The Unity of Western Civilization Part 4

[Footnote 5: (Greek: tou gar logon eontos xynon, zoousin oi polloi os idian echoutes phronesin).]

[Footnote 6: (Greek: anthropoisi pasi metesti ginoskein eautous kai sophroneein).]

[Footnote 7: Thucydides, i. 5. He too, as it happens, is ill.u.s.trating a primitive Old World, round the Aegean sh.o.r.es of Greece, by the contemporary West in the backwoods of Aetolia.]

[Footnote 8: Farrand, _The Basis of American History_, 1904, p. 270.]

[Footnote 9: The [Greek: balanephagoi andres], 'acorn-eating men', of Greek traditional ethnology.]

[Footnote 10: Bicknell, _The Prehistoric Rock Engravings in the Italian Maritime Alps_, Bordighera, 1902; _Further Explorations_, 1903. I begin to suspect that the stippled and shaded enclosures which accompany the drawings of oxen, ploughs, and men with hoes may represent the cultivation plots.]

[Footnote 11: I owe valuable information about the Gipsies to my friend Dr. John Sampson, of the University of Liverpool; but he is in no way responsible for this interpretation of it.]

[Footnote 12: _Odyssey_ ix. 428 (Greek: pelor, athemistia eidos).]

[Footnote 13: _Odyssey_ ix. 214-15:

(Greek: andr' epeleusesthai megalen epieimenon alken, agrion, oute dikas en eidota oute themistas.)]

[Footnote 14: Horace, _Epode_ xvi. In his 'better land'--

Non huc Argoo contendit remige pinus, Neque impudica Colchis intulit pedem....

Iuppiter illa piae _secrevit_ litora genti, Ut inquinavit aere tempus aureum;

aere, dehinc ferro duravit saecula; quorum Piis secunda, vate me, datur fuga.]

III

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

It might appear the height of paradox to preface a discourse on the Ancient World by a.s.serting the conviction that the only genuine and important history is contemporary history. Yet reflection on this doctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious and steady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past in general), but its only rational basis and justification. Were the past really past it were dead--dead and done with, and it were wisdom for us who are alive to let the dead bury their dead. Much of what has been done and suffered under the sun is indeed gone beyond recall, and is well buried in forgetfulness. In such forgetfulness lies the fact and evidence of progress. 'Vex not its ghost'; no necromancy will or should evoke the departed spirits or avail to make them utter significant speech to living men. The chain of links which once bound stage to stage of human history is somewhere for ever broken; and as we retrace, in the memory of the race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which we here call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our vision into the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology and Anthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing a little deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins of our civilization; but before that dimly illuminated region of pre-history there still lies, and will always lie, an impenetrable pall.

As again in thought we move forward down the stream of time, the light available to us for a while increases, increases till we reach the present where it threatens to blind us with its dazzling excess, and then suddenly fades and is quenched in the twilight and final darkness by which the future is hidden from us. Of the whole stream of history our best or utmost intelligence illuminates but a short reach, and that imperfectly.

'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,' and the wise historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits of his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distant future can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, the subjects of judgement. If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thus eternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is not either in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are acted upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what we suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the real alone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also so that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. What we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and where we now stand. All other so-called knowledge or understanding, save as it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning our present selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity or lumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves or others what we so judge concerning the one and the other. Genuine understanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, is always of the present or nothing.

But this present is not the momentary meeting-place of two eternities or the brief span of time which psychologists have named 'the specious present'. Its content is whatsoever is not the dead past or the unborn future; it is whatever is still or already alive, whatever is yet or already operative and formative in our inward selves or our outward environment--in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with our present doings and sufferings. To such a present it is idle to attempt to fix limits of date before or behind. A new conception of the unity of History rises before us as we realize that the Past and the Future are not _severed_ by the Present, but that these meet and are made one in its living and concrete actuality. This is the fact, the centre to which all radii converge and from which they diverge again; and in the Present the Past and the Future live and are, together and all at once.

Bearing this in mind, we approach the records of history in a new spirit and with a new hope. We desire to know neither origins nor ends, we expect no cosmogony and we look for no apocalyptic vision. What we aim at understanding is what we now are and where we now stand, and we realize that to understand this we must not restrict our study to what is merely of recent acquisition or growth. Neither ourselves nor our environment are bounded by chronological limits; both are contemporary with the Pyramids just as much as with the Eiffel Tower. We are not merely the heirs but the epitomes of the ages. As our bodies are but the present forms on which the secular forces of the earth continue their dateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are the forms in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered still live and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, while still their names were named, they initiated or advanced. Not in pious grat.i.tude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-coming oblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselves and our world which is to us as living men all and alone important. Nor will such study deny to us the reward we seek. So approaching the labours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comes before us with a tale, or as we call it, with a 'story'--a narrative of 'old unhappy things and battles long ago'. For though he so puts it, s.p.a.cing it out in sections, half-concealing, half-revealing its logical connexions and ultimate unity, its real meaning, its ultimate--which is also its present--import is an account of what we now are and the situation in which we now stand; and unless somehow for each of us its message comes into such an account, distils and sublimates into such a quintessential judgement on the present, History remains but 'a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It is in the profoundest sense useless to us unless in the end we can say '_De n.o.bis fabula narratur_'--it is _our_ history to which we have been listening.

This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World--the world of cla.s.sical antiquity. It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughts are not past but still live, still 'breathe and burn' in us. They are largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are made. Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundations of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours of our ancestors. We _are_ the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world, at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and single. Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in the unbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is the hero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of the history of Humanity. Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially of Cla.s.sical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our own youth.

Our deeds (and also our thoughts) still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are.

This is the spirit and the conviction in which I would invite you to approach the study of Cla.s.sical Antiquity--not merely in that of grat.i.tude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futile curiosity, but as seekers for knowledge of yourselves and your world.

For what other knowledge matters?

This quest is but the beginning of a search which is and must be lifelong. Perhaps I am wrong in calling it the beginning, and there are others who would and do bid you begin earlier. I can only ask you to begin where I began or begin myself. At any rate if you begin later or elsewhere I am confident that you will lose much light on your present selves and your present world. My own temptation has been rather to stop too soon and so to overleap the intervening period--the 'Middle Ages'--between such Antiquity and the Present. Fortunately for you, you have guides who will point out to you the way of a profitable and instructive journey across the--to me--unknown or imperfectly explored land. I must, however, in no controversy with any of my fellow lecturers here, say a word on the contention that the true beginning of the modern mind and its world--our mind and our world--lies later and elsewhere than in Cla.s.sical Antiquity. The birthday and birthplace of that mind and its world have been variously fixed. We have been bidden to find the one, say, as late as the sixteenth century and the other--not from the same point of view--in the plains and woods of Northern Europe or in the deserts of Arabia or in some still more vaguely indicated region of the East. But I must avow my conviction that our civilization--and I specially remember that we are Englishmen--is not only in origin but in essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the same vital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightened by reflection upon its own past. It is a true instinct that in this country still bases our system of higher education upon a study of the languages and literature of Cla.s.sical Antiquity. We are, as Englishmen, co-heirs, because co-descendants of Cla.s.sical Antiquity, with France and Italy and Greece, yes also with Germany, for European civilization--and not European civilization only--is, I reiterate, in essence still Greco-Roman, not Teutonic or Semitic. At least, if this inheritance is not ours by descent it is ours by adoption, and we are equally legitimate members of the household. And the bonds of such spiritual kins.h.i.+p are closer and more durable than those of blood, if indeed those of blood provably exist at all.

The works and thoughts of which I am to speak--the dreams, the plans, the hopes and aspirations--are a.s.suredly ours also, the stuff and substance of our being, our inner _genius_, our guiding and controlling selves, what we in our first youth imagined and conceived, what we believed, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed.

If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters are small and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is by professional historians, we recognize it as the record of a past which is our very own, while at the same time it is a past which we share with other nations who are our co-partners in the work of conserving, deepening, extending, enriching the present-day civilization of Europe and the world.

In most of us at all times, and in all of us at most times, these influences and their operations lie deep below the threshold of consciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-a.n.a.lysis can sound. They are also the unseen foundations of the social and political superstructure in which we live. Or, to use another figure, they form the fertile soil in which we, with all our activities and inst.i.tutions, are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritual sustenance. Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them, for in this ident.i.ty of foundation is to be found the primary unity of the now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and so widely divergent currents of national life. We all come spiritually from the same ancient home, and it is well and wise to recall its memories.

So we and others shall be the more disposed to re-knit the old bonds and to weave new ones which may one day restore on a grander scale, in more organized fullness and more efficacious potency, the primordial unity which interests and pa.s.sions have with rude violence, at least in appearance, disrupted and dissolved and so for a time arrested or enfeebled.

I have many predecessors in the task of answering the question, What do we owe to the Greeks? Any answer which I have to offer, must, in the compa.s.s at my disposal, be imperfect; it must also be abstract; and lastly it cannot but be in form dogmatic. But I think it is not too much to say that it is to the Greeks that we owe the very conception of civilization and through that in large measure its very existence. The truth of this is more evident if we put the truth in another way, saying that the Greeks first explicitly recognized the contrast between the barbarous and the civilized state of mankind, and delivered themselves and us from the former by defining the latter and attempting, not without success, to establish it in actual reality. No doubt before them men had felt the pressure of barbarism within and without, and had framed dreams of something better, but it was the Greeks who first defined and conceived the ideal and so made it possible to realize it.

Their distinctive peculiarity lay in their setting themselves not merely to imagine but to think out an ideal of civilized life, and narrowly and abstractly as to the end they conceived this ideal, they discerned the main essential lines of its structure, the permanent laws of its development and well-being. In doing this they discovered the need and efficacy of knowledge for the conduct of human life, individual and collective; and found in knowledge no mere means to living but a new and heightened form of life itself, lifted above the trammelling conditions, the disillusionments and disappointments of the merely practical life. Thus they created Science and Philosophy, bequeathing to us the ideals and the results of the one and the other. We may so far define their contribution as consisting in the thought of Civilization-through-knowledge, a thought which was not a thought only but a potent and effective instrument of action, not a mere ideal but an ideal governing, directing, and realized, in action and life.

We have also to recognize another most powerful influence of which they were the vehicles--closely related to the other. The Greeks first articulately conceived and deliberately pursued the ideal of Freedom. It was, I say, closely related to the other, for they meant by it not merely freedom from physical or political constraint but also inward freedom from prejudice and pa.s.sion, and they held that knowledge and freedom rendered one another possible. We may amend our formula and re-state their contribution as the idea and fact of civilization regarded as a process in and to Freedom under the control of Knowledge or Reason, each inspiring, guiding, and fertilizing the other. Theory and practice thus co-operate and help one another forward; each in its advance liberates the other for a further effort. The several faculties of the human spirit work harmoniously together in mutual respect and reciprocal alliance. Hence arises another distinctive feature of the Greek ideal, namely, that of wholeness or all-round completeness; there is in it no one-sided insistence on this or that element in human nature, no tendency to ascetic mutilation, no fear or jealousy of what is merely human, tainted by its animal origin or its secular a.s.sociations.

But we must not exaggerate. This ideal was imperfectly defined, still more imperfectly executed or realized. It would be absurd to suppose that it was held by all Greeks; it was indeed advocated by and for a minority only. Those who now find in it the impulse and guide of Greek history might be hard put to it if they were obliged to produce evidence of their faith, and they would be forced to confess that there was much to be said against their interpretation. There is to be acknowledged first the apparent want of internal unity in the Greek world, split up as it was into small and mutually hostile civic groups; and secondly, the loose coherence of each of these groups within itself (for each, we might almost say normally, was torn by intestine faction). It is a commonplace also that Greek civilization rested upon slavery, so that barbarism was not expelled but remained as a domestic and ever-present evil. Freedom and enlightenment was not in thought or practice designed for all men, but only for Greeks, and among them only in reality for a privileged minority. The notion of a civilized world or even a civilized Greece was, if present at all, present only in feeling or imagination, not in clear vision or distinct thought, still less as an ideal of practical politics. On the other hand the ideal so narrowly conceived was not _in principle_ confined to a 'chosen people', or to one strain of blood. It supplied a programme extensible to all who could show their t.i.tle to be regarded as members of the common race of humanity. As the special features of Greek civilization faded, the lineaments of this common humanity emerged more clearly into view, and the Greek, when he was compelled to give up his parochialism and provincialism, found himself already in spirit prepared to take his place as a citizen of the world. He had learned his lesson, and to him the whole world went to school, first to learn of him what civilization meant and then to better his instructions.

This the world did, but not once for all; for every time since that mankind, or at least European mankind, has begun to lose faith in its dream of civilization or has again to shake itself free from the menace of outward or inward barbarism, it has always reverted to the thought and life of Greece and drawn inexhaustibly from it new light and new fruit, for it is its own thought and its own life, while still there ran in its veins the freshness and the vigour, the blitheness and hopefulness of its immortal youth. In meditating upon the unforgotten debt which we owe to Greece, we revive in memory what the spirit which now lives and moves in us not only once accomplished but still in each new generation accomplishes, accomplis.h.i.+ng ever the better if it repeats its former achievements with increased consciousness and more deliberate care. We too here and now have to define what we mean by civilization, by knowledge, by freedom. Otherwise our future will be determined for us, and not by us. 'What is to come out of this struggle? Just anything that may come out of it, or something we mean _shall_ come out of it?'

a.s.suredly, if we are not to stand bankrupt before our present problem, we must go to school with Greece, with Rome, with Cla.s.sical Antiquity, and in the end with all History, that is to say, with our own experience as a whole; or out of the spreading chaos no civilized cosmos will be re-born. Our civilization has been shaken to its foundations, the task before us and our descendants is to rebuild once more in Europe a habitable city for the mind of man; and in designing and reconstructing it we must take counsel with our predecessors who first found the way of escape from outward and inward barbarism, doing for and in us what we would do for and in our successors.

The first and most obvious achievement of the Greek mind was the deliverance of itself in the sphere of the imagination. Behind the fair creations of Greek art lies a dark and ugly background, but it does lie behind them. That was its first conquest. Under the magic spell of Art the hateful and terrifying shapes of barbarous religion retreated and the world of imagination was peopled with gracious and attractive figures. The Greek Pantheon is, for all its defects, a world of dignified and beautiful humanity. 'No thorn or threat stains its beauty bright.' On the whole the G.o.ds which are its denizens are humanized and humane, the friends and allies of men, who therefore feel themselves not abased or helpless in their relations with them. 'Of one kind are G.o.ds and men,' and their common world is one in which men feel themselves at home. Dark shadows there are, but they hide no mysteries to appal and unman. The imagination is free to follow its own laws, and so to create what is lovely and lovable. Language is no longer a tyrant but a willing and dexterous servant, and the Greek language reflecting, as all language does, the spirit of its users, is the most perfect instrument that the human mind has ever devised for the expression of its dreams.

The works which were then created have ever since haunted the mind of Europe like a pa.s.sion, and we are right in speaking of them as immortal, 'a joy for ever'.

In such a manner the Greek mind humanized its world, and in doing so humanized itself, or rather divinized itself, without stretching to the breaking-point the strands which bound itself to its world. But it did not stop there, and we do it wrong if we dwell too exclusively on its triumphant achievements in literature and art. For 'speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe'. The Greeks were not only supreme artists but also the pioneers of thought. They first took the measure of the Universe in which they lived, a.s.serting the mind of man to be its measure, and it amenable and subject to reason. The world they lived in was not only beautiful to the imagination, it was also reasonable, penetrable, and governable by the intellect. The ways of it and everything in it were regular and orderly, predictable, explicable not eccentric, erratic, baffling and inscrutable. Not only was Nature knowable; it was also through knowledge of it manageable, a realm over which man could extend his sway, making it ever a more and more habitable home. In it and availing himself of its offered aid he built his households and his cities, dwelling comfortably in his habitations.

But the thought which enabled him to lay a secure basis, economic and social or political, for his life had other issues and promised other fruit. The Greek mind became interested in knowledge for its own sake and in itself as the knower of its world.

The second and more important creation of the Greek mind was Science or the Sciences. In no earlier civilization can we trace anything but the faintest germs of this, while in Greek civilization it comes almost at once to flower and fruit. First and foremost we have to think of Mathematics, of Arithmetic and Geometry and Optics and Acoustics and Astronomy, but we must not forget also their later and perhaps not wholly so successful advances in Physics and Chemistry, in Botany and Zoology, in Anatomy and Physiology. Doubtless, especially in the case of the Sciences where experiments are required and have proved so fertile in the extension of our knowledge, there were grave defects, and too much trust was placed in mere observation and hasty speculation; but what they accomplished in Science is no less but more marvellous than what they accomplished in Art. The idea of Science was there, disengaged from the limiting restrictions of practical necessities, the idea of free and therefore all the more potent Science. The whole physical--and much more than the physical--environment of human life was proclaimed permeable to human thought and therefore governable by human will or at any rate already amicable and amenable to human purposes.

But yet a third advance was made. The Greek mind became conscious of itself as the knower and therefore the lord and master of its world.

Turning inward upon itself it discovered itself as the centre of its universe and set itself to explore this new inner realm of being. In the consciousness of itself it found inexhaustible interest and strength.

Thus it created Philosophy, its last and greatest gift to humanity. In so doing it freed itself from the trammels even of Science, which thus became its servant and not its master--at the same time finally liberating itself from the narrowing and blinding influences of pa.s.sion and imagination and all the shackles of merely practical needs and disabilities. Here too it fixed the idea or the ideal. 'Life without reflection upon life, without self-examination and self-study and self-knowledge, is a life not worth living by man.' In doing so it revealed a self deeper than the physical being of man and an environment wider and more real--more stable and permanent--than the physical cosmos, finding in the one and the other something more enduring, substantial, and precious than shows itself either to Science or the economic and political prudence, yet which alone gives meaning and worth to the one and the other. Thus for the first time arose before the mind of man the conception of a life not sunk in nature and practice, but superior to them and the end or meaning of their existence--a life of intense activity, of unfailing interest, of inexhaustible and eternal value.

This life was throughout the duration of Greek thought too narrowly conceived. It was frequently thought and spoken of as the life of a spectator or bystander or onlooker, as a life withdrawn or isolated, cut off from what we should call ordinary human business and concerns, a life into which we, or at least a few of us, could escape or be transported at rare intervals and under exceptionally favourable circ.u.mstances. Yet in principle it was open to all, and certainly not confined to those privileged by birth or wealth or social position. It was not the reward of magical favour or ascetic exercises, it was reached by the beaten path of the loyal citizen and the resolute student. There was about it no esoteric mystery or other-worldliness.

And if to reach it was a high privilege its attainment brought with it the imperative duty of a descent into the ordinary world to instruct, to enlighten, to comfort and help and console, to play a part in the great business and work of human civilization. In a sense this was, and is, the most permanent and fruitful gift of Greece to the European world.

These then were the three ideas or ideals which the Greeks wrought into the very texture and substance of the modern mind, the idea of Art, the idea of Science, the idea of Philosophy; in all three introducing and still more deeply implanting the ideas of Freedom as the motive and end of civilized life and of Knowledge as its guide and ally. It may be thought that I have dwelt too much on theory, and have not said enough of the specific contribution of Greece as working out in practice a certain type or types of corporate life such as the City State; but the fact is that in Greek civilization theory continually outran practice and that it endowed mankind much more with ideas or ideals than with practical ill.u.s.trations or models for our imitation. Yet again we must not exaggerate or imagine these ideas as merely Utopian or such stuff as dreams are made of. The ferment which they set up burst the fabric of Greek social and political inst.i.tutions, but it clarified and steadied down, as the enthusiasms of youth may do, into the sober designs of grave and energetic manhood.

The spectacle of the dissolution of the Greek civilization is not a pleasant one. 'The glory that was Greece' fades out of the world and leaves it grey and dull, and there was worse than this; there was also decay and degeneracy and corruption. To dwell upon it is as the sin of Ham. Nevertheless what took place was not a mere relapse towards barbarism, but on the contrary the supersession of a form of civilization which had done its work by another form less attractive, but more sound and solid. The Romans have the airs of grown and grave men beside the perpetual youth of Greece, (the Greeks were 'always children') but they are well aware of how much they learned and had to learn from their predecessors in the task of civilizing the world. So much is this so that in many departments of civilized life they look upon themselves as imitating the Greeks and carrying out their ideas. In this they were less than just to themselves, for even in the world of art they continued to create; and certainly in literature they produced works not unworthy to stand beside their chosen models. Especially they created a prose style, which without ceasing to be artistic served the sober and serious purposes of political oratory and historic record. But their peculiar genius showed itself most in the applied arts which pressed Greek science into the ministry of life in architecture and engineering. Their roads and bridges and aqueducts still stand to bear witness of them. It would be a great error to deny to them fertile advance in the sciences, because their discoveries are so immediately put to the proof in practice and so little disengage themselves into express theory from their applications.

But before we proceed to reckon up their contributions to European civilization it is well to correct a misconception which arises only too easily from an accident of our education. It is the custom in England to concentrate attention upon a brief period in the history of Rome, ignoring on the one hand the early Republican period and on the other the later Imperial. There is thus lost to our imaginations those figures and their deeds which seemed for example to Shakespeare most characteristically Roman and to our more thoughtful consideration those achievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe. The latter is the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of _Imperial_ Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and most informative. Under the Empire Rome worked as a master, no longer as an apprentice or a journeyman. The theatre of her civilizing activities was here little less than the whole world then known, and the boast is not unjustified that she made into a city what had formerly been but a world, as we might say, merely a geographical expression. The record of that progress reads to us too much as a narrative of incessant warfare, and we are accustomed to think of her empire as a gigantic military power, but in reality it was in aim and result essentially pacific, and so appeared to those who lived under her sway. To them the name of her empire was the 'Roman peace'. It was as such that the memory of it haunted the minds of men when it too broke down from internal economic disorders and external pressure, and a distracted and divided Europe looked back to it as the pattern for a restored civilization.

The aim and result of the Roman Empire was peace, a world-wide peace.

It is true that this end was not very articulately defined by those who pursued it, but (perhaps just because of that) the means to it were more practically designed and more effectively executed. The civilized world was one and to be treated as one; it was still Rome under a single government and a single head. There arose then the idea of a supreme sovereignty one and indivisible, that was the absolutely indispensable condition of a world peace. But the necessity of organization was equally grasped, insisted upon, realized. The civilized world was covered with a network of inst.i.tutions through which the will of the Emperor flowed and circulated throughout the Empire. Peace through system and order--that was the secret of the Roman success. But two other ideas must be added to complete the explanation. The one was the idea or ideal of Justice; no system and no order could work unless it was, and commended itself to its subjects as being, scrupulously and exactly just. The second idea was that in order to be this it must be a legal system, based upon a known body of legal rights and duties, determining and controlling the whole conduct of the subjects to the sovereign and to one another. The notion which the Romans, not so much by their thought or speech, but by their acts, added to the world's stock was that of a peace secured and maintained by the just operation throughout the civilized world of a system of law the same for all, issuing from and enforced by a single central power.

The notion is at least grandiose, and so stated seems almost too high and difficult for human nature to realize. Yet for centuries it was applied, and applied with marvellous success. Nor in spite of its apparent failure in the end has the idea of it ceased to dominate men's minds. I do not speak here of the transitory imitation of it by the Carolingians or of the attempt at the rest.i.tution or copy of it in the spiritual sphere of the Church, or again of its phantom survival in the ghostly form of the Holy Roman Empire. But I would point to the way in which it still--in thought--controls us when without essential alteration of the idea we transfer its application to the nation and still look for the secret of _its_ peace and strength in an organization of all its activities under a law proceeding from and enforced by a sovereign will resident somewhere within its structure, a law demanding and receiving obedience from all loyal subjects. Nor is the hope extinct that the way to a wider or world-wide peace lies through the restoration of a similar system in its application to international relations.

Though I am unable to share this hope (or indeed the desire that its realization should be endeavoured after), I find it impossible to judge that it has yet lost its hold on men's minds or is without elements of importance in view of our present problem and perplexity.

It is perhaps more profitable to ask what we have to learn from the history both of its success and its failure. Of its success for a time and long time in the history of Europe there can be no doubt, and on its permanent effects rests much of what is most sound and stable in the civilization of modern Europe. Peace there was because of it, and again because of it and what it accomplished Europe resisted and survived internal disorder and barbarian invasion so that, as I said above, what still exists as a united or allied Europe is the Roman or Romanized world. Roman ideas and ideals still hold it together, although the Roman Empire has declined and fallen, and no other Empire has risen or, I trust, may rise, upon its ruins. It is not my business to a.n.a.lyse the causes of that decline and fall, though a few words on them may not be out of place. In the first place it declined and fell because those who administered ignored its economic substructure, paying no attention to the causes which were undermining its very material basis, or the enormous suffering which the neglect and consequent disorganization of that entailed. In the second, and partly because of that neglect, they did not sufficiently strengthen its defences against external attack; I do not so much mean in the way of remissness in military preparation as by a surcease of the former policy of bringing their barbarous or semi-civilized neighbours into the higher system, and so extending the range of civilization. It is perhaps fanciful to suggest that we are now suffering the penalty of the failure of Rome to Romanize, that is to say, to civilize their Teutonic neighbours. In the third place, they erred by not recognizing and taking account of new forces which in the way of ideas were entering into the conception of civilized life, the ideas which we ma.s.s together under the head of feudalism, the idea of nationality. Under the influence of the one and the other the ideal of a single world State, with a uniform or rigid system of laws resting upon a sovereign will, one and indivisible, dissolved, or at least entered upon dissolution, approving itself unadapted or unadaptable to the needs of a novel and immensely more complex situation of the world. No mere tinkering at it did or could suffice to save it; and the organization of Europe based upon it collapsed.

The Revolution of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries was in many ways the last attempt to reinstate it, and failure to do so p.r.o.nounced its doom. We cannot now look forward to the reorganization of civilized Europe on the model of the Roman Empire or of an Empire at all, and the more definitely formulated hope of salvation by the erection or re-erection of an international system of law in any real sense seems to me an unsubstantial dream--the administration of a belated nostrum for our disease, not a panacea. Not that way do the lessons of history point. The Roman ideal must be transformed, must be reborn, if it is not to lead our antic.i.p.ations and our actions wholly astray. No more in the political or secular sphere than in the spiritual or ecclesiastical is 'Romanism' a possible guide to the reconstruction of modern European civilization. For that far too much water (and blood) has run under the bridge. Yet the spirit which gave it life and efficacy is immortal, and the study of the secret of its vitality and power is a necessity for us. In the work of reconstruction we must learn from the Romans the value of System and Order, of Justice and Law, as from Greece we have ever afresh to learn the love of Freedom and Truth.