(i 
 
 J^(-n^^^%^ ^ 
 
 fs<JL4^o-<*^ 
 
 *J iKJLA^Aa^-^^^t.*^ , «-/^ 
 
 ntA
 
 STUDIES 
 
 in 
 
 HISTORY and POLITICS
 
 STUDIES 
 
 in 
 
 HISTORY and POLITICS 
 
 By 
 
 The Right Honourable 
 
 HERBERT FISHER 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 M DCCCC XX
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 
 
 TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITV 
 
 2802
 
 ( 5 ) 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 If within the modest circle of my readers there be those who 
 surmise that these essays have been composed during the 
 ample leisure of official life, let me hasten to disabuse their 
 innocence. No such golden moments of lettered ease sweeten 
 the austere labours of a member of His Majesty's administra- 
 tion, for though in the present crisis of the public nerves it 
 would be unfashionable to assume that he (or any one else) 
 earns his salary, it remains a sombre fact that for a Minister 
 of the Crown an eight-hour day is a luxury beyond the 
 wildest dreams of avarice. The papers, then, which have been 
 here gathered together, belong to a previous, and more 
 tranquil, stage of my existence, albeit one has been published 
 and others have received some fresh critical touches since 
 I was called upon to address myself to public affairs. The 
 first, third, fifth, and sixth papers were brought out in the 
 Quarterly Revieiv, the second in the Edinburgh Reviezv, the 
 fourth in the Contemporary Review, the eighth in the Hibbert 
 Journal. The paper on ' Imperial Administration ' was read at 
 King's College and has been published by Messrs. Macmillan 
 in a volume entitled The Empire and the Future. The ninth 
 paper on the ' Value of Small States ' was contributed to the 
 valuable series of war pamphlets issued by the Delegates of 
 the Clarendon Press. Only the last two pieces in the volume 
 have so far escaped the scrutiny of the printer, the proof- 
 reader, and the public. For their substance I am indebted to 
 a course of lectures delivered by me at Oxford in my capacity 
 as Chichele Lecturer on Foreign History three years before the 
 outbreak of the Great War. 
 
 To the publishers of the pieces which are here reprinted 
 I owe sincere acknowledgements for their generous courtesy. 
 
 H. F. 
 Sept. T919.
 
 ( 6 ) 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 7 
 
 2. THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUS- 
 
 SEAU . . . •. . - . .26 
 
 3. OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 45 
 
 4. A LEAF FROM A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 74 
 
 5. LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK . 86 
 
 6. MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS . . iia 
 
 7. IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION . . . 128 
 
 8. FRENCH NATIONALISM .... 146 
 
 9. THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES . . 161 
 
 10. THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA . . 180 
 
 11. THOUGHTS ON THE INFLUENCE OF 
 
 NAPOLEON 198
 
 ( 7 ) 
 
 The Last of the Latin Historians ^ 
 
 ASTERN and melancholy interest, hardly to be matched 
 in any other epoch, attaches to the records of the Roman 
 Empire in the fourth century of our era. The old world was 
 passing away in storm and agony, its frontiers assailed, its 
 creeds challenged and perplexed, its social tissue sufifering 
 a slow and steady process of degeneration, which the political 
 science of that time might note but was impotent to analyse 
 or to cure. It was an age of bitter factions, when the demise 
 of an emperor gave the signal for turmoil, intrigue, or civil war ; 
 when, even within the Christian circle, sect contended with sect 
 in savage and unrelenting animosity, and great political 
 interests were often sacrificed to the vile machinations of the 
 palace. And meanwhile the Empire was assaulted on all sides, 
 by the Persians in Mesopotamia, by the Goths in Thrace, by 
 the Germans on the Gaulish frontier — a contest waged with 
 varying fortunes and exhibiting abundant proof that the 
 legions of Rome had lost neither the discipline nor the cool- 
 ness of their ancient renown, but nevertheless revealing to the 
 
 * I. Aynmiani Marcellini Rerum G est arum libros qui sttpersuni recen- 
 suit rhythmiceque distinxit Carolus U. Clark, Vol. I, libri xiv-xxv. 
 Berlin : Weidmann, 1910. 
 
 2. Die verlorenen Biicher des Ammianus Marcellinus. By Hugo 
 Michael. Breslau : Maruschke, 1880. 
 
 3. Ammien Marcelliii, sa vie et son ceuvre. By Jean Gimazane. 
 Toulouse: Chauvin, 1889. 
 
 4. Die geschichtliche Litteratur itber die romische Kaiserzeit. By 
 H.Peter. Leipzig: Teubner, 1897. 
 
 5. The Text Traditions of Anmiianiis Marcellinus. By C. U. Clark. 
 New Haven, 1904. 
 
 6. Anmiien Marcellin. By L. Dautremer. Lille, 1899. 
 
 7. Studien zu Amfniamts Marcellinus. By W. Klein. Leipzig : 
 Weicher, 19 14.
 
 8 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 understanding eye the ominous .spectacle of a weakening 
 defence against an ever-growing momentum of attack. 
 
 This, too, is the century which witnessed the codification of 
 the orthodox creed of the Western Church and the expiring 
 effort of paganism to maintain itself as the official religion of 
 the Western world. In the brief reign of Julian, which 
 occupies a disproportionate space in Gibbon's majestic work 
 and is therefore to Englishmen the most familiar episode of 
 later Roman history, the contest between the Christian religion 
 and a sublimated form of the older beliefs is shown against the 
 sombre background of the German and the Persian wars. The 
 pagan Emperor, fighting against overwhelming spiritual and 
 material forces, dies after a reign of less than two years ; and 
 the wheel of fortune .swings suddenly round. The worship of 
 the Sun-god is discarded ; the Nicene Creed expels the brief 
 and enlightened catechism of the pagan Sallustius ; and by the 
 end of the century the official triumph of Christianity is secure. 
 
 For twenty-five years of this tormented age we may follow 
 the guidance of a writer who, though standing outside the 
 Christian fold, was so temperate in spirit and so honourably 
 distinguished for judgement and impartiality that critics have 
 been divided as to the exact shade of his religious opinions. 
 The History of Ammianus Marcellinus begins for us (for the 
 earlier books have been lost) in 353 and ends with the defeat and 
 death of Valens at Adrianople in 378, recounting in whole or in 
 part the reigns of seven Emperors, Constantius, Julian, Jovian, 
 Valens, Valentinian I, Gratian, and the child Valentinian II. 
 But the original work, which was designed as a continuation 
 of the histories of Tacitus, went back to the death of Nerva 
 (a.D. 96), so that the accident of literary survival has preserved 
 to us, perhaps fortunately for his reputation, only .so much 
 of the history as concerns the period of the author's active 
 participation in the public affairs of the Empire. We have no 
 external evidence as to the character of the lost books of 
 Ammianus. Probably Gibbon is right in assuming that the 
 first thirteen books were but 'a superficial epitome of two 
 hundred and fifty-seven years'. It has, however, been argued, 
 from references to the earlier books contained in the surviving
 
 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 9 
 
 fragments and seeming to imply a full treatment of certain 
 topics, that the history was written upon a uniform scale, and 
 that it contained some eighty books, thirty-one of which were 
 devoted to the period with respect to which Ammianus was 
 able to employ ocular and oral testimony. This, however, is 
 an hypothesis entirely unsupported by literary tradition ; and, 
 since Ammianus exhibits scant regard to proportion in those 
 parts of his work which we are enabled to test, we need not 
 be at pains to defend the symmetry of his general design. 
 
 The last of the Latin historians was a soldier of Greek 
 speech and lineage who was born about A.D. 332 in the half- 
 Greek, half-Syrian city of Antioch. That Ammianus spoke 
 Greek as his native tongue would be a natural inference from 
 his birthplace, even if Greek modes of speech and thought 
 were not plentifully illustrated in his writings. And it may 
 give matter for surprise that, having been suckled in the speech 
 of Herodotus and Thucydides, Ammianus should have staked 
 his literary reputation upon a work written in a foreign 
 language, over which he never succeeded in obtaining an easy 
 and graceful mastery. Language is a delicate and intricate 
 thing, so delicate and so intricate that only a man with a rare 
 genius for style can hope to win complete purity of expression 
 in a foreign tongue ; and, though the gifts of Ammianus were 
 numerous and solid, a sense of style in writing was not among 
 them. He wrote Latin, then, not out of an artistic impulse to 
 practise himself in a new and difficult mode, but because Latin 
 was the official language of the Empire, because it was spoken 
 in the armies and the public offices, because it was the instru- 
 ment of a public career, and because, through the use of a long 
 line of poets, historians, philosophers, and legists, Latin might 
 be regarded as the authentic voice of Roman patriotism itself. 
 
 Indeed it is curious to reflect upon the singular power and 
 magnetism which the name and tradition of Rome were still 
 able to exert over the mind of a provincial and critical Greek, 
 some of whose most famous pages are devoted to a delineation 
 of the vices of the Roman capital, to the defeat""of Roman 
 armies in Persia and in Thrace, and to the acceptance of an
 
 lo THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 ignominious peace at the hands of victorious Orientals. 
 Ammianus paints the decadence of Rome with every hue of 
 elaborate contempt ; he shows us Roman society eaten to the 
 core by the vermin of sloth, luxury, and vice. He notes the 
 shameful rule of the eunuch and the parasite, the break-down 
 of criminal justice, the perennial curse of calumny and 
 terrorism, with its melancholy tale of innocent victims, which 
 has been the inseparable accompaniment of an uneasy and 
 revolutionary age. All this he describes with rude and insistent 
 emphasis, and yet it never occurs to him to question the 
 claims of the sacred city to the eternal veneration of mankind, 
 or to challenge its supreme place in the Divine ordering 
 of the Universe. That the architectural splendours of 
 the Imperial capital — its amphitheatres, temples, baths, and 
 palaces — contributed in some measure to counterbalance the 
 impression left upon his mind by the degraded habits of its 
 population is probable enough ; for, though Antioch was 
 sumptuous and famed for luxury, Rome was in respect of 
 material magnificence far superior to any city in the Empire. 
 But, in his many allusions to Rome, Ammianus was not 
 chiefly inspired by the emotions of the architectural connoisseur 
 or the retired veteran from the provinces, dazzled by the 
 glittering marbles and huge structures of the capital. If we 
 read his mind aright, he thought of Rome chiefly as the 
 mother-city of a great and enduring Empire, rich in sublime 
 associations, celebrated by a long line of famous authors as the 
 shrine of ancient hardihood and virtue, and still in her old age 
 the legitimate object of sentimental reverence. Nothing will 
 enable us more fully to understand the feeling of the devout 
 Catholic for the city of St. Peter than the spell which the 
 grandeur of Rome cast upon the mind of an Antiochene pagan 
 in the last decades of the Empire of the West. In the time 
 of Ammianus it was impossible to discern the future destinies 
 of the Roman Episcopate, but it is clear from his narrative 
 that the city of Romulus still worked its old enchantments, 
 and conferred upon its officials and upon the members of its 
 aristocracy a special renown throughout the Empire. 
 
 It has, indeed, been objected against Ammianus that,
 
 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS ii 
 
 living under a sky black with storm-cloud, he appears to be 
 insensible to the direction of the wind. A philosophic historian, 
 considering the happenings of that time, would at least, one 
 would think, have noted, as likely to change the very warp 
 and woof of Mediterranean civilization, two great tendencies — 
 the impending victory of the Christian religion and the 
 declining power of the Roman Empire. Ammianus did not 
 argue thus. He belonged to that large class of men who feel 
 little interest in theological speculations and possess no gift 
 for the mystical ascesis of the spirit. The Christian religion 
 did not attract him. As a soldier he admired the fortitude of 
 the martyrs ; and a well-known passage, contrasting the pomp 
 and luxury of the Roman Bishop with the poverty and self- 
 denial of the poor country priest, shows that he was not 
 insensible to the milder virtues of the pastoral life. But of 
 Christianity as a system of belief or conduct he has little 
 knowledge and less curiosity. To the political mind the 
 religious zealot principally presents himself as an administra- 
 tive nuisance ; and Ammianus condemns the synods of the 
 Christian Fathers on the practical ground that they dis- 
 organized the postal transport of the Empire. It is not, 
 therefore, to him that we must look for an appreciation of the 
 strength and promise of the Christian life. A cold and some- 
 what scornful spectator of ecclesiastical events, he appears to 
 be unversed in the literature and only remotely conversant 
 with the ceremonies of the Christians. So far as he could 
 judge the general outcome of that Oriental movement, it led 
 to barbaric chaos, sect wrangling with sect, and every 
 episcopal vacancy furnishing matter for intrigue or bloodshed. 
 In one disputed election to the Bishopric of Rome a hundred 
 and thirty-seven corpses were counted in a Christian church. 
 
 The most impressive feature, on the contrary, of this honest 
 and impartial writer's outlook upon his owri age is a robust 
 faith in the permanence and power of the Roman Empire. 
 This Greek from Antioch is in spirit more Roman than the 
 Romans, so Roman that it is difficult to believe that no Latin 
 blood ran in his veins. His masters in literature are the 
 classical authors of Rome — Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Sallust,
 
 12 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 Tacitus ; and he draws his ideal of human conduct from that 
 older and more simple Roman life which was canonized in the 
 retrospective affection of a luxurious age. Indeed, as we 
 read Ammianus, we are made sensible, at every turn, of the 
 span and impetus of that great body politic which, despite 
 furious batteries from without and more subtle maladies 
 gnawing at the heart, still remained the most impressive 
 monument in the world of force, fortune, and prudence. How 
 could a soldier historian fail to feel the miracle of an Empire 
 which sent its legions to fight on the Tees and the Euphrates, 
 and included within its orbit all the peoples of the Mediterranean 
 world? To a contemporary, the crushing defeat of Julian at 
 Ctesiphon, the immense disaster of the Gothic victory at 
 Adrianople, might well have seemed to be unfavourable 
 episodes, carrying with them no sinister omen of ruin nor seed 
 of mischief beyond repair. For centuries the Romans had 
 fought and absorbed the barbarians ; and Ammianus saw 
 little reason to doubt that Rome would continue to fight and 
 absorb barbarians to the end of time.^ 
 
 One other circumstance may help to explain the survival, 
 despite much cause for despondency, of a firm Imperial faith 
 in the spirit of Ammianus. The last and most impressive 
 book of the history is devoted to an account of the Gothic 
 invasion of Thrace, which culminated in the rout of a Roman 
 army and the death of the Emperor Valens. The story of 
 this great calamity is told with sombre force, and loses none 
 of its tragical quality in the hands of Ammianus, who, after 
 working steadily up to the great climax of the battle, ends 
 with two minor but startlingly significant episodes — a Gothic 
 attack upon Constantinople, which was repulsed by a sally of 
 Saracen mercenaries, and the treacherous massacre by order 
 of a Roman governor of a large body of Gothic youths who 
 had been distributed through the cities of Asia Minor. In 
 the light of our later knowledge these ominous passages 
 
 ^ Fifty years later the Greek historian, Sozomen, started a philosophy 
 of the Decline and Fall ; but Rutilius Namatianus, writing shortly after 
 the sack of Rome by Alaric, was still of opinion that the Empire would 
 last for ever.
 
 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 13 
 
 might seem to be inspired by a profound valedictory emotion, 
 but there is nothing consciously valedictory in the attitude 
 of Ammianus. The history was not composed under the 
 immediate impulse of the disaster of Adrianople, but was begun 
 some ten years later, when the military vigour of Theodosius 
 was asserting itself ; so that, writing in a brief oasis of calm 
 when the sky was blue and the sunshine again golden, 
 Ammianus could recount the perils of the past, gravely indeed, 
 but yet without a note of weakness or despair. 
 
 Almost all the little that we know of the life of Ammianus 
 is derived from allusions in his own writings. Sprung of noble 
 lineage, he passed early into the ranks of the ' Protectores 
 Domestic! ', a corps cVMite which may be compared to our 
 Guards Brigade, and was soon attached to the person of 
 Ursicinus, a distinguished and experienced soldier who inspired 
 the confidence and admiration of his youthful aide-de-camp. 
 A better opening for an ambitious and enterprising young man, 
 fond of travel, adventure, and conpanionship, could not have 
 been contrived ; and, before Ammianus had reached the age 
 of thirty, he had voyaged on military and official errands from 
 Mesopotamia to Gaul and from Gaul to Mesopotamia, and had 
 tasted the excitements of a siege, a reconnaissance, and a cam- 
 paign. It is one of our misfortunes that, with a few rare 
 exceptions, he refrains from recounting his personal experiences, 
 and that his impressions of travel, which must have been 
 various and diverting, are sacrificed to the austere tradition of 
 classical history. Nevertheless here and there we descry traces 
 of his activity. He was at Cologne with Ursicinus in 355, and 
 witnessed the downfall of the rebel Silvanus and the beginnings 
 of Julian's work in Gaul. Two years later he returned to the 
 East, when Roman rule was once more exposed to grave peril 
 from the energy and ambitions of Shapur the Great, the most 
 formidable of the Sassanian kings of Persia. As he recounts 
 this period of his career, Ammianus drops for a moment the 
 impersonal tone which generally marks his history. He 
 describes with some vividness of feeling his own part in the 
 Persian campaign — how he was sent on a mission to the Emir
 
 14 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 of Corduene, how he took part in the famous defence of Amida 
 (the modern Diarbekr), and joined in that expedition to the 
 Tigris which resulted in Juhan's death and the repulse of the 
 Roman legions at Ctesiphon. After that catastrophe he 
 returned to Antioch and for many years vanishes from history. 
 When he emerges, it is as the spectator of the high-treason 
 trials at Antioch in 371, as the tourist visiting the plain of 
 Adrianople that he may inspect the site still strewn with the 
 whitened bones of Goth and Roman, or finally as the man of 
 letters, recently established in Rome and receiving the com- 
 pliments of his friend, Libanius, upon a successful course of 
 historical lectures. The sun-browned veteran was, in fact, 
 reading instalments of his magfium opus to the intellectuals of 
 the capital and tasting the sweets of literary fame. We may 
 guess that his last reading was not later than 392. 
 
 It has been conjectured, on the ground of his interest in 
 legal affairs, that, after the death of Julian, Ammianus aban- 
 doned a military for a civil career, and that the later part of 
 his life was divided between judicial and literary pursuits. 
 Such a development is not impossible, for the ' Protectores 
 Domestic! ' constituted a school of training for civil as well as 
 for military duties. Nor is it easy to suppose that a man of 
 so active a temperament would have retired altogether from 
 public life at so early a point in his course. But there is no 
 direct evidence, and we must be content with surmises. We 
 only know that, resembling the Father of History in curiosity 
 and love of movement, Ammianus travelled widely, visiting 
 Egypt and Greece as well as Thrace, and carrying, as we may 
 conjecture, in his head the exciting design of the great book, 
 the Tacitus brought up to date, which was to be recited before 
 an exacting and distinguished audience in the marble capital 
 of the Empire. 
 
 The circumstance that the history was intended for recita- 
 tion was unfavourable to its quality as a work of art. It is a 
 common experience that lectures, effective enough on first 
 delivery, fail through some lack of subtlety and finish to 
 preserve their power when issued to the world in cold print ; 
 and the historical lectures of the Syrian veteran were probably
 
 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 15 
 
 injured for posterity by too close an attention to the recondite 
 tastes of an affected public. Ammianus had a rough but 
 powerful mind, and, what is even more important in an 
 historian, and priceless by reason of its rarity in that age, an 
 essential sincerity and justness of judgement. Unfortunately 
 he thought it necessary to conform himself to a literary fashion 
 which we suspect to have been foreign to his real nature. His 
 narrative is stuffed with turgid declamation and interrupted by 
 long stretches of encyclopaedic learning which a modern author 
 would omit or at least consign to foot-notes or appendices. He 
 breaks off to describe a prodigy, an omen, a cause ciUbre, in 
 order that out of the studied variety of his matter he may 
 provide a stimulus appropriate to the varying appetites of his 
 audience. Probably, if he had taken literature less seriously, 
 he would have written better, for he is capable, when off his 
 guard, of a simple and soldierly narrative. But, though 
 modest as to his own attainments, he cherished a secret flame 
 of literary ambition. He read furiously. He soaked himself 
 in Livy and Cicero and Virgil, in geographical and scientific 
 handbooks, as well as in the proper and authentic sources for 
 an historical narrative ; and he succeeded in manufacturing 
 a declamatory style of which we can say nothing more 
 charitable than that accurate statements and moderate judge- 
 ments have seldom been presented in a vesture so artificial and 
 inappropriate. 
 
 If we had to single out the special excellence which marks 
 Ammianus as a writer of history, we should find it in his 
 distinct gift for life-like portraiture. He has provided us with 
 a series of personal sketches than which of their kind there is 
 nothing better in ancient literature ; for the ' Lives ' of Plutarch, 
 incomparably more beautiful and attractive, do not come up 
 for comparison, belonging as they do to the category of 
 idealistic literature, whereas the work of Ammianus is founded 
 upon a close and dispassionate study of mixed character. 
 Historians are largely creatures of tradition ; and the portraits 
 of Ammianus may have owed something to a gossipy book, 
 then greatly in vogue but now only surviving in a few scanty 
 fragments, the satirical ' Lives of the Emperors ' by Marius
 
 i6 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 Maximus.^ In any case, it is reasonable to infer from the 
 success which Ammianus achieves in a most difficuh branch 
 of the historian's art that the study of human character was 
 one of the few departments of intellectual inquiry in which 
 considerable progress had been made in the later years of the 
 Roman Empire. Unfortunately the faculty of discerning 
 portraiture was lost as soon as it had reached a point of dis- 
 tinguished excellence in the careful workmanship of Ammianus. 
 The great calamities of the succeeding generation afforded no 
 leisure for that habit of minute and engaging causticity which 
 flourishes in sheltered and critical communities and is nourished 
 by the drama, the satire, and the novel. For eight centuries 
 no greater actor in the stage of European history is so well 
 depicted for posterity as are the Constantius, the Julian, and 
 the Valentinian of Ammianus. Nor was the full spirit of 
 penetrating psychology recaptured for Europe until the 
 Renaissance of the sixteenth century. 
 
 History having to do with the business of the State, it is 
 certainly no disqualification in a writer of history that he should 
 have some real working knowledge of one of the great public 
 callings. Ammianus approached history from the angle of 
 a soldier, and his work is a repository of military information. 
 He is, indeed, our principal authority upon the art of war in 
 the fourth century, and has left us some careful descriptions, 
 more appropriate to a dictionary than to an historical narrative, 
 of the poliorcetic engines of his time. Nevertheless we cannot 
 regard him as a good military historian, and that for a reason 
 which may seem curious, in view of the large space which he 
 allots to geographical surveys. He never seems to understand, 
 or rather he never enables his reader to understand, the strategy 
 of a campaign. He seems to put his geography in one depart- 
 ment and his military history in another, and never to bring 
 them into fruitful connexion, A siege he will often describe 
 with intelligent particularity, but his battle-pieces are confused, 
 his campaigns sketchy and imperfectly grounded ; and it is 
 curious to note that, though he records failure after failure, his 
 work is not greatly distinguished for strategical commentary 
 * Historicorum Romanoru7n Fragmenta, ed. H. Peter, pp. 331-9.
 
 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 17 
 
 or criticism. Poliorcetics, however, he thoroughly understands ; 
 and th& serious interest in practical things, which makes him 
 a master of this branch of military science and betrays itself in 
 a great range and variety of technical disquisitions in other 
 spheres of knowledge, is only part of that masculine sanity of 
 character which constitutes his principal force and attraction. 
 
 It is not to be claimed for Ammianus that he never talks 
 nonsense. He talks a deal of nonsense. He believes in omens 
 and prodigies, and delights in describing them to an audience 
 which did not think the worse of a popular lecture for an 
 admixture of the sensational and the ghostly. But the general 
 balance of his judgement was undisturbed by such concessions 
 to vulgar superstition. His mind was essentially strong and 
 secular, averse from all religious extravagance and as far 
 removed from the exalted temper of the sects as the first Lord 
 Shaftesbury from the Cameronians. In one passage he con- 
 demns his master, Julian, for the intemperance of his paganism, 
 in another he applauds Valentinian for his policy of religious 
 toleration — verdicts not to be explained on Epicurean grounds, 
 but as the considered expression of that moderate and reason-: 
 able spirit which formed part of the Greek ideal of virtue. It 
 is therefore possible from "a study of Ammianus to derive 
 a notion of the best secular moral standard which prevailed 
 among cultivated pagans of the Roman Empire in the later 
 part of the fourth century. 
 
 That standard was by no means low. The conscience of the 
 soldier-historian was revolted by idleness and profligacy, cruelty 
 and intemperance, trickery and injustice. In the main, our 
 virtues and vices were his virtues and vices also. He had 
 sources of moral sustenance which are not ours, but which 
 may not have been inferior in potency to any that modern 
 civilization brings to bear on a character analogous to his. 
 He was inspired by the grejit classical authors of Greece and 
 Rome, and especially by Cicero, whose writings formed the 
 Bible of humane wisdom as long as the humanities retained 
 their value in the Western world. He had the strong Roman 
 respect for the reign of law, coupled with a hearty detestation 
 of that capricious Asiatic cruelty which, in his own time, had 
 
 2S0J ]}
 
 i8 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 begun to debase the administration of Justice. Life in the 
 army had given him a code of honour which is certainly not 
 inferior to. that which now regulates the conduct of some 
 modern armies professedly Christian. Finally, he was moved 
 by a deep sentiment of devotion to the Empire as a provi- 
 dential system for the governance of the world. 
 
 War is the supreme touchstone of ethical principle. Ammia- 
 nus recounts, without adverse comment, the pitiless massacre 
 of women and children in the barbarous fighting of the frontier 
 wars. When a Roman general, after making a truce with 
 a marauding band of Saxons, contrives for them an ambush 
 so that they perish to a man, he observes that a just judge 
 would condemn the act as perfidious and disgraceful, but that 
 reflection would show that it was not improper to destroy 
 a dangerous band of robbers when occasion offered. To assign 
 such sentiments to paganism is to ignore some very recent 
 passages in the history of European morals. A Berlin pastor 
 recently wrote in the Vossische Zeitwig : ' Do you think it 
 contrary to Christianity for our soldiers to shoot down these 
 vermin, the Belgian and French assassins, men, women and 
 children, and to lay their houses in dust and ashes?' and 
 answered his question in the negative.^ Ammianus was 
 ignorant enough to suppose that Christianity exhorted men 
 to eschew all courses save the straight way of justice and 
 clemency ; but then he did not pretend to be a Christian. His 
 philosophy of war was that of the German War Book, tempered 
 by an honourable dislike for treachery of all sorts ; and, if he 
 thought that extreme danger might justify anything, he is no 
 worse than the great majority of men have always been. 
 
 A true estimate of our historian's moral quality can be more 
 certainly reached through a consideration of his attitude upon 
 the great topic of civil justice. War is at best a barbarous 
 thing ; and the wars of the fourth century, being conducted 
 by barbarous armies on both sides, were not calculated to 
 foster a code of clemency. If Ammianus, living through an 
 age during which the Empire was fighting for its life, is not 
 always too scrupulous, we may make allowances for any 
 ^ Times, Lit. Sttpp., Jan. 20, 1916.
 
 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HLSTORIANS 19 
 
 hardness of tone which we detect in him. But the break-down 
 in the administration of Imperial Justice moves him to righteous 
 passion. His own city of Antioch \Vas the scene of two frightful 
 persecutions, one under the beautiful young tyrant Gallus, and 
 the other under the insanely cruel and suspicious Valens. 
 Innocent men were tortured to death by the score. Delation 
 flourished ; the forms of justice were flouted ; no one felt secure. 
 The later of these two persecutions touched Ammianus very 
 nearly. He was himself witness of many of the terrible scenes 
 which were enacted in the law-court, the prison, or the amphi- 
 theatre. He heard the creaking of the instruments of torture, 
 the cries of the victims, the hoarse and cruel ejaculations of the 
 executioner. Some of his own friends were among the innocents 
 who perished. One particular case branded itself upon his 
 memory as, above all others, calling for vengeance. The young 
 philosopher, Simonides, whose grave and stoical reticence had 
 exasperated the savage mind of the Emperor, was burned alive. 
 ' He quitted life as if it were a mad mistress, smiled at the 
 sudden ruin of the passing moments and died without a quiver.' 
 Simonides was executed in private. The mass of innocent 
 conspirators were murdered in the amphitheatre at Antioch 
 amid the loud wails of the spectators. And so far did the 
 campaign of incrimination proceed that in the eastern province 
 people burnt their libraries for fear that the possession of some 
 treatise or other might furnish ground for a criminal charge. 
 
 The sombre story of these judicial murders closes with an 
 eloquent apostrophe to the spirit of humane wisdom which 
 shines through the classical literature of Greece and Rome ; 
 
 ' O glorious wisdom, gift of heaven to happy mortals, who 
 hast often refined their corrupt natures, how many evils wouldst 
 thou have corrected in these dark times, had it been vouchsafed 
 to Valens to learn through thee that Empire is nothing else, 
 in the opinion of the wise, but care for the well-being of others ! 
 If only he had learnt that it was the part of a good governor 
 to restrain his power, to resist insatiate cupidity and implacable 
 passions, and to know that, in the words of Cicero, the 
 recollection of cruelty makes a miserable old age ! Therefore 
 it behoves every one who is about to pass sentence upon the 
 life and spirit of man, who is a part of'the world and makes up 
 
 P. 2
 
 20 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 the complement of living things, to deliberate long and carefully 
 and to resist headlong impulses, for the deed once done cannot 
 be recalled.' 
 
 The stress laid upon the sanctity of human life as part of 
 the animate universe is very remarkable. 
 
 We suspect, though we cannot bring our suspicions to the 
 proof, that the example of his master, Julian, exercised a deep 
 and enduring influence over the character of A mmianus. Julian 
 was just the kind of man to inspire enthusiasm in a young 
 soldier of sound moral instincts and intellectual aspirations. 
 His frame was strong and athletic, his eyes remarkable for 
 beauty and intelligence, his temperament of that sanguine and 
 impetuous type which specially appeals to young men. When 
 in later life Ammianus comes to compose the full-length 
 portrait of the ' Apostate ', the first trait which strikes him is 
 the heroic air of the sitter. The Emperor was no ordinary 
 man. He was to be classed with the heroes — ' vir profecto 
 heroicis connumerandus ingeniis ' — having that indifference for 
 the comforts and luxuries of life ^which, combined with high 
 courage, brilliant energy, and moral ardour, strikes the mind 
 with an ineffaceable impression of greatness. The pursuit 
 of philosophy, though it may give lustre to the soul, does hot 
 always improve the manners of the student. But it is very 
 clear that Julian was attractive. His retentive memory, his 
 eager excitable interest in the great things of literature and 
 philosophy, his copious and fluent gift of conversation, must 
 have made him a stimulating and perhaps even a fatiguing 
 companion. The philosopher Julian was very unlike the 
 philosopher Kant or the philosopher Frederick the Great. 
 Of that patient, plodding, exploring faculty which goes to the 
 making of metaphysical systems, he was completely innocent. 
 He was, in fact, no more of a philosopher than Napoleon, and 
 no more of a cynic than Carlyle. The principal characteristic 
 of his temperament was a glowing impetuosity. He did 
 everything with a rush and practically nothing on system. 
 He would neglect food or sleep for an interesting book or 
 a metaphysical disquisition, and in disputation would be as 
 careless of his dignity as in battle he was reckless of his life.
 
 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 21 
 
 If we are to judge from his writings, most of them dashed off 
 at white heat, he possessed that rare power of giving complete 
 expression to mind and temperament which is the sure mark 
 of Hterary genius. Now a man of this rushing quality, without 
 reticence or reserve, makes mistakes and easily exposes himself 
 to ridicule, but he is apt to be attractive, as the secretive, 
 cunning, balancing intellect can never hope to be. What is 
 * singular, however, is to find this kind of temperament united 
 to a very high measure of practical competence, for Julian was 
 an excellent soldier, expert in every branch of the military art. 
 Ammianus, who speaks with authority upon such points, 
 commends his command of the principles of siege warfare, his 
 skill in the selection of healthy spots for camps, his tactical 
 versatility in battle, his signal power over his troops, and the 
 sage principles on which his outposts and defences were 
 managed. And there can be no doubt that these soldierly 
 aptitudes secured an additional measure of respect for qualities 
 which are not commonly met with in the camp. 
 
 Among these qualities, Ammianus must have been princi- 
 pally affected by Julian's passionate enthusiasm for the ancient 
 culture. An official patronage of letters is one of the most 
 depressing stocks-in-trade of monarchs ; but Julian's attitude 
 towards literature was neither official nor patronizing. It is 
 indeed one of the charms of this singular character, that he 
 preserved upon the throne all the disinterested reverence for 
 learning of the genuine student. His court and camp were 
 thronged by philosophers ; and he spent the last moments of 
 his life discussing the mysteries of the soul with two learned 
 experts — father-confessors they may perhaps be called — who 
 had been drawn in his train to the distant waters of the Tigris. 
 Such enthusiasm, coming from so exalted a quarter, can hardly 
 have failed to kindle a flame of emulation among minds 
 susceptible of culture, the more so when we try to conjure up 
 the quality of Julian's talk (and this may be naturally inferred 
 from his writings), with its rich and easy command of literary 
 allusion, its speed and vehemence, and above all its perpetual 
 concern with the loftiest interests of mankind. 
 
 On the first contact with a remarkable man we often
 
 22 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 exaggerate both his positive and relative magnitude. We feel 
 the enchantment of genius. We are excited by the glow of 
 a strong character, and we do not stop to measure or compare. 
 But, if this was so with Ammianus in his original estimate of 
 Julian, it cannot be said that a cool and true perspective is 
 lacking to the deliberate judgement of his later life. The truth 
 is that an important side of Julian's character was alien, if not 
 unsympathetic, to the lay intelligence of Ammianus. Though ^ 
 the Emperor had abandoned Christianity, religion was still the 
 primary interest of his life. He conceived it to be his mission 
 to oppose to Christianity a State religion compounded of the 
 old creeds of the pagan world but animated by a new and 
 more fervent spirit. In this campaign, which was conducted 
 with desperate energy, Julian received inspiration with equal 
 impartiality from the poets and thinkers of ancient Greece, 
 from the mystical doctors of Neo-platonic philosophy as well 
 as from vulgar quacks and thaumaturgists ; and his theology 
 was a vessel into which every liquid, good, bad, and indifferent, 
 had been indiscriminately poured. The centre of his system 
 was the worship of the sun-god, who was regarded as the 
 supreme embodiment of the energy, spirit, and intellect by 
 which the Universe is ruled. Monotheism was in the air ; and 
 Julian, who was sensitive to the spiritual currents of his time, 
 acknowledges the force of its appeal. But the gods of the 
 ancient mythology were not to be dispossessed by an Oriental 
 intruder ; and place was found in the new system for the 
 traditional polytheism of Greece, Rome, and the Nearer East. 
 
 All this religious side of Julian's activity was indifferent, if 
 not distasteful, to Ammianus. He was by nature 2. politiqtic, 
 with an ingrained distrust of ecstasy and enthusiasm ; and it 
 is like his Roman love of reserve to single out among the 
 defects of Julian's character his volubility and not infrequent 
 converse with persons of low degree, and to comment with 
 some asperity upon the extremes of his sacrificial zeal. So, 
 although he makes a hero of Julian, he is discriminating in 
 praise and does not try to slur over defects. He comments, 
 for instance, unfavourably upon his habit of asking litigants to 
 what religion they belonged, and denounces in the strongest
 
 , THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 23 
 
 terms the cruel edict which forbade Christian masters of 
 rhetoric and grammar to teach in the schools. In general it 
 may be said that his portrait is fully substantiated by Julian's 
 written remains, and that this singular body of literature 
 affords the best proof of the discernment which Ammianus 
 brought to bear upon the characters of his history. We read 
 the letters, the orations, and the satires, and then return to 
 Ammianus to find that the strength and weakness of the 
 writer's curious and attractive temperament have been duly 
 noted. Perhaps a modern historian would seemore to admire 
 in the religious nature of this Crusader against the Cross and 
 less in his military achievements. But in essential points, there 
 will be no disagreement from this, one of the most remarkable 
 studies of character in the whole range of history. 
 
 But, however highly we may be disposed to rate the gift of 
 personal portraiture, it is not the principal treasure of the 
 historical mind. A series of cameos, be they as delicate and 
 true as you will, does not, of itself, constitute a history. We 
 ask for more — for nothing less than the intelligent interpretation 
 of a vanished age, so that we may understand not only the 
 motives of the leading actors on the stage, but the general 
 tendencies of the time, the essential springs of change, the 
 elements of strength and weakness, of progress, recuperation , 
 or decay, which may be inferred from the recital of political 
 transactions or from the analysis of the social and economic 
 fabric, and above all so that we may form a just view of the 
 political and social problems of the age. In the highest 
 sense of the term, Ammianus is no philosophic historian. He 
 has neither the moral depth nor the intellectual grasp which is 
 necessary to the grand style in history ; and, if we were com- 
 pelled solely to rely upon his evidence for our knowledge of the 
 life of the Romans during the later half of the fourth century, 
 some essential elements would be wanting to the picture. But 
 at least it may be said that he enables us to realize, through 
 his own vivid feeling of their importance, two contrasted and 
 portentous facts, the power of the barbarian world and the 
 decay of Roman society. His graphic and vigorous sketches 
 of the Isaurians, the Persians, the Saracens, and the Huns, his
 
 24 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 admirable story of the Gothic invasion of Thrace and of the 
 terrific fighting at Adrianople — where Rome experienced 
 a defeat more crushing than any since Cannae — the care with 
 which he enumerates and characterizes the barbarian tribes 
 who were pressing everywhere upon the Roman defences, and 
 more particularly the attention which he devotes to the various 
 manifestations of the military art to be found among the 
 antagonists of the Empire — all this side of his work was not 
 only relevant to immediate political needs, but has an enduring 
 importance as throwing light upon one of the greatest changes 
 in recorded history. 
 
 We are always a little distrustful of the critic who denounces 
 the decadence of his contemporaries, for every generation can 
 ,be shown to be corrupt on a careful sjelection of the facts, and 
 every society takes a morbid pleasure in the recital of its own 
 manifest degeneracy. It is not surprising that a veteran from 
 the provinces, trained at the ascetic court of Julian, should 
 have found much to reprehend in Roman society. And, as 
 Juvenal was still one of the most popular authors of the day, 
 we may well imagine that a lecture on contemporary history 
 would gain vogue through a spice of moral denunciation. But 
 the real strength of the indictment of Ammianus does not 
 consist so much in his portrayal of the* profligate manners of 
 the Roman people as in the crushing evidence"' which he 
 adduces of a general infection of cruelty, incompetence, and 
 disorder, poisoning the whole body politic of the Empire. The 
 strongest Roman fortress on the Tigris was sacrificed through 
 a palace intrigue directed against Ursicinus, the ablest com- 
 mander in the East. And such an incident does not stand 
 alone. When the armies of the Goths were pouring over the 
 Balkan Peninsula ' like the lava of Mount Etna ', the generals 
 selected to oppose them were not only ignorant and rash, but 
 actually sacrificed an important military advantage in order 
 that they might traffic in slaves with the enemy. But perhaps 
 the most signal evidence of the disease in the body politic is 
 supplied by the conduct of the emperors themselves. Con- 
 stantius was in some ways above the average level of conduct. 
 He was chaste, temperate, laborious, a diligent cultivator of
 
 thp: last of the latin historians 25 
 
 • 
 
 learning and scrupulous in his distribution of patronage. But 
 his tyranny was terrific. The faintest suspicion — and the 
 atmosphere of his Court was poisoned by the breath of traducers 
 — was enough to set in motion the machinery of the most 
 awful persecution. The same evil mania, resulting in the same 
 wild orgy of Asiatic cruelty, afflicted the sluggish and illiterate 
 Valens. Even the better emperors interfered with the course 
 of justice, and were assailed by the voices of intriguers who 
 wished to use the machinery of government for plunder or 
 revenge. And the most sinister feature in this sombre story 
 of panic and savage violence is that the voice of protest is 
 silent. There are epigrams, there are bread-riots and wine- 
 riots and military revolts, but there are no organs of liberty. 
 The Senate of Rome is a powerless shadow. There are no 
 parties formed on a common basis of political principles. The 
 civilized world is governed by an Oriental tyranny. 
 
 'We might censure the vices of his style, the disorder and 
 perplexity of his narrative ; but we must now take leave of this 
 impartial historian, and reproach is silenced by our regret for 
 such an irreparable loss.' So does Gibbon wave his stately 
 adieu to ' the accurate and faithful guide ', whose steps he has 
 followed with punctuality, sarcasm, and profit. The records of 
 the Roman Empire are lamentably imperfect ; and one of the 
 most curious features in literary history is the complete dis- 
 appearance of a series of autobiographies written by some of 
 the most famous of the emperors. What would we not give for 
 the memoirs of Augustus and Vespasian, for the autobiographies 
 of Hadrian and Severus, or the Commentaries of Gonstantine ? 
 Tliey have perished ; and no fragment has been quoted 
 sufficiently substantial to enable us to estimate our loss. For 
 centuries, too, the work of Ammianus was lost to Europe ; 
 and it was not until Poggio's discovery of the Hersfeld 
 manuscript that this invaluable writer was restored to European 
 scholarship. 
 
 1 he fifteenth century was a Ciceronian age ; and in the 
 circle of Italian purists the solecisms of the Syrian veteran 
 were felt to stand in need of apology. The cditio priuccps 
 by Sabinus (Rome, 1494) is prefaced by a letter to the Bishop
 
 26 THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS 
 
 of Bergamo, in which the editor craves that his author may 
 not be entirely condemned for his use of the Latin word for 
 ' deacon '. We do not "know whether the Bishop was able to 
 condone so grave a departure from classical usage. But to the 
 modern eye it is one of the chief merits of this honest writer 
 that his Latinity is not too pure, that it bears traces of the 
 mingling of Greek, Latin, and Christian elements, and that it 
 reflects with care and fidelity the conditions and transactions 
 of the age in which he lived. 
 
 The Political lVriti7tgs of Rotisseait ^ 
 
 THE English opinion of Rousseau, whether as man or 
 publicist, has never been very flattering, and a long 
 series of excellent writers, representing the conservative tradi- 
 tions of the country, have denounced him as the source of 
 most of the unsound political sophistries which vex the sages 
 of mankind. Years before the Confessions had shocked the 
 world with their pitiable revelations of baseness. Dr. Johnson 
 expressed his opinion with characteristic vehemence: 'Rousseau, 
 sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his 
 transportation than that of any felon who has gone from the 
 Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him 
 work in the plantations.' And though we do not say these 
 refreshingly one-sided things now, most normal Englishmen 
 and not a few distinguished Frenchmen do in substance agree 
 with Dr. Johnson and think that Rousseau was a bad man who 
 exercised a bad influence, and that it would have been better 
 for the world if he had never been born. Quite apart from all 
 questions of personal character and temperament, we are apt 
 to think of him as a man of genius who, without any real 
 knowledge of life or history, founded a political philosophy 
 in the clouds. It is not an uncommon view that his teaching 
 
 ^ The Political Writings of Jea7i facques Roitsseau. Edited by C. E. 
 Vaughan. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, 191 5.
 
 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 27 
 
 was responsible for some of the worst excesses of the French 
 Revolution, that he represents that dangerous compound of 
 romantic sentiment and abstract logic which has been for more 
 than a century the bane of French political life, and that in 
 him are to be found the first lineaments of that disastrous 
 theory of the Absolute State 'beyond good and evil' which 
 governs the German conduct of the present war. 
 
 We are an historical people, and we live in an age in which 
 all studies have been brought to the historical test. The 
 revulsion from Rousseau, caused by the fact that he was 
 regarded as the intellectual parent of the French Revolution, has 
 been intensified by the nature of his procedure. We think of 
 him, principally, as the author of the Contrat Social^ a treatise 
 of striking merits and commanding influence, founded, as we 
 know, upon imaginary history and false psychology. And we 
 contrast him unfavourably with the judicious Montesquieu, in 
 \vhose methods of comparative jurisprudence we discover that 
 blessed principle of relativity in which modern political 
 prudence finds a welcome refuge. 
 
 To all this kind of depreciation Dr. Vaughan's elaborate 
 edition of the Political Works of Rousseau does in some 
 measure furnish a very necessary modification. It is well, in 
 the first place, to be reminded that the Contrat Social, itself the 
 fragment of a larger project, is only one of many political 
 treatises composed by Rousseau, and that apart from this 
 famous manifesto there are other tracts, less abstract in form 
 and shaped with more immediate reference to historical 
 circumstance, notably the Considerations sur le Goiivernement 
 de Pologne, which the late Lord Acton picked out from among 
 the writings of Rousseau as the most valuable of all his works. 
 And even from the Contrat. Social itself there are, as Dr. 
 Vaughan points out, opposite impressions to be gathered. The 
 earlier chapters which principally arrest the attention of the 
 reader are individualist and abstract. But the later part of the 
 book develops a collectivist theory of the State and is 
 distinguished by some sense of those climatic and historical 
 influences which Rousseau, in this country at least, is commonly 
 reputed to have ignored.
 
 28 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 
 
 But, quite apart from this call to revise traditional verdicts, 
 Dr. Vaughan's edition is a distinguished contribution to 
 scholarship, providing us, as it does, for the first time with 
 a pure text founded upon a careful examination of the i^anu- 
 scripts, and adding to the existing stock of published material 
 some scattered pieces of reflection which have never previously- 
 seen the light. These fragments do not in themselves constitute 
 a substantial addition to the body of Rousseau's philosophy, 
 for they contain no ideas which cannot be found in writings 
 previously published. They do, however, shed light upon 
 Rousseau's laboured method of throwing detached reflections 
 upon paper, to be subsequently woven together into a continuous 
 tissue, and so prepare the mind to expect that, in a system of 
 thought built up so painfully, there will be some insoluble and 
 contradictory elements. 
 
 There are few subjects less worthy of discussion and more 
 often discussed than the inconsistencies of great authors. In 
 proportion as a man feels deeply and is capable of expressing 
 his feeling with point and eloquence, he is likely, if his sym- 
 pathies be wide and various, to be betrayed into propositions 
 which are not easily combined in the same philosophical 
 system. Not that Rousseau was defective in tenacity of 
 principle, or to be dismissed as a mere rhetorical writer sacri- 
 ficing everything to effect. There is a very hard kernel of 
 business in Rousseau, despite his vagaries and sentimentalities, 
 and one proof of it is that he has managed to engrave indelibly 
 certain very practical conclusions about law and politics upon 
 so keen-witted a people as the French. But he undoubtedly 
 was a great artist, and we do not expect artists to speak as if 
 they were on oath in a witness-box, least of all when they 
 clearly take delight in affronting the conventional prejudices 
 of mankind. Besides, it was Rousseau's method to make 
 a clear-cut incisive effect with every stroke. He does not blur 
 the salient outline of his phrase with adverb, parenthesis, or 
 participial clause. If qualifications be needed, they will appear 
 later on in the work, shining in their own substantive right, 
 brightly burnished and acute. So in the Contrat Social the 
 Republic is declared to 'be the only legitimate form of
 
 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 29 
 
 government. Yet all the objections and drawbacks to Demo- 
 cracy are clearly apprehended and etched in high relief. 
 
 Political philosophers have generally been persons of the 
 tabulating order of mind, but the distinction of Rousseau is 
 that, like Plato and Coleridge, he was a poet. In a fragment 
 written in old age and printed for the first time by Dr. Vaughan, 
 he'says of himself: ' My whole life has been nothing but one 
 long reverie, divided into chapters by my daily walks.' 
 A dreamer, but with forked lightnings in the cloud, a confirmed 
 melancholy, yet cherishing sublime illusions of hope, lyrical and 
 romantic, yet with the strange capacity of putting everything 
 which he writes into the most exciting and startling form, he 
 is clearly not one of those logical people who repay a dry 
 mechanical analysis. It is, of course, easy to trace a genealogy 
 for Rousseau's theories. We may say, if we please, that he 
 got his ' Social Contract ' from Locke and his ' General Will * 
 from Diderot, his division of legislative and executive functions 
 from Montesquieu, and his political economy from the 
 Physiocrats ; and, with very little exercise of ingenuity, it 
 would be possible to contend that he had nothing new to 
 announce at all. But all this will tell us nothing as to the 
 sources of his power. The secret of Rousseau was not purely 
 intellectual : it consisted in the fact that, while endowed with 
 fine intellectual penetration, he felt certain simple things about 
 the rights and wrongs of human life very deeply, things of 
 which there was already a confused and general consciousness 
 in the society of his age, and which his language of matchless 
 ardour and perspicuity first rendered articulate to the world. 
 
 One of these feelings was a romantic enthusiasm for nature, 
 and, as connected with nature, for simplicity. It was part of 
 that exquisiteness of sense which made him so delicate a judge 
 of the voices of birds, so passionate in the presence of mountain 
 scenes and flaming sunsets, that he should view the life of the 
 city, with its hard pavements and jarring noises and not easily 
 intelligible conventions of society, as an offence against the 
 natural reason of man. But there is more than one way of 
 admiring the simplicities of nature, and Rousseau's way was 
 not altogether simple. Mingled with the genuine passion of
 
 30 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 
 
 the poet was the acid consciousness of the vagabond and 
 the outcast, sensuous, restless, ill at ease, tormented with 
 suspicions and humiliating memories, and, even in the midst 
 of fame and flattery, feeling himself singular and estranged 
 from the human kind. So that it was not altogether out of a 
 youthful love of paradox that, in his first essay, the * Discours 
 sur les Sciences ' (omitted, by the way, in Dr. Vaughan's 
 edition), he championed the extravagant thesis that the human 
 soul was corrupted in proportion as Science and Art approached 
 perfection, that astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence 
 of flattery and lies, geometry of avarice, physical science of 
 vain curiosity, even morality itself of human pride, for the 
 apostle of the civic virtues was in some moods himself more 
 than half a misanthrope. 
 
 And yet, when we have said this, we are at once arrested by 
 the recollection of his quick and loving sympathy for the poor, 
 and by his faith in the value of ordinary men. * One of the 
 great causes of the sterility of our modern historians', he 
 would say, ' is their lack of interest : they have nothing for 
 the people.' The proposition is true also of the political 
 philosophers : of Hobbes, whose genius he so warmly admired ; 
 of Locke, from whom he drew much of his formulated opinion ; 
 of Montesquieu, whose influence on his speculations is clearly 
 apparent to the unprejudiced reader. They, too, have nothing 
 for the people. And part of the originality of Rousseau 
 consisted in the fact that he drew attention to the claims of 
 undistinguished, uncultivated humanity. ' Je parle des moeurs, 
 des coutumes, et surtout de I'opinion, partie inconnue a nos 
 politiques, mais de laquelle depend le succes de toutes les 
 autres.' That the guidance of opinion was the true secret of 
 statesmanship was a startling revelation, indicating a displace- 
 ment of all the established political values. 'There was a time ', 
 wrote Kant, ' when I despised the people because they did not 
 care for intellectual progress. Rousseau brought me to a truer 
 state of mind. My foolish vanity has disappeared. I have 
 learnt to honour men.' It all seems very simple and elementary 
 now ; it is in all our text-books ; but it needs either a great 
 war or a great genius to make us really feel this sentiment of
 
 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 31 
 
 hupan fraternity which Rousseau's eloquence made popular 
 in Europe. 
 
 A third influence, leading to a view of the State sometimes 
 difficult to reconcile with the individualist outcome of these 
 romantic sympathies, was the enthusiasm for civic virtue 
 which he derived in part from the traditions of his native 
 Geneva, but chiefly from a study of classical antiquity. Not 
 that Rousseau can be numbered among the scholars. He 
 had no Greek and very little Latin, and for him the living* 
 residue of the ancient world was principally enshrined in the 
 ' Lives ' of Plutarch, read in a French translation, and so 
 ravenously devoured that they could be repeated from memory. 
 So it came about that, while he would not wiUingly allude to 
 contemporary politics, the examples of Hellenic and Roman 
 patriotism were never far from his mind. He would say that 
 he was more familiar with the streets of Athens than with his 
 native Geneva ; and from this pertinacious Classicism, in which 
 he was not indeed peculiar, but only more intense and one-sided 
 than his contemporaries, there arose in him that passionate 
 restoration of the civic ideal which is his main contribution to 
 the history of European morals. 
 
 Indeed, although he wrote on many topics, such as religion, 
 music, botany, love, war, his principal concern was public 
 virtue. Contemporaries spoke of him as ' the virtuous Jean 
 Jacques ' because he specialized on virtue and talked about it 
 constantly in a feeling, eloquent, arresting way, so that ladies 
 wept tears of sensibility as they listened to the little man's 
 beautiful voice and watched the play of his black and flashing 
 eyes. It was virtue in the grand old classical style which had 
 taken his heart captive — the virtue of Lycurgus framing laws 
 for Sparta, of Cato dying for the Republic, not the laborious 
 humdrum sacrifice of the modern parliamentary voter who sits 
 upon countless committees and endures a hundred painful 
 speeches to cure the civic drains or to oust the Tory at the 
 next election. And, given the character of French society at 
 that time, the large passionate way in which Rousseau felt 
 about public virtue, about the call of the State and the utter 
 devotion of the true citizen, was the most efi"ective means which
 
 32 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 
 
 4 
 
 could have been devised for diffusing very widely among it^ n 
 and women who had ceased to be interested in public things 
 something of that elevated and heroic conception of political 
 life which is found in the writers of antiquity. 
 
 It is this paramount concern for the being and authority of 
 the State which lies behind the theory of the ' Social Contract '. 
 In a passage in the ' Letters from the Mountain ' Rousseau 
 allows us to see what meaning the doctrine held for him and 
 why he believed in it. The problem before him was to find 
 some sure, indisputable, rational ground for political obligation, 
 some authority for the State other than brute force, and, for 
 this purpose, what could equal mutual agreement ? He did 
 not pledge himself to the historical character of the contract. 
 The important point for him was that the State should be 
 legitimate, and he could see no source of legitimacy other 
 than the rational consent of consciously directed wills. The 
 doctrine of the general will, always omnipotent and always 
 right, followed as a natural sequel, but was vitiated by a fatal 
 confusion between the will of the majority and the will for 
 good. It was a doctrine of extreme collectivism, wholesome 
 as an antidote to the more material and fashionable forms of 
 individualism, but carrying with it as a logical consequence 
 the red spectre of persecution. In a famous chapter of the 
 Contrat Social Rousseau advances with habitual courage to 
 the grim conclusion of his premisses. After contending that 
 it is important for the State that every citizen should have a 
 religion which makes him love his duty, he continues thus : 
 
 ' II y a done une profession de foi purement civile, dont il 
 appartient au souverain de fixer les articles, non pas pr^cisdment 
 comme dogmes de religion, mais comme sentiments de socialite, 
 sans lesquels il est impossible d'etre bon citoyen ni sujet fiddle. 
 Sans pouvoir obliger personne a les croire, il pent bannir de 
 rfetat quiconque ne les croit pas. II peut le bannir, non comme 
 impie, mais comme insociable, comme incapable d'aimer 
 sincerement les lois, la justice, et d'immoler au besoin sa vie a 
 son devoir. Car si quelqu'un, apres avoir reconnu publiquement 
 ces memes dogmes, se conduit comme ne les croyant pas, qu'il 
 soit puni de mort ; il a commis le plus grand des crimes : il a 
 menti devant les lois.'
 
 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 33 
 
 It is true, as Dr. Vaughan reminds us, that Rousseau is not 
 always consistent, and that, in a note to La Noiivelle H^loise, 
 published at the beginning of the year in which this passage 
 was written, a position is taken up entirely at variance with 
 this advocacy of political persecution. Nevertheless it may 
 be noted that Marat publicly commented upon the Contrat 
 Social in the streets of Paris, and that the worst excesses of 
 the Committee of Public Safety may find theoretical justifica- 
 tion in its keen and brilliant argument. 
 
 The doctrine of the State as an end in itself has received so 
 much attention of late, through the hold which it has obtained 
 over the German mind, that it is worth while to consider how 
 far the Prussian theory is contained in the philosophy of 
 Rousseau. In certain very material points the standpoint of 
 ' the virtuous Jean Jacques ' is very different from the pitiless 
 theory Avhich is the foundation of modern German political 
 thinking. Rousseau hated war. So far from regarding war 
 as the medicine of the State, as a great purifying agency, or 
 as an essential condition of human progress, he declared it to 
 be one of the two worst scourges of mankind, and, ' in spite of 
 the horrible theory of Hobbes ', contrary to nature. 
 
 ' L'homme est naturellement pacifique et craintif : au moindrc 
 danger son premier mouvement est de fuir: il ne s'aguerrit 
 qu a force d'habitude et d'exp^rience.' 
 
 So, in the introduction to St. Pierre's Projet de Paix 
 
 perpituelle^ he states with truth and eloquence the tragic 
 
 contrast between the professions and the practice of Europe : 
 
 ' A voir d'un cote les dissensions perpetuelles, les brigandages, 
 les usurpations, les revokes, les guerres, les meurtres qui 
 desolent journalcment ce respectable s^jour des sages, ce 
 brillant asile des sciences et des arts : a considerer nos beaux 
 discours et nos procedes horribles, tant d'humanite dans les 
 maximcs et de cruautc dans les actions, une religion si douce 
 ct une sanguinaire intolerance, une politique si sage dans les 
 livres et si dure dans la pratique, des chefs si bienfaisants et 
 des peuplcs si miserables, des gouvernements si moderns ct 
 des gucrrcs si cruelles, on sait a peine comment concilier ces 
 etranges contrastes ; et cette fraternite pretcnduc des peuplcs 
 (le I'Europe ne senible ctre qu'un nom de derision pour cxprimer 
 avec ironie leur mutuelle animositc.' 
 
 2302 Q
 
 34 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 
 
 And after noting the various seeds of war in the European 
 organism, he points out how impossible it is to derange the 
 cquiHbrium of Europe ; how neither one Power nor a league 
 of two or three Powers could hope to establish a universal 
 dominion ; and how, whatever suppositions may be made, it is 
 improbable that either a prince or a league could henceforth 
 hope to make any considerable change in distribution of 
 ' territory and political force. The solution which suggested 
 itself was, accordingly, a federation of Europe, a scheme of 
 which a partial outline already existed in the German Federa- 
 tion — ' a body redoubtable to foreigners by the extent and by 
 the number and valour of its people ;. but useful to all by 
 reason of its institution, which, by depriving it of the means 
 and will to conquer, makes it the stumbling-block of conquerors '. 
 It is curious to reflect that, to the thinker of the eighteenth 
 century, the German Federation offered the chief guarantee for 
 the preservation of the balance of power in Europe, and 
 furnished to pacifist thinkers the principal hope for a realization 
 of their dream. So, too, a wise professor at Gottingen, whose 
 lectures the youthful Bismarck may sometimes have attended, 
 sharing in some measure this older opinion, ventured to predict 
 that, if ever the German peoples were united in a single State, 
 they would constitute a menace to the liberties of Europe. 
 
 The speculations of Rousseau about war and peace, his 
 view that no aggressive war can be just, and that wars should 
 only be waged to maintain the equality between peoples, 
 would be dismissed as fantastic by the modern professors of 
 ' Realpolitik '. He lived before the age of fierce nationalism, 
 and conceived of Europe as ' a real society, with its religion, 
 morals, customs, and even laws', as, indeed, in a sense it truly 
 is, and may again be conceived to be. He anticipates also 
 some of the modern arguments directed against the supposed 
 economic advantages of conquest. He speaks of the destruction 
 of lives in battle as the most apparent and sensible, but at the 
 same time the least grave, of the losses incurred in war. There 
 are other losses, less easy to repair — the children who are not 
 born, the fields which are left untilled, the grinding taxes and 
 the interrupted commerce. The true power of a State consists
 
 thp: political writings of ROUSSEAU 35 
 
 in its men, and every subject who is born is as good as an 
 enemy slain. 
 
 It would be easy also to collect from the body of Rousseau's 
 political writings a series of passages expressly directed against 
 the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State. Indeed, not the 
 least of Rousseau's services to political thinking, and certainly 
 one of the principal sources of his influence, is that he conceives 
 of politics as a department of morality, bringing every institu- 
 tion to the touchstone of right and wrong, and entertaining no 
 exculpatory pleas founded upon ancient use. So that, although 
 the doctrine of the general will might, and indeed did, lead 
 straight to the establishment of political tyranny, it was no 
 part of Rousseau's real outlook upon life that such should be 
 the result. ' That government should be permitted to sacrifice 
 an innocent person to the safety of the multitude, I hold this 
 maxim to be one of the most execrable* ever invented by 
 tyranny ; none could be more false, more dangerous, more 
 directly opposed to the fundamental laws of society.' There 
 could be no clearer affirmation of the limits which ethical 
 feeling imposes upon the exercise of material power. 
 
 Another feature of Rousseau's political thought, difficult to 
 reconcile with the collectivist theory of the State, is his steady 
 belief in the rights of property. ' It is certain that the right of 
 property is the most sacred of all the rights of citizens, and, in 
 some respects, more important than liberty itself ; and he 
 goes on to speak of property as ' the true foundation of civil 
 society and as the guarantee of the engagements of citizens '. 
 In part this deference to the rights of property may have been 
 due to the influence of Locke, who makes the preservation of 
 property the prime end of the establishment of civil govern- 
 ment, in part to Rousseau's enthusiasm for agriculture. That 
 it was based on no deep speculative analysis did not prevent 
 its being a very genuine and deep-seated feeling in Rousseau's 
 mind, nor was its inconsistency with other parts of his political 
 doctrine a bar to its subsec^uent influence. The French Re- 
 volution was not directed against property, but against 
 privilege, and both Danton and Robespierre defended private 
 ownership to an acclaiming audience : indeed, the preservation 
 
 c a
 
 36 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 
 
 of property was one of the dearest objects of the newly 
 enfranchised peasantry of France. 
 
 Again, it does not seem as if Rousseau ever consciously 
 thought of the State as Power : he thought of it as Will, and 
 this word to him carried with it no relentless associations. He 
 defends his ideal State as a benignant democracy acting 
 through a popular legislature and an executive of experts — 
 for he was no believer in the democratic control of foreign 
 
 ' policy — and he preferred that it should be of a modest area, 
 choosing to assume that public spirit must necessarily be more 
 vivid and intense in a small State, and that languor and in- 
 difference were congenital to the citizens of great countries. 
 In such a preference he may have been specially influenced 
 by his patriotic regard for the prowess of the small republic 
 of Geneva, to whose achievements in peace and war he has 
 dedicated a noble panegyric ; but it is doubtful whether local 
 pride would have been sufficient to determine his views, had 
 not the general political condition of Europe afforded them 
 a plausible measure of support. To the observer of the 
 eighteenth century the case for the small State was by no 
 
 . means desperate : the whole of Central Europe was a mosaic 
 of political fragments, and there seemed no reason then to 
 expect that the little republics and principalities of Germany 
 and Italy would ever be combined into national States. In- 
 deed, the decay of Spain, the debility of France, the anarchy 
 of Poland, the palace revolutions of Russia furnished some 
 ground for thinking that the true solution for all the political 
 troubles of Europe was to be found in some scheme of federa- 
 tion which would combine the advantages of the small with 
 those of the great States. Among these advantages Rousseau 
 was never tempted to reckon mere material wealth. He 
 thought that poor nations had always fought and would 
 always fight better than rich ones, that commercial prosperity 
 was a curse in disguise, that the representative system was an 
 imposture, and that true ideal democracy could only be prac- 
 tised in miniature. The idea of a nation organizing itself as a 
 .standing army was utterly foreign to him, though he may truly 
 be described as the spiritual father of all the conscripts. ' For
 
 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 37 
 
 a new people whose public interest is still vigorous, all the 
 citizens are soldiers in time of war, and there are no soldiers 
 in time of peace.' So little did he anticipate the age of Krupp. 
 If the worth of a publicist is to be assessed by his power of 
 divination, by his capacity of picking out from the confused 
 mass of contemporary experience the shaping forces of the 
 future and of seeing the world as it will surely become when 
 these forces have acquired a further degree of momentum and 
 influence, then Rousseau will not take a very high rank. It 
 would be impossible to find in his writings any appreciation 
 of the importance either of Colonial development, or of the 
 relations between the New World and the Old, or of the in- 
 fluence likely to be exerted by physical science upon human 
 affairs, or of the national as apart from the civic spirit as a 
 factor in the formation of great nations. He thought that 
 Europe was destined to be conquered by the Tartars ; he be- 
 lieved that economic development was injurious to military 
 power ; he concluded that England was on the road to ruin 
 for the same absurd reason which. led him to argue that the 
 disaster of the Lisbon earthquake was due rather to the sins of 
 the Portuguese than to the cruel caprices of Nature. It was 
 a sufficient indication of decay that London was a big city, 
 that big cities were wrong, that agriculture constituted the 
 strength of a nation, and that the size of London was incon- 
 sistent with a flourishing state of the farming industry. Such 
 a verdict indicates a lack of elementary economic knowledge. 
 We need not quarrel with Rousseau for sharing the ordinary 
 physiocratic view" as to the importance of agriculture as a 
 source of wealth, but it is a serious disqualification in a publicist 
 — even in one whose concern in public affairs is mainly guided 
 by ethical considerations — to condemn commerce and indus- 
 try ab initio, to hold that industrial development is unfavour- 
 able to the growth of population, and that the agricultural 
 industry itself is not considerably helped by the markets for 
 its produce which the development of great towns inevitably 
 opens out to the farmer. 
 
 Nevertheless, as Burke may be regarded as the intellectual 
 parent of the British I^mpire, so to the genius of this vagabond
 
 38 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 
 
 son of a Genevan watchmaker we may attribute the outlines of 
 that French Rcpubh'c which, for a second time, has astonished 
 Europe by the intense and ardent quah'ty of its patriotic 
 devotion. We doubt whether there is another instance in the 
 history of literature of a writer who has combined so many 
 fantastic ideas and unrealized prophecies with a central core 
 of political doctrine which has become so closely intertwined 
 with the intellectual process and habit of a great nation. For 
 this influence it is customary to assign literary reasons, as if any 
 assemblage of literary qualities, however imposing in range and 
 brilliance, would in itself suffice to explain a result so solid and 
 permanent. The truth is that Rousseau's doctrine won upon 
 its merits, the least of which was that, being subversive of an 
 outworn and unpopular system, it chimed in with the rising 
 spirit of revolt. But what gave to it an abiding influence was 
 the fact that it traced with Euclidean precision the outline of 
 a new form of State founded upon the popular will, controlled 
 by the nation in the general interest, and raised clear of those 
 sinister and sectional interests which had so long perplexed 
 the course of public affairs in Europe. 
 
 One of the implications of this new polity was a scheme of 
 national education : 
 
 ' Un enfant, en ouvrant les yeux, doit voir la patrie, et 
 jusqu'a la mort ne doit plus voir qu'clle. Tout vrai republicain 
 suga avec le lait de sa mere I'amour de sa patrie ; c'est-a-dire, 
 des lois et de la liberte. Get amour suit tout son existence : il 
 ne voit que sa patrie, il ne vit que pour elle ; sitot qu'il est seul 
 il est nul ; sitot qu'il n'a plus de patrie, il n'est plus ; et s'il 
 n'est pas mort, il est pis.' ^ 
 
 These sentences taken from a treatise written in old age, 
 with a characteristic note of rhetorical exaggeration, represent 
 one important side of Rousseau's teaching on education. It 
 is the duty of the State to form the mind and character of 
 its' citizens, and an obligation rests upon parents to see that 
 their children are duly indoctrinated with respect for the laws 
 and institutions of their own country. The practical con- 
 sequences which, both in Europe and America, have flowed 
 
 ^ Considerations siir le Gouvernement de Pologne.
 
 thp: political writings of ROUSSEAU 39 
 
 from the application of these principles are too complex to be 
 lightly assessed, and have not been unattended by drawbacks. 
 If the civic festivals of the Revolution were comparatively inno- 
 cent (though generally tedious and ultimately mechanical), the 
 Napoleonic application of the doctrine was a disaster to intel- 
 lectual liberty, only less fatal because the system was less 
 efficient and thoroughgoing than that which has been inflicted 
 upon the political mind of Germany by the educational control 
 of a military empire. 
 
 There remains the curious paradox that this apostle of civic 
 training composed an elaborate treatise on education from 
 which it would be difficult to gather that the inculcation of 
 civic duty was any part of the business of the instructor of 
 youth. Emile is educated privately, and with no direct 
 reference to any constituted theories of public policy. He 
 learns no republican catechism, he is drawn to no public games 
 or festivals, and he receives an amount of individual attention 
 which is inconsistent with any general scheme of national 
 pedagogy. Dr. Vaughan argues that in all this there is no 
 real incompatibility of doctrine, seeing that, in the opening 
 pages of the treatise, Rousseau avows his conviction that a 
 public education is always to be preferred wherever a true 
 public life exists. If then Emile is to be educated by a private 
 tutor, it is because ' the civic spirit, the very idea of the father- 
 land and the citizen, has been swept away '. It is, however, 
 worth noting that Emile receives little or no instruction which 
 might not be given in a modern elementary school. His 
 education, in other words, though administered on refined 
 principles of psycjiology, is popular and general in its extent. 
 He learns reading, writing, and arithmetic, singing and drawing, 
 the principles of undenominational religion, national history 
 taught orally by narrative. He receives physical and technical 
 instruction, is taught by object lessons, is encouraged in the 
 practice of observation, so that, without any direct patriotic 
 training, he may yet become a useful member of society. The 
 Committee of Public Safety thought so well of the programme 
 that they attempted to carry it into practice in the schools of 
 the French Republic.
 
 40 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 
 
 The day has gone by when a philosopher, eminent for his 
 abstract meditations, receives an invitation to legislate for a 
 community in trouble about its soul. But in the eighteenth 
 century there was a wide and innocent belief in the virtues 
 of philosophy, and the illustrious author of Emilc and the 
 Contrat Social received two separate calls to prescribe foi* the 
 maladies of a State. The first summons came in the summer 
 of 1764 from Buttafuoco, a Corsican soldier of distinction, who 
 appears to have been acting at the instigation, or with the 
 authority, of Paoli. The letter of invitation could not have 
 been couched in more gratifying terms. 
 
 ' Our island,' wrote Buttafuoco, *as you have very well said, 
 sir, is capable of receiving a good system of laws. But it needs 
 a legislator. It needs a man of your principles, a man whose 
 happiness is independent of us ; a man who knows human 
 nature from top to bottom ; who, husbanding a distant glory, 
 may be willing to work in one age and to enjoy in another. 
 Condescend to trace the plan of a political system and to co- 
 operate in the felicity of a whole nation.' 
 
 Rousseau replied with great good sense that he lacked experi- 
 ence of affairs, ' which alone throws more light upon the art 
 of government than all the meditations in the world ', and 
 that six months in Corsica, did his health permit, would give 
 him more instruction than a hundred volumes. But, since a 
 voyage was impossible, he asked to be supplied with ample 
 materials for a judgement, adding to a well-conceived list of 
 requirements that it was very much better to have too much 
 than too little, and that no information capable of throwing 
 light upon the national genius of Corsica could be too detailed. 
 This is not the procedure of a visionary, but though the Projet 
 de Constitution pom- la Corse (written in the autumn of 1765) is 
 clearly based upon the evidence, apparently none too copious, 
 which had been supplied by Buttafuoco, it is, in effect, a 
 charming dream. The Corsicans are advised to abjure currency 
 and commerce, to avoid town life and to spread themselves 
 evenly over the surface of the island, irrespective of inequalities 
 in the fertility of the soil. Forced labour and dues in kind 
 supply the needs of this primitive and stationary community
 
 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 41 
 
 of peasant farmers. An agrarian law fixes a limit to property, 
 sumptuary laws rigidly curtail expenditure, for the spirit of the 
 polity is not so much freedom as equality. ' II faut que tout 
 le monde vive et que personne ne s'enrichisse, c'est la le 
 principe fondamental de la prosperite de la nation.' No 
 Cdrsican is to enrich himself. Had Rousseau ever, among his 
 protracted meditations, considered the extent and quality of the 
 interference which would be necessary to prevent a Corsican 
 from enriching himself, or from pursuing any other elemental 
 human ambition (conquest, for instance) to which he h^ a 
 mirtd ? But we may be sure that any objections, founded upon 
 the imperfections of human nature, would have been brushed 
 aside with serene and implacable logic. He would show tHe 
 Corsicans what they should do, but whether they were likely 
 to be wise or foolish was none of his affair. 
 
 The most careful and detailed of the political writings 
 of Rousseau was an ceiivre de ci\'constancc , composed in old 
 age and posthumously published. The Considerations stir le 
 Gouvernement de Pologne was executed by request during 
 that period of troubled uncertainty in Polish politics which 
 immediately preceded the First Partition. To Rousseau no 
 task could have been more congenial than to write prescrip- 
 tions for a spirited people who had taken arms against the 
 autocratic Empress of Russia and were famed through Europe 
 for their inveterate habit of anarchy. The Poles seemed to 
 have the root of patriotism, the promise of nationhood. 
 He is, accordingly, remarkably tender to the traditions and 
 institutions of a race so singularly distinguished from the 
 general level of European cynicism and selfishness. He will 
 allow the dear people to keep their serfs, their nobles, even 
 their monarchy. He acknowledges that they suffer from 
 anarchy, and that two of the causes of anarchy are the libcrunL 
 veto and the right of confederation. Yet he will not condemn 
 these curious vestiges of barbarous antiquity. The libcnun 
 veto, ' a brilliant right rendered pernicious by its abuse ', is 
 to continue under limitations and safeguards, one safeguard 
 being that it is to be confined to fundamental laws, another 
 that the single voter who blocks a law must answer b}- the
 
 42 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 
 
 loss of his head if, six months later, his action is not endorsed 
 by a tribunal. 
 
 The right of confederation was legalized civil war. Rousseau 
 applauds it as 'a masterpiece of policy, the buckler, the 
 asylum, the sanctuary of the Constitution '. So decisive 
 a means of expressing the general will must not, at any cost, 
 be sacrificed. It was the opinion of the most reasonable party 
 in Poland that the sovereign cure for the ills of the kingdom 
 would be the establishment of a strong hereditary monarchy. 
 'It is a great evil ', observes Rousseau, ' that the chief of the 
 nation should be the born enemy of liberty,' an observation 
 hardly calculated to encourage monarchical sentiment. Never- 
 theless, a monarch Poland must have. Republics are only 
 suitable to small States and, though it is desirable that 
 Poland should be divided into thirty-three provinces united 
 by a federal tie, the federation will be of the size which demands 
 the supervision of a monarch. At all costs, however, the 
 monarchy must be elective. ' An elective monarch with the 
 most absolute power would be better for Poland than an 
 hereditary King who was a cipher.' Rousseau is aware of 
 what, indeed, was notorious throughout Europe, that one of 
 the chronic sources of intrigue and disorder in Poland con- 
 sisted in the elective character of the monarchy. He proposes 
 as a remedy that the monarch should always be a Pole and 
 that he should be chosen by lot from the Senators. Sensible 
 as some of his suggestions are, it would, on the whole, be 
 difficult to conceive a series of recommendations less calcu- 
 lated to establish the tottering State upon firm and stable 
 foundations. 
 
 And yet, in these ' reveries ', as Rousseau himself calls them, 
 there is a ground-note of truth and wisdom, of which his own 
 generation in particular stood in special need. He realized 
 the manifold and unexplored potencies of the national spirit. 
 He tells the Poles in effect that, if they have the heart of a 
 nation^ they are unassailable, so that Russia may conquer 
 but never digest them. To enhance the reputation of the 
 military calling, he advocates a citizen army on the Swiss 
 model, and in a remarkable passage praises the martial spirit
 
 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 43 
 
 which pervades the citizen soldiers of his native land. 'I 
 remember the time at Geneva ', he says, ' when the burgesses 
 manceuvred much better than the regular troops,' adding a 
 regret, strange in a professor of pacifist opinions, that the 
 magistrates had discouraged them. 
 
 Indeed it will generally be found that the unsound or 
 questionable provisions in this eloquent and curious treatise 
 spring from just this pervading consciousness that the body 
 politic is a dead thing without national feeling. The weak 
 elective King who is carefully deprived of patronage so that 
 he may not corrupt his subjects, the frequent but short-lived 
 Diets strictly bound by instructions from their electors, what 
 arc these but instruments intended to promote the reign of 
 public virtue? Unfortunately, the prescriptions made up 
 to cure the patient can only be safely taken if the patient is 
 already cured. Rousseau assumes that the lazy, turbulent 
 nobles of Poland are already spotless patriots, eager and 
 able to discharge public duties to the advantage of the 
 State, For such a people three brief codes, intelligible to 
 every schoolboy, will be amply sufficent. ' Are not all the 
 rules of natural law better graven in the hearts of men 
 than all this nonsense of Justinian ? Only make them honest 
 and virtuous and I answer for you that they will have law 
 enough.' 
 
 ' Only make them honest and virtuous.' Is it then so simple 
 to induce honesty and virtue among Poles and the neighbours 
 of Poles ? Is it true that a large community of modern men, 
 rendered honest and virtuous by the alchemy of a wise political 
 tractate, will be content to live under a few simple laws 
 such as may not overtax the memory of average schoolboys ? 
 Abolish commerce, currency, scientific inventions, destroy 
 the towns and scatter the inhabitants broadcast through the 
 country in self-sufficing agrarian communities, so that there 
 is little intercommunion and clash of interests — then perhaps 
 the ideal might be realized. The Lex Salica was brief enough, 
 ' and there is no need for a complicated criminal jurisprudence 
 when cattle-stealing, murder, and rape are the only crimes. 
 But in Poland, where, in Rousseau's own true and penetrating
 
 44 THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU 
 
 phrase, ' the nobles are everything, the burgesses nothing, 
 and the peasants less than nothing ', where the very alphabet 
 of a State sense had still to be learned, was it reasonable to 
 expect that the casuistry of human needs and misdoings could 
 be so easily exhausted ? ' Le bon sens sufifit pour gouverner 
 un Etat bien constitue ; et le bon sens s'elabore autant dans 
 le cceur que dans la tcte.' An admirable phrase, provided 
 that it be understood that it is never good sense to give to 
 complicated things a false appearance of simplicity. 
 
 Among the many golden sentences strewn about Rousseau's 
 political writings there are none which in his own country 
 exercised a more decisive influence than those in which' he 
 declares the true character of law : 
 
 ' Le premier et le plus grand interet public est toujours la 
 justice. Tous veulent que les conditions soient cgales pour 
 tons, et la justice n'est que cette egalite. Le citoyen ne veut 
 que les lois et que I'observation des lois. Chaque particulier 
 dans le peuple salt bien que, s'il y a des exceptions, elles ne 
 seront pas en sa faveur. Ainsi tous craignent les exceptions ; 
 et qui craint les exceptions aime la loi.' ^ 
 
 In this shining little chain of unbreakable argument lies the 
 gospel of Jean Jacques, and the sufficient explanation of his 
 everlasting power over men. 
 
 ' Let ires de la illoHtagne, IX.
 
 ( 45 ) 
 
 Olliviers Memoirs^ 
 
 M6MILE OLLIVIER has written an apology for his 
 • poh'tical career in sixteen volumes, nine thousand 
 pages, and a million and three-quarter words, and if the weight 
 of an apology is to be measured in a grocer's scale his must be 
 one of the weightiest apologies in literary history. It might 
 perhaps be inferred from this that M. Ollivier was a party to 
 transactions which it is impossible or at least embarrassing to 
 defend, that his political course has been far from straight, and 
 that his fame is so thickly obscured by clouds that only by 
 gargantuan puffings and blowings can it be restored to its 
 proper translucency. Such a conclusion would be hasty and 
 erroneous. The writer of this prolix apology can afford to 
 open his public career to the inspection of any jury of moralists 
 without a twinge of misgiving. Whatever may have been his 
 failures and his faults, nobody can say that they were the fruit 
 of a mean, jealous, or"double-deahng nature. M. Ollivier is 
 the most diaphanous of men and the least malicious of memoir- 
 writers. He has the full orator's allowance of vanity, but it is 
 as the vanity of the sunflower, large, easy, and expansive. He 
 can admire Thiers, who eclipsed him, and find qualities to 
 praise in Jules Simon, whom he regarded as an old ally sundered 
 by treachery. He has been a hard but never a rancorous 
 
 ^ I. L Em-pire Liberal. By Emile Ollivier. Sixteen vols. Paris : 
 Garnier, 1895-1912. 
 
 1. U E^'oliition constitutioimelle dti Second Empire. By H. Barton. 
 Paris: Felix Alcan, 1900. 
 
 3. The Rise of Louis Napoleon. By F. A. Simpson. London : 
 Murray, 1909. 
 
 4. Les Trois Coups d^Etat de I^ouis-NapoU'on Bonaparte. Vol. i, 
 Strasbourg et Botilogne. By A. Lebey. Paris: Perrin, 1906. 
 
 5. Lottis-Napoleoti Bo7iaparte et la Revolutioti de 184S. By A. Lebey. 
 Two vols. Paris: Felix Juven, 1907-8. 
 
 6. Napoif'o7i III avnni V Empire. By H. Thirria. Two vols. Paris : 
 Plon, 1899. 
 
 7. Rome et NapoUon III. By E. Bourgeois and E. Clermont. Paris : 
 Armand Colin, 1907.
 
 46 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 fighter, and has preserved a sweet core of geniality through 
 misfortunes which would have dropped acid into a less whole- 
 some nature. Nobody can read these volumes without feeling 
 attracted to their author. They have none of those subtle 
 and delicate harmonies which are so enchanting in the best 
 prose of all ; they are neither witty nor humorous, and they 
 are sadly lacking in restraint, plan, concision ; but they move 
 along at a high level of clear and masculine eloquence ; they 
 are never languid or feeble ; and who can refrain from admiring 
 the unconquerable youth and buoyancy of heart which has 
 prompted a man, after his political career had been broken 
 beyond retrieve, to plan at the age of sixty-nine, and to 
 execute between the ages of sixty-nine and eighty-seven, so 
 gallant and extensive a vindication of the faith that was in 
 him ? ^ » 
 
 M. Ollivier's apology takes the form of a general history of 
 the Second Empire and of its intellectual and political ante- 
 cedents. He wishes to show that Liberalism was an essential 
 part of the Imperial idea, and that he was fully justified in his 
 belief that France could enjoy a wide measure of political 
 liberty under an Emperor of the lineage of Napoleon. And 
 this object is combined with a purpose which is still more 
 directly relevant to M. Ollivier's political reputation. The 
 Cabinet of which he was the nominal chief plunged France 
 into the war of 1870; and not the least among the motives 
 which have led to the composition of this elaborate book is 
 the desire to recount the true causes of that plain and palpable 
 catastrophe. The name Ollivier is associated with a great 
 defeat. There was a time when no Frenchman could speak a 
 good word for the Minister who, on July 15, 1870,' announced 
 from the tribune that he entered the Prussian war ' with a light 
 heart '. Many were the imprecations heaped on that * light 
 heart' of M. Ollivier. No party would defend him. To the 
 Royalists he was a demagogue, to the Republicans a renegade, 
 to the Imperialists the quack doctor who had injured a sound 
 
 ' This favourable impression has been recently strengthened in the 
 mind of the writer by the perusal of the charming letters published 
 in the Revue des Dettx Mondes (June and July, 1919).
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 47 
 
 constitution. When the first great defeats were announced, 
 M. Ollivier was hurled from office and shot through descending 
 levels of opprobrium and contempt into the oblivion from 
 which an unresting spirit of self-assertion armed with an 
 industrious and enduring pen has enabled him triumphantly 
 to emerge. 
 
 The writer of these memoirs was born at Marseilles, July 3, 
 1825, and first came into public notice in 1848, when Ledru- 
 RoUin sent him and his father into the departments of the 
 Bouches-du-Rhone and Var as joint commissioners of the 
 newly-founded Republic. Educated in the Radical tradition 
 of France,, 6mile Ollivier had been familiar from early youth 
 with some of the leaders of Republican opinion. His father, 
 Demosthenes Ollivier, was the friend of Armand Carrel the 
 Republican-Bonapartist, of Pierre Leroux the Republican- 
 Socialist, of Ledru-Rollin the Republican pure and simple. 
 ' Above our childish heads ', says the autobiographer quaintly, 
 ' resounded the grand words, God, Humanity, Plato, Jesus.' 
 We are left to infer that the atmosphere of the Ollivier house- 
 hold was compounded of that sentimental and comprehensive 
 idealism which is the special feature of the Revolution of 1848 
 in its early and exuberant phases. In such a home the young 
 Ollivier naturally grew up to be a Republican, but not, though 
 perhaps this may be the result of temperament rather than of 
 surroundings, a Republican of the most austere and exclusive 
 sect. One key to the inner shrine of Jacobinism he never 
 possessed. He was neither an atheist nor an anti-clerical. On 
 the contrary, much as he deplored the development of 
 ultramontane tendencies in the Church, he was as a youth, 
 and has ever since remained, a loyal Catholic. He tells us 
 how as a boy he found his favourite intellectual pasture in 
 Bossuet and Pascal, and how during his progress as Republican 
 commissioner he created something of a sensation by calling 
 on a bishop. Such Liberalism was rare among Ledru-Rollin's 
 commissioners, but the brief life of the Second Republic 
 afforded little scope for its exercise. The triumph of Louis 
 Bonaparte dealt a shattering blow to the Ollivier family. The 
 father was sentenced to Cayenne, then exiled ; and the avenues
 
 48 OLLTVIER'S MEMOIRS - 
 
 of public life seemed to be 'effectively closed against the son. 
 In the sudden and complete eclipse of public liberties Emile 
 Ollivier found a refuge and eventually a reputation in the 
 practice of the law. The bar has been a great school of 
 political oratory in France. The leaders of the Gironde were 
 barristers, Gambctta and Jules Favre won their first laurels at 
 the bar, and M. Ollivier, who stands as far removed from the 
 d'Aguesseaus and Pothiers of his profession as Lamennais 
 from Aquinas or Erskine from Coke, learnt to love the sound 
 of his eloquent voice first at Lyons and subsequently in the 
 historic halls of the lie de la Cite. Then in 1857 he resolved 
 to rid himself of the scruple which prevented the strait sect of 
 Republicans from entering political life. The friend of Michelet 
 took an oath to the Imperial Constitution, was elected to the 
 Chamber by the third circumscription of the Seine, and found 
 himself leader of a small company of five who alone represented 
 the Republican principle in an Assembly manufactured by 
 prefects and governed by emotions of servility and fear. The 
 programme of the ' Five ' was Liberalism. In domestic affairs 
 they advocated the repeal of the Coercion Acts, the freedom 
 of the press, the publication of parliamentary debates, parlia- 
 mentary control of legislation and finance, elected municipal 
 councils for Paris and Lyons, the abolition of official candida- 
 tures and governmental" pressure at elections. In foreign 
 policy they stood for the principle of Nationality ; in the 
 ecclesiastical domain for the free Church in the free State. To 
 all Five it was common ground that the Empire could never 
 consist with liberty, and that the true object of a Liberal 
 Opposition was to sap* its foundation and to prepare its fall. 
 From this position Jules Favre, who was perhaps the most 
 eloquent and resourceful of the Five, never departed ; but 
 Ollivier was cast in a less obdurate mould, and by swift and 
 continuous gradations the Republican son of a Republican 
 proscript became the apostle of the Liberal Empire. Of the 
 agencies by which this transformation was accomplished there 
 is naturally a full, though not a complete, account in these 
 memoirs. It is clear, for instance, that the Due de Morny, 
 the Emperor's half-brother, took special pains to conciliate the
 
 IDLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 49 
 
 vigorous young iconoclast, though it is impossible to determine 
 with accuracy the weight which is to be attributed to the 
 seductions of this adroit politician. But the course of public 
 affairs probably counted for more with M. Ollivier than the 
 personal influences to which the stalwarts of the Republican 
 cause attributed his lapse. In i860 the Emperor declared 
 an amnesty for political offences. M. Ollivier's ' heart was 
 appeased ', and henceforward he began to think more favourably 
 of the possibilities of the Empire. When on November 24 of 
 the same year the Emperor so far relaxed the rigour of his 
 system as to permit the publication of parliamentary debates 
 and the power of discussing the Address, M. Ollivier discovered, 
 as he tells us, ' a sovereign capable of understanding liberty '. 
 He still declared himself a Republican; but in vague and 
 eloquent language promised his support to the Emperor if he 
 would realize the liberal programme of the Hundred Days. 
 When Morny asked him whether he was content -with the 
 concessions he replied, ' If it is the end, you are lost ; if it is 
 a beginning, you are established'. It proved only to be a 
 beginning. The elections of 1863, despite all that the prefects 
 could do to prevent it, brought new strength to the Opposition 
 and restored Thiers to public life. Blow after blow rained 
 down upon the Government defences. The Mexican expedition 
 was shown to be unnecessary, expensive, a violation of the 
 principles of nationalities ; the Opposition demanded the 
 withdrawal of the French troops from Rome, and claimed that 
 the interests of France were being sacrificed to the clericals. 
 In these attacks M. Ollivier joined, but he was now no longer 
 the most conspicuous star in the Assembly. The wider 
 experience and the more, brilliant eloquence of Thiers gave 
 the Orleanist leader a position among the opponents of the 
 Government to which none of the young generation could 
 aspire ; and perhaps this fact may have exercised a certain 
 unanalysed influence over the attitude of the Liberal leader. 
 Be this as it may, in 1864 M. Ollivier quarrelled with the Left 
 over a bill to legalize strikes, and in the following year cast 
 his vote — nn vote (Vcsp^rancc — for the Address. He was now 
 drawn into the Imperial circle. On May 6, 1865, he dined 
 
 2J02 D
 
 50 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS* 
 
 with the Empress at the Tuileries, learnt that at sixteen she 
 had been a Fourierist, and explained to her that his task was 
 to convert a revolutionary into a constitutional democracy. 
 On June 27 he had his first interview with the Emperor. * I 
 was charmed,* he wrote that evening in his diary ; ' he was gay 
 and open, ready with his smile, and so simple that he puts you" 
 at your ease at once ; not talkative certainly, but an agreeable 
 talker. His eye is quick, fine, caressing, his appearance cold 
 but \vithout stiffness. His nature stHkes me as delicate and 
 feminine.' In 1866 the breach with the Republicans was 
 complete. OUivier founded a Third Party pledged to support 
 the Empire and to urge it do\vn the path of liberal reform. 
 Three years later a following of forty-two had swollen to a 
 hundred and fifteen. 
 
 It is claimed for this desfgn that it was 'not only sound in 
 principle, but that it was within measurable reach of winning 
 a great and durable success. M. Ollivier contends that a 
 Republic was not really desired by France, that the monarchical 
 parties were impossible, and tHat the requisite union of force 
 and liberty could only be secured by the harmonious co- 
 operation of those two incommensurables — a parliamentary 
 government and an Empire founded by a coup d'itat and 
 consolidated by a plebiscite. He further argues with much 
 circumstance that such a policy was the natural and logical 
 outcome of Bonapartism. The great Emperor was himself 
 quite outside the ordinary category of European dynasts. He - 
 was the child of fortune ; his throne depended not upon 
 legitimacy, but upon the will of the people ; and the most 
 durable achievement of his government had been to secure to 
 France the social conquests of a popular revolution. During 
 the Hundred Days, perceiving that a change had come over 
 the political climate, he issued a Constitution, better, in the 
 opinion of Thiers, than any other which France had obtained 
 in all her revolutions ; but the first experiment in a Liberal 
 Empire was shortlived. The battle of Waterloo, which, as 
 Napoleon observed at St. Helena, was as fatal to the liberties 
 of Europe as the battle of Philippi was fatal to the liberties 
 of Rome, ushered in a period of autocratic reaction. All over
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 51 
 
 Europe the liberal spirit was proscribed, and in the stupid 
 excesses of the restored governments the banished Emperor 
 discerned the future hope of his dynasty. In the St. Helena 
 conversations he portrayed his liberal intentions and the 
 democratic elements in his rule. He stood for liberty, equality, 
 nationality, peace. If he had not been a Constitutional 
 monarch from the first, this was not due to any inherent 
 incompatibility between the Empire and Constitutionalism, 
 but to the necessity of quieting the ferment of revolution, and 
 then to the stress of a war which he would gladly have avoided. 
 The day would come when Europe would need a government 
 founded upon the principles of Bonapartism and capable of 
 securing for them the respect which they deserved. A genera- 
 tion elapsed and part of the prophecy was realized : the French 
 had returned to an Empire based upon the plebiscite. How- 
 ever despotic may have been its primal aspect, such a 
 government contained the precious and necessary seeds of 
 liberty. There was the authority of the plebiscite, there was 
 a Chamber elected on a scheme of universal suffrage, there 
 was an Emperor who had shown in his early writings that he 
 possessed a grasp of Liberal principle and an eye for social 
 reform. M. Ollivier contends that a free Constitution was the 
 necessary complement of the Imperial idea. It was not indeed 
 part of his conception that the Emperor should be an irrespon- 
 sible figurehead. Rouher, who stood for autocracy, said that 
 it was plainly impossible that the Emperor should reign but 
 not govern, and M. Ollivier appears to think that a Chief of a 
 State — active, initiating great lines of policy, and responsible 
 to the people at large — could co-exist with a Ministry chosen 
 from the dominant party in the elected Chamber and liable to 
 be removed from office, by its vote. Whatever may be the 
 difficulties inherent in such a dualism, they had not time to 
 develop themselves under the Liberal Empire. M. Ollivier's 
 dream had hardly assumed a palpable form before it was rudely 
 and finally shattered ; but while it lasted the dream was 
 bright. In December 1869 he was invited to form a responsible 
 Ministry. The Constitution was remodelled, so that it 
 became, as M. Ollivier remarked to the Emperor, ' the most 
 
 D 2
 
 52 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 truly Liberal Constitution which had existed in France since 
 1789 \ The press was freed from its shackles ; the parliament 
 recovered complete control over every department of public 
 policy ; and the great scheme of Liberal reform was on May 
 8, 1870, endorsed by seven million votes of the French people. 
 ' If I had then been carried off by fever like Cavour,' 
 remarks M. Ollivier, ' I should have been unanimously ap- 
 plauded as one of the rare statesmen of the nineteenth century 
 whose design had been accomplished in its entirety.' Un- 
 fortunately the first achievement of the Liberal Empire was 
 to accept that disastrous encounter which for more than 
 a generation lowered the military prestige of France. ' A 
 cyclone which I could not foretell, and against which I was 
 not allowed the time to struggle, beats down upon my work, 
 crushes it, and casts me among the vanquished who are con- 
 demned to ostracism.' But for that unseen calamity M. Ollivier 
 announces that ' without phrases or charlatanism of any kind ' 
 he would have slain anarchical or despotic Socialism by a vast 
 scheme of social reform. A sketch of this imposing but 
 uncompleted design is vouchsafed to us. It includes a 
 reform of the civil, penal, and procedural codes, the abolition 
 of collateral inheritance, and the legal emancipation of women. 
 M. Ollivier was a true Liberal. He hated tyranny in all its 
 forms, whether it were the tyranny of the trades union over 
 the workman or of the State over the Church or of the Church 
 over the State. He wished to respect the freedom of contract 
 and to sanction the formation of religious as well as of com- 
 mercial and civil associations. The Latin genius is averse to 
 compromise, and political movements in France have been too 
 often armed with terror in place of argument. M. Ollivier 's 
 policy was framed on a basis of confidence. He trusted the 
 capacity of women to manage their own investments, and of 
 priests to shape their own dogma. Above all, he trusted the 
 Emperor, who is exhibited to us as ' the faithful interpreter of 
 democratic France, ambitious of adding one last stone to the 
 radiant pyramid of glory and generosity ' erected by the genius 
 of his illustrious uncle. So confiding is M. Ollivier that he 
 believes that a Bonaparte could adapt himself to a philosophy
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 53 
 
 of affairs which might have emanated from the brain of John 
 Stuart Mill. 
 
 It is obvious that Napoleon III understood M. Ollivier : 
 it is not so clear that M. Ollivier understood Napoleon III. 
 Having persuaded himself that the Emperor was a Liberal, he 
 finds his own honest and Liberal countenance reflected every- 
 where in the stream of Imperial policy. His handling of 
 diplomatic affairs is an , illustration of this amiable but 
 misleading tendency. The Crimean War, by sowing dissension 
 between Austria and Prussia, undoubtedly paved the way 
 for the liberation of Italy, but what are we to say of this 
 version of the motives which led the Emperor to embark on it ? 
 
 ' The Emperor had no hatred for the Cossacks and did not 
 even cherish any ill will against the Tsar for his impertinence. 
 He had no superstition for the balance of power ; indeed, he 
 intended to destroy it; and the Turk interested him as little 
 as the Ottoman Empire. His object in making war was to 
 restore the prestige of France in that quarter of the world 
 which had witnessed our bitter humiliation of 1840. He 
 wished to put an end to the Holy Alliance of the North, to 
 make a rupture between Russia and Austria which would 
 pave the way to the policy of nationalities — to the freedom of 
 Italy and perhaps to the freedom of Poland.' ^ 
 
 Did Napoleon III really take up arms against the 
 Muscovites for the principal reason that he might the more 
 effectually rescue the suffering Lombards and Venetians from 
 the Austrian yoke? Would he have expected such a story, 
 to find credence with the Empress or with Rouher ? And 
 when M. Ollivier swallowed it, was he not thereby encouraged 
 to pay an even more elaborate compliment to his Minister's 
 credulity ? The Mexican expedition was not upon the face oi 
 it an enterprise calculated upon national or Liberal ideals. 
 The French Government attempted to impose an alien 
 Emperor upon the Mexicans by force of arms, hoping that 
 a clerical autocracy so founded and supported, would arrest 
 the advancing tide of the Protestant Yankees. No episode in 
 the whole history of Empire was more difficult to accommodate 
 to the conscience of a man like M. Ollivier, who believed in 
 ' L' Empire Liberal, iii. iSS.
 
 54 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 Rome for the Romans, Germany for the Germans, Mexico for 
 the Mexicans, and France for the French. Yet a good 
 conjurer can show us a bird where we expected to see a- six- 
 penny piece. We learn that the underlying thought of the 
 Mexican expedition was not the Jecker contract, nor the 
 claims of the Vatican, nor the outcry of the Mexican clericals, 
 nor the desire to profit by the Civil War in America to 
 extend French influence in the w.estern hemisphere, nor the 
 fabulous gold mines of the Sonora, nor any of the many 
 sinister motives which were so freely attributed by the 
 opposition press ; it was, purely and simply, Venice. The idea 
 of the Mexican expedition was so to smooth the ruffled plumes 
 of Austria that she would consent to cede Venice to Victor 
 Emmanuel. ' The ghost of Venice ', as Nigra wrote to 
 Ricasoli, ' roams along the corridors of the Tuileries.' In his 
 subtle and circuitous way the Emperor was still pursuing the 
 fair phantom of Italy, and Frenchmen were dying on the 
 parched uplands of Mexico, as they had died in their snow- 
 bound cantonments round Sebastopol, that the land of Dante 
 might be free. 
 
 M. Ollivier is, however, constrained to concede that some 
 passages in the diplomacy of his hero do not admit of this 
 exalted interpretation. There were ' aberrations ' from the 
 straight path of altruism. The acquisition of Savoy and Nice 
 was apparently sound nationalism, a restoration of lost 
 members rather than a conquest, but no such apology can 
 be discovered even by M. Ollivier for the designs upon 
 Belgium, Luxemburg, and the Palatinate. These projects 
 were regrettable ' aberrations ' from the nationalist ideal, but 
 no part, we are told, of the permanent fabric of Imperial 
 diplomacy. ' Save in a moment of illness and folly in 1867 . . . 
 the Emperor had not even a vague inclination to take Belgium 
 . . . under pressure of public opinion he ma}' perhaps sometimes 
 have desired a rectification of frontier towards the Palatinate.' 
 We are convinced that upon this point M. Ollivier is mistaken 
 and that a rectification of the eastern frontier of France was 
 a fixed part of the foreign policy of the Second Empire. 
 
 That M. Ollivier should have fallen into an error on a
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 55 
 
 matter so important is partly due to his eagerness to minimize 
 the incompatibility between his own political ideals and the 
 practice of the Empire, and partly also to the peculiar 
 confusion and uncertainty of his master's policy. The 
 Emperor's mind was full of vague, grand, and imperfectly 
 harmonized ideas. He had a genuine sympathy for the 
 Italians and Poles, and cherished a belief that it was the ; 
 predestined task of the Empire to assist in the emancipation 
 of suffering nationalities. At the same time he was ambitious 
 for France. He understood enough of French human nature 
 to know that it wanted glory, and he knew enough of French 
 history to find the quarter where conquest would be most 
 glorious and glory would be most grateful. From the very 
 beginning of his reign he had made up his mind to revise the 
 treaties of 1H15, He spoke upon the subject with Prince 
 Albert in 1858, casting and recasting the map of Europe and 
 Africa in his conversation with the freedom of a Bonaparte ; 
 and amid all the vacillations of an uncertain and divided 
 policy he never wholly lost sight of the waters of the Rhine. 
 The complexion of affairs did not, however, permit a frank 
 and thorough pursuit either of the one aim or of the other. 
 Napoleon could not sacrifice the temporal independence of the 
 Papacy to the Italian Kingdom and at the same time retain 
 the loyalty of the French clericals ; and the designs on 
 Belgium and the Rhine were of so revolutionary a character . 
 that they could only be tentatively and secretly pressed as 
 part of a general scheme of reconstruction. The problem of 
 alliances was as complex as the objects of policy were various 
 and confused. The English alliance, consistent with emnity 
 to Russia and help to Piedmont, was at variance with any 
 scheme for extending the frontier to the north-east. On the 
 other hand, an understanding with Austria, while it would 
 gratify the clericals and check the Prussians, would carry 
 dismay into all the Liberal and nationalist circles in Europe. 
 The Emperor Was torn between conflicting sympathies and 
 opposing counsels. Persigny was the friend of the English, 
 Drouyn of the Austrians, Morny of the Russians. Ollivier 
 gives it as his opinion that the capital fault of the Empire was
 
 56 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 that it did not make a firm friend of the Tsar after the 
 Crimean War. Napoleon listened to everybody and trusted 
 nobody. Like Louis XV he sent abroad secret agents and 
 wove his own web of secret diplomacy. Walewski was kept 
 in ignorance of his master's secret meeting with Cavour at 
 Plombieres and of the offensive and defensive alliance which 
 was there entered into. No ambassador and no Minister 
 knew of the Triple Attiance between Austria, Italy, and France 
 which was so nearly concluded in 1869. 'A declaration from 
 one of my Ministers ', observed Napoleon to Von Goltz, ' would 
 not be important. I alone know what the foreign policy of 
 France will be ' — a perfectly intelligible position, but one not 
 easily to be conciliated with parliamentary control. 
 
 The truth of the matter is that Napoleon III was ill-fitted for 
 the role of a constitutional monarch, not because he was devoid 
 of public virtue or popular instincts, but because he could not 
 divest himself of certain ingrained habits of mind, partly due 
 to his antecedents as a plotter, partly to his early practice of 
 autocracy, which are incompatible with true parliamentary 
 government. His reputation both as a man and a statesman 
 has suffered abrupt and unusual vicissitudes. After a period 
 of almost unqualified censure and contempt, a marked 
 tendency has set in to portray the Emperor not indeed as 
 a model of domestic virtue — that would be plainl)^ impossible 
 — but as more generous and less Machiavellian than he had 
 been depicted, to discover in him a certain width of view and 
 elevation of aim, a kindliness of disposition, even a warmth of 
 heart, wholly incompatible with the cruel and calculating 
 egotism ascribed to him by such writers as Kinglake and 
 Victor Hugo. This tendency, which is part of the general 
 revival of Napoleonic studies and has been powerfully assisted 
 by the writings of M. Ollivier, has recently found an English 
 exponent in Mr. Simpson, who has derived from a careful 
 study of Louis Bonaparte's early life a great, perhaps an 
 excessive, admiration for the character of his hero. That 
 Louis Bonaparte possessed in early life an inflexible faith in 
 his destiny, that his tenacity was proof against failures which 
 would have dashed the courage and ruined the prospects of
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 57 
 
 nine out of ten pretenders, that in the midst of a good deal of 
 trumpery display and vulgar self-indulgence he showed industry 
 and resource, that he played a remarkably bad hand with 
 surprising skill, always keeping himself in view when it was 
 most opportune that he should be noticed, always projecting 
 his mind into the future and cleverly guiding it into the 
 grooves of the social progress, will not be denied by any one 
 who studies the pages of Mr. Simpson or those of his French 
 precursors, MM. Thirria and Lebey. But was he of the stuff 
 out of which constitutional monarchs are made? Was he 
 loyal ? Was he capable of trusting his Ministers ? Had he 
 those habits of judicious compromise and quiet influence which 
 are essential to the successful conduct of a constitutional 
 monarchy ? Above all, was he prepared to make a permanent 
 surrender of autocratic power, or were his concessions accom- 
 panied by half-formed and cloudy resolutions of withdrawal 
 which the energetic pressure of a reactionary camarilla might 
 at any moment cause to solidify in action ? It is to questions 
 such as these that M. Ollivier supplies an unsatisfactory 
 answer. 
 
 The early life of Louis Napoleon would, of itself, constitute 
 a weighty reason for distrusting the solidity of the Liberal 
 Empire. For the profession of constitutional monarchy there 
 can be no worse training than a youth expended in conspiracy. 
 Now whether or no Louis Bonaparte was in 1831 an enrolled 
 member of the Carbonaro Society or only in avowed sympathy 
 with its aims, it is certain that he graduated in Italian con- 
 spiracy and that for eighteen years conspiracy of the most 
 secret kind was the main strand of his existence. And this 
 conspiracy belonged in no small measure to the type which is 
 most repugnant to a delicate conscience. For about five 
 years Louis Bonaparte's main object was to debauch the 
 loyalty of the French army. He began by composing a 
 treatise on artillery and by circulating it as widely as might 
 be among the French officers of that arm. Then in 1836, 
 when his name had acquired some notoriety, he made an 
 attempt to corrupt the garrison of Strasburg, was arrested, 
 pardoned by the King, and dispatched to America. Having
 
 58 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 failed with the great eastern garrison, he and his friends next 
 turned their attention to the army of the north. In 1840 they 
 crossed the Channel, a live eagle tied to the mast of their 
 vessel, and descended on Boulogne. The affair was a ludicrous 
 and ignominious Failure. The Pretender, was this time put 
 upon his trial and sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in the 
 insalubrious castle of Ham, Here, exhibiting the finer side 
 of a character singularly compounded of good and evil, he 
 addressed himself to the cultivation of those branches of know- 
 ledge which seemed likely to commend him to the rising 
 generation. He composed a pamphlet on the extinction of 
 pauperism which drew a warm eulogy from George Sand, 
 advocated protective duties on sugar to conciliate the beetroot 
 industry, and recommended a study of the Prussian military 
 system to keep his name before the soldiers. Louis Blanc 
 visited him in prison and found him interested in Socialism ; 
 Lord Malmesbury, another visitor, reported that five years of 
 confinement had not emptied, his mind or relaxed his faith. 
 It is, however, probable that both in mind and body he was 
 permanently affected by his imprisonment at Ham, that he 
 here grew into those vague, dreamy, and indecisive habits 
 which became the perplexity of his advisers and the calamity 
 of his country, and that it was here that were sown the seeds 
 of that serious malady without which Prussia might now be 
 a less powerful State, and France a more weighty factor in the 
 balance of Europe. 
 
 We are not here specially concerned with the moral aspect 
 of Louis Bonaparte's early escapades. His defenders invite 
 us to believe that he was justified in attempting to overturn 
 a government which was supported by brute force alone. 
 That the July monarchy was ' wholly without the spirit of 
 improvement ', and that it ' wrought almost exclusively through 
 the meaner and more selfish instincts of mankind ', is the 
 verdict of John Stuart Mill ; but admitting all the allegations 
 which have been brought against it, such as that it was sprung 
 upon the country by a small knot of politicians and journalists, 
 that it was neither brave, nor glorious, nor progressive, that it 
 entirely failed to strike the common imagination or to enlist
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 59 
 
 the affections of France, it may still be asked by what right 
 a young gentleman, with not as much as fifty friends in the 
 country, embarked upon an adventure which could only have 
 one of two issues — instant failure or a costly civil war. The 
 government which Louis Bonaparte sallied out to overthrow 
 was not ideal ; but at least it enlarged the liberties of the 
 country and rallied to its support an array of parliamentary 
 talent such as France had not seen before and has never since 
 enjoyed. Moreover, in 1836, when the first assault was made 
 upon the fidelity of the army, the government of Louis 
 Philippe had not yet developed into a rigid system that 
 stationary and unintelligent resistance to reform which brought 
 about its downfall twelve years later. There was at that time 
 every reason to believe that the frame of the constitution 
 might be gradually adapted to the needs of a democracy. 
 The hereditary peerage ^ had gone ; the franchise, though 
 still far too narrow, had been expanded ; and since pro- 
 perty was safe and the principles of social equality had been 
 "secured in the institutions of the country, there was no 
 grave reason for discontent. The plan of the building was 
 tolerable, and its insufficiencies could be remedied by altera- 
 tions and additions. A patriot would at least have waited 
 until there was reason to suppose that the occupants them- 
 selves were determined to pull the old structure down and 
 to rebuild upon a new and improved plan from basement to 
 rafter. 
 
 That moment came in 1848; and out of the whirlpool 
 of revolution Disraeli's ' Prince Florestan ' swam ashore with a 
 crown. He had arrived in London two years earlier, the 
 hero of an escape which in its brilliant perfection of con- 
 trivance would have done honour to the invention of Dumas ; 
 and at the first tidings of the February revolution he crossed 
 the Channel to take advantage of events. Finding the 
 political skies vexed and unpropitious, he discreetly returned 
 to his safe London harbourage to wait for a softer wind and a 
 calmer sea. No very long draft was made upon his patience. 
 Reputations are quickly used up in the furnace of revolution, . 
 and in the course of one short summer all the brightest flowers
 
 6o OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 • of the early spring were parched and drooping. Ledru-Rollin, 
 ominously prominent in March, was a beaten man in May. 
 Lamartine, who was expected to be able to sweep the country 
 in April, was a spent force in October. Cavaignac, who had 
 saved Paris in June, was reported in November to be assured 
 of defeat for the significant reason that he was supposed to be 
 specially identified with the Republic. All the odds were 
 on the new man, who bore a famous name, who had kept 
 himself free from paltry entanglements, who had steered 
 clear of the dangerous shoals upon which so many light and 
 flaunting barks had run to their destruction. 
 
 When it was decided that the President of the Republic 
 should be elected not by the legislature but by the people, 
 Louis Bonaparte was assured of victory. The eloquent and 
 irresponsible tribute of two sublime sentimentalists was 
 blazoned on his electoral manifestoes. Chateaubriand had 
 written that no name went better with the glory of France, 
 and George Sand, in allusion to the tract on pauperism, 
 announced that the Napoleon of to-day personified the 
 sufferings of the people, as his uncle had been the incarnation 
 of their pride. The candidate himself behaved with rare 
 discretion. He was watchful and silent, holding himself aloof 
 from public debate or party war-cries, while shadowing forth 
 that vague policy of comprehension which was the secret of 
 his power. His maiden speech in the Chamber was a fortu- 
 nate, perhaps a calculated, failure, for by giving the impression 
 of stupidity he disarmed the vigilance of his foes. Like his 
 uncle before Brumaire, he made himself accessible to men 
 of every political colour, even to those from whom social 
 order had most to fear. He told Proudhon that he was no 
 dupe of the calumnies scattered against the Socialists, and 
 left upon that acute and fantastic person the impression of 
 a chivalrous head and heart, of a mediocre genius unlikely 
 to prosper, and finally of a man whose professions it would be 
 well to distrust. 
 
 The habits engendered in this period of watchful strain were 
 not easily thrown off. We may freely agree with M. Ollivier 
 when he tells us that the programme of the Liberal Empire was
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 6i 
 
 implicit in the Idies NapoUonietmes published in 1839, 
 and that the whole course of Napoleon's internal policy was 
 conducted on a long-meditated plan. The Liberal Empire was 
 unquestionably a deduction of the intellect. Was it ever in any 
 full sense a conviction of the heart? M. Ollivier quotes, in 
 order to refute it, a passage ^ from the memoirs of Baron 
 Haussmann describing i confidential talk with the Emperor 
 in the park of St. Cloud on June 13, 1870, in the course of 
 which Napoleon complained of the incapacity of his Liberal 
 Ministry, and announced his intention of restoring autocracy 
 at the end of the parliamentary session. There was no love 
 lost between Haussmann and Ollivier, and the Empress has 
 authorized a denial of thisserious imputation upon her husband's 
 loyalty. But the Empress was not present at the interview, 
 and the story is so circumstantial and also so typical of the 
 Emperor's wavering purpose that we cannot lightly brush it 
 aside. The Court had never approved of his liberal concessions, 
 and no fine ear was required to overhear its whispered discon- 
 tent. Nor can we wonder if, in view of the pressure of the 
 autocratic party and the manifold signs of public disquietude 
 — the demonstrations in the streets, the lampoons in the press, 
 and the tirades in the Chamber — the Emperor should expe- 
 rience moods of doubt and regret, moods in which his liberal 
 experiment would appear to be a failure, and the prompt with- 
 drawal of parliamentary government an imperious necessity 
 of politics. 
 
 The difficulties which M. Ollivier surmounted in working his 
 system of liberal ideas into the fabric of the Empire may have 
 led him to think that the reconstructed edifice was more com- 
 pact than it really was. In any case the Liberal Constitution 
 was killed in an accident before it had time to prove its worth. 
 Of the causes which led to this sudden ruin of his political 
 hopes M. Ollivier has much that is valuable to relate. He was 
 close to the central wheel of affairs ; he kept a diary, and to 
 the resources of a full memory he adds an acquaintance with 
 the voluminous literature which has sprung up round the origins 
 of the Franco-Prussian War. Many points which had been 
 ^ I'E7npire Liberal^ xiii. 522-5.
 
 62 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 obscure to him at the time he has since been able to clear up in 
 conversation or correspondence With important people. Of 
 course M. Ollivier is human, and that he should absolve him- 
 self of any part of the blame is as natural as that he should 
 find his principal scape-goat in the Prussian Chancellor. But 
 his work is stamped with an air of candour and conviction, and 
 his narrative is the fullest, the most scrupulous, and the most 
 authoritative statement which has yet been published on the 
 French side. 
 
 The causes of the Franco-Prussian War reach back to 1866. 
 France could never forgive or forget the battle of Sadowa or 
 the Treaty of Prague. She had expected to reap a golden 
 harvest out of the collision between the Prussian and the 
 Austrian monarchies, arguing that the struggle would be long 
 and exhausting, and that the moment would surely come when 
 the Emperor would impose his mediation and claim his reward. 
 But these plausible calculations were shattered by the swiftness 
 of the Prussian triumph. The King of Prussia had made 
 himself master of all Germany north of the Main, while the 
 Emperor of France had gained nothing, not a Belgian fortress 
 nor a German hamlet. A surprising and unpleasant series oi 
 contrasts became suddenly evident even to the most listless 
 eye ; the Head of the French State tranquilly composing a life 
 of Julius Caesar while the Head of the Prussian State was 
 forging the most powerful army in Europe ; the prize of Venice 
 shaken out into the weak arms of Italy from the superabundant 
 cornucopia of Prussian victory ; the prize of Mexico abanddned 
 with every circumstance of humiliation at the imperious com- 
 mand of an Anglo-Saxon republic ; on the French side a chain 
 of diplomatic rebuffs in Denmark, in Poland, in Bohemia, on 
 the Prussian side nothing attempted which the power of the 
 State was not able to carry to a conclusion ; on the one hand 
 evidence of intellectual design, on the other of vague, ill- 
 calculated and inconsistent policies. The Opposition led by 
 Thiers rubbed in the sore. They proclaimed that France had 
 been lowered in the scale of nations, that Sadowa was a national 
 defeat, and that if ever the Prussians should attempt to cross 
 the Main it would be the duty of the French Government to
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 63 
 
 go to war. This opinion was by no means confined to the 
 Opposition. Rouher and the Conservatives were equally clear 
 that under any circumstances an attempt to draw the South 
 German States into the Hohenzollern net would be a casus 
 belli. 
 
 M. OUivier drew a distinction. As a champion of the 
 doctrine of nationalities he could not consistently oppose the 
 unification of Germany if it were accomplished by the free act 
 of the German people. In his view the principle of nationalities 
 was sacred, and the balance of power was not. He would fight 
 to protect the South Germans from Prussian coercion, but he 
 thought it both wrong and futile to oppose a spontaneous 
 union of North and South, even if such a union should change 
 the European balance unfavourably to France. But these views 
 were sparsely held. Neither Daru nor Gramont, who succes- 
 sively reigned at the Foreign Office during the Ollivier Ministry, 
 agreed on this point with their chef de cabinet. M. Ollivier, 
 however, was not the man to dissemble his opinions, and having 
 arranged for their publication in the Kdlnische Zeitutig 
 (March 13 and 24, 1870), was satisfied that his pacific intentions 
 were known to the German public. 
 
 The Liberal Cabinet came into power on December 27, 1869, 
 and almost at once began to make cautious and secret advances 
 to Prussia through English channels with a view to mutual 
 disarmament. Daru told Lord Clarendon that France was 
 willing to take the initiative with a reduction of ten thousand 
 men on her annual contingent ; but Bismarck would not listen 
 for a moment to this kind of palaver. He said that the Tsar's 
 health was uncertain, that he could not count on the Tsarevitch, 
 and that the North German confederation might find itself 
 confronted with an alliance between Russia, Austria, and the 
 South German States. The project dropped, and early in 
 May 1870 M. Ollivier heard from Benedetti, the French 
 ambassador in Berlin, that Prussia would be impelled by the 
 pressure of the smaller Northern States to annex the South as 
 soon as she could do it with impunity. Nevertheless, M. 
 Ollivier persisted in believing that the peace could be kept and 
 that a struggle with Prussia did not enter into the schemes of
 
 64 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 his master. Those who have attributed Machiavellian projects 
 to the Emperor have been wont to lay stress on the plebiscite 
 of May 8, and upon Gramont's summons to the Foreign Office 
 on May 14. M. Ollivier assures them that they are completely 
 mistaken. No thought of war crossed the Emperor's mind 
 when he determined to submit the amended and liberalized 
 constitution to the verdict of the electors. He was not asking 
 for a fresh lease of authority in view of foreign eventualities ; 
 he was, on the contrary, giving a reluctant assent to the demands 
 of his Liberal advisers. So little did he wish for \\\q plebiscite, 
 that in discussing constitutional reform with M. Ollivier he had 
 made it an express condition that no plebiscite should be taken. 
 Nor did the Emperor's success at the polls and on the morrow 
 of the plebiscite deflect the policy of Court and Cabinet from 
 its pacific grooves. Gramont indeed had been since 1861 
 ambassador at Vienna, from which post of vantage he had 
 narrowly watched the onward march of Prussian greatness, and 
 Gramont, though neither senator nor deputy, was on May 14 
 brought to the Foreign Office. It has been usual to assume 
 that the Duke was a firebrand pitched into a pacific Ministry 
 by the joint action of the Emperor and Rouher in order that 
 matters might be carried with a high hand. To all such sur- 
 mises M. Ollivier opposes a categorical denial. Gramont was 
 no firebrand, and it was M. Ollivier who recommended Gramont 
 to the Emperor, not Napoleon who imposed him on Ollivier. 
 From the first the bourgeois Minister fell under the charm of 
 the finished aristocrat. ' I met him at Prince Napoleon's. He 
 appeared to me to be seductive, enlightened, instructed. 
 He showed me his dispatch of 1866.' M. Ollivier does not 
 conceal the fact that upon the most important point of foreign 
 policy he thought differently from the man to whom he entrusted 
 the portfolio of foreign affairs. Gramont intended to resist the 
 union of Germany at all costs, Ollivier would draw the sword 
 only on proof of Northern coercion. For the present, however, 
 the cracks were plastered over, and the Cabinet hung on, mark- 
 ing time and keeping an open mind as to the future. 
 
 The Emperor had been more provident than his Ministers. 
 When Gramont went to Vienna to take leave of his embassy
 
 ollivip:r's memoirs 65 
 
 he was shown to his amazement the text of a treaty which his 
 master had been negotiating for the past year behind his 
 back. The draft was of the greatest moment, nothing less 
 than a scheme for an offensive and defensive alliance between 
 France, Austria, and Italy ; but it was unsigned and unratified 
 because Victor Emmanuel exacted as the price of his adhesion 
 the evacuation of Rome by the French troops. The negotia- 
 tions, however, were suspended, not broken, and the three 
 sovereigns exchanged autograph letters to that effect. Indeed, 
 on May 28 Lebrun was dispatched to Vienna to hold a secret 
 military conference with the Archduke Albert. But of all this 
 the chef de cabinet was kept in the darkest ignorance. 
 
 It was early in June, while Lebrun was at Schonbrunn 
 concerting military operations with the Austrian Archduke, 
 that Bismarck requested Marshal Prim to renew his offer 
 of the Spanish Crown to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern. 
 As far back as the spring of 1869 the Prussian Chancellor 
 became aware that Napoleon was preparing a triple alliance 
 against him, and in the Hohenzollern candidature he descried 
 a chance of precipitating a conflict before the scheme of his 
 enemy was matured. The pride of France would never 
 tolerate a member of the Prussian Royal Family on the 
 throne of Spain, even though that Prussian was a Roman 
 Catholic and more nearly connected by blood with the French 
 Emperor than with the King of Prussia. Bismarck was well 
 aware of this. The Hohenzollern candidature had been 
 discussed confidentially in Berlin in 1869, and the Prussian 
 Foreign Office was put in possession of the French objections. 
 So when on July 3 the news came to Paris that Prince 
 Leopold had accepted the offer of the Spanish throne, subject 
 to the confirmation of the Cortes, the French Cabinet instantly 
 flew to the conclusion that here was a plot carved and polished 
 by a cunning hand for the humiliation of France. They 
 agreed that the Prince would not have accepted the throne 
 without the consent of King William, and they received with 
 imperfectly veiled incredulity the assurances of Von- Thilc 
 that the Prussian Government had not stirred in the matter. 
 An instant conclusion was arrived at that the candidature 
 
 2302 ]^
 
 66 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 must be broken off before the Cortes met on July ao, other- 
 wise the enemy would be Spain not Prussia, and while France 
 was occupied in punishing the innocent, the guilty party 
 would cro off with the loot. A Council was held at St. Cloud 
 on July 6 to consider the whole situation and to frame 
 a plan of action. M. OUivier, exhibiting a curious misunder- 
 standing of the state of Europe, argued for a Russian alliance ; 
 Gramont, speaking from closer knowledge, urged a treaty 
 with the Austrians ; finally the Emperor for the first time 
 divulged his secret negotiations with the courts of Vienna and 
 Florence. As he read out the autograph letters which had 
 passed between the three crowned heads, it must have been 
 plain to every one that the withdrawal of the French garrison 
 from Rome was the true crux of the problem of alliances. 
 But no question was more delicate than the maintenance of 
 the temporal power of the Pope ; and not a voice was raised 
 to propose its discussion. The Council proceeded to debate 
 the terms of a declaration to be made to the Chambers. The 
 plan of such a manifesto had sprung up in M. Ollivier's brain 
 and receives no little commendation from his pen. Gramont 
 had drafted a paper which was both hot and strong, and 
 M. Ollivier made it hotter and stronger. Then it was read 
 out to the enthusiastic plaudits of the Legislature. The war 
 fever caught hold of the city. In the Chambers and the press 
 it was loudly proclaimed that Prussia had thrown down the 
 glove and that France must take it up. Five days passed 
 of anxious negotiation and heated polemic. Then late in the 
 evening of July ii an unofficial telegram reached Paris that 
 Prince Anthony of Hohenzollern had been induced to renounce • 
 the Spanish throne in the name of his son. When the news 
 was spread abroad in the following afternoon, a feeling passed 
 over Europe that the crisis was surmounted. The King of 
 Italy returned to his mountains to hunt; his ambassador in 
 Paris congratulated Napoleon on a 'great moral victory', 
 and Macmahon was ordered to suspend the embarkation of 
 the African troops. ' Oui, c'est la paix,' said the Emperor, 
 and in many quarters it was held that it was peace with 
 honour. Guizot said that he could never remember a greater
 
 OLLIVIERS MEMOIRS 67 
 
 diplomatic victory for France, and Bismarck has recorded 
 in his ' Thoughts and Recollections ' that since Olmlitz Prussia 
 had experienced no greater humiliation. 
 
 No disease is more contagious than the war fever, nor 
 is there one less susceptible of sudden cure. Up till 3 p.m. 
 on July 12 the French Ministers had been strung up to 
 regard war as inevitable, and now that intelligence had been 
 received of Prince Anthony's vicarious renouncement they 
 could not suddenly divest themselves of the suspicions and 
 animosities which the conflict had excited in their minds. 
 When Olozaga, the ambassador of Spain, came to Gramont 
 with the news, _the French Foreign Minister, so far from 
 regarding the affair as settled, held that it had been rendered 
 still more difficult of solution. In the telegram which had 
 been addressed by Prince Anthony to Prim there was no 
 word either of France or of Prussia. The Prince had been 
 induced to renounce the Spanish throne in the name of his 
 son (who was thirty-five years of age) upon the representations 
 of Strat, the Roumanian envoy who had been dispatched 
 to Sigmaringen from Paris on the initiative of Olozaga and 
 with the secret concurrence of Napoleon. The telegram was 
 en clair, and all the representations of Benedetti, the French 
 ambassador, had been unavailing to induce King William 
 either to command or to counsel a retreat. Gramont, in 
 whom the punctilio of a professional diplomatist was blended 
 with a deep conviction of Prussian duplicity, considered that 
 the honour of France required something more than the bare 
 renunciation of ' Le Pere Antoine ' ; but M. Ollivier, more 
 easily satisfied, said that if the candidature were seriously 
 withdrawn the affair was at an end, and that he would be 
 no party to pressing fresh demands upon the Prussian 
 Court. 
 
 Fortunate would it have been for France if M. Ollivier had 
 been able to persist in this decision and secure its acceptance. 
 The Triple Alliance was still in the region of dreams, and 
 France had everything to gain by postponing the conflict, 
 if conflict there must have been, until she had secured an ally ; 
 but a spirit of mad unreason had seized upon the Chambers, 
 
 E 2
 
 68. OLLIVIKR'S MEMOIRS 
 
 and when it was known among the deputies of the Right 
 that M. OlHvier thought well of the prospects of peace, there 
 was a loud explosion of anger and a formal inquiry from the 
 tribune as to the guarantees which the Government intended 
 to demand to prevent a repetition of similar complications. 
 The ominous phrase ' guarantees ' launched by Clement 
 Duvernois passed like wildfire through the town on to the 
 Palace of St. Cloud. In that atmosphere of high tension and 
 irresponsible vainglory the one fear was that war might be 
 averted. Four years before the country had stood aside, 
 and Prussia had comfortably eaten up North Germany, 
 Was that humiliation to be repeated ? Was the pretended 
 resignation to be taken as serious and France to be again 
 fooled into torpor while Prussia massed fresh battalions and 
 swallowed fresh territory? If so, the Empire would perish, 
 and Bourbaki, melodramatically throwing his sword upon 
 the billiard table, allowed it to be known that the tragedy 
 of peace would be deepened by a general's resignation. The 
 Emperor was not proof against so much clamorous disappoint- 
 ment, and with the first shades of evening was pushed into the 
 crowning indiscretion of his life. Though it had been settled 
 that nothing should be done till the Cabinet meeting on the 
 following day, July 13, he concocted with Gramont a message 
 to Benedetti at Ems to the effect that it seemed necessary 
 that the King of Prussia should associate himself with Prince 
 Anthony's withdrawal, and that he — the King — should give 
 an assurance that he would not authorize any renewal of the 
 Hohenzollern candidature. The momentous telegram was 
 dispatched at 7 p.m. Later in the evening, after some 
 deputies of the Right, among them Jerome David and 
 Cassagnac, had been to the Palace and put fresh powder on 
 the fire, an Imperial letter was sent to the Foreign Ofllice 
 instructing Gramont to accentuate the dispatch. But the 
 first telegram had reached Benedetti, and before he heard 
 again from Paris he had seen King William and pressed the 
 demand for guarantees. 
 
 It was hard upon midnight before M. Ollivier, calling 
 at the Foreign Office, heard that a tele.^ram had been sent
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 69 
 
 and that anotherwas projected. He was placed in a position 
 of great difficulty. A new and dangerous turn had been 
 given to the Government's "diplomacy behind his back and 
 without the knowledge of the Cabinet. An English Minister, 
 placed in M. Ollivier's position, would certainly have resigned 
 his seals rather than render himself responsible for a policy 
 diametrically opposed to the course which only a few hours 
 before he had openly professed to be alone suited to the 
 needs of the situation. M. Ollivier did not resign. . He 
 contented himself with advising his Foreign Minister to soften 
 the tone of the dispatch to Benedetti, and himself wrote a 
 short paragraph which he seems to have expected that 
 Gramont would substitute for the original text. Then he 
 left the room ' troubled and anxious '. There was every reason 
 in the world why he should. In that brief interview he had 
 allowed himself to be driven from a sound position. He had 
 advised that the Prussian King should be asked to give a 
 guarantee that he would not permit Prince Leopold to throw 
 over Prince Anthony's renunciation. It is true that such 
 a demand was slightly less exacting than the demand con- 
 tained in the dispatch which had been sent off at 7 p.m. ; for 
 M. Ollivier's proposed guarantee was limited in point of time 
 to the situation of the moment, whereas the dispatch of 7 p.m. 
 required King William to give an indefinite guarantee against 
 any renewal of the candidature. But this does not greatly 
 attenuate M. Ollivier's lapse. He had assumed responsibility 
 for the provocative demand for guarantees, and he had not 
 even made it clear to Gramont that the limitation of the 
 guarantee to the present case was the uttermost point to 
 which he would consent to go. 
 
 M. Ollivier did not come to his decision to cling to office 
 without anxious consideration and a sleepless night. The 
 simile of the lightning conductor and the thunderbolt^ which 
 had once before done duty in a political crisis, came to his 
 mind and brought relief. He would remain in the storm 
 centre as the lightning conductor. He reckoned himself 
 certain of a majority in the Council, less certain of the Chamber 
 where he might be overthrown by a coalition of the extreme
 
 70 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 wings ; but with the Emperor's support he might conjure the 
 storm. At first it ahiiost seemed as if his calculations would 
 work out. At the Council meeting on the morning of the 13th 
 a pacific close followed upon the forked lightnings of a 
 passionate opening. When everything appeared to be at its 
 worst, Leboeuf calling imperiously for the reserves, the 
 Emperor supporting the demand for mobilization, a servant 
 entered with a letter from Lord Lyons, who spoke of the 
 immense responsibility which the Government of the Empire 
 would incur, should it enlarge the field of discussion. The 
 Emperor read the letter aloud and the debate was resumed, 
 every member speaking in his turn, and M. Ollivier rising 
 again and again to protest against mobilization. At last the 
 Emperor swung round, dragging Gramont in his train, and the 
 peace party won a victory by eight votes to four. It was too 
 late to withdraw the request for guarantees, but if guarantees 
 were refused the Council would be content with a token of 
 the royal concurrence in Prince Anthony's act. When the 
 evening telegrams came in and it was known that King 
 William had given his entire and unreserved approval to the 
 withdrawal of the Prince, M. Ollivier believed that the crisis 
 was over, and that France would not and should not insist on 
 guarantees. ' Maintenant c'est veritablement fini,' he observed. 
 But Gramont's mood was different : ' c'est peu,' was his 
 ominous and laconic verdict upon the latest intelligence from 
 Ems. 
 
 Disillusion followed hard upon the heels of confidence. On 
 the morning of July 14 Gramont burst into M. Ollivj^r's room 
 with a little leaf of yellow paper in his hands — a telegram 
 from Berlin telling of a certain special supplement of the 
 North German Garjette which described how the French 
 ambassador had molested King William on the promenade at 
 Ems, how the King had refused to see him and had announced 
 through his aide-de-camp that he had no further communication 
 to make to him. It was the famous Ems telegram which 
 Bismarck had condensed and caused to be published that he 
 might scatter abroad the impression that his Prussian master 
 had received and resented an aft'ront from the ambassador ol
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 71 
 
 France. This time M. Ollivier saw clearly. ' They wish ', he 
 said, 'to force us into war.' At 12.30 the Emperor came 
 to the Tuileries, driving through a sea of angry, impatient 
 faces. The Council opened with a demonstration. ' After 
 what has passed/ cried Gramont, throwing his portfolio on the 
 table as he took his seat, ' no Foreign Minister worthy of his 
 place would hesitate to declare war.' Leboeuf said that the 
 Prussians were buying horses in Belgium and that there was 
 not a moment to spare. And then the ball was thrown to and 
 fro. The dispatches of Benedetti had given the impression 
 that King William had been courteous, and a sovereign was 
 certainly within his rights in declining to give audience to an 
 ambassador. On the other hand, how could the Special 
 Supplement, containing, as it did, an ofificial telegram, only to 
 be supplied from official sources, be otherwise construed than 
 as a deliberate provocation ? The same men who had hoped 
 for peace the day before now held that peace was improbable; 
 and at 4 p.m. it was unanimously determined to call out the 
 reserves. Forty minutes later Leboeuf left the Tuileries to 
 take the necessary steps. 
 
 Then ensued one of the most dramatic revulsions in the 
 history of that tormented day. A fresh dispatch arrived from 
 ]5enedetti giving to the language of the King of Prussia a less 
 peremptory form, and sending a sudden spasm of indecision 
 through the veins of that haggard and harassed assemblage. 
 Perhaps they had been precipitate, had neglected expedients^ 
 might yet honourably withdraw? In the general agony 
 Gramont threw out an idea which was caught up as an 
 instrument of salvation — an appeal to a general congress. 
 With tears coursing down his cheeks the Emperor bade 
 Ollivier, his ready writer and rhetorician, pen a Declaration of 
 appeal to the Powers, and when at last this had been approved 
 the Council dispersed. It was 6.30 p.m. The tired men 
 stumbled out into the evening air. 
 
 Not many minutes elapsed before M. Ollivier 's beautiful 
 Declaration began to burn a hole in his pocket. As he reflected 
 in the cool air on the decision which had been taken in the heat 
 of an exhausting Council, he thought it cowardly. Returning
 
 72 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 to the Chancery, he summoned his wife, his brothers, and his 
 secretaries, and read out to them the ' pathetic and eloquent * 
 document which was intended for the consumption of the 
 Legislature on the following day. Cries of astonishment and 
 indignation went up from the domestic circle which had been 
 thus hastily initiated into a secret of the State. And if such 
 was M. Ollivier's return to his dovecote, we may imagine the 
 discomfort of the Emperor among the war-hawks of the Palace. 
 ' What ! ' cried the Empress to Leboeuf, ' do you also approve 
 this cowardice ? Dishonour yourself if you must, do not dis- 
 honour the Emperor.' In a paroxysm of penitence a fresh 
 Council was summoned to meet after dinner at St. Cloud. 
 
 It was one of those delicious summer evenings before August 
 
 has parched the leaves, when the air is hot but not heavy, and 
 
 the stars shine softly overhead, throwing their pale reflections 
 
 into the slow, languid waters of the Seine. Here and there 
 
 groups of men and women strolled and chatted along the quays 
 
 and shaded alleys of the Bois de Boulogne. A serene peace 
 
 brooded over Paris. M. Ollivier drove to St. Cloud and found 
 
 that the Emperor's thoughts had taken the same course as his 
 
 own. The Congress was unsatisfactory ; neither the Chambers 
 
 nor the streets would stand it. ' Mud would be thrown at our 
 
 carriages,' said the Minister, ' and they would hoot us.' After 
 
 some moments of silence the Emperor answered, ' See in what 
 
 a plight a government may sometimes find itself. Even if we 
 
 had no motive for war which we could avow, we should 
 
 nevertheless be obliged to resolve on it to obey the will of the 
 
 people.' The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of 
 
 the other Ministers, and for the first time the Empress took 
 
 her seat at the Council board. Leboeuf began by explaining 
 
 that he had called out the reserves, but that this should not 
 
 affect the issue ; he could recall the order and resign. Then 
 
 Gramont read the latest telegrams. They showed that the 
 
 refusal of the King of Prussia to receive Benedetti was being 
 
 ofificially communicated to foreign governments. The Council 
 
 determined that the reserves should be called out. There was 
 
 no occasion for voting, nor did the Empress open her lips. 
 
 The final step was left for the morning. At 9 a.m. on July 15
 
 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 73 
 
 the Cabinet met again at St. Cloud, and again the Empress 
 was present. The mood of Paris was angry and unmistakable, 
 and as the Ministers drove to the Palace they were assailed by 
 cries of * A Berlin ' and ' Vive la guerre '. When Gramont 
 had finished reading the Declaration the Emperor clapped his 
 hands. The war was voted with unanimity, the Empress 
 alone neither speaking nor casting a vote ; but it is charac- 
 teristic of Napoleon that as his Ministers were on their way to 
 the Legislative Assembly he received Witzthum, the Austrian 
 Minister at Brussels, who was going to Vienna, and asked him 
 to request Francis Joseph to summon a congress that peace 
 might be preserved. But the die was cast. The Chamber 
 vociferously applauded the intrepid spirit of the Cabinet, and 
 by an imposing majority voted a credit of fifty millions to 
 the war. 
 
 Such, in bare outline, is the painful story. Thiers puts the 
 responsibility for the war upon the blunders of the Liberal 
 Cabinet ; the Emperor more wisely divided the blame between 
 himself, his Ministers, and the Chambers ; M. Ollivier brings 
 into special prominence thebelHcose attitude of the Conservative 
 party, which at the critical moment sacrificed a great diplomatic 
 advantage by pressing the P^mperor to ask for guarantees. It 
 is clear that the P"rench might have honourably avoided war 
 after the withdrawal of the HohenzoUern prince, and that in 
 this sense Bismarck spoke the truth when he told Lord Goschen 
 that the war was not of his making. It is also clear that 
 nothing gave Bismarck greater pleasure than the news that 
 the P"rench were producing fresh demands. But what a satire 
 is this exhibition of inconsequence, hesitation, and division 
 upon the vaunted solidity of the Liberal Empire ! The most 
 critical decision in the whole course of the negotiations is 
 taken by the Emperor and the P'oreign Minister without the 
 knowledge of the Cabinet, and the Chief of the Cabinet accepts 
 a policy which he does not approve, because when it comes to 
 his ears it is already irreversible. In spite of all that M. 
 Ollivier has written, Gramont's handling of the problem was 
 either wholly incompetent or quite inconsistent with peaceful 
 desires. M. Ollivier is generous to an honourable colleague,
 
 74 OLLIVIER'S MEMOIRS 
 
 from whom he was divided more widely than he seems to 
 imagine ; but, at least, at this great crisis of national destiny 
 the two Ministers were united in a common failing. Neither 
 of them kept his head. 
 
 A Leaf from a Corsican Note-Book 
 
 IT was very cold at Vizzavona. Though the second week of 
 April was nearing its close, the snow lay deep upon the road 
 and the wind whistled through the pine forest which clothes the 
 lower slope of the Monte d'Oro. Trudging up the long cause- 
 way from the station the party from Corte felt that it had 
 been suddenly transported from Corsica into Switzerland. 
 We were cold and we were hungry, for the hour was close 
 upon two, and we had touched no food since our light 
 breakfast at eight o'clock in the mountain stronghold of 
 Boswell's Paoli. 
 
 At last we gained the hotel, a low shabby building posted 
 on the top of the pass opposite the gleaming summit of the 
 mountain, with a glass veranda, pleasant enough doubtless in 
 summer-time, but in this Arctic temperature very properly 
 deserted by the visitors. The one permanent occupant of the 
 hotel, a young Dane, born and bred in Iceland, who had 
 chosen this desolate spot as suited to the composition of a 
 doctor's thesis upon the origin and nature of genius, was 
 crouching over a wood fire in the little salon. A few French 
 motorists shivered by, eager to exchange this disconsolate 
 spell of winter for the palms, the oranges, and the sunlight of 
 the coast. With the keeper of the hotel such speed was a note 
 of human frailty, for he was himself a Dane, with the grave 
 and stoical habit of the North. 
 
 The importance of Vizzavona lies in the fact that it is the 
 highest point in the long diagonal line of communication which 
 connects Bastia on the north-east with Ajaccio on the south- 
 west of the island. Every traveller who wishes to combine
 
 A LEAF FROM A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 75 
 
 Bastia, Corte, and Ajaccio in his tour must pass over the 
 pine-clad shoulders of the Monte d'Oro, and, save in the summer 
 months, must be prepared to find the forest of Vizzavona deep 
 in snow. The stout Genoese fort which stands upon the little 
 spur just opposite the hotel, and is visible for many a mile to 
 travellers ascending the valley from the south, shows how 
 much the old masters of the island thought of this position, 
 and incidentally also how little they cared for aesthetic effect. 
 Indeed, no one must expect architectural beauties in so poor 
 a land as Corsica. From the earliest extant monuments o 
 the sixteenth to the latest achievements of the twentieth 
 century, there is not a single biluding which reaches respecta- 
 bility. The country learnt nothing from its conquerors, and 
 contributed nothing of its own. In Corfu and elsewhere the 
 Venetians have left some fine military and civil memorials in 
 stone of their ancient Empire. Not so the Genoese ; and a 
 baser and more squalid use of splendid stone and marble can 
 hardly be imagined than that which in Corsica defaces some 
 of the loveliest scenery in the world. 
 
 The proper course for an Englishman halting at Vizzavona 
 is to ascend the Monte d'Oro, a peak over nine thousand feet 
 above the sea, whence a view can be obtained not only of the 
 whole island, but also, under favourable conditions, of the 
 shores of Italy and Tunis : and as a guide can be hired for ten 
 francs, and the time for the ascent is certainly not above four 
 hours, the expedition is easy and inexpensive. But with 
 a howling wind, a black sky, and a prospect of a fresh snowfall 
 in the evening, the conditions were none too favourable, and 
 we decided to pass on southwards in the morning, and to visit 
 those places in the valley of the Gravona which are connected 
 with the early history of Napoleon Bonaparte. 
 
 The villages in the upper part of the valley lie some 
 hundred feet above the roots of the mountains upon the 
 western or left-hand side as you descend, and occur wherever 
 the great wall of granite flings itself back into a horseshoe 
 curve, supplying water for man and beast, and a gentler slope 
 for wood, pasture, and tillage. Of these villages the first, as 
 you descend, is Bocognano, which lies some eight kilometres
 
 76 A LEAF FROM A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 
 
 from the head of the pass. About a quarter of a mile above 
 the main street of the village there is a round knoll, green and 
 terraced, sprinkled with white fruit blossom and the shimmer- 
 ing grey-green of the olive, and crowned by a tiny hamlet of 
 white stuccoed red-tiled cottages, A clear mountain-stream 
 brawls beneath it on the south ; on the north there is a fine 
 grove of Spanish chestnut shading the green slope of the 
 great western bastion of the valley. This little hamlet is 
 Poggiolo, the mountain residence of the Tusoli, in whose house 
 Napoleon spent a night on a famous occasion. I climbed the 
 hill under a warm midday sun, and found myself in a small 
 piazza, face to face with a square, two-storied house of 
 granite, quite ugly, and in every way undistinguished save for 
 the extreme solidity of the material out of which it was built. 
 The front door was of solid chestnut, whitened with age, and 
 above it there was an empty niche, which may have held 
 a Madonna or a saint. A stone balustrade ran along in front 
 of the house from end to end. The walls, which were thick, 
 were plastered with stucco, and the whole house was clearly 
 built with a view to coolness and as a shelter for the eyes 
 against the dazzling summer rays, for there were but two 
 windows giving on the front. The floors were of stone, the 
 shutters and great beams of the roof hewn from the chestnut 
 grove on the estate. Such was the house of Napoleon's 
 relatives, the first to be built in Bocognano, so my peasant 
 guide informed me. ' Maintenant c'est presque rien,' and 
 indeed it is now serving to receive the cast-ofi" rubbish of the 
 hamlet. 
 
 Whether the chance peasant will know anything about the 
 Bonaparte traditions of his village is a matter upon which you 
 cannot lay a bet with any approach to safety. Formerly, I 
 should imagine that things were otherwise, but one of the many 
 results of Napoleon's career is that more than anything else it 
 has contributed to make Corsica, not only in constitutional 
 law, but also in sentiment, a province of France. The young 
 people emigrate to Algeria or Tunis, and embrace in great 
 numbers (so vivacious is the military spirit of the island) the 
 career of arms. The hill villages are becoming dispeopled,
 
 A LEAF FROM A CORSICA^^ NOTE-BOOK 77 
 
 and here and there a smart white chateau tells the tale of 
 a successful emigrant who has returned from the colonies with 
 a fortune and with a very reduced interest in the concerns of 
 his humbler neighbours. For the historical inquirer, the only 
 course is to enter into conversation with the very old inhabi- 
 tants. They at least may remember what their juniors have 
 forgotten, or have never even learnt. In Bocognano, which 
 was one of the Bonaparte villages, this method of approach 
 brought instant success. The first two people whom I hap- 
 pened to accost, a fine old grey-bearded peasant in a brown 
 velveteen coat, and the courteous lady who sells picture 
 post-cards in the main street of the village, were both loyal 
 members of the Bonaparte clientele. ' The father of my grand- 
 father ', said the old man, ' sheltered Lieutenant Bonaparte at 
 Tavera when he was escaping from Bocognano. My name is 
 Jacques Mancini,' And the lady turned out to be descended 
 on one side from the Poggiolis, a family of whom some words 
 must be said hereafter. 
 
 The escape of Lieutenant Bonaparte from Bocognano, in 
 May 1793, is the principal romance of this valley. The island 
 was divided into two bitter factions — the friends and the 
 enemies of Paoli. The great liberator, once the idol of 
 republicans all over Europe, had been denounced to the 
 French Convention as a royalist, a traitor, and a pensioner of 
 England, and a decree was issued for his arrest. Such an 
 insult levelled at such a man threw the Corsican patriots into 
 a frenzy, and bands of armed peasants flocked into the 
 mountain citadel of Corte, where the old general might 
 securely defy the French Commissioners at Bastia to do their 
 worst. Lieutenant Bonaparte, then in his twenty-fourth year, 
 and noted throughout Corsica for the zeal of his Jacobin con- 
 victions, was at Ajaccio, where Paolist feeling ran dangerously 
 high. He determined to cross the island and join his political 
 friends at Bastia. So, setting out from the coast on May 3 
 with his faithful henchman, Santo Ricci of Bocognano, he 
 pushed his way up the hot pass, threaded the forest of 
 Vizzavona, and dropped down upon Corte, where it was his 
 intention to beard Paoli in the grim old palazzo which Boswcll
 
 78 A LEAF FROIJJ A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 
 
 has described. The plan was audacious to the point of 
 impudence, more especially as it had become known to the 
 Directory at Corte that Lucien Bonaparte was openly boasting 
 of having procured Paoli's disgrace. Friends warned Napoleon 
 that his life was unsafe, and that he must retreat to Ajaccio 
 without delay. He jumped upon his horse and rode for his 
 life. At nightfall he reached Bocognano, and was received by 
 the Tusoli ; but his enemy, Marius Peraldi, was riding post- 
 haste upon his heels, and on the next morning, as the young 
 lieutenant was about to resume his journey, he was taken 
 by a band of Paolists and shut up in the inn to await the 
 pleasure and vengeance of his foes. 
 
 The traveller who passes through Bocognano must infallibly 
 lunch at the Hotel de I'Univers, for, despite its ambitious title, 
 it is a clean and modest country hostelry. Here he may fare 
 on excellent potatoes, steamed in their jackets, and on a 
 delicious hruccia^ as the national dish of curds, made with 
 goat's milk, is termed. Then they will give you an omelette and 
 fresh butter and excellent bread, and jam made from the 
 native apple. And fortified by such a collation you may be 
 prepared to survey, for it is but a few steps up the hill, a 
 large slatternly green-washed building pretentiously labelled 
 'Gendarmerie Nationale'. In the wall which looks down 
 the valley towards Ajaccio you will be shown near the ground 
 a window, out of which, on that May morning, somewhere 
 about the hour of dejeuner, Lieutenant Bonaparte is said to 
 have made his escape, with the help of Santo -Ricci and other 
 faithful friends, from the village of Bocognano. 
 
 The story of this adventure has been told by so many lips, 
 and with so many variants and embellishing touches, that the 
 historian may well despair of fixing every detail with certitude. 
 The most illustrious of the narrators is Napoleon himself, who 
 told Antommarchi at St. Helena that he managed to cajole 
 his captors to allow him' to stroll about in the open air, and 
 that, seizing a pretext to withdraw, he made a sudden dash 
 into the country. But the most elaborate and circumstantial 
 account is the result of a judicial inquiry held at Bastia in 
 1855 for the purpose of ascertaining the identity of the man of
 
 A LEAF FROM A CORSICA;^ NOTE-BOOK 79 
 
 Bocognano ', to whom, in virtue of the seventh codicil of 
 the Emperor's will, dated April 35, 1821, a sum of twenty 
 thousand francs had been bequeathed. At this extraordinary 
 scrutiny no less than eighty witnesses were examined. What 
 lies must have been told ! The story which the Court decided 
 to believe may, perhaps, be a tissue of inaccuracies, but since it 
 is the best we have, there is no option but to follow it.^ 
 
 Once away, he must have crossed a little garden slope, 
 jumped the brook at the bottom, and then run for his life 
 uphill for three or four hundred yards. Whether he had 
 to climb the two stone walls which at present cross the 
 line of his retreat I cannot say; but that the slope was then, 
 as now, sprinkled with chestnut trees is more than probable, 
 and that shots were exchanged before the fugitives crossed 
 the ridge I learn from the lips of an old peasant who showed 
 me the ground. Once over the crest the fugitives must have 
 dashed down the old road which twists and twists till it meets 
 the point where the grand new carriage road, after taking a 
 lower and more leisurely circuit, now crosses the deep gorge 
 of the Gravona by a solid and respectable bridge. If you 
 pass over the river by the bridge, and climb the hedge on the 
 other side, you will light upon a little path which leads down 
 to the stepping-stones. Pursue that path, for there is none 
 more delicious. The gorge is cool, steep, and narrow, clothed 
 with solemn ilex and dark arbutus and silvery erica, and, 
 at the bottom, there is a stream of clear and swift waters, with 
 deep pools and tiny waterfalls and great slabs and blocks of 
 g-ranite strewn about its course. It is over these stones that 
 Lieutenant Bonaparte must have passed ; but if the stream 
 were as full on that May evening as it was when I saw it, he 
 did not pass dry-shod. 
 
 A few miles down the valley, and in another recess of the 
 mountain barrier, stands the little village of Tavera. The 
 black goats were browsing on the sunny green pastures, 
 the stream was rustling merrily down to the fuller waters of 
 the Gravona, and the white plaster and russet tiles of the 
 
 ' See Marcaggi, La Genese de Napob'on, whose account of this incident 
 seems to me preferable to that given by Chuquet.
 
 8o A LEAF FROJT A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 
 
 village looked gay and pleasant in the brightness. The village, 
 which stands about a hundred feet above the railway line and 
 the main road, is reached by a winding path of stone, walled-in 
 on either side, and so narrow that a donkey laden with faggots 
 is quite sufficient to obstruct all progress. Go right through 
 the village, past the white-washed church, and strike trans- 
 versely across the oaks and chestnuts towards the little white 
 mortuary chapel of the Mancini family on the brow. Then, 
 by a broad and broken path, over rough slabs of granite and 
 under the grateful shadow of an ilex avenue, you will eventually 
 reach the hamlet of Cazarac. Here a certain traveller met a 
 very old lady, full of intelligence and curiosity, and graced 
 with all the gentle and courteous manner of a mountain race. 
 She took him into her cottage, fetched him a bottle of light 
 red wine, and then, after half an hour of hospitable intercourse, 
 conducted him to the fountain at which Lieutenant Bonaparte 
 is recorded to have drunk upon the occasion of his famous 
 flight from Bocognano. At Tavera he had been received by 
 the ruling Mancini, probably on the site of the grand new 
 house which is now the principal glory of the neighbourhood. 
 Then he struck up the hill and plunged into the macchia, 
 following a little path some half-way up the mountain-side, 
 which my elderly friend showed me. At what hour of day the 
 fugitives reached Cazarac I could not ascertain, but that the 
 Mancini gave the Lieutenant a cup of milk and that the 
 fugitives pressed on rapidly down the valley is vouchsafed on 
 the testimony of Laurent Campana, the most credible of all 
 the eighty witnesses in the great judicial inquiry of 1855. In 
 any case Lieutenant Bonaparte took to the macchia, and to 
 those who so proceed it is vouchsafed to enjoy a fragrance of 
 aromatic herbs so sweet and powerful in the keen mountain 
 air that, having once experienced this pleasure, they must needs 
 hope ever afterwards to be able to recall it. 
 
 We did not follow the fugitives in this part of their retreat, 
 but, since time pressed, took the shortest possible route, which 
 is that of the railway, from Tavera to Ucciani. Here, too, the 
 village is perched on a little spur of the great hills about a 
 kilometre above the railway line. We ordered coffee at the
 
 A LEAF FROM A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 8i 
 
 inn, and, sitting in the evening sunlight on a bench outside, 
 soon attracted a gathering of boys and men. Inquiries as to 
 the Bonapartist legends of the place were at first singularly 
 fruitless. The innkeeper, who looked like a Levantine, knew 
 nothing whatever, and several likely old gentlemen proved 
 equally sterile. At last an antique inhabitant was produced 
 with all the prestige of eighty summers, and an assurance that 
 he contained the necessary information. He came forward to 
 our table and gravely took a seat. A soft felt hat was on his 
 head, a black cloak was thrown over his shoulders, and though 
 his clothes were old and threadbare, he had the bearing and 
 manners of a finished gentleman. He began in excellent 
 French : ' There was a very old man in this village whom I 
 just remember. His name was Silvani, and he belonged to my 
 family, for I, too, am a Silvani. We called him ilprete. Now he 
 knew Napoleon very well in youth, and Napoleon inquired after 
 him at St. Helena. The Silvanis were very faithful to the Bona- 
 partes. One of them was almoner to King Louis of Holland. 
 Yes ; Napoleon used to stay very often at Ucciani, sometimes 
 with the Silvanis, sometimes with the Poggiolis, and sometimes 
 in the house of Leonati, which is now destroyed. On the occa- 
 sion to which you refer, when he was fleeing from Bocognano, 
 he stayed in the viaison Leonati. AH through his life he had 
 many Jid^ks in Ucciani.' All this the old man said very simply 
 and quietly, catching at times for breath. As for himself he 
 had been a soldier ; most of his life had been passed in Algeria, 
 a finer country than Corsica ; but he had fought in the war of 
 1870 and was at the battle of Sedan. A battered old gentle- 
 man, with cataract in both eyes, yet finding some consolation 
 for the afflictions of life in his afternoon glass of lemonade and 
 game of cards in the village inn. 
 
 He led us up to the house of the Poggioli, a stout ugly 
 granite building, and showed us the window of the room in 
 which Napoleon slept. An English farmer would never con- 
 sent to inhabit such a building, and it would be condemned by 
 every district council or sanitary authority in the land. Yet 
 Napoleon slept there, so tradition affirms, and according to 
 M. Chuquet (who in this matter contradicts my old friend) 
 
 2302 f
 
 82 A LEAF FROM A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 
 
 slept there on the occasion of his flight, being receix^ed by the 
 Poggioli of the day who was then mayor of the village. There 
 can be very little doubt that M. Chuquet is right, for in his 
 last will and testament Napoleon left a sum of thirty thousand 
 francs to the Poggioli who had helped to save his life upon his 
 memorable escape down the wild and beautiful valley of the 
 Gravona. 
 
 The next day horses were brought and the fugitives rode 
 straight down to Ajaccio. The other alternative would have 
 been to cross the mountains at Ucciani and to drop down upon 
 Bastelica, a stiff walk of about two hours and a half, at the end 
 of which Lieutenant Bonaparte would have found himself in a 
 region noted for its loyalty to his clan. The village of Bastelica, 
 set in a horseshoe of snow-veined granite mountains, the 
 middle slopes of which are clothed with beech and chestnut, 
 and the lower regions bright with apple-blossom and the 
 sparkling green of an Alpine pastui"e, is one of the loveliest in 
 Corsica ; and it is not surprising that its fresh air and easy 
 access to the highest peaks should attract visitors from Ajaccio 
 during the blaze of summer. But unlike Evisa and Vizzavona, 
 Bastelica is not the product of tourist agencies. On the 
 contrary, it is the historic storm-centre of Corsican history, the 
 birthplace of Sanpiero, the valiant champion of Corsican 
 independence in the sixteenth century, and the scene of one of 
 the classic battles of that age. Seven times has Bastelica been 
 burned, once by the Saracens, once by the Pisans, and five 
 times by the Genoese. An old resident told me that he 
 remembered in his youth the charred houses which bore 
 witness to the last burning of the eighteenth century. Yet, 
 save for the accident of Sanpiero's birth, the reason for the 
 importance of Bastelica is not immediately apparent. It lies 
 in a cup at the head of a valley, but the valley is to some 
 extent a cul-de-sac. There are, of course, paths across the 
 mountains, but no one pass so important as that which connects 
 the valley of the Gravona with the region of Corte. The true 
 reason for the importance of Bastelica would seem to He in the 
 fact that it is the summer pasturing ground for the goatherds 
 and shepherds who, during the winter months, are scattered
 
 A LEAF FROM A CORSICAN N0TE-300K 83 
 
 abroad through the levels of the long valley which broadens 
 down into the sunny and fertile Campo del Oro on the shores 
 of the Gulf of Ajaccio. Even now the population of Bastelica 
 is doubled every June by the incoming of the herdsmen with 
 their flocks and goats from the lower levels of the vine and 
 the olive. Bastelici all of them, for the canton stretches from 
 the mountains to the sea, they collect in their Highland 
 capital during the fighting season of the year, and in the days 
 when fighting was half the business of life were so posted as to 
 be able to dispute the entry into one of the richest valleys in 
 Corsica. Now the herdsmen of this region were friendly to 
 the Bonapartes who possessed land in the Campo del Oro, and 
 were no doubt good customers for the curds and chestnut cakes, 
 the sausages and homespun, which are the principal products 
 of the uplands. It would therefore have been a natural course 
 for Napoleon, had' he been hard pressed at Ucciani, to escape 
 by way of Bastelica ; but that he did not do so is clear. 
 There is no tradition. The mayor, the apothecary, ' le grand 
 Joseph ', the spacious innkeeper, who looks as if he had stepped 
 out of a picture of Vandyke, roundly deny that Lieutenant 
 Bonaparte stopped at Bastelica in his flight. The old men of 
 the place know nothing of him here, and we may be safe in 
 concluding that if they know nothing there is nothing to be 
 known. 
 
 It is curious how little attention is paid by the French 
 Government to the old houses which are connected with the 
 early history of Napoleon. One would have thought at least 
 that some plaque would mark the dwellings in which the 
 Emperor had slept in his boyhood, or which are known to have 
 been in the possession of his family. But neither is this pre- 
 caution against oblivion adopted nor is any attention paid to 
 the upkeep of the structure. A few miles outside Ajaccio, on 
 the slope of a flowery hill, stands the country house of the 
 family, the house of Milelli, from which the fiery young radical 
 lieutenant indited his fierce letter to Buttafuoco. When 
 Gregorovius was in the island in 1853 he was shown the oak 
 (or rather ilex) in the garden of Milelli under which Napoleon 
 would sit dreaming or working, with the azure waters 
 
 V 2
 
 84 - A LEAF FROM A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 
 
 of the bay far below him and the steel-grey mountains 
 beyond. 
 
 The ilex has now disappeared, and the visitors must be 
 content with a dubious stump in the midst of weeds and 
 asphodel. The tall, gaunt house is a slatternly olive farm ; and 
 the garden in front of it, if a tangled mass of weeds can be so 
 described, is ornamented with the family vvashing. Great 
 blocks of granite strewn here and there among the olives and 
 ilexes give an air of disordered grandeur to the scene. When 
 we visited the spot groups of girls were gathering the olive 
 harvest, and the padrone — his hands, face, and shirt black with 
 olive-oil, and in possession of no language but the Corsican 
 dialect — was far too much occupied with his important business 
 to attend to the wants of unintelligible tourists. Nevertheless, 
 being courteous, as are all Corsicans, he led us down to the 
 sorry remnant of Napoleon's tree and plucked us a branch of 
 oranges from the garden. And so laden, we returned up the 
 pretty country path, with its hedges of white cistus and wild 
 peas, and lupins and golden broom, to the carriage which 
 awaited us in the Casteluccio road. 
 
 It is now nearly a hundred and fifty years since Corsica 
 came under the dominion of France, and the conquerors haye 
 not been idle in the interval. They have built roads and 
 bridges and hotels, and have so effectually spread the know- 
 ledge and practice of their language that it is now rare to find 
 a Corsican, unless he be well past the middle age, who cannot 
 understand a few words of French. That a race so distinct in 
 its individuality and so proud of its peculiar traditions should 
 have allowed itself to be absorbed in an alien civilization is due 
 to three governing causes : the living memory of Genoese 
 oppression, the career of Napoleon, and the facilities offered 
 by the French connexion for the profession of arms and for 
 colonization in Algeria and Tunis. Of these influences by far 
 the most important is the fact that Napoleon was born at 
 Ajaccio. In giving Napoleon to France, Corsica more than 
 wiped out the memory of the field of Ponte Nuovo ; and there 
 is not a Corsican who does not feel that all the glories of the 
 ancient monarchy pale beside the brilliance of his nationai
 
 A LEAF FROM A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 85 
 
 hero. We cannot wonder that the Corsican is a Bonapartist. 
 In the little mountain village of ToUa it was my good fortune 
 to make friends with Jean Baptiste Marti, a gendarme in the 
 Gendarmerie'd-pied under the Second Empire. He was a tall 
 old^ man, with a complexion of the freshest pink, an aquiline 
 nose, and light blue gleaming eyes, and, like all Corsicans, he 
 was full of movement and gesture. His life had been spent 
 under arms, and he showed a gunshot wound on his right leg, 
 which still gave him trouble in rainy weather. For many 
 years he had served in Algeria, and then, like many another 
 Corsican, was enrolled in the Emperor's bodyguard. Often 
 and often had he seen Napoleon HI chatting with his officers 
 in the barrack, or had stood on duty in the Tuileries admiring 
 the brilliant uniforms of the men and the gay dresses of the 
 women during an Imperial function. He could tell of all the 
 Marshals of the Empire, of .the defence of Paris against the 
 Prussians (during which he received his wound), of the out- 
 break of the Commune, and the victories of the Versaillais. 
 He had seen M. Thiers direct a gun from Mont Valerien, had 
 taken part with his fellow Corsicans in a desperate charge up 
 the hills of Meudon, and had done his share of street fighting 
 against the Communards. Of all these incidents and experi- 
 ences he would speak with simple and flowing eloquence, and 
 with a touching devotion to the cause of the Corsican dynasty. 
 And many a grey stone village in these wild hills may show 
 such a man as he. 
 
 Among the early friends of the great Napoleon was a certain 
 Nunzio Costa di Bastelica, a lieutenant in that second bat- 
 talion of Corsican volunteers, of which Bonaparte was elected 
 Lieutenant-Colonel in 1791. 'The brave Costa' helped the 
 mother and sisters of Napoleon to escape to the sea on the 
 starless night of May 30, 1793, ^""^ earned the eternal gratitude 
 of the young artilleryman. Gratitude on the one side was 
 matched by devotion on the other, and Costa left descendants 
 as loyal as himself. The author of the ' Ajaccienne', which is 
 the National Anthem of Corsica, is a Costa di Bastelica, and 
 when the band strikes up
 
 86 A LEAF FROM A CORSICAN NOTE-BOOK 
 
 Reveille-toi, ville sacree, 
 Dans ton orgueil et ton amour : 
 La Sainte Famille est rentree, 
 Les exiles sont de retour. 
 Les voici — Victoire ! Victoire ! 
 Qu'il soit fete dans sa maison, 
 L'Enfant piodigue de la gloire, 
 Napoleon ! Napoleon 1 
 
 every head is bared, and men and women sink upon their 
 knees. There has been nothing like this in Europe since the 
 Roman Emperors were worshipped with public rites. And 
 meanwhile, on a high ridge, far above the chattering city of 
 Ajaccio, stands a villa built out of the material of the Tuileries 
 
 4 
 
 by Count Pozzo, descendant of that life-long enemy ofNapoleon, 
 who carried his Corsican feud into the wide field of European 
 politics, and helped to prompt the great revenges of Alexander 
 of Russia. Standing as it does insolently on its hill-top and 
 assaulting the eye of every traveller who sails into the harbour 
 by light of day as something notable and compelling, it seems 
 to typify the victory of the dynasts, to answer the strains of 
 the band, and to confound the devotion of the kneeling crowd. 
 
 Lord Actons Historical IVork^ 
 
 IT was a natural idea to collect the writings of Lord Acton, 
 for, though many men of his time were more famous, few 
 left behind them a larger legacy of unsatisfied curiosity. 
 
 ^ I, Lectures on Modern History. The History of Freedom^ and other 
 Essays. Historical Essays and Studies. Lectures on the French Reiiolu- 
 tiofi. By Lord Acton. Edited by J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence. Four 
 vols. London: Macmillan, 1906-10. 
 
 2. Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone. Edited by Herbert PauL 
 London : George Allen, 1904. 
 
 3. Lord Acton and his Circle. By Abbot Gasquet. London : George 
 Allen, 1906. 
 
 4. The French Revolution: a Political History, 1 789-1804. By 
 A. Aulard. Translated from the French by Bernard Miall. Four vols. 
 London: Unwin, 1910.
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 87 
 
 Though he was a man of the world and polished and pleasant 
 in society, there was always something remote and mysterious 
 about him. He did not fall into any of the received types who 
 are to be found in London clubs or in country-houses and 
 college halls ; and it was not easy to give him a label. His 
 religion — for he was a member of the Roman Communion — 
 cut him off from the pleasant but somewhat narrow convention 
 of English public-school and university life. His education 
 had been lonely, peculiar, and exotic. Descent and marriage 
 made him half a foreigner ; much of his life was spent abroad 
 at Tegernsee or at Cannes ; and he did a thing which must 
 always be very rare among Englishmen of ample means and 
 high station — he devoted the devouring industry of his days 
 and nights to the single-minded pursuit of knowledge. A 
 good deal of pleasant antiquarian erudition has come out of 
 English country-houses, as Sir William Dugdale's monumental 
 folios may testify ; but Lord Acton's learning was not the 
 product of these old-fashioned pieties of the soil. He was 
 a savant not of the English but of the newest and most 
 scientific German type, and yet with none of the narrowness 
 which marks much learned work in Germany, for he was 
 a specialist, not only in one, but in many periods of history. 
 
 Possessing the tastes and equipment of a great continental 
 professor, he moved in the world of fashion and affairs, and 
 stood near, though not very near, to the wheels of government. 
 He was the stepson of Lord Granville, whom he accompanied 
 on a mission to Moscow, the friend and confidant of Gladstone, 
 and a Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria. Like Gibbon, he 
 had sat in Parliament. He had known many makers of 
 continental history ; and, being a complete master of colloquial 
 French, German, and Italian, he was able to converse with 
 them freely and on even terms. It was often said that Lord 
 Acton's memoirs, if memoirs he wrote, would furnish a banquet 
 of rich and curious miscellanies which could not easily be 
 matched. ' Nobody, it was reputed, was more fond or retentive 
 of gossip, not only by reason of the natural curiosity of his 
 mind, but from a rooted conviction that the historian must be 
 prepared ' to take his meals in the scullery ', uniting the appetite
 
 88 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 for small things with the appetite for big ones, and carrying 
 his trained and rigorous habit of thoroughness into the observa- 
 tion of passing events and living people. And yet this ravenous 
 devourer of historical and contemporary knowledge died on 
 June 19, 1902, having published during a long and busy life a 
 few articles and reviews, some of them anonymous, most of them 
 hidden away in obscure and half-forgotten periodicals, a preface 
 to Machiavelli's Prince, and an inaugural lecture delivered at 
 Cambridge upon his appointment to the Regius Chair of Modern 
 History. Such was the literary output of a man who, in the 
 opinion of competent judges, was more original than Seeley 
 and as learned as DoUinger or Stubbs. 
 
 We have now more work by which to appraise him. The 
 essays and papers prove, as is so often the case, to weigh 
 heavier than was at first surmised, and fill two handsome 
 octavo volumes. A course of lectures upon Modern European 
 History delivered from the Cambridge Chair was published in 
 1906 ; and now, eight years after Lord Acton's death, Dr. Figgis 
 and Mr. Lawrence, two Cambridge scholars who have borne 
 the pious labour of editing their master's literary remains, give 
 to the world his Lectures on the French Revolution. We 
 have two volumes of Essays, two volumes of Lectures, and 
 two volumes of Correspondence. The lectures are without 
 annotation, and lack the refining touches of an author's 
 revision. The two volumes of correspondence are not the 
 winnowing of the whole mass, but special fragments illustrative 
 of two disjointed episodes and friendships. In time other 
 letters, the letters to Gladstone, for instance, may be printed ; 
 for the present, six volumes constitute the accessible sum of 
 Lord Acton's published writing. 
 
 It is not a great mass of literature, and yet it is sufficient to 
 exhibit not only a mind of extraordinary range and power, 
 but also a very rare and exalted nature. There is a mournful 
 French saying, tout savant est a inoitiS cadavre ; and the 
 pedestrian qualities which form the necessary groundwork of 
 the learned life — the acquisition and arrangement of material 
 — are too often developed at the expense of the human 
 qualities of insight and appreciation which are the soul of
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 89 
 
 history. No\\r Lord Acton had all the mechanism of the 
 professional historian. He read exhaustively upon each 
 successive topic which he took in hand, annotated his reading,, 
 and collected and tabulated his annotations. His immense 
 magazine of exact knowledge was so disposed that every part 
 of it was ready for use when occasion demanded. If you asked 
 him a question about books, his mind seemed to be constituted 
 in bibliographies. He told you what were the best books to 
 read, what parts of them were most valuable, from what 
 sources the author had drawn, to what extent he was credible. 
 He could mention having seen such and such a pamphlet on 
 such and such a shelf at a Paris bookseller's ten years before. 
 The visitor to the noble library which is now the possession 
 of the University of Cambridge will find everywhere, as he 
 prowls round the shelves, the same marks of meticulous 
 annotation, tokens of a mind in which myriads of facts 
 garnered from every quarter of the spacious realm of know- 
 ledge were bound together into an organized and intelligible 
 whole. 
 
 A man would be hardly human if, with this great business 
 capacity for the arrangement of knowledge, he did not some- 
 times err in assuming a corresponding quality in his readers. 
 In some of Lord Acton's historical articles the knowledge is so 
 recondite, so closely packed, so overwhelming in weight and 
 quality that the mind of the reader recoils. In others the 
 author is submerged in his own quotations. But, however 
 difificult and abstruse Lord Acton may be, he is never dry. 
 His work is exciting even when it baffles, like the music of 
 a new composer who has cut himself loose from the conventions 
 and evolved a technique of his own. 
 
 Great learning has its own dangers. One of the most 
 common is that it leads to a paralysis of the judgement. 
 There are so many authorities, so much has been written on 
 every side of every question, that men who have fully mastered 
 the literature of a subject are generally the least ready with 
 a confident award. That failing, if it be a failing, was not 
 Lord Acton's. Those who knew him only by report as the 
 man whose golden harvests were never reaped will be surprised
 
 90 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 when they come to close quarters with his literary remains. 
 They will learn that, if he published little, it was not because 
 he was deficient in deep feeling or strong opinion, not because 
 he was overmastered by his accumulations, or lacking in 
 powers of literary expression. They will discover no traces of 
 the scholar's diffidence, no delicate blends of light and shade, 
 nothing of the temper which led Renan to declare that truth 
 was a matter of nuances. Lord Acton can wield the sledge- 
 hammer as well as the rapier. He abounds in superlatives, 
 the supreme reward of an exhaustive induction, and moves in 
 a world of his own values. His verdicts are for the most part 
 confident and magisterial ; and this not only from the force of 
 settled conviction, but because he conceives it to be part of the 
 historian's duty to distribute censure and praise to the dead — 
 strong censure to the sinners and high praise to the saints. 
 Thus Solon is ' the most profound political genius of antiquity ', 
 Sixtus V ' the ablest of modern Popes ', Napoleon ' the most 
 splendid genius that has appeared on earth ', Alexander 
 Hamilton * the most scientific of conservative thinkers ', Sieyes 
 ' the most original of the revolutionary statesmen '. The 
 Persians, the Greeks, and the Teutons are ' the only makers 
 of history, the only authors of advancement ' ; and the religious 
 standpoint of the author is revealed in the view that the history 
 of the Middle Ages is ' the history of the gradual emancipation 
 of man from every species of servitude in proportion as the 
 influence of religion became more penetrating and more 
 universal '. 
 
 The literary judgements are as clear-cut as the historical. 
 The author of the Imitation is ' the greatest religious writer 
 that ever lived '. Montegut is ' the first of literary critics ', ^ 
 Burke ' the author of the noblest political philosophy in the 
 world ', Bernhardi ' the ablest of the German writers on 
 Napoleon '. George Eliot is * justly esteemed the most illustrious 
 figure that has arisen in literature since Goethe died '. These 
 are not the awards of a timid or grudgirig judgement. We are 
 reminded less of the cool and balancing Ranke than of 
 Treitschke, ' vehement, certain, and overwhelming'. 
 
 Such a comparison would, of course, be unfair to Lord
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 91 
 
 Acton. Treitschke is one of the most brilliant writers of 
 contemporary history that ever lived, but he had the mind of 
 a partisan, and wrote to the Bismarckian brief with a hardihood 
 untempered by scruples. With less instinct for politics — for 
 there was a certain unworldly iiaiveti in many of his judge- 
 ments of contemporary men and affairs — Lord Acton had 
 a wider range, a nobler purpose, a more generous and dis- 
 interested intelligence. The Berlin professor is a great political 
 pamphleteer ; the Englishman essentially a theologian and 
 philosopher. * 
 
 ' This is my quarrel with Seeley ' (he writes after reading 
 the Expansion of England), 'he discerns no Whiggism, but 
 only Whigs. And he wonders at the mistakes of the Whigs 
 when he ought to be following up the growth and modifications 
 of their doctrine, and its influence on the Church, on Toleration, 
 on European politics, on the English monarchy, the Colonies, 
 finance, local government, justice, Scotland and Ireland. . . . He 
 does not like to go straight at the impersonal forces which 
 rule the world, such as predestination, equality, divine right, 
 secularism, Congregationalism, nationality, and whatever other 
 ruling ideas have grouped and propelled associations of men.' ^ 
 
 Lord Acton was not a philosopher in the technical sense of 
 the term ; that is to say, he had little interest in pure dialectic, 
 and, we should imagine, none of that special aptitude or 
 desire for the free sceptical exercise of the logical faculties 
 which is the mark of the true metaphysician. On the contrary, 
 the natural proclivity of his mind was to cite authority rather 
 than to risk an adventure of the reason. The process by 
 which he won his ultimate categories is obscure, for they were 
 settled before he began to write, and were not subsequently 
 disturbed. But, if he was not a metaphysician, his prime 
 interest in history was metaphysical. It Was the idea that 
 mattered, the impersonal force working itself out through the 
 drifting myriads of brief, blind, feeble, human lives. The 
 circumstances of his creed, family, and training enabled him 
 to view the course of human development with a singular 
 detachment from patriotic or sectarian ties. He came to the 
 
 ^ Letters to Mary Gladstone, pp. 7, 8.
 
 92 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 conclusion, when a lad of seventeen, that Dollinger and no 
 other must teach him history, and, vanquishing the preliminary 
 reluctance of the Munich professor to receive another idle 
 English pupil, spent several years under Bollinger's roof. 
 Here, under the most liberal Catholic in Germany and the 
 most profoud historian in Europe, he learned the widest 
 interpretation of history consistent with the profession of 
 orthodox belief. 
 
 It was an age of giants in historical research. The general 
 tone was severe, disinterested, scientific ; and it would have 
 been a matter for wonder if a pupil trained in that laboratory 
 of mighty workers, the disciple of Boeckh and Ranke and Riehl, 
 had gone to the past for anything less important than truth. 
 From the width and plentitude of his knowledge. Lord Acton 
 could afford to concede points to an adversary. He has nothing 
 to say for the antagonists of Luther, and censures Dr. Creighton 
 for being too lenient to his Popes. He regarded it as a special 
 weakness of Catholic apologists that they would defend bad 
 men and bad . measures. If a pope was a poisoner, there was 
 nothing to be gained for the Catholic cause by concealment. 
 The Church, which has survived the fact, would survive the 
 publication. Catholic as he was, Lord Acton did not refrain 
 from plain speaking. He wrote of the Council of Trent that 
 ' it impressed on the Church the stamp of an intolerant age, and 
 perpetuated by its decrees the spirit of an austere immorality '. 
 
 The two impediments generally most fatal to the pursuit ot 
 truth were thus removed. Lord Acton was a Catholic, but 
 a critical Catholic ; an Englishman, but a cosmopolitan 
 Englishman. The tendency of many movements must, of 
 course, be differently judged by a Protestant and a Catholic 
 writer ; and no special power of discernment is required to 
 determine the camp to which Lord Acton belonged. No 
 Protestant historian, however fully he realized the unreason of 
 'cuius regio eius religio', would describe the Reformation *as 
 a great movement against the freedom of conscience'. No 
 Protestant student of English social and constitutional history 
 would quite go so far as to write, * The Catholic Church has 
 bestowed ori the P>nglish the great elements of their political
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 93 
 
 prosperity — the charter of their liberties, the fusion of the 
 races, and the abohtion of villeinage '. He would reflect that 
 human patience has its. limits, that some Saxon ladies were 
 probably fair, and some Norman lords probably impecunious. 
 But, after making every deduction for the fact that Lord Acton 
 writes history from a strongly-defined theological standpoint, 
 that he regards the course of human affairs as the triumphant 
 vindication of God's purpose through the instrument of the 
 Catholic Church, that he has no tolerance for naturalistic 
 explanations of spiritual developments, that he agrees with 
 Dollinger in thinking that the dissidence of the Protestant 
 Churches is their sufficient condemnation, no historian of a 
 strong religious temperament has ever stood so near the centre 
 of judicial indifference. 
 
 It was not for nothing that he sat at the feet of ' the keen, 
 grave, unemotional professor' at Munich or joined in the struggle 
 against the promulgation of Infallibility, when the Vatican 
 Council, which in his eyes was 'the first sufficient occasion 
 which Catholicism had enjoyed to reform, remodel and adapt 
 the work of Trent ', betrayed the hopes of the liberal Catholics. 
 The history of the Roman Church in his own lifetime, marked 
 as it was by a succession of grave and revolutionary events, by 
 the loss of the temporal power, by the Syllabus of 1864, and 
 by the Council of 1870, made it an urgent matter for serious 
 minds to discriminate between the vital and unessential portion 
 of the Catholic tradition and establishment. Lord Acton did 
 not shrink from conclusions which drove straight across the 
 prevailing currents of official policy ; and^ being thus forced 
 into an opposition minority, he was the more ready to appre- 
 ciate the spiritual case of the dwellers and wanderers beyond 
 the Catholic pale. 
 
 The standpoint of an historian who is both a strong Liberal 
 and a convinced Roman Catholic is certainly unusual, and 
 needs a special line of defence. The idea of most ordinary 
 persons is that human liberty has grown in proportion as 
 ecclesiastical power has decreased, that the Roman Church 
 in particular, with its Inquisition, its Index its Council of Trent,
 
 94 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 its Order of Jesuits, has been by far the most formidable 
 enemy which the cause of free speculation in Europe has 
 had to encounter ; and that, on any survey of the world made 
 since the beginning of the eighteenth century, it is evident that 
 freedom, civil and intellectual, is more fully enjoyed under 
 Protestant than under Catholic governments. The ordinary 
 man will say, * Compare North America, England, Holland, 
 Germany, with Spain, France, and Italy. In the Protestant 
 zone there is, upon the whole, just " that assurance that every 
 member shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his 
 duty ", which Lord Acton defines as the essence of liberty. In 
 the Catholic zone the case is notoriously the reverse.' 
 
 To all such observations Lord Acton would oppose a picture 
 of human progress in which the quarrels of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries are contracted to their due proportions. 
 If we do not grossly misapprehend him, he held the prime 
 essential of liberty to be that the Church should be separated 
 from the State. This condition was not realized in the ancient 
 world, nor yet in Lutheran Germany and Sweden, but it was 
 realized throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, When 
 Christ said, ' Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's 
 and unto God the things that ar& God's', He inaugurated 
 the reign of freedom on earth. The spiritual and temporal 
 spheres, confounded in the economy of the ancient State, were 
 henceforth severed. A barrier was raised against absolutism 
 by the birth of a society bound together by spiritual ties, and 
 developing itself according to the rhythm of its own being. 
 And so, while the barbarian invasions of the fifth century 
 resulted in the formation of military monarchies all over 
 Western Europe, no fatal blow was dealt to liberty. On the 
 contrary, liberty is the product of the mediaeval world, with its 
 system of states in which authority was restricted by privileged 
 groups and powerful classes and, above all, by ' the acknow- 
 ledgement of duties superior to those which are imposed by 
 man'. 
 
 It is to the existence of this mediaeval dualism between 
 Church and State, and in particular to the collision between 
 the Empire and Papacy in the eleventh century, that Lord
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 95 
 
 Acton would attribute the rise and development of a philo- 
 sophy of political liberty. The Libelli de Lite Imperatorutn et 
 Pontifiaim, which fill two volumes of the Monumenta Ger- 
 maniae, are not often disturbed even by professed students 
 of the Middle Ages. Yet here is the first link in the long 
 chain of liberal tradition which, passing through Guelph 
 and Ghibelline alike, 'connects the Hildebrandine controversy 
 with the Long Parliament and St. Thomas with Edmund 
 Burke'. Nor was it merely in the matter of political theory 
 that the Catholic system manifested its liberalizing influence. 
 The Church was the mother of institutions as well as the 
 exciting cause of political speculation. Was not the oldest 
 parliamentary system in the world based upon the framework 
 of the Councils of Toledo ? 
 
 Such, in outline, is Lord Acton's view of the relation 
 between Catholicity and liberty in the Middle Ages. He 
 holds that the Church, while generally allied with the mediaeval 
 monarchies and working through them, contributed to curb 
 tyrannical caprice, to uphold the moral law, and to promote 
 and support subordinate groups and associations within which 
 individuals might freely develop their special aptitudes; and 
 he further holds that without the separate agency of the 
 Roman Church a liberal philosophy of the State would not 
 have arisen. It is true that heresies were cruelly suppressed, 
 and that gentle, cultivated, and pious souls approved the 
 oppression and the cruelty. It is, however. Lord Acton's view 
 that the persecution of the Catholic Church was never aggres- 
 sive (were not the ' Dictatus Papae ' aggressive ? were not the 
 Crusades aggressive?), nor founded upon the doctrine that 
 a deviation from theological orthodoxy is punishable as such. 
 If the Albigenses were exterminated it was not because their 
 theology was unsound, but because they menaced the social 
 order. It was left to the apostates of the sixteenth century to 
 base the necessity of intolerance upon the simple ground 
 of religious crror.^ 
 
 If this view is correct, then the Reformation, in its primal 
 
 ' These views were expressed before the appearance of Mr. Lea's 
 History of the Inquisition in 1887.
 
 96 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 aspect, far from enlarging, greatly restricted the sphere of 
 liberty. The Reformation brought in its train bitter disputes, 
 cruel persecution, long dragging wars. Monarchs became more 
 despotic ; theologians became more intolerant ; the State 
 encroached upon the spiritual sphere. The leaders of the 
 Protestant revolt were no preachers of liberty or toleration. On 
 the contrary, many advocated passive obedience and preached 
 the duty of persecuting religious error. Loi'd Acton is specially 
 severe upon Luther, and holds that the reason which caused 
 him to force the rupture with Rome at the Diet of Worms was 
 the belief, due to Lorenzo Valla's tract on the Donation of 
 Constantine, that the Pope was Antichrist. Of Lutheranism 
 he wittily remarks that, ' born of the union of princes and pro- 
 fessors, it retains the distinct likeness of both its parents, not 
 altogether harmoniously blended '. The union of princes and 
 professors, the Erastian theory of Church government, was (he 
 says) the first product of the Reformation and the deadly blow 
 to freedom. Of pure religious impulse there was probably less 
 than is generally imagined, for Scotland is the only country 
 where the Reformation triumphed in opposition to the State, 
 as Ireland is the only country where, having the support of the 
 State, it fell short of victory. But deficiency of religious zeal 
 was amply balanced by the strength of the secular appetite ; 
 and Thomas Cromwell was not alone in suggesting to his royal 
 master that by attacking the wealth of the Church a ruler 
 might become great and powerful. 
 
 The early triumphs of the Protestant revolt were stemmed 
 by a great rally of the Catholic Church. Of many of the 
 agencies by which the Counter-Reformation was effected Lord 
 Acton was frankly critical. He condemns the Index of Pro- 
 hibited Books. He notes with relief that the persecutions ot 
 the Holy Office of Rome did not extend beyond the reign of 
 Urban VIII. He deplores the fact that the doctrine of the 
 Church should have been formulated afresh in an intolerant 
 age. But he is nevertheless concerned to show how even 
 among the Jesuits, the professed advocates of authority and 
 submission, a liberal philosophy was entertained until 1620; 
 how ' the greater part of the political ideas of Milton, Locke,
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 97 
 
 4nd Rousseau ' may be discovered in the ponderous Latin of 
 the Spanish Fathers ; how impossible it was found to compress 
 original minds by'the iron rules of St. Ignatius ; how Sarasa 
 anticipated Bishop Butler in proclaiming the infallibility of 
 conscience ; how Masenius shared the dream of Leibnitz for 
 Christian reunion ; and how Petavius ' first described the 
 history of dogma, and cast every system into the melting-pot 
 of history'. 
 
 The most crucial passage in the history of modern liberty is 
 the French Revolution. Lord Acton had more than once 
 published opinions with regard to it, and was understood to have 
 mastered as much of the literature of the subject as any 
 Englishman, alive or dead. When he was appointed to the 
 Cambridge chair, he lectured upon the subject during four 
 successive academic years. His discourses made a great im- 
 pression. They were written with scrupulous care and were 
 charged with an austere and pregnant eloquence foreign to 
 graduate practice and undergraduate expectations. Even now, 
 when they are given to the world unfinished, without annotation, 
 somewhat lacking in proportion — for we have read more than 
 two-thirds of the volume before the Tuileries are attacked, and 
 the Convention, the Terror, the War, and the Vendee are still 
 before us — we are able to appreciate the zeal of the Cambridge 
 audience. Here and there the reader may think that a judge- 
 ment is unduly sharp and peremptory, that the influence of 
 books on men is overrated, or that Lord Acton has too easily 
 succumbed to the temptation of accepting new or recondite 
 testimony. Nothing written is infallible ; least of all should 
 we expect infallibility in a course of lectures written for the 
 instruction of the young and untouched by the edged tools of 
 an author's revision. But that in this volume we have the best 
 account of the French Revolution yet written by an Englishman 
 is a proposition which no competent student will dispute. 
 
 The ruling thought of these lectures is the essential incom- 
 patibility of liberty and equality. In Lord Acton's view the 
 French Revolution, aimi<ng at equality or ' government by the 
 poor, payment b)- the rich', missed the priceless boon of freedom. 
 
 2302 ( ;
 
 98 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 Democracy without the safeguard of ' a multiplicity of check- 
 ing forces ' inevitably turns to tyranny ; and the Revolution, 
 sweeping away as it did all the intermediate bodies which 
 "stood between the State and the individual — the wealthy 
 Church, the powerful nobility, the proud and exclusive judicial 
 corporations, the trade guilds and the rest — paved the way for 
 a mechanical despotism, more pervasive, more scientific, more 
 plausible, and therefore very much more dangerous, than the 
 old clumsy monarchy of France. This, of course, is a very 
 common view to take of the French Revolution ; and it has 
 been expounded with great pomp and power by M. Taine, who 
 belonged not to the Roman Catholic communion but to the 
 fellowship of Positivists and Freethinkers. But the thing 
 which makes Lord Acton's view of the Revolution different 
 from Taine's is that, whereas Taine, writing under the fresh 
 and immediate impression of the French Commune, could 
 scarcely find anything in the Revolution to commend, Lord 
 Acton manages to combine his general disapproval of the result 
 with a great deal of unreserved and generous enthusiasm for 
 the aims and intentions of the Constituent Assembly. 
 
 ' By right of the immense change they made in the world, 
 by their energy and sincerity, their fidelity to reason and their 
 resistance to custom, their superiority to the sordid craving for 
 increase of national power, their,, idealism and their ambition to 
 declare the eternal law, the States-General of 1789 are the most 
 memorable of all political assemblies. They cleared away the 
 history of France, and with 2,800 decrees they laid down the 
 plan of a new world for men who were reared in the old. Their 
 institutions perished, but their influence has endured ; and the 
 problem of their history is to explain why so genuine a striving 
 for the highest of earthly goods so deplorably failed. The 
 errors that ruined their enterprise may be reduced to one. 
 Having put the nation in the place of the Crown, they invested 
 it with the same unlicensed power, raising no security and no 
 remedy against oppression from below, assuming or believing 
 that a government truly representing the people could do no 
 . wrong.' ^ 
 
 A partial explanation of the miscarriage of these high en- 
 deavours is to be found in the political philosophy of the period. 
 ' Lectures on the French Rei>olntion, pp. 188-9.
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 99 
 
 Lord Acton, who goes back to Fenelon, ' the Platonic founder 
 of revolutionary thinking ', and even accords to that mild 
 philosopher more space than he is able to find for Rousseau, 
 remarks that none of the intellectual precursors of the Revolu- 
 tion in France were in reality Liberals. Montesquieu was an 
 intelligent Tory, Voltaire an assailant of the clergy, Turgot a 
 reformer and the inventor of the idea of progress, Rousseau 
 a democrat, Diderot a Freethinker. ' The one thing common 
 to them all is the disregard for liberty.' Lord Acton would 
 not, we presume, have denied that the weight of enlightened 
 opinion in France was against arbitrary imprisonment, secret 
 trial, and religious disabilities, and so far favourable to liberty. 
 What he means is, that one wing of enlightened opinion wished 
 to procure these objects through an intelligent but untrammelled 
 despotism, and the other through an intelligent but untram- 
 melled democracy. In particular, he notes it as a specially 
 unfortunate circumstance that, owing to the anti-clericalism of 
 the period, no attention had been given to the very complicated 
 questions which are connected with the relations of Church and 
 State. The leaders of advanced opinion, being estranged from 
 Christianity, had got into the habit of treating Church questions 
 with levity and indifference. They had never seriously ex- 
 amined under what conditions a Church may be established 
 or disestablished, endowed or disendowed ; so that, when the 
 ecclesiastical problem became suddenly urgent, there was no 
 formed body of intelligent opinion concerning it. The ideal 
 of the omnipotence of the State, derived from Rousseau, swept 
 everything before it. 
 
 America, with its famous constitution of checks and balances, 
 might, one would have thought, have come to the rescue ; but 
 the America which influenced France was the aggressive 
 America of Otis and the War of Independence, not the circum- 
 spect America of the Philadelphia Convention. The theory of 
 resistance, the theory that political powercomes from the people, 
 the jealous dislike of the judicial and executive authority, the pre- 
 ference for a Single Chamber, were transmitted from America 
 to France. But the philosophy which informed the debates in the 
 Philadelphia Convention was sealed up in private note-books ; 
 
 G 2
 
 loo LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 and the great Federal constitutions had only been in working for 
 two months when the States-General met at Versailles. No- 
 body knew how the American experiment would stand the test ; 
 nobody knew the true explanation of its provisions. The cause 
 of federalism, though it had been commended by Montesquieu 
 and Rousseau, never really had a party behind it in France ; 
 and ' the one immortal tribute of America to political science ' 
 was entirely lost upon the statesmen and agitators who shaped 
 the course of the French Revolution. 
 
 Lord Acton's enthusiasm for checks and balances leads him 
 to single out for enthusiastic praise a statesman who is generally 
 mentioned in terms of depreciation often descending to ridicule. 
 The Abbe Sieyes was undoubtedly an exceedingly clever man. 
 He came to the front, as everybody knows, during the elections 
 of 1789 with a pamphlet, perhaps the most famous and influential 
 in all history, Qiicst-cc que le Tiers-Etat ? A man who has 
 the capacity of expressing in the most effective form, and at 
 the most opportune moment, the thought of a whole nation, is 
 a considerable man, 'Sieyes understood from the first what 
 the Revolution was about. The Commons, who had been 
 nothing, were to be everything ; arid the Nobles, who had been 
 everything, were to be nothing. At the same time he saw the 
 danger of unbridled democracy. He insisted upon a restricted 
 franchise based upon property, and shared Burke's view of the 
 relations between the legislator and his constituency. Ten 
 years later, schooled by bitter experience, he was prepared 
 with more checks and chains for the animal whose riotous 
 excess had driven him to hide his head during the Terror. 
 He produced an elaborate piece of mechanism, which Bonaparte 
 simplified and distorted to his own ends ; but the operations 
 of the earlier and more influential Sieyes were not so conducive 
 to the kind of State which Lord Acton admired, for he destroyed 
 the provinces of France, created the departments, and was in 
 favour of the government of a Single Chamber. Lord Acton, 
 viewing the body of his political thought without respect to 
 periods, concludes as follows (p. 162) : 
 
 ' In his sustained power of consistent thinking, Sieyes re- 
 sembles Bentham and Hegel. His flight is low and he lacks
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK loi 
 
 grace and distinction. He seems to have borrowed his depart- 
 ments from Harrington, the distilled unity of power from 
 Turgot, the rule of the mass of taxpayers over the unpro- 
 ductive class above them, from the notion that labour is the 
 only source of wealth, which was common to Franklin and 
 Adam Smith. But he is profoundly original ; and, though 
 many modern writers on politics exceed him in genius and 
 eloquence and knowledge, none equal him in invention and 
 resource.' 
 
 This is a higher claim than has been made by Taine or Sorel 
 or Vandal or Aulard ; but it would have been endorsed by 
 Mirabeau, who wrote to Roederer in the course of debate that 
 Sieyes was a man of genius who inspired his veneration and 
 tender love.^ 
 
 Upon the subject of the breach between the Revolution and 
 the Church we should naturally expect to learn much from 
 Lord Acton. That it was injurious to the French character, 
 that it has been the cause of a permanent rift between two 
 sections of the French nation, that it has been provocative of a 
 vindictive, illiberal spirit which has more ihan once disgraced 
 the political annals of France, all this is part of the accepted 
 stock of knowledge. But why did it happen ? Was it 
 inevitable? Who was to blame? Lord Acton's answer to 
 these questions will, perhaps, surprise some of his readers. 
 After showing the close connexion between the Galilean 
 Church and the order of things which the Assembly was 
 resolved to destroy, he goes on to consider the financial causes 
 which led to the appropriation by the State of Church 
 property, and the provisions of the Civil Constitution of the 
 Clergy consequent upon that measure and devised to settle the 
 government and finance of the disendowed Church. He does 
 not deny that the change was sweeping, but he is concerned to 
 show that the principle upon which the Civil Constitution was 
 framed found support in some parts of the ecclesiastical 
 tradition. Under the Constitution, the bishop was to be 
 
 ' Roederer, CEtivres, iv. 172. Lord Acton had clearly consulted the 
 No/ice su?- la Vie de Siiyes [Brit. Mus. R. 92]. Roederer, who reviewed 
 the pamphlet in the Journal de Paris, February 12, 1795, had no doubt 
 that it was written by Sieyiis himself (6E"«2/r^5', iv. 204). *
 
 I02 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 chosen by the departmental electors, the parish priest by the 
 district electors. Lord Acton observes that the principle of 
 election had been upheld by high authorities and had played a 
 great part in earlier times. The right of institution again was 
 taken away frorri the Pope — an act of aggression, but sanctioned, 
 as we are reminded, by the august opinion of Bossuet. A more 
 adroit exercise of diplomacy on the part of the King and his 
 advisers might, we are told, have brought the Pope to accept a 
 settlement in no way subversive of essential principles. 
 
 ' The new dioceses, the new revenues, were afterwards ac- 
 cepted. The denial of papal institution was in the spirit of 
 Gallicanism ; and the principle of election had a great tradition 
 in its favour, and needed safeguards. Several bishops favoured 
 conciliation, and wished the measure to be discussed in a 
 National Council.' {French Revolution^ p. 170.) 
 
 Even in Rome the feeling was not entirely hostile. 
 
 ' It was the office of the King to negotiate with the Pope ; 
 and he might have saved the Revolution, the limited monarchy 
 and his own life, if he had negotiated wisely. . . . The judge- 
 ment of the Italian divines was in many instances favourable 
 to the decree of the National Assembly, and the College of 
 Cardinals was not unanimous against it.' (lb., pp. 170, 172.) 
 
 As it was, Pius VI rejected the Constitution, and drove the 
 King to seek the help of Europe against his own people. The . 
 Church was divided into two camps. Some 23,000 clergy, 
 about a third of the whole and not enough for the service of 
 
 . all the churches, swore to accept the new conditions. The 
 nonjuring clergy were persecuted as a horde of traitorous 
 rebels. The mischief was never wholly repaired, though the 
 scars were plastered over when Pius VII conceded to Bonaparte 
 what Pius VI might have granted to Louis XVI. 
 
 Lord Acton does not conceal his opinion that the real 
 solution of the problem was to be found in measures of which 
 hardly anybody at that time thought — that is, in disestablish- 
 
 #ment and separation. Another alternative, that of leaving 
 Church patronage to the King acting through responsible 
 Ministers, was rendered impossible by the unwise exclusion of 
 the Ministers of the Crown from the Legislature. No expedient
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 103 
 
 could have turned out more disastrously than that which was 
 actually adopted ; but it is open to question whether the cancer 
 of privilege could have been cut out of the body politic at a 
 greatly diminished cost. 
 
 ' Following the example of most English commentators, Lord 
 Acton casts the weight of his sympathies into the scale of 
 those statesmen who, while anxious for radical reform in French 
 social and political life, were alive to the necessity of a strong 
 executive. He gives an excellent sketch of Mounier, the 
 powerful provincial, who, like Washington, combined revolu- 
 tionary doctrine with a conservative temper, but whose austere 
 rigidity of character wrecked any slight chance which he might 
 have possessed of carrying a Constitution upon the English 
 model. It is less possible to write sympathetically of Mira- 
 beau, whose private life was stained by profligacy and corrup- 
 tion, and whose public career was one vast intrigue. Lord 
 Acton, who is by no means blind to these defects, and more- 
 over thinks that Mirabeau never had a chance of success since 
 he was distrusted throughout by King and Queen alike, finds 
 eloquent praise for his talents and his outlook on the world of 
 politics. He describes him as ' the most prodigious individual 
 force in the world ', and praises him as the friend of freedom 
 and of federalism. ' When he spoke confidentially, he said there 
 was no other way in which a great country like France could 
 be free.' If this indeed was a genuine opinion, Mirabeau was 
 discreet in suppressing it, since there was no more certain road 
 to political extinction during the French Revolution than to 
 advocate a course which could be represented as incompatible 
 with the strength and unity of the State. 
 
 These personal estimates and constitutional discussions are 
 blended together in Lord Acton's volume with a narrative of 
 events always minute, condensed, and instructive, and some- 
 times reaching a high level of. literary art. The story of the 
 Tennis Court Oath, of the events leading up to the capture of 
 the Bastille, of the march of the women to Versailles, of the 
 flight to Varennes, of the attack on the Tuileries, of the 
 revolution of Thcrmidor, are told in detail. There is a fine 
 and sympathetic, but all too short, chapter on the Vendee.
 
 104 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 Throughout we are left with the impression of complete 
 familiarity, of great reserves of knowledge lying behind, and of 
 judgements founded at first hand upon a careful sifting of 
 evidence. An epithet seems to reveal the fact that Lord Acton 
 had seen the memoirs of Chaumfette, which were discovered 
 by M. Aulard in 1893 and published in the Revtie de la 
 Revolution Franqaisc. A few sentences show that "he knew 
 the whole literature of the Vengeiir. 
 
 The causes which led to the downfall of the monarchy are 
 recounted in the best spirit of impartiality, the impartiality of 
 a strong mind controlling and sometimes combating a deep 
 flow of natural sympathy. In some discursive bibliographical 
 remarks which have been collected in an Appendix, Lord 
 Acton remarks that ' no man feels the grandeur of the 
 Revolution till he reads Michelet, or the horror of it without 
 reading Taine '. The sovereign merit of Lord Acton's lectures 
 is that his repulsion from the horror has not prevented the 
 grandeur from going unperceived. In his censure of crime he 
 goes as far as Taine and much farther than Sainte-Beuve, who 
 wrote a pathetic apology for the Girondins ; but his judgement 
 of the main lines of policy is unaffected by his condemnation 
 of particular acts. He depicts the King full of vague affable 
 benevolence, but from the beginning of his reign and at every 
 crisis of his career dominated by the sinister counsels of a 
 worthless camarilla. He exhibits Marie Antoinette as the evil 
 genius of France, and lays to her account the principal onus of 
 the war and a long train of treasonable acts after its declaration. 
 His view clearly is that the doom of the monarchy was deserved, 
 for that King and Queen, after squandering golden opportunities, 
 conspired to bring havoc and disaster on their country. Yet 
 he feels the pathos of their fortune, lit up as the darkness 
 gathers by the far-shining courage and resolve of the Queen, 
 once so light and reckless, but suddenly sobered by the tragic 
 days of October, and revealing in her danger and humiliation 
 something of that high and serious quality which had made 
 her mother one of the greatest rulers in Europe. 
 
 From another point of view, the story of the downfall of the
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK* 105 
 
 monarchy has been told in greater circumstance by a writer 
 to whorn Lord Acton is under obligations and to whose 
 unexampled knowledge of the literature he pays a fitting 
 tribute. It is now twenty-five years since M. Aulard was 
 appointed to the Chair of the History of the French Revolution 
 at the Sorbonne ; and most of the advance which has been 
 made in our knowledge of the period has been due either 
 directly to his personal labours or indirectly to the influence 
 which he has exerted over his pupils. He is the principal 
 contributor to the Revue de la Rdvohition, has edited the 
 Acts of the Committee of Public Safety, besides other 
 important documentary collections, and has published several 
 volumes on his own account, the most important of which, 
 L'Hisioirc politique de la Rdvoliition Fraiigaise, has recently 
 become accessible in an English translation. It would be safe 
 to say that what M. Aulard does not know about the French 
 Revolution, nobody knows. He has digested the histories, 
 the memoirs, the debates, the pamphlets, the newspapers, the 
 ofificial documents published or unpublished. His whole life, 
 save for a brief excursion into the poetry of Leopardi, has 
 been occupied in reading and writing about this single subject, 
 this single period. What morasses he has traversed, sustained 
 by his exuberant faith in the Jacobin cause ! We cannot recall 
 the name of an historical specialist in this country who has 
 thrown the work of an industrious life into so small a compass 
 of time. Mr. Gardiner ruled the seventeenth century and was 
 called a specialist. M. Aulard is a specialist in a period of 
 fifteen years. 
 
 A book written by such a man as this necessarily carries 
 enormous weight as a repository of exact and settled informa- 
 tion. Lord Acton, who knew everything about the Popes of 
 Avignon, and the Reformation, and Napoleon, and a vast deal 
 else besides, including astrology, cannot be expected to com- 
 pete with M. Aulard in his minute antiquarian knowledge of 
 the P^rcnch Revolution. M. Aulard is a much narrower, much 
 less interesting man, but on his own special field he can write 
 a more valuable monograph. He could not have done what 
 Lord Acton has achieved in his Cambridge Lectures, for he
 
 To6 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 has not the span or penetration or solid strength of intellect to 
 compress into a single volume the whole spirit and significance 
 of a passionate and complex movement. But, keeping within 
 the more restricted compass of his interests and abilities, 
 M. Aulard can write excellent special studies. We doubt his 
 capacity ever to compass a great history, for his work lacks 
 the atmosphere, the grace, the finish and impartiality of the 
 master^. But if he is not a Vandal or a Sorel, he is a fine 
 example of the laborious, clear-headed French scholar, who 
 has always something new to say, and can say it in apposite 
 and vigorous language. 
 
 But his latest work, despite the title, is no complete history 
 of the French Revolution, omitting as it does war, finance, 
 diplomacy, personal adventure, and presenting a picture of 
 these times from which the pathos, the tragedy, and the 
 grandeur have been purposely omitted. M. Aulard, in other 
 words, has not written a formal history, but rather a series of 
 essays upon the development and transmutation of political 
 ideas and public feeling in France during the fifteen years 
 which divide the summoning of the States-General from the 
 Empire of Napoleon. Such a theme exhibits all M. Aulard's 
 special qualities. Now he is tracing the republican idea through 
 pamphlets and newspapers ; now the diffusion of the cult of 
 the goddess of Reason ; now the risings and falhngs of the 
 political barometer in Paris after Thermidor and Brumaire. 
 We may dispute his judgement or sense of proportion and 
 relevance, but never the abundance or accuracy of his facts. 
 Whatever else may be written about the French Revolution, 
 M. Aulard's book will hold its own as a repertory of exact 
 and sifted knowledge. 
 
 The notion that the government of France could be other 
 than monarchical was a plant of very slow and timid growth. 
 M. Aulard tells the tale of the wise men, Montesquieu, 
 Rousseau, Voltaire, and the rest, who wrote out political 
 prescriptions during the Ancien Regime, not a man of them 
 republican, or believing that a republican government was 
 compatible with a large area of territory. With his extra- 
 ordinary and exhaustive knowledge of pamphlet and news-
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 107 
 
 paper literature, he is able to affirm that until October 1790 
 there is hardly a case in which open profession was made of 
 republican principles. Then a little republican agitation grew 
 up and died down in the Paris press. The Constitution was 
 accepted, the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, the 
 Legislature met, war was declared ; and there was still no 
 mention of a republic. Robespierre professed his fidelity to 
 the monarchical Constitution. Vergniaud and his Girondins 
 were anxious for office under the Crown. It was never 
 breathed in the Press that the throne must be overturned. 
 The thing came with the shock of a thunderbolt. After the 
 storming of the Tuileries on August 10, there was only one 
 course open ; and it was taken on September 32, the day when 
 the guns at Valmy apprised Goethe that a new era had dawned 
 upon the world. 
 
 It is in his treatment of Danton and the Terror that Lord 
 Acton parts company with M. Aulard. The French historian 
 is a strong Jacobin and a zealous admirer of Danton, in whom 
 he discerns the force, the courage, and the statesmanship which 
 saved France at the crisis of her fate. Lord Acton cannot 
 help remembering a certain story which used to be told by 
 Louis-Philippe and may be found in one of Taine's foot-notes. 
 The son of Philippe Egalite^ who had been fighting on the 
 frontier, was accosted by an ogre of a man in the room of 
 Servan, the Minister of War, when the massacre of September 
 was a fresh event. The ogre was Danton. He had heard 
 that the lad had been denouncing the atrocities, and closed his 
 lips with the peremptory avowal, ' C'est moi qui les ai faits '. 
 Danton's patriotism is beyond dispute ; and the founder of the 
 Republic must always occupy a conspicuous place in history. 
 He had no sympathy with the levellers ; he saw the folly of 
 a general crusade against the monarchs of Europe ; he was 
 a strong man who wanted and made a strong government. If 
 he countenanced terrorism, it was for patriotic ends, not for 
 party advantage ; but an accomplice in murder, however able 
 and patriotic, obtains no acquittal in Lord Acton's court. 
 
 It has often been pointed out that the Terror was closely 
 connected with the war ; that it began with Brunswick's
 
 io8 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 invasion in August 1792, rose to its height when the fortunes 
 of France seemed most desperate, and slackened off when the 
 public anxiety was relieved by the great victory at Fleurus. 
 Like every other writer of recent date who has touched upon 
 these times, Lord Acton notes this correspondence. He finds 
 in the war not, indeed, with M. Aulard, an apology, but at least 
 an explanation, for the eclipse of liberty, the concentration of 
 public power, and the abandonment of all the early principles 
 and maxims of the French Revolution. The fall of the 
 Girondins marks the beginning of total darkness. For that 
 vacillating and divided party, which has furnished so many 
 heroes and heroines of romance, there is little but stern 
 condemnation in the Cambridge lectures. They had no 
 principle'; they countenanced the massacres; 'they were not 
 only weak but bad.' On the other hand, they alone stood 
 between France and the Terror ; and, this being so, ' no nation 
 ever suffered a greater misfortune than that which befell France 
 in their defeat and destruction '. It is admitted that the 
 Girondins were incapable of governing the country or of 
 conducting the war to a successful issue. How, then, was the 
 misfortune so great ? Condorcet wrote a little book on Human 
 Progress ' that every man should master in order to understand 
 his age' ; Isnard was ' the first man who divined the prodigious 
 resources and invincible energy of France ' ; and there was no 
 lack of rhetoric or ingenuity in the party. The disease which 
 destroyed them was timidity. They had no statesman 
 tempered to the hot and perilous climate of revolution ; and 
 they rejected the proposed alliance of Danton, whose courage 
 might have helped them to rule the Convention and to save 
 France from the furies. Everything they touched was mis- 
 managed — the war, the public administration, the King's trial, 
 the conduct of parliamentary debate. An attack upon Robes- 
 pierre was the immediate cause of their downfall, as it has 
 been their enduring claim to posthumous regard ; but Lord 
 Acton reminds us that men who had condoned the massacres 
 of September were not entitled to throw stones at villainy more 
 calculating than their own. 
 
 Late in life, and having seen the frustration of many hopes,
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 109 
 
 Tocqueville wrote that there was only one thing which could | d^ A-^'^ 
 not be created in France, and that was a free government, 
 only one thing which could not be destroyed, and that was 
 centralization . The Girondin ideal of decentralization and local 
 'liberties was finally extinguished in 1793; and federalism, 
 which Necker from his exile declared to be the true solution, 
 was ' dreaded as the superlative danger of the time '. The 
 Jacobins fell back upon a system which was at least simple 
 and intelligible — ' that the mass of people should at all times 
 assert and enforce their will, overriding all temporary powers 
 and superseding all appointed agents '. Concentration of power 
 was the note of their political ideal. Liberty was sacrificed to 
 efficiency ; and Napoleon, who knew efficiency when he saw it, 
 gave office to 127 regicides. 
 
 The classic embodiment of the Jacobin spirit is Maximilien 
 Robespierre; and a chapter in Lord Acton's History is reserved 
 for the description of his eminence, his atrocities, and his fall. 
 What was the precise degree of his eminence, or the precise 
 measure of his atrocities, is a matter of unconcluded controversy. 
 Hamel painted him as the saint of pure democracy ; Mr. Belloc 
 represents him as an honest fanatic, comparatively powerless, 
 and consenting to the Terror because he thought it popular. 
 Lord Acton, following the general tradition, depicts him as • 
 malignant and despotic. It is doubtless too much to say 
 that, at the Feast of the' Supreme Being, Robespierre ' had 
 attained the loftiest summit of prosperity and greatness that 
 was ever given to man ' ; for his power in the Convention and 
 Committees, never absolute and uncontested, was already 
 menaced by the forces which were successful in overthrowing 
 it. But that his popularity in Paris gave him a singular ad- 
 vantage on the Committee of Public Safety we cannot doubt ; 
 and there is still the mysterious problem why or how such 
 a man rose to the front of public affairs. His personal 
 appearance, if the evidence of a picture may be trusted, was 
 favourable rather than adverse. His forehead was broad, his 
 deep-set eyes brown and sparkling, his face animated and 
 convinced, with sensitive lips which could relax into a pleasant 
 smile. But he was rancorous, cold, self-righteous, besieged
 
 no LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 with suspicions, without largeness or geniality of soul, the 
 victim of dogmas amiable enough in themselves but perverted 
 to the workings of an insatiable vanity. 
 
 ' In the north of Europe ' (writes Lord Acton),,' especially in 
 Denmark, he had warm admirers. European society believed 
 that he had affinity with it. It took him to be a man of 
 authority, integrity, and order, an enemy of corruption and of 
 war. who fell because he attempted to bar the progress of 
 unbelief, which was the strongest current of his age- His 
 private life was inoffensive and decent. He had been the 
 equal of emperors and kings ; an army of 700,000 men obeyed 
 his word; he controlled millions of secret service money, and 
 could have obtained what he liked for pardons ; and he lived 
 on a Deputy's allowance of eighteen francs a .day, leaving 
 a fortune of less than twenty guineas in depreciated assignats. 
 There is no doubt that he held fast to the doctrine of equality, 
 which means government by the poor and payment by the 
 rich. Also, he desired power, if it was only for self-preserva- 
 tion ; and he held it by bloodshed, as Lewis XIV had done, 
 and Peter the Great and Frederick. . . . His private note-book 
 has been printed, but it does not show what he thought of the 
 future. . . . Only this is certain, that he remains the most 
 hateful character in the forefront of history since Machiavelli 
 reduced to a code the wickedness of public men.' {French 
 Revolution, pp. 299-300.) 
 
 With the Directorial Constitution and * the whiff of grape- 
 shot ' Lord Acton's survey of the French Revolution comes to 
 a close. The hopes of a royalist Restoration had been blasted 
 by the failure at Quiberon and the death of the Dauphin in 
 the Temple prison. Peace had been made with Tuscany, 
 Prussia, and Holland ; and the author of the ftoyades at 
 Nantes had gone the way of Hebert and ' the glowing patriarch 
 of irreligious belief '. A new Constitution, ' affording security for 
 order and liberty such as France has never enjoyed ', had been 
 launched upon a trial destined to be brief and 'stormy. The 
 peasants had doubled their wealth, and socialism had been 
 averted by wholesale confiscations. The conquests of France 
 surpassed the utmost successes of the monarchy under Louis 
 XIV. ' By arbitrary control over promotion and the cheapness 
 of French lives,' an energetic and honest engineer of no very
 
 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK iii 
 
 commanding ability had learnt the art of organizing victory. 
 The golden orb of Freedom had set in a sea of blood. The 
 death of the Dauphin left the hope of the royalist cause in the 
 hands of the hnigrh ; and the alternative to the Revolution 
 became again, what it was at the beginning, the rule of a 
 privileged caste and a legitimate sovereign. 
 
 The student who has mastered these impressive fragments 
 of an unaccomplished design must feel sad when he reflects 
 that behind the polished front of the printed page lay vast 
 stores of thought and knowledge which have perished with Lord 
 Acton beyond recall. What we have gained is much, what 
 we have lost is immeasurably more. In the history of the French 
 Revolution, where the issues are so perplexed, so controversial, 
 and so much obscured by wilful forgery, vague misrepresenta- 
 tion, and idle report, a narrative unsupported by critical dis- 
 cussions loses something of ts value. That Lord Acton 
 should have concluded thus and thus affords a strong presump- 
 tion that it was so. Yet what would we not give to hear himdefend 
 the authenticity of the famous memorandum which Favras is 
 said to have written, Talon to have possessed, Napoleon to have 
 coveted, and Louis XVIII to have burned ! In a tourney 
 with M. Lenotre and Mr. Oscar Browning over the flight to 
 Varennes, would he have victoriously established his contention 
 that the King was ruined by gluttony at Etoges? Would 
 Mr. Belloc have persuaded him that Carnot was a genius, 
 and M. Aulard that Danton was not the murderer of Mandat ? 
 On these and many other delicate and doubtful points Lord 
 Acton would undoubtedly have commanded a respectful 
 hearing from his interlocutors, even if he failed to extort their 
 assent. But such colloquies and discussions can never be. 
 The massed battalions of the reserve stand shrouded in dark- 
 ness, and the general is no longer here to marshal them into 
 action. Perhaps some day a young scholar will in a due spirit 
 of piety take down from their shelves at Cambridge the long 
 array of histories and memoirs on the French Revolution 
 which bear the traces of Lord Acton's reading, and when he 
 has mastered these, and the Croker collection of pamphlets in
 
 112 LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 the British Museum which Lord Acton read and greatly 
 prized, will give us an annotated edition of the Lectures 
 which will enhance their authority and furnish a fresh illus- 
 tration of the genius and industry of their author. 
 
 Modern German Historians 
 
 THE admirable work ^ in which Mr, Gooch surveys the 
 historiography of the nineteenth century reminds us not 
 only of the extent to which the thought and knowledge of the 
 world is indebted to the labours of historical students, but also of 
 the catholicity and interconnexion of the historical movement. 
 No country can claim a monopoly. Every country has made con- 
 tributions corresponding to its wealth of scientific equipment and 
 reflecting the characteristics of its peculiar genius. It cannot 
 even be said that the primacy goes unchallenged, for if in the 
 fifties and sixties, when Sybel, Mommsen, Hausser, Droysen, 
 and Giesebrecht were at the height of their powers, the pride of 
 place unquestionably belonged to the Germans, in the last de- 
 cade of the century the most brilliant galaxy of historical talent 
 was undoubtedly to be found on the banks, not of the Spree 
 but of the Seine. Here the student might listen to Renan on 
 the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament, to Sorel on European 
 diplomacy, to Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris on the mediaeval 
 literature of the Romance nations, to Viollet on the history of 
 law, and to Aulard on the annals of the French Revolution. 
 Taine was completing his brilliant historical work in the 
 Origins of Contempo'rary France. Vandal, Houssaye, Masson 
 were revealing the details of the Napoleonic age in a style which 
 suffered little from the rich abundance of material. Luchaire 
 had already made his name as the most finished exponent of 
 French municipal antiquities. Rambaud and Anatole Leroy- 
 
 ^ History and Historia7is in the Nineteenth Centicry; Longmans, 1913. 
 Cf. Fueter, Geschichte der neuern Historiogi-aphie ; Munich : Oldenburg, 
 1911.
 
 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 113 
 
 Beaulieu were established authorities in Russia. Hanotaux 
 and Lavisse were widely kifown, the one for an unfinished 
 fragment of high quality on the age of Louis XIV, the other 
 for a series of valuable contributions to Prussian history as well 
 as for his general powers as a teacher. Among the younger 
 generation Langlois and Bemont were attracting notice for the 
 solidity of their mediaeval studies, aad when a ' Soutenance de 
 these ' was held at the Ecole des Chartes, the great Leopold 
 Delisle would preside over the jury, bringing from the Biblio- 
 theque Nationale such a sum of minute and exact mediaeval 
 scholarship as can seldom have been gathered in a single brain. 
 
 There is, however, a sense in which the nineteenth century ■ 
 may be claimed for the German historians, for not only was 
 the critical treatment of authorities inaugurated in Germany, 
 but in sheer mass of printed historical matter the Germans 
 easily distance their competitors. It is, however, important to 
 observe that the competence of the Germans in historical 
 study is a fact of comparatively recent date. No English 
 contemporary of Charles James Fox would ever have thought 
 of Germany as a source of historical illumination. No German 
 of that age would have looked to his own countrymen to 
 furnish him with a history in the grand style. The great 
 historical books which the world then read and has never 
 ceased to read were not made in Germany, but in Italy, France, 
 and England. There were Commines and Guicciardini, 
 Clarendon and Burnet, Voltaire and Gibbon, and for the philo- 
 sophy and economics of history, Vico, Montesquieu, Turgot, 
 Adam Smith, and Burke. ' Read Burke,' wrote Stein to 
 Gneisenau, 'it is the breviary of all wisdom'; and again, 
 ' English literature especially deserves to be known because 
 it furnishes us with the best historians', a verdict the more 
 striking when we remember that it proceeds from the greatest 
 Prussian statesman of his age, and from the founder of the 
 Momimenta Germaniae Historica. Even if we take account of 
 the preliminary work of editing and publishing chronicles 
 and documents, in which the Germans have now acquired so 
 great a mastery, there was nothing anywhere comparable for 
 the imposing mass of its achievement to the patient labours 
 
 2302 J J
 
 114 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 
 
 of the French Benedictines. 'Your bold progress', wrote 
 Ranke to Waitz in 1^3^, 'evokes my greatest sympathy and 
 joy. You are treading the paths of Baluze and Mabillon.' 
 That is a significant compliment. When Ranke wishes to 
 praise the greatest German editor of mediaeval historical texts, 
 he does not say, ' You are breaking fresh ground ,' nor yet, 
 ' The mantle of Leibnitz has descended on you .' He says, 
 ' You are treading the paths of Baluze and Mabillon ', of those 
 two Fcench scholars of the seventeenth century who founded 
 the exact science of mediaeval charters and chronicles. 
 
 The true historical awakening of Germany sprang out of the 
 Napoleonic wars, and the movement has never lost all traces 
 of its origin. From Niebuhr and Savigny downwards every 
 German historian has made it part of his professio fidei to 
 denounce the French Revolution and all its works, and to 
 explain the evil which comes of pouring Jacobin wine into the 
 holy vessel of Teutonic civilization. There have been consti- 
 tutional historians in Germany as well as antiquarian historians ; 
 and oceans of historical ink have been expended upon themes 
 as remote from the political passions of mankind as the fossil 
 in the rock or the star in the sky. But the political historians 
 pf Germany have been what the political history of their 
 country has made them. They have been opposed to doctrin- 
 aire radicalism because it is the creation of the French Revolu- 
 tion. They have been liberal because they hated the French 
 despot and saw in the development of constitutional liberties 
 a guarantee for national power. Fervent advocates of Prussian 
 expansion, they favoured the exclusion of Austria from the 
 German confederation, facing such ridicule as might attach 
 to the label of ' Little Germans ', and losing no opportunity of 
 exposing the waste of national power involved in the political 
 disunion of their country. Since a military monarchy was a 
 distinguishing mark of Prussia, they combined with their con- 
 stitutional liberalism a strong faith in the Hohenzollern dynasty, 
 whose services to the German cause they depicted with 
 . romantic enthusiasm. ' One cannot rebel ', said Ranke, the 
 mildest and most candid of men, ' against historic right,' by 
 which he meant that a nation's future is determined by its past.
 
 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS . 115 
 
 and that the way to political salvation lay in the conservation 
 of Prussian institutions and in the spread of the Prussian spirit. 
 Patriotic optimism threw its glow backward as well as forward. 
 Learned gentlemen, forgetting the golden rules of evidence, 
 attributed the results of the historic complex to the forethought 
 of statesmen ; and the Great Elector was invested by the labo- 
 rious Droysen with the attributes of a prophet of the Prussian 
 mission to Germany, a mission as foreign to the mind of that 
 age as the operation of X-rays or the Siberian railway. 
 
 The patriarch of all this historical movement was a Danish 
 administrator, who, being called to Berlin a little before the 
 battle of Jena, was entrusted with the direction of the Banlc 
 of Prussia. Niebuhr was a competent financier, a master of 
 twenty languages, and the most profound and various scholar 
 of his age. It is customary (though not entirely exact) to speak 
 of him as a pioneer in critical method and as, in a sense, the 
 founder of scientific history as that term is now understood. 
 But the real importance of Niebuhr in the intellectual 
 development of Germany does not consist in his learning or 
 in his critical acumen or in his application of philological tests 
 to decide historical problems; for in the generation of Wolf, 
 Boeck, Savigny, and Grimm there was no lack of learned 
 scepticism in Germany, and the Homeric poems had suffered 
 violence before Niebuhr laid sacrilegious hands on Livy. It 
 consists rather in his political spirit. He was the first of the 
 Germans to approach history from the angle of a modem 
 statesman and to discover in the past a discipline for character 
 and a guide for public action. Thus the learning which gave 
 to Niebuhr's Roman History an authoritative place in our 
 English Universities until it was deposed by Mommsen is 
 not really its chief title to be remembered. The learning com- 
 mended but did not constitute the message. For Niebuhr the 
 true interest of the history of Latium was that, presenting as it 
 did ' a model of national development ', it served as an example 
 to his adopted country of the methods by which a small people 
 may achieve greatness. Even as Rome had gathered all Italy 
 under her sway by a resolute exercise of prudence and courage, 
 so might Prussia, shaking off the foreign tyrant and incarnating 
 
 II 1
 
 ii6 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 
 
 all that was valiant and manly in the German spirit, unite 
 the scattered fragments of the German Confederation under 
 her rule. 
 
 The impetus, once given, continued through the centrtry, 
 gaining volume as it went and bringing to the academic 
 prophets of German unity and Prussian power an influence 
 over public opinion which no prodigies of cold science could 
 have secured. It was not so much the political doctrine 
 which mattered, as the patriotic feeling and the stimulus to 
 national self-respect. The Avork of a philologist and legal 
 antiquary like Wilhelm Grimm was almost as important as the 
 lectures of such a man as Hausser, whose eloquence continually 
 touched the quivering nerve of living issues. From the 
 historians Germany recovered a loving, perhaps an exalted, 
 sense of her former greatness. She learned how in the distant 
 .past the Germans had broken down the Roman Empire, 
 founded dynasties in France, Italy, England, Africa, and Spain, 
 and refashioned the face of Europe. This people, laid helpless 
 at the feet of Napoleon, had once been the great conquering 
 and imperial nation of Europe. A German Emperor had 
 ruled in Aries, and the Netherlands too had been part of his 
 domain. One writer argues that Dante was a German ; 
 another places Paris in the list of mediaeval German cities. 
 The old epics and songs, the old chronicles and legal customs, 
 were made the framework for an infinite labour of affectionate 
 embroidery. From Giesebrecht's eloquent and learned pages 
 young people could read the romance of the Mediaeval Empire, 
 of that great and tempestuous effusion of German chivalry 
 which for many centuries filled Europe with its noise, and 
 ultimately suffered the ruinous check which fate administers to 
 those who chase shadows. And the later periods also contri- 
 buted their quota to the sum of national self-esteem. Had not 
 Luther given Europe the Protestant Reformation, and Kant 
 the true theory of knowledge? Even the enemy marched 
 in plumes borrowed from Germany, for Bernhard of Saxe- 
 Weimar and Maurice of Saxony, not to speak of certain 
 paladins of Napoleon, such as Ney, Kellermann, Rapp, and 
 Kleber, were all to be accounted among the sons of Odin.
 
 MODERxM GERMAN HISTORIANS 117 
 
 All this exuberant stirring of national sentiment, though it 
 often led to the expression of unripe opinion, was quite con- 
 sistent with scrupulous workmanship. For the greater part 
 of the century Von Ranke, ' that discreet and disinterested 
 servant of the Prussian monarchy', provided an admirable 
 exemplar of historical impartiality. His governing idea of the 
 individuality of peoples grew out of a temperamental opposition 
 to the French theory of a Universal Republic or Empire ; and 
 it was his main interest in history to define the distinctive 
 character' of each national group and then to describe their 
 mutual action and interaction at the moments of universal 
 history. The spirit of those alert and lively Venetian relazioni, 
 the importance of which he was the first to discover, seems to 
 have entered into this gentle and curious Saxon aristocrat. 
 Wherever he moves, and he moves everywhere, he is always 
 elegant, dexterous, well-mannered. Even the tempest of 1870 
 did not discompose him ; and, while the guns were booming 
 at Gravelotte and Sedan, Ranke was describing the origins 
 of the Seven Years' War with the sobriety of a judge. The 
 hotter tempers of Germany did not appreciate this Olympian 
 detachment. They considered him lifeless and uninspiring; 
 they thought, not without reason, that he gave an excessive air 
 of calm and sunshine to the scene, and that, living by pre- 
 ference in the company of extinct diplomatists and courtiers, 
 he missed the large sweep and passion of popular' movements. 
 
 Ranke, however, lived to be a miraculous survival of an 
 earlier age. The dynamic forces during the later half of the 
 century were men of a very different type from that band of 
 patriot scholars, of whom Dahlmann may be taken as a con- 
 spicuous example, whose life hopes had been crushed by the 
 failure of the constitutional movement of '48. Mommsen, the 
 greatest of all the new professors of ' Realpolitik ', had begun 
 life as a journalist, was even concerned in the disorders of the 
 revolutionary period, and never ceased to manifest a fiery 
 interefst in the politics of the day. Always a liberal and even 
 after 1870 a vigorous opponent of Bismarck in the sphere of 
 domestic policy, IVIommsen was at the same time a convinced 
 and passionate imperialist. Whereas Niebuhr had regarded
 
 ii8 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 
 
 the foundation of the Roman Empire as ' one of the most 
 afflicting spectacles in history ', for Momrhsen it was the salva- 
 tion of the world, and its creator was the only man of genius 
 produced by Rome. The Romische GescJiichte was first pub- 
 lished in 1854, and took the world by storm, not merely for 
 its vigorous eloquence, its hard firm outline and massive know- 
 ledge, but also as a brilliant incarnation of the spirit of Prussian 
 imperialism. An apology for Caesarism so thoroughgoing 
 and confident had never been pronounced by a scholar entitled 
 to a hearing. The old idols of Republicanism were swept 
 down with a contemptuous gesture, Cato as a vain and obstinate 
 dullard, Cicero as a despicable charlatanof the journalist tribe. 
 The ideals of the aristocratic Republic were treated as beneath 
 observation, for, as M. Guilland aptly remarks,^ ' le vaincu 
 pour Mommsen a toujours tort'. The great scholar was on 
 safer ground when in later life he evolved the history of the 
 Empire from the inscriptions, for here his survey was unblotted 
 by the clouds of passion. But the earlier and more famous 
 work is another illustration of Lessing's witty saying that 
 nobody ever writes the history of any age but his own age. 
 
 A younger contemporary of Mommsen brought historical 
 studies into more intimate relations with German politics. 
 Heinrich von Sybel, a Westphalian by birth but a Prussian by 
 adoption, was primarily a publicist, holding in common with 
 Seeley that history should be practical and the historical work- 
 shop a laboratory of political hygiene. His own opinions, 
 which \vere of the National Liberal type, vehemently Prussian 
 and Protestant, were held and enunciated with great vigour 
 during a long and busy life. As a political pamphleteer he 
 was certainly unequalled in his generation, for he took' large 
 views and was the master of a manly and robust style, some- 
 times touched with irony and always marked by conviction. 
 His best short pieces denounced the Mediaeval Empire as an 
 extravagant and disastrous folly, and_ (at some expense of 
 historic justice) depicted Austria as the destroyer and Prussia 
 as the constant champion of German interests. But his fame 
 rested upon two long historical books, each of which in a sense 
 • ' L AUemagne nouDelle et ses historiens.
 
 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 119 
 
 marked an epoch. We do not now read Sybel's ' French 
 Revolution ', which was in truth a political pamphlet designed 
 to unmask the baseness and cruelty of the French, the cowardice 
 and treachery of Austria, and. the loyal courses of the Prussian 
 monarchy in a distracted age. We do not read it, partly 
 because its political estimates are biased, and partly because 
 the book is dull and heavy, wanting alike in psychological in- 
 sight and gra|)hic power. But nevertheless we have all profited 
 by Von Sybel's admirable researches. He was the first historian 
 to attempt a complete study of the documentary evidence for 
 the Revolution, the first to bring out the importance of the 
 Polish question as a factor determining the course of European 
 affairs, and the first who paid serious attention to the economic 
 side of revolutionary history. Of the actors of the Revolution 
 he wrote with a mind utterly empty of the intelligence which 
 springs from sympathy, but often with the clairvoyance of hate ; 
 and after a course of Michelet's inspired rhapsodies, a draught 
 of the Prussian mixture is still a useful antidote. 
 
 His second long work on the ' Foundation of the German 
 Empire ', being an unstinted eulogy of Bismarck, earned for him 
 the dislike of his Imperial master and exclusion from the 
 Archives of Berlin. The brief to which he wrote would have 
 perplexed a moralist, but Von Sybel was too hardened a 
 Prussian to permit himself the luxury of a fastidious conscience. 
 He defends the Second Partition of Poland and is at elaborate 
 pains to argue the Prussian case for the annexation of the 
 Danish Duchies, Von Roon, who was a blunt soldier, did not 
 see the need of professorial apologies. ' The question of the 
 Duchies ', he said truly, 'is not a question of right but a question 
 of force, and we have the force.' To rob first and excuse 
 afterwards was the classical process whereby Prussia had grown, 
 and the successful thief was always more honoured than his 
 apologist. ' Je prends d'abord,' said Frederic II ; ' je trouverai 
 toujours des pedants pour prouver mes droits' ; and Bismarck 
 had no more difficulty in finding his pedant than the robber of 
 genius who established the greatness of Prussia on the stolen 
 provinces of Silesia and Posen. 
 
 The graphic quality, which is so singularly lacking to Von
 
 I20 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 
 
 Sybel, was amply supplied in the work of a deaf and passionate 
 Saxon who has been described by some as the Macaulay and 
 by others as the Carlyle of Germany. Heinrich von Treitschke 
 was a man entirely devoid of some properties generally held to 
 be essential to the adequate writing of history. He was 
 generally lashed up to a white heat of indignation, and con- 
 sistently insulting to large and respectable bodies of the genus 
 Man — to the English and French nations, to the Jewish race, 
 and to all who professed socialist or radical opinions. Violent 
 in his capacity for theological execration — for he preached his 
 political doctrines with fanaticism — he created misgivings 
 among many German scholars, including Ranke, who drew a 
 line between the publicist and the historian. But the man 
 was a genius. His history of the German Confederation from 
 1 815 to 1848 is one of the most delightful and brilliant achieve- 
 ments of modern prose literature. The little courts and the big 
 courts, the wandering idealizing students with their patriotic 
 songs, their duels, their gymfiastic clubs and sentimental 
 absurdities, the newspaper men^nd the junkers, the special 
 characteristics of manner, physique, and tradition by which the 
 inhabitants of one part of Germany may be distinguished from 
 'those of another — all this and much more he paints for us 
 with such wealth of illustration, such vitality, and with so easy 
 a mastery of men and things, that there is no other historical 
 book upon any period from which Germany and all that 
 Germany means can be so well understood. 
 
 So far we have spoken of Treitschke merely as a great 
 descriptive artist, but Treitschke was a great deal more ; he was 
 not even principally an artist, and of course still less a man of 
 science. If we wish to classify this astonishing master of 
 eloquence, we must think of him as a prophet, delivering, as all 
 true prophets must, one message and one message only to his 
 age, and repeating himself now in one form, now in another, 
 but always on a sustained note of fiery and even reckless in- 
 tellectual courage. And the message was in essence identical 
 with the creed of Mommsen, Droysen, Sybel — the necessity for 
 a strong Germany, united under the Prussian sceptre and 
 informed by the Prussian spirit.
 
 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 121 
 
 Of this doctrine Treitschke was certainly the most influential, 
 even if he was not the most learned, exponent. His lectures 
 at Berlin, spiced with malicious sallies at the English, the Jews, 
 and the socialists, were one of the established entertainments 
 of the capital and widely celebrated in the student world of at 
 least six nations. Nobody could complain that the Professor's 
 teaching was lacking in the quality of directness. He knew 
 exactly where he stood and whither he intended to lead his 
 flock. A single idea informed his whole teaching. If he praised 
 Hegel as the ' first political head among the German philo- 
 sophers', it was because the Hegelian philosophy glorified the 
 State. If Byron was held up as a shining example to cosmo- 
 politan decadents like Heine, it was because ' to the banished 
 aristocrat England still remained the first country in the globe'. 
 The State was the ultimate good, patriotism the supreme virtue; 
 and the main problem for the teacher was to develop the State- 
 sense in a people remarkably deficient in political coherence. 
 What matter if there were some exaggeration ? To a nation 
 like the German the call of the State must be bawled through 
 a megaphone. 
 
 In the light of this governing principle, common to Aristotle, 
 Machiavelli, and Hegel, Treitschke expounded the ethics of 
 German imperialism to a generation steadily becoming more 
 and more conscious of its inner unity, its military strength, 
 and its great future in the world. He did not hesitate to glorify 
 war as a necessary and elevating influence on national progress, 
 and at all times and seasons preached with reverential emotion 
 the gospel of material power. For Prussia his enthusiasm 
 knew no bounds, for he held that she had performed every 
 great achievement in German politics since the Peace of 
 Westphalia. The true test of a man, as of a nation, was 
 capacity for sacrifice. But if we ask the oracle to what ultimate 
 end, we obtain no very clear or satisfactory response. 
 
 That Treitschke has beeii the principal literary organ of a 
 very brutal type of imperialism should not blind us to the many 
 elements of real moral grandeur contained in the body of his 
 writing. Perverted, overstrained, violently prejudiced, as he 
 undoubtedly was, nobody has paid more unstinted reverence to
 
 122 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 
 
 the proud and heroic forms of human temperament. And the 
 example of Carlyle ig sufficient to show that a philosophy of 
 politics fundamentally opposed to the specific Christian virtues 
 may be so held and propagated as to exercise, upon the whole, 
 a fortifying influence on the brain and will by bringing into 
 relief the sterner beauties of human character, by insisting on 
 the seriousness of life, and by exciting a more active sense of 
 its duties and responsibilities. So it was with Treitschke, who, 
 with less of mystic depth, had more of practical sense and 
 elasticity than Carlyle. The generation for which he wrote 
 welcomed and needed the stimulus of his genius ; and, though 
 in many ways his influence is greatly to be deplored, in others 
 it was good, not only as giving to the study of politics a large 
 and imaginative outlook, but also because it helped to arouse 
 an intelligent interest in the conduct of public affairs. 
 
 The present constitution of the German Empire/ with its 
 unequal federalism, its Prussian predominance, its aristocratic 
 social structure, its vast system of militarism combined with 
 universal suffrage, is so anomalous a mixture of mediaeval and 
 modern principles that, were it not for the fact that Professors 
 in Germany are State servants, we might be surprised at 
 its having received a general measure of academic assent. 
 Treitschke, like Alexander Hamilton, would have preferred a 
 unitary state to a federation and was ill -pleased with the 
 Reichstag. Yet, upon the whole, being at once aristocrat, 
 militarist, and monarchist, he was well satisfied with the polity 
 as it finally left the shaping hands of Bismarck. As we learn 
 from Mr. Davis's excellent volume;- his early enthusiasm suffered 
 some diminution with the passage of years. Free education, 
 local self-government, a free acceptance of reasonable laws by 
 the citizens of a national state — such was the ultimate residuum 
 of his liberalism. For party strife and parliamentary government 
 he cherished an infinite contempt, and regarded such institutions ' 
 as entirely unfit for Germany. 
 
 Indeed part of his intellectual activity was devoted to 
 
 ' Written in 191 5. 
 
 ^ H. W. C. Davis, The Political Thought of Treitschke. Constable, 
 1914.
 
 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 123 
 
 combating the notion, which was not uncommon in the middle 
 years of this century, that the poHtical salvation of Germany 
 was to be found in English Constitutionalism. This or some- 
 thing like it had been the belief of the great Dahlmann, 
 Treitschke's master in history and the creator of the still-born 
 Constitution of 1848. And it was because English liberalism 
 was at once so seductive and yet so incompatible with the 
 Prussian spirit, that all who stood near to the mind of Bismarck 
 determined to discredit it with every weapon at their command. 
 How basely the campaign was conducted by their hero is con- 
 cealed in many volumes by Von Sybel but amply revealed by 
 the voluble Busch. Nor can we be surprised if the professor 
 of patriotic history in Berlin did not fall short of his political 
 chieftain in his efforts to weaken that -sentimental attraction of 
 the Germans to England which was 'really a deadly sin, nothing 
 less than the sin against the Holy Ghost '. In this congenial 
 operation Treitschke was assisted first by the patent sympathy 
 of the English people for the Danes in the affair of the Duchies, 
 and then by the English neutrality during the Franco-Prussian 
 War. That Great Britain should refuse to strike in with 
 Prussia appeared to him a crowning demonstration of baseness. 
 ' The lust for mammon ', he writes, ' has stifled every feeling of 
 honour, every feeling of right and wrong ; cowardice and 
 sensuality take shelter behind that wondrous theological 
 rhetoric which to us free German heretics is the most repulsive 
 of all the defects in the English character. We seem to hear 
 that reverend snuffle when- we see the English press turn up 
 pious eyes full of indignation against the unchristian and war- 
 like nations of the Continent.' That every nation contains its 
 cowards, its sensualists, and its hypocrites is a sad truth ; but 
 how Treitschke can have brought himself to think that it was a 
 British interest to enter the Franco-Prussian War on the Prussian 
 side passes belief. In his own words and on his own principles 
 the British statesman who could have so far allowed sentiment 
 to overbalance the overwhelming self-interest of the nation 
 would have trebly ' sinned against the Holy Ghost '. 
 
 In so viewing history from the strictly patriotic and nationalist 
 standpoint, without the barest attempt to understand either the
 
 124 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 
 
 general complex of international relations or the great and 
 inspiring features of alien civilizations, Treitschke was unfaithful 
 to that high tradition of scientific detachment which earned for 
 the leading historians of Germany their wide audience and 
 honourable name in Europe. But, if his object was to stamp 
 a particular set of political views upon the main body of his 
 countrymen, he may be pronounced to have been brilliantly 
 successful. His picture of England was not more malevolent 
 than Michelet's ; but, being less fanciful and executed in a series 
 of strong confident strokes, it was far more telling with the 
 public. The selfish island power, impervious to heroic ideals, 
 which had stolen an empire while the world was asleep, the 
 tyrant of the seas, the modern Carthage, the upholder of a 
 barbarous system of international law, the land of hypocrites 
 and shopmen, preaching and canting, yet buying cheap and 
 selling dear and lusting for a ' Cotton millennium', the secular 
 perturber of European peace, against whose insidious diplomacy 
 the unvarnished simplicity of German nature would be for ever, 
 save for some heroic remedy, exposed in unequal conflict, a 
 nation brutalized by sport, demoralized by the obscuration of 
 its ancient aristocracy, patently loose in patriotic principle and 
 organic cohesion — such was the estimate of our people which 
 he drew for Germany, and which in the lower regions of German 
 opinion found an only too easy acceptance. 
 
 It would be unjust not to admit that there are many 
 passages in Treitschke's writings which present a true apprecia- 
 tion of the more sublime qualities of the British genius, as 
 also of some political virtues of the more ordinary stamp. But 
 in general it may be said that his capacity for appreciating 
 Englishmen steadily declined with his own advance in years, 
 and that the England of his admiration was finally interred in 
 1832. In language both plain ancj emphatic he indicated his 
 opinion that some time or other Carthage would cross the 
 path of Rome, and that, though the struggle might be long 
 and difficult, self-interest would be vanquished by valour and 
 the purse defeated by the sword. 
 
 It would have been surprising and even discreditable if so 
 great an event as the foundation of the German Empire, with
 
 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 125 
 
 its "amazing procession of military triumphs and its great 
 exaltation of patriotic feeling, had left no impression on the 
 historical literature of Germany. And in fact the impression 
 has been profound^ the political process directing the pen 
 of the writers, and the writers in turn shaping the public mind 
 to appreciate and extend the process. Indeed it is 'not too 
 much to say that the historians of the Prussian school have 
 been the principal architects of the political creed of modern 
 Germany. They have exalted material power and belittled 
 the empire of moral sentiments. They have applauded war 
 as an instrument of progress and national hygiene. Holding 
 that aggression is a symptom of vigour, and vigour the sign 
 manual of political virtue, they have championed every viola- 
 tion of right which has subserved the aggrandizement of 
 Prussia. They have scorned small states because they were 
 small and have applauded, big states because they were big. 
 And in their violent but not unnatural reaction against the 
 quietism and happy contemplation of that old pleasant 
 Germany for which Mozart wrote tnusic and Goethe verse, 
 and which still holds Europe in its manifold enchantment, 
 they have exaggerated with Teutonic thoroughness the brutal 
 side of politics as a thing much to be respected and a talisman 
 calculated to conduct their too kindly fellow countrymen into 
 an Elysium of indefinite ease and self-respect. 
 
 We too have had our prophets of the strong man and the 
 strong state, of imperialist expansion and of * our country right 
 or wrong ', which is the British equivalent of ' Deutschland Uber 
 Alles '. But no reputable British author has ever written of war 
 as in itself desirable, or has conceived it as part of his serious 
 business in life to breed and maintain the warlike spirit in his 
 people. Nor has the doctrine of force ever become a master 
 element in British political opinion to the extent which is now 
 , the case in Germany, and this for reasons rooted in history and 
 national temperament. The Germans are in the main a mili- 
 tary, the English a civilian nation. To Englishmen a standing 
 army was once regarded as so great an obstacle to that 
 political and personal freedom in which a true national instinct 
 divined the secret of the greatness to come, that ever after-
 
 126 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 
 
 wards militarism has come to be considered as a retrograde 
 force, allied to political tyranny, therefore to be jealously 
 watched and circumscribed. Germany, on the other hand, has 
 been made by the army, and too recently to permit of in- 
 gratitude. Yet a nation with a longer experience of political 
 disputation would have been more critical of the Prussian 
 apostles ; and, if the habit of bringing policies, however 
 gorgeous, to the touchstone of the moral sense had been as 
 widely prevalent in Germany as, thanks to the resplendent 
 genius of Burke, it has happily been in England, the baser 
 notes of Treitschke's resounding organ would have been 
 drowned in protest. 
 
 If we have thus concentrated our attention on the political 
 historians of the Prussian school and on the important share 
 which they have taken in shaping the public mind of their 
 countrymen, it is from no failure to recognize that there is 
 more than one department of historical study in Germany and 
 more than one type of German historian. Even in the narrower 
 sphere of political history the case for South Germany has 
 not gone entirely by default, as Baumgarten's criticisms of 
 Treitschke remind us ; and books are still written by professors 
 of modern history under the good old rubric of scientific 
 serenit}'. Meanwhile outside the regions of modern polemic 
 the indefatigable industry of the German race continues to 
 make valuable contributions to the sum of knowledge. If the 
 exploration of the papyri is for the most part carried on in 
 London and Oxford, the greatest living historian of antiquity 
 is a German. Liebermann, a Jewish scholar it is true, has 
 given us the best edition of the Anglo-Saxon laws, Krumbacher 
 the only Byzantine bibliography ; in the sphere of Biblical 
 criticism, German scholarship, though no longer without serious 
 rivalry, is still sufficiently active to provoke a reproof from the 
 Imperial partner in the Divine concern. But, while it is 
 important not to minimize our continuing indebtedness to 
 German historical science, it is equal h- necessary to avoid 
 overstatement. The Germans have been pioneers in the 
 organization of learned enterprise, but have nothing better 
 of their kind than the dictionaries associated with the names of
 
 MODERN GERMAN HISTORIANS 
 
 127 
 
 Murray, Stephen, and Lee. They created the academic study 
 of history, but are now equalled, if not surpassed, by the severe 
 and polished standards of Paris. The countrymen of Savigny 
 can still boast of great legal antiquaries, but of none so brilliant 
 as Maitland and Esmein. Jhering was a genius, one of the 
 rare Germans who have sown original and fruitful ideas ; yet 
 it will be generally admitted that in range and illumination and 
 fertility Maine was his superior. Indeed, if we weigh the 
 historical product of the nations not by the brute mass of 
 knowledge which it contains but by the quality of its insight, 
 the true balance of its judgement, the wealth of its original 
 perceptions, the charm and brilliance of its manner, we shall 
 find ourselves asking questions which, in the interests of the 
 international comity of scholars, had better not be asked, and 
 will not confidently be answered. Was Stubbs as learned and 
 yet more actual than Waitz ? Has anybody equalled De 
 Tocqueville in social analysis ? What historian is fairer than 
 Lecky, wiser than Gardiner, more imaginative than Carlyle, 
 more full of threads to guide than Guizot, more brilliant in 
 narrative than Macaulay and Vandal ? Among the many 
 excellent German historians of Greece is there a political 
 judgement as massive as Grote's ? We cannot dogmatize, but 
 this at least we know, that whoever would pass from the 
 ancient to the modern world must tread that great Roman 
 causeway the stones of which were so soundly laid by the 
 genius of an Englishman some hundred and fifty years 
 ago, that neither the traffic of scholars, nor any sudden tempest 
 in the climate of intellect, is likely to leave it cracked and 
 unserviceable.
 
 ( 128 ) 
 
 Imperial Administration^ 
 
 I HAVE undertaken to address yoU this afternoon upon the 
 administrative system of the British Empire, but in truth 
 the British Empire does not possess an administrative system. 
 Rather it may be compared to a league of states, each separ- 
 ately equipped with its own body of administrative agents, 
 and, save for the ofifice of Colonial Governor, and a common 
 but undefined obedience to the Parliament" and Cabinet of 
 Great Britain, bound, one to another, by no bureaucratic tie. 
 It would, no doubt, be. possible, even with no radical change 
 in the constitution of the Empire, to create the rudiments of 
 an Imperial administration. Thus, if (to take a long stretch of 
 fancy), after consultation with the Governments of India and 
 the Dominions, a Zollverein were established for the whole 
 Empire, it would be necessary to create an Imperial customs 
 service, and it is probable that the members of that service 
 would be recruited on a common plan, paid at a common rate, 
 and made amenable ■ to a common discipline. Diplomatic 
 agreements might similarly be made with respect to other 
 spheres of Imperial policy, such as naval defence, which might 
 similarly involve the appointment of administrative agents 
 common to the whole Empire and responsible to the control 
 of the Parliament of Great Britain. Such agreements, however, 
 would last only so long as they were agreeable to the temper 
 of the Dominion Governments who had entered into them, 
 and the administrations founded on them would share the 
 same uncertainty. An Imperial administrative system in the 
 true sense of the term could only be created as the result of 
 the prior creation of a true Imperial legislature, of a legislature, 
 that is to say, composed of representatives from all parts of 
 the Empire, and charged with the duty of legislating upon all 
 matters of Imperial concern. 
 
 How far it is desirable to create such an organ is a question 
 
 ' A lecture delivered in the Great Hall of King's College in the autumn 
 term of 191 5. *
 
 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 129 
 
 which falls outside my present scope. I will merely remark 
 upon the fact that the Parliament of Great Britain is singular 
 in being without representatives from the Colonies and outlying 
 parts of the Empire. I do not know whether a Turkish Parlia- 
 ment continues to deliberate in Constantinople, but, if it does, 
 representatives from Basra in the Persian Gulf, who have 
 voyaged to the capital via Bombay, Aden, and Port Said, are 
 participating in the work of the assembly. 
 
 My object to-day is to direct your attention to the machinery 
 which actually exists, to comment upon its leading charac- 
 teristics, and to explain in bare outline some of the gravest 
 among the many problems of administrative mechanism which 
 are occupying the minds of our statesmen beyond the seas. 
 
 Administrations fall, in the main, into two types, those which 
 are and those which are not responsible to immediate parlia- 
 mentary control. For the purposes of clearness, though the 
 phraseology is far from being accurate, we will designate them 
 as responsible and irresponsible administrations. The Civil 
 Services of Canada and Australia are responsible because they 
 are under the immediate eye of a democratic Parliament. The 
 Civil Service of India is irresponsible because, although 
 ultimately subject to the Parliament of Great Britain, it is 
 exempt from interference from any popularly constituted body 
 in India, and possesses therefore a liberty of action considerably 
 in excess of that enjoyed by the administrative agents in 
 our self-governing Dominions. Then, again, an important dis- 
 tinction may be drawn between two types of responsible 
 administration. There is the permanent Civil Service, and 
 there is the party Civil Service. The Civil Service of Great 
 Britain is permanent. Once appointed, the Civil Servant, 
 although his tenure is technically ' during pleasure ', practically 
 retains his office until his appointed time of retirement, unless 
 disqualified by misconduct. But before the reforms of 1883 
 the Civil Service of America was not permanent. The whole 
 personnel of the administration changed with each swing of 
 the electoral pendulum, and all the experience gained in public 
 work was immediately lost to the country. In other words, in 
 America the Civil Service was the creation of a party, born 
 
 2302 I
 
 I30* IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 
 
 when the party came into power, dying when the party was 
 beaten at the polls. It was the creature of an electoral victory) 
 the sport of electoral chances, the spoils of a successful electoral 
 campaign. Whereas a permanent Civil Service tends to correct 
 the native inexperience of democratic government, a party 
 Civil Service tends to confirm it. 
 
 The Dominions of the British Empire, enjoying the benefits 
 of responsible government, have not been exempt from the 
 most insidious danger liable to beset the public service of a 
 democratic and parliamentary state. The Canadian Civil • 
 Service, in particular, bore a particularly bad reputation for 
 political jobbery until the great cleansing of 190H, a result to 
 be attributed partly to the infection of American example, but \ 
 even more to the economic situation of the country, to the ease 
 with which large fortunes were made in business, and to the 
 comparative unattractiveness of the public service as a career 
 for able and highly educated men. To those who travelled in 
 Canada before the establishment of the Civil Service Com- 
 mission in 1908, and even in the years immediately succeeding 
 that great and necessary measure, nothing was more surprising 
 than the universal belief that every Government servant had 
 been jobbed into a post the duties of which he was incompetent 
 to perform. I well remember how at a dinner-party in Quebec 
 a lady expended in my hearing much compassionate vocabulary 
 upon the lot of the passengers on board a certain vessel which, 
 having developed a case of small-pox during its passage across 
 the Atlantic, had been put in quarantine in the St. Lawrence. 
 My hostess was not thinking of the delay. Her pity was solely 
 aroused by the fact that the passengers would be inspected not 
 by a proper doctor, but by a medical officer in Government 
 service who, though she was careful to add that she knew 
 nothing of him personally, would certainly be rough, ignorant, 
 and wholly unequal to his task. 
 
 Experience has shown that in other communities besides 
 Canada it has been necessary to take special precautions to 
 prevent party leaders from using the Civil Service as a means 
 of scattering small rewards among their humbler political 
 adherents, In the Commonwealth of Australia elaborate pre-
 
 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 131 
 
 cautions are taken under the Act No. 5 of 1902 to secure that 
 the control of the Civil Service shall be withdrawn from the 
 politicians and placed in the hands of a Commissioner who can 
 only be removed on an address from both Houses of Parlia- 
 ment. But though Australia and Canada have thus shown 
 themselves alive to the necessity of protecting the public 
 sen'ices from political jobbery, it cannot be said that the. 
 Canadian and Australian bureaucracies ha\'e as yet been able 
 to command a very high measure of general respect. This is 
 due partly to the absence of any provision for recruiting men 
 of superior education into the public services, partly to the 
 lack of a pension scheme, but partly also, as I have already 
 explained, to the greater attractions of a business career in a 
 young country. Youth, however, is a fault which Time itself 
 will remedy. 
 
 We shall be the less inclined to wonder at the somewhat 
 rudimentary administration of our Dominions across the sea if 
 we reflect upon the fact that until the middle of the nineteenth 
 century the bureaucratic element in our own Government was 
 small and unobtrusive. In the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain 
 was supreme at sea, but the proceedings in the impeachment 
 of Lord Melville show that there was at that time no per- 
 manent civil staff of the Admiralty, and that such clerical work 
 as was required was provided at the expense of the First Lord. 
 Even as late as the Crimean War, the Duke of Newcastle, who 
 was Secretary at War, worked in a small room in the Prime 
 Minister's house, and it was not until the reforms ensuing on 
 the close of the campaign that we can properly date the begin- 
 nings of the modern civil staff of the War Office. The story 
 of the rise of the British Civil Service has yet to be written ; 
 and is indeed one of the most important unwritten chapters of 
 our history. The bureaucracy has grown with the sudden 
 swiftness and luxuriance of tropical vegetation after tropical 
 rains, and the country has been covered by a forest of officials 
 almost before it has observed that there has been any change 
 at all in the constitutional landscape. 
 
 This late emergence and swift development of a paid bureau- 
 cracy is due partly to the long survival of a great and whole- 
 
 I 2
 
 T32 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 
 
 some political tradition, and partly to the complex results of 
 industrial revolution and Imperial policy. All through the 
 eighteenth century, and, indeed, even up to the establishment 
 of County Councils in 1889, the bulk of the administrative and 
 judicial work of the counties devolved upon the shoulders of 
 the unpaid magistracy, upon the Justices of the Peace, who 
 represented the rough common sense, the prejudice, and the 
 high standard of personal honour which characterize the rural 
 aristocracy of these islands. Their services were rendered 
 cheaply, honestly, and on the whole industriously, but though 
 they had adequately supplied the needs of a comparative!)'- 
 simple rural society, they were unequal to the severer and 
 more elaborate conditions of a densely populated industrial 
 empire. Indeed modern industry, coupled with Imperial 
 policy, created new tasks for government, requiring specialized 
 ability and accumulated experience. Government by experts 
 gradually succeeded government by amateurs as the sphere 
 of State action extended itself. And in the grant-in-aid an 
 instrument was discovered which rendered the closest inspec- 
 tion of the central bureaucracy an endurable and even a 
 welcome necessity to its beneficiaries. The powerful and 
 permanent bureaucracy which has now become so important a 
 feature in our system functions under a quadruple safeguard. 
 It is recruited in the main by open competition, a safeguard 
 against jobbery and the grosser forms of incompetence. It is 
 divided into a superior service drawn from the best men at 
 our Universities and an inferior service drawn from men of 
 good but average education. It is brought into continual 
 contact with parliamentary life and parliamentary criticism by 
 the questions addressed to ministers in Parliament. And, 
 lastly, it works under the direction of parliamentary chiefs. 
 The Civil Service of Great Britain is never permitted to forget 
 that it is in a true and literal sense a body of servants whose 
 work is liable at any moment to be brought under the 
 master's eye. That it has escaped or can entirely escape the 
 characteristic vice of all bureaucracies cannot perhaps be 
 confidently affirmed, but if it is comparatively free from that 
 senseless surplusage of reglementation which is common in
 
 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 133 
 
 autocratic countries, the cause is to be found in the last two of 
 the four safeguards which have been mentioned, the parlia- 
 mentary critic in the House, and the parliamentary chief in the 
 office. In other words, administrative questions cannot be 
 considered in a purely dry light ; they must be viewed in 
 a political light. And it is an essential part the skill of an 
 experienced civil servant to feel how a measure will represent 
 itself to the vision of Parliament, and with what modifications 
 it may be made acceptable. The machine is continually up 
 against the living forces of opinion, which, despite all party 
 discipline, make themselves felt in the House of Commons, 
 and since the members of the Civil Service are obliged to 
 furnish answers to parliamentary questions and apologies for 
 departmental action to their parliamentary chiefs, they acquire 
 a wide kind of political education, tending perhaps towards a 
 certain spirit of caution or even timidity, but based upon a 
 close apprehension of the views, prejudices, and aspirations of 
 the country. 
 
 In the Crown Colonies, and more particularly in India, the. 
 spirit of the administration is widely different. Here the 
 administration is the Government, and nothing else particularly 
 matters. Questions, indeed, may be asked in London about 
 Indian affairs, but nobody is particularly interested in them, 
 and the Indian Budget night is notoriously regarded as one of 
 the least interesting occasions of the session. The affairs of 
 India are in the hands of the Government of India ; they are 
 managed by the Viceroy and his Council, and by the Governors 
 and Lieutenant-Governors of the several provinces acting 
 through the various branches of the Indian Public Services. 
 Proposals may come from the Indian Government to London, 
 and be vetoed by the Imperial Government. The large lines 
 of Indian policy may be shaped by a Secretary of State in the 
 India Office ; and a powerful Secretary of State may make his 
 influence felt very strongly on the direction of Indian affairs, if 
 he encounters no serious opposition from the Government of 
 India. But, in reality, the last word lies with Indian official 
 opinion, in the sense that a measure would not be forced upon 
 India against the united opposition of the Indian bureaucracy,
 
 134 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 
 
 the Indian Viceroy, or the Indian Governors and Lieutenant- 
 Governors. The Secretary of State exercises a useful and 
 important function. He supervises, he suggests, he sometimes 
 initiates. He is the most important conduit through which 
 English parliamentary opinion reaches and affects the Govern- 
 ment of India ; and for every change which needs an Act of 
 the Imperial Parliament, he must be consulted and his consent 
 secured. But the work of administering India is not done in 
 London. It is done in India itself It is for this reason that 
 the organization of the Public Services of India is a matter of 
 such great importance. There are, it is true, since Lord 
 Morley's rule at the India OfiBce, legislative councils, composed 
 both of an official and of a non-official element, and even in the 
 smaller executive councils it is now usual to include a non- 
 official Indian member, but, great as is the political value of 
 these institutions as establishing a connexion between the 
 British Government on the one hand, and the Indian intellectual 
 class on the other, they are debarred from one of the principal 
 functions of a Western Parliament. The Indian councils 
 cannot turn out a Government, and cannot make a Government. 
 The Indian Civil Service is the Government. It may accept 
 amendments, it may withdraw a measure in face of criticism 
 which it judges to be well founded, it may profit by the sug- 
 gestions of non-official members, but it is master in its own 
 house. Cabinet Councils, Government majorities, diplomatic 
 agencies in the Native States, administrative agencies in British 
 India — all are provided by the Indian Civil Service, that 
 wonderful bureaucracy recruited by a competitive examination 
 in London, which is expected to turn out judges, revenue 
 officers, heads of administrative departments, pro-consuls, 
 legislators, political officers or diplomatists, and under the new 
 regime, parliamentarians as well. 
 
 The supremacy of the Indian Civil Service among the public 
 services of India is one of the leading facts which every student 
 of Indian administration has to take into account. The Civil 
 Service is the political, the governing service of the country. 
 The members draw larger salaries and higher pensions than 
 the members of any other branch of the public service. In
 
 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 135 
 
 the Table of Precedence, an Indian civilian will always rank 
 above a member of any other Indian service of similar age and 
 standing. The other services are excrescences, later develop- 
 ments due to the increase of specialization, grafts upon the parent 
 tree, which is the Civil Service of John Company, now for many 
 years taken over by the Imperial Government. The Indian 
 Medical Service, the Indian Forest Service, the Public Works 
 Department, the Education Department, the Police Service, 
 have in every generation possessed officers of ability and 
 distinction, but however distinguished an officer of these 
 services may be, he is always subordinate to the head of the 
 district, who is a civilian. 
 
 This pre-eminence enjoyed by the Indian Civil Service in 
 India is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the position of the 
 Secretariat. In view of the fact that parliamentary government 
 does not exist in India, it might have been expected that the 
 Governor or Lieutenant-Governor of an Indian province would 
 rule with the assistance of a Cabinet composed of the ad- 
 ministrative heads of the different departments, that the 
 Education Service would supply him with a Minister of 
 Education^ the Public Works Department with a Minister of 
 Public Works, the Forest or Agriculture Department with a 
 Minister of Agriculture. This, however, is not the case. These 
 departments indeed do possess official heads, but they are not 
 part of the Provincial Government. Their work comes up, in 
 the first place, before a Secretary to the Government, who is 
 always a member of the Indian Civil Service, and no large 
 proposal can be carried into effect without the imprimatur of 
 the premier service. Some day, with the growth of specializa- 
 tion and complexity, this hegemony may be broken down. At 
 present it is practically unimpaired. So far as there is an 
 attack upon the position of the Indian Civil Service, it comes 
 not from the specialist services of later origin, but from the 
 Indian Bar. There is a very wide demand that the Indian 
 Civil Servant shall no longer rise to the judicial posts of Dis- 
 trict, Sessions, and High Court Judge, or exercise magisterial 
 functions, and that the Indian judiciary should be filled by 
 a separate form of recruitment. When the Public Services
 
 136 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 
 
 Commission toured round India, the cry for a separation of 
 the executive and judicial functions was heard, most loudly 
 indeed in the province of Bengal, where there is a powerful 
 Indian Bar, but whenever and wherever Indian evidence was 
 taken. It was argued that under the present system of union 
 of functions, the judge came to his work with an administrative 
 bias, that it was anomalous that the head of the police who 
 brings the criminal to trial should, also be the judge who sends 
 him to prison, and that the justice of a civilian judge is amateur 
 justice, good enough in barbarous times, but increasingly un- 
 suitable to present conditions. On the other side it was 
 contended that unless the district ofificer was also magistrate, 
 his prestige would be gravely diminished in the eyes of the 
 native population, that a substantial British element in the 
 judiciary was essential, otherwise the administration might in 
 times of racial tension be gravely hampered, and that though 
 a civilian judge might know less law than a barrister imported 
 from England, he would, through his administrative experience, 
 know a good deal more about the Indians. 
 
 On all sides it would be admitted that the union of the 
 executive and judicial functions is unsuited to highly developed 
 communities, and in India the functions are already separated 
 in the Presidency towns. On the other hand, the system of 
 patriarchal justice possesses the advantages of cogency, 
 economy, and simplicity in rude and primitive districts where 
 public opinion gives very little support to the suppression of 
 crime, and the amount of intricate civil jurisdiction is com- 
 paratively small. For this reason, the union of functions is 
 likely to continue for a considerable time to come in the 
 undeveloped parts of India, as also in Nigeria. On the other 
 hand, it is likely, owing to the growing pressure of the 
 barrister class, to disappear by degrees, and in places even 
 before the time is ripe. 
 
 The relation of the political to the specialist services is 
 another problem which is already discussed and is likely to 
 come into greater prominence, as the technical side of adminis- 
 tration develops. In India the Civil Servant is, as has been 
 said, the most highly paid agent of the Government. In
 
 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 137 
 
 Nigeria the civil engineer commands a higher rate than the 
 head of the district. If an administrative system had to be 
 created for India for the first time to-day, it is very unlikely 
 that it would assume the shape which a long train of historical 
 circumstances has given to the present system. There would 
 be a single Civil Service of India, divided into a number of 
 branches, executive, judicial, medical, agricultural, and the like, 
 each recruited at the rate at which work of the type required 
 can be supplied. There would be no one service so prominent 
 among the other services as is the Indian Civil Service, or 
 so exclusively entrusted with the central functions of advice at 
 the head-quarters of Government. The executive head of the 
 Government would have a wider choice of secretaries and 
 advisers. There would be more equality in pay and prospects 
 between the different branches of the public service, more 
 interchangeability, a less rigid system of administrative caste. 
 
 One of the necessary features of British administration in 
 the tropics is that it is difficult to get any public work per- 
 formed except upon the service system. Ordinarily speaking, 
 you cannot get an Englishman to come out to India to do 
 a particular piece of work lasting one, two, or three years, 
 however highly you tempt him, for if he comes he loses his 
 connexion at home and may not be able to recover it. A 
 University Lecturer may be brought out to teach in an Indian 
 University for the cold weather, but hardly for any longer 
 period short of a working lifetime. Consequently the best 
 chance of obtaining good European sei-vice in a tropical country 
 is to devise a system which will catch men young, train them 
 for tropical service, and keep them in work until the age of 
 retirement is reached. It is on this system that the Govern- 
 ment of India obtains its doctors, its college teachers, its 
 bacteriologists, its forest officers. And no other system is 
 possible. If a new branch of public work is opened, the first 
 ambition of the officers employed is to be formed into a 
 regular service, with fixed expectations of emolument and a 
 recognized place in the official Table of Precedence. 
 
 The critics have not been slow to descry the dangers, temp- 
 tations, and anomalies incidental to the working of this highly
 
 138 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 
 
 disciplined professional hierarchy. If a Professor of History 
 goes on leave from a Government college, the State may name 
 a Professor of Mathematics belonging to the Imperial Branch 
 of the Education Service to officiate in his place, and the same 
 Professor of Mathematics may shortly be transferred elsewhere 
 to teach Geography or English Literature almost irrespective 
 of his qualifications. Again, the system has developed a very 
 close and jealously guarded doctrine of vested interests — the 
 higher posts in each service being regarded as the perquisite 
 of the Service, as a prize against which recruitment has been 
 made, and, consequently, not to be abolished until the vested 
 interests of every person recruited against them have been 
 satisfied. Esprit de corps is no doubt a valuable feature of 
 public life, and there is no esprit de corps so strong as that of 
 the Indian Public Services. The Indians themselves not 
 unnaturally regard these services as manifestations of the 
 European spirit of caste. 
 
 One of the outstanding features of the employment of a 
 European agency in a tropical country is its costliness. A 
 European will not serve in India or in other tropical countries 
 at the rate for which he will render the same service at home. 
 He must be remunerated for exile, for the journey to and 
 from, for the expense of keeping up two establishments, in 
 which, if married, he is almost necessarily involved. He is a 
 very costly article to import, and since he requires a pension 
 on retirement, he is a charge on the revenues of the country 
 long after he has ceased to render it any active service. Con- 
 sequently the British administration in India is the costliest in 
 the world, and a not unnatural mark for Indian critics, who 
 complain of the heavy financial drain which it involves, and, 
 in particular, of the large sums devoted to the payment of 
 pensions. 
 
 The answer to these financial complaints is that if the ad- 
 ministration of India requires a European leaven, the Indian 
 taxpayers must be prepared to pay the price, without which 
 the leaven cannot be procured. At the same time, the costli- 
 ness of the European agency is a very powerful argument in 
 favour of reducing it to the lowest possible figure consistent
 
 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 139 
 
 with continued efficiency, and this has for long been an 
 acknowledged maxim of British policy; 
 
 A whole series of very difficult problems has arisen out of 
 the costliness of the European. A European and an Indian 
 are employed to do the same work. Should they receive the 
 same pay? If they do, then the Indian is greatly overpaid, 
 and the Indian taxpayers proportionately overburdened. If, 
 on the other hand, the Indian is paid on a lower scale than the 
 European, he feels aggrieved by the inequality of reward, since 
 he is adjudged capable of doing the same work. The difficulty 
 has become more acute owing to the fact that no uniform 
 principle has hitherto been observed. Indian High Court 
 Judges are paid the same salaries as their English brothers on 
 the Bench, Indians who gain a place in the Civil Service com- 
 petition in London are paid the same salaries as their English 
 colleagues, but in most services the Indian receives two-thirds 
 of the European rate of pay, and the vernacular press protests 
 against the injustice of rewarding the same work by different 
 rates of pay. It is not a very big question, save when measured 
 by the friction which it generates. 
 
 Another problem which occupies a large part in all Indian 
 discussions is the Indian proportion in the higher branches of 
 the Public Service. In general, the Indians contend that the 
 time has arrived when they may be safely admitted in very 
 much larger numbers to the higher branches of all the Public 
 Services, and one of the matters submitted to the recent Com- 
 mission was the extent to which this desire could be gratified 
 without injury to the efficiency of the Government. It would 
 not be proper to me to divulge the conclusions to which the 
 Commission has arrived, since they have not been given to the 
 public,^ but I may at least indicate the principal factors which 
 enter into the consideration of the problem, since they are 
 extremely familiar to the Anglo-Indian and Indian world. 
 They are three in number : first, the extent to which a particular 
 service may be regarded as ' a security service ', i. e. as contri- 
 buting to the security of the country ; secondly, the extent to 
 
 ^ i.e. in 1915. The Report has now (1919) been before the pubhc for 
 some time, but effect has not yet been given to its recommendations.
 
 I40 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 
 
 which for educational reasons it may be desirable that a service 
 should possess a substantial European element ; and, thirdly, 
 the measure of the facilities provided for the training of Indians 
 to enter those services in which it is desirable that they should 
 be employed in greater numbers. One thing is certain. A 
 man in the higher branches of the Indian Public Services is a 
 marked man. He is seen, he is criticized, he is generally doing 
 notable and noteworthy things. It is necessary that he should 
 be efficient, and it is to the interest of India that authority 
 should be given only to hands which can rightly wield it. 
 
 The questions to which I have been alluding are so con- 
 tinually discussed in Indian newspapers that any treatment of 
 them, however brief and perfunctory, will sound odious to the 
 ear of the weary Anglo-Indian. Another question, undiscussed 
 as yet, but likely to become prominent, is whether the scheme 
 of Indian bureaucracy is likely to provide a sufficient stock of 
 political talent in the generations to come. It is not without 
 interest to notice that there is a good deal of weighty opinion to 
 the effect that a peer imported from England governs a pro- 
 vince better than a Lieutenant-Governor who has risen through 
 the bureaucracy of the Civil Service. There have indeed been 
 idle and ineffective Governors, and very brilliant and effective ' 
 Lieutenant-Governors — but the weight of opinion seems to 
 incline to the Governor. He is not so experienced in the 
 particulars of Indian government. He is, in general, not so 
 able or industrious a man. Of oriental languages and litera- 
 ture he knows nothing, whereas the Lieutenant-Governor 
 generally knows a great deal. But he brings a fresh eye ; his 
 mind is full of Western improvements and analogies ; he is not 
 encumbered by too much knowledge of detail. His outlook is 
 apt to be broader. He is often more conciliatory in his bearing 
 to Indians, having less experience of the difficulty of governing 
 them, and, in general, a good Governor will possess more of 
 the distinctive political talent of handling masses of opinion 
 and party groups than the man whose whole life has been 
 divided between district administration and the secretariat. It 
 may indeed be questioned whether a life spent in the Indian 
 Civil Service is calculated, except in rare cases, to stimulate
 
 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 141 
 
 that part of political talent which consists in the study and 
 guidance of political opinion, or in the framing of the large 
 legislative proposals which are from time to time needed in 
 actively thinking political communities. Until quite recently 
 there was little need for such forms of talent in India, for if 
 there was active thought among the Indians, it certainly did 
 not revolve round the theme of politics. But the Immemorial 
 tranquillity of the East has now been disturbed, perhaps only 
 for a time, perhaps never to be resumed, and we must make 
 our account to meet an age of political discussion and criticism 
 among men educated on the Western model, and using the 
 Western philosophy to obtain their Eastern ends. Will that 
 famous Indian Civil Service, which sends its sons upon their 
 first arrival in India to five years of administrative work 
 among the peasantry in some lonely district, the mother of so 
 many strong and kindly fathers of the poor, rise to the occasion, 
 and throw up men capable of guiding and inspiring the new 
 India ? It is a mistake to suppose that the oriental world is 
 best governed by a policy of perpetual silence. Human 
 nature is the same everywhere, and Indians, like Englishmen, 
 are easily won by oratory, and seduced by the sweets of 
 persuasion. 
 
 The problem of discovering and improving the political 
 talent of the Government of India is made all the more urgent 
 by reason of the rift which has sprung up between the British 
 administration and the intellectual class of India. It is difficult 
 to see how some such antagonism could have been averted 
 once the decision had been arrived at to educate Indians in 
 Western knowledge. From that moment it became clear that 
 the governing bureaucracy would find itself in a dilemma. On 
 the one hand, the Government Colleges would be providing 
 an education in the philosophy, literature, and history of the 
 democratic societies of the West ; on the other hand, the 
 political liberties which were the outcome of those intellectual 
 conditions would be withheld. The paradox of the situation 
 was illustrated very clearly a few years ago when Lord 
 Sydenham's Government removed English history from the list 
 of sulijects necessary to be offered for the matriculation
 
 J42. IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 
 
 examination of the Bombay University amid a storm of pro- 
 test from the Indian leaders of public opinion in the province, 
 who found in English history a long lesson of successful resis- 
 tance to authority. Nor is it to be wondered at if the rising 
 tide of Indian nationalism, with its unpleasant accompaniment 
 of bombs, dacoities, and other spasmodic deeds of violence, 
 should have helped to involve the whole Indian educated class 
 in a certain atmosphere of suspicion with those on whose ' 
 shoulders the responsibility for the maintenance of order 
 primarily rests. The bigger men on both sides can shake 
 themselves free from the pervading feeling of racial distrust, 
 and are anxious to promote the harmonious co-operation of 
 the two races. But the Indian Civil Servant, partly because 
 he is a representative of the official class par excellence, and 
 partly by reason of his absorption in the exacting routine of 
 his official work, is, in general (though there are many note- 
 worthy exceptions), less fortunately placed than the lawyer or 
 the missionary for making real friends in the circle of educated 
 India. Many civilians regret this, and would welcome fuller 
 opportunities of free and friendly intercourse with intellectual 
 Indians. Others find an insuperable difficulty in establishing 
 relations with m.en whose political outlook is so radically 
 different from their own. 
 
 The new Indian Councils, by bringing the leaders of Indian 
 public opinion into connexion with the official class, do, no 
 doubt, afford valuable opportunities of ascertaining the drift 
 and quality of the educated Indian mind. Government 
 measures have to be defended against criticism ; and in the 
 course of debate the characters of the critics divulge themselves. 
 One man shows himself to be steadfast and trustworthy, 
 another to be slippery and fitful. A strong and skilful critic, 
 like the late Mr. Gokhale, inspired general respect, for it was 
 manifest that his conduct was guided by disinterested motives. 
 And nowhere was there a more cordial recognition of Mr. 
 Gokhale's fine qualities than among the members of the Anglo- 
 Indian community. Again, the great difficulty of social inter- 
 course between Englishmen and Indians in India consists in 
 the absence of common topics, and the debates in Council
 
 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 143 
 
 provide common topics. They are not, it is true, so useful in 
 bringing the races together as joint work at the Bar or on the 
 Bench, for in the Councils the Indian element is mainly in 
 opposition, and the opposition is often a source of irritation to 
 the Government. But the Councils are a good deal better 
 than nothing, and, though you may often hear them condemned 
 as involving a serious waste of public time, no time is really 
 wasted which contributes to amend the principal defect in the 
 present political education of the Indian Civil Service, its 
 failure to secure for the Civil Servant easy opportunities for an 
 understanding of educated India. A little sympathy goes a 
 very long way in India, and the finest district officer may fail 
 when he comes to deal with a Legislative Council, by reason 
 of the fact that he has expended all his available stock of 
 sympathy on the peasants, and has none to spare for the 
 journalists and lawyers. 
 
 In speaking of Indian administration, however, we should 
 always bear in mind that in India, as throughout the Empire, 
 we practise no uniform system. Our administration in India 
 belongs, in fact, to two main types. There is the direct 
 British administration of British India, and there is the indirect 
 British administration of the Indian States, just as in Nigeria, 
 besides the portion of the colony directly administered by Sir 
 Frederick Lugard, there are the Moslem Emirates, in which 
 the British influence percolates through native channels. Now 
 the Native State in India is one of our most successful 
 achievements ; and my impression (but please remember that it 
 is merely the impression of a superficial and hasty observer) is 
 that the inhabitants of a well-governed Native State are on 
 the whole happier and more contented than the inhabitants of 
 British India. They are more lightly taxed ; the pace of the 
 administration is less urgent and exacting ; their sentiment is 
 gratified by the splendour of a native Indian Court, and by 
 the dominion of an Indian Government. They feel that they 
 do things for themselves instead of having everything done for 
 them by a cold and alien benevolence. And yet they obtain 
 the advantages of the Pax Britannica, are protected against 
 ihc caprices of a cruel despot, and derive benefit not only from
 
 144 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 
 
 the help of the British Resident, but also from the presence of 
 Indian administrators who have received their early training in 
 British India. A Native Indian State is, in fact, the most 
 perfect experiment so far devised for bringing West and East 
 together in a natural, pleasant, and wholesome way. The old 
 oriental forms are preserved, the princely house, the princely 
 court, the Durbar of splendidly robed oriental councillors, the 
 princely bodyguard. The ordinary Indian seems to be more 
 comfortable in a Native State, wears brighter colours, and goes 
 more at his ease. And among modern Indian princes there is 
 no little emulation in the matter of good works, such as the 
 provision of schools and hospitals, so that these Western im- 
 provements come to be regarded there as popular possessions 
 rather than as intrusive novelties, and are often, indeed, de- 
 manded by the public voice. 
 
 The success of these Native States depends upon the fact 
 that they are encompassed by the atmosphere and institutions 
 of British India. Remove the British Raj and it is only too 
 certain that the princes would quarrel, that their subjects 
 would be ground down with taxation, and that the revei)ues 
 now devoted to objects of public utility would be squandered 
 in guns and rifles. At the same time it is a question worth 
 considering whether it might not be possible to extend thq 
 area of India now governed by this indirect method. In the 
 public discussions as to the future of India, reference to the 
 Native States, which occupy a third of the continent, is 
 generally omitted, and it seems to be assumed that political 
 development will take the form of an extension of self-govern- 
 ment upon a Western rather than upon an Eastern plan. But 
 the other alternative is at least worth considering, for it is 
 possible that by the creation of new principalities in great 
 tracts of country, such as Bengal, the devolution of authority 
 might proceed in a manner at once more intimately congenial 
 to oriental ways of thought and more advantageous to the 
 maintenance of the British connexion. 
 
 Such a proposal, however, would meet with no support from 
 the Indian leaders of political thought, who are apt to view 
 the Native States as backward, if not as reactionary. They
 
 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 145 
 
 , wish for a fuller share of power in British India, and have no 
 interest in promoting a plan by which the area of British India 
 would be curtailed. Nor in their ideals for the distant future 
 do they entertain the project of a federation in which British 
 India would be the predominant, and the Native States the 
 less important partners. Yet the facts of the situation would 
 seem to indicate that if ever India is removed from the category 
 of dependencies into the category of dominions, the con- 
 stitutional pattern of the new State must be a federation in 
 which hereditary monarchies and principalities are included as 
 constituent parts. 
 
 Upon the most important matter (3( all, upon the spirit 
 which informs the British administration of that ancient 
 oriental society where clashing creeds, long-inherited customs, 
 and delicate sensibilities put our powers of governance to their 
 most arduous test, a brief concluding word may be spoken. 
 < There is but one way ', said General Gordon, ' to govern men, 
 and it is eternal truth. Get into their skins. Try. to realize 
 their feelings. That is the true secret of government.' In 
 India the secret has been known of old. In the instructions 
 issued to the supervisors by the Council of Calcutta in 1769 we 
 read as follows : 
 
 'Your commission entrusts you with the superintendence 
 and charge of a province whose rise and fall must considerably 
 affect the public welfare of the whole. The exposing and 
 eradicating numberless oppressions which are as grievous to 
 the poor as they are injurious to the Government ; the dis- 
 playing of those national principles of honour, faith, rectitude, 
 and humility which should ever characterize the name of an 
 Englishman ; the impressing the lowest individual with these 
 ideas and raising the heart of the Ryot from oppression and 
 despondency to security and joy are the valuable results which 
 must result to our nation from a prudent and wise behaviour 
 on your part. Versed as you are in the language, depend on 
 none when you yourself can possibly hear and determine. Let 
 access to you be easy, and be careful of the conduct of your 
 dependants. Aim at no undue influence yourself, and check 
 it in all others. Great share of integrity, disinterestedness, 
 assiduity, and watchfulness is necessary not only for your own 
 guidance, but as an example to all others.' 
 
 2302 K.
 
 146 IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION 
 
 Nearly a hundred and fifty years have passed since these 
 directions, containing the heart of all true political magnanimity 
 and wisdom, were issued by the Council of Calcutta to the 
 Agents charged with the task of supervising the administration 
 of Bengal. A very different theory of government in tropical 
 and semi-tropical countries had been practised by other 
 colonizing nations, but it is to the credit of the British ad- 
 ministration of India that within the first decade of its exercise 
 of political authority, it viewed the problem before it, not as 
 the merciless exploitation of a lucrative estate, but as a 
 responsibility for the lot of an oppressed and impoverished 
 peasantry. In that spirit of paternal guidance and sympathy, 
 the Government of India and of our dependencies has ever 
 since proceeded. A slow Government, cautious to the point 
 of timidity, suspicious of all new ideas outside the sphere of 
 administrative improvement, but within that sphere swift, 
 resolute, and enterprising, a Government unused to external 
 criticism, and somewhat distrustful of external critics, but 
 spotlessly pure, ceaselessly vigilant, studiously respectful of 
 the religious and social traditions of the people, and single- 
 minded in its devotion to the material and moral welfare of 
 three hundred and fifteen million souls. 
 
 French Nationalis^n 
 
 THE spirit of Catholicism may be distinguished from the 
 special quality of Catholic doctrine. The doctrine of 
 Catholicism is universal. The spirit of Catholicism is a spirit 
 of submission to the local pieties, inherited instincts, and 
 particularizing forces of history. The doctrine of Catholicism 
 posits a Universal Church ; but the spirit of Catholicism, so far 
 from being cosmopolitan, is intertwined with an unconscious 
 tangle of exclusions and preferences accumulated in the passage 
 of centuries and transmitted from a distant past. It would seem 
 that the absolute submission which the Churc.h requires of the
 
 FRENCH NATIONALISM 147 
 
 faithful in the sphere of doctrine promotes a general temper of 
 acquiescence in the sentimental legacies of time. The Catholic 
 is naturally a Conservative. He feels the call of the blood and 
 the imperious attractions of the soil. Without any process of 
 analysis or questioning he is prepared to shoulder the burdens 
 of history and to live upon the large force of impulse. He 
 trusts democracy, but only when it follows its instincts, never 
 when it uses its reason, and believes in the Army and the 
 Church as divine agencies for the formation of character and 
 the inculcation of habits of reverence and submission. A 
 diffused and equable philanthropy does not attract him. 
 Respecting the claims conferred by priority, he remembers 
 that he was born first and baptized afterwards, and so metes 
 out his allegiance between his country and his creed. 
 
 Such a sentiment, at once conservative, patriotic, and 
 militant, has been evidenced all through the history of France, 
 but never in a relief so salient as against the stormy back- 
 ground of the three Republics. The political Catholicism of 
 modern France has had its periods of ebb and flow, its trans- 
 mutations of colour and shade, its exaltations and its lapses. 
 It has been royalist and absolutist with De Maistre and De 
 Bonald, democratic with Lamennais, nationalist with Barres. 
 It has risen to the heights of Les Paroles d\m Croyant and 
 sunk to the depths of the tirades of La Croix during the Affaire, 
 But in general it has managed to combine with the fevers of 
 combative emotion, engendered by the controversies of the 
 hour, some of those gentler graces of mysticism and piety 
 which properly belong to the religious temperament. 
 
 The future historian of the great war will take account of 
 this element in the public consciousness of France. Modern 
 war, as distinguished from the military amusements of the past, 
 is a malady which can only thrive at a certain temperature. 
 It may be plotted by Governments, promoted by armament 
 firms, precipitated by the machinations of military cliques; 
 but under whatever form or through whatever agency it may 
 come, modern war always implies a general inflammation of 
 the public mind. Nobody who studies the history of Europe 
 during the last decade can fail to note a steady and alarming 
 
 K 2
 
 148 FRENCH NATIONALISM 
 
 rise in the political temperature. It was most dangerous in 
 Germany, because it was in Germany that it could be most 
 easily used as the lever of grandiose and world-shattering 
 ambitions. But it was not confined to Germany. The 
 temperature was blazing in the Balkans. It was high in the 
 British aristocracy, fast mounting in the British colonies, and 
 had several times risen to the point of fever in the Catholic 
 and nationalist circles of France. 
 
 The peculiar condition of the public consciousness in Europe, 
 which alone made the war possible, was the product of forces 
 and agencies too numerous and diverse to recount, but con- 
 verging one upon another with accumulating momentum to 
 increase the friction and mutual jealousies of the rival powers 
 and peoples. Of these perturbing forces one of the most vivid 
 and arresting was French nationalism. Other movements 
 exercised a more direct influence upon the development of 
 events, were more closely associated with the crucial turns of 
 public policy, bear a larger measure of responsibility for the 
 tragedy which ensued. The nationalist movement in France 
 was not decisive in the sense in which the term maybe applied 
 to the stirrings of the Pan-Germanic idea or to the restless 
 aspirations of the Southern Slavs. It never obtained entire 
 control of the French Government; it was never a triumphant 
 and overwhelming power in the sphere of opinion. Its central 
 core of doctrine was associated not by inner necessity but 
 through the tissue of historic circumstances with suspect causes, 
 royalism on the one hand, ultramontanism on the other — and 
 this in a country where Pacificism was vigorously preached and 
 the old humanitarian gospel of the Revolution still exercised 
 a wide arid seductive appeal. Twice within a decade French 
 nationalism had associated itself with an ill-judged enterprise 
 and experienced a resounding defeat, and to onlookers on this 
 side of the Channel a cause which was connected first with 
 Boulanger and then with the accusers of Dreyfus seemed to be 
 bankrupt of future and definitely overthrown. 
 
 But there is a certain type of minority opinion which can 
 never be safely disregarded, and to this type French nationalism 
 belonged. A minority opinion may be the craze of eccentrics,
 
 FRENCH NATIONALISM 149 
 
 the plot of a sinister group, the airy fabric of prophetic minds 
 dreaming of worlds to come — in all of which cases it is negligible ; 
 or it may be a creed, comprising, amid some unpopular or dis- 
 putable articles, certain deep and widely shared instincts of the 
 race — and that was the case with French nationalism. Its 
 errors were the result not of corruption but of impatience. It 
 caught at straws. It was anxious to be doing. It was full 
 of inexperience, ardour, and desperate irritation. But it was 
 a vital force in France because it represented an instinct, a 
 tradition, and a dream ; and being vital and vigorous there, it 
 could not fail to radiate some part of its heat through the 
 whole body of Europe. 
 
 The founder of the movement was a soldier-poet who, having 
 fought the campaign of 1870 as quite a young man, dedicated 
 the remainder of his long and stirring life to the idea of national 
 revenge. Deroulede was totally lacking in balance, sagacity, 
 and statesmanship. He was a wild, reckless, passionate figure, 
 exercising by reason of his elemental force and sincerity an 
 influence to which prudence can never attain. During the war 
 his course had been marked by romantic vicissitudes. He had 
 been wounded at Sedan, he had escaped from a German 
 prison at Breslau, had stolen into Paris during the siege in the 
 disguise* of a cattle-drover, and had been shot in the ^.rm 
 fighting against the Commune. His great stature and martial 
 bearing, his flashing eyes, with their stern glint of fanaticism, 
 his gift of direct and vehement eloquence and rare capacity for 
 throwing his whole nature into all that he did and said, would 
 have won for him a hearing in any assemblage of his countrymen. 
 But he was not merely a vigorous platform speaker. His little 
 books of songs for soldiers hit the taste of the barrack-room 
 between wind and water. Edition followed edition. Before 
 the war his Chants de Soldat (published in 1872) had gone 
 through a hundred and fifty-eight editions, his Noiiveaux 
 Chants de Soldat (published in 1875) had gone through a 
 hundred and thirty editions, his Marches et Sonneries (published 
 in 1 881) through fifty editions. Of such work we do not ask 
 whether it is literature, but whether it accomplishes the pur- 
 pose for which it is designed. It is sufficient to say that
 
 I50 - FRENCH NATIONALISM 
 
 Deroulede achieved an extraordinary success. Having been a 
 private in the Zouaves, and being a man of plain, wholesome, 
 vigorous appetite, he knew exactly how to speak to the rank 
 and file of the French army. His ballads and songs have no 
 sense of strain or condescension about them. He does not fall 
 into the fatal weakness of parading a familiarity with the 
 technicalities of the military art or the curiosities of barrack- 
 room slang. His metres are simple, rude, sufficiently intolerable 
 to the cultivated ear, but well adapted to a marching tune or 
 a rousing chorus : 
 
 Dans la France que tout divise. 
 Quel Fran9ais a pris pour devise : 
 Chacun pour tous, tous pour I'Etat ? — 
 
 Le soldat. 
 
 Qui fait le guet quand tout sommeille? 
 Quand tout est en peril, qui veille? 
 Qui souffre, qui meurt, qui combat ? — 
 
 Le soldat. 
 
 This is not a high order of art, and Deroulede, who came of 
 a cultured family and was the nephew of that accomplished 
 artificer in language, Emile Augier, could do a good deal better 
 when he pleased. But in general it did not please him to do 
 better, and he managed to discover just that subtle mixture 
 of high spirit, sentiment, and moral platitude which seems to 
 be demanded of the author of popular airs- 
 
 In an autobiographical fragment of characteristic sincerity 
 Deroulede records how the shock of the Franco-Prussian War 
 produced in him an abrupt and entire reversal of judgements, 
 opinions, and sympathies. 
 
 ' I was anything ', he writes, speaking of the days before 
 the Franco- Prussian War, 'but a patriot. There was a long 
 period of my youth during which the glory of arms did not 
 count for me compared with the glory of the arts. I had no 
 comprehension of the grandeur of military service vaunted by 
 Vigny, and I took pride in the fact that I loved Frenchmen no 
 better than foreigners. This malady of cosmopolitanism, this 
 coldness for France, this aversion to the army, had got hold 
 of my brain during the last year of the lycie. My professor of 
 philosophy had sown the first germs, which rapidly developed
 
 FRENCH NATIONALISM 151 
 
 when I passed to the Law School. Every Sunday I read the 
 i?«^of Jules Valles, and, as Edouard Detaille recently recalled 
 to me, there was hardly a student meeting in which I did not 
 bawl out the old refrain : 
 
 Les peuples sont pour moi des freres, 
 Et les tyrans les ennemis.' 
 
 It was, however, one of those conversions which have more 
 show than substance. Deroulede had always been a violent, 
 combative young man, with a genuine love for the soil and 
 scenery of France. Hitherto his enemy had been the tyrant 
 Napoleon : henceforward it was the Prussian. If he was 
 a professed cosmopolitan as a youth, it was because it was 
 fashionable among the clever young men of the Latin Quarter 
 to oppose the revolutionary catechism to the maxims of 
 a decadent and unpopular Empire, not because he was in 
 nature and temperament a pacificist, as he professes to have 
 been. His conversion, in fact, like so many conversions, was 
 a discovery rather than a change. He had hitherto not attended 
 to Prussia, had not connected the great developments of 
 European affairs with the future of his country, and had failed 
 to realize the perils with which France was environed. The 
 war taught him a new scale of values and made him known 
 to his real self : and if his new philosophy was not the highest, 
 it was now based on serious experience and was an integral 
 part of a real and spontaneous man. 
 
 The most distinguished of Deroulede's disciples tells a story 
 of an interview, which must have taken place some time in the 
 early eighties, between the prophet of nationalism and Ernest 
 Renan. Deroulede had come to the College de France to 
 importune the great theologian to join hisLigue des Patriotes, 
 a newly founded association devised to sustain the martial spirit 
 of France and to promote the war of revenge against the 
 German Empire. ' Jeune homme,' replied the sage, with the 
 suave melancholy of resignation, ' la France se meurt, ne 
 troublez pas son agonie,' words calculated to dash the bravest 
 spirit, and to the philosophic student of comparative birth-rates 
 not without a sinister background of plausibility. 
 
 But the strength of nationalism lay in its sanguine defiance 
 
 ^
 
 152 FRENCH NATIONALISM 
 
 of the oracles of prudence and the counsels of resignation. The 
 air was full of self-questioning, of delicate cyjiicism, of exact, 
 intelligent, but essentially despondent labour. One man wrote a 
 book to explain the secret of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Others 
 invited their countrymen to study and admire the Germans. The 
 best minds took refuge in an atmosphere of intellectual criticism, 
 disillusioned with each one of the political ideals which France 
 had in turn tried and discarded with such bewildering rapidity. 
 But the nationalist refused to be drawn off the scent. He 
 despised the great Paris exhibitions, deeply distrusted colonial 
 enterprises as likely to divert the nation from its proper work 
 of recovering Alsace-Lorraine, and poured scorn upon the 
 whole tribe of politicians as upon a gang of jobbers. Among 
 a population deeply desirous of peace and rapidly outgrowing 
 the crude ambitions of Continental militarism, Deroulede's men 
 were a disturbing and upon the whole an unacceptable element. 
 Why should France be required to brace herself up to an effort 
 which upon every sane calculation of military probabilities must 
 end in crushing disaster ? Surely the wise course was to accept 
 the inevitable, to find some means of living upon reasonable 
 terms with the Germans, and to seek compensations for the 
 lost provinces beyond the seas ! So thought Hanotaux, the 
 historian Foreign Secretary, and Caillaux, the coolest and best 
 financial head in France; 
 
 Besides, there was something light-headed and preposterous 
 about Deroulede's whole conduct of the affair. In England, 
 where the sense of humour is comparatively strong and the 
 dramatic instinct comparatively weak, movements are more 
 easily killed by ridicule than they are in France. But even in 
 France the Boulanger movement, though at one time decidedly 
 formidable, suffered in esteem through the exuberant antics 
 of its supporters. The enthusiasm lavished on the General, 
 the crowds who escorted him to the station, the devotees who 
 laid their bodies upon the railway line in order to prevent his 
 departure from Paris — all this frothy ebullition of loyalty to a 
 half-hearted, ineffectual soldier who, if he had been honest 
 with himself, would have bartered all the dictatorships in 
 Europe for a quiet life with his mistresS; seemed to sober
 
 FRENCH NATIONALISM 153 
 
 politicians little better than a fool's phantasmagoria. Visitors 
 to Paris in the eighties will remember the smile which used to 
 come to the lips of wise men when the name of Deroulede was 
 mentioned. He was regarded as an attractive but rather 
 dangerous madcap, picturesque as an incident in the landscape 
 of politics, biat of too fantastic a vehemence to give stable 
 direction to any considerable mass of public opinion. 
 
 But the movement to which his energy had supplied an 
 originating impulse gathered strength as it proceeded. When 
 the Ligue des Patriotes was founded in 1881, the intellectual 
 atmosphere of Paris was saturated with philosophic rationalism. 
 The writings of Herbert Spencer, a thinker rarely mentioned 
 without contumely in the lecture-rooms of Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge, were accepted as the last' judgement in the Latin 
 Quarter not only by students but also by their most influential 
 instructors. Scientific co-operation with Germany had been 
 renew-ed, and the brilliant Curtius was elected a corresponding 
 member of the French Institute. The giants in the world 
 of letters were Taine and Renan, the one a strict determinist 
 • in philosophy, the other a sceptical historian of rare genius and 
 learning, and both as far removed as possible from the temper 
 which promotes or enjoys the animosities of nations. Culti- 
 vated ladies and gentlemen were beginning to taste the first 
 fresh sallies of one of the most delicious inheritors of the spirit 
 of Voltaire, and while the wits saluted the earliest romance of 
 Anatole France, the vulgar devoured the laborious materialism 
 of Zola. 
 
 Twenty years later the intellectual atmosphere of Paris was 
 strangely transformed. The great captains of rationalism had 
 disappeared. The old idols were deposed, and, while an anti- 
 clerical campaign was waged as briskly as ever in the sphere of 
 politics, some of the most attractive of the novelists and critics 
 were numbered among the orthodox fold. At the Sorbonne 
 the idealism of Boutroux had prepared the way for a philo- 
 sophy which exalted vital impulse at the expense of the 
 reasoning faculty, now declared to be but a fractional and 
 delusive element in the apprehension and evolution of reality. 
 It was no longer an unfashionable heresy to allude to the soul,
 
 154 FRENCH NATIONALISM 
 
 or to believe in its endurance after death, A philosopher of 
 genius, with the pen of an artist and shining with an incompar- 
 able lucidity and grace as a lecturer, would throw a spell over 
 a crowded and fashionable audience with a metaphysic which 
 was surmised to give support to the supreme hope of religion. 
 
 In this cultured and more congenial atmosphere nationalism 
 received from its Catholic and literary exponents all the illustra- 
 tion and support which deep feeling and penetrating imagination 
 could bestow. During the rushing hours of his tempestuous 
 life, Deroulede had recked little of the rites and observances of 
 the Church, nor was it until his last illness, as we learn from 
 the charming pages of a reverent disciple, that he was brought 
 to accept the consolations of religion. But though the nationalist 
 movement, as its name implied, was designed to include, and 
 succeeded in including, men of the most various convictions 
 and antecedents, its prophetic literature was in fact Catholic, if 
 not in profession, at least in sentiment, drawing its strength 
 from the older traditions and memories of France, and reacting 
 powerfully against the cosmopolitan hospitality which had 
 given to Jews and aliens so large a part in the economy of the 
 State. 
 
 There was nothing distinctively Christian about the doctrine. 
 ' Nos gentes, nationesque distinguimus. Deo una domus est 
 mundus hie totus. . . . Igitur qui innocentiam colit, Deo 
 supplicat, qui iustitiam Deo libat ; qui fraudibus abstinet 
 propitiat Deum ; qui hominem periculo subripet optimam 
 victimam caedit. Haec nostra sacrificia, haec Dei sacra sunt ; 
 sic apud nos religiosior est ille qui iustior.' This was the 
 primitive Christian spirit, the soul infusing that beautiful 
 dialogue from the pen of Minucius Felix which is one of the 
 few lovely things in early apologetic Christian literature. But 
 it was not the spirit of French nationalism, even when ex- 
 pounded by the most devout and tender of its prophets, for 
 the essence of nationalism was the hatred of Germany and the 
 will to a war of revenge. 
 
 Hatred and revenge are not Christian sentiments, but 
 imperfect human nature is so compounded that there is no 
 easier way to produce cohesion among men than to show them
 
 FRENCH NATIONALISM 155 
 
 an enemy whom they can agree to detest. It is a tenable 
 hypothesis that the nationalist leaven in French thought tended 
 upon the whole to sweeten the body politic and to rid it of 
 some of its more rancorous humours. It is true that it 
 administered in a very deplorable degree to foment anti-Semite 
 prejudice; but if this 'aspect of its influence be deducted, the 
 general trend of its operation was to infuse a wider and more 
 generous tone into politics, to inculate a spirit of comradeship, 
 a higher sense of devotion to the large interests of the State, 
 combined with a greater feeling for the historic glories of 
 France and for that invisible and imperious bond which binds 
 the living to the dead in a spiritual and efficacious communion. 
 This was the valuable side of nationalism, viewed as an ethical 
 agent. It wa§ estimable not because it preached the hatred of 
 Germany but because it preached the love of France, not by 
 reason of its antagonisms but in virtue of its generous affinities, 
 not because it worked for a foreign war but because it 
 endeavoured to compose a domestic peace. Its strength lay 
 in the fact that it did succeed in restoring to the national con- 
 sciousness a vivid sense of some precious things which had 
 been overlooked, forgotten, or trampled underfoot. The admir- 
 able speeches delivered by M. Maurice Barres in the Chamber 
 in 191 1, in defence of the small parish churches in France, at 
 a time when the reckless iconoclasm of the Government was 
 placing them in grave peril of destruction, not only exhibited 
 in a true light the minor glories of French ecclesiastical archi- 
 tecture, but brought out in a very striking and eloquent way 
 the value of the parish church to a village as a centre of age- 
 long associations and a symbol of social unity and peace. 
 And in general the nationalists rendered excellent service by 
 their exaltation of all the natural forms of local and provincial 
 piety which had been so greatly overshadowed by the cen- 
 tralizing policy of the revolutionary State, so that, in reading 
 the literature of the party, one is conscious of a pervading tone 
 of affectionate warmth about everything in France which might 
 contribute to build up the patriotic purpose and character. 
 
 The weakness of the party, if party it can be called, was 
 on the side of practical and constructive statesmanship. It
 
 156 FRENCH NATIONALISM 
 
 represented emotion rather than a plan. 'Je croyais qu'on 
 obtiendrait la Revanche avec quelque heureuse fievre fran9aise,' 
 says the most conspicuous of its later leaders. And again : 
 'Nous n'avons pas cesse de proclamer, je voudrais dire de 
 chanter obscurement, obstinement, glorieusement, la necessite 
 de proteger notre sang et notre societe, de nous mefier de 
 nos envahisseurs pacifiques, de verifier les intrus, de leur fermer 
 notre maison et notre genie.' ^ But the ' happy French fever ' 
 was no scheme of national regeneration, and the doctrine of 
 strict racial purity could never be applied in a country so full 
 of miscellaneous elements and world-wide connexions. In- 
 deed, it is one of the little ironies of life that it fell to Maurice 
 Barres to devote his discours de reception at the Academy 
 to the praise of Heredia the Cuban, and that Naquet, the 
 political agent of the Boulanger party, was by origin a Jew. 
 
 Still, there are moments in history when it is more im- 
 portant to work for a general change of mind than for any 
 defined scheme of practical reform. The nationalists in truth 
 were not agreed upon the polity for France. Some worked 
 for a restored and modernized monarchy ; others were suckled 
 in the Imperial tradition ; but upon the whole they contrived 
 to swing themselves free of the old dynastic anchorages, and 
 were content to wait upon the tide. The one thing which 
 mattered to them all was the ignominy of belonging to 
 a vanquished and acquiescent nation. 'The important thing', 
 says a character in UEnnemi des Lois, ' is not the formulas by 
 which one expresses one's emotion, but to be a little heated 
 with life.' That was the position of the nationalists. They 
 wished to spread a passionate, full-blooded way of feeling 
 about the national problem. 
 
 In this they were greatly assisted by the fact that the 
 memories of the Franco-Prussian War were still living and 
 poignant among men who reached the summit of their literary 
 power in the closing decade of the last century. 
 
 ' La trouee de Charmes, le passage de la Moselle sur 
 Mirecourt et Neufchateau, voila des pays nobles, des pays de 
 
 ' M. Barres, La Croix de Guerre, pp. l6.>-3.
 
 FRENCH NATIONALISM 157 
 
 grande histoire et qui furent, en tous siecles, la route des 
 invasions. Quand j'avais huit ans, j'ai vu la retraite de 
 MacMahon et du general de Failly apres la bataille de 
 Froeschvviller et tout derriere eux I'arrivee odieuse des 
 Prussiens.' ^ 
 
 Barres had seen with the impressionable eyes of a child 
 enough of the tragedy of defeat and the insolence of conquest 
 to furnish the basis for a life of political action. He re- 
 membered the weary and haggard Turcos streaming back in 
 dejection from the field of Froeschwiller, the first Uhlans, 
 revolver in hand, crossing the bridge at Charmes in the dusk 
 of evening, the candles which by command of the conquerors 
 were Ht in every window of the village, the seizure of his 
 father and grandfather as hostages to safeguard the trains, the 
 murder of the chemist Marotte in the village street. On 
 a sensitive artist-nature such experiences make an impression 
 which colours every activity of the mind ; an impression the 
 more formidable seeing that it is of a kind eminently com- 
 municable to beings of the most ordinary clay. 
 
 These memories combined themselves with a vague and 
 undefined aspiration towards a state of society governed more 
 nearly as to its aims by the large popular instincts and tradi- 
 tions of the race, but in which military and clerical discipline 
 should exercise a commanding influence upon character. The 
 movement was not antagonistic to democracy, though its 
 leaders rejected the particular form which democratic govern- 
 ment had in fact taken in France. In all forms of Caesarism 
 there has been a popular element, an appeal, as it were, from 
 the refined philosophy of the Whigs to the elemental loyalties 
 of the unlettered multitude, ' to the sumptuous treasure of the 
 popular soul '. It was so with Napoleon ; it was so with 
 Disraeli ; it has been so with the Catholic nationalists in 
 France. They believed in the existence of a Tory democracy, 
 and thought with our own Jew Prime Minister that an aristo- 
 cracy could be so transformed as to undertake the neglected 
 work of social reform, while giving effect to the full range 
 of national ambition. 
 
 ^ M, Barr^, V Union sacrie, p. 347.
 
 158 FRENCH NATIONALISM 
 
 The importance of such ideas to France cannot be gauged 
 by the standards of a country in which the aristocracy has 
 always borne its full share of the responsibilties and charges 
 of public life. In England, it is so much a part of the 
 established order of things that the upper class should devote 
 itself to politics and render social service of one kind and 
 another, that there was nothing specially startling or original 
 in the notion that the aristocratic party might become the 
 organ through which wide-reaching social changes were to be 
 effected in the interests of the poor. But in France the 
 doctrine pointed to a state of society and to modes of social 
 action in the sharpest contrast to the known and established 
 conventions of ostracism and Fro7ide. There was accordingly 
 something startling in the suggestion that the legitimist aristo- 
 cracy, so long dwelling in proud and embittered isolation, 
 should once more plunge into the warm and genial currents 
 of national life — something original in a programme which did 
 not repose on dynastic principles and was not worked in the 
 interests of a dynastic party. Frenchmen have always felt 
 an air of unreality about our English party divisions. Our 
 opposing politicians meet one another at dinner and at country- 
 house parties, do not fight duels, very rarely bring charges 
 affecting personal honour. While the amenities of life are 
 allowed to be so little affected by the asperities of debate, may 
 it not be inferred that there is either agreement upon funda- 
 mentals or a singular lack of interest in questions of principle? 
 But in France it was just the fundamentals which were in 
 dispute. The Chamber, and the country behind the Chamber, 
 were always skirting fundamentals, touching the raw nerve of 
 civil-war matters, such as the ultimate form of constitution, 
 the dynastic claims, the issae between Christianity and secu- 
 larism ; so that the realization of national unity in France 
 demanded a greater effort, implied a more violent change, and 
 could indeed only be accomplished, even temporarily, by an 
 immense displacement of interest and alteration of values. 
 
 Meanwhile, on the side of emotion and sentiment, the 
 higher type of nationalist literature contributed in a marked 
 degree to deepen the channels of patriotic feeling and to
 
 FRENCH NATIONALISM 159 
 
 rekindle a spirit of hope in the destinies of France. One of its 
 most distinguished features has been the attention which many 
 of its writers have devoted to local history and to that resisting 
 fabric of dialect, tradition, and belief which in many a province 
 of France still retains something of its old richness of colour 
 and pattern. This is specially apparent in the writing of 
 M. Maurice Barres, who has made it a large part of his political 
 mission to spread through France a knowledge of his own 
 native province of Lorraine and a sympathy with her political 
 misfortune. M. Barres is not, like Mistral, the epic recreator 
 of a literary language ; but a tender vein of elegiac poetry runs 
 through his musical and accomplished prose, and he is never 
 seen to better advantage than when he suns himself in the 
 sweet valley of the Moselle, meditating on its gentle beauties 
 and the tragic vicissitudes of its fate. Here, for instance, is a 
 charming description of the little military towns on the eastern 
 border of France in the days before the war : 
 
 ' II est facheux que les romantiques qui nous disent avec des 
 expressions saisissantes le grand secret de melancolie des bois, 
 de la mer et des prairies du centre, aient ignore les petites 
 villes militaires de I'Est et leur atmosphere propre a former les 
 ames : le son du clairon, tout le jour, le drapeau, le general, 
 les promenades sur le rempart, et chaque soir soudain le fracas 
 militaire de la retraite eclatant en apotheose. Ah ! les magni- 
 fiques tambours se dechainant a huit heures sur un geste bref 
 de la grande canne et s'engoufifrant dans les rues avec toute la 
 population derriere ! Cette discipline theatrale et monotone 
 penetrait, pour en faire des heros et des amateurs de mort 
 glorieuse les jeunes gar9ons des places a la Vauban. II y a la 
 un ^tat d'ame fran9ais qui disparait sans avoir refu son expres- 
 sion litteraire.' ^ 
 
 Another prominent feature in the nationalist creed was a 
 revolt against the domination of the ' intellectuals ', and in 
 particular against the cast-iron system of efficient but monoto- 
 nous education which is part of France's heritage from the first 
 Napoleon. So far as impatience with intellectualism went, the 
 movement was only, better than most young men's revolts 
 against the existing order and its defenders by reason of its 
 * M. Barres, UAppel au Soldat, p. 340.
 
 t6o ■ FRENCH NATIONALISM 
 
 attachment to a fashionable but highly intellectual philosophy 
 which tended to exalt instinct at the expense of analysis. But 
 there is a good deal of pith and marrow in the bitter attack 
 upon the lycie which so often recurs in the writings of M. 
 Barres — the lycie with its gloomy barrack, its rigorous and 
 often unintelligent discipline, its neglect of individual aptitudes 
 and susceptibilities, its hieratic type of instruction framed 
 without reference to the spirit of the homes from which the 
 boys were drawn, and imposed, often with considerable force 
 of intellect and conviction, upon minds and characters for 
 whom most of it could never be made real or organic, 
 
 * Une de mes theses favorites est de reclamer que I'^ducation 
 ne soit pas departie aux enfants sans egard pour leur in- 
 dividuality propre. Je voudrais qu'on respectat leur prepara- 
 tion familiale et terrienne. J'ai denonce I'esprit de conquerant 
 et de millenaire d'un Bouteiller qui tombe sur les populations 
 indigenes comme un administrateur despotique double d'un 
 apotre fanatique ; j'ai marque pourquoi le Kantisme qui est la 
 religion officielle de I'Universite deracine les esprits.' 
 
 Such criticism, though perhaps overdrawn and liable to 
 correction in the light of the experience of the present war, 
 contained the germ of some wholesome developments. The 
 French schools of the Third Republic are certainly much 
 better than the French schools of the Empire, more efficiently 
 staffed, more enlightened in their methods, superior in the 
 design of their studies and the quality of their text-books. It 
 is only the exceptional boy who would gain by an exchange 
 of the lycSe for a scheme of private tuition assisted by a 
 personally conducted tour to Rheims, Domremy, and Lourdes. 
 But the system of State teaching in France has its defects as 
 well as its merits, arid one notable defect, pointed out by 
 M. Barres, is that it tends to uproot provincial loyalty and 
 to starve that aptitude for admiration and reverence which is 
 engendered in the wondering mind of the small child and 
 fostered by all the sweetest and most enduring influences of 
 family life. 
 
 What then is patriotism as it is understood by the nationalist 
 in France, whose creed and influence we have been attempting
 
 FRENCH NATIONALISM i6i 
 
 to describe? The love of country, for M. Barres and his 
 friends, is not, according to Renan's famous definition, the love 
 of a soul, of a spiritual principle. It is nothing so ethereal. 
 Rather it is first and foremost the love of a material thing, of 
 an extended space upon the globe, of a land of plough and 
 corn and meadow, shaded with trees, watered with streams, 
 flowery with blossom, here offering some fat reposeful pasture 
 to the sun, elsewhere broken into dark ravines and glistening 
 crags, and bearing upon its surface the multiplied and appealing 
 tokens of the long and diligent labour of man. And secondly 
 it is an understanding * with those who have engendered us 
 according to the flesh ' ; and by an understanding we mean 
 no conscious or reasoned pact, but a willing compliance with 
 those mysterious and potent instincts which, being handed 
 down from man to man through natural inheritance — ' a secret 
 effort of the Unconscious, a tiny shock propelled from the 
 infinite past to the infinite future ' — vanquish all reactions of 
 the cold, discursive intellect, and so form the main tissue of 
 human history upon this planet. 
 
 The Vahte of Small States ' 
 
 UPON the old controversy between Brutus and Caesar the 
 last two generations in Germany have had no difficulty 
 in coming to a decision. The republic is decidedly out of 
 fashion, and with it the whole fabric of idealism upon which 
 in 1848 republican conclusions were wont to be erected. The 
 modern German is all for Caesarism, for a big state, a big army, 
 a big navy, and for a long course of progressive national 
 expansion under the dazzling guidance of the Hohenzollern 
 house. Of the old gentle cosmopolitan feeling, which suffused 
 the literature of the classical period, there is now not a trace 
 surviving. Weltbiirgertiim has given place to the Nationalstaat, 
 just as the delicate melodies of Mozart have been succeeded 
 by the obstreperous and clashing brilliance of Strauss. The 
 ' Written and published in 191 5. 
 
 1303 L
 
 i62 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 
 
 eloquence of Schiller is still popular, but the sentiment which 
 inspired such a piece as the * History of the Revolt of the United 
 Netherlands' is as dead in Germany as Kant's famous dream 
 of Universal Peace. Realism is the fetish of the hour. Politics 
 must be real or they are despised as shadows ; and when 
 a German speaks of Realpolitik he means a policy based on 
 material interests, supported by brute force and liberated from 
 the trammels of the moral conscience. 
 
 It is not surprising that the triumphs of German Caesarism 
 in the world of fact and idea have led to a very general 
 disparagement of the value and utility of small states. The 
 argument may be gathered from the pages of Treitschke or 
 indeed from any of the numerous journalists who have drawn 
 their political sustenance from that bitter and uncompromising 
 apostle of imperial methods. It runs very much as follows. 
 In a small state civic life must necessarily be petty, humble, 
 unambitious. The game of politics must centre round small 
 issues, and thus circumscribed in scope, loses the ethical value 
 of scale. Great affairs envisaged on a large horizon have 
 a power of stirring the passionate and imaginative elements in 
 man, which are apt, save in the rarer cases, to respond to 
 stimuli in proportion to their magnitude. Existence in a small 
 state may be elegant, charming, idyllic, compatible with the 
 production of literature and art, but it can never be swept by 
 the great passions which move the world. A small state may 
 create among its members a mild humdrum kind of affection 
 for its history and institutions, but can never be a source of that 
 triumphant pride and hope which lifts citizenship up to the 
 plane of heroism. In a sense it may be said that the history 
 of small states is wound up. They may linger on^ preserved 
 by the mutual jealousies of rival Powers or because it is worth 
 nobody's while to attack them, but their bodies will be starved 
 and anaemic and their souls mere echoes of the great move- 
 ments of mind and emotion which are liberated, almost 
 automatically, by the diurnal movement in great and power- 
 ful nations of the social and political machine. Sooner or 
 later the small states will go. They will be absortjed in larger 
 political aggregates. They will follow the line of historical
 
 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 163 
 
 development which has created the large modern states of 
 Europe out of a mosaic of tiny and warring fiefs. And nobody 
 will regret their demise, least of all the citizens themselves. 
 
 Indeed, from the point of view of peoples like the Belgians 
 or the Dutch, the moment of inevitable absorption cannot be 
 too rapidly hastened. Only then will they be compelled to dis- 
 card trifles and to 'think imperially' of serious things. Their 
 geography, political and intellectual, will be enlarged. The art 
 of war will be earnestly practised. The spectator will suddenly 
 become an actor. Great tides of national passion and aspira- 
 tion will sweep into the tiny state, chasing away impurities, 
 like the majestic ocean suddenly admitted in overwhelming 
 might into a network of landlocked and stagnant pools. 
 
 The disciples of Caesarism will even proceed to contend 
 that patriotism in its fullest sense is only possible to large 
 nations. Great states march on, little states mark time. The 
 movement of the great state is continuous and imposing, and, 
 as in the case of other orderly developments, its future can be 
 forecast with a certain degree of exactitude. Guided by the 
 hand of God, the mighty organs which are the chosen vessels 
 of the highest culture upon earth take up, one after another in 
 due sequence, each item of their sacred and providential 
 programme. Thus we have a long historic process ending in 
 the formation of the Prussian kingdom, succeeded by another 
 process leading to the establishment of the German Empire, 
 and to be followed by a third process in the course of which 
 the German Empire will become a world-power, not only 
 supreme on the continent of Europe but exercising a pre- 
 dominant political influence over the whole surface of the 
 globe. Great states have a destiny of which their citizens are 
 conscious. Et quasi cursores vital lavipada tradunt. Men 
 come and go, the seasons wax and wane, but each generation 
 in its own brief allotment of life is sustained by the conscious- 
 ness that it works on a providential plan, fulfilling one of the 
 grand and mysterious processes of God for the improvement 
 of the world by the spread of German culture. So did the 
 divines of the Dark Ages applaud the forced conversions of 
 Charlemagne. 
 
 L 2
 
 t64 the value of small statl:s 
 
 Even in matters of technical equipment Destiny is said to 
 have decided in favour of the big battalions. It is freely 
 argued in Germany that a perfect organization of educational 
 machinery is only possible to the opulence and minute 
 articulation of a great nation, for the more powerful the state, 
 the richer will be the fund available for museums, art galleries, 
 and libraries, and the larger the class capable of enjoying 
 them. Great states in fact resemble great businesses which 
 on a given expenditure of capital realize a higher rate of 
 profit than their smaller rivals, command wider markets, and 
 exercise a stronger power in barter and sale. 
 
 It is easy to understand how the Germans have arrived at 
 this confident and unqualified conclusion as to the worthless- 
 ness of small states, seeing that their own late arrival into the 
 circle of the Great Powers was due to the long continuance of 
 that Kleinstaaterei, that small-state system, which attracts so 
 much hostile fire from the ranks of the Prussian historians. 
 The humiliations suffered by Germany at the hands of 
 Napoleon, the glory of the War of Liberation, which may be 
 called the first common act of the German people, the fatal 
 relapse into the old system of loose impotent federation, and 
 finally the foundation of the German Empire under Prussian 
 hegemony — these sharply contrasted periods of national 
 history all point to the same lesson, the paralysis bred of 
 disunion and the power generated by unity. 
 
 Even now the disciplinarian conscience of Prussia judges that 
 the unity of Germany is all too imperfectly achieved. There are 
 the separate states, there are the suppressed nationalities, there 
 are the active and contentious political parties whose struggles 
 impair the majesty of the Reichstag, and whose criticism 
 weakens and perplexes the direction of imperial policy. When 
 the Social Democrats, or the Poles, or the Catholics of the 
 Centre embarrass the Government, good German imperialists 
 look with envy at the social and religious cohesion of Great 
 Britain. There is then no ground for wonder if, to the patriotic 
 German of modern times, a contracted spirit of localism, only 
 to be eradicated by a strenuous effort of the national will, 
 seems to be the principal flaw in the political character of the
 
 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 165 
 
 German race, as it has undoubtedly been the chief source of 
 German political impotence in the past. And we can easily 
 see how Germans, realizing the evils of past disunion, and 
 exercising that tendency to generalize which is inveterate in 
 the Teutonic intelligence, come to the conclusion that the 
 happiness and advance of mankind are bound up in the 
 expansion of great states and in the disappearance of small 
 ones. 
 
 It must be confessed that this general attitude is affected by 
 considerations of a different order. Outside the limits of the 
 German Empire lies a Gerviauia irredenta^ a. line of small 
 states inhabited in whole or part by men of German stock and 
 once included in the imperial orbit. 
 
 ' Of the territory ', writes Dr. Rohrbach, ' which belonged to 
 the German Empire five hundred years ago and was inhabited 
 by men of German stock, more than a third has been abstracted 
 from modern Germany — the German lands of Austria, the 
 Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. If you add in the 
 Livonian territories from the Memel to the Gulf of Finland, 
 where it is true the mass of the peasantry was not German, 
 but where the townsfolk and the knights were German and 
 the princes and nobility members of the Holy Roman Empire, 
 then modern Germany is only half the size of Germany at the 
 end of the Middle Ages. We leave out of our consideration 
 those territories which at the end of the fourteenth and the 
 beginning of the fifteenth century were only bound to the 
 Empire by a loose connexion and belonged naturally to France 
 and Italy, like the Free County of Burgundy, the duchies of 
 Savoy, Milan, Mantua, Verona, and confine ourselves in the 
 first place to territories inhabited by ancient German settle- 
 ments, and secondly to the Slavonic lands of the East which 
 were comprised in the German colonizing movement. To 
 these Bohemia at that time belonged, for its penetration by Ger- 
 man influence was only checked by the Counter-Reformation. 
 It was not till about 1400 that the Kingdom of Poland pushed 
 the German frontier further west. Posen and a piece of West 
 Prussia and Schleswig, though not entirely inhabited by 
 Germans, constitute the only territorial gain which the modern 
 German Empire has to show in comparison with the old 
 Empire. But what are these gains in comparison with the 
 losses ! The ring of territories encircling modern Germany, 
 inhabited by more than 20;00o,ooo, men of German stock,
 
 i66 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 
 
 political!}' and even in national sentiment estranged from 
 German thought.' 
 
 To a person imbued with a belief in the historical mission of 
 Germany this contraction of the imperial orbit, so accurately 
 described by Dr. Rohrbach, is one of those disagreeable facts 
 only to be fitted into a rational scheme of the Universe if they 
 are destined to be speedily reversed. Sooner or later Providence 
 must intend that the broken unity of the mediaeval German 
 Empire should be reunited to the parent stock. And so the 
 argument descends from the high plateau of general ideas to 
 the low ground of political appetite which is watered by the 
 streams of national memory. 
 
 In view of this interpretation it is pertinent to ask what the 
 world has gained from small states in the past, how far they 
 justify their existence in the present, and whether they are 
 likely to perform any valuable function in the economy of the 
 future. 
 
 Almost everything which is most precious in our civilization 
 has come from small states — the Old Testament, the Homeric 
 poems, the Attic and the Elizabethan drama, the art of the 
 Italian Renaissance, the common law of England. . Nobody 
 needs to be told what humanity owes to Athens, Florence, 
 Geneva, or Weimar. The world's debt to any one of these 
 small states far exceeds all that has issued from the militant 
 monarchies of Louis XIV, of Napoleon, of the late Emperor 
 of Germany. It may, perhaps, be objected that the apparition 
 of artistic, literary, or' scientific genius is an incalculable matter 
 of hazard unaffected by the size of the political community in 
 which the great man happens to be born, and that weare only 
 entitled to infer from these examples that a small state may 
 provide an atmosphere in which genius may thrive. It is, 
 however, a relevant answer to much of the criticism now 
 levelled in Germany against small states, to remind ourselves 
 that in the particular points of heroic and martial patriotism, 
 civic pride and political prudence, they have often reached the 
 highest levels to which it is possible for humanity to attain, 
 and that from Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as from 
 the illustrious school of Florentine historians and publicists,
 
 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 167 
 
 the world has learnt nine-tenths of its best political wisdom. 
 America has particular reasons for gratefully recognizing one of 
 the smallest and most illustrious of the city states of Europe. 
 The seed of modern democratic theory was sown in Geneva, 
 and being scattered on the hither shore of the North American 
 continent by small communities, organized on the model of 
 Calvin, burgeoned into the great Republic of the West. 
 
 Nor is it fanciful, in estimating the causes which contributed 
 to the peculiar brilliance first of the Greek and then of the 
 Italian city state, to attribute some weight to the question of 
 size. Indeed, if we do this, we shall only be echoing the voice 
 of antiquity itself In the famous passage in which he depicts 
 the lineaments of the ideal state, Aristotle gives the opinion 
 that a city so large that its citizens are unable to hear the 
 voice of a single town-crier has passed the limits of wholesome 
 growth. This conclusion was based on the view that every 
 citizen must take a direct part in the political deliberations of 
 the state to which he belongs. Indeed, had the states of 
 antiquity exceeded the limits compatible with direct govern- 
 ment, the world would have lost a good part of its political 
 education. As it was, the contracted span of these communities 
 carried with it three conspicuous benefits. The city state 
 served as a school of patriot virtue, not in the main of the 
 blustering and thrasonical type, but refined and sublimated 
 by every grace of instinct and reason. It further enabled the 
 experiment of a free direct democratic government to be made, 
 with incalculable consequences for the political thinking of the 
 world. Finally, it threw into a forced and fruitful communion 
 minds of the most different temper, giving to them an elasticity 
 and many-sidedness which might otherwise have been wanting 
 or less conspicuous, and stimulating, through the close mutual 
 competition which it engendered, an intensity of intellectual 
 and artistic passion which has been the wonder of all succeed- 
 ing generations and such as can never be reached in great 
 states organized for the vulgarity of aggressive war. 
 
 So much at least will be generally conceded. The question 
 for us, however, is not to assess our debt to the city states of 
 the past, but to consider what arguments may be found for
 
 i68 TITE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 
 
 safeguarding the existence of the smaller nation states of the 
 modern world. And first of all it is relevant to ask whether 
 there may not be some advantage to humanity at large arising 
 from the fact that certain communities are withdrawn by 
 reason of the scale from the competition of armaments. To 
 certain military minds in Germany it seems to be a lamentable 
 thing that any community of human beings should be organized 
 on a basis of peace, or that the policy of any Government 
 should be steadily directed towards the preservation of its 
 subjects from the horrors of war. Let us assume for a 
 moment that this extravagant proposition is true, and that 
 the Swiss, the Danes, the Dutch, and the Belgians would be 
 greatly improved in their general morality if they were thrown 
 into some big military empire with an aggressive world-policy 
 and a Providential destiny to impose its culture on the world, 
 and all the other familiar paraphernalia of the Potsdam 
 philosophy. We have still to ask ourselves the question 
 whether, even from the selfish point of view of the Great 
 Powers who are blessed with the moral luxury of a conscript 
 army, there may not be some convenience attaching to the 
 continued existence of small oases of peace in a world nervously 
 equipping itself for Armageddon ? Has Italy no cause to be 
 grateful to the Swiss Confederation ? Would the Scandinavian 
 kingdoms preserve their unruffled neutrality if the Danish 
 peninsula were swallowed up by Germany? And has the 
 disappearance of Poland really benefited the two greatest 
 partitioning Powers whose past appetites have brought them 
 the heritage of restless anxiety which belongs to the vigil of 
 coterminous states? Indeed it is not easy to measure the 
 injurious consequences which have grown from the dis- 
 appearance of that middle kingdom of Lotharingia which once 
 served as a buffer between France and Germany, or from the 
 extinction of the Polish nation at the close of the eighteenth 
 century. By common confession European diplomacy suffers 
 from nerves ; and the nervous tension is necessarily increased 
 with every addition to the ranks of the rivals. The entangle- 
 ments likely to give rise to conflict are proportionate to the 
 number and weight of the Powers which stand inside the ring.
 
 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 169 
 
 Every ally who joins one or other of the coalitions brings with 
 him a whole cluster of new interests which the coalition is 
 bound to defend, and thereby increases the chance of war. 
 Every Power which stands aside lessens the general strain and 
 contracts the area of inflammable controversy. 
 
 But the advantages to be derived from the existence of 
 small buffer states are subject to the clear condition that their 
 independence and neutrality are respected. Let us consider 
 for a moment what the world would have gained if the German 
 Emperor and his advisers had all along regarded the violation 
 of Belgian neutrality as an unthinkable crime. Not only would 
 Great Britain be now at peace, but no general European war 
 would have taken place at all. The challenge to Russia was 
 thrown down by Germany because it was calculated in Berlin 
 that by marching through Belgium the Germans could easily 
 crush France before the Russian peril became insistent. It is 
 absurd to speak of the violation of Belgian neutrality as a 
 ' bitter necessity ' forced upon a reluctant country in an un- 
 foreseen emergency. It was, on the contrary, the deliberate 
 groundwork for a careful edifice of aggressive diplomacy. 
 The entire plan of the campaign against France was framed 
 on the supposition that the Germans would march through 
 Belgium. The whole scheme of operations against Russia 
 was based on the belief that the total weight of the German 
 military power could be thrown on the eastern frontier by 
 reason of the rapid and crushing success which a German 
 army, advancing through the Belgian gateway, would be able 
 to achieve in France. And upon these two military calcula- 
 tions the ambitious edifice of German world-policy was built. 
 All the plans of the General Staff were secretly framed on the 
 supposition that Belgium would be treated as part of the 
 German Empire in the event of war. It was with this prospect 
 in view that Germany thought it safe to defy Russia in 1909 
 and to repeat the defiance in 19 14. And though it would be 
 difficult to set bounds to the military presumption of Germany, 
 it may be safely assumed that if the Belgian doorway had been 
 patently barred, the diplomacy of the German Empire would 
 have been tuned to a more modest key. The moral of all this
 
 lyo THE VALUP: OF SMALL STATES 
 
 is clear enough. The small states should not be abolished : 
 on the contrary, their neutrality should be supported by a 
 guarantee so formidable that the strongest Power would never 
 be tempted in future to infringe it. 
 
 We may test the value of these communities by another 
 criterion. The Hague Tribunal has been the object of much 
 silly depreciation, and the military parties in the world are 
 never tired of giving voice to the contempt in which they 
 involve the whole principle of arbitration. It is true that the 
 belief in the value of pacific solutions chiefly flourishes in small 
 unmilitary states like Holland or in that large and imposing 
 aggregate of small civilian states which goes by the name 
 of the United States of America. And it is equally true 
 that- no nation has yet consented or, in the present state of 
 public ethics, is likely to consent to refer matters affecting its 
 ' vital interests, independence, or honour ' to an International 
 Tribunal. Nevertheless a considerable number of arbitration 
 treaties have been concluded agreeing to refer differences to 
 the Hague Tribunal ; and in the course of the North Sea 
 incident of 1904 the strained relations between England and 
 Russia were greatly eased by the fact that the Hague 
 Conference had already provided a method of procedure by 
 which the dispute might be adjusted without loss of dignity 
 to either side. Arbitration cannot banish war, but it can 
 diminish the accumulation of minor grievances which, if 
 untended, are apt to create that inflamed state of public opinion 
 out of which wars easily arise ; and in the case of larger 
 disputes recourse to arbitration has at least the advantage of 
 gaining time. Now the condition of mind which supports the 
 principle of arbitration, and which provides facilities for 
 recourse to it, is only made possible by the existence of 
 communities organized for peace, and- standing outside the 
 armed and vigilant rivalries of the great continental Powers. 
 
 It is symptomatic of the Prussian spirit to disparage any 
 manifestation of natural feeling which runs counter to the 
 assumed necessities of a militant Empire ; and so in books 
 written even by such eminent and moderate men as Prince 
 von Billow, the late Chancellor of Germany, we find a fixed
 
 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 171 
 
 intention to suppress, so far as may be, the national character- 
 istics of the Poles, Danes, and men of Latin race who have 
 been incorporated in the "Empire. We in England, who have 
 some experience of minor nationalities, cannot read of the 
 recent developments of Prussian policy in Poland without 
 feeling how unintelligent and oppressive it is, and how much 
 better it would be in the interests of internal peace and 
 consolidation, if Germany would throw her mind into a generous 
 and liberal attitude towards the men of alien type whom she 
 has absorbed by conquest. But it is part of the Prussian 
 genius — if a drillmaster can have genius — to regard all variety, 
 not only as troublesome, which it often may be, but as 
 injurious, which it very seldom is. Indeed, one of the principal 
 arguments in favour of the preservation of the small states of 
 Europe (and the same argument applies to the preservation 
 of the state system in America) lies in the fact that these 
 small communities do vary from the set type which is 
 imprinted by steady and powerful governments upon the life 
 and behaviour of the larger Powers. The mere fact of this 
 variety is an enrichment of human experience and a stimulus 
 to self-criticism and improvement. Indeed, the existence of 
 small states operates in the large and imperfect economy 
 of the European system very much in the same way as the 
 principle of individual liberty operates in any given state, 
 preventing the formation of those massive and deadening 
 weights of conventional opinion which impair the free play 
 of individuality, and affording 'a corrective to the vulgar idea 
 that the brute force of organized numbers is the only thing 
 which really matters in the world. 
 
 The critic of small states may also fairly be asked what he 
 means by the word ' civilization '. If civilization is a phrase 
 denoting the sum of those forces which help to bind men 
 together in civil association, if it means benevolence, dutifulness, 
 self-sacrifice, a lively interest in the things of the mind, and a 
 discerning taste in the things of the sense, then there is no 
 reason to think that these qualities are the special prerogative 
 of great states. Indeed, there is a certain type of harsh and 
 stoical patriotism which, by reason of its austere and arrogant
 
 172 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 
 
 exclusiveness, is inimical to the growth of civilized feeling. It 
 is not confined to big states, for it was present in ancient 
 Sparta ; nor is it the necessary accompaniment even of huge 
 military monarchies. But it is the spirit of moderri Prussia, 
 a spirit consistent indeed with the heroic qualities of the 
 barbarous ages, but lacking the sane and temperate outlook 
 of civilized life. All through history the great enemy of 
 human reason has been fanaticism. And there is no reason 
 to believe that the fanaticism of a military state, served by the 
 most destructive artillery in the world, is any bit less injurious 
 to mankind than the spirit which for many centuries of history 
 condemned the religious heretic to the torments of the stake. 
 
 It is difficult rightly to assess the contributions which the 
 smaller states of Europe have made during the past century 
 to the sum of human culture. Nor would a mere list of 
 eminent men such as Ibsen and Maeterlinck, of whom every 
 cultivated person has heard, or Gramme, the Belgian inventor 
 of the dynamo, or Van 't Hoff, the famous Dutch chemist, 
 prove more than the indisputable fact that intellectual life of 
 the highest quality may be carried on in such communities. 
 It is of course possible that, if Holland were forced into the 
 German Confederation, Dutch painting, which has now reached 
 a level far higher than any attained in recent years in Germany, 
 would suffer no eclipse, and that the Dutch universities would 
 persevere in their work of scholarly theological exegesis. It 
 is possible that, under the same conditions, the wonderful 
 perfection to which the little kingdom of Denmark has brought 
 the arts of dairy-farming and agriculture would still be main- 
 tained. But it would depend entirely upon the degree of 
 liberty and autonomy which a German emperor might be 
 willing to concede, whether this would be so or not, whether 
 the natural currents of hopeful energy would continue to flow 
 or whether they would be effectually sealed up by the ungenial 
 fiat of an alien taskmaster. Upon this it is unnecessary to 
 speculate. But it is strictly pertinent to the argument to 
 remember that the three small states, whose existence is 
 closely and specially threatened by the expansion of Germany, 
 have each developed not only a peculiar and strongly marked
 
 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 173 
 
 economy, but certain special excellences and qualities such as 
 are most likely to be developed in an atmosphere of compara- 
 tive tranquillity. Thus, apart from the school of landscape 
 painting, the Dutch have set a model to the world in all 
 that pertains to the scientific classification and management 
 of archives, vanquishing in this particular even the French, 
 whose organization of historical learning is so justly famed. 
 Denmark, too, has its own speciality in a very perfect organism 
 for co-operative production in agriculture. 
 
 Indeed, one of the advantages flowing from the existence 
 of smaller states consists in the fact that they serve as con- 
 venient laboratories for social experiment— a point likely to be 
 appreciated in America, in view of the great mass of material 
 for the comparative study of social and industrial expedients 
 which is provided by the enterprise of the American State 
 legislatures. Such experiments as women's suffrage, or as the 
 State prohibition of the public sale of alcoholic drink, or as 
 a thoroughgoing application of the Reformatory theory of 
 punishment, would never be seriously discussed in large, old, 
 and settled communities, were it not for the fact that they 
 have been tried upon a smaller scale by the more adventurous 
 legislatures of the New World. Man is an imitative animal, 
 and a study of such an organ as 'dx^ Journal of Comparative 
 Legislation exhibits the increasing uniformity of the problems 
 which confront the legislator, and the increasing monotony of 
 the solutions which he finds to meet them. All over the 
 world industrial, educational, penal legislation tends to conform 
 to type. And within limits the tendency is the necessary and 
 wholesome consequence of the unifying influence of modern 
 industrial conditions. But our enlarged facilities for imitation 
 present obvious dangers, and among them the fatal temptation 
 to borrow a ready-made uniform which does not fit. Small 
 states may fall into this pitfall as well as big ones, but at least 
 their continued existence presents some guarantee for diversity 
 of life and intellectual adventure in a world steadily becoming 
 more monotonously drab in its outer garment of economic 
 circumstance. 
 
 No historical state can be driven out of its identity without
 
 174 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 
 
 suffering a moral impoverishment in the process. The evil is 
 not only apparent in the embitterment and lowering of the 
 citizens of the conquered community, whether they are 
 compelled to the agonies of a Polish dispersion, or linger on 
 nursing their rights and wounded pride in the scene of their 
 former independence, but it creates a problem for the conqueror 
 which may very well harden and brutalize his whole outlook 
 on policy. It is never good for a nation to be driven to the 
 employment of harsh measures against any portion of its 
 subjects. 
 
 Upon whatever plausible grounds of immediate expediency 
 such measures may be justified, they invariably harden the 
 tone of political opinion, and create an atmosphere of insensi- 
 bility which spreads far beyond the sphere of the special case 
 and occasion. The acquisition of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany 
 is a case in point. The result of the forcible incorporation of 
 these provinces in the German Empire has been bad for the 
 governed and equally bad for the governors. Coercion is a 
 virus which' cannot be introduced into any part of the body 
 politic without risk of a general diffusion of the poison. 
 
 It is no idle fancy to suppose that the kind of policy which 
 the Prussian Government has thought fit to adopt towards 
 the alien nationalities of the German Empire has reacted upon 
 its treatment of those German parties whose views do not 
 accord with the strict official convention. No Conservative 
 English statesman would ever dream of denouncing English 
 socialists as Prince von Billow denounces the Social Democrats 
 of Germany. But then no English statesmen, Liberal or 
 Conservative, would dream of treating any portion of the 
 British Empire as Prince von Billow treated the German 
 Poles. 
 
 It is impossible accurately to assess the value to a nation of 
 the self-esteem which is the legacy of its history. People who 
 weigh everything in material scales may find nothing worth 
 preserving in the historical consciousness of the small nations 
 of F.urope. They will argue that the Dutch, the Belgians, 
 the Danes, the Swiss, might be incorporated in the German 
 lunpire not only without pain but with a positive accession of
 
 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 175 
 
 material comfort and wealth, and a larger political outlook in 
 the future. 
 
 They will even deny that there need be any moral im- 
 poverishment in an exchange of historical memories, under 
 which the incorporated Dutchman would hook himself on to 
 a German pedigree and count Bismarck and Moltke among his 
 deities, while the Dutch sea-dogs of the heroic age would give 
 their -names to thr^ cruisers and submarines of the incorporating 
 Empire. In all such reasoning there is very little allowance for 
 the facts of human nature or for the working of the moral 
 principle in man. As no individual can break violently with his 
 past without a moral lesion, so too the rupture of the historical 
 continuity of a state carries with it an inevitable weakening 
 and abasement of public ideals, which may continue for several 
 generations. We need not labour to establish a principle 
 which is grounded on such obvious facts of individual conscious- 
 ness. But one historical instance may be adduced in support. 
 When in 1580 Portugal was annexed to Spain, then reputed 
 to be the most formidable empire in the world, she suffered a 
 moral as well as a political eclipse from which she has never 
 since recovered. Her nerve seemed to go and by swift stages 
 she sank into listlessness and decay. 
 
 Nowhere is the shaping power of this historical consciousness 
 more evident than in the peasant nations of the Balkan 
 Peninsula. These rude and valiant democracies live upon the 
 memories of the past to an extent of which sophisticated 
 peoples have little notion. The great ballad which commemo- 
 rates the battle of Kossovo, fought against the Turks more 
 than five hundred years ago, is still one of the most important 
 political influences among the southern Slavs. Nor has the 
 memory of the empire of Stephen Dushan, under whom 
 Serbia was the leading Power in the Balkans, ever been 
 allowed to fade among the Serbs, despite tragedies sufficient 
 to break the spirit of a less stalwart race. To rob the Serbs 
 of their political independence according to the present plan 
 of the German Powers would be a measure difficult to surpass 
 for cruel and purposeless futility. A race which had succeeded 
 in preserving its historical consciousness through centuries of
 
 176 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 
 
 grinding Turkish tyranny would not be likely to renounce its 
 past or its future under the guns of Austria. And even if the 
 improbable came to pass, and a conquered Serbia were to 
 become an obedient and contented fraction of the Austrian 
 Empire, forgetful of heroic ballads and of a long tradition of 
 hardiness and valour, would there be no loss of moral power 
 in the process ? To those who measure all virtues by the 
 standard of civfc virtue, b}^ intensity of emotional and practical 
 patriotism, the loss would be beyond dispute. A great 
 incentive to the performance. of unselfish action would be 
 destroyed, a source of heroic and congenial activity would 
 disappear never to be replaced. Under the hypothesis the 
 Serbs would sink below the level of their blood kinsmen the 
 Slovaks, who, despite the manifold oppressions of their 
 Hungarian masters, still nurture a flame of protesting nationa- 
 lism. From such political apostasy no nation could ever 
 expect to make a complete moral recovery. 
 
 It may be objected that the whole process of European 
 history is summed up by the absorption of the smaller in the 
 larger states ; and that if Hanover is reconciled to absorption 
 there is no reason why Holland, Denmark, and Belgium 
 should lodge a protest in advance against their impending fate. 
 To this contention there is a simple answer. These outlying 
 nations can only be brought into the German fold under 
 compulsion. Their frame of mind is not German, their habits 
 are not German, their history for the last four centuries has 
 served to multiply points of difference from Germany. They 
 have no desire to submit themselves either to the military or 
 to the financial system of the German Ernpire. They are not 
 ashamed of their present condition, and are singular enough 
 to hold that human happiness and goodness do not depend 
 upon the size of an army or navy or a budget. It is enough 
 that the citizen of each of these states can call his country his 
 own. Patriotism has nothing whatever to do with spatial 
 extent nor are emotions to be measured by square miles. 
 Great empires are generally full of the variances of unassimi- 
 lated and discontented men ; and though a country may be 
 weak and small, it may yet be capable of inspiring among its
 
 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 177 
 
 inhabitants the noblest and purest forms of affectionate 
 devotion. 
 
 Indeed, the supreme touchstone of efficiency in imperial 
 government lies in its capacity to preserve the small state in 
 the great union. If the British Empire has succeeded in 
 retaining the affections of its scattered members, the result has 
 been due to the wise and easy tolerance which has permitted 
 almost every form of religious, political, and social practice to 
 continue unchecked, however greatly they may vary from the 
 established traditions of the English race. Thus in the 
 Province of Quebec we suffer the existence of a French 
 ultramontane state based on the philosophy of St. Thomas 
 Aquinas, and preserving even to this day many of the social 
 features of a French colony in the age of Louis XIV, a 
 community more extreme in its ecclesiastical rigour than any 
 Roman Catholic state in Europe, and in language, religion, 
 and social habits presenting the sharpest contrast to the 
 English provinces of the Dominion of Canada. The same 
 careful deference to the pre-existing conditions is shown in 
 every part of our Indian administration, which carries tender- 
 ness to the religious scruples of the Mohammedans and Hindoos 
 to a point of delicate solicitude, which no Government in the 
 world has ever before attempted, and only the most practised 
 experience can supply. These, however, are not the methods 
 of the German Empire, nor can they be the methods of any 
 empire which practises a uniform and universal system of 
 military conscription. As soon as the words State and Army 
 become coterminous, a philosophy of violent unification is set 
 up within the body politic, which sooner or later carries every- 
 thing before it, save the spiritual forces which cannot be broken 
 by any machinery, however despotic and powerful. The 
 Germans have not succeeded in winning either the Poles or 
 the Danes or the Alsatians to their rule, because they have 
 repeated the mistake which England made in Ireland in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which England has 
 never since ceased to lament. They have attempted to 
 manufacture German citizens by violence ; and the history of 
 Alsace-Lorraine under imperial rule has shown how little the 
 
 2302 M
 
 178 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 
 
 policy of violence, however carefully it may be masked by 
 specious political concessions, is availing to change the spiritual 
 allegiance of a people. Indeed the case of Alsace-Lorraine 
 supplies a fair indication of the misfortunes which would 
 ensue upon the compulsory annexation of any one of the small 
 states of Europe by a big military Power. It is not to be 
 imagined that the forced union of these two provinces with 
 Germany has been productive of material injury. On the 
 contrary, they have shared in the expanding industry and 
 commerce of the Empire, and any loss in population due to 
 the emigration of the French has been more than compensated 
 by an influx of Germans. Nevertheless, they have been and 
 continue to be unhappy under the Prussian yoke, Alsace more 
 unhappy than Lorraine, but both sensible of the fact that 
 while material interest binds them to Prussia, the voice of 
 spiritual affinity unites them with the French Republic. 
 
 Statistics indeed prove that, even allowing for immigration, 
 the Germans are still in a minority in the two provinces ; but 
 this fact in itself is not suflficient to account for the continuing 
 attraction of the French Republic, despite the strong material 
 inducements offered from the other side. The phenomenon 
 indeed is worthy of attention. Here are two provinces which 
 have never enjoyed political independence or the sense of 
 cohesion which such independence confers. For the greater 
 part of their history they have counted as members of the 
 German Confederation ; for Alsace only became part of France 
 in 1648, and Lorraine was not effectively incorporated in the 
 French monarchy till 1764. And yet, though they have been 
 replaced in their original German connexion, the natives 
 remain French at heart. The explanation is simple. The 
 French Revolution initiated these two provinces into the 
 democratic ideals of the modern world, which the majority of 
 the inhabitants still continue to prefer to the Prussian doctrine 
 of blood and iron and to the methods of the Prussian garrison 
 at Zabern. 
 
 The truth is that the quantitative estimate of human values, 
 which plays so large a part in modern political history, is 
 radically false and tends to give a vulgar instead of a liberal
 
 THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES 179 
 
 and elevated turn to public ambitions. There is no virtue, 
 public or private, which cannot be practised as fully in a small 
 and weak state as under the sceptre of the most formidable 
 tyrant who ever drove fifty army corps of conscripts to the 
 slaughter. There is no grace of soul, no disinterested 
 endeavour of mind, no pitch of unobtrusive self-sacrifice of 
 which the members of small and pacific communities have not 
 repeatedly shown themselves to be capable. These virtues 
 indeed may.be imperilled by lethargy, but they are threatened 
 even more gravely by that absorbing preoccupation with the 
 facts of material power in which the citizens of great empires 
 are inevitably involved. 
 
 The great danger of Continental Europe is not revolution 
 but servitude. This war could never have been possible if the 
 intellect of Germany had been really free, if a servile Press 
 supported by a system of State universities had not instilled 
 into the vast mass of the German people ruthless maxims of 
 Caesarism, for the most part repugnant to their real tempera- 
 ment and nature. There are other military autocracies besides 
 Germany, and other countries in which political thought is 
 fettered by the Government. But whatever may be their 
 several shortcomings, the smaller states of Europe are not 
 among the despots. Here at least men may think what they 
 please, and write what they think. Whenever the small states 
 may come up for judgement the advocate of human freedom 
 will plead on their behalf. 
 
 M 2
 
 ( i8o ) 
 
 The Resurgence of Prussia 
 
 IT has been said of Napoleon that, though he accompb'shed 
 several vast changes in the world, they were commonly 
 unforeseen and unintended. Very much the same thing may 
 be predicated of every leading actor on the stage of history. 
 Even in quiet times the strongest gifts of foresight and circum- 
 spection are unequal to the task of assessing all the consequences 
 of political action ; and the difficulty is vastly increased in 
 periods of crowded and excited action. We speak indeed of 
 a science and of an art of politics as if the matter admitted of 
 rigorous certainty and delicate polish, whereas a moment's 
 serious inquiry shows that politics, if an art, is of all arts the 
 roughest, and if a science, is of all sciences the least exact. A 
 clerk in an office may be able approximately to forecast the 
 immediate result of his humdrum operations. Not so the 
 statesman whose action affects whole societies of men. The 
 larger his canvas, the bolder and more original his conception, 
 the less likelihood of a picture conformable to the original 
 design. 
 
 At the beginning of the nineteenth century Prussia was still in 
 essentials a mediaeval state. Its vaunted army and its vaunted 
 administration, the products of enlightened despotism, coexisted 
 with a system of rigorous social caste which it was the object 
 of the monarchy not to break down but to maintain. The 
 greatest of the Prussian kings had given his sanction to the 
 theory that there must be three orders in the State, nobles, 
 citizens, and peasants, and that it was the business of law to keep 
 distinct the interval between one order and the other. As the 
 army was to be officered only by nobles, so commerce and 
 industry were to be the exclusive monoply of the middle class. 
 The noble might not embark in trade or make a lawful marriage 
 with ^e daughter of a trader or a peasant. The peasant might 
 not marry or regulate the future of his children, still less quit 
 his holding, without the consent of the lord. Certain properties 
 were regarded as noble, for ever to be held by nobles, and not 
 to be alienated to commoners without the special consent of
 
 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA i8i 
 
 the Crown. Other properties belonged to the peasantry, a class 
 the maintenance of whose numbers was held to be a prime 
 object of State policy. In other words, the enlightened mon- 
 archy of Prussia was not occupied during the eighteenth 
 century in the task of paving the way for modern equality and 
 individual liberty. Its object was precisely the opposite. In 
 M. Cavaignac's apt words it appears as ' the vigilant guardian 
 of the most rigorous classification '} It kept class distinct 
 from class, town distinct from country. ' Only the most indis- 
 pensable trades were tolerated in the country — tailors, black- 
 smiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, thatchers, and weavers. Even 
 so their number was limited and they could only reside on bits 
 of land specially set apart for small traders. If a peasant or 
 even a lord wished to replace a piece of glass, or to buy a table 
 or a chest of drawers, or to repair a wall, or to procure a cask 
 or a pot for his kitchen, to get a pair of shoes, or to eat a piece 
 of meat which had not been killed in his courtyard, he had to 
 go to the town, often many miles distant.' Such was the 
 spirit which informed the Government of Prussia in the con- 
 cluding decades of the eighteenth century. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to point out that the political doctrines 
 of the French Revolution were essentially opposed to the funda- 
 mental axioms of Prussian policy. We do not mean to imply 
 that the Prussian monarchy was dead to humanitarian impulses. 
 On the contrary, ever since the death of Frederick II it had been 
 considering, for the most part ineffectually, various plans for 
 ameliorating the lot of the poorer members of society, and in 
 1799 actually carried out the very important reform of per- 
 mitting the peasantry upon the royal domains to commute 
 their services in kind and labour. But every effort of reform 
 was necessarily circumscribed within iron limits. No Prussian 
 king wished to diminish the feudal power of the noble on his 
 own estate. Social experiments might be tried on the royal do- 
 main ; general political powers might be and had been absorbed 
 by the central government. It was part of the natural concep- 
 tion of public discipline that while the County Council (Land- 
 rat) acted for the State in the districts and the Financial Council 
 * Cavaignac, La Formation de la Prusse contemporaine. Paris, 1891.
 
 i82 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 
 
 (Steuerrat) in the towns, the lord should exercise judicial, 
 administrative, and police functions on his own lands. A 
 Prussian historian has spoken of the ' tribunician powers of the 
 monarchy' during this epoch. The Prussian kings were no 
 tribunes of the people, but the lot of the poor would have been 
 worse without them. 
 
 It should always be remembered that in the age of Napoleon 
 Prussia was one of the poorer states of Europe. In 1808 there 
 were in the whole Electorate of Brandenburg only four towns 
 with a population of more than ten thousand inhabitants. The 
 whole economic output of the country was about equal to that 
 of the Lyons silk industry in the time of Colbert. Berlin was 
 atown smaller than Salisbury ; Frankfort and Potsdam, the next 
 biggest cities, were only twice the size of Abingdon. The whole 
 population of the Prussian monarchy could have been comfort- 
 ably housed in modern London without the building of an 
 additional tenement. I'here was nothing to be ashamed of in 
 this : but it explains two facts which might otherwise arouse 
 inquiry. The first is, there was not in Prussia, as in France, a 
 large educated middle class, accessible to new ideas and capable 
 of formulating the social grievances of the class beneath them, 
 and the second is correlative to the first. Prussian reform 
 came from above not from below. It was the work of the 
 monarchy and its civil servants, not of the people. 
 
 It has been a point of honour with a certain school of Prussian 
 historians to deny to the French Revolution any share either 
 in provoking or in shaping that great series of reforms which 
 brought about the remarkable recovery of Prussia after the 
 catastrophe of Jena. They do not like to be told that Prussia 
 borrowed from her enemy or that there is anything here but 
 a natural development, some what accelerated indeed by the 
 pressure of calamity, but still an organic growth, a Prussian 
 flower springing from a Prussian root. ' Aus dem ureigenen 
 deutschen Geiste ist die Steinische Reform hervorgegangen. 
 The reforms of Stein are the product of the original and peculiar 
 spirit of Germany.' And with great emphasis they repeat that 
 whatever might have been its influence in other quarters, the 
 French Revolution was quite powerless in Prussia, and that the
 
 THE RESURGENCP: of PRUSSIA 183 
 
 initiation of a series of far-reaching and comprehensive reforms 
 was due not to the attractiveness of French ideas, but to a 
 military calamity which braced the Prussian Government so to 
 adapt its ancient institutions and traditions to new needs that, 
 without any breach of historical continuity or servile acceptance 
 of alien remedies, it became once more a great Power on the 
 Continent. 
 
 Even on this showing the impulse comes from Napoleon. 
 Without Jena no decisive reforms. The unmistakable complete- 
 ness of the calamity, the loss of men, of treasure, of provinces, of 
 prestige, the crushing war indemnity, the continued military 
 occupation, must have convinced the blindest optimist that the 
 Prussian State needed reformation from basement to rafter. It 
 is all very well to say with von Meier that the catastrophe in- 
 dicated nothing deeper than a diplomatic and military blunder.^ 
 That was not the view held by the most enlightened Prussian 
 contemporaries of the event. They asked themselves, not 
 unnaturally, the question why the verdict of Rossbach had been 
 reversed, why the Prussian army long vaunted as the finest in 
 the world had been cut into ribbons by the Frenchmen, and 
 what was the secret of that sudden and wonderful military 
 supremacy of the French nation which had placed central 
 Europe under Napoleon's heel. A distinguished and thought- 
 ful officer in the Prussian service put his finger upon the real 
 point, 
 
 ' One cause ', wrote Gneisenau in July 1807, ' has contributed 
 to raise France to this degree of power. 
 
 ' The Revolution has aroused all the social forces and secured 
 to each an appropriate circle of action. What a treasure of 
 latent unutilized force lies in the bosom of nations ! In the 
 soul of thousands and thousands of men there dwells a genius, 
 the spring of which is depressed and stopped by external 
 circumstances. The Revolution has put into action the entire 
 national force of the French people, and if the European states 
 wish to restore the old relations of nations and the old balance 
 of power, they must draw from the same sources. If they 
 appropriate the results of the Revolution, they will have the 
 double advantage of opposing their national force in all its 
 
 1 Franzosische Einjlusse aitf die Staats- imd Rechtsentwicklung 
 Preussens im xix. Jahrhundert.
 
 184 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 
 
 power to the enemy and of avoiding the perils of an internal 
 revolution.' 
 
 It is hardly likely that the perception of this important truth 
 was confined to Gneisenau. We may feel pretty certain that 
 his views were shared by more than one member of the in- 
 telligent and industrious civil service of Prussia. 
 
 It may, however, be at once conceded that the initiator of the 
 Prussian reformation was both by temperament and conviction 
 violently opposed to all the distinctive principles of the French 
 Revolution. Baron von Stein was German to the backbone. 
 The inventions of other countries did not appeal to him ; the 
 tides of intellectual fashion washed round him without leaving 
 a dent upon the solid granite of his strong, pious, and con- 
 servative nature. Philosophy was quite alien to the temper of 
 his mind, literature hardly less congenial, but he found in 
 historical study the nutriment which his nature required. He 
 had read Adam Smith but continued to support frontier tariffs 
 and usury laws, and if he had dived into history he none the 
 less remained an anti-Semite. Nobody was less of a doctrinaire 
 than this strong rugged Franconian noble, whose achievement 
 is regarded by patriotic Prussians with feelings analogous to 
 those evoked among us by the combined names of William 
 Pitt and Sir Robert Peel. And nobody was less willing to 
 take a lesson from France. Stein hated the French and all 
 their ways, from the bottom of his heart. 
 
 In a history of the revolutionary period written for the 
 instruction of his daughter, he argues that the French Revolution 
 can find no apology in social grievances and no explanation 
 save in the spirit of the times — an ugly compound of wickedness 
 and folly. He will not admit that any part of the revolutionary 
 cause was grounded on social justice or substantial reason. He 
 condemns the doubling of the Third Estate, applauds the ancient 
 distribution of the States General into three orders, and conse- 
 quently denounces the establishment of a legislature founded 
 upon the principle of social equality. The House of Bourbon 
 claims throughout his loyal allegiance. He deplored its fall 
 in 1792, he advocated with all the energy of his passionate 
 nature its restoration in 1814, and when sixteen years later the
 
 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 185 
 
 folly of Charles X brought about the exile of the elder line, 
 Stein lamented their fate as a blow at once tragic and 
 undeserved. 
 
 Such was the man whose name is specially associated with the 
 destruction of the caste system in Prussia : and arguing from 
 what is otherwise known of his character and temperament, 
 historians have urged that all Stein's remedial measures must 
 have been woven of good Prussian homespun. The truth is 
 that the most important reform of his ministry, the emancipating 
 edict of October 9, 1807, which gave the villein liberty to quit 
 his holding, introduced free trade in land, and abolished the J^ 
 
 mediaeval system of caste, was not in any special sense his work. 
 The business was prepared and the measure was already drafted 
 before Stein came into office, and received his signature five days 
 later. Stein has the credit of deciding that the edict should 
 extend to the whole kingdom, a point upon which the com- 
 mission had been unable to reach a unanimous conclusion ; and 
 to his power of action we must attribute its prompt passage into 
 law ; but for the substance of the edict we must look elsewhere, 
 partly to the general spirit of the age and partly to the special 
 pressure brought upon Prussia by recent developments of French 
 policy. 
 
 It is natural that Prussian historians should be anxious to 
 deny that the vitality of their country is in any way proportioned 
 to the degree to which she adopted the principles of her enemy ; 
 but nobody surveying the general course of the great reforms 
 undertaken by Stein and Hardenberg in Prussia can fail to see 
 that in effect^ if not in intention, they represent a remarkable 
 resemblance to the changes which were wrought in France by 
 the French Revolution. The French abolished serfdom and 
 struck at the territorial privileges of the nobility, so did the 
 Prussians. The French proclaimed the principle of industrial 
 freedom, and the Prussians, after some partial and temporizing 
 measures, destroyed the monopoly of their industrial guilds. 
 The French submitted the nobles to their proper share of fiscal 
 burdens ; the Prussians swept away privileged exemptions from 
 the land-tax. In both countries the military system was trans- 
 formed and on identical lines ; the nation became the army.
 
 i86 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 
 
 In both countries the civil administration was consciously 
 fortified by centralizing measures and by a clearer partition of 
 departmental functions. In both countries there was a percep- 
 tion of the necessity of separating judicial from administrative 
 activity. 
 
 It would be a poor compliment to Stein and his coadjutors 
 to suppose that they deliberately closed their eyes to the grand 
 lesson of the French Revolution, that they failed to see the 
 truth which the eagles of Napoleon had carried far and wide 
 through Europe, that a polity framed on principles of social 
 equality and enlisting the co-operation of a whole people is 
 necessarily stronger than one which acts upon a caste-ridden 
 and divided population by the dreary method of mechanical 
 pressure. In saying this, however, we do not mean to imply 
 that the first Prussian reformers thought only of France, or 
 were so shallow as to believe that a wholesale importation of 
 French models would save the State. English self-government 
 numbered its admirers in Berlin, and the economic teaching of 
 Adam Smith had found in Theodor von Schon at least one 
 devoted disciple in the committee which drafted the emanci- 
 pating edict. It is never the part of wisdom to exclude a ray 
 of light, and least of all in an hour of black calamity do prudent 
 men reject wholesome remedies because they have proved their 
 worth in other places. 
 
 We may take it then that the Napoleonic conquest not only 
 stimulated a root and branch reform of the Prussian state, but 
 that it contributed to drive home to intelligent Prussian minds, 
 as nothing short of so complete a disaster could, the strength 
 which France had obtained by her adoption of certain social 
 and political principles, and the weakness under which Prussia 
 suffered from the fact that she had not yet incorporated those 
 principles into her polity. And there was a further con- 
 sequence of a more direct, palpable, and pressing character. 
 Under the territorial arrangements sanctioned at Tilsit, Prussia 
 was stripped both of her Polish and of her Westphalian 
 provinces. The Polish provinces were handed over to fhe 
 King of Saxony and formed into the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, 
 while at the same time the western possessions of Prussia were
 
 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 187 
 
 thrown into the new Westphalian kingdom governed by- 
 Napoleon's youngest brother Jerome ; and as each of these new 
 states was to be ruled upon French principles, an active 
 laboratory of revolutionary legislation was established on either 
 flank of the diminished Prussian monarchy. Now both the 
 Polish and Westphalian constitutions decreed in clear and 
 peremptory terms the abolition of serfage and noble privilege. 
 The Constitution of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw appeared 
 in the Moniteur on August 2, the Westphalian Constitution on 
 November 15, Stein's emancipating edict between the two, on 
 October 9. Is it likely that Stein's action, inconsistent as we 
 know it to be with the colour and bent of his temperament, 
 was quite independent of these transactions? There is con- 
 clusive proof to the contrary. The drafting committee in Berlin 
 expressly refers to the Warsaw precedent as one of the grounds 
 of their recommendation ; and a Cabinet order of September 3, 
 1 807, states that the abolition of serfdom had become a pressing 
 necessity through the step which had been taken by a neigh- 
 bouring Government. Indeed, no fine gift of discernment was 
 necessary to perceive that if freedom were proclaimed in the 
 Polish provinces, the Prussian peasant would not long be 
 chained to his ragged and miserable life of servile drudgery. 
 There would be an exodus of the rural population from the land 
 of crushing tributes and forced road-making and compulsory 
 menial service to the free country across the border where there 
 was equality for all. With every absconding Prussian serf the 
 rank and file of the Prussian army would be diminished by 
 one and the prospects of a military recovery proportionately 
 lowered.^ 
 
 Here, then, we find one cogent argument for hurrying on 
 the emancipation of the Prussian peasantry. If the thing were 
 not done quickly, the yokels, who bear the brunt of the Prussian 
 wars, would stream away into Poland, and swell the forces of 
 the arch-enemy. But apart from the contagion of the new 
 revolutionary state there were pressing reasons for a revolution 
 
 ' Meier, Franzosische Einjiusse auf die Staats- und Rechtsentwickhing 
 Preussens im xix. Jah-hutideri, ii. 289 ; Knapp, Die Bauern-Bcfreiung 
 . . . in den alter en 'J'heileti Preussens, ii. 152, 155, 161.
 
 i88 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 
 
 in the land-system of Prussia. The country had been bled 
 white by Napoleon and was in an unexampled state of des- 
 titution. The army, which provided a profession for the 
 nobility, had been temporarily ruined, and the ports being 
 blocked against oversea trade, there was a shrinkage in the 
 profits and consequently in the purchasing power of the 
 mercantile class, the effects of which were soon felt in every 
 nook and cranny of the economic structure. In this state of 
 economic dissolution the maintenance of caste would have been 
 a disaster. Was a ruined nobleman to be still debarred from 
 entering a house of business or from selling a portion of his 
 noble land to a tradesman or a peasant ? It was to the interest 
 of all classes that land should be bought and sold in an open 
 market, and that every citizen of the State should be at liberty 
 to choose his calling in accordance with his natural affinity. 
 The famous ordinance of October 9, 1807, provided all this. It 
 abolished serfdom, inasmuch as it permitted the peasant proprie- 
 tor freely to quit his tenement and released him and his children 
 from the obligation of forced menial service. It introduced free 
 trade in land. It allowed nobles and peasants to embark in trade 
 and commerce, and conversely permitted traders to acquire the 
 lands which had formerly been reserved for the nobility or their 
 serfs. These were striking changes of principle, though it is 
 likely enough that the immediate economic effects were slight. 
 Under Stein's ordinance the lord still retained his jurisdiction 
 intact, and the peasant, though nominally free, still bore his 
 crushing load of services, and since the one was too dejected 
 to throw up his holding, the other too poor to buy him out, a 
 traveller journeying through the country a few months after 
 * the Magna Carta of Prussian liberty ' would have found little 
 or nothing in the outward surface of affairs to remind him that 
 a great change had been accomplished in the legal and 
 economic status of the country folk — no migration and inter- 
 fusion, no crowded auctions of land and stock, nor any of that 
 active bustle and movement which accompanies the opening of 
 fresh markets and the promise of fresh careers. 
 
 Shrewd conservative critics read in the new free trade the 
 inevitable doom of the old rural order. Manorial jurisdiction
 
 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 189 
 
 would go, church patronage would go, feudal rights of police 
 and general administration would go, now that it was open 
 to every upstart with a long purse to purchase the land in 
 respect of which these rights and powers had been exercised. 
 Marwitz, the clarion of the old Tories, protested that Stein 
 was a revolutionary, pitting indigence against property, industry 
 against agriculture, the present against the past, and the 
 individual against the family; and there is a kernel of truth 
 in the humorous exaggeration. * Better three Auerstadts than 
 this edict ' was a sentence overheard in the Berlin casino. 
 A revolution was sheathed in an agrarian settlement which 
 seemed at first to effect no change, and was issued under the 
 signature of a conservative statesman. 
 
 In the second great measure which characterizes his ministry 
 Stein has been held up to admiration as a wise and courageous 
 architect of popular liberty. Sir John Seeley. following Maurer, 
 reminds us that the municipal ordinance of 1808, so far from 
 being a copy from French models, was founded upon opposite 
 and independent principles. The French drew no distinction 
 between town and country, giving to urba^ and rural' communes 
 the same non-popular framework of government, a nominated 
 mayor for executive functions and a nominated council with 
 limited powers of advice. Such was the type of local govern- 
 ment introduced into the Grand Duchy of Berg and the 
 kingdom of Westphalia and faithfully copied in many other 
 client states of the Rhenish Confederation. Now Stein's 
 municipal ordinance has nothing whatever to do with the 
 country districts. It prescribes for the Prussian towns and for 
 these alone, and it further differs from the French plan in 
 providing the towns with a really liberal and democratic 
 scheme of self-government. Nevertheless even here, where 
 contrariety is patent, it would be unwise to disparage the 
 influence of French example. The idea of superseding, by 
 a uniform and simple plan of administration, that curious 
 miscellany of vested interests which passed for the government 
 of a mediaeval town sprang up first in France, and was spread 
 by the Napoleonic conquests through Germany. And while 
 the government of every town in the French occupation was
 
 igo THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 
 
 being transformed upon a frame designed to increase the 
 control of the French Empire in Germany, the Prussians were 
 clearly prudent to parry the blow with a scheme of urban 
 reform no less radical and effective. That the Prussian plan 
 differed from the French is due to the fact that, whereas France 
 had to reckon with local disunion and hostility, the problem 
 for Prussia was to coerce into a spirit of active co-operation 
 a fund of unanimous but slothful support. That here again 
 the ultimate impetus came from Napoleon, is suggested by the 
 fact that three not unimportant clauses in Stein's famous 
 measures are almost verbally copied from the French. 
 
 Long before his programme of reform had been exhausted, 
 Stein was driven from office by the fiat of Napoleon. There 
 ensued upon his fall a brief period of ministerial paralysis 
 followed by one of the most fruitful administrations of modern 
 history. It is somewhat the fashion to disparage Baron von 
 Hardenberg, who from July 4, 18 10, till his death at the close 
 of 1822 was virtually Prime Minister of Prussia. In greatness 
 of heart, in purity of morals, in depth and dignity of character, 
 in intensity of political conviction, in all the gifts which inflame 
 the imagination or exalt the passions of men, Hardenberg 
 stands far below Stein. He was no hero, martyr, or prophet. 
 He was merely an alert, intelligent, charming man of the world, 
 unencumbered by a heritage of romantic instinct or class 
 prejudice, hospitable to new ideas and soaked through and 
 through with the spirit of political compliance. In sweetness 
 of temper, in refreshing immunity from spite and mistrust, 
 as well as in his blithe untroubled gaiety, he reminds us of 
 Lord Melbourne. A finished aristocrat of the old school and 
 yet always on the side of intelligent solutions, he attended 
 only to the sunny and wholesome parts of his associates, and 
 was inclined to think the better, not the worse, of an idea 
 if it bore the familiar hall-mark of the French genius. Of his 
 own frailties he was duly conscious and would at times affect 
 to regret them. Really he regarded his lapses from virtue as 
 inseparable from those winning ways which made him the idol 
 of women and an incomparable manager of men. That he was 
 a complete and rounded statesman would not be claimed
 
 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 191 
 
 for him even by his most sincere admirers, for his gifts lay 
 chiefly in diplomacy, and he had neither the patience, the 
 knowledge, nor the industry which are essential to great 
 administration. He was the parent of some still-born measures, 
 but rebuffs neither disturbed his judgement nor lowered his 
 self-esteem. He went on none the less in his quick-witted, 
 indolent, courageous way, charming the Court with his 'nice 
 blue eyes and pleasant smile and braving the wrath of the 
 bitter and stupid Junkers, until his purpose was substantially 
 accomplished. He was called Jacobin and leveller. In truth 
 he was the most distinguished Prussian disciple of the Napo- 
 leonic state, as Bismarck recognized in 1851, when he wrote to 
 General von Gerlach that the Hardenberg legislation was all 
 taken from the Westphalian Moniteur. 
 
 The achievement of Hardenberg consists of four groups of 
 legislation, each more or less directly inspired by precedents 
 set in the French Empire. First, there was a complete re- 
 casting of Prussian finance, prompted by the instant necessity 
 for finding fresh sources of supply, and based upon the true 
 principle that financial elasticity implies industrial freedom and 
 fiscal equality. Secondly, there was the establishment of that 
 free peasant proprietary which is still a valued feature of the 
 economy of Prussia. Thirdly came the edict emancipating 
 the Jews, and fourthly a very radical reconstruction of the 
 organs of central and local government upon a bureaucratic 
 plan analogous to the French. 
 
 The valuable part of the new finance consisted less in the 
 taxes themselves, which were borrowed from the kingdom of 
 Westphalia (where the portfolio of finance was for some time 
 in the hands of Count von Biilow, the Prussian Chancellor's 
 nephew), as in the fact that they were levied upon a uniform 
 and equal plan without respect to provincial privilege or social 
 caste. It is true that Hardenberg was compelled to withdraw 
 that portion of his scheme which promised a complete system 
 of land-valuation and the disappearance of exemptions from 
 and abatements of the land-tax. So far the aristocracy scored 
 a triumph. On the other hand, he succeeded in introducing 
 a general scheme of indirect taxation, a general tax upon
 
 192 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 
 
 industry, and finally a steeply progressive income-tax. The 
 effect of a new tax is never limited to the resources which it 
 brings to the Treasury ; and over and over again in European 
 history far-reaching political and economic consequences are 
 found to flow from a sudden and steep increase in financial 
 burdens. So it was with Prussia in the Napoleonic age. The 
 competition with France raised the scale of public expenditure 
 all over Europe. The old domestic notion of state-finance, 
 that the King could and should live of his own, finally dis- 
 appeared, and the notion of elastic taxation based upon popular 
 consent began to take its place. In a memorandum drafted 
 at Riga immediately after the shock of Jena, Hardenberg pro- 
 nounced that 'democratic institutions in a monarchical govern- 
 ment seemed to be the formula for the future ', and upon his 
 assumption of ofiice in 1810 he promised to give to Prussia 
 a central representative assembly. Riper experience showed 
 him that in such a body he would find nothing but aristocratic 
 pride and the jealous clash of provincial interests, and the 
 Liberal in him rapidly gave way to the Napoleonic bureaucrat. 
 Still it was under his administration that for the first time in 
 Prussian history a body of representatives from the whole 
 monarchy was summoned to give advice to the King's ministers. 
 The assemblies of February 23, i8ii,and April 10, 1812, were 
 not parliaments elected on a popular suffrage, but small 
 nominated bodies representing the four classes in the kingdom, 
 officials, nobles, citizens, and peasantry. The experiment was 
 widely denounced by the feudal caste, who considered that 
 a monarch who summoned peasants to his council might as 
 well be capering round a tree of liberty with a red cap upon his 
 head : nor did it procure for Hardenberg the support which he 
 expected. Still, precedents once created are never forgotten ; 
 and it was an important landmark in Prussian history when for 
 the first time a minister sought to secure for large schemes of 
 social and financial reform some general expression of national 
 assent. 
 
 The original idea at the basis of Hardenberg's agrarian 
 reform was that every tenant, whatever the size and quality of 
 his tenure, should become the absolute owner of his holding ;
 
 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 193 
 
 and that the tenant's labour-services and dues should be 
 written off against the charges which the lord was compelled 
 to sustain in respect of restoration and repairs. Such a scheme, 
 framed for the benefit of 350,000 peasant families, was far too 
 radical for the Prussian nobility, and the strongest class in a 
 feudal state succeeded in abridging its munificence in three 
 important particulars. The landowners of Prussia claimed and 
 secured a third of the peasants' holding as part payment for the 
 loss of corvees and services, acquired the right to buy up 
 peasant holdings, and succeeded in limiting the operation of the 
 reform to the wealthier peasant proprietors. Even in this 
 mutilated form the measure of September iHii, if executed with 
 force and fidelity, would have liberated about a million acres 
 and seventy thousand proprietors ; but the stubborn soil of 
 Prussia opposed innumerable obstacles to the ploughshare of 
 reform ; the harvest ripened slowly ; and by the end of 1820 the 
 edict of September had only created 1 8,236 peasant proprietors. 
 
 The same liberal impulse which aimed at the conversion of 
 serfs into freemen was employed in the manufacture of citizens 
 out of Jews. Here, too, the example of the Westphalian 
 kingdom, where legislation was exceptionally generous to the 
 Hebrew community, weighed with the Prussian Chancellor. 
 The decree of March 3, 181 2, is the charter of Jewish 
 emancipation in Prussia, providing as it does that Jews settled 
 in the old provinces should be admitted to civic rights if they 
 would take family names, sign in the German or Latin script, 
 and use German or some other living language of the West in 
 their commercial transactions. By this one act Hardenberg 
 accomplished more for the cause of religious toleration than 
 Frederick the Great for all his boasted enlightenment had been 
 able to achieve ; but the pictures of Napoleon which used to 
 hang in the dra\ving-rooms of Jewish houses in Berlin testify 
 to the general belief that the original power working for 
 Jewish liberty in P^urope was not so much the Prussian 
 Chancellor as the Emperor of the French. 
 
 It is curious to observe how under the shock of the 
 Napoleonic wars a double tendency was set up in Prussia, 
 partly in the direction of evoking spontaneous national effort 
 
 2S02 N
 
 194 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 
 
 and partly in the direction of tightening the reins of national 
 discipline. Stein's municipal reform was an example of the 
 first tendency ; so too was his contemplated reform of pro- 
 vincial government in something of the English fashion, with 
 Justices of the Peace and Quarter Sessions ; but Hardenberg, 
 although far more radical than Stein in his social and 
 industrial legislation — indeed for the reason that he was more 
 radical and probably also more impatient — was all for centra- 
 lization and bureaucracy. If he could have had his way he 
 would have made an end of the old historical provinces of the 
 Prussian kingdom, with their separate charters and rights and 
 customs, and have substituted for them a set of entirely 
 artificial and convenient administrative districts. As it was he 
 brought forward a scheme upon the French model designed 
 to transfer the judicial and police powers hitherto employed 
 by the nobility to a State official, the Kreisdirector (director 
 of a district), served by a gendarmerie and assisted by a small 
 nominated council. So bold an invasion of feudal privilege 
 was bound to fail in a country where the city population 
 was hardly less conservative than the nobles themselves. 
 Protestations rained in from every quarter, from patriots 
 who descried the French prefect in the Prussian Kreisdirector, 
 from publicists who believed in local freedom, and from nobles 
 who practised local tyranny. If a handful of peasant repre- 
 sentatives in the so-called national assembly of 1812 spoke 
 up for the edict, that was about the full measure of its 
 acceptance. The pliant chancellor shrugged his shoulders 
 and beat a retreat. Even when it flew the flag of peasant 
 emancipation his light bark had never run into such ugly 
 weather. 
 
 In his classical treatise on the Art of War, Clausewitz 
 makes the just observation that the prodigious efl'ects of the 
 French Revolution abroad were brought about not so much by 
 changes in the military art as by transformations in statecraft 
 and civil administration. It is to the eternal honour of 
 the Prussian reformers that they grasped this important 
 truth from the very beginning. They saw that the revolution 
 militant could only be effectually combated by a radical
 
 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 195 
 
 and comprehensive reform of Prussian society and Prussian 
 government. They did not confine their criticism to questions 
 of military policy and organization. They allowed their 
 minds to travel over the whole surface of public affairs from 
 the ordering of armies and the assessment of taxes to the 
 traditional style of official documents. From the first they 
 grasped the great truth that the secret of military power 
 is political and social unity, that a national aim implies not 
 a state but a nation. They accomplished only part of that 
 wide programme of innovation which Hardenberg had sketched 
 out at Riga in September 1807. They began, but were 
 unable to complete, the destruction of the territorial power 
 of the nobility. They were forced to abandon as hopeless 
 a scheme designed to make the civil service of Prussia as 
 powerful as the bureaucracy of France. Complete and scien- 
 tific unification on the French plan, even had it been desirable, 
 could never have been carried out in face of the tenacious 
 provincial and aristocratic opposition. Nevertheless in the 
 sphere of public administration the long rule of Hardenberg 
 left a durable mark on Prussian history, for just as the office of 
 Prime Miijister in England may be said to have grown up 
 during the twenty years of Walpole's power, so Hardenberg 
 created the office of State Chancellor in Prussia. In 1807 he 
 had urged that a Prime Minister or State Chancellor was a 
 necessity, and it was vouchsafed to him, through his twelve 
 years of Dictatorship, to make title and office familiar and 
 acceptable. To him, too, Prussia owes the constitution of 
 that Council of State, with its three categories of members, 
 princes of the blood, ministers of the Crown, and members 
 specially summoned by the King, which persisted until the 
 fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Thus even though he 
 was unable to introduce prefects and departments and the 
 French system of bureaucratic centralization, Hardenberg left 
 Prussia less obstinately various and provincial, and more 
 easily reducible to the direction of a central mind than 
 she had been in the years of irresolution, chaos, and incom- 
 petence which preceded the salutary shock of Jena. 
 
 In the great fields of scientific knowledge and material 
 
 N 2
 
 196 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 
 
 power the Napoleonic conquest, acting on minds rendered 
 plastic by defeat, produced two lasting and fruitful results, 
 the University of Berlin and the Prussian army, the first 
 the creation of William von Humboldt, the second the work 
 of a man as academic as Stonewall Jackson himself, General 
 Scharnhorst, the modest and learned Hanoverian artillerist. 
 Universities have played a large part in German life, and 
 during the whole course of the nineteenth century have 
 exercised a special influence over political thought and action 
 in Germany. The University of Berlin, which owes its founda- 
 tion to the incorporation of Halle, formerly the academic 
 seminary for the Prussian civil service in the upstart kingdom 
 of Westphalia, has now conquered for itself an unchallenged 
 supremacy among the homes of German learning and has 
 helped to obliterate the older reputation of Prussia as a 
 rough, ignorant, and unlettered country. It has also performed 
 something of the service which Napoleon expected of the 
 University of France. Created and fostered by the Government, 
 this pliant and powerful corporation has readily placed its 
 vast sources of moral influence and intellectual strength at 
 the disposal of the State, preaching the gospel of Prussian 
 patriotism, resisting the insidious advance of disintegrating 
 theory, and framing elaborate and learned apologies for viola- 
 tions of public law and economic fairness. It has defended the 
 seizure of Silesia, the partitions of Poland, the treaty of Basle, 
 the annexation of the Danish duchies, and the violation of 
 Belgian neutrality. It has invented the doctrine of 'a Prussian 
 mission ', discoursed eloquently and learnedly on the unten- 
 able thesis that Prussia had always maintained, as Austria 
 has continually abandoned, the true interests of Germany, and 
 in a word has given far more support to the Hohenzollern 
 policy than the University of France ever brought to the 
 House of Napoleon. As it has never been degraded by the 
 servility of a Fontanes, so it has never gained lustre from the 
 brilliant defiance of a Renan or a Michelet. 
 
 Universities had long been an honourable and prominent 
 
 eature in German life, and there was nothing either in the 
 
 constitution or in the early character of the University of. 
 
 Berlin which marked it as distinct from, or in any way
 
 THE RESURGENCE OF PRUSSIA 197 
 
 superior to, such older seats of learning as Gottingen or 
 Heidelberg. But the Prussian army of 18 14 was a new 
 apparition in German history. It was the nation in arms. 
 Conscription there had been in the days of Frederick the Great, 
 but so lamed by the system of privileged exemption that the 
 total weight of military service fell upon the servile peasantry. 
 Armies so levied might by a rare effort of genius be kindled 
 to a certain professional zeal, but could never, even under the 
 most splendid leadership, rise to the height of patriotic 
 devotion. The new conscription admitted of no privileges, 
 no exemptions, no degrading punishments. It viewed service 
 in the ranks not as a special trade connoting a low and 
 degraded social position, but as a common and honourable 
 duty to the State, a school of patriotic virtue. No purely 
 administrative or legal reform has imprinted so deep an 
 impression upon the life of Prussia as this compulsion placed 
 upon the whole population to undergo a training in arms. 
 It has unified Prussia more speedily and effectively than 
 any arrangement of prefects and departments could have done, 
 and given a military direction to the thoughts, feelings, and 
 aspirations of a vigorous people. The reforms of Scharnhorst 
 conferred some immediate benefits upon the Prussian state. 
 They helped to procure the downfall of Napoleon and the 
 liberation of the Prussian territory from an intolerable yoke. 
 They restored to its ancient self-respect a proud and strenuous 
 nation. They made Prussia once more the leading figure in 
 Germany, and the army so created in the stress of a great 
 national calamity has been ever since the principal bulwark of 
 Prussian strength. For good or evil the Prussian army 
 helped to maintain through all the enthusiastic surges of 
 liberal and democratic opinion which agitated central l^Iurope 
 in the nineteenth century the strict autocracy of the Hohen- 
 zollern crown and, through its tendency to promote and sustain 
 a military temper in the country, preserved for the territorial 
 class a greater degree of authority than the landlord has enjoyed 
 in any other country of equal intelligence. Whether this has 
 been an advantage or the reverse to the world has been declared 
 by the outbreak and the issue of a war more calamitous than 
 any recorded in the history of man upon this planet.
 
 ( 198 ) 
 
 Thottghts on the Infitieiice of A^apoleoii 
 
 IT will probably be admitted, even by the most strenuous 
 opponent of French imperialism, that with two exceptions 
 Napoleon has exercised a greater influence upon the political 
 and social state of Europe than any other single man. Nothing 
 in the achievements of the Consulate and the Empire was 
 fraught with such tremendous consequence for the future of 
 European civilization as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar 
 or the assumption of the imperial crown by Charlemagne ; but 
 then we must remember that Caesar and Charlemagne were 
 operating upon political conditions which were still compara- 
 tively simple and susceptible of receiving a deep and durable 
 impress from a powerful will, while Napoleon, living many 
 centuries afterwards, suffered the penalty of time. He was 
 brought up against complex masses of tradition, political, 
 social, and ecclesiastical, which had been hardened by ages of 
 settled European life and were protected by the great vested 
 interests of an old community. He affronted many things 
 which Europeans were wont to consider respectable and even 
 holy, monarchical sentiment, aristocratic caste, the Catholic 
 Church, the sentiment of nationality. Much of his work was 
 immediately undone upon his fall. All of it was compressed 
 within a period of twenty years. But when all deductions 
 have been made for ill-calculated plans, transitional expedients, 
 and policies triumphantly cancelled by his opponents, there 
 remains a residuum of durable political influences so great as 
 immeasurably to overshadow any which can be ascribed to any 
 other modern ruler of a European state. 
 
 In saying this we do not mean to imply that there have not 
 been minds in Europe of finer, higher, and more original 
 quality. The most durable and successful features of Napoleon's 
 statesmanship are not those parts which one might be tempted 
 to call extravagantly Napoleonic, but those which seem to 
 satisfy deep-seated needs and to crown long processes of 
 historical development. Again, there have been many influences 
 in Europe, on the religious and moral side, which have made
 
 INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON 199 
 
 more difference to the lives of ordinary men and women than 
 the career of Napoleon. What creative ideas can we ascribe 
 to him comparable to those which were put into circulation 
 by Aquinas, Calvin, or Rousseau, or even by his own con- 
 temporaries Goethe and De Maistre ? The Idies NapoUo- 
 niemies, even if we accept them at the nephew's valuation, are 
 still borrowed ideas, long familiar in Europe, some of thern 
 first practised in the Revolution, others derived from the 
 traditions of the Ancien Rdgime. The system of Napoleon 
 did not start full-fledged from his brain, and was indeed not 
 so much a system as a series of brilliant improvisations made 
 in reponse to the stress of fortune. With that wonderful tact 
 for circumstance which Madame de Stael notices as his 
 principal characteristic, he adapted the ideas of his age to the 
 needs of the situation. 
 
 This really comes to saying that Napoleon was a statesman. 
 It is not the business of a statesman to be original. It is his 
 business to measure the human forces about him, to take 
 stock of the conflicting traditions, the complex interests, the 
 hidden currents and open water-ways of thought and feeling, 
 and so to contrive his political and constitutional formulae as 
 to rally for their support the best and highest energies of his 
 people. Exactly in proportion as he is successful in doing 
 this, his work will stanJ the test and strain of time. 
 
 The great transfiguring ideas in politics, even where they 
 originate with men of action, can seldom be safely used until 
 they have survived some controversy and become the familiar 
 property of political thought. It is therefore no more a con- 
 demnation of Napoleon's genius to observe that he merely 
 worked with the ideas of the French Revolution than to say 
 that he breathed the air and trod the earth. The supreme 
 proof of his genius lies, on the contrary, in the fact that he 
 harnessed the wild living spirit of the Revolution to his own 
 career. 
 
 These observations will prepare us to consider the general 
 question of Napoleon's legacy to Europe. We should naturally 
 expect to find that those parts of his work would be most 
 permanent which are founded upon common sense, and might
 
 2CO THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 therefore have occurred to any man of ordinary high abilities 
 on a survey of the political situation, and that those parts are 
 least permanent which could only have come from Napoleon 
 and are stamped by the peculiar idiosyncrasy of his tempera- 
 ment. This is in the main true. The civil work of the Consu- 
 late, the Codes, the Concordat, the Prefects, the Legion of 
 Honour, together with the Imperial University and the Lycees 
 — this is the work for which the previous*history of France was 
 fitting prolusion, so that being adjusted to the needs of the 
 country it was able to endure through a century of factious 
 strife and revolutionary upheaval. The Grand Empire on the 
 other hand perished, for it belonged to the peculiar tempera- 
 ment of Napoleon to imagine a monster which almost every- 
 thing in its previous history had prepared Europe to reject. 
 
 The true greatness of Napoleon as a civil ruler lies in the 
 fact, firstly that he saved for France the most valuable conquests 
 of the French Revolution, social equality and industrial 
 freedom, secondly that he brought to a conclusion the difficult 
 operation of securing for the remodelled state the sanction and 
 support of the Church, and thirdly that he gave to France 
 a code of laws and a system of administration which remain 
 substantially unchanged to-day. He saved equality which 
 was a fierce national passion, and sacrificed liberty which had 
 become a disease. The Code Napoleon, which he regarded as 
 his main title to glory, is, so to speak, the last testamer)t of the 
 French Revolution. In a small portable volume which may be 
 read in a railway carriage or by the fireside you may find the 
 image of a society where all creeds gire tolerated and all men 
 are equal before the law, where private property is respected and 
 the rules of inheritance are based on the principle of equality, 
 where the wife is subject to the husband, and the children to the 
 parents, where the power of the churches is sharply curtailed 
 by civil marriage and divorce, and where no corporations, 
 religious, legal, or industrial, are suffered to abridge the liberty 
 of the individual or to intercept the power of the State. Such 
 a polity, democratic, centralized, and saturated with the lay 
 spirit, was the inevitable result of the French Revolution. 
 
 Modern France is still very much as the Consulate left it.
 
 INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON 201 
 
 Parliamentary government has taken root, the Concordat has 
 been denounced after an uneasy life of a hundred years, and 
 some measure of decentralization has been effectually intro- 
 duced into local government and the fabric of the University. 
 The ideal of the lay state has become more widely held with 
 the lapse of time, and is embodied in the scheme of compulsory 
 secular education which the Third Republic owes to the 
 oratory of Gambetta and the strenuous powders of Ferry. 
 These changes, however, important though they be, have 
 neither transformed the political spirit of France nor swept 
 away the main blocks of Napoleonic granite, the Prefects, the 
 Codes, the Legion of Honour, the Lycde. The most serious 
 innovation is the Parliamentary system, introduced during the 
 Hundred Days in deference to the public opinion of Paris and 
 without faith in its merits by Napoleon himself, and accepted 
 as the unpleasant necessity of vulgar times by the restored 
 Bourbons. But though we cannot easily overrate the negative 
 influence of French parliamentary life as a guarantee against 
 madcap policies and domestic oppression, we may be tempted 
 with British examples before us to form too high a notion of 
 its action upon PVench society and upon the normal work 
 of government. Ministers may rise and fall, but clerks sit 
 steadily scribbling on their office stools. Laws may be issued 
 by the Chambers, but it is customary to draft them in the 
 most general terms so that the details are filled in by the 
 administration. However mutable may be the balances of 
 parliamentary power, the tradition of a cogent civil service, an 
 inquisitorial police, and a special body of administrative law 
 has been handed down from the days of Napoleon. 
 
 One change, not of institutions but of political spirit, is 
 certainly notable. France is no longer the firebrand of 
 P^urope. For fifty good years after the battle of Waterloo 
 she continued to be tormented by the shade of Napoleon 
 summoning her to redeem the frontier of the Rhine and to 
 reverse the work of the Congress of Vienna. It may be open 
 to question how far this survival of the Bonapartist spirit was a 
 wholesome element in Pluropean political life, how far a virulent 
 poison. A spirit of empty, vainglorious, military imperialism,
 
 202 THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 chafing under the lassitude of enforced peace ancj the ignominy 
 of frontiers restricted in the general interests of Europe, does 
 not command much natural sympathy. But it was part of 
 the singular history of the Napoleonic memory that it became 
 associated with liberal ideas in France and with national hopes 
 in Italy and Poland. When Europe was given over to the 
 autocrats, the faults of Napoleon were forgotten and his merits 
 called to mind. Over and against the petty conventions of 
 court and caste he stood out as the supreme type of unaided 
 human energy mounting to the highest pinacle of fortune, and 
 moulding the destiny of the world. It was forgotten that he 
 had tried to manufacture a new nobility, that he had introduced 
 privileged entails, that he had married an Austrian Archduchess, 
 and copied the stiff ceremonials of Spain in Italy and of the 
 Ancicn Rigiine in France. In the sentiment of the common 
 people he remained the Little Corporal sprung from nowhere, 
 of the same humble clay as themselves, an everlasting proof 
 that for the highest tasks of war and government it is not 
 blue blood that is wanted, but the brain, heart, and nerve of 
 the heroic man. So conceived the Napoleonic memory was at 
 once a valuable safeguard against a possible reaction to the 
 Ancien Regime and an important auxiliary to liberal ideas. 
 The mischief was that this democratic and wholesome senti- 
 ment did not exhaust the content of the Imperial tradition, 
 but was allied in it with the evil precedents of domestic 
 tyranny and military expansion. The Second Empire was a 
 testimony both to the living power of Napoleon's name and to 
 the vitality of the ideas which were assumed to be associated with 
 his system : and perhaps it is true to say that no catastrophe 
 less complete than the Prussian War of 1870 would have been 
 availing to exorcise the passion and lust of conquest which, 
 having been aroused by the triumphs of the Revolution and the 
 Empire, could not at once, as Alfred de Vigny shows us, be 
 sent to sleep, but continued for half a century to vex and 
 inflame the political conscience of France. 
 
 Outside the frontiers of France the system of Napoleon 
 seemed to be most firmly secured in the Piedmontese, Rhenish, 
 and Belgian departments of the Grand Empire. Of these
 
 INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON 203 
 
 territories, the first became, after the cataclysm, the scene of a 
 reaction so stupid and violent that all the good results of the 
 French period were swept away, so that the work of liberaliza- 
 tion had to be done over again almost from the beginning 
 by D'Azeglio, Siccardi, and Cavour. In the Rhenish depart- 
 ments the seeds sown by the French Revolution were not so 
 easily uprooted, and a numerous and prosperous peasant pro- 
 prietary continued to testify to the enduring benefits conferred 
 by twenty years of government under the French law. The 
 third case is even more important. 
 
 Among the conquests of the French Revolution there was 
 one so well grounded upon conditions of natural affinity and 
 convenience as to hold out a reasonable expectation of per- 
 manence. The annexation of Belgium had been the earliest 
 and most precious triumph of revolutionary arms, and if 
 England could only have been deleted from the map of Europe 
 no acquisition could have been more easily made secure. The 
 Flemings, it is true, are of Teutonic lineage and speech, but the 
 peasantry and factory hands of the Walloon provinces speak a 
 Romance dialect, while for many generations every educated 
 Belgian had been accustomed to use French as a medium of 
 education, culture, and social intercourse. A people without a 
 national history, in one century the subjects of a Spaniard in 
 Madrid, and in the next offering a scarcely less docile sub- 
 mission to an Austrian in Vienna, might naturally be expected, 
 if not to welcome, at least to accept with complaisance a union 
 with a neighbour, so wealthy, so powerful, and connected by so 
 many ties of common civilization with themselves. France 
 indeed had little to give the Belgians in the way of political 
 liberty which they did not already enjoy under chartered 
 rights; but for many years before 1789 a party in Belgium 
 had been driving hard for an extreme democratic revolution, 
 and a course of wise government might have converted the 
 creed of a Vonckist or Gallophil minority into the common 
 possession of the Belgian people. 
 
 Never was a great political opportunity so shamelessly 
 squandered. The rule of the French Republic in Belgium 
 opened with an orgy of plunder and tyranny and closed with
 
 204 THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 a persecution of the priesthood and a revolt of the peasantry. 
 Compared with these seven miserable and distracted years the 
 Consulate of Napoleon shone out as an epoch of signal content 
 and prosperity. The breach with the Church was healed by 
 the Concordat, and Belgium at last began to enjoy some of 
 the fruits of its incorporation in a well-governed, powerful, and 
 enterprising state. But as the continental war developed, the 
 country began to experience the methods of a new barbarism 
 comparable to the horrors which it had suffered at the hands 
 of the revolutionary commissioners. The hunt for conscripts, 
 pursued with activity all over Napoleon's dominions, was 
 marked with peculiar activity and accompanied by exceptional 
 rigours in a country unused to the tradition of arms and 
 consequently swarming with deserters and refractories. At 
 the same time the Emperor's quarrel with the Pope, reopening 
 as it did the deep wound which had been temporarily closed 
 by the Concordat, led to a recrudescence of bitter feeling 
 among the ultramontane clergy of Belgium. Sixty of the 
 professors and pupils of the Seminary of Ghent were com- 
 mitted to prison for refusing to submit to a schismatic bishop ; 
 of these sixty, forty-eight died in confinement. Meanwhile 
 trade was perishing under the restrictions of the continental 
 blockade and the ceaseless requirements of the tax-collector. 
 The most stable houses were forced into liquidations : and 
 Antwerp, which in the imperial scheme was designed to be the 
 great arsenal of the north, witnessed a shrinkage in its popula- 
 tion variously estimated at twenty or twenty-five per cent. 
 
 Despite these oppressions and calamities it is probable that 
 many Belgians would, upon the fall of Napoleon, have 
 v/elcomed the rule of Louis XVIH as preferable to the 
 government of Holland which was ultimately imposed upon 
 them by the diplomacy of the Powers. Language, law, 
 religion, trade advantages, all the principal constituents of 
 l^elgian civilization drew them towards France, Indeed, after 
 the storm and stress of a hundred years the inscription of the 
 Revolution and the Empire is still clearly legible on the face 
 of Belgian society and government. 
 
 The two outstanding facts in the modern economic condi-
 
 INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON 205 
 
 tion of Belgium are firstly a numerous peasant proprietary 
 and secondly a great mass of low-paid and ill-organized labour 
 in the towns. For each of these circumstances an explanation 
 may probably be found in the history of those twenty years 
 during which Belgium was an integral part of France. 
 
 Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, who has made a scientific inquiry 
 into the economic conditions of the country/ reports that 
 the establishment of the Belgian peasant proprietary is due 
 primarily to the extensive sales of the State Forests and of the 
 common lands which were carried out between 1815 and 1850, 
 but in a secondary degree to the laws of succession which 
 prevail in Belgium. Those laws date from the French Revolu- 
 tion and were codified by Napoleon, and with some emendations 
 and additions govern the Belgian kingdom to-day. The 
 consequences are clearly inscribed in the agrarian map of the 
 country. For instance, one of the special features brought out 
 by Mr. Rowntree's inquiry is the large proportion of land, 
 approximately one-tenth of the whole country, held jointly by 
 two or more owners, a feature which is due to the laws of 
 succession which ' oblige a landowner to divide his property 
 equally, with the exception of one share which, though legally 
 at his disposal, in practice is almost invariably divided with 
 the rest '. The effect of these laws of succession, combined 
 with economic causes, is that 47 per cent, of the soil is owned 
 by persons whose holdings do not exceed a hundred acres, 
 that the average size of a farm is 14^ acres in Belgium as 
 against 60 in Great Britain, and that the agricultural popula- 
 tion per square mile of the cultivated area is three times that 
 of Great Britain. It is interesting that though a law was 
 passed on May 16, 1900, to prevent excessive subdivision, 
 there has never been any tendency to revert to primogeniture, 
 entails, or family settlements. The Code Civil, which has 
 received from the University of Louvain a long line of illustrious 
 commentators, has been amended in certain particulars, but 
 not in any point affecting the cardinal principle of equality. 
 
 The other noteworthy feature in the present economic 
 
 ' B. Seebohm Rowntree, Land and Labour L^essons from Belgium. 
 MacmillSn & Co., 1910.
 
 2o6 THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 condition of Belgium may likewise receive a partial explanation 
 from revolutionary theory and Napoleonic law. The French 
 violently broke up the trade guilds and corporations which 
 were the glory of Belgium, substituting for these close and 
 privileged groups the reign of unfettered individual competition. 
 To the Napoleonic Code a private corporation or association 
 was a thing regarded as inconsistent alike with state-power and 
 individual freedom ; and the jealousy of collective action thus 
 exhibited in the legal system of the country has been one, 
 though certainly not the sole and perhaps not the principal, 
 cause of the tardy development of trade unions and of the 
 very unsatisfactory condition of the Belgian industrial 
 population. 
 
 It is usual to attach great importance to the encouragement 
 which Napoleon gave to the idea of Polish nationality, and to 
 find in this phase of imperial policy the secret not only of the 
 close sympathy between France and Poland which subsisted 
 until the fall of the Second Empire, but also of some influences 
 working in the Polish revolutions of the nineteenth century. 
 We have no wish to underrate the spell which Napoleon cast 
 upon Poland, or the reality of the hopes excited by the creation 
 of the short-lived Grand Duchy of Warsaw ; but the case must 
 not be overstated. The alliance between France and Poland 
 was a diplomatic tradition of the Ancien Rdginie and, had 
 Napoleon never been born, a Frenchman would still have been 
 more acceptable to a Pole than a Prussian, a Russian, or an 
 Austrian. By force of circumstances revolutionary France, 
 attacked by the autocratic powers of the East, was the natural 
 ally of revolutionary Poland, and the Polish regiments in the 
 French armies of the Directory were serving their own national 
 cause in helping to procure the military and political abasement 
 of Austria. Every blow struck for the French Revolution was 
 a blow struck for Polish liberty. What Napoleon did then 
 was not to create a new sentiment of friendship, but to give 
 to this inherent connexion of interest a certain amount of 
 additional and palpable support by the creation of the Grand 
 Duchy of Warsaw, to indoctrinate the Poles with the notion of 
 a civihzed state by the abolition of serfdom, by the introduction
 
 INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON 207 
 
 of the Civil Code, and by the grant of a parliamentary 
 constitution, and finally to commend to the supporters of his 
 dynasty the cause of Poland as a debt of honour and an article 
 of faith. More than a century has passed since the hopes of 
 a free Polish state were shattered on the field of Leipzig ; and 
 the Civil Code, which still forms the legal basis of what was 
 known until 1918 as Russian Poland, is now almost the only 
 memorial of the Napoleonic rule at Warsaw. Yet the scheme 
 of the Grand Empire for a free Polish state to be created as a 
 foil to Prussian aggression has recently been renewed, so 
 persistent is the trend of French diplomacy, so indestructible 
 the spirit of the Polish people. 
 
 With the southern Slavs the influence of the Emperor has 
 been still more decisive. Napoleon was never in Croatia, but 
 with the possible exception of Belgium there is no outlying 
 part of the Grand Empire which has felt in a more effective 
 and enduring way the power of his person and his policy. ' In 
 Croatia ', writes Dr. Seton-Watson,^ than whom there can be no 
 higher authority, ' the real awakening of national sentiment 
 dates from the Napoleonic era. Dalmatia, which on the fall of 
 the Venetian Republic (1797) had for the first time become an 
 Austrian possession, was ceded to the French after the defeat 
 of Austerlitz ; and the genius of Napoleon revived the name, 
 and with it perhaps something of the spirit, of ancient lUyria. 
 The new state thus suddenly created comprised the provinces 
 of Carinthia, Carniola, Gorz, and Istria, the sea-coast of Croatia, 
 Dalmatia with its islands, and from i8c8 onwards the republic 
 of Ragusa. In Napoleon's own words : ' Illyria is the guard 
 set before the gates of Vienna.' Under the enlightened, if 
 despotic, rule of Marshal Marmont the long stagnation of the 
 Middle Ages was replaced by feverish activity in every branch 
 of life. Administration and justice were reorganized, the Code 
 Napoleon superseding the effete mediaeval codes ; schools, 
 primary, secondary, commercial, and industrial, sprang up in 
 every direction : the first Croat and Slovene newspapers 
 appeared :'the old guild-system was reformed and commercial 
 restrictions removed ; peasant proprietary was introduced, 
 
 ' The Souther7t Slav Question, p. 26.
 
 2o8 . THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 reafforestation was begun, and the splendid roads were 
 constructed which are still the admiration of every tourist. 
 Official business was conducted in French and Croatian, with 
 the addition of Italian along the coasts. A well-known story: 
 relates how the Emperor Francis, during his visit to Dalmatia 
 in 1818, plied his suite with questions as to the origin of the 
 various public works which, struck his eye, and met with the 
 invariable answer, ' The French, your Majesty '. ' Wirklich 
 schad, dass s' nit liinger'blieben sein ' (It is a real pity that they 
 didn't stop longer), exclaimed the astonished Emperor in his 
 favourite Viennese dialect, and there the matter rested for 
 eighty years ! 
 
 The Empire then was most permanently effective where it 
 co-operated with national sentiment or was brought into 
 contact with rude peoples still in that tribal stage of civilization 
 which made the barbaric world so pliant to the impress of 
 Imperial Rome. One of the most curious revenges of history 
 is the fact that the revolutionary movement in Russia took its 
 origin from the victorious entrance of the Russian troops into 
 Paris in 1814. Here in the capital of Napoleon these half- 
 barbarian visitors from the far East of Europe beheld for the 
 first time the spectacle of a progressive state, a well-appointed 
 government, and a liberal civilization. The ferment did its 
 work and the Decembrist revolution of 1825 was the result. 
 From this curious military disturbance, which had for one of 
 its incidental effects the development of the Siberian prison 
 system, we may date that active and continuous working of 
 Western political ideas in the Muscovite world which has 
 emancipated the serfs, established county councils, and given 
 to Russia the unreal phantom of a Parliamentary government.^ 
 
 It is only natural to expect that the Napoleonic influence 
 would be specially strong in the Latin countries. The union 
 of Italy was the product of many forces, among which an 
 Englishman is not likely to undervalue the influence of 
 English liberal ideas upon the mind, the character, and the 
 career of Cavour. Indeed the unity of Italy is the most 
 
 ^ It is hardly necessary to add that the prophet of the Bolshevik 
 Revolution is neither Rousseau nor Napoleon, but Karl Marx.
 
 INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON . 209 
 
 signal triumph of English liberalism upon the continent of 
 Europe, as the success of Bismarck has been its most im- 
 portant defeat. Yet as all histories of modern Russia should 
 begin with Peter the Great, so the epic of the Risorghnento 
 opens with Napoleon. He made the Revolution a vital thing 
 in Italy, and without a revolutionary party Italian unity would 
 never have been achieved. For a brief period all Italy was 
 gathered under his sway, administered on French principles 
 and ruled by French law. It was he who revived the military 
 spirit of the Italian race, gave them a new hope, a new energy, 
 a fresh standard of what a government might do and be. 
 Many of his closest relations, including his mother and Lucien, 
 the most talented of his brothers, made Italy their home after 
 the datastrophe of the Empire and earned the admiration and 
 respect of their neighbours. It became a tradition of the House 
 of Bonaparte to be on the liberal side of Italian politics and 
 to forward the political emancipation of Italy, an end believed to 
 have been among the cherished projects of the great Emperor. 
 Jules Favrc, defending Orsini in 1858, argued that the Italian 
 patriot had spent his life in efforts to achieve the grand purpose 
 which had inspired Napoleon I, and which Napoleon III 
 himself had pursued in his own generous and enthusiastic 
 youth : and thenceforward the Emperor, became like a man 
 seeking to lay the unquiet ghost of an ancestor. 
 
 The new kingdom of Italy owes mifch of the spirit and 
 form of its local administration to Napoleonic models. Italy 
 has the commune, enjoying, like its French prototype, 
 functions and powers unrelated to differences of size and 
 importance. The syndic of the Italian commune corresponds 
 to the French mayor, and was also until recent times the 
 nominee of the national Government. Fifty-nine provinces, 
 artificial and unhistorical as the French departments, are ruled 
 by prefects, assisted by small provincial councils or juntas of 
 six ; and the prefect, who is appointed by the Government, is, 
 as in France, both an administrative officer and an instrument 
 for the execution of political pressure. This system, borrowed 
 from the French in the first difficulties of national fusion, was 
 intended to' check the recrudescence of that provincial spirit 
 
 2302 O
 
 2IO THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 which was properly regarded as the greatest obstacle to 
 Italian unity. Perhaps it was necessary to have the prefect, 
 but it was certainly a grave mistake to draw no administrative 
 distinction between a great town like Milan and a small sub- 
 alpine village, and to subject the proceedings of influential town 
 councils to the control and sometimes to the caprice of a single 
 official. The administrative condition of Italy is an exact image 
 of that uneasy dualism which underlies the whole surface of 
 Italian political life. On the one hand there are the communes, 
 full of local patriotism, nourished by historic memories, instinct 
 with vigour and activity, and endowed with spacious powers. 
 On the other hand there is the prefect, a French import, 
 representing the new monarchy which was helped into exis- 
 tence by French bayonets and driven to resort to French 
 models for the necessary but alien system of a centralized 
 government. 
 
 A very fair test may be proposed to determine whether 
 or no a Roman Catholic state has come under the dominion 
 of Napoleonic ideas. Does it or does it not admit the prin- 
 ciple of Civil Marriage? If it does, then the civil power 
 stands outside the churches as in the concordat. If it does 
 not, then instead of the Church being within the State, the State 
 is within the Church. Judged by this criterion, Spain, which 
 only accepted Civil Marriage in 1877, cannot be ranked among 
 the nations which inherited from Napoleon. And yet the 
 Napoleonic invasion of Spain does in a very real sense mark an 
 epoch in the history of the Iberian people. The Peninsular 
 War created Spanish liberalism and was the means of dis- 
 seminating, especially in the more forward maritime provinces, 
 the doctrines of progress, equality, and popular sovereignty. 
 By a curious paradox the cause of Ferdinand VII, himself the 
 embodiment of unintelligent autocracy, was defended by 
 a nationalist coalition, part of which was largely affected by 
 the spirit of the French Revolution. In those years of blood- 
 shed and distraction, when the lawful king was in exile at 
 Valen9ay, and the nation was thrown upon its own resources, 
 Spaniards, and more particularly Spanish soldiers, learned 
 to like the trade of politics, so that what with soldiers fancying
 
 INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON 211 
 
 themselves statesmen, and civilians playing at soldiers, the 
 history of Spain was marked by a succession of military 
 prominciamientos and radical revolts. In all this, however, 
 there was nothing of Bonapartism. The Iwo forces arrayed 
 against each other were the autocratic and Catholic monarchy 
 of old Spain and the spirit of progress in all its shades 
 and colours, moderate, radical, republican. The method of 
 ■ Napoleonic bureaucracy, despite the division of the country 
 into forty-nine artificial governments in 1834, has never been 
 able to conquer the powerful and ancient traditions of local 
 autonomy which have been handed down in an unbroken chain 
 from the Middle Ages. Despite the new-fangled Gobicrno 
 Civil, the Alcalde is still the real governor of the Spanish town, 
 and the strength of the feudal movement of the seventies 
 is sufficient to show how vivacious is the spirit of Spanish 
 separatism and how faint the influence of Madrid on the 
 political currents of Spanish life. 
 
 The place of the Teutonic race in Europe and therefore in 
 the whole world has been decisively altered by the career and 
 policy of Napoleon. It is among the least of the effects of 
 his action in this quarter that his Code survived in Holland 
 till 1838 and in the Rhine provinces till 1900. The larger 
 consequences of his masterful intervention in German affairs 
 were the disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire coupled 
 with an immense simplification in the political geography of 
 that composite and cumbrous state ; and when these changes 
 are coupled with the great series of reforms accomplished in 
 Prussia under the stress of the Jena disaster and with the 
 general spread of pan-German feeling in the War of Liberation, 
 it becomes clear that Napoleon must rank as one of the makers 
 of modern Germany. 
 
 It is needless to say that nothing was further from Napoleon's 
 intention than to go down to history in su.ch a role. His 
 intention was precisely the opposite— to denationalize the 
 Germans, to fix upon them French laws and institutions, and 
 to harness them to the ambitions of the French Empire. Nor 
 was it his purpose to sow the seeds of political liberty among 
 his Teuton subjects. The princes of the Rhenish Confedera-
 
 212 THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 tion were on the contrary encouraged to govern in an arbitrary 
 fashion, that they might supply their contingents to the 
 imperial army with the least possible degree of friction. And 
 this being so, the-i'eally astonishing thing in the history of 
 Napoleon's dealings with Germany is not the reaction which 
 he provoked but the support that he received. Princes and 
 prelates overwhelmed him with servile flattery. Philosophers 
 and poets united to acclaim him as the hero destined by 
 Providence to show mankind the way to higher levels of 
 combined action. That he should have been regarded with 
 peculiar veneration by the German Jews is not unnatural, 
 seeing that everywhere he removed their political and social 
 disabilities, but it is singular proof of his magnetism and 
 power that in the kingdom of Westphalia, a country as alien 
 as any part of Europe to French modes of life and thought, 
 many of the prefects were drawn from the noblest families in 
 the land, and that in none of the French states founded upon 
 German soil was there any noticeable reluctance to accept or 
 even to forward the work of an alien government. 
 
 We have spoken of Napoleon as one of the makers of 
 Germany : and to some extent the achievement of Bismarck 
 was the easier for his work. On the other hand the Napoleonic 
 intervention left a legacy of bitter memories behind it. For 
 how could Prussia lightly forgive the crowned members of 
 Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine who had profited by 
 her downfall, or how could Bavaria, Saxony, or Wurtemberg 
 pretend to share the glow and exultation of the War of 
 Freedom ? The gulf between the North and South, always a 
 factor to be reckoned with in German politics, was deepewed 
 by the events of the Napoleonic age. The Prussian despised 
 the South-German and the South-German repaid him in a 
 thorough heartiness of dislike. When von Reumont went as 
 a Prussian delegate to the Parliament of Frankfort in 1848 the 
 contrariety of temperament and feeling between North and 
 South was one of the facts most painfully impressed upon his 
 mind. , To have taken opposite sides in one of the grand 
 issues of political history is a dividing memory which only 
 joint action in issues equally grand can certainly efface.
 
 INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON 213 
 
 To curious persons asking his opinion of Napoleon the 
 Duke of Wellington was wont to observe that he was *no 
 gentleman', and it would be easy from a thousand instances 
 to corroborate the truth of this excellent and most English 
 observation. Turn over the old files of TJie Times and you 
 will find the greatest conqueror and State-builder of the world 
 treated as a mere mountebank, a vulgar charlatan aping the 
 costume and manners of his betters. There was indeed a 
 more balanced view held by some English contemporaries,* as 
 the memoirs of Lord Holland and the letters of John Cam 
 Hobhouse may remind us, but it was not widely spread, and an 
 impartial estimate of so dangerous an antagonist could hardly 
 be expected until the end of the war. The history of the 
 British view of Napoleon offers a large and interesting field of 
 inquiry. There have been fluctuations, there have been gusts 
 of sympathy shading into hero-worship, but upon the whole 
 the admirers are still regarded by the mass of their fellow- 
 countrymen as a handful of eccentrics engaged upon a forlorn 
 errand. In Central Europe the Napoleonic fashion spread tvith 
 the development of domineering ambitions. The more recent 
 Prussian commentators, swayed by the rising tide of their 
 imperial appetites, have been unreserved in applause, and 
 among the intellectual currents in the Pan-German move- 
 ment no historian will neglect to note the spread of Napo- 
 leonic idolatry in Germany or the acceptance which, during 
 the years preceding the Great War, was so widely pronounced 
 for the political and military ethics of a conqueror without 
 scruple and without fear. 
 
 FINIS
 
 PRINTED IN' ENGLAND 
 AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
 
 HISTORIES OF THE NATIONS 
 
 Crown 8vo (7 i x 5\), blue cloth 
 
 Tlie Evolution of Prussia, the Making of an Empire. By J. A. R. 
 
 MARRIOTT and C. GRANT ROBERTSON. 1915. Second Impression 1917. 
 
 Pp. 460, with eight maps. 6s. 6d. net. 
 
 ' There is no other publication that gives the whole stoi-y of Germany in such a handy form, and 
 that embodies the best results of historical research.' — Newcastle Chronicle. 
 
 1 he BlllkanS, a History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Roumania, Turkey. 
 By NEVILL FORBES, A. J. TOYNBEE, U. MITRANY, and D. G. 
 HOGARTH. Third Impression 1918. Pp. 408, with three maps. 6s. 6d. net. 
 
 ' A most valuable addition to the history of the war. The problems generally of the Balkan 
 peoples are discussed with intimate knowledge and in a spirit so just and sanely sympathetic as 
 to reflect the greatest credit not only upon the authors but on British scholarship generally.' — rimts. 
 
 France, Mediaeval and Modern, a History by A. HASSALL. Second 
 
 Impression 1919. Pp. 330, with" seven maps. 6s. 6d. net. 
 
 ' A quite masterly survey of tlie course of French history. ... As a general sketch, useful alike in 
 schools and as a work of convenient reference, the book is deserving of high praise.' — Scotsman. 
 
 A History of Russia from the Varangians to the Bolsheviks. By C. 
 RAYMOND BEAZLEY, NEVILL FORBES, and G. A. BIRKETT, with an 
 introduction by E. BARKER. 1918. Pp. xxii + 602, with six rmaps. 
 8s. 6d. net. 
 
 'Far and away the best Russian history in French or English that we have yet come across.' 
 
 New Statesman. 
 
 Italy, Mediaeval and Modern, a History by E. M. JAMISON, C. M. ADY, 
 K. D.'VERNON, and C. SANFORD TERRY. 1917. Pp. viii + 564, with eight 
 maps and a preface by H. W. C. DAVIS. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 ' The best short history of Italy we know.' — Irish Times. 
 
 Portugal Old and Young : An Historical study by GEORGE 
 YOUNG. 1917. Pp. viii + 342, with a frontispiece and five maps. 6s. 6d. net. 
 ' A very timely and serviceable work of reference, the whole book is readable and good.'— Quardtan. 
 
 The Guardians of the Gate : Historical Lectures on the Serbs. By 
 R. G. D. LAFFAN, with a foreword by Vice-Admiral E. T. TROUBRIDGE. 
 1918. Pp. 300, with twenty-two illustrations and three maps. 6s. 6d. net. 
 
 ' The book has a peculiar excellence due to the fact that it is at once' the work of an historical 
 scholar, and of a man who has close personal experience of the things about which he is writing.' 
 
 Ti7»es. 
 
 Japan : the Rise of a Modern Power. By ROBERT P. PORTER. 1918. 
 
 Pp. xii + 362, with five illustrations and five maps. 6s. 6d. net. 
 
 ' Tolls the reader practically all that he wants to know. . . No more important book has appeared 
 on Japan for some years.' — Cambridge Review. 
 
 The Eastern Question. An Historical study in European Diplomacy. 
 By J. A. R. MARRIOTT. 1917. With eleven maps. 8s. 6d. net. 
 
 'Its value to students of contemporary politics is practically incalculable.'— /)(ii7^ Telegraph. 
 
 Modern China. a Political study by SIH-GUNG CHENG. 1919. 
 Pp. viii + 380, with a map. 6s. 6d. net. 
 
 Deals with the problems which confront the Chinese statesman and diplomat, and those who have 
 anythin.' to do with China. It eu'lcavours to give a true picture of things as they are in the Far 
 East, and at the same time to suggest constructive schemeij for the future.
 
 J 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 Series 9482
 
 / 
 
 r/ 
 
 ^ 
 
 •r 
 
 
 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 273 776 5