The Evolution of States Part 8

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 134: On this may be consulted a suggestive paper by Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson in the _Free Review_, April, 1894, and an instructive study by Mr. T. Whittaker, "A Critical Essay on the Philosophy of History," in his _Essays and Notices_, 1895. Cp. Spencer, "Progress: Its Law and Cause," in _Essays_, vol. i.]

[Footnote 135: This also is posited by Dunbar, _Essays_ cited, pp. 230, 233.]

[Footnote 136: This again, as well as the general importance of culture-contacts, is noted by Walckenaer, _Essai_ cited, pp. 202-3.]

[Footnote 137: This was seen in antiquity. Julian, at least, pointed to the fashion in which the Greeks had perfected studies the rudiments of which they had received from other peoples (_apud_ Cyrill, v. 8); and Celsus had said it before him (Origen, _Contra Celsum_, i. 2).]

[Footnote 138: See some just remarks by Bagehot in _Physics and Politics_, pp. 67-69, proceeding on Quatref.a.ges, as to the varying success of given race-mixtures in different regions, in terms of the difference of the physical environment. Compare Schaffle, _Bau und Korper de Socialen Lebens_, 1875-8, ii, 468.]

[Footnote 139: Cp. Dunbar, as cited, p. 211, and Bagehot, as cited, p.

71. In such cases as those of British India and French Algiers the exception is only apparent, the European control being kept up by annual drafts of new men.]

[Footnote 140: _E.g._ the ancient aegean civilisation, as seen in "Minoan" Crete; the colonies of the Phoenicians; those of the Greeks in Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily; the medieval Italian Republics; the Hansa towns; those of the Netherlands; and the United States.]

[Footnote 141: See Dr. Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, pp. 73, 74, 83-86, 94-97, etc., for an interesting development of this principle.

Cp. Prof. Ashley, _Introduction to Economic History_, 1888-93, i, 43, and Hildebrand, as there cited. The originality of Hildebrand's ideas on this point has perhaps been overrated by Ochenkowski and others. Smith recognised the main facts (_Wealth of Nations_, bk. i, c. iv). See also the pa.s.sage from Torrens cited by M'Culloch in his essay on "Money,"

_Treatises_, ed. 1859, pp. 9, 10.]

[Footnote 142: _E.g._ Babylonia, Egypt, Alexander's empire, and Rome.]

[Footnote 143: This was written before the recent revolution.]

[Footnote 144: Since this was written China has undergone her new birth.]

[Footnote 145: Cp. Pearson's _History of England during the Early and Middle Ages_, i, 312, and H.W. C. Davis, _England under the Normans and Angevins_, 1905, pp. 1, 2, 47.]

[Footnote 146: j.a.pan now runs a grave risk of such retrogression.]

[Footnote 147: Cp. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_, i, 109.]

[Footnote 148: The point is argued at greater length by the author in an article on "The Economics of Genius" in the _Forum_, April, 1898 (rep.

in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. ii).]

[Footnote 149: Cp. Tiele, _Outlines of the History of Religion_, Eng.

tr. pp. 205, 207, and the present writer's _Short History of Freethought_, 2nd ed. i, 122-24.]

[Footnote 150: The civilisations of North America and the English "dominions," while showing much diffusion of average culture, produce thus far relatively few of the highest fruits because of social immaturity and the smallness of their culture cla.s.s.]

[Footnote 151: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 12; v, 4.]

[Footnote 152: Grote (ii, 150) argues that the need to move the cattle between high and low grounds promoted communication between "otherwise disunited villages." But that would be a small matter. The essential point is that, whatever the contacts, the communities remained alien to each other.]

[Footnote 153: See Stubbs, _Const. Hist. of England_, 4th ed. iii, 632-33, as to England in the fifteenth century; and Michelet, Introd. to _Renaissance_ (vol. vii of _Hist. de France_).]

[Footnote 154: See below, pt. vi, ch. i, -- 2.]

[Footnote 155: This discussion also goes back for at least two centuries. See Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, Misc. iii, ch. i (vol.

iii, pp. 137, 152).]

[Footnote 156: Note, in this connection, the tactic of Mr. Balfour in the election struggle of 1909-10.]

[Footnote 157: This was written, of course, before the recent uprising.]

[Footnote 158: Cp. Professor Giles, _The Civilisation of China_, pp.

1-19, as to the little-recognised diversity of Chinese speech, stock, and climate.]

[Footnote 159: Since these words were written China in turn has had her new birth, vindicating the doctrine above set forth.]

PART II

ECONOMIC FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY

CHAPTER I

ROMAN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION

By singling out one set of the forces of aggregation and disintegration touched on in the foregoing general view, it is possible to get a more concrete idea of what actually went on in the Roman body politic. It is always useful in economic science, despite protests to the contrary, to consider bare processes irrespectively of ethical feeling; and the advantage accrues similarly in the "economic interpretation of history."[160] We have sufficiently for our purpose considered Roman history under the aspects of militarism and cla.s.s egoism: it remains to consider it as a series of economic phenomena.

This has been facilitated by many special studies. Gibbon covers much of the ground in chapters 6, 14, 17, 18, 29, 35, 36 and 41; and Professor Guglielmo Ferrero sheds new light at some points in his great work, _The Greatness and Decline of Rome_ (Eng. trans. 5 vols. 1907-1911), though his economics at times calls for revision.

Cp. Alison on "The Fall of Rome," in _Essays_, 1850, vol. iii (a useful conspectus, though flawed by some economic errors); Spalding's _Italy and the Italian Islands_, 3rd ed. 1845, i, 371-400; Dureau de la Malle, _economie politique des Romains_, 1840, t. ii; Robiou et Delaunay, _Les Inst.i.tutions de l'ancienne Rome_, 1888, vol. iii, ch. 1; Fustel de Coulanges, _Le Colonat romain_, etc.; Finlay, _History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans_, ed. 1877, ch. i, ---- 5-8; Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, vol. i, 1864, chs. xi, xii, xx (a work full of sound criticism of testimonies); W.T. Arnold, _Roman Provincial Administration_, 1879; Brooks Adams, _The Law of Civilisation and Decay_, 1897, ch. i; and Dr. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_, vol. i, 1899. Among many learned and instructive German treatises may be noted the Preisschrift of R. Pohlmann, _Die Uebervolkerung der antiken Grossstadte_, Leipzig, 1884. Special notice is due to the recent work of W.R. Patterson, _The Nemesis of Nations_, 1907--a valuable study of slavery.

As we have first traced them, the Romans are a cl.u.s.ter of agricultural and pastoral tribes, chronically at war with their neighbours, and centring round certain refuge-fortresses on one or two of the "Seven Hills." Whether before or after conquest by monarchic Etruscans, these tribes tended normally to fall into social grades in which relative wealth and power tended to go together. The first source of subsistence for all was cattle-breeding and agriculture, and that of the richer was primarily slave labour, a secondary source being usury. Slaves there were in the earliest historic times. But from the earliest stages wealth was in some degree procured through war, which yielded plunder in the form of cattle,[161] the princ.i.p.al species of riches in the ages before the precious metals stood for the command of all forms of wealth. Thus the rich tended to grow richer even in that primitive community, their riches enabling them specially to qualify themselves for war, so getting more slaves and cattle, and to acquire fresh slave labour in time of peace, while in time of war the poor cultivator ran a special risk of being himself reduced to slavery at home, in that his farm was untilled, while that of the slave-owner went on as usual.[162] Long before the ages described as decadent, the lapse of the poor into slavery was a frequent event. "The law of debt, framed by creditors, and for the protection of creditors, was the most horrible that has ever been known among men."[163] When the poorer cultivator borrowed stock or seed from the richer, he had first to pay a heavy interest; and when in bad years he failed to meet that liability he could be at once sold up and finally enslaved with his family, so making compet.i.tion all the harder for the other small cultivators. As against the plainly disintegrating action of such a system, however, wars of conquest and plunder became to some extent a means of popular salvation, the poorer having ultimately their necessary share in the booty, and, as the State grew, in the conquered lands. Military expansion was thus an economic need.

In such an inland community, commerce could grow but slowly, the products being little adapted for distant exchange. The primitive prejudice of landholders against trade, common to Greece and Rome, left both handicraft and commerce largely to aliens and pariahs.[164] The traders, as apart from the agriculturists and vine-and olive-growers, would as a rule be foreigners, "non-citizens," having no political rights; and their calling was from the first held in low esteem by the richer natives, were it only because in comparison it was always apt to involve some overreaching of the agriculturist,[165] which as between man and man could be seen to be a bad thing by moralists who had no scruples about usury and enslavement for debt. And as the scope of the State increased from age to age, the patrician cla.s.s found ready to its hand means of enrichment which yielded more return with much less trouble than was involved in commerce. The prejudice against trade was no bar to brigandage.

On the other hand, the first practical problem of all communities, taxation, was intelligently faced by the Roman aristocracy from the outset. The payment of the _tributum_ or occasional special tax for military purposes was a condition of the citizen franchise, and so far the patricians were all burdened where the unenfranchised plebeians were not. But this contribution "was looked upon as a forced loan, and was repaid when the times improved."[166] And there were other compensations. The use of the public pastures (which seem at one time to have been the sole source of the State's revenue[167]), and the cultivation of public land, were operations which could be so conducted as to pay the individual without paying the State. It is clear that frauds in this connection were at all times common: the t.i.thes and rents due on the _ager publicus_ were evaded, and the land itself appropriated wherever possible by the more powerful, though still called public property.[168] "The poorer plebeian, therefore, always strove to have conquered lands divided, and not kept as _ager publicus_; while the landless men who got allotments at a distance were inclined to regard their migration as an almost equal grievance. If the rich men, they argued, had not monopolised the public pastures with their herds, and treated the lands which they leased at a nominal rental as their own, there would have been enough land at home to divide among those who had been ruined while serving their country in arms."[169]

But as the sphere of conquest widened, another economic phase supervened. Where newly conquered territory was too distant to tempt any save the poorest citizens, or to be directly utilised by the rich, it could still be made _ager publicus_ and rented to its own inhabitants; and the collection of this and other exactions from subject provinces gradually grew to be a main source of Roman wealth. For the mere cattle-looting of the early days there was subst.i.tuted the systematic extortion of tribute. "In antiquity conquest meant essentially the power to impose a tribute upon the conquered";[170] and "until the time of Augustus the Romans had maintained their armies by seizing and squandering the acc.u.mulated [bullion] capital h.o.a.rded by all the nations of the world."[171] Meanwhile the upper cla.s.ses were directly or indirectly supported by the annual tribute which from the time of the conquest of Greece was drawn solely from the provinces. Paulus Emilius brought from the sack of h.e.l.las so enormous a treasure in bullion, as well as in objects of art, that the exaction of the _tributum_ from Roman citizens, however rich, was felt to have become irrational; and henceforth, until Augustus re-imposed taxation to pay his troops, Italy sponged undisguisedly on the rest of the Empire.[172] Caesar's expeditions were simply quests for plunder and revenue; and the reason for his speedy retreat from Britain, for which there have been framed so many superfluous explanations, is plainly given in the letter of Cicero in which he tells of the news sent him from Britain by his brother--"no hope of plunder."[173] But the supreme need was a regular annual tribute, preferably in bullion, but welcome as corn. On the one hand the exacted revenue supported the military and the bureaucracy; on the other hand, the business of collecting taxes and tribute was farmed out in the hands of companies of _publicani_, mainly formed of the so-called knights, the _equites_ of the early days; in whose hands rich senators, in defiance of legal prohibition, placed capital sums for investment,[174] as they had previously used foreigners, who were free to take usury where a Roman was not. Of such money-makers Gallia Provincia was already full in the days of Cicero.[175] Roman administration was thus a matter of financially exploiting the Empire in the interest of the Roman moneyed cla.s.ses;[176] and the ruthless skill with which the possibilities of the situation were developed is perhaps even now not fully realised. The Roman financier could secure a tribute upon tribute by lending to a subject city or State the money demanded of it by the government, and charge as much interest on the loan as the borrowers could well pay. We know that the notoriously conscientious Brutus, of sacred memory, thus lent, or backed a friend who lent, money to tribute-payers at 48 per cent., or at least demanded 48 per cent. on his loans, and sought to use the power of the executive to extort the usury.[177]

All this, we are to remember, went on without any furtherance of total domestic wealth-production. When corn-growing fell off, irrecoverably depressed by the unearned import from the richer soils of tributary provinces, there was a transference, partly economic, partly luxurious, of agricultural labour to vine-and olive-culture, and a wholesale turning of arable land to pasture. Some export of wine and olives followed, though the rich Romans tended to drink the wines of Greece.

But Italy had ceased to be self-supporting. The produce she imported was far in excess of her power of export;[178] so that in sheer fact.i.tiousness the revenue of Rome is without parallel in history.

Modern England, which has grown rich by burning up its coal in manufacture or selling it outright, but in the process has acquired a share in the national and munic.i.p.al debts of all other countries--England is stable in comparison. While it lasts, the coal educes manufactures, which also earn imports and const.i.tute loans. So with the recent exploitation of German iron; though in that case there has been much of sheer national waste in the wholesale export of iron at "dumping"

prices in times of trade depression. But the history of Rome was a progressive paralysis of Italian production; and the one way in which the administration can be said to have counteracted the process--as apart from the spontaneous resort to vine-and olive-culture and to slave manufactures--was by forcing more-or-less unprofitable mining for gold and silver wherever any could be got, thus giving what stimulus can be given to demand by the mere placing of fresh bullion on the market. Roman civilisation was thus irrevocably directed to an illusory end, with inevitably fatal results. Bullion had come to standfor public wealth, and wars were made for mines as well as for tribute, Spain in particular being prized for her mining resources. As a necessary sequence, therefore, copper money was ousted by silver (B.C.

269), and silver finally, after a long transition period, by gold, about the time of Severus.[179] The silver had been repeatedly debased when the treasury was in difficulties;[180] and in the later days of the Empire it seems to have been base beyond all historic parallel,[181]

though a large revenue was extorted till the end. Between revenue and tax-farming profits and the yield of the mines, the Roman moneyed cla.s.s must indeed have spent a good deal, so long as the tributaries were not exhausted. But their economic demand was mainly for--(_a_) foods, spices, wines, cloths, gems, marbles, and wares produced by the more prosperous provinces; (_b_) expensive forms of food, fish, and fowl, raised chiefly on the estates run by their own cla.s.s; (_c_) some wares of home production; and (_d_) _services_[182] from artists, architects, master craftsmen, slaves, mimes, parasites, and meretrices, whose economic demand in turn would as far as possible go in the same directions.

As for the ma.s.s of the town people, slave or free, which ought on common-sense principles to have been employed either in industry or on the land, it was by a series of hand-to-mouth measures on the part of the government, and by the operation of ordinary self-interest on the part of the rich cla.s.s, made age by age more unproductive industrially and more worthless politically. Despite such a reform as the Licinian law of 367 B.C.,[183] which for a time seems to have restored a yeoman cla.s.s to the State and greatly developed its fighting power, the forces of outside compet.i.tion and of capitalism gradually ousted the yeomen cultivators all over Italy, leaving the land mainly in the hands of the patricians and financiers of the city, who exploited it either by slave labour or by grinding down the former cultivators as tenants. Even on this footing, a certain amount of industry would be forced on the towns.

But not only was that also largely in the hands of slave-masters, with the result that demotic life everywhere was kept on the lowest possible plane: the emperors gradually adopted on humane grounds a policy which demoralised nearly all that was left of sound citizenship.

As of old, monarchy in the hands of the more rational and conscientious men tended to seek for the ma.s.s of the people some protection as against the upper cla.s.s; and the taxes and customs laid on by Augustus, to the disgust of the Senate, were an effort in this direction. But this was rather negative than positive protection, and the effort inevitably went further. In the last rally of what may be termed conscientious aristocratic republicanism, such as it was, we find Caius Gracchus, as tribune, helping the plebs by causing grain to be sold at a half or a fourth of its market value--an expedient pathetically expressive of the hopeless distance that then lay between public spirit and social science. Both of the Gracchi sought by violent legal measures to wring the appropriated public lands from the hands of the rich, with the inevitable result of raising against themselves a host of powerful enemies. The needed change could not be so effected. But even if it had been, it could not have endured. The Greek advisers of Tiberius Gracchus, Blossius of c.u.mae and Diophanes of Mitylene,[184] looked solely to redistribution, taking for granted the permanence of slavery, the deadliest of all inequalities. The one way, if there were any, in which the people could be saved was by a raising of their social status; and that was impossible without an arrest of slavery and a cessation of extorted tribute. But no Roman thinker save the Gracchi and their predecessors and imitators seems ever to have dreamt of the former, and no one contemplated the latter remedy. Least of all were the Roman ruling cla.s.s likely to think of either; and though Tiberius Gracchus did avowedly seek to subst.i.tute free for slave labour,[185] and wrought to that end; and though Caius Gracchus did in his time of power employ a large amount of free labour on public works, one such effort counted for nothing against the normal att.i.tude of the patriciate. In order to fight the Senate he had to conciliate the _publicani_ and money-lenders as well as the populace, and the reforms of the two brothers came to nothing.[186]