The Evolution of States Part 6

[Footnote 118: Grote, ch. 46.]

[Footnote 119: Cp. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, iv, -- 446.]

[Footnote 120: Rev. A.S. Way's translation of Euripides, _Medea_, 829-30.]

[Footnote 121: Thucydides, ii, 40.]

[Footnote 122: _Griechische Culturgeschichte_, i, 11; cp. ii, 386-88, 394, etc. And see Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 727-29, 734, etc. For an able counter-pleading, see the essay of Mr. Benn, "The Ethical Value of h.e.l.lenism," in _Intern. Jour. of Ethics_, April, 1902, rep. in his _Revaluations, Historical and Ideal_, 1909.]

[Footnote 123: Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, _La cite antique_, ed. 1880, pp.

260-64; E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 728.]

[Footnote 124: Grote, iv, 489-90.]

[Footnote 125: Thucydides, v, 85 _sq_.]

[Footnote 126: Cp. Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. -- 66.]

[Footnote 127: Grote, iv, 539. Cp. Thirlwall, i, 181-83.]

[Footnote 128: The view here set forth is fully borne out by the posthumous _Griechische Culturgeschichte_ of Burckhardt. Cp. i, 249-57.]

[Footnote 129: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 17.]

[Footnote 130: Xenophon, _Memorabilia_, iii, 5, 18. Cp. Grote, iv, 465.

As Grote goes on to show, the same general statement holds good of Rome after her victory over Carthage, of the Italian Republics, and of the feudal baronage in England and elsewhere.]

[Footnote 131: Grote, vi, 315-17, 518, rightly insists on the moderation of the people after the expulsions of the Four Hundred and the Thirty Tyrants.]

[Footnote 132: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 17; Grote, iv, 510; T. Davidson, _The Parthenon Frieze_, 1882, pp. 82-128.]

[Footnote 133: Grote, pt. ii, ch. ii (ed. 1888, ii, 173-78); Freeman, _History of Federal Government_, ed. 1893, p. 103.]

CHAPTER IV

THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

-- 1

The word "progressive," however, raises one of the most complex issues in sociology. It would be needless to point out, were it not well to antic.i.p.ate objection, that the foregoing summaries are not offered as a complete theory of progress even as commonly conceived, much less as sufficing to dismiss the dispute[134] as to what progress is, or what basis there is for the modern conceptions bound up with the word. Our generalisations proceed on the a.s.sumption--not of course that human affairs must constantly improve in virtue of some cosmic law, but--that by most men of any education a certain advance in range of knowledge, of reflection, of skill, of civic amenity, of general comfort, is held to be attainable and desirable; that such advances have clearly taken place in former periods; and that the due study of these periods and of present conditions may lead to a further and indefinitely prolonged advance. Conceiving progress broadly as occurring by way of rise in the quant.i.ty and the quality of pleasurable and intelligent life, we beg the question, for the purposes of this inquiry, as against those who may regard such a tendency with aversion, and those who may deny that such increase ever takes place. Taking as proved the evolution of mankind from lower forms of animal life, we conceive such evolution as immeasurably slow in the period before the attainment of agriculture, which may serve as the stage at which what we term "civilisation"

begins. Only with agriculture begins the "civitas," as distinct from the horde or tribe. Thenceforth all advance in arts and ethics, no less than in political co-ordination, counts as "civilisation." The problem is, how to diagnose advance.

All of us, roughly speaking, understand by progress the moving of things in the way we want them to go; and the ideals underlying the present treatise are easily seen, though it does not aim at an exhaustive survey of the conditions and causes of what it a.s.sumes to be progressive forms or phases of civilisation. To reach even a working theory, however, we have to make, as it were, cross-sections in our anatomy, and to view the movement of civilisation in terms of the conditions which increase men's stock of knowledge and extend their imaginative art. To lay a foundation, we have to subsume Buckle's all-important generalisation as to the effect of food and life conditions in differentiating what we may broadly term the primary from the secondary civilisation. Thus we think from "civilisation" to _a_ civilisation.

Buckle drew his capital distinction, so constantly ignored by his critics, between "European" and "non-European" civilisations. This broadly holds good, but is a historical rather than a sociological proposition. The process of causation is one of life conditions; and the first great steps in the higher Greek civilisation were made in Asia Minor, in contact with Asiatic life, even as the earlier civilisations, such as the "Minoan" of Crete, now being traced through recovered remains, grew up in contact with both Egypt and the East. (Cp. Prof. Burrows, _The Discoveries in Crete_, 1907, chs. v, ix.) The distinction here made between "primary" and "secondary" civilisations is of course merely relative, applying as it does only to the historic period. We can but mark off the known civilisations as standing in certain relations one to another. Thus the Roman civilisation was in reality complex before the conquest of Greece, inasmuch as it had undergone Italo-Greek and Etruscan influences representing a then ancient culture. But the Roman militarist system left the Roman civilisation in itself unprogressive, and prevented it from being durably fertilised by the Greek.

Proceeding from general laws to particular cases, we may roughly say that:--

(1) Primary civilisations arise in regions specially favourable to the regular production of abundant food, and lying inland, so as not to offer constant temptation to piratical raids. (Fertile coast land is defensible only by a strong community.)

(2) Such food conditions tend to maintain an abundant population, readily lending itself to exploitation by rulers, and so involving despotism and subordination. They also imply, as a rule, level territories, which facilitate conquest and administration, and thus also involve military autocracy.

The general law that facile food conditions, supporting large populations in a primary civilisation, generate despotisms, was explicitly put in the eighteenth century by Walckenaer (_Essai sur l'histoire de l'espece humaine_, 1798, l. v, ch. iv, p. 198).

Montesquieu, whose reasonings on climate and soil tend to be fanciful and non-economic (cp. Volney, _Lecons d'Histoire_, 6ieme seance; and Buckle, Routledge's ed. pp. 24, 468-69), noted the fact that sterile Attica was relatively democratic, and fertile Lakedaimon aristocratic; and further (following Plutarch) decides that mountaineers tend to be democratic, plain-dwellers subject to rulers, and coast-dwellers something midway between (_Esprit des Lois_, l. xviii, ch. i). He is right in his facts, but misses the economic explanation. The fact that mountaineers as such are not easy to conquer, doubtless counts for a good deal. See it touched on in Gray's unfinished poem on the _Alliance between Government and Education_, written before the appearance of the _Esprit des Lois_, and stopped by Gray on the ground that "the Baron had forestalled some of his best thoughts" (Gray's _Works_, ed. 1821, p. 274). The point is discussed more fully in Dr. Dunbar's _Essays on the History of Mankind_, 1780, Essay vi.

(3) If the nation with such conditions is well aloof from other nations, in virtue of being much more civilised than its near neighbours, and of being self-sufficing as regards its produce, its civilisation (as in the cases of China and Incarial Peru and ancient Egypt) is likely to be extremely conservative. Above all, lack of racial interbreeding involves lack of due variation. No "pure" race ever evolved rapidly or highly.

Even the conservative primary civilisations (as the Egyptian, Chinese, and Akkadian) rested on much race mixture.

As Dr. Draper has well pointed out (_Intellect. Develop. of Europe_, ed. 1875, i, 84-88), the peculiar regularity of Egyptian agriculture, depending as it did on the Nile overflow, which made known in advance the quant.i.ty of the crops, lent itself especially to a stable system of life and administration. The long-lasting exclusion of foreigners there, as in China and in Sparta, would further secure sameness of culture; and only by such causes can special unprogressiveness anywhere arise. Sir Henry Maine's formula, marking off progressive and unprogressive civilisations as different species, is merely verbal, and is not adhered to by himself. (The point is discussed at some length by the present writer in _Buckle and his Critics_, pp. 402-8.) Maine's distinction was drawn long ago by Eusebe Salverte (_De la Civilisation depuis les premiers temps_, 1813, p. 22, _seq._), who philosophically goes on to indicate the conditions which set up the differentiation; though in later references (_Essai sur les noms d'hommes_, 1824, pref. p. ii; _Des Sciences occultes_, 1829, pref. p. vi) he recurs to the empirical form of his proposition, which is that adhered to by Maine.

(4) When an old civilisation comes in steady contact with that of a race of not greatly inferior but less ancient culture, physically so situated as to be much less amenable to despotism (that is, in a hilly or otherwise easily defensible region), it is likely so to fecundate the fresher civilisation that the latter, if not vitiated by a bad political system, will soon surpa.s.s it,[135] provided that the latter community in turn is duly crossed as regards its stock, and that the former has due resources.

(5) In other words, a primitive but not barbarous people, placed in a region not highly fruitful but not really unpropitious to human life, is the less likely to fall tamely under a despotism because its population is not so easily multiplied and maintained;[136] and such a people, when physiologically variated by a mixture of stocks, and when mentally fecundated by contact with older civilisations, tends to develop what we term a secondary civilisation, higher in all respects than those which have stimulated it.[137]

(6) A very great disparity in the culture-stages of meeting races, however, is as unfavourable to the issue of a higher civilisation from their union as to a useful blending of their stocks.[138] Thus it fares ill with the contact of higher and lower races even in a climate equally favourable to both; and where it is favourable to the latter only, there is likely to be no immediate progress in the lower race, while in the terms of the case the higher will deteriorate or disappear.[139]

(7) Where a vigorous but barbarian race overruns one much more civilised, there is similarly little prospect of immediate gain to progress, though after a period of independent growth the newer civilisation may be greatly fecundated by intelligent resort to the remains of the older.

The cases of China and the Roman Empire may serve as ill.u.s.trations.

They were, however, different in that the northern invasion of Rome was by relatively considerable ma.s.ses, while the Tartar conquerors of China were easily absorbed in the vast native population.

(8) Where, again, independent States at nearly the same stage of civilisation, whether speaking the same or different languages, stand in a position of commerce and rivalry, but without desperate warfare, the friction and cross-fertilisation of ideas, together with the mixture of stocks, will develop a greater and higher intellectual and artistic life than can conceivably arise in one great State without great or close rivals, since there one set of ideals or standards is likely to overbear all others, with the result of partly stereotyping taste and opinion.

This point is well put by Hume as to Greece, in his essay _Of the Rise of the Arts and Sciences_ (1752); and after him by Gibbon, ch.

53, Bohn ed. vi, 233; Cp. Heeren, _Pol. Hist. of Ancient Greece_, Eng. tr. p. 42; Walckenaer, _Essai_ cited, p. 338; Ferguson, _Essay on the History of Civil Society_, 1767, pp. 182, 183; Dunbar, _Essays on the History of Mankind_, 1780, pp. 257, 271; Goguet, _De l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences_, 1758, iii Epoque, L. ii, ch. 2; Salverte, _De la Civilisation_, 1813, pp. 83-88; Grote, _History of Greece_, pt. ii, ch. i, ed. 1888, ii, 156; Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, i, 75. Grote brings out very clearly the "mutuality of action and reaction" in the case of the maritime Greeks as compared with the others and with other nations.

See also Hegel, _Philos. der Geschichte_, Th. ii, Absch. i (ed.

1840, p. 275). Hegel, besides noting the abstract element of geographical variety, points to the highly mixed character of the Greek stocks, especially in Attica. So Salverte, as cited. The same principle is rightly put by Guizot (_Hist. de la civilisation en France_, i, lecon 2), and accepted by J.S. Mill (_On Liberty_, ch.

iii, end), as a main explanation of the intellectual progress of modern Europe. It is therefore worth weighing as regards given peoples, by those who, like Mr. Bryce, see nothing but harm in the subdivision of Germany after the Thirty Years' War (_Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed. p. 346). Against the undoubted evils connected with the part.i.tion system ought to be set the intellectual gains which latterly arose from it when the intellectual life of Germany had, as it were, recovered breath.

(9) Thus, while an empire with a developed civilisation may communicate it to uncivilised conquered peoples not too far below its own anthropological level, the secondary civilisation thus acquired is in its nature less "viable," less capable of independent evolution, than one set up by the free commerce of trading peoples. The most rapid growths of civilisation appear always to have occurred by way of the multiplying of free contacts among trading communities, and among the free colonies of such.[140] The "money economy" they introduced was a great instrument of social and industrial evolution;[141] and on such city civilisations the ancient empires themselves seem always to have proceeded.[142]

(10) Every phase of civilisation has its special drawbacks, so that great retrogression may follow on great development, especially when advent.i.tious sources of wealth are the foundation of a luxurious culture. In some cases a great development may be dependent on an exhaustible source of wealth, as in the case of Britain's coal supply, the empire of ancient Rome, the primacy of the Pope before the Reformation, or even the Periclean empire of Athens, and the trade monopolies of Venice, the Hansa Towns, and the Dutch Republic.

(11) The expression "decay" as applied to a people, however, has only a relative significance: used absolutely, it stands for a delusion.

Economic conditions may worsen, and military power decline; but such processes imply no physiological degeneration. All the "dead"

civilisations of the past were _overthrown or absorbed by military violence_; and there is no known case of a nation physically well placed dying out.

Professor W.D. Whitney, who is usually so well worth listening to, fails to recognise this fact in his interesting essay on "China and the Chinese" (_Oriental and Linguistic Studies_, 2nd series). He declares that "according to the ordinary march of events in human history, the Chinese empire should have perished from decay, and its culture either have become extinct or have pa.s.sed into the keeping of another race, more than two thousand years ago. It had already reached the limit to its capacity of development" (p. 88).

Similarly Ratzel p.r.o.nounces (_History of Mankind_, Eng. tr. 1896, i, 26) that "Voltaire hits the point when he says Nature has given the Chinese the organ for discovering all that is _useful_ to them, but not for going _any further_." Voltaire never penned such a "bull." He wrote (_Essai sur les moeurs_, Avant-Propos, ch. i), "Il _semble_ que la Nature ait donne," and "_necessaire_," not "useful." Even that has a touch of paralogism; but the great essayist goes on to suggest two causes for Chinese conservatism--their ancestral piety and the nature of their method of writing. The first is a pseudo-explanation; the second is a _vera causa_, though only one of those involved. The German specialist of to-day is really further from the scientific point of view than the French wit of the middle of the eighteenth century, going on as he does to decide that "defect in their endowments"

causes the mediocrity of the Chinese, and "also is the sole cause of the rigidity in their social system."

This is a vain saying; and it is no less vain to go on to ask, as Professor Whitney does, what has become of Egypt, of the Phoenicians and Hebrews, of the Persians, of Greece and Rome, and of Spain. The answer is easy. Egypt was conquered, and the old race still reproduces itself, in va.s.salage. The "Pelasgic" civilisation of ancient Greece was absorbed by the Greek invaders. The "Mycenaean" and "Minoan" civilisations, as seen in ancient Troy and "Minoan" Crete, were conquered and partly absorbed. The Phoenicians and Hebrews were destroyed or absorbed. The Persians are at present retrograde, but may rise again.[143] Rome and Greece were successively overrun by barbarism. Spain, like Italy, retrograded, but, like Italy, is on the path of regeneration. In all these cases the process of causation is obvious. No nation dies or disappears save by violence; and, given the proper conditions, all races are capable of progress indefinitely. China, though unprogressive in comparison with a European State, has changed in many respects within two thousand years--nay, within twenty.[144]

Professor Whitney adopts an empirical convention, and accordingly misses any real elucidation of the problem of Chinese sociology, which he a.s.sumes to solve (p. 87) by saying we must look for our explanations "deep in the foundations of the national character itself." That is to say, the national character is determined by the national character.