmanship some working compromise can be found. I So it was with the French Revolution. It began [in the idealism of 1789, rose to the Terror of 1793, | and sank to the compromise of 1799, which only the authority of a despot could procure and enforce. 118 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION It was while the movement was on the declining curve that France was governed by the Directory, a body of men whose collective epitaph may thus be written : " They preserved the land-settlement of the Revolution and introduced conscription into Europe." De Maistre, the philosopher of the Catholic reaction, argued that States were never the product of an articulate process of deliberation, but that, springing from some hidden root, they grew in virtue of a mysterious organizing principle of which no man could render an account. A country was made, not out of calculation but out of patriotism, and lived, not by the lamp of reasoned self-interest, but by the inner glow of a national tradition. Men did not obey written constitutions or philosophies ; they obeyed mysteries. Active obedience could only be due to the deep inarticulate call of instinct. The Jacobins put out declarations of the Rights of Man, and estab- lished a system of popular government which was, as popular government always must be, nothing but organized ostracism. In so doing they were, according to De Maistre, ignoring the character of the world in which they lived. They believed that Justice could be realized on earth, whereas God is unjust in time though just in eternity ; they thought that the world was rational, whereas it is a system of profound, solid, and vigorous absurdities ; they believed in the existence of Humanity, whereas we can know nothing but individual men. None the less, having the sentiment of the indivisibility oi their country, the Jacobins were the blind instruments of God. They saw that France should be a nation and they made her a nation. The long obscure process of history, begun in the dim Middle Ages, sanctified WORK OF THE CONVENTION 119 by St Louis and Joan of Arc, glorified by Philip Augustus and Richelieu, aided by the force of Louis VI., the patience of Charles VII., the circumspect prudence of Louis XL, the genial power of Henry IV., was brought to a completion by a generation of republicans who, while appearing to flout all the traditions of their country, were unconsciously serving the oldest and deepest instincts of the French race. CHAPTER VI THE SOWER AND THE SEED I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries of Europe. PAINE, Feb. 9, 1792 THE voice of Immanuel Kant sounding across the sandy plains of Prussia proclaimed in the French Revolution the advent of everlasting peace and a federation of European republics. In Germany, where romantic enthusiasm ranged at large with no formed habit of exact political calculation to check it, such expectations were freely entertained. The poets, the philosophers, the critics welcomed in the Revolution the emancipation of the human race from the enthralment of paralysing social and political conventions. But the literary class did not con- stitute Germany. In that archaic and anomalous polity there were depths of unrealized Teutonic sentiment, of affinities and repugnances, of loyalty to the old dynasties and hierarchies, for which no place was found in the cosmopolitan philosophy of the lettered middle class. The long pedigrees of the Saxon Wettins, the Bavarian Wittelsbachs, the Prussian Hohenzollerns, the Hanoverian Guelphs, were regarded as national monuments, and prized like the Niebelungen Lied or the Luther Thiirm. Weave their dreams as beautifully as they might, ECLIPSE OF THE REPUBLIC 121 the professors of republican and cosmopolitan demo- cracy were impotent to disturb the settled and rooted tradition <{" tin- princely dyn^tirs. 1 But, whatever may have been the prospect of stable republican developments in Europe, it was fatally injured by the course of affairs in France. The execution of the French King, the outbreak of the ? War, the Terror, the Vendee, the excesses of the* revolutionary armies on the Rhine, in Switzerland, and in Italy, and finally, after ten years of tempestuous agitation, the enthusiastic acceptance of a despotism by the very country which had claimed to be the prophetess of human liberty all these circumstances tended to throw Europe back into reaction. In the passions evoked by the great European struggle, the character of the polity which was set up in France by the genius of Bonaparte was imperfectly understood. The enemy saw the obvious things, and was blind to the things which were less acceptable to a biassed intelligence. He saw the soldier of fortune, the coup d'ttat, the despotism, the contrast between the promise and performance of democracy, the shameful eclipse of the Republican idea, heralded with ten thousand trumpets, before it had established itself in the political traditions of Europe. These things were obvious and important. The Republic in France disappeared on that November night in 1799 when the deputies of the last revolutionary Assembly were chased through the windows of the Chateau of St Cloud, and save for the le^aad m ,tlie coinsjj^ifh persisted till 22nd October 1808, there was little in the new government to recall its existence. The Republic then vanished, and the Consulate was ratified by an overwhelming majority of the French 122 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION people. But if the new polity was not a real Republic, still less was it the ancien regime. Bonaparte was a man not of the old but of the new world. In all its fundamental aspects he represented the course of the French Revolution. He secured the new land- settlement, and provided a shelter for the careers which had been forged in the service of the republic. He stood for government founded on the plebiscite, for social equality, for the carriere ouverte aux talents, which he held to be the core and heart of democracy. Against the tradition of the Customs and the Ordi- I^JI j nances, he maintained public trial, the jury, the ' juges de paix, and, in a* slightly modified form, that equal law of division which was the corner-stone of the revolutionary civil law. Against the Pope, the Roman Church, and the Canons he maintained the Civil Marriage and Divorce. True that he made peace with the Pope, recalled the Roman Church into its Erastian connexion with the State, and opened wide the gates of France to the exiled servants of the ancient monarchy. For the religious policy of the Concordat he did not obtain the forgiveness of the intellectuals of his own day nor of the republicans of succeeding generations. But his object was broader than the views of any school or faction to unite the old France and the new, to control all the spiritual and intellectual impulses of his people, and to incorporate the vigorous traditions of the Revolution in a State which should combine the advantages of democracy with a discipline such as no subject or citizen of France had ever known. In the conquests of the Revolution, the Consulate, and the Empire, the political gospel of the new French ITALY 123 nation was spread abroad through Europe, creating here feelings of violent revulsion, and here educating unsuspected and fruitful affinities. The quarter in which this influence proved to be most permanent was the peninsula of Italy. Of all the countries in Europe Italy alone possessed ancient republican traditions ; but these had become so empty of democratic content, and ever since the fifteenth century had been so much overshadowed by the principalities and monarchies of the peninsula, that, as Napoleon observed to the Directory, there was less material for the constitution of republics in Italy than there was in France. From the numerous records of foreign tourists, from the delightful Des Brosses to the sage Goethe, as also from the memoirs of Goldoni and the autobiography of Alfieri, we can gather an impression of what Italian life and society must have been like in the period which elapses between the Treaty of Utrecht and the first contact of Italy with the French Revolution. The heavy hand of the Spaniard had been removed from Lom- bardy, but not before the Spanish dominion, which dated from 1540, and was accompanied by the tremendous instrument of the Inquisition, had crushed all the creative energies of the country. Patriotism was long dead, and the hopes which Machiavelli had derived from the transient success of Cesare Borgia were no longer plausible enough to animate any portion of public life. The Austrians wejre in Lonjhardy ; in Naples and Sicily the Haps- burgs were removed in 1737, only to be superseded by Spanish Bourbons, by the rotten branch of the most rotten trunk in the forest of European monarchies. Piedmont alone, with its rude subalpine population. 124 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION possessed a certain sap and vigour. Here at least there was a national monarchy and a national nobility, though little else that can weigh in the scales of civilization : no art, or music, or science, or literature, or in fact any contribution to the splendid sum of Italian culture ; a land of priestcraft and super- stition, using French for the language of polite society, and a patois more akin to Provensal than Italian in the staple converse of the people ; a tame country, dull as rectangular Turin itself, but possessing the virtue that belongs to a simple, robust, and loyal community. Of the ancient republics, two alone, Venice and Genoa, retained the external signs of former greatness ; but their empire was broken, their commerce had dwindled, and the failure of their out- ward energies was associated with a loss of political animation. These States, preserving the republican forms, but in reality controlled by civic aristocracies, had stiffened into a pose of stationary and dignified content. Their citizens were happy, they loved festivals and processions, the gossip and pretty trivialities of life, the pleasant chat in the piazza, the voices of choristers in the church, the flirtations, the verse-making, the vitteggiatttra. Their days were like a comedy of Goldoni, for they asked nothing better of life than life was able to give them. Heroic dreams did not trouble this pleasant tranquillity. Labour and the risks of political enterprise they were content to leave to the barbarians. In Tuscany, alone there was a more strenuous tradition and a standard of government as high as any in Europe ; but Tuscany was no republic but a grand duchy under the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine. The Italians themselves speak of their national THE AWAKENING 125 movement of the nineteenth century as a " Risorgi- mento," a resurrection, and no phrase could be more appropriate. It was a resurrection of a people once the centre of power and illumination in Europe, but long since fallen into an elegant and sterile decrepitude. And this process of recovery dates from the shock of the French Revolution. It would not, of course, be true to say that the land of Vico, the parent of political philo-i'pliv. h.i'l been Hlt'^.-th-T b:invn of sound and fruitful speculation dunn:; the i-i^hUT-nth a-nUiry. The names of Beccaria and Filanghieri may remind us that this was not so. As there were reformers before the Reformation, so there were precursors before the Revolution, whose influence was felt in the practical administration of the more progressive Italian States. But the summoning of the States-General to Versailles on May 5, 1789, is the real birthday of the Italian Risorgimento. The French Revolution roused Italy from her torpor, broke down the barriers which had obstructed the tides of national life, dis- lodged the Austrians from Milan, the Bourbons from Naples, and for the first time since the age of Justinian brought the whole peninsula under what was in fact, if not in name, a single political system. The republican ideal, which was one of the forces working in the Risorgimento differentiating by its continuous presence and importance the Italian from the German national movement was not so much the product of the old classical and medieval memories, though these must be given a certain weight, as of the new democracy of France. Girondin newspapers were more important than the histories of Rienzo ; the doctrine of popular sovereignty than the tradition of chartered rights ; the sowing of new republics on 126 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION the French model than the chronicled victories of the medieval communes of Lombardy. The ancient classical, aristocratic tradition had its votaries, men who hated Kings and scorned the people, like Alfieri, ;the greatest writer of tragedies in the Italian language, land one of the first prophets of a larger Italian ^patriotism. But the age was full of stir and novelty ; and, being swept into the whirlpool of the French wars, Italy received from the French those impulses towards democratic and republican ideas which, com- bining with aspirations of a different origin and quality, finally secured her national union. The new era was inaugurated by one of the most thrilling exploits in all military history the first Italian campaign of Bonaparte. Here was an Italian epic, not mythical like the " yneid," but a sequence of substantial exploits unrolling themselves in a series of swift and surprising revelations. And the hero of the epic was an Italian. He came from France lead- ing an army the like of which had never been seen before, for it had a creed, and a mission to propagate democracy. The general was an adventurer. No one had explored his pedigree ; few had heard of him ; he ruled an army of wild, rugged, and joyous comrades, involving everything that was sacred and established in the spray of their light and impetuous contumely. Yet in the course of a campaign he beat the Sardinians and Austrians to a standstill, and was master of such parts of Italy as it was germane to his purpose to control. An unknown Italian from Corsica had proved himself more than a match for the Holy Roman Emperor. He had beaten him* again and again, pursued him into the Styrian Alps, and forced him to make an ignominious treaty of peace. By one THE CISALPINE REPUBLIC 127 of the terms of this instrument the Emperor acknow- ledged a new political entity, the Cisalpine Republic, composed partly of that which had been Austrian Lombardy, partly of the Papal Legations, and partly of the western provinces of Venetia and the Swiss territory of the Valtelline. It was the first demo- cratic republic upon a large scale which Italy had known. The constitution of the Cisalpine Republic was modelled upon that of the French Directory, yet since it was no part of Bonaparte's design that the new commonwealth should be independent of French influence, he named its first directors, representatives, and officials. The young general was no idealist, and in the cynical destruction of the Venetian Re- public had demonstrated to the world how little he cared for political liberties. But finding an enthusi- astic welcome among the radical idealists of the larger towns, and carrying the commission of a democratic republic, he chose to represent himself as the herald of the republican idea and the creator of republican States. No one, however, was more conscious of the fact that these polities were unsupported by the general mass of the people, or that the Italians were as yet unfit for self-government. You cannot change the pyschology of a people by a coup d'ttat, or by some quick process of political chemistry convert an idle nobleman into a serious worker, or a medical student into a full-blown statesman. The letters of Napoleon to the Directors of Paris are powdered with cynical gibes at the degenerate fibre of the Lombards and Venetians. He wished his government to understand that stable polities are not based upon the transient excitement of the Piazza, 128 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION and that a tree of liberty or a red cap have no necessary relation to the art or science of government. 2 When a political settlement has become hardened by prescription, even the most transient disturbance of it is a fact of moment. It dislocates the traditional mode of thinking and breaks the hard crust of usage. Even if the old order be restored, the restoration is never quite exact. It cannot reproduce a state of feeling of which one of the essential conditions was the bare fact of unbroken continuity. The old furniture may be replaced, but it is viewed not as a fixture but as a movable ; and questions arise as to whether it looks well in its former position. So it was with the short-lived Italian republics founded under the Directory. Ephemeral as they were, and the creatures of military coercion and financial greed, they broke an old tradition and started a new one. Rome, Naples, Milan, Genoa were capitals of republics, organized on French designs, and depending, so far as local support was concerned, upon the sympathies of the lettered and professional middle class, for whom little space had previously been found in the public life of the country. It is true that, in 1798, Austrian and Russian victories swept the French out of Italy, and that the Cisalpine, Roman, and Parthenopean Republics were brushed away like cobwebs ; but it was not in vain that the tricolour had waved over Milan, Rome, and Naples, and the brief Roman Republic formed a precedent for that larger design which fifty years later, thanks to the valour of Garibaldi, was printed so deeply on the Italian heart. One incident there was in the year 1799 which made an indelible impression upon Southern Italy and may FRANCE AND NAPLES 129 be regarded as the source of a long history of bitter- ness in the Neapolitan Kingdom, resulting in successive waves of secret republican and patriotic conspiracy. Bonaparte was in Egypt, his fleet had been destroyed at the Battle of the Nile, and the Neapolitan Court saw an opportunity of taking a handsome revenge upon the French. The arrival of Nelson with the victorious English fleet threw the Neapolitan royalists into transports of delight and assurance. Encouraged by the presence of an English admiral and an Austrian general, and believing that a rapid blow struck at the French positions in Central Italy would bring Austria into the coalition and save the cause of monarchy in Europe, the government of Ferdinand IV. and Marie Caroline mobilized the army of the kingdom and dispatched it into the Roman State. The inefficiency of a Neapolitan army has often been proved, and it was proved then. General Championnet, drawing in his scattered troops, allowed General Mack and his Neapolitans to occupy Rome and then crushed them in detail as they marched northwards. Their defeats were for the moment decisive. The regular Nea- politan troops fled before the French bayonets, surrendering position after position, and the King and Queen in a paroxysm of fear basely abandoned Naples to its fate and escaped to Sicily on an English man-of-war. But the capitulation of the regular troops did not imply the surrender of the capital. The Neapolitan Government was founded on a union of the Crown, the Church, and the lower classes, and as the French army advanced the priests and friars who adhered to the falling government roused the super- stitious loyalty of the rabble, reminding them of 9 130 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION the Queen's words, " The people alone remain faith- ful, for all the educated classes of the Kingdom are Jacobins." Nowhere indeed in Italy were the social contrasts more clearly marked than in Naples. The aristocracy was more cultivated and ambitious, the professional classes more enlightened than in any other Italian city ; but this island of civility was set in the midst of a dark ocean of barbarism. The lazzaroni of Naples rose at the call of the priests, equally pre- pared to sack the houses of the wealthy Neapolitan liberals and to resist the attacks of the imperious Frenchman. For three days they fought desperately for a King who talked their dialect, relished their dishes, and had himself kept a cook-shop in a poor district of the town. At length, on January 23, 1799, a combination of disciplined valour and dexterous diplomacy gave Championnet control of the city. More than three thousand Neapolitans had fallen in the fighting ; but though Naples was still red with carnage it welcomed the French general with delirious joy. When Championnet took his seat at the opera all the spectators rose from their seats, thousands of white handkerchiefs fluttered in the air, and vivas and bravos sounded for a space of a quarter of an hour. On January 26 the Parthenopean Republic was pro- claimed, and on the following day St Januarius con- descended to perform the miracle which consecrated the new order of things in the eyes of a superstitious Mediterranean people. " We adore St Januarius," wrote General Bonnamy, the French Chief of the Staff, to the Minister of War ; "we live as well as possible with the lazzaroni ; we accomplish miracles with the aid of the respectable cardinal. . . . The Commander- in-Chief has prayed like the devil. He has believed THE NEAPOLITAN REPUBLICANS 181 all that was necessary, and the blood of St Januarius has flowed. At the same moment Vesuvius has belched forth flames, and a Te Dewn has been sung to thank Heaven for the entry of the French into Naples." With the mobility of the South, the population which had savagely resisted the French attacks a few days before, now took the tricolour cockade, and paraded the streets with cries in honour of liberty, St Januarius, and Championnet. The French Commander-in-Chief was so much flattered by these spontaneous out- bursts that he wrote to the Directory that Naples presented the appearance of Paris in 1789 and 1790. In reality the conditions were very different. In France the Revolution was national and came from within ; in Naples it was imposed upon a people by foreign bayonets. In France the Republic was a symbol of patriotism ; in Naples it was associated with the triumph of an enemy. The forces which confronted the French Republic were the Church, the aristocracy, and the foreign powers ; in Naples the greatest danger to republicanism was the cruel and superstitious temper of a fickle and degraded mob. The revolutionary party in France was composed of all the rough homespun of the nation, its peasants, its artisans, its laborious and zealous middle class ; but in Naples it was far otherwise. Here the repub- lican was a man of property and culture, and the representative of ideals not only far in advance of the intelligence of his country, but antagonistic to the general direction of national instinct and opinion. In the paroxysm of fear caused by the excesses of the lazzaroni many refined men and women belonging to the noblest families in the country rallied round the cause of the Parthenopean Republic. A con- 132 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION stitution was framed upon the model of the Directory with certain classical appendages, an ephorate to guard fundamental laws and propose useful reforms, and a censorian power to watch over the morals of the nation ; the country was divided into departments, and a Neapolitan legislature, stocked with some of the noblest and most enlightened minds in the country, addressed itself to the problem of abolishing feudalism and curtailing the overwhelming power of the Church. There are few pages of Italian history which, if read in the light of subsequent events, possess a more pathetic interest than this brief history of Neapolitan idealism. It was so blind, so optimistic, so full of captivating and sonorous eloquence ; and it all came to an end with such tragic suddenness, after thirty days of golden illusions. If we ask why this was so, the reply must be that there were no deep roots to the movement. In Calabria, where, owing to the unpopularity of baronial exactions, republicans were more numerous than elsewhere, they did not, accord- ing to Colletta, exceed one-tenth of the population ; but even had the proportion been higher than this it was obvious from the first that the continuance of the Parthenopean Republic would depend upon the continued popularity and ascendancy of the French. Popular the French could hardly remain, for, despite the politic recognition of St Januarius, their impiety was as notorious as their fiscal oppression. A war- contribution of sixty million francs reminded the Neapolitans that, if free, they were also conquered ; and while the finest pictures in their museums were being dispatched to adorn the galleries in Paris, while every French officer and member of the French civil commission was wringing money out of the embar- A QUEEN'S REVENGE 138 rassed resources of the country, the principles of French Republicanism were not exhibited in an agreeable light. The end came with surprising suddenness. The barons, whose privileges were threatened, repaired to their castles to excite the peasantry ; the monks preached a holy war ; the King and Queen dispatched Cardinal Ruffo from Sicily with orders to raise the Calabrians against the Republic. The position of the French army in Naples became daily more precarious. Royalist bands intercepted couriers, beset the roads, and threatened the food-supplies of the capital ; English men-of-war blocked the harbour. Meanwhile a Russian army had entered the North of Italy and was sweeping the French before it. On May 8, Macdonald, who had succeeded Championnet in the Neapolitan command, marched out of Naples, leaving two battalions behind him to support the failing fortunes of the Parthenopean Republic ; and as the French withdrew the insurgent tides of royalism swept up to the walls of the capital. On June 19, the day upon which Souvaroff beat Macdonald on the Trebbia, the Neapolitan fortresses capitulated to Cardinal Ruffo ; but, to the proud and bitter soul of Marie Caroline, no treaty was sacred if it had been made with rebels. She instructed the capitulations to be torn up so far as they concerned her Neapolitan subjects, and Nelson, to his lasting dishonour, con- sented to be an accomplice in her revenge. Eighteen princes or dukes, two noblemen, fourteen generals, three bishops, eleven priests, and as many lawyers, were among those who were condemned to the scaffold. The replies and speeches of some of the prisoners when faced with their brutal judge read like the noblest 184 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION passages of Tacitus, and show that the classical spirit of the Republic was still alive in Italy. But for the moment fury and superstition were in the ascendant. As the victims passed to the scaffold the lazzaroni could scarcely be prevented from tearing them to pieces ; suspect Jacobins were burned alive, women were flogged, and excesses were committed in the name of God and King which match, if they do not surpass, the utmost horror of the French Revolution. So the Parthenopean Republic was drowned in blood. No European capital, as Colletta observes, has ever lost so large a proportion of its elect citizens. The flower of southern liberalism was cut down, and, by the proscription of all that was noblest and most generous in the country, the forces of progress were deprived of sane and wholesome direction and driven into the underground channels of a dark and desperate conspiracy. 3 With the return of Bonaparte from Egypt the fortunes of the Italian dynasties began to tremble anew. The battle of Marengo shattered the Austrian ascendency and precluded the return of the Sardinian house to Turin. The Cisalpine Republic was restored, and by swift stages the dominion of France was ex- tended throughout the peninsula. But while this process was being accomplished, and while the greater part of it was still in the future, the government of France had passed from a disguised Republic into an undisguised Empire. The mask once thrown away in France, Napoleon could refashion Italy in free dis- regard of democratic theorem. The Cisalpine Re- public was in 1804 converted into the Italian Kingdom, and when two years later the King and Queen of Naples were again chased from the capital, the form NAPOLEON AND ITALY 185 of government established by the French was not a republic but a monarchy. Whatever may have been the ultimate intentions of Napoleon, it did not enter into his scheme to fortify that republican tradition to which his earliest victories had given a new and powerful impulse. The devices which were employed to strengthen the Empire in France were applied to support the monarchical principle in Italy, and if time had been permitted, the French dynasty or dynasties established in the peninsula would have been sup- ported by a cluster of noble and dependent families, whose princely estates, descending by the privileged method of primogeniture, would tower over the dwindling properties of the middle and lower class. Fourteen years passed and the power of Napoleon was broken. The French dominion in Italy which was founded on force crumbled to pieces with the fall of its creator : the Pope returned to Rome ; Fer- dinand and Caroline resumed their odious rule in Naples ; the Austrian flag flew in Milan and Venice, and superstition returned to Turin in the wake of the Sardinian exiles. Of the old Italian republics, San Marino and Lucca alone remained. Venice was Austrian ; Genoa was Piedmontese ; in outward semblance the cause of free government in Italy appeared to have been retarded rather than advanced by the expansive force of the revolution and the Empire. This, however, is the reverse of truth. Napoleon sowed the idea of Italian unity, and a republic was among the modes in which patriotic Italian minds came to conceive that great result. The dynastic tradition had been interrupted, the old boundaries temporarily effaced, and with this revolu- tion in affairs, ephemeral as it may appear to be, the 136 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION twin spirits of loyalty and locality lost something of their hold upon the instinct and intellect of the people. More important than all, the population of Italy had been compelled to take sides in a great and living issue. Part had served the French ; part had offered to them an active or a passive resistance. In every quarter of Italy, and behind all the varying condi- tions of Italian political life, this underlying dualism remained the groundwork of public affairs. The old dynasties were pitted against the revolutionary faith ; the canons against the Civil Code, the index against the belief in liberty, the doctrine of obedience against the gospel of natural rights. Hateful as were the oppressions of the Empire, there was not a town in which some family or group of families had not con- tributed to establish the new regime and to strip from the old fabric its traditional supports ; and this great connexion, when the lamp of the Empire was extinguished, continued to cherish the thoughts which arose from the understanding of that strong and finely-wrought machine. The republican tradition in England, represented by rthe writings of Milton, Harrington, and Sidney, and illustrated by the triumphs of the Commonwealth, survived the Revolution of 1688 only as a literary memory. The Whig settlement, by circumscribing the prerogative of the Crown and fixing the succession in the Protestant line, gave substantial satisfaction to the constitutional feeling in the country. In the first half of the eighteenth century the Hanoverian throne was threatened, not by republicans but by Jacobites, and, when at the beginning of the reign of George III., a radical movement sprang up in the City ENGLISH RADICALISM 187 of London, and " Wilkes and Liberty " became the war-cry of the city mob, the attack was directed not upon the monarchy but upon the ministers of the Crown and the constitution of Parliament. The radicals of that period were not wanting in courage or decision. They advocated universal suffrage, annual parliaments, and electoral pledges : but all this under the shelter of Whig principles and with the claim that they were the true and lawful heirs of the Bill of Rights. If the monarchy during the eighteenth century had been an active principle of evil, some party might have been formed for its destruction ; but the growth of cabinet government was slowly transferring the responsibility for the conduct of affairs from the King to his ministers. The process was indeed neither swift nor continuous, and it suffered a dangerous interruption during the twelve years of Lord North's administration, when George III. was practically his own Prime Minister, and directed the policy which resulted in the loss of the American colonies. Had that intermission been prolonged, had the King been able to break down once and for all the system of government by party cabinets which Burke in his " Thoughts on the Present Discontents " defended as the essential condition of wholesome public life, a considerable strain would have been imposed on national loyalty. The famous motion introduced into the Commons in 1780, that the " influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished," indicates the presence of discontent which might have ripened into mutiny ; but there is a wide difference between a monarchy which exercises its power through parliament and a monarchy which exercises its power outside it. George III. 138 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION indeed ruled for twelve years as an absolute master, but he obtained his ascendency by procuring sub- servient majorities in the Commons and pliant in- struments in the Cabinet. Stiffen the Cabinet, free the Commons, and the Crown would become what under the Bill of Rights it was intended to be, the dignified figurehead of the Commons. The measures by which this result could be obtained were inscribed upon the programme of that Whig party, whose brilliant talents in opposition illustrated the dark days of Lord North's administration, they were the restoration of the Cabinet system, the reduction of the King's power of patronage, and the widening of the parliamentary franchise. Of these three objects the first two had been secured when the roar of the great French conflagration startled the ear of Europe. With a temperament profoundly conservative and with no just grievance against their ancient con- stitution which a moderate enlargement of the parliamentary franchise might not remove, the English people were as impenetrable as granite to the extreme logic of leveller or republican. " We have real hearts of flesh and blood," wrote Burke, " beating in our bosoms. We fear God, we look up with awe to Kings ; with affection to Parliaments ; with duty to magistrates ; with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility." In the first moments of enthusiasm the French were eagerly congratulated upon the courage with which they had shaken off an odious tyranny and procured for themselves liberties which had long been familiar in England. Charles Fox enthusiastically exclaimed that the fall of the Bastille was the best and grandest event which had ever happened ; and the generous sentiment found an ENGLAND AND FRENCH REVOLUTION 139 echo in every Whig or radical conventicle in the country. But as the revolution developed itself, as it was realized that the movement was in every respect dissimilar from the fancied precedent of 1688, that instead of being orderly it was anarchical, that instead of being devised to assist the established Church it was busy with the confiscation of its property and the destruction of its influence, the first glow of enthusiasm died down. Approval was suc- ceeded by doubt, doubt by distrust, distrust by horror and repugnance. In October 1790 Burke wrote that famous piece of philosophical invective which ex- pressed and at the same time determined the general attitude of England towards the French Revolution. The King said that it was a good book, a very good book, and that every gentleman should read it. 4 In the sermon at the Old Jewry which provoked this grand explosion, Dr Price, a Unitarian preacher and one_ of the most notable supporters of the French Revolution in England, maintained that George III. was almost the only lawful King in the world because he alone owed his crown to the choice of the people. The argument, as Burke proceeded to show, was not very solid, but the exception at least is significant. The French Revolution acted as a cordial to English radicalism, and political societies^sprang into being in every town in the kingdom. Some of these societies corresponded directly with the French Convention, and we have it on the authority of John Binns, an Irish radical who ended his life as Mayor of Philadelphia, that in the weekly debates of the Corresponding Societies the more violent members not infrequently crossed the line which divides the radical politician from the avowed enemy of monarchy. Economic 140 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION causes, aggravated by the war, tended to produce a spirit of bitter disaffection among the poorest class in the great towns. Bread was dear, taxes were high, and as the King drove through London to open Parliament in 1794 he was mobbed with cries of " Down with George, down with Pitt, down with the War." Stones were thrown at his carriage, one of the leaders was killed, and the King himself was half dragged out of his carriage by a ruffian who on that same evening recounted his exploit to an admiring circle of his fellow club-men. As the song went How happy a thing Is having a King That tenderly feels all our woes. How well we are fed, How well we are led, Ah I prettily led by the nose. The King, I am sure, Is all that is pure, But then sure the devil is in it. There's Pitt at the helm, A-sinking the realm, And sinking it all in a minute. But, say what you will, Pitt taxes us still Our tea, our wine, and our drams ; They have taxed our light By day and by night, Our lawyers, poor innocent lambs. But although the operations of the political societies gave ground for legitimate alarm, they were for the most part confined within constitutional limits. Of this fact there is a sufficient, if not a decisive, test. In 1794 Hardy, a shoemaker who founded the Corresponding Society, Home Tooke, a REX VERSUS HARDY 141 radical philologist, and others, were tried upon a charge of high treason. Their offence was that they had summoned a convention to meet at Manchester to discuss the question of Parliamentary Reform, but it was believed that investigation would disclose designs of a darker and more subversive complexion. The law officers of the Crown may be supposed to have chosen their ground with scrupulous care. If there did indeed exist, as was asseverated in a thousand pamphlets, a nefarious conspiracy to subvert the realm, these men would be at the bottom of it, and, being brought under examination, would enable the whole skein to be unravelled. Yet after eight days of dramatic tension the whole prosecution broke down. There was nothing in the speeches and writings of the incriminated men which could give the faintest colour to a charge of treason. The jury acquitted Hardy and Home Tooke, and the less important prisoners were released without bail. 5 There was then no republican party in England. Republican sentiment was not uncommon ; republican opinions may be traced, but not any overt or organized action for the overthrow of the monarchy. In one of his St Helena conversations Napoleon told O'Meara that had he succeeded in invading England he would have been well received by the canaille, and that after dethroning George he would have founded one republic in England and another in Ireland. If this plan was really entertained, it was founded upon a complete delusion as to the political complexion of the country. There was indeed a poor and starv- ing proletariat ; and there were some educated re- publicans. There was Mrs Macaulay of whom Dr Johnson said that he did not mind her reddening her 142 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION face if she would give up blackening other people's characters ; there was Hollis the publisher of the classical literature of the cause ; and Tom Paine and William Godwin, together with a wonderful constella- tion of young men fresh from school or college, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Landor, Shelley. But of this miscellaneous group one alone was a force in politics and those not the politics of his native country. It is difficult fully to share the admiration which has been bestowed on Thomas Paine by Dr Moncure Conway, his learned American biographer. Paine's private morals were never of the best, and in political prudence he had much to learn ; but he undoubtedly possessed great courage, a robust in- dependence of received convictions and a considerable capacity for clothing his views in the form which was most likely to appeal to a wide circle of readers. Paine was a Lewes exciseman who escaped to America with a grievance against the British Government just when the clouds were gathering which broke out into the War of Independence. A man of the people, he found in the New World a scope for the character and the energy which had received no adequate recognition in his native land of rotten boroughs and country squires. He plunged into American politics, wrote pamphlets against the British cause, and pub- lished his philosophy of politics in a work entitled " The Rights of Man," and his philosophy of religion in a book, which has had much influence, called the " Age of Reason." Paine, to put it bluntly, was a republican and a deist, representing both in his political and in his religious convictions the very opposite pole of thought to that which is contained in Burke's " Reflections on the French Revolution." Burke was THOMAS PAINE 148 an English patriot ; Paine was a cosmopolitan who quitted England to become an American citizen, and then for a time abandoned America to become a citizen of France. Burke regarded society as bound together in an organic whole by the mysterious cumulative force of tradition ; Paine as an aggregate of separate units connected by an artificial contract. To Burke hereditary monarchy was sacred, to Paine it was the abomination of desolation and the one form of govern- ment which the sovereign people was not entitled to set up. The greatest crime of the French Revolution consisted in the eyes of Burke in the spoliation of Church property and the destruction of ecclesiastical corporations ; Paine on the contrary regarded these acts as constituting a superb victory in the secular campaign of light against darkness, of reason against the forces of priest-craft and superstition. Compared with Burke 's resplendent and massive eloquence Paine's " Rights of Man " sounds thin and hollow. But if he had not the polish or culture of his adversary, if he was lacking in poetic vision and historical imagination, Paine at least grasped one side of the French Revolution which had entirely escaped Burke 's attention. He saw and this Burke never chose to see that the French Revolution was a protest against intolerable wrong, and that the sufferings of the court weighed light in the balance against the misery of an oppressed and starving people. In the one phrase of the " Age of Reason " which is often quoted, he re- marked that Burke had pitied the plumage but had forgotten the dying bird. If Paine drew his political doctrine straight from America, William Godwin represents a more subtle and sophisticated compound. His intellectual 144 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION genealogy may be traced partly to French and partly to English sources. He was the author of an excellent History of the English Commonwealth which the combined labours of Guizot and Gardiner have been required to displace, and he was also a student of the French philosophers. But in the abstract and generalizing cast of his mind he was, despite his his- torical acquisitions, more French than English. There was no feature of human society in which he did not desire to see a radical alteration. Starting from the principle that man possesses no innate tendency to evil, he concluded that all evil must be the result of govern- ment. Government then was bad, punishment was bad, property was bad, and marriage, as the most de- : grading form of property, was worst of all. These pro- ' positions being accepted, very little is left of the Ancient British Constitution ; certainly not the Church, for religion obstructs the free operations of the human reason, nor yet the monarchy, for a king is the most irrational instrument of coercion which is in itself essentially injurious. On the other hand, if force is wrong, there can be no justification for a violent revolution, and Godwin is consistent enough to con- demn the storming of the Bastille. He may, therefore, be regarded as an exponent of anarchy and non- resistance, anticipating as he does some of the doctrines which in our own day have been preached by Bakunin and Tolstoy. But the " Political Justice " was far too fantastic and loosely reasoned to disturb the judgment of the country, and had it not been for the singular influence which Godwin's teaching exerted over the mind of Shelley, he would have been a negligible factor in the organic development of English thought. 6 SOUTHEY AND COLERIDGE 145 And now we come to that constellation of plastic and imaginative young minds for whom the French Re- volution seemed to open new and radiant horizons of happiness exhibiting A people in the depth Of shameful imbecility uprisen Fresh as the morning star. And again A time In which apostasy from ancient faith Seemed but conversion to a higher creed. In every case we meet a repetition of the same story. Enthusiasm passes into disenchantment, and disenchantment into repulsion, by stages which vary in rapidity with the differing temperaments and natures of the persons concerned. Southey, who was a free thinker and a republican when he went up to Oxford in 1792, experienced a first rude shock at the downfall of the Girondins, and lived to become a pillar of Church and Crown, and the mark for the angry defiance of Byron. The political orbit of Coleridge is very similar. He begins as a republican and a Gallophil, he ends by being, in the phrase of John Stuart Mill, one of " the seminal minds " of English conservatism. His con- version, which was marked by the appearance of a splendid ode entitled Recantation, was definitive in 1797 and had been prepared four years earlier when the domination of the Jacobins was established in France. In all this there is no need for surprise. Southey and Coleridge both in reality belonged to the conservative wing of human opinion, Southey because he was a plain Englishman set in conventional lines. Coleridge by reason of a deep mystical belief in the 10 146 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Divine government of the world and the spiritual office of the State. The case is somewhat different both with Wordsworth and Landor. There are two types of the republican mind, the aristocratic and the democratic. There is the man who hates Kings be- cause they lower his personal pride ; and there is the man who hates them because he cares for the common people. Landor belonged to the aristocratic type of republican, Wordsworth to the democratic. To Lander's mind a monarchy seemed inherently vulgar ; to Wordsworth it seemed inconsistent with Spartan austerity and that sturdy independence of character which he found and admired in the Dalesmen of the Lakes. Lander's contempt for crowns was not greater than his contempt for Frenchmen or for mobs. To Wordsworth that hunger-bitten French girl following the cow, whom he described in the " Prelude," was the key to the Revolution and its apology. The stages by which Wordsworth proceeded from faith to renunciation are depicted in the " Prelude," and form not only a wonderful record of inner struggle and confusion, but also supply an index to similar, if less intense, processes of change which must have been going on in many other minds at the same time. Wordsworth was a republican, and he attributes his republicanism to four influences, the democratic equality of the society in which he was born, the senti- ment of social equality which pervades an English university, the reading of classical authors and the spirit of the mountains. Among the dalesmen of the Lakes there were no gradations of rank any more than among the clouds, the hills, and the waters which mingled their influence in all his boyish sports. Words- WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 147 worth did not need to dig liberty and equality out of folios ; he found them by the peat fire of the dales- man's cottage, and on the open air- washed spaces of the mountain side Love had he found in huts where poor men lie, His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills. Growing up then without any formed or explicit poli- tical theories, but deriving from the social and natural harmonies around him a strong bias towards the cause of freedom and social justice, Wordsworth was attuned to sympathize with the French Revolution. From the very first, however, his faith in liberty experienced shocks which would have proved fatal to a plant less securely rooted in the depths of a profound nature. Travelling through France in 1791, he fell in first with a merry swarm, chiefly of delegates returning from the Feast of Federation, and then with a band of armed rustics commissioned to expel the blameless inmates of the famous convent of Chartreuse. Sunshine was followed by shadow ; the triumph of freedom was stained by the guilt of sacrilege. Wordsworth's com- passion for the monks was, however, overpowered by his enthusiasm for " new-born liberty," and he re- turned from his travels with no serious misgivings. As yet he knew nothing of the inner workings of French politics. So he revisited France in 1792, and, after gathering a relic from the rubble of the Bastille, settled down for the summer in Touraine. Here he fell in with a certain Captain Beaufoys, a revolutionary, to whose gracious and enthusiastic character Wordsworth has dedicated a noble passage in the " Prelude." To- 148 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION gether they discussed politics and condemned the idle and selfish courtier's life. Painting to ourselves the miseries Of royal courts and that voluptuous life, Unfeeling where the man who is of soul The meanest thrives the most ; where dignity, True personal dignity abideth not : A light, a cruel and vain world cut off From the natural inlets of just sentiment, From lowly sympathy and chastening truth. The summer passed in pleasant colloquy among the castles of the Loire, and then, in October, Wordsworth was back in Paris. The Tuileries had been stormed, the King and Queen were prisoners in the Temple, and the horror of the September massacres hung like a blood-red cloud over the city. The French State having repulsed the hordes of Brunswick had Spared not the empty throne, and in proud haste Assumed the body and venerable name Of a Republic. Despite the massacres, Wordsworth still remained a staunch believer in the Republic. The horrors were ephemeral, the Republic would be eternal. Returning to England he found London excited by the agitation for the abolition of the slave trade. Wordsworth con- soled himself by thinking that the defeat of Wilber- force's bill was only a temporary rebuff, since the success of the French Republic would bring in its train the abolition of slavery throughout the world. These dreams were, however, almost instantly shat- tered by the outbreak of the war between England and France. That England should fight the democracy of France seemed to Wordsworth the height of impiety. DISILLUSION 149 f He defended the execution of Louis, argued that a republic was the best of all constitutions, and f rejoiced at the miscarriage of English arms. Terrible as was the tyranny of Robespierre, Wordsworth re- mained obstinate and inflexible. He still trusted in the people of France. With grim desolating determina- tion he quelled the patriotism which was gnawing at his heart, and refused to retract a single thought. But when the Directory fell, when the French sub- mitted to the yoke of Bonaparte, when it became clear that the wars waged by France were not for defence but for aggression, when the extinction of the Venetian Republic was followed by the subjugation of Switzer- land, by the imprisonment of Toussaint 1'Ouverture and the threatened invasion of England, the wheel turned round full circle. France, the apostle of liberty, had become for the moment the instrument of de- spotism, and, in the series of sonnets dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, Words- / worth, since Milton the greatest and staunchest of I English, republicans, wrote that immortal palinode in which true liberty is distinguished from its garish counterfeits. CHAPTER VII AUTOCRACY AND ITS CRITICS Then night fell ; and as from night Reassuming fiery flight, From the West swift freedom came, Against the course of Heaven and down, A second sun arrayed in flame, To burn, to kindle, to illume. From far Atlantis its young beams Chased the shadows and the dreams, France with all her sanguine streams Hid, but quenched it not ; again Through clouds its shafts of glory rain From utmost Germany to Spain. SHELLEY " Hellas " FORCE is the antithesis of liberty. The wars of the Revolution and the Empire involved changes which were too violent to be durable, and in its essential features the Europe of 1815 does not differ from the Europe of 1789. But the reaction was not limited to the sphere which a Congress of Vienna may control ; it spread over the whole surface of human interests, and was no less comprehensive than the creed which had been shamed on the Place de la Bastille and beaten on the field of Waterloo. As the Revolution was anti- clerical and dogmatic, so the counter-revolution re- discovered the sentiments and beliefs which clustered round the central column of historic Christianity. Savigny attacked the French Codes, and championed the principle of historical development against the claims of ideal construction. De Maistre built up a 150 REACTION AND THE LATIN ZONE 151 compact edifice of shining paradox in honour of Absolutism in Church and State ; the beautiful elo- quence of Chateaubriand was poured out in copious floods to commend the claims of the Christian religion to the admiration of a cultured and aesthetic intelli- gence. In every quarter of intellectual activity brains were working to re-establish and decorate the principle of authority. Alexander of Russia, who began life as a theoretical republican and ended it as the accomplice of Metternich, may serve as a type of that European generation who watched the shattering of their youth- ful ideals and passed out of the warmth into the cold. Though in some degree or other it had affected every people in Europe, the storm of the French Revolution beat most directly upon the Latin races. The Bourbon monarchy was torn up by the roots in France, Spain, and Naples, and its place was filled up by governments which in all the great affairs of life proceeded upon an opposite principle. From these facts it was natural to deduce the conclusion that the cause of monarchy would be less secure in the Latin than in the Teutonic and Slavonic races of Europe. Spain had lived for six years, Naples for nine years, France for twenty-five years, without the legitimate monarchy whose necessity was proclaimed by the Congress of Vienna ; and it was reasonable to suppose that the strength of the restored dynasty would vary inversely with the term of its exile, that the monarchy would be less secure in France than in Spain, less secure in Spain than in Naples, and that, if Europe were ever to become that federation of republics which Brissot had preached and which Kant had predicted, the first mutter of the storm would be heard within the Latin zone, and the decisive explosion within the capital of France. 152 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION It was recognized from the first that France would be the point of danger. In the five-and-twenty years of crowded history during which she had recast her inner life and filled Europe with the noise of her victories, how could France remember the Bourbons ? Having no part or lot in the national achievements, the exiles dropped out of the national memory, and ceased to enter into the framework of national expectations. New habits were formed, new interests were created, a new generation had grown up to whom the tradition of an exiled dynasty was alien and unfamiliar. And so, when the Bourbon dynasty was restored by foreign arms, it suffered under every disadvantage to which a dynasty could be subject. Its latest credentials, so far as France could recollect them, were all bad, being connected in the public mind with those abuses in the old social system which the Revolution had destroyed, and which the people of France were resolved should never be restored. It was imposed upon the country by foreign foes and as the result of victories which con- tracted the greatness of the nation and abased her pride. To the French mind persons count for much, and on this computation what chance had Louis XVIII. against the fallen Napoleon ? At best the monarchy was an anti-climax ; at the worst it might end in a disaster. Between the extremes of the ancien regime and the Republic there was a middle way, the way of constitutional monarchy. It was a path upon which France had not yet trodden for the venture of 1791 cannot be counted and no other route was so likely to lead into safe places. Acting on the advice of the allies and recognizing the pressure of circumstances, Louis XVIII. consented to be a constitutional monarch. THE RESTORATION MONARCHY 153 He granted a Charter based upon the English model with an hereditary Chamber of Peers and an elected Chamber of Deputies, and appended a list of specific assurances with respect to the freedom of the press, religious toleration, the liberty of the subject, and the land-titles of the Revolution. All the main institutions of the Empire were preserved, the Codes, the University, the Church, the Legion of Honour, the Bank of France, the prefects, the imperial nobility. The social struc- ture of the country remained and was destined to remain as it had been fashioned under the Revolution and the Empire : but the mechanism of the central government was new and its success was problematical. In the minds of Englishmen the rule of Parliament is associated with democratic control. The affairs of the country are governed by the Cabinet, the Cabinet is responsible to the House of Commons, and the House of Commons is responsible to the nation at large. The government of France under the Restoration did not conform to these conditions. The Chamber did not represent the nation, and the Ministers did not necessarily represent the majority of the Chamber. The King regarded himself as the source of the Con- stitution, and the guiding wheel of the political machine. Whatever might be the balance of parliamentary parties it was for him to choose the Ministers ; the Cabinet was responsible not to the Chamber but to the Crown. To the logical mind of the French such a system was a standing anomaly. The Civil Code proclaimed the equality of all French citizens ; the electoral laws confined political rights to a select oligarchy ranging under the restoration from 89 to 110,000 persons. The fundamental creed of the Revolution was that the people was sovereign, the 154 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION source of all law, the will behind all government. The monarchy of the Restoration based its credentials, not upon the general will, but upon its exact antithesis, the principle of legitimacy. A constitution which has grown with a growth of a nation has no adversaries. If change is wanted, it is made within the spirit of the Constitution, and in accordance with principles which the Constitution is believed to embody. But the constitutional monarchy of France was not a growth but an expedient ; and while there was a middle party pledged to support it, there were two sections of the nation who challenged its validity and exulted in every circumstance which seemed to impair its strength. The ultra-Royalists wished to abolish the Constitution, and the party of the tricolour wished to abolish the King. The Republican movement during the Restoration period suffered from a complaint which is apt to afflict all political parties which find themselves in a hopeless minority. Misfortune makes strange bedfellows ; and minorities in opposition enter into alliances and combinations which involve some sacrifice of principle and obscuration of aim. The French Republic had been overturned by Bonaparte with every circum- stance of ignominy. He had silenced the legislature, muzzled the press, reintroduced the hereditary prin- ciple, and stamped out, so far as a powerful government can suppress a vital thing, every republican pro- pensity in the nation. Yet, in the common calamity which followed the defeat of Waterloo, republicans and Bonapartists drew together. They forgot the principles which divided them and remembered only those upon which they were agreed. Equally they represented the tricolour which Louis XVIII. had THE PARTY OF THE TRICOLOUR 155 unwisely discarded ; equally they were the children of the Revolution, cherishing a common hatred for Kings and Jesuits ; and resolved that never again should the peasant pay feudal dues or tithes, or the noble escape his due share of taxation. In the minds of the statesmen who made the American nation the Republic stood for peace, concord, and non-interven- tion. The French republicans cherished no such ideals. It was their aim to reverse the European settlement of 1815, and to help the cause of liberty wherever it was struggling against oppression. They sympathized with the Spanish Americans revolting against Spain, with the Poles conspiring against the Russians, with the Greeks fighting against the Turks, and with the subtle meshes of secret conspiracy which were spread- ing over the whole Italian peninsula. They wanted war and plenty of it. They were clamorous for the Rhine frontier. They regarded it as an obligation of honour to unlock the unnatural union between Belgium and Holland, and to recover for France its lost ascendency in Europe. They viewed a monarchy which had come packed up in the enemy's baggage as a standing disgrace to their country, and in every phase and incident of its foreign policy were quick to read a servile compliance with an enemy's command. In the Chamber the party was led by Manuel and Lafayette ; in the streets and cafes of Paris the war- songs of Be"ranger were a programme in themselves. A movement containing so many subversive and revolutionary elements was naturally suspect to those who moved within the narrow channels of the Constitu- tion. After the first paroxysm of reaction had spent itself, the Liberals a name recently imported from 1 ; Spain began to be successful at the polls. They 156 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION gained twenty-five seats in 1817, forty-five in 1818, t ninety in 1819. Conservative Europe was seriously alarmed. The Republic was raising its ugly head, and, if nothing were done, the old troubles and confusions would begin again, and Europe would be involved in a fresh cataclysm. Louis XVIII. was urged to take strong measures. He was not himself an ultra, like his brother the Comte d'Artois, having a shrewd suspicion that a middle course was always safest, and that if the monarchy were ever to become national it must acquire confidence by respecting constitutional forms. But in 1820 the Due de Berry was murdered . in the streets of Paris, and the Royalists raised an outcry which the compliant temper of the King was unable to resist. A ministry was chosen from the Right ; the electoral laws were revised ; and for the next seven i| years the Government was carried on by the ultras. In this violent and furious reaction the Liberals were practically driven out of parliamentary life. The movement which had begun with an attempt to capture the parliamentary system ended with a conspiracy to undermine it. The Charbonnerie, modelled on the Italian Carbonari, divided into sections of twenty members, and, directed by a central committee, aimed at overthrowing the Bourbons by a military insurrec- tion and with the help of revolutionaries in other countries. Revolutions which are brewed in barracks rarely obtain a commanding or durable success. The movements of 1820 in Spain, Naples, and Piedmont were easily crushed, and the French insurrections of 1822 at Belfort, Colmar, Toulon, and Saumur were equally ineffectual. When in 1823 a French army was sent into Spain to assist the cause of Absolutism it was confronted on the banks of the Bidassoa by a small CHARLES X 157 body of Imperialists carrying the tricolour flag ; but the seductions which Bonaparte had once employed with success depended on Bonaparte and lost all their magic without him. Not a man was suborned from his allegiance to the white flag, and Chateaubriand could boast that, whatever elements of trouble might be found in the kingdom, the army at least was true to the Bourbon cause. The wisest heads of the Restoration period, men like de Serre, Decazes, and Martignac, knowing that France was set against the ancien regime, held it to be a part of common prudence to send the revolutionary passions to sleep by abstaining from any course which might be construed as a menace to the revolutionary settlement. Charles X. was of a different opinion. In temper and intellect he belonged to the older order, to the narrow world of ultramontane theology and autocratic politics. As heir apparent he was deeply suspect, as King he rapidly converted suspicion into mutiny and mutiny into revolt. A bishop was appointed Grand- Master of the University of France, a premonitory symptom of the approaching victory of orthodox theology over free speculation. A thousand million francs were voted to compensate the emigres for the loss of their lands in the Revolution, and a law passed against sacrilege was taken as an indication that offences against religion were henceforward to be treated as crimes against the State. By 1827 the Government had excited against it a coalition of Liberals, Jansenists, and manufacturers. The country was deeply stirred. The electoral currents ran against the ministry, and Villele, in whom the ultras had found a bold and astute leader, resigned his portfolio. There were then two alternatives open to the King. He might take a 158 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION ministry, if not from the Left at least from the liberal Right Centre, and attempt to acquire the confidence of the Chamber and the country, or he might send for the ultras, provoke a quarrel with parliament, and build up an absolute monarchy out of the ruins of the Constitu- tion. He tried the first expedient for a year, and then, in a mood of levity and impatience, had recourse to the second. Summoning Polignac, an dmigre and a mystic, to his counsels, he resolved to crush the opposi- tion by a coup d'etat. Ordinances were issued muzzling the press, restricting the franchise, and dissolving the '' new Chamber before it had met. Counting on the fidelity of the army, and rich in assurances of divine aid, the frivolous old King and his hair-brained minister were confident that they could rivet reaction upon France. In the republican movement in France there were two psychologies, one exuberant, sanguine, reckless, abounding in joyous energies, the other Spartan, austere, and self-controlled. Of the latter type, which was not uncommon in the great Convention, Godefroy Cavaignac was an example. He believed in the Re- public with that fixity, narrowness, and concentra- tion with which John Knox believed in Holy Writ or Charles I. in the Divine Right of Kings. He was suckled in the creed and never dreamt of contesting its credentials. The Republic was to him the symbol of reason in politics ; the ideal for which the heroes of the Revolution had striven and suffered, but to which by a series of uncontrollable calamities they had never been able to attain. The logic of the fanatic is never applicable to the perplexed conditions of political life. Cavaignac argued that the troubles of France were due to the suspension of the Constitution of 1793, and that THE BARRICADES 159 they would be cured by the adoption of that fantastic and impracticable design. In Paris there were always two elements of disorder, the students of the Latin . quarter and the workmen of the faubourgs, and !| Cavaignac, who was a man of deeds, knew where to find an army of the tricolour. The reply to the Ordinances of the mystical Prince were the barricades of the practical republican, and to the surprise of those who confided in military discipline the reply was sufficient. Three days' street fighting were enough to decide the fate of King Charles. The men of the barricades pushed Marmont out of Paris, and the Revolution was left master on the stricken field. The number of men engaged on the barricades was probably not more than eight or ten thousand, and, had the royalist troops been handled with decision and properly reinforced, a course of autocratic government might have received an appropriate baptism in blood. But, having thus ' surprised a victory, the republicans were in turn the victims of a surprise. The politicians of the Palais Bourbon were not prepared for a republic, and they knew that France was as little inclined to that pros- pect as they. The Revolution had not spread outside the capital, and it was still open to the King to appeal to the loyalty of the provinces against a wicked and impious faction. There was a party in the Chamber and there were organs in the press who favoured the A claims of the Duke of Orleans. His father had em- braced the cause of the Revolution ; he himself had been ' admitted as a boy to the Jacobin Club, had fought for the armies of the tricolour, and had then experienced the hard and laborious vicissitudes of exile. Thiers drew up a proclamation commending the Duke. " He 160 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION was at Jemmapes. He is a citizen King. He has borne the tricolour standard in the midst of battle, he alone can bear it again. He awaits our call. Let us issue this call and he will accept the Charter as we wish it to be." The Duke was brought to Paris, rode across the armed city to the Hotel de Ville, and there annihi- lated the chances of a republic. Appearing on the balcony with Lafayette, he embraced in the presence of the mob the man who stood out as the ornamental figurehead of the republican movement. And so in : July 1830 a new monarchy was etablished in France by means of a republican revolution. 1 About this time a little old man, quaintly dressed in a Quaker-like brown coat, brown cassimere breeches, and white worsted stockings, was punctually scribbling twelve to fifteen folio pages daily of a Constitutional Code. Now and again he would put a straw hat upon his head and trot out into his garden to look at his flowers, for he loved flowers and cats and music, and lived all by himself on a handsome income in a grand country-house in Somersetshire. His name was Jeremy Bentham, and it was a famous name, for though he was a recluse from society and full of whimsical habits and curious opinions, he had been writing on jurisprudence, politics, and morals for fifty-six years, and was an established oracle on the art and science of codification, not in England alone but in Russia and Greece, and among the constitutional reformers of Spain and Portugal. Of the leaders in the march of European intellect one alone could vie with him in length of years, the stately poet of Weimar who happened at this very time to be composing, in the second part of Faust, his final message to the world. BENTHAM 161 But of Goethe and his mysterious sublimities Jeremy Bentham knew and cared less than nothing. " Prose is when all the lines except the last go to the margin, poetry is when some of them fall short of it." This was his final verdict on the language of the higher emotions. 2 To Bentham's very practical English mind the logic which had inspired the men of 1789 was as unpalatable as their sentiment. The doctrine of the rights of man was an " anarchical sophism," which could not stand serious investigation, and which it was his pride to have demolished in a slashing treatise. But while avoiding the faulty high a priori road Bentham was drawn into practical conclusions hardly differing from those of the French Jacobin. He began by attacking specific legal abuses, found them to be an inseparable part of the Constitution and government of England, and was thus led to challenge the whole structure of the English state. If the greatest happiness of the greatest number was not realized in English institutions, that was be- cause the English government had no interest in pro- moting it. How could a small governing class have any interest in furthering the happiness of human beings outside its own social pale ? Only in a pure democracy, a government of all by all, could legislation be framed in the true interests of general felicity. A monarchy therefore was necessarily evil, and the situa- tion of a monarch, even of a limited monarch, " at all times that of an enemy of the people," acting by force, fear, corruption, and delusion through his three human instruments, the soldier, the lawyer and the priest, to produce in all times and at all places " the greatest infelicity of the greatest number." It followed that the only good act which a monarch was capable of accomplishing was to abolish his own office, but this he ii 162 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION was most unlikely to do since the " natural tendency not to say the constant effect of a monarch's situation is to place him not at the top but at the bottom of the scale of moral worth." The Holy Alliance and the madness of George III. no doubt suggested other un- flattering features in an institution which Bentham had come to regard with slaveholding as one of the plagues of human society. " While to one another," he writes, " all monarchs are objects of sympathy, to all monarchs all subjects are objects of antipathy ; of a sort of com- pound sentiment made up of fear, hatred, and con- tempt ; something like that which women and children are made to feel for a toad." Moreover, though the madness of a monarch can hardly ever add to the evils which he inflicts, monarchs are most probably mad. " In every monarchical state the great probability always is that in proportion of several to one, at any given period, the fate of all its members will be in the hands of a madman." It might be asked how Europe had come to accept in tranquillity and with apparent acquiescence so absurd and iniquitous an institution. Bentham's answer is By force of custom. " Almost all men are born under it, all men are used to it, few men are used to anything else ; till of late years nobody ever dispraised it, ... men were reconciled to mixed monarchy in England by the same causes by which they were reconciled to pure monarchy in Morocco, Turkey, and Hindustan." 3 In these cheerful and robust observations Bentham was expressing an opinion, then very prevalent in Europe and firmly held by philosophical radicals in England, that the ultimate and perfect form of govern- ment was necessarily republican. It was still the fashion to idealize America and to find in her institutions THE GLAMOUR OF AMERICA 163 the type of pure and successful democracy. " Fortunate Americans ! " exclaims the tiny sage, " fortunate on so many accounts, if to possess happiness it were sufficient to possess everything by which it is constituted, this advantage is still yours ! Preserve it for ever ; be- stow rewards, erect statues, confer even titles so that they be personal alone ; but never bind the crown of merit on the brow of sloth." 4 At least Bentham could feel confident that whatever chaplets might be reserved for trans-Atlantic brows, the great Republic would never summon a lunatic to the White House. To the generation of Europeans who lived through the autocratic reaction and felt the thrill of the Greek War of Independence, America, a land of philosophers living, it was assumed, blameless and beautiful lives, was the last human fortress of Freedom. Darkness has dawned in the East On the noon of time : The death-birds descend to their feast From the hungry clime. Let Freedom and Peace flee far To a sunnier strand, And follow Love's folding star To the Evening land I Before Bentham's Constitutional Code was given to the world, the merits and demerits of monarchy as an institution were submitted to a formal debate in Brussels with a result diametrically opposed to the true calculus of happiness. In 1830 when the storm of revolution was searching all the weak places in the political fabric of Europe, when the monarchy of Charles X. fell with a crash in France, and there were risings in Poland and Saxony, in Hanover, Brunswick, 164 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION and Hesse Cassel, the kingdom of the United Nether- lands, which it had been one of the principal achieve- ments of Lord Castlereagh to create, was seized by a violent convulsion. The southern provinces split off from Holland, declared their independence, and were confronted with the task of framing the design for a new polity. Some of the revolutionary movements of this year were mere protests against unintelligent tyranny ; in Belgium the outcry against specific grievances grew into a demand for national liberation. The Belgians had never asked to be united with the Dutch from whom they were divided by more than two hundred years of antagonistic history. The Dutch were Calvinists, the Belgians for the most part Catholics and Ultramontane Catholics. The Dutch .spoke a Teutonic language ; the educated population ; of Belgium, whether Flemish or Walloon, used French *as the medium of education and social intercourse. The Dutch were saddled with a big debt, part of the interest of which was now charged on the Belgian .taxpayer. The Dutch, being a seafaring people, were advantaged by freedom of trade, the Belgians, a race of manufacturers and farmers, insisted on protection. The civilization of Belgium was in the main derived from France, the civilization of the Dutch provinces from Germany or England. It had been the pride of the Dutch that they had secured their liberty by a tremendous struggle against the overwhelming power of Spain, in the agony of which the inhabitants of the southern provinces had basely deserted them, and that through all the changes which had ensued, they had maintained their independence until they were forcibly assimilated to the French Republic. In contrast to this record of heroic and sturdy liberty the Belgians had BELGIUM AND HOLLAND 165 been distinguished by uniform subservience to alien rule. They had allowed themselves to be ruled first by the Spaniards, then by the Austrians, and finally by the French ; and it was no doubt for this reason the more readily believed that they would not recoil from being governed by the Dutch. Had the first King of the United Netherlands been a man of more pliant temper, this expectation might not have been disappointed. The Belgians had not a little to gain from a situation which secured them from foreign invasion, freed the river Scheldt for navigation, and opened out rich and sunny colonies to their trade ; but men are not exclusively governed by considera- tions of material self-interest, and the Belgians were human beings with susceptibilities which it was the duty of statesmanship to take into account. Un- fortunately William I. was both a stout Dutchman and a strong Calvinist, and the Belgians were very far from being either the one thing or the other. In the two particulars in which the susceptibilities of a nation are most delicate, religion and language, a government controlled by Dutchmen went out of its way to out- rage the feelings of the Belgian population. It made the Dutch language obligatory for admission to public office and employment, and interfered with the sacer- dotal practices of a most sacerdotal nation. There were other grievances such as heavy taxes on corn and meat falling with special weight upon the poor of the southern provinces, but none were so keenly felt as these two main grievances of language and religion. Opposing them the Belgian population, which had been sharply divided into radical and clerical factions, discovered for the first time a common ground of action and a national unity. 166 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION The game of politics is full of surprises. The Belgians hated the Dutch language, the Dutch taxes, the Dutch press laws, the Dutch debt, the Dutch religion, but in a long course of political agitation did not directly contemplate a disruption of the Union. A full measure of administrative autonomy would have stanched their wounds and silenced their cries. They had grown wealthy under the rule of King William and were not blind to the material advantages which flowed from their connexion with a prosperous colonial power. There were socialists and republicans in Belgium as there were socialists and republicans in all the great artisan populations of Western Europe, but as yet their influence was inconsiderable. Nobody seriously proposed to overturn the monarchy or argued that the hereditary principle was necessarily inconsistent with the welfare or freedom of a progres- sive people. The King, indeed, was far fallen in public esteem, but the heir to the throne was popular and in the opinion of capable observers a few moderate con- cessions would even at the eleventh hour have saved the Belgian provinces for the House of Orange. These concessions were not made. The news of the Paris Revolution gave the signal for an outbreak in the Belgian capital. The Government piled blunder upon blunder. A street tumult grew into a revolution. The moderate men fell into the background, the extreme men came to the front, and in less than six weeks after the first token of disorder (October 4, 1830), a provisional government in Brussels declared the Belgian provinces to be an independent State, and summoned a National Congress to give it a constitution. 5 In the memorable debate which ensued, the THE BELGIAN CONSTITUTION 167 question was raised, and for three days discussed, whether the new nation should be a monarchy or a republic. To those statesmen who were schooled in the French democratic tradition there was no reply to Condorcet's remark that the inheritance of political functions was not only a clear violation of natural liberty but an absurd institution, since it assumed the inheritance of appropriate qualities. But the abstract arguments, which had seemed so conclusive with earlier generations, played a subordinate part in this debate. Seron, one of the republican leaders, dilated on the expensiveness of thrones, cited the break- down of the monarchy in France, and asked his hearers whether they could name a country more exactly calcu- lated than Belgium to prosper under republican rule, a country where the nobles were liberal, the priests patriotic, the merchants prosperous, and the artisans enlightened. Another speaker related the crimes of the Holy Alliance and asserted that so long as the conspiracy of Kings should continue, he would never be a party to sending them a recruit. A third orator asserted that there was a general tendency in Europe towards the republican state, and that Belgium should march with the spirit of the age, but the argument which had most weight with an assembly of practical men was the supposed expensiveness of monarchical establishments. European politics are, in the main, very conservative, and though the Belgian National Congress was elected in the midst of a successful revolution by a system of universal suffrage, it decided by 174 votes to 13 to recur to the familiar forms of monarchy rather than to affront the unknown perils of a republic. The Belgian people had always lived under Kings, limited, it is true, 168 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION in certain respects as to their powers, but still exercising very wide influence and authority, and though in the manifold revolutions of history every other public institution had been changed or destroyed, Kingship had survived as the one steadfast political image pre- sented to the consciousness of the Belgians. It was almost common ground that a republic was the most perfect form of government, and that it had proved its worth in the United States and in the Swiss Cantons. It was " a government for angels," cried one Con- servative speaker ; for " a highly educated popula- tion," cried another ; for " communities isolated by mountain barriers and estranging oceans," cried a third. " Belgium," argued de Zoude, with remini- scences of Montesquieu, " has not the severity, austerity, or disinterestedness which alone can con- stitute a republic " ; and moreover she was not a free agent. The American Commonwealth enjoyed a wide and effective scheme of popular education and was untrammelled by relations with foreign neigh- bours the first an important, the last almost an essential condition to republican success. Belgium on the other hand was a small power devoid of natural frontiers and situated in a continent of monarchies. Whatever she might have been inclined to do, had she been towed out into mid-ocean, she could not in her present moorings, as a member of the European family, be indifferent to the view which other European governments might take of her action. "As a monarchy, you will be a power," said Northomb, " as a republic a terror." Europe had not yet forgotten how the rise of the first French Republic had involved the whole continent in war, tumult, and revolution, and ever since the downfall of Napoleon it had been one of ARGUMENTS FOR MONARCHY 169 the principal concerns of diplomacy to bridle the in- surgent democracy of the West. The proclamation of a Belgian Republic would be viewed as a challenge to the existing order, and as a menace to all the crowned heads in Europe. Nor could any course be more prejudicial to the young and ill-established monarchy of Louis Philippe in France. In that country there was a strong republican party anxious alike to overturn the throne and to resume the broken epic of the re- volutionary wars. Proclaim the Republic in Brussels, and the " party of movement " in Paris would receive a call to action to which it would instantly and power- fully respond. The new Belgian nation relied upon the moral and political support of the French King who owed his throne to that popular triumph at the barri- cades which had given the signal for their own revolu- tion. If Belgium declared for a monarchy it would strengthen the hands of Louis Philippe. If it pro- claimed a republic it would forfeit the friendship, if not compass the downfall, of its only ally in Europe. The terrible drama of the Polish insurrection sup- plied an additional weapon to the logical armoury of the monarchists. The calamities of that unfortun- ate nation might be traced to the partitions of the eighteenth century, and these in some measure to the fact that the Polish Kingship was elective and not hereditary. The evils which followed from this un- wise arrangement the diplomatic intrigues, the civil broils, the pretexts for foreign intervention and the like belonged to the most threadbare common- places of European knowledge, but on every fresh advertisement of the Polish tragedy the old lesson received a new and lurid illustration. Could there be a more awful example of the consequences of an 170 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION elective Headship ? Was Belgium to enter on the path which had brought Poland to the abyss ? And the warning voices did not come from the East alone. There were " the bloody and retrograde fluctuations in the republican states of Southern America," exhibit- ing a violence of party-spirit, peculiar, it was thought, to polities which permit the highest prize of political ambition to be scrambled for, and confirming the general belief that republican government is necfssarily unstable. Such was the tenor of much of the argument. Others laboured to exhibit the truth, which had been obscured by the doctrinaires of the French Revolution that heredity was " a neutral institution " equally consistent with tyranny or freedom. The form of the executive was not in itself a matter of primary im- portance. Taxes could be reduced under a monarchy as they could be increased under a republic. The citizen could go and come as freely under the one dis- pensation as under the other. Heredity, said the democrat, would lead to despotism ; but the real pro- tection against despotism was not an elective President, but an elective legislature, a responsible cabinet, an independent judiciary, together with guarantees for freedom of worship and speech and education. These were the really important principles which, once fixed and established in the constitution, would carry with them every liberal consequence which the most un- compromising apostle of human freedom could desire. And such was the spirit which gave shape to the con- stitutional monarchy of Belgium. 6 CHAPTER VIII THE SECOND REPUBLIC IN FRANCE L'Univers n'est qu'un laboratoire.de magie ou il faut s'attendre a tout. PROUDHON Rien de mddiocre sous la Republique. La grandeur est sa nature. MICHELET Au premier mot de republique le premier cri des gens de carapagne a 6t6 ; " Plus d'impot, a bas les impdts." GEORGES SAND ONE of the principal supports of the Restoration Monarchy in France had been the acute and painful recollection of the governments which immedi- ately preceded it. However ill the mass of Frenchmen thought of Louis XVI II., they thought far worse of the Terror, the taxes, and the tyranny from which they were so recently delivered. But as time went on memory began to work its accustomed marvels. The Revolution appeared to be a humanitarian, the Empire a liberal movement. The ugly or doubtful features of either dispensation were seen either through a soften- ing mirage or else they were not seen at all. After 1825 a habit grew up of viewing the Revolution, not as it really was, a succession of different though con- nected phases of a complex movement, some cruel or unwise, others noble, others unripe and ridiculous, but as a single thing, agreeing with itself, and with a distinct will and quality of its own which only the language of hagiology could adequately characterize. The 172 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION historical revival which was so remarkable a feature ./\of that age contributed to foster this respectful and ^ * even devotional attitude towards the French Revolu- ^" tion. Thiers treated it as a rational and progressive '^ movement, every part of which was linked to every y '.** other by a chain of causation, so that transactions *\ which had been wont to excite horror, surprise, and shame, appeared as the inevitable stages in the dis- closure of a great and beneficent design. With Lamartine the Revolution was a beautiful idyll ; with Louis Blanc a prelude to the complete emancipa- tion of man. And very much the same process of transfiguration affected the retrospect of the Empire. As the St Helena Conversations became published abroad, the world learnt that it had entirely mistaken Napoleon. It had regarded him as the incarnation of military tyranny, whereas in reality he was preparing a peaceful federation of Europe upon liberal lines. It had read an ultimate design into transitional institu- tions, and harshly misjudged the greatest of mortals because it had refused to wait for the full divulgation of his plan. His purpose, which had been partially disclosed in his Italian and Polish policy and in the constitutional concessions of the Hundred Days, would assuredly serve as the liberating impulse in the future policy of Europe. He would have united Italy, freed Poland, endowed France with constitutional liberties, and balanced the peaceful federation of the New World with a policy no less peaceful in the Old. The Napoleonic legend grew apace, and, when the bones of the great Emperor were brought to Paris in 1840, there were some who said that the Second Empire was already made. The French Revolution was founded, not upon a SOCIALISM 173 criticism of property, but upon a criticism of privilege. It effected sweeping social changes without any conscious purpose, which in modern economic ter- minology would be called socialistic. Tithes were ' taken from the pockets of the priests and put into the pockets of the landlords ; peasant properties were created and extended ; and the ground was cleared for the untrammelled play of free competition. These changes wentjyery far^ but had_nojendency to promote communism or to weaken the principle of private property in th(j country. On the contrary, inasmuch as the Revolution increased the number of landowners, it fortified the economic interests which were connected with the defence of private property in land. It did not scruple to attack monopoly, than which Socialism has no firmer ally, or to establish a peasant proprietary, than which Socialism has no more deadly enemy. So far as economic legislation went, its ideal was freedom. Men could take what trade they like, sell in the dearest and buy in the cheapest market, and follow their interest to the top of their bent. Factory life was in its infancy, and there were no factory laws. Trade unions and strikes were forbidden, for the idea of an economic combination was suspect as savouring of those guild monopolies which, in pursuance of the most enlightened doctrine of the time, had been condemned as inconsistent with the stainless canon of human liberty. The problem of poverty still remained un- solved. With the growth of machinery and the con- centration of capital, it developed features of which the men of the Revolution had not dreamt, and for which the Codes of the Revolution had made no provision. It was all very well to secure freedom of contract, but in what sense was a contract free, when the parties to it 174 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION were Lazarus and Dives ? The rule of the physiocrats, laissez faire, laissez passer, was a valuable protest against the meddlesome interference of an archaic government and the stifling restrictions of feudal caste, but was it the last word of economic science ? Did it guarantee society against waste ? Did it shelter the weak from the strong ? Had it cured un- employment or raised wages or improved physique ? Was not the anarchy of competition as distinct and palpable an evil as the sheltered and privileged torpor of the guilds and monopolies ? These and similar questionings began to claim in an increasing measure the attention of serious minds in France during the reign of Louis Philippe. In 1838 a Frenchman, by name Pierre Leroux, coined a term which has since become a battle-cry all over the world. The term was Socialism : its meaning, social control as opposed to individual liberty in the sphere of economic production and exchange. One of the earliest and far the most brilliant of the French writers who attempted a radical criticism of the economic basis of society was Claude Henri, Comte de St Simon. Few Frenchmen have printed so deep a mark upon the thought of their age. Men of the calibre of Auguste Comte and Augustin Thierry submitted to the fascination of this aristocrat, who made it his maxim to lead the most original and active life possible, to explore every class in society, and to become ac- quainted with the whole range of human theory and practice. St Simon's doctrine is in extreme outline as follows : The French Revolution had intended to abolish privileges of birth, but had only half-completed its task. It had abolished birth privileges in matters relating to public functions, but not in matters relating ST SIMON 175 to economic functions. It had done away with heredi- tary legislators and hereditary judges, but it had left hereditary wealth and hereditary poverty. It had been an epoch of criticism, not an epoch of construction, and the law of human progress was that epochs of construction should succeed to epochs of criticism. Of this new age St Simon proposed to be prophet and founder. He would complete the abolition of birth privileges by transforming private property into a kind of life interest or trust held under the State. This need not involve a violent revolution. By the abolition of collateral inheritance and by progressive death duties the State would gradually and without disturbance convert private into public property ; and so, owning all the land and all the means of pro- duction, would be able to organize industry upon the principle of distribution for all, " to each according to his capacity, and to each capacity according to his works." The anarchy of trade would be cured by the organisation of industrial communities, whose output would be regulated by statistics, whose gains would be distributed according to the services of the individual producers, and whose activities would be stimulated by promotion according to merit, and by pensions for old age. In the system of St Simon, as in that of his con- temporary Fourier, there is enough of the fantastic and absurd to blast any ordinary reputation for sound sense. But, viewed in the context of their own age, these two pioneers of Socialism exercised a just and intelligible influence. They saw with great distinct- ness terrible disparities of happiness, and urged that the State had the duty and power to remove them. Their writings mark a wholesome reaction from the 176 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION military spirit of the Napoleonic age. St Simon, in this respect anticipating Herbert Spencer, but un- fortunately not the true course of history, proclaimed that the world was passing from a military into an industrial stage. He announced that the problem of curing poverty was more important by vast and immeasurable degrees than the conquest of territories ; and in his works, as in those of Fourier, this problem is handled in the broadest way. These men did not weigh out palliatives in a grocer's scale ; they offered to reorganize society from roof to basement. Their horizon was not limited by the frontiers of political economy ; their economics were affiliated to laws of progress, to cosmologies, to comprehensive, original, and mostly very absurd speculations as to the nature of man and the past and future of the Universe. Nothing arrests attention more successfully than a mixture of sound sense and paradoxical nonsense, especially if it be subtly compounded and addressed to the remedy of admitted evils. St Simon startled France into serious sociology ; and the impulse, com- municated from his writings, spread hi widening circles through the whole framework of French society. There were Socialist songs, Socialist novelettes, Socialist pamphlets, besides solid criticism of the old political economy in such an organ as the Globe, and from such pens as those of Buchez, Carnot, and Duvernier. The most attractive programmes were put out based upon the thinnest gauzes of visionary psychology. Cabet's " Voyage en Icarie " depicted a Utopia governed by the pure ethics of the gospel, in which the rich made a voluntary renunciation of their wealth and the State distributed commodities, not according to the aristo- cratic principle of desert, but according to the charit- THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOUR 177 able principle of need. The doctrine disseminated by Fourier that nature, under proper direction, could be taught to produce a superior race of men and animals, was widely, if not explicitly, held by those who had everything to gain by a social revolution and nothing to lose by a comfortable dream. In the general intellectual ferment watchwords were coined which have done service in the currency of Socialism for many generations : property is theft ; to each according to his needs ; rehabilitation ; emancipation ; solidarity ; scientific and industrial organization. The literature of the movement was neither learned nor profound, but it was full of large and seductive ideas. The title of Louis Blanc's famous treatise " L 'Organisation du Travail," was in itself a programme for humanity. Reading it at a distance of some seventy years we are struck with its slightness and brevity. National workshops aided by state capital, electing their own officers, paying equal wages to their operatives, are gradually to eliminate the individual producer. Competition is to disappear, capitalism is to retreat before the superior type of these democratic, co-operative, and State-aided groups. That is all. There is no attempt to meet difficulties, to push the argument home, or to support it on a basis of economic knowledge. It is as flimsy a raft of dialectic as any upon which a great mass of social appetite has voyaged on the sea of politics. But in comparison with most of the proposals of the day Blanc's pro- gramme was precise and substantial, and, when the Revolution of 1848 broke out, the idea of the National Workshop was firmly lodged in the brains of the Paris artisans. A Socialist State might be governed by an hereditary 12 178 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION monarchy. There is nothing inconceivable, though there would be something anomalous, in such a policy. Anton Menger, a modern German Socialist writer of an advanced type, thinks that the government of his ideal State may be entrusted to a weak hereditary monarch rather than to a republican president. 1 This, however, was not the view of the French Socialists under the government of Louis Philippe. They tended to be re- publican because they were aware that no pressure could wring a scheme of socialism out of a selfish bour- geois government. Thus the idea of the Republic began to acquire a new content and significance. In- dividualists of the old school, who believed in the Republic, either because their fathers had fought for the Revolution, or because the Republic was associated in their minds with military glory and expansion, no longer held the monopoly of that political faith. A new gene- ration had arisen, who worked for the Republic, not on the ground of what it had done in the past, but in the expectation of what it might do in the future. They did not want the old Republic ; they wanted La \ Republique sociale, with established economic security '' for every workman in the State. The two charges which John Stuart Mill brought against the government of Louis Philippe have never been disproved or shaken. First, it was " a govern- ment wholly without the spirit of improvement," and second, " it wrought almost exclusively through the meaner and more selfish impulses of mankind." It was stationary and it was corrupt. In a nation of thirty- four millions it was content that the Chamber of Deputies should rest upon an electorate of a quarter of a million votes, and that electors and deputies alike ' should be subject to every form of official pressure and THE JULY MONARCHY 179 corrupt inducement. All proposals to widen the franchise were^ met with an unqualified negative, and it_ w is stated-JhajT three ckculars jupon ^pauperism addressed by the Minister of the Interior to the prefects constituted the total sum of energy expended by the government upon social amelioration during a period of eighteen years. 2 No government can long subsist upon a policy of negatives. Louis Philippe came to the throne in difficult times. The men of the barricades were consumed with the " maladie de 1815," and it was part of their ideal that the Revolution should triumph abroad as well as at home. To meet the special emergencies of the time a great minister, Casimir Perier, devised what was called the policy of resistance. He made it the principal object of his government to crush revolution at home and to re- assure the foreign powers as to the pacific intentions of France. It was a strong, prudent, and necessary course, but it was not a sufficient policy for a dynasty which wished to establish itself in the esteem of a pro- gressive and high-mettled nation. The country de- manded more of its government than that it should be able to master the conspiracies of the factory and the riots of the street. It was deeply dissatisfied with a foreign policy which, until the rift over the Spanish marriages, bore the appearance of truckling to England and was afterwards plainly enlisted in the system of reactionary alliances. The one military achievement of the dynasty, the conquest of Algeria, brought no compensation for the tranquil acquiescence in the loss of the Rhine frontier, and for the abandonment of the Italians, the Poles, and the Protestant democrats of Switzerland. Dissatisfaction spread apace. While the general public was shocked by the steady increase 180 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION of parliamentary placemen, by the revelation of some flagrant cases of political corruption, and by a terrible murder in the highest class of society, the politicians were irritated by the long ascendancy of Guizot. In 1847 the agitation for political reform spread from the i Chambers to the country. Reform banquets were organized, speeches were made, and though the move- ment was professedly constitutional, it was carried out in an atmosphere charged with republican senti- ment. The hero of this oratorical campaign was Lamartine.the lyric poet of France, and the author of that sentimental history of the Girondins which had recently been acclaimed by men and women of republi- can sentiments throughout France. 3 The foundation of the Second Republic was not con- templated by the organisers of the reform banquets. i They wished to break down the dictatorship of " Lord I! Guizot," to enlarge the franchise, to cure the body i politic of corruption, and to open the door to social reforms. They desired a foreign policy neither Ghibelline at Rome and Milan, nor sacerdotal at Berne, nor Austrian in Piedmont, nor Russian in Cracow, but framed upon the very antithesis of this reactionary spirit, and adjusted to the old republican tradition of France. Some of the agitators who spoke at these banquets, notably Ledru-Rollin, were known to cherish republican traditions ; others, like Louis Blanc, were avowed Socialists ; others, like Lamartine, had put out at one time or other in their career large pro- grammes, including universal suffrage, free education, the extinction of an hereditary artistocracy, the separation of Church and State programmes which were unlikely to be realized under the constitutional monarchy. But if any of these men had been asked at THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 181 the beginning of February 1848 whether they expected to see a republic within the year, they would certainly have replied in the negative ; and most of the reformers would have added that they would not have it if they could, and that France was neither fit nor willing to receive it. Odilon Barrot depicted the dominant | j frame of mind when he spoke of his ideal as "a)' monarchy supported by republican institutions." 4 A battle in the streets, arising indirectly out of the v prohibition of a reform -banquet, brought about the resignation of Louis Philippe. He was unmade, as he / was made, by the barricades. It was a popular revolt, a revolt of artisans and students, neither led nor sup- ported by the bourgeois, but despite this, conquering Paris with astonishing ease, and owing its victory rather to the lukewarmness of the defence than to the weight and fury of the attack. The three days of February have been described by many eye-witnesses, by De Tocqueville, by Flaubert in his " Education sentimentale," and best of all by Maxime du Camp, who went out with Flaubert to watch the fighting in the streets. To him as to many other contemporaries the whole affair was a disgusting surprise. They knew that the government was not very glorious ; but they con- ceived that it was well enough, and that given a change of ministry and a dose of parliamentary reform, it would be made acceptable to the general sense of the country. On February 23, there were some disturbances in Paris, some processions of students and workmen, an attempted barricade in the Rue St Honore", and in the night a bonfire of the chairs in the Champs Elyse"es. Such scenes had not been uncommon in Paris, and the government of Louis Philippe had triumphed over many a more formidable demonstration ; but there 182 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION was one ominous sign. The National Guard was on the side of Parliamentary Reform. When the rappel was beaten on the afternoon of the 23rd, only six hundred of the eight thousand men of the second legion came to f the Maine, and on the following day the news was more disquieting still, for the guard turned out in the morning with cries of Vive la Reforme. Upon this Louis Philippe took the step which he should have taken before, he dismissed Guizot and sent for Mole. When the news spread through the capital there was a general sense of relief. Houses were illuminated. People went mad with joy. Groups of men rushed through the streets carrying paper lanterns and cry- ing, Vive la Reforme ! A bas Guizot ! The crisis seemed to be surmounted. The great obstruction to the im- patient flood of reform had been removed. Suddenly, towards ten in the evening, the sharp crackle of musketry rang out into the air. A detachment of the I4th regiment of the line, posted before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Rue des Capucines, had fired a volley into the crowd. A Corsican sergeant, by name Giacomoni, fired the first shot. " What followed," writes De la Normandie, an eye- witness, " is indescribable. In an instant the road emptied. Some twenty dead and thirty wounded lay on the ground. The first movement of stupor over- past, the crowd returned, howling, exasperated, in a paroxysm of fury. It took up the corpses, escorted them through the streets by torchlight, crying, ' Vengeance ! Treason ! To arms ! '" 5 The grisly procession did its work. Gun-shops were rifled ; pave- ments taken up ; the church bells sounded, and_before daybreak sixteen hundred barricades were up in Paris. THE SECOND REPUBLIC 183 Had Louis Philippe been a strong man, he would have levelled every paving stone of the barricades before making a concession to rebellion. But he was old, stricken by the recent death of the Princess Adelaide, his sister and principal support, and honourably averse from shedding the blood of his subjects. He appointed Marshal Bugeaud to command the troops, and then obstructed the only plan of action which would have led to certain success. Almost to the end he believed that an excited mob could be pacified by soft words and promises of reform and dissolution. Then, as the storm of the insurrection beat up against the Tuile- ries, he signed a deed of resignation in favour of his grandson, and appointed the Duchess of Orleans Regent of the kingdom. " Eh bien ! Puisqu'on le veut, j'abdique." It was not heroism ; but at least it was fatigue and common-sense. The Republic was announced a few hours later. Immediately upon the conquest of the Tuileries a band of advanced Republicans swooped down on the Hotel de Ville and proceeded to appoint a Mayor for Paris and a Committee of Public Safety for France. On the same day and almost at the same hour two distinct governments were constructed in different buildings in Paris. The Hotel de Ville government was Socialist, devised in the office of La Rtformc ; the Palais Bourbon government individualist, and drawn up by the more conservative politicians who wrote for the I Nationale. Had the issue then and there been decided ' by force, the extremists would probably have prevailed ; but Lamartine, whose eloquence and renown had given him the leadership in the Palais Bourbon on that critical afternoon, was determined to avoid a struggle. With a capacity for action rare, if not unique, among 184 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION poets, he marched to the Hotel de Ville, disarmed the authority of the Socialist commune by accepting three of its members, Blanc, Marrast, and Albert, as secre- taries to the provisional government, and took the decisive step of proclaiming the Republic. As the royal family drove off along the quays, the Duchess, leading her little boy by the hand, walked to the Palais Bourbon and appealed to the chivalry of the Legislature of France. But the Revolution was master of the city, and though the Chamber would probably have voted the Regency had it been a free agent, an armed mob bursting in at the doors and windows compelled it to name the members of a provisional government. Such was the birth of the Second Republic. It was launched on the world by the pressure of the Paris mob, and without any knowledge on the part of its principal promoters whether it would be acceptable to the general body of the nation. So surprising and thorough was the success of the Revolution that the Republic was greeted with lyrical enthusiasm as heralding the dawn of a new age, not only for France but for humanity in general. In a few days Louis Philippe was so thoroughly expunged from memory that he might, as De Tocqueville remarks, have be- longed to the Merovingian dynasty. Every ingenious wit about town was busy constructing his Utopia one in newspapers, another in placards, a third in posters, a fourth in open-air harangues. " A proposed to destroy the inequality of fortunes, B the inequality of intelli- gence, C the most ancient inequality of all, the in- equality of men and women. Specifics against poverty and remedies against work, the evil which has tor- mented humanity since its beginning, were proposed." 6 THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT 185 The Provisional Government, of which Dupont de 1'Eure was the nominal head, but Lamartine the soul and spirit, was faced with a crisis of extraordinary peril and perplexity. In a city seething with the ferment of successful revolution, it was debarred by its own antecedents and credentials from the employment of armed force. Three of its members, with what measure of support behind them no man could calculate, were hotly impelling their colleagues down the paths of Socialism. Another body of opinion, enthusiastically held and more strictly belonging to the republican tradition of the country, urged the instant undertaking of a crusade to relieve the suffering peoples of Europe from the tyrants who oppressed them. Again and again the government was besieged by organized mobs and compelled to make promises which it was no part of wisdom to perform. Yet, despite many difficulties and not a few mistakes, these men who, without any preparatory experience, suddenly found themselves called to conduct the government of a great country, exhibited a truer apprehension of the highest states- manship than all the experienced parliamentarians of the Guizot regime. They did away with slavery in the French colonies, abolished the death penalty for political offences, made an end of imprisonment for debt, legalized trades unions, and decreed that the (future Chamber should be elected on a system of uni- versal suffrage. To the finer parts of the republican . tradition they were true ; the dangerous or deplorable elements they were emphatic to reject. They adumbrated a scheme of free primary education ; they declined to be drawn into a war of propaganda or to admit that the guillotine is the lawful arbiter of political difference. While thus attempting to clear 186 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION the name of the Republic from the legacy of suspicion which it had inherited from the past, they were anxious not to be drawn into the madcap raid upon the principles of property. Lamartine rejected the red flag of Socialism as the emblem of the new Republic. " The tricolour," he said finely, " has made the round of the world, the red flag has only made the round of the Champ de Mars ! " At the same time concessions were made under pressure to Louis Blanc and his following. The State guaranteed work to all citizens, and proceeded to establish national workshops to carry out this tremendous undertaking. 7 A people which, ever since the sixteenth century, has possessed State workhouses, cannot complain of the French for accepting the principle of the droit au travail. It is, however, a principle which, unless it be accompanied by a number of most essential safeguards, is liable to obvious abuse. The experiment of the ateliers nationaux, as it was tried in Paris, could not but lead to disaster. The work provided was easy, unproductive, and overpaid, accompanied by no re- strictions on liberty, and presenting every form of seduction most calculated to destroy the industry and independence of the working classes. In a few weeks ; more than a hundred thousand artisans were engaged in doing work which nobody wanted for salaries which the State could ill afford to pay, and to the serious dis- location of private industrial enterprise. To secure discipline the men were organized on a military plan in battalions and companies, and the Provisional Govern- ment seems to have cherished the idea that if it came to a conflict with the Red Socialists, the national work- shops would be on the side of property. How great was this delusion was soon made apparent. TOWN AND COUNTRY 187 On returning to his estate in Normandy, De Tocqueville asked his steward what was thought of the Revolution. The man, who was himself half a peasant, ' replied that when the peasantry learnt that Louis Philippe had been given his discharge they said that it was well and that he deserved it ; but afterwards, learning of the disorders in Paris, of the new taxes, of the possibility of a general war, seeing that commerce was at a standstill, that money was hiding itself, and especially when they heard that the principle of] property was attacked, they experienced a revulsion of feeling. In this report of De Tocqueville's steward we have the chief explanation of the downfall of the Second Republic. The country was not prepared for the Republic and was thoroughly alarmed at the prospect of Socialism. No nation fortunate enough to possess a large landed proprietary will readily accept a government which spreads a feeling of insecurity about land. Accordingly, when the Constituent Assembly met in Paris on May 4, and it was the first Assembly in Europe to be elected upon a system of direct universal suffrage, it was found to be a body of a thoroughly conservative complexion. De Tocqueville remarks that no French legislature had ever contained so many nobles, clergy, or large proprietors. Some four hundred out of a total of eight hundred and forty members were > monarchists, and no fact was of greater significance than that Louis Blanc and Ledru-Rollin, who were regarded as the chieftains of the Socialist and Radical doctrine, were returned at the bottom of the Parisian list. The Assembly, having no other option, was prepared to accept the Republic, but it was very clearly deter- mined that it would have nothing to do with Socialism. 188 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION The struggle which ensued was one of the most terrible of which a civilized capital has ever been witness. Ever since the February Revolution, the workmen of Paris had been excited by the golden prospect of a com- plete reversal of social conditions : the poor were going to be rich, the rich were going to be poor ; the scullery maid would go in her mistress's silks, and the page boy would live upon the wings of the chicken. There was to be no more unemployment, no more exploitation, no more misery. The rich should be taxed to support the poor, and the Republic of equals should march off to help the Poles, and destroy all the tyrannies in Europe. In every political meeting and the men who were employed in the national workshops were able to devote half their time to political discussions these ideas formed part of the common stock of oratory. On May 15, a great mob, excited by the news of the sufferings of Poland, invaded the Chamber, decreed its dissolution, and declared war against the kings of Europe. Fortunately, the National Guard arrived in time to rescue the deputies and to restore order. The unpleasant experience revealed the necessity of taking strong measures. The leading conspirators were im- prisoned, and on June 21, the government took the strong but necessary step of dissolving the national workshops. Then an insurrection began which lasted for three days and is known in history as the days of June. The insurgents fought without a war-cry, with- out chiefs, without flags, but with an organization little short of marvellous, and with a fierceness and courage which could not be surpassed. On the night of June 23, half Paris was in their hands, and before Cavaignac's army had reconquered it, ten thousand men had been killed or wounded in the struggle, and more French THE DAYS OF JUNE 189 officers had lost their lives than in any of the most glorious victories of the First Empire. On the day on which the Tuileries was captured a crowd collected round a statue of Spartacus in the Tuileries garden and crowned it with a red cap of liberty made out of the cloth which had been torn from the throne of Louis Philippe. The Spartacus who led the great servile war of June, if indeed there was any single leader of that desperate enterprise of organized poverty, is unknown to us. The Revolution was as anonymous as a convulsion of nature : it sprang up, like the sudden spurt of a volcano, spread desolation, and was then extinguished. For this very reason it left a deeper mark upon the public mind than if it had been the work of an organized and palpable political organization. Were the elemental fires so incalculable, so fierce, so close beneath the crust of convention ? \ A panic spread through the country which was not the least among the psychological conditions which brought about the Second Empire. In the midst of these terrible anxieties a committee of the Assembly sat down to draft a constitution. Its most distinguished member, Alexis de Tocqueville, informs us that the discussion was poor and per- , functory, the main object being to construct some sort ^ of government, the stronger the better, with as little delay as possible. A month of intermittent work, a report which many of the Committee had not read, and then a full dress debate in the Assembly, in the course of which the most important question of all was decided by an irrelevant flight of rhetoric, and the Second Republic was duly constituted. The first question which had to be determined was whether the Legislature should consist of one or of two Chambers. 190 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Directory had two Chambers, the monarchy had P^two Chambers, the American Republic had two Chambers. De Tocqueville advanced the arguments 'V > for the bicameral system which are familiar to every > student of constitutional questions ; but he was beaten in the Committee and in the Chamber. " Two Chambers with a President," exclaimed Gamier- Pages, " is the image of royalty. I want a single Chamber because I want a strong Chamber, a Chamber capable of resisting the executive power. By craft or force that power had always mastered us. The Committee of Public Safety devoured the Convention as Bonaparte devoured the Councils." These argu- ments prevailed. That the monarchy had two Chambers was felt to be a very particular reason why the Republic, which must be different, should have one; and to this intelligible but irrational prejudice was added the suspicion that were two Chambers established, the executive would be able to establish a tyranny by playing one off against the other. As to the Executive power itself it was generally agreed to vest it in a single person. There was to be a President of the French, as there was already a President of the American Republic. The troubled experience of France during recent months had not improved the reputation of plural executives. It was a plural executive which had sanctioned the right to labour, formed the national workshops, and permitted a for- midable insurrection to break out in Paris. It was a single executive, a military dictator, who had rescued France in the days of June. On all hands then the Presidential system was admitted, and no one can doubt that, in deciding to have a President, the Chamber was taking a prudent step. The success of the experi- DEBATES ON THE CONSTITUTION 191 ment would, however, entirely depend upon the nature of the safeguards provided against the conversion of the Presidency into a despotism. France was a country with monarchical traditions and a centralized administration. " In France," writes De Tocqueville, \ " there is only one thing which cannot be created, and 1 1 that is a free government, only one thing which cannot 1 \ be destroyed, and that is centralization." A President of the French Republic, controlling the administration, directing the thousands of functionaries who spread /& the name and influence of the central power through /\ every household in the country, could not fail to be \ a very powerful person and might easily be a very dangerous person. Especially would this be the case if the President was elected by the direct suffrages of the people upon a plan adopted from America. He would then exercise a power co-ordinate with that of the Legislature, and, as himself the direct representative of the people, might defy with impunity a body whose title to represent the sovereign will was necessarily less distinct than his own. Either then the presidential power should have been expressly limited, or an attempt should have been made to decentralize the administration, or the election of the President should have been entrusted to the Chamber. No one of these courses was pursued. The Constituent Assembly desired a strong executive and was averse to interfer- ence with that " modest action of the sous-prffet," which, according to one orator, was the barrier against the recrudescence of feudalism, and according to another, had prevented Alsace and Lorraine from be- coming German. But the fatal step was taken when ( Lamartine threw in his lot with those who advocated . that the Head of the State should be directly elected J 192 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION by universal suffrage. That vote gave the Presidency to Louis Bonaparte and prepared the way for the Second Empire. 8 It is easy to scoff at the Second Republic, its origin, its illusions and errors, its swift and complete catas- trophe ; and those who follow through the newspapers and pamphlets of the time the story of the first few weeks, when a generous wave of emotion was passing over Paris and everything seemed possible which the imagination of humanitarian fancy could suggest, when the clergy were blessing trees of liberty, and Georges Sand from her sordid attic in the Rue de Conde was pouring out her fevered dreams for uni- versal regeneration, and good-humoured jests were flying about concerning Louis File-vite, and politics were governed by the phrases of a lyric poet, will not be the last to feel the full force of the ironic contrast. But the experiment of the Second Republic was not without a permanent effect on the political tradition of the country. It brought with it universal suffrage ; it introduced the presidential system, and it exhibited the fact that within the circle of republicans there were two distinct currents, one bourgeois, the other socialist ; one desiring to defend the bureaucracy, the land laws, the capitalistic system, the other desiring to overthrow them. To thoughtful minds it suggested the conclusion long ago anticipated by Condorcet that a republic would never be firmly established unless it were supported by a system of free secular education. But the effects of the Revolution of February were not limited to France itself ; they extended with the gravest developments to every animated polity of the Continent. CHAPTER IX ITALY Hither, O stranger, that cry for her Holding your lives in your hands, Hither, for here is your light, Where Italy is, and her might | Strength shall be given you to fight, Grace shall be given you to die for her, For the flower, for the lady of lands. SWINBURNE, " The Halt before Rome " THERE is no more remarkable example in history of the contagious quality of ideas than the sudden spread of revolutionary excitement through Europe in 1848. In the course of a few weeks the established order seemed everywhere to be crumbling to pieces. The Revolution began in Palermo, crossed the Straits of Messina, and passed in successive waves of con- vulsion through Central Italy to Paris, Vienna, Milan, and Berlin. It has often been remarked that the Latin races are of all the peoples of Europe most prone to revolution ; but this proposition did not hold good in 1848. The Czechs in Bohemia, the Magyars in Hungary, the Germans in Austria rose against the paralysing encumbrance of the Hapsburg autocracy. The Southern Slavs dreamed of an Illyrian kingdom ; the Germans of a united Germany ; the Bohemians of a union of all the Slavonic peoples of Europe. The authority of the Austrian Empire, the pivot of the European autocracy, had never been so rudely 13 193 194 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION challenged, and if the Crown succeeded in recovering its shattered authority it was due to the dumb and unintelligent loyalty of its Slavonic troops. In all these movements, which were complex as all movements must be which spread over several countries, there was a republican element. At different times during the course of two tumultuous years republics were proclaimed in France and Hungary, in Baden, Venice, and Rome. The chances for republicanism in Europe were never so good ; the spirit of the Republic was never so widely diffused ; the prestige of monarchy was never so low. To account for these circumstances there is no need to look much beyond the character, policy, and influence of Prince Metternich. Born in the Rhine provinces and having experienced in early manhood the evils of the French Revolution, Metternich had made it the guiding principle of his life to uphold the forces of order against the powers which make for political and social upheaval. He had seen Austria vanquished, humiliated, stripped of her fairest provinces by the great captain of revolutionary France, and the lesson sank deep into his soul. When Bonaparte was beaten and the Austrian Empire recovered its position, it was Metternich's aim so to direct the governments of central Europe that all free political thinking should be forthwith impossible. He pro- vided Germany with a slow unworkable Federal Constitution exactly calculated to check the tide of national aspirations and to secure the ascendency of Austria. He resisted the grant of constitutions to the several States. At the first symptom of popular effervescence he worked upon the German govern- ments to muzzle the Press and the universities. METTERNICH 195 And this repressive influence, which was exerted effectually enough in the German federation, was worked with a yet greater degree of minute particu- larity in the hereditary States of Austria. Here no book, paper, or pamphlet of a liberal tendency was admitted. Here there was neither parliament nor any minor organ for the expression of local grievances. The Government was a pure bureaucracy and was intended to exhibit to the world the model of a stationary and orderly State. Such a policy could not endure. The world was moving on and Austria stood still. It is impossible to draw a spiritual cordon round a great people. The Teutonic races felt, doubtless in a less degree than the French and Italians, but still in a notable measure, the liberal impulses of the world. They followed the liberation of South America ; they marked the triumph of Greece and the success of Belgium ; they were immediately affected by the fall of Charles X. of France. The cause of monarchy incarnate in such men as Louis Philippe and Frederick William IV. of Prussia and Ferdinand of Austria, so far from appearing sacred, was not even dignified. It was a not uncommon opinion that the monarchies of Europe were anomalous obstacles which it was the duty of a vigorous and enlightened civilization to clear away from its path. It is needless to say that there had never been an Italian republic. The republican tradition of the country, such as^it was, was civic and separatist, not national or making for consolidation, but as the spirit of the French Revolution sped through the country with its disintegrating doctrine of the Rights of Man, these ancient maxims of collective and honourable egotism became unfashionable with that class which 196 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION is affected by literary movements. The Italian republican of the new school was the citizen of an ideal democracy, the geographical frontiers of which it was irrelevant to determine. In his library you would find French books and French pamphlets, and the careful analyst might trace the stream of his political reflection to its fountain head in some old file of Girondin newspapers full of that radiant cosmo- politan eloquence which captured the young heart of Giuseppe Mazzini. The downfall of the Napoleonic Empire could not interrupt the progress of a type of thinking which was fixed in the political consciousness of Europe. The Revolution continued, but it was driven underground and made to take many un- desirable and obscurantist forms. The Italian republican of the Restoration period joined the society of the Carbonari a body which had developed out of Freemasonry in the kingdom of Naples during the French period, and which not only spread its net- work over the whole Italian peninsula but possessed affiliated branches in other countries as well. It is the nemesis of despotism that it degrades those who oppose as well as those who serve it. The Carbonaro was bound to implicit obedience and served an organiza- tion which combined with the new and wholesome spirit of liberalism not a little of the ancient venom of the Italian vendetta. By degrees, as the society became more cosmopolitan, as its ritual became more elaborate and esoteric, it [lost^ whatever educa- tional value it may once have possessed ; and the cause of Italian liberalism, discredited by the failures of 1820 and 1831, was far fallen when it was raised on to a higher plane by the moral genius of Mazzini. Among all patriotic and enlightened Italians it was AUSTRIA AND ITALY 197 common ground that the Austrians must be driven be- yond the Alps. It was bad enough that they should occupy the two splendid provinces of Lombardy and Venetia, but even worse that behind every corrupt and backward government of Italy there was this overwhelming support of unintelligent and alien power. So long as the Whitecoat garrisons were quartered in the valley of the Po, no attempt to obtain reformation in the States of the Church or in the Kingdom of Naples could be carried out. Of this fact there had already been two flagrant and painful demonstrations. In 1820 the Austrians had crushed the constitutional movements in Naples and Pied- mont ; and eleven years later, when the Romagna burst out into insurrection against the intolerable government of the Papal legates, the same sinister interposition baffled the cause of enlightenment and reform. Judged indeed by her government of Lombardy and Venetia, Austria should not be described either as a barbarous or as a cruel power ; but her mission was to be stationary, and her removal was therefore an essential preliminary to the vital and wholesome progress of the Italian people. So far the patriots were agreed. Beyond there was room for every variety of hypothetical construc- tion and political ideal. Some desired an Italian federation under the Pope ; others an Italian monarchy ; others a federation of republics ; others a unitary State on republican lines. Of those who professed this last opinion no one was so eminent or influential as Mazzini. The son of a Genoese doctor, Mazzini was born in 1808 while Italy was still under the French dominion. As a member of an ancient city republic, he was suckled in the historic tradition 198 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION of civic freedom and in that peculiar distrust of the neighbouring monarchy of Piedmont which was the heirloom of centuries of bitter contest. He grew up in an atmosphere of patriotic resolves and shrouded counsels. The sight of the fugitives of the foiled insurrection of 1821 begging their bread in the streets of Genoa fired his austere and generous imagination. From that day to the end of his life he went clothed in black, wearing perpetual mourning for Italy. He became a Carbonaro, suffered imprisonment and exile, and lived a life of constant conspiracy and patriotic propaganda. In the eyes of Europe his name was a symbol of revolution : to his fellow- countrymen he stood out as the prophet of the Italian Republic. It is a fallacy, nowhere more completely exposed than in the case of Mazzini, to imagine that the great human influences in the sphere of politics must necessarily be exerted by statesmen. Few men constantly occupying themselves with politics have been so devoid of statesmanship as Mazzini. His estimate of the political forces of his time was almost always wrong ; his particular plans almost always miscarried ; his horoscope of the future was signally falsified in the event. The spirit of accommodation and compromise, the recognition that life presents but a choice of evils, qualities essential to successful statesmanship, were alien to his proud and lofty temperament. At an early period of his life he con- vinced himself that the Repubiic, being the only form of government iri*^Hich the popular will was faithfully expressed, was the only pure and perfect polity ; and then with a mystic belief in the destinies of his own land, nourished not only by the study of MAZZINI 199 the classics but by a profound and exalted passion for Dante, he concluded that this perfect form must be designed for Italy. To those who held out for a monarchy he would reply, firstly that the old Italian tradition was republican, and secondly that there was no means of adjusting the rival claims of the Pied- mont ese and Neapolitan crowns. That the Pied- montese monarchy would ever be worthy to unite Italy was a supposition entertained at one fitful moment and then rejected and combated with blind and unflinching ardour. What indeed was Piedmont ? An autocratic priest-ridden State, without culture or light, which had absorbed the Republic of Genoa and persecuted the Carbonari. Having once fixed this impression of Piedmont in his mind, Mazzini never changed it. He would not appreciate the series of great and fruitful measures by which, under the guidance of Cavour, Piedmont became the most progressive State in Italy ; and when in flftyn -the Sardinian King entered Rome and the scattered members were at last gathered together in a single body, the triumph of a union so accomplished was to Mazzini the tragic inversion of his sacred and most cherished hope. The real clue to Mazzini's power lies not in any faculty of adjusting means to ends, but in the much rarer quality of sustained moral elevation. He was great, not because he could show people how to circumvent difficulties, but because he could persuade people to confront them. The ordinary rules of political arithmetic had little meaning for a man who consistently weighed practical possibilities in the scale of his moral convictions. Some men win confidence by steady and substantial gifts of judgment, others 200 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION by the force of a coherent philosophy, others again by some charm or glitter of eloquence ; but Mazzini belonged to no one of these classes. The source of his influence was the same as that which has furnished the saints and martyrs of the Church, the unfaltering conviction of a devoted and beautiful nature. Although his sphere of activity was political, the type of his genius was not political, but religious or prophetic. Hobbes thought that religion was part of law, Mazzini held that politics was part of religion. He did not therefore agree with Quinet, who traced the failure of the French Revolution to its refusal to cut itself adrift from the Catholic Church. Rather he viewed the Revolution as the last stage in the evolution of Christianity, a religion, as he conceived it, of sublimated egotism destined to give way before a higher type. The failure of the French Revolution, for he could not but acknowledge that the failure was disastrous, was due to the fact that it insisted upon . rights, not upon duties ; upon individuality, not upon ; association. The Republic of the French was a temple ' of all the egoisms. The new Republic would be established upon a nobler foundation and a more positive faith. In a letter which shows a strange inability to penetrate into the life of alien institutions, Mazzini invites the Pope to abandon Roman Catholic- ism and to inaugurate the religion of the future, a creed of which the citizens of the Republic would be the only priests, and the practice of the Republic the only ritual. It was part of Mazzini's patriotic optimism to maintain that Rome would be the centre of that new stream of political illumination which would spread through Europe, and that Italy, under the guiding hand of Providence, being destined THE IDEAL REPUBLIC 201 to provide the first type of the ideal Republic, would reconquer her old position as the schoolmistress of European civilization. The new Republic would not teach Socialism which was material, but association which was spiritual. It would not cry up wages, but exalt character ; it would not achieve economic equality, but establish moral unity. States may be prosperous and self-centred ; living upon a low plane of duty and disinterestedness they may show a fine surplus and a long array of peaceful and unruffled generations ; but such was not to be the ignoble destiny of the Italian Republic. That visionary polity was to be a fashioning tool for the moral improvement of the races of Europe. So far from wrapping itself in the selfish doctrine of non-intervention, it would throw the whole force of its vivid and spirited sym- pathy into all the great human causes of the world. It would help the Poles and Hungarians to be free. The electric shock of its moral conviction and military ardour would bring the monarchies of Continental Europe quivering to the ground. From Italy would spread the -religion of the Republic, a doctrine founded on Theism and on a belief in the invisible but benign hand of Providence effecting its large and splendid purpose through the dark and perplexed tissues of human history. Such in outline was the creed of the new Republic, a creed deriving some of its elements from the Ghibelline vision of Dante, others from the radical Catholicism of Lamennais, and, as Mazzini preached it, so in essentials was its spirit absorbed by thousands of young Italians who, without the transforming power of that high idealism, would have been delivered up to a soulless rage against priestcraft and tyranny. 202 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Mazzini did not work miracles. He neither made the Republic nor came within measurable distance of making it. He could not liberate Italian politics from mean ambitions or violent appetites or from its inveterate malady of jealous suspicion. His intervention in affairs was often fatally injured by a disastrous intolerance, leading him to disbelieve that history or morals could be patient of any other solution but his own. But if he suffered from the limitations of the fanatic, he had also the unique power which belongs to a life strung upon a single idea. He made Italy a moral unity, before the Piedmontese monarchy made it a political unity. iA young obscure exile, he launched a propaganda which inflamed every Italian heart not already close sealed against the generous appeal of patriotism. The Association of Young Italy was founded in a garret in Marseilles, and designed to replace the dark symbols of the Carbonari by a reasoned and instructed faith in the past and the future of Italy. Commended by Mazzini's eloquent pen, the Giovane Italia rapidly conquered adherents, and the republican movements of the '48 with their youthful ecstasies of lyric en- thusiasm are in no small measure the products of its missionary enterprise. 1 The Italian Revolution of 1848 is the result not of a single stream but of many converging currents. Monarchists and republicans combined with liberals of every type and shade of opinion in a simultaneous protest against the Austrian rule with all its un- wholesome corollaries. Unfortunately the common aversion from the Hapsburgs was not sufficiently strong to efface the internal animosities and divisions of Italy. Instead of beating the enemy first and then ITALY AND PIEDMONT 203 settling upon the political organization of the country the Italians confounded the two operations with fatal results. While the struggle was still undecided in the North, the Piedmontese government invited the provinces of Lombardy and Venetia to declare by means of a plebiscite whether or no they would consent to be fused in the Piedmontese monarchy. At a time when the attention of all Italy should have been concentrated on the war, it was diverted to the consideration of a grave political issue. The spine of Italian resistance to Austria was the royal army of Piedmont, and the monarchists not unreasonably claimed the two Austrian provinces as the legitimate prize of a royal victory. To the republicans on the other hand such an attempt to prejudge the destinies of Italy was, of all omens, the most sinister. They were in no mood to sacrifice person and purse only that Piedmont might be enabled to devour another leaf of the Milanese artichoke. They were full of distrust of Charles Albert. His record was dubious, dark, and vacillating ; his hands were embrued with the blood of patriots ; he was not clean of the taint of priest- craft ; a paroxysm of dark superstition might throw him back into the ranks of the clerical coalition and leave his republican allies exposed to the furies of Austria. Such suspicions and forebodings were not uncommon and received some encouragement from the radical papers in Milan. At the crisis of her fate, when unanimity was of all things most precious, the national movement was marred by bitter suspicion and active recrimination. The idea of a united Italy, whether organized upon a monarchical or a republican plan, was not yet within the compass of practical politics. It was hardly 204 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION likely that the Catholic world would tolerate the disappearance of the Papal State, or that the Cabinets of Europe would calmly acquiesce in the formation of a united Italian polity. Charles Albert himself never dreamed of anything more ambitious than a territory extending from the Alps to the Adriatic, and a Piedmontese monarchy thus extended in the north might co-exist with a variety of minor States in the centre and south of the Peninsula. In August 1848 the Piedmontese army was severely defeated at Custozza, and the King compelled to sign an armistice at Salasco. The Austrians were again masters of Milan, and, with reaction triumphing in Naples and France, the prospects of the Italian Revolu- tion were indeed slender. But in the midst of a prospect, generally black and stormy, there were two points of bright light. The city of Venice, under the inspiring direction of Daniele Manin, a Jewish lawyer, had already thrown off the Austrian yoke, and had signified its readiness to accept the dominion of Piedmont when the armistice of Salasco suddenly interrupted its purpose. Finding itself abandoned by the Piedmontese, the Venetian government had a fair and honourable excuse for making terms with the Austrians. But while they were resigned to fight under the colours of Sardinia, the Venetians were yet more eager to show that fifty years of servitude had not extinguished the memory of ancient liberty, and the lieges of St Mark determined to prolong a life of gallant and desperate independence as a republic. For a year the city of lagoons bade defiance to a great and well-appointed army, which found to its cost that one of the most languid and luxurious com- munities in Europe could be steeled to endure priva- THE ROMAN REVOLUTION 205 tions in the cause of freedom. Eight thousand white- coats perished in a siege which redeemed the name of the Republic of St Mark and enlisted the admiration of liberal Europe.* And a not dissimilar scene was enacted in another quarter of Italy. The city of Rome had been a prey to violent political excitement ever since the accession of Pio Nono in 1846 had aroused expectations of radical reform. Clubs were formed ; crowds were addressed by itinerant orators and schooled under the shadow of St Peter's in the ways and words of revolu- tion. The outbreak of the war with Austria increased the confusion in a city which had long been divorced from the steady practice of politics. The Pope, who in quiet times would have been well disposed to liberal courses, was not inclined to burn his fingers in a struggle with the greatest Catholic power in Europe. To the patriots who clamoured wildly for war, he replied with an allocution which committed the Papal State to an inglorious policy of peace. From that moment a revolutionary situation arose. The Roman democrats could find nothing good in a policy of moderate constitutional reform accompanied by a betrayal of the larger interests of Italy ; and, in the fury of party passions, Rossi, the minister who repre- sented the unpopular policies of peace and moderation, was foully murdered on the steps of the Chamber. A few weeks afterwards (November 24) the Pope fled from the Quirinal and sought refuge from the tumults of Rome in the Neapolitan fortress of Gaeta. It was only then, after it had been abandoned by the Pope and was thrown upon its own resources, that the city of Rome showed that its politics were not all compounded of sordid and violent elements. With the failure of 206 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION the campaign in the north a wave of republican patriotism spread downwards through Italy. There was a revolution in Genoa, a second in Leghorn, a third in Florence where the progress of patriotic democracy was so triumphant as to oblige the Grand Duke of Tuscany to flee from his dominions. In these circumstances it is not wonderful that the City of Rome should have formally repudiated the sovereignty of the Pope. It was heartily sick of the mixture of incompetence, cruelty, and superstition which had so long been offered it in lieu of a government. It saw, or rather the guiding spirits of the movement saw, that there was a radical incompatibility between Italian patriotism and Papal rule. But it was one thing to escape from Papal bondage and another to construct a substantial polity in its place. A Parliament elected by universal suffrage met on Feb- ruary 5, 1849. Mamiani argued that the future of the Roman State should be determined by a Con- stituent Assembly summoned to decide upon the fate of all Italy ; but this view, since it involved delay, was overborne by the impatient clamour of the democrats, and amidst a scene of wild excitement it was decided that a Roman Republic should be forthwith pro- claimed. A few weeks went by, and then began the most memorable struggle in the annals of modern Italy. The republican movement in Tuscany, never widely popular, had been crushed, before it had time to establish itself, by the combined opposition of the priests and the peasantry. Piedmont had stamped out the revolution in Genoa, and was herself utterly beaten on the field of Novara ; and there remained only Venice and Rome to stem the rising tide of re- GARIBALDI 207 action. At this juncture the Roman Republic was assisted by the two most remarkable Italians of that time, Garibaldi and Mazzini. They were both con- vinced Republicans, both ardent patriots, but in all other respects as different from one another as two men can be. Mazzini had been brought up in the glories of Italian literature, and was himself one of the finest masters of a pure and elastic Italian prose. Garibaldi was a child not of books but of nature. His youth had been spent upon the waters of the Levant, his early manhood had passed amid the exciting struggles of South America, where he had served the cause of liberty both on sea and land. He had now returned to his beloved Italy, the hero of a thousand adventures and an accomplished master of irregular warfare. Of politics as a science of govern- ment he knew nothing, for his mind was constituted in a few simple propositions based upon a corre- sponding number of profound and passionate instincts. He hated priests, he worshipped liberty ; he was deter- mined, if he could, to make Italy a free republic. With his following of brawny redshirts, their heads covered with conical-shaped hats decked wih black waving plumes, their long unkempt hair flowing over their shoulders, their shaggy beards and bare necks, he seemed to have brought the wild air of the Pampas into the marble capital of the ancient world. The enemy was France. To conciliate the Catholic vote, Louis Bonaparte, the new President of the French Republic, determined that the Pope must be restored to Rome by French arms. A force under General Oudinot was dispatched to Civita Vecichia, and the Roman Republic was faced with the alternative of a politic surrender or a forlorn resistance. Mazzini had 208 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION no hesitation. " It was essential," he wrote after- wards, " to redeem Rome ; to place her once again at the summit, so that the Italians might again learn to regard her as the temple of their common country." The battalions of the National Guard defiled in front of the Palace of the Assembly with shouts of " Guerra ! Guerra ! " drowning the timid scruples of their leaders in a great insurgent wave of warlike excitement. The French were told that the Roman Republic would fight, and learned on April 30 that it could fight with success. Then an interval ensued during which the French general obtained substantial reinforcements, while the Roman triumvirs were amused by an ex- hibition of insincere diplomacy. The attack was renewed on June 4, and for twenty-six days " the degenerate remnant of the Roman people," as it was styled by the Times newspaper, held out against the schooled battalions of France. It was no mere artillery duel. " I saw Garibaldi," wrote Enrico Dandolo, describing the last battle of the siege, " spring forward with his drawn sword shouting a popular hymn." But at last weight of numbers and weight of guns prevailed over the careless enthusiasm of the Roman volunteers. On June 30, S. Pietro in Montorio was in the hands of the French, and Gari- baldi announced to the Roman Assembly that in a few hours the French guns could reduce the city to ashes. There was then no choice but to yield. The chronicle of republican failure ends with a brilliant and romantic epilogue. Garibaldi was de- cided never to surrender his sword to a foreigner upon Italian soil. Riding into the Piazza of St Peter's, he invited all who wished to follow him. " I offer," he said, " neither pay nor quarters nor provisions. I THE RETREAT FROM ROME 209 offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle, and death." Four thousand men elected to follow him on the desperate chance that they might rally Central Italy to their cause and relieve the blockade of Venice. The army of the retreat struck across the Apennines with French and Austrians, Neapolitans, Spaniards, and Tuscans thrown into the scale against it. Its numbers rapidly dwindled, and as town after town declared its opposition or neutrality the chances of making an effective stroke for Venice or Italy melted away. Upon the immediate political situa- tion the forced marches and hairbreadth escapes of Garibaldi had no perceptible effect. The last sur- vivors were hunted down like wild beasts, and the restored government of the Papacy was no whit the weaker or less intolerant for this splendid demonstration of republican courage. Yet in the long series of conflicts which marked the regeneration of Italy there is no incident which has made a deeper impression upon the Italian heart than the retreat of Garibaldi's four thousand men, with its romantic incidents, its thrilling vicissitudes, and its tragic close. 3 The republican experiments of these two years were not without their permanent effects. Though the papal government was restored in Rome, the Pope rm^ been exhibited as the enemy of Italy and as the friend of foreign powers, and the moral foundations of the Temporal Power were proportionally impaired. To obtain Rome as the capital of a free Italy became henceforth a leading principle of the Republican creed. At the same time it had become clear to all who were possessed of sound political judgment that the libera- tion of Italy could not be effected on the Mazzinian plan. Spirited as the Republican parties had proved M 210 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION themselves to be, they could never be a match for the leagued powers of theocracy. Mazzini had despised foreign alliances, and contended that guerilla warfare among the mountains would, if conducted with per- sistence, be sufficient to secure the freedom of his country. That idea was now exploded. Martin^, who possessed a real instinct for statesmanship, learned from his experience as Dictator of Venice, that Italy could not be helped out of bondage without the army of Piedmont and the support of France. Accordingly, in the succeeding decade the Republican party loses the allegiance of the best Italian minds. The National Society organized by La Farina succeeds to the place once occupied by Mazzini's " Young Italy " ; and as the constitutional government of Piedmont embarks on a course of active improvement, the intractable democracy of the older generation gives place to a spirit of patriotic opportunism, willing to take as the war-cry of the future, " Italy and Victor Emmanuel." CHAPTER X THE GERMAN REVOLUTION O Nam en, Namen festlich wie Siegesgesang ! Tell ! Hermann ! Klopstock ! Brutus ! Timoleon ! O ihr, wem freie Seele Gott gab, Flam mend ins eherne Herz gegraben STOLBERG, " Die Freiheit," 1775 Quand les hommes s'attroupent, les oreilles s'allongent. VOLTAIRE IF we look back to Germany as it stood on the brink of this Revolution, we see a country which, despite flourishing schools and universities, was paralysed by the most irrational constitution in Europe. In Russia, in France, in Spain, in Piedmont, in the Kingdom of Naples, there was a national government which could levy money, raise armies, and make treaties. In Germany the sovereign power was divided among thirty-six States, some great, others small, but all tenacious of their respective rights, and solicitous to preserve them unimpaired. Nowhere in Europe was there so sharp a contrast between the strength of the national consciousness and the weak- ness of the political organ designed to give it effect. The Federal Diet was a mere shadow, a congress of diplomatists acting under the instructions of the several States without sovereign power or moral influence. Nobody read its debates. The smallest government was bold enough to defy its conclusions, 212 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION unless they were supported by the two predominant powers in the Confederation, Austria and Prussia. There was no capital as in France. There were no great cities like Paris or Lyons, teeming with an intelligent and independent artisan population. Such as they were, the German towns were for the most part in- habited by small shopkeepers and unorganized craftsmen ; and a labouring population in any sense independent of the custom of prince, lord, or burgess had as yet no existence. The tillers of the soil still lived under the shadow of the castle, and, save in those parts of Germany which had come under the direct influence of the French, were either feudal tenants of the medieval type or leaseholders. There was a great deal of quiet happiness in the life of those times ; but there was a feeling abroad that other countries were becoming great and rich, while Germany remained weak and poor. German emigrants from America would write home of the free community beyond the seas where life was easy and wages high ; and many a society was founded in the United States for the purpose of spreading revolutionary principles through the Fatherland. Tracts advocating' -fehe expulsion of kings, princes, and dukes, the abolition of the nobility, the banishment of the Jews, the assassination of government officials, were carried over the Atlantic Ocean and found readers in the poor quarters of the larger towns. But this influence from America was only one among many elements in the revolutionary education of the German proletariate. The annihilation of the Polish nationality has probably done more to endanger the monarchies of Europe than any one political act accomplished since the monarchies of Europe were THE POLES 218 first founded. To trace its effects in all their various ramifications would lead us a long way. It is suffi- cient here to notice that the destruction of Poland, like the destruction of Jerusalem, produced a Polish dis- persion, and that as the Jews of the dispersion have discharged a peculiar office in the economy of the world as usurers and financiers, so too have the Poles of the dispersion, as agents and vectors of revolution. !In all the republican movements of the Continent the Poles have played a leading parL They _ are to be found in the Saxon riots of '48 ; in the Berlin barri- cades* in the struggle for the Republic in Baden ; in the Italian and Hungarian wars 0f liberation ; in the Chartist movement, and in the French Commune. Homeless and fearless, schooled in war and made reck- less by calamity, they^Tiave been the nerve of revolu- tion wherever they have been scattered by the winds of misfortune. Their influence was in the ascendant in the generation which succeeded the violent sup- pression of the national rising in 1830, and perhaps reached its climax seventeen years later, when Austria, uppressed the Republic of Cracow. Then every Chancellery in Europe was familiar with their woes ; and the exiles oi Poland; being scattered far and wide over the Continent, formed a cosmopolitan network bf conspiracy, and were the means of bringing into t loose communion the disaffected portions of the European proletariate. In the Leipzig of Robert Blum, as in the Paris of Louis Blanc, the restoration of the Polish nationality to be obtained through the defeat and downfall of the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian monarchies was a cardinal point in the Republican creed. 1 The story of the Republican education of Germany 214 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION would not be complete if to the instigations of can emigrants and Polish exiles we did not add the ex- amples of Switzerland and France. The Swiss enjoyed a Republican Constitution long before they became a V democracy. Their Constitution was very complicated and their society very aristocratic when the flame of the first French Revolution spread up into their mountain valleys and gabled towns. By the light of that furious conflagration all the inner discords of Swiss life were suddenly revealed the industrious democracies in the Protestant towns, the feudal society of the Catholic cantons and a contest began between the old and new order which lasted far into the nineteenth century. The democratic school, taking its lessons from France and receiving the support of French bayonets, established a Helvetian Republic with a central executive, a common parlia- ment, a uniform Swiss citizenship, and all the guaran- tees for liberty and equality which formed part of the revolutionary creed. Their action was premature ; their cause was stained by viQle.n_ce.and_pjllagft, and by the odium which attaches to any party which cannot achieve its objects without foreign help. They offended the religious feelings of the Catholic cantons ; they outraged the deep-set loyalties of the forest and the mountain, and in their zeal for national unity miscalculated the force of Swiss separatism. Bona- parte, who understood the life of secluded mountain valleys better than the Jacobin orators of Berne, framed a scheme which united the social equality Of the new School with the ranton^] foflflpgnHprirFL of the old. But though , his Act of_Mediation was partially undone in the reaction, though the Federal Pact of 1815 weakened the guarantees of individual THE SWISS MODEL 215 liberty and diluted the power of the central executive, the old variance of religious creed and political con- viction still remained the fundamental factor in Swiss life. On the one hand there was the party of State rights, on the other the party of the Union, the first aristocratic and Catholic, the second representing the Protestant democracy of the larger towns and the tradition of the Helvetian Republic. The quarrel broke out violently in 1830, and continued in an ascending scale of vehemence until November 1847, when the league of the seven Catholic cantons, the Sonderbund as it was called, was crushed in a brief and brilliant campaign. The lesson of this agitation, providing as it did a kind of working model of the way in which the democratic and unitary principle ma> be made to prevail in a federal State, was not lost upon Germany, and the qxfl"nde and literature of radka Switzerland was one of the principal factors in shaping the political convictions of the workman in the iouth- western corner of the Germanic Federation. But after all the first, last, and most dominant influence was France. However great may have been the revulsion from the Napoleonic despotism and the anti-Gallican spirit ran high in the War of Libera- tion Paris still remained the tribune of European democracy, and to those Germans who were restless under the yoke, a source of political illumination. In the darkest days of the Metternich ascendancy voices from the French Chamber, the oratory of a Foy or a Manuel, kept alive the flame of German liberalism, and the French Revolution of 1830 was repeated on a smaller, but less vigorous, scale in Brunswick and Hesse-Cassel, in Saxony and in Hanover. These move- ments were not indeed republican. The idea of founding 216 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION a unitary German Republic was too bold a conception for the political leaders in the thirties. But as the Republican propaganda advanced under Louis Philippe in Paris, it began to spread across the Rhine. Turn for an example to Arnold Riige's " Deutsche- Franzosische Jahrbiicher," published in 1834. " Every attempt," we read, " to make science service- able to the world, every union of science and state- craft implies immediate union with France. To be against France is to be against statecraft, to be against statecraft is to be against freedom. France stands for the political principle, for the pure principle of human freedom in Europe, and France is alive." German workmen in Paris caught the infection and joined the Marianne, a revolutionary club with the Republic as its goal ; and the teaching of the French Socialists was already widely diffused among the artisan class in Germany, when the news of the fall of Louis Philippe produced a spontaneous rising through the country. 2 Karl Marx, the father of modern Socialism, has left an account of the German revolution of 1848, which is remarkable as coming from the pen of a prominent Socialist and revolutionary of the period. He first exhibits those features in the social state of Germany which he conceives to have been adverse to the effective spread of revolutionary principles, the strength of the feudal aristocracy, the absence of political concentration, the numbers of petty trades- men and artisans, the imperfect development of the factory, and the effect of the economic structure of the country in encouraging deferential habits among the poor. He then lacerates the National Parliament at Frankfort for the pitiable imbecility with which it KARL MARX ON THE REVOLUTION 217 squandered all the treasure house of revolutionary hopes. Instead of using the first moments of enthu- siasm to claim the exclusive sovereignty of the nation, to form an army, to defy the State governments, and if necessary to draw Germany into a patriotic war against Russia and Denmark, the Frankfort Parliament did none of these things. There was never a body so deficient in the wholesome spirit of iconoclasm. It would neither disperse the old Confederate Diet, nor assert its supremacy over the State governments, nor take any means to secure that its decisions should be carried into effect. It placed an Austrian Archduke at the head of a provisional executive, and offered the imperial crown of Germany to the King of Prussia. Reckless alike of time and enthusiasm it spun out elaborate discussions on fundamental rights, accepted a humiliating truce with Denmark, and sank by swift degrees into universal contempt. This, however, is only part of the story. The real destiny of Germany was not decided by the debates in the Pauluskirche in Frankfort, but in the streets of Berlin and Vienna. If the Revolution triumphed in the Prussian and Austrian capitals it would win all along the line, whatever might be the hesitations of middle- class doctrinaires. There was a time in the early spring when the hopes of revolution were unusually bright. The March days in Berlin had persuaded the King of Prussia to summon a Constituent Assembly, to promise a Constitution, and to wear the black, red, and gold of the German Revolution. " Preussen geht in Deutschland auf " " Prussia is merged in Germany " this promise, given in a royal proclamation, would undoubtedly be exactly coeval with the spell of royal timidity, and whether this spell would be indefinitely 218 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION prolonged depended upon the fortunes of the Hapsburg monarchy. In the opinion of Karl Marx the fate of the German Revolution was decided in Vienna. In the month of October the Emperor of Austria, using Slavonic troops and backed by the Slavonic members of the Diet, crushed the Revolution in his capital. The famous band of students was broken, that body of young Germans, four thousand strong, who for a few months dictated a policy to an Empire. Vienna was allowed to stand a siege and to fall unaided, as if the cause of the Revolution from the Carpathians to the Rhine were not involved in its defence. And so, the reaction triumphing through Austria, Frederick William IV. of Prussia recovered from his conces- sions and timidity, and expelled his Prussian Parlia- ment at the point of the bayonet. Autocracy, using the brute forces of the Slavonic world, had blasted the promise of Teutonic liberty. The real truth is that republican principles had little hold on the general mass of the German people. Professors and students dreaming of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, or deriving their political philosophy from the French Revolution, scattered knots of artisans, nowhere very numerous save in Baden and the Bavarian Palatinate, did not constitute the main body of the German nation. Political traditions are not outgrown in a night, and the political tradition of Germany, being rooted not only in the Holy Roman Empire but also in the numerous hereditary dynasties which had flourished under its shadow, was dead against the abstract teachings of democracy. There was indeed a painful lack of unity and distinctness in the political ideals of the reformers. Some wished to include German Austria in the new State, others to BISMARCK ON THE REVOLUTION 219 exclude it ; some dreamed of a revival of the old Empire in a modern vesture of constitutional rights and liberties, others of a central directory ; some thought of the Germany of the future as a Federation upon the American model, others as a strong and united republic ; but the great central body of the nation, holding that no project could succeed without the support of the princely governments, did not advance beyond the conception of a federation of constitutional monarchies. It is interesting to notice that Bismarck, who first rose to prominence in 1848 as a leader of the high Tory party in Prussia, comes to the conclusion that had the Prussian King then taken full advantages of his opportunities he might have formed a stricter and stronger union of Germany than was possible in 1870. Frightened by the Revolution, the rulers of Bavaria and the smaller German States would have made concessions which Prussia was in no position to demand from her allies in the Franco- Prussian War. Thus, while Marx thinks that the situation in '48, if properly handled, would have led to a democratic republic, Bismarck, with a saner estimate of moral forces, detects in it the squandered hope of a powerful Empire. The story of the Republican party during the German Revolution is that of a hopeless minority driven into desperate courses and eventually shattered by the overwhelming force of the monarchical feeling in the nation. The men who led the party in the first instance, Friedrich Hecker and Von Struve, were already prominent in the public life of Baden, the first as a deputy, the second as a journalist. They were the Apostles of the radical South-west, the hope and pride of the young men. In appearance, tempera- 220 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION ment and intellectual preparation it would be hard to imagine a greater contrast. Hecker was a type of the careless poetical student who took his politics from Schiller and plunged into the Revolution for the love of stir and movement and generous ideas. Struve was a doctrinaire of the library. The one was tall, healthy, massive, his voice a full rich baritone, " very beautiful," writes an admiring lady, " with a Christlike head and long fair hair and a face of rapt enthusiasm." The other was small and bloodless (" lives only on vegetables," said his friends) with a cheek of parchment and dim, abstracted eyes. The charm and high courage of the one was supplemented by the considered revolutionary doctrine of the other. 3 The original programme sketched at a meeting of the Radical party at Offenburg on September 12, 1847, did not specifically demand a republic, though it aimed at undermining the power of the monarchies by requiring that the standing armies of the German States should be replaced by a militia of the whole people sworn to respect the Constitution ; but, in revolution, seed ripens fast, and in the frenzy caused by the news from Paris the seed of German radicalism ripened into the full grain. Fifty-one influential men met at Heidelberg on 5th March to consider what measures were to be taken towards the attainment of national unity. Hecker and Struve urged the immediate proclamation of a German Republic, and were met by the reply that the goal of liberal effort should be, not a republic but an empire. Feeling mounted fast and high ; on March 13 the Revolution was master of Vienna ; on March 21 it was master of Berlin ; and when ten days later a preliminary parliament met at Frankfort to FRANKFORT 221 concert measures for a national representation of Germany, the republicans believed that their goal was near. It was an early spring ; the first delicious shimmer of green was on the trees, and to the senti- mental soul it seemed as if the palace of liberty were to rise like an exhalation from a Garden of Eden. Groups of artisans pressed against the shop-windows, staring at the pictures of the French provisional government the famous poet, the simple workman, " a heavenly dream and yet all true." When the Baden men showed in the streets, the air rang with plaudits, for it was known that they went far and that the South had a commanding majority in the Vor- Parliament. At the theatre the piece was naturally Schiller's " Don Carlos," and as Posa came on to plead for the liberty of the Netherlands the house rocked with applause. Men and women were transported with enthusiasm. A new era had begun. A German Parliament had met. " I wished," writes Malvida von Meysenburg, " that the enemy were at the door and that we could all go out singing Luther's Chorale to fight for freedom or to die." Careless of Northern opinion, and disregarding the purpose for which the Vor-Parliament was summoned, Struve rose to urge the immediate proclamation of an indivisible German Republic. But at the very threshold of parliamentary debate, and in the first glow of the Revolution, he and his followers suffered an overthrow the significance of which they refused to acknowledge. Defeated in the parliament, the Republican leaders turned to the people. The South was covered with a network of Radical societies ; and in April Hecker, with a hare-brained temerity which fatally discredited 222 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION his cause, raised the standard of revolt in Baden. His hasty levies fared as ill as an auxiliary force sped from Paris by Hervegh, one of the least com- petent among German poets. A rising in Poland was equally unfortunate, and in the revulsion caused by these events three-fourths of Germany voted monarchists of some shade or other into the parliament which was to shape the new Constitution. Thus the cause was already more than half-lost when the great debate opened in the Pauluskirche in Frankfort. The two hundred Republican deputies were hopelessly outmatched in numbers, and, with a political instinct which from their own standpoint was not unsound, attempted to sustain the passions of the country by a foreign war. All over Germany good patriots believed that Schleswig and Holstein were inseparable, and that, Holstein belonging by general consent to the German Federation, the Danes had no right to incorporate Schleswig. A war had broken out ; the Germans in the Duchies had been supported by a Prussian army, and then foreign powers intervened and Prussia was compelled to make a truce at Malmo. The parliament at Frankfort was violently convulsed by news which was generally read as a national humiliation. It first voted that it would not, and then that it would, confirm the action of the Prussian monarchy. Never did feeling run so high ; never were the debates more violent, for it was the Republican calculation, that, were the German nation to say " We will have war " while the Prussian mon- archy said " We will have peace," a fatal blow would be dealt to the cause of monarchy all over Germany. When the second vote was taken on September 16, and the war party was defeated in a narrow division, THE LAST RALLY 228 rioting began in the streets of Frankfort. The deputies of the majority were branded as traitors to German liberty and German honour ; barricades sprang up, and two members of the Assembly who had voted against the war were foully murdered on the outskirts of the town. Again the Revolution had miscalculated its strength : regular troops poured into Frankfort and had little difficulty in restoring order, and the only result of the incident was to associate the cause of the Republic with anarchy in the minds of the great mass of German citizens. There was still one convulsive spasm, and it was not devoid of pathos or heroism, before the cause of Republican unity was finally effaced. After long and wearisome debate the Frankfort Parliament patched to- gether a Federal Constitution and offered the Imperial Crown of a reconstructed Germany to the King of Prussia. Had Frederick William IV. been a man of imagination or resolve he would have accepted a gift which, whether or not it involved him in a war with Austria, would have implied the foundation of a great national State framed on liberal lines in Central Europe. But he first declined the Crown and then repudiated the Constitution. The South-west, still true to the cause of liberty, fled to arms ; the regular troops of Baden joined the insurgents, and the fire spread right down the Rhine to Cologne and Diisseldorf and across the Thuringian Forest to Leipzig. Some of the noblest and most generous spirits in Germany were to be found hi this last and most desperate ven- ture to maintain the cause of liberal unity against the sinister opposition of the German crowns. It was all in vain. Democratic idealism fell, not for the first or last time, before the trained battalions of Prussia ; 224 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION and the doom of the German Republic was deter- mined at Rastadt, the little frontier town which, in 1798, had witnessed the first preliminary stages in the demolition of the fabric of the medieval Empire. On igth May 1849, Freiligrath, the bard of the Revolution, wrote his last poem in the final number (defiantly printed in red ink) of Karl Marx's Neue Rheinische Zeitung : Wenn die letzte Krone wie Glas zerbricht In des Kampfes Wetten und Flammen ; Wenn das Volk sein letztes Schuldig spricht, Dann stehn wir wieder zusammen Mit dem Wort, mit dem Schwert an der Donau, am Rhein ; Eine allzeit treue Gesellin Wird dem Throne zerschmettenden Volke sein Die Geachtete, die Rebellin. But the Republican party in Germany has never recovered the blow which it received in Baden in 1849, and the unity of Germany was destined to be achieved by men to whom the tradition of Revolutionary France represented everything that was hateful and dangerous to society. The republican ideal most prevalent in the south- west of Germany, while always deriving much of its inspiration from the poetry of Schiller, was specially circumscribed, both by the example of the Swiss cantons and by the humble economic conditions which prevailed in that quarter of Germany. " The Southerner," says a modern writer, " wished for a republic, conceiving it, however, as a soft Arcadia, a small state of peasants and burghers, neither very rich nor very poor, and devoid of the great contrasts of historical and political life. He wanted to abolish princes and the Civil List, and the nobility and the GERMAN REPUBLICANISM 225 standing army, and, if possible, would have dis- pensed with taxes : on the other hand, he had no ambition to play an active part in history, and cared nothing for foreign politics, a great industrial develop- ment, or a world commerce. If it had been possible for Germany to fall into a number of such tiny republics, it would have vanished from the ranks of the great nations more completely than before." 4 Numerically inferior to these southern idealists was a group of men fashioned of harder metal, who, desiring a united and republican Germany, scanned the whole political horizon and preached the duty of a general war. The writers in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had no sympathy with little Republicans or Federalists, and with those who believed in Slavonic union. Their programme was a popular war against Russia and Denmark prefaced by the liberation of Poland. In autocratic Russia they saw the great obstacle to a European revolution ; in Denmark the ally of three counter-revolutionary powers, and moreover " a brutal, dirty, piratical, old Northern nationality, rough to women, permanently drunk, its Berseker rage alter- nating with tearful sentimentality ! " Nobody has ever accused Karl Marx of " tearful sentimentality." And a policy of union through blood and iron was neither the invention nor the monopoly of a Prussian monarchist. One day, late in February 1848, a certain German student at the University of Bonn was sitting in his attic at work upon a tragedy. The youth proposed to himself one of those quiet and dignified academic careers which are the reward of successful industry at a German University. Suddenly a friend burst in upon him with the intelligence that Louis Philippe 15 226 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION was overthrown and the Republic proclaimed in France. Carl Schurz threw down his pen, rushed into the street, and never touched the manuscript again. To him and to his fellow-students it seemed as if the hour had struck for founding a powerful national government upon a broad, democratic basis. School memories of ancient republics mingled in his brain with a sentimental affection for the medieval Empire, and an enthusiasm for the ideas of the French Revolu- tion. He was for the convocation of a national parliament, for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of public meeting, responsibility of ministers, communal self-government, the right of the people to carry arms, the formation of a civic guard. He shared all the enthusiasms and all the illusions of his time, and, being as fearless as he was generous and enthusiastic, was ready to stake his life for his political convictions. When therefore the Frankfort Parliament did at last issue a Constitution, and when the monarchy of Prussia refused to accept it 1 _Carl SchuizL, himself a Prussian subject, took up arms to defend the work of the Revolution. He fought in the campaign of Baden, and then, when all was over, contrived to escape into Switzerland. Not long afterwards a brilliant act of devotion made this obscure student one of the heroes of the beaten cause. His professor and friend Gottfried Kinkel, a man of singular fascination and no little reputation as a poet, had been among the Baden insurgents. At the capitulation of Rastadt, the last town which stood out for liberty, Kinkel was taken, condemned to im- prisonment for life, and thrown into a common gaol. His wife appealed to the young student, and though it was to the peril of his life that he set foot in Germany, THE REPUBLICAN DISPERSION 227 Carl Schurz did not fail her. He never rested till Kinkel was freed, and, among exciting records of adventure, the liberation of Kinkel as told in Schurz's " Memoirs " tiust.T\v> to rank with the famous episode of the Chateau d'lf in Monte Cristo. In the eyes of the Prussian Government the youth was now doubly damned. His own country in its present mood was closed to him, and yet so long as hope was possible he f continued to cherish it. London was full of the broken men of the '48, There was Kossuth, whose splendid oratory had taken England by storm, and Mazzini, the soul of the moral movement for Italian unity. Every straw of hope was clutched at by these exiles in their anxious and attentive survey of continental politics ; but then came the news of the coup d'etat. France, the mother of the Revolution, had turned apos- tate. The last Republican rally had been shot down in the Boulevards of Paris by the nephew of Napoleon. S.chiirz-made up his mind that the cause of liberty was lost in Europe and that its broken fortunes could never be mended.. Wandering out into Hyde Park on a foggy December morning, when the intelligence of the coup d'etat was freshly received in London, he sank upon a bench and resolved to emigrate to America. He had sat musing for about half-an-hour when he noticed at the other end of the seat a little man with his gaze fixed on the ground. The man lifted his head and turned a pair of weary eyes upon his neigh- >bour. It was Louis Blanc. " Ah, c'est vous, mon i jeune ami ! C'est fini, n'est ce pas, c'est fini." And the French Socialist clasped the German's hand. Thenceforward the biography of Schurz, like the story of Hecker and of many another republican of that time, belongs to the history of the United States. 6 CHAPTER XI THE THIRD REPUBLIC She, killed with noisome air, Even she ! and still so fair, Who said, " Let there be freedom," and there was Freedom ; and as a lance The fiery eyes of France Touched the world's sleep, and as a sleep made pass Forth of men's heavier ears and eyes, Smitten with fire and thunder from new skies. SWINBURNE "To Victor Hugo" A coup sur je ne crois pas 6tre suspect quand je parle de mon horreur pour les chimeres, pour tout ce qui ressemble aux utopies, aux systemes par lesquelles on s'imagine qu'il est possible de refaire violemment la societe. GAMBETTA NO government founded on a crime can ever be really stable. However showy its exploits, however substantial its services, the indelible stain remains and the invisible Furies pursue. The Second Empire conferred some services on France, but it was founded upon proscriptions and a couj) d'tjat. At first the Emperor was popular enough. His name worked miracles., with the peasantry ; his court, if not pure, was at least showy and brilliant. By fusillades and cannonades, by summary trials and wholesale deportations he had scared away the Red Spectre of Socialism, and informed men of property that forth- witlirthey might sleep quietly in their beds. The Roman Catholics exulted in this bland husband of a devout Spaniard, who restored the Pope to the Vatican, 228 NAPOLEON III 229 fencouraged the clerical control of education, and I championed the rights of the Latin Church in Palestine. To such as thirsted for military gloryjLhe-Crimean War was a sufficient apology for the new regime. The soldiers of the Empire had stormed the Malakoff, the pride of Russia was abated, and the treaty of peace was negotiated in Paris. But this communion of applause was not of long duration. The Emperor, who, in his youth, had belonged, if not formally, at least in sympathy, to the society of Carbonari, was drawn into the war of Italian liberation. A French army marched into Italy to assist Piedmont against Austria, and by 1861 all Italy save Venice and Rome was united in a single polity under the Sardinian crown. From that moment the French Empire lost the confidence of the Roman Catholics. It had helped the Piedmontese, who persecuted the faithful, and had promoted an impious revolution against Austria, Naples, the Papal State, the established bulwarks of the Roman Church. The withdrawal of clerical support would not in itself have been sufficient to undermine the Empire. Great as was the power of the Catholic Church in France, the tradition of the Revolution was stronger still. Napoleon III. alienated the Catholics and failed to conciliate the Liberals. He supported the Temporal Power of the Pope against the Italian Revolution, experienced diplomatic rebuffs in Denmark and Poland, and went out of his way to court the endless humilia- tions of tiie^ Mexican campaign. It was part of the liberal tradition in Franceto preach the doctrine of natural frontiers, and to maintain that it should be the prime concern of any government, solicitous for the good name of the country, to extract from the Powers 230 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION of Europe, either by peaceful acts or by the power of the sword, a radical revision of the treaties of 1815. Louis Bonaparte shared these aspirations. As the price of his assistance in the affairs of Italy he wrung Savoy and Nice from Piedmont and then addressed his diplomacy to securing an extension of frontier towards the Rhine. In this project, however, he met with a grave reverse. War broke out in 1866 between Austria and Prussia ; and the Emperor, believing, as most people then did believe, that the struggle would be long and costly, was confident that he would be in a position to impose his mediation upon two exhausted combatants and to arrange a settlement of Europe of which France would be the principal beneficiary. But these calculations were disconcerted by the speed and completeness of the Prussian victory. In six weeks the war was over and victor and vanquished had come to terms. Prussia had gained all Germany to the Main, France had gained nothing at all, not a yard of Belgium, of Luxemburg, of the Palatinate, not a single German hamlet or a single German cottage. She had not been quick enough to intervene in the war ; she had not been invited to intervene in the peace. The balance of power in Europe had been changed adversely to her interests and she had not stirred a finger to prevent it. She woke up as it were from a fool's paradise to find that Prussia was the first military power in Europe, and at this unwelcome revelation a quick current of rage, apprehension, and wounded vanity ran through the whole body politic. There is something to be said for a frank autocracy, for a despotism which is what it seems to be and does not pretend to be any better than it really is. The Second Empire was not frank. It was founded upon AUTOCRACY AND LIBERALISM 231 a sham and it lived upon an artifice. It created a parliament, but so circumscribed its functions, that it would neither propose a bill nor question ministers, nor debate large aspects of public policy nor appro- priate supplies. It retained universal suffrage, but by a close and vigilant system of electoral pressure ensured the return of none but official candidates. From 1852 to 1860 political life was entirely extinguished in France. The press was muzzled, an insolent hierarchy of officials served by an army of inquisitive police dominated the country. Innocent men were deported at the whisper of an informer. Eight years passed and then the Emperor resolved to relax the rigour of his system. Having lost the favour of the Catholics, he was desirous oi conciliating thg parliamentary Liberals. The Press_ restrictions were abated, the Moniteur was permitted to publish full reports of the debates in the Chamber, and the popular Assembly was empowered to draw up ag address in response to the speech from the throne^ a concession which enabled it to review the whole sur- face of public policy. These concessions did not go very far, but they were sufficient to revive public activity. The parliamentary opposition, which had risen from nothing to five in 1857 leapt up to thirty- five in 1863, and reached one hundred in 1869, and as the faults of the Government were many and grave, so was the parliamentary oppn c ^^" searching in its criticism arrttttefce in its attack. i In this opposition there were two parties, one ; believing in the possibility of a Liberal Empire, and the other resolved to overthrow the tyrant and I establish a Republic. The leader of the first party was a man who is still alive and is widely known as the 232 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION author of an apology, still unconcluded, in fourteen brilliant and seductive volumes. Emile Ollivier began his parliamentary career as a strong republican, as one of the famous five who during seven years of darkness and silence offered an unflinching resistance to the Empire. But then in 1864, when some few draughts of air had already been let into the engine-room of des- potism, he was drawn into personal relations with the Emperor and became convinced of the possibility of founding a permanent and wholesome alliance between the Empire and the democracy of France. Such an union had already been foreshadowed in the constitu- tional concessions of the Hundred days, in the talk of the great Emperor at St Helena, and in the idees Napoleoniennes, composed by his nephew fifteen years before the coup d'etat. Ollivier at least honestly believed that a Liberal Empire, an Empire with a ministry responsible to a free legislature, would appease the political hunger of France ; and such an Empire he claims substantially to have procured. 1 / Between 1867 and 1870 concession after concession was wrung from the enfeebled grasp of a dying sove- jreign. The Chamber acquired the right of initiating! legislation, of cross-questioning ministers, of amending! the budget clause by clause. Ollivier himself became the President of the Council. It was not in the strict sense of the term a parliamentary government, for the Emperor reserved the right to compose his ministries independently of the majority in the popular House, and he could always alter the con- stitution by the votes of the Senate, a body named by himself ; but the liberal Imperialists of the Chamber were satisfied with the compromise, and believed that in this series of organic changes, which were ratified by THE REPUBLICAN OPPOSITION 233 a plebiscite, they had found the political formula for which France had been vainly searching ever since Louis XVI. summoned the States General to Versailles. Less numerous in the Chamber, but far more formid- able in the country, were the republicans. The coup d'etat following upon the days of June had been more damaging to them than to either of the royalist parties. Their leaders had been shot down or proscribed, their organization was shattered, their programme was involved in that vague but deadly form of discredit which attaches to imputed schemes of crime, anarchy, and communism. But in Paris, Lyons, and in the pthej great industrial centres of France the idea of the (Republic had taken a firm root, and as there were Orleanist families and legitimist families scattered up and down in country houses, so in the huge and hideous fJj|jyg^jtojil. there were families attached to the revolutionary tradition, and numbering martyrs and exiles for the republican faith. No liberal Empire, however plausible its professions, could con- tent this great republican connexion. They argued that the Empire was a crime, that the concessions were illusory, that the experiment of the Republic had never been honestly tried, and there could be no peace or happiness for France until the usurper was deposed. The corruption, the extravagance, the inefficiency of the < iovernmcnl were h.-M up to tin- derision and con- tempt ol '. P, ul -\ -.!- Is by Hi* \\i; ' iesl and I-AM responsible of French publicists, Henri de Rochefort The story of the coup d'etat was dug out, recounted in grave, elaborate, and remorseless details by the serious historian, and flung at the face of the Govern- ment on every occasion and by every device which malignant and watchful hostility could discover. 234 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Translated into the popular imagination of Paris, the actions and adventures of the Empire became in process of time a tissue of wanton and profligate cruelty, and it is characteristic of the changed atmo- sphere of Paris that a young southern advocate, Leon Gambetta, rose to instant fame by a splendid but irrelevant denunciation of the " crime of December," which sixteen years before had made Napoleon master of France. 2 It will be remembered that the republican move- ment of 1848 came to an untimely end because of its connexion with socialism, because the river of revolu- tion broke into two diverging streams, each adverse to monarchy, but one of them red while the other was tricolour. These two currents continued to flow on, however much they might be masked or obstructed by the Empire. The red republican, who was generally, though not invariably, a working man, nourished a hatred and envy of the middle class analogous in intensity to the hatred which the middle class had entertained for the nobles of the ancien regime. He had been taught that the Revolution of 1789, which had humbled the nobility, must be succeeded by a new revolution of which the middle class were to be the victims. He believed that capital was evil and that the scene of waste and misery into which he was born could be converted into a smiling prospect by a whole- sale revolution in the relation of employer and employed. The annual meetings of the Internationale, an association of workers founded in 1864 and drawn from all the leading countries in Europe, helped to spread a familiarity, if not with the writings, at least with the principal conclusions of Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle. By an inexorable economic SOCIALISTS AND INDIVIDUALISTS 285 process, given existing competitive conditions, the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer. All values were created by labour, and yet, however great the value of the product, labour was always ground down to the bare necessaries of subsistence. No palliatives would avail against a condition of affairs which was not confined to any one nation, but essential to the economic constitution of European society itself. Cosmopolitan labour must attack cosmopolitan capital without truce or remission until such time as the land and the instruments of production should be finally and completely transferred from the individual to the State. 8 Such was the programme of the Red Republic. The doctrinaires of the older republican type did not trouble their heads with these large and questionable economic prospects ; they looked to the political machine. They believed that an untrammelled use of universal suffrage would, by a direct and logical process, lead to a republic, and that it was of the essence of a republic that offices should be elective, and that the State should provide free, secular, and gratui- tous education to all its members. Of this school of thought Le"on Gambetta, son of a grocer at Cahors, was in the declining days of Empire the best, because he was the most widely influential, representative. Gambetta's political philosophy was strung upon a few simple convictions held with great distinctness and tenacity and recommended to his fellow countrymen with all the authority which a fine voice, a rich and flexible vocabulary, and an energetic character are able to confer. The cardinal point in his code was a /passionate belief in the beatific virtues of universal /[suffrage. Monarchies might profess to countenance 236 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION universal suffrage, but it would be found on examina- tion that no monarchy could look universal suffrage face to face. The Empire, for instance, had violated universal suffrage in five ways, by establishing heredity as a dogma, by establishing the immutability of the Constitution, by creating two Chambers, by making the chief of the Executive irresponsible, and by depriving the nation of Constituent Power. But once allow the fountain of the popular will to play freely over the Constitution, and taxes will fall, armies will dwindle, education will be compulsory, secular, and gratuitous, and as no official, however exalted, will be unaccountable to the people, so will no depart- ment of public policy be withdrawn from their control. " Universal suffrage cannot abdicate. The popular will of to-day cannot bind the will of to-morrow." In Gambetta's election programme of 1869 all officials are to be elected, the standing army is to be suppressed, the Church is to be separated from the State, and the Government is to provide primary secular education for all at its own charges. Social changes would doubtless follow, but there was the less reason for tabulating economic prescriptions since in a true political democracy the maladies of society would cure themselves. The Empire fell not before the radical propaganda of the students' quarter and the law-courts, but before the Prussian guns. When the news of the capitulation of Sedan was received in Paris on September 4, 1870, the Assembly was invaded and dissolved by an armed mob, and the deputies of the Left, headed by Jules Favre and Gambetta, proceeded to the Hotel de Ville, pronounced the abolition of the Empire, proclaimed the Republic, and established a provisional government FALL OF THE EMPIRE 237 of national defence. There may well be two opinions both as to the policy and as to the morality of promot- ing an internal revolution in a country reeling under defeat and exposed to the calamity of foreign invasion. Favre and Gambetta, representing a section of Paris, took upon themselves to overthrow the Government of France. Their action was no more constitutional than was the attack upon the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. They had received no mandate from the country ; they had no means of gauging the sentiment of the army or its chiefs, and however much they may have been convinced that the Empire was fatally injured in popular esteem, they had certainly no reason to suppose that France was prepared for a republic. It is not, however, difficult to account for the sudden and impetuous city revolution which reversed the plebiscite of the whole country solemnly recorded four months before. There was a precedent, not older than seventy-eight years, and regarded as one of the most splendid memories of French energy and French valour. It would fall within the recollection of a very )ld man how, when France had been invaded by Lustria and Prussia, when the enemy had advanced far across the frontier, had captured important strong- lolds and was within five marches of the capital, the locracy of Paris had stormed the Tuileries, deposed ;, and so communicated its victorious impulse through every fibre of the national being, that the lemy was driven across the frontier and the Republic founded in a blaze of victory. What had been done by the grandsires might be done again by the grandsons. On September 6 the Provisional Government declared in a circular to Europe that France would not yield either an inch of her territory or a stone of her for- 238 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION tresses. But Moltke was not a Brunswick nor Bazaine a Dumouriez. Within six months of this proud act of defiance Alsace and Lorraine were ceded to Germany. Four and a half years elapsed before the Republic, hastily proclaimed at the Hotel de Ville by the strong and impetuous son of an Italian grocer, was formally accepted by the legislature of France. It was then carried as the lame but ineluctable conclusion of a disappointing history without a ray of enthusiasm, and by the narrowest of all possible majorities. The Constitution of the Third Republic was the work of the left centre and bears the hall-mark of its manu- facture. The minds out of which it was slowly and nervously extracted were as untouched by the geo- metrical rigour of the earlier republican theory as they were alien to its large and humane illusions. They did not believe that they were giving the law to Europe or that they were framing a perfect Constitution, or that their craftsmanship conformed to any classical and pre-ordained model of pure democracy. They spoke without rapture, without allusions to Solon or Lycurgus, as business men engaged in one of the com- plicated and difficult operations of practical life. Their main concern was to preclude a repetition of those errors and misfortunes which had been found to flow from a too literal interpretation of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and so they decreed that the Chamber of Deputies should be checked by a Senate and that the President should be the creature not of the plebiscite but of a congress of the two Houses sitting together. The series of events which led up to this meticulous' and durable equipose is a curious page in the history of political conversions. " Passion," in the fine and THE BORDEAUX PARLIAMENT 239 pregnant phrase of John Bunyan, " will have all things now," and the Republic was proclaimed in a fit of passionate impatience by a handful of men to whom France owed no sort of necessary intellectual allegiance. Whether " the revolution of disgust " would be rati- fied by the maturer judgment of the country was a question to which, while the armies of Germany were advancing on the capital, an answer could neither be sought nor found. The burden of the Provisional Government was already as heavy as any which human shoulders can bear, and it was no time to institute those ancient and difficult logomachies which cling about the origins of a constitution. Paris was invested by the enemy, and from September 16, 1870, to January 28, 1871, the conduct of the defence devolved upon the men who had taken on themselves to proclaim the downfall of the Empire. It is no part of our theme to describe how Gambetta escaped in a balloon, how he founded a delegation of the Provisional Govern- ment at Tours, and how ruling over part of France, with powers which were practically dictatorial, he created new armies, prolonged the national resistance, and shed a parting ray of glory upon a desperate and beaten cause. Whether the republican cause gained or lost by his endeavours is a matter upon which opinion may be legitimately divided. Some praised him for showing fight ; others ascribed to the culpable vanity of a self-appointed despot months of bloody and unavailing combat and a needless extension of the nation's agony. Be this as it may, when Paris was at last shamed into submission and when an armistice was granted in order that a National Assembly might be gathered, competent to conclude a binding peace, a wave of monarchical feeling passed over the country. 240 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION When the Assembly met at Bordeaux it was found to contain no less than four hundred monarchists as against two hundred republicans and thirty supporters of the fallen Empire. The most surprising feature of a surprising result was the resurrection of the legitimist party, who after a political eclipse of forty years con- quered no less than two hundred seats. Their success denoted the activity of the priests and a revival of religious sentiment which among the Latin races is the natural and inevitable sequel of national calamity. Gambetta, who had preached the war d I'outrance, had fled into Spain to escape the rising tide of unpopularity, and his radical supporters were for the most part beaten at the polls. At the bottom of the French mind was the sovereign need for peace, order, and reconstruction. At this crisis of national affairs France discovered a leader who, for the mass and brilliance of his endow- ments, stands out as one of the most eminent figures in the nineteenth century. In the elections to the Bordeaux Parliament, Thiej^had been returned by twenty-six departments and had received nearly two million votes. He was now seventy-three years of age, and ever since early manhood his name had been a "household word in French politics and his huge spectacles and elfish body a fortune to the caricaturist. Thirty years had passed since he had served as the Prime Minister of Louis Philippe, forty-one years since he had taken a principal share in procuring the over- throw of Charles X. Babies had grown into sober and grey-haired citizens while this exuberant little man from Marseilles was exhibiting the glittering facets of his various, irrepressible and incalculable activities. Now he was known as the most formidable THIERS 241 journalist of the radicals, now as the author of the first cool and connected history of the French Revolution. He helps to establish Louis Philippe, helps to create the Napoleonic Legend, helps to found the Second Empire, and paves the way for the Third Republic. Every school of political thought into which France was divided might claim a fraction of M. Thiers, except the school of the dunces, the madmen, and the pol- troons. Valour he possessed to the point of temerity, vanity to the point of ridicule, but the governing quality of his eager and domineering mind was a great lucidity and industry in affairs. Being a man who understood the niceties of Government, who had gone deep into the science of finance and had drawn from his studies of the First Empire a sense of the fascina- tion of ordered power, he had not a particle of sym- pathy with revolution. He would shoot down red socialists with as little concern as a gamekeeper knocks over a jay or a magpie. When the roar of the barri- cades was surging up towards the Tuileries and the Court of Louis Philippe was twittering with timorous and divided counsels, Thiers advised the King to retire into the country, to allow the insurrection to gather head, and then to stamp it out with the armed forces of the monarchy. He prescribed the same drastic treat- ment in the days of June and followed his own prescription when Paris was caught by the fever of the Commune. Such a man had nothing in common either with the Jacobin or with the Girondin tradition, save the horror common to all intelligent and progressive minds for the sacred unreason of the ancien regime. He was known as a constitutional monarchist of a somewhat advanced liberal type, as a friend of the Catholic Church, 16 242 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION and as an enemy of socialism. But the circumstance which at this juncture specially commended him to the admiration of France was the recollection of his dash- ing, free, and incisive criticism of the Second Empire. When Thiers was elected to the Chamber in 1863, some- one said that henceforth French history would resolve itself into a dialogue between Thiers and the Emperor. In truth a cloudy, ambitious and unsound policy could not have encountered a more formidable antagonist than this facile and fiery orator who knew the weights and measures of Europe better than the Imperial Foreign Office, and exposed with a desolating command of technique the seamy finance and wavering diplo- macy of a bad Government. Again and again he pressed his indictments in the audience of a people fast moving down the planes of doubt and disaffection. He exposed the wild folly of the Mexican expedition with its ugly dash of financial speculation. He denounced the apathy which accepted the bitter political fruit of Sadowa. He predicted the military ascendency of Germany, and, unless precautions were promptly taken, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Almost alone among French politicians he withstood the passionate gust of frenzy which swept his country into the Prussian War. He was not afraid to speak unwelcome truths. He told France that while she was unprepared, Prussia was ready ; he pleaded for delay ; he protested against the idea that two great nations should engage in a disastrous collision upon a point of diplomatic susceptibility, and for the moment he was the most unpopular man in Paris. A few weeks passed and against the grim darkness of Sedan he shone as the one oracle of wisdom. The Empress appealed to him to save her, and the Paris mob which THIERS 248 had threatened to sack his house came about him and cried, " M. Thiers, tirez-nous de la." To Prosper Me'rime'e, the dying envoy of the dead Empire, he replied briefly, " II n'y a rien & faire aprs S6dan " ; but if he could do nothing to raise the Empire from its grave, there was no service which in the pride and energy of his patriotism he was unwilling to render to France. As a last expedient he travelled round the Courts of Europe in search of mediation, followed at every step of his unavailing pilgrimage by the grateful eyes of his anxious countrymen. It was therefore a natural, if not an inevitable, step (for the Bordeaux Assembly to place the supreme executive power in the hands of Thiers. His authority was uncontested. He was the only statesman who commanded the confidence of the whole nation, or of whom it could be said that in all the parliamentary and administrative arts he towered so far above his fellows that to contest his superiority would savour of an insipid paradox. The task which lay before him was to make peace with Prussia, to repair the havoc of the war, and to give France a constitution : with a true instinct for a complex and delicate situation he saw that while the first two objects should be patiently and immediately pursued to their solution, the last should be left to ripen in the dark. The de facto government was republican. The peace was made in the name of the Republic, the armies obeyed the Republic, the civil servants were appointed and dismissed by the government of the Republic. On the other hand the Assembly of Bordeaux contained a large majority of royalists, and of all the political Assemblies of France none had been elected with so little official interference or under so authentic and 244 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION immediate an impression of popular emotion. Thiers saw that France must eventually come to the Republic, for as he said, " It is the form of Government which divides us least " ; but he recognized that the thing was a delicate plant, that it was invested in a cloud of doubts and apprehensions, that, given an opening, a royalist assembly would unquestionably endeavour to kill it, and that it must be allowed to insinuate itself into the confidence of the country by the gentle efflux of time. All this Thiers saw, and he took a decision of critical importance when he implored the Assembly to devote itself to the reconstruction of France, and gave a pledge that he would in no way seek to prejudice the constitutional issue. 4 In pursuance of this difficult programme the President of the de facto Republic was probably assisted by one of the most terrible calamities of modern history. The conduct of the defence of Paris had more than once been embarrassed by the violent outbreak of a mob which was convinced that sleek bourgeois were betraying France and that a sortie en masse would send the Prussians flying back to Germany. The hardships, the excitement, the mingled tension and lassitude of the siege had generated in the poorer combatants a restless, angry, and bitter temper, a kind of psychological malady, la fievre obsidionale. They had fought and had been beaten through no fault of their own and consequently, as they argued with fiery conviction but imperfect logic, through the fault and treachery of their leaders. They suspected that Assembly of monarchists which had recently, in patent distrust of the home of revolutions and republics, transferred its sessions not to Paris but to Versailles. Their honour was outraged by the terms of the peace ; THE COMMUNE 245 they bore with sullen rage the spectacle of a Prussian army bivouacked in the garden of the Tuileries. They were armed, idle, miserable, angry. On March 18, 1871, a fortnight after the withdrawal of the Prussian troops, the city of Paris broke out into the revolt of the Commune. " A convulsion of famine, misery, and despair," such was Gambetta's phrase for the Commune, and in a movement so passionate and spontaneous it is vain to seek for any clear or consistent thought. Of the communards some were anarchists, others Jacobins, others socialists, others again foreign adventurers or escaped gaol-birds. One member of the governing Esembly was a Prussian, another a tight-rope dancer, third a lunatic, a fourth a condemned murderer. y degrees a cluster of vague aspirations was sent floating out over Paris and was accepted with varying degrees of allegiance by men who were far too busy with their rifles to attend to the furniture of their minds. Organisms were made of cells, States of communes. The miseries of society were due to centralized government and could be cured by its destruction. Republics were better than monarchies, but the Republic, one and indivisible, instead of abolishing poverty the true end of all government had merely lodged power and wealth in the hands of its bourgeois functionaries. France therefore should be dissolved into the cells of which it was a multiple, into independent, self-organized, self-governing com- munes. As in ancient times, the city was the true and only thinkable unit of democratic government. Such had been the real doctrine of Rousseau, and such was the inner spirit of the Girondin Constitution of 1793 with its elaborate provisions for a popular 246 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION referendum. A loose federation of socialistic and re- publican communes would be guaranteed alike against the costly adventure of dynastic wars and the barbarous electoral results of a clerical victory among the villages. Much horror is often expressed at a programme designed to procure the political dismemberment of France ; but it is proper to recognize that among the heterogeneous ideas of the Commune there are traces of that current of humanitarian feeling which, spring- ing from the ideas of 1789, has ever since been a con- stant and melodramatic element in the republican professions of France. The guillotine was solemnly burned and a decree was passed for the destruction of the Imperial Column in the Place Venddme on the ground that it was " a monument of barbarism, a symptom of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, and a permanent insult of the conqueror to the conquered." The eighty thousand affiliated members of the Inter- nationale dreamed that fine old dream of human fraternity which is the prize of youth or the privilege of inexperience, and burned to drive it home at the point of the bayonet. 5 All this, however, passed unappreciated in the general horror which the Commune inspired. The governing propensity of French politicians is timidity, and as France welcomed the Empire, not because it was actively enamoured of Caesarism, but in order to escape the Red Republic, so it was now ready to accept a government which should undertake to cleanse the body politic of the same malignant poison. Thiers with his Provisional Republic performed this office. The lively President strutted behind his troops watch- ing through his field-glasses the success of his own ROYALISM'S OPPORTUNITY 247 strategy with all the gusto of an expert, and the Paris Commune was crushed with inexorable severity. To prevent the spread of the inflammation in the great radical cities of the South, Thiers gave assurances that he would do nothing to endanger the establish- ment of a republic. The royalists of the Assembly accused him of broken pledges, and, when peace had been restored, when the Prussian indemnity had been paid and the Prussian troops cleared from the territory of France, struck down the man who had conferred these benefits on his country. Having a majority for a monarchical restoration, the deputies of the right and right centre were entitled to make their experiment, but in his caustic and perspicacious valediction (May 1873) the old man told them that three candidates could not sit on one throne, that the Republic must come, and that in the bottom of their hearts they knew it. The only hope for the monarchy lying in a fusion of the legitimist and Orleanist sections of the Bourbon house, intrigues to this end were busily woven under the Presidency of Marshal Macmahon, himself favour- able to the monarchy, but above all a plain and upright patriot. The Comte de Paris, heir to the Orleanist hopes, visited the Comte de Chambord, the head of the elder branch, and the Comte de Chambord himself paid a secret visit to Versailles. A committee of nine deputies plotted out the circumstances of the Restoration, how Henry V. was not to be subject to the indignity of a popular election or a plebiscite, how he was to rule in virtue of prescriptive right and grant a constitution out of the fund of his native condescension. In the autumn of 1873 every political club and salon 248 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION in Versailles and Paris was agog with speculation. The contest would be close, the victory ambiguous, for the Republic had made converts in the Chamber and the monarchy could no longer count upon the left centre. According to one computation the monarchy had 348, the Republic 344 votes, while 36 votes were still doubtful. The fate of France, however, was not destined to be decided by a trial of parliamentary strength. It was common ground among all monar- chists conversant with the political temper of the country that if the Comte de Chambord was to be invited to rule France, he must accept the tricolour flag ; but this is precisely what the Comte de Chambord refused to do. The flag was the emblem of his prin- ciple and without his principle he was merely in his own words, " a fat lame man." The old guard of the legitimist cause would, he felt, never forgive a sur- render upon a point of honour. As one of them said, " Si le Comte de Chambord cede il sera peut-e~tre mon roi, mais il n'est plus mon homme." And so, the Pope concurring, the chief of the Bourbons declined to accept the only compromise which might have brought his house back to rule over France. However much the royalists might disguise the fact, this refusal meant the Republic. In one of the early debates at Bordeaux a deputy expressed a wish that the Republic would not come in " par la petite porte." The phrase is happy but the hope was disappointed. The Third Republic came in surrepti- tiously by the postern gate. The Constitution was built up piecemeal by an assembly which did not wish to build it at all, and neither in its successive parts nor in its entirety was it ever submitted to a plebiscite of the French nation. There was none of the old ACCEPTANCE OF THE REPUBLIC 249 rapture as at the discovery of a new world of happiness. The Republic was accepted " faute de mieux " with the lack-lustre welcome extended to an official receiver in bankruptcy who is called in to liquidate a long course of dilapidations. On January 30, 1875, it was carried in the Assembly by a single vote. Meanwhile people of moderate conservative views had been steadily coming round to a solution which was already the creed of the great cities and of the departments of the north and east. They said to themselves, " The Republic we have been afraid of is the Red Republic, the Commune ; but this has been destroyed by a government which is itself a republic in everything but name. Between a conservative republic and a constitutional monarchy there is, as Benjamin Constant used to say, merely a difference in form. We note that M. Laboulaye, who has been taking a prominent part in drafting the new organic laws, is a professed admirer of the English Constitution, and was himself a supporter of the Liberal Empire. Admitting that the Orleanist rigime would be our ideal, it would almost certainly be less stable than a republic. The legitimists would oppose it, it would not be energetically supported by a Church which day by day is becoming more ultramontane, and at any moment it might fall before a coalition of the disaffected groups. The organic laws which have been drafted in a conservative Chamber obviate many of the objections which we have felt with regard to republican government. In particular we are pleased that the legislature is to be bicameral, and we believe that a Senate elected by the communes of France will be a strong and salutary check upon the popular Chamber." 250 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION The character of the new Republic can find no better illustration than in the speeches of Gambetta, now conveniently published in eleven volumes by his friend and admirer, M. Joseph Reinach. If Thiers may be described as the founder of the Third Republic, Gambetta was certainly its prophet. He believed in it, he preached it up and down the country, he made it his mission to define republican ideas and to spread an enthusiasm for republican institutions. As Gam- betta conceived of the Third Republic, so has the Third Republic substantially become. His appetites and repulsions, his enthusiasms and recoils are the appetites and repulsions, the enthusiasms and recoils of the political class which carries on the government of France. Imagine a small bourgeois of the Latin stock born in the south and inheriting the vivacity of the southern temperament. Give him a large, easy, receptive nature, coarse, energetic faculties, a great memory, a facile tongue, a sonorous voice, an eager combative will. Throw him into the Quartier Latin in the middle days of the Empire when it was a rare thing for a student to descend from the seclusion of his gay, rough, reckless Bohemia into the politer quarters of Paris, when the ruling intellectual dynasty was a dynasty of revolt, its thinkers free-thinkers, its great romantic poet and novelist a proscribed exile, and remember that the atmosphere was full of the Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte and of the grandiose democratic sentiment of Victor Hugo. It is easy to predict the kind of effect which such an environ- ment would produce on such a young man. He be- lieves neither in metaphysics, nor in religion nor in any kind of mystery. The Pope he regards as the enemy not only of Italian but also of human freedom. He GAMBETTA 251 hates priests with the fierce, unexamining, compre- hensive hatred of Garibaldi, but confides implicitly in the " lion's marrow " of physical science as the proper diet of energetic manhood, reads omnivorously in French literature, and can declaim page after page of Rabelais and Hugo. From such an apprenticeship Gambetta went to the bar and sprang into fame as the radical opponent of the Empire. Had he remained a radical orator in opposition, the quality of his politics might never have reached a high level. He would have enunciated the same large vague principles in the same large leonine voice, until the principles would have become ossified and the rhetoric a vapour. From this possible catastrophe Gambetta was saved by the war, than which there is no school of politics more rigorous, or less compatible with scholastic and geometrical reasoning. He remained to the end of his life an advocate, but he was henceforward an adaptive advocate. He openly gloried in the fact that he had no doctrine, but allowed his politics to be shaped by circumstances. He regarded his inconsistencies as a sign not of weakness but of a sage, open-eyed flexi- bility. Before the war he roared against armaments ; afterwards he advocated a citizen army. In oration after oration he contended that the Bordeaux Assembly had no constituent powers, and then he helped it to make a constitution. Of all this he was not ashamed. He called himself an opportunist and contrasted the policy of opportunism with the policy of shipwreck. Even on very fundamental questions he revised the crude emphatic opinions of his bellicose youth. The friend of Church disestablishment championed the Con- cordat, the enemy of the Second Chamber helped to create the Senate, " the grand Council of all the com- 252 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION munes of France," and to preach its transcendent merits to a sceptical public. Again and again he protested his horror of chimeras. " There is no social question," he would say, turning his back on Utopia, ' ' there are social questions . ' ' Such versatile obedience to the varying stress of conjuncture does not belong to the classical repertory. Gambetta was neither a red republican nor a doctrinaire republican, but a republican of a new build, less heroic but infinitely more serviceable, a republican of affairs. He repre- sented the bourgeoisie of France, the small proprietors, tradesmen, and professional men who may be seen sipping their coffee and absinthe in the cafes and wineshops, and make the backbone of the community ; he knew the arguments which would go home to them and the kind of polity which was adapted to their needs. And as Gambetta was opportunist, so too was the Third Republic. A great political influence cannot be built upon mere opportunism. The true statesman is like a ship which swings freely with the tides but swings at anchor. If he has no principles, he will either fix nobody's attention or earn everybody's contempt. Just as the average reader appreciates a connected paragraph, so the ordinary voter appreciates a con- nected politician. He is easier to read and remember, and if he is a man of real conviction, he carries through the necessary iteration of a crusade, perhaps impres- sively, but in any case in a fresh and tolerable way. For all his opportunism Gambetta preserved a few passionate political beliefs. He had the belief in universal suffrage and in the scrutin de liste as the best method of giving effect to the will of a democracy ; the belief in the sovereign efficacy of a centralized, CHURCH AND STATE 253 well-conducted republican State ; the belief in a complete system of free compulsory secular education " from the base to the summit of human knowledge " ; and finally the belief that " clericalism was the enemy." And this not only because the clergy of France, becom- ing more ultramontane day by day, supported the cause of the legitimists, but because the declared doctrine of the Papal See was adverse to the root principles of a democratic society. So we are led to consider the ultimate antinomy which divides society in the Latin States of Europe. On the one hand there is the republican tradition dominant and established in France, evident though overmastered in Spain, partially transfused into the institutions of the national monarchy in Italy. On the other hand there is the Catholic Church, the ally of the Bourbon who rules in Spain, and of the Bourbons who can never rule in France, and the enemy and the victim of the French Revolution. The gulf is clear, the incompatibility absolute, the war truceless. The old school of Gallicans, the later school of liberal Catholics, has died out. Ultramontanism has killed it, the thing itself and the bitter ultramontane journalists of the Empire who felt the sting of the Italian wars and spread the poison through France. The syllabus of 1864 and the infallibility decree of 1870 have cut away the hazy middle ground in which many a generous and divided soul found a reconcilia- tion for his inner discords. A French child must either be brought up a Roman Catholic or he must be brought up a Republican. There is no real alternative. In the first case he will learn that the French Revolu- tion was the crime of crimes, that divorce is a sin, that civil marriage is a sin, that monarchy is the best form 254 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION of government, that liberty is an alias for wanton pride, and that, with the exception of two brief interludes, the whole history of France since 1789 has been one ghastly aberration from the path of godly duty. And in the second case he will learn just the opposite of all this, that the Church in all ages has been the enemy of human freedom and progress, that the Civil Code is the charter of social emancipation, and that the French Revolution was the discovery of social justice upon earth. The Third Republic has captured the i schools, dissolved the congregations, and disestablished \the Church, but it still rules over a divided nation. 6 CHAPTER XII AN EXPERIMENT IN SPAIN Espana es como cisne que canta in su agonia Cuando decir podremos que Espafla renacio ? AGUILERA, " Ay de Espana,' 1848 A Republican Propaganda has ceased to exist even among the Socialists. The Natton, Oct. 2, 1902 IN the middle of May 1873 Charles Bradlaugh, atheist and republican, son of a solicitor's clerk and a nursery maid, born in Bacchus Walk, Hoxton, aged forty, once private in the Seventh Dragoon Guards, popular lecturer on Atheism and kindred subjects, editor of the National Reformer, and for all these qualities and professions held in deep aversion by the majority of his countrymen, crossed the Pyrenees in a diligence, and after suffering some molestation from Carlist bands, arrived safely in Madrid. Apart from the peculiar dangers of the time, for civil war was raging over Northern Spain, Charles Bradlaugh was not the man to travel to Madrid for pleasure. On May n a meeting of a remarkable character had been held in the Town Hall in Birming- ham, and Bradlaugh's Spanish pilgrimage was the outcome of that gathering. He travelled as the bearer of resolutions of sympathy with the newly formed Spanish Republic, and these resolutions had been passed at an English Republican Conference containing fifty-foul' delegates from nearly as many English 256 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION towns, and attended by some four thousand five hundred persons. The English emissary was saluted with acclamations in the Spanish capital. The news- papers devoted paragraphs to " Senor Branglong." The leaders of the republican movement entertained him at dinner. Don Emilio Castelar, the Minister of State, while carefully avoiding the indiscretion of an official reception, received him more than once in private audience, and as the burly figure of the ex- dragoon was descried on the balcony of his hotel, plaudits went up from a crowd who, had they been per- mitted fully to inspect the solid furniture of his mind, would have found little to attract and much to repel. 1 The Republican Movement in England was an eddy rather than a current. Apart from the Irishmen, who are always ready to fish in troubled waters, there was a small residuum of artisans who resented the cost of the monarchy and the long retirement of the Queen from the public gaze. The republican clubs, which were formed in 1870, struggled on for a few years, gave some anxiety to Mr Gladstone, and then, other more pressing causes claiming the attention of the British workmen, perished of inanition. So far as it had roots in the past, the movement was derived from the teaching of Tom Paine, " our famous countryman, our great and only prototype," as he is described by his enthusiastic and much-persecuted editor, Richard Carlile. Through Carlile the anti-Christian and re- publican teaching of Paine was filtered into the under- currents of the great English towns and affected the mind of Charles Bradlaugh. The creed of these earnest, half-educated men was very simple, very confident, and not in the least romantic. Carlile, writing twelve years before the first Reform Bill, BRADLAUGH 257 pleaded for a " House of real representatives, possess- ing a democratic ascendency renewed every year, free from the influence or criticism of any other bodies or establishments," and opined that such a House would make short work of an expensive hereditary system of monarchy. Bradlaugh was specially im- pressed with the shortcomings of the House of Brunswick and with the large sums voted by the British Parliament for the support of " small German breast-bestarred wanderers." Given four or five more years of political education, the country would not tolerate a successor to Queen Victoria. It is needless to add that Bradlaugh was as far awry in his calcula- tion as his master Carlile, who hoped " to see the day and witness the deed when an English Senate should disown the divinity of the Christian religion." Queen Victoria lived down the little republican ferment of the seventies, as she had lived down the early unpopu- larity of the Prince Consort and the bitter suspicions which clustered round the person of his adviser, Baron Stockmar. Bradlaugh himself turned to other fields. Advices from South America proved that presidents were not necessarily cheap or republics necessarily incorrupt.* The Spanish Republic which aroused so much interest and enthusiasm in the Town Hall in Birming- ham, endured a short and tragic life. It was born on February n, 1873, and died on October 29, 1875, of a military pronunciamento in the true Spanish order of congruity. In its brief span of tortured existence it battled with a serious cantonal insurrection in the South, with a no less serious Carlist rising in the North, endured four coups d'ttat, and experienced five presidents, the first of whom dismayed the faithful by 17 258 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION secretly eloping to Paris to escape his political responsi- bilities. It considered, but never applied, the frame of a federal constitution borrowed from the United States, issued a decree emancipating the slaves of Puerto Rico, and put out seductive schemes for the protection of labour in factories, for industrial arbitra- tion, and for State-paid compulsory schooling. Beauti- ful illusions rocked its cradle. There was to be no more conscription, no more war : but what with the Carlists and the Federalists, two hundred thousand men were in arms through these two years in Spain itself, not to speak of eighty thousand in Cuba : and, when the last red flag had been hauled down from the last rebel fort in Cartagena, only twenty-eight houses in that great marine city were uninjured by the bombardment. 3 The story of the Spanish Revolution affords a curious instance of the difficulty of infusing the wine of new doctrine into a receptacle which has not been devised to hold it. Spanish republicanism grew out of Spanish liberalism and this in turn was a graft from the French Revolution. In fighting the French the leaders of the Spanish national movement learnt to value the ideas which gave to the French armies their peculiar momentum. The Peninsular War was a school of politics. It taught the Spaniards that they could live without a king ; it revived the old pro- vincial feeling ; it led to the spread of democratic ideas in the great towns and in the army ; it restored the lost tradition of the Cortes, and was the means of giving to Spain a constitution modelled upon the latest French fashion, which, though entirely unsuited to the political conditions of the country, served as the battle-cry of Spanish liberalism in the age of auto- POLITICS IN SPAIN 259 cratic reaction. Unfortunately the sudden impulsion towards political activity was accompanied by one serious drawback. The six years of partisan warfare had revived the national taste for martial anarchy. A large population had grown up students, smugglers, monks, soldiers for whom conspiracy was a career and adventure an industry. They had fallen under the spell of a life, in which everything seems possible, and could not easily adjust themselves to the limiting conditions of a stable existence. The Spaniard is at once indolent and imaginative, on the one side wrapped in oriental fatalism, on the other side open to visionary prospects and Quixotic undertakings. It is difficult to rouse him at all, but he will be less easily stirred up to hoe his own garden than to caper away on Rosinante after the mirage. And quite apart from the funda- mental lines of national temperament, many steady- ing conditions which now exist were absent in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Trade and industry were backward, and the desire to make a fortune in commerce or manufacture was, outside Catalonia, almost a negligible force in the psychology of the nation. Ambitious men did not aim at becom- ing captains of industry ; they embarked in the exciting struggle for public employment and gambled on the rise and fall of political parties. In this thrilling lottery, where the prizes of success were so rich and various, the army, as the most active part of the nation, was as much concerned as the civilians. The generals had become politicians, the soldiers followed the generals, and since the principal desire of the people was to escape the octroi, a military pronunciamento was a frequent and not ungrateful incident in the national life. By degrees a parlia- 260 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION mentary government was forced upon the Crown, but worked in a manner peculiar to Spain. The civil governor of every province was instructed to inform the population submitted to his charge that every vote given to an opposition candidate would be requited by a rigorous exaction of taxes. Since in Spain every one is in arrears with his taxes this threat was generally sufficient to secure the desired object ; but some districts were notoriously recalcitrant, and here a more drastic method, known as the Partido de la porra was employed with gratifying results. A party of ministerial hirelings, armed with bludgeons, assaults the inmates of an opposition quarter. An outcry is raised, the magistrate intervenes ; the recalcitrant voters are taken into custody, detained until the election is over, and then released without a stain upon their characters. By these means a Cortes is obtained of which almost every member is a nominal supporter of the Government, and were the party system under- stood in Spain as it is in England, were Spanish politicians grouped together upon some common and established ground of principle, an energetic ministry might thus be secured in a perpetuity of office. But party government in the true sense of the term did not, and^does not, exist in Spain. The members of the Cortes act for the most part for their own interest. They expect favours from the Government, and when they do not get them, they lay their heads together to procure its overthrow. A country cannot make steadfast progress when its affairs are in the hands of eloquent orators and military adventurers, and when the true spirit of constitutional government is thus persistently violated. An enlightened monarchy might have helped Spain to traverse a difficult period ; THE SPANISH REVOLUTION 261 but of all monarchies in Europe the Spanish was least fitted to perform this office. It would be difficult to find a parallel for a succession of rulers so debased and unintelligent as Ferdinand VII. and the two ladies who succeeded him on the Spanish throne, Christina and Isabella II. The ancient loyalty to the Bourbon crown, divided into two conflicting allegiances by the Carlist war, outraged by the scandals of Queen Isabella's Court, spoiled by the pressure of taxes and conscrip- tion, finally broke down in 1868. The liberals had been driven into republicanism by persecution, the navy was menaced with reductions, the army honeycombed with radical propaganda. The Queen escaped into exile, and after the Crown of Spain had been hawked round Europe it was accepted by Amadeo of Savoy. The rule of this well-meaning but alien prince was unpopular and brief. No foreigner could content Spain; no son of Victor Emmanuel could be grateful to the Church. The murder of General Prim, a man of rare power and lack of scruple, removed from Spain the successful leader of the Revolution, and from the throne its principal support. No sooner had the Duke of Aosta set foot in Madrid than the ground began to quake under his feet. The Revolution of 1868 had been the work of three parties, the Liberal Union whose ideal was the July monarchy, the progressists who were more advanced, and the democrats who secretly or openly worked for a republic. To the amazement of the Spanish conservatives the new King announced his intention to be loyal to a democratic constitution. His virtue lost him the support of one party without gaining him the confidence of the other. A Conservative Chamber was dissolved, a Radical Chamber was summoned, and the republicans, who 262 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION knew what had happened to Louis Philippe and had never regarded the democratic monarchy as more than a convenient portico into the shining palace of liberty, saw to it that the King's position was made intolerable. When this happened Amadeo resigned his throne and the orators and philosophers of the Republic had their chance. Save in Barcelona, where an anti-dynastic party had existed since 1840, Republicanism was a plant of recent growth in Spain. It had ripened rapidly, and shot up into a prominence which was a surprise to itself. Its two most distinguished leaders, Don Francisco Pi y Margall and Don Emilio Castelar the first a Catalan from Barcelona, the second an Andalusian from Cadiz represented types of political conviction and sentiment which chiefly flourished in the great coast towns and had grown up under a plentiful aspersion of exotic doctrine. Don Fran- cisco, a savant and a man of letters, was a disciple of Hegel and Proudhon ; Don Emilio belonged to the romantic school of Lamartine, Michelet, and Hugo. Both proclaimed themselves federalists, but while Don Francisco held to the federal idea with the tenacity of a philosopher and a doctrinaire, Castelar was made of more pliant material, and in the harden- ing responsibilities of office discovered many of the qualities of a statesman. The arguments which led Don Francisco to the federal solution are so characteristic of the peculiar weakness of Spanish political reasoning at this period that they deserve to be briefly stated. Man, said the Catalan philosopher, is lord of himself. If one man extends his hand over another he is guilty not only of tyranny but of sacrilege. Between two sovereignties FEDERAL PHILOSOPHY IN SPAIN 263 there can be no bond but pacts, and out of a series of ascending pacts, pacts between individuals, families, villages, provinces, nations, the true State is ultimately built up. Federation then is the only scientific form of government, the ultimate evolution of the political idea, the only means of securing to a nation dignity, peace, and order. But federation must be distin- guished from devolution. Power must come from below. The central government must receive only such attributes as those which the separate provinces and States may choose to confer on it. The federation of Spain must, therefore, begin by the constitution of the ancient Spanish provinces into organized autono- mous States. The house of liberty must be built from the foundation upwards ; only so could it stand secure. These flimsy deductions from anarchic first prin- ciples were supported by appeals to political experi- ence. France had twice experimented with a unitary republic, and on each occasion the republic had been swallowed up by a despot. Had the French govern- ment been less completely centralized, had the control of Paris not carried with it as a necessary corollary the dominion of France, the success of the Bonapartes would have been impossible. Don Francisco and his following of Spanish republicans, taking their intel- lectual nutriment from France, were resolved, if possible, to avoid the double catastrophe which had befallen their brilliant and aspiring neighbour. They regarded federal autonomy as an insurance against a Bourbon restoration ; and they reasoned, not without plausibility, that the diversified genius and character of the Spanish nation rendered it peculiarly apt to the federal solution. The evils of Europe in general, and of Spain in particular, seemed to them to be largely due 264 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION to the excessive strength of governments supported by military force. They demanded that conscription should be abolished ; they protested against the rigour of the military code, and held that federation would cure Spain of her two most inveterate evils, the military pronunciamento and the mania for public employment. Details were foreign to their habits, and they had not passed beyond the vaguest and most splendid generalities when the sudden resigna- tion of the Savoyard King made them the arbiters of Spain. 4 Ever since the union of Aragon and Castile, the spirit of separation has been strong in the Spanish peninsula. The old nationalities have been obliterated neither by the imposing dignity of Castilian letters, nor yet by the levelling action of the Castilian sovereigns. The Basque, the Catalan, the Galician preserves his ancient language, cherishes his ancient customs, and views with jealous eye the ascendency and encroach- ments of Madrid. In the declining years of Isabella's reign this proud and independent posture had been encouraged by the weakness of the crown and by the federal propaganda of the politicians. The country was sick of taxes, of wars, of conscription, and believed that these plagues would disappear if only the meddle- some gentlemen from Madrid could be sent about their business. Active poisons mingled in the great seaport towns with innocent hallucinations. The Internationale was at work spreading the principles of the French Commune broadcast among the artisans and teaching them to clutch at every description of wild remedy for social evils. The consequence was that no sooner was the republic proclaimed in Madrid than a frenzy of revolutionary excitement swept through the THE CANTONAL WAR 265 eastern and southern towns. Barcelona declared its autonomy ; Cartagena proclaimed itself head of the Canton of Murcia ; Seville, Cadiz, Malaga hoisted the red flag of socialism. Don Francisco was pitiably embarrassed. He had preached federation from below ; and here was a spontaneous movement, federal in name, which threatened to disrupt the Spanish nation. He had thundered against militarism, and to save the Republic he must send an army into Andalusia. For a moment he cherished a belief that he could kill the cantonal movement with rose water ; then discovering his mistake he resigned his office after some five weeks of power or rather of impotence. His successor Salmeron was equally conscientious and ineffectual. Rather than sanction capital punishment in the army he let go the helm and made way for Don Emilio Castelar, in whom republican Spain at last discovered a ruler. 5 The new president was a great artist, the most abundant, the most poetic, the most richly-coloured orator of his age. Those who have heard him in the full tide of his exuberance, filling a great hall with his organ voice and entrancing the imagination of an alien audience with his inexhaustible vocabulary and splendid images, will never forget the impression. Such men live not upon thought but upon feeling, and the feeling which dominated Castelar was the same romantic enthusiasm for liberty which inspired the life of Garibaldi and the teaching of Michelet. The intellectual lineage of the Andalusian orator came through Rousseau and the Girondins rather than through Voltaire and the professors of negation. Castelar was a Christian, and believed that the Christian ideal could only be realized on its political side in a 266 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION democratic polity. The splendours of historic Spain appealed to an imagination which was at once too sanguine, too comprehensive, and too poetic to admit of belittling exclusions. He dreamt that Spain, which had long been debased by the policy of her rulers, would experience a rejuvenescence through the vigour of her people. He believed that a free Spain would be a great country ; that liberty being all-pervasive as air, Portugal would shake off the shackles of her monarchy, and merge her political existence in that of her republican neighbour. He believed that the South American Republics would renew their allegiance to the parent land, and that as it was the mission of Russia to spread civilization through the Central Asian Steppes and the long Siberian plateau, so it was the noble destiny of the Spanish people to reclaim North Africa from barbarism and waste. All these grandiose visions Don Emilio entertained and would support by prodigal displays of inexact historical illustration. But when the hour struck for action Castelar proved that he was not merely a rhetorician. He assumed powers which were practically dictatorial, broke the back of the Cantonal insurrection, and showed that a theoretical belief in the virtues of federation was not inconsistent with a jealous desire to preserve the unity of Spain. Taxed with inconsistency he declared himself a posibilista, an opportunist desirous of a conservative republic, reaching by an opposite route the same conclusion as Thiers, who founded the Third Republic in France. The conditions of the two countries were, however, different. In Spain there was no rooted attachment in the army to the republican idea ; monarchical and clerical sentiment was stronger, and FALL OF THE SPANISH REPUBLIC 267 the principal centres of republican feeling were those great seaport towns which had thrown themselves into the cantonal movement, the suppression of which was the first task of the new Republic in Madrid. It was not unnatural, therefore, that the new Republic should have earned unpopularity. The leaders had been professors of federation, and it was in the name of federation that town after town, and district after district, had declared its autonomy and challenged the authority of the central power. It is true that the insurrection was stamped out, but would it have burst into flame but for the agitation of the Federalists ? Was not the Republic responsible for the civil war, for the five days' fighting at Seville, for the destruction of Cartagena, for the widespread desolation of the Andalusian province ? Such reflections were not without justification. The course of the Republic had been starred by a succession of catastrophes the Carlist successes in the North, the civil war in the East and the South ; and the parliamentary history of the period was enlivened by one military coup d'ttat, carried out in the interest of Castelar at the expense of the Chamber in Madrid. No great prophetic gift was necessary to predict the downfall of so flimsy and unfortunate a fabric, and when, in December 1874, Martinez Campos proclaimed Alphonso XII. in Jovellar's Army of the Centre, few were much surprised or concerned. Indeed the monarchical restoration in Spain was effected with as little difficulty as the return of Charles II. of England, when once General Monk had made up his mind that the King must be brought back to his own. 6 " The Federal Republic," says M. Cherbuliez, " was a chimera of Proudhon translated into Castilian by 268 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION M. Pi y Margall." Chimera it certainly was, for its advocates chose the wrong moment, the wrong methods, and the wrong arguments. The cause of federalism, however, was not extinguished by the catastrophe of the cantonal movement. It is still flourishing in Catalonia, the province of its birth, and the principal focus of republican agitation in Spain. It derives its nutrition from elementary and permanent facts of Spanish geography and racial distribution. It sup- ports a literature of propaganda and prints catechisms of belief. It has enlisted followers from the learned and the cultured class. But the realization of the federal ideal involves, as was seen in 1873, a number of practical problems of great complexity. Should the forty-nine administrative provinces be endowed with autonomy an arrangement which would go very little way in satisfying the historic feeling of the old independent nations ? Or should the Peninsula be carved up, as was projected by the Constituent Assembly of 1873, into thirteen States, corresponding to the old historic groupings ? If so, would Malaga cede pride of place to Granada, Cadiz to Seville, Valladolid to Burgos ? These difficulties had not been thought out by the Federal leaders of the seventies. They made the mistake, common to unpractised and sanguine Spaniards, of supposing that a country can be suddenly cured of its chronic disorders by the immediate application of a Constitutional panacea. The federal republic became the catchword of the hour. It would make Spain as rich as the United States and as happy as Switzerland. It would rid her of the costly conscript and the plaguy office-hunter and the political Jesuit. It would stanch the running sore of Carlism, a malady due not so much to the STRENGTH & WEAKNESS OF FEDERALISM 269 cancerous germs of clericalism and legitimacy as to the obstinate provincial feeling of the Basques. Unfortunately all the light and disordered spirits in society, everyone who nursed a grudge or a grievance, a fad or an appetite, clustered round the respectable group of political visionaries who held aloft the Federal banner. " Who gave you the right to arrest me ? " said a thief caught in the act in the streets of Madrid ; " are not we in a federal republic ? " Under the cloak of Federalism all kinds of questionable, even criminal objects were passionately pursued. Peasants broke down enclosures, arguing that by ancient right the land belonged to the community, and that the labourer was entitled to a common enjoyment of the waste or even of the harvest. The Internationale preached the dissolution of Spain into ten thousand powerless and autonomous communities. Every instrument of public order, the priest, the soldier, the policeman, was held up to opprobrium in the big sea- coast cities by fevered companies of artisan politicians, who flouted patriotism as a delusion and government as a crime. So general and spontaneous an outburst of anarchy had not been seen in any European country since 1789. And when the disorder had been finally mastered, there was no surplus of energy available for the maintenance of a cause which, despite many foul accretions, embodied the purest and most en- lightened spirit in Spanish politics. 7 CHAPTER XIII THE REPUBLICAN CAUSE II n'y a de bon dans 1'homme que ses jeunes sentiments et ses vieilles pensdes. JOUBERT THERE can be little question that since 1870 the cause of Republicanism has made no substantial progress in Europe. France is still the only great European republic, and the political history of France under her new regime has not been such as to invite imitation. The position of the monarchies, which seemed so precarious in 1848, has been considerably, indeed progressively, improved since the failure of that great and generous outburst of high but ill-calculated ideals. In part this change has been due to personal causes. The level of political intelligence among monarchs, which was very low in the generation pre- ceding 1848, has certainly improved ; and the virtues / of Queen Victoria and King William I. of Prussia have had some share in dispelling the clouds of criticism which had collected round the representatives of their respective Houses. How thick those clouds were in England no student of Thackeray's " Four Georges " or of the old newspapers is likely to forget. When George IV. died in 1830, the London Times wrote as follows : " The truth is and it speaks volumes about the man that there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than 270 THE BRITISH MONARCHY 271 tliis deceased King. What eye has wept for him ? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow ? Was there at any time a gorgeous pageant on the stage more completely forgotten than he has been, even from the day on which the heralds pro- claimed his successor ? If George IV. ever had a friend, a devoted friend in any rank of life we protest that the name of him or her has not yet reached us." * Four-score years have passed since these words were written, and it is only with an effort that Englishmen can now realize that the British monarchy had, within the recollection of a single long life, fallen so low in public esteem. Thomas Carlyle, describing, in 1843, the lamentation which went up at the premature death of Prince Henry, the heir of James L, assumes that an emotion so deep and general could never again be experienced. " The sorrow of the population (as we said) is inconceivable to any population now. As yet the whole nation is like the family of one good landlord, with his loyal tenants and servants round ; and here is the beautiful young Lordship and Heir- Apparent struck suddenly down ! Who would not weep ? We, had our time been then, should have wept as I hope ; but it is too late now." 2 Such a view would not have been peculiar to Carlyle ; it would have been held by most Englishmen of that generation. Yet no one can have lived in England through the last twenty years without acknowledging that a great change has been silently and insensibly accomplished by the joint influence of Queen Victoria and King Edward. The monarchy is stronger and more respected ; its place in the scheme of a democratic polity is more comfortably settled, and a sphere of 272 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION unchallenged utility has been discovered for the King and the royal family in the discharge of functions which lie outside the discords of parliamentary life. Nobody who witnessed the national grief in 1901, or again in 1910, can doubt but that it was general and unaffected, the grief of a people successively bereaved of two wise, familiar, and constant friends. That the change has been mainly due to accidents of personal excellence no one could deny. The spectacle of the head of a grand and populous State punctually, prudently, and devotedly discharging his public duties inevitably excites feelings of grateful admiration among his subjects. The fact that the sovereign stands aloof from the party struggle, that he is under- stood to represent the whole interest of the country and not the opinion or interest of a section, greatly adds to the moral power of his office. And wherever a sovereign is endowed with public or private virtues, those virtues will not be allowed to remain unper- ceived. Physical science, which, by planing down social and intellectual inequalities, has given us a democratic civilization, supplies, by a subtle form of revenge, to persons of eminent station, a powerful engine of advertisement and a kind of automatic mechanism for the manufacture of popularity. Re- mote persons are difficult to know, and being difficult to know are difficult to like. But physical science enables the most remote person of all, the head of the State, to take lodgment in the feeblest and humblest imagination. The art of photography catches him at chance moments as he steps out of a train, walks after partridges, chats with a friend, or fondles a child. The cinematograph exhibits him as a spectacle in motion to crowds who have never beheld him in flesh ADVERTISEMENT AND POPULARITY 273 and blood. Electricity diffuses his messages of con- gratulation and condolence ; steam carries him from one end of the Empire to the other. No newspaper issues from the press without a record of his doings of the guests he entertains, the sport he enjoys, the sermons he endures, the public functions he patiently performs. No detail is too trivial to be registered, and in a business age it is not unsafe to assume that the news supplied to a nation is news which a nation wishes to hear. Thus by a process of ceaseless and multitudinous attrition the image of the sovereign and his circle is stamped into the brain-stuff of the country, so that the peasant in the little thatched village carries about with him in his daily task the image of King and Queen x as beings alike splendid and familiar, whose doings in the great capital or elsewhere it is always pleasant to know and to discuss. An even more significant change is the growing recognition of the fact that the precise form assumed by the executive is no scientific measure of political or civil liberty. Assuming that a country possesses parliamentary institutions, that the franchise is wide and the ministry responsible, the ultimate control of affairs lies with the people, whether the head of the executive be hereditary or elective. In the Consti- tution of Great Britain, where the Parliament is sove- reign and the real conduct of affairs lies with a Mini- ster representing the predominant party in the Lower House, the popular will acts upon the executive more swiftly and immediately than is possible under the constitution of the United States. The American President is safe for four years ; a gust of popular disfavour may, at any time, drive the British Prime Minister out of office. In the republic there is more 18 274 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION of social equality ; but it is in the monarchy of the old variety that the machine of legislation and govern- ment responds most promptly to the fluctuating opinion of the mass. This, of course, is a compara- tively new development. Before 1848, there was some reason for thinking that the institution of monarchy was incompatible with constitutional and economic progress. Europe was relatively poor, and weighed against the modest budgets of those days the cost of monarchy was unquestionably heavy. But while the wealth of Europe has greatly increased, the financial burden of its royal families has remained very much where it was. A nation which budgets in hundreds of millions, which spends a million on a warship and eleven millions on old age pensions, can afford to pay its King a salary exceeded by the earnings of not a few among its more prosperous merchants and manufacturers. Items of the expenditure are criticized, but with less and less of vigour and reverberation, as the true financial proportions of the transaction are more perfectly understood. Meanwhile the sphere of politi- cal liberty has been constantly expanding at the ex- pense, not of the monarchies but of the privileged and wealthy classes of Europe. In a review of James Mill's Encyclopaedia article on " Government," published in 1820, Macaulay argued that universal suffrage would upon utilitarian principles lead to " one vast spoliation," and that if it were ever carried into effect in England, " a few half-naked fishermen would divide with the owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities." Universal suffrage has come, not indeed in England, but in quarters where the intelligent prophet sixty years ago would have been least pre- pared to find it. It has been adopted in the elections DECLINE OF REPUBLICANISM 275 to the Imperial Reichstag of Germany since 1871, in Spain since 1890, and in Austria since 1907. Democracy has been too busy in capturing the Parlia- ments to think about assaulting the crowns. The increased urgency of social problems has tended in a similar direction. William Cobbett, who was no Republican, but on the contrary a bitter adversary of that form of government, struck the keynote of much subsequent agitation when he denned capital as " money taken from the labouring classes which, being given to army tailors and such like, enables them to keep foxhounds and to trace their descent from the Normans." 3 The question of the relations of capital and labour is in truth, and has been discovered to be, far more important than the precise form assumed by the executive in a democratic State. The artisan classes of Europe believe that it is the first duty of society to capture the unearned increment, and are not unwilling to accept hereditary monarchy as " a social-democratic institution." In the numerous programmes which are put out at Socialist congresses there is very little talk of republicanism. The French Socialist party, meeting at Tours in 1902, declared that Socialism was essenti- ally republican, but then the French Socialists already live under a republic. The Austrians, the Germans, and the Belgians content themselves with advancing propositions which are thought to be immediately relevant to the material well-being of the lower classes, and are careful to abstain from language which might be construed as revolutionary or seditious. 4 Re- publican feeling may be widely diffused, but it has undergone an allopathic change. A vague, all-per- vading discontent with the economic structure of society has taken the place of the simple and direct 276 protest against the costliness of crowns and the profligacy of courts. Three other factors have contributed to the decline of European republicanism. The first of these is the success of Bismarck's statesmanship in Germany. Finding Germany poor, weak, divided, Bismarck left it the greatest military and industrial power on the Continent. This result he achieved by blood and iron, using as the principal instrument of his purpose the force of the Prussian monarchy, and setting himself deliberately to affront all those liberal principles which enlightened Germans had derived from the political history of France or England. Those who are ac- quainted with the historical writings of Treitschke, the eloquent Berlin professor who spread abroad the new principles of real Politik, will be able to estimate the gulf which divides the German mind of 1888, from the German mind forty years before, when the Frank- fort Parliament was painfully and passionately elaborating the rights of man. The atmosphere has become completely changed. Free trade has given place to protection, the spirit of liberalism to the spirit of autocracy : for the older vague, ineffectual cosmo- politanism there is now a deep and passionate national feeling, expressing itself sometimes in violent anti- pathy, not only to those foreign races which seem likely to thwart the historic mission of Germany, but also to the alien citizens, whether they be Jews or Poles, whose presence impairs the purity of the German race. 5 A second factor is the growth of imperialism and " world-policy." Ask nine Englishmen out of ten to-day what they consider to be the pre-eminent value of the British monarchy, and they will reply that the Crown keeps the Empire together. This answer MONARCHY AND EMPIRE 277 would not have been given in 1837, nor yet in 1850, but it would certainly be given now. We are not called upon to consider the value of the proposition or the light which it throws upon the political psy- chology of the British Colonies ; the significant fact is that the proposition has become a cardinal factor in our political creed. Walter Bagehot pointed out as far back as 1865, that there must be not only useful but also dignified parts in a constitution. The taste for ritual, for playthings, for make-believe, is deeply rooted in human nature, and monarchy appeals to the deferential instincts of the ordinary human being. Overthrow the monarchy, replace the King with an elective President, and what would become of the loyalty of Australia, New Zealand, or Canada ? The British Colonists have no particular respect for the Mother of Parliaments, and a very particular and not ill-grounded aversion to the rule of Downing Street ; but they regard the Crown with feelings of simple and passionate veneration. The King, having been de- prived of political power, cannot harm them ; and having little ritual themselves, they are the more fascinated by the pomp of an ancient and dignified institution which they have no means of reproducing in their several communities, but which they regard as the joint and several possession of the British race. The argument can be reinforced from another quarter. The success of the United States proves that an elective President may rule a Continent which is geographically continuous. It does not prove that the republican system is adapted to communities so disjoined from one another by vast intervals of space as to be incapable of uniting in a common electoral system for legislative purposes. " I suppose," said 278 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Mr Balfour on July 22, 1910, " that the community, so far as this island is concerned, would not sink into chaos if this was a republic and not a monarchy ; but in my opinion the Empire would sink into chaos. You could not have at the head of an Empire, so peculiarly constituted as ours is, a President elected, let us say, as the President of the United States is, every four years the creation, or at all events the choice of a party, changing many times in the lifetime of every individual, and representing the abstraction of a Constitution and not the personal head of an Empire. You could never direct the Empire on that principle simply because, if you insisted on having an elected President in this country, he would be elected by the electorate of this country and not by the electorate of the Crown or of the Crown colonies." Conversely, it may be affirmed that the cause of monarchy in the Iberian Peninsula has been per- manently weakened by the loss of the American colonies of Spain and Portugal. It was a widely held opinion at the time of the French Revolution that Europe would become a federation of republics, and that the common acceptance of the republican form of government would secure to the Continent of Europe the blessings of everlasting peace. Half a century later Cobden was preaching the doctrine that the millennium of peace would come, not through the diffusion of republican principles but from the common adoption of free trade. It is now a very general belief that the cause of European peace is assisted by the social and family ties which subsist '-. between the monarchs of Europe. The time has not yet come to estimate with any degree of exactitude the services which the monarchies of Europe have MONARCHY AND PEACE 279 rendered during the last half century to the cause of peace ; but British opinion has been profoundly impressed by the fact that the Prince Consort and Queen Victoria averted a collision between Great Britain and the United States in 1861, that the Queen helped to save France from a second war with Ger- many in 1875, and that the unique weight of King Edward's personal influence was steadily thrown into the scale of peace. There can be no more signal instance of the decline jof republican feeling in Europe than the action taken ;by Norway in 1905, upon the severance of her con- stitutional bond with Sweden. Of all European nations Norway is the most apt for a republic. Here is a people of peasants, merchants, fishermen, and sailors, free from those abrupt differences of wealth and station which are so painfully evident in most European States, and preserving in its geographical isolation and archaic simplicity of life the high spirit of independence appropriate to a mountain race. After a protracted and bitter constitutional struggle, Norway succeeed in severing a connexion with Sweden which had been forced upon her to suit the convenience of European diplomacy ninety-one years before. The Norwegians agitated for the creation of a Norwegian ministry of foreign affairs, for Norwegian consuls, for a Norwegian flag. The King of Sweden refused to bow to the storm, and ultimately found that he could not obtain a Norwegian ministry. The members of the Norwegian Government laid down their offices, and the Storthing declared that since the con- stitutional royal power had become inoperative, the union with Sweden under one King was dissolved. Having broken loose from her moorings, Norway had 280 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION the whole ocean of constitutional experiment before her. She might have established a republic, and there was a party in the State led by the famous novelist, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, which held republican opinions; but whereas the republicans were divided in doctrine, some advocating an American scheme with a strong President, others a Constitution framed either on the Swiss or on the French model, with a mere figurehead, the monarchists were united. The vacant throne was offered first to a son of King Oscar II. of Sweden, and afterwards, upon his refusal, to Prince Charles of Denmark, who accepted the offer conditionally upon its ratification by the Norwegian people. That the Norwegians acted with prudence at a very difficult crisis of their national affairs will be allowed by anyone who examines the situation. They were trembling on the verge of a war with Sweden, and were unwilling to add to their embarrassments by embark- ing upon a radical change in the Norwegian Con- stitution. Such a change might precipitate a collision on the frontier, and was certain to be the occasion of keen internal controversy. Besides, it had always been their contention, not that they were averse to monarchy in itself, but that the Constitution of the dual kingdom was such that King Oscar II., whose personal popu- larity and good intentions were never in dispute, was unable to rule as a constitutional sovereign in Norway. The union was professedly severed, not that a republic might be established, but that a constitutional monarchy might be preserved. A country therefore which had loudly argued for a generation that its uneasiness was caused by a neglect of the true maxims of constitutional monarchy, could not, without losing every shred of political self-respect, now swallow up its THE CASE OF NORWAY 281 principles. It could not declare that its professed zeal for the spirit of the Constitution was not a reality but a sham ; it could not, after posing as the true con- servative, suddenly hoist the radical colours. And the argument from consistency was justified by con- siderations of prudence. The Norwegians were given to understand that a monarchy would be more accept- able than a republic both in England and in Germany, and as the future had never been less transparent, the Storthing was disposed to place a high value upon the esteem of its two great foreign neighbours. A King, too, would imply dynastic alliances, and these would afford an additional security for peace. A plebiscite of the country was taken, not upon the question of a republic but upon the acceptance of Prince Charles of Denmark. A wave of loyalist enthusiasm swept Norway from end to end. The great republican leader Bjornson advised the accept- ance of the King. The leading newspapers commended him. Most of the peasant members of the Storthing voted for him with acclamation. So striking a com- munion of enthusiasm cannot be explained by mere considerations of political expediency. There is perhaps no country in Europe where the memory of very ancient things is so green as it is in Norway. Every peasant knows of the great sea-kings of far-off times, of Sverri, and Haakon, and Olaf ; takes the Sagas with his daily bread, and peoples the dales and fells and fiords with scenes from that simple and heroic age. In Norway, as everywhere else, the hand of time has woven some new patterns into the texture of the common life. Towns have risen, but they are few and small. Socialism has been imported from Germany, but only since 1887. The austere framework of the 282 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION mountains forbids any wide departure from the tradition of that hard and simple living which is reflected in the Sagas. The clinging illusions of the past are more potent here under the overpowering dominion of great and permanent natural forces. Mixed with a robust appetite for freedom there is a solemn and loyal reverence for the things which have been. " When a man is born under one government," remarked a Bechuana chief, " how can he be happy under another ? " The main part of the Norwegian people agreed with that African sentiment. They had always lived under kings ; they had been loyal to very bad kings ; they cherished an affectionate recollection of the days of Norwegian independence prior to 1387, when they were ruled by men of their own race. And so with the enthusiastic assent of their own famous and subtle dramatist, who has depicted the psychology of a new Norway very different from that of the ancient Sagas, the country accepted the Danish prince and rejoiced in the telegraphic assurance of President Roosevelt that the throne of Sverri, Haakon, and Olaf was once more restored. 6 The study of history, if it does not make men wise, is at least calculated to make them sad. In the mere attrition of experience we lose something of our fresh- ness and our hope. We see how rough a thing is government, how easily the convictions of the great become the bland and soothing make-believes of the little, and how frail and uncertain is the connexion between the professions and the practice of politicians. There are, indeed, times when large and generous ideas take possession of the air, when the tone rises and the conduct of public business is illumined by the ray of some nobler purpose ; but such times are rare, and PERMANENCE OF THE REPUBLICAN IDEA 288 even in the grandest crises of history the microscope discovers the familiar spectacle, old as human nature itself, of vulgar aims and low intrigue. This is so, and yet man being compounded of many elements good and bad, some gleams of idealism or sentiment may be traced even in the politics of the basest age. Creeds may stiffen into forms, forms may become shackles, but there is always somewhere or other latent in society a leaven of revolt against cant. The shape which that revolt may assume varies with every age and every people, but if it be a genuine thing and not an idle explosion of social envy or petulance, it will be found in all its varying manifestations to exhibit one fixed property, a sense of true, and an aversion from false values. The idea of a commonwealth or republic, like the idea of abstract equality or the idea of the social contract, has been a constant factor in the political consciousness of Europe, and it has exercised an extraordinary, though not unintelligible, attraction for many great and noble-minded men. Think only bf the dynasty of poets who have belonged in spirit to ithe free republic, of Milton, Wordsworth, and Shelley, k)f Schiller and Freiligrath, of Alfieri and Lamartine, of Hugo (in some moods), Aguilera, and Swinburne, to exclude the ancients and to mention only a few of the more famous names among the moderns. Such a list exhibits the power and range of the republican appeal. " Give me," wrote Byron in 1813, " a republic, or a despotism of one, rather than the mixed government of one, two, or three. A republic ! Look at the history of the earth, Rome, Greece, Venice, France, Holland, America, our short (eheu) Commonwealth, and compare it with what they did under masters ... to be the first man, not the 284 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION dictator nor sultan, but the Washington, the Aristides, the leader in talent and truth, is next to the Divinity ! Franklin, Penn, and next to these either Brutus or Cassius, even Mirabeau or St Just." So ran one vein of political idealism in the first half of the nineteenth century. The republican movement of Europe reached its zenith in 1848. The Latin world has experienced many subsequent convulsions, and the weak monarchy of Portugal has recently been overthrown. Kingship is less secure in Spain and Italy than among the Teutonic, Scandinavian, or Slavonic peoples, and it is a nice question whether the cause of monarchy is more injured by its alliance with Ultramontanism in Spain, or by its estrangement from the whole clerical con- nexion in Italy. Yet the Republican party in Italy is overshadowed by the Socialists ; the Republican party in Spain, discredited by its association with anarchical or federalist aims. The accepted formula of political progress seems, if we are to be guided by the recent examples of Russia and Turkey, to be constitutional monarchy rather than republicanism. The republican movement has done its work. Its ideals have been appropriated and fused with more or less of complete- ness into the political system of Europe, and most of the domestic programme of 1848 is now fixed and embodied in the institutions of the Continent which, save only in France, Switzerland and Portugal, retains an explicit devotion to hereditary monarchy. " All that we have defended," says Castelar, " the Conservatives have realized. Who sustained the idea of the autonomy of Hungary ? A Republican, Kossuth. Who realized it ? A Conservative, Deak. Who advanced the idea of the abolition of serfdom DREAMS AND REALITIES 285 in Russia ? Republicans. Who realized it ? An Emperor, Alexander. Who preached the unity of Italy ? A Republican, Mazzini. Who realized it ? A Conservative, Cavour. Who originated the idea of the Unity of Germany ? The Republicans of Frankfort. Who realized it ? An Imperialist, a Caesarist, Bismarck. Who has awakened the Republican idea, three times stifled in France ? A celebrated poet, Victor Hugo ; a great orator, Jules Favre ; another orator no less illustrious, Gambetta. Who has consolidated it ? Another Conservative, Thiers." So writes the great Republican orator of Andalusia, illustrating the common truth that, with nations as with men, the colder wisdom of age uses and refines the sanguine enthusiasm of youth. 7 NOTES CHAPTER I 1. De Institutione Delftni. (Euvres (ed. 1858), vol. i. p. 8. 2. Politique tirfe de I'Ecnture sainte, Bks. II. and HI. (Euvres, vol. i. 333 ff. 3. Comparctti, Vergilio nel media evo, i. 232, 235, 303-4, and see Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, i. 14 : " Romanam urbem Deus praeviderat Christian! populi principalern sedem futuram." The interest in the history of republican Rome dates from the Renaissance. Cato, indeed, was a medieval hero, not, however, because he was a Republican, but as the reputed author of certain moral distiches. A. Graf, Roma nella memoria e nelle imaginazione del media evo. 4. See Bryce, " Primitive Iceland," in Studies in History and Juris- prudence, vol. i. p. 312-58. 5 . For the political theories of the Middle Ages, see the treatise by Dr Otto Gierke, translated, with an Introduction, by F. W. M ait land. 6. Campanella (1568-1639), De Monarchia kispanica Discursus. 7. Savonarola, Discorso circa il reggimento e Governo degli Stati. CHAPTER II 1. Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, xi. 6. An admirable account of Arnold of Brescia and of Cola di Rienzo is furnished in Jryce's Holy Roman Empire, c. xvL See also Gabrielli, Epistolario di Cola di Rienzo, Rome, 1890. Emilio Castelar compares Arnold to Brutus, the one " the first citizen of modern Rome," the other " the last citizen of ancient Rome." Recucrdos y Esperantos, ii. 40. 2. Guicciardini, Op. hied., i. 28. 3. /&. 4. See a brilliant passage by J. A. Symonds, Age of the Despots, pp. 71-2, in answer to Sismondi. Of course the balance of genius is on the side of the republic if Florence be ranked as a republic during the veiled despotism of Lorenzo de' Medici. The comparative sterility of Genoa is one of the remarkable facts. \ 288 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION 5. Inferno, xxxiv. 65-7. If Dante had read Plutarch, how different the Divine Comedy might have been ! 6. The end of Boscoli is told in a narrative of extraordinary vivid- ness by his friend Luca della Robbia, Archivio Storico Italiano, i- 273-309. Lorenzo's exploit and apology are given in Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, iii. 283-95, and Giannotti's letter in Delizie delli eruditi bibliofili, vii. 73. For the whole subject Symonds, Age of the Despots, pp. 154-7. 7. There is a famous passage in Varchi (Storia Fiorentina, ii. 20), where he says that if Niccolo Machiavelli had conducted his private life with gravity and sincerity he would deserve to be compared with the intellects of antiquity. For the horror of the Venetian Ambassador at the silk- merchant politicians of Florence, see Alberi, Relaz., 2nd Ser. i. 21. For Varchi's remark, see Storia Fiorentina, iii. 22. 8. Antonio Suriano, 1529, in Alberi, Relazione, 2nd Ser. v. 410. 9. Machiavelli, Discorsi, i. 55. Dante's lines on Florence (Purg., vi. 145-51) are well-known: " Quante volte del tempo che rimembre, Legge, moneta, offizio e costume Hai tu mutato, e rinnovato membre ! E se ben ti ricordi, e vedi lume, Vedrai te simigliante a quella inferma, Che non pu6 trovar posa in sulle piume, Ma non dar volta suo dolore scherma." For the instructive story of the short-lived Ambrosian Republic, see C. M. Ady, The History of Milan under the Sforza. 10. L. Pearsall Smith, " Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton." Intr. P. Paruta, a Venetian publicist who wrote in the last half of the sixteenth century, compares the heroes of his republic to the Fabricii, Marcelli, Fabii, and Scipii ; urges that though Venice had not so great an Empire as Rome, she had preserved her liberty through a longer period of time and had been less disturbed by civil discord ; and in a burst of patri- otic eloquence exclaims that it was in Venice that were preserved the " last relics of the nobility of Italy." Discorsi Politici, i. 219, 232 ; ii. 147. The reader will not be sur- prised to learn that Paruta regards the Republic of Sparta as "the true example of perfect government" (Della Perfezione della Vita Politica, vol. iii. p. 396). 11. Opere di Donato Giannotti, ed. Polidori, 2 vols., Firenze, 1850. 12. Varchi estimates the number of Florentine palaces hi the country at eight hundred, their average cost at 350x3 gold florins. Marco Foscari, the Venetian, writing in 1527, regarded them as a great danger to the city, assuming that Florentines would always make peace with an enemy rather than sacrifice so great a treasure. Varchi, ix. 41 ; x. 29 ; Alberi, Relazione, and Ser. i. 21. NOTES 289 13. Carducci was the second gonfalonier of the .Second Florentine Republic and the soul of the resistance. His speeches are given in Varchi. For Burlamacchi, see Archivio Storico Italiano, ist Ser., vol. x. pp. 435 ff. For the decline of learning during the Counter- Reformation, see J. A. Symonds, The Catholic Reaction, and Dejob, Vie de Muret. San Marino, " where a hundred clowns govern a bar- barous rock that no man invades " (Algernon Sidney), is the classical instance of the tiny republic, and the only Italian State spared by Napoleon. 14. The literature on Machiavelli and Guicciardini is immense. Lord Morley*s two admirable essays, Villari's Life of Machia- velli, and L. A. Burd's learned edition of the Principe, will serve as introductions to the writers themselves. For Varchi's estimate of Guicciardini, Storia Fiorentina, x. 20. CHAPTER III i.feee G. P. Gooch, History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (an admirable book) ; E. Armstrong, Political Theory of the Huguenots ["English Historical Review, vol. iv., 1889] ; A. Franck, Reformateurs et Publicistes de I'Europe, Cambridge Modern History, vol. iii. c. xxii. Calvin's view is given, Institutes, iv. c. 20, 8 (tr. Norton, 1634) : "A government of the best man is the most blessed form, where liberty is framed to such moderation as it ought to be." 2. Hobbes, Behemoth, Dialogues ; Voltaire, Id/es RJpublicaines. 3. Althusius, J., Politico Methodia Digesta, Groningen, 1610 ; and see O. Gierke, Johannes Althusius, 1878, 4. These debates, of extraordinary interest and importance as exhibiting the development of democratic ideas in England, are to be read in the Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth. 5. See the full and striking account of Cromwell's hesitations in C. H. Firth's The Last Years of the Protectorate. Professor Firth brings evidence to show that the question was about to be reopened at the very end of Cromwell's life. 6. For the Republican conspiracies under Charles II., see W. C. Abbott, English Conspiracy and Dissent, " American His- torical Review," April 1909 ; and see Evelyn's Diary, I5th Jan. 1689. There was naturally a good deal of ferment at the beginning of the reign, as may be judged by the fact that Sir Roger Lestrange, the censor, destroyed editions of 600 tracts in three years. 7. A similar impression was left in English observers (as upon tineas Sylvius in the middle of the fifteenth century) by the contrast between the "clean and cheerful" free towns of Germany, and the squalor and depopulation of the prin- cipalities. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters, i. 16. 19 290 8. Hobbes, Leviathan, c. 9 ; Dryden, Prose Works, ed. Malone, vol. iii. 266. 9. Mr Morse Stephens (History of Portugal) doubts whether there was ever any intention on the part of the conspiring Portu- guese nobles to create a Republic in 1640 in case they should fail to persuade Duke John of Braganza to accept the throne. But see The History of Portugal by a Person of Quality, London, 1660 ; and also Ranke's remarks, Die Osmanen und die Spanische Monarchic, p. 475. That the Republic ever seemed possible in Paris rests on the authority of De Retz. A good account of the influence of Calvinism as the source of democratic ideas may be found in Charles Borgeaud, The Rise of Democracy in Europe. CHAPTER IV Condorcet, (Euvres, v. 283. Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, ii. 2; iii. 3; viii. 16; ix. 1-3; Rousseau, Contrat Social, iii. 7 ; Voltaire, Idfes Rtpublicaines. M. Aukjrj^. gives a brief and excellent summary of the opinions of the French philosophers on Republicanism in his Histoire Politique de la Revolution Franfaise (Eng. tr. by B. Miall). Condorcet, (Euvres, v. 299. The enormous influence exerted by the American Revolution may be illustrated by Mably's Observations sur le Gouvernement et les lois des Etats-Unis d'Amtrique, and by Condorcet's Tableau du Progrts de I' Esprit humain ((Euvres, viii. p. 266). 5. Correspondance de Mme Roland, ed. C. Perroud. 6. See some good remarks on the subject of the Cahiers in M. Emile Faguet's Questions Politiques, pp. 1-23 (a review of M. E. Champion's La France d'apres les Cahiers de 1789). 7. For this and most of the succeeding paragraphs in this chapter I am indebted to M. Aulard, who has so closely studied the development of the republican party in France. It is curious to note the timidity of Robespierre. As late as July 1792, he solemnly disclaims being a Republican (Aulard, tr. Miall, i. 309 ; ii. 53). Mr L. G. Wickham Legg has printed some extracts illustrating the growth of Republicanism in his Select Documents of the French Revolution, vol. i. pp. 295-9. 8. Aulard (tr. Miall), i. 297. 9. For Plutarch, see Greard, De la Morale de Plutarque. " J'etais fou de Plutarque a vingt ans, je pleurais de joie en le lisant." Vauvenargues. " Je crains pour moi ces lectures-14 comme la foudre." Mirabeau. " Ce que Shakespeare a copie de Plutarque est bon, mais je ne saurai admirer ce qu'il a ajoute." M. J. Chenier, 17 Feb. 1768. For Cicero, see Zielinski, Cicero im Wandel der Jahr- hunderte. NOTES 291 CHAPTER V 1. Voltaire, Idles Rtpublicaincs, 1765. 2. The religious history of the French Revolution is now being told by a Catholic historian of great eminence, M. Pier de la Gorce. 3. Condorcet, (Euvres, v. 283. 4. Robespierre, April 1793. See Aulard (tr. Miall), ii. p. 177. 5. Condorcet, (Euvres , xviii. pp. 186-7. 6. The victims of the Terror have been estimated by Taine (French Revolution, Engl. tr., iii. 297) at 17,000 (probably too low a figure). Sarpi estimates the number of victims of the Inquisition in the Netherlands during the reign of Charles V. at 50,000, Grotius at 100,000. In Spain itself the figures are equally appalling. From 1480 to 1498 Torquemada is said to have burned alive 10,220 persons, and to have con- demned 97,000 to perpetual imprisonment or public penitence. Symonds (quoting Llorente, i. 229), The Catholic Reaction, i. 194. 7. Dutard, whose excellent police reports are printed in Schmidt, Tableaux de la Revolution Franfaise. CHAPTER VI 1 . The expectation of universal peace was not confined to Germany. Joseph Priestley and James Mackintosh both held that the triumph of reason and democracy in Europe would lead to the abandonment of colonial possessions and so greatly diminish the causes of friction between European nations. Priestley, Letter XI V. ; Mackintosh, Vindicia Gallica. 2. See, for instance, Napoleon's letter to Talleyrand, 7th Oct. 1797, Corr. iii. no. 2292 : " Vous connaissez peu ces peuples-ci. Us ne meritent pas que Ton fasse tuer 40,000 Franfais pour eux. . . . Vous vous imaginez que la liberte fait faire de grandes choses un peuple mou, superstitieux, ' pantalon ' et lache." His own attitude towards Italian parties is tersely summarised. Corr. ii. p. 207, no. 1321. 3. The story of the Parthenopean Republic is told in Thiebault's M tmoires,yo\. ii. ; in Sorel, L' Europe et la Revolution Frartfaisf, 5ieme Partie ; in Colletta's History of Naples ; and by R. M. Johnston, Napoleonic Empire in Southern Italy. 4. For an excellent account of the effects of the French Revolution in England, see G. P. Gooch in the Cambridge Modern *r\^ History, vol. viii. c. xxv. ^V 5. The locus classicus for the history of the English democratic movement of this period is State Trials, vols. xxiv., xxv., where the proceedings in Rex versus Hardy, etc., are fully reported. Bums estimates the regular attendance at the 292 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Corresponding Society at from 1 8,000 to 20,000. " The wishes and hopes of many of the members carried them to the over- throw of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic " (Recollections of J. B., Philadelphia). On the other hand, Hardy's advice to correspondents was, " Leave monarchy, democracy, and even religion entirely aside : never dispute on these topics" (State Trials, xxiv. p. 394). And one of the characteristic features of the movement is the constant appeal to King Alfred, Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, etc., very different from the French Revolution in this respect. Thus Mr Yorke, speaking at Sheffield, " enters into a com- plete detail of the ancient constitution as established by Alfred, which he proved to be at this time totally defaced, if not lost " (State Trials, xxv. 670). 6. For Godwin's influence on Shelley, see Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, vol. iii. pp. 69-100. CHAPTER VII 1. A good deal of information with regard to republican move- ments in France from 1815-30 may be gained from G. Weill, Histoire du Parti Rt/publicain en France, 1900. 2. For Bentham, see Bowr ing's edition of his collected works, with its great index (the most amusing in the world), and Leslie Stephen's Utilitarians. Goethe finds the solution for the problems of life in free practical activity in a free land ; Faust seems to envy the makers of Holland, who daily battle for liberty and life." " Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben Der taglich sie erobern muss." 3. Works, ed. Bowring, ix. pp. 127 ff. 4. Ib., ii. p. 201. Shelley's Hellas was written in 1822. On Aug. i, 1830, the Duke of Orleans told Lafayette that it was impossible to have spent two years in America without regarding the American Constitution as the most perfect that had ever existed. Weill, Histoire du Parti Rfyublicain, P-43- 5. See Cambridge Modern History, vol. x. c. xvi. 6. E. Huyttens, Discussions du Congres National de Belgique, 1830-1 , 5 vols., Brussels, 1844-5 ' an d Karl Griin, Die Soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien, Darmstadt, 1845. CHAPTER VIII 1 . Menger thinks that some future Kaiser may adopt Socialism, as Constantine adopted Christianity. Neue Staatslehre, p. 175. 2. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions, vol. ii. p. 345. The other story, though doubtless an exaggeration, shows the sort of criticism levelled against the government. Daniel Stern, Histoire de la Revolution de 1848. NOTES 293 3. Of Lamartine it was said, " He has never read Aristophanes, he detests Rabelais, he does not understand Montaigne." De Tocqueville is even more severe " Je ne sais si j'ai rencontre dans ce monde . . . un esprit plus vide de la pensee du bien public que le sien. ... II est le seul je crois, qui m'ai semble toujours pret a bouleverser le monde pour se distraire." Mtmoircs, p. 164. 4. Daniel Stern (Mme Agoult) argues (Histoire de la Revolution de 1848) that the revolution was no accident, but the logical outcome of the philosophical movement of the age. 5 . De la Normandie, Notes et Souvenirs. . De Tocqueville, Mhnoires, p. 108. 7. Lamartine's Trots Mots au Pouvoir presents the authoritative apology for the Republican government. 8. See De Tocqueville's Mtmoires, pp. 259 ff. ; and Odilon Barot, Memoires, ii. pp. 215 ff. CHAPTER IX 1. Life and Writings of Giuseppe Mazzini, 6 vols., London, 1864-70 ; Mazzini's Essays, tr. T. Okey, 1894 ; Life of Giuseppe Mazzini, by Bolton King, 1902. 2. The story of the siege of Venice is well told by W. R. Thayer, The Dawn of Italian Independence, 2 vols., Boston and New York, 1894. 3. See G. M. Trevelyan's brilliant Defence of Rome by Garibaldi. The effects of Garibaldi's life were felt far outside the borders of Italy. ' ' Nothing will be done till Garibaldi comes,' was the reply of a peasant made at St Petersburg to a com- rade of mine who talked to him about freedom coming." Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, i. 5 1 . CHAPTER X 1. After 1830 Paris became the intellectual capital of Poland. A belief grew up and was very widely and earnestly held that Poland was the " Messiah of Nations," and that it was only through the sufferings of Poland that mankind could be regenerated. See E. Quinet, Discours d'Ouverture, loth March 1848 : " Cette France du Nord, ce Christ des nations." The influence of the Polish spirit in Europe from 1830 to 1848 still awaits an historian. 2. Borne's Briefe aus Paris may be taken as representing the tendency prevalent among many Germans to idealise France as the home of progress and liberty. Arriving soon after the Revolution of 1830, he regards the pavement of Paris as hallowed by the blood of the martyrs of liberty, and dreams of a state of things in which France and Germany may be 294 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION united in a single polity, and governed by a national assembly sitting alternately at Frankfort and Paris. Borne wished to undo the Treaty of Verdun, just as Cecil Rhodes wished to undo the American Declaration of Independence and to have a Parliament alternately meeting in London and Washington. 3. See Laube, Das Erste Deutsche Parlament, and Malvida von Meysenburg, Memoiren einer Idealisten. Out of 370 members in the Vor- Parliament only 150 were Republicans. 4. F. Mehring, Geschichte der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie , vol. i. p. 49. 5 . Of all the memoirs of the German Revolution in 1848, those of Carl Schurz (English) are the most illuminating and exciting. CHAPTER XI 1. If Mr Gladstone had been a Frenchman he would have been something like M. Ollivier : exuberance, love of letters, eloquence, religious orthodoxy, political liberalism, special interest in theology are common to the English and to the French Liberal leader. 2. E. Tenet's Histoire du Coup d'Etat (1868) made a great im- pression. For the Republican party under the Second Empire, see Jaures, Histoire socialiste, vol. x. i ; Tcher- noff, Le Parti r 22 5> 2 34 Massinissa, 51 Mazzini, 9, 196, 197-202, 207, 210, 227, 285 Medici, Alessandro de', 16, 17, 18 Medici, Catherine, de', 35 Medici, Cosimo de', 27 Medici, expulsion and restoration of, 21, 24-29 Medici, Giuliano de', 17 Medici, Lorenzo de', 17, 30 Medici, Lorenzo de' (Lorenzacchio), 17-19 Medici, Lorenzo de' (the Great), 16, 28, 30 Metternich, 102, 151, 194 Menger, Anton, 178 Mercure de France, 108 Nationale, 64 Merimee, Prosper, 243 Metz, 68 Mexican campaign, 229, 241 Meysenburg, Malvida von, 221 Michelet, Jules, 262, 265 Milan, 22, 128, 193, 203 Mill, James, 274 Mill, J. S., 103, 145, 178 Milton, John, 35, 43, 46, 47, 50, 88, 136. 149 Minos, 86 Mirabeau, 61, 67, 84, 284 Mote, Count, 182 Monarchy, Bentham on, 161-3 Bossuet on, 2, 3 contractual theory of, 8 discussed in Brussels, 167-70 Huguenot theories of, 35, 36 increased popularity of among Teutons, 270-2 least secure in Latin countries, 151, 284 Monarchy, Medieval, 7 pressed on Cromwell, 42, 43 Savonarola on, 9, 10 Sidney on, 49 Montaigne, 51 Montesquieu, 15, 55, 56, 98 Mountain, the, 113 Muretus, 29, 289 N Nantes, 107 Naples, 52, 53, 80, 123, 128-35, 151, 156, 196, 197 Napoleon I., 102, 114, 115, 122, 126-7, 134-6, 141, 149, 154, 172, 214, 232 Napoleon III., 192, 207, 227, 228-36 Napoleonic legend, 172, 241 Narbonne, Comte de, 101 Naseby, 40 Nationale, le, 183 National Reformer, the, 255 workshops, 177, 186, 188 Nationalist aspirations, 155 Necker, 66 Nelson, 129, 133 Nero, 18, 86 Netherlands, the, 102 Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 224, 225 New model army, 41 Nice, 230 Niebelunglied, 120 Normandy, 90 North, Lord, 137, 138 Northomb, 168 Norway, rupture with Sweden, 279- 82 O Gates, Titus, 48 Oceana, 45 Offenburg, 220 Olaf, King, 281, 282 Ollivier, Emile, 232 O'Meara, Dr, 141 Orange, Prince of, 28 Organisation du Travail, 177 Orleans, Duke of. See Louis Philippe Orleans, Helena, Duchess of, 183-4 Oscar II. of Sweden, 380 Oudinot, General, 207 Owen, Robert, 296 Oxenstiern, 57 INDEX 803 Palais Royal, 62 Palatinate, at8 Palermo, 193 Palestine, 239 Papacy. 7, 8, 28, 29, 205-9, 22 9> 2 53'4 Papal States, 197, 229 Paris, 52, 66. 67-70. 73-4, 78, 82, 93, iio. 115, 181-4. 229. 233, 239, 244-7 Paris, Cornte de, 247 Parma, 80 Partbenopcean Republic, 128-34 Paruta, P., 288 Patriote Fran fa is, 69, 70 Peninsular War, 258, 259 Penn, W.. 284 Pere Ducbesne, 108 Pericles, 86 Pestel, Colonel, 296 Peter the Great, 53 Petrarch, 14, 29 Phalaris. 18 Philadelphia, 139 Convention, 63 Philip Augustus, 119 Philip II. of Spain, 37 Philippe Egalitl, no Philosophy, influence on French Revolution, 59, 60 Piedmont, 123, 156, 203, 229, 230 Piedmontese, 229 Pillnitz, 81, 82 Pio Nono, 205-6 Pisa, 16 Pisloia, 16 Pitt, William, 140 Plutarch, 4, 17, 47,59, 84, 288, 290 Poland, Castelar on future of, 266 kingship in, 169 Napoleon I. and, 172 Napoleon HI. and, 229 revolutionary influence of, 212-13 risings in, 163, 222 sympathy with, 155, 188, 225 I'olignac, Due dc, 158 Politicet methodia Digesta (Althu- sius), 38 Political Justice, Inquiry concerning (Godwin's), 144 Polybius, 19, 51 Portugal, 52, 160, 278, 284, 290, 295 Prairial, in Prato, 24 Prelude, the (Wordsworth's), 146-8 Presidential system, 190-2, 273, 278 Price, Dr, 139 Prim, General, 261 Prince, the (Machiavelli's), 30, 31 Proudhon, 262, 267, 294 Provence, Count of. See Louis XVIII. Provincial Government of 1848, 185-6 Prussia, 43, 81, 83, 101, 114, 223, 230, 241 Prynne, W. , 40 Purgatory (Dante's), 8, 23 Quiberon, in Quinet, 200 Quirinal, the, 205 Rabelais, 251 Radicalism, 103 Rastadt, 223, 227 Ready and Easy Way (Milton's), 46, 47 Reflexions on the French Revolution, 139. HZ Reform, Parliamentary (England), 142 ; (France), 180-1 Riforme, la, 183 Restoration monarchy in France, 152- 6p Rhine frontier, 101, 102, 179 Rhodes, Cecil, 294, 296 Richelieu, 119 Rienzo, Cola di, 14, 15, 125, 287 Risorgimento, 125 Robert, M. and Mme., 64 Robespierre, 84, 100, 108, 109, no, 112, 113, 149, 290 Rochefort, Henri de, 233 Roland, 6 Roland, Mme., 59, 60, 85 Romagna, 22, 31, 197 Rome, example of, 50, 84 French Church and, 95 French Republic in, 128 Mazzini on, 200 medieval republics in, 13-15 Republic of, 205-9 Senate of, 88 Roosevelt. T. . 282 Rossi, Count, 205 Rota Club, 44 Rouen, 67, 91 304 THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION Rousseau, 38, 56, 62, 84, 86, 87, 245, 265 Ruffo, Cardinal, 133 Riige, A. , 216 Russia, 53, 160, 225 Sadowa, 241 Saguntum, 28 St Andre\ Jean Bon, 116 St Bartholomew, massacre of, 35 St Cloud, 68, 121 St Germain, palace of, 49 St Helena, 141, 172, 232 St Just, 85 St Mark, convent of, 27 Republic of. See Venice St Simon, Count of, 174-6 Salasco, 204 Salmasius, 35, 43 Salmeron, 265 Sand, Georges, 192 San Marino, 30, 135, 289 Saumur, 156 Savonarola, 9, 21, 24, 29, 30 Savoy, 230 Saxony, 163, 215 Scheldt, loo, 165 Schiller, F., 221, 224, 283, 296 Schlesvig, 222 Schurz, 225-7 Scipio, 51 Second Empire, 172, 192, 328-36, 241 Chambers, 63, 113, 190, 238, 249, 251 Sedan, 236, 241 September massacres, 148 Revolution, 236-7 Seron, 167 Seville, 265, 267, 268 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 48 Shakespeare, 59 Shelley, 14, 142, 144, 283 Sicily, 7, 123, 129 Sidney, Algernon, 40, 41, 48-50, 136 Sieyes, 70, 79 Sinamary, 115 Slav power, 218 Slave trade, abolition of, 148 Socialism, 173-4, 216, 234-5, 265, 275-6, 281, 285, 296 Socialistic writers, 174-8, 234-5 Soderini, 21 Solon, 238 Sonderbund, war of, 179, 214-5 Southey, 142, 145 Souvaroff, 133 Spain, 9, 53, 151, 156, 160, 164, 275, 278, 284 Spanish marriages, 179 Spanish Republic of 1873, 255-69 Republics of South America, 158, 170, 195, 266 Sparta, 50 Spartacus, 189 Spencer, Herbert, 176 Stockholm, 53 Stockmar, Baron, 257 Sully, 57 Suriano, A. , 21 Surinam, 115 Sverri, King, 282, 283 Sweden, 53, 279-82 Swinburne, A. , 283 Swiss cities, 30 Confederation, 3, 39, 50, 56, 88, 168, 214-5 Switzerland, 115, 149, 179 Tacitus, 4, 5, 19, 29, 134 Talleyrand, 101 Tarquins, the, 85 Temple, the, no, 148 Terror, the, 74, 75, 109, 114, 116-7, 291 Thackeray, W. M. , 270 Theodoric, 6 The Rights of Man (Paine), 142, 143 Thierry, A., 174 Thiers, A., 159, 240-47, 250, 266, 285 Thionville, 76 Thomson, J., 59 Thoughts on the Present Discontents, 137 Timoleon, 17 Tocqueville, A. de, 181, 184, 187, 189-91 Toleration, doctrine of, 39 Tolstoian system, 102 Tolstoy, 144 Tooke, Home, 140, 141 Toulon, 156 Toussaint 1'Ouverture, 149 Treitschke, H. von, 276 Tricolour, party of, 154-5 Trier, 82 Tuileries, attack on, in 1792, 74, 148 attack on, in 1848, 183 Turgot, 54-5, 57, 103 INDEX .305 Tuscany, Grand Duchy of, 124, 206 cities of. 14 Tyndale. W.. 35 Tyrannicide, 17-19 Tyranny, doctrine of resistance to, 35-6, 39 U Ultramontanism, 253-4, 284 United Netherlands, Kingdom of, 163-70 Provinces. See Dutch Re- public States. See America Universal suffrage, 77, 187, 192, 231, 235, 274-5 Utrecht, Treaty of, 123 Valmy, 78, 83-4 Valtelline, 127 Vane, Sir H., 43, 44 Varchi, 17, 18, 20, 28 Varennes, 68, 71 Victoria, Queen, 257, 270, 271-2, 279 Voltaire, 36 Volterra, 16 Vendee, the, 106, HI Venetia, 127, 197, 203 Venetian Republic, extinguished by Bonaparte, 127, 149 Venice, 2, 13, 22-4, 29, 45, 47, 88, 124, 135, 193. 204-5, 288 Verdun, 76 Vergniaud, 75-6 Versailles, 65, 94, 125, 244 Peace of, 56 Vico, 125 Victor, Emmanuel, 210, 261 Vienna, 53, 217-8, 220 Congress of, 150, 151 Vievx Cordelier, the, 108 Villele, 157 Vindicia contra tyrannos, 35 Virgil, 5 Voltaire, 56, 57, 59, 62, 93, 94, 101, 108 Von Struve, 218-9, 221 Voyage en Icarie, 176 W Waterloo, 154 Weimar, 160 Westphalia, Treaty of, 39 Wilkes, J.. 137 William I., King of the United Netherlands, 165-6 William I., King of Prussia, 270 William of Orange, 37 Wordsworth, W. , 142. 145-9 Wyclif, ia 20 PRINTED BY TURNBULL AND SPEARS, EDINBURGH A SELECTION OF BOOKS PUBLISHED BY METHUEN AND COMPANY LIMITED '"' 36 ESSEX STREET LONDON W.C. 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THE THRONE OF DAVID. Le Queux (W.). THE HUNCHBACK OF WESTMINSTER. Levett-Yeats (S. K.). THE TRAITOR'S WAY. ORRAIN. Llnton (E. Lynn). THE TRUE HIS- TORY OF JOSHUA DAVIDSON. Lyall (Edna). DERRICK VAUGHAN. Malet (Lucas). THE CARISSIMA. A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION. Mann (Mrs. M. E.). MRS. PETER HOWARD. A LOST ESTATE. THE CEDAR STAR. ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. THE PATTEN EXPERIMENT. A WINTER'S TALE. Marchmont (A. W.). MISER HOAD- LEY'S SECRET. A MOMENT'S ERROR. Marryat (Captain). PETER SIMPLE. JACOB FAITHFUL. March (Richard). A METAMORPHOSIS. THE TWICKENHAM PEERAGE. THE GODDESS. THE JOSS. Mason (A. E. W.). CLEMENTINA. Mathers (Helen). HONEY. GRIFF OF GRIFFITHSCOURT. SAM'S SWEETHEART. THE FERRYMAN. Meade (Mrs. L. T.). DRIFT. Miller (Esther). LIVING LIES. Mitford (Bertram). THE SIGN OF THE SPIDER. Bontresor (F. P.). THE ALIEN. FICTION Morrison (Arthur). THE HOLE IN THE WALL. Nesbit (K.J. THE RED HOUSE. Morris (W. B.). HIS GRACE. GILES INGILBY. THE CREDIT Of THE COUNTY. LORD LEONARD THE LUCKLESS. MATTHEW AUSTEN. CLARISSA FUR1OSA. Ollphant (Mrs.). THE LADrS WALK. SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE. THE PRODIGALS. THE TWO MARYS. Oppenheim (E. P.). MASTER OF MEN. Parker (Gilbert). THE POMP OF THE LAVILETTES. WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC. THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD. Pemberton (Max). THE FOOTSTEPS OF A THRONE. I CROWN THEE KING. Phillpotts (Eden). THE HUMAN BOY* CHILDREN OF THE MIST. THE POACHER'S WIFE. THE RIVER. 1 (A. T. Qulller Couch). HITE WOLF. THE RId*e (W. Pett). A SON OF THE STATE. LOST PROPERTY. GEORGE and THE GENERAL. ERB. Russell (W. Clark}. ABANDONED. A MARRIAGE AT SEA. MY DANISH SWEETHEART. HIS ISLAND PRINCESS Sergeant (Adeline). THE MASTER OF BEECHWOOD. BALBARA'S MONEY. THE YELLOW DIAMOND. THE LOVE THAT OVERCAME. Sldgwlck (Mrs. Alfred). THE KINS- MAN. Surtees (R. S.). HANDLEY CROSS. MR. SPONGE'S SPORTING TOUR. ASK MAMMA. Walford (Mrs. L. B.). MR. SMITH, COUSINS. THE BABY'S GRANDMOTHER. TROUBLESOME DAUGHTERS. Wallace (General Lew). BEN-HUR. THE FAIR GOD. Watson (H. B. Marriott). THE ADVEN- TURERS. CAPTAIN FORTUNE. Weekes (A. B.). PRISONERS OF WAR. Wells (H. G.). THE SEA LADY. White (Percy). A PASSIONATE PIL- PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. '! . . TC H23 THF UP"