Part 13
[21] One pretended proof of a decline is found in the supposed substitution of slave labour for free Italian labour. This began, it is urged, on the opening of the Nile corn trade. Unfortunately, that is a mere romance. Ovid, describing rural appearances in Italy when as yet the trade was hardly in its infancy, speaks of the rustic labourer as working in fetters. Juvenal, in an age when the trade had been vastly expanded, notices the same phenomenon almost in the same terms.
[22] 'The best raw material.' Some people hold that the Romans and Italians were a cowardly nation. We doubt this on the whole. Physically, however, they were inferior to their neighbours. It is certain that the Transalpine Gauls were a conspicuously taller race. Cæsar says: 'Gallis, præ magnitudine corporum quorum, brevitas nostra contemptui est' ('Bell. Gall.' 2, 30 _fin_.); and the Germans, in a still higher degree, were both larger men and every way more powerful. The kites, says Juvenal, had never feasted on carcases so huge as those of the Cimbri and Teutones. But this physical superiority, though great for special purposes, was not such absolutely. For the more general uses of the legionary soldier, for marching, for castrametation, and the daily labours of the spade or mattock, a lighter build was better. As to single combats, it was one effect from the Roman (as from every good) discipline--that it diminished the openings for such showy but perilous modes of contest.
[23] '_Any considerable portion of this provincial corn growth,' i.e._, of the provincial culture which was pursued on account of Rome, meaning not the government of Rome, but, in a rigorous sense, on account of Rome the city. For here lies a great oversight of historians and economists. Because Rome, with a view to her own _privileged_ population, _i.e._, the urban population of Rome, the metropolis, in order that she might support her public distributions of grain, almost of necessity depended on foreign supplies, _we are not to suppose that the great mass of Italian towns and municipia did so_. Maritime towns, having the benefit of ports or of convenient access, undoubtedly were participators in the Roman advantage. But inland towns would in those days have forfeited the whole difference between foreign and domestic grain by the enormous cost of inland carriage. Of canals there was but one; the rivers were not generally navigable, and ports as well as river shipping were wanting.
[24] '_Heraclius._' The same prosodial fault affects this name as that of _Alexandria_. In each name the Latin _i_ represents a Greek _ei_, and in that situation (viz., as a penultimate syllable) should receive the emphasis in pronunciation as well as the sound of a long _i_ (that sound which is heard in Long_i_nus). So again Academ_i_a, not Acad_e_mia. The Greek accentuation may be doubted, but not the Roman.
[25] We have already said that Heraclius, who and whose family filled the throne of Eastern Cæsar for exactly one hundred years (611-711), consequently interesting in this way (if in no other), that he, as the reader will see by considering the limits in point of time, must have met and exhausted the first rage of the Mahometan _avalanche_, merits according to our estimate the title of first and noblest amongst the Oriental Cæsars. There are records or traditions of his earliest acts that we could wish otherwise. Which of us would _not_ offend even at this day, if called upon to act under one scale of sympathies, and to be judged under another? In his own day, too painfully we say it, Heraclius could not have followed what we venture to believe the suggestions of his heart, in relation to his predecessor, because a policy had been established which made it dangerous to be merciful, and a state of public feeling which made it effeminate to pardon. First make it safe to permit a man's life, before you pronounce it ignoble to authorize his death. Strip mercy of ruin to its author, before you affirm upon a judicial punishment of death (as then it was) cruelty in the adviser or ignobility in the approver. Escaping from these painful scenes at the threshold of his public life, we find Heraclius preparing for a war, the most difficult that in any age any hero has confronted. We call him the earliest of Crusaders, because he first and _literally_ fought for the recovery of the Cross. We call him the most prosperous of Crusaders, because he first--he last--succeeded in all that he sought, bringing back to Syria (ultimately to Constantinople) that sublime symbol of victorious Christianity which had been disgracefully lost at Jerusalem. Yet why, when comparing him not with Crusaders, but with Cæsars, do we pronounce him the noblest? Reader, which is it that is felt by a thoughtful man--supposing him called upon to select one act by preference before all others--to be the grandest act of our own Wellesley? Is it not the sagacious preparation of the lines at Torres Vedras, the self-mastery which lured the French on to their ruin, the long-suffering policy which reined up his troops till that ruin was accomplished? '_I bide my time_,' was the dreadful watchword of Wellington through that great drama; in which, let us tell the French critics on Tragedy, they will find _the most_ absolute unity of plot; for the forming of the lines as the fatal noose, the wiling back the enemy, the pursuit when the work of disorganization was perfect, all were parts of one and the same drama. If he (as another Scipio) saw another Zama, in this instance he was not our Scipio or Marcellus, but our Fabius Maximus:
'Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem.'--'Ann.' 8, 27.
Now, such was the Emperor Heraclius. He also had his avenging Zama. But, during a memorable interval of eleven years, he held back; fiercely reined up his wrath; brooded; smiled often balefully; watched in his lair; and then, when the hour had struck, let slip his armies and his thunderbolts as no Cæsar had ever done, except that one who founded the name of Cæsar.
[26] A brutal outrage on a Captain Jenkins--i.e., cutting off his ears--was the cause of a war with Spain in the reign of George II.--ED.
_XVIII. NATIONAL MANNERS AND FALSE JUDGMENT OF THEM._
Anecdotes illustrative of manners, above all of national manners, will be found on examination, in a far larger proportion than might be supposed, rank falsehoods. Malice is the secret foundation of all anecdotes in that class. The ordinary course of such falsehoods is, that first of all some stranger and alien to those feelings which have prompted a particular usage--incapable, therefore, of entering fully into its spirit or meaning--tries to exhibit its absurdity more forcibly by pushing it into an extreme or trying case. Coming himself from some gross form of _Kleinstädtigkeit_, where no restraints of decorum exist, and where everybody speaks to everybody, he has been utterly confounded by the English ceremony of 'introduction,' when enforced as the _sine quâ non_ condition of personal intercourse. If England is right, then how clownishly wrong must have been his own previous circles! If England is not ridiculously fastidious, then how bestially grovelling must be the spirit of social intercourse in his own land! But no man reconciles himself to this view of things in a moment. He kicks even against his own secret convictions. He blushes with shame and anger at the thought of his own family perhaps brought suddenly into collision with polished Englishmen; he thrills with wrath at the recollection of having himself trespassed upon this code of restriction at a time when he was yet unwarned of its existence. In this temper he is little qualified to review such a regulation with reason and good sense. He seeks to make it appear ridiculous. He presses it into violent cases for which it was never intended. He supposes a case where some fellow-creature is drowning. How would an Englishman act, how _could_ he act, even under such circumstances as these? _We_ know, we who are blinded by no spite, that as a bar to personal communication or to any interchange of good offices under appeals so forcible as these, this law of formal presentation between the parties never did and never will operate. The whole motive to such a law gives way at once.
_XIX. INCREASED POSSIBILITIES OF SYMPATHY IN THE PRESENT AGE._
Some years ago I had occasion to remark that a new era was coming on by hasty strides for national politics, a new organ was maturing itself for public effects. Sympathy--how great a power is that! Conscious sympathy--how immeasurable! Now, for the total development of this power, _time_ is the most critical of elements. Thirty years ago, when the Edinburgh mail took ninety-six hours in its transit from London, how slow was the reaction of the Scottish capital upon the English! Eight days for the _diaulos_[27] of the journey, and two, suppose, for getting up a public meeting, composed a cycle of _ten_ before an act received its commentary, before a speech received its refutation, or an appeal its damnatory answer. What was the consequence? The sound was disconnected from its echo, the kick was severed from the recalcitration, the '_Take you this!_' was unlinked from the '_And take you that!_' Vengeance was defeated, and sympathy dissolved into the air. But now mark the difference. A meeting on Monday in Liverpool is by possibility reported in the London _Standard_ of Monday evening. On Tuesday, the splendid merchant, suppose his name were Thomas Sands, who had just sent a vibration through all the pulses of Liverpool, of Manchester, of Warrington, sees this great rolling fire (which hardly yet has reached his own outlying neighbourhoods) taken up afar off, redoubled, multiplied, peal after peal, through the vast artilleries of London. Back comes rolling upon him the smoke and the thunder--the defiance to the slanderer and the warning to the offender--groans that have been extorted from wounded honour, aspirations rising from the fervent heart--truth that had been hidden, wisdom that challenged co-operation.
And thus it is that all the nation, thus 'all that mighty heart,' through nine hundred miles of space, from Sutherlandshire by London to the myrtle climate of Cornwall, has become and is ever more becoming one infinite harp, swept by the same breeze of sentiment, reverberating the same sympathies
'Here, there, and in all places at one time.'[28]
Time, therefore, that ancient enemy of man and his frail purposes, how potent an ally has it become in combination with great mechanic changes! Many an imperfect hemisphere of thought, action, desire, that could not heretofore unite with its corresponding hemisphere, because separated by ten or fourteen days of suspense, now moves electrically to its integration, hurries to its complement, realizes its orbicular perfection, spherical completion, through that simple series of improvements which to man have given the wings and _talaria_ of Gods, for the heralds have dimly suggested a future rivalship with the velocities of light, and even now have inaugurated a race between the child of mortality and the North Wind.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] 'The _diaulos_ of the journey.' We recommend to the amateur in words this Greek phrase, which expresses by one word an egress linked with its corresponding regress, which indicates at once the voyage outwards and the voyage inwards, as the briefest of expressions for what is technically called '_course of post,' i.e._, the reciprocation of post, its systole and diastole.
[28] Wordsworth.
_XX. THE PRINCIPLE OF EVIL._
We are not to suppose the rebel, or, more properly, corrupted angels--the rebellion being in the result, not in the intention (which is as little conceivable in an exalted spirit as that man should prepare to make war on gravitation)--were essentially evil. Whether a principle of evil--essential evil--anywhere exists can only be guessed. So gloomy an idea is shut up from man. Yet, if so, possibly the angels and man were nearing it continually.
Possibly after a certain approach to that Maelstrom recall might be hopeless. Possibly many anchors had been thrown out to pick up, had all dragged, and last of all came to the Jewish trial. (Of course, under the Pagan absence of sin, _a fall was impossible_. A return was impossible, in the sense that you cannot return to a place which you have never left. Have I ever noticed this?) We are not to suppose that the angels were really in a state of rebellion. So far from that, it was evidently amongst the purposes of God that what are called false Gods, and are so in the ultimate sense of resting on tainted principles and tending to ruin--perhaps irretrievable (though it would be the same thing practically if no restoration were possible but through vast æons of unhappy incarnations)--but otherwise were as real as anything can be into whose nature a germ of evil has entered, should effect a secondary ministration of the last importance to man's welfare. Doubt there can be little that without any religion, any sense of dependency, or gratitude, or reverence as to superior natures, man would rapidly have deteriorated; and that would have tended to such destruction of all nobler principles--patriotism (strong in the old world as with us), humanity, ties of parentage or neighbourhood--as would soon have thinned the world; so that the Jewish process thus going on must have failed for want of correspondencies to the scheme--possibly endless oscillations which, however coincident with plagues, would extirpate the human race. We may see in manufacturing neighbourhoods, so long as no dependency exists on masters, where wages show that not work, but workmen, are scarce, how unamiable, insolent, fierce, are the people; the poor cottagers on a great estate may sometimes offend you by too obsequious a spirit towards all gentry. That was a transition state in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, when few manufacturers and merchants had risen to such a generous model. But this leaves room for many domestic virtues that would suffer greatly in the other state. Yet this is but a faint image of the total independency. Oaths were sacred only through the temporal judgments supposed to overtake those who insulted the Gods by summoning them to witness a false contract. But this would have been only part of the evil. So long as men acknowledged higher natures, they were doubtful about futurity. This doubt had little strength on the side of hope, but much on the side of fear. The blessings of any future state were cheerless and insipid mockeries; so Achilles--how he bemoans his state! But the torments were real. By far more, however, they, through this coarse agency of syllogistic dread, would act to show man the degradation of his nature when all light of a higher existence had disappeared. That which did not exist for natures supposed capable originally of immortality, how should it exist for him? And that man must have observed with little attention what takes place in this world if he needs to be told that nothing tends to make his own species cheap and hateful in his eyes so certainly as moral degradation driven to a point of no hope. So in squalid dungeons, in captivities of slaves, nay, in absolute pauperism, all hate each other fiercely. Even with us, how sad is the thought--that, just as a man needs pity, as he is stript of all things, when most the sympathy of men should settle on him, then most is he contemplated with a hard-hearted contempt! The Jews when injured by our own oppressive princes were despised and hated. Had they raised an empire, licked their oppressors well, they would have been compassionately loved. So lunatics heretofore; so galley-slaves--Toulon, Marseilles, etc. This brutal principle of degradation soon developed in man. The Gods, therefore, performed a great agency for man. And it is clear that God did not discourage _common_ rites or rights for His altar or theirs. Nay, he sent Israel to Egypt--as one reason--to learn ceremonies amongst a people who sequestered them. In evil the Jews always clove to their religion. Next the difficulty of people, miracles, though less for false Gods, and least of all for the meanest, was _alike_ for both. Astarte does not kill Sayth on the spot, but by a judgment. Gods, no more their God, spake an instant law. Even the prophets are properly no prophets, but only the mode of speech by God,--as clear as He _can_ speak. Men mistake God's hate by their own. So neither could He reveal Himself. A vast age would be required for seeing God.
But for the thought of man as evil (or of any other form of evil), as reconcilable with their idea of a perfect God, a happy idea may, like the categories, proceed upon a necessity for a perfect _inversion_ of the _methodus conspiciendi_. Let us retrace, but in such a form as to be apprehensible by all readers. Analytic and synthetic propositions at once throw light upon the notion of a category. Once it had been a mere abstraction; of no possible use except as a convenient cell for referring (as in a nest of boxes), which may perhaps as much degrade the idea as a relative of my own degraded the image of the crescent moon by saying, in his abhorrence of sentimentality, that it reminded him of the segment from his own thumb-nail when clean cut by an instrument called a nail-cutter. This was the Aristotelian notion. But Kant could not content himself with this idea. His own theory (1) as to time and space, (2) the refutation of Hume's notion of cause, and (3) his own great discovery of synthetic and analytic propositions, all prepared the way for a totally new view. But, now, what is the origin of this necessity applied to the category as founded in the synthesis? How does a synthesis make itself or anything else necessary? Explain me that.
This was written perhaps a fortnight ago. Now, Monday, May 23 (day fixed for Dan Good's execution), I _do_ explain it by what this moment I seem to have discovered--the necessity of cause, of substance, etc., lies in the intervening synthesis. This you _must_ pass through in the course tending to and finally reaching the idea; for the analytical presupposes this synthesis.
Not only must the energies of destruction be equal to those of creation, but, in fact, perhaps by the trespassing a little of the first upon the last, is the true advance sustained; for it must be an advance as well as a balance. But you say this will but in other words mean that forces devoted (and properly so) to production or creation are absorbed by destruction. True; but the opposing phenomena will be going on in a large ratio, and each must react on the other. The productive must meet and correspond to the destructive. The destructive must revise and stimulate the continued production.
_XXI. ON MIRACLES._
What else is the laying of such a stress on miracles but the case of 'a wicked and adulterous generation asking a sign'?
But what are these miracles for? To prove a legislation from God. But, first, this could not be proved, even if miracle-working were the test of Divine mission, by doing miracles until we knew whether the power were genuine; _i.e._, not, like the magicians of Pharaoh or the witch of Endor, from below. Secondly, you are a poor, pitiful creature, that think the power to do miracles, or power of any kind that can exhibit itself in an act, the note of a god-like commission. Better is one ray of truth (not seen previously by man), of _moral_ truth, _e.g._, forgiveness of enemies, than all the powers which could create the world.
'Oh yes!' says the objector; 'but Christ was holy as a man.' This we know first; then we judge by His power that He must have been from God. But if it were doubtful whether His power were from God, then, until this doubt is _otherwise_, is independently removed, you cannot decide if He _was_ holy by a test of holiness absolutely irrelevant. With other holiness--apparent holiness--a simulation might be combined. You can never tell that a man is holy; and for the plain reason that God only can read the heart.
'Let Him come down from the cross, and we,' etc. Yes; they fancied so. But see what would really have followed. They would have been stunned and confounded for the moment, but not at all converted in heart. Their hatred to Christ was not built on their unbelief, but their unbelief in Christ was built on their hatred; and this hatred would not have been mitigated by another (however astounding) miracle. This I wrote (Monday morning, June 7, 1847) in reference to my saying on the general question of miracles: Why these _dubious_ miracles?--such as curing blindness that may have been cured by a _process_?--since the _unity_ given to the act of healing is probably (more probably than otherwise) but the figurative unity of the tendency to _mythus_; or else it is that unity misapprehended and mistranslated by the reporters. Such, again, as the miracles of the loaves--so liable to be utterly gossip, so incapable of being watched or examined amongst a crowd of 7,000 people. Besides, were these people mad? The very fact which is said to have drawn Christ's pity, viz., their situation in the desert, surely could not have escaped their own attention on going thither. Think of 7,000 people rushing to a sort of destruction; for if less than that the mere inconvenience was not worthy of Divine attention. Now, said I, why not give us (if miracles _are_ required) one that nobody could doubt--removing a mountain, _e.g._? Yes; but here the other party begin to _see_ the evil of miracles. Oh, this would have _coerced_ people into believing! Rest you safe as to that. It would have been no believing in any proper sense: it would, at the utmost--and supposing no vital demur to popular miracle--have led people into that belief which Christ Himself describes (and regrets) as calling Him Lord! Lord! The pretended belief would have left them just where they were as to any real belief in Christ. Previously, however, or over and above all this, there would be the demur (let the miracle have been what it might) of, By what power, by whose agency or help? For if Christ does a miracle, probably He may do it by alliance with some _Z_ standing behind, out of sight. Or if by His own skill, how or whence derived, or of what nature? This obstinately recurrent question remains.
There is not the meanest court in Christendom or Islam that would not say, if called on to adjudicate the rights of an estate on such evidence as the mere facts of the Gospel: 'O good God, how can we do this? Which of us knows who this Matthew was--whether he ever lived, or, if so, whether he ever wrote a line of all this? or, if he did, how situated as to motives, as to means of information, as to judgment and discrimination? Who knows anything of the contrivances or the various personal interests in which the whole narrative originated, or when? All is dark and dusty.' Nothing in such a case _can_ be proved but what shines by its own light. Nay, God Himself could not attest a miracle, but (listen to this!)--but by the internal revelation or visiting of the Spirit--to evade which, to dispense with which, a miracle is ever resorted to.