A short history of war and peace

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OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

A SHORT HISTORY
OF WAR AND PEACE

Br G. H. FERRIS

LONDON
WILLIAMS & NORGATE

HENRY HOLT & Co., NEW YORK
CANADA : WM. BRIGGS, TORONTO

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MODERN KNOWLEDGE

Editors t
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.

PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LlTT.,
LL.D., F.B.A.

PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

A SHORT HISTORY OF

WAR AND PEACE

G. H. FERRIS

v/

AUTHOR OF "RUSSIA IN REVOLUTION,"
"THB EASTERN CRISIS AND BRITISH
POLICY," "THE LIFB AND TEACHING
OF TOLSTOY," ETC. MBMBRB DE
L'INSTITUT INTERNATIONAL DB LA
PAIX

LONDON

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

OK

Pr

BlCKARD Cl.AY A SONS, LliUTEl*,

BRKAD STBSBT HILL, K.C., A»D

BUNOAY, SUFFOLK.

79842S

CONTENTS

OHJLP. *AO«

I THE HUMAN SWARM .... 7

Evolution of Interests in Organisation and
Expansion of Early Societies— Chieftainship
and Property — Conquest and Colonisation.

II THE FIRST EMPIRES .... 33

River Civilisations — The Slave Economy —
Rise and Fall of Babylon— Egypt--
Thoughts at Thebes.

III GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN . . .43

The Peopling of Europe — Greece in Peace
and War — Jesus — The Fathers and Non-
Resistance — Why it disappeared.

IV THE STRENGTH OF ROME . . .64

Paternalism — Citizenship— Roman Law —
Logic of Conquest — Decay of the Legion —
Sack of Rome.

V THE SWARM SETTLES .... 82
Barbarian Kingdoms and Western Church
— Charlemagne — Byzantine Empire and
Moslem Expansion — Crusades — Feudalism
— Land Economy — Chivalry.

vi CONTENTS

CHAT. TAOB

VI THE BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM . .105

Commerce and Towns — End of Serfdom —
Money Economy — Cruelties of Warfare —
Persecution — Discoveries — The Reforma-
tion : "Wars of Religion."

VII THE SWARM OVERSEAS : EAST AND WEST 127
Tudor Despotism — Buccaneers and Slave
Traders — Conquest of India — Colonisation
of North America.

VIII THE BALANCE OP POWER . . .162

European Settlement — Coalitions, and Wars
of Succession— " What Good came of It ? "
— English, American, and French Revolu-
tions.

IX NAPOLEON 169

The New Armaments — From Republic to
Empire — Nelson — How England was saved
— Moscow Campaign — Conscription and
Confiscation— Waterloo.

X THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM . . .197
Wars of Liberation — Garibaldi — Bismarck
and German Unity— Turkey and Russia —
Partition of Africa — British Empire —
Industrial Revolution.

XI THE ORGANISATION OP PEACE . , 227
Deadlock of Armaments— Credit Economy
—International Law, Capital, and Labour
— Arrest of Population — Summing-up.

NOTE ON BOOKS 253

. 255

WAR AND PEACE

CHAPTER I

THE HUMAN SWARM

THE first step in science is to learn to make
distinctions, especially between appearance
and reality. We know that war has been a
vast preoccupation throughout history, and
that the most advanced nations of to-day
are engaged in preparations for war on a scale
undreamed of by the great conquerors of the
past. From this it might appear, and it has
often been concluded, that warfare is an inevit-
able feature of the growth of human societies,
and must continue because it is rooted in
instincts and passions which are modified
in only the slightest and slowest way from
age to age, without which, indeed, the race
would soon decay and die out. A moment's
reflection, however, shows the idea of an un-
changeable " human nature "to be full of
difficulty. Modern thought points to nothing
so certainly as the universality of change.
We stand on a whirling ball, every atom and
molecule of which is in perpetual movement.
Individually, we are aware of being different
7

8 WAR AND PEACE

men and women every day of our lives; the
life of the world has undergone such a trans-
formation even during our own generation
that an unmoved character-basis of society
is incomprehensible, a miracle in a realm of
law — and what an evil miracle ! In a modi-
fied form, the pessimist theory is more plaus-
ible, and therefore more disturbing. It
presents not merely to the blind optimist,
but to every thinking man, a challenging
question : There may be change, but is there
" progress " ? Is not the blood struggle
necessary to " the survival of the fittest " ?
Granted that man is softer in some ways,
is he not harder in others, so that the average
is unaltered ? Looking back over the pro-
cession of the ages, the flux and re-flux of
populations, the building up and collapse of
States, are we not driven to the conclusion
that the simple man's faith in an " increasing
purpose " running through it all, a trend from
violence to reason, is a vain superstition ?

The following pages offer an introduction
to some of the historical material on which
an answer to such questions may be based,
and something like a scientific definition ob-
tained. They deal, not with the speculations
of great minds about war and peace, but with
these kinds of human effort as institutions
evolving in form, if not in spirit; with their
physiology, as it were; their economic bases,

THE HUMAN SWARM 9

and, more slightly, their political and moral
relationships. They assume that sentiment,
opinion, even genius, are factors in social
growth of small importance in comparison
with hunger, sex, greed of wealth and power,
and other primary and universal motives
which provide the body-stuff of history.
They attempt, therefore, to get beneath
more heroic but superficial explanations of
events to those roots of material interest
in which, as the writer believes, and not
in passion or instinct, the causes of war
and peace are to be found. They give
ground for thinking that these material
interests have a pedigree, develop in a certain
direction. Finally, they seek to throw into
proper relief some governing conditions of
the subject, the chief of these consisting in
two simple but momentous facts : The first
is that the earth is now nearly filled with
human societies. The second is that, in
the most advanced of these, the increase of
population is rapidly slackening, while in
some it has practically ceased. These are
conditions which Malthus, and even Darwin,
did not live to witness.

In terms of physiology, all life is a compro-
mise of mobility and stability, of variation
and unification, under pressure of environ-
ment. Though there is no evidence that
they lie under the same doom of mortality,

10 WAR AND PEACE

societies grow, like individual organisms, by
a harmony of expansion and organisation,
the double process being conditioned by
difficulties of elbow-room and food-supply.
If a society expands beyond its power of
organisation, it suffers (as Napoleon said all
empires die) from indigestion. If, on the
other hand, it cannot expand, either laterally
or, as it were, upward and downward (I
mean by intensive cultivation, a limited
possibility except in advanced societies), it
must stagnate and starve. This process of
expansion will be our chief subject-matter.
Every function of society at every stage
,/of its growth is affected by density of popula-
tion and the margins of free land. And,
since we are limited to this planet, the whole
process of expansion is necessarily modified
as the filling-up of the earth nears completion.
History commences with a number of
scattered centres from which tribal swarms
arise like bees from so many hives. Unlike
the bees, they are not vegetarians, or engaged
in a highly systematic storage of wealth.
They are human, however, in the use of tools,
and, paradoxical as this may appear, in their
capacity for drunkenness and destructiveness.
Animals never intoxicate themselves, and sel-
dom destroy more than they want for food.
If it be asked how man can be characterised
as both a reflective and a drunken animal,

THE HUMAN SWARM 11

as one that is capable of associating ideas
and yet of falling lower than the beasts in his
fits of destructive violence, the reply would
seem to be that the former restraints of in-
stinct have become weakened, while the
guidance of reason is still slight. The first
erect animals soon tire of thinking, and must
let off their energy in sheer mischief and
cruelty. The hobbledehoy and hooligan are
survivals of these animal moods; and, even
in the most advanced societies of to-day,
the love of skilful destruction has not been
worked out. It is a relic of the time when it
was, or seemed to be, more profitable to kill
than to keep, when the light of reason was
only an intermittent glimmer, and there was
no social restraint except upon acts immedi-
ately hurtful to the tribe.

We no longer think, then, of the scattered
communities of primitive man as living in
an idyllic state to which the race will revert
by a revival of lost virtues. On the contrary,
we know, from a comparison of prehistoric
remains with contemporary accounts of exist-
ing races in the savage and patriarchal
stages of social development, that these differ
widely from the pictures of them presented
to our grandfathers by idealist writers. The
earliest human life is a state of extreme in-
security and constant strife. With little
no knowledge of building or the use of fire,

12 WAR AND PEACE

of clothing or any but the simplest weapons,
I of agriculture or cattle-raising, the existence
i^of the " noble savage " of the hunting horde
is an alternation of torpor and excitement,
hunger and repletion, equally repulsive.
Passion is his master; in intelligence he is a
\ child. He lives to the day only; foresight,
providence, the accumulation of goods are
Lbeyond him. Leadership in such groups
^could only mean, as, indeed, it has often meant
in later ages, a surplus of violent energy,
showing itself in love of domination, destruc-
tive enterprise, and greed. Tyranny is always
the first, as self-government is the last, of
social achievements.

~ This chieftainship, however, worked to-
gether with the elementary control and breed-
ing of animals to convert the hunting group
into the patriarchal tribe, and to develop five
of the most important of human institutions —
property, slavery, polygamy, soldiery, and
statecraft. The pastoral community, with
its flocks and herds united for easier protec-
tion, is larger and wealthier than the hunting
\group. Arms and organisation are necessary
either to attack or to defend it. Slavery, as
soon as there is regular profitable labour to
be done, supplants the slaughter or devouring
of enemies. Polygamy marks the increasing
value of the labour of women and children
in the domestic industries. Cattle, slaves,

THE HUMAN SWARM 13

serfs, and wives: these are the chief forms
of early property. But, as food and shelter,
and with them vigour and intelligence, im-
prove, the arts rapidly advance. Gold ancPj
other ornaments are treasured as signs of |
superiority — yet another temptation to war- J
like attack. Luxury begins. Economics
inequality also begins, with the hiring of
labourers and the loaning of weapons or tools.
The administration of customary law pro-
duces hereditary chieftaincies and councils
of elders, and priesthoods are evolved to
watch over the religion of the tribe. It has
been said that " the origin of the State, or
political society, is to be found in the develop-
ment of the art of warfare." This seems to
be a partial or inexact statement of the facts*
The origin of the State lies in the need of pro-
tecting the lives and insuring the increase of
property necessary to a growing society; and
it is only in relatively modern times tha
the maintenance of internal order has been
clearly distinguished from the art of military
defence and offence, or increase of property
by cultivation from increase of property by
conquest.

Immense periods of time must have been
occupied by the advance from the hunting
group to the pastoral tribe, and still longer
periods to the clearing and digging of land
for crops, the growth of village communities,

14 WAR AND PEACE

and the beginnings of trade. The next step,
metal working for farm implements and wea-
pons, would come more rapidly, as the rela-
tively larger profits of agriculture easily allow
the maintenance of an industrial class. Often
there would be a throw-back — a famine or
other disaster to the tribe would set it on the
war trail, and, under successful martial
leadership, would convert it into a barbarian
horde breaking like a storm over regions where
better-favoured races had settled down
to the accumulation of wealth. Differences
of land structure, also, would intensify and
perpetuate differences of social character —
mountainous country, for instance, favouring
the survival of martial qualities proper to the
hunting stage ; a broken coast favouring trade
and travel; a muddy delta favouring the
growth of a despotic State. To this day the
sites of the great river civilisations of anti-
quity are bordered by vast desert regions in
which wander tent-dwelling huntsmen and
herdsmen, to whom steady labour seems an
intolerable oppression. In the dawn of civilis-
ation these nomad fighters would be a much
more serious menace to the settled people
of the fertile river-sides. Outlaws, escaped
slaves, prodigal sons, would swell their ranks.
They could offer, as only crime and the more
daring kind of financial adventure do to-day,
the prize of quick-won wealth and abnormal

THE HUMAN SWARM 15

power, Martial talent in the servile or dis-
possessed classes of the settled States must
have been strongly attracted to them. So it
was, up to a comparatively recent date, on the
forest borders of northern Europe. Hence the
first separation of a soldier class, in the kins-
men of the chief, among the more advanced
pastoral communities, and its elaboration in
the courts of the early monarchies, where
pretorians or janissaries are the pivot of a
military system as necessary against internal
revolt as against external attack.

In an examination of the chaotic material
of early history, three distinctions of primary
importance come to light. In the first place,
the swarming movement by which the earth
has been filled — which gave us the great
tribal migrations in the dawn of European
life, the transatlantic migration beginning in
the fifteenth century, and the later reaction
of Europe upon Africa and Asia — reveals a
double character. Varying by infinite de-
grees of the scale of motive, it may yet be
said to possess predominantly a character
either of Conquest or Colonisation, of armed
authority or voluntary enterprise. In the
second place, as the human swarm settles, the
social organisation is seen to be marked by a
preponderant character either of Despotism
or of Democracy. And, thirdly, the eco-
nomic activities on which both organisation

16 WAR AND PEACE

and expansion depend, while infinitely varied
in kind and degree of development, yet
display a common quality either of Ex-
ploitation or of Cultivation. But when we
speak of these six, which are really soluble
into two, preponderant motives, we mean not
a spirit of pure good or pure evil possessing
peoples, classes or individuals, but a balance
of energy, due mainly to favouring conditions
and opportunities, and leading in the direc-
tion either of war or peace. There will be no
dispute as to where the bias lies in early
history. Colonisation in the strict sense
(colonia : a place occupied by and for cultiva-
tion) has proceeded from the beginning; and
the ancient world shows splendid examples,
such as the Greek settlements of the Medi-
terranean and Black Sea littorals. But in
the whole picture it is overshadowed by the
method of conquest. A colony is a settlement
of men, for the most part of like mind and
like race, associated for the pursuit of free
agriculture and industry, and seeking in
equality and self-government a happier lot
than the mother-country offered. The anti-
thesis of this is the characteristic fruit of
conquest, the Imperium, which may be de-
fined as a forcible union of peoples differing
not only in political rights, but commonly also
in race, religion, economic status, and language.
A tribe settles down on the Palatine by the

THE HUMAN SWARM 17

Tiber, or Tower Hill by the Thames. Thanks
to geographical position (at the mouth of a
river, on a good ford, or on a defensible bluff,
for instance), the chieftains wax strong, and
gradually extend their sway over less fortun-
ate tribes in the neighbourhood. They get the
pick of their flocks and lands; slaves, captured
in foreign raids, work and fight for them
with no reward but bare subsistence. The
plebeians support them — at first from the
natural respect for physical or intellectual
superiority, for the sake of employment, for
the benefits of law and order; and afterwards
because they share, if only in a small degree,
in the joy and gain of conquest. This may be
called a Slave economy. The patres become
a hereditary patrician class, differentiated
into monarchy and aristocracy (holding the
land), with professionally organised military,
financial, and ecclesiastical supporters. The
need of a class of skilled artisans or a better
soldiery loosens the shackles of the slave.
Trade arises. Agriculture improves. Let us
suppose that Nature has helped to make
the State in question fairly homogeneous
and stable. Land now comprises the mass
of wealth; land, therefore, dictates the char-
acter of government — a hereditary monarchy,
based on feudalism or some other caste
system, The home-territory becomes a
settled nation-State. The forms of wealth

18 WAR AND PEACE

change. With the aid of a sweeping pesti-
lence, or at the cost of a civil war, free
labour replaces serfdom; tenants and traders
become strong and intelligent enough to
resist extreme oppression and extortion, and
to obtain a large share in domestic legisla-
tion and administration. There is a law of
diminishing returns in government, as in
agriculture; and this begins to affect the
ruling class, who are compelled to look
further afield for new opportunities of gain,
A gold mine, let us suppose, is found in a
heathen land by a company of adventurers.
If the capture is not contested, it remains
a private affair, subject to royal charter; but
the adventurers, holding on to the gold mine,
come home and buy up more means of political
power. Generally, however, the capture is
contested either by natives or by rivals; and
then it becomes necessary to call for the aid
of the home government, with its land and
sea forces, its wealth and prestige.

Meanwhile, the forms of wealth have con-
tinued to change. Factory organisation is
displacing free labour; credit largely replaces
money. These changes should reflect them-
selves in government. But the ancient ob-
session of territorial property prevails ; and
" much would always have more." The diffi-
culty and cost of territorial expansion,
however, constantly increase. The day of

THE HUMAN SWARM 19

the great choice has come. On the one
hand, there lies the possibility of restraint
and intensive cultivation. Along the other
path, the original nation-State — its energies
diverted from the development of native
resources by science and education — becomes
an oligarchy engaged in the exploitation
of a system of alien dependencies. Its
original base of economic advantage has
been upset, its social integrity undermined,
by the poisonous influences which always
flow from tribute. However great the
original virility of its people, it is over-
weighted by the machinery of extensive rule
and the demands of international rivalry.
Sooner or later the structure grows top-heavy,
and falls before the attack of younger peoples,
for whom a fate no better may be in store.

Here is, as it were, a skeleton from the
museum of history. It has the limited value
of a genealogical tree, an artist's manequin,
or the " reconstitution of the crime " in a
French trial. We hasten to add that, as
Plato or Napoleon would be unrecognisable
in their skeletons, so it is what is added to
the " predominant motive " that makes the
humanity, the flesh-and-blood reality, of
the men and movements of the past. As
there is no individual who is wholly good or
wholly bad, there is no society that is pure
democracy or pure empire. Every organism

20 WAR AND PEACE

is a ratio of contending forces ; that is
the method of development. A balance of
energy there must be on one side or the
other, and it will be on that where the resist-
ance is less and the profit more. But the life-
giving must have been greater than the death-
dealing force, else mankind had not multiplied.
Nay, it must be immensely greater, since
one can kill in a moment what it has taken
laborious years to rear. The great unknown
of the Stone Age who invented the flint-
headed arrow set going a wave of expansion
which was doomed to the failure of all merely
destructive effort. Man is a lazy animal;
and there would have been no progress but
for the penalty that falls on the individual
or society which does not produce more
than it destroys. The increasing difficulty of
hunting and fishing stimulates the cultivation
of crops and herds. Slave-raiding only
ceases as free labour proves its superior econo-
mic value. Only when a number of clans had
settled down into some semblance of a nation
could industry and commerce grow. Rob-
bery and piracy are checked when the majority
of men obtain an interest in law and order.
When foreign booty becomes scarce and the
royal resources at home inadequate, a system
of inland revenue, and consequently of popu-
lar government, is established. Force, an
extension of man's attack upon the animals

THE FIRST EMPIRES 21

to those groups of his own kind whom he
regards as alien and inferior, is characteristic
of the early stages of society both in domestic
and external relations, but especially in the
latter, because the checks and balances that
are raised against arbitrary power within
any society are only slowly and with difficulty
carried into its outside affairs. When there are
no more good empty lands, and every nation's
borders march with those of others of nearly
equal strength, a new economy of effort has
become imperative. Warfare, always waste-
ful, has become ruinously so. To the expan-
sion of co-operative industry and commerce,
on the other hand, no bounds can be set.
The extent to which a State has transferred
its activity from the former field to the latter
is the measure of its civilisation.

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST EMPIRES

MUD and sand mean only waste in the
north temperate zone; but the ancient
empires of West Asia and North Africa
lived upon mud, and it is to mud and sand
that we owe the preservation of their wonder-
ful libraries, picture-galleries, and monuments.
The British Museum alone has an immense

22 WAR AND PEACE

number of Babylonian and Assyrian wedge-
script records on clay — collections of books,
letters, laws, contracts, astrological reports,
grammars, liturgies, legends, inscriptions of
all kinds; twenty thousand tablets and frag-
ments have been found in the last half-century
on the site of Nineveh alone. We are, how-
ever, still far from having the full picture of
life under the West Asian Empires necessary
to determine fully the part which militarism
and war played, and that for two reasons. The
first is the vast period of time covered, the
frequent breaks in the records, and — most of
them having been quite recently unearthed —
the need of further study. Then there is
a bias characteristic of the earliest as of the
latest art galleries. Even the artist, if he
pleases to live, must live to please; and the
modern journalist and novelist are not the
first to be drawn disproportionately to the
heroism of the stricken field because it most
easily provides " good copy." The ancient
scribes of the clay tablets, cones, and cylin-
ders, the cutters of steles and monuments
whose masters were kings and satraps, give
us, in cuneiform writing and low-relief
pictures, abundant details of warfare, es-
pecially of royal prowess and the horrible
fate of the vanquished and the captives.
So impressive are these memorials that
whole millenniums seem to be filled with the

THE FIRST EMPIRES 23

clamour of moving hosts, the ferocious en-
counters of bowmen and spearmen, horsemen
and charioteers, the siege and pillage of
cities. That there was perpetual slave-hunt-
ing in the ancient world we know; but it is
a simple deduction that for every year of
devastating warfare there must have been
many years of laborious peace.

At the time of the earliest monuments, the
art of war is so highly developed that rela-
tively little progress is manifest in succeeding
centuries, save in the size of the armies
employed and in their engineering supports.
Through ages men fought with practically
the same weapons till gunpowder came into
use. A carving attributed to the reign of
Eannatum, who first confederated the cities
of Babylonia (perhaps B.C. 4400), shows a
line of close-packed infantry, wearing helmets
with nose guard, and carrying very long
blade-headed spears and squarish shields
reaching from chin to toe. The shields
touch or overlap, and the formation appears
to anticipate the Macedonian phalanx of a
much later time. A splendid stele of Naramsin
(B.C. 3750), found at Susa, illustrates a freer
style of attack in mountain fighting. Bowmen
and spearmen are the chief forces; short
swords, daggers, maces, are also in evidence.
A thousand years later there is little change
in field equipment : chain armour has become

24 WAR AND PEACE

common; the Assyrian helmet is somewhat
taller, often with a conical peak; there is a
conical as well as a square shield. Foreign
slave levies and mercenaries have brought in
the sling and axe; and, with the introduction
of the horse, the war-chariot, carrying a
driver and a combatant and drawn by two
or three horses abreast, becomes an important
and dreaded arm. Some of the archers
shoot from behind a huge square shield held
by an attendant. So far, copper and bronze
are relied upon for weapons, as for tools; but,
" probably from the tenth or twelfth century
B.C. — earlier than in any other country "
(Flinders Petrie), iron comes into common
use; and the hardening of iron to steel soon
follows. This must have resulted in a great
enlargement of warlike material. Under
Ashurnasirpal (B.C. 883-858) companies of
mounted archers appear for the first time.
From the earliest records the towns had been
fortified; but now fortification and siege
operations are upon a vaster scale; sappers
and miners are employed, with spade, pick,
saw, and other tools. A bas-relief shows a
huge turreted battering-ram, running on
three pairs of wheels, being used against one
of the brick walls of Babylon, from the
towers of which archers are shooting at
their long-coated assailants. These siege
operations were not markedly improved upon

THE FIRST EMPIRES 25

for two thousand years. Another relief gives
a remarkable picture of the navy which
Sennacherib (B.C. 705-681) sent down the
Euphrates to the Persian Gulf against the
Chaldeans; some of the galleys have rams
and a square sail, all have two banks of
rowers, and a line of shields to protect the
fighters on deck. Under Nebuchadnezzar
(King of Babylon, B.C. 604-562), a method
of defence anticipating modern Dutch ex-
pedients was put into successful operation.
The Tigris and Euphrates were connected
with huge dams above and below the city,
so that the upper and lower country could be
flooded against the invader. It was these
tremendous works which made it necessary
for Cyrus a generation later to divert the
course of the Euphrates in order to obtain
a passage into Babylon.

Details like these, with which a technical
history of the art of war may be filled, give
us, however, no impression whatever of the
cause of the rise and fall of Babylonian and
Assyrian military power. For that we must
look to the nature of the land, and the
position of the States to which it gave birth
in relation to their neighbours.

The natural fertility of the Babylonian
plain was unequalled in the ancient world.
Whereas the Nile inundation gave only a
narrow strip of black earth, there was here,

26 WAR AND PEACE

in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, and
between, a broad belt which may again in
the early future become one of the greatest
granaries of the world, and, thousands of
years before our era, maintained scores,
perhaps hundreds, of cities and a dense
agricultural population. Surrounded by war-
like and for the most part relatively barbarous
peoples — Hittites in the highlands of the
north-east, and Medes in those of the north-
west, Egyptians in the south-east, Elamites
in the south-west, and nomad Semitic tribes
in the southern desert — it was designed by
nature for a theatre of perpetual conflict.
The northern kingdoms did, indeed, act as
buffer States between Babylonia and those
tribes whose descent from the steppes of
Central Asia is the great mystery of the
morning of civilisation; but in their turn
they were pushed south by these hordes.
Assyria, having first to meet this pressure,
developed the more martial character. Early
immigrations had left, also, causes of internal
conflict. Throughout the plain, the invading
tribes settled in independent principalities,
and the rivalry of their chieftain-kings led
to incessant feuds, only to be resolved (as
in later mediaeval Europe) by the gradual
formation of extensive kii< Adorns or empires,
which, in their turn, became the stakes of
great adventurers in the game of war. But

THE FIRST EMPIRES 27

civilisations like the Babylonian are only
slowly created, and they are not in reality,
though they seem to be, quickly destroyed.
It is most certain that they are only slowly
created, that the botanic and zoological
gardens of Nineveh, the splendid palaces of
Babylon, the regulation of the water-
courses, the very art that made Babylonian
the culture language of Egypt and carried
the clay tablet and seal cylinder into Crete
and far eastward into Asia, are witnesses of
steady labour and developing intelligence
and discipline. Over and over again, wild
mountaineers poured down into the Chaldean
plains, only to be absorbed into the settled
body of townsmen and feudal tenants. The
wealth of the land, especially after the es-
tablishment of systems of irrigation, is in-
dicated by the ruins of many cities that still
await exploration. It explains, on the one
hand, the development of despotic govern-
ments— necessary as much for the construc-
tion and maintenance of the canal works
as for external defence and the enforcement
of peace upon feudatory States — and, on the
other hand, the waves of invasion which
created successively the Babylonian, Assyrian,
and Persian Empires.

Even in the modern world, where a thou-
sand influences tend to equalise conditions,
we find something like a localisation of the

28 WAR AND PEACE

characteristics of the three great stages of
social development — the martial vigour char-
acteristic of the hunting stage in the mountains,
the laborious passivity of the pastoral stage
favouring centralised despotism in the great
plains, and mercantile adventurousness on
the navigable seaboards. (Compare Albania,
Russia, and England.) But in Europe the
spirit of the mountains has been tamed, and
now speaks rather for liberty than conquest.
When Babylonian civilisation was being
founded on the lower courses of the Tigris
and Euphrates six thousand years before
Christ, the three types of society were already
in competition, the prosperous cities of the
south offering a perpetual invitation to the
northern barbarian, recovering from the river
mud and the Gulf coast-trade the wealth thus
destroyed or removed, and imposing their
culture on the invader. At the beginning of
the third millennium B.C., the Sumerian and
Semitic strains were beaten together, and the
first Babylonian empire arose. From Persia
to the Syrian coast, a supreme authority
was recognised; roads were built and postal
services established; trade followed; libraries
in clay were collected; and sculpture gave
splendid expression to the pride of Court and
temple. The Code of Hammurabi (B.C. 2200)
shows an extensive organisation of slave
labour, and above this an elaborate pro-

THE FIRST EMPIRES 29

tection of personal and trading rights, based
on secular ideas and superseding the old
law of the blood-feud. Most of its 280
provisions had been in use for centuries;
but Hammurabi codified and regularly en-
forced them — 1400 years before the Spartan
Lycurgus (if, indeed, he was not a mythical
person) and 1200 years before the Athenian
Solon. We have hundreds of tablets of the
same period referring to legal and com-
mercial transactions only possible in an
advanced society.

This great civilisation, from the relics of
which, eighteen hundred years later, the
Greeks were to learn as we learn from theirs,
was undermined by a Hittite invasion, and
(about 1800 B.C.) a more permanent occupa-
tion by the Kassites, a warlike race on the
eastern border. A century later, the north-
ern part of the Empire asserted its independ-
ence; and a succession of wars between it and
Babylon established the supremacy of Assyria
in Western Asia (from about B.C. 1250).
Under Tiglath-Pileser I (B.C. 1100), Ashur-
nasirpal II, and his successor Shalmaneser II,
its armies overran the Nearer East. A peasant
revolt at home interrupted these wars, but
they were soon resumed. These were no
longer mere raids, but organised campaigns of
conquest. At first the aim was to obtain
only tribute or alliance; but more and more

30 WAR AND PEACE

frequently viceroys were left behind with
the double duty of raising troops to hold
the conquered territory and of sending
' forced levies to the imperial army. The Old
Testament is full of evidence of early Baby-
lonian influences ; and this period is interesting
as that of the first armed contact between
Assyrians and Israelites. The removal of
subject peoples from one end of the empire
to another became a regular expedient for
breaking the spirit of the little nations.
In B.C. 701 Sennacherib invaded Judaea,
enslaved 200,000 of the inhabitants, and only
raised the siege of Jerusalem when Hezekiah
had stripped the Temple to give him tribute.
Twice more, in B.C. 597 and 586, Tinder
Nebuchadnezzar II, Jerusalem was captured,
and its people taken away into exile. In
such manner the Syrian, Armenian, and
Medean States were successively reduced and
ravaged. Slaves, loot, and tribute were the
great objects of the imperial system; and,
though commerce and legitimate taxation
followed in the path of war, a perpetual
supply of plunder was the only means of
maintaining the Assyrian host. The name of
Sennacherib has remained a byword for
wholesale destruction and cruelty. Lands
naturally the richest in the then known
world could not long bear this human plague;
and, undermined by a Scythian invasion, the

THE FIRST EMPIRES 31

Assyrian empire fell in B.C. 606, never to
rise again. Babylon, rebuilt and fortified
by Nebuchadnezzar (B.C. 604-562), enjoyed a
brief period of splendour and independence,
to be overwhelmed by the swift emergence of
the Persian empire, which in turn — made by
the swords of Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius
—succumbed to the attack of Alexander of
Macedon (B.C. 330).

The astonishing thing is not that Babylon
—which, when Herodotus visited the city
in the fifth century B.C., covered an area of
185 miles, or half as much again as the
44 administrative county " of London to-day
— should have fallen into decay, and be now
dust, but that the slave tillage of the Chaldean
plain and the plunder of neighbouring lands
should have maintained it the glorious centre
of the known world through thirty centuries,
with but a few intervals of eclipse. We have
seen that the northern empire was no better
than a system of spoliation carried on by
a hierarchy of soldiers and officers by means of
armies of slaves, serfs, or mercenaries, under
a feudal system which reduced a formerly
free agricultural population to actual or
virtual slavery. In Babylonia the same
development was checked by the power of
the large towns and the privileges of the
priesthood. But, while the people paid with
liberty and life the costs of perpetual war,

32 WAR AND PEACE

its prizes were absorbed mainly in the ag-
grandisement of the palace and the great
temples. In a new colony with the resources
of a mother-country behind it, the effects of
continued warfare are concealed by fresh
immigration of the same race. It is quite
otherwise with an old civilisation. Every
forward step it has taken — for instance, in
the enlargement of cities, the improvement
of agriculture, the increase of roads and
markets, the better rearing of horses, the
perfection of weapons and strategy, the
elaboration of trade credit — means a wider
area of destruction when conflict breaks out.
Every fighting man represents years of
labour in rearing; his place can only be filled
by like years of fresh labour. Under the
strain of continuous warfare, in which scores
or even hundreds of thousands of the strongest
members of the community are slain, while
only the weaker are left to continue the
stock, the original race is progressively
debilitated, and may at last become extinct.
The slave basis of society is inert, unadaptable,
cannot provide reserves of governing power.
When, as is usual, continuous despotism
accompanies continuous warfare, the new
subject peoples, brought in, not by choice,
but by force, and kept in an inferior position,
cannot form a nation with the social integrity
of their predecessors. For there is, though

THE FIRST EMPIRES 33

it is difficult to define, an integrity of a nation,
as of an individual; and, when it is sub-
verted, even a small shock may bring an
outwardly splendid fabric to the ground.
So fell Babylon, and the collapse was, perhaps,
the more complete because so long delayed.

The other great State of antiquity offers
this main point of similarity to Babylon,
that it is absolutely, as Herodotus put it,
" the gift of the river," and this main point
of difference, that through thousands of
years of oppression Egypt has never ceased
to maintain a large and laborious population.
Exhausted by native tyrants, and despoiled
by every militant race of the Levant,
while its ancient art treasures are the
wonder of the museums of the world, the
black soil of this river valley, only from
ten to thirty miles wide, gives life to-day
to ten million people and a sufficient
tribute to its latest masters. There is
a superstitious idea that races and States
must die of old age, of prosperity, of some
vague disease called degeneracy, which is
favoured by continued peace. A rapid glance
through the history of Egypt, especially its
military history, will correct this impression.

The Nile valley has three great advantages.
The river gives the whole country a highroad,
and does for its agriculture what we are
B

34 WAR AND PEACE

beginning to do for ours by intensive cultiva-
tion. It is a self-sufficing country, producing
ample food, building materials, minerals, and
textile crops; so that its rulers are not driven
to foreign adventure, and its people need not
depend on foreign trade. Its position, pro-
tected by deserts and mountains except on
the north, though favouring social stagnation,
was in olden times, and even now is, one of
considerable political strength. These ad-
vantages seem to have borne fruit rapidly
even in the earliest period. The Stone Age
was ended by the introduction — by the first
Asiatic invaders, probably Semites, whose
weapons explain their success — of metal
arms and implements, perhaps also of wheat,
barley, sheep, bricks, and Babylonian methods
of irrigation. The use of copper and bronze
marks a great advance in the status of hunt-
ing and pastoral tribes; and, with even the
most elementary regulation of the Nile
overflow, crops would multiply tenfold.
Gradually the tribal communities of the valley
were gathered into two kingdoms of the
north and south; towns were founded; and,
with the legendary King Menes, a single
dynasty was established (about B.C. 4400,
by the British Museum chronology), with a
. supporting hierarchy of nobles, officials, and
I priests. By the Fourth Dynasty (B.C. 3730-
) 3560) government, the organisation of labour,

THE FIRST EMPIRES 35

and the accumulation of wealth had so far
progressed as to make possible the erection
of the Pyramids. The regulation of the Nile
to convert destructive floods into permanent
irrigation led naturally, indeed, to the
growth of a powerful government. The Great
Pyramid of Cheops is said to have taken
twenty years to build, employing 300,000
men in gangs of 10,000. A few of these
were raided Soudanese herdsmen, but the
mass were natives; and, however foolish these
marvellous works may now appear, they
undoubtedly indicate a time of peace and
plenty, of intellectual advance and national
unification. This development took a course
in some ways similar to that with which we
are more familiar in modern times. Under
the Fifth Dynasty (B.C. 3560-3300) a theo-
cratic absolutism had become firmly estab-
lished, and religious art reached its highest
excellence. Under the Sixth, the courtiers
had grown into an independent landed aris-
tocracy, and the rivalries of princelings led
to the end of what is called the Old Empire
in a re-division of north and south. With
the Tenth and Eleventh Dynasties a United
Kingdom, the so-called Middle Empire, is
restored at Thebes; and under the Twelfth
(about B.C. 2460), with trade and handicraft
flourishing as well as art and literature, the
old landed nobility gradually becomes a
B 2

36 WAR AND PEACE

semi-feudal bureaucracy. Then Imperialism
appears.

The Nile and the humble fellah have done
their best; how are the ever-growing pride
and greed of kings and governors to be
sated ? " Conquest " — the hunt for slaves
and loot — is the everlasting answer to this
question. A spur and example were pro-
vided by the immigration and tyranny of
the Semites of Canaan and Arabia called
Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings (B.C. 1800),
whose superiority probably lay in another
novelty in military organisation, the war-
chariot. Their rule in the north seems to
have lasted for two centuries, and to have
been followed by a nationalist reaction,
including the Hebrew " Oppression " termin-
ated by the Exodus. By this time there could
have been no more of the instincts of the
hunting stage left in the blood of the Nile
peasants than there is of the Viking strain
in our English blood to-day. From the
beginning, the Egyptian appears the least
martial of men. The army, hitherto, had
consisted of a feeble militia, mainly of spear-
men, raised by the local officials, and the
royal guard, with Sudanese and negroes for
stiffening. The war-chariot now became the
centre of a new professional force, with
foreign auxiliaries in increasing numbers —
Syrian and Nubian archers, and Shardana

THE FIRST EMPIRES 37

mercenaries carrying long swords and shields,
dirk and javelin, and clad in mail and helmet.
With such troops Amenhotep I of the " New
Empire " (about B.C. 1560), having unified
the country, set out upon a career of conquest,
which Thotmes I, II, and III carried far
into Syria, Babylonia, and Nubia. The last,
who is accounted the greatest of Egyptian
rnonarchs, led no less than fifteen campaigns.
Immense spoils were brought home and went
to the building of splendid temples, palaces,
and monuments, and to the elaboration of
furniture and ornament. The Court was
steeped in oriental luxury, and the army
swollen with foreign captives. Under Thotmes
IV (B.C. 1430) there is evidence of a reaction
of the powerful priestly and clerical classes;
and in succeeding reigns we hear more of
bribery and negotiation than conquest.

The next great campaigns are the most
southerly reverberation of the oncoming of
the Central Asiatic hordes in which Babylon
was already involved. In B.C. 1297 the end
of a long struggle with the Hittite Empire of
Asia Minor leaves us the interesting text of
a regular treaty of peace and alliance for
defence and offence. Rameses III, of the
Twentieth Dynasty (about 1200 B.C.), revived
the power of Thebes and the arms of Egypt.
In the first naval battle of which we have
a record (B.C. 1192) his Levantine sailors

38 WAR AND PEACE

routed a force of Cretans, Philistines, and
other Asiatics at the mouth of the Nile. The
veracity of the boast of Rameses that a woman
might go wherever she liked in his realm
without molestation is less evident than that
of his stony memorials of slaughter in battle.
But loot sets up a double reaction : it creates
vested interests in disorder at home, and the
cry of revenge abroad. While its rulers
were content to depend on domestic labour
and not on foreign pillage and tribute,
content to develop native resources and an
indigenous civilisation, Egypt remained, de-
spite internal tyranny, a stable and pro-
gressive State, with strength to spare for the
erection of the monuments which astonish
us, even in this day of mammoth engineering
enterprise, by their witness of skill and
organisation. The first outburst of Imperial
adventure in the Middle Empire had led to
a weakening of the native economy by the
introduction of slave labour, and to a barbarian
invasion. The Imperialism of the New Em-
pire, culminating in the campaigns of Rameses,
resulted in a further weakening of the native
economy by dependence on foreign tribute
and commodities, the diversion of large
bodies of men from productive to destructive
work, and to a series of reactions from neigh-
bouring countries, ending in military disaster,
political collapse, economic misery, and sub-

THE FIRST EMPIRES 39

jection to Libyan, Ethiopian, and Assyrian
conquerors.

Henceforth there is no State that can be
properly called Egyptian. But the patient
cattle still draw the wooden plough, and the
creaking of the shaduf, the primitive water-
wheel, never ceases along the Nile. What
more of extortion there may have been by
Persian satraps, Greek and Roman governors,
Arab Kadis and Mamelukes, and Turkish
Pashas, must have been compensated by the
discovery of Roman and still more distant
markets. The Ptolemies were in their time
the wealthiest rulers in the world; and the
encouragement they gave to Greek traders
in the north may have been for the good of
their subjects. But, while the city of Alex-
andria, with its famous library and light-
house, grew to be the centre of intellectual
influence and commercial activity in the
Levant, Greek Pharaohs and Roman prefects
ruthlessly exploited the upper country, and,
by destroying all native elements in the
administration, made easy the way for twelve
centuries of Mohammedan rule.

This rapid sketch of the military history
of the ancient empires of the Near East
indicates some broad conclusions as to its
character. In these rich and extensive
dominions we are already far from the crude
impulses of the savage tribe ; but tribal

40 WAR AND PEACE

conditions on the outside vitally affect them.
The swarming movement, the great immigra-
tions from Central Asia into the warmer and
more fertile lands of the west and south, are
A provocative of constant conflict. The older
land more important " predominant motive "
{is internal despotism, with its law of diminish-
ling returns. The rationale of the union of
village communities into principalities, and
these into empires, has been a general interest
in law, order, and the organisation of the
river works. But the governing class be-
comes larger and larger, developing from
the simplest form of patriarchal monarchy,
through a feudal period, to a bureaucratic
despotism battening upon a vast body of
slave labour. The limit of extortion being
reached, Pharaoh begins to look abroad for
new fields of exploitation; and warfare be-
comes a regular function of government.
Agricultural serfs are not the stuff democracy
is made of; but neither are they militant
patriots. A class of foreign traders has not
yet arisen; and Nature is so kind that there
is no need of outflow in colonisation. War,
with its constant new supplies of captive
toilers, is always a depressing interference
with native life ; and, though it reaches a vast
scale, its organisation strikes us as less re-
markable than the preceding monuments of
peaceful labour. At length, warfare also

THE FIRST EMPIRES 41

presents increasing difficulties, and gives
diminishing returns to the now almost com-
pletely alien ruling class. The original racial
stock may have been ruined in learning the
lesson, as in Mesopotamia, or only degraded
and debilitated as in Egypt. Then the
centre of gravity in history passes to other
lands where ideas may count for more, and
arbitrary power for less.

In a little garden by the Nile noisy with
the evensong of many hidden birds, I sat
once watching the sun go down behind the
holy mountain of Kurna, and dreaming over
the fate of the Pharaohs buried there. From
the parched black fields the peasants had
gone to their mud-brick homes; the feluccas
were moored ashore, their lateen sails looped
up; the wise asses and gentle buffaloes and
camels were stalled. Peace lay over all the
plain where once stood royal Thebes of the
hundred gates. Life seemed suspended, save
that the vast river, a sheet of ruffled steel,
poured downward her vital stream, the same
to-day as ten thousand years ago. The kings
and priests, rulers of thirty splendid dynasties,
do their ghosts still attend their accustomed
shrines now that there are no prostrate
multitudes where once was Thebes ? Dead
. . . and they so sure of immortality; they
and their works and thoughts, all dead I
These colossi, so piteously dumb; these deep-

42 WAR AND PEACE

cut records of war that the jackal laughs at
by night and the tripper exclaims over by day ;
the solitary obelisks and pyramids — can the
world show any such spectacle of pathetic
futility ? The fellah has no pride in them;
they are dead work of alien hands; he is alive,
and, humble as he is, his hopes lie higher.
The sand and ruins of Thebes, laden with the
dust of kings and slaves, exhale continually
this nightmare thought of death. Athens
and Rome breed no such deep sadness. For
this must be the gloomiest tragedy of human
effort — to have meant so much, and to mean
nothing; to have given to-day to win to-
morrow, and to have lost both.

Yet that is not the whole truth. There is
nothing lost. The Egyptian mind passed into
Greece and Judaea. The Dynasties held the
human spirit captive too long; they must be
broken that the wider world might learn what
they had to teach. History is the tale of
this ceaseless fermentation, re-incarnation, or
rather re-animation. Englishmen are but
the latest followers of Hittites, Assyrians,
Persians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Turks,
on the sacred soil of Thebes; and all the
Dynasties could but be a moment in the
secular history of the rise of man. If I
am master of myself, I am greater than
Ptolemy; and the freed fellah bending over
his sugar-cane is nearer the reality of things

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 43

than Queen Hatsephsu. For immortality lies
no more in royal splendour and strength
than in swathings of linen with myrrh and
salts and spices, but only in deeds of beauty,
justice, and love.

CHAPTER III

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN

THE Nile and Mesopotamian basins are the
two great fertile breaks in a belt of deserts
and steppes — including the Sahara, Arabian,
Thian Shan, and Gobi deserts — which run
N.E. by E. across the Old World from Nigeria
to Kamtchatka. To the south of this belt
lie tropical Africa and Asia, to the north the
earlier and later homes of the Indo-European
race. We yet know very little of the cause of
the ancient waves of Aryan expansion, but
their main results are evident. There is a
mysteriously steady westward trend, under
the impulsion, perhaps, of a pressure of
population behind, perhaps of some immense
natural change, such as the drying-up of the
central Asian tablelands, or some great social
disturbance — a trend along the lower level of
the north temperate zone. It is significant that
half a dozen of the greatest historical cities —
Pekin, Constantinople, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon,
and New York — lie very near to the 40° of

44 WAR AND PEACE

northern latitude, and that if, instead of this
parallel, we follow the annual isotherm — the
mean average temperature line — of 50°, we may
add Vienna, Paris, and London to the list. The
tribal stream sweeps into Europe, then, along
this belt of climatic advantage by way of the
Caspian region, one branch moving to the
north of the central European mountain
block, across the Russian plain to the South
Baltic and the western plain; the other into
the southern peninsulas and Asia Minor. As
might be expected, the branches which soonest
develop into rich and strong communities
are those which move southward into the
three Mediterranean peninsulas — partly, per-
haps, because of the mere convenience of
getting up a side street when a procession is
at one's heels, partly because these peninsulas
were richer in natural advantages, and offered
better defensive positions, than the bogs,
forests, and prairies of the north; above all,
when commerce began, because the sea is
a perpetual challenge to the adventurous, and
the easiest path to everywhere — the way alike
of liberty, trade, and empire. To the robust
children of this vast westward immigration
fell some of the richest lands of the earth.
One after another the three peninsulas of the
north Mediterranean seaboard held the
centre of gravity in history. Each people in
turn, the Greek, the Roman, the Spaniard,

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 45

rises to the most magnificent achievement —
to the mastery of the world; and each in turn
is humbled to the dust. In each case the suc-
cessful growth is due directly and indirectly to
geographical position and physical resources;
in each case the temptation of dominion
over peoples less fortunately situated leads to
the weakening, and finally to the destruction,
of the economic advantages and the political
integrity which the conquering race had
originally enjoyed.

Neither within the limits of political, nor of
intellectual, nor of military history, can the
rise and fall of Greek power be adequately
explained. I shall offer here only some
general considerations which fall in the
straight line of our inquiry; but the student
can hardly too often recall the facts of ele-
mentary geography. There he will find the
contributory elements of Greek democracy,
colonisation, and empire. With a rapidity
like that of the transformation of modern
Japan, the city-states of the peninsula de-
veloped a type of political life not merely the
highest of the age, but one of perennial
interest, since there is hardly any political
expedient of subsequent times which is not
foreshadowed in Greek experience. Its rise
was so rapid — a space of less than 500 years
lay between the Homeric epos and the period
of Socrates (B.C. 470-399), Plato (429-347),

46 WAR AND PEACE

and Aristotle (385-322) — its growth, despite
enormous sacrifices, especially in warfare,
and despite the pressure of peoples to whom
its spirit was utterly alien, was so persistent,
that we seem to be in presence of a miraculous
break in the order of ancient history. The
marvel is somewhat modified when we consider
the circumstances which conditioned the first
considerable expansion of the Hellenic peoples
in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., and
gave the direction to their subsequent develop-
ment. The narrowness of the Attic plains
and the difficulty of the mountain barriers
long preserved Greece from invasion en masse,
and directed the tribal settlement so as to
preserve old elements of social cohesion in
the new circumstances of city life. The land
is sufficiently hard to put a premium on energy
and skill; thus, while slaves did the roughest
work, there was always a large supply of free
labour. The abrupt isolation of the different
small communities was a source of military
and governmental weakness; but it encouraged
the spirit of liberty and independence, and
a fluidity of political forms favourable to
experiment and imitation. It is the antithesis
of those broad flat wheatlands of ancient
Babylonia and modern Russia which breed
the taskmaster and the serf. The G&eek had
the sea as well as the mountains at his doors.
His home was easy of defence, fertile (there is

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 47

never famine on a seaboard), yet not rich
enough for idleness and luxury, and requiring
foreign supplies of corn, wood, and wool —
a resting-place between a tent and a ship.
With the advantages of the most southerly
position in Europe, it had that of a mild and
bracing climate. Athens lay nearly equi-
distant~Betwe"eTI the mouth of the Nile, Tyre,
Odessa, Rome, and Carthage. Insular and
peninsular life produces an adventurous dis-
position ; and the sailors of the Piraeus must
have learned very early their advantage in
northern and western voyages over their
rivals of Tyre and Sidon. We find them
building triremes in B.C. 700, and trading
with Russia, Persia, and the Caspian by
way of the Black Sea, with the East by way
of the Nile Delta, and with the western
Mediterranean.

The proximity of the ^Egean islands and
that Asian shore whence " deep-browed
Homer " brought the legends of the race
would early lead to a leisurely outward move-
ment. Each city-state threw off colonies
reflecting its own democratic character. The
Greeks were not, like the Egyptians, reluctant
to fight; but they went abroad as freemen
to found homes such as they had left; their
business was settlement for cultivation and
commerce, rather than conquest. Here Sparta,
landlocked in the Laconian mountains, was

48 WAR AND PEACE

at a disadvantage, a fact which must have
contributed to her development on military
and conservative lines. The first wave of
emigration in the eighth and seventh centuries
probably resulted as much from a temporary
rise of aristocratic power in the tribal organis-
ation, at the cost of the kings and the free-
men, as from the discovery of mercantile
and maritime opportunity. In B.C. 735 was
founded the first Sicilian colony; from the
sixth century the settlements in South Italy
came to be known as "Greater Greece";
and about B.C. 600 the three angles of the
great triangle of Greek influence were estab-
lished at Marseilles, Odessa, and Naucratis
in the Nile Delta. The size and security
of their base of origin is a chief factor in
the stability of colonies. A glance at the
map will show that the base of the Phoe-
nician system was very small, and — directly
the Eastern empires under whose shadow it
lay were stirred into activity — very insecure,
as compared with that of Greece. Tyre
suffered by every disturbance in her Asiatic
hinterland or in Egypt, as Venice and Genoa
suffered in later times when the Eastern land-
routes were closed by the semi-circular advance
of the Saracen and Turkish power. Greece had
the kind of advantage over Tyre that England
had over Holland in the seventeenth century
— she was nearer to the new lands, and safer

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 49

from the old. At the same time, with her
quick and shrewdly acquisitive mind, she
drew upon the experience of the older lands,
learning weights and measures and something
of monumental art from Babylon, mathe-
matics and astronomy from Egypt, iron-
working and shipbuilding from the Phoeni-
cians, and the value of a regular coinage
— perhaps the chief factor of all (about 700
B.C.) — from her own Lydian colonists. The
combination of these acquirements accounts
for the rapid increase of wealth when Greece
entered definitely into the exploitation of
Mediterranean trade. Travellers of free birth
are the keenest of patriots; and it was a
mental activity capable of adding the know-
ledge of " barbarian " life to the heritage of
Mycenaean culture, and not merely the martial
valour of tribesmen fresh from the hunting
and pastoral stages, that fed the flame of
Greek patriotism.

There was a base of slave labour; but in the
great period much of the service was done
by freedmen or well-treated domestic slaves,
who were commonly emancipated (see A. E.
Zimmern in the Sociological Review, 1910.
Prisoners of war were enslaved, but might not
be killed in cold blood. Crops and buildings
were destroyed, but olive-trees rarely. Such
was the rule, though it was sometimes
broken. The seeds of international law are to

50 WAR AND PEACE

be found in treaties made by the Greek city-
states and in the rules for the residence of
aliens and the reception of embassies. A
vague " law of nature," or humanity, was
uncertainly recognised; and, within this,
distinctions were more commonly made be-
tween Greek and non-Greek, civilised and
barbarian enemies. " Xenophon depicts his
ideal king as making an agreement with his
foe that the labourers in the land should be
let alone on either side, and the operations
of war confined to those bearing arms.'*
" The Amphiktionic Council, which has been
by some erected into a board of international
arbitration after the model of the Kantian
scheme, was in truth a religious, not a political
assembly, but nevertheless did operate as a
symbol of international good-fellowship, and
to a certain extent as an active international
agent " (Walker : History of the Law of
Nations). The feuds of the States, though
wasteful and enfeebling, did not destroy the
sense of Hellenic fellowship. Nourished by
like tastes in physical and mental culture,
and organised in the great national sanctuaries
and festivals, in successive leagues for war
and peace, and other federal experiments, it
held the colonies faithful even when far
removed from the mother-states, and sustained
the prestige of a homogeneous civilisation.
When the Persian storm burst over the

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 51

Orient, in the middle of the sixth century,
Greece had these sources of strength, but little
of military advantage to oppose to the invad-
ing host. Her arms and armour, so far as we
can judge by what remains, show a singular
lack of the variety and ingenuity of her
industrial and artistic invention. The decline
of monarchy and the rise of trade had produced
the same change from cavalry (in this case
war-chariots) to heavy-armed infantry (hop-
lites) which we shall see accompanying the
decline of mediaeval feudalism. The body
armour, consisting of metal helmet, cuirass,
and greaves, had long been known throughout
the Nearer East, and was to continue to the
end of Roman times, with only slight changes
in response to the effectiveness or feebleness
of weapons of attack (the helmet covering
the whole head when cavalry had to meet
skilled bowmen, for instance). The metal
breastplate and leg-guards are accounted for
by the smallness of the Greek shield. In
Mycenaean times (B.C. 3000-2000) the sword
had not been invented; the first swords,
developed from the bronze dagger and spear-
head, were used mainly for thrusting. The
long heavy spear then became the most
important weapon; the sword was added as
iron- working improved; bows and slings were
used by mercenaries; the axe was accounted
a purely barbarian weapon. The fighting

52 WAR AND PEACE

power of Sparta lay in her system of
physical training, and her heavy infantry
which found a glorification in the Mace-
donian phalanx, a formation of pikemen,
sixteen deep and five hundred in frontage,
standing so close that the spears of five
ranks extended beyond the front line.
It was the union of the military spirit of
Sparta with the new naval force to which
Themistocles sacrificed the army of Athens
(aided by the discovery of a new bed in the
Laurion silver mines) that made the repulse
of Persia and the Greek reaction possible.
Marathon (B.C. 490), won by the rapid assault
of the heavily-armed Athenians ; Thermopylae,
lost after a heroic resistance; Salamis, where
six or seven hundred Persian ships were
thrown into confusion in the narrow straits
by half the number of Greek triremes (B.C.
480), and Plateea (B.C. 479), where the hoplites
again proved their superiority to the mob of
servile Asiatics, led to the final retirement of
the Persians and the liberation of the Asian
coast-lands. Athens had been twice captured
and partly destroyed; the city and its port
were now strongly fortified, and Pericles
set up new glories in stone on the Acropolis.
His design of a Pax Hellenica broke upon
the aggressive spirit of Sparta. Nearly a
century of civil war witnessed many peace
congresses and at least one reference to arbitra-

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 53

tion, but produced no lasting agreement.
Despite the " Philippics " of Demosthenes,
Macedon was in control of the Hellenic
Confederation and its Council in B.C. 338;
and in 334 Alexander took the warpath against
the Persian Empire, at the head of 30,000
infantry, light and heavy, and 5,000 cavalry.
After defeating the immensely stronger army
of Darius, and reducing successively Phoenicia,
Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and the Punjab, he
endeavoured to found a court and dynasty
of mixed Persian and Macedonian blood.
He died in B.C. 323, being only in his thirty-
third year. He had done much to spread
Greek ideas and to join East to West. But
he had almost completed the destruction of
the old Hellenic stock, begun by generations
of internecine strife. He created an outward
stream of Greek adventure, and an inward
stream of oriental luxury. The ideals and
organisation of the old city-states fell to-
gether into decay. Soldiering became a
profession instead of a patriotic duty. The
economic advantages, the political experience,
the religious spirit which made Hellas great
lost their value in a campaign of Asiatic
empire-building. The old Greeks were killed
out, aliens of a quite different sort taking
their place. The Empire, built in bloodshed,
lacked any natural bond of union, and broke
up into separate kingdoms ; while the

54 WAR AND PEACE

peninsula fell an easy prey to the legions of
Rome.

In societies, as in individual organisms, there
is a ceaseless adjustment of internal to exter-
nal relations; and a self-governing State or
federation which suddenly gives itself up to
the business of conquest suffers a strain such
as a school-master would suffer in the prize-
ring. For a moment, the possession of an
intelligence unusual in that field may yield
brilliant results; but collapse must quickly
follow. Here is a case above all others in
which we may appeal confidently to the verdict
/ of posterity. The Greece we all worship is
not the far-spreading empire of Alexander,
but the group of related, autonomous city-
states, where intelligence and commercial
skill were qualities of citizenship, and citizen-
ship was the essence of civilisation. The great
Greeks reached, and helped succeeding peoples
to reach, a higher plane of political and moral
experience than had hitherto been deemed
possible, created a new world of science and
art, established an ideal of the sane mind in
the sane body and the perfect man in the
perfect society, cut out a new line of progress
between anarchy and despotism, and made
moral ends supreme over material in the
State. These are the things which make us
children of the barbarian West, thousands of
years afterwards, humble subjects of the

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 55

Greek genius. The empire of the spirit
survives the shocks of time; and Greek
universalism, the Greek ideal of Democracy
as a brotherhood of equals for progress in the
good life, the Greek tri-unity of Reason,
Righteousness, and Beauty, are the articles
of a spiritual empire before which all the
material achievements of Macedon and Rome
are as dust in the balance. The Greece that
fell before the Roman legions was a different,
a decadent Greece. Only around the middle
seas did the Greek city-colonies long continue;
some continue there to this day as vital
centres of the arts of peace. Renan said
of the great nations of history that " they
must die first that the world may live through
them." That was supremely true of the
peoples whose spirit was most cosmopolitan.
When Philip and Alexander were forgotten,
the greatest victories of Greece began.

While Aristotle was formulating the political
and ethical philosophy which has been called
the dying legacy of Greece to mankind, a
significant development was preparing among
the other people who, in their national decline,
were to become pre-eminently the teachers
of the Western world — the Jews. No com-
parison of Greek, Jewish, and Christian con-
ceptions of State policy and international
relations is possible within the limits of this
volume; yet the influence of Greek and

56 WAR AND PEACE

Hebrew thought, cast like grains of mustard-
seed into the rough furrow of early Levantine
life, has been so profound in the subsequent
course of events that it cannot be passed over.
The Greek vindication of free, homogeneous
citizenship, the Hebrew vision of human
brotherhood derivative from a divine father-
hood— these ideas have shown such inner force
that the very governing classes whose lives
most plainly denied their validity have
always insisted upon them as the necessary
bases of a sound education.

The Jews are the supreme instance of high
organising power and intellectual ability con-
tinuously dissociated from imperial tempta-
tions and burdens. The special gifts which
made them brokers and middlemen on one
of the chief of the ancient caravan routes,
qualities developed under pressure between
the hammer of Babylon and the anvil of
Egypt, have been nurtured through centuries
of oppression. That a kingdom of this world
was forbidden them is the ground of all their
greatness, if, also, of some evident limitations.
Whether it is better to have no fatherland or
too many possessions, to be hardened and
narrowed in the Ghetto or debauched by
opportunities of dominion too huge for mortal
compassing, who shall say ? Whatever a
freer future may have in store for the Jews,
it is certain that the highest manifestation

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 57

of their religion was not that which they
carried away with them on the dispersion,
but that which is to be found in the Prophetic
age. It was the nearest approach the world
had yet seen to a religion of humanity. The
earlier nomad and peasant religion had been
sacrificial, belligerent, nationalist. " Thou
shalt save alive nothing that breathe th " :
such was the Mosaic law of battle, only to be
modified in favour of related tribes, or by the
needs of foreign trade. The post-Prophetic
religion was ceremonial, priestly, legal, and
was accompanied by a somewhat milder
practice in warfare. Between these, in the
Prophets, we find at its highest the ethical
strain, the emphasis on justice, righteousness,
and inner self-possession, which were and are
of even more value for a better organisation
of the world than more explicitly cosmopolitan
pronouncements. The wide comprehensive-
ness of the Prophetic faith is very remarkable
when we remember that the Assyrian tyranny
was then looming threateningly upon the
Eastern horizon; it contrasts strongly with
Greek racial pride, and still more markedly
with Mohammed's later command of war upon
the infidel. The Law had at once a more
intimate and a more universal quality when
it had no political aim. " If Jahveh represents
the good, the ethical and spiritual principles,
then this has but to be grasped in its depth

58 WAR AND PEACE

for all national restrictions to be set aside.
Good, properly understood, has from the very
first an international significance; it is a
conception which belongs to a higher sphere
than that of communities formed either
naturally or by chance. . . . Thus the unity
of the State and the national citizenship lose
their religious significance; the individual,
who was previously merely considered as a
member of the nation, now steps into the
foreground, and comes to be of importance
in himself for religion; and, as it no longer
matters what nation one belongs to, Jahveh
not being confined to the territory of any one
people, so the citizens of other states, i. e.
the whole world, enter into relationship with
Jahveh. In other words, individualism and
universalism have taken the place of national-
ism in religion " (Prof. Marti : Religion of
the Old Testament).

This broad spirit, as distinguished from the
later sacerdotalism, Jesus resumed and carried
to yet higher levels. For the first time, the
world witnessed propaganda for a moral idea
on a large scale. Love, not dogma or ritual;
universal brotherhood, not a Jewish Messiah-
ship; governance from within, not from with-
out; the power of gentleness — such was the
new message. The heathen had understood
self-sacrifice for the family or at the command
of the State; Jesus taught self-sacrifice for the

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 59

ideal of a universal commonwealth. The
circumstances favoured a faint cosmopolitan-
ism. The conquests of Rome had destroyed
over wide areas the possibility of the ancient
tribal patriotism, and had accustomed men
of many races to acknowledge the bond of
one law. Roman jurists had to some extent
realised the Stoic ideal of a world citizenship.
The Empire broke down many of the old
barriers, and recruited its leaders indiscrim-
inately in East and West — Marcus Aurelius
and Trajan, Seneca and Martial were Span-
iards, Severus was an African. But the
Imperial unity was an artificial product, with
little hold upon the hearts and consciences of
men. It rested on force and upon pride in
an exclusive right of dominance. At a cost
of centuries of anarchy, Europe was to learn
that the destruction of the principle of nation-
ality was an utterly false method of estab-
lishing a world-state. The organisation of
humanity, like the growth of the individual,
must proceed by regular, natural stages.

How much of this was foreseen by the son
of the Nazarene carpenter we do not know;
but he saw the essential fact. Not only were
Jew and Gentile, bond and free, to unite in
an all-embracing kingdom ; not only was
the right of warfare, and of the reduction
of prisoners of war and their children to slavery
— the great buttress of the military empires

60 WAR AND PEACE

of the ancient world — denied; the love of
humanity — not of a vague cosmopolitan ideal,
or of single individuals only, but of man as
man — must become a passion so possessing
as to burn up selfishness, exclusive prejudices,
all the old (and still commanding) ideas of
the virtue of individual and national self-
defence, and even the love of life itself. " In
the society of selfish people," said Sir John
Seeley in his fine exposition of this teaching
in Ecce Homo, " selfishness is simply self-
defence; to renounce it is to evacuate one's
entrenched position, to surrender at discretion
to the enemy. If society is to disarm, it
should do so by common consent. Christ,
however, though He confidently expected
ultimately to gather all mankind into His
society, did not expect to do so soon. Accord-
ingly, He commands His followers not to wait
for this consummation, but, in spite of the
hazardous nature of the step, to disarm at
once. . . . The discipline of suffering will
wean them more and more from self, and make
the channels of humanity freer within them;
and sometimes their patience may shame the
spoiler."

A hard teaching, as to which I will only
say that this, and nothing else, is the heart
of Christianity, however otherwise ecclesias-
tical persons may persuade themselves. Had
it only come as an academic lesson, it could

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 61

have made no impression on Roman life.
But it was a message to the common folk
based on familiar facts and couched in
familiar terms, rich with assurance of a pro-
found knowledge of the human heart. " He
who is truly humane," I quote Seeley again,
" considers every human being, as such,
interesting and important, and, without wait-
ing to criticise each individual specimen, pays
in advance to all alike the tribute of good
wishes and sympathy. Now this favourable
assumption with regard to human beings is
not a causeless prepossession, it is no idle
superstition of the mind, nor is it a natural
instinct. It is a feeling founded on the actual
observation and discovery of interesting and
noble qualities in particular human beings;
and it is strong or weak in proportion as the
person who has the feeling has known many
or few noble and amiable human beings."
To his burning belief in the noble capacities
of man Jesus gave up his life, and it was this
belief and this sacrifice that constituted the
inspiration of the early Church. It has made
many conquests, especially in softening the
barbarian invaders and aiding the re-settle-
ment of Europe, and many failures, especially
its inability to withstand the force of ecclesi-
asticism within and Islam without. Lip-
service has marred its beauty — as when
clerical persecutors invented burning at the

62 WAR AND PEACE

stake in order to evade the guilt of bloodshed,
and, in a much later day, when a " Christian
Power " forced opium upon the Chinese at the
cannon's mouth. But even when, in the fourth
Christian century, Church and State began
to enter into formal union, the leaven went
on working. The persecutions had left their
mark. Christianity challenged, and not quite
vainly, four of the most characteristic results
of Roman imperialism : war, slavery, infanti-
cide, and the gladiatorial shows. Against
the ideal of patriotism, the last word of Graeco-
Roman public morals, the early Christians
placed that of universal beneficence. Courage,
a purely martial virtue for Aristotle, took a
new form in endurance of injustice and passive
resistance of violence.

The view of Tertullian, Clement, Origen,
and Basil that no Christian could properly
be a soldier, or keep a magisterial office
in which he would have to inflict the
death penalty, was gradually abandoned;
and few later bishops endorsed Ambrose in
forbidding bloodshed in self-defence. This
change was inevitable. The refusal to bear
arms may be an effective method of protest
against local oppression, but its organisation
on a large scale requires conditions which did
not exist in the early Christian world. The
Semitic races do not take kindly to soldiering;
passive revolt was natural to reforming Jews

GREEK, JEW, AND CHRISTIAN 63

standing between the Sanhedrim and the
Roman Governor; and it was a feature of the
toleration of the race in the early Empire that
they were not subjected to military service.
As the Church extended into the cosmopolitan
West and became non- Judaic, the character
of protest gradually gave way to that of
missionary zeal. This was met by perse-
cution; and, again, it was natural that a
Tertullian (A.D. 160-220) should threaten cruel
proconsuls with the only method of resistance
then open to the poor Christian. Another line
of influence proved easier, however. The
Church became organised under a federation
of aristocratic bishops. Rich men joined it;
its property grew with the hierarchy. It had
to struggle against internal heresy; theologi-
cal speculation and ecclesiastical discipline
took the place of ethical and democratic
experiment. Most of the Fathers, grateful
to Rome for the opportunity it gave them,
trimmed their sails to the favouring breeze;
most of the congregations became content
to enjoy the advantages of Roman law and
citizenship. The ideals of common property
and non-resistance rose and fell together.

As years passed, and martyrdom ceased;
as ecclesiastics became the patrons and
partners of the secular power, and the hope
of a miraculous success in war offered to the
barbarians the chief motive for conversion,

64 WAR AND PEACE

Christian doctrine and practice underwent a
transformation which was completed by the
panic fear of the Moslem peril. " The spirit
of Mohammedanism slowly passed into
Christianity, and transformed it into its
image. For about two centuries every pulpit
in Christendom proclaimed the duty of war
with the unbeliever, and represented the
battlefield as the sure path to heaven"
(Lecky ; European Morals, where the subject
is fully treated). The Church had become
thoroughly imperialised.

But the " glad tidings " remained. With
the Greek idea of self-government and the
Christian idea of brotherhood before it, the
world could never again be quite the same.
Civilisation could no longer mean only road-
building and the reign of law — henceforth it
could mean nothing less than the making of
civil persons and civil communities. The
divorce of progress from the trade in arms
was proclaimed.

CHAPTER IV

THE STRENGTH OF ROME

ROMANS and Hellenes were of kindred race;
if slavery was the base, citizenship was the
body of Roman, as of Hellenic, power. But
there were deep differences. Rome was the

THE STRENGTH OF ROME 65

meeting-point of three rival nations, the
Etruscans, Sabines, and Latins, among whom
there must have been a good deal of blood
mixture, which would be increased with the
expansion of the Latins over the Apennines.
The city had then no more fitness than now
to become a great industrial or commercial
centre. Situated further than Athens from
the line of Aryan invasion, further also from
the ancient empires, and joined by an almost
unnavigable stream to an inhospitable, har-
bourless coast looking out into the unknown
West, the patriarchal stage of development
was here more prolonged. Destiny pointed
to a landward, not a maritime, development.
The martial spirit was always modified by a
power of assimilation and an accommodating,
practical temper that would have appeared
mean to the proud Greek. Thus, paternalism
was as strong in Rome as personal independ-
ence in Athens; political experience was
prized more than a quick intellect, governance
more than trade, organising skill than the
love of adventure. Civilisation meant, for
her, opportunity, not inspiration, an outer
condition represented by law and order,
rather than an inner state fed by art and
philosophy. If it be true, however, that the
body must be satisfied ere the spirit can
expand, that social organisation is a con
dition precedent of moral and intellectual

e

;

66 WAR AND PEACE

progress, the Pax Romana was the necessary
precursor of Greek, Hebrew, and Christian
ideals in those northern and western lands
toward which Rome faced as naturally as
Athens did to the south and east.

Military skill was, then, but one of many
instruments of Roman expansion. Moreover,
the political instinct which gradually expressed
itself in public works, codes of law, an elastic
administration, and the successive grades of
franchise (Roman, Latin, Italic, Provincial)
was developed first at home. If a genius
for government and devotion to the Mother
City had not been built up through centuries
of moderate popular demands and aristo-
cratic concessions, before the strain of foreign
conquest began, Rome could never have
become mistress of the world. The Romanisa-
tion of Italy, which preceded foreign adven-
ture, and occupied ten times as long as it
took Alexander to conquer the East, was an
outgrowth of democratic experience and civic
pride, together with agricultural colonisation
and road-building, not pure conquest. It was
no mere hunt for tribute and slaves; and it
never became a trade policy, despite Greek and
Carthaginian examples. The long faithful-
ness of the Latin cities and the colonies is
significant of much. Thus broadly based on
the social organisation of a large part of the
peninsula, Rome was safe against Hannibal,

THE STRENGTH OF ROME 67

himself " greater than any of the Romans
themselves in the very qualities which made
Rome great " (Mommsen). Carthage, with
all her wealth of tribute and traffic, a strip
of coast with a hinterland of wild and rebel-
lious tribes, depending on armies of slaves
and mercenaries, jealously restricting her own
colonies in trade and her own citizens in
political influence, was no match for the
citizen soldiery and the statecraft of Rome,
already impregnated with Greek culture.

This is the turning-point. That conquest
degrades the conqueror seems to be a rule
admitting of no exception. The long struggle
of the two Punic wars (B.C. 264-241 and 218-
201), and the cruel campaigns of the following
century, produced both in the capital and
among the Italian allies a deep demoralisa-
tion, which, aggravated by economic revolu-
tion in the home provinces, ran its natural
course in the Csesarean era. While the stout-
est men were away fighting, the meanest were
left to breed, to govern, to sell the public
offices to any who would give most largess,
until at last the Pretorian Guard sold the
Imperial chair itself. The latifundia were
at first a copy of Carthaginian models of
large-scale scientific agriculture. Usury, the
resultant land-grabbing, and extortion by
provincial officials gradually brought about
the ruin of the small farmer and yeoman class
c 2

68 WAR AND PEACE

that had been the backbone of the State.
This, in turn, led to slave tillage, the decay
of the old rural life, dependence on foreign
food supplies, and the gathering of a land-
less proletariat in the towns. Upon the old
slave economy, there was superimposed a
peculiarly oppressive money economy, repre-
sented by the " publicans," or great money-
lenders and contractors — a relative monopoly
due to the scarcity of bullion. The republican
power was divided between a hooligan popu-
lace fed on a regimen of " bread and games,'*
and a governing class seeking new fields of
ambition even in civil war, and wider oppor-
tunities of indulgence in the plunder of the
East. Thus democracy gave place to olig-
archy, the Republic to the dictatorship (Sulla
B.C. 81, Julius Caesar B.C. 49) and the Empire
(Augustus B.C. 29); thus a decadent society
was initiated into a career of spoliation as a
substitute for the peaceful development of
native resources and true colonisation.

Why do we feel the sequel to be so much
more poignant a tragedy than the fall of
Babylon, the decay of Egypt, or even the
disintegration of Greece ? Because it saw a
united Europe, a political system not unworthy
of comparison with our own in richness and
extent, plunged into centuries of anarchy,
through a large part of which almost all
traces of civilisation were lost. No such con-

THE STRENGTH OF ROME 69

tinuous realm has ever been, or is now likely
to be, built upon the earth as that which
served the will of the Antonines. From the
Scottish wall to the Atlas mountains, from
the Lower Rhine to the Euphrates, by slow
and steady steps the rule of Roman law, the
sagacity of Roman administration, had been
extended. The magistracy was inspired by
a spirit of toleration altogether new in the
history of government. The humane spirit of
Greek philosophy softened the rougher though
broader western nature. Stoicism became
the religion of the educated Roman. Cicero
proclaimed a " universal society of the human
race "; Lucan foretold a time when " the race
will cast aside its weapons, and all nations will
learn to love" ; Seneca said, "My country is
the world " ; and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
declared themselves citizens of the world.
Conquest was robbed of much of its sting by
the extension of civic privileges, the reward
of barbarians for services, and the opening
of a door of escape from slavery. Wide-
distant provinces, which could never have
been held by force of arms alone, were
placated by the double expedient of establish-
ing colonies, civil as well as military, and
extending the franchise, above all by
opportunities of peace and exchange of goods,
which made the grandchildren of Julius
Csesar's Gallic enemies most loyal servants of

70 WAR AND PEACE

Rome. Latin became the universal language
in the West, and through it Roman and Greek
ideas flowed from the Mediterranean lands
far into the dark North.

So long as her heart beat sound, Rome had
certain advantages in the maintenance of this
vast organism which none of her Imperial
predecessors or successors have enjoyed. The
first was a relative monopoly of political and
military genius within vast areas whose
potential fertility invited Roman expansion.
Considerations of the " balance of power,'?
such as had been paramount in the policy
of the Greek States and long afterwards
vexed Europe, never troubled her. After
the subjection of Carthage and Macedon,
no such rivals stood in the way of the Caesars
as face every civilised State to-day. West
of the Persian frontier, Rome was the only
great Power. This advantage in the externals
of civilisation made it possible, at a time
when we should expect to see society unformed
and full of turmoil, to maintain settled peace
over an area of some six million square miles
of territory, inhabited by, perhaps, a hundred
millions of people, with a force not numeri-
cally stronger than the British army of to-day.
Moreover, her conquests followed in a rela-
tively natural and organic order, beginning
with the civilised States of the Mediterranean ;
and, though of many races, her subjects

THE STRENGTH OF ROME 71

showed a relative likeness of condition. The
East was but touched, and then only after
Alexander had paved the way ; when at length
it began to react on Europe, Rome was already
tottering to her fall.

It has often been asked what made the once
so robustly democratic Romans meekly accept
the change to dictatorship and autocracy.
The usual answer is that the Senate and
people were unequal to the task of governing
the territories they had acquired. This
must mean that there is a logical develop-
ment in the business of conquest, and that
when the spirit of democracy had been aban-
doned, it was only a question of time for the
forms of democracy to go also. In fact,
structure responds to function in social as
in individual organisms — or rather it tends
to do so, often breaking down in the process.
The Republic had been quite equal to the
defence of the peninsula; it slowly broke
down before schemes of universal conquest,
and with it expired what was left of the old
Roman nationality. The transformation from
a republic based on a municipality to an
empire based on a monarchical household
took place gradually, in accordance with the
Roman temperament. Cicero eulogised the
mixed constitution of his day, but already
alarming changes had taken place; and, as
the preponderance had passed from the

72 WAR AND PEACE

popular assembly (abolished by Tiberius) to
the Senate, so this, in turn, came to be a mere
tool in the hands of the autocratic monarch,
restrained by no effective influence save that
of the soldiery.

The evils of this change, which set in
decisively a generation before the birth of
Christ and was fully developed in the reigns
of Trajan and Hadrian (A.D. 98-138), are
obvious ; its advantages may be fully admitted.
Autocracy is, indeed, the natural organ of
empire. For a time it operates rapidly and
effectively. It keeps internal peace, if at a
heavy cost. It can supplant irregular extor-
tion by systematic taxation. Neither cus-
tomary law nor a representative assembly
imposing any restraint, rules suggested by
experience and common-sense can be promptly
applied to the different circumstances of
widely-separate communities. But this very
promptitude easily develops into a dangerous
facility. As Mr. Bryce says in an interesting
discussion of Roman and English law : " Ease
begets confidence ; confidence degenerates into
laxity and recklessness. ... In the field of
legislation the danger of doing too much is
a serious danger, not only because the chances
of error are manifold, but because the law
ought to undergo as few bold and sudden
changes as possible. The natural process
whereby the new circumstances, new condi-

THE STRENGTH OF ROME 73

tions, new commercial and social relations
that are always springing up become recog-
nised in custom, and are dealt with by judicial
science before direct legislation impresses a
definite form upon the rules that are to
fix them — this process is the best, and, indeed,
the only safe way by which a nation can
create a refined and harmonious legal system "
(Studies in History and Jurisprudence).

In other words, law, to be strong and use-
ful, must grow of itself out of the experience of
the people, not come suddenly from the
imagination of some outer providence. The
highest claim of Imperial rule is to create
social peace, which is merely to prepare the
way for its own disappearance in favour of a
higher type of government. In the derange-
ment of local life that follows conquest, the
advantage of arbitrary rule, such as it is, is
at its maximum; and when, as in the case
of the Roman Emperors, the laws thus given
express a high political genius to which some
traces of its democratic origin still adhere,
extensive good may result, especially in
primitive communities among and between
which this external law is almost the only
security of peace and justice. Such limited
advantages as Imperial monarchy and bureau-
cracy can claim are seen to belong to an early
and passing phase of social readjustment, when
diverse alien territories are newly subjected,

T4 WAR AND PEACE

and cessation of bloodshed and oppression,
and protection from outer foes, are the highest
benefits they can hope for. These are, in fact,
not civilisation, but the conditions in which
civilisation may spring up.

The costs of every benefit, even one so novel
and so important as the protection of person
and property which Rome gave her non-servile
subjects, must be weighed. What we now
call international law arose from the need
©f providing for the ever-growing number
©f aliens in the capital in the early Imperial
period, and the grading of rights from the
Eternal City itself down to the meanest and
most distant province. Other elements passed
down the centuries from the jus fetiale, regulat-
ing the declaration of war, the making of
peace and treaties, and the jus belli, which
proclaimed the sanctity of truces, and military
faith generally, and put some poor bounds
to the ruthlessness of the Roman soldier.
Curiously enough, law and practice did not
develop together. The idea of a " law of
nature," a common law of mankind, and of
consequent restraints upon warfare, advanced
pretty steadily, with a clear distinction between
what was due to civilised and what to savage
foes. " But there were sure signs in the
later days of the conquering Republic of a
lowering of the Roman national tone. . . .
The wars of the decaying Republic were in

THE STRENGTH OF ROME 75

well-nigh every case wars of mere plunder,
the credit at Rome of the triumphing consul
being largely dependent upon the value of the
treasure brought to the public chest by the
pillage of conquered cities. The Roman was
also ruined by evil associations. Reprisals
exercised upon savage foes degrade the more
civilised belligerent, and the case becomes
worse when barbarians are employed as auxili-
aries, or even as regular troops " (Walker).

The jus gentium, with the extension of
civil rights, reacted upon that Roman code
which had been the safeguard of demo-
cratic citizenship so as gradually to break
down Roman privileges and to assimilate the
condition of all the peoples of the Empire as
subjects of an arbitrary ruler. Citizenship,
in the full sense, cannot be far extended; you
cannot be a citizen of a city you have never
seen. Thus, the more " citizens " there were,
the less were any of them citizens. The more
widely applicable became the boast Civis
Romanus sum, the less did it mean. So, too,
the recognition of Christianity as the State
religion was simultaneous with the establish-
ment of absolute monarchy; and Mr. Bryce
points out that the subsequent codification
of Roman law arose out of political and in-
tellectual conditions not of progress, but of
decline. The genius of rulers, poets, orators \
might conceal, and even momentarily checkf I

76 WAR AND PEACE

| but could not remedy, the ravages of a deep-
I seated political and social disease, the disease
\ whose active principle is the spirit of conquest.
I have emphasised the special civil strength
of the Roman character, rather than any
peculiarity of the military organisation of
the Republic and Empire, because, in fact,
it was this civil character more than any
strength of military organisation that made
Roman arms so long invincible. Until the
Carthaginian peril was past, to be a soldier
was first to be the brother of the man next
to you, free like him, confident in yourself
and him, proud of the legion, and devoted
to death to the Mother City. The barbarians
of Gaul, the slaves or mercenaries of Etruria
and Carthage, could have no such esprit
de corps. In the middle of the third cen-
tury B.C. the Republic could summon to
the standards about 280,000 citizens. This
Roman army was greatly enlarged by calls
upon the military garrisons posted in conquered
provinces, and by auxiliaries from the Italian
allies. Here appears the other great Roman
capacity, that of assimilation and leadership,
and with it the peculiar danger of all increase
of mere force. Especially after the victories
over Carthage, the allies pressed ardently
into the military service of Rome. Every
colony also became a recruiting post; and
the hope of plunder and civil advance-

THE STRENGTH OF ROME 77

ment fed the flame of martial daring. By
the time the three Mediterranean peninsulas
and Asia Minor had been subjected, the old
civic patriotism had become transformed into
a definite belief in Rome's " manifest destiny "
to become mistress of the world. Long after
the rapacity of proconsuls and the develop-
ment of a city mob had given omens of what
was to come, the citizen soldiers kept, under
the stimulus, indeed, of hard exercise, regular
pay, frequent booty, and condign punishment,
their spirit of discipline and valour. About
110 B.C., however, after a series of defeats by
the Northern tribes, Caius Marius revolu-
tionised the army by throwing it open to
the lowest grade of citizens, and thenceforth,
" in proportion as the public freedom was lost
in extent of conquest, war was gradually
improved into an art and degraded into
a trade " (Gibbon). Julius Caesar enlisted
Northern tribesmen wholesale, and com-
menced the system of honouring their leaders;
the armies with which he repeatedly reduced
Gaul, at a cost, if Plutarch is to be believed,
of a million lives, were mainly of Gaulish
blood. This was a second revolution, no
less disastrous because inevitable.

The legion was at once a firmer and a more
flexible body than the phalanx of Macedonian
pikemen. In its heyday, and for a period
of three centuries, it consisted of 6,800 heavy-

78 WAR AND PEACE

armed infantry, divided into ten cohorts and
fifty-five companies, supported by 720 horse-
men. The infantry arms were a crested,
open helmet, breastplate or mail coat, leg-
guards, and an oblong shield, a light spear,
short sword, and above all the pilum, a very
heavy throwing spear, five or six feet long,
which was most effective against cavalry.
The usual formation was eight deep, with an
open order of rank and file that allowed of
free movement and rapid evolutions. The
extension of the Empire along the Danube
and Rhine and in Britain, and the reaction
upon it of the Northern tribal immigrations,
set up new conditions. Warfare on so wide
a border, with a force relatively so small,
demanded a new rapidity of movement
between the legionary stations. This and the
decay of Roman physique produced a lighter-
armed infantry and a constant enlargement
of the mounted force. The difficulty of re-
lieving one frontier post from another, when
the attack of the barbarian confederacies
developed all along the line, led to the creation
of a central Imperial army, whose tyranny
could at last only be broken by the division
of metropolitan power which marked the sub-
stantial end of the Empire. When, in A.D.
212, Caracalla extended Roman citizenship
to all the provinces, the old distinction
between the legions and the auxiliaries was

THE STRENGTH OF ROME 79

destroyed; and the enlistment of increasing
masses of Gothic and other mercenaries
sealed the doom of the legion. The Comi-
tttenses, or mobile guards, of Diocletian and
tte Palatine Guard both consisted largely
of barbarians, these being for the most part
nailed horsemen carrying bow, lance, sword,
aid shield. It was thus the Goth (the
Cossack of his day) became " the lineal
ancestor of all the knights of the Middle
Ages, the inaugurator of that ascendancy of
the horseman which was to endure for a
thousand years " (Oman : History of the Art
of War). The last straw came when the
wild Teutonic " foederati " were turned to the
suppression of revolted legions which already,
during the civil wars of the third century, had
done their best to destroy each other. Pro-
vincials and mercenaries faded away before
Alaric's Goths and Attila's Huns; and on
August 24, 410, " eleven hundred and sixty-
three years after the foundation of Rome, the
Imperial City, which had subdued and civilised
so considerable a part of mankind, was de-
livered to the licentious fury of the tribes
of Germany and Scythia " (Gibbon).

This most ghastly tragedy has never failed
to impress the imagination of the student
of history ; but the lesson is not always
clearly drawn. No doubt there were many
contributory causes of the decline and fall

80 WAR AND PEACE

of the Empire. There was a moral and *
material decay. The abandonment even <tt
the forms of republicanism and the concen-
tration of the whole supreme power in the
hands of the Augustan Caesar hastened tie
decay of the old Roman religion, prostituted
to worship of the Imperator, and sapped
by Persian and Egyptian superstition and
by Greek and Christian influences. When,
to adapt the boast of Verres, the governor
of a province had during his year of office
to make three large fortunes out of his poor
subjects, one to pay his debts, one for him-
self to live upon, and one to bribe his judges
if he were brought to trial; when Cato asked
what would become of Rome if she had no
longer any rival State to fear, and Scipio
prayed " not that the gods would increase,
but that they would preserve, the State, "
the old patriotism was evidently dead. On
the material side, Roman roads, aqueducts,
palaces, fortifications, theatres, harbours, and
bridges did not come into being by magic.
It is reckoned that there may have been
sixty millions of slaves in the Empire; cer-
tainly their numbers had continually increased.
As the burden of labour fell with inconceiv-
able cruelty upon the servile masses, so the
burden of taxation fell with crushing force
upon the middle class. Tribute continued,
but did not increase. When expansion

THE STRENGTH OF ROME 81

ceased, and the Empire was forced upon
the defensive, the supply of slave labour was
practically stopped. But, while slavery was
declining, and revolted serfs swelled the ranks
of the enemy which knocked more and more
insistently at the gates, the free worker was
losing his economic freedom. Finally, a series
of plagues and famines thinned the Latin
population. Rome had no defence when all
the old Roman blood had been shed. Long
before, indeed, the best had been destroyed;
and Macaulay, in his essay on The Romance
of History, after drawing a lurid picture of
the intellectual stagnation which resulted from
the rigid Imperial concentration in Rome
and Constantinople, goes so far as to say that
it was well the Empire should be saved by
death from " a calamity far more terrible
than any of the quick, destroying maladies
to which nations are liable — a tottering,
drivelling, paralytic longevity." It has been
suggested that the introduction of malaria
may have been an important factor in the
degeneracy of the Romans. Perpetual war-
fare affords at once a simpler, more certain,
and more adequate explanation. When a
barbarian mercenary pricked the bubble of
Imperial omnipotence and omniscience, Rome
had long been dead, though her ghost was
yet long to haunt the blood-stained fields of
Europe.

82 WAR AND PEACE

CHAPTER V

THE SWARM SETTLES

WE turn now to consider the interplay of
the forces of war and peace in the Middle
Ages. Eastward of the Adriatic, it is the
history of the Byzantine Empire (founded
A.D. 395, and destroyed by the Turks A.D.
1453), with its Greek- Christian civilisation,
which is still to East Europe what Rome has
been to the West. In the West, the period
includes two stages — the first one of destruc-
tion, decomposition, and anarchy; the second
carrying us, by way of " Chivalry," to the
beginnings of modern national settlement.
Europe was, through these ten centuries,
bordered on the north, east, and south by
a semi-circle of barbarian pressure and tur-
moil. Moreover, it was, as it were, inter-
penetrated by this same barbarian pressure
in a modified form. Roman power, originat-
ing in a municipality, had been spread through
a network of towns, well governed and forti-
fied. The countryside was little touched,
was, indeed, little populated, and consisted
largely of forest and marsh. There the bar-
barian invaders first established themselves
—Teuton Franks and Goths in Gaul and
Spain; Slavs, Huns, and Bulgars in the
Balkans; Goths and Lombards in Italy.

THE SWARM SETTLES 83

Thus the municipal system enjoyed a reprieve,
and its Roman character was never wholly
extinguished. But, while Byzantium main-
tained itself with difficulty, the chief heritage
of the Empire of the West passed to the
Christian Church, which, and not any artifi-
cial political combination, was its true suc-
cessor. To these four main elements standing
out above the general disorder and break-up
of old forms — the Byzantine Empire, the
Western Church, the barbarian kingdoms,
and the continued invasions — we must give
closer attention. They represent an immense
confusion, that is not yet completely re-
solved, but also an immense and rich variety
of blood, ideas, customs, and tendencies to
which, after long fermentation, the later
vigour of European life is due.

The West had great advantages in the
accomplished work of Roman administration,
the freer form here taken by Christian in-
fluence, and the greater distance from the
oriental peril ever impending over Byzance.
The Teuton tribes had come far from their
original homes, had learned something from
the Kelts on the way, and had absorbed more
of Mediterranean civilisation during several
centuries of contact with the Empire, though
still obstinately opposed to the Imperial
spirit, and imbued with strong instincts of
martial independence. So long as they were

84 WAR AND PEACE

only urged on by a normal increase of popu-
lation and need of new arable lands, so long
even as they were content with occasional out-
breaks of the raiding instinct, there was a
possibility of a continuous development. But
when, in the fourth century, the Mongols
began to invade Europe and to drive the
settled confederations before them, there was
no power to stay the inundation. The
Vandals, pressed forward by the Goths, as
these were by the Huns, crossed Spain, deso-
lated Roman Africa, capturing Carthage in
439, and, after a career of piracy in the
Mediterranean, were only at length defeated
by the Byzantine general Belisarius, in 534.
The West Goths, following them, set up a
theocracy in Spain which lasted till the Arab
conquest in 713. The Italian-Gothic king-
dom of Theodoric, the most developed of
these shadowy realms, lived only from
493 to 533, giving place to the Lombard
dukedoms. The prime cause of this dis-
turbance, the Huns, an utterly alien race,
with the lust of destruction and cruelty
developed in an astounding degree, swept
like a plague over Central Europe till, stopped
at Chalons in 451, they disappeared from
the scene as rapidly as they had come. The
invaders, wherever they stayed, had gradually
to accommodate themselves to the legal
customs, the language, the religion, and

THE SWARM SETTLES 85

manners of the latinised mass. Such was the
darkness of the eclipse of civilisation following
their onset, however, that the population,
already reduced by millions, was long sta-
tionary under a chronic dearth of food;
while the only extensive dominion which could
be maintained for a lengthy period was that
of the lawless and treacherous Frankish kings.
In the effort to redeem and raise the Frankish
Empire, the Church itself slipped downward
to the utter degradation of the ninth century.
I have said that the Papacy was the chief
heir of the Roman Empire. At the beginning
of the fifth century, it was an elaborately
organised institution, with a pope at the head
making ultra-Augustan pretensions which
were only slowly to be recognised, with its
own revenues, its Senate in the form of
occasional, and its system of local government
in the form of provincial and national, coun-
cils, its hierarchy of bishops, priests, and
deacons. To the power of its gospel and
ritual, it added, in fact, that of a State
machinery; and, as the clergy became more
and more separated from and supreme over
the laymen, the business of ruling the bodies
of their subjects inevitably began to over-
shadow that of saving their souls. In the
surviving Roman municipalities, bishops
stepped into the magisterial chairs; outside,
abbots became great landowners. Political

86 WAR AND PEACE

ambition grew; in men of culture and a wide
outlook in a time of anarchy, it was, indeed,
often welcome. Barbarian princes, eager to
legitimate what they had gained by the sword,
were very willing to pay for such august
patronage; and this degree of compunction
shows, doubtless, the influence of those larger
ideals of human union for which the name of
Rome still stood. Thus, under the Merving
Franks, the great Churchmen had sunk into
the position of a worldly aristocracy, rich in
lands whose tenants and serfs they led to the
battlefield like the secular counts and dukes,
luxurious, ready at intrigue, indifferent to
learning as to religion, greedy, alternately
servile and arrogant. It is true that the
Church often stayed the hands of a ruthless
king, and that the close of the sixth century
was marked by the beginnings of a great
outpouring of missionary zeal, the firstfruits
of which were reaped in England and
Germany. But the Roman See had defi-
nitely sacrificed an intensive for an exten-
sive influence. When the Frankish dynasty
was changed, and Charlemagne, fresh from
the overthrow of the Lombards, was crowned
Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III before the
altar of St. Peter's, on Christmas Day 800,
" Christianity seemed like a society of soldiers
and priests, governed by a soldier and a
priest " (Lavisse : Political History of Europe).

THE SWARM SETTLES 87

Charles effected a temporary reformation;
there was one secular and military ruler
capable of forbidding the princes of the
Church to ride to war or carry arms. His
new idea of a revived Holy Roman Empire
was, however, to prove a plentiful cause of
deadly strife through many succeeding cen-
turies. The rule of peace he had made soon
fell into disuse. It is said that, within thirty
years, at the close of the ninth century, two
archbishops and eight bishops died on the
field of battle. (Buckle suggests, nevertheless,
that these fighting ecclesiastics were the more
formidable opponents, because " in those
happy days it was sacrilege for a layman to lay
hands on a bishop.") Sees and abbeys became
the rich spoil of worldly adventurers; licence,
unchecked in the priestly palace, invaded
the cloister. The Papacy had entered upon
the unchecked enjoyment of temporal power,
and had sunk into profligacy, when the cry
of the outer barbarian again rang across
Europe, and a new attack began which shook
the new political fabric, created Chivalry,
that strange union of cross and sword, and in
or on the way to the " Holy Land " drowned
the pure ideal of human fraternity in a sea
of blood. The Northman and the Saracen
appeared simultaneously : how were they to
be held back ?

Goths and Lombards had established them-

88 WAR AND PEACE

selves by weight of numbers and horseman-
ship, the Franks by infantry strength, all
by vigour and daring. They were well armed
with lance, sword, mace, and axe, with ring
mail and scale armour, with big machines
(fonda and balista) for throwing stones and
darts, and battering rams. As compared
with the Goths of Spain, a nobility supported
by war-bands of personal retainers and
adventurers, the Franks, owing to the killing
off of their minor chieftains, were an undis-
ciplined horde. Generally, however, the be-
ginnings of feudalism were apparent in the
growth of bodies of " King's men " and a
nobility of service in place of the old tribal
aristocracies. The tribal swarm had itself
passed through a definite development from
the patriarchal stage in which it first appeared,
under pressure of the process of conquest.
The Teuton " kindreds," or unions of house-
holds, had become federated into the " folk,"
with its popular assembly of men capable
of bearing arms, and its " kuninge," or noble
family. For long the popular assembly was
the dominant force; but gradually, as raids
grew into mass movements, and folks into
federations of folks, the need of leadership
created a specialised military class. Headed
by the chieftain whom the Romans patronised
and called " princeps," prince, or the war
leader (" dux," duke), the old group of royal

THE SWARM SETTLES 89

kinsmen was transformed into a little court
of *' thanes " — adventurers, giving the king
a rather independent support, and tending,
as warfare ceased to pay, to settle into a
territorial aristocracy. In Britain and Scan-
dinavia, protected by the sea from the over-
whelming masses of the continental horde,
the development took place more slowly and
regularly; the spirit of tribal democracy
lasted longer, and the military development
was delayed. So the Anglo-Saxons, in war,
were still, in the fifth and sixth centuries,
only scattered bands of unarmoured foot-
soldiers, with spear and axe, and until after
the Norman Conquest knew nothing of forti-
fication or of cavalry fighting. Two cen-
turies before this, Charlemagne, who may be
regarded as the first crusading monarch, had
compelled the adoption of armour throughout
his Empire, organised cavalry, commissariat,
and the raising of foot levies by landlords,
and established a system of fortified posts
connected by roads. But this was altogether
insufficient to meet the new emergency.
Perpetually in the field, from the Ebro to the
Elbe and Danube, endeavouring to establish
order and stem invasion, he lived to see a yet
wilder flood break over the North-West.
First, the Danish Vikings swooped suddenly
upon the Irish, English, and Frankish coasts,
everywhere pillaging monasteries, sacking

90 WAR AND PEACE

towns (London and Canterbury among them),
devastating the countryside. The pioneer
raiders became adepts, veterans in plunder
and destruction; and still other hosts followed.
Rarely has the tribal swarm taken a more
terrible shape.

Three ways of meeting them were gradually
discovered. The first was the substitution
of a regular class of mounted soldiers for
the slow and ill-armed local foot-levies; the
second, the fortification of cities, river bridges,
and nobles' houses; the third, and much less
important, was King Alfred's establishment
of a fleet, the foundation of English sea-power.
The first two expedients became the basis
of feudalism : the feudal castle may be called
the nail which fixed the nobles, hitherto
roving fighters, to a given territory. Similar
measures were instituted on the east against
the Magyars, a race of mounted bowmen
much given to stratagems, cruelty, and rapine.
At the same time, defensive armour was
elaborated (hauberk, or neck and cheek
guard, long mail shirt, and kite-shaped shield);
and the two-handed axe and long sword came
into use. The final supremacy of the feudal
mounted lancers and archers, over levies of
infantry armed only with weapons for close
fighting, is marked by the battle of Senlac
Hill, near Hastings (1066), which decided
the destinies of Britain. It was a triumph

THE SWARM SETTLES 91

of organisation and greed over ignorant
courage and patriotism. The Northmen had
in the ninth century established a dynasty
in Russia, and in the tenth a nominally French
duchy in Normandy; in the eleventh, they
scored their greatest achievement, the subjec-
tion of Anglo-Danish Britain. " Duke William
had undertaken his expedition, not as a mere
feudal head of the barons of Normandy, but
rather as the managing director of a great joint-
stock company for the conquest of England,
in which not only his own subjects, but hun-
dreds of adventurers, poor and rich, from all
parts of Western Europe had taken shares "
(Oman). There may have been 696 vessels
in the fleet of invasion, carrying 10,000
mounted and 15,000 unmounted men.

The North submitted or settled down, and
in " The Truce of God " — a series of rules for-
bidding fighting on holy days and otherwise
restricting warfare, first adopted by the clergy
of Roussillon in 1027, and extended in 1054
and 1119 — a novel and remarkable effort
was made by the Church to check internal
disorder and Teutonic barbarity. It was to
be otherwise in the East that Greece and
Rome had so easily conquered. During the
centuries through which Constantinople, with
its undivided spiritual and temporal power,
and its strangely bureaucratic character, held
the Balkan lands against Slav and Turk, and

92 WAR AND PEACE

Asia Minor against the Saracen, there was a
still quicker development of professional
cavalry and a much higher skill in strategy
and tactics, an art of war in which shrewdness
and even trickery were permissible, though
treaties and armistices were respected and
cruelty to captives was forbidden. The shrewd
Byzantines laughed at the blind courage, and
sometimes played upon the ignorance, of the
Crusaders, who, however, more than once
took a treacherous revenge. Northmen and
Magyars had now settled down or been driven
back. The land road by the Danube to the
Orient was open; and the navies of Venice,
Genoa, and Pisa were making an easier route
by sea, which had the further merit of divert-
ing the stream of commerce from Byzance.
The Arab raiders of the tenth century were
comparatively easily checked; three later
waves of Moslem conquest showed a deepen-
ing strain of barbarism. The Saracens were
more civilised than Franks and Goths; and
the conquering force which, within a century
of Mohammed's death in 632, carried the Cres-
cent and Scimitar through Persia, Syria,
Egypt, Northern Africa, and Spain, enfeebled
by the division into the three caliphates of
Bagdad, Cairo, and Cordova, was eclipsed by a
new irruption of invaders from Central Asia.
These, the Seljuk Turks, were repulsed with
more difficulty; and it was at the cost of

THE SWARM SETTLES 93

frightful losses from starvation, disease, and
slaughter that Jerusalem was held in Christian
hands for a hundred years. The horde of
Jenghiz Khan followed. " Babylonia was
till then still the chief seat of Mohammedan
culture; but since the Mongols set foot on
it, it has been a desolation" (Noldeke:
Sketches from Eastern History). The Moslem
empire of Saladin and the Mamelukes of
Egypt was a nearer and not less redoubtable
enemy; in 1291, nearly two centuries after
the first of the eight crusades, the last Christian
foothold on Syrian soil was abandoned.

The rise and arrest of the Ottoman Turks
completes the story of Modern expansion.
Checked for a time by the Mongol horde which
had penetrated into Russia, this most per-
manent of the Turkish sovereignties took
Constantinople by storm in 1453, forty years
before the Arabs were driven from Spain.
Though stopped by Hungary, and later by
Russia, the Ottomans have kept their grip
upon the Balkans, and even appear at last
to be entering into the paths of European
development. Islam to this day sways the
peoples of the whole desert belt from Central
Asia to the Atlantic, with Asia Minor, Syria,
Mesopotamia, and large parts of Central
Africa; while she counts millions of followers
in India and other parts of the East.

The Crusades show a very mixed motiva-

94 WAR AND PEACE

tion. In course of two centuries, during
which all Europe — first common folk, then
nobles, then kings — was set afoot, they
drained off from the barbarian West a great
deal of that spirit of adventure which is so
much more easily satisfied than the spirit of
greed and dominion. Feudalism would have
lasted longer but for this bloodletting. The
completeness of the stoppage of the movement
is the best proof of the immense modification
of ideas and interests it brought about. It
was exploited by clerics and contractors of
every grade throughout Europe. Every fresh
venture meant loans by wealthy townsmen
to kings and nobles ; it was not without cause
that the practice of usury became a burning
question between the new commercial class
and the Church. The demands of hundreds
of thousands of men for supplies on their
eastward journey must have enormously
stimulated trade and shipping; and in the
wake of these armies the import of spices,
sugar, drugs, and precious stones from the
East, and the return flow of woollens, hides,
metals, and food stuffs, increased rapidly.

Representatives of the merchant princes of
the Italian cities accompanied the Crusaders,
always on the look-out for commercial privi-
leges. The Venetian money-lenders forced
the knights of the fourth crusade to help
them in capturing the rival port of Zara, and

THE SWARM SETTLES 95

then to plunder Constantinople itself; it was
thus the city of the lagoons won its empire,
and Shakespeare got a subject for his wit*
The by-products of the Crusades range from
shaving and bathing to a new geography, a
new vocabulary (bazaar, barracks, elixir, tariff,
talisman), and a new art of diplomacy,
copied from Byzantine practice in Near Asia.
While the rise of towns and a commercial
class was ultimately to lead to an era of
toleration and progress highly inimical to
Roman influence, the first and greatest
material gains of the feudal reaction on the
Orient came to the Church. Many pilgrims
gave their estates in return for masses and the
papal benediction; others sold them to the
monasteries at a trifle of their value. Some
of the returning Crusaders entered the cloister,
abandoning their worldly goods to the clerical
authorities. Again, estates of dead nobles
were forfeited to Crown or Church; and the
outbreak of religious zeal produced a crop of
great endowments. But a very mountain
of gold would be no fortification against such
a moral and intellectual shock as the rough
Westerners suffered when they saw Rome as
she was against the background of what she
had been, when they heard the wonderful lore
of Byzance, when they discovered that the
Saracens could teach them lessons in honour,
courtesy, and mercy, as well as in mathematics

96 WAR AND PEACE

and astronomy, medicine and engineering,
and that even Mongol emperors could treat
on an equality with Christian kings.

Our canvas is too small for a perfectly clear
picture of the warfare of the earlier Middle
Ages, but this crowded sketch will serve to
remind us of its main outlines, the chief
factors in the subsequent development. The
field of the inquiry falls into four zones. Of
these one, the south and east coasts of the
Mediterranean, has fallen definitely into the
hands of the Moslem Arabs and Turks, at
first the source of important elements of
Semitic culture, then a conquering horde
recruited from the deserts and sustained by
polygamy, slavery, and a fanatical religion.
Europe, constantly trying to recover its lost
unity, begins to settle into three main divi-
sions— the Eastern, the most conservative
and martially organised, because always on
guard against Asiatic savagery; Italy, Ger-
many, and the North, a host of little princi-
palities, obsessed by Roman traditions and
superstitions, the prey alternately of pope
and emperor and their parties (Guelphs and
Ghibellines) ; the West, in which Rome, by
its ecclesiastical jurisdiction and secular in-
fluence, is still a strong power, but one soon
to be threatened by the growth of monarchy
in France and England.

Throughout Central and Western Europe,

THE SWARM SETTLES 97

the system of military landlordism known as
Feudalism is the answer of the age to the
demand for external defence and internal
order. We have seen it beginning in the
Frankish court as a blend of barbarian client-
ship and clerical patronage. From this point
it extends to an all-embracing and elaborately
graded system of sovereignty, military organis-
ation, and land-holding. The words it has
left tell their own tale : " feudal " (connected
with the Teutonic vieh, cattle ; fehde,
hostility, vengeance of the kindred); " gen-
tleman," man of race; " knight," from the
Teutonic, armed follower; " esquire " and
*' equerry," from French ecuyer, the knight's
shield- bearer; " fealty " (old French jeaulU,
from Latin fidelitas, faithfulness, loyalty);
" homage," which is making yourself so-and-
so's man (homo); and the modes of address
still current, "My lord," "My man." The
king in theory owed fidelity only to God, or,
as the Churchmen said, to God's Vicar in
Rome. Even so pious a theory being subject
to disturbance, he entrenched himself in new
possessions too large for direct exploitation
by parcelling them out, in return for armed
support, among his vassal lords, who, in turn,
divided their land on the same terms of pro-
tection and service. Monarchy became terri-
torial instead of racial, and, as it became more
able to defend religion and order, made itself
D

98 WAR AND PEACE

more free of the two larger but vaguer authori-
ties— Papacy and Empire. The system ex-
tended rapidly in the ninth and tenth cen-
turies, after the break-up of Charlemagne's
Empire, because small landowners were only
too glad to save themselves from noble robbers
and wandering swashbucklers by obtaining
the protection of neighbouring lords in return
for personal service. Churches, monasteries,
and towns thus granted their lands as fiefs,
engaging professional soldiers to defend them,
or putting themselves under a count or duke;
thus, in return, the towns got their charters
or bills of rights. Under the aristocracy so
created (kings, lords, knights, squires), and
its attendant priesthood wielding both worldly
and unworldly power, lay the mass of the
population — freemen, mostly in the towns;
yeomen, and serfs tied to their lords' estates,
in the country.

The immediate result of this development
was to create a settled countryside, to stimu-
late agriculture and land values, and so to
produce a rapid increase of population.
Towns ceased to be the only centre of order.
" The social preponderance, the government
of society, passed suddenly from the towns
to the country; private property became of
more importance than public property; pri-
vate life than public life " (Guizot : History
of Civilisation in Europe). Within his own

THE SWARM SETTLES 99

domain the lord or squire was absolute master,
with but the faintest shadow of the old tribal
obligations toward the lower mass. The
hereditary spirit, evidently convenient both
to the family and the suzerain, grew rapidly,
its attendant art, heraldry, arising in the
twelfth century. Intermarriage strengthened
the sense of class superiority, and solidified
the aristocratic structure. In France, the
field of constant warfare, private as well as
public, the weakening of the baronage per-
mitted a development of royal supremacy
and a centralisation that have left marks on
the State to this day. In England, where
the right of private war between nobles was
never recognised, we owe the beginning of
our liberties to a better balance of power
which forced first the barons and then the
king to consider the interests of the com-
moners in town and country.

The paradox of feudalism, resembling in
this respect the " armed peace " of our own
time, is that, beginning as a higher organisa-
tion of military forces, it ended by producing
a deadlock of these forces, a condition in
which regular warfare was almost impossible.
This arose from the great development of
body armour and of fortification. Veterans
returned from the East brought from their
contact with Byzantines and Saracens some-
thing more than sacred bones and curious
D 2

100 WAR AND PEACE

perfumes. Through the twelfth, thirteenth,
and fourteenth centuries — the period of the
unquestioned supremacy of the new cavalry
— knightly armour became more and more
elaborate, the helmet at last covering the
whole head, the mail coat falling to the
feet and being strengthened with thin iron
plates. Thus a caste which as yet possessed
no nationality protected itself from itself.
Seignobos (Mediceval Civilisation) quotes a
chronicler of the battle of Bremule, 1119,
thus : " 140 knights remained prisoners in
the hands of the conqueror ; but of 900
engaged in battle I know of three only who
were killed. In fact, they were completely
clothed in iron; and as much through the
fraternity of arms as through the fear of God
did they spare each other, seeking less to kill
than to take prisoners." The stone age had
now followed the age of wood and mud in
fortification. The first feudal castles followed
the earlier model, consisting of a ring wall
round the nobleman's house, with a tower
for a last refuge. Then the tower became a
solid keep, usually at one end of the enclosure,
with the houses of the retainers in its shadow.
With knowledge of Byzantine castle-building
and Saracen sieges, the protecting walls were
doubled and tripled; the battlements were
set with projecting turrets so that besiegers
could be played upon, and these outworks

THE SWARM SETTLES 101

took a greater, and the donjon a less, import-
ance. Finally, the concentric type of forti-
fication was perfected, and at its best it was
impregnable, until gunpowder revolutionised
the conditions. In the towns, too, as the
proverb attests, the Englishman's house be-
came a castle, with turret and sometimes a
parapet, and with the family rooms " up-
stairs " (that is, up a removable ladder) for
better defence. The town walls and gates
were more and more elaborately fortified;
many a city and small State owed its con-
tinued freedom to this fact.

" By 1300, the defensive had obtained an
almost complete mastery over the offensive,
so that famine was the only certain weapon
in siegecraft" (Oman). In another century
the only warfare that was not too costly to
pay consisted of plundering raids by rela-
tively small mobile forces. The Hundred
Years' War, beginning in 1337, between the
now firmly founded French and English mon-
archies, partook mainly of this character,
and at the same time witnessed the introduc-
tion of a weapon, the longbow, and a type
of man, the " free lance," that were to pre-
pare the way for a new military era. The
foreign wars of the Plantagenets could not
have been carried on but for the wholesale
employment of foreign adventurers, together
with the younger sons and other impecunious

102 WAR AND PEACE

members of the noble class who hired them-
selves for foreign service without much
consideration of its object. These scientific
plunderers were stiffened with picked levies
of archers wielding what had become, under
Edward I in his border wars, the national
weapon. Bannockburn proved the weakness of
feudal cavalry against skilled bowmen in a good
defensive position ; and, at Crecy and Poictiers;
Edward III improved the lesson, to the aston-
ishment of the French chivalry. When Nor-
mandy had been devastated, the French
nobles shut themselves up in their castles,
and, no more booty being obtainable, the
war came to an end. But feudalism was
doomed as a military instrument.

Chivalry — the word reminds us that every
lighting organism must have a sort of religion
of its own. In the primitive tribe it was
the blood feud, the lex talionis. In ancient,
as in modern, settled States, it was patriotism.
In the expanding Empires, ancient and
modern, it was race pride. In the early
Mediaeval as in the later Moslem theocracy,
it was the spirit of proselytism, so nearly
allied to the spirit of persecution which
inspired the religious wars of a later day.
The religion of feudalism was chivalry, a
very curious and interesting mixture of
Christian and barbarian elements, both de-
based to the purpose of taming a class of

THE SWARM SETTLES 103

full-blooded princelings. It was at once a
discipline, physical and moral, a cult of
aristocratic pride (valour, pride, and loyalty
were pre-eminently the sentiments of chivalry)
and a playground of the romantic tempera-
ment. Feudalism was a secular organisation
of society; and the Church was not excepted
from its sovereignty. Chivalry, with its
professed object of protecting religion and
succouring the weak, and its elaborate ritual.,
represents the best (if we except cathedral
building) the Church could obtain of its
Teuton masters in return for this submission.
It produced some softening of manners, and
favoured an enlarging influence of woman.
Alas, it did not help the despised villeins, or
prevent ferocious cruelty to prisoners of war;
and it created a new form of inflated vanity
which, though it soon became unpopular,
has left deep marks upon our public and
private life. The late mediaeval art of
hunting is distinctly a case of what biologists
call reversion to type. The tournaments
stand, in point of legitimacy, between the
Greek games and the Roman gladiatorial
shows. Courtesy — the manners of the royal
or ducal court — became dependent on ruin-
ously extravagant fashions. Knight-errantry
has deceived later generations by the great
literature it produced. In superstitious and
disorderly days, it may have given a certain
balance of good; but the spirit it set afloat

104, WAR AND PEACE

in the governing classes of the West was
essentially false and hypocritical, since it
blinded them to the iniquity of a servile basis
of society, and of an art of war all of whose
privileges and restraints were for the well-
born. Another embodiment of the fighting
Churchman consisted in those Orders, the
Knights Templar, Knights of St. John,
Teutonic Knights, and others, which Buckle
(History of Civilisation, ch. ix) denounces
as " establishments that inflicted the greatest
evils on society, and whose members, com-
bining analogous vices, enlivened the super-
stition of monks with the debauchery of
soldiers." The fighting parson survives to-
day in " transpontine " melodrama, as the
proud rescuer of distressed maidens survives
in the penny novelette ; but the solid business
of defence and conquest has passed to paid
laymen mostly of the common orders.

We have now seen how, after infinite losses,
Romanised Europe held back or assimilated
the barbarian invader, and, combining Teuton
custom with clerical teaching, found a new
method of settlement and protection. We
have glanced at the military features of this
system, at the mixed character of its expan-
sion in the Crusades, and at the nature of its
peculiar esprit de corps, called Chivalry.
The causes and effects of the decay of Feudal-
ism, and the transition to modern conditions,
will be the subject of our next chapter,

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 105
CHAPTER VI

THE BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM

Two centuries and a half separate the re-
discovery in the West of how to make gun-
powder (usually attributed to a German monk
named Schwartz, about 1330; but it is said
by De Bloch to have been used by the Tartars
against the Poles in 1241) and the defeat of the
Spanish Armada — a time fuller, perhaps, of
the elements of far-reaching change than any
like period in history. At the beginning,
Europe seems to be settled under the heavy
hand of Feudalism, and in lip-service to Rome;
at the end, its western lands have reconsti-
tuted themselves politically and economically,
and are started upon a new stage of the
swarming movement by which man has taken
possession of the earth. Our subject-matter
now becomes more and more complex, because
the whole globe comes under review, and every
kind of social growth has contributed to the
motivation of war, of which the military art
is one of the least important and least im-
pressive products, and because the connected
ideas of organised peace and national self-
government by representative institutions now
faintly emerge.

The collapse of Feudalism was due to a
series of changes — economic, political and

106 WAR AND PEACE

military, intellectual and religious — having a
double character of destruction and construc-
tion. In the first place, the /economic bases
of society were radically altered, especially in
England, by the growth of commerce and
manufacture, the rise of towns, the decay
of serfdom, and the emergence of a free
labourer and tenant farmer class.

Italy and Germany led the way in the
establishment of independent cities whose
memorials are to-day the bourne of our
holiday pilgrimages. But the evil traditions of
Rome and the Lombard dukedoms lay heavy
upon them; what they won in industrial skill
and financial power they squandered in
profligacy and strife; and when the main
stream of trade was diverted from the Levant,
the Rhine, and the Baltic, to the Atlantic,
they fell behind. There were, of course, many
other influences. Where militant Protestant-
ism established itself kings gained, if candle-
makers and fishermen suffered. Disturbed
eastern frontiers left feudalism an unfinished
task; and among the new States it was those
which proved their strength in feudal warfare
against Slav and Turk that best held their
own — those of Austria and Prussia. But
perpetual warfare — wars, ostensibly, of re-
ligion and royal succession, wars of conquest
and the " balance of power " —destroyed the
energy and wealth that might have won a

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 107

New World; while thousands of toll-bars
impeded trade even more than the hos-
tile tariffs of neighbouring States. As the
Teutonic knights represented the old spirit
of conquest, so the Hanseatic League repre-
sented the opposite principle of commercial
expansion. But if Luther's scoffing question,
" What is the good of Crusaders who do not
crusade ? " satisfies us as to the disappear-
ance of the one, the reason of the collapse
of the other is less obvious. It lies in the un-
natural, perhaps it would be better to say the
unsocial, character of the Hanseatic organisa-
tion. There were external causes — the rise of
Danish and Swedish power, the civil broils of
the fifteenth century, the change in the
movements of our humble friend the herring ;
but internal causes of decay are nearly always
the more important. International federation
cannot be worked on a purely capitalistic
basis. The commercial empire which the
league established across Northern Europe
in the middle of the fourteenth century was
moribund by the middle of the sixteenth.
It never lacked wealth or armed force; but it
combined the weaknesses of the ancient Greek
federations and the commercial despotism
of Carthage. Niebuhr likens the Phoenician
States to plants which do not take deep root,
but spread over the surface of the ground.
The Hansa was not subject to the influence of

108 WAR AND PEACE

a contiguous tropical desert; but it, also, had
to learn that trade is a function of society, and
cannot permanently subsist apart from the
other functions of a sanely organised group.

Failing the new economic impulse toward a
larger unity that came successively to Spain,
France, Holland, and Great Britain, feudal
separatism in central Europe continued longer;
and Germany and Italy, their little States
generation after generation the prey of foreign
adventurers and rival native princes, have
only in the last century formally effected their
national unification. The steady advance of
the cities of the West from a semi -feudal
condition, in which the great merchants stood
over the craft guilds as the nobles over their
retainers, to one of complete freedom and self-
government, is a happier spectacle. Parallel
with this development there occurred a rural
revolution, the conclusive factor of which was
the frightful visitation known as the Black
Death, in its milder modern form called
bubonic plague. Following in the track of
war, it is reckoned to have swept away a
quarter of the population of Europe and a
third, or more, of that of Great Britain. The
commutation of the serf's labour dues for
money payments had been slowly proceeding
since the Conquest. The plague, by producing
a great scarcity and consequent dearness of
labour, decisively stimulated the rise of a

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 109

wage-paid labourer class. But the landlords
fought hard to keep their privileges; and
though the rise of wages continued, and serf-
dom gradually died out, after the extinction
of the agrarian revolts under Tyler and
Ball (1377-81) the subsequent laws of
revenge and panic, the evictions, the growth
of large holdings and sheep farms, created a
new vagabond and pauper class which pro-
vided excellent material for the wild essays
toward empire-building that were to follow.

Every economic change tends to express
itself in a corresponding political change.
Every improvement in the industrial arts,
every new market or branch of trade, every
successful expedition, every new discovery
of natural resources, every extension of the
use of law instead of force, leads, through the
increase of available wealth, to the enlarge-
ment of the unit of government and the
elaboration of a governing class. The market
succeeds the family as the economic base of
society ; and national boundaries tend to re-
present the market. The old Slave economy
is passing away; the second great economic
stage, based on settled land-ownership, is
being undermined; a third stage, based on
money and credit, is opening. Government
changes accordingly. Custom is slowly modi-
fied in favour of ability and competition;
birthright yields place to State service, kinship

110 WAR AND PEACE

to professionalism. Internal administration
is gradually divided between central, inter-
mediate, and local authorities. In England,
especially, the new central power of a national
monarchy was held in check by strong
survivals of the spirit of patriarchal society,
by a prior development of law, the rudiments
of representative government, and by the
overshadowing strength of the great nobles,
due largely to intermarriage and the union of
estates. When slavery is extinct and serfage
is only a local bond, kings must get money by
new expedients. Hence taxation; and this in
turn is the nest of representative institutions,
because it exhibits publicly the ratio of govern-
ment expenses and the contributions of
various classes of citizens. State revenue
soon brings in its train a universal use of
currency, in place of barter and service pay-
ment ; and this change to a Money economy
is an immense stimulus to trade.

After the Great Charter (1215) parliament-
ary power and individual right were firmly
enough based to stand the strain of a cen-
tury and a half of warfare and, thereafter,
another century and a half of Tudor and Stuart
despotism. They embodied, in fact, the only
method of national unity, without which
England might long have remained a French
fief, a stagnant and servile estate. Under this
restraint, where feudalism had been the

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 111

negation of nationality, monarchy offered a
rallying point, a voice and hand, to society, a
general authority based on an administration,
a system of taxation, a judicature, and a
permanent army. In the thirteenth century
there was reason why a common Englishman
should " dearly love a lord." But the suicidal
work of the Hundred Years' War against
France (1336-1431) was nearly completed in
the War of the Roses (1450-71) ; and the Tudor
sovereigns finished it by bringing women and
men indiscriminately to the stake and the
block, and by confiscations that transferred a
fifth of the land of the country to the Throne.
Henry II, by the imposition of a military tax
in lieu of service and the employment of
mercenaries with the product, Edward III,
by the dissolution of the liveries, or nobles'
bands of armed retainers, paved the way for
this change. Gunpowder — used at Crecy
(1346) as bombs to frighten the French horses,
and with portable cannon against Joan of
Arc at Orleans (1429), was from the beginning
the king's weapon. And, as we saw that the
old Romans killed themselves out in conquest
and civil strife, so a main cause of the collapse
of feudalism consisted in the fact that the
chivalry of the West killed itself out in a
warfare which had not even the excuse of
being directed against the outer barbarian.
In this case, as in that of a thousand years
earlier, the collapse of the established order

112 WAR AND PEACE

was marked by a serious, if less-prolonged,
anarchy. It is the most grievous chapter in
English history. I shall call attention here
only to two parts of the gloomy picture —
the demoralisation of the conduct of war-
fare during the decadence of chivalry, and
especially during the French wars, and the
growth of the spirit of persecution and its
outcome in political terrorism and a series of
wars of religion. Edward III commenced
the vain struggle for the French Crown by
profuse subsidies to German and Flemish
princelings for military aid — an interesting
precedent to Pitt's Continental policy; yet,
in the end, England had to do her own dirty
work and pay the Florentine bankers into the
bargain. It was not only a land struggle.
The narrow seas were overrun with marauding
fleets, English, French, and Spanish; and from
this time forward, piracy and privateering
were endemic in the Channel and the Atlantic.
But every county of England bled — border
wars and highland forays brought no com-
mensurate misery on Scotland — and North
and Central France were ruined. The Black
Prince, hero of Crecy and Poictiers, proved
himself a very king of freebooters, and an
adept at foul butchery. The new mercenaries
(soldier, from solde, simply means a paid
man, and " brigand " at first only meant
a light-armed soldier) easily proved their
superiority to the lumbering cavalry of the

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 113

old noblesse. In service, they tried to " play
the game," with only a little more greed and a
little less scruple than their employers. In
the intervals, they were simply highwaymen
on a large scale, hunting in companies,
pillaging villages, holding castles and even
towns to ransom, and using horrible cruel-
ties. Such an interval preceded the peace
of Bretigny (1360). Famine and desolation
drove the English out; but, nine years later,
the king was directing the cold-blooded
massacre of the three thousand inhabitants
of Limoges. Then it was the turn of John
of Gaunt to waste a British army in rapine.
These conquests were all lost, the south coast
was ravaged, British shipping was destroyed,
debt accumulated, and pestilence and social
revolution reduced the possibilities of foreign
aggression. It was fitting that the revolt
against the poll-tax should be headed by a
returned soldier from the French wars, Wat
Tyler. The truce continued under Richard
II, much to the disgust of his nobles. Henry
V renewed the war; and it is strange that
one of the finest outbursts in English literature,
that which Shakespeare puts into the mouth
of the king on the eve of Agincourt —

" This story shall the good man teach his son ;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers " —

114 WAR AND PEACE

should cover so wanton and barbarous an
adventure.

Much of British fighting pride goes back to
those three French battlefields on one of
which eleven thousand Frenchmen, including
a hundred princes and great nobles, were left
dead. But it is an ill story to read now as a
whole and in cold blood. The Church had
lost all hold upon Christian ideals in anxiety
for its threatened lands. " The greed of the
nobles had been diverted, whether, as later
legend said, by the deliberate device of the
great Churchmen, or no, to the fair field of
France. For the real source of the passion
with which the baronage pressed for war was
sheer lust of gold. So intense was the greed
of gain that only a threat of death could keep
the fighting men in their ranks ; and the results
of victory after victory were lost by the
anxiety of the conquerors to deposit their
plunder and captives safely at home before
reaping the more military fruits of their
success. The moment the firm hand of great
leaders such as Henry or Bedford was re-
moved, the war died down into mere massacre
and brigandage. Cruelty went hand-in-hand
with greed; and we find an English privateer
coolly proposing to drown the crews of a
hundred merchant vessels which he has taken,
unless the council to whom he writes should
think it better to spare their lives" ( J. R.
Green : History of the English People). Such

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 115

ruffians helped to beat the French counties
into a nation.

Anarchy, however, cannot be restricted to I
the foreign field; the curse of conquest always I
comes home to roost. Rapine abroad was i
inevitably reflected in lawlessness at home. }
" British Parliaments, which had become
mere sittings of their retainers and partisans,
were like armed camps to which the great
lords came with small armies at their backs.
That of 1426 received its name of the 4 Club
Parliament ' from the fact that, when arms
were prohibited, the retainers of the barons
appeared with clubs on their shoulders.
When clubs were forbidden, they hid stones
and balls of lead in their clothes. The disso-
luteness against which Lollardism had raised
its great moral protest reigned without a
check." The savagery of the French cam-
paigns was repeated in the slaughter and ruin,
the treasons and executions, of the Wars of
the Roses. The men who burned Joan of
Arc were soon ready for the exercise of the
rack, the wheel, and the block at home. This,
together with the call of the Church for new
means of authority, and the panic cry of the
propertied classes for order at any cost, is the
cause of Tudor tyranny and terrorism.

Our subject thus develops a new paradox. !
As the breakdown of a military organisation I <
of societv led to new horrors of warfare, so '

116 WAR AND PEACE

the dawn of enlightenment which issued in
the Reformation led to an unprecedented
outbreak of superstitious fury, and the
New Learning, in aid of which Colet declared
from the pulpit of St. Paul's that " an unjust
peace is better than the justest war," con-
tributed to bloodshed from end to end of
Europe. A power become tyrannical and
degraded at length provokes a challenge, and,
equally surely, attempts persecution in reply.
The officers of Innocent III, the founder of
the Inquisition, had set an example as early
as 1216 of how to deal with budding sceptics
by the massacre of 27,000 people in the
capture of Beziers. For a time thereafter
the Papacy was rendered impotent by its
division. In the first years of the fifteenth
century, the Wycliffite pioneers were burnt
and John Huss died at the stake. It was
amid this opening of the struggle of rationalism
against persecution that Constantinople fell,
the Turks took Belgrade, in 1520, and nine
years later stood before Vienna — a respite for
papal power, and a stimulus to reaction
throughout Eastern and Middle Europe. This
was the hey-day of trials for witchcraft. The
offence had been known throughout the Middle
Ages. In the demoralisation of early Tudor
times it became the pretext for wholesale
persecution. " The panic created by the
belief advanced at first slowly, but after a time

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 117

with a fearfully accelerated rapidity. Thou-
sands of victims were sometimes burnt alive
in a few years. Every country in Europe
was stricken with the wildest panic. Hun-
dreds of the ablest judges were selected for
the extirpation of the crime. It was not until
a considerable portion of the eighteenth
century had passed away that the executions
finally ceased; the last law on the subject,
the Irish Statute, was not repealed till 1821 "
(Lecky : Rationalism in Europe).

Such was the work the travelling inquisitors
of Romanism set afoot in the diseased imagin-
ations of the ignorant masses. It was
greatly stimulated by the outbreak of the
Black Death, for terror breeds cruelty as well
as invites oppression. The persecuting spirit
took an economic colour in massacres of Jews
and the repression of Lollards, in the practice
of confiscating the property of heretics, and in
the after-treatment of the " mere heathen "
beyond seas. It took a political colour as
the issue between Protestantism and Catholi-
cism involved royal successions, the struggles
of England and Holland against France and
Spain, the struggle of conquering Germans
against reforming Bohemians. It was only
decisively checked when the majority of
people could read and write, and when these
majorities made and unmade their national
governments. But for long it involved the

118 WAR AND PEACE

most learned and the most ignorant in a
common savagery; Luther, Erasmus, the
Pilgrim Fathers, and Wesley were equally
victims of the belief in witchcraft. The
connected doctrines of hereditary sin and
exclusive salvation were also very ancient;
their new vigour in the mouth of the great
Reformers is evidently connected with the
dislocation of a religious and political system
that had come to rest on a doctrine of here-
ditary merit and indifference to purity or
justice. The violence of revolution responds
to the violence of a dying tyranny.

On the whole, the Romance nations, where
Papal influence and the old country life were
strongest, remained Catholic; the Teutonic
States, where harder conditions have always
favoured independence and individualism,
and where the commercial towns enjoyed
increasing power, became Protestant. In
France and Germany, where the two spheres
met and the two forces were nearly balanced,
the result was prolonged civil war, marked
in the former case by the massacre of Hugue-
nots in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572.
One of the worst assertions of arbitrary power
at this time lay in the transfer of small States
by royal marriage from one ruler to another.
This led to popular revolt on the one hand,
and, on the other, persecution was brought in
to aid tyranny, as when the Low Countries,

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 119

added to the crown of Castile, Aragon, and
Burgundy, revolted against the blood-orgies
of the Inquisition, and, after a struggle of
incomparable bravery, established the Dutch
Republic in 1609. Both Protestants and
Catholics persecuted — Protestants less, per-
haps, because they less often exercised civil
power; Catholics certainly more because
they had the power as well as the tradition.
" Llorente, who had free access to the archives
of the Spanish Inquisition, assures us that
by that tribunal alone more than 31,000
persons were burnt, and more than 290,000
condemned to punishments less severe than
death. The number of those put to death
for their religion in the Netherlands alone in
the reign of Charles V has been estimated by
a very high authority at 50,000 (Sarpi;
Grotius says 100,000); and at least half as
many perished under his son. These atroci-
ties were not perpetrated in the brief parox-
ysms of a reign of terror or by the hands of
obscure sectaries, but were inflicted by a
triumphant Church with every circumstance
of solemnity and deliberation. Nor did the
victims perish by a rapid and painless death,
but by one which was carefully selected as
among the most poignant that man can
suffer. They were usually burnt alive. They
were burnt alive not unfrequently by a slow
fire. They were burnt alive after their

120 WAR AND PEACE

constancy had been tried by the most excru-
ciating agonies that minds fertile in torture
could devise" (Lecky). Yet this was not
all. Hundreds of thousands who did not
suffer death suffered loss and the terror of
death. " Where religious fanaticism rein-
forced political resentment, there was no limit
to the barbarity of the rough soldiery. In the
struggle with the Huguenots, nothing was
sacred from the plunderer, not even the
sepulchres of the dead. In the Low Countries,
too, the fight was to the death. Pillage and
devastation reigned in the open field; siege
after siege terminated in a scene of wild
licence and savage butchery. The story of
the Thirty Years' War will live for ever as
a tale of horror. Twelve hours after the
fall of Magdeburg, 20,000 men, women, and
children lay charred and blackened corpses
amid the ashes of the lifeless city " (Walker).
The wars of religion planted animosities in
Europe that are still not rooted out, and made
a virtue of military excess. They produced
a spirit of intolerance that poisoned the two
great liberationist movements of the following
centuries, the English and French Revolutions,
and added a new element of ferocity to the
movement of expansion oversea by which
a series of European Empires were to be
established in America, Asia, and Africa.
Is it enough to say, as Lecky does, that "it

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 121

was out of the Christian conception of the
guilt of error that persecution arose " ? I
think not. Persecution and tyranny are twin
expressions of the Imperial idea in a time of
demoralisation when the property basis of
society is changing, and an old governing class
is giving place to a new. They have an almost
completely utilitarian origin. Popular super-
stition may be cultivated and provoked (as
we see in Russia to-day) in order to provide
the means and surroundings favourable to
persecution; but its effective cause is the
determination of a small number of men in
possession to retain by terror the property and
power whose regular sanctions are disappear-
ing. Thus, the rationalistic spirit of the
Reformation only destroyed persecution when,
passing from the field of private opinion into
alliance with democracy and trade, it became
a positive political force capable of restraining
all forms of arbitrary rule, secular or clerical.
This happened first in England, the Nether-
lands, and Scandinavia, then in France. At
the two ends of Europe, Spain and Russia are
economically most behindhand because there,
face to face with the Moors and the Mongols,
despotism was most strongly developed. The
era of religious wars is usually counted as
closing with the Peace of Westphalia (1648),
six years after Galileo's death as a prisoner
of the Inquisition. The Thirty Years' War,

122 WAR AND PEACE

begun by Protestant revolts in Bohemia and
Hungary, soon degenerated, in fact, into a
secular struggle for territory in Central Europe,
during which France rose to greatness under
Louis XIV, and Germany was devastated
and divided by foreign adventurers and her
own rival princes.

I have given this much prominence to the
two great expressions of the anarchy following
the breakdown of feudalism — the degradation
of warfare, and the mania of persecution —
because there is a too common impression that
the era of invention and discovery meant a
sudden passage from darkness to light; and
this idea makes the barbarities of the following
centuries incomprehensible except on the
supposition that human nature is incapable
of progress in one direction save at the cost
of backsliding in another. There was, in
fact, no such sudden transition. The mari-
ners' compass was in use in 1300; yet it was
1492 ere Columbus landed in the West Indies,
1497 ere Da Gama rounded the Cape, 1522
ere Magellan circumnavigated the world, and
1577 ere Drake sailed for the Pacific. The
Chinese used fireballs and like contrivances
five hundred years B.C., and to this fact seems
to be due the erroneous belief that they then
used gunpowder. The first traceable employ-
ment of artillery in China was at the defence
of Taiyuen in A.D. 757 (Herbert Spencer's

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 123

Descriptive Sociology, vol. " Chinese," 1910,
p. 285). We have seen that gunpowder
mysteriously reappears in the fourteenth
century, along with small portable cannon.
But, in 1427, of an army of 80,000 against
the Hussites, only 200 men carried arquebuses;
at the end of the century only a tenth of
the French infantry were so provided, and
leaden bullets were only just coming into
use. Cannon developed much more rapidly
than hand arms; but the pieces of bronze of
the end of the fifteenth century were lumbering
things, needing 50 horses for transport and
service. At Nordlingen, in 1645, the artillery
could only fire three rounds, and, about the
same time, a musketeer only fired seven times
in eight hours (Jean de Bloch: La Guerre). In
1596, the British crown was trying to revive
the use of bows and arrows; and archers
appeared in the British forces in 1627. Mus-
kets were used with rests till the reign of Charles
I, when gunpowder cost no less than £3 a
barrel, so that train-bands often could not
afford to practise. Its effective use may be
dated, not from 1330, but from the invention
of the cartridge, the flint-lock, and the
bayonet three centuries later. If the inven-
tion the most sure of all to appeal to the
wealthy and powerful was thus slowly de-
veloped, how much more tardy would be that
intellectual and moral change which Caxton

124 WAR AND PEACE

started when he introduced the printing press
into England in 1476. In fact, it was to take
four centuries to give rag paper and movable
types their logical issue in universal primary
schooling.

Nevertheless, these landmarks represent the
beginnings of change deep, universal, and
abiding. If it was true that the world could
never again be quite the same after Chris-
tianity had thrown down its challenge to
Roman Imperialism, so it is true that, what-
ever the immediate turmoil, a world possessing
the printed sheet could never again be wholly
dominated by mere force and the superstition
that is the base inspiration of force. When
the " disruption of Christendom " occurred,
thousands of new centres of life were already
re-creating European society. While the age
of discovery brought fresh opportunities for
the outer man, there came, through the
recovery and spread of Greek and other
Eastern learning, and through the Reforma-
tion within the Christian Church, a great
stimulus to intellectual life, an introduction,
even for the common people, into new realms
of moral experience, and a new independence of
personality. Systems of tyranny and conquest
accepted without question in the ancient
servile world could not long exist in face of
this fundamental change : sooner or later a
political revolution must follow. In its appli-

BREAKDOWN OF FEUDALISM 125

cation to a practical emergency, secular reason
no more than religion spoke at first with a
single voice. Dante, the greatest mind of
the Middle Ages, had not got beyond the ideal
of a universal monarchy as the way to personal
and social freedom. Kings now proved them-
selves only too ready to claim this benevolent
function, after Dante's example of ascribing
it to a particular prince.

Still, the idea of a European jurisdiction
was there, and it grew. The " Consolato del
Mare," a large collection of maritime rules,
" made seemingly at Barcelona about the
middle of the fourteenth century," " set out a
veritable common law of the sea " (Walker)
for the coasts of Europe; marine insurance
was common, though not nearly as common as
wrecking and piracy, at the end of the fifteenth
century. In Central Europe, as the Imperial
ban failed of effect, leagues of cities and
principalities for mutual defence sprang up.
The end of the Thirty Years' War (1648)
marks the eclipse of the aim of world dominion,
and the definite appearance of territorial
nationality. Mixed or rival precepts drawn
from Roman civil law and mediaeval Church
(canon) law were gradually, with the clearer
definition of the boundaries of State control,
developed into a code of rules no longer
universal, but properly international, a code
of duties corresponding to the new rights.
Absolute right of ownership in the seas was

126 WAR AND PEACE

permitted to continue long because of its use-
fulness against piracy. Elizabeth vigorously
denied it in defending Drake; yet as late as
1805 the British Admiralty claimed possession
as far as Cape Finisterre, and to this day
military claims upon sea are upheld that have
long been obsolete on land. Similarly, English
protests against the Spanish monopoly of
trade with the Indies gave birth to ideas which
were afterwards to undermine the fabric
of Britain's own trade monopoly. Though
diplomatists too often imitated their royal
masters in " going abroad to lie on behalf of
their country," for it was a faithless age, a
certain etiquette and regularity were now for
the first time elaborated in State relations. By
the end of the sixteenth century there was a
definite assertion of neutral rights.

In Italy, which had suffered most from the
corruption of the Papacy and the tyranny of
soldiers of fortune, where the Renaissance and
the ideal of free republicanism were already
declining, and hope of resisting the foreign
invader and the native oppressor seemed
dead, a new force — politics as an independent
science and art — was brought to birth by
Machiavelli (1469-1527). It was a sinister
apparition. Ancient Rome still haunted the
Italian imagination; and the author of the
new statecraft could think of no better
expedient, amid the troubles he so clearly
saw, than a revived Caesarism. The happier

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 127

circumstances of insular England are indicated
in the fact that the Utopia was being
written at the same time as The Prince.
Though there was a quick reaction against
More's early radicalism, the seeds of progress
had been sown, and the conditions favoured
their growth. Finally, there appeared, in
Vasquez, Ayala, and Gentilis, above all in
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a clear definition
of the rights and the grosser wrongs of warfare ;
a declaration of the freedom of the seas; a
code of rules for Ministers, Ambassadors,
Generals, and Admirals; a law of neutrality
and private immunity; a discussion of what
is permissible under the Law of Nature, under
the Law of Nations, under honour and moral
justice, and under specific agreement; last,
but not least, a revival of the idea of arbitration.
Thus far we have traced the Westward
swarm across European history. We must
now follow its passage across the Atlantic,
into the Pacific, and round the African coast
into the Indian seas.

CHAPTER VII

THE SWARM OVERSEAS : EAST AND WEST

ENGLAND was by no means first in this
field. Companies of Portuguese, Spanish,
Dutch, and Russian adventurers had inaugur-

128 WAR AND PEACE

ated the new era of discovery and conquest
on the American, African, and Asian coasts,
and in Siberia. It was, in fact, a very little
and a very backward England that gave birth
to Shakespeare and humbled Imperial Spain.
In the two centuries after Edward III, the
population had increased from 2J millions
to perhaps double that number, at a high
estimate. Scotland was still independent.
The country was very imperfectly settled;
communications were difficult; industry was
but slightly developed; the small external
trade was carried on by foreigners ; the develop-
ment of the middle class had but lately begun.
Seamanship was in the first flush of its
success. Italians and Spaniards preceded Eng-
lish adventurers into the Western Hemisphere,
while Portuguese and Dutch showed them the
new Eastward passage. English seamen rarely
ventured beyond the Baltic, the Narrow Seas,
the Spanish coast as far as Seville, at the time
when Columbus was making his famous voyage,
and for a long time afterward they did not
venture into the Mediterranean. Until 1532
English traders with the East found their
chief opportunity in the yearly visits of the
Venetian fleet. America had been discovered,
and India reached by sea, nearly a century
before Gilbert took possession of Newfound-
land and Raleigh founded the colony of
Virginia. With these exceptions, not yet

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 129

established, (Calais, the last of the French
possessions, having been lost in 1558) Eng-
land had not an inch of territory beyond
these islands till she had asserted herself
against Spain by the defeat of the Armada
and by the Dutch alliance; till, through
immigration of Protestant refugees, London
had succeeded Antwerp (sacked by the
Spaniards in 1567 and 1585) as the greatest
commercial centre of North- West Europe;
till, from the Thames to the Bristol Channel,
a chain of busy seaports had arisen, and the
El Dorado legend had taken a firm hold upon
the English mind. These are the elements
to which is commonly traced the rough out-
burst of Elizabethan maritime enterprise.
But they are, in the main, conditions and
manifestations rather than causes of the
new spirit of foreign adventure and aggression
which marked the sudden opening of a new
chapter of British history. Some other
motive-force there must have been beside
greed of Spanish gold and hatred of the
Spanish Inquisition. What is the missing
factor ?

We have seen in the last chapter that,
among the first effects of the breakdown of
Feudalism and Papal authority, on the one
hand, and the growth of national monarchies
and the rural revolution on the other, were a
notable degradation of warfare and an un-
E

130 WAR AND PEACE

precedented outbreak of persecution. Here
are the main elements of a fresh movement
of armed expansion — landless, rightless,
demoralised masses of men, and governing
classes in need of fresh fields for easy exploit-
ation. Henry VIII and Elizabeth were not
the first arbitrary rulers to gain popularity
by pointing their victims to opportunities
of compensation. They had broken the
barons; that was matter for gratitude, for
in a sparse agricultural population local is
always felt more than central tyranny. It
was they, and not the people, who drove
out Popery. Under temptations of general
profit, as well as under threats of general
danger, military force is quickly concentrated
in a single national centre. Thus, the royal
house grew rich and strong and proud, so that,
under the later Tudors and the Stuarts, Eng-
land came near submission to a pure tyranny.
Evidently, the easiest field for the use of
this new force of monarchy lay outside the
national boundaries. The growth of restraints
within the State, and of a national spirit,
for a time stimulate licence without. As in
ancient days, while the process of internal
consolidation was conditioned by growing
enlightenment and freedom, the process of
expansion was not subject to any such checks
and balances. The rivalries that arose in
the years of national settlement in Europe,

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 131

especially the rivalry of England with the
other two great Atlantic States, Spain and
France, were taken as sanctioning a resort to
extremes of savagery which would not have
been thought of in internal relations. From1
being a Roman dispensation throughout a
great part of the known world, supported by
the most sacred sanctions, law had come to
be regarded almost as a mere emanation of
local sovereignty. Regard for a rudimentary
moral code had been extended from the
village community to the confines of the
nation; but here, in spite of Christian pro-
fessions, it reached its limit, or at least became
seriously weakened. Within each nation the
development of wealth and population con-
tinued steadily; but, in the relation of these
nation-states with each other and the out-
side world, humane considerations were at a
discount. For centuries after their discovery,
the new worlds of the West and the East were
regarded by statesmen, as well as swash-
bucklers, as lying outside civilisation.

The firm establishment of military monarchy
was quickly followed by the emergence of
capitalism. Enterprise and ambition grew
rapidly under the stimulus of possibilities of
wealth " beyond the dreams of avarice," that
is, beyond the scope of local usury. The
broadening of the market and the sources of
supply involved a broadening of economic

E 2

132 WAR AND PEACE

and political bases. This development was
hurried and accentuated by the inflow of
bullion from Central and South America.
The Spaniards went for gold; they found
only silver, but in such quantities as to upset
completely the existing European currencies.
The laziest countryside was aroused by this
mysterious appreciation of its crops and stock.
Thus the new Money Economy was confirmed
and extended — a bridge toward the Credit
Economy of to-day. Trade increased rapidly,
but the chief aim of statecraft in the next
century and a half was to procure an ever
larger import of the precious metals. In
the general spread of capitalistic organisation
thus produced, and the national rivalries
excited by dazzling visions of treasure going
a-begging beyond the ocean, the island state
of England grew in national self-consciousness
and self-confidence, in commercial experience
and maritime skill, and in the reserves which
enabled her in the eighteenth century to
adopt the sweeping changes known as the
Industrial Revolution. To her insularity,
and its influence in the hardening of national
character and narrowing of national purposes,
much of England's phenomenal success must
be attributed.

The State, then, was ready; the great mer-
chants were ready. A further reason for the
readiness of the common people to leave home

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 133

and risk death on strange seas lay in the
consequences of the oppression, extortion,
and profligacy of the Tudor Court. For a
time, the rural population dispossessed by
evictions and the decline of arable farming
found recompense in the activity of the
new cloth manufactures. But, when Henry
VIII launched out upon his monstrous career
of robbery at home and bloodshed and waste-
ful entanglement abroad, wholesale ruin fell
upon the country-folk who composed the great
body of the nation. The mob of nobles and
courtiers to whom the monastic lands were
given raised rents, confiscated stock, laid hold
of the commons, and mercilessly evicted the
helpless tenants. Thus, while the old foun-
tains of relief were closed, a new mass of
pauperism was created. Not content with
such triumphs of rapacity, the King pro-
ceeded to the theft of the guild lands and
successive debasements of the currency. In-
surrections in the eastern and southern coun-
ties were repressed by foreign mercenaries;
the hanging of Ket at Norwich marks the
failure of the popular resistance. Elizabeth
reformed the currency (further debased by
the Ministers of Edward VI) in time to save
English credit; but, by the laws for the
regulation of labour and the relief of distress
which are the economic landmarks of her
reign, the revolution was deepened and fixed,

134 WAR AND PEACE

The justices assessed wages at so low a level
that employers voluntarily raised the rate.
Starvation pay, supplemented from the poor
rate, became the rule. Combinations of
labourers were effectively broken up. Runa-
way journeymen and recalcitrant apprentices
were imprisoned. Servants could not quit
town or parish without licence; masters tak-
ing servants without a testimonial were fined;
absentees from work were fined; a servant
who forged a testimonial was flogged; one
who assaulted his master was imprisoned for
a year or more.

It is not difficult to connect this regime of
oppression and robbery with an outburst of
adventure which reproduced the chief features
of outlawry in earlier feudal times. Steady,
settled country life was becoming impossible at
the very moment when fables of the golden
East and true tales of loot in the Spanish
Main began to echo through the land.

This demoralisation shows itself, as might be
expected, in the character of the Elizabethan
maritime adventurers. These first expansion-
ists began with buccaneering, at the outset
in the English Channel. " Huguenots from
the French shores joined forces with Devon-
shire sea-dogs from Dartmouth or Bideford,
and plundered impartially all shipping that
passed up into what were called the Narrow
Seas. ... It was a fierce life, a state of war

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 13S

without its rights for the victims or its duties
for the conquerors. We cannot doubt that]
bitter passions, religious hate, greed, sheer!
love of violence and bloodshed, were only too?
easily fed in these buccaneering exploits. . . . \
English and Huguenot corsairs swept the
Channel and the Bay of Biscay. Tremaynes,
Stukeleys, and Cobhams, scions of famous
West-country houses, continued to spend their
money in fitting out craft of twenty or fifty
tons with cutlasses and guns and reckless
men only too glad to learn the art of using
them. Fishermen abandoned their favourite
grounds off Kinsale or in the Iceland seas,
and took to the more profitable trade of
piracy; and throughout the West, from
Bideford round to Exmouth, the sea-dog's
life was the envy of every young fellow of
spirit " (Woodward: Expansion of the British
Empire). At the same time, some more dar-
ing fellows were doing for the more distant
lands what the Northmen did for the England
of Alfred. Drake, twenty years before, had
set the example by plundering the coast towns
of Spanish South America, and, having
received the secret support of Queen Eliza-
beth all along, had been knighted for his pains.
Hispaniola and the Spanish Main offered
a happy hunting-ground to British hooli-
gans. " To England, the war (with Spain)
is throughout an industry. ... As we now

136 WAR AND PEACE

put our money into railways or what not,
so then the keen men of business took
shares in the new ship which John Oxenham
or Francis Drake was fitting out at Plymouth,
and which was intended to lie in wait for
the treasure galleons, or make raids upon
the Spanish towns in the Gulf of Mexico.
The two countries were, formally, not even
at war with each other " (Seeley; The Ex-
pansion of England). For forty or fifty years
after their first settlement, the Bahamas
were a hot-bed of wreckers and pirates.
Captain Morgan had his headquarters in the
British colony of Jamaica ; Charles II
pocketed the royal share of the loot, and
knighted the master of the black flag. " Our
early maritime heroes were all pirates; and
even after the Government determined on
putting down the practice, and actually hanged
numbers of adventurers who became a scandal
to it, mainly because* they had originally
been sent out by Government, and had
been old-fashioned enough to strain their
commission — even after this, a preliminary
apprenticeship in this lucrative and invigora-
tive business was no bar to the subsequent
employment of a buccaneer, who had aban-
doned this special calling, in Church and
State. The first chairman of the East India
Co., Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, was ' an
ancient buccaneer.' Paterson, the reputed

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 137

founder of the Bank of England, is some- 1
times said to have been a missionary in the;
Antilles, sometimes described as a pirate, and !
it has been suggested that he was probably
both by turns" (Thorold Rogers; Economic
Interpretation of History). Buccaneering soon
lost even the semblance of political ex-
cuse; and for a century or more England
had good reason to repent (though Spain,
amid the ruins of her attempt to corner the
silver supply, had better) the royal policy
which was long represented as a fit way of
vindicating British independence and Chris-
tianity pure and undefiled — a policy to which
we now trace back the careers of scoundrels
like Morgan and Kidd.

In a less martial and more strictly com-
mercial type, the Elizabethan spirit embodied
itself in the trade in negro slaves, initiated by
John Hawkins (another of the good Queen's
knights) in 1562. Hawkins, who may be called
the father of our transatlantic trade, was,
indeed, in high favour with the Government,
and was accounted a highly estimable fellow.
His first expedition consisted of three small
ships carrying only a hundred men, with
whom he bought or caught three hundred
negroes, and sold them to the hated Spaniard
in San Domingo. His second venture, in
1564 (the year of Shakespeare's birth), con-
sisted of four ships and one hundred and

WAR AND PEACE

seventy men, and was attended, as he proudly
said, " with great profit to the venturers, as
also to the whole realm, in bringing home both
gold, silver, pearles, and other jewels great
store." The third voyage, in 1567, took five
ships — -one commanded by Francis Drake,
and two lent from the Royal Navy. So the
kicrease went on. We need not attempt here
to describe the horrors of slave-hunting and
the " middle passage " across the Atlantic.
There can be little doubt that the evil
of slave labour, which had already existed in
the Spanish colonial system for half a century,
and with which the Spanish Government
endeavoured to cope by regulative injunc-
tions, was immensely aggravated by the
application to it of British trading methods,
otherwise only applied to dead commodities.
For two centuries of Imperial development
there was practically no sign of compunction
in regard to this immense iniquity — that was
to be a product of the brief cosmopolitan
period in the history of English political
thought. In 1662 the African Company
was formed in London, and occupied the
mouth of the Gambia. This direct attack
on the Dutch traffic in slaves for the British
American plantations led to the Anglo-Dutch
war of the following four years (1663-67),
in course of which the American coast from
Nova Scotia to Florida fell to England. In

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 139

1689 the Company's monopoly was removed,
and every Englishman was free to become
a slave-trader. In twenty years the sale of.
negroes reached 25,000 annually; a century!
later this number was quadrupled. Probably*
not less than a million slaves were imported
into the colonies in the course of a century.
By the Treaties of 1713, which marked the
achievement by Britain of primacy among
the Western Powers, she obtained the formal
assent of Spain to the slave trade with Spanish
America, and it became " a central point
in English policy " (Lecky: History of England
in the Eighteenth Century). " From this date,
says Seeley, " we took the leading share and
stained ourselves beyond other nations in the
monstrous and enormous atrocities " of this
traffic. The direct atrocities of the negro
slave trade are, however, but a part of the
cost of a system by which the natural evolu-
tion of large tracts of sub -tropical countries,
both in Africa and America, has been injured
and a series of mischiefs produced the gravest
that are recorded in human history.

While Drake's piratical voyage round the
world, the supreme achievement of Eliza-
bethan adventure, had flung England into
open conflict with Spain for supremacy, it
had also attracted British cupidity towards
the hoary and jewelled East; and it was there
that British Imperialism first crystallised in

140 WAR AND PEACE

the form which at length gave the title of
Empress to an English Queen. Gilbert, Hayes,
and Raleigh, in their premature attempts to
find vacant lands for settlement by emigra-
tion and cultivation, had shown how much
more difficult is colonisation than freeboot-
ing. Joint-stock capitalism, in the infant
shape of the East India Company (which,
however, might rather be described as a highly
capitalised merchant guild), was now to show
that, if England did not yet want, because
she did not need, colonies properly so-called,
she was quite ripe for the race after depend-
encies and dividends.

During the first half of the three centuries
in which British influence has been brought
to bear upon India, it was governed by a trad-
ing and non-political policy. The merchants
of London absolutely controlled the Company,
though royalty watched over its rights in the
background. Climatic and other conditions
in India forbade colonisation, even in the
modified sense of " plantation." Self-defence
on distant seas had to be provided for at a
time when the State had no naval force to
apply to such a task; but, beyond this, the
astute patricians did not wish to burden the
venture with military or political obligations.
They simply wanted to tap the wealth — not
the gold treasures, but the spices and cloths —
of the East, to obtain a series of " open

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 141

markets " without territorial responsibility.
At first they found the islands more accessible;
but Dutch antagonism, based on a military
and territorial policy, diverted them to the
Indian mainland.

A very different Hindostan, in some
respects, from that which afterwards came
under British sway. The earliest adven-
turers, navigators and merchants, coming
through perils of stormy seas, armed rivals,
and piracy, from a far, small country still
raw, unlearned, disunited and undeveloped,
had found upon the Mogul throne at Delhi,
Akbar, the chivalrous and learned con-
temporary of Queen Elizabeth and Henry IV
of France, whose reign is the highest point
of native Indian rule. This great monarch,
who was just dead at the time of the first
expedition of the East India Company, had
consolidated the petty Hindu and Moham-
medan States, as much by diplomacy as
by force; had established political equality
between the different races, respecting the
humane side of the Hindu traditions and in-
stitutions, and founded a land revenue system
and other details of government which survive
in essence to this day. The governors and
friends of the Company were as pacific as a
Cobden could have wished. Sir Thomas Roe,
an ambassador sent to the Mogul Court in 1615
to combat Portuguese influence and help the

142 WAR AND PEACE

British factories, wrote : " War and traffic
are incompatible. At my first arrival I
understood a fort was very necessary; but
experience teaches me we are refused it to
our advantage. If the Emperor would offer
me ten, I would not accept one."

A series of unprofitable years, during which
the Mogul Empire was being undermined by
dissension and intrigue, brought about a change
of temper. The Civil War at home favoured
a certain demoralisation in these far-distant,
feeble, and scattered trading stations; and
afterwards, as the trade grew more valuable,
to keep up quasi-imperial appearances came
to be the most obvious way of justify-
ing the maintenance of the monopoly. In
1635 Charles I had granted a licence to a
rival company, on the ground, among
other things, that the East India Company
had not established fortified posts. Four
years later Fort St. George was established
at Madras; and shortly afterwards a new
charter was obtained, giving the Company
power to make peace or war with any non-
Christian people, to establish fortifications,
export arms duty free, arrest traders infring-
ing its monopoly, and exercise civil and
criminal jurisdiction in India. In 1640 a
Surgeon Boughton, by medical services to
a daughter of the Mogul, obtained facilities
for the Bengal trading stations; but the purely

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 143

pacific term of English influence was coming
to an end. In 1657, when the concern was
in low water, Cromwell remodelled the Com-
pany on somewhat broader lines. Sir
William Hunter calls this year the first of
" the three cyclic dates of Great Britain in
the East " — the others being the battle of
Plassey in 1757, and the reconquest of India
after the Sepoy Revolt a century later. In
1661 Charles II, without concern for Parlia-
ment or public opinion, confirmed the monopoly
of the Company and its military and judicial
authority.

By this time the Company had become the
wonder and the envy of all the merchants of
England. Imports from the Ganges increased
from £8,000 to £300,000 a year in the twenty-
three years following the Restoration. " The
profits were such that, in 1676, every pro-
prietor received as a bonus a quantity of stock
equal to that which he held. On the capital
thus doubled were paid during five years
dividends amounting on an average to 20 %
annually " (Macaulay). The value of £100
of stock rose to £350 and even higher, a
marvellous thing in those days. No wonder
there was an irruption of private adven-
turers. Thomas Pitt, grandfather of Lord
Chatham, and owner of the " Pitt diamond,*1
was one of the more prominent of these
" interlopers " — a sort of link between legiti-

144 WAR AND PEACE

mate traders and buccaneers of the Kidd type.
But in Sir Josiah Child they found a hard,
persistent, and resourceful enemy. Child,
who had been an office-boy in the City, rose
by his abilities to be the head of the greatest
trading corporation of the time, one of the
most wealthy and powerful personages in
the land, and the founder of a new com-
mercial imperialism.

It was a favourable juncture. A king who
shamelessly begged for foreign money and
aid for the furtherance of his designs against
his people was just the man to foster schemes
of Imperial adventure and aggression; the
people who could not destroy the Jacobite
tyranny except by means of a foreign army
and a foreign prince were just the stuff to
be victimised by men like Child and his
colleague Cook. " The whole breed of our
statesmen," says Macaulay of this period,
" seems to have degenerated. . . . Vicissi-
tudes so extraordinary as those which mark
the reign of Charles II can only be explained
by supposing an utter want of principle hi
the political world. . . . Profligacy became a
test of orthodoxy and loyalty, a qualification
for rank and office. The excesses of that age
remind us of the humours of a gang of foot-
pads revelling with their favourite beauties
at a flash-house." Sir Josiah Child knew
where his strength lay. The people might

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 145

shout, rival traders might scheme: it
mattered little so long as the authority of
Whitehall stood behind the India House.
When the interlopers became really trouble-
some, Charles's enthusiasm was stimulated
with a gift of £10,000. James was no less
royally treated, and every Court favourite
had his or her price. Child's brother John
was made a baronet and General of the
British forces in the East. The expenditure
of nearly £100,000 in bribes procured the
renewal of the old privileges in 1693. Two
years later the Company was indicted for
corruption; in 1708 it was obliged to amalga-
mate with the rival body which had maintained
the opposition to it, and thenceforward its
worst difficulties at home were ended. It was
now solidly connected with the State; and
the more romantic and speculative interest,
which led in 1720 to the episode of the South
Sea Bubble, was diverted to another field,
where the trade in negroes offered for a giddy
moment greater profits than the trade in tea.
In India the Company prospered for half a
century more by refraining from intervention
or aggression. A brief spasm of interference
with native rulers in 1684 had resulted so
disastrously as to be a warning. But French
and other European rivals whom bribery
could not reach nor threats restrain were now
exciting increasing jealousy, and turmoil

146 WAR AND PEACE

among the native peoples offered new tempta-
tion. By 1740 the Mogul Empire had fallen
to ruin; the provinces had been devastated
by Persian and Afghan invaders, and the
Mahrattas had risen to power. Here was a
situation irresistibly tempting to the wilder
youth equally of the French and the English
Companies, bored to death with the mere
handling of goods amid the unnatural limita-
tions of an Indian trading station. Almost
at the same time the fever of adventure
and intrigue broke out in both corporations,
in the rival personalities of Clive and Dupleix.
Dupleix had the advantage of age and expe-
rience; he had already discovered the native
susceptibility to military prestige and the
military capacity of the sepoy under European
training. His ambition stuck at nothing, and,
as Governor of Pondicherry, he wielded the full
local power of France. He soon controlled
native authority in the Deccan and Carnatic,
and was planning further conquests, when he
was suddenly called home. Clive, on the
other hand, then but a boy clerk at Madras,
was soon to show how social disintegration
evokes military genius.

We have again reached low-water mark in
the public and private morality of England,
a time when organised religion was well-nigh
dead, and organised education hardly existed;
when high society was profligate, and ruthless

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 147

laws were answered by criminal terrorism;
when the early stages of the Industrial Revo-
lution were imperceptibly shifting the basis
of the national economy, and adventure
abroad was taken to compensate for political
stagnation under a disciplined and powerful
oligarchy at home. The successful develop-
ment which culminated with the Peace of
1713 had left Britain the first Power in the
world; but " it secularised and materialised
the English people as nothing had ever done
before. Never were sordid motives so
supreme, never was religion and every high
influence so much discredited, as in the
thirty years that followed " (Seeley). Scot-
land was still a distant and little-known land;
only in 1710 " men were leaving off armour
which had hitherto been worn by every one
who could afford it as a useful precaution
in a barbarous and therefore a warlike
society " (Buckle). When the struggle with
France was resumed, and Pitt was in the midst
of his efforts after a world empire, there was
an end of political lethargy, but there was no
moral revival. In the general programme
of war against France all round the world,
to beat her out of India became an important
aim. In 1746, two years before the Peace
of Aix-la-Chapelle, the Madras station was
destroyed by the French, and Clive, among
others, was made prisoner. Five years later

148 WAR AND PEACE

he had his revenge in the siege of Arcot, fol-
lowed by a complete humiliation of Dupleix.
Thus the way was cleared for Pitt's plans
for direct Crown rule in India, which, says
Green, " when he proposed them, were regarded
as insane"; and these designs received a
decisive stimulus in 1756 by the coincidence
of the crime of the Black Hole of Calcutta,
committed by an ally of the French, with the
outbreak of the Seven Years' War in Europe.
Corrupt and treacherous in diplomacy, Clive
never lacked courage, and the victory of
Plassey made him dictator in Bengal. The
young adventurer who, as leader of a boyish
gang of window-breakers, had terrorised the
shopkeepers of Market Drayton, overturned
in a few years the peaceful, commercial, and
non-territorial policy of the past century and
a half. At the Peace of Paris, in 1763, France
gave up all right to military settlement, and
so removed European rivalry. The south of
the peninsula was now conquered, and a
specious plea for complete imperialisation was
based on the need of abolishing the corruption
of the Company's officers. That the Company
was pretty thoroughly demoralised, and that
Clive and the like of Clive were not the
men to put things right, may equally be seen
in the records of the time, which make a
shameful picture of extortion and robbery by
British traders, to the ruin and terror of the

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 149

unprotected natives. Beside Clive, the other
great instrument of the imperialisation of India
was Warren Hastings, also a clerk of the Com-
pany, who rose rapidly to be Governor- General
of Bengal, laid the basis of the present Civil
Service, and by routing Hyder Ali destroyed
the last possibility of a strong native govern-
ment. He was tried in Westminster Hall
on charges of gross cruelty, extortion, and
the wrongful suppression of free native tribes,
but was acquitted.

Enough has been said to show that, whether
good or bad, empire-building in this supreme
case was not inevitable, was not a necessary
result either of national defence or the ex-
pansion of the national economy. On the
contrary, what we find is a reflection of the
ills of English society, the opening of a new
battlefield for the working out of European
quarrels and for military and commercial
adventure. For the first time England was
committed on the large scale to absolute
dominion over a community alien in race,
history, religion, and interest — a far-distant
peninsula having a population ten times
as large as that of the ruling State, and
impossible of white colonisation.

Meanwhile, the West was showing expansion
of a strongly contrasted type. In North
America settlement by and for agricultural
and industrial cultivation led to a steady
and soundly directed development. I say

150 WAR AND PEACE

" cultivation " because the word sums up
the contrast between this regeneration of an
old stock in a new world and the establish-
ment of absolutism in Asia. But the cultiva-
tion of the land is only the basic activity of
colonial life. The best part of American
colonisation was founded by communities of
men and women distinguished by religious zeal
and independence of character. It was an
extension of some of the purest and hardiest
types of British manhood. It represented the
spirit of More's Utopia, as the European state-
craft against which it was a practical pro-
test represented the spirit of Machiavelli's
Principe. It was a great movement away
from Empire toward Democracy; if it had been
otherwise the British Islands might to-day
be a small dependency of a kingdom of North
America. The extinction of the North
American Indians, which Seeley likened to
the attack of a party of hunters upon a herd
of antelopes, is not to be forgotten. But it
is not possible to regard these nomads with
quite the same respect, not to say awe, which
any rational mind must feel before the ancient
civilisation of Hindostan. The early experi-
ments of Frobisher, Gilbert, and Raleigh
were not successful; but they set a high
example in their deliberate search for unoccu-
pied lands for pacific colonisation, in an age
when most Englishmen who crossed the seas
were freebooters. The first American terri-

THE SWARM OVERSEAS 151

tory successfully developed, that of Virginia,
was a plantation, owned at the outset by a
chartered company, afterwards to be worked
by slave labour. The four New England
States were colonised (1622-33) pacifically —
save for two Indian wars in Connecticut
— by Puritan settlers. New York, New
Jersey, and Delaware were, it is true, taken
from the Dutch; but, self-government being
grafted upon existing institutions, no serious
sting was left behind. On the other hand,
Pennsylvania, bought by the Quaker William
Penn from his royal debtor Charles II, was
one of the noblest social experiments in his-
tory. If other American colonies had been
founded in the same spirit and of like
material, the difficulty with France might have
been more easily rectified, and at least America
would not have been made, like India, an arena
for the settlement of a European feud.

That there was as much of the temper of
independence in New England as in Pennsyl-
vania, if less of the gentler humanities, Great
Britain was to learn when, in 1783, she was
compelled to give her American colonies
complete independence. The policy of trade
ascendancy and monopoly — which had been
supreme since Charles II mounted the throne,
and which was enshrined in the Navigation
Acts and other measures making English
ships the sole carriers and England the sole
depot or market for colonial trade — was a crude

152 WAR AND PEACE

expression of the idea later to be enshrined
in the phrase "Trade follows the Flag."
Monopoly was the essence of British trade in
India and elsewhere. That it could not be
imposed upon a few small communities —
only 1^ millions of people all told, in the
middle of the eighteenth century — set the
world thinking. The struggle with France
cost France Canada, but it cost us the United
States. That England thought it more pro-
fitable (that is what it comes to) to hold India
conquered than North America free must
seem strange to any man who now studies
the facts with open eyes. To-day, when the
territorial expansion of the British Empire
has ceased, we may say that the lesson has
come home; for, while thought of India is a
reminder of great tasks, great duties, great
perils yet to be borne, the free, self-governing
Dominions and Commonwealths of Britons
across the seas give good ground for pride in
what has been accomplished and hope of the
future ,

CHAPTER VIII

THE BALANCE OF POWER

THRICE in our story of the Westward swarm
we have seen a great settlement and equili-
brium established, and at length broken by
internal decay and external attack; thrice

THE BALANCE OF POWER 153

we have seen an economic basis of a settled
society established, only to be transformed —
the slave economy into a land economy, and
this into an economy of trade currency. At
each stage the breadth of the picture expands,
and, however dark it may yet be, takes on
some more hopeful colour. Rome made an
empire wider than the old despotisms of
the Nile and Euphrates valleys; its collapse
wrought terrible havoc, yet the fate of Europe
has never been like that of the ancient Levant
and North Africa. Feudalism covered a
larger area than Roman Viceroys could effect-
ively govern ; its collapse, and the end of the
Mediaeval Empire, brought long anarchy, but
not such as that of eight centuries earlier.
Slavery and serfdom have passed; the era
of free labour and free thought has dawned.
We have now to trace the establishment of
a fourth, a much wider and more firmly-based,
equilibrium — a settlement shared in some
measure by the whole world, a peace often
and gravely threatened, it is true, and subject
to many grave problems, but sustained by
a richer variety of living forces, of interest
and intelligence alike, than any that preceded
it.

We have seen that the new imperialism \
offered a temptation of increasing returns
to the governing and moneyed classes of the \
Atlantic seaboard States. But this opportun-

154, WAR AND PEACE

ity was only slowly developed, and it did not
reach the greater part of Europe. There the
territorial greed of absolute monarchs, ex-
pressed in matrimonial and contra-matrimonial
intrigues, and subserved by growing wealth,
ever-larger mercenary forces, and a new type
of statesmanship joining cynical craft to
real constructive power, characterises the
process of national consolidation and rivalry,
from the time of the Emperor Charles V,
Francis I, and Henry VIII of England down
to the French Revolution. Wars of religion
merge into wars of royal succession, and these
into wars of trade and empire. Beneath
them all, there is the same spirit of rapacity,
cloaked in a cunning which must yet be
accounted better than mere force, and sup-
ported with an ability that left some admirable
by-products for the consolation of long-
suffering peoples. Thus, from the foundation
of British diplomacy by Henry VII, England
was engaged for centuries in a shrewd game
of beggar-my-neighbour with the three great
Powers of the Continent, France, Spain, and
the Empire, taking a partner now on one side,
then on the other, and always for a price.

France was traditionally and generally the
enemy, but every combination was unstable,
and an opportunism usually based on economic
considerations ruled supreme. Reformation
England remained formally the ally of perse-

THE BALANCE OF POWER 155

cuting Spain. The Holy League of 1511, to
enable Venice and the Empire to drive France
out of Italy, saw the first definite entangle-
ment of England in European rivalries since
the loss of her continental possessions. Wol-
sey had irons of his own in the fire which he
fanned between Hapsburg and Valois; but
according to the ideas of the age he was well
defending English interests. Queen Mary's
marriage to Philip of Spain found Parliament
reluctant to quarrel again with France, and
few save the shippers of the Channel would
echo her famous apostrophe on the loss of
Calais. Elizabeth gave a fresh turn to the
policy of the Balance of Power by enlisting
the aid of the Scottish Reformers; and, having
found new friends among the Dutch and
French Protestants, she dared at length
openly to flout Spain by posing as defender
of the new faith and Queen of the Western
Seas. At the same time, the alien economic
influence represented by old Lombard Street
and the Hansa Steelyard was thrown off.
With a new pride, England turned her face
to the ocean, never again to think of conti-
nental possessions.

It was the treasure-hunt that determined
the development of English sea power. From
the time of Henry III, the Crown had
realised the value of a command of the
Channel, but a regular navy was a late idea

156 WAR AND PEACE

By the death of Henry VIII there was a
fleet of seventy sail, and the Woolwich and
Deptford dockyards had been founded. His
two successors, however, let the ships decay;
and Elizabeth's effective navy only numbered
some thirty vessels, under captains badly
paid, though bold and skilful. Drake was able
to bring another forty, private ships mounted
with guns for buccaneering work, out of the
Channel ports; and these were sufficient to
dispose of the 130 vessels of the Spanish
Armada, ill-handled and suitable only for
Southern seas, even had not winds and waves
proved kindly cruel. The combination of
religiosity and money -hunting became flagrant
under the Stuarts. Cromwell's foreign policy
was more honest, but hardly less materialistic.
He first effectively put down piracy in the
near seas. With the Navigation Monopoly
Act of 1651, and the consequent war with
Holland, trade interests for the first time
explicitly directed British arms. Holland
had her revenge upon Charles, the pensioner
of Louis, in 1689, when she gave a Dutch
king to England and made her part of the
league against France. Under William III
there was at least a steady intent in English
policy — that of preventing the union of
France and Spain, our powerful rivals, under
the Bourbon family; and, to British merchants
as well as to the lesser continental States,

THE BALANCE OF POWER 157

what was called the preservation of the
balance of power seemed the beginning if
not also the end of political wisdom. The
merchants, indeed, had cause for reflection, as
the struggle was carried through the Low
Countries, Spain, Lombardy and to the
Danube, and it became evident that Marl-
borough was righting less for any political
aim than from ambition and a passion of
strategy and tactics, seasoned with payments
from contractors and foreign States.

The Treaty of Utrecht, by which the War of
the Spanish Succession was terminated in 1713,
made no substantial alteration in the map of
Europe, though it did really establish the
monarchical equipoise. Its most material
result to England, the Asiento Contract for
the monopoly of the slave trade to the
Spanish colonies, was a degrading sequel to
a terribly costly quarrel. The war added
forty millions sterling to what had been a
nominal national debt, but it had the good
effect of strengthening the pacific reaction
which enabled Walpole to take the first steps
toward free trade, and favoured another
momentous development in the political
experience of the world — the passage to
aristocratic and middle-class power in Parlia-
ment, and Cabinet responsibility under the
two-party system. James I had written a
book to prove that divine right of kings to

158 WAR AND PEACE

dispose of their country as though it were
a private farm which was most fully pro-
claimed at the Court of Louis XIV. The
French peasants were not, the English yeomen
were, well enough off to rebel. Cromwell and
his Puritan cavalry said the decisive word
on this subject for England. It was finally
elaborated in the Bill of Rights after the
second Revolution and the banishment of
the Stuarts; and the first dull Hanoverians
did not dare or care to dispute it. The
Jacobite risings of 1689, 1715, and 1745
showed that the old sentiment lingered on
in the remoter parts of the country, but
offered as little evidence of divine rightful -
ness as did the transatlantic imbecilities of
George III and Lord North of the sagacity
that can alone commend kingly rule. An
era of rationalism in which the spirits of
Renaissance and Reformation were blended
had come, and in its dry light the only
choice for royalty was to modernise itself or
disappear.

As we look eastward, the Europe of this
period takes a gloomier aspect. Through
ages of warfare with the Spanish and German
branches of the Hapsburgs, the territory of
France extended into Flanders and Alsace,
under a monarchy unequalled for splendour and
arrogance. But the glory of court and camp
costs dear. Hereditary absolutism, whatever

THE BALANCE OF POWER 159

heights it may attain, is doomed because
it cannot perpetuate its abilities; and the de-
generacy of the Bourbons synchronised with
the flood of eighteenth century scepticism.
A prophet might have seen the guillotine at
the end of this road. The absentee landlords
for whom it was disgrace to be dismissed from
Versailles to their estates saw nothing. Enjoy-
ing the largest, richest, and most homogeneous
estate in the Western world, Louis XV and
his courtiers could never be content. Terri-
torial greed, extravagant display, and preda-
tory militarism ruined the work of great
Ministers like Colbert and Turgot. The loss
of Canada to England (1759) was ill compen-
sated by the gain of Lorraine, Alsace, and
Corsica (1766-68). Ideas brought home from
the free soil of the New World and sown
in the hot-bed of native grievance contributed
to the terrible harvest of the Revolution.

The United Provinces (Holland) enjoyed in
the seventeenth century, largely through the
vigour of their municipal life, a sudden but
brief efflorescence not unlike that of the
ancient city-states of Greece at their height,
or the North Italy of the Renaissance; and,
as in those cases, the strange association of
sublime art and profane plutocracy again
appeared. Spain, drunk with fanaticism,
having staked her trade and industry on
the issue of universal empire, could yet not

160 WAR AND PEACE

keep out of European broils, and, with the loss
of her Italian and other outlying possessions,
sank into a miserable lethargy. Italy had
given freely of her best and worst, and was
reaping a bitter return. Soldiers of fortune
pillaged the cities that soldiers of fortune had
made. Milan, Parma, Naples, Sicily passed
from hand to hand, pawns in the royal
family game. Worst of all, Germany was a
field of perpetual warfare from the Baltic to
the Alps. Here Bourbon humbled Hapsburg
(it was cheaper to keep the army abroad than
at home); here Spain assailed the Northern
heretics, and Kings of Sweden, Denmark,
France, and England shared the federal
power.

The separatist spirit was the cost to Ger-
many of her pre-eminence in the work of the
Reformation. In the Thirty Years' War
(1619-48) millions of lives were destroyed,
and the country was covered with ruined
villages and towns. In an uncultivated
land without traditions and centres of
self-government, or in a flat agricultural
region, the answer to this anarchy would
have been autocracy. Germany was none
such; yet the growth of military States like
Prussia and Austria is very comprehensible.
The Hohenzollerns, heirs of the estate of the
old Teutonic knights, shrewd, frugal, indus-
trious, unblushingly self-confident, survived

THE BALANCE OF POWER 161

the inroads of Poles, Swedes, and Russians,
took to themselves a crown in 1700, and
with it the representation of northern and
Protestant Germany against the Catholic and
Austrian south. The Wars of the Polish
Election (1733) and the Austrian Succession
(1740-48) greatly weakened Austria, and
brought Prussia, under Frederic II, " the
Great," author, philosopher, organiser, and
fighter, the Duchy of Silesia and a place in
the circle of the Great Powers. In the Seven
Years' War (1756-63) against Austria, Poland,
and Sweden, Frederic showed his military
skill and won a lukewarm aid from England
and Russia. This sounds enough; and yet
a century later, long after London and Paris
had composed their graver differences, Vienna
and Berlin had not finished their long feud.
Ocean-borne commerce was the chief factor
in the more rapid constitutional and social
progress of the Western nations.

Meanwhile, a new State, of very different
constitution, character, and destiny was arising
between Asia and Europe. Three circum-
stances explain the fact that Russia is to-day
the one absolute monarchy left in the Western
world, and the one country in which famine
and revolution are chronic. The first is the
structure of the land, a vast plain falling into
three zones — i ich wheat-fields and prairies in
the south, forests and clearings in the centra
F

162 WAR AND PEACE

and frozen tundras in the north. With only
a few fat-scattered cities, with no considerable
trading class till the nineteenth century, and
a poor nobility dependent on servile agricul-
ture, the Tsardom found no counterpoise in
national affairs, though, till lately, it has had
to make terms in local administration with the
peasant communes now in course of destruc-
tion. Secondly, the long and cruel sway of the
Mongols favoured the growth of absolutism, as
did the aggressions of Poland in the fifteenth
century. The third factor is the influence,
unbroken for a thousand years, of the Rus so-
Greek Church, with its splendid ritual and
fixed dogma, its determined opposition to
intellectual freedom and progress. We talk
of the dead hand of feudalism in Western
Europe; the dead hand in Russia is that of
the Byzantine Emperors. Peter the Great
put a Western veneer upon the life of his
court, but could do no more. Blocked on
the Baltic by Sweden, Russia expanded
southward and eastward until the eighteenth
century, when she took Finland, Livonia,
Esthonia, and large parts of Lithuania and
Poland, while reaching through Georgia into
the heart of Asia, Centuries of warfare
with Sweden and Poland, with Napoleonic
France, with Turkey and her allies, and with
the mountaineers and tribesmen of the Asiatic
borderlands, have not availed to make the

THE BALANCE OF POWER 163

Russians a warlike or, in the ordinary sense,
a patriotic people. They have given birth
to few great soldiers. Consciousness of nation-
ality is feebly developed; and the crisis of a
foreign war has more than once been seized
as an opportuntiy of revolt against a hated
Government. A certain dull obstinacy of
resistance, together with the hard natural
conditions of this strange land, served, never-
theless, to break the greatest conqueror the
world has ever seen.

Such, in the briefest outline, is the history
of the steps Europe had taken during the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth cen-
turies, toward the territorial settlement which
is essential to any stable civilisation, and the
balance of national powers which was the only
method, since all authority of European
extent disappeared, of guaranteeing peace
and progress. One must, no doubt, be very
far removed from these blind and reckless
times, so full of cynicism, licence, and slaugh-
ter, to see in them any progressive tendency.
Would, then, the conclusion that millions of
men sacrificed their lives for nothing, except
to satisfy the whims of greedy monarchs
and much- decorated generals, be any easier ?
For every effect, there must be an adequate
cause, in human affairs as in the physical
world. Ignorance, greed, hate, lust of fighting,
a bestial obedience — these explain much, but

F 2

164 WAR AND PEACE

by no means all. Old Kaspar of Blenheim
suits a lazy humour : —

" They say it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun! . . .

" ' But what good came of it at last ? '
Quoth little Peterkin.
'Why, that I cannot tell,' said he,
* But 'twas a famous victory.' '

Little Peterkin's question remains; and there
is no history till it is answered.

It is true that the treaties of the time show
little change for so much loss. The mistake
is to regard this as no result at all. At what-
ever insane and even suicidal cost obtained, it
is a very material result. Uncertain tenures
and claims were tested by the rule in which
they had risen, the rule of power. One after
another, a number of uncertain combinations
of these arbitrary tenures had been tried.
The greater national units had proved their
vitality and capacity for progress. Neither
Papist nor Calvinist could henceforth lord
it over Europe. The divine right of Hapsburg
and Bourbon was as unequal as the blood-fury
of a Charles XII or the calculation of a
Frederic to establish a European empire.
That is the negative result. There was
something positive, too. The ancient regime
could go no further. War Lad left it bankrupt.

THE BALANCE OF POWER 165

But the common people were awaking to new
methods of life. Every one of these competing
nations represented the possibility of a differ-
ent contribution to a possible union of Europe.
Forces had arisen, especially in the West —
Parliament, machine manufactures, Ministers
not of the king but of the Commons, news-
papers— which were beginning to shape a
new governing power. The costs of aggression
were now plainly advertised in figures of
taxation and national debt. They were
steadily increasing at the time when taxpayers
and investors were beginning to scrutinise
them most jealously. The currency must
no longer be debased — the bankers see to
that ; and the enemy cannot be held to
ransom or tribute. War has brought about
an equipoise of great monarchies. It is not
enough. There must be a balance of power,
a sound settlement, within the State, before
there can be a true balance and union of
States. So, echoed from Puritan England to
revolted America, and back, there rings out
in Paris the challenge to the next great for-
ward step — national freedom and self-govern-
ment, in a word, Democracy. It is the
death-knell of arbitrary rulers, the notice-to-
quit to all absentee landlords, however noble.
There is yet one dominant element in the
period which we must attempt to place before
we pass on to examine the work of the

166 WAR AND PEACE

nineteenth century. It is summed up in
one terrific word — Napoleon. If democracy
makes for peace, how came this prince of the
powers of death to be its herald ? Was the
Bastille pulled down in order that the bones
of Frenchmen might be strewn from Cadiz to
Moscow ? In one of his early journals, Renan
seeks to explain obstructive institutions
and movements in history as securities for
proper digestion in the body politic, without
which " it would move too quickly, would
not sufficiently fathom each possibility."
The movement of humanity can, moreover,
only be even when some equality of condition
has been established throughout the world;
meanwhile, it proceeds by fits and starts,
now rushing forward, now falling back to
bring up the laggards, and again going forward
with mischievous jolt and jar. The inequali-
ties of a century ago in Europe were unimagin-
ably gross. Napoleon drove the ploughshare
of the Revolution across and across this
stony field, sowing in every bloody furrow old
seeds of hate with the new seeds of liberty,
equality, fraternity.

Before he came to power, France had
secured her frontiers, and vindicated her right
to a republic, against the enraged coalition
whose interference had provoked the worst
excesses of the Terror, and was to provoke a
yet more injurious reaction. From defence of

THE BALANCE OF POWER 167

the republic to the expansion of its area, front
this to a campaign of revenge by the forcible
conversion of other States, and from this
to the dream of a modern Caesarism and the
final awakening at Waterloo — so the fever
ran. The better inspiration was a new
thing in the annals of conquest; the worse
was only new in the fire-like speed with
which it spread. This feverish speed was
Napoleon.

Everything about him is of interest, but
there is only one thing essential for us to know
and understand — his representative quality.
An alien and a parvenu, having no dogmatic
prepossession, revolutionary or other, pursuing
only one and that a selfish aim, he did yet
represent in certain ways the time and the
people; there, and not in any miraculous
quality we call genius, lies the secret of his
success, the rational explanation of his career,
It was the end of an age, a doomed age,
beginning with great monarchs and little
soldiers, and closing with great soldiers and
little monarchs. A people without political
experience was called to a work of political
reconstruction. But first there must be a
great clearance of debris; then, this people
must learn from the only teacher, experience,
in what democracy consists and does not
consist. The logic of conquest had to be
worked out in their blood. Like them and

168 WAR AND PEACE

with them Napoleon stood between the past
and the future, with something of both in him.
The vigour and pride of the Revolution were
given into his hands, and he spent them
without any kind of scruple. To these he
added an inhuman energy, in which all the
blood feuds of his native Corsica seem to
blaze out afresh, and a power of sacrificing
all to one aim, which put to scorn the feeble-
ness and dissensions of the surrounding
monarchies.

He served an ancient, because essentially
predatory, art of war with new guns and a new
strategy. He was a modern man and a man
of the people in this limited sense : he incar-
nated the grosser side of the thwarted prole-
tarian, his daring, grasping vigour and self-
confidence, his mechanical skill, his common
sense, directness, and thoroughness, his con-
tempt of phrase-mongers and " hereditary
asses " (as he called the Bourbons). He
converted a nation into a military Trust; the
millionaire of warfare, we might call him.
But here is the distinction : the millionaire
belongs to the new time in proportion as he is
engaged in making things. Napoleon had
only to destroy the old regime and the spirit
of conquest with which the Revolution had
become infected. His methods were those
of the modern man of business, and there lay
his success. His aims were those of the old-

NAPOLEON 169

time monarchies; and there he was fore-
doomed to failure. So far, and only so far,
was he right in calling himself the Child of
Destiny.

CHAPTER IX

NAPOLEON

WHEN the Swiss were holding their moun
tains against Austria and Burgundy; when
Italian or German citizens held their walled
towns, and the Dutch revived the ancient
Babylonian experiment of digging canals
against invasion, they were in the stage
which we may call the late mediaeval defensive.
The increasing use of gunpowder, with the
consequent disappearance of body armour
and the old fortification, initiated a period
of offensive militarism. After the inven-
tion of the bayonet by Vauban in 1641,
and of the flint-lock, adopted by France in
1648, the pikeman gave way to the mus-
keteer. Artillery was multiplied and lightened.
Conde" and Turenne, in the battles of seven-
teenth-century France on the Rhine and Dutch
frontiers, anticipated the motto " L'audace, et
toujours Paudace," marching rapidly, break-
ing the old sanctity of " winter quarters,"
practising novel and daring methods of

170 WAR AND PEACE

attack according to the character of the
ground. Frederick II, whom his father (proud
possessor of giant grenadiers) had caned
for lack of interest in the Potsdam drill-
ground, showed in the organisation a moving
commissariat and regular horse batteries,
as well as in the tactics of his startling
descent on Silesia, that some of these lessons
eould be carried yet further. The French
flint-lock, lightened and otherwise improved
between 1777 and 1800, could fire three and
even six shots a minute. At the same time the
use of fulminate of mercury was discovered,
and cannon were designed for their different
purposes. Napoleon exhausted these possi-
bilities, alike of personality and armament,
and in this, as in his political aims, we recognise
that he belonged not to the beginning, but
the end of an age.

He was twenty years old, and still in
Ajaccio, when the great explosion of 1789
occurred. Burke's provocative Reflections and
the dispersion of the emigres were followed
in 1791 by the Austro-Prussian Declaration
of Pilnitz, a virtual notice of war on the
Republic. The actual declaration against
Austria came from Louis XVI in the follow-
ing spring; and in July, Prussia entered the
field. The old royal army of France suffered
a series of reverses; and this failure, while
it aggravated the anti -royalist passion, and,

NAPOLEON 171

as the allies advanced, led to Danton's policy
of terrorism and the September massacres,
also actuated the establishment of a popular
army whose singular inspiration it was to
" make tyrants tremble," and punish any
people " so obstinately attached to its state
of brutishness " as not to be willing to throw
over its " prince and privileged castes "
(Decree of December 15, 1792). This was
something utterly new, different in every way
from the orthodox army of the time, hired
and impressed, with its gaudy uniforms, formal
drill, and " gentlemen " officers. That the
" armed doctrine," as Burke called it, proved
an extraordinary inspiration, the occupation
of Belgium, Savoy, and the Middle Rhine
before the end of the winter eloquently
testified.

But the mere enthusiast in war is a broken
reed. Dunkirk, Wattignies, Wissembourg,
Tourcoing, Fleurus were won by overwhelm-
ing numbers, and the relentless energy of
Carnot, " organiser of victory." The rebels
of Vendee and the south were crushed by the
same use of the power of conscription and
requisition. It must always be remembered
that the Revolution and the Republic were
threatened by three enemies at once —
foreign invasion, insurrection, and treason
like that of Dumouriez. Even so, there can-
not be any just judgment upon this time of

172 WAR AND PEACE

general upheaval and wild words and deeds
without something of the sympathy which
moved Wordsworth as he walked among the
villages of France, —

" And found benevolence and blessedness
Spread like a fragrance everywhere " —

which held him even through the Reign of
Terror, and only broke down when —

" Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for."

Bonaparte first appears as an actor in the
quickly-changing drama in August 1793, a
young artillery officer commanding the guns
before Toulon. The king had been executed
seven months before; and England was in
arms with the Austrians and Prussians
against the Republic — a Coalition doomed to
failure by the restriction of British effort to
the colonies and the high seas, and by the
more base preoccupations which consummated
the two partitions of Poland between the
Central and Eastern Powers, in 1793 and
1795. Prussia, thus consoled, abandoned the
German territories west of the Rhine, and for
ten years stood out of the conflict. General
of artillery with the successful army in
Italy, and defender of the Convention with
his " whiff of grapeshot " against the Paris
insurgents in October 1795, Napoleon re-

NAPOLEON 173

turned to Italy in full command six months
later, and definitely opened his career of
conquest. Marked as much by rapacity,
terrorism, and deception, as by power of
organisation, manoeuvring skill, and quick
seizure of opportunity, the campaign fitly
terminated in the Peace of Campo Formio,
October 1797, by which France obtained the
Rhine frontier and shared with Austria the
spoil of Venice, destroying the most ancient
of existing republics. The pillage of Switzer-
land— the event which did most to turn the
poets and thinkers of England and Germany
against France — and the conquest of Egypt
occupied the summer of 1798. Nelson's
destruction of the French fleet off the Nile
scotched this adventure and Napoleon's
power of mischief on the sea; but, like our
colonial victories, it did not arrest his domin-
ance in Europe, or the unscrupulous ambition
which emerged triumphant in the plot of
November 1799, the establishment of the
Consulate, and the gradual destruction of
representative institutions in France.

After two years of manoeuvring, Pitt
succeeded in dragging Russia and Austria
into the Second Coalition. The Tsar rejected
the British proposal that the restoration of
the Bourbons should be demanded — a blunder
of Pitt's which did much to consolidate
Napoleon's power. The general basis of the

174 WAR AND PEACE

alliance, therefore, was that France should
be driven within her previous frontiers.
These shifty partners had yet much to
learn. For a time they were victorious
alike on the Rhine and in North Italy. But
while, under one master, France was rising
to its fullest military strength under the con-
scription law of September 6, 1798, its enemies
were enfeebled by childish jealousies. Russia
having sacrificed Suvoroff s victories to pique,
and retired from the campaign, Napoleon
broke the Austrian forces at Marengo (June 14,
1800), and posed more confidently than ever
as the man of glorious destiny. While Moreau
routed the Archduke John's army in the
defile of Hohenlinden (Dec. 3), the brief
Franco-Russian alliance, masquerading as a
League of Neutrals, was abruptly ended by
the coincidence of the assassination of the
Emperor Paul with Nelson's victory at Copen-
hagen (April 2, 1801). Neutrals had only
too good ground of complaint against British
naval policy; but it was not to a half -insane
Tsar and a military adventurer who recog-
nised no restraint of law or honour that they
could look for protection. A pause now en-
sued. France had lost Egypt ; she might have
relinquished Holland and Spain and Italy
and yet remained, writh the Scheldt, the
Rhine, and the Alps for frontiers, the strongest
State in Europe. But Napoleon was already

NAPOLEON 175

entertaining vaster designs, which he hinted
at in threats of a " revival of the grandeur
of ancient Rome " — a new Rome against a
new Carthage.

Dreaming of Augustan glory, he was
sufficiently awake to know that, now as
in old time, this involved not merely the
destruction of the last shadow of republican
forms, and an autocratic concentration of
national power, but economic changes no
less far-reaching. Under the Republic, France
had risen spontaneously in defence of its
territory and the Revolution. The reaction
upon neighbouring lands and the first develop-
ment of the spirit of conquest had found in
Bonaparte its financier as well as its engineer.
He made these wars pay their way by system-
atic extortion from the conquered peoples.
" It was not in vain that we had so long
sought temporary palliatives to our deficits
in the spoliation of nations, vanquished
enemies, or allies. These criminal expedients
of a Government reduced to the last extremity
were about to become the regular and normal
system. There was no longer the excuse of
the old distress; but the Government wished
at the expense of foreigners to spare the tax-
payers who had it in their power to give or
withdraw their support. It became, there-
fore, customary to consider as our natural
tributaries all nations who were incapable

176 WAR AND PEACE

of self-defence. And this system of exaction,
at first only a consequence of war, began to
be regarded as its chief end. Bonaparte
henceforth indulged in the chimerical dream
of keeping the people content with war by
giving them Europe to devour " (Lanfrey :
History of Napoleon, where the predatory
side of his career is illustrated from the text
of his proclamations and other documents).
To humble Spain or Venice was one thing
however, to humble England quite another.
A widening programme of conquest meant
a widening revenue, a new navy, and a quick-
moving administration. Ultimately, perhaps,
foreign loot might redeem these luxuries;
immediately, France must pay for them.
Moreover, there must be no more mobs of
hungry desperadoes in Paris — perhaps the
only thing the First Consul really feared.
Bonaparte set to work, therefore, with cool
impetuosity, to amend and centralise French
taxation, education, and local government;
to establish a national bank; to placate the
Pope, and make the clergy servants of the
State; to create a Court and a press by which
he could hypnotise the people into accepting
his schemes as their own. The Peace of
Amiens (March 25, 1802), by which France
momentarily gave up Rome and Naples,
while England restored her colonial con-
quests during the war, except Ceylon and

NAPOLEON 177

Trinidad, gave time for these changes to
bear fruit.

It was a fleeting pact. In May, 1803,
England again declared war, and seized several
colonies; while Napoleon fastened armies
upon Hanover and Napl-es, and extorted
contributions of men and money also from
Holland, Switzerland, and Spain (72 million
francs in one year from Spain alone). His
foul murder of the Due d'Enghien upon a
sham charge of conspiracy, and his assump-
tion of the titles of Emperor (Dec., 1804) and
King of Italy (May, 1805) provoked the new
Tsar, Alexander I, to the initiation of a Third
Coalition, in which Austria and Sweden were
persuaded to join. Prussia, however, was
still resolutely irresolute. At last England's
sea power was to be seriously challenged.
While Pitt was defending to the Tsar the
annoying " right " of searching neutral ships,
which was and continued to be one of the
most arbitrary weapons of the British Ad-
miralty, Napoleon was organising his in-
genious plan for a junction of French fleets
in the West Indies, and a combined dash
back to Boulogne, where a force of invasion
was to be picked up. Whatever it may have
been worth — Whitehall does not seem to
have been alarmed, and Napoleon afterwards
said that the Boulogne army was only in-
tended to deceive Austria — Calder's victory

178 WAR AND PEACE

off Finisterre put an end to the threat; and
Trafalgar (a victory for the gunners, in the
main; its price, ten thousand lives — and
Nelson's) finally determined England's supre-
macy at sea. These events led, however,
to another style of warfare, which, though
ultimately ruinous to France, brought England
also into dire straits — the embargo upon
British goods under the " Continental system,'!
and the consequent Orders in Council estab-
lishing the Continental blockade.

Napoleon had from the outset understood
that his arch-enemy must be struck at
through her commerce. But his economic
knowledge does not seem to have bettered
the ignorant Protectionism which had accom-
panied the rise of the Republic, and had
produced several ineffectual decrees for the
seizure of British goods. Under the Berlin
decree of November, 1806, trade with the
British Isles was forb'dden, and British
subjects, goods, and letters were declared
seizable. Three months later, a retaliatory
blockade was proclaimed by England — a
foolish measure, which led to a rupture with
the United States, and greatly aggravated
domestic suffering and discontent. Whether
the Continent was starved into revolt against
Napoleon, or whether other causes chiefly
contributed to excite the rising of peoples
to effect what their rulers had so signally

NAPOLEON 179

failed to accomplish, need not here be dis-
cussed. What is certain is that England
was saved from peril of starvation and
revolution not by Ministerial measures actu-
ated as much by a monopolistic as a defensive
spirit, but, in the first place, because, in his
ignorance of economic law, Napoleon actually
helped her to the one commodity she could
not do without — corn. " At the time when
Napoleon was about to order British and
Colonial goods to be confiscated or burnt all
over his vast empire, he sought to stimulate
exports to our shores. Why ? Because such
exports would benefit his States, and enable
public works to be carried out. We may go
even further, and say that Napoleon believed
the effect of sending those exports to our
shores would be to weaken us. His economic
ideas were those of the crudest section of
the old Mercantile School. He believed
that a nation's commercial wealth consisted
essentially in its exports, while imports were
to be jealously restricted, because they drew
bullion away. Destroy Britain's exports,
and allow her to import whatever his own
lands could well spare, and she would bleed
to death " (Holland Rose : Napoleonic Studies,
chs. vii and viii). Four other factors helped
to carry England through her economic
crisis : the increase of wealth due to the
recent industrial inventions; improvements in

180 WAR AND PEACE

agriculture encouraged by the rise of prices;
the opening of the South and Central American
markets in 1808, after the Spanish rising, and
of the Russian market in 1812; and the
development of smuggling, due to the rise
of prices on the Continent, and to the fact
that most British exports were not bulky
for their value.

Thwarted in his designs on India, North
America, and all that rests on naval power,
the great soldier, who from his birth on one
island to his death on another never under-
stood the sea, turned back to challenge what
remained of independence in Europe to
mortal combat. Six weeks carried his army
from Boulogne to the Danube; in two
months more Ulm had been captured with
60,000 men, Vienna entered, and the Russians
and Austrians cut in two at Austerlitz with
a loss of 27,000 men. As Napoleon stood,
a new Emperor of the West, with a ring of
subject States and appanages and a royal
family of his own around him, the news of
the death of Pitt (Jan., 1806) may well have
completed his satisfaction in the collapse of
the Third Coalition. Prussia remained, a
futile court amid a disorganised and hopeless
people. Playing adroitly on the rival in-
terests in Hanover, Bonaparte first removed
the danger of English co-operation, then
smashed the Prussian forces at Jena and

NAPOLEON 181

Auerstadt (Oct., 1806), and a fortnight later,
after rifling the tomb of Frederic the Great,
triumphantly entered Berlin. Here was an-
other land to squeeze for men and money.
The army numbered 600,000 men; but it was
no longer wholly French — France had been
exhausted by forestalled conscriptions — and it
had lost all its republican character. France
was, indeed, no longer to Napoleon anything
more than his chief province and military
base. In the length and breadth of the
Continent, there was now left only one great
independent Power. Thus far, the conqueror
had always posed as the liberator of peoples;
and, as he advanced to the Vistula, the Poles
hailed him as their avenger, and helped to
destroy, at Friedland (June, 1807), the last
resisting force that could be brought against
him. But it is precisely from this moment
that the reaction against the Empire of the
peoples that had hoped all of the Republic
must be counted.

In the perspective of a century's unceasing
study, the victories leading to the Tilsit
treaty are seen to be the culminating point
in this marvellous career. The Star of
conquest stood at the zenith. Never in the
world's history had the force of one man so
dominated the imagination of millions. Never,
assuredly, had gun and bayonet, horse and
cannon been put to such use; " the art of

182 WAR AND PEACE

war, one may say, had reached its last limit "
(Thiers : Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire).
The passionate revulsion that delivered the
ideals and powers of revolutionary France
into the hands of a young Corsican had
seemed a miracle, yet that was a small
beginning. A dozen years and a hundred
blood-soaked battlefields had made him
general of generals, king of kings, absolute
master of a wider realm than had ever ac-
knowledged one allegiance, angel or devil of
universal legend, the supreme incarnation of
the glory of war. The more the bloodshed,
the deeper the worship, the deeper the fear,
and the wilder the frenzy of self-immolation.
The splendour of the Star was yet unclouded;
but it moved downward. The rest of
Napoleon's story is one of occasional vic-
tories and recurring failure, of infatuation
deepening to madness, of growing physical
and mental exhaustion, broken by desperate
sallies, and a last rush to utter ruin.

The bargain with the Tsar, made on a raft
in the Niemen on June 17, 1807, had pro-
vided for the dismemberment of Prussia, and
the enlistment of the Scandinavian and
Iberian States against England, as prelimin-
aries to a partition of the world between
France and Russia. Canning's prompt seizure
of the Danish fleet checked the Baltic move;
and when Junot entered Lisbon he found

NAPOLEON 183

that the Portuguese fleet had escaped. Then,
at last, the decisive factor which all the courts
of Europe had failed to discover made its
appearance. The people in arms had made
Napoleon ; the peoples in arms were to humble
him. The first national rising took place
in the mountains of Spain and Portugal in
the summer of 1808; and the victories of
Baylen, Vimiero, Corunna, and Talavera,
though long fruitless, sent a tremor of hope
through the ravaged continent, brought Brit-
ish arms effectively into the land struggle,
and, by locking up 300,000 of Napoleon's
troops in the peninsula, seriously weakened
his force in the north-east. The dead bones
were stirring too, in Prussia, where the last
relics of serfdom were only abolished in 1807.
Stein's land and local government reforms,
followed by Von Humboldt's educational
measures, and Scharnhorst's invention of
universal military service — adding to a small
active army a reserve, a landwehr or militia,
and a landsturm or mass levy — produced a
radical transformation. No less striking was
the change of mind which converted Schiller
and Fichte from academic exponents of anti-
patriotism into apostles of the new spirit of
nationality.

The Prussian revolt was momentarily
submerged by the humiliation of Austria
at Wagram, the annexation of Oldenburg,

184 WAR AND PEACE

Hamburg, and other German districts, and
the misery caused by a final effort to make the
embargo on British trade effective. Where,
however, a particularly feeble Hohenzollern
could not yet dare all, Russia could ; and when,
in the Tsar's refusal to confiscate certain
neutral ships, the hands of East and West
met over his head, Napoleon decided to
stake his fate upon the Moscow campaign.
France, impoverished in blood and wealth,
was tired of war. The best counsellors
groaned; yet who could resist the brilliance
of this Imperial reception at Dresden, where
submissive kings and princes jogged elbows
with arrogant officers, and a mob was always
waiting to catch a glimpse of the superman
whose word was Europe's law ? A cosmo-
politan army of 617,000 men had been drawn
from every part of the continent; and, of
these, 448,000 men, with 1,372 pieces of
cannon, thousands of caissons of artillery and
ambulance, and many herds of cattle, com-
menced the fateful passage of the Niemen
on June 24, 1812.

Mystery stood upon the very threshold of
this silent realm. Where was the expected
enemy ? Through swamps and prairies, past
interminable forests, the Grand Army sought
it, to find a few flying peasants, or deserted
camp-fires, to catch a distant glimpse of
Cossack outposts. Why did the Tsar not

NAPOLEON 185

send proposals of peace ? Weeks passed,
and no word came from the Russian camp.
Where was the enemy ? Could he, the man
who had always attacked, the man whose
genius was speed, be expected to stand there
and wait on the defensive ? And, again,
where was the enemy ? The Sphinx of the
North made no reply to these questions;
a grim sky seemed to say eternally that
Russia neither expected, nor asked, nor offered
anything. At last, a town was found amid
the immens ty of this implacable land :
Vitepsk — deserted, save for one Russian
soldier asleep under a hedge. What next ?
Napoleon wavered. To-day he would stay
and "organise Poland"; hospitals were set
up, soon to be filled, and soon then to be
abandoned, without even food, and forgotten,
a horrible thing. Then he would go on, on to
Moscow. " Decided, he jumps up suddenly,
as though to leave no time for further
uncertainty, and, full of the plan which must
give him victory, strides to his maps. They
show him Smolensk and Moscow, the great
Moscow, the holy city ! — names that he
repeats complacently, and that seem to
quicken his eagerness. With this, the very
spirit of war seems to possess him. His
voice hardens, his glance sparkles, his gestures
become wild. We keep away from him, for
fear as much as respect; but, at last, his plan

186 WAR AND PEACE

is made, his determination taken ! " (Segur :
La Camp ague de Russie).

His determination ! Is, then, the will of
one man for ever to triumph over all human
rights ? The Sphinx has two more of her
silent words to say. " At last, I have them ! "
cried Napoleon, as the Grand Army faced the
fortress of Smolensk; but at nightfall, when,
after a brief resistance, the Russians retired,
columns of smoke were seen rising, then
sparks, then an all-embracing sea of flame.
What do the soldiers think, or do they never
think ? Napoleon still has their measure,
rains decorations upon them, and speeches :
" This fight was the finest in our military
history ; the soldiers who heard him were men
with whom one could conquer the world;
those killed had died an immortal death."
But, in the foul, crowded hospitals, hunger and
agony rei#n; in the stillness of his quarters
Napoleon cannot evade the questions : What
is this new terror, — the fruit of accident, of
despair, or of design ? With Charles XII
in his mind, he hesitates again, and again
goes forward. On August 28 the advance
guard enters Viazma, only to find it in
flames.

At length, on September 5, the Russians
turn : it is Borodino. On the night before
the battle, Bonaparte is in a fever. " He
seems to be reflecting on the vanity of glory.

NAPOLEON 187

1 What is war ? A business of barbarians,
in which the whole art consists in being the
strongest at a given point.' " During the
terrible struggle he hesitates over his orders,
shows an astonishing lethargy, refuses re-
serves, retires to his tent. " Let him return
to the Tuileries," exclaims Ney, furious,
44 and leave us to be generals for him ! "
It is a half -victory, and at what a cost —
forty -three generals killed and wounded;
50,000 Russian and 30,000 French losses.
Se*gur recalls two old sayings of Bonaparte,
the first in Italy fifteen years before : " Health
is indispensable to war, and nothing can
replace it " — the other at Austerlitz : " I
shall be good for war for six years more;
then I must stop." Now, dragging a tired
body over the stricken field, he could pity his
broken victims. Many years afterwards, the
distinguished Frenchman, De Vogue", wrote :
44 1 was talking one day with the Russian
priest of Borodino, and he spoke of the pros-
pects of the coming crops, adding care-
lessly : ' In my childhood, the corn was
much richer here; our land had been so well
manured.5 "

Not far from Moscow, a German engineer,
on the Tsar's order, was experimenting with
a great balloon from which a rain of ex-
plosives was to be poured upon the ogre of
the West. Rostopchin knew a better weapon

188 WAR AND PEACE

than any such novelties in the art of war.
Let " the Red Cock " crow : revolution and
invasion could be burnt up in the same
flames ! Forgetting all their sufferings, their
losses, their doubts and fears, in a spasm of
pride and relief, the invading host poured
into the city, only to be driven out by a blind-
ing smoke. The conqueror of the world had
been beaten by a gang of incendiaries.

Obstinate against all reasoning, hoping
against hope that Alexander would bow to
his majesty, distracting himself with the
rules of the Comedie Fran9aise and the latest
novel, Napoleon held his ground for two
months, king of the ashes of Muscovy. Then
the Sphinx spoke her final word. The first
snow fell, and with it the last illusion of
the Grand Army. On October 19, its remains,
100,000 men, with 550 cannon and many
carts -full of spoil, turned westward, with
Kutusoff's Cossacks ever at its heels. The
battle of Malo-Jaroslavetz diverted it into
a route already ravaged, marked by dead
bodies, and now a frozen desert. As the
hospitals established in the summer were
passed, the wounded inmates came out and
stood by the road, begging not to be aban-
doned. Theirs was not the worst fate. At
Krasnoy, in the middle of November, the
retreat became a flight, heroic Ney always
holding the rear, — a flight of spectres through

NAPOLEON 189

fog and driving snow. In this shadow of an
army, this band of tattered fugitives, misery
conquered the last semblance of order, and
with it all humane scruples disappeared. At
every step men fell by the way : there was,
there could be, no help. Cold, hunger, deadly
weariness, wounds, and sickness broke all
semblance of manhood. Baggage carts were
driven pitilessly through the demoralised
mob of infantry and camp-followers. In
the passage of the Beresina (Nov. 26-28)
the rush for the frail bridges carried thou-
sands to their doom in the icy river; while,
overhead, the explosion of shells and a burst
of storm caught up oaths and cries of despair
into an infernal chorus. Of 80,000 men,
60,000 survived this debacle.

Napoleon left the army secretly, reaching
Paris on December 19. The remnant strug-
gled on to the frontier through the worst of
the winter, leaving circles of dead at every
bivouac, almost incapable of fighting, with
bloodshot eyes and bursts of hysterical
laughter, dragging itself through the snow,
reduced to unspeakable savagery. Before
Vilna was reached, 30,000 men more had
perished. At Ponari, the treasure-boxes were
pillaged; Segur says that ten million francs
in gold and silver disappeared. When the
Russian pursuit ceased, at Kalish, there
remained of the Grand Army two Kings,

190 WAR AND PEACE

a Prince, eight Marshals, a few Generals on
foot without suite, a thousand infantry and
cavalry, including some hundreds of the Old
Guard, still armed, and 24,000 broken fugi-
tives, with streaming hair and bandaged
limbs, blind and dumb from weakness and
despair. Such has ever been the harvest of
war; but never, perhaps, has the tragedy
of Nature's vengeance upon human pride
been so swift and overwhelming.

When I say Nature, I do not only mean
that part of it which appears in frost and
fire and the vastness of the Russian plain.
The evil nature of war itself is against warfare
on the Napoleonic scale. Whether then or
now, it breaks down of its own weight. There
is an inner and fatal impossibility. De
Bloch illustrated it by showing that, as be-
tween two Great Powers of to-day, war
would develop into a ruinous deadlock,
through the very perfection of armaments,
and the immensity of the forces engaged.
We may illustrate it from the starvation of
the Grand Army. There is in every war
machine a feud, as it were, between its two
sides, the combatant and the commissariat.
The mercenary armies which sprang up on
the collapse of feudalism came nearest to
solving the problem, for all their fighting
was brigandage and rapine; " War must feed
war " was their motto. The transition to

NAPOLEON 191

permanent armies, for which regular arrange-
ments had to be made in times of peace,
necessitated a special organisation of supplies.
Thus, Gustavus Adolphus introduced the
system of " magazines," or centres of pro-
visioning; while, in France, the furnishing
of food, clothing, and munitions was farmed
out to contractors, and vivandieres began
to be attached to the camp. Frederick the
Great remarked that " the basis of the
organisation of armies is victualling. With
the bayonets one may win battles, but it is
economic conditions that decide the result
of a war."

But Napoleon drew, first from France,
then from the conquered lands, armies
such as had never been seen on the soil of
Europe. He used the conscription like a
thumbscrew, anticipating and extending the
regular calls till the unhappy wretches had
to be brought up in handcuffs, while they
deserted in thousands. How were such hosts
to be fed ? The old " magazine " system
paralysed the movement of troops. The
French Revolution made a breach in it by
the decrees of 1792-1793 authorising the
levy of " contributions " and the seizure of
the enemy's goods, and declaring the private
property of all Frenchmen liable to seizure
for the needs of national defence. Bonaparte,
scorning the infant precepts of international

192 WAR AND PEACE

law, carried this change to its logical issue,
and restored to warfare, in a thinly veiled
form, its ancient character of wholesale
brigandage.

The first beneficiaries were his soldiers;
he looked after them as generals had never
done before, and they repaid him with an
unprecedented attachment. " Soldiers ! " —
so he appealed to them — " you are half
starved and half naked. I am about to lead
you into the most fertile valleys of the world.
There you will find flourishing cities and a
land of abundance. There you will gather
honour, glory, and riches. Will you, then,
fail in courage ? " This spirit of predatory
adventure, and this only, made possible the
great victories on which his fame was built.
Taine (Les Origines de la France Contempo-
raine) gives details showing that, in the three
years ending December 1798, requisitions
and confiscations in Belgium, Holland, Ger-
many, and Italy, amounted to two milliards
(£80,000,000). " In all the wars that made
Napoleon Emperor,'* says Be Bloch, " the
French armies fed themselves exclusively by
means of contributions and requisitions. So
the war of 1805 was made. In 1806 and 1807
the Prussians were not only subjected to
requisitions, but also to contributions amount-
ing in three years to 245,091,800 thalers
(about £37,000,000). The war indemnities

NAPOLEON 193

paid to France independently of these direct
fines amounted to another 1,020 millions
of francs (£40 millions). During the cam-
paigns of 1809, 1812, 1813, and 1814, Napoleon
practised the same system. But, as the
troops could no longer be fed exclusively with
supplies obtained from the inhabitants, in
all these campaigns money raised as ' con-
tributions ' had to be spent in purchases.
During the wars of 1808 and 1814 in Portugal
and Spain, the French armies supplied them-
selves also by means of requisitions and contri-
butions ; but there, as in Russia, they suffered
horrible privations " (La Guerre, vol. iv).

The ambition of Caesar cannot be sus-
tained by the methods of the bandit. Napo-
leon fell between these two stools. At the
opposite ends of Europe, the man of victory
found obstacles against which he could make
no adequate provision. In a poor, hard
land, occupied by a sparse, hardy people, war
cannot feed war. The rule which Moltke
borrowed from Napoleon, to march separate
and fight united, was tried. Marauding
bands scoured the country far and wide of
the main army. But this led to a fatal
relaxation of discipline, and at the same
time gave the guerilla fighters of Spain and
Russia their opportunity. We have seen how
the Grand Army degenerated into a barbarian
horde. The greatest war machine ever made

194 WAR AND PEACE

had broken down under a demand lighter
than any considerable army might have to
meet in a European war to-day.

The stoutest manhood of France was de-
stroyed. " In one year," says Taine, " 1,300,000
men were called up, and most of them perished
in the campaign of 1814. . . . Between 1804
and 1815, Napoleon sent to their death more
than 1,700,000 Frenchmen born within the
limits of olden France, to whom must be
added probably 2,000,000 of men born outside
those limits and killed by him under the name
of allies or enemies." From first to last,
this modern Minotaur probably devoured five
million human beings. Neither base enough
to limit himself to campaigns of extortion
and brigandage possible only in Central
Europe, nor patient and sober enough to
learn the slow craft of empire-building ;
blind to the nobler sides of human nature;
understanding neither the minor economics
of a modern commissariat, which might have
saved him in Russia, nor the major economics
of international trade, which might have
shown him England's weak spot, the greatest
of conquering soldiers succeeded at last only
in proving that the conquest of Europe had
become impossible.

The final flickers of his genius need not
detain us. Before the survivors of the Mos-
cow expedition could reach home, he was

NAPOLEON 195

getting a new army of 350,000 men into the
field. At Lutzeu and Bautzen, the allied
Prussians and Russians were beaten back.
But the infatuation exhibited in repeated
refusals of generous terms of peace brought
Austria into the coalition, and in the su-
preme struggle of Leipzig (Oct. 16-19, 1813),
Napoleon's power was shattered. On March
30, 1814, the allies proclaimed his deposition,
foolishly restored the Bourbon Court, and
forthwith set to work upon the reconstruction
of the Balance of Power. The famous Con-
gress of Vienna, which included six reigning
monarchs and the most famous of European
statesmen, was, indeed, still in session when,
on March 1, 1815, Napoleon, having broken
from his exile in Elba, landed near Cannes
with a handful of men. He came, he said,
to save France from the Bourbons and the
returning Emigres, and not to undertake any
new warfare. Within the month he stood
victorious in Paris. The Allies were slow in
moving, and it was not till the middle of
June that the final conflict came. At Quatre
Bras, on June 16, Wellington repulsed Ney;
on the 18th, at Waterloo, Bliicher's Prussians
came up in time to make decisive the French
rout. A month later, Napoleon gave himself
up to the commander of the Better ophon. He
died at St. Helena on May 5, 1821, talking
to the end of his battle-fields : " I am going
G 2

196 WAR AND PEACE

to rejoin Kleber, Desaix, Lannes, Massena,
Bessieres, Duroc, Ney. . . . They will feel
again the intoxication of human glory. . . .
We will talk of what we have done, we will
talk shop (de notre metier) with Frederic,
Turenne, Conde, Caesar, Hannibal. . . . Un-
less " (with an odd smile), " up there as down
here, they are afraid of seeing so many
soldiers together."

A Frenchman can best write his epitaph.
De Tocqueville put it most briefly — " He was
as great as a man can be without virtue";
and Thiers, no harsh judge, thus concluded
his long story : " Never was resort to one
man more justifiable than in 1800. Yet,
after a few years, this sane man became
mad, mad with another madness than that
of 1793, but not less disastrous; immolated
a million men on the field of battle; drew
Europe upon France, which it left conquered,
blood-soaked, despoiled of the fruit of twenty
years of victory, desolated, only having some
germs of modern civilisation to cherish.
Who, then, could have foreseen that the
sagacious of 1800 would be the insensate of
1812 and 1813 ? Yes, one might have fore-
seen it by recalling that omnipotence carries
in itself an incurable insanity. So, in the
great life where there is so much to learn
for soldiers, administrators, statesmen, let
citizens in their turn learn one thing — that

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 197

it is never good to deliver the fatherland to
one man, no matter whom, no matter in what
circumstances."

CHAPTER X

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM

WE left Metternich and Talleyrand, Harden-
berg, Nesselrode, and Wellington, in accord-
ance with the will of their royal masters and
the bargains made during the late stages of
the war, re-shaping the map of Europe with
a view to establishing " a system of durable
equilibrium." Though much of the work of
the " Holy Alliance " has had to be undone,
at incalculable cost, they were the unwitting
pioneers of a new era, a new statecraft, and
an international balance quite other than that
of their immediate design.

There were four chief weaknesses in the
post-Napoleonic settlement. (1) It was the
arbitrary work of a monarchical league against
the spirit of the Revolution. Lands were
bargained away and parcelled out without
any pretence of consulting the inhabitants.
It soon appeared, however, that two related
forces which had received a bloody baptism
on the recent battlefields had come to stay —
Nationality and Democracy; and the political
history of the nineteenth century is very

198 WAR AND PEACE

largely concerned with the triumph of these
principles, and consequent changes of territory
and government. (2) When the four allies
of 1815 concluded a compact, to which France
was afterwards admitted, for " the surety of
their States and the general tranquillity of
Europe," to be maintained by periodical
meetings of rulers and statesmen, they were
establishing a system of International Concert
which has vitally affected the politics of
Europe, and has been partially extended to
the relations of all the civilised States of the
world. (3) Turkey was not represented at
the Congress, and was not affected by it.
The United States, having in 1814 agreed
with England to abolish the slave trade,
asked only to be let alone. Asia was un-
affected; Africa beyond the coast was still
almost terra incognita. But it was soon
found that the Balkan Peninsula could not
be ignored, that the scramble of the European
States for territory in Africa and Asia con-
stantly threatened a conflict in which the
European balance would have been destroyed,
and that America could not permanently
refuse to join the family of nations. The
gradual settlement of the overseas swarm,
completing the effective occupation of the
earth, created, in its relations with the mother
countries on the one hand and the coloured
races on the other, a thousand grave problems.

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 19$

As the great work of the nineteenth century
was the establishment of a European Concert,
so the twentieth century seems destined to
effect a world-wide settlement and equilibrium.
(4) It was impossible to anticipate the sweep-
ing transformation of the economic activities
of all the great nations, and their social and
political life, which the past century has
witnessed. The Industrial Revolution has,
in fact, changed the face of the globe, pro-
ducing at first an immense increase, then a
no less momentous arrest of population, a
new education and mobility, a vast augment-
ation of wealth and comfort along with much
misery and discontent; knitting the peoples
together by bonds of common interest and
experience, while creating fresh occasions of
jealous rivalry ; developing both property and
labour into international forces, dependent OR
a Credit Economy; setting up new ideals and
means of peace, and altering effectively the
whole machinery of war. A rapid glance at
the interplay of these factors in contemporary
civilisation will complete our task.

The political development of Europe con-
tinued to be most rapid in the West, where
first the Industrial Revolution confirmed the
earlier progressive trend ; slower in the Central
States, broken and ravaged in the conflicts
of centuries ; and most tardy in the East, where
the Turk remained, and conquests in the South

200 WAR AND PEACE

and East confirmed the arbitrary character
of the Russian State. For forty years, there
was no great war on the Continent; but there
was an abundance of revolutionary outbreaks
of the spirit of national democracy. The old
Cosmopolitanism had proved woefully in-
sufficient. What was true in it could not be
destroyed, indeed; the ideal of brotherhood
had, in the eighteenth century, taken a place
from which it could never be dethroned in
the minds of thinking men. But, long before
Spencer and Darwin began to elucidate the
processes of evolution, Napoleon left Europe
face to face with this radical lesson — that
a pious dream, an academic culture are no
basis for a federation of the world; that
societies grow by regular organic stages, and
only so; that if a world-unity is to be attained,
it must be through a political and economic
association of well-established groups, each
freely contributing to the life of the whole.
Cosmopolitanism was a mind without a body.
Its realities were as much beyond the common
mass of men as their realities were strange to
the cultured few. Goethe said he did not
know what patriotism meant, and was glad
to be without it. But the vulgarisation of a
sentiment must not blind us to its real bases.
The interests and influences that make a
nation are the same that, in variable pro-
portion, have made other social groups, both

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 201

smaller and larger. We judge these senti-
ments of social growth — clannishness, paro-
chialism, provincialism, nationalism, patriot-
ism— as useful when they are supporting a
true function in a developing society, without
obstructing larger forms of union. When a
stage is reached in which vital relationships
outreach the early limits, when, for instance,
labour and capital are equally governed by a
world market, and law, administration, and
culture overpass national boundaries, there is
an inevitable, if slow, widening of sympathies
and common interests. The vogue of Imperial-
ism in England and Germany represents, in
part, a perception that baronial towers and
city gates are not the only ancient barriers
which fail to define the real interests of to-day.
National growth embodies a partly instinctive,
partly conscious sense, at first that any union
was better than chaos, and afterwards that
the union must be popular, not monarchical
or oligarchical, must express a homogeneity,
a mobile equilibrium of interests. So regarded,
Internationalism is the fulfilment, not the
negation, of Nationalism, and therein differs
from the academic Cosmopolitanism of the
eighteenth century.

Instead of liberating Europe for an era of
humane democracy, under republican and
federal forms, the perverted Revolution had
delivered it over to a new tribe of military and

202 WAR AND PEACE

autocratic " saviours." For reasons already
traced, it was certain that the revulsion toward
authority would be most extreme in Russia,
Prussia, and Austria; and from these States
the military and autocratic spirit radiated
throughout the century. It was in the
Mediterranean and Atlantic seaboard States
that the liberationist movement made most
lapid progress. Here Western democratic aid
was an effective factor; thus, while protesting
against despotic intervention in Portugal,
Canning elicited from the United States the
famous Presidential warning against aggression
In the New World which has come to be known
as the Monroe Doctrine (1823), and afterwards,
in a brilliant interval of British foreign policy,
procured the recognition of Greek independ-
ence. The " July " revolution of 1830, which
established a quasi-constitutional system under
the Orleans family in France, followed by the
achievement of national independence in
Belgium, and the reform of parliament in
England, marked the gathering of progressive
forces in the West, and the failure of the
reactionary alliance.

For Central Europe there was to be no short
cut to unity and freedom. How, in 1848, Young
Italy arose, really united for the first time in
three thousand years, how, amid chaos of
defeat, Piedmont became the " pole-star of
Italian patriots," how Bourbon and Austrian

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 203

rule was gradually ended, the Roman and
Venetian difficulties overcome, and the king-
dom firmly established as we now have it, is
an oft-told tale. But there is here a new type
in the portrait-gallery of warfare, new, and
yet, so rapid is the contemporary movement,
a type already passing beyond the under-
standing of the early twentieth century; for,
as an Italian writer says, " the generations
pass, men's minds take new directions, and
the facts of experience become as lanterns
hung up in abandoned streets." The genera-
tion of Kossuth and Hertzen, Mazzini and
Garibaldi is past and half -forgotten; there
are still battles to be fought for freedom, but
they are fought in other ways. Sad, grey,
sophisticated, taught from school up to think
of ourselves as " Titans staggering " under
the weight of a predestined orb, we must go
back to the most ancient scenes of European
history to recover the secret of conquering
youth.

That was Garibaldi's secret — and we may
take him for type of the soldier of liberty, as
we took Napoleon as the typical predatory
conqueror, and as we shall take Bismarck as
a type of modern statecraft lying between
these extremes. No Perfect Knight, he, in-
deed : he was melodramatic, loved too much
the red shirt and brigand hat; quarrelled
with Mazzini, the thinker of the movement,
quarrelled with Cavour, without whose state-

204 WAR AND PEACE

craft the cause could not have been won;
sometimes even sulked in his tent; was only
a great master of irregulars, not a great general.
If you please. And, when all is said, Garibaldi
stands first in the heart of his people, before
Mazzini, and far before Cavour or Victor
Emmanuel — rightly first, because there is no
human quality above perfect honesty and
perfect devotion to a high aim. Youth and
inspiration never faded in him; and so he
made youthful errors and achieved impossible
victories, passed through the fire of many
battlefields in two hemispheres, was ship-
wrecked, wounded, condemned to death,
imprisoned, exiled, betrayed, humiliated, but
never turned aside from his purpose of making
Italy one and free. It is natural to think of
him as a sailor, the son and grandson of
Mediterranean sailors, with the simplicity and
strong will that the sea breeds. One day he
sails in his father's felucca from the palmy,
flower-buried shore of Nice for Rome, carrying
with him already something of the bitterness
of the disinherited — " like the Jews, we had
grown up without a country." The world
will never cease to wonder and to dream
over the ruins of the Imperial City — the vast
relics of the Empire, its baths and temples,
the tremendous skeleton of the Colosseum,
the broken arches and columns and statues,
the remains of imperial villas and tombs, the
wonders of papal Rome, of St. Peter's and

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 205

the Lateran, the palaces and gardens, city
walls and gates, the monstrous fountains, the
churches, cloisters, and shrines. But one needs
to stand beside the muddy Tiber, to watch
the sunrise behind the Pincian Hill, the sunset
behind St. Peter's and the Castle of St. Angelo,
to look over the desert of the Campagna to
the brooding heights of the Alban and Sabine
Hills, to look and watch with the eyes of an
Italian, and an Italian of seventy years ago,
to understand what Rome meant then to her
disinherited children.

In January, 1834, Garibaldi landed at Genoa,
and, disguised as a peasant, put his hand to
forty years of work and risk for " Young
Italy." His first conspiracy brought him
promptly a death sentence; but he got away
to the New World, and we have glimpses of
him buccaneering for Rio Grande and Monte
Video, escaping by a hair's breadth all manner
of death, commanding squadrons, driving
cattle, teaching mathematics, and at last
sailing home to the tocsins of '48, with the
first of his Italian Legions. The memories
of three centuries of slavery and division, of
foreign tyranny and priestly corruption, were
to be wiped out. Alas ! old Chaos is not so
easily disposed of. Within six months the
Lombard movement was drowned in blood.
Rome called its champion from the northern
mountains; and, on February 8, 1849, when
Garibaldi, as a deputy of the Constituent

206 WAR AND PEACE

Assembly, took part in the proclamation of
the Republic, the end again seemed near.

But " Jesuitry, allied as always with the
autocrats of Europe," recovered itself, and
the commander of the defence was soon in
full flight across the Apennines with a dwind-
ling army, and the dogs of Austria, France,
Spain, and Naples at his heels. Years of exile
followed this extraordinary escape; the soldier
took to the sea again; we see him working as
a candle-maker in New York. On the out-
break of war against Austria in 1859, Cavour
summoned him to Turin, and, on the bloody
fields of Magenta and Solferino, Lombardy
was won, at the cost of Savoy and Nice, the
price of French patronage, paid with the
consent of their peoples, however. The States
of Central Italy were next in revolt ; then, with
the march of " The Thousand " from Marsala,
Sicily was free, and Naples followed. Victor
Emmanuel was at length King of Italy; but the
heart of the kingdom was still to win. In 1866,
Austria, now sufficiently troubled with the
rising power of Prussia, ceded Venice; and it
was as a by-product of the Franco-German
war that the temporal power was finally
broken. Twice Garibaldi had marched upon
the capital, twice been captured and im-
prisoned. But Sedan is a great word that
changes many things; the chassepots of
Mentana no longer "worked wonders";
France, for twenty-one years, with one short

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 207

interval, protector of the Papacy, must now
look nearer home. And so on September 20,
1870, Italian troops entered into their own.

Germany achieved a very different unity — •
that of a Federal Empire — in a very different
way. An economic liberation made the
political conquest possible, yet it is often
forgotten or underestimated. Stein and
Hardenberg had laid down the principles of
a moderate Free Trade; Prussia's example
was copied by one State after another, and,
till the eve of the Franco-German War,
this tendency was supreme. The inclusion,
between 1819 and 1836, in the Zollverein,
or Customs Union, of practically all the other
German States, except Austria, contributed
greatly to the growth of common interest
and feeling; and the abolition of an almost
incredible network of tariff barriers gave the
stimulus to trade and population without
which Bismarck's scheming could have been
of no avail. The need of new revenue for
the Imperial Government, so as to relieve
the separate States from an increase of their
" matricular " contributions, in the economic
crisis following the war of 1870, was the
chief factor in the adoption of the Protec-
tionist system in Germany, as in the United
States the chief factor was the costs of the
Civil War. Political reform lagged, and yet
lags. The revolution of 1848 had compelled
most of the Germanic governments to con-

208 WAR AND PEACE

cede parliamentary assemblies with a wide
suffrage. The Austrian throne was shaken
by revolts in Vienna, and in Italy, Hungary,
and Bohemia. Nothing saved the Hapsburgs
but the racial diversity of their subjects;
and though, with Russian aid, the Hungarian
insurgents were suppressed, lasting peace was
only obtained by the grant of autonomy under
a difficult federal system which has been con-
stantly threatened by race strife. The divi-
sions of North and Central Germany were of
a different character, but hardly less obstinate.
They are based upon facts of geography.
The only naturally united part of the Empire
is that to which the work of unification fell
— the North German plain, with Berlin at its
centre, the whole German seacoast at its
back, and a preponderantly agricultural in-
terest. South of this, there is a relatively
homogeneous strip — the Kingdoms of Saxony
and Bavaria, divided by the Thuringer Wald.
To the south of these into the Alpine passes,
and westward across the Rhine, lie border-
lands severed by nature, by early tribal
settlements and remains of Roman influence,
by the westward trend of the Rhine commerce
and the eastward course of the Danube, by
the division of these highways among feudal
princelings, by the contest between the Papacy
and the Reformation, by dynastic rivalries
of France and Austria, and finally by diverse
industrial development. Here are the causes

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 209

of the particularism against which Bismarck's
" mailed fist " and his tariff policy were suc-
cessively directed; here are a dozen of the
reasons why, in the third quarter of the last
century, the democratic idea sank into a
movement of federal union under Prussia,
and an unprecedented effort of military
organisation designed to cement this union
by confirming the expulsion of Austria and
establishing the new industrial forces in safe
possession of both sides of the great national
river.

Armaments had undergone great changes
since the Napoleonic wars. The percussion
rifle, patented in England in 1807, supplanted
the flint-lock during the 'twenties. In 1836
the German Dreyse produced his improved
needle-gun, which " behaved perfectly " in
the hands of the Prussian infantry against
the Saxon and Baden insurgents of 1850.
The conical bullet, invented by the French
Captain Minie in 1849, gave greatly improved
accuracy of fire in the Crimean campaign,
when Armstrong cannons were first used.
The American Civil War witnessed the in-
troduction of the breach-loader and the
magazine rifle. The sterner application of
universal service in 1859-62 had given Prussia
the strongest army on the Continent; and
her advantage in 1866 from the rapid fire of
her needle-guns startled all Europe. France
immediately adopted an improved Chassepot.

210 WAR AND PEACE

Shrapnell, the first explosive projectiles (the in-
vention of an English colonel, first used in the
Peninsular campaign), were improved; and the
rifling of the bore of cannon gave a further
range and accuracy. Prussia had learned
another lesson in the campaign against
Austria; and her superiority in artillery was
one of the chief factors in her success in 1870.
" There is no doubt " — thus Busch, in his
Bismarck, reports his master as saying in a
gloomy moment, and the Chancellor does
not seem to have disavowed the words—
"there is no doubt that I have caused un-
happiness to great numbers. But for me,
three great wars would not have taken place;
80,000 men would not have been killed, and
would not now be mourned by parents,
brothers, sisters, widows, and sweethearts. I
have settled that with God; but I have had
little if any pleasure from all I have done."
The three wars, whose death-toll is here so
inadequately stated, were those of 1864,
about the Danish Duchies of Schleswig and
Holstein, which then passed to Austria
and Prussia; that of 1866, after the expulsion
of the Austrians, when, in a seven weeks'
campaign, Hanover, Saxony, and Hesse were
occupied, and Austria suffered a crushing
defeat at Koniggratz (Sadowa); and the
Franco-German War of 1870. In establish-
ing the King of Prussia in the Presidency of
a German Confederation from which Austria

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 211

was finally excluded, Bismarck sought to
soften the blow, already foreseeing a graver
struggle. In 1867 the twenty-two North
German States adopted what was substan-
tially the present Imperial constitution — a
legislature, consisting of a Federal Council of
State rulers, and a Reichstag based on uni-
versal suffrage; control of the Executive, of
foreign affairs, the army, and the power of
declaring war being in the hands of the
Prussian King and Chancellor. By a separate
Convention, the Southern States anticipated
their incorporation in the Empire by placing
their armies at Prussia's disposal. Over the
whole land the same system of conscription
and stern discipline prevailed.

So prepared, Bismarck hurried on the conflict
by which he designed to put a final limit
upon French influence and to establish the
hegemony of Prussia in Central Europe. The
trivial episode of a Hohenzollern candidature
for the Spanish throne was skilfully engineered
by the man who despised sentiment, and put
all his faith in " blood and iron," to lead to
an overt quarrel. Not content with the
regular press bureau of the Berlin Foreign
Office, Bismarck had an agency of his own
through which he tuned the German journals
with provocative communications. The in-
comparable " Buschlein " was one of his men;
in his revelations we see the Chancellor con-
stantly engaged in these journalistic intrigues,

212 WAR AND PEACE

" working up the Spanish question," threaten-
ing reluctant papers with a withdrawal of
subsidies, issuing here inflammatory attacks
on the French, and there nasty sidethrusts
at his Imperial master, William I. The
publication in a carefully edited form of a
telegram from the King of Prussia declining
a further interview with the French Am-
bassador, Benedetti, was the last touch.
The French Government regarded this as a
deliberate insult, Germans regarded it as a
well-merited rebuff closing a series of insults.
A little later, Bismarck indulged in this
significant reminiscence : "I have not seen
Moltke looking so well for a long time past.
That is the result of the war. It is his trade.
I remember when the Spanish question
became acute he looked ten years younger;
afterwards, when I told him that the Hohen-
zollern had withdrawn, he suddenly looked
quite old and infirm; and when the French
showed their teeth again, Moltke was once
more fresh and young. The matter finally
ended in a diner d trois — Moltke, Roon and I
— which resulted " (here the Chancellor smiled
a cunning smile) "in the Ems telegram"
(Busch, I, 226).

Despite knowledge of the superior force of
Prussia, and, as has since been shown, against
the feeling of the great majority of the French
people, Gramont and the Empress had their
way : war was declared on July 19, 1870.

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 213

The British Government immediately offered
its mediation to both Powers; it was refused
by Napoleon, to the great chagrin of Glad-
stone, with whom Anglo-French friendship
was a point of principle. The French never
got beyond the frontier, though their sole
hope lay in a rapid dash into South Germany,
which might have brought Austria and Italy
into the field. " Week after week passed;
stories reached the German frontier stations
of French soldiers made prisoners while
digging in potato-fields to keep themselves
alive. Absence of whole regiments that
figured in the official order of battle, defect-
ive transport, stores missing or congested,
made it impossible even to attempt the in-
road. The Emperor, to whom alone the entire
data of the military and diplomatic services
of France were open, was incapable of exertion
or scrutiny, purposeless, distracted with pain,
half -imbecile " (Fyffe : Modern Europe). On
August 4, the German Southern Army drove
back the defenders of Weissenburg, and two
days later overwhelmed McMahon at Worth,
the Northern and Central armies crushing
Frossard at Spicheren on the same day.
The courage of the French soldiers was of
the highest; but nearly all the generalship,
as in the bold rapidity of movement shown at
Mars-la-Tour (Aug. 16), and the concentra-
tion of artillery at Gravelotte (Aug. 18), was
on the German side. After this double

214 WAR AND PEACE

defeat, Bazaine shut up his army in Metz.
The Emperor retired upon Paris, but, urged
by the Empress to save the dynasty, turned
back with McMahon to attempt the relief
of the besieged army. Caught at Sedan by
a German force twice as strong, Napoleon
capitulated after a day's desperate fighting
(Sept. 2). On September 4, Gambetta and
Favre proclaimed the Third Republic, the
Empress flying to a long exile in England.

The siege of Paris lasted from September 20
to January 28. Meanwhile, Gambetta had
made heroic efforts, even after Bazaine's base
surrender of Metz, with 170,000 men and vast
stores (Oct. 28), to organise new popular
levies. These sacrifices were in vain. Bis-
marck wanted to hurry things by a summary
vengeance on the irregulars in the country
and on the obstinate Parisians; but his
counsel was not taken. On February 26,
1871, preliminaries of peace were signed,
which gave to the victors Alsace (except
Belfort), with Eastern Lorraine, Metz, and
Strasburg, and an indemnity of five milliards
of francs (£200,000,000). The Germans had
suffered 28,600 killed in battle, 12,000 by
disease, and 100,000 wounded; the French
150,000 killed, 150,000 wounded, and 600,000
prisoners.

At such a cost, Europe, as a diplomatist
put it, lost a mistress and gained a master.
About Bismarck's masterv there was not

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 215

to be a shadow of doubt. King William
had already been crowned at Versailles as
first German Emperor (Jan. IT, 1871), by
the will of the federal armies and with
the assent of the princes. The third and
greatest of Bismarck's wars had completed
his life-work. He remained long in office, to
counteract the liberal influence of the Emperor
Frederic and his wife, to see a more typical
Hohenzollern into the saddle, to combat
Socialism, to bow to Clericalism, to establish
Protectionism, to found the alliance with
Austria (1879), in which four years later Italy
became a partner.

It was left to the Emperor William II,
in the year of Bismarck's death (1898), to
initiate the building of a great German navy,
which was to produce some such counterpoise
to British naval power as the German army
had set against France's power on the Con-
tinent. This double rivalry has not resulted
in war, though war has often been threatened;
but it has stereotyped the system of universal
compulsory military service throughout the
Continent, and, aggravated by commercial
competition, has grievously injured Anglo-
German relations. For twenty years French
life was poisoned by a passionate desire for
"the revenge"; but with the springing-
up of a new generation, and an increasing
disparity between the French and German
populations, common sense prevailed. The

216 WAR AND PEACE

turning-point may be dated from the fall
of General Boulanger (1891), and the libera-
tion of Captain Dreyfus (1899). Thenceforth,
the Republic has stood steadily for inter-
national peace and social progress.

In 1891 the Franco-Russian Alliance was
concluded as a balance to the Triple Alliance.
In 1904 England and France terminated a long
era of jealousy by a territorial give-and-take
and a popularly supported " Entente Cor-
diale." Shortly afterwards (1907), England
and Russia settled old quarrels in Asia, and
began to act in unison in European affairs.
These connections, together with England's
old alliance with Portugal, and the relation-
ships of her royal family with Spain, Norway,
and Denmark, were regarded in Germany as
the result of a " policy of encirclement "
deliberately conceived by King Edward. It
would be juster to consider them as the logical
fruit of the political policy of Bismarck, to
which, though with increasing hesitation,
the German Empire is still committed. The
Iron Chancellor was as great in political
as Napoleon in military strategy; he was
greater in honesty, patriotism, and construct-
ive achievement. He has been credited with
much that comes from quite other sources,
especially from the expansion of industry and
trade that accompanied, but were not created
by, political unity. And, after all, his work
is sunk in this general result — that Europe

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 217

is partitioned between two vast systems of
armed alliance, beneath whose oppressive
weight the forces of education, trade, and
democracy are preparing a sounder and
more stable union. Scorning democracy and
humane ideals, Bismarck had, despite himself,
contributed in no small measure to the growth
of the United States of Europe.

Two centres of disturbance on the Con-
tinent remained. After many efforts to throw
off the worst tyranny now remaining in the
world, the subject peoples of the Russian
Tsardom have yet to win their personal and
national liberties ; and the Balkan lands under
the Turkish Sultanate have been a running
sore throughout the past century. Russia
lost territory by the Crimean War, but suc-
ceeded in her second aim of preventing the
Ottoman Empire from being " broken up into
republics to afford a refuge to the Mazzinis
and Kossuths of Europe." This object con-
tinued to inspire her policy; and thus we
find Russia alternately attacking and patron-
ising the Sultanate. The treaty of 1856 at
last recognised Turkey as in the comity of
nations, established what was henceforth
to be known as the Concert of Europe, and,
under forms of "non-intervention," introduced
the principle of collective pressure upon the
Turkish State. The Concert proved much
more effective in limiting Russian aggression
than in staying Ottoman cruelty. After the

218 WAR AND PEACE

Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, the Berlin
Treaty gave complete independence to Servia,
Montenegro, and Roumania, and closed the
Dardanelles to Russian warships. It cut
Bulgaria into two parts, which were, however,
reunited in 1885, and have since become a
completely independent kingdom, and placed
Bosnia and Herzegovina under the occupation
of Austria, which finally absorbed them while
Turkey was engaged in the domestic crisis of
1908-9. Greece, between the jealous fears of
Austria, the hostility of Russia, the indifference
of England, obtained no satisfaction, and
drifted slowly toward a disastrous campaign
against Turkey in 1897, which placed Crete in
the custody of a lesser Concert of maritime
Powers.

A Kurdish proverb advises the farmer to
stay his shears till the fleece is ready. For
some time after the Russo-Turkish war,
Abdul Hamid contented himself with the
task of accumulating treasure at his Palace.
In 1891 he opened an overt campaign for the
destruction of the Christian peoples in his
realm. In the massacres of 1894, " the
Armenians were absolutely hunted like wild
beasts," as one of the British agents, Mr.
Shipley, said; the Italian Consul -General esti-
mated that 50,000 persons were slaughtered in
this first onslaught. The Concert had become
impotent because the Tsar, patron of " the
Assassin," was supported by his fellow Em-

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 219

perors in forbidding intervention; while, with
France tied to Russia, and Italy to Germany
and Austria, England did not dare to act for
herself. In September 1895 a new massacre was
perpetrated under the eyes of the Ambassadors
in Constantinople, followed by butcheries in
Asia Minor which, according to the British
official reports, destroyed 30,000 lives, and
ruined the Armenian provinces.

Never have British policy and the morals
of Europe sunk so low as at this time, when
Prince Lobanoff was allowed to veto any
coercive action because " Russia could not con-
sent to the formation of a new Bulgaria on
her (Transcaucasian) frontier." Nicholas II,
newly crowned, had not yet stood trembling
with fright among the baillies of Aberdeen
and the keepers at Balmoral; was still in
the eyes of an easily blinded world the
great White Tsar, mysterious, omnipotent. A
single Power, supposed to be Italy (it is one
of the secrets of recent history) suggested
that the Dardanelles should be forced, and the
Sultan seized in his Palace. " Any British
Minister," replied Lord Rosebery, " who en-
gages in a European war, except under the
pressure of the direst necessity, except for
interests directly and distinctly British, is a
criminal to his country and his position."
So the pro-Armenia agitation of Mr. Glad-
stone was extinguished; and the Sultan set
his forces to a campaign of revenge in Crete

220 WAR AND PEACE

and Thessaly. The same union of Sultan,
Tsar, and Kaiser doomed Macedonia to fruit-
less insurrection, and a prolonged internecine
warfare (see H. N. Brailsford's Macedonia).
At length, in 1908, a new and decisive factor
appeared on the scene. Coached by civilian
exiles, and spurred on by fear of an effective
European intervention, a band of young
Turkish officers raised the banner of revolt
in Monastir, and frightened Abdul Hamid into
conceding a Constitution. A reactionary con-
spiracy followed, but it was quickly suppressed,
the Sultan deposed and imprisoned, and the
new Parliament assured an effective support.
It must be long ere the lands governed from
Constantinople can be brought near to the
general European level; but thenceforth
there was a hope and means of progress that
had never before existed.

The position of the Sultan of St. Petersburg
had, in the meantime, been shaken, though
less decisively. The Manchurian campaign
(February 1904 to October 1905) was the first
war fought by Great Powers under thoroughly
modern conditions. General Kuropatkin's
revelations have shown that certain timber
concessions on the Korean border, in which
the Russian Court was deeply interested,
played a prominent part in its causation; in
a larger view it represented the rivalry of
two old autocracies, one of which, however,
had rapidly modernised itself, for the heritage

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 221

of East Asiatic suzerainty. The frightful
effect of the new weapons was exhibited in
the destruction of the Russian fleet, the
disaster of Liao-Yang, the siege and fall of
Port Arthur, and the yet greater debacle
of Mukden. Altogether, two and a half
million men were placed in the field, in nearly
equal proportion, by the two combatants.

The Japanese reports show 470,000 casual-
ties (80,000 killed or dead of disease, 170,000
wounded, 221,000 sick); the Russian reports
140,000 killed and wounded, 345,000 sick,
40,000 missing, and 31,000 prisoners. The
battle of Mukden, when 350,000 men were
engaged for three weeks on a frontage of
fifty miles, with losses aggregating 163,000,
was probably the largest and most destruct-
ive in modern history. The war shook the
Tsardom to its foundations, provoking mili-
tary and naval mutinies, and revolutionary
outbreaks, in fear of which Nicholas II con-
ceded to Russia the form of parliamentary
institutions. It showed the world the con-
nection between oppression at home and war
abroad, and taught neutral fishermen, ship-
owners, and investors that no quarrel can be
distant enough for them to escape injury.
Thus, considerations of business reinforced
the feeble promptings of humanity, offended
by the " bloody Sunday " massacre. And,
while Japan won the homage due to efficiency
and stoic courage, she, too, had to learn a

222 WAR AND PEACE

hard lesson. Russia was left at the end of
the war with a national debt of a thousand
million pounds sterling. But, even if it
could have paid, there was no possibility
of extorting, an indemnity, since there was
no possibility of occupying the Russian
capital and seizing the treasury and adminis-
tration. The Treaty of Portsmouth was a
confession that, in the twentieth century, war
cannot pay, as well as a warning to European
States to abandon their baser designs upon
the now awakened East.

In the story of the extension of the European
equilibrium to the remainder of the world, the
most considerable chapters are those relating
the colonisation of North America, and the
growth of the British Empire, which now
embraces nearly a quarter of the population
of the earth. The three centuries of British
Imperial history may be roughly divided into
four unequal periods of development. The
first two we have already noted — an experi-
mental stage which we may count as extending
from the East India Company Charter of 1600
to the Union of Scotland and England in 1707,
or to the Peace of Utrecht and the Anglo-
Spanish Slave Trade Compact of 1718; and a
period in which England was absorbed in the
struggle with France which gave her Canada
and India, and with the policy of high taxation,
trade restriction, and coercive sovereignty
which lost her the American colonies. A third

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 223

step carries us through the Napoleonic struggle
to the final repeal of the Corn Laws in 1849.
Commercialism was now ripening rapidly;
and England's success as a trading State led
to a temporary decline of political imperialism.
The solidest gain of this period consisted in
the settlement (1788-1840) of the Australian
colonies.

Finally, in the latter half of the nine-
teenth century, the trade supremacy due to
prior industrial development, and encouraged
by free trade and popular education, was
checked by the appearance of powerful
foreign rivals, the first result being, during the
'seventies, 'eighties, and 'nineties, a fever of
territorial expansion with the object of " stak-
ing out claims for posterity," and in the hope
that trade would " follow the flag." The chief
extensions of the Empire were in Africa, where
the Southern hinterlands, inclusive of the two
Boer Republics, were conquered, and huge
territories entirely populated by native races
were subjected in the west and in the east-
centre (Nigeria alone having an area of 450,000
square miles, and a population estimated at
30 millions); while Egypt was occupied under
a nominal Turkish suzerainty, and the Soudan,
after campaigns against successive Mahdis,
was held as the joint property of England
and Egypt. The territories of British India
were also greatly extended. In the last
fifteen years of the century, the population

224 WAR AND PEACE

of the Empire was estimated to have increased
from 300 to 400 millions, and its area from
eight to twelve million square miles, while
British naval expenditure rose from £11, 000,000
to £25,000,000 a year. So far from being,
as was said, a " record reign of peace," the
sixty-four years of Queen Victoria's reign —
marked early by the Crimean campaign and
the Indian Mutiny (1857) — witnessed some
forty Imperial wars or expeditions, in which
China was opened to the opium traffic, and
Sikhs, Burmese, Afghans, Chitralis, Egyptians,
Soudanese, Abyssinians, Kaffirs, Zulus, Basu-
tos, Matabeles, Mashonas, Bechuanas, Ni-
gerians, and Maoris were taught the superior
merit of high explosives. The Queen died
amid painful echoes from the South African
battlefields, crying on her death-bed, " Oh,
that peace may come ! "

Something more than a reign and a century
ended with the passing of this venerated figure.
Many factors contributed to a reaction under
" Edward the Peacemaker." One, and not
the least, lay in the discovery that the conquest
of 50,000 Dutch farmers had required a cam-
paign of two and a half years, an army of
250,000 men, and an expenditure almost equal
to the cost to England of all the other wars
of the Victorian era (I estimate this at about
£280,000,000, of which the Crimean War ac-
counts for £116,000,000). Reflection on these
facts speedily produced one of the most notable

THE NEW EQUILIBRIUM 225

vindications of British statesmanship and
democracy, in the granting of self-government
to the Boer States, followed by the establish-
ment of a Union of South Africa under a
Boer Premier.

To the same years dates the great settle-
ment with France (August 8, 1904), a
compact between two democratic States made
after a prolonged period of peace without
immediate outside pressure, and, so, like
neither the arbitrary rearrangements of power
and territory occasionally made by councils of
autocratic rulers, nor the treaties closing the
wars of the past. For twenty years, the words
Egypt, Newfoundland, Morocco had stood for
problems supposed to be well-nigh insoluble;
and behold ! as with a magician's wand, a
wholesale diplomatic clearance of questions
of territory and trade, of " honour and vital
inte • ./:•;." The way had been prepared by a
series of arbitral treaties among the West
European Powers, led by France and England,
as the way for these had been prepared by the
first Hague Peace Conference in 1899. While
the spirit of pacific reconstruction was thus
" in the air," the costs of empire-building were
brought home in various forms to thinking
men. The trade return had been signally
disappointing; and the self-governing colonies
had made it clear that they could not be
counted on to share any further burdens of
Imperial adventure. The rise of Japan, with

226 WAR AND PEACE

which England concluded in 1902 a military
and political alliance, and the appearance of
Young Turkey, put a new aspect upon the
problems of Asiatic rule; ravages of famine
and plague, and sporadic conspiracy against
holders of outposts in a far land impossible
of British colonisation, recalled Seeley's con-
clusion as to the necessary lack of common
interest, save in trade, between India and
England. What, then, remained ? Duty, the
hardest duty of world-rule to-day. Its first
implication was evidently that the problem
should not be aggravated by further increase
of the " child peoples " under Anglo-Saxon
tutelage. Accordingly, a decade has passed
without war in, or addition of territory to,
the British Empire. The basis of Imperial
peace is laid.

Meanwhile, the North American Republic
has grown from strength to strength. Only
once has this great experiment been threatened
with destruction. Freed from dynastic rival-
ries and feudal obstructions, from religious
strife and military ambition, the States had
kept one evil heritage from the Old World,
the morbid revival of patriarchal agriculture
in the sub -tropical region around the Gulf of
Florida. Nominally on a question of union or
disruption, the Civil War of 1861-65 really re-
presents the last effort to found a state openly
on slave labour. The slaves had, in fact,
increased from half-a-million at the time of the

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 227

Revolution to four millions on the outbreak of
the war. The South was beaten less by the
badness of its ease than its lack of men. At
the end of the struggle, its armies were out-
numbered by nearly six to one. Yet it re-
quired four years' conflict, with the loss of a
million lives and two thousand million pounds
sterling, to attain the end which, a few years
before, might have been reached by an easy
monetary transaction. Such, in our time, is
the cost of the appeal to the sword.

CHAPTER XI

THE ORGANISATION OF PEACE

THE new political equilibrium is strength-
ened by four of the most notable developments
of the past half -century. These are (1) the
ceaseless advance in the quality and quantity
of armaments, by which the character of
warfare has been completely transformed;
(2) the full establishment of an international
Credit economy, by which the commercial
life of the civilised nations is being steadily
unified, while each is threatened with injury
from any breach of the peace; (3) the rein-
forcement of older elements of international
culture and law by the power of organised
Labour, now, like organised Capital, a force
of international character; and (4) the general
tendency among Western nations toward
H 2

228 WAR AND PEACE

an arrest of population, which removes the
impetus to warfare formerly supplied by a
surplus of " food for powder," marks the
proximate end of the swarming process, and
imposes a new sense of the value of the lives
on which the future of Western civilisation
must depend.

1. In death-dealing efficiency, the improve-
ment in arms since the Franco-German War
has thrown all the inventions of all previous
history into the shade. It began with the
production of the Martini-Henry, Berdan,
Gras, and Werder rifles. A double revolution
marked the year 1886, when smokeless powder
and the Lebel small-bore magazine gun were
adopted in France. The Mannlicher, Mauser,
Lee-Metford, and other models followed, each
giving greater range, rapidity, and accuracy
of fire. In artillery there have been similar
changes; the new steel processes have made
possible a continuous enlargement of cannon,
and the use of high-explosive projectiles,
while there are now many types of quick-
firing machine-guns. The development of
naval power, from the Merrimac and
Monitor of fifty years ago to the latest
" super-Dreadnoughts,'* is still more prodi-
gious. One fact will serve to illustrate the
effect of invention in this field. In the
twenty years following the " Navy scare "
of 1884, Great Britain spent £450,000,000 in

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 229

the effort to maintain a fleet stronger than
any two possible rivals. In 1905, the Ad-
miralty, in its scheme of concentration,
admitted that most of this expenditure was
then represented mainly by scrap-iron, 115
vessels of the classes of " unprotected " and
" protected " cruisers being condemned as
practically useless except for " police " pur-
poses. This clearance was, however, only
the beginning of a new and higher level of
competition, opened by the laying-down
of the "Dreadnought" in October 1905.
Since then another fleet has become obsolete.
The modern British Navy has never fought
a battle; but it has cost more in money
than the whole of the British campaigns
of the past century.

The most considerable attempt to show the
effect in actual hostilities of these changes
is that of the Polish banker and economist
Jean de Bloch (1836-1902), author of the
huge six-volume work on modern warfare
already cited, and founder of the Museum of
War and Peace at Lucerne. De Bloch's
conclusions were that, as between Powers of
nearly equal strength, warfare will in future
be a suicidal deadlock, a struggle without
possibility of decisive result, and ruinous to
both parties; that other means of settling in-
ternational disputes must therefore be found;
and that, as these vast armaments are need-

230 WAR AND PEACE

less for defence and useless for aggression,
those who rely upon them are visionaries.
His evidence pointed most clearly to two
facts : the first, that the history of war
exhibits a gradual removal of combatants
to greater distances from each other, so that
neither in the better nor the worse qualities
it evokes is the struggle what it used to be;
the second, that science gives great compara-
tive advantages to the defence, in the power
of long-range, quick-firing rifles and guns
(from ten to forty times more effective than
those used in 1870 and 1877), and in the new
art of entrenchment. Throughout history
earthworks have been used; but earthworks
which an enemy could safely approach within
two or three hundred paces were a trifling
obstacle compared with those of to-day,
planned to permit of gradual retirement, and
fronted with a fire zone of a thousand yards
across which effective rifle fire can be main-
tained at the rate of twenty shots a minute.
The army of a great State would now be an
immensely larger force than ever took the
field in the past, consisting of the manhood
of a nation, not a mercenary surplus. It
would be a body of educated men, an army
of engineers. Its infantry lines and battery
positions would be invisible. The invader
must come into the open if he is to accom-
plish anything; he would find his cavalry

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 231

useless against entrenched infantry, and
would experience a difficulty which would not
be experienced by the defence in supplying
himself with the very heavy and powerful
shells now needed for artillery. Battle in
the open would mean annihilation; yet it is
only by assault that entrenched positions
can be carried. The attacker would be
forced to entrench himself; so the science
of the spade reduces battles to sieges, and
campaigns become a long deadlock between
stationary forces, and a game of hide-ano>
seek between mobile forces. The spirit of
resistance will be encouraged by the fact that
a conqueror must make greater sacrifices
than the defenders. The volunteer of demo-
cracy has proved himself, man for man, a
match for the regular soldier, mercenary
or conscript. Guerilla fighting will no longer
be without order or method; it will be scienti-
fically equipped, and moved by a spirit of
nationality stronger than ever before known,
Railways will be easily destroyed and roads
blocked.

Warfare will drag on more slowly than ever.
The numbers of men and the field of opera-
tions will be so large that the genius of the
best generals will be incapable of controlling
them. Even with a railway base, an army ot
200,000 men cannot move quickly, especially
since they cannot any longer live on the

232 WAR AND PEACE

country; and the dispersion necessitated by
modern fire makes the direction of such a
mass difficult and hazardous. The hey-day of
warfare lay in the infancy of firearms, when,
with small, mobile armies, a bold and calcu-
lating commander could direct quick marches,
sudden changes of plan, feints, turning move-
ments, cavalry charges, strategical demon-
strations of all kinds. But this strategy
is as dead as Bonaparte. Even a Moltke
could not manipulate the European army
of to-day.

There is a notable inadequacy in Buckle's
treatment of the decline of military genius
(in his chapter on " The Comparison of Moral
and Intellectual Laws"). Of his two great
generalisations — that in early societies pri-
mary economic factors (climate and food
supply, in particular) are absolutely dominant,
while in civilised societies intellectual acquisi-
tions are the supreme and only permanent
factors of progress — the first is much the more
safely established; but both require more
examination than he gives them. In ancient
times, as Buckle shows, militarism com-
manded the best talent of the peoples; and
he adds : "in the modern world this iden-
tical profession, including many millions of
men, has never been able since the sixteenth
century to produce ten authors who have
reached the first class, either as writers or

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 233

thinkers." This method of glorifying intel-
lectual influences seems unjust and unsound,
for why should a soldier in any age be tested
by his power to write a book ? Economic
influences are as dominant as ever in history,
though their character has changed. Soldiers
of genius no longer appear because the
environment is unfavourable, the demand
has failed. Othello's occupation 's gone. The
mechanism of war has killed the art of war;
and this mechanism is itself doomed because,
while it can reap no recompense, its cost in
use is likely to bring its owners to the pit of
bankruptcy, famine, and revolution.

This argument might be illustrated in
detail from the American Civil War, the
Austro - German, Franco - German, Russo-
Turkish, and Boer campaigns. We have
little evidence of what the results of conflict
between the naval monsters of the twentieth
century may be, for the destruction of the
Spanish fleets off Santiago and Manila, and
of the Russian fleet in the strait of Tsushima,
would be better described as battues than
battles. But the principles established by
De Bloch apply here, with, possibly, greater
force, especially since the appearance of four
instruments which he did not live to see —
wireless telegraphy, the aeroplane, the dirigi-
ble balloon, and the marine internal combus-
tion engine. There will be the same choice,

234 WAR AND PEACE

for States of nearly equal strength, between
inaction in harbour and annihilation in the
©pen; while (failing an agreement to respect
private property) a swrarm of privateersmen
-will destroy the maritime commerce on which
the combatant nations depend. The old
conditions of dashing attack and personal
valour, all the strategy of Nelson, are gone
with the old wooden sailing ships. Half-a-
dozen battles would now destroy fleets that
have cost hundreds of millions to build and
eould not be speedily replaced. One such
convulsion would shake European society to
its foundations.

The substantial truth of these views is no
longer disputed. It was stated tersely by
the Russian Emperor in his famous rescript
of 1898 summoning the first Hague Peace
Conference: ;t The financial charges conse-
quent on increasing armaments strike at
public prosperity in its very source. The
intellectual and physical strength of the
nations, labour and capital, are for the major
part diverted from their natural application
and unproductively expended. Hundreds of
millions are devoted to acquiring terrible
engines of destruction which, though to-day
regarded as the last word of sc.ence, are
destined to-morrow to lose all value, in con-
sequence of some fresh discovery in the same
field. National culture, economic progress,

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 235

and the production of wealth are either
paralysed or checked in their development.
Moreover, in proportion as the armaments
of each Power increase, so do they less and
less fulfil their object. The economic crises
due in great part to the system of excessive
armaments, and the continual danger which
lies in this massing of war material, are
transforming the armed peace of our days
into a crushing burden which the peoples
have more and more difficulty in bearing.
It appears evident, then, that, if this state
of things were prolonged, it would lead
inevitably to the very cataclysm which it
is desired to avert, the very horrors of
which make every thinking being shudder in
advance. "

2. For forty years there has been no war
in Western, Central, and Northern Europe;
and, with the exception of the Cuban cam-
paign, North America has enjoyed unbroken
peace. During this period, the commercial
intercourse of the world has undergone a
revolution in character, as important as its
increase in extent, if less obvious. The in-
crease is, indeed, as much the result of the
development of an elaborate Credit system
as of the new manufacturing processes and
improved communications. But a Credit
economy is immensely more sensitive than
a cash economy. Commodities and bullion

236 WAR AND PEACE

are more susceptible than ever. Fragments
of a penny on the price of grain may divert
millions of pounds' worth of trade from one
country to another; and these fractional
changes may arise from some local and
apparently trifling disturbance thousands of
miles away from the market which registers
them. The material conveniences of our
time — division of labour, joint-stock trading,
improved transport, telegraphs and cables,
newspapers — have all increased this sensi-
tiveness, and, by its very nature, credit feels
it more quickly than material wealth. So
long as peace continues, the advantages of
" paper " more than compensate for this
weakness. Even the speculation on stock
and share and produce exchanges, which so
easily degenerates into gambling, has served
the trading class by levelling out variations
in prices due to natural causes. Insurance,
being a substitute for a reserve of capital, not
only protects against loss, it increases borrow-
ing power. Banks draw from the unused
surplus of wealth in the community immense
funds which, being lent out or made the basis
of commercial credit, lead to the greater
development of trade. The smooth working of
the central administration and local authorities,
as well as of manufactures and trade, depends
to-day upon this power of easy borrowing.
The rapid development of the United

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 237

States, the British colonies, and countries
like Argentina is wholly due to it. Thus,
an extension to foreign countries of the
proprietary interests of the creditor nations
has taken place which must deeply affect
the policy of these nations. The amount of
British investments abroad probably exceeds
£3,000 millions, a sum equal to one-third
of the estimated value of private property
in the United Kingdom (see F. W. Hirst,
The Stock Exchange, and Chiozza Money,
Riches and Poverty); and this sunk capital
yields an income of some £80 millions a year
to persons living there. The investment
of foreign capital in the United Kingdom
amounts to hundreds of millions sterling.
France holds about a half of the Russian debt
of £1,000 millions. In these and other cases,
the connection between investment and policy
resulting either in war or peace is clear. The
policy of Britain has been injuriously dis-
turbed by financial influences when it was
in contact with wealthy lands feebly held,
generally by native tribes. The complete
partition of Africa closed this period of
belligerent expansion. Foreign investment
in settled countries must favour the organisa-
tion of peace. It may produce incidental
evils: the French loans to Russia have
bolstered up a corrupt and cruel government,
while ensuring an interim balance of power

238 WAR AND PEACE

in Europe. But it serves the growth of a
more rational world-order in two ways :
it reminds powerful sections of one community
of their material interest in the peace and
welfare of another, perhaps a " rival," State;
and it reminds any would-be belligerent
that, in a day when the value of national
capital has become so largely dependent
upon international credit, the old rewards
of successful warfare cannot be reaped.

An Anglo- German war, for instance, would
destroy not only the regular volume of exports
and imports, so vital to the prosperity of
both peoples; invasion would destroy English
property in Germany and German property
in England; above all, it would destroy the
sensitive mechanism of credit on which the
economic life of both countries depends. The
cash reserves, already so small for the struc-
ture of credit they have to uphold, would
be further diminished. There being no cer-
tainty as to the issue of such a conflict, and
only too much certainty as to its ruinous
cost, State securities in both countries would
fall rapidly. Foreign countries would call
in their balances from London and Berlin,
which, in turn, would be compelled to realise
their foreign loans. The withdrawal of credit
and loanable capital, the interruption of
supplies, and the withdrawal of labour
would starve trade and manufacture; and

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 239

the rise of taxation and prices, coupled with
falling wages and reduced employment of
those not actively engaged in the war and the
war industries, would produce distress, deepen-
ing to panic. If there were any victor in such
a conflict, and if he succeeded in occupying
the enemy's capital, he would find the wealth
due to credit flown, and the immediately
seizable capital scarcely sufficient to pay for
the investments lost by his own countrymen,
let alone the costs of the war.

But, long before this, the forces of organised
labour in both countries would have been
mobilised for revolt, and neighbouring Powers
would be ready for an effective intervention.

3. The political and economic union of
nations described above has been further
strengthened by the growth of an inter-
national legal, legislative, and administrative
system, which, although still in its infancy,
has already reached a considerable elaboration.

We have seen that conciliation and arbitra-
tion were occasionally used in very early
times to prevent or end disputes. As a
settled quasi -legal process, International Arbi-
tration may be dated (as may the unofficial
Peace Movement in which Victor Hugo,
Bastiat, Cobden, Bright, and Elihu Burritt
were the first great figures) from the period
following the Napoleonic wrars. It has steadily
increased in definiteness and authority. The

240 WAR AND PEACE

first stage consisted in the addition of an
arbitration clause to commercial and other
treaties, and the evolution of a regular pro-
cedure through occasional arbitrations. Then
arbitration treaties proper began to be nego-
tiated, in the 'eighties. A great leap forward
was made when the first Hague Conference
(1899) established a Permanent Arbitration
Court, with a detailed code, which was
amended and enlarged at the second Confer-
ence (1907). From 1822 to 1900 there were
enacted 125 Arbitration treaties; in the sub-
sequent decade, 180 agreements of very much
larger scope have been signed. The Anglo-
French Treaty of October 14, 1904, became
a model, which all the leading nations have
since followed. During the nineteenth cen-
tury, 212 arbitral awards were made, and
every one was executed, though several (the
Alabama, Samoa, Venezuela, and Alaska)
disputes were of a grave character. When,
in 1910, the Hague Court quietly settled the
long-standing Newfoundland fisheries dis-
pute, no doubt remained either of the utility
or the authority of this international judi-
cature.

Meanwhile, the parent body, with a Third
Conference in view, has assumed the position
of a permanent institution representative
of the whole civilised world. In 1899, dele-
gates of 26 independent States met in the

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 241

" House in the Wood " in the Dutch capital,
and astonished the sceptics by the spirit with
which they commenced the difficult business
of international legislation. In 1907 there
were 230 delegates from 43 States; among
other results of their labours were an agree-
ment to establish an International Naval
Prize Appeal Court (the first international
body having power to over-rule national
jurisdictions) — for which a Conference of
naval Powers sitting in London has since
projected a Code; various further amendments
of the rules of warfare; and a resolution
against the forcible collection of debts till
arbitration has been resorted to or refused.
No Power being ready with a practical formula,
and Germany being hostile, the armaments
problem was dismissed in a pious resolution.
It must be long ere the Hague Conferences
can assume a parliamentary character; but
they mark a vast advance upon previous
" Concerts," and a distinct step toward
world federation. Probably the tasks hither-
to confided to special international congresses
will be more and more frequently referred
to the regular meetings for which Mr. Carnegie
has built a palatial home at the Hague.

Many institutions for a common supervision
of international commerce had been founded
before this development; and they are, there-
fore, still scattered about the world, in Berne,

242 WAR AND PEACE

Brussels, Paris, London, Washington. These
bodies, including the International Postal
and Telegraph, and Railway Unions, Sani-
tary Commission, Copyright Union, and simi-
lar bodies, each having a permanent bureau
and head-quarters staff, will, no doubt, be
gradually concentrated in a business-like
manner.

This extensive official apparatus is sup-
ported by an ever-increasing number of non-
official institutions and movements, some
of which, indeed, receive governmental aid.
Only a few of the more important can here be
named. The Inter-Parliamentary Union,
founded in 1888, now includes several thou-
sand deputies of the leading nations; it has
its permanent bureau and annual conference,
and does important preparatory work for the
Hague Conferences. The Pan-American Bu-
reau, handsomely housed in Washington, was
established in 1890 to encourage commercial
and friendly relations between the twenty-one
American republics, which jointly maintain
it. The Peace Movement, with its hundreds
of local societies, has its permanent bureau
in Berne, and its annual national and inter-
national congresses. The Institut du Droit
International, and the International Law
Association, founded in 1873, have done
valuable pioneering work. The Anglo-Ger-
man Friendship Committee may be named as

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 243

a type of many bodies aiming to improve the
relations of particular countries. Civic and
educational visitations, professional con-
gresses, auxiliary languages, " co-operative "
holidays, international newspapers, and the
international Trade Union and Socialist move-
ments, representing millions of humble toilers
who have hitherto been content to leave high
politics to the Foreign Offices — these are
among the most characteristic phenomena
of the time; and they do not exhaust the
list of influences by which the social organis-
ation of the world is being remodelled on a
basis of reason and amity. It is difficult to
think that, against such a variety of forces,
the interests of the small numbers of men
who profit by war and preparations for war
can long prevail.

4. Finally, a physiological change is taking
place in the most advanced societies of the
world, the character and most momentous
consequences of which can here be only very
cursorily indicated. A generation ago, the
falling birth-rate of France used to be the
subject of ominous comment. The Republic
was doomed, it used to be said, by the greatly
superior increase of German population, and,
therefore, of German military power; nothing
could save it, for was not this the sum of all
the multifarious decadence that Paris flaunted
in the face of a nobly prolific world ? It now

WAR AND PEACE

appears that, slowly, almost imperceptibly,
the world, prolific Germany included, has
begun to follow the perilous example of
republican France. " A decreasing birth-
rate," says the British Registrar General,
" is a feature common to nearly all European
countries, and also to the principal Colonial
States. The effect on the growth of popula-
tion has been to some extent modified by the
concurrent decline in the death-rate; but it
is obvious that the death-rate cannot decline
indefinitely " (75th Annual Report, Cd. 4961
of 1910). The following figures show that, in
the period and in the countries named, there
has been a fall in the rate of natality averag-
ing about 16 per cent.

BIRTH-RATES PER THOUSAND OF POPULATION

England
& Wales.

German
Empire.

France.

Italy.

Austria.

1881-85

33-5

37'0

247

38-0

38-2

1886-90

31-4

36-5

23-1

37'5

37-8

1891-95

30-5

36-3

22-3

36-0

37'4

1896-1900

29-3

36-0

21-9

34-0

37-3

1901-05

28-1

34-3

21-2

32-6

35-6

1907 .

26-3

32-3

197

31-5

33-8

Fall . . .

7-2

4-7

5-0

6-5

4.4

Percentage of

Fall on 1881-

1885 figure .

21-5%

12-8%

20-2%

17-1%

11'5%

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 245

In some countries, the gain by the falling
death-rate is still superior to the loss by
fewer births; elsewhere, as in England and
some British Colonies, the rate of " natural "
increase of population (i.e. without counting
immigration) is declining so steadily that it
threatens soon to reach the vanishing point.
The following tables show the decline in the
rates of birth, death, and natural increase
per thousand of population since the year
(1876) when the birth-rate in England stood
at its maximum :

Births
Deaths ....

Increase . . .

England.

Prussia.

1876.

1909.

1876.

1909

36-3
20-9

25-6
14-5

407
25-4

32-9
17'8

15-4

11-1

15-3

15-1

Births
Deaths ....

Increase . . .

Australian
Commonwealth.

New Zealand.

1871.

1908.

1871.

1908.

38
13

26
11

40
10

27
10

25

15

80

17

246 WAR AND PEACE

As the Local Government Board laconically
observes, " the death-rate cannot decline
indefinitely." In the most advanced coun-
tries, indeed, it cannot now be expected
to decline very considerably, for the chief
gains have been achieved in the saving of
infant life, and the higher age-average of the
population (due to fewer births) implies a
higher mortality rate. When the minimum
mortality point has been reached, the natural
increase of population will probably have
ceased altogether.

In brief, we seem to be within calculable
distance of the day when, in all the most
civilised countries, there will be some such
balance of vital economy as already obtains
in France, a balance which neither legislation
nor exhortation is likely very greatly to dis-
turb. At the same time, the coloured peoples
of Africa, Asia, and America will continue to
multiply, in some cases — as in India, with
the progress of measures of famine prevention
and sanitation — at, perhaps, an accelerated
rate. One conclusion springs irresistibly,
imperatively, from this view of the near
future. The extension of military and naval
service is one of the most potent influences in
depressing the birth-rate; their reduction
would be a corresponding stimulus. Whether
the great White States can continue in-
definitely to bear the burden of competitive

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 247

armaments, or no, they can only continue
to indulge in the exercise of these arma-
ments in actual warfare at the cost of their
estates and their civilising work in Africa
and Asia, at the risk of inviting a new swarm-
ing movement like that which, sixteen hun-
dred years ago, destroyed the hard-won
Roman Peace. To-day, the leadership of the
white races is nowhere challenged; but a new
era of bloodshed would undermine both the
moral authority and the military power of
Europe and America. Our royal rhetoricians
and facile journalists invent and discard such
phrases as " the Yellow Peril " too rapidly
to realise the modicum of truth they contain.
There is no immediate " peril,'* but there is a
" colour problem " as complex and pressing,
in its way, as the problem of poverty which
threatens within the gates. The carica-
turists were partly right : France, so long as
there was a question of " la revanche/' was
overshadowed by Germany's more rapidly
increasing population. By the same logic, the
hegemony of the white races, as they approach
to a stable economy of population, must de-
pend upon their developing a greater unity of
action, a higher and more mobile equilibrium,
and in ensuing true civilisation, which is the
making of civil persons in civil societies.

To sum up : So far from being based upon

248 WAR AND PEACE

unchangeable passions, the nature of man as
"a social animal" is based upon material
and moral interests which have undergone
deep changes, irregular, indeed, but in a
certain general order and direction. We can
trace these changes both in the structure
and the function of successive societies
established in course of the swarming process
by which the earth has been filled. These
stages of settlement have been modified by
the environment provided by the natural
conditions of the place and the social condi-
tions of the time. Thus, in early times, in
certain places (rich river valleys surrounded
by arid or mountainous regions), the condi-
tions favoured the rise of a Slave economy,
reflected — for structure always responds
to function — in despotic and predatory
governments. In a later time, and a more
developed environment, the claims of rival
communities now counting equally with
physical conditions, a Land economy arises —
that is, the prevalent types of capital and
labour consist of land and serfs — with a
political structure dominated by feudal nobles.
Yet later, on a favourable seaboard, a trade,
or Money, economy arises. Slavery and serf-
dom are dead of inefficiency; agricultural
land gradually gives place to commerce as
the chief form of wealth and source of power.
The government is an oligarchy, and the

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 249

main aim of its policy is to obtain national
stocks of bullion. This economic condition
has, however, no sooner become general
among a group of neighbouring and fairly
equal societies than it begins to develop
an elaborate system of credit. The Credit
economy stimulates the organisation of labour,
which again is reflected in a series of quasi -
democratic governments impelled toward an
organisation of settled peace, by way of
armed alliances, arbitration treaties, common
administrations, and quasi -legislative con-
gresses; while the most startling result of the
conjoint influences of this era of industrial
democracy is an arrest of the growth of
population.

The outward and the inner growth of any
organism progress together, and ceaselessly
modify each other. Thus, through these
types of society, an evolution of warfare is
discernible. In a Slave economy, the pro-
perty power, threatened with diminishing
returns, seeks to maintain itself by slave
raids and extortion of tribute. In a Land
economy, such as that of feudal Germany,
where authority gathers in small local units,
there is constant petty conflict, while the
motive of larger warfare is to obtain new
domains for regular rent and revenue. The
field of war is, however, already restricted
by the concurrent growth of similar communi-

250 WAR AND PEACE

ties. This proximate check leads to a wider
search for new lands unoccupied or feebly
held. This is the last stage of the swarm.
Barter, impossible over great distances, passes
away. The hunt for " precious metals,"
needed for a standard of exchange, becomes
the cause of predatory expeditions, and col-
lisions between monarchies claiming divine
right to lay up gold by the sale of black men.
But legitimate commerce presently becomes
supreme; and, after many painful readjust-
ments of political power, creates at last a
civilisation dependent upon domestic and
international peace.

In speaking of these as chronological stages
of evolution we are, of course, using a con-
venient fiction. There was a Trade economy,
with democracy on a small scale, in ancient
Greece; there were elements of the Land and
Credit economics in ancient Rome; while
the highest ideal of human unity was spoken
into deaf ears eighteen hundred years ago.
The irregularity of the progress of societies
differently situated and constituted has, in-
deed, been one of the fertile causes of warfare.
This was especially the case in early times,
when a small martial people was tempted to
assail a splendid but rotten empire (Greece
and Persia), or the rulers of a powerful empire
to enslave small neighbouring peoples (Baby-
lonia and Judaea). Even in very recent

ORGANISATION OF PEACE 251

times, the clash of acutely different property
systems has resulted in war (slave labour v.
free labour in the United States; mining
interests v. patriarchal agriculture in the
Transvaal); but such cases are becoming rarer
through the equalisation of conditions and
interests due to the rapidity of modern com-
munications. A kindred motive to warfare
has been found in the demoralisation pro-
duced by the collapse of an established
politico-economic system. Centuries of an-
archy followed the break-up of the ancient
empires. The collapse of feudal authority
in Europe led to an outbreak of rapacity and
persecution, which merged into the so-called
wars of religion and a series of dynastic
struggles. In its turn, absolute monarchy
proved itself utterly inadequate to the task
of securing a steady increase and just division
of property in expanding societies, and its
dying struggles led to a series of revolutions
and wars of national liberation.

Each of these crises of transition has been
favourable to the appearance of great soldiers;
but, generally speaking, military ambition
and genius have been very minor factors in
the causation of war. Napoleon, for a short
time, dominated the course of events, because
he was able to turn the weapons of the new
industrialism to predatory use in regions
still divided and oppressed by a dying Land

252 WAR AND PEACE

economy. The further development of arma-
ments by industrial science has for ever
forbidden any such reversion to type. On
the other hand, certain conjunctions of cir-
cumstances in early times help to explain
the appearance of great pioneers of the peace
idea ; but, while it is impossible to imagine the
cause of social progress without its prophets
and martyrs, its thinkers and artists, it was
only when the long fermentation of a thousand
elements had produced a favourable environ-
ment that the previsions of these rare minds
could be assimilated by the mass of men, and
so become expressed in stable institutions.
The great task of the twentieth century,
whether we regard domestic or external,
moral or economic, needs, is seen to be the
removal of the fear of war, and the burdens
of preparation it entails, by the organisation
of a settled peace.

Such then, in all too brief outline, is the
history of the human swarm and its settle-
ment. By many other paths, man's progress
from a state of war toward a state of peace
may be traced; it is the writer's hope, by limit-
ing this essay to a consideration of certain
fundamental principles of organic growth,
to have provided a serviceable introduction
to such further studies.

NOTE ON BOOKS

No history of the economics of warfare exists, so far as the
writer knows. Tho student must be content for the present
to gather his information from a thousand sources — general
histories (The Cambridge Modern History, The World's History
in eight volumes, edited by Dr. H. F. Helmolt, and Seignobos'
three-volume sketch may be recommended as containing much
of the best English, German, and French scholarship), histories
of particular periods or countries, biographies of great com-
manders, and histories of particular campaigns, like Oman's
Peninsular War and Kinglake's Crimean Campaign. Other
general works have been named in the text of this volume.
Herbert Spencer's Descriptive Sociology, the publication of which
is being continued by his trustees, contains much detail of
military history. Prof. C. W. C. Oman's History of the Art of
War is an invaluable fragment ; designed to cover ancient and
modern times also, only one volume has actually appeared (1898)
dealing with the period A.D. 400-1400. Grose's Military
Antiquities is an important source. De Bloch's La Guerre
presents a mass of evidence, some historical : voL i. deals with
the mechanism of war, vol. ii. with Continental conditions,
vol. iii. with naval warfare ; and the remaining three volumes
with various economic and social aspects of the subject. A
summary of thesis and evidence has been published in English :
The Future of War (Ginn). Among modern military works may
be mentioned Col. J. F. Maurice's War (with a commented
list of books), Hamley's Operations of War, Clause witz's
War, Moltke's Tactical Problems, 1858-82, Von der Goltz'
The Nation in Arms, Creasy's Decisive Battles, Adams' Great
Campaigns, Colomb's Naval Warfare, Mahon's Sea Power in
History, Dilke and Wilkinson's Imperial Defence, and General
Sir Ian Hamilton's Compulsory Service. Jablonski's Histoire de
L'Art Militaire, a half of which deals with Roman times, is
useful for its quotations from Xenophon, Polybius, Caesar,
Napoleon. Prof. Guglielmo Ferreros Militarism contains
several chapters of historical value.

On the growth of International Law, see the works of Hall,
Wheaton, and Walker. The Two Hague Conferences, by Wm.
253

254 NOTE ON BOOKS

I. Hull, places the results of these assemblies in the briefest
possible compass. International Tribunals, by Evans Darby,
is a complete record ; Gaston Modi's Histoire Sommaire dc
I' Arbitrage Permanent is the best brief review (Monaco : Institut
de la Paix). The International Library (Ginn), edited by
Edwin D. Mead, contains, among other valuable volumes, Tkt
Gre.ai Design of Henry IV, Bridgman's World Organisation,
Ohanning's Discourses on War, ana Sumner's Addresses on War.
The Great Illusion, by Norman Angell, deals trenchantly with
the iconomic difficulties of aggressive warfare in onr time.
Among other works may be mentioned Kant's Zum Ewigen
Frieden, the last chapters of A. R. Wallace's Darwinism,
Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, J. A. Hobsou's Imperialism, The
Burden of Armaments (Oobden Club), War and Its Alleged
Benefits, and La Ftdtration de I' Europe, by J. Novicow ( Alcan) ;
The Arbiter in Council, edited by F. W. Hirst ; The Human
Harvest, by Prof. David Starr Jordan ; and among refer-
ence books L'Annuaire de la Vie Internationale, by A. H.
Pried ; The Peace Year-book (National Peace Council, St.
Stephen's House, London, 8. W.), which gives a fuller bibli-
ography ; The Navy Annual, and The Statesman's Year-book.
Among a host of novels of warfare, Erckmann-Chatrinii's The
Conscript, Tolstoy's War and Pea™ and Sevastopol, Zola's La
D&dcle, and the Baroness Von Suttner's Lay Dcii'n
have enjoyed an immense vogue.

IXDEX

ALLIANCES, Modern, 216-7, land, 181 ; Corunna, 183 ;

226 "Wagram, 184 ; Borodino,

Arbitration, International, 50, 186-7 ; Malo-JaroslaveU,

62, 127, 225, 239-243 188 ; Beresina, 189 ; Leipzig,

Armenian Massacres, 218-9 "Waterloo, 195 ; Solferino,

Arms, Armies, and Art of 206 ; Koniggratz, 210 ; Gra-

War : (Babylonian) 23-5, 30 ; velotte, 213 ; Sedan, 206,

(Egyptian) 36-8 ; (Greek) 214 ; Metz, Paris, 214 ;

51-2 ; (Roman) 65-6, 70, 74- Mukden, 221 ; Santiago,

5, 76-9 ; (Carthaginian) 67 ; Manila, Tsushima, 233

(Carolingian) 87-9 ; (Feu- Black Death, 108, 117

dal) 90, 97-104 ; (Modern) Buccaneers, 136-7
105, 111-113, 120, 122-3,

156, 168-170, 175-6, 183, Christianity and War, 58-64,

184, 190-4, 209-210, 215, 85-7, 102-4, 118, 121, 124

221, 224, 228-235, 238, 243 Conscription, 171, 174, 181,

183, 191

Bartholomew, Massacre of St., Cosmopolitanism (Jewish), 67-

118 8; (Stoic), 59, 69; (18th

Battles, Some Great: Marathon, century), 183, 200-1
Salamis, 62 ; Byzantium

(1453), 82, 93 ; Chalons, 84 ; Diplomacy, 37, 49-50, 74, 95,

Ha-stings, 90; Bannockburn, 126-7, 154
102 ; Crecy, 102, 111, 112 ;

Poiotiers, 102, 112 ; defeat of Federation : (Greek) 45-60 ;

Spanish Armada, 105, 156 ; (Hanseatic) 107 ; (American)

Orleans, 111 ; Belgrade, 150-152, 226-7 ; (Gorman)

116; Agincourt, 113-4; 207-215 ; (of the world) 200-

Magdeburg, 120 ; Nord- 201, 240-3, 247
lingen, 123 ; Antwerp, 129 ;

Plassey, 143 ; Dunkirk, 171 ; Gunpowder, Early use of, 105,

the Nile, 173 ; Marengo, 111, 122-3, 169
Hohenlinden, Copenhagen,

174 ; Trafalgar, 178 ; Ulm, Hague Court and Conferences,

Austcrlitz, 180 ; Jena, Fried- 225, 234, 240-2
255

258

INDEX

Hanseatic League, 107-8, 155
"Human Nature" and War,
1-3, 248

International Law, 49-50, 66,
69, 73-5, 125-7, 198, 240-2

Islam and War, 57, 64, 91-3,
96, 102

Judaism and War, 55-8
Monroe Doctrine, 202

Naval warfare, 25, 37, 47, 52,
90, 112, 125-6, 155-6, 173,
174, 177-8, 183, 215, 221,
228-9, 233-4

" Non-Resistance," 60-64

Patriotism, 49, 59, 62, 76, 163,

183, 201, 204
Peace Movement, 239-243
Predatory Wars, Napoleon's,

167, 175-6, 191-4

"Truce of God," 91
Tsardom, Russian, 161-3, 217-
222, 237

Wars, particular : Hittite-
Babylonian, 25, 29 ; As-
syrian-Judaic, 30 ; Hyksos-
Egyptian, 36 ; Ramesean,
37-8 ; Greek — Persian, 31,
50-55 ; Rome and Carthage,
66-7, 76 ; Rome and barba-
rians, 69, 74, 77-9, 82-5 ;
Campaigns of Charlemagne,
86-9 ; Vikings, 89-91 ; Nor-
man Conquest, 89, 90 ; By-

zantine, 91-2 ; Crusades, 92-

6 ; Mohammedan, 92-3, 96 ;
Hundred Years' War, 101,
102, 110-115 ; Anglo-Scot-
tish, 102. 112, 115 ; Wars ol
Roses, 111 ; "Wars of Reli-
gion," 116-122, 154-5, 160;
Spain and Netherlands, 119-
120; Thirty Years' War,
120-2, 125, 160 ; England
and Spain, 126, 128-9, 131,
135-6, 156 ; Anglo-Dutch,
138, 156; Mogul, 141-2;
Mahratta, 146 ; English Civil
War, 142,158; Anglo-French,
in India, 143, 146-8 ; iu
Can > da, 152, 159 ; Seven
Years' War, 148, 161; Ameri-
can Colonial Wars, 150, 151 ;
War of Independence, 152 ;
of Spanish Succession, 156-

7 ; Jacobite risings, 158 ;
Franco-Spanish, 158-160 ;
Wars of Polish Election and
Austrian Succession, 161 ;
Russo-Polish, 162 ; of French
Revolution, 166-7, 171-2 ;
Napoleonic, 173-196 ; Mos-
cow Campaign, 184-190 ;
Greek Independence, 202 ;
Italian liberation, 202-7 ;
Hungarian rerolt, 208 ; Ger-
man Unity : war with Aus-
tria, 210 ; with France, 211-
215 : Crimean, 217 ; Ameri-
can Civil, 207, 226-7 ; Russo-
Tnrkish, 218 ; Greek-Turk-
ish, 218 ; Macedonian, 220 ;
Mauchurian, 220-2; South
African and other British
Imperial wars, 223-5

Richard Clay <b Sons, Limited, London and Bungay.

Ferris, George Herbert

A short history of war
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