ESSAYS ARRANGED AND EDITED

BY

F. S. MARVIN

SOMETIME SENIOR SCHOLAR OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD

AUTHOR OF THE LIVING PAST

Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
London    Edinburgh    Glasgow    New York
Toronto    Melbourne    Bombay

1915

The following essays are the substance of a course of lectures delivered at a Summer School at the Woodbrooke Settlement, near Birmingham, in August 1915. The general purpose of the course will be apparent from the essays themselves. No forced or mechanical uniformity of view was aimed at. The writers will be found, very naturally and properly, to differ in detail and in the stress they lay on different aspects of the case. But they agree in thinking that while our country's cause and the cause of our Allies is just and necessary and must be prosecuted with the utmost vigour, it is not inopportune to reflect on those common and ineradicable elements in the civilization of the West which tend to form a real commonwealth of nations and will survive even the most shattering of conflicts. That we on the Allied side stand fundamentally for this ideal is one of our most valuable assets.

The method of the course was primarily historical, though certain essays have been added of a more idealist type. It is hoped that the point of view suggested, though prompted by current events, may be found to have some permanent value. It could obviously be applied to many other aspects of European life, e.g. morality and politics, to which conditions of space have only permitted indirect reference to be made in this volume.

F.S.M.

CHAPTER I. THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

The appeal to history. Previous great schisms in Europe which have been surmounted give hope for the present. The Reformation. The Napoleonic Wars.

The two points of view, (1) Man's nature itself tending to unity through conflict. (2) The stages in the process developed in history.

In pre-history conflict and diversity are predominant, though the necessities of life prescribe certain uniformities. Consolidation comes in favoured physical conditions, especially great river-basins like the Nile and the Euphrates.

The possibility of a world-unity first consciously envisaged in the Greco-Roman world. Greece gives unity in thought, Rome in practice. Order with a solid intellectual foundation established with the Roman Empire. In the mediaeval world a unity mainly spiritual is reached in the same framework. The position of Germany in this development. The break-up of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. The enlargement of the known world and the growth of wealth and knowledge. This crisis still continues and has been recently accentuated by the birth-throes of nationalities. The supreme problem for international unity is now the reconciliation of national units with the interests of the whole. Underneath the superficial turmoil the great unifying forces of science and of common sentiments continue to grow and will ultimately prevail.

CHAPTER II. UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

Retrospect of the search for unity in man's affairs, in its political and scientific bearings.

The Unity of Man as an Animal Species. Ancient beliefs, doubts suggested by the practice of slavery, their solution, and the modern conception of a 'Human Family'.

Man's struggle with Nature in the N.W. Quadrant of the Old World. Unity here not to be found in the Food Quest. Prehistoric Europe shows variety of regimens, hoe-agriculture, pastoral nomadism. The wheel and the plough and the composite bread and cheese culture.

Race, Language, and Culture as Factors of Unity. The spread of the European Bread Culture is earlier than that of Indo-European Speech and probably than that of the 'Alpine' type of man. Race in Europe has led not to unity but to discord, and linguistic affinity does not ensure mutual intelligibility.

CHAPTER III. THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

Contemporary history is the only genuine and important history, the present is the only object of historical knowledge; what the present is and how, properly conceived, it gives history its unity and justifies the study of what is past (ancient history); all history is our history, and otherwise without meaning or value to us. The history of classical antiquity is the history of the youth of the modern world, of the formation of the now latent but still potent hopes, fears, designs and thoughts which constitute the substratum of the European mind; how this still unites a divided Europe and affords a ground of hope for a restored and deepened union. Our debt to the Greeks: (a) the very notion of civilization, (b) the idea of its realization through knowledge, (c) the ideal of freedom as the inner spirit of true civilization. How the Greeks failed to work all this out in both theory and practice, and how nevertheless they taught their lesson to the world; the services of Greece to the world in the creation of Art, the Sciences, and Philosophy; the Greek ideal of a life beyond 'civilized' life, but rendered possible by it, and thus giving to civilized life a new and higher value; defects and merits of this ideal.

Lessons still to be learned by us from the study of both the success and the failure of Greco-Roman civilization; how the consideration of these may at once sober our expectations and inspire us with hope in the present. The forces which created it still maintain it and show no signs of exhaustion. But that they may continue in effect we must study these forces and learn the lessons the ancient experience of their working conveys, exerting ourselves first to understand Greco-Roman thought and practice and then to better their instruction.

CHAPTER IV. THE MIDDLE AGES

I. The mediaeval world. Geographical extent. Economic structure: its features of uniformity and isolation: the effect of the rise of a national economy on mediaeval society. Linguistic basis. Mediaeval scheme that of a general European system of estates rather than of a balance of powers.

II. The unity of mediaeval civilization in its great period (1050-1300) ecclesiastical. The attempt of the Church to achieve a general synthesis of human life by the application of Christian principle. (1) The control of war and peace and the feudal world: the Truce of God and the Crusades: the papacy as an international authority: the mediaeval conception of war. (2) The control of trade and commerce and the economic world: just wages and prices: the mediaeval town. (3) The control of learning and education and the world of thought: reconciliation of Greek science and the Christian faith: allegorical interpretation of the world and its effects on natural science.

IV. The influence of law on the development of the kingdom into the state—a process begun early in England and France, but only generally achieved about 1500. The new conditions—geographical, economic, linguistic—which prepare the way for the new world of the sixteenth century. The gulf between that world and the old mediaeval world. The hope of unity to-day.

CHAPTER V. UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

The Problem in the Ancient World. Law universal and supreme over mankind (Sophocles, Antigone). Law arbitrary and varying from place to place (Herodotus). Nature and convention. The 'rightlessness' of the stranger in antiquity. The law was a 'law of citizens'. Admission of the foreigner to legal protection. Rome develops a law of the men of all nations (ius gentium), which reacts upon the law of citizens (ius civile), and ultimately coalesces with it. The law of nature.

The break-up of the Ancient World; the Middle Ages. The invaders bring their own law with them. In the kingdoms which they founded each man had his 'personal law'. Local Law. Feudal Law. The beginnings of National Law: England, France, Germany. Roman Law in the Middle Ages. The Canon Law.

The Modern World. The reception of Roman Law. State Sovereignty. The Modern Codes. Unity and diversity of law within the political unit. The world divided into territories of the English Common Law and lands where Roman Law conceptions prevail. Forces making for unity: the notion of a 'law of nature'; the pursuit of common ends. International law, private and public.

CHAPTER VI. THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

CHAPTER VII. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Western civilization possesses a certain unity (1) in the sense of unity of character, (2) in the fact that it has a common origin, ultimately in the Greco-Roman civilization but more immediately in mediaeval Christendom, and (3) in the sense that its parts have maintained a constant intercommunication of ideas. (4) The different qualities of German, French, and English thinkers have in large measure complemented one another, (5) and the history of science and of speculative philosophy is largely a history of the interaction of distinct national schools. (6) The same thing is true of political thought. (7) Thus the world of thought forms a commonwealth which is superior to all national differences and, in spite of the war, remains a foundation of a very genuine unity.

CHAPTER VIII. UNITY IN EDUCATION

Distinction between Unity and Uniformity. Historical Unity; the origin of the School and the University. Both instruments of the mediaeval Church for maintaining a common system throughout Western Christendom. Importance of Latin as the universal language of education. Suppression of the vernacular and of national movements. The Reformation; a common European movement. Erasmus. The new teaching based on classical literature. Tendency to disunion; the influence of the Reformation and the national Churches. Growth of national literature. Political influences, the French Revolution, and the National State. The essential Unity still preserved, not merely in the study of the natural sciences, but in the historical unity given by Christianity and the spirit of Greece.

Commerce and finance practical expressions of the instinct of self-preservation which is common not only to all men, but to all living creatures. Early appearance of trading habit in boys. Early examples of trade. Abraham's purchase of a burying-ground from Ephron the Hittite. Solomon's trade with Hiram of Tyre. Herodotus, the first historian, opens his history with an allusion to trade. Trade is based on specialization, and is at once a cause of unity and of disunion. Its extension from individuals to communities. Foreign trade stimulated by variations of value in different communities. Specialization increases efficiency, but makes the worker a machine, and a speculator on the chance that others will want what he makes. International trade also promotes both unity and friction. On the whole, commerce a great promoter of unity. Likewise finance, or money-dealing. Its origin and development. London's catholic taste in foreign securities: sometimes prefers them to the home-made article. Effect of foreign investment on home production and consumption. Foreign finance and productive specialization.

CHAPTER X. INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION

Interdependence true of countries as of classes. A fact brought home to us by the European War. Importance of international action in relation to the raising of social and industrial standards. This truth perceived by Robert Owen a century ago. Work of Owen and his successors in the direction of an international minimum of labour conditions. Action of the Swiss Federal Council. The German Emperor calls the first Conference on workmen's protection 1890. Formal failure and substantial achievement of this Conference. Founding of International Association for Labour Legislation and International Labour Office. Constitution and work of these bodies. Biennial conferences of the association: subjects and methods. International Conventions of 1906, their scope and value. Subsequent labours of the Association. Its present position and future hopes.

Ideals arise from perceived social evils. They have caused in recent years (a) Common action by European Governments and (b) action by separate Governments influenced by foreign experience. There has also been a growth of sentiment, not yet embodied in law or institutions, with regard to (i) the position of women and children, (ii) social caste, and (iii) the increase of common action for reform by civilized states.

CHAPTER XII. THE POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE

The nineteenth century has made three great contributions towards the possibility of International Government, the political realization of nationality, the growth in substance and method of international law, and the progress of federalism. In other fields outside politics, especially in commerce and finance, a network of international co-operation has grown up. Closer political union is needed for three purposes: first, the consolidation, extension, and improved sanctions of existing international law; secondly, the settlement of differences between nations; thirdly, positive co-operation for the common good. This progress involves some further diminution of 'sovereignty' and 'independence'. But these concepts have no absolute validity. In the Hague Conventions and other intergovernmental instruments the rudiments of international government already exist. In order to establish effective security for peace, what is needed is a general treaty providing that all disputes be submitted to arbitration or conciliation, with such guarantees for acceptance of the award as will establish confidence. The test of confidence is the voluntary reduction of armaments. Internationalists differ as to the nature and rigour of the sanctions. Some rely entirely on a 'moratorium' and the pressure of public opinion: others would compel the submission of all issues, but not the acceptance of awards: others, again, would apply force, diplomatic, economic, or military, to both processes.

CHAPTER XIII. RELIGION

The history of Europe suggests that, though the Church exerted a considerable influence on the growth of a common type of civilization in the West, in modern times religion has proved a divisive rather than a unifying factor. During the last generation or two, however, there has been a decline of the dogmatic and sectarian tempers. This change is largely due to the growth of the scientific spirit, and, as in other realms of inquiry so in the study of religion, international co-operation has steadily developed. Both literary criticism and psychological analysis have contributed to the widening of sympathy. The better understanding of certain elements in the Christian ideal and the Christian hope must also be taken into consideration as a factor making for a new catholicism which finds expression in movements like the Adult School Movement and the Student Christian Movement, and in the ever-growing demand for closer co-operation in missionary work.

Beyond this, partly through the comparative study of religions, we are conscious that religious thought in the West possesses some common characteristics, notably, faith in the solidarity of mankind and in the reality of progress. Of themselves, these two convictions do not constitute any very close bond of union, and both beliefs need to be defined and enforced by the sense of sin and the consciousness of God which the West has learned from Jesus.

CHAPTER XIV. THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY

The final test of a high international aim is the joint effort of the stronger peoples to protect and assist the weaker and less advanced. The case of Africa and the Brussels Conference of 1889. Analogy with the treatment of the young at home.

THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

In face of the greatest tragedy in history, it is to history that we make appeal. What does it teach us to expect as the issue of the conflict? How far and in what form may we anticipate that the unity of mankind, centring as it must round Europe, will emerge from the trial?

Only two occasions occur to the mind on which, since the break up of the Roman Empire, a schism so serious as the present has threatened the unity of the Western world. The first was the Reformation and the war which it entailed down to the Peace of Westphalia. The second was the struggle against Napoleon, terminated a hundred years ago. The latter was in many respects a closer parallel. It was a struggle of the independent nations of Europe against the overweening ambition and aggression of one Power. It united them in an alliance which achieved its purpose and survived the successful issue of the war for some years. Some such course, with a comity of nations far wider and more enduring than the Holy Alliance as its sequel, we hope and predict for the present war.

And the issue three hundred years ago may also inspire us with a cautious optimism, a strong though not unmeasured trust. The right cause triumphed, fully in the end. Freedom was secured, both for churches and for individuals, throughout the world. The evil features in the papal system, against which the attack was really levelled, quietly but completely disappeared, and the institution survived, itself reformed. Before a hundred years were out the world had moved on to the conquest of new vantage points and the establishment of a wider unity on a firmer base.

The process of gaining a greater unity among the leading nations of the world, like all the aspects of human evolution, must be regarded from two points of view, distinct in theory, inextricable in life. What does the nature of man itself demand? How has this nature expressed itself, and been affected in history by the external conditions, the geography, climate, conflict and commingling of races, which the theatre of its appearance has imposed?

Still looking at the matter a priori, it is clear that the vast community of mankind, though it has come more closely in contact in recent years over all the planet, yet acts, and must act, habitually and momentarily, through many smaller aggregates. Of these the leading types are the family and the country or nation. The former is not directly relevant to our inquiry, the latter plays a leading part in it. The former is less dependent on external conditions of land-formation and the like, and is in consequence more universal, more purely human. The latter has been shaped by geographical conditions, by racial qualities, by the apparent accidents of history. Its relation to the larger units of human society raises the most difficult, fundamental and unavoidable questions. To curb aggressive nationalism is the root-problem of the present war. To reconcile permanently nationalism with humanity would be to establish the everlasting peace.

We shall in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage of pre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with superhuman insight and prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilization would pursue. All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, a culture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by a similarity which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widely severed by distance and climatic conditions. The raw material of the human product in science, art, and invention was alike in texture although often exuberant in detail and imagination. But it had not yet the unity of an organic whole, knit by a common purpose and conscious of itself.

It is with the advent of the Greek that the seal is placed upon the claim of the Mediterranean to be the birthplace of the highest type of human civilization, the centre from which a unity of the spirit was to spread, until, by material force as well as by the conquering mind, the European or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race. The supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions, as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the city-state. For our present purpose the first and the last are the most important and the first the most important of all.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the framework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral and civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Roman missionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than the Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest. Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the Pope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants. The moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to sides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, was nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thus lifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and military nation of the West.

The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. It lasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity which supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured for a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching and pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full force over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual fabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of cognate and derivative institutions which have served the cause of unity in the moral and intellectual sphere. We shall speak later of the more perfect and lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages and the Renascence tended to the same end, using a material in philosophy and theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of knowledge and the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing a more complete community of scholars than has perhaps been ever witnessed in Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine love of truth, or even of honest disputation, was independent of differences of race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from Oxford to Paris, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sit at the feet of some world-famous teacher.

Mediaeval Europe was, in fact, much more of a unity than the modern traveller would expect, and this was mainly due to the influence of the Church. The spiritual unity went deep on one side of man's nature, and when a man like Erasmus surveyed the prospect at the beginning of the sixteenth century we can well understand his horror, and his determined abstention from any step which would precipitate the break-up of the one organized body which represents the old united culture of Christendom and might check the new forces which were threatening selfishness and disorder in ever-widening circles on the globe. For it must be noted that new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the unity of the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers were extending, East and West, the sphere in which the European was to impose his influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenth century thus becomes one, perhaps the most critical, of all the turning-points in the history of the West. Danger was mixed with hope, disorder with new knowledge and fresh power, and the crisis has not yet been surmounted. But we have gained by now some insight into the nature of the new forces and see that they should, and one day will, work more fully in the direction of unity in the civilized world, of healthy independence in the parts and a growing harmony in the whole. Little of this could have been seen by the observer at the outbreak of the Reformation.

The sixteenth century saw both the strengthening of national governments and the beginning of European colonization. England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, all settled down under a central government stronger and more independent than they had previously enjoyed, and pegged out estates for themselves beyond the seas. In each case wars have been entailed in the process, and, as we know, the backwardness of Germany at this period has been visited upon the rest of Europe tenfold in recent times. National expansion thus appears to be an eminent provocation of international strife. It is with no intention either of ignoring facts or minimizing dangers that one turns here to the other side of the account. Where was the spark actually fired which led to the present conflagration? In that part of Europe where the national units were least stable and developed, where the conditions of government and social order are most remote from our own. Who can doubt that if in the Balkans the Turks had been able to establish even the sort of government we maintain in India, or if, still better, the Balkan States, apart from the Turks, had gained their own independence in a federation like the Swiss, the aggression of the Central Powers would have been checked? The compact, well-established national unit is not in itself a danger, but there is a danger in weak, oppressed, or disjointed nationalities, who have not found safety and offer a bait to their expansive neighbours.

We put physical science first because it contains the largest number of certain and accepted laws. The further we get from mathematical exactness the more liable we are to differences of opinion, which may, as in the case of anthropology, cluster round some question of national pique. But it would be easy to trace through all the sciences, and into philosophy and religion, a growing unity of method and result before which national differences often resolve themselves into a difference of style. The style is the nation's, but the truth is mankind's.

It has been said with truth that it is easier to trace the growth of science as a joint product of co-operating minds, than to find a growth of common sentiments among the men and the nations who have created it. True among individuals, it must be at least as true among groups and nations. We may work successfully with some one at a problem or learn from a teacher or a companion when we dislike him personally and do not seek his society apart from the needs of our common work. It has often happened, and will happen again in private and public. But though particular antipathies may increase, the tendency to dislike others is a diminishing quality among civilized men. In the long run common sense and necessity will prevail. We are born to live a while before we die; and we must live on the same planet, sometimes next door to those who have sworn a never-dying hate.

Looking back, indeed, over the course of anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, much of which lies in the years since 1870, and nearly all of it since 1815, the first thing which strikes us now is the frequency and delicacy of its response to contemporary thoughts and aspirations. A few of the greatest men have recognized this at the time. I quote from Karl Ernst von Baer, the founder of comparative embryology, and in great matters the master of men as different as Huxley, Spencer, and Francis Balfour. He died in 1876, when political anthropology was still young; but in his great book on Man he 'appeals to the experience of all countries and ages, that if a people has power, and attempts wrongdoing against another, it also does not omit to conceive the other as very worthless and incompetent, and to repeat this conviction often and emphatically' (Der Mensch, ii. 235). It is easy for us to dot the i and cross the t here; less easy perhaps to realize that what troubled von Baer was the persistence of British and American ethnologists in the polygenist heresy, which he traced (and rightly) to their reluctance to treat their 'black brother' as if he were their relative at all. Judgement in that ethnological controversy went by default, with the victory of the North in the American Civil War; and in 1871 the lion lay down with the lamb, even in London; inveterate foes in the Ethnological Society and the Anthropological merging their fate in one Anthropological Institute. In 1915 the reluctance of the 'tall fair people who come from the north'—I borrow a phrase from Professor Ridgeway—to fraternize with mere brunettes, beyond Rhine and Danube, comes in its turn before the same tribunal as polygenism in 1862.

The 'human family' then seems re-established as something more than a platform phrase; and separatists (who are always with us) have had to fall back upon another criterion of disunity.

THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS A RATIONAL ANIMAL

The other half of the trouble, less clearly diagnosed by Lucretius, but detected, as we have seen, by Heraclitus, is hereditary pride, based on ignorance no less than is Lucretian fear. It is the 'lie-in-the-soul', the conviction, assailed by Socrates and before his time as well as after, that we know how things stand, when in fact we do not. Like fear, in its mental aspect, it is a failure of the Will-to-know; once again, an acceptance of the inferior status of the ignorant.

Organized fears, then, lead to tabu, the systematic inhibition of experiment which might conflict with hypothesis; and organized pride, to magic, with its systematic disregard of the results of each experiment that is made, when it does so conflict with hypothesis. And it is these two superstructures of ignorance, inhibiting and insisting by turns, which add the glamour of irrationality to so much of the behaviour of mankind, and disguise its native rationalism and its morality too. Beset by fear and pride, craftsman and cultivator and explorer and reformer alike are in the same predicament. 'I could do this or that and do it thus, but may I?' and if such opinion as counts says 'Thou shalt not', the fallacious substitution of 'shalt not' for 'mayst' cannot fail to endanger advancement. It may be over the chipping of a flint axe, or a trade-union rule about a high-speed lathe; but if the craftsman conforms to opinion as such, and not through positive concurrence of his own judgement with it, he has accepted the fallacious conclusion as his own, and lets his work fall to second-hand and to second-best.

MAN IN CONFLICT WITH NATURE IN THE NORTH-WEST QUADRANT OF THE OLD WORLD

We come now, from this rather general survey of human faculty, to the more pertinent question, what sort of unity do we find in human achievement within that region, or rather within those regions, of the Old World where the stream-heads of our modern culture seem to take their rise? The qualification which has slipped from my pen is half the answer already, for we are to deal not with one homogeneous region but with a cluster of regions in all climates from Arctic tundra to Sahara and the Nile, and in all altitudes from alpine to maritime. Unity of prehistoric culture, in such conditions, can at best be but a question of degree.

Two contemporary lines of discovery have tended to determine the result. Geology gives us a very long margin of time since the north-west quadrant began to be reinhabited by human beings after the Ice Age, and assumed approximately its present distribution of land and water. Archaeology, which in this aspect is the special stratigraphy of man, sanctions an extension of time, since not merely human beings but organized societies of men made their appearance in Europe, which far exceeds the period required, or commonly assumed, for the spread of any known Indo-European language, from any possible 'home' to any region where it was spoken at the beginning of historic time. And not only does archaeological evidence enable us to detect such societies sedentary for a while on this or that site over the face of Europe and its neighbourhood; it traces not merely one 'prehistoric culture', but a number of distinct types of such culture, each with its own geographical distribution, and with distributions which expand and contract at different times, superseding one type of culture here, and another there, and in turn superseded by others.

Keeping in mind this analogy of prehistoric Europe with pre-Columbian North America, let us classify the problems of subsistence which these Old World regions offered to prehistoric man; and consider, granting him all the reason in the world, and uniform physique (if you please) as well, how he is to formulate solutions which shall show any trace of uniformity, and yet be solutions for him of the one Protean problem, how to sustain life here and now?

South of the tundra, the Great Northern Woodland encircles the planet, interrupted only by the treeless sea. Here too we hunt, and trap, and eat berries of the undergrowth, like Algonkins or Tacitean Germans, many of whom had no more skill in cattle than Algonkins. But we have not the place to ourselves, like the tundra folk and the Algonkins. Our forest world is in ever-present danger of disintegration, and our wood-craft with it. Fond folk with tame animals (poor sport, both of them, for sportsmen like us) come blundering in off the parkland away south, up the grassy glades, trampling undergrowth and scaring the game. People are saved from all that 'over there', because no one can tame the prairie buffalo and drive him over the hunting grounds; some sport, too, the prairie buffalo! And worse still, there are the people who come hacking and burning our great trees, and tearing up the turf and underwood, and all to plant their fancy grasses with the fat seeds, that the deer like to browse over; and that is the only thing to make those people show fight, if we or the deer go among their fat-grass plots. Those people come up, too, from the south and the south-east, and have to go back thither for seed if their sowings fail. Of course they like their animals tame, like the other fellows; but the grasses are their first string, as we bow-men say.

It is in the southern third, or thereabouts, of the continuous Woodland, where the deciduous forest trees begin to give place to evergreens, as they themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutely subdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize the Mediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate its scale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical Hackbau, as the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how truly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to a poor man. For the house-slave could handle a zappa, the spadelike Levantine hoe, where an ox would fail to turn round, yet where food-plants could be coaxed to grow, and an olive-tree would luxuriate.

South-eastward, outside the Carpathians, and within them also, in the great plain of Hungary, we meet a totally different régime; vast featureless and treeless grasslands, extending past the Black Sea and Caspian to the foot of the mountains of North Persia and the spurs of the Central Asian highlands. Here, if Man is to maintain himself at all, he must be master of tame animals which can eat the grass, and in turn sustain him. South of the eastward continuation of the woodland Mountain Zone, through Asia Minor into Persia, and also south of the Mediterranean lake-region and the ridges of Syria and the 'Africa Minor' of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, which partly enclose it, lies another group of grasslands, Arabia and Sahara, desert-hearted, but capable of sustaining a considerable population of nomad pastoral folk round their margins and in oases, and of emitting them in volcanic emigrations now and then.

The exhilarants show the same geographic control; with the olive culture go the wines and brandies of the south; with the forest culture, the ciders and the cherry brandies of Central Europe; with the copious cereals and meadow-grass, the beers and whiskies of the North. In details, of course, the distribution of types is intricately confused; but the main outline is clear; and we reach a first glimpse of a coherent European culture, on the almost animal plane of regional foodquests.

RACE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE AS FACTORS OF UNITY

Most strongly contrasted externally with the 'Boreal' type is the slight-built Mediterranean brunet. That his home is in the south, that he is closely related with the men of the African and Arabian grasslands, and that he was among the first post-glacial explorers of the Atlantic seaboard, is admitted. More doubt arises as to the extent to which he penetrated from these southern and western bases into the heart of peninsular Europe. Certainly as we trace him to the south-east he seems more and more restricted to the Mediterranean coastline, and at last has no early monopoly even of the islands. The contrast between Crete and Cyprus is instructive as to this. The 'Mediterranean' type, in fact, reaffirms to the anthropologist the close zoological affinity between South-west Europe and North-west Africa.

To this broadly threefold analysis of European man, add only this, that ever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions and left the grasslands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also there has been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it will be clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniform basis of our European culture.

Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe' amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in French, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language; while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just a chance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three.

What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the right lines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) they co-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of the North? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselves of enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near to the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If northern genealogies are any guide,—and they are not likely to have reduced the real interval wittingly—Rome's empire reached its full extent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was in building, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War. In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historical transactions; it was not in finished societies like these that Great Gods (or their votaries either) set out from 'home' over the face of Europe to unite it.

Leaving, then, these high works of the mind, Language and Religion, which have proved but blind guides, and 'of a short stay' in this labyrinth, let us turn to the material evidence of industrial and aesthetic activity. Here we begin at least to get something like first-hand evidence, for we have the manufactured object itself, not Caesar's impression of a Celtic god, or Herodotus' transcript of a Scythian word. We can judge for ourselves of fabrics and styles, and though, of course, we have only objects of the least perishable sorts, stone, metal, pottery, we have, at all events, in the pottery the most imitative of arts, and therefore the widest basis for conclusions as to the principles of a style. Moreover, outside the sea-borne culture of the Mediterranean, pottery does not travel far: its uses are domestic, not commercial. John Gilpin's fate is typical of those who would carry things on horseback in bottles. Like words, however, potsherds enlighten us more about frontiers and contrasts than about uniformities. They are terribly provincial and tell their tale with a twang. We can trace our Bandkeramik and Schnurkeramik and Urfirnissmalerei and all that sort of technological idiom, across the map, as we can trace the centum and satem languages. But even if we could collate the 'Bandkeramiker' with the 'Satemvölker' as recent enthusiasts propose, we should be no nearer to a common technology for Europe than we were to a common language.

It is not a merely ephemeral interest which draws attention at this point to the significance of engines of war, among this class of transferable inventions. Little has been done in a systematic way on this topic, but the rapidity with which a really important change in equipment and organization passes from camp to camp, and revolutionizes not only armies but states, when it is a question of survival or defeat, has its illustration in many phases of warfare, and ranks among the great levellers of national or regional pride.

The recorded movements of peoples in historic times, and the previous movements inferred from language, and other symptoms, indicate a long-established distribution of what might be described in meteorological phrase as man-pressure; certain regions being characterized either always or repeatedly by high man-pressure, and an outward flow of men into the cyclonic areas or vortexes of low man-pressure in the human covering (or biosphere) of the planet. Typical high-pressure regions are the Arabian peninsula with its repeated crises of Semitic eruption, and the great Eurasian grasslands. Typical regions of low man-pressure, and repeated irruption, are the South European peninsulas. Occasionally a region plays both parts, alternately accepting inhabitants, and unloading them on to other lands; examples are the Hungarian plain, Scandinavia, and Britain. Others again can hardly be said to have a population of their own at all, but are simple avenues of transmission, like Western Switzerland and the Hellespont Region. I am speaking now, of course, about ancient times. The causes of these recurrent movements are not clearly made out; but the movements themselves, and the fact that they are of regional recurrence, are matters of history.

And here we come at once upon a new factor making strongly for a more general uniformity of culture within peninsular Europe than its physical character would at all prepare us to expect. For although individual men often respond very rapidly to fresh surroundings, and can change their mode of life almost as they change their clothes, societies react far more slowly; at the pace, in fact, usually of their most obstinate members. Confronted therefore with the opportunity, or the need, for a change of habit, in the course of a migration for example, they must either refuse it, like a shy horse, or (if they accept it) enter on their new career imperfectly trained, and extemporizing adjustments here and there in very unworkmanlike fashion. Only rarely does the statesman or 'lawgiver' appear, just when he is wanted, to bring Israel up out of Egypt into the desert, and out of the desert into the good land beyond Jordan, and to canonize a new code of behaviour suited to a new set of needs. This social inertia, of which political history is the sorry record, is of course least perceptible, and most effective, when the region of transition is graduated gently; and we have already seen that this is conspicuously so around the parkland margin of the northern grassland, where it faces on peninsular Europe. Let us follow this clue in detail.

It is probably to this westward drift from more purely pastoral condition to less, that we must attribute the only really large unity of European civilization in the later prehistoric ages, namely, its social organization in patriarchal households linked into clans and tribes. We may doubt whether this social type is permanently adaptable to a forest régime, any more than to industrial life. Certainly forest folk outside peninsular Europe only display it rarely and imperfectly. But it is characteristic of all pastoral folk; once established, it coheres and persists under great external stresses; and in early Europe its liability (strong though its structure is) to break up sooner or later into a more individualistic order, was counteracted by the recurrent drift of new grassland peoples westward from one of its principal homes. Grassland Arabia, let us note in passing, has been performing the same function, since history began, for its own marginal neighbours from Babylonia to Palestine and Egypt.

No one would suggest that this patriarchal and tribal structure favoured political unity or large enterprises of any kind. In fact, throughout the early history of Europe these coherent kinship groups, with their inner insulation and their inability to offer anything but passive resistance to the forces which were to dissolve them, were an insuperable bar to anything politically larger. 'If only these could hold together, they would rule the world' is the judgement of Herodotus on Scythia, of Thucydides on Thrace, of Polybius and Caesar upon Gaul, of Tacitus on Germany: each with the unspoken afterthought 'but thank goodness that they cannot!'

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Marett, Anthropology. Home University Library.

J.L. Myres, The Dawn of History. Home University Library.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,' and the wise historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits of his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distant future can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, the subjects of judgement. If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thus eternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is not either in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are acted upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what we suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the real alone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also so that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. What we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and where we now stand. All other so-called knowledge or understanding, save as it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning our present selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity or lumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves or others what we so judge concerning the one and the other. Genuine understanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, is always of the present or nothing.

This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World—the world of classical antiquity. It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughts are not past but still live, still 'breathe and burn' in us. They are largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are made. Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundations of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours of our ancestors. We are the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world, at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and single. Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in the unbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is the hero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of the history of Humanity. Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially of Classical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our own youth.

The works and thoughts of which I am to speak—the dreams, the plans, the hopes and aspirations—are assuredly ours also, the stuff and substance of our being, our inner genius, our guiding and controlling selves, what we in our first youth imagined and conceived, what we believed, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed. If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters are small and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is by professional historians, we recognize it as the record of a past which is our very own, while at the same time it is a past which we share with other nations who are our co-partners in the work of conserving, deepening, extending, enriching the present-day civilization of Europe and the world.

The first and most obvious achievement of the Greek mind was the deliverance of itself in the sphere of the imagination. Behind the fair creations of Greek art lies a dark and ugly background, but it does lie behind them. That was its first conquest. Under the magic spell of Art the hateful and terrifying shapes of barbarous religion retreated and the world of imagination was peopled with gracious and attractive figures. The Greek Pantheon is, for all its defects, a world of dignified and beautiful humanity. 'No thorn or threat stains its beauty bright.' On the whole the gods which are its denizens are humanized and humane, the friends and allies of men, who therefore feel themselves not abased or helpless in their relations with them. 'Of one kind are gods and men,' and their common world is one in which men feel themselves at home. Dark shadows there are, but they hide no mysteries to appal and unman. The imagination is free to follow its own laws, and so to create what is lovely and lovable. Language is no longer a tyrant but a willing and dexterous servant, and the Greek language reflecting, as all language does, the spirit of its users, is the most perfect instrument that the human mind has ever devised for the expression of its dreams. The works which were then created have ever since haunted the mind of Europe like a passion, and we are right in speaking of them as immortal, 'a joy for ever'.

This life was throughout the duration of Greek thought too narrowly conceived. It was frequently thought and spoken of as the life of a spectator or bystander or onlooker, as a life withdrawn or isolated, cut off from what we should call ordinary human business and concerns, a life into which we, or at least a few of us, could escape or be transported at rare intervals and under exceptionally favourable circumstances. Yet in principle it was open to all, and certainly not confined to those privileged by birth or wealth or social position. It was not the reward of magical favour or ascetic exercises, it was reached by the beaten path of the loyal citizen and the resolute student. There was about it no esoteric mystery or other-worldliness. And if to reach it was a high privilege its attainment brought with it the imperative duty of a descent into the ordinary world to instruct, to enlighten, to comfort and help and console, to play a part in the great business and work of human civilization. In a sense this was, and is, the most permanent and fruitful gift of Greece to the European world.

But before we proceed to reckon up their contributions to European civilization it is well to correct a misconception which arises only too easily from an accident of our education. It is the custom in England to concentrate attention upon a brief period in the history of Rome, ignoring on the one hand the early Republican period and on the other the later Imperial. There is thus lost to our imaginations those figures and their deeds which seemed for example to Shakespeare most characteristically Roman and to our more thoughtful consideration those achievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe. The latter is the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of Imperial Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and most informative. Under the Empire Rome worked as a master, no longer as an apprentice or a journeyman. The theatre of her civilizing activities was here little less than the whole world then known, and the boast is not unjustified that she made into a city what had formerly been but a world, as we might say, merely a geographical expression. The record of that progress reads to us too much as a narrative of incessant warfare, and we are accustomed to think of her empire as a gigantic military power, but in reality it was in aim and result essentially pacific, and so appeared to those who lived under her sway. To them the name of her empire was the 'Roman peace'. It was as such that the memory of it haunted the minds of men when it too broke down from internal economic disorders and external pressure, and a distracted and divided Europe looked back to it as the pattern for a restored civilization.

Nevertheless, as it is necessary for the living body to deposit a bony skeleton and for the living soul to harden its impulses into habits and stiffen its aspirations into rules and plans of action, so civilization as a whole must create within and around it a structure of ordered and systematic thought and action within which the higher forces now recognized and disengaged may be all the more free to do their work. Without such a mechanical or apparently unspiritual basis these forces can only work fugitively, erratically, and so ineffectively, as they did in the Greek world. To the prosaic business of creating or recreating and maintaining in being such a structure a large part of our energies must be devoted, and in all this from the Romans we have still much to learn. If we decline to learn and digest this lesson, turning from such concernment in disgust or disdain, our lives will be lost in vain dreams, in idle longings and empty regrets; and the kingdom of Freedom and Truth will be taken from us and given to others who have known how to grow up and to face like men the hardships and hazards without which it cannot be won or held. From the inspiring visions of these ideals we must turn as we did when we and our world were Roman, to the serious and sober task of creating a political and legal structure on which the eternal spirit of European civilization can resume its work of extending, deepening, enriching, the common life of Humanity.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Hegel, Philosophy of History, Parts II and III (to be read not as philosophy, but as history guided and enlightened by philosophy). Translation in Bohn's Library.

Marvin, The Living Past. Clarendon Press.

Adamson, The Development of Greek Philosophy. W. Blackwood. (For a brief but pregnant account consult Webb's History of Philosophy. Home University Library.)

Butcher's Some Aspects of the Greek Genius ('What we owe to Greece'). Macmillan.

Murray's Rise of the Greek Epic. Clarendon Press.

Warde Fowler's Rome. Home University Library.

Bryce's Holy Roman Empire. Macmillan.

II

For a time, and in some measure, they were actually accomplished. Let us look at each estate in turn, and measure the accomplishment—speaking first of the knightly world, and the Church's control of war and peace; then of the world of the commons, and the Church's control of trade and commerce; and last of the clerical world and the Church's control of learning and education.

It was not only by the regulation of trade and commerce that the Church sought to penetrate the life of the towns. The friars made their homes in the towns in the thirteenth century; and the activity of the friars—Franciscan and Dominican, Austin and Carmelite—enabled the Church to exercise an influence on municipal life no less far-reaching than that which she sought to exert on the feudal classes. Towns became trustees of property for the use of the mendicant orders; and the orders of Tertiaries, which flourished among them, enabled the townsfolk to attach themselves to religious societies without quitting the pursuits of lay life. A mediaeval town—with its trade and commerce regulated, however imperfectly, by Christian principle; with its town council acting as trustee for religious orders; and with its members attached as Tertiaries to those orders—might be regarded as something of a type of Christian society; and St. Thomas, partly under the influence of these conditions, if partly also under the influence of the Aristotelian philosophy of the [Greek: polis], is led to find in the life of the town the closest approach to the ethics of Christianity.

III

IV

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

W.J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History, vol. i, pt. 2, ch. 3; vol. i, pt. 2, ch. 6. Longmans.

Lord Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire. Macmillan.

A.J. and R.W. Carlyle, Mediaeval Political Theory in the West. W. Blackwood.

H.W.C. Davis, Mediaeval Europe (Home University Library). Williams & Norgate.

Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition), articles on 'Crusades' and 'Empire'.

J.N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, Appendix I. Longmans.

Bede Jarrett; Socialist Theories in the Middle Ages. T.C. and E.C. Jack.

E. Jenks, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages. Murray.

F.W. Maitland, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, translated from Gierke's Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht. Maitland. Cambridge University Press.

R.L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought. Williams & Norgate.

H. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press.

A.L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press.

H.O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind. Macmillan.

E. Tröltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen (II. Kapitel).

P. Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe. Harper.

UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

Such, at any rate, is the theory of the 'law of citizens'.

In the middle of the third century B.C., Rome, after its first successful war against Carthage, took special measures to deal with the problem of the alien litigant. The great and growing commerce which came from all parts of the Mediterranean called for something more than a mere admission to treaty privileges. A special officer was from henceforth appointed to deal with the law-suits to which foreigners were parties, and the judgement was given by a body (which we may compare with our jury) which might include fellow-citizens of the foreign suitor.

But here a difficulty arose: what law was to be applied to a transaction between a Roman and a foreigner, or between two foreigners? The Roman law, the law of citizens, had been codified two centuries earlier, and its outline had been hardened by the practice of two centuries. The forms for a transfer of property, for instance, were rigid and solemn; the foreigner would hardly know them, and if he did, his alien hand could not effectively do the prescribed acts nor his alien mouth speak the almost sacred words. The answer was that behind the forms of the law of this city or that, there was 'a law of the men of all nations'. The common elements in the ordinary transactions of life, in whatever form they were clothed, could be taken into account and given effect to. Thus, side by side with the ownership according to the law of Roman citizens, the solemn words of promise which only a Roman citizen could utter, the marriage which only a Roman citizen could enter into, there might be property, contract, marriage to which any one, citizen or alien, might be a party.

The gradual extension of the citizenship (completed at the end of the second century A.D.) to the whole of the inhabitants of the empire made possible, at least in outward appearance, the application of a uniform system of law throughout what was then the civilized world, though beneath an apparent uniformity local traditions and customs survived to the end, at any rate in the east. The 'civil law', as the Roman law in its final form has been called down to the present day, consists of elements of the narrowly Roman and the more universal law inextricably interlaced.

Before the Roman law had been put (at Constantinople) into the final shape in which it is preserved to us, the Roman empire in the west had already been broken up by barbarian invasions. The invaders brought with them their tribal laws and customs, rude, often cruel, narrow rather than simple, for simplicity is the work of civilization. They did not understand, and could not adopt, the law of the world into which they had come. Yet neither could they, if they would, force their laws upon the conquered inhabitants. Among these the old civilization lingered on in a degenerate form, and with it the Roman law. One of the first things that happened was that the conquerors drew up for their Roman subjects short codes of the Roman law as it survived in a debased form, as they drew up statements of their own law for their followers. For a long time each man, according to the community to which he belonged, had a 'personal' law. As late as A.D. 850 we hear that in France it might happen that five men met together and each would have a different law. Of course such a state of things means before very long that there must be at any rate one set of common legal rules which must be applied throughout a territory, namely rules to decide which kind of personal law is to be used when there is a dispute between two persons whose personal law is different.

England was the first western country to attain political unity with a territory substantially the same as at the present day; and the determination of the English kings that in the more important matters justice should be done throughout the land in the king's name, either by his courts at Westminster or by judges sent by him to the counties, secured the formation of an English Common Law which left comparatively little play for local custom, and which at an early time became strong enough to resist attempts to introduce foreign law. As early as the time of Henry III the barons proclaimed with one voice that they would not have the laws of England altered in favour of a rule—the legitimation of bastards by the subsequent marriage of their parents—which in one form or another has been adopted in Western Christendom, and even in the neighbouring kingdom of Scotland.

The Canon law was the law of the Western Church, a truly international society. It was formed largely on the model of the Roman law, and it largely borrowed from it, though it is full of non-Roman elements. It governed not merely what we should call purely ecclesiastical matters, but dealt or attempted to deal with other things, such as marriage and the disposition of the goods of the deceased. Our own law of marriage and divorce, and of probate of wills, has a history which goes back to the ecclesiastical law of the Middle Ages. Like the Roman law it exercised an influence as a model and a repository of maxims, all the greater because in every country it was a law in actual force within a sphere of which the boundaries were constantly being disputed between the lay and the church powers.

Thus it came about that the world, which derives its civilization from Western Europe, may be divided into lands of the English law, and lands where in outward form at least the law is Roman. And yet we must not make too much of this division. In the first place it cuts across national boundaries. It unites us with the United States of America, it separates us from some of our own colonies while it unites them with continental Europe. In the second place law is, like language, a form of thought; and diversity of form, though it hinders, does not prevent a unity of substance.

It is perhaps only another way of putting the same thing to say that law has developed and is developing constantly by reference to the pursuit of ends more or less consciously arrived at by mankind. So far as these ends are common, and I take it that in the main, amid national and individual diversity and conflict they are common ends, law has been formed for their attainment. On the whole what men have asked law to do for them has been the same at any given stage in civilization. The eighteenth century asked for liberty, property, and happiness. We are putting a rather different meaning, or perhaps a different stress on the words, not only here but throughout the civilized world, and the main movements of legal change are in the same direction everywhere.

One word about the two kinds of law known as Public and Private International law.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Jethro Brown, The Austinian Theory of Law. Murray.

Maine, Ancient Law. Murray.

Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law. Cambridge University Press.

Vinogradoff, Common Sense in Law. Home University Library, Williams & Norgate.

Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe. Harper's Library of Living Thought.

THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

For some hundred years past it has been common to lay great stress upon the importance of national characteristics in art. This has been very natural, for they represent one main aspect and justification of the revolt against the conception of the one permanent and immutable standard of perfection of the Neo-classicists of the Renaissance. Lessing and Herder, who were the critical protagonists of the new world, had indeed a knowledge and admiration of ancient art which was probably superior to that of the classicists, but they refused to admit that art was bound to follow the forms of antiquity, and maintained rather that its forms would necessarily change with the changing conditions of the world, and with the varying characteristics of different nationalities or races.

It may indeed be urged that there is some real and fundamental difference between the art of the East and that of the West, but as we have come to know eastern art better, we have become more doubtful even of this, and are rather impressed with the unity of the artistic expression even of East and West. I am far from wishing to say that nationality or race has no significance in art, but I think that we have been in danger of greatly exaggerating its importance. I am at least certain that we have very constantly made too much of the supposed differences in the literature and art of the different European countries, and that we must make clear to ourselves that European art and literature are really one.

So far as there is such a thing as nationalism in literature it is wholly modern, while in mediaeval literature and art there is hardly anything of it. This may seem strange to those who imagine that it is only the railway and the steamship which have brought the world together, but the truth is that the movement of ideas and fashions was probably at least as rapid in the Middle Ages as it is to-day. However this may be, the fact is, I think, clear, that when we come to examine mediaeval literature we find that it is practically homogeneous, that whether we look at it in England or France, in Germany or in Scandinavia, it has practically the same qualities. I do not speak of Italy yet, for Italian literature is the latest-born of the great European literatures, it has not at least come down to us in any forms earlier than those of the thirteenth century.

But they all represent the sense of the glory and splendour of the great fighting man, of the stout heart, which rises with rising danger and is never so great or so splendid as when it faces overwhelming odds and defies the inexorable fates. The epic poet is so possessed by this sense of the greatness of human nature that it does not matter much even whether the man is wrong or perverse: he loves the obstinacy of Roland, who will not, till too late, sound his horn to call Charlemagne and his armies, but prefers to face the enemy, and if need be to die, by himself, rather than to ask for help; he is filled with the sense of the magnificence of the stark figure of Hagen, who had indeed treacherously murdered the great Siegfried, but whose heart is so high and his hand so heavy, that when he is overpowered, and Chriemhilda at last avenges upon him the murder of her husband, the old knight standing by kills Chriemhilda herself—it was not meet that so great a fighter should be slain by a woman. These are the men of the epics.

The epic is the story of great and heroic figures, abstracted in that sense from the common or ordinary circumstances of life, but the background of the action is always realistic and even detailed in its realism, so that, just as again in the Homeric poems, we can frequently reconstruct the life and manners of the time to which the poems belong from that which they tell us. And it is impossible to say that there is any really national difference between the epics as we find them in different languages; they are indeed the expression of the temperament and personality of the great artists who produced them, and they are each unique and individual in proportion to the greatness of their authors, but in their general characteristics they are the same.

The truth is that the chivalrous or romantic world is unreal, partly perhaps because the artists are occupied with nothing but the emotions, and profound though these are, it is perhaps because of their abstraction that the romance ended in the strange allegorical movement of the thirteenth century. In the hands of the later and lesser poets, the romantic method finally loses almost all sense of personality, and becomes a picture and analysis of abstract emotion. It is to these abstractions that Guillaume de Lorris gave a new life and a singular grace in the personifications of the Romance of the Rose, and the charm and grace of his art carried Europe off its feet, so that for nearly three hundred years it tended to dominate European poetry. Even the greatest artists of these centuries, Dante and Chaucer, at least started with this method, and at the very end of the fifteenth century William Dunbar in Scotland still used it with grace and vivacity.

European art still transcends nationality; in its essence it is differentiated by the personality of the artist, not by the distinction of nationality. This may seem at first sight a paradox, for you may be inclined to say that surely the modern national literatures are in many ways different, you will say that there is surely some great difference between Dutch and Italian painting, some great contrast between English and French poetry. Many people used to speak, perhaps some do still, of the warm and passionate and romantic south, and of the cold and ungracious and passionless north. But this is merely a delusion. Dante is not more imaginative or passionate than Shakespeare.

What is it then which has produced this impression? The answer to the question and the best evidence of the unity of European art will perhaps be found in examining some of the great movements in its history, since the time when the civilization of the Middle Ages reached its highest point in the thirteenth century.

We all know the world of Shakespeare, how he ranges from Falstaff to Hamlet, from Bottom to Lear, from Mrs. Quickly and Doll Tearsheet to Rosalind and Imogen and Cordelia; we know how to Shakespeare, and in a lesser degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe and Webster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothing which the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform, transmute, from mere dross into pure gold. We say, and we say rightly, that here is the greatest thing that England has brought forth, and we think of it as representing the splendid youth and the first maturity of a great nation.

And yet how different were the circumstances of the two nations, Spain was decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supreme heights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell. At the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and was falling into the grey obscurity of a clouded evening. It had quickly lost the great place which for a few years it had held in the world, every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the great Armada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders and Holland, on the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland; a handful of valiant Dutchmen had defied its power and broken its wealth; the real enemy of Spain, that is France, had gathered itself together after forty years of ruin and misery, and had driven out the Spanish power. Indeed, so great, so overwhelming, was—as we can now see it—the ruin, that Philip II, who to the English imagination has stood for the embodiment of cruel and masterful malignity, has become to the historical student one of the tragic figures in history, a sincere, stupid, bigoted man, vainly striving to hold together the great empire which had been created by Ferdinand and Isabella, by Cortez and Pizarro and Charles V.

England, on the other hand, was rising from obscurity to its place as the mistress of the seas; Englishmen were raiding and plundering the New World, which Spain and Portugal had looked on as their own; England was sending out its sailors and merchants to all the seas, and to all lands, from the frozen north to the Indies.

And yet the drama of Spain is in all its most essential and intimate characteristics the same as that of England; represents on the one side the same overwhelming sense of the tragic conflicts of life, the same sense of the greatness, the splendour of human nature, which is most triumphant when most it seems to fail; and on the other side at least something of that exquisite, that almost unimaginable grace of the romantic comedy, of the world of Portia and Viola and Beatrice and Miranda. I do not think that the unity of the great art of Europe, the comparative insignificance of merely national characteristics and historical circumstances can find a more convincing illustration.

I do not think I need say much about the classical movement in art and literature, for we all know that it was international. It was begun by Petrarch, not indeed the Petrarch of the sonnets, for these are only a later form of the Troubadour lyric, and do not show any special trace of the classical influence, but the Petrarch whose letters were the first summons of Europe to a new and indefatigable work of the rediscovery of the ancient world. It was an Italian with whom the classical movement began, but it was only in the hands of two northern artists that it achieved a satisfying development in literature: the one a Frenchman, Racine, the other an Englishman, Milton. Neither are, I imagine, really classical at all, but of the two, Milton, as he was by far the more learned in ancient art, was also probably nearer to the ancient world both in form and in spirit.

Nor need I say anything about the deplorable ravages of the movement of good taste and common sense, which produced Boileau and, in some measure, Pope. It did some good, but far more evil, but happily it is long past and dead and done with, and we can afford to remember the little good and to forget the evil. Good or evil, it was at least very clearly a European and not a national movement.

We all know, though not as well as we should, the work of Defoe, and beside Defoe there stands a painter whom also we all know, the great Hogarth. We all at least have read Robinson Crusoe, and we have probably all seen Hogarth's engravings of the good and bad apprentices, and the series of paintings in the National Gallery known as the 'Marriage à la mode'.

What is it now that we find in Defoe and Hogarth? An infinite multitude of detail—we all remember the 'three Dutch cheeses' and the 'fowling-pieces' which Robinson carefully ferried on his raft from the wreck to the island—an unsparing presentation of all the ugly and sordid realities of life; you might almost say, by preference the ugly realities, the squalid vices, the stupid and brutal ferocity of human nature. It is not a pretty or a pleasing world which we see in Hogarth or in Defoe's Colonel Jack. But they are great artists. If you see human nature often on its most repulsive side, in its harshest and most repellent form, at least you see in their novels or pictures, the world as they saw it in the streets and taverns, in the police courts and prisons of their day, as for that matter you can still see it everywhere in town or country. The world which they see may often, perhaps usually, be ugly, but at least there is no conventional prettiness, there is no smug veneer of an artificial good taste which refuses to call a spade a spade, and which deliberately turns away from those things in life which are irritating to its sense of decorum and propriety.

What was this, then, that had come to European art and literature? Clearly what we see is the transition from the heroic world of the tragedy, from the splendid beauty and force of the Italian painters, from the infinite grace of the romantic comedy, to some other artistic apprehension of the world. The movement was not indeed wholly dependent upon a reaction, but in its development it corresponds with the reaction against the continuance of a great tradition which had become merely a convention, when it had lost its vitality and sincerity. The best examples of this may perhaps be found in Dryden's attempt to carry on the heroic tradition in English tragedy, and in Voltaire's strenuous and meritorious efforts to continue the work of Racine and Corneille. They meant well, and their tragic dramas are not without merit, but it is clear enough that they could not bend the bow of Ulysses. They were great artists, as we can see clearly enough in Absalom and Ahitophel, or in Candide, but their genius lay in other directions. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' is a great judgement of life, one very wholesome and necessary for all time, but it was not the mood of Othello or of Hamlet.

European art had to come down from the empyrean, and though the descent was great, yet it gained new life by once again touching mother earth.

We find this a strange and even a ridiculous spectacle, the men who had prided themselves on their common sense and reasonableness, whose literature had sparkled with wit and epigram, blubbering and crying like great children; but whatever we think of it, that is what happened. The first artist of the new type was a Frenchman, Marivaux, and his Vie de Marianne is a study of a young woman who is the embodiment of sensibility and self-consciousness, an amiable and virtuous girl, who is hardly able to enjoy the good that life brings her, for fear lest she should miss the opportunity of renunciation. The first great novel of sentiment is also French, the Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, and here indeed we are in the deep waters of affliction; there are but few moments between the beginning and the end of his sad story when the hero is not in tears. And yet it is a great novel, for there are few studies of human nature, as absorbed and almost lost in emotion, which are more moving.

These novels, however, which appeared between 1730 and 1740, are overshadowed by the works of the great Englishmen, by Richardson and Sterne and Goldsmith, for these are not artists of England alone, but of all Europe, known and loved and imitated in every country in Europe. The sorrows of Clarissa, the pathetic or maudlin humour of Sterne, the idyllic grace and gentle laughter of Goldsmith, these, as they moved every heart, influenced even the greatest of European artists. The influence of Clarissa on Rousseau, of Goldsmith on Goethe and Jean Paul Richter need no exposition.

There are indeed two great poets in whom we begin to feel that the background begins to be almost as important as the figures of the foreground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalry and honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whether the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and the gloom of his caverns and dungeons. Spenser's poetry is like a tapestry on which indeed some story of human life is presented, but which is in the end a great work of decorative art, to which the immediate subject contributes form and pattern and colour, but in which it is in a measure lost.

We may perhaps, without being fanciful, find a parallel to these poets in the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, in whose work we see the landscape of Venetia and the Cadore compelling more and more our attention, as not a mere background, but as an integral part of the picture; but it was not till the seventeenth century and the Flemish and Dutch painters that we see the transition complete, and the artist sets before us not some scene in human life, but simply the beauty and splendour of 'nature' herself.

If Goethe represents the great humane conceptions of the revolution most profoundly, Wordsworth comes very near him in the depth of his knowledge of humanity, and in his supreme sense of the unity of all life and nature with the living spirit who is in all things; and the great romantic artists of France are governed by the same sense of nature and love and the spiritual, and in Victor Hugo this reaches a level only just below that of Goethe himself.

You must not misunderstand me, nationality has real meaning, it has something akin, but distantly, to personality; but in the main it affects the more superficial aspects of art. In painting and sculpture the European artists use a language which we can all understand, imagine life and nature under terms which we all feel and know to be true. And, though in literature the language creates a real difference, and causes a difficulty in recognizing the unity which lies behind the difference, yet the moment we begin to overcome that difficulty we find ourselves in a world intelligible, familiar, moving to us all; and intelligible just in proportion to the greatness of the artist.

We may be divided from each other by many things, material or political, but in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctions and are only men and women, with the earth under our feet and the heavens above us.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

The subject treated in the essay may be considered in relation to the following works:

Beowulf; The Song of Roland; The Nibelungenlied.

Tristan and Iseult (Thomas, or Béroul); Mary of France, Lais.

Dante, Divina Commedia.

Boccaccio, Decameron; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales.

Shakespeare; Lope de Vega; Calderon.

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Le Sage, Gil Blas.

Marivaux, Marianne; Prévost, Manon Lescaut.

Richardson, Clarissa; Goethe, Werther.

Goethe, Faust; Wordsworth, Michael, &c..

Victor Hugo, Légende des Siècles.

There are English translations of the greater number of these.

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES

When we speak of unity in this connexion we may mean one of three things. There is a unity of character or type. There is the unity involved in continuous unbroken descent from a common origin, and there is unity of effective interconnexion and mutual dependence. These senses of the term unity are confused by some writers, but must clearly be distinguished before any useful inquiry can be made. Unity of character, for example, is a different thing from continuity of historical development, for a civilization might radically change its character in the course of generations. It might lose all the specific features of its own family and come into closer resemblance with others of quite distinct parentage. Again unity of character is not the same thing as the effective interconnexion and co-operation of different centres. On the contrary, such co-operation is of most value where there is marked difference of character, where, for instance, a lack of a quality in one nation is counteracted by a surplus in another. Thus these three forms of unity are distinct, but if distinct they are not unrelated. Naturally, where there is a common origin, many traits of the primitive unity of character are likely to persist, and where there is effective intercommunication, many differences may be rubbed off. So, where we start with unity of origin, we are likely to find some measure of unity in other respects, and this is what we do find, in fact, in the case of Western civilization. It does possess a certain unity of character, and this is largely due to unity of origin, and is maintained in spite of marked divergences, which have not impeded an effective intercommunication but have tended rather to add interest and value to the results which that intercommunication has produced.

SECTION II.—UNITY OF ORIGIN

This unity of character is very largely due to continuous descent from a common cultural ancestor. The civilization of the West is fundamentally one not because the peoples of the West are one racially. They are not so. They comprise every branch of the Aryan family and a considerable admixture of quite other stocks. Their civilization owes its common characteristics mainly to a common origin and continued interaction. That is why it is in the mass a community of ideas, for ideas pass from man to man and from nation to nation more readily than institutions, more readily far than character, more readily perhaps than anything except material goods. In the realm of ideas Western civilization forms a single commonwealth of informal but of exceeding democratic constitution. This freedom, indeed, it owes in large measure to its international character, for there are constantly arising local and temporary dictators, arbiters of fashion in the ideas of politics, philosophy, and even of science. Within a narrow circle such a dictator often has it all his own way, but it is seldom that he can maintain a prolonged ascendancy throughout the international commonwealth unless there is some pretty solid foundation for his doctrine.

The paradox of thought is that while unity is its ideal, freedom is its necessary condition, and endless divergence the inevitable consequence. There could not be much thinking about matters of faith without heresy, nor about matters of politics without disaffection, rebellions and new political grouping. Heresy and schism broke up the mediaeval unity and reinforced the political tendencies making towards the modern state system. The rise of modern literature displaced the classics from their unique position as literary models. After the seventeenth century the habit of writing in the vernacular tended more and more to oust Latinity, and culture in each country began to assume more of a distinctively national character. Specific national characteristics began to appear in science and philosophy as well as in literature and education, and a large part of the history of modern thought depends on the partial independence on the one hand and the frequent interactions on the other of these centres.

SECTION III.—UNITY OF INTERCONNEXION

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Merz, History of European Thought in the 19th Century. W. Blackwood.

Marvin, The Living Past. Clarendon Press.

THE UNITY OF WESTERN EDUCATION

I have been asked to address you on the Unity of Education in Western Europe. The task is not an easy one, for what do we mean by unity? It would be easy for me to spend my time in talking on the technical aspect of the subject; I could deal with curriculum and organization, with school buildings and class-rooms, black-boards, and all the material of schoolmastering, and could show you how great is the similarity in these matters in all civilized countries. I doubt, however, whether this would interest you; I doubt whether this is the unity of which you are in search. You would tell me that you asked for unity and I had given you uniformity. Uniformity you can have anywhere; in modern life all is standardized and stereotyped; you have it in the great hotel and the Atlantic liner—there you have men of all nations, they do the same thing at the same time, they eat the same food and wear the same clothes; you find it in the factory and on the battle-field. Go to a textile factory, whether in Oldham or in Chemnitz, or in Bombay, the processes are the same and the product is the same, except as there may be more or less adulteration.

Uniformity is not necessarily unity, and unity is not inconsistent with variety. That which I presume we are searching for is a more fundamental, spiritual, and intellectual unity—internal not external; not a painted and stucco resemblance, but a unity of origin and of life.

Let us see what we can learn from history.

The history of European education is centred round two institutions, the School and the University. Both have their origin in the remote past, and both have maintained themselves with singular fidelity to their original type.

The School goes back to the very origin of our civilization; if we are to understand its nature, we must transfer ourselves in thought to those early days when the first missionaries planted in the Somerset valleys and on the stern Northumberland coast the Cross of Christ. They came to a people still on the verge of barbarism, with a language still unformed by literature, with a religion that gave no clue to the mysteries of life by which they were oppressed. They came to these men full of the enthusiasm of the Gospel—coming not only as teachers of religion, but as the apostles of a higher civilization, for they had behind them the awful name of Rome.

But if the substance and the object was identical throughout Europe, so always was the form in which the teaching was given; at a time when all learning and all religion came from Rome, the foundation of knowledge was the Latin tongue. In these early days was established the tradition that still subsists; the gateway to learning and to culture lay by the narrow road of the Latin grammar. The schoolboy who still tells out his longs and shorts can compare them with the ruder efforts of his Saxon forefathers thirteen centuries ago. Never have authors attained a fame and a circulation equal to that of the great grammarians who, during the decline of the Empire, codified the rules of Latin speech; generation after generation passed, and down almost to our own days every schoolboy began his career on the lines laid down in the works of Donatus and Priscian.

We must, however, guard ourselves against a mistake into which it would be easy to fall. It is true that in the early mediaeval days education was based on the study of the Latin language; and it was only through literature that the language could be learnt. The study of classical literature as we understand it was, however, far removed from the ideals of this time. The most authoritative teachers never neglected to warn their pupils against the moral dangers which arose from the study of heathen writers; Ovid and Cicero were only admitted under protest, and they were merely the stepping-stone to the study of Augustine and Prudentius.

This system, which had originated as a part of a great spiritual movement, long outlived its usefulness. It became an intolerable tyranny. Its effects were to be seen in the teaching of the humblest grammar school, and every boy who began the study of the Latin grammar was being initiated into the abstractions or the Scholastic logic. It became a dead and iron crust by which the mind of man was confined, and it was the school and the university which were the peculiar institutions by which this system was maintained. Unity of education there was, but at what a price had it been won.

One thing had, however, been secured: the common Christian basis of our modern civilization had been stamped upon the peoples; so long as Europe remains Europe this cannot be forgotten or obliterated. No nation can repudiate its own past, and, whether they will or no, all Western nations are irrevocably bound together by the ties of the home in which their childhood and youth was passed.

At last the change came: it came in that double revolution which we call the Renaissance and the Reformation. In considering them we must confine ourselves as closely as we can to their effect on education.

The common mediaeval system (and in this the spirit of the Renaissance was still mediaeval) depended on the common Church, and especially in education, in the use of Latin as the universal language of learning. During the sixteenth century both were overthrown. Luther was stronger than Erasmus, and the new languages, Italian, French, Spanish, English, quickly began to encroach on the claims of Latin to be the one language of the school.

The religious revolution need not detain us. It is sufficient to recall that in many parts of Europe the divergence of creed tended to become if not identical with, at least closely to follow the boundaries of states and nations. In every land the school was still strictly under the control of the Church, acting now as the delegate of the temporal ruler, and in each country a whole body of teaching and discipline was evolved, the result of which was a fundamental difference in the attitude of mind. The English bishops, the German consistories, the Scotch presbytery, set their seal on the schools, as much as did the Jesuits and Port Royal in France. The Shorter Catechism, the English Prayer Book, the German hymns, each gave a distinct character to the religions of the country, and this character was the basis of the teaching in the schools.

Religion, which had been the great unifier, became the chief engine of separation.

The influence of these changes upon the school is remarkable. Strictly speaking, for many generations they seemed to have little immediate effect upon it. In every country in Europe Latin remained both the subject and the vehicle of higher education, but it is just for this reason that we find that, during the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth, the schools are more and more falling out of touch with the intellectual life of the times. They continued in the old way; for them Shakespeare and Milton, Montaigne and Molière, Cervantes and Tasso, seemed to have written in vain. They maintained the form of an older period, but they had lost the spirit by which it had been inspired. Their learning remained purely classical; but even though the new national literature was long in winning for itself a definite place in the recognized school system, the growth of this literature and the evolution of national consciousness of which it was a part could not in fact take place without altering the whole spirit of the teaching. If we are to understand how this was we must keep in mind one of the chief characteristics of what is called a classical education.

Now just as the finest expression of the English national spirit is found in those whose school training had been based on the classics, just as the Girondists based their revolutionary doctrines on Hellenic models, so almost at the same time the great political awakening of Germany and Prussia was inspired by what has been called the second Renaissance; and yet how profound is the divergence between Wellesley and Pitt, Humboldt and Stein, St. Just, Demousin, and Vergniaud; all were children of the common classical tradition, but how different is the use to which they put it. During the centuries that passed between the Renaissance and the Revolution, the education of the different countries had then in fact been drifting far apart. What has been done during the nineteenth century has been openly to carry into effect changes which had long been overdue and were already to a large extent operative.

It was inevitable that the new literature and thought would eventually find its way into the schools and universities. Before this change had been accomplished, a fresh and even stronger influence asserted itself. Democracy had come, and a democracy which based the state on the principle of nationality. It seized on the school as the means to hold the minds of men in fief, just as had the mediaeval Church, and in doing so enforced and perpetuated the national differences.

This is indeed inevitable. Education, as we have seen, can only be effective when it is the vehicle for strong beliefs, and is informed by the conscious expression of an attitude towards the world. Now, in modern days, the consciousness of a common European spirit has, in fact, almost disappeared. In its place we find the intense consciousness of the nation. Even religion has become national, and God has once again become a tribal deity. The new consciousness of the common interests of what is called Labour have no recognition in the approved teaching. If the work of the school was not to be merely the dead instruction in useless knowledge, if the work was to be directed towards informing the minds of the pupils with ideals and beliefs, it was only in the idealization of the national thought that this could be attained.

Is the older union of thought to be permanently lost? If not, you must find it again in some higher synthesis. There are many who would do so in the pursuit of mathematics and the natural sciences; in them, at least, no divisions of country can be found. The student in his chemical laboratory, the doctor in his hospital, the mathematician in his study, finds his colleagues in every country in the civilized world, and it matters not to him whether the next step in penetrating the secrets of nature have been made in Vienna, or in Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bologna.

On the other hand there are two considerations that I should like to put before you, as leading to a less important position, the one arising from the practical nature of science, the other connected with its essential intellectual origin.

Now in education it is the technical side of scientific progress which almost inevitably becomes most prominent, and the greater the advance in knowledge the more will this be true. The wider the domain of knowledge the greater is the number of those who will be chiefly occupied with the use of the processes and materials that have been discovered and the smaller is the proportion of those who will have reached the border of the known, and will begin the work of exploration into the unknown. That is, the greater will be the number of those who are the servants and not the masters of science. A unity of a certain kind we shall have, the unity of those who have learned to pilot an aeroplane, to apply X-rays, to extract the phosphate from iron, or to test cattle for tubercle. All this may produce a uniformity in the machinery of life, it passes by untouched the motives of action, the beliefs, affections, and interests. How many illustrations of this do we see around us! What more glorious illustration of the power of the human intellect can be found than the later developments of electricity, but scarcely had the discoveries been made when we find them seized upon by the man of affairs, and wireless telegraphy becomes the subject of speculation on the Stock Exchange, and a chief instrument of war. That which the chemist finds in his laboratory is, within a few years, sometimes even a few months, found again in the factory, and perhaps on the field of battle.

What is this spirit? Is it not the confidence in the spirit of man, the spirit which in intellectual matters bends to no authority, and recognizes no limit to its enterprise, which probes all things, tests all things, and follows fearlessly where the argument leads it? This is what I mean by the spirit of Greece, it is that which Sophocles has immortalized. Of all this, what we call science is but a part, perhaps at present the most striking and important part, but still a part only; to look to it as the key of our civilization and the sole basis of our education would be to set up a partial and, therefore, a false ideal. An ideal, moreover, which, if pursued to its logical conclusion, would become the basis for the most appalling tyranny, by which the free spirit of investigation, to which we owe all our scientific progress, would be buried in the structure that itself had reared. For what is the end to which it must lead? Is it not a society which is held together by technical skill, a society of organized efficiency, where each individual holds his place, not as a living spirit, but as a slave of the great machine, tied throughout his life to the perfect performance of his limited and specialized task? I can imagine such a society; it is the ideal which some modern German writers have definitely put before us. It may be that this will be the Europe of the future, a Europe with a common government and a universal system of education by which each child will be trained to take his allotted part in an organized slavery. I hope I shall not live to see it.

A unity there is, but it is the unity of the countless and varied flowers that carpet the meadows in spring, the unity of the common spirit of life which animates them all.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Leach, The Schools of Medieval England. Methuen.

Mullinger, J. Bass, The Schools of Charles the Great.

Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts.

Rashdall, Universities in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press.

Foster Watson, Grammar Schools. Cambridge University Press

Woodward, Erasmus. Cambridge University Press.

COMMERCE AND FINANCE AS INTERNATIONAL FORCES

When a bee takes honey from a flower and leaves in exchange the pollen from a flower of an opposite sex, it may be said to be at once a merchant, a carrier, and a matrimonial agent, and the brilliant colours with which flowers attract these merchants have been compared to the advertising posters of the human trader. But however the case may be in the animal and vegetable world, there can be no question that the trading instinct appears at a very early stage of human development. In boys the instinct to trade or swop articles appears long before they feel any inclination to fall in love or to give much serious thought to religion. The classical example is given by Mark Twain, who relates how Tom Sawyer exchanged one of his own teeth, which had been pulled out that morning, for a tick in the possession of Huckleberry Finn, and then 'the two boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before'. In fact, of course, they both were wealthier than before, because each had got something that he wanted more than the article with which he had parted; and this pleasant result sums up the whole genesis and basis of commerce.

In this very early and curious example of a bargain we find the seller continually expressing reluctance to sell and asking the buyer to accept as a gift the commodity that he wants. It appears from the sequel that this is merely an example of Oriental politeness. At any rate, the end of the bargain was that Abraham paid the money, four hundred shekels of silver, which is described as 'current money with the merchant', thus apparently showing that this system of payment in metals was already a regular feature of commercial transactions. Coined currency had not yet been developed, for we may note that Abraham weighed the silver.

When we come to the days of Solomon we find something like a developed international trade. The fifth chapter of the first book of Kings describes how Solomon, on taking the throne of his father, sent to Hiram, king of Tyre, and stated his purpose to build a house unto the name of the Lord his God, asking Hiram to send his servants to hew cedar trees out of Lebanon, and saying that he would give hire for Hiram's servants according to all that he should appoint. Hiram replied that he would do all that Solomon desired concerning timber of cedar and concerning timber of fir. 'My servants shall bring them down from Lebanon unto the sea: and I will convey them by sea in floats unto the place that thou shalt appoint me, and will cause them to be discharged there, and thou shalt receive them: and thou shalt accomplish my desire, in giving food for my household. So Hiram gave Solomon cedar trees and fir trees according to all his desire. And Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand measures of wheat for food to his household, and twenty measures of pure oil: thus gave Solomon to Hiram year by year.'

Adam Smith's chapters on division of labour are so well known that there is no need to point out the very great economic benefits that arise from it. Clearly, any man who spends all his working time upon one particular process of productive activity acquires thereby a skill and rapidity in carrying out his part of the operation which would be impossible to any worker who has to carry the manufacture of an article from the beginning to its end. Just as we saw, when the primitive savage left off doing everything for himself and took to building huts for the rest of the community, that the huts became much more water-tight and comfortable, so the process goes still further, and building becomes very much more rapid and very much more cheap and efficient when a large number of specialists are set to work on the various very different processes required for the construction of a house. The consequence is that the production of goods is very greatly cheapened and made much more rapid, but at the same time the worker tends to become an artisan instead of a craftsman, and his work is likely to be much more monotonous and much more trying. Instead of seeing his product grow under his hand from its beginning to its end, with constant changes in the nature of its call on his energy and care, he is employed during the whole of his working time on some mechanical process, with the result that he himself becomes something very like a machine. What he has gained in the power to make and acquire commodities cheaply and quickly is offset to a certain extent by the less interesting and varied nature of his work.

Commerce thus not only shows the unity of mankind by being a universal feature of his existence, but increases that unity by making each individual dependent upon the exertions of his fellows, and on their willingness to take from him stuff which he is turning out; but if commerce thus promotes unity, it also tends to create a certain amount of friction and disagreement between one man and another when differences of opinion arise concerning the value of the product which each man is making, that is to say, concerning the amount of goods which the rest of the community is prepared to give him in exchange.

In the Merchant of Venice we find Antonio trading with all the countries of the then known world,

but we do not find that Shylock was lending money on at all the same international scale. When communication was slow, difficult, and untrustworthy, money-lending at a distance was made very risky, because it was impossible for the lender to keep the watchful eye on the borrower's operations and credit that is required if he is to feel comfortable in his venture. For a Lombard Street banker to lend money to a merchant in Cheapside payable at a year hence was, until comparatively lately, a much safer enterprise than to lend it to a merchant in Paris, because the local borrower was always under the lender's observation. If he were overtrading or living on too lavish a scale it would at once be noticed and reported.

Dr. Bowley, in his book on England's foreign trade, puts the matter dramatically as follows:—

It is interesting to note that the result of the present war is likely, if anything, to check the export of capital for a time, not only owing to the very obvious reason that for the present all our available capital is going into the war and for some time to come will have to go into expenses connected with the war, but also because this war has set a new precedent with regard to the duty of belligerents in the matter of making payments to one another. In olden times, when war was a gentlemanly business, trade and finance were very little interrupted by it. At the time of the Crimean War the Russian Government punctually paid the interest due on Russian loans to English holders and thereby established a prestige amongst English investors which was cherished for several decades. Now that nations have taken to going to war with tooth and nail, throwing their whole available population into the field and using every possible device, military, commercial, and financial, to beat their enemies, any such pleasant decencies as paying money due from one country to another in the shape of interest or otherwise have been abandoned. When the war is over it is possible that investors will remember this fact to a certain extent and will be more chary than they were before of investing their money abroad, at any rate in any country with which there is the remotest possibility of our being involved in war.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

A.L. Bowley, England's Foreign Trade. Swan Sonnenschein.

C.K. Hobson, The Export of Capital. Constable.

W.S. Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.

Smith's Wealth of Nations, chs. i-iv.

INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION

Recognizing this mental attitude in a large section of the business men of every country, and bearing in mind that, in order to secure the efficient administration of labour laws, the legislator must be able to carry with him at least the general consent of the majority of those employers to whose trades they apply, it becomes clear that if we would remove all objection to complete and adequate protective law for the workers we must first dispel the fear of the manufacturer that such law would handicap him unfairly in the international market. And what way so apt to this end as the bringing of his competitors under a law similar in character and as far as possible uniform in its provisions?

The composition of these commissions—in which all the real work of the conferences is done—is truly heterogeneous. A commission may represent a dozen nationalities; it will certainly contain specimens of every social class, members of the most varied shades of thought in politics, religion, and sociology. I can still remember the constituents of my first commission at Geneva in 1906. Our subject was the night-work of young persons. At the head of the table was a professor of Civil Law in the University of Louvain. On either side of him sat a Catholic clerical member of the German Reichstag; a German Protestant pastor from Bavaria; a distinguished Parisian engineer; an Austrian nobleman interested in social reform; a Hungarian man of science; a Dutch factory inspector; a Swiss Trade Union secretary; and myself. We were a motley crew, but the strange 'pattern' which we must have presented to the observation of any higher intelligences interested in our deliberations had no effect on the goodwill and good humour with which they were conducted.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

History of Factory Legislation, Harrison and Hutchins. Macmillan. Revised edition.

Frederic Keeling, Child Labour in the United Kingdom. P.S. King.

Clementina Black, Sweating. Duckworth.

R.H. Tawney, Studies in the Minimum Wage: (i) Chainmaking; (ii) Tailoring. G. Bell & Sons.

J.A. Hobson, Work and Wealth. Macmillan.

Edward Howarth and Mona Wilson, West Ham: A Study. Dent.

Sir Thomas Oliver, M.D., Dangerous Trades. John Murray.

Annual Reports of International Association for Labour Legislation (British Section), 1906-14. To be obtained of the Secretary, Queen Anne's Chambers, 28 Broadway, Westminster.

Ernest Barker, Nationalism and Internationalism. C.S.U. Pamphlets, Mowbray, Oxford.

Dr. Bauer, International Legislation. Mowbray, Oxford.

Ernest Francke, 'International Labour Treaties,' Economic Journal (June, 1909). Reprinted separately, Macmillan.

Albert Métin, Les Traités Ouvriers. Armand Colin: Paris.

E. Mahaim, Le Droit International Ouvrier. Librairie Recueil-Sirey: Paris.

Fagnot, Millerand et Strohl, La Durée légale du Travail. Félix Alcan: Paris.

Paul Boyaval, La Lutte contre le Sweating System. Félix Alcan: Paris.

Students might also consult the following Reports:

Le Travail à Domicile en France. Ministère du Travail: Paris.

Le Travail à Domicile en Belgique. Ministère du Travail: Bruxelles.

COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM

Earlier ages were more able than ours to believe in the good old days. We, knowing more of the past than our forefathers did, can find in it no golden age. But our eyes do not rest even upon the present. In the nineteenth century men thought they were at the end of a process, and their evolutionary creed was often only a polite method of saying what fine fellows they were. Now we look forward. The future seems to us longer than the past and more important than the present; and we ourselves seem to be at the beginning rather than at the end of time. A knowledge of the past has made it impossible to believe that growth has stopped, and we understand how different the future may be, in part at least, by perceiving how different even this grimy and blood-stained present is from the still more inhuman past.

Among the recorded changes the Economists write of an increasing interchange of goods, and we can see as well an increasing interchange of ideas across the frontiers of States. Music, painting, literature, and science have all been influenced; and ideas concerning political, economic, and social facts have been affected by that interchange which has developed our philosophy, our science, and our art. No one nation has originated all; and each nation has depended on hints and hypotheses which have arisen in others.

The common ideals of the present are the result of a gradual development, but we shall consider them here as attempts to deal with existing evils and plans for a better future.

For purposes of study, however, one may divide. We may put aside the moving sentiments—the passions, however faint, which urge men to wish for a better future—and we may consider first the particular instances of reform.

One definite and in some sense new departure in the results of the shared enthusiasms of nations has been the industrial legislation of recent years. That has been already dealt with. But, although in an economic age such as ours industrial reform may seem the most striking, it is not the only effect of our shared enthusiasm and later ages may not think it the most important. There has been reform of social evils owing to the interchange between nations of ideas on education, religious toleration, medicine, and sanitation, the treatment of criminals, the suppression of slavery and many other subjects. All these and many more reforms are, as it were, registered in institutional (legal or administrative) change.

The French Government proposed an international conference, which met in 1851, to deal with infectious disease; and a second conference met in 1856. In 1865 the outburst of cholera in the East led to a third congress at Constantinople. Great Britain opposed treaties for regulating quarantine, &c., because of the delay which might be caused to the pursuit of shipping interests. But at last a treaty was made in 1892 at Venice for protection against cholera. Further and more effective treaties were agreed to by civilized states in 1897 and 1903. A bureau of information concerning infectious disease was established at Paris, and commissions to supervise were established in Turkey and Egypt. With regard to sleeping sickness Great Britain took the initiative; and a conference met in 1907, in London, at which six countries were represented. So much with respect to disease; we may now turn to examples of the joint action of states as regards crime.

The African slave traffic has been dealt with since 1885 (Berlin Conference) by the European States acting together on certain general principles. And what is known as the White Slave traffic was the subject of arrangement between fifteen states in the conference at Paris in 1902.

Again, the reform of prisons and penitentiaries has been much assisted by international congresses since 1846. The last was held in 1910 in America, at which twenty-eight states were represented. A secretariat has been established at Berne for the exchange of expert opinion and for making suggestions to governments.

With respect to all these movements for social reform three points must be noticed: first, the initiative in most reform has come from private enterprise and not from diplomacy or governments. Secondly, this private interest has spread from the few of one nation to the few of another before any effective result was attained. Thirdly, the states have not acted together because of any general theory of international action, but simply because certain social evils could not be dealt with at all by any state acting separately. Whatever hampers common action, then, also hinders effective reform in dealing with disease or crime. I need not elaborate the conclusion.

Perhaps the general attitude has not really changed. We persecute more for political than for religious unorthodoxy; or it may be that in our more economic age we forbear to burn heretics only because we cannot afford the faggots. But in any case the relations between men in society are more justly arranged, even where religion is concerned.

We have thus examples of (1) joint governmental action and (2) separate actions of governments influenced directly by foreign governments.

There are also certain results of the interchange of ideals between nations which are not yet, or only in part, registered in legal or political institutions. Such for example is the changed position given to women. A change has occurred quite outside the political or even the economic sphere, both in the habits of western humanity and in their guiding conceptions.

In the position of children, also, an immense change is proceeding. We cannot fail to call it social reform, that the child should be given so much more definite a place in the social organism. Aristotle thought woman was a mistake of nature's in the attempt to make man; and nearly all philosophers have treated children as if they ought to be rather ashamed of themselves for not being grown up. I speak of philosophers in the wide sense of the term, for I do not think the metaphysicians knew that there was such a thing as a child in the universe. However that may be, we can hardly believe that as late as the nineteenth century parents really imagined that they knew what was good for their children. In our more sceptical age, children have generally to be careful not to allow their parents to read certain books, and in every well brought up family, it is thought that parents should be seen and not heard. A social change has occurred in the comparative importance we assign to childhood and age.

Something has been already done—English writers and English experience have given a motive power to Hungarian, Russian, Finnish, Turkish, Persian, and Indian democracy. Groups of men have claimed, for example in South America, their right to free development. And everywhere during the period of European peace the contact between nations was teaching every nation the force of its own character, while the new complexities of society were weakening the old dividing lines of caste between individuals.

Such are the changes which have been introduced into social life owing to the interdependence of nations. But we should not understand what has happened if we accepted the mere record of achievements. The future is built not only upon what we have done, but upon what we hope to do. Reforms accomplished do not make us more satisfied to endure evil not yet reformed—for always working in the achieved present is the ideal which transformed the past into what we now see.

We may turn, then, to consider some general features of the force working in social reform which is not yet achieved. And for that purpose we put aside established law and custom to consider the implied attitude.

Now that political privilege and inequality before the law are more or less removed, there is a greater concentration upon the underlying social injustice. We all accept it as good that the activities of government should not be for the benefit of the few, or that the money should not be drawn from one class. We suppose at least that there should be one law for rich and poor.

To any one with a knowledge of history this seems an immense step since small classes in every nation held political privilege, made law for others, and forced tribute from the majority. Not that all is justice and liberty. The law still, with noble impartiality, forbids both the millionaire and the pauper to steal bread. Of course it is not directed against the poor. The law never forbids the poor man to cheat the state out of more than £3,000 a year. Again, political power still depends on the social position of your cousins and your aunts. But something has been done.

Secondly, there has been a transference of enthusiasm of the religious or poetic kind from the sphere of contemplation or aloofness to that of earthly and even material action. Ideals of social reform do not any longer involve a neglect of food and clothing: we are all more and more convinced that it is idle to preach culture to a starving man, or to talk of liberty to one whose whole life is a bestial struggle for bare food and covering. I speak of normal times. In England, France, and Germany, social betterment means giving to a greater number security of bare life, upon which alone the good life can be built.

We are fully aware of the immense social danger in the desire for riches; but that is no objection to the desire for bread and clothing and the bare necessities of human life. And the seemingly materialistic enthusiasm which will gradually transform our semi-bestial civilization is no less poetic or religious than any Eastern aloofness or Tolstoian simplicity. Poetry is not all rhyming couplets: religion is not all for the intellectually or artistically incompetent. So, a world in which twenty per cent. of humanity did not slowly starve to death would not necessarily be less worthy of admiration. Nor would religion disappear if every one were healthy, unless religion means the result of neurasthenia or dyspepsia or premature ageing. No doubt there is some exaggeration in this element of the common social ideals. Not even a poor man lives on bread alone; and it is indeed possible to have a perfectly well-fed society which would be quite barbarous. But we must regard the fine flower of culture as purchased at too high a price if, for the sake of a few connoisseurs and courtiers not to say bourgeois plutocrats, the majority in every nation must lack a bare human life. Some declare that the division between nations is more important than that between the rich and the poor. It may be so; but the only reason must be that what the few have, the many, however dimly, may hope to share or may be induced to think they do share. Humanity is infinitely gullible. But in every nation there is rising a murmur which may yet become an articulate cry.

Nor again is it absurd to hope for a world in which all should have at least the opportunity for the development of any faculties they may possess. The social gain would be immense. It would be like the change from a harmony which is produced by a few amateurs to one of a full orchestra.

Thirdly, it is increasingly evident that no one state or nation can act effectively in social reform unless it acts in concert with others. Treaties of commerce, common prison legislation, and common measures for sanitation and medicine have proved effective because they are in the nature of things. They are necessary means for the desired prosperity even of the most selfish and segregated state.

This ideal of social reform then seems to be agreed upon between some men of all nations, that more common action should be taken. It is not a vague sentiment for the abolition of conflict between states; nor is it a pious aspiration for peace. It is the clear perception that the state cannot fulfil its functions in modern life if it continues to act as isolated or segregated. That for which the state itself stands cannot be attained even within the frontiers of one state by any state acting alone.

This is not the place to distinguish those subjects upon which states should act together from those on which they should act separately. That is simply the problem as to the limits of political regionalism. The fact which is sufficient for our argument here is that certain forces, chiefly economic, have come into existence in recent years, which disregard state boundaries. In concrete terms, these are international trusts and international labour interests. But it is increasingly evident that these cannot be effectively dealt with by any one state acting separately. The isolated sovereign state of earlier times is simply helpless before the elaborate world-system of economics; and control can only be secured by an established world-system of politics. The states, one supposes, exist for justice and liberty. Divided, they will perish or become mere playthings in the hands of non-moral economic 'interests'.

It is better to put into the coldest terms a conception which has too often hitherto proved futile, because it arose rather from vague discontent, than from the perception of a definite evil. The fire of enthusiasm must indeed work upon that conception before any effective change can be made in the attitude of governments or of peoples. But enthusiasm will be wasted if we cannot pause to see against what we are contending.

We are struggling with the greatest of all obstacles to social reform when we attack the isolation of nations. Unless that is overcome we shall perhaps patch and prop; but, time and again, we shall be enslaved to the immensely powerful non-moral forces, in the midst of which humanity finds its way. I cannot speak more clearly—[Greek: bous epi glôssê]. The nations face each other in conflict, while death, disease, violence, bestial indolence and docility corrode every state.

But when war was at its brutish worst Grotius spoke with effect of a moral bond which survived between men who in physical conflict had been trying to take their 'enemies' for beasts and stones. And humanity began once more its long struggle with the beast in man. So now—I leave it to your imagination.

Our conclusion, therefore, is that one of the elements in the present attitude towards social reform is a tendency to co-operation between nations. We have seen that this has already had effect in various details of law and administration; and there is every reason to suppose that the method will be carried further.

But the problem cannot be left there. Co-operation as a word is a mere charm, like Evolution. There has been, and there may be co-operation in doing wrong. That action has become common does not prove that it is right; and an ideal implies at least some ethical judgement. Therefore, in every nation there are some few who are convinced of the necessity for more deliberately moral action in common between men of different races. If there can be so much co-operation in the making of armaments or the defrauding of shareholders, there may yet be more co-operation in the elimination of disease and poverty. And not only may there be such co-operation, but it must be. The situation no longer exists in which most of the effects of an evil régime are confined within frontiers. The social distress of European nations must be dealt with as a whole because it is a whole. Therefore whatever militates against the unity of western civilization destroys the possibility of social reform.

The quality of our age was its expectancy. For that reason men of every nation were moved to desire a transformed society. But perhaps that quality of expectancy was the quality of youth. For the first time in history, in the early twentieth century, age was giving place to youth in the political equilibrium of the generations. Now—I dare not speak too plainly. The young men of the western world are already, since August 1914, noticeably fewer. Death may have made no difference to them. It has made an immense difference to the future. It means that the eager expectancy of youth, which is the source of so much enthusiasm for a better world, is being lost. The crisis is here. As yet the common ideals of civilized nations still survive; but the desire for a better future is at ebb and flow with a tired acquiescence in the established order. It is in our hands to decide which shall overcome. No generation has faced a greater issue. We cannot tell what will be the outcome; but to hope too much is at least a more generous fault than to despair too soon.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

C.D. Burns, Political Ideals. Clarendon Press.

P. Geddes, Cities in Evolution. Williams & Norgate.

J.A. Hobson, Towards International Government. Allen & Unwin.

P.S. Reinsch, Public International Unions. Ginn & Co.

POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE

World-state is a term likely to be offensive in its arrogance, if it be taken to mean the substitution of a single political community and government for the numerous separate national states which have hitherto existed. I therefore hasten to say that I intend no such meaning, but use the term as a convenient expression to cover any body of political arrangements, to which most of the principal nations of the world are parties, sufficiently stable in character and wide in scope to merit the title of international government.

While, therefore, the most impressive political events of the nineteenth century have been the expression and the successful realization of nationalism, many powerful undercurrents of internationalism have been gathering force. The pressures of civilization have been more and more towards extra-national activities. Thoughtful men and women in our time recognize the urgent need of closer international communion for three related purposes: First, the consolidation, extension, and effective sanction of the existing body of international law; secondly, the establishment of peace on a basis of reliable methods for the just settlement of differences; thirdly, the provision of regular accepted means for the co-operation of nations in all sorts of positive constructive work for the human commonwealth.

"There are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this or that or other of the things dear to them. There were never creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words; they are the unjust stewards of all men's ideas; whatever fancy or favourite instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his favourite masked word to take care of for him; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him—you cannot get at him but by its ministry." In war-time this domination of 'masked words' is all-powerful, and is likely to leave the thinking powers of all Europe seriously impaired when the war is over.

This consideration brings me directly to confront the enemy, that is to say, those who contend that a world-state or any real international government is now and must always remain an impossibility, an unrealizable Utopian dream. The process of social evolution on its political side ends with the national state. It is a final product. National states cannot, will not, and ought not, to abate one jot or tittle of their inherent sovereignty and independence, and the experience of history shows that all attempts at international federation or union are pre-doomed to failure.

But the proposals differ widely, both as regards the scope they assign to the work of preventing war, and as regards the measures they advocate for securing the fulfilment of international agreement. They may be grouped, I think, in three classes on an ascending scale of rigour. The first class envisages a general treaty, by which the signatory states shall undertake to submit all differences between them to processes of arbitration or conciliation conducted by impartial courts or commissions, and to abstain from all acts of hostility during the progress of such investigation. This principle has recently found an important expression in the treaties signed last year by the United States with Great Britain and France, and other nations. The first article of these treaties reads as follows: 'The High Contracting Parties agree that all disputes between them, of every nature whatsoever, other than disputes the settlement of which is provided for, and in fact achieved, under existing agreements between the High Contracting Parties, shall, when diplomatic methods of adjustment have failed, be referred for investigation and report to a Permanent International Commission to be constituted in the manner prescribed in the next succeeding article; and they agree not to declare war or begin hostilities during such investigation and before the report is submitted.' The objects of this method of pacific settlement are three: first, to provide impartial and responsible bodies for a reasonable inquiry into all disputes; secondly, to secure a 'cooling off' time for the heated feelings of the contestants; thirdly, to inform the public opinion of the world and to make effective its moral pressure for a sound pacific settlement.

But granting that national government does not represent a final form of political structure, and that some federal internationalism is now practicable, is it possible to hope or to expect that by a single stride, or by a series of rapid strides, the sovereignty of national states will submit to so much diminution as is involved in the more advanced scheme of international government? Most historians, statesmen, and political philosophers will, I think, hold that so large and rapid a process of development is impracticable, however desirable in theory it might be. It will be necessary, they insist, to take one step at a time, to preserve as closely as possible the principle of continuity, and not to attempt to move further and faster than circumstances and the necessities of the time compel.

The International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects. Humphrey Milford.

G. Lowes Dickinson, After the War. Fifield.

C.E. Hooper, The Wider Outlook beyond the World-War. Watts & Co.

F.N. Keen, The World in Alliance. Southwood.

Norman Angell, Prussianism and its Destruction. Heinemann.

Allison Phillips, The Confederation of Europe. Longmans.

The New Statesman. Special Supplement. Suggestions for the Prevention of War.

J.A. Hobson, Towards International Government. Allen & Unwin.

RELIGION AS A UNIFYING INFLUENCE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

The argument of these essays has been to prove that even now, in the greatest armed conflict of the world, the term 'Christendom' is not inapplicable to Europe. There is a real unity in Western civilization—a unity due in large measure to the influence of religious faith and organization. The mediaeval Church gave the Teutonic peoples of Northern Europe, and the barbarians who overran the Roman Empire, their first momentous introduction into the great inheritance formed by the uneasy blending of Christian faith and literature with Greco-Roman civilization. The spiritual achievements of Greek and Roman, Jew and Christian have remained the common possessions of the West, the foundation of what is still Christendom. In so far as it exists Christendom witnesses to the formative power of a religious faith: in so far as it remains a dream, we may suspect it demands the renewed impulse of a faith enlightened and chastened by all the experience of the past.

If, however, we ask, Is there any likelihood that a common religious faith and life will contribute to raise Western civilization to a yet higher unity? modern as contrasted with mediaeval history seems at first sight to demonstrate the futility of any such inquiry.

Those who are concerned for the future of our civilization will look eagerly for signs of any such development in the religious life and thought of our time. Do recent history and present experience discover any influences at work which may yet restore a unifying power to religion? Naturally any answer to such a question will be of a subjective character. The personal equation cannot easily be eliminated; we may be duped by our hopes or deceived by our fears. In the last analysis we cannot safely predict the future of religion. We may, however, take stock of our present situation, and survey its significant elements, even if our value-judgements as to their relative importance will inevitably vary.

and some members of both entertain the suspicion that all creeds are outworn.

Beyond the internationalism of scholarship, we must remember the reaction of criticism on popular religious thought. Slowly but surely the judgements of believers, lay and clerical, are being permeated with some sense of historical perspective. The mere attempt to recognize the literary character of the various books of the Bible has effected a liberation. The variation of the different parts of the Bible in literary quality, in evidential value for history and in spiritual significance, are at last being freely recognized outside the study and the lecture-room. Men are ceasing to regard the Bible as a series of legal enactments or common-law precedents of equal authority. This is leading to a revision of inherited traditions, that were based on a view of the Bible which is no longer tenable. In general this development favours a more modest assertion of one's own beliefs and a more charitable consideration of other people's. When we continue to differ, we differ with a more sympathetic understanding of those from whom we differ.

We have so far been concerned with influences making for a deeper sense of unity within the Christian Church. But if we attempt a wider survey, we shall discover that religious thought and feeling in the West, whether definitely Christian or no, possess some common characteristics, bear the impress of convictions which are ever struggling for expression.

The expressions of this faith in human solidarity are so various, and its influence so pervading, that it is not surprising to find some modern thinkers looking to it as the essence of religion. In the sociological theory of religion, it is suggested that to become aware of society and its claims constitutes religion itself. A man is converted when his soul is 'congregationalized'. There is even a tendency to find the highest element in religious experience in a strong feeling of one's unity with one's fellows. Such a feeling of endless sympathy and tolerance is so large a part of love that it is easily mistaken for the whole. For this starting-point, we might readily imagine a Western faith in humanity with Walt Whitman as its prophet. But a second characteristic of Western thought about religion forbids any idealization of humanity as we know it, and draws us beyond the indiscriminate catholicism of 'The Open Road'. This characteristic may be defined as our faith in the worth of activity and in the reality of progress. We believe in the unity of mankind much more as a task to be achieved than as an accomplished or given fact to be enjoyed. Nietzsche says somewhere, 'if the goal of humanity be wanting, do we not lack humanity itself?' We look for the ultimate unity of mankind in the pursuit of a common end. The search for such a goal, and the effort to achieve it, lend worth to history and to present action.

However it arises and whatever form it takes, this faith in progress is characteristic of the Western outlook, and gives a positive answer to the question, Is life worth living? That such a faith is strange to India may be evidenced by the reception accorded to the poet Tagore in India itself. Mr. Yeats gives us the judgement of a Bengali who said of Tagore, 'He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.' Now Tagore's genius is thoroughly Indian, but his originality in this respect is due directly or indirectly to contact with the influence of the West. It is our belief in action and in the worth of human achievement which is voiced in his poems and in his philosophy, and the note is new in India.

These two characteristics, faith in the oneness of mankind and in the reality of progress, do add a sense of common aspiration to the civilization of the West. But of themselves they do not create a very close unity. Men may believe in human solidarity and in the worth of effort, and yet be following divergent ideals and divisive enthusiasms. These beliefs are surrounded by haze and indefiniteness. In themselves they scarcely constitute a religion that will satisfy, much less one that can effectively unite us. However fully we share them, they will not enable us to meet and surmount the present crisis. So far as I can judge, these vaguer beliefs in humanity and progress are largely the deposit of Christian faith, and to be rendered effective they need to be ever reconnected with the central elements in that faith; in particular, with the Christian judgement on sin and with the Christian devotion to the historic Jesus.

Surely there is something providential in the resolute endeavour of the last century to get back to Christ. The whole movement has succeeded in disentangling the authority of Christ from that either of Moses or of Paul. We are almost where the disciples were when they saw no man save Jesus only. Some things in the traditions remain obscure and baffling. But we see enough to measure afresh our distance from Him. And when the peoples of Europe are thoroughly weary of the work of destruction, it may be they will turn to Him again for the secret of rest, and find that He alone can guide their feet into the way of peace.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Sabatier, L'Orientation religieuse de la France actuelle. Armand Colin: Paris.

W.K.L. Clarke, Facing the Facts; or, an Englishman's Religion. Nisbet.

E.C. Moore, Christian Thought since Kant. Duckworth's Studies in Theology.

THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY

The preceding chapter has recalled attention to the need of deeper elements of unity in civilization than can be afforded by any commercial, financial or political ties. Plans for a political union of nations, common tendencies in social reform, even the essential unity of commerce and science, will be of no avail, unless there is a basis in common sentiments of a religious kind, in the consciousness that we are all members one of another and can only advance and realize ourselves by the help and sympathy of other members of the same body. It is to this point then that we will address ourselves in the concluding section of the subject. The mechanics of unity need both earnest advocacy and careful study. But beneath and beyond them a motive force has to be found in ideals and sentiments by which alone in the end the working of all such mechanical arrangements is rendered possible. Right sentiments are not a sufficient safeguard, but they are an essential foundation, and it is of the first importance to realize the things to which the mass of mankind are most deeply attached, how they are affected towards one another, the channels through which the tide of feeling most naturally flows and is extended. Looked at from this point of view the problem becomes primarily an educational one. We study mankind as we find it in order to effect an improvement in the direction which we desire.

But here again, looking at the question from an educational rather than an abstract point of view, we have to recognize that actual realization of the life and services of other nations is a slow, difficult, and, at best, a limited process. It was really easier for the travelling student of the Middle Ages to enter into the simple and similar life of universities abroad than for the modern traveller to grasp the complex relations of a great foreign city or state. We have therefore, in practice, to select and concentrate. For the modern Englishman a knowledge of one or two other countries and languages is as much as the pressure of life will permit, and it is greatly to be regretted that poverty and hard work limit even this acquisition to very few. A Wanderjahr for the working-man would do much to cement the unity of western civilization.

ERRATUM.

Page 305, line 14 from bottom

for cannot it abolish read it cannot abolish

Marvin: The Unity of Western Civilization.

[** Transcriber's Note: The text below was modified to reflect the ERRATUM above. The original ERRATUM is left in the document for historical purposes. **]

The unity of which we believe ourselves to be now the champions must therefore be a real thing based on freedom and realized by conscious effort; but it must also be truly comprehensive, not exclusive of any willing co-operator, not aimed against any one but for the whole. It is not intended in this volume to discuss any burning questions of the day, and therefore the briefest indications must be given of how the nucleus of western culture has been formed and how it must reform itself after the war. France, Germany, and England have been for many years, collectively far the most important centres of science and social progress in the world, and it would have been the ideal policy for them to give a united lead to the rest of the world. The war has altered that, but it cannot abolish the fundamental facts on which the civilization of the West is based, science, power over nature, and social organization. In these the same three countries will still have a certain primacy, though the position of the United States will be enormously strengthened. No peace can, of course, be permanent which contemplates the excommunication of a leading member of the human family.

Italy in science, philosophy, and literature, is a worthy colleague, and Russia makes a great stride forward by allying herself with the forces of progress and European unity.

They are not insignificant, as we know to our cost. But by dwelling on the things of greater moment and solidity, we train ourselves and others to reduce the elements of discord to their true proportion and allay the storm. The progress of a united mankind is thus an ideal, slowly realizing itself in time. But its realization is quickened and rendered wider and more beneficent, the more we think of it and believe in it. A blow comes, such as the present war, and seems to shatter the whole picture which so many hands have limned and so many eyes admired. Those who have followed its growth through the ages, know well that no such blow can finally destroy a living growth or even go very deep in injuring its features.

It is surely a commonplace that in proportion as western populations, from statesmen downwards, are animated by sentiments of comradeship which arise from considerations such as these, the danger of war must diminish and the possibilities of fruitful common action increase. Yet there is probably no country in Europe where any deliberate attempt is made to instruct the people in ideas which would most surely broaden their sympathies and lay the foundations of peace.

The advantage of putting the educational issue first has been already indicated. We can all get to work on it at once for ourselves, and it is a far more fundamental and, in some respects, easier thing to introduce a new idea into the minds of others than to alter the boundaries and political conditions of States. If we once achieved a general atmosphere of co-operation and goodwill in the world, the practical problems would be already more than half solved.

Discussion will take place, with more and more vigour as years go on, as to the various measures which have been described collectively as the establishment of a World-State. At what point could it be said that a World-State is in being? How can such a World-State be reconciled with the independent sovereignty of the several States comprised in it? What is to be the sanction imposing the decisions of the larger community on its constituent members? Such are a few of the problems involved in any advance towards the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism. None of them admit of a single definite answer. They do not belong to questions of pure theory, and we shall have to solve them slowly and with difficulty, seizing every favourable opportunity of a slight advance, avoiding grave obstacles, compromising with every possible friend.

It is in truth one of the most poignant features of the tragedy in which we are manfully and rightly bearing our part, that the community-sense in the world had never been so highly developed, or found so many channels in which to diffuse itself, as just at the moment when the blow fell. The socialist movements in all civilized countries have always had this as a leading motive; comrades and poor among themselves, these men have always been eager to stretch out a hand to those of like mind abroad. And in the last chapter we saw how among Christian communities throughout the world there has been in recent years a growing approximation. Neither the cause nor the effects of such forces can die away. They will reappear when the storm has passed and rebuild the wreck.

One large aspect of the united action of the western world has received no notice in this volume, though it might very well be the subject of a detailed study in itself. This is the relation of the more advanced and powerful nations of the West towards the weaker and less progressive peoples. It might, indeed, be treated as the touchstone of our civilization, just as the education of the young is a good, perhaps the best, test of the advancement of any single people. For it involves some joint action of the western nations; it shows how far they are disinterested and how far skilful in their treatment of the less advanced.

But the general act of the Brussels Conference is clear and adequate as to what the purpose of the Powers should be. "To put an end to the crimes and devastations engendered by the traffic in African slaves, to protect effectively the aboriginal populations of Africa, to ensure for that vast continent the benefits of peace and civilization", is in fact the whole duty of a united western civilization when dealing with the less civilized. The results achieved may well seem small compared with the magnitude of the purpose, but those who know most about it do not despise them. Slave-raiding and tribal wars have been diminished and some check put on importing arms and spirits.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Kant's Perpetual Peace (new edition just published).

International Policy. Chapman & Hall.

Fayle, The Great Settlement. Murray.

The Leadership of the World. (Oxford pamphlet.)

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNITY OF CIVILIZATION***

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