The Evolution of States Part 29

[Footnote 601: Machiavelli, however, had special schemes of const.i.tutional compromise (see Burckhardt, p. 85, and Roscoe, _Life of Leo X_, ed. 1846, ii, 204, 205); and there were many framers of paper const.i.tutions for Florence (Burckhardt, p. 83).]

[Footnote 602: See Gibbon, ch. 70. Bohn ed. vii, 398, 404.]

[Footnote 603: Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 6, 7.]

[Footnote 604: Lea, _Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, 2nd ed.

pp. 145-47, 212-20, 224-36, 242-43.]

[Footnote 605: Sismondi, _Short History_, p. 20.]

[Footnote 606: Trollope notes (_History of the Commonwealth of Florence_, i, 31) how Dante and Villani caught at the theory of an intermixture of alien blood as an explanation of the strifes which in Florence, as elsewhere, grew out of the primordial and universal pa.s.sions of men in an expanding society. Villari (_Two First Centuries_, p. 73) endorses the old theory without asking how civil strifes came about in the cities of early Greece and in those of the Netherlands.]

[Footnote 607: Which, however, was probably already being weakened by the silting up of the Pisan harbour. This seems to have begun through the action of the Genoese in blocking it with huge ma.s.ses of stone in 1290. Bent, _Genoa_, pp. 86-87. Sismondi notes that, after the great defeat of 1284, "all the fishermen of the coast quitted the Pisan galleys for those of Genoa." _Short History_, p. 111. As to the Pisan harbour, whose very site is now uncertain, see Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. tr. iii, 258, _note_.]

[Footnote 608: After destroying Ugolino, the Pisans chose as leader Guido de Montefeltro, who made their militia a formidable power.]

[Footnote 609: Pignotti, as cited, iii, 283-84.]

[Footnote 610: Heeren, as cited, pp. 69, 120, etc.]

[Footnote 611: Cp. Trollope, _History of Florence_, i, 105; Villari, _Two First Centuries_, pp. 95, 100.]

[Footnote 612: Cp. Sismondi, _Short History_, pp. 88-90.]

[Footnote 613: _Podesta_, as we have seen, was an old imperialist t.i.tle.

In Florence it became communal, and in 1200 it was first held by a foreigner, chosen, it would seem, as likely to be more impartial than a native. Cp., however, the comments of Villari, _First Two Centuries_, p.

157, and Trollope, i, 84, 94; and the mention by Plutarch, _De amore prolis_, -- 1, as to the same development among the Greeks. In the memoirs of Fra Salimbene (1221-90) there is mention that in 1233 the Parmesans "made a friar their _podesta_, who put an end to all feuds"

(trans. by T.K. L. Oliphant, in _The Duke and the Scholar_, 1875, p.

90). The Florentine inst.i.tution of the _priori delle arti_, mentioned below, is traced back as far as 1204 (Cantu, as cited, viii, 465, _note_). The _anziani_, during their term of office, slept at the public palace, and could not go out save together.]

[Footnote 614: Thus Dante and Lorenzo de' Medici belonged to the craft of apothecaries.]

[Footnote 615: See Trollope, ii, 179, as to the endless Florentine devices to check special power and to vary the balance of the const.i.tution.]

[Footnote 616: Two years before a feebler attempt had been made to set up a military tool, named Gabrielli.]

[Footnote 617: Machiavelli, _Istorie_, end of 1. ii and beginning of 1.

iii.]

[Footnote 618: According to Giovanni Villani, in the fourteenth century there were schools only for 8,000 children, and only 1,200 were taught arithmetic.]

[Footnote 619: Details in Perrens' _Histoire de Florence_, Eng. trans.

of vol. viii, pp. 268, 284-88, 291, 307, 310.]

[Footnote 620: Cp. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 276-80.]

[Footnote 621: M. Perrens indeed p.r.o.nounces the two Councils set up by Savonarola's party to be much superior to the former bodies (_La civilisation florentine_, p. 61); but he admits that "at bottom and from the start the system was vitiated by the theocracy which presided over it."]

[Footnote 622: Cp. Armstrong, in _Cambridge Modern History_, 1902, i, 171.]

[Footnote 623: The constancy of Pisa in resisting the yoke of Florence, and the repeated self-expatriation of ma.s.ses of the inhabitants, is hardly intelligible in view of the submission of so many other cities to worse tyrannies. It would seem that the sting lay in the idea that the rule of the rival city was more galling to pride than any one-man tyranny, foreign or other.]

[Footnote 624: Sismondi, _Republiques_, xvi, 71-76, 158, 159, 170, 217; _Short History_, p. 336.]

[Footnote 625: As to the misery of Florence after the siege, see Napier, _Florentine History_, iv, 533, 534.]

[Footnote 626: Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. iii. citing Sandi.]

[Footnote 627: Review of Mitford, _Miscellaneous Writings_, ed. 1868, p.

74.]

[Footnote 628: Macaulay doubtless proceeded on the history of Daru, now known to be seriously erroneous. Compare that of W.C. Hazlitt, above cited, pref.]

[Footnote 629: Cp. Brown, in _Cambridge Modern History_, 1902, vol. i, _The Renaissance_, p. 285.]

[Footnote 630: Cp. Armstrong, in _Cambridge History_, i, 150-51.]

PART V

THE FORTUNES OF THE LESSER EUROPEAN STATES

CHAPTER I

THE IDEAS OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL GREATNESS

It lies on the face of the foregoing surveys that the principle which gives ma.s.s-form to all politics--to wit, the principle of nationality--makes at once for peace and war, co-operation and enmity.

As against the tendency to atomism, the tribal principle supplies cohesion; as against tribalism, the principle of the State plays the same part; and as against oppression the instinct of race or nationality inspires and sustains resistance. But in every aggregate, the force of attraction tends to generate a correlative repulsion to other aggregates, and--save for the counterplay of cla.s.s repulsions--the fundamental instinct of egoism takes new extensions in pride of family, pride of clan, pride of nation, pride of race. Until the successive extensions have all been rectified by the spirit of reciprocity, politics remains so far unmoralised and unrationalised.

The nullity of the conception of "race genius" has been forced on us at every meeting with it. No less clear, on a critical a.n.a.lysis, is the irrationality of the instinct of racial pride which underlies that conception, and which is involved in perhaps half of the strifes of tribes, States, and nations. Yet perhaps most of the reflections made by historical writers in the way of generalisations of the history of States and peoples are in terms of the fallacy and the irrationality in question. And the instinctive persistence of both reveals itself when we come to reflect on the fortunes of what we usually call the little nations--employing a term which at once sets up a whole series of partial hallucinations.

The main distinction between civilised nations being difference of language, there has spontaneously arisen the habit of identifying language with "race," and regarding a dwindling tongue as implying a dwindling people. In the British Islands, for instance, the decline in the numbers of the people speaking Celtic dialects--the Erse, the Welsh, and the Gaelic--leads many persons, including some of the speakers of those tongues, to regard the "Celtic stock" as in course of diminution; and statesmen speak quasi-scientifically of "the Celtic fringe" as representing certain political tendencies in particular. Yet as soon as we subst.i.tute the comparatively real test of name-forms for the non-test of language, we find that the Welsh and Gaelic-speaking stocks have enormously extended within the English-speaking population, so that "Welsh blood" is very much commoner in Britain than "Saxon," relatively to the proportions between the areas and populations of Wales and England, while "Highland blood" is relatively predominant in "Saxon"-speaking Scotland; and "Irish blood" is almost similarly abundant even in England, to say nothing of its immense multiplication in the United States.

Enthusiasm for one's nation as such thus begins on scrutiny to resolve itself into enthusiasm for one's speech; and as our English speech is a near variant of certain others held alien, as Dutch and Scandinavian and German, with a decisive control from French, enthusiasm for the speech-tie begins, on reflection, to a.s.similate to the enthusiasm of the district, the glen, the parish. Millions of us are at a given moment rapturous about the deeds of our non-ancestors, on the supposition that they were our ancestors, and in terms of a correlative aversion to the deeds of certain other ancients loosely supposed to have been the ancestors of certain of our contemporaries. Thus the ostensible ent.i.ty which plays so large a part in the common run of thought about history--the nation, considered as a continuous and personalised organism--is in large measure a metaphysical dream, and the emotion spent on it partakes much of the nature of superst.i.tion.

How hard it is for anyone trained in such emotion to transcend it is seen from the form taken by the sympathy which is bestowed by considerate members of a large community on members of a small one.

"Gallant little Wales" is a phrase in English currency; and a contemporary poet, who had actually written pertinently and well in prose on the spurious conception of greatness attached to membership in a large population, has also written in verse a plea for "little peoples" in terms of the a.s.sumption of an ent.i.ty conscious of relative smallness. Some of these more sympathetic pictures of the lesser States obscurely recall the anecdote of the little girl who, contemplating a picture of martyrs thrown to the lions, sorrowed for the "poor lion who hadn't any Christian." The late Sir John Seeley, on the other hand, wrote in the more normal Anglo-Saxon manner that "some countries, such as Holland and Sweden, might pardonably (_sic_) regard their history as in a manner wound up; ... the only practical lesson of their history is a lesson of resignation."[631] The unit in a population of three millions is implicitly credited with the consciousness of a dwarf or a cripple facing a gigantic rival when he thinks of the existence of a community of thirty or sixty millions. Happily, the unit of the smaller community has no such consciousness;[632] and, inasmuch as his state is thus intellectually the more gracious, there appears to be some solid psychological basis for the paradox, lately broached by such a one, that "the future lies with the small nations." That is to say, it seems likely that a higher level of general rationality will be attained in the small than in the large populations, in virtue of their escaping one of the most childish and most fostered hallucinations current in the latter.

Certain patriots of the wilful sort are wont to flout reason in these matters, bl.u.s.tering of "false cosmopolitanism" and "salutary prejudice."

To all such rhetoric the fitting answer is the characterisation of it as false pa.s.sion. Those who indulge in it elect wilfully to enfranchise from the ma.s.s of detected and convicted animal pa.s.sions one which specially chimes with their sentiment, as if every other might not be allowed loose with as good reason. Matters are truly bad enough without such perverse endors.e.m.e.nt of vulgar ideals by those who can see their vulgarity. Ordinary observation makes us aware that the most commonplace and contracted minds are most p.r.o.ne to the pa.s.sion of national and racial pride; whereas the men of antiquity who first seem to have transcended it are thereby marked out once for all as a higher breed. It is in fact the proof of incapacity for any large or deep view of human life to be habitually and zealously "patriotic" in the popular sense of the term. Yet, in the civilisations which to-day pa.s.s for being most advanced, the majority of the units habitually batten on that quality of feeling, millions of adults for ever living the political life of the schoolboy; and, as no polity can long transcend the ideals of the great ma.s.s, national fortunes and inst.i.tutions thus far tend to be determined by the habit of the lower minds.

It is pure paralogism to point to the case of a large backward population without a national-flag idea--for instance, the Chinese[633]--as showing that want of patriotic pa.s.sion goes with backwardness in culture. There is an infinity of the raw material of patriotism among precisely the most primitive of the Chinese population, whose hatred of "foreign devils" is the very warp of "imperialism." The ideal of cosmopolitanism is at the other end of the psychological scale from that of the ignorance which has gone through no political evolution whatever; its very appearance implies past patriotism as a stepping-stone; and its ethic is to that of patriotism what civil law is to club law. If "salutary prejudice" is to be the shibboleth of future civilisation, the due upshot will be the attainment of it one day by the now semi-civilised races, and the drowning out of European patriotisms by Mongolian.