VIII. MR. GOLDWIN SMITH'S IRISH HISTORY[322]…

VIII. MR. GOLDWIN SMITH'S IRISH HISTORY[322]

When Macaulay republished his Essays from the Edinburgh Review, he had already commenced the great work by which his name will be remembered; and he had the prudence to exclude from the collection his early paper on the art of historical writing. In the maturity of his powers, he was rightly unwilling to bring into notice the theories of his youth. At a time when he was about to claim a place among the first historians, it would have been injudicious to remind men of the manner in which he had described the objects of his emulation or of his rivalry--how in his judgment the speeches of Thucydides violate the decencies of fiction, and give to his book something of the character of the Chinese pleasure-grounds, whilst his political observations are very superficial; how Polybius has no other merit than that of a faithful narrator of facts; and how in the nineteenth century, from the practice of distorting narrative in conformity with theory, "history proper is disappearing." But in that essay, although the judgments are puerile, the ideal at which the writer afterwards aimed is distinctly drawn, and his own character is prefigured in the description of the author of a history of England as it ought to be, who "gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction," "intersperses the details which are the charm of historical romances," and "reclaims those materials which the novelist has appropriated."

Mr. Goldwin Smith, like Macaulay, has written on the study of history, and he has been a keen critic of other historians before becoming one himself. It is a bold thing for a man to bring theory so near to execution, and, amidst dispute on his principles and resentment at his criticism, to give an opportunity of testing his theories by his own practice, and of applying his own canons to his performance. It reminds us of the professor of Cologne, who wrote the best Latin poem of modern times, as a model for his pupils; and of the author of an attack on Dryden's Virgil, who is styled by Pope the "fairest of critics," "because," says Johnson, "he exhibited his own version to be compared with that which he condemned." The work in which the professor of history and critic of historians teaches by example is not unworthy of his theory, whilst some of its defects may be explained by it.

The point which most closely connects Mr. Goldwin Smith's previous writings with his Irish History is his vindication of a moral code against those who identify moral with physical laws, who consider the outward regularity with which actions are done to be the inward reason why they must be done, and who conceive that all laws are opposed to freedom. In his opposition to this materialism, he goes in one respect too far, in another not far enough.

On the one hand, whilst defending liberty and morality, he has not sufficient perception of the spiritual element; and on the other, he seems to fear that it would be a concession to his antagonists to dwell on the constant laws by which nature asserts herself, and on the regularity with which like causes produce like effects. Yet it is on the observation of these laws that political, social, and economical science rests; and it is by the knowledge of them that a scientific historian is guided in grouping his matter. In this he differs from the artist, whose principle of arrangement is drawn from himself, not from external nature; and from the annalist, who has no arrangement, since he sees, not the connection, but the succession of events. Facts are intelligible and instructive,--or, in other words, history exhibits truths as well as facts,--when they are seen not merely as they follow, but as they correspond; not merely as they have happened, but as they are paralleled. The fate of Ireland is to be understood not simply from the light of English and Irish history, but by the general history of other conquests, colonies, dependencies, and establishments. In this sort of illustration by analogy and contrast Mr. Goldwin Smith is particularly infelicitous. Nor does Providence gain what science loses by his treatment of history. He rejects materialism, but he confines his view to motives and forces which are purely human.

The Catholic Church receives, therefore, very imperfect measure at his hands. Her spiritual character and purpose he cannot discern behind the temporal instruments and appendages of her existence; he confounds authority with influence, devotion with bigotry, power with force of arms, and estimates the vigour and durability of Catholicism by criterions as material as those of the philosophers he has so vehemently and so ably refuted. Most Protestant writers fail in approbation; he fails in appreciation. It is not so much a religious feeling that makes him unjust, as a way of thinking which, in great measure, ignores the supernatural, and therefore precludes a just estimate of religion in general, and of Catholicism in particular. Hence he is unjust rather to the nature than to the actions of the Church. He caricatures more than he libels her. He is much less given to misrepresentation and calumny than Macaulay, but he has a less exalted idea of the history and character of Catholicism. As he underrates what is divine, so he has no very high standard for the actions of men, and he is liberal in admitting extenuating circumstances. Though he never suspends the severity of his moral judgment in consideration of the purpose or the result, yet he is induced by a variety of arguments to mitigate its rigour. In accordance with the theory he has formerly developed, he is constantly sitting in judgment; and he discusses the morality of men and actions far oftener than history--which has very different problems to solve--either requires or tolerates. De Maistre says that in our time compassion is reserved for the guilty. Mr. Goldwin Smith is a merciful judge, whose compassion generally increases in proportion to the greatness of the culprit; and he has a sympathy for what is done in the grand style, which balances his hatred of what is wrongly done.

It would not be fair to judge of an author's notion and powers of research by a hasty and popular production. Mr. Goldwin Smith has collected quite enough information for the purpose for which he has used it, and he has not failed through want of industry. The test of solidity is not the quantity read, but the mode in which the knowledge has been collected and used. Method, not genius, or eloquence, or erudition, makes the historian. He may be discovered most easily by his use of authorities. The first question is, whether the writer understands the comparative value of sources of information, and has the habit of giving precedence to the most trustworthy informant. There are some vague indications that Mr. Goldwin Smith does not understand the importance of this fundamental rule. In his Inaugural Lecture, published two years ago, the following extravagant sentence occurs: "Before the Revolution, the fervour and the austerity of Rousseau had cast out from good society the levity and sensuality of Voltaire" (p. 15). This view--which he appears to have abandoned, for in his Irish History he tells us that France "has now become the eldest daughter of Voltaire"--he supports by a reference to an abridgment of French history, much and justly esteemed in French schools, but, like all abridgments, not founded on original knowledge, and disfigured by exaggeration in the colouring. Moreover, the passage he refers to has been misinterpreted. In the Irish History Mr. Goldwin Smith quotes, for the character of the early Celts, without any sufficient reason, another French historian, Martin, who has no great authority, and the younger Thierry, who has none at all. This is a point of very little weight by itself; but until our author vindicates his research by other writings, it is not in his favour.

The defects of Mr. Goldwin Smith's historic art, his lax criticism, his superficial acquaintance with foreign countries, his occasional proneness to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of rhetorical effect, his aversion for spiritual things, are all covered by one transcendent merit, which, in a man of so much ability, promises great results.

Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned,--the habit of making history into the proof of their theories. The absence of a definite didactic purpose is the only security for the good faith of a historian. This most rare virtue Mr. Goldwin Smith possesses in a high degree. He writes to tell the truths he finds, not to prove the truths which he believes. In character and design he is eminently truthful and fair, though not equally so in execution. His candour never fails him, and he is never betrayed by his temper; yet his defective knowledge of general history, and his crude notions of the Church, have made him write many things which are untrue, and some which are unjust. Prejudice is in all men of such early growth, and so difficult to eradicate, that it becomes a misfortune rather than a reproach, especially if it is due to ignorance and not to passion, and if it has not its seat in the will. In the case of Mr. Goldwin Smith it is of the curable and harmless kind. The fairness of his intention is far beyond his knowledge. When he is unjust, it is not from hatred; where he is impartial, it is not always from the copiousness of his information. His prejudices are of a nature which his ability and honesty will in time inevitably overcome.

The general result and moral of his book is excellent. He shows that the land-question has been from the beginning the great difficulty in Ireland; and he concludes with a condemnation of the Established Church, and a prophecy of its approaching fall. The weakness of Ireland and the guilt of England are not disguised; and the author has not written to stimulate the anger of one nation or to attenuate the remorse of the other. To both he gives wise and statesman-like advice, that may soon be very opportune. The first American war was the commencement of the deliverance of Ireland, and it may be that a new American war will complete the work of regeneration which the first began. Agreeing as we do with the policy of the author, and admiring the spirit of his book, we shall not attempt either to enforce or to dispute his conclusions, and we shall confine our remarks to less essential points on which he appears to us in the wrong.

There are several instances of inaccuracy and negligence which, however trivial in themselves, tend to prove that the author is not always very scrupulous in speaking of things he has not studied. A purist so severe as to write "Kelt" for "Celt" ought not to call Mercury, originally a very different personage from Hermes, one of "the legendary authors of Greek civilisation" (p. 43); and we do not believe that anybody who had read the writings of the two primates could call Bramhall "an inferior counterpart of Laud" (p. 105). In a loftier mood, and therefore apparently with still greater license, Mr. Goldwin Smith declares that "the glorious blood of Orange could scarcely have run in a low persecutor's veins" (p. 123). The blood of Orange ran in the veins of William the Silent, the threefold hypocrite, who confessed Catholicism whilst he hoped to retain his influence at court, Lutheranism when there was a chance of obtaining assistance from the German princes, Calvinism when he was forced to resort to religion in order to excite the people against the crown, and who persecuted the Protestants in Orange and the Catholics in Holland. These, however, are matters of no consequence whatever in a political history of Ireland; but we find ourselves at issue with the author on the important question of political freedom. "Even the highly civilised Kelt of France, familiar as he is with theories of political liberty, seems almost incapable of sustaining free institutions. After a moment of constitutional government, he reverts, with a bias which the fatalist might call irresistible, to despotism in some form" (p. 18). The warning so frequently uttered by Burke in his last years, to fly from the liberty of France, is still more needful now that French liberty has exhibited itself in a far more seductive light. The danger is more subtle, when able men confound political forms with popular rights. France has never been governed by a Constitution since 1792, if by a Constitution is meant a definite rule and limitation of the governing power. It is not that the French failed to preserve the forms of parliamentary government, but that those forms no more implied freedom than the glory which the Empire has twice given in their stead. It is a serious fault in our author that he has not understood so essential a distinction. Has he not read the Rights of Man, by Tom Paine?--

It is not because a part of the government is elective that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.[323]

Napoleon once consulted the cleverest among the politicians who served him, respecting the durability of some of his institutions. "Ask yourself," was the answer, "what it would cost you to destroy them. If the destruction would cost no effort, you have created nothing; for politically, as well as physically, only that which resists endures." In the year 1802 the same great writer said: "Nothing is more pernicious in a monarchy than the principles and the forms of democracy, for they allow no alternative, but despotism and revolutions." With the additional experience of half a century, a writer not inferior to the last repeats exactly the same idea:--

Of all societies in the world, those which will always have most difficulty in permanently escaping absolute government will be precisely those societies in which aristocracy is no more, and can no more be.[324]

French constitutionalism was but a form by which the absence of self-government was concealed. The State was as despotic under Villèle or Guizot as under either of the Bonapartes. The Restoration fenced itself round with artificial creations, having no root in the condition or in the sympathies of the people; these creations simply weakened it by making it unpopular. The hereditary peerage was an anomaly in a country unused to primogeniture, and so was the revival, in a nation of sceptics, of the Gallican union between Church and State. The monarchy of July, which was more suited to the nature of French society, and was thus enabled to crush a series of insurrections, was at last forced, by its position and by the necessity of self-preservation, to assume a very despotic character. After the fortifications of Paris were begun, a tendency set in which, under a younger sovereign, would have led to a system hardly distinguishable from that which now prevails; and there are princes in the House of Orleans whose government would develop the principle of democracy in a manner not very remote from the institutions of the second Empire. It is liberalism more than despotism that is opposed to liberty in France; and it is a most dangerous error to imagine that the Governments of the French Charter really resemble ours. There are States without any parliament at all, whose principles and fundamental institutions are in much closer harmony with our system of autonomy. Mr. Goldwin Smith sees half the truth, that there is something in the French nation which incapacitates it for liberty; but he does not see that what they have always sought, and sometimes enjoyed, is not freedom; that their liberty must diminish in proportion as their ideal is attained; and that they are not yet familiar with the theory of political rights. With this false notion of what constitutes liberty, it is not surprising that he should repeatedly dwell on its connection with Protestantism, and talk of "the political liberty which Protestantism brought in its train" (p. 120). Such phrases may console a Protestant reader of a book fatal to the Protestant ascendency in Ireland; but as there are no arguments in support of them, and as they are strangely contradicted by the facts in the context, Mr. Goldwin Smith resorts to the ingenious artifice of calling to mind as many ugly stories about Catholics as he can. The notion constantly recurs that, though the Protestants were very wicked in Ireland, it was against their principles and general practice, and is due to the Catholics, whose system naturally led them to be tyrannical and cruel, and thus provoked retaliation. Mr. Smith might have been reminded by Peter Plymley that when Protestantism has had its own way it has uniformly been averse to freedom: "What has Protestantism done for liberty in Denmark, in Sweden, throughout the north of Germany, and in Prussia?"--not much less than democracy has done in France. An admirer of the constitutions of 1791, 1814, or 1830 may be excused if he is not very severe on the absolutism of Protestant countries.

Mr. Goldwin Smith mistakes the character of the invasion of Ireland because he has not understood the relative position of the civilisation of the two countries at the time when it occurred. That of the Celts was in many respects more refined than that of the Normans. The Celts are not among the progressive, initiative races, but among those which supply the materials rather than the impulse of history, and are either stationary or retrogressive. The Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Teutons are the only makers of history, the only authors of advancement. Other races possessing a highly developed language, a copious literature, a speculative religion, enjoying luxury and art, attain to a certain pitch of cultivation which they are unable either to communicate or to increase. They are a negative element in the world; sometimes the barrier, sometimes the instrument, sometimes the material of those races to whom it is given to originate and to advance. Their existence is either passive, or reactionary and destructive, when, after intervening like the blind forces of nature, they speedily exhibit their uncreative character, and leave others to pursue the course to which they have pointed. The Chinese are a people of this kind. They have long remained stationary, and succeeded in excluding the influences of general history. So the Hindoos; being Pantheists, they have no history of their own, but supply objects for commerce and for conquest. So the Huns, whose appearance gave a sudden impetus to a stagnant world. So the Slavonians, who tell only in the mass, and whose influence is ascertainable sometimes by adding to the momentum of active forces, sometimes by impeding through inertness the progress of mankind.

To this class of nations also belong the Celts of Gaul. The Roman and the German conquerors have not altered their character as it was drawn two thousand years ago. They have a history, but it is not theirs; their nature remains unchanged, their history is the history of the invaders. The revolution was the revival of the conquered race, and their reaction against the creations of their masters. But it has been cunning only to destroy; it has not given life to one constructive idea, or durability to one new institution; and it has exhibited to the world an unparalleled political incapacity, which was announced by Burke, and analysed by Tocqueville, in works which are the crowning pieces of two great literatures.

The Celts of these islands, in like manner, waited for a foreign influence to set in action the rich treasure which in their own hands could be of no avail. Their language was more flexible, their poetry and music more copious, than those of the Anglo-Normans. Their laws, if we may judge from those of Wales, display a society in some respects highly cultivated. But, like the rest of that group of nations to which they belong, there was not in them the incentive to action and progress which is given by the consciousness of a part in human destiny, by the inspiration of a high idea, or even by the natural development of institutions. Their life and literature were aimless and wasteful. Without combination or concentration, they had no star to guide them in an onward course; and the progress of dawn into day was no more to them than to the flocks and to the forests.

Before the Danish wars, and the decay, which is described by St. Bernard in terms which must not be taken quite literally, had led to the English invasion, there was probably as much material, certainly as much spiritual, culture in Ireland as in any country in the West; but there was not that by whose sustaining force alone these things endure, by which alone the place of nations in history is determined--there was no political civilisation. The State did not keep pace with the progress of society. This is the essential and decisive inferiority of the Celtic race, as conspicuous among the Irish in the twelfth century as among the French in our own. They gave way before the higher political aptitude of the English.

The issue of an invasion is generally decided by this political aptitude, and the consequences of conquest always depend on it. Subjection to a people of a higher capacity for government is of itself no misfortune; and it is to most countries the condition of their political advancement. The Greeks were more highly cultivated than the Romans, the Gauls than the Franks; yet in both cases the higher political intelligence prevailed. For a long time the English had, perhaps, no other superiority over the Irish; yet this alone would have made the conquest a great blessing to Ireland, but for the separation of the races. Conquering races necessarily bring with them their own system of government, and there is no other way of introducing it. A nation can obtain political education only by dependence on another. Art, literature, and science may be communicated by the conquered to the conqueror; but government can be taught only by governing, therefore only by the governors; politics can only be learnt in this school. The most uncivilised of the barbarians, whilst they slowly and imperfectly learned the arts of Rome, at once remodelled its laws. The two kinds of civilisation, social and political, are wholly unconnected with each other. Either may subsist, in high perfection, alone. Polity grows like language, and is part of a people's nature, not dependent on its will. One or the other can be developed, modified, corrected; but they cannot be subverted or changed by the people itself without an act of suicide. Organic change, if it comes at all, must come from abroad. Revolution is a malady, a frenzy, an interruption of the nation's growth, sometimes fatal to its existence, often to its independence. In this case revolution, by making the nation subject to others, may be the occasion of a new development. But it is not conceivable that a nation should arbitrarily and spontaneously cast off its history, reject its traditions, abrogate its law and government, and commence a new political existence.

Nothing in the experience of ages, or in the nature of man, allows us to believe that the attempt of France to establish a durable edifice on the ruins of 1789, without using the old materials, can ever succeed, or that she can ever emerge from the vicious circle of the last seventy years, except by returning to the principle which she then repudiated, and by admitting, that if States would live, they must preserve their organic connection with their origin and history, which are their root and their stem; that they are not voluntary creations of human wisdom; and that men labour in vain who would construct them without acknowledging God as the artificer.

Theorists who hold it to be a wrong that a nation should belong to a foreign State are therefore in contradiction with the law of civil progress. This law, or rather necessity, which is as absolute as the law that binds society together, is the force which makes us need one another, and only enables us to obtain what we need on terms, not of equality, but of dominion and subjection, in domestic, economic, or political relations. The political theory of nationality is in contradiction with the historic nation. Since a nation derives its ideas and instincts of government, as much as its temperament and its language, from God, acting through the influences of nature and of history, these ideas and instincts are originally and essentially peculiar to it, and not separable from it; they have no practical value in themselves when divided from the capacity which corresponds to them. National qualities are the incarnations of political ideas. No people can receive its government from another without receiving at the same time the ministers of government. The workman must travel with the work. Such changes can only be accomplished by submission to a foreign State, or to another race. Europe has seen two great instances of such conquests, extending over centuries,--the Roman Empire, and the settlement of the barbarians in the West. This it is which gives unity to the history of the Middle Ages. The Romans established a universal empire by subjecting all countries to the authority of a single power. The barbarians introduced into all a single system of law, and thus became the instrument of a universal Church. The same spirit of freedom, the same notions of the State, pervade all the Leges Barbarorum, and all the polities they founded in Europe and Asia. They differ widely in the surrounding conditions, in the state of society, in the degree of advancement, in almost all external things. The principle common to them all is to acknowledge the freedom of the Church as a corporation and a proprietor, and in virtue of the principle of self-government to allow religion to develop her influence in the State. The great migration which terminated in the Norman conquests and in the Crusades gave the dominion of the Latin world to the Teutonic chivalry, and to the Church her proper place. All other countries sank into despotism, into schism, and at last into barbarism, under the Tartars or the Turks. The union between the Teutonic races and the Holy See was founded on their political qualities more than on their religious fervour. In modern times, the most pious Catholics have often tyrannised over the Church. In the Middle Ages her liberty was often secured and respected where her spiritual injunctions were least obeyed.

The growth of the feudal system coinciding with the general decay of morals led, in the eleventh century, to new efforts of the Church to preserve her freedom. The Holy See was delivered from the Roman factions by the most illustrious of the emperors, and a series of German Popes commenced the great reform. Other princes were unwilling to submit to the authority of the imperial nominees, and the kings of France and Castile showed symptoms of resistance, in which they were supported by the heresy of Berengarius. The conduct of Henry IV. delivered the Church from the patronage of the Empire, whilst the Normans defended her against the Gallican tendencies and the feudal tyranny. In Sicily, the Normans consented to hold their power from the Pope; and in Normandy, Berengarius found a successful adversary, and the King of France a vassal who compelled him to abandon his designs. The chaplain of the Conqueror describes his government in terms which show how singularly it fulfilled the conditions which the Church requires. He tells us that William established in Normandy a truly Christian order; that every village, town, and castle enjoyed its own privileges; and that, while other princes either forbade the erection of churches or seized their endowments, he left his subjects free to make pious gifts. In his reign and by his conduct the word "bigot" ceased to be a term of reproach, and came to signify what we now should call "ultramontane." He was the foremost of those Normans who were called by the Holy See to reclaim what was degenerate, and to renovate the declining States of the North.

Where the Church addressed herself to the conversion of races of purely Teutonic origin, as in Scandinavia, her missionaries achieved the work. In other countries, as in Poland and Hungary, political dependence on the Empire was the channel and safeguard of her influence. The Norman conquest of England and of Ireland differs from all of these. In both islands the faith had been freely preached, adopted, and preserved. The rulers and the people were Catholic. The last Saxon king who died before the Conquest was a saint. The last archbishop of Dublin appointed before the invasion was a saint. Neither of the invasions can be explained simply by the demoralisation of the clergy, or by the spiritual destitution of the people.

Catholicism spreads among the nations, not only as a doctrine, but as an institution. "The Church," says Mr. Goldwin Smith, "is not a disembodied spirit, but a spirit embodied in human society." Her teaching is directed to the inner man, and is confined to the social order; but her discipline touches on the political. She cannot permanently ignore the acts and character of the State, or escape its notice. Whilst she preaches submission to authorities ordained by God, her nature, not her interest, compels her to exert an involuntary influence upon them. The jealousy so often exhibited by governments is not without reason, for the free action of the Church is the test of the free constitution of the State; and without such free constitution there must necessarily ensue either persecution or revolution. Between the settled organisation of Catholicism and every form of arbitrary power, there is an incompatibility which must terminate in conflict. In a State which possesses no security for authority or freedom, the Church must either fight or succumb. Now, as authority and freedom, the conditions of her existence, can only be obtained through the instrumentality of certain nations, she depends on the aid of these nations. Religion alone cannot civilise men, or secure its own conquest. It promotes civilisation where it has power; but it has not power where its way is not prepared. Its civilising influence is chiefly indirect, and acts by its needs and wants as much as by the fulness of its ideas. So Christianity extends itself by the aid of the secular power, relying, not on the victories of Christian arms, but on the progress of institutions and ideas that harmonise with ecclesiastical freedom. Hence, those who have most actively served the interests of the Church are not always those who have been most faithful to her doctrines. The work which the Goth and the Frank had done on the continent of Europe the Normans came to do in England, where it had been done before but had failed, and in Ireland, where neither Roman nor German influences had entered.

Thus the theory of nationality, unknown to Catholic ages, is inconsistent both with political reason and with Christianity, which requires the dominion of race over race, and whose path was made straight by two universal empires. The missionary may outstrip, in his devoted zeal, the progress of trade or of arms; but the seed that he plants will not take root, unprotected by those ideas of right and duty which first came into the world with the tribes who destroyed the civilisation of antiquity, and whose descendants are in our day carrying those ideas to every quarter of the world. It was as impossible to realise in Ireland the mediæval notions of ecclesiastical liberty without a great political reform, as to put an end to the dissolution of society and the feuds of princes without the authority of a supreme lord.

There is one institution of those days to which Mr. Goldwin Smith has not done entire justice.

It is needless to say that the Eric, or pecuniary composition for blood, in place of capital or other punishment, which the Brehon law sanctioned, is the reproach of all primitive codes, and of none. It is the first step from the license of savage revenge to the ordered justice of a regular law (p. 41).

Pecuniary composition for blood belongs to an advanced period of defined and regular criminal jurisprudence. In the lowest form of civil society, when the State is not yet distinct from the family, the family is compelled to defend itself; and the only protection of society is the vendetta. It is the private right of self-defence combined with the public office of punishment, and therefore not only a privilege but an obligation. The whole family is bound to avenge the injury; but the duty rests first of all with the heir. Precedency in the office of avenger is naturally connected with a first claim in inheritance; and the succession to property is determined by the law of revenge. This leads both to primogeniture, because the eldest son is most likely to be capable of punishing the culprit; and, for the same reason, to modifications of primogeniture, by the preference of the brother before the grandson, and of the male line before the female. A practice which appears barbarous is, therefore, one of the foundations of civilisation, and the origin of some of the refinements of law. In this state of society there is no distinction between civil and criminal law; an injury is looked upon as a private wrong, not, as religion considers it, a sin, or, as the State considers it, a crime.

Something very similar occurs in feudal society. Here all the barons were virtually equal to each other, and without any superior to punish their crimes or to avenge their wrongs. They were, therefore, compelled to obtain safety or reparation, like sovereigns, by force of arms. What war is among States, the feud is in feudal society, and the vengeance of blood in societies not yet matured into States--a substitute for the fixed administration of justice.

The assumption of this duty by the State begins with the recognisance of acts done against the State itself. At first, political crimes alone are visited with a public penalty; private injuries demand no public expiation, but only satisfaction of the injured party. This appears in its most rudimentary form in the lex talionis. Society requires that punishment should be inflicted by the State, in order to prevent continual disorders. If the injured party could be satisfied, and his duty fulfilled without inflicting on the criminal an injury corresponding to that which he had done, society was obviously the gainer. At first it was optional to accept or to refuse satisfaction; afterwards it was made obligatory.

Where property was so valuable that its loss was visited on the life or limb of the robber, and injuries against property were made a question of life and death, it soon followed that injury to life could be made a question of payment. To expiate robbery by death, and to expiate murder by the payment of a fine, are correlative ideas. Practically this custom often told with a barbarous inequality against those who were too poor to purchase forgiveness; but it was otherwise both just and humane in principle, and it was generally encouraged by the Church. For in her eyes the criminal was guilty of an act of which it was necessary that he should repent; this made her desire, not his destruction, but his conversion. She tried, therefore, to save his life, and to put an end to revenge, mutilation, and servitude; and for all this the alternative was compensation. This purpose was served by the right of asylum. The Church surrendered the fugitive only on condition that his life and person should be spared in consideration of a lawful fine, which she often paid for him herself. "Concedatur ei vita et omnia membra. Emendat autem causam in quantum potuerit," says a law of Charlemagne, given in the year 785, when the influence of religion on legislation was most powerful in Europe.

No idea occurs more frequently in the work we are reviewing than that of the persecuting character of the Catholic Church; it is used as a perpetual apology for the penal laws in Ireland:--

"When the Catholics writhe under this wrong, let them turn their eyes to the history of Catholic countries, and remember that, while the Catholic Church was stripped of her endowments and doomed to political degradation by Protestant persecutors in Ireland, the Protestant churches were exterminated with fire and sword by Catholic persecutors in France, Austria, Flanders, Italy, and Spain" (p. 92). He speaks of Catholicism as "a religion which all Protestants believed to be idolatrous, and knew by fearful experience to be persecuting" (p. 113). "It would not be difficult to point to persecuting laws more sanguinary than these. Spain, France, and Austria will at once supply signal examples.... That persecution was the vice of an age and not only of a particular religion, that it disgraced Protestantism as well as Catholicism, is true. But no one who reads the religious history of Europe with an open mind can fail to perceive that the persecutions carried on by Protestants were far less bloody and less extensive than those carried on by Catholics; that they were more frequently excusable as acts of retaliation; that they arose more from political alarm, and less from the spirit of the religion; and that the temper of their authors yielded more rapidly to the advancing influence of humanity and civilisation" (pp. 127. 129).

All these arguments are fallacies; but as the statements at the same time are full of error, we believe that the author is wrong because he has not studied the question, not because he has designed to misrepresent it. The fact that he does not distinguish from each other the various kinds and occasions of persecution, proves that he is wholly ignorant of the things with which it is connected.

Persecution is the vice of particular religions, and the misfortune of particular stages of political society. It is the resource by which States that would be subverted by religious liberty escape the more dangerous alternative of imposing religious disabilities. The exclusion of a part of the community by reason of its faith from the full benefit of the law is a danger and disadvantage to every State, however highly organised its constitution may otherwise be. But the actual existence of a religious party differing in faith from the majority is dangerous only to a State very imperfectly organised. Disabilities are always a danger. Multiplicity of religions is only dangerous to States of an inferior type. By persecution they rid themselves of the peculiar danger which threatens them, without involving themselves in a system universally bad. Persecution comes naturally in a certain period of the progress of society, before a more flexible and comprehensive system has been introduced by that advance of religion and civilisation whereby Catholicism gradually penetrates into hostile countries, and Christian powers acquire dominion over infidel populations. Thus it is the token of an epoch in the political, religious, and intellectual life of mankind, and it disappears with its epoch, and with the advance of the Church militant in her Catholic vocation. Intolerance of dissent and impatience of contradiction are a characteristic of youth. Those that have no knowledge of the truth that underlies opposite opinions, and no experience of their consequent force, cannot believe that men are sincere in holding them. At a certain point of mental growth, tolerance implies indifference, and intolerance is inseparable from sincerity. Thus intolerance, in itself a defect, becomes in this case a merit. Again, although the political conditions of intolerance belong to the youth and immaturity of nations, the motives of intolerance may at any time be just and the principle high. For the theory of religious unity is founded on the most elevated and truest view of the character and function of the State, on the perception that its ultimate purpose is not distinct from that of the Church. In the pagan State they were identified; in the Christian world the end remains the same, but the means are different.

The State aims at the things of another life but indirectly. Its course runs parallel to that of the Church; they do not converge. The direct subservience of the State to religious ends would imply despotism and persecution just as much as the pagan supremacy of civil over religious authority. The similarity of the end demands harmony in the principles, and creates a decided antagonism between the State and a religious community whose character is in total contradiction with it. With such religions there is no possibility of reconciliation. A State must be at open war with any system which it sees would prevent it from fulfilling its legitimate duties. The danger, therefore, lies not in the doctrine, but in the practice. But to the pagan and to the mediæval State, the danger was in the doctrine. The Christians were the best subjects of the emperor, but Christianity was really subversive of the fundamental institutions of the Roman Empire. In the infancy of the modern States, the civil power required all the help that religion could give in order to establish itself against the lawlessness of barbarism and feudal dissolution. The existence of the State at that time depended on the power of the Church. When, in the thirteenth century, the Empire renounced this support, and made war on the Church, it fell at once into a number of small sovereignties. In those cases persecution was self-defence. It was wrongly defended as an absolute, not as a conditional principle; but such a principle was false only as the modern theory of religious liberty is false. One was a wrong generalisation from the true character of the State; the other is a true conclusion from a false notion of the State. To say that because of the union between Church and State it is right to persecute would condemn all toleration; and to say that the objects of the State have nothing to do with religion, would condemn all persecution. But persecution and toleration are equally true in principle, considered politically; only one belongs to a more highly developed civilisation than the other. At one period toleration would destroy society; at another, persecution is fatal to liberty. The theory of intolerance is wrong only if founded absolutely upon religious motives; but even then the practice of it is not necessarily censurable. It is opposed to the Christian spirit, in the same manner as slavery is opposed to it. The Church prohibits neither intolerance nor slavery, though in proportion as her influence extends, and civilisation advances, both gradually disappear.

Unity and liberty are the only legitimate principles on which the position of a Church in a State can be regulated, but the distance between them is immeasurable, and the transition extremely difficult. To pass from religious unity to religious liberty is to effect a complete inversion in the character of the State, a change in the whole spirit of legislation, and a still greater revolution in the minds and habits of men. So great a change seldom happens all at once. The law naturally follows the condition of society, which does not suddenly change. An intervening stage from unity to liberty, a compromise between toleration and persecution, is a common but irrational, tyrannical, and impolitic arrangement. It is idle to talk of the guilt of persecution, if we do not distinguish the various principles on which religious dissent can be treated by the State. The exclusion of other religions--- the system of Spain, of Sweden, of Mecklenburg, Holstein, and Tyrol--is reasonable in principle, though practically untenable in the present state of European society. The system of expulsion or compulsory conformity, adopted by Lewis XIV. and the Emperor Nicholas, is defensible neither on religious nor political grounds. But the system applied to Ireland, which uses religious disabilities for the purpose of political oppression,[325] stands alone in solitary infamy among the crimes and follies of the rulers of men.

The acquisition of real definite freedom is a very slow and tardy process. The great social independence enjoyed in the early periods of national history is not yet political freedom. The State has not yet developed its authority, or assumed the functions of government. A period follows when all the action of society is absorbed by the ruling power, when the license of early times is gone, and the liberties of a riper age are not yet acquired. These liberties are the product of a long conflict with absolutism, and of a gradual development, which, by establishing definite rights revives in positive form the negative liberty of an unformed society. The object and the result of this process is the organisation of self-government, the substitution of right for force, of authority for power, of duty for necessity, and of a moral for a physical relation between government and people. Until this point is reached, religious liberty is an anomaly. In a State which possesses all power and all authority there is no room for the autonomy of religious communities. Those States, therefore, not only refuse liberty of conscience, but deprive the favoured Church of ecclesiastical freedom. The principles of religious unity and liberty are so opposed that no modern State has at once denied toleration and allowed freedom to its established Church. Both of these are unnatural in a State which rejects self-government, the only secure basis of all freedom, whether religious or political. For religious freedom is based on political liberty; intolerance, therefore, is a political necessity against all religions which threaten the unity of faith in a State that is not free, and in every State against those religions which threaten its existence. Absolute intolerance belongs to the absolute State; special persecution may be justified by special causes in any State. All mediæval persecution is of the latter kind, for the sects against which it was directed were revolutionary parties. The State really defended, not its religious unity, but its political existence.

If the Catholic Church was naturally inclined to persecute, she would persecute in all cases alike, when there was no interest to serve but her own. Instead of adapting her conduct to circumstances, and accepting theories according to the character of the time, she would have developed a consistent theory out of her own system, and would have been most severe when she was most free from external influences, from political objects, or from temporary or national prejudices. She would have imposed a common rule of conduct in different countries in different ages, instead of submitting to the exigencies of each time and place. Her own rule of conduct never changed. She treats it as a crime to abandon her, not to be outside her. An apostate who returns to her has a penance for his apostasy; a heretic who is converted has no penance for his heresy. Severity against those who are outside her fold is against her principles. Persecution is contrary to the nature of a universal Church; it is peculiar to the national Churches.

While the Catholic Church by her progress in freedom naturally tends to push the development of States beyond the sphere where they are still obliged to preserve the unity of religion, and whilst she extends over States in all degrees of advancement, Protestantism, which belongs to a particular age and state of society, which makes no claim to universality, and which is dependent on political connection, regards persecution, not as an accident, but as a duty.

Wherever Protestantism prevailed, intolerance became a principle of State, and was proclaimed in theory even where the Protestants were in a minority, and where the theory supplied a weapon against themselves. The Reformation made it a general law, not only against Catholics by way of self-defence or retaliation, but against all who dissented from the reformed doctrines, whom it treated, not as enemies, but as criminals,--against the Protestant sects, against Socinians, and against atheists. It was not a right, but a duty; its object was to avenge God, not to preserve order. There is no analogy between the persecution which preserves and the persecution which attacks; or between intolerance as a religious duty, and intolerance as a necessity of State. The Reformers unanimously declared persecution to be incumbent on the civil power; and the Protestant Governments universally acted upon their injunctions, until scepticism escaped the infliction of penal laws and condemned their spirit.

Doubtless, in the interest of their religion, they acted wisely. Freedom is not more decidedly the natural condition of Catholicism than intolerance is of Protestantism; which by the help of persecution succeeded in establishing itself in countries where it had no root in the affections of the people, and in preserving itself from the internal divisions which follow free inquiry. Toleration has been at once a cause and an effect of its decline. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, supported the mediæval State by religious unity, and has saved herself in the modern State by religious freedom. No longer compelled to devise theories in justification of a system imposed on her by the exigencies of half-organised societies, she is enabled to revert to a policy more suited to her nature and to her most venerable traditions; and the principle of liberty has already restored to her much of that which the principle of unity took away. It was not, as our author imagines (p. 119), by the protection of Lewis XIV. that she was formidable; nor is it true that in consequence of the loss of temporalities, "the chill of death is gathering round the heart of the great theocracy" (p. 94); nor that "the visible decline of the papacy" is at hand because it no longer wields "the more efficacious arms of the great Catholic monarchies" (p. 190).

The same appeal to force, the same principles of intolerance which expelled Catholicism from Protestant countries, gave rise in Catholic countries to the growth of infidelity. The Revolutions of 1789 in France, and of 1859 in Italy, attest the danger of a practice which requires for its support the doctrines of another religion, or the circumstances of a different age. Not till the Church had lost those props in which Mr. Goldwin Smith sees the secret of her power, did she recover her elasticity and her expansive vigour. Catholics may have learnt this truth late, but Protestants, it appears, have yet to learn it.

In one point Mr. Goldwin Smith is not so very far from the views of the Orange party. He thinks, indeed, that the Church is no longer dangerous, and would not therefore have Catholics maltreated; but this is due, not to her merits, but to her weakness.

Popes might now be as willing as ever, if they had the power, to step between a Protestant State and the allegiance of its subjects (p. 190).

Mr. Smith seems to think that the Popes claim the same authority over the rulers of a Protestant State that they formerly possessed over the princes of Catholic countries. Yet this political power of the Holy See was never a universal right of jurisdiction over States, but a special and positive right, which it is as absurd to censure as to fear or to regret at the present time. Directly, it extended only over territories which were held by feudal tenure of the Pope, like the Sicilian monarchy. Elsewhere the authority was indirect, not political but religious, and its political consequences were due to the laws of the land. The Catholic countries would no more submit to a king not of their communion than Protestant countries, England for instance, or Denmark. This is as natural and inevitable in a country where the whole population is of one religion, as it is artificial and unjust in a country where no sort of religious unity prevails, and where such a law might compel the sovereign to be of the religion of the minority.

At any rate, nobody who thinks it reasonable that any prince abandoning the Established Church should forfeit the English throne, can complain of a law which compelled the sovereign to be of the religion, not of a majority, but of the whole of his subjects. The idea of the Pope stepping between a State and the allegiance of its subjects is a mere misapprehension. The instrument of his authority is the law, and the law resides in the State. The Pope could intervene, therefore, only between the State and the occupant of the throne; and his intervention suspended, not the duty of obeying, but the right of governing. The line on which his sentence ran separated, not the subjects from the State, but the sovereign from the other authorities. It was addressed to the nation politically organised against the head of the organism, not to the mass of individual subjects against the constituted authorities. That such a power was inconsistent with the modern notion of sovereignty is true; but it is also true that this notion is as much at variance with the nature of ecclesiastical authority as with civil liberty. The Roman maxim, princeps legibus solutus, could not be admitted by the Church; and an absolute prince could not properly be invested in her eyes with the sanctity of authority, or protected by the duty of submission. A moral, and à fortiori a spiritual, authority moves and lives only in an atmosphere of freedom.

There are, however, two things to be considered in explanation of the error into which our author and so many others have fallen. Law follows life, but not with an equal pace. There is a time when it ceases to correspond to the existing order of things, and meets an invincible obstacle in a new society. The exercise of the mediæval authority of the Popes was founded on the religious unity of the State, and had no basis in a divided community. It was not easy in the period of transition to tell when the change took place, and at what moment the old power lost its efficacy; no one could foresee its failure, and it still remained the legal and recognised means of preventing the change. Accordingly, it was twice tried during the wars of religion, in France with success, in England with disastrous effects. It is a universal rule that a right is not given up until the necessity of its surrender is proved. But the real difficulty arises, not from the mode in which the power was exercised, but from the way in which it was defended. The mediæval writers were accustomed to generalise; they disregarded particular circumstances, and they were generally ignorant of the habits and ideas of their age. Living in the cloister, and writing for the school, they were unacquainted with the polity and institutions around them, and sought their authorities and examples in antiquity, in the speculations of Aristotle, and the maxims of the civil law. They gave to their political doctrines as abstract a form, and attributed to them as universal an application, as the modern absolutists or the more recent liberals. So regardless were they of the difference between ancient times and their own, that the Jewish chronicles, the Grecian legislators, and the Roman code supplied them indifferently with rules and instances; they could not imagine that a new state of things would one day arise in which their theories would be completely obsolete. Their definitions of right and law are absolute in the extreme, and seem often to admit of no qualification. Hence their character is essentially revolutionary, and they contradict both the authority of law and the security of freedom. It is on this contradiction that the common notion of the danger of ecclesiastical pretensions is founded. But the men who take alarm at the tone of the mediæval claims judge them with a theory just as absolute and as excessive. No man can fairly denounce imaginary pretensions in the Church of the nineteenth century, who does not understand that rights which are now impossible may have been reasonable and legitimate in the days when they were actually exercised.

The zeal with which Mr. Goldwin Smith condemns the Irish establishment and the policy of the ascendency is all the more meritorious because he has no conception of the amount of iniquity involved in them.

The State Church of Ireland, however anomalous and even scandalous its position may be as the Church of a dominant minority upheld by force in the midst of a hostile people, does not, in truth, rest on a principle different from that of other State Churches. To justify the existence of any State Church, it must be assumed as an axiom that the State is the judge of religious truth; and that it is bound to impose upon its subjects, or at least to require them as a community to maintain, the religion which it judges to be true (p. 91).

No such analogy in reality subsists as is here assumed. There is a great difference between the Irish and the English establishment; but even the latter has no similarity of principle with the Catholic establishments of the continent.

The fundamental distinction is, that in one case the religion of the people is adopted by the State, whilst in the other the State imposes a religion on the people. For the political justification of Catholic establishments, no more is required than the theory that it is just that the religion of a country should be represented in, and protected by, its government. This is evidently and universally true; for the moral basis which human laws require can only be derived from an influence which was originally religious as well as moral. The unity of moral consciousness must be founded on a precedent unity of spiritual belief. According to this theory, the character of the nation determines the forms of the State. Consequently it is a theory consistent with freedom. But Protestant establishments, according to our author's definition, which applies to them, and to them alone, rest on the opposite theory, that the will of the State is independent of the condition of the community; and that it may, or indeed must, impose on the nation a faith which may be that of a minority, and which in some cases has been that of the sovereign alone. According to the Catholic view, government may preserve in its laws, and by its authority, the religion of the community; according to the Protestant view it may be bound to change it. A government which has power to change the faith of its subjects must be absolute in other things; so that one theory is as favourable to tyranny as the other is opposed to it. The safeguard of the Catholic system of Church and State, as contrasted with the Protestant, was that very authority which the Holy See used to prevent the sovereign from changing the religion of the people, by deposing him if he departed from it himself. In most Catholic countries the Church preceded the State; some she assisted to form; all she contributed to sustain. Throughout Western Europe Catholicism was the religion of the inhabitants before the new monarchies were founded. The invaders, who became the dominant race and the architects of a new system of States, were sooner or later compelled, in order to preserve their dominion, to abandon their pagan or their Arian religion, and to adopt the common faith of the immense majority of the people. The connection between Church and State was therefore a natural, not an arbitrary, institution; the result of the submission of the Government to popular influence, and the means by which that influence was perpetuated. No Catholic Government ever imposed a Catholic establishment on a Protestant community, or destroyed a Protestant establishment. Even the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the greatest wrong ever inflicted on the Protestant subjects of a Catholic State, will bear no comparison with the establishment of the religion of a minority. It is a far greater wrong than the most severe persecution, because persecution may be necessary for the preservation of an existing society, as in the case of the early Christians and of the Albigenses; but a State Church can only be justified by the acquiescence of the nation. In every other case it is a great social danger, and is inseparable from political oppression.

Mr. Goldwin Smith's vision is bounded by the Protestant horizon. The Irish establishment has one great mark in common with the other Protestant establishments,--that it is the creature of the State, and an instrument of political influence. They were all imposed on the nation by the State power, sometimes against the will of the people, sometimes against that of the Crown. By the help of military power and of penal laws, the State strove to provide that the Established Church should not be the religion of the minority. But in Ireland the establishment was introduced too late--when Protestantism had spent its expansive force, and the attraction of its doctrine no longer aided the efforts of the civil power. Its position was false from the beginning, and obliged it to resort to persecution and official proselytism in order to put an end to the anomaly. Whilst, therefore, in all cases, Protestantism became the Established Church by an exercise of authority tyrannical in itself, and possible only from the absolutism of the ruling power, in Ireland the tyranny of its institution was perpetuated in the system by which it was upheld, and in the violence with which it was introduced; and this tyranny continues through all its existence. It is the religion of the minority, the church of an alien State, the cause of suffering and of disturbance, an instrument, a creature, and a monument of conquest and of tyranny. It has nothing in common with Catholic establishments, and none of those qualities which, in the Anglican Church, redeem in part the guilt of its origin. This is not, however, the only point on which our author has mistaken the peculiar and enormous character of the evils of Ireland.

With the injustice which generally attends his historical parallels, he compares the policy of the Orange faction to that of the Jacobins in France.

The ferocity of the Jacobins was in a slight degree redeemed by their fanaticism. Their objects were not entirely selfish. They murdered aristocrats, not only because they hated and feared them, but because they wildly imagined them to stand in the way of the social and political millennium, which, according to Rousseau, awaited the acceptance of mankind (p. 175).

No comparison can be more unfair than one which places the pitiless fanaticism of an idea in the same line with the cruelty inspired by a selfish interest. The Reign of Terror is one of the most portentous events in history, because it was the consistent result of the simplest and most acceptable principle of the Revolution; it saved France from the coalition, and it was the greatest attempt ever made to mould the form of a society by force into harmony with a speculative form of Government. An explanation which treats self-interest as its primary motive, and judges other elements as merely qualifying it, is ludicrously inadequate.

The Terrorism of Robespierre was produced by the theory of equality, which was not a mere passion, but a political doctrine, and at the same time a national necessity. Political philosophers who, since the time of Hobbes, derive the State from a social compact, necessarily assume that the contracting parties were equal among themselves. By nature, therefore, all men possess equal rights, and a right to equality. The introduction of the civil power and of private property brought inequality into the world. This is opposed to the condition and to the rights of the natural state. The writers of the eighteenth century attributed to this circumstance the evils and sufferings of society. In France, the ruin of the public finances and the misery of the lower orders were both laid at the door of the classes whose property was exempt from taxation. The endeavours of successive ministers--of Turgot, Necker, and Calonne--to break down the privileges of the aristocracy and of the clergy were defeated by the resistance of the old society. The Government attempted to save itself by obtaining concessions from the Notables, but without success, and then the great reform which the State was impotent to carry into execution was effected by the people. The destruction of the aristocratic society, which the absolute monarchy had failed to reform, was the object and the triumph of the Revolution; and the Constitution of 1791 declared all men equal, and withdrew the sanction of the law from every privilege.

This system gave only an equality in civil rights, a political equality such as already subsisted in America; but it did not provide against the existence or the growth of those social inequalities by which the distribution of political power might be affected. But the theory of the natural equality of mankind understands equal rights as rights to equal things in the State, and requires not only an abstract equality of rights, but a positive equality of power. The varieties of condition caused by civilisation were so objectionable in the eyes of this school, that Rousseau wrote earnest vindications of natural society, and condemned the whole social fabric of Europe as artificial, unnatural, and monstrous. His followers laboured to destroy the work of history and the influence of the past, and to institute a natural, reasonable order of things which should dispose all men on an equal level, which no disparity of wealth or education should be permitted to disturb. There were, therefore, two opinions in the revolutionary party. Those who overthrew the monarchy, established the republic, and commenced the war, were content with having secured political and legal equality, and wished to leave the nation in the enjoyment of those advantages which fortune distributes unequally. But the consistent partisans of equality required that nothing should be allowed to raise one man above another. The Girondists wished to preserve liberty, education, and property; but the Jacobins, who held that an absolute equality should be maintained by the despotism of the government over the people, interpreted more justly the democratic principles which were common to both parties; and, fortunately for their country, they triumphed over their illogical and irresolute adversaries. "When the revolutionary movement was once established," says De Maistre, "nothing but Jacobinism could save France."

Three weeks after the fall of the Gironde, the Constitution of 1793, by which a purely ideal democracy was instituted, was presented to the French people. Its adoption exactly coincides with the supremacy of Robespierre in the Committee of Public Safety, and with the inauguration of the Reign of Terror. The danger of invasion made the new tyranny possible, but the political doctrine of the Jacobins made it necessary. Robespierre explains the system in his report on the principles of political morality, presented to the Convention at the moment of his greatest power:--

If the principle of a popular government in time of peace is virtue, its principle during revolution is virtue and terror combined: virtue, without which terror is pernicious; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but rapid, severe, inflexible justice; therefore a product of virtue. It is not so much a principle in itself, as a consequence of the universal principle of democracy in its application to the urgent necessities of the country.

This is perfectly true. Envy, revenge, fear, were motives by which individuals were induced or enabled to take part in the administration of such a system; but its introduction was not the work of passion, but the inevitable result of a doctrine. The democratic Constitution required to be upheld by violence, not only against foreign arms, but against the state of society and the nature of things. The army could not be made its instrument, because the rulers were civilians, and feared, beyond all things, the influence of military officers in the State. Officers were frequently arrested and condemned as traitors, compelled to seek safety in treason, watched and controlled by members of the Convention. In the absence of a military despotism, the revolutionary tribunal was the only resource.

The same theory of an original state of nature, from which the principle of equality was deduced, also taught men where they might find the standard of equality; as civilisation, by means of civil power, education, and wealth, was the source of corruption, the purity of virtue was to be found in the classes which had been least exposed to those disturbing causes. Those who were least tainted by the temptations of civilised society remained in the natural state. This was the definition of the new notion of the people, which became the measure of virtue and of equality. The democratic theory required that the whole nation should be reduced to the level of the lower orders in all those things in which society creates disparity, in order to be raised to the level of that republican virtue which resides among those who have retained a primitive simplicity by escaping the influence of civilisation.

The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy. It was necessary that it should exist if the Constitution was to stand, and if the great ideal of popular enthusiasm was ever to be realised. The Revolution had begun by altering the social condition of the country; the correction of society by the State had already commenced. It did not, therefore, seem impossible to continue it until the nation should be completely remodelled in conformity with the new principles. The system before which the ancient monarchy had fallen, which was so fruitful of marvels, which was victorious over a more formidable coalition than that which had humbled Lewis XIV., was deemed equal to the task of completing the social changes which had been so extensively begun, and of moulding France according to the new and simple pattern. The equality which was essential to the existence of the new form of government did not in fact exist. Privilege was abolished, but influence remained. All the inequality founded on wealth, education, ability, reputation, even on the virtues of a code different from that of republican morality, presented obstacles to the establishment of the new régime, and those who were thus distinguished were necessarily enemies of the State. With perfect reason, all that rose above the common level, or did not conform to the universal rule, was deemed treasonable. The difference between the actual society and the ideal equality was so great that it could be removed only by violence. The great mass of those who perished were really, either by attachment or by their condition, in antagonism with the State. They were condemned, not for particular acts, but for their position, or for acts which denoted, not so much a hostile design, as an incompatible habit. By the loi des suspects, which was provoked by this conflict between the form of government and the real state of the country, whole classes, rather than ill-disposed individuals, were declared objects of alarm. Hence the proscription was wholesale. Criminals were judged and executed in categories; and the merits of individual cases were, therefore, of little account. For this reason, leading men of ability, bitterly hostile to the new system, were saved by Danton; for it was often indifferent who were the victims, provided the group to which they belonged was struck down. The question was not, what crimes has the prisoner committed? but, does he belong to one of those classes whose existence the Republic cannot tolerate? From this point of view, there were not so many unjust judgments pronounced, at least in Paris, as is generally believed. It was necessary to be prodigal of blood, or to abandon the theory of liberty and equality, which had commanded, for a whole generation, the enthusiastic devotion of educated men, and for the truth of which thousands of its believers were ready to die. The truth of that doctrine was tested by a terrible alternative; but the fault lay with those who believed it, not exclusively with those who practised it. There were few who could administer such a system without any other motive but devotion to the idea, or who could retain the coolness and indifference of which St. Just is an extraordinary example. Most of the Terrorists were swayed by fear for themselves, or by the frenzy which is produced by familiarity with slaughter. But this is of small account. The significance of that sanguinary drama lies in the fact, that a political abstraction was powerful enough to make men think themselves right in destroying masses of their countrymen in the attempt to impose it on their country. The horror of that system and its failure have given vitality to the communistic theory. It was unreasonable to attack the effect instead of the cause, and cruel to destroy the proprietor, while the danger lay in the property. For private property necessarily produces that inequality which the Jacobin theory condemned; and the Constitution of 1793 could not be maintained by Terrorism without Communism, by proscribing the rich while riches were tolerated. The Jacobins were guilty of inconsistency in omitting to attack inequality in its source. Yet no man who admits their theory has a right to complain of their acts. The one proceeded from the other with the inflexible logic of history. The Reign of Terror was nothing else than the reign of those who conceive that liberty and equality can coexist.

One more quotation will sufficiently justify what we have said of the sincerity and ignorance which Mr. Goldwin Smith shows in his remarks on Catholic subjects. After calling the Bull of Adrian IV. "the stumbling-block and the despair of Catholic historians," he proceeded to say:--

Are Catholics filled with perplexity at the sight of infallibility sanctioning rapine? They can scarcely be less perplexed by the title which infallibility puts forward to the dominion of Ireland.... But this perplexity arises entirely from the assumption, which may be an article of faith, but is not an article of history, that the infallible morality of the Pope has never changed (pp. 46, 47).

It is hard to understand how a man of honour and ability can entertain such notions of the character of the Papacy as these words imply, or where he can have found authorities for so monstrous a caricature. We will only say that infallibility is no attribute of the political system of the Popes, and that the Bulls of Adrian and Alexander are not instances of infallible morality.

Great as the errors which we have pointed out undoubtedly are, the book itself is of real value, and encourages us to form sanguine hopes of the future services of its author to historical science, and ultimately to religion. We are hardly just in complaining of Protestant writers who fail to do justice to the Church. There are not very many amongst ourselves who take the trouble to ascertain her real character as a visible institution, or to know how her nature has been shown in her history. We know the doctrine which she teaches; we are familiar with the outlines of her discipline. We know that sanctity is one of her marks, and that beneficence has characterised her influence. In a general way we are confident that historical accusations are as false as dogmatic attacks, and most of us have some notion of the way in which the current imputations are to be met. But as to her principles of action in many important things, how they have varied in course of time, what changes have been effected by circumstances, and what rules have never been broken,--few are at the pains to inquire. As adversaries imagine that in exposing a Catholic they strike Catholicism, and that the defects of the men are imperfections in the institution and a proof that it is not divine, so we grow accustomed to confound in our defence that which is defective and that which is indefectible, and to discover in the Church merits as self-contradictory as are the accusations of her different foes. At one moment we are told that Catholicism teaches contempt, and therefore neglect of wealth; at another, that it is false to say that the Church does not promote temporal prosperity. If a great point is made against persecution, it will be denied that she is intolerant, whilst at another time it will be argued that heresy and unbelief deserve to be punished.

We cannot be surprised that Protestants do not know the Church better than we do ourselves, or that, while we allow no evil to be spoken of her human elements, those who deem her altogether human should discover in her the defects of human institutions. It is intensely difficult to enter into the spirit of a system not our own. Particular principles and doctrines are easily mastered; but a system answering all the spiritual cravings, all the intellectual capabilities of man, demands more than a mere mental effort,--a submission of the intellect, an act of faith, a temporary suspension of the critical faculty. This applies not merely to the Christian religion, with its unfathomable mysteries and its inexhaustible fund of truth, but to the fruits of human speculation. Nobody has ever succeeded in writing a history of philosophy without incurring either the reproach that he is a mere historian, incapable of entering into the genius of any system, or a mere metaphysician, who can discern in all other philosophies only the relation they bear to his own. In religion the difficulty is greater still, and greatest of all with Catholicism. For the Church is to be seen, not in books, but in life. No divine can put together the whole body of her doctrine; no canonist the whole fabric of her law; no historian the infinite vicissitudes of her career. The Protestant who wishes to be informed on all these things can be advised to rely on no one manual, on no encyclopædia of her deeds and of her ideas; if he seeks to know what these have been, he must be told to look around. And to one who surveys her teaching and her fortunes through all ages and all lands, ignorant or careless of that which is essential, changeless, and immortal in her, it will not be easy to discern through so much outward change a regular development, amid such variety of forms the unchanging substance, in so many modifications fidelity to constant laws; or to recognise, in a career so chequered with failure, disaster, and suffering, with the apostasy of heroes, the weakness of rulers, and the errors of doctors, the unfailing hand of a heavenly Guide.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 322: The Rambler, March 1862.]

[Footnote 323: Works, ii. 47. This is one of the passages which, seventy years ago, were declared to be treasonable. We trust we run no risk in confessing that we entirely agree with it.]

[Footnote 324: Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Préface, p. xvi.]

[Footnote 325: "From what I have observed, it is pride, arrogance, and a spirit of domination, and not a bigoted spirit of religion, that has caused and kept up those oppressive statutes. I am sure I have known those who have oppressed Papists in their civil rights exceedingly indulgent to them in their religious ceremonies, and who really wished them to continue Catholics, in order to furnish pretences for oppression. These persons never saw a man (by converting) escape out of their power but with grudging and regret" (Burke. "On the Penal Laws against Irish Catholics," Works, iv. 505).

"I vow to God, I would sooner bring myself to put a man to immediate death for opinions I disliked, and so to get rid of the man and his opinions at once, than to fret him into a feverish being tainted with the jail-distemper of a contagious servitude, to keep him above ground, an animated mass of putrefaction, corrupted himself, and corrupting all about him" (Speech at Bristol, ibid. iii. 427).]

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IX. NATIONALITY[326]

Whenever great intellectual cultivation has been combined with that suffering which is inseparable from extensive changes in the condition of the people, men of speculative or imaginative genius have sought in the contemplation of an ideal society a remedy, or at least a consolation, for evils which they were practically unable to remove. Poetry has always preserved the idea, that at some distant time or place, in the Western islands or the Arcadian region, an innocent and contented people, free from the corruption and restraint of civilised life, have realised the legends of the golden age. The office of the poets is always nearly the same, and there is little variation in the features of their ideal world; but when philosophers attempt to admonish or reform mankind by devising an imaginary state, their motive is more definite and immediate, and their commonwealth is a satire as well as a model. Plato and Plotinus, More and Campanella, constructed their fanciful societies with those materials which were omitted from the fabric of the actual communities, by the defects of which they were inspired. The Republic, the Utopia, and the City of the Sun were protests against a state of things which the experience of their authors taught them to condemn, and from the faults of which they took refuge in the opposite extremes. They remained without influence, and have never passed from literary into political history, because something more than discontent and speculative ingenuity is needed in order to invest a political idea with power over the masses of mankind. The scheme of a philosopher can command the practical allegiance of fanatics only, not of nations; and though oppression may give rise to violent and repeated outbreaks, like the convulsions of a man in pain, it cannot mature a settled purpose and plan of regeneration, unless a new notion of happiness is joined to the sense of present evil.

The history of religion furnishes a complete illustration. Between the later mediæval sects and Protestantism there is an essential difference, that outweighs the points of analogy found in those systems which are regarded as heralds of the Reformation, and is enough to explain the vitality of the last in comparison with the others. Whilst Wycliffe and Hus contradicted certain particulars of the Catholic teaching, Luther rejected the authority of the Church, and gave to the individual conscience an independence which was sure to lead to an incessant resistance. There is a similar difference between the Revolt of the Netherlands, the Great Rebellion, the War of Independence, or the rising of Brabant, on the one hand, and the French Revolution on the other. Before 1789, insurrections were provoked by particular wrongs, and were justified by definite complaints and by an appeal to principles which all men acknowledged. New theories were sometimes advanced in the cause of controversy, but they were accidental, and the great argument against tyranny was fidelity to the ancient laws. Since the change produced by the French Revolution, those aspirations which are awakened by the evils and defects of the social state have come to act as permanent and energetic forces throughout the civilised world. They are spontaneous and aggressive, needing no prophet to proclaim, no champion to defend them, but popular, unreasoning, and almost irresistible. The Revolution effected this change, partly by its doctrines, partly by the indirect influence of events. It taught the people to regard their wishes and wants as the supreme criterion of right. The rapid vicissitudes of power, in which each party successively appealed to the favour of the masses as the arbiter of success, accustomed the masses to be arbitrary as well as insubordinate. The fall of many governments, and the frequent redistribution of territory, deprived all settlements of the dignity of permanence. Tradition and prescription ceased to be guardians of authority; and the arrangements which proceeded from revolutions, from the triumphs of war, and from treaties of peace, were equally regardless of established rights. Duty cannot be dissociated from right, and nations refuse to be controlled by laws which are no protection.

In this condition of the world, theory and action follow close upon each other, and practical evils easily give birth to opposite systems. In the realms of free-will, the regularity of natural progress is preserved by the conflict of extremes. The impulse of the reaction carries men from one extremity towards another. The pursuit of a remote and ideal object, which captivates the imagination by its splendour and the reason by its simplicity, evokes an energy which would not be inspired by a rational, possible end, limited by many antagonistic claims, and confined to what is reasonable, practicable, and just. One excess or exaggeration is the corrective of the other, and error promotes truth, where the masses are concerned, by counterbalancing a contrary error. The few have not strength to achieve great changes unaided; the many have not wisdom to be moved by truth unmixed. Where the disease is various, no particular definite remedy can meet the wants of all. Only the attraction of an abstract idea, or of an ideal state, can unite in a common action multitudes who seek a universal cure for many special evils, and a common restorative applicable to many different conditions. And hence false principles, which correspond with the bad as well as with the just aspirations of mankind, are a normal and necessary element in the social life of nations.

Theories of this kind are just, inasmuch as they are provoked by definite ascertained evils, and undertake their removal. They are useful in opposition, as a warning or a threat, to modify existing things, and keep awake the consciousness of wrong. They cannot serve as a basis for the reconstruction of civil society, as medicine cannot serve for food; but they may influence it with advantage, because they point out the direction, though not the measure, in which reform is needed. They oppose an order of things which is the result of a selfish and violent abuse of power by the ruling classes, and of artificial restriction on the natural progress of the world, destitute of an ideal element or a moral purpose. Practical extremes differ from the theoretical extremes they provoke, because the first are both arbitrary and violent, whilst the last, though also revolutionary, are at the same time remedial. In one case the wrong is voluntary, in the other it is inevitable. This is the general character of the contest between the existing order and the subversive theories that deny its legitimacy. There are three principal theories of this kind, impugning the present distribution of power, of property, and of territory, and attacking respectively the aristocracy, the middle class, and the sovereignty. They are the theories of equality, communism, and nationality. Though sprung from a common origin, opposing cognate evils, and connected by many links, they did not appear simultaneously. Rousseau proclaimed the first, Baboeuf the second, Mazzini the third; and the third is the most recent in its appearance, the most attractive at the present time, and the richest in promise of future power.

In the old European system, the rights of nationalities were neither recognised by governments nor asserted by the people. The interest of the reigning families, not those of the nations, regulated the frontiers; and the administration was conducted generally without any reference to popular desires. Where all liberties were suppressed, the claims of national independence were necessarily ignored, and a princess, in the words of Fénelon, carried a monarchy in her wedding portion. The eighteenth century acquiesced in this oblivion of corporate rights on the Continent, for the absolutists cared only for the State, and the liberals only for the individual. The Church, the nobles, and the nation had no place in the popular theories of the age; and they devised none in their own defence, for they were not openly attacked. The aristocracy retained its privileges, and the Church her property; and the dynastic interest, which overruled the natural inclination of the nations and destroyed their independence, nevertheless maintained their integrity. The national sentiment was not wounded in its most sensitive part. To dispossess a sovereign of his hereditary crown, and to annex his dominions, would have been held to inflict an injury upon all monarchies, and to furnish their subjects with a dangerous example, by depriving royalty of its inviolable character. In time of war, as there was no national cause at stake, there was no attempt to rouse national feeling. The courtesy of the rulers towards each other was proportionate to the contempt for the lower orders. Compliments passed between the commanders of hostile armies; there was no bitterness, and no excitement; battles were fought with the pomp and pride of a parade. The art of war became a slow and learned game. The monarchies were united not only by a natural community of interests, but by family alliances. A marriage contract sometimes became the signal for an interminable war, whilst family connections often set a barrier to ambition. After the wars of religion came to an end in 1648, the only wars were those which were waged for an inheritance or a dependency, or against countries whose system of government exempted them from the common law of dynastic States, and made them not only unprotected but obnoxious. These countries were England and Holland, until Holland ceased to be a republic, and until, in England, the defeat of the Jacobites in the forty-five terminated the struggle for the Crown. There was one country, however, which still continued to be an exception; one monarch whose place was not admitted in the comity of kings.

Poland did not possess those securities for stability which were supplied by dynastic connections and the theory of legitimacy, wherever a crown could be obtained by marriage or inheritance. A monarch without royal blood, a crown bestowed by the nation, were an anomaly and an outrage in that age of dynastic absolutism. The country was excluded from the European system by the nature of its institutions. It excited a cupidity which could not be satisfied. It gave the reigning families of Europe no hope of permanently strengthening themselves by intermarriage with its rulers, or of obtaining it by bequest or by inheritance. The Habsburgs had contested the possession of Spain and the Indies with the French Bourbons, of Italy with the Spanish Bourbons, of the empire with the house of Wittelsbach, of Silesia with the house of Hohenzollern. There had been wars between rival houses for half the territories of Italy and Germany. But none could hope to redeem their losses or increase their power in a country to which marriage and descent gave no claim. Where they could not permanently inherit they endeavoured, by intrigues, to prevail at each election, and after contending in support of candidates who were their partisans, the neighbours at last appointed an instrument for the final demolition of the Polish State. Till then no nation had been deprived of its political existence by the Christian Powers, and whatever disregard had been shown for national interests and sympathies, some care had been taken to conceal the wrong by a hypocritical perversion of law. But the partition of Poland was an act of wanton violence, committed in open defiance not only of popular feeling but of public law. For the first time in modern history a great State was suppressed, and a whole nation divided among its enemies.

This famous measure, the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism, awakened the theory of nationality in Europe, converting a dormant right into an aspiration, and a sentiment into a political claim. "No wise or honest man," wrote Edmund Burke, "can approve of that partition, or can contemplate it without prognosticating great mischief from it to all countries at some future time."[327] Thenceforward there was a nation demanding to be united in a State,--a soul, as it were, wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again; and, for the first time, a cry was heard that the arrangement of States was unjust--that their limits were unnatural, and that a whole people was deprived of its right to constitute an independent community. Before that claim could be efficiently asserted against the overwhelming power of its opponents,--before it gained energy, after the last partition, to overcome the influence of long habits of submission, and of the contempt which previous disorders had brought upon Poland,--the ancient European system was in ruins, and a new world was rising in its place.

The old despotic policy which made the Poles its prey had two adversaries,--the spirit of English liberty, and the doctrines of that revolution which destroyed the French monarchy with its own weapons; and these two contradicted in contrary ways the theory that nations have no collective rights. At the present day, the theory of nationality is not only the most powerful auxiliary of revolution, but its actual substance in the movements of the last three years. This, however, is a recent alliance, unknown to the first French Revolution. The modern theory of nationality arose partly as a legitimate consequence, partly as a reaction against it. As the system which overlooked national division was opposed by liberalism in two forms, the French and the English, so the system which insists upon them proceeds from two distinct sources, and exhibits the character either of 1688 or of 1789. When the French people abolished the authorities under which it lived, and became its own master, France was in danger of dissolution: for the common will is difficult to ascertain, and does not readily agree. "The laws," said Vergniaud, in the debate on the sentence of the king, "are obligatory only as the presumptive will of the people, which retains the right of approving or condemning them. The instant it manifests its wish the work of the national representation, the law, must disappear." This doctrine resolved society into its natural elements, and threatened to break up the country into as many republics as there were communes. For true republicanism is the principle of self-government in the whole and in all the parts. In an extensive country, it can prevail only by the union of several independent communities in a single confederacy, as in Greece, in Switzerland, in the Netherlands, and in America; so that a large republic not founded on the federal principle must result in the government of a single city, like Rome and Paris, and, in a less degree, Athens, Berne, and Amsterdam; or, in other words, a great democracy must either sacrifice self-government to unity, or preserve it by federalism.

The France of history fell together with the French State, which was the growth of centuries. The old sovereignty was destroyed. The local authorities were looked upon with aversion and alarm. The new central authority needed to be established on a new principle of unity. The state of nature, which was the ideal of society, was made the basis of the nation; descent was put in the place of tradition, and the French people was regarded as a physical product: an ethnological, not historic, unit. It was assumed that a unity existed separate from the representation and the government, wholly independent of the past, and capable at any moment of expressing or of changing its mind. In the words of Sieyès, it was no longer France, but some unknown country to which the nation was transported. The central power possessed authority, inasmuch as it obeyed the whole, and no divergence was permitted from the universal sentiment. This power, endowed with volition, was personified in the Republic One and Indivisible. The title signified that a part could not speak or act for the whole,--that there was a power supreme over the State, distinct from, and independent of, its members; and it expressed, for the first time in history, the notion of an abstract nationality. In this manner the idea of the sovereignty of the people, uncontrolled by the past, gave birth to the idea of nationality independent of the political influence of history. It sprang from the rejection of the two authorities,--of the State and of the past. The kingdom of France was, geographically as well as politically, the product of a long series of events, and the same influences which built up the State formed the territory. The Revolution repudiated alike the agencies to which France owed her boundaries and those to which she owed her government. Every effaceable trace and relic of national history was carefully wiped away,--the system of administration, the physical divisions of the country, the classes of society, the corporations, the weights and measures, the calendar. France was no longer bounded by the limits she had received from the condemned influence of her history; she could recognise only those which were set by nature. The definition of the nation was borrowed from the material world, and, in order to avoid a loss of territory, it became not only an abstraction but a fiction.

There was a principle of nationality in the ethnological character of the movement, which is the source of the common observation that revolution is more frequent in Catholic than in Protestant countries. It is, in fact, more frequent in the Latin than in the Teutonic world, because it depends partly on a national impulse, which is only awakened where there is an alien element, the vestige of a foreign dominion, to expel. Western Europe has undergone two conquests--one by the Romans and one by the Germans, and twice received laws from the invaders. Each time it rose again against the victorious race; and the two great reactions, while they differ according to the different characters of the two conquests, have the phenomenon of imperialism in common. The Roman republic laboured to crush the subjugated nations into a homogeneous and obedient mass; but the increase which the proconsular authority obtained in the process subverted the republican government, and the reaction of the provinces against Rome assisted in establishing the empire The Cæsarean system gave an unprecedented freedom to the dependencies, and raised them to a civil equality which put an end to the dominion of race over race and of class over class. The monarchy was hailed as a refuge from the pride and cupidity of the Roman people; and the love of equality, the hatred of nobility, and the tolerance of despotism implanted by Rome became, at least in Gaul, the chief feature of the national character. But among the nations whose vitality had been broken down by the stern republic, not one retained the materials necessary to enjoy independence, or to develop a new history. The political faculty which organises states and finds society in a moral order was exhausted, and the Christian doctors looked in vain over the waste of ruins for a people by whose aid the Church might survive the decay of Rome. A new element of national life was brought to that declining world by the enemies who destroyed it. The flood of barbarians settled over it for a season, and then subsided; and when the landmarks of civilisation appeared once more, it was found that the soil had been impregnated with a fertilising and regenerating influence, and that the inundation had laid the germs of future states and of a new society. The political sense and energy came with the new blood, and was exhibited in the power exercised by the younger race upon the old, and in the establishment of a graduated freedom. Instead of universal equal rights, the actual enjoyment of which is necessarily contingent on, and commensurate with, power, the rights of the people were made dependent on a variety of conditions, the first of which was the distribution of property. Civil society became a classified organism instead of a formless combination of atoms, and the feudal system gradually arose.

Roman Gaul had so thoroughly adopted the ideas of absolute authority and undistinguished equality during the five centuries between Cæsar and Clovis, that the people could never be reconciled to the new system. Feudalism remained a foreign importation, and the feudal aristocracy an alien race, and the common people of France sought protection against both in the Roman jurisprudence and the power of the crown. The development of absolute monarchy by the help of democracy is the one constant character of French history. The royal power, feudal at first, and limited by the immunities and the great vassals, became more popular as it grew more absolute; while the suppression of aristocracy, the removal of the intermediate authorities, was so particularly the object of the nation, that it was more energetically accomplished after the fall of the throne. The monarchy which had been engaged from the thirteenth century in curbing the nobles, was at last thrust aside by the democracy, because it was too dilatory in the work, and was unable to deny its own origin and effectually ruin the class from which it sprang. All those things which constitute the peculiar character of the French Revolution,--the demand for equality, the hatred of nobility and feudalism, and of the Church which was connected with them, the constant reference to pagan examples, the suppression of monarchy, the new code of law, the breach with tradition, and the substitution of an ideal system for everything that had proceeded from the mixture and mutual action of the races,--all these exhibit the common type of a reaction against the effects of the Frankish invasion. The hatred of royalty was less than the hatred of aristocracy; privileges were more detested than tyranny; and the king perished because of the origin of his authority rather than because of its abuse. Monarchy unconnected with aristocracy became popular in France, even when most uncontrolled; whilst the attempt to reconstitute the throne, and to limit and fence it with its peers, broke down, because the old Teutonic elements on which it relied--hereditary nobility, primogeniture, and privilege--were no longer tolerated. The substance of the ideas of 1789 is not the limitation of the sovereign power, but the abrogation of intermediate powers. These powers, and the classes which enjoyed them, come in Latin Europe from a barbarian origin; and the movement which calls itself liberal is essentially national. If liberty were its object, its means would be the establishment of great independent authorities not derived from the State, and its model would be England. But its object is equality; and it seeks, like France in 1789, to cast out the elements of inequality which were introduced by the Teutonic race. This is the object which Italy and Spain have had in common with France, and herein consists the natural league of the Latin nations.

This national element in the movement was not understood by the revolutionary leaders. At first, their doctrine appeared entirely contrary to the idea of nationality. They taught that certain general principles of government were absolutely right in all States; and they asserted in theory the unrestricted freedom of the individual, and the supremacy of the will over every external necessity or obligation. This is in apparent contradiction to the national theory, that certain natural forces ought to determine the character, the form, and the policy of the State, by which a kind of fate is put in the place of freedom. Accordingly the national sentiment was not developed directly out of the revolution in which it was involved, but was exhibited first in resistance to it, when the attempt to emancipate had been absorbed in the desire to subjugate, and the republic had been succeeded by the empire. Napoleon called a new power into existence by attacking nationality in Russia, by delivering it in Italy, by governing in defiance of it in Germany and Spain. The sovereigns of these countries were deposed or degraded; and a system of administration was introduced which was French in its origin, its spirit, and its instruments. The people resisted the change. The movement against it was popular and spontaneous, because the rulers were absent or helpless; and it was national, because it was directed against foreign institutions. In Tyrol, in Spain, and afterwards in Prussia, the people did not receive the impulse from the government, but undertook of their own accord to cast out the armies and the ideas of revolutionised France. Men were made conscious of the national element of the revolution by its conquests, not in its rise. The three things which the Empire most openly oppressed--religion, national independence, and political liberty--united in a short-lived league to animate the great uprising by which Napoleon fell. Under the influence of that memorable alliance a political spirit was called forth on the Continent, which clung to freedom and abhorred revolution, and sought to restore, to develop, and to reform the decayed national institutions. The men who proclaimed these ideas, Stein and Görres, Humboldt, Müller, and De Maistre,[328] were as hostile to Bonapartism as to the absolutism of the old governments, and insisted on the national rights, which had been invaded equally by both, and which they hoped to restore by the destruction of the French supremacy. With the cause that triumphed at Waterloo the friends of the Revolution had no sympathy, for they had learned to identify their doctrine with the cause of France. The Holland House Whigs in England, the Afrancesados in Spain, the Muratists in Italy, and the partisans of the Confederation of the Rhine, merging patriotism in their revolutionary affections, regretted the fall of the French power, and looked with alarm at those new and unknown forces which the War of Deliverance had evoked, and which were as menacing to French liberalism as to French supremacy.

But the new aspirations for national and popular rights were crushed at the restoration. The liberals of those days cared for freedom, not in the shape of national independence, but of French institutions; and they combined against the nations with the ambition of the governments. They were as ready to sacrifice nationality to their ideal as the Holy Alliance was to the interests of absolutism. Talleyrand indeed declared at Vienna that the Polish question ought to have precedence over all other questions, because the partition of Poland had been one of the first and greatest causes of the evils which Europe had suffered; but dynastic interests prevailed. All the sovereigns represented at Vienna recovered their dominions, except the King of Saxony, who was punished for his fidelity to Napoleon; but the States that were unrepresented in the reigning families--Poland, Venice, and Genoa--were not revived, and even the Pope had great difficulty in recovering the Legations from the grasp of Austria. Nationality, which the old régime had ignored, which had been outraged by the revolution and the empire, received, after its first open demonstration, the hardest blow at the Congress of Vienna. The principle which the first partition had generated, to which the revolution had given a basis of theory, which had been lashed by the empire into a momentary convulsive effort, was matured by the long error of the restoration into a consistent doctrine, nourished and justified by the situation of Europe.

The governments of the Holy Alliance devoted themselves to suppress with equal care the revolutionary spirit by which they had been threatened, and the national spirit by which they had been restored. Austria, which owed nothing to the national movement, and had prevented its revival after 1809, naturally took the lead in repressing it. Every disturbance of the final settlements of 1815, every aspiration for changes or reforms, was condemned as sedition. This system repressed the good with the evil tendencies of the age; and the resistance which it provoked, during the generation that passed away from the restoration to the fall of Metternich, and again under the reaction which commenced with Schwarzenberg and ended with the administrations of Bach and Manteuffel, proceeded from various combinations of the opposite forms of liberalism. In the successive phases of that struggle, the idea that national claims are above all other rights gradually rose to the supremacy which it now possesses among the revolutionary agencies.

The first liberal movement, that of the Carbonari in the south of Europe, had no specific national character, but was supported by the Bonapartists both in Spain and Italy. In the following years the opposite ideas of 1813 came to the front, and a revolutionary movement, in many respects hostile to the principles of revolution, began in defence of liberty, religion, and nationality. All these causes were united in the Irish agitation, and in the Greek, Belgian, and Polish revolutions. Those sentiments which had been insulted by Napoleon, and had risen against him, rose against the governments of the restoration. They had been oppressed by the sword, and then by the treaties. The national principle added force, but not justice, to this movement, which, in every case but Poland, was successful. A period followed in which it degenerated into a purely national idea, as the agitation for repeal succeeded emancipation, and Panslavism and Panhellenism arose under the auspices of the Eastern Church. This was the third phase of the resistance to the settlement of Vienna, which was weak, because it failed to satisfy national or constitutional aspirations, either of which would have been a safeguard against the other, by a moral if not by a popular justification. At first, in 1813, the people rose against their conquerors, in defence of their legitimate rulers. They refused to be governed by usurpers. In the period between 1825 and 1831, they resolved that they would not be misgoverned by strangers. The French administration was often better than that which it displaced, but there were prior claimants for the authority exercised by the French, and at first the national contest was a contest for legitimacy. In the second period this element was wanting. No dispossessed princes led the Greeks, the Belgians, or the Poles. The Turks, the Dutch, and the Russians were attacked, not as usurpers, but as oppressors,--because they misgoverned, not because they were of a different race. Then began a time when the text simply was, that nations would not be governed by foreigners. Power legitimately obtained, and exercised with moderation, was declared invalid. National rights, like religion, had borne part in the previous combinations, and had been auxiliaries in the struggles for freedom, but now nationality became a paramount claim, which was to assert itself alone, which might put forward as pretexts the rights of rulers, the liberties of the people, the safety of religion, but which, if no such union could be formed, was to prevail at the expense of every other cause for which nations make sacrifices.

Metternich is, next to Napoleon, the chief promoter of this theory; for the anti-national character of the restoration was most distinct in Austria, and it is in opposition to the Austrian Government that nationality grew into a system. Napoleon, who, trusting to his armies, despised moral forces in politics, was overthrown by their rising. Austria committed the same fault in the government of her Italian provinces. The kingdom of Italy had united all the northern part of the Peninsula in a single State; and the national feelings, which the French repressed elsewhere, were encouraged as a safeguard of their power in Italy and in Poland. When the tide of victory turned, Austria invoked against the French the aid of the new sentiment they had fostered. Nugent announced, in his proclamation to the Italians, that they should become an independent nation. The same spirit served different masters, and contributed first to the destruction of the old States, then to the expulsion of the French, and again, under Charles Albert, to a new revolution. It was appealed to in the name of the most contradictory principles of government, and served all parties in succession, because it was one in which all could unite. Beginning by a protest against the dominion of race over race, its mildest and least-developed form, it grew into a condemnation of every State that included different races, and finally became the complete and consistent theory, that the State and the nation must be co-extensive. "It is," says Mr. Mill, "in general a necessary condition of free institutions, that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities."[329]

The outward historical progress of this idea from an indefinite aspiration to be the keystone of a political system, may be traced in the life of the man who gave to it the element in which its strength resides,--Giuseppe Mazzini. He found Carbonarism impotent against the measures of the governments, and resolved to give new life to the liberal movement by transferring it to the ground of nationality. Exile is the nursery of nationality, as oppression is the school of liberalism; and Mazzini conceived the idea of Young Italy when he was a refugee at Marseilles. In the same way, the Polish exiles are the champions of every national movement; for to them all political rights are absorbed in the idea of independence, which, however they may differ with each other, is the one aspiration common to them all. Towards the year 1830 literature also contributed to the national idea. "It was the time," says Mazzini, "of the great conflict between the romantic and the classical school, which might with equal truth be called a conflict between the partisans of freedom and of authority." The romantic school was infidel in Italy, and Catholic in Germany; but in both it had the common effect of encouraging national history and literature, and Dante was as great an authority with the Italian democrats as with the leaders of the mediæval revival at Vienna, Munich, and Berlin. But neither the influence of the exiles, nor that of the poets and critics of the new party, extended over the masses. It was a sect without popular sympathy or encouragement, a conspiracy founded not on a grievance, but on a doctrine; and when the attempt to rise was made in Savoy, in 1834, under a banner with the motto "Unity, Independence, God and Humanity," the people were puzzled at its object, and indifferent to its failure. But Mazzini continued his propaganda, developed his Giovine Italia into a Giovine Europa, and established in 1847 the international league of nations. "The people," he said, in his opening address, "is penetrated with only one idea, that of unity and nationality.... There is no international question as to forms of government, but only a national question."

The revolution of 1848, unsuccessful in its national purpose, prepared the subsequent victories of nationality in two ways. The first of these was the restoration of the Austrian power in Italy, with a new and more energetic centralisation, which gave no promise of freedom. Whilst that system prevailed, the right was on the side of the national aspirations, and they were revived in a more complete and cultivated form by Manin. The policy of the Austrian Government, which failed during the ten years of the reaction to convert the tenure by force into a tenure by right, and to establish with free institutions the condition of allegiance, gave a negative encouragement to the theory. It deprived Francis Joseph of all active support and sympathy in 1859, for he was more clearly wrong in his conduct than his enemies in their doctrines. The real cause of the energy which the national theory has acquired is, however, the triumph of the democratic principle in France, and its recognition by the European Powers. The theory of nationality is involved in the democratic theory of the sovereignty of the general will. "One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do, if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves."[330] It is by this act that a nation constitutes itself. To have a collective will, unity is necessary, and independence is requisite in order to assert it. Unity and nationality are still more essential to the notion of the sovereignty of the people than the cashiering of monarchs, or the revocation of laws. Arbitrary acts of this kind may be prevented by the happiness of the people or the popularity of the king, but a nation inspired by the democratic idea cannot with consistency allow a part of itself to belong to a foreign State, or the whole to be divided into several native States. The theory of nationality therefore proceeds from both the principles which divide the political world,--from legitimacy, which ignores its claims, and from the revolution, which assumes them; and for the same reason it is the chief weapon of the last against the first.

In pursuing the outward and visible growth of the national theory we are prepared for an examination of its political character and value. The absolutism which has created it denies equally that absolute right of national unity which is a product of democracy, and that claim of national liberty which belongs to the theory of freedom. These two views of nationality, corresponding to the French and to the English systems, are connected in name only, and are in reality the opposite extremes of political thought. In one case, nationality is founded on the perpetual supremacy of the collective will, of which the unity of the nation is the necessary condition, to which every other influence must defer, and against which no obligation enjoys authority, and all resistance is tyrannical. The nation is here an ideal unit founded on the race, in defiance of the modifying action of external causes, of tradition, and of existing rights. It overrules the rights and wishes of the inhabitants, absorbing their divergent interests in a fictitious unity; sacrifices their several inclinations and duties to the higher claim of nationality, and crushes all natural rights and all established liberties for the purpose of vindicating itself.[331] Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition. In supporting the claims of national unity, governments must be subverted in whose title there is no flaw, and whose policy is beneficent and equitable, and subjects must be compelled to transfer their allegiance to an authority for which they have no attachment, and which may be practically a foreign domination. Connected with this theory in nothing except in the common enmity of the absolute state, is the theory which represents nationality as an essential, but not a supreme element in determining the forms of the State. It is distinguished from the other, because it tends to diversity and not to uniformity, to harmony and not to unity; because it aims not at an arbitrary change, but at careful respect for the existing conditions of political life, and because it obeys the laws and results of history, not the aspirations of an ideal future. While the theory of unity makes the nation a source of despotism and revolution, the theory of liberty regards it as the bulwark of self-government, and the foremost limit to the excessive power of the State. Private rights, which are sacrificed to the unity, are preserved by the union of nations. No power can so efficiently resist the tendencies of centralisation, of corruption, and of absolutism, as that community which is the vastest that can be included in a State, which imposes on its members a consistent similarity of character, interest, and opinion, and which arrests the action of the sovereign by the influence of a divided patriotism. The presence of different nations under the same sovereignty is similar in its effect to the independence of the Church in the State. It provides against the servility which flourishes under the shadow of a single authority, by balancing interests, multiplying associations, and giving to the subject the restraint and support of a combined opinion. In the same way it promotes independence by forming definite groups of public opinion, and by affording a great source and centre of political sentiments, and of notions of duty not derived from the sovereign will. Liberty provokes diversity, and diversity preserves liberty by supplying the means of organisation. All those portions of law which govern the relations of men with each other, and regulate social life, are the varying result of national custom and the creation of private society. In these things, therefore, the several nations will differ from each other; for they themselves have produced them, and they do not owe them to the State which rules them all. This diversity in the same State is a firm barrier against the intrusion of the government beyond the political sphere which is common to all into the social department which escapes legislation and is ruled by spontaneous laws. This sort of interference is characteristic of an absolute government, and is sure to provoke a reaction, and finally a remedy. That intolerance of social freedom which is natural to absolutism is sure to find a corrective in the national diversities, which no other force could so efficiently provide. The co-existence of several nations under the same State is a test, as well as the best security of its freedom. It is also one of the chief instruments of civilisation; and, as such, it is in the natural and providential order, and indicates a state of greater advancement than the national unity which is the ideal of modern liberalism.

The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society. Inferior races are raised by living in political union with races intellectually superior. Exhausted and decaying nations are revived by the contact of a younger vitality. Nations in which the elements of organisation and the capacity for government have been lost, either through the demoralising influence of despotism, or the disintegrating action of democracy, are restored and educated anew under the discipline of a stronger and less corrupted race. This fertilising and regenerating process can only be obtained by living under one government. It is in the cauldron of the State that the fusion takes place by which the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity of one portion of mankind may be communicated to another. Where political and national boundaries coincide, society ceases to advance, and nations relapse into a condition corresponding to that of men who renounce intercourse with their fellow-men. The difference between the two unites mankind not only by the benefits it confers on those who live together, but because it connects society either by a political or a national bond, gives to every people an interest in its neighbours, either because they are under the same government or because they are of the same race, and thus promotes the interests of humanity, of civilisation, and of religion.

Christianity rejoices at the mixture of races, as paganism identifies itself with their differences, because truth is universal, and errors various and particular. In the ancient world idolatry and nationality went together, and the same term is applied in Scripture to both. It was the mission of the Church to overcome national differences. The period of her undisputed supremacy was that in which all Western Europe obeyed the same laws, all literature was contained in one language, and the political unity of Christendom was personified in a single potentate, while its intellectual unity was represented in one university. As the ancient Romans concluded their conquests by carrying away the gods of the conquered people, Charlemagne overcame the national resistance of the Saxons only by the forcible destruction of their pagan rites. Out of the mediæval period, and the combined action of the German race and the Church, came forth a new system of nations and a new conception of nationality. Nature was overcome in the nation as well as in the individual. In pagan and uncultivated times, nations were distinguished from each other by the widest diversity, not only in religion, but in customs, language, and character. Under the new law they had many things in common; the old barriers which separated them were removed, and the new principle of self-government, which Christianity imposed, enabled them to live together under the same authority, without necessarily losing their cherished habits, their customs, or their laws. The new idea of freedom made room for different races in one State. A nation was no longer what it had been to the ancient world,--the progeny of a common ancestor, or the aboriginal product of a particular region,--a result of merely physical and material causes,--but a moral and political being; not the creation of geographical or physiological unity, but developed in the course of history by the action of the State. It is derived from the State, not supreme over it. A State may in course of time produce a nationality; but that a nationality should constitute a State is contrary to the nature of modern civilisation. The nation derives its rights and its power from the memory of a former independence.

The Church has agreed in this respect with the tendency of political progress, and discouraged wherever she could the isolation of nations; admonishing them of their duties to each other, and regarding conquest and feudal investiture as the natural means of raising barbarous or sunken nations to a higher level. But though she has never attributed to national independence an immunity from the accidental consequences of feudal law, of hereditary claims, or of testamentary arrangements, she defends national liberty against uniformity and centralisation with an energy inspired by perfect community of interests. For the same enemy threatens both; and the State which is reluctant to tolerate differences, and to do justice to the peculiar character of various races, must from the same cause interfere in the internal government of religion. The connection of religious liberty with the emancipation of Poland or Ireland is not merely the accidental result of local causes; and the failure of the Concordat to unite the subjects of Austria is the natural consequence of a policy which did not desire to protect the provinces in their diversity and autonomy, and sought to bribe the Church by favours instead of strengthening her by independence. From this influence of religion in modern history has proceeded a new definition of patriotism.

The difference between nationality and the State is exhibited in the nature of patriotic attachment. Our connection with the race is merely natural or physical, whilst our duties to the political nation are ethical. One is a community of affections and instincts infinitely important and powerful in savage life, but pertaining more to the animal than to the civilised man; the other is an authority governing by laws, imposing obligations, and giving a moral sanction and character to the natural relations of society. Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion, and it stands to the domestic feelings and to home-sickness as faith to fanaticism and to superstition. It has one aspect derived from private life and nature, for it is an extension of the family affections, as the tribe is an extension of the family. But in its real political character, patriotism consists in the development of the instinct of self-preservation into a moral duty which may involve self-sacrifice. Self-preservation is both an instinct and a duty, natural and involuntary in one respect, and at the same time a moral obligation. By the first it produces the family; by the last the State. If the nation could exist without the State, subject only to the instinct of self-preservation, it would be incapable of denying, controlling, or sacrificing itself; it would be an end and a rule to itself. But in the political order moral purposes are realised and public ends are pursued to which private interests and even existence must be sacrificed. The great sign of true patriotism, the development of selfishness into sacrifice, is the product of political life. That sense of duty which is supplied by race is not entirely separated from its selfish and instinctive basis; and the love of country, like married love, stands at the same time on a material and a moral foundation. The patriot must distinguish between the two causes or objects of his devotion. The attachment which is given only to the country is like obedience given only to the State--a submission to physical influences. The man who prefers his country before every other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the State. They both deny that right is superior to authority.

There is a moral and political country, in the language of Burke, distinct from the geographical, which may be possibly in collision with it The Frenchmen who bore arms against the Convention were as patriotic as the Englishmen who bore arms against King Charles, for they recognised a higher duty than that of obedience to the actual sovereign. "In an address to France," said Burke, "in an attempt to treat with it, or in considering any scheme at all relative to it, it is impossible we should mean the geographical, we must always mean the moral and political, country.... The truth is, that France is out of itself--the moral France is separated from the geographical. The master of the house is expelled, and the robbers are in possession. If we look for the corporate people of France, existing as corporate in the eye and intention of public law (that corporate people, I mean, who are free to deliberate and to decide, and who have a capacity to treat and conclude), they are in Flanders and Germany, in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and England. There are all the princes of the blood, there are all the orders of the State, there are all the parliaments of the kingdom.... I am sure that if half that number of the same description were taken out of this country, it would leave hardly anything that I should call the people of England."[332] Rousseau draws nearly the same distinction between the country to which we happen to belong and that which fulfils towards us the political functions of the State. In the Emile he has a sentence of which it is not easy in a translation to convey the point: "Qui n'a pas une patrie a du moins un pays." And in his tract on Political Economy he writes: "How shall men love their country if it is nothing more for them than for strangers, and bestows on them only that which it can refuse to none?" It is in the same sense he says, further on, "La patrie ne peut subsister sans la liberté."[333]

The nationality formed by the State, then, is the only one to which we owe political duties, and it is, therefore, the only one which has political rights. The Swiss are ethnologically either French, Italian, or German; but no nationality has the slightest claim upon them, except the purely political nationality of Switzerland. The Tuscan or the Neapolitan State has formed a nationality, but the citizens of Florence and of Naples have no political community with each other. There are other States which have neither succeeded in absorbing distinct races in a political nationality, nor in separating a particular district from a larger nation. Austria and Mexico are instances on the one hand, Parma and Baden on the other. The progress of civilisation deals hardly with the last description of States. In order to maintain their integrity they must attach themselves by confederations, or family alliances, to greater Powers, and thus lose something of their independence. Their tendency is to isolate and shut off their inhabitants, to narrow the horizon of their views, and to dwarf in some degree the proportions of their ideas. Public opinion cannot maintain its liberty and purity in such small dimensions, and the currents that come from larger communities sweep over a contracted territory. In a small and homogeneous population there is hardly room for a natural classification of society, or for inner groups of interests that set bounds to sovereign power. The government and the subjects contend with borrowed weapons. The resources of the one and the aspirations of the other are derived from some external source, and the consequence is that the country becomes the instrument and the scene of contests in which it is not interested. These States, like the minuter communities of the Middle Ages, serve a purpose, by constituting partitions and securities of self-government in the larger States; but they are impediments to the progress of society, which depends on the mixture of races under the same governments.

The vanity and peril of national claims founded on no political tradition, but on race alone, appear in Mexico. There the races are divided by blood, without being grouped together in different regions. It is, therefore, neither possible to unite them nor to convert them into the elements of an organised State. They are fluid, shapeless, and unconnected, and cannot be precipitated, or formed into the basis of political institutions. As they cannot be used by the State, they cannot be recognised by it; and their peculiar qualities, capabilities, passions, and attachments are of no service, and therefore obtain no regard. They are necessarily ignored, and are therefore perpetually outraged. From this difficulty of races with political pretensions, but without political position, the Eastern world escaped by the institution of castes. Where there are only two races there is the resource of slavery; but when different races inhabit the different territories of one Empire composed of several smaller States, it is of all possible combinations the most favourable to the establishment of a highly developed system of freedom. In Austria there are two circumstances which add to the difficulty of the problem, but also increase its importance. The several nationalities are at very unequal degrees of advancement, and there is no single nation which is so predominant as to overwhelm or absorb the others. These are the conditions necessary for the very highest degree of organisation which government is capable of receiving. They supply the greatest variety of intellectual resource; the perpetual incentive to progress, which is afforded not merely by competition, but by the spectacle of a more advanced people; the most abundant elements of self-government, combined with the impossibility for the State to rule all by its own will; and the fullest security for the preservation of local customs and ancient rights. In such a country as this, liberty would achieve its most glorious results, while centralisation and absolutism would be destruction.

The problem presented to the government of Austria is higher than that which is solved in England, because of the necessity of admitting the national claims. The parliamentary system fails to provide for them, as it presupposes the unity of the people. Hence in those countries in which different races dwell together, it has not satisfied their desires, and is regarded as an imperfect form of freedom. It brings out more clearly than before the differences it does not recognise, and thus continues the work of the old absolutism, and appears as a new phase of centralisation. In those countries, therefore, the power of the imperial parliament must be limited as jealously as the power of the crown, and many of its functions must be discharged by provincial diets, and a descending series of local authorities.

The great importance of nationality in the State consists in the fact that it is the basis of political capacity. The character of a nation determines in great measure the form and vitality of the State. Certain political habits and ideas belong to particular nations, and they vary with the course of the national history. A people just emerging from barbarism, a people effete from the excesses of a luxurious civilisation, cannot possess the means of governing itself; a people devoted to equality, or to absolute monarchy, is incapable of producing an aristocracy; a people averse to the institution of private property is without the first element of freedom. Each of these can be converted into efficient members of a free community only by the contact of a superior race, in whose power will lie the future prospects of the State. A system which ignores these things, and does not rely for its support on the character and aptitude of the people, does not intend that they should administer their own affairs, but that they should simply be obedient to the supreme command. The denial of nationality, therefore, implies the denial of political liberty.

The greatest adversary of the rights of nationality is the modern theory of nationality. By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation which constitutes the State, because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a contradiction of the principle of its existence. According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilisation in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence.

If we take the establishment of liberty for the realisation of moral duties to be the end of civil society, we must conclude that those states are substantially the most perfect which, like the British and Austrian Empires, include various distinct nationalities without oppressing them. Those in which no mixture of races has occurred are imperfect; and those in which its effects have disappeared are decrepit. A State which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a State which labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government The theory of nationality, therefore, is a retrograde step in history. It is the most advanced form of the revolution, and must retain its power to the end of the revolutionary period, of which it announces the approach. Its great historical importance depends on two chief causes.

First, it is a chimera. The settlement at which it aims is impossible. As it can never be satisfied and exhausted, and always continues to assert itself, it prevents the government from ever relapsing into the condition which provoked its rise. The danger is too threatening, and the power over men's minds too great, to allow any system to endure which justifies the resistance of nationality. It must contribute, therefore, to obtain that which in theory it condemns,--the liberty of different nationalities as members of one sovereign community. This is a service which no other force could accomplish; for it is a corrective alike of absolute monarchy, of democracy, and of constitutionalism, as well as of the centralisation which is common to all three. Neither the monarchical, nor the revolutionary, nor the parliamentary system can do this; and all the ideas which have excited enthusiasm in past times are impotent for the purpose except nationality alone.

And secondly, the national theory marks the end of the revolutionary doctrine and its logical exhaustion. In proclaiming the supremacy of the rights of nationality, the system of democratic equality goes beyond its own extreme boundary, and falls into contradiction with itself. Between the democratic and the national phase of the revolution, socialism had intervened, and had already carried the consequences of the principle to an absurdity. But that phase was passed. The revolution survived its offspring, and produced another further result. Nationality is more advanced than socialism, because it is a more arbitrary system. The social theory endeavours to provide for the existence of the individual beneath the terrible burdens which modern society heaps upon labour. It is not merely a development of the notion of equality, but a refuge from real misery and starvation. However false the solution, it was a reasonable demand that the poor should be saved from destruction; and if the freedom of the State was sacrificed to the safety of the individual, the more immediate object was, at least in theory, attained. But nationality does not aim either at liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the State. Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin, in order that a new invention may prevail over the works of God and the interests of mankind. There is no principle of change, no phase of political speculation conceivable, more comprehensive, more subversive, or more arbitrary than this. It is a confutation of democracy, because it sets limits to the exercise of the popular will, and substitutes for it a higher principle. It prevents not only the division, but the extension of the State, and forbids to terminate war by conquest, and to obtain a security for peace. Thus, after surrendering the individual to the collective will, the revolutionary system makes the collective will subject to conditions which are independent of it, and rejects all law, only to be controlled by an accident.

Although, therefore, the theory of nationality is more absurd and more criminal than the theory of socialism, it has an important mission in the world, and marks the final conflict, and therefore the end, of two forces which are the worst enemies of civil freedom,--the absolute monarchy and the revolution.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 326: Home and Foreign Review, July 1862.]

[Footnote 327: "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority," Works, v. 112.]

[Footnote 328: There are some remarkable thoughts on nationality in the State Papers of the Count de Maistre: "En premier lieu les nations sont quelque chose dans le monde, il n'est pas permis de les compter pour rien, de les affliger dans leurs convenances, dans leurs affections, dans leurs intérêts les plus chers.... Or le traité du 30 mai anéantit complétement la Savoie; il divise l'indivisible; il partage en trois portions une malheureuse nation de 400,000 hommes, une par la langue, une par la religion, une par le caractère, une par l'habitude invétérée, une enfin par les limites naturelles.... L'union des nations ne souffre pas de difficultés sur la carte géographique; mais dans la réalité, c'est autre chose; il y a des nations immiscibles.... Je lui parlai par occasion de l'esprit italien qui s'agite dans ce moment; il (Count Nesselrode) me répondit: 'Oui, Monsieur; mais cet esprit est un grand mal, car il peut gêner les arrangements de l'Italie.'" (Correspondance Diplomatique de J. de Maistre, ii. 7, 8, 21, 25). In the same year, 1815, Görres wrote: "In Italien wie allerwärts ist das Volk gewecht; es will etwas grossartiges, es will Ideen haben, die, wenn es sie auch nicht ganz begreift, doch einen freien unendlichen Gesichtskreis seiner Einbildung eröffnen. ... Es ist reiner Naturtrieb, dass ein Volk, also scharf und deutlich in seine natürlichen Gränzen eingeschlossen, aus der Zerstreuung in die Einheit sich zu sammeln sucht." (Werke, ii. 20).]

[Footnote 329: Considerations on Representative Government, p. 298.]

[Footnote 330: Mill's Considerations, p. 296.]

[Footnote 331: "Le sentiment d'indépendance nationale est encore plus général et plus profondément gravé dans le coeur des peuples que l'amour d'une liberté constitutionnelle. Les nations les plus soumises au despotisme éprouvent ce sentiment avec autant de vivacité que les nations libres; les peuples les plus barbares le sentent même encore plus vivement que les nations policées" (L'Italie au Dix-neuvième Siècle, p. 148, Paris, 1821).]

[Footnote 332: Burke's "Remarks on the Policy of the Allies" (Works, v. 26, 29, 30).]

[Footnote 333: OEuvres, i. 593, 595, ii. 717. Bossuet, in a passage of great beauty on the love of country, does not attain to the political definition of the word: "La société humaine demande qu'on aime la terre où l'on habite ensemble, ou la regarde comme une mère et une nourrice commune.... Les hommes en effet se sentent liés par quelque chose de fort, lorsqu'ils songent, que la même terre qui les a portés et nourris étant vivants, les recevra dans son sein quand ils seront morts" ("Politique tirée de l'Ecriture Sainte," OEuvres, x. 317).]

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