UC-NRLF $B MAS 321 5ucce ^i iiiiii iji among ^^ii^_A2_ C^ ' LIBRARY V University of California. Class SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS BY EMIL EEICH DOCTOR JURIS AUTHOR OF " GR-ECO-ROMAN INSTITUTIONS," "ATLAS OF ENGLISH HISTORY," •• FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN EUROPE," ETC. LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, ld. 1904 J^ c^^^ <^<^ PEEFACE In " Success Among Nations " the attempt has been made to initiate the reader into the psychological view of history, by giving, in outline and by means of a few illustrations, a bird's-eye view of the human forces that have raised some nations to the glory of success, while their absence has prevented other nations from holding their own in the battle for historic existence. It is certain that a living knowledge of the present helps us most essentially in the comprehension of the past. But may we not also assume that a knowledge of the past so gained may guide us, to a certain extent, in a foreknowledge of the future ? At any rate, in the present sketch we have also essayed to draw a few lessons from history as to the probable course of events regarding the leading nations of Europe and America. After a rSsume of success in the past, we have tried to sketch the probable success in the future. In our deductions we have been prompted by no motive of national prejudice, nor by any vague or traditional view of politics. Our predictions may be entirely wrong ; but we venture to say that our method of arriving at them is the only one that can seriously be advanced. We may have applied it wrongly. It is, 220732 vi PREFACE nevertheless, the method by which alone historic insight can be obtained. Its principle is simple ; to carry it out is somewhat less simple. It consists in a study both of numerous books and historic "sources/' and of about a dozen highly diflferentiated modern nations, each in its own country. The study of modern nations is more difficult than is generally assumed. It is easy to arrive in France and to stay there for a month or two. It is difficult to arrive at the real soul of the French people. More than mere passing through France, America, Germany, etc., is needed to grasp some of the less obvious, yet all-important, features of a nations psychology. Nothing short of lengthy struggles for existence in a modern country will give one the opportunities by the close analysis of which one may arrive at the real soul of a foreign nation. The author of the present work may claim this particular mode of studying modern nations. From Hungary, his native country, to the United States he has had ample and eagerly sought for opportunity of studying the leading nations of modern times during long and often painful conflicts and struggles. The result of all these observations of the human soul in its various national manifestations is very frequently quite the reverse of what is generally held to be the case. In fact, there is little danger of exaggeration in stating that most opinions held by one modern nation on the others are wrong. The reader is therefore requested to give the author the benefit of doubt, whenever the author's view of a given national institution seems to be heterodox. Let the gentle reader ask himself whether he has taken his view on the basis of personal and patient PKEFACE vii study of the given foreign institution in its own country, or whether he has derived it only from a newspaper or an encyclopaedia. Most of all, let the reader be tolerant with regard to views on the reader's own country. There exists no greater fallacy than the inference, that because a man is an Englishman he must necessarily know all about England. An Englishman may know much about England ; or an American about America. But it does not necessarily follow at all. As a matter of fact, it is a very rare exception. Knowledge, difficult enough in the inorganic world, is increasingly difficult in the organic ; and with regard to human institutions we are still in the infancy of true knowledge. May the following pages contribute to a better understanding of nations, and so to the promotion of the noblest aims of civilization. This book is the outgrowth of a suggestion made to me by an American friend, Mr. Curtis Brown, London correspondent of a distinguished American newspaper, who, I trust, would gladly testify to my often-expressed admiration for his fellow-countrymen, notwithstanding the criticisms I have ventured to ojffer here. EMIL EEICH. London, December 25, 1903. CONTENTS CHAPTER I ECONOMIC SUCCESS PAGE Success, as will be readily admitted, is either material or intellectual. This division becomes more complete by subdividing material success into (a) economic, and (b) political success; and intel- lectual success into (a) literary and artistic, and (6) religious success. In the present chapter we shall treat of economic success ; in fact, many a great nation of history succeeded pre-eminently, not to say exclusively, in economic achievements. Examples: (in ancient times) the Babylonians; the Egyptians (refutation, incidentally, of the common error, that the Egyptians created science, religion, or art) ; the Carthaginians ; China ; (in modern times) the pre-Columbian states in America .... 1 CHAPTER II CENTRES OP NATIONAL SUCCESS Human progress, amongst white people, has historically started from a few centres, not one of which offered remarkable natural advan- tages to man. Man's efforts had to combat or supplement Nature. Those centres are : Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Florence, Paris, and London. Influence of the alphabet 20 CHAPTER III SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM. — I Some nations succeed in bringing a greater or lesser number of people under their rule. Such are the Persians, the Mongols, the Mace- donians, the Romans. Distinction between these nations : (a) some (examples) mere brute conquerors, establishing tyrannies, not states ; (h) others (examples) establishing not mere conquests, but states proper .... 40 CONTENTS CHAPTER IV SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM. — II PAGE Other examples of empire-building. Venice. Her rise and growth. Causes. Effects. Holland and the Dutch Empire. Keasons of its failure. The British Empire. Its unprecedented character . 57 CHAPTER V INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS. — I Not every manifestation of man's thinking power constitutes intellectual progress. The Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, and Carthaginians, too, had books, inventions, intellectual contrivances of aU kinds. Examples. Yet they never had literature, philosophy, science, or art proper. What makes these four products of the human mind ? Short explanation of the saHent points of the most perfect speci- mens of literature, philosophy, art, and science, i.e. Greek works. Their essential advance on all previous efforts. Examples . . 76 CHAPTER VI INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS. — II It cannot be denied that an over-exuberant growth of intellectuality deprives nations of much of that grit and rough energy without which abiding commonwealths cannot be established. Thus the Hellenes, the Kenaissance Italians, the eighteenth century Germans, etc., who all astounded, and still astound, the world with their unparalleled intellectual achievements, were all unable to hold their own, and were either ruined or came very near being so. Causes of intellectual greatness. Not to be found in race, nor in " evolution," which are mere words. Historical causes . . 95 CHAPTER VII RELIGIOUS SUCCESS. — I A few nations succeeded in founding systems of religion that spread over vast areas and converted millions of people. Buddhism. Hebrew Monotheism. Christianity. Mahometanism. Calvinism. The origins of the four latter rehgions are all from amazingly small and apparently insignificant beginnings. Where they do not lead CONTENTS XI PAGE to the establishment of an ecclesiastical polity or Church proper, there they absorb man's best powers to an extent injurious to his other interests. The Roman Catholic Church . . . .111 CHAPTER VIII RELIGIOUS SUCCESS. — II Cause of universal religions is exclusively : personality. Short sketch of the personality of Moses, Jesus, Mahomet, and Calvin. The futility of modern so-called higher criticism, which may or may not destroy this or that passage or chapter in a canonical book, but which utterly fails in the construction of the main point : the personality of the founders of religion 137 CHAPTER IX SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS The Latin nations (the French, the Italians, the Spanish). After brief discussion of the Spanish, follow the Itahans. Their two besetting evils, in spite of a splendid geopolitical position, are : (1) In the past, that they have not won their unity by their own efforts ; (2) that the Papacy constantly undermines them. France : Her history both the most interesting, and the most widely read ; yet France, practically, a terra incognita, especially to English- speaking people. Profound mistakes about the character of the French. Her women, her men. Her basal aspirations. Her wealth. Europe's absolute need of France. Her destiny. She will always be the leading nation in Europe on account of her wealth, her intellectuality, and her numerous reverses, that have sobered and steeled her 155 CHAPTER X SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS The Slav nations, Poland, and especially Russia. Power of Russia very much overrated. History never goes by numbers, as do Parlia- ments. Has at the present, and for generations to come, neither wealth material nor wealth intellectual or vohtional. Gravitates, since 1762, exclusively towards Asia. Panslavism is no danger whatever to Europe. Russia, moreover, cankered by her Greek Church 182 xii CONTENTS CHAPTER XI SUCCESS AMONG GERMANS PAGE The Germans. The women. The men. Education ; especially higher education. The Universities. The cause of the superiority of the German professor. German intellectual activity; its universality and wonderful organization {Jahrhucher, Handhiicher, Encyclo- psedien, etc.). Germany's great military defeats and successes in the nineteenth century. Her imperialism. Her internal dangers. Socialism. The chief obstacle to German imperialism is her geography. She can never absorb Austria. Reasons : France and Italy cannot admit it. Irreconcilabihty of France. It is only by absorption of Austria that Germany could, by obtaining access to the Adriatic, sit astride on the continent of Europe, and so essentially improve her chances for imperialism and world- policy by securing real sea-power. Her industrial progress will soon be checked and toned down by the rapid and rising industrialism of Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the numerous minor, but very wealthy, states of Europe. Yet with all that, the German will undoubtedly realize much of the higher tyipe of civilization . . 202 CHAPTER XII BRITISH SUCCESS The English. Their women. Their men. Education. Intellectual activity. Regime (social) of castes. Up to Elizabeth, England failed in her attempts at imperialism, both in France and in Scotland ; not so in Ireland. After the Tudors, England, chiefly aided by her geopolitical situation, built up, by colonization and conquest, a vast empire based on sea-power and, in modern times, on rational and humane government too. Her empire lacking territorial continuity. Her sea-power exposed to serious challenging ; as has been her industrial supremacy. Her civiliza- tion will always be great and one-sided. In Europe she can no longer be umpire. It remains to be seen whether sea-power, now coveted by all the great nations, will continue to remain in her possession 227 CHAPTER XIII SUCCESS IN AMERICA The Americans. The women. The men. The Americans have, ot ^ all modern nations, the greatest chance of success, economic or CONTENTS xiii material, provided the Far East will be ready to undergo a pro- cess of Europeanization. Then the Americans will be in the very- economic centre of the globe. Intellectual success in the highest sense is less likely in America, in spite of the immense increase in colleges, libraries, and all the other means of conveying know- ledge. For the highest intellectual progress is based on intense personality, and absolute democracy, which pervades all the spheres of American life (not as in Athens, only some), is hostile to the rise of intense personalities other than political. Moreover, American women have, by over-mentalization, weakened their powers for good. What a nation wants consists, in addition to a good geopolitical position, mainly and exclusively of two factors : real women, who do not want to be men ; and real men, who do not try to be women. As to rule, America will come into conflict with Europe, and then learn a wholesome lesson. The true trend of history is : progressive differentiation, not imperialization, of Europe ; progressive unification of North America. It is by such vast contrasts between great peoples that the highest objects of civilization are secured 244 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS CHAPTER I ECONOMIC SUCCESS Success, as will be readily admitted, is either material or intellectual. This division becomes more complete by subdividing material success into (a) economic, and (6) political success; and intellectual success into (a) literary and artistic, and (5) religious success. In the present chapter we shall treat of economic success; in fact, many a great nation of history succeeded pre-eminently, not to say exclusively, in economic achievements. Examples : (in ancient times) the Babylonians ; the Egyptians (refutation, incidentally, of the common error, that the Egyptians created science, religion, or art) ; the Carthaginians ; China ; (in modern times) the pre-Columbian states in America. Scarcely anybody, upon the most cursory consideration, can have failed to realize how rarely, if ever, national success has been complete. If, on meeting with un- mistakable indications of widespread material prosperity, he has looked to find anything like a corresponding degree of intellectual activity, he must, on the whole, have been singularly disillusioned; and on proceeding to pass in review the great nations who have won a lasting name in the world's history, he must have been ever more and more struck by the almost constant divorce between great economic welfare and intellectual progress. More especially is this contrast patent among B ',1 3 2 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS the people whom we find grouped at the dawn of history about the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. The one-sided nature of these civilizations has long since been remarked, and, with one or two important excep- tions, with which we shall deal later on, their develop- ment followed entirely material lines. In the present and immediately succeeding chapter we shall confine ourselves to the investigation of material success. The parallelism between the economically successful nations is exceedingly striking. In spite of every possible difierence of ' race ' and time, we note the same phenomena recurring with almost constant regularity. Amongst many latter-day historians it has been the fashion to seek an explanation of national pre-eminence in race. This method certainly has the advantage of flattering national vanity, but it cannot claim any great scientific value, as the problems it deals with, though expressed in a diS'erent set of terms, are not brought any nearer solution. In nearly every instance the racial threads from which a white nation is woven are so inextricably intertwined that it would be quite im- possible to determine, even with approximate exactitude, what is the predominant element. Let us, then, at once set aside the hypothesis of any peculiar virtue inherent in a particular shade of complexion or variety of blood, and seek for a far readier explanation of our facts in the physical conditions under which those nations lived and had their being. We shall then see why it is that the conquering race is so often compelled to bow to the civilization of the vanquished and advance along their line of development. How often has this been the case in Egypt, Babylonia, and even China ! ECONOMIC SUCCESS 3 The civilization of those great nations has always exercised a peculiar fascination upon the imagination of the masses, who are impressed by the quantity and bulk of its productions. The traveller, passing amid the countless debris scattered upon their track, felt his imagination dazzled. Gazing upon the mysterious writings on the walls, he dreamed that they infolded unfathomable depths of wisdom, and for a moment he was eager to prostrate himself in adoration before the cradle of all human knowledge. Fired by kindred feel- ings of awe and curiosity, men of learning spent years of patient, unflagging labour in the decipherment of those long-lost tongues, only to find, when at last their efforts were crowned with success, when cuneiform and hieroglyph held no more enigmas, that they had only been pursuing a will o' the wisp. At the most they could add a few unmeaning names to the roll of a yet more unmeaning dynasty. What wonder that the greatest of all Egyptologists, F. de Champollion, died bemoan- ing the years he had thus wasted in unavailing toil. In all the mass of Egyptian writings there is scarcely a line which repays perusal. When Ebers discovered his famous papyrus, containing all the secrets of medicine as practised from time immemorial in the land of the Pharaohs, there was a moment's glimmer of hope, immediately extinguished. Here, again, we meet with the same dull veneration of what has gone before, which marks all the works of Egypt. Even medicine has been reduced to a stereotyped code, and we have no reason to doubt Diodorus of Sicily when he tells us, that the doctor who failed to comply with the injunctions therein laid down exposed himself to capital punishment. The 4 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Ebers papyrus lias preserved for us the sixth book of this stupendous work almost unimpaired. It includes a wealth of minute anatomical observations, but no con- clusions are drawn ; added thereto is a rich store of charms and incantations designed to relieve the un- happy patient. Egyptian mathematics, as preserved for us in the Aahmes papyrus, are but little better. A few elementary problems are clumsily solved, but their prac- tical object is self-evident, and no general theorems are deduced. A span of a hundred centuries severs us from the earliest records of Egyptian history brought to light by modern research, yet ten thousand years have not sufficed to the Egyptians to produce a single writing of real literary worth. As early as the fifth dynasty (3727-3479 B.C.), short biographical notices begin to be engraved upon the statues ; they are but the baldest statement of fact, and make no claim to literary form or style. The Prisse papyrus, although not written till well on in the twelfth dynasty (2886-2726 B.C.), was com- posed in the fifth. It is the work of Prince Ptahhotep, and lays down the rules for the observances of a virtuous life. We might have thought that this marked the dawn of a new literature, but from the fifth dynasty onward the stream of literary remains becomes more and more meagre. Much has doubtless been destroyed, for we know of the existence of well-stocked royal libraries, but it is very improbable that we have lost anything but the records of official transactions, and the reports of governmental departments. The bulk of what we possess consists of books of ritual, containing the most minute directions upon points of religious ECONOMIC SUCCESS 5 ceremonial. We have also a considerable number of fables, but they certainly do not rise to the level of the modern images d'Epinal. In the twelfth dynasty Egyptian letters are considered to have reached their heyday. Hieroglyph painting was certainly never carried to a higher pitch of perfection, and we are happy enough to have recovered one or two documents bearing some slight trace of human feeling, and not the production of the usual official automaton. Our most precious record is the letter of Duaufsechruta to his son Pepi, then at college, in which are extolled the excel- lencies of a religious life. But this one vestige of the higher aspirations of literature stands out in sad and lonely contrast amid the waste of formal inscriptions, unless we except the poem composed by Eameses to celebrate his triumph over the Cheta (Hittites) in the 13th century B.C. Egyptian civilization appears to be spread over great masses of population with remarkable uniformity. It is extensive but not intense. It is curious to watch how, at a certain point of its development, all its productions become petrified. All becomes conven- tional, and though often carried to the highest pitch of mechanical perfection, it always bears the impress of the eminently skilled artisan, never the touch of the artist. For generations the same model has served and has been copied with slavish fidelity, but probably throughout Egypt there is not a single work bearing witness to the creative genius of an individual artist. Egypt in all her days never rose to the level of a fifth-rate Pheidias or of a sixth-rate Praxiteles. The enterprising Birmingham manufacturer may scatter 6 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Ms pseudo-antiquities broadcast upon the bric-d-brac markets of Cairo and Alexandria. He will never essay to restore the lost arms of a Venus of Milo. The Egyptian is without ideals, and all his annals do not suffice to produce a single personality, a spark of indi- vidual genius. Conventionality pervades his every act, even to the most dramatic aspects of life. In many instances his absence of originality is quite instructive. When the invention of new instruments permitted the Egyptians to quarry stone, it might not unnaturally have been expected that their architecture would have undergone a revolution, or at least would have received some innovation. But the precedent of his forbears had entered into the Egyptian soul, and the last stone building of ancient Egypt followed the lead of its wooden prototype of untold centuries before. Of primitive art in Egypt very few specimens have survived, but though we are hardly able to watch the successive stages of its development, we can observe the progress of the paralysis to which it fell an early victim. Some of the earlier statues still show the hand of the individual artist, such as the famous figure of a scribe now in the Paris Louvre ; this dates from the fourth dynasty. In the fifth dynasty the disease has already got a firm hold. There is a wealth of detail, but the vigour of the earlier work is gone. Very rapidly all artistic initiative vanishes, and all subsequent productions conform more and more to the conven- tional type. There is one very characteristic sign of conventionality which clung to Egyptian art to the very last ; this is the lack of perspective, which we shall see recurring under similar circumstances in the ECONOMIC SUCCESS 7 far East. In all hieroglypliical paintings the human being is depicted in the same artificial and impossible pose. The face and legs are invariably depicted in profile, but the eye and trunk are drawn always in full face. Even this incongruity does not appear to have shocked the Egyptian artistic sense. It is the land of Egypt that fashioned the people of Egypt, and the land of Egypt was made by the Nile. The Nile has made the Egyptian a cultivator, and in agriculture the Egyptian found his unparalleled material wealth, but at the cost of all his nobler aspirations. Doubtless economic causes played no small share in undermining the intellectual stamina of the people. The ruling classes amassed the riches of the country in a few hands, but were entirely occupied with the task of governing the subservient toiler, and in gratifying their own desires for material comfort. The workers split up into castes, and, with no horizon of ambition, would rapidly sink to a level of stupid uniformity, while learning, likewise confined to a narrow sacerdotal caste, would become cumbrous and spiritless. The ideal of the Egyptian was a life of enjoyment in this world, and his great preoccupation was to prolong the delights he had enjoyed here below after death. Nearly all the great industries of Egypt were in some way connected with the service of the dead, and many of the most gigantic engineering works were carried out to the same end. The principal use made by the Pharaohs of their immense powers and dominions was to raise the vast pyramids, which they no doubt considered capable of resisting all the attacks of nature and able to preserve their remains through infinite ages. 8 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Love of battle for battlers sake was also not a trait in the Egyptian character, and when his wars were not wars of self-defence, they aimed at some very tangible material object. The west coast of the Sinaitic peninsula was conquered, not out of any mere ambition of power, but in order to secure its very valuable malachite and copper mines. As Egyptian history was fashioned by the Nile, so that of Babylonia is the work of the Tigris and Euphrates. Here rich black alluvial soil makes farming easy and profitable. The results tally with those already noted in Egypt. Herodotus speaks with contempt of Babylonian doctoring as pure empyricism. Their claim to scientific knowledge outside astronomy does not appear to be better founded. The monuments of Babylonia, though they have for the greater part crumbled to dust, being built of sun-dried Euphrates mud, appear to have been as massive as those of Egypt, but not much more gainly. Our documentary evidence regarding ancient Babylonian history is far more copious than that we possess concerning Egypt, and through the ingenious discovery of Grotefend in 1802, by which the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions was made prac- ticable, and the further labours of Burnouf, Rawlinson, and Lassen, we have been able to get the fullest insight into the civilization of Niniveh and Babylon. Since 1842 vast numbers of records on cylinders and earthen- ware tablets have been turned up among the ruins of Niniveh. They contain information concerning almost every d etail of public and private life. There are dedi- cations of monuments, adulatory inscriptions telling of the conquests of great kings, letters, accounts, private ECONOMIC SUCCESS 9 contracts ; and quite recently the oldest code of law, that of King Hamurabbi, has been unearthed. Yet another country achieved great commercial success upon the Mediterranean. In Carthage the intellectual stagnation is more frank and open. The Eoman occupation swept away almost all that was truly Punic, but what little has been gleaned from the heaps of debris that cover the site of the ancient city does not tend to exalt Carthaginian art in our estimation. When Carthage fell to the Romans it contained much that was beautiful, but all this was the plunder of Greek cities of Sicily. The productions of Carthage are for the most part a close counterfeit of Egyptian models, but the refinement achieved by generations of skilled Egyptian workmen is wanting, and the imitation is awkward, clumsy. But a£_a^ommercial_j)qwer^^^t^^^ Carthagin ians were eminently successful, and they were able to organize an immense system of plantation in Africa, which, after the Roman conquest, became one of the pri ncipal gra in-suppliers of Italy. The Carthaginian colonial system was no doubt rotten at the base ; the colonies were worked entirely for the benefit of the governing oligarchy at home, without any regard for the native. Carthage would tolerate no commercial rivalry, and her harsh conduct towards the conquered enemy left her devoid of friends when the moment of crisis came. In the days of their opulence the Cartha- ginians preferred to delegate their military duties, and to buy soldiers at a price, rather than bear the risks and fatigues of campaigning in person. So long as there was money in the treasury the system answered well, and so long as the seat of war was far removed 10 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS from home. By a judicious intermixture of many- tongued aliens, Carthage was able to keep her armies in hand. Her wealth made it possible for her to carry out immense works at home : the great city walls, thirty cubits high, in the thickness of which she found room to stall numberless horses and elephants; the great harbour works, which sheltered vessels from every quarter of the then known world, and from which issued the fleets which were to conquer her the Balearic Islands, Corsica, and Sicily, and particularly Spain. All of these colonies she ruled to good purpose, if with a rod of iron, establishing irrigation works, and opening up metal-mines. For their fellow-inhabitants on African soil the citizens of Carthage nourished a lively distrust, even for such as were half of the same blood as themselves. It is not astonishing, for the natives had long been reduced to the state of fellaheen, and were forced willy-nilly to enter the Carthaginian armies. Whenever occasion offered they were always ready for insurrection, but Carthage had prudently reserved for herself the privilege of a walled defence ; she compelled her semi-Phoenician subjects to dwell in open villages, in spite of the frequent forays of wild desert tribes of Bedouins. The commercial genius of Carthage had absorbed all her other talents. We have already had occasion to note the crude productions of her arts. In letters she made, as far as we know, little progress beyond the bounds of practical utility. The one name which has come down to us is that of Mago, whose book on agriculture was translated into Latin by order of the Senate. Carthaginian power depended upon capital, ECONOMIC SUCCESS U and when that capital was exhausted, when she could no longer pay for her defence, the whole empire, full of dissension within, fell like a house of cards before the onslaught of Eome. The famous secular fight between Eome and Carthage was, on the whole, a fight between a real nation, whose every member resolutely defended his country, and a narrow oligarchy leading mercenary armies. At times Carthage did dispose of the immense superiority of the genius of some of her individual leaders, such as Hamilcar Barcas, and his immortal son Hannibal. In the long run, mercenaries proved unable to defeat national armies. We now pass to the further Orient, to find much the same state of afiairs as we have encountered in the near East — great material prosperity extending unin- terruptedly over many thousands of years. The rivers have been mainly responsible for this great economic success. In China the alluvial pl a ins deposite d by_^the ?^^_?S"j^!? , i!*?^.^-^!^-? Yang-tse have jielded the same abundant crops time out of mind, yet for at least three hundred yjears we can trace no mark of advance. In agriculture, by long experience, the Chinese have dis- covered the most expedient rotation of crops, the most advantageous means and material for manuring the land, where the land is not of the rich yellow earth which dispenses with all manure. By these methods they have arrived at considerable economic prosperity, without ever troubling themselves about the why and wherefore of their success. All has been achieved in a groove of routine. Agricultural chemistry is not even a name for them. Travellers from Europe, impressed by the immense output of productions, have imagined 12 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS that unbounded wisdom must be at the back of this measureless material welfare. The Jesuits, whose missions began to spread over China after 1582, had had no small share in circulating stories of the great mathematical achievements of the Chinese. Our mis- conceptions on this score have only been finally exploded within the last century by the labours of the eminent French orientalist and mathematician, Emmanuel Sedillot. His researches prove conclusively that the Chinese were acquainted very early with several important geometrical and mechanical contrivances, such as compasses, the level, the square, and the wheel. Whence they procured these instruments is exceedingly debatable, but it is certain that they grossly neglected the opportunities thus afforded them. Except by purely empirical methods, they were incapable of solving the most elementary geometrical problems ; and they had not the faintest notion of classifying and co-ordinating their observations. With the secret of the magnetic needle in their hands, they made no progress in navigation, and though they had noticed the recurrence of certain celestial phenomena, their astronomy remained primitive. At the time of the arrival of the pioneers of Jesuit mission work, Eicci and Schall, themselves distinguished mathe- maticians, a few trigonometrical truths had no doubt filtered through from India and led to their great overestimate of Chinese science. Those who followed Columbus across the Atlantic lifted the veil from two other nations at the pinnacle of material prosperity. The description of the comrades of Cortes in Mexico read like some fairy tale. But it is the story of Egypt over again. Here are huge ECONOMIC SUCCESS 13 pyramidal temples, teocallis piled storey upon storey and crowned with lofty towers. The capital, reared on an island in mid-lake Tezcuco, is a marvel, with its broad streets of stately houses, with the great stone causeways linking it with the mainland, and with its floating gar- dens. But all this at the cost of wantonly squandered labour. The Mexican, too, had eaten of the forbidden fruit. An all too fertile soil yielded in profusion all that was necessary for his daily wants. The banana thrived everywhere, while the hillsides cut in terraces stood deep in maize. The agave, chocolatl, and tobacco were to be had for the minimum of toil. Steeped in this atmosphere of material content, the Mexican remained insensible to all mental stimulus. His monuments, like those of Egypt, may excite our astonishment by their massiveness. To raise them must have required the toil of countless servile hands (the Cholulu temple is said to have employed over 200,000 workmen) ; but the strange contorted figures with which they are graven are too hideous and grotesque for admiration. As in Egypt, every figure is moulded on the same conventional type, on which the workmen never ven- tured to improve. We are, from lack of information, at a disadvantage in forming a true estimate of ancient Mexican culture. The secret of the native records is unsolved, and it is very unlikely that the future will do anything in the way of elucidating them. Their number was very considerably reduced by the Spanish invaders, the ignorant destroy- ing from motives of superstitious terror, and the more educated out of religious fanaticism. Bishop Zumarraga's holocaust of hieroglyphic manuscripts at t> 14 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Tlatelolco has become famous, but there were doubtless many Zumarragas on a minor scale throughout the land. Grave doubts have been thrown by modem criticism on the strict veracity of our Spanish historians. Where numbers are in question they are hopelessly, if not always wilfully, inaccurate. It was very natural for the conquerors to exaggerate the glory of their discovery, and their accounts have led us into great misconceptions with regard to the extent and depth of the old Aztec civilization. The mental calibre of the Aztec was certainly not heavy. It is quite impossible to reconcile the rite of human sacriJ&ce, practised on a large scale in Mexico, at the time of the Spanish arrival, with the idea of an exalted degree of civiliza- tion. Cannibalism was also widely practised. We are able to judge for ourselves of the proficiency of the Mexican in many departments of mechanical industry. He was able to carry out great systems of irrigation by means of canals. The Spanish were filled with admiration at the splendid granaries in which the surplus corn was laid by for times of need. Agricul- ture, as was the case in many of the Old World civiliza- tions at which we have cast a glance in the foregoing pages, lay at the root of Aztec prosperity. The use of meat was rare, owing to the absence of all but small animals. The buildings with which the entire country is strewn have always ofi'ered food for speculation to the explorer. Numerous as we may imagine the population to have been, the existing ruins are out of all pro- portion to the number of inhabitants, and even to this day many a temple and palace lies unknown amid ECONOMIC SUCCESS 15 the dense tropical forest-growth, just as it was left by the destroying hand of the Spaniard. Within the last two years Professor Maler's adventurous journey up the Usumatsintla led to the rediscovery of the ancient city of Yaxchilan, which is being gradually washed away by the swift stream of the passing river. It is very hard to say why the Mexican should have been seized by such an overmastering passion for stone construction when abundant timber lay ready to his hand. The toil of quarrying immense masses of stone without iron implements of any description, and of thereafter transporting them for long distances, over uneven ground intersected with frequent watercourses, without the aid of any draught-animal, must have been immense. We cannot but admire the ingenuity with which the great calendar stone of black porphyry, weighing some fifty tons, was brought many miles from its original home into Tezcuco. The buildings, how- ever, show no great progress in architecture. In Yucatan the palaces are windowless, the doors serving both for light and ventilation. The rude geometrical designs which decorate the exterior are as barbaric in their conception as in their execution. The Mexican was never able to sculpture a human figure which was not grotesque. Much skill is shown by the Aztec in the working of metals ; some of his woven tissues have been pro- nounced as fine as any found in Egypt, while in the gaudy feather-work, which so struck the Spanish fancy, he was a past master. But in spite of all the cunning shown in handicraft, the Mexican never attained any intellectual heights. The Aztec hieroglyphs, to which 16 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS we shall have occasion to recur, were but a small advance upon the woodmen's signs employed by the Redskin, and Aztec astronomy did not extend beyond a certain number of chronological observations. We do not know upon what path Aztec culture was bound when the Spanish invasion broke so rudely upon its peace. Whether it would in the course of ages have risen to greater things, or whether it was already on the high-road to decline, is a question no longer in our power to answer. All we know is that the Aztec's civilization had only succeeded to a yet older civiliza- tion, wrenched by the right of might from the Toltecs, whose life of material ease had rendered them incapable of resistance against the wilder races of the north. The earlier expeditions of Francisco Pizarro to Peru during the fourth decade of the sixteenth century revealed another State rivalling even Mexico in wealth and prosperity, but presenting many striking features of similarity with Aztec institutions. Agriculture i^^fche^ foundation of their success^ and though the^ land is not in itself so favourable to husband^^^ it is rendered prol ific by^immense engineering enterprise. By proper irriga- tion the sandy soil of both valley and sierra could be made cultivable, and no effort was neglected to procure " the necessary water. The mountain lakes were tapped, 1 and stone aqueducts were built to carry their waters many hundred miles over hill and valley. The hillsides, • in themselves far too precipitous to bear plantations, I and drained by surface water, had to be cut into i terraces and faced with stone. In many instances I where the soil had been washed away new earth was I supplied, and carefully fostered into fertility by loads of ECONOMIC SUCCESS 17 guano brought from islands along the coast. Every- thing was done by the hand of man ; draught-animals there were none, and the llama as a beast of burden was not capable of carrying heavy loads, and was, more- over, too precious for other purposes to be frequently employed. In sandy valleys whole acres were cleared of the superficial arid stratum, and the subsoil, by dint of fish manure, brought under cultivation. Each clearing had to be walled in to keep off the encroaching sand- drifts, and the unfertile detritus to be removed frequently attained a depth of twenty feet. All these immense works were allowed to fall into ruin under the Spanish regime, but enough remains to bear witness to the indefatigable industry of the ancient Peruvian agri- culturist. The Peruvian was, however, yet lower in the intel- lectual scale than the Mexican. The peculiar polity of the State, while ensuring a certain degree of material welfare, and visiting idleness with heavy penalties, was absolutely opposed to individual enterprise. The country, though governed on humane principles, was farmed entirely in the interests of the governing classes, who were exempt from all taxation, the weight of which fell upon the labouring masses. Caste was rigidly maintained. We may query whether this system of afiairs was always accepted without murmur by those subjected to it ; but so excellent was the police organi- zation maintained by the Incas that resistance on a small scale was impossible. C-reat_highway;s radiated from Cuzco, the^apital, in all dir ections. These roads, paved, culverted at regular intervals,"sEaded with trees, supplied with drinking-water, and dotted with barracks 18 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS and post-houses, made it possible to concentrate troops in any discontented region with incredible swiftness. From Cuzco to Quito the road was unbroken for fifteen hundred miles, the narrower ravines were spanned by stone bridges, and where the valleys were broader the road was carried over strong suspension bridges, built of planks and ropes. Peruvian architecture carries us back to Egypt. The buildings are massive, with walls immensely thick, calculated, no doubt, to resist the frequent earthquakes with which the country is visited. The great blocks of stone are fitted together with nicety, but there is the same lack of originality in the construction as marked the Mexican palaces. The same gloom reigned in the interior, unlit by windows, and the difierent chambers had no means of intercommuni- cation. It is singular that the Peruvians, living in a land rich in iron, should never have discovered its uses. Their implements were either stone or copper alloyed with tin. Peruvian textile fabrics were unrivalled, and they displayed especial skill in weaving the most delicate tissues from llama wool. These fabrics were dyed in brilliant colours, or bright feathers were worked between the threads, as was done in Mexico. We have advanced ample proofs of the material opulence of ancient Peru. It remains to show how insignificant in comparison with their technical cunning was the intellectual capacity of the inhabitants. There is much that is obscure in the lore of the quipu, or cord of coloured threads, by which the Peruvian endeavoured to compensate for ^e^want of a system of writing. The whole of the national adminis- tration was carried out by means of these cords ; ECONOMIC SUCCESS 19 taxation returns were forwarded to the capital, and all kinds of statistical reports were drawn up. We have stories told by early Spanish colonists, telling of the rapid manner in which the Peruvian was able to sum up his reckonings. But we cannot fail to see how primitive and inadequate a contrivance this must have been for communicating or recording abstract ideas. Consequently, Peruvian learning, such as i% was, must have been perpetuated exclusively by oral tradition. Garcilasso de la Vega, to whose " Commentarios Eeales," published at Lisbon in 1609, we owe a considerable amount of our information regarding Peruvian institu- tions at the time of the Spanish conquest, vouches for the existence of a quantity of Peruvian national poetry in which was recorded the history of the land, and he even goes so far as to translate for us a Peruvian ballad. He also claims that the Peruvians had developed a dramatic literature of no mean standing. Peruvian astronomy is so elementary as to be practically non- existent. Eecent discoveries by Professor Uhle in the Pisco valley have considerably enlarged the horizon of Peruvian history, and many interesting relics have been brought to light, dating probably from pre-Inca times. It is, however, scarcely likely that even more ample discoveries will essentially change our judgment on the civilization of the Peruvian Incas. CHAPTER II CENTRES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS Human progress, amongst white people, has historically started from a few centres, not one of which oflfered remarkable natural advantages to man. Man's efforts had to combat or supplement Nature. Those centres are : Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Florence, Paris, and London. Lifluence of the alphabet. It has been shown how diflBcult it is for intellectual gro^ress to take £lace_ in a jcountrj^^ where^ the natural conditions perimt of_the easy and rapid acq uisition of wealth, and some of the ensuing examples will go far to prove that accumulated hoards of riches are almost as potent a factor in the demoralization of man's nobler faculties and aspirations. We have seen how gre at states, whose opulence has bj^. foundedon agricultural^ success too easily won^haye failed to jaise 2£for them- sdyes_ anj jdeals in art, litera ture^, or even politics. Where nature has been over-profuse in her benefits, human initiative has been retarded, if not wholly blighted. The desire and capacity for all occupations which do not present an immediate prospect of gain are slackened, and instead of going about his own business, which is the formation of new ideals, man simply be- comes an extra wheel in the gigantic machinery of nature. Art, when it becomes the monopoly of a CENTRES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 21 limited but opulent governing class, instead of being the aim and object of national ambition, is doomed to early sterility. Art will never consent to become the luxury of those who can afford to pay, and the combined fortunes of a dozen industrial millionaires will do nothing towards inspiring a masterpiece. If over-opulence is fatal to man's intellectual advance, so is indigence. Poverty is not conducive to man's real progress. A nation whose every thought and action is absorbed in the winning of its daily sus- tenance cannot be expected to strike out any new paths of thought, or to conceive any original or exalted artistic ideals. There is^no instance of a^nomadic people having attained even to a moderately high grade of civilization ; and races which, if they have ceased from actual wander- ing, are still entirely occupied with the satisfaction of their immediate wants, remain stationary. The fact is too self-evident to demand any illustration. We should no more look for instruction in art from the Samoyedes of the Great Tundra, than we should expect to discover a Shakespeare among some itinerant horde of Sioux Indians. A certain degree of^copafort is essential to the development of a higher civilization. It is equally- essential that that degree of comfort should have been achieved by effort. We need the creation of a leisured class, in whose memory is still fresh the recollection of those steps by which they have passed to obtain social independence. A governing faction, whose immunity from the cares of everyday life is due to the " sweating " of a subservient population of peasants or fellaheen, will ever remain intellectually impotent. As we proceed we shall notice that almost every 22 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS step forward that man has made in art, science, or literature has started from some city-state. Such city- states do not appear to have existed among any of the great economically successful nations which we have noticed in the foregoing chapter. In almost all these countries the bulk of the population is distributed thickly throughout the country. It is impossible for the agricultural inhabitants to concentrate about a few points; they must dwell in close proximity to their land — that is, in villages. The cities of Egypt and the Carthaginian provinces, like those of Mexico and Peru, are the privilege of the wealthy dominant class ; they rarely contain any popular element, and certainly never boasted of anything approaching a bourgeoisie. In Egypt the great towns are either administrative centres, the seats of some great religious observance, or pleasure habitations of the rulers. The inhabitants are rulers or subjects, between whom there is nothing in common. The mechanics are necessarily grouped more or less into these centres for the better convenience of their task-masters. Such cities are essentially arti- ficial ; there is nothing natural in their formation. We have many instances, in Babylonia especially, of the arbitrary transfer of thousands of inhabitants from one point of the country to another, in order to meet with the requirements of a tyrannical government, or some- times merely to satisfy the personal whim of the sovereign. We shall endeavour to show how different was the case among the real intellectually progressive nations. It is due to no mere hazard that the centres from which the guiding ideas of modern humanity have radiated ^. .^ v-d «fc-*. a»'C'<«<^ CENTRES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 23 have little in their physical surroundings to recommend them. In every instance their inhabitants have either had immense natural difficulties to overcome, or, at least, great natural drawbacks to put up with. It is out of this constant wrestle with disadvantages that they have emerged with the temper of steel, and the hardened energy capable of carrying them irresistibljr ahmg^ the^ath^of the^^^^^ t^eirjife of struggles has helped th em^ to conceive. It is invariably in spite of Nature that they have made themselves a place in the world. The most important events and institutions of history have been, directly or indirectly, inaugurated by Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Florence, Paris, and London. No place in the world would seem less fitted to become a centre of intellectual activity than Jerusalem. Standing high upon a narrow and precipitous limestone plateau, ill-watered, and with only here and there a patch of green fertility in the neighbourhood, little oases just broad enough to support their own small communities, no town could appear more unlikely to become the heart of all the religious ideas of modern times. Jerusalem was the one bond of union which knit together the scattered units of Israel. Here they had their common sanctuary and their common God, under whose protection all the tribes fought. Israel was the centre of a ring of enemies, and all her history is the record of a continuous struggle against them. It is, first, the victory of Ehu over the Moabites, then of Barak over the Canaanites, of Gideon over the Midianites, of Jephthah over the Ammonites, and of Samson over the Philistines. It is after half a century (TL/iCs. ©--w^ 24 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS of varying struggle against the Philistines, under Saul (1055 (?) B.a) and David (1025(?) b.c.), that Hebrew ^ religious poetry, culminating in the Psalms, attained \ its glory. -' The physical conditions under which Greek civilization grew up are particularly suggestive of reflection. Some of the contrasts which we encounter within the narrow limits of Greece are also especially instructive. In Attica, Nature had not been lavish of her gifts ; but albeit nowhere spontaneous in her bounty, she is always ready to give intelligent labour its reward. Perhaps no country was^ever better fitted^ to_call forth m^^^^^^^ energies. The valleys and plains of Attica, as is so often the case in mountainous countries, are exceedingly fertile, but the lowlands of Marathon and Eleusis, however generous their crops, could never cope with the food demands of the capital. Attica was forbidden from the outset to become a great corn-producing country. Cattle raising on an extensive scale was equally out of the question. But the olive gardens were rich, and the vineyards productive ; both entail the application of considerable skill. Wine and oil are not the staff of life, and the Athenians very soon found it necessary to barter their surplus supply of these commodities against the more imperative neces- sities of every day. Their natural outlet was towards the sea, the only real communication by land opening into Boeotia, whose markets were already overstocked. The rudiments of commerce Athens, no doubt, acquired from Phoenician traders ; but the rise of Athenian greatness coincides with the decadence of Phoenician Tyre and Sidon, which had fallen to Assyria, and CENTRES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 25 Athenian ships soon took the place of their predecessors on the high seas. The Athenian who stood on the heights of the Acropolis of his beautiful town and scanned the wide view thence over the Saronic Gulf must have felt the call of the sea. The regular alter- nation of westerly morning winds, which would carry him in a few hours among the Cyclades, and the evening breeze from the eastward to bring him home again, simplified the difficulties of navigation. But Athens won nothing save at the cost of toil and struggle, although that struggle was not always of too severe a nature. Her rising prosperity led her to appreciate at their value many of the possibilities of the home country. The silver mines at Laurium, close to Athens, which found labour for 20,000 men in the days of Athenian greatness, were turned to account. Sugar was as yet unknown, and wine required the admixture of honey for its good keeping. The hives of Hymettus were another valuable asset in the island commerce. The estimates of the ancient population of Attica are practically valueless, so wide are the discrepancies between the figures advanced by even the most competent authorities, but in so small a compass there was probably rarely, in the old world, so great a diversity of pursuits. Athenian^ agriculture was necessarilxin the hands of small holders ; large slave- plantations remained unknown jeven in the days of decadence, jind slavery at Athens always retained a grea't deal of that patriarchal element which com- pensated to some extent for its evils. Athens never experienced those formidable revolts, even when she would have been too weak to stamp them out, which so 26 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS often threatened the very existence of Eome and^ Sparta. In Athens a loney of all cities, there was, in the public market-pla ce, an altar of Pity. The co-existence of men of so many interests in^o narrow a space (Attica is hardly the size of a small English county) cannot have failed to quicken the intelligence. On the Athenian agora (market-place) the common ground of the shepherd, farmer, and merchant, there must have been a constant give and take of ideas. Already the early Athenian's mental horizon must have been far wider than that of his fellow-beings in Egypt or Babylonia. Then, as Athenian vessels spread over the more distant seas, there must have been a constant influx of new conceptions. The foreigner was always tolerated in Athens, even fostered, and anything of value he may have brought from his native land among his intellectual baggage soon became absorbed into the general wealth of his adopted city, there to flourish and bear fruit. Caste restrictions^ were jmkno wn ; each^„ citizen was free to choose his own calling. No priest- craft existed to monopolize the intelligent thought of the nation. Rapidly prospering business drew capital into the country, and a class grew up which was not compelled to seek its subsistence by continual toil. They had mental cravings and higher aspirations to satisfy, and with what success they applied themselves to this task we shall see in the following chapters. As we turn away from Athens, from its port, the Peirseus, with its motley throng of traders and chaf- ferers from every quarter of the then known world, towards Boeotia, the contrast is striking. Here the CENTEES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 27 overflow of the Cephisus, recurring with the constant regularity of the Nile, has reproduced the condition of Egypt; ag^r icultural prosperity has drawn intellectual impotence in its tram, and throughout Greek history the Boeotian muses are unheard, save when the silence is broken by the voices of Hesiod and Pindar, the latter of whom could only sing beyond the stultifying atmo- sphere of his own land. In the moulding of Athenian destinies a yet more powerful agent was at work. On all sides Attica was open to attack. The hostility of the neighbouring countries, if not always active, needed but little to be- come so. Jealousy of the Athenian hegemony, envy of her affluence and of her colonial dominions, had taken a deep hold upon them. The allies of Athens were seldom loyal for long, and their friendship, based on interested motives, inspired but little confidence. They had con- templated with equanimity the devastation of Attica and the burning of Athens at the hands of the Persians (480 B.C.), little dreaming how soon she would rise with greater glory than ever from her ruins. The Persians were hardly disposed of, when Athens was plunged into wars at home, marked by the battles of Tanagra (457) and Coronea (447). During the long struggle of the Peloponnesian War the Athenian citizen was compelled to watch from the walls the wasting of his crops, until the almost annual inroads of his enemies gave place to the establishment of a permanent hostile garrison at Decelea, in Attica (413-404), within striking distance of the city gates. This constant exposure to danger, the mere fact that he must be constantly on the alert to ward off a sudden onslaught, did not allow the 28 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Athenian to sink into a condition of mental coma. It? was only by the exercise of all his ingenuity, the strain-^ ing of every nerve and muscle, that he could make up for the losses suffered at home. His enterprise abroad received new impulse. The sea must be kept open at all costs ; once the Bosphorus was closed and the Black Sea corn ships cut off, Athens must inevitably succumb. War^is the parent of all things^ oncesaidjerhaps the greatest of _ Greek _^^ and in that short apophthegm of Heraclitus there lies more of the secret of Greek intellectual success than in all the elucubra- tions of subsequent theorizers put together. Not only Athens, but almost every other Greek state of impor- tance, owed its all to the constant struggles in which it was involved. The enemy hammering at the city gates, no matter whether he was an Asiatic barbarian or fellow-Greek, caused every inhabitant of the state to feel to the full his citizen nationality and his own importance as a national unit. InJ^he^few y^ears_of jhe so-ca lled thirtyyears' jeace, which onl^ l5^*l^ frona 445-431, Athens reached those heights of axt and lett ers which have never been surpassed. Sophocles, the great dramatist, took part in the dances offered to the gods for the immense victory over the Persians at Salamis. He himself bore a hand in carrying out the Periclean policy, and in 443-442 filled the important office of Hellenotamias, being thus closely associated with Athenian colonial ideas. Euripides, the dramatist, was born on the day of the victory of Salamis (480), and was brought up amid fresh memories of the Persian war ; he saw the fall of Themistocles, lived through the years when Pericles and Cimon were battling for political (Z CENTEES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 29 supremacy, and went through all the hope and despair of the Poloponnesian War. ^schylus, the first of the great Athenian dramatists, fought at Salamis. Some of the greatest masterpieces of Athenian drama were staged when the war was at its height. The OEdipus Coloneus appeared about 430 B.C., the Philoctetes in 409 B.C., and the Orestes of Euripides in 408. The life of Athens was peculiarly calculated to encourage intel- lectual activity. The distinction between rich and poor raised up no social barrier, and the needy were always welcomed by their more fortunate countrymen if they only displayed some slight signs of intelligence. From morning to night everybody was out of doors, and it was in the street and public places that there was a constant interchange of ideas. The dialogues of Plato show how keen was speculation in every department, how fervent was the thirst for knowledge. These were the times when Protagoras and Gorgias came to Athens and held debates with Socrates, the culminating figure of the age of Pericles. We shall have occasion to speak later of the great artistic works with which Athens was filled at this time. Could we look back three hundred years and see the spot on which Eome now stands, there would be little in the sight which would lead us to suspect that we were contemplating the future capital of the world. A low group of hills, round which the yellow Tiber sweeps with a bend some fifteen miles before reaching the sea, and about their foot a sodden swamp from which the fever-laden miasma cannot have failed to work havoc in the ranks of the early settlers. Such is no site to allure the wanderer seeking for a home, 30 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS and we can well imagine that the primitive inhabitant did not take up his abode thereon as the outcome of his own untrammelled choice. For the lowlander, harried from the plains by the forays of his predatory neighbours, it is an ideal haven of refuge to which to fly in stress of need, and an ideal coign of vantage, whence his eye might scan the undulating campagna, and from which he could swoop down to exact reprisals. The origin of Rome is wrapped about in the same fog of uncertainties which veils the beginnings of Athens, yet we cannot doubt that the Eternal City was of humble parentage. In the passion for discipline and the stern law which she created, can we not yet discern the strict and severe order which had to crush out all dissension in a banditti fastness ? Why seek to disprove the legend which tells of the asylum opened on the Palatine Hill to harbour the persecuted stranger, whether innocent or criminal ? Already in the prehistoric days Rome was building up those ideals which were to make her mistress of the Western world. We shall see how different were her ideals from those which animated the cities of Greece. Unfavourable as the position at first glance might appear to be, it yet contained the elements of success. As the Greek colonists along the western and southern Italian coasts began to extend their relations into their hinterland, carrying their products into Etruria, the main trade-route would naturally seek to cross the Tiber somewhere near Rome. We know the importance which attached to bridge-building among the ancient Romans ; the name has survived in the pontifical title, if the thought thereof has been lost. Caravans of CENTEES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 31 merchandise must have been unceasingly on the come and go across the Pons Sublicius on their way to and from Caere, the commercial city of Etruria. The in- hospitable sea-coast would render the land route prefer- able to any other, even should it be more costly. Later, no doubt, light vessels would adventure them- selves across the sand-bar of Ostia and up the Tiber. A non-peasant population, principally aliens, soon settled at Rome. The increasing opulence of Rome, and her cramped position, hemmed in by a number of Latin cities, whose hostility was now embittered by jealousy, initiated the struggle which made her the mistress of Italy. Thenceforth the intervals of peace were to be few and far between. Already Rome had grasped her ideal of Empire-building, and was beginning to assimi- late her conquests with a completeness and rapidity which is stupendous. In . the short interval between the Italian wars and the opening of the struggle against Carthage, every- thing that we regard as essentially Roman is in full development. The foundations of Roman law were laid which were to remain unshaken till this very day ; ^e great colonizing policy^ far-seeing^ severe when severity was^ called for, and mild when expedient, was tested and found good. In art, letters, and science Rome never approached Greece. In all these spheres of thought the Roman was unimaginative. Roman art must be sought in her great roads of morticed stone, in adamantine buildings, and, above all, in the arch which Rome created, if not for beauty, yet for utility. Roman art must be sought for in her laws and institutions ; here it is that the vigour and initiative of the Roman mind is felt. 32 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Eome did not remain insensible to the higher, if not always practical, flights of human intellect. Greek art was studied and assimilated with fervour, but never carried further. We have Eoman statues which are equal to the Greek in lightness of touch and technical execution, but the inspiration is Greek. It is imitation, not originality. No doubt the encounter with Greek art, which had reached perfection before Eome had emerged from barbarism, must have had a paralyzing effect upon the would-be Eoman artist. Latin literature, which was gradually beginning to flow slowly in channels of its own, is parched up at the outset, and Greek letters take its place. Eome never developed a middle class in the sense that such a class existed in Greece. The early Jnflux of slave labour and the innate ^contempt of the Eoman for handicraft had^ much to do with the absence of a l)ou rgeoisi e j^ioi^eTy ^ and we have seen that it is from this class that art has always sprung. A slave-born art is impossible. It is a striking fact that, with barely an exception, not one of the names of honour in the annals of Eoman literature is that of a native Eoman. All her authors, except Caesar and Lucretius, are provincials, so that we may with justice speak rather of a Latin than a Eoman literature. The first Latin literary works are those of a Greek slave transplanted to Eome after the capture of Tarentum. But Eome was impatient of unofiicial initiative. The great personalities of early Eome are her magis- trates, her consuls, her praetors, her quaestors. What particular family name that magistrate may have borne is not material. Such a man was consul; not a particular CENTRES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 33 member of a particular gens^ however distinguished that gens might be. He impersonated some state prerogative, and with that his own initiative was merged. Outside these state personalities, individuality wa^ not encouraged. It wasl&etter for the Eoman burgess to be as like his fellow-burgess as possible. Rome was organized upon a military system which shows in striking contrast with that of Greece, where all is overflowing with exuberant vitality coming from unofl&cial or private sources. Florence is the chief centre from which the blaze of the Renaissance radiated over all Europe, yet the physical surroundings of the city do not mark her out as destined to play the principal rdle in the regenera- tion of humanity. She was, indeed, little indebted to nature. Her beautiful position on the Arno, backed by the Apennines, lent lustre to her glory, but did little in helping her to acquire pre-eminence. The plains were no doubt fertile, but her inhabitants never turned the soil to full account, and when some of the richer capitalists, in the days of the city's incipient decline, invested their money in land and essayed farming on a considerable scale, the enterprise either ended in failure or was early abandoned. Florence did not enjoy the sanitary advantages of modern times ; malaria, miliary fever, typhoid did not encourage the citizen to settle in the plains rather than on the more salubrious heights of Fiesole. The plague visited Florence in 1347 with even more disastrous effect than other towns of Northern Italy. Two-thirds of the inhabitants are estimated to have perished. A famous Florentine doctor of the eighteenth century, T. Targioni Tozetti, D 34 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS expresses his sorrow, from the health point of view, that the design of destroying Florence (in 1760) was not carried into effect, and the inhabitants were not transplanted to Empoli. The mean temperature is exceedingly high and liable to sudden and extreme variations. The Florentine has not the sturdy build of the Siennese or Milanese. Well on into the beginning of the Middle Ages the historical rdle of Florence was insignificant. Under the Eoman Empire, Fiesole (Fsesulse) was the only place of importance. After the fall of Eome the route from north to south changed. The Eoman had been accustomed to pass by way of Ancona, but in the Middle Ages the armies of invasion crossed the Apennines at Florence and marched by way of Siena and Viterbo upon Eome. The geographical position of Florence became in consequence one of first-rate importance. As a commercial centre its development was rapid. The continual going and coming of foreigners of many nations suggested to the Florentine new vistas of business ambition. He originated new systems of busi- ness methods, and began to feel the force of capital and to inaugurate a new era thereby in industrial production. The opulence to which Florence rose in a very short space of time could not but raise her a swarm of foes, while she herself was not insensible to the desire of extending her power at the expense of her economic rivals. Hence these interminable struggles with Pisa, with Lucca, with Siena, Arezzo, San Miniato and Fiesole. Many points of resemblance with Athenian history will at once strike the most casual observer. The banditti of the neighbouring regions had to be CENTRES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 35 disciplined by force and compelled to take up their abode in Florence. Hardly for a year together was the city quit of intestine dissensions. At one time it was the massacre of the Paterini (1240), at another the secular struggle of Guelph against Ghibelline. The predominant faction drives its rival into exile, until the vanquished, gathering forces abroad, find means of re-establishing themselves and reversing the process. Artisan riots, often very serious afi*airs like that of the Ciompi (1378), are not of rare occurrence. We can imagine what the everyday life of Florence must have been when eleven years of comparative tranquillity are considered as something abnormal (1379-1390). The struggles of Guelph and Ghibelline attained their maximum of fury during the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ; yet it was precisely at this, epoch that Florence stood at the height of artistic glory. Dante took part in several expeditions against the Ghibellines of Pisa, Arezzo, and Bologna. His gallantry at the battle of Campaldino (1289), in which the Arezzo Ghibellines were crushed, was con- spicuous, and he bore himself with valour at the assault of Caprona (1290), when that city was wrested from Pisa. The quarrels of the Guelphs among themselves, the struggle of the Bianchi against the Neri, drove him abroad (1302). It is impossible to describe in detail the part played by many another great Florentine in the fortunes of his mother city, but let dates speak for themselves. Cimabue the painter lived from 1240 to 1302; Giotto the painter (1276-1336) was the friend of Dante, w^ho devotes several stanzas of the Divina 36 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Commedia to his praises ; not to mention many others who belong to this period. In Florence feudal ideas of nobility met with little respect. Work was the order of the day, and enterprise in business brought esteem and honour. Growing affluence created a leisured bourgeoisie. Of this class came Boccaccio, who was the son of a merchant, and was himself put to work in counting-houses at Florence, Naples, and Paris. And how many another great man of the Florentine school of art and letters went through the same training. It was under free institutions that Florence attained the maximum of her grandeur. The impulse of those times still produced many great men under the Medici. We need only mention Lionardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Michael Angelo, but from that time the glory of Florence began to wane. Of Paris little need be said, save that its position was none of the most favourable for the founding of a great city. Throughout the early Middle Ages Paris remained a town of comparatively small importance, and it was not until the royal power began to assert itself over the surrounding feudal nobility that the city began to raise its head. Henceforth Paris was to share the good or evil fortune of the King of France, and it is when the monarchical power, after long years of strife, succeeded in establishing its supreme right, that Paris became the focus of French thought and civilization. Naturally Paris is not at all the centre of France, the true central point lying in the neighbourhood of Bourges. One salient mark of intellectual inferiority character- izes almost every one of the nations of whose material success we spoke in the last chapter. The want of an CENTRES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 37 alphabetical system of writing was as fatal to their intellectual progress as its absence was the stamp of their intellectual stagnation. Of all these nations, the Egyptians came nearest to a complete phonetic system, and it appears almost inconceivable that they should have hovered for thousands of years upon the brink of that momentous discovery without ever achieving it. They were within a step of realizing an alphabet, but that step they were never able to make. The hiero- glyphic script, which shows but little advance through all the known periods, was even in its highest develop- ment only a conglomeration of ideographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements. The difficulties which are entailed in mastering so complicated a contrivance must have always caused it to remain the prerogative of an extremely limited section of the community, and it was consequently wholly unavailable as a medium of general culture. Many of the symbols which we employ to-day are no doubt descendants, battered out of all shape and recognition by the wear and tear of centuries, of some of the ancient ideograms of Egypt and Chaldaea. The erudite labours of German philologists have succeeded in establishing in many instances a practically unbroken genealogical tree of our modern characters, but this philological method of research is liable to lead to serious misapprehensions. It is quite unjustifiable to conclude that, because one or two of the signs are Egyptian, therefore the alphabet was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Whence the symbols were borrowed is absolutely immaterial. The fact remains that the Egyptian was never able thoroughly to realize the restricted number of sounds in speech. He was 38 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS quite unable to grasp that the whole gamut of ele- mentary sounds which his tongue articulated did not outnumber thirty at the most. This brilliant generali- zation was to be made by the Phoenicians, and their traditional claim to this high honour has never been seriously shaken, in spite of the learned disquisitions of Dr. Hugo Winckler. A homely comparison will perhaps help to enforce the absurdity of ascribing the invention of the alphabet to the Egyptians. It is well known that prisoners in convict establishments, no matter of what country, are able to communicate with one another by a series of preconcerted tapping signals. For instance, any arbitrary combination of short and long raps, such as ^ ^ - ", might express some particular meaning according to pre-arranged plan. It would be, however, quite ridiculous to conclude from this that our convict was the originator of the Morse system of electric telegraphy, because in that system, as is well known, letters are signalled in the same manner by a succession of long or short raps. It would be difficult to overrate the importance of the Phoenician discovery. At one bound man was given the most perfect instrument for recording his thought. The Egyptians must have had every oppor- tunity of profiting by the Phoenician invention, but the extent to which conservatism and conventionalism had taken hold of them is shown by the fact that they never adopted a truly alphabetical writing. Egyptian hiero- glyphs were, however, an immeasurable advance upon cuneiform writing, and in comparison with both the Mexican picture records were absolutely primitive. We have nothing to show that the Mexican had ever CENTRES OF NATIONAL SUCCESS 39 reached even the first stage of phonetic writing. His pictures bore an arbitrary and conventional ideographic sense which was in no way related to the sound. The practice of such a contrivance necessitated years of labour with an excellent memory to boot, and had not very much to recommend it above oral tradition. Many great authorities assert that it would be impossible to adapt any alphabetical system to the requirements of Chinese ; if that is the case, the Chinese nation has an insuperable barrier in the way of its future progress. A system of writing which entails not only a good memory and skilful hand, but also compels a man to spend the best years, or at least the most receptive years, of his life in its acquisition, can never serve as the medium of a high culture. It need hardly be men- tioned that the quipu or Peruvian thread writing, if writing it may be called, though its secret has been lost, can have been little better than a memoria technica. CHAPTER III SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM. — I Some nations succeed in bringing a greater or lesser number of people under their rule. Such are the Persians, the Mongols, the Macedonians, the Romans. Distinction between these nations : (a) some (examples) mere brute conquerors, establishing tyrannies, not states ; (6) others (examples) establishing not mere conquests, but states proper. The next variety of success coming under our consider- ation is political, or rather the success experienced by some nations in bringing a lesser or greater number of other nations under their dominion. When the number of nations subdued is large, or when the territory acquired is extensive, it is generally customary to give these conquests the title of Empire. We shall have occasion to observe that empires have differed widely not only in quantity but in quality, and with this object we shall select some of the most typical examples of empire-building, it being impossible within so narrow a compass to enter into exhaustive descriptions of all the imperial states which have risen into eminence and fallen into decline during the world's history. The selection of a few salient types cannot fail to be more profitable and instructive. At the very outset we cannot help being profoundly SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 41 struck by certain general features which invariably characterize the growth of these empires, and, amongst other things, we cannot help wondering at the facility and comparative rapidity with which these vast territorial acquisitions have been accumulated when compared with the slow and painful steps by which the governing nation has often attained its own national unity. It has been a matter of far greater difficulty to weld together a few small but highly individualized tribes or nations, such, for instance, as constitute the countries of modern Europe, than to pile together an immense agglomeration of land, peopled by races whose con- science of their national entity is either undeveloped or degenerated. The whole of the Roman Emp ire was constructed within the short space of a couple of centuries, whilst the nnitj of modern Italy has only been reached after fifteen centuries of struggle, and at the price of untold misery and J3loodsh^. When we know the history of one Oriental dynasty, a slight change of names will allow us to reconstruct the history of any other with almost mathematical precision. In every case some warlike, courageous chief puts himself at the head of a needy but no less coura- geous tribe, and hurls himself against the already decadent structure of the empire to which he is nominally a subject. The empire promptly collapses, aad the insurgent chieftain possesses himself of the inheritance of his sometime masters, and becomes the founder of a new empire, which in its turn is doomed to a similar end. Such is the history of Cyrus and of the rise of the Persian dominion. Of the early doings 42 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS of Cyrus we know but little, save that at the head of the malcontent Persians, who chafed under the yoke of the Medes, he defeated these latter in a couple of battles, and possessed himself of the Medic Empire (544). Carried on by the impetus of his success, he proceeded next to demolish the kingdom of Lydia. Croesus was beaten in the Thymbrsean plains and taken alive at Sardis (544), Babylon was the next to fall (538), and with it all its possessions passed under Persian rule. Macedonia was far behind the rest of Greece in point of view of intellectual culture, and, politically speaking, the part played by the country is insignificant down to the time of King Philip 11. , in the fourth century B.C. It was through the personality of Philip alone that Macedonia came to the forefront of Hellenic afiairs. In a short reign of twenty-three years, by dint of sheer political genius, he raised his country to the position of arbiter, or rather dictator, over the whole of Greece, with the exception of Sparta. As Philip had possessed political ability of the first order, his son Alexander had pre-eminent military talent, and we shall see that, as the regeneration of Macedonia was entirely the personal achievement of Philip, so the conquest of a vast oriental dominion by Alexander was exclusively the outcome of that monarch's individual ambition. Alexander is in no way a personification of Greek or Macedonian aspirations. Philip had grasped one fact of immeasurable impor- tance, and upon that fact he had based the whole of his far-reaching policy. This fact was the absolute incapability of the Greek states for concerted action. The grandiose raid of the ten thousand Greeks right into SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 43 the heart of the Persian dominions had revealed the impotence of the Persian Empire. This was the lesson which Alexander took to heart. It is not at all in- credible that Philip may have conceived the plan of overthrowing the power of Persia. At all events, Alexander had learnt the lesson well before he had reached his twentieth year. After disposing of a few insurrectionary movements at home, he hastened to put his plan to the test. In little more than twelve years Alexander had built up an empire in which the domin- ions of Persia were only the major part. Leaving Pella in the spring of 334, at the head of an army of 30,000 infantry and 5000 cavalry, Alex- ander marched by way of Thrace and the Chersonese to the Hellespont, which he crossed at Eleontes. Thence the route lay along the coast of Asia Minor, via Abydos and Lampsacus. The Persian army which sought to dispute his passage of the Granicus was utterly defeated (May or June, 334) in the battle of that name. In two years the whole of Asia Minor, as far as Cappadocia and Cilicia, lay at the feet of Alexander, and he was in a position to push forward. The Persians had again occupied an important strategic point, where the road lay squeezed between mountain and sea at Issus. This time the Persian army, reinforced by Greek mercenaries, who alone considerably outnumbered the force of Alexander, was commanded by the Persian King Darius in person. It was again routed (October, 333), and Alexander's road lay clear into Syria and Phoenicia. Tyre fell after a desperate resistance of seven months ; the siege of Gaza occupied two more months (November, 332) ; and 44 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Alexander, after thus mastering Palestine, was enabled to proceed to the annexation of Egypt, which oflfered no great difficulties. At this time took place the foundation of Alexandria. On his return from Egypt, and having, by the conquest of Western Asia, assured his base and communications, Alexander turned to the heart of the Persian Empire. Not far from Nineveh, at Gaugamela, he again encountered Darius at the head of overwhelming numbers. Alexanders consummate strategy and disciplined troops once more secured him a crushing victory (October 1, 331), and Darius fled to the mountains, to be butchered by the revolted satrap Bessus. Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, next fell to the conqueror, and the latter city was burnt to the ground. Alexander, moving with an incredible rapidity, secured all the provinces of the Persian Empire from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. He penetrated into the depths of Russian Turkestan, where he founded Alexandria Eschate. By this time the mutinous atti- tude of the troops was growing more and more menac- ing ; but Alexander, still hankering for fresh conquests, pushed on towards India. On the Indus he defeated King Porus, the ruler of a great kingdom occupying what is now known as the Punjaub. Alexander was now bent on reaching the Ganges, and the Sutlej was already behind him, when his men categorically declined to move a step further, and he was compelled, bitterly unwilling, to retire to the delta of the Indus (325), whence half his army were shipped by sea to the mouth of the Tigris, while he himself returned by land to Babylon. In the early summer of 323 Alexander fell a victim SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 45 to an attack of fever, and his plans of fresh conquest perished with him ; and as he left no successor, the empire which he had built up fell a prey to internal dissension, and in no long time collapsed. It is a widely prevalent opinion that to Alexander is due the Hellenization of Asia, so far as Hellenization ever did lay hold of Asia. To Alexander also have been attributed, on what authority it is difficult to divine, the most elaborate projects of interior adminis- tration. It would be hard to find in the life of Alexander anything that could justify us in the hypo- thesis that he was contemplating anything like an organized government of his unwieldy dominions. Had he survived, we can only suppose that he would have endeavoured to indefinitely extend the sphere of his conquests. At the moment of his death he was pre- paring for the subjugation of Arabia, and, from his private correspondence with Crater us, we learn that he had really conceived the ideal of universal dominion. It seems most unlikely that he would have materially interfered with the old system of things which had existed under the Persian rule, except in so far as his iron hand would have ensured him a greater degree of respect and obedience upon the part of the frequently too independent satraps. Alexander regarded his newly acquired possessions as important only so long as they were capable of supplying him with fresh treasures of money and fresh bodies of recruits wherewith to prosecute his grandiose designs. His whole govern- ment was an efficient tax-levying machine. It does not appear that Alexander was any fervent admirer of Hellenic institutions, and we have no reason 46 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS to suppose that lie was at all set upon introducing such institutions into Eastern dominions. He, on the con- trary, assumed oriental habits of life himself, and, as far as we can see, endeavoured to induce his principal oflEicers to follow suit. On the authority of Plutarch, we learn that Alexander consulted Aristotle upon the best methods to follow in colonizing his new empire; but this was, no doubt, early in his career, as we know the deep hatred which he conceived for Aristotle later in life. Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between the Roman conception of empire building and the achievements of Alexander the Great, hi^ the forma- tion of^he Eoman Em^ireJndJviduaJ^^^^^^ had very little share ; Rome was fortunate from time to time in the possession of military genius of the first order ; but the Roman dominions continued to extend with amazing rapidity, no matter who was at the head of the Roman armies. No country has ever carried out an imperial ambition with such thoroughness, for in the Roman Empire our admiration is not excited by the marvellous strategic combinations^ by which it was acg[uired, so much as by the rapidity with which the newly won provinces were absorbed_and Romanized. The Roman provincial very soon became more Roman than if he had been born within the circle of the seven hills. All the great empires of the East have suc- cumbed, leaving scarcely a trace upon the countries which they embrace. The Eoman language is still spoken from the iBlack Sea to the Atlantic, and all the invasions of barbaric hordes, Slav, Teutonic, or Turanian, have not succeeded in materially reducing its domain. SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 47 Surely it is a striking fact that the Greek, who was intellectually far and away the superior of the Roman, has not succeeded in imposing his tongue upon a single non -Hellenic nation, while Spain within the second century of its conquest was adding such names as Seneca, Lucan, Martial, and Pomponius Mela, to the list of Eoman writers. We cannot explain Roman success by the superior military organization of the Roman army. As a matter of historic fact, every one nation of antiquity had the honour and glory of having signally defeated Roman armies in more than one sanguinary battle. We should far rather seek a solution of the problem in the history of the peoples which Rome had overcome. Much light will be shed upon the subject if we compare the position of the Romans as conquerors of Europe and Asia with that of the English invaders of India. In very many countries which the Romans absorbed there was, after 149 B.C., no attempt at really serious op- position. The inhabitants had become nationally ^effete after centuries of struggle for independence followed by a period of pressing and tyrannical misrule. Except in Gaul, which gave serious trouble, but was unable to resist from want of any stable unity, the Roman dominion succeeded to some previous foreign rule. Thus Sicily had been finally enervated by the Punic occupation ; when the Carthaginians were turned out, the country showed no desire to regain inde- pendence. Its virility had been stamped out, and the land, no doubt, in great degree depopulated. It, at all events, became a Roman province without demur. The same may be said of the Asiatic dominions of 48 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Eome, except Pontus, under its heroic King Mithri- dates, of those in Carthaginian Spain, in Macedonia, after some serious resistance, and finally in Africa. The resisting power of the native had spent itself in vain attempts to throw ofi* the yoke of his foreign task- masters ; when, by foreign intervention, the taskmaster was finally thrown down, the native was already too far gone to reassert himself. As he would fight to no good purpose for his master, so he would not fight to recover his own autonomy. Rome's peculiar good fortune was that she was able to avail herself of precisely the moment when all these nations had been reduced to this condition of efi'eteness. Surely we have another striking proof of the state of the enervation of these people in the fact that, under the whole long period of comparatively beneficent rule which they enjoyed under Eoman government, not one of them developed above the dead level of mediocrity. It is, moreover, quite out of the question that Rome should ever have succeeded in keeping down the immense population of her empire, however superior may have been her military system. The Roman troops of occupation were but as a drop in the ocean among the native inhabitants, and those troops were continually engaged in border-wars among the tribes, which were always endeavouring to overstep the boundaries of the empire. In these little afiairs Roman reverses were anything but exceptional ; yet the subject people never made use of these moments of stress and trouble to strike a blow for themselves. A map of the military organization of the empire at the end of the first century a.d. would show nearly all the legions massed in the frontier SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 49 states. The whole of Spain requires but one legion ; in Gaul, south of Paris, there is not a Roman soldier, but all along the Rhine and Danube, one might say, with little exaggeration, that the garrisons are within hail of one another. The reader cannot fail to be struck by the remarkable similarity of affairs in modern India. Here, too, the English rule established itself with the greatest facility in the seat of the Moghul emperors. The native did not resist, and has seldom risen, and the famous mutiny itself, rich as it may be in dramatic and heroic incidents, did not really entail any immense exertions to blot it out. Compare the number of troops (450,000 British) necessary for the pacification of the small Dutch republics of South Africa, and of those which were requisite to quell the Indian mutiny (125,000 British only). In India the population has lost its vitality, and in India the distri- bution of military force is chiefly towards the north- west frontier. A reverse in the frontier campaigns is not reflected by an outbreak in the rear of the British line of defence. We leave the reader to think out in greater detail the striking points of coincidence with which the above comparison teems. We have already had occasion to show the principal steps by which Rome achieved the subjugation of Italy. The era of her territorial expansion and foreign con- quests begins with the close of the first Punic war (264 -241 B.C.). Sicily was now Roman. The victors, no longer fearing resistance on the part of the Carthaginians, who were exhausted and, moreover, in great difficulties on account of the mutiny of their mercenary troops, made use of the most flimsy pretext for seizing Sardinia E 50 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS and Corsica (238); Demetrius of Pharus and Queen Teuta of Scodra (in Dalmatia) were the next to be attacked. These two sovereigns had been oppressing a number of Greek cities along the lUyrian coast, which finally appealed to Eome and were taken under her protectorate (229-219 B.C.), while the realms of Deme- trius were annexed. From 225-222 the Gauls of the Po valley (Boii and Insubri) were brought into obedience, although their final pacification was yet to be the work of years. The Koman acquisition during the war with Hannibal (218-201) were of far greater importance. Syracuse, which had been imprudent enough to fight in the Carthaginian rank, was conquered. All Punic possessions in Spain, and all their island dominions between Sicily and Spain, were surrendered wholesale to Eome. The definitive subjugation of North Spain cost the Romans another seventy years of hard fighting against the wild Celtiberian guerillas. In 197 B.C. King Philip of Macedonia was compelled to make large territorial concessions, which the Eomans, however, did not add to the Empire, warned as they were by their Spanish experience of the cost and unprofitability of militarily occupying a broken, mountainous country. The same policy was observed in 190, when Antiochus was forced to cede all his lands west of the Taurus. The Eomans divided them among their friends and allies of Pergamum and Ehodes. Macedonia again gave trouble from 171 to 168, when it was finally crushed and partitioned out into four confederate republics, the inhabitants at the same time undergoing disarmament and being constrained to pay tribute. It was not until after the insurrection of 146 B.C. that the SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 51 Romans saw that if Macedonia was to be held at all it must be held as a Roman province. The same years which witnessed the incorporation of Macedonia and Achaia beheld the fall of Carthage after a heroic defence of three years. Rome thus acquired her great Province of Africa. The Celtiberians who had struggled against sub- jection under the brave chieftainship of Viriathus, who fell a victim to Roman treachery and was assassinated, were finally defeated in 133 at Numantia, and Spain was thus Roman except the north-west corner of Lusi- tania and Galicia. Attains, King of Pergamum, had received the lion's share of the spoil when King Antiochus had been crushed by the Romans at Chseronea (191) and Magnesia (189). In the same years that Numantia fell, Attains died, bequeathing all his dominions, for want of heirs of his body, to the Roman Senate. The Romans, who were still opposed to extending their dominions beyond their then bounds, would not accept the legacy in its entirety. Several of the Pergamean provinces were abandoned to native sovereigns, the Romans only occupying the coast district, Thrace, Mysia, Lydia, and Caria, which latter country had for some time enjoyed a quasi-indepen- dence. The Romans were thus in possession of con- siderable territories at either end of the Mediterranean, but the connecting links were missing, and their dominion was necessarily dependent upon their mari- time supremacy. The Romans, launched now upon a career of imperial policy, were compelled, from mere self-preservation, to consolidate their possessions. Called to the aid of the Marseillais, who were with 52 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS difficulty holding their ground against Celts of the Khone Valley, the Eomans, after defeating the aggres- sors in 121, established themselves all along the seaboard, and founded two important colonies — Narbo- (Narbonne) and Aquae Sextia (Aix-en-Provence). Spain was then connected with Italy by the via Emilia. The power of Eome at sea was seriously jeopardized by the growth of piracy, and buccaneers made frequent and unavenged descents upon the Eoman watering- places in the Campania. M. Antonius, who was entrusted (103) with the suppression of this nuisance, added Pamphilia, Pisidia, and Phrygia to the Eoman possessions in Asia Minor. Further legacies brought Eome the Cyrenaica (96), and Bythynia in 74, but this latter bequest entailed a considerable war with King Mithridates. The Eoman sufi'ered many severe reverses until the campaign was entrusted to Pompeius, the conqueror of Cilicia (fo7). Mithridates, after a severe defeat near Sinope, fled to the Caucasus, where, in despair, he committed suicide. The whole of the dead monarch's realms, save Armenia, fell to Eome, which thus acquired Paphlagonia, Syria, and Palestine. Meanwhile Crete had been occupied (^7) by Metellus, and Cyprus was taken in 58 by Cato. The already enormous territory of Eome was in the next few years doubled by the conquests of Csesar in Spain and Gaul. In Spain the whole of the western coast was brought into subjection, and in eight years (58-51) Gaul as far as the Ehine was added to the Eoman Empire. Marseilles, which had served the enemy, was stripped of the major part of her posses- sions, and Numidia in Africa was likewise reduced. SUCCESS IN IMPEEIALISM 53 Meanwhile M. Antonius, Caesar's second in command, had been making himself master of the Dalmatian highlands. Thus, at the death of Caesar, Eome was mistress of almost the whole of the Mediterranean basin. The work of organization and the task of rounding off these extensive dominions fell to Caesar's successor, Augustus. The campaign against Antonius and Cleopatra brought him Egypt. The reduction of Ehaetia, Noricum, and Pannonia assured the Danube frontier. In 25 B.C., by the will of King Amyntas, Galatia was included in the Empire. Beyond these limits the Empire never extended permanently. The signal defeat of Varus in 9 B.C., at the hands of the Germans under Arminius, dissuaded the Eomans from attempting the serious conquest of Germany, and the acquisitions of Trajan, Dacia, Arabia, Armenia, and Babylonia were either abandoned by his successors, as in the case of the two latter, or maintained with difficulty. Far away upon the northern border of China, in the sterile, inhospitable land about the Gobi desert, there have dwelt, time out of mind, a number of nomadic tribes of Tartaric people. There was no common bond of union between them, and only when some Khan of exceptional personal vigour arose were a few of these scattered communities brought together for a short time and forced into common action. Directly the strong hand was removed there was sure to be a recrudescence of intestine quarrelling. It was under these conditions that Temuchin, who was later to wear the proud title of Gengiz Khan, was born. There was but little in the circumstances of his birth which 54 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS presaged his future career. On the banks of the Onon river, in some rough tent of a Tartar encampment, Temuchin first saw the light. His father went the way of most Tartar chieftains and was killed in battle, while his young son was left to shift for himself. It was only through the virile energy of his mother Yulun, that his rebellious followers were kept to their allegiance. The greater part of Temuchin's life was spent in this kind of petty tribal bickering ; it was not until he was fifty years of age that he felt himself strong enough to summon a " kuraltar," a solemn assembly of Mongolian chieftains, and exact the title of Gengiz Khan, by which he was recognized as head of the united hordes. With this force at his back Gengiz Khan swept down upon the north of China, and, after three years' hard fighting, compelled his former suzerain, the Emperor, to sue for peace upon humiliating terms. The Khitan were next in turn, and were rapidly subdued. For a moment it seemed as if Gengiz Khan would be content to rest upon his laurels ; but, unhappily, the Sultan, Mohammed III., of Khowaresm, forgot himself so far as to arrest the envoys of the great Kian, who had been sent to his country with a caravan, and to plunder their merchandise. Gengiz Khan, highly incensed at this afiront, determined upon war. Accompanied by his sons, he moved with great rapidity upon Samarcand, which was soon captured. The Sultan Mohammed endeavoured to avoid a decisive battle, and withdrew in the direction of Bokhara, which he abandoned to the Mongols, who pressed close upon his track. The fate of Bokhara is typical of the fate of all the cities in which SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 55 tlie Mongolian conquerors set foot. Many of these cities of Turkestan had become active centres of civiliza- tion ; Bokhara especially was famous for its books and learning. The Mongols spared nothing ; the male population was put to the sword, and the women and children thrown into bondage, while the city itself, with all its valuable libraries and rich mosques, was given to the flames. Meanwhile Mohammed had perished for want somewhere upon the shores of the Caspian Sea, and had left the salvation of his realm to his son Djelaleddin. Gengiz Khan pursued him through Ghasna to the Indus, where he compelled him to accept battle. He was defeated, but fought with such unexampled bravery, and escaped by swimming the Indus under a heavy shower of arrows, that he wrung a mede of praise even from his vanquishers. Beyond the Indus the flood of Mongol invasion did not pass, but recoiled upon Persia. It was then that Gengiz Khan's son Tuji was detached to overrun the southern provinces of Eussia ; his son Batu conquered the whole of Eussia, and pushed forward as far as the Dniester (1237). In the mean time Gengiz Khan was spending his time in Persia, hunting upon a gigantic scale, and drawing up a code of constitution, half religious, half political, and wholly patriarchal for the government of his people. This, the famous " Yassa,'^ is in force to the present day. Shortly after his return to Karakorum (1224) Gengiz Khan died (1227). By testamentary disposition, he split up his do- minions among his sons, by whom they were yet more extended. The Mongolians were only prevented from 56 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS speading over Western Europe by their defeat at Liegnitz (1241). The story of the great Mongolian Empire is so full of romantic details, that it has been a favourite subject for song and poetry ever since the dawn of European letters. There are few who have not heard of the glory of Kublai Khan and his ''stately pleasure-dome'' at Peking. But in reality, from a historical point of view, the conquests of the Mongols are of second-rate im- portance. They passed like a storm over half the world, destroying everything in their path, but their trace has vanished, and they have left nothing to mark their passage, save here and there a vestige of their vandalism. Where the Mongolian conqueror became a permanent ruler, he was soon absorbed into the superior civilization of his subjects, just as in China ; he entirely lost any marked national characteristics he may have possessed. CHAPTER IV SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM. — II Other examples of empire-building. Venice. Her rise and growth. Causes. Effects. Holland and the Dutch Empire. Reasons of its failure. The British Empire. Its unprecedented character. Scarcely could there be a more impressive example of the paramount influence of geographical position upon the destinies of human communities than that afibrded by the rise and fall of the Venetian Republic. The advantages which Venice obtained from her peculiar situation are obvious. Protected from the inroad of the sea by the strong bulwark of the Lidi, rendered even more powerful through the labours of her engineers, and from assault from the mainland by the intervening expanse of lagunes and morass, Venice remained throughout the days of her prosperity practically un- assailable, although her aggressive policy and gathering wealth secured her her full share of foes. Venice is peculiarly suitable to navigation, as the rise and fall of tide there is greater than at any other part of the Adriatic. But all these advantages do not suffice to explain Venetian success, or why in so brief a space of time she rose from insignificance to hold the proud dominion of all the then known seas. Things must have v< 58 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS materially altered since the days of the Eoman Empire, when it is not even sure that the long-shore fishermen had deigned to form a settlement on the Venetian Islands. During the early centuries of the Middle Ages the countries of Northern Europe had been growing rapidly in importance. There was a constant flow of trade between those lands and the Mediterranean basin, and this stream of commerce was forced to find its way for the most part through the passes of the Corinthian Alps and to the sea. Half of Europe thus became, as it were, the hinterland of Venice. It is clear that Venice boasts certain advantages over the modern ports of Fiume and Trieste, and her island position allowed her early to assert her independence of the Empire. For several centuries Venice was practically the centre of the civilized world ; at the' opening of her career a series of historical events contributed con- siderably to the increase of her power. These were the crusades. Venice had already at that time gained a firm foothold on the Dalmatian coast, and had been successful in defeating the Normans off Buthrotum (1084), in gratitude for which the Byzantine Emperor Alexius had granted the Venetians peculiar trading facilities and right of domicile in many of the Levantine ports. During the first crusade the Christian army in Syria depended almost entirely for their provisions upon supplies shipped by Venetian vessels, and we may feel sure that the Venetian merchant knew how to look after his profits, and that he was well paid for his assist- ance in reducing Kaifa, Acre, and Sidon. Pisa, the only possible rival, was disposed of in an engagement SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 59 off Ehodes. The increasing prosperity of Venice led unavoidably to her territorial expansion. Her 'possessions in Dalmatia and Croatia were becoming more and more important, as she drew from thence the rough materials for her dockyard. We accordingly find her at constant variance with the Hungarians, and losing and re- gaining (1116) Zara, Spalato, Sebenico, and Trani. This is the beginning of Venice's Colonial Empire, and already her doges style themselves " Duces Venetiarum, Dal- matise et Croatise!^ During the second crusade, these dominions were augmented by the capture of Tyre (1147), by the Doge Domenico Michieli, and this conquest is already organized on the plan which we shall see observed with regard to all future Venetian colonies. Soon after this Venice became involved in hostilities with the Byzantine Empire. The keen commercial competition of the Venetians was driving the Byzantine out of the market, and the Emperor Manuel Comnenus was greatly incensed at the support given by Venice to the Latin conquerors of Syria. This quarrel soon burst into open flame, the Dalmatian colonies, backed by an imperial army, broke into insurrection, and the Vene- tian doge, Vitale Michieli, found great difficulty in reducing Trani. He then (1172) sailed to the ^gean and seized the imperial possessions Lesbos, Chios, and Samos. Plague drove the fleet home, after an unsuccessful descent upon Euboea, and the pestilence spread over Venice ; the troubles which ensued ended in a remodelling of the constitution on a more popular basis (1172). Momentous in Venetian history is the date of the 60 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS fourth Crusade (1203). The Crusaders, now cut oflF from the Holy Land by the hostile empire, were com- pelled to charter the Venetian fleet. This they were only able to obtain after helping to reduce the revolted city of Zara. The Doge Dandolo, who had personal motives for wreaking a terrible revenge upon the Emperor Manuel, who had had him blinded, succeeded by artful diplomacy in diverting the Crusading army upon Constantinople. The partition of the Byzantine territories ensued, and a large share fell to Venice, which thus became an imperial power of the first magnitude. At one blow she obtained the Morea, Buboea, a number of islands in the ^gean, including Andros, Salamis, and ^gina, Lesbos and Abydos, which gave her the command of the Dardanelles, practically the whole of the east coast of the Adriatic, and not least important, the island of Crete. Crete became the bone of contention between Venice and her great rival, Genoa. Soon after 1261 the war broke out which was to last with few interruptions for a hundred and fifty years. The Venetians soon realized that the policy which they had hitherto prac- tised with regard to their new acquisitions was incapable of securing their permanent dominion, and accordingly several attempts were made at colonizing Crete with native Venetians ; colonies were likewise settled in Cyprus, the Morea, and the Ionian Islands. Peace had been patched up between Venice and Genoa in 1238 by papal interven- tion, but the war again broke into flame in 1258. The interests of the two powers would not allow of any lasting pacification. Henceforth it was a struggle a outrance. We cannot here follow out in detail all the SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 61 vicissitudes of this great contest, which after many victories and defeats was to end in the utter undoing of Genoa at the battle of Chioggia (1380), when Venice herself had been brought to the brink of ruin, and only escaped destruction through the opportune arrival of her admiral. Carlo Feno, from the East, who, by blockading the port of Chioggia, compelled the entire Genoese armada to surrender at discretion. Many circumstances drove Venice into playing a Continental policy. It became absolutely necessary for her to secure the command of the Brenta, as upon the maintenance of the course of that river depended the insular position of the Eepublic. The diversion of the river channel was equally important to several of the mainland cities, whose domains were continually liable to the most destructive inundations. Towards the middle of the fifteenth century Venice stood at the height of her power. We have the reports of Tommaso Mocenigo, which bear witness to the pros- perity of the Republic in every branch of industry and trade. We possess detailed records of the imports and the exports, and valuations of property in Venice itself. Venetian agents were at that time stationed in almost every important city of Europe. Besides its fleet of 45 galleys, manned by 11,000 men, which was continually cruising in the Adriatic, Venice possessed 300 first-class . vessels, and as many thousand smaller merchantmen, of which the crews are estimated at 36,000. Very shortly after this Venice reached the limits of her territorial expansion. On the mainland her domain spread from the Alps above Bergamo to the 62 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Adriatic at Kimini. The whole of the Adriatic east coast belonged to her, from the mouth of the Po to the Morea. Besides this she possessed the islands of Zante, Crete, and Cyprus, not to speak of numberless isolated trading-posts on the Black Sea, nay even on the Caspian, in Syria, and along the north coast of Africa. Venetian exports ran into close upon five millions of pounds sterling per annum, then worth from six to fifteen times the purchasing power of that amount. Every year officials were despatched to inspect the Venetian possessions on the mainland ; they criticized the condi- tion in which the fortifications were kept, and forwarded home reports ; the accounts were gone into and audited. The island colonies were subjected to the same system of control, but at less frequent intervals. We still possess the notes of a famous proveditore for the year 1482. This forms part of the diary of Marino Sanuto, and it shows into what minute details the inspectors went in the fifty odd towns which they visited upon this particular tour of supervision. There is much of the irony of fate in the fact that Genoa, at last reduced to impotence after a secular struggle with Venice, should have given birth to the man who was to compass, unconsciously enough, the ruin of her rival. The discover y of America b y ChristoghiM;^ Coljimbi^^ in 1492 sounded^ the knell^jof Venice^s ^o od fortune. Misfor tunes never come sin^i^. The opening of the sea-route to the Far lEastHjy the Cape of Goo5TEo£e was^^j^n^equa^^ Venet iajQCommerce. The whole cponcmical^eguilibrium of the world was shaken, ^5^J^^®^4y?£J^®£j^-^ Ven ice's geographical position were nullified. At^ one blow the SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 63 Mediterran ean^ inst ead of bein^ the sea about which all SeToteri^tsof^e wo rld were grouped, became a com- ^^^^X^lrJi^^ffiP^?^^^* lake. The land routes to the East, always expensive, and now rendered more and more perilous every day by the advance of the Turks, were abandoned, and trade began to flow round the Cape instead of into the eastern end of the Medi- terranean. Continental commerce began in the same way to drift westward towards Atlantic ports instead of coming south to the Adriatic. To crown all these disasters, the Turks, since 1453 in possession of Con- stantinople, assumed every year a more uncompromising attitude. Of the conventions signed with the Osmanli in 1479, 1503, 1540, none ended to Venice's advantage, and she was compelled to renounce her possessions one after another, and to give up all idea of regaining access to the Black Sea. The Venetian merchant must have grasped too clearly the agents which were under- mining his welfare, and must have understood how irrevocable was his doom. All his efibrts were unavail- ing. On the Continent all were against him. France, Aragon, the Pope and the empire, leagued at Cambrai (1508), defeated him at Agnadello, and all the mainland possessions of Venice were plundered and destroyed. In 1571 even Cyprus was taken away. A few days after the fall of Famagusta, the last Venetian stronghold in Cyprus, the united Spanish, Pontifical, and Venetian fleets, under Don Juan of Austria, succeeded in winning a signal victory over the Turks off Lepanto (October 7, 1571). Spain, however, withdrew from the alliance, and thus to a great extent sterilized the results of this success. The Venetians considered it advisable to come 64 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS to terms, while yet the Porte was dismayed at its dis- comfiture, and accordingly a treaty was concluded at Constantinople, March 7, 1573. The signory agreed to pay 300,000 ducats in annual instalments spread over three years, besides 1000 ducats a year to be allowed to retain Zante. Cyprus, however, was gone irrevocably. We have said that the great geographical discoveries at the close of the fourteenth century changed as lib were the economical centre of gravity of the world. Let us now go on to observe how the same causes which brought about^Jhe abasement of Venice led to the rise^ of Holland and Jaid the foundations ^ England's Imperial ambitions. The revelation of a new world in the west had stimulated the flagging energies of Dutch commerce and Dutch industry into fresh vigour, and although the country had now fallen under the yoke of Spain, her prosperity made rapid strides. Nevertheless, the land was not yet ripe for the immense colonial role it was destined to play in the seventeenth century. The struggle for independence (1566-1609) cut off the country from all participation in the profits of the new Spanish conquests. Moreover, Spain continued to regard her American colonies with the utmost jealousy, and was not inclined Ijo see with equanimity any European intruder, were he Dutch or were he English, poaching on her rich preserves. She intended to preserve the strictest monopoly of her fresh field of commercial enterprise. Portugal, in like fashion, having disclosed the new route to the East, made haste to close it with all the barriers and obstacles in her reach. Even the nautical data, which might assist a navigator in SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 65 weathering the Cape, were kept as far a secret as possible, and Houtman picked up the information which he was to turn to such good account only when he was held in captivity in Lisbon. Portugal grasped to the full the grand importance of the achievement of Vasco de Gama, who returned in 1499, after circumventing the Cape and reaching Calicut. He was welcomed with the utmost enthusiasm. King Emanuel loaded him with distinctions, and in 1502 he was sent to sea again at the head of a little fleet of nineteen vessels. On this voyage he took possession of portions of Mozambique and Sofala, entered into advantageous arrangements with several Indian potentates, and laid the foundations of the Portuguese colonial dominions. His successors, Almeida, Albuquerque, and Cabral, the discoverer of Brazil, set their country on an even footing with Spain. The wealth accruing from these new dominions raised the Portuguese naval power to the second rank. Holland, though unable to reap immediate benefit from the Portuguese colonies,benefited by them indirectly. Dutch vessels at Lisbon transhipped the wares from the Indies, and were aided in their distribution over Europe. The carrying trade of Holland was already of very great importance, and Dutch ships might be seen in the Norwegian ports loading timber, filling their holds with grain at Baltic harbours, or taking aboard cargoes of wine in the French rivers or on the Ehine. The North Sea fishing-grounds were not only a source of enormous wealth, but an unrivalled school of seamanship. It was not likely that the Dutch would watch very long with complacency the treasures of half the world flowing into the cofiers of their foes. Many a Dutch seaman had F 66 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS served his apprenticesliip on board a Portuguese mer- chantman, and when Portugal fell to Spain in 1580 the Dutch were not long in trespassing on her defenceless possessions, and no doubt the fact that those possessions were the property of their arch-enemy, Spain, lent zest to their incursions. In 1594, four vessels under Houtman started for a cruise in the East Indies, which lasted for two years and four months, and turned out so much to their financial betterment that their example was followed by several small companies formed at Eotterdam, Delft, and Hoorn. It was dangerous work navigating in those days, except in force suflBcient to be able to dispose of troublesome rivals, and the sea was not yet severely policed as it is in modern times. A large company was consequently more likely to prove success- ful than a small. Such considerations led to the founding of the two great Dutch Indian companies, which were the prime agents of Dutch colonial aggran- dizement. Dutch colonial history is the history of those companies. The West Indian Company, founded 1621, did not prove an unqualified success, and after spending five millions of money, they gave way before the Portuguese; the company, remodelled in 1671 and 1692, secured Dutch Guiana and Surinam. The rapidity with which possessions were acquired by the Eastern Company, founded 1602, is stupendous. From the Cape, occupied in 1653, they spread to Ceylon. Quite unscrupulous in their colonial policy, they here combined with the natives to eject the Portuguese (1632-1657). The acquisition of Ceylon secured them the monopoly of the cinnamon trade, which was SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 67 immensely lucrative, and by the occupation of the Moluccas they obtained a similar monopoly of cloves. From 1650 to 1680 Java was being reduced to sub- mission, and Batavia, founded as early as 1619, became the focus of Oriental commerce. In India, the taking of Negapatam (1660), Cochin (1663), St. Thome (1674), mark the principal stages of Dutch expansion. The Dutch colonial system has been subjected to adverse criticism on many grounds. We have here to regard it chiefly from an historical point of view. The P-Q^llgJPl Holland was dictated by purelj commercial ambition; it was carried out with the sole object of enriching the mercantile class at home. In this object it was eminently successful, and the influx of wealth into the mother country was enormous. Small traders and retailers were rich enough to covet highly finished pictures from the famous Dutch painters. This accounts for the! predominance of still-life pictures, to meet the taste of the Dutch rich small bourgeoisie. Colonial expansion in the true sense of the word was never existent. Holland was not afilicted with any surplus population, and consequently her colonies had never really come under the influence of a Dutch colonial population, with Dutch ideas or Dutch culture. The proportion of Dutch colonists, beyond the ofiicial governing staff*, in Java for example, is entirely in- significant. The culture-system of wholesale exploita- tion, on which the colonies were administered, though now somewhat mitigated, is still in vigour. By this arrangement the native is compelled to cultivate the plantation of the Dutch owners, and after a sufficient amount of the product has been put on one side for his 68 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS sustenance, the rest is disposed of to the profit of the master. The distinction between this system and slavery is obviously only a verbal one, and it is no matter for surprise that those subjected to it are only too ready to exchange Dutch dominion for any other. Holland was unable to oppose any serious resistance to Clive in India (1759), or to Cornwallis in Ceylon (1795). It would, however, be quite erroneous to run away with the idea that the defects of the Dutch system are connected with any inherent racial inferiority of the Hollander as a colonist. The same phenomenon will be seen to recur with inevitable regularity whenever a small power, carried away by mercantile enthusiasm, is led to found a broad colonial empire. It was as impossible for Holland Jbo people her transmarine jos; sessions with a Dutch population, as we have seen it^ was impossible for Venice to really colonize her ac^ui-^ sitions in the Mediterranean. Such a proceeding, if it were at all feasible, would entail a fatal depletion of the home country. An empire, however, built up on entirely commercial lines is necessarily unstable. Any blow dealt at the centre of such an empire brings the whole colonial superstructure tumbling down like a house of cards. The various members either fall a prey to the ambition of some fresh empire-builder, or else lapse into their original quasi-independence. We have seen how, on the decline of Venice, her various colonies fell away, and it would be impossible at the present day to discover the faintest trace of Venetian influence on her former possessions. In Crete, Venice has, in spite of secular dominion, left no mark. The same was the case, in antiquity, with the Phoenician SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 69 dominions in Sicily ; and although the merchants of Tyre and Sidon held for centuries innumerable trading- posts along the Sicilian littoral, they have left not a trace of their civilization. For Holland, with her one million (or a little above) of inhabitants in the seventeenth century, to people colonial possessions containing indigenous populations ten or twenty times as great was out of the question. When by immense expenditure of capital and effort she has finally succeeded in quelling the native, and bring- ing his heritage into profitable working order, her domain will fall to the lot of some power whose super- abundant home population must find an outlet. It is difficult for the present generation to realize that the colonial empire of Great Britain is the fabric of comparatively recent times. England, although the last of the great powers to embark upon an extensive colonial policy, has far outstripped all her competitors, with the result that, at the present day, she is in possession of over one-fifth of the surface of the globe, and rules over a quarter of the world's inhabitants. England's insular position has been the principal agent in building up this immense empire, and she has been thereby enabled to take full advantage of any conti- nental complications in which her rivals may have found themselves involved. Thus the three dates which mark successive reductions in the colonial empire of France (1713, 1763, 1814) are red-letter days in^ Brit ish colo nial annak. When tEe first agents of the new European trading companies began to found their factories along the Indian coast, the whole of the peninsula was still held 70 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS by the strong hand of the Moghul dynasty. Accordingly we j&nd very few high-handed proceedings upon the part of the new-comers such as we shall encounter later on. They were content if their humble suit to the Moghul Emperor secured them the commercial privileges which as yet formed the uttermost horizon of their ambitions. At the end of the sixteenth century the idea of making broad territorial conquests in India does not seem to have even suggested itself to the servants of the European companies. The English company (chartered in 1600) did not seek more than to partici- pate in the prosperity enjoyed by its Portuguese and Dutch forerunners, and was highly well-pleased at obtaining from 1612 to 1616 grants of settlement from the Great Moghul at Surat, Ahmedabad and Cambay, on the west coast. It was advisable to keep on good terms with the native rulers, whatever might be their dissen- sions with European rivals. These latter led to frequent quarrels, some of which were marked by horrors like the massacre of the English by the Dutch at Amboyna (1623). Had the Europeans sought at this period to obtain a foothold in the peninsula on anything but terms of toleration, it is more than probable that they would have found their match in Akbar or his successors, but even as late as 1706 no notion of conquest had passed through the minds of the peaceful members of the old "John Company." A good dividend was the whole of their desire. But the days of the Moghul dynasty were numbered; the chief administrators of the Moghul government were no longer to be kept in hand. With the death of Aurungzeb the dissolution was precipitated, SUCCESS IN IMPEEIALISM 71 and the provincial viceroys, no longer held in awe by the central authority at Delhi, began to shift for them- selves. Thus the Nawab Wazir of Oudh became to all intents and purposes independent. Such was the Nizam of Hyderabad, under whom stood the Nawab of Arcot, lord of the Carnatic. In addition to this internal dis- ruption came the invasions of the Hindu powers, Mara- thas, Sikhs, and Rajputs, and the power of the Great Moghul was still further shaken by the irruption of the Persians under Nadir Shah (1728), which ended in the sack of Delhi. It was this state of aflfairs which led Dupleix, the French director-general at Pondicherry, to conceive the possibility of a French colonial empire in India, and his rapid progress very soon showed how feasible was his idea. The English were now not long in adopting the same ambitions as those of the French director- general. The struggle for mastery between France and England lasted with very brief moments of respite from 1744 to 1763, but in spite of the efforts of men like Dupleix, Labourdonnais, Bussy, and not least of all of the Bailli de Suffren, who worsted the English fleet time after time off the east coast of India, in 1782-1783, the idea of colonial expansion had not really been taken to heart by the French Government at home, and the successes of her Indian agents were unhesitatingly immolated to the exigencies of European politics. We cannot follow out the course of subsequent English expansion in India, under Clive, Warren Hastings, Cornwallis, and Wellesley. The resistance they met with was not really serious, and India was never here- af ter^apable^ of any undivided effort. The enei^ies^oJ 72 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS the country appear to have been sapped and exhausted by_the_Mogh^ and England^ in buUdingup^^^h^ Indian Empire, was_ confronted^ with jnu^ state of affairs as were the Eomans in their imperial development. The nationalities of India are eflfete, and both with and without the benefits of British rule they have remained incapable of progress. Will they ever arise with vigour from this long torpor ? The British colonial empire is entirely dependent for its maintenance upon the predominance of the British fleet, and this will explain the care and lavish expenditure which Great Britain has devoted to some of her smaller possessions. They are destined, in case of war, to act as bases for naval operations, and to link together the outlying colonies of the Empire. It is, of course, quite out of the question to introduce inde- pendent systems of government in these purely strategic possessions, which are accordingly bound to the home- country by far closer ties than the larger agricultural colonies. In Europe, England possesses Gibraltar, captured from the Spanish in 1704 by a combination of the English and Dutch, and ceded in 1713 to England by the treaty of Utrecht. The various attempts to retake it have been abortive, and from 1779 to 1783 it withstood a siege upon the part of the allied Spanish and French. The possession of Gibraltar, now rendered impregnable at immense cost of money and labour, assures England an entry into the Mediterranean in time of war, and communication with her two other European outposts, Malta and Cyprus. It is probable that the artillery of Gibraltar would prevent any hostile fleet from coming in or out of the Mediterranean. SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 73 Malta, handed over to England by the Maltese in 1800, after the capitulation of the French garrison, and ceded finally by the treaty of Paris 1814, is a strategic point of first-rate importance, dividing, as it does, the Medi- terranean into two basins, standing midway between France and her most important colonies, and forming a convenient centre of operations against the new French naval base at Bizerta. Cyprus, although only held under convention, is not likely to be evacuated except under compulsion, and is an advanced post for the control of the Dardanelles. It is possible that it will be converted into a naval station as important as Malta, whose harbour Valetta is considered the finest in the world. Besides these important points, England also retains the^ Channel^ Islands as sentinels to watch the movements of France's magnificent chain of northern ports. We can do little more than enumerate the British points of vantage in remoter parts. Ad<^ and Perim guard the Red Sea, Mauritius stands as a van- guard upon the Cape route to India, and a series of strong positions, Pulo-Penang, Singapore, Labuan, Hong-Kong, Port Hamilton, and Wei-hei-Wei are ready to meet eventualities in the Far East. It ha-s always been the policy of Great Britam_to try and close all the minor seas by a powerful fortified post pitched at their outlet, and British endeavours to secure such a position at the entrance to the Persian Gulf have threatened from time to time to induce serious European complications. In the Atlantic England holds three exceptionally strong points, the Bermuda^ Islands acting as a balance to the American naval base at Key West, and further south the islands of Ascension and St. Helena 74 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS In dealing with the British Empire, we cannot insist too strongly upon the fact that historical precedents are entirely wanting. We cannot forecast the future of the British Empire by an appeal to the lot which has befallen the greal empires of the past. Any comparison is fictitious. The British Empire is an empire sui generis. We have seen that the Roman Empire was on the whole built up and governed on entirely difierent principles. The causes of the growth were chiefly negative. Other empires have been constructed through the individual energies of great fighters, great strategists; but immediately the personal link was broken they were destined to subdivide, to melt away as rapidly as they had been put together. Perhaps a comparison with the present Kussian Empire is most fruitful in reflection. The Russian Empire, although it enjoys the inestimable advantage of geographical continuity, is not by any means at the same stage of development as the British Empire. Russia's energies are quite absorbed in the task of assimilating and welding into a homogeneous mass her vast territories, in the industrial and the agricultural exploitation of her dominions, and this task will preoccupy her for generations, at least for a century to^ma Russia is really already at a standstill in her expansion, and as soon as she has secured her maritime outlet with the necessary hinterland we may expect her to limit her eS'orts to the improvement and absorption of her present possessions. The two great ambitions which have been and still are ascribed to Russia are certainly quiescent, if not dead. No attempt has been made on the part of the Russians since 1762 to advance at the expense of Germany, and with that country she SUCCESS IN IMPERIALISM 75 has maintained unshaken amity. No serious endeavour has been aimed at conquering Constantinople, a policy with which Russia is still generally credited. We have spent, perhaps, too much time in dwelling on the history of England's tropical colonies, when it is to her colonies of white population, such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, that her grandeur is chiefly due. No other country has hitherto carried out a colonial policy of anything like comparable extent. English colonists have almost always preceded, not followed, the addition j)f_a fresh dominion to the Empire. The " colony" was first peopled up with an energetic British population, and only subsequently formally annexed. Owing to this particular feature, England is enabled to maintain an immensely wide sway at the minimum of expense. The plantation colonies are likewise administered at the present day on more humane lines, and their government is not carried out with a main view to benefiting the home country. CHAPTER Y INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS. — I Not every manifestation of man's thinking power constitutes intellectual pro- gress. The Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, and Carthaginians, too, had books, inventions, intellectual contrivances of all kinds. Examples. Yet they never had literature, philosophy, science, or art proper. What makes these four products of the human mind ? Short explanation of the salient points of the most perfect specimens of literature, philosophy, art, and science, i.e. Greek works. Their essential advance on all pre- vious efforts. Examples. We have in the present chapter to deal with intellec- tual success, and from the beginning crave the reader's indulgence for any digressions it may be found necessary to make. By intellectual success should be understood success in the production of works of artistic value. At the very outset the word art brings us into collision with a stumbling-block. Very few people indeed are possessed of anything but the most vague and illusory conception of the nature and aims of true art. They have doubtless, as they are themselves convinced, the capacity for appreciating a work of art when it is set before them ; but ask them on what ground and prin- ciples they base their appreciation, and they will be exceedingly hard put to find an answer. Their concep- tions may be instinctively correct, but they would find the INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 77 greatest diflSculty in formulating them. Perhaps they have even been led astray by the catchwords of so-called naturalistic and realistic schools, which have been founded in quite recent days in consequence of a mis- conception of the very essence of art. They profess that the very perfection of art lies in the closest possible imitation of nature. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. As we shall have occasion to see, nature is essentially inartistic, and art is the pride and privilege of man alone. Perhaps we shall have the nearest approach to a true definition if we strike a mean between two famous sayings of Aristotle, that art imitates nature, and, secondly, that art makes that which nature could never make. Throughout antiquity one nation alone can be said to have made real intellectual progress. Put their hands, put their minds to what they would, the Greeks almost inevitably produced perfection. There exist people, nevertheless, who would still rank the crude productions of Egyptian manufactories with the master- piece of Pheidias and Praxiteles. It devolves upon us to show wherein lies the difference between Greek art and Egyptian pseudo-art ; to prove that the same principles underlie Greek art in all its branches ; to prove that our admiration of a play of Sophocles, and of the Belvedere Apollo, though it may be generated by difierent senses, depends upon essentially kindred feelings. If we are brought into contact with anything that is beautiful we experience a sensation of pleasure, and granted that the sensation of pleasure is at all keen, our instinctive desire is to obtain its recurrence. Our pleasurable feeling has been caused by a beautiful 78 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS object, and it is our aim to reproduce the form of that beauty — that is, to create a work of art. Here at once becomes apparent the wide gulf that separates nature from art. The beauty of nature is almost always defective, or at least it is accidental. Possible things, or, at best, utility, is the main object for which nature works, it is not her end to be beautiful. Man perceives the beauty of nature, idealizes it, laying aside all utili- tarian imperfections, and produces a masterpiece which is perfect. The sole aim of art is to attain the supremely beautiful, and it is accordingly freed from the trammels which hamper nature. To produce a work of art requires genius, that is, the combination of a true appreciation of the beautiful with the creative power. Without the creative faculty a man may have subtle taste ; he may be a connoisseur, but no genius. As man is unable to create the sub- stantive part of his work, it stands to reason that what he does create is the form in which the substantive part supplied by nature is presentable. It is in the creation of artistic forms that the Greek excelled. The great problem which the historian of Greece has to solve is why a small nation of relatively insignificant numbers should, in the short span of only a few centuries, have been enabled to conceive ideals in almost every branch of art, after which all the other peoples of antiquity had striven in vain. Until he can throw some light on this, the main question of his subject, the historian has done little to advance us in the true knowledge of Greece. Let us note a few of the artistic forms invented by the Greek, especially in literature. We have already seen that, among the pre-Hellenic nations of the INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 79 Mediterranean basin, literature in the true sense of the word cannot be claimed to have existed. Egypt cannot boast of a single literary form, even less so Babylonia. At the very outset of Greek history we have to face the problem of the Homeric epics, so true and perfect in their form that they have never since been rivalled. When we shall see later with what painful and in- eflfectual efforts the Middle Ages endeavoured to again realize the lost ideal of the epic, we shall have a true grasp of the magnitude of this the first achievement of Greek letters. The Greek then presents us with a tragedy perfectly developed, a form of literary expres- sion which was entirely original, and in speaking of the tragedy we have a very good opportunity of disproving the common idea that the ne plus ultra of art is perfect rendering of nature. What would be the result of a faultless reproduction of nature in tragedy ? Would it not be the achievement of disastrously complete illusion ? It is the aim of the poet to excite either our pity or terror, but only in a certain degree of moderation. Were the illusion complete, what audience would stand such a play as the Iphigenia in Aulis? Theatrical reality would of all things be the most intolerable ; it would at the same time be ineffectual ; for it could never hope to compass the horror or pity experienced in real life. If illusion were what we really desired, we should rather go to the operating theatre of some hospital, or visit a slaughter-house. It is clear that the Greek aimed at something very different when his sense of moderation forbade him to represent death on the stage. In a Greek play murder is never done before the eyes of the audience, and if, as is generally the case, the tragedy 80 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS must culminate in death, the supreme act takes place out of sight behind the scenes, and the audience is only given to understand indirectly what is happening or what has happened. And this is the result not of any religious or moral scruple, but of a keen artistic sense of what is befitting. Modern ideas of tragedy are not so reserved, and often lead to the production of melo- drama, in which the illusion is as complete as it is possible to make it, and the play consequently loses its artistic value. Melodrama and literature are contra- dictions in terms. Let the reader try to think of any melodrama of the present day which is likely to be read by future generations. Our children's children will not read The Lights of London or Tlie Silver King in place of Hamlet^ or, at least, let us hope not. Yet those two plays are melodrama carried to its perfection. They are also far from being works of art. A vitiated conception of what we should expect from the drama has been conducive to several other features of modern theatrical representations. In order to heighten the illusion, plays are over-staged, enormous expense is incurred in obtaining the utmost correctness of historical costume, every mechanical contrivance is requisitioned to produce perfection of scenic effects, and yet it may well be doubted whether a latter-day audience listens to a performance of Shakespeare with the keen enjoyment of the gatherings at the old '* Globe " in the seventeenth century, when the scenery was, for the most part, left to the imagination of the spectator. With the decadence of the Roman Empire the ideals of the drama were lost with those of the rest of art and INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 81 literature. As we have seen the Middle Ages groping to recover the epic, so we can watch them feeling about tentatively after the long-forgotten dramatic forms, or, rather, endeavouring to create them afresh. Their success was very qualified ; popular as the mystery play may have been in its day, it never realized the height of art. It was a vain endeavour to crush religious thought into an uncongenial form. The miracles and mysteries are now dead to all save those who care to resuscitate them out of philological or historical interest. It has never yet been our good fortune to see any- thing like an adequate explanation of how it was that the Greeks were enabled to create de toutes pieces the drama. Books dealing with Hellenic literature either ignore the problem altogether, although the problem is one which we cannot afford to neglect, or else furbish up some solution which shivers forlorn in spite of its ample clothing of rhetoric. Perhaps this indifference to the great fundamental questions of Greek literature is less astonishing when we reflect how little has been done to clear up the origins of English national drama. Surely it is a matter for surprise that the English, of all modern nations, should have produced the greatest of all European dramatic literatures ; that a country in which the outward display of emotion, the making of gestures, is steadily suppressed from the earliest age, should have brought forth tragedies and comedies which can_standjcomparison with the models of ancient Greece. In Italy, where we could well have expected to witness the blossoming of a great and original drama, where everyday life is dramatic, in a land of animation and 82 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS movement, there is nothing to tally with our expecta- tions. These are among the problems which lie at the base of literary criticism, but which, so far, have been studiously avoided. It is chiefly this bold difi*erentiation of literary form which strikes us from the very beginning in Greek letters. By the time that Greek literature had begun to decline, almost every form known to us in modern times had been developed and had given forth brilliant examples. We have added very little to these original forms created by Greece, and in few has^ the same pitch of excellence been attained. The history of European intellectual progress is the history of spread- ing Hellenization. The real advance does not begin until the rediscovery of Greek forms at the Renaissance. It was the recovery of the old forms which gave the great impetus to modern literature. The subject- matter already existed, and was only waiting for a befitting setting. The great invention of modern literature is the novel, which does not really find its prototype in ancient literature. We are in no way indebted to the novels of Herondas and Apuleius. We have already said how little has been done to explain the origin of Greek literary forms. Let us reflect for a while why so little has been done. Literary criticism is as yet in its infancy ; it has not even made the progress which history has upon scientific lines. The base on which a true literary criticism will have to be founded is the psychology of nations, and as yet little has been done in this direction. It is only in quite modern days that books like the ** Volkerpsychologie " of Wundt have appeared ; and, valuable as these books INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 83 may be, they are only pioneers which are opening up the first tracks through a primeval waste of ignorance and prejudice. A man like Professor Wundt has to deal with very great problems, however simple, almost childish, they may appear at the first glance. But the great problems of nature generally aim at the explana- tion of the commonplace. It may well be said that the genius is the man who can solve the commonplace. It very often requires a genius to perceive that great questions lie in the simplest phenomena of every- day observation. It required a Galileo to see that the solution of the riddle of the physical universe would be substantially advanced by watching the falling of two stones of unequal magnitude and weight from the top of the tower of Pisa. Many had sought to explain the startling, striking appearance of comets, no one thought of looking into so simple and everyday thing as the comparative velocity of falling stones. Perhaps the reason why so little progress has been made in the scientific study of history and literature is that in these branches of learning we are less ready to recognize our want of knowledge. Many people will confront you with the statement that they know history ; they would not venture to say the same with regard to physics or another branch of natural science. In effect they not only do not know history, but are devoid of all idea of what there is to know. In dealing with questions of history and letters, both, as we have noted, dependent upon psychology, we are met with another considerable difficulty. All our generalizations must of necessity be based upon sense impressions which we have worked up into concepts. Now, in questions, say, of physics, these 84 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS sense impressions may be obtained readily, and can, as a rule, be reproduced with suitable apparatus in any labo- ratory. But suppose we wish to investigate a question of national psychology, we have no laboratory to appeal to, we must seek sense impressions in the world abroad. In order to comprehend the characteristics of one's own nation, one must subject it to a scrutinizing com- parison with other nations. How difficult is this com- parison to make. How few have even the opportunity of making it. It implies a long sojourn in foreign countries of a person endowed with keen and critical faculties of observation, and a mastery of the language and literature of those countries. These are the essentials, and how rarely are they fulfilled. But with- out comparison after this manner there can be no real advance. In dealing with an ancient literature our difficulties are increased a hundred-fold. Direct sense^ impression it is impossible^or us to have, sojbhat we^re^ compelled to establish an analogy with something^ ^^^L living which is within our sjphere of observation. In such questions, moreover, our judgment is especially liable to be led away by national vanities and pre- judices and personal feelings. It is almost as impossible for an Englishman to arrive at a just appreciation of France as it is for a Frenchman to give an unbiassed opinion upon England. The statements of both are certain to be tinged with something of their secular prejudices, something of their long-standing antagonism. This contempt often leads to the neglect of comparison altogether. Let us take a very familiar example. Nothing strikes an Englishman abroad as do the gestures with which all those who meet him punctuate their INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 85 conversation. The continental visitor to England is equally struck by the absence of all gesticulation. Both will be pretty certain to leap at an uncharitable explana- tion of this remarkable diversity of manners. As the continental will ascribe the Englishman's lack of anima- tion to a supposed glacial insularity of character, the Englishman, with equal bias, will put down the vivacity of the foreigner to a morbidly nervous state of tempera- ment, or dismiss it as a ridiculous affectation. Surely it is a little too much to suppose that some forty millions of French people are suffering from shattered nerves, not to speak of countless millions of Germans, to whom at the same time we attribute the most un- nervous stolidity. These are problems which must be faced without national prejudice. They may, per- haps, at first appear almost childish in their simplicity, but, as we have already said, it may be the solution of just such a simple problem which will supply us with the key to far greater questions. It is one of the most striking facts in the history of Greek thought that the Greeks devoted themselves especially to the explanation^ of the apparently most simple phenomena, which had hitherto been looked upon with contempt as hardly worthy of notice. Another illustration of the difficulty of accounting for the excellence of Greek literature can readily be found when we reflect on the difficulty which attaches to a subject even more familiar to us. We mean French prose. Very little has ever been done to explain the excellence of French prose, that is to say, how it is that the French have brought their prose to so far higher a level of artistic perfection than is attained by English 86 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS prose. In English writers the subjectiveness of the prose has done much to destroy its artistic beauty. When we come to poetry we find the very reverse is the case. Here English is as far above French as we have seen French is superior to English with regard to prose. In poetry alone does English escape from the trammels imposed upon it by its subject, and it is just in poetry that French falls a victim to its subjectivity. In modern times French lyric poetry can hardly claim to exist. There are beautiful pieces by Musset and Victor Hugo and many others, but they are never quite first class. Is not this due to the difierent relation of man and woman in France ? But to this we shall recur when speaking more particularly of France in a later chapter. The best way of realizing the great art of Greek epics is to compare them with the epics of other nations. Not long after the beginning of the last century, attention was drawn to the considerable amount of poetry which was current orally among the older inhabitants of Finland, and was, with the advance of European civilization, in imminent peril of lapsing into irrevocable oblivion. By the successive labours of two Finnologues of eminent learning, Topelius and Lonnrot, a great quantity of this indigenous Finnish literature was saved ; most remarkable is the celebrated epic the *' Kalevala," which excited so keen an interest through- out Europe that it was translated into almost every European language. Here we find a far greater effort towards distinctive form than we have seen in previous works of popular poetry ; there is a fine metre running all through the poem, which, nevertheless, falls short of the Homeric epics by an immeasurable gap. And what INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 87 is the reason ? The epic form is impaired by the intro- duction of a mass of extraneous matter, which detract from the unity of the poem. Perhaps the most striking instance of the way in which the Greeks clung to their distinct literary forms will be found in their conception of an ideal historical writing such as we! have in Thucydides. Read Thucydides, and then take up a volume of some modern historical work, and the immense difference of method between the two authors will be at once apparent. We do not intend to institute a comparison in disparagement of modern historians ; all that we would wish to show is that their aim and manner of proceeding is essentially different. In modern writers the historic form is crushed by the subjectiveness of the historian himself ; the book is a work of practical didactic utility, and does not pretend to being a work of art. Let us take a typical example of difference of methods. A latter-day writer of history in dealing with, for instance, a party question, takes up a stand outside his subject. He will express in his own words what he considers to have been the opinion of the "Whigs, or the tenets of the Tories. In Thucydides there is nothing of the kind. The personality of the author is relegated to the background, and it is the historical characters themselves who speak and give us an insight into party politics. We are present at a debate in the Ecclesia (Assembly), and hear the great men of the day themselves debating the pros and cons of going to war. The speeches reported are not ver- batim notes of what actually took place ; they are very possibly drawn, as far as language is concerned, from 88 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS the imagination of the author. This is the artistic method of writing history. It has the advantage of being exceedingly life-like, and any one who has read the discussion in Thucydides which precedes the Sicilian expedition is not likely to forget it. Whether it is the best method with a view to subjective utility is beyond the question. It is difficult to estimate comparative merits ; nearly all our great historical works deal with past events ; Thucydides is the historian of his own days. But what is essential is that Thucydides has produced a work of art, and is the first to entirely differentiate history and to give it its particular and appropriate form. It is precisely this form that is difficult of attain- ment. Many nations of modern Europe, as well as of antiquity, have searched for it in vain. Especially is this true of literary formlessness. We find peoples existing for whole centuries without anything at all deserving of the name of a national literature. We cannot doubt that among them are very many people with strong mental intellectual qualities, and yet they succeed in producing nothing. Is not this because they fail to find the appropriate form in which to embody their higher aspirations ? Among many of the nations of Eastern Europe, for instance, we find an astounding faculty for brilliant conversation. In every- day talk it is often one's good fortune to hear gems of thought let fall with the utmost nonchalance. One would expect to find this brilliant wit reflected in an equally brilliant literature. But nothing of this kind happens, and it never reaches paper, and if ever it does, appears stifi*, awkward, and uninteresting in the extreme. INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 89 And what is the cause ? There is no kind of literary form to give it appropriate expression. It is mere parlature ; it is not literature. In the Middle Ages it is especially interesting to note the ineffective struggle to reach this form. Objec- tive material is there in abundance. There are adven- tures and events enough to provide a whole library of epics. Nevertheless, the medieval romances are singularly disappointing, and always because the form is indistinct and imperfect. No one would for an instant deny that the " Chanson de Eoland " contains the most brilliant inspired passages. It is in the whole that it is disappointing. The real idea of an epic has become blurred, and an epical poem is likely enough to contain disquisitions on metaphysical and semi-scientific subjects, an intermixture of religion and of almost anything else. It becomes finally an inextricable maze, in which the medieval clerk tries to give vent to his views and ideas upon almost every conceivable matter. Modern poets, with a truer appreciation of their art, have taken the ground-ideas of very many of those early romances, washed them free of all their unromantic dross, and served them up for us in a clear-cut poetic form. But any one who has had his imagination captivated by, say, the " Idyls of the King " of Tenny- son, and has turned back to see what the medieval poems a the Arthurian circle have made of the same material, would recognize at once the immeasurable superiority of the modern poet. Men of decided ability there were throughout the Middle Ages, and with much of value to impart, but they were unable to find their true literary form, and accordingly were compelled 90 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS either to hold their peace or to express themselves in an uncongenial manner, and very often to become grotesque. It is the form which makes the artist, as it is the artist who makes the form. Consider what would have been a Wagner without his particular form. His glory- is in having originated a new form of operatic expres- sion. Had he been forced to adopt one of the already existing forms of opera, had he been compelled to write, say, sonatas instead of discovering the famous leitmotiv- music, he must have ended in fiasco. A similar example is afforded by Mr. Whistler, the painter. In Greek philosophy we shall also observe this same conception of form, but in philosophy we are wont to give it the name of system ; it is the creation of one dominant principle from which radiate all other thoughts and conceptions. The Greek was the first to distinguish between a systematic philosophy and the collections of apophthegms or wise sayings which had hitherto been the supreme achievement of other nations in the direction of philosophy. To the Greeks we owe a system of thought ; the other nations of antiquity have no doubt bequeathed us learned saws, and isolated thoughts in abundance. They are mere sparks, mere scintillations which for an instant of time illumine the dark abyss of human existence ; the Greek has kindled a steady burning flame by which we may pursue our investigations. In a word, to the Greek alone we owe system. The Greek alone was able to generalize, and we shall see later on with what power he did so in the realm of natural science. Already the early pre-Socratic writers, the philo- INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 91 sophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., had seized upon the two main ideas, on the elaboration of which all later philosophies depend. These are the ideas of " being " and " becoming " which we owe to Parmenides and Heraclitus respectively. To this all philosophic problems come back ; they are all problems of " static " or of "dynamic" forces, and thus depend upon the original idea of Parmenides, or they go back to Herac- litus for their basis. The early Greek had thus hit upon the soul of philosophy. Very shortly after came Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who laid the foundations of all researches into human thought. Hitherto all researches had been directed, as it were, to the thought of the world. The philosophers now began to turn their attention to the mind itself, and to look into the working of man's thought. In their opinion it was useless to pursue any further their researches into the great questions of the causes of the world until they should have discovered the value of their instru- ment of thinking itself. It is this very idea which lies at the root of Kant and his philosophical school. The chief thought of these men was the laying down of the rule of relation between general and particular concepts, a relation without which there is no philosophic thinking at all. The predecessors of the Greek philosophers had never been able to arrive at any such distinction. Their isolated ideas they had embodied in Dicta, in semi-scientific myths and stories, but these wise sayings were devoid of all power of correlation, or philosophical power. In science the Greek supplied the same artistic principles. As we have seen in former chapters, many 92 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS of the great nations of antiquity had of necessity accumulated masses of empirical observations, but system they were never able to attain. In all their works there is no trace of correlation or co-ordination. Science, if looked at from the standpoint of mere formal appearance, may very properly be considered to be an increasing power of mental "stenography." As our ability to generalize becomes greater, so the bulk of our scientific knowledge is continually reduced. We may rightly imagine that, say, in some five hundred years, sciences which now fill some three or four folio volumes may by generalization be reduced within the covers of a thin octavo. It is quite erroneous to suppose that as science progresses it must necessarily increase in mass. It is frequently said, nevertheless, that if science continues to advance at its present rate, scientists will be compelled to specialize in very narrow limits, and to devote themselves to some outlying branch of science exclusively. All this is essentially untrue. In order to obtain a concrete idea, onljr look at the bulky boqks^ pubUshed on natural philosophy ^ before and after the appearance of Ne wton^s small treatise on natural philosophy, hi^ "Prin^^^^ (1687), and you are at once struck by the immense reduction which has taken place. By this faculty for mental stenography, by powerful and far-reaching generaliza- tion, whole masses of material are narrowed into the smallest possible space. Let us take a very simple example. Imagine trigonometry before the discovery of the famous Pythagorean theorem, by which the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle is proved to be equal to the sum of the squares on the other two INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 93 sides. The Egyptians, although able, from sheer empirical data, to compute the length of the third side of a few rectangular triangles whose two other sides were given, were yet unable to make this computation for any triangle of that kind. What the Egyptian would have required whole shops full of papyrus to express, was reduced by the Greek formula to the brief expression a^ + 6^ = c^. Thus also the very converse of the common idea is truth. The more science advances, the less will the scientist require to specialize, in the old sense of the word. We have seen during the last century men of the greatest scientific genius, but not one of them can be said to have been a specialist. Helmholtz, Virchow, Darwin, Bunsen, Lord Kelvin^ all spread their investi- gations over wide spheres of ^ience, and their power of genera lization^as thus vastly increased. It is the privilege of the human mind to generalize. In art the case is entirely different. Our muscles cannot generalize, and must be constantly trained to their special objects. How rare it is to find even an eminent sculptor who is an eminent painter. It is to the Greek that we owe the power of scientific generalization. We must, however, not suppose that the Greek was a despiser of particular facts. We have only to read the works of Aristotle on natural history to have an idea of the immense labour he must have undergone in the col- lection of facts. He always went to the direct source of knowledge ; he must have gathered his information at first hand from all sorts and conditions of men. He must have talked with fishermen and conversed with farmers and cattle-breeders, fowlers and hunters. True, 94 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS many a sage in Asia had done the same before Aristotle. The Chinese collected vast unwieldy storehouses and encyclopaedias of facts. But Aristotle differs from them in the unerring way in which he can throw his know- ledge together and at once seize upon the guiding generality which runs through it all. In many instances Aristotle advances theories which modern science is still unable either to confirm or refute. He systematized science. What the great Greek artists and poets did for art and poetry, Aristotle and his disciples did for science. They gave it, once for ever, the form or system, without which knowledge remains powerless, because shapeless. The moderns have pointed out many a mistake in the scientific writings of Aristotle, and Whewell has even gone to the extent of saying generally that he tried to hang a real pitcher on to a painted nail. However, Aristotle only erred, just as "omniscient" Whewell erred, because he was human. His method and system are still the guiding stars of scientific thinking. He fully appreciated in- ductive methods, and gave its true value to thinking deductive. The form of strict scientific thought is still the same that he taught it to be when walking up and down in the Lyceum of Athens over two thousand years ago. CHAPTER VI INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS. — II It cannot be denied that an over-exuberant growth of intellectuality deprives nations of much of that grit and rough energy without which abiding commonwealths cannot be established. Thus the Hellenes, the Kenais- sance Italians, the eighteenth century Germans, etc., who all astounded, and still astound, the world with their unparalleled intellectual achieve- ments, were all unable to hold their own, and were either ruined or came very near being so. Causes of intellectual greatness. Not to be found in race, nor in '' evolution," which are mere words. Historical causes. Before entering on an investigation of the causes of intellectual success, we hold it necessary to premise a few remarks on the contrast between will and intel- lectual power. Nature has drawn a very clean-cut line of demarcation between the two powers. In the brute creation we may see volition at work untrammelled. It is not our business here to discuss the vexed question of instinct, but suffice it to say that when once the animal has conceived some particular desire, the whole of its energies, the whole of its being, is centred on the accomplishment of that desire. No matter what hin- drances, what obstacles be strewn upon its path, the animal pushes on blindly to the achievement of its object. Especially interesting is it to watch the action of undiluted will-power in the case of gregarious 96 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS animals, where the community, fired by the same wish, is able to bring most formidable forces to bear. There is no reasoning when once the desire has flashed across the animal brain. Consider the migrant birds when once they feel that it is time to be moving southwards ; nothing can stay them. Storms and high winds will not make them postpone for one hour the moment of their leave-taking. Theirs is not to reason out their travelling prospects, to balance the risks of delay against the risks of voyage by inclement weather. They must obey the imperious call of their volition, unquestioning and unreasoning. Every one must re- member years when thousands of swallows have been driven back to perish upon the coasts, all for having precipitated their journey by a few hours. The lemmings of Sweden, advancing over hill and water straight for the sea, where all of them are drowned, are the martyrs of a dominant will-power. In every branch of animal life we may observe the same phenomena in a more or less striking degree. Volition is followed by headlong action which cannot be checked by any sense of shame or even fear. It is this gigantic ' development of will-power alone which enables creatures like ants and bees to accomplish works which man would consider a glory. But these works are, as a rule, carried out at a cost of life and limb which man, en- dowed with reasoning power, and refusing to be entirely enslaved by his desires, would avoid through some intelligent expedient. The life of an animal, however, turns entirely upon the carrying out of its specific duty, and if it is hindered in this, life is, as a rule, the penalty. It is the prerogative of man to be able to dominate INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 97 his will-power instead of allowing his will-power to entirely master him. But this prerogative is not shared by all mankind in an equal degree. The balance between will-power and intellect is rarely, if ever, level ; it sometimes dips in the direction of the former, some- times of the latter. We have here to treat of nations, and not of individuals, and we shall find the distinction clearly marked between what we may, perhaps, be permitted to call the volitional nations and the intel- lectual nations. To the former class belong the Romans and the English. To the latter, in a greater or lesser deo-ree, belonoj most of the countries of con- temporary continental Europe, and to it belonged the Italians of the Renaissance and the ancient Greeks. No one can deny that the over-intellectualization of a nation entails the loss of a great deal of that grit and rough energy which is necessary in the struggle for existence. We find, the Greeks, after a short period, during which^ their intellectual activity \^^^ displayed with unparalleled brilliance, falling jtdctims to the in- vader; polit ical steadfastness and in tegrity are missing, and treac hery is rif e. We see the same thing again among the fifteenFh and sixteenth century Renaissance Italians, whose marvellous outburst^ of intellectual vigour is quick ly followed by national ajgathy. Once more the same thing happens with the eighteenth century Germans. It is then that German literature grew up in a very few years, after centuries of almost complete silence. But these prodigies of art are not accompanied by any corresponding move forward in the growth of national unity. Germany is, then, even more dismembered and torn by internal dissensions than ever. H 98 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS The Germans themselves appear politically enervated, atrophied. Every petty German princelet is able to sell his subjects with impunity to the highest bidder. There scarcely seems any one to utter a word of protest, and German troops are bartered to any power whose purse is deep enough to pay for them. England is an especially good customer in this military slave-market, and Hessian regiments are employed by her in her un- availing attempts to keep down the insurgents in her revolted American colonies. English subsidies keep the heads of many a minor German sovereign above water. But Germany had not gone absolutely to wreck and ruin when there came the battle of Jena, October, 1806, which in one day brought her to the lowest verge of humiliation ; it also called her to her senses before it was too late. Germans began to see that, if you require to keep a place in the world, you must have something of a more virile fibre than mere Gemut, Gefuhl, and Idealismus, something more than an eternal adoration of abstract Schonheit, The day of jJena was the^ foundation of German greatness. A sudden change came over German minds, and they began to strike out the new path which was to lead them on the road to Sedan and the capitulation of Paris. Without abandoning his intellectual ambitions, the German began to cast aside the unpractical ex- aggerations to which he had carried them, and to take a more matter-of-fact and worldly view of life. It is very questionable whether nations ever have, or ever will be, able to maintain a mean between intellect and will-power; of all modern nations, the Germans have certainly come nearest to the attainment INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 99 of such an ideal. The Americans have not reached it, as a whole, though doubtless there are many men in the Eastern States who may claim to have reached it individually. We are, however, not dealing with in- dividuals, but with nations. This balance between intellect and volition is rare enough even in single persons, and when it does occur it produces such men as Napoleon or Bismarck. Napoleon had an iron will, rather a will of hardest tempered steel, but it was allied to a military and political genius of the first order. Let us pass on to investigate the nations gifted with superabundant will-power. Typical are the English, and when once this leading trait of all-predominating will-power is grasped, it will serve as a lever to solve many of the most interesting problems of English national psychology. In England we have the true cult of will-power. The Englishman's idea is that the world is ruled by character, by will, and in order to secure himself that dominion, he applies himself to the development of those qualities. The world, however, as we shall later on see, cannot be governed by will alone. This hypertrophy of the will-power can, indeed, claim manifold advantages. It is to this that the Englishman owes that persistent bull-dog tenacity which he sets on high as his ideal. It is an ideal which will carry a man far in business, will permit him to hold on through years of comparative ill-success, until he finally succeeds. It is to this quality that the Englishman owes, no doubt, in no small degree, his success as a colonist and as an empire-builder. It is the quality which will keep a man at his post in the distant out-stations of civili- zation, and make him settle far away from home. 100 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS It is the superabundance of this quality which will go far to explain the many anomalies of English life and customs. From the verj earliest childhood the^ I English boy^ is subjected to methodical will-culture ; he is soon trained to suppress to the uttermost all external signs of emotion ; he is habituated to seeing his future in the exercise of his will-power ; and when he goes to school he is practically given over to his j own initiative. At fifteen he already feels oppressed by the responsibility of his own career ; the wnole of » his education runs on profoundly anti-continental lines ; \ he is not at all discouraged in the idea that his school j is intended to develop his pluck and resistance very \ much more than his intellectual capacities. At the f time when a French boy, perhaps intellectually far j more advanced, is yet a child in character, the English I boy is already in possession of the qualities which are « to carry him through life. His mental equipage may not be very heavy, but he has an energy d toute epreuve. Surely there is much in all this to account for the gloom which overhangs most circles of English private life? It is in the youth of a country, careless of the morrow, that lies the cheerfulness of a people. The English boj Js not careless of the morrow; he feels the responsi^ bilities of man's estate, and nothing ages so much as responsibility. Surely there is something much more logical in this explanation than in the pseudo-psychology of Professor Boutmy, of Paris, who ascribes all the idio- syncracies of English character to the most absurd climatic influences. But, like many latter-day philoso- phers on both sides of the Channel, he draws the data for his comparisons in great measure from books, and INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 101 books do not, as a rule, give a true reflection of national life. The French novel accounts for the numberless caricatures of French life which people the English brain, but the gulf between the French novel and French life is as wide as the gulf between earth and heaven. The French novel gives a picture of French life much like the image which the convex mirror gives of the human form. The idealization of will-power has played no in- significant rdle in the growth of the English constitu- tion. In no modern state, save England, has the action of will-power been allowed so free a course. Where other European countries have introduced bureaucratic methods, England has adhered to what we may perhaps call volitional methods. What could be more foreign to the Continental mind than the growth of English judge-made law? Continental law and procedure has, thrqugh^the actionjDf intellect, long been reduced to a code, while in England the judge retains not only the prerogative of law administration, but also of law- making. Law, as it were, has beenjeft largely to the will of Englishjudges. This very brief outline of the action of a super- developed volition upon the progress of a nation will serve as an excellent basis of comparison against which the institutions of Continental nations, the intellectual nations par excellence should show up in bold relief. We shall later have an opportunity of amplifying what we have to say of England. For the nonce let us con- fine ourselves to the investigation of the causes, results, and methods of intellectual success. We have already shown that the downfall of the 102 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Greek states may to no mean extent be attributed to their over-intellectualization. Consider for a moment the effect of this abnormal culture of intellect on the Greek character in general. The artistic temperament must certainly have been distributed through the population of the Greek city-states to an extent which at the present day we have the greatest diflSculty in realizing. Even in latter-day France, where esprit is spread over almost every class of society, there is, nevertheless, nothing like a parallel. Think of the vast theatre of Dionysus at Athens, which could hold almost the whole population of the city, packed to over- flowing with an enthusiastic and really appreciative audience, that never missed a point, however subtle, either in comedy or tragedy ; and we shall probably gain some faint idea of what the inhabitants of a Hel- lenic city-state were intellectually. But the abuse of intellect brings its inevitable consequences. This ex- aggerated artistic temperament hates the rough contact of real life. It engenders an over-sensitiveness to which physical hardships become intolerably repugnant. It creates what the French have so aptly termed Vame du jouisseur. We can very well imagine how to the subtle mind of the Greek of the period of de- cadence any decided course of action became difficult, if not impossible. The fault with him was not that he was not able to grasp the political questions with which he was confronted, but that he grasped them so well, that he was able to conceive endless solutions to them. Ways out of his difficulties he could find in numbers; but he lacked the will-power and deter- mination to carry out any one of them with con- INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 103 sistency. He could see not only one side of a question, but infinite sides. His misfortune was to see not only the pros of a course of action, but the cons too ; and by the time the balancing of this advantage against that drawback was complete, the moment for action was gone by. He had to pay the penalty for his over- subtlety, which could not only split a hair, but split again into five or six the hair which had already been split countless times before. It was thus that the Greek, after the Roman conquest, became the little Grceculus of his victor, who was found useful as a tutor or as an ofiSce-clerk, to be treated with a certain sort of mild contempt. We can quite understand the double current of feeling which we see running through Roman minds, an admiration of Hellenic culture at its best, the culture on which all Eoman intellectual pro- gress was based, and a contemptuous disdain for its latter-day representatives. The Greek, under the later Roman Republic and the beginning of the empire, stood very much upon the same footing as the Bahu of contemporary India, another very typical example of the efiects of over-intellectuality. In the city-states of Italy under the Renaissance every one was an artist, men and women, we might even say children ; for many a genius of the Renais- sance began to display his powers at a precociously early age. If every ^citizen was not an author of artistic productions, he wa s at least a refined ^(?w- noisseur. In art, as we have seen, individualization is all-important — it is the sine qua non of art; but the Renaissance Italian carried this individuality be- yond the domain of art into every sphere of practical 104 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS and political life. His whole being was revolted by the idea of a syndicate. He^ could as little conceive t hat «iny_advantage_ should arise in matters political from union as he couW„ imagine that a masterpiece jof_art could be^reatedby_the collaboration of several separate artists. The national unity of Italy appeared as great an absurdity to him as would have seemed the execu- tion of a statue by a combination of several workmen. It became his ambition to multiply political in- dividualities as it had hitherto been his business to multiply artistic individualities. Concerted action on the part of the Italian city-states scarcely entered his mind. When such concerted action did take place it was never complete, never unanimous, and was only performed at a moment of imminent and overwhelming danger. Directly immediate peril had disappeared this momentary union collapsed, and the various small states reassumed their normal state of internecine hostility. There is continual war of Pisa against Florence, of Genoa against Venice, of Lucca against Arezzo, in fact of every city against every other city. As Aristotle has well said, with that keen and astound- ing insight into the very heart of things which characterizes his remarks on almost every subject he may happen to handle, Greece united could have ruled the world. With how much more truth might the same have been said of the Italians at the Eenaissance. But this want of union was also the essential of their artistic pre-eminence. Italy was redundant with the greatest men of genius that have been known to modern times. But the very passion for indiy id.uality which gave birth to Leonardo da Vinci, Leon Battista Alberti, INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 105 Kafael, to Michael Angelo Buonarroti, to Macliiavelli, to Giordano Bruno, produced as a necessary pendant such types as the Sforzas and Borgias. The Italians, sunk in artistic abstraction, fell a prey to a handful of vile, and profligate, and often illiterate despots, whose yoke the want of political cohesion and decision amongst the people of Italy would not permit them to shake offl How similar, how strikingly parallel, was the state of affairs in Germany towards the close of the eighteenth century, we have already had occasion to show. The most ingenious books have been written en- deavouring to apply the theory of race to the explana- tion of the rise of intellect among nations. But the racial theory has been ridden to death. After a long struggle, it is now being eventually abandoned by its most fanatical adherents in the ranks of modern his- torians. But the average man still pins his faith to it. The ordinary Englishman still attributes, and will con- tinue to attribute, the success of his nation to the pre- dominance of the Anglo-Saxon stock ; there is something extremely flattering to national pride in the notion. It also permits of a rapid and complete annihilation of the so-called Latin races. The Frenchman is also fired by a kindred admiration for all that has issued from the Gallo-Eoman blood, a theory which also allows of the equally rapid and complete disposal of all that is Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon. We have already shown how abso- lutely impossible and inapplicable such theories are in the scientific study of history. Race is quite impossible of identification, and where we can to some extent follow out the lines of ethnographical demarcation, it does not 106 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS in any way correspond with the national frontier. We must seek for some more substantial basis on which to found our theories of the causes of intellectual growth. We must at once insist upon the state of intellectual stagnation in which the nations, who have been pre- served from all contact with foreign neighbours, who have been cut off from all sources of foreign immigration, have remained. We have in the earliest chapters, it is to be hoped, succeeded to some extent in convincing the reader of the intellectual nonentity of ancient Egypt. Now Egypt is, above all, a neighbourless land, shut off by impenetrable, natural boundaries of waste and desert from uninterrupted contact with the outside world. Let this sufl&ce as a negative illustra- tion of our theory. We shall now proceed to prove that all the nations of antiquity, as of modern times, which have the glory of being initiators of great intel- lectual progress, have been border nations. Situated upon the confines of some great empire, they have also been, on the whole, comparatively insignificant nations on the score of numbers. The mind of man, it must be said with regret, is very prone to sloth. Unless he is to derive some benefit from mental activity, he is not likely to put himself out. This applies to the early manifestations of intellectual activity ; once the stimulus is given the process is likely to continue for some time. But it may be laid down as a principle, that progress of intellect has always been manifested in response to some external stimulus. Let us consider for the moment the conditions of existence of border nations. Their num- bers will not permit them to sustain a struggle of main force against their more powerful neighbours ; they must INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 107 seek for some efficient weapon with which to ward off the onslaught of their outnumbering foes. The only such weapon is to be found in a superior intelligence ; directly intelligence stands at a premium it begins to appear. A superior degree of intelligence, superior mental capacity alone, could save the Phoenicians from their Hittite, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, and other neighbours. The great outburst of Greek genius takes place just at the moment when the Hellenes had suc- ceeded in stemming first the old Asiatic empires (1000 B.C.) and then the flood of Persian invasion (fifth century B.C.). The cities of North Italy rise into eminence at the very moment they are able to cast off the yoke of subservience to the Holy Eoman Empire; Venice when she was free from allegiance to the Byzan- tines. The manifestations of Italian intellect are the echo of Legnano, where Emperor Barbarossa was utterly routed by the Lombard city-states. We have seen some of the pernicious results of over- intellectuality upon the nations of modern Europe. Let us endeavour to show some of the means by which they seek to combat this over-intellectuality, or rather to compensate for it by a restoration of the balance of will-power. The great nations of Continental con- temporary Europe have adopted an artificial means of developing the defective volition of their citizens. Up to the time of his majority the young man of the Con- tinent has led a very different life to his English counter- part. He has been subjected to a course of intellectual raining, which has been carried out with but little regard to the development of his will-power. Few people have any idea of the grinding intellectual mill 108 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS through which the average Continental youth has to pass. In Hungary the Prussian system of intellectual gymnastics is carried out with unheard-of vigour. For nine and a half months in every year the average Hungarian boy is compelled, in accordance with the Ministerial curriculum of secondary education, to toil every week through twenty-eight lectures, dealing with almost every branch of knowledge. The ordinary day's labour, when home-work is included, can seldom fall short of eight hours. Physical and bodily exercise are only assigned two hours a week, and the games which form so prominent a feature of English school-life are prac- tically unheard of. The pity of it all is that this intellectual surfeiting entirely misses its object. If this educational system does not prepare a man for the actual difficulties of existence, we might at least expect that it would lead to the most remarkable intellectual achievements. Alas ! nothing of the kind. Hungary has failed to startle the world with great philosophies, great inventions, or great commercial enterprises ; she has not even produced, in contemporary days, an even third-rate musical composer! And the reason is that the state has developed the intellectual faculties at the cost of the volitional. The reaction from this intellectual grind is very great, and there is nothing to be surprised at when we see the young man, who has by eighteen rushed superficially over half the sciences, disgusted for the rest of his life with all serious reading. His varnish of education, however, has given him the idea that he is really instructed ; it has, as a matter of fact, only enabled him to dilute all knowledge with a flood of rhetoric. Taine, in one of his best passages, has branded INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS 109 this system of over-straining the young mind. We quote him in his own words : ** Lorsque Tacquisition des cadres generaux est aisee et precoce I'esprit court risque de devenir paresseux. . . . Souvent, au sortir du college, presque toujours avant vingt-cinq ans, il possede ces cadres, et comme ils sont commodes, il les applique a tout sujet ; desormais il n'apprend plus, il se croit suffi- samment muni. II se contente de raisonner et souvent il raisonne a vide. II n*est pas au fait; il n'a pas le renseignement special et concluant ; il ne sent pas qu'il lui manque, il ne va pas le chercher, il repete des idees de vieux journal." In the over-intellectualized <^^^ system of education is almost invariablj reflected in_a highly^ bureaucratic government, which is, after all, the natural outcome of a mind which has always been trained in the formal systematization of things. But nothing can be more paralyzing to national energies than a bureau- crat government, which, by its red-tape routine, very soon reduces all its members, through all the stages of mental atrophy, to the condition of mechanical auto- mata. It has been shown time after time that energy can only be maintained by constant struggle. The leisured ease, which is the fond dream of men of science and letters, rarely leads to anything great. Otherwise we should look for the greatest works of genius among the members of the monastic orders or among the class of well-paid and leisured civil-servants ; but this arti- ficial freedom from the cares and anxieties of existence is destructive of all individual initiative. The Continental Powers have, from political motives, adopted the system of conscription, which goes far to 110 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS remedy the effects of a faulty education of the will- power ; the result has no doubt been attained uncon- sciously, but should the agitators for international disarmament and the abolition of compulsory military service meet with success, it will be an evil day for the Continental countries. CHAPTER YII RELIGIOUS SUCCESS, — I A few nations succeeded in founding systems of religion that spread over vast areas and converted millions of people. Buddhism. Hebrew Monotheism. Christianity. Mahometanism. Calvinism. The origins of the four latter religions are all from amazingly small and apparently insignificant begin- nings. Where they do not lead to the establishment of an ecclesiastical •polity or Church proper, there they absorb man's best powers to an extent injurious to his other interests. The Roman Catholic Church. In Eriglisli-speaking countries the majority of persons who have pursued their studies after they have been released from the compulsory acquisition of a certain quota of knowledge during their period of school life have been drawn to the almost exclusive pursuit of the physical sciences. The very English language is an imposing witness to this fact. German has the word Wissenscliaft and English has the word Science, but although the German word contains all that is implied by the English term, it cannot fitly be translated by the word " science " ; it contains a great deal more, and may include literature, history and art, all of which, to the English mind, appear eminently unscientific. Science means practically the physical sciences, and the physical sciences alone. It is, then, not unnatural that the English mind, when it is brought to bear on historical 112 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS and social questions, should seek to apply to them the same processes of reasoning which it has found so successful in physics. I t is notjiin natural that the Englishman should imagine that the jame Jaws of mass and number which hold good in mechanics shoul3~lSnc[ also appropriate application in history and sociology^ It has been our constant endeavour to point out throughout this volume the absolute error^of all con- siderations of mass in history. But it is out of this fundamental error that have grown the exaggerated ideas generally prevalent as to the immense part to be played by America and Russia in the future ; out of this error likewise has grown that Chinese phantom which has for years haunted the minds of European politicians, the YeUow Terror. Equally empty is the bugbear of Panslavism which has long hung as an imaginary menace over Europe. Although we shall have occasion to enter into American politics in greater detail, we may state now that whatever influence America may be destined to exercise upon the central and southern parts of the great Western continent, she will never become a decisive factor in European history. If there is any teaching clearly derivable from European history, it is that it has always been decided by quality and not by quantity. And since high-strung and intense quality exists only in a few people, we may well say that the history of Europe has gone by minorities. The wealth of highly differentiated types, individualities, and national personalities in Europe is an insurmount- able bulwark against which the uniform undiflerentiated masses, emerging possibly from the far East or from the far West, may expend their efforts in vain. RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 113 This great and indisputable fact, this basal and fundamental experience of all European history, shows nowhere more clearly than in the history of religious success secured by a few nations who succeeded in founding religious systems and churches embracing millions and even hundreds of millions of people. All the great religious institutions, ideals, and dogmas came not only from a very few people, from peoples whose numbers were insignificant, but from the most remote of peoples, from the most obscure and unexpected corners. The Roman Empire, the vastest fabric of human ingenuity and force that has ever been raised, was sapped, undermined, and dissolved by a mere handful of Jews, issuing from the least important of the then Roman provinces. Again the constant and startling correlation between the immense success of a certain religion on the one hand, and the exiguity of its origin on the other, is strikingly illustrated by the spread of Mahometanism, now covering broad tracts in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Of these religions, as is generally known, some are universal in extent, others are not so. The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, may be fairly called universal, comprising as it does hundreds of millions of adherents distributed over all the surface of the globe. Mahometanism and Buddhism have extended their influence over such immense expanses of territory that they, too, may be fittingly ranked among the universal religions. In studying the sects of these various creeds, the religions within religions, we observe the same con- stant relation between ultimate immense success and poor and petty beginnings. Let us take as an example I 114 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Calvinism. It may be said without exaggeration that, with the exception of Christopher Columbus, no man of the Kenaissance, and for centuries after, has influenced the fate of European politics more profoundly than has Calvin . He really^ introduced the^^rinci^^^ of^demo- c^ra£7, imder the^guise of theo^^^^ and this principle, as it spread in ever-widening circles, became every- where the seed of political revolution. On reaching Holland, it kindled into flame that titanic rebellion and struggle for liberty which, after lasting four score years, ended in the triumph of the Dutch. As Calvinism spread over the British Islands, it stirred into being, first in Scotland, and subsequently in England, the greatest civil wars which these islands have ever witnessed, and by means of which the whole constitu- tion of England was altered in aU its vital elements. When Calvinism burst upon France it led to four and thirty years of civil strife from 1559 to 1593, and was thus the indirect means of unification in France, and hence of the pre-eminence of that country in Europe. On reaching America, it inspired the early settlers in New England with that steadfastness, that tenacity of purpose, which was destined to make the colonies the haven of refuge for hundreds of thousands of the oppressed and downtrodden of Europe. We omit a multitude of examples which we might adduce of the influence of Calvinism upon Hungarian, Polish, and Swedish history. There, too, it was the all-pervading leaven which induced political fermentation and pro- gress. Calvinism is not yet dead, and the latest mark of its power is the three years of heroic struggle of the South African Boers, devoted adherents of Calvinism. JL.^ ^c .^es RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 115 Its latest apostles are named Botha, De la Rey, De Wet. And all this mighty influence came from the obscure citizen of a yet obscurer township of Picardy. On con- sidering the immense efi"ect upon religious, or rather upon politico-religious ideas of this insignificant Picard ; when, moreover, we remember that his famous head- quarters in Geneva were laid in a town of then not more than twelve thousand inhabitants ; we cannot but stand amazed at the apparent disproportion between the cause and the efi'ect. Religious success, indeed, has as its chief and essential conditions small numbers gravitating about a central force of intense quality — a personality. Of personality we shall speak at length in the succeeding chapter. Let us now take a typical example of the rise of a great religious power. Let us briefly trace the conditions which have contributed to the vast influence of the Society of Jesus, the order of Jesuits. We may well regard this order as a political unity. In our preceding chapters we have pointed out that an ideal balance between the volitional and intellectual powers would be likely to procure the supreme degree of success in a nation. We have also intimated that this balance has been rarely even partially attained ; that the development of an excess of will-power entails, as a rule, a serious diminution of the elasticity of the intellectual power; the converse we have likewise proved to hold true. If we read the rule for the government of the Society of Jesus we are struck by little that is novel. He that joins the order must take the same solemn triple oath, of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which is the base 116 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS upon which all other great monastic institutions have been built. The rule of the Jesuits has nothing that is characteristically distinct from the regulce of the Bene- dictines, the Franciscans, or from those of a score of other orders. There are the same minute directions for the observation of a spiritual life, but they are not sufficient to account for the rapid spread of the society, which in a few years swept like a prairie-fire over Europe from end to end, gathering multitudes of fresh adherents in every country. In 1759, fourteen years before its abolition by Clement XIV., the order numbered 22,589 members. These figures alone will serve to give some idea of the widespread power of the society, which will only be heightened when we come to see what every unit of this immense total represented in energy and intelligence. To-day they are still the most powerful order existing, numbering probably over eleven thousand members, and extending their influence by a vast missionary system over the whole surface of the globe. It is clear that the seeds of Jesuit success are not to be found in its regula ; they must be sought for in the personality of Loyola himself. To feel the full force of this, we should have lived with him on the Montmartre at Paris during those seven years of toil (1528-1535) during which he was making himself ready for his great mission ; we should have had a life in common with Peter Faber, Francis Xavier, Laynez, Salmeron, Boba- dilla, and Kodriguez de Azevedo, who were to become the first members of the great society ; we should have felt what they felt in the presence of Loyola. The idea which Loyola had succeeded in grasping was, after all, simple. He may not have framed it in RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 117 the same words as we should put it nowadays, but he had, at any rate, realized the fact that ^reat intellect, impelled by unflinching, indefatigable will-power, con- stitutes the greatest possible human force. He knew that in nature such a combination rarely exists, even in the case of single persons, and never in the case of communities. If, then, by artificial means he were able to make members of an association combining both these qualities to an eminent degree, there would be no political, no religious institution which would not be compelled to bow before it. It was Loyola's own personality alone which enabled him to carry this ideal into execution. Of its details we know enough, but we know, nevertheless, but a fraction of what is to be known. The Jesuits have been careful to cover up their traces, and all the archives in Europe are incapable of showing the important part they have played in nine-tenths of the otherwise incomprehensible events of European history. We have seen that this combination of intellect and will-power can only be obtained by artificial means. Let us cast a rapid glance at the mechanism which turns out a Jesuit, and what is the cost at which it is kept active. Assuredly if any proof were needed of the price at which ideals are purchased, the Society of Jesus would furnish the most striking of examples. The method of Jesuit-making is the conception of Ignatius Loyola. The training of the will-power probably offered the greatest difficulties, for the will-power was to be developed, not for the benefit of him that exercised it, but for the service of the order. It was to be a living instrument which the society might always expect to act with mathematical precision. To obtain this 118 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS perfect instrument, it was expedient to get rid of all human passions and emotions which might possibly cause it to waver. This was the object of the moral education of the Jesuit. All the sources of emotion must be choked. Love of parents, love of relations, love of country must be annihilated in order that nothing shall interfere with the divine mission. " They must free themselves of all love for the created, in order to bestow their whole love upon the Creator." Even friendship was crushed out, for although a semblance of friendship was maintained between novices, we may imagine the utter isolation which really existed when we learn that every novice was compelled to send in a regular report to his superior of the conduct and feelings of his companion in the recreation hours. All passion and sentiment were crushed out by the most humiliating religious exercises, until the Jesuit was finally reduced to the level of a foreigner even in his own country. He was freed of all scruples save obedience to the commands of his superior; the responsibility for all other actions he might scruple to perform being assumed by the order. He was an unemotional automaton, with an abnormal will-power on which the order might im- plicitly depend to carry him through any degree of self- abnegation and self-sacrifice. To make man the willing slave of this crushing psychological ideal required the personality of a Loyola. The intellectual training was equally severe. If the instrument was steeled in temper, it must also be of the proper and most useful design. Any original stock of talent that the novice might possess the order pro- ceeded to develop to its own advantage. No expense RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 119 or care was spared in giving the novice the most perfect education ; that is to say, the real education does not begin until the two years of noviciate proper, during which the novice may return to the world, or the order may refuse to keep him, are ended. In the class of scholastici approbati the Jesuit passes from eight to fifteen years, during which he undergoes a most searching educational curriculum. Much has been said, and justly been said, of the evil done by the order of Jesus, but the general tone of re- viling is to'the real student of history revoltingly unjust. The Jesuits are, as we have already said, not an order, but a state. As is the case with all states, their history abounds in things great and small, sublime and vile. We should like to remind the reader of a few only of their immortal merits. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the most abominable jof all pr^ddces^ajid^ superstitions^ the beHef m witchcraft^ was rampant, there was, save ajnong the Jesuits, th^^^ most piti^We lack of moral courage. Neither Bacon nor Leibniz, neither Descartes nor Spinoza, had the moral courage to combat publicly the terrible supersti- tion that claimed thousands of innocent victims, down to children of six years, who were burnt, for instance, as witches at Wiirzburg. Among the first men who had that rare courage were Jesuits, the Paters Adam Tanner, Paul Layman, and more particularly the noble Frederick Spec. The latter s "Cautio Criminalis" was so power- ful an argument against witch-trials that it actually brought about a change in the horrible practice. It was, therefore, very much more effective than the works of Weir and Reginald Scot. 120 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS As to the merits of the Jesuits in regard to science, they are exceedingly great. They produced several first-class mathematicians and physicists (Guldin, Christ, Scheiner, Grimaldi, etc.), and at present one of the most comprehensive conspectuses of higher mathematics is published by Pater Hagen in America. Another Pater, E. Wasmann, has quite recently been publishing very important monographs, adding new evidence for the theory of evolution. To the historian proper many of the works of the Jesuits are absolutely indispensable. Quinine was brought over by the Jesuits, and the camelia is named after Pater C. J. Camel. But when we again return to the consideration of origins we are startled. The Spanish, as we shall show, and as is, moreover, very well known to every one from their history, have never been able to establish and build up permanently powerful polities. Their empire was always loosely knit together, and ready to collapse at the earliest shock. A hundred years after the dis- covery of America it was already on the high-road to dissolution. Of the greatest imperial opportunities ever vouchsafed to any nation, the Spanish only succeeded in making political bankruptcy. Is it not, then, highly remarkable that a man should arise out of this, of all nations, to found the greatest body politic ever estab- lished ? So true is it that religious success, the most powerful influence upon mankind, and upon which depends the whole material, intellectual and moral life of nations, is originated by one commanding personality, emerging from the most insignificant beginnings and the most unexpected quarters. It has long been remarked, and often repeated, that KELIGIOUS SUCCESS 121 it was a providential fact that the Christian religion came from remote Bethlehem, a village whose name was unknown to the Romans. Had it pleased Providence to kindle Christianity in Eome by fixing there the birthplace of the Saviour, struggles infinitely more intense might have crippled and retarded the spread of Christianity. Eome had succeeded in subjugating other nations politically ; in intellect and religion, how- ever, she remained in many instances their decided inferior. These nations, conscious of their intellectual and religious superiority, were perhaps readier to acquiesce in the otherwise beneficial political supremacy of Rome. Had, however, Rome acquired also the immense leverage of religious pre-eminence by becoming the birthplace of a Messiah, it is impossible to predict what fearful religious wars and convulsions might not have arisen whereby the progress of religion would have been indefinitely impeded. The Jew is an exceedingly difficult quantity to analyze. It is certainly most expedient to regard him under the head of religious success, for although we shall see that there have been many other agencies at work contributing to his success, it is, after all, the bond of religion which most closely unites Jew to Jew. We shall devote a few words to showing that the Jews are certainly not a distinctive unmixed race, in spite of the strong ethnical characteristics which have set their mark upon the majority of them. The Jew in historical times has not lived in that absolutely strict racial isolation in which he is popularly supposed to have lived. We have the most conclusive evidence, documentary evidence, showing that among the Jews of Central, 122 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Southern, and Eastern Europe there was during the Middle Ages a very considerable infusion of non- Hebrew blood. Moreover, albeit the Jews have main- tained a distinct type such as few other tribes have preserved, there is, nevertheless, ibetween the Jew of Poland and the Jew of Spain, between the Jew of Austro-Hungary and the Jew of Germany, the most decided physical dissimilarity. But whatever bodily variety there may exist among the Jews, the moral and social, the psychological type is remarkably uniform. The Jew is the Jew all the world over, be he fair or be he swarthy, and the theory of race breaks down utterly when it endeavours to reconcile this psychological uniformity with this physical variety. Let us glance for a moment at another nationality of exceedingly mixed blood, the South African Boers. No one could deny that there is one prevalent Boer character ; but in order to explain it we must seek for some more workable theory than the theory of race, for among the Boers the racial confusion is quite inextricable. The very names point to the frequent influx of foreign elements, French, English, German, Portuguese, or any other nationality. But all these discordant factors have been reduced to one homogeneous whole. A De la Eey, despite his name, is Boer to the backbone, and nothing but Boer ; the same may be said of a Joubert or a Villiers. One of the greatest men that has ever arisen among the Jews, Spinoza, has accounted for the remarkable persistence of type among his co-religionists, and for the unflinching, uncompromising attitude which they maintain towards modern civilization, by referring to the very hatred which other nations have preserved RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 123 towards that type. Spinoza has certainly made the first step towards solving the problem, but it would be very much more satisfactory to say that the Jew is the foreigner par excellence. He has at all times reaped the benefits of his foreign status. We will here digress for a moment in order to give in some detail the general theory of the foreigner at which we have from time to time referred in other chapters. It is commonly supposed that the stranger in a country is at a decided disadvantage. The teach- ings of history point very much in the opposite direc- tion. Is it, after all, so very surprising that the foreigner in a strange land should, as a general rule, succeed ? He is, to begin with, in circumstances which are likely to fill him with energy, and in order to expatriate himself, he must already have required no inconsiderable amount of energy and determination. His stock of knowledge, being that of a foreigner, will probably be novel, and be able to realize a good price in a new country. He is determined at all costs to succeed, and, indeed, if he does not, he must regard himself as irrevocably lost. He has set all upon his last venture. It is only necessary to glance rapidly at some of the greatest personalities that have illustrated history to convince ourselves of the all-important part which has been played by foreigners in the building up of countries. At Athens, Themistocles, the saviour of Hellas, was not a pure Athenian born, but the son of an alien mother. Lysander, Sparta's greatest man, was not a Spartan at all, but the child oiperioeci, or resident aliens. But to come to modern days, where the names occur in abundance, so that we can only choose one or 124 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS two out of the profusion. There is Mazarin in France, perhaps her greatest statesman, but of Italian birth. In England we need only mention such famous names as Simon de Montfort, King William III., Disraeli. It is a singular fact, though perhaps not so astonishing when we come to look deeper into the matter, that the Christianizing of Europe has been almost exclu- sively the outcome of foreign missionary zeal. Verily, a man is not a prophet in his own country, and, as if in confirmation of the words of Scripture, almost every land of Europe has sent preachers to its neigh- bours, and received from them preachers in return. Three of the greatest monastic orders have been founded in France by foreigners : the Carthusians by St. Bruno of Cologne; the Cistercians by St. Stephen Harding, an Englishman ; and the Order of Pr^montre (Prsemon- stratensians) by St. Norbert, from Xanten, in West- phalia. We might adduce an infinity of other striking examples, but the brief space which we can allow to this digression forbids it. We should like, however, to emphasize the fact that the debt of England to foreign importations is immense, especially in the industrial and commercial world. How many trades and industries in England have been based upon foreign energies ! We need only think of weaving, introduced and developed by Flemings; of the great drainage works of the Eastern Counties, carried out almost entirely by Dutch labour, many traces of which remain in the local geography, in such names as Little Holland and in the title Dutch Eiver applied to the Goole Canal. In South Wales, again, the mining and smelting works are in no small part due to Flemish initiative and EELIGIOUS SUCCESS 125 enterprise. Two of the most thriving towns, Swansea and Milford, were founded by refugees driven in the twelfth century from their homes in the Netherlands by the terrible floods. Again, there is the London watch industry, originated by French settlers in Clerken- well. The expulsion of the Huguenots from France, which followed upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, scattered a multitude of the most intelligent inhabitants of France over the rest of Europe, and Louis XIV., by this act of religious intolerance, con- ferred unwittingly enough an inestimable boon upon his neighbouring enemies. We have already pointed out that Egypt, fenced off among its desert barriers, and almost completely insulated from foreign contact, was inevitably predestined to lapse into a condition of stag- nant conservatism ; in our later pages we shall show that the same conditions^are now having a practically identical^ result in the ca^e of .Spain. It is needless to insist that the immense energy of the Americans is owing chiefly to the fact that they are all foreigners. With these few observations to guide us, we may come back to the consideration of the Jew. As we have said, he is the classical stranger, the foreigner par excellence. In his case the conditions of the alien are doubly accentuated. The hatred with which, from religious motives, he was visited in the Middle Ages, and is even now visited, have completed his almost utter loneliness, and prevented him from absorption into the environing nationality. His foreign status has been indefinitely prolonged, and he has thus con- tinued to reap the benefit accruing from this state. Moreover, in the early Middle Ages, when the 126 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS bourgeoisie was hardly even yet nascent, he was almost the only man ready to undertake commerce, or who had any business faculties. He made use of all the splendid opportunities offered to him greatly to his financial betterment. His success certainly did not add to the love and esteem in which he was held, and so his foreign position, as time went on, was more and more keenly impressed on him, until in some cases he was expelled, as he was from England in 1290. The prevailing notion of universal Jewish success is, however, highly exaggerated. The vast majority of the Jews are paupers. It hardly needs a journey in Eastern Europe to bring home this fact, when there are such numbers of poverty-ridden Israelites in the Western capitals. Their misery is, no doubt, to some extent hidden, in that the rich Jew, animated by that spirit of solidarity which marks all Jewish communities, comes to the succour of his poorer brethren, who would otherwise become a burthen on the public relief funds. The number of Jews who have attained exalted posi- tions in wealth and politics (we need only cite the Eothschilds for riches ; and Cremieux in France, Lassalle in Germany, Disraeli in England for political distinc- tion) has, no doubt, tended to give this overdone idea of Israelite prosperity. The example of his more fortu- nate brethren who have succeeded cannot but give an immense stimulus and high hopes to the still struggling Jew. If his ambitions are less confined to money, and soar into the ideal, he need only remind himself of such names as Heine and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The isola- tion in which the Jew is held by his inimical environ- ments is yet further heightened by his religion and by RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 127 his religious observances. His God is, after all, chiefly his own God, the God of the elect, who is mostly indifferent or hostile to Gentiles. We have seen, then, that the Jew derives his strength from his almost pariah-like exclusion from his surround- ings, which, while it increases his energy and fighting instincts, must also free him, to some extent, from his scruples in dealing with Gentiles. Against such a position the storm of anti-Semitism must expend its fury in vain, as it only serves to strengthen its foe. It can only help to make them more aggressive, and, con- sequently, more successful. Is it not, perhaps, for this very reason that the Jews have never sought to offer a corporate resistance to their modern aggressors ? Should the present Zionist propaganda, which is being pursued with such enthusiasm by its promoters, really lead to something practical being done in the way of repatriating the Jews in the land of their origin, the friends of the racial theory will be astonished at the results. All the distinguishing traits which at present stamp the Jews as something quite apart would rapidly fade away ; and though it is impossible to fore- cast what their future might be, it is certain that it would proceed along lines quite different from those of their present activity. A word or two remains to be said about the very important reform movements which have, during the last thirty years, been going forward in America, and as to what may be expected from them. Jewry there has been undergoing a process of modernization. The strict rules of ritual with which the Jew, if an observant Jew, was expected to comply, are being relaxed — the 128 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Sabbath need not be observed so severely, and restric- tions in dress and diet, and in intercourse with Gentiles have been allowed in great part to lapse into abeyance. In spite of all these modifications in his mode of life, the Jew is not likely to merge into his non-Jewish surroundings ; he will neither allow himself to be absorbed nor will he be allowed to do so. Antipathy against him is still unabated, and as long as this anti- pathy persists he will remain a foreigner, and not infre- quently a successful foreigner. Of all examples of religious success, that offered by the Eoman Catholic Church is certainly the most mag- nificent, although that success is obscured in Protestant countries by the strong tide of misunderstandings and misconceptions. On closer examination, we shall see that most of these misunderstandings rest their founda- tion upon a substratum of ignorance, for in these same Protestant countries the past history of the Catholic Church, as well as its present organization, are almost utterly unknown. While the Protestant countries are willing to admit any degree of cunning and subtle diplomacy in the dealings of the popes and of their dependent bishops, they affect to despise the whole fabric of the Eoman Church as a gigantic imposture now tottering to its fall. Their disdain, we shall have no difficulty in proving, is entirely unjustifiable, while their auguries have no prospect, within all human per- spective, of being fulfilled. Of all organized polities, the Roman Catholic Church has, by its organization, realized the d eepest goliticaj jpsycholo^. It has inherited, in all their vigorous vitality, the ground principles which led to the KELIGIOUS SUCCESS 129 building up of the Eoman Empire, and which gave that Empire its strength ; those principles it has, however, utilized with such wisdom and developed to such good effect that it is to-day, though shorn of much of its influence, still the mightiest body politic ever reared in history, and the most enduring. It is unwise to rate the present political power of the Papacy too low, and those who are inclined to do so should remember that one of Europe's greatest statesmen, Bismarck, found that he had made a fatal mistake in making light of papal power. In 1874, when Bismarck promulgated the famous May Laws against the Eoman Catholic Church, he gave utterance to the proud saying, " Non Canossamus," meaning thereby that it would never again be the dire necessity of the German Empire to humiliate itself before the Papacy, as Emperor Henry IV. had been driven to bow in abject submission to Pope Gregory VII. at Canossa in 1077. Fortune proved that he was wrong, and he was compelled to yield. Thus, after eight hundred years, the Holy See has not lost the upper hand in Germany, and still to-day the Central or Catholic party in the German Keichstag is the decisive party. Macaulay has re- marked, and he here only repeats what had been remarked before, that the Catholic Church owes no small part of its success to the capacity it has at all times displayed for making use of the excessive. To make ourselves clearer, the Eoman Catholic Church has at no time found it necessary to exclude from its com- munion even its most fanatical members. Where Protestantism would have split ofl" into some fresh and independent sect, Eoman Catholicism has created an K 130 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS order, or something equivalent. Instead of driving the over-zealous into opposition by an attempt to reduce them to a level of conformity, it has turned the super- abundant fervour into a useful and appropriate channel, thus avoiding the excessive subdivision and decentrali- zation which makes the weakness of Protestantism. Eoman Catholicism finds room within its limits for such associations as the Jansenists, the Trappists, and the Poor Clares, all of which may be considered as extreme sects, but all of which remain faithful to the mother church. It was in the Middle Ages that the Roman Catholic Church stood at the summit of her glory, and it is then that she rendered the most conspicuous service to man- kind. It is impossible to even hazard a guess as to what the modern countries of Europe would be even now had it not been for the monastic establishments in medieval times. They alone shielded the flickering light of civilization from utter extinction, and the great monas- teries were the only bright spots that stood out against the night of feudal barbarity. In has unhappily become the fashion in later days to depreciate the merits of those early monks. As a matter of fact, it would be difficult to overestimate the worth of what they have done. The darkness of the tenth and eleventh centuries would without them be almost complete. It was they alone who still cherished some hankering after better things, and if they were not always able to carry out every desire of their ideals, it is, at any rate, something that they should have preserved for humanity the tradition of nobler ideals. They alone were able to afford some relief amid the surrounding poverty and RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 131 misery, to ameliorate the lot of the downtrodden serf, and curb the passion for destruction of the nobility. Between serf and lord there was little to discriminate as far as culture was concerned ; learning, such as it was, was the monopoly of the clergy, and in the clerical state alone was it possible to rise above the strict class distinctions; from the clerical schools and universities radiated the light of knowledge. The early Middle Ages were times of struggle and strife; scarcely a foot of continental soil but was not yearly drenched with blood. The clergy alone ventured to maintain the ideal of peace, and they alone conceived, and to some extent enforced, such measures as the truce of God and the peace of God, by which fighting was forbidden, under heavy ecclesiastical pains and penalties, at certain times of festival and on certain days of the week. All these were tendencies in the right direction. In that period of tumult and disorder organization was to be found hardly anywhere save within monastic walls. We must not imagine that the monks restricted themselves to spiritual exercises and spiritual action. Their life was eminently a life of practical toil. At a time when all was disunion and infinite subdivision the massed capital of the religious orders was especially efi'ective. They were great agriculturists and landowners, as many of their surviving cartularies or property inventories show. They possessed wide lands and numberless bond servants, the latter treated, no doubt, more humanely than their brethren under lay feudal landowners. The monastic settlements were like little oases of deforestation in the ever-increasing, ever-spreading, ever-thickening jungle of Europe, fast relapsing into its primeval undergrowth. 132 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS The monks, however, did great spiritual services as well, when the secular clergy, through simony and worldliness, were becoming rapidly undistinguishable from the rest of the feudal nobility. Amid all this work of digging and delving, farming and deforesting, the regular clergy found time to think out artistic ideals, and to apply themselves to executing them. To them we owe Grothic art in its entirety, and especially Gothic architecture, which at this time was beginning to clothe Europe with its fair robe of churches and cathedrals, delicate lace-like tracery, and pointed ogival arches. Of course, those orders living a life of artificial abstinence, being, as it were, dehumanized, were liable to periods of decadence ; in fact, most of the new foundations were movements in the direction of reform, but until the twelfth century reform was always active, always ready to cauterize the diseased monastic communities. The orders were at first independent — rather, each monastery was an independent, self-governing unity — but by degrees the tendency to centralization began to dominate. The monasteries became grouped, and also gradually came to be of a more monarchic constitution ; the abbots were made answerable to the Holy See ; the abbot of Cluny was so important as to enjoy ipso facto the privileges of a cardinal. Thus the papacy, at variance often with the secular clergy, still possessed through the regular clergy a strong hold over nearly the whole of Europe. It was by organization, when organization was elsewhere unknown, that the monastic orders achieved their great success. We have now seen what wonderful success the Eoman Catholic Church achieved in the organization RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 133 of the monastic or regular clergy, and how that clergy, in order to free itself from interference upon the part of its secular ecclesiastical superiors, placed itself under the immediate domination of Rome. But this is by no means all the work of Rome. There was still the s ecular clergy to brin g to a kindred sta ge _ oi or gan ization. This was brought about by two prin- cipal series of measures, due almost entirely in con- ception and execution to the great Pope Hildebrand (G-regory VII.). He saw that, if Rome was to maintain her dominion, she must make her ruling agents entirely dissimilar to those over whom they were to rule. This is a broad political principle which has often since been recognized and formulated, perhaps by none more suc- cinctly and precisely than by John Selden, who declares that "' all_mgn that would get ppwer oyer others must make themselves as unlike them as they can." This deep psychological idea was grasped once and for all by Hildebrand, and by a series of measures he established the celibacy of the secular clergy, who up to 1073 a.d. had been permitted to marry. They were thus estranged from their surroundings, and it is certainly due in no small degree to this fact that the Roman Catholic Church has achieved a degree of political success which the Pro- testant and Greek Churches, where marriage of priests is permitted, have never been able to attain. The other set of measures by which the power of the Roman Church was secured has been called the Strife of the Investitures. It aimed at freeing all ecclesiastical appointments from lay interference, conferring the right to nominate to all ecclesiastical benefices upon the pope alone ; in this it was eminently successful. The Protestant Church has 134 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS failed to establish any such principle, as is amply testi- fied by the conge d'elire, by which the English Govern- ment practically nominates to all bishoprics, and also by the lay bestowal of livings. All questions of dogma were laid once and for all to rest by the declarations of the great Council of Trent (1545-1563), and so strictly were the dogmatic prin- ciples formulated that they are for ever placed beyond the reach of casuistry and debate. On points of dogma it is impossible that any further serious difierences should arise. So much did the Koman Catholic Church achieve at the Council of Trent, in spite of her previous unsuccessful attempts at Pisa (1409), Constance (1414- 1418), and Basle (1431-1443). No lay state can boast such a degree of internal organization or such a formu- lation of its political tenets. The dogmas proclaimed at the last oecumenical or general council (1869-1870) are only logical consequences of the Tridentine council's declarations. Perhaps the dogma of the Eoman Catholic Church which has been most obnoxious to Protestants is that of the infallibility of the pope. This dogma is, however, for the most part, completely misunderstood ; it is the logical sequence of the whole constitution of the Eoman Catholic Church, and was really already consecrated by- the Council of Trent, which declares the papal authority superior to that of any oecumenical council. If the word 'infallibility' is not there, the essence of the dogma is certainly there. There is nothing personal in papal infallibility ; it is merely official, and only applies to declarations made by the pope ex cathedra. As in a state there must be finality in matters political, so in EELIGIOUS SUCCESS 135 the ecclesiastical polity there must be finality in matters ecclesiastical. Thus papal infallibility stands on a line with the final jurisdiction of the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States. It is a current notion in Protestant countries that with the spread of enlightenment must come the decline of the Eoman Church. There is at present no sign of such a decay, and no reason for us to forebode its approach. The Eoman Church is not directly founded on enlightenment, and cannot therefore be destroyed by the spread of such enlightenment. There is, indeed, something impressive in the present attitude of whole- sale condemnation which the Eoman Catholic Church maintains towards the progress of modern science, an attitude which is proclaimed in the most uncompro- mising fashion by the syllabus of 1864. According to the Eoman Catholic Church, man can neither create nor invent truth ; he can only grasp revealed truth. Since all truth has been long ago revealed, according to Eoman Catholic dogma, modern science is a mere con- tradiction in terms, there being no principles of know- ledge left to discover. This is the philosophical atti- tude of the medieval scholastics, chief among them St. Thomas Aquinas, and is still the attitude of Eoman Catholic Thomistic philosophers. The popes themselves are constantly complaining that they have sustained, through the usurpation of their temporal possessions in Italy, at the hands of the Italian kings, grave loss of authority and influence. However, from the consideration of Eoman Church history, and of the actual influence of the Eoman Church at present, nothing is more certain than that the Curia in the 136 SUCCESS AMONG' NATIONS Vatican, now reduced to what is apparently purely- spiritual influences, has still a power so great that nothing short of ignorance or wilful blindness can venture to predict the downfall of the Roman Catholic Church. CHAPTER VIII RELIGIOUS SUCCESS. — II Cause of universal religions is exclusively : personality. Short sketch of the personality of Moses, Jesus, Mahomet, and Calvin. The futility of modern so-called higher criticism, which may or may not destroy this or that passage or chapter in a canonical book, but which utterly fails in the construction of the main point : the personality of the founders of religion. All the numerous facts that we have grouped together to form the preceding chapter have been intended to impress the reader with the immense and lasting effects wrought by the so-called universal religions. With regard to Buddhism and Mahometanism, vast as has been the expenditure of erudition and research, we really know comparatively little ; and as to the causes of their widespread influence we are still woefully ignorant. With Christianity and Judaism, although the amount of learned toil which has been concentrated on them has been infinitely greater, we are not much further advanced. The countless efforts which have been made, and are every day being made, to solve the riddle of their immense effect upon most parts of the world have so far been singularly fruitless. Of course, to fervent believers who unhesitatingly ascribe everything to direct revelation and to the will of God, and attempt to ofier 138 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS no further explanation, the problem offers no difficulties. With unbelievers the case is different ; and it were vain to deny that both in Europe and America untold numbers of more or less highly cultured people have, by a false and incompetent method, arrived at a wholesale condemnation of Christianity, or at an attitude of sneering and contemptuous indifference. For them the Bible is a book like any other book, full of half historical, half legendary stories, which you may believe or not, according to the measure of your credulity. When they discover that many of those stories have been found in earlier forms unearthed among the most ancient tablets and inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria, brought to light in Egypt, or rediscovered in very modified form in pre-Christian Buddhist records, their scepticism is only heightened, and they are hardly willing to leave the Bible the credit of being an artistic but plagiaristic compilation. Others, again, with a more learned turn of mind, have gone deeply into such books as the famous " Supernatural Eeligion,'* in which the results of the so-called Higher Criticism, or the researches of mostly German neo-theologians, have been dished up in the most erudite and imposing fashion. The former class of unbelievers is convinced that Christianity is purely derivative, that it is a mere collection of old stories, myths, and legends tricked out in a new and more or less attractive garb. The followers of the Higher Criticism are either convinced that the whole life of Jesus is a mere myth, or that at the best it is an allegory or a downright historical mystification. In order to grasp firmly and completely the causes of the unique success of Christianity, we are bound to EELIGIOUS SUCCESS 139 dwell on the two classes of unbelievers whose views we have just briefly outlined. It is the aim of the first group to disprove the peculiar power of Christianity by tracing, as far as possible, the externals, such as the signs, symbols, and emblems, to the legends of the old nations of Asia and elsewhere. When they are enabled to demonstrate that the festivals of the Christian church are merely survivals of far more ancient holidays ; that Christmas was insti- tuted long ages before the first year of the Christian era, and is identical with the Saturnalia of the Romans ; that the cross was employed as a religious emblem long before the date assigned for the great crucifixion, when they can prove indisputably the non-Christian origin of a thousand such details, they are ready to rub their hands with contentment, thinking, as they do, that they have thereby dealt the final blow to the agonizing phantom of Christianity. Perhaps the most famous leader of this school of sceptics was Frangois Dupuis, who published his great work on the " Origine de tons les Cultes " at the time of the French Revolution. He began by making many very remarkable discoveries concerning the chronological systems of the ancients, and especially concerning the Zodiac. He very soon began, carried away by the ingenious nature of his theories, to see in the Zodiac an explanation of all mythological stories of the ancients, and he thereupon endeavoured to show that all the legends of Christianity, as well as those of the Babylonian and other religions, are merely trans- muted tales about the Zodiac. Another book very well known in its day was the " Anacalypsis," by Godfrey Higgins; its tendency is identical. The Christian 140 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS emblems of baptism, Christian ritual, Christian vestments are none of them original. All find their counterpart in the Druidic ceremonial, or at least in the ceremonial of other pre-Christian beliefs. We shall not be at pains to disprove such statements as the above, all of which we shall, however, endeavour to point out are wide of the real question. It is not for a moment possible, nor is it our intention to deny that there is often a remark- able similarity, and very possibly a relationship, between the signs and symbols of the old Christian ritual and those of more ancient creeds. We would not refuse to believe that between the parables and legends of the New Testament and similar stories in pre-Christian and Buddhist books there exists a strong family likeness. The similarity is too evident to escape the least per- spicacious eye. What is, however, now asserted, and what we shall later on £roye in greaterdetail, is tEat_ the greatest number _of those similarities, of those coincidences, of those identities, is insufficient to show that Christianity is a niere transmutation of Buddhism^^ Druidism, or any other pre^ChristianisnL The theme of the second category of unbelievers is essentially the same, although in this case it depends for support upon more subtle philological refinements. We shall now trace, in as few words as possible, the drift of the school of Tubingen. It is now universally recog- nized by critics of the New Testament that a very great number of the books which are usually associated with the names of the Apostles are not really directly apostolic. The different schools of theologians have waged bitter war as to what is the real authority on which these books repose. Are they really true and RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 141 fair representations of what was actually taught by the Apostles ? Do they preserve for us the story of the life of Christ as it was handed down by the Apostles ? Did St. Paul really write such and such an Epistle, or is it composed by another? The Tubingen school, which dates its foundation from the appearance of the famous " Life of Christ " by Strauss, has on the whole taken up a very strong negative position. It asserts that nearly all, or at all events the large majority, of the New Testamentary writings are mere frauds con- cocted by later theologians, after the second century A.D., to support doctrines of their own creation. Our extraneous evidence as to the early existence of most of the New Testament books is very fragmentary, consisting for the most part in second-hand passages from Papias, a disciple of St. John the Evangelist, who was Bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, and is con- jectured to have died about 156 a.d. These passages, preserved for us by Eusebius, have been turned, twisted, and contorted in order to supply any kind of evidence. Thus every book of the New Testament has been subjected to the most detailed and destructive criticism, until very little survives beyond the four major Epistles of St. Paul ; the text even of these is declared corrupt in the extreme, and full of subsequent embroideries and interpolations. These are the main lines of the great book by Ferdinand Baur, "Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ." He declares that the four Epistles, to the Eomans, to the Corinthians, and to the Gala- tians, are alone undoubtedly genuine. All the other Epistles are subject to greater or lesser degrees of suspicion. He then goes on to investigate, in his 142 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS *' Critical Kesearches into the Canonical Gospels (1847)," the discrepancies between the four Evangelists ; he endeavours to prove what are the theological motives with which the Gospels have been written, and to show that the more this theological motive predominates, the less can the Gospel possess of historical value. The results of these two important books are embodied in one great work, the third of the series, " Christianity and the Christian Church in the Three First Centuries." It is clearly demonstrated that the unity which is supposed to have prevailed in the early Christian Church is a mere empty imagination, and that all the extant New Testament writings are fragments of a widespread controversial literature ; they are all written with the object of supporting some particular dogma, and this argumentative basis must necessarily impair, not to say destroy, their historical value. When we get up after reading the masterpieces of the Tubingen school, it is to behold all our authorities shattered into a thousand atoms, and if we have been carried away by their philological methods of reasoning, to see in the life of Christ a mere myth, a mere creation of some obscure sect of controversialists. The Old Testament has fared but little better; it also has been subjected to a minute process of philo- logical criticism; here it is the personality of Moses which has been torn into shreds. Layer upon layer of additions have been discovered, more especially in the Pentateuch. We cannot go into details about the disputes between the various schools of Jehovists, and Jahvists, the theories of Graaf and De Wette, but suffice it to say that the Old Testament issues from RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 143 this war of criticism as battered and unrecognizable as did the New Testament. With the limited space at our disposal, it would be quite out of the question for us to endeavour to give a full orientation of the history and value of these various schools of Higher Criticism. We shall limit ourselves to pointing out _the fallacy of their methods. Few of the historians of Christianity have ap- proached their task in anything like a philosophical spirit. It has never entered their minds to ask them- selves the simple question, whether the means at their disposal, their instruments for investigating the subject, are really sufficient or satisfactory. It is the first step in philosophy to investigate the main tool of philo- sophy, to investigate the nature of the mind, and to find out whether it is a proper and adequate instru- ment of thought. It has rarely happened that a theologian has ever cast any doubt upon his means and methods. Has he sufficient data in the Greek texts which have been handed down to him, and which are at best one-sided reports of events, perhaps very in- sufficiently understood by those by whom they were compiled ? Must he not widen his horizon of observa tion ? Must he not apply some more living test ? In all other domains of science we see the worker, who is confronted by an inexplicable phenomenon, seeking anxiously for some kindred phenomenon in order that he may institute a comparison. The physicist often has the advantage of being able to reproduce the required phenomenon, and so to arrive at the causes. The historian and theologian must adopt some similar 144 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS method of research. They cannot, of course, reproduce their phenomena at will ; they are, however, sometimes able to watch kindred phenomena that have been reproduced in the course of history. Failing this, they are at least able to make a comparison between kindred events which they will find recurring through- out history. It will at once be seen how remote such a scientific method has, as a rule, been from the historical and theological investigator. Even during our own days it has been possible to watch, in Europe and America, the growth of great religious sects, which, if they cannot be for a moment ranked on the same level as Christianity, have at least developed along sufficiently similar lines to make a comparison between them and Christianity a fruitful source of investigation. The origins of Christianity are remote and obscure ; let us admit that the records dealing with them are tinctured with party bias and untrustworthy, but the whole history, say of Wesleyanism, or even of Mormonism, is within our immediate reach ; we can yet talk with people whose ancestors or who themselves have been influenced by the teachings and felt the personality of John Wesley or of Joseph Smith. There is a better chance of our being able to understand the influence of Calvinism, or Mahometanism, where our information is more copious, and where a finnicking process of verbal criticism is not necessary to verify our argu- ments step by step, than we have of explaining the spread of Christianity. When we have succeeded in grasping the minor, the more modern and less obscure phenomenon, we shall possess a powerful leverage with which to approach the major question. RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 145 It is, however, imperatively necessary that the reader should grasp the main point with absolute clearness, and it will be advisable to make him do so by an apparent digression. The storm of controversy which has raged unremit- tingly about the Homeric question for the last century bears in many points a striking resemblance to that which has been battering against the authority of the New Testament. It has been raised by much the same philological wind. The authorship of Homer has been split, subdivided, and pared down until it is very doubtful whether there remains a single isolated line which can be safely left to the credit of Homer or " the other author of the same name." Differences of dialect have been pointed out, and lines that have been interpolated; passages stolen from other poets have been carefully dissected out of the main body of the poems. Especially has the Odyssey been victimized, and the various cantos from which it is supposed to have been welded together have been precipitated and assigned to independent rhapsodists. No man has distinguished himself more in this field of polemics than tlfe proto and arch-mutilator of Homer, F. A. Wolf, who first gave vent to the disruptive theory in his famous '* Prolegomena in Homerum," printed in 1795. But all this mass of verbal criticism falls wide of the mark. Wolf and the true admirer of Homer are not really interested in the same thing. It is difficult in a few simple words to sketch their diflerent attitudes of mind. Wolfs criticism is almost exclusively directed against the external, almost tangible, elements of the Odyssey; ugon^the soul of the^jgo^ he does not L 146 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS really touch at all. There is, however, a great deal more in the Odyssey than a mere linking together of melodious lines full of fine phrases, and telling more or less interesting stories. A man may have read the Odyssey and appreciated it, he may have forgotten the words, and have but a dim and uncertain ring in his ears of the majestic roll of its verse, but, never- theless, he has not forgotten Homer. He has but to close his eyes a moment and there will rise before his mind the grand figure of Ulysses, the man of unyield- ing patience, the man of infinite cunning, the ever- faithful husband of Penelope. It is in vain that the philologers have spent lives of toil in stratifying the Odyssey ; in assigning dates to particular poetical deposits, because at these dates alone such and such a particle was used, or because at this date they conceive the fossilized digamma to have disappeared. All their geologizing will not do away with the personality of Homer, because Homer does not consist, as may perhaps be imagined, of a definite number of stanzas, a definite number of lines. The immortal value of his poems lies in a few and exceedingly beautiful types of humanity. The story of the Odyssey is amusing, interesting, but without the great ethical worth of its great characters, of Ulysses, of Penelope, of Telemachus, it could not claim to rank higher than many a German fairy tale. Each of these mighty personalities must have been drawn by a single hand. A personality in literature cannot be the outcome of a process of evolution ; it is the con- ception of one man, taken from a single model, perhaps a little idealized. The moral type cannot have been EELIGIOUS SUCCESS 147 created by the author out of his own inner conscious- ness ; we may be as sure of the real existence of the prototype of Ulysses as we may be sure of the real existence of Homer. Whether all the great characters are the work of the same author is not quite so certain. At all events, the only permissible stratification of the Odyssey would be a character stratification. The philological method is futile. The character of Ulysses running through the whole poem from end to end is of one piece, and bears the impress of one great mind. We do not for a moment wish to imply that Homer did not borrow one anecdote from one author, one from another, in order to beautify his work ; he may have bodily transferred whole passages — this is quite possible. The point is that the unity of the poem, the guiding spirit, reflects the mind of one man. To bring home the essence of what it has been our wish to demonstrate above, let us take a few conclusive examples from more modern authors, and more modern books, the history of the composition of which is more familiar to us. What work could better serve our purpose than "Hamlet," which will also give us an opportunity for saying a word or two upon another heated literary squabble. In this case we need hardly do anything but repeat what we have already said concerning the Odyssey. What is it that we find to admire in Hamlet ? Is it the famous soliloquy, " to be or not to be ? " Is it the apparition of the spectre of Hamlet's father? Is it the famous scene within a scene ? No, it is the great solitary and melancholy figure of Hamlet himself which sinks deep into our 148 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS brain and there remains unalterable, indelible long after the words, the lines, the scenes, and the acts have vanished in oblivion. It is in this that lies the great- ness of Shakespeare, and it is this which is ignored or avoided by all Baconian theorists. Of Hamlet we know the sources, as we do of many of the other plays. But nobody reads the crabbed Latin of Saxo Grammaticus, because he will not find there the great personality of Hamlet. The external garb of the play is not dubious in its origin, but from whom among his contemporaries Shakespeare took the soul of Hamlet we do not know. This is the point missed by all the Baconian party. Even if, by aid of ciphers or other mystifications, we were enabled to track down whole passages from the plays to Bacon, we should not by any means have proved the case, even if we had proved a primd facie probability. The words are second rate, the character is the essential. As far as verbal dexterity is concerned, a clever collaboration of authors might well have pro- duced the play, but a syndicate could not have given birth to the great and fascinating type. Personality alone creates personality, and it is in this faculty that Shakespeare outstrips Marlowe, often his peer as far as words go. To return to Homer, he excells not only in metre and language, in naivete and wisdom ; all these features we find in very many less valued epics. His paramount excellence is in the delineation of those great types of gods and men which have until to-day charmed and fascinated the reader, inspired the artist and the thinker; types that interest us in childhood, manhood, and old age. It is in this that Homer is superior to Virgil and Tasso. EELIGIOUS SUCCESS 149 Both these poets are inferior to him, not in language, but in their incapacity to create great poetical types. Let us now apply the standards which we have made to the consideration of the Bible. We shall at once see that the ethical and religious value of Moses, the Prophets, and Jesus is not so much in what they said and did, but in their very personalities. The moral teaching of the Old and New Testaments is exceedingly elevating, exceedingly beautiful ; we cannot conceive any one wishing to deny it. It is not, how- ever, owing to these teachings that Christianity has achieved its unique success. The books of all the other great religions contain ethical rules and moral precepts equally, perhaps even more sublime. Mankind have always professed a strong liking for such sublime sayings, the injunctions of which they, however, uni- formly fail to practise. They form, nevertheless, a moral ideal, which, if it is never attained, serves at any rate as a guiding light. What can be fairer than many of the noble maxims contained in the Buddhistic books, or in the Koran ? We are not surprised that mission- aries among Mahometan and Buddhist nations do not succeed in gathering many converts when the mission- aries limit their preaching to pointing out the beautiful moral code inculcated by the Christian writings ; un- believers find in their own holy books ennobling precepts enough for them to follow. It is only when they are able to give something of the wonderful personality of Jesus that they can hope to succeed in gaining proselytes. It is in this that we must find the great reason for the success of St. Paul ; he was able to impress those among 150 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS whom he went with that marvellous personality of the Saviour. That he should have invented that personality is as impossible as that Plato should have invented the personality of Socrates. That it was not from repeating the mere verbal teachings of Jesus that St. Paul suc- ceeded we know full well. There was not one of his hearers who had not heard such teachings a score of times before. It was not the abstract duty of a moral doctrine which would drive the rich young man into selling all that he had, and following in the steps of the Apostle; it was the magnetism of an irresistible personality. Those who hesitate to believe that the teachings of Jesus were not entirely original, who are shocked at the idea that those teachings contain much of the moral commonplace, should look up the book of Edmund Spiess, printed at Leipzig in 1871. Spiess himself was a fervent, unshaken believer, but in his ** Logos Spermatikos " he has made an exhaustive com- parison between the ancient Greek authors and the lessons of the New Testament. For every quotation chapter and verse is given, and the coincidences are astounding, both in number and quality. Ancient Greece had then the Christian teachings, but it did not have Christianity. What was then lacking? The personality of Christ alone. We should like to bear out our statement by a few examples taken from more recent times. We shall speak of great historical personages, great religious characters, and we shall seek to show that their great achievements were due not to their personal genius alone, not to their peculiar intelligence, not to their station of life, not to their situation, but to the sheer RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 151 force of their personalities. It is no mere hazard that the great men and women who have left such a mark upon history have arisen out of obscure and humble places. It is no mere chance that Napoleon came from half-unknown Ajaccio; that Ignatius Loyola issued from an obscure mountain fastness in the equally ob- scure province of Guipuzcoa ; that Jeanne D'Arc saw the light in the before unheard-of hamlet of Domremy, on the marches of Alsace and Lorraine ; above all, that Jesus came from the most out-of-the-way village Beth- lehem. In all these personalities we find one striking similitude. All of them have been early conscious of themselves, all of them have realized their vocation before. Yet to the eye of the stranger, there was no- thing to justify such a conviction. They had nothing to depend upon save their own personalities. Already, in the autumn of 1796, at the time of his campaign for the Quadrilateral, Napoleon's letters are full of the con- viction that he is predestined to become the ruler of the world. The same clear prescience filled the heart of young Loyola. The great order of Jesuits contained nothing particularly original, nothing that seemed to proclaim that it would surpass in power all the great monastic orders which had gone before; its success was due entirely to the great personality of Loyola, who already, as he lay upon his bed of sufiering at Pampeluna, wounded almost to death, felt that it was his vocation to save the agonizing Catholic Church from being annihilated by the Reformation, and to restore it to its dominating position. Yet in Loyola, a poor Basque knight, of no apparent talent, ignorant 152 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS beyond the ordinary degree of ignorance of his fellows, there appeared to be nothing which predestined him to such a rdle ; all the same, he was already convinced of his success, and within fifteen years he had founded his order, had convinced, by the sheer force of his conviction, men far and away his in- tellectual superiors, won over the hesitant pope to a belief in him, and in great measure accomplished his task. So again with Jeanne D'Arc. What could have, on the face of things, appeared a more ridiculous absurdity than that a rough village girl, from the most unimpor- tant bourgade on half French territory, should save France from the tide of invasion which the King of France and the pick of French military talent had been powerless to resist? We know the intellectual capa- cities of a French peasant-girl of to-day. What can they have been in the darkness of the Middle Ages? Such a girl was certainly not likely to give the French generals tutoring in strategy. Yet from the first she was possessed of her conviction, and this conviction carried her through all the coarse pleasantries of scoffers, and subdued the seigneur of Vaucouleurs into belief in her until he sent her to the Kings head- quarters. In a few months her task was done. We are not surprised to hear of mystic visions, nor is there need for us to be astonished. How else should we expect this peasant-girl to express her self-conviction ? She knew of no such abstractions as '' personality ; " she could only express herself in the terms which were natural to her and comprehensible to her surroundings. Of course, she saw visions ; how else should she explain RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 153 the certainty with which she was filled ? We know that Jeanne was anything rather than a languishing mystic; she was all life and youth, full of ready rejoinders for her persecutors. Precisely similar is the conviction of a higher nature of Jesus that He is the Saviour. We can well under- stand that those about Jesus, impressed by His grand personality, would seek some means of expressing what they felt and what they could not understand. They had not at their fingers* ends the psychological phraseology of to-day ; they were, moreover, common people ; they were, besides, orientals, and to represent this, to them, superhuman personality they employed superhuman imagery. The story of a miraculous birth is, after all, common to nearly all the great personalities of anti- quity ; the birth of Romulus is supernatural, so is that of Lycurgus, and of many other great figures of ancient history which we might mention. Why should we take all these stories au pied de la lettre ? How else would it have been possible for these people to express themselves ? It is sufficient to see that, as in a few other cases of history, so in that of Jesus, the chief, the only, problem is not this or that text, but the personality of the Saviour. To deny this personality is to deny the fact that Christianity has now been in existence close on two thousand years. Such phenomena, as Christianity, derive all their immense ethical power from a com- manding ethical personality, and from nothing else. Their dependence on such a personality is a psycho- logical truth, not a theological or an historical. It cannot be denied ; the experience of every day proves 154 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS it. As the immense force of Calvinism is all based on the personality of Calvin, and not on his theological teachings ; as the Eoman Catholic Church has always been vastly superior to the Catholic Greek Church, because the latter does not admit the supreme person- ality of a pope ; even so the whole of Christianity is derived from, based upon, and consummated in the unique personality of Jesus. CHAPTER IX SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS The Latin nations (the French, the Italians, the Spanish). After brief dis- cussion of the Spanish, follow the Italians. Their two besetting evils, in spite of a splendid geopolitical position, are : (1) In the past, that they have not won their unity by their own efforts ; (2) that the Papacy con- stantly undermines them. France : Her history both the most interest- ing, and the most widely read ; yet France, practically, a terra incognita^ especially to English-speaking people. Profound mistakes about the character of the French. Her women, her men. Her basal aspirations. Her wealth. Europe's absolute need of France. Her destiny. She will always be the leading nation in Europe on account of her wealth, her intellectuality, and her numerous reverses, that have sobered and steeled her. We have hitherto confined our observations to success in the past ; we have endeavoured, as far as has been within our power, to show what have been the causes of national success, and when that success has not been maintained, to assign a sufficient reason for its decline. When success has been only one-sided, as we have seen was especially the case among the nations of antiquity, it has been our aim to search out an explanation of these limitations. It is not too much to hope that the lessons which we have gleaned from these historical investigations may prove of great utility in examining the causes underlying the success of modern nations, and in forecasting, within reasonable bounds, what we 156 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS may expect to be the fortunes of those nations in the future. We have set ourselves up standards according to which we may judge, and for this reason we hope the reader, impatient to get at a solution of the more personal and more palpitating questions of the present, will pardon any tedious pages he may have found. It will be most convenient to deal first with the so-called Latin nations. Nothing can be more mis- leading than the name, which would induce us to suppose that there is a strong bond of unity existing between the nations speaking Eomance languages. The bond is purely philological, and in our preceding chapters we have done all in our power to show that philology and race can never form the basis of history. Much less can aflSnity of language do so when aflSnity of "race" is wanting. But the resemblance between the Latin races is purely superficial. In national character there can be nothing more opposed than are the Italians, Spanish, and French. Ethnographically speaking, there is an equally striking diversity, and among these nations internal individualization is carried to a pitch which we find nowhere else. Nothing can be more dangerous than to hazard generalities concerning the so-called Latin nations. Between the French and Italians there is a far wider gulf than exists, for instance, between Germans and Dutch. The Spanish, again, are absolutely distinct in every way from French or Italians. We are not justified in attempting to carry the methods of the naturalist into the study of history. Spain has fallen from her high estate, and she can no longer boast anything but an insignificant SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 157 vestige of the magnificent power which she wielded in the sixteenth century, when for a short time she stood in the van of European nations. But her might had been fostered into greatness by peculiarly artificial means, and when those means were cut off she was bound to relapse into her former line of progress. It is true that she has lost, probably without recall, her oversea dominions, from which she drew in no small part the wealth which enabled her for a short time to pursue the most grandiose ambitions in Europe. Before her transmarine possessions had fallen entirely away, they had already ceased to be the fathomless mine of riches for which they had at first been held. The exhaustion of her means has compelled Spain to curtail her exaggerated projects, but it would be rash to conclude that she is really a decadent nation. Her late humiliation at the hands of the United States has drawn upon her an undue share of contempt. It is well to remember that the home country of Spain is a poor country, in which it requires all the ingenuity of the inhabitants to make both ends meet. Spain has not the superabundant fertility of France, and the land is very greatly underpopulated. She thus lacks the financial means for maintaining an imperial policy, and the money for internal government can only be wrung with infinite pain from the poverty-ridden inhabitant. Perhaps the greatest drawback from which Spain suffers is her isolation. The insurmountable barrier of the Pyrenees, with its scanty passes, renders Spain an almost utter stranger to the rest of Europe. She lies at the extreme end of the Continent, and has no passing travellers ; there is no going to and fro of strangers 158 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS through her midst, and thus we are not surprised to find in her the most conservative country of the west. She is almost entirely cut off from the intercourse with the outer world, and lacks the stimulus of the foreigners importing novel ideas and excess of energy which we have shown again and again to be so powerful an incentive to progress. Spain is the least visited country of Europe; the number of pleasure-seeking travellers thither is most restricted. Is there, then, anything astonishing in the Spanish peasant and Spanish gentleman being still tinged with the old-world courtesy of centuries ago ? Spain is the land of quaint manners and quaint customs which the rest of Europe has long ago discarded in the hurry and scurry of progress. But manners and customs are not all that has remained unchanged in Spain. Spain has been called the priest-ridden. It is easy enough to say that she has been ruined by her priestcraft, but the problem is far more complicated than that. It is certain that her isolation is one of the most formidable obstacles that bar her way, and one that she will with the greatest difficulty surmount. Her natural resources are poor, but, such as they are, they are very imperfectly developed. The fertile districts, scattered like oases along the coast of Eastern Spain, are susceptible of considerable extension. This is a question of irrigation, and irrigation is expensive work, and we may look forward to a very good proportion of the savings of needy Spain being devoted for some time to come to this kind of work, at present suffering from many restrictions. Water, in the greater part of the country, is worth money. A most interesting work by M. SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 159 Brunhes, wMcli has only just appeared, makes a special study of Spanish irrigation, and the writer, who can speak with the authority of a specialist, holds out most sanguine prospects for the future. The division of nations into the living and the dying was the idea of a late English statesman. We may be permitted to doubt whether any of the nations of modern Europe is yet in so morbid a condition as to justify any prediction of its death. Spain has certainly declined since the sixteenth century, when, in 1582, she was able to discomfit a fleet of Italian, English, and French ships on sea off Terceira, and when her infantry battalions were the envy of the world. There is no reason to despair of her future. For some time she may lag behind her brethren on the path of progress ; we have shown that her position predestines her to slowness of advance. Bodily and mentally the Spanish are as sane and sound as any, and though they may perhaps never be permitted to regain the proud station which once they held in the forefront of Europe, they may very well attain a humbler degree of ambition, develop their own home country, and build up a polity as remarkable as any which at present exists. To pass to the Italians, there can be little doubt that they are the most gifted nation in Europe. In the world of action, as in the world of thought, they have produced men not only of great power, but of unique power. Probably no man, single-handed, and through the sheer force of his own personal genius, has ever done so much to change the face of the world as did the great Genoese, Christopher Columbus; and what Columbus did in the West, Marco Polo, another 160 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Italian, accomplislied in the East. Dante raised the finest cathedral in words, and one well comparable with the greatest buildings of the Middle Ages, the work of generations. What characterizes the Italians above all is their initiative. It is the first step which is the hardest to make ; but it is the Italians who have always been ready to take the first step in action, and able to make the first step in new paths of science. When once the route across the Atlantic was shown by a Columbus or a Vespucci, it required no remarkable courage or enterprise to follow in their track. But imagine the cool nerves necessary in those days of yet imperfect seamanship to strike boldly out across that vast waste of unchartered waters, in vessels little larger than our coastwise fishing smacks, and with more than a good chance of never returning. In all modern sciences the Italians have played the part of pioneers. It is they who have taken up the pursuit of knowledge where the Greeks or Arabs had left it. They have laid the foundations of arithmetic and algebra, of physics, electricity, pathological anatomy (the creation of Morgagni) ; they have traced the first lines in socio- logy and in the philosophy of history. Often enough they have left traces of their labours upon scientific terminology, to remain as a memorial of their achieve- ments. Thus it is that in electricity we have retained the name of Volta, the renowned physicist of Pavia, who lived from 1745 to 1825. We might multiply examples without end. We cannot help being overpoweringly impressed by their extraordinary mental activity, and by the diversity of their attainments, which is almost incredible. The SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 161 history of Italy teems for the last eight centuries with the most intense personalities. As we may observe this wonderful display of individuality among Italy's great men, so we may observe it in the country itself. We cannot judge of the land until we have seen it all. Each province, each city, we might almost say each quarter of each city, has its distinctive character, its own peculiar individuality. This is the mark of a highly civilized and progressive country. The Floren- tine is not a Eoman in language, looks, or mind, any more than the Eoman is a Neapolitan. Just as the country has no universal language — for the Tuscan, the literary vehicle, is an acquired tongue over most of the peninsula, and is not the everyday speech of even the educated classes throughout the country — even so there exists no universal mental type. While political union should give the land political strength, its intel- lectual disunion should be no less a source of intellectual strength. It is important to say a few words concerning the woman of Italy, in that we conceive the ideal perfection of a country to consist in the possession of men ripened to the perfection of manhood, and of women grown to the perfection of womanhood. Woman in Italy, though far from being so all-important a force as in France, is, nevertheless, of very great influence. She is frequently of surprising beauty, of deeply emotional life, and yet marked by the greatest devotion to her household duties ; she is, above all, thoroughly womanly in the most noble sense of the word. Perhaps Italy's trump card in the future is her supremely excellent geopolitical position. In speaking M 162 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS of political success, we have had occasion to point out the great geographical advantages which were contribu- tory to the rise and prosperity of Venice . During the latter half of the last century the conditions of Venice from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries have, by the opening of the Suez Canal, reappeared to a great extent, but this time for the benefit of Italy as a whole. Italy is still the centre of the Mediterranean world, but of a regenerated Mediterranean world, in which the going to and fro of commerce is increasing every day. She has now reassumed her former position midway between the Orient and the Western world. The opening of the Suez Canal promises well for the future of Italy. Italy has not been able to avail herself to the full of the benefits of her newly acquired position. She has had great evils at home with which to contend, but within the coming few years she must forcibly make use of her advantages. A good geo- graphical situation inevitably, almost automatically, confers prosperity. Let us cast a glance at two of the great evils against which Italy has had to struggle. After a thousand years of unsuccessful straining after unity, she has at last succeeded in reaching the longed-for goal. Un- happily, union has not come as the fruit of her own efforts, but has been conferred upon her by the victories of France and Prussia over the Austrians in 1859 and in 1866 respectively. When a nation has won its own independence by the expenditure of its own energies and at the cost of its own blood, it receives an incal- culable stimulus to further progress. We have seen what was the efiect upon Athens of her triumphant SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 163 issue from the wrestle for life or death against the over- whelming might of Persia. No sooner had she come off victorious, than she rose at one bound to the zenith of her intellectual and political glory. Two thousand years later history repeats itself. The crushing defeat of Philip II., and the destruction of his "invincible" Armada, is for England the opening of her career of fame ; it was immediately followed by her golden age of letters and intellect. To return to Italy, as we have said, her independence was not her own achievement. Is it, therefore, a matter for surprise that her union has not had as a sequence that leap forward in prosperity which seems to have been so confidently expected from it ? Moreover, the union is by no means so thorough as externals would lead us to conclude. This is Italy's second evil. The House of Savoy, the present reigning family, has stripped the Holy See of its temporal dominions, and has raised up for itself an irreconcilable foe in the papal curia. Since Italy is still almost exclusively Catholic, the Church has at its beck and call an immense power of latent hostility to the exist- ing Government. This is the one great shadow which is cast upon the otherwise brilliant future of Italy. No modern nation's history has ever exercised such a fascination or cast such a glamour over the minds of men as has that of France. Every volume that tells of France's doings in the past, and every fresh batch of memoires, authentic or apocryphal, is read with keen interest and keen delight by quite as many thousands of people outside French frontiers as within. And while speaking of apocryphal memoires ^ is there any other 164 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS country in Europe where the writer of this, the most ingenious form of literary charlatanism, could ply his calling to profit and advantage ? The throng of people in England, America, and Germany whose lot it is to earn their bread in the less exalted branches of letters, know well how great their debt of gratitude is to French authors who keep them busy with an unfailing supply of translating and re-editing to do. In no other country, certainly, do the rights of translation find so ready a market. But we need hardly insist upon a fact which will so readily be accorded by all as is the popularity of the history of France. When Archduke Charles of Austria, the great adversary of Napoleon, once said (it will be found in his memoires) that he took no interest in any history but in that of France, if he cannot be said exactly to have been talking platitudes, he was at least repeating what had been said countless times before, and what has been the unspoken thought of very many others after him. We shall make some endeavour to solve the riddle of the wonder- ful charm pervading French history. It is a charm, however, which is anything but confined to history. It will not be difficult to prove that it is neither un- justified nor unnatural. Surely, when we institute a comparison, the annals of all other people seem some- what one-sided ; they rarely speak of more than one-half of the people. In France history has been made by man and woman ; we meet countless entrancing person- alities of either sex, and this goes no small way to explain the interest of the general reader. The study of institutions to him seems dry ; he wishes for a history not only instructive but amusing, and in which SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 165 he can still feel the pulses of human life. And this he finds pre-eminently in France. But this explanation, much as it doubtless contains of truth, is not entirely satisfying ; it will not tell us why people took so keen a delight in all that hailed from France long before France had got any very long tale of history to boast. Dante, at the dawn of the fourteenth century, tells us that French dress, French manners, French customs were everywhere the fashion of the day. French was spoken by everybody, and ever since, though it has become modified into some- thing very different, the French language has been spoken widely from one end of Europe to the other. In olden days it was a language of deep, sonorous melody ; but we will speak more of its present-day qualities. It still has elegance of tone and clear-cut form, but it is more to its, may we say, psychological excellencies than to its physical good points that it owes its pre-eminence. Its diplomatic use may recall the days when French influence, the influence of Louis XIV., was paramount in Europe; but its survival points to permanent advantages. It is the most delicate weapon of diplomatic fence; it is the foil which touches, dis- comfits the adversary without inflicting any open wound. It is to this unhlundeTing finesse that French owes much of its popularity ; it is the language of tact, and the only tongue which has developed to a fine art the use of sous-entendu. The rigid moralist may feel a preference for the speech which says everything bluntly, in bare, bald nudity ; but it is a speech which will, perhaps, leave him a few times too often in awkward predicaments in life. One more proof of the spread of 166 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS French linguistic influence. German, in spite of its modern re-Germanization, is saturated to the core with French. It was the language which Goethe knew as well as his own ; it was the language in which Lessing long meditated writing his " Laokoon ; " it was the language in which the great German philosopher and mathe- matician, Leibniz, did compose his famous " Theodicee." Need we add the well-known example of Gibbon, who habitually threw all his thoughts into form in French, and subsequently turned them into English. In opposition to this almost universal knowledge of French comes the equally universal ignorance of France. Nor is this a matter of very great surprise. Perhaps it would be nearer the mark to say that France is not so much unknown as misunderstood. Despite external signs of amity, the deep-rooted, lasting prejudices against France are legion. The hard things said of her are as the sands of the sea. These misconceptions are not the result of envy or jealousy alone ; the most patriotic Frenchman would not put so harsh a construc- tion upon them. The truth is that France, like every other complicated nation, but perhaps even more so than other nations, lends herself to misinterpretation. If we know the character of one Servian, we know the character of all Servia. Not so with France. We do not know the character of France from the type of a single Frenchman. In the highly civilized nations there is a light and shade which is quite absent among the smaller, less-developed, less-cultured peoples. In Fr ance pr obably the scale of jights and shad.es is wider than anj;where else. Unhappily, the foreigner is, as a rule, far more jgrgne to see the shades. To the foreigner. SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 167 moreover, the association of ideas in which he has lived and been brought up is overpowering. It entails the greatest effort for him to enter into or appreciate other national ideals. Of the antipathy of character between the Englishman and the Frenchman we have spoken before, without any endeavour to judge their relative merits. From the familiar example of gestures and gesticulation, which we have already called into service, let us seek to draw another lesson. Imagine the asso- ciations which an average young Englishman has with gestures. In everyday life they are quite unfamiliar to him, and the only place where he is likely to see them is on the stage. There they are theatrical. From theatrical the transition to artificial is almost imper- ceptible; and from artificial his thoughts will at once lead him on through all the gamut of human short- comings, imperfections, and even vices. Our young Englishman, supremely unconscious of the associations with which his mind already teems, betakes himself across the Channel, and the first young Frenchman or Frenchwoman with whom he falls into talk will ges- ticulate, and will consequently be at once set down as theatrical, i thence artificial, and hence we shudder to think what. All that we have so far said of France is more or less introductory. But we could hardly pursue our subject before the reader was forewarned and, we hope in some measure, forearmed against national prejudice in general and its subtle causes. In pursuit of our uniform plan, let us now investigate some of the elements upon which the mainsprings of French life depend, and which are likely or not to contribute to 168 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS the future welfare of France. It would be impossible to do better than to begin with the Frenchwoman, the most important person of the French social economy, in which she certainly ranks before the man. This not being an anthropological treatise, we are not called upon to go into the Frenchwoman's physical characteristics in any detail. There are beautiful women in France as there are unbeautiful ; whether the average standard of good looks is higher or lower in France than elsewhere is not very material. We shall have something to say of the Frenchwoman's peculiar charm later. Let us now take her when she is yet a young girl, and see by what steps her character is moulded. Outside the Orient, the French girl is the most secluded of any. To those who have not seen it, the almost penitential isolation in which the French girl, up to the time of her marriage, is kept from the other sex, except from the members of her immediate family, is almost inconceivable. To this seclusion must be attri- buted very largely two cardinal defects of France, one literary, the other social. It has often been wondered why French poetry is sterile in lyrics ; but is not the very fountain of lyric verse wanting ? Are not modern lyrics inspired by the social intercourse of the young man with the young and innocent girl ? We shall not perhaps find a fitter occasion for speaking of the French noyelj which has probably been productive of more misunderstanding with regard to France than anything else. It is certainly the chief yehicle^ through which^ knowledge^ or rather pseudo-knowledge, of France is spjead. Numberless people are conversant enough with French to read with ease this lighter form SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 169 of French literature, but their psychological insight is quite insuflScient. The novelist in France is driven into an unenviable position. He is absolutely debarred from introducing the jeune Jille into his writings. In life she is a nonentity ; in the novel she would be an absurdity. There is no subject of interest on which to build a romance except the illicit amour after marriage. The novelist is compelled, in spite of himself, to treat life invariably from the point of view of adultery. By no other means can he give his book even a semblance of plausibility. The foreign novel reader, however, leaps at once to the conclusion that his French author depicts the prevalent features of French married life. Nothing could certainly be more absurdly untrue, as a few months' sojourn in France would certainly convince the most rabid of Francophobes. The future of the French novel is not bright ; these limitations which are imposed upon its topic doom it to monotony. With whatever grace of style or interesting setting the author may surround his plot, it is bound to revolve upon the same unsavoury theme, which finally becomes wearisome in the extreme. The influence of the French novel is undoubtedly pernicious, but it is certainly far from being so great as is currently supposed. By the woman of France the novel is scarcely read : she has no time for it, as we shall see when we come to look into her real sphere of activity. Let us, then, admit that the French novel is doomed, owing to the social conditions of France : the ordinary married woman, important as her part may be in actual life, does not offer the interest necessary for a romance ; and in spite of the profound thought with which a Balzac may enwrap his theme, or 170 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS the brilliants with which many more recent novelists have studded their work, there can be no permanent success. The French may remain the most dazzling of raconteurs^ they will never, so long as the conditions in which they live persist, rise to the heights of first-class novel-writing. Let us pass on to the social result of the seclusion of the French girl, and here the outlook is even less promising. We shall find, later, much which compen- sates for the deleterious effect _exercised^^^i^^ character of the young men of France by their complete severance from the respectable portion of the other sex. It is this isolation which has given rise to the great bane of France, the demi-monde and the grisette, though the latter name is somewhat out of fashion. Of course, when viewed through foreign glasses, this side of French life is also liable to be set down as another feature of general moral depravity. But we must always be on our guard against moral generalizations. The attitude of the shocked and indignant moralist is not conducive to a real insight into the truth. This characteristic of France is a necessary consequence and concomitant of the other social institutions of the country. The strict^seclusion in which Jhe French girl is held before marriage, although, on the one hand, it is the prime cause of the virtue, the energy and restless industry of the married Frenchwoman, yet, on the other han^jit isjiin^^^^ indirect £rinie cause_of jmny^^of the social habits of French joung men and \kevc declassees mates. For this is the great principle of all sociology, that for institutions making for ideals, such as virtue, order, SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 171 national glory, etc., we must invariably pay heavy prices. So far, at any rate, those ideals have never been realized without very grave drawbacks in another direction. The Athenian was a glorious^ specimen of mankind ; but h e was_£gssiU[e_qnly^ OTi^aje of dx)wntrodd^ slaves^ So it is with every nation; and it is only the conventional hypocrisy or ignorance that disguises or misses the fact of the melancholy inter- dependence^ bet w^en^M paid for them. It is out of this captivity of years that the French girl emerges the French woman. She has the character which will carry her through the numberless difficulties, the numberless deprivations, the innumerable self-abne- gations, with which her path is strewn. Her character has been bought with a Spartan training in her youth. We have seen the cost at which English will-power and English virility are purchased. From the age of ten, by the systematic suppression of youth and gaiety, by the equally searching test of a precocious responsibility, the English boy at eighteen has become a volitional athlete, without peer in Continental Europe. He can be, and frequently is, entrusted with positions of con- fidence and responsibility at an age when the Frenchman is certainly still in parental leading-strings. The Eng- lish boy has his complement, his counterpart in the French girl, whose training on her side is equally searching, thorough and severe. The physical discipline of old time Sparta was nothing to the moral drill of the French girl. According to the unshakable principle laid down a few lines above, French womanhood is bought at the price of French girlhood. When she 172 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS emerges from her seclusion she has all the high-strung, braced-up energies which enable her to fill her position in the home. People who have only seen England and America can, with difficulty, realize how thoroughly the Frenchwoman pervades every detail of family life. Nothing is done without her counsel and consent. In business she has her say, and many of the great com- mercial houses trace their descent in the feminine liiXQ^ It is the Frenchwoman who rules from the caisse, who keeps the books, who sees the travellers, etc. She realizes to the full her importance in her world ; how much her influence may achieve and contribute to the family advancement. Her amiability will secure her friends, and she knows the value of friends. May not any stranger contain potential utility ? Nothing, at all events, is lost if you secure his good feeling. Her good nature, which has become her second nature, rather her only nature, has its origin in the most logical, the most longheaded, and practical reasons. We do not wish to imply it is interested and self-seeking ; it has so long ago become part of her being, that the origins are dimmed and forgotten. But the great element of her charm is in her righteous self-respect. Those who would wish for a tangible concrete proof of the French- woman's supreme importance, should remember one striking feature of French cities, at least to the foreign idea. The frequency with which in shop signs the names of husband and wife are coupled together, the common occurrence of widows' names in the same way, and many other familiar examples. To pass on to the Frenchman, we have seen to what perils his youth is exposed, owing to his complete SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 173 absorption by his family ; he is even more likely to fall a ready victim to temptation, owing to the comparative dependence in which his boyhood and early manhood are passed. We have seen that the education of his character and will-power are really neglected, and he is kept in a state of tutelage, which, to the English boy, would savour too much of " bemothering." He is then suddenly given over to his own devices, often with disastrous results. We have examples, which are hardly exaggerated, in the classical works of '' Sapho '' and '* La Dame aux Camelias." From the age of twenty- one he will, in the generality of cases, be subjected to a course of severe discipline, this time in the army ; and we shall not again have an opportunity of judging to what extent his character has been formed until he has completed his period of conscription, formerly three, now, eventually, two years. It is improbable that he will have attained his complete moral development before the age of thirty. At that age, or soon after, he will afford the rare spectacle of a man with all the pluck and energy which we are accus- tomed to associate with British youth, and yet retaining the cheerfulness of disposition of boyhood. He is in the position of one who has had his fling, and is now ready to settle down to the sober realities of existence. It is probable, if statistics may be taken as a criterion, that he has more stamina and resisting power, as the rate of mortality in France, between the ages of fifty and sixty, is considerably lower than in either England or Germany. Much has been said of the nervous and fidgety temperament of the French ; it is a superficial judg- ment which assigns them such a nature. Apart from his more or less artistic style of conversation, there are 174 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS probably few more matter-of-fact men tban the French- men. He^ carries reasoning into many more branches of actual life than is usually the case among other nations. Seldom does his eye lose sight of the main chanceT" Eeasoning in France has been carried into the arrange- ment of marriage ; and reason is everywhere. It is no doubt due in a great part to this exaggerated love of cold reasoning, and traditional systematization of every- thing, that there are few openings in French commercial or public life for the free lance. There are few French- men in France who have succeeded in a single lifetime as the result of their own unaided energies. The idea of French nervousness has no doubt principally arisen from a wrong interpretation of the vicissitudes of French public life and political history. It is drawn in no small part from the spectacle of rapidly succeeding French Cabinets and Parliaments. But it would be only just to remember that the French Chamber of Deputies is an institution of far less consequence than the English Lower House. We must look for the real battle of French Government in the bureaucratic administration^ ^ than which nothing could be more sober and less nervous. French nerves are, doubtless, less steady since the humi- liation of 1871, and, like all people humbled by defeat, they are somewhat demoralized. Consider what would be the state of the English mind if Dover and Kent were in the hands of the Germans and being rapidly Teutonized. But what is least realized in France by the casual stranger is her immense wealth. It has long been well known to the economist and the statistician that France is the richest country in Europe, but to the general public SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 175 her wealth seems incredible, and chiefly for the reason that it leads to very little outward display. It requires, for example, a very keen insight into the workings of French social manners and customs to enable you to assign the inhabitants, say, of a small provincial town to their respective places in the scale of wealth. The accumulation of riches does not draw in its train all those diflerences in the way of life, in dress and social position, which we are wont to associate with it in England. Enter the principal cafe of some depart- mental capital and watch those two men playing billiards, and who appear to be on a footing of perfect familiarity one towards another, you would hardly guess, for there is certainly no distinction of attire, that the one is living on his income of some £4000 a year, the other is still a struggling chemist in the town. It is wonderful, too, how much opulence very often lies hidden, almost unsuspected, under the apparently humble externals of the ordinary tradesman. When he has laid by a pile, on which the English tradesman would cer tainly co nsider hi mselfjustified in retiring^ the_ Frenchman still clings to busi ness. Although his every- day expenses are very probably less, he has, as a rule, far heavier drains on his purse. Each of his daughters will claim a handsome dowry if she is to be married well, and these dowries must be paid without im- poverishing the business ; a course which would entail an injury to the prospects of his son. It is obvious that the Frenchman has very good reasons for sticking to his shop, and these reasons are reinforced by two points in his character, which are essentially French. In no^ountry is the passion for hoarding money developed 176 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS to such a degree as it is in France. The bounds of praiseworthy thrift and economy are too often left behind, and the passion for saving grows into miserly avarice. Herein the French suffer from the defects of their good qualities. The thrift of France is known all the world over. Pauperdom in France has been reduced to the lowest possible minimum, while most of the tradesmen have two or three lines of financial defence behind which to retire in case of business reverses. To come, however, to the second point in his character which keeps the French shopkeeper to his counter. In retiring he sees no prospect of greatly modifying his social standing, nor has he any desire so to do. The retailer in France has no feeling of dishonour in belong- ing to his allotted station in life. Small-trading leaves no slur, and he does not feel any passion for dis- associating himself with anything suggestive of the shop. Shopkeeper he is, and shopkeeper he is proud to be and to have been. His calling has given him a self- respect, which a similar calling could not give in every country of Europe. Here we have struck the keynote of French private life. No country of Europe has been so thoroughly de- medievalized as France. The barriers of class and caste have been levelled to the uttermost, and though these barriers still subsist, as they must, there is nothing in them that is galling or preventive of a thoroughly good understanding through all ranks of society. There is no straining of one class to enter another, and conse- quently very little of that sense of discomfort which arises from false position. Very few men in France find it desirable to conceal their social origin. They are SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 177 fully conscious of the position in life they have been born in, and are well pleased with it. We have been induced somewhat to digress. A few striking examples of the almost fabulous wealth of France, and we will pass on to discuss her political prospects. Peasant dowries ranging between 10,000 and 50,000 francs are anything but uncommon, and as we rise in the social scale, so the figures rise. The statistical returns of moneys devolving by inheritance show a total for France nearly thirty times as great as those for England, Austria^ jO£j^^ It is not uncommon in England to receive money by legacy ; in Hungary the legacy has become so fabulous as to be the stock subject for jokes and pleasantries ; but in France the acquisition of riches by bequest is so common as to be almost the rule. In no other country could the famous Humbert frauds have gained credence for a moment; in France the huge heritage of the "Craw- fords" was not extraordinary enough to excite very critical comment. The success of this giant escamotage was due less to the personal genius of that arch-swindler Therese Humbert, than to the social conditions of the land in which she had the astuteness to lay her plans. It isjrobable that no other country sajeFranxie coiJ^ hav e paid, with so little difficulty^ the immense in- demnity exacted by Germany after the close of^the war of^ 1870-71. Germany herself thought that France would be crippled for years to come by the payment of £200,000,000 ($1,000,000,000). It is well known with what astounding rapidity France discharged the debt, and how quickly her finances recovered afterwards ; but it is not always remembered that the French losses N 178 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS during the period of actual warfare cannot well be estimated at less than £1,000,000,000 ($5,000,000,000) ; yet a few years later France was already on the save, and any municipal corporation requiring loans for public works and improvements was able to obtain them at a very moderate rate of interest. It is anything but uncommon to hear France classed among the decadent nations of Europe ; but even when apparently unmistakable symptoms of decay can be observed in a people, it is very rash to predict its approaching downfall and dissolution. Such predictions have almost invariably fallen very wide of the truth. We have only to go back a century and a quarter, to the days when England had just come out of her fruit- less struggle to crush the revolt of her American colonists (1783), to see how the confident prophecies of her political opponents, that she would no longer be capable of interfering in European affairs, were terribly disappointed. The Courts of the Continent made haste to chant the dirge of English greatness, little dreaming that after the lapse of but a few brief years England resurgent would become one of the arbiters of their own fortunes. She refused to be relegated to the position of a second-rate Holland, but by 1798 had so far restored her shattered navy as to be able to secure, by the battle of the Nile, the maritime ascendency which she had struggled through more than a century to win. This is the era of England's dominant sea-power, for in the Seven Years' War (1756-63) she had not done more than hold her own, while from 1775 to 1783 her fleet was defeated time after time, and England owed her safety at home only to the unreadiness of the Spanish and French. SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 179 England, by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, had long ago given up all idea of territorial acquisitions on the Continental mainland. But the possession of an overwhelming fleet and superabundant capital per- mitted her to interfere with the greatest efiect in Con- tinental afiairs, and the side on which she chose to fight, or which she thought fit to subsidise, was pretty safe to come ofi" with flying colours. We have been led into this momentary digression in order the better to show the position of contemporary France, which has almost, so to speak, stepped into the shoes in which England stood a hundred years back. If England reaped advantages from her insulated position, France's position on the Continent to-day is one of political insulation. She is the country which can afford to subsidise her friends ; and her army, pro- bably the most effective in Europe, with the second navy of the world, makes her a coveted ally. She has the advantage of having no hankering after territorial aggrandisement, her desires being limited to the re- covery of the Ehine frontier and Alsace and Lorraine, and her lost prestige. Her Continental neighbours are not so unambitious, and Germany is still credited with the wish to regain the German-speaking Eussian pro- vinces of Livland and Courland, and to absorb the Teutonic part of Austria. When the day of conflict comes, France will sit astride the balance, which she will be able to incline one way or another, as best suits her ends. We must not give too willing credence to the propaganda of the franc-maqons and others, who now hold a high position in France, and foretell an era of peace for France, during which she will be the 180 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS ville lumiere, whence shall radiate art and civilization. It is a fair ideal, but one which would cost too dear. Such a torch would consume five hundred thousand lives a day, and would serve but to cast a lurid glow upon the death agonies of France. The peacefulness of France is but surface deep, and she only awaits an occasion to avenge the disgrace of the war of '70. She has obeyed the behest of Gambetta, *' N'en parler jamais, y penser toujour sr Nothing can be of greater service to a nation than a true sense of its own value, a true sense of proportion, even if dearly purchased. The disasters of Vannee terrible had a sobering efi"ect upon France which cannot fail to prove highly beneficial. Before 1870 the French had reached a most injurious degree of self-satisfaction. France was not only a great nation, but la grande nation^ the other great Powers of Europe being reckoned as of little importance. France now knows that there are other nations in Europe, that it is well for her to be ever on her guard against them, and that she cannot afford to trust to an inflated reputation. One of the greatest assets of France, however, is her wonderful homogeneity. She is much more united and consolidated than any other European country, but the provinces, although thoroughly merged in a national whole, still preserve to a great extent their individual types. To speak of a Bourguignon, or Picard, or a Gascon, is not only to give a man a distinct geographical position, it is also to describe his character. The Republic, much as it may be abused, was a powerful agent of French success, as it has proved by surviving longer than any other form of government SUCCESS AMONG LATIN NATIONS 181 since the ancien regime was thrown down. It is, after all, the natural form of government for a country so homogeneous as France, just as Eoyalty is the necessary adjunct of a land which is much divided by hetero- geneous forces. In such a country, for instance, as Austria, the throne forms the one rallying point of innumerable discordant elements. Where the bond of Eoyalty is so all-important, we may be sure that the line of succession will be carefully maintained, no matter what the qualities or the defects of the particular monarch. But where a Eepublic is at all feasible, it certainly confers manifold benefits. The decease or incapability of the ruler in a monarchical or imperial country may be productive of the direst consequences ; in a Eepublic it is always possible to have a capable man at the helm, and if he be tried and found wanting, he can be readily replaced. It has long been customary to regard the French colonial empire as more or less a failure; it should, however, not be forgotten that it embraces many of the richest portions of the globe, and would prove an immense source of capital in the event of European war. The African colonies have the additional advantage of being within a few hours' steam of the mother country. The late policy of France with regard to the Holy See has done much to nullify the sapping influence of the Catholic Church in France, and to rid the French of the one discordant element within their frontiers. With so many points to favour her, we can hardly doubt that France has the greatest chances of future success* CHAPTER X SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS The Slav nations, Poland, and especially Russia. Power of Russia very much overrated. History never goes by numbers, as do Parliaments. Has at the present, and for generations to come, neither wealth material nor wealth intellectual or volitional. Gravitates, since 1762, exclusively towards Asia. Panslavism is no danger whatever to Europe. Russia, moreover, cankered by her Greek Church. It has become customary of late years to look upon the Slav as something so essentially extra-European, that it comes almost as a shock when, upon examining him more closely, we discover that he is, after all, but part and parcel of the same family to which the majority of European nations appertain. In his language there is really nothing strange to the Western ear, and the student accustomed to looking at various tongues from a philological point of view is imme- diately struck by the close relationship evident between the numerous Slavonic languages and other branches of the Indo-European stock. Familiar sounds and words at once strike his ear, and he is delighted at recognizing, under a very thin veil of disguise, verbal terminations and inflexions already familiar to him through Latin and Greek. If the language of the Slav is not foreign to us, even less so are his physical SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 183 characteristics. We meet with the same fair hair, the same fresh complexion, the same clear, light-blue eyes which we have been wont to set down as peculiarly Teutonic, and by the time we have made out all these features of similitude a great deal of the original feeling of strangeness has worn off, and we are prepared, as far as externals go, to accept the Slav for our kinsman. When we have learned a little more of the working of his soul, perhaps we shall not have quite such a brotherly feeling towards him. For over a thousand years the Slav, under varying styles and titles, has peopled the whole of Europe east of the Elbe Eiver. A very great proportion of that country he may very well look upon as quite his own ; over the rest he forms a very considerable per- centage of the population. All about the Central and Lower Danubian basin he is scattered especially thick, and forms decidedly the preponderant element. In point of language the Slav falls into three natural divisions, the Southern, the Central, and the Northern. In character he displays very slight diversity, and the Slav from the extreme South would on most subjects find himself in complete sentimental harmony with his Northern brother. His chief feature is an over- sensitive, frequently over-sentimental, mind, easily prone to rhapsodic vagaries, alternating with fits of the profoundest melancholy. Much of this is reflected in Slav music, and nothing can equal the inexpressible depths of despondency of some of their folk-songs in the minor key. From these crises of despair they burst, without the slightest warning, into the most extravagant hallali. For the rest of his character the Slav is 184 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS stamped rather with subtlety and cunning than with real intelligence. He seems to prefer attaining his end by ruse and craft rather than by open and straight- forward means. The same inequality, the same un- evenness, the same extremes which characterize the emotions of the Slav, have also set their mark upon his education. If he is of the upper class, be he Eussian, Pole, Servian, or Bulgarian, we shall find him over- educated. His mind is overloaded with instruction, and this defect is shared even by the women, who devote themselves with enthusiasm to study, and often take up a prominent position in the learned professions. The number of women doctors who are Polish and Eussian is greater than that of any other nationality. In his intellectual pursuits the Slav enjoys the advantage of being an excellent linguist, and here we may be pardoned a momentary digression. It has frequently been supposed that the Slav owes his talent for languages in no small part to the difficulties with which his own tongue bristles. This theory is distinctly erroneous. No Slav language can be difficult. It is only the old languages, which have for centuries been the vehicles for every kind of thought, that can finally attain that degree of subtlety andjinesse which render English, German, and French especially, so exceedingly difficult. A language which has never, or has only for some few decades, been a literary medium, must in- evitably be exceedingly simple. Extensive vocabulary Slav languages may boast, but this is the criterion of linguistic poverty. French and Greek, probably the most perfect instruments of human thought, are com- paratively indigent in word-forms. Whence the Slav SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 185 really draws his linguistic talent is from his polyglot surroundings. In the events of everyday life he may be called upon to employ half a dozen independent tongues. His household will certainly contain servants speaking several Slav idioms, and in Eussia he will very probably have Tartar domestics as well. French and German are essential to social intercourse,^ and the Slav is absolutely dependent on foreign literature to compensate for the deficiencies of his own. To the Slav, therefore, the knowledge of languages is an im- mense stimulus to wide reading, and the necessity of reading is an equally potent motive for the acquisi- tion of languages. Thus it frequently happens that a Kussian is quite as familiar, if not more familiar, than we are ourselves, with the works of our latter-day philosophers. It would probably be no exaggeration to say that the writings of Herbert Spencer are quite as well known in Russia as they are at home. But to return to our theme. If the upper class of Slav countries suffers from superabundant intellectu- ality, the lower class compensates for this by an equally exaggerated extent of ignorance. Among the peasant class there is no intellectual activity whatever. And here, in speaking of the upper and lower class, we have set our finger on the great besetting sore of all Slav countries. The country of the Slav is no country in which to seek the mean, either emotional, intellectual, or social. His is the land of extremes. There is no bourgeoisie proper in Slav countries. The one immense drawback of the Slav is that he must be either peasant or noble. The middle class does not exist, or is only very slowly beginning to 186 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS exist. As far as the great majority of its members is concerned, a Slav population consists of an agricuL tural peasantry attached to the soil. The peasants, who have but lately emerged from a condition of serfdom, rarely possess the freeholds of their lands, and have been little benefited by the exchange of a servile for a free position. They are still dependent upon a not very numerous and not very wealthy nobility, the landholders. Eural life is the hall-mark of Slav countries. Urban life is very poorly developed, owing to the want of a bourgeoisie. In Slav countries, as an indigenous bourgeoisie does not exist, the whole of the commercial movement is monopolized by the foreigner or by the Jew. We at once see why the Jewish population of Europe gravitates to the East, and repressive measures against Jews in those countries can only result in the stagnation and paralysis of commerce, unless the exiled Jews are immediately replaced by foreigners. Any one who has travelled in North Hungary, where the social distinction is between a Slav peasantry and an Hun- garian landed nobility, cannot fail to have been struck by the completeness with which the Jew has mono- polized the functions of a middle class. Every tavern along the roads is kept by an Israelite innkeeper. A glance at the map will suffice to convince the reader how sparsely scattered are the centres of city life over Slav countries, and if he were to visit those centres he would see how widely they difier from Western European cities in the life which they harbour. The Slavs of the South are split up into several small kingdoms and principalities, and of them we shall SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 187 not speak at length. The rdle they play in modern Europe is of very second-rate importance. It is of the two great groups of the North that we shall have most to say — Poland and Eussia. The Poles have always occupied a large position in European interest and sympathies, ever since the tragic end which befell their political liberty, now over a century ago. We shall not here trouble the reader with a recapitulation of the history of the years from 1772 to 1795, which ended in Poland's extinction as an independent Power, and in the partition of the ancient kingdom between Austria, Prussia, and Eussia. During the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries, Poland was still a mighty and im- posing monarchy. The Elector of Brandenburg yet acknowledged the King of Poland as his suzerain. But in consequence of vices in the national character, fatal diplomatic mistakes, and an absolutely erroneous political strategy, Poland was, by the middle of the eighteenth century, reduced to such a state of internal anarchy as to fall an easy prey to the three neighbour- ing monarchies. These diplomatic and political errors are at present beyond our subject, but it is of great importance that we should note several of the national shortcomings, and the fundamental mistakes of Polish society, which contributed no small part to the undoing of the country. The whole of the civic rights were in the hands of a very few noblemen, while the whole mass of the peasantry, numbering over twelve millions, was abso- lutely excluded from all participation in political liberty. As in all Slav countries a bourgeoisie proper did not exist, its place being taken either by foreigners 188 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS or Jews, neither of which classes could reasonably be expected to feel any patriotic in,terest in preserving the integrity of the kingdom. It is upon a strong middle class that a country must rely for its preservation in a moment of national peril. The peasants, on the whole, in a state of miserable semi-servitude, were unlikely to rise in defence of the country. It made but small difference to them which way things went. All that they could look forward to was a change of masters, which could not for them result in anything much worse than their actual condition. The national defence, therefore, devolved almost entirely upon the nobility, and what could a handful of fifty to sixty thousand men accomplish in the face of incomparably more powerful and resourceful foes ? Poland's eventual fate, were she left isolated, was a foregone conclusion with the partitioning Powers. But of all Poland's shortcomings, the greatest is her woman. Her appearance is generally enough to carry all before her. Her beauty is, as a rule, of the type w^hich the French have so expressively called the fausse maigre; she has flashing eyes and very much of the grace of the women of France, but with a deeper current of passion. To set off her beauty she has, as a rule, a wealth of brilliant and engaging conversation, which is irresistible when it flows in her own melodious language, with its magnificent cadences. Liszt has said that the only safety from the sorcery of the Polish i (liquid I) as spoken by a Polish woman, is in flight. The love, the necessity for intrigue, which is part of the being of every Slav, is carried to a fine art by the Polish woman. But all her power of fascination SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 189 is counterbalanced by an absolute lack of any capacity for her household duties. She is not like the French- woman, who can be always charming without disdaining the cares and troubles of her own menage. The existence of the Polishwoman is truly that of a butter- fly; never did a proverbial expression find a better application. She is brilliant, dazzlingly brilliant and captivating in the salon, and at times heroically brave, even on the battlefield. But for the hum-drum exist- ence of everyday, which nourishes the stamina of a nation, she has no aptitude, no inclination. Her life is anything rather than home-life. She, as a rule, talks French as well as Polish, and she did havoc in the French armies. The only real passion, feminine passion, to which Napoleon is known to have fallen a victim, except his real love for Josephine, was that for Madame Walewska, which kept him dallying at Warsaw from December, 1806, till January, 1807. The Polish- woman is capable of anything in a moment of passion, but is marked by a temper of reckless enjoyment of life which renders her unfit for the worries of everyday existence. Even at the present day, when Poland exists no more, her women still remain a power. Wherever they are they make formidable opponents to the partitioning Powers. It is with the Kussian as with the German. Wherever the Polishwoman enters in, the process of Eussification or Germanization, as the case may be, ceases, and a current of Polonization begins. Thus it is that many of the East German villages, which before the partition hardly bore a trace of Polish influence, have now become entirely Polish, 190 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS and this metamorphosis has taken place almost ex- clusively through feminine influence. So extensive has this process become that the German Chancellor has of late declared, and in no spirit of exaggeration, that one of the most formidable perils with which Germany's future is confronted is the Polonization of her Eastern inhabitants, and even of the Westphalian mining districts filled with Poles. All efi'orts, even those of the most tyrannical description, to keep Polish nation- ality within bounds on German soil, have proved ineffectual. The papers tell every day of fresh terror- izing methods in Eastern Pomerania, of Polish riots rigorously repressed; but it is well to remember that these disturbances frequently take place in a country which has only recently become Polonized. In the primary schools of Russian Poland, the State-paid teachers are compelled to teach the Russian National Anthem, but although the masters, in order to retain their berths, do make some effort to execute orders, they never meet with any response upon the part of the Polish children. In Germany the same thing takes place, and from there we hear of persecutions for Use- majestS against children hardly in their teens. All these are signs that the idea of Polish nationality is still green, and far from losing ground owing to the harsh measures of the conquerors. Hopeless as the cause of Poland may seem to be, it would yet be rash to assume that the famous exclamation of one of the Polish patriots on the field of Ostrolenka, ** Finis Polonise ! '' is really the final word in the destinies of that country. Perhaps there is more truth in the refrain of the great Polish folk-song, SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 191 "Poland is not ended so long as we live." Over a hundred years have gone by, and yet Poland seems to have been rejuvenated by her disasters. The dormant sense of nationality is waking into life, despite the drugs and opiates with which the partitioners would like to prolong the lethargy. This reawakening is becoming every day more apparent. A new literature has arisen in the days of captivity. May we not even now look forward to the day when Poland will confront Germany with a demand for internal independence ? When she will claim to enter the German confederation on a footing of equality, with her internal institutions swept clean of Teutonic influence? Poland will, perhaps, some day take up towards Germany the same position that Hungary has taken up towards Austria, and we may witness the formation of a Polono-German dualism, on the same lines as the present Austro-Hungarian dualism, in which the union is only maintained in external rela- tions. In politics it has often and truly been said there is no morality, but it looks very much as if there was a Nemesis which, sooner or later, inevitably overtakes the doers of great political crimes, and that Prussia, too, will not escape punishment for her share in the partition of unhappy Poland. Eussian power is overrated. But the exaggerated conception of the invincible and resistless might of Eussia shows no sign of waning. Although almost every historical event of the last century in which Eussia has had a hand might seem to have been specially designed to relieve Europe of the bugbear of a Muscovite terror, the myth of Eussia's hostile 192 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS intentions towards the West, and of her capacity for carrying her inimical designs into execution, has been steadily gaining ground. Its origin has been attributed to Napoleon, who is represented to have said that within fifty years from his time the whole of Europe would be Eepublican or Muscovite. Very possibly the dictum may be apocryphal ; we are not concerned with proving its authenticity. All we would wish to indicate is that the idea had already gained currency during the latter years of Napoleon, and has continued to strike deeper root ever since. To disclose the fallacies which this idea involves will be the main thread which will guide us in what we have to say of Eussia. It is true that almost every year of the last century and a half has witnessed the increase of Russia's terri- torial possessions, until now they stretch unbroken from Polish Wilna in the West to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. But immense territorial conglomerations and vast throngs of population have not gone for much in the making of history. We can never insist too much that history does not go by masses and majorities, which, however important they may be in the building up of institutions, are not the main producers of history. Small ^nd intense minorities are^ the stuff fromjw hich start the causes of hjgtoy. We may admit that a mass of population throughout which a comparatively high state of civilization prevails, in which there is unity and homogeneity, and which is bound together by a chain of common civil and moral institutions, may be of great power. The United States of America afford us a striking instance. In America there is a uniformity of civilization, sentiment, and aspirations, which is SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 193 exceedingly astonishing to a stranger fresh from intensely differentiated Europe, who is, as a rule, accustomed to meet with at least three degrees or stages of civiliza- tion within a day's travel. At home he has been wont to class his fellow-beings roughly as either peasants, bourgeois, or nobility ; in America he meets with the bourgeois alone. Consequently, any given idea in America, once it takes, spreads with the swiftness of an immense prairie-fire ; it is impossible to foresee where it may end ; it is a spectacle at once sublime and powerful. But to return to Kussia. Nowhere is there homo- geneity. We have already shown the class distinction prevalent in all the Slav countries. Besides this there are a thousand elements of subdivision. The creeds and sects of Eussia may be counted by the score ; the different and mutually unintelligible tongues run into hundreds, and there are besides a legion of conflicting psychological forces. The average degree of civilization is very low when measured by European standards. The only tie which binds Russians together is an out- ward semblance of political unity, maintained by an army of eight or nine hundred thousand State ofiicials, who themselves constitute a class apart. The more you study Eussia the more the conviction will be borne in upon you that she is not greatly to be feared. The spectre of Panslavism, as taught by Bakunin, has, or ought to have, completely disappeared. Let us examine for a moment the Eussian peril to Europe from a military point of view. It is quite impossible that an invasion of Europe such as took place in the thirteenth century, at the hands of the 194 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Mongols under the son of Gengiz Khan, could any longer succeed. We have no longer to fear anything like the hordes of Turks who swept down upon Europe in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The days of Soliman are over, and the defensive organi- zation of the modern Western nations would make very short work of such an unsystematic foray. But a methodically and scientifically planned invasion on the part of Eussia is equally beyond the horizon of possi- bilities. For warfare on this grandiose and regular scale Eussia is in no wise prepared. Her armies are filled with excellent recruits, who have proved them- selves, time after time, endowed with all the essential fighting qualities, dogged perseverance, resistance, and unflinching bravery in time of defeat. The figures of modern military statisticians will give some idea of the sterling worth of the Eussian rank and file. The com- parison of the losses sustained by Eussian troops in battle against an enemy of equal strength, with the casualties of Italian forces under like circumstances, is peculiarly instructive, and will show immediately that, as far as the courage of the common soldier is concerned, Eussia has no reason to be dissatisfied. At the battle of Zorndorf (1758), 45 per cent, of the Eussian army was left upon the field, and the losses at Kunersdorf (1759) were equally heavy. Here are the percentages of Eussian casualties in several other famous engage- ments : Austerlitz (1805), 15 per cent. ; Eylau (1807), 28 per cent. ; Friedland (1807), 24 per cent. ; Borodino (1812), 31 per cent. ; Warsaw (1831), 18 per cent. ; Inkermann (1854), 24 per cent. ; Plevna (I.) (1877), 28 per cent. ; Plevna (II.)> 28 per cent. ; Plevna (III.), SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 195 17 per cent. Observe now the Italian lists, and the striking contrast which they show : St. Lucia (1848), 2 per cent.; Custozza (1848), 1*2 per cent.; Mortara (1849), 2*2 per cent. ; Novara (1849), 5 per cent. ; Solferino (1859), 8 per cent.; Custozza (1866), 4 per cent. But physical bravery alone will not suffice unless it is directed by first-class strategic ability, and the Eussian generals have not by any means shone so brightly as have the men under their command. In the Caucasus it was only after thirty-five years of almost uninterrupted fighting, with vast resources of men and money at their disposal, a free hand to use any repressive measures against the enemy, and after sustaining many defeats and enormous losses, that the Kussians eventually succeeded in partially pacifying the heroic mountain tribes who were opposed to them (1829-64). The story of the Crimean War (1854-56), and of the Eusso-Turkish "War (1877-78), is so well known that we hardly need say that Eussian general- ship was anything but an unmitigated success. Nor is this incapacity difficult of explanation. In modern warfare more than the weapon is needed ; the intelligent initiative of each individual officer is required in the first place, and although this may be increased to a great extent by a special military training, it is more largely the result of the national moral and intellectual education. Eussia would be even more handicapped in a Euro- pean war by her lack of money. She is really a poverty-stricken country, and what capital she has at her disposal is almost entirely absorbed by her nascent industrial development. She has none of the hoarded 196 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS wealth of Western countries to fall back upon in time of need, and the funds to which she owes her present financial position have been drawn to a considerable extent from the surplus riches of France, her ally. The great famines with which the country is so frequently visited are an unmistakable sign of her economical* backwardness. What commerce there is is almost ex- clusively in foreign or Israelitish hands. The native industry is insignificant, or rather nil ; for the immense mineral wealth, the petroleum wells of Baku, have fallen into the hands of English capitalists. Repressive and terrorizing measures against the Jews can only end in crippling what little commercial enterprise there is. The Russian having as yet been unable to create a mercantile middle class, the exchange of goods is prac- tically limited to the great fairs, such as those of Nijni Novgorod. Commerce is thus in Russia still very much in the same stage of development as it was in Europe during the early Middle Ages. The country is agricul- tural, but the absence of a numerous class of middlemen paralyzes the movement of corn and other agricultural products. For the development of a really extensive network of railways, capital is wanting, and other means of transport are hopelessly inadequate. The great rivers are quite insufficient, and the magnificent project of linking the Black Sea with the Baltic by a canal still remains a project. But of all the drawbacks under which Russia labours, the greatest is her geo- graphical position, that is to say, the position of Euro- pean Russia, shut in between three closed seas, the Caspian, the Baltic, and the Black Sea. We shall see later that Russian policy tends always towards the SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 197 acquisition of a real and unimpeded maritime outlet, and that on this point alone she is likely to come into hostile collision with other European Powers. We have so far shown that Kussia is incapable of seriously menacing the peace of Europe from a military point of view, and that, even had she the military capacity, the financial straits in which she stands would preclude her from espousing such an enterprise. It remains to point out that an unfriendly attitude towards Europe is absolutely inconsistent with Eussian policy, and that nothing could be more remote from the minds of Eussian statesmen than an invasion of Europe. The whole of Eussian policy points towards the East. For the last hundred years the expansion of Eussia has always been away from Europe, and she has annexed vast tracts of land beyond the Ural Mountains. Quite erroneous is the idea, very generally current, that these recent acquisitions consist only of barren and inhospit- able steppes. Much of these newly won possessions ofi'ers the brightest prospects to the agricultural colonist, and^ it is their development and exploitation which will monagolize all the enerj^ies of the Eussian nation for generations to come. The Eussian peasant is cut out by nature for a colonist. He has one great advantage over other European nations. His generally low state of culture permits him to intermarry, without any undue sense of debasement, with the indigenous tribes of the ultra-Ural districts. In times of peace he is prodigiously prolific, so that there is every prospect of Eussia, in the end, really absorbing her Asiatic conquests, with the result that the whole of her immense dominion, from west to east, will be peopled with a Eussian-speaking 198 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS and Eussian - thinking population. In this she will stand in marked contrast with, and have a considerable advantage over, the French, English, and Dutch, who have never been able to form in Asia any other but " provincial " colonies, that is to say, colonies of natives with a European government of officials. Thus, while other Europeans are hindered by climatic drawbacks^ and their superior culture from ever really Europeanizing their colonial acquisitions, the Eussian^ from his com- paratively low state of culture, stands an excellent chance of completely Eussifying the whole^ qf^ his emjpire. But this is still the work of centuries. Whether Eussia will also succeed in denationalizing Manchuria and North China is a question of the very far future, and on which it would be rash to risk an opinion. Our knowledge of the interior of China is too imperfect to permit of any serious prediction. There has always been a tendency to exaggerate the grounds of hostility that exist between England and Eussia. The slightest movement of the Muscovite Government, either on the Pamir frontier, in Persia, or in the Far East, is construed as a harbinger of war. It is doubtful whether serious statesmen hold the same view. In Russian policy two points must be firmly^ gTasped,_firstlyj^_that sooner or later Eussia must acquire an ice-free and open port on the ocean^ and, secondly, that she is irresistible on land. She is already in possession of the hinterland of Persia and of North China ; whether she will open her first harbour on the Indian Ocean or the North Chinese coast may still be doubtful. What is quite certain is that, once Eussia is in possession of the hinterland, it is quite impossible SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 199 that any other European Power should debar her from the sea- coast. What Russia will do intellectually, what she will achieve in the interests of civilization, is a matter of the deepest interest. Will she produce a new type of culture, different, but as valuable in its way as those evolved by England, France, and Germany ? To this question, at least, we are in a position to hazard a preliminary answer. Very many obstacles stand in Eussia's way along the path of progress, but it is a very wrong notion to imagine that the autocratic govern- ment now prevailing is among the greatest. The idea that a country may be given a beneficial constitution in a day ; the Benthamite conception that a form of government can be drawn up upon ideal lines to fit the requirements of any nation, and that that nation will be able to don it and wear it like a new suit of clothes, has long been proved false. A constitution, unless it has been won by the efforts of the people themselves, is not likely to prove a good fit. And in Russia the lower classes have not manifested any desire for a superior form of government to that under which they at present live. The class that desires constitutional reforms is the middle class, and this class, in the real sense of bourgeoisie, we have already shown does not exist. Its absence, however, is the greatest check upon the advance of Russian culture. It has been our aim throughout this book to show, that all the great streams of modern civilization, all its ideals, have risen among the bour- geoisie. The bourgeoisie is the outcome and the one great creation for which we have to thank the Middle Ages. Russia is still mediaeval, although possibly her 200 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS mediaevalism may be slightly tinctured with humanity, borrowed from Western states. Serfdom may be abolished, but Eussia has still to live through her Middle Ages, and we may well be permitted to doubt whether she will attain to a parallel degree of culture wifch the great European countries, unless she first passes through the stages through which those countries have passed. There is no royal road to civilization. But the most hopeless barrier to Eussian progress is her Church, the Greek Church. From the Greek Church it is impossible to see how she will escape. Wherever the Greek Church has become paramount, it has proved infinitely more sterilizing, infinitely more paralyzing in its influence than has the Eoman Catholic Church. We cannot here go into the causes of this baneful power, which the author has sought to follow out in detail in a chapter of his " General History," which is to appear during the course of the present year. We must ask the reader to take the fact for the present as he finds it. It cannot be denied that the Catholic Church, much as may be the misery and sufi'er- ing it has caused, has always acted as a potent civilizing agent. Even the opposition it has called forth, has been for good. But the Greek Church has never excited opposition. It has had neither a saint Bernard nor a Torquemada. It has had believers and heretics, but no passionately aggressive and inquisitive doubters. Now that the Eussian s themselves have opened their eyes to its imperfections, sects innumerable have risen against it, but none capable of seriously opposing, much less of replacing, it. For a moment there seemed some hope that Tolstoiism might supply the remedy, but it is to SUCCESS AMONG SLAV NATIONS 201 be feared that it contains too much quietism and qualities that make for stagnation to really replace the Greek Church. Hungary has no benefactor to whom she is more indebted than to Pope Sylvester II. (999-1003 A.D.), to whom she owes her catholicization, and her admittance to participate in Western thought. Every one of the great Western nations has had to stand the test of a triple trial, before it could reach its actual condition. It has had to pass through an intellectual Renaissance, a religious Keformation, and a political Eevolution. And we may suppose that Russia will not escape the necessity of passing through a like series of stages. Incidentally, it may be borne in mind that the Catholic countries, too, have had their Reformation in the Council of Trent. To resume, we may predict with fair confidence that Russia will no longer prove a serious menace to the peace of Europe ; that her future will be fully occupied with her colonial, industrial, social, and political develop- ment, and if we may judge from historic precedent, her social growth will of necessity precede her political development. So far, revolutions in Western Europe have not been of the making of a discontented peasantry, but of a middle class which has risen to consciousness of its own power, and has grasped the fact that it is its prerogative to govern itself. CHAPTER XI SUCCESS AMONG GERMANS The Germans. The women. The men. Education ; especially higher edu- cation. The Universities. The cause of the superiority of the German professor. German intellectual activity ; its universality and wonderful organization {Jdhrbucherj Eandhucher^ Encydopasdien, etc.). Germany's great military defeats and successes in the nineteenth century. Her imperialism. Her internal dangers. SociaHsm. The chief obstacle to German imperialism is her geography. She can never absorb Austria. Reasons: France and Italy cannot admit it. Irreconcila- bility of France. It is only by absorption of Austria that Germany could, by obtaining access to the Adriatic, sit astride on the continent of Europe, and so essentially improve her chances for imperialism and world- policy by securing real sea-power. Her industrial progress will soon be checked and toned down by the rapid and rising industriahsm of Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the numerous minor, but very wealthy, states of Europe. Yet with all that, the German will undoubtedly realize much of the higher type of civilization. At the present day there is no problem which excites keener interest than the future career of Germany. Every one would like to know whether she is destined to become the great power which will be able to impose its dictates upon the whole of Europe, or rather upon the whole world, or whether the bond of unity, by which she is now held together, will, when the master hand, now directing her policy, is relaxed, burst asunder, leaving the component states once more in their primitive SUCCESS AMONG GEEMANS 203 disunion. To most people these are problems of more than academic interest ; they touch the man of business in the dealings of everyday life just as much as they absorb the student of history. Within a generation Germany has risen by leaps and bounds from a level of comparative unimportance to a position in which she makes her commercial, political, and intellectual com- petition felt the whole world over. We shall do our best in the course of the ensuing pages to sketch out the main lines along which the future of Germany is likely to proceed, and to give, at any rate, a provisional answer to some of the questions raised above. It is all-important to gain first a clear idea of the social forces which are at work in Germany. The German character is not so difficult of appreciation as is the French, and we have a great advantage in speaking of Germany in that we have not first to stem such a tide of prejudice and misconception, as we have had to do in the case of France. Germany is certainly less known, either to her advantage or disadvantage, than is France, and what knowledge of her does prevail in foreign countries is in no small degree tinctured by the rather envious ad- miration of her success, and the methods by which she has attained it. The social types of Germany are com- paratively simple, though they diff'er considerably accord- ing to place. The German of the South, much as he has in common withth e German of the North politically, is strongly differentiated from him both physically and socially. Let us first take the typical woman of North Germany. Her feminine charms are certainly some- what less than those of her Southern . sister. There is 204 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS something slightly angular in her temperament, as there is in her person, something a little too harsh, a little too severe. The faces which you see in one of the great Northern cities are rarely beautiful, though, of course, there are exceptions ; the features are more often cast in a rather rigid and unpleasing mould. Perhaps these characteristics are the outcome of a long process of social evolution. We can imagine what life has been in the Hanseatic cities for generation upon generation. They were the first great centres of commercial activity, and their wealth grew rapidly. An early result of this thriving_ business life was the institution of the maricbge_ ^^J^2I\VSI!^'^^^' Alliances were doubtless contracted out of purely interested motives. Such and such a family combination was bound to prove highly advantageous to business, as it would secure the co-operation of two great firms. The bargain was struck, the marriage was concluded entirely as a business move, without one jot or tittle of a sentimental character. Suppose this pro- cedure to have been repeated an indefinite number of times in successive generations, and is there anything surprising in the physical type being finally affected ? Speaking more in general, it would appear that feminine beauty is certainly more common amongst those nations who keep business and private life strictly separate ; where marriage is, as a rule, the outcome of mutual attraction and conformability of disposition, rather than of a money arrangement. The average of beauty in America, for instance, is certainly higher than in the countries of Europe, where the dowry system has been of long standing, and still prevails. As we go South, the women of Germany become SUCCESS AMONG GERMANS 205 more genial, more attractive, and at the same time the social environments are modified. We have passed out of the region of the large and ancient free cities into a district where urban life is only now developing widely, but where the bulk of the population consists of well- to-do peasants, living a healthy open-air life in the midst of a country in which subsistence is cheap and good, with plenty of wine and beer. The money- marriage has not here been the rule, and the physical type is consequently finer. The German woman has not been nearly so active in the making of her country's history as has the woman of France. Her rdle is not nearly so important in public life; moreover, her bringing up is very different. If the Frenchwoman arrives at the perfection of her being in married life, the German woman is probably of greater influence during her maidenhood. Although she cannot claim the unfettered freedom of the American girl, she is not, in her youth, cloistered and cooped up with the severity enforced upon the French girl. She strikes the happy mean, and enjoys considerable liberty, without the loss of that naivete and idealistic turn of mind which appeals so strongly to the purer imagination of the young man. We can at once grasp the reason why Germany has bloomed into a wealth of lyric verse, utterly foreign to France. After marriage, the German woman, as a rule, lapses into almost entire obscurity ; the cares of her household absorb her thoroughly, and she becomes the Hausfrau, whose stolid dulness has become almost proverbial throughout Europe, and it must be admitted that this reputation is not quite un- merited. 206 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS In Germany the triple class distinction is maintained, much as in France, and generally over the whole continent. This distinction, of course, does not exist before the law, in the eyes of which there is complete equality ; it is none the less real. It does not, however, preserve much of its mediaeval character, and peasant, bourgeois, and noble, although clearly differentiated, each have a pride in their position, and do not visit each other with mutual disdain. In America, where the peasant population is non-existent, and in England, where it has to all intents and purposes ceased to exist, there can be little conception of what this Bauernstolz^ the pride of t^^^^ ^25^7 ^' ^^^ German peasant is in many ways different from his French counterpart, who, either as a result of his grasping, miserly avarice, or for some other reason, has become almost everywhere depoeticized. The word paysan, in French, and the word Bauer, in German, conjure up very different pictures before the mind's eye. When a Frenchman applies the name " peasant," he suggests a thousand niggardly, cunning, money-grabbing, utili- tarian, commonplace qualities, and the word certainly has in it a ring of contempt. The German Bauer, on the contrary, has retained much of the poetry of olden days ; he has clung tenaciously to a thousand quaint customs, to his picturesque costume, and he still has that wealth of fantastic and poetical imagination which has left so profound a mark on German literature ; he still is the repository of stories, legends, and fairy tales, which he has refused to forget under the grindstone of a matter-of-fact, prosaic age. The folklorist, who might live for a lifetime in some French country districts with- SUCCESS AMONG GEEMANS 207 out enriching his collections by a single item, would find his paradise in the wild surroundings of the Harz and the Black Forest. We shall see how powerful, in other walks of life in Germany, is this tendency to idealism, and what a valuable adjunct it is to German national life. Unhappily, the third estate is being, ever so slowly, undermined by the spread of a constantly widening industrialism. The preservation of a large peasant population is one of the most indispensable necessities for all the great continental Powers, for it is upon the sound and healthy recruits furnished by this class that these nations most chiefly rely in time of war. They are the physical basis of national prosperity. The bourgeois section of the community has im- mensely increased with the growth of urban life ; it is from the bourgeoisie that the intellectual backbone of the country is built up, all being more or less highly educated as the result of a thorough state training in the schools, which are open and compulsory to all. Here we come to the greatest force which is working for the future welfare of Germany. This is her intel- lectuality. The systematic thoroughness with which everything is carried out in the world of intellect is almost inconceivable. When any one has been com- pelled for years to make use of German books, he will begin to realize the immense labour which has been done by Germans in the organization of knowledge. From his earliest years the German youth, whatever degree of learning he may eventually be meant to attain, is, at any rate, taught to learn systematically. He is never permitted to specialize in any subject until he has a complete grasp of generalities, in order that 208 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS he may have in his mind at least a sense of the propor- tion of what he has to learn. The schools are also systematized,, and fall into two strictly demarcated categories, the Realschulen and the Gymnasia. In the former are taught chiefly the natural sciences, some- what as in the modern sides of English schools ; in the latter the principal subjects of instruction are Latin and Q-reek ; but the student is in all cases compelled to go through a preliminary general curriculum. By the time the young man goes to the University, his knowledge will probably be already very extensive ; he, at all events, has his mind thoroughly ordered, and knows in what particular receptacle to classify all sub- sequently acquired information. His studies are never allowed to proceed haphazard. In the higher walks of scientific research the same methods are pursued. Many of the Universities have at their disposition very con- siderable sums for bestowal in the form of prizes for the furtherance of original scientific work. This patri- mony is very carefully administered, and subjects suitable for research, and requiring elucidation, are pointed out to the competitors, in order that none of the precious store of energy need be expended in vain. This system of education looks very perfect upon paper : we have already shown what are the evil eff*ects of over-intellectualization. The Germans have certainly hit the mean, as far as it is feasible to hit a mean between first-rate intellectual development and a degree of volitional energy indispensable to render that intel- lectual development fertile. A few words will show what immense services have been rendered by the Germans in the systematic SUCCESS AMONG GERMANS 209 classification of knowledge. The very names of books have received a technical significance quite unknown in other countries. To the German mind, for instance, the word Encyclopddie represents something quite different from the alphabetical agglomeration of facts which we usually associate with the term Encyclopaedia. Such a work would be called a Konversationslexicon, or Reallexicon ; the Encyclopddie is something quite apart. If you wish to study a science, the first book you must lay your hand on must be its Ency clopadie. Itjvill not^necessari^ big book at all, and^ it^ is not the place in whic h to seek for mi nute detail s of knowledge^ but^b^jmeans^of^it a grasp of the jgound whkh your particular science covers j you will get an idea of its organization, its divisions, its system ; you will get a summary view of the whole science, so that you will know exactly how far it has been carried, and what there is for you to learn. All this is implied to the German by the word Encyclopddie, Should you wish to pursue your studies further you will have to purchase a Grymdnss^ : this will take you over the same ground again, but will give you much fuller detail ; it will, above all, give quotations from the original sources, from the great books on the subject, together with the fullest bibliographies, whereas the Encyclopddie has only given select bibliographies. The next books are the Lehrbueh and the Handhuch, The former is a yet further expansion of the Grundriss^ especially destined for the use of the student ; the latter a complete compendium of the science, for the use and reference of the specialist. You have now made yourself a thorough master of your subject by 210 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS dint of assiduous labour on this organized system, but you will still require to be kept au courant of the subsequent progress in your study. Your Handbuch, in spite of frequent new editions, will be a little behind the times. To combat this drawback, the Germans have devised yet another instrument. This is the Jahrhuch, the triumph of German scientific methods. As the name implies, these books appear annually. They are edited by the most competent authorities upon the subjects with which they deal. Let us con- sider, for example's sake, a Jahrhuch on botany. Its internal classification will be arranged upon a system which has already been inculcated on the student in the Encydopddie, so that in turning over its pages he will not have a moment's hesitation as to what par- ticular section will contain the information of which he is in search. It is the object of the Jahrhuch in question to enregister everything that has been done during the preceding year with regard to botany. Every fresh discovery is noted, every periodical article dealing with botanical questions or researches is carefully recorded, every book which has been published during the year is given, very often with the fullest critical notes. Nothing which has appeared in any country relating to their particular subject can for a moment elude the vigilant eyes of the compilers of the Jahrhuch, It needs no keen insight to see what invaluable services this work may render to the writer upon botany or to the scientific investigator himself. The writer is sure of having absolutely the latest and most accurate infor- mation concerning the matter of which he is writing, the scientist can assure himself that he is not frittering SUCCESS AMONG GERMANS 211 away his time in researches which have already been worked out to a successful or unsuccessful result by another. Even if the Jahrhuch be only looked upon as a saver of time, an economizer of labour, it would be hard to overrate its value. Every science has its Jahrhuch There are Jahrhucher on Teutonic Philology, on Oriental Philology, on Ancient Philology, on Modern History ; there are Jahrhucher on almost everything. Some of the series cover many years, some are of only recent institution. But it is certain that the German scholar, in quest of the most up-to-date literature on his particular speciality, can really not be nonplussed in his search. If he wants to know what the latest traveller has had to say upon the obscurest Tungusic dialect spoken somewhere almost out of ken in the wilds of Siberia, he can find it within the minute so long as his Jahrhuch is within his reach. So, too, the doctor, interested in malaria, can discover, with mechanical ease, the latest specialist literature on his subject. We have gone somewhat fully into the social and intellectual aspects of modern Germany, for it is very necessary to have a clear notion of the way a nation lives and thinks, before embarking upon what may appear a somewhat ambitious attempt to forecast that nation's political career. It is in the everyday life of the people, and from long habitation among them, that one can alone hope to win some knowledge of the ideals by which they are impelled. Without this ex- perience a man's ideas of the great motive forces by which a nation is influenced will, in all likelihood, be nothing but a dim and distorted phantom of his own 212 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS strivings and ambitions. We shall now endeavour, within the limits of our power, to sketch the ideals by which the future of Germany is being moulded, and to estimate what chances those ideals possess of being fulfilled. Imperialism, which has become the watchword of the external policy of several great nations of to-day, has laid hold of the German mind with especial force. Now that, by the successive defeats of Austria and France, the Germans have built up and assured the stability of their internal union, they have begun to aspire to a far wider extension of their power. It is their ambition, by the development of their naval strength, to carry their sphere of influence over the whole globe. The Emperor, when he declared that "Germany's future lay upon the water," was only giving voice to the idea which animates a very con- siderable majority of the nation, which is full well aware that Germany cannot make good her claim to be a first-rate power until she can make herself respected and feared upon the sea. She must raise her maritime force until it is able to stand upon a footing of equality with the other great naval Powers of Europe. For the last ten years Germany has been toiling unremittingly to bring about the accomplishment of this design. Her dockyards have been at work ceaselessly, building and equipping battleship upon battleship, cruiser upon cruiser, until to-day she has a very considerable fleet in commission, while her programme of naval construc- tion during the next decade is upon grandiose lines. The German scientific journals show us that Germany is pursuing her object with the systematic thoroughness SUCCESS AMONG GERMANS 213 which characterizes all her work. Every month witnesses the publication of some new book on naval tactics, naval construction, or naval history, and no pains are being spared in order that Germans may make the most minute and searching study of all that appertains to an exhaustive and practical knowledge of everything that is requisite to a first-class navy. The drift of all this busy, unflagging preparation can hardly be doubtful. For fifty years there was the same hum of an army making ready, the same keen attention to military affairs, the same drilling of soldiers and training of oflicers, before Germany hurled herself irresistibly upon France, full of sanguine confidence in her success. In the same manner there can be no doubt that Germany is arming herself with patient, calculating, and laborious perseverance for the day when she shall at last feel ready to throw down the gauntlet of defiance in the face of England. Germany is of those that look, meditate, and prepare before they leap, in order that they need have to leap but once. Technically, then, the German dream of a world- power means immense power both by land and by sea. In order to obtain this, Germany would like to have direct access to the Adriatic. Once she gains this access, she can put into execution the oft-meditated plan of drawing a canal from the Elbe to Trieste, and she would thus sit astride of Europe, and could afibrd to make light of any Franco-Eussian combination against her. She has carried out a very similar design in linking the Baltic to the North Sea, and rendering herself independent of the dangerous passage of the Kattegat, easily closed by a hostile power in time of war, 214 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS and of which she is able to control neither entry. By a trans-European canal she would nullify the strategic value of the English Channel, where very possibly she would have, far from any protecting base or haven of shelter, to run the gauntlet of the combined English and French navies. In the construction of such a canal she would only be realizing, on a somewhat more grandiose scale, the dream which has been cherished by some great French statesmen, and is still cherished by Russia. Richelieu already pointed out that a canal on the grandest scale, linking Bordeaux to Nimes, would undermine the value of Gibraltar. A French fleet could be carried, as it were, overland from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean much more rapidly than a hostile armada could sail round the whole Iberian peninsula, and France could change the scene of operations in a naval war as best suited her convenience, and offer battle with her whole combined fleets against the dis- united squadrons of her enemy in whichever sea she preferred. The French maritime forces, if swept out of the Mediterranean, need not any more dread being cooped up in the harbours of the southern littoral, but could re-emerge upon the western coast. The project has remained a project, and it seems almost inexplicable that the French should take so little interest in securing the pre-eminence of their navy by a work which would have rendered a battle of Trafalgar out of the question, and which would certainly prevent the recurrence of such a battle. Russia has much the same scheme for uniting the Black Sea and the Baltic ; but, as we have before pointed out, Russia's policy tends ever eastwards, and we need hardly be astonished that she hesitates to SUCCESS AMONG GERMANS 215 strain her already impoverislied finances in order to secure her pre-eminence in two land-locked seas. With Germany the prospective gains are immeasurably grander. There is one circumstance which promises well for the future of Germany's naval ambitions, and this is the ever-increasing growth of her mercantile marine. Hitherto England alone has enjoyed the privilege of an immense unofficial reserve of ofiBcers and men, on which she could draw in moments of stress, to fill the breaches caused by war, and to man her spare vessels. But the number of German sailors is growing daily, as is the number of ships that fly her flag ; and Germany, too, may soon have an equal, if not superior, stock from which to replenish her navy when need arises. The statistics of the Suez Canal show that the number of German vessels passing backwards and fo rwards between ^JQE-^, M^^__ j^^ .^QjSt is now only surpassed bj the number of British ships, a fact which a lone bold ly illus- trates the metamor phosis which th e shi pping: world has undergone in the course of the last two or three decades. Germany's over-sea policy is not the outcome of sheer ambition, mere desire to participate in the game of grab ; it is inspired by imperious necessity. It is the result of no artificial impulse. Since 1870 the figures of her population have well-nigh doubled, the elbow-room in the Fatherland is becoming cramped, and the energetic portion of the inhabitants is compelled to emigrate to America, where it ceases to contribute to the force of the home-country. It is a matter of crucial importance to Germany that she should have fields of colonial expansion under her own imperial control. But where are such fields to be found ? §16 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Almost all available space has long been occupied by other Powers, and Germany is, at all events, not yet desirous of winning territory by hostile means. In her distress her eyes have fallen upon the nearer east. This is the explanation of her forbearance and solicitude for the sublime Porte ; it lies in no disinterested affec- tion, but Germany would like to win a firm foothold in Asia Minor, already the scene of her brilliant railway schemes. And if eventually Germany should colonize the eastern end of the Mediterranean, she will have even more potent inducements for securing a naval base in the Adriatic. We have sketched out in brief and summary outline what we may expect to be the tendency of German foreign policy in the near future. It is now time to observe the hindrances and stumbling-blocks with which such a policy is sown. Perhaps the most formidable antagonist with which Germany has to contend will be found within her own borders, in the socialist party. We must not by any means impute anarchist tenets to this party, but they constitute a powerful disruptive element in the Imperial Federation, to the foreign policy of which they are violently opposed, and they are strong enough to make their opposition very keenly sensible. In the last elections they disposed of over three million votes, out of a total of between ten and eleven million voters. An active minority with such numbers cannot fail to he influential. It is on principle strongly against any manifestations of imperial control over the component twenty-six polities of the German union. For a strong imperial policy the union, how- ever, must remain supreme. Statistics, moreover, prove SUCCESS AMONG GEEMANS 217 irrefutably that socialism, far from falling off, gathers fresh forces with every successive election. So far for the internal conditions militating against German imperialism. Let us now extend our horizon of obser- vation. Difficult as would be the physical obstacles to over- come in building an^ Elbe-Trieste canal, they are not sufficient to daunt the modern engineer ; the political barrier is a far harder matter to negotiate. Germany is cut off from the Adriatic by Austria, and it is any- thing but probable that Austria would contemplate with docile equanimity the fulfilment of German ambi- tions. The canal is the one remedy which wiU cure^ Germany's geographical deformity as a wqrld-powerj the construction of such a canal presupposes the down- fall of Austria. This may be procured in two or three fashions, but it is uncertain that any of them offer any considerable chance of success. It has been hazarded that Austria, owing to the reigning political anarchy, would be incapable of showing an unbroken front to German military aggression. But is not this semblance of anarchy liable to great misinterpretation? Before 1867 Austria did not cause the politicians of Europe any grave anxiety, though threatening disruptive symptoms. But under this superficial calm lay political gangrene and stagnation. Are not the frequent crises which in latter days have shaken the political frame of Austria wholesome signs which indicate the malady of the patient, but also his capacity of resisting it ? Even civil war is not by any means the horrible and unquali- fied evil which it is represented to be, and should the differences of Hungary and the Austrian provinces 218 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS eventually culminate in a hostile encounter, may not the country, as a whole, come out of the trial saner and sounder, as have the other great nations of modern times ? The seeds of French, English, and American national strength have all been sown in civil bloodshed. But to return to the thread of our argument. Germany will probably not hazard a war-like venture, which might, if only from a purely military point of view, prove disastrous until she has fully essayed pacific means of attaining her end. These means are twofold. The absorption of German Austria into the German Empire. This solution is also rich in improbabilities. The only method left is to bribe Austria into assent, and this is the method which might, perhaps, succeed, for Germany could afibrd to pay a long price ; but Austria is wide awake enough to be well aware that her assent, bribed or not, must end in her political sub- jection. Granted that Germany gains eventually access to the northern Adriatic, what sort of a reception may she not expect from her Italian rivals, who, as we have shown, are in a fair way to become arbiters of the Mediterranean ? Let us now assume that Germany's hypothetical designs upon the Adriatic have failed or collapsed. We have shown that her swiftly augmenting population must find an outlet, cost what it may. The number of her inhabitants, now some fifty-seven millions, will, if the present rate of increase is maintained, soon become overwhelming. Germany's almost only other means of finding a dumping ground for her surplus population is in the defeat of England and in the seizure of her rival's colonies. The idea of England being overpowered SUCCESS AMONG GEEMANS 219 on sea is still received in most quarters with an incredulous smile, especially by those who have not made a study of naval history. The uncertainty of naval power, however, is well known to those who have really gone deeply into the annals of the past. Its rise and downfall may be the matter of a single fight, and one great maritime engagement may prove the undoing of a Power which depends for its existence upon the sea. An army may be annihilated, but new armies can be got together and knocked into shape in a compara- tively brief time. A fleet cannot be improvised, and more especially is this true in modern times, when the war- vessel has become specialized into something entirely difi'erent from the merchant ship, and requiring, to maintain its eflSciency, a higher trained and disciplined crew. It is common knowledge that, whereas a blue- jacket must go through a course of education covering years, a soldier may be made in a few days, or can be spontaneously developed in a single engagement. What Bacon in his Essays has said of sea-power has been little modified by subsequent experience. We quote his famous passage in his own words. " To be master of the seas is an abridgement of a monarchy. Cicero writing to Atticus of Pompey his preparation against Caesar, saith, ' Consilium Pompeii plane Themistocleum est ; putat enim, qui mari potitur eum rerum potiri.' . , . And without doubt Pompey had tired out Caesar, if upon vain confidence he had not left that way. We see the great efiects of battles by sea. The battle of Actium decided the empire of the world. The battle of Lepanto arrested the greatness of the Turk. There be many examples where sea-fights have been final to 220 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS the war ; but this, when princes or states have set-up their rest upon the battles. But thus much is certain ; that he that commands the sea is at liberty and may take as much and as little of the war as he will. Whereas those that be strongest by land are many times, nevertheless, in great straits. Surely at this day with us of Europe, the vantage of strength at sea, which is one of the principal dowries of this kingdom of Great Britain, is great ; both because most of the king- doms of Europe are not merely inland, but girt with the sea, most part of their compass ; and because the wealth of both Indies seems in great part but an accessary to the command of the seas." English history contains the record of some of the most unaccountable and almost incredible fluctuations of naval power. We need only recall the utter discomfiture of the English fleet ofi' Cape Henry by the French admiral, de Grasse (1781), a defeat which dealt the coup de grace to the British dominion over the American colonies, and had as immediate sequence the capitulation of York Town and the close of the War of Independence. England was no longer mistress of the seas, yet after the lapse of only a few years her navy had regained all its lost prestige, and was able to achieve brilliant victories like those of the Nile and Trafalgar, while again, a few years later — only seven years, in fact, after Trafalgar — the English were once more powerless to overcome a few improvised American ships of war. We have made this momentary digression in order to point out that naval power alone is very uncertain, and the result of a struggle upon sea is even more dubious to-day, after a long interval of peace. Few commanders to-day have SUCCESS AMONG GERMANS 221 ever seen anything like an actual engagement, and when the theory of naval warfare comes to be subjected to the test of reality, we may likely enough discover that it holds as many surprises as did military warfare in the late South African campaign. In the event of hostilities, England undeniably would dispose of many great advantages. She would, in all probability, be called upon to fight in her own waters, within easy reach of supplies. The morale of her crews and officers should be splendid, reposing, as it does, on long traditions of victory and invincibility, and the value of a good morale in warfare cannot be placed too high. The energy and enthusiasm of the people would be immense, conscious, as they would undoubtedly be, that the hour for the final struggle for life and death had come. The whole nation would be ready to serve either with body or with money, and it is hard to believe that England could be crushed. It is very possible that France, in the event of an Anglo-German rupture, might utilize the favourable moment for advancing her own designs. Despite the outward signs of tranquillity which now give the German pro- vinces of Alsace and Lorraine a delusive semblance of resignation, one traveller after another during the last few years, and among them many worthy of the most implicit confidence, have pointed out that the rigorous regime by which Germany has sought to de-Gallicize her conquests is an unqualified failure. It is said that the eyes of all that is left of the one-time French inhabitants are strained upon the Vosges, from beyond which they still hope for salvation. And France may seem to slumber; but who knows but what she may 222 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS turn the right moment to account to heap humiliation upon her old enemy, and demand the restoration of the Rhine frontier. If the terms of her neutrality were rejected, might she not throw her fleet and treasures into the balance against Germany ? The present amicable relations between France and England may ripen into a communion of interests. In politics the moral code of everyday life is suspended. The superficial morals under which political moves are cloaked are hypocrisy. We do nothing but formulate what has been acknowledged upon all hands again and again. Where the contracting parties are not really bound together by mutual interests, no convention can be of long or sound duration. We must not, therefore, be misunderstood when we state that, from the standpoint of strict politics, Germany has committed a sovereign error. It was her political cue to clandestinely give succour to the Boers, to prolong, as it was in her power, the struggle of the two Republics against England, and to maintain in them a scourge against Britain in her day of distress. Be it under- stood, once more, that we speak from the purely political standpoint, and not from the moral view. We may conjecture one more foreign policy for Germany which demands, as its voluntary or involun- tary victim, Holland. It is a policy which has so many prospects of being carried to accomplishment, that it has already excited the liveliest anxieties in the Nether- lands, where more than one book has been written dealing with its probable lines of conduct. The integrity of Holland being guaranteed by inter- national convention, any armed move of Germany SUCCESS AMONG GEEMANS 223 against her would at once furnish, the other contracting powers with a casus belli. It is exceedingly improbable that Germany would risk incurring the combined hostility of Europe, but she is at full liberty to under- mine Batavian liberty with diplomatic instruments. The constitution of the German Empire furnishes it with admirable machinery for increasing its territory, such as is possessed by no other European country. Should France, for instance, endeavour to annex the Netherlands in spite of treaty engagements, the Nether- lands would see that the last hour of their national existence had come, that they would henceforth be nothing more nor less than a French province, a depart- ment of the Bas-Ehin. When Germany adds a new state to her Confederacy the case is different. The new-comer is merely enrolled as a part of the Federa- tion, and his internal economy is in no wise tampered with. Holland, if she joined the Empire to-morrow, might retain her Queen, her internal law and constitu- tion ; it is only in foreign policy that she would necessarily be compelled to follow the dictates of the Federal diet. But what inducements can Germany hold out to Holland to even thus much sacrifice her political freedom ? In all such agreements there must be as much give as there is take. Germany would acquire a broad and important sea-board, and the Dutch colonies would become Imperial colonies; but what can Germany offer in return ? German protection might hardly seem a suflSciently satisfying equivalent for a guaranteed immunity from foreign interference. All that Germany can do is to offer the Dutch a sufficient pecuniary compensation for their accession 224 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS to the Union, and it is not impossible that in this way she might be successful. We must remember that Germany could afford to pay a long price for a purchase which would dispense her with the necessity of a European war. Of German commercial enterprise we propose to say little or nothing, save that it should not appear to be such a bugbear as it does, when small industrial countries like Belgium can so successfully resist its onslaught. It is in the higher interests of humanity quite desirable that the type of civilization which the Germans have developed during the last four centuries should continue. They have undoubtedly succeeded in creating, both in philosophy and in one of the great arts, in music, works of imperishable value. It would be equally impossible to deny that in their literature they have produced in Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and a few other poets and writers, intellectual personalities not unworthy of the best specimens of Hellenic thought. As Macaulay used to say, even English literature must envy Germany for her Lessing, and Goethe is, in the universal opinion of all students of literature, by far the greatest figure of modern intellect. It is equally well known that the steadiness and systematic com- pleteness of German work cannot but lead to a more rapid progress in the world of science ; nay, it may be said that the Germans alone»of all nations have realized the idea of a Republic of Letters. They recognize no *' standard work " and no authority. As the French have completely demedievalized their social life, so have the Germans their intellectual life. In Germany SUCCESS AMONG GERMANS 225 the youngest scholar is quite welcome to combat publicly the views and theories of the oldest professor. Neither the attacked professor nor the public regard that young scholar with any misgivings at all. As an outward sign of this truly democratic attitude in the Republic of Letters, we may note that in German books of science or philosophy alone authors are quoted without any title whatever, not even that of Mr., let alone that of Dr. or Professor, although in private life no nation is more title-ridden than are the Germans. These preceding remarks are sufficient to indicate the great qualities of the Germans in intellectual pursuits. On the other hand, it is difficult to believe, judging from the past, that the Germans will ever be able to mature that ideal development of both man and woman which alone can be considered as the palm and prize of the highest form of civilization. The German woman, in spite of many a great national quality, has so far not given proof or hopes justifying us in the assumption that she will, in her proper sphere, create the same charm of graceful idealism that so many German intellectual men have succeeded in creating in the sphere of intellectual idealism. More serious still is the deficiency of the Germans in that they have suffered their whole political and too much of their intellectual life to be officialized and Byzantinized. Even within the last thirty years they have, outside Bismarck, produced not a single great political person- ality. We see a number of hard, steady, and honest workers, but not a single great personality. The over- bureaucratization of nearly the whole of intellectual life in Germany leaves, as a rule, little elbow-room for the Q 226 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS growth of free, untrammelled, and elastic forces. The reader will not have forgotten that Rome owed her greatness chiefly, as does England in our own time, to the great number of men who, unfettered by any bureaucratic routine, devoted all their strength to the great political and social problems of their country. Germany, therefore, runs the great danger of quicken- ing but little the onward march of women towards the ideal, and of paralyzing the resources of her men by subjecting them to an excessive bureaucratism. CHAPTER XII BRITISH SUCCESS The English. Their women. Their men. Education. Intellectual activity. Begime (social) of castes. Up to Elizabeth, England failed in her attempts at imperialism, both in France and in Scotland ; not so in Ireland. After the Tudors, England, chiefly aided by her geopolitical situation, built up, by colonization and conquest, a vast empire based on sea-power and, in modern times, on rational and humane government too. Her empire lacking territorial continuity. Her sea-power exposed to serious chal- lenging; as has been her industrial supremacy. Her civilization will always be great and one-sided. In Europe she can no longer be umpire. It remains to be seen whether sea-power, now coveted by all the great nations, will continue to remain in her possession. Our attempt to sum up the immediate prospects of England and America is by no means novel, although the lines upon which it is carried out may have some right to be considered novel. The books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspaper articles which have appeared during the last few years dealing with England and America, now and in the near future, are numberless. Although we, of course, cannot claim to exemption from mistakes, we may at least venture to hope that what we have to say may serve as a complement, and to some extent as a corrective, of what has been said by foregoing writers. During the last few decades the number of books of travel has incessantly multiplied. Many of these books 228 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS no longer deal with remote tribes and people, but treat of nations nearer home, and with whom we are in daily and immediate contact. For the most part these books are of little practical value. They have too much about them of the method of the professional globe-trotter ; they deal almost exclusively in externals, and rarely, if ever, dip for a moment beneath the surface. It may very well be possible, after a few days' sojourn in a Samoyede encampment, to give a correct and detailed account of all the Samoyede nation. Their life is all upon the outside ; their actions are entirely dependent upon natural wants or desires ; beyond a few simple barbaric customs, there is nothing to observe. We cannot approach the study of a modern highly civilized nation in the same manner. A few weeks' stay in a London hotel or travelling through the English counties would not permit us to estimate so complicated, so intricate a phenomenon as the English national character. The traveller will, no doubt, have been struck by a multitude of singularities, which he will have jotted down, and which he can work up into a piquant, racy, and amusing volume ; beyond this his observation does not go. Many of these latter-day books of travel have been put together by foreigners, who, before disembarking, had widely advertised their mission. It is doubtful whether these unfortunate people have ever been allowed the opportunity of getting a real insight. Their model has, voluntarily or involuntarily, assumed a pose which they, all too unconscious, have mistaken for his natural attitude. The result has been a series of national caricatures, some flattering, others the reverse, which may be exceedingly amusing, but are devoid of real value. BRITISH SUCCESS 229 The essentials upon which a true appreciation of a people can be based are a long sojourn among them, not as a wealthy and independent stranger, but as a 2articipator in their struggle for existence. To know a people well, you must have seen them in good fortune and in the despair of adversity ; you must have fought against their men and against their women ; then, finally, perhaps, it will be granted you to penetrate behind the mask of conventionality. Many a man has struggled for life in foreign countries, many have succeeded, but few have thought fit to commit their experience to paper. In many instances the struggle has resulted in the extinction of their own national character, and they have not preserved about them enough of the foreign atmosphere to enable them to stand outside their subject. A foreigner is, as a rule, better qualified to criticize a country than the native ; he has to begin with a basis of comparison on which to go, for without comparison how shall he throw into relief the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of the country under study ? As untrustworthy as the accounts of the passing travellers are the judgments based on tabulations of statistics, upon demographical, anthropological, and other so-called scientific formulations. Of what is really going forward in the soul of a people they really tell nothing. We could give numberless examples in support of what we have above stated. We will limit ourselves to recalling the classical instance of Arthur Young's travels through France (1787-8) just before the outbreak of the Kevolution. He is the type of the well-informed and conscientious traveller. He 230 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS spares himself no trouble in collecting details, we might almost say in drawing up statistical reports on all that he heard and saw; nevertheless, no one could have been further from suspecting that he was walking upon the thin crust which would soon be shattered by the most titanic upheaval the world has ever known. He exemplifies the futility of judgments founded upon the cursory observations of a rapid journey, however intelli- gent, however keen an investigator is the traveller. With long sojourn in a country, moreover, the student must, of course, combine a thorough knowledge of the language, and should likewise be well acquainted with the national history. The past annals of a nation are an armoury from which may be taken instruments to explain many of its present peculiarities. The knowledge of a country means for the most part a knowledge of its men and women, and of their relative stations and importance. Of the young Eng- lishman we have already said much. We have watched in his school-days the precocious development of his virility, will-power, and independence, due principally to the non-interference, except when absolutely neces- sary, of his parents. His volitional resources are very early brought into play ; as he advances in life he will find his will-power impelled by other puissant motives. If there is one thing which strikes the Continental mind with astonishment, it is the extraordinary social distinctions which still prevail in England. In his own country he has probably lived among the bourgeoisie, which he has been accustomed to regard wiih pride as the backbone of the state, to which he himself belongs, and which he feels no desire to leave. In England he BRITISH SUCCESS 231 will also find a commercial middle class, on which the country also chiefly depends ; but in this middle class he will not discover the same pride of position, but a constant yearning to be free of its surroundings. Small trading in England breeds contempt, and big trading fails to breed respect. Between nobility and middle class exists another social layer, which on the Continent, if it exists at all, is exceedingly attenuated. This layer considers itself to be the sole repository of the true principles of honour, of the only code of good manners, and consequently treats the middle class, numerically infinitely more extensive, if not always with active, at least with latent contempt. The barrier of caste is inexorably maintained. The middle class, on the other hand, suflers under this contempt, which it apparently recognizes as justified, in that it does not rebel against it. Self-respect it has none ; the word shopkeeper, retailer, trader, all have in them a ring of disdain which they themselves arp the first to detect. It would seem inexplicable that, in a country whose greatness is built up on commercial success, the com- mercial classes should not have succeeded in establishing their own proper dignity. On the contrary, their sole ambition is to escape from their own social connection, to disassociate themselves from commerce ; and this is their prime motive for the acquisition of wealth. This want of self-respect in the middle class results in its isolation, the middle class being rarely admitted, and then only on sufi'erance and out of interested motives, to participate in the pleasures of the '* gentry." Another result of this want of self-respect is internal division among the middle class itself. Its members. 232 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS never knowing when they will be able to quit their surroundings, disown their acquaintances, and form fresh connections somewhat higher up the social ladder. To those who have lived for any time in France, the difference between the Continental bourgeoisie and the English middle class cannot fail to be especially patent. Let us only for a moment consider one or two of the purely superficial forms in which it is reflected. In the everyday manners of a people there is much which is instructive, if we only have in our possession the psychological key by which they are explained. Who, for instance, would dream of entering or leaving a shop in France or Germany without taking ofi* his hat, and without some words of greeting ? This is not so much a sign of superior Continental courtesy as a sign of the respect in which the Continental bourgeois holds himself and expects to be held. Any one failing to observe these rules would be set down at once as an unman- nerly dog. Then turn to English shops. It is possible that the customer, on entering, may utter a brusque " good morning ; " should he bow or take off his hat, he would certainly be considered an eccentric oddity ; should he show any signs of wishing to shake hands with a shopkeeper, he would probably seek in vain for a hand to shake, and he would assuredly not be held in any regard or affection for having so far demeaned himself. These are but a couple of a thousand similar traits. It is less easy to see why the English trader should acquiesce so readily in this degradation. Perhaps we may be able to find an historical explanation not quite unsatisfactory. England has never witnessed the social revolutions which for centuries tore the very BRITISH SUCCESS 233 vitals of France. The political revolution, the only- one which England underwent, had no appreciable effect upon her social conditions. The inhabitants of the English cities have won their rights and liberties by means entirely different from those, for instance, which secured the privileges of the communes of Northern France. Tlie chronicles of Amiens, Abbeville, Laon^ Langres, Nantes, Rouen, Nancy, tell of year after year of carnage and massacre, battle from street to street. In every town we find the same division between a bishop, a very secular person as a rule, and the seigneur, the temporal lord. Between their incessant quarrels the bourgeoisie, now espousing one side, now another, and always aiming at its own ends, was gradu- ally able to raise itself to a position in which it could no longer be dictated to by either party. This develop- ment of a communal bourgeois is not by any means limited to France. There are even bloodier and more protracted fights in the great Rhenish cities, such as Bonn and Cologne. Italian city states, as we have already seen, grew up in the midst of unremitting struggles and bloodshed. We can well imagine that liberties achieved at such terrific cost of life and limb gave the new free citizen a pride and a self-importance which he could not have otherwise come by. English burgess liberties have been acquired in a very different manner. At no epoch of English history do we find the land studded with cities each filled with intestine strife. There are no quarrels of bishop and noble. When liberties were granted, charters given, it was either in return for some pecuniary advantage or out of the goodwill of the overlord ; they have never been 234 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS extorted at the point of the sword, and at infinite per- sonal peril. Is it, then, a matter for surprise that the English middle class should not have won such recog- nition at the hands of their superiors, as the Continental bourgeoisie has only been able to obtain, by displaying its own capacity for proving troublesome ? We would not insist upon the exclusiveness of this historical proof of that debasement of the English middle class. It is undoubtedly more than a mere survival, and there must have been and are other concurrent causes for its continuance. The isolation of the middle class has had far-reach- ing social results ; the solitude of the English young man in general is intensified in this stratum of society. In religion it has produced nonconformity and dissent of all kinds, which are no survival of sixteenth and seventeenth century Puritanism, but the outcome of contemporary social conditions. The preoccupation of the young Englishman for ethical questions is un- doubtedly caused by his solitude. His emotions must find vent in some direction, and as most of the other natural channels of emotion are choked, or, at any rate, obstructed, they translate themselves by a religious semi-moralizing vein. In no country do religious questions, although equally strong, or even stronger, religious convictions exist, find such eccentric expression as in England. Again, English wit has taken a form elsewhere completely unknown. It has adapted itself to cir- cumstances. English humour is excellent; it is also characteristic of the nation. To the Continental mind unacquainted with English life it appears absolutely BRITISH SUCCESS 235 incomprehensible. But what is English humour almost invariably based upon? On false position. The con- ditions of English fife lead to an inordinately large number of false positions. In France they are to all intents and purposes unknown, the distinctions of class giving rise to no misunderstanding. The same may be said of ancient Greece and Eome. All of these countries have given birth to excellent wit, without a trace of real humour. What the English middle class lacks in social respect it endeavours to compensate for by an assumption of a gravity, very far removed from the true seriousness inspired by a sense of responsibilities and dignity. We thus see that England has not become entirely demedievalized. We must not be construed to have viewed all English life with jaundiced eyes, because we point out that many of the class barriers of the Middle Ages have not yet given way. There is much that richly compensates. If some of the medieval barbarisms remain, there has also been retained much of that indefinable medieval charm. The ideals of the gentleman are high, and he is surrounded by an atmo- sphere of stately grandezza, such as is difficult to find elsewhere in an age of hurry and rush. He still professes unfailing adherence to the given word, and undying hatred of untruths. Before saying a few words upon the Englishwoman, we would like to remark in passing that the mainte- nance of primogenitura, the right of the eldest son, has supplied another keen incentive to English energies ; it increases the number of men who must carve out their future by means of their own resources. 236 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS In spite of her frequently rare degree of personal beauty, the Englishwoman has not been the important factor in the history of her country which the French- woman has been in France. She has, as a rule, been retiring, engaging man through her sweetness of dis- position rather than by qualities playing upon deeper emotions. Her duty as a childbearer she has carried out as behoved her, much of England's greatness having depended on a constant surplus of population. The population of the country, despite the incessant stream of emigration, has risen by leaps and bounds since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it numbered some fifteen millions, until to-day it surpasses that of France. As a rule the Englishwoman seems — and here she is probably distinguished from her Continental sisters — more attached to her husband than to her children. With the latter she certainly, in the case of the sons, does not interfere so as to cripple their personal independence; she does not superintend all their affairs, as does the French mother, nor does she exercise over them, when married, the irksome jurisdic- tion of the French belle-mere. In the higher ranks of society her dignity, graceful restraint, and distingui manner make her the embellishment rather than the nucleus of social life. Beyond these spheres the Englishwoman is certainly much less successful ; she is no business woman ; there are few great firms in England who would not smile at the idea of any personal feminine influence being exercised upon their direction ; although a woman happens to stand at the head of one of the greatest London banks, she is an exception, and even her authority is for the most part BRITISH SUCCESS 237 delegated. But that a woman should throne it in the managerial penetralia of a city office would seem to the Englishman quite as incongruous as it would appear natural to a Frenchman. The title Veuve Cliquot in France appears as little worthy of comment as a firm trading as Mrs. Bass would strike the English mind as absurd. The Englishwoman has apparently not been able to reconcile the rdle of a business woman with her natural role as a woman. If she takes to business she appears to become defeminized in the act ; she has a tendency to degenerate into Mrs. Grundyism, and thus to become a centre for the propagation of gloom. However, it cannot be stated that the defects just mentioned, while conducive to much cheerlessness, really constitute a national danger. The objectionable qualities of the English middle-class woman can almost all be traced to the lack of self-respect characterizing her caste. Whether they will ever be remedied is more than doubtful. Social respect is the ozone, the oxygen, without which all the attempts of man or woman to attain a complete culture must be stifled. It is doubtful whether that ozone can be distilled from the retorts and crucibles of higher education, readings, and feminist movements. Is it not generated alone by the storms of a social revolution of which the hour for England is irrevocably past ? In another place we have spoken in some detail of the success of England in the past ; we have endeavoured to lay bare some of the causes, geopolitical and other, which have contributed thereto. Of the prospects of her future career we have hitherto said nothing. Un- doubted as her success has been up to now, can we with 238 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS equal confidence predict her continuous prosperity in time to come ? Does the present drift of English policy really appear the best means of securing such future prosperity? Those are the two principal questions which we shall now bring under consideration. By way of recapitulation, we would recall to the reader's mind that the British dominion forms an empire sui generis. In instituting comparisons between it and other great empires of bygone days, it is necessary to proceed with the utmost precaution. The comparison is bound to break down upon many serious points. Between the British Empire and the present-day empires, such as the Russian and American, the dis- similarity is so obvious that we are less likely to be led into error. It must be ever borne in mind that the British dominions comprise two very distinctly separate cate- gories of possessions. There are, on the one hand, countries peopled by English-speaking inhabitants, chiefly emigrants, or the descendants of emigrants, from the mother country. They are bound by the strongest ties of sentiment to the central nucleus of the Empire, from which they do not, at all events for the moment, show any tendency to fall away. Com- pared, however, with the countries under British rule populated by coloured tribes, they stand in an almost insignificant minority. The native population of India, for example, would, as far as numbers are concerned, engulf several times over the whole of the white inhabitants of the Empire. We have seen that the growth of the British Empire was induced, or at all events facilitated, in BEITISH SUCCESS 239 past times by England's unique insular position, which permitted of her assuming a rdle in international politics peculiarly advantageous to herself. At the beginning of the last century England was the power disposing of the greatest amount of available capital. She possessed a dominant naval power ; and on the sea no country, save France alone, showed even an am- bition of disputing her power. These two adjuncts rendered her an estimable ally, and she was able to utilize the vacillations of European politics to her own profit. Those were also days when the great armies of universal conscription did not as yet exist, and when forty thousand English soldiers thrown in the balance on one side or another might very well turn the fortunes of the day. Meanwhile, England's inter- national position has been completely revolutionized. Hitherto she has been geographically and politically an island ; she is now a political peninsula. She can no longer play the part of umpire, and she can no longer disassociate herself from European disputes. Her navy is no longer the only navy upon the seas, although it may very probably prove the most powerful. The great European Powers have drawn heavily upon their treasuries in order to carry out their great naval pro- gramme. Germany, Italy, Eussia, and France are each possessors of considerable and highly organized fleets. From the military point of view, England is now a negligible quantity upon the European mainland, where any force she might venture to land would be swamped in the immense national levies. The splendid isolation of which England has made so proud a boast is no longer feasible. She can, in her 240 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS naval construction, with difficulty maintain a two-power standard. Alliance with a Continental power is a matter of first-rate necessity. The great stumbling- block to such alliance is British imperialism. But British imperialism, if it is to do away with all prospects of foreign alliance, if it aims at rendering England superior to Continental amity or enmity, will have to overcome very great drawbacks. Even if these drawbacks are surmountable, it is open to grave question whether they can be overcome with sufficient expedition to render British imperialism a substitute, or at least a workable substitute, for a powerful Continental ally. We must not forget that British imperialism neces- sarily proceeds upon lines very diflferent from Russian or American imperialism. This is a matter of geo- graphical necessity. America and Russia have the immense advantage of territorial continuity in their possession. The British dominions are scattered broad- cast in all the quarters of the globe ; they are difficult enough of protection against foreign aggression ; against internal dissension they are powerless. Their immunity from foreign attack depends upon the thin thread of sea power, of whose strength no man may judge. No home compulsion could ever succeed in stifling intestine disruption. We have seen, by the bitter experiences of the late South African War, at what disproportionate cost England can alone hope to extend her rule over recalcitrant white people. This disproportion is thrown into even greater relief if we reflect upon the com- paratively insignificant expenditure, of both money and men, at which America acquired her formerly Mexican BEITISH SUCCESS 241 dominions, or even the cost of her victory over Spain in the Cuban War. It is an open secret that there are at the moment of writing two conflicting policies, both animated by the sincerest desire to procure their country's welfare, struggling to place themselves at the helm of Britain's foreign policy. The one party is headed — unofficially, it goes without saying — by the King, and aims at the con- tinuance of British prosperity by means of an improve- ment in her international status. The other party has the same object, but seeks to obtain it by a rigid anti- foreign policy of imperialism. The Empire, drawn closer together by the bonds of a fiscal scheme extending over all the colonial possessions of England, is to oppose an unbroken front to the Continental Powers to which it is designed to prove a match. Which of these two parties will gain the upper hand is the burning question of the day. It would certainly seem that the King pursues the wiser and more feasible line of action. No student of history can for a moment doubt that inter- national agencies have for the last three hundred years been infinitely more important in every European country than have agencies irrespective of international powers. With the greatest tact, and with his characteristic lack of ostentation, the King is pursuing the traditions of a hereditary policy. He is knitting together the bonds of friendship which are to help in the final struggle, which must inevitably take place before the colonies are ready to assist, and which an aggressive fiscal policy may even precipitate. All durable and sound policies must be based on a permanent stratum of mutual advantage. 242 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS There remains one question which requires a few words. Does the English type of civilization show a likelihood of persisting or even of being adopted as the type of civilization of the entire world ? Much of what we have said in previous chapters has gone to show what are the essential diflferences marking the distinc- tion between the English and other Continental types of civilization. We may be allowed, then, to sum- marize briefly. We have seen that English civilization is productive of a special degree of virility ; that it develops a genius for action and a genius for poetry proper such as in youth is unknown over the rest of Europe. With all this, we have seen English civiliza- tion to be somewhat one-sided. It has least of all civilizations contributed to all-round perfection. It^is the civilization of the specialist. Thus the mass of English people is indifferent, or, rather, almost hostile, to art proper, whether in manners, words, painting, sound, or marble ; the mass is indifferent to system and general ideas, without the cultivation of which complete civilization is impossible. Those qualities are, however, by no means entirely disadvantageous. As a comple- ment and corrective to other European types of civilization they are exceedingly valuable. Many Continental tendencies of thought, enfeebled by lack of vigour and virility, have been, and may in the future be, braced up to greater things on contact with English civilization; their laxity in the consideration of facts and their tendency to prose literature may be checked. Thus far English civilization is likely to be successful in its spread. But the ideals which have been put forward by Professor Mahaffy and many others do not BRITISH SUCCESS 243 show any probability of fulfilment. The minor nations of Europe, it has been hazarded, may, in the future, think fit to adopt the English language and English modes of thought. Such a conversion would, no doubt, result in very great economic advantages for those nations ; it is, however, too Utopian to be really seriously considered. England has, moreover, hitherto not displayed any marked capacity for absorbing the civilizations of other white peoples. So far only the Latin, or, more correctly speaking, the Graeco-Latin civilizations, have proved at all able, in the realm of culture, to exercise real powers of imperialism. France has in this manner assimilated much more than England or Germany. From the international standpoint, how- ever, it is infinitely more desirable that each nation should excel in one or more branches of culture rather than attempt to attain uniform excellence in all. Up to now no nation has succeeded in becoming a general model of civilization, and no nation can hope so to become in the future. CHAPTER XIII SUCCESS IN AMERICA The Americans. The women. The men. The Americans have, of all modern nations, the greatest chance of success, economic or mateiial, provided the Far East will be ready to undergo a process of Europe- anization. Then the Americans will be in the very economic centre o the globe. Intellectual success in the highest sense is less likely in America, in spite of the immense increase in colleges, libraries, and all the other means of conveying knowledge. For the highest intellectual progress is based on intense personality, and absolute democracy, which pervades all the spheres of American life (not as in Athens, only some), is hostile to the rise of intense personalities other than political. More- over, American women have, by over-mentalization, weakened their powers for good. What a nation wants consists, in addition to a good geopolitical position, mainly and exclusively of two factors : real women, who do not want to be men ; and real men, who do not try to be women. As to rule, America will come into conflict with Europe, and then learn a wholesome lesson. The true trend of history is : progressive differentia- tion, not imperiahzation, of Europe; progressive unification of North America. It is by such vast contrasts between great peoples that the highest objects of civilization are secured. It is with the very greatest diffidence that we begin our remarks resper-ting the Americans. This diffidence has been inspired by nve unbroken years of sojourn in the United States, and those five years have only succeeded in confirming the impressions received on the first day of landing. The Americans are filled with such an implicit and absolute confidence in their Union SUCCESS IN AMERICA 245 and in their future success, that any remark other than laudatory is unacceptable to the majority of them. We have had innumerable opportunities of hearing public speakers in America cast doubts upon the very existence of God and of Providence, question the historic nature or veracity of the whole fabric of Christianity, but never has it been our fortune to catch the slightest whisper of doubt, the slightest want of faith, in the chief god of America — unbounded belief in the future of America. The habit, which is common to all Americans, of lumping all the countries of modern Europe together into the half-contemptuous name " the old country," has at last, by a persistent and constant association of ideas, filled every citizen of the United States with the conviction that America alone is the young, the fresh, and better-equipped country. Europe is considered to be an agglomeration of nations of petty extent, already economically efiete, and bound within a very short period of time to collapse before the vigorous onslaught of American energy. One circum- stance especially strikes the stranger newly landed on American shores. He may have travelled through France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, England, but no- where will he be pressed to vouchsafe an opinion as to what he thinks of those countries. Immediately he sets foot in America he will be asked how he likes the country ; but he must not be led to regard those questions as anything but rhetorical, for nothing but laudatory statements are expected in reply. To speak a few words of America itself, Peschel and many other eminent geographers have long ago proved that the American continent as a continent is, 246 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS physiographically speaking, very much inferior to Europe. A number of the most valuable cereals, as well as other edible plants, the vine, etc., will either not grow there at all or grow in very restricted quantities. Geopolitically, it is certain that America is placed in both a new and an inferior position. If there is one thing which follows with absolute and indubitable clearness from European history, it is the fact that each nation in modern Europe was made infinitely less by its own spontaneous efforts than by the necessity of averting the hostility and aggression, military and otherwise, of its own immediate neighbours. Every European nation has been built up by struggle and fight, and the great countries of Europe have become great not owing to some supposed racial excellence, but simply and exclusively as the outcome of the struggles imposed upon them by their geopolitical position. We might compose a scale of European grandeur, and it would be clearly seen that those peoples which have had the least fight to maintain themselves stand lowest and have made least progress. Each square foot of European soil has cost thousands, not to say hundreds of thousands, of European lives. The sweat and tears of generations have fertilized every square inch of European territory. The Union, on the other hand, has been placed, ever since the War of American Inde- pendence, in an entirely different position. The geo- political necessity of fight for every rood of land during centuries has never existed in America. Territories such as in Europe would have taken untold years to conquer and annex were acquired by the Union in a few months. To sum up, the Union is neighbourless ; no enemy SUCCESS IN AMERICA 247 threatens it in the north, no enemy threatens it in the east, none in the west, and there is no menace of importance in the south. This cardinal circumstance differentiates American history completely from Euro- pean history, and in attempting to draw any analogy from European to American, or from American to European history the utmost caution must be observed. The reader, remembering the importance we have attached throughout this volume to fight and struggle against enemies as the formative agent of historical progress, will ask whence, then, comes the undeniable energy so characteristic of the people of the United States ? In reality we have long answered this question by insisting in rapid detail upon the psycho- logy of the foreigner. The Americans, as far as the majority is concerned, are still what in every European country would be considered foreigners ; that is, if we leave out the negroes, the mass of white men in America are unable to trace their family beyond the grandfather as coming from American stock. Such people in Europe still rank as foreigners, and in this sense the majority of Americans are foreigners, and still participate naturally in the characteristic energy and vitality so peculiar to the foreigner. We now come to the third great difference between America and Europe, and that is the American woman. In Europe, despite the numerous attempts at feminism — a movement which might be more aptly termed defeminization of the woman — the woman has still kept, with more or less success and grace, her position as a mother, ruler of the household, and wife — that domestic Trinity which is the chief credo of her life. 248 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS In her attitude towards the man she does indeed recognize that he is, from certain points of view of the social economy and of social ethics, her master, and the mastery she wants to exercise over him she n^turaJly^^seeks to win, not bj superior masterfulness, but b^ greater grace and womanliness. The greatest European poets have long typified her in the poetical forms of Penelope, Marguerite, Ophelia, and a few others, which attach man both physically and mentally with an unshakable passion by means of the most naive womanliness proper. Had Homer made Ulysses fall the victim of the charms of Calypso, or had Goethe made the love of Faust a haughty hyper-educated princess, both would have spoiled their masterpieces for ever. We can now turn our attention to what constitutes the third great diEference between America and Europe. We find that in the United States the attitude of woman to man is essentially altered. The American woman, especially in the course of the last fifty years, has assumed an outward tone and an internal attitude diametrically opposed to what it is customary to esteem feminine in Europe. The old-world imivete of Europe appears to her quite out of date ; the retiring dignity, the restraint, the self-efiacement of the European woman is repugnant to her. Her ambition is to win the recognition of her bright intelligence ; she likes to pass for a person of energetic verve, ready at a moment's notice for action of every description. The incessant craving for movement has taJien h^^ even^ mm:e strongly than it has taken hold of the American man. She ctannot stand being stationary. "We have often heard in America the singular remark SUCCESS IN AMERICA 249 that the Americans are attached to family life. The incredible host of boarding-houses, with which the land is eaten up, would seem but a poor proof of that state- ment. There is probably little exaggeration in saying that the burthen of latent contempt, heaped by the gentry in England upon the middle class, is in America heaped by woman upon man. In both cases we meet with the same passive acceptance, the same absence of all spirit of revolt. The brighter the American wife, the more overwhelming her conversation, the greater her anxiety to augment her knowledge, the more joyous is her submerged spouse. He is proud of her superiority, and submits thereto unquestioningly, not to say with satisfaction. But the evils of this over-mLentalization of the American jvN^onan, j^^^ h^;£er-galyankation of hej[^ ^nergy, are now no longer the theme of foreign inveigh- ings alone. Of late years they have been pointed out in condemnatory spirit by American women themselves. It must indeed be feared that this cultivation of a fierce energy is beyond the role of woman, and bids fair to culminate finally in her absolute physical breakdown. It also misses its mark, for nothing is shown more clearly by statistics than that the number of dis- tinguished women workers in the domains of art, letters, and science is small compared with the number of brilliant women authors and women painters of Europe. We cannot fail to note the vast disproportion between the all but frantic passion with which the humanities and arts are cultivated in America, and the number of successes produced. Even among the Americans them- selves the number of their really great women is 250 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS confessed to be exceedingly restricted. They have 'not yet had their Sophie Germain, their George Eliot, their Georges Sand, their Madame de Stael. One of the most serious questions which clouds the already threatening future of America is the break- down of American maternity. The problem is of too painful a nature to be discussed here, but statistics reveal that the United States can in nowise depend for its future prosperity upon the offspring of its own women. We speak, of course, of American women bred and born.* The recent immigrant does not form part lof the question. But it is already well known that America depends for the increase of its population upon a continuous inflow of alien immigration, with- out ^ which the population would already be certainly stationary, and would, in the future, most assuredly decline. In Europe the great problems have been what we may well call vertical problems. They have, as a rule, depended upon some difference between the upper and lower strata of society. Where these differences could not be amicably settled they have given rise to social revolutions. In America the problem is, on the contrary, horizontal ; it is the problem of the antagonism between man and woman, and cannot be solved by an appeal to force. Only the educational means of solution remain, and these offer the most dubious pro- spects of success. From the European point of view, it is quite clear that the American woman has taken up her whole attitude owing to the absolute want of all class systems in America. In Europe the triple division into nobility, bourgeoisie, and peasantry gives the woman her distinct sphere of action, mental and moral ; SUCCESS IN AMERICA 251 in America, there being no such class division, the woman has lost all powers of social perspective. She is rooted upon no broad basis whatever; she has no concrete foundation beneath her feet, and it is, to say the least of it, most problematical whether education can furnish that basis — that sense of position without which woman is incapable of finding her social bear- ings. It is hopeless to attempt to offer any solution of this grave and immense problem. Many a state has been brought to ruin by its women. The Spartan married woman, a typical example of feminism in the worst sense, certainly contributed as much, or more, to the downfall of her country as did the hetcerce to the collapse of Athens. We have now to consider, if somewhat rapidly, the salient characteristics of the American man. It is needless to show, having pointed out as we have the three fundamental differences which must of necessity render every organ of American social life distinct from that of Europe, that the American man differs essentially from the European man. His energy and push are well known ; his readiness for constant change, his quickness in grasping practical facts, his eagerness in collecting knowledge — these are general and certain facts. If the American is un-European, he is certainly to a far higher degree un-English ; this is already marked by his un-English love of system and method. He has the deepest respect for knowledge ; we know it from the immense sums of money lavished in America upon educational benefaction ; we know it from the crowds of American students who flock east to fill the German universities. From Germany the American 252 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS has imported much of the Germanic systematization of learning ; he has brought home, and to some degree acclimatized, the German scientific monograph. His passion for ordered system is borne out in the immense output of bibliographical publications, and the elaborate indexes which accompany every work with the slightest pretence to serious interest. On the other hand, the American man is lacking in natural completeness. We may say that each nation has the women it merits ; the Americans have been unable to create that form of womanhood which in Europe is esteemed best. The American consequently lacks many of the influences which such women alone can bring i;o bear. His develop- ment is far too rapid ; he springs into manhood far too quickly, and jumps out of it again with too great rapidity. This same rapidity characterizes all his doings. His patience, even, is rapid ; it is, as Alphonse Karr has so wittily said, immense, mais pas pour longtemps. To summarize, he lacks that great regu- lator of our inner steadiness, a well-balanced emotional life ; and this renders him incapable of applying all his heart or all his intellect to any one thing for any con- siderable time. He is, indeed, sensation-ridden to an extreme, and his individuality is not well developed. This latter affirmation, we are well aware, cannot fail to be most indignantly combated by some Americans. It is, however, to the impartial observer, quite clear that two types alone have developed, and can possibly develop, in the United States — the poli- tician and the commercial man. Literature is the make of intense personalities, and it is to the lack of such personalities, and not to the youth of the Union, that SUCCESS IN AMERICA 253 America's failure to accomplish great things in art and letters is due. It is also exceedingly doubtful whether a nation having no native language of its own can rise to a first place in literature. As Austria has not sur- passed Germany in letters, as Scotland has not surpassed England, so America has not surpassed Europe. We have pointed out the three great differences which for ever mark the Americans as a nation apart. It must have been clear to the reader that these are not the peculiarities of a supposed Anglo-Saxon " race," but the outcome of the particular circumstances under which the American nation and civilization have developed. In many respects the Americans are more antipathetic to England than to the rest of Europe — a fact to which we shall revert in considering the political prospects of America. For once and all the reader must sacrifice the theory of race with which all, or almost all, the modern popular works on history are indissolubly blended. America, we have seen, owes infinitely more to the constant influx of foreigners than to any sup- posititious strain of semi-Teutonic blood among its original settlers. The absence of individuality is due, not to the unoriginal character of the Anglo-Saxon race — England certainly cannot be said to be deficient in strong personalities — but to the complete isolation in which America finds herself from all hostile foreign interference. It would be easier for America to establish a filial relation with any other European nation than to maintain her cousinship with the English. Perhaps, save for the chance identity of language, no two nations are more absolutely and irreconcilably dissimilar than are the Americans and the English. 254 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS Let us pass on, now that we have pointed out the principal social features of America, to a very brief con- sideration of what may possibly await her upon her political career. The ever-increasing exploitation of the Far East, the rapid rise of the Japanese to the position of a first- class naval and industrial power, the awakening of the Chinese from their recluse-like slumber of two thousand years to fresh economic activity, which is now con- fidently predicted, are circumstances which may pro- foundly modify the present political geography of the globe. America will certainly be the first country to feel the effects of the change. She will be in very much the same position in which England stood at the close of the fifteenth century ; that is to say, she_would become the centre of all the economic movements of the world — of a world much more extensive than it was in the'^days of Columbus, and of far keener commercial activities. America would become the focus of trade ; very possibly she might, with rising prosperity, become the focus of the hatred of many rivals — a hatred which would save her from the intellectual stagnation which we have seen to be the invariable concomitant of riches which have been easily won without struggle or strife. We see in this that America would certainly have greater reasons for incurring the enmity of England, whose geopolitical position would be vastly impaired by the increasing welfare of America. We should then have additional proof of how easily the fictitious bond of consanguinity would be broken asunder, when real and tangible interests come into play. England would be opposed to America both in the Atlantic and in the SUCCESS IN AMERICA 255 Pacific. The same struggles that England had to sustain against Holland, France, and Spain, America will have to sustain upon a far grander scale. When Panama becomes the centre about which the whole world gravitates, America, we may be convinced, will not be left to enjoy the possession of the isthmus in peace, and to reap therefrom advantages at the cost of all the other European Powers. We have at all times insisted upon the futility of all calculations in history based upon numbers to the disregard of quality, but what would be the result for America in a struggle in which she would have to face the confederate quality and four hundred million inhabitants of Europe ? It is only after a secular war against Europe, the course of which would profoundly modify the whole American character, that America could hope to win her inde- pendence from European dictation. After the somewhat adverse criticisms which we have passed upon much that is American, we hope that we have at least established our claim to perfect sincerity, and our readers will certainly give us credit for speak- ing the truth when we say that we are of opinion that, despite her serious drawbacks, America has solved ideals, moral and social, which European nations have in vain endeavoured to attain. Many of the popular myths which are in Europe substituted for a true knowledge of the American character are most hopelessly incorrect. Perhaps the most characteristic of all the current legends attaching to the American is the legend of the almighty dollar. In Europe it is currently supposed that all the five senses of the American are concentrated to form a sixth sense — the sense of dollar-grabbing. 256 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS -t^ Nothing could be further from the truth. Years of residence in America have convinced us of the fact that while America is no doubt the country where most money is earned, it is probably the country where least value is really attached to money. Wealth raises up no spiked railings of social distinction, and generosity is perhaps more general than in any other country of the world. Money is easily acquired, and in the acquisition of money alone does American talent find the outlet which it cannot find in artistic and literary channels. There is a general atmosphere of urbanity and hospitality pervading the whole land, which is delightful to the stranger fresh landed from Europe; this atmosphere is far more real and far more genuine than anything of the kind to be found in the old world. To what is it to be attributed ? The social palisades within which most European households are doubly and triply entrenched are non-existent; there is no pride of caste which fences about the access to a house, and a stranger, provided he makes himself liked, may very well be asked anywhere. This is the rosy side of democracy. But what is the true cause of this general urbanity and good-fellowship ? Is it not in great part due to the preponderance of the foreign element ? All that is comparable to it in Europe we find in summer watering-places, and in places where strangers are gathered together. Here for a while an artificial atmo- sphere of contentment, freedom from care and from restraint, is created, and people make the best of one another, without too deep a regard for all the little social bolts and bars which separate them in normal times. This is the prevailing atmosphere of America. SUCCESS IN AMERICA 257 The freedom of the American woman also supplies another undoubted charm to American life, although we have seen at what heavy a price that charm is purchased. The reader may have gathered what our opinion is about any future Americanization of Europe, an idea — fantastic and absurd as it may appear in the eyes of the citizens of the Old World — that is prevalent in the New World. It is difficult for the European to enter sufficiently into the American frame of mind, to have any conception of what is the real American mental attitude towards Europe. The American looks upon the great European Powers very much in the same way as we Europeans look upon the minor states of the Balkan peninsula. He cannot conceive that Europe, unless federated into a kind of United European States, should be able to offer any resistance to American onslaughts. He has no idea of the individuality, and hence vitality, of every country of modern Europe, much less does he see that this individualization of the various parts of Europe is an increasing, and not a decreasing, phenomenon, and that by means thereof Europe will only increase in strength. None of the countries of modern Europe can be said, when taken separately, to have achieved complete success, but their individual successes combined together build a perfect and invincible whole. Europe as a whole has been completely successful. The lesser nations, such as Bulgaria, Servia, Denmark, and Roumania, are asserting more and more loudly every day their claim to be considered as independent units. Those claims will not be crushed and overwhelmed by the wave of s 258 SUCCESS AMONG NATIONS imperialism which is now passing over Europe. Should the great Powers endeavour to grind them into sub- servience, Europe may again see a repetition of its Platsea and its Salamis. We may confidently predict that these minor nations will, in the near future, win recognition among the other great countries of Europe, and that they will develop independent, new, and complex types of civilization. We cannot deny that a close study of American history and of American institutions inspires us with far greater apprehensions as to a sound development of America in the future, than with fear for the fortunes of Europe. The path of America is strewn with stumbling- blocks which it will require her utmost ingenuity to circumvent or to surmount. INDEX Aahmes papyrus, contents of the, 4 Abbeville, internal quarrels of, 233 Abydos, added to Venetian dominion, 60 Achaia, incorporated with Koman Empire, 51 Acre, conquest of, 58 Aden, as guard to the Red Sea, 73 Adriatic, Germany's designs on the, 213, 216 ^gina, added to Venetian dominion, 60 ^schylus, patriotism of, 29 Agnadello, Venetian defeat at, 63 Ahmedabad, conceded to Great Britain, 70 Akbar, 70 Alberti, Leon Battista, 104 Albuquerque, explorer, 65 Alexander the Great, the conquests of, 42-46 Alexius, Byzantine Emperor, 58 Alphabet, the, importance and origin of, 37-39 Almeida, achievements of, 65 Alsace and Lorraine, France's lost possessions of, 179, 221 Amboyna, massacre of English by Dutch at, 70 America, effect of Calvinism in, 114; uniformity of civilization in, 192; discussed, absolute confidence in her success, 244; geographical position of, 246 ; influence of the foreigner in, 247 ; American women, 247; their attitude to man, 248; evil effect of over-mentalization, 149; question of maternity, 250; the American man, 251 ; dissimi- larity to England, 253; political aspect of, 254; money-making capacity, 255 ; freedom from class restraints, 256 ; their contempt of European powers, 257 Amiens, disturbances of, 233 Amyntas, King, 53 ^* Anacalypsis,^^ by Godfrey Higgins, 139 Ancona, 34 Andros, added to Venetian dominion, 60 Angelo, Michael, 36 Antiochus, his concessions to Borne, 50,51 Antonius, M., conquests of, for Roman Empire, 52, 53 Apuleius, works of, 82 Arabia, added to Roman Empire, 53 Arezzo, at war with Florence, 34, 104 Aristotle, Alexander's opinion of, 46 ; philosophy of, 91 ; science of, 93 ; quoted, 104 Armada, stimulating effect on Eng- land of the destruction of the, 163 Armenia, added to Roman Empire, 53 Arminius, Varus defeated by, 53 Art, Egyptian, 6 ; Carthaginian, 9 ; Mexican, 13; Peruvian, 18; con- ditions favourable to the cultivation of, 20; Roman, 31; Dutch, 67; definition of, discussed, 76; Grecian, 78 260 INDEX Ascension, naval importance of, 73 Asia Minor, conquered by Alexander, 43 ; Germany's designs on, 216 Assyria, Tyre and Sidon conquered by, 24 Athens, civilization of, considered, 24-29 Attalus, King of Pergamum, 51 Augustus, 53 Aurungzeb, death of, 70 Austerlitz, Kussian losses at, 194 Australia, England's colony of, 75 Austria, necessity of royalty to, 181 ; Germany's policy towards, 217 Azevedo, Rodriguez de, one of the first members of the Jesuits, 116 Aztec civilization, 13-16 B Babu, effects of over-intellectuality on the, 103 Babylonia, civilization of, 2; con- sidered, 8 ; Athens compared with, 26 ; fall of, 42, 44, 53 ; imperfection of its art, 79 Bacon, lack of moral courage, 119, 138; quoted on sea-power, 219 Bailli de Saffren, his engagements against the English, 71 Baku, petroleum wells of, 196 Bakunin, erroneous teaching of, 193 Barak, his victory over the Canaan- ites, 23 Barbarossa, Emperor, defeated at Leg- nano, 107 Basle, unsuccessful Catholic council at, 134 Batavia acquired by the Dutch, 67 Batu, conquests of, 55 Baur, Ferdinand, on the authenticity of the New Testament, 141 Belgium, 224 Belvedere 'Apollo, beauty of, 77 Bermuda Islands, British possessions in, 73 Bessus, Darius killed by, 44 Bethlehem, 121 Bianchi, their quarrels with the Neri, 35 Bismarck, character of, 99 ; his atti- tude towards Papacy, 129, 225 Bizerta, French naval base at, 73 BobadiUa, one of the first members of the Jesuits, 116 Boccaccio, 36 Boeotia, agricultural prosperity of, 27 Boer, effect of Calvinism on the, 114; characteristics of the, 122; Ger- many's encouragement of the, 222 Bokhara, fate of, at the hands of Mongolian conquerors, 54 Bonn, internal disturbances of, 233 Borgias, the, 105 Borodino, Russian losses at the battle of, 194 Bourgeoisie. See Middle Class Boutmy, Professor, his estimate of English character, 100 British Empire, magnitude of, 67; rise and growth of her Indian Em- pire, 70-72; her colonial poHcy, 72-75. See England Brunhes, M., on Spanish irrigation, 159 Buddhism, 113 Bulgaria, progress of, 257 Bunsen, scientific investigations of, 93 Bumouf, his research in cuneiform writings, 8 Bussy, his opposition to English advance in India, 71 Buthrotum, defeat of Normans off, 58 Bythynia, added to Roman Empire, 52 Byzantine Empire, 58; at war with Venice, 59 ; fall of, 60 Cabral, discoverer of Brazil, 65 Caesar, writings of, 32 ; conquests of, 52 Calicut, Vasco de Gama's voyage to, 65 Calvin, influence of, 114, 115 ; person- ality of, 154 Calvinism, considered, 114, 138 Cambay, conceded to Great Britain, 70 Camel, Pater C. J., the Camelia named after, 120 Campaldino, battle of, 35 Canada, England's colony, 75 Canossa, Henry IV. 's submission to the Pope at, 129 INDEX 261 Cape, the, passage to the East round, 65 ; added to Dutch dominion, 66 Cape Henry, English defeated ofif, 220 Caprona, the assault of, 35 Caria, added to Koman Empire, 51 Carlo Feno, Venetian admiral, 61 Carthage, art and commerce of, con- sidered, 9-11 ; war with Kome, 50; fall of, 51 Carthusians, founded by St. Bruno, 124 Cato, Cyprus conquered by, 52 Caucasus, Kussian policy in the, 195 ^^ Cautio Criminalism'''' hy Frederick Spec, 119 Ceylon, acquired by the Dutch, 65 Chseronea, Koman victory at, 51 ChampoUion, F. de, Egyptologist, 2 ** Chanson de Roland " criticized, 89 Charles of Austria, archduke, quoted on France, 164 China, civilization of, 2; considered, 11, 12, 53, 54; Russia's policy in, 198 Chioggia, Genoa defeated by Venice at, 61 . Chios, seized by Vitale Michieli, 59 Cholulu, ancient temple of the Aztecs, 13 Christianity, founding of, 124; con- sidered, 137-154 ** Christianity and the Christian Church in the Three First Cen- turies;' 142 Cimabue, the conditions of his time, 35 Cimon, political contests of, 28 Ciompi, riots of the, 35 Cistercians, founded by St. Stephen Harding, 124 City-states, development of, 22 ; effect of over-intellectuality on Italian, 103-105 Clement XIV., abolition of Society of Jesuits by, 116 Cleopatra, war against Rome, 53 Clive, 68; Enghsh expansion in India under, 71 Cluny, privileges of the abbot of, 132 Cochin, taken by the Dutch, 67 Cologne, internal disturbances of, 233 Columbus, Christopher, his discovery of America, 62; influence of, 114; great personal force of, 159 " Commentarios i?ea?es," by Garci- lasBO de la Vega, 19 Constance, unsuccessful Catholic Council at, 134 Constantinople, fall of, 60 ; in posses- sion of the Turks, 63 ; treaty con- cluded at, 64; Russia's desire for, 75 Continental education, 107-110 Comwallis, 68 ; English expansion in India under, 7 Coronea, battle of, 27 Corsica, added to Roman Empire, 50 Cortes, his conquest of Mexico, 12 Council of Trent, question of Catholic dogma settled by the, 134 Courland, Germany's designs on, 179 Craterus, Alexander's correspondence with, 45 Cremieux, as type of successful Jew, 126 Crete, added to Venetian dominion, 60 Crimean war, 195 " Critical Researches into the Canon- ical Gos'pelSj'' by Ferdinand Baur, 142 Croatia, Venetian possessions in, 59 Croesus, defeat of, 42 Crusades, the, 58, 60 Cuban war, cost of, 241 Cuneiform writing considered, 3, 8 Custozza, Italian losses in the battle of, 195 Cuzco, ancient capital of Peru, 17 Cyprus added to Roman Empire, 52 ; added to Venetian dominion, 62; and loss of, 63 ; Enghsh occupation of, 72, 73 Cyrenaica added to Roman Empire, 52 Cyrus, the conquests of, 41 Dacia, 53 Dalmatia, Venetian possessions in, 59 Dandolo, Doge, his revenge on the Emperor Manuel, 60 Dante takes part in the wars of 262 INDEX Florence, 35 ; Giotto, friend of, 35 ; greatness of his works, 160 Dardanelles, command of, obtained by Venice, 60 ; English control of, 73 Darius, King, defeated by Alexander, 43 ; death of, 44 Darwin, scientific investigations of, 93 David, King of Israel, Hebrew reli- gious poetry under, 24 Decelea, garrison at, 27 De la Key, effect of Calvinism on, 115, 122 Delhi, sack of, 71 Demetrius, his appeal to Rome for help, 50 Denmark, progress of, 257 Descartes, 119 De Wet, effect of Calvinism on, 115 De Wette, his criticism of the Old Testament, 142 Diodorus of Sicily, quoted, 3 Dionysus, theatre of, 102 Disraeli as type of successful Jew, 124, 126 JDivina Commedia, by Dante, 35 Djelaleddin defeated by Gengiz Khan, 55 Domenico Michieli, Doge of Venice, his capture of Tyre, 69 Don Juan of Austria, victory over Turks, 63 Duaufsechruta, his letter to his son Pepi, 5 Dupleix, French director-general, Indian policy of, 71 Dupuis, Fran9ois, his work on Chris- tianity, 139 Dutch Empire, rise and growth of, 64-69 Dutch Indian Companies, the found- ing and growth of, 66 E Ebers, his discovery of Egyptian papyrus, 3, 4 Edward VII., policy of, 241 Egypt, 2 , value of the writings of, con- sidered, 3; literature of, 4; civili- zation of, 5 ; art of, 6 ; the people of, 7 ; Athens compared witii, 26; annexed by Alexander, 44; im- perfection of its art, 79 ; stagnation of, 125 Ehu, his victory over the Moabites, 23 Elbe-Trieste, Germany's proposed canal, 213, 217 Eliot, George, 250 Emanuel, King, of Portugal, his en- couragement to explorers, 65 Empire-building, Alexander the Great's method of, 42-46 ; Rome's method, 46-53; the Mongoh'an Empire, 53-56; rise and growth of Venetian dominions, 57-64 ; Dutch policy, 64-69; English methods of, 69-75 England, possessions of (see British Empire), hterature of, 81 ; will- power of, 99-101; effect of Cal- vinism in, 114; her indebtedness to foreign importations, 124; stimulating effect of the destruction of the Armada on, 163 ; her mis- understanding of the French, 167 ; method of training compared with that of Fmnce, 171, 173 ; wealth compared with that of France, 175 ; policy of Germany towards, 218- 221 ; discussed, 227 ; class dis- tinctions in, considered, 230-234; humour, 234; effect of primo- geniture, 235; women of, con- sidered, 236, 237 ; dominions of, 238 ; her navy, 239 ; Imperialism of, 240 ; policy of, 241 ; future of, 242 Etruria, Greek produce sent to, 30 Euboea, Venetian unsuccessful at- tempt upon, 59; obtained by Venice, 60 Euphrates, its influence on Baby- lonian civilization, 8 Euripides, patriotism of, 28; his Orestes, 29 Eusebius, 141 F Faber, Peter, one of the first members of the Jesuits, 116 INDEX 263 Fiesole, importance of, 34 Finland, literature of, 86 Florence, growth of, considered, 33- 36, 104 Foreigners, influence of, considered, 123-125 ; influence of, in America, 247, 250 France in league against Venice, 63 ; decline of colonial empire of, 69 ; Indian policy of, 71 ; literature of, compared with English, 85 ; eifect of Calvinism in, 114; discussed, the fascination of, 163, 166; foreign misunderstanding of, 166- 168 ; women of, 168-172: men of, 173; wealth of, 174-178; status of, 178-181; comparisons with Germany, 205, 206; Kichelieu's idea of grand canal for, 214; attitude of, in the event of an Anglo-German war, 221 ; Eng- land's middle class compared with bourgeoisie of, 232 G Galatia added to Koman Empire, 53 Gambetta quoted, 180 Gaul conquered by Rome, 52 Gaza, siege of, 43 Genoa at war with Venice, 60, 104 Genziz Khan, conquests of, 53-55, 194 George Eliot, 250 Georges Sand, 250 Germain, Sophie, 250 Germany, intellectual progress in, 97, 98; indemnity exacted from France, 177; designs of, on Liv- land and Courland, 179; her Polish possessions, 189-191 ; con- sidered, 202 ; the women, 203-205 ; class distinctions in, 206 ; intel- lectuahty and organization of, 207 ; 211; political aspects of, 211; Imperialism, 212-216; socialism in, 216; geographical disadvantages of, 217; poh'cy towards England, 218-222; pohcy towards Holland, 222-224; future of, 224-226, 239 ; American students in, 252 Ghibelline struggle with the Guelphs, 35 Gibbon, his use of the French lan- guage, 166 Gibraltar taken by the English, 72 ; Richelieu's proposed canal to undermine the power of, 214 Gideon, his victory over the Midian- ites, 23 Giotto, the conditions of his time, 35 Goethe, his knowledge of French, 166 ; greatness of, 224, 248 Gorgias, his debates with Socrates, 29 Graaf, his criticism of the Old Testa- ment, 142 Granicus, defeat of Persians at, 43 Grasse, Admiral de, defeated the English off Cape Henry, 220 Greece, intellectual progress of, dis- cussed, 77; literature of, 78-94; causes of the downfall of, 101-103, 107 Greek Church, the, retarding in- fluence of, 200 Gregory VII., Pope, Emperor Henry IV.'s submission to, 129 ; organi- zation of, 133 Grimaldi, 120 Grotefend, his discovery of the decipherment of cuneiform inscrip- tions, 8 Guelph struggle with the Ghibellines, 35 Guiana added to Dutch Dominion, 66 Gulden, 120 H Hagen, Pater, mathematician, 120 Hamilcar Barcas, 11 Hamlet, 80 ; the personality of, 147, 148 Hamurabbi, King, code of law of, 9 Hannibal, 11 Hastings, Warren, English expansion in India under, 71 Heine as type of intellectual Jew, 126 Helmholtz, scientific investigations of, 93 Henry IV., Emperor, his submission to the Pope, 129 264 INDEX Heraclitus, quoted, 28 ; philosophy of, 91 Herodotus quoted, 8 Herondas, novels of, 82 Hesiod, poetry of, 27 Hieroglyphic paintings considered, 3, 6, 7; Aztec manuscripts, 13-15; limitations of, 37 Higgins, Godfrey, on the origin of Christianity, 139 Hindu invasions, 71 Holland {see Dutch Empire), Ger- many's policy towards, 222-224 Homer, controversy on the author- ship of the works of, 145-148, 248 Homeric Epics, perfection of, 79 Hong-Kong, English strong position of, 73 Houtman, learns information for weathering the Cape, 65 ; voyages of, 66 Hugo, Victor, poetry of, 86 Humbert, Therese, frauds of, 177 Hungary, educational system in, 108 ; effect of Calvinism in, 114 ; status of Jews in, 186 ; benefit of Catho- licism in, 201, 217 Hymettus, beehives of, 25 ^^ Idyls of the King^'' Tennyson's, compared with medieval poems, 89 Incas, ancient civilization of the, 17- 19 India, Dutch possessions in, 67 ; rise and growth of England's Empire of, 70-72 ; population of, 288 Indian Companies, Dutch, 66 ; English chartered, 70 Indies, trade to the, 65 Inkermann, Kussian losses at the battle of, 194 Intellectual progress discussed, 76- 94 ; its effect on a nation, 97, 101- 105; causes of the development of, 105-107; Continental educa- tion, 107-110 Iphigenia in AuUs, 79 Italy discussed, most gifted nation, 159-161 ; women of, 161 ; geo- graphical advantages of, 162; its disadvantages, 161-163; its navy, 239 Jahrhuchy described, 210, 211 Jansenists, 130 Java taken by the Dutch, 67 Jeanne d'Arc, personaUty of, 152 Jena, battle of, its effect on Germany, 98 Jephthah, his victory over the Am- monites, 23 Jerusalem, civilization of, considered, 23 "JoAti Company f' policy of, 70 Joubert, 122 Jesuits, The, the rise, growth, and influence of, 115-120; personality of, 151 Jesus Christ, personality of, 150, 153 Jew, The, considered, 121-128 ; com- mercial importance of, in Slav countries, 186 K Kaifa, reduction of, 58 Kaiser, the, quoted, 212 " KalevalaJ'^ celebrated Finnish epic, 86 Kant, philosophy of, 91 Karr, Alphonse, quoted, 252 Kelvin, Lord, scientific investigations of, 93 Key West, American naval base at, 73 Khitan subdued by Gengiz Khan, 54 Kublai Khan, 56 Kunersdorf, Russian losses at, 194 Labourdonnais, his opposition to English advance in India, 71 " La Dame aux Camelias" 173 Langres, disturbances of, 233 ^^ Laokoon,^'' by Lessing, 166 Laon, disturbances of, 233 INDEX 265 Lassalle, as type of successful Jew, 126 Lassen, his research in cuneiform writings, 8 Latin nations considered — Spain, 156- 169 ; Italy, 159-163 ; France, 163- 181 Laurium, silver mines at, 25 Layman, Paul, moral courage of, 119 Laynez, one of the first members of the Jesuits, 116 Legnano, Emperor Barbarossa de- feated at, 107 Leibniz, lack of moral courage of, 119 ; his use of the French language, 166 Lesbos seized by Vitale Michieli, 59, 60 Lessing, his knowledge of French, 166 ; greatness of the works of, 224 Liegnitz, defeat of Mongolians at, 56 ''Life of Christ;' by Strauss, 141 Lights of London, The, criticised, 80 Liszt, his opinion of Polish women, 188 Literature, Peruvian, 19; conditions favourable to the cultivation of, 20 ; Hebrew poetry, 24 ; of Greece, 28 ; of Kome, 32 ; of Greece, discussed, 78-94 ; of America, 250, 252 Livland, Germany's designs on, 179 ''Logos Spermatikos^' by Edmund Spiess, 150 Lonnrot, his services to Finnish literature, 86 Louis XIV., influence of, 165 Loyola, Ignatius, founder of the order of Jesuits, 116-120; personality of, Lucan, 47 Lucca at war with Florence, 34, 104 Lucretius, writings of, 32 Lydia, conquest of, by Cyrus, 42; added to Koman Empire, 51 Lysander, his services to Sparta, 123 M Macaulay, quoted on the Catholic Church, 129 ; his opmion of Goethe and Lessing, 224 Macedonia, rise and growth of, 42-46 ; fall of, 50 MachiaveUi, 36, 105 Magnesia, Eoman victory at, 51 Mago, his book on agriculture, 10 Mahaffy, Professor, opinions of, 243 Mahometanism, 113 Maler, Professor, his journey up the Usumatsintla, 15 Malta, importance of, as naval base, 72, 73 Manchuria, Russia's policy in, 198 Manuel Commenus, Byzantine Em- peror, 59, 60 Marino Sanuto, diary of, 62 Marlowe, 148 Marseilles, territories of, taken by Rome, 52 Martial, 47 Mauritius, naval importance of, 73 Mazarin, his services to France, 124 Modes, conquest of the, by Cyrus, 42 Melodrama opposed to true art, 80 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, as type of intellectual Jew, 126 Metellus, Crete taken by, 52 Mexico, civilization of, considered, 12-16; America's war with, 240 Michael Angelo Buonarroti, 105 Middle Ages, literature in the, 81, 89 ; the Roman Catholic Church in the, 130-132 ; class distinctions of, 235 Middle class, importance of, lack of, in Slav nations, 185-188 ; of Ger- many, 207; French and British, discussed, 230-234 Milford founded by refugees, 125 Mithridates, King, 48; war against Rome, 52 Moghul Empire, concessions to Great Britain, 70 ; internal disruptions, 71 Mohammed III., of Khowaresm, de- feated by Gengiz Khan, 54 Moluccas, the, occupied by the Dutch, 67 Mongolian Empire, rise of, 54-56 Morea obtained by Venice, 60 Morgagni, founder of pathological anatomy, 160 Mormonism, the founding of, 144 Mortara, Italian losses in the battle of, 195 266 INDEX Moses, personality of, 149 Mozambique, taken by Vasco da Gama, 65 Musset, poetry of, 86 Mysia, added to Roman Empire, 51 N Nancy, 233 Napoleon, character of. 99 ; .person- ality of, 161, 189 Navy, English, importance of, 72, 73, 239 Nawab of Arcot, 71 Nawab Wazir of Oudh, 71 Negapatam taken by the Dutch, 67 Neri, their quarrels against the Bian- chi, 35 New Testament, authenticity of the, 140-143 Newton, his " Principia,''' 92 New Zealand, England's colony, 75 Nijni Novgorod, great Russian fair of, 196 Nile, the, its influence on Egypt, 7 ; battle of the, 178,220 Niniveh. See Babylonia Nizam of Hyderabad, independence of, 71 Noricum, reduction of, by Rome, 53 Novara, Italian losses in the battie of, 195 Numantia, Roman victory at, 51 Numidia, defeated by Rome, 52 O Odyssey, controversy' on the author- ship of the, 145-147 (EdipuSj Coloneus, the, 29 Old Testament, criticism on the, 142 Order of Pr^montre, 124 Orders, of the Roman Catholic Church, 124, 130; organization of, 132 Orestes, the, of Euripides, 29 " Origine de tons les Cultes,''^ by Fran9ois Dupuis, 139 Ostrolenka, battle of, 190 Palestine added to Roman Empire, 52 Pamphilia added to Roman Empire, 52 Pannonia, reduction of, by Rome, 53 Paphlagonia added to Roman Empire, 52 Papias, disciple of St. John, his evi- dence of the New Testament, 141 Papyrus, various Egyptian, con- sidered, 3, 4 Paris, growth of, 36 Parmenides, philosophy of, 91 Paterini, massacre of the, 35 " Faul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ" by Ferdinand Baur, 141 Peirseus, the, 26 Peloponnesian war, 27, 29 Pergamum, 50 Pericles, political contests of, 28 Perim, guard to the Red Sea, 73 Persepolis conquered by Alexander, 44 Persia, invasion of Greece by, 27; battle of Salamis, 28; rise of do- minion of, 41; Alexander's con- quest of, 43 Personality, force of, 144 ; of Homer, 145; of Shakespeare, 147; of Moses, 149; of Loyola, 151; of Jeanne d'Arc, 152 ; of Jesus, 153 Peru, civilization of, 16-19 Peschel quoted on America, 245 Pheidias, perfection of the works of, 77 Philip n. of Macedonia, 42 Philip of Macedonia, his concessions to Rome, 50 Philip II. of Spain, defeat of his Armada, 163 Philoctetes, the, 29 Philosophy, Greek, discussed, 90-94 Phoenicians, the alphabet discovered by the, 38 ; intelligence of, 107 Phiygia added to Roman Empire, 52 Pindar, the poetry, 27 Pisa, at war with Florence, 34 ; de- feated by Venice, 59, 104; un- successfcd Cathohc Council at, 134 Pisidia added to Roman Empire, 52 INDEX 267 Pizarro Francisco, his conquest of Peru, 16 Plato, the dialogues of, 29; philosophy of, 91 Plevna, Eussian losses in the battles of, 194 Plutarch on Alexander the Great, 46 Poland, effect of Calvinism in, 114; discussed, 187 ; women of, dis- cussed, 188-190 ; spirit of nation- alism, 190, 191 Polo, Marco, great personal force of, 159 Pompeius, conquests of, 52 Pomponius Mela, 47 Pons Sublicius, 31 Poor Clares, religious order of, 130 Port Hamilton, English strong posi- tion of, 73 Portugal, imperial policy of, 64; conquered by Spain, Q6 Porus, King, defeated by Alexander, 44 Praxiteles, perfection of the works of, 77 " JPrincipia,^'' Newton's, 92 Prisse papyrus considered, 4 ^^Prolegomena in Homermny F. A. Wolf, 145 Protagoras, his debates with Socrates, 29 Protestant Church, the, as compared with the Roman Catholic Church, 128, 129, 133-135 Psychology of nations, 82 Ptahhotep, Prince, author of the Prisse papyrus, 4 Pulo-Penang, English strong position of, 73 Quipu, the, or Peruvian thread- writing, 18, 39 Quito, ancient road to, 18 Race, influence of, 2 ; characteristics not attributable to, 105, 106; Jewish, considered, 121 ; Anglo- Saxon, 253 Rafael, 105 Rameses, poem composed by, 4 Rawlinson, his research in cuneiform writings, 8 Religion, Jerusalem, 23; various, considered, 113; Calvinism, 114; the Jesuits, 115-120; Jewish, 121-128; the Roman Catholic Church, 128-136; personality the cause of the founding of, 137-154 Rhaetia, reduction of, by Rome, 53 Rhodes, 50 Ricci, mathematician, 12 Richelieu, his idea of a grand canal for France, 214 Roman Catholic Church, the, organi- zation of, 128-134 ; attitude towards science, 135; personality of the Pope, 154 ; French Government's attitude towards, 181 Roman Empire, beginnings and growth of, 29; compared with Greece,* 31-33; its method of empire-building, 46-53, 113 Rothschilds as types of successful Jews, 126 Rouen, disturbances of, 233 Roumania, progress of, 257 Russia, added to Mongolian Empire, 55 ; empire of, compared with British, 74, 112; power of, over- rated, 191 ; civilization of, 192 ; military strength of, discussed, 193, 194; poverty of, 195; geographi- cal position of, 196 ; Eastern policy of, 197; future of, 198-201; scheme for a grand canal, 214 Russo-Turkish War, 195 S Salamis, battle of, 28 Salmeron one of the first members of the Jesuits, 116 Samarcand captured by Gengiz Khan, 54 Samos seized by Vitali Michieli, 59 Samson, his victory over the Philis- tines, 23 268 INDEX San Miniato at war with Florence, 34 " Sapho;' 173 Sardinia added to Roman Empire, 49 Saul, King of Israel, Hebrew religious poetry under, 24 Savoy, House of, hostility of the Holy See to, 163 Schall, mathematician, 12 Scheiner, 120 Schiller, greatness of the works of, 224 Science, discussed, 91-94, 111 ; Ro- man Catholic attitude towards, 135 Scot, Reginald, 119 Scotland, Calvinism in, 114 Sebenico, reduction of, by Venice, 59 SediUot, Emmanuel, his oriental re- search, 12 Selden, John, quoted on ruling, 133 Seneca, 47 Servia, progress of, 257 Sforzas, the, 105 Shakespeare, his personality im- printed in his works, 148 Sicily added to Roman dominion, 47 Sidon, fall of, 24, 58 Siena, 34 Silver King, The, criticised, 80 Simon de Montfort, 124 Sinope, Mithridates defeated at, 52 Slav nations discussed, language and characteristics of, 182-186; Poland, 187-191 ; Russia, 191-201 Smith, John, founder of Mormonism, 144 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Socrates, the debates of Protagoras and Gorgias with, 29 ; philosophy of, 91 Sofala taken by Vasco de Gama, 65 Solferino, Italian losses in the battle of, 195 Sophocles, his celebration on the victory of Salamis, 28 ; the plays of, 77 South Africa, England's colony of, 75; effect of Calvinism on Boers, 114 ; cost of war in, 240 Spain, conquered by Rome, 51, 52 ; in league against Venice, 63 ; con- quests and pohcy of, 64 ; jealousy of, 64; discussed, 156-159 Spalato, reduction of, by Venice, 59 Spec, Frederick, his " Cautio Crimi- nalis," 119 Spencer, Herbert, Russian knowledge of the writings of, 185 Spiess, Edmund, his book on Chris- tianity, 150 Spinoza, 119 ; on Jewish type, 122 Stael, Madame de, 250 St. Bruno, founder of the Carthusian order, 124 St. Helena, naval importance of, 73 St. Lucia, Italian losses in the battle of, 195 St. Norbert, founder of the Order of Premontre, 124 St. Paul, authenticity of his Epistles, 141 ; his teaching, 149 St. Stephen Harding, founder of the Cistercian Order, 124 St. Thomas Aquinas, philosophical attitude of, 135 St. Thome taken by the Dutch, 67 Strauss, his " Life of Christ,''' 141 Suez Canal, of great advantage to Italy, 162; statistics of, 215 Suftren. See Bailli de " Supernatural Religion,'^ 138 Surat conceded to Great Britam, 70 Surinam added to Dutch dominion, 66 Susa, fall of, 44 Swansea founded by refugees, 125 Sweden, effect of Calvinism in, 114 Sylvester II., Pope, his benefits to Hungary, 201 Syracuse conquered by Rome, 50 Syria added to Roman Empire, 52 Tanagra, battle of, 27 Temuchin, afterwards made Gengiz Khan, conquests of, 53-55 Terceira, Spanish naval victory off, 159 Teuta, Queen, her appeal to Rome for help, 50 Tezcuco, Mexico's ancient capital, 13, 15 INDEX 269 Themistocles, 28; his services to Greece, 123 " Theodicee^'' by Leibniz, composed in the French language, 166 Thrace added to Roman Empire, 51 Thucydides, historical writings of, compared, 87 Tiber, the, 29, 31 Tigris, its influence on Babylonian civilization, 8 Tolstoi, influence of, 200 Toltecs, ancient civihzation of the, 16 Tommaso Mocenigo, his testimony of Venetian greatness, 61 Topelius, his services to Finnish literature, 86 Tozetti, T. Targioni, quoted, 33 Trafalgar, battle of, 220 Trajan, conquests of, 53 Trani, reduction of, by Venice, 59 Trappists, Order of, 130 Treaty of Paris, 73 Treaty of Utrecht, 72 Tubingen school of criticism, 140-142 Tuji, conquests of, 55 Turks, 63; defeated by Don Juan of Austria, 63 Turner, Pater Adam, courage of, 119 Tyre, fall of, 24, 43; taken by Venice, 59 U Uhle, Professor, his researches into Peruvian history, 19 United States. See America Usumatsintla, Professor Maler's jour- ney up the, 15 Utrecht, Treaty of, 72 Varus defeated by the Germans, 53 Vasco de Gama, voyages of, 65 Vega, Garcilasso de la, quoted on Peru, 19 Venice, its rise and growth, 57-64, 104 ; geographical advantages of, 162 Vespucci, pioneer work of, 160 Via JEmilia, 52 Vinci, Leonardo da, 36, 104 Virchow, scientific investigations of, 93 Viriathus, assassination of, 51 Vitale Michieli, Doge of Venice, conquests of, 59 Viterbo, 34 Vladivostok, 192 Volition discussed, 95 " Volherpsychologie,'' by Wundt, 82 Volta, physicist of Pa via, 160 W Wagner, originator of new form of musical expression, 90 Walewska, Madame, Napoleon's re- lations with, 189 Warsaw, Russian losses at the battle of, 194 Wasmann, Pater E., on evolution, 120 Wei-hei-Wei, English strong position of, 73 Weir, 119 Wellesley, English expansion in Lidia under, 71 Wesley, John, founder of a religious sect, 144 Wesleyanism, the beginning of, 144 West Indian Company, Dutch, Q^ Whewell, his criticism of Aristotle, 94 Whistler, original manner of painting, 90 William in., 124 Will-power discussed, 95-97, 107- 110, 230 Winckler, Dr. Hugo, on the alphabet, 38 Wolf, F. A., his criticism of Homer, 145 Wundt, Professor, " VolJcerpsycho- logiey" by, 82 Wiirzburg, burning of witches at, 119 Xavier, Francis, one of the first members of the Jesuits, 116 270 INDEX Yang-tse, 11 " Tassa,''^ the code of constitution drawn up by Gengiz Khan, 55 Yaxchilan, discovery of ancient city of, 15 Yellow Terror, the, 112 Young, Arthur, his book on travels through France, 229 Yulun, mother of Gengiz Khan, 54 Zante retained by Venice, 64 Zara, reduction of, by Venice, 59, 60 Zodiac, the, 139 Zorndorf, Russian losses at, 194 Zumarraga, Bishop, his discovery of Aztec hieroglyphic manuscripts, 13 THE END 1 PKINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BE0CLB8. THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN ' THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. 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