Studies in Literature and History Part 18

RACE AND RELIGION[56]

I propose to offer for consideration some very general views upon the effects and interaction of the ideas of Race and Religion upon the political grouping of the population in various countries of Eastern Europe and of Asia, with the object of showing how they unite and divide mankind over a great portion of the earth. It will be understood, I hope, that it is impossible in a brief discussion to go far or thoroughly over such a wide field. I can only try to indicate some salient points that may be worth attention.

If we look back upon the ancient world, as it was known to Greece and to Rome, and as it can be dimly surveyed through the records of cla.s.sic antiquity, we find that before the Christian era the populations were divided and subdivided into races or tribes, with names signifying a common origin or descent; at any rate some kind of tribal a.s.sociation. The designation of their country was usually derived from the name of some dominant race, as Gallia from the Gauls or Judea from the Jews; indeed I might say, as France from the Franks or England from the Angles. Religious denominations of any large community were, I venture to suggest, unknown, at any rate in ancient Europe. The polytheism of these ages was too local and miscellaneous to weld together any considerable groups on the basis of a common worship or belief; for although three great religions then existed, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the faith of Zoroaster (still represented by the Pa.r.s.ees), these were confined to Central and Eastern Asia. And, moreover, these religions had not the missionary spirit; I mean that they made no vigorous open attempts to spread and gain proselytes, still less did they use force to convert great mult.i.tudes. But after the Christian era a change came over the face of the Western world.

The Roman empire--that greatest monument of human power, as Dean Church has called it--began the fusion of races into one vast political society; its dominion extended continuously from Britain on the west to Asia Minor and the countries bordering on the Caspian Sea; it settled the law and language of Southern Europe. The establishment of the Roman empire is a cardinal epoch of the world's political history. Then followed two events of immense political importance that changed the whole aspect and condition of the religious world--the rise and spread of two powerful missionary and militant religions.

First came Christianity to overspread the lands which the empire had levelled politically. Islam followed in the seventh century, and the conflict between these two rival faiths, each claiming universal spiritual dominion, altered not only the spiritual but also the temporal order of things in Europe and Western Asia. In Asia the victorious creed of Mohammed imposed upon immense mult.i.tudes a religious denomination; they became Mussulmans. In Western Europe the dominion of the Roman empire had by this time fallen to pieces; it was torn asunder by barbarian invaders; but upon the ruins of that empire was built up the great Catholic Church of Rome, which gathered together all races of the West under the common denomination of Christianity. Beneath the canopies of these two great religions the primitive grouping of the people survived; throughout Europe there were no settled kingdoms or nations, but a jumble of races and tribes contending for land and power. Now we know that in Western Europe this strife and confusion of the Middle Ages at last ended in the formation, on a large scale, of separate nationalities, and perhaps we may take, roughly, the end of the fifteenth century as the period when the great territorial kingdoms were definitely marked out, and when the rulers were rounding off their possessions under designations that may be called national. In these countries the subdivisions according to race had now lost almost all political significance; but in the sixteenth century another great disturbing element reappeared. The great wars of religion again made a fresh division of the people into two camps of Roman Catholics and Protestants. This ferment has gradually subsided, and at the present time all minor groups of the population in Western Europe have been absorbed under large national designations; the nations are marked off within clearly cut frontiers, and separated by the paramount distinction of languages. In Western Europe you do not now define a man by his original race or by his religion, you ask whose natural-born subject he is, in whose territory he lives, and you cla.s.s him accordingly as French, English, Spanish or Italian.

Now it has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts that still have great strength and vitality, may be connected with the influence, in France and England, of a certain school of political philosophy that arose in the eighteenth century, in France. The Encyclopedistes, as they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French Encyclopaedia, treated in theory all notions of separate races, religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a common civilisation, which was to unite all peoples on general principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emanc.i.p.ation from local or national prejudices. As a theory this might not have had much practical effect; but at the end of the eighteenth century came the French Revolution, when these philosophical notions took a very seriously practical shape; for the French Republican armies invaded the kingdoms of Western Europe with the war-cry of universal fraternity and equality. Revolutionary France ignored both race and religion. It proclaimed, De Tocqueville says, above and instead of all peculiar nationalities, an intellectual citizenship that was intended to include the people of every country to which it extended, superseding all distinctions of language, tradition, and national character. Under Napoleon this fierce impulse of democratic levelling was transformed into Imperialism: he aimed at restoring an Empire in the West. But this aroused equally fierce resistance, and when Napoleon had been beaten down, the national feeling emerged stronger than ever. The doctrines of the French Encyclopedistes were inherited by the English school of Utilitarians, led by Bentham and the two Mills; and John Stuart Mill in particular, declared that one of the chief obstacles to human improvement was the tendency to regard difference of race as indelible. In fact, all this school, which had considerable influence some forty years ago, treated religious and social distinctions as inconvenient and decaying barriers against rational progress, or as fictions invented by indolent thinkers to save themselves the trouble of investigating the true causes that modify human character.

There is undoubtedly a certain degree of truth underlying this view.

In the settled nationalities of the West these distinctions of race and religion have a tendency to become unimportant and obsolete for political purposes, although a glance across the water to Ireland will remind us that they have by no means disappeared. What I wish to lay stress upon is the very serious importance of race and religion, politically, in other parts of the world, and particularly in some Asiatic countries with which England is closely connected and concerned. For, in the first place, there has been a notable revival of the sentiment of race in Eastern Europe. And, secondly, the spread of European dominion over Asia may be regarded as one of the most prominent and powerful movements in the politics of the latter half of the nineteenth century; one which may become the dominant feature of politics in the twentieth century. It is this movement that is forcing upon our serious attention the immense practical importance of race and religion.

The plan which I shall attempt to follow in making a brief survey of my subject, is to begin with a glance at the political condition of Central Europe, and to travel rapidly Eastward. In the West, as I have said, we have compact and permanently established States with national governments. But as soon as we pa.s.s to Central Europe we find the Austro-Hungarian empire distracted and threatened by internal feuds, arising out of the contention for ascendency of two races, Germans and Slavonians, and also out of the demands of the various provinces and dependencies for political recognition of their separate ident.i.ties, founded on claims to represent internal sections or subdivisions of the two chief races. The Slavonic populations in the north-west of the empire are parted asunder from those in the south-east by the Hungarians, who came in from the east, and are of a different stock, and who have succeeded in establishing the federated kingdom of Hungary. I will not trouble you with statistical or geographical details. For my present purpose it is enough to mention that the subjects of Austria, apart from Hungary, are cla.s.sed in eight separate sections, differentiated by separate languages, and that Poles, Bohemians, Germans, and Italians, are all and each claiming a kind of home rule within the empire, and show an increasing tendency to group themselves by distinctions of race. In Bohemia the population is nearly equally divided between Germans and Slavs, who speak different languages, have separate schools, and contend violently for political preponderance. In Moravia and Silesia, where the Slav element is stronger, the same conflict goes on. In Galicia the contest is between Poles and Ruthenians, between the Roman Catholic and the Greek churches. In Hungary proper the Magyars have political predominance, but the population of German descent and language is more numerous than the Magyars: in Transylvania, further eastward, the Magyars are politically overriding the Slav races; in Croatia to the southward a similar struggle is going on. Throughout every province of the Austro-Hungarian empire we see the same intermixture of races, religions, and languages--the more numerous and better united sections are striving for political ascendency: the weaker sections contend against them by demanding autonomy. And, as all these various antipathies and jealousies are represented in the Parliament of the empire, the peaceful consolidation of the empire into a large national State is interrupted by resistance under the watchword of separate nationalities. Religious differences between Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, and the Greek Church in the Eastern provinces, accentuate the incoherence. Each separate group takes for its symbol, the standard round which people rally, a language--German, Polish, Tcheque, Ruthenian, and so on. They are all being energetically maintained and jealously preserved in speech and writing in the schools and the a.s.semblies. Moreover, three different churches, at least, are rallying their adherents and driving in the wedge of religious dissension. All these groups go back to the early traditions and history of the races, they sharpen up old grievances, and oppose each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil society, and to reverse the order of political amalgamation of small States into large ones which has been operating for centuries in Western Europe. In Western Europe the principle of nationalities has been a method not of disintegration, but of concentration. It has led within the last fifty years to the establishment of two States of first-cla.s.s magnitude, Germany and Italy; and Louis Napoleon, who had proclaimed the idea of national unification, was ruined by his own policy, for the Germans destroyed his dynasty, and Italy gave him no help. But in Austro-Hungary, on the contrary, the movement is not toward centralisation--it is centrifugal and separatist; and if it continues to increase in force it may threaten with dissolution an ancient and powerful empire.

You will observe that since we entered, in our survey, the Austrian territories, we have found ourselves within the jurisdiction of an empire in the true sense of that word, which I take to mean the dominion of one superior sovereignty over many subordinate races, tribes, or petty States that obey its authority. I may be permitted to regard the German emperor as the military head of a const.i.tutional federation, which is a different thing. Now I think it may be said that from Austria eastward across South-Eastern Europe and Asia, from Vienna to Pekin, the general form of government is not national but imperial. Every government is holding together a number of different groups, all jealous of each other, all of whom would fall apart and probably fight among themselves, if they were not kept under by one ruler over them. It may be affirmed, broadly, that the structure of modern Europe, as represented by the ma.s.sing of the populations into great h.o.m.ogeneous nations within fixed limits, has now been completely left behind in the West, and that from the sh.o.r.es of the Adriatic Sea right across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the real subdivisions of the people, the bonds that unite and separate them into different groups, are denoted by Race and Religion, sometimes by one, sometimes by the other, occasionally by both.

Our first step over the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire, proceeding south-east beyond the Danube and the Carpathian mountains, brings us into the various princ.i.p.alities and provinces that were once under the dominion of the Ottoman empire, though almost all of them are now independent of it. Nearly all of them lie in the region south of the Danube, which is usually known as the Balkan Peninsula. Here the complexities of race and religion are abundantly manifest, and these archaic divisions of political society surround us everywhere.

This region has indeed been parcelled out, within our own time, into territories of diverse States, but this is quite a modern formation, and the idea of such political citizenship has been very recently introduced.

If, now, it is asked why, in this corner of South-Eastern Europe, this medley of internal distinctions, which was the prevailing characteristic of the ancient world, has been so long preserved, the answer is that all this country, the Balkan Peninsula, was under the direct government of the Ottoman empire up to about seventy years ago, and that most of the provinces were only liberated from the Turkish yoke in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The effect of the long dominion of the Turks over this country had been to perpetuate the state of things which existed when they first conquered it. Their policy, the policy of all Asiatic empires, was not to consolidate, or to obliterate differences produced by race and religion, but to maintain them in order to rule more securely. And here I may quote from a book recently published under the t.i.tle of _Turkey in Europe_, which is unique of its kind, for in no other work can we find so complete and particular a history of the Balkan lands, or so accurate a description of the grouping of the people, taken from personal knowledge and local investigation. The author, who calls himself Odysseus, reminds us that the Ottoman Sultans acquired these territories when they were in the confusion and dismemberment which followed the decay and fall of the Byzantine empire; and he explains that the Turks, who have been always inferior in number to the aggregate of their Christian subjects, could hardly have kept up their dominion if at any time the Christians had united against them. As the Christians were not converted, religious unification, which in Asia was the basis of Mohammedan power, was here impossible, so the Turks divided that they might rule. 'The Turks have thoroughly learned,' he says, 'and daily put into practice with admirable skill, the lesson of _divide et impera_, and hence they have always done, and still do, all in their power to prevent the obliteration of racial, linguistic, and religious differences.' They have perpetuated and preserved, as if in a museum, the strange medley that was existing when these lands were first conquered by Turkish Sultans nearly five hundred years ago.

Their idea of government has always been simply to take tribute and secure their paramount supremacy. The result has been that the confusion, intermixture, and rivalry of race and religion is far more intricate than even in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the central government has tried to reconcile and amalgamate. In Turkey, Odysseus tells us, 'not only is there a medley of races, but the races inhabit, not different districts, but the same district. Of three villages within ten miles of one another, one will be Turkish, one Greek, one Bulgarian--or perhaps one Albanian, one Bulgarian, and one Servian, each with their own language, dress, and religion, and eight races and languages may be found in one large town.'

What has been the upshot and consequence of this Turkish system? It has been to make the Balkan Peninsula a battlefield, during the last four centuries, of two great militant creeds, Christianity and Islam, collecting the population into two religious camps; while inside these two main religious divisions there are manifold subdivisions of race.

Men of the same creed are in different groups of race; nor are the race-groups always of the same creed, for one section may have become fanatic Mohammedans, while the rest have adhered to Christianity. The intermixture is the more complicated because one cannot attempt to distinguish a race by physical characteristics, by their personal appearance or features as marking descent from one stock. The practices of polygamy, slavery, of the purchase of women, and their capture in the interminable wars, have produced incessant crossing of breeds. It is not often understood or remembered that in former times a tribe or band of foreign invaders, when they had to cross the sea or to make long expeditions, very rarely brought women with them. So when they settled on the conquered lands they must have intermarried, forcibly or otherwise, with the subject race. If they ma.s.sacred the men, the women were part of their booty. Neither is the test of language a sure one, though it is the best we have, and is becoming more and more the criterion of race; for a kind of struggle for existence goes on among the languages, they spread or contract under various influences, mainly political. The folk may change their language as they may change their creed; and, what is more remarkable, they may even change their race. According to the book I have just quoted, the Ottoman Government cla.s.ses all its subject population into religious communities. Whatever be a man's race or language, if he professes Islam, he is called a Mohammedan; if he is of the orthodox Greek Church at Constantinople, he is Greek or Rumi, for Stambul was the capital of the Roman empire; or else he is Katholik, Armenian, or Jew, according to his creed, not according to his birthplace or his blood. So the official designations are religious, while the popular usage is various, sometimes following race, sometimes creed, and it is still constantly shifting, as I shall presently try to explain.

And here it may be interesting to mention a peculiarity of the growth and const.i.tution of the Eastern or Greek Church, in contrast with the Western Church of Rome. The Roman Church has always claimed universality--it has ignored and attempted to trample down all political and national divisions; it demands of all Roman Catholics, whoever they may be, submission to the supreme spiritual dictation of the Roman pontiff, and those who accept any other authority are outside the pale. From the beginning the Roman Catholic Church has made incessant war upon every kind of heresy or dissent, transforming the old rites and worships where they could not be exterminated. It proclaims independence of the State, it has no local centres or national branches. The Pope at Rome claims spiritual authority over all Roman Catholics everywhere. But the historical fact that the Eastern or Greek Church was always under the control of the Byzantine empire at Constantinople, has kept this Church much more closely allied to the temporal power; and the result has been that throughout its development it has remained closely connected with the State. So that wherever a fresh State has been formed, the Greek Church has become national, and the spiritual authority, adapting itself to political changes, has become a separate inst.i.tution. The most signal example of this is to be seen in Russia, where the Greek Church, being cut off from Constantinople, had its own independent Patriarch up to the time of Peter the Great; and very lately, when Bulgaria became a State, it set up its own head of the Church, or Exarch. When Bosnia and Herzegovina were ruled by the Turkish Sultan, the chief of the Greek Church in that country was the Patriarch at Constantinople. Now that these provinces have pa.s.sed under the administration of Austria, the ecclesiastical authority has also been transferred from the Patriarch to local Metropolitans. Each new State shows a tendency to establish what I may call spiritual Home Rule. We know that in Western Europe the establishment of National Churches came in by one great religious upheaval that is called the Reformation. In Eastern Europe the movement has proceeded gradually, keeping pace with the rise and recognition of separate governments, and the result has been the multiplication of internal ecclesiastical divisions.

I have said that the Ottoman empire recognises only religious denominations in the cla.s.sification of the people. Apparently this was the general usage in former times. A Greek meant a member of the orthodox Greek Church, who might or might not be an inhabitant of Greece, nor would he necessarily have spoken the Greek tongue. If a Christian changed his religion, as a matter of course he changed his name and his designation; he was placed in another group. But the pressure of political independence has been latterly bringing into prominence the idea of Race. Odysseus, from whose book I quote again, gives us the very curious fact that even race is not immutable, it changes like religion, with the political movement; it has become a question of political expediency. When a separate State has been organised, as in Bulgaria, or when a league for shaking off the Turkish yoke is being organised, as in Macedonia, the plan of the leaders is to induce the people to drop minor distinctions of origin and to unite for the purposes of political combination, under some larger national name, to call themselves h.e.l.lenes in Greece, Bulgarians in Bulgaria, and Macedonians in the Turkish province of Macedonia. Moreover, when a new State has been thus formed, like Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, on the principle of Race, the patriotic party begins to discover that many Greeks or Bulgarians are outside the territory, and they set up a claim to enlarge their boundaries in order to bring these people inside. So that the questions of races and churches are used to keep up continual intrigues, dissensions, and a lively agitation throughout these countries. For since religion is always a powerful uniting force, there is a constant effort to bring the people to congregate under the Established Church of their new State, to renounce their obedience to any spiritual head outside its limits. We have, therefore, the curious spectacle of a frequent shifting of denominations of Race and Creed for the purpose of political consolidation. In fact we are witnessing in the Balkan Peninsula a struggle among the petty States to strengthen themselves by capturing each other's population.

I think I may have said enough to prove, briefly and superficially, the importance, in Central and South-Eastern Europe, of the ideas of Race and Religion, the necessity of understanding their strength and operation. So soon as we cross into Asia we find these ideas universally paramount. It will perhaps be remembered that Henry Maine pointed out long ago, in his book on Ancient Law, that during a large part of what we call modern history no such conception was entertained as that of territorial sovereignty, as indicated by such a t.i.tle as the King of France. 'Sovereignty,' he said, 'was not a.s.sociated with dominion over a portion or subdivision of the earth.' Now I do not believe that a territorial t.i.tle is a.s.sumed at this moment by any of the great Asiatic sovereigns in Asia. Here in Europe we talk of the Sultan of Turkey, the Shah of Persia, or the Emperor of China; but these are not the styles or designations which are actually used by these potentates; they are each known, on their coins, and in their public proclamations, by a string of lofty t.i.tles, generally religious, like our 'Defender of the Faith,' which make no reference to their territories. Such were the t.i.tles of the Moghul emperors of India, and I may here observe that the term Emperor of India, now borne by the English king, is entirely of British manufacture. The truth is that Asiatic kingdoms have no settled territorial boundaries, they are always changing, just as our Indian frontiers are constantly moving forward; and wherever in Asia there exists a demarcated line of frontier, it has been fixed by the intervention of European governments interested in maintaining order. In Mohammedan lands the basis of a ruler's authority, in theory at least, is religious, and all through Western Asia there is the closest connection between the State and the dominant creed of Islam; for a Mohammedan sovereign's authority is ecclesiastical, so to speak, as well as civil; he is bound, in the words of our Litany, not only to 'execute justice,' but to 'maintain truth'; and the theory of two separate jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal, is practically unknown, though of course in dealing with religious questions the ruler must be supported by the chief expounders of the law of Islam.

To borrow a phrase from Hobbes, 'the religion of the Mohammedans is a part of their policy,' as it is also the fundamental bond of their whole society.

We have seen that in South-Eastern Europe there is an intricate intermixture of the distinctions of race and religion, with a tendency of race to win the mastery. This is because the people of those countries were conquered by Islam, but only partially converted, and the Turkish Sultans, as I have already said, encouraged discord among their Christian subjects. But in Western Asia the faith of Islam not only conquered but converted much more completely; it almost extirpated other faiths in Asia Minor and Persia, leaving in Asia Minor only a few obscure sects, like the Nestorians, in a region that had been wholly Christian, and leaving in Persia only some scattered relics of the great Zoroastrian religion, still represented in two or three towns by those whom we call Pa.r.s.ees. In these lands, therefore, religion has generally mastered race, for the laws that regulate the whole personal condition and property of the people are determined by their religion, with a certain variety of local customs. Nevertheless, beneath the overspreading religious denomination there are a large number of tribal groups, all of whom are known by tribal names. Most of these tribes are fanatic Islamites, but in the midst of them is one group which is distinct by religion and probably by race--I mean the Armenians. They do not form a majority of the population in Armenia, they are scattered about Western Asia, and are divided into two Christian sects, which under the Turkish empire are regarded as two religious communities. Their recent terrible misfortunes afford a signal and melancholy warning of the danger of interfering in Oriental affairs without a full understanding of the complications arising out of these very differences and antagonisms of race and religion that I have been endeavouring to explain. And the whole story is a striking example of the tremendous power of religion in Asiatic politics. In 1895 the European Powers interposed in the name of justice and humanity to press upon the Turkish Government the reforms that had been promised by treaty, and thus to better the condition of the Armenians, by securing to them a certain share in the local and munic.i.p.al government. But the Armenians are a scattered and subject people, different in race and religion and language from the ruling Turks, and the demand for giving them some kind of independence alarmed the Turkish Government and inflamed the fanaticism of the Mohammedans. The only result of European intervention was a frightful ma.s.sacre of the Armenians, which the European Powers witnessed without any serious attempt to stop. Such are the consequences of misunderstanding the real political situation and the forces at work.

Probably many people in England had a very hazy notion of what the Armenians were, or what their name signified. We have always to remember that throughout Asia, and indeed over the greater part of the non-Christian world, the various sections of the population very rarely use for themselves, or indeed for the country that they dwell in, the name that is used for them by Europeans. As our own system has become territorial, as we call any natural-born inhabitant of France a Frenchman, and so on, we are led by a false a.n.a.logy to talk of Turkey and the Turks, Persia and the Persians, India and the Indians, China and the Chinese. But these broad designations denoting modern nationalities are not used in Asia by the people themselves, to whom such a conception is foreign. I know of no terms in the languages of these countries that correspond to our words, Turkey, India, China, as geographical expressions, and I think that the names used by Europeans for outlying countries or peoples often come from some accident or chance, or mistake, or by taking the name of a part of a country for the name of the whole. In Asia the people still cla.s.s themselves, in their ordinary talk, by names designating religion or race. A curious example of a religious designation still survives, by the way, among Europeans in South Africa. When the first Portuguese explorers of the African coast asked the Arab traders about the indigenous tribes, they, being Mohammedans, said that the natives were all Kafirs, which means Infidels. This was supposed to be the general name of a people, and it has been handed down to us so that we still call the South African natives Kaffirs. I doubt whether the tribes concerned have ever used or recognised among themselves this unsavoury name. I may note, by the way, that one of the most ancient tribal names in Asia is that by which the Greeks, outside the Turkish empire, are often known--Yunani, or Ionian--which must have been in use from the days when the Greek colonies settled on the coast of Asia Minor, many centuries before the Christian era.

We are pushing our survey eastward across Asia. The kingdom known to Europe by the name of Persia is styled by its inhabitants _Iran_, though I doubt whether a Persian subject belonging to a particular tribe or sect would call himself _Irani_. The next independent kingdom, beyond Persia, is Afghanistan; and here we have an example of a designation originally implying race, gradually merging into one that is territorial and political. Afghanistan originally meant, I believe, the great central ma.s.s of mountains occupied by a tribe called Afghans; it is now becoming a name that includes the whole territory ruled by the Afghan Amir at Kabul. The causes that are producing this change in the signification of the word are, first, that the Amir of Kabul has subdued, more or less, all the tribes inhabiting the country; and secondly, that the pressure of England and Russia on two sides of that country has necessitated an accurate demarcation of frontiers all round it, in order that the Amir's territories, which are under our protection, may be precisely known.

The kingdom is thus acquiring a territorial designation. But this kingdom of Afghanistan is really composed of a number of chiefships and provinces very loosely knit together under the sway of the Amir, which might fall asunder again if the rulership at Kabul became weak.

And the population is all parcelled out into various races and tribes, usually dwelling in separate tracts under local chiefs; they are always known among themselves by names, denoting race or tribe; sometimes patriarchal, like the Children of Israel, or the clans of our own Highlands; sometimes local, and in one case historical, for the dominant tribe to which the Amir belongs has called itself Durani or royal.

It is therefore the distinction of race or tribe, not of religion, that governs the whole interior population throughout this vast region of high mountains and valleys in the centre, with comparatively open country on the north and south; the whole area has been peopled by a conflux of tribes. Yet Afghanistan has some of the symptoms of national growth--I mean that if it could hold together as one kingdom it might grow into a nationality. In religion the Afghans are almost all fanatical Mohammedans, for Afghanistan is the great bulwark and citadel on the eastern frontier of Islam, and beyond it, in Eastern Asia, there are no independent Mohammedan princ.i.p.alities. The kingdom has a strictly defined territory, and a dynasty which has risen from the chiefship of a powerful tribe to the heritable possession of that territory. This dynasty, moreover, is identical in race and religion with a large majority of its subjects, which is another peculiar source of strength; for almost all the other first-cla.s.s kingdoms of Asia are ruled by dynasties of alien race, who sometimes profess a religion different from that of many of their subjects. We are frequently reminded of the important fact that in India the English rulers are aliens in race and religion from the people; but we may also remember that after all this is only a difference of degree, a wider separation between the governors and the governed than elsewhere in Asia. The princ.i.p.al kingdoms of Asia are ruled by foreign families or dynasties that have come in by conquest. The Moghul dynasty that preceded our own government in India was foreign; and it was a Mohammedan rulership over an enormous Hindu population. The Ottoman Turk was a foreign invader from Central Asia, who still governs a variety of races and religions. In Persia the Shah's family is of a Turkish tribe. And the Emperor of China is a Mandchoo Tartar, of a race quite apart from that of the immense majority of the Chinese. Of course the Russians are as much aliens in Central Asia as the English in India; they govern from St. Petersburg as we do from London. I doubt, therefore, whether there is any other kingdom in Asia that has more of the element of national unity than Afghanistan, though unfortunately its political condition is precarious, because there is still much tribal disunion inside it.

Eastward again beyond Afghanistan we enter the Indian empire, a vast dominion stretching south-eastward from the slopes of the outer Afghan hills and the Persian border to the western frontiers of the Chinese empire and of Siam, and controlling the whole seaboard of Southern Asia, from Aden to Singapore. It is the possession of this wide territory that has given to the English a direct and most important interest in the problems of race and religion. For, in the first place, in this empire we have to deal with three out of the four great faiths of the world--Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism--and we have to uphold for ourselves the fourth, Christianity. Secondly, we have also within the borders of our empire a multiplicity of races and tribes; and we have the peculiar Indian inst.i.tution of Caste, which marks off all Hindu society into innumerable groups, distinguished one from another by the rules that forbid intermarriage and (in most cases) the sharing of food. Now the word Hindu requires a special explanation, because there is nothing exactly like it elsewhere in the world; it is not exclusively a religious denomination; it denotes also a country and a race. When we speak of a Christian, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist, we mean a particular religious community without distinction of race or country. When we talk of Persians or Chinese, we indicate country or parentage without any necessary distinction of creed. But when a man tells me he is a Hindu, I know that he means all three things together--religion, race and country. I can be almost sure that he is an inhabitant of India, quite sure that he is of Indian parentage; and as to religion, the word Hindu undoubtedly locates him within one of the manifold groups who follow the ordinances and worship the G.o.ds of Hinduism. Next in importance to the Hindus, as a religious community, come the Mohammedans, who number over sixty millions in India. The two faiths, Hinduism and Islam--polytheism and monotheism--are in strong opposition to each other; yet they are not quite clean cut apart, for some Hindu tribes that have been converted to Islam retain in part their primitive customs of worship and caste. And in Burmah, as in Ceylon, the population is almost wholly Buddhist.

In a very able article that has recently appeared in an Indian magazine, the writer, a Hindu, observes: 'The Hindus offer a curious instance of a people without any feeling of nationality.' He finds an explanation in 'the intensity of religiousness, which led to sectarianism, and allying itself with caste, tended to preserve all local and tribal differences.' Other causes, historical, political, and geographical, might be mentioned, but I agree that the chief separating influence has been religious. And, however this may be, it may be affirmed that within our Indian empire at the present moment the primary superior designation of a man is according to his religion--he is either a Hindu, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist. But inside these general religious denominations are very many distinctions of caste, race, or tribe. The Sikhs are a sect of Hindus who belong exclusively to the Punjab. The Marathas and Rajputs are races who profess Hinduism and who always call themselves by their racial names: and there are many aboriginal tribes, like the Bheels and Gonds, who are being gradually absorbed into Hinduism. Race and religion are, in fact, more profoundly intermixed in India than perhaps in any other country of the world; and into such an intricate subject I cannot now enter. My present point is that in India we are governing an empire of the antique pattern, quite different from the western nationalities, a country where complexities of race and creed meet us at every turn in the course of our administration; an empire which, as Mr. Bryce has pointed out in a recent essay that is full of light and knowledge, has many striking resemblances with the dominion of Imperial Rome.[57] There is the same miscellany of tribes and races in diverse stages of civilisation, warlike and half-tamed on the frontiers, softened and reconciled by peace, prosperity, and culture in the older provinces of the empire, wild and barbarous in remote interior tracts. There is just visible in India a similar though much slighter tendency of the language of the ruling race to prevail among the educated cla.s.ses, because the English language, like the Latin, has greater literary power, and conveys to the Indians the latest ideas and scientific discoveries of the foremost nations of the world.

There is also a certain diffusion of European manners and even dress, resembling in some degree what took place even in such a remote province of the Roman empire as Britain, where, as we know from Tacitus, it was made a reproach against the Romanising Britons that they were abandoning their own costume for the Roman toga and adopting the manners of their conquerors. All these tendencies are slightly affecting distinctions of race and religion; though in India these distinctions are far deeper than they were under the Roman empire, and so far as one can judge they are ineffaceable.

In regard to religious differences, so long as the people were almost universally polytheistic the Romans had little trouble on this score, since every deity and every ritual was tolerated indifferently by their government, provided that public order and decency were observed; and this is the practice of our Government in India. But we have one difficulty in governing India that did not trouble the Romans at the time when they first founded their empire by conquest. I think that religion had then very little influence on politics. It was the advent of two great militant and propagating faiths, first Christianity, next Islam, that first made religion a vital element in politics, and afterwards made a common creed the bond of union for great ma.s.ses of mankind. It has now become in Asia a powerful instrument of political a.s.sociation. Therefore when we proclaim for our government in India the principle of religious neutrality we do indeed avoid collision with other faiths, but we are without the advantage that is possessed by a State which represents and is supported by the religious enthusiasm of a great number of its subjects. I take the separation of the State from religion to be a principle that is quite modern in Europe; and outside our Indian empire it is unknown in Asia. Everywhere else the ruler is the head of some dominant church or creed. On the other hand our neutral att.i.tude enables us to arbitrate and keep the peace between the two formidable rivals, Islam and Hinduism, which in a large measure balance and restrain each other. And it is easier to govern a great empire full of diverse castes and creeds when you only demand from them obedience to the civil law, than when the Government takes one side on religious questions. Nevertheless, though in India we proclaim and practise religious neutrality, we must always remember that India is, of all great countries in the world, that in which religious beliefs and antagonisms affect the administration most profoundly, and subdivide the population with the greatest complexity. For the empire contains a wonderful variety of races and tribes, especially on its frontiers; it has the fierce Afghan tribes under our protectorate on the north-west, a cl.u.s.ter of utterly barbarous tribes in the north-east, and in the Far East beyond Burmah we have undertaken the control of a border tract, full of petty rival chiefships, where the language, manners and origins are related to the neighbouring population of China.

In China we have the true type of Asiatic empire, by far the oldest in the world, a sovereignty that, with various changes of dynasty, has governed the Far East of Asia from time almost immemorial; an immense conglomeration of different races under the rulership of a dynasty that is foreign to the great majority of its subjects. Here again I must remark on the absence of territorial or national designations.

The word China, as designating this empire, is not used by the people themselves; the official name means, I believe, the Great Pure Kingdom; and the emperor himself is known by various t.i.tles signifying august, lofty, or sacred. I suppose that almost the whole population belongs to the great Mongolian or Tartar family of mankind; but the subdivisions of different tribes, races, and languages must be numerous, as might be expected in such a vastly extended empire, and the tribesmen are all known by their tribal names. In regard to Religion the situation is peculiar, it is without parallel elsewhere in Asia; for three great systems exist in China separately and independently, each of them working in peace side by side with the others: the religion founded by Confucius, which is a great system of morals; Buddhism, which is a Church with a splendid ritual, priesthood, and monastic orders; and Taoism, which is a kind of naturalistic religion, the worship of stars, natural forces, spirits, deified heroes and local G.o.ds. It is said to be a common thing for one person to belong to all three religions, and the State superintends them all impartially. One very remarkable and peculiar fact, which I give on excellent authority, is that in China religious denominations are never used to denote sections of the people, except by the Mohammedans, who are not numerous and form a cla.s.s apart. But any attempt to describe the religion of China would lead me far beyond the scope of this address. My present point is only to lay stress on the enormous political importance, in China as elsewhere in Asia, of the religious idea. For whereas powerful religious movements, affecting the destinies of kingdoms and causing great wars, have ceased in Western and Central Europe, in Asia all governments have constantly to apprehend some fresh outburst of religious enthusiasm, the appearance of some prophet or new spiritual teacher, who gathers a following, like the Mahdi in the Soudan, and attacks the ruling power. The Taeping rebellion, which devastated China some forty years ago, is a case in point; it was begun by a fanatic leader who denounced the established religions, and it soon became a dangerous revolt against the Imperial dynasty. And the outbreak against the foreigners in China last year is understood to have originated in religious fanaticism.

These events go to ill.u.s.trate the enormous influence on politics which Religion, whether you call it enthusiasm or superst.i.tion, exercises everywhere in Asia.

But of all empires in Asia, the Russian empire is the greatest and the most powerful. I have only s.p.a.ce to say here that it is of the same type with the others; it is a vast dominion over an infinite variety of races, tribes, and creeds; it is a government which has come in by foreign conquest; a Christian Power which has among its subjects a great number of Mohammedans. It differs from our Indian empire in this respect, that the Russian conquests were made gradually by land, across Central Asia, or by slow immigration and extension, as in Siberia, whereas the English reached India by a long sea-journey. So that in the Asiatic empire of Russia the separation of race between the rulers and their subjects is not so sharply defined as between England and India. Nevertheless the problems that confront Russia in Asia are similar in kind to those which face us in India; she has to reconcile to her permanent dominion a miscellany of alien peoples, whom it is almost impossible to fuse and consolidate into anything like a nationality.

I have now endeavoured, very imperfectly, to show how Race and Religion still powerfully affect society, and trouble politics, throughout a great part of the world. How far they influence and interact upon each other is a difficult problem; but one may say that some religions seem to accord with the peculiar temperament and intellectual disposition of certain races; that, for instance, the active propagating spirit of Islam flourishes in Western Asia, while in Eastern Asia a quiet and contemplative faith, with little missionary impulse, no strong desire to make converts, has always prevailed. But in the East everywhere Race and Religion still unite and isolate the populations in groups--they are the great dividing and disturbing forces that prevent or delay the consolidation of settled nationalities; and so far as our experience goes, a fixed nationality of the Western type is the most solid and permanent form of political government and social aggregation. An empire is a different and looser mode of binding people together, yet at certain stages of civilisation and the world's progress it is a necessity; and an empire well administered is the best available instrument for promoting civilisation and good order among backward races. So managed it may last long; and its dominion may be practically permanent, for commerce and industry, literature and science, rapid and easy communication by land and sea, spread far more quickly, and connect distant countries far more closely, in modern times than in the ancient world. Yet there is always an element of unrest and insecurity underlying the position of imperial rulership over different and often discordant groups of subjects; and this has been one main cause of the immemorial weakness of Asiatic empires, and of the indifference of the people to a change of masters, because no single dynasty represented the whole people. It is just this weakness of the native rulers that has enabled the European to make his conquests in Asia; and we have carefully to remember that although our governments are superior in skill and strength, we have inherited the old difficulties. For it is my belief that in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, the strength of the racial and religious sentiments is rather increasing than diminishing. This is indeed the view--the fact, if I am right--that I especially desire to press home, because it is of the highest importance at the present time, when all the European nations, and England among the foremost, are extending their dominion over peoples of races and creeds different from their own. Our governments are now no longer confined to the continent which we inhabit; we are acquiring immense possessions in Asia and Africa; we can survey the whole earth with its confusion of tongues; its mult.i.tude of beliefs and customs, its infinitely miscellaneous populations. We must recognise the variety of the human species; we must acknowledge that we cannot impose a uniform type of civilisation, just as we admit that a uniform faith is beyond mere human efforts to impose, and that to attempt it would be politically disastrous. This is the conclusion upon which I venture to lay stress, because some such warning seems to me neither untimely nor unimportant.

For there is still a dangerous tendency among the enterprising commercial nations of the West to a.s.sume that the importation into Asia of economical improvements, public instruction, regular administration, and religious neutrality will conquer antipathies, overcome irrational prejudices, and reconcile old-world folk to an alien civilisation. Undoubtedly a foreign government that rules wisely, justly, and very cautiously, acquires a strong hold on its subjects, and may stand, like the Roman empire, for centuries. But this can only be achieved by recognising, instead of ignoring, certain ineffaceable characteristics in the origins and history of the people, for whom the tradition and sentiment of race is often their bond of union and the base of their society, as their religion is the embodiment of their spiritual instincts and imaginations.

FOOTNOTES:

[56] Address delivered as President of the Social and Political Education League, May 5, 1902.--_Fortnightly Review_, December 1902.

[57] _Studies in History and Jurisprudence_, vol. I., chap. i.

THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS

In considering the subject of my address,[58] I have been confronted by this difficulty--that in the sections which regulate the order of our proceedings, we have a list of papers that range over all the princ.i.p.al religions, ancient and modern, that have existed and still exist in the world. They are to be treated and discussed by experts whose scholarship, particular studies, and close research ent.i.tle them all to address you authoritatively. I have no such special qualifications; and in any case it would be most presumptuous in me to trespa.s.s upon their ground. All that I can venture to do, therefore, in the remarks which I propose to address to you to-day, is to attempt a brief general survey of the history of religions from a standpoint which may possibly not fall within the scope of these separate papers.

The four great religions now prevailing in the world, which are historical in the sense that they have been long known to history, I take to be--Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Having regard to their origin and derivation, to their history and character, I may be permitted, for my present purpose only, to cla.s.s the two former as the Religions of the West, and the two latter as the Religions of the East. These are the faiths which still maintain a mighty influence over the minds of mankind. And my object is to compare the political relations, the att.i.tude, maintained toward them, from time to time, by the States and rulers of the people over which these religions have established their spiritual dominion. The religion of the Jews is not included, though its influence has been incalculable, because it has been caught up, so to speak, into Christianity and Islam, and cannot therefore be counted among those which have made a part.i.tion of the religious world. For this reason, perhaps, it has retained to this day its ancient denomination, derived from the tribe or country of its origin; whereas the others are named from a Faith or a Founder. The word Nazarene, denoting the birthplace of Christianity, which is said to be still used in that region, was, as we know, very speedily superseded by its wider t.i.tle, as the Creed broke out of local limits and was proclaimed universal.

There has evidently been a fore-time, though it is prehistorical, when, so far as we know, mankind was universally polytheistic; when innumerable rites and worships prevailed without restraint, springing up and contending with each other like the trees in a primeval forest, reflecting a primitive and precarious condition of human society. I take polytheism to have been, in this earliest stage, the wild growth of superst.i.tious imagination, varied indefinitely by the pressure of circ.u.mstance, by accident, by popular caprice, or by the good or evil fortunes of the community. In this stage it can now be seen among barbarous tribes--as, for instance, in Central Africa. And some traces of it still survive, under different pretexts and disguises, in the lowest strata of civilised nations, where it may be said to represent the natural reluctance of the vagrant human fancy to be satisfied with higher forms and purer conceptions that are always imperfectly a.s.similated by the mult.i.tude.

Among primitive societies the spheres of human and divine affairs were intermixed and identical; they could not be disentangled. But with the growth of political inst.i.tutions came gradual separation, or at any rate the subordination of religion to the practical necessities of orderly government and public morals. That polytheism can exist and flourish in the midst of a highly intellectual and civilised society, we know from the history of Greece and Rome. But in ancient Greece its direct influence upon political affairs seems to have been slight; though it touched at some points upon morality. The function of the State, according to Greek ideas, was to legislate for all the departments of human life and to uphold the moral standard. The law prohibited sacrilege and profanity; it punished open impiety that might bring down divine wrath upon the people at large. The philosophers taught rational ethics; they regarded the popular superst.i.tions with indulgent contempt; but they inculcated the duty of honouring the G.o.ds, and the observance of public ceremonial. Beyond these limits the practice of local and customary worship was, I think, free and unrestrained; though I need hardly add that toleration, as understood by the States of antiquity, was a very different thing from the modern principle of religious neutrality. Under the Roman government the connection between the State and religion was much closer, as the dominion of Rome expanded and its power became centralised. The Roman State maintained a strict control and superintendence over the official rituals and worships, which were regulated as a department of the administration, to bind the people together by established rites and worships, in order to cement political and social unity. It is true that the usages of the tribes and princ.i.p.alities that were conquered and annexed were left undisturbed; for the Roman policy, like that of the English in India, was to avoid giving offence to religion; and undoubtedly this policy, in both instances, materially facilitated the rapid building up of a wide dominion. Nevertheless, there was a tendency to draw in the worship toward a common centre. The deities of the conquered provinces were respected and conciliated; the Roman generals even appealed to them for protection and favour, yet they became absorbed and a.s.similated under Roman names; they were often identified with the G.o.ds of the Roman pantheon, and were frequently superseded by the victorious divinities of the new rulers--the strange deities, in fact, were Romanised as well as the foreign tribes and cities. After this manner the Roman empire combined the tolerance of great religious diversity with the supremacy of a centralised government. Political amalgamation brought about a fusion of divine attributes; and latterly the emperor was adored as the symbol of manifest power, ruler and pontiff; he was the visible image of supreme authority.

This _regime_ was easily accepted by the simple unsophisticated paganism of Europe. The Romans, with all their statecraft, had as yet no experience of a high religious temperature, of enthusiastic devotion and divine mysteries. But as their conquest and commerce spread eastward, the invasion of Asia let in upon Europe a flood of Oriental divinities, and thus Rome came into contact with much stronger and deeper spiritual forces. The European polytheism might be utilised and administered, the Asiatic deities could not be domesticated and subjected to regulation; the Oriental orgies and strange rites broke in upon the organised State worship; the new ideas and practices came backed by a profound and fervid spiritualism.

Nevertheless the Roman policy of bringing religion under authoritative control was more or less successful even in the Asiatic provinces of the empire; the privileges of the temples were restricted; the priesthoods were placed under the general superintendence of the proconsular officials; and Roman divinities gradually found their way into the Asiatic pantheon.

But we all know that the religion of the Roman empire was falling into mult.i.tudinous confusion when Christianity arose--an austere exclusive faith, with its army of saints, ascetics, and unflinching martyrs, proclaiming worship to be due to one G.o.d only, and sternly refusing to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. Against such a faith an incoherent disorderly polytheism could make no better stand than tribal levies against a disciplined army. The new religion struck directly at the sacrifices that symbolised imperial unity; the pa.s.sive resistance of Christians was necessarily treated as rebellion, the State made implacable war upon them. Yet the spiritual and moral forces won the victory, and Christianity established itself throughout the empire. Universal religion, following upon universal civil dominion, completed the levelling of local and national distinctions.

The Churches rapidly grew into authority superior to the State within their own jurisdiction; they called in the temporal government to enforce theological decisions and to put down heresies; they founded a powerful hierarchy. The earlier Roman const.i.tution had made religion an instrument of administration. When one religion became universal, the churches enlisted the civil ruler into the service of orthodoxy; they converted the State into an instrument for enforcing religion.

The pagan empire had issued edicts against Christianity and had suppressed Christian a.s.semblies as tainted with disaffection; the Christian emperors enacted laws against the rites and worships of paganism, and closed temples. It was by the supreme authority of Constantine that, for the first time in the religious history of the world, uniformity of belief was defined by a creed, and sanctioned by the ruler's a.s.sent.

Then came, in Western Europe, the time when the empire at Rome was rent asunder by the inrush of barbarians; but upon its ruins was erected the great Catholic Church of the Papacy, which preserved in the ecclesiastical domain the autocratic imperial tradition. The primacy of the Roman Church, according to Harnack, is essentially the transference to her of Rome's central position in the religions of the heathen world; the Church united the western races, disunited politically, under the common denomination of Christianity. Yet Christianity had not long established itself throughout all the lands, in Europe and Asia, which had once been under the Roman sovereignty, when the violent irruptions of Islam upset not only the temporal but also the spiritual dominion throughout Western Asia, and along the southern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean. The Eastern empire at Constantinople had been weakened by bitter theological dissensions and heresies among the Christians; the votaries of the new, simple, unswerving faith of Mohammed were ardent and unanimous. In Egypt and Syria the Mohammedans were speedily victorious; the Latin Church and even the Latin language were swept out of North Africa. In Persia the Sa.s.sanian dynasty was overthrown, and although there was no immediate and total conversion of the people, Mohammedanism gradually superseded the ancient Zoroastrian cultus as the religion of the Persian State.

It was not long before the armies of Islam had triumphed from the Atlantic coast to the Jaxartes river in Central Asia; and conversion followed, speedily or slowly, as the direct result of conquest.

Moreover, the Mohammedans invaded Europe. In the south-west they subdued almost all Spain; and in the south-east they destroyed, some centuries later, the Greek empire, though not the Greek Church, and consolidated a mighty rulership at Constantinople.

With this prolonged conflict between Islam and Christianity along the borderlands of Europe and Asia began the era of those religious wars that have darkened the history of the Western nations, and have perpetuated the inveterate antipathy between Asiatic and European races, which the spread of Christianity into both continents had softened and might have healed. In the end Christianity has fixed itself permanently in Europe, while Islam is strongly established throughout half Asia. But the sharp collision between the two faiths, the clash of armies bearing the cross and the crescent, generated fierce fanaticism on both sides. The Crusades kindled a fiery militant and missionary spirit previously unknown to religions, whereby religious propagation became the mainspring and declared object of conquest and colonisation. Finally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the great secession from the Roman Church divided the nations of Western Europe into hostile camps, and throughout the long wars of that period political jealousies and ambitions were inflamed by religious animosities. In Eastern Europe the Greek Church fell under almost complete subordination to the State.

The history of Europe and Western Asia records, therefore, a close connection and community of interests between the States and the orthodox faiths; a combination which has had a very potent influence, during many centuries, upon the course of civil affairs, upon the fortunes, or misfortunes, of nations. Up to the sixteenth century, at least, it was universally held, by Christianity and by Islam, that the State was bound to enforce orthodoxy; conversion and the suppression or expulsion of heretics were public duties. Unity of creed was thought necessary for national unity--a government could not undertake to maintain authority, or preserve the allegiance of its subjects, in a realm divided and distracted by sectarian controversies. On these principles Christianity and Islam were consolidated, in union with the States or in close alliance with them; and the geographical boundaries of these two faiths, and of their internal divisions respectively, have not materially changed up to the present day.

Let me now turn to the history of religion in those countries of further Asia, which were never reached by Greek or Roman conquest or civilisation, where the ancient forms of worship and conceptions of divinity, which existed before Christianity and Islam, still flourish.